Revelations: Columbia University, Illegal Immigrants, and D.C. Lost Its Head

1h 25m

In this episode, Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler discuss the new 91-page document on anti-Semitism from Columbia university taskforce; Aurora, Colorado reminds us of the crimes and misdemeanors of illegals; the problem of an MIA president and global politics; China threatens the Philippines and the broad implications.

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Transcript

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to listen to the star and namesake.

That is Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at at Hillsdale College, where Victor is right now as we are talking on Sunday, September 1st.

This episode will be up on, I believe, Thursday, the 5th of September.

We've got to talk about some college things, Victor.

I do want to mention first, and later in the show, I'll explain more about Victor's official website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

You should be going there.

You should be subscribing.

More about that later.

Victor, as you pointed out to me before

the show began, we were talking.

There's some very disturbing news

analysis of what happened last year to Jewish students,

particularly at Columbia University.

The kids are back on campus now.

And I think it's a good point for us to reflect on the madness that happened, the badness that happened, and maybe will happen again.

We'll talk about that.

We'll talk about migrant insanity in California and in Colorado.

Vindman, the nefarious colonel and whistleblower affiliated with

the last impeachment attempt at Donald Trump.

Excuse me, the first one.

He's running for Congress.

We'll get your thoughts on that and a few other topics if we have the time for it.

We'll do all of that right after we return from these important messages.

We're back

for the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So, Victor, there's a report today in the New York Post and our good friends at Powerline blog.

Folks, if you

want to

find

a reliable place for sane analysis analysis and some good references to other articles.

I'd go to Powerline if I were you.

Victor does that.

Yeah, I do.

I go every day.

I see every day.

Yeah, every morning they have not only good analysis, they have good selection about what to talk about and to discuss.

Steve Hayward, Scott Johnson, John Hendricker.

Hendricker?

Is that

I'm going to actually contact him, Victor, and ask him how he watches.

It's Hinder Acre.

That's how it's spelled.

Hinderacre.

Yeah.

But

they're all very good.

Yeah.

Well, today at Powerline,

they refer to the New York Post piece, which actually, I subscribe to the Post, I get it.

And I just quickly caught it.

But here's Jewish students at Columbia University were chased out of their dorms, received death threats, spat upon, stalked, and pinned against walls as the Ivy League School devolved into a cesspool of anti-Semitic hate in the wake of Hamas's October 7th murderous raid on Israel, the new and disturbing details emerged from the lengthy 91-page document released Friday by the school's faculty-led anti-Semitism task force, which revealed the extent to which the hate permeated the institution.

John's

power line piece also talks about

blatant anti-Semitic incidents at the University of Pittsburgh.

Victor, as I mentioned you before the show, if somebody looked at Hillsdale, looked cross-eyed at another student,

we would be sure to hear about it in the media.

Not much outside of the New York Post or

the few usual conservative suspects are we hearing about the atrocities that went on in the wake of the larger atrocities of October 7th.

And if these were black students and they were white people who did this, or if they were latino students and a bunch of white students went after them and pushed them spat at them said horrific names yelled you know dirty money to a faculty all of that stuff they would be expelled uh somewhere summarily i want i wonder remember the president her name was safik the president of Columbia that resigned just recently yeah and that it was like as if this was just

a mid-career decision or a stress.

No, it wasn't.

It was because this thing was going to come out.

And she was most famously, you remember during the QA with

the congressional people?

Your congressman from New York.

Is that who your name is, Elizabeth, Stephanie?

You know,

Stephanie.

Stostalmik.

Yeah.

She asked that.

famous question of gay

and sapphic.

She said, is

calling for genocide an actionable offense at your university given and she had read some of their speech codes and they said

it depends on the context that was what gay and then they kept pressing and they said well

if it's not directed at a particular person but it's just generic i guess it's okay so if you were to say

I'm calling for the elimination of all black people or all Latino people or all gay gay people, but I'm not directing that toward a particular gay person or Latino.

Does anybody in America believe that person wouldn't be facing severe consequences on campus?

So my point is they were lying and they knew they were lying and they thought that the media likes them and they were in, they were the same liberal people in the Congress that would shield them.

And everybody in the Congress who's anybody has got a degree from one of their universities and their donor class.

And they felt they were exempt.

And finally, it got so egregious that she quit.

This comes out almost the same time as at my university, Stanford.

There's almost a thousand pages,

and it wasn't compiled by right-wing people.

The members of that committee to investigate anti-Semitism were liberals, and they were shocked.

of the blatant anti-Semitism.

I remember walking across campus and seeing Ben Shapiro being announced to speak in a can of insecticides saying, Ben, be gone.

You know, a poster that was deliberately trying to evoke, you know,

Zygon B and the Holocaust.

So

it just keeps on going.

And

then

we also have the president of the University of Pennsylvania, and she couldn't answer those questions either, whether it was okay or not to call for the genocide of the Jewish people.

I think her name was Liz McGill, and she was rewarded by now she's at Harvard and the London School of Economics.

So there really is no consequences for any of these people.

They're part of a brotherhood or a womanhood or cloister.

They're married to the right people.

They're in the right zip code.

They have the right cattle brand university degree stamped on them.

And they never face.

They're kind of like the university version of Anthony Fauci and the bureaucracy.

They are, you know, like James Comey or Andrew McKay.

It's the same thing.

You have to accept shame.

And if we live in a society with no shame, then

they can do the merry-go-round of jobs.

Remember, Profumo back in England in the early 1960s was so ashamed, went to become

an agent of charity for the rest of his life.

But these people all get

reshuffled.

Like the Oberlin, the head of

that dean at Oberlin.

Yes.

She's got some other freaking

job.

another college.

I don't know how many millions of dollars she cost them in that settlement.

Oh, like 33 million.

Yeah.

She was an absolute racist, too.

She was.

She was out there leading the demonstration.

So

there's no consequences,

at least for anti-Semitism.

So the question is, everybody's listening.

What's going on, Victor?

Why is this happening?

Why is it open season on Jews?

Well, in the question of academia, you always go for the most likely exegesis first, and that's cowardice.

And what's happened is a demographic reality, and that is when we went to what I call repertory admission, that is that blacks, Latinos, women,

and other

intersectional groups were traditionally

let in basically by quotas representing their demographic percentages.

But after George Floyd, there were a feeling that we need reparation.

So women at most campuses are way over 50%

and blacks are over 12% and Latinos are over 12%.

And

the white population, but especially white males at Stanford's about 9%,

but they're not 33%.

As I said the other time, the only group that I can see is overrepresented as far as white males and in groups that keep percentages like that.

The Pentagon is the best example, or people who get killed in Iraq and Afghanistan at double their demographics and the general population.

Otherwise, no.

So

the idea is that there's increasingly very few Jewish students on campus.

And there's increasingly, because they pay with Gulf-Fed money, they pay full tuition.

Students from the Middle East are growing by leaps and bounds.

And then you add in that equation $10 to $20 billion in endowments for these greedy universities to get endowed Middle East programs.

And then you throw Donald Trump into the matrix that everybody on campus hates and supposedly supports Israel.

And what do you have?

You have the ingredients of a lot of students that are here as guests of the United States government on campus with a lot of money and universities who are very vested in having them there, and very few Jewish students.

And these college presidents get up in the morning and they think:

if I were to discipline somebody from the Middle East for slapping a Jewish student or spitting on them, would that be, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, a wise thing to do?

Would

the Jewish, if I don't do anything and they run amok, as this article suggests, happen,

will the Jewish community be on my back more than the general faculty who are useful idiots for these Middle Eastern students?

And they make that cost-benefit analysis.

And they think there's not enough Jewish students anymore.

And many Jews are assimilated and Israel is not their main concern.

And to the degree there are donors who are Jewish, they either are left-wing and they will not predicate their donations when I mention we all have to fight Donald Trump, or if they do, they'll be easily caricatured as Zionist or something.

But I cannot take that risk with Middle Eastern students.

I mean, everything from terror coming, emanating from the Middle East to golf money to endowment, I'm not going to do that.

And so they don't.

And that's the simple explanation of why, to them,

Anti-Semitism is a collateral damage of being president.

It just happens, and we're not going to do anything about it.

But clamping down on the perpetrators of that means the faculty will go against me, the students will go against me, I will be called all sorts of names and I will be threatened.

When you go after Jewish students,

there's no consequences.

So they know that.

And if you were to,

you know, they say, well, if I just allow people to, at the University of of Pittsburgh, you know, break a glass over a Jew's head, or if I allow people at Columbia to chase Jews, or if I allow

a professor to segregate Jews, they're not going to break into my office like they did at Stanford.

They're not going to trash it.

They're not going to desecrate historic sandstone colonnades that are porous with paint, with all sorts of

obscene or,

I don't know, uncivilized uh sloganeering they're not going to do that and i know they're not going to do it and because i've seen the the relative protest i've seen the jewish students protest at stanford it looked like i don't know

it didn't look like a protest to me it was very polite the marquess of queensbury

yes you would walk by and the student would look at you and said are you interested in learning about the middle east and there was a nice little israeli flag an american flag a little table.

And the student would come up and said, could I, would you be bothered if I talk to you?

You go by the

Baptist

from the river to the sea.

You know what I mean?

And so,

who was we going to react to what?

And that's

college president with very few exceptions.

I know two who, I know

three.

Pete Peterson, who's the dean at the

School of Public Public Policy at Pepperdine, Larry Arndt, the president of Hillsdale, and Max Nikias, the former president of USC.

And that's about it, that were courageous and were disinterested and just ran the universities in the interest of education and truth.

And

you wouldn't want to break their rules because they would apply an even standard no matter what your ideology are.

I'm not saying they were conservative and favored conservative.

They just would favor,

if they favor, they favor everybody or nobody is what I'm trying to say.

And otherwise,

and I've been on a lot of campuses.

I've been at the Naval Academy.

I've been Hillsdale.

I was a visitor for a while for the Nimitz, for a few days at Berkeley.

I've been a visiting professor in the classics department at Stanford, visitor at Pepperdine.

And I can tell you that there's very, very few people that in college administration that are fearless.

Very few.

And you have to be fearless.

You have to be fearless, given the amount of pressures that people use to go after you.

I wonder if the biggest, if I may use a technical term, scumbags of all, are the UCLA administrators.

That was pretty bad.

They're like proud of it.

If you're an administrator in the CSU 23 campuses or the nine UC campuses, you pretty much have an open season on any conservative or Jewish group.

You can say what you want.

You can do it.

They're not going to fire you.

The regents are not going to fire you.

Nobody's going to fire you.

The public's not going to fire you.

They will fire you.

There are certain things you can't do.

You can't seem insensitive to gay issues or

minority issues or women's issues.

But if you,

you know, every once in a while you see a CSU president fired, but it's always because he did not discipline a supposed sexual harasser or a homophobe or a racist, supposedly, but never

someone who clamped down on free speech or was overtly biased against Jewish students or had a double standard.

Clovis Community College, the president ordered all the posters for the young Americans of Freedom just torn down.

And they, yeah, torn down.

They sued.

and that went to a federal pillar, and they won.

And the president and the college were forced to pay.

And most of the, almost all of the students who went to court were Mexican-American, Hispanic conservatives at a community college in Clovis, and they won.

But think about that.

The president must have known they were going to win.

I mean, you just can't go order posters removed.

from one particular group that violates your own

idea of free speech.

But again, the idea is I don't really care.

I just know that I have to survive in today's political climate.

Anything I do that shows a clear bias to the left is like taking out indemnity insurance.

And anything I do that shows fairness to the right is asking for all sorts of attacks.

Silence is violence.

They can't allow conservative free speech anywhere.

Well, Victor, we've got plenty more topics to talk about today.

Let's talk about what's going on.

What are some of the consequences of Kamala Harris's border or lack of border?

We've seen some madness in California and in Colorado.

And we'll get your thoughts on this, Victor, right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, I hope I have this right, but in Aurora, Colorado, there are Venezuelan criminal gangs that seem to be taking over certain complexes there.

And as spill-off from, I think Denver, nearby, Denver is one of the more notorious sanctuary cities in America.

So we have these,

you know, I don't know where, if they were going to be running rampant in aurora colorado i don't know why they're not going to be down the block in milford connecticut next you know in a day or two so we have that craziness and then we have these reports in california of these you know migrants i'm sorry these illegals i don't know why they stopped school buses

scaring the crap out of kids you know i i don't understand that when they say migrant a migrant is

It's a different word than immigrant with an E or an I.

And there's a purpose.

A migrant is a neutral term.

It just means a person who moves around.

It's as if that's what people in the Oklahoma

diaspora were that came to California.

They were migrants.

They went from one state to another.

And emigrant with an E means you're leaving your native country to another country.

And in the Latin IN that that allides to I-M means you're coming into a country.

So these people, if you're going to use use the word migrant, they're immigrants, but they're not legal immigrants.

They're illegal immigrants.

And you can either say illegal immigrants with an I,

or you can say illegal alien immigrants, or you can say illegal alien, but they're not migrants.

They're not just wandering around as if they're going from California to Arizona or from Bakersfield to Fresno.

They are crossing a international boundary to get here.

So they're illegally doing so.

And they come here and they sense very quickly, and I don't think people get this, if you cross an international boundary and if you know it is illegal and if no one does anything to you, then you reside in that country illegally.

And if you reside illegally, And you know there's a law that says you cannot do that and no one does that, then the next step is, I will apply under a fake ID for various different voting or, I don't know, help or disability or subsidy.

So what I'm getting at is every time you lower the bar or ignore the law, then that particular person gets empowered.

And when immigrants, I,

come here illegally and they break the law of any law, and they are not prosecuted or they're let go, that sends a message to the criminal element that you can do in crazy things like take have an arm takeover of an apartment building or you can be tired from illegally crossing the border and you're going to get empathy from americans so if you see a yellow school bus and you try to stop it and get on it for whatever purposes, legal or illegal, you're tired, you're hot, you want to lift, or you're actually trying to, it doesn't matter.

There will be people in authority in the United States that will contextualize that and

they know that.

So they do that.

And there were people, they said, well, in many Latin American countries, yellow buses are municipal buses.

Maybe they thought it was a municipal bus.

But my point is this.

If you are a U.S.

citizen and you and there's a number of you, and you are trying to force your way into a school bus, I can tell you that'll be a felony.

And I can tell you they will go after you without mercy if you try to get into a sacrosanct bus full of small children.

But if you're an illegal alien, you will be given exemption, just like California.

If you want to buy a house right now, it's very difficult.

It's 7% interest.

But if you're an illegal alien, the California legislature, and we'll see what Davin Newsom does, has said you can get a $150,000 stipend.

If Gavin Newsom says,

If he signs that, he knows that his career is over, done.

He'll never be elected because that'll be a campaign ad for the rest of his life.

So

he's trying to figure out what to do.

But there is a sickness upon the land that all of us are witnessing.

There is some deep-seated

either self-loathing of oneself or of one's country or city or state.

But that's the only explanation how an entire society could go stark raving mad and allow people who are foreign nationals to come into their country knowingly breaking the law, then knowingly breaking the law a second time by staying here, and then knowingly breaking the law either with this type of activity or applying for things up which they're not eligible.

And we don't do anything about it because of what?

Because we feel that either we're culpable or we're too wealthy.

No, we're $36 trillion in aggregate debt.

California has a $50 billion annual deficit.

Our roads are crumbling.

Our infrastructure is crumbling.

There are people homeless on the street.

We are a Dickinsian society in decay.

We don't have that money.

Our military is shot.

It doesn't have weapons.

It doesn't have manpower.

Everything is falling apart.

And you don't have to feel guilty.

You don't have the wherewithal to allow this to happen.

So all we, again, it's like the campus.

All we're looking for is one brave woman, one brave man, just to say, no more, no more.

We're going to follow the law and everybody's going to be accountable.

If you are an armed illegal alien and you go in, we're going to prosecute you.

We're going to charge you with felonies.

We're going to convict you and we're going to put you in prison.

And the moment your sentence is over, we're going to deport you immediately.

And if Venezuela doesn't want to take you, then we'll just parachute you into Venezuela.

Or we'll do what you did.

We'll just get a big barge and crash it onto the beach.

Dump you on the shore, right?

You're not going to stay in this country.

And you know what would happen if you did that?

There would not be people being endangered and children wouldn't be endangered and people in apartment buildings because they would stop doing that because you would deter them from doing it.

So everybody should realize that when you don't detour something and you don't follow the raw, what you're really doing is making a statement that you

don't care about innocent life.

You're saying to yourself, my moral sanctimoniousness is so much more important than the welfare of my fellow Americans who will be collateral damaged.

It's more important for me to say I am the most liberal, tolerant, humane person in the world that allows people from a foreign country to come in here without audit, who are very poor, and I don't care if they're criminals or not.

I don't care who they damage.

It's important for me to allow them to come in.

That's what we're talking about.

Yeah.

Well, the first words of the Constitution, Victor, include ensure domestic tranquility.

And this is so,

so anti-American.

It is.

And when you think of, just think for a second of Camilla Harris when she is flipping now and she's running ads that she's tough on the border.

What she's basically saying is,

I helped let in 10 million people.

Thousands of them are causing havoc, not in my neighborhood,

in your neighborhood.

And I understand that most of you for the last three and a half years have not supported that.

But I didn't care because I was elected and I had my tenure

now I have to move up and be president and I realize that that is an anchor around my neck so I'm going to reinvent myself to reflect your position that was antithetical to mine in other words I ignored you for three and a half years and said you're a racist you're you sing Merry Christmas when poor illegal aliens can't can't have a nice Christmas

the Ku Klux the Border Patrol is whipping people.

They're like, just like the Ku Klux Klan, they're treating them like slaves.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

We should just get rid of it.

Think that all away.

It doesn't exist anymore because I am a border hawk for the next 70 days.

I will guarantee you whether she wins or loses, she will not be a border hawk after November 2nd.

If she wins,

she will, as vice president, and there is no president now, let's be honest about it, that border will be wide open again, and you will have millions crossed.

If she loses in her anger and spite, she will still be vice president, and she and Biden will open that border.

The only time in her entire life that she will be for respecting and enforcing the law.

She always talks about being

Madam Attorney General.

Yes, you were an attorney general, but you have nothing but contempt for the law.

The only time she will ever, ever

say that she wants the border to be secure and immigration law to be enforced is the next 70 days.

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Victor,

going back to something you just said, and let's be honest, we really don't have a president right now.

This gets me a little about America.

I mean, I love America.

I love my country, but we clearly don't have a president right now.

And it just...

doesn't seem to be any collective shock or outrage or maybe maybe we've all known this

you know but not too deep below the surface level for for three years now and we've just it's baked into our cake i don't know but this guy is is just on a beach licking ice cream cones

well

i've said that onebody somebody wrote me an email and said

would you want the alternative and i said i thought would you want biden sane and in control because he's doing less damage

yeah i get that but your point is she's on the campaign trail saying that she's running against herself.

And so whatever she was doing, she's not supposedly doing now.

She's now critiquing what she did.

So she's not in control.

He's at the, he's on, I don't know, what is it, 20, 30 days?

He's not in control.

And

It's no accident that things are starting to heat up around the world.

For example, and I wrote this in the epilogue of The End of Everything.

I said, you know, 99% of these existential threats are just that.

They're not reified by actual extinction.

But every once in a while, an Alexander the Great comes along and a Scipio Aemilianus or a Mehmet, and they mean it when they say they're going to destroy something.

So we have now

been hearing from Putin and everybody for two years

that Russia would not use use nuclear weapons.

It's not going to do anything.

Well, today, their foreign minister and Putin have said,

if the United States continues to use offensive weapons in the hands of Ukraine, we are going to look at it as a direct attack

on Russia.

And of course, we don't take that seriously.

Right-wing people don't because they feel we can deter them with our own nuclear weapons.

Left-wing people don't because they hate Russians,

all Russians.

But the point is that

this

offensive into Kursk, toward Kursk, is now getting pretty big.

And I think it's more like the Battle of the Bulge.

I think it's the last, the Germans who made a big bulge in our lines, didn't realize that they weakened their entire defense because to the southeast there's a huge Russian offensive.

And I think it's going to break through.

But my point is this.

We are giving, they attacked oil refineries.

And that is perfectly legitimate in a war.

I understand that.

But this is not a normal war.

It is a proxy of NATO, the West, and the United States against the aggression of Russia.

And now, for the first time,

Ukraine is inside Mother Russia.

And that makes strategic sense, but it doesn't make geopolitical sense.

Because what you're doing is

you are slowly egging, egging, egging on the Russian military to the point where they won't be able to exist if they allow a foreign army to be in this nuclear superpowers territory attacking refineries, power grids, the Kremlin.

And you can say, well, they do that to Ukraine.

They do.

And it's asymmetrical and the world's not fair.

I'm talking about the self-interest of the United States, not what's logical or fair.

And at some point, when they look at this country and they see nobody's in control and that Ukraine is using high Mars and U.S.

offensive weaponry to hit targets of Russian civilians, I mean, that's who's going to suffer, right?

Without power and without gasoline.

They're going to react.

I don't know what they're going to do, but they're going to react.

And

we need a very strong president to say either Ukraine is not using U.S.

offensive weapons and they're offensive or they are doing it and they're justified and we do not take to bullying.

Whatever your position is, my point is there has to be a position.

And what Biden said, as I said earlier, is the idea, don't,

how dare, that doesn't work.

It doesn't.

It's just loud, loud braggadachio carrying a twig, and that's what he is.

There's no initiatives.

We hear all these initiatives and everybody said, I think there's an article in the L.A.

Times.

Well, Camilla hasn't done everything, but she was vice president.

Well, she was delegated to be space czar and border czar.

She had a lot of portfolios, and she had more power in theory than any other vice president in history because we had a president that was never there to begin with.

So had she been really competent and really believed in her agenda, she could have just enacted it.

And she did vote 33 times to break a tie in the Senate more than anybody's ever done that.

So these people who say, well, yeah, she's running against Joe's agenda.

She couldn't do it.

She can't do it now.

Well, she did it before when she broke the tie.

So all she has to do is

break a tie.

Just vice president, say, Joe, you're at the beach.

Is it okay with you?

I want to initiate a wealth tax and tax on realized income and then go back to my buyback of AR for 15.

Can I do that?

He would say, go ahead.

And then she would get her Republican and Democratic people there.

And they would say, we're going to stop you, the Republicans.

And the Democrats would say, go for it.

And then I will be the tiebreaker.

And that'll be it.

That's, go ahead and do that.

There's not a chance in the world she's going to do.

There's nobody there.

She's on the campaign trail hiding from the media.

He's in the beach and will not, on the beach, and he will not talk.

to anyone.

Because if he talks to anyone,

it's either he can't talk to anyone as we know, or he can't talk to anyone.

He doesn't care anymore that you make fun of him.

He doesn't make sense.

Because if he gets up there and says, and I told Mr.

Putin in Ukraine, I mean, the Iraq war, it's Afghanistan and

the Navy battleships and

Khrushchev

is in charge.

Everybody said, why listen to him?

We've heard it before.

He has no idea where he is.

He doesn't know anything.

So nobody takes him seriously.

So he can keep talking like that.

Or his handlers say, don't talk anymore, Joe, because all you do is cement this idea.

There's nobody in control.

I think

Madame Jill is probably don't say anything, F him.

Let them deal with that.

Joe is in a proverbial cave nursing his wounds, and she's very furious.

It goes back to that first debate when Camilla Harris called Joe a segregationist and a racist.

Remember, she was reportedly very angry at that.

Bussing.

At some cause.

There was some cause that those charges were true, but it was untoward, I suppose, to say that of a fellow Democrat in the campaign.

But nevertheless, she is playing her Edith Wilson role as de facto head of the government to the very end, I suppose, along with whatever outsource authorities Michelle and Barack Obama have.

And then, seems to me, if you look at who's running the country, everybody says, who's running the country?

The answer to that question is who

committed the coup?

Who snapped their fingers and removed Joe Biden?

Whoever that is is now running the country.

I think we know.

It's Jill Biden is now not running the country, I don't think.

And

Joe Biden is not running the country.

It is a consortium of Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, with input from Nancy Pelosi, Hycomb Jeffries, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and probably Chuck Schumer.

And

they,

through Camilla Harris, are implementing policy with veto power as Roman tribunes from the wealthy donor class, whether that's the Ivy,

excuse me, whether it's George Soros or whether it's the Silicon Valley mega-rich, I don't know.

But that, or the Fitzer family, I don't know who the, which billionaire class, but it's the billionaire left-wing donor class, the Congressional and Senate left-wing leadership,

and the Obamas, and they're running the country right now.

And they're doing it through, I think,

Kamala Harris's staff.

I don't think that Anthony Blinken

and Jake Sullivan,

one is a former Clintonite,

Jake Sullivan.

He was the one that cooked up the Alpha Bing hoax.

Remember that ping, the Alpha Bank communicating with Russia, Donald Trump?

Right.

His fingerprints were all over that.

And Blinken is the one who cooked up the 51 Intelligence Authority hoax.

Those two, I don't think, are taking orders from Joe Biden or even Jill Biden.

I think they are de facto working for this consortia, the new Harris.

All the people that were in Biden's reelection campaign,

they've either quit or they've joined abandoned ship and they're working for Harris.

And the Obamas are now overt.

Their people are running the appointments and things like that.

So

what are, but the problem with this consortia is it's not public.

And we don't have a

we should have a president that has a press conference addressing Ukraine right now.

Or

American hostage was just killed, murdered.

And five are still there waiting to be killed.

We have an American president that says, Hamas, if you kill another American, it's something you're going to regret.

I'm not going to tell you how you're going to regret it, but you're going to regret it.

And what I would do is I would just say, we are in a state of war with

Hamas.

If you kill more Americans, and anybody on a visa from that part of the world is going to go home right now.

You're not going to start the fall term.

If you are from the West Bank or you're from Gaza and you're over here, you're going to go home because our respective countries are de facto at war because they're killing American citizens.

But you're not even going to hear anything.

Nothing, nah.

It's very scary right now.

China is colliding with the Philippines.

It's flexing its muscles with Iran.

Iran is full of oil money.

It's in a strategic pause.

It doesn't quite know what to do, whether it wants to risk

an Israeli retaliation, how far Hezbollah should go.

Putin is being disgraced.

He's getting desperate.

He hopes his offensive will crack Ukraine before

the presence of Ukrainians on his soil completely humiliates him.

He's desperate.

And there's nobody in Washington in control.

None

that we know of.

Yeah, right.

I mean, I wonder, is Blinken going to Delaware on the beach and briefing the president daily?

What would he do?

What would he say?

But he'd say, Mr.

President, this is Secretary of State, your Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken.

Now, we have to craft a policy vis-a-vis these statements that are coming out of Russia this morning that they're going to threaten to use nuclear weapons against the United States if we continue to give offensive weapons that are hitting our utility grid or our refinery, are displacing thousands of Russian citizens inside our own country.

We feel that that is an attack on Russia by a U.S.

proxy.

Now,

what was your statement?

What should we say?

What would he say?

What do you, what's a proxy?

Where's Kharkov?

I don't know.

So he's not in control.

And so they're not calling him.

They're calling, I don't know, the Obamas, or they're calling Nancy, or they're calling Haichum, or they're calling Chuck, or they're calling Elizabeth Warren.

I don't know.

I wonder if that, who's that Iran?

I'm sorry, the woman who is Obama's

Valerie Jarrett.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

She's our point woman on Iran, probably.

Yeah.

Robert Malley, are they calling him?

Who knows?

But Joe is not, you heard him on the debate.

He's not there.

There's no there there.

He's gone.

Zilch, zombie,

de facto construct.

He doesn't exist as a president.

And that's the height of the irony because we are witnessing right now the greatest attack on democracy in our lifetime.

We are witnessing

a president who was put into

power in the March 2020 primaries after he had not won a single primary in Iowa, New Hampshire, or or Nevada.

And the only reason he won in South Carolina is

Representative Claiborne went to him and said, we want a left-wing DEI agenda, and we will get black voters to come out and vote for you.

And we will get all the other candidates, Mr.

Buttigig,

Ms.

Warren, and Bernie Sanders, who all have more delicacies than you.

They're going to vanish, Presto.

all at once.

You're going to be the nominee.

You're going to be president.

We know you don't know where you are.

We're going to tell you what to do.

You're going to have the most hard left, race-obsessed, DEI-woke agenda that you've ever had.

And we're going to, all you have to do is go through the motions.

And that went on for three and a half years.

And then they said, you know what?

He's no longer a useful idiot.

It doesn't work.

Let's get rid of him.

Well, he won't go.

He says he's not going to go unless God comes.

Well, then we're going to be God and come down and tell him to go.

And so they said, Joe, 25th Amendment, Cabinet will vote.

It'll go to the Congress.

Don't think the Republicans won't salivate and get rid of you.

So do you want to go?

You want to be president?

Because we feel that we have contempt for the American people.

It's much more important that we have a fit candidate.

as our party's nominee for president than it is that we have a fit president for the rest of the people.

We don't care if you're senile, diminuted, unhinged, non-composment, and you're president of all the United States.

We do care if you're going to head the party that way and lose the election.

So you're out.

And now, Camela, we don't like you.

We don't want you.

We know who you are.

We've seen how you ran your 2020 destructive campaign.

We've seen that you're a lightweight.

You're out of your league.

However, we can't get rid of a black incumbent vice president so you're going to be the nominee and we're going to get all of the other challengers out in the next 24 hours and we're going to give you all the delegates and all you have to do is do what joe did in 2020 you say you're a moderate moderate moderate got that camela you're a moderate no more woke no more i'm a radical no more illegal aliens can't don't say merry christmas none of that you are a moderate number two you don't leave your basement.

And if you do, you do not give interviews, town halls, lectures that are unscripted or unedited or not, they're not pre-pan.

You don't do that.

And then we will raise more money for you.

And that's what we're going to do.

And you will be elected.

And you will be our useful idiot.

And that's what they're doing.

Same thing.

She's as linguistically challenged as Joe was

cognitively challenged.

And this is an attack on democracy.

It really is.

It's all done in the shadow.

And they basically said this.

We,

this coup, the donor class, the congressional grandees, and the Obamas, we have contempt for all you people.

And we don't give a damn about 14.5 million votes in the primary that went to Joe Biden.

We could care less.

They have no vote.

From now on, if you vote in a primary and your candidate wins the delegates and he wins the primaries, he's headed for a sure thing.

If he's behind in the polls, we can get rid of him anytime we want.

And that's what they did.

You say in the shadows, I say democracy dies in plain sight here in America in 2024.

Hey, Victor, you mentioned before,

maybe we should wrap up

with a little foreign policy stuff, not that you haven't talked about here, but you mentioned China and the Philippines, and let's get to that when we return from these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Again, we're recording on September 1st, Sunday.

This episode is up on Thursday the 5th.

Victor is at Hillsdale doing his annual Hillsdale stuff, teaching, lecturing, peering, etc.,

filming a new

small

series on his book, The End of Everything.

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Go to VictorHanson.com.

You go there, you'll find links to everything Victor does, his articles, his syndicated column.

weekly, his weekly essay for American Greatness, the archives of these podcasts, links to Victor's books, The End of Everything, which I just mentioned, the new, the updated The Case for Trump, the 2024 edition.

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So

Victor,

we've seen now for several months, maybe even longer, China's intimidation of the Philippines and it seems to be of way off stage.

We're looking at the Middle East.

We're looking at

Ukraine and Taiwan as hotspots.

But for me personally, and I assume a significant number of our listeners might feel the same i mean philippines has a has a special relationship with the united states and uh you know a lot of our

our um grandparents or their uncles etc they're a lot a lot of americans died there but it's and for me as a catholic um

this there's

our community here in in connecticut there are lots of uh uh filipinos philippines you know who live here who are americans who who are very religious, sweet people.

I have a terrible fondness for

our relationship there, but

they're getting

bullied relentlessly by China.

And this kind of a David and Goliath situation,

I have deep fears, not only for the Philippines, but this might be

a spark for much, much worse conflagrations in the world.

Your thoughts on this?

Well, I mean, our relationship with the Philippines, I think, is best

emblem,

it's emblematic of that famous poster when they kicked us out of Subic Bay.

Remember,

Americans go home and take me with you?

Yeah.

And so the left for a period of time was very anti-American.

And that we had a huge force in the Philippines.

And traditionally, we had guaranteed autonomy before World War II, and we did honor it.

And after the war was over, we helped reconstruct that.

Devastated Manila, for the Siege of Manila, is one of the most costly battles of the Pacific War.

And they got their autonomy, and they had a series of dictators, and we were blamed for that, especially the Marcos regime.

And then they had a revolution, the 21st, late 19th.

And Melda got went away with all of her shoes, and then we got elected governments.

But there was this lingering anti-Americanism that was reified that we'd left.

And China looked around and said, well, if we ever get powerful, we ever get a navy bigger than the United States, we're just going to fill that vacuum.

And that's what they're doing.

And

it's a very complex situation because

what did the Philippines think was going to happen when they kicked us out?

Did they think that China was going to be a nicer

superpower?

Did the United States ever take our ships and try to ram theirs?

No.

We had all sorts of rules of, I mean, I'm not saying that sailors were necessarily polite on Saturday nights in Manila, but my God, when we left, there was a power vacuum, and maybe it's better for us too.

And out of that relationship, as you point out, we had a lot of wonderful Filipino Americans that came to our country, and that was wonderful.

But right now,

China looks at the world

and it looks at all the anti-American places

that

got into the world communist, anti-imperialistic places in the world.

And there is no Soviet Union to take advantage of it.

Russia doesn't have that power or reach and they fill that void, whether it's the Philippines, same thing with Vietnam.

Oh,

there was a Vietnam War and South Vietnam is now absorbed.

Oh,

the Americans are never going to be there.

We'll just come in.

And the Vietnamese should have been saying, according to revolutionary theory, oh, come on in.

You're brothers in the worldwide communist struggle.

Instead, they're get out.

You're 10 times worse than the Americans that killed us.

And the same thing, the Philippines.

These people

don't screw around.

They're not like the Americans.

When an American sailor does something wrong, I mean,

there's a hearing, there's a court, there's a fine, there's indemnities.

They just ram stuff.

They just take stuff and they say, what are you going to do about it?

And that's their attitude all throughout the Pacific.

So it's taking a while for all of these countries to come to their senses and say, you know what?

We thought the American ubiquity and omnipresence was bad.

But what's worse is they vanished and their fleet is pathetic and they're not anywhere to be found.

And China is, they play for keeps.

These are the real imperialists.

And we're Asians, and China's Asians, but we don't trust these Asians, and we would rather be with Westerners because they treated us much better than these people do.

And that's hard to take, and it's taken them a period to realize what they're up against.

And

we're at a real crossroads, Jack.

The United States is going to have to take a deep breath and decide whether it's fifth century Rome or it's going to have a renaissance.

I think that's what Make America Great was about.

We're 36 trillion almost in debt.

We have 123% of GDP we owe.

The defense budget is about $850 billion, and the interest on the debt at 6, 5 to 7%

is about $1.2 trillion.

So we're paying more to bondholders than we are to build our rebuild our defenses which under Biden and Harris have just deteriorated so what do we do do we say to everybody we can't afford 10 million illegal aliens coming in it's billions of dollars that our cities cannot afford we federal government can't make it we're broke

and we're going to have to look at all of the entitlements

And we're going to have to simplify the tax code, go back to Simpson Bowles or something, three brackets or something something that encourages productivity.

And we've got to get greater productivity and wealth.

And we don't have the luxury anymore of putting Anwar off limits or federal leases off.

Everybody says, well, Biden is now pumping as much as Trump.

Yes, after he drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and he was afraid he would lose the next midterm, he started drilling again.

But if you look at what Trump was

projected to be drilling at this point, had we had Anwar open and we had our pipelines built and we had more, we would be pumping about three to four million barrels more than we're doing now.

So my point is, are we going to tighten our belts, say everybody who's able-bodied has got to get out there and work?

And we're going to enforce the law, we're going to get the crime rate down, we're going to rebuild our military.

It's going to be so powerful that the Chinese will never screw with us or intimidate our allies.

And you know what?

We're 40 or 50,000 short.

We're going to stop the woke, the DEI, the white supremacist cabal hoaxes.

And we're just going to, and the 8,500 that we kicked out because they'd had COVID, but they hadn't had, most of them had had COVID, but they hadn't had the vaccination.

We want all of you back.

Anybody that left the military, you can come back.

You don't need the vaccination.

Please come back.

And all of those we offended, that we called you racist, or we didn't promote you because we thought you suffered from white privilege or rage, or you didn't read enough of Professor Kendi's book as we ordered you to or suggested you do, come back, please come back.

Lassie, come home.

Until we stick you the next time.

Well, it's a hard sell because nobody trusts them anymore after Afghanistan.

And we promise we're so short of funds, we're not going to leave 70,000 trucks there.

We know how expensive they are.

And we're not going to leave 400,000 semi-automatic weapons.

And we're not going to leave

60,000 machine guns.

We're not going to leave 100 helicopters.

We're not going to leave 40,000 armored vehicles.

We're just not going to do it anymore.

We promise.

That's what we have to do.

And I don't see this, the Harris Biden.

I think it's more

this is a racist, sick country.

It's been flawed at the beginning, got worse, it's terrible now.

We need to have more social programs.

We've got to really stick it to these fat cat, upper-middle-class people who are cheating, and we're going to get the tax rate up to 40, and then with their state rates, it'll be 55.

That's their attitude.

And I don't see any hope if that happens.

I really don't.

For someone who works, you know,

like most people, I work 365 days.

Whether I had long COVID or not, I worked.

And I don't see, I paid, you know,

we're in a state where the top bracket is 13.3.

And that's not counting, you know, Obamacare and payroll and federal, I mean, state federal taxes.

So all of us that are middle class, upper middle class, are paying a huge amount, and yet you're being demonized for doing it.

Pay your fair share.

Remember Biden?

Pay your fair share.

Pay your fair share.

It's the the guy who's i pocket 27 million yes 27 that said oh refund or payback loan repay that's what it was on his checks his son is a tax cheat but my point is

it's gut check time because the chinese are sensing that we are a wounded animal and they're on the scent of our blood and whether it's the philippines or off the coast of vietnam or what they say to australia or what when they make a video and send it to the Japanese of Chinese nuclear weapons blowing up Japan, which they've done, or unleashing their little pet pit bull, Kim Jong-un,

they feel they're in the driver's seat, that we're the setting sun.

They do have 1.4 billion people.

We only have 330 million, and we're divided, divided.

Diversity is our strength.

It is if you're unified and you have a common core of beliefs and you share those customs and traditions, but it's not if you're, say, you're diverse and therefore you are OPRA and you're multi-billionaire and you go to the Democratic Convention instead of saying, this is the most wonderful country in the world.

I had nothing and now I am a billionaire and I've had more opportunity and deference shown me than almost anybody, anybody.

And I look at the people on this stage, my friend Michelle and Barack, they've been so fortunate that we were, they didn't say that.

And so I don't see how diversity is our strength if we're going to be diverse to the point of being disunited.

Right.

Historically, I guess you could, the Yugoslavias say diversity is our strength.

Rwanda say,

that worked out.

The Rwanda, diversity is our strength.

In Iraq, people say, I'm Shia.

I'm Sunni.

I'm Christian.

Diversity is our strength in Iraq.

I don't think so.

So diversity is only your strength if there's no political diversity.

It's unity.

You are all on the same page as far as the Constitution and the rule of law.

But if you allow your superficial tribal affiliation to be your sole referent, and that transcends being an American or feeling a sense of shared American, then diversity is your weakness.

E.

pluribus baloney.

I don't know.

You know, it's, I, I, I don't like to quote sun also rises because everybody does it about

going bankrupt, but it does

gradually then suddenly.

Decline is gradually then suddenly, gradually then suddenly.

Yeah.

Well, um,

Victor, we usually on the show with a quote from one of our

listeners, not readers, but I have something a little different here.

Um,

Bob Hyde, who's a great,

who's a friend and a listener, and he happens to be the son of Henry Hyde, the great congressman.

Bob lives in Dallas, and he wrote me,

Bob, like a lot of people, love

when you talk about favorite movies, favorite shows, favorite music.

And he wondered what your thoughts were about the last hurrah, which was since we're in election season now.

Although I think we're always in election season.

Yeah, I saw that not long ago on Turner Classic Movies.

That was John Ford, wasn't it?

It was John Ford, 1958.

Spencer Tracy and was

Pat O'Brien his sidekick advisor?

Yeah, he had, he had from

a bunch of old actors.

Yeah, Pat O'Brien was one of the actors.

It's kind of a funny thing where it's sort of,

they all started out, as I remember the movie, the subtext is Spencer Tracy and Pat O'Brien.

See, old Irish guys dethroned the wasp and they took control for years and they gave the guys on the bottom rung the discriminate.

They all grew up poor and discriminated as Irish.

Then they took control and then they kind of became

backdoor.

Not illegal, but they were kind of a, what's the word for it?

Consortium that ran the city and they were yeah up to

you think it's boston that's the impression yeah it's kind of boston irish and they kind of did whatever they wanted and then they didn't realize it in the new tv age plastic advertising uh and the war hero i mean there was a war hero there and the old wasp newspaper and the protestant bishop they all want to get out get them

and they think they're invulnerable but they don't realize the world's changed and in that last election um

Frank Skeffington.

That was the name of it.

Skeffington, yeah, he can't deliver.

They can't, all of his little borough chiefs who go out, you know, and pay for funerals and buy dinners, they can't get the votes out.

And a new world has happened in the late 50s.

I think it was made in the late 50s.

Yeah, 56, 7, or 8, somewhere around there.

Yeah, you get the impression that TV is the medium and

kind of

you go to, I think there's a nephew or somebody who went to Yale or something.

and anyway you get the impression that

these guys

their day is over and then he he has a stroke as i remember and

uh he loses the election and it's kind of a shock he gets a stroke and then he says he's going to run for governor he dies yeah it's a it's a john ford uh i don't know that's one of his best it's a good it's a good movie and uh it's Yeah, there's so many soldiers characters that he brings back and you like to see them.

That's a theme in all of his movies, Irish, the Irish, you know, the Irish Sergeant in Victor McLaughlin in those

trilogy, the calmering.

Yeah, and then.

Well, the Irish, the quiet man.

Yeah, the quiet man, the same thing.

And even

Marino Sullivan, right?

Or Marino Harrow, I mean.

Is it Marino O'Hara?

Yeah, Marino Harry, yes.

Yes, the redhead.

Redhead.

She was always the Irish, fiery Irish and McClintock, remember, and all that.

And so, yeah, I mean, that was a great movie.

And you'll never see a movie like that made again.

No,

no one cares about the Irish anymore.

As a doubt, I got to.

Yeah, well, we care about them a little in this house.

I just want to recommend, Victor, there's another.

I don't know if you can find it on the internet anywhere, folks.

Go search, but there's another great political movie called The Great McGinty by Preston Sturgis from 1940.

It's kind of a a fun movie.

He was a great screenwriter.

Oh, he was terrific.

And

of his movies, the one,

Hail the Conquering Hero, which is a comedy about with Eddie Bracken coming, you know, it's kind of a war hero that wasn't, it's just really, really well done.

Now, totally different, Victor.

I just got to share this with you, and then I'll shut up.

Is that last night, Mrs.

Fowler and I decided to watch

Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way.

I remember that.

That's Kirk Douglas, isn't that, isn't he?

He's John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews.

I mean, Paul Apprentice, who is still alive.

She is gorgeous.

I remember that.

What a great movie.

That's when Kirk Douglas,

doesn't he rape Pat Neal and he crashes his plane?

He rapes a young nurse.

Oh, yeah.

And then

death heroes his way out of getting, you know, apprehended for what he did.

And Pat Neil, Patricia Neal always played that role as the

still attractive, but kind of seeing the whole world.

Yes.

Not wise guy, because she's always

favorably portrayed, but she had a stroke, too.

She did.

And she lived forever, didn't she?

She, yes, she recovered from that and then went back to acting.

She won an Oscar after she had the stroke in the, I think, the last picture show.

You know, who was in that was, what's his name?

The guy in Shane, the little boy.

He's his son, right?

John Wayne, Brandon DeWilde.

Yes.

And he didn't, he died young.

This may have been one of his last movies.

I think he got in a crash, didn't he?

Car accident, yeah.

Crash or car accident.

But it's a, it's a.

That's an auto.

That was an old, he was kind of a weird director, auto Pritime.

Yeah, he was either really good or really bad.

Oh, he, he hit it here.

You just wish a little it was a better, better CGI possibilities, but this wasn't made in 65.

One of the weirder movies he made was Dana Andrews.

I've always liked Dana Andrews.

Oh, yeah.

The best years of our lives was his greatest role.

Oh, well, also,

yes, I agree with you, but then

he was in the one of the three guys executed in the Oxbow in 65.

Yeah, he was.

He was really good.

That's a sad movie.

Yeah, yeah.

And this was kind of like

a lot of those movies.

The subtext is Pearl Harbor.

Isn't John Wayne?

He's kind of demoted or something later on.

He comes in right after Pearl Harbor's been hit.

He was his

ship was out, out of the harbor, and then he thought he was on an expendable mission and he didn't zigzag.

And his ship got torpedoed and he was demoted court-martial.

But at the time, his

superior, who was played by Franchotone, who was a great actor from the 30s, said, you know, the Navy is what the Navy is right now, but in a few months, it's going to have a different mindset given what happened today at Pearl Harbor.

So, yeah, he was his

resuscitated.

It was not as good as for here to eternity, but it was the subtext was Pearl Harbor.

and what's everybody's lives are going to change.

Right.

But

they had, they had kind of a really good cast.

You're right about that.

Oh, yeah.

Terrific.

Burgess Meredith.

Yeah.

I hadn't seen the Battle of the Bulge in a long time, and I watched

Dana Andrews wasn't very good.

I mean, he didn't have a good role, but he was in that.

But Henry Fonda was in that.

But it wasn't such, it was really a long movie, but it was a little cheesy.

Yeah, it was.

Some of the special effects.

Yeah.

The best Battle of the Bulge movie is, I think, Battleground with Van Johnson

from 1950.

It's actually one of the best war movies ever.

One of the war movie I really liked that the critics hated

was A Bridge Too Far, Richard Attenborough.

I liked that movie.

It was really well done.

And I also, I thought The Longest Day was really good, too.

Oh, yeah.

It's terrific.

Sometimes click, click.

They don't make war movies or Westerns like they used to.

No.

Although I'm watching this new Western with Kevin Costner.

Have you seen it?

I haven't.

They advertised here.

I haven't seen the two.

Part one.

Yeah, part one is out.

It's called Horizon, I think, isn't it?

Right.

I have to see that, and then I tend to see part two, which comes out.

You can see that it's deliberately, not deliberate, that's the wrong word, but it's heavily influenced by lonesome dove realism, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

And it's got some of the filming, in some ways, is more effective, showing a realistic take on the West.

It's got kind of like a mixture of Lonesome Dove and Deadwood, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Kind of ranching.

Yeah, it's pretty.

It's actually, I saw it, and

I never thought Kevin Costner was a good actor, but as he got older, he developed a screen presence.

You know what I mean?

There was something about him that was much better than when he was younger.

Younger, he was just kind of a good-looking guy that couldn't act, and now he's used that ability of being having the presence without having to say a lot.

That's pretty good.

Yeah, there's a there is a don't F with me grabby toss to him in

his little

movies.

Yeah, and this he has a shootout where he he just sort of plays the quiet guy and he lets the guy mouth off, mouth off, mouth off.

I'm going to get you, and then he just shoots him and he shoots him again and again and again.

Oh, wow.

But, But it's a good movie.

I was surprised.

Anytime that a modern, as I said before, anytime a modern director or actors tries to make a Western, it's very difficult because each decade we get further and further away from knowledge of the West.

By that I mean firsthand, same with World War II.

We don't have anybody that has

an authentic rural Western accent, you know,

and we don't have people that really love the West, or we don't have a guy guy like John Ford who

really admired the cavalry or the settlers, but was also fair to the Indians, too.

But we don't have those people anymore.

Where do you get a guy in Hollywood that's working as a waiter and say, I want you to play a cowboy around 1870 and sound like him and look like him?

It's very hard to do.

Hence, the genre

declining.

Yeah,

it is.

It is.

And that part of it was also, it was the confidence of coming out of World War II.

That we had all of those veterans coming home, 12 million of them, and baby boomers.

And everybody was, America had a big surplus.

It was controlling the world economy.

We were pre-Vietnam.

Even Korea didn't turn out to be an Afghanistan or a Vietnam.

So it was a very confident time.

I can remember as a little kid, 58, 59.

I was,

you know, five and six years old i just could feel it it was this is the new education we're all going to get improvement the world book salesman showed up at your house

and i remember the craft uh what was it there was another inside aware yes they all sold up they all showed up yeah sanitizer

yeah new type of dry cleaning we had a guy come out and this is the

10-hour martinizing dry cleaning that show up in this panel truck.

And it was all.

And then I remember

they would deliver our milk and they say a brand new milk fortified with vitamin D,

wonder bread.

Yeah.

It was very, sometimes it was really dangerous, you know, be sure to get your DDT powder all over your kitchen floor.

Oh, my gosh.

But

it was a very exciting time to be a young person.

And

all these veterans around you that were really confident came back from the war, you know.

It would be a nice, singular essay on that from your perspective.

I can just remember my dad, we were like, I don't know, 13 or 14, and the roof was leaking.

We had no money.

So we're going to put a roof on this.

And I said, I don't know how to put a roof.

Yeah, well, the three of you are going to get up there.

It's called squares.

And it was really heavy.

And my mother said something like, I think there's people who sell shingles that have kind of a conveyor belt.

Oh, we don't need that.

We have a ladder.

We'll go up to the building supply and get our own shingles.

And we put it up there and we were doing it.

And it was like 100 degrees.

Oh, my gosh.

And 120 up there.

My two cold eyes present.

Yeah, we were hammering shingles.

And I said to my mom,

This is torture.

And she said, well, your dad is on his 42nd mission that he never took.

He finished at 41, but he thinks it's 42.

So just imagine that you're taking off from Tinyon and you're on your way to Japan.

Well, my brother was really, we all, somebody said, well, it's like we're getting bombed rather than we're.

It was always a 40-second mission.

Yeah, they all thought they could do everything.

They were so confident.

I wish we had that.

Oh, they had right to think that.

We have that idea.

I've been at Hillsdale, you know, for six days now, and I look at these students.

And it's the first time I've been really

optimistic about this younger generation.

I don't get that feeling too much at Stanford, although I have some wonderful students that come by

at my office a lot.

But these people are really upbeat and they're very competent and they really feel they can change the

nature of the trajectory of this country.

Yeah.

Well, they should.

Victor, there's something about the institution itself I've mentioned before, you know, National Review hiring.

I know one time we had six, five or or six Hillsdale graduates in the office.

And

between that, Thomas Aquinas, King's College in New York, which sadly doesn't exist anymore.

But

there was a good caliber of people that came out of these institutions.

The only thing I'm worried about is that it's caught on so much, there's not enough Hillsdales to meet the demand.

So I hope that

I think the present Larry Arn is, they have a Hillsdale charter for schools K through 12.

So they're doing that, but they need to, I think they are, I never want to say they need to, because Hillsdale is always a step ahead of you, but

I think their

curriculum and the way that the faculty operate and students could be Xerox for other schools.

Let me share something, and folks can go to National Review's website.

I just I wrote a piece for the current issue, the education issue, because what I do, you know, my job, my day job with American Amphil, American Philanthropic, you see a lot of, wow, this college is really cool.

I never heard of it, et cetera.

So you mentioned that the Hillsdale classical education.

Not only that, they're offering classical education at Hillsdale, but the program of K through 12 schools that they're creating.

Well, there's also comparable, a Catholic version of that, the Chesterton schools.

And then there's the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

It's out of Idaho.

They have 700.

They're growing at 150

a year.

The Bradley Foundation funds a lot of these initiatives.

Yeah.

And so that's inspiring.

And then at the K through 12 level, and there are colleges,

and this is what I wrote about.

I just picked four colleges that are are Christian, unwoke,

offer an affordable education, some even less than $10,000 a year.

There were some other things, and religious and authentically religious, not nominal.

And

there are colleges out there.

Now, that's Hillsdale is not, you know, I know it's religious, but it's not religious, religious.

But like...

say,

Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis.

But anyway, I think folks should should be

inspired.

There are things out there.

They gotta look for them.

But they're

they've gotta save their the other half of the country, though, because I mean, when you look at the people fleeing California, fleeing New York, fleeing Minnesota, fleeing Illinois, when you look at the blue state big cities that used to be our iconic cities, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, they're uninhabitable.

And the blue blue state finances are all they're all broke and people want to leave.

Even liberals want to leave them.

They are.

And

the university idea of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, it doesn't have any prestige anymore like it did.

The graduates that you meet are not well educated.

The campus tensions are really hostile and the people that are there are not nice people.

And you get the impression that

We inherited all these institutions.

It wasn't the left.

San Francisco or LA or Chicago.

It didn't belong to one political party or Harvard.

I mean, Harvard took a primary role in developing Napalm in World War II.

I'm not, yeah.

These institutions were very patriotic and they were very mainstream.

You see the war memorials on all the campuses.

Yes, absolutely.

And so you can't just write them off, but I don't know how you reach them.

But

you can start to see that

at every aspect, what I would call the

blue mentality doesn't work.

I mean, if you look at the fertility rate of some of these red states versus blue states, or traditional Republicans, or people who are religiously observant, and you look at the fertility rate, it's like two to three.

And then the people who are in blue state and big cities identify as atheists, agnostics, or

hard leftists, it's 1.6, 1.4,

1, 0.

And so

this whole country is in a radical transition and nobody really knows what's going to come out on the other side.

All you can do is just double down and hope that you follow the American model and keep it alive.

Well, Adam said, you know, this.

Country was built for virtuous people and that's what we need for America to succeed.

I recommend people go to church because that helps with you.

We need

the strength in the family and community and

get, you know, and then

no society ever survives that doesn't honor their ancestors.

Right.

Anybody who trashes their ancestors, and that's what's the sickest of all the sick things the left does,

is it uses the institutions that it inherits.

It uses the university's beautiful campuses.

It uses

Grand Coulee Dam.

It uses

magnificent airports.

It uses the interstates.

It uses all of the stuff they inherited, but then they trash the people who created them.

And, you know, Pete Buttigick, these highways are racist.

Yeah,

then don't use them if they're racist.

Use your bicycle.

You took the words out of my mouth.

Use your bicycle.

Nobody's forcing you to go on these racist freeways.

And for all these people who say that country is flawed, then don't

participate.

Don't use it.

If you think

San Francisco was a bad place before the homeless took over, then

don't go there.

Those iconic buildings have been desecrated as somebody built.

That's the way I look at it.

The worst thing is

of all the sins that human sins, ingratitude is the worst.

This whole generation is so full of being ungracious and ingratitude for and yet they use all these things that they inherit these institutions they take them over claudine gay should go back and look at harvard university and look at the quality of education in the 50s 60s even 70s and then look at what she oversaw and ask herself and look at look at her compare i'm not a big fan of past Harvard president, but you look at what they knew and what they published and their training compared to hers.

It's a joke.

It's a joke.

Well,

we pick on her,

pick on implies something, but she deserves all the criticism she's gotten.

But I think the board of trustees of that institution and some of these others have really dodged the criticism they deserve.

That's exactly.

She's a reflection of the deterioration of the board.

Yeah.

So the board.

Anyway.

Yeah,

we're over our limit here today, Victor.

We got to sign off.

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