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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I am Jack Fowler.

You're here to get the wisdom from Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

You'll find its web address at victorhanson.com.

Go there

and

subscribe, even, and I'll tell you why later in the podcast, why you should.

We are recording on Friday, April 26th.

This particular episode will be up

on Tuesday, the 30th.

I apologize in advance, Victor, for several things, including my bumbling way of asking you questions, but also I'm in the Bronx.

We may hear noises in the background.

It could be gunfire.

You never know.

It could be a pro-Hamas demonstration.

It could be a pro-Trump demonstration.

Strange things are happening in New York City.

So let's, you know, Victor, a couple of things have been going on.

I mean, more than a couple,

that we should get your thoughts on.

Union support for Donald Trump, a viral union member cursing, cursing in ancient Rome and Greece.

craziness

in our airlines and flight concern, and also

an interesting, to get your take on an interesting piece by Neil Ferguson on the Second Cold War.

Victor, I hope we can get to all of this, and we will try hard, and we'll start right after these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, as you have discussed with me and with Sammy, you know, Donald Trump has been in New York City a lot for this lawfare crap hole that he's had to deal with.

And part of while he's there, he has done some

pretty

politically advantageous things, meeting with normal human beings, meeting in the bodega up in Harlem, meeting with union members.

So, yesterday

in the city, he stopped by this, oh my gosh, it's this huge construction site on Park Avenue and 48th Street, monster building going up.

And he met with these steam fitters and just, you know, guys that make

build our cities, and they love him.

And it's not only

the actual, the workers, but it was a really interesting interview, Victor.

with on Fox with a guy named Bob Bartels.

And he's the president of the Steam Fitters local 638, lifelong Democrat.

And he was on Fox and Friends, and he says

he's polled

the guys in his local, and they are three to one for Trump.

And he said this, quote, we are very tired of the situation with groceries, inflation, gas prices, illegal immigration, crime.

We're living it every day in New York City.

He also said, you know, his union membership, they're pro-American, of course, and they're patriots.

Meanwhile, I mean, union leaders are backing Joe Biden.

Excuse me for knocking things around here in this room here, Victor.

And then, so let's get your thoughts on what you're seeing there, Victor, with the, we call them the manly class, the muscular class supporting Donald Trump.

And then there's this infamous viral video of a union member going after Joe Biden.

Your thoughts, Victor?

Donald Trump is making inroads into the traditional Democratic base, such as it is.

So whether it's Latino and black males or

some young people even, Asians even, and of course the union classes.

Usually the work muscular classes, 80% of them aren't union.

Most of the people who are in unions today

are in

SCIU or government, you know, service industries or government.

The ones that are usually vote Democratic, but what this guy said and what others have said like him

is that there's an out-of-touch union elite that feel obligated because of tradition or what the party line is.

They have to endorse Trump, but no one else does.

Now, why is that?

Because I think we should take him at his word about economic issues, the border and crime, but there's also another element.

People don't like Joe Biden, that he has all this braggadaccio.

He just gave a interview, Jack, as you know, with Howard Stern, and he talked about beating Donald Trump up.

He talked about that he was the all-star high school player.

Anybody talks about their high school glory days as Bruce Springsteen?

Remember that song, Glory Days?

Glory Days, right?

Yes.

There's something wrong there.

I mean, I wish I could tell everybody I played football in high school and I wrestled and I was a star and I pinned this guy, but I didn't.

I was mediocre.

And most people are mediocre.

But

he's now reduced to bragging about his high school career.

He's talking about all the hot women that contacted him after the tragedy of his wife.

And sent him salacious pictures, right?

Yes, and they send him pictures, chick pictures.

I thought that was called sexting, isn't it?

It's against the law or something.

I don't know.

I mean, we had the Hollywood Access Hollywood that almost put Donald Trump out of the

2016 race.

But my point, I guess, I'm getting at is

there's something about him that rubs working people wrongly.

I know that it's joked from Scranton and he brags about that he was the first person in his family to go to college.

Lie.

I know that he talked about being a semi-truck driver.

Lie.

I know he talked about cutting off six feet of chain and taking on

ghetto thugs.

Lie.

So that braggadach everybody gets tired of.

And I think that's one element.

The other element is the Democrats, and we always use that Wiley Coyote roadrunner metaphor, but they thought they had him

with these indictments in Washington, New York, and Atlanta.

And what he's doing in New York is

on the way to the courtroom.

on the way out of the courtroom, he's trying to use all of that free publicity.

And this is what everybody got angry about.

Remember Jack in 2016?

Well, Trump got all, you guys gave Trump all that free publicity for ratings, CNN, MSNBC, even.

So he's using that attention, and then he's drawing,

you know, he's bootstrapping it on to campaign issues, which this guy enunciated.

I mean, it's crime, and it's the border, and it's economy.

That's the three, the trifecta.

And then he's in New York.

So after one appearance, he's up at the bodega.

Another appearance, he's with a lot of union workers.

And he's going to keep doing that and try to show everybody.

So New York is, yes, they're elites.

Yes, they're all 88% of them are Democrats.

Yes, they may convict him.

But in the process, there are pockets of working people.

And he's trying to make this idea that he's far more of a populist than Joe Biden.

And I think a lot of it is

everybody says he's obnoxious and cruel, but there's a lot more likability with Donald Trump than there is Joe Biden.

And anytime he can showcase that, it's to his advantage.

People are tired of being lied to.

They're tired of all these elites telling us that there's no inflation, that the border is secure, there's nothing wrong with crime, it's actually down.

We know that's not true now, by the way.

The FBI statistics and the states and cities that do not participate in that statistical gathering show us that that was a complete fabrication, which we talked about.

So

people say, don't lie to me.

I know crime is going up.

Don't lie to me that the border is secure.

I know it's not.

Don't lie to me that race relations are better.

Don't lie to me that the economy is humming along.

We see what the prices are, 30, 40 percent and higher.

And they're going up and gas is going up exponentially here in California.

So

that's the whole subtext.

And Donald Trump's trying to flip.

this disadvantage that he has to his advantage.

And he's done it before.

I think the left has to understand understand what the optics are.

If you take a deep breath, they're basically telling America,

we don't trust you.

We're afraid that you're going to be deluded.

You're not smart enough to know the real Donald Trump or the real Joe Biden.

So we have to help you.

And we can do it in a lot of ways.

We can have the National Voter Compact, and we're working on that to abolish de facto the Electoral College.

We tried to get him off the ballot for you, and now we're going to tie him up in court, bankrupt him physically and mentally destroy him for you so you don't fall into this.

And that's not a very good strategy.

It's not a successful agenda.

Yeah.

Victoria, speaking of crime going up, did you see the news that Adam Schiff

had his

car broken into in San Francisco

yesterday?

Yes.

And Gavin Newsom City.

What do you think he did?

Do you think he called up Gavin and said, hey, Gavin,

what's going on in the city?

And it's just another, when these elites cannot be insulated from

the logical ramifications of their ideology, they get kind of put out.

But

yeah, he's been campaigning all over California.

He's got a huge money advantage.

And Steve Garvey,

I would like him to win, but he's not a dynamic candidate.

But we'll see.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I just want to take a quick minute to welcome back our sponsor, Hillsdale College.

And listeners, you should know that Victor is one of the professors in three of the over 30, excuse me, over 40 free online courses at Hillsdale.

That's right.

The first course Victor teaches is American Citizenship and Its Decline based on his book, The Dying Citizen.

The second course is The Second World Wars, based on his best-selling book by the same name.

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And we thank the good people of Hillsdale College for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, another thing or two

on unions

was that I'm looking at a CBS News report, a headline, Biden touts.

labor endorsement, but members worry about Trump's cultist support.

So from the leadership of many of these unions, including some of the, you know, the muscular union, the construction unions, UAW, the leadership supports Joe Biden.

But interesting,

now this is anecdotal, but a New York Post piece yesterday interviews a guy, Dan Gould, Darren Gould, 58, general, a foreman carpenter from Wenake, Wanake.

I never heard of that town in New Jersey, said he feels Trump is going to come back and get this country back on its feet.

Trump got a great reception.

They say unions aren't big for Trump.

Well, they are.

Maybe the top union brass aren't, but when you talk to the men on the construction site, they're all about Trump, he told the Post.

Gould insisted if Trump isn't re-elected, America is in big trouble.

Which leads me into Victor, the viral video.

I think it's 12 seconds.

Newsmax was down at the construction site where Donald Trump had been earlier, and

he

caught up with a big dude and, you know, wearing his hard hat and labels all over it.

And he asked him about the election.

He said, Trump, it's Trump's turn.

Trump's coming back.

And then he asked him, do you have anything to say to Joe Biden?

And he said, blank you.

And this has gone viral because it just cuts to the chase of how a lot of people feel.

Victor, any thoughts about that particular video?

And is this a one-day flash, maybe?

Do you think you have anything like that consequences?

And then I'd like to get your thoughts on vulgarity in classical times.

Well,

I mean, it was that F Joe Biden.

Remember that?

What was his name?

When they used that phrase, that euphemism for saying the F word with Joe Biden.

I forgot the initials, you know.

And

it's or Joe Biden said the other day, you remember, Jack, he said that he was going somewhere and a young man, a young seven-year-old flipped him the bird.

Yeah.

And that happens all the time.

I don't believe it happens all the time.

I don't think seven-year-olds flip Joe Biden the bird at all.

But Joe Biden,

remember, is

rumored by leaks from his aides to say the F-word all the time in the White House, but usually in connection with Donald Donald Trump.

So I don't know what to say.

I do

that's why I spent some time when this I had this letter that people said that I had used the F word on occasion.

I have not.

I got a letter today, Jack, that said, oh, the Reverend who wrote you that meant that you used the word feces.

And I guess that was in connection with the homeless problem.

I probably did, but remember,

that's a clinical term.

It's not,

would you prefer me to use the S word?

It's a general rule, Jack, in English because it's a combination of Anglo-Saxon, Germanic

vocabulary and Latin and Greek.

Profanity is bifurcated.

So it's usually an Anglo-Saxon language.

Right.

By that I mean for every word, there is a clinical term.

So you can say urinate.

That is a Latin word in English.

Comes from Latin.

And you can use the P word for urinate.

You can say defecate.

That is a Latin word.

There's an Anglo-Saxon.

Usually they're monosyllabic and

they're not compounded.

And they don't, you can't really tell what they, that S word comes from the, I think originally from the word schism

that calls a break in the pelvic, you know, the rear end.

And that's where it comes from.

And then, you know, there's words, the F word, and then there's intercourse.

Well, intercourse is a Latin word.

And so

every single word in English that is foul comes from Anglo-Saxon.

And every one of them has a counterpart that

the elite use to be clinical and scientific.

And it's always better, I think, when you're in public, if you have to refer to those words to use the polysyllabic Latinate word than the Anglo-Saxon word.

But it's getting very common now.

Trump says it all the time at rallies.

You know, he says, I'm going to beat the crap out of this.

I don't mean literally, but

a race.

So

I don't like it.

And the ancient world,

one of the big shocks I had is being 20, being on the UC Santa Cruz campus in 1971 where the F word was,

everybody used it.

But when I started studying classics in depth,

if you read the 11 plays of Aristophanes, I mean,

they're pretty explicit.

And

they have every imaginable combination of words, much more a rich vocabulary of obscenity and profanity than ours.

You can find it in inscriptions, and they're usually the same thing, go F yourself or something like that in Latin or Greek.

We also have poets.

Some of the most foul things are in the poems of Catullus.

I mean, they are really up there.

And then also Petronius's Satyricon.

They're on pots a lot.

Greek vase paintings.

They have little inscriptions about go do this to yourself or do that to yourself or blank, blank, my blank.

So it's very common.

And

I don't know what to say.

There was an advantage.

Where did this all happen is what I'm saying.

I mean, they used to prosecute people for using the F word, as you know, but where did this

degradation of the language start in the 1960s?

And we've got to remember everybody what the rationale was.

I can remember coming out of Selma High School and going into the first class at UC Santa Cruz.

It was a seminar required of Western civic.

And there were about 10 people there.

They were all from LA or New York, it seemed like.

And

nobody showered.

There was BO.

And at that time, I don't know if you remember, I'm a little older than you are, women were told not to shave under their arms or legs.

And they were not to use artificially plastic was the word people used, deodorant.

So people had this thing, you remember called petouli oil?

It was really

a strong-scented

foul, but it was supposed to be organic.

And before we used words like organic.

And I remember the professor, somebody passed wind, and he kind of got

the F word.

And he got embarrassed.

He said, if you got to do it, go, go ahead and do it.

We can do it opening in my class.

So everybody sat on the ground.

There was no hierarchy.

We made a circle.

And then people used the F word.

And that started it.

That generation, our generation, started using that

all the time.

And all of this dirty vocabulary.

And I think

there's a backlash against it now.

And I think people are saying, you know, language reflects chaos.

And it gets into this thing, if I'm trying to tie too many things together, excuse me, but

we can talk about, you mentioned this airliner that was in Los Angeles, this used

747 Lutanza, and you watch that video and it hits, makes a hard landing.

It's hard to know if that was the

air traffic controller's error or he just came in too abruptly and then he took off again.

It was a go-round, but a go-round, I had mentioned I've been on two of them the last few years, but one of them barely touched, but nothing like that.

And then double bounce before he had to

take off the guy.

It was lucky that the landing gear didn't collapse.

And that's juxtaposed to that Reagan situation where it was 400 feet connected and that air traffic controller saying, stop, stop, stop,

as somebody had ordered them wrongly at a 90 degree angle.

And then we had that awful picture of that Swiss air that was headed toward what was it, five southwest.

All those planes were coming across the runway.

Had that pilot not stopped, they would have bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

So this is too what I'm getting at is the whole society,

there is no rules anymore.

There's no law, There's no decorum.

And it's all roughening around the edges.

And everybody doesn't understand why there was in the first place.

I just got off a flight literally an hour ago.

And I can remember the first flight I ever took was in 1971.

I was 18 and I was going to Yale University to study intensive Greek.

I thought I wanted to be a classicist.

And I was all by myself.

I was 18.

I'd never been out of Fresno County, really, except for the coast a a couple of times, or more than a couple, but I'd never been anywhere else.

And everybody was well dressed.

I mean, they had what I would call, I don't know, hagger slacks and a button-down shirt.

And then

they looked like the Kingston trio, Jack.

You know what I mean?

The men were dressed that way.

They didn't look like they rolled out of bed.

Yes.

Well, I was on the flight today, and I mean,

people, what is this thing with people wearing pajamas now?

Have you noticed that?

Are they pajamas or what are they wearing?

They look like pajamas.

Yeah.

And they have shoes and socks, but they had pajamas on.

And then there's sweatpants, sweatpants.

There are five or six people wearing sweatsuits.

And then there's the yoga pants that can be

too revealing, especially to people who shouldn't be wearing them.

And it's just, they were just slobs.

And what I'm getting at is

there were rules why people dressed, why people used a particular type of vocabulary, why people came on time.

And then we juxtapose why there was very strict meritratic standards to be a air traffic controller, a Boeing mechanic, a pilot on United.

There were rules.

There were rules why

people

didn't take drugs or that it wasn't, you know, you just didn't,

you didn't go smoke marijuana anywhere.

And when you start to erode that culture, you get into a lord of the flies mentality very quick.

People start reverting to their natural voclivities.

You see that with these serial pictures of these students that beat the blank blank out of teachers.

And, you know, I went to a rural school, Eric White School, and I can remember when I first went there, it was 1961.

Teachers were sacrosanct.

You would never do that.

And in high school, you'd never do that.

The only thing I can remember in high school that we had a teacher who was, they called her Krabby Appleton, and somebody put a

trash can full of water on the bathroom, faculty bathroom, restroom, so it fell down.

You know, they used to have the big hinge above on those heavy doors.

She'd open the door and the water drenched her, almost hit her head.

And I mean, that was a scandal.

They had an investigation, and they brought 11 or 12 people in, they expelled them.

That was really something.

And so, what I'm getting at,

the whole tradition of

careful vocabulary, of careful dress, of careful comportment, of careful respect for people and authorities, of for being on time, for not missing cloud.

I was delayed today because an air traffic, I mean, air flight attendant didn't show up.

Just one, but you can't fly without the requisite number.

So we just sat there waiting for somebody who never did show up.

We had to wait for another person to come.

But being timely.

It used to be that people who weren't that way were slobs or they were vulgar.

Now it's almost been institutionalized in a political sense.

Well, it's racist or

it's classist or you've created these arbitrary rules to oppress the other.

And so

if it doesn't stop,

if this erosion of decency and culture and tradition and norm doesn't stop, then you end up with things like planes crashing

and something like high-speed rail right down the road from me with

$30 billion and no track laid, and people just standing around have no idea what they're doing.

And that's what I'm most worried about.

And this unraveling of civilization.

I have have this book coming out, you know, The End of Everything, about civilizations that were destroyed in war, but one of the themes of the book is

they were very great empires and nations, but they started to unravel insidiously without the consciousness that they were doing it.

And

they were in a series of declines.

I noticed too, I've been reading a lot of European newspapers online.

They just speak now

nonchalantly of American decline.

It's really startling.

And I'll say things, since the decline of the United States and the Middle East,

since America is no longer willing or can confront China, since America is

lost its sense of confidence.

It's really insidious.

It appears at all levels.

So we really got to, decline is always a choice.

It's not a fate.

We have all the ingredients in this country, whether it's

the building blocks of civilization.

We have fuel.

We have food.

We inherited a great infrastructure.

We have a good constitution.

Even though we've lost our elite universities in science and math and some of the professional schools, they're still good, the best.

So we can reverse it if we just have the will to

do certain things.

Secure the border, stop crime.

don't waste federal money on stupid programs and

look at the content of our character and not our tribal affiliation.

Well, Victor, we'll maybe talk a little more about DEI

and

the Second Cold War and

maybe even gas prices.

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on Friday, the 26th of April.

Victor, you mentioned Krabby Appleton.

That reminded me that was a character

on the

cartoon Tom Terrific that was on, I think, Captain Kangaroo.

Yes, I didn't know a person of your youth would remember that.

Well, I watched Captain Kangaroo.

And, you know, Captain Kangaroo himself was from the Bronx.

And actually, Mrs.

Kangaroo, his wife,

her father owned a funeral home in my neighborhood.

So that's just.

I think there was a band called Krabby Apple.

There was.

They were really primitive comics.

Remember, they were line drawings and just

they were the cheap version.

They weren't like Looney Tunes or Warner Brothers or Disney.

Artwork in.

I think the best cartoons artistically, besides Disney, like Snow White, et cetera, were the Columbia cartoons of Mr.

Magoo early on that won Oscars, just the artwork is just terrific.

So anyway, cartoons aside,

Victor Gas, you mentioned gas

an article this week, $7.29 a gallon in California.

I pulled up about two weeks ago in Palo Alto at 6.20.

So I was in Nanol Park, I think.

And

what did Joe Biden expect?

I mean,

he came into office, he canceled,

he took ANWAR off, he canceled new federal leases, he canceled the continental and keystone pipelines, he jawboned the frackers and horizontal and said they shouldn't be given lending opportunities.

And then all of a sudden, gas went sky high.

And before the 2022, he's basically sent the message, hey, everybody

talk talk talk about outlawing in internal combustion engines talk green but under the radar drain the strategic reserve do it now right before the the midterms and you know what keep tell those guys to to frack and pump as much as they can we got to get this gasp and they got it down temporarily But when you have a war in Ukraine and you've sanctioned Russian oil, then they are dumping it at cheap prices as much as they can to the Chinese, the Indians, et cetera.

And Iran is doing the same thing.

And people are worried

you can't navigate through the

Red Sea.

You can't navigate through the Black Sea.

It's difficult to go to the Straits of Hormund, the Hormuz, the Horn of Africa.

No one respects the

ability of the U.S.

Navy to keep the seas safe.

We don't respond to attacks.

And the result is psychologically people feel that there's going to be a shortage of oil.

So it's starting this mob buying of tanker oil by the brokers and it's driving the price up.

Here in California,

when you mention that $7, we have the fourth, I think, the fourth largest reserves of oil of all the states.

We have,

I think it's the third largest natural gas, the Monterey Shale Basin.

And we have all this stuff, and Gavin Newsom won't touch it.

Nobody will want to touch it.

What's so weird about these people is we're the largest, we're not the largest per capita consumer of gas, but we're the largest aggregate because of our population.

So we're importing oil from the Saudis, natural gas from Canada and Alaska.

So it hasn't affected people in the sense that this, the green mentality of our leadership says, oh, this stuff is bad.

We're going to limit access to it and transition, but the people are still wanting it.

They're burning it, you know.

And I don't know what to say when all these students, I see that a lot of these students are protesting not just for Hamas, but they have other agendas about we don't want to use fossil fuels.

They don't have to do that.

They don't have to.

petition Princeton or Yale or Stanford.

All they have to do is not use them.

They can just say, you know what, this dorm is fossil-free

dorm.

We're not going to turn on any heating.

We're just not going to do it.

We're not going to use any electricity because it's probably fossil fueled and we got rid of all but one nuclear plants.

But they don't do that.

They want to use fossil fuels.

I was in a monstrous

in Fresno of all places, traffic jam, and I thought, wow.

Here's a state where it's just all these young people that zoomed by me and then they slammed on their brake.

They're in this thing.

And I thought, wow, they're all for climate change, radical

curtailment of fossil fuels, but it hasn't affected their own habits at all.

Right.

Right.

Well, I wanted to.

Kind of like Me Too, if I could add something.

During that hype of Me Too, when

they went after Garrison Keillor and

everybody, you know,

Al Franken.

Yeah.

And it was.

But he wishes he hung on for a few minutes.

Frankenstein.

He lost his job.

But the point was that I thought, well,

if it is true that there are these sexual predators all over and we've got to find them and restrain them and punish them, which I agreed with, then it might be wise not to wear semi-nude clothing for a while.

But it didn't stop the Kardashians and all these people going, you know what I mean?

Just taking selfies of themselves half-naked in a way that no one else would ever dress.

It was the weirdest thing in the world.

Incidentally, I think what ended me too was the emergence in

2020 of Tara Reed when she came out of the woodwork in the primaries and said that she had been sexually assaulted and raped, basically digitally raped by Joe Biden.

Excuse that term, but that's what she said.

And it was pretty clear that she had because her mother called in, I think it was to the Larry King show and said, my daughter has been sexually assaulted by a very prominent Democratic politician.

And she talked about it.

And then people, I think it was Camilla Harris was still in the race.

And she said, I believe her.

And then all of a sudden, Joe was anointed.

And it was just, okay, let's now turn all of the media firepower on Tara Reed.

And she's an idiot.

She's heavy now.

She's mad.

She's crazy.

And that's what they did.

And that kind of ended the idea that you were going to have me too.

And then all of a sudden you started reading op-eds that this was suicidal.

We lost Al Franken in the Senate.

Good old Garrison Keillor, Matt Lauer, all these Charlie Rose, what happened?

I said, let's just stop this stuff.

Let's just stop it.

And this is Chris, what's his puss on MSNBC?

Chris Matthews.

Chris Matthews back.

I see him on

the people saying he would go into the stylist room and say to someone, did I ever tell you I loved you?

You're so beautiful.

And just

that was kind of creepy.

I debated him a couple of times.

I don't want to say anything

negative about him, but he said a lot of things negative about me in the debate.

Really?

Ad hominy.

Well, anyway, Adhominy.

Well, we won't talk about it.

It was things like, you know, he said that Donald Trump uniquely was an election denialist, and he just threw that out there.

You know, January,

he doesn't have any facts.

It's just all bark.

And I just, when it was my turn to respond, I said, excuse me, in 2004, there were over 30 House members that voted not to accept the Ohio results, including Senator Barbara Boxer.

In other words, that would have nullified the election.

Then Stacey Abrams lost by 50,000 votes.

She was introduced by major grandees of the Democratic Party for two years as the real governor of Georgia.

In 2016, the DNC

in a clandestine fashion helped all of these

movie, I guess you call them grade three or four movie stars, and they were going on TV every night and they were saying, please, electors, please electors, be counterfeit elect,

don't vote according to the majority vote in your state.

Flip.

Do the right thing.

Our country's in your ⁇ that was an insurrectionary act.

So I pointed these out.

And then I said, of course, Jimmy Carter and Hillary Clinton said Donald Trump, after he had been elected, was an illegitimate president.

And he got very angry.

There you go, the Republican talking point.

I don't want to hear, you know, no response to what I actually said.

Well,

he's a specie meatball, another Holy Cross graduate, just like me and Tony Fauci.

Hey, Victor, I want to talk a little more about DEI, but first I got to say a word.

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Victor, I didn't send you anything on

this, but

mentioning the airlines and the air traffic controllers.

And I've seen a few stories lately

about medical associations and the drive for

DEI continues apace there.

When you talked about turning around the nation, we still can.

I believe we can, but that one thing really worries me, this

generation, this cluster of

folks getting educated in medical schools, psychiatry, pediatric, wherever, where they're, whatever time they're supposed to, a significant time that they're supposed to be spending, you would think on learning the medical arts, they're learning

ideology.

And these are the people who are going to be, you know, opening my skull in 20 years of wrestling.

Yeah,

as I said, I had to go to the emergency room about a year ago, and I was in full shock from a weird beasting, you know,

65, 70 over 35 with a heart rate of about 170.

And

I went in.

I won't mention anything about it, but I don't want to identify anybody.

But I've noticed one of the reactions to people who don't, who come out of the system and they're not trained in the old-fashioned way, because I mentioned an immune problem I had,

the clinical name for it, and the doctor had never heard of it.

It's not that uncommon.

But they, I guess the rationale for the medical schools is that they have protocols now.

So when

he was

diagnosing this reaction and why it had happened and what to do about it, he was reading off a computer.

You know what I mean?

He was sitting on a stool reading a computer.

And I notice when I go to some special,

I know that they're recording things, but what I think is happening is that they're getting protocols from the major university med centers.

So the idea of a doctor is changing now.

A doctor is somebody who's branded.

And he's not the old.

I had a country doctor.

I'll mention his name, Marshall Sorensen.

He was absolutely a saint, Jack.

Delivered all my kids.

Country doctor.

In any given day, he must have seen 20 patients with every variety of heart, lung, infectious problem.

By the time that he was 50, he was the most...

brilliant diagnostician, you know what I mean?

And he was, that type of person's not around anymore.

I don't think it is in common.

I know know there's some people saying, well, my doctor's like, and I'm glad they are, but I think what the medical schools are doing now,

maybe recently doing, is they're turning out people who in a 24-hour day have had a large chunk of their available hours to study or class time allotments in what you're talking about, therapeutics.

And so, and the rationale is not just they're going to be more humane and diverse and more understanding of the other and have a quality of result, beautiful society, and da-da-da.

But they feel that the expertise, we're kind of like Mycenaeans,

where there's going to be

Mycenaean lords at the palace, and they all have it down on linear B.

Nobody else knows what linear B is.

That's how

they were destroyed, actually.

They were decapitated.

When you decapitate the so-called Wannocks at a Mycenaean palace, everybody says, well, how do we farm now?

Where's the commissar that tells me how to farm?

Or

what do we do with the olive oil or all this?

So what I'm getting at is

I think we're turning out a lot of medical graduates who feel

that they can operate in the medical field as a doctor because it's sort of like us with all of the knowledge in our iPhone.

So if somebody comes in and they'll just say, he has sore throat,

dilated pupil, something, and then they'll type

those into a computer and out comes a diagnosis but without knowing the history of the patient or not or you know what I mean if right if I go if I went to go see Doc Sorensen and I said man I got a really bad pain in my lower back he would say well let's start with the premise Victor I remember now you've had five kidney stones So you've got too high oxalate.

And I may be wrong, but let's get it.

Let's just shoot a picture right now.

And then I would walk over.

And they used to have these old, you know, the same building would have a very simple x-ray machine.

But he knew my history, and he knew all of his patients' history.

And those people are very rare.

Whereas you can't get that type of knowledge right out of a computer.

And, you know, it's like in my narrow field, you can't just go take a Zoom class on how to learn classical Greek and think that you can get it all off a

interactive course.

You have these, I had all Austrian and English and German professors that were classicists so when they were teaching you say Greek composition how to write in classical Greek or how to read a difficult chorus from Aeschylus

they would give you anecdotes and they say now here's a technique that's not in the books you know what I mean or when you want to you ran into an articular infinitive in Thucydides now remember this is what this is what he's trying they had ways of explanations and exegesis that couldn't be replicated and that was part of the the teaching experience.

And that's so where we're headed, if we're not going to be merucratic and we're going to hire and promote and qualify excellence on the base of tribal affiliations and think that it won't matter, same with pilots, same with, because we all have these computerized protocols that we read and follow that a few grandees at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT have created.

I'm not saying it's not bad.

I mean, I'm out in rural California, and if I were to get cancer, I'm sure the cancer protocols that brilliant researchers at UC Meds in San Francisco or at Stanford Medical School or USC Medical School will be available to the doctor.

But it's not the same as going up there and talking to one of those people and having, you know, face to face is what I'm trying to get at.

And we see it with urgent care.

We have a lot of these urgent carers now in our area where you have people that don't really have any medical experience.

I mean, maybe they have MA.

Not all of them are registered nurses.

And a person comes in and they zoom into the doctor.

It's like a,

you know, he's the center of a spider web, the spider, and then he directs them what to do.

And

I just don't think it's going to be a vibe.

It's all a symptom that this society is broke and it has no rules or protocols.

We've got 50 to 55 million people here that weren't born in the United States.

Record high 14, 15% of the population.

There's no protocols.

Nobody cares.

We're Americans, but guys, we're Americans.

We're the best in the world.

We're the richest.

We can do anything.

No, you can't.

You can't unless you enforce rules.

So

you've got to tell people, you've got to go to class.

You can't miss class.

If you miss a certain class, you're expelled.

If you come late,

I remember in high school or grammar school, if you came late to class and you opened the door, they said, what are you doing?

The door is to the principal's office.

We're not letting you in.

If you came late, we were paranoid about being late to class.

You just didn't do it.

And you didn't ditch class.

But I guess what I'm getting at is that the whole society and medicine, everything is unwinding.

And the quality of care and the type of people who used to administer it are rare.

It's getting rarer and rarer.

Let me tell you where there are some rules, though, Victor.

Did you see this story from, you know, that Jason Rance?

He's on Fox every once in a while.

He's a radio host up in Seattle.

He puts on the story.

I like his reports.

He's very modest, soft-spoken, but always has got something interesting to say.

Yeah.

He just put this thing up on his page, UW, University of Washington.

Students postpone anti-Semitic encampment for having too many white saviors, Activists with the UW Progressive Student Union announced they are postponing Thursday's UW Palestine encampment because there were too many white students involved.

The group received criticism for not including Muslim and Arab students in the organization.

You can see how these protests are working, aren't they?

It's the tutors or the grandees or the mentors are from the Middle East.

And then they get these useful idiots.

And you can see Fox has a whole little mini industry of interviewing these people.

And do you see that young woman they asked her?

And she turned, she says, I don't know what I'm here for.

And she turns to the other woman.

What are we here for?

What does this river to the sea actually mean that we're shouting?

So

it's a bunch of

mediocre, mediocre

college students.

And by the way, I thought this was final season for most of these universities.

So why aren't they in the library studying, studying, studying?

It has to be, does it have anything to do with Yale giving 80% of their

people A's

or letting in for three years people with no SAT score?

And so the idea is that everything is a gut course now.

And I don't know.

I have a feeling that it's harder to get a B at Georgia Tech in a basic

coding class than it would be to get

an A at Stanford now.

And I would bet you it's much harder to get a B in a Shakespeare class at Hillsdale College than it is to get an A in a Shakespeare class at Yale.

If they teach Shakespeare at Yale, you never know if they do.

Yeah.

And so that's it's an enormous opportunity for trade schools and schools that are traditional.

University of Austin, University of Texas is trying to have

a graduate conservative center.

Hillsdale, as I mentioned, I always mention St.

Thomas Aquinas, Pepperdine.

All of these clouds, they're all growing.

People are turning to them.

They're islands in the storm.

Yeah, they are out there.

Hey, Victor, we have one more topic to get your wisdom on, and that's the Cold War, the Second Cold War, and reflections on a piece that your colleague from Hoover, Neil Ferguson, has written in his Bloomberg column.

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I just do want to mention first, Victor, before talking about Neil Ferguson's piece, that you have a website.

We have a lot of new listeners all the time.

Numbers are growing, growing, growing.

Some folks may not know.

There is a place called The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHanson.com is the web address.

And if you go there, you're going to find links to everything Victor writes.

particularly his American Greatness, weekly essays, his weekly syndicated column, links to his books, the forthcoming one, out May 7th, The End of Everything,

links to the podcast and the archives of them, and the ultra articles that he writes exclusively for the Blade of Perseus.

There's a string of them up there right now as we're recording the bunch of angry readers.

So Victor's gone on the counterattack.

I had a backlog.

So I think I have seven of them coming up.

They're not not just angry readers.

I use some of the occasions to write long essays on topics of interest.

So

one of the readers complained about that I wasn't stalwart enough in supporting aid to Ukraine.

I support aid for Ukrainians to dig in and exhaust the Russian army, but not to give them money and see them be wiped out by trying to be George Patton going into Russia, like happened in the so-called spring offensive that was an ungodly disaster.

But anyway, so I took that occasion to write a long essay on that.

And I've been doing that with a lot of the angry readers.

You know, folks want to read them, you have to subscribe.

Five bucks gets you in the door.

It's $50 for the full year.

Do subscribe, victorhanson.com.

And let me mention everything else here.

A at V Dhansen.

That's Victor's handle on X

and on Facebook, VDH's Morning Cup.

sign up for that.

There's a friendly

fan page, call it the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club, but that's also on Facebook.

So

get you Phil of Victor in various months.

That was Sammy's idea, the blade of Perseus.

She wanted to have a paywall.

And she said

she did some research and found out that the average paywall was between $8 and $10

a month

and somewhere between 700 and 800 words.

And she said,

without my knowledge,

we're going to go down to $5,

and you're going to supply 2,100 words

for the paywall each week.

So I have three 700-word essays, and sometimes more.

But the idea was to give the readers a little bit more than

a lot of different topics, too, that are not really op-eds that I write.

Well, what Sammy says goes.

So anyway, Victor, let's

go to the other side.

By the way, I'm going to interrupt you, but one last, I just spoke at a big event.

I just got off the plane and came home.

Where?

It was in Scottsdale, and it was for the Hoover Institution.

Wonderful people there.

Huge crowd.

And

they were all kidding.

And someone said to me, I get so tired of this, Jack.

She said,

you're so cross with Sammy.

you you just snap at her sometimes don't snap at our sammy i said i don't snap at sammy where did this come from our sammy see sammy's got uh she's she's a lovely soul she's

was was jay bhattacharya there by the way were you the only uh senior fellow uh no there was a there was a lot of senior fellows there was a lot of great lecturers there i had a

One of the things that's happened just off the topic at the Hoover Institution,

and I'll be candid, history as a discipline has collapsed at the history department at Stanford.

It's gone completely DEI.

They have very few majors.

They have expelled some fine faculty members.

When I was a PhD student there, I mean, they had

Gordon Craig, the German historian,

had David Kennedy, Polter.

It was a really top-notch.

Stephen Osmond, the great German historian as well, was there for two years.

But now what's happened at the Hoover, our director, Condoleezza Raises, wanted to emphasize history, which is, you know, for years there was only two historians, and I was the only classicist.

And now suddenly we have this history group.

And I don't want to, you know, I don't want to toot the institution's horn, but when you compare it to history departments at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, think of having a history department where you have my colleagues are Neil Ferguson, Andrew Roberts, the Churchill biographer,

you know, wrote The Storm of War, wrote The Napoleon, gosh,

he's preeminent narrative historian in the world.

And then we have Stephen Kotkin, the great Russian historian, who's writing a three-volume history.

We just hired Barry Strauss, the ancient historian, who's written...

I don't know, 16 or 17 books.

So we've got an all-star lineup.

And it's really different to be there now because you have all these brilliant historians.

And then H.R.

McMaster, you know, has a PhD in history and political, and he's been writing a lot about history.

So there's a lot.

It's not just contemporary op-eds.

We've got a lot of people working on contemporary issues, but from a historical background that we didn't have in the past.

Yeah, folks should check out the Hoover website regularly.

There's always new links to profoundly important writing there,

including, and check out Strategica.

That's the online journal Victor edits there.

Victor, you mentioned Neil Ferguson.

He's got a column.

He writes a column from Bloomberg and most recent one, the headline is China, Russia, Iran Axis is bad news for Trump and GOP isolationists.

And a quick quote from it, he says, Mark Levin and Speaker Mike Johnson, Mark made some to-do about this on Fox this past week.

They have have realized,

as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has long argued, that some quarrels in faraway countries must ultimately concern us.

They are parts of a single war being waged by a new axis against the fundamental values we hold dear, democracy, the rule of law, individual freedom.

I predict that the isolationists' counter-arguments will not age well.

For now, fortunately, we are in Cold War II, not World War III.

However, Cold War II is proceeding rather faster than Cold War I.

Victor, he put a lot into this piece, but any thoughts on any of it as we

live a lot.

I like Neil a lot.

He's a colleague of mine.

He and I and Scott Atlas, you know, were kind of...

brothers in arms when we were attacked by the faculty senate right so but i i think i would expand on that and deterrence can be broadly defined not just in military capability, but the types of

activity that military capability is an expression of a strong economy, a fiscally sound country, and secure borders.

So, yes, but we're not going to be able to deter

the Chinese from taking Taiwan, and we're not going to be able to stop Putin from crossing international borders, and we're not going to be able to isolate Iran

unless

we stop spending.

We're $35 trillion in debt, and we're spending a trillion dollars every hundred days, and nobody's talking about it.

And so I understand that

there was a lot of Republicans, but they were not all isolationists.

Some of them were saying, look, I'll support Ukraine, but we've got to look at two things.

We don't have a border.

And, you know, with all due respect to you guys, Putin is an existential threat, and so is Hamas, and so is Iran.

But the Chinese Fed fentanyl, Mexican wink and nod appease, cartel promoted fentanyl industry has killed 100,000 Americans.

It's ruined tens of thousands of lives.

And nobody says a word.

So what they were trying to say is, let's just make this multifaceted.

You and the Democrats want aid, want to waive a, sure, we'll give them the 60 billion, but why don't you at the same time shut the border down?

Just do that.

And then let's get together and stop borrowing a trillion dollars so we can start rearming.

And you get nothing.

And so they get so frustrated, they being the Republican base, that they say, well, what leverage do we have except to do to stop something that Democrats want?

And that's how they got into this.

I like Speaker Johnson, but you know, he walked into a buzz, so I felt bad because he's being praised now by the Democrats.

And that's toxic from the praise from some of those people.

So yes, Neil's right.

We've got to stand up to Putin.

We've got to stand up to Chi, we've got to stand up to the Theocrats, but we won't be able to do that unless we we have the money.

We've got to go slash that budget.

We've got to get to, we've got to go back to old Al Simpson, the Simpson

budget reduction plan.

Bowles,

Simpson,

Erskine Bowles, I think his name was, and Alan Simpson.

They had the plan.

If we had just followed it, Obama commissioned it in 2009.

They came back.

They were

simplified tax code, three brackets.

It wasn't very harsh.

It was just gradually stopping.

We would right now have a balanced budget and we would be starting to pay down the debt.

And so we've got to do that.

We're short.

What I'm getting at is we don't, when you have to move 155 millimeter shells from your depository in the Middle East over to Ukraine and you're still outproduced by North Korea, who's just sent 2 million shells, something's wrong.

We're kind of a fat country.

We've been doing, we're spending all this money on social programs.

Gavin Newsom Newsom one day says, here's $500 million for illegal alien health care.

Oh, yeah, let's start paying for reparation.

We're just printing money and giving it to various groups that claim they have

reparatory grievances.

And meanwhile, we're in a sea of madness abroad.

So yes, but to create...

The other thing very quickly is

I'm not sure that the Republican MAGA people are isolationist.

I think there is a better term that Russell Walter Meade brought into popular currency, and that was Jacksonian.

And that was no better friend, no worse enemy.

And what I mean by that was,

before you say these MAGA people, if that's who Neil's talking about, are isolation, let's just look at four years of Trump Magism.

Who killed Soleimani?

When he inherited ISIS, Barack Obama didn't do anything.

Remember, he said they were JBs.

Donald Trump put troops into Syria and Iraq, and he bombed the proverbial, here we go again, the S word, and he destroyed ISIS for now.

He dealt a grievous blow by interfering in the Middle East and getting rid of solomani.

When he looked at Israel, he said, you people,

you keep saying you're going to help Israel, but if you have any daylight between you and Israel, then people jump in.

And that's why we had the 2006 war.

That's why we've had all these wars.

So, you know what?

Tell me what you want, Israel.

And they said, well, we want the embassy in Jerusalem.

Okay.

We want the Golan Heights.

It's never going to go.

Okay.

We want to get out.

You've got to get out of the random.

Okay.

We want you to declare the Houthis terrorist organizations.

Okay.

No interventionist Democrat did that.

That was a Jacksonian, these are our friends, and those guys are our enemies, and we're going to help our friends.

And they looked at Russia, and they said, Clapper said he's Putin's puppet.

Okay.

Well then why did Joe Biden suspend $100 million of aid to Ukraine?

Why did Barack Obama never approve offensive weapons?

Donald Trump was impeached not for canceling it, but for approving javelins and other offensive weapons and temporarily delaying them.

not never authorizing them.

Who upped the sanctions on the Russian oligarchs?

Who got out of an asymmetrical missile deal with Putin?

Who did that?

Who dumped oil on the world market to crash supplies to hurt Putin?

It was Trump.

So

I don't think that we should be isolationists.

I think we should be muscular and tough and then pick and choose.

And I support NATO.

But how do you get for 40 years, everybody said,

Mr.

Netherlands?

Would you think that maybe

you guys should

pay 2% of your GDP?

And

Mr., oh, I don't know, Mr.

Belgium, would you pay 2%?

Right.

Mr.

Italy?

And they said, well, Germany says no.

Germany says no.

So if Germany says no, we say no.

And then you go to Ms.

Merkel, you're right on the board.

Well, we get Russian natural gas.

I know, but you are endangering the entire NATO structure.

And then they didn't listen.

So Trump went into full art of the deal.

You guys are freeloaders.

We're going to get out.

You better do that.

And then Presto, everybody said he was a maniac and he's undermining our alliances.

He's destroyed our friends.

And then guess what?

We've got more countries now in NATO paying their 2% than ever before.

Even well before the Ukraine invasion.

And so what I'm getting at is, yes, let's make sure that we...

we don't get blindsided by another Pearl Harbor,

but let's also not make an alliance.

We've got to be a little bit more sophisticated to just say, Mr.

Zelensky's, we're going to have a spring offensive and you're going to go in there.

When 12 million people have left the country, they've suffered 300,000 dead, wounded.

They can't draft anybody from 18 to 25 where they'd have a revolution.

Draft resistance is at an all-time high.

He's canceled elections.

He has outlawed political parties.

So let's just say,

right now, let's go back to the Obama, Biden, Trump idea that we're not going to forcibly be able in the near term to get back the Donbass and the Crimea, okay?

That was the position of all three past administrations.

But let's fortify what the Ukrainians can get.

Let's maybe get close to where Putin was and then fortify it.

Not

try to attack a fortified line, but use something like the Russians' fortified lines and protect what we have in Ukraine, and then let the Russians beat against it and ram their head against it and bleed them white.

And after maybe a year or two, they would come and negotiate.

So I don't see that

I understand that there's some ultra, ultra-maga people who are isolationists, but for the most part,

The people who were pressuring the speaker on Ukraine and the the Democrats were trying to get aid separate for Israel.

They were overwhelmingly hoping to arm.

The people who were trying to cut off the aid or use it as a hammer

were not the Republicans.

It was Obama and then later Joe Biden.

And if

the only thing that's going to save us if we're in Cold War II is telling the people in the Middle East, there's no daylight between us and Israel.

If you want to go kill 12,000 Jews and rape them and mutilate them and behead them, we're sorry, but Israel is going to take a righteous retribution on you.

It's going to be messy, and I wouldn't do it if I were you, and that will stop it.

Or go tell Iran.

You've had your tit for tat with Israel.

You sent in 320, 99% didn't make it.

50% of your ballistic missiles blew up either on the launching pad or malfunctioned the air.

Do you know what that would mean?

If they had nuclear tips on them, they might either blow you up or your Arab allies

whose airspace they traveled over.

And you know what?

All of Israel's three or four or how many there were got through and they took out your premier air defense.

Do you really want to have a tit for tat for them?

And we're going to be helping them, by the way.

And that would create peace.

And then we went to the Australians and the Japanese and the South Koreans and the Taiwanese and the Philippines.

And we said, this is a no-better friend of America group.

And we have, and that's what we're trying to do.

And we have an alliance.

And we're going to try to help each other and arm each other and share intelligence and stop this Chinese aggression.

But who's not doing that?

You know, who's an isolationist?

And I don't think that...

I wish, I like what Neil wrote.

I wish he had written the second half of the article and said that the new left-wing isolationist.

Joe Biden,

has he done anything for the 170 times they've attacked us in the Middle East?

He sends a couple of missiles.

It doesn't do any good.

The Houthis are doing it.

They're doing it.

The Hezbollah and Hamas.

They don't care.

They're not afraid of us.

Biden is an isolationist because he's afraid of his Arab populations in

Pennsylvania and especially Michigan.

He's the one that said, I don't know.

I mean, isn't there something wrong with this argument when we had four administrations and three of them

saw Putin violate international borders?

I mean, he went into Georgia and Alsatia under Bush.

He went into Donbass and Crimea under Obama.

He tried to take Kiev under Biden, but for some reason, he didn't go under the isolationist Trump.

He was scared of, I mean, usually they're not scared of isolationists.

They're scared of interventionists that might do something unpredictable.

So

we had peace.

There was no blow-up in the Middle East.

There was no blow-up in Ukraine.

There was no war at all.

There was no Chinese.

Why didn't the Chinese send a spy balloon during the Trump?

Because he would have blasted it apart.

Then he would have called up Chi.

And why did North Korea stop testing ballistic missile?

Because Trump was an isolationist?

And the MAGA people just wanted to crawl in their turtle shell?

No.

They were Jacksonians.

Their attitude was, I don't really want to go and change the hearts and minds of Iraqis anymore.

And you know what?

We shouldn't have got out of Afghanistan the way we should have kept the Bagram Air Force Base and had a, you know, punitive attack on anybody who attacks us.

That was a good strategic location.

But we're not going to try to have the pride flag at the U.S.

Embassy.

We're not going to put George Floyd murals up on the streets of Kabul.

We're not going to have a gender studies program at the university.

We're not going to change hearts and and minds.

You guys have your hearts and minds, and we respect it.

But that's the attitude I think

most Americans, they're not isolationist, they're Jacksonians.

Don't screw with me.

And then we're going to build up enormous offensive.

We're going to rebuild our Navy to 600 ships.

We're going to have a five-year supply of javelins and missiles.

We're going to create the real Reagan-esque iron dome over the United States, like Trump said he would do.

And don't screw around with us or don't screw around with our allies because we're not going to be proportionate.

We want to tell you in advance.

If you Houthis shoot at another American ship, we don't play by the Biden rules.

Well, they didn't hit it, and we have to have context.

No, we're going to take out your electrical grid.

And if that's not enough warning, we'll take out your ports.

So don't do it.

We don't want to do this, but we will do it.

You'd have peace.

So I think that's where we are.

And I know what Neil was writing about.

He's right about that.

You can't withdraw back into the country, but you've got to,

you know, you've got to build up your military.

And

you've got to have cash reserves and you've got to be completely self-sufficient in oil and food.

And the left doesn't want to do that.

It doesn't want to do it.

And Biden is allowing everybody in the world to take advantage of us while he's saying that there's mega-isolationists.

It's just crazy.

Well,

Victor, I want to say that that was, I wouldn't call it a rant, but I think you might call it a rant.

That was a great rant for those who might think it's a rant.

And then for those who

have contempt for the host of the show interrupting you during a rant, I didn't interrupt you.

Nobody has.

I get angry letters, and

they're triads.

One of them is, would you stop interrupting Sammy and start being nice to her?

she's so sweet and then that's my hit or

i heard you say an s word or something

and then there's a rant against jack but you have to do the commercials so that's why you talk too much i mean if you actually would measure the time that you're not doing commercials it's much less than my time

as it should be because they go to sammy's and they make fun of sammy they write and say sammy's not assertive enough or sammy's too retiring or something like that.

But those are all minor.

That's a minor.

When

I was at a group with 400 people or so, they were all very complimentary of the podcast.

I was in Fresno and I walked into a doctor's office and people came up and they said they were listeners.

So

on the whole part, I mean, we're in the arena.

If you're in the arena,

you're either going, you know, you're going to be a gladiator and you're going to have to take your blows.

You take the blows.

Yeah, I'm fine with it.

I'd just like to

note it.

And the nice lady, it was kind of nice who complained about some of the lewd,

word lewd tonight.

What were your lewd, what did you say?

She said blue pill.

What was it?

Is that a reference to what, Viagra?

Yes.

Yes.

I think the phrase is blue pill and lubricant.

I don't remember saying it, but yeah, it's kind of kind of crude.

All All right, anyway, we're at the end of this.

And Victor,

we thank the people that listen, that write in, that write comments on your website, that write comments on the Apple iTunes site, and that rate the show, which you can do there, zero to five stars, 4.9 plus is the average.

Thanks for folks that do that.

Of the many comments that have come in lately, here's one, and it's titled Victor's Tales of His Life.

This is from Curious About Motives.

And he or she writes, whether about farming or early life, your personal personal stories are so great.

Reminds me of another era when we didn't have much, but were content.

I appreciate that you are such a down-to-earth person,

or could be that conservatives have a brighter outlook in life,

on life in general.

That used to be the norm.

I listen to all your podcasts with great interest.

Keep it up.

Curious about motives.

Thank you, Curious.

Thank you, Victor.

Thanks, everyone who goes to civilthoughts.com and signs up for the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society, 14 recommended readings.

Here's an excerpt.

Here's a link of great stuff I've come across.

You're going to love it.

Free,

not selling your name.

So thanks for the folks that do that.

Victor, you were terrific today, as you always are.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

You're all much appreciated.

And thank you for the letters and greetings when I see you all.

And we'll see you very quickly again.