The Coarsening of the Culture and Howard’s End

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Victor, so many things to talk about today.

Speaker 2 And I think we'll kick off the show with your take on the looming

Speaker 2 Alaska visit, visit, meeting, conference, head knocking between Donald Trump and Russia's President Putin in Alaska.

Speaker 2 And who knows, Victor, what changes will happen between when we're talking right now and when the show comes out. But we will act like it's going to happen next Friday.

Speaker 2 And we'll get to your take on that when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show. So, Victor, let's kick it off.
Trump, Putin, Alaska,

Speaker 2 assume it takes place. What are your thoughts

Speaker 2 five days, six days out?

Speaker 2 Well, I think we're where we've talked on this show before that we all know the parameters of a so-called deal, an an armistice. I don't know if it's going to be a permanent peace, but it's

Speaker 2 Ukraine will not be in NATO. We knew that before.
And by the way, the European NATO members quietly,

Speaker 2 I think I told you I spoke to some European diplomats not too long ago, and I talked to some afterwards privately without

Speaker 2 reference to their names or countries. They all admitted they didn't want Ukraine in NATO just because they felt that was a bridge too far on the borders of

Speaker 2 and there was too much corruption, and it didn't satisfy EU, much less NATO requirements. But it's a very powerful country now.
It's rearmed.

Speaker 2 So we all know that it's not going to be in NATO, and Putin got that, I suppose. He could take back to his masters, whoever they are, military or oligarchic.

Speaker 2 And then we know that we're not going to get back the Donbass and Crimea.

Speaker 2 They have a complex history, and you can make an argument that they were as Russian as Ukraine, if not more so. And then we go

Speaker 2 the don't ask and the areas to the west of those acquisitions. And he's anywhere from 50 to 100 miles.
So the question is, how far to Kiev does he get to keep the stuff he stole?

Speaker 2 And if you reject that he should have any of it, which in a perfect world is reasonable,

Speaker 2 do they have the wherewithal to push him back? And they're on the defensive right now, again, and he's starting to grind them down, as Russia always does.

Speaker 2 After all, if we had a discussion and you talked to General Halder, the head of OKW,

Speaker 2 11 days into the Operation Barbarossa, around, I don't know, the 1st of July, he would have said

Speaker 2 it's not an exaggeration to say that the war is over and we've conquered Russia in 11 days.

Speaker 2 And then he found himself freezing on December 7th outside Moscow at this first subway station and couldn't get any closer and never did get any closer.

Speaker 2 So Russia does very poorly when it's on the offensive in other people's countries. It does very poorly at the outset and then it grinds you down.
And that's what's happening.

Speaker 2 So the question is, how much do you give him?

Speaker 2 And that's complicated because Zelensky

Speaker 2 rightly points out that it's in the Constitution of the Ukrainians that no one can cede any territory to anyone without a referendum of the people.

Speaker 2 The people poll, I think, 60% they want the war over, and they poll 60% they don't want to give up an inch.

Speaker 2 So we'll see, but they don't have the military wherewithal to push Russia much further back. And Russia, I think, believes that after a million casualties

Speaker 2 And they were not able to take Kiev or absorb the country and that the further west they get, the longer their supply lines, the more exposed they are, the shorter the Ukrainian supply lines are, interior lines.

Speaker 2 They feel

Speaker 2 that they want to consolidate and get as much as they can, but they're not going to get what they want. And that's what we're looking at.
Where is the DMZ, the demilitarized zone?

Speaker 2 And Trump will try to,

Speaker 2 you know.

Speaker 2 And the media, of course, hates Trump.

Speaker 2 If you look at what he's done lately, I'm not saying these are lasting pieces, but there's a deal between Cambodia and Thailand.

Speaker 2 There's a deal between Congo and Rwanda, Serbia and Kosovo, India and Pakistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan,

Speaker 2 and maybe Egypt and what, Ethiopia. So he's got seven or eight regional conflicts that are not

Speaker 2 flaring up. I don't say they're comprehensive peace settlements, but if he were to get this, then

Speaker 2 they might be... I mean, the Armenian president said he was worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
How does he do it? He basically

Speaker 2 threatens to cut them off on trade or not give them trade status or tariff, things like that, or expel their people from the United States. He has a lot of levers.

Speaker 2 But it's pretty amazing that he, this warmonger, Hitlerian fascist that we were told by the left, seems to be intent on saving as many lives in war as possible.

Speaker 2 He was always like that.

Speaker 2 He was always attacked by the left for being a neo-isolationist, but in particular for doing things like not retaliating when they sent missiles in performance art fashion after the death of Soleimani, some people on the right attacked him and the left that he didn't reply to the Iranian performance art attack on our base at Ghatar.

Speaker 2 But he doesn't want to have these forever wars. He never did.

Speaker 2 And you can really see that, I don't know if

Speaker 2 he's a businessman and he thinks it's a bad deal to destroy stuff rather than build it, or

Speaker 2 he's profoundly touched by the waste in human lives of war. I don't know what it is, but they have him wrong that he is

Speaker 2 He is not a warmonger.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 he's not killing people with predator assassination drones like Obama. He's not joking about it at the White House correspondent's

Speaker 2 dinner and saying, you want to date my daughter? It's spelled

Speaker 2 P-R-E-D-A-T-O or Predator. Remember that? Threatening people, making a joke out of predator.
Never knows when you,

Speaker 2 you'll never know when it's going to get you, he said. Obama made a big joke out of killing people.
And then Brendan, of course, lied and said we hadn't killed any at all collaterally.

Speaker 2 And then he apologized for lying.

Speaker 2 If you look at the last 150 years, Victor, and no one's done it better than you through your various books, just the total carnage around the world

Speaker 2 is so staggering, I don't know how you couldn't have a president of either party

Speaker 2 that would be repulsed by the thought of war, unless for the most absolute

Speaker 2 needs and purposes.

Speaker 2 Unless it is, there are certain countries that are not attacked, at least

Speaker 2 Sweden is vulnerable and Finland is vulnerable to Russian aggression, but they haven't been attacked, not Finland since 1939.

Speaker 2 And the reason is they're highly, and the Swiss are never attacked, they're highly mobilized, and they have arms industry, and they have deterrence.

Speaker 2 The United States had not been attacked until I think I could make the argument that in the 90s we sort of let bin Laden think he could could do whatever he wanted to the United States without retaliation.

Speaker 2 We let him go. We had many times a chance to get rid of him.
We didn't under Clinton.

Speaker 2 But under Biden, of course, we lost deterrence. And after Afghanistan, we lost deterrence.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 if you remember the Roman fifth century, late fourth century, fifth century, Vegetus's famous adage: si wis

Speaker 2 pacum para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.
And if you have deterrence,

Speaker 2 you're not going to be attacked. And everybody said, well, you have to be perpetually armed? You've got to spend all that money? Yes, you do.

Speaker 2 And that's what Ukraine's problem was.

Speaker 2 It didn't offer a deterrent to this huge country right next to it. And the Europeans didn't either.
They were doing the Nordstrom 2 pipeline. They were disarming.
They weren't meeting their 2%.

Speaker 2 They were giving, maybe insidiously and inadvertently, they were giving the message that Vladimir Putin

Speaker 2 was not an existential threat. We had the former German Gerhard Schreuter, remember him? He was working for Gazprom.

Speaker 2 The whole Merkel foreign policy was corrupt and appeasing of Russia, or if not allied with Russia. So anyway, we had the red jacuzzi button in Geneva that Hillary pushed and said,

Speaker 2 reset.

Speaker 2 We're not going to be like George Bush. It was hard on the Russians after they invaded Georgia and Ossatia.

Speaker 2 We're going to be giving them lectures on human rights, and they're going to like us for that. That's what they thought.

Speaker 2 By the way, you mentioned

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 recent peace settlements or quasi-settlements that Donald Trump

Speaker 2 has helped engineer. never mind what he did in his last administration with the various alliances he helped create in the Middle East between Israel and other countries.

Speaker 2 But it reminds me, Victor, that the NATO Defense Secretary, I forget his name, who called him Big Daddy or Daddy. And there really is an aspect to that, isn't there, to him?

Speaker 2 Daddy/slash Colossus, the big dude in the room.

Speaker 2 You can quote that famous line from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, when I I think it's Brutus or Cassius says he betrothed like a colossus and were

Speaker 2 small people among his legs. And that's sort of what he was.
He started that image at the northern Notre Dame Cathedral when he was... Remember that when he first came in?

Speaker 2 I think that was before he was inaugurated. Everybody wanted to get near him.
And the reason they wanted to get near him is that...

Speaker 2 not just that he represented the economic and military power and cultural influence of the United States, but he would use it in a way that Biden would use, if he did use it, it would be anemic and it would be anti-Western.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the Europeans are funny people. They have this outward sort of postmodern leftist veneer, but then, you know, they're aristocratic, they're traditionalist, and they understand the United States.

Speaker 2 They don't like us publicly, but privately, they really want us to protect them. And that's what's so strange.
And Trump knows that. He knows it very well.

Speaker 2 That's why he was able to leverage them to get up to the 2% and the 5%. All he had to say is, well, if you don't want to pay,

Speaker 2 then I guess you don't want us to protect you.

Speaker 1 How dare you say that?

Speaker 2 Publicly, privately. I don't know.
We'll pay. We'll pay.
Just promise you you'll be here when they invade.

Speaker 2 And that's kind of what it was.

Speaker 2 Well, we're going to get to another topic here in a second, Victor. But first, I want to tell many of our new viewers and listeners about our friends at bestotgrill.com.

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Speaker 2 And we thank the good people from Solair for sponsoring, once again, the Victor Davis Hanson show,

Speaker 2 he said as he hit his microphone.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor. This new microphone,

Speaker 2 I can't do any

Speaker 2 face. No, I hit your microphone.
No, I hit my phone. Oh, you did.
I hit my microphone, yeah.

Speaker 2 People like when you karate chop the air and your microphone. It's fine, Victor.
Anything you do is groovy in that regard. Let's talk about, you know what, an unsettling matter.

Speaker 2 Let's talk about coarseness, okay? And there are two connected stories, to me, anyway. One is the...

Speaker 2 the decline and now demise of Howard Stern and his show, the once king of all media, the colossus of media.

Speaker 2 I think he had 20 million people at one point listening to his show, and now it's, I don't know, I think we may have more people listening to what we say, you say, anyway.

Speaker 2 I just did a Newsmac interview where they said that that moment their audience was bigger than Howard Stearns, which means I think he only has 100,000 listeners. I think that's shock.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's shocking. And he cut that deal in 2020 for $100 million a year for five years, which is up now.
I don't know why any because he was all done by 2020.

Speaker 2 Almost, at least least the COVID thing, he went crazy about the lockdown.

Speaker 2 And in one way, that was good, because I was never a big fan. I mean, I would be out pruning in the 80s with people who would listen to him.

Speaker 2 And I won't mention who they were. And he was talking about having people come into his studio and then undressing.
He was looking at their phallic size or

Speaker 2 size of women's blank blank. He was crude.
He would call up people. and what was he, you know, he would call up people and game them and say, Did you know that you ordered 20 pizzas or something?

Speaker 2 You have to pay for them.

Speaker 2 Or I'm the police. I mean, he really, it was kind of like swatting people.
And he had all these jokes, and he was cruel. He was really cruel to people.

Speaker 2 And he was famous because he made fun of both sides, and he really trashed politicians, and he hated them.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so what happened happened was that Howard Stern went from being unorthodox, edgy, I think pornographic, potty mouth, slutty,

Speaker 2 obnoxious, crude.

Speaker 2 But nevertheless, he broke every boundary. He insulted every politician.
He wasn't considered left or right. He was just anti-establishment in the crudest of all fashions.

Speaker 2 I didn't like anything he did.

Speaker 2 He got divorced. He got married, he married a younger Starlet, he made these huge $100 million a year, five-year contracts.

Speaker 2 He got $20 million, and it went to his proverbial head.

Speaker 2 And COVID came, he had all of these huge mansions,

Speaker 2 places that he,

Speaker 2 you know, vacation. I think he had one in Palm Beach, one at the somewhere on the coast.

Speaker 2 elsewhere, a big place in New York. And

Speaker 2 he associated with people that he didn't want to insult and politicians that were more in line with his new thinking, which was liberal and progressive, but was not necessarily characteristic of this huge audience.

Speaker 2 And so the more that he got frustrated as the audience

Speaker 2 insidiously dropped off, he began to insult them.

Speaker 2 The problem was you, not me.

Speaker 2 I'm just the same Howard Stern. No, you're not.
They tuned in for you

Speaker 2 because you would say things that other people would not. You were a shock jock.
You invented the genre. You were pornographic and slutty, and they wanted to hear it, apparently.

Speaker 2 And then when you became passe and predictable and left-wing, you became a scold, a sanctimonious Karen. And you were completely

Speaker 2 invisible from these party hacks in the Democratic Party that were always lecturing people. You can't turn on your gas stove, you have to have an IV, you better get 17 boosters.

Speaker 2 You better wear three masks.

Speaker 2 And that's who you became. But the only problem with that is you still expected that somebody was going to subsidize you at $100 million a year.
But you never,

Speaker 2 there's 100 podcasts, I say 1,000, that have more

Speaker 2 audience than you did. And you just insulted the genre and said, oh, podcasts are nothing.
They don't matter. And the funny thing was, you were on the edge.

Speaker 2 You were the one that jumped to Cirrus radio and subscription radio, and you knew all the new genres, and you had revolutionized talk radio, and you became an old fogey reactionary, and you didn't keep up with the new genre.

Speaker 2 And somebody in his garage opened a laptop, and he had a bigger audience than you did. But the difference was he didn't expect to be paid $100 million a year.

Speaker 2 So the bottom line, Jack, was that Howard Stern became a,

Speaker 2 I don't know, a Stephen Colbert, an overpaid, sour puss, a scold.

Speaker 2 And he has zero market value now. I mean, he made enough money in his life that's not going to hurt him.
He can just become a fixture at Manhattan

Speaker 2 left-wing events if he wants. If he ever dares to leave his house, because he's deathly afraid of cold.
I would give him a piece of advice unsolicited.

Speaker 2 I'd had an immune problem, and I flew maybe twice a month for the last five years, and I spoke to people 500 to 1,000, shook hands. I got

Speaker 2 COVID twice, long COVID six months, one long COVID a year. And just part of the hazards of the game, Howard.
It's not going to kill you.

Speaker 2 You should go out there and mingle with people and you'll get your immune system challenged. Maybe you'll get COVID.
Maybe you won't. But it's not the end of the world.

Speaker 2 Victor, you have more listeners than he does. Are you getting $100 million a year?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 I have to look at what I'm getting, but uh it's not reflected I think

Speaker 2 in our ratings or anything. I think

Speaker 2 that if there was a little rule that said that you have a bigger audience than Colbert or Howard Stern, you deserve what they get. I don't know.

Speaker 2 But it's so weird to see these left-wing people who are on the left spectrum

Speaker 2 outraged that somebody's not going to pay them what they're not worth and that they should be subsidized due to their brilliance, even though their brilliance is losing their parents'

Speaker 2 company millions of dollars. It's so arrogant.

Speaker 2 I want to say one last thing about Stern. This is a clip from Kirsten Fleming, who wrote a column about his leaving.

Speaker 2 And he says, Last summer, Stern, overestimated his own influence, made things even worse by entering the presidential media circus to sit down with a clearly diminished Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 The old Stern would have spent 30 minutes at least on the gap-prone president's mythical neighborhood gang gang leader and overall bad dude, Corn Pop.

Speaker 2 Instead, he marveled over Scranton Joe's high school football exploits.

Speaker 2 He called Biden's family, which consists of a crackhead son he later pardoned and a grandchild he didn't acknowledge until the New York Times bullied him into it. Extraordinary.

Speaker 2 Stern even offered this profundity: You're the kind of leader I love. We're lucky to have you in the Oval Office.
That's so funny.

Speaker 2 That reminds me of that guy on MSNBC, or maybe it was a network.

Speaker 2 He was an African-American, really well-known anchor, and he was asked about Colbert, and I think they had said data-wise he had 240 guests or something, one Republican.

Speaker 2 He said, well, the one thing about Colbert is that

Speaker 2 he has no partisan,

Speaker 2 observable partisan leanings. He interviews people and he gets them on both sides.

Speaker 2 He levels both barrels on both sides. No, he doesn't.
He doesn't. And people who were supposed to be edgy

Speaker 2 are not edgy. And, yeah, I mean, how can you brag on the

Speaker 2 old Joe Biden from Scranton, take Trump behind the gym, beat him up, slam the guy's head, cornpock, measured off channel? That was all braggadaccio from an insecure bully.

Speaker 2 Howard Stern, just, gosh, he has no self-awareness that he is, he destroyed his brand. He became a misanthrope,

Speaker 2 you know, and I guess a hermit.

Speaker 2 He doesn't like people.

Speaker 2 As I said, he's misanthropic, but he wants people to pay for that, as if he's out there pounding the flesh and intermingling with crowds, and he's doing all this stuff.

Speaker 2 And he used to really attack Rush Limbaugh. One thing Rush Limbaugh never did was A, attack his audience, or B, change

Speaker 2 his methodology or his ideology to fit.

Speaker 2 I mean, he got married a number of times, but he never changed his ideology because he married a younger woman or anything. He was adamant, adamantine, in

Speaker 2 his beliefs.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's kind of ironic because he was in his own trap. He was an outsider who was so filthy-mouthed that no one really in the establishment wanted to be seen with him.

Speaker 2 He was only an underground counter-establishment figure.

Speaker 2 But he always, when he started to make the big money and he had the big house and he had the big name, and people started to solicit him for interviews or to appear on his show, he wanted so much to be, I didn't realize that, an establishment fixture in New York.

Speaker 2 And the problem was, Howard, that they didn't want you the way you were. You had to completely repudiate who you were and then become a wishy-washy on the one hand, on the other hand, nothing,

Speaker 2 with no sincere or no strong feelings, and that's what they liked about you.

Speaker 2 And you did, and then you wanted it both ways. Where's my audience? No, you only had one audience.

Speaker 2 You appealed to people's worst instincts. But you wanted to, I guess, be accepted by the New York literati, political class, intellectuals, financial titans, and they didn't want that aspect of you.

Speaker 2 So, mea coppa, mea maxima coppa, you obsequious bowed to them. They accepted you on one condition.
You don't go back to your profane and obnoxious self, which is why you were well paid.

Speaker 2 But he may be having in his way, not that he thinks of it the last,

Speaker 2 a laugh with just the broad coarsening of our culture.

Speaker 2 He didn't reflect it. He was a catalyst for it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so that's another news item I'd like to bring up with you, Victor, before we head to our next break is this

Speaker 2 the throwing of sex toys onto the courts at WNBA games. And we've been very critical, WNBA in the past, but just this public display of crudity is becoming, I don't want to say normal, but

Speaker 2 less unnormal, abnormal than it used to be, and it shows itself in so many other ways. I'm getting sick of it.

Speaker 2 I get sick of it. I didn't like I don't like when Trump uses the word a lot, SHIT.
He shouldn't say that.

Speaker 2 I don't even like it when he said he can go to hell. I don't like it when Jasmine Crockett sits up there in front of the stage and says that Trump is a piece of SHI blank.

Speaker 2 And I don't like these potty-mouthed

Speaker 2 on FU House of Representatives and senators that use the word, I mean, they're just foul language. These are our representatives.

Speaker 2 And it's kind of the broken windows

Speaker 2 logic of language as this is of crime when you walk by and throw a rock in a warehouse window and then you see five, six, seven, and then people think, well, if the windows are broken, you can scrawl graffiti on it.

Speaker 2 Well, if there's graffiti on that building, the one next door is okay, too, and do that. And it's insidious and it's infectious.
And so it's the same thing with this language.

Speaker 2 If you hear a major figure, an athlete, a person in the media, a politician use those words, then you can say, well, I can use them, and you can say this and this, and then you go down and you get

Speaker 2 whatever these things are, sex things

Speaker 2 thrown on

Speaker 2 the court of the WBA? I don't know if that was a homophobic effort to suggest that these women use these things or it was foul, but it was just, and the guy who did it, I think, was 19 or 20.

Speaker 2 Well, it's been done several times. Yeah,

Speaker 2 even, but even the penalties for it, they were thinking, well, you can't come to a game if you do it again for a year. You should just say, don't come ever.
We don't want you. That's it.

Speaker 2 And just ban them and see what happens.

Speaker 2 The part of the problem is there's no deterrence. so everybody knows that whatever

Speaker 2 the, you know, there's no penalty, there's no penalty. When you have those pro-life

Speaker 2 demonstrations, they got pretty much

Speaker 2 when those two elderly men, 72 and 84, were beaten up by that creepy guy, that abortion activist, and he beat one of them up, and then the other person tried to help him.

Speaker 2 And then he was beaten up,

Speaker 2 and then the judge, an Obama or Biden appointee, gave them no jail time. Yet you could see that he was trying to kill them, step on them.

Speaker 2 If they had been in this asymmetrical era of justice, if those people on the ground had been

Speaker 2 young abortion activists and some,

Speaker 2 and they had, excuse me, if they had been elderly abortion activists, 70s and 80s, and some young pro-life person went and stabbed, hit them, and tried to kill them and step on them, he wouldn't even be getting out of prison.

Speaker 2 That's why there's this cynicism about this system.

Speaker 2 And just tangently, Jack, there's a new meme that goes on right now by the left. Have you seen it this last week? It's, we're going to get tough, Corey Booker.

Speaker 2 Jasmine Crockett, Gavin Newsom. We're going to bring in a pencil to a knife.
Yes,

Speaker 2 we're going to get tough like the Republicans did. No, you haven't been acting like John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Speaker 2 You haven't been playing by the Marcus of Queensbury rules. You people were always knife fighters.
Do you remember what you have been doing?

Speaker 2 You keep saying, we're going to have to get mean to save democracy. No, you destroyed it.
You impeached a president for the first time in history twice.

Speaker 2 First time in history, you tried him as a private citizen. First time in history.
First time in history, you tried to get a presidential candidate off the ballot in 25 states.

Speaker 2 You raided an ex-president's home to get 0.01%

Speaker 2 of his 14,000 documents classified, 102 classified documents. You debanked Melania Trump, Baron Trump, Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 You got Morgan Stanley, you got Bank of America to take away a person's ability to conduct commerce, to live, by stripping them them of their bank accounts based entirely, not on their criminal record, but on their political views.

Speaker 2 You did that, Mr. Left.
You were the ones that coordinated five

Speaker 2 criminal civil suits. And I include Eugene Carroll, who was bankrolled by Reid Hoffman in that ridiculous lawsuit.

Speaker 2 And Letita James, you know, the more we're learning about Letita James, my gosh, she's up for targeting a political figure by distorting the law. That's ostensibly what they're going after.

Speaker 2 But she's got a lot more political exposure by filling out affidavits for a second home, mortgage

Speaker 2 affidavits

Speaker 2 for a second home in Virginia, in which if she really did what she's accused of, it looks like she did do it.

Speaker 2 She tried to get a primary home designation for a second home so she could save on on property taxes, save on the mortgage rate.

Speaker 2 She suggested that her father was, I guess, her husband or her companion in this pseudo-primary residence.

Speaker 2 And then she didn't even think that as an elected official statewide in New York, you have to be a New York resident. Now she's on record that that was not her primary home in New York.

Speaker 2 They can get her for a lot.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 here we learned that she went to the White House three times, supposedly for

Speaker 2 functions, but we don't know who she met.

Speaker 2 And this goes with Mr.

Speaker 2 Coangelo, the third person in the DOJ, who came from Letita James' efforts to destroy Trump and then rotated out on November 18th back to Alvin Bragg, the same day that Jack Smith was appointed, the same day Nathan Wade, the paramour of Fanny Willis, was in the White House.

Speaker 2 This was all coordinated.

Speaker 2 And so they're talking about we're going to fight dirty. What more could you do, Gavin? What more could your party do? If you're willing to try to destroy a political appointee,

Speaker 2 if you get the FBI to partner with Facebook to censor the news,

Speaker 2 if you get the FBI to keep quiet that they have a laptop that's authentic, that they have verified, and you get 51 people to lie to the American people that it's Russian, that if you're doing the Russian collusion hoax and you do all of this lawfare, what more can you want?

Speaker 2 Now Carver is saying, Jack, well, we've got to be retop and we're going to get in there and you know, we get in there,

Speaker 2 we're going to get Puerto Rico, we're going to get

Speaker 2 D.C. and they're going to be states, no doubt about it, and

Speaker 2 we're going to pack the court. Pack the court.

Speaker 2 You would have packed the court had you not lost the Senate and the House and you not had a waxen effigy as president. You were going to pack the court.

Speaker 2 You were also going to get rid of the filibuster and you announced that you were going to destroy the Electoral College, which you're pretty close to with the National Voters Compact, that you're getting these state legislatures to vote that they'll only pledge their electors to the national vote total, not their own state.

Speaker 2 So I don't know how they could get more radical than they are now, Jack. They do anything.
They go after ICE officers. They run Tesla drivers off the road, they try to firebomb Tesla, dealerships.

Speaker 2 They've done everything.

Speaker 2 I don't know what this idea, they've been meek. They've been, I mean, we had 120 days of riot, looting, and arson in May, June, July, August, September of 2020.
What more do you want?

Speaker 2 Well, if you go back to the Supreme Court nomination, confirmation hearings with Bob Bork and Clarence Thomas, and

Speaker 2 the gutting of democracy or civilized governance and

Speaker 2 destroyed Brett Kavanaugh with lies from Susan Blossy Ford.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, what won't they do? Sharon and I, oh, my wife, Sharon, we watched Chappaquiddick last night. I don't know if you saw that movie came out a few years ago.

Speaker 2 And Sharon's from Massachusetts, so we've actually been to Chappaquiddick, but the movie is very.

Speaker 2 it tracks what happened.

Speaker 2 And to think

Speaker 2 that this was the leader of the Democratic Party, essentially he was. The lion.
You mean the lion of the Senate?

Speaker 2 The lion of the Senate. And just the

Speaker 2 absolute horrible man he was. And did you hear

Speaker 2 last week this came out about JFK Jr.

Speaker 2 that he may have been gay and his uncle was going to out him if he didn't show up at that trial, that rape trial

Speaker 2 for his cousin down in Florida, which Uncle Teddy was, of course, implicated in. But the Uncle Teddy threatened him to out his gayness.
Anyway, I mean, that's been bouncing around.

Speaker 2 Actually, the Daily Mail wrote about that the other day. But yeah, Vic, to your point,

Speaker 2 they've been this way for generations.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I know it. And especially in the era of Trump, they have tried every single thing, legal, on legal, non-legal, unlawful,

Speaker 2 amoral, immoral, anything to destroy Donald Trump. And they have ruined the reputation of the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ.

Speaker 2 They've destroyed the reputation of Joe Biden. They've done anything, everything.

Speaker 2 And everybody has done this.

Speaker 2 What do you think the retired military officers were doing when they deliberately violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and came out of the woodwork and said that Donald Trump was a fascist, he was Hitler, he was a liar, he was the equivalent of an Auschwitz jailer, that he should be removed sooner the better, even though we had schedule?

Speaker 2 I mean, this was pretty tough stuff from four-star generals and admirals, and yet they did that. And they did that for the short-term aim of getting rid of Donald Trump because they hated him.

Speaker 2 So this has been a courtioning of our culture. They've used every extreme mechanism from going through the First Lady's underwear drawer to

Speaker 2 trying him as a private citizen in the Senate. They did everything.
And here he is back,

Speaker 2 and they can't do anything. So, now they say, well, we're going to double down and get really, really mean.
Well, what's the next step? You know what the next step is?

Speaker 2 And you can see it already, Jock. They're talking about violence.
They really are. They are condoning violence at ICE centers.
They're condoning street violence. And you really get the impression that

Speaker 2 they're saying to themselves,

Speaker 2 We're 40, 60 on the issues, and we won't change. The American people are stupid.
I'm not going to be for secure borders. I'm not going to get rid of the Soros attorney, the prosecutors.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to renounce the new Green Deal. I'm going not to put up with getting rid of DEI.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to abandon biological men and women's sports.

Speaker 2 And I don't have the House, I don't have the Senate, I don't have the Presidency, I don't have the Supreme Court, I have no power, and I have no power because my issues don't resonate.

Speaker 2 And my institutional power, which was insidious and gave me this leverage, he's getting rid of. He's getting rid of PBS and NPRs, federal funding.

Speaker 2 He's going after the cherished universities where we violated the Bill of Rights and civil rights legislation. He's going after the blue shoot, blue stocking, silk stocking law firms.

Speaker 2 He's going after our power. He's going to tax endowments.

Speaker 2 They're really frustrated. So I said, what can we do?

Speaker 2 The more that we talk, the more people hate us, the more that we make videos, the more we put Representative Swalwell out there lifting weights weights, or Jasmine Crockett talking about evil white people, or the more we put on Corey Booker screaming and yelling, or Hycum Jeffries with his baseball bat, the more people don't like us.

Speaker 2 So, what's next? I think next is violence. That's what they're talking about.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, we're going to

Speaker 2 talk about,

Speaker 2 well, you're going to talk about it, I'm going to ask you to talk about

Speaker 2 some accomplishments

Speaker 2 in the culture war,

Speaker 2 illegals having their in-state tuition

Speaker 2 cut.

Speaker 2 We have

Speaker 2 Judge Boseberg getting smacked down, and we have a bunch of other things to get your opinions on. And we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 2 We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show, and I have an explanation to make, and Victor has a correction to make.

Speaker 2 So let me start Victor with the explanation, because this show began with me in a different room, and now I am at my son-in-law, and daughter and son-in-law's house, because my computer, my Wi-Fi crashed.

Speaker 2 And it's good to have five children that all live nearby. It's great to have a son-in-law who's a high-tech whiz.
So I came over here, and he set me up right away.

Speaker 2 So it's a different background, but God bless

Speaker 2 Eliz and Ben for helping me out here. So that's my little story for the change of venue here.
But you, Victor,

Speaker 2 I'm snarping at you.

Speaker 2 On a podcast, I mentioned Luke Wood,

Speaker 2 the president of Sacramento State.

Speaker 2 and a recent video that appeared in which he was being interviewed and various clips

Speaker 2 were posted in which he said he wanted to eliminate whiteness. And he went on about the toxic nature of whiteness.

Speaker 2 And he was asked by the host, well, is that to get rid of a manifestation of something,

Speaker 2 wouldn't you have to get rid of the source?

Speaker 2 White people. And he said, no, he was for everybody.
He didn't really answer that. He said, for everybody.
And of course,

Speaker 2 as I said, other examples were adduced.

Speaker 2 If somebody said they wanted to get rid of blackness, would black people think that was an indirect or maybe even a direct threat to get rid of blacks or Jewishness?

Speaker 2 So, anyway, in the course of our discussion, and I also talked about it on the Daily Signal, a five-minute video I do each morning, I made some

Speaker 2 errors that were not accurate, and they want to correct. They sent a kind of a nasty note, they being

Speaker 2 his university, California State University, Sacramento.

Speaker 2 He said,

Speaker 2 He said, I said that

Speaker 2 Sacramento State, if you didn't know it, was near UC Davis. And they said,

Speaker 2 Sacramento,

Speaker 2 Cal State Sacramento, also known as Sac State, is the only public university in the world, fourth largest economy, in the world's fourth largest economy. It's not

Speaker 2 the same as UC Davis. It's the only public university in the world's fourth largest economy.
It's not in the same city. Do you understand that?

Speaker 2 California State University Sacramento, also known as Sacramento State, is the only public university in the world's fourth largest economy. That's not correct, Mr.
Fact Checker.

Speaker 2 It's not in the same city as UC Davis. I went back.
I did not say, Mr. Fact Corrector, that it was in the same city.
I said Sacramento State University is near, near, N-E-A-R, UC Davis.

Speaker 2 But by falsely trying to correct me, you have made a terrible mistake if that's literally the only public university in the world's fourth largest economy.

Speaker 2 My gosh, there's 23 state campuses. News to Fresno State.
Yeah, there's 23 of them. There's nine UCs.

Speaker 2 And so there's a lot.

Speaker 2 And near, I guess, would be

Speaker 2 accurate.

Speaker 2 And then I said

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 Luke Wood, and by the way, his name is not technically Luke Wood. It's Jonathan Wood.
That's his middle name, I think, or his nickname, but probably his middle name.

Speaker 2 But it doesn't sound as edgy, apparently, Jonathan Wood, as Luke Wood does.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 he could have corrected me and said, don't dare call me Luke

Speaker 2 Wood. My original, my first name is Jonathan.
Well, he didn't. But he said that I had said that he had been president about a year.
Well, it is two years. Okay.

Speaker 2 He's been president since 2023. Okay, two years.
Well,

Speaker 2 about a year is a little bit inexact, but you could say about a year. It might be over a year or under a year, but that's not a major error.
Next, when he said,

Speaker 2 I said that he had been at UC San Diego, he was at San Diego State University. I plead wrong.

Speaker 2 Here's what I plead wrong that I should have said U University of California, not the state university at state university.

Speaker 2 There's a difference between the CU campus, San Diego, and the UC campus at San Diego.

Speaker 2 You referenced the term blacklighting as a term he coined, which is incorrect. The actual term is race lighting.
Sorry about that.

Speaker 2 But what he, and he defines it, race lighting is an act of psychological manipulation where black, indigenous, and people of color, B-I-P-O-C, parentheses, receive, I'm quoting, receive racial messages that distort their realities and lead them to second guess themselves.

Speaker 2 I said that I did not believe in blacklighting and that he had created it. Now he says that he is the co-creator.

Speaker 2 Well, you still are a creator. If you're co-creator, you're a co-creator.
And the technical term, when you do that to black people, is not blacklighting, but he calls it racelighting.

Speaker 2 But he doesn't really give me an example that I could adjudicate it, or you, the listener, could adjudicate whether that's an actual phenomenon or it's something that he cooked up in his mind because I don't know what you mean with a psychological manipulation where black, indigenous, and people of color receive racial messages that distort their realities and lead them to second guess themselves.

Speaker 2 Is there something called white lighting? I mean, nobody's putting a gun. You're an adult.
You can tell whether somebody is trying to distort reality and lead them to second guess themselves.

Speaker 2 You know, when somebody, I grew up in a Mexican-American community my entire life. I think there was 10 of us in a school of 400 between fourth and sixth grade.
When somebody called me gringo

Speaker 2 or white boy, and I was called that a lot, I didn't second guess myself. I didn't distort my reality.

Speaker 2 I just thought the person who was yelling at me was insecure and part of a majority that was bullying.

Speaker 2 So I don't quite understand that.

Speaker 2 The other one is

Speaker 2 the final one.

Speaker 2 The interview was conducted December 8, 2017.

Speaker 2 An excerpt was reposted on YouTube July 29, 2025, without a notation that it is from an earlier show, creating the confusion. There's no confusion.
I just said a recently circulated YouTube video.

Speaker 2 It just reappeared.

Speaker 2 Apparently, nobody knew about the original 2017 interview, and he didn't want to publicize it because of what he said was objectly racist when he said he wanted to eliminate whiteness.

Speaker 2 And then somebody saw that and started to repost it without a date. That's what I was referring to.
So

Speaker 2 I don't have any need to

Speaker 2 you know give an apology.

Speaker 2 If you put something on, if something just appears on the internet and it's accurate and you haven't changed your views, I don't, unless I will apologize to Jonathan Luke Wood if, now that his original podcast is circulating all over the internet in a reformulated clip,

Speaker 2 that he doesn't believe that anymore. He could have said, here's what I would have written.
The interview was conducted December 8, 2017, and now I'm ad-libbing, when Dr.

Speaker 2 Luke Wood wrongly and mistakenly said that he wanted to eliminate whiteness.

Speaker 2 That excerpt was reposted on YouTube January 29th without a notation that it's from an earlier show, creating the confusion. Here's me, that he still believes it.

Speaker 2 But he does. He still does.

Speaker 2 That he does not any longer believe it, but he still believes it.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 why doesn't he just come out and explain?

Speaker 2 I don't understand this.

Speaker 2 Why doesn't he just say, I mean, he has the university telling me

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 it's the only public university in the world's fourth largest economy, which it isn't.

Speaker 2 And then he's saying, I said it was in the same city as you, which I didn't. It's 20 miles apart.
That's what near means.

Speaker 2 And I said it was about a year when it's exactly two years.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 I do confess that I confuse CSU San Diego and UC San Diego, but and then he says that the term is that he uses and prefers is race lighting, not blacklighting, although they mean the same in this context of himself.

Speaker 2 So I don't understand why he's so angry other than the real reason that he's so angry is that if you go on and you

Speaker 2 Google Luke Wood, he's otherwise a non-entity. There's a few puff pieces, but suddenly everybody's remarking on

Speaker 2 this new clip. The clip, Mr.
Luke Wood, is new. It's new.
It's just appeared, and it comes from an older interview that you apparently do not want aired.

Speaker 2 So you're angry that people are not referring you back to the original. If you go back to the original interview, it is even more damning than the recent clip.

Speaker 2 So I wouldn't advertise that people know that there is a longer version because almost everything you say is tinged with racialism.

Speaker 2 And when you, as a public servant and a university president at a very large campus, you publicly announce at any time, and you do not withdraw that, at any time, that you want to eliminate, eliminate, eliminate whiteness, the manifestation apparently of white people,

Speaker 2 then you have to account for that. And he says, you can read more about the term in President Wood's research here.
I don't believe that's research. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 I don't believe there's any data or factual components to your

Speaker 2 race lighting or your theory that when people talk about other people, there's coded messages that show they're racist and that the people who are the objects of this purported racism don't know what's happening to them, only that they second guess themselves because they haven't read President Wood's research.

Speaker 2 Don't believe that.

Speaker 2 I do believe that you're doing a disservice to the vast majority of your college community because you who, if a person was of the persuasion or considered themselves white, who would want to talk to you or deal with you or expect that you would deal with them in a fair and judicious manner after you said you wanted to eliminate whiteness?

Speaker 2 If you want to talk about exactness,

Speaker 2 what does your whiteness mean? I think when I've looked at your research and I did, I think what you mean by whiteness is the predominant Western civilization culture that the United States reflects.

Speaker 2 And I mentioned that explicitly on our podcast. And that's what you don't like about it.
But you do like about it. You do like about it because this culture that you call whiteness is self-correcting.

Speaker 2 The only reason you call it whiteness is the majority of the population who created it and brought it here and you participate in, you don't like it.

Speaker 2 And you understand there's career advantages in saying that you don't like it.

Speaker 2 And there is something called DEI, which is a racialist concept that promotes, hires, retains, and admits people on the basis in large part of their race. And you're wedded to that idea.
Because in a

Speaker 2 purely meritocratic society and one that holds people to account, I can tell you that if I said

Speaker 2 at the Hoover Institution that I have a theory that we should eliminate blackness without much explanation and we should eliminate Jewishness or anything, or even whiteness, I would be summarily dismissed.

Speaker 2 And I would never do that, because to do that is racialist, and you know it is. And you got away with it, and all of a sudden it reappeared, and now you're very upset.
And I don't blame you.

Speaker 2 If you had honor, if I were you, I would either do one or two things. I would make a video, and I would say,

Speaker 2 An earlier time in my life, a few years ago, I did believe there was such a thing called whiteness that reflected views originally of white people, and I want to eliminate those views with which I disagree.

Speaker 2 Some people believe that it is, by extension, means I want to eliminate the people who project whiteness. I don't.
I'm sorry about the confusion and I will not mention whiteness again.

Speaker 2 Or you can resign. It's up to you.

Speaker 2 And he'll do neither because he assumes that his fact-checker can get away by saying that your whole analysis is flawed, Professor Hansen, because you said that UC Davis is near Sacramento State

Speaker 2 and they're not in the same city. I never said they were.
I said, I'm a fifth-generation Californian.

Speaker 2 I can tell you, when you go from UC Davis to Sacramento, at least the suburbs, you've got about a 20-mile drive, which is near in the wider expanse of California, believe me.

Speaker 2 Fresno Fresno is near to my farm, 17 miles to downtown.

Speaker 2 So this is ridiculous, it really is, but why would you have your flack go out and try to correct the record and make errors in the correction or then just quibble over a minor little mistake and not get to the heart of the manner that he does really abide by this notion of whiteness and whiteness has to be eliminated and he won't explain exactly the relation of whiteness to white people and the confusion that normal people would have by eliminating whiteness.

Speaker 2 You want to,

Speaker 2 you know, it's like saying, I see a reflection in the mirror, and that reflection, I want to eliminate that reflection,

Speaker 2 but I don't want to break the mirror. I want to get rid of the reflection.
How do I get, because it's everywhere. Well, where does the reflection come from? It comes from someone.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you

Speaker 2 I don't know what he means by that.

Speaker 2 I really don't. I'm so glad they issued a correction because we have so many new listeners and I'm sure they've just thrilled to experience a Victor correction of a correction.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean,

Speaker 2 it's deserved. It was deserved.
And he didn't send it to me. He sent it to the Daily Signal.
But we discussed it on our podcast, but he should have sent it to me. I've had that that in the past.

Speaker 2 Just very quickly to give one example.

Speaker 2 One morning I woke up and the Stanford Daily said

Speaker 2 Director Racian should fire Victor Hansen from the Hoover Institution. And I was shocked, and I didn't know why.
In fact, I was out of town, so I called John Racian, and he started laughing.

Speaker 2 He was our director. He was a wonderful person.
He said,

Speaker 2 well, have you read the Wall Street Journal? I said, No. Well, go read it and call me back.
So, you know, those noble and quotables?

Speaker 2 I had written an essay about a week earlier that says that affirmative action

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 incompatible with the American system for a variety of reasons.

Speaker 2 And I listed them, one of which said you cannot ascertain the exact racial components of somebody without a DNA test in a multiracial, intermarried, assimilated society, nor should you try.

Speaker 2 And more importantly, you can't adjudicate to what degree a person's background earns repertory action in the present. That's all I said.
I mean,

Speaker 2 if you look at the Holocaust and survivors of the Holocaust and Jewish people are not getting special treatment, then it's very hard to suggest that someone else is.

Speaker 2 Maybe blacks because of slavery in Jim Crow, maybe some

Speaker 2 fourth generation Mexican Americans that were redlined out of property, but compared to the Holocaust and the trauma of that. So that's what I meant.
And then he said,

Speaker 2 well, there was a person on the Stanford Daily Staff that is part Asian. I think that's I'm recalling something 15 years ago.
So I said, well, what are you going to do?

Speaker 2 And he said, well, you know, they have a program, a policy that anything they print that is controversial, an attack on somebody, they will print letters to the editor. So you should write a letter.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I wrote, I think I wrote a little letter, and then somebody called me, Rush called me, Lumbell. And he said, hey, Victor, this is outrageous.
I'm going to mention it.

Speaker 2 And then it was on Mark Levine, and then the next thing, just...

Speaker 2 dozens, if not hundreds, of letters came to Stanford. 99% was, you should be ashamed of your people for attacking this.
And they printed, they put a little insert, they printed about 15, 20, 40.

Speaker 2 And then the guy called me up.

Speaker 2 And he said, I've talked to your director, and he says, if you will agree, we don't have to print anymore. I said, well, how many do you have?

Speaker 2 And he said, too many to print, and they're all on your side.

Speaker 2 I said, do what you've got to do. It's your newspaper.
But it's the same thing.

Speaker 2 You don't go to the person, you try to go to the employer or you try to go to somebody and then you quibble, but you can't even do it.

Speaker 2 Boy, it's

Speaker 2 don't quibble with Victor, folks.

Speaker 2 I try to be very careful of what I said.

Speaker 2 I guess I was tired when I said you see San Diego better than CSU San Diego.

Speaker 2 But when somebody is trying to tell me that

Speaker 2 When somebody is trying to tell me, quote, California State University Sacramento, also known as Sacramento State, State, is the only public university in the world's fourth largest economy.

Speaker 2 It's, I think he means, is the only public university in

Speaker 2 the world's fourth largest economy as symbolized by Sacramento. I don't know.
I have no idea.

Speaker 2 The capital of the state.

Speaker 2 He should have said is the only public university in the capital of the world's fourth largest economy.

Speaker 2 I'm glad he gave you, you have been given another opportunity to give this broader attention to the press. Yes, he needs to be known that Dr.
Jonathan Luke Wood,

Speaker 2 who has been president for over

Speaker 2 now, two years at California State University Sacramento,

Speaker 2 a few years ago gave an interview with a black conservative journalist, and the most controversial elements within that interview have now been

Speaker 2 sent there's been a synopsis of them short though it be and it is circulating and in it the president of California State University Sacramento unapologetically

Speaker 2 insists even when challenged to explain himself by a very good host that he has no apologies about it, that he wants to eliminate whiteness.

Speaker 2 And when he's pressed to show the difference between the reflection or the manifestation and the source, whiteness versus white, and he's given examples, blackness versus black, Jewishness, he cannot answer, and he's stubborn.

Speaker 2 And finally, he just says, I'm for all people. Essentially, that's what he says.

Speaker 2 So I don't know how someone like that can continue as a university president in a multiracial state in which so-called white people are only 36% of the population, 45% are Hispanic.

Speaker 2 And I don't understand how you can do that because anybody else who would say such a thing, and we saw it in the Los Angeles City Council hot mic a few years ago, where members of the city council of Hispanic background said something terrible about African Americans, and they, I think most of them either were censored or resigned or took a leave of absence.

Speaker 2 But that's a terrible thing to say. You want to eliminate whiteness.
Discourage whiteness? Explain what whiteness is? He couldn't even explain what whiteness is.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor,

Speaker 2 in one way, not enough, but so be it. We're going to take one little quick topic, but first, I want to let our listeners know that they need to take control over their money.

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260 million citizens are already using a digital yuan.

Speaker 2 I can never say that right, but it's their dollar. That can expire if not spent, if not spent by government deadlines.
And it's not just a theory.

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Speaker 2 Victor, I'm going to push off till after the break, the final break, your thoughts on that in-state tuition story. But let me just quickly say something came up on the news this morning.

Speaker 2 One of the morning shows JP Vance was on, and he was sticking it to the media about the focus on Epstein. And he said something to the effect of, like, we've got it.

Speaker 2 Bill Clinton, the records are Bill Clinton, visited Epstein Island 26 or 28 times.

Speaker 2 Maybe the Democrats shouldn't be making a bigger question. I don't understand that because

Speaker 2 they leak

Speaker 2 that was that's one of their brands, their signature is leaking things. We saw that with a Mueller investigation.
Everything was leaked. We saw that with James Comey.

Speaker 2 He had a private conversation with the President of the United States in which he assured him he was not the object of the ongoing crossfire hurricane investigation when he was doing exactly that, investigating Trump.

Speaker 2 He went out into his car or somewhere and he

Speaker 2 memorized what he called memorialized that conversation on an FDI device and then he sent it to a third party to leak to the New York Times. So

Speaker 2 I don't understand. Everybody knows that they had complete control over the so-called Epstein files, and they chose not to release it in four years.
And they would have been quiet today except Pam

Speaker 2 Bondi jumped over her skis and had had information that she thought could be released. It wasn't a formal list, it was just a bunch of names that had appeared in the trial and the

Speaker 2 interrogatories and text and email. And apparently, when that reached the general public, they were prominent donors.

Speaker 2 I would imagine they would be more on the Republican side, but when I looked at the list, they had people as diverse as Leonard DiCaprio, Bruce Willis that had come into contact, Alan Dershowitz.

Speaker 2 So big deal, and nobody knew the status of them. So then Pam Bondi was probably said, if you release my name and I didn't do anything,

Speaker 2 I'm going to be ruined. And the people who did do things,

Speaker 2 and she probably thought, okay, we won't, but she had said she would.

Speaker 2 That was the extent of it.

Speaker 2 And I think they would have been better off just to release all the names and let the investigative journalists, left and right, go after each name and try to see whether there was any culpability or not.

Speaker 2 It's not a fair system, but that's where we are. So my point is, that was when they got angry because of the inconsistency, but not the content.

Speaker 2 They had four years, and they would have leaked this if there were two things

Speaker 2 that were in there. One, if Donald Trump had been on that plane at that island, they would have leaked it in a nanosecond.

Speaker 2 And two, if Bill Clinton had not been on that plane, they would have leaked it. And the reason that they did not leak it was Bill Clinton, as you said, had been on that plane,

Speaker 2 not at the New York apartment alone, not at his office at Harvard alone, but at Epstein's private, whatever we call that,

Speaker 2 den

Speaker 2 that was sort of a fortified sex fortress, and he had been there. And they did not want that to get out.

Speaker 2 And so they didn't release it. And they couldn't find anything there that proved that Donald Trump had been on that flight down to the Caribbean.
So they didn't release it. That's clear.

Speaker 2 So I don't understand their strategy. I really don't.
Release the Epstein, release the Epstein, release the Epstein. I would release it.
Everything.

Speaker 2 And then maybe we would learn why they did not release it.

Speaker 2 And any collateral damage to a Republican donor or grandee or politician, if they did not engage in intercourse or sexual activity with someone under the age, depending on which state the plane was flying over, whether it was 16 or 18,

Speaker 2 then

Speaker 2 that they just showed bad taste or they were crude, but they're not a statutory rapist. Let them deal with it.
Get it out. But I don't think they want it out.
I really don't.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, we're going to take a little break and we'll come around the home turn down the stretch with, and we'll get your thoughts then on this in-state tuition break for illegals.

Speaker 2 And we'll do that right after these final important messages.

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Speaker 2 And we are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. We're recording here today.
A little mangled up, I apologize, but Sunday,

Speaker 2 what is it? It's the 10th. And this episode will be up on Tuesday, the 12th.
Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, is a must for fans of Victor's writing and wisdom that he shares.

Speaker 2 He does two exclusive articles every week for Blade of Perseus and one exclusive video.

Speaker 2 And you'll find the archives of these podcasts, links to everything else Victor writes,

Speaker 2 links to his other appearances. So it's $65 a year.
It's $6.50 a month if you want to stick your toe in the water, but discounted $65 a year.

Speaker 2 The address is victorhanson.com, and it's the blade of Perseus. Check it out.

Speaker 2 So, Victor, here's the

Speaker 2 headline from AP. So, this may be a little slanted one way or another, but

Speaker 2 thousands lose in-state tuition breaks under Trump's immigration crackdown. Tens of thousands of U.S.
college students without legal residence status are losing access to in-state tuition prices.

Speaker 2 As part of President Donald Trump's crackdown on immigration, the Justice Department has been suing states to end tuition breaks for students without legal residency.

Speaker 2 Starting with Texas in June, it also filed lawsuits in Kentucky and Minnesota, and most recently, Oklahoma. Last year, Florida ended its tuition break for students living there illegally.

Speaker 2 Federal law prohibits aliens not lawfully present in the United States from getting in state tuition benefits that are denied to out-of-state U.S.

Speaker 2 citizens, the Justice Department argued in a lawsuit this month in Oklahoma. There are no exceptions.

Speaker 2 Victor, for a lot of conservatives, this is one of the most maddening issues that illegals, you know, how come my kid can't even get into the school because they're clogged with foreigners and illegals.

Speaker 2 And that's

Speaker 2 paying for it. You know they have a lot of exposure to the left because if you look at the articles that appear today, yesterday, about this topic, they don't tell the truth.
Big surprise, shocker.

Speaker 2 They say things like Trump cuts off tuition grants for students.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 what he does do is saying if you are not a U.S. citizen and you are here illegally and you are living in a different state in which you are now

Speaker 2 your primary residence was in a different state than

Speaker 2 where you originally were, you would have been subject to out-of-state tuition.

Speaker 2 And citizens are subject to that. Okay, we all agree on that.
However, if you are illegal and you are living in the state, The left is saying, well, you're now a state resident.

Speaker 2 You are a state resident, but you're not a U.S. citizen and you're not a legal green card holder.

Speaker 2 So you are breaking the law, but you are claiming that you get a, and usually, Jack, it's about a two-thirds discount on tuition

Speaker 2 when it's not legal to do so. But more importantly is the asymmetry.

Speaker 2 You are telling the American citizen that he is not eligible for that sizable discount because he lives in a different state, but you're telling the illegal

Speaker 2 immigrant who's breaking the law that he is eligible, even though he's unlawfully here, because he happens to be in the same state in which he goes to school.

Speaker 2 This came up, I wrote a book, I wrote an article for City Journal called Mexifornia. That was a name that was very popular in the California penal system among Mexican gangs.

Speaker 2 It was a term of pride that they had taken over the prison in California. And so I used that term, Mexifornia,

Speaker 2 and in 2003, Peter Collier at Encounter Books asked me to enlarge that essay, and I did, and it came out as Mexifornia as a long essay. But here's why I wrote it.

Speaker 2 One of the reasons I wrote it is I had about, oh, 60 or 70 students that regularly took both classic courses in translation when I was teaching at Cal State University, Fresno, and Greek and Latin.

Speaker 2 And one of them was one of my brightest students, brightest. He was here illegally.
He went to a very prestigious Ivy League graduate school.

Speaker 2 And I didn't know he was illegally until he told me, or I should say, he told me after someone else told me, who was the other person who told me? He was a classic student who lived in Texas.

Speaker 2 And his family had just,

Speaker 2 I don't know, they had been in California for a while, but they were permanent residents of Texas and he came from Texas and enrolled in Fresno and they told him that he had to

Speaker 2 get a job in Fresno and reside in California I think it was over a year before he would be eligible for in-state tuition and he was very angry and he said X your student is here illegally and he

Speaker 2 gets two-thirds off CSU tuition and I have to pay the full price even though I'm a U.S. citizen.

Speaker 2 And he said, Do you know the argument?

Speaker 2 And I said, I guess it's because they figure that he buys stuff in California longer than you do, and sales tax, or his parents pay California property tax if they own a home,

Speaker 2 or they pay California state income tax, therefore they're contributors to that, and they don't care about the law, and that your parents are in Texas and pay those same fees to Texas.

Speaker 2 That's the theory, but it should be nullified by the fact that you are obeying the law and he's not.

Speaker 2 And you know what was weird about it, Jack, is that I mentioned it to this person

Speaker 2 and I kind of forgot about it. And then about a year or two later, when it came time to apply to graduate school, he got into

Speaker 2 one of the most prestigious Ivy League PhD programs and classics in the country. And then he came and reminded me that he was here illegally.

Speaker 2 And I called up the chairman and I said, I've got to be very explicit with you. This student is very bright.
He's done very well. He did very well on the GRE.

Speaker 2 I think he really deserves to be in your school. But he did not accurately answer the question of whether he was an American citizen or not.
He's not.

Speaker 2 He is a citizen of Mexico, and he's here illegally. You know what the person said to me? I think I mentioned it before.
That's even better, Victor.

Speaker 2 That is great. So we have somebody who's a person of color and now he's an undocumented.
That's great.

Speaker 2 And that was, I had another student who was just as bright and

Speaker 2 kind of eccentric. In fact, I would say this other student was the most gifted natural philologist I'd ever had as a student.

Speaker 2 By that I mean, after about six months of studying classical Greek, he could read it almost like English. He was that intuitive.
He was very strange. He was a loner.
He had very long hair.

Speaker 2 He happened to be white.

Speaker 2 And when it came time to apply to graduate schools, I had about four students that year, and four of them qualified as minorities.

Speaker 2 One, maybe dubiously, they were one quarter this or something.

Speaker 2 He had no, and all the four got into the Ivy League, and he did not.

Speaker 2 He got into, I guess, a second-tier school, but he got, we were able to get, but he was by far the best philologist, and these programs were in philology.

Speaker 2 And he came to me, and he got very angry at me, and he said, you are a perpetrator of this unjust system because you emphasize that these students were minority students, and you know that I can read Latin and Greek better than they can.

Speaker 2 And I said, yes, I do, but there's other elements that are involved, study habits, personality, compatibility, manners. I'm like you being so rude right now.

Speaker 2 But anyway, I liked him, and he did not get it.

Speaker 2 There was nothing for him, is what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 2 And one of the students was this person who earlier had got in tuition break and was illegally here.

Speaker 2 And I didn't tell him that, but it got around that X was an illegal alien and got into the best of all the program.

Speaker 2 And he didn't, and he was considered the best philologist.

Speaker 2 And I just say that because that happened a lot in my 21 years there, a lot, because I was the main advisor for classics, humanities, along with Bruce Thornton.

Speaker 2 And we probably, as I said, sent 50 or 60 people to PhD programs over 21 years.

Speaker 2 And it was just a reoccurring theme that a person who was so-called white could not get in from a third-tier school like Cal State Fresno, even with a master's degree.

Speaker 2 But you could, because it was known as having what I would call genuine minorities, not people who were, you know, fourth-generation Argentinian. Tenian or something.

Speaker 2 And it was really frustrating because the people you talked to on the other end, who were governing the department chairman, did not care. They did not care about the truth.

Speaker 2 They just wanted to get punched boxes.

Speaker 2 And I tried to reason. I said, you're making decisions on these people's lives, and you're not doing it meritocratically.

Speaker 2 And the people that you are letting in are my students, and they're very good students, but they're not deprived any more than these other students are.

Speaker 2 It was at that time, you know, 30 years ago,

Speaker 2 we were dealing with the second generation of the Oklahoma diaspora.

Speaker 2 These were people's parents who came from Oklahoma in the 30s and early 40s who were dire poor, and they still hadn't emerged from poverty.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 poor whites from Oklahoma and Arkansas, but no one cared.

Speaker 2 Well, as regular listeners of this podcast will know that you've explained many times that DEI is not a recent thing.

Speaker 2 It goes back many decades. It's affirmative action rebranded to include people other than black.

Speaker 2 It was redefined by Obama and said that we're no longer in a black-white binary. We're in a white, everybody else but white, and it's not 90-10, it's 30-70

Speaker 2 demographically.

Speaker 2 And that started under Obama. It really did, among all the other pernicious things he did.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yes. Oh, gosh.
What a long list. Destroyer

Speaker 2 of our country. Well, it's not destroyed yet.
Hey, Victor, we've, because of my idiocies here. Did everybody realize that there was a scene change with Jockey

Speaker 2 scene one to scene two?

Speaker 2 Actually, you should know, mentioning Mexicornia, that yesterday I went to a store to buy something to

Speaker 2 supposedly amplify my Wi-Fi at my house. It failed.
But while I was shopping, I had a National Review t-shirt on. A guy buttonholes me,

Speaker 2 hey, National Review, and he started talking to me about Mexifornia and you and Raymond Ibrahim, the book you did together way, way back. So

Speaker 2 it's funny you mentioned Mexifornia now, but

Speaker 2 we were talking about you in a Target store last night in

Speaker 2 Trumbull, Connecticut, Victor. So, hey, again, want to thank you for all the wisdom you shared.
Thank folks for checking out Victor's website.

Speaker 2 There's There's also on Twitter or X, excuse me, at V D Hansen. There's a great friends of Victor Davis, the Victor Davis Hansen fan club on Facebook.

Speaker 2 And for me, as for me, I write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter. It gives 14 recommended readings.
It comes out every Friday. Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.
It's free.

Speaker 2 We don't sell your name. You're going to like it.
I know you will. Thanks, Victor.
Thanks for your patience and tolerance.

Speaker 2 And thanks to our listeners and our many new viewers through YouTube and Rumble. And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 2 Thank you, everyone, for listening and viewing.