The Lame-Duck Period: Right Revolution, Left Devolution

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to listen to the wisdom of Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

We are recording on Saturday, the 21st of December.

This particular episode will be up on December 26th.

I guess this is the second day of Christmas.

Is it two turtle doves?

Something like that, Victor.

And I think it's the first day of Hanukkah today.

Happy Hanukkah to our friends and late Merry Christmas to those of you who we did not wish, who did not hear the previous podcast.

We've got a lot to talk about today, a lot of Victor's wisdom to glean, and we're going to start off getting his thoughts on Elon Musk, who is under

great attack from the left.

And Victor's thoughts on that will be coming up right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor is.

I need an apple.

He's eating.

Apples.

Oh, I love apples.

I love them, Victor.

Not as much as I love MMs, but I love apples.

Well, MMs, they're my vitamins.

So,

Victor, you have some thoughts you want to share on

Elon Musk, who is the bad boy now.

he is the bad boy.

And I think it was Whoopee Goldward in this age of litigation, I have to be very careful, but I think she

suggested on the view

that

J.D.

Vance and Musk had taken over and they were going to get rid of Trump.

By get rid of, you mean

still.

Yes.

And

what they're trying to do, the left, everybody knows what they're trying to do.

They're attacking Elon

on a variety of fronts, that he's not elected.

Well, he's actually an appointee now of an actual federal, he's going to be a federal official along with Vivek, at least on an advisory board.

And they're trying to drive a wedge by leaking about him and da-da-da-da-da, so that Trump and he fight.

Remember, in the left-wing mind, as I said in the earlier broadcast, it's perfectly okay for George Soros to flood the zone

with $100 million to get hard left, defund the police, destroy the jurisprudence of their cities,

prosecutors.

It's fine for Mark Zuckerberg to give $419 million, but you cannot do that if you're Elon Musk and give

$250 million to get out the vote in Pennsylvania, for example.

That's a cardinal sin.

So they hate him because they feel that he had a real

role.

And they're going after him, and they want to have Trump turn away from him.

And they don't quite know what to do with him because they keep, you know,

as I said last time, Van Jones went on this tirade about these unelected millionaires and billionaires.

But the source of their anger is that,

hey, you guys, ever since Bill Clinton, the billionaire class are ours.

If you go on the Fortune 400, all of the top names are left-wing.

If you look at the size, the magnitude of these wealth,

these wealthy dynasties, the Bloomberg dynasty, the Zuckerberg dynasty, the Lisa Jobs

dynasty, the Google dynasty.

All of them, the Amazon dynasty, they're all on our side.

The Reed Hoffman, they all are on our side.

But this one guy, he was on our side.

Elon, we loved him.

He was going to displace fossil fuels with this wonderful Tesla.

He was this good guy.

And now we hate him because he crossed us and he bought Twitter.

So then the question is, how do you adjudicate Elon Musk?

And I think that the reason Donald Trump won, I really do, was that in this process of four years of his recovery, his comeback,

he was led on.

His supporters, I should say, were not censored, and they had a social media platform.

What do I mean by that?

Facebook was hostile.

Instagram was hostile.

Google searches have political

motivations.

The order of your Google search will reflect a prior ideological agenda.

So all the conservatives had, there was true social.

Devin Nunes was doing a wonderful job, but as far as the sheer bulk, Trump lost that 88 million followers when they kicked him off.

And they kicked him off.

It was almost like a trust.

And it should have been subject to antitrust.

It was four days after January 6th.

It was Google.

I mean, Facebook kicked him off.

And then...

Facebook cooked him off for two years, as I remember, and Twitter banned him for life.

So when when he bought that everybody thought was gloating they said oh what an idiot he spaited he paid 44 billion it was only worth 20 he's going to lose money

and they didn't understand elon musk that he's worth what 500 billion since he bought it right uh his wealth has doubled because of the increase in stock prices of

his privately held companies and tesla i think tesla's what up to 420 something a share GM is 50.

So

it didn't bankrupt him, but more importantly, it opened the whole online social media communications.

There are no FBI agents now who were working with Facebook to suppress news unfavorable to Democratic candidates.

It just revolutionized everything.

And you can go on to X now and say what you want as long as it's not defamatory or obscene in a way you couldn't do before.

It was all left-wing and it was censored.

And the government was involved in it, as you know, the FBI.

And it was a revolving door.

They hired James Baker, FBI counsel, who's making, I don't know, $200,000.

Suddenly he's working for Jack Dorsey at Twitter and he's making $7 million.

So he was one of the people who, as legal counsel, who approved this whole idea of the FBI kind of merging with the old Twitter.

So he revolutionized social media in the United States.

Then he took Tesla.

And I was looking at, you know, what the two best-selling cars are in California?

No.

The two models of Tesla.

Two, yeah, the Y model

is the number one selling car in California.

And of all of the cars,

the combined Tesla lineup is, I think, number four or five in the country.

And that's not, that's things like Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes,

GM, Ford, Chrysler.

It broke into that.

No one had ever done that before with a startup.

And

everybody in the left now hates him, but I just got back from Palo Alto and Menlo Park, Jack, they've all got new Teslas.

They're everywhere.

They wouldn't be caught dead without one.

No, they can say they hate him, but they know that of all the electrical vehicles on the market, the Tesla is by far the best.

My wife has one.

It's just,

I mean, I don't understand how to drive it as well as she does, but it's flawless.

And then you go into the space rocket, that

the

X

rocket, SpaceX rocket, it's bigger than that.

Remember we were told, thank God,

when we went to the moon, that we had something that no one ever had had in history, and that was that Saturn V huge rocket.

And people announced that no one, Soviets, were never going to go to the moon because they didn't have the wherewithal to get the capsule up there.

But this was a revolutionary breakthrough.

But in terms of size, I mean, you put them side by side, that huge, tall, 360 feet, it was larger than the Statue of Liberty.

And then...

SpaceX is taller.

It's like 30 or 40 feet taller, and it's got more thrust than this huge Saturn.

And there's there's no more of those.

They just disbanded them.

They made the greatest rocket in history, and they said, eh, we're done.

I think there's only one of them left that actually works.

And maybe it's in a museum.

I don't know.

But

he revolutionized the space industry, and he took over from NASA, and it's profitable.

And he revolutionized the satellite industry.

He put in more satellites than all the countries in the world put together last year.

And the tunnel.

Yeah.

And then he went in, so Tesla, nobody could break into the car market at that level.

Social media, he revolutionized, he revolutionized the space, and he's working on neural link.

Whatever you think about him,

his

life has benefited millions of people.

And the irony of it is he has done more to advance the alternate fuels industry than any leftist megaphone.

Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, any of those people that are attacking him now.

Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

He did it.

And he saved NASA from itself.

And he saved social media from himself.

If he hadn't have opened up Twitter,

the next Republican president would have gone in there and so tightly controlled that because it was working as an agency of the U.S.

government.

And we know now from Mr.

Andreessen's revelations on Joe Rogan that they had even scarier ideas should Harris be re-elected and the Biden continuum that they were going to control and pick and choose

who got to do what with artificial intelligence based on their fealty or lack of toward the Biden administration and then the Harris administration.

So

I don't understand.

I understand that they don't like him because he's powerful and he's an apostate.

But he said the last thing, I don't know if he was trolling, you know what he said yesterday.

What?

He said, well, I'm not just a partisan.

I am going to back Democratic candidates that are sane in the primaries.

So think of that.

So if you're going to run and you think you're going to be outspent by Reed Hoffman and George Soros and all those people, now all of a sudden Elon says he's going to spend money to give you a shot in the Democratic primary.

Well,

I'll throw out one candidate idea on that.

But first, I just want to take a moment, Victor, for our sponsor, Factor.

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Two things, Victor.

I'm throwing this at you.

This congressman actually from the Bronx, Richie Torres, who's a Democrat, who's been calling BS on much on the Democrats,

particularly on the insanity of the Israel hate.

And he is now going after Governor Hochul.

The election for governor in New York will be in 2026.

I could see him, he's kind of refreshing in an odd way

for Democrats.

So he may be somebody that Elon Musk might get behind.

But anyway, there's that.

And Victor,

the other thing about Musk,

I think with his going into Twitter, excuse me, X and cleaning out, what, 90% of the staff,

may have exposed, maybe this is part of the hatred, like

by showing there's a bureaucracy in the social media world that might lead to resentment of people who are their jobs.

Or you take the FBI types who are looking for secondary careers, like there may not be that many careers to be had.

Well, we all know what they're doing.

Mark Zuckerberg, I think Google and Mark Zuckerberg's

Meta,

they respectively buy up, what, 100 startups a year.

They have this huge cash, so they just go out and they just buy up, buy up any competitor and they absorb them.

And they have market monopolies.

I think 95% of the world's searches are run by Google, which is fine, except they're completely ideological and they interfere with free expression.

As I said, you...

Anything you want to Google, just see what comes up on it, and it will have a left-wing tinge.

And if you want to find a disinterested result you're going to have to go five pages in before you'll find it.

And so

he opened that up and that is quite an achievement and

they hate him for it because they

they were controlling Silicon Valley and that was the next medium and they had the old media with the Washington Post and LA Times and New York Times.

They had the network, all three network channels, they had PBS and I know Fox offered a different point, but Fox in a Good Night had three and a half million people.

If you add up all the left-wing cable shows and the three networks and public TV, you get 20, 25 million people.

So they have all the cards.

The thing about the left, you've got to remember, is anytime somebody speaks up with them and claims a minority voice, I don't mean in terms of ethnicity or race, just

power,

if they have 3 million, four million, then they're all, you go after them.

How dare you?

So, you know, when Van Jones went after

billionaires, billionaires, when he went after Elon, Elon, I think, pointed out, and a lot of other people did, they counted the number of billionaires who gave to the respective candidates.

It was about 88 billionaires for Harris and about 55 for

Trump, a billionaire himself.

So in their way of thinking, that is outrageous.

How can he get 50 billionaire?

They never look at themselves.

And

so, he goes on there and tweets 10, 12 times a day, and they just hate it.

They hate it, they hate it, they hate it.

Well, I'm just a mere thousandaire myself.

So, hey, Victor,

I know you've talked, you and I, a little bit, and then I know you have with Sammy about

these

Joe Biden pardons

and

how

schemy and disturbing they are.

But you have some more thoughts to share on them, and we'll get those thoughts when we come back from these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Saturday, December 21st.

And this episode is up on February, February, December.

Sorry, folks.

December 26th.

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Its address is victorhanson.com.

Go there.

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Victor Joe Biden's 1500 plus, for all we know, that it's not over yet.

He may have more diseased Christmas presents to hand out in terms of pardons to various creeps.

I have some thoughts on this I'd like to ask you about.

But first,

you have some.

You're kind of put off by these

pardons of people that might be on death row.

Well, Joe Biden said he was asked in one of his final interviews.

It may be the final one because he has disappeared.

And getting back to Ben Jones' accusation that unelected people are running the country, i.e.

Trump and Elon Musk, I mean,

I don't mean unelect, he means that they have not had

they shouldn't have formal authority, but I would remind him they don't have formal authority.

All Joe Biden has to do right now, everybody, is get to work at six

George W.

Bush had his suit and coat and tie, and he was on the job at six in the morning.

And all he has to do is do that, and no one will say a word.

He is President of the United States.

He goes to Notre Dame, and he can say to Donald Trump, you're not invited, whatever he wants to do, but he doesn't.

He can't.

And so that's in that vacuum, people are coming in.

And the most logical person to come in is the elected President and his advisors, one of whom is

a Renaissance man in charge of trying to save us from ourselves and spending ourselves into oblivion.

And so the question is,

not who is president, i.e., Donald Trump is president, but who is making these pardons?

We have no idea.

Does anybody think that Joe Biden says to, I don't know, his chief of staff, hey, you met this guy?

He's committed a bankruptcy.

There's 40 people on death row right now on the federal.

He has no authority over state.

But he killed a prisoner.

And I think I went through and looked at them.

And most of the people there were in robberies where they killed somebody or they executed somebody in prison.

And the racial disparity, the most on death row are white people because they represent the majority of the population.

And then black people and Latino people together are more, so they're overrepresented in their demographics.

White people are underrepresented.

But in actual numbers, there's more of the 40 than the other two separately, but not combined.

So I don't think there's a racial motive.

But what he's, who gets to go to death row or not.

But what I'm getting at is he doesn't know the individual circumstances.

He doesn't know the families of the bank guards that were executed.

He doesn't know the kidnapped people,

how they suffered or were tortured by these people.

He doesn't care.

He just thinks, I'm going out now and I don't believe in the death penalty, so I'll just cancel all this legal jurisprudence, adjudication, penalty, forget the victims' families.

I'm out of here.

Which, and then the 1,500, I don't know about the judge who was taking bribes to put juveniles in this horrific private for-profit prison.

I don't know about the Chinese

communist resident alien who was downloading porn.

I don't care.

That's his attitude.

And then there was these stories circulating that

Jill had a burn-it-down,

I guess burn-it-down philosophy is, and think about it.

A payback.

Yes.

Nancy Pelosi and the Obamas engineered this with input from Hykim Jeffries and Schumer.

We have no loyalty to the Democratic establishment now.

Donald Trump, we've detested for our entire lives.

We want to...

hurt him.

We want to hurt the Democratic establishment.

And they were all disloyal to Joe.

So we're going to go out and we're going to make things even difficult for our own party.

We're going to pardon people.

We're going to lie about six times we said we wouldn't pardon Hunter.

We're going to pardon Hunter.

And they did.

And we're going to sell off that wall and we're going to try to have a little tweak in it to really get them angry.

$5 a ton or pennies on the dollar.

We'll just sell it off.

Ha ha ha.

There's your wall.

Remember, Joe said, not one foot am I going to build.

So they're trying to be mean-spirited.

At least the old guys,

the Clinton administration, when they left office, they stole some stuff.

Remember that?

They lifted some furniture, china, or they took off some buttons on the computer.

W's, they took the W's off.

They took the W's off, and

they wrote little pop-up windows that said, screw you, and they opened their computers.

They left little notes and books that said, F you.

They were just petty.

These people are different.

They're really trying to harm people and harm the transition.

And

they've got Trump fuming, which is what they want to do.

But

he is going to be known for two things,

Biden.

They carried off the greatest presidential deception.

And yes, I'll use the word cabal and conspiracy in history.

They got a group of insiders to put a wall around this man, and they didn't tell us when he was in the White House, when he was not in the White House, where he was, what time he came to work, what time he went home.

In fact, it wasn't just that they didn't tell us.

They lied about it.

They lied about it.

And the basic premise now is...

Well, Victor, they have 50 people talked to the Wall Street Journal, they said, and the New York Times is on.

Yes.

And why now?

Why now?

Because these these reporters said we didn't say anything because they were going to deny access to us.

We would have had no presidential beats if we had told the truth.

So he could hurt us.

Now, he can't hurt us.

He's not there.

He has no power.

He's going out.

So we'll blab.

We'll basically.

And have you seen that guy, Chris Saliza?

What's his name in CNN?

They go now on, they go on like podcasts and they go like this.

Oh my God,

I wanted to speak.

and now looking

something.

No, no, no.

No mia coppa, maxima mia copa.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

You knew what you were doing and you would do it again because you wanted to have access.

And they told you, no access if you tell the truth.

And so they could hurt you and they cannot hurt you now.

And they could help you.

Maybe if I lie and say, hmm, I just saw Joe Biden, fit as a fiddle, strong as an ox, sharp as a tack.

Is there any more metaphors I can use that somebody hasn't used?

I know what I'll do.

I'll just say he's Albert Einstein.

He exhausts me.

Somebody said that.

He exhausts me.

He's a cringe, Jean-Pierre.

I go in there.

I'm just tired.

That dynamism and that power.

And

they wanted, you know, he could help.

Well, if you lie about us, you get an exclusive interview.

Yes, you will.

We'll give you a tip.

We'll give you a a list.

So now, Jack, they cannot be helped by Joe Biden and they cannot be hurt by Joe Biden.

So they're telling the truth.

And they're telling the truth because it's going to be very clear and it can no longer be hidden that he is completely senile.

And he cannot function as president.

And people are going to go back and say, you people lied to us.

And you were part of a conspiracy to injure the interests of the United States.

You let this man carry the nuclear codes next to him.

He was making existential decisions.

Now we know why we left

$50 billion

of weapons to terrorists.

Now we know

why we were having daylight with Israel and we were trashing Israel.

Now we know why we borrowed $7 trillion.

Somebody was doing this, but this guy couldn't have been doing it.

Who were these people?

We want to know who made these decisions.

Was it Michelle?

Was it Barack?

Was it the consortia of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, the squad?

Who was it?

Jill?

Was she the con?

But they're not going to tell us that.

They're not going to tell us who the Edith Wilson is at this generation.

I have to think Jill is the greatest villain here.

I mean, Joe Biden.

Excuse me, it's Dr.

Jill.

Dr.

Jill.

I forgot.

You know, Victor,

back on

the pardons,

he's non-compassmentist, so he's not in a position to say,

oh, you know, that

judge in Pennsylvania, Scranton, who screwed the kids over, and et cetera, et cetera.

Let me see his record.

Or did he even know there was this

Chinese spies, et cetera?

How many?

Were there 1,500 of them?

So somebody's bodies, plural, are putting this smorgasbord of...

lowlifes in front of them and he's signing pardons for them.

Yeah, it works like this.

pro quos here.

No, it works like this.

He just said, I'm going to pardon people, and I have two criterion for pardon them.

Whatever they can do for the Biden family or the larger friend and associate of the Biden Consortium, I'll do it.

And whatever makes people angry, because I'm going to be a puny little Samson that's going to pull down the temple when I go out.

Give me as much chaos and nihilism as I can.

And make it symbolic.

And the more egregious the pardon, the better.

Wait till we get to the last 48 hours, Jack.

I expect Ashley

Biden, I expect Jim Biden.

All of them get pardons.

They all get pardons.

And

they know they're going to get pardons.

Because if they don't get pardons, when you write a check and you say, loan repayment, $250,000,

somebody in an honest DOJ, if the statute of limitations is not over, over, is going to say, wait a minute, you transferred $250,000 to your brother?

Did you pay gift tax on it?

Did you pay income tax on it?

Where did you get the money?

Did you pay income tax?

Can you show me the loan document where he loaned you the $250,000?

Did he charge interest?

If he didn't charge interest, it was a gift.

Did he pay gift tax on it?

So they're going to ask a lot of questions.

So I think they're going to give him one of these unusual, historically rare pardons.

That they're going to pardon all the Bidens for anything they may have done from 2014 when he got on his plane and sold stuff to their foreign interest till the present.

Anything that's uncovered.

Do you think?

And that's his attitude.

Do you think Liz Cheney will get a pardon from the Biden?

She's so angry, isn't she?

You want to say, Liz,

calm down.

Why are you so mad, Liz?

I don't understand it.

You ran Washington for,

I don't know, you were, I think that thing was appointed in,

it was in May it started of 2021 and it went for over a year.

And

Liz,

you kind of engineered that Kevin McCarthy couldn't pick people that historically has been the prerogative of the opposite party to fulfill the minority appointees.

So you just said, I'm not letting any of my associates, we're not going to let anybody on here unless they're like us.

They've had to vote for Trump's impeachment the second time, and they have to have no political future.

If you have that, you can come on the committee.

And

there were no takers, and the other nominees were normal, and they didn't want them.

So did she suborn perjury?

Did she obstruct justice?

Did she witness tamper?

I don't know the law.

Apparently, she called this Cassie Hustinson up and said, you know, I really think you want to

turn state evidence, and this is what I think you should do.

And her lawyer wasn't present, and that was undue influence on a whip.

And then the question is, do they usually prosecute that in February?

I don't know.

But she seems to feel that she has criminal exposure and wants a pardon.

And I think she'll get one.

And then there's going to be another dilemma.

If you were

Mr.

Vinman, if you are James Comey, if you're Andrew McCabe, if you're Christopher Wray, if you're Anthony Fauci, if you're Francis Collins, if you're John Brennan, if you're James Clapper, do you take these pardons or not?

Victor, you mentioned loan.

You mentioned

the Biden family loans, which is a nice little jumping off for loans, because once a student loans, we have yet another effort by Joe Biden or whoever is making these decisions to wipe out student loans, 54,900 student loan borrowers are getting 4.28 billion in debt wiped out this month.

This has some

program called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers after 10 years of qualifying payments, blah, blah, blah.

I I don't know why nonprofit workers, you know, you and I are very involved in nonprofit institutions.

I don't know why they should get some special.

I don't know why any of these people should.

They took the loan, as

Calvin Coolidge said, to the Europeans that wanted reparation relief.

They rented the money, didn't they?

And the point I'm making is this.

The universities, once this program came in and guaranteed federal loans, if you look, you'll see a sharp increase in the rate of tuition inflation.

They had a captive market.

They told these young, impressionable 18-year-olds, just as if they were selling cars, this is the thing, this is the thing.

They didn't say this to them.

If you come into our university and you, it's about $60,000 a year, room board, and tuition.

If we give you $240,000, these loans are not cheap.

They're 6%.

6%.

So,

you know, you're going to be paying $15,000, $20,000 in interest alone.

And these are the majors that we offer.

We have 50 majors, but this major, this major, this major, this major has a 50% unemployment rate.

This major, this major, this major has an average per capita first to five year employment rate of, I don't know,

$55,000.

So we're going to give you all the information you need.

This is is how much each class costs you when you come to our university and you go into debt with this federally guaranteed loan.

And oh, by the way, we have a $30 billion endowment, and we are not going to give anybody any break.

We're not going to guarantee your loan.

We have some scholarships, but basically, you're in the government.

You're with the government.

And so

that was a situation that transpired.

And it was, I don't know, a fraudulent loan.

It was misleading.

The applicant never got any counseling.

And as someone who goes into the local car dealer, I usually, when I buy a car, it's usually I say to myself, Victor, it will be about five hours, minimum.

And then you get a stack of papers this big.

You've seen it.

You just sign, sign.

Are you aware of the interest rate?

Yes.

Are you aware of how long it's going to take you?

But yes.

Are you

aware of the monthly payment?

are you aware that we have the right to take the car back from you are you aware that we have a gps device that we can contact our car and are you aware that you do not own this car unless you pay yes are you aware that you were of cognizant mind and we are financing you and loaning you the money yes all of this stuff and they don't do that with 18 year olds not at all so they've got they're they're subject to uh

a lot of correction, and I think they're very worried.

And the universities are now scrambling like crazy to reach out

to Trump, and I just don't think he's going to be sympathetic.

And before anybody says, well, it's because there are a bunch of Yahoos.

No, they're people like J.D.

Vance that went to Yale Law School, and a lot of them, they know the Ivy League.

That's why they don't like it.

Because they went there and they've seen that other side of that jack,

that one-eyed jack.

And so I think there's going to be a lot of reform.

And it could be, and we're going to get the federal government, rather than forgive loans, we'll just get out of it.

And we'll tell everybody, you know what, here's tables about what you will be making as a master electrician, a master drywall, a master plumber, master diesel mechanic.

Here's what you will be making when you factor in your $200,000, $300,000.

college education.

And it's up to you now, but we're not going to subsidize it.

And I think it's going to be radical.

And I think they're going to tax endowment too.

Maybe not all of it, but they're going to start to tax endowments, say, over five or six billion dollars, because they're going to say to the universities, you're not nonprofit.

You've got all this profit money, and you're spending money in all sorts of stuff that has nothing to do with education.

94% of your faculty at Stanford University gave money to one party.

You have no free speech.

You don't respect the Fourth and Fifth and Sixth Amendment when somebody's charged with a crime on campus.

So

they know that.

They know that it's institutionalized anti-Semitism.

And so they're very scared right now, and they should be.

And Trump, they think Trump is a Yahoo.

They don't understand

that Trump represents reform and a cultural revolution.

And I could just give you a little tidbit.

I don't have any influence with Donald Trump.

None.

In 2016, nobody called me and said, Victor, Trump got elected.

Could you help me get a job?

No.

Nobody in 2020 called me.

Jack, I have answered seven or eight calls a day.

Hey, Victor, do you know Trump?

No, I don't get involved.

Victor, do you know this?

Hey,

and I always say this.

Weren't you for Romney or weren't you in

Utah?

I remember what you wrote.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was then.

So my point is, it's culturally acceptable now to be for Donald Trump.

He has got seven or eight applicants for every single job, 25,000.

He's got 100,000 people.

And these people are not stupid.

He's drawing in the most intelligent, highly educated, yes, Ivy League trained people who want to participate in this counter-revolution.

And they're very skillful.

And it's not going to be like the first administration.

There's not going to be a New York Times op-ed

says anonymous, oh, we're staging a revolution.

We're trying to contradict Donald Trump from the inside.

Ha ha.

There's not going to be a Rex Tillertson state.

Marco Rubilo is not going to say Donald Trump is stupid as Rex Tillertson did.

You're not going to see the DOD try to resist the

executive branch, and you're not going to the White House, and you're not going to see someone

as John Bolton who will wink and nod, oh, yeah, I don't want to say anything about the impeachment.

I got a memoir coming out in about a month or two.

Yeah, it'll all be in there.

But I don't want to go on record about what the real Donald Trump is like.

It's all going to be in my book.

And then the news count goes, Bolton reporting, shocker book to come out, Bolton's book promises

starting revelations about Donald.

Remember that?

All that stuff.

And that's not going to be here this time.

It's not going to be here this time.

There's not going to be a Scaramucci.

There's not going to be an Omaroso.

There's not going to be a Cassidy Hutchinson.

He's got people who are very skilled, but they're also very loyal, and they're committed to overturning this cultural revolution.

And the left has no idea about that.

One of the claims against him, Victor, for running that why he could not be re-elected from Republicans was that he could not staff an administration with Confederate.

That was the claim.

And

I think he's got just the opposite problem.

He's got everybody in the conservative movement.

Did you read Brett Stevens the other day, Maya Culpo?

I did not.

What did he think of your question?

Oh, Brett Stevens.

It was a typical never Trump, I'm sorry, I was wrong.

It starts out with Donald Trump is

all, you know, you list all the terrible things that you got right.

And then it says, but it doesn't do any good just to be blanketly rejection of us because he did some things.

Yes,

he left with a 1.3, 1.2 inflation.

Yes,

the world was quiet.

Yes.

So let's all just, can't we just get along?

That was that.

We don't need to be automatically hating Trump.

I'm no longer a never-Trumper.

That's what he said.

So the Never Trump, he destroyed

Mitt Romney.

He destroyed Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney came around and he said, hey, Mitt Romney, wasn't it true that Donald Trump's going there?

What do you think about this cash?

Well, he won the election, and he said he was going to bring change.

And

we usually accord the president his appointees, and that's what he's doing.

So I have no problem with it.

So that was Mitt Romney.

And they're all doing this now.

So they all want jobs.

They all want to do it.

And we don't know how long it's going to last because the left is just taking a pause.

They're exhausted.

They're saying to themselves, well,

somebody tried to kill him.

We called him a Nazi.

We lowered the bar of assassination attempts by calling him that.

We got him off the ballot almost in 16 we had these you know Eugene Carroll cost him eighty million and letita james got him up for 370 million and then alvin braggs got a sword of damocles over his head when he gets out of office oh jack smith did his best fanny wilson just got removed from the case poor fanny for lying under oath etc etc and poor i like nathan wade by the way i did

i i liked him because they asked him that question

did you take money or go And he just looked at the camera for, what, two minutes thinking, what are the consequences of being A, being silent, B, lying, C, telling the truth.

I've got to pause and think about this.

Anyway, all of that stuff didn't work.

None of it worked.

And now the left's saying, and we got Joe Biden, they caught us in this lie.

I am done.

I can't take it anymore.

They're in their fetal position for about a month or two.

Donald Trump, violate the the Logan Act.

Violate every element of the Logan Act.

Just take over.

I know you're a private citizen.

Just save us.

We do not want to lie anymore.

We tried to destroy you.

You're still standing.

So go to it.

We'll slander and smear you and defame you in about 60 days.

But we have no leaders.

Everything we wanted is polling 20%, 30%.

The whole thing blew up.

The country's a mess.

We understand that.

And Joe Biden is a waxen effigy

indeed waxen I've read he is going to make one last trip victory he's going over to meet the Pope

two more

let's stay there

hey listen speaking of of

before of education

A headline about one of your favorite people,

give you a chance here to reflect on him.

Here's the headline from the college fix, the great college fix,

which is created by John Miller,

who's a professor at Hillsdale.

Fauci holds

several professor titles at Georgetown, but never teaches.

The article begins: Dr.

Anthony Fauci is a distinguished university professor, in quotes, at Georgetown University, but does not appear to have taught a single course since his appointment, nor does he have any future classes scheduled.

And then it it also goes on to say he is

at the O'Neill

Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown.

He is a distinguished senior scholar.

But the fix went through all the course catalogs at the school.

There's no evidence that Fauci has taught any classes at all.

He did.

Did you see his proposed class that he was going to offer?

No, I did not.

Yeah, he was.

It was called

How to Evade U.S.

Gain of Function Law by

rerouting $600,000 to his crony, to a crony, Peter Dasek, who will then manipulate Lancet with a phony investigation and make sure the money ends up in gain of function biomedical level four biology lab in Wuhan.

And three units with a midterm and a final.

And you're welcome to take it.

He pulled it off.

Again, the thing about Anthony Fauci that we all forget, if we just forget all of the acrimony, all of his career, just start from a fresh slate

and say,

was

this virus a gain of function manipulation?

Yes.

Did the United States lend expertise, instrumentation, and money

with consultation to the Pentagon for whatever reason, good or bad?

Yes.

Did money circulate and was this instrumentation and knowledge and money done below the radar?

Yes.

Was this against the law in the United States?

Yes.

Did Anthony Fauci authorize this?

Yes.

Did this manufactured virus, with the help of U.S.

influence, input, money,

did it escape from this lab?

Yes.

Did this virus show a genetic imprint that it would be almost impossible to match in nature?

Yes.

Did this virus kill somewhere between 50 and 100 million people and make another 200 million very, very ill?

Yes.

Presto, ergo.

There you are.

QED.

Quad erit demonstrandum.

That was what we were trying to show.

So

just think of that process.

And when you think about it, good old Uncle Anthony is right at the very center

of this virus.

You take Anthony Fauci

out of the equation, and you could have a good debate whether this Wuhan virus would have been created.

Because I don't think that the Chinese themselves had that level of expertise without Western help, and in particular, American help.

Somebody authorized that American help, and that help was not just Peter Dasick's 600,000.

It was okaying

the consultation, the communication, the expertise to be transmitted to that lab from Americans.

And he knew about it.

I know he knew about it because if you look at the corpus of his messages, he was very worried about that from the get-go.

And

I'm not, I mean, I know that he said, wear a mask, don't wear masks, wear a mask, wear two masks, wear one mask, social distancing.

I don't know where it came.

We just made it up.

Six feet.

All that.

You know, the booster will not make you infectious and you will not be.

Okay.

Those are all errors of stupidity, incompetence, sloppiness, you name it.

But the origins of the virus, he had a hand in,

at least according to the evidence.

And he suppressed evidence of that.

And when he was asked by Rand Paul under oath, did you subsidize help foster gain of function research?

He said no.

And I think that's why he's going to be the number one person in line for a pardon.

For a pardon, yeah.

You know, a few weeks ago, Victor, I was up in New Hampshire on business and I stopped to see old John Sununu.

I don't mean to call him old, but he's in his mid-80s.

He's a great guy.

I love him.

Of course, he came on a few national review cruises.

That's how I got to know him.

And he says, come by.

And we had coffee.

So we're just talking about this or that.

And folks should remember he was the chief of staff for George H.W.

Bush.

And I asked him about Fauci.

And he said, Bush wanted him to be the head of NIH.

He didn't like Fauci.

Let's put it that way.

Did not like him.

But Bush had wanted this.

And Fauci actually turned it down.

And Sununu said.

He's confident it was because of all the money he was already making through his job

from royalties from these.

He's a multi-multi-multi-millionaire.

Yeah, he's probably the luckiest or the most abusive and

used his job in government.

He and his wife were among the two highest federal employees in the country

as far as compensation goes.

So he and he was,

you know, he, and Burks was, she was,

I don't know who was, what their respective roles were.

I think she was incompetent or he was malicious.

But that's just my own speculation.

But I do think that the evidence, we had Stephen Quay on here, and

he went through chapter and verse about the genetic sequence of the virus and how hard it would be, the cleavage site, the spike pro, all of that he went through.

And then the mRNA vaccination, all of that he went through.

And

Fauci knew that when he was promoting that, that there were real problems with the mRNA vaccine.

And I'm not saying that history won't show that it saved more lives than it damaged.

It could very easily.

And the quarantine, I think, we do know the quarantines probably took more lives than would have been lost, at least if we look at the Swedish one.

But that's disputed too and controversial.

But it's not controversial that he was intent on seeing gain of function virology take place.

And if it could not take place in the United States, he knew that it could take place in China, and he wanted in on the results.

Maybe for a patriotic purpose, he was communicating with the Pentagon, supposedly.

They probably wanted to see what the Chinese, as if you could ever trust anybody in the Chinese communist apparatus, which was very naive.

But whatever the particular motive, good or bad, he had a role in fueling, fostering that type of research that led to COVID.

And he won't talk about it.

No meakulba from him.

And then he got carried away with this cult of personality where finally he was reduced to coming into his office and he had on there the little Fauci bobblehead dolls, the paintings of him.

Remember that?

All of that cult of the personality.

And he was Saint Fauci.

I guess he was, it was kind of like

Paradise Lost.

He was the divine Fauci.

I am the science.

And Scott Atlas was the fallen Lucifer going into the.

They really went after poor Scott.

And they tried to demonize him.

Waiting for my alma mater Holy Cross to take his name off the science building.

Victor, I do have something to chew the fat over with you over.

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We thank our good friends at Solair for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, so close to you.

It's San Francisco.

Story.

Close to me.

I'm speaking from Gloria Salma.

Well, it's close to the middle of the country.

I'm known to go to work

each week at Palo Alto.

Yes.

I've been with you as we've stepped over

human waste.

I did one too many national review retreats in San Francisco.

You have a right to remain fat, says San Francisco's weight czar as her hefty pay packet is revealed.

This is from the Daily Mail.

San Francisco Department of Health's new weight czar has gone viral for her proclamation that, quote, no one has to be healthy, end quote.

Virgie Tovar, 42, longtime activist for body positivity and fat acceptance, was hired this week as a consultant by the Liberal City's Health Department, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm so glad they have the money to spend on this, Victor.

Any thoughts?

I mean, they're broke.

They have a deficit, as does the state, and they find ways of wasting their money and then raising taxes, which is why

tourists can't afford to stay there.

It's not only not safe, but the room tax and the

regulatory climate is such that it's very expensive just to eat or to go into San Francisco.

And there's no bang for the buck anymore.

It's a beautiful city,

but the injection, fornication, urination, and defecation

are right in your face.

You know, what's weird about this is this.

It's the 180-degree about face from the left.

It went from liberalism and naive passivity and idealism and utopianism to this hardcore

Stalinist,

Jacobin, cultural revolution stuff.

And what I mean by that that is, in the old days, your Democrat who would rail in Congress would say that food companies are killing us with high fructose sugar.

They're putting all these fat additives in.

We're not eating healthy, kind of like RFK, whom they now demonize.

But then all of a sudden, in the Marxist binary they created, fat people or obese people, you can't say fat, they were victims.

And so you don't dare say that someone who's 5'5,

remember Oliver Anthony

Richman from Richmond?

And he said you can't be eating something when you're 5'3 and weigh 300 pounds.

That got him in trouble.

The point I'm making is that

now,

if somebody is obese,

it's not okay to say,

what's your diet?

What's your exercise?

Do you realize that when you're carrying that type of weight, it stresses your cardiovascular system?

Do you understand you're running a greater risk of cancer, autoimmune diseases, diabetes?

And

if you don't think it's important for your own health and longevity and sense of calm and helping your family, then maybe society at large, that you could help society by not being...

You know, that's one thing I think about all the time at 71.

Can you exercise today?

Can you avoid sweets?

Because the health system doesn't need Victor to go in there all the time.

That's right.

So my point is

this new

Maoist type thinking, all of a sudden it turned everything upside.

Now the obesity is okay.

You don't mention it.

It's the same thing with children.

They said before,

it takes a village, children, and we have to protect the children.

Remember Hillary when she ran?

Got to protect the children, the children.

The children, the children.

Then all of a sudden,

then all of a sudden it's...

Well, we have to protect the trans people and the graphic gay instruction books in the library.

And

if a young kid sees it, well,

even the age of consent is now questioned.

There's a whole movement that you should lower the age of consent and children need to explore sexuality and all of this stuff.

And then

you go into the pharmaceuticals.

It was always the left.

They say, big pharma, big pharma, big pharma.

They're just pushing all these unnecessary drugs, all these very dangerous hormones.

And then there's the AMA, that awful American Medical Association.

They're condoning, if not fueling, surgical procedures that are not just not necessary, but very dangerous.

And they're making all this money.

And then we hear that,

well, if you have these drugs, they're wonderful.

It's okay.

These powerful hormones that you take at 10 or 12.

And there's nothing wrong with lopping off two breasts or testicles or these life-changing optional surveys.

And we don't really care if a person changes his mind or not.

It's 16.

This is important.

And then you think, wow,

don't you distrust big pharma?

And then we get into the morning after abortion pill, whatever you want to call it.

Sure, 78, 80, 90 times.

out of 100 it's safe, but it's a prescription drug, should be, because in certain cases, that

terminated feces,

fetus will not be fully expelled, and that can cause sepsis.

So you need to have a doctor.

Make sure that the patient is in good health, and after they take the pill, reports back to the physician that there's no complications from aborting.

And all of a sudden, they're pushing the abortion pill without prescriptions.

So in this, and that's what's dangerous about DEI and woke.

It has this ironclad, Maoist-Stalinist

agenda, and it destroys any opposition from left or right.

It's turned on classical democratic liberalism.

It loves big pharma.

It loves optional, dangerous surgical procedures.

It loves using dangerous drugs that are not proven they can be used safely without prescriptions and doctors' consultations, as long as it promotes this agenda.

And what is the agenda?

That half the United States is victimized in terms of sexual orientation, gender, race,

you name it.

And we are here to empower that group.

And that's the only thing they care about.

All the other classical liberal positions have been destroyed.

We talked about gun controls, another one.

Gun control, you've got to ban handguns.

You've got to ban them.

You just can't, or if you're not going to ban them, they have to be registered.

Oh, he made his own handgun, and there's no, it's not in the Federal Registry, so you can't trace it.

And he just

blew the back out of a healthcare.

I like that guy.

I'm glad he used that gun.

He didn't have to register it.

I don't care.

All I care about is he shot the right guy.

So much for gun control.

Not one peep out of the left about this is another reason we need gun control.

People who make their own guns and cannot be licensed.

So that's what the Democratic Party has become.

Well, and we love the FBI.

Victor, we've got one more.

I love the FBI when Cash Patel.

I don't, oh my God, what is he going to find in those folders?

The first one he's going to, he's going to go on his desk and he's going to see ABC and he's going to pull the one that says P, Patel, and he's going to draw that and he's going to say, oh, this is a memorandum that Cash Patel is a dangerous insurrectionist and we need to monitor his emails and phone calls even though he works for the House of Representatives.

Victor, we've got one more thing to talk about.

Not too pleasant, albeit

when we come back from these messages, it's about this terrible

terrorist attack in Germany, but there seems to be much more going on in that country.

And we'll get your thoughts on that when we return from these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on the 21st of December.

Now, this show, again, it's up on the 26th, and for all we know, much will have happened between when we're recording and when you're listening.

But

two days ago, Victor, as many of our listeners know, a

a Saudi Arabian transplant, a doctor

in Germany drove through a crowd at one of these Christmas markets, which are big deals in Germany.

And there's an excellent story.

I recommend folks go to the Daily Mail and check it out.

From the last report, five people are dead, murdered.

But there is already a great

stress going on in Germany, a fearfulness that some Muslim eruption is about to take place.

There was

another town, I think it was Essen, where they had these Christmas markets.

All of a sudden, boom, like for an hour, there was this parade of

Muslim men.

Yeah, shouting Allah Akbar to Christmas shoppers.

Yeah, yeah.

Jack, you got to remember, they were only retaliating to all those Christians that went in during Ramadan and said, Jesus is king, Jesus is king to them.

I forgot about that.

I forgot about it too.

I don't think it ever happened.

Yeah,

there's some question about

what his religion.

I've read all sorts of motivations that no one knows the truth yet.

People say, well, he left Saudi Arabia because he was an atheist and he was welcomed into Germany and he

He reciprocated that magnanimity with death.

But did he do it because he hated all religion because he was an atheist?

Or did he do it because once he got to a Christian

country,

he re-Islamicized and he was now an Islamic zealot and more of a zealot because he had been an apostate before and he couldn't stand the social isolation that he had selled.

Who knows and who cares?

He's just a killer.

And he shouldn't

You know, he shouldn't have been led in the country.

He should have, they should have audited, adjudicated, they should have monitored him, but

they're not going to do that.

But I do object to one thing you said, Jack.

You said that

he staged an attack.

I didn't find that in.

I read Reuters, I read Associate Press, Associated Press, I read the Washington Post, New York Times.

It didn't say he did it.

It said a car drove into, and car drives into

Christmas celebrants.

Yeah.

Car

kills two people.

Car wounds.

the car did it.

Because it didn't say that he did it.

It just said that a car did it, and he apparently was behind the wheel just kind of at the mercy of the car.

It didn't say it was self-driving, but in none of those press accounts did it say

Saudi immigrant drives car into

crowd, kills, maims

dozens of people.

It doesn't say that.

It just says the car did it.

So I expect the German government to,

I don't know, they'll drive in the BMW and they'll drive it up on a ramp into the witness chair and they'll say, Mr.

BMW car,

how many cylinders do you have and why did you kill these people?

And the car will say,

I don't know.

I can't explain it.

And then they'll call the man that was driving and say, did you,

I don't know, the car just took over and forced us to go in there.

I'm not kidding you.

If you read those accounts, that would be what you would, a person from outer space

would conclude.

It's a larger question, though, I think,

of reciprocity that people in Europe now,

they're starting to see certain truths very slowly, that Christians are not doing that to Muslims.

that Germans are not eager to go to the Middle East and

immigrate.

That,

and I think this would be very controversial, that it is still much better for a

Muslim to live inside Israel than it would be for a Jew to live on the West Bank.

And that a Arab can be inside Israel and a full citizen with a higher standard of living and more civil liberties than his counterpart in Gaza and the West Bank.

And if a Jew just said, you know what?

I don't like Israel.

I'm not a settler.

I'm just going to go over and live in Jericho and be a citizen of Palestine.

He would never be accepted at the same commiserate level.

So there's this reciprocity.

And one of the subtexts was: I was watching some of the debates in the German Bund, Reichstag, whatever, and

Elon Musk wrote that the alternative, the AFD alternative for

Deutschland, that so-called right-wing.

They usually don't even call it right-wing.

They call it racist, Nazi, but it is an anti-immigration,

it's kind of like a MAGA movement, but a little bit more extreme.

And I don't think MAGA is extreme at all, excuse me.

But the point I'm making is that they took the occasion of this tragedy to tell everybody that this group will never have power.

You'll never sit here.

One of the speakers, you'll never sit here in the parliament.

And that's just,

you know what the public reaction is going to be, as it is all over Europe.

Why are they doing this?

They come from the Middle East.

They're poor.

They have no freedoms.

And they come over here.

And then we say to them, yes.

The fault, dear Caesar, is not in the stars.

It's in us.

It's in us.

We empower people.

We had an 18-year-old Egyptian visitor, foreign student on a student visa where at Georgetown.

and they just uncovered the fact that he was going to kill a bunch of Jews and attack the Israeli consulate.

Why did they let him in?

Was there any background check?

And will he be deported if he's found innocent or guilty?

Will he carry out a sentence?

You're never going to get respect from the Middle East until you insist on a code of behavior.

And when you insist on that code of behavior, you will be liked by the Middle East.

If you tell a student from the Middle East, you are a guest of the United States of America, you have a student visa, you are going to be adjudicated on your behavior.

If you come over here from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, West Bank, wherever, and you go to Georgetown, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, we expect you to follow the rules of our society and legal system.

If you break them as a guest,

if you break them,

you break them, you're going to go home.

You're going to be prosecuted and you're not coming back.

And if you would do that, the message would get out and then you would not see students from the Middle East trashing the Stanford president's office, occupying the Manhattan Bridge, the Bay Bridge, shutting down

traffic, defacing a federal cemetery.

You wouldn't see any of that.

You know, I lived overseas off and on.

If you counted the cumulative months, it was close to three years.

And I can tell you, I was driving in Greece once, and it was during the oil embargo, and they had even and odd license plates, right?

And you had, if you were a tourist and you rented a car, you got a piece of paper that said that your

last digit on your license plate allowed you to go both even and odd.

So I was driving in the Peloponnese.

I was actually driving by my, I was driving by myself.

No, there was another guy with me.

And I got pulled over by a Greek policeman.

And it was kind of nice in Greece that they still had guys that looked like Roderick Rutherford or something.

Only he was on a motorcycle.

He had boots up to his, you know what I mean?

He had that kind of YMCA look.

He had the hat and the boots and he was all dressed in black leather.

And he came out.

I spoke spoke some Greek, but he spoke some English.

And basically, he said, You broke the law.

And I said, I'm so sorry, I'm a guest in your country.

But I showed him all the papers.

And he got very angry.

And he said in Greek, this is not fair.

You're a xenos, zinni.

You're one of the xeni, xeni.

You're a foreigner, and you're getting rights that we don't have in Greece.

I can't, my family can't drive a day.

Why do you get to?

And I said, I think it's for promoting tourism.

I don't know.

They just said, if I rent the car, I can drive on either Eat or even odd days.

He was very angry.

And then I said, I apologize.

I agree with you.

I don't think it's fair.

You should treat everybody.

You're a citizen.

And then when I said that, he got very happy.

And he said, I'm sorry.

I did not know that you had these papers.

But you have the right attitude.

You are a guest in our country and you like Greece.

And you didn't want to break the law.

I said, no, I didn't.

And I don't think I did break the law, but I understand.

And it was like

every month I was in Greece or it was in other countries, I always was afraid to offend the host.

You know what I mean?

Every time my parents sent me a new pair of Levi's under the dictatorship, they would ring you in and they'd say, these Levi's, are you going to sell them here?

And they would, you know, $10 pair of Levi's in 1973, they'd put a $10 tariff on it.

And I say, no, no, I'll do it.

And then I would be even afraid to wear a new pair of Levi's.

Because we were all that way.

We all respected the Greek government.

We did not want to break their laws.

We did not want to be sent home.

We did not want to offend the cultural sensibilities.

If they said, Victor, you're going to have an apartment from, remember this, from 1.30 to 3 o'clock, you are not going to make a noise because it's siesta.

You're not going to hang your underwear outside the window.

You're not going to have your t-shirts

dry in the wind on a clothesline.

You are not going to, on Saturday,

Friday nights, make a lot of noise to disrupt your neighbors.

You're not going to try to get up at six o'clock in the morning and bang your pots.

Remember this.

And that was the attitude.

And why can't we insist on that here?

I don't know.

If I may, Victor, because you live so much time overseas, if you had done something wrong,

you would have thought it would have been natural to never be

allowed back into the country.

Oh yeah, that's why one of the reasons I was, besides I had respect for my host,

I wanted to come back and I didn't want to have something, even the visa, you had, I had a student visa sometimes, but a couple of times I went over and there was a 90 day, I think it was 90 days, and you

And when you left, they would tell you, okay, you're not coming back in if you don't have a visa, and they would punish you.

And I was very careful, and

I led a couple of tours there.

If you go to a Greek archaeological site and you lecture, it's against the law to a foreign group.

You have to have a permit from the National Archaeological Service because they're trying to protect the union of

guides, right?

You have to hire a local guide for your group.

So, when I took a group from Cal State, we had 30 people.

I went and drove all the way up to this consulate in San Francisco, and I filled out all these pages and pages and I got

a pass with my picture on it, kind of a passport that allowed me to speak at archaeological sites for five years, I think it was.

And I used that on two occasions.

So every time I'd go to an archaeological site, some guide would see me and she would, mostly were female, and she'd see there was no other Greek with me guide.

And then she would call the police.

And then the police would come and they would escort me in Olympia Olympia or Delphi down to the police station.

And they knew,

and as he said to me, I have to do this because the guides are very powerful.

They're more powerful than the police union.

So we're going to make you walk in front of them.

And then we would get to the police station and I'd show him all this documentation.

He'd start laughing.

Great job.

I'm so happy you brought your people over.

It helps the tourist industry.

And

carry that all the time.

I appreciate it.

You don't know how many foreign groups try to cheat and they don't have papers, so that's why the guides are angry.

They have to have a living.

They have families.

I said, I understand entirely.

And he said, if I were you, as you walk out of the site, go up to the guides and give them a little tip.

So

I would do that every time.

But the whole point I'm making is that

there's something in classical ideas, it goes back to Homer, and it's the zenos.

The xenos.

You treat guests very well and guests

treat the host well.

And you don't come over here and suddenly inflict, impose your views on your host and start demanding, especially when

the host has been accused, not us, but Europe, of imperialism and colonialism, and they are so sensitive about it.

You don't play the cultural imperialist.

And that's what these students from the Middle East are doing.

And I say that with certainty, because I walked across the Stanford campus for four months, and I would see students from the Middle East come up to me and scream and yell, river to the sea, and try to give me literature and then argue and yell.

And I thought, you know what, I would always say the same thing.

There's a rule at Stanford, you can't camp overnight.

You are obstructing the passage of 16,000 people to the student union.

They have a right to walk and be unimpeded.

They have a right not to see people people sleeping in front of them day and night.

Now, you may think that's genocide.

I don't care, but you're a guest here.

And I would say that to people.

I did it on two occasions.

And they got really freaked out.

What are you talking about?

And they got freaked out because they had no respect for their host.

Because their host would probably say,

is it okay if you stay four months?

Do you like me?

Please, please, please.

And that's the wrong attitude.

New sheriff in town, Victor.

I hope so.

Donald Trump, I wouldn't.

He's not going to tolerate that.

And you know what?

He's not going to tolerate that because he represents the majority of American people are fed up.

And they don't like to apologize non-stop.

They have nothing to apologize for.

Nothing.

And you can see that with the people around him.

And they're not going to be, oh, he doesn't like me.

Oh, we'd have fewer student visa.

They're going to tell the universities, we know what you're doing.

You're bringing people over here who are not

no background checks and you're charging them a premium full tuition room and board to make money.

And then you let them break the rules, not just of your campus, that's your business if you want to run a lawless campus, but you allow them to come off your campus and shut down our freeways, shut down our bridges, deface our monuments.

And

then you protect them.

Well, we're going to arrest them and we're going to charge them with felonies and we're going to yank their student visas if they do that.

And then to encourage the others, as the French say, you'll only have to do it once or twice.

And the word will get, I think the word's already gotten out.

The campuses are very quiet right now.

They know that

Trump is coming in, and they will be on a plane in two seconds if they break U.S.

law.

Let us pray.

Hey, Victor, first of all, I've got to wrap my head around the image of you doing some sort of

low-grade perp walk in Greece because of your

policeman was.

It was at Olympia.

It was at Olympia the most and Gelphi, but the one in Olympia, the guy walked me in.

He was very nice.

And then we got into the office and he asked me if I wanted coffee.

And I showed him that I bought all these papers.

It was just like 20 pages with stamps on everyone.

And he just said, ah, paper,

doesn't matter.

I don't want to see them.

Just sit down, Mr.

Hanson.

Have us some coffee.

We got to wait 10 minutes.

And the whole point was we got to make sure the guys think that I'm

yelling and screaming at you and you're going to be in jail.

And then he said, no, okay, 10 minutes up.

We're going to walk back.

So we walk back and he walks over to the guides and I said, well, what did they say?

And

I said that you were severely humiliated, that you felt terrible, that you almost were jailed.

So he said, on the way out, give them a tip.

They're good people.

They have a union.

They have families to feed.

Oh, man.

So every time I went to the, that was the second site I stopped.

I was only 29, 30, I don't know what I was.

First tour I ever led.

And after that, every time I got to the Agora, I got to Sunian.

You name the site that I went to.

I went right over to the archaeological warden of the site.

I showed him all the paperwork.

And then I went over, if I saw a foreign tour, I went over to the foreign guides, I mean the Greek guides, and I said, I'm very sorry, but this is an American group that would not have come here.

It's a university group in Cal State, and we're not taking business away.

They're not tourists.

And would you like to talk to us?

And sometimes they would actually come over, even, you know.

And I said,

you know what?

I feel really bad.

Maybe you want to talk to us and we'll give a tip.

So they would come over and I'd tell everybody, won't you give them $5?

And then they would get ecstatic.

They'd make, you know, $100

for tips.

Yeah.

Wow.

So that's what you're supposed to do, especially in a wonderful country like Greece.

People are so friendly.

They've had such a horrific history of being killed and slaughtered by the Ottomans and World War II by the Germans.

And they're still there, and you have to have some...

They're kind of like the Israelis, the Kurds, the Armenians, that no matter what the world does to them, they don't, you know what I mean?

They persist.

And they all live in bad neighborhoods, and they're all small populations, and they're all persecuted for it.

They're like Israel.

I just think if you're an american whatever your politics are you should look at israel and you should look at the kurds and you should look at the greeks and the armenians and the cypriots and say these are unusual people in very dangerous neighborhoods and they're they have a long illustrious history and for the most part they're democratic and they're trying to be just and civil in a very difficult place where their neighbors want to destroy them and we're going to lend them our support and when we go visit them we're going to make sure that they're happy with us.

That's always been.

The Lebanese into that equation.

Yes, the Lebanese are wonderful people, and they're in a very dangerous place.

Well, Victor, you've been terrific.

You know, you're just this anti-EOR.

Victor is just.

I know.

I'm talking.

We're going from topic to topic, and

I'm upbeat.

I don't know what happens.

Donald Trump will do that.

I mean, I thought that.

Just something about this past year as it closes that the things they did to him, the things they tried to destroy him, it would have destroyed.

I was just always put myself, I think all of us should in his place.

I'm just thinking, if I got up in the morning and they had fined me, you know, $400 million, if I was reading that I was Hitler, that people were happy they almost killed me if they were taking me off the ballot and I knew I hadn't done anything wrong,

I couldn't take it.

I mean, days would you have to be in court?

No, I I don't know how he did it.

I was deposed twice.

Just being deposed something is very unnerving.

I've been a witness in two court cases, and it's not fun.

And he was there the whole time.

Not only was he there, he went out into a bodega and talked to people.

Anyway,

whatever people's politics are, he's an indestructible force of nature.

Well, Victor, people, as you know, leave comments about you and the show.

And here's one from the Blade of Perseus.

Jim

Ehrlich writes,

The genocide of the Volga Germans was done by the

communists right after the Russian Revolution.

My family left Russia in 1912, and anyone who stayed died from starvation in 1920, 21.

The communists took their seed, corn, and livestock and left them to die.

I follow Victor, and he is one of the few people that mentioned the the plight of the Volga.

Well, you know, it was even worse than that because

there was a residual population along the Volga.

I don't know if it was 200 or 300,000.

They had been there from, I don't know, post-medieval times.

And Stalin, after the war was over, they forcibly removed them and starved them to death.

That was not just during the Revolution in the 20s.

That was after World War.

During World War II, they considered anybody who spoke German or had German ancestry, and there were none, very few of them were ever found to be pro-Hitler.

Sort of like the Japanese.

It was much worse than the Japanese internment.

They destroyed him, killed the Japanese internment.

Nobody died.

There was no killing.

There was not one single Japanese American that was ever found in the United States to engage in espionage.

They were in Hawaii, but not in the continental United States.

And yet we put them in camps.

And thanks to

the McClatchy newspapers and

unfortunately, Earl Warren

and FDR.

Well, Victor, you've been terrific.

And I want to thank you for sharing all the wisdom you did.

I want to thank our listeners for listening.

I want to thank those who write me to say, hey, Jack, I get civil thoughts.

I like it.

So go to civilthoughts.com.

That's the free weekly email newsletter I write that has 14 recommended readings.

I think you'll enjoy it.

So

visit Victor's website, The Blade of Purchase.

By the way, if you're on X

at V D Hansen is Victor's handle.

Victor, again, terrific.

Thanks for everything.

Folks, we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.