Newsom's Cronyism, DOJ's Threat, and Intellectual Thieves

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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, that is Victor Davis-Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is many things: military historian, classicist, syndicated columnist, best-selling author, farmer.

I think I probably missed a few things there, Victor.

Sorry.

He has an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

I'll tell you more about that towards the end of this episode, which we are recording on Sunday, March 3rd, a few days, two days actually before

California's

primary.

So this particular episode will be out after that primary.

So maybe following that, Victor, you and the great Sammy Wink can decipher

what the California voters decided to do.

Steve Garvey, Adam Schiff,

who knows?

Maybe there'll be a Republican senator from California.

Anyway, all that aside, Victor, a few topics to discuss today will include this spate of

plagiarism at Ivy League colleges by top DEI officials.

We have a new issue of Strategica out.

That's the online journal that Victor oversees at the Hoover Institution.

CBS Bias and your friend and mine, Gavin Newsom, and his friend, some billionaire who's getting an exemption from these catastrophic or stratospheric, I should say, Victor,

hourly, $20 an hour minimum wage laws that are now being voiced on small business owners in California.

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

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

Victor, since even though I'm in the Bronx right now, I have California California on my mind.

We might as well start with Gavin Newsome, this buddy of his, he's a billionaire.

I think his name is Paul Ryan.

Greg Flynn.

Greg Flynn.

Sorry.

Did I say Paul Ryan?

Yes.

Sorry.

Greg Flynn, who is a

multiple franchisee

of various franchises.

And one of them is Panera Bread.

And Panera Bread is, wow, it's been exempt from this new law that California has.

I think it goes into effect

April 1st, $20 an hour.

Not if you're Panera Bread owner, billionaire, and donor to Gavin Newsome.

This is news to Gavin Newsom, though.

He never knew it.

He never knew it.

He never knew it.

He never knew he got $220,000 from Greg Thrillin for his campaign.

He never knew there was an exemption in the law, he said.

That Panera bread, unlike all of the other multifaceted

on-delivery, fast food, whatever term we use for, you know, fast food chicken, fast food bread, fast food hamburgers, fast food fit, whatever, he's exempt.

And now he says he doesn't know why Panera Bread was exempt.

It's very reminiscent of you've got to wear a mask, even in your car, basically.

You've got to wear a mask here, but not if you're Gavin Newsome down

at the Super Bowl and not if you're in LA or not if you're Gavin Newsom at the French laundry having a $500

plate dinner with your lobbyist friends from the healthcare system.

Imagine that.

Healthcare lobbyist, healthcare lobbyist, the healthcare governor, masks, social distancing.

booster, booster, booster, booster, and no mask

for them and no $20 an hour because I guess he thinks it's absurd.

His friend thinks it's absurd.

You know, it's really funny.

In my hometown, it's traditionally when

in the old days when there were set dates where people would release public assistance, then

all the fast foods were packed.

And then I don't know whether, I think now people just get an EBT card, but they're still tacked.

And

believe me, if you have this $20 an hour, you you should see the prices have gone way, way, way, way up.

I mean, it's just incredible.

And

Gavin doesn't like that for his friend.

I think everybody's got to realize something about the left.

The left is not your old working-class lunch bucket, Walter Ruther,

George Meany.

No, no, no.

This is a bunch of very, very, very wealthy people who are very well connected.

In our California version, it is Nancy Pelosi,

the late Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom,

Barbara Boxer.

These people were responsible for the state.

They're all very wealthy.

They're all from political families.

They all know each other.

And they're all hard left with one asterisk.

The consequences of their politics never apply to them or their friends.

So they don't need to wear a mask.

They don't want to pay $20 an hour for all of this guy owes over 2,000 franchises nationwide.

He's a billionaire.

And just think of how tight and cheap these people are.

They throw down $20 an hour down the throats of small businesses and franchise owners.

And then just to save that $4 an hour in his 20-something Panera bread outlets, he gets an exemption in the bill.

And then Gavin Newsome lies.

But, you know, he's got a reputation now, a flagrant lying after that DeSantis debate where he just got up there and just denied everything.

And he's been,

I don't know if you remember, but it came up about the $67 billion deficit.

Oh, no, no, no, that's just not.

That's not, now we find out it's up to $72 billion.

And so, and climbing.

And we just in California, from some of your listeners, if you didn't know, our representative from Fresno, Juan Arambola Jr., just introduced a bill

qualifying illegal aliens who are massing at the border in huge numbers to be eligible for low interest

discount loans for the underprivileged.

So what you're basically telling the middle class of California that can't afford a home, you know, the guy makes $60,000, his wife makes $40,000, and the houses are $1,000 a square foot and they can't afford it.

You should just go down to Mexico, renounce your citizenship and come back in illegally and you'll be eligible for a low low-interest

impoverished loan.

It's just incredible.

You know, California, I've never really talked seriously about leaving, but because I'm 70 and I have all this.

But when I look at all that's going on and I see that

they go after very wealthy people who are not left, and the left-wing, this country, this state is run by Silicon Valley, the immigrant lobby, Latino legislature lobby, radical left,

and then

basically the universities,

the academics, you know, USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford that produce all of the

BAMA, that go into coding, they go in, they write AI in Silicon Valley, they serve in the bureaucracy of the state.

And it's

it's driven out the entrepreneur, the small business person.

10 million have left in the last 30 30 years.

And it's a medieval state, as I keep saying, of very poor people and very, very wealthy people.

Go ahead, Victor.

I was in Arizona, you know, at a Bradley Foundation meeting yesterday and on the way to the airport.

I looked at the gas was $3.40.

Two hours later, I look at the gas, it's $5.90.

I couldn't believe it.

You know, California is the fifth largest holder of natural gas and oil reserves of the 50 states.

And

everything, I mean, it's just it's just insane what they're doing.

And so when you can't afford it,

you have to be poor.

And then you get subsidies.

You get, you know, subsidize electricity, subsidize this, subsidize that, don't report your income.

They don't go after you.

Or if you're very wealthy, you can pay.

And then the people in between leave.

By the way, I noticed something today, Victor,

an an article on the Daily Mail about

the skyrocketing costs of home insurance, and the insurance companies are blaming, you know, costs like everything gets looped into climate change, all these, you know,

unprecedented storms that we're having now due to climate change.

But a lot of the costs for

home insurance are related to the...

fires in California, which are related to

the negligent policies of

California government to let them burn.

So California's leftism,

in other ways, is

making life very unaffordable

all over the country.

It is.

I wrote

in the Los Angeles Times, there was an op-ed, excuse me, and I replied to it in the Los Angeles Times by a state environmentalist and I think a professor saying that this new, this was before the Aspen fire and the paradigm the big fires that this new policy of letting these things burn was very good because people shouldn't be living in the foothills anyway and it created natural mulch for bugs and then helped

forget all the billions of critters that were fried

and that was a policy absolutely and when it came the insurance it wasn't just that though the insurance uh

group knows that in california they have a very high rate of fraudulent claims.

They know that the replacement cost and labor and materials and government regulations makes it the most expensive place in the continental United States to build per square foot.

So you always have to keep upping, upping, which then, you know, creates more fraudulent claims.

But I had a place in the mountains.

I do, and I had it since 2006, and I have paid from 2006 to the present without one

missed year.

I mean, I never ever filed a claim.

I had snow damage.

I had people run into my garage door and destroy.

I've had all sorts of trees.

I have never filed because I was paranoid about losing it.

The fire came, the aspen fire came three years ago.

It burned all around.

It did not, it was, my place was saved barely, and some others.

But the point I'm making is, I live 500 yards from a class two or three fire station with two big rigs.

Across the street from me is a fire hydrant.

My house is built of fire retardant Trex decking, wood and concrete pulp siding, pulp concrete siding, and heavy duty fire resistant composition roof.

Okay.

And now there's no trees.

If you had the worst fire in 100 years and it didn't during my place, there's not going to have another fire.

And guess what?

I get a letter about a month ago saying your insurance is canceled.

I never thought, yeah, I don't know.

And I called around.

There's no insurance for a place above 200, 2,000 feet.

They just canceled it.

I called my agent.

You can't get it, Victor.

I'm sorry.

You have to get the state policy.

The state policy I'm still waiting for will be double the premium and it'll be half the coverage.

And that's what's happening with, if you look at my car insurance, it's almost double.

And why is is that it's regulations they put on the the insurance company but it's also fraudulent claims and

it's it's just the insurance companies have this impression that or reality that there's too many regulations to meet It's too costly to buy vehicles or to repair them or to fix up places.

They'll have no fire policy that would protect homes.

They don't care if

there's not a tree around you.

If you're above four or five thousand, especially, you're not going to get insurance.

And they're canceling policies.

And

they think the California populace is not very honest, and they're not.

And so, you know, about half of all accidents in Los Angeles are hit and run, and the person leaves.

As I keep telling people, I've had five of them where somebody went off the road and damaged trees or vines and left, left their car.

Right.

Of course, I couldn't claim that because the police impounded it, wouldn't let me impound it for damages.

And I never filed a claim.

You can't impound it, but you know, riffing on what you were talking about, almost like you're trapped where you are, but you love where you are.

I mean, it's your fifth-generation home.

But if you, even if you tried, like, I'm going to keep it, I'm going to move to Nevada,

you know,

to not deal with the taxes, come back every once in a while.

I bet if you came back, there'd be somebody living in your house and you would clean it up.

That's exactly uh

my daughter i'm helping my daughter move and she had a house in santa cruz and she was wondering if she should go back and forth and i said no you better rent it immediately because somebody will move into it in fact when i had it and i was fixing it up on weekends on the four or five days that i wasn't there people would park in the driveway

mostly students but i would go i'd catch them and they were parking in my driveway and i'd said you can't oh nobody's using this man

This is I park.

I can't afford UCSC parking man.

And then I had that little courtyard and they'd have parties there in the courtyard.

And I'd go there and there would be, you know, cups, papers, beer cans, everything.

So they were already taking over the outside of it.

And nobody would do, you know, nobody does anything about it because this is Joe Biden's America now.

There is no law.

I mean, there really isn't if you think about it.

Law is pro forma.

Smash and grab, no law.

Shoplifting, no law.

Salt, knockout game, hit somebody in the face, you'll be out that day, no law.

Everybody knows it.

And so what do you do?

You either go to a red state where there is state laws that are enforced, or you arm yourself, or you just,

I don't know what you do, but

you move to a red state, make sure it's not one with a...

sanctuary city or a sanctuary county like

Athens.

I almost vomited when I heard that Athens mayor.

Did you hear him talk about all the safety things he was going to implement to protect the students of University of Georgia?

And he did everything except apologize for his past policies of welcoming people who had broken the law.

And then those poor people were protesting against him, and he sort of got freaked out.

It's really amazing that.

Trump has an ad out.

I don't know if you've seen it.

Have you seen it about the Georgia tragic death?

No, I did not.

What's it say it's it's devastating it just has for the first 10 seconds it's got everybody saying the border is secure

the border is not open this is corinne jean-pierre the border has been secure for a long time major case the border has always been secure it's never been more secure joe biden i don't know where the border is secure The border is secure.

And then it shows pictures of the crime scene and pictures of the assailant and what was he doing.

And it's Joe Biden's America.

It's very dangerous in Joe Biden's America.

And then the left, you know, it was very funny how the left looks at all of these things.

They did it with Kate Steinley.

They look at this as acceptable collateral damage.

They didn't talk about the poor woman who was killed, the young student.

They talked about the dangers of young women jogging, just like they talked about Kate Steinley.

Anything other than really you, because they're an anti-humanist.

They love humanity, but they don't like particular people.

And they'll never talk about the damage in real terms.

It's almost Stalinist.

It's almost, well, we have to make an umlaut, we have to break some eggs.

And if a few people get hurt or get killed, if we let this guy out, we feel so good about ourselves that this guy carjacked and he roughed up a woman or he

went into a store in LA and sliced some woman, now he's out, or that kind of stuff.

We're really tolerant.

And then, but, you know, we have a private security patrol.

I've been, you know, there's some areas where I've been asked to speak to private homes.

One of them was Pacific Heights and one of them was Piedmont.

And I can tell you that when I drove my old pickup at the time or my pickup in there,

I got, I mean, I had a security guy come up behind me almost instantaneously.

Right.

And then I parked.

and I asked if it was dangerous to park.

He said, oh, no, no, this is one of the safest places in the United States.

And it was.

But it was right, you know,

a few thousand yards from Oakland and the same thing from Market Street.

And so that's what the left

does.

Depressing, depressing.

Well,

I just think that.

That's one of the reasons for the first time I think Donald Trump is going to win.

It's not so much Donald Trump, it's this election zone one, whether you're for civilization or not.

It's that simple.

You're either for civilization or you're not.

And you're either for allowing crime to get out of hand or you're willing to let radical environmentalists hurt people's lives by taking away their gas stoves or charging $580 a gallon for gas so you can hardly drive, or you're not.

Making you mandate an EV

or you're not.

Or implementing DEI commissars and everywhere on higher education, or you're not.

And all those things are anti-civilizational.

My colleague Neil Ferguson gave a great talk at the University of Austin, of which he's a founding board member, about this, about the treason of the intellectuals.

I was really surprised because I listened to it, and Neil's a very soft-spoken guy.

I've known him.

He's a good, great historian, wonderful person.

And he just laid it out that this is the 30s were the treason of right-wing intellectuals that up cozied up to fascists and now they're they're cozying up or they are themselves totalitarians yeah it was very powerful

speech he gave he also it was published on the free press so folks should go um look that up hey victor i'd like to talk one more thing about along the lines of of um that's uh cultural disintegration in biden and let's get to that and we'll get to some other topics right after these important messages

Back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Hey, Victor, before I pick up on a thread here, I just want to say that our God-given freedoms are facing unrelenting attacks.

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Victor, it's again, it's Sunday the 3rd, and I was watching Fox this morning before we came on.

Maria Botaromo had on Peter Schweitzer.

I love Peter.

He's a great.

He's a wonderful,

wonderful guy.

Absolutely.

So, so

smart.

And he has been so into

the corruption of our government officials, the Biden family, and Mitch McConnell.

His books have been bloodied them both, but he's got a new book out.

I don't have it in front of me, but it just,

the talk he was, the conversation he was having with Maria was the tie between the Bidens and the Chinese who are bankrolling the Mexican drug cartels bringing all this fentanyl into America.

The largest killer of Americans right now is this essentially China stage managed operation that

have people involved with it who are involved with the Bidens

in their

Hunter and Jim's and Joe's big guys business.

It's really

disturbing and just another

brick in the wall of it.

This is what Joe Biden's America is.

So maybe we can talk about that on a more depth on a future.

Well,

Jim Biden, remember he just had that impeachment inquiry testimony.

He admitted that the $40,000 that was written to Joe Biden, I guess it was a loan repayment or whatever, was impossible given that the fund that he paid, that they paid back had no funds until China put money in.

So Joe Biden got money from China, whatever he says.

Almost everything said about that,

his son-Hunter's relationship was false.

Almost everything he said about the files was false.

Andy McCarthy in National Abuse got a very good article pointing out that that, and I had pointed out a long time ago, that that narrative that Joe Biden was shocked.

when he found out he had files and he contacted federal authorities, his lawyers did, immediately, unlike Donald Trump.

That was a a complete lie.

That whole process

was taken because they had appointed Jack Smith, who was looking into Donald Trump

classified, and they got paranoid.

So Joe Biden got his attorneys after the latest batch to notify the archivists that they had violated the law.

So they could say, well, we violated it, but we told you.

The reason that was a lie, because six years earlier on tape, his ghostwriter was told by Joe Biden that he had classified files and the ghostwriter should have been indicted because he destroyed that tape.

And the only reason we know about it is forensics from Robert Hurst's investigation.

We covered it.

And they thought about indicting him.

He said, well,

I only erased it because I was afraid of hackers.

Try that with the IRS sometimes if they ought to be.

And then Joe Biden kept quiet from 2017 to the moment they were going to appoint Jack Smith.

It's so crooked.

And they should have gone after him.

And I don't know.

It's too,

we keep talking about it.

It's two-tiered justice.

It really is.

And the message is,

the message from all of this, whether it's Letita James going after Trump or Jack Smith going after

Trump in a way that Robert Hurd let off Joe Biden, or James Comey letting off Hillary Clinton for destroying subpoena materials or, you know, Kevin Klein-Smith getting a slap on the wrist for forging a document that allowed people to illegally spy on Carter Page.

It's you better join the winning team.

Hey, you guys, if you're a business person in New York, you better give to Eric Adams and Letita James and Mr.

Greg.

And if you don't, you're going to end up like Donald Trump.

And that's the message that goes throughout, whether it's with the IRS or the FBI or whatever.

It's insurance.

It's an insurance policy.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

It's just protection money like the old mafia.

Right.

And everybody knows Joe Biden's got exposure on that China thing.

He doesn't,

you know,

I mentioned earlier, we mentioned about this new book on white rage, the world

by these two columnist Dash professors.

And

the whole point is the fentanyl, if the

fentanyl, everybody said if the fentanyl was going after any other group, if it was like cocaine among the Wall Street young investor class, it snorts, and they were bad cocaine and they were dropping like flies,

they would go after them.

But fentanyl, they don't care because it's poor white trash they think that's mostly dying.

Although everybody is dying from it, from these mislabeled drugs.

But

they don't think it's a problem.

They really don't.

And they just let it happen.

And we know that China is mostly, as Peter Schweitzer, you brought him up,

he's been pointing out for a couple of years that it's, yeah, the cartels assemble it, and yeah, the cartels sell it, but it's only on the directive of the Chinese.

And that's part of a larger problem.

I think that China's strategy now is not to confront the United States economically

or

militarily in a crisis.

It is to

send

billions of dollars of fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year without their fingerprints on it because it's done through the

cartels.

And people can say, well, these people took an Atavan or they took a Valium or they took Sekinol.

They didn't.

And so they were taking something they shouldn't.

Yeah,

that's the way they discovered it.

They had it coming to them.

They had it coming to them.

And then bring in 25,000, mostly Chinese males.

I don't know what they're doing here.

I never knew what the 350,000 students were doing here.

And I don't know, as I keep harking why we had a biolab with Ebola and,

you know, everything from chalimydia to HIV to COVID vials in Readley, California with dead genetically altered mice on the floor, but we did.

Nobody seemed to be upset about it.

There's something going on with the Chinese.

I don't know what it is, but I have a feeling they're trying to condition us in such a way that we either tolerate what they're interfering with presidential politics.

And the very idea that our president,

President of the United States, got money from a Chinese communist-affiliated company via his brother, and his brother had no talent, Jim Biden, Frank Biden, Hunter Biden had no talent other than selling his name.

One thing people should remember: it's common for Donald Nixon or

Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton.

Billy Carter.

Billy Carter.

What was

Bill Clinton's brother's name?

I forget it.

Yeah, all right.

Yeah, it's common for all these people to name drop and try to get, but it's uncommon for the person they name drop, i.e.

the president, to be actively engaged.

And

in other words, Hunter would have ended up at like Donald Nixon or Billy Carter.

They didn't end up with 20%.

Roger Clinton.

Roger Clinton.

Yeah, they wouldn't have ended up with millions.

The reason that the Bidens were different is they didn't just name-drop, they sold a willing product, Joe Biden, Joe Biden.

And so, what is going to be interesting is to find out exactly what executive orders or what type of legislation, either as vice president or president, Joe Biden has done, that's been easy on the Chinese.

Well, Victor, can I just mention that you mentioned the book about, it's called White Rural Rage, the Threat to American Democracy, and that's by Tom Schaller and Paul Walton.

And you're intending to talk about that at greater length on another.

Yes.

To be fair, I want to read it.

I've just been reading excerpts.

Yeah.

Victor,

we have some DEI plagiarism.

madness going on.

Today's episode is going to be a little shorter.

So let's get your thoughts on on some of these headlines right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor, two headlines: Columbia,

Columbia University in New York, its new chief diversity officer is his name is Elaid McKen,

and he is

he is a major league plagiarist.

He plagiarized one-fifth of his 163-page thesis.

This is from reporting from the Washington Free Beacon, which, by the way, has been all over this stuff about the presidents of the colleges and all these DEI officials and the anti-Semitism on campus.

So, Washington Free Beacon is a website I recommend to folks.

So, that's one

person.

And then, Harvard,

Harvard's chief DEI person, a woman, Sherry Ann Charleston, is also, you know, the first guy was Babe Ruth.

She's Lou Gehrig.

She's been accused of 40 examples of engaging in plagiarism going on.

But wait, but wait,

we had that other one.

Yeah, I forgot that, but we had the other one, Shirley Green.

Remember her?

She was in the extension and she plagiarized

at Harvard.

There's been two Harvard DEI people, Charleston and Greene, Shirley Green.

And she, she, remember that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, she was the

extension.

You know, she was in the extension office, and they tried to downplay it because she wasn't.

That's a big, Harvard extension is a big deal for the business side of things.

Yeah, but you're right about Sherry Charleston.

She was Harvard's chief diversity officer.

And she did, but the other woman,

Shirley Green, was also Harvard Extension.

And she, I mean, she didn't quite match it, but she had 40 passages.

So,

and then I know what the narrative is, black women are targeted.

No, it's nothing to do really with race.

It has something to do with this.

Once you exempt a whole classification of academic, and you say, if you're left-wing, that's important, if you're left-wing, if you're black, and especially if you're black female and left-wing, and if you're for into DEI,

then you know that they're not going to, there's no rules, there's no standards, at least there's no rules and no standards as applicable to everybody else.

So you protected a whole class based on not their work or their ability, but their race, their gender, their ideology.

And once you do that, human nature being what it is, there's no deterrence.

So all of these people thought,

Claudine Gay, Green, Charleston, I can do, why do all the work?

I'll just copy some stuff.

They wouldn't dare look at this because I am the police and they don't police the police.

So what we have is everybody should remember that.

These are auditors.

So it was Claudine Gay.

She put her nose into every little thing.

They were auditing the behavior as a Soviet commissar of other people.

They were not creating productive

research.

They were trying to monitor people to find racism, and they were intellectually corrupt and intellectual thieves.

And how they existed so long, because suddenly everybody said, well, let's start investigating these people.

So Columbia has one, and there's three now at Harvard, three at Harvard.

And

I keep going back to

that simile in 1942 when Stalin finally thought, you know, I've lost 5 million people.

And I've had the two greatest encirclements in the history of military operations where I've lost probably a combined 1.3 million.

And I've got three brilliant commanders, Konyev, Rostovsky, and Zhukov.

But I've got to get rid of the guys that I put in there.

I mean, after the show trials and the military trials, we had commissars everywhere.

And all they were doing, you saw, remember Enemy at the Gates, the journalist Commissar who tries to lie about

the snipers and everything.

So

that's what we have.

And they're commissars.

The problem is not that they cost millions of dollars, multi-million

campus, 10, 20 million dollars, because they have staff and centers, but

they impede research and they cast a shadow of fear on people.

And they cast people under suspicion unless they so the result to these DEI are faculty try to virtue signal and performance art their commitment to DEI.

They have these mandatory three-hour indoctrination videos you have to take, you have to sign things.

And it's really an impediment on free speech.

It's a repressive atmosphere that they create, which is antithetical to the advancement of knowledge and ideas and conversation.

And they're very toxic people.

And the people, and I think people are going to say, we won't have a university if we have DEI.

And

it's not just the left.

I mean, mean,

they are left, but it's the idea that you're taking a particular ideology and you are mandating people have to adhere to that in lockstep fashion.

Well, Victor, there's a little more I'm curious about on plagiarism, but I do have one more obligation to the show and

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Victor, picking up the point you made earlier, I'm just wondering, because some of these, back on the DEI and the plagiarists and

DEI

conceptually, I think existed 10, 15, 20 years ago by different names, you know, Marxism, but not not an official policy, not really blooming much until George Floydian times.

So

this Harvard DEI boss, Sherry Ann Charlson, was engaging in all this crap polo

15 years ago.

And I wonder if they, she, I'm going to use her as a prototype, if she thinks she was being sneaky.

And she was going to get away with because, right, as you said before, nobody polices the police.

Or did she think i have a right to do this she has a right to do it because she's been in classes an undergraduate and graduate where she understood that no faculty member would hold her to the same standards and therefore she thought there must be a reason they're not holding me to the same standards so they must feel guilty and why would they feel guilty they must have done something wrong to me therefore if they've done something wrong to me and they're not holding me to the same standards as other people then i have a god given right at repertory behavior.

So I'm just going to do what I want because they're not going to do anything to me because they feel guilty.

And they feel guilty.

They wouldn't feel guilty unless they had done something wrong to me.

So my theft of this is my right to steal this stuff.

They know what they're doing.

And, you know, they're right.

When Harvard Crimson, that really rode with the Me Too, for take one example, and the George Floyd woke,

the idea that you should just follow, you should just hunt out racism or sexual, whatever, they wrote i

you remember and i'm quoting now

that

green

that would follow charleston and gay it marks the third set of anonymous plagiarism allegations against black women who hold or held leadership positions at harvard

so the idea is that well

Harvard's fine with this if the crimson reflects Harvard's view and I think it does.

We're fine with this.

The problem is that somebody exposed black women plagiarizing and stealing.

So that you're it's your fault.

This is a very Soviet idea.

It's, oh, you, you're a commissar and you're crooked and you're stealing money or you're ordering generals to go into battle and get people killed.

Oh, you reported me and this is and you did it.

It's your fault.

And they had them shot.

And so this is what's really scary is that Harvard's reaction to this is, we're fine with the plagiarism.

In fact,

if you remember the Harvard Corporation's initial defense of gay, it was I played the race card.

She did too, said she'd never done it.

And then it was an attack on people who brought it to their attention.

So Harvard is fine with people plagiarizing as long as you don't get caught.

They really are.

I shouldn't say that.

I should say they're fine with some people plagiarizing.

And this is not the end of it.

So what is going on right now nationwide

are literally thousands of DEI officers wondering, oh my God.

Because none of them have published much.

They're going back to their theses and education.

Most of them have EDDs or master's degrees.

They're going back to those theses and thinking, oh my God,

am I next?

Right.

And if Bill Ackman has his way, yeah.

Yeah, he's got a whole, I mean, and they will find more.

And the more and more they find, the more they'll say that they're targeting people because of their race or gender.

Yeah.

So

I don't know.

It's just, it's very Soviet.

And

this whole thing is, it's, you can see what's mounting all of this.

The new critical race theory, the critical legal theory.

the George Soros prosecutors, the politicalization of the election, getting the president,

the presidential nominee off the ballot, trying to use lawfare to destroy a company in New York,

giving an exemption so Gene Carroll can file again, two standards of justice for Biden and

Donald Trump vis-a-vis Jack Smith's investigation,

the destruction of our downtowns in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington.

the soaring crime rate that nobody wants to talk about,

the open border, 8 million people.

It's a civilization in free fall.

And I wrote a column this week about it, and I quoted the proem to Livy's Monumental History of Rome.

And he said, when you know the problem, I'm paraphrasing because it was very succinct, you know, the medicine's worse than, but when you know the problem and you know what has to be done, but you can't do it

because of the social disdain or odium or impediments, then the society collapses.

We know know we have to close the border.

We know we have to tell people who came here illegally to go back where they came and apply legally.

But we know that would be a monumental task.

And we know that if we deported 3,000 or 4,000 people, the New York Times were saying that we were interring people like the Japanese internment.

We know we have to put people in jail who hit people.

shoot people, steal, carjack, but we know that our prisons would fill up again and we know know what that would be like as far as the left.

We know what the homeless problem has to be solved.

We have to build mental institutions.

We have to build humane areas where they can be transported with shelter, medical care, away from the downtown, but we know that would require some coercion to put them on buses and get them help, and we can't do that.

So we're paralyzed.

And we think, you know what?

I know it's not healthy that these beautiful cities have excretement on the sidewalk or that people are assaulted by homeless people or they're injecting drugs or they're urinating right on the street.

But I can handle it.

I just can't handle being told that I'm a fascist or I'm mean or

not.

And so the same thing.

And when you get to that stasis, it's very,

the veneer of civilization is very, very thin.

And that was the whole theme of Thucydides' history at the stasis at Corsaira or the Melian dialogue or the plague.

Once you strip off that thin layer of civilization, you get human nature in the raw and it's not a pretty sight as you see at Market Street in San Francisco or you see with a smashing grab in Washington or you see a Saturday night in the inner city of Chicago or you see Gavin Newsom or the Biden family just free to do whatever they want and flaunt the law.

And so,

and that's what happens.

And so we, each according to our station, have to restore civilization.

So I think this a good campaign ad would be vote for civilization in November.

Yeah, we're veering towards Haiti.

And on top of that, Victor, you mentioned at the outset, and we're going to have to wrap up here quickly given our schedules, but you mentioned at the outset

California has $72 billion in debt.

That's just this year.

And I assume it'll increase before the end of the final restrictions are made.

And then the news that on a federal level,

we are adding $1 trillion

in debt

every 100 days.

Well, when you have a high interest, you've got to pay 5% or 6%

on T-bills or

4% to 5%,

and you owe $36 trillion.

You know, do the math, do the math, and then divide it by 12 for an annual interest rate.

And that's not counting the deficits they're still they're still spending they're still printing a bill a trillion joe biden every day just promises this and this and this and this and this

and the republicans are so discredited in the house they don't have the numbers or the unity unity or cohesion or the moral capital to stop it yeah and donald trump spent a lot of money some of it was for covid but if he comes in he's going to have to be physically sound.

And again,

is the disease too great?

We know what we have to to do.

We know that right now people are paying half.

We have a 38% tax rate here in California,

13.3%.

We have a payroll tax.

We have the highest gas taxes.

We can't tax people anymore.

And we know that we have to cut.

But can we do it?

Could you have the McClatchy paper saying in California, Joe Blow was working for 20 years at the DMV as a clerk, and all of a sudden the DMV was cut back and, you know, he now doesn't have a job.

And I don't think you could do that.

So we won't do it and we'll just, I don't know where it goes.

But

it's a civilizational crisis of free fall and it has to be arrested very quickly or we're going to be third world.

Everybody should remember when you see all these people coming across the border just to take the issue of immigration, there's no problem with race.

I have no problem with race.

If they come across and they are 100% American in attitude and values and training and they're productive, I think that's wonderful.

But when you have so many people

come so quickly and they don't have English and they don't have legality and they don't have an audit background and many of them don't have a high school diploma and many of them come from illiberal, impoverished societies, and they're greeting a host that has lost confidence in the melting pot and requires requires nothing other than to give free stuff to the immigrant.

It doesn't say, if you're going to come here, you have 90 days to take a citizenship test or a green card.

They don't ask anything.

Then why wouldn't the people bring the values of the country they came from?

In other words, we would have people from the Congo, we'd have people from China, we'd have

people from Venezuela, we'd have people from Oaxaca, they would just act as if they were in their countries here.

And

that's what's happened.

If people think that that's illiberal, I suggest you drive down

DeWolf Avenue out in Fresno County and see what it looks like right now.

Just drive down one day and see the mattresses, the

washers, the dryers, the freezers, the packs of garbage all strewn across almond orchards on either side of the road.

And every once in a while they're lit on fire and you can smell a toxic fume.

Or maybe you can look at the pipelines and the concrete that's just all defaced with rival gang Norteño's slogans written over by Sereños, written over by M13 all the time.

Or,

you know, drive out in the country after, I don't know, nine o'clock and think if you're going to go into a person's home.

I wouldn't do it if I were, if you run out of gas, or somebody throws you out a car, I don't think I would knock on anybody's door because they're all armed and they're paranoid.

And so it's, it's, um,

it's, it happened very quickly.

I think the lockdown and the disastrous COVID quarantine, the George Floyd mania,

the whole Trump derangement syndrome, it was kind of like a perfect storm that wrecked the country.

And it's got to got to happen.

The renaissance has to begin very quickly because things change very quickly.

I think people forget that.

We keep quoting that line from the sun also rises suddenly, gradually, then suddenly about bankruptcy.

It was gradually happening, and then suddenly it happened.

San Francisco had problems in 2008, 2010, 2015, then suddenly around 2021 or 22, it just all imploded.

Yeah, came a came a blank hole.

Can't curse on that.

And I also suggest you don't watch

Turner broadcasting direct TV because if you Turner classic movies, because if you do, you see live shots from New York or Philadelphia or San Francisco in a Hitchcock movie or a classic George Stevens, whatever it is.

And these are not set.

These are not studio sets.

They're just pictures of the cities.

And they look clean.

People are well dressed.

uh it's not like it is now civilization well victor we've um we're a little bit crunched today a little out so we're we've come to the end uh we'll help we'll hold off on uh for the next time we talk to bring up the new issue of strategica you can folks in the meanwhile if you hear this go to the hoover website and look up strategica victor oversees this online publication and the the new issue is about iran Iran and its proxies and how we resist them.

Edward Lutvach and Bing West and a third piece, I forget who wrote it, but check that out.

Check out Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

Go to victorhanson.com, subscribe.

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Victor, one last thing.

Here's a nice comment that somebody left for the show about the show,

on

iTunes slash Apple.

This is from W.H.

Clark 2001, titled An Undisputed National Treasure.

He or she writes, a towering intellect with an immense understanding of human history, I fear to contemplate a day without VDH's incredible insight and sage commentary.

on current events framed from a historical perspective.

Unlike others, oh, I didn't notice this.

Unlike others, I appreciate the interactions with Jack and Sammy.

However, I must admit, I am less focused on what they say because VDH's words are still bouncing around in my head as they speak.

Love and good wishes to all from a devoted listener.

Victor, can you imagine how many people out there right now that your words are bouncing around in their head?

That's

cool.

I hope they're bouncing in a happy way and they're not.

Well, after this kind of a mega ER performance, I don't know about that.

I like the word bounce rather than rattle.

Yeah, that's yeah, you get rattle when you get punched.

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

Thanks.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.