America Grows Tired of the Lecturers

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to hear from Victor Davis-Hansen, star.

The namesake, he's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow from the Hoover Institution and the Wade and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is a best-selling author this year.

Two, two best-selling books.

The End of Everything and the updated version of the case for Trump.

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

The web address is victorhanson.com.

Later in the podcast, I'll tell you why I think you should be subscribing.

We are recording on Saturday, the 19th of October.

This particular episode will be up on the 24th, Thursday the 24th.

I kind of wish we were able to record one closer to that date, but both of our Victor's schedule and my schedule are a little, we're...

The twain would not meet.

But we'll get Victor's wisdom on a lot of important topics and actually on some stuff that he's written.

And let's begin today's episode with Victor telling us about a recent essay he's written on the lectured versus the lecturers.

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

We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, this is Big Piece you wrote, as you do every week for American Greatness, and folks can find it also at American Greatness, but also on your website, The Blade of Perseus.

Victor, who are the lectured?

Who are the lecturers and who's fed up with each other?

You know, everybody's wondering why when even the left-wing media says that young people have larger percentages for Trump than in the past, that African-American men do, that Hispanics in general do,

that independents do.

Why is the race supposedly then equal?

And the answer apparently is that he hasn't, Trump has not been able to penetrate the 53 to 54 percent vote of women.

And he's about 44, so it's 10 points higher.

That's a lot.

And women, as I understand it, make up about 55 percent of those who vote.

And I was just curious in the difference

in attitude that Republicans, libertarians, conservatives, traditionals have when they have a constituency that is not voting for them.

And most of the young women, it's because of lifestyle.

They want basically the Harris idea of unlimited access to abortion.

They're urban metrosexuals, a lot of the young women, and they don't like the Trump crudity.

They don't like the gratuitous insults.

So

he rubs them the wrong way.

I understand that.

But one thing that Trump doesn't do is saying that, oh, you women,

you're suffering from COVID.

You don't understand.

He doesn't get surrogates out there and say,

you don't understand what you're doing.

You're voting against your interest.

I know he appeals.

So, how does he try to win them over?

He tries to say,

the crime rate is rising, and I'm going to do my best to make sure that you're secure when you go downtown.

Or

the 30% increase in power, gas, staple foods, insurance, and you're the one that does the book, so I'm going to try to do that.

But he doesn't hector them.

But

Harris talks down.

Obama talks down.

Biden talks down.

Clinton talks down.

And especially to black men.

So

I keep going back to that little riff that

Obama did, you know, that was so widely disseminated, that little video clip where those young black guys have their, they're just kind of shocked that he's telling them, you know,

the blacks are not voting in the same degree they did to me.

And I can't believe what you're doing.

And maybe, you know, you're not comfortable with a woman.

He's just belittling them.

And that talk down doesn't work, but it's this idea that we're morally superior.

And we, when people don't agree with us, then we're going to

talk down.

But Trump's not doing that.

That's why he's winning.

He's not saying to the people who are not voting for him, you're an idiot, or you're you should be voting me, but you're brainwashed.

So he's trying to win them over.

And one of the things that the role in politics is you never insult the electorate.

Remember, you don't, they keep using that clip when Kamara Harris said, most young people are dumb.

That's just a bad thing to do for Harris and Obama and others to dress down.

The same thing about illegal immigration.

People,

I mean, the idea that you would deport people who came in illegally is logical.

You don't say you're insensitive, you're xenophobic,

you're nativist,

because you want

immigration to be measured and diverse and legal.

I mean, if 12 to 20 million people walk across illegally and break the law and reside here illegally, and you want them to go back and try it again legally, that's not the extreme position.

That's the logical, conservative position.

The radical one is letting them in.

But it's almost like the correction is worse than

the felony.

And so, again, they talk down on people as if you can't ever talk about

deportation.

How dare you talk about that?

That's why she was out protesting.

No deportation, no deportation.

Same thing with the electric vehicles.

Well, we know what's better for you, you stupid people.

Now, I know some of these EVs, the batteries expire, wear out seven or eight years, unlike your engine.

And I know that you can only go 320 miles where some of these larger gas tanks will get you 500.

And I know that when you

the difference is when you run out of battery power,

it's not quite the same as running out of gas.

When you run out of gas, you walk down to a service station and have somebody give you a can and you walk back with gas or they help you or somebody comes by and might have not with a battery you've got to be towed and usually it's a special tow truck that knows how to you know to tow it and you and then where do you go you i don't know they just dump you off at a charging station i suppose and all tesla has apps that tells you how the the charging stations are used but you pull in to a metro area and you look at your little app and all the stations are full right

I don't think that happens with gasoline.

I don't think you go into a gas station, there's still lines way out under the street.

Yeah.

I had a friend that did that, Victor.

They were going like 500 miles.

Let's rent

an electric vehicle

from Pennsylvania.

I don't know whether we go to Tennessee, somewhere like that.

It was a nightmare for them because of that.

Yeah, I mean, where do we find the next place to charge up?

I don't think the car dealers,

I don't think Camilla Harris and the car dealers that have these EVs are saying, you've got to get an EV

SUV so you can get the family and the three kids and get all your camping gear and then you can drive a thousand miles to the Rockies, camp out and get home.

And they're not saying that.

And so people are revolting against it.

And,

you know,

people have

Teslas.

My wife has a Tesla.

She drives to work.

She drives back.

It's about a 70-mile round trip.

Charge it in the evening right here.

It's wonderful.

But do what I say to her, I like to borrow your Tesla to drive 205 miles to Palo Alto and back.

No, because I've seen the Tesla stations in Palo Alto and Menlo Park and they're very crowded.

And anyway, my point is, don't talk down to people and then force them.

to buy.

And now what do we have?

The whole industry is paralyzed.

They're laying people off.

They can't sell them because government interfered and told the consumer, you don't know what you're doing.

We know what's better for you.

Right.

And I always go back to 1980, and that's what broke that election open.

You know, October 17th,

Ronald Reagan down,

way down.

Seven to eight points.

Seven to eight points.

Yeah.

And then on the last Gallup poll taken, I think it was the 30th of October, down three points.

Reagan wins by 10 points.

How is that possible?

Because people collectively shrugged and said, you know what?

This guy just, I remember that Malay speech,

turn down your thermostat.

You can't, you can't, we get, you know, you can't drive too much.

You got to go 55.

The era of limitation, Jerry Brown, spaceship Earth, all, you know, we can't do this.

We can't do that.

We got to live within our means.

And then Reagan comes.

We can't get the hostages back.

We've got to

endure these insults.

Remember, Mossadegh, Mossadegh, Mossadegh, Mossadegh, Mossadegh.

We deserve what we got.

We're awful.

Soviets go into Afghanistan.

Yes.

Everybody just, you know, we deserve to stay in line for gas.

We told you, you know, you're going to run out of oil very soon.

Era of limitation.

Can't just get prepared for $500 $500 barrel oil.

We can't have any new technology.

They just said, you know what, I'm sick of you, Jimmy.

Go back to Georgia.

And then Reagan, there will be no hostages.

And America has

going to see its greatest days yet.

And we're so much better than the alternative.

And we're going to have a 600-ship navy.

And we're going to cut taxes to 28% to unleash the big chugging road of American capitalism.

Well, he's going to blow up the world.

He's going to send Pershing.

Yeah, yeah.

So the point is they elected him because they were sick and tired of saying, you can't do this, you can't do this, you can't do that.

And I think everybody's saying, you know what?

I remember Ms.

Smith in high school, the lunchroom monitor, telling me, don't do this.

Clean your plate.

Put it there.

Put it this.

And they would say, I grew out of that.

I don't want to hear it anymore.

I'm an adult.

I can make wise decisions.

And then they collectively said, I want Reagan.

And nobody understood it was coming.

And I think, you know, the only person who said this is Tyrus on Tyrus.

Yeah.

He's basically said this, he's a very astute person.

He really is.

He is.

I love him.

He's got a natural intellect, and he has a great deal of common sense.

He's very prescient.

And he keeps saying, This is not close.

Do not fall for it.

People are sick and tired of

Biden-Harris and all of this.

You have to leave the border open.

You can't just deport people.

You can't deport people.

How dare you?

You just couldn't do that.

If they want to come, they have a right to come into our country.

Fentanyl is very dangerous, but we just couldn't stop it.

We can't stop the cartels.

We can't do that.

I know that Ukraine doesn't have any strategy.

We don't have a strategy how the thing is, but we just have to keep pouring money in without even worrying about how the war ends up.

We only talk about how the war ends up or how do we end this thing or what's the end game when we're in it, but not when people are on the receiving end of billions of dollars.

And how dare you say we can't spend money on our own border, but we're protecting Ukraine's border.

That was so simplistic, stupid.

They get sick of that.

you can't have a natural gas stove.

And everybody thinking, well, wait a minute.

You told me that it's a lot cleaner than any other fuel.

That's why I have one and it's sufficient.

No, that was then.

This is now.

It's warming the earth.

Get rid of it.

And so they're just thinking, you know what?

I'm sick of this.

I am sick of this.

And make America great.

Where'd it come from?

Ronald Reagan.

Basically, Trump repackaged a Reagan-S slogan.

And better than the alternative, don't have to be perfect to be good.

We're the party of Elon Mutt's electric hands catching a rocket in mid-flight when it comes back.

Oh, it's terrific.

Yeah, we're the, and notice all these tech guys.

There's a big Wall Street journal essay on Ben Horowitz, David Horowitz, whom I like and know.

He's the head of the Horowitz Freedom Foundation, and he's now flipped from Democrat to Republican.

This is the son.

Yeah.

He controls with Mr.

Andreessen, I think, $42 billion in capital to invest in startups.

And his attitude, basically, if you read the article, it's

that's what we do.

We're optimistic.

We need a latitude to make our own decisions.

And in fact, the decisions have been very good in the past because these companies are improving American productivity and life.

And so I think people, they want to, they want to be optimistic.

They want to think, you know what,

if we have to, we can start to balance the budget if we have to.

If we want to have a bigger Navy, we can do that.

We can cut back on all of these programs like Stacey Abrams' $2 billion.

We don't have to spend that.

We don't have to give all this money

to the universities so researchers can study the genitalia of the fruit fly.

We don't need to do that.

We can stop all this.

And so that it's it's a it's a uh

it's an election between shake your finger and lecture somebody and basically other people state flipping them the bird and saying, no, no longer.

Don't do that to me.

I'm tired.

You've done that for four years.

It didn't work out.

I'm done with you.

And I think that I think Trump has a very good chance.

I really do.

And I think that's what Tyrus is saying.

Yeah.

And other people like him.

Yeah.

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Two quick things, Victor.

One,

I don't think I've ever asked you this before, and I want to go back to the lectured lectured, but you mentioned Ronald Reagan and

you did an impression of him, too, which is very good.

Did you ever meet Reagan?

Never, never have, I never, I was a little too young.

I met,

I'm trying to remember.

I met at an occasion, his initial secretary of state, you know, the judge.

He was really good.

And

he was from Pasarobles.

I met him.

I met his son, too.

I'll remember his name.

No, he was right before

George Schultz.

Oh, his.

Oh, you're talking about the secretary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Remember that.

Al Haig was the case.

No, it was.

It wasn't Don Regan.

No,

he was Treasury.

Ah, I forget.

It's calamity.

I'll remember in a second, but he was a wonderful man.

He was a cattle rancher, William Clark, judge of the children.

Oh, Bill Clark.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

He owned a cattle ranch in

Paso Robles.

I met him once at a place, at a club, and he was wonderful.

And his son is still a Paso Robles Catalan.

Well, Bill Clark came on a national, we had on a national review cruise once.

This is before your association with NR in 1999.

We had Caspar Weinberger, Bill Clark, Ed Meese, Jim Buckley, Al Haig was on it too.

Oh my gosh.

Talk about, I know I'm missing a person or two, but it was terrific.

Hey, anyway,

back on,

and we sum up the

lectured, lectured.

This may be why this whole BS of Kamala Harris having the joy campaign, which we discussed on our last podcast, there's no more joy in the joy campaign.

There's a lot of Trump hatred there, but you can't have a joy campaign when you're lecturing to other people, when you're nannying them, right?

No, you can't.

You can't be happy.

They're not a happy people.

They want to control it.

They have one thing in common.

remember that about these all of harris's campaign there's articles today now that

electricity prices have gone up by 30 percent since 2021 because of these solar wind mandates yeah uh the rise in natural gas prices

And people not paying, and

you've got to cover them, too.

One quarter of Pacific gas and electric

users

don't pay.

And then California, of course, passed a law that says you cannot shut the power off if people don't pay.

So we have, I guess you would call it electronic squatting.

Just like if you leave your home,

if you have a second home and you're gone and you come back and there's, I just talked to a friend of mine, he's a really great guy.

And he had a place,

we were talking about Malibu.

And he had a place there that was an escrow.

He was selling.

And guess what?

Squatters came in and took it.

And that to get them out out was a very

laborious process because the laws were on their side.

Well, there's something called electricity squatters, too.

These are people who just don't pay their bill for whatever legitimate or illegitimate reason, but you cannot cut their power off.

So then PG ⁇ E or Southern California Edison then make up the difference by charging more for the people who will pay timely and in full.

But again,

part of the reason that they don't pay, and I'm not trying to excuse them, but it's gone up 30%.

Everything has gone up.

And why has it gone up?

Because of these mandates and people, if you had a candidate in California that said, hey, we have the fifth largest natural gas hole.

We're going to let all the natural gas guys get in here and we're going to start building more natural gas, cheap electronic electricity generated.

We're going to bring back a couple of nuclear plants.

Solar is fine, but we got too much energy in the day anyway.

So we're going to just stop that for a while.

These battery things that we're building are not yet at a technology that's complete, that's competitive.

But they're not going to do that.

And so they just tell us that you have all of these mandates, mandates, mandates.

And that's what Harris represents.

She's done that her entire life, nannyism.

And it's just.

It's freedom versus

that's what made Elon Monks.

I think people forget that if we had this conversation 10 years ago, he was pretty much let it be known he was a man of the left, or maybe the libertarian left.

But you tell a guy like that who's a Renaissance man, you can't do SpaceX, you can't launch missiles from

Vandenberg Air Force Base and help national security and the military.

You're not one of us.

You can't, you can't, you can't.

You shouldn't, you don't.

And that's just, you can't put a person in jail for burning down a police precinct.

You can't put people in jail who occupy your university and break all of the rules and go out and deface monuments.

How dare you?

They have a right to shut down the Bay Bridge.

I think that's,

just don't tell us what we can and can't do.

Why don't you just say, here's the law and we will carry out the law?

And so that's what the election is really about.

Well, you put California on the mind here, Victor, and maybe we should

talk about some things, California related to the academy and related to philanthropy.

And we'll get to those topics when we come back from these important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

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Victor, your friend and mine, I just don't know that he's your friend.

Your governor.

Well, your legislature has banned legacy admissions, and Gavin Newsom signed that into law.

It's interesting, the fore and against on it.

But

we've talked about legacy admissions as being an issue.

But what are your thoughts about what's transpired in your home state?

I understand the argument for it, that you want a small number of people

who have repeatedly, generation after generation gone to a particular school.

I mean, I think I've mentioned that my mother was,

she got a double BA from University of Pacific, and then she got another one at Stanford.

She went to Stanford Law School.

I think she was one of the first women to.

Her sister, Lucianna Davis, got her BA in MA.

My first cousin went to Stanford.

She grew up with us when her mother died.

Her son, my cousin and veritable nephew, went to Stanford.

I went to Stanford.

So should my kids go to Stanford because of that?

No, no, no.

I do believe in meritocracy more than legacy affiliations.

And I don't think a person can be consistent opposing woke admissions or repertory admissions and then also opposing legacy admissions, except if the legacy person would have got in anyway and they're fast-tracked or something.

But that's not usually the case.

If it was the case, the person wouldn't have to call in and say that I'm the third.

And then you have to define legacy too, Jack.

What does legacy mean?

Does it mean that they're going to let you in just because your parents went there?

Nope.

That's pretty much gone now.

What legacy means is you're going to pay.

During this whole woke thing, you know, the last four years, the admissions where I work at Stanford University, according to their own website, I don't know how they define white.

Sometimes they have a category mixed race as well.

But they used to pretty much reflect national demographics.

They cut back on whites somewhat.

It was 67% are white in the country.

They got down to about 60%.

But then they got down to 20%,

20%.

And only 9%

were white males.

That meant if you were a middle-class white guy with a perfect, well, I can't say perfect SAT because they were no longer required.

I can't say a perfect

straight A's because they didn't really compare the quality of your high school anymore.

But the point is they were letting Latino and black applicants in at a higher rate than

not

just based on the criteria that otherwise had they been white, they wouldn't have been admitted, but also

higher than their demographics.

And so when you had about, you know, 20%, 9% white males, you basically said no white male who is not an athlete and not the son of an administrator or professor or legacy or donor is going to get in.

And so that's one reason to oppose it.

The other is you shouldn't have those racial categories in the first place.

So if you're against racial categories that are not merucratic, then you should be against legacies as well.

Because

it's not just blind admissions.

And to be frank, I know I don't like to spread rumors, but

I'd say four or five people called me

during this George Floyd

repertory admissions.

And the new president, we'll see if he ends it, but as I speak right now, the latest class to be admitted was 20% white, about 9% white male at this Stanford University.

We'll see if he goes back and makes it more meritocratic.

Or if you are a person on the left, he makes the class look more like America, Jack.

Because it doesn't look like America now because white people, even in their decline, are still about 67% of the population nationwide.

And they do advertise themselves as a nationwide university, not a California university.

But nonetheless,

we'll see if there are changes, but

I'll be very skeptical.

But anyway, what I wanted to finish was that I got about three or four calls from people concerned about their children getting in Stanford.

And in the past, I had written recommendations for maybe three or four, interviewed the kids.

I never wrote one without, you know, I didn't have them in class, but somebody came to Stanford and said, would you talk to my son?

And

I would read the transcript very carefully.

I would interview them.

And then I would, I don't know to what degree they were a valuable recommendation.

But my point is,

in that process, the last year or two, people said,

I'm really angry.

I'm a big Stanford supporter.

My kid had perfect credentials, but the word is, if you want to get your kid into Stanford, you have to, and you're a white male, you have to pay about nine or $10 million gift.

I know Stanford would say, that is an out-and-out lie.

It might be.

I'm not suggesting, I'm not trying to gossip, but there was the perception,

the rumor, the impression

that for a rare white male admittance of 9%,

and you were not an athlete or you're not the son of a prominent faculty member,

that a donation would be expected.

And that's another reason to get rid of all this stuff.

Yeah.

You're not going to get rid of it because if somebody gives you 100 million bucks and then they say, I have a grandson named Timmy and he's applying.

Not that you're going to give any special consideration, I'm not asking for it.

But if Timmy's name comes up, you might want to think that his old granddad helped you out with teeny weeny bit, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, well, there's uh, money buys you insurance, and

they have a nice thing, chir nipse

chira in Greek, hand washes hand, huh?

Yeah,

um, we have one other um education-related topic, maybe even two, but first, Victor,

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Victor, two more education things.

And then I forgot something

about the lectured and lecturers.

We'll get to that.

But

one, Harvard, the news reports come out this week.

Harvard has taken a 15%

fundraising hit.

Donations

from alumni have dropped that much over the school's weak response to campus anti-Semitism.

Remember, Victor, it was like October 8th of last year.

Weren't there like 30 or something Harvard groups came out immediately?

The bodies were still bleeding.

And these

pro-PLO, pro-Hamas groups at Harvard were

out there advocating for these murderers.

Is it any surprise that it's been 15%?

Maybe the surprise is it's not enough.

Your thoughts?

Well, the problem with the university endowments, I know a lot of people say, well, come on, Victor, Stanford has almost 40 billion or more.

Harvard,

I think it's up to 60 or more.

What does it matter if they're down,

you know, annual giving maybe is a billion dollars or down $150 million or well, the problem is that their budgets, everybody, their budgets have swollen to astronomical agree, partly because of DEI, partly because of the administrative state.

There was a very stunning Wall Street Journal essay, and Stanford got very angry about it last year.

It said that there were about 16,000 undergraduates and graduates on the Stanford campus, but about 15,000 employees were classified as administrative.

In other words, you had one administrator or one administrative assistant for every student.

And that's expensive is what I'm getting at, Jack.

So,

yes, if you stop

donating to the endowment and the endowment this year, of course,

because of the stock market, it probably got 9%.

But a normal year, some years they don't quite

stay even with inflation.

So they want annual giving.

But if you're spending money beyond your annual giving that's not targeted to the endowment, then you have to borrow money from or just take money from

the endowment.

And that's sort of eating your seed corn is what I'm getting at.

Right.

And so that's why people are very concerned.

I don't think anybody realizes that even if you got 50, as I said,

50 to 60 is probably 54 or 55 billion at Harvard.

And that annual giving that you count on both to meet the operating budget of Harvard and to build up the endowment

starts to cut off.

And

when you're not in a recession, then you start to worry because you start to say to yourself, what in the world are we going to do if

we have to do this every year?

Do you see what I mean?

It's sort of like you have a savings account and you're spending more each year, but your savings account has 100,000 in it and you're borrowing against your, you're not adding any to your savings and you're spending more and more.

So you're probably getting to the point where you're going to have to

borrow against your savings, then that's not sustainable.

And so, and so it's not sustainable if the financial people,

you know,

they get so let's just take a number.

If you're spending six billion dollars a year at Harvard

and your endowment is $50 billion, right?

Now just take the lower, 55, and you're probably, I bet this year they got 9%, but let's just say they got 10 and they got 5 billion or 4.5 billion from the endowment.

You still were short and you have to go tap it for a half a billion on the rest.

You know what I'm saying?

Yes.

That's not a sustainable projection, especially when you have institutional drifts, themes,

facts that you can't change if you're in development.

So

you're the development officer at Stanford, Harvard, and you go to these people and say, look, we're raising money at a fantastic rate.

We had the best year in history, but we're down.

We're down from what we raised last year, and you're up.

And you're spending a fantastic amount of money.

You've got hundreds of DEI people, administrators, staff.

You've got this,

you've got this climate change institute, you've got this.

Can't you cut?

And that's got to, that's something that has to give, is what that is all about.

And

who's the beneficiaries of it?

Hillsdale College, $300 million annual raising fundraising, $300 million for a college not of 16,000

like Stanford, but

one-tenth the size of Stanford is Hillsdale, and it raised 300 million.

Yeah.

Well, these are schools that are seen as causes, and rightly so.

They're authentic.

And it's not only Hillsdale.

I mean, the moment for a lot of schools, some of these, Thomas Aquinas, Catholic University, Belmont, Benedictine on the Catholic front, University of Austin,

Texas.

You know,

this is a moment for a lot of places.

Hey, Victor,

if we can, also on

disqualifying

in the academy,

well, maybe disqualifying is the wrong word, but let's talk about another problem

or actually good news.

This has to do with sports and

San Jose State University, not

too far from you.

You may drive past it

sometimes when you're heading up to

Hoover.

Its volleyball team has a dude on it.

And a number of

colleges now have stepped up and said, we're not, the women have voted, we're not playing this team.

This is wrong.

And the most recent

the women's volleyball team at the University of Nevada, Reno, they voted to forfeit their match against San Jose State.

Other schools that have done this, Southern Utah University, Boise State, University of Wyoming, and Utah State University.

They've all said no mas.

So this is a good sign that there's

pushback, I think, on

this level.

that women's women in women's sports

should be for women.

Yeah, and what's the argument for it?

The argument for it is we should have a

member of our team that has a male muscular skeletal development and has innate greater body strength.

And in a sport like basketball, particularly volleyball, can slam the ball and injure people that don't have that advantage.

And we're going to use this person to our advantage.

And if you object, we're going to say you're transphobic.

That argument's no longer valid.

Too many women in volleyball have been hurt

or they've been slammed and stunned or they've lost.

So really, it's a really selfish argument because what you're saying is that we're going to tell all these women who spent their entire life to master basketball or volleyball, they've got a college scholarship, they go there and then they're not going to win because they're competing against a team that brings in what we would used to call a ringer, somebody who is not on the off, that doesn't fit the profile of the roster.

And remember, I'll think, this isn't something that we all discuss for 30 years.

This isn't something that was debated about, that came up in Congress.

This is something that just

in a matter of three to five years, people just said trans

sexualism or,

you know, the trans movement, whatever you want to call it,

is now orthodox.

And anybody who objects is a bigot.

And men

who are transitioning to women, if they have male genitalia, they can be in a locker room with young women.

And if you object to that your daughter will see a man next to him with a phallus naked who says he's a woman, then something is wrong with you, not them.

You understand that?

And if your daughter gets slammed over the net by a 5'11 biological male who says he's transitioning and she's got a broken nose, that's okay.

That's the price we're paying for equity.

I don't think that argument works anymore.

It doesn't.

It just, it does not work.

And

well, good.

I know maybe pushback is

happening.

Everything, you know, these stories have a common theme, don't they?

Think of what we've been talking about the last two broadcasts.

On all these topics, there's a Tokyan ring that binds all the lesser lesser rings, the theme.

And

why are these candidates who are running for Senate

for re-election that have all the advantages?

They have more, you know, Casey or Sherrod Brown or Baldwin.

They have more money.

They have the power of incumbency.

They're in purple or left-wing states, not brown necessary, but most.

And yet they're emulating Trump positions.

They're distancing themselves from Harris.

Why are these universities that have $40, $50 billion,

suddenly their budget is exceeding the amount of annual giving, and they are relying on the interest from the

endowment, which is declining in the sense of it's not being added to?

Why now?

And why all of a sudden are

teams pushing back on trans

men playing against them?

What's going on in the whole country?

I think the whole country is trying to send us a message.

Time out.

No nick porcas, not this pig.

We're tired of it.

You had your agenda.

We don't want your open border.

We don't want 100,000 cartel-induced fentanyl deaths.

We don't want the Soros,

you know.

DAs and federal local prosecutors.

We don't want the blue state mayors that are destroying the cities in Portland, Chicago, Seattle.

We're done with it.

Almost every story we talk about, there's a subtext about that.

That there's a traditionalist anger, that this is rammed down our throats.

We were talking about EVs.

We're talking about lecturing people, that you're not sensitive to women's issues if you're Barack Obama, or you're unaware, or you're unenlightened.

No, they're enlightened, Barack.

They know a lot more about how it is to pay your bills.

You're the guy with the 2,000-gallon propane tanks at Martha's Vineyard, not a guy in a barbershop in the Bronx.

He doesn't have that privilege to have 2,000 gallons of propane on call for your, I don't know, 20,000-foot estate.

So don't lecture him anymore.

Do not lecture us, Camela.

Nancy Pelosi, do not lecture us.

Do not lecture us, you people at Martha's Vineyard, that we're illiberal because we don't like illegal aliens

crowding into our schools and our social services.

This is election.

This is really, I think, a determinative election.

Really is.

Victor, I forgot to

bring up before

one of our favorite people and lecturers, and that's Liz Cheney.

And

we'll get to her.

What else?

We have some FBI

not admissions, but sneaky admissions, at least online, about crime data.

And maybe we'll have another topic.

And we'll get to these when we come back from these final important messages

we're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show so Victor

Liz Cheney conservative conservative

There's a headline.

Harrison Liz Cheney will team up for a pitch to Blue Wall Suburbs.

And she she will be doing, she, Liz Cheney, will be doing a road show with Kamala Harris in, where are we talking?

Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee.

They will hold moderated conversations.

I don't know what that means.

Maybe it requires a teleprompter for Ms.

Harris.

But

Liz Cheney's

living proof of that

saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

With these conservatives like this, you know, who needs enemies?

Victor, any thoughts on this before we get to you?

What are your favorite topics, the FBI?

Well, let me just

thinking about how to explain the inexplicable of Liz Cheney, but maybe we could all do it this way.

So let's just do two narratives.

There's narrative of Liz Cheney.

She's in her late 60s,

50s, excuse me.

She's probably 57 or 58.

She's been the only congressman.

Wyoming has that congressperson at large for three terms.

She was picked and groomed by Kevin McCarthy and others to be the third ranking, I think she was ahead of the Republican

conference.

You know, that's the third highest.

There's the speaker, then there's the

whip.

The whip, and she's the third person.

So she was in line to be the first

Republican Republican speaker.

She really was.

And she was in a completely safe district.

She had kind of tinkered with

running in a primary.

That's Mike NZ.

Mike and Z.

Yeah.

And that was, and that was kind of a heresy.

And she got swatted down and she learned her lesson that she had a different type of political domain.

Okay.

So

she was one of these women who did it all.

She was a lawyer.

She was a politician.

She was the son son of a very famous vice president, secretary of defense,

aide to Jerry, going back to Jerry Ford,

a very successful CEO, a very wealthy family now.

Her mother was head of the National Endowment.

Everything.

And

she did it all.

She had five children.

I had dinner with her.

She was a very impressive person.

She really was.

And she was a rock-hard Wyoming conservative.

She was never going to be voted out of office.

So then January 6th comes and she's appalled.

Okay, a lot of people are appalled.

My congressman was called, David Valadeo.

He was so appalled that he voted to impeach Donald Trump.

And he's one of two people who are still politically

active.

I mean, he lost his seat in punishment, but he won it back.

And most people in the district, it's a plus nine Democratic, plus 11, I think, think, you know, only David Valladale can win in that district.

So why hold a grudge and vote against him?

He doesn't mention it.

If you ask him, he'll just say it was, I was shocked by it, and he'll want to drop the subject, which is smart.

But he did not go on a jihad and make that the basis of a new career.

But she thought, apparently, that given all of what I just said, the powerful Cheney name, the safe seat in Wyoming, her legal skills as a former lawyer, a national candidate, third highest ranking, that she had powers and influence that she didn't.

And so she thought this is a seminal moment.

Donald Trump tried to stage a coup and insurrection.

He's done for.

The MAGA people are done for.

They're ridiculed.

They're all over.

I'm going to be on the forefront, Jack.

I'm not going to be in the pack.

My rise to further power and influence will be depend on Hinge that I am the leader of the new Republican Party that sees the future and it's not MAGA insurrection.

So that's what she did.

And people said to her politely, Donald Trump is not done.

It'll come out that it was a buffoonish riot, but it was not a full-fledged insurrection.

And you're very vulnerable.

And they tried to warn her.

She didn't listen, but she doubled down.

And she lost by over 30 points.

She lost that safe seat.

And then she had a choice to make.

Recoup,

try to

articulate that maybe you were a little extreme, that you disagreed with Trump.

In other words, be a Nikki Haley, right, Jack?

A Nikki Haley.

Nikki Haley did not like Trump.

She represented the other party.

She was soundly defeated.

Trump, she was on the receiving end of what I thought was unnecessary, slurs against her, you know, bird brain.

And she gave just as good as she got.

She said, Trump's a loser.

He can never win.

But now she endorsed him, and she's still a viable candidate, even though she's not holding office.

She was in a weaker position than Liz Cheney.

Liz Cheney, when she decided to go for broke, had it all.

And so then she had a decision that once that failed completely, she lost her seat.

She lost her future in the House.

She's 58.

She's going nowhere politically, kind of like Nikki Haley.

What do you do?

What do you do?

Especially when the alternative is not just Democrats like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, but hardcore socialist Kamala Harris and screwball Tim Waltz and what they represent.

An open border,

20 million people,

a huge spike in crime, Soros prosecutors, a war on energy that Wyoming depends on, a war on coal, natural gas, and oil that Wyoming depends on, a war on ranchers and freedom to get water in the arid West that Wyoming depends upon.

National security, beefing up the defense budget, which her father used to advocate as Defense Secretary and Vice President.

You want me to go on, Lynn, Liz?

Yes.

Standards, anti-woke, anti-DEI, returned america that Liz Cheney depended on and advocated.

And what does she do?

She, in her anger, she not only

decides that she's no longer going to be a part of the Republican Party, which is fine.

She can be an independent conservative, but she joins not the left, but the hard left.

And she doesn't just join hard left.

She goes out and campaigns with someone rated the most left-wing senator in the entire 100-person U.S.

Senate and the second-most leftist senator in the 21st century rated.

She is through the left of Bernie Sanders.

And you go out and you campaign for her.

Now, what are we all to think about it?

That's a very principled thing to do.

Right.

No,

that is a complete symptomology of somebody who was crushed by Donald Trump.

She's angry.

She's willing to go work for all the people who were calling her father a Nazi, a Halberton crook,

a Brown shirt,

Darth Very, a person who shot somebody with a shotgun and almost killed him, potentially maybe.

All the slurs, slights, on fairness that was leveled at Dick Cheney.

And now she's joining that group, refuting every position she ever had and advocating for an agenda, which if we have another four years of it will probably wreck the country.

Now, why is she doing that?

Why does everybody think she's doing that?

Because she's principled?

No.

Because she's another person that Donald Trump crushed.

Donald Trump basically said, I'm going to take these people on.

I'm going to crush them.

And then I'm going to show you, in his view, I'm not sure it's accurate, what they were always for.

They're going to, because of their hatred of me, they're going to peel off their exoskeleton or their exoskin and show you the real essence.

That's what Bill Crystal really was.

He's back where he always wanted to be.

He's a huckster on the right, but now he's a man of the left.

And I did that for him.

I gave him that alternative to be choice so he could go back where he belongs.

Yeah, let David French be David French.

Yes, David French.

Exactly.

Trump did that.

But that's what happened to her.

And she has, tragically to say, she has zero political future.

Even if Donald Trump loses, she has no political future.

The people of Wyoming will never forgive her.

In fact, I think she's on the faculty at the University of Virginia.

She's just a Washington area transplant now.

Maybe she'll have a, maybe she thinks that this type of

conservatism will get her elected to Congress in Northern Virginia Virginia among federal workers.

But I know the left.

I've known them my entire life.

I've worked with them for over 50 years.

They don't forgive people.

No matter what she does, they're going to be people who say, you're the daughter of Darth Vader.

You're the daughter of the Halliburton CEO.

You're the daughter of a neo-fascist Dick Cheney.

You're a daughter.

That's how they'll think.

They'll never accept her.

Never.

This is 1984, right?

You capitulate.

you're tortured,

I'm a loyal trooper again.

And then Winston Smith at the end is in this bar.

And his next step, they don't recount it in the book, but you know what's going to happen.

He's going to get a bullet in his head.

Yeah, right.

There's no execution from the left is the end game.

No, you can't.

So this is what we're.

What they're doing to her is what Donald Trump did to Mitt Romney.

Remember,

he paraded after Mitt Romney said that Trump stakes, Trump University, Trump this, Trump Airlines were all fake.

He's corrupt.

He's horrible.

Don't vote for him.

Oh, hey, Dick, this is Donald.

Mitt, this is Donald Trump.

Hey, would you like to, I was thinking the other day, let's just bury the hatchet.

Would you like to be Secretary of State, maybe?

Yes, yes.

What do I have to do?

Well, you just have to jump through a couple of hoops and come up to Trump Tower, and we'll have the media take pictures of you as you crawl on all fours up to the top of office.

And then I'll have a pro forma interview, and then you'll go out, and everybody will think you're humiliated as you beg and beg for Secretary of State.

At which time I will no way in hell give you that job, and you will be utterly disgraced, but you want to do it anyway.

And that's what that's what the that is is exactly what the left is doing to Liz Cheney.

Liz,

can we humiliate you some more and make you crawl on all fours to worship Camilla Harris and become a neo-socialist to help her get elected?

And by the way, after that is all over, there's no way in hell you're going to be accepted as a hard leftist

Harris progressive.

We just don't want you.

We want to humiliate you.

And they are humiliating her.

Well, Victor, we're...

it's tragic because she was a very accomplished person.

She really was.

She is a very accomplished person.

I can't say was.

She is.

Yeah,

by the way, I think layered into this too, I agree with everything you said layered into it is the, is Trump's broader,

if you want to, well, of, of, of, uh, of, uh, of Bush-Cheney Inc.

Call it that, if you will.

And well, all the I know a lot of former Bush-Cheney people, and all the ones that were not destroyed by Trump had one thing in common.

They said things along the following.

I don't like the way Donald Trump refers to the Bushes who were gentlemen.

I don't like some of his policies.

I'm a free marketeer.

I'm not saying that I'm one of these.

I'm not.

But I talked to them.

But given the alternative, this is kind of the bill bar, right?

Given the alternative, his agenda is so much closer, A, to my whole life's fight for America, and B, so much better for America than the alternative, that I'm going to vote for him, even though I understand I'm never going to be appointed by him.

There's not going to be anything in store for me, and his crudity

is embarrassing.

But I'm going to vote for him because I care about the country.

Those people, and there were a lot of them, made it okay.

They're not destroyed.

People respect them.

And

that's kind of,

there's a lot of people in, you know, those are people, I suppose, like, don't you think a lot of the editorial writers from the Wall Street Journal, I don't know if Gerard Baker is, or Daniel Hinneger or Kimberly Strassel, but that's the impression I get.

that they have deep personal reservations about his character and his crudity.

And they were Bush

doctrinaire Republicans, and they'll vote for him.

And therefore, although they'll criticize them, they have very viable, successful careers because their readers and their constituencies understand that.

They don't understand how you suddenly in one year refute not just all of your positions, but all the people who took you at your word.

All the voters of Wyoming that were drilled in over and over and over again by the Cheney family, that you had to have free exploration of gas and oil in Wyoming, that that arid state needed federal water projects, that you had to protect the rights of guns, that you had to have traditional values, that you had to have a strong defense.

And all of that, you just say, nah, that was just rhetoric, because my personal anger and hatred of Donald Trump trumped all of that.

Sorry, see you,

I'm not going to see you anymore in Wyoming, and I'm on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris and Tam Walt.

Yeah,

I say radical socialism is a good thing now.

I mean,

that's the arc they've taken, or as you put it, maybe that's what, for some of them, where they always were until I like the idea, the image of the exoskeleton victor.

That's pretty good.

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I'm sorry, Victor, that reminds me.

The one tailgate I've been to in the last 15 years, weirdly, was at Yale.

I live near Yale.

And I have nothing to do with Yale.

And it was a game, Yale versus Columbia.

And we were sort of friendly with, became friendly with Dick Morris through national review cruises and his family.

And they invited us, Sharon, my wife, Sharon, and I.

And it was terrific.

Terrific to be tailgating on a nice

Saturday afternoon.

Not that I gave a rat's patoot about either team, but so be it.

Anyway,

Victor, let's head into the

ground around the turn here into the home stretch with some quick final thoughts about the FBI.

So we remember that

Donald Trump was fact-checked in the debate by, I forget who the heck the reporter was, but

that he cited that the crime was up.

And no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that was David.

Wasn't that David Muir of ADA?

It was him.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's who it was.

And now the FBI has updated its website.

Didn't come out with any press statement.

We were wrong.

We blew it.

No.

So Donald Trump, what he was saying was right.

And not crime is up.

I think the number I read in this article is approximately 4%, not down to 2% to 3%.

So,

you know,

this agency just has become

gained a black belt in playing

politics and

gaslighting now.

Why would you say that, Jack?

Why would you say that?

Are you suggesting?

that an FBI attorney would alter a document submitted to a FISA court and commit a felony and be convicted of it?

Are you suggesting that the former FBI director James Comey would plead amnesia 245 times under oath?

Are you suggesting that Andrew McCabe, his interim replacement, would lie four times under oath to federal investigators?

Are you suggesting that Robert Mueller, the icon of

FBI directors, would before Congress say that he has no idea what Fusion GPS is

or the steel dossier, which were the cornerstones of his very investigation?

Are you suggesting that James Baker, the lead counsel of the FBI, would

be a draftsman of a plan to have FBI agents work with Facebook and the old Twitter to censor stories deemed injurious to the Biden cause, such as to make sure that any New York Post story about the authenticity of

Hunter Biden's laptop should be suppressed, and then he would shortly retire and go to work for Twitter and find out he had a salary of $7 million a year.

The FBI that goes into,

I don't know, school board meetings to monitor the thought and expression of parents because the teachers' unions have complained to Merrick Garland, the boss of the FBI, the Attorney General, and he's given an order to go spy on those people?

Are you suggesting that the FBI would start to

run

SWAT-type raids like, I don't know, Mar-Lago, and then rearrange documents on the floor to make them messier than they actually were?

And then to add insult to injury by gratuitously going into Melania, former First Lady of the United States, bedroom, and go through her underwear drawer and stuff, mess it all up.

Are you suggesting

the same FBI that would go after an anti-abortion protester and show up with a SWAT team in his home?

That FBI?

The FBI that would get James O'Keefe in his underwear and march him out and say, Do you have this

diary of Ashley Biden and be a retrieval service for the Biden family, whether that was guns and dumpsters or lost diaries or lost laptops.

Yes, that's the FBI.

I don't expect anything of them.

Nothing.

It's been totally politicized.

I'm scared of the FBI now.

I grew up with Ephraim Zimblos Jr.

I watched it every night.

I thought it was a great thing.

That's one of the reasons I liked Once Upon the Time in Hollywood, the Tarantino movie, when they brought back, you know,

Leonard DiCaprio was kind of a guy who was a criminal.

They showed him in in an FBI.

He was trying to recapture how America watched the FBI every Sunday night or whatever.

So, yes.

And there's only one remedy for it.

Well, there's two remedies, and they're not mutually exclusive.

Take the headquarters of the FBI and move it to Kansas City, Better Fresno, Boise, you name it.

Get it out of Washington so FBI agents

do not marry, associate, Peter Stroke, Lisa Page type of relationships and get into politics.

Are that in

my

son works for CBS?

My daughter is an FBI agent, but

all of that stuff.

Just get it out and let them go after criminals.

And don't get involved in politics.

Don't get involved with James Comey in determining whether a guilty

Hillary Clinton right on the election committed a major or minor crime as if he's a DOJ person that makes that decision, which he isn't.

Whether Hillary should have been prosecuted had nothing to do with Comey.

He presents the

evidence to Loretta Lynch.

She makes the determination, not the FBI.

That's an overreach, an acquisition of power that's not legislatively designated to them.

So, yes, get them out.

And

myself, take the various divisions, whether it's the criminal division, the civil division, the foreign

espionage division, the anti-terrorism division, and break them up and put them in other agencies.

Because something is wrong putting that huge group of people right in Washington.

And they have too much power, and they have abused it again and again for political purposes.

And that's what they've lost the confidence of the American people.

They have.

Yeah.

So, and I just delineated why they have.

And

well, you've delineated well.

Mel, my friend, we have

come almost to the end of this particular episode.

I was a bad boy.

I typically, the end of these episodes, I read a comment.

I didn't do it the last one, so I'm going to read two here.

And we read the comments that our listeners or Victor's readers, you know, folks who go who who subscribe to the Blade of Perseus, comment on his articles.

On Apple, people can rate the show zero to five stars and Victor gets 4.9 plus average from over thousands of such ratings.

And some people leave comments too.

So here's a comment from Apple.

And it's titled Substance Over Style.

This pod consistently makes my top two or three of many love the variety of topics and segments about history and military history, even though I don't have much knowledge in these areas.

Very simple.

And that's signed by RDCU8MBDT.

I don't know what that stands for, but thank you for that.

And then from the Blade of Perseus, one of the readers there

leaves a comment.

And this is from a woman named Anna Maria Calley.

And she writes, Mr.

Hansen, I moved moved to this country 15 years ago, and I saw you for the first time at Fox.

Since then, I started following you.

Now I know more about the USA, my home state, California, a crazy one.

And you make me remember history classes.

Thank you for your wisdom, your ample knowledge, and vocabulary.

You have taught a lot.

Wish you the best.

That's beautiful.

Quite nice,

Anna Maria, and thank you to the other

bunch of bunch of vowels and

letters from Apple.

Victor, as regards, oh, I want to thank the folks who

subscribe to Civil Thoughts, which I write every week.

I write an email newsletter.

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So that's that.

Go to Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, sign up for that.

And I think that's about it.

Victor, you've been terrific, as usual.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Thanks, dear listeners, for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Much appreciate it.