The New Movement: Art, Immigration and Diplomacy

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to listen to our star, namesake, Victor Davis-Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is a best-selling author, syndicated columnist, farmer, classicist, philologist.

Classicist is one of the big focuses of today's episode.

We're recording on Saturday, the 21st of December, and this particular episode will be up on December 24th.

We have a special guest with us for the big beginning of today's episode, and that's Justin Schubau, who is the president of the National Civic Art Society.

And we're going to talk about him.

Victor will ask him some questions.

I'm going to get in one or two also on making America beautiful again, and we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, and I would like again to introduce Justin Schubau.

He's going to turn on his camera magically because, folks, we are not only recording this for audio purposes, but we've begun to record video versions of this

podcast.

And I think at the end of the show, Victor might tell people where they can find them.

You know, I had the great pleasure of meeting Justin earlier this year at the National Conservatism Conference, where he and some others were talking about civic and public architecture and beauty.

And then he's also a very good friend of Sabin Howard, who, Victor, you remember you interviewed Sabin, who's the sculptor who designed the beautiful, striking, and I think game-changing

World War I sculpture, the official sculpt

memorial now down in Washington,

A Soldier's Journey, and more to come from Sabin, I hope, in the future.

But, you know, we found out Donald Trump also

has great passion for these

things, these things, beauty,

finding our heritage in sculpture, finding our heritage in public architecture.

So as we approach the

forthcoming 47th presidential administration, and I think Justin,

who was an appointee of Donald Trump in the prior administration, he was on the U.S.

Commission of Fine Arts.

I think he might find himself again in important positions and doing important things to make America beautiful again.

So, Justin, welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

If you'd like to give us a little correction, if I need any correcting on your introduction and a thing or two you might want to say, and then we're going to have about 20, 25 minutes of discussion with you.

Well, that was all great.

I'm really appreciative of being here.

Longtime fan of Victor's work and

just a true honor.

Justin, let me just get to the quick.

You represent, I don't know if it's a restoration or rediscovery of the classical traditions in Western art, and particularly in America.

How did we go from the point,

I don't know at what magic moment it was in the 20s, where we had people in

Daniel French, who did the Lincoln Memorial or St.

Gaudians who did the Sherman Monument.

And then we had this takeover of postmodernism or Impressionist or representational art and public statuary and

modern art, etc.

And then

is it your feeling that your champion, I'm just going to sculpture, it applies to architecture, but the Sabin Howard or the Frederick Hart,

what is it, a reaction or a restoration?

Is that what you're envisioned for public statuary architecture?

We would

go back to the neoclassical mode that was that really when you come to New York or Boston or San Francisco, people are always struck by neoclassical architecture and statuary, even though it's in the minority now.

It's all from a prior generation.

It's not being done except from that Frederick Hart school, at least in terms of sculpture and statuary, Sabine Howard, et cetera.

Sure.

So

my organization

believes that the greatest celebratory commemorative works are those done in the classical tradition.

You know, you look at the Lincoln Memorial, you look at the Jefferson Memorial.

My favorite overlooked memorial in D.C.

is the Grant Memorial.

in front of the Capitol building, where you could really see both the heroism of the troops, but also the suffering and the tragedy.

You mentioned the new national World War One Memorial.

I think ever since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is obviously modernist and minimalist, and there was an incredible controversy about it, and then ultimately realistic statues by Frederick Hart

were added to satisfy the public.

You know, maybe that kind of bleak modernism was appropriate for the Vietnam War, but it set a trend

where we no longer

build

statues or memorials that evince heroism and valor.

And in fact,

I worked with the person behind the World War I memorial to ensure that the competition for the design would require that the memorial have heroism and valor in it.

And so.

was that a contentious struggle?

No, no.

I mean, it was not controversial at all.

Now, I mean, among ordinary people, now, there was

a mention of it in an architectural newspaper saying that the memorial glorifies war.

I don't think that's true at all.

If you look at it, it shows, yes, absolutely, the courage of the troops entering the crucible of battle,

charging with their rifles and bayonets, and you can see the officer

encouraging them.

But then, yes, you do see death and destruction.

There is

what I would call a stylized broken cross representing a kind of destruction within Western civilization.

But the memorial does end with an actual victory parade.

with the troops flying holding the flag.

And for Saban Howard, the sculptor, he describes this as representing America on the ascendance on the world stage.

It is

a victory memorial.

And I think, or I'm hoping that it will change the direction of American commemorative works.

A bleak

counterexample of the general trend among the artistic establishment is the United Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where that plane went down.

You know, what the passengers did on that flight, storming the cockpit, is up there with Paul Revere's ride.

Ordinary citizens fighting back and saving a core building of government.

Yet, that memorial contains nothing commemorating the heroism of the passengers.

What is the status right now, if I could ask you, about the Eisenhower memorial?

So we launched and led a campaign to stop the proposed design for that memorial by Frank Gehry, you know, so-called starchitect, very, very flashy, postmodernist architect.

Originally, the sole statue in that memorial was going to be a life-size barefoot boy seated on a plank, kind of like a Tom Sawyer image, based on a speech Eisenhower gave his first political speech called Dreams of a Barefoot Boy.

But it was a matter of political hocum, as Eisenhower would later admit.

And we started this fight.

Ultimately, the Eisenhower family came out in force against the design, which is completely out of scope and scale.

The main feature is this 400-foot-long steel screen or so-called tapestry held up by 80-foot-high pillars.

Now, Congress objected to the scheme so much that it upheld funding for four years.

But alas, although we improved the design by forcing Gary

to remove two sections of it, each as big as a basketball court, two giant screens, and also got rid of the barefoot boy,

the Eisenhower family essentially caved to pressure.

And once that happened, Congress authorized the memorial and it got built.

Is there going to be any statuary at all of Eisenhower?

Well, it did open, and there are statues of Eisenhower as

president and supreme allied commander.

So that's better than him being a barefoot boy.

But the main feature of the memorial, the so-called tapestry, it's supposed to depict Normandy Beach today at peacetime, but really it just looks like a bunch of scribble and you have no idea what you're looking at.

Justin, could you tell us your expectations for the Trump, Donald Trump's next administration, given especially what he did in his first term with various, I think there are about five five or six executive orders related to art, beauty, sculpture.

And I associate that also with the commission Victor was on, the 1776 Presidential Advisory Commission,

which also was an attempt to

restore and reclaim America's heritage in some way, shape, or form.

Anyway, what are your expectations for Donald Trump in his next term?

Well, the first major cultural move that Trump made in his first term was issuing a revolutionary executive order that reoriented federal architecture from ugly modernism to beautiful classical and traditional design.

The order which, you know, I'll admit my organization instigated and helped draft, looked back to the founding fathers,

Jefferson and Washington.

who consciously chose the classical tradition for Washington, D.C.

and its core buildings of government.

I mean, they even had a direct hand in the design of the White House and Capitol.

And Jefferson had amazing rhetoric talking about how the Capitol is the first temple built for the people.

He said it embellishes with Athenian taste for a nation looking far beyond Athenian destinies.

And the founders began this or inaugurated this classical tradition for American public architecture that lasted for about 150 years.

But then the federal government rejected it and started building brutalist, ugly, dismal federal buildings.

And in more recent years, under the current design program, has been

constructing even avant-garde works that look like art projects or alien spacecraft.

I'd ask people to look at the San Francisco Federal Building as one of the worst of the worst.

Trump recognized this problem.

and issued this amazing executive order that was widely hailed.

Unfortunately, almost immediately after taking office, Biden rescinded it.

There was tremendous pressure from the architectural establishment, which is dominated by modernists.

And then

there was also opposition from cultural elites like the New York Times.

They published an editorial titled, What's So Great About Fake Roman Temples?

I mean, the implication being that the Capitol building and the Jefferson Memorial and the Supreme Court are all fake because obviously those are not 2,000 years old, old, 2,000 years old.

Now, I have, I'm very hopeful that President Trump will reissue that order.

I mean, I think there's going to be a general agenda to make America beautiful again, and that will be a key part of it.

If you, Justin, if you were the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, given the budget and the nature, how can

the National Endowment for the Arts affect this or what could you do?

Because it's largely grant-making, isn't it?

Well, the endowment, which has a budget of $210 million, is the largest funder of arts and arts education in the country.

My vision for the NEA comes from Dana Joya, the masterful poet and

translator who ran it under George W.

Bush.

He said a great nation deserves great art.

I think that the NEA needs to give grants to the most talented

artists, musicians, choreographers, and so on to

design

or create pieces of art that redound to America's greatness.

And one way I would like to do that would be to create an initiative to celebrate the grand tradition of American civic architecture that goes back to the founders.

And so that's part of my vision.

There's also incredible opportunity here given the semi-quincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration.

I would love to see the NEA perhaps fund a design competition for a new monument or memorial.

The NEA actually funded the competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

And also, the NEA chairman has a role in the Garden of American Heroes that President Trump said he's going to build.

And we need to make sure that the statues are done right, that we don't get kitsch, we don't get mannequins, but that we have art of the quality of the National World War I Memorial by Sabin Howard.

And in fact, I encourage Sabin to enter that competition in the first place.

We need to find the talent where it is.

Just because a sculpture is figurative does not mean that it's good.

No, that's absolutely right.

One of the things,

it seems that a lot of the fuel for postmodernism or representational art or whatever term we use comes from the university art departments.

They seem to be dominated by modernists.

But I noticed every time I go each autumn to Hillsdale College and their sculptures that are arranged of Thatcher and Churchill, but especially their Romanesque new church.

It was the largest church built in the United States over, I think, a six-year period when it was inaugurated two years ago.

But

it's a beautiful building.

It's a Romanesque art building.

And I think it's patterned after the Cathedral at Oxford.

But

that's very rare.

Here where I work at Stanford, there's a very good

classical artist, John Peck, and he's giving classes

in acrylics and watercolors.

And I guess it's in the tradition of what the Greek artistic critics said, that you want to capture what the eye sees.

That was the point of archaic art.

And then in classical art,

you want to see that something even better than the art the eye sees.

It's not necessarily always realistic.

It's perfection.

If you look at some of the things by Meniscales or Praxilates,

and especially Renaissance art.

But it's too bad because I guess what I'm trying to grasp at, we have a public desire.

There seems to be an innate hunger for that type of art that's inspirational

and makes us want to aspire to greater things.

And yet, the artistic world is cynical and nihilistic and wants us to see things that bring out cynicism or nihilism or depression in us.

And

it's quite a, and that's why I'm very confident because

I think the Trump movement shows that there is this popular support for classical norms, and

that applies to art and literature as well.

Absolutely.

I mean, one term I like to use

when it comes to what kind of public art we should building is legibility.

Is there symbolism and allegory and meaning that the ordinary person can understand?

It's not some question mark or inkblot.

These works should be making a statement or even an exclamation.

And talented sculptors and artists can achieve that.

If you're doing some kind of modernist, minimalist work, sometimes they're not trying to make a statement at all or they're making a bleak statement I mean to give a maybe a controversial example I say look at the memorial in New York City for September 11 these two giant black holes in the ground literally water going down the drain to me that's an image of looking into the abyss when what we could have done is build upward in the same site that the World Trade Center used to exist and build something magnificent and inspiring.

But that's very often just not what we get from modern artists today.

I mean,

Theodore Ardorno,

the Frankfurt theorist,

he said there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.

And I think that's summarizing a particular worldview.

But I completely reject that.

We do not want.

Is it true the old classical argument that rebounded in the 40s and 50s and 60s that people who

that the first generation of modern artists at least were trained by classical masters, so a Picasso could draw.

But in subsequent generations,

those techniques and that craftsmanship was abandoned.

And so you get the impression now that the young artist who is a representational or modern or postmodern artist lacks the basic artistic skills to do classical art or classical architecture.

Right.

Yeah.

Tom Wolf

famously said, modern art is creativity without skill.

You know, you'll go to a contemporary art museum and you think, well, I could have done that.

But the artist's response is, well, but you didn't.

You didn't.

And so they're demonstrating their cleverness, their ability to play within the art world.

You know, it's a demonstration of power.

You know, there was that recent artwork of a banana duct tape on the wall that sold for $6.2 million.

That's an amazing achievement by the artist, right?

What a clever, powerful, I mean, trickster, you might say.

And there's no skill involved.

It's conceptual art.

It's about, well, I had the idea of it.

It's in some ways representative almost a kind of the end of art.

You know, art has become so self-conscious of itself, so questioning of every fundamental principle that it's ceased to exist.

Hey, Justin, we have just a few minutes left.

And again, I appreciate your joining us here.

You mentioned before the National Garden of Heroes.

And Donald Trump, I think, as he was maybe in his last week or two as president,

he more fully, he issued a more fulsome executive order that had over 200 figures

from Arthur Ashe, Cy Young, baseball, Bill Bill Buckley, just a wide

spectrum of great Americans.

So, could you give us a little more on

what Donald Trump's plans were, and do you expect them to be repeated and maybe even expanded?

So, sure, President Trump issued an executive order creating this garden of American heroes that would include many, many figures of great figures from American history.

It didn't state where it would be, but it referred, I believe it referred to Mount Rushmore.

And I've heard that maybe

it will be located near that work, obviously, one of the great works of American public sculpture.

And it could also be, you know, a sort of destination that people would go to see

art.

I mean, I have high hopes for the garden.

I think one thing they will start with is gathering already existing works works of art since you don't have to build them from scratch and we can find the best that is outwear out there but then they will you know commission artists to do to do the new works

well what just a final question during that frenzied period of iconoclysm when we were destroying and toppling statues say from

2019 to 2024 not that it has ceased completely but and I know that some of them, maybe if you, there's the difference between Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, and somebody like James Longstreet,

who after the war

worked hard for

he was an abolitionist, essentially, but he was kind of a tragic figure.

But that was all lost in that frenzy.

Some of the works that were destroyed and

replaced were not just Southern generals.

Where are all those?

And is there any, were they some of them were removed?

I think there was one at the Natural Museum, the Museum of Natural History in New York.

What happened to them and where are they?

And are they ever going to come back?

Well, the one you just mentioned at the Natural History Museum was a statue of Theodore Roosevelt.

You know, I think he was accompanied by,

you know, like, you know, he was on a horse accompanied by a black man and a Native American.

So, you know, it offended various people.

That, I believe, was moved to North Dakota,

even though it was, you know, artistically a great achievement.

I mean, another

example, this one's really outrageous, is the New York City Council removed a statue of Thomas Jefferson.

Talk about

iconoclasm

at its worst.

So, you know, I think that obviously,

you know, people went too far under certain circumstances.

you know it is interesting to talk about Theodore Roosevelt he was actually extremely interested in art and architecture he wrote a review of the 1913 Armory show but he also said that a national greatness that it does not include artistic production is but a malformed greatness and I think that's the sort of attitude that President Trump is demonstrating.

I mean great statesmen throughout history going back to Pericles Pericles and the building of the Parthenon, have understood the importance of great art and architecture for the body politic.

So I'm extremely optimistic about what's going to happen next.

And it could be quick.

Pericles,

that was the great achievement.

He completed the Parthenon in 20 years, his team of architects and sculpture.

Well, if anybody's listening in the Trump transition, and I know that some people have, are,

we have a great guest, Justin Schuben, and he would be the ideal director of the National Endowment for Arts.

And good luck, Justin.

Whatever role you'll play, I'm sure it's going to be influential and determined.

Well, thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for joining us, Justin.

And to our listeners, we will be back after these important messages.

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Hey, we're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Again, we are recording on the 21st of December and this episode is coming out on Christmas Eve, December 24th.

Santa will be coming down everyone's chimney soon.

Victor, a couple things we need to talk about would, I guess, include

the border wall and this craziness.

You may have talked about this with the great Sammy Wink,

the craziness of selling the wall.

Two things that happened yesterday,

newsworthy, and then Victor, we'll talk about this a little and then on to illegal immigration in more general is that Donald Trump himself

filed some amicus brief.

I'm not sure exactly in what court to stop the Biden administration from auctioning off this existing wall that has, you know, it's just sitting there rusting.

And then the auctioneer today has pulled the auction of this taxpayer-funded protection of our border.

Victor, any thoughts on that?

And then

into

broader on immigration?

Well, I mean, it's pure nihilism.

I think I said with Sammy, we mentioned just a second.

Biden hates Trump more than he likes the American people, because if he liked the American people, he would have said the following.

The people have spoken.

The wall came up in the campaign.

Even my vice president, Camilla Harris, supported it.

She did not oppose it during her 100-day metamorphoses.

And by the way, Jack, where is she now?

All those positions that she carved out that were not representative of her last 40 years, but she swore to us that she was for fracking, for border enforcement, for a wall.

I haven't heard her.

She could stay, she could appear out of nowhere in the last 30 days and say, you know what?

I had a change of heart during this last 100 days of that campaign, and I told you that I would stop illegal immigration and Wawal.

I assumed, and I was asked about it, and I said I was happy to see it built.

Okay, let's build it.

She's not going to do that, obviously, because she was never sincere.

She was always disingenuous.

But it was very cynical because they would rather charge the

American taxpayer will get hit twice on this.

Not that it's a great sum, but it's emblematic.

They'll get hit the fact that the materials are there for a lot of miles.

They sold them for scrap or for other uses, you know, other federal agencies, other private entities that will use it for some type of fencing,

perhaps.

And then due to the Biden hyperinflation,

and that included building materials.

When we have to purchase the next elements of the wall,

they'll be much more expensive.

But you know,

I just want to talk a little bit about illegal immigration.

I first started talking about this.

I wrote Mexifornia 23 years ago.

And

it was very controversial.

It was so controversial, Jack, that I had just been appointed to the Hoover Institution.

And the director, John Rason, who was a saint,

he was a wonderful person.

He called me.

He said, Victor, I've got a problem.

I've got a lot of open borders, free market, libertarians, and

they have no problem with you.

In those days, you didn't, I was the first person that came in that under the new system that you had to be tenured by Stanford.

But in that transitional period, the old system of a unanimous vote was assumed for senior fellows.

Okay.

And he said, there's a lot of otherwise conservative,

moderate, some left, but they don't like what you wrote.

So I got to wait six months.

And that shows you how controversial it was because it wasn't just the left.

It was the corporate right who wanted cheap labor and the libertarian philosophers who thought that, you know, borders was a federal regulation and get rid of it.

That being said,

the attitude of the left right now is they said it could cost a trillion dollars to deport people.

It's too expensive.

And think of that logic, everyone.

That logic is if you say, well,

when a highway patrolman is going down the road and he sees somebody swerving around,

it's very expensive to pull the guy over, give him a breath test, arrest him.

have somebody come out and confiscate the car, take him in, brook him, then have a trial, then maybe a jury, and da, da, da, da, da.

It's much cheaper just to let him go.

And then that's economical.

That's the attitude of the left.

Well,

yes, we let in 12 million people, and yes, there's crime, and yes, they tax Social Security, and people have suggested it may be a trillion dollars in labor and capital for now what would be 30 million plus illegal immigrants.

But the cost to rectify what they did is what they're arguing.

And therefore, we shouldn't follow the law because

basically they're saying, well, we were weaving all over the road.

It's too expensive at this late date to

punish us.

But we can do it very quickly.

There were three things that Trump did.

He built,

he repaired 500 miles plus,

and then he built 30 or 40 with a trajectory.

And you couldn't fortify all of it, but it's a 2,000-mile wall.

And he will do it in a year.

The second thing is he will bring back

the demand that you apply for refugee status before you come here.

You just don't come over here and say, you know what, I'm here and I'm illegal.

And by the way, I look back at my situation, I think I'm a refugee.

No, you go to an embassy or a consulate and you make the argument and then you're adjudicated before you come.

You don't come illegally.

The third was catch and release.

We're going to catch you, but you have rights of anybody else, and we don't know whether it's illegal that you came illegally or not, so we'll give you a court date.

A million and a half people have not showed up that already have deep, they've already been adjudicated, they have quasi-deportation.

So, if he did those three things:

stop catch and release, refugee status back in your native country, finish the wall.

The other thing he could do is

he could stop

the tax-free remittances.

And there's 63 billion that go to Mexico and there's 60 that go to Central America.

And he slaps a 30% tax.

You're talking $18, $20 billion.

It would more than pay for the wall.

And you could just say, we don't care what the status is of anybody who use Western Union or online banking.

Anything electronically that goes to Mexico or Central America until the immigration problem is solved, will be taxed at 20 or 30 percent.

And then he can threaten tariffs as well, as he did last time.

Because Mexico knows what it is doing.

It sees this as a deliberate policy.

It's the Frederick Jackson-Turner safety vow.

We're going to let all these people go so they don't march on Mexico City for redress of grievances, people in Chiapas, Michokan, Oaxaca.

We get the money.

It's a greater revenue stream stream than oil or tourism.

We have to have it.

We want, as Obador said, we want all, we've had 40 million expatriates.

It's a beautiful thing.

The third thing is, and I think they're really going to hit this, if you look at the 14th Amendment, it does not say

flat out, unequivocally, that anybody born on the soil of the United States is a citizen.

It says anybody born on the soil who is not subject to the laws of a different entity,

basically.

And so when you're coming here as foreign parents, you are subject as a citizen of Mexico or Russia to those laws.

If you look at the 27, I think it is, European countries,

17 of them just say, no way.

These are liberal left-wing that we all admire on the left.

Leftists are always saying, we've got to do what the EU does.

They don't allow anchor.

birth.

And the 10 that do, I went back and looked at this, they require all sorts of things that at least one parent be a citizen or a naturalized citizen or they have they apply in advance that they know they're going to be in a foreign country when the baby it's just completely different than those are the most liberal and they would be considered conservative i think there's only three countries that have this anchor baby clause and if we stopped that believe me we would have we we would remove an enormous incentive of people coming here deliberately to have a baby so they could anchor relatives, etc.

The other

I think it's really important is that the deportations,

they have iterations.

So the first deportation, easy, 500,000 felons.

We know that.

Everybody will love that.

The next a million and a half felons.

Excuse me, a million and a half, the next one.

These are people, as I said, they're not felons, but they have already been adjudicated and found to be here unlawfully and either didn't go to their deportation hearings or refugee status hearings, and they're subject to immediate

deportation.

That's 2 million.

The third,

I think, is politically viable.

Those are people who are able-bodied,

not working.

on public assistance, state, local, or federal, and have only been here, say been here less than five years.

That would be three or four million.

The fourth iteration would be easy.

Those would be people, and Trump had signed that order.

Remember, Jack, about terrorist people

from countries that sponsor terrorism would not be given visas.

So if you could just say, we don't want people right now coming from Russia, from Somalia, from Sudan, from Iraq, from Iran, from Venezuela.

You can get 20 countries that sponsor terrorism or

mainland China, mainland China.

And those,

we could say, we don't want you coming.

And if you're here illegally from those countries, you're subject to immediate deportation.

Then we get into the territory of

Well, what if they have been here five years and what if they are working and what if they are not on public assistance?

Then I think you could say then we can offer you a green card, not not citizenship, a green card.

And

I think you would have a lot of public support.

Why do I believe that?

Because

in the past, illegal immigration and the efforts to stop it were opposed by the La Raza

Identity Politics DEI woke group.

And they said this was racist or it's

Mexico has claims on the American Southwest, etc.

But when you talk to Hispanic communities today, and this was evident in the last election, they are at odds with their bi-coastal university media political elites.

They're at odds because these people coming in the

there's two things about this immigration that's different and makes it politically toxic for the left.

Number one, they're coming in huge numbers.

And they are not going to Malibu or, as we've seen, Martha's Vineyard.

And they're not going to Maui.

They're not going to Calarama or

one of the four Obama mansions.

They're going in the Rio Grande Valley.

They're going to Fresno County.

They're going to inner city Chicago.

They're going where you are, Queens, Bronx, Manhattan.

And these

groups are traditionally left-wing groups, and they are angry that their activist leadership promotes this in the abstract, and they suffer in in the concrete.

The second thing that makes this politically viable, and I think Trump will be able to do this politically, is

half these people, I would call them the Biden illegals,

half of the Biden illegals are not coming from Mexico.

And I think about 40% are not coming from Latin America or Mexico.

So somebody who's in the Rio Grande Valley and he's a representative or state legislator,

he can say, these people are overwhelming and they're from China.

They're from Syria.

They're from Angola.

We have no vested in, we, the expatriate community, don't want this.

And these constituents don't have a lot of expatriate communities.

So I think it'll be politically viable.

I really do.

The other thing they can do very quickly is, and they've talked about this, I think it's a federal law already for five or ten years.

If they can just, Trump can just announce tomorrow with an executive order

and then he can reify it with congressional legislation.

He can just say, if anybody is detained here

who entered the United States and resided illegally,

you will not be given a green card from now on for 20 years.

You will never be able to come in the United States legally for 20 years.

So we want to warn all of you,

all of you who have not been detained, all of you who are under the radar, please go home and apply for legal Visa cards or legal green cards or work cards or student visas.

Because when we take office or when we set this policy, the clock is ticking.

And if you are apprehended, you will never be allowed to apply for a legal green card.

That would set off a gold rush in the opposite direction.

Well, that sounds like an exceptional, almost a 10-point

plan, Victor.

I hope it does, because I think that Tom Holman and Christine Noam and all these people, they're the right people.

And you have to be inured to criticism.

Let's remember, you know, 62, I think before the election, I saw some polling numbers, 62, 65, somewhere in there, percent of Americans favored deportation.

Just a deportation.

Like getting rid of all the illegals.

So that is a great political number to work from.

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Hey, Victor,

I'm betting, and I hope what you've just gone through with us,

we will see that in some form of writing by you.

But there's another piece you've just written.

It's up on your website, The Blade of Perseus, victorhanson.com.

You've written this.

This is your essay for American Greatness.

Are the years of madness ending?

I strongly encourage our listeners to check it out if they haven't already.

Victor, it's a terrific

piece.

Would you give us a little rundown on what it's about?

Well, this election was a mandate.

As we've talked before,

very rarely have Republicans done the following: won the popular vote by a clear margin,

won a very clear majority in the Electoral College of 312 electoral votes,

and then entered office as they will in a month with the White House, small but nevertheless a Speaker who is a Republican in the House, a small majority, they own the House,

a wider majority in the veto proof.

They cannot,

excuse me, not that they have 66, but the left will not be able to veto things.

They won't be able to do it.

There is a Republican, 53 Republican senators, and they control the Supreme Court.

They have all.

And then the third leg of this trifecta.

Popular vote, Electoral College, all the branches of government and every issue that Donald Trump ran on.

Close the border.

fund the police,

develop energy, deter our enemies,

worry about people in East Palestine or the people suffering in the Carolinas and Georgia rather than giving a billion dollars as we did this week to Ecuador.

All of those have 60 to 65 percent.

And so I'm very happy.

That was what part of the article was.

That gives you the political wherewithal to stop the madness.

But as we just

talked with Justin,

this was a cultural revolution that we witnessed for the last five, six years.

It started in opposition to Trump.

So Trump is waging a counterrevolution.

And it's got to be cultural, economic, and what Justin

talks about in the realms of art or literature.

It has to be It has to be 360 degrees because that's what happened.

We woke up, and I'll define the madness, you know it better than I do.

We woke up one day and it just hit us like this.

I knocked off, I hit it so much, I knocked off my hat.

But we woke up

and

there were three genders, three sexes.

Not that 0.0001 historically have suffered from gender dysphoria, but now that was a civil rights movement and people who thought that you should treat people with tolerance and kindness and equality and parity that suffered from gender dysphoria.

No, that was different.

This was a category where biological males had a right to dress in your daughter's locker room.

I'm just taking the most egregious example.

And then we were told that we were going to change names.

We were going to rename buildings, toppled statues.

1619 was the foundational date of America, not 1776.

We were told that it was archaic, ossified, passe to vote on Election Day.

Suddenly, we were told 70% of the electorate through early balloting and mail and would not show up on Election Day.

And by the way, the error rate, rejection rate would go by, a drop by a magnitude.

We were told that the

military was a social cultural organization and it was going to be on the tip of the spear of providing abortions and resistance to this anti-abortion craziness.

That's what we were told.

It was going to have transgendered issues, indoctrination, and we were going to focus on white, the three pillars of

white privilege, white rage, white supremacy.

quoting Lloyd Austin and General Milley.

And we lost 45,000 soldiers.

And then we were, it was just everywhere, every element of our life.

And so then this rejection came in.

And now Donald Trump is saying the madness is over.

We're going to fund buildings that look like classical, beautiful buildings.

We're going to have art that looks like what our eyes see, not just trickster stuff that we just talked about.

We're going to see,

we're not going to rename buildings anymore.

at least not for the next four or five years.

We're looking at the universities in a new way.

We're saying the clotting gaze of the world, you're not going to just institutionalize anti-Semitism.

You're not going to say that plagiarism is okay for me, but not for thee.

We don't have to honor the first or the fourth or the fifth or sixth amendment on count.

Yes, you do.

You do because you take federal funds.

You take a lot of federal funds.

We're not going to weaponize the agencies and the bureaus anymore.

In fact, we're going to go one step further as counter-revolutionary.

Donald Trump is going to say, you surveilled Cash Patel.

You tried to destroy him along with Devin Nunes.

He has been a public defender.

He has been a prosecutor.

He has been an investigator.

He has worked for the Senate.

He's worked for

the House.

He's worked for the executive branch.

He, the victim of you, is going to run you.

Same thing with RFK, Tulsi Gabbert, Jay Bataria.

You went after these people, and these are the people we trust most to stop what you're doing because they've been victims of it.

So this is a counter-revolution against the DOJ, the IRS, the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon, all of which have been part of this crazy cultural revolution.

So I think that Trump and the people around him see this.

It's not just George H.W.

Bush comes in and he takes over from Reagan and then he loses to Clinton and then George W.

Bush comes back and stops Clinton.

No.

These people were not even Bill Clinton.

They came into the White House, first under Obama and then under Biden to change the very nature of America in every conceivable fashion.

And to redress that grievance, you have to do the same thing.

And you have an advantage because you're not saying that you're trying to destroy things.

You're trying to restore and save and preserve the work of prior generations, most of whom were better than us, to tell you the truth.

We need to get over this idea that we in the present can use our values and go back and judge, condemn, execute people of the past who had no,

you know, when they had a cataract, they went blind.

When they got an infection, they died.

They had no sewage.

They had no electricity.

They had no cars.

Most of it was just a struggle to live one more day, and we in our decadence and lush leisure and affluence than from the parlour condemned.

Now we're not going to do that anymore.

So I'm really excited for the first time, really, in my adult life.

I like George W.

Bush.

I did not think that he was going to, I mean, with no child left behind or

a lot of the stuff that he allowed, I don't think he was looking at, he was a political reformist.

I don't think he was looking at the entire cultural middle.

And I don't think that John McCain was, and I do not think that Mitt Romney was.

No, they weren't.

Victor, I mentioned that this article can be found on your website, The Blade of Perseus.

The address there is victorhanson.com.

I want to recommend to our listeners that they check it out regularly.

And if you go there, you'll find these essays.

Victor Writes for American Greatness, his weekly syndicated columns, the archives of these podcasts, links to Victor's various books, best-selling books, and his other appearances on other podcasts.

And then you'll find ultra articles which you need to subscribe in order to read them.

Victor writes two or three of those every week.

The current series he's working on is called Turning Points on the Road to Trump's Election.

Terrific stuff.

Five bucks a month gets you in the door and $50 discounted for the full year.

That's the blade of Perseus Victorhanson.com.

Victor,

I sure hope

the efforts to

crack down on the universities have broader consequences for the students there.

Here's a headline from the New York Post

article the other day.

This has to do with the murderer, Luigi Mangioni, who killed the

murdered

head of the CEO of United Healthcare.

Maximilian Meyer, who is a student at Princeton, wrote a piece for the Post, Not-Ed, Why My Ivy League Campus is Rooting for Luigi Mangioni.

And here's just a quick little glimpse from it.

The Emerson College poll found 41% of voters aged 18 to 29 saw Thompson's murder as acceptable, while just 40% found it somewhat or completely unacceptable.

But here at Princeton, a poll of nearly 1,500 students on the Fizz, I'm not sure what that is, social network revealed that

25% found Mangioni's action completely justified, with another 22% saying Thompson's death was deserved.

Only 13% managed to say the killer was purely in the wrong.

This is what is the mindset of today's Ivy Leaguers.

Any thoughts on this, Victor?

Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts.

I want to be very careful what I say.

I spent, you know, I'm 71.

I've spent 50 years

defending the university and the importance of a college education, the importance

of learning literature, art, science, math at a high level beyond high school.

The way that it is practiced now, at least at the elite level, I don't believe that anymore.

I believe that you get those statistics at Princeton either for one or two reasons.

You self-select people

who have lost their moral bearings and they look at Princeton or Stanford or Harvard or Yale as places where they can come and be lectured to and accommodated by similar people people who have lost their moral bearings with the caveat or the, I shouldn't say caveat, the advantage that you will get a cattle brand Harvard degree and that will be entree into riches and career.

Or they come from all over the United States and they come as first year students

and they end up being morally and mentally and intellectually corrupted.

and brainwashed.

And so whatever it is,

they're not mutually exclusive.

They are turning out people for whatever reason that are harmful to the body politic.

They're amoral.

Anywhere you get close to 50%

that would

approve of a person on a video taking a firearm out and shooting them.

And then there is all this hypocrisy.

We just had a tragic shooting in Wisconsin.

And the fact that we don't know much about the shooter tells, and I don't know what the shooter was, but at a Christian school, but anytime in America, it's the Ann Coulter rule.

Anytime in America when you're not giving the normal description of the shooter, you should assume that the left feels that that shooter had some justification because she was part of

the victimized binary.

I don't know what that means in Wisconsin, but we'll see.

But the point I'm making is as soon as that happened, they were calls for gun control.

Here you have an example of a guy with a pistol that he printed out, parts of it at least, that were not metallic,

and he's shooting.

And there hasn't been one person who said on the left, oh my god, we've got an assassin, and he shot this person.

We've got to stop

virtual printing of gun parts.

Let's stop.

Because the left always wants to outlaw stuff.

They don't.

It's almost like they're glorifying guns.

And then the second thing,

this guy was a product product of the upper, upper, upper, upper 1%

as defined by income, money, privilege.

Where are the people saying he is a beneficiary of white privilege?

The person he shot came from the lower middle classes, worked hard, did well in school, pulled himself up from the bootstraps, and was running a large company.

And that large company was functioning in a post-Obama, Obamacare environment where the government came in and controlled things and limited competition.

We know that in every other realm of economic activity, that means higher cost, more regulation, more burdensome regulations.

So this person basically is angry that the healthcare system doesn't work like it did 15 years ago before he and his supporters voted for people who put put this system in, then he uses a firearm and it's a, oh gosh, I forgot, Jack.

It's one of the biggest sins you can commit.

It's a ghost gun.

He created it so it's not registered.

That is the greatest sin of firearms abuse.

And you hear nothing.

I thought that Elizabeth Warren said, we've got to stop all ghost guns.

Look at this.

Instead, she got up and tried to explain why she could understand that people were sympathetic to him.

So, rich kid, the real headline is, rich, spoiled brat who has no real source of support for four or five years, bounces around from

Frisco to Hawaii,

surfs, gets a surfing injury, blames his problems on other people.

I was watching, when I was listening to this, I was, is it Jimmy Jones, the guy on Fox that lost his legs in Afghanistan?

Yeah.

And they were reporting this, and I just looked at him.

I thought,

how much pain and suffering did you have to endure for double amputations?

And you did all that for your country.

And I have never heard a bitter word from him.

Never.

And yet the left is now trying to tell us that because this person had an operation that didn't go well on his back, and he was frustrated with the health care system, or they didn't understand him, or

he wanted to shoot somebody.

The other thing is,

and this is not conspiratorial thinking, do you really believe that this guy, we're talking about support for him, I don't believe that he just happened to walk out and a few seconds later he sees this person.

He must have had somebody who told him where this person was staying, when he was coming out, or somebody who was out there trying to be lookout.

My point is it's representational of all of the support that he has.

And I was shocked to see young people cheer this guy on.

It was really disturbing.

We had a little bit of that with Ted Kaczynski and the Unibomber.

But this was just egregious.

This was outright mafia-style murder.

Shot him in the back,

executed him.

And then people are cheering that on in the university.

And who would want?

So you're now a Silicon Valley's

employer at Amazon, Google, Apple, and you look at all this support and you think, wow,

these campuses have almost 50% either strongly or somewhat favorably are inclined to this type of activity.

Do I really want them here in my building?

Because at some point they might consider me a capitalist insect

and go out and get their raid can and spray me or shoot me.

This is what philanthropists' dollars have

rendered.

This is what they've grown at these petri dishes.

Hey, Victor,

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Victor, we're going to get to Christmas after

we take one more break, but I just have to ask you about

I'm gonna call him my old friend Radek Sikorsky Radek wrote for National Review when I first was there and I was when I was a congressional reporter over 30 years ago Radek is

Polish

extraction and English not extraction he's Polish and also part English but he moved on from being a journalist to a leading Polish politician he's the foreign minister now and he had been once before by the way here's the headline.

Under my old friends

of Foreign Service of Poland.

Poland says it will arrest BB if Israel PM attends Auschwitz liberation anniversary.

What the F has happened to, of all places, Poland is going to arrest

the Prime Minister of Israel?

These people are cracked.

Not that they're cracked, they're nasty.

Anyway, I'm not sure.

Well, 75%

of Jewry that was destroyed in World War II, not that it was the Poles' fault, they suffered two million fatalities, but it would seem that people

who were in control of the government in Poland would be at least cognizant

that they have a special obligation as custodians of the death camps and the memorialization of what happened on their soil,

that they wouldn't try to do that to an Israeli an elected Prime Minister, President of Israel, who was visiting not not to discuss military strategic issues, but

to commemorate the people who died at Auschwitz.

So then the question then comes,

what do you do about it?

Well, we're not a participant in an international criminal court,

and neither is Israel.

So they're not subject

in the greater sphere to their jurisdictions.

But supposedly Poland doesn't have to do this, but they are exercising, as is Trudeau, saying we are a member, so if

whoever we condemn as a war criminal, we, the members of international, we're all going to, criminal court, we're all going to enforce it.

Donald Trump, I wouldn't, if I were the Polish government, I would not, I would be very scared right now because they are on the front lines of a

Russian-Ukrainian war.

They are staunch allies of the United States, and they are members of NATO, and they depend on American largesse, weapons, and readiness.

And if they are going to threaten to jail,

indict, jail, hold, whatever our closest ally, Prime Minister of

Israel, then I think Donald Trump will react to that.

I really do.

He will just say, and it could be any type of reaction.

He can say, I don't want to have anybody, I don't, you know what?

If you don't want

the prime minister who's trying to save his country as it's attacked by Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and Iran, 500 projectiles from Iran, 10,000 missiles sent in from Hezbollah, 7,000 sent in from Hamas, another 500 from the Houthis,

and they are after October 7th, they are

fighting for their very existence.

And if you don't see that, and you want to jail the person who was at government, the prime minister whose country was attacked,

then just don't come here for a while.

And I think Trump will do that.

I think he will say to the Polish government, if you really persist on that and you're threatening to arrest an Israeli official, the highest official, an elected official, an American's closest allies,

we don't want to see you.

Just think about it.

And that would be the lightest objection.

And I think they're really crazy.

I don't think they understand Donald Trump.

He doesn't care.

If he says something like, I don't want the Polish foreign minister coming to the United States till he sobers up and somebody comes in, Mr.

President, I'm the undersecretary of Secretary of State.

This is not very sober and judicious.

It's fine.

I'll get out of here.

You're fired.

That's what he will do.

And he will get the support.

Same thing with Trudeau.

Trudeau said that he would arrest Netanyahu.

Okay, well then

you know, Justin, just stay out of the United States.

You're going to lose your, you're going to be out of power anyway, and then you're going to be a non-entity.

But for these vanishing months in which you're in control of Canada's destiny,

don't come in the United States.

If you can say people can't come in your country that haven't done anything and they're our closest ally, and you're saying that they don't have a right to come in your country, and not, I shouldn't say that.

Canada, like Poland, is not saying don't come here.

They could say that.

They can just say, you know what, it's very tense.

We don't want you to come here.

They're saying we're going to rest you if you come here.

And I think that we have to tell people that we stand for things.

And I would just say to Trudeau, don't come to the United States as long as you have that order of resting Netanyahu.

Just don't come.

And I think they'll make, you know, everybody says Trump can't do this, can't do this.

He did this with Obador.

He just said: if you're going to greenlight millions of people here and your cartels are killing 100,000 people and you know what you're doing by laundering the profits the cartels are on your soil and you know it and half your government's corrupt and you're buying Chinese product, maybe we just won't have NAFTA for you.

How's that?

And that got their intention.

And

I just think that

one of the reasons we saw that at the Notre Dame Cathedral,

that greeting of the returning president-elect,

and everybody was like a mob fighting to touch him.

I've never seen anything like it.

And it was because they know that when he comes in,

he's going to beef up the military,

he's going to deregulate, he's going to invite capital, and there's a very good chance that the American economy military will be preeminent as it was in the past by the time he's done.

And that means it's very strong.

And more importantly, people like the Canadians or the Poles or the Japanese or the Australians,

they know that if they get into trouble,

it won't be, we'll fly you out.

Joe Biden asks, hey, if you get, hey, Mr.

Paul is foreign minister, if Russian invades,

it will depend on whether it's a major or minor Russian invasion, whether we help.

And by the way, oh, they're already in your country.

We'll fly you out.

Oh, we're going to put a hold on offensive weapons to Poland.

Remember, that's all the things that O'Biden did.

He put a hold when as soon as he came into office, he put a hold on offensive weapons to Ukraine.

Then he said his reaction would depend what the magnitude of the Russian invasion.

And then right

during the period when they were trying to decapitate Kiev, he offered to fly Zelensky out.

Maybe we should have that attitude toward Poland and see if he prefers that type of government.

Victor for Secretary of State, that's my vote.

Votes will be back with the Speaker.

Well, I would object because

I'm a fan of Marco Rubio.

I really am.

Oh, yeah.

No, I agree.

I agree.

Especially the MAGA Marco Rubio.

He has been the most effective

elected senator on VC, along with Tom Cotton on China.

You know what I I mean?

He's terrific.

He's not unthinking.

He just says, oh, we're going to put tarovs on.

He's been very precise in saying we've got a problem with our economy and we've got to be very smart how we finesse this, but they are enemies.

Yeah,

you like some of them.

Yeah, that will call out our actual enemies and point a finger at them.

I should have included him.

I would not press Marco Rubio once he's Secretary of State.

I think he's going to tell the Polish Foreign Minister and he's going to tell the Canadian Foreign Minister,

if you think you're going to arrest or threaten to arrest the elected prime minister of Israel, given he's done more for Western civilization in one year against the fight, in the fight against terrorism, than you people have done in your entire lives,

you should think, Mr.

Netanyahu.

Without him, Lebanon would be doomed for eternity.

Hezbollah was growing.

The Hassads were

massacring people every day.

And the Houthis were completely in control of the Red Sea.

And Iran was, we'll see, but Iran was the funder and the creator of all of this anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Israeli bias.

And he, and he alone, almost stopped all of it.

And yet you're going to put him in jail?

I think Rubio will tell him that.

Yeah.

Okay, well, I withdraw that nomination, Victor, and we will come back with your take on your favorite Christmas movie when we return from these final important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Davis-Hansen show.

Merry Christmas coming.

Santa's coming.

Reindeer are up on the roof already.

On your new roof, Victor.

I hope on your roof the reindeer aren't walking on.

Do you have some solar panels up on some of them?

We don't want any damage there.

So, Victor, just, you know, our listeners love your thoughts on your favorite military movies and your favorite books, what you like to read, etc.

So, yeah,

do you have a favorite Christmas movie?

You mentioned to me before you like Battleground.

I do.

That was in 1949, I think, wasn't it?

William Wellman movie?

William Wellman was a great director.

He did a lot of great

films.

And I think one of my favorite was that mid-50s, The High and the Mighty with Robert Stack and John Wayne.

They're flying that DC-4 across Hawaii, and they have that explosion.

And then

they tell John Wayne, he's the retiring pilot, and he's trying to to mentor Robert Stack, who's the technician.

He's a great pilot, but he doesn't have the old backbone.

They made the comedy airplane based off of that, too, I suppose.

I know they did.

Maybe they did, but Robert Stack, they have the navigator, and he keeps coming in: the wind is this way, and the weight is this way, and we're not going to make it.

And then, yeah, we have the wind's changing, we're going to make it.

The whole time, John Wayne's calm, Robert Stack's trying to grab the wheel, we got to ditch.

And he said, If we ditch in the way, if we ditch the water,

we're going to drown.

We're going to drown.

Wow.

So then

it's just an incredible movie.

And they land.

And then they say

to the retired, I think his name is Roman, his last name in the movie.

And they say, Mr.

Roman, we had 30 gallons of gas left.

And he starts to walk away and he whistles all the time when he's happy.

And he whistles.

And then

Robert Stack goes, There goes that old pelican.

And it's a great movie.

William Wellman was a great director.

He did Battleground, but that's not my favorite movie.

Well,

yeah, the chargers say Battleground is not a Christmas movie.

It's about Bastille, which happens at Christmas.

But anyway,

what was good about that movie,

there was a movie with Henry Fawn.

You remember the Battle of the Bulge?

Yes.

I thought that was kind of

attempted to tell a story better.

Battleground was the first real post-World War II movie where it was realistic.

They showed people getting scared and arguing.

I think one guy abandons his position.

They have Ricardo Monteblan as the Latino guy.

He's pretty good in that.

He's never seen snow before, and he's freaked out.

He gets killed in that.

They almost all get killed in that movie, as I remember.

I still like It's a Wonderful Life by Frank Cowpro.

Partly, I like it because of the actors and actresses in that.

Not just Jimmy Stewart, but I always liked Donna Reed.

She was really good.

She died very young.

It was tragic.

She died, I think, in her early 60s of pancreatic cancer.

But I worked on the Donna Reed show.

Oh, she was a great show.

And then one of my favorite actors is, he was the adult uncle in that that loses the money, Thomas Mitchell.

Tommy Mitchell, yeah.

Remember, he was in high noon.

He was the guy that was the city, the mayor, and he comes in and

praises Gary Cooper about how we have to help him.

Gary Cooper starts a smile.

Yeah, but

I think you better

get out of town and all our problems vanish with you.

He was the drunk doctor and stagecoach.

He was the father in Gone with the Wind.

He's been in many of the classics.

Another great actor was Lionel Baronmore as Potter.

He was just wonderful in that movie in a very sinister way.

He was supposed to epitomize the heartless small town.

I grew up in a very small town

similar, and there was always one or two people in these small towns that, you know what I mean, that owned everything.

They were the city attorney.

They ran the funeral pile.

They had the only law firm.

All of downtown they owned.

And that was Potter

A Wonderful Life.

So

it was a great movie.

And Frank Capra, he was faulted for

being happy endings and rosy versions of America.

But he was actually

a great director.

I was just thinking, though, that was the golden period.

And I was looking down here.

I just looked at this.

If you look at those films right after World War II, Jack,

and I'll just take

the year after

1946, 1946, The Best Picture was The Best Years of Our Lives.

That was it.

William Trotter, great.

Lovely.

And then they had the same year, The Razor's Edge.

That was

a great book.

And then The Yearling.

Remember The Yearling?

Oh, sure.

With Gregory Peck and

Mrs.

Reagan.

The year of its wonderful life.

He didn't win the Academy Awards.

And then

Duel and the Sun,

Caesar and Cleopatra.

I like that movie.

But my point is, this is a list of all the movies that were considered.

And even if you go back into the last year of the war, or the last two years of a war, and I was thinking maybe of,

oh,

1943, I'll just pick it.

And

Casablanca, 1942, Casablanca, Best Picture of the Year.

And in that year, right during the war,

they had

all of these great books, you know, The Talk of the Town, that was a great movie, too.

And

Mrs.

Minerva.

Mrs.

Miniver,

Pride of the Yankees.

Remember that with Gary?

Teresa Wright?

Yeah.

So

I know that it's nostalgic and romantic, and we always, but there was something about movies in the 1940s, all the way through the 50s on the waterfront, high noon, all of those great movies.

And then there was a reaction against them with the anti-hero.

And we, you know, the wild, these were great movies too, the reaction to those.

The wild bunch, Butch Cassidy, everybody loved those movies, even if they were violent.

But then something happened.

I don't know what it was.

It got a little bit, the reaction to the reaction, or they were away from the exemplar and they'd forgotten how to make a good movie.

And now it's just ruined.

But it's just Soviet.

They're not even movies.

They're just Sovietization.

Every Every time you go to a Hollywood movie, you know

if it's a drama crime,

there's going to be an evil white guy with tattoos, and he's going to be missing some teeth.

He's going to have some crosses tattooed on his chest or back.

He's going to have a Russian or South African accent.

And you know that the hero will be a black woman or a gay guy.

And if it's a,

I don't know, a drama, just an

everyday drama, it's going to be, like in New York,

it's going to be a bunch of neurotic young people who are unmarried, no children, psychodramatic, under meds, and they're going to inflate some little triviality in their lives about why they didn't get a raise or this person had sex with somebody who was not kind afterwards.

And it's just going to bore you because it's going to be saturated with little themes about abortion and gay marriage, all that stuff.

It's not Ars Gratia Artis anymore, not art for the sake of art.

It's art for the sake of politics.

Well, this is why

creativity.

I think one good thing I've noticed, I've been talking to people in the publishing industry

and my wonderful literary agent over the years, Glenn Hartley and Lynn Chu

and others,

just people who write me, and reading, reading.

And you get the impression that the woke

list

that came in, especially after George Floyd,

that era is over.

And the same thing with MSNBC and the Joy Reed.

She's taking a big pay cut, supposedly, as did Rachel Milo.

Not enough, but some.

But you get the impression that the readership for woke literature and the viewership for woke news.

And then Disney is just, I don't know what's happening to Disney.

They cannot make a movie, a contemporary movie.

They either have to take an old cartoon and remake it and not deviate from it.

But once they deviate and put in the woke value system, nobody wants to see it.

Nobody,

it was like the Soviet Union in the 50s.

I don't want to see another movie about the class struggle and how brilliant Stalin was.

And that's what they've done to art, and that's what we're talking about with

justice and sculptures.

You know,

we've talked about it before.

I mean, thank God for Turner Classic Movies that we can see so many of these great films that you mentioned.

By the way, Victor,

we have to close out, but you mentioned Jory Reed and Rachel Maddow taking pay cuts.

She took a pay cut from 30 million to 25 million.

But I saw some article that said Jory Reed is making $3 million.

And so why isn't there a ratio

$3 million to tell what, 600,000 people is what she's got, or 500, that they are racist and horrible white people.

That's what she does every night.

But

how come she's not accusing

she's on every night?

Rachel Maddow's on like what, once a week?

One night.

One night a week, 30 and she

makes 10 times the salary.

When they had the $16 million settlement with ABC,

they were outrage at ABC.

All these people said, this is terrible.

They didn't back up George.

They settled.

George Stephanopoulos got a $20 million renewal of his contract.

And they said, for $16 million,

we could have hired 30 more people that are losing their jobs.

40 more people.

Well, how about Rachel Madow?

She's getting $25 million for one night a week.

That's double what ABC paid out.

And they don't say a word about that.

It's the funniest thing in the world.

That's warped.

Warped.

Well, they don't know who their friends are and who their enemies are, but their enemies, if you're

working stiff at the network news, your enemies are people like Rachel Maddow and George Stephanopoulos.

Because you're left-wing and you believe in equity and parity.

And these people are making, I don't know, thousands of times more than you are.

Staggering.

And they're mediocre.

And you can justify a George Stephanopoulos or a Rachel Maddow or a Jory Reed on two grounds.

Either they're so brilliant, they're like that old guy.

You remember him?

For

old liberal.

I really liked him for

NBC or CBS Eric Severide.

Oh, he was.

I forget what he was on.

I was going to say he was in ABC.

He was CBS.

Yeah, CBS.

Edward R.

Murray and Walter Cronkite

and those guys that.

Howard K.

Smith.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Howard K.

Smith, the

Huntley Brinkley.

Yeah.

Harry Reasoner.

Yeah, they were the guys that went on B-17s in World War II on missions and stuff.

They were great people.

Eric Severide had always those convoluted analyses

of the Vietnam War.

He was like an intellectual.

And my grandfather...

I would be down here in

grammar school or working on the farm, and he'd say, it's getting dark.

We've got to go inside and hear that man Severite.

He'll straighten things out for us.

I would be picking up walnuts, or I'd be in the tractor, and I'd go into my grandfather's.

He said, Now, boys, don't be quiet.

The news, they'll bring Severite on, and he'll clear up all the stuff about that damn Vietnam War.

He didn't like, excuse me for the language.

He didn't like Vietnam, of course.

Nobody did at that stage.

But the point I'm making is that

those guys,

they were old liberals, but

they were somewhat empirical, and they were much better educated than Stephanopoulos or Joey Reed or Rachel Maddow, the Rhodes Scholar.

Well, Victor, let's head off into the sunset.

I just want to refer to your

It's a Wonderful Life and Frank Capra, and remember that he also, as a great patriot, he was the producer of Why We Fight the Great Documentary.

They treated him awards badly.

I remember when he said these people are communist, and communism's killed millions of people.

And I'm not going to lie that this person's person's not a communist during this so-called McCarthy.

And then when they gave him that lifetime award

on the waterfront, did he go on the waterfront?

That was Kazan,

Ali Kazan.

I'm thinking of him.

On half of him.

Ali Kazan.

He was a great director, too.

He was.

Oh, my gosh.

Trade Rosenberg.

Was Capra Italian, wasn't he?

Yes, he was.

Kazan was

an Asia Minor Greek.

He was Greek, yeah.

And when they gave Kazan that award, you remember all those actors turned their back on him?

Yeah,

half of them sat.

He was.

I remember Ed Harris.

I was watching him at that.

He's such a

great director on the waterfront Kazan.

And then Capra was a great director, too.

Yeah.

Well, Capra did It's a Wonderful Life.

Kazan did one of the great anti-communist movies, Man on a Tightrope.

I know you can find it on

YouTube somewhere.

But hey, anyway, Victor, you've been terrific.

I want to thank the folks who rate this show

on Apple and zero to five stars.

And again, practically everyone's giving you five stars.

Some people leave comments here and there.

And a lot of them leave comments on your website, The Blade of Perseus.

Here's one from Greg Afuso, who writes,

quote, rally round the flag, down with the traitor and up with the stars.

I think he's quoting from the, those are the lyrics of

our old theme song, the Battle Cry of Freedom.

I feel like we just fought and won a civil war, albeit a cultural one.

If we are vigilant and smart about it, we can have 12 years of peace and prosperity from the next attack on Fort Sumter.

Thank you, Greg.

I want to thank folks who go to civilthoughts.com and sign up for the free weekly email newsletter.

I write

this

yesterday.

I did Megan Kelly

and Mark Levine, and they were so upbeat and buoyant about the election.

And even Eeyore, I'm no longer Eeyore, I'm Smiley Vic.

You know what?

I've been very upbeat,

and I'm amused by the whole thing.

The people that are in mourning,

and

I like Trump's attitude now.

He's almost like he's an Olympian.

You know what I mean?

Reserve now.

Except he did do that Chris Christie.

Did you see that?

Oh, my God.

The drones.

I wouldn't mention that.

But O-Is, you just did.

He's become an Olympian.

And that's great.

Well, we like smiling.

I'll just finish.

They hate Elon Musk now, and they think he's running the country.

And I heard Van Jones go off on him.

This is a millionaire.

We don't know who's running the country.

And I'm thinking, okay,

you told us for four years that Joe Biden was fit as the fiddle.

He was there, and you knew that he was senile when he ran because you know Barack Obama.

Barack Obama said to Joe Biden, Joe, you don't have to do this, don't run.

And you sat there and didn't say a word when we didn't know for four years who was running the country.

And as far as billionaires go, Jeff Bezos gave you $100

million,

and you took it and you can use give it to charities or you can spend it on yourself.

I won't ask you the ratio of charity to personal consumption ban, but you have no moral or rational right to get up or logic, I should say.

You have a right to do whatever you want.

What was Zuckerberg's 470 million?

Elon Musk

when your candidate outraised Donald Trump two and a half to one and got almost double the number of billionaires than Trump did.

And $250 million, what Elon put on his own money and hired people to get out the vote, was not what Mark Zuckerberg did in 2020 when he spent $419 million

to

absorb the work of the registrars with mail and bout with his own employees.

So I get so tired of this hypocritical, sanctimonious these people.

More power to Elon.

Amen, brother.

All right, Victor, I'm going to wish our listeners a Merry Christmas and a happy Hanukkah, which I believe starts on Thursday.

Thank you, Victor.

You've been terrific.

God bless all.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.