Grades, Military Technology, and the Left's Ick and Shtick

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to listen to Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College and a best-selling author of The End of Everything, his most recent best-selling book.

I'm sure his

kind of new book, The Case for Trump, the 2024 edition, which

has a significant addition to it from the earlier edition, I know that's doing dang well also.

Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

The address for that is victorhanson.com.

I will tell you more later in this episode why you should be subscribing.

Victor and I are talking today.

It's Sunday the 8th.

This particular episode is out on Thursday, the 12th.

That'll be two days after

the Trump-Harris debate.

I think you'll have to wait till tomorrow, the 13th, for Victor and Sammy to be

podcast dissecting the debate.

I kind of feel, Victor, you might,

right after the debate, maybe spew on it on

the X on Twitter.

Yeah, I have to.

I think I'm scheduled this week for three Foxes.

I haven't looked at, I haven't double-checked, but I think

well,

Victor, politics is in the air, of course, but you know what?

School's open, school's out, college is back in, protests are happening.

But there's a really interesting

essay in last weekend's Wall Street Journal about canceling.

grades, getting rid of them.

And we'll get your thoughts on that, on the Hooties, on the new issue of Strategica.

Maybe if we have time,

Obama's monument to himself, and I don't know, maybe if we even have more time, something about Gavin Newsom.

We'll get to all this right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So, Victor,

there's a

piece in the weekend Wall Street Journal by

Yasha Amonk, who is a should have looked this up.

If he's a professor of international affairs at John Hopkins University, he's very, I

know him, you know, I heard him.

Yeah,

okay.

This is titled College Grades Have Become a Charade.

It's Time to Abolish Them.

And yeah, he's saying, like, just end it and we'll figure out.

He doesn't have a solution.

I do want to, before I get your thoughts on this, Victor, by the way, I'm not knocking that he doesn't have a solution.

He just says it's so broken.

It's, it's got to end because they're meaningless.

He makes one interesting point in this really worthwhile essay, I think.

It's that everyone's getting an A at Yale, right?

But there are people who are going, let's say, outside of their comfort zones.

Maybe somebody's studying biology

and then, I really

want to learn Hebrew or something that's totally different from their strength and try and don't necessarily succeed all that well.

And maybe we'll get a C.

So you have these

really aggressive students who can have a worse GPA at the end of the day than

these guys just sitting on their asses for four years and getting by with some

BS major.

So I thought that was an interesting point he made.

But Victor, the premise is grades are a joke.

Let's do away with them.

Your thoughts?

Well, a couple of thoughts.

If you're giving 70%

A's like Yale, or maybe it's 80, then you have done away with grades, right?

They don't exist anymore.

Or

you are saying to the world that everybody that comes into Yale is brilliant and will get A's anyway.

They deserve them.

But whatever it is, traditionally, when you're grading, the way that it breaks down is about 20% A's, 20% B's, 20% C's, 20% D's, 20% Fs.

And that's not happening for a variety of reasons.

There is an elephant in the room, Jack, and that is if you're not for the last four years allowing SAT scores to adjudicate GPAs, and let me be clear about this, the SAT was designed to help people from poor zip codes or poor reputed high schools.

In other words, if they got an inner city high school GPA of 4.0, someone in,

I don't know, Beverly Hills who got a 3.2, that was considered a better GPA.

And you can understand why it was a more rigorous high school.

So the SAT then leveled the playing field.

But if you get rid of the SAT

and then you go back to just high schools, you have no idea to calibrate their grades.

So then you let in people who cannot, according to your own standards, do the work.

And you have a lot of choices, Jack.

You can water down the curriculum or you can introduce new gut courses, and they do both, or you can inflate your grades.

And that is what they're doing at Stanford.

That's what they're doing at Harvard.

That's what they're doing at Yale to accommodate students who were not

subject to a rigorous SAT

adjudication.

Okay, and they're going to stop that now.

We're going to bring back the SAT because it didn't work.

The only thing is, I went under a process in 1969 or 67 Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz's new model campus supposedly inaugurated pass or fail with an evaluation

and believe me

when I took courses all pass fail

they gave a lot of fails

and people didn't do the work and then if you had an evaluation I got an evaluation from in political science.

I passed the course it was a senior class.

They told me not to take it.

I thought I might want to see what politics.

I took a senior class with politics majors.

And we had, I remember U.

Thomas, the Spanish Civil War, Thucydides, the Philippines.

I didn't know what any of this was.

And that guy wrote the cruelest evaluation.

It said something like this.

Victor Hansen attended all of our seminars, which was laudatory.

I can still remember it.

It was impressed in my mind.

And he said, Victor Hansen has a

persuasive

pro style and can frame and argue.

However,

thematically in his four papers, when it came to

a sophisticated level of analysis, he was typically thin,

typically thin.

That was damning.

And I had that people ask me about that for years.

When I applied, you know, to graduate school, I remember a guy said, hey, did you ever read this evaluation?

In those days, you couldn't look at it.

You remember, you couldn't see it.

It was all secret.

So my point is that you can have a mechanism of pass-fail if you have evaluation and standard.

It's not really grades versus pass-fail, it's standards.

And you can be as tough with pass and fail.

The other point he makes is that,

and this is

a matter of

finance.

And I had this problem when I was teaching classics.

So when I would get really bright students that would take an introductory introductory Latin for their language requirement,

an introductory Latin class or introduction to Western humanities for their GE requirement, and they would come to me and say, ah, Professor Hansen, I'd like to take Greek.

I'd like to take Latin.

I might continue a Latin.

And then you would think, then they'd come back and say, will I get an A?

And I said, I don't know, it depends.

And he said, well, the work is so much harder than what I'm doing in sociology or political science or ethnic studies or gender studies.

And I'm on a, I want to get a Pell grant or I want to get this grant and I'm on a student loan.

So why should I take your courses and get B's in them when I can get A's in the other one?

And that's what he's talking about.

So

I tend to agree with him to tell you the truth.

Yeah.

By the way, you mentioned you, Thomas,

historian

of

the Spanish Civil War and many other things.

Did you ever, I'm just curious, do you ever meet him or know him in any way?

No,

he was a,

I saw him give a lecture.

I think it was at Berkeley or Stanford.

All I remember about him,

he was very elegant and he had white hair to his shoulders.

But

he

he

I had one little note.

It was written in a fountain pin from him.

I don't, I just, the guy lived for a long time.

He wrote a,

yeah, he, the reason is he wrote.

He died a few years ago.

Yes, he wrote a Conquest of Mexico that is the best.

It's not really originally researched, but it's the best compendium.

He has.

He updates almost all the original sources.

It's called The Conquest of Mexico, and it's about the destruction of the Aztecs.

I looked at it again when I wrote The End of Everything, and I had forgotten what a great, it was, I think it was published like 97 or 98.

Okay.

And I used it for

Carnage and Culture.

I looked at, also looked at it.

It was a brilliant,

it was really a...

a brilliant and he wrote something on Montezuma,

a biography of Montezuma that I I looked at.

So get a sense that is he like Paul Johnson in a way.

Yeah, but I

he was much better.

I mean, between you and me,

that's okay.

I reviewed Paul Johnson's Napoleon and other things.

Yeah.

But he was a

he was more than a journalist.

The Spanish Civil War, I just read that this summer again, because I gave a lecture in Barcelona on the Spanish Civil War.

And that is a brilliant book.

And he wrote a history of the world that I wrote.

And when I wrote Carnage and Culture, I don't think he reviewed it, but he wrote me a note about the Aztecs,

something about

that

he was,

you know, he was widely

recognized during his lifetime.

He was,

yeah.

I don't know what he was, but he was.

He was a lord.

Yeah, he was a lord.

He was.

He got a lordship for for.

Yeah, and he was,

I don't know, I think he was, he started.

He was one of those guys that started out as a leftist, and I'm not sure that he ended up that way.

But he was a British original.

Yeah, he

yeah, he moved a little around.

Labor, conservative.

Yeah, but he wrote a lot of great, he was a very good writer, and he wrote these massive books.

So I have only good thoughts about him.

Yeah, okay.

Well, good.

Just curious about that.

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So,

Victor, there is, let's see, I do want, I didn't mention earlier, but I think later on after this,

I want to talk about both vice presidential candidates.

But let's talk about Strategica, which is the online journal, the Hoover institution, that you are the editor of and overseer of.

And there's issue 93 is out the last few days, and it's about

field artillery.

And it's got two significant pieces.

One is by General Michael Combest that's titled Radically Rethinking the Field Artillery.

And then the great Bing West.

I love Bing West.

He's just a great guy.

Has high-tech made artillery obsolete?

Victor, you've touched on artillery versus drones, and so do these gentlemen and their pieces.

But you want to tell us about this new

edition of Strategica?

Well,

Bing West, just to focus on that,

I think there's a worry among firsthand veterans of combat because they understand the lethality.

About 35% of people in World War II

and maybe even higher in World War I were killed by artillery.

And

it's become very sophisticated with not just proximity shells that appeared in World War II, but they're now GPS guided.

And you can get a shell that'll be $3,000 or $4,000.

And Russia is,

you know, and they can be blocked by, you know, jamming.

But

the thrust of a lot of this issue is

it really hasn't...

The role of artillery hasn't changed that much, even though there's missiles and

it can be very, there's missiles now and there's very sophisticated bombs.

Having an artillery platform on the ground, side-by-side infantry in constant contact, the technology,

the good part about these articles, the technology is such that they can be so accurate.

that they are analogous to the precision of a precision guided bomb or a precision

drone.

The advantage should be, in addition, that they are so cheap, they're much cheaper, just a shell.

And while they are cheaper than a sophisticated drone or maybe a sophisticated bomb, that is the platform,

the actual barrel and the artillery piece, and they can be several million dollars,

while they're cheaper than a $170 million fighter or $80 million fighter, fighter.

The shells are becoming so exorbitant now that they are losing our edge.

The idea of artillery was to give plentiful barrages that were cheap, they were lethal, and they were a force multiplier of the infantry.

But now they

are starting to get into the realm of guided missiles, and they're losing that advantage economically.

I mean, even a cheap one is like five grand, right?

Yes.

And

as they point out, and that's hurting Ukraine, because the Russians are producing about 10 times more shells than Ukraine and its allies.

And it doesn't really do them that much good to give them a five or six thousand dollar artillery shell imported from the United States or from Germany or France when they're getting hit by 10 shells being made cheaply in North Korea.

You know what I'm saying?

And so

it opens up a wider question that now has been the subject of maybe two or three strategicas, but it's on the mind of everybody in the United States.

We won World War II

by out-producing Germany, Japan in quality,

not always in quantity, but I mean in

quantity, but not always in quality.

We didn't have anything that approached a Mischer-Schmidt 262 jet, which they produced about 1,400 of them at the end of the war.

Even a P-51 wasn't up to it.

But when you look at the number of P-38s and P-51s and P-47s we produced, or the numbers of B-17s, B-24s, B-29s we produced, or the 50,000 Sherman tanks we produced, vis-a-vis the, I don't know, 1,600 Tiger 1s, maybe 600 or 700 Tiger 2s,

Or when you look at the sheer 146 fleet light and escort carriers.

So the point is in World War II, we had this huge military of 12.42 million people, and we just flooded the zone with weaponry.

And we didn't really care whether it was highly crafted as a V-2 rocket.

because in a cost-benefit analysis, it was much more effective.

But what we are doing now, inadvertently or insidiously, we're following the late German World War II model.

We're trying to get very, very sophisticated, highly complex weapons that cost so much to build and to sell, to market, that we don't have enough of them.

And the enemy is using a lot of cheap weapons.

And one of the things with the Houthis in Yemen, one of the problems is that they have all of these cheap Iranian imported weapons, drones, rockets,

et cetera, that they can hit our targets, but to retaliate against them, the cost of the retaliation is 10, 100, 1,000 times to one.

And so, what Bing and the other contributors of this issue are warning us is:

if you're going to make sophisticated artillery that

is going to restore the primacy of artillery, you've got to find a way to

make it more affordable

and

ubiquitous and

you've got to rethink it.

Yeah.

Well, that's,

I just don't want to spell this correct for our listeners, I hope it's S-T-R-A-T-E-G-I-K-A.

That's Strategica.

So Google that or go to Hoover's website.

and you will

can enjoy these articles and the prior issues.

Victor, you mentioned Houthis.

I'd like to talk, get your thoughts, deeper thoughts about them, and we will get such thoughts when we come back from these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

We're recording on the 8th.

This episode is up.

on Thursday, the 12th of September.

Victor, very briefly before the Houthis, if I may.

I should say one thing, and I should say one thing to clarify.

They're not saying make cheap, inaccurate shells.

They're trying to say that the precision and the technology of U.S.

artillery is unsurpassed.

And that you can put a big shell on a target 25 miles away

and you don't have to shoot 50 or 60 stupid shells, I mean, not guided, just to get in the general area.

That is what you want.

But the problem is

you want to find a way to make that, you want the precision, but you want to be able to hit a lot of targets with the precision.

And so you want to lower the cost.

It doesn't have to be the same as

just a World War II artillery shell, but it has to be the same where you can not go broke is what I'm saying.

Yeah, well, the cost of precision is

the motivation of precision is what?

Precision is a virtue in its own way, right?

I guess, but then non-precise has collateral damage, which creates

moral conflicts.

Is that part of this, Victor?

Yeah.

And also,

Bing is, they're a little different, but

there's a very highly technical article by General, as you said, Comvest.

And he's trying to argue that we don't want to go back to just World War II Russian tile barrages.

We want to find a happy medium between what we do really well

is send out very precise long-distance shells like nobody else in the world.

But when we give that to Ukraine, it's so expensive and they're getting plastered with area shelling.

So we've got to find a way where they can use these

to nullify

the numbers of the Russians, but not and make it inexpensive.

I haven't read the article in about three weeks, but he makes a lot of good points.

One of them is the more shells you send out of an artillery barrel, the quicker it, you know, blows up or is worn out.

So ours, the idea that you're sending fewer, but they're more precise, and he comes up with some figures, 30 or 40 shells that are not guided to hit a target 20 or 34, 20 or 25 miles away when you can hit it with one that's guided, if it's not disrupted.

But he's not calling for just having one for every 40 shells.

There just has to be a mechanism where the shells...

that are so sophisticated and so accurate are in the hands of the artillery people in the field in enough numbers where you can fire them

without being afraid to go broke.

Okay.

I'm just curious now,

who am I to restrict you in time, but just like a minute or two.

If you are facing, it's World War I and World War II, and you're facing

you're a German facing France, you're a German facing Russia,

who are you most afraid of?

Who's the deadliest with artillery of your foe?

Who would you be afraid of more?

It depends on the war.

You mean World War II to take that example?

I would say in World War II, the first, the European theater of 1939, 40, 41, and 42,

oh, I would say

it was Germany because they created in vast numbers an 88 millimeter

flat gun that they found out was one of the most lethal, accurate, highly mobile guns that take out tanks, fortifications.

So, that 88 millimeter, it was kind of like the French 77

in World War I.

It was rapid firing, it was accurate, it could be used in so many ways.

You could tilt it up and hit an airplane, you know, up at

you know, 20,000 feet.

You could knock out something at three, four, five miles.

You could put the barrel on a tank,

a tiger tank.

So, But as the war went on, two things happened.

One,

Russia moved its factories on the other side of the murals.

And the British and the Americans, it wasn't just that we gave them Lindlease and supplied 25% of their wherewithal.

We targeted that.

We went to Stalin and said,

What do you do well and what do you not do well or do not have?

And he basically said,

we do tanks, heavy industry, big guns, 245 millimeter, 120 millimeter.

We do that really well.

But what we don't do is build trucks, reliable trucks, or we don't have synthetic rubber ponchos, or we don't have radios, or we don't have rations like C or K ration,

and we don't have any aluminum.

So we...

did that and then they didn't have to diverse.

And so Russia ended up in sheer number of artillery platforms and Katushka, I guess you could call it Katushka rocket kind of artillery.

They were by far

better than the Germans by the fact that they had bigger calibers and they had more of them and they had more shells by 1944.

That said,

the United States artillery

when they got into Italy, but especially when they got into Normie, they were

excellent,

whether it was light artillery or big, heavy, you know, 155 millimeter artillery and up.

And they did two things that they invented, and one was time on target.

And so if you have an artillery barrage,

say there's a Germans,

I don't know, 10 miles away, and you have artillery all the way around the

battlefield, and you have

something like a 76 millimeter or 125 or 240.

They all have different velocities and different

ranges, but they were able to calibrate the radio and coordinate them.

So even though they were very different artillery pieces, they were able to hit a target

from all directions at the same time or roughly the same time.

So you would have artillery pieces.

that were not in the same place or they were not in the same caliber, they didn't have the same variety, but they had calibrated the particular distances and abilities, and then they coordinated them.

So they could really concentrate on one thing with a lot of platforms.

And the other thing, of course, was that they did in late 44 and 45.

They created a proximity fuse.

So the old idea that you were in World War I or the beginning of World War II and you jumped in a forecastle or you jumped in a trench and then the shell hit 10 feet away, but you were below the ground.

So the blast just went across.

If you didn't stand up and get your head taken off, you laid flat, the shrapnel went right over you.

It didn't dig into the ground.

But when you have a proximity fuse, very cheap, and it's going, the artillery shell's coming down, and you can calibrate it by the baromatic pressure or the time fuse.

and it will explode 10 feet above the ground, 20 feet above the ground, 30 feet above the ground, 40.

Then what happens?

It showers straight down into a foxhole or a trench.

And that was what the Americans developed.

And it was, the Germans finally made fun of us.

They said, you know, you don't, your Americans rely too much on artillery.

And we don't use, well, they said that because they didn't have enough of it at the end of the war.

The British were very good.

Japanese were not as good.

They had a wonderful mortar, a very deadly, huge mortar in the field.

But other than that,

the Americans and the Russians were very very good at artillery.

Russians are very famous for just plastering things with high-caliber artillery.

And,

you know, not very accurate, but just saturating a field.

Well, Victor,

back to the Hooties, which you've mentioned in the last couple of podcasts and earlier here.

And I am just, let me play dumb, which I do very well.

Just who are the Hooties

and how the hell did America let them become so empowered?

You know, there's a,

I don't, I'm not a big fan of the New Yorker, but there was a really good article about the New Yorker that discusses all of that.

And I read it not too long ago.

There's a tribe in Yemen called the Houthis.

So it's an ethnic name,

but there's a political movement called Ala-Ansar.

And what is that movement that combines people that are

in the movement besides the Houthi tribe?

So, some of the leaders would be, you know, Muhammad El-Houthi or Hussein el-Houthi with their tribal affiliation.

But what did that particular tribal group and people who believed in it outside of the group that were inclusive and all called Houthis, even though some of them were not tribal?

What was their platform of

Al-A-Ansar?

And it was a Shia Islamic tribe as a minority party in a Sunni country.

So you remember when

Obama was there, the Saudis were bombing the Houthis

and because the Houthis had been sending their primary enemy was Saudi Arabia, the Sunni country that they said suppressed

Shia minorities in the Gulf.

They are a surrogate of Iran.

So Iran supplies basically three groups, the Houthi Shia,

the Hezbollah Shia,

and they make an exception with Hamas, which is a Sunni group because

there is no really large Shia population on the West Bank.

And

I have been critical that we're not doing anything, but part of the reasons that we're not doing anything, you know, there's

It's a huge movement and population,

it's bigger than Hezbollah or Hamas.

And nobody has a good record going into Yemen's civil wars and fighting them.

Nasser tried to in the 60s as a,

you know, as a

Sunni

pan-Arabic nationalist, and he gave

a lot of aid to the Sunni government.

And it was just a quagmire.

And everybody who's gone in there has regretted it because they're fanatic and now they're appendages of Iran.

So I guess that's the idea of the United States reluctance.

Israel had no reluctance.

Israel went out and took, as we talked about earlier, their port, all of their sophisticated cargo platforms.

But it's just a question whether you want to treat the symptoms or the cause of the disease.

Do you want to just keep fighting Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis, or do you want to deal with Iran?

Because Iran is the one sending the Houthis all the way.

They wouldn't be able to function without Iran.

Any

Shia movement in the Middle East that's militant is ultimately getting stuff from Iran.

And that's why there would be a, you know, the thing about hitting Iran is

it might be messy, but you would have a lot of global support.

All of Europe is terrified of Iran.

The Sunni Arab world wants Iran.

to cease its aggression.

The United States, if we have to deal with Iran, it would be much easier than dealing in the field with Hezbollah and the Houthis.

And Israel knows that.

So

Israel's not eager to go keep bombing the Houthis because there's 20 million of them, I guess, in Yemen that are controlled by the Houthis.

And they send missiles.

And

they're starting to have global terrorists too.

So it's nobody wants to go in there.

And every time you talk to a U.S.

general, and I have, they just said it's the bad and worst choices.

They're fanatic, crazy people.

There's more of them than Hezbollah and Hamas.

They don't stop when you hit them.

It's too expensive to hit them.

And

they're appendages of Iran.

And the only cure for them is to deal with Iran that supplies them.

But Iran knows that.

At some point, somebody in Europe or the Israel or the United States are going to get together and say, all the problems of the Middle East originate from Iran.

Thank you, Barack Obama and others for, you know, because our answer

is typical, you know, right?

It's

created by Barack Obama.

Barack Obama's view, remember, was creative tension.

That was Ben Rhodes's idea that we're going to tilt to Iran, we're going to have the Iran deal, we're not going to have any embargoes, we don't like the Sunnis.

We don't like the Gulf monarchies.

We don't like the moderates in

Mubarak and Hussein and Jordan and Egypt.

We don't like the

constitutionally governed Israelis.

We're going to balance them with this new underdog.

I think Barack Obama saw the Shia Iranians, Persians, as sort of like he thought he was in Chicago as a community organizer.

You know what I mean?

They were the underdogs.

This was his constituency.

Well, maybe we should talk a little about Obama more

and talk about Tim Walls'

COVID scandal and the Associated Press

at

abuse of J.D.

Vance.

And maybe we'll have time for another topic and we'll get to these right after.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

Please do go, especially if you're a new listener and you're a fan of Victor's writings, go there.

You will find the links to his weekly American Greatness essay, his weekly syndicated column, archives of these podcasts, and links to his various books.

And then there are links to articles.

You'll see a little black box.

say ultra you'll click on it you won't be able to read it unless you're a subscriber five bucks a month, $50 discounted for the full year.

And Victor writes two or three ultra pieces a week.

So again, if you're a fan of Victor's writings, you should be subscribing to The Blade of Perseus.

Victor, at the Washington Free Beacon,

my old National Review colleague Andrew Stiles, who I love.

Andrew's a wise guy.

And he wrote a piece

not too long ago, Barack Obama's Monument to himself is a hideous eyesore.

And this is about, it's let me just read here quickly: Obama's presidential library in Chicago is also nowhere near completion.

It's not even a library.

The so-called Obama Presidential Center won't be anything like the reverential monuments constructed by his predecessors.

There's no research library or presidential archive.

Obama's records will be digitized and published online.

But there is a museum, fitness center, playground, recording studio, teaching kitchen, several gardens, and a sledding hill.

The center will be run by the Obama Foundation, a private nonprofit, rather than the taxpayer-funded National Archives and Records Administration.

Its mission is no less than to, quote, inspire, empower, and connect people to change the world, end quote.

Above all, it is a hideous monstrosity befitting the outsized ego of its namesake.

Victor, any thoughts on this before we move on to vice presidential topics?

Besides laughing at this

monolith, it is ugly.

It is ugly.

It is ugly.

And didn't he went into a

park, you know?

Yeah.

Yes.

Let me just say that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are not in the Democratic legacy of good old Harry Truman from Independence, Missouri, right?

So they wanted, one of them wanted that, is it his

Clinton's library is ugly.

Is it near Little Rock?

Yes.

And then you've got this one that's ugly.

And in the age of digital records, you don't have to really go there anymore unless you want to see them firsthand.

There's some advantages of that, but they're multimedia centers.

And the people.

The weird thing about them is they build these

on the left, they build these museum multimedia centers, exhibition halls that they call libraries at places that are supposed to be iconic with their Democratic roots, and they're never there.

Bill Clinton never went back to Arkansas.

He was glad that he could get out of it.

Hillary didn't.

The Obamas will never go back.

They have their mansions still there.

But they like the other mansions much nicer in Hawaii and D.C.

and Martha's Vineyard.

So presidential library, at least you could identify a former president.

They went to Washington, they fulfilled their, that's what George W.

Bush did.

He's back in Texas.

But it's this new bad habit of

going to Washington and then never staying there and just being a junkie.

Part of it is because their spouses then tried to have spin-off literary or political or

you know, careers like Hillary and Michelle.

So they wanted to.

It was going to be the Jill Biden Library.

And Jill Biden, yeah, the Biden Library.

I guess University of Delaware, where he

I don't know, I just think it's a waste of money.

It's a waste of time.

They should just,

he could have just put a nice little place in a park.

I know the local residents didn't want it.

No.

But I was surprised because we were always told how elegant.

Remember David Brooks said, oh my God, I saw that crease in Barack Obama.

His pants.

And I knew he was.

Yeah.

Anybody who would would say that is not credible about things.

And

so you didn't think that he would build such an ugly thing, but it looks like a Jeffrey Epstein-sealed

island fortification where there's no way, you know what I mean?

It looks like the Maginot Line or something.

It looks like it should be part of the California train system down the block from you.

Ugly, ugly, ugly.

And I don't know.

It's a disaster.

Yeah.

Well,

more important,

our vice presidential candidates.

Victor,

let's start off with Tim Walls, the current, he is the governor, as I say, the former

governor.

And Powerline, which is one of our favorite websites, one of the first things you check out every day, and happens to be in Minnesota.

So they've been all over Walls for several.

years.

And John Hindraker has a piece from the other day.

It's titled Lying, Liars Keep Lying.

And here's what he writes.

The Feeding Our Future scandal, I'm not sure that our listeners,

many of them know about this, is the largest known COVID-era fraud coming in somewhere between $250 and $500 million.

It was extraordinarily brazen.

Various nonprofits pretended to feed many hundreds of thousands of non-existent children and build Minnesota's government.

The money was federal, but the program was administered by Tim Walls's Department of Education.

Many criminal prosecutions have followed, but no heads have ever rolled at the Department of Education or anywhere else.

And Governor Walls has never been held accountable.

Victor, I want to recommend to our listeners that they should visit Powerline regularly,

go find this piece, Lying, Liars Keep Lying.

And it goes on at some length with the various excuses why it was everybody else's else's fault, but Tim Walls for this.

He kept blaming the judge, remember?

The judge was trying to get to the bottom of it.

Yes.

And remember.

Lied, lied, flagrantly lied.

Yeah, go ahead.

It's all about the Democratic Party trying to appease a growing number, in this case, Somali, but mostly Muslim voters in Michigan and Minnesota.

And that's what it's all about.

There's a Sienna poll that came out today that has Donald Trump ahead in the national poll by one point.

That's not known as necessarily a conservative poll.

No.

And what you're seeing is gradually,

as we always say in the sun of rights, also, right, and then suddenly Donald Trump has erased that lead.

that Kamala Harris enjoyed.

I don't know if it was the RFK or Tulsi Gabbert advocacies or Byvac, they're all doing out there.

J.D.

Vance has really come into his own as somebody that the left is afraid of on the talk shows on the weekend because he just

kills them with a thousand cuts.

But whatever it is, or maybe it's Donald Trump's greater emphasis on the issues or his ecumenicalism of having, you know, Nikki Haley on the stage and Brian Kent, but whatever he's doing, it's working.

And he's caught up now and he's ahead in the polls, at least in some of them.

And he's at Nate Silver says he's ahead, 60% chance plus of winning.

And that's going to force

Camilla Harris to come out.

Because if she gets down by two or three points, and given what the polls record are that she might be down seven or eight, she will become an Obama-like fixture.

She'll want to talk every chance she gets, and that'll be a doom loop.

The more she talks, the worse it'll get.

which gets back to governor waltz that will go down even if they win that will go down as the worst vice presidential pick

much worse than dan quayle which was laughed at at the time right

but

There's nothing, nothing that he brings to the ticket.

He doesn't bring a state that otherwise she wouldn't have won.

He's herky jerky.

He gets on the stage.

He looks like he's insane.

He's hyperactive.

You know, he points to everybody.

He does almost a,

he's very sensitive to charges that

he was in China over 30 times.

And what does he do?

He gets on the stage and he does a kind of a character stereotype Chinese bow.

He folds his hands and he bows down to people as if.

He's stereotyping China.

I don't know what he is, but he's also a pathological liar.

Is there anything he hasn't lied about?

He lied about an award he got as if it was singular and unique and they gave him to a lot of people.

He just lied about his PhD and said he was a recent PhD.

He was basically terminated because if you don't finish your thesis after seven years or

your coursework, you're gone.

And he was still listening.

I didn't hear about that.

Really?

Yeah, he was listing it.

He was, you know, he listed

that he was a recent PhD, but he hadn't gone, he hadn't been active in years.

PhD candidate kept saying that.

He lied about being in a combat zone.

He lied about carrying a weapon into war.

He lied about his DUI.

He lied about this program.

He lies about everything.

And

that's

caught up to him.

I mean, most of these stories were minor, but they all are sort of like,

you know, dropping oil drops in water.

They coalesce and then they form a blob.

And the blob that he is is a liar because he's lied in so many tribal and existential fashions about his biography.

And he doesn't bring anything to the ticket.

And he is, everybody says that

she won't talk to the press because she doesn't know anything.

He doesn't talk to the press.

They ask him about one of the

murdered hostages.

He just,

you know, he took his hand and waved it away because he can't say anything.

And he's, he, he's, he's really going to, he's really hurting her.

Yeah.

It's funny, Victor.

He was the cool guy out of the box, and Vance was the detriment to the ticket out of the box.

I said that in the beginning.

Remember, I said that J.D.

Vance

would

be criticized for a month because they were going to win Ohio anyway.

And he had criticized Trump, and there was a whole corpus of anti-Trump sentiments that he said in his 30s, early 30s, that would have to be aired and forgotten.

But all of that said,

I've talked to him on the phone.

I've talked to him.

There's nobody, there's no more articulant, smart on your feet politician than J.D.

Vance.

That's why he got elected without any prior political.

He can out debate.

He can run rings around the mediocrities at CNN or MSNBC.

Every time he's on there, they go after him and they lose.

And so he's

a plus, plus, plus.

And when you combine him with Vivak and

Tulsi and Robert F.

K.

Jr., Trump, unlike 2016 and 20, he's got some really good surrogates that are going out over the country.

I hope they use them in the last two or three weeks because they're very well spoken.

They can out-debate any media figure.

And

it's just been wonderful for him.

But this guy is an albatross around an albatross's neck.

And

yeah, and he is.

Didn't happen to a nicer guy.

Yeah, I mean, Camela Harris is a false multiplier of

Biden's incomprehensibility and gibberish.

And Tim Waltz is a force multiplier of her gibberish

because he is.

He speaks gibberish.

I don't know what it is with the left.

They used to try to brag that they had the most rhetorical and malefolent with Clinton and Obama, but not recently.

They're back to Jimmy Carter.

I may have misheard you, but I thought you said false multiplier.

And

that's a great phrase, by the way.

False multiplier of her mediocrity.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you think, wow, she can't speak.

She can't go up.

She'll appoint somebody like Josh Shapiro, who's kind of a liberal J.D.

Vance.

It's quick on his feet.

He's moderate.

He's got a huge following in Pennsylvania.

And no, she wanted to do the opposite.

She must have thought, I'm so mediocre.

Which person

in the national field is more mediocre than I am?

There can't be any, can there?

Oh yeah, there is.

Kamala, there's a guy named Waltz, and he's more mediocre than you are.

Really?

He speaks less well than I do?

Yes.

He lies more than I do.

Yes.

He's more incomprehensible.

Yes.

He He pads his resume and reinvents himself more.

Yes.

He's my man.

Get him over here.

And that's what happened.

Well, let's look a little at J.D.

Vance here in this

controversy that's more about the press, of course, totally about the press than about him.

Associated Press of all places deleted a tweet.

This is a week ago from the day this podcast is being aired

about

these

shootings.

I think three kids and a teacher were murdered in Georgia, the Appalachie High School.

And J.D.

Vance said something to the effect of that he laments that the school shootings are a fact of life and says the U.S.

needs to harden security to prevent more carnage.

So he's saying this is terrible, that this has become

a reality.

Of course, the Associated Press took his quote and said,

J.D.

Vance says, school shootings are a fact of life.

And implying, Victor,

it's part of the fabric now.

Let's live with it.

And then back on Tim Walls and, of course, Kamala Harris, they both doubled down on that distortion.

Yeah,

I think they were pretty good because I checked the original AP story.

Yeah.

And then their latest one.

And they do have that lie, you know, they say that it's a fact of life.

But then in the next paragraph, I'm going to read what I saw this morning.

If these psychos are going to go after our kids, we've got to be prepared for it.

We don't have to like the reality that we live in, but it's the reality we live in.

We've got to deal with it.

And that was the exact elaboration.

It was just a fact.

And what he's saying, what he's calling, I don't like this.

I don't like this is a fact of life.

But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize our schools are soft targets.

We've got to bolster security so he said i don't like this is a fact of life and they just took it out just like charlottesville when he said there were good people on both sides and i don't mean the white supremacists people who wanted to object to take and they said he was praising whites that's what the left does and again The ultimate cause of all of that distortion and misinformation is really ideological and they don't have

an agenda that or a platform that people want.

So they can't talk about, we're going to give you less penalties, we're going to, for crime, we're going to defend, defund more of the police, we're going to give you more Afghanistans.

We think you should pay $6 a gallon for gas.

It's not too bad that you're paying 30% more for staples in a 19

excuse me, 2020.

They can't run on any of that.

And so it's, it's,

I think they're going to lose.

I still do.

I really believe that.

I think people are wising up.

It reminds me so much of 1980,

even though Trump is much more familiar, but they had so demonized Ronald Reagan that he's nut and he was going to blow up the world that in the debate, Carter said, Amy, I talked to Amy and she's very worried.

And it was just.

People just waited and waited and waited and they thought,

I'm going to get rid of this guy.

He's president.

He's a nice guy.

And Reagan, you know, they all tell me he's going to blow up the world.

He's for corporate fat cat.

I'll just wait, wait, wait.

And they waited.

And the polls were pro-Carter in June and July.

And even into August, September, even in October, there was one.

I think it was Gallup that had Carter six or seven points ahead.

And then they just shrugged and said, no, not me, not this pig.

I can't vote for that.

Can't vote for Jimmy Sanctimonious Carter anymore.

Look, what about the Iran hostages?

Look at the economy.

Look at stagflation.

I'm not going to do it.

And it was overwhelming.

Landslide.

I think that's what it could happen.

They're just looking and they're looking.

Yes, I know Trump's crude.

Yes, yes, yes.

But I can't take this economy.

I can't take this border.

I can't take this humiliation overseas.

I can't take this crime.

I can't take the shocklifting.

I can't take the homeless people.

I can't take

20 million people on my lawn.

I just can't take it anymore.

Yeah.

Did you see Trump saying something to, I think he was talking to Sean Hannity

and

about

a week ago, self-deprecating in his way.

He was.

I know people can't stand me.

They hate me, but they know this.

They know they can't vote for these nuts.

Every time he does that, I keep going back.

I went back with Sammy when he said, they asked him about his brother tragically dying from alcoholism.

He said, can you imagine what would happen if I drank?

Meaning, I'm such an extreme personality that I would be really obnoxious.

So he said that, and he was absolutely right.

It's not about him.

If you don't like him, like his program.

That's what the Trumpers never got.

They never got over their ego or their careers.

They just couldn't say, it's not about me.

It's not about Donald Trump.

It's not about Stormy Daniels.

And don't give us any stuff about

Stormy, Stormy.

That is regrettable.

That was bad for him too if he did get involved with her when his wife was pregnant.

Shame on Trump.

But

compared to, and they're going to say, well, that's what about

exactly.

Compared to Bill Clinton in the sink right off the

Oval Office with Monica, compared to John Kennedy deflowering virgins in the presidential bed.

compared to LBJ with a little closet sex room in the house, supposedly, or

exposing himself to the cabinet or talking to people while he was on the toilet to humiliate them or Roosevelt with Lucy Mercer and his daughter trying to arrange things.

Secret.

Come on.

It's about policy.

And the policies that Trump established and

helped the country in his four years and the ones that Biden did are ruining.

And I think even the left says that.

There's an article in the LA Times that proves that today.

It basically, it's an op-ed where it says, Jack, that

California may be bad, but the problem is there's the GOP is nowhere around to be seen.

I'm thinking, yes, there's only eight seats in the California Senate out of 40.

And there's a super majority in the Assembly,

and you haven't had a Republican government, unless you call Schwarzenegger one, you know, 20 years.

But my point is, I guess the writer was saying,

why aren't you guys more prominent in stop insanity?

If you're going to let us act insane, it's your fault.

Speaking of California, Victor,

I was going to try and make a stop clock is right twice a day joke, but Gavin Newsom has something akin to stop clocks.

He's occasionally, he can make the right decision.

Maybe not for the right reasons, but he vetoed a bill designed.

For all I know, it might be overridden given the insanity of the makeup of the legislature.

But he did veto the bill designed to give $150,000 home loans to illegal immigrants headlines citing funding concerns.

You called that, didn't you?

Yeah, I did.

I said he would do it.

And I think some of the comments

on Ultra or one of our podcasts said that I was wrong about that.

But he wouldn't have a, he wouldn't have, he's running for 2028 right now.

And he's really bitter because he thought he would be in the running.

I mean, you saw that snide comment at the end.

And this is what I'm supposed to say, or we're supposed to say.

He was a much better candidate than Camilla Harris in the sense that for 20 minutes, he was even with DeSantis until he ran out of his canned lines, but she couldn't have been persuasive for five minutes.

But I think he kind of

lost control of the Assembly and the California

Senate because

the problem is for Newsom, when you have black legislators and they're pushing for reparation, there's only 3% to 4%,

maybe 5%,

depending on the demographics you read of African Americans in California.

So there's not.

It's a free state, by the way.

Yes, yes, a free state.

So there wasn't a lot of people in the legislature that were going to push that.

And he didn't want that on his desk.

So he was able to go and

he did what he had to do.

He gave them money, even though he had to borrow it because we're still 60 billion in the hole.

But then he just told those guys, I don't want that bill on my desk.

I don't want to go through the embarrassment of vetoing it.

So kill it.

And I think he was going to do that with the $150,000 for illegal

aliens mortgages, but California is about 50 to 55% Latino or Hispanic, whatever term you use.

And there are far more Hispanic legislators than there are black in the California Assembly and Senate.

So I think he gave the message out to them, don't put this on my desk and make me do this.

And they said, no, we want you to.

In other words, they didn't care.

They thought they held out hope.

They could force him to sign it.

I don't understand why they put it out there, because if you're a Mexican-American legislator in California and your constituency

is Mexican-American, if you think that's your constituency, then why would you privilege a foreign national over your own constituency?

Right.

Yeah.

And why, when the average price of a house in California is over $900,000, which you give a particular

community $150,000, which only will jack up the price of all houses that are already in short supply.

And it's racist too, because I know it says illegal immigrants, but believe me, if somebody comes from Norway and crosses the border and goes up there and says, yeah, I'm a Norwegian and I came from Mexico and I have the money and I would like to get this loan for 150,000.

They're going to say, get your blank, blank back to Oslo, you squarehead.

We want nothing to do with your white supremacy,

white rage.

You know, that's what they would do.

Yeah.

I know I'm going to get, maybe I'll get a call from the Hoover Institution that I was.

being unkind to my Scandinavian.

The consul

from Norway will be.

Were you imitating the voice of Scandinavians in a deprecatory fashion?

No, I was just repeating what I heard all my life as a kid.

Hey, I learned something interesting about Scandinavians

and Sweden.

In fact, Vicar,

you know, and the listeners, if they care, know that I'm from the Bronx.

And the Bronx is named after Jonas Bronck.

from the 1650s or so when he came to these shores.

and jonas bronck i always thought he was dutch you know the dutch in new york city no he was from sweden so sweden your your roots with the bronx are i never it's it's shocking to me so uh i'm gonna i'm just gonna make note of that i'm gonna start a swedish anti-definition league because every movie there reports no they are you remember uh that one with cliff was it cliff robertson the great northfield Minnesota,

about Jesse Jackson aborted raid at the bank in Northfield, Minnesota?

No.

Yeah, it was really a good movie.

And

it was also redone with the Long Riders.

You remember with the Carradine Brothers?

Yes.

Okay.

I think that was Arthur Hildiba.

But both movies have Swedes because it was a Swedish town, right?

And they fight it out with Swedes.

But in the preliminaries to the gunfighting,

they push him away and say, Get away, you stupid Swede.

Wow, what is that?

What are you looking at?

Why are you get out of here?

I felt that I should,

I don't know.

Yeah,

put down your Electrolux and turn off your Volvo and send a letter.

Well, Victor, we are at the

end of this particular episode.

Again, I think our listeners who are listening today on the 10th

should know.

Actually, it's not the 10th, it's the 12th that you and Sammy will be discussing the debate tomorrow, the 13th.

And we have a few notes to read from some good people who rate the show.

You can do that at Apple, zero to five stars.

And nearly everybody gives Victor five stars.

It's a terrific 4.9 plus rating here.

Thanks for those who take the effort to do that.

And then those who go above and beyond and leave comments.

And I'm just going to read a few quickly.

One is

titled Philosopher King, and it says, The influence you are having is hard to measure, but not hard to imagine.

That's signed by the Weekly Objective.

There's one titled, I have to read this only because it's too funny.

My name's in it.

It's titled Dr.

Knowledge and Jack the Commie Slayer.

I love this podcast.

Please, someone who has connections, recommend VDH for a cabinet position with President Trump.

That's signed by Beartooth Cowboy.

And this is a little longer and a little less comical.

It's titled A Gift.

Dear Mr.

Hansen,

there are a few people that I consider a gift from God.

Some teachers, pastors, and family members, I would add you to the list.

Your clarity of thought, knowledge of history, along with your ability to communicate effectively, are truly a gift.

And I look forward to listening to you you every chance I get.

I especially enjoy your conversations with Megan Kelly.

I'm reading the end of everything right now, sobering.

I wish I would have had the chance to study with someone like you when I was young.

I know it's hard getting old.

I'm a little younger than you, but I hope you work well into your 80s.

Thank you for your work.

And that's signed by Brett Elliott from Greeley.

Very nice.

Yeah, you're awfully, awfully nice.

So we thank those and

those.

I always kid that my greatest constituency, at least ad hoc, when I'm at an airport or somewhere comes up to me, are women.

I'm 71.

They're between the ages of 65 and 90.

And

I talked to them and I find out that I learned so much.

And I,

you know, the thing about getting old is you think you're younger than you are.

When you think that other people who are 70, you think you're 40

and you're not.

And I must have had 10 conversations in

the last trip, the Fresno Airport, the Denver Airport, the Detroit Airport, and LAX with women maybe 75, 85, 90 that came up and wanted to talk.

It was fascinating because, you know, you were from the same generation and they want to talk about things that no one else would know about, movies, music.

uh why don't you put this song as your background music and

and you know the four the everly brothers or the righteous brothers stuff like that but i find myself uh fascinated with you know

i i kind of people that i know will kid me when i'm when i give a talk on a cruise or something and there's young attractive women they walk by don't don't say a word and then some woman 80 years old who may be attractive but she's 80 comes up to me and wants to talk and say oh that's your constituency but i like that constituency because they're so informed and yeah

and uh they're such nice people

i

you have young fans too victor though so uh i'm sure i uh tell my wife that

well you i assume uh at hillsdale you were you know where you're back from recently you know obviously this place

with a greater proportion of young than old.

But

anyway, I mean, I know I've met several of your former students over the years who are just

so thrilled to have been, had the chance to

take a course with you when you were teaching there.

I know you're not teaching courses there anymore, per se, but I was

more busy, busier this

time than I've ever been.

There was wonderful weather, too, when I was in Hillsdale.

Usually it's

bad weather.

It was sunny and it was

not that hot.

I mean, they thought it was hot because they're used to milder temperatures, but compared to 115 when I left, 110, it was just, it was nice.

There was breeze and I enjoy, you know, meeting people, going out to dinner with Hillsdale faculty, students, interviews, videos.

It was very good.

It's such a nice place.

I like the town of Hillsdale, too.

Well,

it is in the middle of nowhere.

So that's the downside.

Hillsdale needs an airport, I think.

It's not like Selma's in the middle of somewhere.

Although I can,

it's near Fresno.

Yeah.

A famous politician, which I will not name once, said, where do you live?

You still live near where?

Selma?

I said, yes.

He goes, and where's that?

Fresno?

And he was kidding.

He said, I've never heard of it.

Fresno is over a million.

Greater Fresno is over a million people.

Yeah, yeah.

It's the gateway to Yosemite.

So

we have Sequoia trees in our lobby at that, the airport.

Yeah,

I'm very fond of that airport.

I've gone in and out of there many a time.

Well, anyway, Victor, guys, for me, I want to just say civilthoughts.com.

Go there, civilthoughts.com, sign up for the free weekly email newsletter.

Jack Fowler writes 14 recommended readings of excellent articles I've come across the previous week.

Here's an an excerpt.

Here's a link to the article.

You're going to like it.

Not selling your name.

So it's just totally an act of love on my part.

CivilThoughts.com.

Vick, you've been terrific as usual.

Thanks very much.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.

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