Elon, Zohran, and the Pitfalls of College Endowments

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Speaker 3 Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Speaker 3 I am Jack Fowler, but you're here to listen to the man, the farmer back from the hills, Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Warshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 3 And we are recording on Sunday, July 6th. Victor is back in his happy home in the Central Valley, and he is is riproaring and ready to take on a few topics.

Speaker 3 The first one is that Elon Musk now has made it official. There will be a third party in American politics.
We have Medicaid fraud. We have Trump UGs, which are refugees from Trump.

Speaker 3 Good luck, suckers. Mandami, the socialist candidate for New York City.
Did you know, Victor? He was.

Speaker 3 Did you know he was black? You know that? I mean, excuse me, I didn't leave his name.

Speaker 2 You tied a con that I've had a lot of former students that were born in Africa, either in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, and they said they were Africa.

Speaker 2 And every single, and I warned them not, every single one got caught. Yeah.
Or at least they didn't work. They didn't get caught.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It didn't work with him either.

Speaker 3 Nice scam. Well, we'll get your deeper thoughts on that and a few other topics, and we'll do that.

Speaker 2 It's not going to win him the black vote either.

Speaker 3 Well, the initial take was pretty PO'd,

Speaker 3 at least according to the New York Post, amongst the

Speaker 3 black citizenry of New York. Anyway, all that and more when we come back from these initial important messages.

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Speaker 3 We're back with Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor's the man with a website, The Blade of Perseus.
VictorHanson.com is the address. Later on, I'll tell you why you should be subscribing.

Speaker 3 Victor, I listened to your shows with the great Sammy Wink from Friday and Saturday, and you did discuss at some length Elon Musk's threat to launch a third party.

Speaker 3 I think it was yesterday on Twitter, maybe it was the 4th of July, maybe it was the time when he celebrated.

Speaker 3 He did officially announce he was going to create an American party. And

Speaker 3 if I can just look at, here's what it will do. America's party will be focused on reduce debt, responsible spending only, modernize military with AI robotics.
It will be pro-tech.

Speaker 3 It will accelerate to win globally with AI, less regulation across the board, but especially in energy, free speech, pro-natalist, and centrist policies everywhere else.

Speaker 3 That's the basic theme of America's Party. Victor, your thoughts.

Speaker 2 Didn't we have a party called the American Independent Party under George Wallace, third party?

Speaker 3 Had several third parties.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it was called.

Speaker 2 It's never worked, Elon. We had the Dixie cracks with Strom Thurman in 1948, I guess.
I guess it got some electoral votes. Ross Perot got the highest ever, I think, except for Teddy Roosevelt.

Speaker 2 He got 19% of the vote in 92%. He probably ensured that George H.W.
Bush would not be reelected, which was, that was his purpose. He had a long Texas feud with the Bushes.

Speaker 2 Not that Bob Dole would have won, but

Speaker 2 we keep forgetting that when four years later he announced and he pulled back and it was all crazy, he still got almost 10% of the vote.

Speaker 2 And that meant that Bill Clinton was never elected with 50% of the vote. So that's what they do.
And Teddy Roosevelt, spoiler, he's a sore loser. He thought William Howard Taft

Speaker 2 would be the left-wing progressive Republican, but Taft wasn't.

Speaker 2 So, as you remember, he ran in the election of 1912, came in second, the bull moose, but ensured that

Speaker 2 that was his purpose if he wasn't going to win, that Taft wasn't. And what do they get? They got Wilson, we got Clinton.
So, if Eli Elon Musk knows that, he's not stupid.

Speaker 2 So, if he's running a third party, it is to punish the Republicans in the next midterms and in 2028. And from what we know, he's not close with the MAGA wings, so there's incentive.

Speaker 2 He can't hurt Trump. But I don't know why he's doing that.
It's so sad because it was a good relationship. And I admire Elon Musk, and I have a confession to make.

Speaker 2 I went out and bought a Tesla yesterday. I ordered one in support of Elon because I saw that they were, you know, everybody's trashing Tesla.
And I got one.

Speaker 2 I give my wife's Tesla, I gave to my son, and he's very excited about it. But

Speaker 2 he's done so much for the country. And then if he had have just come by that White House once a month.

Speaker 2 But when you knew that he was moving into Mar-Lago and he was over the top and he spent that money, you knew that relationship was not going to last at the same degree of intensity.

Speaker 2 And it had the potential. Now, Donald Trump, because Elon is attacking, this is attacking Trump personally by forming the party to hurt him.

Speaker 2 So Trump is now speculating out loud, you know, about Elon's companies and his immigration status. And that's just not, it's not helpful for either one of them.

Speaker 2 And they should call up and they should have a private summit and each person should say, look, here's the parameters. I'm not going to ever attack you publicly.

Speaker 2 You're not going to attack me publicly. I'm not going to get in the way.
I'm not going to use the office of the presidency to either enhance or detract from Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, X.

Speaker 2 And by the same token, I expect you not to go out of your way to hurt us. And if we can have this relationship, relationship, it'll be wonderful.

Speaker 2 That's easy to do for normal people, but they're very talented megalomaniacs, you know, and it's going to be very difficult.

Speaker 2 And the only people who benefit from all this is the left. It's a larger question.
You know, Donald Trump has said things in the last 72 hours about going after people, and he doesn't need to do that.

Speaker 2 And what it does is it detracts from what the left did to him. And everybody knows, see what the left says.
Well, Donald Trump said he hates Democrats. That was today.

Speaker 2 He hates democrat well they hated him he was just honest and presidents are not supposed to descend to the level of their opponents but he does and that's fine but every single thing that donald trump is doing somebody handed him a precedent on a platter so they're all saying oh he's going after two of the three networks poor george stephanop george stephanopoulos lied 11 times and slandered donald trump by calling him a rapist that's a no-brainer and cbs may have affected the election by editing that transcript.

Speaker 2 I looked at the Kamala Harris transcript, Jack. Did you see the question they asked her? It had nothing to do with it.
Her answer had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 2 They went back in the transcript and then they edited it and plugged answers in to make her look better. But my point is, who started that? Well, that was the left and Dominion.

Speaker 2 Remember the voting machines? And they went after Fox News, and they got that multi-billion dollar settlement. And why did they get it? Because Fox News, people like Tucker or Sean or other people,

Speaker 2 or they had guests like Sidney, what's her name, you know, Lynn Wood and his partner who's Sidney Powell, yes, and they went on TV and they said that Dominion was communicating with a communist memorable lab.

Speaker 2 So they held Fox liable. So Trump comes into office and he said, well, they went after Fox because that network hosted people that said things that were derogatory.
So that's a good precedent.

Speaker 2 And the same thing about subpoenas and threatening to jail people. Well, they were the first time they took a presidential person, a former advisor, Peter Navarro.

Speaker 2 They shackled him because he didn't obey a congressional. That's a good precedent.
We can do that. And then they used, they said, well, he went after a law.

Speaker 2 Well, they coordinated Mark Elias and the Soros Money PACs coordinated, as we know now, Fannie Willis and Jack Smith and Letita James, probably indirectly e-ging Carroll, but Alvin Bragg.

Speaker 2 And they had them all working as lawfarer and Trump said, that's a good precedent. And they just handed it all up to a platter, and then they projected and said, well, what is he doing?

Speaker 2 Well, he's doing what he's replying in kind of what you did.

Speaker 2 And you can argue that he shouldn't go down to your level, or you can argue that that's the only thing you understand as somebody who tit-for-tat karma.

Speaker 3 They killed the Marcus of Queensbury rules, so why are they. We did that.

Speaker 2 I think the Republicans are saying we did Marcus of Queensbury rules. We would rather lose nobly than win ugly.
And that's what we did. We did that in

Speaker 2 2008 with John McCain. Every time they slurred McCain and said he was senile, he didn't know that he had 11 houses.
He was having an affair.

Speaker 2 And then somebody said, Barack Hussein, Obama, then McCain said, please don't say that. There's no need to put, remember that? He said, don't you say he played, and they just trashed him.

Speaker 2 And then we had Mitt Romney, and they had him, he was a frat boy hazer. He put an animal on his car.
He and Paul Ryan took people in wheelchairs and they didn't reply in kind.

Speaker 2 They hijacked the debate. Cindy Crawford, what's her name? Candy Crawford.
And they hijacked that debate.

Speaker 3 And Candy Crowley. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Crowley, excuse me. And they hijacked that debate.
And you can go back to last time the Republicans were like Trump was when they unleashed Lee Otwater, 1988.

Speaker 2 They were 17 points behind at the convention. And by the time they had the Boston Pollution Harbor ad, the Tank ad, the Willie Horton ad, that was the end.
And everybody was outraged.

Speaker 2 And I guess George H.W. Bush said, well, I'm never going to do that again.
That was dirty.

Speaker 3 That was originally an Al Gore ad. The Willie Horton, they steals it from Al Gore.

Speaker 2 So they did.

Speaker 2 And here's a guy who comes along and said, I don't care if I win ugly. I just don't want to lose nobly.
And they won two out of the three elections that Trump was in. So I don't know.
I mean,

Speaker 2 they gave Trump ⁇

Speaker 2 they greenlighted everything he does, everything he does. And the executive orders, who said, I have a phone and a pen, and if Congress won't act, I will just use it.
That was Barack Obama.

Speaker 2 And who came up with the idea of cherry-picking district judges? It was Barack Obama's people when they were out of power, left when they were out of power. They did that all the time.

Speaker 2 They created that precedent. And who was the

Speaker 2 yes, IRS, Lois Lerner? And who, and now they're saying, well, Donald Trump is that parade and the flyovers, he's politicized the military. Just listen to what Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley did.

Speaker 2 Mark Milley is on record, you know, calling Donald Trump a fascist. And he went, called his Chinese communist counterpart to say that his own commander-in-chief was unhinged, basically.

Speaker 2 So they politicized that no end on site. That's what's ironic about it.
And I don't know why the Trump people don't just say that.

Speaker 2 Why don't the Trump people say, if you're upset that what I'm doing right now,

Speaker 2 why didn't you get upset when I'm just following the precedent that my predecessors on your side allowed me to do? I'm just following protocols that you established. You know, it's very simple.

Speaker 2 They said, well, you can't call the Joe Biden ageist. You can't do this.
You can't say he's senile. And Trump said, ah, you know.
They got Bandi, what was her name? Bandi Yee, the Yale

Speaker 2 psychiatrist who's testified before Congress that Donald Trump needed a straitjacket essentially, that he was crazy.

Speaker 2 We had Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, that we're going to have an intervention to find out if he was crazy on tape. This is all what's going on.
There is a divine reckoning.

Speaker 2 Every excess, there's an answer to it. Donald Trump is the answer to their excesses.

Speaker 3 Hopefully we see more of it in our lifetime. Hey, Victor, I do want to drill down a little more on the third-party idea, but first, a message from our sponsors.

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Speaker 3 Victor, about the third party, it's one thing to have a de facto independent effort, call it that, but to set up a real party that is going to, you know, act like the Republican Party or the Democrat Party with all the rudiments, state level, local level, et cetera.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's just an insanely gargantuan lift. So that's one thing.
The second thing is Elon Musk said he is going to primary MAGA incumbents.

Speaker 3 But is he going to

Speaker 3 primary leftist Democrats?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 No, he's not. It's all designed to punish the Republicans.

Speaker 2 And when you read the charter principles of that American party, I couldn't figure out anything that was different than the Libertarian Party.

Speaker 2 Sounded almost like every libertarian that runs every year. Once in a while, they get 2% or 3%, maybe more in 3 or 4% in a particular state.
And some people have argued they've affected the election.

Speaker 2 But if it wasn't Elon Musk, and as I said, third parties don't work, but this is not... intended to be a permanent third party.

Speaker 2 It's just a rubric, just a name for an effort in the midterms and maybe in 2028 to punish the Republican Party. And I don't know.

Speaker 2 And it would the only problem I have by saying that third parties never work, fourth motor companies never break into the big three. NASA has a monopoly.
Nobody in the private sector can outdo NASA.

Speaker 2 The idea that you're going to have an independent internet person when you had all of these carriers and they're going to break in.

Speaker 2 And everybody said if you pay three times what Twitter is worth, you're going to go broke or it's going to fall apart or the left is all going to leave.

Speaker 2 And every time the experts were wrong about Elon Musk. So I have a little bit of humility and I want to be careful about saying the third party won't work, but I don't think it's his intent.

Speaker 2 He's deeply hurt that he feels that he got this Doge super team and at great expense to their reputations and his time.

Speaker 2 He went through government and although he didn't get a trillion dollars, he got nearly 200 billion of suggested cuts and he gave, what, over $300 million to particular candidates, mostly in swing states, mostly in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 2 And he feels that he did a great service to Donald Trump, and he did a great service with Doge. He did.
And the net result is the left demonized him, and his cars are off by 20% car sales.

Speaker 2 And he's taken his eye off the ball.

Speaker 2 SpaceX, it hasn't had quite the spectacular success, I think it will again, that it did when we saw that erector set arm catching the booster, the descending booster.

Speaker 2 And he feels that he took a big hit and he wasn't appreciated.

Speaker 2 And after trying to explain to people that, he took drastic message and he went way overboard with the Epstein reference and that he won Trump the election. And then Trump

Speaker 2 replied in kind. And then he tried to put a peace feeder out and said he thought he did a little bit over.

Speaker 2 And what I'm trying to get at, Jack, if we were to go through a Rolodex of all the different people who thought they were going to take on Donald Trump and ruin them, Liz Cheney, Bill Crystal, John Bolton, Rex Tillertson,

Speaker 2 we could go on and on. We could go, you know,

Speaker 2 movie stars, Alex Baldwin. I mean,

Speaker 2 do you know anybody that came out on top? No.

Speaker 2 I don't.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump's strength is he will say anything to anyone, anytime, about anything. And most people won't do that.
And so they get in this thinking, well, he's president or he's a businessman.

Speaker 2 He won't, I can say this. No, you can't.

Speaker 2 The other thing about him they don't understand, if you've been called Hitler and Mussolini for 10 years and they tried to take you off the ballot like they've never done to any other presidential candidate, and you were the object of five different civil and criminal courtroom psychodramas and 93 indictments, and they raided your house and went through your

Speaker 2 wife's

Speaker 2 underwear drawer and they cancel the credit cards of your wife and son. And you were almost killed twice.

Speaker 2 Why would you hang back? You know what I mean? What more can you do to him? So it's a stupid thing to get into a personal tit-for-tat with Donald Trump because you're going to lose.

Speaker 2 And I think the richest man in the history of civilization thought that that were not true. And I feel really bad, so I felt so bad about it.

Speaker 2 Not that I needed a Tesla, but I went out and bought a Tesla to show my

Speaker 2 as a sign of an obscure farmer in Selma, California making an appeal to Elon to lick his wounds and be on a workmanlike relationship with Trump.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 when it gets a little old, I hope you give it to me, Victor.

Speaker 3 Although I'm not your son. Hey, Victor,

Speaker 3 we're going to move on and talk about the

Speaker 3 New York City socialist Democrat mayoral candidate

Speaker 3 Madame and some interesting invitation to New Yorkers from the mayor of Dallas. And after that, we're going to get into Medicaid fraud.

Speaker 3 And we're going to start all of that when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 3 We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson show recording on Sunday, July 6th. And this episode is up on Tuesday, the...

Speaker 3 8th. Is it the 6th today?

Speaker 2 It is. I don't know.

Speaker 3 It's the 9th. I wrote the 9th.
What an idiot.

Speaker 2 Please don't take away my July. I'm sorry, Victor.

Speaker 3 How was your 4th of July, by the way, up in the mountains?

Speaker 2 Did you have an eye?

Speaker 2 Well, I had a little setback with my postdoc.

Speaker 2 I had an infection and I had some eye problems, and I went up to altitude 7,200 feet to get pure air, but then that was kind of canceled by the pressure up there.

Speaker 2 But my wife and I had a really good time. We didn't.
The one thing that was really frustrating for Californians, we are burdened by every regulation.

Speaker 2 So, you know, they passed a new rule that said every single boat owner that gets in a boat and drives it over, I don't know how many feet, 12 feet, 8 feet maybe, has to go be licensed to anywhere, a river or lake.

Speaker 2 And then when you go online, you see all these private companies that the state has authorized that you can go on. And they range from $40 to $80.

Speaker 2 And this test

Speaker 2 goes from five to six hours. And it's not like a DMV that we're all familiar, you know, with that.
You can just kind of sleep or watch TV while you're doing it.

Speaker 2 It's

Speaker 2 this type of, if you hear three blasts, what do you do if you hear two blasts? What if you, what's a yellow flag with a white stripe versus a red stripe? And it's hard.

Speaker 2 And so, and then you have to take this test, then you have to go get it, pay the state to download it so you can get the license from the state.

Speaker 2 And with all the things the sheriffs have to do, and people, do you really want to add that whole regulation? And do you really think it's going to save?

Speaker 2 What causes boat accidents are people who are drunk and high. And why don't you just enforce the laws you have?

Speaker 2 But I bet you five bucks, if we went through every single company that's posted online as an acceptable licensing agent, you would find a lot of people that had ties a brother-in-law of the state assistant.

Speaker 2 Yes, with the new summer administration or the California legislature.

Speaker 3 Also, if you're up there, you, your wife, let's say your son, daughter-in-law, you're all up there, and they they would all, in order to pilot the boat, they would all have to have licenses, right?

Speaker 2 They would all have to have to do this. If I signed up, I think it's five and a half hours, and like a fool, I just was kind of half asleep doing the first hour session, and I flunked it.

Speaker 2 So I had to go back and do it again that session. But there's six of them, I think.

Speaker 2 It's going to take me six hours, and there's a time, I think you only have 30 days or 40 days once you pay your money. Yeah.
And it's not going to reduce.

Speaker 2 If he really wants to reduce reduce deaths in California due to accidents, Gavin, the 99, the I-5, the 101, there are four lanes, only two in each direction in places that are very, very dangerous.

Speaker 2 The Monterey Corridor, gosh, Delano to

Speaker 2 Tulare,

Speaker 2 seven or eight bottlenecks on the 99. All of I-5, basically from San Luis all the way down to L.A.
is only two lanes in each direction.

Speaker 2 Why don't you just do that and save people's lives rather than come up with this little stupid idea that you're going to make every single boat driver in the entire state have a license?

Speaker 2 And what are the sheriffs going to do? I mean, I talked to one person. He says, if you're down at one lake where it's really crowded, it's easy to enforce.

Speaker 2 If you're up at another lake where you are now, they're not going to enforce it. That's just folk wisdom.

Speaker 2 With night luck, I would go on the boat, I would pull out for five minutes, and then somebody would flag me all the way.

Speaker 3 Well, hopefully, that'd be a fan of us podcasts, Victor, and they would cut you some slack. So, let's go to my native city, Victor, if you know my wrongs.

Speaker 3 Here's a headline from the New York Post, I believe, yes Saturday: Black New Yorkers rage over Mamdani's quote-unquote African-American claim.

Speaker 3 And here's how the article begins: Black New York isn't buying it.

Speaker 3 A slew of Big Apple residents fumed Friday over mayoral frontrunner Zoran Mamdani's claim on an Ivy League college application that he is African-American, with with enraging the socialist pal is a fraud and trickster.

Speaker 3 Quote, he's just trying to get over, end quote. An 86-year-old Harlem resident, identifying herself only as Marjorie, said Mondami, a socialist of Asian Indian descent.

Speaker 3 Mondami, a Democratic socialist, has checked off the box black or African-American and that and Asian boxes on his 2009 Columbia University application regarding his race, the New York Times reported.

Speaker 3 Okay, Victor.

Speaker 2 I don't understand what he thought he was going to do. I mean, he's a Marxist-communist.
He's the son of wealthy, a filmmaker and a professor. He's a child of privilege.

Speaker 2 He's never really had a normal job. He's in his 30s, and he has a long record.
Well, he said, I never said I wanted to defund the police. He said that so many times.

Speaker 2 X is just full of people with direct quotes and postings from him.

Speaker 2 He's just a pathological liar. He said, I'm going to go after richer and whiter neighborhoods.

Speaker 2 And as I said last time on the podcast, if you look at any survey of per capita family income, Indian people from India, Indian Americans, not Native Americans, but people from India have the highest per capita income.

Speaker 2 And there's a huge Indian American community, as you know, Jack.

Speaker 2 So why didn't he just say, statistically, I'm going to go after richer people and I'll start with Indian Americans because they're the richest. But he didn't say that.

Speaker 2 He said white because he's worried about Eric Adams, who's going to get the black vote and the Hispanic vote.

Speaker 2 Especially now, as you pointed out, that he lied, and that was, as I said earlier, that was the oldest trick in the book.

Speaker 2 I've been in academia so long, I've canceled so many people going to graduate school, and I've had so many people who were foreign students or from the Arab communities or Coptic communities, and they have told me why I was, you know, my family is from Morocco.

Speaker 2 I'm going to say I'm African American. I said, it won't work.
At least it didn't work then because it was affirmative action.

Speaker 2 Then when Obama refashioned that as DEI and said anybody who's not white is a victim, that might have worked, but that's probably what he thought.

Speaker 2 But then, you know, all of that stuff, you know, he's going to say, he said he wants to seize the means of production. I said to myself, what do you mean by that? How? You're just going to take it?

Speaker 2 You're going to tax it 99%, a wealth tax? Are you going to

Speaker 2 dox people who are wealthy and unleash the Bastille mob on them? Are you going to go after Trump Tower or Tesla?

Speaker 2 What's your priority? Who do you go after first? George Soros? I doubt it. And then just today, Doc, there were two more, three more studies.

Speaker 2 Alwockie, remember that American citizen that Obama offed without a trial? He was a radical ISIS member?

Speaker 2 There's a report coming out, I think it's in the New York Post, that said that he tried to defend him, not the fact that he was a citizen who was killed without habeas corpus or due process, but that he was a radical ISIS member, and he was.

Speaker 2 And then there was another story that said, and again, I haven't confirmed this, I'm just reading it.

Speaker 2 So until I see it in six or seven different news accounts, but it just broke today, that he posted or he trafficked in a video of Indian Americans dressed up as Hasidic Jews and kind of rapping about Hanukkah.

Speaker 2 And that's another one.

Speaker 2 And so whether he was, you know, trying to fake it out like he was a black person or whether he was attacking Jews or making fun of them, he sounds like a child, a spoiled little brat that thought he was a rapper and he did all these videos and he was overexposed and then he ran for office and he's outraged that anybody would do to him what he does to other people.

Speaker 2 Does that mean he's not going to win? Not necessarily because everything I just outlined is probably a recommendation for his constituency to come out and vote for him. Right.

Speaker 2 So the only way that they're going to stop him is they're going to have to get Cuomo, who's an egomaniac, and Eric Adams, who's an egomaniac, and Silwa, who I like, but is an egomaniac.

Speaker 2 And they're going to have to get them all three together, and they're going to have to say, one of you, whoever is polling the highest,

Speaker 2 the other two are going to, I know that will be Joe Biden election rigging, maybe, but otherwise he's going to win.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And why can't New York be Detroit? I know Detroit is supposed to be.
It will be.

Speaker 2 I think it's becoming that way now.

Speaker 3 Yeah. You know, once upon a time, Victor, when we went through this 50 years ago, 40 plus years ago, New York circling the drain, you did have industry bases that had to be there.

Speaker 3 I mean, Wall Street had to be there. There was still some manufacturing.
The media was there. This is all pre-bandwidth.

Speaker 3 Once bandwidth happens, a lot of these places, first of all, there's no manufacturing left. And everyone else can, like, so long, see you later.

Speaker 2 Why wouldn't Miami become the new banking of the East Coast? Well, what kind of financial down there? Or

Speaker 2 North Carolina, Charlotte. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's got a lot less taxes. It's got a lot less regulation.
It's got a lot better climate.

Speaker 2 And New York, I went there the first time I was 18 and I was a summer, my first year in college, and a professor said, if you're going to get four years of Latin and Greek, you're going to have to go to summer school.

Speaker 2 So go to the Yale Intensive Summer School. So I did for 10 weeks.
And one weekend on my own, I thought, I've never been to New York. So I took the train.
It was 1972.

Speaker 2 Thomas Eagleton had just announced that he had psychic shock treatment and they were looking for Sergeant Schreiber or somebody to take his place. McGovern was.
was anyway.

Speaker 2 I went there and that was the most seedy, dirty Times Square I can ever remember.

Speaker 2 I got off, I got out and I walked up there and about five people came up and asked me if I wanted sex from somebody, if I wanted drugs, if I it was sorted.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, I didn't really go much, but when I went under Giuliani, I would be doing a Fox thing and they'd say, well, the Fox car will come and get you.

Speaker 2 And I'd say, why would they have to come and get me at the hotel? It's only 15 blocks. So I would do a late Fox and I walked 15 blocks and everybody was out.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 In the 90s, they were all out. It was lit up.
Hi, how are you? There was no crime. It was like a night and day.
And then they went, they took that and they just destroyed it.

Speaker 2 And you're right, they've turned it into Detroit.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 it really could circle a drain. I have another thing I want to bring up about this Mondami stuff.

Speaker 3 But first, Victor, I want to let our listeners know that right now the headlines are chock full of data breaches and regulatory rollbacks making us all vulnerable. But you can do something about it.

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Speaker 2 show.

Speaker 3 Victor, two quick things about Bakkan Mandami and the broader

Speaker 3 question is that this seems, again, to make the point that Shelby Steele and others have made for years that affirmative action has, at its core, been a racket for white liberals and leftists.

Speaker 3 And this also shows this propensity amongst the left to steal things. We have here stolen race,

Speaker 3 stolen valor, and then stolen sex, you know, know, by Leah Thomas.

Speaker 3 You know, they just, they just, they're thieves in every which way. Anyway, any thoughts on any of that? If not, we'll move on, we'll move on.

Speaker 2 Except they say you can construct your sex, but they don't say you construct your race.

Speaker 2 So if a man is born biologically like Leah, quote, Leah, unquote, Thomas, and he says, well, I'm a mediocre swimmer and I have sort of feminine qualities, so I declare myself a constructed female.

Speaker 2 And then if you don't accept that, then you're a bigot. So

Speaker 2 Momdami, to take one example, says, I am an Indian American, but I'm going to construct myself as a black person. But we don't allow that.

Speaker 2 And the question is, does Mondami, who has black hair and black beard, would he be closer to being black than Leah Thomas would be to a woman? I think so.

Speaker 2 And so the point is, it's all hypocritical, but it has one common theme, that certain people who feel that they don't have the qualifications to do something want an edge.

Speaker 2 And all affirmative action was, was the bookend to white networking. I'm not talking about Asian students in general or poor kids from Bakersfield that were merocratic.

Speaker 2 I'm talking about the old boy network, the professor's son, the president's son that didn't have the qualifications. Maybe their parents did or and they used money or influence.

Speaker 2 And then the white bicoastal elite said, we feel kind of bad, but not bad enough to give it up.

Speaker 2 So what we're going to do, we're going to allow blacks and Hispanics to have the same type of insider non-merocratic advantage that we wealthy white people do.

Speaker 2 Now, we've got to explain this, so how we're going to get away with it. So, we're going to say that they have been victims of systemic racism for years.

Speaker 2 Slavery, Jim Crow, in case of Hispanics, the Zusu riots in LA, 40s. And somebody did that, but it wasn't us.
It was those awful people from East Palestine, Ohio.

Speaker 2 Those awful garbage dregs, chumps of Joe Biden, those awful irredeemables, deplorables of Hillary Clinton, and the awful clingers of Rocco. And that's what happened.

Speaker 2 And so the people who lost out on it were, I don't know, the white working class that didn't have any money, it didn't have any influence, didn't have any contacts, but there were very talented people among them that were self-motivated, they studied hard, and they applied to college, and they were deemed a white oppressor.

Speaker 2 Not the wealthy person who had everything going for them, who said, yes, there are white oppressors, but not me. It's him.
It's him. He's the guy that voted.

Speaker 2 Or there's the guy that voted for Donald Trump. Those are the guys that are right-wing.
Those are the guys with a southern accent. Those are the guys that work in factories.
Those are the guys that...

Speaker 2 with the beer guts. Or is that famous exchange from Peter Stroke and Lisa Page? I went into Walmart and I could smell them.

Speaker 2 So that's what it's all about. And that's why they should abolish all of it.
And I'm perfectly happy. I think all of our listeners are perfectly happy.

Speaker 2 If you're going to get rid of affirmative action and these corrupt universities, then they shouldn't sell admissions, either by charging $10 or $12 million for a legacy or giving somebody extra, just get rid of it and make it meritocratic.

Speaker 2 But that's a larger question, Jack. There's an article by Peter Berkowitz in today's Real Clear Politics that he talks about a discussion.

Speaker 3 Sorry.

Speaker 2 I get animated when I talk about about universities.

Speaker 3 I'm sure Peter Berkowitz will be excited to see you got so animated talking about his piece.

Speaker 2 I'm a little dizzy too. We had Larry Summers and Ross.
Duthot, is that how you? I'd say Dothett.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Dothett. Ross.
He and another person, Frank Mealy or somebody. I don't know who the other one was.
No, not him, another person. All on the liberal side except Ross.
who's centrist.

Speaker 2 And they were talking. I was surprised that Larry Summers was basically saying, I don't like the way Trump's doing it, but the universities deserve it.

Speaker 2 And so what I'm getting at is if I, again, I keep saying that, if I was Stanford, if I was the UC system, if Columbia, Princeton's going that way, you better settle because people don't know what you do.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you have defied the Supreme Court now. You're on record of breaking the law.
You have race-based admissions, hiring, retention.

Speaker 2 You have race-based graduations, theme houses, you call segregated dorms.

Speaker 2 You've been gouging us at 55, 60 percent of federal grants. You have not given due process and protection for anybody on your campus that is accused of sexual assault.

Speaker 2 Even if he did that, they have a right under the Constitution. And more importantly, you don't respect free speech and you don't believe in diversity.
95% of your faculty is left-wing. So just settle.

Speaker 2 As far as your big esteemed endowments, do you understand what's coming down the line? You're going to pay, according to the reconciliation, Jack,

Speaker 2 the House wanted 21%, but I guess the low number is still 8%.

Speaker 2 That's billions of dollars out of higher education on the endowment. That's on top of the 15% limit on surcharges.
And that's going to cost these Ivy League schools a half a billion, a billion a year.

Speaker 2 And they brag about their endowments, but like we've said on many occasions, the money is either targeted or it has never been liquidized.

Speaker 2 And so there was a good article in the Wall Street Journal, and another person wrote and said, you know, a lot of these institutions brag about their endowments, but until you actually get the money, and, you know, you're talking about, I don't know, half a trillion dollars probably nationwide.

Speaker 2 And you start taking that money out and trying to liquidize it because it's tied up. And when you add on the taxes, these new taxes on endowment income, they're going to be in big financial trouble.

Speaker 2 And it's only going to get worse, and they're going to have no empathy. And more importantly, they have lost a lot of their constituents.

Speaker 2 A lot of Asian students, a lot of Jewish students, they're going to places in the South where they know they're not politicized and they're safe or they're merucratic.

Speaker 2 So if you're going to go code, go to Georgia Tech or SMU or someone like that, Texas A ⁇ M, you'll get a better education than you will be at these Ivy League. It'll be safer.

Speaker 2 You won't have to put up with a lot of foreign students that are demonstrated. You won't have to have these spoiled brat kids, their legacies, as many.
And so they don't know what they're doing.

Speaker 2 They're like blindfolded walking off a cliff, and they're so arrogant and they've been so protected and they're so insular that they don't understand that they don't have any cards to play.

Speaker 2 The latest poll has them about 35% approval of higher education. And

Speaker 3 Cornell is about to take a beating also.

Speaker 2 You know, there was a thing today, was it in the Fox or about New York Post? The Dartmouth riots of May 2nd, you know, on Dartmouth when there was the pro-Hamas riot.

Speaker 2 They put all the pictures of those kids in there, and it was almost like a textbook. A lot of them were from the Middle East, but a lot of them were very wealthy kids.

Speaker 2 And they go and this rite of passage.

Speaker 2 So I think Trump just said, if they're going to turn out left-wing people and move the country left in a way that the majority of the people don't want, that's fine, but we're not going to pay for it.

Speaker 2 And they don't get it. Claudine Gay, you know, she gets up there in that Inquisition this was, they really tore her apart, but it was like.
Well, whether we enforce that, it depends on the context.

Speaker 2 And you're thinking, you're a plagiarizer, and you're president of Harvard, and you have never paid the price.

Speaker 2 And after you resign under pressure, you're going to never pry the price because you guys protect your own if you if you hit the right button.

Speaker 2 You have all plagiarized.

Speaker 2 She plagiarized and she should have been fired.

Speaker 3 You know, Vic, there's something philosophical about endowments and the obsession of them. I mean, you have to have, you should have an endowment, but the obsession to supersize them.

Speaker 3 It almost, you know, if the institution itself was doing its mission and truly educating and being a good thing, then it would not have to obsess about future funding because it would have faith that the new alumni would treat the institution like the old alumni did and would give.

Speaker 3 And in the giving, these enormous endowments could be spent now to make education much more affordable, et cetera, and have faith that you're such a good institution that the money will keep coming.

Speaker 3 But they've been very good in that.

Speaker 2 When I was a point, I won't mention names, but when I was appointed to my present job, most of the senior fellows are endowed. So somebody, I thought, endowed it.

Speaker 2 So this philanthropist who was a wonderful person, everything about him, I'll just mention his name, Martin Anderson, not the Martin Anderson government. He was just a saint.

Speaker 2 And he said, I see you've been at the Hoover. I want to talk to you.
And I said, okay. And he said, I'm willing to chip in as every senior fellow is,

Speaker 2 but I'm not going to endow it. And I don't want to put my capital in something that's permanent.
And I don't know after I'm gone how it will be used.

Speaker 2 I won't make a annual contribution to your compensation. And I said, well, why would you want to do that? I mean, why would you want to help me? Is it something I wrote? I said, nope.

Speaker 2 And he said, you've got three things going for you. You're Swedish like me.

Speaker 2 I'm a Marine combat veteran who was at Choice Island, and you're named after a Marine who was killed on Okinawa. But I said, I didn't do it.
He said, It doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 And he said, I have family in the San Joaquin Valley. And you punched all three buttons, and as long as I'm alive, and he passed away.

Speaker 2 But my point he was trying to teach me was I was only 49, and he said, When you endow something, you lose complete control over it. They'll tell you something, but how it will be used decades.

Speaker 2 And you see all these professors.

Speaker 2 It's so funny, Jack, when I see all these radical professors and I look at the names, you know, the Jack Jack Thompson professor of humanistic studies, and you go out and look at the person he's named after,

Speaker 2 that person's worldview has nothing to do with what the money has just been misappropriated. So it would be much better if the donors follow that precedent.

Speaker 2 If they want to endow a professor, they'll say, I have a 10-year contract and I will do it, predicated on if they follow the rules of the university or something that I agree with.

Speaker 3 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: There's a trust but verify aspect to that.

Speaker 3 You know, to close this out, there's a guy called up National Review one day when I was still there, and he went, he had gone to Holy Cross, and coincidentally, I picked up and he said, I want to fund a chair

Speaker 3 at Holy Cross for Bill Buckley. And my immediate instinct was,

Speaker 3 I said to him, are you crazy? I mean, they will, first of all, you'll die someday and you won't know what the hell's going on, but they'll take your money and then they'll put a communist note.

Speaker 2 They will. I've had people call me.
I've had four or five people in my life call me and say, I wish I really had done some research research because the person that's my name chair is a Marxist.

Speaker 2 I said they're all Marxists, basically.

Speaker 2 All this stuff is coming, it's all coming like a perfect storm to the university.

Speaker 2 It's segregation, it's racial prejudice, it's defying the Supreme Court, it is shady bookkeeping on grants, it is these enormous endowments are kind of fraudulent.

Speaker 2 What Harvard or Yale or Stanford says they have, they really don't have. It's like a guy who says, I I have a 10 million 401k, and then all of a sudden somebody said, You just got sued for 5 million.

Speaker 2 Well, you have 10 million. He tries to take out 5 million.
No, you don't have 5 million. And a lot of that stuff is tied up in speculative real estate, in long-term CDs, with penalties and stocks.

Speaker 2 And they don't have a lot of discretionary income.

Speaker 2 And they rely on the interest on the endowment, which will now be taxed in part, and annual giving, which their publicity is negative, and that's going to scare off a lot of people.

Speaker 2 And there's another thing that no one talks about, but I have talked to a lot of people because I've had to do a lot of fundraising the last two years.

Speaker 2 If your child, if you're in Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, I don't know, alumnus, and you want your child to go there, and from an early age, he was in the Harvard child prodigy camp, you know, at five, and they have such things.

Speaker 2 And he did everything that you wanted. He got a perfect SAT score.
He got 4.5 with advanced placement. You sent him to Ghana to build water wells in the summer so he could help the poor.

Speaker 2 And he applied and didn't get in? You're not going to give any more to that place. You are not going to.
And so they have so many people that they have excluded on the basis of race.

Speaker 2 These people had it with them. And

Speaker 2 I'm not talking about the people who pay $10 million or $20 million.

Speaker 2 I'm talking about affluent people who can't afford $10 million, which is, I hear, $10 to $15 million is if your child's qualified and he's white, that's what it takes to get a fair hearing.

Speaker 3 I'm being a little bit cynical, of course, but I remember the actresses who went to jail to get their kids into some of the California schools, right? That was

Speaker 3 like half a million to 700, something like that.

Speaker 2 What was it? Sailing scholarship. Or crew, something, yeah.
Yeah, something like that. So

Speaker 2 megaphone on the crew. Somebody's got it.
Anyway, it's a corrupt situation. And you know what's the good thing about it? Peter Burkitwitz is a very astute writer.

Speaker 2 And he wrote this essay about this discussion about higher education. And he made the point, or he reflected what people were saying, is that the brand itself is being tarnished.

Speaker 2 And the biggest beneficiaries are, I wish I could say, in deference to you, they were Catholic or religiously themed university, but that's not true, as you know, because there's only a few

Speaker 2 Catholic, yes, that's, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas, et cetera, et cetera.
But what they were saying is we might have reached peak Harvard, and that brand no longer means anything.

Speaker 2 If you've gone 20 years with DEI and affirmative action, and you've accelerated it to an insane commissariat degree after 2020, then you put thousands of people out into the workplace that, by your own admissions, did not meet the standards that you used to institute across the board, and you did it for a purpose.

Speaker 2 You did it to show employers and government that your graduates, in terms of computation skills, analytical, historical knowledge, oral, and written fluency were so superb to get through and get a BA through your rigorous curriculum by world-class scholars.

Speaker 2 But if you take that, that brand, and then you destroy it and you let in people who have not met those requirements, then the faculty either has to inflate the grades, which they did, or lower the workload, workload, which they did, or make new gut courses, which they did.

Speaker 2 And the net result is for many years now, you've sent out people. You should read the comments on some of these articles about higher education.
They're from people who hired these kids.

Speaker 2 I was reading them today, and they're going, oh, I hired two kids from blank school, and I had to get rid of them both. They were just troublemakers.

Speaker 2 So the point I'm saying is that they've taken that brand and demonstrated to employers and prestigious law firms or medical associates that their name doesn't mean anything, and they've been using the fumes of it.

Speaker 2 The creator of the fumes no longer exists. So what's going to happen? I think they're going to be put out of business.
And that's sad, but it's going to happen unless they have a...

Speaker 2 They got to get some, they got to get about 10 presidents that are, you know, like a John Silber or something. John Silber, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, 35, and they got to go in there and just clean house and get back to the original mission statement. And I don't think you could do that.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump was the president of a university. That's kind of what they need.
By the way, that piece is called Reforming Higher Education Reform by Peter Berkowitz on Real Clear Politics.

Speaker 3 Victor, one last thing before we go to the break, and then we'll get one more topic in for today's show.

Speaker 3 When you're talking about the funding tied up, it just reminded me of George Bailey when there's the run on the bank and the run on the morning. No, I don't have all the cash here.
It's in your house.

Speaker 3 It's in your house. It's your house.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's funny you meant that because

Speaker 2 as I was recuperating, I was trying to write, but I had this infection. And I was watching.

Speaker 2 And did you see the other night?

Speaker 2 You know how they run thematically on Turner? Did you see Mr. Deeds goes to town and Meet John Doe? Meet John Doe.

Speaker 3 I saw Mr. Deeds like three weeks ago.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I just saw Meet John Doe. Yeah.
And, of course, Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
Yeah. And I didn't realize, Meet John Doe got Academy Award for Best Picture.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's very sad because those pictures from 1935 to 40 were the most popular pictures and frank cowper was a he was he had a 40 he had that yeah but then with world war ii you know there was a more sophisticated and the the film noir the anti-hero right

Speaker 2 his last great film which is was his best i think is a wonderful life but i didn't realize it did so dismally at the box office when it came out yeah it was it was it was a flop i have i think for some reason it's a brilliant piece of filmmaking oh it is yeah you know those he always has the big it's kind of like John Ford, too, with the movies.

Speaker 3 They have these crowd scenes constantly, and Capra has several of them in most of the movies. Um, and it's the pop, you know, the Greek chorus is in there.
I love his movies.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I like him. I like Ile Kazan.
I was watching on the waterfront the other day. Eva Marie Saint.
There's something about her, she was just stunning. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 I mean, I know she didn't have that classic look like Ava Gardner or Elizabeth Taylor, but no, when she was in North by Northwest,

Speaker 2 beautiful, she was beautiful. She's still alive.
I think she's.

Speaker 2 I really like her. I've always liked her.
She was my favorite actress. I really thought she was wonderful.

Speaker 2 All those movies, I mean, I was thinking of all those George Stevens, gosh, and William Wyler, Best Years of Our Life. All of them.

Speaker 2 I have to tell you, you're never going to have people of that talent again.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 we missed the golden age, but thank God for Turner. It's still there.
Two things. One is I have two ties, personal ties on the waterfront.
The priest in the movie, that's a Carl Malden.

Speaker 3 Well, he was based on a real priest, John Carl Malden.

Speaker 2 I didn't know that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, a Jesuit who had tried to clean up the waterfront. And

Speaker 3 he went to my high school in Anthony Fox High School. But he worked for what was called the Xavier Institute of Industrial Relations.

Speaker 3 And the Jesuits were trying to create this Catholic counter force to the communists who were trying to run the waterfront. So Father Carey ran the Xavier Institute.
He was a dear friend of the family.

Speaker 3 And then the second thing in the movie, you know, part of the scene, there's a wedding at at a bar where, where, and the bride, Mrs. Garvey in real life, she was a friend and a family friend.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And she came by National Review one day. She used to be an editor for Oxford University Press.
And she, little sweet lady, she came by one day, said, Let's go have a drink. So

Speaker 3 I went to the bar on the third and 35th of the year.

Speaker 2 I didn't realize, I just looked at characterizations of my law. I didn't realize how brilliant Lee J.
Cobb and Rod Steiger were. They were great.

Speaker 2 Yes. They were really.
Carl Malden is kind of, he was like Eli Wallach, character actors. And I think they each, didn't they live in their mid-90s?

Speaker 2 He did. They were both indestructible.
They were both brilliant character actors.

Speaker 3 I think Carl Malden ended up better. I think he always overplayed it a little in the movies, but in the streets of San Francisco, the TV series, he was terrific in that.

Speaker 2 This whole question. He was the villain.
Remember, there was a weird Marlon Brando flop, but I really liked it. It was a Western called One-Eyed Jax, and Carl Malden was dad, they called him.

Speaker 2 He was evil, and uh, and Marlon Brandle comes back to kill him. Yeah, a little out of character there.

Speaker 3 So, hey, people, thanks for letting me reminisce. I love when you reminisce about movies, Victor.

Speaker 3 We're running overtime here, but we have time for one more topic, and we'll get to it when we come back from these final important messages.

Speaker 3 We are back with the the Victor Davis Hanson show recording on July 9th.

Speaker 3 No, July 6th, Jack, get it right. And this episode will be up on Tuesday, the 8th, of Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.
Check it out.

Speaker 3 Anything and everything about Victor's on there.

Speaker 3 Links Galore to his other appearances on other podcasts and shows, the archives of these podcasts, his weekly essay for American Greatness, weekly syndicated column. Why would you want to subscribe?

Speaker 3 Which, if you do, it's $65 a year, which is discounted from the monthly $6.50.

Speaker 3 You do that because twice a week, Victor writes an exclusive piece for the Blade of Perseus and he does an exclusive video. So check it out.
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Speaker 3 Victor, I have one more movie there. I just have to say, I saw Night of the Hunter last night, which was a terrible bomb when it came out.
But in, oh my gosh,

Speaker 3 in a long time.

Speaker 3 It's fantastic. Okay.
What should we talk? Oh, let's talk about, let's end this show today today with talking about Medicaid fraud.

Speaker 3 So there was a hearing the other day. This has to do with the CBO Congressional Budget Office estimates.
And of course, Democrats are saying these big, beautiful bill, Medicaid,

Speaker 3 people are going to die. They're going to starve, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 3 The guy who testified said, here are some of the numbers. It's staggering.
Who's going to get kicked off, Victor? There's 12 million people total.

Speaker 3 4.8 million are able-bodied adults without dependents who choose not to meet modest work requirements. 1.4 million are illegal immigrants.
1.6 have access to other insurance.

Speaker 3 1.3 are already ineligible and shouldn't be on it in the first place. 1.8 million on Obamacare are illegal immigrants.
And finally, 1.1 million are absolute fraudsters. This is 12 million people.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 2 this is a massive fraud operation.

Speaker 2 There's 40 million people in California, and 40% of them are on Medi-Cal.

Speaker 2 And 50% of all babies are born on Medi-Cal. When I go to the supermarket, I beat that horse to death, but it's not just that the majority of people ahead of me are on Medi-Cal, but

Speaker 2 the cards that they give, the WIC, women, infant children, or the electric bank transfer credit cards. The old days, at least you had to have these kind of Confederate dollars, remember food stamps?

Speaker 2 Well, today they're just credit cards. But the number of people I would say that present a card and then it's rejected is 50%.

Speaker 2 And I think the number of cards that are produced are about three or four. And my experience is watching people.
And so what the left does, though, is they

Speaker 2 vastly expand the roles and they vastly expand the budget. And then they set into motion periodic hikes.

Speaker 2 And then when Trump came in or any Republican, if they say we're not going to increase by 20%, we're going to increase by, that's a cut.

Speaker 2 So any slowing down of the enlargement, I think Medi-Cal was five times, or it's double, excuse me, than it was just five or six years ago. The labor participation rate is only 62%.

Speaker 2 So that's not going to work. I don't understand the Democrats.

Speaker 2 Maybe their propaganda is going to be more effective, but trying to suggest that you shouldn't go after people who are illegal or able-bodied and they're taking money from people who need it or all these deportations of people who are criminals doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 3 Well, Victor, I want to let me just throw in one last thing. We were talking before about New York, and this is funny, I think.
The mayor of Dallas, who is

Speaker 3 Eric Johnson.

Speaker 2 I remember him. He's black.

Speaker 3 He's a former Democrat. Yeah.
In 2023, he did that after opposing a city council tax hike. Well, this is according to the Center Square.
He reported, he sent out a note.

Speaker 3 Dear concerned New York City resident or business owner, don't panic.

Speaker 3 Just Just move to Dallas where we strongly support our police, value our partners in the business community, embrace free markets, shun excessive regulation, and protect the American dream.

Speaker 3 A big city in a state with no income tax run by a black Republican, I don't know, sounds kind of appealing, you know? Doesn't that for instance?

Speaker 2 And there's another, isn't Myrtle Beach now the big retirement place in South Carolina? It was kind of like a New Jersey, you know, like the boardwalk, and now it's been upscaled.

Speaker 2 The point I'm making is that this is one of the greatest transformations in American history that south of the Mason-Dixon line, where per capita income, GDP, state, everything was below, given the Civil War and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and agrarianism versus the modernistic

Speaker 2 Yankee New England or Midwest. It's all flipped.
It's all flipped. The center of dynamism, of population growth, of GDP is all in Florida, Tennessee, Texas.

Speaker 2 And everybody thought we're going to be the blue state. It was the Pacific, Seattle, Oregon, California, and then the East Coast Strip, and then the Midwest around the Great Lakes.

Speaker 2 It's all stagnated, and people are going. I don't know when it's ever going to stop.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I think, Victor,

Speaker 3 there's a thought. Well, it'll get so bad people will come to their senses.
But people don't always come to their senses. I mean, you wrote a book.
They do, but it's too.

Speaker 2 I mean, the emperor,

Speaker 2 the last paleologist in 1453, came to his senses, and he said, this used to be 1.4 million people.

Speaker 2 We have 50,000 residents, and half of Constantinople is open fields, and we only have 7,000 people on the walls. And the army out there is 200,000.
Come to your senses.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 3 when did the mayor of Detroit come to his sense? When did St. Louis, Gary, Indiana?

Speaker 2 When did we

Speaker 2 London Reed, we had Willie Brown, we have Gavin Newsome, we had Jerry Brown, and now we have a moderate Democrat, and look what he's got to work with.

Speaker 2 And the budget, the budget is just the blue state model doesn't work. It's an aging population.
It's a huge underclass. It is an understaffed.

Speaker 2 The pensions are not sustainable. The taxes and regulations are so high, no business wants to locate there.
The climate is not all that great, except for the Pacific coast.

Speaker 3 But even places like

Speaker 2 that used to be part of the red state model, like Arizona and Colorado and Nevada, are starting to hemreach because they're purple states. They haven't gone full blue state.

Speaker 2 They have ruined Minnesota. They probably almost ruined Michigan.
They ruined much of Wisconsin. They

Speaker 2 tried to ruin Pennsylvania. They had the on-midas touch.
Everything the left does

Speaker 2 turns to dross. Give us your illegal aliens.
We'll put them in hotels. We want more federal funds.
Half people on Medi-Cal.

Speaker 3 How dare you do that?

Speaker 2 We got all these new constituents. Mayor Johnson's a wonderful guy in Chicago.
8% approval rating.

Speaker 3 What a disaster. Oh, Victor, you've been terrific as ever.
I'm glad to see you're surviving at least. I know this is an ongoing struggle for you, but say

Speaker 2 it's pretty cool. I thought it would be.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 you'll get there. I want to thank people that I had a couple of emails yesterday from folks who get Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society.

Speaker 3 It comes out every Friday, every Friday, including 4th of July. It came out.
And how do you get it? You go to civilthoughts.com, sign up. It's totally free.
We're not selling your name.

Speaker 3 And when you get it, you'll see there's 14, 15 recommended readings. Interesting, great, cool articles I've come across the previous week.

Speaker 3 I'm confident next issue, I'm going to put that Peter Berkowitz piece in there for people to see. So, civilthoughts.com, sign up.
Thank you. Victor, I have a couple of notes I want to read.

Speaker 3 There's so many comments, so blank and many on YouTube now.

Speaker 3 Thank folks that do that. I'm trying to plow through them and read them.
I'm going to read a few.

Speaker 3 I'm going to call this the great Sammy Wink Commentathon from Capped4550. Love your show and your insight, Victor.
I so enjoy it when Sammy hosts.

Speaker 3 From United States Dale, he writes, just simply, the great Sammy Wink. And Stevies4784 writes, thank you, Sammy.
I really appreciate how you let Victor talk. Your cohort sometimes talks too much.

Speaker 3 Talks too loud. So thank you, Victor, for letting you for letting Victor complete his thoughts.
One more. One more.
This was

Speaker 3 from the 4th of July. Jill Clark 6076 wrote, happy 4th of July, VDH and Sammy.
I got ready for our barbecue listening to the best podcast on America. In America,

Speaker 2 that's very nice.

Speaker 3 There's so many nice people writing so many wonderful things.

Speaker 2 You know, I'll just finish. I had an anecdote.
I was up in the mountains and a person came up to me and he said, did they buy you off? I said, what did you mean?

Speaker 2 And he said, we haven't heard you lately.

Speaker 2 And I said, yeah, we haven't missed a podcast. And he said, no, no, I haven't heard you.
I thought they just finally got to you and they bought you off. I said, we're doing four podcasts a week.

Speaker 2 I haven't missed one. I even did it the day after my operation.
And I do five for the Daily Signal. I have not missed one since January.
One.

Speaker 2 But I have missed a lot of Fox because I had, you know, you don't want to go on there when you might sneeze and I had some eye problems. So

Speaker 2 yeah, you don't want to go. So, but I might go on tomorrow night.
So we'll see.

Speaker 3 Okay, well.

Speaker 2 But we have not, my point is, we have not been bought off.

Speaker 3 Yeah, who, by whom?

Speaker 2 I mean, I was wondering the powers that be.

Speaker 3 Who's the hey?

Speaker 3 Somebody actually, somebody wrote a comment somewhere, Victor, that said, I thought that was so funny.

Speaker 3 This was a negative comment. You were a suck up to Israel and Turkey.
I'm thinking, have they ever heard Victor talk about Turkey?

Speaker 2 No, I have not been very. I visited there a lot.
I like the Turkish people. Very honest.
I'll leave it at that. Yes, I'll leave it at that.

Speaker 3 Okay, Victor, you've been wonderful. Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.
Thanks, folks, for listening and viewing. And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Speaker 3 Bye-bye.

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

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