Universities, Election Interference, and Colonialism

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Hello, ladies.

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This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

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Victor, today there's a breaking, not breaking, well, there's a story that came out yesterday, updated today,

about elite universities

corralling their forces to fight the Trump administration.

We have...

Your thoughts, we want to get your thoughts on the fall of Saigon.

It's the 50th anniversary of the fall this week.

Klaus Schwab,

the man who wants to be the leader of the world, is found to be a mooch.

What else do we have?

Some thoughts on colonialism, Russian interference, excuse me, Israeli interference by Democrats two years ago.

So we'll get your thoughts on these topics, Victor, when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

My friend, let's get right to it.

Here's the Wall Street Journal story.

The in uh titled Elite Universities Form Private Collective to Resist Trump administration.

The informal group currently includes about 10 schools, including Ivies, and leading private research universities, mostly in blue states.

Strategy discussions gain momentum after the administration's recent list of demands for sweeping cultural change at Harvard, viewed by many universities as an assault on independence.

This story is well worth reading, Victor.

It reads kind of like the cool kids are assembling, the highest levels, trustees, presidents, et cetera, et cetera.

It's not like they haven't colluded before, at least when it comes to admissions.

And it seems like, Victor, these places sitting on piles of money still want the dollars in your wallet and my wallet.

They do.

And as I said, I used that metaphor earlier of a mossy rock you turn over.

But I don't think they really,

I mean, they can negotiate.

There's been some news accounts that their

presidents are negotiating privately off the record with the Department of Education.

They know what they're doing, and they're culpable.

And they thought that no one would, because they're Harvard and Yale and Stanford, nobody would ever, given their alumni are strategically placed all over the corporate and government world.

But they know what they're doing, and what are they doing?

They took $500 million

this year, 2024, from China and gutter alone.

No.

There was just a news story that broke this morning, Jack, that Harvard University, with its

health policy partner in China, was training

so-called health workers in China, and they were involved in the persecutions of the Uyghurs.

So Harvard University is directly involved in that genocidal campaign.

They've taken $60 billion since they started taking money just from communist China and Gutter and other Gulf cheekdoms.

And

it's not as if there's not consequences.

We know the result of them, what they're trying to do.

They're trying to affect U.S.

policy and train the next generation of elites.

That's why they focus on elite colleges.

They think that's where the bang for the book.

They know that they were charging 60% and above on surcharges on federal grants.

They know that $1.7 trillion in student loans

allowed them to

raise the rate of tuition, room, and board twice as high as the rate of inflation the last few years.

They know they have safe spaces.

I don't think it's going to work, Harvard, to call, as the Mayo Clinic just did and others, that the Department of Equity

Inclusion and Diversity is going to be

the,

what is it called?

The belonging group or the belonging,

the division of belonging, and they're doing that with segregated dorms or

theme houses.

That's old.

The latest one I saw, Jack, for racially segregated was

auxiliary celebrations or additional celebrations.

But they know what they're doing.

They're breaking the 14th Amendment.

They're breaking the civil rights statutes.

Everything about them is culpable.

And I don't think they want the public ⁇ if they get into this, they're going to be sorely disappointed because just the going ⁇ just the reduction from 50 to 60 percent down to 15 percent on government contracts with a big bill in the Senate and House versions in each about taxing the endowments.

And then a cutoff of a lot of this Chinese and Middle East money.

Everybody, you know, we say that Harvard has a $50 billion endowment, Stanford 30, Yale, I think 40.

But

that is,

if you go look at those endowments, they're targeted.

People are not stupid enough, I mean, some are, to write a blank check to Harvard because they know what it's going to go for.

The general fund will be used for the most unpopular and harebrained scheme.

So they're targeted.

$7 or $8 million

per endowed professor

programs,

everything from good ones, Western

to transgendered stuff.

But what I'm pointing out is that when you start looking at the scale of these cuts,

$2 billion up to $9 billion, and you look at their operating budget and you look at the amount of capital whose interest upon it can be used in the general fund to pay the daily electricity,

they're going to have to borrow money and they're going to have to get into the private bond market or something against their endowment.

And I don't think people realize that.

But

they were counting what I'm trying to say.

It's not liquid.

No, it's not liquid and it's even worse.

It's targeted.

They can't touch it for what they want to use it on.

And so

what I'm getting at is

you could have a bunch of endowed professors that are wildly paid and you could have some great programs at Harvard and bad programs that are wildly overfunded and they couldn't pay the heating bill because it's not in the general fund and that's why they're going to go out in the open market and buy because they were using the federal government especially the 40 or 50 60 percent surcharges on these massive grants to pay their bills and to swell their administrative state with the private private giving to harvard was down 150 million dollars and i'm sure stanford and yale principal if they want to disclose it it's similar.

And a lot of people,

I did see that Harvard added a segregated dorm, I mean, a segregated graduation ceremony.

Now you can have a Jewish auxiliary ceremony.

Why is that all of a sudden?

I think they have 10 ceremonies, actually.

Yes, they do.

But they just added a Jewish one

that could break off from so-called white people.

At Stanford, if white people are 20% of the incoming classes, are they going to have, and they're a minority in the state as well, are they going to have separate white graduations?

I wouldn't want to go to them.

Would you want to go to a graduation that had Gavin Newsom with you and you were supposed to feel solidarity with him because he happened to be the same you as you were?

I wouldn't.

Yeah.

I don't have a particular affinity with, I don't know, AOC or Elizabeth Warren just because they look white.

AOC may be Hispanic, but she's whiter than most white people I know.

Yeah.

Victor, you talk about not tussling.

You said it here and heard it here and have said it directly

on some previous podcasts that universities should not get into a fight with the government on this.

But also, I think how this plays out in the public,

we as a country seem to have borne too much of a brunt of genuineflecting to entitlement.

And this is entitlement.

This is an assumption.

and I think we're done with entitlement, or we're getting done with entitlement,

and that mindset in the society is going poorly.

The thing is, they always get the propaganda because they're tied at the hip with the left-wing media, the left-wing corporate world, the left-wing foundations, but they don't want that message to get out about what they're really doing with the racial segregation and Chinese communist money and

illiberal Middle East money and anti-Semitism and safe spaces, segregated, all that.

They don't want that to get out.

No First Amendment rights, shouting down speech.

It's just a mess.

And

they think what they're trying to do is say,

if you cut the federal subsidy, people are going to die of cancer.

Or this super, super secret weapon we're building.

That's all lies.

There's money there for scientific research.

Every time the state of California cut the CSU system, you know what they would do?

They would say

they would keep the Laraza studies, or they'd keep black studies, or they would keep therapeutic studies, and they'd say, we're going to cut the physics department.

We're going to cut German.

We're going to cut French.

And it was always because nobody, all of the things that they wanted to fund,

nobody would care if they cut them.

But they did care about other things.

So that's what they do.

Why don't they just say, we're going to have to cut all of the DEI out?

You know, there's an article, I mean there's a study, Jack, as I remember, from the Goldwater Institute, and it said the annual cost of DEI on campus, not in the corporate world, not elsewhere, just on campus was at least $2 billion

and 400 million hours of labor.

Gosh.

I was curious about that.

I remember it was about a month ago.

I looked at it.

And then

the countervailing arguments, well, yes, but there's so much savings and profit because of inclusivity.

That's what the left does.

You know, DEI, we have all these bureaucrats monitoring and snooping about to look at people's complexions, but that's actually helping us.

Speaking of DEI, Jack, just to be off topic, did you see that internal report that the New York Times got its hands on about the tragedy at Reagan Airport and the helicopter pilot?

I did.

Well, I listened to Megan Kelly was talking about it this morning.

Yeah, go ahead.

Well, I mean,

I'm not, I don't have the, Alex Berenson was tweeting about it, but it does seem that the female pilot was repeatedly ordered not to stay in the space that she was headed to, not to go there, not to stay there.

And for some reason, she didn't follow those orders.

And then there were other suggestions that if there were two nodes of culpability.

One is the military should never be flying blind with night vision at night in the busiest corridor and the most important corridor in the United States.

That's just insane.

Anywhere near Reagan Airport.

And the people in the chain of command who ordered or adopted that policy should be held responsible.

That being said,

if there is a suspicion that this was

70 people were killed because of one pilot's error, you'll see what's going to happen.

People are going to go back, and maybe you, because I didn't listen to Megan today, they're going to investigate the number of hours she had under training, what was her training record, and the question will be: was she put into that very risky position at that risky corridor because of DI or because of her spectacular record as a pilot and lengthy hours of aviation service?

I don't have that answer.

Yeah.

Well, 70 dead people, though.

And from what I heard,

she was in control.

She had been directed two times or maybe three times to change course,

and including the flight level, you know,

the height

of the flight.

And that does not sound like she followed any of the orders given then and there.

So,

hey, Victor, we're going to I've mentioned entitlement before.

We'll speak about it, get your thoughts on another entitled person, Klaus Schwab.

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Victor, before we take a break.

Headline, financial and ethical misconduct allegations against Davos founder Klaus Schwab.

I would have never imagined

he founded it.

It was his life's work.

Wasn't there also a suggestion there might have been possibly sort of kind of maybe a little bit of sexual harassment or sexual discrimination?

I think so.

I think he did.

He was lecturing us all about our wasteful habits, our overindulgence, American consumerism, our carbon footprint.

And he was going to get the world's best and brightest, the elite, to come to Davos each year, and then they could plan out how we use our energy, our demographics,

our tax laws, everything among European, Asian, and American elites.

That was the idea.

Yeah, eating crazy.

Thank you, Klaus.

All these people, isn't it funny how,

you know, I did a video for the Daily Signal on what comes around goes around, and I didn't want to get religious, although I am a Christian.

But I said all belief systems have this, what comes around goes around, karma, payback's a bitch, that kind of vernacular nemesis in Greek.

And

I was talking about Jack Smith and his $140,000 dollar confession that he got free legal services, or Letitia James

basically committing much more egregious offenses, but of the same nature that she accused Trump of.

Fanny Willis is just a train wreck, you know.

And Stacey Abrams, same thing.

But Klaus Schwab, I mean, my gosh, he was the self-appointed moral censor of the universe.

And

then

did he stay on?

I think he's 88.

Was he staying on because he knew that it was like musical chairs?

As soon as he got up, he would have no place and people would start to like Biden.

What is it with these people, everybody?

Why do we only hear about Biden's transgressions?

And now we're hearing a little bit more about the barisma today.

There is a story about it.

But why do we hear only that he was non composmentes and maybe demented once he got out of his chair?

And the same thing with Klaus Schwab.

Surely this was known.

So he steps down and all of a sudden it comes out.

It shows you the obsequious nature of all the people in the media and around them.

It's hard.

I can't remember the guy's name in CNN

who's writing the book about Biden at the media.

Oh, my gosh, what can I remember?

Don't get old, Jack.

He knew about this.

Well, actually, on top of somebody put together a video of his

people.

How dare you?

He has a stutter.

Of course he's

smart, et cetera.

Cheap fakes.

Remember that?

Cheap fake.

Well, I haven't heard Corinne Jean-Pierre lately to come back out and defend Joe Biden.

How dare you suggest that I was completely right that he had no cognitive problem.

I was surprised.

I thought that given the left-wing history that she would end up as chief of communications of Apple, Google's point woman.

It hasn't happened yet.

Yeah.

Well, she'll be, there's a pedestal waiting for her at some foundation.

Yeah, they always take care of their own.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, when we come back, we're going to look at U.S.

interference, speaking of the Biden administration in

Israel.

Let's also get your thoughts early on in this episode about the fall of Saigon, and we'll get to these matters and others when we come back from these important messages.

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Victor, I have a little headline here.

I wrote this.

Russian interference, bad.

U.S.

interference, good.

Former Biden aide.

We tried to oust Netanyahu

after October 7th through elections or, quote, God knows what, end quote.

One little paragraph.

Elon Goldenberg, a former aide to President Joe Biden, told Israel's Channel 13 that the Biden administration tried to oust

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the October 7, 2023 terror attack.

Channel 13 interviewed Goldenberg, noting that while Biden administration officials had been reluctant to speak in the early days of the Trump administration for fear of retribution, they are now telling their story.

Russian interference, Russian interference, right?

But U.S.

interference, okay.

Victor, your thoughts.

Well, there was Russian interference.

Remember, it was some of the sources for the steel dossier were Russian, and they were probably

dependent on Hillary Clinton's lack of ethics and morality, and they knew that her agents would pick that up, and they used it.

But

it's kind of like the El Salvador story.

We go down, we trapes down, we American Democrats, and we, I'm not a Democrat,

but we Americans traipse down to El Salvador, and then we say, hey, El Salvador, this is what you're you're going to get down to your knees and listen to me.

Now,

Mr.

Garcia, he happened to be illegally in the United States, so therefore we have authority over him.

So here's what you're going to do.

You're not going to, we don't care about your laws about M13.

We do not care about anything about M13.

We just know that he's your citizen, and your citizen is, you're going to be forced to give your citizen against your will and send him back to us.

And now the same thing with Israel.

We're going to go over there.

And

some of the articles that came out, Jack, are a little eerie because

they say things like they pondered what to do or they were considering other measures.

And I don't know what that meant, but they really and now we know why they put stays on 2,000-pound bombs.

They really thought they could get rid of Netanyahu

and have their Obama agenda for the Middle East, which was to empower Iran and play it off against Israel and the Gulf states.

So it was

again,

everybody remember projection.

Anytime a leftist says that there's interference, that's because they interfere.

That's what they do.

Anytime they call you an imperialist, it's because they're imperialist.

It wasn't some conservative that went over to

Kabul and said, oh, we're going to have a gender studies.

Here's $80 million in this traditional Islamic society.

Oh, we're going to have a pride flag on our website and maybe

fly it from the embassy.

Oh, we're going to put George Floyd posters in Kabul.

And

that's what the left does.

It really does.

They're cultural imperialist and they're political imperialist.

Everybody,

you all know what I mean.

Once you have any ideology that says the ends are justify any mechanism because they're superior to everybody else in an ethical or humanitarian sense, then any method is okay.

That's what leftists have always done through history.

We're for the people, we're for collective people, we're not for the rich, the elite, the

aristocrat.

We're always for the people.

Therefore, if we have to kill them, or we can do anything we want, we can do anything we want.

It's lies.

That's what they do.

They do have to also have in that equation their

bad guys.

So it could be the kulaks in Russia, or it could be the

deplorables here in America, right?

You know,

the folks who are the true enemies of the elite.

Victor,

speaking of foreign affairs, then, let's reflect back, get your reflections, if you don't mind, about this being around the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.

I know you mentioned, as we ended the last podcast, you remember watching what happened, but your thoughts about how that war played out?

And any reflections you want to share about

the fall, but also about the war itself?

Well, I was an undergraduate my senior year, and I was on a very left-wing campus, University of California, Santa Cruz, in its incipient early years when it was really nutty.

And all my colleagues had told me that

the North Vietnamese were Lincoln-esque.

They were Democratic Ho Chi men.

They loved him.

There were posters all over my dorm that he was like a Lincoln figure.

And if they could just get rid of these awful right-wing puppets, then you were going to have this socialist European democracy.

So when the South Vietnamese resistance collapsed, and remember the Congress in the post-Watergate era, I think they cut off aid

support for assistance to the South Vietnamese 17 times.

So they didn't have any air support.

They were fighting pretty well as long as they had air support.

And of course, the North Vietnamese had signed the Paris Peace Accords.

It was all set.

There was going to be a South Korea-like, North Korea-like distinction.

And it was going to be a viable...

But then the U.S.

Congress thought, you know what?

I guess we like Ho Chi Minh.

He was dead, but we like his system a lot better.

So they naively cut off all the aid to the South Vietnamese, and they panicked.

They didn't have any support.

They had fought pretty well.

We didn't have ground troops at the time and the whole thing collapsed and they ended up on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, but soon to be Ho Chi Minh City.

No more Saigon.

And then those pictures of

those carriers out in the Pacific and they remember they had to get room to get the the planes to bring people and they were throwing these new planes over the side.

It's very it was just Gerald Ford was the inheritor of it.

Kissinger was disgraced.

Ford was disgraced.

And the Congress did it, the Democratic-controlled post-Watergate Congress.

And then what happened?

They came right down Highway 1, the conventional forces, so much the Viet Cong had been obliterated.

It wasn't

the CIA and the

Creighton Abrams military had gotten rid of them, gotten rid of the Viet Cong.

It was just a traditional, they had armor, tanks, all Chinese and Russian-made equipment.

They came in and they took all of the 200,000, 300,000 of any Arvind troops, the Army of Republic of Vietnam.

They took them, they put them in camps, they tortured them, they starved them, they killed them, and then there were 500,000 people who just got in boats and just got out anywhere they could and they were flying on.

Any way they could get to the United States.

And there were three or four locations.

Fresno took seven or eighty thousand.

I remember it very clearly because my father was a community college administrator in the state center college, and he had a program called the Vocational Training Center, where they were trying to suggest that this area that was Appalachian-like in its per capita income was going to train people to be mechanics, air conditioner, repairmen.

And so, as soon as this happened, when they flew in, 70,000 people, all in an area, I know you visit Fresno, Jack, but that area near our friend who has a big office there, that was where they

still is a

Southeast Asia community.

And they didn't give them any preparation.

They didn't, there was no, and they relied on private charities.

And I just remember my father came up with the idea that he was going to reach out and have Southeast Asian Cambodians, Thai, Vietnamese, but mostly Vietnamese try to become mechanics

and they started training them.

But Fresno was a designated refugee locus,

as was California, was the preferred, when people were surveyed, where do you want to be?

It was all California, the climate.

And then also, you know, along the Louisiana coast and places.

But

it was just a complete...

refutation of everything that Hollywood told us, everything the left told us that this was going to be a golden age of Vietnam.

Now people say, well, look at now.

Fifty years later, Vietnam is a friend of ours.

That's only because of two reasons.

Don't believe that it's not a cutthroat, autocratic, dictatorial communist.

It is, but the only reason that it might be somewhat less horrendous than it was is that we have a mutual enemy in China and they're terrified of China.

And then, number two,

we allow them to be a source, an alternate source, to Chinese assembly and manufacture.

So, a lot of American companies and even European and Japanese and Korean are using Vietnam as a place to export to the United States.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I'm curious, Victor, the military

strategica and related things you do at Hoover, has there ever been any focus, even

for a day conference

on

the war war itself in Vietnam.

Yeah, there has been.

H.R.

McMaster is a fellow, and remember he wrote a book on Vietnam,

very critical of the military.

I think he's had speakers and fora on it.

We've had our mutual friend Mark Moyer out as part of the military history, and he wrote, he's working on volume three of a revisionist

history of the Vietnam War that suggests the war was won basically by 1973 and it it was viable, and all we had to do was extend the same support to South Vietnam that we did to South Korea.

And he made the argument, I think he would make the argument, that the political evolution of Vietnam was transgressing at a rate maybe more rapidly than South Korea.

So the problem wasn't that it wasn't an instant democracy.

Korea really didn't become a democracy from 1953 into the late 70s and early 80s.

And Vietnam was having, but the problem was us.

We weren't that generation, our grandparents, who were willing to say, you know what,

Korea may be bad, but compared to the

20 million that Stalin killed or the 70 million that

Mao killed, it's a paradise, so we're going to try to nudge them along, but we're not going to try to sell the rug from, we're just not going to cut off South Korea because it doesn't look like Carmel.

Our generation did.

And of course, the aftermath was the Cambodian Holocaust, and then

what comes around goes around.

The China invaded, remember, they invaded Vietnam.

They didn't do very well, by the way.

The Vietnamese were crack soldiers after two decades of fighting the Americans and the French, and they really

musked up the hair, so to speak, of the Chinese who got out.

Yeah.

But

it was a mess.

The whole thing was everything about it was a mess.

And as someone who was a

I got a

1972, I got my

lottery number, my twin brother, and I think we were 258.

But there was no troop.

By the time I turned 18, there was no troops there.

They had all been gone in 1971.

So from 1971 to 75, they survived as a viable entity.

They just needed American guidance, support, intelligence, munitions.

And we cut them off.

And Jerry Ford didn't, I don't know what the, I think Kissinger wanted to keep funding them, and Ford said no.

We saw it played out again nearly 50 years later in Afghanistan.

Yeah, Afghanistan, that was the locus classicus.

That was the repeat.

The difference

There was a little bit of difference, and that was

when we got out of Vietnam, we didn't leave $50 billion in munitions.

And the embassy was nice, but it wasn't a brand new $1 billion embassy.

And some of

we gave up bases, but nothing like Bagmam Air Force Base with that geostrategic locale.

And

now who's in Afghanistan now?

The Chinese are in, and why are they in there?

They have a multi-billion dollar plant or concession to get rare earths.

Afghanistan's Afghanistan's got one of the richest deposits of rare earth minerals.

Well, we're going to talk about China a little bit in a minute, some of its monkey business.

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Victor, I said China.

You said China.

We said China.

China is

helping fund

the Houthis who are using that money to attack American ships.

I wonder how,

yeah, this is.

Senator Cotton, I just got a book in the mail, has a new book out, Seven Things You Can't Say About China.

That they're our existential enemy and they think they can go to war with.

It's a short, but it's a very good book.

We may have him on the podcast.

Oh, he's terrific.

Yeah.

He is.

That'd be great.

Yeah, so

China's policy is sort of like Putin's.

Anything the United States does, they're going to oppose.

And

the Houthis, but you know,

I said that before.

Under Biden, we lost the navigability of most of the major.

I mean, the Black Sea was a no-go, the Red Sea was a no-go, even the Straits of Hormuz, we were being harassed in Haran's heyday, especially after the fall of Afghanistan.

And the east coast of the Mediterranean was kind of dangerous with Hezbollah and Syria.

And

we didn't know how dangerous maybe the Panama Canal could have been with the Chinese presidents growing at an astronomical rate and that.

And isn't it funny?

You know, Trump's under all of this pressure and everybody thinks everything has gone to hell, but they don't.

It's like we wake up.

I think everybody listening is kind of freaked out like I am.

It's like,

Well, I woke up and the Houthis are not controlling the Red Sea.

How did that happen?

He wouldn't have dropped a bunker buster on them, did he?

Oh, he did.

Oh,

he's really taken out their command and control, and they know it.

Oh, he's given Israel a blank check to do whatever they want.

Oh, they've stopped.

The Red Sea is navigable in the Suez Canal.

Oh, the border.

How'd that happen?

There was no comprehensive immigration reform.

It shouldn't have happened.

Oh, they just deported, what, 700, 800 people from Florida.

Ooh, they're finding all these criminals.

That doesn't make it.

It's like,

you know, I beat this horse now.

I don't mind, but I looked, Jack, today at the Wall Street Journal.

Every single article was negative.

Negative, negative, negative, negative.

Negative, never.

You would have never thought that the Wall Street

Dow Jones is making a rally the last few days.

You would have never thought the economic news on inflation, on job growth, on corporate

profits, on affordability, affordability.

That's all been good.

It's just negative, negative, negative.

What is the rational?

Why, why, why?

I want to know why.

Why are they doing that?

Because he doesn't get to answer those questions.

Because he's an apostate, a libertarian.

Well,

think about

not a war he created.

We have a war in Ukraine because of what Joe Biden did in Afghanistan.

The big fat dots connect.

And Donald Trump is trying to bring this to an end.

And he just had some, you know, what seems like a good meeting with Zelensky to try to make this happen.

And not getting the requisite slap on the back from the media, the same media

that praised, Barack Obama wasn't even president.

He got the Nobel Peace Prize.

He even said he didn't deserve it.

He's not going to get ⁇ if there is a peace, and I think that 60, 40 there will be ⁇

he's not going to get anything.

And they're going to get angry at him.

They would rather have another million and a half casualties than see him as the person who was the catalyst for a last time.

Absolutely.

They would.

You see that they really trashed him for wearing a blue suit.

And I read about 10 articles.

They said, well, the Vatican has a Stern Code during Vatican funerals.

It's a black tie and black coat, as you see in the picture.

And then they cut the picture.

They had another story.

I'd say 30 to 40 percent of the crowd had suits on that were other than black, but they didn't let them be viewed.

And then they had that picture that he was dishonoring the Vatican sobriety or formality when he and Wodzelinski had those two chairs.

Right.

And then Macron tried to come in and get his picture with him.

That's armor, too, I think.

Pauline.

And he said, butt out.

It's not your place.

Yeah.

Well, it was actually, you know, a day for the breaking of traditions.

I mean, where the Pope was buried himself, how his coffin, you know, was just plain pined.

It's fine, you know.

Yeah, I kind of like that idea.

Yeah, but

so what?

He was there.

He came.

If he hadn't come, then it would have been a story into itself, too.

Hey, Victor, before we go to a break, I want to get your thoughts on one other thing, and then we'll have another topic or two.

It is,

if I could only, oh, yeah, it's about sanctuary cities.

I mean, there isn't a thing that Donald Trump is doing that a federal judge is not trying to stop.

I think you mentioned it the other day, but

gosh, what show was I listening to?

Under

Biden, I think there were, let's say, 16, a dozen to two dozen actions over his four years,

efforts to get federal judges to stop something Biden was doing.

Donald Trump has already had 68.

I know it.

He's had more than the entire Biden tenure.

Yeah.

It's just,

and I don't know why John Roberts and the Supreme Court doesn't step in.

Can't the Republican Senate and House don't they have enough cohesion to get a bill passed?

They have a majority.

Are they afraid that the left would, I guess, filibuster?

But

it has to stop because

right now the country is being run by about 350 liberal district judges.

And they think they get...

So what's their motivation?

I never heard of any of this Wisconsin.

I never knew Roseberg.

I never knew Judge Firm.

They are now

nationally known.

They're like that Judge Aragon.

Remember Ergoron that hammed it up in the,

that was a Letita James trial.

He just couldn't stop looking at the cameras.

They're Judge Ito, remember in the OJ trial?

They're just celebrity creatures.

They're fawning.

They just have, they're like a moth to a light bulb.

And the light bulb is Donald Trump.

And they just have to fly to him and circle around him and be seen.

And it's really disgusting.

It really is that what they've done to the judiciary.

And it's really hard.

I wrote an article about democratic legality.

They all talk about what dictatorial, dictatorial, he doesn't listen to the Supreme.

No, no, you set the president.

Chuck Schumer, you were the one that yelled and threatened the justices by name.

You, Merrick Garland, you were the one that let people swarm in the homes, commit felonies, and you didn't even investigate and didn't even prosecute.

You were the one that lowered the bar so assassins could show up ready to kill Kavanaugh or Gorsuch.

You were the one,

Elizabeth Warren, that talked about packing the court.

You were the one, Joe Biden, who said that you were going to go around the Supreme Court, ignore it, to cancel student loans.

So it's just...

Again, the idea is that their means are justified because their ends are so more moral than the rest of us.

Everybody gets, I don't know, they get pretty tired of it.

Sanctuary cities is a neo-Confederate idea.

It's no different than South Carolina in 1832 saying, you know what?

Take your tariffs and smariffs and get rid of, we're not going to follow them.

And Andrew Jackson said,

you know, have you read the Constitution?

And we're going to have tariffs.

They may be protecting

Yankees, but we're we're going to have tariffs.

That's what the Congress voted.

And I will take troops and I will force you at your ports.

I'll shut the...

And he did.

He was going to invade.

And

this idea that these individual 600 jurisdictions can say,

well, federal law doesn't apply here.

And then, but you know, they really don't

believe that, Jack, because as I said before, if you were in Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Mississippi, and you said, you know what, our little town has a new law that says you can buy a handgun the day you can walk out with it.

No federal gun registration.

Or, you know what, when you're billing your apartment building and there is a two-spotted-nose possum and he's on an endangered species list, just smash the SOB because there is no Endangered Species Act.

We don't follow the federal...

What would happen to the left when that happened?

They'd go berserk.

They'd go berserk.

And that's what Harvard should know.

I mean, the federal government goes in and tells Bob Jones, rightly so, you want federal money and you want to make it against your policy that people of different races can date each other or marry each other, then don't take federal money.

And the same thing applies to Harvard.

You want to have your graduations or your dorms predicated on, or your programs predicated on race?

Fine.

Just don't take federal money.

Right.

You can do whatever you want to do in your private life.

We're not going into your dining table and saying you can't have a guest over.

You have to have a, you know, you can't say, I don't want somebody of a different race having Christmas with me.

That's your business, Harvard.

But just don't get on the public teat.

I don't understand that.

They have all this money.

They're entitled to it.

They're entitled.

They're entitled.

They are entitled.

And then

they get all these Harvard graduates and professors that say that we're going to

lose the war against cancer if Harvard can't participate or Boston General Hospital is going to starve to death.

It's just disgusting when they have all of these programs and

they're collaborating with the Chinese with millions of dollars of joint programs.

The Chinese are not stupid.

They take the money, they get the Harvard veneer, and then they use it for what communists do, to persecute and kill their enemies.

Yeah.

Victor, I don't know if you made up that

type of possum, two

spotted possum.

I should have said miserable.

Maybe it's for real.

I know there's a salamander that stopped a lot of stuff.

Yeah, mox turtles stop things here in the northeast.

Hey, we're going to take a little break and then come back for a final segment.

And on that, we're going to get your thoughts on post-colonialism.

And if we have time, Victor, I want to raise Martina Navratilova, who is.

She's just, I never thought I would consider her a conservative hero, but she's a hero for sanity.

And we maybe get some thoughts about her.

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

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show again, recording on Monday, April 28th.

And this episode is up on Thursday, May

1st, recording a little late in the afternoon.

Victor, I had to go, I had lunch today with Michael Walsh, who you had on the show.

Yeah,

yeah, Michael's up in

the hills of Connecticut.

He's got his new book out, too.

It's a very good book on determinative battles,

great battles.

It's really good.

Yeah, it doesn't.

It's got a great blurb on the back by Victor.

Michael's a great musician, too, and he's planning to do a concert tour.

So just a lovely great guy.

I've known Michael a long time.

He's a good, good man.

Yeah, Victor,

let's get Martina, I don't want to say out of the way first.

She's kind of like J.K.

Rowling, isn't she?

She is, yeah.

She's a culture warrior.

And here's, you know, she's been very much involved in the similar fight as J.K.

Rowling on the trans athletes.

Here's a headline: Martina Navartilova blasts Nike a reported role in trans athlete research.

She's taking aim at the sportswear giant for trying to hide its apparent involvement in research programs concerning transgender athletes.

On Tuesday last week, Nike refused to say whether it was funding transgender research of any sort.

Still, a story over the previous weekend published by the New York Times seemed to provide evidence that Nike is financing at least one study of trans athletes being conducted by Joanna Harper, a man who identifies as a woman, etc.

She ends up, she tweets, I think, says, why is this sneaker brand doing medical experiments on our children?

That's a great question, Victor.

I don't know.

The left, I grew up with the left telling us that the American Medical Association was toxic, that doctors are toxic because they want to operate on optional procedures that have no proven medical benefit and are dangerous.

They have too many, this is what I grew up on, too many hysterectomies.

I was told that I had orthoscopic knee surgery.

It didn't have any proven effect.

Now that I have this sinus infection, I'm reading all these reports that

multiple antibiotic courses, really, even if it's bacterial, don't really work.

So my point is that the left has a long history of opposing procedures and drugs, and then they turn around

with this experimental radical surgery, mastectomies, or

altering the the sexual organs, really disfiguring and dangerous, and then the hormonal treatment that are very danger it's kind of like the abortion pill that they wanted to g give without

a prescription.

We're learning now that it can be very dangerous to take it without a close doctor supervision.

So, my point is, they're just completely hypocritical.

And then

on the transgender question, I was interested, I think it was the Manual of Mental Health and Therapy, the fifth edition.

They just did a study, Jack.

It's one in 14,000 people demonstrably have

gender dysphoria.

And yet, there was a poll that

people in generation,

this generation, we're not X, what are we?

Generation Z, yes.

Generation Z

had a poll, and 30%

think they're LGBTQTTT.

So, in other words, this is a when you have scientific data

showing that this dysphoria is about 005%,

0.005,

1 in 15,000.

And then you say that there's a mass group of people

that are suffering this, and it's because it's in the news as the latest civil rights left-wing cause celeb, you can see that it's a cultural construct.

It's all of these people want to transition, or at least they want to get in, and it's a very dangerous thing to do.

And that's not even getting into the males competing in female sports.

And when you ask very polite questions, as Martina Navatarola and J.K.

Rowling and others have said, if you're right and this is a genuine third sex,

then why don't we just have transgender athletes?

We have disabled Olympics.

Let's have a transgendered.

If you really believe, on the contrary, that it's not a separate sex, that people can transition fully and authentically to the opposite sex, then let's just do a study and see how many biological females that have transitioned to males are walking away with accolades and medals from male sports.

How many center nose guards are there in the NFL?

How many fullbacks?

How many great players in the NBA are transgendered males that were biological.

There's none.

So the whole thing is just.

It's absurd.

And it was just a cult.

It's like a pet rock or a Duncan yo-yo.

And I'm not saying that that generally, you know, I mentioned before in antiquity, whether it's

Catullus' tragic Addis poem or Petronius' transgender transvestite scenes in the Satyricon.

And I think there's a passage, as I remember, in Diodorus about a male who has multiple sex organs and is an object of inquiry by physicians in ancient Greece.

But the point is, it was rare, and it was a medical condition.

And all of a sudden, it's been a cult phenomenon, as the left does with everything.

I think the number you mentioned before, Victor, about 30%,

that's disturbing on another level.

Take it outside of the trans, you know, that 30% of Generation Z might think they're, okay, I might not be trans, but I'm something else on that 190

gender

scale.

I think it's non-binary.

That's the 30% of the people who plan like David David Hogg.

Remember he said he was never going to have children, promises, promises,

because he was going to have a particular type of expensive dog as his partner or his pet.

You know, it's

this ideology kind of,

I don't know if you ever watched this show, The Last of Us, have you seen it?

It's an existential about

fungal disease takes over and kills everybody and their zombie.

Anyway, Pedro Pascal is in it.

The only reason I'm mentioning it is he came out the other day and trashed J.K.

Rowling, the guy that was in Game of Thrones, you know.

He's a good actor.

I really like him.

He was really good, but they killed him off on the second season because he was a male.

And you can see the subtext in this series that everybody loved it.

And then you kill the male, rough, tough, masculine character who is, and every scene has little touches of, I don't know what you'd call it, gender dysphoria or gay.

And so now

the female young girl is becoming a teenager.

And now we're going to see that now you got the white male cisgendered guy out of the way, the hero, you kill him off.

Then she and another girl

have already had a lesbian relationship and a kiss.

And I guess in some versions they had a sex scene.

But you can see where this thing is going, that they're going to be the revengers, that you're going to see two little teenage girls take on all of these horrific cisgendered males who killed their hero, who was a cisgender.

But it's going to be, what I'm getting at is

they can't just take these stories and make it incidental.

It has to always be right in the center of everything: sexuality, sexual orientation.

And it's all the mind, it's all the creation of a small percentage of the population in places like Malibu or West Hollywood.

And And then they wonder why the Snow White latest thing bombed.

I think it might be the biggest loss in Disney history because of its DEI fixations.

Yeah,

I mean,

did Shane need a gay angle to it or a hermacite angle to it?

That's funny you said that because I was saying to Sammy, I don't know if I said it on the air, I said it would be exactly like Shane,

that just when they're meeting at that dance in the movie and they don't know what to do,

one of the Ben Johnson characters, the guy that turns good, you remember?

Yes.

He kills Alan Ladd, like 40 minutes in.

He's gone.

And then Gene Arthur and another woman take up.

They think, you know what, we didn't need Shane.

And they go after the evil cisgender

people in town, the three of them.

But

they're going to kiss a little bit, Jack, and they're going to be in a bed together.

And then they're going to turn the lantern on and say, How was that kiss we had?

Would you rate it one to ten?

That's what they did in this.

And she said, I give a six.

Well, I'm not completely gay.

That's what they would do to Shane.

Yeah.

Or high noon, Gary Cooper would, you know, he'd be he would be a white male Christian cis person that was just too headstrong, and

the four would come in, and Lee Van Cleef would shoot him in about and then all of a sudden Grace Kelly would say, oh, my God, Katie, Gerard, you and I have got to go get those guys.

But before we do, you know, you're kind of good looking.

And they would have a little on-scene kissing, and then they would be in a bed together, and then they would conspire to kill the bad guys and get the credit for avenging poor little stupid kids.

Well, she did.

She did kill.

Didn't she?

Did she should kill him?

She did.

She did.

She killed one of the four, but she did it.

She did it, put it this way, she did it in partnership with her husband.

Right, right.

But she didn't see him killed and then partner with Katie Girardo and then as an excuse, that should have been the plot line to get the bad guys, but it's actually a subtext for the real emphases of the director and the writer to show teenage girls coming of age, as all you girls can if you watch this and have homosexuality.

I see a great Victor Davis-Hansen essay here, like four or five great movies.

The search has like rewritten

for today.

The reason I'm saying is I like Pedro Pascal, if that's his name, I can't remember.

And he's a great actor, but why did he have to go after J.K.

Rowling?

I guess it was because

he was a part of this very lucrative franchise that made Last of Us.

And I'm sure they're going to have flashbacks, get him in some of the episodes he's filmed.

And then J.K.

Rowling, given what she said about transgender, he thought that if he attacked her, that would cement his public fee days as a champion of the type of homosexuality that his series has emphasized and made him...

I mean, he was known, but he's now a superstar because of this series.

And I predict that it's going to lose a lot of viewers.

At least it's going to drop off from where it was.

Yeah.

Because now it's just...

It's just, we're just going to indulge what some 30-wannaby Hollywood writer thinks about what he did the night before last or something.

I'm shocked, Victor.

You have time to watch any television game.

Well, I was typing a column in my defense as I watch it.

My wife says to me, You've never watched television without typing.

Oh, is that true?

Oh, wow.

Or I probably was trying to decide whether grapefruit extract, cucumber,

a salt spray, or Manuka honey salt spray was preferable for my sinus infection.

I will find that patron saint.

We'll get a cure.

So, Victor, last thing here, you wrote in your most recent syndicated column, how ironic

those who rail about colonialism now sound like 19th-century Yankee imperialists.

We just talked about the 19th century Confederates.

Would you give a little explanation on that, on lefties and colonialism?

Is any way you see?

Well, imperium, you know, is a Latin word for power, and you put on the

ism, which is actually the Latin version of a Greek adjectival.

So imperialism means the use of your power, and then this context beyond your national boundaries.

And it starts with Roman imperialism, and then

we get into European imperialism and cult.

But now in the modern world, it's mostly talking about European imperialism in the 18th, but especially the 19th century, in places where people were of color.

Nobody says that the British were imperialist in the United States because

they were colonial,

because the people that they were trying to dictate looked like they did.

So

they'll tell you that it's an imperial power pushing its weight around, but when the imperial power pushes its weights around other people who look like them, then nobody seems to care.

And that's,

but what it means is.

It may have been imperialists in Ireland, the British, but we'll talk about that another.

That was a religious difference, though.

If the Irish had been Protestants, it wouldn't have been imperialism.

And it's not imperialism, Jack, that little Denmark has a huge colony called Greenland, and it's a European left-wing government entity, and Greenland belongs to North America.

So it is exercising long-distance imperialism and it owns Greenland.

And

now they feel so bad because of Donald Trump's

ruminations that they put the Greenland map on their coat of arms.

They've given them a billion dollars, patted them on the head and said, you have a vote for your autonomy, semi-autonomy.

But you know, my colleagues at the Hoover Institution, Andrew Roberts and Neil Ferguson, have written a number of books and in passing in some books about British imperialism.

And they have taken the point of view that while

it was coercive, the people who were under it,

it lasted so long because it was not like German imperialism.

And it wasn't even like French imperialism.

It was different in that Anglo-Saxon judicial.

And what do I mean by that?

Yeah, they ended suti, the practice that the married wife has to jump on the pyre.

I think it was that great,

I'll remember his name, that British generally said, and that somebody said, well, are you interfering with suti?

They let them have their custom, and we have our custom.

And our custom is we hang people that make sure that their wives are executed when they die.

And they tried to moderate the caste system.

They built railroads,

they left law codes.

One of the reasons that India

is,

I think, destined to be more effective than China is that it has the English languages that unites these thousands of dialects, which was their great challenge.

You had so many little tiny principalities with different languages and culture and religion, and the British came in and gave them English, and then, of course, a constitutional system of government.

Which they did in Hong Kong, by the way, talking about China.

They did, they did in Hong Kong, and they did in Singapore.

And that's why those countries are very advanced.

So there was

not defending imperialism.

I'm just saying saying that like a lot, history is not melodrama.

You pick winners and losers in a Marxist binary, it's tragedy and there's all sorts of complexities, but they don't talk about that.

And of course they're in, as we just said earlier, left-wing people have no problem with imperialism as long as it's left-wing.

China went into Tibet.

That was one of the most brutal imperialistic takeovers.

They tried to extinguish their religion, their language.

They did everything.

And it was the Soviet Union was the imperial.

As soon as that power started to falter in the middle of Moscow, all those republics broke away.

They wanted nothing to do with Russia, and they wanted nothing to do with that brutal, murderous system.

That was an imperialistic system.

And so some imperialism is good, some is bad.

You can argue that Iran was trying to have an imperial presence by its diktat to Assad, its client the Hezbollah, its client the Houthis.

They They couldn't really operate independently without approval from Tehran.

October 7th would have never happened if the imperial power didn't say to the subject, the colonial power, here's some money and here's the date and here's what you're going to do.

If Iran had said to Hamas, you're not going to do that.

We're not going to give you any aid.

We're not going to give you any satellite information, locations, we're not going to give you any arm, they wouldn't have done it.

They couldn't have done it.

So imperialism is bad.

And imperialism was really good in Afghanistan, apparently.

We went in there, and as I said earlier, we got a traditional Islamic society to have a gender studies.

I'm sure there was a transgendered course for Taliban women.

And I'm sure there was a George Floyd, like sort of like Nancy Pelosi member in the capital.

They all took the knee.

They had a little flag of Africa around shawl, something like that.

And then they had the...

They might have had a Harvey Milk School there.

Yeah, the tribe flag.

They had all of that.

That's imperialism, everybody.

That's subjecting your values onto a traditional, far-distant society through force of arms.

Because ultimately, all those things we did in Afghanistan to push a left-wing progressive culture were backed by what?

The Marines, the Army, the Air Force.

Without them, they would have been slaughtered, all of those cultural imperialists.

And they were almost slaughtered anyway.

But the left has a lot

of imperialism, but we never call it that.

Well, that's in Victor's, amongst many other thoughts, his most recent syndicated column.

Again, you can find that every week on his website.

Well, we've come to the end, Victor, of another

gremlin time.

Yeah, we have a short.

I had a short in this

amplifier.

That's all right, Victor.

You go along with the intelligence.

So, hey,

I've got three comments I want to read.

So many folks leave comments on YouTube now.

The podcast is, you can watch it on YouTube, also on Rumble.

You can listen on various platforms.

Thanks for everyone who leaves comments.

Try to plow through them.

There are hundreds and hundreds of them now.

But here are three, Victor.

One is short and sweet from Still Learning 8360 writes, back to school at age 68 in VDH University.

Wonderful.

I agree with that totally.

Then there's another one from.

Do I get federal funds, Jack?

I want

a graduation ceremony.

I have a, I'm looking at my little studio, and I have a segregated area for my dog, Gracie, and another one that she's not to talk to

Spike.

He's different.

And we've got this new somebody dumped.

I don't know.

I think my wife called her Cashew or something.

Oh, yeah,

she's, yeah, she kept it.

Of course, she did.

And now they're, so I'm going to have segregated ceremonies for all of them.

All right.

Well, I know.

Maybe that way I'll get federal funds.

I'm coming out there.

Maybe you'll let me be the commencement speaker.

Yes.

Now, this one from me, you, she, he, they

writes, Victor Hansen, I am so glad that a friend introduced me to your show recently.

Just wish I had known about you much earlier.

Bless you for your insight, intelligence, fairness, and loyalty to this country.

May you be blessed for your efforts to keep us informed and keep this country a positive influence in the world.

Very kind.

And one final one from Karen Prather, 9693.

Good Saturday afternoon from Arkansas.

Enjoying VDH and Sammy discussing America's and the global

current state of affairs in such a factual and intellectual, calm, collective, and cool way to help those who are listening to connect all the dots.

to see the bigger picture of so many events that have happened and current and are currently happening.

God bless and thanks.

These three comments, by the way,

very reflective of what many people are saying.

Thanks, folks, for that.

I just want to end here by letting you know that I write, I, Jack Powell, write, Civil Thoughts, which is a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society, which is trying to strengthen civil society.

You know, civil society is at the core of what makes America great and exceptional.

exceptional.

Civil Thoughts comes out every Friday.

What you'll find when you get it in your inbox are 14 recommended readings, great articles I've come across the previous week that I think you might enjoy reading or find inspiring.

So sign up, go to civilthoughts.com.

We will not sell your name, I promise you.

Thanks for those who do, who have subscribed.

Victor, you've been terrific.

As you've always said, everybody.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you for watching.

And I will say, Jack,

I had to go to Phoenix to speak for the

university, my institute.

And I was noticed that when people came up at the airport and on the plane, they did not reference books that I've written.

They didn't reference Fox News.

They just referenced our podcast.

Yeah.

Well, that was the only reference.

So that shows you that I think that we're gaining an audience.

It's very true, and exponentially.

All right, great.

Folks, we'll see you again on the next episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Okay, thank you.