Crimes and Miseducation

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The star and namesake Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

The Blade of Perseus, that is the name of his official website.

Its web address, victorhanson.com.

You should go there and you should subscribe.

And I'll tell you why.

later on in this podcast.

We are recording on Saturday, the 27th of April.

This particular episode, I think, is up on May 1st or thereabouts.

Victor, as ever, plenty of things to get your wisdom on.

We have

some incredible Jew hate on campuses.

We have

American security issues, the pullout of troops.

stationed in a couple of African countries.

What the hell is going on there?

We have some

prosecutors, prosecutorial madness.

I don't think that's news to anyone, but there's a new little wrinkle that came out today.

And also, if we have time, we'll talk about a new push for

a national push, a federal push of urging Joe Biden to create a commission on reparations.

So we'll get to all that right after these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, maybe let's let's get started on

things prosecutorial.

There's news today, this morning.

I saw it in the New York Post, which I subscribe to every day.

I got the actual paper of this upstate New York prosecutor who was pulled, was speeding.

And the cops tried to pull her over.

And no, she just kept going and had her excuses, pulled into her own driveway on the way.

She called the chief of police in the town.

She thought it was, well, who knew?

You know, they just, she thinks she's above and beyond.

We've seen this before.

And of course, we see prosecutors in New York, Victor, as you know, who are doing demented things with the law.

Victor, you want to riff on this?

Yeah, I mean, I saw that too.

And she was going 20 miles above the speed limit.

And 35 is usually an area that is, you have to be very careful.

And there's a reason it's 35.

And she's going 55.

And they put the,

you know, the red light and she won't pull over.

So they follow her to her home.

And she says, I'm not going to pull over at 5.30 in the afternoon, I guess.

And they said, well, you have to.

And she said, well, then write me a ticket.

And they said, well, now you've got another, you know, it's kind of resisting an officer.

And I think that's a felony.

And most, and she said, oh, well, yeah, I'm going to call, put your police chief on.

And they start trying to reason with her.

Well, why did you do this?

Well, you know, just write the ticket.

DA.

Well, we can't just write the ticket because now you've got another offense.

There was no need for this.

And then she called, and apparently they didn't charge her with anything.

And

she's the DA of Monroe County.

Isn't that where Rochester is and stuff?

And so my point is, what is going wrong in New York?

I mean, think about it.

Think about that whole legal

system is completely, in that state, completely out of control and rotten.

You've got this woman who typifies the idea that if you are elected a district attorney prosecutor, you can do anything.

So then we shift to Letita James, the state attorney general who sets the example.

And she cooks up this idea that Mar-Lago is worth $17 million,

along with Judge Ngoran, who's utterly corrupt.

And then they decide that it's to go ahead with a crazy suit.

And we've talked about this, where the banks, a Deutsche Bank especially, who has sophisticated auditors, is happy to loan Donald Trump a huge loan on his assets.

They know what they're worth.

He pays back the interest.

He pays it on time.

They're happy.

They bring in outside witnesses and they say there was nothing wrong.

And Letita James campaigns on getting Donald Trump and raises money on getting Donald Trump and editorializes about the case on Twitter and

doesn't believe, as the banks do, that Mar-Lago was worth somewhere between $500 million and a billion.

There's no crime, and now

he's down.

He's what?

There was originally $450 million,

and then they had to go to court to reduce it.

And then we had the Eugene Carroll case, which was not a rape case, and the judge involved in that says it's essentially the same as rape.

And they have a $73 million

settlement and Judge Ngoron is hamming it up, the left-wing judge with the Tita James case.

And now we have another prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, this psychodrama that's going on.

He's trying to say that something Donald Trump did in 2017 affected the election in 2016.

And he says that he reported a legal non-disclosure payment

as a legal expense, and it should have been a campaign contribution.

Therefore, he violated federal law, which the feds don't think was a violation because they didn't indict him.

But had he said,

oh, no,

this is not a legal expense.

I'm going to have my camp, it's a campaign.

Then they would have indicted him for that.

And then you have Hillary Clinton, who hired a foreign national and hid the payment through the DNC

and Perkins Co.

law firm and Fusion GPS,

and it was a complete lie and tried to defe, and she was fined over $100,000, but no criminal statute.

Same with Barack Obama, $300,000 plus for not listing accurate information about mega donors in 2008.

And they didn't get that until, I think, 2011.

So,

and then you have the judge in this Alvin Bragg, this, what's his name,

Meacham or something.

He

has given money to the Biden campaign, and his daughter has pulled in, what,

$90 million advertising that she has connections and

anti-Trump feeds.

The whole thing is rotten.

And then when we get into the last Tesser and this ugly mosaic, then we have

the corrupt lawyers

in the New York legislature.

So Alvin Bragg is well beyond the statue of limitations.

And a judge rules, and I guess they had a statute that says, no, no, COVID.

COVID, we get to extend the statute of limitations.

And then to get Eugene Carroll, who was way past the statute of limitations, they get another legislature,

legislator, and he's famous for what?

For saying that anybody who

a House committee wants their tax records, that the New York tax system will be required to turn it over just on a subpoena from a congressional committee.

It was only designed against Donald Trump.

And then they have another

bill in the legislature that says, well,

for one year,

you can avoid the statute of limitations on sexual assault.

Again, tailored right toward

Donald Trump.

And they do.

And then E.

Jean Carroll wins this defamation.

The judge editorializes and wrongly says it was a rape, or it was essentially the same as rape.

It wasn't.

I don't know what's wrong with that state, but it's completely corrupt.

And anybody who had to do business at the corporate level or the personal level with those

elected

district attorneys, the judges, the state attorney general, the entire state is corrupt.

People should flee that state.

If you are a conservative or traditionalist, you're going to have a target on your back.

I wonder, Victor, we talked on our last podcast about the construction workers, union workers supporting Trump, and Trump met them at this huge building going up at 48th and Park on the east side.

And I walk past it and look up and it's majestic, you know, grandiose project.

I wonder who the hell is going to fill these offices?

Who in their right mind would stay, come to this city, stay in it if they didn't have alternatives?

And everyone has alternatives, right?

Bandwidth gives you alternatives.

You do not have to be in New York City anymore.

You had to once upon a time, right?

If you were in finance?

Yeah, I mean,

it doesn't really matter anything that there's no, there's no, well, I guess what I'm saying, there's no rule of law in this

Rochester.

She just flat out said, I'm the DA.

I'm the DA, and you're not going to arrest me, basically.

And you know what?

Write me a ticket, but I'm not.

And they did.

And they didn't arrest her.

And she called their subordinates.

She should be recalled.

She should be fired.

But who would fire her?

The state Letita James?

She ran her election and her fundraising on getting Trump.

And then she gloated on X that she was going to take Trump tower.

And there was no crime.

Nobody had ever been charged with that crime of overvaluing real estate assets to get a successful loan, which the bank was set.

Never happened.

Nobody in New York has ever been charged by a local prosecutor for a federal crime that the feds did not want to prosecute.

Everybody knows that.

That judge, he

I mean, he should never,

this one, I guess his name was Merchant.

Merchant,

any other state would have recused him.

He gave money to Joe Biden.

His daughter is making money off the case.

He's completely compromised.

And

Ngoron, the judge in the Eugene Carroll case, should have been completely, or was he in the, he wasn't, excuse me, he was in the Letita James case.

He should have been taken off.

The moment he started, what, mucking it up up in front of the cameras, he was completely biased.

And so was that Judge Cohen in the E.

Gene Carroll case.

They're all corrupt.

And it's so ironic because the left keeps saying that, you know, democracy dies in darkness, Trump's going to do that.

They have destroyed the American people's confidence in their legal system.

It's just.

And it's a wider problem, though, Jack.

Laws don't mean anything.

You mentioned, and we're going to, this Columbia student, this guy named James, or I think, I don't know if there is some suggestion he was trans.

I don't know what his pronouns are, but he just flat out was leading these protests, and he just said he was, would probably or could, would like to kill people.

I'll kill your ass.

You're a white

F-A-G-G-O-T.

That's what he's saying on Columbia's grounds.

Yes.

And then he wasn't removed for a while.

Finally, they suspended him.

But they only did that under pressure.

And then we had this other demonstration

I saw where

this black couple, this guy right in front of the police says, I'm going to kill you, you MF white person.

And then we had,

as we went over last week, this Patel woman who right in front of the Bakersfield City Council said, I'm going to murder you, see you at your home.

They all have one thing in common:

they're DEI people,

and therefore they think they're above the law because they're perpetual victims, and they can always cry racism, and they're cowardly.

Because as soon as this James did this, and he bragged that he'd like to be suspended because he wanted to go on a vacation, and then he was going to be suspended, then he came out with this wimpy pansy little apology, you know, well, I mean,

and then the same thing with Patel.

Then she's up for arraignment, as we talked about, and she's facing 18 felonies.

She starts crying.

I can't believe that.

This is so unfair.

And then this couple that yells these horrible things and they start to look and they're on camera and then they walk away.

And I've thought, well, if you really want to do that,

If Mr.

James really wants to do that, why doesn't he say,

I'm a revolutionary.

I want to kill people.

That's what he said.

Why doesn't when they come and say, do you really mean it?

Why didn't he say yes?

I want to go to prison and prove my point that I'm an armed revolutionary, maybe.

Or why didn't Ms.

Mattel say at the hearing, I'm defiant.

I threatened them, and

you do your best, and I'll do my worst.

They never do.

They're all entitled, and they think that they're privileged.

And this whole, there's two things going on in this whole Columbia, USC,

Princeton,

it's a university's out of control, and they have let people in who can't do the work, at least as they require the work, and they fall back on this DEI, I can't be a racist, I'm going to use the word white in a racist fashion, see what you can, and then they start issuing threats.

Nothing happens, and it's just out of control.

And then there's just the Biden

the Biden collapse of jurisprudence nationwide.

So you have this district attorney in Rochester or Monroe County just says, basically, screw you.

I can do what you want.

And

it's just blanket.

Joe Biden, I mean,

everybody is canonizing Robert Hurr.

He's a Republican.

No, I have no respect for him at all.

He went through that entire file and he found that Joe Biden, for over 30 years, going back to his early Senate days, had been illegally taking out classified documents.

He found that his ghostwriter and Joe Biden were discussing classified files, and they did not report that for seven years.

He found that the ghostwriter had no security clearance and yet was handling classified U.S.

files.

When he asked if they had evidence of files, the ghostwriter destroyed the evidence.

destroyed it.

If you or I got an IRS subpoena that said, bring in your income records, and we told the IRS, I erased it, I destroyed it, they would put us in prison.

And

her did not do anything to that guy, nothing.

And then he said, essentially, if you read the entire report, I'm not going to prosecute him because

a jury would see that he's a sympathetic old man that forgets.

And

what if Donald Trump said that?

What if he said to,

let's just say he said to Alvin Bragg, I forget.

I can't remember.

I just can't remember if he's on the stand.

What if he pulled the James Comey?

I'm going to do 250 times, I'm going to say, I can't remember.

What if he said that he was going to, he should go into court and say this to Alvin Bragg.

Okay, this is Monday, and I'm James Comey.

I can't remember.

I can't remember.

This is Tuesday, and I'm the head of the FBI, Andrew McCabe.

I'm lying, one.

I'm lying, two.

I'm lying three under oath, three, four, I'm lied.

What are you going to do about it?

I just lied four times under oath.

Nothing.

And didn't do anything to Andrew.

Then he's going to say, this is Wednesday.

I'm the head of the CIA, John Brennan.

I'm under oath.

He's going to testify.

He said, you know what?

I just lied.

I just lied under oath, Mr.

Bragg.

And I lied again, twice.

What are you going to do about it?

Now it's Thursday.

I'm James Clapper, the head of director of national intelligence.

Ah, you you know, on that testimony I just gave, I gave the least untruthful answer.

How's that?

What are you going to do about it?

I gave the least untruthful answer.

So

what do they all have in common?

They're all people on the left that feel that they're exempt from the consequences of their illegality because of their ideology or their race.

And we don't have equality under the law anymore in the United States.

I never knew I'd say that.

It is completely political.

Robert Hur disgraced the independent investigation.

The only thing you could say to him

to defend him, and I know a lot of people I like and respect are defending him, but when he says that Joe Biden committed basically a felony and illegally took out things and knew he did, but he couldn't prosecute him

because no jury, he thought, would convict him.

He was doing exactly what James Comey did.

James Comey said that Hillary Clinton used feloniously a private server and transmitted classified information, but no jury would convict her because she's a prominent leading presidential candidate.

And that's where we are in this country.

It's sad to say, but we have no moral right to lecture any other country on the rule of law.

That's one of all the reasons of all the reasons to vote against these people.

That's the chief reason to restore the rule of law.

To let the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, where they're trying to find 20,000 names that are audited that will follow the Constitution.

Because what Republicans do is

when Democrats get elected, they fire everybody and they put in their team.

And they're all political.

When Republicans get elected, They let the same people in.

And that's what Donald Trump did.

And they need to sweep that bureaucratic, administrative, political appointees out.

Day one.

Day one.

And honor the rule of law.

Yeah.

Both, both for against anybody, but just make them blind.

Well, Victor, let's talk a little more about

that rot and the destruction of evidence.

And we'll get to it right after this important message.

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Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor, I just wanted to pick up a little on two things you raised just before.

One is the destruction of evidence, and

it's not anecdotal, it's a trend.

We have the ghostwriter, we have Hillary destroying evidence

with her

server.

And then look at the January 6th committee.

What happened to all these, you know, all this.

We can't find it, can we?

Right.

So this is De Riguer on the left.

And then the other thing, if I could just throw this out too, and if you have any thoughts, please, is the

is this rot?

And we were

last year, last calendar year, I think it was 2023

when the federal judge spoke at Stanford and the outrageous judge.

I was a little judge Duncan.

Yeah, I was on campus that day.

And

I walked right by it.

It's right between my apartment and my office.

And they just mobbed him.

But I think what happened that day, and maybe this gets into a little about your book,

The End of Everything, is that

with the FBI early on, we were like, well, it's just these guys at the top.

But I think the institutional

problems have are

probably back 20 years.

They start in the university.

They start in the university.

So this judge, this prosecutor in upstate New York, et cetera,

this is not a recent thing that defies the rule of law.

We have people being educated for the last generation who do not,

in law schools, in major law schools who do not support the rule of law.

So there is just a colossal amount of rot.

They didn't suspend any of those students.

Those right students that did it.

If somebody wants to know why one of the top law schools in the United States,

17% of the people people that graduated flunked the California bar on the first time.

That's been watered down considerably from what it used to be.

You can see why when you have that type of curriculum and that type of student.

And there were very, I mean, the DEI person who hijacked the lecture was put on leave and then she was an embarrassment.

But the law dean was promoted because she showed a modicum of anger about it.

Modicum.

But

there's a lot of things wrong with this country.

We have an open border.

We have lost deterrence abroad.

We're going broke.

We have no sense about climate change.

We're destroying fossil fuel industry.

Okay.

But the most important, and we don't have the rule, is the university, because all of these problems germinate there.

They started in the 1960s.

And that generation that came of age,

Roger Kimball wrote about them, tenured radicals.

They're in control.

And they politicize and weaponize that university.

Of all the things that people on the right or the conservative side need to do, if they get the House and the Senate and the presidency, they've got to look at the university.

They've got to say to the university,

we're not going to subsidize this.

We're not going to subsidize what's going on in Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, USC.

We're just not going to do it.

And you know what we're not going to do?

We're not going to get in the student loan business.

You have multi-billion dollar endowments.

You guarantee your loans.

And I guarantee you that if the university

had all those students out there screaming and yelling at Columbia, and some CFO said to the president,

we've got a thousand people who are overdue on their student loans and it's against our endowment, they would do something.

The second thing is we've got to tax those endowments.

We're subsidizing billions of dollars of income that's coming in nationwide.

And there's no reason we have to pay for it.

It's adding insult to injury because that's what it's the humanities.

And I say this as a 50-year veteran of humanities, as a professor of humanities, but that's the problem.

And the humanities, to the degree that

they've ruined their

their discipline is obvious, but they're seeping into the medical school, the business school, the law school, science, engineering.

And the only way that we can stop it is to get the government out and then to educate people that you should,

it's just insane to get a journalism, sociology, psychology, environmental studies degree when the average graduation rate is six years and the average debt incurred is over $100,000 when you can go to trade school and be a plumber, an electrician, a roofer, and you can make a $90,000, $100,000 your first two years on the job.

Just insane.

And that's really, people forget that there's another aspect.

I wrote a whole chapter in The Dying Citizen about it.

The problem is that when you allow these universities this control and they indoctrinate the students, 30, there's a great article by

Joel Kotkin, who's written some really brilliant articles, and this one is in, I think it's the American Mind.

It's listed as all good things are listed on power line.

But he's making the argument about fertility rates and they're just dropping in blue states, but 30%

of young women are not married.

And I think 28% say that they identify single women as LGBTQ.

And it's saying that there's not a lot of men, they say, to pick because they're,

I don't know, they're just in college or they're just not working.

One in five is not involved in the labor force.

A lot of this goes back to the universities.

They go to the university, they hear climate change, climate change.

AOC said not to have children.

Our professor said that we're all doomed.

We're not going to get married.

Who's going to do this?

Or if women's studies be a powerful, proud woman.

And then they hear this abortion's great, all of this stuff.

And in classical terms of getting married, having children, buying a home is the way that a society perpetuates itself.

And they get that entire message, that propaganda at the university.

And then, of course, the auxiliary

hate Jews, hate Israel, hate whites, hate America, and they get and then they go out into the larger they go out into the bureaucracies they go to the corporations right and we're paying for it and the good that the university used to do in giving people a common general education which I always thought was a wonderful thing I always thought the general education curricula doesn't exist anymore the general education is propaganda now so the demerits outweigh the merits of these universities and the only chance that we can save them from themselves is to say, you know what?

We're not going to subsidize you, and you're going to have a severe loss of income.

Now, it's up to you.

If you want to buy

off

DEI people and you want to bring them in, and you want to pay all this money so they don't call you racist, go ahead.

If you don't want the SAT and you want to have 20% of your

incoming class so-called white, as they do at Stanford, go ahead.

If you want your quad occupied for months on end, like Stanford or what will appear to be at Columbia, go ahead.

But you're going to have to make that decision with a lot less money.

And we're not going to send students to you where your

admissions makes packages and say, come to Columbia.

It's

$90,000 a year, but we've got a very sophisticated aid package.

We've got some here and some there, and we've got a student low interest loan that we pack.

No.

No, no, there won't be any low interest loans from the federal government they want they're not paid back anyway a third of them and so that would really change them that's the only thing they understand and we've got to do that

well victor i um i have a thought to share on on the birth dearth and and also on

the loyalty to institutions but first i just want to uh mention a word barbecue and we're just hearing that word can make your mouth water you may already have a low temperature slow cooking smoker, egg, or pellet barbecue.

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Two things, Victor.

One on, you mentioned the

Joel Kotkins piece with his, I did not see that, but there is also a piece out today

on City Journal's website.

And I heartily recommend everyone to

follow City Journal.

It's published by the Manhattan Institute.

Victor, you're a contributing editor to City Journal, and you've written for it many times.

But Steve Malanga, he was a fellow there, has a piece out today on the fertility crisis.

And he does make a partisan note on it.

He says, you check out the red states and blue states.

It's the blue states that have the intense problems.

I saw that article.

He had a good point.

Yeah.

And

their formula

of,

I guess, radical feminism and LGBTQ

and mainlining transgenderism and the idea from an early age that the only way that women find fulfillment is in career.

and not 19th century child raising and the idea that these men

hate traditional masculinity.

You know, we We don't really need to take charge.

We don't really need to protect our wife.

We really don't need to have children.

We're just going to go do our own thing.

That's a toxic mix as far as fertility goes.

And they're slowly extinguishing themselves.

They're not reproducing.

And

that's one thing.

Remember,

there's a reason that border is open.

And no matter how bad the political flack is,

it's either the number one or number two concern.

And Joe Biden polls about 30% support.

So there has to be a reason why in the face of widespread criticism and a glaring liability in his campaign portfolio, he continues to keep it open.

And the answer is he wants bodies.

And one of the reasons he wants bodies is that his constituency is not reproducing.

So he feels he's going to import people who are going to change the census because even though they're illegal, they'll, for some reason, I don't know why it seems illegal to me that they're going to be counted as U.S.

citizens.

And he feels that under most states where 70% of the people do not show up on election day with an IDE, they will find ways to have these people vote.

And as we see in New York and Illinois and LA, they have massive medical, legal, educational, food, and housing needs, and that requires massive redistributed monies and employees.

And that's why they're letting them in.

And part of the reason is the people you see at Columbia that are screaming and yelling in the cameras,

they don't believe that they're going to get married at 23 or 24

and they're going to have two or three kids.

They just don't believe it.

And they don't believe that those skinny little armed kids out there who are going to climb up on the top of a skyscraper with a girder on their shoulder.

They just don't think that's going to happen.

When you look at those union people and you compare them physically to my kids, oh my God.

It's just

eat them for breakfast.

It's, it's, and then, you know, there's,

I think it was Ru Texeria wrote recently.

He's the Democratic pollster operative that is, he's a pretty reasonable guy.

And he wrote that

the Democrats are deluding themselves because they're getting 70%

of the,

what he called the elite.

These are people with advanced degrees and are bicoastal elites.

They are to the Mexican American and Latino working class what

Silicon Valley people or the Columbia faculty people or the Washington politicals are to East Palestine, Ohio.

And he said, Democrats have fooled themselves that 70% of these people are voting for Biden.

That's what they pull.

They're very liberal.

And Latinos have made great

strides in the Democratic Party as highly visible politicals.

But the problem is that when you look at the working class, that is people without college degrees or sometimes without high school degrees who are Latino, it's 50-50 Trump or more.

And unfortunately for them, they are 70% of the demographic.

So 70% of the demographic is split evenly and probably a little bit more for Trump.

And again, it's getting back to this.

And these are the communities.

And I can tell you from anecdotal experience, the people that I see every day who are Mexican-American, they have three or four kids in their working class.

The people I see in academia who are Mexican-American, they are exactly, have adopted the culture of the white bicosto elite.

And

it has nothing to do with race or ethnicity.

It's this ideology of the left, this postmodern 21st century ideology.

It's a very toxic, selfish ideology.

It's all about themselves.

It's Agretta Thunberg.

I mean, she's the poster girl, right, for the whole climate change.

She represents the values of these people on the left.

And the last thing they want to do is get up in the middle of the night and change diapers or not go to a fern fern bar at two in the morning

or

not get over to Florence for the summer or something, whatever it is.

And

there's some hope because it does show you that the red state model, whether it's recovery after COVID in terms of unemployment and GDP or

influx versus exodus of population or current

growth, population growth, economic growth, they're all outperforming the blue states.

Right.

And

it's something to behold.

And the only problem the left has, they have a problem with the 10 million coming in.

They're thinking,

well, what do we do now?

The blue state model is collapsing and losing population, so we need new blue state leftists.

So should we bring these people to Illinois or New York?

But they kind of alienate our base.

But on the other hand, we will never flip Florida or we won't flip completely Colorado or Texas unless they go there, at least for a generation or two.

And so they can't figure out whether they're more valuable to replenish their army of

voters in blue states or to try to go on the offensive and flip red states.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, one other thought that comes from what you were talking about earlier is has to do with institutions and loyalty to institutions and how do we handle them.

And

you know, I'm kind of reminded of that old lucky strike campaign from decades ago.

You know, I'd rather fight than switch.

A guy smoking a cigarette and he had a black guy.

He was going to keep smoking lucky strikes.

Anyway, I saw this piece on a very interesting website.

It's called The Imaginative Conservative.

And Brad Berzer, who you know from Hillsdale.

I know Brad very well.

He's a wonderful guy.

Oh, he's terrific.

Yeah, I love him.

I call him Double B, but he's

so he's founded it.

And

there's a guy,

a professor, a theology professor at the University of St.

Thomas, Dave Dieble, who writes frequently

for the imaginative conservative.

I just saw Dave last weekend.

I was at the Philadelphia Society meeting.

So let me just read this quickly, Victor, because it has to do with this honest and widespread tension and

dilemma that we have as conservatives, because conservatives like to conserve, right?

What do you do about institutions?

Here's what Dave wrote.

I've always wished not simply to stand athwart history, as William F.

Buckley did in yell stop.

I have wished to actually stop history in many cases and occasionally turn it into reverse.

And yet, though I still maintain this frame of mind for many things, this conservative impulse in me has been challenged seriously over the last few years, especially with regard to institutions.

Our scattering and shattering times have turned my soul from a desire for universal preservation to his desire for the least attractive side of market economics, the creative destruction, so lauded by Joseph Schumpeter.

When I see or hear a story of a school, college, university, publication, charity, or think tank being shuttered these days, my usual instinct is one of relief and often celebration.

Their passings mean much less to me than my, well, he had talked earlier about shirts, ratty shirts.

Anyway, he finds himself often elated.

And that's the tension.

And Victor, I think you're a fight.

You know, don't give up,

fight it out.

Who the hell are they to say they own these institutions, which, as you've mentioned in the past, were built by

alumni, donors, et cetera?

Why concede them to these leftists?

But that's a real thing, what Dave Dieball writes, a real concern that many conservatives do have.

Any thoughts about that?

Well, I tend to agree.

I mean, if you take where I work, the Hoover Institution is semi-autonomous.

So I just got back yesterday from a Hoover retreat in Scottsdale where we had almost, I guess, nearly 400 or so donors or overseers.

And I really take very seriously donor intent.

I really do.

If

our institution does not not follow the mission statement of limited government, individual liberty, free markets in the context of war, revolution, and peace, that would include deterrence abroad, strong defense,

then I'm not going to

tell people to donate.

So when I receive I, not me, but the institution, and a donation comes in from a particular donor in my name, I always say to myself and I I say to the people who work for me on our military history group, we're going to honor donor intent under all circumstances.

That doesn't extend to Stanford.

I

went there for a Ph.D.

My mother went to the University of Pacific to follow my dad who was on a football scholarship.

Then she went to Stanford and got a second BA and then went to law school, was one of the few women, you know, in 1946 to get a law degree.

Her sister, Lucianna Davis, my grandfather had no money, but he mortgaged his farm.

She got a BA and a master's degree in 1945 from Stanford.

My first cousin,

she went there for a graduate degree.

Her son, my

first cousin once removed, was there.

I'm there now in the larger.

I have no loyalty to it, not until it changes.

Maybe the new president, Mr.

Levin, will do something differently.

But I've seen on campus what people say and what they do.

I've gone before the faculty senate.

I've dealt with the Stanford Daily newspaper trying to give a response and going through edit after edit and censoring.

And I've talked to what happens to conservative students.

I have no loyalty to it.

They've hijacked it.

I will later, if they change.

I'm giving the business dean, whom I have a lot of confidence in, because I've seen him at what he did at the business school.

And believe me, had they not fired Claudine Gay

and

the Pennsylvania president,

Stanford would not have picked a white male Jewish president.

They wouldn't have done it.

But there's a sense now that it's okay for a brief window to get somebody on meritocratic grounds, given what we've seen.

UC Santa Cruz,

that changed my life.

I was a kid from a farm.

I'd never really been anywhere.

I went to UC Santa Cruz.

I was kind of lost.

My dad looked around.

He took me to the dorm.

He went into the bathroom.

There was a guy and a girl taking a shower together, walking around naked.

That was his first and my first in the male part of Morrison House.

And then he went into the room and there were drug paraphernalia all over my roommate stuff, and the hallway had all sorts of smells coming out of it and he said I don't know what the hell you're doing here we thought you know his idea was this is the closest UC campus they say it's new it's really good you guys can save money by renting a house together

there's no tuition it's a great deal you all got in congratulations and then he looked at it and said oh my god and I was very fortunate because why all these people are saying I went over to classics and here they had a Harvard PhD, John Lynch.

They had a UC Berkeley, Mary Kay Gammell, Orlandi.

They had Gary Miles from Yale.

And I kind of went into the circle.

I went to Yale for summer school with this wonderful teacher, John Madden, who was a friend of John Lynch.

I came back.

Then I got a scholarship to go to Greece.

for a year to study.

I came back.

So I had a wonderful classics people.

They really saved me.

And then I won a full ride to Stanford when I was basically just turned 20 for a PhD, but it was because of those professors that taught me so well.

And then when I went to Stanford, I didn't like it at the time, but I had these Europeans.

Gosh, I mean, Anthony Robicek, Lionel Pearson.

Andrew Devine, Mark Edwards.

They were all non-U.S.

citizens.

Even my thesis advisor was a British subject, a dual citizen, Michael Jameson.

and I learned a lot.

I mean, it was all philology, philology, manuscripts, tradition,

writing and glattin.

It was just wonderful.

But the institutions outside that embryo at both universities, I had no, they were crazy.

They were absolutely crazy.

I was a visiting professor at Stanford in 1991.

I can never forget that Pete Wilson was speaking right outside my window in the classics department.

And I guess that was during the gay marriage bill, you know, that we passed it twice, California did, and the Supreme Court, the federal court, almost the day it passed, Jack, they threw it out.

And then they tried to blame the Mormon community when actually, when they looked at the demographics, the black community had overwhelmingly rejected gay marriage and had voted not to support it.

But the protesters were out there and they had feces in toilet paper and throwing it at the sidewalk right in front of my, right below me.

And I used the word, by the way, feces, feces, because

I got an angry letter and said, don't dare talk about excretement.

And I would never use the S word or the C word, but the point is, that's what they were doing.

And I thought to myself, somebody's going to expel them.

Nothing happened.

And that's the same thing with Judge Duncan.

Nothing happened.

And there was a Gaza camp out there for months.

And they asked them, you know, you should dismantle it.

Nothing happened.

Finally,

and they disrupted Parents' Day.

Nothing happened.

And again, I always quote that line from

Voltaire's Candide,

where

Candide says, you know,

the British have an odd habit.

Every once in a while they hang an admiral.

They were referencing Admiral Bing, who was not really culpable.

They hung him, and not because

his conduct was that egregious, but to encourage the others, Voltaire says.

And

I mean that, by the way, metaphorically, not literally.

But my point is this, if a

Stanford president had dismantled that Gaza thing, or he had expelled the students who disrupted classes or alumni or Parents' Day or whatever,

Or back then had they done that,

we wouldn't be where we are today.

It wouldn't take very much.

We've seen, seen, as I just referenced, what happens to Miss Patel when she tries that stunt in Bakersfield.

I guess she thought, as I said earlier, Jack, she was at Harvard or Yale or New York City or Alvin Bragg was a DA or she's down there with Fannie Willis.

But believe me, Bakersfield's not that place.

And she stepped in it when she

when she threatened to kill the city council, and then she started crying, and she won't do it again.

And I guarantee you, people will not go before the Bakersfield City Council and threaten to kill them again.

It won't happen

because they'll end up in prison if they do.

And that's

that's it doesn't take much to recreate deterrence in this case.

And

you could stop the knockout game in New York.

You could stop the assault.

You could stop all that.

If

after they were arrested, they had a speedy trial and they were sentenced to five years and they were in jail.

I know people would say, well, it's inordinately a particular race, it's racist, but it would stop it.

It would stop it.

And you could stop the all if you woke up one day at the Columbia and you said, I want you people to get off.

You're on private property.

You're breaking every statute applicable to the occupation of this university.

We have a graduation ceremony that we have to prepare for.

you have 10 and they didn't and then one morning at four in the morning you had the national Guard just physically remove them bust them as Ed Meese did in the 60s when he was the Bay Area DA and then just charge them with felonies they it would not it would all collapse and deport anybody

anybody on a student visa or a green car just deport them just say you know what here's your hearing that you're arrested what do you we're going to deport you and that would end it yeah and it wouldn't be police tactics it would just be but you know what the president of colombia she said we're still in long negotiations what's there to negotiate what is there you know it's sort of like the da who i guess the police were in her garage negotiating with her well you know you shouldn't have

i guess what ignored a red line chasing you by a police is that a negotiable item apparently it is

But you can stop it if you want to.

The problem is, it's not just that the people who

become college presidents have learned and it's been acculturated for years how to bend, how to pontificate, how to be flexible, how to go on both sides of the issues.

It's that they themselves are leftists and so they sympathize with the radical Palestinians over, I guess, the roles of their own university.

I have a feeling that if Jewish students went out en masse

and support said, support the IDF in Gaza, they would all be put in jail within a nanosecond.

I'm convinced of that.

Because ultimately, this whole movement, DEI

and the pro-Palestinian, I'm not even going to use that word, pro-Hama, is anti-Semitic.

That's the one thing that they have accomplished.

You've got to give them credit, Jack, and I'll just finish this with this reflection.

For years we were told that being anti-Israel was not anti-Semitic.

For years we were told that being pro-Palestinian was not pro-Hamas.

For years we were told that the university's foibles were outweighed by its great contribution.

One thing all of these protests have done,

they've just torn off this scab, and they've showed us the true putrid wound underneath.

And we know now that if you are Jewish and you're walking along with any paraphernalia,

Yarmuk,

Yarmuka, or you have a Star of David, or they think you look Jewish, or you're dressing in a way that might reflect your Jewishness, they're not going to ask you if you're pro- or anti-Israel.

They're going to go after you on a campus, or they're going to harass you, because they don't make any distinctions because they're anti-Semitic.

And when you look at those protests and you see Hezbollah and Hamas flags and rivers to the sea, they are mouthing

basically the bylaws of Hamas.

There's no difference to those people.

And they'll tell you that.

And when you look at that university and you ask yourself,

this is finals time.

This is supposedly one of the best and most expensive universities.

How in the blank do these students have time time

to go out day after day as finals are coming up to study?

And it can only be possible because of two

things.

Either the professors have given them exemptions

or two, the classes have been so gutted to allow for people who otherwise would not have been admitted years earlier.

Or it doesn't matter what they get on the final because if you're at Yale or places like that, 80% get A's.

But again, we don't have to support it.

Right.

Victor, we have time for one last topic, and that will be reparations.

And we will get to that right after this final important message.

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

I do want to remind our listeners and to inform our new listeners, of which there are many,

of Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

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That's theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Victor, here's a headline

from the Daily Mail: Reparations hardliners press Biden to get black votes in must-win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with multi-trillion dollar slavery payouts.

And I'll cut to the quick here with

one short paragraph.

Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, a reparations stalwart, and others say Biden should bypass Congress and use his executive powers to create a slavery payouts panel to put him the line against Donald Trump.

They point to polling, which shows that in a toss-up Michigan, nearly 60% of black voters who don't regularly vote would be more likely to show up for Biden if he created a reparations commission.

And Victor, as an ancillary to the reparations, I saw it this morning in an article about the Biden administration was looking to put out regulations

forbidding menthol cigarettes and are stopped now from doing so because

blacks and whites smoke at the same proportion.

I think I saw 11% of the whites, white population, 11% of blacks do.

But of the black population,

80% of blacks smoke menthol cigarettes.

So he's being advised, don't do this because it's going to cost you a black vote.

So Victor, some racially charged things to try to help get Joe Biden over the

finish line in November.

I don't think we should be surprised by that, but do you have any thoughts?

Yeah, there's two issues there.

One is

it's this continuing pattern that Joe Biden's entire agendas, we've talked about crime, inflation, the border, foreign policy doesn't pull anywhere near 50%.

So his advisors have taken a pie graph and they have identified single-issue voters.

And we've seen the consequence.

For some people,

Jack, they vote on gas no matter what.

And so he's already emptied the petroleum reserve.

He's told the Ukrainians for all that braggadachio that we're going to defeat Russia.

He said, please, and he whispers, so it's not inexact to mimic him.

He says,

please do not hit Russian facilities.

You're not allowed to hit their oil facilities.

He said that, so they don't disrupt the price of oil.

He's willing to let 170 attacks on Americans in the Middle East, mostly in Syria and Iraq, go unanswered, because he's clamped down on the Israel.

He does not want a Middle East confrontation.

He doesn't want the Red Sea and the approaches to the Suez Canal, anything closed before the

election.

He's gone soft on Venezuela.

He wants oil, dirty, gooey, ugly, smelly oil.

I know he closed down Anwar, and I know he's canceled federal leases, and he wants wants not ours, but other people to make it, because he wants that constituency to have cheap gas.

We know that he's pandering to the Arab American, Muslim-American constituency in Michigan by restraining the IDF, and both in terms of Hezbollah.

and Hamas and Iran.

And now he's looking at another, what he thinks will be a single issue within the black community.

I think the statistics I've seen, Jack, is it's either even, even, or there's a slight majority that don't want reparations within the black community.

If you look at the Latino community and the white community or anybody else, it's overwhelming, over

75%.

That's one issue.

So that's what Joe Biden does.

But the larger issue of reparations, especially in a non-slave state, you know, Michigan was one of the most fertile recruiting places

for

the Union Army and the Army of the West, Sherman's Army.

And when you go to Hillsdale College, you can see statues of

representing Hillsdale graduates who died fighting for the Union Army to abolish slavery.

There weren't, when you read, I think his name was Henry Hitchcock, he wrote a diary of being on Sherman's march.

from Atlanta to Savannah.

And two things came up if you read that diary or you read Sherman's memoirs itself.

Most people

that were in, I think of the 220 regiments, about 215 came from Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, and Ohio.

You know what?

They had never seen a black person in most cases.

And they were shocked at how friendly black people were, given what the South had said about them, how industrious they were.

20,000 of them joined the march.

Some were tragically killed because they couldn't accommodate the sheer influx that followed the march to the sea.

But my point is that if you were in Michigan and you were a farm kid that were 18 and 19,

let's say somewhere near, I don't know, today's Lansing, and the call came out

to go fight in the Army of the West.

And one of the 1864 agendas was to go all the way leave your home and march all the way down to a different climate and to see people you've never seen before, not just blacks, but they'd never heard a southern accent before.

And they were big strapping farm kids and they were the key to Sherman's success.

Because when they did the victory march after they went through the Carolinas after reaching Savannah, remember they went all the way through the Carolinas during winter.

And the German military at Tache saw the Sherman's army after he had seen the army of the Potomac that had brand new uniforms and Irish, no offense, Jack, mostly Irish and German immigrants.

And they looked at these people and they said, Oh my god, the German attaché, this army is the most deadly army in the world.

They were tan, they had black pioneers.

We've talked about that.

So, my point is: this: you're going to ask the descendants if they are living in Michigan generation, and many in rural Michigan are,

whose great-great-grandparents,

especially male,

volunteered to join this army whose purpose was to go down and destroy southern plantations and free black slaves whom you've never seen a black person.

You have nothing to do with slavery.

But you're going to risk your life and get killed to free slaves.

And you're going to ask their descendants in Michigan

to give money to blacks that in 1861 to five, there were not very many blacks at all in Michigan.

And if they were, they were not slaves.

It was outlawed.

It doesn't make any sense at all.

And then there's the other question.

So you're going to ask the present Michigan taxpayer who has no memory, if you ask them, who are your great, great, great grandparents?

They have no idea.

And if you ask the black community of Michigan, who was your great-great-grandmother or father who was the slave?

They have no idea.

It's been so long ago.

And we are, and the government are going to decide

how to take money from this group who has no history of slavery within their family and doesn't even know the names of the people alive at the city.

And we're going to decide how much money you're going to give to this person,

regardless of their class situation or anything, or individual.

And it's not tenable.

It won't work.

It'll just cause enormous division.

It's just, it's a, and then we're doing the same thing in California, of course, under Gavin Newsom.

And I think our population, we were a free state.

We had very few blacks.

Most of the blacks that were in California came during World War I and World War II to work in the defense industry.

But the point is that we're $75 billion in the hole.

And the idea that we're going to borrow more money to redistribute income to people who were not, have no descendants descendants of being slaves in California from people who have no descendants who were slaves.

It's insane.

One out of 27% of the population of California was not born in the United States.

So you're telling somebody, oh, you just arrived here from Bolivia.

Oh, you just arrived here from Mexico.

Oh, you just arrived here from Hungary.

Well, you're going to pay black people in California.

And it's bad enough.

You know, we've just passed a law, or it's going to come.

It's not a law, Jack, it's an administrative edict by the

Power Commission that

all of us are going to pay more money per month

regardless of the kilowatts we use, all of us being people who are considered well-off.

I think that means $100,000, something around $50,000, and then it goes up to $75,000.

If you make over $150,000, you make over $200,000.

But it could be $1,200 a year.

You pay.

And why are you doing that?

Because the power companies are broke.

Why are they broke?

For two reasons.

Number one,

the solar wind was a complete fiasco, and we decommissioned well

producing nuclear plants, and we decommissioned coal plants, and

we're decommissioning natural gas plants.

And we're blowing up hydroelectric.

We just blew up four dams on the Klamath River that produced enough hydroelectric clean energy for 80,000 homes.

And the result was an environmental catastrophe, at least short term, because the muddy river that came through killed salmon and trapped wildlife, etc.

And

the kicker, we have to find a way, Jack, to pay for 4 million households who won't pay their or can't pay their power bill.

So we don't cut off people's power when they choose not to pay it.

We just say to other people, from now on, you're going to pay an extra $100 or so a month to pay for that.

So

you know the only irony about all this, Jack?

This social mitching now from

reparation issue in Michigan to California.

California is so crazy.

It's so socialist or communist that the architects of it cannot escape any longer the consequences of their doctrine.

They can't hide in Beverly Hills or Atherton anymore.

The whole society is in such free-for-all.

Their kids are not getting into USC, UCLA, Stanford because of their DEI

discriminatory admissions.

They don't like to go to San Francisco and step around homeless.

But the thing is,

and I'll just finish our broadcast today with this.

Did you see Adam Schiff, Jack, yesterday with his

felt vest on?

And he was supposed to be with a suit, wasn't he?

All right.

Where's my tuxedo?

What happened to my tuxedo?

Yes.

Well, thieves broke into his car and he parked it in California and San Francisco.

And he went in there and said, oh, my gosh, my liberal ideology, didn't they know that was Adam Schiff's car?

That I'm exempt from all the misery I cause other people?

Harvard Law School, I think, graduate.

Just like the DA in upstate New York.

They're exempt.

Exactly.

And then there was just earlier the San Jose left-wing mayor, Matt, I think his name is Mahan, all of a sudden, somebody, they had to fight some unruly person.

And then, you know, a little while earlier, Karen Bass, remember the L.A.

mayor who's always lecturing people about racism and

inordinate policing, and she's a good friend of George Gascon.

Well, she came home

and, you know, I mean, she woke up, I guess, in the early morning, and there was a guy in their home.

He broke in, and he was a repeat offender.

And then, you know, the worst DA in the United States is not Alvin Bragg.

It's not Fannie Willis.

It's not this dualerly or whatever her name was.

Is it Los Angeles?

Is that it?

Oakland, Pamela.

Oh, Christ.

Oh, yeah.

She's driven out all these small businesses.

And

she was doing a virtue signaling event on

domestic violence.

And guess what?

Somebody came up and dared to smash and grab her.

And they stole her laptop.

And it's kind of reminiscent of,

you remember what happened tragically to the Pelosis when...

somebody broke in.

And then you remember Barbara Boxer, the other liberal senator of California, when she was, I guess she was right near her Oakland upscale apartment.

And somebody just walked up to her and did the same thing they did to Pamela Price and stole her cell phone.

And my point is that all of our major California political figures on the left are being assaulted and

held up, which is wrong and terrible.

But that wasn't supposed to happen.

This new critical legal theory, critical race theory, critical penal theory was supposed to fall on Joe Idiot from Bakersfield, the poor, middle-class, clueless, white working-class person who didn't have these refined, sophisticated views about legal theory.

And they would have to pay the price for their past parents' and grandparents' racism and illiberality by letting out repeat offenders.

And these repeat offenders would always do things like Kate Steinley, remember her, the tragic woman who was killed by the repeat in San Francisco,

by the repeat offender who was let off, basically.

But they were angrier.

Remember, he seems to have been shooting at sea lions, which is a capital offense as compared to shooting a human being.

And so my point is that everybody on the left should realize that when you create the Lord of the Flies environment, there's nothing that says that you're going to be distinguished as a good

revolutionary just because

you think that you're a champion of the poor and the underclass.

And if they lash out with cry of the heart violence, and you can contextualize it when it falls on others, it's so prevalent now that you have created a, you're Dr.

Frankenstein and your Frankenstinian monster called Mr.

Crime is out of control.

And every once in a while when he roams around, he's going to get, just like the monster went after Dr.

Frankenstein, he's going after you.

So when you're at him shift and you put your car in a secure garage and you do your handshaking political stuff during the day and then you walk back to your car to get your suit for your big high-end donors and your car smashed and grabbing a garage and you don't have your, you have no clothes.

You have nothing.

Well, that's what happens to everybody else other than these people until recently.

And now, when you hit the DA who's part of the problem, the mayor who's part of the problem, a Senate candidate who's part of the problem, the home of a senator,

deceased senator who's part of the problem,

the home of, I mean, Barbara Boxer, who was part of the problem, there is no impunity for anybody, the mayor of San Jose included.

No tears being shed.

That's what happens to a society in decline.

The the people who caused it the

Jacobins were not immune, you know.

It reminds me of the end of the end of the movie, The Thing.

Remember the older

scientist, that crazy scientist who lets the thing out of where it was stored and then he tries to

buddy it.

You know what I mean?

The corporation makes the monster, and all of a sudden, the monster devours all the people that were sent out.

And that's sort of what is happening right now.

There's no immunity.

When you have somebody, it's a gangbanger, M13, or Teños or Reynos, they don't distinguish people that they attack.

That's just collateral damage.

And sometimes the collateral damage are the architects in the legislature or the legal system that allowed that to happen.

And

I don't know if this person learns from that or not.

Another kind of

de-orienting, but it's the reality.

It's reality.

I mean, I see it from a Christian point of view.

I don't mean Old Testament, but there is a force in nature, in the universe.

It's a leveling effect.

And it says to all of us in your personal life, if you

go to excess,

you know, eubris is what the Greeks called it.

And you're ebristic,

and that eubris hurts yourself, but especially if it hurts other people, there is a natural force.

The Greeks called it nemesis that leads to acte destruction.

Some of the Asian people call it karma.

The popular culture, the Anglo-Saxon words, payback's a bitch.

There is a reckoning.

I don't know whether it's a natural law a divine

God has created or a God is actually implementing it in our own lives.

But you have to be very careful what you say or do because there is a, maybe not completely in our lives, but it'll be settled in the next world.

But if you're trying to,

if you're an architect or a national surgeon and you're operating on the United States and your goal is to completely change everything to a way that fits your utopian dreams, but you know it's going to inflict needless punishment on people and destroy lives, and you think that these people are collateral damage to to your grand utopian scheme, and you're going to avoid it, or your family's going to, you better be very careful, because there's powers greater than you that

will ensure.

I'm not saying that all of Adam Schipp deserved this.

What I am saying is that Adam Schipp is part, as the head of the House Intelligence Committee, that allowed a lot of awful things to go on in the United States and lied repeatedly and was smirking about, you know, Mr.

Venman and Sarah Mella and the impeachment, and all of that illegality, and that philosophy of liberal jurisprudence, it's going to filter down, and you're going to be targeted.

And you should be very careful to be, walk on, you know, walk on glass.

Be very careful what you say or do, because there's a divine power that's all watching.

Hesiod called it the optomalos

zenos, and that meant the eye of God watches everything.

You know how I know that?

Besides being, you know, reading Hesiod's Works and Days a lot of times.

I'll just finish with this anecdote.

When I was

20 years old,

maybe 19, my mother was up for a judicial appointment, right?

She was nominated by the Fesno County Bar as either the first or second woman.

I think there was a really nice woman, brilliant woman.

I really liked her named Lynette LaRue.

That was the first

woman superior court.

But at that time, Jerry Brown was governor.

My mom was an old-fashioned Democrat.

She had three kids.

She was living on a farm.

And

someone that was pushing my mom's nomination said to me, Jerry Brown knows Greek.

And

he came over to our house.

He said, hey, Victor, why don't you write the governor

a little thing in Greek?

And I was, you know, an undergraduate Greek.

I wasn't a stylist in Greek.

I was a graduate.

That was something that one learns in graduates.

So I wrote a note in Greek.

These are the qualifications of my mother.

This is where she went to school.

This is what she's done for 20 years as

an appellate court legal researcher, et cetera, et cetera.

We live on a farm.

We've been five years.

It was very hard to do.

And he wrote back a letter to me, Jerry Brown did, in Greek.

And you know what it was?

It was a quote from Hesiod's Works and Day.

It was kind of egotistical.

It said, the eye of Zeus sees everything,

knows everything, and judges everything.

So there is the eye of Zeus right out of Hesiod's Works and Days.

I give him credit.

It was very, it was just taken right out of, it was in classical Homeric, Ionic Greek hexameter.

Word for word, it's a quote from Hesiod.

I don't know how I got on that, but that's okay.

People remember.

I remember that because he has a long memory, and I used to be very critical of his governance.

And one day, not one day, on a few occasions, he called me up in my office, and he let me have it

about all the things.

And he said, and I don't know if he just had researched it or he had a photographic memory and he remembered the hundreds of appointments he made.

I doubt he did, but he said, and you owe me one.

I appointed your mother 50 years ago.

And I started laughing.

I couldn't get angry at Jerry Brown.

There was something about him I liked because as soon as he said that, he'd always finish by,

you know, I know Greek and Latin.

And let's, I know as much as you do.

And

who are the commanders on the Peloponnesian War, the expedition to Sicily?

And he would talk like that.

And he was, that was unusual.

And usually I heard somebody in the background saying,

Governor, this conversation's over or something.

You did commend him recently, Victor, for his tenure in Oakland.

So

he was a much better

mayor of Oakland than what is there now.

Yeah, well, hard to think who could be worse.

His father was a great governor for a Democrat.

He was a very good governor, Pat Brown.

He sued the Sierra Club to ensure the completion of the California Water Project.

There were elements.

I mean, Jerry Brown got carried away with small is beautiful and all that stuff.

But essentially he was trying to inculcate Jesuit values to people.

You know, yes, frugal and that.

He spent a year.

I think he spent a year with Mother Teresa in Calcutta.

So he's, you know, he's got to give the give the I won't call him a devil, this dude.

No,

I enjoyed the few times he called me to remonstrate about my conservative columns that had been critical of his governance.

And I remember he said, I had said something about everybody going to Texas.

He goes, do you think people are going to leave California and really going to enjoy humid Houston?

And I said, Jerry, I can't remember what I said to him.

I said,

you guys on the Democratic Party inherited

a natural paradise and you made it into purgatory.

And those guys in Texas had purgatory and they made it into paradise.

And that's the difference between you and the Texas government.

That's a very apt and accurate analysis and comparison i victor we we have to we have to wrap it up but we wrap it up by thanking our listeners and those who listen um via apple can leave comments and can rate the show zero to five stars again victor's average is 4.9 plus and thank you for those who take the time to to do that and also who take the time to comment.

And here's a comment.

We read them all here.

We read them on on Victor's website, Lady Perscus.

This is titled Behind Enemy Lines.

And he writes, I'm a federal civil servant who loves the honesty about our national situation.

My wife and I listen to the show on our weekend drives.

I hold the wheel enthralled by Victor's incisive assessment of our nation.

My wife falls asleep to the soothing vibrations of Victor's calm voice from the stereo.

Thank you for the marital bliss.

And it's signed, iHeart Sammy.

So there's a

member of the Sammy fan club.

Victor, you're, I guess, you're a help to their marriage, although Mrs.

iHeart Sammy is falling asleep while we're talking.

I think I knew that.

I won't mention his name.

Is that from his first name, Gary?

I don't know.

It's just signed, iHeart Sammy.

That's all I know.

So it might be Gary.

Gary's a good friend of mine.

He's a wonderful guy.

He's a very successful business.

And he's an unsung hero of a vanishing, rare,

but successful California entrepreneur who tries to do business.

If it's the same Gary that I know in the Bay Area.

Well, I don't know.

This one says I'm a federal civil servant.

So maybe another guy.

Gary that I know wrote me that he and his wife.

It was intended as a compliment, but they fall asleep listening to our podcast at night.

Wake up, Gary.

All right, Victor, you've been terrific.

I want to thank everyone for listening.

I want to especially thank the folks who have signed up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter that I write, Jack Fowler for the Center for Civil Society.

And please go there, sign up at civilthoughts.com every Friday.

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And I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks, Victor.

You've been terrific.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.