Feminizing Pro-Hamas Protesters and Losing-Leaving California

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host.

You are here to get wisdom from the star and the namesake.

That is Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

It is waiting for you to go visit it and to subscribe.

I will tell you why you should be doing that later in this podcast, this episode.

We are recording on the 11th, which is the day before Mother's Day.

And it's also a few days after Victor's new book, The End of Everything, has come out.

I think we should begin the show today, Victor, by mentioning a pretty positive book review that's found in today's weekend Wall Street Journal.

And then among other topics, we should get your wisdom on.

I think we should start with a piece by Heather McDonald.

Heather's terrific.

You had her as a guest on one of the episodes last year.

We did.

Yeah, Heather has a piece in City Journal.

And it's on, I call it Chicks for Hamas.

It's probably inappropriate that I would say that, but it's titled Hysterics for Hamas.

So,

and a couple of other topics.

We'll get to all that, Victor, right after these important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show, Victor.

Maybe, you know, I don't know how often I've never written a book.

barely even read books,

never mind write one.

Never mind write a bestseller, which yours was, it came out of the box on

May 7th.

It was at the top of Amazon's

rankings.

You've got a terrific, I think, review in the Wall Street Journal today by Robert Kaplan,

who calls it a profound book.

It is a profound book.

Victor, you have any thoughts

about

that review?

I know you're humble and shy, but do you have any questions?

I was very appreciative because I've written, I think, 26 books, but once you get into opinion journalism

and once you become a political commentator and once you're on the right side of the spectrum, then all the other things.

I used to actually write book reviews.

Can you believe it, Jack, for the Times Literary Supplement in London and for the New York Times?

And I used to be reviewed favorably in those.

And then after I started to be identified as a conservative opinionist, boy i got clobbert and all of those venues were cut off but so the wall street journal is still

even-handed so i was really pleased they they're

i i really i've always liked robert kaplan i just i don't say that i've met him a couple of times but i don't just say that because he reviewed the book favorably but who who is he by the way oh he's written so many things on geography And

he is a,

I don't want to say an autodidact, but he's a traveler.

He wrote on the Balkans.

He wrote on the Iraq War, the Middle East, but he's an actual itinerant journalist where he goes to the actual places that he's interested in.

Firsthand, he interviews people.

He wrote a really good book on the Balkans.

And

he's kind of an appropriate person to review a book like you.

Well, he's a man of action is what I'm saying.

He's put himself into

a lot of dangerous places.

And he's written

his best book was Balkan Ghost.

I think that was the name of it.

And it was very influential in

mobilizing, as I remember, the Clinton administration to stop Milosevic and

the Serbian so-called slaughter.

And a lot of people got very angry at that book.

I was in Greece, I think, when it came out.

But

it was about the age-old hatreds, tribal rivalries

because of the clash of civilizations in the Balkans between Ottomanism and Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

So you had

Romania and

versus Serbia versus Albania and all of these different, and then the location where it was between

great powers like Germany and the Soviet Union or Daesh earlier Russia.

So it was a

very good book.

And, you know, it's very funny about, just as a side comment,

I think everybody should know when you write a book.

So our book started off at number one in Amazon.

I think it's 23 now.

It's been out eight days or seven days and six days.

But the point I'm making is that I've been on the New York Times bestseller list for The Case for Trump and The Dying Citizen for a while.

And

it's not predicated on how many copies you could sell.

You could be much, much higher in Amazon sales, which we account for about 70% of all hardback, but you will not necessarily be on the New York Times bestseller list, even though you sell more books than other people.

And they have a very complex formula they don't disclose, but it has a lot to do with reviews and books.

selected bookstore sales.

And so

I don't expect the end of everything to be on in the New York Times but seller list.

I just don't.

That was a fluke that the other two books were, even though they sold, you know, I think they've sold over well over 200,000 copies each.

And

so anyway, that was nice.

And I hope it helped sales.

I've been doing a lot of media every day, about seven or eight interviews, especially overseas.

This book,

the first book I've written, where there's more overseas interest.

I've been doing a lot in Britain and Australia, for example, on this book.

Who's that Australia guy?

I hate to put it that way.

Who's that Australia guy?

But you've done so many.

Huge, huge numbers.

Yeah, we had a million one time.

John Anderson, he was the vice deputy prime minister of Australia, Conservative.

He's a farmer.

He's a wonderful man.

He really is.

He's articulate.

He's bright.

He's well-informed.

He's very pro-American.

He's very worried about the reliance of Australia and the United States if we're going to,

as we did in World War II, you know, we were the only major power that had the ability to protect Australia after the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese, and we stepped up.

And, you know, my father has a good story when he was flying in the Marianas.

They took off and flew to Australia for a weekend, a party.

I don't know if it was authorized or not on their B-29.

Anyway, my point is that

I've been very fortunate for people like John Anderson.

And

I've been to Australia and I've been treated very well there.

It's very funny about Europe.

Every time I go to Europe, people are very nice.

If they want to come up and talk about a book I wrote or something, they watch Fox News.

It's kind of, I've made that analogy before about European conservatives.

They're like black conservatives.

And the minority of the intellectual, if you can call left-wing BLM type people, are kind of intellectuals.

But when you meet a black intellectual like Tom Sowell or Shelby Steele

or

Walter Williams, the late Walter Williams or

Roland Fryer, people like that, they're just superior in every aspect to anybody of any race.

And I think it's because they have to be because they're under so much pressure.

And the same thing holds true to European intellectuals.

There's so many brilliant French conservative intellectuals and British conservative intellectuals,

of the Roger Scruton Camus caliber,

Swiss too, and Swedish.

Every once in a while in my life, a Swedish journalist has stopped by my farm trying to write stories about expatriate Swedes, even though Mike Tai is Sweden director, are non-existent.

And

they're very conservative.

They're very, it's amazing.

And of course,

this week there's been all these stories about the immigrant riots in Malmo and places in Uppsala and Sweden.

I think the prime minister said this is unsustainable.

19% of the population is Muslim now.

And it's just part of this death wish we've discussed in the West, where

given our leisure and affluence, you can really see a society that's ossified and fossilized.

One barometer is the fertility rate, and it just dives in the West down to 1.3 or 4.

The United States is the lowest it's been, I think, since the Depression, 1.6.

And then the immigration, where people just open the doors and say, take over our civilization.

We can't handle it.

We're sick of it.

We're decadent.

And then the rise of people who are unmarried and have, you know, are never married or stay single.

And so it's very big video out this past week.

I don't know if you saw it of a Dutch politician, a woman, talking about the leadership of all the major cities there, all Muslim.

And then there have been any number of such

memes about Britain, major cities there all

politically Muslim, Muslim-led.

The world's changing, Victor, as you know.

You know, it's funny when I go to Hillsdale, it's like

this place, not just the educational component of the campus is a corrective of all the pathologies.

I was talking to a Hillsdale, I think it was an English professor, and they were, he said people made fun of him as being nearly, what was the word he used for his family size, disappointing

because he only had four children.

There's like eight children, nine children, ten children.

I think somebody there has 13.

They're all wholesome.

Whatever you want to say ideologically,

when you have so many people that are happily married with five, six, seven, eight kids, and they, you know, their kids are all successful in the sense that they're law-abiding and honest.

And something about that school, I don't know what it is, but they have been able to endure all of these assaults, the assault by the federal government against them, culture, the attacks on Larry aren't, and yet they get stronger.

Especially now, I mean, they're just at the top of the counter-revolution to the woke DEI, and they're just swimming in money and applications and they've got this wonderful faculty.

I mean, they're currently

the problem they have is that growth.

Sorry, go ahead.

Go ahead.

Well, I was just saying the growth is the real challenge for Hillsdale is to maintain its culture as Hillsdale as it grows.

I think that's a difficult thing to pull up.

Well, it is because a lot of left-wing people who remain left-wing are angry because the campuses are anti-Semitic, their children didn't get in because they were white, and they apply to places.

Their parents say, where would they get a wonderful education so they would master Shakespeare or they would read C.S.

Lewis or they would get mathematical facility.

Ah, Hillsdale.

And it's crime-free.

And

there's no protest.

There's no anti-Semitism.

I'm going to send my kid there.

So all of a sudden, Hillsdale goes up, I don't know what, maybe 800 or 900 applicants for three or four hundred of years ago, maybe up to 10,000.

I don't know what it is.

It's sky high.

And that puts an onus on them because they have this legacy of being traditionalist and conservative.

And yet, and they go by the SAT and GPA.

So what do you do with all these people that want in?

But like every leftist, they want in.

We fight it at Hoover.

We fight it everywhere.

They want to take the DNA and take over, you know what I mean?

It's like the Ottomans going into Constantinople.

They destroy Christendom in the West, and then they take Hagga Sophia and slap some minarets on it.

And that's what they do.

They'll take over foundations.

They take over everything.

So Hillsdale's got, I think they interview 95% of the students now.

But I think that where they really have been successful is the faculty because each person is vetted completely by the department.

The deans know what the Hillsdale message is, and then the president, Larry Arn, has the ultimate.

When you look at their history department, I mean, I'm just talking about people I've known for years, Tom Connor, Mark Kalkoff, Paul Ray.

I mean, and I could go on and on.

They have a wonderful classics department.

It's just the quality, you know, Wilford McClay of Land of Hope.

Remember him?

Oh, I love him.

He's terrific.

Brad Berzer, John Miller.

Yeah, that's a great thing.

son is a wonderful person his son is a classicist at hillsdale so

they just have great faculty you know it's it's funny too at hills at st at stanford when i was a graduate student it had one of the best history departments it really did i mean i may not have agreed with them ideologically didn't matter but they had uh

the Pulitzer Prize winner on the American experience, Don Kennedy.

And they had Gordon Craig in German history.

For a while, Stephen Osmond, the Reformation historian, was visiting the year I was there as a visiting professor.

And you look at it now, and there's no students, there's no major.

It's woke this and gender that, and gay this and trans this, and nobody wants to take it.

And you look at the faculty, nobody knows who they are.

And so in that void, The director of the Hoover Institution, Condoleezza Rice, has tried to create historians that could offer historical instruction in an alternate, well, it's not alternate, it's an additional or complementary civics program,

and then have scholars in history that they could consult.

And so

in the history project at Hoover, I mean, there's three of us that direct it, but Neil Ferguson, myself, and Stephen Kotkin, the great Stalinist biographer.

And then we're bringing in Barry Strauss, the the ancient historian, and Andrew Roberts is a visiting distinguished fellow.

So when you get people like Kotkin and Andrew Roberts and Neil Ferguson, Barry Strauss at Hoover, you have a much stronger history.

And somebody I went to graduate school, Josiah Ober, who's a classical historian, he's, if you look at the Google Scholar ratings,

all of these people are in the top 10 worldwide.

And then you compare it to the complementary department of Stanford that wants nothing to do with Hoover.

Right.

It's embarrassing because if you call this the Department of History at the Hoover University, the historians are some of the best in the country.

And yet there's this department right a few hundred yards away that wants nothing to do with an Andrew Roberts or Neil Ferguson.

They didn't allow Neil to be a member of the department.

I didn't

want to.

They tried to take him out, right?

Yes, they did.

When I was 21 years ago, I didn't even apply, asked to be a member of the classics.

I'd much rather go to the, I instead went to Hillsdale during my six weeks, you know, off

vacation.

I went the first, you know, August 25th to September 25th every year for 20 years.

That was my university affiliation.

I still go there.

I'm going to go there this year to give lectures.

But my point is that.

I do admire Condoleezza Rice.

She really looked at this, and she got in trouble, by the way, with the history.

She said that she wanted people to talk about big history or narrative history, you know, the Gibbon-type history, Macaulay history,

Livy history, Herodotus history.

So that's why she recruited, you know, she enhanced,

she brought Khotkin in, H.R.

McMaster, who's written a lot of books on history in addition to military studies.

and Norman Enmark, who's great on the Eastern European problems.

And then, of course, Andrew Roberts, I think he's the best narrative historian in the world.

And it's really fun to be there now with all these different historical people and the attention that it earns.

It's focusing on telling a story rather than your typical history professor who is the

gay

attributes of ping-pong in colonial America.

That is too wide.

You cannot be a world's expert with unimpeachable monopoly of knowledge if you're that wide a topic chat right sorry got to be a lot narrower

you have to have if you get three readers you're a success

well my friend the first time i wrote a book that was on the bestseller list you know somebody came up to me and said two things had happened in my career i had won this award for the American Philological.

They give it to the top teacher every year.

My friend John Heath won it too.

And when I won that and I had a book on the bestseller, Carnage and Culture,

somebody, I won't mention their name, came up and said, wow, you really destroyed your career.

Why did you do that?

And I said, what do you mean?

Why did I do that?

And he said, well, that just makes you a popularizer.

You have no academic credentials.

You're just writing for the masses.

And,

you know,

to get a teaching award, you have to have no standards.

And I thought, oh, my God.

That's, and then that

you know john and i wrote who killed homer

about

stuff like that and we were very criticized because we said in 20 years there wouldn't be greek offered in classics departments and we were off by

let's see we were off by three years yeah yeah too long right yeah yeah well

well my friend um that was all terrific i i think we might uh take a little break here here for an important message.

And when we come back, we'll get your thoughts, Victor, on Heather McDonald's new article in City Journal on hysterics for Hamas right after these messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show, but Victor, I just want to I want to say a word and then a few more words.

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Okay, Victor, more reading from me, which I know annoys some listeners, but trust me, it'll be over quickly.

Heather McDonald, who's just terrific.

I love Heather.

She's such

one of the more important public intellectuals in the conservative movement.

She writes this for City Journal, which I think many might agree is the best magazine in America, published by the Manhattan Institute.

Brian Anderson edits it.

And folks, if you're not checking out City Journal, well, do that.

Anyway, here's what Heather wrote in Hysterics for Hamas.

The female tilt among

anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria.

True, when activists need muscle

to echo the University of Missouri professor Melissa Clark's immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matters protests, males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example.

But the faces behind the masks and before the camera are disproportionately female.

And she gives a link to something from a Princeton,

recent Princeton demonstrations, and she asks the question, why the apparent gender gap?

Victor, she answers it, but I I think you might have some thoughts.

Why is there this

feminization of the leadership of these protests?

Yeah, she makes some good points.

And I think you're right about Heather.

She's one of those rare

female opinion,

and I don't mean because they're female, but rare because they're courageous.

And they tend to be,

I must say, they tend to be more female.

You think of Julie Kelly.

and Heather McDonald, Carolyn Glick, Molly Hemingway, people like that,

that are, they just write the truth and let people handle it as they may.

But I think her point is that

with all of this emphases on gender and race,

we really don't appreciate the fact that 55% of the campuses are female.

And in these disciplines, in graduate school, especially in the humanities, it's up to 60%, 65%.

So A, there's more women there.

And then

they tend to be, she said, did she imply they were more emotional?

I don't think she did, did she?

Or maybe she said they were.

I think the.

Well, the title is Hysterics or Hamas.

Yes.

And

by the way, I don't know if you need to know this, but

the word hysteria comes from

uteros or

uterus.

Oh, really?

Yes, I'm pretty sure it does.

I remember one.

And the idea, it comes from, I think it comes from an Egyptian idea, but anyway, it's

it was the

inability, something was wrong with your uterus and you couldn't bear children.

I had something, it was the empirical description of hormonal problems, right?

Menopause or

postpartum depression.

So when women acted erratic, they said, and they were not necessarily wrong.

They weren't saying, I mean, we think, oh, how sexist they were, but actually

they were able to

see that women were prone to postpartum depression.

Women were prone to menopausal

ovary, fallopian tubes, maladays that would affect your psychological well-being.

And they centered that in the uterus, and they called it uterat, utesteria.

It was uterus disease and it made you crazy.

And so

I think she uses that word.

And so what she's saying is that I think that was kind of a pun maybe that women are more prone to hosterias.

But I think what she meant is that

they use the muscle, the men for the muscle and the women for the emotion.

And maybe

the fact that they're more visible.

I would add another component,

maybe more controversially.

If these protests were to take place in Gaza, let's say that there's a big protest

and they want to object to the fact that Hamas got everybody killed in the retaliatory, not everybody, but they got into this war.

or that they haven't had, better yet, they're protesting they haven't had an election in 20 years in the West Bank, in Gaza, and Jordan, and Egypt.

And Iraq is different.

They have had elections thanks to the United States and Syria.

And

do you think women would be at the forefront of that?

I don't.

And Iran?

They just executed a woman in Iran for criticizing the government and beat her to death, 16 years old.

So my point is, women can't participate in that manner in the Middle East.

So when they come over here,

when you look at who is leading these protests and who gets arrested, in many cases, they're women.

And in many cases, they're not even students.

Some are students.

So a lot of the high-profile women's role in the pro-Hamas

demonstrations is just the fact that they have no outlet in the Middle East and they want to come over here and fully express their left-wing pro-Hamas feedings.

It's really true.

It's the most bizarre thing, though.

It's such a paradox and inconsistency and terrible irony that people who have no freedom to express themselves on any topic and if they dare veer into

the left-wing cultural realm and they mention gay marriage or

promiscuity or define women should define their own sexuality and birth control and make birth control

and dental dams, all this stuff.

I'm just taking it from the Chicago protesters.

They wanted dental dams.

They wanted morning after pills, etc.

So if they were to embody that in the Middle East, they would be killed.

So they come over here,

and what do they do with their newfound freedom?

They say death to America and death to the Jews, and they're anti-Semitic.

And yet, if you say, well, now that you're over here, you're resonating the entire credo of Hamas.

Yes.

Do you want to go back over there?

No.

So you want to come over here and then use the

kindness and the liberality of your host, but you have only ingratitude toward the host?

Yes.

And you don't want to go back and feel kindred fides with the Palestinians or the Egyptians or the Jordanians?

No.

And so you figure.

You figure.

It's the same psychological disconnect between these wealthy, elite kids that

go in and destroy things.

And then

they make maintenance workers, they make police clean it up, they spit on them.

And you think, well, you're supposed to be leftist.

You're supposed to love the muscular classes, but they don't treat them well.

And then when they get arrested, they're so, they're like little Bolsheviks.

Or they're Jacobins.

And they think it's 1793 and they're going to guillotine as they yelled at somebody, guillotine, guillotine, guillotine.

But then when they get caught, like that tearful Arizona State,

and Sammy keeps talking nonstop about the Portland guy.

Remember him, Jack, that ran at full speed and hit the shield of the policeman and bounced off like a ghost.

Like a nerf, like a nerf human being.

Not even like a nerf poll.

Anyway, so the point is that they're really brave.

They're on the barricades.

They think it's les Miserab.

They're doing all these things.

And then they get, oh, we're going to have to.

You can't arrest me.

I have to graduate.

I didn't get my gluten-free chips.

You didn't send me my birth control pills.

How dare you?

And did you see

the cut with the kind of obese woman filming the other Palestinian women they were screaming about?

They were on a...

a hunger strike.

We're immunocompromised.

We're shaking.

We haven't eaten.

They're going to let us die.

Just eat.

It's your decision.

Anybody gives them the choice of living by their own principles, they go crazy because they're so used to being hypocritical.

And this has done more damage to higher education and the left.

The thing that is saving the left right now are finals and summer vacation because if this went on, And I just say that, Jack, because remember our favorite Kamala Harris when in June, after they tried to burn down the St.

John's Episcopal's Church, they went in, Antifa BLM people went and tried to break into the White House grounds.

Much worse than January 6th.

They tried to break in and get at the President of the United States.

They put him in the bunker.

Then the New York Times crowed that he was cowardly for going in the bunker.

Remember that?

Right.

Yep.

And they had done the Portland

precinct and the federal courthouse and all that stuff.

And then Camilla Harris said, and this isn't going to stop, nor should it stop.

It's going to go on.

It's going to go on all the way to the election.

And all of a sudden, Snopes and all PolitiFact, all the people came out and said, she didn't mean that.

She was talking about the mostly peaceful demonstration.

No, she wasn't.

She wasn't.

And the point she was trying to make is this, that the president is a conservative Republican, and these are left-wingers, and this is hurting him because it shows he's not in control.

And therefore, I favor the violence.

And this is exactly what what Molly Ball wrote in Time in that infamous essay that I beat to death like a rug.

And she said they coordinated the demonstrations to coincide along with the gift giving from people like Mark Zuverberg.

And she called it a cabal and conspiracy and mail-in voting.

Okay.

So now they have all of these protests, right?

And Camilla Harris is supportive.

Why doesn't she come out and say, and these protests at Harvard and Princeton and Yale, they're not going to end, nor should they end, and they're going to go all the way to the election?

No, she doesn't want that because they are on the same side as a sitting president.

And they are hurting him because he can't stop it.

Trump couldn't stop it because

when he tried to call out the National Guard, his own military in the Pentagon and the retired generals trashed him and governors and mayors mayors of all these blue states said, we're not going to let them in.

I think even the Minnesota Attorney General's daughter tipped people off about it.

So,

but now

Joe Biden can stop it because all he has to do is call up the mayors and say, I'm sending in the National Guard.

And you're on my party and

you're going to accommodate them.

He won't do it.

So now Kamala Hara, they want it to stop.

And they think that the summer recess will stop and save them because they know that it's bleeding candidates.

You can see what's going on.

There's two issues now that are really disgusting on the left.

One is

people like John Tester in Montana.

I've always fought for secure borders.

He's never said a word until now.

You know what I mean?

Oh my gosh, what a thought.

I've always fought.

And then there's some Democrats coming out and say, we've got to stop.

We've always been for just peaceful demonstrations.

No, you guys were all egging on BLM and Antifa in 2020.

The only demonstration you ever opposed was January 6th.

So the point I'm making is that

this is hurting the Democrats.

And they don't know how to stop it.

And they won't stop it because secretly they're sympathizing with it.

Because secretly, the Democratic Party is anti-Semitic.

And it's run by the squad.

It's run by the Black Caucus, the Latino caucus, Antifa.

so secretly

blm yes bernie sanders elizabeth warren all of them joe biden joe biden

cutting off aid

yeah they're killing biden on those quotes where can you believe this is reprehensible anybody would even think of cutting off aid

But he did it before.

You remember in 2006, he was grandstanding.

This is really, you know, I don't want to get off topic, but man, he has had a bad month because

there's something about him.

I've never seen a president in every aspect of his presidency melt down cognitively, physically,

issue-wise.

Can't speak, can't lecture, betrays his friends, family is utterly corrupt, can't finish a talk if he sees a young preteen in the audience without either mentioning her eyes or come over here and blow that awful turkey gobble on that young girl, that baby's neck in Finland.

Everything about him is melting down, and they know it.

And that little stupid little gimmick, that Faustian bargain they cooked up about,

well,

Pete Buttigig's going to get out, and Elizabeth Warren's going to get out, and Bernie's going to get out, and Julian Costro and Spartacus are going to get out.

And then good old Joe Biden from Pennsylvania will come in and then we'll control him like a puppet.

He thinks that phrase, come come on, man, is like some magical incantation that is going to persuade anyone of the lie that follows.

And you saw this week about.

Don't forget his twin to that.

Come on, man.

And then the other one, no joke, no joke.

When he says no joke, you know he's lying.

He's right.

Yeah.

He just lies.

He has some really whoppers this week.

He said that he came in with 9% inflation.

It was 1.4%.

That was just incredible.

Did you see Fareed Zakaria the other day, or is it today or yesterday?

He said

that we've got to scrap the whole immigration system and we've got to make people apply for asylum where they came from and get rid of catch and release.

and audit.

And then I could not believe the liberal

interrogator said to him, oh, you mean

the Trump plan?

Anyway.

Well, Biden this week also, like, come on, people have money to spend.

Like,

it's the price of

gasoline at $7 a gallon.

Big Mac has gone up three times.

They said it.

Three times the price.

You know what's happened in California?

We had a $75 billion deficit, and he's been cutting.

He's still got $27 billion to go.

And he can't raise taxes because we have the highest income tax at 32%.

We have the highest assessed valuation, so they're cheating on the old restriction of one percent.

It's up to two percent in many districts.

People can't afford the property tax, they can't afford the insurance.

My insurance has doubled, house insurance has doubled, car insurance has doubled, and people can't afford it.

So, you know what they're doing?

They're cheating,

or they're not paying.

And this is a civilizational breakdown: one quarter

all PG ⁇ E, Pacific gas and electric, gas and electric bills are not functioning.

They're not being paid.

And because we're a left-wing communist state, and rather than cut off the power, which you can't do, they are assessing everyone who makes over $150,000 up to

over $100 a month.

Nothing to do with the power you use.

Just a,

you are going to pay this because you live in California and we're socialists and this will cover the bills that aren't being paid.

And then we have the largest black market in the world, I think, or the fifth largest economy in the world.

But I can tell you, I'm just amazed two miles from where I live on a Sunday.

You can buy everything, Jack.

You want to buy a brand new lawnmower?

You can get it out at the swap meet.

You want to go get a suit of clothes?

You can get it.

You want to get a Sego palm, you can get it.

I don't know where it comes from.

Some of it looks brand new, but there's no sales tax.

And the people there are not paying income tax.

And I can drive in a five-mile radius and I can at least find nine four-corner.

And I don't mean people are peddling Hispanic chocolate drinks, that true, or papaya or mango.

Yes, they're doing that.

But you can buy clothes, you can buy flowers, you you can buy tools, you can buy bicycles, anywhere.

So what I'm getting at is, and then I was at the bank not long ago talking to a teller, I won't mention the bank, the town, and she was, I was getting,

had a check and I got cash because I was traveling.

And she said, you would not believe.

the amount of people who come in here and they want $10,000 in cash.

And I said, well, why do they want it?

Because she said, everybody has to pay cash to get anything done in California.

And people are working off the books like crazy.

And I, and you know what?

I get angry because almost every person I've had that comes to do something says to me,

I want cash.

And I said, I'm not going to do it.

I have to pay.

I have to pay income tax.

I pay half my over 60% of my income goes to

federal 38%

and 13.2% and Obamacare and payroll tax and property tax and car.

I'm not going to do that.

Well, then you get in line because they're not going to do it.

And this is because they don't want to pay the 13.2%

income tax.

This state is just,

people are either going to the black market

or

that means they're buying things with no sales tax and they're not reporting the profits in income tax, or they're just dysfunctional and they're not paying their rent, they're not paying their traffic tickets, and they're not paying their power bill.

And because they're considered DEI, because this is a minority-majority state,

no problem.

And then, third, they're not doing it, they're just dropping out.

I was talking to a person in the mountains this winter, and I was complaining that all of

for 16 years, I had comprehensive fires insurance in Huntington Lake, and I always paid it on time.

And I was careful never to file a claim.

If I had a leaky roof, no problem, I would fix it and pair with the damage.

When the snow got horrendous and knocked a gate, I never filed a claim, never.

If a bird flew into a window, I never filed a claim.

I didn't want to lose it.

It was so hard to get, and I got it.

Then we had a big aspen fire,

and my house was not burned.

And I built the house with non-combustible materials, pulp,

concrete, paneling, Drex decking, composition, fireproof.

Okay.

And

guess what?

They canceled it.

They cancel it.

And I asked them, why are you kidding?

We're getting out of the business.

Nobody can do it in California.

We don't want to insure any of them.

There's no fire protection.

I'm right next to a fire, very good volunteer fire.

I have a hydrant right across the street from my house.

Doesn't matter.

California's forest management is derelict.

They let stuff burn

and they don't take care of the forest.

And they don't want people living up there anyway.

That was the best when I called around.

That was based on the message I got.

I talked to the fire inspector for the insurance.

And then you have this fair plan.

It's a state socialist plan of last resort.

You pay double the triple the

triple the premium, five times the deductible, and 50% of the coverage.

And guess what?

I was talking this winter to get back to that.

People are not buying fire insurance.

Can you believe that?

Yeah.

They're not going to do it.

They just say, I'm not going to do it.

I'm not going to pay $10,000, $15,000 a year.

I just can't afford it.

Plus the increased property.

Property taxes have gone up 40% in the last four years in California.

You know, Victor, we asked for these

listeners to provide questions so we could do these podcasts, record some podcasts when you were away.

And a lot of them were from people from California with these

really

sad stories about, I was born here, grew up here, loved living here, and I'm being, it's almost not, I'm moving out of the state.

It's like I'm being chased out of the state.

It's just impossible to live there.

Well,

it's crazy.

And remember that,

okay, so I got a, I'll give you an example.

A teacher who's very close to me wrote me a note that they need extra units as all teachers.

So they're going, but part of the requirement to get the extra units, they have to take these mini courses.

And

this person sent them to me today.

Orientation and gender identity in public schools.

Number one.

Confronting white nationalism in schools.

Number two, three, decentering white culture and recentering diversity using picture books.

Number four.

Empowering educators, recognizing, responding to tax on inclusive practices.

Five.

LGBTQ and queering in the middle.

Six.

Male privilege, seven.

Get this is number eight.

No, Karen, there is no boogeyman, debunking the myths of critical race theory.

So that is what every public teacher takes to get extra units.

But I thought there was no such thing as critical race theory.

So the, yes, the point is if you're a white male, they're just basically without any empirical evidence saying to you,

you are toxic and we're going to teach people to hate you.

Right.

And male, white people.

Okay.

So they did that with the Pentagon.

Remember that?

We're going to study Professor Kindy, racism, Mark Milley, Grand Standards, so did Lloyd Austin, and so did the chief of naval operations.

They got up in front of the Congress.

We're going to make everybody read Kendi and we're going to look for white privilege, white rage, white supremacy.

And then, you know, two years later, oh, we didn't find any, and we don't know.

I can't believe it.

Well, we did lose 45,000 people who die

inordinately in our wars.

And so they're going to do the same thing for California.

And maybe it's by,

and they're driving out,

if you look at the Exodus, and I've looked at at the demographics, they're mostly upper white,

entrepreneurial and professionals.

And they're leaving because

not just that they can't afford it, but they feel unwelcome.

And they feel people are attacking them on the basis of their race.

And if you look at the public schools and what I just read, they're correct.

If you look at Stanford University, where I work, more 20%

of the incoming class is white, despite the Supreme Court ruling that just went down.

And they don't, these universities are,

they're out extra-legal.

They don't think they have to comply with any federal statute or any Title IX or anything.

And so I think people are going to continue to leave.

And

they're going to, it's already, you're going to see that when you take a particular demographic that used to be the majority that created the state and you demonize it and you hate it and you blame it and then you drive it out, then you're $76 billion in debt.

And one quarter of the population lives below the poverty line almost.

And one third of the welfare recipients flock to your state.

And you have 27% of the people were not born in the United States from all different countries, mostly poor, and they need civic education, which you don't believe in.

And pretty soon, you get on a road in California, and it's decrepit, and it's under construction slowly because of unionized labor.

And then you see the craziest drivers in the world.

And every once in a while, when you get up to $100 million in traffic tickets, like Jerry Brown did, you just say, you can't pay.

They don't pay.

It's free.

You don't have to pay, depending on your income.

And so people just, they've had it.

My daughter just moved up to the foothills, and one of their close neighbors just said,

they were a wonderful family, homeschooled, beautiful home in the foothills.

They had moved there to get away from the madness of the Bay Area.

We're leaving.

Can't take it.

We're leaving.

And so this is the,

this is the, you know, Robert, Roger Simon wrote a good book about Exodus from California.

And it's one of the unstold, it's

a phenomenon of our time that's much bigger than the Oklahoma diaspora to California.

The third generation that came from Oklahoma, now whose grandparents came from Oklahoma, they're leaving.

They're going back to Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas.

Another great thing, theme is somebody should write a book on how in the world

did the old South of 11 states of the old Confederacy that had institutionalized racism, and some of them had embraced Jim Crow,

how did they end up

60, 70 years after the start of the civil rights as more conducive to black Americans than the North, the Union North?

In other words, people in the inner city of Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco, Los Angeles are going to the South.

And why are people in liberal California going to the South?

And I think you can just listen to that debate between DeSantis and Newsom for all of Gavin Newsom's

cock of the walk, prancing and lying and all of his slick stuff.

He lost the debate and he had to lie because DeSantis just hit him with fact after fact.

And that is so strange that you can, if you go to a red state, you will have more personal freedom.

you will be safer, you will be more prosperous, and

you'll find friendlier, nicer people.

Oh, no question.

Victor, having grown up in the Bronx, I would consider that a northern state, a blue area.

And when I was first married, Sharon and I are first married, we lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia for about six years.

I know for a lot of people that's not considered the South, but Sirius House was by our standards.

And the racial, if

whatever racial radar i was entitled to have i thought wow where i was living in virginia was much more hospitable and much less overtly racist than what it is i experienced or lived in in the in in new york absolutely right the north is the hotbed of racism i when i go on the stanford campus and i look at posters and I read course descriptions and I read the Stanford Daily, it's a racist society.

It really is.

It's just obsessed with tribal identities and identity.

It is.

It's just crazy.

And they got what they wanted, didn't they?

They got a four-month camp of Gaza people screaming and yelling anti-Semitic epithets.

And maybe we should talk just for a second about what these campus protests.

There was something at Stanford.

Did you see that?

Oh, that the guy testified.

He was on our podcast.

Yeah, we had him on our podcast.

Yeah, and he testified to the endemic

anti-Semitism on the Stanford campus.

There was one really good story this week.

Did you see the Delaware School of Design?

I don't know what it is, but obviously it's well known.

And they had an occupation, just like everybody else.

It's a very simple campus.

And the president said, would you please leave?

It's against the rules, and you're disrupting the free access to university facilities on the part of the majority of the students.

No.

Free Palestine, river to the sea.

Would you please leave again?

We'll give you one extension.

No.

Okay, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to remove you and we're going to give you a choice.

You can be suspended immediately if we remove you, or you're going to have to go to repertory

or repatory reparations.

Right.

They don't mean reparations like everybody thinks they mean reparation.

So they said, no.

So they removed him.

And they said, okay, what do you want to be?

You want to be arrested and suspended from school?

No, it is no.

Okay, here's what you're going to have to do.

You're going to have to clean up that God-for-awful mess you made and pay for the damages.

And then you're going to have to go into a big session and address all the students and listen to how you impacted their education negatively.

And then you're going to apologize.

That's what the president did.

That was brilliant.

What if they did that at Yale?

Delaware School of Design, I think it was.

I could not believe it.

Somebody sent it to me.

What if Stanford's president did that?

What if Yale, okay, you have a choice.

You hate Yale so much.

Just leave and you'll be arrested if we have to pull, and you're going to be suspended and you you won't get your little Yale BA.

Or if you're from the Middle East, that's Sionora, your student visa's over with.

Or you can clean up all the feces, all the urine, all the condoms, all the trash, all the food, sweep it up so the proletariat and working class maintenance people that you idolize from a distance but despise, and you rough them up in Hamilton Hall, remember, at Columbia, then they don't have to do it.

And then you're going to pay for all the windows and stuff you broke.

And then that's not all.

You're going to get into a big arena and you're going to have a big panel, all of you, and you're going to have everybody ask you a question of

how did you, this is how you destroyed my final year at Yale.

And you're going to like a conservative cultural revolution.

Yes.

And they would like that because that's what they love: ideological

retraining and rebooting.

Right.

And

did you see the guy also

in Central, you know, the Central Park World War?

Every time I've been to Central Park, I try to go to that World War I memorial.

It's so pretty and beautiful.

And the kid that spray painted it?

No, what happened?

His dad turned him in.

Yes.

He was 16.

He was 16.

So

I did Brian Kilmade tape it yesterday.

It's going to be on by the time we hear this tonight.

But

one of the nice things when you go on to those Fox shows and tape, you get to listen to the whole show.

And

there was an argument of whether it'll be on tonight, whether

we have hit peak woke.

And Brian Kilmade was making the argument that

roast that they did for Tom Brady, the quarterback.

Tom Brady, yeah.

Sure.

There were some politically incorrect jokes and that mark they knew.

And then he mentioned some comedians who are selling out just saying what they want

and

I would have added they're reinstating the SATs at MIT and I think a few other universities just the beginning and when you look at the presidents of these universities

they are picking a lot of male white males now

And they're doing it at Stanford and they've done it in two or three other places.

And that's just shocking.

It's so weird because almost every time the president of Cornell just quit.

Where did all these women come from?

55% of the population of the school, but I mean, my president of Harvard, president of MIT, president of Penn, president of Cornell, you know,

president of U.S.

George Floyd.

I mean, this is not the reaction to George Floyd.

This was happening prior to that.

It's this trend.

It's what

Heather McDonald had called that war on young white boys, white males.

I don't know.

I don't get that.

You know, there is a,

all of the unhappiness of the DEI industry is all directed at white males, but there's never any, what's the word, appreciation.

So this was a 90%, 95% white at the founding, and it was 90% white until, you know, Ted Kennedy changed the immigration and all that.

And this is why it was so awful.

But if that were be true, why do they,

why is it such a nice place everybody wants to come from?

Right.

I mean, what were the traditions that drop people?

Should that group of people who died on Okinawa just said, you know what, we're white, toxic males.

We'll let the nice Japanese take over and kill everybody.

And they have a much better tradition than white male toxicity.

And oh, by the way,

you know.

Fascism and Germany and Italy and Nazism, that was not bad.

And Soviet communism, that wasn't that bad.

You can only kill, you know, 20 million of their own.

And, you know, Mao killed 75 million, but I like that tradition.

I'm Anita Dunn.

I work for Obama.

That's my hero, Mao.

Break some eggs.

Yeah, look at these white, toxic American people who follow the Constitution.

What do they do?

World War I, we should have lost.

World War II, no big deal.

Soviets beat the German, all that stuff.

Oh, Shiloh, Gettysburg.

You know, why would these crazy white males attack each other and kill 700,000 of themselves just over the plight of black slaves?

I mean, think about it.

So

I never got that, that there were all these good things about America, and I've never associated them with white people.

I've always associated them with Americans.

I didn't care what they looked at.

But the left comes along and says, no, no, Victor, you're wrong.

These are white people who created slavery and

they did all the bad things and the bad things outweigh the good.

Okay, if that's true, then why does everybody want to come to the legacy of the United States?

Why do they do it?

Why don't they say, white people, vote, I'm not coming up.

I'm an indigenous person from Oaxaca.

I'm not going to set foot in that white male-founded country and those toxic legacies.

But they do.

And no one can explain it.

Well,

we've got to do one more spot, Victor, and maybe time for one more quick little topic.

I'd like to pick up on what you were talking about at Stanford and Kevin Fagelis and

some of the thought processes on students as children.

And let's get to that right after this final message.

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

Again, we're recording on Saturday, the 11th of May.

Tomorrow, when we are talking, is Mother's Day, and this particular episode is out on Tuesday the 14th.

Victor, I touched on this with you in a previous podcast, but Kevin Fagelis testifies before Congress, 30-year-old Stanford student, a little older than most, and he says,

and he's talking about

these students as children, and so have others.

So did Mayor

uh adams of new york new york city when the cops went into columbia and it was all we have to protect the children so anyway um he writes uh fagulous was actually testified it's a it is the job of the uh the parent is to guide us in a direction unfortunately it's the university and the board of trustees of the university and the leadership he's talking about stanford that are failing in their obligation as surrogate parents of these kids to discipline them and hold them accountable and tell them that it's unacceptable to essentially terrorize Jewish students.

Now, Victor, I don't want to seem to be in disagreement with what he says, but this selective, not by him, but across the board,

the students

are children, but

they're elevated by the administration when they agree to negotiate with them, right?

Standards.

Well, how come they're not children at that level?

But they're children when we want to say, well, this is really done by outside

activists.

They're certainly not children.

Men who are 18 are not, and women in this country are not 18 when they're children,

excuse me, when they're 18.

They're not children when they're asked to go serve and die for their country, but these little candy hineys

are selectively children.

So I think he said that, I think the correct term, what he meant was

these children that should be adults.

In other words,

they're at an age where their grandparents were flying B-17s a week.

Yes.

And they're at an age where people in the Depression

were getting married at 18 and working 20 hours a day.

And that's what I think he means.

Yeah, no, yeah.

I mean, it's just

for society to call 18-year-olds

children to start acting that way.

I think it's disastrous for

a country to...

Their prolonged adolescence is what they are.

But the faculty are children.

I've said that before.

The faculty

have never grown up.

They went to undergraduate, graduate school, and right into the university in tenure, and they've never been out in the real world.

They're more culpable than the students.

I've spent 50 years with them.

They're the most dysfunctional.

And I don't mean that in a negative, stereotypical way, because I've met some brilliant, some of my best friends that use that phrase, have been faculty.

But the point I'm making is the majority of them are children.

And, you know, they're just whiny.

And, you know, you, you,

I remember when

there was cuts at CSU and I was in a faculty lounge with about five of them and they were laying some people off.

And

this person says,

well, we work harder than anybody.

And

we didn't get our 3%.

I said, the state is broke and they're going to cut and they're going to lay off people.

Now,

they wouldn't.

I said, they do that every day.

I said, I have watched farmers blow their brains out.

I said, I have a good friend that hung himself, took an OD, shot himself, and

let carbon monoxide to make sure he killed himself because he was going broke.

I had another good friend that had a curable lymphoma and shot himself.

So, because that was the great tragedy of the early 80s with the Farm Depression.

So,

your little whining doesn't matter.

And it was just amazing how these people were just clueless, that they were so important, and you would not err, and they were so morally superior, and they just didn't believe anything applied to them.

And,

you know, as I said, I have to go to university tomorrow for the week and my routine.

And

they're back back at it at Stanford again and

when you walk by you can't get away from them.

They write stuff on the sidewalk and chalk.

They come up to you.

They hand you stuff and then when you engage them and you shouldn't engage them because they want you to engage them then

it's

ignorance, ignorance.

And

I asked one of them So

what was the deal with Transjordan?

They didn't know that Transjordan became Jordan and it was the area under the British mandate that was east of the Jordan.

They have no idea.

No idea.

Dare to pick it out on a map of the world.

It's an ignorant, arrogant group of people and they're entitled.

And what has happened is they have torn off the veneer of the campus that nobody really knew what was going on that wasn't on it.

And they showed the entire world.

that they were spoiled, they were violent, and they had no moral compass.

They could not distinguish between a period of peace on January 6, on October 6th,

and then on October 7th, Hamas went in and mutilated, mass raped, decapitated,

murdered, and took hostages of over 1,400 people, including hostages and the murdered.

And then for 20 days, the IDF did not go into Gaza.

And they were protesting on behalf of the people who had murdered them.

Or, in the words of a

corneal professor, I was exhilarated.

It was exhilarating to see October 7th.

And then

when the IDF finally went in to get the perpetrators,

nobody in Gaza said, take them.

Here they are.

Here's the hostages they took.

We didn't do this.

We want peace.

No, they shielded them in mosques, schools, hospitals.

And then when the IDF tried to pry them out, they said, look at you.

you're murders, genocide.

And

that's the moral bankruptcy of these campuses.

Yeah, but I'm glad you said tore off this gap because this is not something that started on October 8th.

This has been

right under the surface

for years.

Hey, Victor, we've come to the...

We're running out of time.

We've run out of time other than to say a couple of things.

One is that you have a website, The Blade of Perseus, and I want to urge our listeners to visit.

We have lots of new listeners.

Go to VictorHanson.com.

You're a fan of Victor.

That's why you're listening.

You must be a fan of his writing, too.

And you can find the links to articles, and actually, going way back to essays he's written for American Greatness, this weekly syndicated column.

Yes.

Which, to read them, you need to subscribe, and you should.

Five bucks gets you in the door.

It's $50 for the full year.

And links to Victor's books also

is VictorHanson.com.

I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society.

So please check that out.

Go to civilthoughts.com.

Sign up.

Again, free.

I send out every Friday.

get an email in your it's in your inbox 14 recommended readings i'm pretty confident you will like it.

Books, many go to Apple's rating system.

I don't listen on.

I don't have Apple, so I don't know.

But the rating system there, you can rate this podcast zero to five stars.

And many people also leave comments and we do read them.

But I have a comment today, Victor, from

from a friendly Facebook group for the show, the Victor Davis-Sanson Fan Club.

And it's from Paul Puchinow.

Paul, if I mispronounce your name, I'm sorry, but he writes, thanks to VDH for bringing up the topic, which you and I, Victor, discussed in a recent podcast, that Anthony Blunt might have not only spied for the Soviets, but for the Nazis as well.

I'm a World War II and espionage buff and was not aware of that.

I looked up the book you referred to.

Victor, it is The Traitor of Arnhem by Robert Verkeik.

I may have said that wrong.

If anyone else is interested in learning about that topic, which Medih talked about

in this podcast,

thank you, Paul.

For that, again, we do read the comments, whether it's on Apple or Victor's website

or

on the Facebook group.

On Twitter, excuse me, I have to call it X, not Twitter anymore.

On X, Victor's handle is at BD Hanson.

And Victor writes once, twice a week, writes very long, almost column-ish posts there.

So, So, Victor, you've been terrific.

I know this is coming out after Mother's Day, but my mom is still around.

Many of you who are listeners are mothers, late, late, late, but still

very happy Mother's Day to all.

We do consider them mothers, right, Victor?

I'm not going to say birthing persons day.

Who are you to say?

You will be fired if you say men cannot have children.

Oh, yeah, but I I failed biology.

And my wife is a mother.

God bless her.

Hey, Victor, you've been terrific, really terrific.

Thanks, Victor, for everything.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.