Our Jacobins: a Smorgasbord of News

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host and the star and namesake.

That is Victor Davis Hansen.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We are recording on February 17th, a Saturday.

This particular episode should be up on the World Wide Web on February 22nd.

That's a Thursday.

Also on the World Wide Web is the Blade of Perseus.

That's Victor's official website at victorhanson.com.

We'll talk more about that later in today's episode, Victor.

There's a couple of free speech matters, a couple of gender matters, a two-state solution, a whole smorgasborg of interesting topics to propose to you to get your thoughts and wisdom on.

And we'll get to,

we'll start on, we'll start on free speech, and we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, you and I discussed this

one or two episodes ago.

I was a little, more than a little, intimately involved in this case.

The Michael Mann, the climatologist suing Mark Stein.

We discussed the verdict against Stein over a week ago.

National Review, where I was the publisher, was involved and still will be involved because Michael Mann will be bringing back all parties into the case.

post-trial by new legal action.

I think one thing that is interesting, Victor, the lawfare issue aside,

let's break these

institutions and individuals that have the temerity to question us, the scientists, quote-unquote scientists, is now the claim, the claim to make these people,

the scientists, a protected class of a sort.

So here's a

Here's just a little chunk from an editorial in Science magazine that's based on the Man Stein verdict.

And it says, although some free speech advocates warn that the verdict will have a chilling effect on the criticism of scientific findings, perhaps the verdict can be viewed more optimistically as appropriately directing matters of opinion to blogs and opinion columns while matters of scientific disagreement are handled in the literature of scientific record.

In other words, Victor, you

and I and others should shut up about challenging the actual science.

Maybe because

we don't have the right credentials after our name, right?

We don't have

the PhDs.

But if you don't, shut up.

Your thoughts.

Well, I think everybody's got to see this in the wider context in which it's taking place.

I don't think anybody would believe if Mark Stein

was a Greta Thunberg and a radical proponent of global intervention that is necessary to stop climate change.

And Michael

Mann had said that he didn't think climate change

either didn't he didn't think it existed or to the degree that it existed, he didn't think that government action would make much of a difference.

And

do you really believe that a court would say that Mark Stein had defamed him?

I don't.

I think they would say what he said about Michael Mann needed to be said because we're in an existential crisis and Mark was just trying to get the truth out that climate change exists and Michael Mann is a climate.

denialist and they would nullify the jury or whatever that's that's what it would be so what i'm getting at is there's a lot of things going on, but

the left feels that they cannot count on elections anymore.

They don't poll 51%.

And that gives them two alternatives, Jap.

Three alternatives.

They feel that they have to use the institutional control, the administrative state,

the corporate boardroom, K through 12, academia,

entertainment, professional sports, media, traditional media, Silicon Valley, to affect public opinion and the money that accrues from these globalized industries to sway.

And what do I mean?

How does that manifest itself?

That means that Michael Mann will be lavish with a lot of money and Mark Stein will not.

That means that Eugene Carroll will have a Silicon Valley person footing the entire bill.

That means there's going to be millions of dollars going into the coffers,

campaign coffers, of Letita James.

And the same thing about Alvin Bragg.

And that's how they will affect it.

The second thing is they will affect it through the courts.

They have given up on the give and take of legislation.

It's too burdensome.

So they feel that with their institutional control, that they can exercise an agenda and maintain power through the courts.

And they have.

And so if they see an existential elected threat that the people have elected through the Electoral College, or maybe in 2024 through the popular vote, if they see that threat on the horizon, then they will use all of their institutional control and the media to outfund him, to change the voting laws, to make sure that Election Day voting does not really exist.

And in the long term, they will try to get rid of the Electoral College or pack the court or get rid of the...

So they look at systems and processes because they don't believe the people can be trusted to do the right thing as they define the right thing.

And so the courts now are really the engine of the United States as far as where the battles of what we're ideology are taking place.

And this is important.

And we are losing on the conservative side that battle for a variety of very simple reasons.

Our law schools, as part of the academic enterprise, have embraced critical legal theory, which means that the laws are constructs created by a privileged white male class, and therefore there are mechanisms to get around it and to get true justice.

Because you should consider the law.

If it's a campaign finance law, it can be valuable, maybe, to go after Donald Trump, but not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

If

Eugene Carroll's got a ridiculous story,

she should win because she's fighting an existential right-wing threat in a way that Tara Reed is a nut and you should never believe her.

If the latest FBI informant suggests that he had information about the Biden family, then you've got to go after him

and you indict him.

But you would never do that to Christopher Steele, who cooked up the P-tape and was taken at face value.

That's what critical legal theory is.

And they

have the majority of prosecutors.

And that's what Sorrell saw that better than all the conservatives combined.

He saw that you could affect change through the courts in a way you could not through the Congress or the executive even.

And that's why he got elected all of these local and state prosecutors.

Take George Sorrells out of the equations and there is no Letita James or Alvin Bragg.

or Fannie Willis.

They just wouldn't exist.

And so they understand that, and I think we don't.

So the courts are where the left sees that social, cultural, economic, political change can take place.

And they feel that the law schools are turning out prosecutors, judges,

defense attorneys that reflect a unanimously left-wing point of view.

And that's why it's the final thing I'll say, and this is why I have such contempt for the Never Trumpers, to the degree that any of them still swear, like George Will, that they are conservatives.

Whatever damage they think that Donald Trump does by his crude behavior pales in comparison with empowering or directly aiding a democratic administration, whether at the state or federal level, to be elected, because what they are doing is getting

thousands of federal and state judges who are on the left, who believe in critical legal theory,

critical critical race theory, into positions of power to affect social change that will not be conservative.

And that's what's happening.

We're going to go through our grandchildren's lifetimes.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And that's why, and it sets a message.

I think everybody realized that deterrence makes the world go around.

People act accordingly to

an instant adjudication of cost to benefit.

And when they start to see that if you go down the Mark Stein pathway, or you go down the Donald Trump pathway or you go down any of the Terra Reed pathway or you go down any of these pathways, you're going to be in trouble.

You're going to end up like General Michael Flynn.

You just don't do that.

And so you make the necessary adjustment.

You go down the Scott Atlas pathway or the Jay Baccaria pathway considered in comparison with maybe the Fauci pathway or the James Comey pathway or or the Robert Mueller or the Andrew McCabe.

The system gives you indemnity.

It protects you.

You will not be sued.

If you lie under oath, you will not be prosecuted.

You will not be prosecuted.

If you take money from the Romanians or the Chinese or the Russians, you will not be prosecuted.

If you're a Hunter Biden, you can get away with it.

He almost got away with it.

except for one odd judge.

Right, right.

And he probably will get away with it.

So that sends a message to all of us.

Do you really want to be out there speaking on the conservative side and questioning radical changes in government to react to climate change that will cost trillions of dollars and affect the middle class?

Do you really want to question DEI?

Do you really want to question an open border?

Do you want to get that name?

Because your life is going to be very, very complicated.

And if you don't cross your T's and dot your I's in your taxes and your behavior and what you you say, you're going to be broke.

Asset forfeiture.

You're going to be ruined.

And I think all of us understand that, that they have created deterrence.

And the left, but the weird thing about it,

deterrence always works two ways.

It scares off people who will feel punished, but it also encourages people to be audacious.

And that's what it's doing.

It's telling people on the left, you can say whatever you want.

You can go after anybody you want.

You can do this, you can do that,

and we're going to protect you.

Lita Tita Jane, you can go on a junket, you can pay in cash.

The IRS is never going to investigate you or way, no way.

They're not going to do that.

And so that's where we are in America.

I never thought we would be there.

I never thought that we would have a third world judicial system, but we do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And again, what's in the pipeline for that are the example from,

was it last year, within the last 18 months at Stanford Law School?

This is the future bright

jurisprudence crowd coming to America, and they are hostile to free speech.

And this is all coupled.

Remember, when you mentioned Stanford Law School and Judge Duncan, the idea that you shout down a conservative federal judge and you give him a message to all conservative judges.

If you're going to roll in a way that we don't agree with on transgender, or you're going to use the wrong pronoun, you're not going to be able to set foot on a campus.

We're going to disrupt your lecture.

And if you think anything's going to happen,

we're going to hijack your lecture.

Nothing's going to happen.

None of our students who did this are going to pay a price.

It's just not going to happen.

They're going to be heroes.

And so, and that's the message.

And that's coupled with the reality, Jack, that

our students are going to be considered the best and the brightest with the Stanford JD,

but they're going to, only 83% of them are going to pass the watered-down bar exam.

Right.

Because they're not going to be competent in things like contractual law or,

you know, probate law or criminal law or civil law.

They're going to be competent in work law.

And they've taken classes about DEI law and race law and culture law and gender law.

And so we're creating a highly politicized, weaponized legal community that lacks the knowledge of jurisprudence of past generations because they don't think that jurisprudence is necessary because it doesn't exist.

Everything now is relative.

It's Foucaultian flexible.

A contract is only to be adjudicated in terms of who is the victim of the contract and who is the victimizer.

Who owns that house doesn't matter anymore.

If you don't have sufficient shelter according to your needs and you see an empty house, then you go in there and move it.

Critical legal theory says that you have a right to that, a human right.

And forget about who owns it and the mortgage and the ownership and the title.

You possess it by the fact that you're in it.

and they can't get you out.

And that's where we're headed to.

And it's not new.

It's what destroys civilization and the rule of law.

It really is.

It's very scary.

Well, hopefully we'll have time at the end, Victor, to pick up on that squatter issue a little more.

But

we'll stay on verbiage.

Let me just use one word before we move on, and that word is barbecue.

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Victor words.

Here's a piece from National Review the other day by Ryan.

Mills headline, Blinken, Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State, cautions State Department staff against misgendering using gendered terms like father in official cables.

So here's what it says here.

In early February, just days after the United States launched dozens of strikes against Iranian-backed militants in retaliation for killing of three American soldiers, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken finally found time to provide guidance to his staffers on a really, really pressing issue facing the nation, the threat of misgendering.

Making assumptions about another person's gender identity based on their appearance or name quote can be problematic and quote and send a quote harmful exclusionary message end quote blinken wrote in a february 5th cable which instructed state department employees to avoid using common terms victor this is going to be you know this is really threatening terrible terms like mother and father son and daughter husband and wife victor this is our um State Department.

Well, I mean,

not surprised.

Yeah, he's basically saying that it's 1793 and we're in the reign of terror.

And Robespierre is running things.

And the Committee

of Public Safety is in control.

And they're monitoring the thought, the expression, the vocabulary of all of us.

And if you buck them, they're going to put you in a guillotine figuratively, although I'm not sure it won't eventually come to literally.

And that's what's happened.

It's the same thing of the Bolshevik revolution of 1918.

Suddenly, this minority party takes over and they start going after everybody.

So now it's pronouns.

And what does that mean?

What does that mean that we all have to

change the English language because in this particular year, in this particular era of our lives, somebody has decided that 0.0001 of the population historically feels that it's now a civil rights issue rather than a medical issue.

And this is crazy.

And

it's, I don't,

there was something, I get back to this, Jack, that

there was something

insane about taking 330 million people and locking them up under the fear of COVID for over two years and giving them and shutting down the schools and connecting everybody together, mostly through a computer or television screen, and having that information siphoned to them by the left-wing apparatus.

And that's what happened.

And there were a lot of psychological,

you know, psychosocial ramifications to that.

And one of them is we had a lot of really bizarre ideas, like hiring thousands of DEI

czars throughout our universities, and then the transgender pronouns.

And Me Too took off again.

And we had all of these kind of say-them-witch trial.

I don't know if you want to be more cynical.

It was sort of like swallowing goldfish or packing people in a Volkswagen.

It was these fads, and we haven't recovered from it.

And so this is insane.

And I guess what everybody's looking for is they don't want a Napoleon to stop the French Revolution.

They don't want

some

vile person like a Hitler to stop the Weimar Republic's decadence.

They don't want a Lenin or Stalin to get rid of the revolutionary chaos.

They want an elected government that says we're going to respect the law and the customs and traditions of the United States.

And we're going to stop this madness.

People commit crimes, they're going to go to jail.

People cross the border and think it's their country and break the law, they're going to be sent back, but they're never going to be able to cross the border.

And we don't want to intervene in foreign affairs.

And we are no better friend or no worse enemy.

But if you attack the United States, we're going to be disproportionate.

We don't want to, but we will be.

Unpredictable and disproportionate.

But we have no desire to go into your wretched country and try to teach you about gender studies or to fly a pride flag on our embassy or to have a George flag.

That's not our business.

And I think that's what we're hoping will happen, a return to sanity and normality.

And

I don't know what's going to happen.

I don't know what's going to happen in this election.

I fear that

these people are so unhinged and they have so many resources and so much money.

And they have so little morality or ethics, and they will manipulate things in a way we have never seen.

It's going to be very hard to defeat them.

It really is.

And even if you defeat them, as we saw with the Trump four years, they won't stop.

They will use the courts,

they will use the FBI, they will use the CIA, the administrative state, almost every tool in their arsenal they will use.

The impunity,

how they act, Victor, is shocking.

And I'd like to pick up on two examples of insanity and get your thoughts on them.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

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Back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor,

two insanities.

One, we'll stay on the gender.

And then I'd like to raise something that happened this past week.

Again, we're recording on Saturday the 17th in New York City at St.

Patrick's Cathedral.

But the first thing is,

here's a headline from the Daily Mail from the other day.

Elderly woman,

California woman, 90, is fired from her volunteering position of 60 years at an MS, multiple sclerosis nonprofit, because she, quote, did not understand pronouns, end quote, despite previously winning multiple awards for being a volunteer.

So a 90-year-old lady, I guess, doesn't know that you should be Z-Zer instead of

she, her.

And despite all the...

the time dedicated to this service, she gets poop canned.

This is nuts.

Yeah, it is.

They're bullies, too.

There's maybe not much more to say than that, but go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, what would you do?

Why would you go after a 90-year-old woman who's a volunteer for 60 years, who's given her time and her labor-free

noble cause of trying to stop this horrific disease?

And you don't care about her work.

You're not talking about...

the disease.

You're not talking about the effect it will have on other volunteers.

You're just sort of going to go down the what, the Bud Lightroad, the Dylan Mulvaney thing.

Is that what you're going to do?

And

it's not that she deliberately said she wouldn't do it or she had a habit of being provocative.

She was just confused about it, as I am.

Everybody is.

Right.

And I don't know what to do.

And then every time a Stanford professor sends a memo, they have pronouns, you know, at the bottom under their signature.

I don't know what it means.

Isn't that the intention to keep people like you and me and others confused?

I guess it is.

I do know that 10 years ago,

when I look at the literature of something called gender dysphoria,

and this is people who

genuinely have, or they're in a physical biological gender, sex, and yet psychologically, they don't feel that they're part of that.

And that does occur, that mismatch in nature.

But on the record, it's a very rare physical and mental phenomenon.

And it's recorded in the literature, but

it's a very, very small percentage of 1%.

And how this

got to be

30% of a particular campus say they

they may be transitioning, and that's what some of the polls

it shows you that it's almost a mass hysteria.

And it's brought about by fear that transgendered activists will harm you, show up, screen you, sort of like happened to the swimmer at San Francisco State when she was cornered.

Remember that, right?

Yeah, and and right, yeah, Riley Gaines, Riley Gaines, she was in physical danger, right?

That was by intent to show everybody that this is what's going to happen to you.

And when the government doesn't do anything or doesn't protect you, it's

or

the institution also that they should not be held

in cultivation.

I get paid by Stanford University, and the Hoover Institution is semi, semi-autonomous.

So when I go on campus or

I go to my office or I have

relations, you know, over the email with very, I am always assuming that something's going to happen.

I just am.

That I'm going to get a call and say, did you say that?

Did you write that?

How dare you?

It's happened to me.

Did you go on Fox News?

The faculty senate wants to investigate you.

I just assume that.

And you have to have two attitudes.

You have to have two.

I don't know what I would do if I was 30 again with three little kids and no money, making $19,000 a year.

But I just assume that

everybody has a rendezvous with that encounter, no matter where you are.

You can be at a university, you can be at the fire department, you can be in the police force, you can be

you can work at the DMV, but you have a rendezvous with that.

And that's what's scary about it.

And the people who are coming out of the woodwork to be the enforcers believe that they're on the winning side.

It's not that the issue, they don't particularly believe or disbelieve in the issue.

The point is, they believe in the issue which they feel is the wiser thing to believe in given their career concerns

yeah they will they will if you're what's his name michael phillips the cake baker in colorado you win they're going to come out after you look at his life yeah and that's the point isn't it just say look what they did to devin nunes you would

i drove down the 99 uh

for years and would see these

billboards, Devin Nunes, Putin's poodle, Putin's asset.

Does anybody put a billboard now and say, we want to apologize to Devin Nunes?

As chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, he was right

that the Russian government did not collude on behalf of Donald Trump, but rather fed information to Christopher Steele and others to compile a phony dossier to destroy Hillary Clinton's political rival for a price, both being paid by the FBI as an informant and by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

I don't see that.

All I remember is when I go up to the Bay Area, everybody once in a while says, Do you know Devin Noonan?

Isn't he down there in your play?

Yeah, I do.

God, he was the guy who helped Trump beat the

Russian interference rap.

No, that's not true.

He was the guy that exposed the Russian interference lie and concoction

and dissimulation.

But,

you know, that's how they, but you ruined a person's reputation.

That's right.

As Ray Donovan, right, the former Secretary of the United States.

Transportation.

Yeah.

Where do I go to get my reputation back?

Speaking of reputations, Victor, the

Archdiocese of New York, Roman Catholic Archdiocese, took a blow this past week.

And I don't mean to get sectarian here, but this is in line what we're just talking about.

Some transgender

atheist prostitute died and got a funeral mass at St.

Patrick's.

Now, I'm telling you, Victor, if

Mary O'Malley, who prayed her rosaries every day and went to mass every day, died, she would not get a funeral at St.

Patrick's Cathedral.

She wouldn't.

But this guy did.

And it was chaos.

600 or so transvestite, transgender,

decked out like a la, the sisters of

perpetual indulgence.

Just a hellacious poop show that took place at a Roman Catholic Mass officiated by a Roman Catholic priest who referred to this guy who claimed to be dead guy, claimed to be a woman, using the she and her her pronouns at St.

Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.

And for two days, on top of so, Victor, that this could even happen, that the transgender, transvestite community thought they could act like this at this sacred place, that the Archdiocese of New York would be so stunad not to know that something

was going to happen here and that it took more than 48 hours to respond to it.

It's really disheartening that

we have to negotiate people.

They're running things.

We don't want to end up like the church during the Jacobin Revolution when they went out and killed people.

So we're going to deal with them.

And at some point,

in this Marxist cultural binary of victimizers and oppressors versus victimized and oppressed, we're starting to see that there's too many victimized people and not enough victimizers because everybody's coming out of the woodwork and making claims against this mythical victimizer group.

But that mythical group doesn't have the numbers and it doesn't have the wherewithal and the money to

keep satisfying these demands.

And at some point, the number of people who get up every morning, they go to work.

I'm not

advocating a married nuclear family.

I'm not saying anything about it.

I have a lot of friends that are gay.

I have friends that are single.

I have friends that live alone.

I have members of my family who have never had children.

Fine.

I think that's great.

But at some point,

the person who buys a home and has two or three children and raises them to be good citizens, there are too few of them.

They're just too few of them.

And they get no credit.

They get up every day.

they go to work, they pay their taxes, they keep quiet, and they look at all of this stuff that's going on that we've talked about with the legal system, the lawfare, the weaponization of politics,

this particular transgender group, this Black Lives Matter group, this

voice of Otsalan.

There's just too many, the center's not holding.

There's not enough people who say, wait a minute, we are 35 trillion dollars in debt we don't have the money we're printing it wait a minute we have a nuclear superpower called china that wants to destroy us and they're doing a pretty good job of it wait a minute there is a new alliance in the world of iran

and russia and china and north korea and they are peeling off people like gutter and turkey and they don't like any of you

Wait a minute.

You cannot

walk down a street in the early evening in Minneapolis and Memphis and Washington and Baltimore.

That is an existential problem.

At some point, these are the things that count.

And all we're doing is worrying about pronouns and a drag show at a diocese, and it doesn't make any sense.

It's like we're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

We have some real problems

and we have no unity.

We have no common purpose.

We have no educated population.

If I take a microphone and I go into my hometown and I walk along the streets of Salmor, I go up to Fresno and I walk up to somebody and I said, can you tell me the difference between the Senate and the House of Representatives?

If I say to you, do you know who Franklin Delano Roosevelt was?

If I say, could you tell me the difference between world war one and world war ii if i say to them would you please just tell me what the supreme court they have no idea none you could do that on a college campus yes also and get the same exactly so we are

an ignorant ignorant and arrogant culture and we've got to save it and that's why we try to do these everybody according to their station has to do something to stop it and you know you can can write, you can podcast, you can listen, you can act, you can, you've got to vote.

You not only got to vote, you've got to take people to the polls, you've got to watch the polls, you've got to be vigilant.

And to

I think it's the 11th hour.

I'm really,

put it this way,

we're all in the walls of Constantinople.

And it's coming up to Black Tuesday, May 29th, 1453, and the city is no longer 1 million people.

And the empire is no longer 20 million people.

There's only about 50 brave souls in the city.

And we're looking at an army of 250,000 that want to kill us and destroy the culture.

That's the metaphor that I see, the simile.

And we either resist and say, you know, not this pig.

We're not going to do it anymore.

We're going to speak out.

We're going to restore this great country.

Or we concede and make the necessary adjustment

and join them.

It's like the invasion of the body snatchers, you either stop it or you just go limp and get body snatches, and you wake up and everything's fine.

Yeah, don't go to sleep, folks.

You're one of them, yeah.

Well, Victor, um, we'll stay on the um social madness for a little bit and then get into foreign policy.

And we'll do that right after this uh important message.

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

Victor, I just want to make one comment about the 90-year-old volunteer lady.

Interesting, how you can be 90 and daughtering and can't, I'm assuming, well, it's not unfair to say she's daughtering.

Let's just say confused about a certain point.

And you can't volunteer for a charity that you've been doing that for 60 years.

But you can be 80 and daughtering and be president of the United States.

So I just want to make that comparison.

You cannot do almost any

job in America, but you can be in the United States.

Everybody should listen.

If you don't know where you are or you slur your words, you can't be a truck driver.

You can't be an electrician.

You cannot be a teacher.

You cannot be a surgeon.

You cannot be a lawyer, but you can be the president of the United States.

Because that's not apparently a very important job.

We are a lucky people.

Hey, victor last week some climate punks with pink powder threw it on the constitution at the national archives i

you know this kind of um public theater of these

whiny scrawny punks whether they're throwing pumpkin soup on the mona lisa in france or here uh is

I shouldn't say it's

comical because you look at them with disdain, but I think they are having some kind of

sickening impact on our culture.

But I just wonder if these two clowns who did this

at the National Archives last week, do you think they'll be prosecuted by?

No, no, I don't.

I think they're going to have the same fate as the young Senate aide who took off all of his clothes and he went into a

hallowed

chamber of the Congress and then he filmed himself being sodomized and he thought that was great with his jock strap on.

And then he put it all over social media.

And then when people objected, he said, oh, you're telling me that I can't love the person I want and the way I want.

And he got, no, there was no, there was no, not public nudity, not in, you know, taking over a public space for a sexual act, nothing.

They won't have anything.

I know that because there were two guards there, Jack.

You saw them.

They were sitting there apparently armed.

I don't know why they have weapons.

They're never going to use them, but there they are.

And these people were desecrating a sacred document and they didn't do anything.

Why didn't they just go arrest them?

And they allowed them to start mouthing off.

There's no deterrence.

And so we don't live in a shame culture anymore.

In the old days, which

are not so old, they would have been arrested.

Right.

And I'm talking about the 50s and 60s when I grew up, and then they would have said

they were going to be sentenced to

a year in jail with, you know, maybe six months off for good behavior if they went out in a road gang and picked up trash.

Or they went out and, first of all, they have to clean up their mess in front of everybody.

And then their names, I remember what it was like.

Those two people would have had this treatment.

Right.

John Smith, age 19, a student at, I'm just making this up, City College of New York.

John Smith, son of Mr.

John Smith and Doris Smith at 1415 Elm Avenue in Brooklyn,

was arrested.

That's what they would say.

Right.

And that would work.

Today, we don't even know the names of the shooters at the Super Bowl Kansas City event, right?

Right.

Why didn't people, well, they're juvenile.

Oh, no, they're not juvenile.

They're adults that shot and killed somebody and wounded dozen, over a dozen.

And we don't even, we're not even allowed to know their names.

So

it's not going to change until there has to be some social opprobrium of breaking the law.

I think a lot of the things is the juvenile court system.

We don't.

We treat people who are adults who are committing violent acts as if they're children.

I think you should say anybody over 14 who commits an act will have his name printed, printed, his address printed, his parents' name, such as they are, and have them printed.

And let people know.

And these people, we should know who they are.

And that was, if you doubt that, one of the things that Bill Ackman discovered and the donor class at Harvard,

they didn't care about their money necessarily.

They didn't care about their arguments.

They cared about one thing.

They let it be known that all those people who were protesting and signed those petitions or broke the law, they were never going to hire them again.

In other words, they were going to be socially ostracized.

And these people, they knew for all of their bragadaccio about being a brave protester on the barricade, they were careerists, careerists.

And the most important thing was getting a blue chip law billet.

And when that was impossible, oh my God, this is so unfair.

I mean, I just called for the genocide of

the Jewish people and the destruction of Israel while I was on the campus and I broke campus rules.

Why would you not let me go to a blue-chip law firm?

And so I think we can get back to that very quickly

if we had some deterrence.

Did you see on that score, Victor, that the House Education Committee is going after Harvard for not producing

legislation related to that committee's probe into anti-Semitism at Harvard.

And that Penny Pritzker, who's the

and the interim president, Alan Garber, they have not turned over documents.

They've turned over some, but not all.

So, you know, I hope that Congress, I hope if they could ever get the Republicans, could get their act together and they could get a 20-vote margin in the House and win the Senate by five seats and get a Republican president.

They should just tell Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford, you've got a choice.

We'll keep out of your business.

If you want internal laws and legislation that we don't agree with, you're a private institution.

Go ahead and do it.

But if you take money from us,

if you take money from us, if you want a tax-exempt endowment where you're not going to pay federal income tax on the income, if you want students on federally subsidized loans, if you want federal research grants,

if you want people to get federal tax deductions from giving money, then we're going to have a say.

And I suggest you don't do any of that and you break with us and be completely autonomous.

But if you're not willing to do that, we're going to tell you stuff that you're going to have to do, and it's going to be in accordance with the Constitution.

And that's what they need to do.

These people are completely roguish, the universities.

Jack, we've had for 30 years Prop 209.

It says you cannot use race or gender as criteria for hiring or promotion

or admission.

And the university just snubbed their nose at it.

They just said,

screw you.

We're not going to do that.

Nobody's going to do anything to us because the governor or the attorney general, they're on our side, the federal government.

Nobody's going to do that.

I was on hiring committees and when we would start hiring by race, I'd say, excuse me,

let me read you the statute, Prop 209.

Oh, you know, that's, it doesn't matter.

Come on, it doesn't matter.

And

it just ignored it.

In practice,

they're right.

And that's a part of it.

They were a great shame.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

I'd like to take a minute to welcome back our...

one of our favorite sponsors, Hillsdale College.

And our listeners should know that Victor is one of the professors in three of the over over 40 free online courses at Hillsdale.

That's right.

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That's one of the three courses.

That's based on Victor's book, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

Then there's the Second World Wars, which is the course based on Victor's book by the same name.

And then the third course is Athens and Sparta, partly based on Victor's book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

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Victor, let's turn.

We have a little time left.

Maybe we'll have time to get into the squatting.

I'm not sure, but let's talk about an important foreign policy matter back to Anthony Blinken, who we talked about earlier in the show, and his boss, the daughtering Joe Biden, and their continued, one,

contempt

for Benjamin Netanyahu, and reports have come out about just the

standard vulgarities that Joe Biden uses to

characterize the president of, not the president, the prime minister of Israel.

And then the ongoing push for a two-state solution, which means

sanctifying Israel's enemy as its neighbor.

Any thoughts, Victor?

It's not new.

It's not new, Jack.

During the Clinton administration, we interfered with the internal relations politics of Israel.

We sent Clinton campaign operatives over there with the express purpose of defeating candidate Netanyahu.

Remember during the Obama administration, they got so angry that Netanyahu spoke to Congress about the real dangers of the Iran deal that they deliberately held him up and made him wait.

And

I think that Obama was quoted as calling him chicken shit.

And they made fun of him.

They hated him.

And so

the United States gives lectures on the left all the time about what we did with Allende and what we did with Mossadegh.

But they have no problem, no hesitation to interfere, whether it's Ukraine or whether it's Israel anytime they feel like it and interfere with their politics

and

what we give Israel is about $3 billion

in military aid and we think we have a lever and we tell Netanyahu you better have a wartime cabinet you better have members of the opposition we give we just We're going to approve $100 billion.

A lot of that's going to go to Ukraine.

We do not tell Mr.

Zelensky, listen, we're on your side, we want you to repel Russian aggressions, but you cannot repeat, you cannot suspend habeas corpus, you cannot declare martial laws, you cannot ban most political parties, and you cannot put off elections.

You understand?

We didn't do that during World War II,

and you can't either.

They don't.

And so they just keep telling Netanyahu, you know, you're not going to have collateral damage.

Does anybody say that to us when we hit back after these 170?

The Israelis say, hey, I know you were hit 170 times, but I want you to be very careful that you text.

We can show you how to do it.

You text the people that live around your intended target.

And by the way, we're willing to help you with Ukraine.

So in occupied Crimea or occupied Donbass, when the Russians send a drone from a platform and you want to take out that platform, Here's how you do it.

You text people that live around it.

You drop looplets.

What you lose in the element of surprise, you make up in moral currency.

Do we do that?

No, we don't do that at all.

Do Israelis or anybody say to America,

you're not proportionate.

How many Houthis and how many Iranian surrogates have you killed versus how many you lost?

Yeah.

And

we don't say that to the Ukrainians.

We don't say to them,

we want you to be proportionate.

Putin went into your country, but that's no reason to hit the Kremlin unless you can tit for tat show you that you're doing no more damage and you're suffering.

We only say that to Israel.

Victor, do you think, though, about, and pardon if there's any Bronx noises in the background here, about Netanyahu, Netanyahu, that part of the disdain for him is, one, that he's a Jew, and two, that he is a,

has been an actual warrior, you know,

a man.

He got very angry when they had those two pictures during the Obama administration, and they went all over the internet.

There was one with Obama smoking a cigarette, I think he, a long cigarette, and he had a Panama hat, and he was all decked out almost in girly fashion, relaxing.

And then right next to him, there was

Netanyahu at the same age and a paratroopers with, I think, a parachute on his back, you know, airborne or something.

Maybe it was just regular combat, and he had been involved in a rescue operation.

Yeah, they were juxtaposed.

There's another element as well as the fact that he's Jewish and that he was a combat veteran, and that is He grew up for a long part of his life on the East Coast.

He's got an American accent.

His father was an academic,

very famous student of the Spanish Inquisition.

His brother was a very accomplished radiologist and playwright.

And so he understands the

America intimately.

He knows how it works.

He knows the great strengths and the great weaknesses of America.

And when they talk to him, he sounds like an American.

So there's a familiarity that they...

that bothers them.

They think it's spooky.

They think that they can't con him.

He knows about how he is one of us, they almost think.

Right.

And when you go to Israel today

and you juxtapose to 20, 25 years ago, and you look at a town like Haifa or parts of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, and you see the roads, and you see the infrastructure, and you see the waterfront, and you see the ports, and you see the parks, and you see the bustle and hustle.

It's just stunning.

And one of the reasons it's stunning is under Sharon, he was an interior minister, economic minister, name it.

And he opened up that economy and he stopped the kabbuts mentality of socialism and he allowed people to be free market capitalists.

And the result is all of that

Jewish education and brilliance was unleashed.

And the result is now it's got almost the the same per capita income as the United States and greater than a lot of European countries.

And it's at the forefront of every, you know,

every scientific field in terms of research and development.

He did that.

Netanyahu did that.

And that's why they hate him even more.

It's so weird about the left.

I feel,

you know, if you're a foreigner and you're dealing with America, when you look at this, when you get a left-wing government in there, it's very hard to deal with because

they don't play by the rules.

It's what your ideology is.

It's what your ideology is.

And that determines it.

All of a sudden, if Donald Trump is bequeathed the Abrams Accords and you signed on to it and you want to participate and Biden comes in and says, oh, no, no, that's got Jared Kushner's fingerprints in it.

And they just cool it until they need it.

And then suddenly the Middle East pulls up and he says, I'm going to revive the Abraham Accords.

And I'm going to say it's the Biden Accords.

And I'm going to court Saudi Arabia that I said was essentially a criminal state.

And then it's okay.

So what would you do if you're a Saudi Abraham Accords are good.

Now they're bad.

Now they're good again.

And that's how you deal with it.

Well, Victor, by the way, springing this on you, the latent, it's not even latent, it's blatant,

the testing of Jews,

that's part and parcel, I think, of the hatred of Netanyahu is kind of across the board.

I want to recommend to our listeners to check out every once in a while online.

It's a journal, Tablet Magazine.

We've talked about it in the past.

It's a Jewish online journal.

And there's a there's a terrific piece in the most recent last week, and it's by a professor from Columbia University, Shai Dabadai, who's

in the business school, and his wife, Yarden Greenspan, and they are left-wingers.

They are left-wing, progressive Jews.

And they lamented, rightly so,

to their friends in the community at Columbia, the attacks on Jews on October 7th.

And even though they're people of the left, even though they check every box, they are now vilified by their fellow progressives and lefties who have been shunned, etc.

So it's the fact that they, you know, if you're going to be a Jew,

just shut up about being a Jew, you know?

Be a lefty, but once you start talking about that, there's no room here for you.

So I want to recommend that.

And Victor, if we're going to take just one last quick break here.

When we come back, we'll get a final few thoughts from you on squatting, not

the not the exercise, but the thievery.

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

Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, let's

cap today's episode with your thoughts.

Here's a headline from a publication called Zero Hedge and a writer, Tyler Durden.

Here's the piece.

It's titled, Squatters are taking over homes all over the nation on an industrial scale and turning them into dens of crime.

And

there's so much here in this piece.

And he talks about just in the Atlanta area alone, where Fanny Willis is too busy being on cruises with

her lover, that there are 1,200 homes in the Atlanta area that are being squatted.

Writes here, squatters are ruining entire neighborhoods in Atlanta, and police response to evict is so slow.

Some homeowners have resorted to paying nuisances to leave.

Brazen squatters even opened an illegal strip club on property they had taken over, one of the 1,200 homes which have been squatted in the city, according to the National Rental Home Council.

I'd be terrified in Atlanta to lease out one of my properties, says Matt Urbanski, who manages a local home cleaning company.

He told Bloomberg.

Victor, this is not just Atlanta.

It's nationwide.

I still can't get my head around it.

My brain is insufficient, as you know, as the listeners know.

But the thought that you're home, right?

Your home, your heart.

Home is the thing you could, you know, if someone's trying to break in, you can shoot them.

But if someone breaks in and you're not there, they have a claim to it.

And the agents of law and order in our nation, across the nation, don't seem to give a rat's ass about this.

Well, I think everybody should realize.

I discuss this a lot in

the dying citizen.

People forget that the impetus, the fuel, the catalyst for constitutional government, whether a federated republic or a broad-based oligarchy or a radical democracy, as it was originated, as it originated in Greece, was the protection of property.

That is, the right to have property in your name, legal ownership, and the ability to sell it or more importantly, to pass it on to your children without confiscations from the state.

Prior to that, in the 7th and 8th century in Greece, most of the civilizations of the Near East or Egypt or Persia, they had no clear concept of that.

The degree to which you own property was predicated on largesse from the state, and the state could confiscate it, enhance it, subtract it it as it felt best.

So it was the idea of the individual could have property and that was a radical economic idea because suddenly people decided, I'm 70 years old, but I can plant olive trees even though they won't come into bearing until I'm 75.

But I don't care if I die because my children will have it.

And once you protect property, all good things follow from it.

But if you don't protect property, then you don't have personal freedoms and the whole system unwinds.

And that means why would anybody work hard or take a mortgage out or try to improve a piece of property that they own when they don't own it?

In the sense that somebody can walk in and say, I appeal to a higher moral justice.

You have two pieces of property and I have no, so I'm going to take one of yours.

And when the state enables that through indifference or active complicity, it unwinds the whole system.

Why would anybody want to, I have, you know, it's very funny.

About five years ago, I had one of my many root canals, and there was a wonderful young dental hygienist that was assisting the dentist, and she was talking as he went between patients, and I was waiting for the painkiller to take in, that her family had gone back to Mexico.

They were immigrants, and they went down to southern Mexico in Oaxaca, and they went to their home, which they thought the neighbors were watching out.

She said it wasn't that great, but it was two or three bedrooms and they had about an acre.

And guess what?

There were squatters there living in it.

And when they objected, some people with AR-15s came up and said, you better leave right now, meaning they either connected with a cartel or they had permission or they just were armed themselves.

And as she was saying this, she goes, this is what we, one of the reasons that we love the United States.

And I said, like an idiot, I don't think that could ever happen here.

There is the rule of law.

They would call the sheriff and have the sheriff, and that's not true, Jack.

That's no longer true.

I have friends now in the Bay Area and family members.

If you own a home

and you are going to move out of it and you want to keep it, maybe for a vacation home or you want a second home, you should not do that.

Because once it is determined that it is empty, someone will either move in, or if you want to rent it and they have no intention of being a genuine renter, but they will not pay and then they will just stay on, you don't have any redress, at least in a left-wing jurisdiction.

Right.

And so

that unwinds constitutional government.

That says to people, why buy a house?

Why invest the money in fixing it up?

Why if you don't own it?

And

I think we don't don't realize that

we look back in history and it all seems a mystery.

We say, why did Rome have all the existential problems solved by 100 AD and 70 million people, a million square miles with habeas corpus, aqueduct?

And then just 300 years later, it all fell apart.

Shouldn't it have got better?

Doesn't everything get better?

Isn't the Whig idea of history material moral progress?

What happened?

Why was Byzantium a wonderful place to live under Justinian in 530, but it was a non-existent place in 1453,

say by June?

Why, why, why?

Well, this is the answer.

What happens is civilizations and societies, they insidiously don't even understand what's happening before their very eyes.

They find out that they defund the police or that they can't count on the public monopoly of violence to protect people.

So they get a fortified farm out in North Africa or they go up in the hills or during the Ottoman occupation,

the Byzantine Empire falls apart.

So you go way up at a place like Andriitsna and hide from the Turks

and you don't own property anymore.

Property rights disappear, individual rights, personal safety disappears.

Your money, you don't have anywhere to put your money because it can be confiscated.

And when you start to see what's happening with attaching, you know, assets, the police, you know, they raid your house.

We're going to attach your assets.

Or you can drain a person's assets through jurisprudence.

you know, lawfare, as we're seeing as waged against Mark Stein.

It's insidious.

Again, I don't want to use that trite phrase from Hemingway's Son Also Rises about bankruptcy, but it was gradual then suddenly, gradually then suddenly.

It all mounts up.

It's like debt.

You know, we can handle 10, 20 trillion, 30, but not, and maybe 35, but not 40.

And we don't find that until it's sudden.

And we don't find that we don't own property and you can't have property until it's sudden.

And you can't, you know, you kind of avoid bad places and all of a sudden you can't go anywhere because it's sudden.

All that that was gradual.

And that's what's happening.

We've got to stop it.

Stop, stop, stop.

That should be one of the great things of the campaign pledges of the Trump administration.

You mentioned Atlanta, you're talking a lot about upper middle class and middle class African Americans who have played by the rules.

They've saved their money.

Maybe they inherited a small home and then they were able to build a bigger one somewhere else or buy one and they want to rent it out.

And they can't.

They can't collect rent.

They can't get get them out they can't they can't afford to fix the damage god help if you went in there and and physically tried to pull them out uh you'd go to jail and donald trump needs to say he needs to have a agenda for america a contract with america i hope the heritage foundation who's ever advised him has that and one of them would be we will have a federal racketeering a rico statute that says across state lines or whatever the federal jurisdiction can be imagined, if you occupy a home for any purposes that is not your own and you do not have a contractual right to be in that home and you are evicted, you will be invicted.

And if you're not, if you resist, you are subject to the following statutes and stop it because you can't count on these local prosecutors or all based you know, sorrows-funded critical legal theory, da-da-da-da-da.

The law is flexible and is, you know, is used for the oppressed in the cultural binary of winner and losers.

I know I'm sounding depressed today, but it's not the weather out here in California.

It's gray and rainy, but

it's just

this week with the Biden dementia and the special counsel's report and coming on the heels of the 83 million Gene Carroll,

this obscene 350 million settlement

with a Letita James boast that, you know, it's about what she did, and then the Fannie Willis testimonies, and it just, and then what we're, Ukraine is that they're, they're retreating, they lost another city.

I mean, it's, it's everything.

Right.

It's everything we were told is not true.

It's a grim, it's been a grim, grim week.

Yes, it has.

And we got to end on a big happy note or we're going to depress ourselves into story.

Well, I'll tell you, a happy note is that Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus, and it's at VictorHanson.com.

Folks, if you like Victor's writing,

American Greatness and the syndicated columns, you're going to want to subscribe to The Blade of Perseus because two or three times a week, Victor writes a piece exclusively for the website.

When you go there, you'll also find links to the aforementioned

American Greatness Essays, syndicated columns, archives of this

podcast,

links to Victor's other appearances,

linked to his forthcoming book, which he essentially talked about a few minutes ago, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

That's out in May.

There's a link to The Dying Citizen.

Should be a link up there, Victor, to the case for Trump,

because that will be a more heightened issue as the months, approaching months, come.

Yes, I do check.

Yeah, well, it's no question about it.

I have a series I'm starting for next week about a barn.

I know that some people, I've written about farming, and I have a 150-year-old barn that's collapsing.

I didn't know what to do with it.

And I'm looking out the window now at people all hanging on the sides of it trying to save it.

But

I had to put all new trusses.

And it just was one of those things where you start to look at, you think, maybe I can just patch the roof or put another wrap.

No, it's the whole thing.

And you either have to, and the smart thing would be to destroy it and get a nice metal shed

that is prefabbed and would be very strong.

Or but some great grandpa, but I know it.

I know it.

I know it.

I thought I was a pragmatist and a realtist, but I'm

spending a small fortune to rebuild the barn.

And the people, unfortunately, that are doing the work are more enthused than I am.

So they're telling me, we've got to do it perfect.

We've got to do this.

You know what?

And they're not after money, really.

They have such pride in their work, but they're giving me all sorts of ideas how to make the strongest, biggest, toughest barn in the world.

Well, it'll be around another 150 years.

You're a sentimental man.

Unless when I die, my son finds out that squatters are living in it.

Well, maybe those dogs you have will take.

You know, they don't look very excited today about being watchdogs.

When the riots happened, George Floyd riots all across America, and in New York,

Manhattan, a lot of stores were broken into.

But one store that wasn't was Saks Fifth Avenue, which is right across the street from the aforementioned St.

Patrick's Cathedral.

And one of the reasons why was the folks at Saks had

these tough, you know, retired Navy SEALs, etc.

And each one of them had a dog with them, like a German Shepherd or

a mastiff or something.

And damn, people, bad people are afraid of dogs.

I was thinking that just to close, that I have Queensland healers, and the collective age of them is over 50 of the four.

Yeah.

And

they're kind of worn out with life, and they've got all sorts of medical problems, and they get scared.

I I mean, they used to be,

gosh, super dogs.

So I'm thinking of going the German route.

Have you ever noticed that every,

and I'm not speaking ill of our German friends, but every dog that is vicious,

even a little ween dog I had, a dachshund, there were snappers and German shepherds and Weimaroners and Doberman pinchers.

And I'm thinking of going one thoroughbred German shepherd, one Doberman pincher, and one Weimarnauer.

One more honors.

And I think that would give me a lot of deterrent.

Yeah, amen.

Got several shits all every year.

All male, all uncastrated, no neutering, all in the prime of life.

What a weird combo that triad would be.

Oh, I can't wait to visit you and see them, to pet them.

Last thing, Victor,

five bucks a month, $50 a year to subscribe to your website.

So folks, go to VictorHanson.com.

And

hey, if you're on

X Twitter, Victor's Handle is at VD Hanson.

If you're on Facebook, there's a wonderful group of people.

They run the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club.

You'll find that.

There's about 60,000 people belong to that group.

And what else?

Oh, me, Jack Fowler, Civil Thoughts.

I write that free weekly email newsletter.

Please subscribe.

I know folks are really enjoying it.

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

Again, it's free.

I do that for the Center for Civil Society at Anfil, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

And Civil Thoughts is 14 recommended readings, articles I've come across the previous week that I do think and believe that you will like.

So thanks to those who do that.

Now, Victor, I have a comment or two to read to get us out of here.

And I, oh, here's one.

It's called Great Podcast.

And it says,

this is, by the way, from off of iTunes and Apple.

And thanks to the folks that go there and leave comments.

We do read them.

You're one of a diminishing few that I can count on for an informed, thoughtful view on current events.

Thank you for being there for us.

Your historical insight is also greatly appreciated.

That's signed Red Wolf OPW.

And here's one more, just to show.

And Victor, don't interrupt me.

Just to show that

we read everything and we flagellate.

Imagine, it's titled, Imagine Uninterrupted VDH, exclamation point.

Imagine a podcast

featuring the uninterrupted brilliance of VDH, a podcast in which he has the luxury of slowly making his point, not fighting or competing with his co-host.

Where can I find this podcast?

The magic of VDH is his calming, reassuring, informed pace of weaving through history, connecting his power to the world.

I didn't write that, Jack.

No, I know you didn't.

Revealing today's missteps.

Imagine an hour of listening to VDH uninterrupted at a leisurely pace.

This current podcast takes VDH's magic and destroys it with the frantic paste of competing co-hosts, a sacrifice.

Fantastic.

That's so weird that you said that because I got a long email that said, you're wandering.

You're too discursive.

You go off on dead ends.

why don't you listen to sammy and jack you get you shorter burst uh we don't want to hear about some greek thing or some world war ii incident you're off topic how dare you be a military historian yeah that's what i do i'm serious so yeah well anyway this was signed by it's el

and you know hey you're entitled to you know, punch, punch the ugly co-host in the face.

He deserves it every once in a while.

Well, Victor, you've been been terrific.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Uh, to our, particularly to our new listeners, thanks for coming.

I hope you stick around.

You'll get Victor four times a week.

So, uh, it's uh, and it's doing very well in the in the rankings out there, and that's because of the man who is the star of the show.

So, thanks again, Victor.

Thanks for listening, folks.

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

Bye-bye.

Thanks again for listening, everyone.

See you very soon.

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