The Daniel Penny Controversy and the Coming End of Nihilism

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You are here to listen to, glean wisdom from, the star namesake Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's also a syndicated columnist, military historian, best-selling author, classicist, philologist,

farmer.

Victor's got a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

Later in this show, I will tell you you why I think you should be subscribing.

We are recording on Saturday, December 7th.

It's a little late here, getting dark here in Milford, Connecticut.

Victor, it's still sunny and probably warm back there.

The sun just broke out after fog.

Oh, well, congratulations.

Very happy hours of sun.

Very happy for you.

Well, I hope we have an hour plus of wisdom, and I know we will, on today's episode, which should be up on the 12th of Thursday, the 12th of December.

Victor, we'll start off the show today by talking about,

getting your thoughts on Daniel Penny, the brave New York subway rider, who,

for all we know, Victor, between when we're talking today and when this episode is out, his legal fate may have been decided, but there's still much wisdom to glean on how he's been handled.

And we have Josh Hawley attacking airlines.

We have

Jody Ernst, the senator from Iowa with a really troubling study of federal workers, that and more.

And we'll get started with all that when we come back from these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor Daniel Penny,

yesterday, Friday the 6th, it was the jury in his trial, his insane trial, came back deadlocked on the main charge.

And then the judge sent them back, back, take the weekend off, come back Monday, and

consider some of the lesser charges, which I think is something that was not supposed to happen at all, given his initial instructions.

Daniel Penny,

protected fellow citizens of New York City, I would know as somebody who took the subway, who's been taking it for years, what a nightmare it can be there.

Anyway, Victor, this is an ongoing injustice.

Your thoughts?

Well, I I think everybody's gamed it.

They've dropped, as you said,

the most serious charges.

But unfortunately, people thought, as I understood it, that that meant that he might be more likely to be convicted of a lesser but still serious charge.

And then

everything about it was, I mean, it's in New York.

And then

apparently you're under the auspices of Alwyn Bragg.

The prosecutor in question has a long history.

She's kind of a radical feminist

prosecutor.

She has a history of going soft on certain people.

Murderers.

Murderers

that she has arbitrarily, I guess,

envisioned as

victims, the victimizers.

And so they go across.

And yet

they waited, I think, Jack, for two weeks before they decided to prosecute him.

They brought him in.

He didn't know that Neely had been killed.

He explained it very calmly.

He was not happy about it.

He was telling everybody that he thought Neely posed a threat.

There were people who were non-white, because I mentioned that because some of the demonstrations

at the prosecutor's office to make sure that he was indicted had a racial component to it.

Black Lives Matter,

white man.

And the Neely person was threatening people.

And he had a long history of mental disturbance and some violence.

And so this man volunteers.

And some of the people said, why didn't he just leave the other subway?

Well, why didn't Neely just leave?

A law-abiding citizen has a constitutional right to be left in peace on a subway.

And if somebody comes in there and threatens to kill people and harm them, and the point was that when he intervened to save people, there were people who were not white.

I think a black and Hispanic person who helped him.

And I looked at the video.

They were pretty tough themselves.

and so

that creates deterrence when somebody it's unfortunate that Neely died but

when you go repeatedly 40 some arrest and you keep pushing the envelope pushing them something's going to happen and so now I think his uncle is smells money is suing don't Daniel Penny and

family members who did Nothing for him while he was alive.

Nothing for him is alive.

They smelled money.

The whole thing is a commentary on the sickness of modern American society.

And particularly DEI woke radical progressivism in general and New York City in particular.

Just accessible.

By any other standard and any other normal place, he would be a hero.

And it's still not clear what killed, as it wasn't with George Floyd.

It was the same situation.

George Floyd...

was under the influence of fentanyl.

He had some amphetamines.

He had late-stage heart disease.

He was

recovering from a recent bout with COVID.

And

it's not at all clear that the officer in the Minnesota police Minneapolis police killed him by putting his knee to subdue him.

And if he had not tried to pass, getting off topic, but if he had not tried to pass counterfeit currency, if he had have obeyed the police when they got there and just stayed in the car and not been confrontational, he would probably be alive.

The same thing with Neely.

All he had to do was after he threatened people and people said, stop it, if he just stopped.

But he didn't want to do that because he assumed that these were sheep and he was a wolf.

And he was going to bully, bully, bully them to the extent that he was cognizant of what he was doing.

He had drugs in his system.

And

it's just if he's convicted, it doesn't even matter at this point, Jack, whether Penny is convicted or not.

The left made their point that if he's convicted, no one will ever lift a finger for anybody in a subway.

But if he's not convicted, after what they put him through, people will say, you know what, this is a clear case that I could stop this person from hitting this woman over the head.

I might be acquitted, but they're going to destroy me and Antifa and BLM are going to show up and they're going to sue me.

I'm not going to do it.

I'm just going to sit back there like

Kitty Genovese.

Genovese, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, we're just going to watch it happen.

So that's what they want.

That's the city they want.

That's the city they're going to get.

But he's a hero

in half of America's mind.

And I think

people will,

they're donating to his GoFundMe.

I think it's several million dollars now to help him get through this.

And he has not tried to, he was not like Kyle Rittenhouse.

Kyle Rittenhouse was similar, but

the things that he said and his demeanor sometimes were braggadashi, you know what I mean?

It wasn't pennies much different.

And I was somebody who thought Kyle Rittenhouse got a terrible deal, and they went out to demonize him because he was white and he had a gun, and the people that

he stopped from trying to kill him were themselves, in one case at least, culpable with child molestation.

But this was even more clear-cut.

This was more clear-cut than the George Floyd case, the Kyle Rittenhouse.

This was just black and white.

I I don't mean that in a racial sense.

It was just clear that this man stepped up, tried to put a person in a headlock to stop him.

He didn't know whether he had drugs in his system or what his mental and physical.

All he knew is that this person continued, somebody could get hurt.

And he wasn't going to sit there and watch this person hurt people.

This is a crime in our world.

It's in the wrong place if you take your manhood seriously.

It's very courageous.

He has no idea what somebody in New York who's threatening people in a subway has in his coat pocket, whether it's a 38 or a clock or he has no idea or a knife.

But just to step up there and take that risk,

he should be commended.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, there's

a couple of other New York City things to talk about.

One is the embattled mayor of the city, Eric Adams.

So

New York's election cycle is is the year after the presidential election.

So in 2025, there will be mayoral elections.

Adams is a former police officer of the city.

He is under federal investigation and actually charged with certain

financial crimes, chicanery related to

turkey,

getting upgrades on flights, and God only knows what the quid pro quo on this was.

However, I think he's found a friend in Donald Trump and even though he invited, seemed to have welcomed early on the illegal immigrants that were coming into New York City, he is now

quite adamant to get them the hell out

because of the unrest they're causing throughout the city, not only the crime, but clearly political unrest.

Anyway, Eric Adams is thinking of becoming a Republican.

He's been chattering about it a little bit.

I'll have to see that to believe it.

I think he asked him if he was going to become a Republican, and the latest iteration of that was, I'm an American politician.

That's what he said.

I belong to the American Party.

I love this country.

It was very noble what he said, but I haven't been a big Eric Adams fan because

he demagogued the illegal immigration issue before the Martha's Vineyard redirect.

So he was out there.

Remember when the bus pulled up in that sort of emblematic moment and he had his cameras around from his PR department and he was handing out bottled water to illegal immigrants that they got off the bus.

And he was thinking, oh, there's going to be about a thousand of them.

I'm going to shore up my DEI support and act like this is a warming city.

And then people like

Governor Abbott and Texas and Ronda Sanders said, well, if you think that's a good thing, then you can relieve us.

And they started bussing them up there.

And all of a sudden, he thought the world was unfair.

And he didn't understand the left.

The left

tolerates no

apostates.

And so they thought they were going to punish him.

And suddenly he said, we can't handle this.

And the next thing he knows, he's indicted for

his past.

quid pro quo supposed activity on behalf of the Turkish government.

But when he ran for office, remember he had that speech where he said, I took on the crackers

and the police department.

I thought that was a racist thing to say.

Well, it was.

He doesn't know who he is.

He tries to act like he's an ex-cop, and there he's a law and order person.

He doesn't know

quite what the minority, the majority population of New York is at.

The election has kind of shocked him.

He's thinking, hmm, where is 51% of my voters?

Are they

they couldn't be Trump voters, but maybe

they want a closed border now, or maybe they think the Silicon immigration is taking...

Maybe on the other hand, I've got these left-wing crazy people.

How do I cut the difference?

That's what he's thinking.

He doesn't have any.

I've never heard him voice any long-standing principled position.

That's what I'm saying.

Right.

I never

say that, but Mayor Bloomberg was a lot better.

Well, he was.

I mean,

in part

because

he carried on with Giuliani's.

Lossio was worse, and Bloomberg was better.

And I say that as a farmer who resented

Bloomberg saying, drop a seed.

Any idiot can

grow food.

Well, even with our own nation as a whole, domestic tranquility is one of the first promises of the Constitution, and that's what we we want, law and order.

And Bloomberg and Giuliani, despite Bloomberg's pressing for

criminalizing

big gulp sodas and the like, he did carry on the broken windows.

Police.

Everybody, that's a good point.

Everybody should remember that material progress is not linear, it's cyclical.

So you could make the argument that New York City was a much better place to live in 1950 than it was in 1972 or 73.

The first time I went to New York was 1971.

I was a summer student at the Yale Greek Intensive Program.

And I took, I didn't know what I was doing.

I was right off, I'd only been in college one year.

And I went into,

1971, I went into

downtown New York and I thought Madison Square Guard and I went to all the little places and I thought it was a nightmare.

Yeah.

Well it was.

Then Giuliani cleaned it up and kind of that lasted till Bloomberg.

And then

we, de Blasio came in and ruined it.

And now we're back to the 1970s cycle.

Same thing in the country at large.

And kind of like, you know, Constantinople was,

if you had gone and looked at that city at 550 A.D., it was a paradise.

If you looked at it at 1440, it was in chaos.

So so much for a thousand years of technological progress.

And it all depends on each generation keeping up the traditions that were successful and a lot of them don't.

And our generation is very culpable.

We took a wonderful inheritance and

we took paradise and turned it into purgatory, if not hell.

And New York's no better example of what's happened.

Victor, this nihilism, Jack, is so baffling.

I talked to people yesterday who was speaking, and one woman at my table, she was very sincere, and she made a good point.

She said, I just have to ask you a question.

Just answer me a question.

This is after my talk.

I said, yeah, what is the question?

She said, why are they doing this?

Just tell me, why are they doing this?

I said, well, we define this.

The border.

12 million people.

350,000 criminals.

A million people that are already under...

Why?

Why are they letting people go in all of our cities that riot and burn and kill people?

Why do they they let them out the same day?

Why do you go into a store here in Los Angeles

and they just let you loot?

Why are they doing this?

Why do we go into the food market and all these prices we've had for 20 years?

Nobody can afford them.

And I said, because they like it.

She said, what do you mean?

I said, that's what Dirty Harry said.

Why is this,

remember the Scorpio killer in that movie?

He said, why does he do it?

And why do you think you know he does it?

And he said, I know why he does it.

He likes it.

And well, they like nihilism.

They like destruction.

They don't like the country.

They don't like the civilization.

And they think if they create enough chaos, they can come into power and destroy it.

Biden was the perfect

vehicle for that because he was predisposed to enjoy chaos.

He was predisposed, and he was also,

but he was a very clever politician.

He always would veer or tact a little bit to the right and even beyond the right.

He would talk about being from a slave state of Delaware, or he would cajole people with the corn pop saga.

He could always play act like he was, My mother wasn't, I'm not going to let this country, you know, I grew up here, I don't want my mother in a jungle, racial, remember that?

Yeah.

And so

he was just a despicable person, he always was.

But he demagogued every type of issue.

And so we're in a period of decline, and it's a question of whether we can get back out and back on the trajectory of improving things.

Yeah.

I mean, happy days are here again to some.

I don't know.

Happy days are possible again.

Everybody I saw it, you know, it's so funny.

Everybody, it's happened to me.

I've been very happy and upbeat.

I didn't think it would affect me this way, but the more that I saw that that campaign, the last two months of Harris and then the donors and then post facto

the payoffs to Sharpton and

COPA, the $20,000 deficit after blowing through $2.5 billion of her own campaign and PAC money

and then some of the things that they wanted to do, we were really lucky.

Yeah.

Divine Providence saved us.

Yeah.

And Donald Trump's energy level.

I still think we have a great cultural fight

on hand, and we're in a better position than we were

a month ago to fight it.

You have to have people that when you go and

when

you send your daughter to a school, there's not going to be a biological male in the shower room.

You're going to have to have a situation where you're not going to have your 18-year-old kid have a transvestite

dance party on a military base.

You're going to have to

be reasonable where your society is not allowing viable fetuses.

They're not fetuses, they're babies, living beings to be killed in the birth canal and say, well, it only happens 10,000 times a year out of a million.

It doesn't matter.

And we have to have a situation where we're not sitting on a gold mine of rare earth materials for electric batteries, oil and gas, and then we won't touch them because we think that we're morally superior and we're going to let the Saudis deal with a dirty goo or the Chinese mine this or that.

If you're going to use something,

then produce it.

If you don't want to produce it, don't use it.

So my view of all you people in your private jets,

if you don't want oil to be produced in California, then don't fly out of California.

Just don't do it.

I go to the San Jose airport sometimes and I look at those, that looks like a whole U.S.

Air Force journey of Gulfstream citations.

They're just all all out there.

And most of those people are radical environmentalists thinking, you better start producing oil to fuel that thing.

Because I don't use it, and my friends and everybody I know in Selma doesn't use it.

And we're for producing oil for you.

But that's what we're talking about with this nihilism.

It's just

angry.

You know, it's like that.

Rooting for the...

Are they rooting for the killer who shot the united health ceo well we're going to talk about that a little later yeah yeah taylor lorenz i saw that she said i'm not rooting for him the fact that i want somebody to pay the consequences doesn't mean i support yes it does yeah it does yeah

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Victor,

if you took the subway

in New York up to Columbia,

And hopefully if there was some violence on the train, someone like Daniel Penny was there and would protect you and

he wouldn't get arrested for it.

You might find at Columbia

a newspaper.

I'm just throwing this at you to kind of wrap up the nihilism thing, and I think the fight we still have on hand.

A new paper has been produced, the Columbia Intifada, which the New York Post today has been reporting on.

It's nameless.

No one who's written this article or that article has had the guts to put their name on it.

But these institutions of higher learning are still very much affiliated with

hatred, anti-Semitism, hatred, and calls for murder of Jews.

So

this is a deeply ingrained enemy, we have ideological enemy.

So

anyway,

we had our college presidents, and they were three of them, MIT, Penn, and Harvard.

And they were presented with the clear evidence of anti-Semitism, and they either could not or would not do anything.

They remind me of people, you know, in the 1930s that said, what do you want me to do about it?

And we have a 900-page report by four or five liberal professors at Stanford where I work, and they conclude that it's not safe, physically, or mentally healthy for a Jewish student to be on campus.

And

what were they going to do about it?

They're not going to do anything because it's a matter of numbers that under the woke

reparations type of admissions where you have these universities letting in 9%, 10% of the student body is white male, or 20% white as Stanford brags, or 30% as Yale.

When you have those quotas, you're not going to have a lot of Jewish students.

And when you're welcoming DEI, and remember what Obama did, he got rid of the idea of the black-white binary and historical affirmative action repertory efforts.

And he included first Hispanics, and then

under the last two years of the Obama, they just said DEI is everybody who's not white.

You can be a multi-millionaire Brazilian.

You can be,

you know, you can be from the most corrupt family in Jamaica.

You can be the heir to a cement fortune in Haiti like Claudia and Gay, but you're oppressed.

And my point is, when you go and you make campuses with people who feel they're victims, and you make the Jewish student the ultra-expression of white privilege, vis-a-vis the Israel's settler colonial lie, then you set yourself up for a lot of people, especially from the Middle East, when you have, we have 500,000 foreign students in our universities.

They think it's open season because there's very few of them.

The Jews have gone from about 25 in their heyday in the Ivy League campuses and comparable universities down to about, I don't know, 7 or 8%.

And the Middle East students have soared.

There's a couple of things, though, that

I think everybody should keep in mind.

What makes people angry about this, and Trump kind of rode on, this was another issue that Trump rode to his success, is that they come over here to the extent they're green card holders or student visa holders.

I'm not saying they all are.

And then

they attack this country.

And they use and enjoy its freedoms and they support a custom protocol culture that

they don't want to be in.

So it's almost like, I want your freedom of speech, I want your constitutional Bill of Right protections, I want to be in a society where women have an equal opportunity, I want all of this, but I want to champion,

what, from a distance, what the values are among the Palestinian Authority, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Syrians,

everywhere in the Middle East.

If anybody can interrupt me and say, no, Victor, there's a lot of democracies in the Middle East other than Israel.

Just name them.

Turkey, I don't think so.

So

that's what gets people very angry, that they're such hypocritical people.

And then they are so anti-American in speech and comportment that you think, well,

how can we help you get away from us?

Just, we will pay your ticket to go back to the Middle East, and you won't have to go out and occupy the Manhattan Bridge or deface a federal cemetery of veterans in Los Los Angeles, or kill a Jewish man on the streets of LA.

We'll help you do that.

You don't have to do that.

Just go back and say, I finally got free of the great Satan.

I got rid of all my unpleasant experiences.

I don't have to see any more Jews.

And I'm free to be back in the middle.

But they don't do that.

It's like the Boston City Council member we were talking about.

She pushes all of her anti-American DI buttons, but

she's here.

And she's an immigrant.

So that's what really gets people angry: that there's such a disparity between the protester in Europe and the United States

and the advocate of free speech and horrific speech and what they are able to do.

The other thing that gets people really angry is

how many

if you're there's two million, two million, two million Arab-Israeli citizens.

It's about 20% of the population, if not a little bit more.

So

if you're Jewish and you say, I would like to live in a historical area

in the West Bank, I'm going to go buy a piece of property.

Do that.

You have no protection.

Does anybody really think that if you're an Arab-Israeli

you're in much greater danger than a Jew is in an Arab country?

I don't think so.

So it's this disparity everybody gets angry about.

The disparity that these people are going to write an intifada magazine about displaced people, and we've got,

well, you're worried about the oppressed of the world that have been displaced.

How about the Uyghurs that have been taken out of their home and are in a camp?

To one million in China.

Right.

Or that 20 or 30,000

Cypriots were injured or killed in 1974, and maybe the million of them that were displaced that are still can't go back into Turkish-occupied Cyprus.

Or how about the Volga Germans that were ethnically cleansed about the same time as the creation of Israel by Stalin?

I could go on and on.

How about the 14 million Germans, some of them were opposed to Hitler, that walked back from East Prussia and Eastern Germany when Stalin stole, you know, Poland and gave it to Western Ukraine and then they gave East Prussia to create Poland.

Does anybody in Germany today say, oh, I'm a refugee from 1947?

That's when my family was forced out of my 500-year home

in what is now Poland?

Does the world sympathy?

No.

It's only the Palestinians are refugees and only the Jews are oppressors.

Not the Chinese, not the Russians, not the

Africans, not the Arabs who ethnically cleanse Jews.

It's only the Jews.

So that disparity is what drives people crazy about the whole issue.

And

we'll see.

You know, I think the country that has the best chance of democratizing is Iran right now.

Because as we talked in our earlier podcast, they are so humiliated, that theocracy, and they are so inept, and they have spent so many hundreds of billions of dollars over the years funding Hezbollah and the Houthis and the Assad government and Hamas.

the per capita income standard of living is and is just retarded.

It's retarding from what it was.

It's going backwards.

So let's hope that maybe the Iranians will do what they did in 2009 under the auspices of Barack Obama, the Green Generation, where he sat mum for 11 days before he said a word of encouragement.

Fresh from his Nobel Prize

peace process.

Why are you guys doing this?

We're trying to have a

historical détente with your oppressing theocratic mullahs.

You're just not on the right right page.

You can't be Democratic.

I've got to get credit for talking to the theocrats that hate us.

That's what his position was.

Well, Victor,

you mentioned the murder in the streets of New York, the CEO of United Healthcare, and the reaction to that.

And we're going to get your reaction to that reaction when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor's Victor's got a website, theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Go there and you will find links to so many things, Victor's appearances on other podcasts or shows, the archives of these podcasts, to his weekly essays for American Greatness, his syndicated column, to his books, and to the ultra articles, which are the pieces two or three times a week that Victor writes exclusively for the Blade of Perseus.

To read them, and you're going to want to read them because you're a fan of Victor.

You need to subscribe $5 a month, discounted for the full year at $50.

And while I'm telling you about Victor things,

if you're on X, his handle is at

VD Hansen, and Victor writes essentially a mini-essay every week

on X.

And on Facebook,

the VDH's Morning Cup.

And there's a great group there, the Victor Davis-Hansen fan club.

You might want to

check them out.

So Victor Brian Thompson, CEO of

United Healthcare, murdered in the streets of New York last week by an assassin.

Between now, when we're recording, and when the show is out on the 12th, that person may have been found.

There's lots of clues,

evidence anyway, leading to

hopefully his capture.

But okay, good, good.

We want that to happen.

But the immediate reaction from so many, you mentioned Taylor Lorenz and many others on social media,

just

disgusting, sinful, satanic snark.

Any thoughts, Victor?

Well, I mean, she said right after, she said, and people wonder why

we want these executives dead right after this person was shot.

And then when they had a

backlash on social media, she said, I use the we.

I didn't mean me.

I just said we as a country, but we don't want them dead as a country.

It was her and her people like her.

And then that was proven and reified when people joined in and comment, yeah, you're right, we do want them dead.

And it was

the Party of Peace, the

Kumbaya group on the left.

But the point is that

there is no such thing anymore.

This left-wing movement, as we see with the 120 days of murder and arson and looting and destruction in 2020,

as we see

all over the world, it's coming from the left right now.

The anti-Semitism in the United States, this is not a kumbayal party.

They feel that any means necessary are justified because they want diversity, equity, inclusion, and equity.

Equity is what I'm getting at, an equality of result.

So in their view,

they don't want to know about...

I'm sure that health concerns can be too profitable.

They give their managers too much money.

But basically under our system, we have the one place in the world that develops most of the drugs that save people's lives, whether you like it or not.

And in their way of thinking, they should all be free for everybody.

And you should never

get sick in Canada.

Get really sick in Canada and see what happens.

They don't understand the principle of insurance, too.

I was talking to these local insurance people, as I said this last week, and whether it's fire insurance on homes in California or it's property liability or it's car insurance,

no one can afford it anymore.

So when she says the insurance companies, well,

They just they're not many of them are losing money.

I don't know if the health carers are, but the other people are, and some of the problem is fraudulent claims and lack of state efforts to put out fires.

And they've just said, you know what?

We don't believe California will put out forest fires and save people's homes.

We don't believe that the system really cares about

preemptive efforts to stop natural disasters.

We don't believe the California population basically is completely honest.

We believe that a person in California is more liable than other places to light his kitchen on fire or ram somebody in the parking lot and say that he was hit.

So we're just not going to deal with you.

Whether it's true or not, we don't care.

We're not going to deal with you.

So

on health care, one of the reasons it's going up is I think it's Obamacare and it's the socialization of men and the lack of competition.

So that And that's one thing, but I can tell you in California that my life as a patient has radically changed because every time I go into a specialist, I don't wait 40 minutes.

I can wait an hour, an hour and a half, and the room is full of people who are obviously not U.S.

citizens.

And if you're taking 12 million people that have never had a health care provider, and you're adding them to another 20 million who've never had a health provider, and there's now not, I was told that a reader pointed out that there was not 63 million non-U.S.

born, but 80 million now.

Those are enormous numbers.

We let in 12 San Francisco's underbuides,

12 cities the size of San Francisco.

And somebody has to handle that because we're a fair and just society that offers parity.

So, yes, there's a lot of costs for health insurance.

Just go into my hometown in an early morning out of the United Healthcare and see people in line waiting to get in.

And who pays for that?

Who should pay for that?

But

that's what she was.

She doesn't think about anything.

It's just, you know,

and I'm speaking at somebody who'd been denied coverage on certain things.

And I didn't always have good health insurance until, you know, recently.

So it's

Well, maybe it may be

the broader health issue and Robert Kennedy, etc.

You know, my wife, who did all the shopping and still does the shopping, well, we had five kids, so there's less shopping now, but

she would always get behind somebody with

public.

Yeah, I know, I'm sorry, Victor.

But I'm sorry, like.

I was like, whole food for less, and I was behind.

I wasn't behind, but I was within distance of looking at shopping carts, and there was

seven or eight, and only one did not have soft drinks, and there was not any Diet Coke.

Not that Diet Coke's healthy, but It was all

fructose corn corn.

I mean we have an obese diabetic nation.

Everybody.

Yeah I go in there and I say to myself is there 10% of the people that are not obese and the answer is no.

Almost everybody there is obese.

And so

everybody has a responsibility to try to be healthy, not just to be productive and live, but to keep the cost down for other people.

I try to go

as little as possible to a doctor.

I really do.

Just because you don't want to just jam up the system.

When you're really going to need it, then you go.

But,

you know.

Yeah.

I know that's not wise, but

you've got to...

There's so many people that are coming into the system for the first time, and they're taxing the system.

And then the people are blaming people that run the system.

And maybe they are not coupled, Some of them, obviously, I don't know about the United Healthcare CEO, but I did notice that in the media, they're trying to demonize him.

They get into his personal relationship with his estranged wife or separate wife as if he was some kind of demon and he was a miserable.

He had it coming to him, is the essence of that.

He had it coming.

That's what Taylor Lorenz was basically saying.

With people like this, what do you expect?

So

there you go.

Well, any movements necessary.

Victor, I want to talk about another depressing thing, FEMA, but first

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the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, I haven't been to a tailgate in a long time, but I did go to a football.

I may have mentioned this once before, I went to a Yale football game as a guest of my old friend Dick Morris, that Dick Morris, yeah, and his family.

And they put on, oh my gosh, it was terrific.

What a spread.

There's nothing like a great tailgate.

You won't tailgate in the

hills of North Carolina.

So James O'Keefe,

he of the video has

doing a series right now uncovering the ongoing FEMA horrific response to Hurricane Helene.

And if I may,

I talked to my old friend Neil Freeman, and Neil

has been affiliated with National Review and Bill Buckley.

Neil was the first producer of Firing Line.

Neil was Bill Buckley's

aide on his top aid on his when he ran for mayor in 1965.

I have the poster behind me here of Bill's mayoral campaign.

Neil lives near Asheville, which was pretty much decimated.

But up in the mountains of

North Carolina, they've been devastated too.

And still,

two months plus after, Victor,

pathetic response from FEMA.

And we've seen these stories also of

officials disallowing

certain kind of homes, forcing people to live in tents.

It's a frickin', it's winter is here, you know, it's upon us.

So the response-it's a demographic.

Yeah, maybe they had it coming to them, too.

I don't know.

Some of them have Trump signs.

That's a mortal sin.

But the point is, they're East Palestinians, right?

They're people from East Palestine, and Pete Budijik was scared to go there for months

when they had that toxic cloud.

But Biden, I don't know, did he ever go?

I don't think Harris would feel comfortable there.

So there is a particular demographic in this country

that

it's open season on, and that is the lower to middle class, and I don't see, I don't mean class by any accurate description of them, I'm just talking about economic,

I'm talking about income levels.

And the people who make less than 30 or 40,000 a year who happen to be white, and they happen to be members of the working classes, and they happen to be as rural as they are urban, and they happen to often be not on the two coast and more to the south than to the north.

But there are people, as you know, in upstate New York where you live and where I live in the San Joaquin Valley that are dire poor in that demographic.

But

the

Uniparty has decided that that particular group can carry all of the sins of all of the complaints of the left.

In other words, when you say white, as Millie was talking about, white rage and white oppression and white supremacy, and what we hear in these indoctrination courses that we all put up with in the university, the white bicoastal elite feels exempt from any complaint about their illiberality because they can say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's those guys.

It's the deplorables, it's the dregs, it's the chumps, it's the irredeemables, it's the clingers, it's the garbage.

That's who it is.

And once you've demonized that whole demographic,

then

nobody cares.

So they just basically said, ah, it's kind of a bad pro it's kind of a mountainous area.

There's a bunch of poor white people up there.

They don't like us.

I don't really want to go in there.

And

pretty much that person who they fired for say for warning people not to lend assistance to a Trump, she she kind of encapsulated it, that said that it was not her,

that it was common policy.

And then she came up with the perfect victim-victimizer paradigm where she said, oh, well, I'm not a victimizer.

Those people are dangerous.

They might be armed.

It was just to protect our workers.

I was just concerned.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So

that demographic is, as I said, the dispossessed.

And the only time we want those people around is you want to go to a hellhole like Fallujah, or you want to go to Hellman Province.

or on the first time I was sort of embedded in a Blackhawk, and I looked up on my right, and here's a 19-year-old that fit that demographic

with a 50-caliber machine gun with no protection at all, flying at night on a black hawk, or when I was embedded the second time when I talked to one of these soldiers.

That's who goes there, and that's who dies at double their number.

And so that's the only time people want them.

And now they're not joining.

But

that is,

very strange how we romanticize every other group and then we demonize this one particular group.

And believe me, that particular group is as disliked and dislikes the white bicoastal elite.

They're not racist people.

If you ask somebody from that area or areas in the Oklahoma diasporas, Do you get along more

with a Mexican-American guy you work at the plant with or a Nancy Pelosi type of person.

They will tell you the person they work with the plant with.

And that's what Donald Trump, that was his genius for all of the political science professors who said it was impossible.

He did substitute class solidarity for racial tribalism.

And a lot of black people look at that.

They're more empathetic, I think,

to stuff like that than the white lower class than the white wealthy people are.

Because they could see they're in the same boat.

Well,

the best Trump card a white liberal could play

was I'm not a racist.

And if racism is being downgraded as

an arbitrating thing, they've lost their cachet.

They've lost their Trump value.

You always have to have Daniel pennies

that have no money, a Marine veteran, and you can go after him, or you can go after the non-existent white MAGA thugs that were ghosts, that didn't exist, that attacked Trucey Smullet, or the La Crosse spoil brats,

or the Covington working-class Catholic kids.

You always have to, if you're a white progressive elite, you always have to find one.

person that you can virtue signal in performance art that they are racist.

And then you tell your Hispanic and black elites, oh, I'm even more

muscular on racial issues than you are.

I condemn these people because I know them, because I'm white.

No, you don't know them at all.

They are much more close.

They understand Mexican and black people of the same economic circumstances much better than they want to understand or do understand you.

Somebody said once to me,

I think I repeated it.

I won't mention the person.

He's pretty well known.

He said, if you think about it, most of the pathologies in the United States, past and present, grew up and were disseminated by white, wealthy people who are never, that's why I always say never subject to the consequences of their ideology.

But basically, he was saying white academics, white media, white corporate elite.

Yeah.

They're the ones that design all of these things.

And why they do is an object of mystery, whether it's to deflect their own guilt because they live quite segregationist and privileged and secluded lives from koi polloi, maybe that's it.

They find inner penance by attacking other white people who are not racist and calling them racist.

Or maybe they just don't like poor people.

And most of the people in the United States who are poor by numbers are white.

I don't know what it is, but they do not feel comfortable.

Well, fighting racism is, and Shelby Steele is written about this, it's always about the, it's about the white liberal and how they feel about themselves.

He was so far ahead of everybody, and I don't think people understood the profoundity of what he was saying.

He wasn't simplistic at all.

He examined the mindset and the mentality of a self-satisfied, sanctimonious, white, affluent liberal and all the damage he does to this country by mandating all these other programs that he knows will be pernicious to the people who participate but which will bring him psychic satisfaction at a safe distance.

Well, Victor, we've got one last big topic to get your thoughts on, and it's sort of along the lines of what we were just talking about.

We could add the muscular classes here to the type of people disdained by our elites.

And Joni Ernst, the senator from Iowa, has a report about working from home.

Muscular classes can't work from home, they have to work from work.

We're going to get your thoughts about her report when we come back from these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show recording on Saturday, December 7th.

This particular episode should be up on Thursday, December 12th.

Joni Ernst has a report

released yesterday or the day before.

It's titled Out of Office:

Bureaucrats on the Beach and in Bubble Baths, but not in office buildings.

And Victor, I'm going to read a chunk or two here from the executive summary.

Bureaucrats have been found in a bubble bath on the golf course, running their own business, and even getting busted doing crime while on taxpayer dime.

Members of President Biden's own cabinet claim to be on the the clock while being out of office and unreachable.

Just 3%

of the federal workforce teleworked daily prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today, 6% of workers report in person on a full-time basis, while nearly one-third are entirely remote.

Most federal employees are eligible to network, to telework.

And 90% of those are.

One other thing I just want to

put here from her, her audits are finding as many as 23 to 68 percent of teleworking employees for some agencies are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay.

Some employees live more than 2,000 miles away from their office,

but in cheaper places than where they're claiming they live.

Victor, this is a, I'm so happy she,

Joni Ernst, did this report.

This gets in line, of course, with the Doge efforts that Elon Musk and,

in fact, Ramaswamy are promoting.

Also, Victor, oddly gets in line a little bit with, I think, your thoughts about, you know, why does everything have to be centralized in Washington?

This is two different questions.

Coming to the office every day is...

Well, I think they're setting them up for two reasons.

They're setting themselves up.

Number one,

Ramaswamy and Musk want to cut, and everybody said, you know, we're already lean.

Well, this just proves their point, A, and B, they want to decentralize, as you said.

They want to take the FBI, cash at that.

He wants to put the headquarters somewhere in the center like Kansas.

So if

they've already granted that argument by saying, we're not going to come to work, and we don't, all these buildings in Washington are empty, so we don't need them.

So why not disperse them closer to where people want to live?

And maybe the federal workforce would be happier.

So put the Department of Agriculture in Fresno, put the Department of Energy in Houston, put the Department of Interior in Salt Lake, put,

as I said, the FBI,

put it in Kansas City, put the CIA, I don't know, Miami or something.

But get them out of Washington.

And then maybe Virginia would turn into a normal place again as far as its

housing prices and blue state, lockstep, mine think,

groupthink.

Everything good would accrue from it.

And if you have a bunch of federal people that are trying not to go to their offices in Washington,

then just get out.

Same thing with the federal workers in general.

I mean,

these are, when they start cutting, everybody should put on your seat belt because you're not going to, if they cut half of what they they say they're going to cut and they make these changes on the border, you have not seen what's going to happen.

You can have 12 million people come in here illegal, and they've only been here three and a half years.

You can have 500,000 unaccounted minors under Joe Biden.

You can have 400,000 convicted felons.

You can have a million and a half people who have already been deported with all the paperwork done.

But when you start deporting a few people, CNN is going to rush down there.

This is this young little kid.

It has to go back to Mexico.

They won't tell you about the parents.

They won't tell you anything.

And that is going to be the narrative.

And you're going to see some federal employee.

I worked for the federal government for 28 years

and I've lost my job.

And it's going to be very hard to continue that

first hundred days we talked about.

They're going to have to do it.

I just wonder, Victor, about you mentioned the narrative,

and yeah, there's a narrative, and there's still not an unpowerful media, but

I just wonder if people, the I don't give a rat's petute what

CBS News, NBC, etc., have to say anything.

I hope so, that, and

I hope it's they've had the same experience as I have had with the

Homeland Security people, national transportation, Transportation, the people at the airports, you know, when you go in there and

the line is a quarter mile long out the door and you see 15 people just sitting around talking before they want to open up another line to get in through security.

Or you go to the DMV state office and there's a line out the door and you see 15 windows and five of them are open.

And so.

That airport thing, you sound like Josh Hawley.

Did you,

I mentioned this to you, Josh Hawley was channeling Victor Davis Hansen in part the other day when a number of the

executives from most of the airlines were testifying before Congress, and he just reamed them left and right, generally about the very poor

experience

what a poor experience it is to travel in America.

I've got to think about it.

I said to myself, what are the most incomprehensible things you could think of?

And whether it's I have an hour connection in Dallas, I get into a plane and the guy takes off.

He said, oh, by the way, we didn't have enough fuel in Fresno.

We're going to Stockton to fill up.

Or I'm flying back from Chicago at 11 at night to Fresno and the guy says, hey, Fresno doesn't have enough fuel.

We're just going to spend, oh, an hour in Denver to top off our tanks to get back here tomorrow.

And then you stay there three hours.

Or you go in and there's somebody screaming and yelling and

arguing and arguing and arguing and arguing and arguing

and no one stops her from screaming.

Or you suddenly go on your way to, I won't mention a couple of my favorite cities, but there's 25 people

with wheelchairs to get on the plane, and then all of a sudden they get cured halfway through the flight and they have to meet a connection.

They want to get out to the curb and suddenly there's no wheelchairs.

Or

they tell people, to Fresno Airport, do not take this, this is a

Canadian regional jet, do not take a big lower bag, you know, in for the,

please check it.

And then you get in and you have a close connection.

And there's all these people with this one and a half foot clearance.

They got a three foot thing and they think this square peg is going to fit in a round hole.

And then they kind of go, oh, oh, what's going to happen?

And they say, we told you not to check it in.

You know what I mean?

It's just everything about it.

You know, I was in a plane not too long ago, and we came in 20 minutes early, but we ended up getting off 20 minutes late because they couldn't find a berth.

And then when we did find the berth, I think anybody in the plane could have parked the skybridge better than the person who was offering.

I felt bad for him.

He just kept bouncing off the plane.

He could not connect.

And you think, if you have 300 people in this plane, wouldn't you think you could have one person that could connect?

So the whole thing is a mess, and the only reason that people are not dying like flies is it's all kind of automated now.

It's much safer, the planes, in the sense that they have autopilots, and they're kind of like electric cars and transponders, and they can find

the airport.

signals them to them.

They almost fly themselves.

But you do need these great pilots when you get into bad weather or tricky landing conditions.

But other than that, we're very lucky that the technology is saving us from ourselves because these airlines are poorly run and they're arrogant too.

Victor,

what was your record for the most wheelchairs you've seen?

I think I gave myself away.

17.

Yeah.

That was 17.

And the other day I was in Fresno.

They've kind of stopped it, though, a little bit.

I give them credit.

I was on a flight and there was only six.

And I think they have to have a doctor's excuse or something because before

it was just incredible.

They all got in wheelchairs and it was so patently that they just wanted to get the

overhead space, you know what I mean, for huge things.

And then they would go there and then they would get out of the wheelchair and walk and then they would run off the plane.

I mean, I'm not in every case, but

it's

just

so poorly run.

You think that they just said to everybody, if you check your bags in, it's free.

And if you don't check your bags in, you're going to have to pay a premium.

Then you would board in half the time.

Or if they just told people what to do before they boarded, you have to go in there, you have to shut your, everybody shut your phone off before you go in.

Everybody will not be on a phone when you're trying to board.

But these are simple things they can't do.

And then the people, you know, I can't believe these.

Have you seen these 50s commercials every once in a while?

They're on the internet of,

you know, Pan Am in 1962 or something like that.

Everybody's dressed like they're going to a wedding, and

the planes are very dangerous in that period, but very clean.

And you go in now, and it's like the Greyhound bus station.

I mean,

it's either yoga pants,

where I fly, it's either yoga pants or sweatsuits.

And

it's some type of very smelly food.

You know what I mean?

Like a foot-long hot dog with all this dressing on it that people pull out of their purse or something.

It's just like the bleachers at a

baseball game.

It reminds me of the depot at Amtrak in Fresno.

Something's wrong with America when Jack Fowler's the best-dressed guy on an airplane.

Oh, me, oh, ami, you know.

Yeah.

I was on a flight not too long ago, and there's a woman that came in, and I was in business class, and she was, she looked like

she was so well-dressed with one of those

thousand-dollar professional power suits, you know, she had on.

Yeah.

And she had her hair turned, very attractive young woman, about 40, professional.

She had a ballast, you know, and one of those, have you ever seen those guys on the plane?

They open it up, their suitcase, and it has about 17 little compartments yeah and they have you know towettes they have a hand walk a hand cleaner they have pins computers every type of appearance and she she had all that and she and then she was looking at me and she pulled out these toilettes and she I swear to God she scrubbed she she scrubbed the

tray.

She scrubbed the drink tray.

She got up and scrubbed the seat.

She scrubbed the vision the screen ahead of her.

She scrubbed scrubbed everything and I just, I was laughing and she kind of gave me a dirty look and I just said, it's no use.

It's no use.

You're in a germ factory, so I wouldn't, I don't even try.

She did start smiling.

She thought that was funny.

That which does not kill me makes me stronger, maybe.

Hey, Victor, we've come to the end of this particular episode.

I just want to thank our listeners for listening and for those particularly on Apple who rate the show zero to five stars, and Victor gets five stars from practically everyone.

Thanks for taking the time to do that.

It's a very good time to be alive.

It really is.

It's a very exciting time, and we all watch with anticipation what's going to happen on January 20th.

But for the first time in a long, long time, I think we all have justified hopes that the madness is waning and the nihilism is ending, and we have a chance to make America healthy and great again.

Yeah.

Well, Santa Claus is coming, so maybe he's got a big, maybe he's got the greatness in his bag.

I remember winter was coming in the game of phones.

That's what I felt like.

Winter is coming.

But now I feel it's

some enchanted evening.

Yeah.

Well, listen, Victor, I got one thing I've got to read here from, because someone left a comment on Apple, and they're praising you.

And it's titled Friendships, Plural, by Mitch 1762.

And he writes,

Dr.

Hansen, I really loved your thoughts on friendship.

Friends are the family we choose.

I've been blessed with quite a few 40-plus-year friendships.

As you said, they don't grow without cultivation.

If you're in the market for another friend, I would enjoy being yours.

Thank you for your thoughtful and measured mini-lectures on our daily happenings and your history lessons.

You are a gift to us, Mitch.

That is such

I

when you're young, you don't appreciate them.

But

I've had lifelong friends and

one of my closest and oldest is Bruce Thornton.

I try to talk to him every week.

And I have three old friends.

I mentioned Charles Gergas was ill.

I feel really bad.

I haven't seen him lately.

And then I have my closest friend from graduate school, Larry Woodlock.

And I have to see him.

I know that he's disappointed in me because he thinks I went probably to the dark side.

And then my co-author, John Heath, who was a beautiful writer, we just haven't connected in three or four years.

I try to call once in a while, but you have to develop,

once you have good friends and they're tried and true,

you have to make the effort to make sure those friendships persist.

And you have to be, you can't be hypersensitive.

You have to be the one to make the approach and work at it.

I totally agree.

I have a great friend, Ken and Ken, friends, Ken and Lisa, and the friends of Sharon and mine

from high school.

And they, guess what, Victor?

They are huge fans of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Anybody Davis Hansen?

I try to work on friendship.

I have a lot of friends at Hillsdale College, at Pepperdine, at Hoover.

And I've been very blessed with good friends.

So I try to

work on it.

I don't mean work is distasteful, but you just can't get caught up in yourself.

Yeah.

You've got to develop.

Well,

you're easy to be a friend with, Victor, because there's no diva in you.

There's a little Eeyore in you, but there's no Diva.

I'm getting over the Eeyore.

Somebody said that to me.

Somebody said this is the first time I've seen your teeth in five years.

All right, on that note, thanks, everybody.

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

Bye-bye.