Biden: The Biden Way and Way Out

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Speaker 1 Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
I got to pull my mic over here, Victor. Excuse me.
Sorry, folks. Hello, ladies.
Hello, gentlemen.

Speaker 1 This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the inept and bumbling host.
We are recording on Sunday, the 19th of January. This is the last full day of the Biden presidency.

Speaker 1 It may be the last full day of the Obama era.

Speaker 1 Victor Davis Hansen, who is the star of this show, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 1 This episode will be up on the World Wide Web on Tuesday, the 21st.

Speaker 1 Those of you who are listening on the 21st and wanting Victor's take on Trump's inauguration, inaugural speech, whatever, it'll come. You'll get that analysis.

Speaker 1 He'll do it with the great Sammy Wink in a few days. We got plenty of mop-up, sweep-up after the Democrat elephants to get Victor's take on.

Speaker 1 And I think the first thing, Victor oh, wait, I forgot to mention you have a website, theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com. More about that later in the show.

Speaker 1 But when we come back from important messages, I think we should first get get Victor's take on Joe Biden's

Speaker 1 farewell speech. I think it was a speech, but your take on that again when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 1 We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Now, it's a podcast.
It's It's been a podcast for several years with justthenews.com. And we are also on Rumble.

Speaker 1 And thank you for those who catch it this way. So, Victor,

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 we are on the end of an error, E-R-R-O-R.

Speaker 1 Joe Biden put the punctuation mark on that, although he still did a few things following his farewell speech.

Speaker 1 pulled some rabbits out of hats. We can talk about them too on the ERA and some more presidential pardons.
But, Victor, what was your take on the farewell?

Speaker 1 Well, Joe Biden gave two farewell speeches, one to the State Department and one to us. I'll start with the latter first.

Speaker 1 He thought he was Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jack, and it was almost, you know, he gave that on almost the same day of January.
I think Biden did it on the 16th. I did it on the 17th of 1961.

Speaker 1 So 64 years later, as Ike left, he gave the speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. And he and his speechwriters created that word.

Speaker 1 In other words, we were in a Cold War mentality. We were building the B-36, the B-52, all this, taxes.
The citizen was feeling that we were an empire, to quote Pat Buchanan, not a reply, etc.

Speaker 1 So I guess Biden thought he was the White Eisenhower. And I would like to,

Speaker 1 because Biden was worried about a modern, comparable danger, and he called it oligarch and multi-billionaire.

Speaker 1 Now, as I see it, there were three things wrong with it. To quote our dear departed Lloyd Binston about our dear Dan Querrell,

Speaker 1 Joe, you're no Ike. I knew Ike.

Speaker 1 So I didn't know Ike. As Binston and knew JFK.
But the point is, Eisenhower was coming out of a two-term successful presidency. He was the hero of the Great Crusade.

Speaker 1 That was his Crusade in Europe, his memoir from Normandy, the beaches of Normandy, across the Rhine to the interior of Germany. What did Joe did? He got out of Afghanistan in humiliation.

Speaker 1 And then he had bragged to the State Department, there'll be no president after me who ever has to fight in Afghanistan.

Speaker 1 That would be as if Roosevelt said, there'll be no president after me that ever has to worry about D-Day again because I lost. And

Speaker 1 so he had no credibility. And then he got, so what was he worried? He was screaming about the oligarchs.
Oligarchs, oligarchs, oligarchs.

Speaker 1 And I thought, you shameless hypocrite, liar.

Speaker 1 This is a guy.

Speaker 1 who gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Sorrels, a multi-billionaire who broke the Bank of England, who is a convicted criminal in France and can't ever go back, and who used $60 million in 2020

Speaker 1 to help subvert the election, and then another 60 or 70 to get elected, the likes of George Biscon and Chase Boudin.

Speaker 1 All of the rest of them, Kim Fox,

Speaker 1 Alvin Bragg, all of the people who have ruined criminal jurisprudence in our major cities.

Speaker 1 And then he was the one that Mark Zuckerberg volunteered to put $419 million to subvert the work of the registrars and absorb some of their employees, added their own employees to add mailboxes and facilitated this disastrous mail-in voting in the swing states and helped Joe Biden win.

Speaker 1 That was an oligarch, Joe. That's what you did.
And then he was the one that conspired with oligarchs to suppress the news of the hundred libraries as Miranda Devine

Speaker 1 has written so wonderfully about

Speaker 1 suppressing the news of the genuine authentic hunter laptop and incriminating

Speaker 1 computer and so he's a cold hypocrite and then number three

Speaker 1 these oligarchs quote unquote they're not just people like George Sorrells. I'm not making fun of finance.
Finance is important as the fuel that runs the American economy.

Speaker 1 But when you see that erector hand grab a rocket by Elon Musk, or you see that Elon Musk broke into

Speaker 1 the top three automakers and no one else had done that, when you see Elon Musk reinvent social media, and then he steps up for almost nothing, that's pretty impressive.

Speaker 1 And now he's a frenemy of Jeff Bezos. He praised Jeff Bezos' rocket.
And Jeff Bezos refused, as we remember, to endorse, have his Washington Post megaphone megaphone

Speaker 1 endorse Camilla Harris. So he's down, he's making, what do we call it, Jack, the Hodge, the holy trek to Guarlago.
Is that the Hodge?

Speaker 1 It deserves its own special term.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's some kind of Hodge, but Mika and Joe Scarborough, they made it. Bezos made it.
Zuckerberg's made it. Bill Gates.
Bill Gates is there, and he says he's re-examined. Snoop Dogg made it.

Speaker 1 Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg who cut a video about how to shoot Donald Trump.
You remember that?

Speaker 1 He was on my list of all the people who threatened to shoot Donald Trump and now he says he likes Donald Trump. He likes him.

Speaker 1 People get religion. They do.
So my point is that these oligarchs

Speaker 1 are active people who do things. They make cars, they make rockets, they change the way we buy things in the case of Amazon.
They change the way we communicate. So Peter Tell,

Speaker 1 David Sachs,

Speaker 1 Mark Andreessen, Netscape, all of them do stuff. They're not just waging, not that it's not good and be a stock market.
They can be very good. I'm not criticizing.

Speaker 1 But what they remind me of is what FDR did in 1941. All during the National Recovery Act that was declared unconstitutional, the New Deal, civilian...

Speaker 1 Conservation Corps, etc.

Speaker 1 All these captains of industry opposed it because he took over the free market, controlled it, and for long the 29 Depression all the way to 38, almost 10 years.

Speaker 1 And they said that he was ruining the economy, and he went after them. Then the war started, and he thought that the New Deal paradigm would work, and it didn't.

Speaker 1 We had an army smaller than Portugal when the war broke out. And so what did he do? He created something called the War Production Board.
These were oligarchs.

Speaker 1 They were Charles Wilson, the head of GE, and Guys Geyson DuPont, Campbell Soup. And then he turned, he thought, well, even that's not enough.
What did that war production do?

Speaker 1 They kind of did what Elon did, only they did it to a much greater degree. They took over Louisville Slubbers and started making war equipment.
They took over DuPont Chemical and made napalm.

Speaker 1 I don't mean he took it over, but the people transformed it who owned it.

Speaker 1 Then he turned to three people, kind of like the version of Bezos and Elon or Ramaswamy or Kenneth, And he said, William Knudsen, you're the head of GM. I fought you my entire life.

Speaker 1 I'm going to make you a two-star general.

Speaker 1 You just do what it has to take, but this is what I want. So then Knudson got together with Henry Kaiser and said, just plow a path through

Speaker 1 Contra Costa County to the sea, and I want a liberty ship. Here's a design for liberty ship.
Here's a design for free. I want them every three days.
And he did.

Speaker 1 And he said to Henry Ford, go out to Willow Run, biggest building in the private sector, make it. And I need a B-24 every hour.
And he did.

Speaker 1 And so those were oligarchs. And those oligarchs, they were called the dollar a day men.

Speaker 1 They got no compensation. They made a lot of money.
But the point I'm making is what Trump is envisioning is not turning over the government to a shady bunch of oligarchs.

Speaker 1 but enlisting a bunch of high-profile people who everything they do is scrutinized by the media to use their talents that made them billionaires on behalf of us.

Speaker 1 So they're saying to these people, you can make us the preeminent space. You can make us preeminent in biotechnology.
You can make us preeminent in artificial intelligence.

Speaker 1 You can make us preeminent in cryptocurrency. You can make us preeminent in genetic engineering.
These are the new

Speaker 1 challenges that our great-grandfathers and grandfathers faced at the beginning of the world. And I think it's very exciting.
And so Joe Biden, of course,

Speaker 1 that was some of the speech. Then he just lied, and I'll just very quickly pile in on what he said to the State Department.
He said

Speaker 1 he praised Afghanistan. I know you don't believe it, but he did, that he got out.
Pride flag

Speaker 1 gender studies whole thing, 50 million.

Speaker 1 He had a pride flagging and gender studies program at Kabul flying, but he didn't care about 13 people who died or 50 billion in munitions that he

Speaker 1 abandoned. And then he praised, he praised the, I could not believe how shameless he was.

Speaker 1 He praised Iran for being weakened and Hezbollah weakened and Hamas weakened and Assad fallen. And all those happened despite, not because of him.

Speaker 1 It was Israel that he thwarted at every turn. And so

Speaker 1 he paid $6 billion for hostages and fueled Iran. He lifted the embargo and gave him $100 billion

Speaker 1 in oil revenue. He begged, got down on his knees, please, please, can we get back in the Iran deal? He told Israel not to respond in kind to the Iranian 500 projectiles they sent on two occasions.

Speaker 1 He said, don't take out the hierarchy. Don't kill Nasser.

Speaker 1 Don't take out these people at home. He did all of that, and yet he was

Speaker 1 taking credit for Netanyahu's work in the Middle East. It was so shameful, shameful.
Everything about it was shameful.

Speaker 1 And then just to finish, Jack, now we hear, and we can get into that, why are we hearing all this stuff now? Why now, now, now? Oh, 50 people tell us he was senile.

Speaker 1 50 people tell us he was always demented. And now we hear that Speaker Johnson went in a room with him and he said,

Speaker 1 everybody get out. And he says to Johnson, what do you want? And Johnson says, well, you've shut down all the liquid national gas export terminals in my state.

Speaker 1 And you had bragged that you were going to help Europe withstand this Ukrainian war and the subsequent related

Speaker 1 closure of natural gas imports, which they had been on from Russia. And now we can't send him any.
And Joe Biden said, I didn't do that. I didn't do that.
He said he didn't do it.

Speaker 1 He said he didn't do it. Well, who did?

Speaker 1 And can you imagine if

Speaker 1 did that? And then the other, the final thing, I'll shut up, is

Speaker 1 he says, Jack,

Speaker 1 yesterday,

Speaker 1 what about you, that 25th Amendment, equal women, I didn't borrow my women,

Speaker 1 the 28th Amendment, the Equal Rights of Men, Men, and they said, law of the land.

Speaker 1 And he actually put that in writing. That's treason.

Speaker 1 That's insurrection. Where's Liz Cheney?

Speaker 1 Liz Cheney would be tweeting or kidding at her and all those people. Where's Nancy Pelosi? The president of the United States

Speaker 1 took a inner defunct, failed ERA that had been declared null and void when the time expired.

Speaker 1 42 years ago, it is. 42 years ago.
And by executive fiat, he claims that it is now the law of the land. Can you imagine if Donald Trump did that? Yeah.
And

Speaker 1 no one said really a thing about it. Well, some people have said.
Some people. Well, they set a precedent, Jack.
They set a precedent that you can try. Why don't they impeach him right now?

Speaker 1 Have a special Sunday session and impeach him and then try him as a private citizen as they did to Trump.

Speaker 1 Well, it's not only if

Speaker 1 you look at what Mike

Speaker 1 Speaker Johnson said, and the totality of it was he thought Biden really didn't remember that. There's just no evidence of him being

Speaker 1 daft.

Speaker 1 But since he is daft,

Speaker 1 and others, as you referenced, Jack Reed, the senator from Rhode Island, saying we need two neurosurgeons to prove that this guy isn't cuckoo bird back in the summer.

Speaker 1 Nevertheless, Victor, there have been people like Kristen Gillibrand, the senator from New York, who is saying, ah, so it is now the law of the land. So he's, I'll give him, give Biden this.

Speaker 1 He's nuts, right? But what about the people that aren't nuts that are taking the nutty, illegal, crazy thing he said and now trying to say it is the law of the land?

Speaker 1 Exactly, and on the natural gas, he's basically saying to Speaker Johnson that a bunch of people that are wacko green people said to themselves, he's senile and he's leaving office.

Speaker 1 So let's draw up an executive order and just put it under his nose and say, this is going to create a green utopia, Joe, sign it. And he did.

Speaker 1 And then they said, do you realize that you put up thousands of people out of work and you're costing Europe.

Speaker 1 It's winter, Joe. It's winter over there.
And they're not going to get natural gas. Do you know what you're doing to the lives of people?

Speaker 1 These people don't care. You know, it's

Speaker 1 what... What Joe Rogan said about Newsom.
They don't care about people. When they were talking to Newsom about the fire, and he was trying to explain, do you remember what he did?

Speaker 1 He went like this, Joe.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Oh, my gosh.
What was that? I don't know. I think he had some nervous.

Speaker 1 Well, I don't want to make fun of people. Well,

Speaker 1 when Donald Trump did that, making fun of someone,

Speaker 1 it wasn't Tronald Trump like this. They said, oh, my gosh, he's making fun of disabled people.
That speaker was.

Speaker 1 But it was,

Speaker 1 they don't care about people.

Speaker 1 It's kind of like the third man. You know, the scene where Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton are

Speaker 1 up in the Ferris wheel. Ferris wheel.

Speaker 1 And Orson Welles' character says, would you care if one of those little dots down there disappeared?

Speaker 1 So from their height, they don't care about the dots. They just don't.
No,

Speaker 1 no. I recommend that.
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Kind of reminds me, Victor, of

Speaker 1 I love that movie

Speaker 1 Back 21 with Danny Glover and Gene Hackman from, I think it was late 80s.

Speaker 1 I think there's going to be a market for movies like this. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 People do not want to have any more psychodramas or melodramas of some neurotic metrosexual who can have a little section of how he vents about Donald Trump and how awful people are to him, why he breaks up for 55 times with his girlfriend, and then they have a long two-hour monologue about whether they should have kids in the age of global warming.

Speaker 1 And I was waiting for the Colonel Vindeman story. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Hey, Victor, picking up, excuse me, picking up on the senility issue. And you think of when

Speaker 1 grandma, who's got dementia, all of a sudden her will, she passes away. Her will is read.

Speaker 1 They realize the will was signed, you know, one week before she kicked the bucket by some nefarious nephew, held her hand. And these things go to court, right?

Speaker 1 I've seen that happen in my own family.

Speaker 1 Okay, well, it's totally fine.

Speaker 1 The compass mentis, if it's applicable to the estate of a farmer, not or anybody, why is it applicable to the United States of America?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I do not know.
And then I superimpose all of this.

Speaker 1 This is why the left has zero credibility. They had Bandee Lee, some part-time part-time

Speaker 1 psychiatrist or psychologist at Yale, go lecture the Senate that Donald Trump need an intervention straightjacket. She wrote an edited book.

Speaker 1 And then they had, and that prompted, I guess it was Andrew McCabe and Rod Wosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, the interim FBI.

Speaker 1 Now, should you wear the wire or should I wire? One of us has to catch him in his dementia so we can go to the cabinet, go to Mike Penns, the cabinet member, and get a 25th Amendment.

Speaker 1 That's what they were trying to do. And yet, I haven't heard, have you heard Rod Wilsonstein say at work, or Andrew McCabe on his

Speaker 1 animal's position at CNN? I think it is.

Speaker 1 I haven't heard Ward say anything.

Speaker 1 Has McCabe said, you know what? I think you need to get a wire and trap Joe and get that on record.

Speaker 1 Maybe James Comey can come forward and say, you need to have a private conversation with Joe, like I did with Trump. Tell him he's now under investigation,

Speaker 1 and then go out in your FBI vehicle, memorialize it, and then leak it to the New York Times. That worked with me.

Speaker 1 So, no, they don't, they don't, none of that.

Speaker 1 These people are.

Speaker 1 By the way, Victor, you started this

Speaker 1 conversation about the farewell speech going after Biden's stressing of oligarchy. What in Greek is oligarchy? What is the meaning? It's a term.
Oligost means the few,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 arch,

Speaker 1 it means the rule. And so, in greek city-states

Speaker 1 there was either democracy demokratia that means the rule of the demos or the people that means a lot of people so usually there's a property qualification

Speaker 1 so if you have a city-state of 20,000 citizens at Athens they could all they could all participate and in oligarchy you might have 5,000 participate 500 and they both were in opposition I'm doing this impromptu so I hope it sounds convincing.

Speaker 1 They were in opposition to aristocracy.

Speaker 1 That is the best people. That's their term for landed, noble, title.
The elite. The elite by birth.
So the aristocrats, and

Speaker 1 it's a very rare word in Greek, plutocracy. That's the rule of the people with plutos.

Speaker 1 or wealth, plutocracy.

Speaker 1 They don't use the word in the United States of aristocracy because nobody believes that Elon Musk is there or Mark Zuckerberg or Bezos because they were born into a third generation Ivy League East Coast titled family.

Speaker 1 But they do use the word oligarchy because there's a few of them. But it's a really and it's a misplaced term because oligarchy does not mean two or three people.

Speaker 1 It means an oligarchy is People have said it of the United States that the people with money and influence, a small number, run the country. That's an oligarchy.

Speaker 1 I think if they're going to be exact, if they were really, they could say a plutocracy, people who were multi-billionaires.

Speaker 1 Why don't they say

Speaker 1 some lazy? Well, I have one other word for you. There's also an oclocracy.
I think we are really an oclocra. Oclos is the mob, what the Romans call the turbo.

Speaker 1 The turbo. So the oclocracy is a rule of the mob, red and circuses.
The people who are on the dole and they determine budgets and spending and they have to be entertained by T V all day.

Speaker 1 Pizza. That kind of thing.
I think we're really run by a bureaucracy.

Speaker 1 Yes, the Bureau. The Bureau.
That's a good French word that came out in the 19th century. The Bureau.

Speaker 1 It's funny. We've been run the last

Speaker 1 four years. It's not funny.

Speaker 1 By someone who sold out cheap. You know, his references to oligarchy were about wealth and billionaires, but

Speaker 1 maybe there's resentment there that he could have. I mean, he cashed in.
Look, he cashed in, but he cashed in really cheap given what I guess he could have gotten away with. 20 million bucks.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he sold out the country for 20 million bucks.

Speaker 1 Remember, I'm speaking, and you're speaking right now. I'm in the West Coast, obviously, at about 9:30 in the morning on Sunday.
We've got about another 24 hours. So don't underestimate Joe.

Speaker 1 He can still give Jim Biden a pardon,

Speaker 1 Ashley Biden a pardon.

Speaker 1 A lot of people can still get pardons, and he will. He just gave one to Marcus Garvey, who's been dead 100 years.

Speaker 1 He doesn't know that, though.

Speaker 1 He does not know that.

Speaker 1 He did sell the country out on two cents on the dollar.

Speaker 1 Not that it would have been better if he had charged more, but

Speaker 1 he's a despicable human being. I hate to say that.
It sounds cruel for someone who's senile. But he was mean his entire life.
He's a racist. He always said, we've talked about that so often,

Speaker 1 all the racist vocabulary. And then when he's a hypocrite and a liar, when he keeps saying, I can't take this, I tried to unite the people.
No, you did not.

Speaker 1 Your semi-fascist, ultra-mega phantom of the opera speech was horrific. You attacked the Supreme Court.

Speaker 1 Your vitriol against the members led to people showing up at their houses, including an assassin.

Speaker 1 You did all of that. You really weakened the court.
You bragged that

Speaker 1 you had canceled student loans, which was unconstitutional. And then you bragged that you nullified their order and found ways to circumvent our own Supreme Court.

Speaker 1 I could go on, but he was really a mean person.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm glad he's gone. I don't wish ill to him, but

Speaker 1 he's one of these people who he's going to be a Millard, he's going to be Millard Fillmore Eyes very quickly. You're not going to hear much out of him.

Speaker 1 Nancy Pelosi's daughter was giving a Parthian shot. That's a nice little term for the Parthians, that when they would ride their horses,

Speaker 1 they would come up to the Roman army and then have the Roman army come out of formation to charge them. Then they would turn around and shoot their...
bow while they were riding at them.

Speaker 1 But my point is that she,

Speaker 1 as the Pelosis fade into obscurity, the daughter said it was really mean that Joe,

Speaker 1 Jill, Jill would not talk to Nancy, wouldn't show up where Nancy was.

Speaker 1 And this was so mean because,

Speaker 1 Jack, when Joe had no money as a junior sinner, he went out to see the Pelosis in San Francisco. And guess what they did? They loaned him their car so Joe could drive around San Francisco.

Speaker 1 How did he repay that 50 years later?

Speaker 1 How did she

Speaker 1 he didn't speak to her? His wife was mean to Nancy for staging the coup that got rid of him.

Speaker 1 Lady McBiden, she

Speaker 1 called her. Lady McBiden catfight, if I could be so sexist to say Nancy Pelosi versus Joe Biden, I wonder who would win that one.

Speaker 1 Well, I think Nancy, if she could pick up her walker and use it as a club,

Speaker 1 she might get it.

Speaker 1 Somebody Somebody wrote me a neat email, Jack, that now that we know

Speaker 1 it's kind of like the old Soviet Union when they wanted to get rid of somebody on a plane, and you know, some people they threw away their boarding pass, never showed up.

Speaker 1 Well, Nancy's not showing up, and Mike Pence's wife is not showing up,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 Jill Biden, I don't know if she is or not, but

Speaker 1 Michelle Obama's not showing up. And the person wrote and said, Victor,

Speaker 1 is this a coincidence?

Speaker 1 Something, and they were serious, something bad is going to happen. And that's why they moved it indoors.
Indoors, yeah.

Speaker 1 I said, no, well, there was some security question.

Speaker 1 They had the Iranian president, I can't pronounce his name, it has actually an Armenian ending to it. And he said, he gave an interview.
And he said something to the effect,

Speaker 1 we don't want a bomb.

Speaker 1 We're for peace.

Speaker 1 We see our hostilities with Israel in

Speaker 1 cessation.

Speaker 1 We never tried to kill Donald Trump. We don't want to kill Donald.
I wonder why that's happening. Why is all this happening? I just don't understand it.

Speaker 1 It's all happening from Sup Dog to the President of Iran to Mr. Trudeau to,

Speaker 1 my gosh, the whole country

Speaker 1 of the Assad

Speaker 1 discombobulates. Everything is just,

Speaker 1 it's like the world upside down, and the British are playing into Georgetown.

Speaker 1 Well, it's beautiful in its way to watch, I think, Victor. Hey, I'm glad you mentioned Obama.

Speaker 1 Obama, Michelle Obama, and we should talk about the Obama era.

Speaker 1 Is it over? And we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 1 Have a great day.

Speaker 1 We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Sunday, January 19th. This episode is up on the 21st, Tuesday, the first full day of the Trump 47th presidency.

Speaker 1 Victor's got a website, The Blade of Perseus. I heartily recommend y'all check it out regularly because when you do, you will find the links and actually the actual pieces.

Speaker 1 Victor's weekly essays for American Greatness, his weekly syndicated column,

Speaker 1 his various appearances, links to those, such as

Speaker 1 Victor's regularly on, say, Megan Kelly's podcast, The Archives of These Podcasts, links to his books, links to some of the Twitter de facto essays he writes.

Speaker 1 I said Twitter, I know that upsets some people. I'm sorry.
X, X.

Speaker 1 And then the Ultra articles, which he does twice a week for The Blade of Perseus and a weekly video for The Blade of Perseus, which you can access if you're a subscriber.

Speaker 1 Don't you like the new Megan Kelly of her podcast?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 she reminds me of a carnivore that she gets these

Speaker 1 bullied people. Oh, she's.
And then she carves them up. She's terrific, but I just wish, you know,

Speaker 1 I just wish the blue

Speaker 1 lingo would just...

Speaker 1 I'm on her mother's side. I'd be careful.
We were criticized by a reverend for using an F your word once. I think we said the F word.

Speaker 1 I knew actually I never

Speaker 1 said it. I'm very careful.

Speaker 1 You are

Speaker 1 a very nice woman came up to me

Speaker 1 when I was speaking in Los Angeles not too long ago and said she really liked our podcast because her 10-year-old daughter worked out

Speaker 1 and could listen to the language. Right.

Speaker 1 And I'm very conscious of the audience.

Speaker 1 Well, I will say,

Speaker 1 let me just say, folks, go subscribe.

Speaker 1 VictorHanson.com, and that's the Blade of the Space. I see Megan Kelly.
Well, she's, yeah,

Speaker 1 I'm very

Speaker 1 done a great service. She's very well prepared, and she dissects these things that need to be dissected.
Yeah, she is

Speaker 1 fearless, and I think open-minded and fearless, and that's a very appealing thing.

Speaker 1 And unlike Skeletor, she's beautiful. Oh, mom, mommy.

Speaker 1 Okay. So she has an added advantage.
She is beautiful.

Speaker 1 Actually, when she was at Fox, and Andy McCarthy, our friend and my old colleague at Nash Ree, would go in, and I said, Andy, I don't know how you sit across. But I mean, she's just stunning.

Speaker 1 She knows this. She doesn't remember, but in 2003, during the Iraq War,

Speaker 1 I'm trying to remember the press conference. He was such a wonderful person.
I feel so bad I don't recall him. You know him.
I think you knew him.

Speaker 1 He was the press secretary for George Bush, and he had an ascendant career, and he got ballot counsel, and he died.

Speaker 1 Oh, Tony Snow?

Speaker 1 Tony Snow. Yes.
Yeah, I love that. Oh, Tony is great.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and he and Brett, on Saturdays, they were talking about the war.
They asked me for six Saturdays to go into Fox.

Speaker 1 And I remember,

Speaker 1 I think they had just hired me. I think it was Megan Kelly.
They had just hired, you know, as a

Speaker 1 legal analyst, a legal analyst. Or maybe she was an intern, or maybe she was just visiting.
I remember saying to Tony Snow, wow, that woman is very bright and very...

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You were at the Naval Academy then. I was

Speaker 1 a visiting professor. I realized that after, I can look back at that, and I have been a visiting professor in a number of places, and that

Speaker 1 was the most liberal left-wing department I have ever been in. I hope Secretary Magset will think that.

Speaker 1 I was sitting there, I think I told you once, I was sitting there when a professor, who was a uniformed officer in the Marine Corps, gave a talk on Iwo Jima

Speaker 1 where my father landed twice in a disabled B-29 and saved his life. 25,000 landings.
I know some of them like his were repeated.

Speaker 1 But this officer said it was basically a worthless campaign. They killed 25,000 Japanese for no reason.
It could have been bypassed. They had actually P-51s they stationed there.

Speaker 1 My father said that not only

Speaker 1 when they

Speaker 1 took the island were they able to save the crew, but when they went into Japan, they were escorted most of the way from Iwo Jima on.

Speaker 1 And that saved lives. But he gave this talk that

Speaker 1 was basically that we were racist, that we just wanted to kill Asian people. I got so angry that I got up and there was, I was my, it was like my first week there.

Speaker 1 And then there was this weird professor.

Speaker 1 Chinese American, Mao Chung-myu. I didn't know him, and he just got up and he said, You don't know any of the sources to the speaker, and this Victor Hanson and I will be leaving.

Speaker 1 And so we got up and left, and I turned to him and I wrote it

Speaker 1 Frenchy in Casablanca. I said, Miles Mao Chung, I think this will be the start of a beautiful relationship.
And for one year, we were best friends. We ate every day.

Speaker 1 We're still very close friends, but he was a wonderful guy. But that's the type of thing that I remember.
Not that there weren't great people there, but my gosh, I thought these four

Speaker 1 mid-shipment, they're just getting this revisionist history. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 we are going to cap this

Speaker 1 intro to the second segment of today's podcast just by, I will say, since we kind of got off on vulgarity, that even

Speaker 1 off-camera, off-audio,

Speaker 1 Victor

Speaker 1 is not blue. Yeah.
There's no MF, whatever coming out of Victor's mother.

Speaker 1 My mother, we were driving Yosemite once, and my dad said, my butt hurts. He was driving.

Speaker 1 And we had an old 54 Chevy pickup with

Speaker 1 a windows in the corner. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it was a 55, 6. It was all bumpy with wires in the seats, and one of the wires came out.
And she said, Bill,

Speaker 1 I just appreciate it that in front of the boys you're not use that type of language.

Speaker 1 And my grandfather, her father, I asked him when I was like 14, I said, what the hell is going on out here when I was

Speaker 1 trying to, and he said, Victor,

Speaker 1 don't disappoint me.

Speaker 1 I don't use that language on this phone. It's going to do that.
What a good boy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That reminds me, and we're going to get your thoughts on time, Victor, quickly, this Michael Mann case, that National Review and Mark Stein, whatever, this free speech case has gone off for 13 years.

Speaker 1 And National Review actually got a bit of a victory in this regard a few weeks ago.

Speaker 1 The judge said part of its legal bills had to be paid by man.

Speaker 1 But when this first began, and I was doing fundraising for National Review, we had an online campaign to, you know, donate money to fight this case because we're going to kick Michael Mann and the Heine.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the first hearing in the court in Washington, the man's attorney was lamenting that publisher Fowler

Speaker 1 said we're going to kick him in the heine, and the judge started laughing.

Speaker 1 Anyway, yeah,

Speaker 1 use children's words. I'm a little disturbed sometimes when I don't care, but you notice our national politicians, they use the S-H-I-T word now, just like anything.

Speaker 1 It always conjures up a battle.

Speaker 1 So I don't like that. I mean, our terms are private.

Speaker 1 I know my wife is now saying, be careful, Victor. I hear you say all sorts of things.
Yes, I do in private sometimes to you. Well, let me get you cursing.
Let me get you blue.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about Barack Obama. So he has,

Speaker 1 since 2008,

Speaker 1 with a four-year period, and that period of Trump's presidency,

Speaker 1 he was very active to

Speaker 1 dismantle it. He has been the force of the Democrat Party for 16 years.
Is the Obama era over? It may not be. What are your thoughts, Victor?

Speaker 1 Well, everybody always goes back to that original Star Trek John Gill episode where the person is drugged and

Speaker 1 they go to a planet and he's used a national socialist paradigm and it's got a hand, but he has handlers. That's what...

Speaker 1 Biden was John Gill and the Obamas and their team that were infiltrated, I can use that term, into the Biden

Speaker 1 inner circle with help from Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Black Caucus Wing. They ran the country and they ran it into the ground.
But

Speaker 1 the Obamas themselves then made a strategic move along with Nancy Pelosi to move and Chuck Schumer. They pressured Trumer to get rid of Joe.
I'm not sure the Obamas wanted Kamala.

Speaker 1 I know at one time somebody's going to say, well, Victor, he said she was a hot or good-looking Attorney General here. And he did.

Speaker 1 But he had talked to her more than five minutes, so he knew that she was in it.

Speaker 1 I don't know who. Stacey Abrams, maybe.
I mean, there were three people. Do you remember when Joe said he wanted a black, white president? And they mentioned three people.

Speaker 1 You know who one of them was?

Speaker 1 The mayor of Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 The communist mayor of Los Angeles. Now, I'm going to leave it to our audience to decide who would have been worse.

Speaker 1 Kamala Harris, Karen Bass, and the third one was Stacey Abrams, the real governor, the election denialist, who just, her PAC just got fined or what, $300,000 for intellectual, I mean for election fraud.

Speaker 1 So that was the choice, but the Obamas were behind that.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they made the strategic decision to use their gravitas. So I guess I don't know if they're living together because there are rumors now that they've had marital problems.

Speaker 1 But let's just, for the sake sake of argument, say that Barack flew out from the Oahu mansion on the beach, and Michelle flew out from the Calarama beach after she

Speaker 1 locked up the

Speaker 1 Martha Smineard estate. And they hit the campaign trip separately.
And then they did what they always do.

Speaker 1 Barack Obama got some African-American young people together and said, you don't know what you're doing, and you are falling into a trap of being sexist and misogynist, that old Marxist dialectic, the people are deluded by religion or any of the opiate of the masses.

Speaker 1 So that's what he did. And then he put his credibility online, and so did she.
She called Donald Trump repeatedly a racist. There was no evidence for that.
It was very embarrassing.

Speaker 1 And then what happened was that Donald Trump, just days after the Obamas had put their credibility on the line, Donald Trump got the highest number of black voters probably since the 1940s or even higher, maybe as high as Ike,

Speaker 1 maybe higher. I haven't looked at Ike's percentages, but

Speaker 1 and Hispanics higher than almost anybody, maybe even higher than George W. Bush, if you actually look at particular states.

Speaker 1 And so they were kind of discredited, discredited because they didn't produce, discredited because they came off as they are, talking down to people, sanctimoniously so.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they had tension over this. So Michelle did not show up at the Carter funeral because she did not want to get near Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 And I don't think, did Jill, was Jill there? I can't remember.

Speaker 1 But if she was, she didn't get near Donald Trump or didn't, she didn't, maybe she thought, I don't know if she had a plastic glove on when she.

Speaker 1 Jill Biden sat stonily next to Kamala Harris. Yes, that's what it was.

Speaker 1 So then

Speaker 1 Mike Pence's wife didn't want to touch Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 But anyway, Joe Biden, Barack Obama was joking around the whole time, actually, kind of against the grain of a solemnity, the

Speaker 1 solemn nature of a funeral, but they were laughing and getting, and that got Michelle even angrier. It got a lot of people on the left very angry.

Speaker 1 And after all, they had a point. How can you call somebody a racist, a Hitler-like fanatic, a dictator,

Speaker 1 like Joe Scarborough and those people did?

Speaker 1 And the answer is, people, Victor, the answer is he's President of the United States. And

Speaker 1 Barack Obama,

Speaker 1 who cooked up in the Oval Office, we should remember it was before Trump took office. And he cooked up the FBI surveillance and the Steele dossier.

Speaker 1 And he knew as he left office that James Comey had hired or was going to hire Christopher Steele and then Brennan discussed that CIA involvement in the Oval Office.

Speaker 1 We know that these all the principals in the government side,

Speaker 1 Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Bruce and Nelly Orr, James Baker, FBI Counsel, Andrew McCabe, all of them were Obama people. And so he understands what a president can do to hurt somebody.

Speaker 1 And And again, everybody should keep this in mind. They project.
So all of these people that are making their hajj to Mar-Lago or they're trying to kiss up to Donald Trump,

Speaker 1 their premise is, we know what we did to him. We know what we said about him.
We knew how we tried to destroy him. And we know that if...

Speaker 1 we were now in an ascendant powerful position, I wish we were, but we're not. But if we were him and we had suffered what we did to him,

Speaker 1 and we were him, he would go after us, legitimately so, and therefore we're terrified of him.

Speaker 1 And I, private citizen Barack Obama, do not want somebody from the National Archives popping up and said, you know, I was silenced all those years, but you know, he didn't bring, he didn't give us the stuff when we wanted it.

Speaker 1 Or I was in the CIA and we were snooping on people we shouldn't have. And Stephan Harper and somebody from the FBI said, well, that order came down from

Speaker 1 they don't want any of that stuff. And so that Barack Obama's smart.
So he was trying to, you know, I like Donald Trump, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

Speaker 1 And the other people are not smart.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah,

Speaker 1 that explains Mark Zuckerberg. You know, he's bringing, he's blaming DEI now on

Speaker 1 what's her name? Send,

Speaker 1 you know, the well-known

Speaker 1 Facebook

Speaker 1 CEO.

Speaker 1 Oh, the one that got

Speaker 1 fired. Yeah.

Speaker 1 They're blaming D.I., he's blaming that. And then all of these people understand.

Speaker 1 In their minds, they're saying, do we really want people like Peter Till

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 Elon Musk

Speaker 1 to have the inside? Larry Ellison, people like that who have been pretty strong supporting Donald Trump for at least more than a year.

Speaker 1 We want them to have the inside track. So

Speaker 1 we want to broaden the field, and Trump wants to broaden the field. But again, it's the idea that a lot of these people are worried that Trump might do to them what they tried to do.

Speaker 1 We've got to remember one thing: that when if we take back and we go back to about January 20, just about this time of the year, four years ago, we were in the aftermath of January 6th, and Google and Apple

Speaker 1 and Facebook

Speaker 1 conspired to destroy Parliament.

Speaker 1 That was an upstart

Speaker 1 alternative to

Speaker 1 Facebook and Twitter. And remember that it, for a brief moment, it was signing up millions of people and it was breaking down their capacity to hire them.

Speaker 1 And then suddenly those three consortia conspired to deny app access and destroyed that company. And that was, I think,

Speaker 1 and they had billions of dollars to destroy partly. A good friend of mine, Rebecca Mercer, they destroyed her company.
And

Speaker 1 so Joe Biden was absolutely happy with that.

Speaker 1 So when he lectures about oligarchies and monopolies, it's only because he feels that he doesn't have them at his disposal or the left has lost complete control of them.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 you know, the upside, as frustrating as it is to see a story about Bill Gates having a great three-hour meal, thinking this guy has been so much

Speaker 1 not only hostility towards Trump and Republicans and conservatives, but generally the world through his philanthropy to try and spread this one-worldism. And

Speaker 1 one of the leading voices for the...

Speaker 1 COVID-19 vaccine and all this oppression that came around that.

Speaker 1 But all that said, or blathered, I should say, in my case,

Speaker 1 I think Trump, when he said success will be the best revenge, that's probably the more motivating factor in his mind.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just would comment.

Speaker 1 I think that's why people are excited, because whatever their particular area of interest or expertise, there's people right now, millions of people, saying, I can frack, I can frack, I can frack, I can produce 25 million barrels, I can get natural gas, I can supply Europe, I can build ships, I I can build more cars.

Speaker 1 I can revive the nuclear industry. I can get precious metals for batteries.
I can open a mine.

Speaker 1 I can go in and get Latin and Greek and traditional history and English back into the prep schools, the high schools.

Speaker 1 Everybody in their own, according to their station, feels that there's all this pent-up talent and energy in the United States.

Speaker 1 And they've been told, don't do that. You can't do that.
You're racist, you're homophobic, you're transphobic.

Speaker 1 And they're just tired of it.

Speaker 1 The animal spirits want to be set free.

Speaker 1 And Trump's idea is kind of like a ringmaster, and he's just going, boom.

Speaker 1 And then he's telling his 13 cabinet members, be loyal.

Speaker 1 No Rex Tillertson, no John Bolton, no anonymous. Just be loyal, follow the agenda, and let it go.
Open it up.

Speaker 1 And let's see what America can do. It's like 1941.

Speaker 1 I remember a guy from a national review cruise 2016 right after the election, and he was so pumped. He was a small businessman in Tennessee.
I forget his name, but

Speaker 1 he said, Freon is back, baby. So whatever business he had needed refrigerated trucks.
And this was essential that

Speaker 1 with Trump's election, he anticipated the restrictions on Freon being removed. And he said,

Speaker 1 I just bought, like, made an order of four or five new trucks. You know, small thing.
It's very very small thing. Same thing as

Speaker 1 here. That's funny you mentioned it.

Speaker 1 California just suspended its mandate of outlawing diesel trucks produced before a certain date. You have to put this,

Speaker 1 you know, depth or whatever it was, that urine, urea into your tank. And I had a diesel truck.
You have to put it blue.

Speaker 1 stuff called blue and you put it in and it neutralizes supposedly the diesel but under the the new uh california guidelines, your truck had to burn at very high temperatures. That's why you see a lot.

Speaker 1 I had a good friend, I won't mention his last name, Gary, who wrote me about this very eloquently and showed that there's a lot of problems, problems the diesel truck industry is having and truckers in general.

Speaker 1 Under these new mandates, with turbos and especially the temperatures that are required in California, and this had a bearing on the 100 fire trucks that were in maintenance.

Speaker 1 In LA, right. Yes.
I had a beautiful diesel. I had 25,000 miles on that Echo Diesel.

Speaker 1 It was a wonderful truck as long as you didn't drive uphill over at a hundred five or try to kill anything because they burned so hot. Right.
And so that's suspended.

Speaker 1 It's not just academic. I had a very a good friend, I won't mention his name, but he rented a portion of our farm where one of my siblings sold out.
So I saw him almost every day on my walks.

Speaker 1 And he was farming.

Speaker 1 You know, it was tough to farm, especially renting property from this absentee

Speaker 1 owner that bought one of my brother's parcels. And he had just showed me this beautiful truck he had rehabbed, a diesel truck, big flat truck.
I think it was a two-ton.

Speaker 1 And he was explaining he could put his equipment on it, and he got it. And then I saw him about

Speaker 1 a year later, and he was just throwing. He said, I'm going to have to

Speaker 1 destroy that truck or go somewhere. I don't know if even if that's legal, take it out of state and sell it.
They bargain because of the engine.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that wasn't the reason, but that was one of the reasons he killed himself. Oh my gosh.
Yeah. He said, I can't make it.
That was very tragic because everything was conspiring against him.

Speaker 1 His son's a wonderful guy, too. I'm very lucky his son is farming.
But he had

Speaker 1 a very valuable John Deere

Speaker 1 tractor. And because renters, you know, they don't have

Speaker 1 just one place they can store their equipment. So when he would do his tractor work, he didn't know, because I live, you know, I have all these criminals now that come and dump stuff and steal.

Speaker 1 So out in the vineyard, he tried to hide it and they stole the battery. So I just said to him, look, come into my shed and put it next to the house.
And he did.

Speaker 1 And what was, this was a $100,000 brand new John Deere. It was a wonderful tractor.

Speaker 1 And it just sat there for two months and I thought wow where is he and I didn't realize he'd killed himself and his family didn't know where it was

Speaker 1 and yeah it was what I'm getting at again is that when all of these people get together in little rooms and they make these decisions most of these these stupid arrogant over educated no common sense they destroy lives and that that's what I get so angry about Los Angeles when I see all of those poor people and their whole

Speaker 1 it's just

Speaker 1 those homes are just Dresden like or Hiroshima like and then you think oh I'm going to junk it to Ghana oh I called in a bomb threat ha ha ha oh I let the reservoir be dry since February ha ha ha oh I'm making twice as holiday as I oh I'm a DI I hired 70%

Speaker 1 I can't carry a man and he has no place being there when I come to the door oh I'm going to look like all of that or Gavin Newsome. Oh,

Speaker 1 the reservoirs are full. No, they're not, Gavin.

Speaker 1 I just went by Pacheco. It's 70% full.
Folsom's 37% full. We're in a drought right now.
You're still letting water out. You should be

Speaker 1 spanking every drop. But

Speaker 1 when they act that way, or they do this with their shoulders, oh, it's a local problem.

Speaker 1 It's they don't care about people. That's the thing about the left.
It's all, I mean, they love humanity in the abstract, and they hate humans in the concrete.

Speaker 1 By the way, Bill Maher made a funny little comment about

Speaker 1 the fires. He said,

Speaker 1 people aren't able to escape it because of California's high-speed rail. And that, as you've talked about many times, Victor, that project is.

Speaker 1 I saw a headline from the L.A. Times from last March or May.

Speaker 1 Despite some progress, state's high-speed rail is 100 billion short and many years from reality.

Speaker 1 I don't know if you can see that.

Speaker 1 The whole thing was supposed to be up and running by now from

Speaker 1 Sacramento to San Francisco and from the San Joaquin Valley over Pacheco to the Bay Area on all the way down through Te Pache, LA.

Speaker 1 It's 15 years, and it was supposed to be done for, I think, 80 billion. I think they've spent, they claim they've spent 17 or 20 billion.

Speaker 1 They've spent more than that.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 one,

Speaker 1 I don't think they've laid more than 10 feet of rail. Two, they've been caught up in imminent

Speaker 1 domain lawsuits like you wouldn't believe.

Speaker 1 They could have taken the right-of-way of the Santa Fe and these parts, the Santa Fe, there is a right-of-way, just expanded that rail and improved the rail line and got it up to 70 or 80 miles an hour and had two tracks.

Speaker 1 They have one. So you have these waiting trains when you cross over.
They didn't want to do that. They had to be that, and so they've got over the skyline of Fresno.
There's this huge bridge.

Speaker 1 And their biggest problem right now is,

Speaker 1 I'm exaggerating, is graffiti. It's graffiti, graffiti.
The former Fox Nation, Laura Logan, came out here to do a thing on it. So she came out about four years ago.

Speaker 1 And she said, my God, it's got graffiti all over. I said, yes, it's brand new, too.

Speaker 1 And it just sits there like Stonehenge. And so, I mean, they had all these, right?

Speaker 1 They've issued communique. We've hired this percentage of disabled, this percentage of gay, this percentage of trans.

Speaker 1 They have the whole DEI thing.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 it's never going to be done. And then the worst thing about it is, if it were to be done from Bakersfield to Merced, and you look at the operating cost, it's going to be public utility unions.

Speaker 1 It's going to lose money every day.

Speaker 1 Oh, my gosh, yeah. Absolutely.
And then you look at the sin, that's the sin of commission. And then you look at the sin of omission.
You have parallel in many places to it

Speaker 1 or perpendicular, the 99 freeway from Bakersfield to Sacramento. And per mile driven, it is the most deadly in the United States.
There are still places where there's only two lanes in each direction.

Speaker 1 And it's prone to fog, and it's superimposed on a state where 27% of the population was not born in the United States, so they have different ideas about driving.

Speaker 1 And he could have made that three-lane freeway all the way for a fraction of what he spent.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, we had $7.5 billion,

Speaker 1 most of it for at least almost $3 billion for reservoirs. He didn't build one reservoir.
He used

Speaker 1 $250 million from that bill to blow up four reservoirs, as I keep saying.

Speaker 1 So everything he touches, he's the on Midas touch. Everything he is going to have a newsome.
Yes. He turns it to dross.

Speaker 1 And Stonehenge is one of his.

Speaker 1 He didn't create it. He inherited it and he made it.
He touched it like this.

Speaker 1 Touch, dross. Dross.

Speaker 1 Anything that the golden state touches, it turns it dross. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, Victor. Pot iron touch.

Speaker 1 Kryptonite. I don't know.
Hey, when we're going to take one last break.

Speaker 1 And since this episode is being recorded the day before and will come out the day after Martin Luther King Day, and since we have many new listeners, I thought it would be good to hear you talk again about the time young Victor met

Speaker 1 Martin Luther King. And we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.

Speaker 1 we're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show. So, Victor, two things.

Speaker 1 You know, tell us again, if please,

Speaker 1 it's a charming story, but I think also an important story. And then if you maybe cap it off with

Speaker 1 what would, I guess, what would Martin Luther King and Martin Luther King ism, if there is such a thing,

Speaker 1 how would that go over with

Speaker 1 America's black leadership today? And by black leadership, I don't mean Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, and I mean the Congressional Black Caucus that Mayor Bass used to be the head of.

Speaker 1 Yes. Well, I mean, he's most famously

Speaker 1 quoted as it's content of our character, not the color of our skin. That was part of his dream that his children would be judged on the content of their character, not the color of skin.

Speaker 1 And the tragedy, to answer your second question first, is that

Speaker 1 the third generation of black leadership still believes that it's the color of your skin that matters the most and that people like Martin Luther King, who states the content of their character, are sellouts, or they're deceived, or they suffer from false consciousness.

Speaker 1 So it's tragedy that we reverted, we turned the civil rights movement just when it was working into a tribalist movement.

Speaker 1 So we're all going to be in parts of the identity politics tribe tribe of our choosing. I say of our choosing because in a multiracial society,

Speaker 1 I've had at least three cases, instances, of people that I've known in the last three or four years that I had no idea they were African American. I had no idea.

Speaker 1 A person who's very good, I mean, he's one of the best, I think he's the best student

Speaker 1 employee I've ever had.

Speaker 1 So, right. And he's so,

Speaker 1 and he just casually remarked that he was African American. I didn't have any idea.

Speaker 1 So the point is it's

Speaker 1 we went from content of our character to DNA badges. Oh by the way I said that once to a student and he said that he got a DNA test.

Speaker 1 He was from India and sent it in that he was dark and he had the DNA that he put with his application.

Speaker 1 So it's not it so I remember that the old days from the civil rights movement, my parents, my mom was a Democrat, my dad was, they were, well, I don't know what you've called them, Harry Truman Democrats, former Democrats.

Speaker 1 They'd gone to university.

Speaker 1 They were kind of the upward mobility. They thought that the country was, you know, they loved Kennedy.

Speaker 1 Everything.

Speaker 1 And so when the civil rights came, there was something called dollars for Democrats. And my mom would put us in her old car.
I had no money. They lived in 1,100 square foot home.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, it was about 900 square feet. My brother still has it.
And

Speaker 1 my mom wasn't working. She had three kids.
She lost a child, so she was kind of still worried about that. I remember a hearing story.
My sister who died. She had German measles.
She was pregnant.

Speaker 1 And then my father... was just farming cotton and then he was teaching part-time at

Speaker 1 Wheelie College. So we had very, we were living on a corner of the ranch and helping my grandfather.
And anyway, to make a long story short, we would go around and to what was then the barrio.

Speaker 1 Today it's the whole city or Mexican American, but then there was a smaller pub and knock on doors to try to raise one dollar for dollars for Democrats. And that was the 1960 election.
For

Speaker 1 looking back, I think I would have voted for Richard Nixon over JFK.

Speaker 1 I'm sure I would have, even given what happened later, tragically to both of them.

Speaker 1 But nevertheless, I was, but in that period, I was 11 years old, and of course Martin Luther King announced the Grace Cathedral, I think it's an Episcopalian Church, or Anglican Church.

Speaker 1 I don't, you can define the difference to me, and their closer relationship to Catholicism than evangelical Protestantism.

Speaker 1 But in any case, the church had either been just, I know it had taken years to be built, it was either just built or rehabilitated.

Speaker 1 But it was a big event in San Francisco, and they could not believe that Martin Luther King. So my mom had a friend that was the daughter of someone who was the dean of women, I think, at college.

Speaker 1 And she called up and said, why don't we go, why don't you all drive up from Selma and we'll go to the Grace Cathedral.

Speaker 1 So we all got up at 4 in the morning and put on a little font lord, a little clip on ties. I think it was 11.
I think this was March. I think, Jack, actually, it was 60 years ago this March, 65.

Speaker 1 I remember the day. It was March of 65.

Speaker 1 And I put a little clip-on tie. We had corduroy coats.
We got all, the three of us, we all got into this little 544 Bobo with 100,000 miles, no seat belts. So my dad-putted over the thing, and then

Speaker 1 we stopped before we did in Los Baños, and my father called the woman who was arranging to pick us and she said there's an African-American family

Speaker 1 that has no car. Their car broke down.
They want to go. So my dad then, when we got to San Francisco,

Speaker 1 we picked up the woman that was going and we didn't fit in the car, but she had a car. So then we traded cars and we went out to Hunters Point and picked up two women, African-American women.

Speaker 1 And then by this time we were late. We would have been two hours early, but going around San Francisco picking up everybody.

Speaker 1 So we get to Grace up on the top of the hill and we all get out and there's a huge vine. I could not believe it.
It's snake for, I don't know, a mile. We're in it

Speaker 1 and the woman who was escorting us,

Speaker 1 don't worry, this thing is a cathedral. This is like Notre Dame.
It'll hold the whole city. So we get up and we're right there.

Speaker 1 And I was kind of, I had glasses.

Speaker 1 Nobody cares, but in my family, my two brothers were very bright, but they were very athletic too.

Speaker 1 My twin brother was a great baseball player. So it was my older brother, but I wasn't.

Speaker 1 I had glasses. They only wanted to wear glasses.
I was left-handed. I wasn't bad in athletics.
I participated, but I was mediocre.

Speaker 1 And I always wanted to read books. And they always say, well, you know, we want to play two-on-two baseball.
Look at Victor. Mom, he won't play with us.
He's got his head in that stupid book.

Speaker 1 And they were right about that. So anyway, we get to the thing, and they start to close close the door right in front of my parents.
And they said, no more.

Speaker 1 So my mom took both her hands and pushed me in. And I almost fell over.
And I was locked in by myself, right by the door.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it was kind of, I just remember the speech was that famous speech that he gave on Newman. If you're going to be a janitor, you be the best janitor.

Speaker 1 If you're going to be a gardener, then you be the best gardener. Whatever your station in life is, you be the best and let other people worry about whether you're black.

Speaker 1 And it was very

Speaker 1 moving. And then at the end, he walked around.
He didn't go down the aisle where everybody who was important was. He walked around the periphery.

Speaker 1 And so as he walked around the periphery, he stopped right by the door. And there was about four of us.
I was the only white person there. And then he tapped us each on the shoulder like this.

Speaker 1 Hey, you know, thank you. And then he walked on.

Speaker 1 And then they opened the doors and my mother said, well, what was it like? They heard it outside on a steeper.

Speaker 1 She said,

Speaker 1 now I know you're not going to believe this, Victor, but I pushed you because someday after I'm dead, you will remember that moment.

Speaker 1 So that was

Speaker 1 a big,

Speaker 1 I remember it my entire life. It was, it was really,

Speaker 1 I remember my parents, they were so idealistic. They were farmers.
They had no money. And they were kind of caricatured because my mother had gone.

Speaker 1 My my father had gone to University of Pacific and then he got drafted or he joined the Marine Corps and then it's a long story ended up in the Army Air Force and then he on these horrific missions over Tokyo and then my mom as soon as she went up to follow him got a degree there then had to start over and got another BA from Stanford and then she got a law degree almost never happened for a woman in 1945

Speaker 1 And then they came back and they had all this education, but no money. And so my dad, then he grew up on a farm.
He was farming little cotton, cotton.

Speaker 1 He had a 10-acre cotton allotment, and then he was coaching football and teaching at Readley. And then my mom.
What was he teaching at Readley?

Speaker 1 He taught physical education, and then he became an administrator of the Knight Division. But he was the football coach of Readley High School and then Readley College for a while.
So I remember

Speaker 1 growing up, and then he got in a big argument with the president. And then when I was in high school, there was somebody that president, my dad was,

Speaker 1 my mom, they were always champions of lost causes, St. Jude technique.
There was a guy who was kind of loud and

Speaker 1 but he was always

Speaker 1 checking on everybody. If the coach came in late, he was another coach, and he would write it down.
Or if somebody fought, he was always right, but he was disruptive.

Speaker 1 And they fired him without cause. So then he came over to our house, and my father had gotten along great with everybody.

Speaker 1 And my mom said, I wouldn't get involved in here. All of your friends are running a college or up for maybe a presidency.
Do not champion this guy. She didn't know it.

Speaker 1 And my dad goes, well, what they're doing. My dad was huge.
He was 6'4,

Speaker 1 2'10.

Speaker 1 Really. So he championed this guy.
One thing led to another. And the president yelled at my dad.
My dad picked him up and held him up in the air for a minute.

Speaker 1 Luckily, he didn't get fired because my mom was, even though she, well, she was a lawyer.

Speaker 1 So the result of all that was my dad went from this high administrative to teaching bonehead English and bonehead history.

Speaker 1 So I was like the little bookworm. So I'd come home.
And he had these weird hours where he was doing night school. So I would come up to high school and he said, Victor,

Speaker 1 just in time, I've got some exams for you. And he'd hand me like 100 of bonehead English multiple choice.

Speaker 1 And there was no scanthone. And like an idiot, I would find all the football players that I liked.
They all took his class. I go, Dad, Jimmy, James Jones, he's got 68%.

Speaker 1 He's my favorite Reedy College football player. Look, that little

Speaker 1 mark on that D, A, B, C, D. I don't think he meant it.
I think there's some there. And he said, well, use your judgment, use discretion.
No preferences, but go ahead.

Speaker 1 So I did all this correcting. And then he bought a three-volume book called English Grammar.
That's how I earned English Grammar because I read the whole thing and I talked it with him.

Speaker 1 Subject, predicate, correctology. The fiction

Speaker 1 you were looking for your versions of hanging Chads back in the day. I was.
I learned all about hanging Chad. So

Speaker 1 I don't know. I don't want to get personal about your family, but everybody believes they're.
Is that true, Jack? Everybody believes they were blessed with their parents.

Speaker 1 No, not everybody believes that. Well, we are all blessed with parents, so you believe it or not is a different story.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I was won the lottery. I had a wonderful mother-in-law.
Yeah. Yeah.
I worship them. I don't know if my siblings worship me the same degree.
Maybe I was come up with all them.

Speaker 1 Well, I did. I did.
I owed a lot of anything I was able to do was because of them.

Speaker 1 I think any regular listener to this podcast is that very much comes through your love for your

Speaker 1 parents and all your family,

Speaker 1 including, didn't you have a crazy Uncle Luke or something like that? Rodeo?

Speaker 1 Tango. Tango.
Tango Johnson. I liked him, but I was his favorite.

Speaker 1 Victor, are you going to vote for my mom?

Speaker 1 Or are you going to be a commie like your parents?

Speaker 1 You going to be a big commie and vote the Democrats?

Speaker 1 They kill everything, the Democrats.

Speaker 1 God rest all their souls. Well, anyway, Victor, we've come to the end of this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but why not? A couple things. Again, folks, visit Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.
Do subscribe.

Speaker 1 It's now $65 for the full year, but it's discounted monthly, $6.

Speaker 1 No, it's,

Speaker 1 yes, that is discounted.

Speaker 1 Monthly at $6.50.

Speaker 1 For a year, $65. So Blade of Percy is VictorHanson.com.

Speaker 1 We always have a shared,

Speaker 1 I just thought a shared favorite movie, The Best Years of Our Lives. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And the, is it Myrna Loy, wasn't it? Yes. She was when her husband would get a little out of it and wrinkle it, and she was a long-suffering wife.
Well, she always had a little smile on her face.

Speaker 1 Well, we would go somewhere, like a restaurant,

Speaker 1 and there would be somebody

Speaker 1 berating their waitress. My mom was like Myrna Loy.
She turned to us and says, oh my God, here comes mission number 51.

Speaker 1 He got out of the B-29s at 40 and now we've already got 11 more missions. And oh please, she said, please, Bill, don't say anything.
Don't do it. And he would get up and say,

Speaker 1 Mister,

Speaker 1 I expect to go to a restaurant where you accord the working people some courtesy and respect. And I haven't heard it.
In fact, you've been insulting. Now, whatever you said to her, you say to me.

Speaker 1 And my mom would go like, oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I would always hide under the tape.

Speaker 1 There was a great scene, many great scenes in that movie where Dana Andrews is back working as a soda jerk and

Speaker 1 Harold, oh, I forget his last name, who won the Oscar, who had the

Speaker 1 Oscar.

Speaker 1 And he

Speaker 1 got into it with a customer and um and uh dana andrews clocked them into into uh

Speaker 1 you remember that scene very well you know who that you know that customer was he was the sheriff on bonanza oh sure yeah

Speaker 1 i forgot his name but he was a good and that guy was sort of the the representation of the early mccarthy

Speaker 1 he was yeah it was very it's not a conservative film i mean it's a great film it's wonderful film but uh he was a great actor Daniel.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he was. So was Frederick March and

Speaker 1 Myrna Loyches.

Speaker 1 French over Tokyo Reagan. That was another.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Frederick March was a bit of a. And Myrna Loy also, they were people of the, I don't know if they were the left, but they were left of center, definitely.
But somewhat.

Speaker 1 You know, they make great movies. They're great contributors to our culture.
Bill Holton was a good. He was a conservative.
Well, he was Ronald Reagan's best man

Speaker 1 when Reagan married Nancy, the second marriage. So,

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 I just thought that was fascinating.

Speaker 1 Just to not

Speaker 1 prolong things, but when Fred, you remember the bridges of Tokyo Reed when Bill Holden was in it? Yes,

Speaker 1 and Mickey Rooney and Grace Kelly.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the old man, they called him, the head of the carrier. That was Frederick Marshall.

Speaker 1 I think so. I haven't seen the movie either.

Speaker 1 Remember that? I just sent that because they faulted Reagan for saying, quoting him.

Speaker 1 After Bill Holand gets killed,

Speaker 1 the movie ends and he kind of says,

Speaker 1 where do we get such men that will fly over hell and they'll come back into this little place and land it? And Reagan said something to the effect.

Speaker 1 It was a great speech. He said, where do we get such people? And then they all said, ah, he's just quoting.
He's stealing.

Speaker 1 Henry Kissinger bought Frederick March's house in Connecticut.

Speaker 1 I don't know why I know that.

Speaker 1 But that was a very disturbing movie because the fear

Speaker 1 of Bill Holden as a pilot,

Speaker 1 very palpable.

Speaker 1 I was flyer in Colorado, remember? And they called him on? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think I told you once.

Speaker 1 My father had this pilot, his name was Allenby, and that guy was a genius, and he figured out how to run the RPMs up high and hit the brakes.

Speaker 1 And when they took, a lot of planes didn't make it off the runway at Tinyon, which by the way, they're clearing the jungle right now, Jack, at Tinyan in the Mariana Islands.

Speaker 1 And they're rediscovering those 7,000-foot runways for B-29. They're all overgrown with jungle.
Nobody's seen them, and they're using GPS to find them.

Speaker 1 and clear them because they're using dispersion tactics.

Speaker 1 So if we get in a war over Taiwan, and rather than put put a carrier out there, we're going to put planes all over the Marianas and surrounding islands. A great strategy, but

Speaker 1 this guy was a great pilot.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he was a civilian after flying over four, that got his crew over 40 missions, twice in Iwo Jima. They had all kinds of near-death.

Speaker 1 And he went back to Korea just like Bill Holton, and he flew another 40 missions. Dang, you're right.
That was tough.

Speaker 1 They shot down a lot of B-29s in Korea. I remember seeing him once.
He had kind of a,

Speaker 1 he collected furniture and stuff and sold it. I know.
He had a, I don't know what, with a furniture store, but he would pull in with a space.

Speaker 1 He came from Oregon and he had kind of a jumpsuit. He's kind of heavy.

Speaker 1 I kind of said something to my mom once.

Speaker 1 God, that guy looks really weird. I was like a 10

Speaker 1 man saved 11 people, including your father, and you're going to go up to him and say, I want to thank you, Mr. L.

Speaker 1 God bless mom. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 two things. One, I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society.
It has 14 recommended readings. It's totally free, doesn't sell names, comes out every Friday.

Speaker 1 Check it out. Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.
I know you're going to like it. Second thing: we get many people who go to Apple, listen listen through Apple, and rate the show zero to five stars.

Speaker 1 And 7,200-something folks have done that. And the average is 4.9,

Speaker 1 which is

Speaker 1 all due to the wisdom Victor shares us four times a week, sometimes five times a week through this podcast. So thanks for those who do that.
Some leave comments. And here is one.

Speaker 1 It's from Sears Jalen. And it's titled Modern Takes with Historical Bases.

Speaker 1 I've been listening to VDH for about six months now and truly enjoy hearing his perspective on modern events grounded in historical knowledge.

Speaker 1 There's always something new to learn, and Professor Hansen puts it out there in an easy-to-digest manner with a healthy dose of realism.

Speaker 1 Both friendly co-hosts Sammy and Jack are great additions, I didn't read it for this reason, to the conversation.

Speaker 1 I also really enjoy the weekend segments in which a historical topic is discussed, usually in a series.

Speaker 1 If it hasn't been covered yet, a series on war tactics, tools, and formations from antiquity would be a wonderful series. Corbus, Phalanx, etc.
So,

Speaker 1 thank you, Sears Jalen. Victor, you've been terrific.
Thanks for all the wisdom you shared today. Thanks, folks, for listening.
And we will be,

Speaker 1 if I could speak English, we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Bye-bye.

Speaker 1 Thank everybody for listening. We're getting our ratings on Audible and

Speaker 1 Apple, and we're just off the charts. I mean, you know, top 10 in the nation.
It's only because of the people listening. Thank you, everyone.