Don't Look Back: America First and the Dangerous Alternative

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Hello ladies,, gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You're here to listen to the star and namesake.
Again, that's Victor Davis Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He is a best-selling author.
He is a classicist, a military historian, a farmer. He's everything.
Philologist. He's a man with a website, and that's called The Blade of Perseus.
Its address is victorhanson.com. You can check that out.
You should be, and I'll tell you why later in this episode, why you should be subscribing. We are recording on Saturday, the 25th of January.
And this particular episode will be up on Thursday, the 30th. Plenty to talk about today.
Victor, it's Donald Trump. Did you hear Donald Trump put out a lot of executive orders we have a few few to get your opinions on uh we have the uh oh my gosh greenland is who'd have who'd have thunk that greenland would be um on the lips of many people in america uh what else that's a very touchy subject well between the as t T.S.
Eliot said, between the dream and the waste, between the dream and the reality or what lies the abyss. There was a report, Jack, that the Danish Prime Minister and Domp had a, what was it, a vocal argument.
Was it January 6th or 7th before the inauguration? It was a week before the inauguration. He was not president yet.
The Europeans, apparently, who were listening in or were later apprised of it, said they were shattered or they were shocked at the level of invective and animation on the part of Trump. Well, we'll get to that.
We're going to start with Trump's executive order on America first, and then lay into the Greenland stuff. And we'll get to all this right after these important messages.
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And as of late, we're recording this video recording and it's up on Rumble. So check if you want to see it and hear it at the same time.
Go to Rumble. Victor's also doing, I don't know how you do everything you do, Victor, but he's also doing.
I got a, yeah, I got a note. I told you last time

I got another one. It said, Victor, you're doing five podcast, five little ones for the Daily

Signal. You do your four a week and then you do one now for the paywall.
You write two of the

ultras plus two columns. You're overexposed.
We keep telling you. We've seen you too much.
Cool it. I don't know.
Victor, you're like a bag of M&Ms. I was on Sean last night, and they wanted me to be in the chair at 10 to 6 for a hit.
Yeah. At 5 to 7, my time, they said, sorry, I waited there an hour because of the L.A.
press conference and the confirmation. Then they had their regular Washington team.
Right. So, it's very hard to sit still for like, and my studio heater went out, so it was freezing cold.
And you're doing it with Fox out of the kindness of the car. I try to do it three, no more than three times a week.
Yeah. Again, I don't get paid for that.
I don't want to be paid for that. I just want to be able to say what I feel.
Not that you can't if you're paid, but people sometimes have that impression. Yeah, well, strings attached are strings attached.
So, Victor, let's get your thoughts. Mr.
Overexposed, let's get your thoughts on this. Mr.
Overexposed. I'm going to read the first two sections, very brief, of Donald Trump's America First Policy Directive to the Secretary of State.
Section 1, purpose. From this day forward, the foreign policy of the United States shall champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first.
Section 2, policy. As soon as practical, the Secretary of State shall issue guidance bringing the Department of State's policies, programs, personnel, and operations in line with an America-first foreign policy, which puts America and its interests first.
So who could disagree with this, Victor? Can we count the people? Yeah, please. And he also said in an ancillary executive order that only the flag of the United States shall fly or from the United States.
It's going to hurt the Black Lives Matter flag. Yes, no more pride flags.
If you saw that website the day of the August 2021 evacuation to Kabul, there was a State Department that showed the pride flag, whether it was actually on the embassy, I don't know, but it was on their website. So, I mean, you're right, that truth should be self-evident that every country, you know, I think I told you this, Jack, but this is very funny to show that, I mean, it's not like Barack Obama, if we were here and we were having this conversation in 2009, remember they asked Obama, do you think your country is exceptional?

Well, it's just a step.

You know, but a sudden, well, you know, Greece thinks it's exceptional.

Maybe Britain thinks it's exceptional.

Everybody thinks they're exceptional.

So we're not exceptional.

That kind of attitude.

Then he went to Turkey on the apology tour.

Every time he opened his mouth, it was we stole the land from the Native Americans. We had slavery.
That's all over with. And this is, I wrote some very critical things of China.
The Chinese council showed up at my office, asked to set me straight. Luckily, I had one or two people there.
It turned out to be Miss Fang Fang. I didn't know that at the time.
Only later, when I saw her picture, did one of my assistants and I conclude that it was Fang Fang. But man, she came in the tightest Levi's with knee boots and sunglasses hanging from her blouse opened and wanted to give me a gift.
But anyway, the point, give old Skeletor a gift? I don't think so. But anyway, so she said something they'll never forget.
And she said, every nation thinks only of themselves first, and your nation doesn't. So when we have overflights into Japanese land, airspace, or sea space with our boat, you don't do anything until we go away, and then you do something.
So why are you doing this? Because no nation does not consider its interests first. I said, that's debatable.
Barack Obama's president. And then she said, maybe it's a trap.
It's a trap. You want to encourage us and then you'll just trap us in the act of being too far in.
I said, if you want to believe that, I'm not going to disagree. But her point was that during the Obama administration, as an enemy, she didn't think that the United States put our interests first.
And I think I'll just

be very quickly and I'll think I'll show you what I mean by the Mexican government. The Mexican

government, Jack, we had two developments that just happened. A hiker walking along the border

with another hiker, American citizen on American soil was shot in the leg and could have been

killed by two cartel gunmen that were in the United States, had crossed the border with impunity, apparently. Simultaneous to that, we had spent about $150,000 to fly 88 criminal deportees back to Mexico, and we were informed right before the plane took out that Mexico would not allow that plane to land.
I think those two incidents, not that they're connected, but they reflect an impression in Mexico that Mexico thinks that the United States does not put its interests first, and if America doesn't put its interests first, then why should Mexico? And it's okay if cartel people go across the border and shoot people. It's okay to Mexico to show us, excuse me, the middle finger.
You're not bringing these people back. Because they have had for four years caravans come from Central America, wave by, hi, you guys, just keep going.
The United States doesn't care about its sovereignty. Get in there.
And then they've said, we're going to get another million or two in on this. And they did put about two million of their own, maybe three or four million.
Then they said, you know what? The United States is so stupid that our guys go over there in America. they get local, state, federal, housing, food, education, health care, supplements, even though they're there illegally, and they send, because they free up their money, they send $63 billion to us.
That is our largest source of foreign exchange. It's a bigger revenue winner than tourism or oil.
And in the last 20 years, we have been getting Chinese material and assembling it in Mexico, and we are running up fantastic trade deficits with the United States. And we started out with $50 billion, and now we're up to $150 billion in red ink for the U.S.
We are America's biggest trading partner, bigger than China, and we run up $150 billion surplus. And they do nothing.
And that's not counting the $63 billion that our people suck out of the economy and send home. And that's not counting the multi-billion cartel profits that are absorbed by the Mexican economy by selling fentanyl disguised as prescription drugs or other less lethal gain.
Because nobody in their right mind would take a fentanyl pill unless we, you know, lace other things with it. And we kill 75,000 people a year from fentanyl.
And over 10 years, we've killed more people than Americans lost in World War II, 450,000, 117,000 in World War I, 37,000 in the Korean War, 56,000 in Vietnam. We are the biggest killers of America than all the other people in the world and all of the 20th century wars.
And they do nothing. They welcomed us in.
Mr. Mayorkas welcomed us in.
And if you have that attitude toward us, then of course the cartels can go by and just shoot somebody on sight. Or of course Ms.
Scheinbaum can say, don't dare let, you know what we should do about all this? We could stop it, and I think Donald Trump is going to do this. We could stop it in four or five easy pieces.
Number one, we don't care who you are, whether you're a citizen, illegal, you're a Greek, you're Italian, you're Victor. You send any money back to Mexico, we slap a 20% excise tax on it, on that remittance.
Just psss. And that would earn us $12 billion a year.
And we keep it on until the attitude of Mexico changes and there are no more illegal. Then number two, why are we taking an expensive military osprey that costs hundreds of thousands dollars per flight to deport? We just have a port of exit.
We just take a big point out of the wall. It has a swinging door.
We bus people by the thousands every day, and we give them a backpack. And in it, it has aspirin, it has water, it has food, it has all of the numbers of their particular countries, consuls, everything.
Mexican people, who to call, we open it up, and we say, would you please there there and Mexico will facilitate, just as they facilitated

your exodus out of your country and influx into America, so will they facilitate your walk home. And that's number two.
Then number three, we say to Mexico, and notice what I'm not saying. We don't yell, we don't scream, we don't insult them.

We do this like Donald Trump did very well with the people in the L.A. fire when he had that press conference.
We said we like Mexico. Remember Trump spoke to Davos and he said we love America.
We love Europeans. We love Europe.
We're just trying to be the leader and have you guys help us. We love tech.
We love tech. You guys should join us.
We're your best friends. So he just says to Ms.
Scheinbaum, we love you people. You were a Berkeley scholar.
You love this country. We do too.
We met and says, hey, we didn't want to do it. We were forced to.
You can reverse it any day. Oh, we sent 20,000 people this month back to Mexico.
It was not just a fraction who you sent in. We can work on this.
And oh, we sent 20,000 people this month back to Mexico. It was not, it's just a fraction who you sent in.
We can work on this. And oh, you have $150 billion surplus and you're deliberately using Chinese imported stuff to assemble.
Well, we can do that. When you get down to zero and we have zero, we'll be friends and you'll like us again.
And he could do that so simply, you know, and I think he will do that.

But the point is that they will respect us.

They will say, you know what?

They think about America the way we do about Mexico, and we respect them for that.

But now they're like fang-fang.

No country would do that.

No country would take 12 million people in four years. No country would take felons.
No country would destroy their own border. No country would say, yeah, 75,000 people dead from Mexican imported fentanyl.
That's just collateral damage. No country would do that.
$150 billion while Americans are losing their jobs with a trade surplus from Mexico, given what they're doing to it. No country would do that.
So we just have to speak very kindly and softly and carry a huge club and not get loud and carry a twig. President Trump did issue an executive order on the cartels, yes, declaring them a terrorist? He did.
And this is why i said this is why don't i didn't just put words into his mouth donald trump said an executive order to begin i'm pretty sure to stop catch and release so you're not going to catch anybody and just say here's a little ticket show up and we know two million people will never showed up and he said if you want to be a refugee, you apply in your own country, like every other country. You just don't fly into France and say, I'm a refugee.
You apply from Somalia. And I think he's made it clear whether that was an executive order.
I'm not sure. But he's said that the wall will begin immediately.
So he's already taken measures. I just hope that he taxes remittances, and I hope he stops the expensive flights that the Mexicans hold hostage by not allowing us to land.
They came by land, and so they shall pass through by land.

Why we didn't – oh, another thing Jackie did. This was very important.
I say that every once in a while, which unfortunately is more often, you get delayed going into Fresno Air Terminal. You go in there after 12.30 or 1 on a delayed flight, and it's the busiest period of the day.
There are hundreds of people there coming in from three different cities, direct flights from Mexico, and they all, I've talked to them, and they have an app, and that app says that they have applied for temporary asylum or something, and that allows them without any background or any passport to get on those planes in Mexico and fly. And he canceled that app program.
So I think those flights, if I come in because I'm going to Chicago for a Bradley meeting this weekend, if I get delayed, which means I'm on United from Chicago, so I will be delayed, the airport will be like it was for most of my life. After 2 o'clock in the morning, there's nobody there.
Not the busiest time of the year. Of the day, I should say.
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See terms for details, and we thank the good people from Delete Me for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show. Victor, it seems maybe like it's a, I don't want to diminish this comedy thing.
America wants Greenland? America's fighting with the Dutch or Danes or whoever the hell they are over Greenland? You're right. Wait, wait, wait.
Whatever the hell they are. You're so chauvinistic about your Italian and Irish roots.
Sorry. I am a Scandinavian.
And I resent that. America's named after an Italian.
You have to deal with that. I'm sorry, Jack.
The Italians did not discover America. My ancestors did.
And Vinland. And they did it 500 years before yours.
Yeah, well, tell that to Amerigo Vespucci. Recounting the tale that you mentioned at the beginning of the show about Donald Trump, this on January 15th, his phone call with the Denmark's prime minister, it was horrendous.
He was very firm. It was a cold shower.
Before, it was hard to take it seriously, but I do think it is seriously and potentially very dangerous, said a source. Donald Trump really wants America to have Greenland.
Tell us what your thoughts are about this, Victor. I don't know what he means by having Greenland.
I think what Donald Trump is trying to emulate is something like the United States experience with Greenland during World War II. Let's remember that the Wehrmacht overran Denmark in four days in World War II.
And then Greenland was severed. And the Nazi government wanted to have bases in Greenland and therefore avoid this empty area, or expand this empty area in which Americans could not attack them by air.
In other words, air patrols from Britain and air patrols from New England or bases in Canada could not cover the entire Atlantic corridor for American cargo ships to Britain during the early years of the war. So we'd said there is no more Denmark.
So we're going to go in there and use Greenland as a base to fill that gap and ensure there's air cover. And that really stopped the U-boat threat.
We used long range B-24s, etc. So what Trump is saying is that these conditions have arisen again, and that China and Russia are in a race to claim the Arctic as is going on with the Antarctic, and they are appropriating Greenland's airspace, sea space, and northern corridors.
And when you put into the matrix that we may have a Northwest Passage very soon, and I'm told that some ships can navigate it with some danger, but given the problems in Panama, and if it were to be opened, it might be just as quick. And the point that I'm making then is you don't want Chinese and Russian ships blocking that or using that in the way that China is trying to squeeze the Panama Canal.
And then additionally, Denmark has a very – if Denmark was an unapologetic champion of Western civilization and said, look, we have things in our past, but we're better than the alternative, no. They've been very EU-ish.
And yet they are an imperial power. A little tiny country operates imperialist, colonialist power over this vast continent, which, as I've said before, is closer to New York City than it is to Copenhagen.
And if you look at the map, it's not part of Europe where Denmark is. It's part of North America where America.

Does that mean that Trump wants to invade it? No. Does that mean he wants to plant? What he's trying to do is allow them to have an open ballot.
Just like we allowed Puerto Rico. Remember that? We said you can have a, Puerto Rico's had I think one or two plebiscites.
They can either vote to be independent, they can continue to be a commonwealth, or they can vote that they want to be a state. And then we react to that in various fashions.
So they're going to have a plebiscite apparently, and Greenland can say we like the status quo and I think that'll be the end of it, or we want to be autonomous, and then we're free to choose who and how we conduct our foreign relations, or they want to be part of the United States, as Trump would. I imagine that if they had the choice, they would probably want to be autonomous, with one big exception.
They, like Denmark, cannot defend themselves. And when a Chinese warship came into their harbor, there would be one person they'd call.
And that's Trump's point, isn't it? He's saying to Denmark, yes, you have sovereignty, and yes, Greenland, but when things get rough, and they're going to get rough, believe me, given the nature of the governments in China and Russia, when you get squeezed either by Russia in your area of the world or Greenland, the person you call is the United States. We know that because it happened in World War II.
We know that because you were not part of the Soviet bloc because of NATO, which was an American run and subsidized operation. And we know it in the post-Cold War.
So we want to have certain concessions. We want more access to bases, and we want to have our companies pay a fair price of royalties for mineral extraction or whatever.
And that's what he's talking about. And of course, by Trump, art of the deal, you say what I just said in very sharp terms.
Then they get shocked. And then you get down to the real business and you get 55% of I want the whole continent.
I want to swallow it with a big American stomach. That's not going to happen.
But that's part of the bargaining technique. Yeah.
Yeah. a little hard to take Europeans when they have the wherewithal to pay 2% to 4% GDP on military, and then they don't do it, and then they expect us, and then they ridicule us as sort of crass American legionnaires that are under the direction of Socrates and Greek philosophers.
And it gets tiring after a while. I thought I heard Trump say 5% the other day.
Oh, he's upped it. No, no, he's upped it from 2%.
But the problem with 5%, we're not paying 5%. Yeah.
I think we're 3%. So we were doing 7% in the Reagan administration.
We need to get up to 5%. But I don't think he wants to get to five until Pete Hexeth ensures that it's not going to DEI and it's not going to these huge multi-billion dollar platforms that would be very vulnerable, you know, in a period of crisis when you're trying to, as I said last time, I think there has been changes in the Pentagon.
So if Taiwan were threatened and if we were to protect it, we wouldn't have to send an aircraft carrier and lose 5,000 sailors and $14 billion investment when we have airfields in the vicinity that have not been used but under American sovereignty, like the Mariana Islands that were so critical in World War II. So we're redoing those airfields.
In fact, a guy sent me, as I said with Sammy, he sent me a picture of, my father was based on Tinyan, and they found those airfields. It's kind of like, oh, one of those Raiders of the Lost Ark.
You know, I mean, it's all jungle and they're clearing it out. And then they're finding these coral runways and they're paving them.
And the idea is you're going to spread all of American air power in small 30, 40 planes here, there, there, so that you couldn't possibly lose them in a Pearl Harbor surprise attack. Victor, before Trump mentioned concerns about the Panama Canal,

I have to say I just didn't know, didn't care,

it wasn't on any radar screen I had.

But you think about China's control of it and China's Belt and Road,

I should say, which probably has some ports along the coasts of South America on either side, that's really a problem. That really isn't.
It's funny you said that. I was curious about this.
So last week I spent about three hours and just searched stories and essays about this problem prior to Donald Trump bringing it up. In other words, I deliberately did not look at anything in 2023 or 2024.
I'm talking about 2016, 17, 18, 2017, 18. And it was remarkable that there were two spheres of thought.
if a person, a writer, an essayist, was on any international board that had like a Panama Canal Advisory Committee or a corporation that we have, I think there's five concessions, international concessions, and the entrance and the exit are run by China. In other words, that's where their ports are.
And we have one near the entrance, maybe one or two, but there's a third part. But anyway, there's three different countries have concessions, and that means they have repair facilities, and they escort their ships.
But the people involved with that process in Americans are writing that it's perfectly okay. Don't fault the Chinese.
We're involved. We're here.
And then some retired military, I would say on the left side side of the spectrum are saying, and I would call them the people from Brookings or some of the left wing think tanks are saying this is not a problem. This is militaristic Yankee imperialism.
We don't want to go back to stealing the canal and Reaganism. But if they're just people who are looking at the situation, they're very worried.

And they were saying this for five or six years. It would be as if the Americans had in China at one of their most strategic corridors, maybe the Spratly Islands that they have now refurbished and created and put Chinese bases.
If the Spratly Islands were controlled by American military or American companies, they would not allow that. And the thing about China is it's kind of like Mexico.
we have got into such an asymmetrical relationship with them insidiously based on the idea that we were so happy after the fall of the Berlin Wall that if we just normalize relationships with capitalist China, it would, remember that? It was the George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton idea that the more they get involved in the world, the more they liberalize, the more their kids come over here and they see Harvard, Stanford.
I love the United States. I'm going to go back and tell everybody in China we've got to be like Yale.
It didn't work that way. It was more like Yamamoto's two years before World War II when he went to Harvard, or Tojo's train trip across the United States like in 1939, or Mitsuka's, the foreign ministers growing up in Portland, Oregon.
the more that the Japanese militarists who would become militarists saw the United States,

the more they wrongly concluded that it was decadent, roaring 20s, creepy place,

sort of like the Muslim Brotherhood people who came over here. And that is the same thing with China, that they go back and say, you know, these people are flabby, they're just chaotic, rappers, gangsters, etc.
So the solution is we should just tell China, and I think that's what Trump is going to do. Whatever you do to us, we're going to do to you.
Oh, we have a spy balloon. We didn't understand.
It got off course. It's a weather balloon.
Oh, it went right over five military bases. Oh, we're so sorry.
Oh, we have a trade surplus with you. Oh, we're sorry.
We didn't mean that. Oh, one of our missiles looks just like one of your missiles? It's just a coincidence.
So, oh, one of your payroll departments at a major corporation had a cyber? Well, we're sorry. We had nothing to do with it.
If you just treated them the way they treat us, and I think we'd get along fine. But when you get in these asymmetrical relationships where for whatever reason, they're mostly caused by the left-wing globalists and utopians, and you allow these countries to take advantage.
Another one is Turkey. You let them take advantage.
That's a NATO country. And just because it has the largest army other than ours, and just because we have a base at Insular that has nuclear weapon, they think they own us.
And they do things that no other NATO ally would be allowed to do. But when you don't stick up for yourself, as Trump is trying to do, then you get this.
And remember what Trump is doing. He's not doing this out of the head of Zeus.
He's reacting to a prior Biden administration and an Obama pattern. So he is going back to the middle, not the extreme.
The extreme is 12 million people walking in the United States. The extreme is having 330,000 Chinese students in the United States.
The extreme is sending a balloon over here. The extreme is Vladimir Putin having cyber attacks and your president saying, please knock off the hospital ones.
You know, it's a return to normalcy, to quote the famous, was that Harding or Coolidge return of normalcy? I think it was Harding. Coolidge didn't say anything.
Silent cow. Yeah.
Victor, we're going to next take up that meritocracy is back, baby. And then also one last look at Biden's senility.
Maybe it won't be a last look, but we may have other reasons to on future podcasts to get into that. But we're going to get to those when we come back from these important messages.
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That's code victor20 at takelean.com. Hey folks, we are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
We are recording on Saturday the 25th of January, and this episode is up on Thursday the 30th. God only knows, and he does what is going to transpire between today and Thursday.
I'm sure there'll be a ton of shocking news. But then Victor and the great, great Sammy Wink can discuss those on their two podcasts that they record the end of every week.

I wanted to mention one last thing on the Panama Canal.

I want to recommend folks to Google, search however you do it,

William F. Buckley Panama debate.

Now, Hoover owns the old firing line archives,

and they've let this very famous debate, was Buck debate, was essentially Buckley against Ronald Reagan. I'm sorry on that, Jack, but your hero was on the wrong side.
Oh, I know he was. Yes, yeah.
Well, my hero was also Ronald Reagan. Yes, I know.
It's a fascinating look at But Buckley, his family had concessions in Mexico, didn't they? And he spoke, didn't Buckley, didn't he speak fluent Spanish? Well, yeah, actually, Bill's dad knew, oh, what's his name? Zapata. Zapata, yeah.
And yes, so he was, he had oil, actually was around the world eventually, but originally in Mexico, then in Venezuela.

And Bill's first language was Spanish, and second language was French, and then his third language was English, which is why he kind of spoke in this very interesting way. Some people think he was more like Thurston Howell, you know, with some kind of country club accent.

But no, Bill had an eclectic linguistic upbringing. But yes, he was on the wrong side of that issue, Victor.
So meritocracy. Let's get your thoughts on this, Victor.
Donald Trump, the president of the United States, issued an executive order titled Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service. Here's a little clip from it.
But current federal hiring practices are broken, insular, and outdated. They no longer focus on merit, practical skill, and dedication to our Constitution.
Federal hiring should not be based on impermissible factors such as one's commitment to illegal racial discrimination under the guise of equity, or one's commitment to the invented concept of gender identity over sex. I love that this is an executive order, this language.
Inserting such factors into the hiring process subverts the will of the people, puts critical government functions at risk, and risks losing the best qualified candidates. Victor, this is a tremendous executive order, and it's been amplified in other ways about merit.
I love, again, the language here. Victor, what are your thoughts on the return of meritocracy to a nation based on meritocracy? Well, you know, one of the arguments of the early, what predated woke DEI or affirmative action was, well, what do you guys care about classics or English? They're not doing it in brain surgery, and they're not doing it in the FAA, and then they were.
So the argument is every element of our existence now is subject to what I would call a commissariat. A commissariat is just a term that suggests, like the Soviet Union, that ideological purity was used as a criterion instead of merit.
And it had disastrous effects on the Soviet Union because of two things. Once a person is picked for their ideology, or in this case, their race, and I think, to be fair, I think ideology has a role as well as race and gender in this sense.

Two of the smartest, I think I've said this before, two of the most accomplished scholars that I have met,

and when I got to the Hoover Institution, it was clear to me that they were preeminent, were Shelby Steele and Tom Sowell.

And I quickly discovered in the way that the university treated them, or the way they were referred to,

Thank you. were Shelby Steele and Tom Sowell.
And I quickly discovered in the way that the university treated them or the way they were referred to, they were discriminated not by race but by ideology. In other words, nobody is more discriminated in the United States than a conservative scholar.
And I can tell you when I first got there, I met two other scholars who were African-American, Condoleezza Rice and Chiron Skinner. And in terms of articulation, vocabulary, symphony of syntax, they were outstanding in the way they spoke and reasoned.
And I can tell you at that point, I walked into the Hoover Institution and I tiptoed through red paint, Jack, in 2009 to my office because Condoleezza Rice was coming back and the Stanford student said she had blood on her hands. from, I wrote an op-ed.
People forget that, that she was, when she was trying to negotiate

a Palestinian newspaper,

portrayed her as a primate in a tree in the most racist fashion possible. And then if anybody had, Kyron Skinner is a very brilliant scholar, also African American.
So my point is that when I got to Hoover, there were these four preeminent scholars, and they were pretty much the marquee scholars in various degrees. I mean, not that everybody who was smart was African-American, but it was clear that if you wanted to have an engaging conversation, you would have no more engaging with those four.
Okay. But they suffered discrimination because they were labeled at that time conservative.
And that was anti-American. Anti-American.
What I'm getting at is I think Shelby Steele would have been president of Harvard University. And I can tell you that's true.
You know why? He had a twin brother that looks exactly like Shelby Steele, but who is a hard leftist, but has not written nearly as much as Shelby. But he has been offered jobs and highest jobs ahead of the Center for Behavioral Studies, deanship, provost, etc.
And that really shows you what I'm talking about. So, why did we get to this situation? Why would anybody in the world say that this pilot is not the person with the most hours behind the wheel? Or this general got promoted not because his planes had the fewest missed landings on the carrier? Or why would this professor get this billet like Claudine Gay, who would plagiarize and publish nothing? And so for 40, I'm 71, I started in graduate school at 20, so for 50 years I've asked myself, the only way I can explain it, Jack, is to capture to the best of my imagination very quickly this conversation I've had a thousand times from the left.
And it goes something like this. Well, Victor, quote-unquote meritocracy is not meritocrities.
It's a construct that you, of a privileged white male upbringing, have created artificial rules and regulations that other people of color and sexual orientation and gender obviously have not had the same experience.

So you weighted this system to reward your background, your culture, and your prejudice, and then you called it, quote, quote, meritocracy. And then you say to them, well, how about Indian immigrants or Asians that, according to meritocracy, beat so-called white people in things like SAT verbal scores or per capita income? Oh, yes, yes, that's what you do.
You force other people of color to mimic as trained seals. I'm quoting somebody in The View that talked recently about Snoop Dogg.
And they have to emulate, and then they master, and then they have to warp their lives. They have to get their kids, like Professor True, they make them into little automatons, and they have to just study all day to beat your system, where white kids don't have to do that.
Asians can, yes, they can perform, but they're put under enormous pressure. And I've heard that my entire life.
So that's what the left says. And then the final kicker is you can get 50 of the most left-wing professors and you tell them, we're going to fly a United flight through a lot of storms over to Europe.
And we have a choice from somebody who has more experience hours behind the wheel and has higher ratings and somebody that was picked more on, you know, they're probably just as good, and there's a bottom line they both have to meet, which do you want to go? Or you're going to have your meningioma taken out, your glioblastoma taken out in an hour. Do you want somebody who was, you know, in other words, do you want somebody from India taking your glioblastoma who has more, 100 more hours of brain surgery experience than a white one? I would.
But they don't admit to that. But when you look how they operate, I can tell you from academia in their lives, they don't look at race when it affects them.
It's only when they apply those rules to other people. So they think.
And in the case of Los Angeles, you can make the argument that the reason that Karen Bass won that election was because a lot of white liberals voted for her because they felt that, A, she was ideologically correct, as you said, a neo-communist, and B, she was a person of color, and they wanted to say, I voted for the first black woman mayor. And you can say that she appointed, I guess his name was Brian Williams, the guy who called in the bomb threat, the deputy, because he was black.
And you can say, and I'm not saying anything, they didn't. And Miss Quiones was hired as power and water at double her pay because they said she was the first Latina.
And she said that. And then I think the fire chief said that she was the first gay woman.
And then I think the second person in command said she was the first gay woman and on and on. So if they're using that.

The water lady was attracted to the job because of DEI and not because of water. I don't think you can make the argument she left PG&E, the largest power company in California, with a sterling record that reflected that PG&E was one of the best well-run companies, which it was 30 years ago.
The thing is about all of this DEI stuff is that the people that are criticizing Karen Bass now and Ms. Keonez and the rest of them are all wealthy white.

A lot of them are, most of them are, I mean, there's people in the inner city, they're wealthy white people. In other words, they're saying, we believe in DEI and stuff for you people, but not for us when it comes back and boomerangs us.
And two of the greatest examples of that, Kanji Brown, the Supreme Court justice, and Kamala Harris, the vice president, both of whom were appointed, basically, not basically, were nominated or selected by Joe Biden. And if somebody, please correct me, but I was watching Justice Brown with her.

She was in a Broadway play recently.

And then she was the one about the gender question.

I've read some of her opinions, and I have no need to talk about Kamala Harris. but whether you believe or not that they on a merocratic basis would not qualify,

they themselves would admit that they were selected on non-merocratic grounds. And that was because Joe Biden announced in advance that he was narrowing his search only to people who were black and female for the next Supreme Court position and his vice presidency.
Once he said that, and you brought up Karen Bass, she was one of the finalists for vice president. She, along with Stacey Abrams.
So he looked at Stacey Abrams. He said, this person is insane.
She's still an election denialist. She's, I can't do that.
I can't. And then they looked at Karen Bass and said, they'll tear me apart, given her Castroite background.
And then Kamala Harris. And they said, don't do it, Kamala Harris.
You'll get word salad ad nauseum. Look at what – go back, Joe, and look at her 2020 primary.
She called you a racist. I mean, 2000 – yeah, 2020.
And yet he did that. And so it confirmed the stereotype that you don't, and it was their stereotype that they created.
And the reason I'm happy about this is that a lot of African-American people who obviously have outshone by their innate ability all of the competition, for years people would say, well, they're there because they're DI. And now they don't have to worry about that.
They really don't. They just say, you know what, I didn't get any particular advantage from the government.
But another thing, just to finish, you're talking about 1964, 1965, until now. So you're talking 60 years.
And we're into generation four almost. It's going to be very hard.
You just don't executive order that away. These people are already, when they're eliminating DEI and this anti-amerocratic industry, they're already saying, well, Monday I was the dean of diversity, equity, inclusion, and now I'm the dean of uniformity and meritocracy.
And yes, I was promoted to full professor with only one refereed article. But I'm not really, I wasn't really a full professor.
I was just, this is what they're doing. They're trying to contextualize everything, change the language, because it's going to be very, what we're talking about is the most massive dislocation, really, in government and academia and the corporation in our lifetime, because you're saying to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, in the case of DEI, you're not going to have a job, because you are there just to enforce racial quotas, and there are no more racial quotas.
And you have been trained since undergraduate to major in these subjects, and we don't find how we can use you in a parallel position because you're not a chemist, you're not a mathematician, you're not a historian. In many cases, not all.
And then in addition to that, you're going to have a lot of people who went into the field hoping that DEI would use it. And I can see in my own life as I look back and had there not been DEI and stuff, it would have been very different.
Very different. I have run, I think, 11 searches when I was at Cal State University.
Almost one every year I was involved in Humanities or Classics. And I was told point blank by a dean who's now dead.
You will go in. You will interview all 200 candidates.
You can have one white male and the finalists, but they will not be hired. I don't care if they are Jesus Christ.
They will not be hired. You understand that? And I said, yeah, I can't do that.
Well, you're going to do it. And I've had that directly said to me.
And then when I graduated with a PhD jack in 1980, I went on the job market for the whole year. I applied to about 70 jobs.
I was told by two major universities, they said, you had a very good interview. We're not supposed to say this, but we're not hiring a male.
We have to hire a woman. We're not going to hire you no matter what.
I said, well, my Ph.D. is going to be public.
We don't care. I'm just telling you, we're not going to hire, so don't sit by the phone.
And I didn't get a job. I wasn't even interviewed only two times.
And I had finished the Stanford exam process for PhD in two and a half years and taken a year to go to the American school. And this story was repeated by almost every white male I knew.
And the idea that what was even more pernicious, all of the white males who came out of the post-war era, what was so weird is the architecture of affirmative action in D.I.E. was really run by white males.
And they were using a new generation or people from a less prosperous economic background, from less prestigious schools, to use them as the guinea pigs and the lab rats for their own idea. We had a philosophy department that I think had 10 white males.
And there was a white male who had been used by them getting one third of the pay as a part-timer with no benefits in those years, teaching the maximum numbers he could, and he kept applying. And he came to me, and I had just gotten tenure, and he said, would you help me? Nobody would help me.
I said, sure. So I went and talked to the chairman.
He says, well, we're a affirmative action department, and we're not going to hire him. He's a white male.
I said, well, look in the mirror. You're all white males.
He says, yes. And that's why we're correcting.
We're not going for the next four billets. We're not hiring any white male.
I said, what if they're preeminent? We don't care. I said, well, why don't you resign? You've been here 26 years.
It would be a very good point. You've got a very good retirement and you could hire at the senior level.
You could hire a female or a person of color in philosophy, but just do that. And that's why people hated it so much.
The subtext of this whole anti-American discussion is that working class white male, this is the version of neglecting East Palestine and the Carolinas when they have problems. Nobody wants to go in there and help those people.
The same thing under affirmative action, DEI, woke inclusion, all of that. It is aimed at working class, a white guy who does really well.
He gets straight A's at Cal State Fresno. He's the best historian.
And then he finds out that Harvard, Yale, Stanford doesn't want another white male, especially someone from Cal State Fresno. So then he goes to University of Ohio and he does wonderfully there.
And then they say, well, you have a university, We're not going to hire you. But they take care of their own, the wealthy, the promoters of DI.
It's all predicated on the Pacific Palisades idea that you can vote for these confederacy of dunces, but you are protected because you live in Pacific Palisades. And they would not dare allow their incompetency to hurt you.
And that was what these people who pushed this thing for 60 years, I am a very prestigious white male, and I feel so bad that there's not enough people unlike me, but I don't feel bad enough that I will step down and give my billet to somebody that I want to help. In other words, I'm going to call the white working class.
Once you get that in your head, everyone, everything in this country makes sense, that there is a hatred among this bicultural elite of deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, dregs, scum, all the words that Joe Biden, clingers, Obama and Clinton invented for these people. And they're talking about working class white males in large part, whether in the military or in academia.
And those people lost out. They really did.
And so I'm glad to see it over with.

But I don't, it's going to be very hard to dismantle. Well, it's the end of the beginning, right? Yes.
Because you see, if we have a war overseas or we have something, Donald Trump was, let's just be honest, Jack, he was headed for a massive win in 2020. because if you look at the month of November of 2019 and you look at unemployment and GDP and inflation, the economy was running about 2.5% to 3% growth.
The unemployment was like 3.5% and the inflation rate was 2%. And we were just booming.
And then we had the COVID panic, the lockdown. It was a trifecta, three things.
The COVID infection that got everybody acting crazy. And then the lockdown, we've never had that before.
And then we had the George Floyd death and the wokeness. And then maybe I can add a fourth.
In reaction to all that, the left stepped in and they said to themselves, we can really do stuff. And I'm quoting Gavin Newsom, literally.
This is an opportunity for a more progressive capitalism. I'm quoting Hillary Clinton, word for word, this is an opportunity for single-payer health care.
They looked at this as a Rahm Emanuel, no major crisis goes to waste. And they changed the voting laws from 70% voting on election day in the swing states to 70, almost 70, in California more, but in the swing states, 70% not voting on election day as the rejection rate for wrong or inauthentic ballots fell from 4 or 5% to about 0.3, even though the double the number of the influx.
So when you look at all that, we got into this situation because of that. Donald Trump had have been president, he would have won.
There's no doubt in my mind. And we wouldn't have had any of this, DEI.
But what I'm getting at, this can happen again. We can have another COVID.
We can have something, national trauma. We can have a 2008 meltdown.

And that is when the left takes power. Under normal circumstances, people do not want to vote for this, whatever you want to call it, the progressive project.

But you get the Iraq war or you get the 2008 meltdown or the COVID and people get paranoid or they will turn to an FDR and a great depression or something. And that's what happened.
And so my point is, I don't know what you would say. If they're very successful, it'll be in remission.
But the tumor will reappear at some point unless it's excised and it hasn't been excised.

Well,

wow.

That was,

uh,

that was pretty profound,

Victor.

Now,

uh,

I have to,

we have to move on to senility,

but first not your own mind,

but I want to let our listeners know that,

uh,

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But I was sent this from a listener, Howard. Howard S., I'll call him.
And he sent me an article from a guy, Daniel Greenfield. What do you think about the idea that Congress should consider some Biden actions given evidence of senility? and and and you know we who's signing these executive orders that biden introduced who's

signing these these uh pardons and etc i mean there is some culpability there is something almost criminal here so i guess the argument is congress this this new congress should investigate this and is there any way to invalidate some of the orders uh that biden executed in his final who knows maybe even the full four

years of he was the mad king in the game of thrones or king george on the madness of king george yeah it's very funny you said that because the uh the effort to disguise uh joe biden's non-compost mentes, not control of his facilities, faculties, excuse me, that coincided with a hypersensitivity toward the mental state of the commander-in-chief because it followed Donald Trump. So we've got to remember to put this in the right context, the left, the left, I mean, the left, when Donald Trump entered office, immediately one of their accusations was he's not mentally fit.
Therefore, we're going to 25th Amendment. Rosa Brooks, a former Obama Pentagon lawyer in Foreign Policy magazine, 11 days after Donald Trump took office, said this man must be removed.

He's unstable.

He's not sane.

He's dangerous.

We have three alternatives.

We can use impeachment.

Takes too long.

We can pull the cabinet, 25th Amendment, and remove him for medical reasons.

Takes too long.

Military coup.

Yes.

Yes.

Maybe an officer will just have to intervene. She did that.
She said that. Then we had, as I said on an earlier broadcast, we had this part-time psychiatrist, psychologist, Bandy Lee, who started mouthing off from her Yale perch and convinced the left to hold hearings on Donald Trump's sanity.
And they said that people should, as you're arguing, Jack, should ignore or they would find legal redress that the executive orders that Donald Trump had issued came from a crazy person. And she diagnosed him.
And the American Psychiatric Association said, you know what, we're going to censor her because she did something you can't do. She telediagnosed a patient that she's never met.
And then we had a third occurrence where Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and as I said, Andrew McCabe, the acting interim FBI agent, got together and discussed, according to both of them, I know it was he said, he said, but if you took their testimony, somebody said that Donald Trump could be caught in a moment of derangement if we wired Rod Rosenstein. Then he would go in there and apparently get into a conversation which he could prompt Donald Trump to reveal his mental incapacity, and then we would use that for impeachment.
That's what the whole situation was, and that was what caused Donald Trump to volunteer to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which he aced. And his Dr.
Jackson, the White House doctor at the time, now a House member, confirmed. So it's very ironic for people on the left when we really did have someone who was mentally incompetent.
And if you think that is a partisan charge, I suggest you guys go back and look at tapes of the 2020 primary debates when Joe Biden was, for a reason, did not win the Iowa caucuses. He did not win the New Hampshire primary.
He did not win the Nevada caucuses. Because people like Cory Booker on stage said, I don't know what he said.
Trump said that in the debate. Somebody said, would you reply to Joe Biden? I don't know what he said.
Cory Booker was the first to do that. And every one of those candidates at one point or another said that Joe Biden on the stage was not cognitively fit.
So they not only

flipped from being custodians of presidential capabilities and mental faculties, but they went

from enablers of dementia only for political reasons. And then I think on the case of Biden, Jack, you got to remember that, and I know you do remember, it wasn't just that they knew that Joe Biden was mentally unfit.
They liked that fact because they were wanted to vote for Bernie or Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker or the Castro, Julian Castro or Pete Buttigieg. That's where their heart was on the left wing.
And they had more support than Joe Biden because the voters had seen Joe Biden. They didn't like him, A, and they thought he was cognitively unfit.
And then the donor class, the same donor class that met with George Clooney and the Obamas to get rid of him, they said, wait a minute, this is in our interest. Joe Biden, for bad or worse, remember this is Bob Gates has said, no, Joe Biden has never made a correct, he's been on the wrong side of every foreign policy decision in the last 20 years.
And Barack Obama said, never underestimate the ability of Joe to F it up. And so they went to the other candidates and they said, look, you're going to drop out within a month.
Bernie, Elizabeth, Pete, all of you are going to drop out. Amy Kobish, all of you.
and he's going to be the nominee, and we're going to get him elected with the black vote in South Carolina primary. And once that happens, it's actually not a problem, because although we can trust him, we know that he's senile.
He's not senile enough that he can't oppose and just go give a lecture once in a while. And we will implant in what's left of his brain an Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren agenda.

And it's better for us because our fingerprints are not on it.

And we have old Joe Biden.

And no one will get mad when he destroys the border.

No one will get mad when we have Soros prosecutors let criminals out.

No one will get mad when we weaken the United States abroad.

No one will get mad when we push down the New Green Deal.

It's Joe Biden from Scranton.

So they trust him because he used to say racial jungle.

He used to say we need to pump more.

He played along with that.

And that's what they did.

They liked the idea that he was mentally incompetent because they could use him as a waxen effigy.

And then that role continued until they made one mistake too many. They said to themselves, I don't think we can pull it off the last three or four months.
We've got to have a stress test. I know what we'll do.
We'll go to Joe and we'll say to Joe, look, you've got one chance. We've got to do it before the convention.
You've got to trap Donald Trump into accepting the bait. You bait him, bait him, bait him and say he's a coward.
That's what he's afraid of. He doesn't want us to be a coward.
You tell him, I want to debate you right now. Say an end debate right before.
And Trump took it. And then they thought he'll just do what he did last time.
Trump will yell and scream and Joe will just get all the moderators will be on his side. But he blew up.
They didn't expect that. And then they said, you know what? This con cannot continue.
He can't even fill the role of an empty puppet. So we've got the puppeteers have to open it up and get Kamala.
Oh, no, no, that was the insurance policy. Remember? Joe got back at us because when he thought, well, I'm the wax and effigy and they're going to use me, but they might turn on me, so I'm going to pick Camilla.
And she is my Spiro Agnew. They will never get rid of me because that means her.
And that gave him another month of life. And then finally they said, where are we? He is so bad, we'll take a choice on, we'll reinvent Camilla into a black female Cicero or Socrates.
And that's what they did. There we are.
I met Spiro Agnew once, National Review. It's funny.
The Natalie, what? The Nattery Nabobs of Negativism? Negativism. Yeah, Pat Buchanan wrote that line.
That guy, who was the New York Times columnist, too, that wrote? He's very famous. God, he was good.
He was the speechwriter for Nixon. Yeah, Jewish American guy.
I'll figure it out during the break, maybe. Yeah, we, you know you know agnew every vice president has a sculpture uh a bust in the rotunda and and but agnew didn't and and we argued for it actually that was very similar to biden because they had had rumors that uh agnew had done quid pro quo but in the great scale of things what, what Agnew had done as mayor of Maryland was, A, known before they nominated him, and known during the fantastic Nixon landslide, and known all of 72 campaign cycle and the first part of 73.
And it paled, B, in comparison what the Bidens have done it really was it was minor stuff giving contracts to people who gave him you know what i mean campaign down and then they just used it and said we're going to get rid of him because if we get rid of him then we can get rid of nixon so then the washington post started printing with along the new york times these sensational stories that agnes was this big crook. And then they got rid of him.
And then they said, now we can get Nixon. We can get rid of Nixon.
He'll get good old Jerry Ford. And Jerry's okay.
And they got rid of Nelson Rockefeller. Bill Sapphire.
That was the. Bill Sapphire.
Yeah, yeah. Well, we're going to have um speaking of old things uh and you mentioned psychiatrists and boy there was a psychiatrist uh at a famous trial 50 years ago excuse me 75 years ago who tried to portray uh whitaker chambers as a mental case and it didn't work and what happened was the conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury in one of the more important events in modern American history.
And that anniversary just happened last week. And we're going to get Victor's thoughts about that and why there's still a love for Alger Hiss when we come back in these final important messages.
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and this episode's up on the 30th.

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Thank you, Victor. Not only a philologist and a historian, but also a great mathematician.
That's VictorHanson.com. As for me, Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts.
Go to thoughts go to civil thoughts.com sign up for a free weekly email newsletter of recommended readings i know you're going to love it i do that for the center for civil society so victor yeah you know last week i mean how could anyone note anything of historic importance given what was happening of historic importance. Donald Trump became president,

and then this avalanche of activity that he has unleashed. But it was on the 21st of January was the 75th anniversary of the perjury conviction of Alger Hiss, who went to his grave, the commie SOB that he was denying that he was a commie.

So it'll be a pivotal event in our history. We just talked, you were talking about Nixon.
Nixon became president. Why? Because he was the freshman congressman from California who took up the cause of Chambers.
Whitaker Chambers had been a former communist, and he had informed the government. There was a big cabal, including Alger Hiss, involved in the Roosevelt administration.
I suggest, I think it's one of the best books ever written. Witness is Chambers' memoir.
How old was he? He was not in, when you started working for national review he he had long since gone he died in 1960 a heart attack he was a relatively young young man uh if somebody googles uh bill buckley in esquire he wrote one of the one of the best pieces buckley ever wrote is a fascinating look at Chambers.

But a brilliant writer. Victor, I think what's important about this is we don't have to go on a history lesson, but you know there are still many, there's incontrovertible evidence that Chambers was, excuse me, that Hiss was a spy.
But Dan Mahoney, our good friend, told me that the University of Kansas this year is publishing two books trying to make the case of Hiss's innocence. Well, if you're a leftist, that's tenure automatic.
Yeah, right. But part of the thing was, and correct me if I'm wrong, when I read about it and looked at some of the evidence there.
remember the guy from, was he from Wesleyan that wrote that book Guilty? Perjury. Yes, Perjury.
Alan Weinstein. And that was kind of – He set out to – Did he come back and kind of backtrack from that later or not? No, no.
He set out to write a book – But he revised it and made it stronger, maybe I'm thinking. In the second edition.
It's possible. I don't know that.
But the thing was when you read it, it was actually more of a cult. It wasn't, and correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't Whitaker Chambers kind of plump, he had bad teeth, kind of homely, kind of slovenly dressed, and Alger Hiss was sort of like a genteel New England aristocrat.
He was the pinup boy for the elite. Yes.
He had his trial. He had Supreme Court justices and Secretary of State.
He looked like Averill Harriman. He did.
He did. So a lot of it was that this person had all the right credentials, and he was a member the protected class and so what's so long what's so wrong with a childhood or teenage or 20s flirtation with stalinism that was their attitude and this guy is a wannabe drift you know barging into our club and he doesn't belong because he doesn't look right he doesn't talk right and the guy who's barging in the club is ten times smarter than this dunce Alger Harris.
But it was funny. It touched where I worked because the Hoover Institution started out in 1919 as an archival depository for all of this philanthropy that Herbert Hoover had done in the post-war European on food relief.
He'd saved over eight or nine million people in Holland and other places that were starving after World War I in Germany. And one of the things that came out of that is he was a fierce anti-communist, and that coincided with the white Russian exodus.

White everybody does not mean race, but it's in contrast to red.

It's an ideological term of czarist.

And anyway, Herbert Hoover had been a genius, self-created.

He had been an orphan, and he created this mini fortune in mining, along with his brilliant wife. In any case, he was able to scour Europe and bring back seminal texts, not just about famine, but about communism and the people who had experienced it.
And so he came back in 1919. He went to the Hoover Institution, excuse me, Stanford, which he had been the first graduating senior from Stanford.
And he was an orphan, I think, from Oregon or somewhere in the Pacific. Well, he came via Iowa when he was adopted.
He was adopted. Right.
But in any case, he created the Hoover Institution. And from 1919, Jack, really until almost 1960, it was an archival repository.
I think the tower was built in 47 or 48. And that's what it was.
in the stacks from, I think it's level four to level nine or just today. I've been in there.
It's just mind-boggling. The elevator doesn't stop there, the main elevator.
So my point is this. Hoover, who lived well into his 90s, was very proud of this.
He was Commerce Secretary under Coolidge, and then he became President for four years, and then Depression, you know the rest of the story. But he was very close to some of the Stanford, Wallace, Sterling, all of these people.
But after World War II, the Hoover Institution had a lot of people with connections with Alger Hiss

in the State Department. And this was a landing pad for people to work.
And Hoover came in in the late 50s and he looked at this and said, this was not what I intended. This was supposed to be a receptacle for anti-communist literature, as well as World War I and World War II, revolution and peace, but in the context, and that was the mission statement, of free markets, individual liberty, and limited government.
And these are Alger Hiss type people. He used that term.
I never knew that. Yes, he did.
And so then he decided to make it a think tank. So then he said he got in a big fight with Stanford.
And one of the fallouts of Stanford was, I'm not going to give you my presidential library. So the desk in the 11th floor is of Herbert Hoover's and that museum next to my office is not his presidential.
That is the secretary of commerce during Herbert Hoover, as I recall. His presidential library, as you know, is in Iowa.
So but he did something very smart. He said, I'm going to scour the country and find a young person who is a genius and very conservative.
I'm going to make him a director of the Hoover Institution. Then they had a huge fight about the degree of autonomy, and it was never settled.
But he staked out the nicest part of campus. And out of that, he picked Glenn Campbell, who was in his 30s.
He was a Harvard PhD in economics, as I remember, and he was brilliant. I was a graduate student.
I remember I wandered in there once, and I was in the lounge drinking. We snuck in there

sometimes, and he walked in there, and he just said, who are you? I said, we're a graduate.

Get out. Go back to where you belong in Stamford.
But in any case, long story short, at that point

from 1960, basically the early 60s, to now,

that 65-year period,

that was the second incarnation

as a think tank. It was very small.

It had almost no money.

But he was there for almost

30 years.

And then

Stanford, it was just open warfare.

So finally, they kind of

forced him out. But he had a young assistant who was supposed to be a caretaker, John Racian.
And everybody said, you know, you don't hire your assistant. This is now a prestigious.
And John turned the next year he was a caretaker, the next year. And by three years, people said, this guy's young too.
He's like, he's an economist. And maybe he's not from Harvard, but he's really smart and he's personable.
And he raises money and he's a wonderful person. And we're going to have him.
So part of the unique challenges of the Hoover Institution was from 1960, basically, to 2010, all the way to John's retirement in 2000. It only had two directors.
So they never really worried about the relationship with Stanford. They had two conservative directors.
It was an eccentric place. Nobody had really examined the relationship.
And that was Herbert Hoover's doing to keep that tradition that you had one person a long time who was conservative and he ran it according to independent and autonomous rule. Then we lost John.
He retired after 30. So we had 60 years of two people.
And then we had another person come in whose name I won't mention. And then Stanford came in and said, you know what? This thing has been unaddressed.
Even though there were relationships that were established between us and Hoover, we've got to take a look at this. And we need more joint appointments.
We need less conservative. And that was the pressure that was put on in the years that John Racine left.
But the point that I'm getting at in a windy fashion is Alger Hiss's people

were what drove

Herbert Hoover crazy.

Yeah, well, you know, Hoover

the archives, and you know this, Victor

Solzhenitsyn is

the late

Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Yeah, he was there. He was upstairs

right in the office above me.

Yeah, he would not have been able

to do the Gulag or many of the

other books without access

and use of the... First year I got

Thank you. right in the office above me.
Yeah, he would not have been able to do the Gulag or many of the other books without access and use of the... First year I got there, there was this kind of shrunken guy with a very thick Hungarian accent.
He wasn't coming in. And I was just from Cal State Fresno.
I was 48, I think. And I said, excuse me.

And he introduced himself as Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. Yeah.

And then it was a great time when I was there because that was the heyday when Tom Sowell, when I first got there, he was in his early 70s.

And he was very active.

And then there was Milton Friedman whom I debated. They had me debate him on immigration at a private restaurant.
And then there were so many weird guys there that were really brilliant that had been pariahs in academia. And we were kind of a collection place in the United States.
And we didn't have a lot of money when I first got there. The island of misfit toys in its way.
Yeah, it was a very exciting time to be there in the late 40s. Milton Friedman was terrific.
Another National Review cruiser. I loved him.
Loved him. Very nice man.
Well, Victor, we've come to the end of today's episode. I want to thank our listeners, especially those who take the time on Apple to rate the show, zero to five stars.
And Victor gets five from practically everybody, 4.9%. Some people leave comments.
And I'm going to read two. One is titled, Thank You for Enlightening Us.
It's an absolute delight listening to BDH's analytical capability. It's fascinating.
I love his humor, his way to narrate personal anecdotes, history facts, and geopolitics, connecting them with current events. A great scholar to listen to and not be afraid of indoctrination into communism or other isms.
His experience in working the land,

it also speaks of the integrity, honesty, and wisdom he learned there and applies it in his life in academia. It reminds me so much of my dad.
I'm so glad I found your show. And this is from Valentina HR.

And then there's another one, Epaminondas. After a career, that's what it's titled, after a career spent in finance, I enjoy learning history from Victor.
Admittedly, I did not pursue an adequate education in history as a young person. After reading a bit about Victor's hero, Epaminondas, I see many similarities between Victor and his hero.
Epaminondas freed slaves from the Spartans. VDH is freeing the mind-numbed woke from their stupors.
Thanks for the red pills, VDH. And this is signed Lillian 777.
We thank those two and everyone else who takes the time to write. Victor, you've been terrific.
Thanks, folks, for listening. Check out Victor's website, Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.
Sign up for Civil Thoughts at CivilThoughts.com. God bless all, and we will be back soon with another episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody, for listening.
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