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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is our Tuesday edition, and I am Sammy Wink, and Jack Fowler is

indisposed at this time

for a very good reason.

So I hope he's having fun.

And so I'm taking over.

So

we will be doing the news of the week for Tuesday and Thursday, Victor Davis-Hanson and I.

So this is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Stay with us and we'll be right back to get into the latest news.

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We're back.

And so, Victor, the latest news is the debates.

And I know that we talked about them for Saturday of last week, but

Donald Trump recently called for drug tests before the debate.

And I know there's probably not a whole lot to say, but I was wondering your thoughts on his shenanigans.

The thing about Trump is that he also added, given, I think he alluded to the cocaine that was found in the White House and said that

Biden is the

guy.

The thing about it is that he tries to troll people

and then people get very angry.

They say he's an amoratory whoever.

But the thing is, he always focuses in on a kernel of truth.

And then it's not a lie.

It's an exaggeration.

So what he's saying is,

if you look, translated, the subtext is,

well, you remember the first debate when he was Sleepy Joe and he came out and I tried to interrupt him and he was high as a kite as he and he was.

And then you remember the Phantom of the Opera Semi-Fascist Ultra MAGA, where you shouted,

that.

And then there was the State of the Union.

They said, oh, there's no way he's going to go.

And he was just like, nobody saw him for three days before.

So they put him to sleep.

Maybe it's a three-day work week.

And then he rests and rests and rests.

And then I don't know whether it's previgen or Adderall

or

some

attention deficit disorder drug.

And he's animated.

He's not necessarily coherent, but he's animated.

And they know they're doing that, and yet nobody would ever say anything.

Nobody would be so unprofessional to say anything or crude, but Trump would.

So Trump is always saying is just take a drug test.

Because we don't allow people to take

stimulants in certain occupations, like forklift driving.

But what is more important than the presidency of the United States?

I remember when George

H.W.

Bush had a bout with thyroid cancer, or it was a high thyroid, and they put a radioactive isotope in, and he didn't sleep well.

The left went crazy.

He's radioactive and he's walking around.

And then they said he's taking halcyon, sleeping pill.

Halcyon

leads to nightmares and visions of delusion.

They could call him up with a nuke.

They do that.

So it's not an unreasonable demand to just say, Joe, take a urine test.

I will too.

And we'll just make sure that none of us are pepped up in a way that's unnatural.

Because you can't do that.

His point is well taken.

You can't do that

every day as president.

So why do it during a debate to give a false impression of what your level of competence is, unless you think he can take Adderall every day?

And that's scary if that's what he's taking.

So I thought he does that all the time.

We talked about that a lot when he said, you know, Lil Marco and all that stuff, low energy, they were based on certain unspoken caricatures, but they were accurate.

Yeah.

And so that's what he does.

And the left gets so angry that they can't really,

I mean, all they have to say is, no, no, we didn't put Joe up knowing that he was non-compostmentes.

We would never do that.

We would never foist a president upon you as a vehicle for the Obama team to

run him as puppeteers do a puppet.

We wouldn't do that.

He's fine.

He's sharp as a knife.

All that stuff.

It's a lie.

And so

he takes

a scimitar or a blade of some sort and cuts through all this crap.

And the scimitar or the blade is cruel, it's crude, but so is the stuff that he's cutting through.

And that's what drives them crazy, because they have these pretensions that's sophisticated and moral the sort of clotting gay I'm clotting gay president of Harvard University I also happen to be an anti-Semite and a serial plagiarist who didn't publish enough to even be a full professor if tenured so how dare you say that well you're a fraud so you can say whatever you want because you are a fraud you may have titles you may have letters after your name, but you are a fraud.

And when you cut through that,

then there's nothing nothing there.

It makes the left angry.

It does.

I can tell you, it really does.

Speaking of anger, we had a current event in the Congressional building

in

what is called the Oversight and Accountability Committee, which seems almost an absurd name at this moment.

But they were talking about Merrick Garland's whether he should be served with contempt of Congress.

And apparently, Jasmine Crockett said to Marjorie Taylor Green, or suggested she didn't know what was going on.

So Crockett said, Do you know what we are here for?

And Green replied, I don't think you know what we are here for.

I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you've read.

Anyways, and it went on, and AOC got herself in there with baby, baby girl, and don't do it or something to that effect.

And it's shenanigans that even Fetterman called the Jerry Springer show.

And I was wondering when he went to the window.

Then they went after Fetterman.

AOC did.

Like, you're not standing in solidarity with our DEI people, and you're making fun of us as well as Marjorie Terry.

You should only make fun of one side.

She even said both sidesism or something.

And then the worst was, Presley then trumped everybody with that little retort when she said to Comer, would it be unprofessional to say of another colleague that she was dyed blonde?

Bleach blonde, bad built, butch body.

Butch body.

And then there

means I'm 50.

I got a pretty good body.

So everybody is outraged, and they say this is sort of like, I guess, Congress when Sumner was caned before the Civil War, or what you see on videos of the Taiwanese or South Korean assemblies sometimes, parliaments, where they start throwing chairs at each other.

My favorite are in the Philippines, where they go after each other.

But there's something to this.

I don't take it too seriously because the left is outraged, right?

Because they hate Marjorie Taylor Greene.

But they had a Senate

staffer, young man, who went into the hollowed chambers where some of the most important testimonies in our recent history have transpired.

And he bent over and he pulled down all his clothes off and he had some type of,

I don't know what it was.

Contraption on.

A contraption athletic supporter and then he filmed himself being sodomized and then in the Senate chambers and they thought everybody was outraged oh this is homophobic no it's not it's disgusting and

you know I the one thing I got angry about the January 6th even the guy with the buffalo horns I don't like you going into the halls of Congress and vandalizing it and putting your feet on the desks.

I don't like people being naked and being sodomized in front of That's what is really shocking.

I don't like Mr.

Bowman going out and letting off the fire alarm and then lying about it just so he can delay a vote.

So this is the ultimate culmination of what has been typical.

So I don't, I don't, they want to blame, they're calling Marjorie Taylor Greene white trash.

And a racist.

That's right.

Crockett is a racist.

Every time you see a clip of her, she talks collectively about white people, collectively.

No one ever calls her on it.

And she is a fire

bomb thrower just as much as Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And so is AOC.

AOC has said the craziest things and she's a half-educated autodidact with the phony letters after her name.

She got a degree and she thinks she's Socrates.

She reminds me of thousands of people I've met who are autodidactic and they think they're really brilliant and they talk your head.

I know I won't mention some people because they're in my immediate sphere of influence, sphere of association, I mean.

But they're always weighing in on something, you know, and they're loud and they don't have an argument and you give them just a tiny little cross-examination.

They go nuts.

She's that type of person.

And she's always talking about herself.

She takes those videos where she puts makeup on or she's cooking and then she says, everybody wants to date me.

No, they don't.

Nobody wants to date you.

It's just,

I don't know, it's just,

in one sense, it's Jacksonian.

It's like Andrew Jackson bringing people in the White House.

It's just what America is now.

So don't be so sanctimonious, you know.

Don't be so sanctimonious.

Illian Omar married her brother.

to get in here illegally and you all on the left know that she did and you didn't do anything about that that is incest that is a fraud of the it's a violation and you were perfectly okay with it because she was a left-wing firebomb thrower and you like that so don't start saying oh i'm shocked she made fun of somebody's eyelashes you guys are running right now for illegitimate prosecutions that

with crimes that have never been alleged about anybody else and will never be alleged about anybody else after Trump.

So don't suddenly get into an epidemic of self-righteous sanctimoniousness.

Yeah.

I have to hand it to James, Jim.

Is it James Comey, the head of the so-called oversight account?

Comer, not Comey, the FBI.

Okay.

Yeah, James Comer, the head of the so-called oversight and accountability.

He goes, what?

What the?

What

is this?

When what's her name said about

it was the bleach bomb bad built butch body

who was he was just dumbfounded and then didn't raskin who's the

ranking minority member somebody call him raskins yes with an s and he goes you don't have to add that s to my name

I think he was trying to make a play whoever said that I'm rascal you know rascalins yeah

and then uh oh somebody said Goldman was

oh, that representative from Paula Luna from Florida, she's pretty funny.

And he was pontificating about it.

And she said, well, you've been coaching witnesses, you know, Michael Cohen, you trust fund baby.

And he's the heir, you know, to a billion-dollar family fortune.

So it's a whole circle, it's a confederacy of dunces.

But it's funny, and I'm not going to be shocked about it because that's the America, and it's America in the raw.

And yes, I wish that the Senate is

a more sober and judicious place, and the House too, but it's not.

No.

And speaking of sort of doing violence,

tape has re-emerged from 2016 of Sean Diddy Combs beating up his girlfriend, Cassie Ventura.

It's horrible to watch it.

It is horrible.

It's really brutal.

And it's even worse because when she filed suit against him, he denied everything.

This is lies.

And she was a very well-known singer.

She lived with a guy for like six years.

And she had said he would be systematically beating her up.

Meaning, if she probably looked at somebody else other than God like Combs.

But

I've never seen anything quite like that.

I've seen people.

that one other athlete that beat the person up in the Vegas elevator.

Elevator, yeah, I remember.

That was horrific.

But, uh,

and, you know, we're not going to hear anything about, we've got to watch out, there's an epidemic of young black male violence against women.

You're not going to hear any of that.

That elevator was an African-American young celebrity, too.

And you're not going to hear anything,

anything from the left in the manner they usually associate words matter, words are hurtful.

So nobody's going to say, Mr.

Combs and Lamar Kendrick, Popo, kill the Popo.

All of that rap music culture, lyrics, vocabulary about hoes and beating the bitch and all of that misogyny has led to people's behavior like this or legitimized it or institutionalized.

You'll never hear any of that, but it has.

Yeah, sure.

It's one of the most pernicious influence on young people there is, the lyrics and the message and the values of rap music, but you can't touch it.

Here we can touch anything and we take the consequences.

And I'm sure I'll get another five letters or emails about you're a racist, you made fun of rap.

Have you ever listened to Mark Kendrick and all that?

Yeah.

But the point is that he denied it

and it's savage.

Gosh, he runs out in a towel.

He's obviously in bed with her and she thinks he's out cold.

So she sneaks out with all of her stuff.

She's almost ready to escape out the elevator.

He runs out holding the towel.

He throws her to the ground, and then his towel he has to hold up.

And he grabs some of her stuff so she can't leave the person.

Then he starts kicking her and hitting her.

Then he grabs her coat by the back of the neck and tries to drag her.

And then the next thing is he's sitting down.

Obviously, she's captive, and he's throwing a glass base at her.

It's horrible.

It is.

He should be put in prison for years for that assault.

And,

you know,

we'll see.

And

they liked, I mean, ask yourself, is that he didn't do the damage of the crazy guy that went into Paul Pelosi's home and hit him with a hammer.

But

he could have if it was just a matter that she was in a public place.

But they gave him 30 years.

And I don't have any problem with 30 years for him.

But I do have a problem with sentencing somebody who goes into Pelosi's home and sentence legitimately 30 years and then sentencing people who didn't do stuff like that on the right of January 6th for 10 years or five years with no violence.

But I'm glad that Pelosi's assailant got 30 years and I think he combs should get the same.

Yeah.

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Well, Victor, we have Newsome goes to the Vatican and other things that he's said.

So, let me give you the two most important things about California since so much of the left says it's the model state for things.

Apparently, Newsom is claiming that the homeless solutions that California has has founded are models for the rest of the country.

And recently, he's had a lot of flack, and he gave a press conference on his budget shortfalls.

His office estimates $44 billion, but the legislative analyst's office that works for the California legislature says it's $55 billion gap in the budget.

And so they're way off by $10 billion, which is no small amount.

And who lied in the past?

Who told us for the last year it was only going to be $25 when it turned out to be $76?

That's after he's cut.

Yeah, I know.

It was Gavin Newson.

I don't think he's ever recovered from that debate with DeSantis.

He came out with his slick hair and his one-liners, his can lines, and strutted around, and that was the Gavin Newsom we all know.

And then he ran out of ideas and he showed that he's an imbecile.

And then he was trying to tell everybody that more people were coming to California.

Yeah, they are.

They're coming to California, but they're crossing the southern border.

And they're impoverished, and they have enormous educational, housing, food, legal needs that were broke.

And he gave $500 million to to them just recently.

But we know

he's already spent 10 billion on homeless.

And is he telling us if you go to San Francisco today and you go down Market Street, it's not going to be there?

I drove over the freeway not too long ago and I'd look to my right down on the overpass and there's a huge homeless encampment in Fresno.

And every once in a while, you know, in this little town that I live next to in Selma, they have to clean out the clover leaves because there's homeless people.

And every time in Fresno,

they look like hobbit burrows on 41.

People burrow into the side of the and they clean them out.

But I don't think he's solved the homeless problem.

He's got half of the homeless in the United States here in California for a reason.

And then

he can't address the just, he's in a rock and a hard place.

Because he has all of these leftists in the legislature with super majorities.

And they are attuned to giving away other people's money with the richest entitlements in the United States.

And then he's got, and these are mostly the Latino caucus, somewhat the black caucus, the Asian caucus.

And then he has a lunatic

white left-wing caucus who is obsessed about

letting all of this precious stored water that we need to grow food go out the Sacramento and San Joaquin tributaries to the ocean to create riparian banks and streams and rivers, just like we read about in 1850,

or to save the little delta smelt that's probably dying to the extent that it is dying by either introduced

striped bass or maybe high nitrogen contents from 30 waste plants that dump their

effluent into the estuaries in San Francisco Bay.

So he does that.

I have a little game I play each week when I drive to Stanford.

Should I try this road?

This road?

This road?

Or this road?

Since they're all blocked by the Stonehenge high-speed rail, it's going to be $300 billion boondoggle.

They can't stop, and they really can't go on.

They're too incompetent to build, and yet they can't stop because they don't know what to do with all this confiscated land, this corridor, and these ugly, graffiti-ridden, 10-year-old overpasses that are still trying to be built.

And then, of course,

Jerry Brown introduced with the legislature 13.3 income tax.

He said it would be for one year to get out of the last time we were in this.

They got the thing, they raised billions of dollars, and now we're talking, the legislature wanted to go up, legislature wanted to go up to 14.

But they can't because people to the number of 300,000 are leaving every year.

If he tries to get out of this by going from 13.3 to 14 or 15, you'll get another 100,000 leaving.

And people in Silicon Valley can say, good riddance, I quoted somebody who said that in the Dying Citizen, make way for a new type of a Californian.

And i.e., the subtext was a racist.

These are all old white people who had businesses that are greedy and

rich, and we want to make way for the new global influence of egalitarian people of color.

That was what he was saying, if you read the whole speech.

So

he can't, he doesn't know what to do.

He has to cut.

If he cuts, he gets the people in the green world mad at him for all of their basically inert solar and wind projects that will

ensure that we have high energy and we'll never build nuclear.

We'll never, we'll keep blowing up.

We blew up four dams on the Klamath River that were giving 80,000 homes clean

hydroelectric power.

We blew them up and we we said this was going to restore a natural river, and we ended up with mud flats that killed animals and wildlife.

Of course, when they do that, it's just collateral damage.

When we do something like that, then we're Hitlerian.

So, everything about it, I mean, he,

the only way he could get out of this is

to cut,

and we have such a massive multi-billion dollar budget, it would be easy to cut.

He could just fire all the DEI people at the 21 CSU and nine UC campuses and probably come up with a half a billion dollars.

And then he could cut all of the bureaucracy and he could probably come up with all of the illegal immigration subsidies.

And then he could cut taxes down to, I don't know, 13.3, go down to be competitive at 7 or 8%.

It doesn't have to be tax-free like Nevada or Texas, although you might want to talk to them.

And

he would let the power companies build natural gas plants and develop natural gas.

We could get out of this very easily.

He doesn't want to do that.

He's a captive of the racial tribalism and green fanatics.

And unions.

California's got the largest public workforce of any state, and they're unionized.

I still have that

nightmare when I went to the DMV about five years ago, and everybody had a purple shirt, and it said S-C-I-U.

And I said, you really think that that's appropriate that you try to be a public employee and you're politicizing your union?

And the woman said to me, do you want to be waited on or not?

That was really.

And of course the DMV is a mess.

It's a mess.

And it's expensive in California.

So he can't raise taxes, he can't cut.

So he struts around and says that my accountant says that there's not that big a problem.

but he's up against reality.

A state

can't print money.

It's got to balance its budget.

And it can't sell bonds for the state deficit.

So he knows that.

And

there's still a requirement.

Yeah, I think it's two-thirds of the legislature has to raise taxes.

And there's a few Democrats that are terrified because they know what California's become.

Its universities are anti-Semitic.

It's captive of the open borders crowd.

It's captive of the unions.

And there's a lot of Democrats that said they hate us, but I'm still voting Democrat, but they hate who I am and what I represent.

And its economy runs on the black market.

That's a big thing, no one.

We've talked about that.

We have a large portion of the population who is buying everything from sofas to beds to shovels to food to plants at their Sunday swap meet where there's no sales tax and there's no income tax for the peddlers.

And people are getting work done for cash.

Yes, and here in the San Joaquin Valley, if you want

somebody to wire your house, to go under your house and add a new plumb line,

I don't know.

To clear out your pool that you don't want anymore.

To clear out your pool you don't want anymore, to haul away trash around your house that some people have thrown to put a new roof on,

to put something

a conduit in, you better have cash because that's what they want.

You don't have cash,

you get paid and you get it deducted, and then you pay estimates.

And if you dare not do that, they have your name, but not other people.

The problem with all this is doesn't, it's not just tribalism, and we can talk about

the plagiarist and the DI and all that, but

it's just the simple principle.

The satirical

poet Juvenile said, who will police the police?

Qui custodiet custodias.

And when you set anybody up as overseers and there's no accountability, so you tell people, let's say in DEI,

you are going to monitor everybody for their illiberal thoughts, but nobody is ever going to monitor you, and you are exempt.

You can do whatever you want.

Or you tell people who come across the border,

you broke our law, but that's okay.

And then you broke your law again when you're residing here illegally.

That's okay.

And then you broke your law again when you have a fake ID, but that's okay.

Well, you create a sense of exemption.

And then when you read about these people who are plagiarizing or breaking the law, it has anything to do with their culture or their race.

It's just simply they have been told that they are exempt from consequences.

Same thing with the students.

You know, I keep going back to that famous line in Voltaire's Candide where he says of Admiral Bing.

He says the British have this strange custom from time to time to hang an admiral.

Pour encourage les utre.

Is that what it is?

To encourage the others.

All you have to do is deport a thousand people in California, and your problem,

people will get the message.

All you have to do is put people in jail who steal, and people will get the message.

All you have to do is treat people in the DEI hierarchy like you do anybody else.

But we don't do that.

No, we sure don't.

I think I know what Newsom's up to.

If you drive on these freeways here, you've got all this work going on and desperate

measures to

get it all done by the election or by late summer.

You can tell they're just because they put all these rerouting things all over and rerouting because of the rerouting corporations.

Why not?

But it's California, so the Caltrans, it's all unionized.

You go by.

I went by the 99 the other day.

And it's, it's so funny.

If you were a private corporation, they would sue you and bankrupt you for the hazards you put out there.

I mean, there's no warning.

All of a sudden, a barrier appears.

The barrier is exactly the same color as the concrete road.

So when you're driving, they blend into one thing, and you think,

maybe it's my cataract.

No, you look at the side of the barrier and it's got rubber marks all over it.

And you hear of all these wrecks, and they're not liable.

They're the state.

And it's so funny.

Maybe he's doing that, but it's too little, too late.

And it's the same thing about fire insurance.

You wake up one morning, you go out to your mailbox, and here it says, oh, by the way, we canceled your fire insurance.

And then you see why.

There's no fire protection, prevention.

When you have the aspen fire, the paradigm, they don't want people living in the foothill.

And they like forest fires.

They consider them natural.

And I'm quoting literally about a person who wrote in the LA Times that these are good.

They create mulch for bugs and birds, and they restore the natural environment.

And we shouldn't thin out the forest, let the fires do it, and people don't have any business living in the way of fires.

Well, the insurance companies say, not this pig.

I'm not going to go in the state with you, lunatic.

I'm getting out of here.

And they cancel and they leave.

Or they jack up the deductible and the premium so high nobody can afford it.

And then I think if you were to survey people

from Bakersfield to Sacramento Foothills, I would imagine 30 to 40 percent do not have house insurance.

No.

They can't pay $1,000 a month, $1,500 a month.

No, of course not.

Well, Victor Vefori, I just want to say my point was just that he's trying to clean things up so he can say that he's a great governor and he's going off to the Vatican, a very easy place to say, look, I've got a little diplomacy under my wing.

You know what he reminds me of is those Westerns when somebody sets the barn on fire, the arsonists of the bad guys, and then they go out to the little wishing well and they

turn

the handle and they get a little bucket of water and they run into the the barn and it's a complete conflagration and they pour one little bucket on.

Yes, exactly.

And you watch that and you think, you know, even a modern, I don't know, 5,000 gallon a minute hydrant could not put that fire out.

And so he can't put the fire out what he caused.

No, Gavin, even the slick hair and the tight pants and the felt vest and the Abercrombie

and all your French laundry buddies and the Getty money, it can't help help you now.

You help screw up the state.

Everybody knows they're leaving, and you need them.

And you can't say you need them because even though you like to hang around with wealthy people,

you are a captive of the green and the tribal lobby.

And the state is going into a death loop, it is in a death loop.

And he's exactly the type of person the tribal lobby hates, though.

He's a white male

rich because he's a white

male, white male, heterosexual,

trust fun,

privileged, spoiled, slick, superficial, pretty little boy.

And he's like just, he's our Justin Trudeau.

He really is.

And everybody doesn't like him.

And so what does he do?

He has to compensate for that.

And so he panders and panders and panders.

And every once in a while, he just said, man, this is a crazy place.

I'm going to China or I'm going to go to the Vatican.

And he's doing this.

It's even sicker because deep down in his dark heart, he's thinking, well, Joe Biden had that June debate.

And I know he was under pressure from the donor class and the Obamas to have one last chance.

So they're saying to Joe, okay, go out in June before we have the early balloting and the convention.

You get a big chance to take your Adderall and really do a State of the Union Phantom of the Opera speech.

And if he doesn't, that is, if he folds and he

starts talking about his uncle being eaten by cannibals or that he's the first person in his family

to go to college, or he starts talking about

in this debate that he's a semi-truck driver or that he was nosed out by Roger Stahlbach for a football quarterback or whatever scholarship, he's going to implode and you can get rid of him before the voting starts and before the convention.

And Joe is thinking,

ah,

this is my chance.

I will shine and then I'll shut them up before the convention.

And Gavin is going, I don't know what's going to happen.

If he blows it, he's out, and I may be in.

And I've got to get ready.

So I'm going to go Globetrot, fix up the nightmare Mad Max road called the 99, fix it up a little bit so too many people don't get killed this summer, even though it's got the highest death rate per 100,000 miles driven of any freeway.

I wrote about the 99 once, and the head of a big trucking company said, Dear Mr.

Hansen, I enjoy your column, despite your naivete.

Do you think that we let any of our truckers drive the 99?

We avoid it like the plague.

And every time he.

So he's now tinkering with the 99, a little bit on the 101, just here and there.

What he does in California, you have those two lanes each direction,

and there's not even freeways.

There's, you know, cross traffic on the 101 and some places and the 99.

And so, what he does is he takes a section and he puts six lanes, right?

And so, you're driving along, but, but, but, and all of a sudden, it's a modern freeway, it's three lanes, and the trucks are not in all three lanes.

They just tell you, they flip the bird at you and say, I'm driving in the left lane, and I'm driving on the right lane, and that's your problem.

There's, I know there's a 50-mile, 55-mile speed limit, I'm going to go 70.

And that's your speed limit.

So try to pass me, you can't do it.

But when they get three lanes, sometimes the Bolin will take the third lane, but usually they just take the two.

And so his solution is to make five miles of three lanes, and then you go back down to a backup bottleneck.

You can see that in 101 as you come into San Jose.

I get backed up all the time as the lanes start to collapse.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about whether DEI is dying on campus or not.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

We're back.

You can find Victor at X at

V D Hansen.

That's his handle.

And on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

So come join us there.

Victor, we have a new DEI manager who has defrauded both Facebook and Nike to the tune of

million from Facebook for

doing all sorts of things, creating vendors and paying off friends, et cetera, to get all this money for herself.

So living a lavish lifestyle.

And so that story's out.

But I think I wanted to talk broader about: do you think that DEI is dying?

I guess both in the corporation or on campus.

My own feeling is it's not because it's too embedded, but I was wondering if you could speak on on that.

Yeah, it's dying like the Oscars are dying or the Tonys or the Grammys or the Emmys or the NBA.

They're institutionalized or the White House correspondents dinner.

So there's a lot of people who have just ignored them, right?

But you've created a whole bureaucracy.

millions and billions of dollars in investment.

North Carolina got rid of it to their, they just canceled it and used the funds to pay for police.

And

they're trying to get rid of it in subtle ways.

So they're bringing back the SAT.

It's back at, I think, MIT.

I think maybe Yale's going to, I think Stanford will have to do it because they're in their fourth year of repertory admissions.

And without the SAT and comparative adjudication of GPAs, you're not going to be able to get students that can do your work that you feel made your reputation in the past.

So in that sense, maybe it's dwindling, and then you've got

almost every day, and it's not just coming from Christopher Ruffo, whom I like and admire, but almost every day there's a story about a DEI plagiarist.

And

did you see that the two that were at MIT, their thesis, Boys in the Hood,

and the other one was Sista, something.

And it was just...

It was nothing.

And yet it was plagiarized.

They have the two columns of her work plus the plagiarization.

They're almost, the whole thing was plagiarized.

And this is in the aftermath of Claudine Gay.

And you get the impression you've just scratched the surface.

And what you did is you created a whole exempt class.

We're going to give you a PhD, we're going to let you into graduate school, and we're not going to grade you.

We're just going to let you do what you want.

You can write a thesis.

I mean, Cal State Fresno in the 1980s, when

I was an MA advisor, there was a person there who was really.

she took a ruler and measured the margins.

She would not allow contractions in the thesis.

She looked at the footnotes to make sure they were the Chicago style.

It wasn't that easy.

And she would call me up and say, Victor,

you signed off on this thesis.

I said, I signed off on the content.

There were problems with it.

And she said, yes, but it doesn't meet our standard.

I said, well, then send it back to them.

But she did.

There's no standards in the university tonal for DEI.

So

what's happening?

There's about six fronts.

There is the plagiarism front.

More and more DEI people are

being found out, and it's disgraceful, and

it's blemishing their reputation.

That's the first front.

And then there's the anti-Semitic front.

The Palestinian students feel that their natural allies are DEI.

So if you're an African-American professor at Cornell, you can say you're exhilarated on news of October 7th.

If you're an African-American lecturer at Stanford, you can tell the Jews to go on one side of the room.

If you're the head of the Chicago chapter of BLM, you can put gliders there in a poster glorifying the death from the air Hamas attackers.

And when you look at the crowd, you get the impression that there's three components.

There's the DEI student and faculty people, of which the Middle Easterners think they are a component.

And then there's the Middle East component, and then there's what I would call the idiotic, useful idiot, the wealthy, entitled, elite white student.

But they all have one thing in common, don't they?

They all have a certain form of privilege.

And they think they're exempt.

And so that is the second front that's hurting DEI, that is objectly anti-Semitic.

And that's something that we've talked about that the black community just won't, it will not address.

It didn't address

Jesse Jackson when he said Jaime Town, it did not address Farrakhan, really.

And somebody, yes, he did.

No, he didn't.

It didn't.

Barack Obama had a picture with him, and they suppressed it.

Al Sharpton said, put on your yarmuk and I'll meet you.

Remember that?

Yeah.

Abject anti-Semite.

And

so they haven't addressed that.

So there's anti-Semitism is hurting it and the

plagiarism is hurting it.

The third thing that's hurting it is the natural allies of DEI

were

three constituencies.

Wealthy Asian Americans who

excelled at the SAT and GPA, wealthy white liberals whose parents had cattle brands from the Ivy League, Stanford, et cetera, and they felt that their kids, to get the proper trajectory and the good life, would have to go to these schools.

And at one time, these schools were 30% Jewish American.

And what did they do?

DEI, they went after all those constituencies and said that we want Latinos and blacks at higher and Native Americans at higher percentages in these universities than their demographics.

We don't believe anymore in in disparate

impact.

We believe in repertory.

So, given all the injustices that we've suffered, it's not enough to have 12, 11 percent black.

We want 15.

We want 18 Latino, etc.

Maybe we want a little bit more Asians because we got sued and to hell with the Supreme Court.

So, they've offended these liberal constituencies.

You know what I mean?

DEI did.

They've taken the slots from these liberal parents.

Their kids are getting perfect.

I just talked to someone yesterday.

His earlier daughter went to Harvard, and his kid had perfect SAT, perfect GPA, and he could not get in.

And

so it's happening, and they're doing that.

And so that's a third mark against them.

And number four,

these DEI people are running the universities, and I mean minorities and women.

And they're not Condoleezza Rice, believe me.

You know what I mean?

A proven stateswoman and competent diplomat and,

you know, who excelled

without any consideration of her race or gender.

These are people like the Sonoma State President.

I think he's a Chinese American fellow, and he should have never been appointed.

He's an interim president, and he just arbitrarily said, you know what?

I negotiated with the students, and I just, we're going to boycott Israel.

We're not going to buy anything that has anything to do with Israel.

That's against the state law to do that.

And they suspended him.

Or it's like the Cornell president.

She's just quit.

Or it's like the Penn president that she had to leave.

Or it's like the MIT president that's on her.

Or it's like Claudine Gay.

We could do this all day long.

All day long.

We could.

And so that's hurting it.

The nation is looking at DEI people

and they're starting to see that it

as I said,

it's anti-white, it's anti-merit, it's racist, it's anti-Semitic,

and it gives an exemption or amnesty for types of behavior.

And we can talk about the

just recently,

the woman who stole, what, five million dollars from Facebook Metro.

Yes.

And then she went to Nikon Nike,

and she did the same thing again.

Yeah.

I forgot her name.

Do you know her name?

Oh, yeah.

She was.

I'm putting you on the spot, but I just read about it.

Yes, Barbara Furlow Smiles.

She smiled, yeah.

I saw a picture of her.

She was, Miss Smiles was smiling, and I think they sentenced her five years.

Yeah, five points.

I can't believe I did this.

I'm so sorry.

Well, what did you do, Axelle?

How did you get away from the sophisticated electronic audits of Mark Zuckerberg's company?

These are the people who know everything about you.

So, how did this woman bill her nanny and her gardener and her friends and her relatives for nothing?

They didn't do anything, right?

She wrote invoices to all of them, then they gave her kickback.

It's the oldest con in the world.

So, how can you get by all of the electronic audits that knows when you're going to the bathroom, when you're drinking your coffee?

They know everything about you.

And the answer is, she was DEI.

And don't go there.

And if you cultivate that that soil, you reap what you sow.

You know what I mean?

It's just,

it's got to end because it's anti-merocratic.

I was talking to a very gifted pilot the other night, very gifted.

I've flown with him a couple, more than a couple, and he's a brilliant pilot.

And he was just lamenting that a lot of his friends in the military that were pilots, they're leaving because they know that the DEI in the military means that they're not going to be promoted based on on their actual performance.

And they're leaving.

And

they're short 45,000.

We talk about that ad nauseum, 45,000 recruits.

And if you look at the demographic, it's almost all white males that are not joining up in the numbers proportionate in the past.

And,

you know, you can't say anything, but all these rash of United problems in Boeing, they never tell you who the culprit is or what happened.

So

this is, I don't think people realize when they say America's exceptional, yes, it's the Constitution, yes, it's the

rich natural bounty, yes, it's the customs and tradition, but it's also that it's a society that ran on meritocracy.

There's no such thing as a pure meritocracy.

Everybody's trying to get his uncle or his cousin into college or I understand on the police force or firemen.

But by and large, compared to the alternative in the Arab world or Africa or Latin America, we don't hire our first cousins or our tribe or the same religion.

But DEI destroys that and it says we hire on the basis of tribalism.

And once you do that, you're going to go into a death spiral

because you're not looking at actual performance, past or present.

And therefore you have no way to adjudicate future performance, except that it will not be

merucratic.

And finally, the sheer mass of that anti-merocratic

behavior starts to overwhelm a society.

And I think that's part of what's, not the whole reason we have financial problems and poor governance, but the bureaucracies and our state agencies are

run by people who did not get to that position based on their superb achievement and definable performance.

They're just not.

Claudian Gay is, for me, she is a perfect example.

I was at Stanford as a busy professor when she went up for tenure in the political science.

She should have never been tenured based on her scanty publication record.

And we know now that portions of her thesis were,

what, plagiarized?

And that's what she

excerpted as part of her publication record.

They should have fired her then.

She had no publications to recommend her for a

full professorship at Harvard, much less the presidency.

So there you have it.

There you have it.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our podcast today, and I have one comment to you.

It's from Apple Podcasts.

I'm not sunny, but I feel compelled to write you VDH.

Number one, thank you for the wisdom of ancient times.

Despite your Eeyore

persona, we love it.

It helps with perspective.

Sunny Sink, I think she means Sammy Wink.

Her voice, it's like a combination of melting butter and honey.

Thank you.

I'm mellophilous.

And she is a perfect foil for Eeyore.

Love that.

Number three, power through Victor.

I live up north on the Puget Sound and walk my dogs every day listening to your wisdom.

Number four, living where I do, your perspective on the fall of Constantinople resonates clearly.

We, or our kids, are too rich.

No more words need to be said.

Number five, thank you and the, and I like,

quote, radio free Europe.

You are the same voice we need.

Darrell West Clinton from Washington.

Thank you.

Very nice letter.

Constantinople, I said that in a, I don't know if I said that on television or not.

I've been doing a lot of interviews, six or seven a day on the book, but

I did say it was very sad to read about Constantinople.

They were all on the walls.

Maybe the Darnellas, they're going to come up.

Maybe the ancient Hellspont will see a Venetian relief column.

Maybe somebody from the Black Sea will break through the Bosphorus and help us.

Maybe the internal glory of the Byzantines and Christendom and Hellenism will save it.

No, no, no, no, no.

I'm doing a, just finished, I'm doing an ultra-series.

And we're going to do a a podcast on each chapter of the book, and we have been doing that.

But I'm doing an ultra on five, the four chapters and what it does.

Because when I wrote that book, it was more historical.

Because I was, why do these societies destroy, you know, destroy their enemies?

Why do they wipe them out?

I know that Philip did to

Olynthus and excuse me,

to Olynthus, and the Athenians did to the Melians, but big, big cities, big empires.

It happens.

The Incas, and I picked four of them, but I didn't realize as I was writing it that it would be contemporarily, in contemporary terms, so relevant.

What we see at Ukraine, it's getting to an existential stage.

If they lose that war, they're going to be absorbed by Russia.

And

you saw what happened on October 7th.

And that's an existence.

And for the first time in my life, Iran has actually sent missiles that hit the soil of Israel.

And Israel had not attacked Iran directly.

And then you have air.

So

I think it's very relevant that,

especially given that human nature doesn't change, but the technology of destruction does.

So AI,

chemical, bio, nuclear.

And it would be much easier to destroy at Constantinople or Thebes or Carthage today.

And the people who would like to do that are no better, but I think a lot worse than Scipio and Alexander.

Well, thank you, Victor, and thanks to Mr.

Clinton for that comment.

And we'll be coming back on Thursday.

Again, I'll be standing in for Jack.

I hope I can live up to his work.

So thanks, everybody.

Thank you, everybody.

Thanks for listening.

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