The Gallery of Rogues Cultivated by the Left

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is a military historian, a classicist, a philologist, a farmer, professor.

I don't know what you're not, Victor.

Everything.

The hardest of all is farming.

Yeah.

Much harder than being a professor or even a writer.

It's the hardest thing in the world.

Someone put a picture of you, someone yesterday on Twitter, maybe it was today,

a picture of you from one of your

earliest books of you on the farm in a very dirty outfit.

Yeah, that was a New York photographer for

the free press.

No, you know what that was.

Excuse me.

That was Jane Smiley wrote a review of.

She wrote a review of a book that I wrote.

It wasn't The Other Greeks.

It was Fields Without Dreams.

And it was very complimentary.

She later hated my guts and wanted to retract her preface to The Land Was Everything.

But Fields Without Dreams is about losing money and farming, all the people I met.

And they've sent this photographer out.

And as I remember, I picked her up at the Fresno Air Terminal, but I was working on the farm.

And so I got off a tractor, drove up, got her, and then I said, I will get dressed.

Just stay here outside.

She said, no, no, no, no, no, you got to be like this.

So I just took it like that.

Yeah.

Well, if that was an everyday picture of you, I would just think, oh, my gosh, what does it mean to be a farmer?

I was 25.

I got my PhD.

I came back and I did not cut my hair or shave for about a year.

And then I just farmed all the whole time.

And I looked at my Social Security.

I always do that when they see, you know, your prior salaries.

Do you ever get that thing?

Yes.

And

1980 was $6,100,

$7,200, $4,500.

But it was kind of a good time.

We had all these

canned food we did.

We had dried tomatoes for the year.

We did all that stuff.

We dried all of our apricots, our figs, and we preserved them and lived on nothing.

I had about five cars.

I had a 1970 V6

Dodge pickup.

I had a 1964 Vovo.

I had a

1968 Ranchero.

Remember those?

And it had a 289 V8 in it.

I had a, my dad bought it rec for me.

It was a Pontiac Le Mans 1972.

So I had like four.

Yeah, I had like, oh, and I also had a 1967 Buick Riviera that my uncle sold to me for $2,000.

I paid him off by the month.

And I had all these cars here.

I had five of them.

And then I would when one would go bad, I would use the other.

And then I there was always two that weren't working.

And

there was a lot of guys that that on the farm that were really good mechanics and I learned a lot from them.

So I kind of, you know, I would change generators and carburetors, but I got them all running.

And then one day, my wife and three kids were in a town, a country town, Readley, and it was like 105, and the car broke down on the railroad track as they were passing.

And it was that huge Electra boat.

So I said, that's it.

And I got, I liquidated all of them for maybe,

I don't know, $900.

And then I went out and bought a Mazda van on credit.

That was the first new car I'd had.

You know, your life would have been so much easier as a farmer if you had only followed the Michael Bloomberg.

Drop a seed.

What did he say?

Drop a seed.

Stick your finger in the ground.

Drop a seed, yeah.

I was merciless to him

when I said that.

When I see these guys farming, you talk to them, they are expert welders.

They are expert mechanics.

They are expert truck drivers.

They are expert tractor drivers.

They are expert agronomists.

They are expert accountants.

They are

financial planners.

You talk to them, the guys that really know what they're doing.

It's something, and gosh, I'm not talking about the corporate agribusiness.

Those guys are smart too, but I'm just talking about the guy that does everything on his own property.

And there's not very many left of them.

Kind of like independent truck drivers.

You know, those guys that have their own truck

and they know how to fix it, and they have little calculators in their mind about the price of gas and the price it costs them per mile per the load.

Was they also on top of every state that had to buy the amount of gas for that state that they were in?

So if you were driving halfway across the country, you had to juggle all these numbers.

I used to talk to those guys that would transport fruit all the way from California to the New York supermarkets, and they would tell me about the idiosyncratic state gas prices, rules, how much it was costing them, where they slept, which truck stopped.

But they had it all down to the bottom line.

Yeah.

Anytime you have somebody who's independent like that, they're really valuable in a consensual society because you need at least a minority of the population, outspoken, eccentric, self-employed.

That was what was weird about Trump is that he had that background that he had dealt with.

No offense about your home city, Jack, but crooked politicians, crooked social activists, crooked environmentalists, crooked

city politicians, crooked union, all of them.

And how to build a building with dealing with all those people, I don't know, but he did.

He did.

Yeah, they couldn't fix the rink at Central Park.

He said, give me that.

And he did it in like five minutes.

Hey, Victor, we're going to stick to agriculture and actually agroterrorism.

We had tried in our previous recording, I had said we were going to talk about this Chinese communist madness, and Gordon Chang had some thoughts.

So we're going to get your thoughts on that, Victor.

We have, hopefully, we can get to, we got a lot of things to talk about.

High-speed rail in California.

Douglas Douglas Murray has a great column on leftists martyrs at University of Florida a big to-do down there with the election of a president so we'll get to all these things first with the CHICOM efforts to kill us by food or kill our food when we come back from these initial important messages

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I don't think I mentioned your website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Later on, I'll tell you why you should be subscribing.

Victor, also, I'm not sure.

I think maybe you possibly talked about this a little with the great Sammy Wink, but Gordon Chang, who is a,

I'm sure many of our viewers and listeners know him.

He's on Fox a lot.

He writes a lot, writes for the Epoch Times, all sorts of stuff.

He's on our military history working group, too, at the Hoover Institution.

Well, that's right.

He writes for Strategica.

He writes a lot.

He's been one of our foundational members.

Yeah.

Well, he has a piece on Fox News about these Chinese students smuggling in this bioterrorism.

And a couple of things quickly.

He says,

you know, they should be sent to Guantanamo, bay.

They're terrorists.

But he also makes a larger point that what this is evidence of to him is a de facto people's war.

People's war is a very specific thing to China, but against the U.S.

I mean, I think essentially he's saying they're at war with us.

Yeah, he used that term, and that was specifically to the Maoist revolution against the

Kai-shek government, and it denotes the idea there's no separation between civilian and military, that it's the people who each, according to their task and ability enlist in the noble cause.

So what he's saying is that I'm just extrapolating here, but whether or not these two, and they had formerly been, I think, students at the University of Michigan, and they had lab rights there.

And I think one of them was still an employee, and then the girlfriend fled back to China.

But they were introducing this deadly fungus that

was kind of like a last of us scenario that would destroy wheat and grain, soy and other staple crops of the heartland of America, but that was also toxic to humans, liver damage, etc.

And they were implanting it in hopes that they would cause famine.

And his point was it was kind of irrelevant whether

not irrelevant, but you don't really have to ascertain the fingerprints of the Chinese Communist Party on that operation because when people leave China to come here and when they depart here to go back, they are interrogated by the Chinese Communist Party.

And all the information they glean by statute, they are compelled to divulge what they know about the United States.

And they are briefed before they get here.

And in many cases, that creates a kind of a freelancing, independent, I'm going to get points with the Communist Party.

And they think up plans on their own, which are usually coordinated, but not always.

And there's always a subtext to the Chinese balloon story, or there's always a subtext to this.

And we discussed it about 12 miles from here in Reality California we had a city build its small town agrotown and a person was driving by connected with the the government city government and he saw some leak out of a packing house it was where i had actually worked for a few weeks when i was 17.

lo and behold they went in there and the first thing they saw was i think 200 dead lab engineered rats those are engineered rats so they have the same dna as human lungs and stuff so they can experiment and then they found these vials of, gosh, they were malaria, they were COVID,

they were every toxic chemical.

And it was quote unquote a Chinese-affiliated company that was supposed to be competing with vaccination contracts.

But it didn't sound like that.

And they had been boarded up in Fresno, and they had fled to what they felt would be an obscure location in a rural community.

But here in this very safe, stable Readley, which is a wonderful town, my wife is from that, from Readley.

And it was, my gosh, they had a toxic biochemical lab basically right in the middle of it, run by a Chinese national with a checkered financial and maybe criminal history.

And it was kind of like these agro-terrorists.

And then

just about a month ago, Jack, the Stanford Review ran a series of articles.

That's the conservative newspaper.

They were brilliant journalistic pieces by students.

And they basically interrogated Chinese students.

And

Stanford, like Harvard, has about 25 to 30 percent of the students are foreign nationals.

And there had been stories, as you know, that the Kennedy School of Government, it was kind of ironic, they trained

many of the Chinese Communist Party apparat.

And we've had people that go over to China and they remark that they see these Chinese people brag about their perfect English and their heart.

They compete with each.

I went to Harvard.

No, I went to Brown.

No, I went to Stanford.

That kind of American snobbery.

But they're die-hard communists and they come over here as children of the apparatus to be educated and pay 110% tuition room and board, make about $400 million a year for Harvard.

But at Stanford is even more dangerous because we are located, A, in a large Chinese-American community where they feel they can blend in and not be detected, the espionage element.

Small percentage, but a large number in actual numbers.

And then, in addition to that, they have the protection of the campus, and then they are sitting next to $9 trillion in market capitalization of Silicon Valley.

So, they have all this technology they can appropriate.

And the bottom line, this investigative series of articles in the Stanford Review was they interviewed people and they basically said, Yeah,

there's students at Stanford, and we are engaged in

technological theft and espionage.

And

they explained why and they were debriefed when they get back and they were prepped before they came.

And this was juxtaposed to the Stanford's history.

We had, as I said on an earlier broadcast, a few years ago, not much, much years ago, but a few, I think four years, six years ago.

We had a People's Liberation Army colonel who was a visiting professor of neuropsychiatry or something and was outed.

And then we had a Confucius Institute that was a hub.

And then we had several million dollars of Chinese gifting that was not fully reported to the Betsy DeVos Department of Education.

And this poses this question: there's over a million foreign students in the United States, and given the selectivity of our elite campuses in business programs, in PhD programs, in medical school, in law school, in government programs, why are we privileging these people from illiberal, autocratic, and anti-American regimes.

They can be from Iran, they can be from the West Bank, they can be from Gaza, they can be from Syria, they can be from Iraq, they can be from communist China.

Why are we bringing these people here?

And the answer is: they pay a premium and they are a money-making source of revenue for these elite universities.

And more importantly, they bring with them a hostile anti-Americanism, at least maybe not individually, but their home nations insist upon it, kind of dovetails with the ideology present on the campuses.

And so, this is a very emotional issue because when you talk about, when Donald Trump talks to Harvard or Stanford or any of these campuses about the danger of unaudited foreign students from illiberal regimes and the twofor that happens, A, they appropriate scientific knowledge or government secrets, and B, they being maybe 1% of a million, 10,000 maybe, or maybe 5%.

And then, second, they go back with that expertise and use that expertise in government that is hostile to the U.S.

And why are we doing this when we have all this talent here that would love to go to Harvard Business School or Stanford Law School or

the PhD program in physics and stuff?

And I don't understand it.

I really don't.

Maybe you don't understand.

bit of a And that what I just said, if you say that, then you are dubbed a nativist, xenophobectionist.

You're just pilloried and caricatured.

But it's a real problem.

It really is.

I think it has a more acute

sense that even at a state university here

in Connecticut, University of Connecticut, probably not the percentage of students from China as there are at Stanford or Harvard.

But

I don't know, Victor, my taxes are paying for this school system in this state.

I would like to think there is a benefit of the doubt for the students of this state to go to the University of Connecticut.

But you're right, if they're paying

full freight from China, they're going to take a look at the United States.

I want to mention that the university I taught as a visiting professor a few years back for a number of years, and the person who hired me is no longer alive.

So it's not a reference to the current administration of this particular university that's wonderful.

And this guy was a wonderful person, but I was teaching a graduate seminar and I had maybe 50% of the class are mainland Chinese students

and very affluent.

And

the idea that I could go over to China, even if I'd spent five years trying to learn Mandarin and compete, it would be impossible for me.

And I'm supposedly a linguist or a philologist, but

so they didn't have good English capability.

So when I gave a test, they would just naturally, under exam conditions, just group together, right?

And they would just discuss things in Chinese.

And I would have to break them up and say, no, no, you can't do that.

And they said, well, we're Chinese.

And I said, you can't do that.

And then I would go talk to the administrator, and he said, my hands are tied.

These people pay a premium room board and tuition.

And so I liked them all, but they were just oblivious.

It was like, and you could tell that they were very, very wealthy and entitled.

And they were not going to listen to some peon professor tell them they couldn't do this.

And then this administrator said to me, well, Victor, do you feel that their collaborative effort increases their score?

I said, no.

I mean, they have so much linguistic difficulties that you're talking about some person getting an F, some person getting a C minus and D, and then basically it was, could you give them a C plus or B minus?

So that was disturbing.

And then I came to like a couple.

I never understood, by the way, whether they were brother and sister or boyfriend and girlfriend or operative agents or what, but they were just inseparable.

But they would come for advice and they would say to me, this is a very dangerous place.

Could you, and they had a little map on their phone and said, point out the places that you wouldn't go to in Los Angeles.

I just said I wouldn't go to any of them myself.

But then they wanted to know which car they should buy.

And they asked me to compare the BMW, the Range Rover, and the Mercedes.

Oh, nice.

And I said, I had no idea they were out of my payment.

And then, like a week later, the young woman drove up in a beautiful Mercedes and asked me, and she said, I really want to thank you for picking this out.

I said, I didn't say anything.

I said they were beyond my payment.

And she said, well, I was going to buy a Mercedes and you didn't object.

So I thought that was approval.

But my point was, I said, well, how do you afford this?

And she said, my father is a very important man in China, in Maar province, provincial official.

And so you get the impression there's a lot of people from the Middle East and from China that are not representative of those countries, that they mirror image the elite of Americans.

But the difference is that our elite come out of a consensual society and their elite to be an elite have to cut deals with autocratic governments.

And they're basically owned by those governments.

And they're here not on private money, but on money that's either quote-unquote public or extorted from the public.

It's not healthy.

It's not healthy.

And I'm not a xenophobe or anything, but there's no reason why you would have

20 to 30 percent of the population at these very elite graduate programs and even undergraduate when you have 340 million Americans and a lot of them are underprivileged, and they would do just as well on competitive SAT or GRE or LSAT or MSAT.

So I just don't understand it.

I don't.

It's just baffling.

And this is what you get.

University of Michigan-affiliated agroterrorists or Stanford PLA operatives or

Fang Fang who came up to my office and told me, as I remember, and I want to be careful because somebody should check it, but as I remember, she told me she either, I think she graduated from Cal State Hayward because she had a Valley Girl accent.

She turned on like that after a halting American accent.

I saw the other day, just in reference to Fang Feng, who was kind of the flack for the San Francisco Consulate and was a busybody.

Apparently, because that's what she informed me, that she went to all the political organizations, meetings in the Bay Area.

But did you see where Eric Swalwell was referencing her and he said he was proud of that?

Did he say that?

No, I saw him being commented on, but it was not.

Yeah, Yeah, he said something that he was not ashamed of his liaison or something.

God, he's a buffoon.

Charlemagne the God really kind of tore into him.

Isn't that a contrast between the two?

I think he's more famous for having a flatulence at a public hearing, but

he's sort of a refined version of Tim Waltz.

Yes.

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Victor, my son, one of my sons at UConn, all my kids graduated from UConn, all five of them, but one of them did have as a roommate, as a freshman, a kid who was the son of a mayor of a Chinese city with over a million population.

I have a feeling it's probably 100 cities like that.

But he was such a brat,

this kid.

He was so entitled.

And they had this,

I asked him when we were moving in, all right, well, tell me about what do you do?

And he have a fancy, I have an uncle.

I go see, we see our uncle every weekend in the stores, Connecticut.

In hindsight, I'm thinking it had to have been the handler for all the Chinese students.

Yeah, I mean, I don't understand it.

During the Cold War, when we were in existential rivalry with Russia, we did not have Russian students over here, nor did we send a lot of Americans over there.

I think there's only 12,000 American students in China right now.

So why don't Mr.

Garber, the president of Harvard, why doesn't he just look in the mirror and say, mirror, mirror on the wall, tell me why there's 30% of our population are foreign students, and we have a high number in the Kennedy School of Government, and our graduate programs from Communist China, and to what degree they are are connected or not with the Chinese Communist Party.

Because if he doesn't ask himself that, then could he at least say, is Harvard or Stanford partly culpable for the one million waggers

that are being tortured and encamped in this facility of slave laborers?

Are they partly culpable for the destruction of the destruction of independent

Tibetan culture?

Johnny, what's his name in Hong Kong, you know, that we just honored?

Jimmy Lai.

Jimmy Lai, excuse me, Jimmy Lai.

Are they responsible for suppression of free speech that had been a commodity of Hong Kong until the communists expropriated or the lease ran out in Hong Kong?

Any of these things, and not to mention, not to mention the Silken Road or the Belt Initiative, where they're exploiting third world people or this racist country that would not, you know, they don't, they have certain racial laws and exclusions.

Do you feel that Harvard or Stanford, that you are contributing to this when you come over here and profit on educating the children of this communist apparatus or for that matter the Iranian theocrats?

Or for that matter people in Gaza that promote Hamas, this terrorist organization?

You feel or Lebanon that promote and follow and are part of Hezbollah?

Do you feel any compromise?

Yeah, especially if you're into disinvestment in Israel.

If you can be about that and you're not about disinvestment in China, something's quite out of whack there.

It's insidious, and it's going to destroy this country until we get wise about it.

It's another thing about Donald Trump.

People, you know, they can say all they want about him, but until he arrived on the political scene, the basic attitude was laissez-faire.

We're going to let our corporate entrepreneurial class go into China and get joint partnerships, and they're going to make a lot of money.

And the fact that after about eight years, the Chinese are going to master that joint venture, expropriate it, steal the money, and then get the technology is okay because the wealthier they are and the more entrepreneurial they are, they will develop into a consensual society.

They will have the Western affluence, affluenza, they used to call it, and they will be consensual.

That is completely discredited at every element of what I just said.

And all that close corporate partnership did was enrich a bunch of oligarchic, aristocratic, dictatorial, Orwellian people.

And they do horrendous damage throughout.

They pollute everything that they get involved in.

The World Health Organization, the origins of COVID, you name it.

In fact, you could argue that the Chinese are responsible for more American deaths than all the Americans lost in World War II.

If you accept that one million people died of COVID, and there's somewhere between 10 and 15 million people that still have debilitary illnesses, long COVID side effects from it.

And

they don't take any culpability and we don't hold them to account.

Tell has gotten hold of some of Anthony Fauci's devices, phones, at least phones, maybe, maybe,

and they'll be delving into that to see where his fingerprints are on any of this.

I don't know if they figured out.

I think that the day after he discovered

that the virus was not only

in Wuhan, but it was starting to spread to Europe and the United States.

And he had that frenzied exchange, remember, remember with Francis Collins.

Basically, we have to be very careful how we present this because they might blame us for circumventing the laws against gain in function research by going to Peter Dasik at Echo Health and we had our basically that's what he was doing.

But there must have been conversations about that off the record, you know.

And those were beyond, would he be foolish enough to do it?

on his government phone.

And I can tell you one thing, I know Cash Patel, and he's not the sort who's going to do a James Comey and say, this would be too controversial.

I might be self-incriminated, so we'll just kind of lose it somewhere.

No,

it'll be released.

At least to a congressional committee.

Yeah, they may not be full-fledged kraken or baby kraken, but at least we'll have some info there.

Hey, Victor, sticking to higher ed, the University of Florida has just gone through this drama.

Okay.

The former president of the, we just talked about the University of Michigan, Santa Ono, who was a real lefty up there, for whatever the hell reason.

I didn't understand that story at all.

Yeah.

Let me tell you a bit.

He was in Canada and the United States.

He had a record of being a DEI extremist.

Yeah.

Why would the University of Florida make him the finalist?

And think that.

He was

the sole finalist.

I know it.

But thankfully, the state, there's some other state body overseeing that nuked it.

In part, I think Governor Rick Scott and some others started.

So what the hell are we doing here?

This guy's in DEI, Maven.

You know, at the Bradley Awards two weeks ago in Washington, I sat next to at one of the pre-award dinners that Bradley put on, we honored the recipients.

And I was at the table with Chris Ruffo, and people were politely disagreeing with him about the Trump efforts with Harvard and saying that we were Trump was may or may not be too intrusive.

And at one point he turned to me and said, am I right or wrong?

And I kind of weighed in extremely pro-Chris.

But I think.

They've got a brand name to protect, Victor.

Yes, but

he's doing very valuable work.

And

he's paying a huge price.

As he recited at the awards, that people have gone after his family.

They've sued him.

He's taking on the whole left-wing progressive project.

And DEI is their heart and arteries of the whole system.

And for him to go right after it, and the story's not over yet with DEI.

Everybody's announced prematurely its epitaph, but

there's so many people invested in it, it's going to be very hard to get rid of.

Harmeet Dylan, who was also the best.

I mean, she's got everybody in their crosshairs.

It's amazing.

It's amazing how Trump, the Trump people were able to draw on the knowledge of all these people.

Harmette Dylan, I would not want to cross her because she's very learned in the law.

She's very used to suing people on behalf of people's civil rights.

And as a prosecutor, she knows exactly what people are doing.

And more importantly, she knows exactly how they hide what they're doing.

Yeah, yes.

Well,

we

have

a Rhode Island judge who's

doing hinky things to get your take on.

Douglas Murray has a, I think, a very important column to get your, again, also get your take on, Victor.

And how about we'll get to those when we come back from these important messages

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Saturday, June 7th, and this episode will be up on Thursday the 12th.

And I hope on Thursday the 12th, Victor himself will be nicely recovering from

his Rotorouter

episode.

The router will be

over with all breathy victories

of pounding will be gone

to take you immediately

well the swelling must go down i've had it done before the aftermath for the first days are worse than the days before but it alleviates quickly

well victor's got a website folks i mentioned earlier the blade of perseus consider subscribing in fact do subscribe it's 650 a month discounted 65 for the full year.

And why you would do that is because

there's so much that is offered on the site.

Links to Victor's articles, weekly essay for American Greatness, weekly syndicated column, books, these podcasts, other appearances.

But Victor, twice a week, writes an exclusive article for the Blade of Perseus and cuts an exclusive video.

And if you're a VDH fan, you will want it.

So do subscribe.

Or Father's Day is coming up.

I think think it will make a great Father's Day present for

your husband, your uncle, your father, whatever.

So do think about that.

And also, I said links to books.

I mean, if dad's a military historian, buff,

go look at, get, get the Second World Wars.

I mean, I think that would be an award-winning Father's Day gift.

So, Victor, here's a headline.

Major Democrat donor became judge

ruling against Trump.

That's a weird headline.

But anyway, a federal judge who has ruled twice to halt executive actions by President Donald Trump previously gave about half a million in campaign contributions to Democrat.

The judge, U.S.

District Judge John McConnell of the District of Rhode Island, will also preside over yet another case involving Trump.

That case, by the way, Victor, involves Sanctuary City status.

So this guy, you know, can I just, I know I've been talking too much and I'll shut up in a second, but one of the greatest federal judges of our lifetime was the late James Buckley, and he was a friend, a dear friend.

I love Jim.

God rest his soul.

But he, I remember, even as a 90-something years old senior status judge, he left his house.

Actually, he had a house on the Buckley estate up in Connecticut.

And his sister, Priscilla, lived in the main house, and she had a political event there.

And even though Jim didn't live in that house, because he lived in the house on the estate, he left the property because he thought there could be absolutely no connection between a federal judge and any sense of fundraising or any sense of fundraising.

My mother was a Superior Court judge of Fresno County, and then she, I think she was the second female state appellate court judge, and she would not discuss any case if I asked her about it.

Absolutely not.

And then she gave me, she gave all of us a code of behavior.

And

she said,

if you drink and you drive, not because

it wasn't that it's going to embarrass me, but it's illegal.

It's illegal.

It's illegal.

And tax, you are not to.

I remember I said, well, you know, I'm a professor, mom, and I have a little crappy little office.

You know, I've had it, I made it out of plywood and everything.

I think I'm going to write off the plywood.

No,

you're not full-time farming.

That is an illegal write-off, and and I don't want you audited.

So it was,

I really thought I was kind of paranoid about,

and I think that's important.

But

there's about 750, as I understand it, the lowest rung, I'm not making fun of that judge, very important, the district judge,

because they're set up regionally, you know, the Ninth District Court, that's a circuit judge,

circuit judges, but they are set up regionally, unlike the Supreme Court.

But this idea that

what was occasional or episodic in the past, that you sued to stop an administration, and the Republicans did it, but not, there has been more lawsuits right now in the first 130 days against Trump to district judges than the whole Biden four years put together.

And this was all pre-planned.

that Mark Elias and all the Democratic operatives and the Sorrels Fund and their affiliates, all that money was set to, as they say, pounce

the moment Trump took office.

So you have about 750 judges, probably 450 are left-wing.

Their rulings, their scores on the liberal index are all known to this, and they are cherry-picked.

And they just trade places

that use Judge X, Judge Y, Judge Z.

We used him last week, we'll use this guy.

And then these people feel that, given whom they associate with and given the media that interviews them are the situations that they will be iconic if they rule and stop the evil orange Donald Trump, Orange Man.

And that's what they do.

And they know they're going to eventually be either reversed or stayed because they over...

they overshot their jurisdictions and their authority.

But basically, for now, the most powerful people in the United States are these 450 judges who can stop an elected president and stay all of his executive orders, everything, in a way that we've never seen before.

If this guy was a Republican and the shoe was on the other foot, do you think we'd be hearing calls for impeachment?

Well, we do.

We have a good example of that because the judge in the Eugene Carroll case was left-wing, and he was the one that fined Donald Trump, I think, $83 million.

And then Judge Ngoron in the Letita James case was a Democratic liberal judge, and he fined originally it was $450,000.

$450 million.

I I think the appellate court reduced it down to $370 million.

That's still on the books.

He's appealing that.

And then we had, so we had Ngoron, then we had Judge Murshan, remember him?

And his daughter was a Democratic, made a fortune trading off his name.

And that was in the

was that the Alvin Bragg case?

And then we had one kind of slightly conservative judge, Justice, I forgot her name, and the Jack Smith, and everybody got angry, remember that?

And they said, she is a Trump operative.

In other words,

their whole ideology was that all the judges have to be Democratic supporters, if not donors.

They all have to be partisan.

And if anyone isn't, then he's a Trump sellout, and we should object to that.

And that's what they're doing.

And I don't know how you stop it.

The Supreme Court, I think, will step in at some point and say,

you're not going to cherry-pick district court judges.

And if you do cherry-pick them, their rulings are not not going to apply to 340 million people outside their jurisdiction.

You know what I mean?

It's not going to happen.

I think you have to gain a supermajority in Republicans and House and Senate to then pass a bill to restrict what areas federal judges, which they're entitled to do.

You can restrict the judiciary, but it has to come from a congressional law.

It does.

And what we're seeing is a titanic struggle, everybody, from what people want, the popular mood in the country on all these issues, and that reflection of that popular mood in control of the House and Senate and the Presidency, and to a lesser extent the Supreme Court, and the institutional resistance for causes that are unpopular and antithetical to what people want.

And that's the courts, the administrative state, the foundations, K-12, higher education, the media, and they don't have any popular support, but they have enormous institutional power.

And they check what the popular elected president wants to do in a popular elected Congress.

And they have insidious ways.

And

they can raid Mar-Lago.

They can try to get Trump's name off the ballot.

They can take a laptop that they know is authentic and say it's Russian created and suppress information for a year.

They can partner with Twitter to suppress information about it.

They can go do the Russian collusion.

They can turn the Secret Service into a private retrieval service for the Biden family.

Whether it's a lurid missing diary of Ashley Biden, or it's an illegally gotten gun thrown in a dumpster of Hunter, or a laptop that was left and abandoned at a computer repair shop, they can go after the repairman and try to destroy his life.

That's what the Secret Service does when it's politicized.

Totally forgot about that diary with the, you know, daddy's showering with me and I'm not looking into a whole lot.

Heck, are you objecting to a teen, 12 or 13-year-old girl showering with her father?

Are you objecting?

I'm very narrow-minded.

You'll forgive me.

Do you remember the Secret Service, ex-Secret Service agent that wrote a memoir or a series of articles that said one of the reasons that she was reluctant to be assigned to the Biden family vice presidential detail is he had a habit of getting out of the pool naked in front of her and walking around, prancing around?

Yeah.

Something was,

and then when you correlate that, remember when he ran in 2020, he had to issue a series of apologies to the women that he had hugged?

All the cardinal sins of the left that had tried to destroy Kavanaugh, Joe Biden had surpassed those allegations in

one week.

And, of course, they dealt with all of them the way that Hillary dealt with the bimbo eruptions.

Help us.

Kathleen, Willie, remember her cat was hung from a tree?

Terrible people.

How do these people all die?

Hey, Victor, before we, I have to read something, but just quick thing, I'm going to throw this in there.

I didn't tell you ahead of time.

Your quick comment, if you don't mind, James Carville lecturing Jews.

Did you see the clip of him?

I mean, that was old-fashioned anti-Semitism in the most crude, raw sense.

The only reason Jews, you know, only reading they go over Trump, not the anti-Semitism,

they just want to get

a tax cut.

Greedy little bass.

That's what basically was saying.

I can't listen to him because every other word is F-U-blank or S-H-I, and he's crabbed, he's angry, and for the one second of insight, you have to put up with 10 seconds of lunacy.

He's,

you know, he's just pathetic, and he's, he has no power.

He's out.

He's from an his basic message is, I ran, I ran Bill Clinton.

Yeah, I went to center, you know, we did 100,000 police officers, we bounced the budget, and we were rolling along, and then we went, I don't know what happened, left-wing dug over, and we got to go back to where I was.

And that's how, you know, he's just a.

And then there are people that were from the Clinton era that make the same message, but they're

kind, logical people, like Mark Penn, the pollster.

When he talks about Hillary Clinton's message and

why she deviated and why the Bill Clinton message was successful.

And when I say successful, remember Bill Clinton never won 50% of the vote either, not even in the re-election.

Part of it, and remember, if Ross Perot had not run in 92, but even in 96 he got 9.5% of the vote.

If he had not run in those two elections, it would have been very close.

And even though they ran two

I mean, you can make the argument that George H.W.

Bush and Bob Dole were not dynamic candidates.

But still, so it wasn't a pop, but it's hard to listen to him in this anti-you know, anti-Semitism.

It's pretty, that was just, nobody said anything about it, you know.

You know, Tucker's had people on his show that he shouldn't have had on in the sense that I don't know if he knew what they were going to say, but when you had Daryl Cooper basically saying that Churchill was a terrorist and there wasn't, you know, they mussed their hair up a little bit in Ukraine, but it wasn't really a plan, the starvation plan to kill Jews and Ukrainians.

It wasn't premeditated.

And, you know, you have people like that.

But, boy, they pounced on him, and maybe deservedly so.

But when Carville, I didn't hear any reaction to that, did you?

I did not.

Maybe the reaction will be from Jewish donors who will say, enough of you clowns.

Yeah, and I didn't,

there was also a suit at Columbia that was thrown out by a liberal judge that the students, you know, made the argument, and you had those videos of those students being harassed when they went into the library and stuff, and

that was thrown out.

And so, I don't know where it all goes, but the Jewish ratios at the Ivy League and places like Stanford are declining like this.

Yeah.

Well, if I was a Jew in America today, and I'm not, but I would be

afraid, maybe, afraid

of

Mr.

Mohammed Suleiman.

Yeah, well,

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Victor, let's get to Colorado via Douglas Murray, who's got a column in the recent New York Post.

It's titled, A Lefties Learn How to Get Away with Martyr.

And the newest martyr is the daughter of the scumbag who was Molotov cocktailing Jews in Colorado.

Your thoughts about that, Victor, if you want, and broader this whole martyrification of these

Mangioni and others by the Democrat Party.

Yeah, I was on Laura Ingram on Thursday night, just a few nights ago, and this came up.

And the thing about Mr.

Suleiman and his five children and his wife was, first of all, they were all here illegally and knowingly illegal.

This came up with the ICE incident in Los Angeles where, and on CNN, Scott Jennings was sparring as usual with these crazy people on CNN, and they all are under the impression.

the authorities in LA, the people that are sympathetic to Mr.

Suleiman, that it's not a crime or an offense to be here illegally.

And they always say, well, it's a civil offense.

Well, it might be crossing the border inadvertently, but when you reside here illegally, usually you have to have some form of identification.

And usually that identification in some ways is fraudulent.

But it's still an offense, whether it's a criminal offense or a civil offense, it is a crime to come here illegally without permission.

If you don't believe that, just camp out at the LAX or SFO airport at Customs for about five hours and see the number of people who will be taken into a room because they have no passport or they snuck on or something's wrong with something.

They got in here somehow.

So the point I'm making is that the left seems to think that these people,

both the perpetrator and the family, have a perfect right to enter the United States on a tourist visa, extend it, and

just be resident illegal aliens here.

That's number one.

And number two, the lawyer was just horrific that he enlisted because no sooner was the arraignment than she started to suggest that Donald Trump was like Nazi Germany and

he was treating this would-be burner of Jews as if he was a Hitlerian figure.

And what was so shocking and amoral,

that it was completely opposite.

That the people in Germany burned Jews, burned their bodies, sometimes burned them alive, but usually after gassing them, but they used fire to incinerate Jews.

And here was Mr.

Soliman, who I would have to think, he tried to get a gun, he wouldn't, but there was some connection he knew that there was a special emotional resonance with burning Jews, and that's what he tried to do.

Except the only difference between him and the satanic people at Auschwitz or Treblinka is

he tried to burn them alive, and yet his lawyer was suggesting that he was a victim and that the people who were trying to stop this family and him in particular were somehow Hitlerian when the Hitlerian person was him.

Then we got into the second question about the family, and of course, Douglas Murley was trying to point out that the left's Pavlovian response is always,

how do I feel good about myself and morally superior to the state, all the other people, by trying to always side with the person who is the so-called underdog?

And how can I always do that from a safe place?

So, this family who was living in a smaller house, why this father was planning this by his own admission for one year, and who had stated, in addition, that he would postpone his campaign to burn Jews until his daughter graduated,

because apparently that might hurt her graduation.

So, he was aware of the consequences on his family.

We are supposed to believe that his wife and all five of them knew nothing about this.

And we'll see.

That could be possible.

But there'll be an investigation and they all will have a social media trail and there will be people who knew them and there will be testimony and we'll see.

But even if there isn't

Even if there isn't direct knowledge of it and they knew about it, then they're still here illegally, just as in Los Angeles.

Even if the ICE was not arresting cartel members or drug dealers, they're here illegally.

And if you don't believe they should be deported, then why have a border?

Just say, you know what, anybody can come in and stay.

And maybe you will say that.

The other larger question that Douglas Murray, I thought, very adroitly explored in that article was, this is not unique to Mr.

Soliman.

They have a rogue's gallery.

The left does.

So they took Abrego Garcia, and they sent him back.

That was very smart, as John Yu pointed out, that the Trump people said, you know what?

We're not going to argue anymore that he was ordered to deport.

He's already been adjudicated.

And the only reason that he didn't go back to El Salvador, he made this preposterous claim that he would be in danger because the cartel was threatening his grandmother.

So let's just bring the blank-blank back, and we'll have a real inquiry into who he is.

And we don't even have to prove the obvious that he's an M13 gang member.

We don't have to prove the obvious that he struck his wife, threatened to kill her, she thought threatened to

kill her, and hit, you know, broke his kid's computer.

We don't have to prove any of that.

And we don't have to even prove that some of his co-conspirators said that he was in the reason the cartel was after him because he was indirectly involved with a hit on one of their grandmothers.

And that might have been.

We don't have to do any of that.

Let's just look back at he was in a car with eight illegal aliens speeding breaking the law and the car was registered to a known trafficker and he did that and now it's alleged we learn that he really never was a Maryland man family man construction upstanding

he was a trafficker that's what the allegation says and the co-conspirators and that I think I heard his lawyer say something like

Well, these are core conspirators and they have something.

Yes, that's the system that you use yourself.

That is what everybody uses.

You try to get evidence by a lighter sentence.

So don't attack necessarily an institution.

They can be true, they can be false, these testimonies, but it depends on the degree they can be corroborated.

But apparently, some of the people in league with him are going to testify that he was a trafficker and a lead in the trafficking operation.

And if that's true, he's no longer a Maryland man.

But that doesn't stop them.

They They are now, he is a cause celeb because it makes they think Donald Trump look bad.

So all of the left-wing pieties, you don't touch women.

This guy is a woman beater.

You don't endanger children.

This guy smashed possessions of his own children.

This guy woke his wife up in the night to beater.

This guy was a gang member.

This guy was a human trafficker.

This guy trafficked women and minors.

These were all Nancy Pelosi emotional.

We did it for the children.

I'm voting for the children.

It's for the children.

No, no, you're not.

This guy is

public enemy number one.

If half these things, the latest, are proved.

So they have idolized him because they think he's an underdog, and they've idolized Mr.

Solimane, the anti-Semit Jew burner.

And now they did it with Luigi Mangione, the assassin.

This is a premeditated murderer who set up a middle-class guy who worked himself up to an executive, and he blew him apart and he premeditated it.

And because he was good looking and because he was kind of left-wing and he came from a good family and he was...

he wore nice clothes and he was kind of hip, they have made him into a lionized character.

And they have no idea what the public thinks about all of this.

But I hope, I hope, that there is the ghost of Lee Atwater still floating around at midterm time because it would be a wonderful commercial to show Luigi Mangioni with a little description for a second or two and Mohamed Suleiman with a second with his shouting his anti-Semitic epithets with his it was kind of like a

what an ad hoc jerry-rigged flamethrower that he had a hose and stuff and have a little clip of him and then have a clip of Abrego Garcia and put all of them there in the car with the traffickers and say these are the heroes of the left.

And then I would juxtapose those scenes of 10,000, 8,000 people storming the border each day and said, this is what you want.

This is what you're going to get in the midterm.

Yeah, and folks in L.A.

attacking ISIS.

Yes, attacking the things.

And maybe we could have a nice outburst from Representative Bowman letting off the fire alarm, or we could have Miss Talib addressing a crowd that stormed the rotunda, which sort of got the January 6th people in big trouble.

Yeah.

Or we could have Jasmine Crockett rant about white people.

There's a whole menagerie you could bring up.

And I hope they have people that will remind us what it was like.

I like the word menagerie.

That's terrific, Vic.

That's terrific.

A bunch of animals.

All right.

We've got one or two more quick topics to talk about on this episode as we head around the home turn.

We're recording the day of the Belmont, so head around the home turn into the stretch, and we'll talk about some quickly about the California high-speed rail project and

the FBI and Roman Catholics and Hollywood and Roman Catholics.

And we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor,

spend just a little bit on this, if you don't mind, and I do mean little, on the high-speed rail project, which we know these massive Stonehenge on crack monster things near your actual home.

The train to nowhere.

Well, the Trump administration, I don't know if they've done it now between when we're talking and when this

podcast is airing, but Secretary of Transportation, oh my God,

Duffy said, we're going to cut off Sean Duffy, yeah.

Sean Duff, we're going to cut it off.

No federal aid.

They were counting on billions to this high-speed rail project.

And without that, Victor, I do not see how they can lay a single

mile of track.

I live on a particular avenue where five miles away it crossed.

It shut down our avenue, as I said, for four or five years.

Now, when you go over the overpass, you look down, and there's not one, there's the bed established,

but there's not one foot of rail after, I guess it's from its inception.

It's about

I guess it's about now, boy, it's over 10 or 12 years.

The original cost was something like 40 billion.

Now it's estimated at 300 to 400 million to go from Los Angeles through Tehachapi all the way up to Sacramento with a lateral, basically where Los Banos is to get into the Bay Area.

And remember, everybody voted for this Bay Area idea.

Then the Bay Area County said, not in my backyard.

You're not going to build it here.

You go down to those rustic yokels in the San Joaquin Valley.

They're broke.

They'll bite it up.

So they came up with the idea of about 150 miles from Bakersfield to Merced.

I think you listening, many of you don't know where Merced is.

You haven't heard of it.

You may have heard of Bakersfield, but it's not a high traffic.

So some of the preliminary estimates have already showed that if somebody right now

was to fly down from another planet and say, here,

here is a brand new completed high-speed rail line from Bakersfield to Merced.

It's all paid for.

It's yours.

It would lose hundreds of millions of dollars over it because it wouldn't be profitable because no one who can get in a car and drive a little over two hours at 70 miles an hour, even on a decrepit freeway, would get on this thing.

And from what we've seen about who operates the BART system and the unions and the light rail in LA, would you really want to be on

this new experimental technology given the people who would probably direct it and run it because they're going to be incompetent?

And it's way over, it's about $20 billion.

So now the question is, what do you do with it?

And what they did, Jack, so everybody knows, is they immediately deliberately took high-trafficked areas and built those overpasses first.

So the 99 is bumper to bumper between Sacramento and Bakersfield.

So when you see the Fresno thing,

it's well over two or three miles of going over the skyline of Fresno.

And then Highway 41 has, you know, it's a four-lane highway, and now they have that to show everybody.

And they've done that.

So the idea was we're going to show everybody that we're, it's all ready to go.

But what they didn't show you was the

real system in between those cities, and it's nothing.

And then the other thing is they went into an area of Kings County that is the most picturesque, beautiful farmland in the world.

It has ancestral oaks, and they went right through it, and they had to pay top dollars.

I'm talking about millions of dollars of imminent domain and legal cost.

They put businesses out of, you know, family, multi-generational businesses in Fresno out of business.

They paid hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the rights, and it's parallel to the Amtrak.

And the idea was you can't use the Amtrak right away because it's so fast that that you have to have a line that, you know, the curves wouldn't, they would derail it.

And then the bridges,

they're not fabricated or engineered to hold

a regular passenger train.

So there's no use is what I'm trying to say to everybody.

I'm kind of exasperated because I can't even imagine you would spend $30 billion and you would build Stonehenge and then people would say,

okay, you destroyed all these farms.

So you had a guy with 500 acres and he had to, get across to his peach orchard from his plum orchard.

He had to drive nine miles to the underpass, and we paid him eight or nine million bucks for the land that we destroyed.

And we destroyed all these ancestral oaks that if you took a chainsaw, you'd be in jail.

We did all this stuff.

We put all these people out of business, and now we can't use it.

We can't use it for trains, we can't use it for freeways.

And how much is it going to cost to blow it up?

I don't know.

Are you just going to leave it there as a reminder, like Stonehenge, of a primitive society that once lived here?

Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes with the Statue of Liberty.

Yeah, it's going to be like a Mycenaean Turin's or Mycenae.

We're all just going to

go.

Who is that civilization that built that?

It's going to be here forever.

These people, I don't know how government, they're corrupt or stupid, but who goes to work for them?

And I say that not in a condemnatory passage, because I can tell you, when I was growing up, Jack,

the most brilliant people you'd meet were things like Caltrans engineers and California Water Project designers and architects.

I mean, they built that massive California aqueduct, and they got it from inception to implementation five or six years.

That San Luis Dam is beautifully engineered.

You go up to the California, the Big Creek project of Huntington, Florence Lake, Edison Lake, Huntington Lake, Shaverley.

It's just like a genius.

And that was a private enterprise Henry Huntington project.

But what I'm getting at is,

I don't know what happened to our generation, but it's stupid.

It's incompetent.

And we're kind of like Dark Age Greeks from about 1200 BC to 700.

We're kind of wandering around.

Who are these guys that did it?

Who were they?

Maybe we'll call them Apollo and Ajax and Achilles, these heroes, because we'll make myths about them.

Oh, my gosh, they built the aqueduct.

Well, how do you fix it?

I don't know how you fix it.

Well, how do you run it?

I don't know how you run it.

Well, how do you do anything?

I don't know.

There was a race of demigods, and they're all dead now, but they're

mythological creatures like centaurs or something.

And they did this.

But we don't know who they are, but we only know that they were horrible people.

They were just horrible people.

They were racist and transphobes and homophobes and

colonizers and expropriators.

And they were horrible people, and they did all these horrible things.

But we like the horrible things they did because we like their airports and we like their aqueducts and we like their dam.

We can't make them anymore.

We can't even repair them.

That's what we are.

Oh, well, every month will be Pride Month.

Hey, Victor, one last topic.

It is Pride Month, isn't it?

It is, yeah.

Two Catholic stories.

One is that Senator Grassley has uncovered

much evidence far flung from what we originally believed about the FBI under Joe Biden investigating Catholics because you know traditional Catholics who worship like they were they were potential terrorists and that was out of the Richmond FBI office it was an infamous memo but turns out it was circulated

yeah well

we believe it was circulated to over 1,000 employees and discussed by other field offices in cities including Milwaukee and Louisville so this this crap that Christopher Ray said you know kind of like was an isolated thing and he didn't say it was one lunatic but that was the impression it was just this was a much germinating issue within the fbi to to see practicing roman catholics as a threat to the country then one other thing victor if i may spring on you there's a apple tv show

i don't watch it's called your friends and neighbors it stars john ham and they just had an episode out the other day where He and another woman character enter a Catholic church and they go to the tabernacle where where we Catholics believe that the consecrated host that we believe is the actual body of Jesus Christ.

This is what we believe.

He took it out and then he gave it to, he dipped it in jam and it was just a desecration.

He did a Gretchen Witter thing.

Worse.

Worse, because she did a Dorito chip, but he was taking an actual host.

Well, it filmed it.

And Victor,

I can't.

What does Apple think?

What is Apple corporate action thinking?

I don't know.

I mean,

why do they hate

they're kind of like Robespierre and the cult of the divine being or the radio.

Even Robespierre and the Jacobins said that there was some value in religion, even though they tried to destroy it.

They killed over 6,000 Catholics, the Jacobins did, but they hate religion and they hate ⁇ I think they hate the behavior ⁇ they don't like people who are religious and live by the Ten Commandments and are civil and traditional.

They just don't like them.

And they feel that all of their aberrant and alternate lifestyles and behaviors are what makes life diverse and interesting.

Even though we buy their Apple phones and buy their Apple computers, you know, they're still...

I wonder if they wanted to be edgy, would John Hamm on his show take a Koran and burn it or step on it?

You know, it's very funny.

I tell another of my father's stories.

He drops me off at UC Santa Cruz.

I mentioned he went in the bathroom once and there was people in Cordillas.

But

it was so crazy when he dropped me off at the dorm.

So I came home Thanksgiving and my mom said, well, how's everything going at the dorm?

And I mentioned all these crazy things.

I had a roommate who had spears, arrows, swords, and told me that he was going to execute me.

What?

Yeah, he did.

I put his head in the window and closed it and put a belt.

I was a restaurant in high school, so I could protect myself.

He turned out to be,

they threw him out, they put him in a mental ward.

I would visit him.

I actually liked him, but he almost, we had a knockdown, drag-out fight.

But he turned out to be a very good person years later.

I met him.

Anyway, and then there was a guy who he was, there were people shooting flaming arrows from the dorm at people.

I would walk to class, and there was a big hollow in a redwood tree with this young girl without shoes or anything but kind of a sheet, which she lived in the hollow.

So you'd see her and she'd like wave to you from the tree.

And it just, then I would see the

salvator.

They had this amphitheater, and they were always saying during the camp, burn it down.

And then this woman who would yell all these things, I was driving down, and she was hitchhiking with this designer luggage.

And she asked me if I would take her in this broken-down car I had to the San Jose airport, which is a long way away.

And I said, no.

And she said something to the effect, well, it's not the San Jose airport that you use, meaning it was a private jet.

And she was, but she, and anyway, I was telling

at Thanksgiving, my mom was trying to make sense of it.

My dad just sat back and said,

well, what he's trying to tell you, Pauline, is that he went to the Fresno zoo and he saw the giraffe and the zebra and he saw the lion and he saw the hippo.

And it's the same thing.

He just is, he's been in the zoo the whole time.

I don't know what, what, you know, I hope he didn't feed the lions or something.

He doesn't get in the cage with them, but he's been at the zoo.

Simple as that.

It's all there is to it.

It was a a menagerie.

This was a brand new, relatively brand new school, too.

It was brand new.

It had only been opened when I got there five years.

My brother was older.

He went there.

He was only four years, I think.

And the weird thing about it was

they had raided the Ivy League School junior faculty, right,

who wanted to break away from traditionalism.

So I was like this country hick, and I met this wonderful professor, John Lynch, and he was a classicist.

And he said, I was taking his Western Civ required course.

He said,

You write good essays.

Why don't you study Greek and Latin?

I said, What?

And the point I'm making is

for all this hippie stuff, I had Yale, Harvard-trained people who were trained by the old group, not the hippies.

So they were the most famous philologists in the world, had been their professors.

So they knew Greek and Latin like English, and they taught us, they were very disciplined.

So when I got to Stanford University in the PhD program, even though some of my contemporaries had had prep school Latin and Greek, I had as good or better Greek and Latin because I was doing composition in undergraduate.

You were writing Latin and Greek.

So I looked back at that, and yes, it was crazy, but that particular seam was, I got a wonderful education.

And they corrected all your essays minutely.

And they were some of the best professors in the world.

But the whole climate was crazy.

It It was insane.

And I only got in one really bad, except when my roommate fight was when we, I was walking down with a couple of guys.

We wanted to watch this demonstration.

They were walking from the campus down to the courthouse to demand that there be a moratorium on something because Nixon bombed Cambodia or something.

Everybody said to me, hey, there's going to be a lot of girls walking down there, and some of them will probably go topless.

So there's about five of us, and we were kind of misfits from the valley.

There was a guy from Merced, a guy from Stockton.

So we were kind of just walking along parallel to them.

And they got by, the campus had cows, you know, because it was grazing at 22,000 acres.

So they would rent it out to livestock farmers.

And they got next to these cows and they started, free the cows, liberate them from domestic tyranny.

And so they went over and they started to push down the post and let these cows who had been slaughtered on the road.

So we were all from kind of rural areas and we, you know, grew up.

So we said, if you do that again, we're going to beat the and we got started pushing.

And

that's where I got the term spaghetti arms.

A guy said to me about Antifa, he said, this is going to be easy because these people are spaghetti arm terrorists.

But the point I'm making is it was a raucous, crazy time to be at that place.

When I look back at it, it's so baffling because juxtaposed to that hippie

counterculture, if you just went to class and you picked the right professors, there were some brilliant professors there.

And I got really well trained in classics.

And when I went to graduate school, I got all the coursework done in two and a half years.

It's because of them.

And it was really good.

I mean, I went in there, and the first day, the chairman of the graduate PhD program said, Well, have you read any Euripides?

I said, Yeah, nine plays.

Have you read Sophocles?

Yeah, four plays.

You've read Neacolus, six plays.

Have you read Herodotus?

Half of it.

You read Thucydides?

Three books.

Can you.

And then they had a test to place composition as a graduate PhD.

And he said, well, you haven't had composition, so everybody has to write in Latin and Greek on this test, and it will tell us whether you're exempt.

And so I took it, and he called me back in and said, you got everything right.

I said, so I don't have to take it.

And he said, no, that was just verbiage.

You're going to take every composition class.

And I was so happy I did because the teachers that taught us composition were brilliant, and I learned even better how to write Latin and Greek, which helps you read Latin and Greek.

All Mutin.

Oh, you don't have to know Greek.

And then in graduate school,

I have a soft spot for Stanford University, excuse me, because of the professors I had.

They were from Austria and England and Germany, and they were all philologists.

And they were no nonsense, you know what I mean?

You couldn't go in class and said, I was depressed last night.

I didn't read 1,200 lines of Sophocles.

No, no, no, no, no.

It was jing, ding, ding, ding, ding.

And they turned out some very accomplished classicists out of that program.

And today, it's theory and Foucault and gender studies and no Greek and no Latin and all these programs.

Sad.

We hate to end on a sad note, Victor, but alas.

I was trying to be happy and upbeat about praising people that were in these programs.

Well, I think people are upbeat hearing that you stuck someone's head in a window.

I only did that for survival because I said to, I called my dad and I said, this guy says he's going to hit me when I'm asleep.

And he's got all these weapons.

And he said, you better just, he said, you're a wrestler.

Don't get in a boxing match because he may not know how to box.

Just wrestle him.

Take him down, put his head in the window and put your belt around it and he can't get out.

And then tell him not to do it anymore.

And he said, don't go tell the deans there.

They're just as bad as the students.

They won't do anything.

My mom said something about vigilanteism and all that stuff.

But

your dad was a college administrator.

Well, he was.

He knew how to handle these situations.

He had a problem with

that.

He was also 6'4, 120 pounds.

He was he,

I don't want to go on, but I would say his mission in life was to intervene when he saw some bully picking on someone.

And he did that quite a lot in my life.

And some of it was really good, but some of it was a little bit because you didn't know if the person was armed or something, you know.

Yeah, you know, he'd always say something to the effect, you really like doing this to people, then why don't we just settle it now?

And I wasn't as big as he was, so when he said, Why don't you settle?

And the person I'm talking about was 6'3.

And he was a hippie, but and he was a very nice person.

He was not well.

He was taking massive amounts of drugs.

And after we did this, this knockdown fight, and I kind of, I think, got the best of it, then we sat down.

I said, Do you want to do this every night?

Do you want to be friends?

If you want to be friends, you got to get all the weapons out.

And then shortly after that, they incarcerated him in the mental hospital.

And I dutifully visited him three or four times a week.

In fact, I did something I should confess I feel bad about.

You couldn't bring in anything because it was a padded room, top floor place.

But he loved Taco Bell.

And he said, Victor, if you really like me, would you bring in burritos, the beef bean burrito?

And I would get about four of them and then hitchhike over there and put them in my

coat.

And then I'd give him burritos.

I liked him.

And I really, I'll just tell you, his first name was Jack, and he was a wonderful person, but we had it out.

And he terrified me for my first quarter there.

And then he was gone.

He was gone.

By the way.

Disappeared.

You were talking about your father before.

I never tell you this.

Whenever you talk about him, I have an image of like John Wayne.

I just.

yeah, you know what?

It was funny.

He reminded me of Bill Holden, the wild bunch.

He was the same type of talking like that.

Yeah, he was very sweet to people, though.

I don't want to give the impression he was brutish.

He was very every time anybody has bumped into me, they always say what a sweet person he was and how kind he was and how upbeat he was.

But I don't think you can fly at 20, 21, 40 missions, you know, over Tokyo

and six, you know,

nine hours in a cramped B-29, nine hours back, crash in Iwo Jima twice, and lose 14 of your 16 planes and be normal.

And the stuff he would tell us when he had a couple of drinks that they gave him, you know, amphetamines to keep them up and kind of sleeping pills to get them.

And then

he had my sinus, I inherited it from him, and he had sinus infections with the altitude, and they would give him sulfur powder.

He'd sniff all the time.

I don't know.

I think he went through a, and and then his brother, first cousin, was adopted, was killed.

And

I think he had a lot of

I worshipped him.

I still do.

I won a lottery with parents, both of them.

I just feel.

Well, we'll all meet them someday

in a better place.

I believe so.

Yeah, I was very lucky, though.

I look back at it.

Everybody thinks not everybody looks fondly on their parents.

Yes, I know that.

Especially my generation.

They blame all of their imperfections or disappointments on a parent's culpability.

And it is true that the Depression, World War II generation, was pretty tough, but they were tough mostly in a good sense.

He would walk in last story on a Saturday, we'd work after school, and it would be like five o'clock on Saturday.

And we had been,

I don't know, working with my grandfather, picking up walnuts, chainsaws, and then we would sit down, like two hours before dinner.

And so he'd walk in and say, Okay,

this is the old men's retirement club, and you're in your soft little recliner chair, and you think life is just sort of relaxing, and we're not done with it.

Sergeant First Class William Hansen has the orders on the door, and they're spelled out in detail, Victor.

So you go there and it'd say, Victor, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

Get replace shingles on top of roof.

Victor, I want you to hose down patio.

Victor, go out and pull weeds out of driveway.

And then he'd have the time frame, 5 o'clock, finished 5.30.

And it was kind of a joke.

He wasn't a martinette at all.

He was a worker.

That's that whole Swedish culture.

That was the thing that was weird about it.

Kingsburg, California, they worked.

I don't think anybody ever worked like those people.

Kind of drove my mom crazy.

They were just workaholics.

Go to a funeral.

Yeah, he died.

Go home.

Yeah, he's dead.

Yeah, he worked hard.

No, he never slept.

Yeah, he was working hard.

He was a good man.

He paid his bills.

He worked hard.

It was work, work, work, work.

This will be the last episode you and I talk about before Father's Day.

So this is a good way.

You found a good way to Yeah, it was timely because I always think of him all the time.

But I think of him all the time, every day, actually.

And I'm 71.

I have been doing that for a while.

I miss him terribly.

It's really,

you know, it's kind of sad.

I'm 71.

I act like a kid.

I miss my parents.

Suppose I grew up.

And I had great grandparents, too.

Yeah, it's a blessing.

I'm very lucky.

I feel like most of anything I've accomplished was due to them.

Well, you frequently attest to their wonderfulness.

So don't, don't, I don't know anyone who so publicly

shows respect for their parents as you do.

Victor, we're going to close it out here, except for me to say thank you to the folks that go to civilthoughts.com, sign up, put your name in there, put your email address.

You sign up for Civil Thoughts, which is the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society, and it gives you 14 recommended readings, comes into your inbox every Friday.

It's free and we're not selling your name.

I know you'll like it.

Civil Thoughts, go there and sign up.

Thanks for those that do.

Thanks for everybody who has.

And Jack, just as a final reminder, we're going to go through a lot of our questions next time, right?

I asked the good people at the Victor Davis-Hanson Fan Club at Facebook to send in questions, and I got a ton of questions.

So we're going to recover.

I haven't seen them yet, but I will answer them.

Well, I'll show you in a few minutes.

We're going to have two or three episodes of Victor's Recovery episodes.

It won't even be a recovery.

It'll be a blink.

Okay.

Victor's Blink.

I've got to be careful of you, Bris, because Nemesis will hit me, but I expect to

recover very quickly.

Well, thanks, Victor.

I've got a wonderful ENT surgeon.

He's really good.

He did it last time, and he's brilliant.

Dr.

Jerome Hester of Menlo Park, I shouldn't advertise that, but he's a great guy.

He really is.

If you have an ENT problem, I would go to him.

I hope St.

Blaise is watching with him on the fateful day.

I wanted to be a sanctus nozzle, but he said he doesn't exist.

Yeah, it just doesn't.

Victor, thanks very much.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

Thanks for watching.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.