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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You are here to listen to the great man, star and namesake Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Schubuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

On the internet, Victor has a home, The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHandson.com is the web address.

I'll tell you why later in this episode, why you should be subscribing.

We are recording today is Sunday the 18th, and this particular episode, Victor, will be up on the 20th, Tuesday the 20th, in the midst of the Democratic National Convention.

God only knows between today and then what kind of madness might be ensuing.

ensuing.

But we'll talk a little pre-convention politics.

Victor has a very important

post that he put up on X

about comparing Kamala Harris's views on protests from 2020 to those in 2024.

We also want to get Victor's updated takes on Tim Walls, the Democratic vice presidential nominee or soon-to-be nominee.

And Victor, I think I'm going to to spring this on you, ask you about your recent travel, but we'll get to all that after these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Hey, Victor, if you were, did you talk about

your air travel with Sammy on the?

No, I didn't because I think my

My our listeners, our listeners, think that I'm too much of an Eeyore pouting, but it's very hard.

I'm on the Bradley Foundation, so it's very, very hard, you know, to get from

Fresno to Milwaukee, both cities that don't have large airline presences.

And when you miss a flight, yeah, it's hard to rebook.

And I'm the only member on the board from the West Coast.

So in the last 12 years, I'd say 25% of the time, I've either been stuck in a city or it's taken more than 12 hours.

But anyway, it took a little, I was very surprised because I don't, I'll be frank, I don't like to fly United.

I've had bad luck, but on the way out, I always fly a day early, you know, so I won't miss anything.

But on the way out, it was timely, even it was a short connection in Denver, but it was just a freak that I've never had that happen where you land at a, you know, at a gate and then the next gate is the one you leave.

So it worked out.

But then we got to Milwaukee.

We had to sit there at the gate because one of those things when you see all these gates, you know,

and they're open at a

smaller airport.

And then the one airport that you come into, there's a plane there.

And it was, so that was a 30-minute delay.

And I got there.

We got to the hotel at 6.30.

But on the way back,

there were storms that would have affected if I had gone.

Well, when you leave at, say, one o'clock or two in the afternoon or whatever, it's very hard to get back to the West Coast from a city like Milwaukee to a city like Fresno.

So we thought about going to Atlanta, but it was.

So anyway, there's a new, believe it or not, for the summer, they have a non-stop Airbus from Chicago to Fresno.

But the problem is it leaves at

8.15, something like that.

And it relies on a plane coming from either Maine or DaGuardia.

So it's often late.

And you look at the history of the flight, it's not good.

But, and it, so I got out and then, you know, that we had an early release at 12.

So I stayed around Milwaukee just reading for two hours and took a car to Chicago and then waited the five hours.

And then, of course, we got in the plane.

It actually came on time, Jack.

Wow.

But

we had a little,

there wasn't enough fuel.

So

I think flights that go to less important destinations, and that's the final flight without a connection.

Yeah.

That's just a suspicion.

They have less priority, but we had to wait for it to fuel.

And then we

were going, we had to reroute in the air around the storms on the direct trajectory.

But, you know, we

and then we get to Fresno and it's the same thing.

There's no gates at, you know, basically 11 my time, 1

a.m.

in the morning to 2.

And there's no

baggage handlers and I don't know.

I think there was another plane there, but we just sat there for 20 minutes or so.

Then we get in and there's a very weird phenomenon at Fresno.

There's direct flights to southern Mexico and they schedule them like it

in the wee hours.

At two in the morning, three in the morning.

Yeah, yeah, one, two, three, whatever.

It's hard to know because maybe they're late or early, early, but they come in and they're bringing in people that I'm not sure they're U.S.

residents

or green call holders of any legal status, but they look like they've just come from Mexico.

And I don't know if that's just, I don't know if there's, maybe they have passport

verifications in their departing airport, but you know, a U.S.

citizen often has to go through passport control even from Mexico.

And anyway, they come in.

That was so, I got off the plane and I've never seen the Fresno airport so crowded.

And I asked one of the people, they had Starbucks open at midnight.

And I said, is this normal?

And she said, yes, this is the busiest time of the airport from one to three in the morning.

When these flights come in, the, you know, most people don't really check in anymore.

They do it automatically or they do it online or

and the check-in was just, because I guess people had luggage.

It was just baggage, right?

Yeah.

And then you couldn't, you could, outside there were police.

It was just like a traffic jam.

And then there were departing flights back, I suppose.

So there must have been, I don't know, coming in and going out well over, I don't know, 1,500 people right in that small terminal.

It was just amazing.

It just took on a whole new life in the evening.

I should say the evening and the early morning of the.

The witching hours in Fresno.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's something strange about it.

Why why those flights at that time.

And I'm not going to speculate, but it was a weird trip.

So the time from the period that I left the meeting in Milwaukee,

given all that, to the time I went into my bed in Selma, which is not Fresno, I think it was

14 or 15 hours just to get home.

All the more reason to stay put, right?

Yeah, I'm coming to the point.

I talked to a lot of people, you know, that I used to talk to Rush once in a while.

You know, he'd text me, or when I was in Palm Beach, I'd go over to see him.

And he had a beautiful plane.

And he was telling me that as he got into his later 60s,

the opportunities for him to speak and the remuneration were something that was just astronomical, you know,

the request, but the desire on his part had diminished accordingly.

Right.

I think it's, I think it's just, and that he didn't have a problem with the airlines.

I think it was just that you get accustomed as you get older and you, you can find income doing, doing other things.

And then you,

for me,

you know, I was in Europe twice with 38 days and I got COVID and then I had long COVID.

And by the way, I'm almost over long COVID after, I don't know, 11 weeks, but I've been pretty much on the road.

I've been flying or traveling a lot.

And I get to the point now when

my wife and I sat down, we just said,

do you really want to go to do all these things, cruises, trips, all this, when you can do podcasts and reach people and you like your audience?

You can write your website, you can do your columns, you can write books, you can do your Hoover things.

And while you won't, your income will drop, but you really don't need to go out of state for long periods of time, especially from this area.

If I lived in San Francisco and just jumped on a plane, maybe it would be different.

And you were just commuting, you know, to Denver or something non-stop or something.

That would be another thing.

Sometimes they asked me to speak in Phoenix or Salt Lake, and it's just, bam, it's an hour, an hour and a half.

I don't mind that.

But I have a lot of trips down to Malibu.

I've got to go to Hillsdale.

I just got back from Bradley.

I've got to go to Utah for Hoover.

I've got to go to

Long Beach for Hoover.

I've got to go do a couple of talks in California.

And I've got to go up to Course Gold of all places.

I like Course Gold.

But that's the site of

Sam Peckinpaw's great movie, you know.

Which one?

The

High Country?

Yes, the breakout movie.

I was waiting to see if you would remember.

I watched it two weeks ago.

Yeah,

it was

watched it before.

It was really good.

Yeah, it's about Corsco.

That's one of the Peckinpaw.

Denver Peckinpaw was a justice that my mom was on the Superior Court, and he was there.

She really liked him, even though he was,

I think he was more conservative than my mother was.

But I met him a lot of times.

He was Sam Peckinpaw's brother.

He was an old gentleman.

They had a cattle cattle ranch, I think, in Corsica.

And

he had a revolver, I remember, as a justice.

But he was, those were, anyway,

that's a long excursion on when you get to be, I'm going to be 71 on September 5th.

And I had two bouts of long COVID.

So I think somebody's telling me, hang around.

Selma,

do podcasts, do your three or four Fox, just have a relax.

Yeah, sit on the porch with a little bit of a picture.

And I've got a book on

the lost world of rural childhood, you know, and

I'm working on that about growing up, how it was different to grow up on a farm and the people you meet and the animals you encounter, the work you have to do,

the degree to which that

contributes to character or doesn't or whatever.

And then I'm also thinking of writing a book.

There's an obscure leader in the ancient world.

I mentioned he was, was the, I wrote a novel about Apaminondas, and I wrote two chapters and two books on him, and I've written a lot of articles.

And I've been everywhere where he lived.

You know, I went to all the battles he fought.

Who is that, Victor?

Apaminondas.

He was a great thief.

I don't know how a book would ever sell or be of interest called Apaminondas the Great.

But I'm thinking Cicero said he was the most distinguished man that Greece produced, but we don't know much about him.

Plutarch's life of Apaminondas disappeared in the Renaissance, apparently.

And Xenophon hated his guts as a pro-Spartan black laconiophile.

And so he didn't get a proper press.

I would like to write a long biography about him because I think he's a fascinating

Pythagorean and a liberator.

Anyway.

Okay.

Well, that's all quite cool.

So United.

I always fly American, but we'll see.

Okay.

Well, Victor,

over the last few days, you've been writing.

Well, you're never not writing.

And you did a very interesting piece for X, which you do once or twice a week now.

And this one is titled Kamala Harris on Inciting Good 2020 or Stopping Bad 2024 Street Protests.

Now, Victor, by the time this podcast is up, we may see

more evidence of the latter at the Chicago Democrat Convention.

But Victor, you know,

she was,

I guess you could say, aiding and abetting things.

You know, it's very funny.

I did a little, I tweeted that.

And I don't know how to tweet.

I just, you know, I don't, I do something you shouldn't do.

I write longer, like almost a column, and then my daughter puts it on.

Right.

But the point I'm making is I did something, Jack.

I looked at what Trump said during that protest when he said, you're now are going to, and now assembly, assemble, remember, peacefully and patriotic as you go to the Capitol.

And I looked at the fact checkers.

They were merciless.

They said, that was reckless.

He may have said that, but he didn't mean it.

You have to have the context, right?

So, okay, that was maybe ill-advised when you have a big crowd that is prone to go over intense times to suggest they go to the Capitol, but at least he gave a qualification.

But they treated that the way the Charlottes feel when he said there were fine people on both sides, and I don't mean the white supremacist Nazis, but they cut that out.

And now even Snopes is apologized, I guess, I don't know, apologized, but corrected it and said that he did say that, even though Kamala Harris and everybody's using it, Tim Waltz and everybody's still obsessed with Charlotte, spreading that lie.

But my point is this.

When you look at what Kamala Harris said on June 17 to colbert and you watch that cbs late night interview it's amazing he is freaked out

he really is she says these demons and she's talking after two weeks of this stuff after they've defaced the lincoln memorial they've they're just about ready the next i think three a week later they're going to go into the white house grounds they've toppled Andrew Jackson's statue.

They've tried to,

you know, it's that horrible period in Washington, D.C.

And it's violent, just like it has been everywhere.

And so she gets on and says, these demonstrations, I don't know if she was vying for the nomination.

She hasn't been nominated yet.

The convention hasn't occurred, but she said, these demonstrations are not going to stop, and they shouldn't stop.

And they're going to go on and they're going to go on and they're going to go on.

And they're going to go on to election day.

And they're going to go on after election day.

And beware, they shouldn't stop.

She just kept doubling down.

And of course, in that climate, since the demonstrations have been characterized by rioting, looting, arson, and cumulative will lead to 14,000 arrests, 35 deaths,

1,500 law enforcement people injured, 2 billion.

That was completely reckless.

for a major candidate to say that.

And yet you should look at the fact check.

Well, she didn't actually say looting or violence.

She meant peaceful protest.

Yeah, well, she didn't say peaceful protest.

Maybe she did later when she was called on it.

And then, so she said that.

And then when you look at Waltz,

when he said during this period of tension, and he was in charge, he didn't, he refused the deployment of the National Guard.

And he said, people like me do things to people that don't look like me.

And he sided with the Antifa BLM violence.

And then you later, you know, under the COVID, we saw that, God, that that was the creepiest film, Jack, when those guys came with paintballs and they said, stand down.

It was like out of the 1930s Nazi films, you know that?

Shooting people on their porch.

This guy is really, really dangerous.

Nobody's really appreciated that fact that he is one of the most dangerous figures we've seen.

And, you know, so anyway, he

is responsible for the safety of Minneapolis and he won't protect it.

And then his wife basically says she opened up the window so she could get a whiff of this protest fumes, I guess the suit of arson or something.

And then the daughter gets on and tweets, hey, everybody, I can assure you that you can protest tonight because there's no guard, meaning wink, nod, my dad's not going to send out the guard because he doesn't want you arrested for whatever violent thing you're going to do.

And then you have this force multiplier, this Minnesota Freedom Fund, where Camilla Harris tells people to donate in the midst of riot and arson and death and looting to get these violent people who have been arrested, get them out.

And when they get them out, you know what they're going to do.

They're going to go right back.

And they did.

And resume that.

So you put all that together.

And this is what my tweet was about.

What are they going to do now, those people?

Is Waltz?

Okay, so let's say

this week there's violence, and there's 150 organizations that have promised to really do stuff.

And everybody says, well, this time on like like 1968, the police are prepared.

No, they're not.

They're defunded.

Look at what happens on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday in Chicago.

And what do you think happened on July 4th?

What's going to happen on Labor Day?

It's violence.

Nobody does anything.

And so this idea, the mayor, Johnson, does anybody think that he is a law and order person?

So there's going to be problems in Chicago.

I may, Victor, also these cops, I think, have had their standard liability protections removed by state legislatures.

Yes, they have.

And you think after they've been reviled and defunded and insulted, and they have no more liability coverage, that they're going to want to go out there and really risk their lives for people who've told them in the past that this rioting is basically helpful for democracy.

So here's what the question I posed.

Is Camilla Harris, as she speaks, says, hey, everybody, Now we've got a violent, we've got protest,

but I want you to donate to the Chicago Freedom Fund to bail these people out outside.

And then is she going to say to the convention as she gives your speech and you can hear them chanting through the walls, this is not going to stop.

It shouldn't stop.

This is going to, or is she saying, well, BLM and Antifa have legitimate claims,

but the pro-Palestinians don't?

Or is she going to be honest and say, hey, when you have a Republican guy like Trump, we try to encourage all the violence and unrest to embarrass him we can.

But when you have somebody like me or Joe, then you better behave, because that's the message.

And then we should expect her to say they should beware, everybody.

They're going to go on.

They're going to go on to election day.

They're going to go on to after election day.

And then Tim Waltz is going to get up there and say, what's he going to hear when we smell burning coming through the convention hall?

Is he going to say,

we don't want the guard.

Don't deploy the guard.

People that look like me do things to people who don't look like me.

And my wife just was in the hotel and she wanted to smell it.

So she put down the window and got a good whiff of the burning.

And my daughter is going to get on Twitter tonight and warn everybody that there's not going to be any reinforcements.

Is that what they're going to do?

I think they've got a lot of problems, and this demonstration poses a lot of problems.

If the Republicans just ran an ad and had her speaking, this is not going to stop, this should not stop, beware, and then put as a Chiron on the bottom, her bail these people out.

And then they had tweets from his wife, his daughter, and what he says about so-called white people and violence, and then just have a background of Chicago.

That would be very effective.

With

a cackle soundtrack.

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Victor, on your continuing on your X slash Twitter post, somebody, I don't know that you did it.

I saw you put a link to Kamala's asking to raise money in 2020, but somebody else put up, maybe somebody else,

her tweeting about Jesse Smollett and how it's...

I don't know who put that up, but I wrote about that as well when she said that he's

one of the most upstanding citizens.

It's modern-day lynching and this is racism and gender, all that stuff.

She was racing out of these starting blocks, wasn't she, to get the first demagogic statement out.

Right.

And then

when she corrected us, I remember she didn't really apologize to us for lying or for demagoguery.

What she said was, it's unfortunate because this can have an effect basically to discredit genuine claims of racism.

So when you make up racism and you try to cause a veritable riot and destroy a racial harm in the United States, and then you abet it, and then that is all

a hoax, then the people who had nothing to do with it are to blame because they might, just might conclude that many of these accusations are inaccurate.

That's her basic position on that.

But

well, Victor, anything more on walls?

You

well, I was really upset.

I don't think it has enough play.

He was going, he was 30, he was a teacher, and he was in a 55-mile-an-hour zone, and he was going 96 miles an hour.

And he had an alcohol content, we learned, almost of one point, between 1.2 and 1.3.

That is like,

this is the guy who's always lecturing about dangerous guns and bad behavior.

When you're going 96 miles an hour in a 55-mile hour zone,

And

you're drunk, that's like pointing a gun at somebody.

That's dangerous.

You're taking the lives of innocent people in your hands.

And then when he didn't pull over and he said he couldn't hear, and he said he had tinnitus, and he had tinnitus.

And guess why, Jack?

It's the same old from his military service.

So he always uses that.

And then he accuses people who object to his fabrication and his invention and his disparagement in a way really of dishonoring the military by contorting his service.

Then he projects onto you and said, how dare you make fun of my service?

But he was doing that when he was 30, claiming that he had an ear condition and therefore apparently didn't hear orders or sirens, and then denied that he was drunk and used that and said, I guess he was claiming he had vertigo or something.

So they took him in and they tested him.

And he was drunk, severely so.

I mean, it's 0.8 now.

So he was almost one and a half times what, well, he was one and a half times drunk, what is considered now to be a felony DUI.

So my point is, and then he says he gets his lawyer and they, I think

they say it's reckless driving.

And then there's no concept.

I mean,

as you pointed out, when they had the October surprise 48 hours before the 2004 election

with George H.

Was that 2002

when George H.

Yeah, when they released that October surprise, and now people suggest that it cost Bush two or three points

because he wasn't candid about it.

Right.

But he was a lot more candid when it came out in his explanation than this guy is.

And by the way,

they did that with Bush in 2000 with the DUI October.

But that had taken place also many years, many years earlier.

And then they did it in 2004 with a phony, fake but accurate Dan Rather memo

about, you know, he flew this very dangerous F-102 or 100, or I don't know which one it was.

It was a very dangerous plane.

But they said that he was AWOL and he got special treatment to get in and he was derelict.

And of course, it was a fabricated.

And remember

the Lawrence Walsh, 1980,

the special prosecutor, and I guess that was 88 when they tried, oh, 92.

92 was about a week or maybe before the allegation.

And that did hurt George

H.W.

Bush, that he was in on the conversations in Iran-Contra four or five years earlier.

And then we have to remember

the

allegation that in 1980 that Ronald Reagan had pressured, remember, the Iranians through back channels not to release

the hostages.

I think that was the first time the left used the October surprise, or it was formalized.

And then we had the Access Hollywood.

Remember that?

That was an October surprise.

And then we had the last little remnants of Russian collusion in 2016.

Remember BuzzFeed, right before the election, started publishing the

sensational accounts of urination and everything on the dossier?

And then in 2020, of course, right before the debate, we had the Russian disinformation that the Hunter's laptop in the hands of a technician was actually a product of Russian disinformation, according to John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Mike Morrell,

and James Clapper, and 51 intelligences.

So

brace yourself, everybody.

There's going to be an October surprise.

And I don't know if it's Stormy 2.0 or what it's going to be, but it's going to be there because they don't have confidence that their agenda appeals to the majority of people.

They just don't.

And

between non-election day balloting and,

I don't know, you know, I'm doing an Angry Reader right now for my website.

And this guy writes me this sanctimonious about how all Donald Trump is anti-democracy.

If you just think for a minute, and I'm replying, democracy dies and Democrats are dying, are destroying democracy in darkness.

They really are.

They staged this council.

They staged a coup in 2020 where they just got all the candidates.

They disappeared.

And Joe hadn't really won a primary.

He'd lost Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada.

And they said to themselves,

it's either Elizabeth Warren or Bernie and they're communists and we're going to lose.

Joe, you're now old Joe Go, old Joe from Scranton.

You're a moderate.

You're going to unite.

That's the story and you're going to get in your basement.

Everybody get out.

Pete, you get a cabinet position.

Well, we don't know what we're going to give Bernie and Elizabeth.

You're going to give that a dog.

And that's what they did.

And then when it didn't work and he was no longer useful,

it was you, well, they thought he was useful.

And they said, Joe is perfectly right.

I just heard him.

Remember Kamala Harris just before the debate?

She's on record and saying, you know, he's he's one of the most astute people I know.

He just anticipates people.

He just has all the facts at his fingertips.

And then all of a sudden we have, and then of course the donors say, hey, look, he's embarrassing us.

So he's going to do something we've never done.

He's going to have a stress test

before the convention, before the nomination, so we can get somebody else on the ballot.

And Joe, you screw up and you're gone.

And if you don't want to go, If you screw up, then we're going to 25th Amendment you.

Okay.

And so he goes and screws up, and then the Prabhda narrative goes,

Well, he's not able to be president.

Excuse me, are not presidential nominee.

Now, he's perfectly fine to be president because that's just you, the American people.

But us,

we're not going to lose, and that guy's going to lose.

So the narrative now is he was always, he's just, he's debilitated.

And as far as that insurance policy, that Spiro Agnew insurance policy we told everybody when Joe was cognitively adept and astute and Socrates just, you know, four, eight hours ago?

Well, that's out the window now because we found out that she's not Spiro Agnew.

You can have her as president.

She is brilliant.

Remember Hope and Change?

Yes, now it's joy and vibe.

It's just as powerful a message.

Bybe and, I don't know, vibey and joyy instead of hopey and changey.

It's great.

Now, we're going to do the same thing we did with Biden.

She goes into the basement.

She has no interviews, no press conferences, no

town halls, no unscripted.

We reinvent her.

She's always been against fracking.

She doesn't want to buy back your guns anymore.

She's a border hawk.

She thinks Afghanistan was a mistake.

So we'll do what we did with Biden, and we're going to count on these swing stakes, where the error rate for mail-in ballots mysteriously dropped from 0.3, I mean, from 4% to 5% traditionally, when there were 30%, down to 0.2 to 0.5% when they're 70%.

And that is just incredible what they did.

They nullified, as people have said, 15 million votes of the primary.

I guess the message to a primary voter of the Democratic Party is, hey, we want your vote, but I want to warn you in advance.

If you vote for a guy, And come July and he's eight points down in the polls, the Silicon Valley people and Wall Street people and Hollywood people are going to remove him.

And they're going to get somebody else.

And it's not going to be somebody who goes to a convention because the delegates have been selected to vote at the convention, but they're not going to do it because they're going to select somebody before the convention.

So your vote really doesn't matter.

That's the message.

They did this before.

There were some dry runs at the Senate level years back.

Remember, Torricelli in New Jersey looked like he was going to lose.

Get up.

They put in that old husk of Frank Lautenberg.

And then in Connecticut, he won.

He did win.

Yeah.

And he had, but Torricelli was also, they thought he was going to get convicted, and he did, right?

He had some legal exposures and they were worried about it.

Yeah, he did.

Yeah.

It goes with the state.

But there was a breaking story this morning.

And I want to tell everybody, I don't think it's substantiated yet, that there's a leak out.

There's two leaks.

One that Nancy Pelosi, so a source said,

told Biden,

if you don't get out, I'm going to release your internal polls that show you where you are and spread it out.

And I don't know what that meant.

That it was even worse than what

polls were, which were always.

And then there's another

rumor this morning.

And I don't know, because by the time people hear that, maybe Jill, that Jill Biden, Jill is not sharing her prepared remarks with people.

Oh, my gosh.

If she's really angry and she gets up there saying it was a coup that got rid of Joe.

Yeah.

But she won't.

Thanks, Nancy.

And there's another theory.

A guy wrote a really smart letter and I'd seen it.

There's two scenarios going out there right now about this convention.

Scenario A is this, Jack.

It's a pre-conventional explain something that has happened.

It says the narrative

well, they had it all engineered

to get rid of Joe

from the ticket, but to keep him in there till the next five months because they want the power,

and then force him off by threatening him if he didn't acquiesce, they would use the 25th Amendment and they had the cabinet members' votes.

And they, because they controlled the Senate, they could get him out.

Okay.

And probably

they probably could do that, but

the scenario broke down because

they had still not corrected on Kamala as Spyro Agnew.

They still believed she was, that she was just unacceptable.

And they were going to either anoint a Gavin Newsome or Amy Kobuchar or someone else or open the convention up in a contrived fashion.

But that Joe got angry.

And so he remember obama didn't endorse kamala for four days he had his finger in the wind right joe manchin was coming on tv and stuff i might be her candidate there was a sense that there were forces in the democratic party that didn't want her but then joe in his spite licking his wounds in his cave said

i endorse her immediately and some people took that as he, well, you want to get rid of me, then you're God here, whether you like her or not.

Yeah.

And they were unhappy.

That's one narrative.

The other narrative is a lot of people are trying to debate, and I mentioned it in a column, whether she, that they will remove him if she's down a point or two or three from the ticket, not from the ticket, from the presidency.

They'll go to him and say, look,

you're getting worse.

Whether he is or not won't matter.

And you've got five months, four months left, and you're going to have to step down.

Or we're going to start leaking stuff that you say and do that's going to be really embarrassing.

And that would make her an incumbent president running as an incumbent.

The reason I don't believe this narrative, Jack,

can you imagine her as an incumbent without a press conference without

I think if she had that exposure for three or for a couple of months, say if they were to do this in October or late September, it would be devastating to her.

She wouldn't get the advantages of incumbency.

She would earn the burdens of having to actually speak on the world stage.

And it would be.

Well, maybe.

We have a president right now who's kind of AWOL, right?

I mean,

America being a culture.

But it was that form that doomed him, that he couldn't hide it.

But of course, your point is he did it for three and a half years.

I guess what people are saying right now, I have a colleague, I won't mention his name, who tweeted out, she shouldn't, I mean, I used to read tweets that he wrote.

He wrote one tweet that said it's incumbent upon every major politician.

He was talking, I think, about Trump, but I don't know that.

You didn't mention it.

That they have to be transparent, communicate, and communicate with the people, but not now.

He says, if it's conducive for Harris to have press conferences and interviews, then do them.

For her camp.

But if it's not, don't do them.

And I think that's their attitude.

Their attitude is, hey we pulled it off for three and a half years with joe biden you don't think we can do this for 80 days it's a it's a joke this is nothing the um harry reed rule at the end no matter what you do at the end if you can say it worked won yeah remember he said it worked didn't it yeah i think that was leslie stahl that asked him wasn't it and said do you feel bad that you created an entire myth that uh Mitt Romney hadn't paid his income tax he said it's worked it worked didn't it yeah

Well, Victor, we have going to be a very exciting but also dangerous next 80 days.

Yeah, well, we were talking about protests earlier, and there may be some other grounds coming up

for protests that mix with foreign policy as what instigated protests on American campuses last October.

And we'll get your thoughts on this and other matters right after these important messages.

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

Again, we are recording on Sunday the 18th, and this episode will be up on Tuesday the 20th.

Victor, I'm looking at

today's Wall Street Journal online.

Headline, How Israel Killed a Ghost.

Hezbollah's commander, Fwad Schucher, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, lived a life so secret, few knew his name or face before an airstrike killed him and helped put the Middle East on the brink of war.

This is a expose, a story, how this came about.

By the way, Victor, I'm embarrassed as an American, never having heard of him, and that this guy was responsible in part for the bombing in Lebanon that killed all those Marines, 241 Marines in

the Reagan administration.

Well, we should have taken this son of a bitch out years ago, but Israel did in July.

Anyway, Victor, your thoughts on

the death of Flad Schucher and its ramifications?

Well,

you had a really good point because

that was in 1983 and October, and there were stories that we had a bounty on him, you know.

But this administration was almost chastising Israel for taking someone out that we used to have a bounty on and wanted,

you know, some 40 years ago.

We wanted him out, and yet they did it.

What was mysterious about it was this guy was the most secretive of all of these top echelon terrorists.

He had a fake name.

He didn't appear.

He had different disguises.

Even his most intimate people didn't really know where he was.

He never left anywhere.

He moved around.

He was a confidant in Nasrallah.

And yet here he is in this hotel

and he's not even up in his room yet.

And somebody

tells him or instructs him that he should go to his room and that this someone

is a confidant of the inner, the most ironclad inner circle.

And the moment he goes up there on the prompt of the Israelis, an Israeli missile blows up his bedroom.

So what it suggests is that the most careful, secretive, stealthy terrorist murder of Hezbollah,

the Israelis can not only break into his most intimate circle, and by the way, Jack, this is after,

after

he has been warned not to use a cell phone.

I think Nasrallah told him, according to the story, put it in a box, disconnect it, destroy it.

And he's using encoded information or messengers.

But the Israelis have the ability to order him up to his room with a fake request and then kill him in the manner that this other secretive person was killed in Damascus and the other one right in front of the theocrats in Tehran.

So if we're wondering why,

and of course, he was the architect apparently of killing these poor Druze kids in Israel.

So if we're wondering why Israel, Iran has hesitated right now, because we were told they were going to react immediately, part of it is they want to know just how supportive the Biden-Harris administration will be.

They want to know what the tempo of the election is, if there's a chance that their nemesis Trump will be elected, or they get a debilitated Biden for four months more, and maybe an even more sympathetic Harris who will be running the country, Jack, if she wins.

If she wins in November and Biden's still there, she will be running the country.

Her team is all, his team has abandoned him.

They're working for her now.

But it does show you that the Iranians must be thinking, man, they've killed three people, and these people were the hardest to get to,

and they weren't.

They weren't in gutter.

They were in the bastions of Damascus, the bastions of Lebanon, the bastions of Tehran, and they're gone.

That means they can get any one of us at any moment.

So if we order these strikes, as we told the world we're going to do, in retaliation, what's stopping them from taking out

Khamenei

are Nasrallah themselves?

Nothing.

Nothing.

And if they hit Israel, they will do it.

And if they were to do it, what would be the reaction of the people of Lebanon and the people of Iran?

Are they beloved figures?

It's hard to know.

Do you think the Druze population, the Sunni population, and the Christian population would be unhappy that Nasrallah was gone?

Do you think that the majority of Iranians would be unhappy that the theocratic great leader would be gone?

I doubt it.

Do they think that?

I think they do know that.

And so that's why you have this

strategic hiatus right now.

It's kind of like the old Western, western you know when remember that scene in the wild bunch when

they

they go the last time they go to confront and get their friend back and they go up to mapache and they say we want him back

and then they cut his throat and i don't know it's either bill i think it's bill holding or somebody shoots mapache and then they're just you think it's all gonna the bloodluding is gonna start and just stops stops yeah everybody looks at each other it's a great scene.

Oh, my God.

And everybody's thinking, do we want to do this?

Can we diffuse it?

Is emotion or logic or revenge?

What's going to happen?

And then they start, I think they start smiling when Ernest Borg and I and they all smile because they want to get into it.

And then they do.

And that's where Iran is right now.

It's this creative hiatus where everybody's stopped.

And the Iranians, people are saying to the Iranians, don't do it because the U.S.

is assembling forces.

There's still the Arab territory that will be defended if you send missiles over.

We don't know with the Europeans, if there's any in the theater, there might be one or two French or British warship.

Don't do it.

And the Israelis are signaling to them, don't do it.

And I think they're going to do it.

And if they do it, it's going to be a mess.

It's going to be violent.

It's going to be, we'll see.

Paid for by our tax dollars, right?

How many billions did we

give and empower them?

All these leftists that are just ecstatic because a very heroic counteroffensive into curse that the Ukrainians did.

Myself, if I was a strategist, and I'm not getting into the politics of it because it has political utility

to embarrass Putin, and if you want to win the war, that's a good thing to do.

But

we learned on that failed offensive last year that you bled out 10 or 15,000 of your best fighters.

So, if in the south the Russians are threatening to crush you and break in, and you think you're going to have a small pincer movement in the north to relieve the pressure,

it's kind of like the German Battle of the Bulge.

You know what I mean?

The Germans thought that they were going to go right in the Ardennes at two green American divisions and then penetrate 30, 40 miles.

They wanted to get to Antwerp.

That was impossible.

That's what they said.

And therefore, they would deflate the entire

offensive and maybe be able to transfer troops back to the Russian front.

And it would have the opposite effect.

And I think I'm afraid the Ukrainians are going to get bogged down inside Russia while the Russians inside Ukraine will try to

advance, maybe even to the rear.

Who knows?

But the point I'm making is I don't, nobody, everybody in the West is ecstatic

about that, that offensive operation.

But if

Iran hits Israel and Israel

retaliates in a defensive, they're going to get angry at Israel.

That's what's so strange about the whole thing.

There's two different sets, and we've talked about that, right?

There's two moral protocols, one imposed on Israel and one lifted from Ukraine.

And I don't know why that is,

because it seems to me the Iranians are even more evil than the Russians, and the Middle East is more strategic to our interest, maybe, than the Ukrainian-Russian border.

And

Netanyahu, for all the vitriol that's shown him, is acting with a coalition government with elections coming up and

no martial law.

And Zelensky has canceled elections, cancel political parties, cancel

freedom.

Religions with martial law.

Yeah, with martial law.

And we dwell on ceasefire, ceasefire, ceasefire.

No ceasefire in Ukraine.

We're not calling for that.

We're calling for victory, victory, victory.

And then we say, do not kill one person.

You're killing collaterally.

Innocence, we don't say Ukraine.

Hey, by the way, when you send these missiles back and drones and you hit these targets in heavily occupied Crimea, are you killing civilian?

We don't care.

It's victory, victory, victory.

And how that has happened is part of this phenomenon that we've watched, that the left recreates morality ad hoc.

Morality is what's conducive for their political agenda.

There is no absolutes.

My old colleague.

Yeah, National Review's Joe Sobrin, who was very controversial.

Joe's been gone dead for a while now.

But Joe's line was: beneath every double standard is a single standard.

So

that's a good point.

Yeah.

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Victor,

I have a small item, and then we're going to take a little break and then we'll have one last topic about double standards.

And I sent you this.

I don't know if you've got time to look at it, but I know you can riff on it.

This was

the free press, which is a great, this is Barry Weiss started this, the woman who was the columnist at the New York Times and she left to form this

website.

And there's a piece.

uh titled one rule for frat boys another for violent activists and it's a really interesting uh story i'm sure folks may

many folks may have heard of this at the university of maryland last year there was some,

at some fraternity, someone spanked someone with a paddle, whatever the hell.

So, school closed down everything.

All the fraternities, serious investigations.

You can't have a lawyer.

If you bring a phone in with you to record anything, you're going to be held

as uncooperative.

All this kind of kangaroo court crap hola that we see going on at colleges

when they engage in their version of jurisprudence.

And of course, Victor, if you were engaged in actual violence on a campus in the name of supporting the mass murderers of October 7th, you'd be fine.

So anyway, it's a very interesting take on how

the bet noir is not for the

academy leaders.

Go ahead.

I'm sorry.

Well, it's true.

This podcast, I have to be careful.

And remember, this podcast, Jack, originated in part.

Part of it came out of National Review when we changed our platform and our nature, but part of it was at the Hoover.

It was called the Classicist.

And I, you know,

I got the message that people in the Stanford community didn't want it or didn't like it and put pressure.

So I voluntarily took it off.

I'll be frank, when I was at Stanford where I work, and they have a beautiful studio.

And unlike the Hoover studio, which is good, but it closes at five o'clock, which means you can't really do any Fox evening, right?

There's wonderful people that work there that will accommodate you if they can and stay late.

But if Fox calls and says, would you do something at Pacific time, you know, eight or nine, then obviously you go to the Stanford studio.

But I've been told on two occasions that you can't use this unless you write out in advance everything you're going to say.

And I said, are you serious?

I don't know what I'm going to say.

They don't know what they're going to ask.

They might be, once you know, they have some talking points, but sometimes they're irrelevant because of late-breaking news.

It's all extemporaneous.

I don't memorize anything.

I don't know what I'm going to say.

Well,

and then you say to them, well, wait a minute.

Last time I was in the so-called green room or the other studio and I saw this professor and he was screaming and yelling about Russian collusion, and Trump is going to be in peace.

It was the most partisan.

But unlike what I was going to say, it was not factual.

It was a complete lie.

And you just, you put, you put these people on MSNB.

You're going to have to write.

And then you complain.

I said, oh, we didn't really say that.

I said, okay, I'll do it.

And then I go again.

Oh, by the way.

You're going to have to write out what you are going to say.

I said, but this is asymmetrical.

You don't apply that to the other people.

Well, that's the way it is.

And then,

you know, after the 2020 elections,

you're going to go to the faculty senate.

We may have to censor you or try to fire you because you were on Fox News and you said something to the effect that when someone said to you they thought there was questions about the election, you didn't immediately correct them.

You acquiesced.

I said, no.

I said the problem was that

the laws were changed in March and April, stealthily so, under the guise of COVID.

And I can cite you the states and the statutes and the changes that were made if you want me to.

But I said, by the way, are you going to challenge other people?

We have people who go out in Dumbarton Bridge and cause a riot, basically, get...

13 accidents during rush hour.

They get 70 people arrested.

And he's one of the accusers.

No, that's okay.

So what I'm getting at is that's what universities do.

It's not aberrant.

They do not feel that they are disinterested centers of education.

They do not believe that their role is twofold.

You come to the university and we give you a broad-based general education.

So you know literature, art, science, math, and we give you the tools and the reference.

You know what the Pythagorean theorem is.

You know what the Pantheon is.

You know who Washington is.

You know who Locke was, you know who Voltaire.

You know who Stalin and Castro were, but you also

hear about who Ronald Reagan was.

So that's what we do, A, and then we give you the inductive method of reasoning, the Socratic method.

So you look at all of these different

facts, figures, dates, personalities, wars, peaces, treaties, and out of that, you learn the inductive method, that when somebody asks you a question, you don't have a preconceived theory or answer.

You look at

the data and then you come up, and you sometimes will disagree with each other, as human nature is.

But we do not teach you just a set of facts, and you don't take a course with dashed studies that says the first day of class.

There are three sexes, and we're going to assign readings that prove that.

And if you disagree, you're going to be in trouble.

Right.

that's not what we do and that's what they do it's a deductive center and that's very important to know that because it's endangering not just the university which is dealing with a falling demographic competition from trade schools competition from people who have surmised they don't want their children in those dangerous places where they're not physically safe and they're not honest, and it's too expensive, and the government needs to get out of the business.

Not just that,

they're struggling with, but they're struggling with the idea that they're losing their global stature.

And nationally, globally, people that have bachelor's degrees from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford,

they're not very good at computation, at reasoning, at analytics, at comp oral fluency.

And the employer knows that now.

And so they're like Disney or Bud Light or Target.

They have the brand name, but the brand name is no longer commiserate with excellence.

They've had three or four years of this radical change, but even before that, they were doing it.

Then they only put the pedal to the metal and accelerate it.

And it's really,

I mean, we say to ourselves, well,

Victor, you're just in classics.

You know what?

If everybody's writing stuff about the sexual ambiguity of Dionysus and they're not studying the Peloponnesian War or democracy or the formation of the Roman Republic, who cares?

Nobody cares.

It's not engineering.

It's not math.

It's not medicine.

It's not business.

It's not engineering.

It is.

It is now.

DEI and postmodernism is, if you look at those disciplines.

It starts, it's like a virus.

It starts in the sociology and the humanities, and then it it grows.

And if it's not confronted and refuted, the relativism

undermines it.

In medical school, I hope you don't need surgery 10 years from now.

There's a lot of very courageous professors of medicine,

and they're trying to put their finger in the dyke.

But there is this DEI medicine now.

And I've mentioned one thing because I subscribe to kind of a scientific, it's not a blog, but it's the scientific papers, you know, that come out on long COVID.

Yes.

Double-blind studies.

And what's really disturbing is it's not just, there are, but they tend to be more European or Japanese or Australian.

Studies such as, well, creatin, if taken in four grams for the first 90 days of long COVID, it...

diminishes fatigue.

Okay.

According to whom?

Well, here's a double-blind study.

30 that did, that is what you want to read.

But there are things like this now.

The impact of long COVID on underserved communities, and then it's not necessarily by a doctor, and they're spending enormous amounts of time not solving the problem for everybody, but trying to leverage

the problem for their own political agenda.

And that's a commissariat system.

When you put an overhead on an institution or a discipline and you said, this is not going to solve the problem.

This is not going to solve the problem of pushing army groups south out of Russia, because it's more important to adjudicate whether a Russian general in pure Marxist-Leninist fashion marched his troops and got them all slaughtered than take a strategic retreat and fight another day, which would have been useful to the republic, of socialist republics.

No.

And so even Stalin got rid of it.

Even Stalin by mid-late 1942 said, if we have the Comissars anymore, and they insist on ideological agendas rather than strict Klaus Switzerian strategies, we're going to lose.

And he got rid of them.

And if he can get rid of them,

the biggest mass murder in Russian history, we should get rid of them.

Well, speaking of getting rid of, Victor,

another

college president has been gotten rid of.

And we'll get your thoughts on that when we come back from these final messages.

Back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

Victor's website is the blade of Perseus.

Go to victorhanson.com.

Check it out if you haven't already.

You'll see Victor writes a ton of stuff for the website.

They're ultra articles.

You have to subscribe five bucks a month, discounted to $50 a year in order to read them.

I quantify them as about two books worth of original Victorism on an annual basis.

You'll also find links to the articles, his syndicated columns, his essays for American Greatness, his appearances on various

podcasts and other shows, the archives to these podcasts.

So go to the bladeofperseusvictorhanson.com and do sign up.

Victor, the headline, Manoush Shafiq resigns.

And by the way, a few weeks earlier, so did three other top administrators at Columbia University.

Harvard, Pennsylvania, I think MIT, right?

Well, we have, well, no, I mean, actual

Columbia.

Oh, yes, the three that were trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes on their iPhones.

Right.

And then we have Claudine Gay, Harvard, Leah Liz McGill.

Former Stanford professor.

Martha Pollack, Cornell, they all resigned.

I'm going to get out of the way.

I wish their Board of Trustees.

And we had that Scarcy ruling.

Judge Scarcy and UCLA basically said you guys are anti-Semites

about the UCLA administration.

I don't know if that guy's going to last.

Well, do you have any thoughts about

particularly the Columbia?

Well, what she did was she looked at the fate of her colleagues, and she surmised and said, well, the reason they're going is

that they did not stop the anti-Semitism and they talked out of both sides of their mouths and they were humiliated before Congress.

And they didn't realize that the donors and the alumni and the board don't like the resulting bad press.

So I am going to survive and I'm going to avoid those mistakes.

But she didn't really realize why those presidents

made those mistakes.

Those presidents made those mistakes for two reasons.

One, they have been academic weaklings, as most academics are.

And two,

they sympathized with the people who were causing the problem.

So they were,

I don't know, intellectually, spiritually, morally incapable of disciplining and enforcing their own rules.

Okay, so she thinks she's not going to make that mistake.

So she starts to issue these,

what?

These little suggestions that the camps will have to be disbanded, that are there in illegal occupation.

And at first, she makes some progress.

And then they just say, screw you, we're not leaving.

And the students start screaming and yelling.

And the faculty start screaming and yelling in support of the illegality.

And then the alumni and the donors say,

Well, we're going to back you, but you said you were going to not suffer the fate of the other presidents.

You're going to force your own discipline.

And her response was to get into a fetal position and just, I can't take this anymore.

My family, I can't take it.

It's kind of like, you ever see that movie, that Tarantino screenwriter, True Romance?

It's a great movie.

No, I haven't yet.

Yeah,

it's got every great actor in it from Gary Oldman,

Christian Slater,

to Patricia Arquette.

Anyway, at one point, the guy just puts his hands over his ears and goes, I can't take this anymore.

And he can't function.

It's like Ted Turner.

Remember, he said that sometimes he got into his office and went into a fetal position.

Fetal position, yeah.

Well, that's what she metaphorically did.

Yeah.

Because she couldn't take the pressure from the donors and the alumni telling her to

woman up and just fulfill her duties and the faculty and the students.

Because the faculty are cowardly.

They just like to sign letters and threaten people and then go out and virtue signal at the demonstrations, a lot of them.

And the students are cowardly.

And no one wants to

show that they are because you just need one honest president.

When they go in and they destroy things and they occupy buildings, buildings, you call the police and here becomes the critical factor.

When they're arrested, you press charges.

You press charges and you bring in evidence to the DA.

And when they're very wealthy, prominent parents or their Mideast governments call you, you say, I'm sorry, we don't need your students here.

They're a liability.

They cause problems.

They're lawbreakers.

And there's a lot of kids.

We're very selective.

We only take 3 to 5%.

There's hundreds of kids in Missouri and Montana, all over the United States that don't get a chance that your kids did.

And so we're not going to let them come back.

I'm sorry.

And that would send a lessons.

Yeah.

Because Tommy and Julie have been groomed since they were three years old to go to Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, Yale.

Their helicopter parents have said to them, you're brilliant.

You're going to go into dad's law firm.

You're going to go onto Wall Street with Uncle Jack.

You're going to do all this stuff.

Right.

And all of a sudden, they have a felony record.

Right.

And you know, my,

so they could do it.

They could do it very easily.

We'll see what the new president of Stanford is going to do.

He's got some big decisions.

Some Stanford students went in and they trashed the president's office.

As I said with Sammy, they maligned or used

vile graffiti on that porous historic limestone colonnade at Stanford.

And I was watching these middle, as I said on the early one, these

poor maintenance people were meticulously with tweezers or something chipping out the paint.

I guess they couldn't, you know, sandblast it or wash it off with a pressure washer because it would damage the stone.

And we'll see what happens when school comes up in about a week and when they start putting those tents out because they said that was against the rules and they were not going to allow that.

And we'll see if

the sat has been reintroduced and will there be a protest that there's a minimum SAT score expected to be admitted.

Well, this is the new president, and we'll see how he does.

Victor, that broken windows policing theory is really just human nature, right?

And if you do not tolerate these

maybe petty

crimes, not even compared to murder, but still if you do not tolerate them,

it alleviates a whole range of other issues that emanate from that.

So

that's what I've always, I've always quoted that line from Candide

to encourage the others about Admiral Bing.

That's what the British hung him.

He wasn't really that guilty, but they said it's gotten too far.

There's laxity in the British fleet.

And this person was culpable for less than aggressive leadership.

in the fleet.

And so we hung him.

We hanged him.

And that encouraged the others.

And I'm just being kind of facetious, but yeah,

that's how it always goes.

I remember when I was eighth grade, there was a bunch of people and they did something that was really bad.

I don't know if I was kind of a rough junior.

You know, those

olive green, I guess they were war surplus garbage cans we all grew up with that were kind of steel

in our big classroom.

Well,

remember when you went into a bathroom, there was that kind of valve that made the old-time valve on the door way above.

It was like a triangular

with that hydraulic thing in it.

And to

close the door automatically.

Well, everybody filled it full of water and they lifted each other and put it on that triangular thing.

And then there was this particular teacher they didn't like.

So they feigned a

fight.

They said, fight, fight, fight.

I'm just going to use a name.

I don't want to incriminate the teacher.

Mr.

Smith, Mr.

Smith, Joey's being beaten up.

You got to go in.

So he opened the door and that thing fell on him.

And it was like 20, 30 gallons of water, right?

And just drenched him, but it also hit his head and he started bleeding.

Oh, God.

And so

immediately, the principal was a really great guy.

I'll mention his name because I really admire Mr.

Hebner.

He has family in this area.

He was a wonderful person.

And he just came and closed the door.

And he said, all of you in there that did that and all of you who thought it was funny are equally guilty.

So you're going to march out in single file.

And so I was the last one.

I went gone and I wanted to watch it.

I didn't know what they were going to do.

I thought it would be kind of weird.

They say, hey, Victor, we're going to play a trick on Mr.

Smith.

I didn't know what it was.

I didn't even, but I was in there.

So we all walked out.

And the first guy said, now, who are the people who did this?

And if you don't tell me, we're going to expel everybody.

So they fussed up and they were expelled, I think, for two days or three days.

Now, who were all the people who didn't speak up and who were in the room?

And I raised my hand first.

So he said, all the rest of you go because you're going to be suspended for the rest of the day.

And he said to me, why were you there?

You don't do that.

And I said, I don't know.

He said, because you're weak.

You're weak.

You might as well have done it yourself.

That's why they do these things because people like you don't open your mouth.

Yeah.

So I'm not going to suspend you like I did the others because I don't think you, I think you objected to it.

But you know what I'm going to do?

You're going to go back in there.

It just happened.

And you're going to take the waste paper basket and you're going to clean it and you're going to bring it back to Mr.

Smith's room and then you're going to grovel and apologize to him.

And then you're going to clean the entire bathroom.

I said, but there's the water's water's not, I mean the toilets, I mean everything.

You go back there and clean it and just think about how weak you were.

So I came home.

I was really upset.

So I, you know, said to my mom and dad, this is unfair.

I was just, my dad, were you in that room?

So the guy almost got his head cut and you just watched it.

I said, yes.

I said, you got what you deserve.

I'm sorry.

And my mom went to law school.

You know,

so I was going to be like a little smart ass lawyer with her.

And she said, you're an accessory after the fact.

I'm sorry, you're guilty.

And you got off all.

I would have sentenced you to

a prison term and you just got a work furlough program.

So the point is.

that was to encourage the others.

And I can tell you that anytime that happened for the next 10 years of my life, and they said something like,

Johnny Smith, we're going to pants him because he's a smart ass freshman and we're going to winter green him and put winter green on his genitals and we're going to throw him naked out in front of the girls' PE.

I said, no, you're not.

I would try to stop it.

And

just had a profound effect on me.

Yeah, you're weak to be accused by someone you respect.

I really like Mr.

Hootener.

And then I would, you know, what else I would do?

I didn't, I wasn't a toady or kisser, but every time I saw him and he came up to me and he kind of winked and he said victor i was your friend i said mr

kiebner you were my hero you really did a good job and i really appreciated that because my parents were tougher on me than you were and i'll never do that again because mr smith got stitches and uh

but my point is if they would just do that if they would just take those people in who went into the president's office and then anybody that went with them because there was a reporter there and he said i was just a reporter I was watching it.

No, you were like me.

You were aiding and abetting it by your presence, and you were not trying to stop the illegality.

If I may.

If you're not as culpable, you shouldn't be expelled like I wasn't expelled, but you should have to go in and clean up the president's office.

I would think it's possible today a little more difficult in that you know your parents were not going to side with you.

Maybe, maybe you had a delusion.

But today,

you know, you give a kid a B plus, a kid from some elite high school, B plus, and the parents bring a lawyer.

And, you know, so the parents have become, I think, facilitators often.

I was very

little darling.

My mom was a Democrat, but she was like a Truman Democrat.

I remember just one little story.

I remember I was the student body vice president, and we were having, we hadn't had a Chicano president in a while.

And there was this really good guy and he came to me and I was a senior and he said, I want to run for president.

Would you be my campaign manager?

Well, I knew the guy who was running against him.

This is my junior.

I was running for vice president.

I was vice president and he was a junior running for the president of the student body.

And I knew the person running against him.

kind of an old town family.

And I said, yeah, it's time for, you know, if you're, and I liked him.

And so I said that.

Well, then he came back to me and he said, well, I've got a great plan.

I'm going to have an assembly for all the Hispanic students, what, 70%, 60.

And I said, okay.

And there's no white people allowed.

And I said, well,

okay.

So I came home.

I said, tomorrow there's going to be assembly and I'll just make up a name.

Johnny Lopez is going to, I think he's going to win.

And he wants me to be his campaign manager.

My mom go, that's great.

And she said, I said, and he wants to have this Chicano assembly.

She said, okay, but I don't like the word Chicano because it's designating, I said,

but I said, but there's going to be alternate events for non-Mexican American.

They can't go.

And she said, what?

You're going to participate in that?

You're not going to participate in that.

I'm sorry.

You're not going to participate in that.

You go back tomorrow and tell him that's illegal.

It's contrary contrary to the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

And I will read you the statute.

So she went and

I didn't have zero.

She writes it all out, you know, in one of her law books.

So I go back and I go and see the principal.

I said, you can't do this.

He said, aren't you his campaign manager?

I said, yes.

So they made it voluntary.

And, uh, but my point is my parents were always doing that to me, disagreeing with me.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Don't tell me what to do.

And they didn't, they were trying to, they were very strict.

And a lot of people listening know what I'm talking about.

Their parents did the same thing.

And

these administrators are like parents in local parentheses.

They shouldn't be.

But these kids today that are 18, 19, 20, they're prolonged adolescents.

They're not like us that, you know, we're driving at cars, shooting guns when we're four and driving a car or out.

picking peaches when you're 12.

They didn't do that.

They're not self- and you have a responsibility giving these prolonged adolescents to force them into adulthood and to take responsibility.

And that means that one thing, consequences.

You talk to people in this election and Donald Trump,

he said, I'm the common sense.

You know what he should say?

I'm the consequences candidate.

Because if you go out and you riot and you burn, you're going to go to jail.

And if the local prosecutors won't do it, I'll get you on federal racketeering with my federal attorneys.

You come across this border and you do so illegally.

You broke the law and you're going to be deported and you're never going to get back in.

I'm sorry.

You're never going to get back in.

So don't do it.

And then he should tell the 600 sanctuary cities.

So you think that you're going to be like a neo-Confederate insurrectionist and you're going to deliberately violate federal immigration law by saying a criminal who's here illegally will be shielded by you.

Well, here's what's going to happen.

You do that and you're not going to get federal funds.

If you don't want to follow federal immigration law, you're not going to get highway funds.

You're not going to get environmental funds.

Just no, don't do it.

And then you explain that to your constituents.

That would stop it really quick.

Yeah, amen.

Quick.

And that's what this election is really about.

It's if you shoplift, there's consequences.

If you urinate or defecate or inject or fornicate on the sidewalk in front of people, there's going to be consequences.

But this no consequence society, I can loot, I can do this, I can hit, or the double standard, whether consequences for January 6th, but not for the 9,820 days in 2000.

That would win him the election.

He just has to say, I'm the consequence president.

Sounds like a headline of a

coming PDH essay.

Everybody wants consequences.

They want something to mean.

They want something to be real.

They get up in the morning and they say, you know what?

A quarter of the people don't pay their power bills in California.

And yet I see them.

They spend their money on other stuff.

There's a hundred million dollar fund just to get rid of your traffic tickets.

You don't even have to pay the fine.

And we're sick of this.

There's consequences, consequences.

So you people outside of Chicago, if you riot and burn and you shut down traffic, they're going to go to jail and you're going to be prosecuted.

And if you're convicted, you're going to serve time.

And we don't care who your parents are, or how much money you are, or what color your skin is, or what religion, you're going to be treated exactly the same.

And that would go with the American people.

It really would.

They're sick of this no-consequences society.

Nothing matters otherwise when you don't have a law.

There's no order.

There's no law.

Yeah.

And there's this,

that's an issue right now.

It's got

Hansen 2028 in response to that.

No.

Trump was on the right track

when he said he was the common sense.

It's common sense to use your resources to close your border.

I know people get angry because they write me,

when I say this, but he doesn't want to say, she's dumb.

She's stupid.

No, you analyze and then you convince people why that is so.

You say

price controls are a form of Marxism.

And the point is,

who is really price gouging?

Is it the farmer who produces it?

He's not.

It's a 1% to 2% margin for this store.

It's not.

And why are the prices going up?

It's probably because you people borrow all this money, put people flush with cash when there was a supply change, disruption, money.

too much money, chased too few goods, and you didn't care, you caused it.

And

price gouging, if there is any gouging, it was the inflated employee's salary of $20 an hour in places like California.

Well, or the non-employee salary sitting in the basement and getting federal funds to do that.

You mean the DEI overhead?

No.

Yeah.

Or the increased prices in gasoline and diesel, fuel, and electricity.

Right.

And that was all caused by either regulatory over-regulations or green mandates or DEI mandates or too much federal federal money.

And so Kamala owns it all.

So that's if he if he does that and shows that this is really a Marxist idea.

Or it's like saying everybody gets a house that hasn't bought one and I'm going to give you $20,000.

So

Joe Lopez in my town worked really hard and he squimped and saved and he bought a little $900, a 900 square foot home.

And he and his wife just worked.

And this is true.

I know know it happens all the time.

And then after five years, they said, you know what?

We got a little equity, so we're going to buy a house in that new tract.

And the government said, no, no, no, no, no.

You don't get your $20,000.

This prolonged adolescent who's been taking three units, he's 36 years old, he gets it.

That's what happens when the government tries to adjudicate morality and all of this other stuff.

Pick favorites.

Yeah, it doesn't work.

And then the developer is going to say, wait a minute,

the government's going to give you $20,000.

Well, when I went back over my books, I realized that all the regulations of that house is not $700,000.

It's $720,000.

Right.

So.

Yeah, same impact as Pell Grants and

forgiving student loans for the same thing.

So I'm really worried about this because

she is the most

socialist, Marxist.

These are Marxist ideas.

They've never worked.

And she's pushing them.

I don't know if they're going to make her recant the price control.

And

they're not exposing it.

And Trump's got to say, I'm not going to call her any more names.

I'm going to show you how dangerous she is by quoting her and her.

He's starting to do that.

But, you know, it's very hard to get her out of her media iron dome.

The only way you're going to get her out of the iron dome is to break it apart by your polling.

The polls, I understand, can be rigged, but you've got to get four or five points.

The only reason you're going to get four or five points is that you've got to show mastery of the detail, argumentation, non-stop.

You're starting to do that, but you don't have one penny, one time, one penny of advertisement, one moment to go into personal invective because it just turns off people.

Temperament matters.

It does.

It does.

And he needs to be ecumenical.

Why couldn't he have, he needs to have

Governor Kemp with his arm around him.

He said, you know, Governor, right in front of 10,000 people, I was hard on you.

And I know we disagree with

the election.

You were kind of pushed back at me, but you, I need you, your support, and I like you.

And we've got to stop socialism.

Then he should have on the other side, he said, the next rally should have one arm around DeSantis and the other around Haley and said, these people are good people.

And I ran against them.

There were harsh words, but they agree with me.

And they're wonderful people.

And we're going to unite.

And saying, he should do that.

He's trying to, and that was what he can do.

He really can.

He'll get elected.

He went in a landslide.

He can break.

This whole Harris candidacy is like an egg.

And it's got a shell.

And if you just lightly tap it in one place, stupid, stupid, it's not going to break.

But you tap it everywhere and you get, you say, we're ecominical, we've got all, we're all united, or this is socialism and here's why.

And you get expert and you get good ads, Lee out, you can break it apart and when it breaks, it'll shatter.

It'll be just like Dukakis in 88.

It'll go from 17 points ahead to eight points down on Election Day.

But no.

Crackle the cackle.

Yeah.

Yes, that's a good tactic.

We got to go.

And I'm

just want to

more than terrific today.

And I thank everyone who listens.

I want to thank those who, as some people write, I get emails every week from folks who have signed up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at Anfil, where we're trying to strengthen civil society.

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Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up, and you're pretty sure you'll enjoy it.

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Victor, you've just been great.

We'll be back again soon, folks, with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.