Hardball and Softball Politics

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are recording on Sunday, September 1st.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I am the host.

You are here to listen to the star and namesake Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where Victor is right now, doing his annual sojourn teaching, recording experience at the Great Michigan University.

Well, college anyway.

We've got plenty to talk about today.

By the way, today's issue episode comes out on Tuesday, September 3rd.

We have news from late yesterday of hostages in Israel, including one American, six in total, were murdered by

the Hamas

terrorists.

And we're going to get Victor's views on that.

Also, we're going to talk about some social media hijinks

against Hillsdale, that and more when we come back from these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor, how are you doing up there in Michigan?

Okay.

You know, it's a beautiful day.

And we just...

There was just a huge, they have a new program called Military History and Strategy, Hillsdale.

Yep.

And the theme was the Christians and the Legions and Barbarism in the late empire.

It was very good.

It was two days.

And only at Hillsdale would you have over 600 people

of the public drive all the way out here to a rather isolated community on Labor Day weekend to hear that.

And I gave the last talk on

yesterday, but they were excellent speakers.

It was well run.

And, you know, you look at the campus, I can't,

Jack, it's just amazing.

They're now building a huge building for their PhD program.

And they've got a new pavilion.

The whole campus has been utterly transformed in the 21 years I've been here.

Yeah.

Larry Arns just rebuilt it from the ground up.

And I went out to their shooting range.

I went there 20 years ago.

It was just, they had just got some land and they had some targets.

It must be a $20 or $30 million complex.

It's the nicest shooting, most sophisticated shooting range in the United States, and it's home to the U.S.

Shooting Olympic team.

And I could not believe it.

They're building a huge, one of the largest in the country, indoor pistol range.

They have skeet shooting.

They have European skeet shooting.

They have movable target shooting.

They have a restaurant.

They have a conference center.

They have beautiful accommodations for visiting shooting teams.

They have scoreboards.

It's really stunning.

It's about over probably over 200 acres.

It's just phenomenal.

And then when you talk to the students,

when I first came here, you know, it was selective.

It was about one out of every three students were admitted.

But

because of the woke and the bad publicity of these universities, they are getting

just overwhelmed by applicants.

And they're trying to retain, you know,

they're conservative Michigan and they're doing a great job of it, but they are getting

thousands of people who in normal times would be admitted to Stanford, Harvard, Yale, but because of these reparations admissions, they're not.

And these are people with perfect SAT scores, 4.5 AP, high school.

And

it's now somewhere somewhere between 10 and 15 applicants for one Hillsdale opening.

It's one of the most selective colleges in the United States.

Part of its virtue, Victor, is it is what it is.

I mean, what if somebody dropped a billion dollars on it and tripled its capacity?

But

when does Hillsdale stop being Hillsdale?

You know what I mean?

With growth.

Well, you know, what's weird is that

chronicle of higher education or education report said there's 300

liberal arts private colleges that are going to go under and that's a result of a

the 1.7 trillion dollars in student loans and inflation going i mean that tuition went even higher than inflation b

people questioning the whole idea of college C, all of the lunacy, left-wing violence on campus.

And then D, is the fertility rate.

We haven't been at 2.0 since in the 21st century.

So we've had years now, 1.6, and there's just not enough kids coming into that 18-year-old cohort.

And so these schools are coming up for sale.

They're beautiful campuses, you know, the little tiny private liberal arts, beautiful campuses, and they are insolvent.

And so everybody should ask themselves, they are insolvent and hillsdale college

is in a multi-million dollar building boom it has you should see the studio i did the videos it's a state-of-the-art brand new studio it's nicer than anything i thought at stanford university they have a sophisticated radio studio They've got uplinks for live.

I can do Fox here.

They have uplinks for that.

It's

their, I mentioned their shooting range.

They've got a brand new sports center.

They're rebuilding their football stadium to, I mean, it's going to be incredible.

They got a

brand new soccer team and soccer stadium and track.

And

they're building this huge building on campus, as I said, for classical education and MA and PhD programs.

So why are they booming and why are they being swarmed by a record number of applications when similar, I don't mean similar in ideology or mission, but similar in the sense of private liberal arts colleges are going bankrupt?

And it's because they have understood that there's a yearning in the United States to send your children to a campus where

What's the word for it?

They're going to have a normal college experience.

There's not going to be a a Hamas camp out in the middle of campus.

They're not going to swarm the president's office.

If you leave your bike on lock,

you know, my introduction in 2004, I think it was, I forgot my bike and I parked it on campus eight in the cafeteria, went home.

The next day, I thought, oh my God, I left this bike.

There it was, just because nobody touched it.

And where do you find that anywhere?

And people are polite.

The students are polite.

They're brilliant.

And they have a winning formula.

And

you mentioned that we're going to talk about this idea that there are video courses.

And I've done three of them.

I did this Dying Citizen, World War II, and I shared one with Paul Ray on

Athens versus Sparta.

And I have another mini one coming up on the end of everything.

taking it down on Facebook,

their Facebook page about all these courses, because apparently some buddy didn't like a course on communism and Marxism,

mandatory, you know, a good course enlightening people about the nature of communism.

They never do that.

They never do that with other places.

Yeah, let's maybe we should talk about that now, Victor, and we'll get into the hostage.

Let me just read a little clip here.

And this happened about a week ago to our listeners, and it didn't get a lot of attention.

Hillsdale was censored by Facebook and then the headline, Facebook admits error in censoring Hillsdale College.

And I'm going to read a little something here from Newsmax.

A conservative college in Michigan called out Facebook for censorship after having its page taken down for launching a new course.

that is critical of communist and Marxist ideology.

The Hillsdale Online Facebook page has been down since Monday night, just as we launched a new course on Marxism, socialism, and communism, Michigan's Hillsdale College posted on X, reportedly drawing a Maya culpa from Meta, the Facebook parent company.

Facebook is denying people access to our course on repressive ideologies.

Such issues are usually resolved within 24 hours, Meta told us.

clip here.

Meta claims that Hillsdale's online course page was taken down for almost 100 hours because of ads they mistakenly flagged on Facebook.

But those same ads have been running unchanged for over a year.

That's a lot of college executive director, et cetera.

I think Emily Davis told Box Digital.

So, yeah, Victor, it doesn't happen to Oberlin.

It doesn't happen to Harvard.

It doesn't happen to Antioch.

It doesn't happen to Kenyon.

It doesn't happen to Williams.

It doesn't happen to Brown.

It only happened to the Hillsdale.

And

this comes on the tale of my Mia Culpa from Mark Zuckerberg.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

The FBI asked me to use my huge influence in Silicon Valley in general, and in particular,

basically 70% of social media that I control to squash accurate stories that the laptop of Hunter Biden's was genuine, as everybody obviously knew.

And so I did that, and that probably affected an election.

And I'm sorry about that.

And now,

what is he going to say about this?

Is he just going to keep doing this for the rest of his life about every week?

He's going to sit, you know,

we had, we took down a private college's Facebook because they offered a course, but we can't say that, that we didn't approve of and for 100 hours.

And it was a mistake.

And we regret that.

And they just, is he just, are they all going to do that every three or four days?

And why are they even making the effort?

Because before they just did it.

I mean, mean, this was, we're talking 2020.

He's never apologized.

He's known that that laptop, he knew that that laptop was authentic, Jack, from the very beginning because the FBI had it in its possession.

There were people leaking it, that this was authentic.

The 51 authorities knew it.

And so he knew that, but he takes all this time on the verge of election.

You know why he's doing it?

Because he thinks there's a 52% chance that Donald Trump's going to get elected.

And he thinks, as I said earlier, that if he were Donald Trump and

somebody had done that to him that affected the election of 2020, he would get even.

Not that Donald Trump is, but he thinks that.

So now he's all of a sudden trying to

win his,

I guess, exemption from a possible Trump presidency.

It's pathetic.

And if Trump loses,

they'll go right back to it.

In fact,

they will go right back to it.

And

it's pathetic

that they can do

stuff about him also, some claims that he may be like some kind of crypto-Republican.

This is Zuckerberg.

On what point?

I don't believe that.

He commented when Trump survived

the

assassination and put his fist up, never fight, fight.

And I think he said something like, wow, that was a kick-ass moment for our president.

He just does that.

He just does that.

His sister had a classics, classical language, classical studies website.

Used to attack me all the time.

I wrote something about it.

Zuckerberg's sister?

Yes.

Really?

Yes.

She bought, she bought, I won't mention the name, but she bought a classical online magazine.

a very well-known magazine, then turned it into a vehicle for herself.

She has a PhD in classics.

She was teaching at Stanford and something.

And then she ran it into the ground.

And it was so partisan

and it was so vitriolic that it, and then she just fired everybody.

And I wrote something about the fact, I think she attacked me for who killed Homer or something.

I said, if you really worry about classics dying, and if you even do worry about it, why don't you, instead of spending all of your brother's money on buying up a magazine and then turning it into a hyper gender studies, radical feminist, radical critical race theory distortion of classical studies and hiring these people.

Why don't you go down to Bakersfield?

There's Cal State Baker.

I founded a classics department at Cal State Presno.

Why don't you go down there?

And there's first generation students, in-need students.

You can use all that money.

You can help them hire Latin teachers.

It would be the best thing for first generation Hispanic and any other kid from any background.

You could do that.

You could go down and live in Bakersfield.

Just do that for five years.

And that would be really something you could change a lot of lives.

But why take your money and then just take an existing pretty good journal and take the name and distort it.

So I don't trust anything that family

does and it's all a sham.

He's an egalitarian with tie-dye shirts and all that, and he's building a wall around his Hawaii estate.

And when he was in Palo Alto, he sort of

borderline on the zoning.

He built, he combined, I think, two different lots.

So all these people,

I think

they have such incredible amounts of money in this globalized market.

Right.

And they interfere so frequently in the political process.

He put in $419 million in 2000.

He made Sam Bankman Freed look like a piker.

He made George Soros look like a piker.

He put the money in basically to absorb the work of registrars in

key states.

Then he said, Well, I'm not going to do that again.

Well, I don't believe that.

Just like you do it in the first place.

I don't get the registrars being pushed aside.

I will believe him when we hear tomorrow we wake up and

we learn that Wellesley College has their

internet courses down for four days.

Right.

That chance.

Victor in the crosshairs of the Zuckerberg family.

I never knew that.

It's on my website if you look it up.

And

she,

I don't want to get personal, but they were the

I got attacked all the time, you know.

Yeah.

Somebody sent me, I think I mentioned it with Sammy.

Somebody sent me a military blog where the person wrote, is Victor Hansen still alive?

I think I mentioned that with Sammy.

And somebody said, well, he's still a classicist.

And the guy said, I'm sure classicists would be tickled if he was dead.

So I get that a lot.

I have a long angry reader from a guy that I'm publishing over,

only because he's talking about issues of the campaign.

And I want my readers to see how

the mind of the left works.

Well, for new listeners, Victor's talking about his website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

And that is one of the

Angry Reader is one of the ultra-articles series that you write exclusively for that website.

I'll get the plug-in for it now, folks.

You should visit the website, tons of links to everything Victor writes, and subscribe, and you'll be able to check out these Angry Reader comebacks that Victor has, amongst other exclusive pieces.

Victor,

while I'm giving plugs, you know, coincidentally,

one of our sponsors today is Hillsdale College.

And I want our new listeners, again, especially our new ones,

to let them know that Victor is one of the professors in three of the over 40 free online courses at Hillsdale College.

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The second

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Thank you.

I remember her now.

Her name was Donna Zuckerberg.

They had something called Eidolon, and that was the journal that she ran into the ground.

Was she a professor at Stanford or she just took over this?

She was a a Princeton PhD.

And

I don't think that they, I think that for a while she was there.

But if you're a multi-billionaire, I think any university would probably.

Oh, my gosh.

I mean,

I don't think you say no to somebody.

Genu Flexing.

But it was, that journal would attack me a lot.

And it was, it completely was just, they destroyed it, and she fired everybody.

And

that was the end of it.

But it was again this very wealthy, elite person

talking about classics among very tiny little groups of people about feminist classics and then trashing anybody who didn't believe with it.

And it was just so exclusive when the whole field was in the process of imploding because people were banning Greek, you know, as

a requirement, yeah, yeah, And it was, and it was,

you know, it was,

it was kind of like

fiddling when Rome was burning, is what I'm trying to say.

Right.

And it was all about the alt-right.

She kept talking about all the alt-right and calling people Nazis.

And,

you know, she got into Steve Bannon, of course, and Milo, what's his name?

And it was all, this was supposed to be

this was supposed to be a threat.

And then she had,

she went after who killed Homer, John Heath and myself.

Yeah.

It's all, I mean, if she was supposed to be expanding interest, there's all sorts of things she could do, talk about the ancient world and outreach programs and all the hard work that people do.

There's so many assistant professors that get hardly any money and part-timers.

They teach Latin, they teach Greek, they're trying to build interest in it.

They write.

And the worst, I mean, here's some multi-billionaire person detached to Stanford for a while, buys a magazine, and then all she can do is attack people

on esoteric topics of feminism, radical feminism, and it didn't make any sense.

Yeah, Victor, isn't it?

There are a couple of fields of study where

the

subject matter attracts the enemies, like religion, theology, etc.

I think most religion professors are atheists.

And it's hard to imagine a physicist

hating physics, but yeah, we have classicists who hate the classics, right?

Well,

we have a Princeton professor who was a Stanford PhD.

He used to technically too.

I wrote an essay about him in New Criterion.

Right.

I won't justify, dignify his name, but he said that, that he wanted to destroy classics.

The chairman of the classics department at, the former chairman of the classics department at Stanford said he wanted to destroy classics.

And by that they meant classics is a rarefied

white

male-centric, elite,

racist, sexist, homophobic subject that should be destroyed and then rebuilt by people.

Greek is exclusionary.

Latin is exclusionary.

That's the point.

Only wealthy people have the time to study it.

Therefore, you should destroy it.

And the number of people who really do know Latin and Greek is shrinking by the year because of that attitude, because they have eliminated Greek as a requirement for classics majors at a lot of universities.

I know that sounds absurd.

We said that in Who Killed Homer over 20 years ago, that they would do that.

And everybody said that we were paranoid, John Heath and I.

And they've done it.

Well, Victor, we have a couple of other topics.

So we're going to get to the Israeli hostage murders.

And, you know, I didn't talk to you about this before the show.

I sent you a note, but did you talk with Sammy about the Arlington Cemetery?

No, we didn't.

So let's talk about that too, then.

And we'll get to these topics and some others when we come back from these important messages.

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

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

Victor is in at Hillsdale, where he goes annually to teach and record and and give lectures.

So

I'm glad you made it there, Victor.

It didn't seem without your usual, maybe just a little bit of a torture from the airlines.

But I know it's not easy for I've gone to Hillsdale twice.

It's it's um I had a very

get there.

Yeah, I was very lucky.

We left 45 minutes late, and I had less than an hour connection.

Oh, gosh, you know why we left late?

Because the United

person at the desk was only there was only one person trying to board two Airbuses.

And so she was going, or I felt a lot of empathy, but she had to board probably 400 people at once.

And so what happened is we all boarded 10 minutes before takeoff, five minutes before takeoff.

We were late boarding.

And then we sat there while she couldn't get the names of the passengers and come in and give the list to the crew.

So we just sat there.

And then the pilot was great.

He was heroic.

We got a tail wind.

and

I landed and somehow at an airport, I looked at my phone.

I got back.

I had 8,000 steps, but I ran like a madman and I got to

the gate in a different terminal, maybe five minutes before the door closed.

So that was

wonderful.

It's a quick trip.

Like, sounds like O.J.

Simpson running through the airport.

I'm so cynical.

Yeah, I'm so cynical.

I said, this this this will be late i'll miss my connection it gets on there right everybody said we're almost boarded we're ready to take off 15 minutes later we're waiting for the passenger list 20 minutes later we should be going pretty soon 30 minutes later 40 minutes later it always happens like that yeah

and so well when when you have less than an hour to connect you can i think there's a good good chance of you'll probably have 20 of the time you'll you'll miss the connecting flight because of stuff like that.

Hey, Victor, let's get your thoughts on what happened

yesterday in Gaza, where six hostages were murdered in the tunnels beneath the city.

One of them is Hirsch Goldberg Pollen, an American.

And here's the end of Joe Biden actually put out a...

a statement from,

I don't know, seems like he's on his 53rd week of vacation this year, but

it ends.

I have worked tirelessly to bring their beloved her, she's talking about the family,

safely to them.

And I'm heartbroken by the news of his death.

It is as tragic as it is reprehensible.

Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes, and we will keep working around the clock for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages.

Victor, in general, your course, your thoughts, anything you want to share.

And that, if you wouldn't mind, that phrase, make no mistake, it is so empty.

It's this threat, and this administration, just its threats are,

you know,

you know what's very funny about all this?

I shouldn't say funny, tragic.

Somehow,

we have elevated a bunch of mass murderers into a political movement.

These people go in on October 7th and they slaughter, they behead, they rape, they torture, they do every unimaginable medieval atrocity.

And they would have done more.

They take hostages, just like they're out of the medieval ages.

And then when

they take corpse over and we're told by our Western media that this is only Hamas, it's not the people of Gaza.

And yet we find that there are four or five hundred that hear that there's rape going on and murder going on and violence and theft and they tag along and then when they bring a corpse back you see the people spontaneously start kicking and spitting at a corpse or a wounded person and so then we learned in the past that some of these hostages have been what outsourced to so that decentralized to families that are watching them

and and then this administration says they're supposed to negotiate with Hamas.

So, and they have American hostages.

And what Joe Biden does is nothing, but he always, because he's always been that way, he's always been a blunderbuss, a bombastic

person that no one takes seriously.

So he always says, don't, don't,

or they'll regret it.

And it's all

is

what happens if, what would you say to Putin?

Don't.

What would you say to Iran?

Don't.

And then they just ignore him.

And no one ever holds him accountable.

We're a society where no one's ever held accountable.

There is no consequences.

So we're asking the Israelis who've suffered 1,200 dead to then deal with this apparatus, these terrorists, as if they're a legitimate state.

And they're just a bunch of thugs and hostage takers.

And they could leave, all they have to do is let the hostages go and have negotiations if they were a credible entity.

And they're not.

And so now they're,

you know, every once in a while they hear that Israel's getting closer and closer to particular lines in their underground labyrinth or subterranean tunnel complex.

And when they feel that one of their outsourced group of hostages is getting close to being rescued, they shoot them or torture them or kill them.

And then we're supposed to think, well,

all states do that.

That's not abnormal.

And so

this all would have been over with had Joe Biden just said

when they went in there in October 21st or 22nd, 28th, if he just said, Iran is not going to participate in this war.

Hezbollah is not going to participate.

This is between Israel and Hamas.

And Hamas preempted and slaughtered civilians and Israel is going to retaliate and destroy Hamas.

That's between them.

And we're not going to get involved, but Hezbollah is is not going to get involved, and the Houthis are not getting involved in Iran.

And we will demonstrate very quickly what we mean when outside parties will not get involved.

And that would have been it.

So if the Houthis

had

attacked more tankers, we could have just taken out their grid and said, you know what?

We'll take out another power plant for each.

ship that you sink.

Or if Hezbollah had sent over, as they have, I think they've sent over 6,000 or 7,000 rockets.

We could do all sorts of things.

We wouldn't even have to do it ourselves.

We could just tell the Israelis we're not going to have any restrictions on your retaliation.

But we couldn't do that.

All we did in this campaign season is worry about 250,000 voters here in Michigan.

And it's very ironic.

I brought that up with the interview with H.R.

McMaster

about the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

I don't see the difference.

In fact, I'll go further.

What Joe Biden did by suspending 3,500 bombs that were congressionally approved to Israel and put them on hold for his own personal reelection purposes, that because he felt that that would win him back the quarter million voters that he needs in Michigan to win while he was a candidate.

That seems to me a lot more egregious than telling Mr.

Zelensky, you're corrupt, Burisma's corrupt, and Hunter Biden is doing nothing for $80,000 a month except being paid by your government to get influence with the Biden administration.

Or in this case, he was getting influence with the Obama administration, vis-a-vis his father.

That's what Trump did.

Now we're learning even, Jack, that there's more and more things coming out because everybody wants to show you that Joe Biden, they were right to have a coup and get rid of him.

So we're starting to see now that Hunter had a lot more money coming in than we thought, and barisma was a lot more overt than they claimed.

But my point is, suspending aid and then resuming aid because you're worried about the Biden corruption when Joe Biden in July and August of 2019 was not even a candidate yet for president.

It's not nearly as egregious because the aid was resumed and it was offensive aid that Obama had canceled.

The bombs haven't been restored to Israel because they still want to pander.

And

according to their logic, that's an impeachable offense.

But the right always says,

Yes, it's impeachable, but do we really want to go down there and be attacked for impeaching Joe Biden?

Do we really want to do that and have a kamala harrow they don't even care about that their attitude yeah we'll impeach him right now they never said do we really want to impeach donald trump and get diverted yeah that's what they're attitude they they do that all the time

well see this this this sense it's not even a sense uh let's call it the reality that biden is essentially like the man we like movies the manchurian candidate he has taken so much money and freaking tim waltz too it seems like like he must be a dual citizen.

This has got so much love for China.

Like, these people have sold out our country for

chump change.

And the lies, they caught Tim Waltz in another lie.

It just never stops.

He lied about how he was introduced to politics.

He said he went to a John Kerry rally.

People poked holes in that fact.

He went to a W rally, right?

Yes.

And said he was shocked by the treatment of the, he brought some students with them, and that's what prompted him to.

He had already been to some anthology.

I think one of the

people said that wasn't true, that the students were treated poorly.

He lied about getting this award that he didn't get.

Or if he did get it, it was given to several people.

He lied about all of his military.

He's a prefarrator.

And I could not believe Camilla Harris in her convention address.

I said to myself, did she say that?

She said that Donald Trump ordered an armed mob and five people killed.

They killed five people.

They didn't kill one person.

Not one person did the Trump protesters kill.

They suffered

and four deaths.

And the one person that wasn't a Trump supporter, Officer Sicknick, died of natural causes.

When they had that little take the knee and there's five deaths, they were talking about people who months later, for

whatever cause they no one knows, committed suicide.

Right.

And

then they said that

armed mob, I don't think anybody was ever arrested in the Capitol or the environs around it with a weapon.

When you look at that picture of those,

and I'm not approving of it, but because I don't believe you ever go into a federal building that's closed to the public, but they went in and they fought, they were in between the little satin ropes.

You know what I mean?

That's not what insurrectionists do.

They don't peacefully walk through a corridor on their way in to commit an insurrection.

And usually insurrectionists are not told by the insurrectionists in chief,

proceed peacefully and patriotic.

patriotically over to the camp and and then they do so in an unarmed fashion.

Insurrectionists, we know what they look like and how they act.

They act like they did in May, June, July, August, September of 2020.

They burn, they kill people, 35, 40 people, they attack 1,500 police officers, they light fires, 14,000 of them are arrested.

That's what insurrections are.

So that whole convention was a pack of lies.

It just gets down to the question that

we can talk about the Dana Bash interview, but we're getting down to the point where it's just overt now.

It's just overt.

I mean, they're just saying, you know what?

70 days, we're going to run out the clock.

We cannot let her go out and do an unedited live interview by herself.

It's not going to happen.

So if you don't like that, that's your problem.

And we're going to lie, lie, lie, lie.

And we're going to say basically that

She's a happy face on a mega agenda.

She's for fracking.

She's for border security.

She's tough on on crime as a prosecutor.

She's going to restore deterrence.

She's going to do all the things that

she's going to undo all the things that she and Biden did.

That's what we're told.

And this is how they're going to win the election, they think.

Yeah, that they're incapable of doing now.

Hey, Victor, well, let's get your thoughts on the interview.

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And we thank the good people from Solair for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, I wasn't sure if you had

gotten to the Dana Bash interview with the great Sammy Wink,

but if you didn't, what's your take on

what transpired in these

league?

Has anybody ever seen, we talked a little bit, but I went back and looked at it again.

Has anybody ever seen a major network interviewing a presidential candidate where they ask them the question and then they give them a multiple choice group of answers?

Why have you changed?

Was that A?

Was that B?

Was that C?

And there's this video going around where they show her interviewing J.D.

Vance.

She interrupts him.

She says that's not true.

She's screaming back and forth.

It's a normal interview.

This wasn't an, that's not the right noun interview.

It was a sham.

It was a construct.

She had to be there with Waltz.

She looked like a deer in the headlights.

She was giving these softball things.

And they never followed up when she you know, when on him either, when they basically said, you were a liar when you said said you went to war and he said

you know

uh it's regrettable that people will question a person who was in the national guard

did she say well yes it is but did you answer the question no and then he said well i have a little sometimes i'm a little loose with my grammar so was the tense of the verb wrong you used the subject rather than the predicate what what was wrong with your grammar when you said that you had used a weapon of war it seemed to me it was very explicit She didn't do any of that.

And I guess what she was saying is she put her finger up in the air and she said, now let me think a minute.

Given where I live and my friends that I associate with and my career and my compensation, is the downside more

that if I were to ask embarrassing questions, which I know she can't answer, and if I were to ask those questions and follow-ups, and she implodes like she will, and maybe that will alter the campaign, and she will lose, and people will blame me,

or will I be praised for the first time in my life of being a tough, disinterested, real journalist?

And that would be the upside.

And she took one nanosecond and said, nah, I'm going to...

I'm going to ingratiate myself to her and help her win the election.

And I do not want to offend.

In fact, I want to appease all of my friends.

And I don't care about MAGA people or the American people in general.

That was

to win the Candy Crowley Award for

a journalistic

resistance.

Candy Crowley.

And it was worse than Candy Crawley.

She was smiling and

no follow-ups, no follow-ups, multiple choice.

No, it was, it would be like saying,

Victor,

can you tell me something about the Peloponnesian War?

And

I go blank for a second.

She goes, do you think it was 27 years long?

Is that right?

Or do you think it was 40 years long?

Or do you think it was 100 years?

Which was it?

It was just, you know, and then she starts off looking at, there's the bus or wherever they came in.

And it was just.

It was basically one of those Obama, what flavor of ice cream is your favorite?

You know,

and that's going to be her only

I bet you this week alone or the last two weeks Donald Trump has talked 15 hours non-stop non-edited with all sorts of podcast interviewers compared to that thing and so really it's an insult to the American people because what Harris is saying to the American people is this

I am a train wreck.

You know it.

I know it.

I cannot speak without a teleprompter.

I will not be able to function if ask a question that I don't know is coming in advance.

And even if I did know it, I don't know.

So I can't do town halls.

I can't do live interviews.

I can't do on-teleprompted speeches.

And second,

I have said that I'm a radical and proud of it and that I'm woke and everybody should be woke.

And my record in California and as vice president and as senator, where I proudly was voted the most left-wing senator of all hundred in the Senate, which is pretty hard to do given Bernie Sanders is there.

But nevertheless, that's who I am.

But I'm not going to be that way for the next 70 days.

I am going to look at the MAGA agenda, and I am going to be a crime fighter, a China hawk, a border hawk, a deficit hawk, a

deterrent hawk, you name it.

I'm going to just take that MAGA agenda.

And whenever I find that they poll 51% 51% on a particular issue, that's my issue.

Now, American people, that's what I think of you.

And then if you elect me,

if you elect me,

my values have not changed.

She said that.

Well, have you changed your position?

Yes, but my values haven't changed.

Oh, I didn't know that.

I'm Victor Hansen, and I decided that I'm going to vote for

Joe Biden, but my values haven't changed.

Or I'm going to vote for, I don't know, Camilla Harris, but my values haven't changed.

I think we should confiscate guns.

I think we should cancel patents, but my values haven't changed.

Can you imagine J.D.

Vance saying that?

If he had said,

my values haven't changed, but

I think I'm for open borders now.

I kind of like what Joe Biden.

They would tear him apart.

And so.

It's not even an interview.

They have just so destroyed the practice of journalism.

People are so cynical

of these.

And the sad thing is that on a big night for Fox, you're talking three to five million viewers.

And a normal night for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC,

CNN, and PBS, you're talking 25 million people, 30 million.

Not CNN.

I mean, collectively, maybe.

Yes, collectively, all together.

All together.

No, Fox gets more viewers than CNN and MSNBC on many nights together.

Yeah.

Yeah.

but not public tv that's my hope for robert kennedy i really hope donald trump will appoint robert kennedy as the head of the public broadcasting company in charge of npr and pbs yeah oh my gosh that'd be that would be wonderful

heads would heads would spin and roll yeah hey victor um we've We need to get your thoughts about what

happened at Arlington Cemetery, and we'll get those right after these final important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So, Victor, the 13 Gold Star families who lost their sons and daughters in Afghanistan three years ago invited Donald Trump to be with them at Arlington Cemetery this past week.

I think it's kind of galling.

I mean, the bodies are in the ground because of Biden and Harris, but then

allegedly Donald Trump didn't follow the right protocol, et cetera, and is being attacked by Harris and Biden.

Biden walked out of church today.

And I'm not going to say what I think about him because, blah, blah, blah, ice cream cone.

And one last thing, the families, one of the, I saw this

video that came out today of one of the families.

They're irate

about.

Harris's attack.

You folks, you SOBs have never called us once, never even mentioned the name of the family.

Yes.

And she said, you murdered my son.

Yeah.

And she was right.

And everything about this story is

just so fake.

I mean, they say that a public-minded employee saw a camera taking pictures, and this was

politicizing this act.

They asked Donald Trump to come.

And they were unanimous that they wanted him there.

If there's a protocol that a political figure is not supposed to be photographed when he is participating in a funeral commemoration, then they should have told Joe Biden that, who was up for re-election, because that's what he did.

He went to Arlington and cut a commercial.

Of course, there wasn't, and if an employee, had to come up to Joe Biden's team and said, wait a minute, I'm a public-minded Arlington Cemetery employee.

And what you're doing with filming Joe Biden and to use in a political or any type of commercial is against the rules.

So I'm going to try to stop you.

They would have had that person fired in two seconds.

If anybody doesn't believe me, you got to remember that the Missouri State Fair had a clown, and that clown put on a mask of Obama.

Just a rodeo clown.

And that person was fired and banned for life, I think, from the Missouri State Coast.

Yeah.

Yes.

So that's how they operate with people who freelance and do things like that.

And so

the only person that was, and then, of course, Harris said that Donald Trump should be ashamed of himself.

They always do this shame.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Remember,

Biden uses these stock phrases.

How dare you?

The idea.

He always says the idea.

The idea that you would say that.

How dare you?

This is a guy who made $27 million selling the United States out to its enemies so that this mediocrity of a family can profit from it.

And so, yeah, I thought it was very bad.

And I'm sure that Donald Trump was both sincere and he understood that Joe Biden had completely ignored these families, that he's never taken responsibility, that no one has, that they've stonewalled them, and that he wanted to both

help them you know get some attention for what happened some accountability and if that was going to be conducive to his campaign all the better i'm not that naive right but but that is what politicians do sit it reminds me so much with after that horrible summer of 2020, that all of that violence, when they tried to burn down the St.

John's Episcopal iconic church across from the White House, when they tried to storm and break down the fence to get at Trump, who went into the bunker, he had a photo op with Mark Milley.

And all of a sudden, Mark, I should not have been mused.

This was terrible.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And I thought, you hypocrite.

During the Rodney King riots, the chairman of the Joint Chief,

Colin Powell, wrote a note.

to George Bush, hey, I've got 5,000 Marines and they're raring to go, Mr.

President.

And

that was widely, I remember that was widely reported, photo-op.

Colin Powell sends the Marines into Los Angeles.

Nobody thought anything of it.

This whole idea that the sanctimonious, that Donald Trump is such a satanic figure, that any means necessary or

are permissible to neuter him is really getting old after nine years of this.

This was a completely

manufactured psychodrama.

And again,

these things are designed to take out five, eight, ten, twenty-four hours of the news cycle so that Kamala Harris is exempt from you're not giving interviews by yourself that are spontaneous and you don't have a website yet that shows you exactly what you're for.

Are you for canceling patents, as you've said?

Are you really, really, really going to have a wealth tax?

Do Do you really, really want to tax on earned income?

We need to know that.

Did you really, really, really,

weren't you really, really a border czar?

And why did you allow this border to be completely destroyed?

Are you really, really, really going to increase the federal tax rate?

Are you really going to increase the defense budget, like you said?

If so, by how?

They don't want to talk about that.

It's going to be

smiley, smiley.

I'm not going to cackle.

I'll try not to cackle.

I'm going to to smile, smile.

I'm a black woman.

How dare you?

Everything else is a lie.

Who she is is a lie.

She even lied about Jack working at McDonald's.

There's no evidence she ever worked at McDonald's.

Or living in Oakland.

Oakland.

She's

all of a sudden she became a working-class, poor black woman who grew up in Oakland and was discriminated against, not that she was from Berkeley and she ended up in a very high-end Canadian, I think, Toronto neighborhood.

Privileged child of two PhD parents.

And we're supposed to believe all this stuff.

There's something to living in certain places where, well, you know, I'm from the Bronx originally.

And if you tell me I grew up in the Bronx, it'd be like, oh, my God.

How many people did you murder?

How many murders, you know, does this imply toughness by virtue of just where you're born?

And that's the whole thing with Oakland.

Like, I'm from Berkeley.

What are you, a candy ass?

Oh, I'm from Oakland.

Oh, my gosh, you must be.

And also, Berkeley, she doesn't

for 70 days, she's going to wipe clean any reference in her bio to anything that exudes leftism.

And a Berkeley attachment is forbidden, verboten.

She's not going to allow you to think she's from Berkeley.

She is not a radical.

She was not the most radical senator, as

GovTrack said, in the U.S.

Senate.

She did not open the border.

She did not try to bail out violent offenders in the 2020 riots.

She did not say that these riots should, the demonstrations should go on.

They should not stop.

It's a movement.

They're going to go on.

She did not do that.

She's good old Kamala from Oakland.

And that's who she is.

And she pretty much is telling the American people.

Donald Trump was a disaster.

Our term was wonderful, but Donald Trump's issues are actually mine.

I thought up not taxing tips.

I thought up not taxing Social Security.

I was the one who really closed the border.

I was the one who wanted an orderly withdrawal.

Donald Trump is responsible for Afghanistan.

They've said that.

And the attitude to the American people is, F you.

Excuse me, I didn't say the word.

F you.

You did not.

That's right.

Or screw you.

I don't care what you think.

I don't care if you think I'm lying.

I don't care if you think I'm hiding.

I just assume that 51% of you are going to fall for this.

That I can reinvent myself.

I can hide.

And I can campaign on the idea that Donald Trump is Hitler.

And I can get away with it in 70 days.

Just watch.

Because I know that Joe Biden got away with it for three and a half years.

And I can get away with it.

She didn't even ask him, ask her to be specific.

How just all she had to do, Dana Bash, was say, this is what you said about the cognitive abilities of Joe Biden and give four or five examples.

She couldn't even do that.

I wonder if the Dana Bashes of the World fear, remember when Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis about

his wife,

and that for many people is like, oh, that's what killed Dukakis, was that answer to that question in that debate.

I wonder if

i think they'd be taught in journalism school don't you remember uh you're on the left team that's when roger mudd said to ted kennedy can you tell me why you want to be president it was like

i wasn't given that question in advance i can't answer that i'm running for president

and i can't tell you that i'm only running for president because i want the power and the money and the prestige and i'm a kennedy but i have no idea what i'd want to do why'd you ask me that so he just looked stunned and that was

that was the end of yeah when jackie gleason used to go homina homina homina that was what kennedy was like and you remember yeah i mean

and when they

uh

and also it should have ended camela harris's when

he was asked uh

she was asked have you been to the border right and she looks and she said yes and he said you have not been to the border and she said

i haven't been to europe either.

That should have ended her can it and Lester Hold asked that question.

He didn't even follow up.

He should have said, what's so funny about it?

And what does Europe have to do with just going to the border?

And why did you lie to me that you'd been there?

You know,

God help us.

It's going to be a tough election, I tell you.

I don't know what Donald Trump's internal polls are,

but the external ones have it pretty much much dead even.

And I hope that that represents a 3% to 4% bias as they have in 2016 and 20.

But I think you have to calibrate a 2020

70%

not voting on Election Day advantage for the left.

Well, I have to hope her

likability, which she had worse, worse likable numbers than Biden did.

Wasn't she down like 35, 36, somewhere in that area

a year or so ago?

Didn't somebody just say on national TV,

she's almost as charismatic as Hillary?

That was a compliment.

Let us pray.

All right.

Well, Victor,

we're about at the

end of this particular episode, which I do want to

note, folks.

Again, this comes out September 3rd, and that's an important day

in music history, the 3rd of September, a day I'll always remember.

Papa was a Rolling Stone Day.

So anyway, I just want to make note of that.

We have lots of new listeners.

Thank you folks for coming, and I hope you're staying.

Some folks take the opportunity on Apple to rate the show zero to five stars, and practically everyone gives Victor five stars, and some folks.

Leave comments.

We read them all, even the ones that say, Jack, shut the hell up.

But here's one

that's the titled VDH, Please Stay Home and Write Your Book.

This podcast is a treasure trove of memories and knowledge that is hard to come by.

I haven't missed a single episode since January 2022 after hearing my 90-year-old aunt mention that she would like to have dinner with VDH because she finds him so interesting.

I've been meaning to rate this podcast, but out of sheer laziness, I have failed to.

Not today.

Today, he mentioned he is tired of traveling and working on a book about animals from his childhood, etc.

I implore VDH to stop traveling and stay home and finish that book.

I pledge to buy a copy for myself.

I will.

I can't.

I will.

I will.

He takes my advice.

I have 140,000 words.

All I have to do is edit it.

Sounds like two books.

Yes, I want to edit.

And I'm working, but I

had to do the Trump revision, and I'm the writer in residence for the new new criterion.

And so that was four essays.

That was,

oh, that was 25,000 words.

And then I was doing the publicity.

And then I had two trips to Europe with the Art Tour and then the Hillsdale Cruise.

And then I had long COVID for 90 days.

But I'm now suffering from long COVID euphoria, which comes when you feel like you're almost over.

And I am going to get to the annals book.

Somebody said to me, I was.

By the way, Victor, I just want to say that's from Purdy's mom.

Thank you, Purdy's mom.

Go ahead, Victor.

Oh, thank you.

I have a special affinity for women my age and older because

somebody said to me yesterday, of all the people who seem to be wanting to talk to you, they're all female and over the age of 70.

A young guy told me that.

And I said, are you saying that young women do not want to talk to me?

And he said, yes, I am.

and i said well i i really like older women over 70 i think they're very

they've lived enough to see how the world works i um

i ran a bingo for my parish for seven years and i must tell you the clientele there were women over 70 typically and they were

they were a little some of them were a little rough around the edges but uh i I got along very well with them.

So

it's my kind of crowd.

At that age, there's no longer any reason to not be explicit

and

you know they i like what they say you know uh mr hans did i tell you that you have a a shirt on and

it it it has buttons on your collar it's not a buttonless collar and they're not being used

and i said what is it i didn't look what's it look like and a woman said it looks like you have a kite there are two kites on either side of your tie

Actually, a 69-year-old lady, Stephanie, who you've met at down in Florida with Allie, whose name's, we'll not give last name.

She says you were on,

what's his name?

Jesse Waters show earlier this week from Hillsdale.

And she said, Victor, I saw him last night.

He looked so good.

He looked polished.

I don't know.

You did look good, by the way, Victoria.

Somebody said to me that I smile.

Oh, my God.

I got to grab it.

He goes, you smile for the first time in your life.

Mark the calendar.

Yeah.

Yes.

I thought of my, my mom always said, you'll go far in life.

I know you will, Victor, but you would go a lot farther.

You just smile.

Please smile.

I've seen the smile.

It's a

wonderful thing.

Yeah, you do.

Okay.

All right.

You've been great, Victor, folks.

Hey, especially those who have signed up from Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at Anfil, which I provide 14 recommended readings.

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Thanks, Victor, for everything.

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And we will be, if I get these words out of my mouth, we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thanks again, everybody, for listening.