Obama as ex-President and Conservative Ghettos on Campus

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor Davis Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

There he is, looking all peppy and

peppy and recovery, the endless recovery.

Victor, he's out in sunny California.

I'm Jack Fowler in the People's Republic of Connecticut.

It's a beautiful day here.

Important things to talk about to get Victor's take on.

Yeah, did I mention, I forget if I mentioned the day.

It's Monday, July 21st.

This episode will be up on the 24th.

Victor, we need more elaboration, discussion, intelligence from you on the Russia hoax story, on the Autopen, on the new nominee for mayor of Minneapolis.

The Manhattan Institute has put out a Manhattan statement on higher education reform.

And the Democrats are going to do an analysis of what happened in 2024.

But you can't talk about Kamala and you can't talk about Joe Biden.

I don't know.

Anyway, Looney Town.

But we'll get to all these topics and Victor's take on them when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I didn't mention, I'm just scatterbrained here today.

I apologize.

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Okay, Victor.

The Russia hoax.

We talked about it in the last episode, but we need a little more take from you.

Now, one of today's headlines is Telsi Gabbard,

the intelligence head

who has unleashed these documents, putting out

the documents that have been, I don't know, hidden, unexposed for the last few years.

She said whistleblowers are coming out of the woodwork

to talk about just what went down with Barack Obama, John Brennan, James Comey, and the cast of characters.

Victor, your take on the further take on this, and also, if you might compare it a little to that great scandal of Watergate, I mean, I think people, they shot horses for, you know, they shot people for far less than what is going on now.

That's a good point.

I think all of our listeners are kind of bewildered.

I am,

because

a couple of things.

Trump said, no, his revenge is a success, as we mentioned, but this is different.

This is

of such a magnitude of what they did.

It's like trying to destroy Mike Flynn ten times over with the President of the United States elect.

And remember, we've already gone through the collusion in the 2015-16 cycle.

This is different.

This is after he was elected.

This was in the transition period in the first months of Donald Trump's tenure.

And

I know somebody said to me, I was at a place last weekend where a lot of people came up to me and said, Donald Trump,

he's tweeting too much.

And I guess today Trump had some he had

Brennan Clapper and everybody in prison garb and profiles as if they're in prison.

And he said Barack Hussein, Obama.

I understand what everybody's worried about.

He shouldn't probably do that.

But they tried to destroy him.

They tried to destroy him personally, financially, psychologically, and career-wise.

And they tried to destroy an elected president.

There's a lot of

clips that are going around today that I looked at, and it's just amazing for Hillary Clinton to have said,

not just before the election, but afterwards.

17 intelligence agencies, 17 intelligence agencies, 17 intelligence agencies, and then you hear Barack Obama, outgoing Barack Obama, lame duck in the last month.

Well,

17 intelligence agencies said that Trump was

working with...

And then you had this clips of Clapper saying he's a Russian asset.

And then there's Brennan,

and then there's Comey, 245 times he can't remember.

And he's assuring the President of the United States, the President of the United States, that he is not the subject of cross-fire hurricane.

And he was.

So you add it all up.

And the crux of the situation, as I said last time, is that the intelligence heads were told by the 17 intelligence agencies, their heads, that there was no proof that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to throw elections or was an inadvertent beneficiary of their efforts.

And they were baffled, as we talked about last time, because Dutch intelligence tapped into them and they tapped into Hillary Clinton's emails, and they found out that Hillary Clinton was blaming them for colluding with

Trump, which they knew they weren't, but they were baffled why she was doing it until they

concluded it was because

she was trying to hide her own email exposure, which they exploited.

So what I'm getting at is there's a paper trail.

They all talk too much.

James Comey, 245 times when he was asked directly, he said, I don't know.

James Comey

leaked a classified document.

James Comey for the last four years has tweeted.

He's been on television.

There's a whole paper trail.

James Clapper was a CNN consultant and John Brennan was MSNBC and they're on record again and again and again.

And what we learn now is they were told after the election by 17 intelligence agency heads there was no collusion.

And they deliberately, in the case of Brennan, may allegedly have destroyed that and just said ignore that.

And why did Brennan do it?

Because they're going to start blaming each other.

Jack, and so when Brennan destroyed this

assessment or suppressed it and then gave a false assessment to Obama, he's going to say that he was told to do that by Obama.

Because Obama, it's been reported that Obama said to his intelligence twins, Clapper and Brennan, I want this to continue.

I want to develop this, even though they had been told there was nothing there.

So it's going to be, he said, she said.

And it's just, finally, it's the further evidence of

the fall and further fall of Barack Obama.

He was already

discredited when he tried to rev up everybody for the failed Harris lecture on the election.

And then he gave a lecture to those black, very enthused campaign workers, and basically basically said in Marxist fashion, you're deluded and you're suffering from false consciousness because you're afraid, you don't know you're afraid, but I can

read your mind, you're afraid to vote for a powerful black woman.

And then, you know, he gave this embarrassing, did you see that podcast he gave with Michelle?

It was talking about, they were talking, as Michelle's want is, she always blames people for her unhappiness, her insecurities.

So she doesn't like powerful black men.

So she was saying that

in association with the crisis of men, subtext on spoken, black men, who 70% of them don't have a two-parent family, that you have a community, takes a community to raise a man.

And then she interviewed Barack Obama.

He came on there and he said, well,

You need to have some close advisors.

You need to have some close confidants that help out, meaning I had no father and I turned out to be the genius that I am.

And the reason was

I had a gay professor.

And this gay professor took me under his wing

and became a surrogate father.

And I'm thinking, Barack, the whole dark internet is covered with

John Marshall Davis's pornographic career, his tutelage of you,

the Pakistani roommate at Occidental.

It's just a swamp of accusations that you're gay.

So why would you go out and say that traditional fatherhood is not enough, that you need a surrogate person, and that surrogate person that saved you or helped you was a gay professor?

I mean, maybe it's true, but all he's doing is fueling that whole narrative.

And maybe when you couple that with his anger or her anger or their talk about divorce or separation, that is sort of a Philippine.

Maybe he wants people to know that he's unhappy.

I don't know, but it was a disaster.

I was listening to it when I was driving.

It was a disaster.

It really was.

And so he,

it's pretty clear that Barack Obama hated Donald Trump, that he was shocked when Donald Trump won, that he knew that Hillary had prompted because Brennan told him that

Brennan said in writing that Hillary Clinton had prompted a false narrative to destroy Donald Trump.

And

that's what the intelligence, that came, I guess, from somebody talking about this Russian source.

But

it's pretty clear to conclude that Barack Obama was President of the United States, and he ordered

these intelligence heads to ignore what their agencies had found, i.e.

nothing, and to pursue a narrative that he felt would destroy Donald Trump, of which he had no evidence for.

And then he unleashed James Comey and John Brennan and James Clapper and Victoria Newland and a whole bunch of other people.

And then they spread this thing, Bruce and

Nellie Orr and a whole bunch of them, James A.

Baker.

They all spread it.

And that was by design.

George W.

Bush leaves office after two terms with a political tail between his legs, right?

His numbers are low.

He's turned the government back over essentially to the Democratic Party.

And Barack Obama does the same thing.

And George Bush goes quietly into the night.

He went out like the gentleman he always was.

He was a professional.

I've met him a few times.

People disagreed with a lot of things he did, but

he had a professional code of conduct, and he didn't go from the sideline.

Even though he didn't like Trump, he wasn't vocal about it.

He said one time at the first inauguration, that was weird S-H-I-T, you remember that?

When he heard the populist MAGA narrative.

But he didn't do what the Never Trumpers did.

He didn't do what Mitt Romney did.

Mitt Romney became a loudmouthed Never Trumper, and then for a brief tenure in his career, what was his name?

It was

Pancho or Rolando, something.

He had a

kind of an Anthony Weiner fake name on social media.

I remember

they all liked Hispanic name.

Carlos Danger.

Is it Carlos Danger?

I think so.

Anyway, he wanted Donald Trump's endorsement for that Utah seat, so he asked, and Trump gave it to him.

And then, as soon as he got it and got elected,

he voted to convict Donald Trump.

Well, I guess the point I was trying to get at or throw up there for your take was

you know, we could say George Bush acted in a presidential way, put presidential in quotes.

And many people are critical of Donald Trump being unpresidential in many of the things he does.

For example,

the

social

message you just...

But

maybe the king of

acting in a non-presidential fashion is Barack Obama, who, as an ex-president, tried to destroy the next presidency despite his own terrible performance as president.

That was one of the themes I wrote in the first Trump book, The Case for Trump.

Would you rather have somebody that was crass and crude and told the truth?

And I'm not saying it's an either-or, I know there's gradations, but or would you like sober and judicious and eloquent and mellifilous Barack Obama lying and trying to destroy people's lives?

And that's what he did.

And he's the only thing that's different now, Jack, you get the impression that

CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, NPR,

they don't have the same stature.

Their megaphone isn't as loud as when Obama capitalized on them.

And the people around

Hillary and Obama,

Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken, Ben Rhodes, they're all disgraced.

So he's lost a lot of his stature.

He's lost a lot of his subordinates.

He's lost a lot of his outlets.

It's just a wild west now on the internet.

He can't control it.

And so the idea that he's going to give an interview

to the New York Times, anybody cares, it doesn't matter.

Brock, you're out there and you're going to sink or swim.

I don't know what the truth is.

It's all going to come out now.

It's all going to come out.

I don't think they're going to do anything to him because all they'll have to do is just have a New York or Washington, D.C.

judge and jury, and he'll get off.

He could, you know, do anything, but he's going to have to account for what he did.

And that's going to silence him because the moment he opens his mouth, as he customarily does on social media every couple of days, people are going to say,

If I were you, I wouldn't talk given what you're doing.

People, see, everybody, James Comey, for example, he's always talking about how crude Donald Trump is, but he was the one that, as we said last time, arranged this, you know, 86, 47.

And he's all of these spies.

John Brennan said he was a head of the Kakistocracy, and he said he was a Russian operative.

James Clapper accused him of being a traitor.

These people are...

Just because they wear ties or just because they have letters after their name or they have fancy titles doesn't mean they're not scoundrels.

They're all scoundrels.

They weaponize the government.

And you know how you know they weaponize the government?

Because if you,

I'm serious, Jack, as I just did, if you Google weaponize and Barack Obama and government, it'll have Barack Obama warning about other people, i.e., Trump, weaponizing the government.

That's what comes out, because they project.

My wife's under the impression that from youth, people

always would say, now everyone be quiet, like she's in the second grade.

Everyone be quiet.

Barry has something to say.

And he just seems to have been raised in this tradition that everything that came out of his mouth with pearls of wood.

Remember the biography of him?

I looked at part of it by the famous civil rights historian.

And when he was in his prep school in Hawaii, he was kind of a mediocre seventh or eighth man on the team, but he was always demanding the coach let him in for more playing time.

And he had an outsized

remember how he had that little meme when he was president that he was a great basketball, and he was following the Final Four.

And

he and Reggie Love, the ex-baseball player,

basketball player, melded together somehow.

And the point was that he really wanted to let us all know that he was a great athlete.

But he was the same type of personality.

Always more outspoken than his abilities warranted.

We saw when he threw out the first pitch, I think it was a White Sock game.

We saw what kind of an athlete he was.

Hey, Vic, you mentioned George Boyce's first pitch.

Oh,

yeah,

the World Series.

Yeah, beautiful.

Hey, you mentioned media.

We're going to get to that in the auto pen.

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Victor, let's back into the Autopen story by seeing how the media has covered it.

And our good friends, and I love media research.

Center Brent Bozell, who's, I don't know if

he's been confirmed yet or even up.

He's a not president's nominated ambassador to South Africa, but here's a headline: ABC, CBS, PBS censor Biden's auto pen scandal.

NBC offers a scamp 34 seconds.

Here's the first few paragraphs of a story.

On June 18th, Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings into whether former President Joe Biden was actually in charge.

Given his clear mental decline, a focal point of the investigation was the concern that the auto pen was being used for executive orders and pardons without Biden's knowledge.

All four broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS ignored it.

There wasn't any reporting of the topic until a July 13th New York Times story that prompted a brief 34-second mention by NBC.

In the month of coverage, ABC, CBS, and

PBS have yet to devote a single second to the Biden Auto Pen scandal on their evening, morning, or Sunday roundtable show.

shows.

Victor, maybe no one cares because nobody watches them anymore.

But the media is the same old media.

I didn't understand that.

You know, Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon went to jail when they were subpoenaed to Congress.

Why didn't they just say, okay, I'll show up.

And then every time they ask him anything, they'd say, I can't, under the Fifth Amendment, I can't testify.

And I guess they had too much dignity or they didn't want to give the impression that they were lying or hiding something as these people did who went up and took the Fifth.

Remember Eric Colder when they asked him about Fast and Furious?

He wouldn't really, he wouldn't produce produce documents.

He wouldn't testify.

He wouldn't come even.

They held him in contempt, just like Steve Bannon, and they did a referral like they did to Merrick Garland.

And there were always two rules.

If you were a left-wing, prominent person, and Congress called you to testify, you just said blank you, and nothing happened.

If you were Bannon, who was a close advisor to the President of the United States, or Peter Navarro, who was one of his chief domestic advisors, and you called them, and they didn't show up, they put you in ankle cuffs and handcuffs, tried to humiliate you.

So nothing.

Sandy Berger stole documents.

Peter Sanderson.

He stuck them in his crotch, remember?

Stuck them in his crotch.

Yeah, he did.

All these people, again, there's two different

scenarios here.

There's a people who can be crude and loud and they're honest and they make no bones about their views of Trump, of Bannon, of Peter Navarro.

And then there's all of these sober and judicious, careful apparatus of the apparatus, and Eric Holder, Merrick Garland, James Clapper, James Comey, John Brennan, Barack Obama, they're very carefully and they no, no, no, no, no, no, they're just scoundrel.

They really are.

Well, the auto pen thing, Victor, it's just so disturbing.

I mentioned before that

freaking judge in Scranton who somehow was sending kids to this foster care jail, essentially, and getting kickbacks.

How does a guy like that, what did he do to merit a presidential pardon?

Never mind all the murderers who got off.

Well, it's really the staffers were getting, we don't know, they were getting emails, at least one or two of them, about

whom to pardon and whom not.

So Biden didn't even know any of them.

So that's there, and yet they won't testify.

All they had to do was say, yes, I got an email from somebody, but I assumed that Joe Biden had orally approved it.

They can't even do that.

Got to leave this money somewhere along the way.

Just think about what we've been through.

So

I was speaking to a group not too long ago, and somebody in the audience, a very prominent person, a former high office holder, said, January 6th, January 6th, January 6th, January 6th.

And I said,

do you understand

that the two biggest attempted coups in this country's history were the Russian collusion-dash laptop disinformation efforts that affected the 2016 and surely affected the 2020 election and the first 22 months of a presidency that was almost destroyed by a complete lie?

Are you sure?

that you want to say that when Joe Biden didn't know where he was

and he had a whole surrogate team that had...

And how did he get elected?

He got nominated first by a cabal that got rid of the opposition, and then he was appointed as a waxen effigy as good old Joe Biden.

And then

he lived by the coup and he died by the coup.

They just called him up and said, you're done.

After that debate, no, excuse me, everybody.

They said, Joe, you have to have a stress test.

I know you say you're perfectly fine, but you're going to have a historic debate.

You're going to go full Clint Eastwood and bait Donald Trump so that he would foolishly give you a very, very early debate.

So when you blow it, we can get rid of you and get somebody in there.

And then they had a coup and got rid of him and put on Harris.

Not one person voted for Kamala Harris.

She didn't get I should say not one delegate.

And they just anointed her.

Remember

Joe Manchin for about, what, 24 hours?

Senator Manchin, are you thinking?

Yeah, yeah, see what the convention does.

I'm here as a moderate alternative.

No, no, no.

That was it.

Yeah, the train left the station.

Hey, Victor, I want to ask you about some of these prominent people.

And then we've got this Minnesota, Minneapolis mayoral race that

seems like it's going to echo what's happening in New York.

We have what else?

We have

the Manhattan statement to bring up the Democratic Party self-analysis.

And we'll get to all these things when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, so I'm not putting you on the spot, but because you just mentioned earlier, you talked to some people recently, and I'm curious, these folks,

if you could take a temperature about Donald Trump and his successes

here in the second term, financial too, the markets are up, et cetera.

And there's a g let's assume there's a general position on him by these people you talk to.

Are they more positive about him than you would have thought they would have been?

Are they less?

Or

are they resentful?

It's almost, I must have spoken to

one, two, three, four, five, six.

I would call them Hoover Institution supporters all over the country, maybe in five different states this spring.

And then I probably

spoke to other like groups.

And I say altogether I must have spoken to two or three hundred of what we would call the bicosta elite, maybe center-right,

and they all say the same thing.

I don't like Trump's tweets.

I just don't like it.

I don't like him.

But you know what?

I can't find one thing he's done wrong.

The border, military recruitment.

I didn't like that trade stuff and the tariff, but my God, the economy didn't crash.

It's doing well.

And I got sick of the bias at PBF, but I don't, my wife can't stand it.

That's what they say.

But gosh, it's so much better than the first term.

They all say that.

And the subtext of all of them is:

when you start looking at, as we said earlier, known on knowns, we know there's things in action right now that we have never seen before.

We have never ever seen a million people self-deport.

We have never seen zero illegal aliens.

Think of a million people deporting the vast majority on public assistance.

And we're kind of

one-fifth of the way getting rid of 500,000.

Just think of the economic benefits of that.

If you deport people who are wards of the state or you get rid of 100,000 known criminals and we don't know about the trade and as I said May was a an aberrant date.

There was more revenue than there was

expenditures and everybody said, well that's a May is always peculiar.

It's peculiar, yes, and you're absolutely right.

It may be reversed in June, but it's peculiar in a way that we haven't seen since 2017.

That's eight years.

We have not had a single May where you had more revenue coming in than going out.

I looked at the Wall Street Journal today, Jack, it's schizophrenic.

I thought, who are you people?

Let me look at your names.

Oh, yes, you were the ones in March.

Recession, recession, trade war, trade war, stock market collapse, inflation, maybe stagflation.

Business leaders upbeat on the Trump economy.

Yeah, yeah, because they're starting to see that if you get

Doug Bergham said the other day, not, I had said 10 to 10, he thinks 15 trillion in new

investment.

Silicon Valley, as I said, is $9 trillion in market capitalization, $9 trillion.

So you're talking about one and three-quarters of Silicon Valley,

one

twice as large,

almost twice as large investment.

Two Silicon Valleys plop down all over the country if that happens.

And then you hear Doug Bergham, you know, he makes the

he's a very smart guy, and he was on TV.

And,

you know, when he says there's a hundred trillion dollars in assets, they go crazy.

But what he's talking about is

why are we worried about Canadian lumber when California used to have 30 mills, it only has two?

We have all this lumber, we have all these rare earth minerals.

We're going to open, we have all this coal, we have all this oil, which is not, it's not being utilized.

And

we're doing this German subsidies-type wind and solar when we have all these.

And so there's things out.

What I'm trying to get at, there's things that are going on below the radar screen.

We know them, but we don't know the effect of them.

We don't know the effect of what China has to pay in tariffs to stay in our market.

We don't know the effect of all these endowment taxes and all these

surcharges down, you know, 10 billion here, a billion there, it adds up.

And we don't know the effect of deregulation.

He was on television about three weeks ago just saying that the permitting in the Department of Energy and the Department of Interior has gone from six months to three weeks.

Just think of the economic.

So there's it's a holistic approach of deregulation, tax cuts, the promotion of AI

as a productive money, making, money-saving, saving

new type of technology, robotics, foreign investment, closing the border, the military getting its recruits with volunteers, the deportations.

Add it all up, and it will have an economic lift.

I really do.

You know, on the cultural front, Victor, this is just an anecdote, and it's a Bronx anecdote.

It involves two of my sisters who live in a certain area of the Bronx.

It's a mixed, a little bit Irish-left, Dominican, et cetera.

But the last few years under Biden, you just want to blow your brains out at night, especially on the weekends.

Just madhouse.

Not criminal necessarily, but a madhouse.

And I saw my sisters the other day, went down there, and I said, How's it going?

Because they wanted to get it during the summer.

They just said, We've got to get out of here.

It's just crazy.

He says, Everything's quiet.

And they

one of them's a bit of a lefty.

Sure, it has to do with self-deportation.

Like the dynamics of the neighborhood of change.

A million people add up.

And I've been really ragging, if I could use that word,

Gavin Newsom, but

Gavin should take a deep breath and say, my best friend is Donald Trump.

Maybe he thinks that, and he can't say it, because if half of the illegal aliens are in California and there's a million deportations, just say 300,000 self-deported, we were broke.

So basically, Donald Trump is taking wards of the California welfare system off Gavin's hands.

And when you, you know, I drove by sections of high-speed rail recently, there's not one.

Our former colleague Rich Lowry has a very good column on it, very good, and it's about the boondoggle, the not one foot of track lay,

$30 billion.

That was supposed to be the price for the whole thing.

And, you know, 90,000 people in Merced, 400,000 in Bakersfield, and we spent $30 billion and we're going to

go from nowhere.

And I like people from Bakersfield, but compared to what most major rail hubs is, Bakersfield and Reset don't qualify.

But the point I mean, if he cut them off, Gavin can say, oh my gosh, we were almost ready to finish high-speed rail.

And Donald Trump cut it off.

So I don't have to spend any more, I can't spend any more state money.

That guy deported people.

Oh, wow, what's our Medi-Cal budget?

Oh,

it's not so much in the red.

And maybe Donald Trump will say, you know, what you're going to do on federal lands in California, we're going to develop some natural gas or something.

Oh, my God.

Oh, wow.

We have the highest unemployment of any state.

It's well over 5%

now.

And

Trump is his punching bag, but I think deep down he thinks, I'm going to ride the Trump wave, and it's going to help me get out of the self-created mess that I have inflicted on California, and maybe I can use him.

Well, it's kind of hard to do with headlines like this.

I said this to you just before we started recording.

Here's a headline from the, this is from the Washington Free Beacon, a piece by Andrew Kerr.

Gavin Newsom pushed Private Foundation to donate $500,000 to anti-ICE to fund police groups.

As he did in 2023, Newsom asked the James Irvine Foundation, a private foundation in California, to donate $500,000 to the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a group that supports defunding the police, etc.

I don't know how he ⁇ you're right, Victor,

he should latch on to

Trump's successes here.

Well, you know what?

He reminds me of Jefferson Davis or

Calhoun, you know, these separatist insurrectionist

nullificators.

Because that's what they did.

They were trying to solicit private people to resist in the 1850s and late the federal government.

And they confiscated federal land and they said the federal law did not apply within Alabama or Florida or

that's what they did.

They're doing exactly like what he did.

They tried to use their powers, federal and state, to destroy the authority.

and the domain of the federal government in their states.

And that's exactly what he's doing.

He's a neo-Confederate.

He really is.

And if anybody else tried that from the right, and I've mentioned before, you know, oh, the five-spotted lizard is no longer.

Oh, I squashed him with my bulldozer in Wyoming.

Oh, there was a federal endangered speech.

Not in Wyoming there isn't.

We just go ahead and smash those little guys.

He would go, you know what I mean?

It's such an outrage, you know.

Well, you've been, you're the first one, and I'm done it consistently on

the new Confederacy and it's.

Yeah, I wrote too many articles about it.

It's something else.

You know, I said to Sammy, I think it was you, that when I walked to an airport, I see a particular person eye me at a distance.

Yes.

Did you see all

that type of profile up in Maine where Justice Roberts has a

little cut?

Yeah, they were protesting with their

puff vest and kayaks and their Abercrombie and fish outfits on kayaks.

And they were all fitting.

I thought, I've seen every one of you at an airport.

You give me that stare about 500 yards away, and then you start to come forth like you're a little leopard or something.

Can you imagine

how they plan that, Victor?

Their little

social media group.

And let's get ourselves in the future.

Imagine, I thought now, wow, these are the same people in Nantucket.

They said, Donald Trump,

illegal immigration,

he's against a good marriage.

Oh, wow.

There's all these people from Oaxaca and Martha's Vineyard.

Let's get the charity boxes.

Let's get all of our Hoka shoes that we can't wear.

Let's get all of our puff vests.

Let's get everything we can and get it over to them immediately.

Oh, I feel so good.

I gave Manuel my $200 youth sneakers.

Hey, Manuel, there's a bus outside.

See you.

Wouldn't want to be.

Get over to New York.

Get over to Chicago.

Not in my name here.

That's how they think.

It really is.

I'm not being a I'm not caricaturing.

I'm very fond of uh I know very I'm fond of John Roberts, and I know Mrs.

Roberts is a graduate of uh Holy Cross, uh so uh so is Mrs.

Fowler, so am I.

So

as I said before, people have criticized John Roberts on our side, but

what is it now?

Is it 16 or 17 out of twenty Supreme Court decisions uh that involve the lower district courts have gone Trump's way.

It would have been impossible without him.

It really would.

So he's very quietly enforcing the law and the law that favors Donald Trump.

And if he's so bad, you wouldn't have all these Karens kayaking around his summer retreat, defaming him and lying about him.

You know what I mean?

So

I think he's a sympathetic figure.

I've always thought that.

I'm going to go get my kayak and drive up there and defend his dock.

So,

hey, Victor, let's talk about, before we take another break here and get some other subjects,

his headline, Minneapolis mayor who oversaw Black Lives Matter riots, loses Democrat backing to Somali American socialists.

This happened on Saturday.

He lost,

who was it here now?

Jacob Frye.

Remember him?

He was about as far left as you could get in 2020 when they were burning and all the fumes were wafting into Tim Waltz's wife's open window.

Remember?

Do you remember him groveling before some meeting of

the five police?

Yes.

And I remember him going out and looking at the fire and worrying about whether the people who were letting the fires off were okay.

He is now,

he may run.

A la New York, where

current mayor, incumbent Mayor Adams is going to run as an independent.

Fry,

who may be the conservative in the race, compared to Omar Fatah, 35 Minnesota state senator, who won the endorsement of the Democrat Farmer Labor Party.

He got 60% of the votes from the delegates at their convention on Saturday, and he is a complete freaking leftist.

I don't know what they call him.

He's called a socialist.

I think he's a very good person.

That's so strange that an immigrant Muslim

radical leftist would have a name that was close to Fatah, the name of the Palestinian radical terrorist group.

But anyway,

he's running, and when you look at the pictures of his supporters, it's that same kayak crowd that's supporting the

Farmer Labor Party of Minnesota.

And you want to go what goes through their mind?

I got mine, and maybe socialism will impoverish everybody else, and they'll stop all growth.

So I don't have a windmill,

I mean, you know, an air turbine thing, and I don't have a solar farm right next to my Minet's Minnesota forest retreat, or when I get on my Tesla, not now, Tesla, my EV and go down the freeway, it's not too clogged with these hoi-polloy

diesel pickups or so.

I don't know what it is, but why would they vote for a socialist when they're all affluent under

and they're all products of capitalism?

And that's been a question that we've all asked ourselves.

And usually the answer is they have reached a level of affluence where they're never responsible or they are protected from their ideology.

It's always inflicted on poor people and middle-class people, but not them.

As important as it was for our generals, Millie and others, Victor, as you remember, talked about many times too, to investigate this concept of white nationalism and

how

prevalent it is and infective, etc.

I wonder why they don't have the same desire to investigate how prevalent these weirdos are are on the left and their role in society and what makes them tick.

I don't know.

You mentioned, you know what, I was thinking these pardons were a little overdone, but when you think about it very carefully, they were kind of inspired because

Anthony Fauci, I think you could make the argument light under oath.

And I think you can make the argument that if there was any one American responsible for gain-in-function viruses in China, it was him by recycling money

from Echo Health or allowing transfers of key instrumentation.

And then you think of Mark Milley, he took a pardon too.

And I thought, well, I was just thinking to him the other day.

What if Mike Flynn had never been the target of crossfire hurricane?

Remember James going,

we just went in there and got Michael Flynn.

We didn't, the guys didn't even know that he didn't, he didn't even have a lawyer.

Can you believe it?

He was laughing about taking a destroying that man's career.

And what if Michael Flynn had, right now, during the Obama administration, we were talking about, well, what would the left say if Michael Flynn called up the Russians and said, listen,

I'm a key four-star general, and I am in a very high position in CENTCOM.

Now, if I...

get an order from Barack Obama that I think is dangerous, and he's dangerous.

I'm going to call you guys up first and warn you.

What would they do?

They would have had him hung by the heels.

And that's what Milley did.

And he got a pardon.

So all these people did things we've never quite experienced.

And I don't think they're

personally, I don't think any of them are going to be held to account.

I think they're going to be embarrassed.

I think they're going to have to spend a lot of money on their lawyers.

But I don't think anything's going to happen to them.

I agree with you.

They'll have to wait till the afterlife, but that's the reality of America.

And I've said this before, Victor, you've said it before too.

I mean, what commies,

the head of Bulgaria, Poland, East Germany, did any of these ever face consequences for their madness and mayhem and murder on this earth?

And they didn't.

They got away with it.

Nobody gets away with it, though.

In the end, nobody gets away with it.

Victor, let's talk about one more political thing, and then we're going to take a break, and then we're going to get on some, we'll round out the show with some, I think, important higher education topics.

So the last political thing, here's a headline from the Daily Mail from the other day.

Insane oversight in the Democratic Party's autopsy of the disastrous 2024 election.

The Democratic Party plans to dissect what exactly went wrong in the 2024 presidential election, with two glaring exceptions in the analysis.

The After Action Review commissioned by the DNC won't question the timing of President Biden's decision to stand down before the election.

That's one thing.

The review will also steer clear of finding out whether Kamala Harris was the best pick to replace Biden following his disastrous campaign report performance.

So, Victor, yeah, we're going to have a study that's going to be a half-high-neat study.

Any thoughts about that?

Yeah, did Trump or one of Trump's advisors or friends say it's like going to a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad?

I think it's like a guy has a heart attack, he goes in for a bypass, and they instead concentrate on taking his appendix out.

I mean, the whole purpose of the autopsy is to show you why they lost, and they have the polling data.

The polling data shows two trends.

Hispanic males and black males abandoned them in the millions, and that was the margin of error in places like Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada.

There's no doubt about it.

And the second thing were certain issues killed them.

Defund the police, but especially open borders.

So if they were going to do a disinterested analysis, they would say, these are the 70, 30 issues we've got to address, and we've got to mark

directly ask Hispanic men and black men why they voted for a multi-billionaire from Manhattan.

And if they were wise, they could do a third thing.

They could take a close analysis of Camilla Harris's A, her word salad, where she was incoherent.

For the first 40 days, she didn't even have an interview.

She hid.

C, she was buying endorsements from a bunch of over-the-hill celebrities and her staff was blowing through money in the millions of dollars and jets and flying around.

So it was the worst managed campaign.

It was one of the worst candidates, but they can't do any of that.

She's a black woman.

You don't dare say that illegal immigration is bad.

The Green Dew Deal, don't ever question it.

Everybody wants to defund the police.

So again, they're at McGovern, 1972.

They're going to do it again.

And then I was listening to

Eric Swalwell,

dupe,

and

Beto Arvork.

And they, I was driving for six hours yesterday,

across the

very wealthy areas, but basically across the detritus of the California infrastructure.

And I was just listening.

Beto Arourk was really weird.

And so was Eric Swalwell.

And they had cuts.

Their analysis is they weren't mean enough.

We've got to get mean.

We've got to get tough.

We've got to get mean.

We've got to get tough.

We've got to go for the throat.

You did that you tried to destroy donald trump you impeached him twice you tried him as a private citizen you indicted him 93 times you raided his house you raided melania's underwear drawer you you took away her banking privileges you took him off the ballot you tried that in 25 states you lied in the biggest scandal in history 20

2015 and 2016.

you invented an entire hoax to destroy a candidate.

Hillary Clinton hired Christopher Steele through three paywalls to do what?

To destroy Donald Trump.

You did everything imaginable.

You turned a riotous, bumpkin, weirdo demonstration on January 6th into insurrection.

You lied, said five people were murdered.

You did everything that was dirty, angry, over the top.

And what's the analysis?

We didn't do it now.

And that's what turned off people.

You can, you know, I'm doing this, I'm doing finishing the manuscript of the second analysis, The Fall and Rise of Trump.

And boy, I've been looking at every one of those indictments and every single time there was a mugshot, an indictment.

Donald Trump, in 10 days, his polls went up one or two points.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That which does not destroy me makes me stronger, literally, and this is politically with him.

Yeah.

Yeah, he is.

All right.

We have

a hard break in 20 minutes, so we're going to take a final commercial break here, and then I've got two topics to pose to Victor.

We're going to wrap it up with his genius and brilliance on some higher ed issues.

We'll do that when we come back from these messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, talking to Victor on the 21st of July, Monday.

This episode will be up on Thursday the 24th.

Victor, first headline.

Samuel Abrams wrote this piece in National Review, throwing conservatives a bone won't fix what's wrong with Harvard.

Conservative faculty are almost impossible to find

at that campus.

And that absence has created a warped, often anti-intellectual climate on campus in response to the intense and deserved political legal pressure the administration, Trump administration, is applying to Harvard, particularly with regard to the presence of campus anti-Semitism and of a progressive activist faculty intolerant of other views.

There is now talk of Harvard's creating a conservative center on campus to promote viewpoint diversity and fend off these concerns.

I don't know, Victor, I think it's a joke.

I think it's too little, too late.

There's efforts to do the same, as you know, at the University of Texas as well as the new campus at the University of Austin.

But my point is, and they can be good things for conservatives, but this is what the left does when they're confronted with the reality that they had basically McCarthy-era loyalios.

If you are going to get this job, you must state what you have done in the past, the present, and the plan for the future to enhance diversity, equity, inclusion.

That's what they do.

If you don't answer it, or you don't,

you know, you're not hired.

So, the result over these years with affirmative action, DEI, and all that stuff is 95% of these elite campuses have liberal faculty.

95% of the faculty I should say on these all of these elite.

So why don't you try to

junk the loyalty oath?

Why don't you try to get different you they all love diversity

I mean they they define diversity as hating white males, but why don't they make intellectual diversity?

So instead they want to make a little Balkan-like enclave, like the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

The problem with that is that when you put all of the conservatives in one place,

two things happen.

They're completely marginalized and they have zero effect on the run, the day-to-day operations.

So the Hoover Institution sits right in the most choice location.

I'm on the 11th floor of the tower.

I look over the, every time I'm in my office, I look over the campus.

I have zero influence.

The whole institution has zero influence.

And if you don't believe it, we just had a 900-page analysis of anti-Semitism written by one Hoover Fellow.

I don't think it will have any effect, a very liberal Hoover fellow, and they found that it's epidemic.

The Hoover Institution's there, but it doesn't seem to affect the fact that they put on their website 9% of the admittees the last four years were white males.

9%.

Or they don't seem to have any effect that they were charging 50% surcharges.

They have racially segregated dorms, segregated,

excuse me, theme houses, and racially segregated, oh, excuse me, auxiliary or additional graduation ceremonies.

So, what I'm getting at, that's the one thing.

They don't serve the purpose of trying to make the university more liberal.

They just put them all in one place, kind of like a gulag.

And then the second thing, yes, the second thing that happens is

when you have the Hoover Institution or a Harvard Conservative, there will be people with some means that will step up on the conservative side and try to donate.

So half of the Hoover budget comes from, roughly, I won't give you the numbers, but half the number comes from the endowment income and half comes from annual giving.

And when the Stanford professors look at Hoover,

they say, oh, I hate that place.

And then that's just for show.

The second thing is,

well, those guys don't have to teach if they don't want to.

They're pure researchers.

Hmm.

They have nicer facilities than we have.

Hmm.

They probably get paid more than we do.

Hmm.

They have wealthy donors that might want to fund my program.

Hmm.

Hey, guess what, everybody?

You people at the Who, I'm kind of, you know, I've been thinking, you know, I considered considered voting for Mitt Romney once.

I like John McCain.

That's what they say.

And then so they try to infiltrate.

And, you know, our former director, John Rayson,

this is not private.

It's so he had on his desk a helmet, like a World War II helmet.

So when I would see him going to the faculty summit to defend the Hoover from an attack, he'd always p wear his Army helmet to it.

So his purpose was that we have to maintain the integrity of the institution and it's an adversarial relationship.

And they were always trying to undermine that.

And they still are.

And that's what will happen to the Harvard Center for Harvard Conservatism.

Oh, I hate those people.

Look at those crazy.

Oh, wow, they've got a lot of money.

They've got nice stuff.

I'm kind of conservative.

And then I'll try to get in there.

And then I'll kind of get a guy that's a little bit, just a little bit more liberal than I will.

And then he'll try to hire a guy that's just a little bit more liberal.

And pretty soon, you know, birds of a feather flock together.

So it's a bad idea.

That's a bad idea.

They should demand that statement we're going to get to about the Manhattan statement.

That was what they need to do.

They need to have intellectual diversity across the faculty.

And they don't have to say, well, check a box if you're a conservative on the.

They know

who is who.

They do know it.

And that's how they got 95% left-wing.

They did that.

All they have to do is use that same

intuition to ensure that it's 50-50, but they'll never do it.

Well, you take a state like Texas, by the way, Victor, my opinion, who cares, but here it is.

There's some of the, you mentioned the University of Texas, Civitas Center,

Texas, Florida, I think North Carolina,

North Carolina and Tennessee have all created, their state colleges have created these classical

University of Colorado at Boulder, yeah, they have one.

Well, they have they have one professorship that they give.

But these places, these four other schools have created actual centers that are going to be like the Dam Mahonies and the Matt Spaldings of the world could hypothetically be there.

But so I like the alternative, but you're right, there's a ghetto aspect to it.

We're going to house all this here where it should be throughout.

But back to, say, Texas, you know, a state that's clearly conservative through and through, state legislature, Republicans.

How come the Board of Regents

in these red states don't act in a way in North Dakota, South Dakota, to see that these

woke state university systems are unwoken?

There are alternatives, political alternatives, in some places anyway.

Harvard's private, so what can you do?

I think that they're put on the board for reasons other

for reasons that range from getting their children into the university or their grandchildren to

getting publicity that enhances their career for their resume

in the corporate world to getting a building or some honorific

or

rubbing shoulders and telling people, I just I was with the president of Harvard today.

Kind of Jeffrey Epstein Idis, you know, that's what he was after.

And, you know,

I don't want to give it away.

I mean, I mentioned I gave a lecture.

I also gave a recent lecture about surcharges and academia.

And this one person

at the point where I said, and, you know, 55, 60% some of these surcharges, private foundations that give grants do not allow you to do that, your university to take that much.

And I got a grant from the federal university, from a couple, when I was a Cal State professor, I was angry they took 10%.

You know what I mean?

As I said to them, I'm not using any other facilities

other than what I'm teaching.

I'm doing this in my own time.

Well, you use your office.

No, I said, I write at home.

Well, you're using the library.

I said, I use the library to prepare for class.

What's the difference if I check out an extra eight books?

So what I'm getting at is that

when you, I was giving this lecture and this guy got up and he said,

I am on the board of trustees at blank blank, this very

and you don't know what you're talking about.

Oh, you're one of these guys and you want to cut cancer research, and that's what you are.

You just want to cut, you want to,

you're all the NEH, NIH, oh, the badge hard, cut, cat, cat.

And I said things that are you aware that there's some studies that suggested that 20 to 30 percent of federally grant

federally granted scientific studies are not reproducible, that they find a result.

And I'm talking also about the president, the former president of Stanford University.

His findings and a co-author were not reproducible, meaning other people who took him at his word could not find the same results as he did.

And I said, Are you sure that you think 55% is necessary?

Are you aware that the number of grants that can be distinguished, such as a new hormone off-label use

has amazing ability to

prevent head and neck cancer type studies versus a DEI, this underserved community didn't get the vaccinations as quickly as Martha's Vineyard kind of stuff.

So that, and you know, just his attitude.

So

they get all hysterical about all this stuff.

But the Board of Trust, I don't have any.

One of the finest presidents, I keep mentioning Max Nicias in the context of an ambassadorship for Cyprus, I hope.

But he was, if you look at actual money raise and reform at USC,

and you look at the test scores and GPAs of USC applicants, but more importantly, people admitted it was not just comparable with UCLA, its supposed intellectual superior in Los Angeles, but it was superior under his direction.

And what happened during the Me Too?

There was somebody on campus that was allegedly groping women as a gynecology or something, and he had a...

you know, he had an investigative team look at it, but he didn't fire him that day, you know what I mean?

And it was like a lynch mob.

And so I, and the Board of of Trustees did nothing, nothing, nothing,

nothing.

Every time I see a board member of that esteemed body that did nothing, but just sort of, oh, well, can't make it today during the, I just can't take it.

Scout Atlas.

I saw the same thing with Scout Atlas.

Oh, I would have liked to say something.

Oh,

maybe he was right.

Maybe, I don't know.

Lockdowns were pernicious, but I didn't have the information at the time.

I'm sick of that.

We lived through the Oxbow incident in a way, culturally.

Very good.

Exactly.

We did.

Nobody spoke out against.

And there are people who were me too that I wasn't a big fan of, you know.

But

what's his name?

Garrison Keillor.

Okay, he might have been something you can discover.

But to take his books off, back-ordered on public TV, what they did to him.

Mark Halpurn may have been provocative, but they destroyed that guy's career.

And now he's got a podcast that's really good.

Yeah, he is.

I really admire him for coming back like that.

But they just

had this idea that if

two people who were grown adults

entered into sexual banner or sexual congress, and one of the people was dissatisfied after the fact, or I'm not saying all of them were like that, but then that was the equivalent of sexual assault.

It didn't make any sense.

Well,

I don't know.

That's why the Lord's Prayer says, avoid the near coming.

Just to finish that, one of the, when I was a teacher in the Cal State system at an unknown location, there was an unknown professor whom I knew whose name will not never, but he was an upright Christian in a place where atheism and agnosticism were.

And whatever you said about him,

he never, never

would even flirt with a woman.

And he had a very attractive returning student who was divorced and followed him to class.

I only know that because I taught in the class after him.

So he would walk out with his class.

And

sometimes students, we all think they're victims, but actually a lot of them are not.

They're victimizers in some cases.

I know there's power asymmetries, but when you see an older, older man,

he was probably near 70, and he was very polite, and she was probably 35.

I would watch her

and she was not coming to class.

I just noticed sometimes he'd walk out.

I think he gave her a bad grade, as I remember, for not, and then she got angry because she thought that she had talked to him on the way out of class.

So I was on the department committee, and

you know what her

charge was, that he pinched her.

He put his hand here once and patted her, but instead of just patting her on it, he said, I'll see you.

Don't worry about your.

And he might have done this, you know, like a little masawa.

And we had a department hearing, and we

barred him from teaching that year and took away all ability to get a sabbatical or merit pay.

And I swear to God, I swear that his blackish gray hair turned white, literally white.

And it was such a shock because he was such a devout, upright Christian.

And here he was with a stigma that he had been sexually harassing.

You know, it's sort of like the other day AOC said, makes sense Donald Trump would have written Jeffrey Epstein because he's a known rapist.

I'm thinking, no,

he was found to have engaged, according to the jury, in sexual assault, which could be anything from touching you on the head or massaging your back, but he did the judge who was

wrong in saying they were equivalent, he was not.

And I think he was reprimanded.

And

that cost, what, ABC?

Was it George Stephanopoulos?

Said that 11 times, and they paid, I don't know what it was, $16 million.

So I thought to AOC,

you just lied to the nation and said the President of the United States was a rapist.

He wasn't.

He was never convicted of rape.

And so

I think there's a move against all this, that people are just people, and men and women are different, but they have to be treated with respect but in the area of flirting and all of this it's not a felony if a person respects the wishes of the other person and again when I hear when I got to campus after farming five years I thought sexual harassment was really this I really did I got up there and I'd seen it in graduate school I'd seen it two cases, but I got up to Cal State, I thought, well, wow, there's all these

nerdy little guys in high school that were punks, and then they got a PhD, and they were using their power, and they went to class, and there was some naive young girl, 18 or 19, who was beautiful, and they said, come in my office for office hours.

They slammed the door, put a chair against it, and chased them around the office.

I think that happened something like that twice.

I didn't think it would be some

35-year-old woman with two kids whose husband left her and she wanted to get a renewed education, and she was starting to date some guy who was a professor but wasn't even teaching her, right?

And that was a taboo, and they went after people like that.

And I thought, wow, what is that about?

No due process.

Hey, Victor, we have two minutes left because we have a hard out.

So we're not going to talk about the Manhattan statement, but I just want to recommend folks go to City Journal, which Victor is a contributing editor to Cit Journal.

Go to the Manhattan Institute website, I should say.

And Chris Ruffo, who as Victor knows, knows him, and Chris

was one of the awardees of the recent Bradley Prizes.

He is the man at Dead Center on fighting this woke idiocy on higher ed.

And he drafted the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education that

has so many bullet points on it, but it's very powerful, and it is an action plan to do what Victor said, not to create little ghettos or here, you know, we can all go hide at this little center, but to total reform of the state.

I'm not saying the Hoover Institution is a ghetto.

How could you ever, you know,

when you have Milton Friedman, Tom Soule, it was a great, it's an intellectual powerhouse, but my point is

it took Herbert Hoover years to develop that autonomy, but

if you and it's only because of people like Tom Soule or Milton Friedman or Shelby Steele that it was able to retain its integrity, but it was under constant assault by Stanford.

And that's what happens.

And

I can't even name all of the conservative people groups that just caved finally.

But

yeah, but I know no knock on Hoover.

I don't equate Hoover to this.

I think of like that Zephyr Institute or the Buckley Institute at Yale or the Witherspoon, which are all good places, but

they have the whole

institution should be like them.

You're going to find conservatism

for this

one little outpost on their

conservative campus.

Anyway, that's...

Yeah, every

conservative institution will always drift right-wing.

Was that John O'Sullivan?

The O'Sullivan law.

Unless it's explicitly conservative, it will eventually.

Yes.

Well, we've seen that in foundations, Pugh, MacArthur, and the Manager.

That's why I like the Bradley Foundation.

I've been honored to be on it over a decade.

But every year we go back over the mission statement.

What would the Bradley Brothers say?

Let's look at not what we think they would say.

What do they actually say?

And how would you take that literally to apply to today's grant making?

And

let's not get on an agenda that

that's not what their donor intent was.

Right, absolutely.

But that's what happens to these groups.

I mean,

Pew, who

made the money that funds the Pew Foundation, he was on the back cover of the first issue of National Review.

Way to go, Bill Buckley, go, and now his billions are being spent on the left.

John D.

Rockefeller and the Rockefeller Boys and the Ford Foundation, all of them.

They all started as captains of industry and they ended up promoting socialism.

Well, British Foundation.

you have been terrific.

I know you got things to do, and I appreciate all the wisdom.

Thank the folks that take the time to leave comments.

Thank the folks that go to civilthoughts.com and sign up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter.

I write, go to Victor Davis-Hanson's website, theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Do sign up there and subscribe.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, everybody, for listening, for watching.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.