Tariffs, Taking the Knee, and Remedial Courses

Speaker 1 What if your drive was fueled with more?

Speaker 1 More protection, more performance.

Speaker 1 Shell v Power Nitro Plus Premium Gasoline removes up to 100% of performance-robbing deposits to rejuvenate your engine's performance. Fueling every drive with a fuel like no other.

Speaker 1 Shell V Power Nitro Plus Premium Gasoline. More performance with every drive.

Speaker 1 Compared to lower octane fuels in gasoline direct injection engine fuel injectors, actual effects and benefits may vary according to vehicle type, driving conditions, and driving

Speaker 2 Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show, ladies and gentlemen. He's talking about Buddha, I think.
He may be delirious.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I had the flu for three weeks, and I went to work. in a plane.
I came back with a sinus infection. I had it for two weeks.
I finally went in. I don't believe antibiotics ever help sinus infections.

Speaker 2 I've had my sinuses operated on,

Speaker 2 I guess if you count the insertion capsules they put in two or three times,

Speaker 2 and they gave me doxicillin.

Speaker 2 And I

Speaker 2 went to the bottom of the page.

Speaker 2 Don't get graphic, please. Yeah, the reaction I've had to doxicill in the last three days is worse than this sinus infection.
I hate antibiotics, so I'm going to try to...

Speaker 2 I have a goal that after six weeks of flu and sinus infection, I've been working every day, I'm going to declare myself arbitrarily, completely healthy today.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 They can because they think they can.

Speaker 2 Virgil, he was Dante's

Speaker 2 sidecar, I think. They warned me that

Speaker 2 the doxicillin turned your teeth brown, so if you see my teeth looking brown during the episode, it's not anything

Speaker 2 untoward. Okay.

Speaker 2 I have another brown comment I want to make, but I won't.

Speaker 2 Victor Davis Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and he's the owner and possessor of a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Speaker 2 Its address is victorhanson.com. And I'll tell you towards the end of this episode why you should be subscribing.

Speaker 2 We are recording on Sunday, April 6th, after a momentous week in America and around the world. This particular episode will be up on Tuesday, April 8th.

Speaker 2 Between that will come a Monday, and that Monday may have

Speaker 2 epic financial consequences for America.

Speaker 2 We don't know, but I'm just letting you know that because when we come back from these important messages, the great Victor Davis Hansen is going to give a few more thoughts on tariffs, which he has discussed at some length with the great Sammy Wink in some prior episodes.

Speaker 2 But you'll hear that when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 3 Did you know that parents rank teaching financial literacy as the toughest life skill? That's where Greenlight comes in, the debit card and money app made for families.

Speaker 3 With Greenlight, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores, automate allowance, and track spending with real-time notifications.

Speaker 3 Kids learn how to earn, save, and spend responsibly, while parents have peace of mind, knowing smart money habits are being built with guardrails in place.

Speaker 3 Try Greenlight risk-free today at greenlight.com slash wondery. That's greenlight.com slash wondery.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson show. Victor's alive and he's two arms tied behind his back or half his brain tied behind his back.

Speaker 2 He can beat up anyone when it comes to scholarly thoughts. Victor, you have some thoughts you want to share.

Speaker 2 In addition to what you've already discussed with Sammy, what are you doing?

Speaker 2 I was curious because everybody says this is the end of Trump and everything. So I looked at the Harvard Harris poll.
I'm speaking on a Sunday, and he's gone from 1% approval to 49.46.

Speaker 2 He's still

Speaker 2 approval, and he's been subject to

Speaker 2 things that make,

Speaker 2 you know, it's kind of like the sensationalism sensationalism of Russian collusion or a laptop disinformation or law affair. It's been incredible, the psychodramas.

Speaker 2 So I was trying to think, why is he doing?

Speaker 2 And then I started looking at some data, Jack.

Speaker 2 Over, when Trump came in in 2017,

Speaker 2 the stock market was about 19,000. Even after this precipitous, is it 10% down from the first of the year? I think it is.

Speaker 2 The total losses, or is it 13%?

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 2 the point I'm making is that they went up 65%

Speaker 2 under Trump,

Speaker 2 even with COVID, 55% under Biden, and even with their sudden losses, they're right now on 38,000, 37,000. They're double what they had just nine years ago.
Double.

Speaker 2 Second data point, wages had gone way up for the first time in 12 years under Trump. They just skyrocketed.
$10,000. The average wage index rose under Trump's four years.

Speaker 2 And then they, because of the inflation, nothing that Biden did, but the general inflation of wages to catch up with prices under Biden, they went up another 6,000.

Speaker 2 So they went up about 30% from $50,000 to $61,000. Okay, or something not that quite high, 25%.

Speaker 2 But here's my point.

Speaker 2 Wall Street is going crazy

Speaker 2 and angry about the tariffs that are designed to help workers, whether they will or not, I don't want to get into, but they in this period have doubled, they have 100%

Speaker 2 gain,

Speaker 2 and the workers have only had about a quarter of that or a third of that.

Speaker 2 And they're not saying, well, wait a minute.

Speaker 2 They got all this money, and I want to double my wages. They didn't.
So the other thing about it is, why does Trump's

Speaker 2 why didn't his popularity collapse? Powerline had a good footnote today, Jack, and it quoted Business Insider of last year, and they pointed out maybe one of the reasons is

Speaker 2 10% of the American population owned 93% of the stocks. So what we're watching is the media, legal, political, academic, investor, trader, corporate class paranoid

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 their 100% profit,

Speaker 2 their 100% profit is now 90% profit. In other words, the stock market is where it was on January 1st, two years ago, 2023.

Speaker 2 So all the money we got, I mean, even with inflation, we haven't really lost purchasing power to that degree.

Speaker 2 And then the other thing is, if the 1%

Speaker 2 own 93% of the stocks, the 50%, Jock, they own 1%.

Speaker 2 1%.

Speaker 2 So they're not upset.

Speaker 2 They know that the stock market is very critical to their well-being, whether they're participating or not, because it's a barometer of American

Speaker 2 pensions. But I'm talking about everything.

Speaker 2 Most people don't have a 401k, or maybe it's

Speaker 2 60%, but 50% only

Speaker 2 what I'm getting is they only own 1% of the stocks in the whole market, 50% of America.

Speaker 2 So their pensions are pretty paltry.

Speaker 2 And so this is a class thing. And what is Trump trying to do?

Speaker 2 He's trying to appeal to a particular class that was told by Joe Biden, you've got to go, if you can go down in that mine and you can program.

Speaker 2 Or he'll, you know, whether you like it or not, we're going to put you in the coal business out of business. Or Peter Strzzok, I went to Walmart and I smell these guys.

Speaker 2 Are the dregs, garbage, you know, irredeemable? That whole vocabulary, that whole people, they're not,

Speaker 2 they're the ones that elected Trump, and pretty much Trump is at 50%.

Speaker 2 I don't believe some of the crazy polls. And this is after the worst press a president can get, which begs the question, why is he doing this? Why is he taking this risk? Bush didn't.

Speaker 2 Bush had tariffs. Reagan had tariffs.

Speaker 2 Biden had tariffs. Clinton had big tariffs.
Nobody got angry. You know, I went back and look at some quotes, Jack.
Nancy

Speaker 2 Pelosi said, this free trade with China is a job loser.

Speaker 2 You know what Paul Krugman said

Speaker 2 about protection tariffs?

Speaker 2 There's a lot to be said for mercilism.

Speaker 2 And you know what Warren Buffett wrote in 2003? It's about time we stopped this huge trade deficit because they're buying land and everything, investments.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it's mostly because Trump's fingerprints are on the tariffs that people are upset. Why did he do it? He wants to get

Speaker 2 in Trump's mind, Jack.

Speaker 2 If a country runs up a big deficit and what he calls is disrespected or ripped off, then they have no respect and people will deter people. They have no influence.

Speaker 2 If they're tough and they demand equity from their friends and neutrals, then people respect them abroad. Then, second,

Speaker 2 if he can cut $500 billion out of Doge this year, I can't do a trillion like they say, but if he did $500 trillion, if he can deregulate and tax,

Speaker 2 cut taxes and grow the economy, if he can get $4 trillion and maybe 20 million jobs out of that foreign investment,

Speaker 2 if he can get $500 billion out of revenues, he thinks he can get close to balancing the budget in a year or two, and that will calm the bomb markets, etc.

Speaker 2 Then the second thing is

Speaker 2 he's willing to negotiate, and it's like musical chairs. If you don't want to negotiate, and everybody else is,

Speaker 2 the only way he'll lose is they all get together, Japan goes to China and says, we represent the Asian community.

Speaker 2 Mr.

Speaker 2 Chi, and can we stand solid together? That's not going to happen. It's more like every man for himself.

Speaker 2 If you're the last guy where the music stops, you have no chair because everybody's cut a deal and you demand high tariffs and you're not going to be competitives. And he knows that.

Speaker 2 So it's working its way out.

Speaker 2 The other thing is, he's equating it with military, too. In his view, all the countries

Speaker 2 that don't make the NATO countries, there's still eight of them, you know.

Speaker 2 And Spain, for example, one. I mean, they'll make the 2%.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Canada, 1.37%. So in his view, they're the ones running surpluses with us.
They're running surpluses because they don't spend anything.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so he's also looking at dollars going out of the United States. And he looks at Mexico.
He sees $63 billion remittances. He says cartel going out, $20 billion.
He says he sees $171 billion outflow.

Speaker 2 It's a quarter of a trillion dollars going into the Mexican economy from us. And you've got a lot of people right in the town that I'm living that are, because I see them at the store,

Speaker 2 they pay with EBT cards and then they pull out all this cash to buy non-EBT covered foods.

Speaker 2 And I think those are the people who are sending the remittances to Mexico or Central America. And Trump is saying we're sending too much money out of the country.

Speaker 2 And it's not just the investment that I'm after for assembly and manufacturing, it's what they're doing. The Chinese are buying strategic land near military bases.

Speaker 2 The Middle East are buying professorships and curricula in our elite universities. They're inflating the price of homes in Los Angeles and everything with these third and fourth home.

Speaker 2 It's not always good for us.

Speaker 2 Don't monitor that type of foreign investment. So he has a lot of reasons that he's doing this.
And finally,

Speaker 2 I have to be very careful.

Speaker 2 My Wall Street friends, whom I dearly love, but

Speaker 2 they should.

Speaker 2 I would ask Wall Street this, Jack, have any big recession or depression, I can name the two biggest ones that I call, the 1929 Great Depression that lasted a decade and the 2008 meltdown, as I recall, they were not due to tariffs.

Speaker 2 They were due to what? Greedy Wall Street speculators who were buying on the margin during 19, all during the 20s, oblivious to how Germany was inflating its currency,

Speaker 2 oblivious to how we were loaning money to Germany so that Germany could pay France and Britain, so France and Britain could pay their loans back. It was a crazy cycle.
And that speculation

Speaker 2 blew up. And how did the 2008, was it all those terrible.
No, it was not. It was subprime mortgage securitization that the Wall Street people love.
And they were trading all of these speculative,

Speaker 2 huge mortgages that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had stupidly, on their prompt, allowed to happen. So I can't think of one recession or depression.
It was caused by excessive tariffs. And so

Speaker 2 I just wish Wall Street would stop quoting.

Speaker 2 Every time I pick up the Wall Street Journal, there's

Speaker 2 There's the Smoot-Holly Act, Smooth Holly Act, Smooth Holly Act, Smoot Holly Act, Smoot Holly.

Speaker 2 It did not cause the depression. It came after the stock market.
It was punitive. It was preemptive.
It came at a time of a huge surplus and trade. There was no need for it.

Speaker 2 It has nothing to do with these tariffs. If you want to talk about tariffs, talk about the Biden and Obama tariffs.
They were similar.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's what I wanted to say. Well, that was quite the mouthful and an appropriate lead-in for this

Speaker 2 note here.

Speaker 2 We're going to get back to your thoughts in a second, but first, here's an important message for anyone concerned about their financial future, and I think that might be anyone in America today.

Speaker 2 Have you seen the headlines? These are all headlines.

Speaker 2 The Department of Government Efficiency has uncovered a staggering $115 billion in government fraud, with investigators suggesting that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Speaker 2 Financial analysts are now confirming what many have suspected.

Speaker 2 The previous administration's economic success was largely artificial, propped up by funneling trillions through NGOs and creating an economic mirage.

Speaker 2 As this corruption is exposed, experts predict we're heading toward a short but deep recession when this false economic support evaporates.

Speaker 2 What does this mean, ladies and gentlemen, for your retirement savings?

Speaker 2 Throughout history, when governments manipulate economies and currencies collapse, physical gold has been mankind's most reliable store of value.

Speaker 2 Shouldn't you consider protecting part of your retirement with an asset that governments can't create with keystrokes or devalue through corruption?

Speaker 2 American Alternative Assets is offering a free wealth protection guide to help safeguard your financial future from the coming economic correction. Call 8332USA Gold or visit victorlovesgold.com.

Speaker 2 Call today for your free guide and learn why now may be the perfect time to add precious metals to your portfolios. That's 833-287-2465 or Victor LovesGold.com, and he sure does.

Speaker 2 Protect what you've earned.

Speaker 2 I want to buy it as soon as I can afford it, but right now it's all in here. Well, call the number I just gave you.
833-2USA Gold.

Speaker 2 I do have one of my crowns. It's gold.
It's in a little plastic bag. I think it's worth $75, the person wrote on it.

Speaker 2 I just have one last thing to read.

Speaker 2 Protect what you've earned before the fraud economy collapses completely. And we thank the good people from American Alternative Assets for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Speaker 2 Victor, I just want to pick up a point you made on the societal, cultural, class-oriented aspect of this.

Speaker 2 Treasury Secretary

Speaker 2 Scott Besant was on.

Speaker 2 I saw a clip of him from the last day or two, and he did this interesting thing. He wasn't hanging tariffs on this, but he said, you know, last year was record travel of Americans to Europe.

Speaker 2 And at the same time, though, there are people with full-time jobs who are now increasingly having to rely on local food pantries for basic foodstuffs. So this

Speaker 2 disparity here. I don't think he's begrudging Americans who take vacations to Europe.
I did last year with my wife.

Speaker 2 But there is this need to address the lower 50% and lower economically, as you brought out before.

Speaker 2 Yeah, people, they don't have stock, so maybe they're also not worried so much about as I am what's happening in my 401k.

Speaker 2 So anyway, that was a point

Speaker 2 that he made. That's a very good point.
And I see it all around me.

Speaker 2 And you know, another thing that people haven't related to that, Jack, if you stop 10,000 people of the poorest people in the world coming in every day, and that's at the rate they came in at 12 or 13 million over the Biden, forget about finding them all.

Speaker 2 Just stopping it will mean less money going out from the federal, local, and state governments and our health care.

Speaker 2 I when I had this flu and situs infection, I called up a local group and they said you can I was really had that fever and everything and they said come in Thursday, five days from now. I said, okay.

Speaker 2 And then I called my GP

Speaker 2 and I got an appointment for a checkup. You know what it is?

Speaker 2 In July.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I went to my urologist and they said, sorry, your appointment's the wrong day and you can come in two months, even though I showed up the day they sent me. So, and what was the common denominator?

Speaker 2 There was thousands of people in Central California who are here illegally and they have no health care and the state has $8 billion shortfall in Medicare,

Speaker 2 Medi-Cal, and 40% of the state is on it, and you have to take them because they need help, and

Speaker 2 they have swamped all of these services. So if you stop that influx,

Speaker 2 you're going to save a lot of money and it's going to help Americans because Nancy Pelosi

Speaker 2 and Joe Biden do not have to wait in the waiting room with 40 people who just arrived here from Venezuela or Colombia or Mexico. Oh, they don't even have to wait for haircuts.

Speaker 2 So, if you're Nancy Pelosi, just do whatever the hell you want.

Speaker 2 Nancy Pelosi's lecture, I saw again and again and again, where she gives that big. She looked pretty good.
She was about 55, and she was screaming about

Speaker 2 the George W. Bush outreach to China, and that she was a working-class protectorist, and we have to have tariffs.
It was pretty good. So was Bernice.
He wants tariffs then. So did Warren Buffett.

Speaker 2 He wanted tariffs. So did Paul Krugman, as I said.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 on that note, by the way, Victor, your mentioning of Medicare, Medicaid,

Speaker 2 fraud or abuse is a perfect jump-off point for the next topic we should get your take on, and that has to do with Doge investigation of Social Security and not only how it affects illegal use of our medical system, but also our election integrity.

Speaker 2 And we'll get your thoughts on that. And I don't know, fencing and 5% defense expenditures that Marco Rubio is talking about.

Speaker 2 Maybe another topic or two when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. We're recording on Sunday, April 6th, and this episode is up on Tuesday, April 8th, and we are blessed because Victor is alive, and he is not delirious.

Speaker 2 So thank you for all those things, good God in heaven. Victor, the dots connect here on the Doge investigation.

Speaker 2 I'm sure you saw, and I believe any number of our listeners or viewers have seen. the um

Speaker 2 uh Elon Musk and one of his minions, I forget the guy's name, but they did, they were on a stage, they look at the amount of people that

Speaker 2 the board of illegals who are now in the social security system,

Speaker 2 and then how many of them are on

Speaker 2 immediate on taking advantage of our health care system. And then, out of curiosity, they compared some of these

Speaker 2 illegal citizens, I'm sorry, non-citizens, illegals, with the voting rolls in several states, and of course found them any number of people registered and that they had voted so the whole point though wasn't it yeah

Speaker 2 we all knew that they did two things they being the left

Speaker 2 they

Speaker 2 took soros zuckerberg all of those pack foundation money in 2020 and then they said oh we're going to lose covet covet covet covet covet we have to change the voting laws in pennsylvania arizona georgia Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina.

Speaker 2 And they did. And they said,

Speaker 2 you know, we're only going to have 30%

Speaker 2 of the electorate showing up. Well, they'll have to show an ID.
But the other people, early and mail-in voting. And then if you look at the actual numbers, it's about 60%

Speaker 2 were Democrats, 65%.

Speaker 2 So 70% of the electorate voted for the first time, not at the polling station. And of that, 70%, over 60% were Democrats.

Speaker 2 And that was initiated because we had about 30 million illegal aliens here then.

Speaker 2 And a lot of them felt,

Speaker 2 well, I can tell you that our DMB in California just announced nonchalantly a few years ago, oh, we mailed out 100,000 motor voter registration forms to non-citizens.

Speaker 2 So everybody knows they're voting.

Speaker 2 That was the whole point of the open border, to bring in 12 million people who needed radical social attention, cultural subsidies, economic housing, food, health, and then a larger government and then higher taxes, more federal employees to address that, more claims of, look at the poverty rate.

Speaker 2 We've imported 12 million people.

Speaker 2 They don't have Teslas. This is unfair.
And then they're going to vote.

Speaker 2 Everybody knew that. And the left always has these little preemptive tropes they use.
Have you ever mentioned that, that they would vote? That's racist.

Speaker 2 You're part of the great replacement theory nut. And then they would write books like Demography is Destiny and The New Democratic Majority, you know.

Speaker 2 Remember when they cared about election integrity? Remember with Dinesh D'Souza, because he made an excessive payment to a New York State Senate

Speaker 2 candidate, and he actually was convicted and the... the torment he was put under.

Speaker 2 Well, we all know it's not a...

Speaker 2 I remember when they felt also, to your point, that if there was some violence going on in a protest and somebody was walking nearby or was accompanying them in the general vicinity, they were party to the violence on January 6th.

Speaker 2 So we locked up about

Speaker 2 400 people that had no participation at all.

Speaker 2 But then I noticed that when you're at a university and they're breaking in and destroying things and you're right next to them screaming and yelling with an illegal mask on, you're just a bystander.

Speaker 2 You're not responsible for the violence.

Speaker 2 One last Doge thing, Victor. It doesn't have to do with Social Security, but

Speaker 2 a random

Speaker 2 bit of corruption they found. Doge uncovers VA's agreement to pay $380,000 a month for minor website modifications.

Speaker 2 I saw that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and

Speaker 2 now

Speaker 2 this work is being executed by one internal VA software engineer who's spending less than 10 hours a week. It's just so, what is that? $380 a month.
This is $4 to $5 million.

Speaker 2 Just like that. I think, Victor, your thoughts on this.

Speaker 2 We all remember William Proxmeyer and giving out the monthly award, but it was seen as a lark, and this is the way government, you know.

Speaker 2 But I think the population has,

Speaker 2 or the majority of the population is now, has embraced this

Speaker 2 again. Any time

Speaker 2 Elon Musk gets those geniuses, these sober, judicious, middle-aged guys that are very successful, and he puts them in a room and they conduct a seminar in sober and judicious terms with Brett Baer,

Speaker 2 the result is shocking, how brilliant these guys are and the

Speaker 2 the fraud that they've uncovered. But any time he gets on the stage with a chainsaw, it it doesn't work.

Speaker 2 Anytime Donald Trump gets that chart and he starts saying these are what the tariffs are against us,

Speaker 2 and these are our replies, and he's very instructive. It works.
Anytime he tweets out that tariffs are beautiful or Europe is pathetic, true that that is, he doesn't win as much.

Speaker 2 So a lot of it is modality and tone. And

Speaker 2 that's really important, I think,

Speaker 2 to do that.

Speaker 2 And I wish they can get the message out.

Speaker 2 I keep beating that dead horse. We didn't want to do this.
You guys forced us to do it. You know, Canada, I thought they were running a $60 billion.

Speaker 2 That was some of the figures, but I just looked at the reformulated. They're running $100 billion.
So all these Canadian guys are angry at Trump, and we hate Americans, and you think,

Speaker 2 well, you didn't even patrol your side of the border. You have a $100 billion surplus with your close friend that puts you under the nuclear shield, and you spend 1.3% on defense.

Speaker 2 That's no friendship.

Speaker 2 He needs to say that, but in a polite way.

Speaker 2 Well, I think all Americans love Canada, and probably most Canadians love Americans. Did you see Peggy Noonan's piece?

Speaker 2 I don't like them when they love us to death. Well, that's, yes,

Speaker 2 I agree. But did you see Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal piece, which goes, oh, our dear friends, and

Speaker 2 they landed at Juneau or gold. I forget which beach Juno.

Speaker 2 My advice, my reaction to that is.

Speaker 2 I hope people are watching this podcast instead of listening. Which way is the wind blowing? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 let's get a little cultural now, Victor, for some of your thoughts. And this has to do with fencing,

Speaker 2 which is a, well, it's an ancient, it's a long time Olympic sport. So So you see Santa Cruz, they had a great fencing team when I was a student.
I tried it. Oh.
Well, I won't tell you,

Speaker 2 another day I'll tell you how

Speaker 2 the NYU fencing team ruined my wedding night in Worcester, Massachusetts. But that's another story.

Speaker 2 Another day, and it's a legitimate story. But

Speaker 2 there was a fencing tournament, I believe, in Maryland, and Stephanie Turner, 31-year-old woman, took a knee rather than fight the trans, I'm going to say tranny, I don't know what to say, Redmond Sullivan, who I think had been fencing as late as December as a man and now is fencing as, and she was expelled from the tournament.

Speaker 2 And the USA fencing director Damian Leyfeldt,

Speaker 2 turns out he is a big pro-transsexual competition guy. But I'm glad she did this.
This is terrific.

Speaker 2 I am too. And notice how the entire

Speaker 2 narratives are being flipped. If you also parallel that with Pete Hexeth's non-sexist new requirements, especially for special forces and combat units, that

Speaker 2 everybody is required to do the same level of physicality, and there is no longer any

Speaker 2 contextualization or exception for women. And the point of that is that when you're in combat, nobody really cares what your gender is.
They do care whether you can carry a guy off the battlefield.

Speaker 2 And so the subtext of those special Lloyd Austin exceptions for women was that women, apparently, in the Biden administration's view, needed to have different physical requirements because they could not compete on the same level, obviously given their muscular skeletal size is not that of men on average.

Speaker 2 And so now we're told that women have bought into that. And they understand that.
So they don't want to fence. They don't want to play volleyball.

Speaker 2 They don't want to b with men because they will lose and get hurt. And that's very understandable.
And that is also why men

Speaker 2 that are in combat might not want to rely on the average woman that won't have the same physical strength. And it's no argument, women, to get some

Speaker 2 six-foot woman who works out, kind of like that Adam's Rib movie with Spencer Tracy and Catherine Hepburn in the courtroom. They bring in a big weightlifting woman to show they're equal.

Speaker 2 But my point is, most women,

Speaker 2 and maybe if you take a weightlifting woman who's a professional weightlifter next to a spaghetti arm Antifa demonstrator, you can make your point. But

Speaker 2 by and large, men in the military are physically stronger. I'm not saying they're smarter, but they're physically stronger, and you have to protect everybody.
But that's the argument has been one

Speaker 2 that I think most women realize now that they don't have the advantages in muscles and skeletal size, and they need to have their own

Speaker 2 protected turf.

Speaker 2 I don't understand.

Speaker 2 Why don't they have a special trans

Speaker 2 is it because they they want to welch in and graft onto women's sports and if they had their own trans league they wouldn't because since they're 0, 0, 1% of the population, it would just be a

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 guy if you were at a bar, Victor, what would the guy say?

Speaker 2 Because these guys are a bunch of losers, they can't win as men, and there's no women becoming transsexual and becoming men and competing in men's divisions and winning. I mean, this is this is, and

Speaker 2 these guys are misogynists too, a lot of them.

Speaker 2 Every argument,

Speaker 2 they will never answer any argument.

Speaker 2 If you say, if I'm a woman, but I really think I'm a man, but I was born with a muscle-skeletal system that's female, I can just change it, and the next thing I know, if I want to, I can be a guard on the Detroit lion.

Speaker 2 That's not going to happen.

Speaker 2 George Plimpton did that.

Speaker 2 Biological woman. And that means that you're going to have a disadvantage.
And that's why we don't hear one of you in male sports winning medals. It doesn't happen.

Speaker 2 Do you remember, though, the hostility of that?

Speaker 2 I think she was number three.

Speaker 2 She still may be in the LA fire department, the one that said, well, too bad, you know,

Speaker 2 if you're stuck in the wrong room and you're a big fat guy, and that woman can't drag you downstairs, you deserve to die. When they fired the fire chief, I think something happened to her.

Speaker 2 Yeah, her attitude was, if you're a white male and you don't think I can carry you out,

Speaker 2 then it's your fault you get burned up. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Wrong place, wrong time, sucker. Too bad.
Hey, Victor, let's get on one other cultural matter here. If I could only find my panel.
Here we go.

Speaker 2 Today's, well, there are more cultural matters to come. But before we go to a break, Ricky Schott has a column in today's New York Post.
Again, Again, we're recording on Sunday, April 6th.

Speaker 2 It's titled Harvard University, The Ivy League Teaching Remedial Math. Here's how it begins.
Harvard might be America's most elite university, but now it's offering remedial math classes.

Speaker 2 The school's math department is providing a new scale-back math class for freshmen who are apparently arriving on campus lacking, quote, foundational skills, end quote, in high school math, basics like geometry and algebra.

Speaker 2 It's not even trigonometry.

Speaker 2 Harvard is quick to blame these math gaps on pandemic learning losses.

Speaker 2 But in truth, administrators brought this mess on themselves by scrapping standardized testing requirements during the pandemic, all in the name of equity.

Speaker 2 You know, Victor, you have talked about people you know in business

Speaker 2 seeing the value of the branding of these diplomas of these institutions having real meaninglessness when it comes to employment. But that's after four years.
This is even

Speaker 2 the beginning of four years, they're not, don't seem to me to be qualified for that university, but maybe they are. You wouldn't see this in Hillsdale, by the way.
Your thoughts?

Speaker 2 Everybody knows that, that these universities are existing on the fumes of their past glories when they had average admittance requirements of about 770 minimum on the SAT or straight A's from the top schools at 4.5,

Speaker 2 something like that with advanced place courses. And then when after George Floyd, they all had to run to see who was the most virtuous, all the college.
Oh, we're going to drop the SAT.

Speaker 2 No, we're going to drop the ACT. No, we dropped it before you did.
We're going to not raid high school GPAs. Well, we did that last week.
That's what they were in that frenzy.

Speaker 2 Because they're academics and they have no sense, no independent thinking because they're insecure people. And who wouldn't be with lifetime employment in the faculty lounge? I mean, gosh,

Speaker 2 hanging around with young people all day.

Speaker 2 So they only had three choices, as I said. They either had to inflate the grades, and Yale gives 80% A's.
I think Stanford's a 75%,

Speaker 2 or they had to water down the courses, and that's what these are, remedial courses, or they have to introduce new ones. Because if they don't,

Speaker 2 given their admissions, then

Speaker 2 you're going to be called a systemic racist because it's going to to show up in your grading that the people who did not come in with an SAT score are predominantly non-I mean, they're DEI people.

Speaker 2 Not all, but a lot of them are. And if you give them what they deserved in class, you're going to be in big trouble.
And so they just don't want to die on the altar of standards.

Speaker 2 And they're looking at a lot of stuff. Stanford was notified last week.
that they're going to, Marco Rubio, and he's been wonderful on this. He doesn't even play around with the media.
He just says,

Speaker 2 I don't want to hear it. It has nothing to do with the First Amendment, nothing to do with any of the amendments.
It's just a simple bureaucratic.

Speaker 2 We give green cards and visas to people who say they're coming here either to work or to study.

Speaker 2 And we don't give them to engage in violent protest. We don't engage in anti-Semitic, overt anti-Semitism.
And we don't give visas to people who actively and

Speaker 2 unapologetically support a terrorist-designated organization like Hamas

Speaker 2 and they do that and they've been they've been deported and one will encourage the others they said they're going to stop this well I don't think so I think what I've seen instead on the campus is a quietude

Speaker 2 to think about that but all of these it's about money and when you see J.D. Vance hitting this topic and the people in the Senate and I think they're going to get the a 51% vote in the House.

Speaker 2 And I think they're going to tax them anywhere from 15 to 20% on their endowment. They're talking about

Speaker 2 $500,000

Speaker 2 worth of endowment for every student. Some people want a million, some people want less.

Speaker 2 But a lot of these big places are going to end up paying a couple hundred million dollars minimum a year to the government. Donald Trump really wants revenue so he can balance the budget.
And that's

Speaker 2 going to tax the endowments. He's probably going to do things where they have to cover or post security for their student loan programs and get the government off of

Speaker 2 a trillion dollars in overdue loan.

Speaker 2 So I think the universities aren't going to get any support. They pull very low now, and they don't get it.

Speaker 2 All they do is give speeches to each other about how humane and morally superior they are to everybody. And then they look at their product and they said,

Speaker 2 I tell you right now, if I walked across the Stanford campus, which I do when I'm up there and when I'm not fighting whatever I have, but when I'm up there and I walk across that campus, if I stopped and said to five people,

Speaker 2 Can you name the president who

Speaker 2 the president during the American Civil War? Can you me

Speaker 2 anything about what D-Day is? Would you please explain to me the Pythagorean

Speaker 2 theorem? And can you tell me what the difference between an Ionic column and a Doric column? Or what even Ionic and Doric mean? Or what's the Parthenon? None of them would know it. No.

Speaker 2 They spent all this time in other things.

Speaker 2 And I'm talking about the smart kids, too, the people that took, you know, that were competitive. And the answer to all this is we should have had a Marshall plan to go into K through 12

Speaker 2 and just say to people, we don't care about the teachers' union, let them die in the vine. We're going to make a private academy and we're going to have a classical curriculum.

Speaker 2 And where that has happened, it's worked. But

Speaker 2 the teachers' unions, it's working. Well,

Speaker 2 I think the greatest indicator of your future is not

Speaker 2 whether you can take a math class at Harvard, but whether you can read at third grade level. So

Speaker 2 people can't anymore.

Speaker 2 The reason I quit at Cal State Fresno after 21 years, I was assigning.

Speaker 2 I used to assign, I taught a class called Introduction to Western Humanities, and it started with Homer and it went all the way to contemporary American novels.

Speaker 2 But in the first part, I would have Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid,

Speaker 2 maybe Tacitus or Livy, Livy,

Speaker 2 Herodotus, Thucydides, about seven authors. And by the end of that 21 years, I had two,

Speaker 2 the Iliad and the Aeneid. And people said they couldn't read them.

Speaker 2 So what I used to do, Jack, is I would have a student who came in my office and said, I'm going to flunk your class because I can't read this thing. It doesn't make sense.

Speaker 2 So I would say to them, would you read out

Speaker 2 Read out loud the first page.

Speaker 2 Sing Goddess the Wrath of Achilles. Well, I don't know who Achilles is.
What does wrath mean? I have no idea what wrath means. And then buckler.
Well, that's a shield. Can you look it up?

Speaker 2 No, I don't ever use a dictionary.

Speaker 2 And I said, would you read it out loud then? Just read, because you say you can't read it. Read out loud.
And usually you can read about 180 words

Speaker 2 a minute.

Speaker 2 And I swear to God, it would take like 10 minutes to read a paragraph. The book, nobody could read anything.
And so I would ask them:

Speaker 2 you know, there's 600 pages, there's 1,250, 12, or 12,000 lines. At the rate you're going, this would take you three or four months.
And they said, exactly. They couldn't read it.

Speaker 2 And this is 20 plus years ago, right? Yes. Yes.

Speaker 2 They cannot read. They don't read.
They don't know how to write. They don't know anything.
There's a small elite that's invested invested in the stock market.

Speaker 2 That's pretty much the same ratio that knows how to read in America.

Speaker 2 And by age, I want to be careful. The people who are working class people are probably better educated in their 50s and 60s than today's elite at the elite campuses.
They can read better, I think.

Speaker 2 Maybe.

Speaker 2 You know, Victor, I saw an NYU professor, and I forget his name. I made a note somewhere, but can't find it.
But

Speaker 2 going on about a point you've sort of raised in the past.

Speaker 2 The colleges with the big, we're talking before about taxing the endowments or the return on the investment. Billion dollar plus endowment institutions that are small are essentially hedge funds

Speaker 2 that are running colleges and keeping their capacity small.

Speaker 2 Now, there are places that

Speaker 2 like Thomas Aquinas College, our friends out there, where you reach, you max out with your actual capacity, but there are many places that are not. They could accept

Speaker 2 an additional 100 or 200 students. They have the money there, but why aren't they spending the money on giving more people the allegedly greater education you can get at this

Speaker 2 great private college? They're letting in about a million foreign students, and they don't give them any foreign aid, I mean, student aid. They pay 110% in real dollars.
Yeah, so it's a business.

Speaker 2 I mean, you know, it is a hinge one.

Speaker 2 All right. Well, anyway, my friend, friend,

Speaker 2 we have a couple of other topics to get your take on.

Speaker 2 Your aforementioned Marco Rubio has some serious thoughts about increasing defense spending amongst our allies and maybe a proxy voting fight in Congress.

Speaker 2 And we will get your thoughts on these matters, Victor, when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show recording on Sunday, April 6th. This episode is up on Tuesday, April 8th.
Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus. Go there, type in VictorHanson.com,

Speaker 2 hit the return button, and you will be so happy if you have not been there yet. By the way, Victor, we have so many new followers of this podcast via YouTube and Rumble rather than mere audio.

Speaker 2 And our home site, by the way, is justthenews.com.

Speaker 2 That's for the audio function here.

Speaker 2 But so many people you might not know about Victor's website, when you go there, you'll find links to the articles he writes weekly for American Greatness in a syndicated column and the archives of these podcasts and links to his books and other appearances and ultra articles, which are twice a week.

Speaker 2 Victor writes an exclusive article for the Blade of Perseus and once a week an exclusive video.

Speaker 2 It is $65 a year to subscribe, which is discounted from $6.50 a month. So that's the Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.
You can also find Victor on X. His handle is at VD Hanson.

Speaker 2 VDH's Morning Cup is on Facebook.

Speaker 2 As I said before, YouTube, now you're doing a weekly, excuse me, a daily five days a week

Speaker 2 video for the Daily Signal. So Victor's

Speaker 2 everywhere.

Speaker 2 Victor, let's see. U.S.
wants NATO and Canada to spend 5%

Speaker 2 of GDP on defense. U.S.

Speaker 2 Secretary of State Marco Rubio asked Allied foreign ministers gathered in Brussels on Thursday last week to increase their defense spending to 5% of their GDP, a very substantial increase for most members of NATO and considerably more than even the United States spends as a percentage of GDP.

Speaker 2 We quote, we do want to leave here with an understanding that we are on a pathway, a realistic pathway, to every single one of the members committing and fulfilling a promise to reach up to 5% of spending, Rubio said from Brussels.

Speaker 2 Well, it's a tall order, Victor, as you just mentioned. A lot of these places can't even get to that 2% commitment.
But I thought that was pretty easy because remember Stirmer went over.

Speaker 2 He went back to Britain and he and Macron said, you know, basically they treated our poor little Zelensky so rude.

Speaker 2 And then they got, and as I mentioned, I did a couple European podcasts where they were shouting and yelling. And

Speaker 2 their point was that we don't need the United States. Take your stupid badges.
We don't need them. And what they were saying was we're going to have this huge European, pan-European force.

Speaker 2 And then to do that, you need 5%.

Speaker 2 They would rather let in 16% of the population of Germany was not born in Germany, and Britain's got, is just uncontrollable as is France. So, in their view,

Speaker 2 if it's a question of spending 2% GDP or 1% more GDP and arming ourselves and contributing to the defense of the West,

Speaker 2 they would rather let in people without background checks from the Middle East. And that's what they're doing.

Speaker 2 And then, if you listen to what the propaganda is from the Middle East, it's that they're slowly

Speaker 2 outnumbering their host. They went from six to seven to eight to ten to fifteen to percent.

Speaker 2 And that's the idea. So

Speaker 2 I don't think it looks good for native-born Europeans.

Speaker 2 Aggregate fertility rates are about 1.4,

Speaker 2 and the people coming in are about 3.5%.

Speaker 2 And the people coming in, they believe in something.

Speaker 2 The people who are born,

Speaker 2 my Paisons back in Italy, do they believe in Western civilization anymore?

Speaker 2 No, they believe in

Speaker 2 something more than I do, then that was because he got it unfairly, and it's the government's job to give what he doesn't need to me.

Speaker 2 And that's what their whole that's what drives Europe.

Speaker 2 French Revolution.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor,

Speaker 2 we're going a little fast and a little truncated today, so we just want to keep you alive.

Speaker 2 We have another topic, and if we have a little time, I'm going to raise NPR, but aforementioned promise to talk about proxy voting. So, Carol Swame,

Speaker 2 who served with you on

Speaker 2 the 1776.

Speaker 2 She was a wonderful person. She's very bright, very well-spoken.
She played a critical role in the Claudine Gay

Speaker 2 step-down.

Speaker 2 Remember, Jack, she had a two-fold argument. One of that Claudine Gay, who was

Speaker 2 laughed by all of the bicultural elite, was really

Speaker 2 had plagiarized from Carol, from Miss Swain. Well, that's right, from her.

Speaker 2 And then, more importantly, she pointed out that at a point when she was liberal, they were lavishing on her all sorts of Ivy League laurels and offers.

Speaker 2 And then when she became conservative, she was out in the wilderness. But that Claudine Gay

Speaker 2 did not just plagiarize from her, but was an utter mediocrity.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that was what she said. It was both true.
Yeah. By the way, that reminds me, Bill Ackman had said he was going to go through

Speaker 2 this plagiarism project. Remember that? He was going to look at the term papers.

Speaker 2 We should investigate that. He tweeted something about me the other day.

Speaker 2 He did. Yeah,

Speaker 2 he said that

Speaker 2 he liked what I said about tariffs, but he had one disagreement, that they were not reciprocal.

Speaker 2 And I think they are reciprocal. It's how you define reciprocity.

Speaker 2 I didn't mean to suggest that if Germany says we're going to go down to two, then we are two or three or what, but whatever country has a higher tariff of whatever size, we are going to look at them in a way to lower their tariffs, not necessarily symmetrical.

Speaker 2 And then if people say, well, why did we level tariffs on Israel? Well, Israel hasn't dropped their tariffs. They just said they were going to.
Well, why are we doing it with Australia, this flat 10%?

Speaker 2 Because they've run a surplus. I don't think that's going to stand, by the way.
I think that Trump will match Australia's tariffs. But they have a little problem with beef.

Speaker 2 Ad cow

Speaker 2 from Canada, as I said, 2003, and then for 16 years they banned all beef. And then they came back, I think, in 2019 and said,

Speaker 2 okay,

Speaker 2 it's kind of a gimmick to keep your beef out.

Speaker 2 Australian beef is really good. When I was there, it's beautifully, it's grass-fed, but it's very expensive.

Speaker 2 And they really don't want these big, husky, fat cows that are in American stockyards and force-fed, you know what I mean? Shipped over there at half the price.

Speaker 2 So they have to come up, because they're a free trade country, they have to come up with a gimmick. And the gimmick for 16 years was, well, they might have mad cow disease.
And now it is,

Speaker 2 well,

Speaker 2 okay,

Speaker 2 that was a gimmick, but we got to make sure that every cow that's dressed out was born in the United States. So you can't import cows from Mexico, calves, and then raise them.
And

Speaker 2 that's what, that's the gimmick, and that's part of the Trump's tariff policy. He's trying to tell us it's not just the tariff, but these other countries

Speaker 2 I'll give you another example.

Speaker 2 Europe will not let chickens go in the United States, from the United States into, because in the United States, if you buy a fresh chicken, a whole chicken, and you put it on the counter,

Speaker 2 because of the process of dressing it out and all that in the air, you can have botulism if it's not, you know, refrigerated.

Speaker 2 So they passed a law that said they all sanitized, so we kind of spray chlorine on our chickens. And then you can wash it off.

Speaker 2 But that was the excuse that Europe used not to allow American chickens into Europe. And so what Trump is trying to say is there's all these gimmicks, health, safety rules that they use.

Speaker 2 China does a lot of them, just to stop the tariffs. And they need to explain that and break it down so that we

Speaker 2 understand

Speaker 2 what they're doing.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, the regulatory state of other nations is just as much an issue as the tariff rates. you know.
Well, back on Carol Swain, Victor,

Speaker 2 she wrote an op-ed in the New York Post that says, stand firm, GOP, proxying

Speaker 2 voting makes a mockery of Congress. And this became quite an issue last week.

Speaker 2 Where here's what she writes: Representative Ana Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, has sparked a bitter public feud with some of her own party as she pushes to allow some House members to vote by proxy.

Speaker 2 It's thrust this critical question into the spotlight. Will Congress uphold its foundational role or erode it under the guise of modern convenience for new parents?

Speaker 2 Luna, a sitting member of Congress, when she welcomed a child in 2023, partnered with Representative Brittany Peterson, who's a Democrat from Colorado, another new mother, to advocate for a rule change allowing new House parents to delegate their votes to colleagues for 12 weeks postpartum.

Speaker 2 I see this as quite a slippery slope, but what do you think, Victor?

Speaker 2 I have no problem with it.

Speaker 2 can find, if they, what they do is they get a

Speaker 2 major vote and they say, I'm going to vote Republican, conservative. Is there anybody who's going to vote liberal?

Speaker 2 And then that person says yes. And if they have a, they're pregnant too, then they don't, even either one has to show up.
And they can't, they've done that for years.

Speaker 2 The only problem with it for Republicans is twofold as I see it. Number one,

Speaker 2 they have to be genuine that they oppose the Democrat. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 If a Democrat says,

Speaker 2 well,

Speaker 2 I want no restrictions on, I'm going to vote for a bill with no restrictions whatsoever on abortion, and you can vote that

Speaker 2 you'll have to vote that way. And then they'll try to...
It's very hard to get a perfect symmetry, is what I'm saying, so they both don't show up.

Speaker 2 The other problem is that the trademark brand of the Trump administration is show up for work.

Speaker 2 And no Zoom, no three days at home,

Speaker 2 no doing the internet in your living room in your pajamas you got to

Speaker 2 work

Speaker 2 that's very hard for a republican congresswoman to say i'm not going to show up for work beyond yeah so that's that's a

Speaker 2 messaging problem

Speaker 2 you know i think it would expand too i'm well i'm the husband of the woman my my wife just had well imagine what's his name

Speaker 2 duffy who had like eight or nine kids who's now the secretary of transportation you know i want my 12 weeks or you know gay couple gay congressman, they adopt a kid. Well, I need my 12 weeks.

Speaker 2 So I have a feeling this is.

Speaker 2 My children,

Speaker 2 my wife was working at the post office,

Speaker 2 and I was teaching four classes, five classes a semester often. And I had three kids that were at that time, I think, six, eight,

Speaker 2 ten, or ten, and they were at three different schools. My wife went to work at noon and came back at midnight.

Speaker 2 And I got done teaching at, I would go teach a 7 o'clock in the morning class, 40 mile commute. And anyway, I would teach these classes and then I would get in my pickup and drive.

Speaker 2 I got three tickets like a madman so I could go to each of the three schools and pick them up and then I was exhausted. So did I make them a nice

Speaker 2 Caesar salad? No. You know what I did.
I got, they would go like this. Can we have a happy meal? I said, it's too expensive.
Come on, we want a happy meal. KFC.

Speaker 2 I said, okay.

Speaker 2 And then I would love my fries and milkshake. I haven't had fast food in 40 years.
I haven't.

Speaker 2 But anyway, then I would bring them home and they would just go crazy. And I would, you know, like I had all these pennies in a jar to pay for it.

Speaker 2 So what's getting me now is that they're in their 40s. And every once in a while they'll make an offhanded remark, like, I can't believe you

Speaker 2 force-fed us McDonald's Big Macs. And I said, you gulped them up.

Speaker 2 You gave us a milkshake. We should have been eating

Speaker 2 avocado juice. We should have been drinking avocado juice or something.
I said, are you serious? You had the time of your life.

Speaker 2 No favors go punished, Victor.

Speaker 2 So even from our, especially from our children sometimes. Hey, last thing,

Speaker 2 let's get you, because

Speaker 2 I promised Mrs. Hansen wouldn't kill you today.
So

Speaker 2 that's her job if she wants it.

Speaker 2 Last topic, let's just get your take on NPR PBS funding. Catherine Maher,

Speaker 2 if that's how she pronounces it,

Speaker 2 yeah, she testified before.

Speaker 2 We talked about her last year. She was so obnoxious with her.

Speaker 2 I don't remember. I don't recall.
I have no recollection of saying that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 She said:

Speaker 2 89-0 breakdown, Democrats did Republicans amongst staff,

Speaker 2 foot-dragging on the not even more than foot-dragging, burying the Hunter-Biden coverage. I mean, should the U.S.
taxpayers be

Speaker 2 what's the point of I could see there's a point for Radio Free Europe, hypothetically, but I don't see the point of the United States.

Speaker 2 During Berlin blew that all up, the writer who said that they were

Speaker 2 lying, they were all left-wing. They lie about everything.
One of the things, the biggest lie is NPR says something like this.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 you must remember that we only have one to two percent federal funds.

Speaker 2 So we are. No,

Speaker 2 you are lying. You only have one per two percent of federal funds because all those productions you buy, Dallington Abbey, all that stuff,

Speaker 2 you give to your 400 or so

Speaker 2 regional stations.

Speaker 2 And they pay you money for that and then they pay you dues for that so the mothership NPR in Washington yeah you don't you get all this corporate money from you know the foundations Tides Foundation all of them that's fine the MacArthur Foundation but you would have no NPR at all in Washington DC you've got them all over you got them in Fresno you got them in Bakersfield so where do they get their money to pay you the money to to buy, to rent or pay or license all the stuff that you give them.

Speaker 2 The evening news, Fresno will air it. They have to pay for it.
And that money means that they can claim they only have 1 or 2 percent federal funds. But where does the federal comes come from?

Speaker 2 The corporation of public broadcasting, the $500

Speaker 2 million a year, half a billion dollars.

Speaker 2 It goes to the regional station for this Ponzi's thing. So the federal government gives most of the money, they do have individual

Speaker 2 fundraising, for all of these towns and cities

Speaker 2 to have a budget for the year, and most of their budget is, besides the upkeep of the station, is

Speaker 2 to buy

Speaker 2 product from NPR.

Speaker 2 And then NPR can say, well, we're getting money from our stations. We're not getting money from the government, but the stations are giving money from the government to pay you in government money.

Speaker 2 And so I think this is not

Speaker 2 1971 or wherever it was when

Speaker 2 some of the ideas came forward for NPR. It's 2025, and you turn on DirecTV,

Speaker 2 there's 550 stations. There's

Speaker 2 the streaming, it's everywhere. Thousands of stations.

Speaker 2 Some of them are cultural channels, art, cooking, anything that NPR offers, you can get on private subscriptions, streaming, or direct TV.

Speaker 2 And there's a big,

Speaker 2 every type of politics. You can go to pay a DirecTV and you can say, get anything you want.

Speaker 2 And if they're not going to provide balanced comment,

Speaker 2 I mean, when David Brooks is your

Speaker 2 conservative analyst on television, and it's, you know, so my point is that they should just go out in the private market and raise, they can get all those billion.

Speaker 2 Why isn't the Soros Foundation give them 500 million a year? And then they can do it, and they can be as left-wing as they want. But they represent the people's money, and they're misrepresenting.

Speaker 2 And her performance was a catastrophe because every time they asked her, did you believe, did you still, didn't you write that you believe that white privilege will be is there and it makes it impossible.

Speaker 2 Ah, did I say that? I don't recall that.

Speaker 2 And it was just again, again and again. Did you say this about Donald Trump?

Speaker 2 She's a 1% wealthy woman representing the wealthy white, bicostal, educated professional class that calls everybody a racist. She said America was fundamentally racist, I recall.
But she's not.

Speaker 2 One of those types from years ago that didn't know anyone who voted for Nixon, how could Nixon have been elected president?

Speaker 2 He was polling it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, we've never met a McGovern, a Nixon voter.

Speaker 2 We've got to let you get to taking some more medicine.

Speaker 2 First, before we do, we're going to end the show with a couple of things. One, I want to say thank you to folks who've written me about civil thoughts.
And someone said, please say it's lower.

Speaker 2 Civil Thoughts. That's the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society.
It comes out every Friday. I have 14 recommended readings.
How do you get it?

Speaker 2 You go to civil thoughts, all one word.com, sign up. Again, it's free.
We're not selling your name. I know you will enjoy it.

Speaker 2 Victor Hansen's website, Victor Davis Hansen's website, The Blade of Perseus, go to VictorHanson.com, do sign up there. We have so many comments on Victor now that it's this

Speaker 2 shows up on YouTube and

Speaker 2 Rumble. And I have two comments to read.
One is:

Speaker 2 I assume this is from a conversation that you had with the great Sammy Wink, and it's from

Speaker 2 Emilian.

Speaker 2 And it says, My late father, World War II vet,

Speaker 2 European Theater of Operation, would have been absolutely delighted over this deftly presented video. I can hear him saying now, you tell him, Hansen, he can't be here now to see this.

Speaker 2 So I'm watching it and relishing every moment for him and for myself. Thank you.
So that's Emilyn.

Speaker 2 And then this is from Apple. Now, people can go on Apple and rate the show zero to five stars, and practically everyone gives Victor five.

Speaker 2 If it's not a five, the excuse is usually a fouler, but let's we'll talk about that another day. This is a comment from N.P.
Griffin, and it's titled Versailles: Outstanding,

Speaker 2 full of substance, engaged, and with Sammy's questions, musings, Victor shares wealth of knowledge, history, politics, life.

Speaker 2 Listening to Victor, since I first listened to him, making sense of politics of the 1980s on the Art Bell Show. Following Victor on radio, podcasts is a wonderful ride.
Thank you, Victor.

Speaker 2 You are so appreciated. Victor, I never thought of you as a ride, but, you know, maybe, maybe.

Speaker 2 I was looking for a letter I got from my angry reader on the altar, and it said, Be careful.

Speaker 2 And then as you are a maggot,

Speaker 2 cock, blank,

Speaker 2 blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. And he actually put his name on it with his email.
I didn't list his email, but I have it on the next ultra read.

Speaker 2 I just noticed that the ones that go directly to me and not the website are getting more and more inflammatory.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I guess it's the time.

Speaker 2 I just have to tell you one anecdote. There's this great writer, Bill Kaufman, and he writes for The Spectator and all kinds of publications over the years.
And he's a bit of a friend.

Speaker 2 And I mentioned him in Civil Thoughts a few weeks ago, something he wrote. And then he wrote me the other day.
He said, Jackie, I couldn't believe this.

Speaker 2 And he lives up in Elmira, New York, or Batavia,

Speaker 2 upstate near Rochester.

Speaker 2 And I'm walking down the street and there's a guy in a big bucket truck that cutting down a huge dead maple tree. And the guy in the top says, Hey,

Speaker 2 hey, Bill, you're famous.

Speaker 2 He says, Why? He says,

Speaker 2 Jack Fowler mentioned you. Do you know Jack Fowler? Now, I know this guy in the bucket truck.
I don't know him, but I know he had to have heard about so he must have signed up for Civil Thoughts.

Speaker 2 No, he's he's a listener to the Victor Davis Hansen show. So

Speaker 2 we have a diverse.

Speaker 2 We certainly do. It's great, great audience.

Speaker 2 I'm going to find up if I'm going to to give a Victor Hansen Ultra Award to the person that can send me an email and says you can beat a sinus infection without taking any of these horrific antibiotics just by doing the following, fill-in-the-blanks.

Speaker 2 Ancient...

Speaker 2 I've had about 100 of them in my life. I've been operated, as I said, three times in my sinuses.

Speaker 2 I've got to find a way of not taking this crappy antibiotic. Well,

Speaker 2 maybe pincushions. What do you call that when you get stuck with pins? I did this once.
I mentioned it, and somebody sent me a National Institute of Health, long-detailed blind study.

Speaker 2 You know what it said, Jack?

Speaker 2 It said for people who have had sinus infections longer than two weeks, chronic sinitis. You know, and the worst symptom was fatigue, and that is my worst symptom.

Speaker 2 But this is what versus a placebo and nasal wash. So you take doxicillin or augmentin, terrible antibiotics, it screws your flora all up, you get tired, but you put up with it, it's going to kill it.

Speaker 2 At the end of three weeks of that,

Speaker 2 I'd probably have to take another three weeks to recover. At the end of three weeks of that, versus people who took the

Speaker 2 augmentin or doxicillin, but it wasn't really, it was empty,

Speaker 2 the capsule, it had something else in it, sugar, I don't know.

Speaker 2 Guess what? There was no difference between washing your nose out with an Eddie pot once or twice a day and just filling yourself up with antibiotic.

Speaker 2 Oh, we know. We know the consequences of the antibiotics also.

Speaker 2 Anyway, one last thing.

Speaker 2 I mentioned last week, you know, my daughter was getting married, and so many people wrote me some nice notes, and it was very lovely. Thanks for your prayers.
It was a great, great wedding.

Speaker 2 On that, Victor, you need to go to bed or take some more medication.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we will be back soon. Thanks, folks, for listening.
We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen show bye-bye thank you everybody for listening and viewing

Speaker 4 with markets changing and living costs rising finding a reliable place to grow your money matters now more than ever with the wealthfront cash account your uninvested money earns a 3.5 apy which is higher than the average savings rate there are no account fees or minimums And you also get free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts 24-7.

Speaker 4 So you always have access to your money when you need it. And when you're ready to invest, you can transfer your cash to one of WealthFront's expert built portfolios in just minutes.

Speaker 4 More than 1 million people already use WealthFront to save and build long-term wealth with confidence. Get started today at WealthFront.com.

Speaker 4 Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank.

Speaker 4 Annual percentage yield on deposits as of November 7th, 2025 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum. The cash account is not a bank account.

Speaker 4 Funds are swept to program banks where they earn the variable APY.