Biden: The Biden Way and Way Out

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
I got to pull my mic over here, Victor. Excuse me.
Sorry, folks. Hello, ladies.
Hello, gentlemen. 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. It may be the last full day of the Obama era.
Victor Davis Hanson, who is the star of this show, 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. This episode will be up on the World Wide Web on Tuesday, the 21st.
Those of you who were listening on the 21st and wanting Victor's take on Trump's inauguration, inaugural speech, whatever, it'll come. You'll get that analysis.
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.
And I think the first thing, Victor, oh, wait, I forgot to mention you have a website, thebladeofperseusvictorhanson.com. More about that later in the show.
But when we come back from important messages, I think we should first get Victor's take on Joe Biden's 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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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Now it's a podcast.
It's been a podcast for several years with justthenews.com. And we are also on Rumble.
And thank you for those who catch it this way. So Victor, yeah, we are on the end of an error, E-R-R-O-R.
Joe Biden put the punctuation mark on that, although he still did a few things following his farewell speech.

If you 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?

Well, Joe Biden gave two farewell speeches, one to the State Department and one to us. I'll start with the latter first.
He thought he was Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jack, and it was, you know, he gave that on almost the same day, January.
I think Biden did it on the 16th. Ike did it on the 17th of 1961.
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.
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 to accept this. So I guess Biden thought he was Dwight Eisenhower.
And I would like to, because Biden was worried about a modern, comparable danger, and he called it oligarchs and multibillionaires. Now, as I see it, there were three things wrong with it.
To quote our dear departed Lloyd Binston about our dear Dan Quarrel, Joe, you're no Ike. I knew Ike.
So, I didn't know Ike, as Binston knew JFK. But the point is, Eisenhower was coming out of a two-term successful presidency.
He was the hero of the Great Crusade. That was his crusade in Europe, his memoir from Norman.
The beaches of Normandy, across the Rhine to the interior of Germany. What a joke did he get out of Afghanistan in humiliation.
And then he had bragged to the State Department. There'll be no president after me, whoever has to fight in Afghanistan.
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. So he had no credibility.
And then he got, so what was he worried? He was screaming about the oligarchs, oligarchs, oligarchs, oligarchs. And I thought, you shameless hypocrite liar.
This is a guy who gave the presidential medal of freedom to George Sorrells, a multi-billionaire who broke the Bank of England, who was a convicted criminal in France and can't ever go back, and he used $60 million in 2020 to help subvert the election, and then another 60 or 70 to get elected, the likes of George Viscount and Chesie Boudin and all of the rest of them, Kim Fox, Alvin Bragg, all of the people who have ruined criminal jurisprudence in our major cities. And then he was the one that Mark Zuckerberg volunteered to put $419 million to subvert the work of the registrars and absorbed some of their employees, added their own employees to add mailboxes and facilitated this disastrous mail-in voting in the swing states and help Joe Biden win.
That was an oligarch, Joe. That's what you did.
And then he was the one that conspired with oligarchs to suppress news of the 100 life, as DeVine has written so wonderfully about, suppressing the news of the genuine authentic hunter laptop and incriminating computer. And so, he's a cold hypocrite.
And then number three, these oligarchs, quote-unquote, they're not just people like George Soros. I'm not making fun of finance.
Finance is important as the fuel that runs the American colony. But when you see that erector hand grab a rocket by Elon Musk, or you see that Elon Musk broke into 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. 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 and endorse Kamala Harris.
So he's down, he's making, what do we call it, Jack? The Hajj, the holy trek to Guadalupe? Is that the Hajj? It deserves its own special term. Yes, some kind of Hajj, 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 reexamined.
Snoop Dogg made it. Snoop Dogg.
Snoop Dogg would cut a video about how to shoot Donald Trump. Remember that? 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. People get religion.

They do. So, my point

is that these oligarchs

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,

David Sachs,

Mark Andreessen, Netscape,

all of them do stuff. They're not just

Thank you. communicate, so Peter Tell, David Sachs, Mark Andreessen, Netscape, all of them do stuff.
They're not just waging, not that it's not good to be a stock market, they can be very good, I'm not criticizing, but what they remind me of is what FDR did in 1941, all during the National Recovery Act that was declared onitutional, the New Deal, Civilian Conservation Corps, etc., all these captains of industry opposed it, because he took over the free market, controlled it, and prolonged the 29 Depression all the way to 38, almost 10 years. 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. 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.
They were Charles Wilson, the head of GE, and guys from DuPont, Campbell Soup. And then he turned, he thought, well, even that's not enough.
What did that war production do? They kind of did what Elon did, only they did it to a much greater degree. They took over Louisville slugglers and started making war equipment.
They took over DuPont Chemical and made napalm. I don't mean they took it over, but the people transformed it who owned it.
Then he turned to three people, kind of like the version of Bezos and Elon or Ramaswamy and he said, William Knudsen, you're the head of GM. I fought you my entire life.
I'm going to make you a two-star general. You just do what it has to take, but this is what I want.
So then Knudsen got together with Henry Kaiser and said, just plow a path through Contra Costa County to the sea, and I want a Liberty ship. Here's a design for a Liberty ship.
Here's a design for free. I want them every three days.
And he did. 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.
And so those were oligarchs. And those oligarchs, they were called the dollar a day men.
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 of shady bunch of oligarchs,

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. 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. You can

make us preeminent in cryptocurrency.

You can make us

preeminent in genetic engineering.

These are the new

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,

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, he praised Afghanistan. I know you don't believe it, but he did, that he got out.
Pride flag, gender studies, whole thing, 50 million.

He had a pride flag in a gender studies program at Kabul flying, but he didn't care about 13 people who died or 50 billion in munitions that he abandoned. And then he praised, he praised the, I could not believe how shameless he was.
He praised Iran for being weakened and Hezbollah weakened and Hamas weakened and Assad falling. And all those happened despite, not because of him.
It was Israel that he thwarted at every turn. So he paid $6 billion for hostages and fueled Iran.
He lifted the embargo and gave them $100 billion 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 to occasion.
He said, don't take out the hierarchy. Don't kill Nassau.
Don't take out these people at home.

He did all of that.

And yet he was taking credit for Netanyahu's work in the Middle East.

It was so shameful.

Everything about it was shameful.

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. 50 people tell us he was always demented.
And now we hear that Speaker Johnson went in a room with him, and he said, 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.
And you had bragged that you were going to help Europe withstand this Ukrainian war and the subsequent related closure of natural gas imports, which they've been on from Russia. And now we can't send them any.
And Joe Biden said, I didn't do that.

He said he didn't do it.

He said he didn't do it. Well, who did? And can you imagine if Trump did that? And then the final thing, I'll shut up, is, look, he says, Jack, yesterday, that 25

equal women

I get more

women

28th Jack, yesterday that 25th

equal women, I get more of my women

at the 28th

amendment, the equal rights of men, men, men

they said, law of the land.

And he actually put it that inviting.

That's treason.

That's insurrection.

Where's Liz Cheney? I thought Liz Cheney

would be tweeting or kidding

her and all those people. Where's Nancy Pelosi? The President of the United States took a inner, defunct, failed ERA that had been declared null and void when the time expired.
42 years ago it expired. 42 years ago.
And by executive f fit, he claims that it is now the law of the land.

Can you imagine if Donald Trump did that?

Yeah.

And no one said really a thing about it.

Well, some people have said.

Well, they set a precedent, Jack.

They set a precedent that you can try.

Why don't they impeach him right now?

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

Thank you. that you can try, why don't they impeach him right now? Have a special Sunday session and impeach him, and then try him as a private citizen as they did to Trump.
Well, it's not only, if you look at what Mike, Speaker Johnson said, and the totality of it was, he thought Biden really didn't remember that, just evidence of him being daft.ft but uh since he is daft and others as you you referenced jack reed the senator from uh rhode island saying we need two neurosurgeons to prove that this guy is in is in you know cuckoo bird back back in the summer nevertheless victor there have been people like kristin 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.
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? 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. 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.
And then they said, do you realize that you put up thousands of people out of work and you're costing Europe? 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? These people don't care.
You know, it's what Joe Robin 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? He went like this, Joe.
Yeah. Oh, my gosh.
What was that? I don't know. He had some nervous, well, I don't want to make fun of people having actual problems.
Well, I mean, when Donald Trump did that, making fun of someone, it wasn't Donald Trump like this. They said, oh, my gosh, he's making fun of disabled people.
That speaker was, they don't care about people. It's kind of like the third man.
You know the scene where Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton are up in the Ferris wheel? Ferris wheel. And Orson Welles' character says, would you care if one of those little dots down there disappeared? So from their height, they don't care about the dots.
They just don't. No, they don't.
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Kind of reminds me, Victor, of... I love that movie Back 21 with Danny Glover and Gene Hackman from, I think it was the late 80s.
I think there's going to be a market for movies like this. Absolutely.
People do not want to have any more psychodramas or melodramas of some neurotic

metrosexual who

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. And I was waiting for the Colonel Vindemann story.
Yeah. Great.
Hey, Victor, picking up, excuse me, picking up on the senility issue. And you think of when a grandma who's got dementia, all of a sudden her will, she passes away.
Her will is read.

They realized 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? I've seen that happen in my own family. Okay.
Well, it's totally fine that the compass mentis, if it's applicable to the estate of a farmer or anybody, why is it applicable to the United States of America? I don't know. I don't know.
I do not know. And then I superimpose all of this.
This is why the left has zero credibility. They had Bandy Lee, some part-time psychiatrist or psychologist at Yale,

go lecture the Senate that Donald Trump needed an intervention spray jacket.

She wrote an edited book.

And that prompted, I guess it was Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein,

the deputy attorney general, and the interim FBI boss.

Now, should you wear the wire or should I wear it? One of us has to catch him in his dementia so we can go to the cabinet, go to Mike Pence, the cabinet members, and get a 25th Amendment. That's what they were trying to do.
And yet, I haven't heard, have you heard Rod Wilson, or Andrew McCabe on his analyst position at CNN? I think it is. I haven't heard him say anything.
As McCabe said, you know what? I think you need to get a wire and trap Joe and get that on record. 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. And then go out in your FBI vehicle and memorialize it and then link it to new york times that worked with me so no they don't they don't none of that yeah these people are it's by the way victor you started this uh conversation about the farewell speech uh going after the biden stressing of oligarchy what what in greek is oligarchy what is the meaning? It's a term.
Oligos means the few. And arche, it means the rule.
And so in Greek city-states, there was either democracy, demokraptia, that means the rule of the demos, or the people. That means a lot of people.
So usually there's a property qualification. So if you have a city, state of 20,000 citizens at Athens, they could all participate.
In an oligarchy, you might have 5,000 participate, 500. And they both were in opposition.
I'm doing this in prompting, so I hope it sounds convincing. They were in opposition to aristocracy.

The aristocracy, that is the best people.

That's their term for landed, noble, tight.

The elite.

The elite by birth.

So the aristocrats, and it's a very rare word in Greek, plutocracy. That's the rule of the people with plutos, or wealth, plutocracy.
They don't use the word in the United States of aristocracy because nobody believes that Elon Musk is there, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Bessels, because they were born into a third-generation Ivy League, East Coast, title family. But they do use the word oligarchy, because there's a few of them.
But it's a misplaced term, because oligarchy does not mean two or three people. 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 oligarch. I think that if they're going to be exact, if they were really, they could say a plutocracy, people who were multibillionaires.
Why don't they say some lazy? Oh, I have one other word for you. There's also an occlocracy.
I think we are really an occlocracy. Occloss is the ma, what the Romans called the turbo.
The turbo. So the occlocracy is a rule of the ma, bread and circuses.
The people who are on the dole and they determine budgets and spending and they have to be entertained by TV all day. I think we're really run by a bureaucracy.
Yes, the bureau. That's a good French word that came out in the 19th century.
It's funny. We've been run the last four years, it's not funny, by someone who sold out cheap.
His references to oligarchy were about wealth and billionaires but 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 yeah he sold out the country for 20 million bucks yeah 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. He can still give Jim Biden a pardon.
Ashley Biden a pardon. A lot of people can still get pardoned.
He will. He just gave one to Marcus Garvey, who's been dead 100 years.
He doesn't know that, though. He does not know that.
He did sell the country out at two cents on the dollar. Not that it would have been better if he charged more.
Right. 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, all the racist vocabulary.
And then when he's a hypocrite and a liar, when he keeps saying, I can't take this about, I tried to unite the people. No, you did not.
Your semi-fascist, ultra-mega phantom of the opera speech was horrific. You attacked the Supreme Court.
Your vitriol against the members led to people showing up at their houses, including an assassin. You did all of that.
You really weakened the court. You bragged that 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. I could go on, but he was really a mean person.
Well, I'm glad he's gone. I don't wish ill to him.
But 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. 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, 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 after them. But my point is that she, as the Pelosi's fade into obscurity, the daughter said it was really mean that Joe, Jill, Jill would not talk to Nancy, wouldn't show up where Nancy was.
and this was so mean

because Jack

when Joe had no money

as a junior senator, he went out to see the Pelosi's in San Francisco. And guess what they did? They loaned him their car so Joe could drive around San Francisco.
How did he repay that 50 years later? How did she? He didn't speak to her his wife was mean to nancy for staging the coup they got rid of her lady lady mcbiden she lady mcbiden called her yeah lady mcbiden catfired if i could be so sexist to say nancy blowsley versus joel biden i wonder who would win that Well, I think Nancy, if she could pick up her walker and use it as a club, she might get away from it. She's not going to inauguration.
Somebody wrote me a neat email, Jack, that now that we know it's kind of like the old Soviet Union when they wanted to get rid of somebody on a plane and you notice the people when they threw away their boarding pass never showed up. Well, Nancy's not showing up and Mike Pence's wife is not showing up and Jill Biden, I don't know where she is or not, but Michelle Obama's not showing up and the person wrote and said, Victor, is this a coincidence? Something, and they were serious, something bad is going to happen.
And that's why they moved it indoors. Indoors, yeah.
I said, no, well, there was some security question. 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, we don't want a bomb. We're for peace.
We see our hostilities with Israel in cessation. We never tried to kill Donald Trump.
We don't want to kill Donald Trump. I wonder why that's happening.

Why is all this happening?

I just don't understand it.

It's all happening from soup dog to the president of Iran to Mr. Trudeau to, my gosh, the whole country of the Assad's discombobulates.

Everything is just, it's like the world upside down and the British are playing

it at Georgetown. Well, it's beautiful in its way to watch, I think.
I'm glad you mentioned

Obama, Michelle Obama, and we should talk about the Obama era. Is it over? And we'll do that when

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we're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, recording on Sunday, January 19th. This episode is up on the 21st Tuesday, the first full day of the Trump 47th presidency.
Victor's got a website, The Blade of Perseus. I heartily recommend you all check it out regularly because when you do, you will find the links and actually the actual pieces.
Victor's weekly essays for American greatness, his weekly syndicated column, various appearances, links to those, such as pictures regularly on, say, Megyn Kelly's podcast, the archives of these podcasts, links to his books, links to some of the Twitter de facto essays he writes. I said Twitter.
I know that upsets some people. I'm sorry.
X, X. 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.
Don't you like the new Megyn Kelly, her podcast? Well, I. She reminds me of a carnivore that she gets these.
Yeah. They're kind of bully people.
Oh, she's. She carves terrific but I just wish you know I just wish the blue lingo would just I'm on her mother's side with that we were criticized by a reverend for using an F word once I think we said the F word as opposed to the actual F word.
Yeah. I don't think I ever said it.
I'm very careful. You are a very nice woman came up to me when I was speaking in Los Angeles not too long ago and said she really liked her podcast because her 10-year-old daughter worked out and could listen to the language.
Right. And I'm very conscious of the audience.
Well, I will say, let me just say, folks, go subscribe. Go to VictorHanson.com, and that's the Blade of Precious.
I like Megyn Kelly. Well, she's, yeah, I'm very fond of her.
She's done a great service. She's very well prepared, and she dissects these things that need to be dissected.
Yeah, she is fearless, and I think open-minded and fearless, and that's a very appealing thing. And unlike Skeletor, she's beautiful.
Oh, mama mia. Okay.
So she has an advantage. She is beautiful.
Actually, when she was at Fox and Andy McCarthy, our friend and my old colleague at Nashville,

you would go in and I said, Andy, I don't know how you sit across.

I mean, she was just stunning. I don't know if she knows this.

She doesn't remember.

But in 2003, during the Iraq war, 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. He was the press secretary for George Bush.
And he had an ascendant career, and he got a ballot council, and he died. Oh, Tony Snow? Tony Snow, yes.
Tony was 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.
And I remember, I think they had just hired me. I think it was Megyn Kelly.
They had just hired, you know, as a legal aunt. A legal aunt.
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... You were at the Naval Academy then.
I was. I was a visiting professor.
I realized that after I can look back at that, I have been a visiting professor in a number of places. And that was the most liberal left-wing department I have ever been in.
I hope Secretary Hegseth will figure that out. 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, 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.
Right. 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. My father said that not only when they 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.
And that saved lives. But he gave this talk that was basically that we were racist, that we just wanted to kill Asian people.
I got so angry that I got up. And it, I was my, it was like my first week there.
And then there was this weird professor, Chinese American, Mao Zedong Yu. 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.
And so we got up and left, and I turned to him,

and I quoted Frenchie in Casa Blanca.

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.

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 poor midshipmen, they're just getting this revisionist history. Yeah.
Well, we are going to cap this intro to the second segment of today's podcast just by, I will say, since we kind of got off on vulgarity, that even off camera, off audio, Victor is not blue. Yeah.
There's no MF whatever coming out of Victor's mouth. My mother, we were driving Yosemite once and my dad said, my butt hurts.
He was driving. And we had an old 54 Chevy pickup with a windows in the corner.
I think it was a 55 or 6. It was all bumpy with wires in the seats.
And one of the wires came out and she said, Bill, I just appreciate it that in front of the boys you do not use that type of language. Yeah.
And my grandfather, her father, I asked him when I was like 14. I said, what the hell is going on out here? Oh.
And he said, Victor, don't disappoint me. I don't use that language on this phone.
I'm just going to do that. What a good boy.
Yeah. That reminds me, and we're going to get your thoughts on something, but Victor, quickly, this Michael Mann case, that National Review and Mark Stein, whatever, this free speech case, gone on for 13 years.
And National Review actually got a bit of a victory in this regard a few weeks ago. The judge said part of its legal bills had to be paid by man.
But when this first began, and I was doing fundraising for National Review, we had an online campaign to donate money to fight this case because we're going to kick Michael Mann in the hiney. And in the first hearing, in the court in Washington, the man's attorney was lamenting that publisher Fowler said we're going to kick in the hiney.
And the judge started laughing. Anyway, yeah, use children's words.
I'm a little disturbed sometimes when, I don't care, but you'll be noticed our national politicians, they use the S-H-I-T word now just like it's anything. It always conjures up a bleh.
So, I don't like that. I mean, our private, I know my wife is now saying, be careful, Victor, I hear you say all sorts of words.
Yes, I do in private, sometimes to you to you well let me get you cursing let me let me get you blue let's talk about barack obama so he has um since 2008 with a four-year period and that period of what trump's presidency he was he was very active to to uh 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? Well, everybody always goes back to that original Star Trek John Gill episode where the person is drugged and they go to a planet, and he's used a national socialist paradigm that's got a hand, but he has handlers. That's what Biden was, John Gill, and the Obamas and their team that were infiltrated, I can use that term, into the Biden inner circle with help from Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Black Caucus wings.
They ran the country and they ran it into the ground. But the Obamas themselves then made a strategic move, along with Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer, they pressured Schumer, to get rid of Joe.
I'm not sure the Obamas wanted Kamala. I know at one time somebody's going to say, well, Victor, he said she was a hot or good-looking attorney general.
And he did. But he had talked to her more than five minutes, so he knew that she was an end.
I don't know. 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.
You know who one of them was?

Karen Bass.

The mayor of Los Angeles.

The communist mayor of Los Angeles.

Now, I'm going to leave it to our audience to decide who would have been worse.

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. So that was the choice, but the Obamas were behind that, and 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. But let's just, for the sake of argument, say that Barack flew out from the Oahu mansion on the beach, and Michelle flew out from the Calorama beach after she locked up the Martha's Vineyard estate.
And they hit the campaign trip separately. And then they did what they always do.
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 massages. That old Marxist dialectic.
The people are deluded by religion or the opiate of the masses. So that's what he did.
And then he put his credibility online. And so did she.
She called it Donald Trump repeatedly a racist. There was no evidence for that.
It was very embarrassing. 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, maybe higher.
I haven't looked at Ike's percentages, but and Hispanics higher than almost anybody, maybe even higher than George W. Bush, if you actually look at particular states.
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.

And 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.

And I don't think, Jill, was Jill there?

Thank you. at the Carter funeral because she did not want to get near Donald Trump.
And I don't think... Was Jill there? I can't remember.
But if she was, she didn't get near Donald Trump. Maybe she thought...
I don't know if she had a plastic glove on when she... Jill Biden sat stonily next to Kamala Harris.
Yes, that's what it was. Back to back, side to side.
Mike Pence's wife didn't want to touch Donald Trump. Right.
But anyway, Barack Obama was joking around the whole time, actually kind of against the grain of the solemnity, the solemn nature of a funeral. But they were laughing and that got Michelle even angrier.
It got a lot of people on the left very angry. And after all, they had a point.
How can you call somebody a racist, a Hitler-like fanatic, a dictator like Joe Scarborough and those people did? And then the answer is, people get victor. The answer is he's president of the United States.
And Barack Obama, 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.
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. We know that all the principals in the government side, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Bruce and Nellie 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. And again, everybody should keep this in mind.
They project. So all of these people that are making their hodge to Mar-a-Lago, or they're trying to kiss up to Donald Trump, their premise is, we know what we did to him.
We know what we said about him. We know how we tried to destroy him.
And we know that if we were now in an ascendant powerful position, I wish we were, but we're not. But if we were him, and we had what we did to him, he and we were him, he would go after us legitimately.
So and therefore we're terrified of him. 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.

Or I was in the CIA and we were snooping on people we shouldn't have.

And Stephen Harper and somebody from the FBI said, well, that order came down from, 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, da, da, da, da, da, da. And the that Barack Obama's smart, so he was trying to, you know, I like Donald Trump da-da-da-da-da-da.
And the other people are not smart. And so that explains Mark Zuckerberg.
He's blaming DEI now on what's her name? You know, the well-known Facebook CEO. Oh, the one that got, yeah, sparred.
Yeah. They're blaming DI.
He's blaming that. And then all of these people understand.
In their minds, they're saying, do we really want people like Peter Till and Elon Musk to have the insight. Larry Ellison, people like that have been pretty strong supporting Donald Trump for at least more than a year.
We want them to have the inside track. So 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. Yeah.
We've got to remember one thing. 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 6.
And Google and Apple and Facebook conspired to destroy Parler. That was an upstart alternative to Facebook and Twitter.
And remember that for a brief moment it was signing up millions of people and it was breaking down their capacity to hire them. And then suddenly those three consortia conspired to deny app access and destroyed that company.
And that was, I think, they, and they had billions of dollars to destroy. A good friend of mine, Rebecca Mercer, they they destroyed their company and so Joe Biden was absolutely happy with that 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 yeah well 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, not only hostility towards Trump and Republicans and conservatives, but generally the world through his philanthropy to try and spread this one world ism and and one of the leading voices for the covid-19 vaccine and and all this oppression that came around that but all that said or blathered i should say in my case we i think trump when he said success will be the revenge, that's probably the more motivating factor in his mind.
Yeah, I just want to comment. 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 can build more cars. 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 can build more cars. I can revive the nuclear industry.
I can get precious metals for batteries. I can open them online.
I can go in and get Latin and Greek and traditional history and English back into the prep schools, the high schools. I can

everybody

in their own

according to their station

feels that there's

all this pin-up talent and energy in the United States. They've been told, don't do that.
You can't do that. You're racist.
You're homophobic. You're transphobic.
You can't. And they're just tired of it.
The animal spirits want to be set free. And Trump's idea is kind of like a ringmaster.
And he's just going, and he's telling his 13 cabinet members, be loyal. No Rex Tillerson, no John Bolton, no Anonymous.
Just be loyal, follow the agenda, and let it go. Open it up.
And let's see what America can do. It's like 1941.
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 he said, free on his back, baby. So whatever business he had needed refrigerated trucks.
And this was essential that with Trump's election, he anticipated the restrictions on Freon being removed. And he said, I just bought, like, made an order of four or five new trucks.
You know, small thing. It's very small.
The same thing I hear. That's funny you mentioned it.
California just suspended its mandate of outlawing diesel trucks produced before a certain date you had to put this you know debt or whatever it was that urine urea into your tank and i had a diesel truck you have to put it blue stuff called blue and you put it in and it neutralizes supposedly the diesel but But under the new California guidelines, your truck had to burn at very high temperatures. That's why you see a lot.
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 the diesel truck industry is having and truckers in general. 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.
In L.A.? Yes. I had a beautiful diesel.
I had 25,000 miles on that EcoDiesel. It was a wonderful truck as long as you didn't drive uphill at 105 or try to tow anything because they burn so hot.
Right. And so that's suspended of people.
And it's not just academic. I had a very 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 one of my walks.
And he was farming. He, you know, it was tough to farm, especially renting property from this absentee 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.
And he was explaining he could put his equipment on it, and he got it. And then I saw him about a year later, and he was just going to throw it on.
He said, I'm going to have to destroy that truck or go somewhere. I don't know if even if that's legal to take it out of state and sell it.
They barred it because of the engine. And 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.
His son is a wonderful guy, too. I'm very lucky his son is farming.
But he had a very valuable John Deere tractor.

And because renters, you know, they don't have just one place they can store their equipment.

So when he would do his tractor work, he didn't know because I have all these criminals.

I come and dump stuff and steal.

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.
And this was a $100,000 brand new John Deere. It was a wonderful tractor.
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't know where it was.
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, 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 stupid, arrogant, overeducated, no common sense, they destroy lives.
And that's what I get so angry about Los Angeles when I see all of those poor people and their whole...

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 the salary as I...

Oh, I'm a DI.

I hired 70%.

Thank you. 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 the salary as I, oh, I'm a DI.
I hired 70%. I can't carry a man and he has no place to be there when I come to the door.
Oh, I'm going to look like all of that are Gavin Newsom. Oh, the reservoirs are full.
No, they're not, Gavin. 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. are full.
No, they're not, Gavin. 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

spanking every drought.

When they act that way

or they do this with their shoulders,

oh, it's a local problem.

They don't care about

people. That's the thing about the left.

It's all...

They love humanity in the abstract and they hate humans in the concrete. By the way, Bill Maher made a funny little comment about the fires.
He said 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 is uh i saw a headline from the from the la times from last march or may despite some progress states high speed rail is 100 billion short and many years from reality i i don't think it's it's the whole thing was supposed to be up and running by now

from Sacramento

to San Francisco

and from the San Joaquin Valley

over Pacheco to the Bay Area

and all the way down through to Apache

LA. It's 15

years and it was supposed to be done for

I think $80 billion.

They claim they've spent

$17 or $20 billion. They've spent more than that.
And one, I don't think they've laid more than 10 feet of rail. Two, they've been caught up in imminent domain lawsuits like you wouldn't believe.
They could have taken the right-of-way of the Santa Fe. These parks, the Santa Fe, there is a right-of-way, and just expanded that rail and improved the rail line and got it up to 70 or 80 miles an hour and had two tracks.
They have one, so you have these waiting trains when you cross over. They didn't want to do that.
They had to be. So they got over the skyline of Fresno.
There's this huge bridge. And the biggest problem right now is, 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. And she said, my God, it's got graffiti all over.
I said, yes, it's brand new, too. It just sits there like Stonehenge.
And so, I mean, they had all these, right? They've issued Communicate. We've hired this percentage of disabled, this percentage of gay, this percentage of trans.
They have the whole DI thing. But it's never going to 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 union public unit utility unions it's going to lose money every day oh my gosh yeah and then you look at the the sin that the sin of commission.
And then you look at the sin of omission. You have parallel in many places to it 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.

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. And he could have made that three-lane freeway all the way for a fraction of what he spent.
And then, of course, we had $7.5 billion, most of it for at least almost $3 billion for reservoirs. He didn't build one reservoir.
He used $250 million from that bill to blow up four reservoirs, as I keep saying. So everything he touches, he's the on Midas touch.
He's Gavin Newsom, yes. He turns it to dross.
Yeah. And Stonehenge is one of his, he didn't create it, he inherited it and he made it, he touched it like this.
Touch dross. Dross.
Anything that the golden state touches it turns to dross. Yeah.
Well, Victor. Pot iron touch.

Kryptonite.

I don't know.

Hey, we're going to take one last break. 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 Martin Luther King. And we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.
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Excludes restaurants. We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.
So Victor, two things, you know, tell us again, if please, it's a charming story, but I think also an important story. And then if you maybe cap it off with what would, I guess, what would Martin Luther King and Martin Luther King-ism, if there is such a thing, would, how would that go over with America's black leadership today? And by black leadership, I don't mean Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele.
I mean the Congressional Black Caucus that Mayor Bass used to be the head of. Yes.
Well, I mean, he's most famously quoted as its 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.
And the tragedy, to answer your second question first, is that 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 say it's the content of their character are sellouts, or they're deceived, or they suffer from false consciences. So it's tragedy that we reverted, we turned the civil rights movement just when it was working into a tribalist movement.
So we're all going to be in parts of the identity politics tribe of our choosing. I say of our choosing because in a multiracial society, 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. A person who's very good, I mean, he's one of the best, I think he's the best student employee I've ever had.
So bright. And he's so, and he just casually remarked that he was African-American.
I didn't have any idea. So the point is, 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. He was from India and sent it in, that he was stark, and he had the DNA that he put with his application.
So it's not fit. So I remember the old days from the Civil Rights Movement.
My parents, my mom was a Democrat. My dad was, they were, I don't know what you'd call them, Harry Truman Democrats, former Democrats.

They'd gone to university.

They were kind of the upward mobility.

They thought that the country was, you know, they loved Kennedy and everything.

And so when the civil rights came, there was something called dollars for Democrats.

And my mom had put us in her old car.

I had no money.

They lived in 1,100 square feet.

Oh, no, it was about 900 square feet.

My brother still has it.

And my mom wasn't working.

She had three kids.

She lost a child.

So she was kind of still worried bad about that.

I remember hearing a story.

My sister died. She had German measles.
She was pregnant. And then my father was just farming cotton, and then he was teaching part-time at Wheatley College.
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 to what was then the barrio.
Today, it's the whole city of Mexican-American. But then there was a smaller barrio.
And knock on doors to try to raise one dollar for dollars for Democrats. And that was the 1960 election.
Looking back, I think I would have voted for Richard Nixon over JFK. I'm sure I would have, even given what happened later, tragically, to both of them.
But nevertheless, I was, but in that period, I was 11 years old. Of course, Martin Luther King announced the Grace Cathedral.
I think it's an Episcopal Church or Anglican Church. I don't, you can define the difference to me.
And they're closer relationship to Catholicism than evangelical Protestantism. 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.
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.
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. So we all got up at four 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. I remember the date.
It was March of 65. And I put a little clip on tie.
We had corduroy coats. We got all, the three of, we all got into this little 544 Volvo with 100,000 miles, no seat belts.
So my dad putted over the thing. And then 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 that has no car.
Their car broke down. They want to go.
So my dad, then when we got to San Francisco, 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 Hunter's Point and picked up two women, African-American women. And then by this time, we were late.
We would have been two hours early, going around San Francisco, picking up everybody. So we get to Grace up on the top of the hill, and we all get out, and there's a huge line.
I could not believe it. It's made for, I don't know, a mile.
But we're in it, and the woman who was escorting us, who knew, said, 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.
And I was kind of, I had glasses. Nobody cares, but in my family, my two brothers were very bright, but they were very athletic, too.
My twin brother was a great baseball player. My older brother, but I wasn't i was i had glasses the only one who wore glasses i was left hand i wasn't bad in athletics i participated but i was mediocre and i always wanted to read books and they always say 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 and about that.
So anyway, we get to the thing, and they start to close the door right in front of my parents. And they said, no more.
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.
And it was kind of, I just remember the speech was that famous speech that he gave on numeracy. If you're going to be a janitor, you be the best janitor.
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.
And it was very 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 and so he, 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 his knees on the shoulder like this.
Hey, you know, thank you. And then he walked along.

And then they opened the doors and my mother said, well, what was it like?

They heard it outside on a

speaker. She said,

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.

So that was

sweet.

I remember it my entire life.

It was really, I remember my

Thank you. You will remember that moment.
So that was a big... I remember it my entire life.
It was really... I remember my parents, they were so idealistic.
They were farmers, they had no money, and they were kind of caricature because my mother had gone... My father had gone to University of the Pacific and then he got drafted or he joined the Marine Corps.
Then this long story, he ended Army Air Force and then he on these horrific missions over Tokyo and then my mom 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 and then they back, and they had all this education but no money.

And so my dad, he grew up on a farm.

He was farming little cotton.

He had a 10-acre cotton a lot, and then he was coaching football and teaching at Reedley, and then my mom.

What was he teaching at Reedley?

He taught physical education, and then he became an administrator of the night division, but he was a football coach of Reedley High School and then Reedley College for a while. So, I remember 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, my dad was, my mom, they were always champions of lost cause, St. Jude type.
There was a guy who was kind of loud, but he was always checking on everybody that 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.
And they fired him without cause. So then he came over to our house.
And my father had gotten along great with everybody. And my mom said, I wouldn't get involved in here.
All of your friends are running the college or up for maybe a presidency. Do not champion this guy.
She didn't know him. And my dad goes, what they're doing? My dad was huge.
He was 6'4", 2'10". 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.
Luckily, he didn't get fired, because my mom was, even though she, well lawyer. So the result of all that was my dad went from this high administrative to teaching bonehead English and bonehead history.
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 home to my high school, and he said, Victor, just in time, I've got some exams for you.
And he'd hand me like a hundred of bonehead English multiple choice. And there was no scan front.
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%. He's my favorite reading college football player.
Look, that little 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.
So I did all of his correcting. And then he bought a three-volume book called English Grammar.
That's how I learned English Grammar. Because I read the whole thing and I talked it with a subject predicate, correct object.
Victor, you were looking for your versions of hanging chads back in the day. I was.
I learned all about hanging chads. So 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? No.
Not everybody believes that. Well, we are all blessed with parents.
So, you believe it or not is a different story. Yeah.
I mean, I won the lottery. I had a wonderful mother.
Yeah. Yeah.
I worshiped them. I don't know if my siblings worshipped me.
Maybe I was kind of a normal. I did.
I did. I owed a lot.
Anything I was able to do was because of it. I think any regular listener to this podcast, that very much comes through your love for your parents and all your family, including, including't you have a crazy Uncle Luke or something like that, a rodeo? Tango.
Tango. Tango Johnson.
I liked him. I was his favorite.
Victor, are you going to vote for my own man? Why are you going to be a commie like your parents? You're going to be a big commie and, well, the Dettocrats, they kill everything, the Dettocrats. God rest all their souls.
Well, anyway, Victor, we've come to the end of this. We've got to go with that.
A couple things. Again, folks, visit Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.
Do subscribe. It's now $65 for the full year, but it's discounted monthly.
No, it's – yes, that is discounted. Monthly, it's $6.50.
For a year, $65. So, it's BladeOfPerseus, VictorHanson.com.
We always have a shared, I just thought, a shared favorite movie, The Best Years of Our Lives. Yeah.
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. Well, we would go somewhere, like a restaurant, and there would be somebody berating their waitress.
My mom was like Marta Loy. She turned to us and said, oh my god.
Here comes mission number 51. She got out of the V-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,

well, mister, 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.

And my mom would go like,

oh, my God.

I would always hide under the table. There was a great scene, many great scenes in that movie where Dana Andrews is back working as a soda jerk and Harold, oh, I forget his last name, who won the Oscar.
Yes, he won the Oscar. And he got into it with a customer, and Dana Andrews clocked them into one of the stands.
I remember that scene very well. You know who that customer was? He was the sheriff on Bonanza.
Oh, sure, yeah. And that guy was sort of the representation of the early McCarthy.
He was. Yeah.
It was very. It's not a conservative film.
I mean, it's a great film. It's a wonderful film.
But he was a great actor. Yeah, he was.
So was Frederick March and. Frederick March.
Yeah, Frederick. A bit of a.
Right over Tokyo.

That was another.

Yeah.

Frederick March was a bit of a.

And Myrna Loy also.

They were.

They were people of the.

I don't know of the left, but they were left of center.

Definitely.

But somewhat.

You know, they make great movies.

They're great contributors to our culture.

Bill Holman was a good.

He was a concern.

Well, he was.

He was Ronald Reagan's best man when Reagan married Nancy, the second marriage. So, yeah, I just thought that was fascinating.
Just to not along things, but when Fred, you remember the Bridges of Tokyo Reign when Bill Holden was in it? Yes, and Mickey Rooney and Grace Kelly. And the old man, they called him, the head of the carrier.
That was Frederick Marshall's. I think so.
I haven't seen the movie in a long time. Remember that? I just said that because they faulted Reagan for quoting him.
After Bill Holden gets killed, the movie ends and he kind of says, 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. 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.
Yeah. Henry Kissinger bought Frederick March's house in Connecticut.
I don't know why I know that. But that was a very disturbing movie because the fear of Bill Holden as the pilot, very palpable.
And, you know. He was a was a lawyer in Colorado, remember? They called him on? Yeah.
I think I told you once, 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.
And when they took... A lot of planes didn't make it off the runway at Tinian, which, by the way, they're clearing the jungle right now, Jack, at Tinian in the Mariana Islands, 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 and clear them because they're using dispersion tactics.
So if we get in a war over Taiwan and rather than put a carrier out there, we're going to put planes all over the Marianas and surrounding the island. It's a great strategy.
But this guy was a great pilot and he was a civilian after flying over four, got his crew over 40 missions, twice in Iwo Jima. They had all kinds of near-death.
And he went back to Korea, just like Bill Holden, and he flew another 40 missions. Dang.
You're right. That was tough.
They shot down a lot of B-29s in Korea. I remember seeing him once.
He had kind of a, he collected furniture and stuff and sold it. I don't know, he had I don't know what was a furniture store but he would pull into this big he came from Oregon and he had kind of a jumpsuit and he was kind of heavy and I kind of said something to my mom once God that guy looks really weird.
I was like 10 man saved 11 people including your father and you're going to go up to him and say, I want to thank you, Mr. Al.
God bless mom. Yeah.
Okay. 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. It doesn't sell names.
It comes out every Friday. Check it out.
Go to civiltoughts.com. Sign up.
I know you're going to like it. Second thing, we get many people who go to Apple, listen through Apple, and rate the show zero to five stars.
And 7,200-something folks have done that, and the average is 4.9, which is 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. It's from Sears Jalen, and it's titled Modern Takes with Historical Bases.
I've been listening to VDH for about six months now and truly enjoy hearing his perspective on modern events grounded in historical knowledge. 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.
Both friendly co-hosts Sammy and Jack are great additions. I didn't read it for this reason.
To the conversation, I also really enjoy the weekend segments in which a historical topic is discussed, usually in a series. If it hasn't been covered yet, a series on war tactics, tools, and formations from antiquity would be a wonderful series.
Corvus, phalanx, etc.

So,

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, if I could

speak English, we will

be back soon with another episode

of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye. Thank you.
Thank you, everybody

for listening. We're getting our ratings

on Audible and

Apple, and we're just

We'll be right back. episode of the Victor Davis Hanson show.
Bye-bye. Thank you.
Thank everybody for listening. We're getting our ratings on Audible and

Apple and we're just

off the charts and

top 10 in the nation. It's only

because of the people listening. Thank you

everyone.

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