Vertigo: Things That Unmake the Democratic Party

Speaker 1 This is a real good story about Drew, a real United Airlines customer.

Speaker 3 After almost four years of treatments, I was finally cancer-free. My mom's like, where do you want to go to celebrate? I'm like, let's go somewhere tropical.

Speaker 3 And then a pilot hopped on the intercom and started talking about me. And I was like, what is going on here?

Speaker 4 My wife beat cancer too, and I wanted to celebrate his special moment.

Speaker 1 That's Bill, a real United pilot.

Speaker 4 We brought him drinks and donuts. We all signed a card.

Speaker 3 I was smiling ear to ear. Best flight ever for sure.

Speaker 4 That's how good leads the way.

Speaker 6 Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Speaker 6 Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 6 He is a best-selling author, a farmer, philologist, military historian, classical historian. He's everything.
All right, Victor?

Speaker 7 I think so.

Speaker 6 Yes, we are recording on

Speaker 6 Saturday, May 24th, and this episode will be up on the World Wide Web on Thursday, May 29th. So much to talk about.
Victor's got a website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Speaker 6 I'll tell you why later in this episode, you should be subscribing. Thanks to those, many, many, many new listeners and viewers of the podcast.
We truly appreciate it. Victor, much to talk about.

Speaker 6 I have a couple of trans, gay, political stories. One of them has to do with

Speaker 6 the real ideological severity of a particular state, Colorado. So I want to get your thoughts on those issues.

Speaker 6 We also have Donald Trump issuing, I think, a very important new executive order on scientific standards. Are we breeding killers in today's society? A topic to talk about.

Speaker 6 Trump versus the Mexican cartels. So plenty to get your, and if we have some time, we'll throw in another topic or two.

Speaker 6 But we'll get to these issues, Victor, and your thoughts on them when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 8 At anytime fitness, we speak strength. Today's word, creatine.
Not just for bodybuilders anymore. These amino acids can really boost your strength gains.

Speaker 8 And Anytime Fitness is here to help you do just that, with anytime access to all the equipment you need, plus a personalized plan and coaches who are with you every rep of the way.

Speaker 8 So see how our training, nutrition, and recovery expertise can turn you into a lean, mean, creatine machine. Start now at anytimefitness.com.

Speaker 9 Hey, Zach!

Speaker 5 Are you smiling at my gorgeous canyon view?

Speaker 10 No, Donald.

Speaker 11 I'm smiling because I've got something I want to tell the whole world.

Speaker 9 Well, do it.

Speaker 12 Shout it out. T-Mobile's Got Home Internet.

Speaker 9 Whoa, I love that echo.

Speaker 12 T-Mobile's Got Home Internet Internet. How much is it? Look at that, Zach.
We got the neighbors' attention.

Speaker 11 Just $35 a month.

Speaker 11 And you love a great deal, Denise.

Speaker 12 Plus, they've got a five-year price guarantee. That's five whole trips around the sun.

Speaker 9 I'm switching.

Speaker 12 Yes, T-Mobile home internet for the neighborhood.

Speaker 9 Donald, you still haven't returned my weed whacker.

Speaker 12 Carl, don't you embarrass me like this, please?

Speaker 2 What's everyone yelling about?

Speaker 9 T-Mobile's got home internet.

Speaker 9 Yes, T-Mobile's got home internet.

Speaker 10 Just $35 a month with autopay and any voice line. And it's guaranteed for five years.

Speaker 11 Beautiful yodeling, Carl.

Speaker 4 Taxes of these supply. Ctmobile.com/slash ISP for details and exclusions.

Speaker 6 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. By the way, when this show is actually up on the World Wide Web, Victor will be in one of his final, for the time being, travel experiences.

Speaker 6 He'll be in Washington. I, too, will have the pleasure of being in Washington at the same time.
Victor, maybe you and me, and if the great Sammy Wink is there also, we can go get a picture taken and

Speaker 6 share it with our friends.

Speaker 6 You're going to be giving a talk at,

Speaker 6 well, the Bradley Prizes are being

Speaker 7 awarded we have the

Speaker 7 all-day Bradley Foundation meetings, and then we have the Gala Prizes where we're going to honor

Speaker 7 three of our

Speaker 7 Bradley Prize winners.

Speaker 7 And it's going to be at the Daughters of American Revolution Hall. It's not very far from the White House.
And I'm going to give a lecture at the Heritage

Speaker 7 Foundation.

Speaker 6 So it's the Russell Kirk Institute. Yes.

Speaker 7 Russell Kirk Lecture on Borders.

Speaker 7 20 minutes, I think it's supposed to be short, and then with questions and answers, and a panel, I talk to people about it. Okay.

Speaker 6 I'll write a question. Maybe they'll let me ask it.
I'm going. I will review your performance.
So, Victor, you know, I'm going to start off with a different,

Speaker 6 from what I said at the outset, just to get your quick take on

Speaker 6 Chuck Schumer.

Speaker 6 So I think it was probably about two weeks ago from when this is airing, that terrible incident in New York. The Mexican Navy three-masted ship lost its function, crashed into the Brooklyn Bridge.

Speaker 6 A couple of sailors died. Many were hurt.
And the first thing that Chuck Schumer did was to put out a statement to say,

Speaker 6 is Doge possibly responsible for this?

Speaker 7 I think it was more incriminating. He suggested that cuts to the Coast Guard's vigilance allowed this to happen, which was untrue.
He's really deteriorated.

Speaker 7 He was the one that said, he was the one, remember, in 2020, he got out in front of the Supreme Court and said,

Speaker 7 Gorsuch Kavanaugh, you've reaped the wind.

Speaker 7 You've sowed the wind. You're going to reap the wheel when you don't know what's going to hit you.
And he was the one that urged more recently that

Speaker 7 Democratic progressive operatives go down and disrupt town halls and Republican districts. He calls for violence almost.

Speaker 7 He's in an existential crisis. I think he's 73, and he's an institution, and he's not going to go out like Dianne Feinstein, you know what I mean? To the last

Speaker 7 micro

Speaker 7 energy bolt,

Speaker 7 just

Speaker 7 die literally in the saddle.

Speaker 7 He's going to be out. They're going to vote him out.

Speaker 6 I could see that in a problem.

Speaker 7 Yeah, AOC is going to vote him out.

Speaker 7 And he knows that. So now he's sort of,

Speaker 7 as I said, he's like Tiresias and Cabnus and Euripides Baccha. He's an old man that puts on a costume and tries to dance around like he's young and try to out AOC

Speaker 7 and he can't. And so he tries to blame Trump for everything.
And there's so many clips of him.

Speaker 7 prior to 2016 praising Trump to the skies as a businessman and a friend. He has no no identity and he's caught now, as many American left-wing Jews are, with the the

Speaker 7 outbreak epidemic of this anti-Semitism that is 99.9%

Speaker 7 left-wing. Unless you're

Speaker 7 Tom Friedman and you always say, both sides, both sides.

Speaker 7 Carolina, both sides, both sides. And of course that is that we know that that was the the left-wing version of that demonstration and riot has been completely warped and not factual.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 he's one of these Jewish Americans that feels

Speaker 7 really angry that Donald Trump and the MA right

Speaker 7 is the most vigilant force in the United States about anti-Semitism. And it's the only force that's willing to deport people from the Middle East that harassed Jews.

Speaker 7 It's the only force that I know that's calling these college presidents to account for their tolerance of anti-Semitism. And that really bothers people.
There was a conference I attended,

Speaker 7 I won't mention where,

Speaker 7 where there was a lot of academics that were Jewish to come in and talk about the new anti-Semitism. And to be fair, I mean, there were some interesting talks, but I would say fairly, if I were to

Speaker 7 represent the thrust of what everybody said, Jack, you know what it was? Don't dare put me into a position that I have to defend Donald Trump. He is a racist.
He is an anti-Semite.

Speaker 7 And here I have to now.

Speaker 7 And the subtext of it, the truth of it was that all of their friends

Speaker 7 in the academy, because that's what they were, intellectuals and academics, had abandoned them basically and would not speak up for them.

Speaker 7 And most of the animus that was coming toward them, they were shocked because they were Middle East scholars, either here on

Speaker 7 green cards in the university or U.S. citizens or U.S.
legal residents and or DEI people,

Speaker 7 DEI people that they were kindred ideologically to. And it was almost like,

Speaker 7 wow, Donald Trump wants to deal with Iran and stop its ability to destroy Israel. But all my friends are blaming me because Donald Trump wants to help the Jews.
And I'm in a possible position.

Speaker 7 I hate Donald Trump. That was their idea, what he did to me.
And I could not understand it. I finally just said, I can't take this anymore.

Speaker 7 And I thought, so you only have one voice in the United States that's worried about the survivability of Israel.

Speaker 7 And you have one voice who's worried about the harassment and dangers posed to Jewish students on campuses. And you have only one voice who's worried about the epidemic of anti-Semitism.

Speaker 7 And that one voice comes from the conservative movement that's in power, thank God. And yet you are angry at that voice because it puts you at odds with your ideological twin.

Speaker 7 But they're not your ideological twins anymore. They hate you, not for what you say or do, but for who you are.
They hate you. And we saw that with Elias Rodriguez.

Speaker 7 And we're going to see more of that, unfortunately, because the more frustrated these Middle East students are and their kindred spirits, these wealthy, pampered, spoiled, rotten kids at these universities.

Speaker 7 The more that they try to disrupt and they try to scream and yell, and the less effect they have, they're going to get more and more

Speaker 7 angrier, angrier, angrier. And we're going to see people like this do it because there's no deterrent.
Maybe Jean Pierrot and Pam Bondi have talked about the death penalty for this creep. But

Speaker 7 I can't read a Tom Friedman column. I don't read him anymore because when he gets on anti-Semitism, it's basically that

Speaker 7 the Jews are put into a, they're being manipulated by the mega-Trump movement to be natural allies of it. And that means they're not illiberal and they're not going to do it.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 then there's just incoherence. And then you want to shake him and say, okay, who's the one that is guaranteeing the survivability of Israel? The Biden, Obama people, or the Trump people?

Speaker 7 Who is the one that will be there in Israel's dire need? Who will not cut off arms shipments to Israel?

Speaker 7 Which people are saying that if you come over here from the Middle East and you harass Jews, you better go back home?

Speaker 7 Which people are saying if you're a college president and you can't enforce laws prohibiting anti-Semitism, you should quit? I don't think it's the people. And then who are the people who are saying

Speaker 7 what?

Speaker 7 Who are the people who are killing Jews? Put it that way. Who are the people roughing them up? Who are the people in Congress that are openly anti-Semitic? Who are they? And that's just clear.

Speaker 7 They're all on the left. And so, why would you want to defend those people just because you don't want to be castigated as conservative?

Speaker 6 Well, because you can't stomach the reality that on your watch and with your participation and activism, you created and allowed this to happen. Whether you're a philanthropist.

Speaker 7 I feel bad. One of the participants at this conference came up to me and she said, thank you for writing so many columns about the dangers of anti-Semitism.
Pause, and I thought, I know what's coming.

Speaker 7 However, that does not mean that I support your praise of Donald Trump. I said, I could care less.
I really could. I could care less.
But let me ask you a question.

Speaker 7 I asked her, What if I had been very critical of American Jews and said they were participating in genocide in Gaza, but I had trashed Donald Trump. What would your attitude be?

Speaker 7 Well, you didn't do that, so that's a hypothetical. I said, no, no, tell me.

Speaker 7 Would you value the fact that I would write things that were critical of Trump more than

Speaker 7 that I had supported the Jews in the past? And they don't have an answer for any of that.

Speaker 7 And here

Speaker 7 Jews in Israel are fighting for their life. And you just

Speaker 7 ask questions of these people

Speaker 7 at this conference, these people at the conference, and I said,

Speaker 7 you know, it was always, well, this is complex, and there's a long history of this. And I said, no, it's not complex.
Gaza was in the hands of the Palestinian. They had it from 2006.

Speaker 7 Not one Jew in Gaza. They all got out.

Speaker 7 American Jews, in a magnanimous fashion, spent about $40 million and gave them a very thriving, prosperous greenhouse industry for winter vegetables and stuff to Europe. They destroyed it.

Speaker 7 They had an election. It was supervised.
Internationally

Speaker 7 they willingly voted in a terrorist organization.

Speaker 7 That terrorist organization then systematically killed or drove out all political appointees, including those of the Palestinian authorities, some of whom they threw off roofs, and then they got what they wanted.

Speaker 7 And then for the last 20 years, they have been run by a terrorist clique. And they had this country all to themselves.
And they had trillions of dollars in international aid.

Speaker 7 And they could have gone the Dubai route. They could have gone the Jordanian route.
They could have done what two million Arabs do by being citizens of Israel and are very prosperous.

Speaker 7 But they decided not to do that.

Speaker 7 Or maybe their government that they voted in decided not to do that because there was one election in the old Bernard Lewis formula, one election, one time in the Arab world. And that's what...

Speaker 7 happened, that happened under the Bush administration. And so what did they do? On October 7th, they started a war.
Not just a war, they killed more Jews than in any day since the Holocaust.

Speaker 7 1,200 of them. They didn't just kill them.
They put them in ovens. They raped them.

Speaker 7 They tortured them. They dismembered them.
They desecrated the body. They did

Speaker 7 every unimaginable thing you can imagine. Just horrific.
And then after it was all over, they began,

Speaker 7 as they had before, they got all of their

Speaker 7 terrorist tentacles from Iran. The Houthis started sending rockets.
Hezbollah sent rockets. Hamas came out of the tunnels and sent rockets.
Probably about 20,000 rockets.

Speaker 7 And they all had one thing in common. They were aimed at civilian targets.
And they had another thing in common. They were incompetent.

Speaker 7 So the Israelis knocked down 98% given their efficacy and scientific knowledge. And then they hated them more for not being killed.
And out of that came this crazy movement.

Speaker 7 And you say to one of these students, as I have on the Stanford campus as I walk by, take away October 7th, there'd be no problem.

Speaker 7 You guys could have Gaza as you had Gaza and you're welcome to do what. If you want to take $50 billion

Speaker 7 and not build high-rise apartments and Marriott hotels and you want to make tunnels like subterranean terrace, that's your business.

Speaker 7 It was all yours. You could do whatever you want.
And you decided that even that was not enough. You had to go kill a bunch of

Speaker 7 civilians in the most liberal part of Israel, by the way, who had gone bent over backwards to welcome in somewhere between 10 and 15,000 guest workers every day and pay them two to three times more than they could get in Gaza.

Speaker 7 And that magnanimity, again, was seen as weakness to be manipulated and taken advantage of. So it's very simple.
They started the war. They wanted to fight it.
They wanted to kill every Jew in Israel.

Speaker 7 They launched all the rockets. And they're angry because they can't win.
Because Iran turned out to be, what, a paper tiger. Hezbollah turned out to be a paper tiger.

Speaker 7 Hamas turned out to be a terrorist paper tiger compared to Israel. And that got them even angrier.
So

Speaker 7 it's pretty simple.

Speaker 6 Well, is it simple enough to say, you've got to kill them? I don't know.

Speaker 6 And then here, though, the protesters, these punks and

Speaker 7 truly despicable people.

Speaker 6 Yeah, who 30 years from now may be the senator from this state or the governor of that state. And,

Speaker 6 boy, I'd love to see some hard hats, as in days of old, do things.

Speaker 7 Well, that's why the Democratic Party is in trouble right now, because their core constituents of old, the blue-collar white working class, the Hispanic working class, the inner city black and regular black, they're defecting in massive numbers.

Speaker 7 And why?

Speaker 7 All these issues we talked about, transgenderism, the boy, but also there's something about this new democratic youthful elite, the David Hoggs of the world, the AOCs AOCs of the world, the squad of the world, the Bowmans of the world, the Karen Basses of the world.

Speaker 7 They're arrogant and they talk down to people and they think they're better than everybody. The techie lords, all of them.
And people don't like them. They don't like the way they talk.

Speaker 7 They don't like the sound of their voice. They don't like their background.
And they think that they're a global, arrogant,

Speaker 7 despotic elite. And that's the biggest problem.

Speaker 7 Even James Carville, who's kind of unhinged, from time to time stumbles on the truth and says that his party is full of a bunch of people, look down at people and tell them what to do.

Speaker 7 And the same thing with foreign policy. That's the biggest irony.
They are the biggest cultural nineteenth-century imperialists we've ever had in this country.

Speaker 7 They really do believe that we should go in with U.S.

Speaker 7 aid and go into these traditional Islamic countries, African countries, and then start flying pride flags and gender studies programs and green initiatives, solar, all of that.

Speaker 7 And that's what they did at the University of Kabul.

Speaker 6 Well, Victor, I want to take a moment for our sponsor, Hillsdale College. I think you know that place.

Speaker 4 I do.

Speaker 6 Did you, dear listeners and viewers, know that Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses? That's right, more than 40 free online courses. Learn about the works of C.S.

Speaker 6 Lewis, the stories in the book of Genesis, the meaning of the U.S.

Speaker 6 Commission, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, or the history of the ancient Christian church with Hillsdale College's free online courses.

Speaker 6 You can even take Victor Davis Hansen's class, The Second World Wars. This free seven-lecture course will help you to understand this massive and complex conflict in a new way.

Speaker 6 Go right now to hillsdale.edu slash VDH to enroll. There's no cost, it's easy to get started.
That's hillsdale.edu slash VDH to enroll for free. Hillsdale.edu slash VDH.

Speaker 6 And we thank the good people from Hillsdale for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Speaker 6 Victor, back on culture and politics, we mentioned trans. I have a few trans things, related things I'd like to bring up with you.
One before we go to a break, and this has to do with Colorado.

Speaker 6 And once upon a time, you know, Colorado had one of the greatest senators in my lifetime was Bill Armstrong,

Speaker 6 just the,

Speaker 6 gosh, he was a great principled guy. But I'm looking at, you know, judging a state by its by its representation in the Senate.

Speaker 6 In the last 30 years, Armstrong, Wayne Allard, Hank Brown, even Ben Nighthorse, Campbell, Republican senators. And that state has gone so left now.

Speaker 6 Now, so here's a headline, and it has to do with trans. Colorado's trans revolution is worse than you think as governor signs new law.

Speaker 6 Here in Colorado, trans activists control the state house, senate, the governor's seat, and whatever they want to do, however far they want to push the envelope, they can.

Speaker 6 And they did this legislative cycle. Some of the bills are so radical that even California's governor refused to sign similar legislation.
This session, we saw two radical trans bills pass.

Speaker 6 both chambers. One of the measures prohibits free speech and would force parents to affirm their children's sexual identity, confusion, or risk losing custody.

Speaker 6 The other bill forces taxpayers to fully fund transgender medical interventions.

Speaker 6 And if that wasn't enough, we even have what they call a transcontinental pipeline to move trans people here from other states.

Speaker 7 Victor,

Speaker 6 what happened to Colorado? Mom, mommy.

Speaker 7 Well, it's the usual trajectory of the left-wing DEI movement. It all starts out as we've been oppressed.
Okay, step one. We want equal opportunity and protection under the law.
Step two, achieved.

Speaker 7 We would like to have some redress of grievances for our prior oppression. Step three, usually granted.
Now, then we get into step four. That's not enough.

Speaker 7 We want to take our ideology and our lifestyle and mandate

Speaker 7 that you accept it. Step five.
And if you don't accept it, we are going to violate the Constitution and put penalties on you. And step six,

Speaker 7 we are actually, even though we are very small numbers, we are going to exercise power like we're a majority. And that's what they do.

Speaker 7 Step seven, we're going to exercise that power by majority, by threatening people, by occasional violence, by

Speaker 7 trying to demonize legislators.

Speaker 7 Colorado 30 or 40 years ago, especially eastern Colorado, you know, when you go on the other side of the Rockies, it was analogous to Wyoming, Utah, Montana, ranchers, oil, you know, people.

Speaker 7 But when people left California,

Speaker 7 they left for two reasons. They left to go to low-taxes, red states where there was normality and sanity.

Speaker 7 So they left, they went to Idaho, they went to Nevada, they went, they used to go to Arizona, but especially Tennessee and Florida and Texas.

Speaker 7 But there were other Californians that decided they wanted to leave. They were the more affluent because California was too crowded, the schools were no good, their infrastructure,

Speaker 7 they couldn't go to Yosemite anymore, it was too crowded.

Speaker 7 So they wanted to get a California lifestyle, natural, you know, and they went to western Colorado, the Aspen, the Vale, the Boulder, the Denver crowd, and they control it.

Speaker 7 And it's Jared Polis is the, I guess he's the first openly gay governor.

Speaker 7 He's a multi-millionaire, so he is an elite,

Speaker 7 he's worth about 400 million bucks.

Speaker 7 So, in his way of thinking, he's not really first-hand experienced or worried about what the average Coloradan has to do as far as all these initiatives and mandates they have.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 it's got a LGBTQ

Speaker 7 agenda, and that's the whole state. And it's not a purple state anymore.
It's a solidly blue state. And I don't think it's ever going to change back.
I really don't, until it gets so bad.

Speaker 7 I went to, I started going to, you know, I spoke a lot in Denver in the 90s and early at the turn of the century. It was,

Speaker 7 Jack, the downtown was one of the cleanest, nicest places in the world. They had that street that had been converted into a mall, you know, right downtown.
It was beautiful.

Speaker 7 The last time I came, I spoke there, there was a crowd screaming and yelling, and I couldn't get out of the hotel because, you know, the

Speaker 7 photographer, Andy, who was injured, Andy, N-G-O-No, is it? I don't know how to pronounce it.

Speaker 6 Yeah, who's been brutalized by the Antifa folks?

Speaker 7 Yeah, well, there was a rumor that he was in the building

Speaker 7 as part of the, and

Speaker 7 it spread like wildfire. And I looked out the door, and the police was there.
They were jumping on top of the police car with an impunity.

Speaker 7 And the guy who was supposed to take me to the airport, I was worried. He said, he called me the driver and a taxicab driver I had requested.
And he said, I'm not getting near there.

Speaker 7 And I said, what do you mean? He said, they'll jump on my car. They're crazy people.
I know these people. I said, well, I have to get to the airport.
So he said, here's what you do.

Speaker 7 Go out the back door of this hotel and walk five blocks to this park or something. That's what I did.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 it was just crazy. And then earlier that day and the day before, I walked down that beautiful mall and it was just like, it was like Berkeley.

Speaker 7 It was just the same thing as a California Venice Beach Street. It was the same old deal.
And so

Speaker 7 it's like downtown Portland, downtown Seattle, downtown San Francisco, downtown Los Angeles.

Speaker 7 Somebody's got to... to write about all of these cities, downtown Minneapolis, downtown Washington, all of these cities, they're all run by

Speaker 7 either blue state left-wing mayors or DEI mayors or both, and they're a complete shambles. They've destroyed these things, and they've driven all the productive people out.

Speaker 7 And nobody really knows the long-term effect of all this, Jack, because

Speaker 7 there's been a lot of research that shows that when people

Speaker 7 leave these places,

Speaker 7 They go to red states,

Speaker 7 and yet they don't always become left-wing people. The people who are most likely to leave these places are independents or apolitical.

Speaker 7 And more importantly, the red state populations are growing at a greater rate, both due to the exoduses that they're gaining and Illinois, New York, California's losing, and then the fact that it's for red state or conservative people are more likely to be religiously observant and have two to three children.

Speaker 7 And the lifestyle of the bicultural elite discourages, as AOC said, fertility. Didn't want to have children.
And so, remember, David Hogg said he didn't want to have children.

Speaker 7 Everybody's just supposed to take drugs, he said, and get laid and enjoy yourself.

Speaker 7 So, who knows?

Speaker 7 What I'm getting at is, I don't know what the ultimate ramification is going to be, but you could see in 20 years if this would continue at the same rate, it would be kind of like the end of us TV show with all these

Speaker 7 weeds growing over the city. I mean, who's going to live there? I mean, nobody would want to, who wants to live in Minneapolis or Portland or Seattle, or at least downtown.

Speaker 6 We have to make it. Detroit, truly great city.
Second place for the 1968 Olympics, you know, so it was that great, that late.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's sad. All these beautiful buildings that are just go to downtown San Francisco.
Maybe it's coming back a little bit with a new mayor.

Speaker 6 Yeah, Detroit is. I know they're making improvements.

Speaker 6 But, well, Victor, a couple of other trans-related topics,

Speaker 6 not topics, but incidents to get your take on. And maybe we'll get your take on the latest on juicy, juicy smollet when we come back

Speaker 6 from these important messages.

Speaker 5 You know that feeling when you come home late from work and those puppy dog eyes just pierce right through your soul? Or when you're packing for a trip and your cat refuses to leave your suitcase?

Speaker 5 Yeah, we've all been there. Pet parent guilt is real.
And you know what? It's completely normal. I feel it all the time, like when I have to leave for work and my dog gives me that look.

Speaker 5 You know the one. Or that time I forgot my phone inside after already saying goodbye and had to do the whole emotional departure scene twice.
These moments just come with being a pet parent.

Speaker 5 That's why I'm grateful for Hill's science-led nutrition, which helps you give more love than humanly possible.

Speaker 5 Whether it's those long work days or trying to balance attention between multiple pets, Hill's Pet Nutrition gets it.

Speaker 5 They've created science-based nutrition that supports your pet's lifelong health so you can feel confident even when life gets hectic. Because you're only human, there's Hills.
Science does more.

Speaker 5 Ready to let go of the guilt? Find the right food at hillspet.com slash wondery. That's hillspet.com slash wondery.

Speaker 13 It's time your hard-earned money works harder for you.

Speaker 2 With the Wealthfront Cash account, your uninvested cash earns a 3.5% APY, which is higher than the average savings rate.

Speaker 2 No account fees, no minimums, and free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts anytime. Join over a million people who trust Wealthfront to build wealth at wealthfront.com.

Speaker 13 Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA SIPC, and is not a bank. APY on deposits as of November 7th, 2025, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Speaker 13 Funds are swept to program banks where they earn the variable APY.

Speaker 6 We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show recording on. I lost my paperwork, whatever day it it is today.
It's Saturday, May 24th, and this episode will be up on

Speaker 6 Thursday, May 29th. Victor's website is the Blade of Perseus.
Its address is victorhanson.com. Do subscribe at $6.50 a month or discounted to $65 a year.

Speaker 6 And when you do that, in addition to all the other, the tremendous amount of free material you can find on the website, you will be able to access the ultra articles that Victor writes exclusively for the blade of Perseus and the ultra video he does every week so victorhanson.com do do that folks Victor yeah let's let me just ask you about about Jesse Juicy

Speaker 6 he has here's a headline from hate crime hoax to handshake settlement Jesse Smollett I'll let you call him Juicy walks away actor and hate crime hoax are extraordinary Jesse Smollett is going to shell out $50,000 to a Chicago charity to settle a lawsuit filed by the city.

Speaker 6 The lawsuit sought restitution for the cost of investigating the hate crime hoax he perpetrated in 2019.

Speaker 6 Victor, you think this is the last we're finally going to hear of this character?

Speaker 7 I doubt it. Mayor Johnson, remember, he's got, what, 8% approval rating? He's bankrupt Chicago.
He's got a civil rights investigation by Harmette Dillon of his hiring.

Speaker 7 He's the one that, when they found out he only only basically only wants to hire African Americans. He said it's because they're more empathetic than other people.
So he's a complete abject racist.

Speaker 7 So his government, his city government, was the one that made the deal. I gave a talk on Juicy at the Reagan Library once.
It's on tape if anybody wants to look at it. But remember what it was?

Speaker 7 As soon as that happened, almost instantaneously, anybody with half a brain knew it was completely bogus, except Camilla Harris, Nancy Pelosi. Remember them? Oh, this is another racist.

Speaker 7 This is another.

Speaker 7 I wrote it the next day before even. I said, this is just Covington kids.
Remember that? That the Covington kids had berated this Native American Vietnam combat veteran? All eyes.

Speaker 7 Or it was the Duke La Crosse. They had physically and sexually assaulted a poor working African-American mother, forced to go into all lies.

Speaker 7 Or it was the Duke La Crosse team. These kids and the fraternity had got all lies.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 so Trayvon Martin, the son that Barack Obama said that he never had, just innocently walking around and then beaten up by this white Hispanic,

Speaker 7 beaten to a pulp. And then they photoshopped the pictures of George Zimmerman.
Remember that?

Speaker 7 They censored the call.

Speaker 7 Michael Brown? Yes, Michael Brown.

Speaker 7 At some point, everybody, we live in the Soviet Union. We really do, the old Soviet Union, and we're just sick of all these lies.
So Josie Smollett basically did the following.

Speaker 7 He hired two African nationals that he, one of whom he was having a sexual relationship, bodybuilders, black guys, and he took them on a route and prepped them about what he was going to do.

Speaker 7 Then they went in and bought MAGA red caps, MAGA-like red caps, and rope and bleach, and they're on tape doing it.

Speaker 7 And then they rehearsed this that somehow he was going to get up at 2:30 in the morning and go get a Subway sandwich.

Speaker 7 And he was going to confront these two people he'd hired, but they would have mask on and disguise their accent. And we were supposed to believe that they were white MAGA marauders.

Speaker 7 And everybody knows that in Chicago, in a liberal black neighborhood, at 2:30 in the morning, there's a lot of white MAGA people hunting, hunting down poor black actors.

Speaker 7 And they all are fans of the movie, of the TV show Empire. And just so they're prepared, they do two things.
These white MAGA demons who patrol inner city and the suburbs of Chicago in

Speaker 7 sub-freezing weather with their hats on and their mask on, they carry rope to show you they can lynch you and they try to put around your neck and they also carry bleach, so they're going to bleach you white

Speaker 7 and they're going to make fun of black TV shows which they're ad, they're just fanatic viewers of. They just can't get enough of empire.
So Juicy just goes down to get his

Speaker 7 sandwich and he sees two MAGA people, i.e. the people he hired.

Speaker 7 And they attack him. But Juicy, although he's diminutive and

Speaker 7 these MAGA monsters from Texas or somewhere are huge, they set Juicy off because they say, blank, blank you and blank empire,

Speaker 7 blank your black show that we don't like. Nobody knows who it is in the anyway.
So they start to fight Juicy and he does a miraculous thing. Holding his cell phone in one hand and his

Speaker 7 subway sandwich in the other, with his kickboxing, he's able to fight off both of them. I kicked their blank.

Speaker 7 And he didn't drop his phone, he didn't drop his subway. And then, unfortunately, they did put the noose around his neck, but he fought them off and broke it.
So it was just the noose to be showing.

Speaker 7 And then they tried to throw bleach on him, and they were very smart because the temperature outside

Speaker 7 would have ensured the bleach would have frozen. But they had a special formula that

Speaker 7 defied the the laws of chemistry. And they threw the bleach in mid-air and they said, Abra cadabra, don't freeze.
And the bleach didn't freeze. It coated him.

Speaker 7 So then he fought him off and he made his way back and he called the police and they came there and he had the sandwich that was messed up and his cell phone and they asked the cell phone until they could get the and he wouldn't give it to them because he had fought so dearly for it.

Speaker 7 And he showed him the bleach and and this, and he had kind of a bruise where he and then everybody said this was endemic racism, da-da-da-da-da-da. And then within days, the whole thing broke down.

Speaker 7 The people he'd hired turned state's evidence. Yeah, he hired us.
We worked out with him. Yes, I had sexual relations with him.
Here's the check. He was stupid enough to write the checks.

Speaker 7 They had the checks. And they had him on tape buying the materials.
And yet, all of these left-wing people stuck to this story.

Speaker 7 And at that point, you saw that this whole thing, DEI, the whole thing was completely bankrupt.

Speaker 7 So all it was was this is a has-been mediocre actor that a black gay director of a black TV show thought was a mediocre washed up and got rid of him.

Speaker 7 And he was angry because he would not get any more adoration if he ever got any. So he hired two black people to dress up as white racists.
and put the MAGA and then attack him.

Speaker 7 And we were supposed to believe that. Everything about it was demonstrably untrue within a nanosecond.
There was evidence of everything imaginable, and yet they still didn't believe it.

Speaker 7 And now they let him off, basically.

Speaker 7 He should have been in prison for 10 years. And remember the DA, they had to bring in an outside DA because the city DA.
And

Speaker 7 remember, she was communicating with the Michelle Obama team. Right.
The whole thing was a joke. It was.

Speaker 6 And the interview, I was looking it up while you were talking about Robin Roberts on ABC. It was pathetic.

Speaker 6 Maybe softball.

Speaker 7 Donald Trump had a really good reaction to it. He said,

Speaker 7 where's the

Speaker 7 lawsuit that you smeared all of these

Speaker 7 people? You called them white racist, and they would never do such a thing. They never did any of that.

Speaker 7 And as I said, you put it into

Speaker 7 Michael Ford and

Speaker 7 Michael Brown, I mean, and you put it in with the Covington, and you put it in with the Duke La Crosse, and you go back to Tawana Brawley, and my gosh.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that was Al Sharpton. He never really apologized for that.

Speaker 7 And you go to the OJ thing, and

Speaker 7 it's just at some point you just don't believe it.

Speaker 7 And we've had at Stanford, I think, two incidents where a noose was hanging from a tree. In one case,

Speaker 7 it was down by the lake, and it was embedded into the tree, and it was for somebody swinging or something. But of course, that's not how everybody reports it.
And it's people are so conditioned.

Speaker 7 If you, and we had the race car driver, remember, with the

Speaker 6 it may have been Daytona, but yeah, the whole

Speaker 7 18th. And then the condition is: we're going to produce a new, so we're going to produce the N-word written on my dorm wall.

Speaker 7 And if anybody suggests that we did that to gain empathy or to jack up the need for more DEI officers, they are a racist. If they want us to show the proof of it, they are racist.

Speaker 7 We don't have to, given the history of racism. That's what we are.
And what is the result on

Speaker 7 the populace in general? It's complete cynicism. It's kind of like in Poland about 19, I don't know, 65, and somebody says, you know,

Speaker 7 Comrade Brezhnev says that we have the greatest bread allotment of any in the Warsaw Pact, and no one believes it.

Speaker 7 Not one word. And that's where we are now.
That's why DEI has vanished, at least for now, because nobody believes it's true anymore.

Speaker 6 Right. It's worn out the patients.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, loyalty oaths. For 50 years, the left told us that a loyalty oath during the McCarthy period was the worst thing that ever happened in the United States, and this was horrible.

Speaker 7 And they fought it with the ACL, and then they turned right around.

Speaker 7 They all wanted diversity oaths. Before we hire you, you have to write out your commitment to diversity and how you have sponsored, accelerated,

Speaker 7 helped the plight of blacks,

Speaker 7 people of color, gays, trans, women, and you have to delineate in detail your sensitivity to it. And if you don't, we're not going to hire you.
You don't care.

Speaker 6 You're the world's greatest physicist. We're not going to hire you.

Speaker 7 No, we don't care about that. So that's, and then the whole time this was going on, China's like, this is so great.
These stupid people, they are idiots.

Speaker 7 Every once in a while, when they attack us for spying or sending a balloon over, we're going to say, you're racist.

Speaker 7 Yellow peril at 19, you know, 1860, yellow peril, 1920, you guys are racist, you're racist. And then every time

Speaker 7 we tell them, oh, we have to eliminate coal, we have to eliminate oil, we have to eliminate natural gas, we have to get wind and solar, China's like, we'll sell you the solar panels and we're going to, we built three coal plants this month.

Speaker 7 What a bunch of idiots. We're going to get all the coal in the world and get cheap electricity and then make them buy our

Speaker 7 spy-embedded panel.

Speaker 6 All right. Hey, Victor, just I have another, I'll lump these two together back on trans

Speaker 6 some headlines.

Speaker 6 One of our favorite Biden administration officials, Admiral, Admiral Rachel Levine, was given an honorary degree by Smith College.

Speaker 6 Surprisingly, a feminist group there called the Women's Declaration International protested. It's nice to see a so-called feminist group

Speaker 6 come and defend women.

Speaker 6 In a post to its ex-account, that WDI group said, tomorrow, Smith College, a historically women's college, will award Richard, oh, they actually use the name, Richard, quote-unquote, Rachel Levine, an honorary degree.

Speaker 6 Levine, who pretends to be a woman, will then speak at commencement. We're on the ground in Northampton, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, to show our support for women.

Speaker 6 And then the other thing, Victor, you take them all together, is the Supreme Court, the United States Supreme Court, voted to 7-2 to order Maine to restore the lawmaker, Laurel Libby, her powers, because she was censured by the state house on a party-line vote.

Speaker 6 Democrats control the legislature there. Why? Because she spoke out against boys pretending to be women and competing.

Speaker 7 Let's vote about.

Speaker 7 Who would be the two Supreme Court justices that would think that it was perfectly fine if a legislator just happened to make a speech that they found disagreeable that they had a right to remove them from all politics.

Speaker 6 This is too easy, Victor. It's too easy.

Speaker 7 And so that's where we are. Those were two of the words.

Speaker 6 So do my Aaron Jackson.

Speaker 7 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 7 The wise Latina, and I wrote a column about when she was appointed, she gave a talk, I think it was at Bolt Hall. I can't use the word Bolt anymore, of course.

Speaker 7 It's been changed, where she used the word Latina, I think, 25 times. And then she kept saying that, as a wise Latina, I have more capability than a white man.
Remember that? About to be a judge.

Speaker 7 And Brown

Speaker 7 was the one who told us that she didn't really know how to define a woman.

Speaker 7 And that's who we have in the Supreme Court. And,

Speaker 7 you know, the whole thing about the the trans thing, I don't understand if they really do believe they are.

Speaker 7 I don't know. I hear conflicting reports.
Are they a third sex? Because they keep saying there's more than two sexes, or do they really think they have transitioned to an identical

Speaker 7 biological sex as biological people?

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 if you go look at classical studies of sexology and psychiatry, you can see this term, and it's always gender dysphoria, dysphoria, or it's gender confusion.

Speaker 7 And it's in that literature goes way back, and they've done countless statistical studies. And it's always like point, I don't know, 0.5%

Speaker 7 of the population, 0.3%.

Speaker 7 It's just a minuscule amount. It's a definable phenomenon that a person's psyche is mismatched with their body, but it's there.
There are gradations of it. They have transgenderism.

Speaker 7 They have transvestism, where people like to dress up in the opposite clothes, but otherwise they're heterosexual. They have all these gradations.

Speaker 7 They're all discussed by people like Havelock Ellis or Masters and Johnson. It's all there.
But this idea that 30% of the brown student body

Speaker 7 might be transgender, that is something that's just

Speaker 7 scientifically impossible. And it's part of a cult and a political movement.

Speaker 7 And, you know, the weird thing is, as I said on a couple of broadcasts, that there's a passage in the historian Diodorus about someone who had multiple sex organs.

Speaker 7 And there is a famous poem by the Roman poem Catullus about a man who gets into a

Speaker 7 frenzy from the Eastern god Sibylle and

Speaker 7 dresses up in women's clothing and he's the pronouns in Latin change from illi to illa during the poem because he becomes a woman and he transitions in this ecstasy to the mother goddess and

Speaker 7 he castrates himself. The word in Latin, as I remember, is ponderaire ilie, the weight of his testicles.

Speaker 7 He cuts it off, and then the whole frenzy ends, and he's on the beach lamenting his fate that he's injured or mutilated himself. And it's kind of an anti-Western, it's in the context of Cleopatra,

Speaker 7 anti-Egypt, anti-Eastern anti-Eastern topos in Roman literature. It's like this is what Eastern decadence can do to good Romans.
But

Speaker 7 it's not quite black and white like that. There's also an intrigue in this cult that's expressed in the thing.

Speaker 7 And then, of course, we have Petronius the Satyricon, a novel written around 60 AD, maybe by a consular official, a consular rank official, Petronius, mocking or a parody of the Emperor Nero, but

Speaker 7 in the Pisa de Resistance, the Tomalchio's dinner, and then there's three of them, Asclitos,

Speaker 7 and there's the old poet Eumolpus, and then Gaeton, and Colpius, four of them. And my point is that this is very common.
Gaeton dresses up as girls. He dresses up as boys.

Speaker 7 He doesn't have a sexual identity. He transitions back and forth.
He's used as a boy.

Speaker 7 He's used as a woman. He's used as a man.
And it's all in this

Speaker 7 larger male of how decadent the Bay of Naples has become with this, right before, you know, this is Vesuvius, well before that, but food, fashion, what happened to the Roman soldiers that created all this?

Speaker 7 And they mock all this. And

Speaker 7 it's a brilliant satire, but my point is, gender dysphoria is ancient. And it's always, in the ancient context, seen as something that's not regular or normal, and very rare, rare, rare.

Speaker 7 And we have been told over the last, I don't know, 20 years ago, we didn't talk about it.

Speaker 7 But now, the last five years, it's the barometer of whether you're liberal or illiberal if you even question the numbers. It's an epidemic.
It's a civil rights issue.

Speaker 7 Leah Thomas is a full-blooded woman. She is no different than any woman biologically.
And nobody believes that. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Good luck winning a Democrat nomination if you don't embrace that.

Speaker 7 Lunacy. That's going to be

Speaker 7 the death knell of that party.

Speaker 7 That was that issue, as minor as it might seem to some people, that and the open border were so illogical and so disruptive and so nihilous, it really hurt the Democratic Party.

Speaker 7 We'll see. We'll see.
Well, I want to ask you,

Speaker 6 you mentioned Stanford earlier. Maybe you did earlier on the previous podcast, but I have something to bring up about stuff on campus there.
But first, I want to talk to our listeners and viewers.

Speaker 6 Let's face it, our healthcare system is no longer serving the people it was designed to help. Appointments take weeks, only to end in a rushed five-minute consultation.

Speaker 6 Prescriptions are delayed, bureaucratic red tape gets in the way, and treatment options are limited to what some agency

Speaker 6 deems acceptable. It's inefficient, impersonal, and increasingly untrustworthy.
And that's why all family pharmacy is different.

Speaker 6 They believe in medical freedom, your right to choose what works best for your health alongside a doctor who respects that choice. No interference from government regulators or insurance companies.

Speaker 6 Ordering is simple and direct. Skip the waiting rooms and the long pharmacy lines.
Just go online, place your order, and your medications are shipped. right to your door.

Speaker 6 They carry over 200 medications, including trusted names like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, mibenzidol, antibiotics, and other essential treatments your family may need.

Speaker 6 You can also order emergency kits, customize your supply, or buy in bulk to be fully prepared. Over 100,000

Speaker 6 Americans have already made the switch to all family pharmacy. Perhaps now is the time for you to do the same.

Speaker 6 Visit allfamilypharmacy.com/slash victor and use the promo code VICTOR10, that's V-I-C-T-O-R, the number one, the number zero, to get 10% 10% off your first order.

Speaker 6 That's allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor. Take back control of your health on your terms, and we thank the good people from All Family Pharmacy for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Victor,

Speaker 6 I'm not going to read all this because I know our listeners are sick of this Bronx accent, but

Speaker 6 I titled this Stanford Goes Ugly.

Speaker 6 There's a piece by Ada, I think it's Ada Golcha in the Stanford Review, Lament for Beauty, Stanford's treatment from architectural grace retreat, excuse me, from architectural grace.

Speaker 6 There's a big new building unveiled for the campus. It's the Computing and Data Science Building.

Speaker 6 I don't know if it's actually been opened or if I saw a rendering, but it's one of these very cold, cold buildings.

Speaker 6 And something else was just opened similarly, the Escondido Village Graduate Residences.

Speaker 7 I guess the yeah, they're not as bad, though, is that.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 7 Well, I mean,

Speaker 7 I lived there in the 70s,

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 7 the new residences are actually better looking than the 70s. Stanford

Speaker 7 had this problem where they had this beautiful Romanesque architecture of circa Roman Empire and the provinces around 400 AD to 600. It's beautiful.
Colonnades, kind of a sandstone, tile roofs.

Speaker 7 And then as the university started expanding in the sixties and seventies, they tried to use reinforced concrete and make a modernist architecture

Speaker 7 in the same color. And they did the art library that I used when I was a graduate student.
They did the undergraduate. And what's happened, Jack, is they they systematically blow them up.

Speaker 7 We blew up the art library to build the the Hoover

Speaker 7 Conference Center, the Treitel Building. They blew up the

Speaker 7 undergraduate library, I guess, because of online and the lack of need for a big library. They blew it up, and it's now an open-air.

Speaker 7 So we do have some of these ugly 70 buildings at Trite, but the new ones are kind of, well, they're all different. This one and the music hall are postmodern, but some of them are kind of like

Speaker 7 New York classical

Speaker 7 high-rises, you know. They're just

Speaker 7 sparse, but they're not not all glass and aluminum like the 60s. They're kind of retro,

Speaker 7 like that Chrysler building, you know, something like that. And

Speaker 7 their problem is that to emulate the original architecture, which is the most beautiful, with the colonnades and the heavy stones.

Speaker 7 And during the Loma Lena earthquake, they took a beating. Even the

Speaker 7 iconic chapel was the roof collapsed in places.

Speaker 7 It would be too expensive, I guess, they feel.

Speaker 7 So I guess what the article is about, they have three, they have three types of architectures.

Speaker 7 They have the original and the best and the most beautiful, and then they have the 60s, 70s, 80s modernist

Speaker 7 Impressionistic architecture that shows a little bit of Romanesque here and there. And they still have the post office and the store and places like that.

Speaker 7 And then they have the new stuff that can be retro or in some cases postmodern. But you put them all together and they've lost

Speaker 7 that beautiful Romanesque signature architecture. And it's very hard to make a Romanesque science building.
I give that, you know, multi-story with a colonnade around it. That's not going to happen.

Speaker 7 The quad is still very beautiful.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 the main quad with the complete, it looks like an Italian Renaissance town or something from the late Republic

Speaker 7 late Empire.

Speaker 7 Roman Empire.

Speaker 6 Relocated to Peking

Speaker 6 the last time I was there.

Speaker 7 Yeah, Stanford has a lot of problems because it's in the Bay Area and it's in Santa Clara County. And

Speaker 7 it's a left-wing lunatic

Speaker 7 planning commission, building codes that they have to comply with.

Speaker 7 And then they have housing for faculty, but the housing, a three-bedroom, two-bath house of maybe $1,800, usually they're made in the 1960s style.

Speaker 7 They're about $4 or $5 million.

Speaker 7 So nobody can afford to live there.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 the housing is,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 when people retire, they live for a long time and they can't expel them.

Speaker 7 So you've got about 20% of the people that are living in Stanford housing are not either retired or they're not connected with the university.

Speaker 7 They're the widow of somebody, some of a professor or something.

Speaker 7 And then they have this huge acreage to over 2,500 acres that they can't touch and they don't want to touch. But it's just

Speaker 7 very expensive and it's very hard to get around. And

Speaker 7 I've been there all my life. I mean, my mom and her sister went there in the 1930s and 40s.
And I was a kid. I would go to the alumni thing with them.
I was a graduate student for five years there.

Speaker 7 I was a Brisbane professor on the campus for two.

Speaker 7 And I've been

Speaker 7 employed by them the last 21 years.

Speaker 7 And I don't say that as an aficionado of Stanford. I really don't.
I really admire the science and what they

Speaker 7 were responsible for Silicon Valley, Stanford University.

Speaker 7 Both the business plan and the technology came, Bill Hewitt and the others, they launched it, Stanford Research Center, all that institute.

Speaker 7 But since then, it's got a very strange combination of very, very wealthy snobbishness and aristocratic disdain for average people coupled with left-wing progressive socialism, DI.

Speaker 7 And that's a bad combination to see somebody who looks down at the people in the concrete and yet in the abstract always talks about equality and equity. And that's what they are.
That's the faculty.

Speaker 7 And the secret.

Speaker 6 It's easy to hate the people you look down on in the concrete because

Speaker 6 from the third man,

Speaker 6 up in the first wheel, who cares about that little dot down there?

Speaker 7 They always hate the middle class. They feel that their wealthy and aristocratic friends have good taste, and the poor are romantic, and they're suffering, but not the middle class.

Speaker 7 These are the guys that, you know, have jet skis and Winnebagos and MAGA hats.

Speaker 6 Well, Victor, we're going to

Speaker 6 take a little break and when we come back from that final topic to get your take on, and that is the new executive

Speaker 6 order put out by Donald Trump related to scientific research. I think it's important, and I think your views on that might be important to our listeners and viewers.

Speaker 6 We'll do that when we return from these final important messages.

Speaker 1 Big news: Wayfair's Black Friday sale is here. Right now, score up to 80% off everything home.
These are our best deals of the year. Shop Wayfair's Black Friday sale now at Waybear.com.

Speaker 2 Wayfair, Every Style, Every Home.

Speaker 6 We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, Donald Trump's new executive order is called Restoring Gold Standard

Speaker 6 Science. When I first read it, I was like, why are we going back on the gold standard? Not yet.

Speaker 7 He hasn't done that yet.

Speaker 7 Everything is gold. Golden dome, golden standard.

Speaker 6 Yeah, golden faucets in my hotel room. So here's what he means: the restoration of

Speaker 6 science as we used to believe it was.

Speaker 6 And we know in recent years, Victor, it's been so politicized, and you can't, if you're doing research and you get these conclusions, if they're the wrong conclusions

Speaker 6 to the liberal ideology, the leftist ideology,

Speaker 6 they're not to be followed. And we have so many papers, so many scientific studies that have been debunked because they're based on lies.
So here's what the executive order wants to do.

Speaker 6 Gold standard science means science conducted in a manner that is reproducible, transparent, communicative of error and uncertainty, collaborative and interdisciplinary, skeptical of its findings and assumptions, structured for

Speaker 6 falsifiability of hypotheses, subject to unbiased peer review. That's difficult for a lot of scientists.
Accepting of negative results as positive outcomes and without conflicts of interest.

Speaker 6 I have a feeling, Victor, this is the way science was once upon a time. Yeah,

Speaker 7 I think what they did was they just looked at all the college presidents of the most elite campuses, and whatever they did,

Speaker 7 they wrote something to outlaw it. I mean, think about it.
Stanford's

Speaker 7 president, not the interim president before Mr. Levin, but the prior one,

Speaker 7 had to resign for allegedly falsifying his findings that were not reproducible. And he did illustrations that did not reflect the actual scientific inquiry or finding.

Speaker 7 And he was ridiculed and had to resign. Claudine Gay,

Speaker 7 who had been, by the way, a Stanford political scientist, she plagiarized her thesis.

Speaker 7 Her findings were completely, and she, you know, I think Carol Swain said that she borrowed from her liberally without attestation. So

Speaker 7 they have a point that it's ubiquitous, and part of the reason that they have such confidence, especially in the sciences and health, is that Jay Bhattacharya is an expert.

Speaker 7 That's what he's trained as. He has an MD and a PhD, but he was not a practicing physician.

Speaker 7 But he got the MD to understand practical medicine because his expertise is in health economics and research. And he understands to a T the type of grants that have been given.

Speaker 7 So, what he's basically saying, and this I think comes from him and RFK, is: we spend $50 billion on these grants, and we're going to cut a lot of them because they're taking away money from legitimate grants, because they're DEI.

Speaker 7 And what do I mean by that?

Speaker 7 What percentage of this community didn't get the third booster in a timely fashion as somebody did in Beverly Hills? Something like that.

Speaker 7 Or the air in Salinas is less breathable than it is in Presidio Heights. In other words, they don't look at all the other factors, wind, climate, they just look at economics.

Speaker 7 And then they want, they're always trying to find somebody who is a victim of a market capitalist successful paradigm, and then they want to have restitution or something.

Speaker 7 And that's what their research is. It's not about curing cancer, it's not about any of that.

Speaker 7 It's using science and health issues to critique the system as an exploitative system in the typical left-wing manner, and they're going to cut it out.

Speaker 7 And then what the left does, when these cuts are made, they know that the public supports them.

Speaker 7 So when you cut... As a general, when you cut research grants to universities or you say they can only charge 15%

Speaker 7 rather than 50%, that's going to cost Stanford $180 million a year.

Speaker 7 Then what happens, somebody in the English department, you know what I mean, who's who's writing about the sexual ambiguity of Shakespeare or something, says, this is terrible, what it's doing to research.

Speaker 7 We're cutting grants and we're not going to be able to cure glioblastomas and, you know, we're going to get mast cell leukemia. We're not going to get any of this.

Speaker 6 This is all going, this is terrible.

Speaker 7 And that's what they do. They all hide behind, we're not going to have a super fast computer because, as if that justifies what they're doing.
But in fact, they're not cutting that stuff.

Speaker 7 They're going through sifting through it, and they said,

Speaker 7 we don't have the money. We don't have the time to subsidize this DEI research that's socialist-inspired, equity-inspired, diversity-inspired.
And I just, I think it's great what they're doing.

Speaker 7 And they have people that really know the university, and that's what scares the left even more. These are insiders who have put up with it.

Speaker 7 And I would suggest, in the case of Stanford, if you don't want

Speaker 7 somebody

Speaker 7 to cut your surcharge or overcharge from 50% to 15%, or you don't want someone to say that studying how many trans people got the shot two weeks later than everybody else, then you shouldn't have censored Jay Bacharya and tried to destroy him.

Speaker 7 Because there is something in the world universe called karma, nemesis, what comes around, goes around, payback is a B-I-T-C-H,

Speaker 7 divine retribution, God, whatever term you out there adhere to, it exists.

Speaker 7 I tend to think it's a religious concept, Christianity, but there is ultimate equilibrium. And what we're seeing now is all the people who were on the bottom rung are on the top rung.

Speaker 7 And Donald Trump has an uncanny instinct. And I almost think sometimes, Jack, when he was picking his cabinet, he said, hmm, I need somebody as HHS.

Speaker 7 Who do they hate the most and have tried to destroy? Bobby Kennedy. I need somebody at the NAH.
Who have they censored and tried to destroy his career on

Speaker 7 Jay Bacharia? I need somebody at

Speaker 7 FBI. Who have they monitored and Cash Patel? I need somebody, Director of National Television.
Anybody they put on a terrorist watch list? These McCarthy. Oh, Tulsi Gabbard.

Speaker 7 I need somebody at the Pentagon. Does anybody write a book about it and what's happened to the military? And they went out and distracted.
Oh, Pete Hexa. That's what he did.
He did that. Absolutely.

Speaker 6 Victor, you mentioned Tulsi Gabbard and that. Did I read this or hear this, that

Speaker 6 she was criticizing the Biden administration? Maybe she was in Europe.

Speaker 7 And then... That night they put her on the terrorist watch list.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 Everybody says, Victor, are you suggesting that the left is more vindictive, more prone to destroy civil liberties, more

Speaker 7 conniving, more dangerous,

Speaker 7 because they're somehow deranged? No, I'm saying that all that is true for one reason:

Speaker 7 because human nature being what it is, if there is no deterrence, humans are capable of terrible things. And what deters a politician from doing bad things is a free, independent

Speaker 7 media, and a free independent university and a free independent foundation and a free independent administrative state. And they all are left-wing.

Speaker 7 And the people in the government know that, and they know they can get away with stuff because they'll always get a cover-up or they'll get support.

Speaker 7 So if it's Joe Biden and you say, I'm fit as a fiddle, and you're cancer-free, and no, the left, and that.

Speaker 7 But if you're on the other side, it forces you to be very, very careful because you know that if you slip up one moment or you exaggerate, you do anything, they're going to go after you.

Speaker 7 And that makes the Republicans at this time, in this place, I don't know how long it will last, but it's been there for a long, long time, more likely not to do stuff like that.

Speaker 7 Or if they do it, like Nixon, and a lot of that was exaggerated in Watergate, but they're going to go after.

Speaker 7 They're going to go after Nixon in a way they never went after JFK for doing some of the same stuff or LBJ.

Speaker 7 But that keeps Republicans and conservatives honest because they have a press and a culture and a university system that hates their guts.

Speaker 7 And the left, it makes them dishonest because they're part and parcel of covering up for the greater cause of mandated equality. It's just simple as that.

Speaker 6 Well, greater cause of me having power, I think. That's the essence of it.

Speaker 6 Well, Victor, that's about all the time we have today, except the usual fare at the end of the show of expressing our gratitude for people for viewing and listening and we thank you for doing that no matter whether you're on YouTube or Rumble watching or Apple, Spotify, etc.

Speaker 6 Thanks. Thanks for joining us.
Many new people doing that. I want to remind you again, Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.
You're obviously here because you're a Victor Davis Hansen fan.

Speaker 6 You should become a fan of his website. We have some friends also out there on Facebook, the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club.
It's not official, but they're good people.

Speaker 6 Allison and Paul and Joe, and they run that

Speaker 6 thing. Check that out.
Victor's got a page on Facebook also, VDH's Morning Cup on Twitter. Excuse me, X.

Speaker 6 His handle is at

Speaker 6 VD Hansen. So

Speaker 6 do follow all those. Here's some comments I picked up from looking at.

Speaker 6 I think these are all from YouTube. There's just two.
I'll read just two. This one is from Niner

Speaker 6 9RPWR

Speaker 6 9802. Victor, you're an absolute work of art.
My bride of 40 years and I never miss a show. Isn't that nice, Victor? You're a work of art.

Speaker 7 No one's ever said that about me. They've said I'm a skeletor and Freddy Krueger, but not a work of art.
No, you're a, you're a, um, you're a, you're beautiful.

Speaker 6 Uh, then Cliff Holzer, 6895, writes, thanks for loving our country, Victor. I'm of the same age, 71, worked as an architect, and I know how hard the last 12 years have been for our country.

Speaker 6 I have five grandchildren, and for me, you are a guiding moral light that shows a fair, thorough reading of history can be and must be the anchor for our future generations of Americans.

Speaker 6 Thanks again for your great work. Victor, I want to thank the people who write me

Speaker 6 because they're enjoying civil thoughts. That's the free weekly email newsletter I write write for the Center for Civil Society, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

Speaker 6 And Civil Thoughts comes every Friday in your inbox.

Speaker 6 It's got 14 recommended readings, interesting and inspiring, or just cool articles I've come across the previous week that I think you might enjoy. To get it, go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

Speaker 6 Again, it's free, and we are not selling your name. Victor, you've been terrific.
Thanks for all the wisdom you've shared.

Speaker 7 And I

Speaker 6 look forward to talking to you again soon. And we'll be back with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Speaker 7 Bye-bye. Thank you for listening and watching again.
Much appreciated.