Deep Pockets and Deep Throat: From California's Homeless to NPR's Politics

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, the star and namesake Victor Davis-Hanson, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Moshavuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus is its name.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

Folks, you should be visiting there frequently.

And I'll tell you why.

towards the end of this particular episode.

We are recording on Saturday, April 13th, and this particular episode will be up on Thursday, what is it, the 18th of April.

Plenty to talk about, and including, Victor, the recent news about the $24 billion that California has spent on homelessness in the last five years.

And nobody knows what the F this money has done, where it's gone to.

And while it's being spent, of course, homelessness is on the increase in your in the once golden state we have that we have some generals involving themselves in supreme court matters um

npr and some other media stories we'll get victor's views on all these things

uh right after these important messages

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor, California cannot account for $24 billion that it's spent on the homeless since 2019, and it can't assess the impact of that massive spending.

I saw some numbers that since 2019, despite all that money out of your pockets and the pockets of others who have probably fled the state now, Homeless numbers have risen 20%, approaching 20,000 in your state.

Well, I think we know where it went.

Yeah, go ahead.

It went to three groups, the homeless themselves.

And that meant did they get the money and save it up and then,

after a while, put a down payment on rent?

No.

It went for drugs or whatever their particular

preferences of intoxicant is, because many of them suffer from mental health issues and self-medicate.

Number two,

it went to the state bureaucracies that are in charge of this problem that do nothing.

If you look at the results of we have more homeless than ever.

And then three, it went to these private contractors who go to the state and say, we need this, so many millions for this shelter or that shelter or this program.

But it doesn't deal with the problem.

The problem is that

if you were not suffering from a mental or physical ailment, it would be very hard in California, especially if you've come here recently or you've been divorced or you're older, to find housing.

Why?

Because we do not allow

builders to build new developments, new apartment buildings without strict regulations.

It's not just the ones that are important like earthquake, but it's things like, is your

drywall made from green materials, that kind of stuff.

And it's just regulation after regulation and it's too expensive.

And so if you want to get a new home in a depressed area like mine, it's probably $400,000 or $500,000.

If you want to buy one on the coast, I was just looking today

at a development in Seaside, which wasn't necessarily the nicest area of Monterey, but it's a very, you know, it's a nice place.

They're about a million and a half dollars for a new home, about 2,200 square foot with no yard, basically.

So that's the problem, and they don't know how to deal with it because to deal with it would have to be a rejection of all their philosophy.

They'd have to force people who had mental problems to get aid.

They'd probably have to go and get 100, 200 acre vacant lots and put tents and humane restrooms and have a doctor on call and then force people to

get off the street.

And they're not capable of that.

They just can't do it.

And so what they do is they virtue signal and say, not in my name, how dare you infringe on the right of homeless, but I'm not going to get anywhere near them.

That's their attitude, the left.

So it's not going to change.

It isn't.

We used to have a hobo problem, and the people who were mentally ill went to state mental hospitals, and the other people

who felt that they could live on their own if they couldn't, who weren't able,

their family took care of them.

As I said on earlier podcasts, I think my grandfather told me he had 27 people here during the Depression from

31, 29, I don't know, all the way to 1940 until the war started, 41 until the war started.

But

I've met a lot of them who've come by in the years since I've lived here, the last 50 years.

Second cousins, third cousins, aunts, uncles,

basically saying, we camped out in your barn, where's the shed?

We lived.

We lived in the pump house, that kind of stuff.

But we don't do that anymore.

No, throwing money at it.

It's all cruelty.

That's all we do.

Yeah.

California,

they had a poll not too long ago, Jack, and they asked the average Californian, what percent does the 1%

pay of the total income tax, which is the 1% pays somewhere, but depending on the year, it's less because so many have left,

and it's gone down as far as qualifying as the 1%.

It's about 45% to 48% of all the taxes is paid by one, and the 5% pay about 80%.

But most people, what do you think the 1%?

Oh, they pay 20%, maybe 30% of the tax.

That's about.

And then the people are leaving not just

because of stories like this.

They feel that they're paying

13% of their income on the top brackets, and they're getting the worst, among the worst schools in the nation, among the worst infrastructure in the nation, among

the worst homeless problem in the nation, among the worst illegal alien problem in the nation.

And they have about the worst health care system in the nation.

And it's a beautiful, rich state sitting on 2 billion barrels of immediately usable oil and more natural gas.

And we're importing it from Saudi Arabia and Alaska.

They look at all this and they say, you know,

I pay all this taxes and I get nothing to return.

And then they look at Newsom and what the rhetoric that comes out of the legislature, you didn't earn that and you've got to pay your fair share and you're this kind of stuff.

Yeah.

That's why that's nobody ever remarks.

That's a reason why we have left-wing

billionaires and everybody says, why are they so left-wing?

Yes, I know.

It's because they're never subject to the consequences of their own ideology because they have the money.

But a lot of it is

they understand that if they are conservative, they become targeted and they feel that psychologically they can feel good about themselves by being left-wing or on the contrary, they won't be a target if they're left-wing.

And so they put up with being damned, even though they know they pay half the income tax in many years.

And they don't get anything in return.

And then they think, well,

you know,

I don't really go down the 101 and commute.

I stay home and Zoom or I fly overseas.

Yeah, it's hard to get to the airport.

I don't really,

you know, my neighborhood in Hillsborough or Atherton or

Piedmont or Knob Hill, Pacific Heights, Presidio.

It's not that bad.

I have private security.

We don't let the riffraff come in.

And as far as school goes, my kids go to prep school or private universities.

So I don't really get affected by the dismal school.

And so they navigate around it.

And it's the people that they call, you know, illiberal that have to deal with the consequences of what they vote for.

I was talking to my wife not long ago, and she made a good point.

I was saying, look at the, why do people vote?

She said, I don't have any sympathy.

Don't have any sympathy.

They voted.

They voted for this.

They vote, they vote, they vote, they vote.

They get what they want.

And then they start whining, and then they vote again.

Then they're told, this is what happens when you vote for these people.

And then

they vote for them again.

And so,

you know, it's and historically civilizations commit collective suicide.

They know what they're doing, but they just can't stop.

Well, but especially in, it seems where you live, Victor.

I mean, I'm provincial as the next guy.

And the first time I

actually, every time I've gone to California, it's like, wow, this place is special.

And as I, I'm putting you on the spot here.

And I just wonder if there's any place so generally beautiful.

God's, you know, smiled and blessed.

I've been all over the world.

There isn't.

That has been so self-destructive, self-inflicted suicide.

I go back to this.

It was

in early

June of 1976, and I was 23, and I came home from Stanford University to work on the farm for my grandfather.

I think he knew he was dying.

He was 86, but he died suddenly a month later.

And he was sitting out in what's my yard right now, and I can remember the exact day.

It was June 10th.

I don't know why I remember that, of 1976.

And he was sitting there.

Maybe it was June, yeah, June 9th or 10th.

And he had this chair that we still have.

It's an iron outdoor chair.

And he looked out one day and he was sitting there.

He was actually working that day.

He was digging furrows and irrigating, 86.

And he said, you know, sit down.

Just take a break, Vic.

So I sat down on a stump.

We had just cut down a tree, and he sat near him.

in the yard.

And he said, this is paradise.

Look at this natural paradise.

Can you think of any other place in the world that's so beautiful it's like a patchwork it's irrigated it's so beautiful and then he said have you ever seen a more peaceful place he said we don't even lock our doors and he said then you got this farm and this farm and he mentioned all of these farmers around they were all ethnic there's this mexican-american this armenian this punjabi this Japanese.

So it wasn't all white supremacy at all.

And he just said, these are such nice people.

They're all so hardworking.

This is just, you're so lucky to live here.

I hope you come back and take care of the house for me when I'm gone.

And your mother's here and your father's here.

It was,

it's really hard to screw this up.

It really is.

You have to have people who are not just incompetent, but malicious, that really did want, hate.

Willful.

Willful.

It's not willful blindness.

It's willful maliciousness.

venomous, toxic.

They really wanted to destroy.

When you could look at those big city prosecutors or any of these prosecutors, it wasn't just they felt bad that so-called underprivileged people of color who were repeat felons or the poor

were being incarcerated.

They wanted them out.

They wanted them to keep doing what they're doing.

And they do it.

They do it again and again and again.

And so these police that have been killed in the last three months, you look at the people who killed them, they've been out, out, out, out.

They know it.

And their attitude is: well,

you people are privileged.

You think you're going to have a little nice, secluded life.

Maybe you're not.

We're going to let these people out until you change the system.

And so that was.

Well, that's right.

If we may, Victor, you know, you know, can we pick up on that

point?

Because

it ties in a little

with the recent

death of OJ and

justice.

And justice doesn't matter if dependent upon the political results in America.

And

let's get your thoughts on that

right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

Victor, I'm so glad you brought up that point just before we went to the break.

I was reading the New York Post today.

Some little old Greek-American lady going to her Orthodox church in New York City, pushed down the steps by a guy who'd been let out of prison, let out, he wasn't even in prison, you know, six, seven times.

She cracked her skull,

brain bleed.

How many times is this happening in how many cities across

Hey, remember that

while she was bleeding with a cracked skull, he robbed her and then he walked away and looked back and saw that she got up and followed her to her car and stole her car.

Stole her car, right?

Yeah.

So

too bad

this is the kind of thing that needs to happen until the systemic racism changes.

And a lot of this mindset began with O.J.

Simpson who died last week.

Is there any

and who's

some CUNY City University of New York professors?

Yeah, he killed his wife.

He cut her head off, but he deserved to be exonerated.

Didn't he write a weird book, If I Was Going to Kill My Wife, where he almost kind of, I don't.

Yeah.

He wrote it.

I mean, he was.

He knew he was guilty.

Everybody knew he was guilty.

I can remember the very day I was teaching a night class at Cal State, right near my house, 30 miles away.

And the student union was full and they were watching.

In those days, they didn't have a lot of televisions on campus.

And there was

what we would call a big screen, maybe 36 inches then.

And it was surrounded by people.

And I was preparing to go.

And in the late afternoon, they announced, early evening, I guess it was, the verdict.

And they all started cheering.

They all started cheering.

And I could not believe it.

And I walked up and a student I knew really well was taking my class.

He goes, hey, OJ, get out.

I said, he cut his wife's head almost off.

And I went through the evidence.

It didn't matter.

And it doesn't matter today.

You know, it was very funny then because there were two African, an African-American couple that I really liked.

And they were both a

She had been very prominent in the 60s in campus activities, and he was too, but they were now in their 40s or 50s.

And they both, unfortunately, had HIV.

In those days, people didn't know whether HIV, you know, if you cough on somebody and all that stuff.

So they wanted an independent study

in ancient history for their history major.

And I was at that point teaching in both departments.

classics and history.

So they came to all these people.

Nobody would give it to them because they were terrified about AIDS.

So they came into my office and they said, would you give us an independent study and we could meet together, my husband and I?

I said, yes, I will.

And they said, well, we have AIDS.

I said, well, I don't think I'm going to get it to you.

You could give it to me.

And if you're coughing and everything,

you'll go out of the room.

So they came every week.

And it was right during this thing.

And at the end of our 45 minutes, they wanted to talk about OJ.

And we went through all the evidence.

I would say, well, they have the footprint of this weird Bruno Magli shoe, and there's, what, only 200 sold.

And here's how many million shoes are sold.

And what are the chances are that OJ would have this particular soul on this particular shoe?

You know, it's almost impossible

that anybody, you know what I mean?

He has this show, this thing.

It's one out of 10 million shoes, and it's there.

And then I would go through Cato.

You remember Cato, the thump?

Cato Kalen.

Yes.

And it was pretty, I heard a thump and that, that.

And then

I went through it all.

The knife,

OJ had had, didn't he train with a knife for a movie?

And all at the time, I knew it pretty well.

And then I asked them to present their case.

And it was that

Furman was a racist.

And I went through that.

And da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

Okay, when it was all over, it was pretty clear that I won the argument.

Right.

And I remember, I never forget it.

I really liked them, and I kept in contact with them.

They became long-haul truckers for a while, and then they did a lot of things, but they were really eager to improve themselves, even though they'd had children that were in prison, and they had a lot of really, they were very poor.

They had been, the weird thing was they had been pretty upper-middle class.

They were student activists.

They had

almost got finished their degrees, and they had come back 20 years later to finish their degrees.

They were very devoted to each other, and they had had HIV from drug use.

So anyway, we were...

And I asked them to give their...

And it was all cosmic.

You know what I mean?

It was nothing about the...

I said, well, you didn't talk about the shoes.

You didn't talk about the knife.

You didn't talk about the DNA.

You didn't talk about the thud.

You didn't talk about the timeline.

You didn't talk about what his friend was doing at the same time.

You didn't talk about the blood on the sidewalk.

You didn't talk about...

And they didn't...

We said, no, we're not going to talk about that.

They talked about this social cosmic justice.

And I said, well, that's what they're trying.

I mean, that's the acquittal, that the whole system is systemic racist.

So they start with that premise and nothing can be proven.

So we're going to acquit them.

It was jury nullification.

I had a good friend who became very famous.

He's a very wonderful guy about

predicting what juries would do based on their social, economic, racial, employment status.

And that's that's very big now.

And he's got one of the biggest firms, but that's how he started.

And he was, once he

saw what he could predict what the verdict would be.

And that's what jury selection studies are about.

And so that was, you're right about it.

It was the first time that we mainstream or institutionalize what I would call critical legal theory, that the evidence presented in a normal case cannot be empirically evaluated that would lead to a logical verdict, because the system is created by wealthy, white, heterosexual, Christian males, and they have

intrinsic biases and they created a system that rewards them and punishes everybody else.

And that over outweighs all evidence.

I keep going back to that.

I've done it a lot with Sammy.

The only reason it's against the law to steal sneakers is that some guy that lives in Brentwood doesn't need to steal sneakers.

So just to be gratuitous, he went out and made a law against it.

But that doesn't mean you have to follow it.

If you need sneakers, take them.

It's kind of the antithesis of Leigh Miz or Rob, you know.

Right.

Yeah.

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Hey, Victor, speaking of legal

theories,

the nexus of two of your,

well, let's just put one of your favorite issues anyway, so it won't be a nexus.

Generals, United States Army generals and admirals, a significant number of them.

I just

opened before the show the Samicus brief that

I mean, a ton of them, admirals and generals are joining the case against Donald Trump, Jack Smith's case, and arguing

against the former president and maybe

future president.

It's kind of...

On the issues on

immunity, whether a president has immunity to which...

Criminal prosecution, yeah.

Yeah, my problem, I have to be very careful because I work with a lot of four-stars.

So I don't mention people's name, but you would think.

You would think

that here we are in the military.

The military, depending on which statistic at which month you read, is somewhere between 20 and 40,000 recruits short.

They had

the chairman of the joint chiefs, Secretary of Defense, Chief of Naval Operations go before the Congress and the country in a highly publicized testimonies and basically said, we're going to implement diversity, equity, inclusion.

Mark Milley, remember, Jack said he was going to find out white privilege, white rage.

He was going to learn a lot from Professor Kendi, going to require that as the other did on their, the other chiefs did on their reading list.

And they went to run an investigation.

And they ran an investigation.

It was done in December of last year.

They found no systemic racist to white supremacist click.

But again, they lost 20 to 40,000 recruits.

And if you look at the statistics, which I have very carefully, they're not a fall-off in women.

They're not a fall-off in Latinos.

They're not a

falloff in blacks.

They're a fall-off in white males.

Okay.

And then

you would think that in the last tumultuous year of the Trump administration, the May to October rioting,

at which time

we had 120 days of looting, 2 billion in property, 35 killed, 1,500 officers, in which the military weighed in.

That was when Mark Milley, remember, said he was tricked into having a photo op of the President?

Right.

They all do, but apparently he was.

And then we had a series of disclosures that Mark Milley had called his Chinese counterpart and had warned him that if my commander-in-chief, Donald J.

Trump, were to we were to go on to the DEF CON 5432 all the way.

I will notify you first.

Seems to me an open and shut case of treason, but nonetheless, he was heroic for doing that, apparently.

Then we had another general said he was, Donald Trump was a pathological liar.

Then we had another one who said he was Mussolini-like.

Then another one said that he was on the wrong side of the beaches at D-Day.

He was on the enemy team.

He would be.

Then we had another one who said

that he was

doing what the Germans did at Auschwitz, only he was doing it at the border.

Then we had

another general who said that Putin,

Trump was a Putin asset, an asset, that he worked for Putin, basically.

Then we had a couple of colonels who said that

they're going to have to remove Donald Trump.

and that the Joint Chiefs should start that.

Then we had a very famous admiral right right at op-ed who said that he should be removed sooner the better, even though we had a scheduled election.

Okay.

All of those were in violation of

Uniform Code of Military Justice.

I think it's Article 82.

No retired or serving four-star general flag officer shall disparage the Commander-in-Chief, Vice President of the Cabinet.

They all violate it.

They knew they did.

They knew that the country, the media, the military would not do a thing.

Okay.

You have all that.

You have the problem with recruitment.

You have the DEI

conglomerate taking over the military, and you have a big pushback.

You're losing thousands of votes.

Okay.

Don't you, and oh, by the way, Jack,

last December,

The Washington Post published a story saying that 80, 80, 80%

of all four-star generals upon retirement go to the defense industry to work.

Think of that.

80.

So there must be something there that we don't know.

What's the big attraction of going to work for people

who hire you to help them sell weapons to the Pentagon where you were one of the

leading actors and therefore have a whole network of former subordinates that now are making decisions?

Is that it?

So there's that.

And then we had another op-ed

recently by, I think, three retired generals in the Washington Post

that said

that Donald Trump was an insurrectionary and he would try to overthrow the election.

And people in the military had to be vigilant and take the necessary measures.

I think it was Easton.

I can't remember the names.

I'm not going to mention the names because I know some of these people.

Okay.

So in that environment, wouldn't you think if you were a retired four-star admiral or it's better to just be quiet?

Why would you weigh in to the most contentious, politicized, weaponized matter in the whole universe?

The tit-for-tat

Fur investigation versus the Trump.

That's a whole mess.

And you go in and you try to lend your fee days, and you know, you're not a lawyer, you're not a legal expert, and your considered opinion that if

the Supreme Court of the United States cannot find that a president should have immunity from the types of things that are happening to Donald Trump, why would you do that?

Why would you do that given all the things that have happened, given what you know?

Oh, I'll add one other piece of data.

The Ronald Reagan Library each year publishes a survey, as you know, Jack, of

the national confidence in the U.S.

military.

It's usually about 75 have high confidence.

Last year it reached an all-time low of 45.

This year it went to 46.

This is when Biden is president.

Right.

So

given that more than half the country do not have high confidence in the military, given that people are not joining, especially the demographic that dies at double their numbers in combat and the general population, given that there's been contentions already with the active and retired general class, given that people have been writing essays warning

that Donald Trump should be removed before his tenure was up, given that a Pentagon lawyer, Rosa Brooks, wrote in Foreign Policy 11 days after the inauguration that Donald Trump should either be impeached, removed by the 25th Amendment, or removed by a military coup.

Given all of that, why would you weigh in?

Why would be the purpose of it?

Why are these generals and admirals doing it again?

What's wrong?

What's the entitlement?

What's the.

Especially when 80% of the people who wrote that letter apparently work for the defense industry.

Well, maybe that's it.

Maybe that's the why.

I don't know.

It could be if you did not sign this letter, once it was percolating, that some

that America's left-wing boards didn't

want you companies, wouldn't hire you because

you didn't join there, so they were all politically motivated.

If you think they would like Donald Trump, he increased the military budget.

Yeah, right.

And so my point is that,

and I have been getting, I've gotten gotten a lot of indirect criticism.

People have come to me and said, you better be quiet about it.

So General So-and-so or so, and Admiral is really pissed off at you.

And so I'm not trying to be inflammatory or, but I do think the people should understand

that this is a suicide pact that these retired officers are doing, and they should stop for their own good and for the good of the country.

They don't realize that the more they weigh in on contemporary political issues and the more that the left tells them, how dare you not,

you should warn the country about this or that,

and the more that

they fall for that,

and then the more that they work for the defense industry at the same time,

the more, according to polls, they have lost the confidence of the country in the military.

And then you superimpose that in the dismal performance

in Afghanistan and the humiliation that happened in the withdrawal or the humiliation, it's not their fault, it's the commander-in-chief, but the humiliation of being attacked 140 times without a muscular response.

And then the stories that were short,

dozens of major ships, maybe hundreds of ships and planes and backorders of shells and

there's so many things they could concentrate on and get their house in order rather than weighing in on a contentious Supreme Court decision.

Victor,

other things

our listeners would, I'm sure, want to get your wisdom on.

One of them is college costs and the overrating of elite schools.

And we maybe have some time also to get your views on some of these media stories, NPR exposed, Sage Steele

talking about interviewing Biden.

So let's get to some of these matters starting right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on Saturday, April 13th.

This particular episode is up on Thursday the 18th.

And Victor, here's a couple of headlines.

Well, let's take these two, meet the two

higher ed related stories.

This was from someone in National Review wrote,

no, that's the elite story.

Insane costs of private school.

That's it.

The College Fix had a piece about the yearly college costs at Vanderbilt.

I was a little surprised.

that it was Vanderbilt, but it's now nearly $100,000 a year for a top private college in america that's a hundred thousand all in books tuition etc

uh i can't imagine why in four years it won't be 125 000 a year for some of these institutions so uh and and you've got any thoughts on that victor and then there's a separate piece uh from national review about the how some of these same colleges are just so damn overrated, at least as regards their return on investment.

Oh, they're all.

You can go to a state college or

the ones that are most overrated are your liberal four-year private non-Ivy League, because they have some prestige, but they can't place you or give you a network about the Ivy League.

And that particular poll, and I looked at it.

When they say, yes, Stanford and Harvard and Princeton and Yale

are overcharging, but those are some of the few that may,

depending on your major, give you a good return on your investment.

What they're really talking about is you go there with a bunch of wealthy, well-connected, influential children and you network.

It has nothing to do with the education you receive.

It's just like saying we're going to put all the nation's wealthy, powerful people from the best zip codes.

We're going to put their kids in Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford,

you name it.

And therefore, you get a good return on your investment because of your education.

No, you don't because of your education.

You do.

It doesn't have to be a university.

It could be anything, but you get those people and they network.

And that's not reflected in the poll, or it would be much worse.

But they typically, they're in a doom loop right now, Jack, because they sold the country after World War II.

And it was that everybody had to have a BA and we were going to have a technocracy, so 50% of the country does.

And they then got the government to back $2 trillion in student loans.

And then

they got these big government contracts for research, this or that.

Every university, Stanford, it's got almost $1 billion, I think, if not more.

And in reaction to that, they started this huge administrative blow.

They hired,

and they raised the rate of tuition higher than the rate of inflation.

That was just, they did that.

And the more that they did that,

the more that students had to take out student loans.

And they could do that because the student never really saw the bill.

He never got a bill that said from Yale, oh, by the way, here's your three classes per semester or quarter or whatever, and this is the price per hour you're paying.

This is the overhead.

No, they just pay it, and they either the parents paid it or they added it to their loan.

And the result is now

they are politicized.

If you go into the bookstores, you look at the reading list for these classes, they're not rigorous anymore.

They're not competitive.

If you look at STEM,

Even STEM now, when you're letting in for the third year students without the SAT, and by the way, that's not my editorialization.

In the aftermath of George Floyd, and in some cases earlier, they decided that to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, they had to get rid of the SAT.

That was a barrier because people were starting to publish embarrassing

statistics, such as one particular group was 250 points lower than the other particular group and yet was still getting into the university.

Okay.

So they announced in a very virtuous signaling manner they were getting rid of the SAT jack, and they they did.

And the experiment is out.

And now, guess what?

They're announcing that next year, they, most of the Ivy League, are announcing they're going to

reinstitute the SAT.

Why?

Is it a right-wing plot?

Did Jack Fowler and Victor Hansen say, you better do that?

Did you people out there write to the university says, please, no, no, no, no, it came top-down.

They went into a big meeting room and closed the door and said, you know what?

We are letting people in on criteria other than the SAT and a comparative evaluation of the value of their high school GPA.

And the result is we're meeting our diversity, equity, inclusion standards and we're even getting into repertory admissions.

And then our faculty are on our back because they can't teach these students because they're unprepared.

And so we have all these remedial classes.

And guess what?

All these employers, big tech, Google, Facebook, all these people are telling us that the people we're we're sending out are entitled.

They feel they have a right to have a job with us and to dictate our pay.

They go to HR in a moment if they have any problem.

And they don't know anything.

They didn't get educated because they watered down the curriculum or they gave 80% of the grades were A's or they added new gut courses.

And so as a result,

it's not worth the $100,000.

And they're starting to see gradual, not dramatic, but in most of these, even Harvard, slight

2%, 3%

reductions in applications.

But more importantly, the number of people going to trade schools, community colleges going way up

because on the return on the investment

after COVID, when you start to see electricians and plumbers making $50, $60 an hour,

And then you see what an environmental studies degree does over six years is the average graduation time it takes now.

So do you really want to be 23 years old and owe $200,000 and see what your environmental studies or sociology or ethnic studies degree gets you?

You're not going to impress an employer on your vocabulary or your syntax or your ability to

compose engaging English essays for your job.

You're not going to be able to do that.

But you might be able to be much better off to spend $20,000 and be a master electrician.

So that's what's happening to it.

It's sad, but

what I mean by a doom loop, Jack, is that the fewer people that

go

to college that can pay the full amount, the more money that the student has to borrow, the larger the student loan federally guaranteed portfolio grows, the more pressure it is on the left to cancel that $2 trillion debt, the more criticism they get from normal people that you're letting 90% of the population, in the case of those who have overdue loans,

90% have to pay for the 10%, and most of them are affluent.

The The more political flack you get, so the more you, what, entice students from overseas, and they tend to be from China, the Gulf-rich, oil-rich,

Middle East, to come over here, the more foreign students you have, the more stuff you see on campus that we've talked about.

And how do you stop it?

How do you stop it?

You'd have to radically get rid of 90% of the administrators, make

everyone teach three or four classes a semester,

no more conferences, no more clodding gay plagiarism, just have people teach and then

do real research, but less research because most of it's worthless.

And

trim your cost and then advertise

that you have your reading classical authors, medieval authors, history of Western Civ, math, science, biology, and it's rigorous.

In other words, what I'm saying is do exactly what Hillsdale College does, St.

Thomas Aquinas does,

St.

John's does.

Yeah.

Relatively affordable to, I mean,

half the cost of Vanderbilt.

Yeah, and you can do that.

And that's why Hillsdale's biggest problem right now is they're swamped with applications in an unprecedented fashion.

And then you, you know, you don't, and then the other thing is that the faculty is not diverse intellectually or ideologically.

So a parent knows, say you're a left-leaning parent and your daughter gets into Stanford or he gets Oberlin or

Brown.

Kenyon or Princeton.

So you think, well,

I'm probably probably not going to get a lot of student aid for my kid given my income.

So I'm going to have to pay over out $400,000 with interest over four years, say, I don't know, $450,000.

Do I really think my child is going to come home Thanksgiving and Christmas and impress me with an expanded vocabulary or new insights on the world?

Or is that child going to lecture me about how I am

amoral, right-wing, not DI.

So do you really want to do that?

And I think a lot of people are saying,

well, the only value in it is that you're stamped like a cow with a brand, a big H for Harvard.

And if they're there,

you know, maybe their roommate will be the next Mark Zuckerberg or somebody who will have a stock tip or hire somebody or parents are really powerful.

But other than that,

there's nothing there anymore.

The faculty, I just, I have this bad habit of looking each year at the PhD theses in my own field, and it's worthless.

And

it's like when I was doing research for a couple of books on military history, I would look at German.

Germany in the 1920s was one of the

the places to go for Greek and Roman military history.

But when you looked at, say, after 1935, for a period between 35 and 40,

and you looked at stuff that was coming out of German universities,

it was things like the Aryan makeup of the Spartan nation

or

Jewish Hebrew influences, you know, on

the classical world that were, you know, it was all propaganda.

It was worthless.

And it is worthless today.

And you get the impression that there's going to be a decade or two decades that in 10 or 20 years from now they're going to look back and say, what were these universities doing?

Transsexual ambiguity and the cult of dynamite.

Who wants to read that?

And so that's what, I just don't, I think they're in a doom loop.

They're

like San Francisco, and I don't know how they get out.

They really are in big trouble.

And I wish I could say it's going to hurt the United States, but what made the United States great is we did have this technocracy that was trained at these wonderful universities, but after the 60s it started to erode,

you know,

gradually, and now it's suddenly.

And I think that their worth is outweighed by the damage they do.

Yeah.

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Victor, another topic or two to discuss as we kind of head into the home stretch.

How about, Victor, your thoughts on, I don't know if you know anything about the immigration issue, Victor, but Joe Biden, Joe Biden,

he may, something may have happened, by the way, between when we're recording and when this show is out.

But there's this headline in the Red State, I'm reading right now, Biden to issue executive order to close

border.

Yeah, right.

This is by Ward Clark.

Victor, I'm sure our listeners have heard this promise and pledge by the man who led eight, 10 million people over our, what used to be border.

Victor, your thoughts about what Joe Biden may do.

Well, it's so funny because

When he came in, everybody, you remember that Mayorkas

said said specifically, as did Joe Biden, remember he said, not one more foot of this wall.

That's what he said.

That was an executive order.

And then you saw those pictures of all the steel rusting that was all ready to go for the new wall.

Trump replaced, I think, I don't know, 500 miles of the old wall, and he started about 30 of the new, and they just stopped it.

And then Mayorkas bragged that if you had, they were going to stop

the rejection or the repeal of catch and release.

In other words, you could catch somebody, but they were going to be released.

And if you wanted to be a refugee, you didn't have to apply in Mexico.

You could come here and do it.

And da-da-da-da.

I think there were 60 or 70 things they overturned on the part of Trump.

My point, Jack, is that they had executive orders.

This is all a ruse.

It's a lie.

It's all a contortion.

Joe Biden, when he says he has to see if he has the authority, no, he doesn't have to see.

He had the authority because he's already used it.

He's issued a series of executive order for one purpose, to overturn his predecessor's policy and open the border to let in 10 million people.

For him, for Mallorcus, for the left, it is win, win, win.

A bigger entitlement industry, larger government, more redistributive taxes, A.

Two, more people in the particular states that will change the way that we

make up congressional districts because they'll be counted even if they're illegally here in the census.

Three,

most of these people,

more than 50% are going to two states, Texas and Florida, the two most despised states and the most despised governor on the part of the left.

And they're going there for one purpose, to take these once,

well, in the case of Texas, it used to always vote Democrat in the 60s and 50s.

Remember Ann Richards?

To stop these purple states from turning hard red, which they are now, to reverse it.

That was what...

the agenda was.

That's why he executed.

Now, there's only one reason he just said what you said.

Because when you look at the issues, economy, abortion,

immigration is either one, two, or three, depending on the constituency and demographic you pull.

And Joe Biden looks at that and says, you know, if this goes on all and

summer's coming up, and we know what happens when summer comes up, people rush the border.

They can sleep outside.

And it's destroying destroying these Latino communities along the border.

And it might not make any difference in Texas,

but Texas got smart.

And they're sending these people everywhere.

And when they it might not make any difference in Chicago and New York because their electoral vote is already assured that we have.

But you keep sending them into Nevada.

and Georgia and Arizona, even Colorado.

Who knows what will happen?

You're alienating our base.

So they go to Joe and say, you've got to stop it.

And he says, well,

I've got to come up with a reason that explains why I did it.

We tried to blame the Republicans in the Congress when we cooked up that phony bipartisan immigration deal that would limit only 5,000 illegal entries per day.

And they didn't fall for it, although it was helpful.

We claim

they opened the border by not voting for our phony bill, but that didn't work.

So now I've got to explain how I closed the border when I opened it.

And I'll just say, I don't know if I have the authority.

I have to find it.

I don't know if I have the authority.

And everybody who's listening will say, yeah, Joe, you are so constitutional.

So the Supreme Court just ruled not too long ago that your blanket amnesty before the midterms to buy votes from student loan holders was illegal.

And so now you have another election, and guess what?

You just mentioned this Supreme Court and how to get around it.

So you just violated the Constitution and overrode your constitutional limitations.

You didn't obey the Supreme Court.

So if

you don't obey the Supreme Court, why would you worry about you can't close the border until you find out whether it's legal or not to have an executive order?

So the whole whole thing is a complete joke.

And I think all of us make a deep, deep,

deep mistake when we listen to the media and we look at that disaster on the border and we think, oh my God,

something went wrong.

They're incompetent.

We don't have comprehensive immigration reform.

Oh, this was...

This got out at, no, no, no.

This was deliberate.

This was planned.

They are delighted.

They think it's the biggest success of the entire Biden administration.

When they're out of power, they're going to look back and say, you know, you can say all you want, but we got 10 million of our people in here, new voters.

And the right went crazy.

And nothing made them angrier than what we did.

It was Mayorkas is a hero.

He did a great job.

Now, we lied about it, and we created a lot of public distrust, and we called,

we wrote, we wrote, made the crime rate go up.

We called a lot of mayhem.

A lot of people died along the border.

But you know what?

You got to break some eggs for an amulet.

That's how they look at it.

That's what happened.

Well, Victor,

we have time for one more quick topic, and we may crunch too much in one space, but it'll be about the media.

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

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

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Victor,

a couple of things happened media-wise

last week or two.

We could probably spend an hour getting your thoughts about the NPR story where the long-term editor there uh came out and said, yeah, this is a left-wing place and there's not any room for any conservative thought.

Some other things that came out in the immediate aftermath were of the 87 writers or editors there, every single one of them is a Democrat.

There's no room in the end

for

anyone who's not a leftist at NPR.

And this has gotten more extreme.

in recent years.

And another media story, also, Victor, is Sage Steele.

Sage Steele was at ESPN for years.

She was let go because her mom is white.

Her dad is black, but she doesn't want to play in the race game.

She wants to be Sage Steele.

She doesn't want to be Sage Steele.

I'm black.

I'm white.

So that's why she got canned.

But she came out.

She's been a lot on Fox and other, by Megan Kelly's shows and other shows recently.

She talked about Biden.

And as a reporter for ESPN, she was.

dictated by her bosses to stick to an explicit script while interviewing Joe Biden, could not change a word, not a single word.

And she stuck to it.

You know, she was, that was what the bosses do when she did it.

But that's how one had to deal with Joe Biden, especially from a company owned by ESPN, owned by ABC, some journalistic operation there.

And no one surprised Victor by the kid gloves that Joe Biden has slowly been given by the media.

So anyway, Victor, those are two stories.

Any thoughts about them as we head into the hometown down to the finish line here?

And When you look at Joe Biden, I'll answer the second question first.

Don't be surprised by Sage Steele's admission that she was given a series of questions and she couldn't deviate from it.

Or don't be surprised when you see Joe Biden and he has

a pre-selected group of

journalists he calls on.

Or don't be surprised that he won't give an impromptu interview at the Super Bowl.

I'm not saying he can't have moments.

You put him in bed for three or four days before a presidential debate in 2020

or the State of the Union.

Maybe you give him a stimulant like Adderall or something.

I don't know.

He can, for brief moments, shout and yell.

Not that he's cognizant, but he's animated.

But given his mental state and the geometric rate of decline, what would you do?

What would you do?

If you're listening right now, you're Mr.

Smith, what would you do if you were presented with that challenge?

You've got a person who's one step, one fall, one trip away from oblivion.

You've got a person that

if you take your eye off him at the tarmac in Finland, or at a campaign stop, he may go over and blow some young girl's hair.

He may turkey gobble her neck.

He may call her out and say, you're really sweet looking to a 12-year-old.

Or what would you do if he starts to slur?

And you can nobody, it's a language that nobody's heard before.

I mean, it's just slurry slurs.

Or what would you do when you put him on the stage?

You put little arrows because he could go shake somebody's hand.

It doesn't exist.

So my point is this.

Of course they have to do this.

They have no choice.

So if if he's going to give an interview, you've got to get the questions to him and have him script it and tell that interviewer, there's not going to be any sudden gotcha questions.

You go do that with Donald Trump, but not Joe Biden.

And it's obvious now, and it's going to increase as this

campaign comes.

It's very ironic, of course.

This comes from a media that always tells us that democracy dies in darkness, and it's so independent, and it's provocative, and it's edgy.

That's only in the case of Trump.

They are the most obsequious, toady

appeasers in the world.

They understand that he cannot be elected without their help, and they will do all they can to condition him.

As far as the NPR, I guess the guy's name was Yuri Berliner.

Yes.

He basically came out and said there was zero,

zero Republicans on the editorial staff.

It said 80 something to zero.

They didn't, nobody said that's wrong.

Nope.

They didn't say you're lying.

And then he said that this gradual politicalization that's now accelerated to complete monopoly of the left over NPR, and by extension it's PBS too.

where David Brooks is considered a conservative to give the conservative point of view.

He pointed out that as this accelerated into a complete monopoly,

it dovetailed with a crash in audience.

Nobody's listening to it anymore.

It's been radical, the falloff in the NPR audience.

And then he made

the next correlation, Jack, that it was very ironic because

They prided themselves on diversity, equity, inclusion as defined not by ideology, but by ethnic or racial identification.

and yet their audience shrank to bicostal white affluent liberal elites so the more that they got

black or latino liberal bicoastal elites

and mouthed the same stuff the more black audiences latino audiences poor people fled

So now they're just an echo chamber.

So when you look for the response, nobody said, that's a lie.

Our

viewership's going up.

That's a lie.

We have the most diverse listening audience, much more than

Fox.

That's a lie.

That's a lie.

There's plenty of rep.

No, they didn't do any of that.

They just said, we take issue with what he said.

They were mute.

It was like, oh, oh,

number one, that SOB is not supposed to say all that.

It's true, but you're not supposed to say it.

And two,

how do we fire him?

If we fire him right now or shut him up, we're government employees.

Something could happen.

So we've got to wait, wait, wait, and then we'll find out something he did 30 years ago and bring it up.

And that's what's going to happen.

I tell you what should happen.

If Donald Trump gets elected.

I know that people think the head of the public broadcasting is no big deal.

It is a big deal.

It governs a lot.

They should take Vivek Ramaswamy and they say, Vivek, go clean it up.

And it takes somebody with energy who knows tech and media and is really smart and is really well spoken.

And he is.

I know that I've criticized him as a presidential candidate, but for this job, he has all the prerequisites.

And he would clean that thing up in two minutes.

And all he has to do is say, you know what?

We're putting, I'm going to start hiring conservatives until we got 50-50.

I'm sorry.

We're just going to do it.

It's called DEI.

It's called diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But it's going to be defined.

And I don't care what color they are.

I don't care what gender.

If I have to hire all black conservatives, it's going to be great.

But we're going to do that.

I wish they would.

The thing about black conservatives are like French conservatives.

When you have a demographic that is entirely liberal, and then you see somebody who is an independent thinker,

they tend to be more articulate, better reasoned, more analytical than almost anybody.

And so when you look at French intellectuals, even late-stage Camus

or Aran or any of those people, they were so much smarter than the left-wing, normal,

trash-talking, boilerplate French.

And when you look at caliber of

Roland Fire, Shelby Steele, Tom Soul, it wasn't that they were much smarter and much more analytical and better writers than

black liberals.

They were better than anybody.

I mean, anybody, white, black,

it didn't matter, and they had to be.

because they were subject to a lifetime of abuse, not necessarily from black people, but from from white liberal wealthy people.

And white liberal wealthy people think like this.

Well, I've done so much.

My father was in the civil rights

motor.

You know, he went down and was a freedom rider.

And I always vote liberal.

And I've supported LBJ.

My parents did.

And I just don't understand why these black people don't do what I tell them.

Because I'm a liberal genius.

and they've been a beneficiary of my liberal.

They owe me.

That's their action.

It really is.

I've earned the right to boss them around, yeah.

Yeah.

And then when they see somebody who's 10 times smarter than they are, more analytical, they go ballistic.

They go ballistic.

I don't think there's an equivalent for Uncle Tom.

Like if you're...

If you're Shelby Steele or Eli his son or whatever, and

you're disparaged in that way, I don't think there's an equivalent that you, Victor, or I could be,

you know, so labeled.

So that really is a

test, a crucible that they go through their whole lives.

The closest only thing I've ever had, and it just, it's not even a, it's shame on you.

I get emails a lot and it's, you know better.

You have a PhD.

You wrote books and yet you're in ignoramus.

That kind of, you should know better.

I can see the mega people.

Well, number one, the MAGA people that I know who don't have college degrees are usually self-employed and they're 10 times smarter than PhDs.

And half of them tell me stuff that I hadn't even thought about.

So, number one, that is totally bogus.

That anybody who writes or has a PhD knows more than a guy who runs a business or is a master electrician.

And then the other thing is that

you have to be humiliated or feel bad according to my point of view my value system

and it's really funny because as I tell people I write back to some of them I've had people write I liked your book you know it must be on boilerplate I've liked I really liked war like no other I like corn but then once I saw what you I threw it against the wall or I stomped it or I lit it on fire I thought wow can't whoever lights a book on fire come on but they they write you that and then

they'll see you.

I've had people, especially former colleagues, and

it's really funny because

they think that

they think it really bothers you or that you're going to think, oh my God,

the Department of Classical and Foreign Languages doesn't like me.

You know what I mean?

That kind of stuff.

As if

it's weird, their impression of their power influence

well victor uh you've been terrific i've we've got to uh bring this to a conclusion and as we normally do we thank our fair listeners especially the new ones well i think maybe especially the the old ones i should put that for hanging in here now we're four or five years into this you know i want to say one last thing um sure

Two things very quickly.

I was thinking the other day, I got a letter from Tom Seoul, and he was talking about about the need for conservative authors to have websites and stuff.

Very interesting.

I got to reply to him.

But of all the people I met at the Hoover Institution and at Stanford University, and I met a lot of smart people,

there was nobody who had the combination of common sense and intellectual depth that he did, of all of them.

I mean,

I went to lunch with him twice a month, and I would see people come and sit down.

Sometimes even former mentors, former students would come by

and he was just give them master class and refutation.

He could refute them.

It was really amazing to see how quick he was and how well

reasoned he was, how smart.

He came up with all sorts of just plain

truth.

And he had that ability to cut through all of this.

He was very widely read.

You haven't seen him in a while, right?

I only ask because I hear comments.

I hear comments.

I haven't seen him personally, but I correspond with him a lot.

I think he's 94 now.

But the point I'm making is that

I don't know if he had to be given the abuse.

I know he had natural talent and brains, but it was something.

I asked him that once, and every once in a while he would send me a book.

Like, give you one example.

There was a classic book called The Influences of Geo,

The Influences of, I think it was called Geographic Environment.

And it was by a brilliant woman named Simple,

written, I think, in the 40s.

But the point was, she was trying to explain Greece and Rome and the medieval world in terms of

their position to the Mediterranean versus the Atlantic or mountain versus fertility

land.

It was really ahead of its time.

It was kind of like Brodel, but ahead of him.

And

I knew it really well only because that was a book I used extensively when I wrote The Other Greeks.

And Tom Sin, I got this big, heavy package, and it was a rare copy of HIT, hard book.

And it just said, Victor,

you must, I know you've known this book, but you should have it on your shelf.

And he's done that with about four or five books.

My point is, there are some great books that we don't read anymore that were classics in the 40s or 50s.

Right.

And he knows them all.

That's all he does.

He doesn't trust faddish literature.

He goes back to the champion.

Last thing.

That would make for a great article, Tom Sowell's Forgotten Books Readings List.

It would.

It would.

Why don't you ask him?

Well,

he's a very private person.

I've been very careful.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

But the other thing is,

my books came yesterday, so I have a hardback, The End of Everything.

and

just came out.

The pub date is May 7th, but Sammy and I, because I'll be gone on the 80th anniversary of Normandy, we're taking 160 people to Normandy.

We're going to talk about ancient Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, Tenochtitlan, or what we know as Mexico City, with the introduction to how societies are annihilated.

And then I think the most interesting will be the fifth one that Sammy and I do on it can happen again.

What are the vulnerable civilizations?

What are the neighborhoods

they have to live in?

And who is threatening to wipe them out?

Not just destroy them, but wipe them out.

Yeah.

It is called annihilation, after all.

It is.

It's very rare.

I mean, usually we didn't wipe the Japanese out.

We didn't wipe the Germans out.

But it happens.

Sometimes it's because of the vulnerability of the target.

Sometimes it's...

I'll just give you a brief hint.

The people who wipe people out,

they're not Genghis Khan necessarily.

They're not even Hitler.

They're people that are intellectuals.

They're people who were taught by Aristotle, if you're Alexander the Great.

They're people like Scipio Aemilianus, who founded the Scipionic circle of intellectuals.

There are people like Hernan Cortez, who was a very educated lawyer and

very articulate person.

There are people like Mehmet II, who said he was the new Caesar and he was going to reclaim the Roman imperial tradition as a Muslim, and he had a huge library.

There are people, in other words, that have pretension to intellectual excellence and philosophy, etc.

Those are the ones you've got to watch.

These will be podcasts for the listeners for uh the no you when you're gone

the podcast is not gone so to look forward to i guess sometime in later may victor and sammy doing five or six uh part uh podcast series on the on the book might be good to get the book dear listeners

read it and hear victor's reflections on them on the book as through the podcast.

So, hey, Victor, I have one comment to read from folks that many people post their comments at iTunes and Apple.

Of course, you can rate the show there, zero to five stars.

Thank you, everyone who does that.

Most people leave five stars, 4.9% ranking.

It's terrific.

This particular comment is titled Sunny, and it goes, I love the show, fan of VDH for more than a decade.

Eeyore has the most brilliant perspective on humans.

My mother taught me there is nothing new under the sun, and VDH brings it home every week with ancient scripts and perspectives from ancient Greece, Rome, Byzantium, etc.

I'm a top student at 63, he says.

My reason for commenting is sunny.

Each week you lather us with your voice.

Warm honey, lathered with melted butter.

I know I'm not the only one who enjoys this part of your podcast.

Anyway, keep sharing your commentary and know your listeners enjoy both of you.

And I think by the both, he's meaning Sammy there.

This signed from Daryl from Whidby Island, Captain, Capt D23.

Well, Daryl, Capt D23, however you want to go by, thanks for that kind, kind words.

Victor, thanks for all the

warm honey lathered wisdom you've shared today.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.