Orange Man…Popular?

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Speaker 3 Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. This is our Saturday edition where we do something a little different in the middle section, and that is to talk about history.

Speaker 3 This week, Victor will be looking at the early part of the Cold War. So, stay with us for that.
And then, but we'll start with some news stories, and those news stories will be about all things Trump.

Speaker 3 So, stay with us, and we'll be right back from these messages.

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Speaker 3 Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Speaker 3 Victor is the Martin and Neale Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 3 You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com. Come join us there.

Speaker 3 The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus, and you'll find all sorts of things that Victor does, produces podcasts, video, audio versions of them.

Speaker 3 And he does special articles for ultra subscribers. So we hope everybody chooses to subscribe.
And we have an ultra video at the end of each week. So $6.50 a month or $65 a year.

Speaker 3 So Victor, let's talk about things. Trump, a lot of various things.
So we'll just go down the list.

Speaker 3 The first thing is, is the polls, new polls out that Trump is doing well in the swing states and New Mexico and Michigan.

Speaker 3 I was surprised about New Mexico, but even Michigan, the approval is higher than the disapproval score for Trump.

Speaker 4 I'm skeptic.

Speaker 4 When you have polls showing that he's doing well, they're accurate. But I go back to the 2020, 2024 elections.

Speaker 4 And to a lesser extent 2016, there were only three polls in the last two elections that were accurate, and that was Rasmussen.

Speaker 4 That usually has Donald Trump ahead by a couple points, Insider Advantage and Trafalgar.

Speaker 4 When I look at those, and they have all had him consistently in the plus side, which is amazing given he's higher than Barack Obama. And Joe Biden,

Speaker 4 this is just about, we're right coming up to August when he collapsed after the Afghan pullout, remember.

Speaker 4 But it's pretty amazing given the controversial things he's done, this counter-revolution against not the symptoms, but the source of leveling power.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, the second thing then is that,

Speaker 3 and this is a really strange thing, Megan Kelly on her show has been talking about Pam Bondi's days are numbered. And she says this because

Speaker 3 of the

Speaker 3 distribution of Epstein file things.

Speaker 3 She said she was having a dump, Pam Bondi Bondi did. And then when everybody looked at the stuff that came out, it was nothing that wasn't known anyway.

Speaker 3 So she said she basically got that wrong in the sense that there was nothing new. And then also that Trump has not praised her when he should have.
For example, he praised Cash Patel and J.D.

Speaker 3 Vance, but he left her out in the

Speaker 3 things that are being done by the Justice Department.

Speaker 4 Well, I like Megan Kelly. I go on her show a lot.
She's a wonderful person. She's very bright, and she has much better insight sources than I do.
However,

Speaker 4 I think the way to approach the question is, how did someone who was an ex-teacher, not that I'm a teacher, so I'm not making fun of them,

Speaker 4 how do you end up worth half a million dollars without any clear demonstrable stock market savvy or investment hedge fund? Nothing.

Speaker 4 And the more you read about Jeffrey Epstein, and the more you see what he was doing in his Caribbean sanctuary and his New York penthouse, he was basically using people to get access to financiers, CEOs, very powerful people.

Speaker 4 Then he would invite him on his plane, go down the Caribbean, have him come in, and he was surrounded by this harem of young women, many of them underage.

Speaker 4 And then we know, and there's no reason why that would be true. Most people have security.
I put security cameras in my farm, but I would never put them inside. You know,

Speaker 4 every interior space was kind of like Diddy did the same thing. And so he was trying to get lure people in and then

Speaker 4 capture them on tape interacting with his women. And then he would go to them.

Speaker 4 I think this pretty much, I'm just quoting journalistic reports. And he would be say, I will offer to be your money manager.

Speaker 4 I will offer to be in your investment, meaning, would you like these things to surface? So most of the money that was paid on an annual basis went to him.

Speaker 4 And from what we can tell, if the going rate, say, on T-bills or something, was 4%, he would get you 4%. He didn't do anything.

Speaker 4 He just didn't lose the money. So in their way of thinking,

Speaker 4 well, he's not that great, but I'm not going to lose money. And he's he's going to take a fee.

Speaker 4 And he was blackmailing people. So when Pan Bondi announced that,

Speaker 4 that she had this information on her desk,

Speaker 4 I think they came in thinking this is an open and shut case.

Speaker 4 Now we have access to DOJ, FBI, CIA files, and we'll find out who was

Speaker 4 being blackmailed and who had visited the

Speaker 4 sex dens, so to speak. So she said that, I think, in February.
So something has happened from now until then. It's not just Pam Bondi.

Speaker 4 I agree with Megan, but I'm just saying that they all pulled back. And I think the only rational explanation is somebody came to them and said, oh my God,

Speaker 4 you don't want to go through all those pictures.

Speaker 4 She said that they're pornographic and she didn't want them released. I think that's true.

Speaker 3 But she said children.

Speaker 4 But I think there are some very, very, very, very important people who I'm not saying they were caught in Flagrante de Lecto, in the act of sex, or servicing, being serviced sexually, but they were there.

Speaker 4 And if they released all those names or videos, they would have very prominent people who would say, this is terrible. I just went over to check on my investments.

Speaker 4 And I got Bill Clinton on the Lolita Express. I just went on my, I think even Alan Dershowitz said he went on the plane.
I just went on there to see what's going on.

Speaker 4 He was my client or I wasn't checking my investment and therefore I'll be defamed. I'll be ruined.
And I think that's why they pulled out. That's a charitable explanation.

Speaker 4 The uncharitable is there were very powerful people, left and right, Democratic, Republican, who said, don't do that. And then maybe they were big donors or something.

Speaker 4 So I'm not saying they were bought off at all. I'm just thinking that I think they went in there without any idea how many people were on those cameras or on those lists.

Speaker 4 And they didn't see the upside in releasing them because they had no proof that all the people on the list or on the camera had done anything wrong.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 they weren't going to, I think what Megan is saying, if they haven't done anything wrong, let the stuff come out. And then they can explain it.
But I don't think that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I agree with you.

Speaker 3 I thought that's the impression I've been getting from, you know, sort of subtext to all the things that have been written about it is that there must have been somebody or something beyond just left-wing individuals, which is what they were hoping for.

Speaker 3 And so they pulled back on that.

Speaker 4 We don't want to have a war with people like the Clintons and stuff like that. They're going to be on there.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay. And then also we have at the TSA has ended the need to take off your shoes as you go flying.
So we're happy for that. But I thought that was interesting.

Speaker 3 Weren't they always worried about the guy who had tried to light his shoes on yeah, the shoe bomber?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And that didn't work. It's hard to, I mean, you do go through screening, right?

Speaker 4 So you go through a

Speaker 4 type of what's the word, x-ray, anyway. But I never quite understood why they persisted so long.
And the other part of it is,

Speaker 4 you you know, if you go show your passport, I did, and you get the fast track,

Speaker 4 hundreds of people. That used to be very

Speaker 4 a quick way to go through security, but there's so many people now. The only advantage is you don't have to take your computer out and you don't take your shoes off.

Speaker 4 So my point is, there's everybody's going through without shoes. And so I think they just finally said,

Speaker 4 We're getting backlogs of record travel season. It's hype of summer.
Why are we doing this? It's slowing down everything. That's the one thing that takes takes the longest.

Speaker 4 Take off your shoes, tie your shoes, etc.

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Speaker 3 So turning to things perhaps more much more serious.

Speaker 3 Russia is, of course, in the throes of a war with Ukraine and they just recently

Speaker 3 unleashed their biggest drone attack on Kiev. Yes.
And NATO, in fact, scrambled jets. I don't know that they did anything with those jets, but nonetheless, they made a show of

Speaker 3 potentially supporting the Ukraine. And I was wondering your thoughts on that.

Speaker 4 Well, the NATO leader was interviewed by New York

Speaker 4 Intelligence, or it's a New York Times affiliate.

Speaker 4 And he said that he was buoyed by the

Speaker 4 twenty-three or to twenty-four nations that have met the two percent and the more that Poland I think is the highest at three point four or something. And they're all going to go to five.

Speaker 4 But he was asked specifically what if Putin went into a country like

Speaker 4 the Baltic states. He said they wouldn't do that because we know what they would do.
And NATO, I mean, we they are disarmed in one sense Europe.

Speaker 4 But when you look at their air power and you look at the arms industry in Europe, French aerospace, Swedish aerospace, British aerospace, to the degree

Speaker 4 that they don't have

Speaker 4 F-35s, their Gripens and other junks are really good. And they have a huge amount of numbers.
I think they have six or seven hundred.

Speaker 4 So I think they're showing Putin that if you try to swarm a target, because when they come in with that number, you don't know really where they're going to go.

Speaker 4 And they were trying to say if they veered into Poland, and that's

Speaker 4 the tripwire, you would pay a high price. So I can see it.
The other thing what Putin is trying to do, he's doing two things.

Speaker 4 Number one, he's showing the world he doesn't really care that Iran may not be shipping it drones anymore, because they've taken that cheap Iranian model, which is about a tenth of the cost of our drones.

Speaker 4 It's not as good, but it's like a Turkish drone. It's cheap, it works, and they have their own, they've copied it and they've improved upon it.
So they're making their own drones now.

Speaker 4 And he's trying to show everybody, and any given day, I can send 700 out of them. And they can do a lot of damage, which they did.

Speaker 4 And the second thing is, when Trump came into office and he said, I can end that on the first day, he thought that because he had not demonized Putin in art of the deal fashion, in other words, he had treated him as a belligerent, but somebody could make a deal.

Speaker 4 And then he saw that

Speaker 4 Putin was not going to cut a deal. And Putin was not going to cut a deal because,

Speaker 4 as we said earlier, he's not going to go settle the war with getting 30 miles beyond where he was, or 40 or maybe 50 miles, and then telling the Russian apparatus, hey, I got a million Russians killed, maimed, wounded, missing, and we got this far into Ukraine.

Speaker 4 And they're going to say it wasn't worth it. So what he's trying to do is show Donald Trump that he's not going to settle.

Speaker 4 And so Donald Trump is, and Putin is also saying, you have a MAGA base, you campaigned on getting out of Ukraine, you balled out Zelensky, and now you think you can pressure me, but I don't believe you.

Speaker 4 I don't believe you're a base. I don't believe you will arm the Ukrainians.
And if you do, this is what you're going to get. It's going to be hopeless.
And I think now the ball is in Trump's court.

Speaker 4 He's going to have to, if he wants to cut a deal, he's going to have to give them arms of some sort, mostly defensive arms to neutralize this threat. Sophisticated jammers, more patriots, etc.

Speaker 4 I think they sent off twelve or thirteen ballistic missile.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Trump said that in his cabinet meeting that he was going to arm the Ukraine with defensive arms.

Speaker 4 People that are listening say, ah, Victor, we're going to get another war. Well, we can, but my point is, if you don't do anything,

Speaker 4 the Europeans won't do anything, and he will take over a sizable part of Ukraine, maybe all the way to Kiev eventually. They can't stop him.

Speaker 4 And then you're going to have a Biden, Afghanistan, who lost Afghanistan. And they're going to blame Trump.
The left is. And a lot of people are going to be angry.

Speaker 4 And they say they don't want to give aid, but they don't want Putin to take over Ukraine. So it's a lose-lose situation for Trump, but he can give them enough wherewithal to knock down drones.

Speaker 4 And I think he'll do that.

Speaker 3 All right. And last thing, Trump, I think this is all I have, is Karen Bass is going to sue Trump over the ICE agents.

Speaker 3 And I guess she would take this case in California courts so she might get somewhere with that.

Speaker 4 Play George Wallace to the bitter end. Karen, have you ever read the Constitution? You're not an independent sovereign nation.
You're not South Carolina in 1861. This is not Fort Sumner.

Speaker 4 You can't do this. You're nullifying the federal government.
You're subject to federal laws. You can't tell Los Angeles people, don't pay your income tax, federal income.
That's a felony to do that.

Speaker 4 Ask Gavin. He said that essentially.
He can be prosecuted if people do not pay their income tax. You can't tell a federal officer he has no jurisdiction.

Speaker 4 He has jurisdiction over the entire United States. He can go anywhere.

Speaker 4 It's not just a federal courthouse in Los Angeles. He can go anywhere if it's a matter of federal law.
And that's what immigration is. So you have no jurisdiction.

Speaker 4 And I don't know why she thinks this is a win-win situation. The polls have showed

Speaker 4 before Trump came in that 65% to 70% wanted deportations. And now even in the height of the frenzy and negative publicity, it's still 55%.

Speaker 3 But do you think that's the case in Los Angeles? I mean, that's her constituency. That's all she's worried about.

Speaker 4 It's this way.

Speaker 4 I don't like anecdote, but I went into the post office in my my hometown today and about five people came up to me, all Mexican American.

Speaker 4 And they all said that we were talking on separate occasions, that's why I was kind of late, and they were talking about deportation, and all of them were for it.

Speaker 4 And, you know, it would be

Speaker 4 I I don't think the the left under quite understa I understand there's a million undocumented illegals in LA and I know they have family and everything and they don't like uh all that, but

Speaker 4 just because someone is of the the same ethnic background doesn't mean they're going to sympathize with people who come.

Speaker 4 If a bunch of Swedes came, and I don't know much about Sweden, a lot of Mexican-American people have never been to Mexico, they don't speak Spanish.

Speaker 4 So a bunch of Swedes came here illegally, and there were millions of them, and somebody said, Victor,

Speaker 4 they're deporting them. I would say,

Speaker 4 yeah,

Speaker 4 they came here illegally. So just because they look like me, or they have the same type of name or color, I wouldn't be any.
I like Sweden.

Speaker 4 I'm not speaking against them, but my point is the left is so fixated on ethnic solidarity, they don't look at individual self-interest.

Speaker 4 And you talk to a person in the Mexican-American community and they'll say, I don't like the ER crowded by people who are speaking sometimes indigenous dialects that I don't understand, much less Spanish that I don't understand.

Speaker 4 I don't like people coming into the public schools and forcing us to have English as a second language.

Speaker 4 I do not like people whose parents are in gangs and come up to my children and say, you don't speak Spanish, I'm going to get you, Gringo. So they don't understand that at all.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the Cold War today.
Stay with us.

Speaker 4 We'll be right back.

Speaker 3 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. If you want to find Victor on social media, you can find him at X.
His handle is at V D Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

Speaker 3 So if those are your chosen social media outlets, please join us there. So Victor, looking forward to the Cold War, the early part of the Cold War, and

Speaker 3 the matrix of the Cold War.

Speaker 4 The Cold War, we talked about the Berlin era,

Speaker 4 started the Cold War last time in 1946.

Speaker 4 The problem was there at the Potsdam Conference of July, late, middle July, all the way into August in Germany. And Churchill had been voted out of office.
Clement Attlee was there.

Speaker 4 And Roosevelt was dead. It was Harry Truman.
And so there was a new cast of allies. And Stalin was there.

Speaker 4 And there was two,

Speaker 4 the war had been over for a month. And there were two things on the agenda.
One, what do we do about Germany and the force

Speaker 4 areas of occupation, France,

Speaker 4 America, and Britain? And Stalin. And France was already troublesome.
They were always saying,

Speaker 4 we'll join you, but we're going to go our own way. We're not going to listen to you.

Speaker 4 We're going to do our own thing in our own zone, which is kind of ironic when they were overrun in six weeks and they were saved by us.

Speaker 4 But de Gaulle being de Gaulle. Anyway, the next question was Poland.
And it was very clear at Potsdam that Joseph Stalin was going to do two things.

Speaker 4 He wasn't necessarily going to keep his word that at Yalta that there would be free and fair elections in the Eastern European countries. And I mean by that, the Baltic states,

Speaker 4 Finland,

Speaker 4 Poland, Hungary,

Speaker 4 Czechoslovakia, Romania. Albania, and Bulgaria, as well as Greece and Turkey.
At Yalta and at Potsdam, there there was a deal made that

Speaker 4 Churchill and the British and the Americans would be able to influence Turkey and Greece. They could have any type of government the West wanted, and Stalin would keep out.

Speaker 4 But in exchange for that, they didn't think they had the wherewithal to stop him in Eastern Europe. It's not that they signed it away, but they couldn't do anything.

Speaker 4 And they did get Finland and Austria as demilitarized states, so there would not be Warsaw or NATO troops. NATO wasn't in existence yet, but they wouldn't be part of a growing fear of a Cold War.

Speaker 4 The biggest issue was that started the Cold War,

Speaker 4 as we saw with the Berlin airlift. It was weird that the capital of occupied Nazi Germany was in the Soviet zone, but it was occupied by four powers.

Speaker 4 So, you couldn't really that's what caused the Berlin airlift. You couldn't supply it.

Speaker 4 The other problem was

Speaker 4 in September 1939,

Speaker 4 Stalin had invaded Poland in league with Hitler under the Molotov-Ribbentrop.

Speaker 4 And naively, the Western powers saw, because the Soviet Union had sacrificed 20 million people, probably 27 million with civilians, to stop Nazi Germany, that they were a solid ally.

Speaker 4 So when they went to him, they said, let's go back to what the world before Nazi Germany. So, Joe, you invaded with Hitler.
He didn't want to be reminded of that. And

Speaker 4 you swallowed half of Poland.

Speaker 4 Would you please give back half of Poland? And what the Poland we're talking about is not the Poland today,

Speaker 4 it's Ukraine. It's from Kiev, basically a little bit west, all the way to the border.
And he said no.

Speaker 4 Whether he actually said the famous thing and when he was told, well, maybe

Speaker 4 the population of what is now western Ukraine was Polish since the medieval period,

Speaker 4 and Polish-speaking and non-Orthodox Catholic.

Speaker 4 So someone said, supposedly, maybe the Pope should be consulted about his flaw. And he said, how many divisions does the Pope have?

Speaker 4 Whether he said that at Potsdam or Yalta or at all, it's disputed. But his point was, he's not going to give this up.

Speaker 4 So then the Allies decided that the large part of Germany where the war started, the Danzig corridor, Pomerania, East Prussia, was not going back to Germany.

Speaker 4 So they looked at basically the rump state of Poland when it lost western Ukraine, and they said, we will give you basically square mile to square mile from Germany.

Speaker 4 And I think the Poles didn't like that. because they had to ethnically cleanse millions of them as refugees.
But there was a sense that that because

Speaker 4 one area had been Polish and the other had been Germany, Germany, even though this was the agrarian, the old Prussian part of Germany, it was still a rich area and Poland would be, they'd have access to the coast and it was a good deal for Poland.

Speaker 4 It was a bad deal for Poland. But I mean, they got Germany.
And then Stalin then settled Russian Orthodox and Ukrainians into that area. And that's the start of what we have the problem today.

Speaker 4 The other thing about the Cold War, then

Speaker 4 Truman

Speaker 4 was very different than Roosevelt. Roosevelt felt that if he, as he said at Yalta, he said, Winston, if you'll just indulge me and let me handle Joe, he hates you, he likes me.

Speaker 4 And there was a sense that Stalin could be worked with, that he had lost all these troops. But more importantly, there's a subtext.
He had 400 divisions in Europe, and we only had about 50.

Speaker 4 Everybody went home. We had superior naval power and air power, but there was no real way without using atomic weapons in Europe to stop him if he had wanted to go all the way into Western Europe.

Speaker 4 So people said, you've got to indulge Josala, and that started appeasement. And then after the Berlin airlift, there was this period where we had nuclear exclusivity, but by 1949, they had a bomb.

Speaker 4 And so the question was: then, what were the rules of the Cold War? And the rules of the Cold War were:

Speaker 4 essentially, neither power

Speaker 4 would use a proxy to attack the homeland of its nuclear rival.

Speaker 4 In other words, you don't go into an area of the Soviet control and arm Turkey or arm Iran

Speaker 4 to attack Russia. And Russia doesn't come in and go into Mexico or Cuba and try to hit the United States through proxy.

Speaker 4 Khrushchev wanted to push that.

Speaker 4 So he said, you're breaking that rule. You have nuclear weapons in Turkey.
You're using a proxy, which is true. And then we said, you're arming Castro.
And we almost went to DEF CON 1.

Speaker 4 I think we meant to get one.

Speaker 4 DEFCON 1 means you're you're ready to go with nuclear weapons on the plane

Speaker 4 during the October crisis of 1962.

Speaker 4 And so what I'm getting at is the world then became bipolar. There was the Soviet bloc and there was the Western bloc.
And unfortunately for us, we had the worst propaganda or the worst

Speaker 4 narrative. We were saying that the old Axis powers, Mussolini's Italy, Tojo's Japan, and Hitler's Germany are now our friends.
And we're going to democratize them and rehabilitate them.

Speaker 4 And we've lost China in 47 to 49. So he went communist.
Stalin then and the Russian Comintern bloc said, ah, look, they're allying themselves with Nazis, fascists, and militarists.

Speaker 4 And we are liberating the Chinese from feudalism.

Speaker 4 And we're going to go into Africa and free everybody from British colonialism.

Speaker 4 And we're going to go into Korea. We're going to go into South Vietnam and Asia along with the Chinese.
And we were looking at this and we were thinking,

Speaker 4 they've got China with 900 million people, and they're going to, how can we go into Korea and save Korea? How can we go into Vietnam on their back door?

Speaker 4 And we didn't know what to do when they got the bomb. The other thing that we were very worried about, we disarmed and they didn't.

Speaker 4 In the Korean War, they went to parks and tried to find Sherman tanks that people had used for museums.

Speaker 4 It was crazy. So the Americans then had to rearm very quickly, and they couldn't just rely.

Speaker 4 There was a doctrine in the United States at the beginning of the Cold War that if you had a nuclear weapon, then you didn't need a conventional weapon.

Speaker 4 And then people started asking themselves, well, what if they have a nuclear weapon?

Speaker 4 Are you going to destroy the world over every single district? No.

Speaker 4 So if they have a nuclear weapon and you have a nuclear weapon, then you have to have a conventional weapon because nobody can use them.

Speaker 4 And if you do have a nuclear weapon and they don't, if you use them, you're going to have a lot of problems internationally.

Speaker 4 And so

Speaker 4 the other thing was the Russians began to build the mother of all bombs. I mean, they were not one megaton, they were like 50 megaton bombs.
Huge, dirty bomb.

Speaker 4 They had maps where you drop one on Kansas City and it pollutes the whole United States. Stuff like that.

Speaker 4 And so they in this period of 46 to 52, 53, the rules of the Cold War were established. There were going to be only conventional use.
There would be a nuclear deterrence both ways.

Speaker 4 Neither side would make an ABM system to nullify the other's ability to mutually destroy you, mutually assured destruction. There would be no first-strike capability allowed.

Speaker 4 Both sides tried to achieve it, and the war would then be fought ideologically. And then, of course, the American left, Salon thought he could win because he thought, well,

Speaker 4 I can overthrow democracies pretty easy, and they're fragile, and they have no history of democracy in Asia, Africa,

Speaker 4 to the same degree in Eastern Europe. So I'll just implant communist dictatorships and call them people's republics.
You know, they were not republics.

Speaker 4 And we had this problem with the left, and that is

Speaker 4 you have to be perfect or you're not good. So the Thu government in Vietnam, Syng Menri in South Korea, the Shah in Iran, people say, oh, they're not Democrats.

Speaker 4 You're backing strongmen. And the Soviets, they're backing people's republics.

Speaker 4 So it was very hard for the United States to say that the only way we can stop communism is to have these transitional autocracies or dictatorships that have a greater propensity.

Speaker 4 This was Gene Kirkpatrick said that under Reagan.

Speaker 4 They may be right-wing, but they will eventually metamorphosize into pluralities and consensual governments. If they're communist, they never do.
They're not allowed to.

Speaker 4 They have to be destroyed or they have to be toppled. And she was right about that.

Speaker 3 So are you referencing things like Pinochet's government and the U.S. tolerance event?

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 And also in Bolivia, same thing. So it was a dirty war.
The CIA would be fighting the KGB by arming insurgents. It was a war

Speaker 4 from 53 after the Korean War all the way to the fall of the Berlin Wall to 89, and then the destruction of the Soviet Union in 91. It was a proxy war

Speaker 4 where we used our proxies. And it was kind of a tragedy.
I mean, Vietnam, 55,000 dead, 35,000 dead in Korea.

Speaker 4 And it was a messy, messy time, always under the threat of nuclear annihilation. And the idea was containment, containment, containment.
That was George Kennan's theory.

Speaker 4 If you just contain them and don't let them expand their empire, the inherent contradictions of communism will blow them apart. He was right about that.
And Reagan came in and said, no.

Speaker 4 Reagan said, it's very simple. We win,

Speaker 4 So he built up. And then he said, we have Star Wars, which we didn't have, but he said, we're going to make a sophisticated space-based system to knock down missiles.

Speaker 4 And the Soviet Union had no idea what he was talking about, but they believed him. And so they wanted a super peace.

Speaker 3 How did the Middle East work into this? I mean, you've mentioned Africa, Asia, et cetera, but what were the...

Speaker 3 How was the Middle East working at the time?

Speaker 4 It was the same Soviet blueprint. They went into an area, and after the end of World War II,

Speaker 4 after the Casablanca Conference and the Four Freedoms and all that stuff, kind of like Wilson's 14 points, the Allies said that they were fighting World War II to free people, freedom of religion, freedom of speech.

Speaker 4 So that you had two colonial powers, France and Algeria, Morocco. Italy had Libya,

Speaker 4 and then you had Egypt, and then you had, that was British, and then you had Syria, Lebanon, French, British and Iraq. And so

Speaker 4 when the French and the British said they were going to decolonize, there was no tradition of democracy or anything. So the Soviet Union brought in

Speaker 4 what they called pan-Arabism secularism and Baathism.

Speaker 4 That was a secular communist ideology. That was what Saddam Hussein was.

Speaker 4 And so they implanted during the Cold War Nasser in Egypt. He was a secular pan-Arabist.
Their idea was the Arab world would erase artificial colonial boundaries.

Speaker 4 Libya would be called the United Arab Republic, Libya and Egypt, or Egypt and Syria. That was the dream.
They were going to make these huge socialist republics.

Speaker 4 The problem with the Soviet Union, when they didn't realize that this was Islamic, and the colonial powers had been wise enough to allow Islam to be the predominant ideology.

Speaker 4 And all they did was create a veneer. The Soviet Union came in, and under its operatives, they tried to suppress all religion.
And that created the Islamicist movements.

Speaker 4 So you had the Muslim Brotherhood and all of these resistance movements that were fighting the Nasserite-type governments in the 50s and 60s.

Speaker 4 And when the Soviet Union fell,

Speaker 4 The last vestigial pro-Soviet puppet who was secular was Saddam Hussein. And as soon as he did that, he started to become Islamist.

Speaker 4 And so one of the reasons that Islam spread so quickly in the 80s and 90s, radical Islam, was

Speaker 4 the Soviet Union's effort to create a secular Arab Soviet client failed. And there was enormous reaction.
Both people said, well, they're gone and they're weak and Islam stronger.

Speaker 3 That's interesting, the connection between Marxism in the Middle East there in the Soviet world and Marxism in our current woke left as well. So

Speaker 3 Marxism is Marxism given the failure of the Yeah, and it seems it's poisoned everything.

Speaker 4 If you're brought up in affluence and you're spoiled, like Mamdani,

Speaker 4 he's spoiled, so

Speaker 4 he can afford at other people's expense to dream about communism.

Speaker 3 Well, Victor, I have a question on France, actually, that is probably probably unrelated to this. So why don't we go ahead and go to some

Speaker 3 messages and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about France. Stay with us.
We'll be right back.

Speaker 3 Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. You can find these podcasts on YouTube and on Spotify and Rumble.

Speaker 3 So please come join us for podcasts there if you you would like to see the video version. So Victor, I had kind of unrelated to this, but still maybe perhaps a little bit historical.

Speaker 3 I was looking, given the war in the Ukraine, there was some maps of U.S. where U.S.
troops were placed in Europe. And I noticed that it's significantly

Speaker 3 U.S. troops are absent in France.

Speaker 3 Do you know why with the French we don't have any troops, but lots in Germany, some in Spain and Italy, et cetera.

Speaker 4 De Gaulle in the 60s, they pulled out of NATO because they felt they were not going to be part of the Soviet-American rivalry.

Speaker 4 In other words, they had colonial ties with communist countries like Morocco, Algeria, Syria, and they had interest in Africa.

Speaker 4 Because of their colonial and they didn't want to be, they felt lockstep. The other thing was that de Gaulle was very bitter

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 when France was lost and he fled to to Britain, he was treated poorly, he felt, by Churchill and the British.

Speaker 4 And there was a lot of bad will because of the bombing of the French fleet in World War Two, the Vichies, etc. So they did not want a Western world that was anglophonic, only

Speaker 4 the British and the Americans. They felt that that Canada and parts of the French-speaking world was theirs, and they were not going to follow what Washington and London said.

Speaker 4 They were going to be freelancers. They had about 200 nuclear weapons they developed.
And it was very difficult for them because there were two things going on.

Speaker 4 What they said publicly, French nationalism, we really didn't run World War II. We were overrun because we were all by ourselves.
The Americans didn't help us.

Speaker 4 The British fled at Dunkirk, but we were there. We were the French.
That's how the narrative was. And then we were occupied and treated brutally.

Speaker 4 America wasn't occupied. They don't know what it was like.
The British wasn't occupied. Of course, the British were bombed.

Speaker 4 So then their attitude was:

Speaker 4 we're now a world power with nuclear weapons.

Speaker 4 But the problem was that the Soviet Union didn't really believe this.

Speaker 4 The Soviet Union believed that if they were going to have nuclear talks, you had to to count France as a member of NATO, even though it was out of NATO.

Speaker 4 And those nuclear weapons would be considered Western.

Speaker 4 So de Gaulle discovered that if there was a nuclear war, the Soviet Union or China were going to target Paris, regardless of its relationship with the West. Then he discovered that for things...

Speaker 4 He was also bitter because... He wanted to save Vietnam and Cambodia, and the United States, Eisenhower, would not do it.

Speaker 4 We gave them a lot of arms, but we didn't give them lip capacity.

Speaker 4 And he was very bitter in the Middle East that the French in 1956 and the English in Suez had invaded to overthrow the Egyptian government and retain the Suez Canal and French interests.

Speaker 4 And the United States had been on the wrong side. I think that was a mistake on our part.

Speaker 4 We had opposed that. And so he was very bitter, but then that bitterness didn't work out the way he thought.
He thought he could champion the French Canadians.

Speaker 4 He thought he could the North African French-speaking Arabs, the Syrians, the Lebanese,

Speaker 4 all these people in Africa. And it didn't work out that way because he needed the United States ultimately to back him up because the Soviet Union could pick him off.

Speaker 4 He wasn't, the French world was not strong enough. by itself.
So then incrementally and insidiously, he started cooperating with NATO again.

Speaker 4 And to square that circle, he told the French people, we're not going to have U.S. bases

Speaker 4 in France because we're a strong independent nation. But if you look at what they actually did, they started participating as they do today.

Speaker 4 They're full NATO member again in all NATO maneuvers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And their nuclear weapons would be used in accordance with NATO.

Speaker 3 Well, let's turn then then to some current news. Newsom has,

Speaker 3 and I think everybody in California, no surprise, the Palisades and Eaton fires, the rebuilding process, we all said they're going to try to have low-income housing there. And

Speaker 3 Newsom has signed a bill allocating $101 million to low-income housing in both areas, Palisades and Eaton.

Speaker 4 Well, Gavin had his podcast career cut short. He was Steve Bannon, Charlie Kerr,

Speaker 4 and basically thought, well, I'm going to, I see Josh Shapiro. Everybody thinks he could have won, and the left lost the election.
I'm going to be the new Josh Shapiro.

Speaker 4 And then, as I said last time, people in his circle shook him and said, you ninny, you neepo baby, you don't know anything. These people will never nominate you.

Speaker 4 You've got to get rid of that stuff and go hard, hard left to get the nomination.

Speaker 4 Now, if you want to get the presidency, you've got to get nominated. And then you go to the middle.
But don't go to the middle now.

Speaker 4 So he is going, you know, he's going to lose refineries.

Speaker 4 He's down attacking Trump in Los Angeles. He's siding with Karen Bass.

Speaker 4 He's saying there should be no deportations. The price of gas may go up to $7 or $8 a gallon if we continue with this one and a half cent periodic raise up to 67 cents.

Speaker 4 And he gets rid of two more refineries that are leaving. He doesn't do anything about it.

Speaker 4 And then

Speaker 4 he's in South Carolina. South Carolina has an early primary now.
That's what gave Joe Biden the presidency. Remember, he had lost New Hampshire and Iowa to Pete Buttigig and Bernie Sanders.

Speaker 4 And then Jim Claiborne, who runs South Carolina, said, no, we want Joe Biden. But if we get Joe Biden, we'll make you president because we will win your big primary and then we'll get everybody out.

Speaker 4 But you have to have a black agenda, left-wing agenda, and that's what Biden did. So that's where Newsom is.
And I guess he's not interested about the optics, that they can't rebuild the palisades.

Speaker 4 They're not going to let people get the permits. Price of gas is still high.

Speaker 4 California is a mess. It's kind of cleaning out the highways a little bit.
And I see that in Fresno and other places. But he's trying to run for president.

Speaker 4 And the thing about him is he's slick, he looks good, he's a nepo baby, though. He's never accomplished anything on his own.

Speaker 4 It's all been through the Getty family fortune that's backed his business opportunity. He's got a $9 million home because he married a wealthy woman.

Speaker 4 He's always been a beneficiary of marital wealth or family ties from his father.

Speaker 4 And he's connected remotely to the Pelosi's. He's that he's a child of privilege and special interest.

Speaker 4 So he's never going to get away from the idea that when he talks about equity and diversity, he's the poster boy for privilege and special interest.

Speaker 4 And then the other thing is he's all transactional. He has methodology.
He looks great, but he's not very bright. So he does things that have destroyed.

Speaker 4 And as I said last podcast, when you add in his eight years on the San Francisco City Council, his eight years as mayor, his eight years as lieutenant governor, six years as governor, no person has been more responsible for the destruction of the Bay Area in general and California in particular.

Speaker 4 He's there.

Speaker 4 His footprints are on everything from higher taxes to high-speed rail to the Aspen Fire, the Paradise Fire, you name it, the blowing up of the Moss Landing battery plant or boondoggles like the Manning Avenue 2,000 acre solar farm.

Speaker 4 Everything he does turns to draw us. He's really incompetent.
And he starts starts off really slick. He always has canned lines.

Speaker 4 So when you look in a debate he did with DeSantis, so the first 10 minutes, he was more charismatic than DeSantis. He was flashy.
He had all the memorized.

Speaker 4 He was like Camilla Harris kind of word style.

Speaker 4 And then,

Speaker 4 you know, DeSantis just quoted, Gavin, we have half your population,

Speaker 4 and we've got less inflation,

Speaker 4 we've got a better GDP, no taxes, and we have half your population, and we're getting three or four hundred thousand new people a year, and you're losing 300,000. So people must know something.

Speaker 4 And he just quoted statistics:

Speaker 4 you have the highest, you have one of the highest poverty rates, 21% in the state. So

Speaker 4 he didn't know what to say. He just kind of, whenever he gets in a

Speaker 4 jam, he does this.

Speaker 4 Or he goes like this, and it's like a magician or something. but it's everybody's on to him.

Speaker 4 If you see him one time, you think, wow, he's slick.

Speaker 4 He's charismatic. Then you see him after two times.
Is he going to go do that little neck shuffle that kind of touch his head, stick his hair back? You know?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, let's turn then to the Education Department is charging the University of Minnesota for violations of Title VI, Civil Rights Act, because of a professor Melanie Yazzie who is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and she has been employed at, she's moving now actually.

Speaker 3 She's got a new university she's going to. But while she was there, she did a lot to incite violations of civil rights, anti-Semitism, and then also extremism.

Speaker 4 Everything she said about Israel and Jews, but Jews in particular, and just put blacks in there. And she'd be fired.
If this had happened under the Biden administration, she said about

Speaker 4 destroying Israel or all this Jewish, and it had been black, she would have been all done. But she thought she was protected.

Speaker 4 That was one of people don't realize that one of the evil things about diversity, equity, inclusion among many, because it's racist, but it also gives exemption.

Speaker 4 So somebody then claims that she's a member, if you saw her on the street, you wouldn't know she was Native American. That's true of Elizabeth Warren, who is 0.001%.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 so she claims she's indigenous. And then she thinks because she now is, she's a Ward Churchill-like person, she can do anything she wants, and nobody will ever say anything.

Speaker 4 Oh, she'll say, genocide, genocide, genocide. Racist, Professor, this is a new age.
We've done that con now for 50 years.

Speaker 4 And we don't care anymore what anybody is.

Speaker 4 We don't care if they're white, we don't care if they're brown, we don't care if they're black, we don't care if they're Finnish, we don't care if they're Romanian, we don't care if they're Ugandan, and we don't care if they're indigenous.

Speaker 4 You're just people. So anybody who uses that is a scoundrel of their race.
And that's what she's done. She's ridden that all the way.

Speaker 4 And so I would get in trouble right now, and I won't do it, if I mentioned all the professors I know

Speaker 4 who at one time had no accent marks and no Spanish articulation or modulation of their name, but now have added accent marks to their name and they trill their R's.

Speaker 4 And many of them don't even speak Spanish. So there's no reason to.
They're like the Castro brothers that ran, you know, Julian Castro

Speaker 4 or Gonzalez that representative.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 I think people are tired of it. We're a multiracial society and we know that it won't work.
It'll be like India's caste system or Brazilian violence. It won't work if you privilege your race.

Speaker 4 Not when there's not going to be a majority white anymore, and there isn't in California.

Speaker 4 And that's one of the reasons California is a m a mess because you there is no dominant group and every single group thinks that they have to accentuate their their feeds, their ethnic feedes, so we've got all these DEI consortia.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 the country is now I mean, it doesn't even you could say it's sixty seven percent, seventy percent white, not ninety anymore. But I don't even know what white means.

Speaker 4 Everybody's family is intermarried. And what they're doing is,

Speaker 4 I don't think you want to go down there. Historically, it does not work if you're a smaller group and you claim ethnic or racial chauvinism.
Because ultimately, if you just take a typical day,

Speaker 4 typical week,

Speaker 4 And you think, what did Jasmine Crockett say? Oh, she said they nominated Joe Biden and they pushed him because he was an old white man.

Speaker 4 Or what did

Speaker 4 Whoopi Goldberg say? Or what did

Speaker 4 what's her name? Saeed Perkins? The Texas woman that she has no empathy for the dead white children because they were white and they get they were exclusive.

Speaker 4 People get sick of that. And

Speaker 4 when you look at that picture of Mexico and you see all of these Mexican protesters and they have trapped tourists in that delicatessen or whatever it was, and they're yelling, Gringo, go home, gringo, go home, gringo, go home, and you juxtapose it with Mexican, I'm not talking about Mexican American, I'm talking about Mexican nationals.

Speaker 4 And when you juxtapose it with Mexican nationals here in the United States who were burning the American flag and waving Mexican flags, that's why Trump has support.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 that's a larger issue, but

Speaker 4 if I was President Scheinbaum, I would take a deep breath

Speaker 4 and I would stop that.

Speaker 4 And I would stop intervening in American affairs like Obador did. Oh, I think it's so beautiful that we put 40 million of our people and we're telling them not to vote Republic, all that stuff.

Speaker 4 And I would just take a deep breath and I would say, hmm.

Speaker 4 I run a corrupt country run by the cartels. They have a $20 billion profit in the United States.
They are killing 70,000 Americans by disguising their dangerous drugs as value, anything.

Speaker 4 Number two, I have $63 billion on tax dollars in remittances from my people that are in the United States who are on many cases state, local, and federal support.

Speaker 4 And they're freeing up $200 to $300, $400, $500 a month to send back to me in Mexico. And number three, I'm running up a $171 billion

Speaker 4 trade surplus, mostly by getting around American terrorists in league with the communist Chinese.

Speaker 4 So they can send disassembled parts, TVs, phones, appliances into my country, and I will assemble them. And then they'll go in either tariff-free or with reduced tariffs.

Speaker 4 Now, I have a lot of exposure, and I don't want to lose that.

Speaker 4 So, I'm going to be nice to the United States, and I'm not going to allow my people to be on national and international TV driving out white people who are

Speaker 4 gentrifying because they're legal. They're legal residents.
The people that I have in the United States, that's a matter of contention, are not Mexican-Americans. They're illegal.

Speaker 4 So, I'm not going to try to defend illegality, and I'm I'm going to try to defend legal residence and tourism in Mexico.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 if she doesn't do that and she still does the 1960 Cadillo type thing and says Mexican chauvinism, then she's going to get Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 They're already going to tax remittances at, I think, 1.5% or 2%.

Speaker 4 If they get up to 10% to 12% to 15% to 20%,

Speaker 4 It's going to be shattering.

Speaker 4 There is

Speaker 4 about $1 trillion in money sent out of the United States.

Speaker 4 And if Donald Trump is under pressure from the MAGA base that he's going to add $3 trillion to the deficit over a decade, he is looking for revenue.

Speaker 4 He's going to get $300 billion in tariffs, and he will look at remittances.

Speaker 4 And if the Wall Street gurus say, oh, you don't want to do that, you'll stop the international flow of money, and you won't have any remittances at all. And he'll say, fine, that's great.

Speaker 4 We get a trillion dollars. It stays in the United States.
That's like foreign investment. So they have a lot of exposure, and she's overplayed her hand.

Speaker 4 And the people in the street of LA have overplayed their hand.

Speaker 4 I'm not talking about white-Mexican rivalry, I'm talking about Mexican-American citizens, black citizens, Asian citizens, and white citizens, or in other words, Americans who are tired of this.

Speaker 4 All of them are tired of it.

Speaker 3 Well, since we're on Mexico, we had the ICE arrested Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., who is apparently a prize fighter of some sort.

Speaker 3 I don't know if it was just boxing or if it was one of those more everything goes type of fighting. But nonetheless, ICE arrested him, and apparently he is wanted in Mexico for organized crime.

Speaker 4 Is he related to Cesar Chavez? No.

Speaker 3 No, he's not related. His father was a fighter, though, and well known.

Speaker 3 Anyways, he's got warrants out for his arrests in Mexico, and he's an illegal immigrant on top of it, which is why they arrested him.

Speaker 3 And Scheinbaum apparently is going to be happy to get him back so that he can do his time for what he's been doing.

Speaker 3 You know who he did have relationships or has a distant connection with?

Speaker 3 It's El Chapo, the Sinaloa boss. Apparently, he

Speaker 3 got married to a woman who dated the son of El Chapo. So

Speaker 4 the whole world.

Speaker 4 The Mexican government complains when we jail Mexican nationals, but then secretly they communicate: please keep those cartel people in your jails for as long as you can, because if they come over here, they have so much money they will corrupt us and get out or kill us.

Speaker 4 And so that's one of the things that is understood.

Speaker 3 All right. So the last thing or two kind of

Speaker 3 interesting things about the Democratic Party, since we were talking about incompetence of Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 3 Tim Waltz apparently was called to testify to the House Oversight Committee on Immigration and he had to bring in outside lawyers that Minnesota taxpayers paid for

Speaker 3 to the tune of $430,000 to prep him for this. And what I was thinking was think of the contrast with Trump's cabinet that go in there routinely to testify to Congress for various things.

Speaker 3 They just go in there and tear at it.

Speaker 4 Tim Waltz is a buffoon. I mean, when I first saw the guy, I thought,

Speaker 4 I'm not a picture of physicality, but

Speaker 4 this guy is 20 pounds too heavy. He's got a skin-tight

Speaker 4 hipster suit on with his high water pants and his tight crotch and his puffs go up to his elbow. And he's frenetic.
He's just a madman.

Speaker 4 He was jumping all around like he was Mick Jagger, and he was pointing at people. Hey, you, he was just a buffoon.

Speaker 4 And then he was on the national scene a month, and then they found out, well, he lied about his military service. He lied about Tineman Square.
He lied about his Chinese visits.

Speaker 4 He lied about everything.

Speaker 4 And then the next month it was his wife said she opened the window so she could smell the scent of rioting and burning objects.

Speaker 4 And his daughter tipped off Antifa people that his dad was going to call. And they were a whole, they were just a dysfunctional group.
And then when he would try to talk, I felt, you know,

Speaker 4 he used all these swear words to talk about Musk. And for a while, he thought, I might be viable.

Speaker 4 There's nobody in the national stage, and I'm a left-wing guy, and maybe I can go out and just fill the vacuum as a vice president. And he went on there, say,

Speaker 4 January and February, and he started using expletives, A-H-O-L-E, and S-H-I-T and all that stuff about Musk. And he goes like this.

Speaker 4 And I go out there and I have a little app with Tesla and it's going down. And I'm so happy.

Speaker 4 And everybody said,

Speaker 4 hello, you're a buffoon. Your state has a portfolio of stocks.
And one of the largest and most

Speaker 4 lucrative stock the last decade has been Tesla. So you're rooting against the taxpayer.
Oh, I am. Well, just forget that.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 And then he went on TV and said, Oh, I guess I shouldn't be doing that. No, you shouldn't even be in the national scene.
And they have to coach him. So I feel bad for him because what would he say?

Speaker 4 He can't tell the truth. He's not that bright.
He's a buffoon.

Speaker 3 Yes, I suppose.

Speaker 4 He's there because of one reason. The only reason we know about him is that he was the only person that she interviewed that was dumber than she was and less articulate.
And she knew that.

Speaker 4 So she thought, if I put Josh Shapiro on the ticket, oh my God.

Speaker 4 If I put Gretchen Whitmer on the ticket or any of these people, Amy Kobuchar,

Speaker 4 they're going to outshine me. This guy,

Speaker 4 I'm going to be Cicero compared to him.

Speaker 3 Well, now that you're mentioning it, she might have been better off getting Gavin Newsom because he's not all that bright.

Speaker 3 But he might have been

Speaker 3 slicker than Tim Walls.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but she didn't want him because

Speaker 4 he is the governor of a huge state.

Speaker 3 Hurstry.

Speaker 4 He has 30 years history with him, and he doesn't like her.

Speaker 4 And she's in the Willie Brown wing of California politics. And Gavin is in the

Speaker 4 exclusive elite Pelosi, Feinstein, Jerry Brown wing.

Speaker 4 And he did not want.

Speaker 4 You can't have two people, first of all, running for the presidency from the same state.

Speaker 4 You shouldn't even have one because you're going to get California's electoral votes anyway, no matter who it is. So you don't need a Californian anymore.

Speaker 3 Well, just one last thing before we go to comments from your listeners. Since you brought up Kamala, the right-wing press are beating on her relentlessly still.

Speaker 3 And they came up with this Muslim influencer, Karim Ramah, who interviewed her but did not run the interview before the election because he said it was so bad.

Speaker 3 He was being interviewed and he said it was so bad that

Speaker 4 he couldn't even fix that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I guess he's releasing or he's at least he's talking about how stupid she was and his

Speaker 4 quote everybody's they sued CBS at Settle, you know, about editing the 60 Minutes. So if you look at some of the things they edited.

Speaker 4 That would have lost her the election right there. She gave answers.
You know what she did in the debate that she kind of

Speaker 4 matched Trump, or maybe some people said she was calmer than Trump.

Speaker 4 He was Trump. He didn't even prepare.
He just walked in there, you know, and

Speaker 4 she got about 10 or 15 memorized answers. This is what you say on fracking.
This is what you say on

Speaker 4 immigration. You say comprehensive immigration reform.
On fracking, you say all sources of energy are required.

Speaker 4 On the Middle East, you are a strong supporter of Israel, but you have concern for the people of Gaza. For crime, you say we must follow the law, but the law must be just.
That stuff.

Speaker 4 And so when they started asking her questions, her answers didn't match the questions. It was like her eyes started spinning.

Speaker 4 Okay,

Speaker 4 which

Speaker 4 question is on energy? What was the memorized? Oh, I'll give the one on immigration. And she just gave the wrong answers, but it sounded pretty good because she wasn't talking extemporaneously.

Speaker 4 She was just reciting a prompt.

Speaker 3 She'll never hear the end of it. That's what I know.

Speaker 4 I don't know. That was how you can

Speaker 4 blow a billion dollars.

Speaker 4 Why would you pay Al Sharpton for an endorsement or Oprah?

Speaker 4 She had to pay everybody. And then she flew those little pampered staffers around in private Gulf streams and stuff.
If I was a donor, I'd say, I'm never going to give her any money.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think a lot of them do it for me.

Speaker 4 She'll just waste it

Speaker 3 All right, Victor, so I have a few comments from your website.

Speaker 3 One of your articles, The Decline and Fall of Our So-Called Degreed Experts, Rollin had to say, I know this is also true of higher education in South Africa, which seems to serve as a petri dish for social decline for Western societies in general.

Speaker 3 Yet this negative assessment of academic standards applies more to the humanities and social sciences and less to the hard sciences, does it not?

Speaker 4 He says as a factor of the history, I hope I agree with him, but I get these disturbing reports from students that

Speaker 4 Harvard has remedial math, Stanford has remedial math, and that the computer and I hear, I talk sometimes to people from Silicon Valley and they say that some of the coding people

Speaker 4 and then I look at the Stanford curriculum and I see all sorts of DEI influence in the sciences and math. I look at the the med school and I see DEI admissions and hiring and retention.

Speaker 4 So I see the business school dean.

Speaker 4 I don't know. I don't want to prejudice her.
I don't know her, but I think she's the first dean of the business school that has a degree in sociology.

Speaker 4 And she says that she's a promoter, right at the time that DEI is under assault for its racism, she's talking about being an advocate of DEI.

Speaker 4 So I like to agree with him, but I think DI has permeated the hard sciences and the professional school.

Speaker 3 And funny you should say that because we have another comment on that same

Speaker 3 column. Sorry.
Professor Hansen, you hit the nail on the head.

Speaker 3 Upon completion of my PhD, I spent a decade in private industry and then 27 years as an engineering professor at a Rhode Island University.

Speaker 3 Engineering schools used to be islands of common sense at most academic institutions, but leftist administrators and the incessant groveling for federal research dollars have erased that outpost of sanity.

Speaker 3 Most of my colleagues were knowledgeable in very narrow domains, but they arrogantly assumed their knowledge transcended the constricted boundaries of their subject matter.

Speaker 3 They assumed expertise combined with zero practical real-world experience resulted in so-called experts you describe. So there you go.

Speaker 4 That's

Speaker 4 why would MIT have this problem with presidents? It's Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and MIT had some of the worst anti-Semitism and

Speaker 4 foreign student from the Middle East activity. And just in general, academia to say it the hundredth time, they do not want to fight with Trump.

Speaker 4 Trump knows that if you turn over the rock, whether it's segregated dorms or graduations or violating the Supreme Court edict or overcharging the Department of Energy or HHS 50% on federal grants or it's no First Amendment rights, anti-Semitism, no Fourth, Fifth, Sixth Amendment rights.

Speaker 4 Pick your own race of a dorm member. It's just a creepy place, and they don't want that to get out.
And then when you look at their budget, it's

Speaker 4 endowment income, taxed. It's private giving down about 10%.

Speaker 4 It's federal grants, 15%,

Speaker 4 maximum overcharge. So these universities are going to be hit with $100, $200, $300, $400, $500 million

Speaker 4 short.

Speaker 4 And there's only one way to square that circle, and that's to raise more money, and they can't give them the publicity they have, or cut administrative staff.

Speaker 4 Are they going to cut the admission staff? Are they going to cut the groundskeepers? Are they going to cut DEI?

Speaker 4 And they'll think you can't cut DEI, you'll have a riot. Well DEI people don't do anything.
They're commissars. Do they teach? Do they produce research? No.
They just monitor people.

Speaker 4 I looked at your curriculum and I see that

Speaker 4 you're reading three Shakespearean plays and one of them is Otello.

Speaker 4 And how are you presenting the black man in Shakespearean tragedy? Are you talking about

Speaker 4 that kind of stuff? Intrusive stuff. I see your grading policy.
Over the last seven years, there's been a high incidence of people of color getting lower grades. Could I look at your syllabus?

Speaker 4 Your syllabus doesn't have a commitment to DI. That's what they do.

Speaker 4 You're on a hiring committee, and I recommend that your department, you must hire this person and that woman and that guy and this. And nobody likes that.

Speaker 4 They do monitor through the you know what's the weird subtext of all of this about the university these letters and everything

Speaker 4 it can all be explained by one thing donald trump is a bogeyman so all these presidents now are saying to their left-wing lunatic faculty and students oh my gosh i agree with you so much but i have to deal with this orange man he is nuts you don't know what he'll do to you he don't know what he'll do to me but i can i can cut a deal I'll cut a deal.

Speaker 4 Now, I don't want to do this. I don't want to cut DI.

Speaker 4 I don't want to bring back the SAT score.

Speaker 4 I want to let you guys chase down Jews.

Speaker 4 I don't want to curtail the communist Chinese students that are everywhere in my campus.

Speaker 4 I don't want to stop you from throwing rocks at a speaker, but I have to because it's Donald Trump made me.

Speaker 4 So they're going to use him as cover because they know they can't go on what they're doing because they're an AD and A in the donor and the class and the public.

Speaker 4 So, Donald Trump is for them a useful foil.

Speaker 3 Yes, and maybe some of them really actually believe those things.

Speaker 4 Oh, I think they all believe it. They think, thank God for Trump.
He's making me do all the things I could never do, but I knew that if I didn't do them, we'd go broke.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's true. But also, I think some of them actually really do regret having to do the things.
They're in league with the faculty is what I'm trying to tell you

Speaker 4 at times.

Speaker 4 Many of them are ex-faculty, but once they get in there and they see $2 million salaries, stock options, beautiful house, they want to stay there.

Speaker 4 And the only way they can,

Speaker 4 they're in a vice and somebody on the donor side is squeezing them on the top and the crazy Marxist faculty senate is on the bottom and they're going, oh my gosh, I'm being squeezed on both ends.

Speaker 4 Donald Trump did it.

Speaker 4 And he's their salvation.

Speaker 3 That's true. All right, Victor, Victor, thank you very much for all the wisdom today, and thanks to our audience for joining us.

Speaker 4 Thank you for listening and viewing.

Speaker 3 This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.