The News, Thomas Wolfe, and 1939 Poland

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. This is our weekend edition and we always do something a little cultural in the middle segment.

So we'll be looking at a little bit of literature and a little bit of war there. So we can expect that.
But let's go ahead and start with a few more news stories.

Stay with us and we'll be back after these messages.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor's the Martin and Ely Anderson, Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com. And we are a subsidiary of John Solomon's Just the News.
And we do have some reporting from John Solomon today that we want to have a look at.

So we'll do that. But the first thing I wanted to talk about, Victor, what are the polls of independence? And we have a

PBS story that says that

the independent polls are, hold on, I got to get it, that the independent polls,

the polling of independents, so independent voters, is showing that

Harris is down from Trump. Trump has 49% of the independent voters.

And, oh, sorry, Trump has

49%,

and Harris has 46% of those independent voters. So, this for Harris was a seven-point dip.
She was apparently ahead with independent voters earlier. That's PBS.
What are your thoughts?

Well, we talked about that on our last

podcast, and I suggested that when people digest a debate and they think about it, or they're subject to press coverages of it, their impressions change. And so what has happened in the

48 hours since we last talked about the debate? And the answer is there's a lot of clips going around and they're not good for her and they're better for Trump when he's,

especially his closing last three or four minutes. And then we get to the point where the debate was really, as we said, it was about Trump's authenticity, his

raw, he's what you get when you see him. And he can be obnoxious, he can be crude.

He lost his temper, he was easily triggered, but he did basically say things that the American people agree with.

They want the border closed, they want low inflation, they want crime down, they want a deterrent foreign policy, they're very skeptical of the whole transgender youth

problem, if I could use that, about people transitioning to a very early age with dangerous drugs and procedures without the consent all the time of their parents.

So these are the issues, and they don't go away, and she wouldn't address them. So she was a lot slicker, she was swarmier.

Everybody, when they got

done watching it, they said, wow, he lost his temper, he was crude, he growled, look at her, she was smiling, she had her hand on her chin like the thinker.

But when you start digesting it, and then you add into the additional factor

that the

two moderators, Lindsey Davis and David Muir, were just ⁇ I mean, they weren't even subtle about it.

You know,

we went over that. They asked fact-checking questions, or they fact, and there weren't even questions, and half the time they were wrong about the FBI statistics or abortion and the state law.

They asked Trump for follow-ups. They didn't ask her for follow-ups.
They interrupted the tempo when Trump was speaking, they allowed a hot mind.

I could go on and on and on, but that also factors into is what I'm trying to say.

And so when you see the independents, and there were about six or seven focus groups that have been in the media lately, the last 48 hours, and they all are pretty much the same thing.

They're groups of 10, groups of 20, groups of eight.

And they're picked by the liberal media and New York Times or ABC, CBS, and they ask them as an independent. And of course, that's hard to adjudicate when somebody says they're an independent.

You can have stronger Trump or Harris supporters are independent than their relative counterparts in the Democratic-Republican.

But nevertheless, when they say they're independent and undecided, they go for Trump. And the reason that they cite is that

she didn't tell us what she was for. And she had to because Trump didn't have to, because everybody knows what he's for.

And so after, you know, it's kind of like drinking a Coca-Cola, it tastes good while you're drinking it, but you just feel awful in about an hour or two.

That syrupy, sappy feeling, and that's kind of what the debate was about. There was just nothing there, there was no nutrition there.

And people voice that apparently in the independence.

I think the disappointment with Donald Trump is that when she was so sappy, and they asked her particularly

what her program was, and she just said, I'm from the middle class.

And she didn't give any, he could have really pounced on her. And he did well in his closing statement, but they felt it was a lost opportunity, and there's only 60 days.

And what they're afraid of is, when I say lost opportunity, define your terms, Victor, well, I mean it's dead even in the polls.

And no one can adjudicate whether

One of two realities is actually true. The one reality is he's really ahead in the polls because of their flawed record in the past two Trump elections.

The other alternative reality is he's going to have to be ahead in the polls because of the,

what's the word,

misadventures that take place under early balloting and mail-in balloting in the swing states.

So he could have put her away is what people are thinking. And he didn't.
And now the question is, should he

She said today she was going to have more interviews, starting out with black journalists, but that's a tip-off.

I mean,

black journalists represent 13% of the population, and that's the first she's already done

interviews with them.

What she needs to say is, I'm going to have a news conference, and black journalists, and white journalists, and Hispanic, everybody's free to come and ask me questions, but she won't do that.

It doesn't sound like somebody who's coming off a great victory in the debate.

And

if she had a great victory and it showed in the polls. Well, first of all, it doesn't doesn't matter whether you have a great victory or not.
It's what the polls say after the debate.

And they're not showing that either one leapt up, except Trump seems to have solidified his lead among independents.

And that's who's going to decide the election. There's two things that are going to decide the election.
A, the independent swing voter, and B, voter turnout.

And those are predicated on a lot of factors.

How much money you spend, how effectively you spend it, what the candidate says, October surprises, foreign and domestic unexpected events from the next 60 days. But those are the two

issues that will determine how many people go out to vote and who's more successful in getting out the vote. And then

what will the swing voter? And then there's the third one I should add, and that is voter integrity. To what degree do the votes represent

the final votes represent the actual votes cast. Yeah.

And it seems to me that the independents, maybe they're noticing this, that Kamala does not give any policies that she's for, and she has only surrogates going out and doing it.

And I think that's just, I mean, it seems obvious to me that that's her method by which she'll say, well, I never really promised it. You just thought it.

But see, it wouldn't matter if right now Joe Biden

was stepping aside and he was polling 55% like Obama did when he went out of office, right?

And even if it was dead even, and she supported those policies and she articulated them. So, right now, if she was saying,

she wouldn't even have to articulate them, she would just say, I'm for Joe Biden's policies. Everybody knows what they are, they're very unpopular.

But when they're very unpopular, and he's polling 38 to 41 percent,

and she's running for president

as the current incumbent vice president, then people want to know, are you going to continue these unpopular policies that you co-owned? And if you're not, what are you going to do?

And if you're going to do them, why haven't you spoken out before? Or will you speak out about them in the next four months? And those, you hit a brick wall when you ask her that.

Well, they don't even ask her that, but that's what the independent voter wants to know. And every one of those focus groups, that's what they ask.

What's her policy? Is she going to be the same as Biden? Is it going to be more content? We don't know. She never tells, and she won't tell

Because, you see, those were

this debate, it was very reminiscent of the first 10 minutes, 20 minutes of the DeSantis Newsom debate. He's very like her.
He's slick like her.

He's swarmy like her. And he's empty-minded like her.
He's more effective, but

they're very similar. And what happened in that debate, if you look at it,

the first 15 or 20 minutes, it was exactly like the entire Harris debate. She was

kind of empty, didn't really want to kind of lie to it repeatedly and repeatedly.

You know, Newsom couldn't answer the questions about why is everybody leaving California, why is everybody going to Florida? Why is Florida with no tax have a surplus?

Why would California the highest tax in the nation? All that. He just kind of said, oh, you know,

you have a crime rate and women don't like your, all that stuff. And then he landed out of the canned lines.
And for the next hour, DeSantis was like a machine gun.

He just slowly took him apart because he couldn't answer because he'd already exhausted the repertoire of canned lines. She had done the same thing but he didn't do that Trump and he didn't do that

because she said that he, you know, there were certain things that she was told to say that he's really sensitive about.

One is crowd size and being boring because he was an entertainer and the apprentice and she got to him on that. And then his father's business and his own business and and she got him on that.

And then she called him a racist from something 30 or 40 years ago. That was another thing that was not fact-checked, the Wilding rape incident,

incident, travesty.

And so that's what she did. And when Newsom tried to do that to DeSantis, it didn't work.

So

that's what we're going to see. I don't think there'll be another debate.
Anybody who tells Trump to debate with a network news moderators, it's got to have his head examined because

you're going to be three people. Why do you even need two moderators? Lincoln, Douglas, somebody just says, okay, here's the Oxford-Cambridge rules of debate.

Donald Trump, you make a statement five minutes, and I'm going to time you. Kamala Harris, you make a statement of five minutes.
Donald Trump, you have three minutes of rebuttal.

You can say anything you want. If you think she's lying, say it.
And then Kamala, you have three minutes of rebutting his opening statement. Donald Trump, you have two minutes to rebut the rebuttal.

And Kamala, you have two minutes to rebut Donald Trump's rebuttal.

Next topic. Next topic.
Now we're going to have 10 topics.

I don't know. You know, 90 minutes, 10 minutes of topic.

Opening statement,

opening statement, rebuttal, rebuttal, rebuttal of the rebuttal, rebuttal of the rebuttal. Move on.
You don't need a moderator. You just need a timekeeper.

And I have done, maybe in my life, in the public forum, maybe 40 debates,

I would say 90% of them were like that. I debated Arianna Huffington.
It was exactly like that. I debated a libertarian scholar on the border.
It was exactly like that.

It was, you know, that's the way it is. The moderators shouldn't be involved at all.
Yes, I agree. And they

not going to be able to do it. He was good, though.
He was ready for that candy crawley act. And he responded in a way Mitt Romney didn't at all.

He said, you're wrong about that on the FBI statistics.

And as I said,

he had some good canned lines. And

those were in the, he had, I don't know if they were canned or not, but when you look at the

The short takes, even in the liberal media, I mean, when he said C, spot, run, that was her

program. And he said, he didn't quite say there you go again, but he said, does that sound familiar? Her interruption, let me speak.
He said, please let me speak. Does that sound familiar?

Because she did that to Michael Pence in his debate. So he had, and that's been replayed and replayed and replayed.
And people are getting very angry.

You know that people are getting very angry at the moderators because

the moderators and their defenders are getting

angry at the anger. And they have destroyed their their careers, and they know no Republican, I think, would ever, ever do a debate on ABC again.

It's going to hurt Disney, too.

This is kind of like the trans thing and Bud Light with Disney.

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And we thank Field of Greens for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So Victor, I wanted to just notice something that on all the commentary afterwards, what I noticed was that Marco Rubio came out, Ted Cruz came out, and then of course J.D. Vance is doing his job.

And those three people

are just so good at articulating the position of the market.

And that can make a difference because if you look at the second team, the

explicators of Biden versus

Harris versus Trump, It's not even close. There's Vivek, he's great.
Vivek, yeah. And there's J.D., he's he's really good.
And there's Tulsi, there's RFK.

Maybe the two best are Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton. And they go out and they joust.
They go on all the liberal networks and they don't want them on there anymore.

But when you look at the Harris team, I mean, were you going to have Biden go out and defend you? Maybe Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer? Who else are you going to have?

So that's an advantage that they need to use.

And you can really see it when J.D. Vance walked in, they thought, to a buzzsaw about the eating of geese and ducks and stuff like that in Ohio and the Haitian 20,000.
It's brilliant.

So they basically said, are you going to tolerate that lie?

And he said,

we don't know.

We know that the city said they were investigating it, and so far they didn't have information, but there's 911 calls, but people said, this guy's got carrying around the neck of a duck, a goose.

And so, and then he said, But this is all a meme.

And the point is, there's 20,000 Haitians in this little tiny town, and they are overrunning the town. And the Biden administration and the Harris administration dumped them there.

And you don't care, so you're off on this other excursion. And he said, When people say that they're eating animals in the park, then

it's incumbent upon you to refute it. And basically, he said that was the report.
So refute it. And, you know, they say, well, there's no evidence that

when a woman says, I've seen a cut-off pig's head in the park, or somebody calls 9-11 and says, right now, here's the license plate of somebody who's walking around with a goose from the park, then refute it.

And so, and I don't know what happened, but he was really good at that. And the thing about it is it's so, they're so smug.
When you get a Rubio or a Tom Cotton or a J.D.

Vance or Tulsi or RFK with these

really mediocrity, these people, you know, gosh, when you see Nicole Wallace or this David Muir or Lindsey Davis or these people, and they're pressed and

they're pressed and they have to offer a counter, they can't do it. I don't know what it is, but

if you're a politician and you're good at it,

then you've got to to be quick on your feet. You really do.
That's what politicians do.

And if you have to be out in the public and you have to, and you actually receive and take questions, you've got to be pretty good at it.

But if you're an anchor person, you don't necessarily have to be that way at all. You just read off the teleprompter.
Yeah, that's what you're saying.

And that's what, I mean, these are not opinion people. They're not Laura Ingram or Sean Hanny that come out or Tucker that go out and say things that are of an opinionated nature.

They're just reading off the evening. I mean, I'm not saying they're not slanted, that they're the script that they read, but usually

they're mediocrities. And when you just say, no, that's not true, and here's why, then you see their faces.
It's this dumb look at it.

And when

Trump tried to fact-check the FBI that David Muir's face was just

duh.

Trump said, well, all the cities don't report their crime statistics. Oh.

And then when he was trying to say, and now you've changed your view about the election results, huh? You said you won by a whisker. He said, that was it.
Nobody who knows me knows that I believe that

Biden won by a whisker. That was sarcasm.

I didn't note.

Yeah, I didn't note the sarcasm. You idiot.

Yeah. And then that's when he turned to Kamala and said, this guy still believes he won in 2028, giving her her line and her answer.
It was pathetic. They didn't even hide it.

They didn't even hide it. That was really funny.
It's really funny about Mitt Romney, though, because

you're right.

The difference was that she intervened about the Libyan incident and an act of premeditated terror versus just spontaneous terror. And Obama was wrong, and she covered for him and lied.

And Romney just sat there, you know what I mean, with his face. And everybody, millions of people thought, are you going to fight for us or not?

And he wasn't. And

when they did it to Trump, he fought. He fought back.
And then what I'm getting at is Mitt Romney was asked about, he congratulated Kamala Harris on the debate. Oh, my.

And think about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of that act.

Here is a person who in 2012 was the first major candidate to

to experience an overt

lack of professionality with Candy Crawley. And he was a victim of it.
And he should know that that affected that election, perhaps. And now he sees it again.
And rather than condemning it,

he's complimenting the beneficiary of it.

And these people are really...

I don't want to even

go there, but

it's very funny about Lynn Cheney and and Dick Cheney because there's millions of people of the working classes who felt that they were conservative and they did not like the progressive trajectory of this country.

And they dutifully voted for George H.W. Bush, even when they didn't believe in the aristocratic, blue-blood golf course agenda of the Republicans.
All George H.W. Bush could say in 2000,

excuse me, in 1992 in his reelection, but it was capital gains cut, capital gains cut, capital gains cut.

And they dutifully voted for Bob Dole. They dutifully voted for W.
They dutifully voted for W again.

They started to get a little upset because of the 2008 bailout of Wall Street and the Iraq War, of course, and the inability,

you know, things like inability to make a cultural counter-argument to the left, so no child left behind, prescription drug, all these big kind of,

is it Janet Napolitano gets in a war? It was just this kind of uniparty stuff. They voted for John McCain.
I remember John McCain was in a rally. Remember that?

And some local disc jockey said, and John McCain is going to defeat Barack Hussein Obama. And Hillary said, I think he's a Muslim.
That's at least what he said, or he says he's not. Remember that?

Yeah. That's his name.
So you want to emphasize that? He emphasizes it to certain.

audiences. And what did John McCain do? Because I don't approve of that.

And he dressed down his host, virtue signaling his moral superiority. And then he goes around and asks people to vote for him on the conservative side.

And then you go to Mitt Romney and he won't fight in 2012. And then you get Trump, and he's the answer to that.

So my point is that

before everybody says the MAGA people are

all gone, Trump is crazy, and it's going to fade out, and what, they're going to come back? No, people have had it with them. They're not going to be loyal to those people.

If they get a control of the Republican Party, there's millions of people who won't vote for them because they're smug, they're arrogant, and they're tired of them because they did it.

They've been there before. Yeah, and apparently, they're like the left.
Apparently, I don't know. That's the untold story, isn't it?

That what's happening in American politics right now is ideology and race are starting to disappear as distinguishing characteristics of the parties, and and class is starting to emerge.

So what do I mean by that? I mean if you ask

Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer their worldview and the Cheneys, it's about the same now

on Ukraine, on the border, almost everything.

And

if you look at a growing number of Mexican-American people,

their view is not the same as the Cheneys. It's It's not the same as Pelosi, it's not the same as Schumer.
It's starting to be more like Trump. And it's a class solidarity.

The Uniparty represents the plutocratic, very, very wealthy, and the upper middle class, upper, upper-middle class, credential class, and the subsidized poor.

And in that vacuum, people are starting to create a conservative national party.

And that's the Republican Party. And that's what's so bizarre about all of these never-Trumpers and former politicians that are all endorsing Kamala Harris.
It's just weird.

The Romneys of the world, the Cheneys of the world, the Bushes of the world,

they're all for them.

And it's because they share the same culture, they share the same taste, they share the same aspirations, they share the same privilege and income.

And they have no idea what their policies do to average people.

I took my morning walk today and I walked out and

what, guess what happened?

Somebody planted a washer and dryer over the night and it sprouted. And I saw a big

washer, dryer, and a pond that my great-great-grandfather had picked this land to homestead because there was a natural artesian pond. And right on the bank is a white washer and a white dryer.

Just tossed there with a lot of other, I mean, be fair, there was drip hose and there was car seats. And that's what illegal immigration is.

And it doesn't happen at the Cheney's home, and it doesn't happen at the Pelosi home, and it doesn't happen at the Harris L.A. digs, and it doesn't happen in Martha's Vineyard at the Obamas.

And it doesn't happen, the crime doesn't happen either.

People don't.

Haitian refugees don't walk around Martha Vineyards holding geese by the necks, you know what I mean? That they just killed in the public park. Yeah, they don't do that.

And the thing is, the Obamas and the Cheneys and all those people around, they don't care anymore. And they're exactly alike.
And that's what's so strange about the politics now.

You have RFK and Tulsi Gabbard on this side, and then you have the Cheneys flip over to the other side. But it's where they all wanted to be.
Because Tulsi

Gabbard knew that she felt uncomfortable with all of these Silicon Valley characters and all these corporate characters and all these millionaire Democrats and all of this, you know, we're going to go to Moscow stuff on Ukraine.

I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime.

I mean, I was brought up in a conservative Democratic Party, which doesn't exist anymore, that was mostly about economics. Small farmers, amazing cooperative.

I know I was brought up with Sunmade as your Bible.

These are a bunch of small farmers. I have a co-op.
I came to detest Sunmade. But my point is,

anybody that wasn't in Sunmade was kind of atheistic.

That was the religion that I was brought up and the farmers grange and all of that stuff.

And you have to be very conservative and you can't drink and you can't smoke and you've got to not embarrass your family's name in town, etc. That was the Democratic Party.
That doesn't exist now.

But there is something re-emerging, and I think it's the Conservative Workers' Party.

And they're very skeptical about pornography in school libraries, and they're very skeptical that children should be subjected to dangerous drugs, but without their parents' consent below the age of 18.

And they're very skeptical of partial birth abortion. There's about not eight, as I said, depends on how you define them, there's somewhere between five and ten thousand.

I did a taping this morning before we came on. Just did it, I just finished it with Mark Levine, and he wanted to talk about abortion.

And,

you know, there's more abortions last year than almost ever, over a million again. We're back up there.

And I don't like that word reproductive rights. We've talked about it.
It's deproductive rights, because we have 1.6 fertility. We're getting down to the depression levels.

And people can't afford a house.

they can't afford groceries, and they're not getting married, they're not having children, and yet all we're focused on is abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion.

We should be focused on young people. This country needs to reproduce itself at 2.0.

Having children is a wonderful thing. You need to have programs to help you buy a house, not the government giving you

another handout or canceling your student debt, but making them affordable by building more. It's very funny about Kamal Harris.
She just says, I'm going to give everybody,

well, in California it was $150,000. It wasn't it for a house, but she wants to give it $25,000.
$25,000.

And you want to say to, well, just take away some of the

liability laws or just take away some of this, you know, that every single home has to have no natural gas

and only electricity or has to have solar panels when California can't use the solar energy. Just take that away.

Just give people freedom to have the kind of house they want and the price will go down.

Yes, absolutely. Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back for our cultural segment and stay with us.
We'll be back.

We're back. This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show and you can catch Victor on Twitter.
His handle is VD Hansen and Facebook he has Hansen's Morning Cup.

So please join him there for lots of good tweets in addition to all the other work he does. So it's pretty amazing.

So Victor, we have the cultural segment and I know that you want to talk the last thing about literature in that in the 20th century, Thomas Wolff's work.

And then we're going to hear a little bit about the Poland invasion in World War II.

Yeah, we have this series. We started with Homer about almost six months ago, and we went through great literature.
And I thought I just, we did Alexis de Tocqueville

of the 19th century. I'm just haphazardly, but you know, the great period of

American fiction novels was the 1920s and 30s. And

there was usually a corpus of what we call classics: William Faulkner, John Steinbeck,

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, people like that.

And among them at the time was Thomas Wolfe. He was born in 1900.
I think he died in 1937. He was kind of an awkward person, about six feet tall, 6'6, I think he was.

He was from Asheville, North Carolina, and he was part of that southern renaissance that included writers like Faulkner. And this is also John De Passos, a great writer.

So my point is that

he came from the small little town. His father was a working-class guy, and he wrote four massive novels.

The most famous, I think, although not the best-selling, was Look Homeward Angel.

And then of Time in the River was the one that made him rich. It really sold the second one.
And then he died.

He died, I don't know if it was a brain tumor, I think it was a metastasized metastasized form of pneumonia in his, tuberculosis, excuse me, that makes little postules or

tumors in the brain, but he died tragically at 37. And then he had a great, he had two great Edwards,

Edward Ashwell, but also Maxwell Perkins, the famous one from Scribner's. And the problem with him was, if that were a problem, he would write a million words.

And these were, if they were published, they'd be 2,000 pages. So then,

and he was so enamored with his, he's got what we call the Asiatic Faulkner style, southern writers, very

long sentences, complex sentences, subordinate clauses, multi-syllabic words.

And they had to prune it.

And when he died, he had huge manuscripts, and one of them was

The Web and the Rock, but the most famous one, You Can't Go Home Again.

And they came out after his death. And then he was very popular because he had this moving prose, and he

died so young. He was kind of an alcoholic.
He had a tragic life.

And then in the 1970s, I started reading him in high school and college, these four novels, because everybody was saying that he was not a good writer anymore.

It was kind of the Ernst Hemingway, Steinbeck type of, you know what I mean, journalistic, short, what we call the addict style.

And they were just subject, verb, predicate. And they were more anti-heroes.
And they weren't trying to write the great American novel. And then we went into the next generation.

I don't think, you know, John Updike and Norman Mailer and all

I don't think they were nearly as good as this earlier generation. But nevertheless, he fell in estimation.
And people said, he's just writing the same book four times and it's on discipline.

They're too long. And then maybe in the late 80s, people began to actually read them again.

And they not only thought they were classics, but they thought, well, wow, maybe they shouldn't have been so edited because he had things in there that made the characterization of the plot more cogent.

So they started reappearing, I think, Le Commer Dangel, and longer, even longer versions. And they're kind of about the same thing.

This young writer from the South, the first book is about growing up in the South in this period where people are starting to look at the 1920s and the South has been left out of the American experience and it's starting for the first time to have industry and people are starting to talk about race and yet it has this 70-year tradition from the Civil War.

And then he leaves and goes to

New York and Harvard, and he hits it big with his first novel. And he tries to juxtapose how the North looks at the South and the South looks at the North.

And then in the next three, it's a progression of how his fame and his candor about people in the town,

they end up either hating him because he mentioned them or not hating him more because he didn't.

But the point was, it was kind of a full disclosure of the pathologies and the crisis and the strength of small-town America in the South.

And then he has an affair with a Jewish-American, very sophisticated wife of a stockbroker, Esther Jack is her name in the book. She's a real person.
All these are real people, but he has pseudonyms.

The funniest thing is this

Piggy Logan, as Alexander called her, the famous artist. And he just, as a southern guy, comes up there and thinks it's ridiculous, you know.

But it's as

these four novels, as you go through them, you start to see he's getting more and more disgusted with the urban sophisticated life, and he's getting more and more fond of his upbringing and the people he knew.

And it's sort of, even when he gets on race, he's very critical of segregation and prejudice, but he can't quite figure out why

black people in the South get along better in some ways in white than they do in the North.

And the North has a particular prejudice against them, at least in the personal level, that's not found the same. And he's trying to figure this out.

Then he's going over to Europe, and because he's from a German family, I mean, wolf, he goes to Germany right

when Hitler's taking over. And for this first impression, is all his German publishers and all of his reviewers, he's more popular in Germany than any other country.
And

he starts to see that there's new free waves and there's no crime and they're out of the depression and they're over.

And he doesn't know what's going on. And as he goes back, he sees Hitler, and he's just terrified of Hitler.

He starts to become more and more anti-capitalist the more he is in New York, and he sees this enormous amount of wealth versus the lower classes.

But the final one, You Can't Go Home Again,

it's hard to know whether the Web and the Rock or the they were written kind of like a long manuscript and they were artificially cut up and then retitled as two different books after he died by his editors.

But he's trying to say

everything I wrote makes sense that I had this wonderful upbringing and I was exposed to this.

And I mentioned it to J.D. Bans as what I think probably was his experience.
Growing up in Appalachia, kind of getting

upset about the drug use, the violence, the dysfunctionality, going in and being welcomed in New York and Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

And then the more you get imbued with this attention from this particular culture, the more you look back and say, for all the pathologies, there was something there.

There was something there there that there's not in these artificial places.

But he tries to say, you can't go home again because you've been changed and they look at you at change and you don't fit anywhere.

And he's trying to use that personal experience to explain the entire

American experience.

That we're not just hyper-capitalist and we're not just European aristocrats, that there was something about America's working classes and immigration and this creation of a radically populist culture that was unique.

And at the end, he becomes hyper-pro-American as he died before he died. And

he was a great writer.

I find, I mean, I've read Steinbeck and

Hemingway,

and he's kind of like John Das Postles. They're kind of not read enough, but they were really brilliant people.

What do you think of

Wallace Stegner?

Steigner? Yeah, the Steiner.

I read Angle of Repose. That was a great novel

about a

guy who's kind of crippled. I think he's in a wheelchair, and he's looking at family members and things.

His son, Peg, he started the creative writing program at Stanford.

I know a lot about this because my older brother, Nels, NELS,

nice Swedish name, was a writer and is a writer. And he was very successful when he was very young.
And he went to an MFA program. And he was at UC Santa Cruz.
And there were some great writers there.

Paige Stegner, the son of Wal Stegner, who lived in Santa Cruz, not too far from a house that we stayed in.

And of course, there was John Euston, Jim Houston, James Huston, was really famous. And there was an African-American writer, I forgot his name, when I was a first year.

But anyway, my brother was very, he still writes, but a lot of what I'd learned about novels came from his record. His favorite, and I couldn't follow him, was Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.

But there was a period in my life that when I was farming, I had been just studying Latin and Greek for eight years, four years undergraduate, four years, and it wasn't archaeology or art history.

It was philology, manuscripts, textual criticism, reading in Greek and Latin seven, eight hours a day. I needed a break, so I was farming.

When I was farming, I would read novels and then talk to people, and my older brother was kind of an expert on them. I learned a lot from him.
But

that was a great period in the 1930s.

And I think I'm glad to see that Thomas Wolfe is being reappreciated. And then the modern version, Tom Wolfe, you know, of the 70s and 80s,

the right stuff and all that. He was a great writer, too,

another southern writer. I think he was from Virginia.
And he was not liked at all because he was a man in his full. I remember Norman Mailer attacked him and John

Updike attacked him. Everybody attacked him because he was fabulously successful and sold books.

And the thing about novelists, they all want to sell novels, and then the people who sell novels are considered sellouts.

They're not true to their artistic allegiance.

And then when they are popular, they said, well, he just sold out.

I could sell novels too, but I won't do that. I won't compromise my artistic integrity.

If someone wanted to start reading Thomas Wolfe's works, what would be a good one to start? I think you should start with Look Homeward Angel.

He's got some short stories, though. He has a collection of short stories.
They're pretty good.

He's really perceptive on race. He's got this vignette in one of the novels, I think it's Time in the River, where there's an African-American veteran of World War I,

and he's renting

a room in a small southern town, and he's completely disciplined.

He rents a room, he's kind of a Mr. Fixer, fixes thing for the family, and

he dresses immaculately.

His habits are just impeccable when he eats, how he eats, manners, and he's completely controlled and everybody's, and then he just goes nuts one day. And

I think he starts shooting people. And the point is that no one is perceptive of all the put-downs that he faces every day.

And that this complete regimentation is kind of a protective device so he won't go crazy. And finally, you can't...
be the only black guy in a southern town in the 1920s.

And no matter how hard you try to be the perfect citizen, it's just not going to work, to be totally accepted.

And so he has things like that all through the novel. And he's got a scene in, I think it's

Time in the River, maybe. I can't remember, but there's, as I mentioned earlier, there's these really wonderful people that are in the elevator.

And in those days, you know, you had to have an elevator operator. And he goes up to these sophisticated

upper west side parties because he's a famous novelist and everybody wants to know him and they're all, you know, the women are all smoking, and everybody's trying to talk about reading Spingler's Decline of the West, or the poet Bedouin's, and all it was just name-dropping, who's there.

And the only authentic people he sees are going in the elevator. And then one day they have a flash fire and they die because they're trapped in there.

And no one cares, even though they've been taking them up and down.

And he fixates on that.

And that's,

I really got, and

it made a big impression because because my parents were like that. It was really weird.
My mom and dad grew up very poor on these farms, very small farms. And when I would go places,

I remember my mom said, how's everything in your dorm the first year? And I said, it's okay. It's kind of crazy with my roommate and all this.
She said, do you talk to the maid?

I said, well, there is no maid. But she said, who cleans your sheets? I said, we turn in our towels and our sheets at a central place.
He goes, be sure you talk to her.

Be sure you become her friend, because you don't know what it would be like to have to deal with a lot of really rich kids. And those kids up there in that year were very wealthy.

But there was always that emphasis that you, you know, my mom was an appellate court judge and she was peddling food at a farmer's market in her 60s. I think it was really good.

And that's what's, that is permeated in his novel. That's why I like J.D.
Bance a lot.

Because you get the impression that he's authentic. I know that people say, well, he sold, he didn't.
He's authentic and he's articulate, but he has a deep empathy for the working classes.

And Poland's invasion. Well, we talked about World War II.
And that concludes literature, but we're going to talk about the, we talked about the causes of World War II,

the

anger of Hitler about the outcome of World War I,

the supposed shortcomings of the Versailles Treaty.

in short term, and more importantly, the American isolationism that did not help stop Hitler when he could have been stopped, or the Russian collusion under the Molotov-Ribbentrop track, where they were actually aiding Hitler, or the appeasement of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain.

And we talked about the context of this new kind of development where Tucker Carlson had on Darrell Cooper, who's a blogger who kind of gave the updated Pat Buchanan view of World War II.

But World War II starts,

it has to start arbitrarily because it doesn't start, we don't say that World War II started with the

Japanese absorption of Manchuria in 1933 or the invasion of China itself in 1933. You've got to remember by 1939, the major cities of China, Shanghai and Beijing, were under Japanese control.

A third of the country, and not just a third, the more populous and industrial side. But that didn't trigger an entire war.

Russia fought over the Mongolian border with with China, but it didn't trigger. But this Polish war did.
So on September 1st, Hitler went into Poland

and

he carved up the country in three weeks. The deal was he was going to share it with Joseph Stalin, who was attacking from the east.
Poland...

Poles had been there from time immortal, but their country as a formal entity had faded in and out of history because, unfortunately, it was between two superpowers,

Germany, and Russia. But the Poles were always a unique people.
Under the Versailles Treaty, they had their own country.

And Russia wanted some of it, and Germany wanted some of it because Germany lost territory under Versailles.

So

Hitler has told everybody that he wants

Danzig,

which is

Gdansk. It's a German-Polish mixed city, and it has a corridor for Poland.
So Poland is created, but it doesn't have a seaport. So they give it Danzig along this corridor of Poles.

And there's a majority Poles in the corridor, and maybe 50-50, who knows, in Danzig.

And Hitler says that that is a bridge.

not a bridge, a barrier. It's a bridge for them, but it's a barrier from us with East Prussia.

And East Prussia is the old landed aristocracy of Germany, where it's primarily large estates, the Vaughan people, VON.

When Guderian gets, we leave, he gets an everybody, if you're a German general and they get canned and Hitler doesn't want you to start a coup, he gives you a bunch of money and a East Prussian estate.

That is the hereditary

embryo of the German army, Prussia, East Prussia especially. So Hitler has now, remember in 36 they said you cannot militarize the west bank of the Rhine, the Rhineland.
He does.

You cannot combine Austria with Germany. He does under the Anschluss, 37.
You cannot go into the Sudetenland in 38. He does.

Now he said that's the last territorial acquisition I want.

But he's told his German officers and the Nazi Party hierarchy, I'm going to get every single German speaker, and I'm going to create a huge multi-state German empire, the Third Reich.

And so it's going to have 80, 90 million people at some point. It's going to be the biggest, most powerful.
And we're going to destroy all the borders that prevent that.

And the countries that do have large German minorities, we're going to destroy and then take the German minority and annex it and then make protectorates, the protectorate of Poland, the protectorate of Bohemia or Monrovia.

And he got away with it. So this is his last acquisition.

So right after telling everybody, he, and this is what was so controversial about Tucker's blogger's point, as if the allies or church were responsible for the war.

So Chamberlain's still prime minister, and he's been disgraced at Munich because it didn't stop the war, because here he is threatening war again.

And

he says the Danzig corridor, the connection of the Poles to the sea, is we're going to get rid of it.

We're going to say the Poles cannot vote in it because they're the majority and the German minority can.

And we're going to free Danzig up.

And what he's basically saying is, we're going to destroy Poland.

And that was contrary to the Versailles treaty. It's contrary to everything he did, but it was typically anticipated.
But he hesitates a little bit. He's saying this all during 1939

because France

and Britain have been aware now and they're rearming and they have more,

combined, they have a bigger army than does Germany. If you add Holland and Belgium in it, they probably can feel 4 million people.

Of course, then Germany may be 3 million.

So they have a larger population and a larger military. So he doesn't know what to do.
He wants to go in Poland and steal it, and he stole all this, but everybody's on to him.

So he comes up with this idea,

if I go in there, the Russians can come and attack me from the east, but what about my western flank?

I've got to do something, because France and

Britain in the late summer tell him,

if you go into Poland, we have a military alliance now, and we will declare war on you. And he doesn't believe it, because they haven't been serious in the last four years.

But he makes a deal a week before,

the Molotov ribbon pact, and he puts the Russians' name first.

And he says, look,

if I go into Poland, I'll only take a third. I just want all of Prussia, but I'll give you two-thirds.

And you can take

what is Ukraine and Belarus. And by the way, when we talk about these shifting borders during the Ukrainian problem today and the war and Putin's aggression, what is now western Ukraine was Poland.

So when we talk about

Hitler taking the eastern portion, which it lost after World War II, the western portion,

Poles never got back.

Stalin stole this in 1939 when he invaded, and what he really invaded is present-day Western Ukraine. And then after the war,

last year of the war, they said, okay, Stalin, now give it back. And no, I'm not going to get it back.

If you want to keep this crazy Polish identity, this nation, then you take East Prussia and you steal it from the Germans and give it.

And today's western Ukraine was ethnically cleansed of Roman Catholic Polish speakers. We'd been there a thousand years.
Nobody talks about that. But it happens to be true.

I don't know what the significance in geostrategic terms today and that war mean, but it's something to keep in mind in the context of changing borders.

So, anyway, once that happens, then he knows Russia will not invade and he's got an ally. So he invades on September 1st.
The Allies, in the night of September 2nd, early, they declare war on him.

In theory, he's in trouble because he's committed 80% of the German army, and they are invading in a tripartite pincer. They're coming down into Poland from East Prussia.

They're coming eastward from Germany itself. And they're coming northward from occupied or annexed Czechoslovakia, that area.

For the first three weeks, they run wild. Poles are great fighters.
They have a million people under arms, but they don't have sophisticated aircraft, and they're being bombed.

This is what got me so angry when I read this, Darrell Cooper's suggestion that terrorism was started.

Churchill was a terrorist because he approved of

area bombing.

Warsaw was bombed from the first day and for the next three weeks.

We don't know how, I mean, there were 65,000 Polish soldiers killed, but there may have been somewhere between 100 and 150,000 Poles killed, both executed after the war and bombed for the first time really in modern history.

Civilian centers were a target by Hitler. He started area bombing.
And then

Stalin said he was going to come in from the east. Hitler said, Where are you? Take the pressure off because the Poles are fighting.
Everybody thought the Poles would last three to six months.

The Poles thought all we have to do is fight three to six months. And they said to France, You've got three million people, million in your army.
There's nobody on the western German border.

You can do

the best thing you can do for us is invade Germany. And they go into the Saarland for, I don't know, 15 miles.
There's nobody there. And then they pull back.

And they say to the British, all you have to do is land

on the Atlantic ports and you can go right into Germany. There's nobody there.
And the British,

we'll think about it. We'll drop some leaflets.
And they don't. And so Germany has no fear about Russia from the East or the Allies from the West.

And in three weeks, after Stalin takes care of the Japanese, they have a war

on the Mongolian border. Then he says, well, the Japanese are not going to deal with me.
And I have no problem in the East, so I will invade and grab this stuff. But I want some stuff.

I want a concession in the Baltics. which the Nazis give him.
And they carve up Poland on October 6th, five weeks later, everybody in the world is stunned. They thought the Poles

could hold out for six months. They thought the Germans would not be able to fight back the British and French on their way, and nobody does anything.
And Poland is now

disappears. And this is the first time you see that it's not just a German minority,

like the Anschluss, a German-speaking minority, like the Rhineland or the Anschluss or the Sudetenland. These are Poles, a distinct people,

and they start slaughtering them. And they start slaughtering Jews.
And nobody had ever expected that. They should have.
It's in Mein Kamp.

Right before the war, he has a, and this, I don't think this historian understood that, Mr.

Cooper, because he says that this slaughter in Russia and the slaughter was accidental or it was just chaotic. Hitler brings the German general staff in a room.
These are von Kleis,

these are von Rundstedt, von Manstein. He brings them all in.
He says, look, this is going to be different.

This is why I created the SS Totenkopf, the Death Thedge units. We're going to kill people.

This is a war of extension. Not because

we need

security. We want Lebensroom.
So we want these people dead.

So when you go into Poland, you're going to kill prisoners, you're going to rape, you're going to kill, you're going to do things you've never even imagined, and you're going to be spearheaded by the Totenkopf people.

And it was all planned. He told them that.
We have a transcript of it. And that's what they did.
It shocked the world. And then

people said

in France and Britain, well,

he finally got what he wanted. So we didn't start a war.
We declared war, but we didn't really attack him when we're trying to drop leaflets. And what are we supposed to do anyway?

We don't want to, now he's got Poland before we can do anything. It's already over.
It's over in five weeks. So maybe now he got everything he wanted.

He has East Prussia, he has a Sudetenland, he has Austria, he has a Rhineland. All the German speakers in the world are together.
Maybe some vulgar Germans aren't, but they're all together.

He's got a megastate, and he'll stop, and maybe we can negotiate. And he does say, well, let's negotiate.
It's like, and I think Hitler,

Churchill says it's like talking to an alligator that swallowed something.

You know, it's just a matter of how quickly it'll be digested till he opens his jaws again.

And this guy, of course, Mr. Cooper felt for the dirt.
They didn't.

He implies that Churchill didn't

want peace. Churchill wasn't even prime minister.
Churchill was first, he wasn't anything. He was first Lord of the Admiralty, and Chamberlain was prime minister.

And the thing was that Chamberlain did declare war on him because he'd been humiliated, not by Churchill, but by Munich. But he didn't do anything.
He didn't, I don't know if he could have.

He had the wherewithal yet, it's debatable.

And now you have the phony war.

That is from October 6th of 1939 until the invasion of Denmark and Norway in April of 1940 and subsequent invasion of France in early May, Belgium, and the Low Countries, guess what?

Where is the war? Where is the war for November, December, January, February, March?

And it's called the Phoney War. Yeah.
And we'll get to that next. Next time.
Great.

So, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about what we can find on John Solomon's Just the News. Stay with us and we'll be back.

We're back. So we are

the mothership for our podcast is John Solomon's Just the News. And John Solomon is an investigative reporter in DC and so he usually is digging up some of the most interesting things.

And recently he's dug up a questionnaire for the ACLU that Kamala Harris filled out, in which she

trying to woo, as he says, the ACLU,

agreed that taxpayer funding should go to gender reassignment surgery, pathway to citizenship for people who have come across the border illegally and have broken our laws, decriminalization of drugs like cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl, and the kneecapping of ICE, the

immigration customs enforcement.

Those are some of the most terrible things that we all know she supports, and she's pretending not to. So I was wondering.
She was running in the primaries. This is, I shouldn't say she was running.

She didn't run in one primary election. She was in the primaries and pulled out in December before the first caucus or election.

And remember where it was. Bernie Sanders was way ahead at this time in the polls.
And then the next two or three candidates were Pete Buttigig and Elizabeth Warren.

So if you're Camilla Harris, you've had this big Oakland rally, you've got all this money, you're a black woman, everybody thinks you're going to be, and then they start to hear her and she starts to sing.

So she was trying to carve out a position.

between

a communist-socialist and hard left Elizabeth Warren and Buttigig. You see what I mean? Yes.

Just a little bit to the right of Bernice Sanders, not even to the right, almost, I'm the female version of Bernie Sanders. This is the period when she started going on record about fracking and

all of these other crazy positions she had, confiscating guns, and she filled out these questionnaires for these hard left groups. So now we're in a race, basically.

We're in a race in 60 days. Can Republicans, conservatives, the Trump people ferret out all of this record that's there and hidden?

A, can they find it? And this is a good example of John Solomon find it. And they can, two, can they get it out into the public domain?

And three, can they make the public aware that she is a hard-left socialist and force her to either say that she's rejected these positions, which

she doesn't want to do,

or

she still holds them. And what she's done so far is: don't talk about it, don't talk about it, use the media, use the media so that they don't ask me.
They're part of my team.

You know, a Lindsey Davis and a David Muir, they're guy, they will never ask me. And she was right about that.
Don't talk about it. And then, if you're forced to,

then you square the circle. How do you square the the circle? You say,

my values haven't changed. Wink, nod, AOC, squad, BLM, Antifa.
I really do believe these, but some of my positions have. Or as Bernie Sanders said on what he was caught on tape two days ago,

how do you square that, Bernie?

She's running for election. She's running for election.
So she's saying something. She just has to say things that wink nod are not true.
And I don't, I would do that. You know, that's what he said.

He said she's being practical. Yes.

And so there you have it. And this

campaign was always a race because the aborted nature of it. She just was anointed.

He abdicated, she was anointed, and then we had 90 days, now we have 60. And can you get the truth out about her? And it's going to be very hard when the media has created an iron dome around her

and you can't penetrate it.

And when you try to debate, and I know Trump could have been more effective, but when you have two debate moderators and they're fact-checking Trump at the critical point, he has momentum four times and not her, and then they're feeding questions that are designed to embarrass him, but not her, and then they're demanding he follow up, but not her,

it's very hard unless you're doing a really good job. And he's out there campaigning, giving, I think, what was it? He's given something like 26 interviews to her one, major interviews, maybe more.

Every day he's doing it. And this is superimposed on the idea that he's been in court.

He's been fighting Fannie Willis. He's been fighting Alvin Bragg.
His lawyers are fighting Jack Smith.

I don't know if right now I have a lot of jobs I'm doing, writing and speaking and my Hoover obligations, but if right now there was a federal prosecutor that had indicted me, and there was a Fresno County prosecutor that was putting me on trial, and there was a California state prosecutor putting me, and I was being sued for millions of dollars in a civil suit.

I don't know if I could take it.

We just assumed he, and somebody tried to kill me and shot my lobe on my ear.

Can any of you listening to all that? It's very hard to do that. Yeah.

And appear at a debate and

not be,

you know, grumpy, I guess is what they're calling him. Grouchy, grumpy.
Yeah. Not be that way when you're facing people.

I know people will say, well, yeah, Victor, but that's politics, it ain't beanball. I understand that.

But I'm just suggesting that no one in the modern political environment, present or recent past, has had to go through that. Yeah,

no political party has ever waged law affair like it,

in the way we see, or institutionalized lying like collusion and disinformation, or tried to bankrupt somebody.

Well, maybe on the lighter side,

did you see Joe Biden put on a MAGA hat?

Now, was that a Freudian slip? Was that a signal? You can interpret it

three ways.

I'll give you the least likely

that he's for Donald Trump.

That meant he knew it was a MAGA hat rather than just a red flag hat or something with American flag.

B,

he's sending a message to Kamala Harris with this Freudian gesture.

You

in your back

room, wheeling, dealing, conniving, treacherous manner, got rid of me. As you were saying, you supported me.
If you really, really, really supported me, I'd still be here.

But they went to you and said, Would you be able to do? And so I'm going to put on a MAGA hat. How do you like that?

Or

C,

he has no idea who he is or where he is, and they just handed him something. He didn't know if it was an ice cream cone or a flag or what.
So he just put it on.

He had that thousand-yard stare on his face. So

I don't know whether it was just sonality or a

kind of a subtle gesture that Camilla deserves what she gets in this election, or he's he's

he likes Trump.

I'm being facetious with that last alternative. Maybe a little of the first two

together. Who knows?

I'm not in his mind.

And also, kind of on the lighter side, although strange side, I don't know if you talked about this with me, but J.D. Vance made a remark about childless cat ladies.

I think, you know, the whole birth rate thing. And so childless cat ladies are against Trump.
And then Taylor Swift came out for Trump, for Harris, sorry.

and she was calling herself a childless cat lady. Did you see either of those things? Yeah, I did.
I did.

You know, it's funny, when I was first married and didn't have children, we had cats for maybe two, three years, and we doted on them.

Where's Fluffy? Where's Blackie? Oh my gosh, Fluffy went out in the street. I'm so worried.

And then when you have a child, they're relegated to pets.

They are. So if you don't have children, then you fixate on pets, and you're not supposed to say that.
He could have been a little bit more diplomatic by calling it

childless cat men. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Because there's men that fixate that are not.

But there is something about that profile. And again,

whether you like it or not, if you're a historian, or a critic of culture, when you look at society's past, present, and future, the ones that have a declining birth rate and they're shrinking and they're aging do not do well.

And so nobody's talking about that because it's considered offensive to gays or women or the new, you know, I mean, the non-traditional family or single, whatever it is.

But what he's basically saying is, with all, if you cut through all of these little slurs, and they came, you know, two or three years ago, most of them,

he's basically saying that the most criticized demographic in America, that is a man, a woman, marry, and they have 2.1 children and they reproduce themselves and the nation then has a steady population, if not gradually growing through immigration.

They are the ones that we should be admiring and mainstreaming, and yet we're demonizing them. And we're giving all of these alternate lifestyles like childless cat ladies.

And that is not going to lead to a robust demographic, whether you like it or not.

And you can say, well, yes, but we have brilliant

Madame Curies everywhere because they don't have to. Yes, there's a role for that, but not in the majority cases.
And not to the extent that the country is not reproducing itself.

And, you know, he said something, and I don't know if he's been explicit, but when you want to go to the Democratic Party and you want to know why he's let in

10 million people from all over the world that are A, poor,

B, don't speak English for the most part, have no audit, no background check. We don't even have health

back check. We don't even know if they have tuberculosis or anything.
So, my point is this.

Yes, they want a constituency that's needed, that will need federal programs and higher taxes and redistribution. That's what they're for.

And two, under the new auspices of early and mail-in balloting, they think that it's going to be much more likely that somebody who's here illegally as a resident can vote.

And if you try to clamp down and ask for requirements of proof of citizenship, it'll be racist or nativist or xenophobic. But there's another one, and that is

it is true, and you listen, I just came back from Hillsdale College, so I think the average, it seems to me that the average size of a Hillsdale

say history faculty is probably about five kids.

And maybe, I think I've talked to a couple people. They had 12 children, 11 children, but I didn't really talk to anybody that had less than three.

But the point is that Red America is more fertile than blue America.

And

Blue America knows that. And yet

fertility is antithetical to a lot of their constituencies because they're for the powerful woman who's a career, you know what I mean? And

other lifestyles that

it's a little bit more difficult to have children? So part of the advocacy for an open border is just, well, we're not going to have kids because, you know, life's too precious for us.

Or maybe under our policies, you can't afford a home or you can't pay back your loans, or we've made the economy

such that whatever the particular catalyst is for this, bringing in 10 million people on their left, you just say, well,

they had kids, and now they're on our side. So what does it matter if we have them or we bring in people from other countries that have them?

Whereas

if you have three kids, you say, well, we have enough people here.

We have people that we've audited that speak our language, that are born here, that are natural. And we're not going to bring in a bunch of people.
We don't know who they are.

We don't know if they're healthy. We don't know if they're criminal.

We don't want people, the first thing you do is break our laws, because then they'll break, the second thing is stay here and break their laws.

And the third thing they'll do is get ID that that breaks our laws and the fourth thing is they'll break all of our laws so that was the that's the dichotomy yeah well the last thing is before we end this podcast did you see that James Earl Jones died I think it was on Tuesday

and

he what a great voice I mean that's got to be the million billion dollar voice of all voices I was wondering he was a great actor and he was from that Sidney Poitier generation. And, I mean,

he played in these traditional Shakespearean productions, you know, Hamlet, Othello,

King Leary. He was great in all of those.
And

remember he was the great, I think I was introduced to him when I was in high school, The Great White Hope. Wasn't he the...
voice for Darth Vader in the original Star Wars for a while.

He was in those, I think he was in a lot of those Star Wars. He was really good in the hunt for Red October and these action movies.
He always played kind of a CIA or a top government official.

Yeah, doesn't he play in Harrison Ford's Clear and Present Danger? Yeah, I think he did. He did.
And

he was a gentleman. He was classically trained.
I mean, it was just a model person. He was like Sidney Poitier.
I remember growing up with Lilies of the Field, Great White Hope.

All those were great black actors. Yeah.
It was a different time. It It was a very different time.
If that trajectory had continued, we would not have the racial animosity that we have today.

And people like James Earl Jones and Sidney Poité's attitude was

once we get

an equality of opportunity, we will be as successful or succeed the majority population because we'll have to work harder and we'll appreciate it. We don't want any special help.

All we want to do is not have institutionalized or even a culture of racism.

Just give us a level playing field and we're going to really excel, even though we've been held back for so long by institutional racism.

But there was an upbeat, what I'm trying to get out is that Tom Soule kind of up Shelby Steele upbeat confidence that they could more than make it in America.

And, you know, when you go to have lunch with Tom Soule and you listen to him and you're in a very sophisticated restaurant in Palo Alto with very wealthy people and you see, you listen to their their conversations, and you see that you're with the smartest guy in the room.

Or you talk to Shelby Steele for an evening, and you compare it to other people you've talked to.

It's no comparison. So that was an upbeat, confident

that you don't see with the Michelle Obama antithesis.

No, the whole generation that learned to be victims.

They raise the bar. They always raise the bar.
No matter what I do, they raise the bar. This is a downright mean country.
I've never been proud of this country until they nominated Barack.

I was in Target and a woman asked me of all people to bit that package up there just to put me in my that that kind of stuff just never ends.

And yet that wasn't that wasn't the tradition of African American can-doism, if I can use that confidence.

I hope it and it's I'm not suggesting it doesn't exist

it disappeared. There's a lot lot of African-American

successful people who don't think they need government, don't want it, don't worry about racism.

But when you have a multi-billionaire like Oprah Winfrey, who made a great career out of appealing and profiting from an audience of basically white women who were home during the day watching her television shows at 11 in the morning or something, and then she gets in front of a nationwide audience and says she's been a victim of oppression.

This is a woman who went into a Swiss, what was it, a boutique, and she wanted an alligator $37,000 purchase, and the Swiss woman, teenager or something, didn't know who she was, but wasn't in the habit of going up and giving anybody a $37,000 purse to look at.

And then she said it was racism, directed her.

That's where we are now. Yeah.

Well, or Michelle Obama, too. She said that at the convention.

Yes, she did.

I just wanted to say RIP to James Earl Jones, and thanks to our audience for this Saturday episode. Thank you, everybody, for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.