Going to Giza and Cutting Through DC Waste

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This is our Saturday edition where we do something different in the middle segment. And this week, we're continuing on the seven wonders of the ancient world.
And we'll be looking at the Giza pyramids. But before that, we have news stories.
Sam Bankman Freed's parents are looking for a pardon. Trump has signed legislation.
The Guantanamo Bay might be open for illegal immigrants that are criminals and lots of other stories. So stay with us and we'll be right back.
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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Seniors in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, VictorHanson.com.

Please come join us there.

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So those are new prices, but we'd be happy to have you there. And so, Victor, there's lots going on in the news before we get to the Giza pyramids.
Sam Bankman-Fried's parents apparently are looking for a pardon, strangely from Donald Trump. I don't.
That's shameless if you think about it. I have an apartment.
I go over during the week to work at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford campus. So their home was in maybe a mile, half a mile radius.
And I remember the paparazzi's helicopters that were very visible and noisy. when, remember was under house arrest, and then he violated the conditions of his parole when he went to jail.
I had followed both Professor Bankman and Professor Freed. They were at the Stanford Law School.
Stanford Law School's got a reputation. Some of you people listening, remember the Judge Duncan incident when they shouted down a federal judge and some of the law students rushed the podium? Then the Stanford DEI officer hijacked his lecture, blamed him, sided with the agitators that were violent.
And then one of them said, I hope your daughter is raped. That whole terrible incident.
And by the way, there were members of the Stanford Law faculty who testified and made fun of, I think it was during the first impeachment, they made fun of Barron's name. They've done all sorts of things at that law school.
And they've had a precipitous drop in alumni support because of that reputation. But she, Mrs.
Freed, or I should say Professor Freed, was known as a bundler of stealthy silicon money. So if you wanted to give to hard left candidates, not mainstream, hard left, but you didn't want your fingerprints on it, she was the bundler.
And even though she was a law professor, he was also very involved.

And then when Sam Bankman-Fried created this pyramidal hoax Ponzi scheme,

they were both intricately involved and had transfers of property worth $15 or $16 million.

They're both being sued now for various alleged crimes. But here's the point.

In the 2020 election, Sam Bankman-Fried was the second largest individual donor, direct donor,

to the Biden campaign. I think he gave over $60 million.
I'm not saying that the PACs,

like Mark Zuckerberg, 419, weren't great,

but direct Soros, then Bankman, as I recall. And they were vicious, vehement critics of Donald Trump.
So after he created this Ponzi scheme, Sam Bankman, and he got his parents involved, And again, I'm not going to prejudge them, but allegedly they were deeply involved with his scheme, and it collapsed, and it destroyed a lot of the investors who had given him so much money during this cryptocurrency and wouldn't have had they been transparent about their actual financial status.

Now they want a pardon from the very president they tried to destroy in every aspect of the word. Are they insane?

Or is that just intellectual arrogance shared by the academic mind?

We are so brilliant.

We are so impressive that even our enemies that we despise will want to help us because of our intellect and our morality. It's just mind boggling.
And, you know, if they want to get a pardon, maybe they should go the RFK route, spend a year and a half campaigning for Donald Trump, widen the MAGA base and the Bankman Freedmans. We've been, we can do a Brett Stevens.
Remember Brett Stevens in New York time column was, he said, why I'm never, never Trump. I was wrong.
I thought we could crush this guy. He will.
Yes. He was crude.
He was charismatic, but we didn't understand. He appealed to minorities in the middle class and we didn't.
Maybe they could do that. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I doubt it. Anyway, back to the story.
So Donald Trump had a victory this week in, well, not really a victory. I guess he settled a case with Zuckerberg and Facebook where he got deplatformed and was paid out $25 million.
His victories just keep rolling in. And a lot of these prior enemies of Donald Trump who had either tried to ban him from social media as Mark Zuckerberg did after January 6th.
And we've discussed how they destroyed Parler and Rebecca Mercer's attempt to try to give an even-handed, truthful voice for conservatives,

a social media platform, and that Google and Apple and Facebook conspired to deny app access to it,

and that he had put 419.

Now, all of a sudden, he's worried about Donald Trump.

So he shows up at Mar-a-Lago, and now he says, well, I'm not going to fight this suit anymore.

Yes, we did deal with it. He's worried about Donald Trump.
So he shows up at Mar-a-Lago, and now he says, well, I'm not going to fight this suit anymore.

Yes, we did deplatform you.

Yes, you were not guilty of anything.

Yes, it was an arbitrary decision. We'll give you the $25 million if you drop the suit.

But this follows some earlier suits.

We had, I think his name was Zachary Young or somebody. He was an Afghan helper.
He was a former military veteran who, when he heard about the plight of our contractors and our loyal Afghan interpreters, tried to get them out. And CNN kept defaming him.
And then when he sued them, and he won $5 million for defamation, but we don't know what the punitive damages were.

That's disclosed.

It could be a mega deal.

Neither side can tell us.

But in those internal communications, they were just vicious, abhorrent, what they said about him. And, of course, this follows George Stephanopoulos' $16 million settlement to Donald Trump,

because on 11 occasions he kept saying,

Donald Trump, rapist, Donald Trump, rapist, Donald Trump, rapist,

even though he'd never been convicted of it.

That was very clear in the E. Jean Carroll suit

that he was guilty of sexual assault, which can be like that.

Yeah, sure.

And the judge in that case should have been cited because he had used the word rape and that empowered George Stephanopoulos. So they lost that suit.
And then there may be a, I think CBS is going to settle because CBS took the Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes, and they said they were going to play it in its entirety, and then they selectively edited it. So in their view, anything that they felt was poorly articulated or factually incorrect, which is a lot, they've been cutting, and then they released it and promoted it, almost as if it was a campaign contribution to her failed efforts.
So Donald Trump said, this was a fraud, this entire interview, and it was used to hurt me. And four years ago, they would say, that's absurd.
But now they're looking at the tempo of the nation. And the judges in the lawfare movement are embarrassed, especially after we look at Judge Mershon, Judge N.
Goran, and Judge McCarthy in the Fannie Willis case. They all have shown themselves to be be biased and they will be reversed.
And the people themselves are tired of lawfare. So these media conglomerators are thinking to themselves, we're on the wrong side of public opinion and he could win big.
So let's just settle it and get over with it and get down on our hajj to Mar-a-Lago and make our peace. That's what they're doing.
I mean, come on. That's what they're doing.
I know. It is.
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It's honey and, um, and it's, it's honey and chamomile and it has collagen in it. And I add lemon to it and a little bit of honey and it's so tasty, nice warm drink for the evening and it puts you to sleep and it's got sorry melatonin in it so thank you native path for sponsoring the victor davis hansen show um victor so let's go on then donald trump of couple of things that we haven't talked about yet in our friday episode or in this one is that he passed the lake lake and riley act so he signed And he opened Guantanamo for the worst of the criminals of illegal immigrants that are being arrested.
And I was wondering your thoughts on either one. Well, in Guantanamo, he's getting already a lot of criticism, and that goes back 20 years to post 9-11 when suspected, I should say suspected in quotes, in the sense that certain Al-Qaeda people who were picked up in Afghanistan and abroad were brought to Guantanamo, so it would not be inside the United States and subject to U.S.
criminal law in its entirety, although the agencies like the CIA were. But the point is, there was waterboarding use.
So everybody said they torture them, torture them, torture them, torture them. And therefore, Guantanamo is forever cursed.
And then there's a lot of people like Mayor Karen Bass, to take one example, who were aficionados of the Castro regime. And so Cuba has a soft spot in the leftist mind.
And Guantanamo is an imperialist outpost. So they don't like anything to do with Guantanamo.
So why would he put these criminals, and these are the worst of the worst. These are the murderers, the rapists, the assaulters.
And why not just send them back to his country? Well, he can't send them back to Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, because these regimes are hostile to the United States. In other words, why are they here in the first place? Did they just say, oh, I killed a person in Venezuela.
No, they were let out of prison for the most part because these hostile left-wing regimes, and we've seen the megaphone in Colombia, it's crazy. And we saw Mr.
Obador who bragged that the 40 million who had come in over the years were a beautiful thing and that they all should vote if they were citizens, but he didn't make that specification. They should vote against Republicans, but these regimes will let them out the moment they get home.
So Donald Trump, for the meantime, wants them off the street. So this is a transit place.
In other words, he's putting Colombians and Venezuelans, other people from illiberal regimes, and then he's telling their government. Now, I'm going to bring them back home, but he needs to get leverage over and tell them rather than just swarm them with criminals and have them come right back and have to repeat the process, which is costly.
He's saying, I'm going to hold them here, and this is what we're going to do,

and this is what's going to happen to you.

So he's formulating punitive actions should they be preemptively released,

and they will be unless he has enough deterrence.

And so that's what's going on there.

Your second question.

The Lake and Riley Act.

That was a no-brainer.

Any Democrat that voted against that law is going to face opposition

Thank you. question the lake and riley act which that was a no-brainer any republic any democrat that voted against that law is going to face opposition in a purple state how the law is just simply ends it's a it's a it ends neo-confederatism nullification it just says that any jurisdiction local, state, that has criminals under detention or arrest them, and those criminals are subject to violations of federal immigration law, need to give those people to the federal government and not shield them.
And so this brings up a larger question of this whole neo-Confederate. Now, why do I use the word neo-confederate? Because the left really, in its democratic legacies, is starting to appear like the Democratic Party of 1859, when it started to nullify federal laws.
It had happened in 1832, when Andrew Jackson had to take federal troops and tell South Carolina, if you resist paying tariffs, because the government had put tariffs on goods, and you try to defy us, we're going to use troops to force you. And then, of course, what caused the Civil War was precisely this, that states like Alabama, Mississippi, but especially South Carolina, once more, said that federal jurisdictions within their domains were their property.
So a post office or an armory were not federal. And more importantly, they said that state law trumps federal law.
And so what I'm getting at is this is a very reactionary, illiberal idea that these 600 jurisdictions can tell the federal government, we pick and we choose which federal laws, because they really don't mean it. They really don't mean it.
If Provo, Utah, or Cheyenne, Wyoming, or a city in Florida like Tampa says, well, that's a good idea. We're not going to enforce the EPA jurisdictions.
If you want to buy a handgun, we're just nullifying federal law about gun registration. The whole thing would unravel.
So it's all predicated on the idea that we're going to break federal law and privilege state law over federal law, but nobody else is going to do that because if they did do it, we'd be back in the Civil War. So that's what's really illiberal about it.
And that brings up a larger question. They are illiberal.
If I would say to our listeners, what are four or five elements of confederatism around 1865?

I would say one was federal nullification, nullifying federal laws. I would say two was the one drop rule that they were fixated on racial purity in the old South, but they didn't really know how to define it.
because people might be indistinguishably black because of the nature of slavery and the slave owners and sexual intercourse between master and slave, etc. So they had this problem.
So they came up, if you were 116th genealogical speaking, you were black. That's exactly what we're doing now with the Democratic electorate.
We're trying to trace to the nth degree, Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas is a good example.
And as I said on an earlier broadcast, I talked to a student that said he sent in his DNA. So it's racial essentialism, just like the Confederacy.
And then we have this condescending idea that there's a subservient helot class. Helot's just a term that refers to the Spartan form of indentured servants in Mycenae, for the more Spartan, but also in Laconia.
Yeah. And what I mean by that, we've had all these people come out in Los Angeles, one of the so-called czars that Karen Bass has appointed from the business community to help build.
He says, if you deport, we're not going to have a class to build our homes.

And they're all worried about all of us wealthy people depend on illegal aliens.

And if you send them back for breaking the law, then we would have to pay higher wages to attract people back into the workforce.

Because remember, everybody, we have a 62% labor participation rate.

62% of able-bodied.

We're not talking about people 70s. We're not talking about tenure, we're talking about people in the prime of their life.
62% participate, they go to work. So that other 38% might be drawn into the workforce if wages went up.
But of course, it's the idea, well, we want cheap labor from Mexico. And Mexico likes to give us cheap labor because they get $63 billion.
That's a very Confederate, a very, very, very, very Confederate idea. And as is a pyramidal society of plantation owners and slaves and no middle class.
And if you look at California, it is a pyramidal society. It's a hard left state with an elite on top and then no middle class and the largest poverty rate in the United States.
21% of Californians live before the poverty rate. One out of three welfare recipients are in California.
We have the highest number of homeless people of any state. And it's very Confederate.
It's very ironic, but the Democratic Party in some ways hasn't changed. Yeah.
If we could turn then to another condescending thing, just to use your word, we've had accusations against Caroline Lovett and J.D. Vance that they are really just DE appointments by the view said that about Caroline Levitt and Stacey Abrams said it about J.D.
Vance.

And I was wondering your view.

Well, this is before I answer that.

There is a panic among the DEI movement.

If you were Stacey Abrams and you were confident in your ability, remember, she's lost every major election she's run and she's an election denialist. She paraded around, she lost the gubernatorial election, I think it was 2018, by 50,000 votes.
But yet she said she was the actual governor because of quote unquote fraud. This is exactly what the left said destroys the country, and they attacked Trump for it.
But they paraded her around as an icon. And she was one, along with Karen Bass, that might have been the vice president candidate.
But they thought, wow, we're stuck with Kamala Harris because bad as she is, she's better than Stacey Abrams or Karen Bass, and that was borne out by later events. So she's saying DEI, and she's angry as an elite, elite, elite person, as is Whoopi Goldberg.
These are multimillion-dollar people. Stacey Abrams had all these PACs.
She's been cited as well as misusing campaign funds. But my point is, they feel that they don't have confidence in their own ability.
So they want to always play the race card. Because of the history of slavery or Jim Crow for the last 60 years, I am in 60 years now of affirmative action.
I get a perpetual pass that has nothing to do with class. And people are tired of it.
And you've got to remember that 48% of Hispanics voted for Donald Trump when he knew he was going to dismantle DEI. And 26% of black males voted for Donald Trump when he knew that.
So a lot of minorities don't want that stigma. And so how do they react against it? They start blaming people.
So then they say, poor white J.D. Vance got DI, but how did he get it? And he paid for his graduate school, not with claiming, I mean, would they please tell me what white people get if you're white? I'm speaking as someone who spent 50 years in academia and 22 years at the Cal State system when I would apply for, I'd had, I think I spent, I sent 51 people to top-notch, mostly Ivy League universities and law, medicine, PhD programs.
And this is when I called those people at those programs, I would call them up and I said, I've got a wonderful PhD candidate. She's got four years of Latin, four years of Greek.
I had her take a master's program. I gave her independent instruction in Greek composition, Latin composition.
I made her learn Italian, German, and French. And if you can just admit her, and you know what they would say? Her? Well, that's good, but is she a minority? I had one student who was brilliant, and I tutored him.
And I called up a university, an Ivy League PhD let him in. And he came in when he got this extraordinary offer.
And he said to me, I lied about my age. I'm not 24, 23.
He was in his 30s. And I'm an illegal alien.
So I knew what that meant, that that was not something the universities would object to, they would love. So I just double-checked, and I called up this Ivy League university.
I said, I just want to inform you that your applicant that will be joining you in a month is actually not a U.S. They said, great, that's wonderful.
He's undocumented. So I, in that period, every single time I had a white male, it was almost impossible to apply.
I could get them into PhDs or law schools that were what the elite and snobbish fashion would call third or fourth tier, but not at the top places. It was almost impossible.
I had this guy, I'll just say his name was James. He was an authentic natural genius.
He was very strange. And James, if you're listening, you know who you are.
I mean, he was kind of an isolationist. He lived alone.
He admired the dark ages in Europe, But he was an authentic genius in SARS language facility and Latin. I had not, I had, I'll just, I'm not going to use Latin.
I had a girl, woman named Christy, and she was comparable with her knowledge of languages, classical Latin and Greek. But he was amazing.
And by any standard, he should have been admitted to Harvard or Yale. He got almost a perfect GRE score.
He had straight A's. I couldn't get him in.
And I would get so angry and they'd say, white, white, white, white, male, male, male. So let's just get rid of this idea.
Stanford University, after George Floyd, let in, according to their website, not Victor. Now, maybe they're wrong and they're lying, but it was 9% to 10% white males.
That demographic is 35% almost of the population. And every other racial category other than white males, women were overrepresented or at least equal, not white males.
So this idea that he got the GI Bill of Rights after he went to a combat zone, J.D. Vance, and then he came back and got the GI Bill to go to Yale Law School.
What is the argument about the press secretary, Ms. Levitt, is that she's DEI on what grounds? Whoopi Goldberg? I guess she's saying that I was a trailblazer.
Me, Whoopi Goldberg. No, you were never a trailblazer.
You came in well after women's liberation from a very early age, color purple, all that. You were given all, I mean, I'm saying you were giving special preference, but you were giving a quality of opportunity.
And you took advantage of it. You were talented.
But this idea that she's not because she's white is absolutely insane. And if you look at her performance, or even, I'm not a big fan of Jen Psaki, but Jen Psaki was a far better press secretary than Corrine Jean-Pierre, who was lost.
And Miss Leavitt is a far better, as was Miss Huckabee, as was Kayleigh McEnany. And I only say that because when Corinne Jean-Pierre was appointed, the first thing they did not say is she is a skilled journalist.
She had been on, I think, MSNBC or CNN, and she is absolutely a razor. No, they said that she is the first black female lesbian.
That was the first thing they said. And so, Ms.
Levitt, if Whoopi Goldberg and the women of The View believe that she's a DEI candidate, would they please tell me what angle she used to get that job? Because when you look at her at the screen, she's the youngest press secretary in U.S. history.
I just turned the TV off before this broadcast.

She was like a bandsaw. All those reporters asked these questions.
She has no binder. It's all up here.
She boasted, my binder is my brain. But they don't like her because she's attractive, she's well-spoken, and she's 110% Trump.

And she answers all the questions.

So this is going to happen more and more and more. And I just hope that people who have been beneficiaries of DEI can come to the conclusion that this was a moment in American history where it's negative, far outweighed it's positive, for the recipients of it.
And now they are liberated from it. And when they, by their own merits, and many will, by their own merits, excel, no one's going to say, well, you got the job because of your race or gender or sexual orientation.
Well, Victor, we're at a break, so let's stop for a few messages and then come back and talk a little bit about the pyramids at Giza. Stay with us.
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You can find Victor on social media at X. His handle is at Victor Hanson.
Sorry, his handle is at VD Hanson. And on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup.
So please come join him there. Well, Victor, I'm anxious to hear about why the Giza pyramids are part of the seven wonders of the world and then their extraordinary nature.
I think technically according to Diodorus and others in the Hellenistic, early Greek period, but later in the Hellenistic, it was the Great Pyramid at Giza. I'm going to use the Greek names, not the Egyptian pronunciation, but it's the Great Pyramid that's associated with Cheops of, I think it's the fifth dynasty, but it's roughly, my gosh, it's 2,500 years before Christ.
We're talking about 40. It's the oldest by far of all the seven wonders.
And you know what's ironic about it is the great pyramid at Gaza of Cheops is the oldest by far seven wonders of the world, but it's also the only one that's extant in full. You can go there today and see it.
And it sits next to the Sphinx, which is dated within 30 or 40 years. And we say dated because we've had elements within the pyramid that have been found, wood especially, that we've radiocarbon dated.
And the thing about that is you can't tell exactly when that piece of wood was put in there, but you can tell how old it is. Now, it could come from a 200-year-old tree, but it gives you a framework, I think, between 26 and 2400 years before Christ.
These were funeral tombs, and they were analogous to the much later mausoleum at Heliconarsus that we talked about of King Mausilus.

In other words, in the fourth, fifth, the old dynasty, not the new dynasty. We say old is around Giza, which is about, when I went to Cairo in the 70s, it was 20 miles outside.
Now it's incorporated almost. But the new dynasty moved down to Luxor, way down, I should say up the Nile, given the topography of Africa.
And it was known in antiquity, so the first person that noted it was Herodotus. There's a long passage in Diodorus who wrote in the first century, 30 B.C.
to 10 or 20 A.D., and they both, as travelers, they had seen it. Now, today when you go there, there's these blocks.
It's made out of limestone. It's 400 feet tall.
I think until, I don't know, one of the early cathedrals, it was the tallest in the world at 400 feet, and it's huge, the mass of it. I think people have counted 2.3 million blocks.
And inside, they're made of limestone. But what was even more remarkable, they melted some of the limestone down to finish it.
So they put lesser blocks and rubble, and then they paved it over so it was shiny. Today, there's just a few pieces.
And then the Pyramidian, the little cap, which was missing, and it's missing on most pyramids. But today, you can go there.
I went there in 1974 and rode a camel. At that time, you could climb on it.
Today, it's a felony. And people who do it, and they still do it, but they have to pay the guides.
But it's a lifetime ban, I think, from the Egyptian government. There was a very famous case of a German tourist that got caught recently, and they banned him from life from returning because he put it on the Internet and everything.
But the point is that when you would go there, there were these people would come up to you, and one of the things was, I can climb from here to the 400 feet in less than 10 minutes. And I will bet you money.
I think it was 10, maybe 15. And then, you know, you're there and you're a student.
You don't have any money. But we all got together.
There were five of us. And we put in $5.
And $25 was a lot in 1974. We said there is no no way because the blocks are not like stepping stones

they're like the height of a person and it's dangerous because you know you know they're not they weren't intended to they are they're only two millimeters off from the base in the straight line to to the top and they're they each side represents due north due south due east due west so it's situated. But nevertheless, when the finishing, the casing, they call it, fell off or it was taken off, it was used for, you know, lime for houses stripped.
It's very dangerous. And this guy came up and we thought, well, one of, I won't mention his name at the time, but I think his name, well, I will.
Was it Steve? Yes. And he tried to go up three blocks when he was looking.
And he then counted what he thought. And he said, there's no way you can't do it in less than 40 minutes if you were a great athlete.
He was a very good athlete. This guy was an expert.
And he just jumped like a gazelle. And then he got up the top and he goes like this, waves to us, points at his watch.
And then he said, so then we thought, well, how quick can he get down? So we were yelling to him, we'll pay you another 25 if you can do it in five minutes. He didn't hear us, but he jumped down just quick.
Inside, there are three passages. You can go today through, we went through the so-called smuggler's passage.
I don't think they call it that anymore. It's the main entrance.
You go up a few things and the Egyptian government had it lighted in wood railings and it goes into the interior tombs. There's three or four of them.
They're made of granite. So they had to get that from up the Nile and float it all the way down.
We know that because hieroglyphics have been found that detail the exact way it was built. And in a nearby excavation, I think that was in the 90s, they actually found a description of how they cut the blocks.
And they found tools. So modern archaeologists took a block roughly of the same size, and then they used ancient tool replicas because they found these ossified tools.
And, you know, you took a chisel and you split a little crack, and then you put wood shivs inside where you wanted to cut, and then you poured them with water, and the water would expand and then break it over a day or so. And anyway, they figured it out.
And they had band saws to finish it off, long, long saws. Some of them were 15 feet long, I think.
But in any case, they figured out how long it took that and how many, then that, because they knew the number of blocks on the Great Pyramid, as I said, over 2.2 million. They could figure exactly whether they really did spend 100 years or something.
And they came up with something like 13 years with a workforce of 40,000 people. So it wasn't astronomical.
And it was very efficient. So they could pretty much tell.
There's also a passage in the subterranean underneath. I think it goes down over almost 200 feet.
Yeah. And that was, all of these have been plundered, except every now and again, they get more sophisticated x-ray technology and they find another pocket or passage.
I think they had found a red room not too long ago. But you can walk, you can go into the smuggler's passage and it's been plundered even in the old kingdom was plundered.
So when you go into the actual Cheops tomb, you can see the sarcophagus. I think the lid is broken, but you can see where it was.
It's still there, but everything else has been looted. A lot of it turned up over the centuries.
People entered private collections and people in the Egyptian government. So if you go to the Egyptian museum, you can see one of the strangest things is nearby.
They thought they were going into the underworld And people have suggested that these tunnels were trying to hit water. Because there's also some air shafts long to let air in, but maybe they weren't air shafts.
Maybe they were escapes from the spirit to go up, they thought. Or some of the subterranean passages got pretty near the water table from the nearby Nile.
So the idea was you're going into the River of the Dead, and they found a ship, and it's huge. It's in the Egyptian Museum.
They reconstructed an Egyptian archaeologist. It took him about 14 years.
So it's the largest of the seven wonders of the world. It's the oldest, and it's one of many dozens of pyramids.
There's the Saqqara stepping stone pyramid, not too far, and these are the old kingdom. Kefron's is right next to it.
It's almost as big, the two big ones, and then you can take the train or boat and go up to Luxor, the Valley of the Kings and the new dynasty. And there's even more impressive.
The Sphinx is nearby. That leaves us with six of the seven wonders of the world.
And we're going to do the one that was the most controversial in the Hellenistic period. it was the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, because few people had actually seen it and Babylon had been destroyed and there was sort of, what was it, the reconstructed gardens? Was it the original Garden of Nebuchadnezzar? And Saddam, of course, wanted to be an Iraqi nationalist rather than just a pan-Arabist.

So during his regime, he began, and we'll talk about that, making blocks with his initials on them and tried to rebuild the hanging gardens, but in a very inexact. So I was there, I think, in 2006, and one of the Blackhawk people we were going by, I was embedded.
And that came to mind when we had this tragic crash, what it was like to ride in a Blackhawk helicopter at night in a combat zone and how good the pilots were. But we flew over and people pointed it.
And then the next day, there was a Humvee going out there anyway, near there. So I didn't get right there, but I got very near it and could see it.
But we'll talk about that to conclude this series. I saw an article about maybe a few months, a year ago, on the Saqqara Pyramid.
And they were looking at some new excavation where they thought that they because they're always wondering how did they get these huge blocks up how were the workers doing that and the article said that they had found a water shaft that they thought that they were raising those huge blocks some of which could be the size of a car, up through a water system. But they didn't, it wasn't specific.
There's all these theories. There's a theory that they had dissolving types of salt-laden rock salt and then types of ores that would dissolve with water.

So they made these big ramps, huge ramps, and then they pushed them up and then to all around it. In other words, the pyramid was not that tall.
They didn't have lifting devices like the Greeks did. But they would surround it with this dissolvable earth with rams.
And so each course it was just added like a volcano. And then when you're done they were able to get water to it and dissolve everything that melted.
That was one theory. And I'm not sure if that's right or not.
But that pyramid is made. All the pyramids outside of Cairo are made of limestone.
And limestone, it was very cheap there. And so they didn't, it was the problem they had was when they wanted to make the royal interior tombs everlasting because they knew granite would last a lot longer than limestone, they had to get granite.
And that meant they had to bring them on the Nile River. And some of these blocks weighed tons, you know.
The other thing about it is, this is a little bit more controversial, but when you have autocratic societies, pyramidal societies of an elite, usually a theocratic elite on top, you see this. And you see it in periods where there's no constitutional or consensual government.
So we talked about the mausoleum at modern Bodrum or ancient Heliconarsus. That was in the Hellenistic period when King Mausilus was an absolute ruler, and that was from the kingdom of Artemisia a couple of hundred years earlier, a dynasty.
And the same thing about the pharaohs, and the same thing about the Aztecs. They have these huge pyramids, but you don't see civic labor and capital invested in these monumental burials or sarcophagi or mausolea in a democratic or a consensual government.
So you don't see that at Athens. You don't see that in Greek city-states.
You see temples to the gods, but they're functional. They actually have the rear of the temple, the Opistodamus, has an iron grill, and you can see the city's gold inside there, the reserves, so that everybody knew where they were.

So you could come up.

You could worship the deity, Athena or Zeus or Artemis, depending on the particular city. Each one had their local patron god or goddess.
But they also were functional archives and treasuries. My point is that most people, if they have free will, will not vote to spend this enormous amount of money on the burial site of a theocrat.
In fact, in the Greek city-states, they had sumptuary laws that we know from inscriptions that forbid extravagant gravestones because they thought that that was a misapplication of the city's collective resources. You couldn't, it's kind of like today in the cemetery.
I go to Hillsdale every year and I walk through a cemetery. I'm just fascinated.
And some of the gravestones are enormous. The Confederate war era, that's all, you know, now we just have flat slabs and you can mow over it.
So we had our own de facto sumptuary laws. But it shows you that the only societies that create these monumental, non-functioning, non-productive projects are theocracies or autocratic governments.
You see it in the modern world today, Saddam Hussein and all of his things that he used for himself and his family. And you don't see it in societies where people can be free and vote.
Just one more question, not to be too extraneous. I know that the Mycenaeans had very large walls and they had the same issue.
So-called Cyclopean walls. Yeah.
And the same issue was how did they get this? And I know that they think they built it by ramps of dirt all the way up. Do you think that the Mycenaeans were inspired by the Greek Giza pyramid? Or did they get any information from ancient Egypt? Well, we know that everybody was referring to this early period in Greece.
At one time, we thought that they were Semitic peoples that had inhabited Greece before today's Greeks who had a very different alphabet, borrowed from the Phoenicia, the Alpha to Omega Alpha. Because Mycenaean linear B and the earlier linear A, which we don't know who those people were.
They were probably Minoan or pre-Mycenaean. They're very different.
They're part phonetic and they're part hieroglyphic. And that is directly influenced by Egypt, as is a lot of their art.
And until maybe 650 in Greek art, you see those Egyptian, we call it Egyptian statuary, where the arms are folded so they don't break off. There's no realism.
And then in painting, somewhere in Greek art around 550, you see the disappearance of the Egyptian eye. The Egyptian eye is simply the eye as you're looking forward.
But when you have a profile, they still use the Egyptian eye, even though the eye doesn't see that. Because that's a convention and they haven't mastered the idea of showing an eye from the side.
My point is that these were societies that were somewhat like Egypt. They had borrowed from Egypt.
They had contact with Egypt. Somewhere around 1650, in a series of volcanic eruptions on Crete and Santorini, these Minoan settlements that were very much affected by Egypt were destroyed.
And what we now know as Greek speakers, Mycenae, we call them, they were Greeks, but they were not classical Greeks or city-state Greeks. They came in, appropriated the Minoan civilization, modified their script into Linear B, which is Greek.
We didn't know that until 1953 with the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventress, the architect. And then they militarized it so that all the walls that you see, the Mycenaeans didn't have walls.
That's why they're supposedly a matriarchic, peace-loving. All the people on the left love the Minoans.
They hate the Mycenaeans because they were warlike. And they built these Cyclopean walls.
But here's the catch. They were so centrifugal and so top-down that if you decapitated the elite, and sometime around 1150 or 1200 B.C., that elite broke down.
So nobody had the expertise. According to the Linear B data that we have on it.
All the farm, all the weapon, all the farm material, all the weapons, they were all centrally brought up to palace stores and then redistributed. It was kind of like communism.
But once that elite was decapitated, nobody knew how to write. Nobody knew how to run these huge architectural projects.
And we went into a dark age. And when it reemerged around 700, it was very different.
It reemerged as decentralized, what we call polices or poles, city-states. And that was the beginning of Western civilization.
And these people didn't know what the Mycenaeans were. So that is also the beginning of Greek mythology in around 700.
And what do I mean by that? So you're walking around Greece around 700 and one day you fall into a Tholos tomb. Or the next day you're in a forest and you see this huge Cyclopean wall.
Or you go to the site of Mycenae and you're plowing one day and you pull up all this gold, or one day you're out in the field collecting olives and it rains and all these linear bee tablets show up. What do you do? You say these were gods and they were but you're also matching that physical remnant or archaeology with a folk tradition.
So once you have a cataclysm, and we don't know what caused the end of these myths, then that is the catalyst for myth. It's like all these apocalyptic, you know, water world and all these end of the world or the Mad Max.
And you make these myths about it. So these Greeks then in the Dark Ages, not the city state, they thought, wow, somebody was here.
The population fell by 90 percent. And agriculture was stagnant.
It was mostly livestock. There's a little bit of remnants of the Dark Ages in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
It's a tripartite society. I mean, there's Mycenaean, Dark Age, and Contemporary, 700.
But the point I'm making is when you can't make sense of monumental architecture or remnants of a lost civilization everywhere in your midst, and you combine that with a folk tradition that you grew up that said it said well once upon a time there were all these cyclops and they built these big walls and they went to troy and there was a guy named achilles and there's a guy named ajax and they went to troy well some of those names appear in a linear b so these were mycenaean functionaries bureaucrats generals and then when society decides, it would be sort of like we get a nuclear bomb and all of a sudden we, Petraeus, Petraeus, Petraeus, and then pretty soon Petraeus, who was just a general, then he becomes Lord Petraeus who led the great expedition, and they exaggerate it. And then it's codified when you have an actual civilization because of the reintroduction.
I shouldn't say reintroduction of writing, but an introduction of a much superior script, Greek. And then we codify all these myths, and that's the end of mythology because there's no longer an oral tradition, and it can be, you know, nobody.
So all of this has an ancient aura to it

when it's codified in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Hesiod. You don't make up myths in a literate

civilized society unless you're a cult figure or a nut. It's always about an earlier time that

you're trying to explain something that's disappeared and was more majestic than your

own society. That's a long, windy answer to the pyramids.

That's okay. That was wonderful.

Let's go ahead and take a break, though,

and we'll come back to talk a little bit about retrospective on pardons and executive orders

and then also the hysterical style of interrogation of these new cabinet members.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show.
We are now producing video podcasts and you can find them both on Rumble and on YouTube. Just put in the Victor Davis Hanson show and you should come up with that show in either case., Victor, I was wondering if you could, because we've been hearing for months, because Joe Biden pardoned, executive orders have been very frustrating for the last years.
And then now Donald Trump is in, and he's got lots of executive orders, and he's got droves of pardons. And I was wondering a couple of things.
Has it

always been this way through presidencies? And what has changed? And is this a good or bad precedent? And I know that's a lot of questions. It's more of a democratic phenomenon.
If you go back, let's go back to Donald Trump has pardoned. He had about 200 pardons in the first, I think, I'm doing this by memory.
And then he had 1,500. So he's got about 1,700.
Joe Biden had about 8,000. Then you go to Barack Obama, he had about 2,000.
And then George Bush had, I think, 200. And Bill Clinton had, I think, about 2, Now, I take that back about Obama.
I think he was lower than that, but Bill Clinton had 2,000. So what I'm getting at is, of the last four or five presidencies, about 80% of the pardons came in just two, the Clinton administration and the Obama administration, and not in the Bush administration.

And even with this mass pardon by Trump, it pales in consideration to the numbers. And we're talking about clemencies and pardons, reductions in sentences and actual exoneree.
They're free to be they're free of penalty, any incarceration or criminal activity. So it's unusual.
Nobody had ever pardoned their family like that. That was new.
And the preemptive pardons for 10 years of all activity, even though there might be crimes, we could wake up tomorrow and somebody can come forward and said, you know what? I got to admit now in 2009, I should say during the vice presidency of Joe Biden in 2015, I didn't really tell you, but I got a check for two million dollars as a money man for the Biden. It doesn't matter.
The Bidens will not be indicted. They have a preemptive pardon, not after the pardon.
So Joe, in his last years, can't grift anymore. But he doesn't need to.
He's already got, according to the Comer people, Representative Comer, they've got $30 million in foreign shakedown. So it is unusual.
There are good pardons. And I think a lot of people are getting a little worried that Donald Trump is running.

I'm not.

I'm happy.

But there were so many egregious violations of norms under Biden that the accelerated, quick recension of all of them seems radical.

It's not radical, everybody.

It's back to common sense.

There were three or four protesters. Two of them were women.
They didn't do anything violent. They just assembled outside an abortion.
And the FBI came and got them and put them in jail and made them wear and incarcerated. And they had to wear ankle braces even when they were let go.
And remember when they grilled Merrick Garland? They said, well, why are you doing this? I think it was Senator Lee from, Mike Lee from Utah. Why are you doing this? You have all these people that are bombing anti-abortion headquarters or violent.
And these people are peaceful, these anti-abortion people. But the pro-abortion are not.
And he said, well, the pro-abortion people are easy to find. They're in daylight.
And the other people are kind of terrorists and they work by night. Think of that admission.
The real dangerous people would be hard to catch so we don't catch them. And the people who are easy, we go after them and they try to.
It was all about the left had wanted to make a point. And so they weaponized the entire government.
They really did. Yeah.
So we'll just take it as a very bad precedent. How are we going to get out of this? You know, it seems like you say you're not going to do it.
And then you ask yourself, well, we're not going to weaponize the government.

Kash Patel is going to be really challenged because he's got people who broke the law. And we know some of them did.
We know that James Comey leaked a classified memo. We know that he claimed he couldn't remember 245 times.
He denied paying Christopher Steele. We know that Andrew McCabe lied four times.
I'm one of the few people on the right that like Bill Barr. I think he was naive about the left, and I think he could have done a little bit more.
But he was very good with the Mueller investigation, but he made one mistake. When it was brought to his attention by the inspector general that Andrew McCabe, I think on four occasions, had lied under oath to federal investigators about leaking things.
He said, well, why punish? They should have put him and they should have brought him for perjury. And they didn't.
They did not. And so when Kash Patel is going to find stuff that the FBI did, and then what does he do? If they're still within the statute of limitations, does he try to indict them? Then they say, you're weaponizing the government.
No, you're just trying to bring it back to the norm. That was really a horrible confirmation hearing, I thought, with Adam Schiff.

He really embarrassed himself.

He said, turn around.

I just did a video for our website about it.

It was horrible.

I wanted to yell out when I was watching that.

You scoundrel.

You scoundrel.

When you were censored, you were censored.

Part of the modus operandi of a house censor, remember Representative Paula, is her name Luna from Florida? She wanted to charge him 25 million bucks. But anyway, part of the ritual, this rare occasion when your compatriots censor it, you have to go up to the dice as they read out the censor.
And Kevin McCarthy and then Adam Schiff got everybody to yell and scream and boo. So if he wanted that reciprocal treatment, when he said to Cash Patel, turn around and look at the Capitol Police that you wrote about, he should have had everybody in the galley start yelling and screaming at Adam Schiff.
That's what Adam Schiff did. They treated him very unfairly.
He did wonderfully, Kash Patel. And it was just under further argument that you've got to get somebody in there to clean out that mess of perjurers and people who broke the law.
Adam Schiff is a sui generis. I've never seen someone who is more shameless.
He was censored for lying about the Mueller investigation. He was censored for lying about the whistleblower that he said he had no contact with in the first impeachment.
He lied repeatedly, Michael Horowitz found, with the minority so-called shift memo, and it still has not fazed him. And people voted him in as our senator.
Wasn't it our Nevada senator who said, well, it worked, didn't it? That's all that happened. That was Harry Reid when they said, I remember that.
I'm doing this by memory, but I remember they said to Harry Reid, in the 2012 campaign, in the critical last few weeks, you got on the floor of the Senate and lied and said that Mitt Romney had not paid his income taxes and that you had had access by elite. And that was not true.
And he said it worked, didn't it? So sad. He was one of the worst senators in the history of the U.S.
Senate, given his whole family became quite wealthy in the way the Democratic machine controlled Nevada. Yeah, very sad.
Victor, I'd like to take a moment for our sponsor, Hillsdale College. Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses.
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And we welcome and love the continuing support. Yeah, I have to go to Hillsdale.
I shouldn't say I have to. I want to go.
But I've been invited there three times in 2025. So I'll be there on March 3rd and 4th.
Mark Moyer is holding a military history conference, and they've asked me to speak about World War II in film. And I'm going to talk about great movies like Patton, Bridge Too Far, that depict events in World War II.
And then I have the senior class and the university has asked me to give the graduation address. So on May 10th, I will be giving the graduation address for Hillskill College in 2025.
That's a big honor, too, because they voted for you to do it, the senior students themselves. Yes, the graduating class traditionally votes for the person they want to speak.
Yeah, it is. I've spoken once at St.
John's. That was a wonderful experience, their graduation.
And I gave the graduation speech to a college in Napa once in Angwin, California. And then I'll be there the first week of September, my annual 10 days, where I give guest lectures and meet with students and give interviews and meet donors and things.
So it's really had a lot of national attention as the epitome of what a university should be, a college should be. And I think we're going to see some radical changes in higher education.
And I guess the theme would be if you people just did what Hillsdale did and just did a few simple things and not have one course with a dash with the word studies following it, therapeutic class, you'd be in great shape. And you just honored the Bill of Rights and you enforced equal opportunity and banned racially segregated graduations or safe spaces and you ensured free speech, you might regain your reputation.
My experience is that under Larry Arn, when I first got there, it was struggling because of the prior, I don't want to get into it, but the prior president had some difficulties. And over that 22 or 23 year period, the faculty got sizable pay and pay for productivity, not just pay.
And the faculty is wonderful. There are so many scholars of an international reputation.
And then there's a complete makeover of the college. I think they've invested over a billion dollars.
So it has national – it has the greatest, the most impressive shooting range of any college in the United States. And it has, I think, the largest chapel, or I would call it a cathedral.

It's huge.

And then all the facilities are new, and then the endowment is, everything about it's been successful.

And I have very favorite places.

Another one is Pepperdine, especially the School of Public Policy, Pete Peterson.

Jim Wilburn did a great job.

So was Pete Peterson. It's a wonderful place, Pepperdine.
I wish I could say that about my other billets that I've been visitors, but I will politely decline. Well, Victor, so let's turn then to the interrogations broadly of these new cabinet members.
They've been pretty hysterical, I guess is the word you want to use. The hysterical side.
No, yeah. Paranoid side.
Elizabeth Warren yelling at Kash Patel, not allowing him to talk, or even Bernie Sanders and his onesie thing. I don't know.
You know, it's just the Democrats make themselves look crazy instead of just asking somebody questions rationally and following up on those questions. They want to just.
I know I went back. I was curious.
I went back and looked at the Republican questions of Biden's nominees. One of them wasn't, there were two.

The FAA guy didn't even know how long a jet runway was.

And there was another person that was rejected,

but they were sharp, but they were not like this.

They were not hysterical.

Elizabeth Warren was just, she kept interrupting Bobby Kennedy and yelling at him.

And if you just took a pause, you just said, am I listening to this correctly? Elizabeth Warren is attacking Bobby Kennedy because he is skeptical and less trustful of the pharmaceutical industry. And I, and then he just demolished them.
He just said,

you know, a lot of these, all the people in this committee get pharmaceuticals and Bernie, you're the number one and Elizabeth, you're number two. And he got, he went crazy.
Oh, these are from the workers. No, they're affiliated with the pharmaceuticals.
They spend $250 million in political campaigns as Bobby Kennedy testified. Tulsi Gabbard will be the most difficult because she has some things she said that will offend people about Syria.
They were going to get her that she had said that we shouldn't overthrow the Assad regime, but she handled that masterfully today. She said, you people tried to overthrow him and the way you tried to overthrow Mubarak and the way you tried to overthrow, and successfully Gaddafi.
And how did that work out? You put the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Libya is a mess. and Syria is now a mess and the person that we put in, the terrorist,

was a big advocate of 9-11 and cheered on everybody on 9-11. Now he's running Syria.
So she was pretty good. I thought Adam Schiff embarrassed himself.
Tim Kaine embarrassed.

Every one of them embarrassed. Behind all of this was Chuck Schumer, who was being criticized by governors for not being harsh enough.

Believe that or not.

And again, 37 percent.

So they took a poll contemporaneously with Quinnipiac and they looked at this.

It's been going on for two weeks.

And it's no surprise that 37 percent of the population, that's it, has a favorable impression of Democrats. And that's because they look at those people and they say, these are ossified hacks.
And Robert Kennedy Jr. made a good point.
He said, this is all happening because I endorsed Donald Trump. Had I come before you and been nominated by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, you would be supporting me.
And I think also if he had have been, Rand Paul would have been supporting him and others in the Republican Party. And it's just vicious.
And then when Carolyn Kennedy, we talked about that, wrote that scurrilous letter.

My God, she said he was a sexual predator.

And she got all of the – the one thing I couldn't understand, she said that he was responsible for all the addictions and travesties of the – does he – Of the Kennedy family. I thought, okay, an unborn conceptual Robert F.
Kennedy made his uncle, JFK, deflower a virgin in the marital bed when he was president, made him get addicted to painkillers, and made him have an affair along with Robert Kennedy's father with Marilyn Monroe. That was Robert Kennedy before he was born.

And then I thought, well, she said all these terrible things.

So I thought, wow, Carolyn Kennedy is finally coming forward.

I regret that she's picking this occasion, but she's obviously being disinterested in empirical,

and she's going to examine the Kennedy pathologies. And then silence.
Nothing. Nothing.
I thought, well, wait a minute. Who was the biggest alcoholic in the U.S.
Senate? Couldn't be Ted Kennedy, could it? And who was the only senator in the history that we know of that was directly responsible for, I would say, kill somebody? You get in a car, you're drunk, you go over a bridge, you're going out for a tryst, you run into the water, you're drunk, she's in there, and then you swim out and swim away. And she's there in an air pocket, slowly drowning.
That was her uncle. So if she's going to quit, did Robert Kennedy ever do that? The whole Kennedy thing is, I think it doesn't help him at all to have the name Kennedy anymore.
What helps him is he's trying to stop two pathologies, obesity and diabetes. And that is based on food selection and exercise.
Nobody could disagree with that. That's got to be, you know.
Cash Patel, I mean, he's going to get confirmed thanks to people like Adam Schiff. The questioning was so unfair.
And when he ordered him, it was kind of racist in a way. You know, it was like, you turn around and look back at those Capitol police.
These are the people you defamed. And he said, I'm not going to do that.
You know, you're lying. And Cash was right.
He said, you know, you're lying. And what he meant was the inspector general of the United States government, the Department of Justice, found out that your memo was a pathological lie.
And he found out that you were lying when you said that you had no contact

with the whistleblower and Mr. Vindman that cooked up the impeachment.
And he found out you were

lying when you said that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians serially and repeatedly, and

that got you finally censored. So Adam Schiff should have been the one that people were questioning.

Cash did very well to keep his temper, and he's going to be confirmed, and I think he will be met, I hope, with all the people who are culpable will submit their resignations, the Washington-centric left wing. Remember what the FBI became very shortly? It became a retrieval service for the Biden family.
And by that, I mean, somebody said, what do you mean retrieval? Okay. Ashley Biden lost her diary, and we've got to get it because in it, she admits that she, as a, I don't know, 12 or 13 year old, was taking naked in the shower with the president of the United States.
Got to get that. Oh, James O'Keefe may have it.
He didn't. Let's go roust him out at 2 in the morning in his underwear and intimidate him.
So they did. Oh, Hunter.
Oh, my God. Hunter lost another laptop.
But this one's bad because it's got nude pictures on it. It's got him with a gun.
It's got him using Coke. It's got him with prostitutes that got him nude.
But most importantly, he has text messages in which he refers to his father as the big guy and the 10% recipients of foreign bribery money. Where is it? Oh, this guy, this repairman has it.
So we'll go take it from him because he confiscated it because Hunter never paid the bill. And after the bill is not paid, his labor is recompensed by possession of the item, which probably was.
So the FBI went and got it. And then they said, oh, my God, this thing is authentic.
We better sit on it for a year.

And then, you know, Anthony Blinken calls up Mike Morrell, former CIA interim director. Hey, that laptop is really going to hurt us because Trump's going to spring it on this last debate.
This is 2020 in October. What are we going to do? And then Mike Morrell says, well, you know, I'll round up 50 intelligence authorities that swear that it's Russian information, disinformation, but we'll use the word information because that won't say that.
And we'll say it has the hallmarks because we know the FBI or buddies in the FBI have it and they've told us it's authentic. So we got to lie.
And if you think that Leon Panetta is not capable of lying, he lied.

If you're thinking James Clapper is not capable, he lied.

If you're thinking that John Brennan is not capable, he lied.

And the best thing that Donald Trump has done of all those executive orders, the one that I admire him the most, is yanking the security clearances of everybody who signed that lie

and tried to warp an election.

And then the election happened. And when you look at that debate, I went back and looked at the YouTube of that debate.
It is shameless when Donald Trump says, we all know what's on the laptop. We all know you were getting money.
He said, that is a lie. 51 intelligence authorities.
How dare you? It's like it was all set up. That warped an election.
A polling firm, albeit conservative, found after the election of those that knew about the laptop, it affected their vote. And it might have meant as much as 7 or 8 percent of the electorate.
It was horrible. So, gosh, all of the things they've done.
And the FBI was, oh, I last forgot one thing before we finished. I said they were retrieval service, but I only mentioned the diary and the laptop.
Remember the gun that his wife or his, it was his, after he seduced the widow of his brother and then got her hooked on heroin or dangerous opiates. Then he was very dangerously brandishing a gun around children.
So then she threw it in a dumpster and the Secret Service then, I think, enlisted the FBI and both of them went out and tried to find it. Unfortunately for Hunter, they found it very close to a school.
Somebody, a transient had found it. And so if you have a problem in the Biden family and you're missing diaries or guns or laptops, you just call up Christopher Wray and say, you know, get your boys out there and get it.
And then he says, I can't do it because Merrick Garland called me up and said, I got to go after parents at a school board meeting. And then after I do that, I've got to go arrest these 74-year-old women that were peacefully protesting at an abortion clinic.
And then I'm too busy because I got to organize a SWAT raid at Donald Trump's home in Mar-a-Lago. But I'll still try to do it.

That's what the FBI has become.

And there was a Rasmussen poll

that recently asked,

what is your confidence in the FBI?

46%, I think 29% had very unfavorable,

not just unfavorable.

So when Cash got up there and said

that almost 60% of the American people have lost all confidence. By the way, if you look at the Reagan Foundation's polls of the military, it's the same thing.
Those were the two most cherished institutions among most Americans, say, 30 years ago, whether it was George H.W. Bush, George W.
Bush, or Bill Clinton. But what they did to the Pentagon and the FBI in weaponizing them has lost.
It doesn't matter what Victor says. You can say, well, the entire generals had a right to call him Mussolini and Hitler.
Okay. But that's not what I say.
It's what the people think. And the people have lost confidence in the Pentagon and especially the FBI.
So we'll see what Pete Hexeth and Kash Patel. I know all of you that are listening, at times you kind of get, you're thinking to yourself, Trump just said the bull, S-H-I-T word, and he kind of did a lot of executive order.
And they're saying this, just take a deep breath. We are emerging from the most politicized, weaponized, dangerous period.
That's the truth. And the correctives have to be draconian to get this country not to the right, but back to the center.
And you'll have to do things that they call right-wing because they were socialistic and nihilistic. So we're going to see a lot of things, but just they need to happen.
People have to go to work for five days. So Kash Patel is going to be put to the test of reversing the mockery the Bidens made of the FBI.
And he's going to have to tell everybody to go to work five days a week and you can all quit hard yeah he's going to say you know what there's an executive order any federal employee so all you fbi guys that were involved in the mar-a-lago raid and you were involved in arresting grandmothers at abortion clinics that were peacefully demonstrating and all of you that was survey that showed up on January 6th stood out like sore thumbs, all of you have a chance to quit, and you get paid for nine months. So sayonara.
See you. Wouldn't want to be you.
Yeah, let's hope it works. Anyway, Victor, let's go for our last thing.
I wanted to share some images that your David Mamet. David Mamet.
I just want to look at two of them. He sent, especially to you, they say to Victor from David Mamet.
And this one has a Santa Claus in his unique drawing style, the David Mamet's drawing style. It says titled Santa Claus in Hollywood.
And Santa Claus is saying,

better watch out, better not cry, better not shout. I'm telling you why.
You'll be blacklisted.

That's the first one. And the second one is, it doesn't have a title, except it sort of has in

quotes, his dimples, how merry. And then he has Noam Chomsky saying, we can no longer afford to consider this a merely rhetorical question.
Well, I got to know David Mamet originally through my friend Shelby Steele, who was a good friend of his. David Mamet, if everybody doesn't, he's a Pulitzer Prize and Tony winner.
And he had a stellar, I think in his early 70s, he lives in Santa Monica, so he's living on the front of the disaster of California. And he was, I think he would say that he was a red diaper baby.
In other words, he was brought up by socialist parents, Jewish parents, and he had this metamorphosis. He looked at the left-wing project and he saw that it was illiberal and it was dangerous.
And he had a lot of authority because some of our best-known movie, I think that movie, he was both a director and a screenwriter, Hijack.

But he wrote the screenplay, I think, for The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Untouchables, you know, bring enough. Obama stole his line when Obama said he went to Philadelphia and he said, I tell you guys, we've got to be tough with Romney.
You've got to bring a gun to a knife fight. That's what we do in Chicago.
Yeah, Barack, you took that from David Mamet. And he wrote a series of play, American Buffalo.
So he's probably one of the top three playwrights in the United States. His screenplays were very, and he was a director.
And I've had lunch with him, I think twice. He's in enormous physical condition.
He looks like he's built like he's 50 years old. And that's good because he'll have a long life, I hope.
But every once in a while, he'll send me one of his cartoons. And they're very funny.
They're very witty. Yeah, they're very personalized to you.
That's what – those are really important pictures. He falls in a category of certain celebrities.
And Tulsi Gabbard, it's very hard. If you're a never-Trumper, people are not going to go after you and try to destroy your career.
They're not. They just don't want anything to do with you.
But if you're a left-wing person and you're apostate, they're trying to destroy Robert Kennedy.

They're trying to destroy Tulsi Gabbard. They tried to destroy David Mamet.
I think he wrote that book, Brain Dead Liberals. And, you know, they did the same thing with John Voight.
When I would teach at Pepperdine, I got to know John Voight a little bit. And he was the sweetest, nicest guy.
He had this unique ability to say the most critical things of leftists that were shocking and great, but he did it with a smile, and he was so kind. And I'll just finish by relating something.
Everybody who's lost a child gets very nostalgic when you get older. And I was asked once to go speak to a large group.
I think it was in Beverly Hills. And John Voight was there.
And I took my daughter who's passed away, Susanna, and she was a student at Pepperdine. So we went there and everybody mobbed.
I was at the head, I was in this huge living room. It was a very palatial home.
And I was going to speak, but of course everybody wanted to look at John Voight and be near him. So my daughter got lost in the crowd as she walked up and there was nowhere.
The way it worked was I was to speak while people went to a buffet and got their plate and were sitting down. There might have been 50 people in this.
So she then, he saw me come in with Susanna and he said, hello, and this is my daughter.

And then he got mobbed.

So then I started my speech and I looked out and poor Susanna was all by herself in this corner of a kind of a, I don't know what it was.

It was an ante room.

And John Voight looked over there and he walked all the way over, got up from the center of attention and walked all the way and sat down with her and talked to her. And, of course, all these people tried in the middle of my talk to follow him.
But he just kind of not waved them away, but he just made it clear he just wanted to talk to her. I've never forgotten that.
And he once texted me or he called me. He was going to go on Bill O'Reilly for the first time.
And so he had all these great ideas. He's really a smart guy.
He's very brave. He took on.
And so I said, well, he said, I said, you know, when you go on, you have to be kind of sober. He said, of course.
And then he went on there. Because he neglected all of my advice, it was really good because he was animated and he was fiery.

But he did it in that soft, wonderful voice of his.

He's a guy that there's about three or four of these celebrities I've bumped into now and then.

And I really like David Mamet.

I really like John Boyle. And one of my favorites is Dennis Miller.

I used to go on his show a lot, his radio show, and they really went after him. And he was very, he's a great guy.
He's a wonderful guy. He's spoken at the Hoover Institution before.
He waived the fee. He was just a very generous, magnanimous person.
I saw him one time at a show in Las Vegas, and he was just the amount of political material and the nonstop jokes every second or two. His only problem was he had such a brilliant mind, and he had a photographic memory, and he would tell these great jokes, but sometime they were lost on people.

That was one of these football.

And I like that idea because if you didn't know, you tried to think about it.

But that being said, he had a huge audience anyway.

And that was kind of funny because he had been a star as a person of the left on Saturday Night Live.

And then when he went gravitated toward the center, center right, then people got furious and disowned him. And you can be an apostate on the right, and you cannot be an apostate on the left.
If you try it, you're doomed. You really are.
And I know that people go after Liz Cheney now. I have no animus toward Liz Cheney, but part of that is she gives it back.
She says terrible things about Republicans and that it calls into question. If you're a politician more so than a celebrity, then when do we believe you now or before? You know, she's third ranking Republicans.
and there's two types of never trumpers in ending there's a never trumper who say i am a stolid conservative i and i agreed with most of what donald trump did but the messenger was so distasteful for me that it i couldn't vote for him even though i agreed with his message. I don't agree with it.
It's absurd. But that's very different than saying the messenger is awful, and therefore I'm refuting the entire message, even though he is advancing things that I told and raised money for and was enriched by my advocacy for all Donald Trump's positions.
And that's what, in other words,

my hatred of Donald Trump is much greater than my love for the conservative idea and the traditional America.

And that's, that's all of the never Trumpers almost now.

And that's insane.

It is insane.

I like what Brit Stevens, the arch never Trumper,

he wrote a New York times mea culpa.

And he said, I'm never, never Trump anymore. And he said, and we thought that he was so awful.
And we thought that he did things that nobody else did. And then he didn't.
We'd realize he didn't. And we thought he was a racist and he thought he was this and people vote more blacks and Hispanics and young people voted for him.
That was the big thing about Never Trumpers. He's a racist.
He's a sexist. Young people hate him.
Yeah, okay. Why do they all vote for him? And you can't answer that because he wasn't.
Anyway. And on that crazy note, we're going to end this episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
It's our Saturday episode.

Thanks to our audience for joining us. I should thank everybody.
I realize I've been moving because I've been freezing because we turned off the heat so it wouldn't be so loud. It's about 50 degrees here.
So thanks to everybody and thanks to you, Victor. Thank you, everybody, for listening.
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