Envisioning a Better Nation: Musk and Mega-Donors

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, our star, and the namesake is Victor Davis-Hanson, and he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow.

at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor lives on the internet at the Blade of Perseus.

The web address there is victorhanson.com.

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Plenty to talk about today.

We're recording on Sunday, February 4th, and this particular episode should be out on February 8th.

But there's a couple of Elon Musk stories that I think would be worth getting Victor's views on, and we'll get to them right after these important messages.

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

So, So, Victor, earlier today and very early Sunday morning,

Elon Musk

tweeted, Xed, however you want to say it, about this

college idea he has.

But before we get into that and some other higher ed

topics, I think it's worth

asking you if you have any opinion on this Musk pay package

deal at Tesla, where he took, he made a deal.

He didn't take any salary, et cetera, and he made

a stock deal.

And he took the company to this outrageous,

I don't mean bad, outrageous, but high, high value.

And the deal was that he'd get what he got.

And by the deal, he was supposed to get $55 billion.

He took the company from $20 a share to

close to $200 a share.

And a judge has

tibosh that.

And I don't get it.

You know, these are, I know people want to complain about corporate pay, but this was a deal made between a board and an individual who

achieved

great success and has a right to what was he was agreed to be paid for that.

And

is this lawfare directed at Elon Musk because he's coming over to our side?

What do you think?

Well, on all these issues, it's qui bono or qui mallo, Latin phrase, who benefits and who gets to what bad thing?

What's the bad downside?

Who got hurt?

So your point is that all the shareholders, all the principals, because of Elon Musk, they made a fortune.

And if they, you know, kept the stock 20 to 150 or whatever it was.

So they don't have a complaint.

So this is an outside person who files a lawsuit in Delaware, which is a Biden state.

And

all of a sudden, they cancel this program.

And then we know what happens, Jack, the whole media.

conglomerate then who used to worship the soil that he stepped on because he was the great green hope with Tesla and they loved Elon Musk.

Then he bought Twitter.

Then he started to tweet, and then he said he wasn't going to support it, and then they hate him now.

So the point I'm making is that all of a sudden, you pick up the Wall Street Journal or any other major

news outlet this week, and what do you learn?

You learn that suddenly, oh, Elon Musk was taking ecstasy.

Oh, Elon Musk

picked the people on the board that were his friends.

Duh.

Elon Musk then he took psychedelics, LSD.

He was protected by his board.

He's erratic.

Okay.

Whatever,

the whole thing, the Gordian knot that can be cut is simply this.

If all of these things were true, then the price of Tesla would have gone from 20 to 5.

But it didn't.

And there was something about his leadership style, his genius, or whatever it is, that he took an obscure no name brand and did something that no one has ever done.

And that is broke into the big three monopoly of car.

No one ever tried.

Everybody has tried that.

No one has succeeded.

He not only succeeded, he beat them.

And he provided this product that the bicosto elite love.

Five years ago, if you walked into Palo Alto, you could hear somebody say, I have a Tesla.

And so it's not based on any empirical evidence that he's

bankrupting the company, that he's incompetent.

All we hear is, you know, this guy is his friend.

He took drugs.

He did this.

But they don't look at the actual bottom line, and that's what counts, the reality, not

their

suppositions that they're angry at him.

I guess what's happening, there's a larger issue here, and that is he says he's going to move to Texas, take the whole headquarters.

And if they keep doing that, Delaware's got this name for being friendly tax-wise and regulatory-wise toward companies to headquarter and et cetera.

But it's going to go the way of all these places.

And what we're doing is we're seeing in every aspect of the economy, of culture, social life, military, everything,

we're all migrating either psychologically or physically to a different paradigm than the dominant institutional, bi-coastal, progressive project.

So there's stories today about San Francisco, another one about San Francisco, that it's just mass flight, that bankruptcy is just spreading throughout commercial and residential real estate, and people are leaving.

I can tell you that I have a daughter that moved up

from Santa Cruz

up into the area between Sacramento and Auburn foothills of California.

And you think that nobody would want to live there because of California.

If you're going to flee San Francisco, San Jose, you would go to Nevada.

But if you don't want to leave California, so when I was helping her look at places, Jack, I thought they would be so cheap, like the Fresno area.

They're the same price.

You know why?

Because everyone in the Bay Area that has a family and wants local control and doesn't want crime and homelessness is fleeing to the foothill.

And this used to be kind of a, in California, people would make fun of the poor white class, the Oklahoma diaspora.

Oh, they went to the foothills.

It reminds them of the Ozarks.

It's cheaper up there.

No, it's not.

It's now a refuge for liberal family, and they're all liberal.

They're all saying, well, we got what we wanted.

We had Gavin Newsom as

board supervisor for eight years.

We had him as mayor for eight years.

We had him as lieutenant governor for eight years.

We've had him,

you know, for governor for five years.

So we've got, I don't know, 29 years of the SOB.

That's what they're saying.

And we don't want it anymore.

We got what we wanted.

Gavin got what he wanted.

And they destroyed the city.

And so they're leaving.

And so what I'm getting at is when Elon Musk does this and flees to Texas or these other projects, I don't know what the ultimate trajectory is.

Either the blue states are going to have to self-correct or they're going to be bankrupt.

And they're they're going to have mostly a DEI constituency that is in dire need of social services, and they're going to have an exorbitant tax rates to punish the people who are still there.

They can't leave either because of age, or they have farming property, or they have businesses that can't be moved.

But it's not going to be pretty.

It's going to be violent.

It's going to be a Hobbesia, nasty,

brutish, solitary, in short.

Yeah,

it's hard to contemplate that

on a state level, much larger, annihilation, which is one of the topics of a book

you have coming out, can happen, but it's happened to one of America's great cities, Detroit.

We've talked about this before.

I mean, Detroit was Detroit came in second place in the voting to host the 1968 Olympics after

in 46 and 47, it had the highest GDP per capita of any major city in the United States.

It was coming off World War II.

It had been supplied the wherewithal for vehicles in World War II.

There was pent-up consumer demand.

People couldn't get trucks, cars after the war.

It was booming and it was a model.

And now, you know, the first time I went to Hillsdale College, I was asked to go up to Detroit and speak, and I just drove around.

I didn't know anything 20 years ago.

And it was like a moonscape.

I thought, wow, I'm going to be killed.

I was driving around a residential neighborhood strack and there was grass growing through houses.

It was just all abandoned.

And then

now we hear that the Dearborn

community and the radical Arab community is completely pro-Hamas and all of the Imams are spouting all of this stuff off.

And then you've got the problem with Detroit and it's shrunk from, from, I don't know, 2 million to 600,000.

And it's in a doom loop.

San Francisco's in a doom loop.

LA's in a doom loop.

Baltimore's in a doom loop.

We mentioned last

broadcast, the poor guy, the lawyer,

the very well-connected Washingtonian who was carjacked, died.

It's in a doom loop.

They're all in, Minneapolis is in a doom loop.

Seattle is in a doom loop.

Portland's in a doom loop.

And the people who are doing, it's all self-inflicted.

It's not because of COVID or the plague or a sudden industrial meltdown or a shortage of gasoline.

It was all self-induced.

And you'd think that people would say,

you know, I did this.

You know, every once in a while

I will have a deadline and I have to do all these things.

And then I work on my computer to 12.

And, you know, at 70 or 69,

I can't sleep.

And then the next day, I'm just wiped out.

But I don't say, how how did this happen?

Who did this to me?

Why did they have me do a deadline?

No, it's always me.

I always say, you an idiot.

Why did you stay up on a computer to 1:30 or 12 and couldn't sleep?

It's your fault.

But why can't they do the same?

Why can't they just say, we did this?

Why can't Gavin Newsom go and say, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, I did this?

They can't.

And they destroy it.

Why can't Jerry Brown come out of his Grass Valley retreat and say, oh my God,

I did this.

And they can't do it.

Well,

the fact of shame is

gone from our society.

They have worry beads.

It's called Trump.

Or they have some kind of totem in their hand.

And when they get rattled, that they know they destroyed their own culture.

Trump, Trump,

and that's how they rationalize it.

That's all they have.

Trump, Trump.

I met some very sophisticated, intelligent, highly degreed people,

and it's Trump.

It's Trump when you try to reason with them about a soaring crime rate or

the collapse of the educational system or the weaponization of the FBI or the open border or the Afghan humiliation or the blowing up the Middle East and the way that we blew up the border.

Trump.

Trump.

That's all they can say.

Oh,

I read this article where the Europeans are very, very afraid of Donald Trump.

They're just terrified of it.

I don't even believe that anymore.

I think they're looking at their own borders and they're looking at Ukraine and they're looking at the Middle East and they're thinking, oh, my God, we'll say that

we don't want Trump, but I think we'd better privately get Biden out of there.

At least Trump did something.

I think they're on their knees saying they're rosaries in Europe,

hoping that Trump will be the president.

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So, Victor,

today,

Elon, again, Sunday the 4th, early this morning, Elon Musk sent out a tweet, Should I do it?

And the it was this

Elon,

well, it's called the Texas Institute of Technology and Science, and you can all figure out the acronym, folks.

And it may seem at first like a joke, but it's not.

Musk has proposed

a university in Austin, Texas.

He's already allocated $100 million to the project, and he sold some stock earlier this year to put an additional $2 billion into a foundation that seems to be the source for funding

this college.

So, Victor.

You know, Elon Musk may be giving the left more reason to hate him if he creates an institution that is

maybe along the lines of University of Texas Austin, maybe along the lines of the

rehabbed and revitalized new college of Florida.

I think this is a cool idea.

Your thoughts?

Yeah, I think he's trying to, he's looking at something like Caltech or MIT, and he sees what's happened to MIT.

And I think Caltech is in the process of self-correcting with their flirtation post-George Floyd.

But Austin is the liberal enclave of Texas.

One of the largest enrolled campuses in the world is the University of Texas at Austin.

Got a huge endowment from oil revenues.

And it used to be, you know, it wasn't the Board of Regents, the Texans, they made sure that it was disinterested, that it wasn't hard left.

And now I think it's more or less indistinguishable ideologically from other universities.

So then we have this other project, the University of Austin.

And there's a lot of people involved that are excellent.

Neil Ferguson, Barry Weiss, you know, Joe Lamsdale, a lot of and they've got a great faculty and they're they have students now and they're going to try to create a premier elite type of, I guess, Ivy League college right in the same area.

So I the only reason I'm mentioning this, I'm wondering if These two are, I don't know why they wouldn't combine forces.

Maybe Elon doesn't want to lose control, but, or maybe it's going to offer a scientific or a,

you know, a

Caltech-like of physics, math, et cetera, computers, engineering, in a way that the University of Austin is more undergraduate education.

But

I guess there's the other thing that's happening, people are going, I mean, Austin was, When I went there 20 years ago, it was not hard left.

It was sort of, and then it was, you know, the alternate country to Western.

And then it became a big sanctuary for left-wing people leaving blue states.

And I think it's still pretty left, and maybe this will bring it back ideologically.

But

the only thing I have, the only problem I have with all this is,

and I think New College is great.

I think this University of Austin is great.

I think is great.

So what we're doing is we're saying to higher education, you're hopeless.

You have a $50 billion endowment at Harvard, $38 billion at Stanford.

You're hopeless.

So we're going just to

replicate what you should have been.

But why do we do that?

I mean, why do we just say to Harvard,

it's yours now.

All the people that were there in the 1940s or the 1950s or the 1960s, all the people who were dead that gave the money that is now 50 billion.

When I was at Stanford in 1975 to 79, it was

left-leaning, but there was no suppression of free speech.

It was, I mean, people in my department, my faculty thought I was kind of crazy because I lived on a raisin farm and I was kind of conservative and I was interested in military history and classical languages, but they thought that, but they were fair to me.

They never said,

you can't say that or you're a nut.

Maybe they didn't want to recommend me in the way that I thought I should have been, but I didn't think that...

my point is

they have been taken over.

And when you try to just say, okay, we lost, I would like us to fight to get them back because they don't belong to this generation.

When you go on these campuses, Jack, and you see these young 18 to 21-year-olds who are the most poorly educated generation in a long time and the most arrogant.

and the most outspoken and the most political and the most intolerant.

They have a sense of entitlement that because I'm physically at Princeton or Yale or Harvard or Duke or Berkeley, I own this place.

It is now mine.

I can do it.

I can rename this.

I can topple that.

I can do this.

I can have a comic book course.

And then, you know, the faculty and the administration let the lunatics win the assignment.

But somebody should step in and say, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You don't own the campus.

You do not own the campus.

The taxpayers own more than you do.

If it's a public university, 100%,

if it's Stanford, and the taxpayer said to Stanford, you're going to start paying taxes on your endowment.

It's not going to be tax-free because you're not disinterested.

And two, we're not going to give you hundreds of millions of dollars for research because you don't honor the...

the Bill of Rights about free speech and due process.

And number three, we're not going to subsidize $2 trillion in student loans that you count on.

If you did that,

they would reform very quickly.

So we have power to do this.

I don't want to cede them.

I think it's good to add new universities, but somebody should also have a take back our university movement.

So we don't just say,

you know, we got about $5 trillion

in tradition, legacy, infrastructure, endowments.

We're just going to give it to the left.

and to these students that are destroying the First Amendment.

We're just going to give it to them because we can't work with them.

And we're going to go start over.

And it'll take us 30 or 40 or 50 years to match what they've been given free.

I don't think we should do that.

Victor, there's an interesting piece

at the James G.

Martin Center.

I hadn't sent this to you, but it's about

colleges and universities using their tax-exempt status to expand in other ways,

ways that are pretty inappropriate

to the nonprofit status.

Actually, you know what?

I'd like to, I'm going to spring this on you, and I'm going to do that right after

these important messages.

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

Yeah, Victor, picking up what I was saying, it's along the lines of,

you know, fighting back, although I guess maybe fighting back has to start with punching back and punishing, right?

From the perspective of the university, if you were taxing their endowment, that would be considered punishment.

But the piece I was looking at the other day at James G.

Martin Center, and I forget who the author was, I don't have it in front of me, said, you know, Columbia University in New York City and Manhattan, NYU in Manhattan, have spread out, and Harvard has done this too.

They spread out their geographical tentacles, and then they create,

oh, we're going to put

a hotel here, and we're going to put a conference center here.

And they make money off it, but they don't pay taxes on it because it's done

under the tax-exempt status of the college.

And even though it has nothing to do with education, having a Marriott hotel on Harvard's property.

So

one of the thoughts here was

to have laws that

enforce local tax payments on colleges for

property tax.

Why does some guy that works at the power company and he can't make a budget and he pays an exorbitant property tax and he lives next to Harvard, why should he have to pay property tax when all these people are making fantastic salaries and lifestyles and they claim we're superior to you because you're just a political partisan taxpayer and you've got to pay taxes.

But us, we've evolved to a higher level and we don't have to pay property tax.

And, you know,

this is all going to come to a fore because there's thousands of DEI administrators that we've hired and we've had thousands of staffers.

And they're not just a waste of money in the era of commission.

It's omission.

We're not funding other things at universities because they're psyching away resources.

And that's all predicated on the idea they have these tax breaks.

If they didn't have a tax break, somebody, a CFO and their university would say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

We cannot pay this guy $250,000 in salary and $100,000 in benefits and $1.5 million in a secretary and administrative aid because we don't have it because we've got to pay property tax.

And that's what we need.

We really do.

Because they won't reform on their own.

And I think everybody

might say, well, Victor, how do you know?

Why do you have this attitude?

Because I've been there.

I've been in academia for 50 years.

And I've met met as a student, as a graduate student, as a professor, as a fellow on campus after campus after campus.

And people should realize the academic mind is very peculiar and it believes that it's reached a higher intellectual and moral plane and it's exempt.

It should have tenure.

It should have summers off.

It should have a, you know, at the most three to six hours in class out of a 40-hour week.

And da-da-da.

It needs travel.

It needs support.

It needs research.

its university press book is groundbreaking.

Everybody's going to have to read it to know what's going on, that kind of attitude.

And it's created an entitled class that's exempt from market realities.

And they need to be brought back to reality.

And I think we can do it very easily.

If

you get a Republican in the White House, if the Republicans take the Congress and the House, you won't believe what these college presidents will do.

They'll go to Congress and they will swear on a Bible that, not that the Bible means much to them, but they will swear under oath that they're not political and in total fright of what could happen.

And,

you know, I used to think that would be heresy because I'd say, oh my God, Yale and Vanderbilt and Duke and University of UCL, they do such wonderful things.

My God,

they save the country with science.

Yes, they do, but not as much as they used to.

And they need a little prodding.

They need some direction because they don't have it internally.

We benefit from universities and people benefit from education, but not as it's morphed into.

Not as it's morphed into.

Well, Victor, we're talking here on the 4th.

This podcast will be out on the 8th, and soon enough after that will be President's Day.

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And we thank AMAC for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

And I want to mention also, Victor, that

yesterday in my mail came the new issue of AMAC magazine that comes comes out

every other month.

And on the cover, it says, plus a special feature from guest columnist Victor Davis-Hansen.

You have a great piece in here, Victor, and I recommend folks

read it.

Or, again, I recommend you become a member of AMAC.

Why Now?

An Epidemic of Anti-Semitism.

It's pretty good, more than pretty good piece by you, Victor.

So

very quickly in that piece, I talked about some centrifugal forces that are kind of in perfect storm fashion of mixing my metaphors, but they've really changed the attitude of higher education toward

Jewish culture and Jewish people.

And part of it was the DEI

movement.

We didn't really examine it carefully, but and we've talked about this, Jack, it is inherently anti-Semitic.

And it's very pernicious because unlike the old-fashioned 1940s and 50s right-wing

white anti-Semitism, you could easily caricature that.

You could identify it.

But when you give a shield or you give exemption, you say this person's Latino or this person's black or they can't be anti-Semitic because they are a victim.

They're part of the oppressed class and Jews are white.

then it's very hard to articulate and to

stop.

And that's one thing that's happened.

And I mean that sincerely.

When you look at most black leaders that we've seen on the left, whether it's Reverend Wright and Dim Jews or Jesse Jackson and Jaime Town or

Al Sharpton, bring that Yarmark.

No need to mention Farrakhan, Ilyan Omar, that's the Benjamin's baby.

You could go on and on.

And so, and nobody's addressed it.

The other thing is, when you get rid of the SAT and comparative ranking of high school GPAs and you bring in at some campuses 28 to 25 percent of the student body are foreign students, then you have two things going on.

One, there's a lot less Jewish students.

You can see it on campus.

It used to be 10, 20, 30 percent, and now it's down below 10 percent on many campuses.

And then number two, these are talking about the elite campuses especially.

Then you have all of these students that are very well funded from the Gulf and

rich Arab countries that are coming over here, and they gravitate to Middle Eastern programs, and a country like Gutter is given $10 billion

to fund these programs, and others have too.

And they create enclaves where they feel that

even though they're on green cards or they're on student visas, that they have a right to tell the United States, given that they're at these elite universities,

they can tell us, hey, we're going to throw paint on on the Lincoln Memorial we're gonna shut down the Manhattan Bridge we're going to

chase Jews into a library on campus we're gonna tell Jews at MIT they can't go here and they can't go here we're gonna shut down the Bay Area Bridge we're gonna desecrate the cemetery in Los Angeles we can do whatever we want and you won't dare touch us kind of like the attitude of these immigrants that you know hit the police

and you put all that together with foreign students and the DEI and the this there's not a very big big presence of Jews, and then you get this emboldened anti-Semitism.

And then, when people don't really know much about the issue, and they're sheep and they're poorly educated, as most undergraduates are, and they put their finger in the wind and they think, wow,

the new orthodoxy is not just transgenderism, or it's not just DEI, but it's also hate Israel and be anti-Semitic.

And that's what wins majority approval.

And if you buck that, you're going to be in big trouble.

And so that's what the article was about.

Well, a related article, Victor,

is in Tablet magazine.

And Tablet is an online journal.

I strongly recommend it to our listeners.

It's a Jewish publication, Jewish-centric.

That's even a proper phrase.

Very eclectic, but often pieces of just exceptional journalism.

Tony Badran, I don't know who he is, but he wrote a piece last week.

It's titled, Why America's Richest Universities Are Protecting Hate-Filled Foreign Students.

And it touches, more than touches on the points you just raised, Victor.

It says here, if I may,

I think there's even deeper evil going on here.

The first is

He writes, the scheme by which U.S.

taxpayers pay to give 25%

or more of the places at America's most prestigious universities to foreign students is a recent innovation, one that took shape between 2004 and 2014, and has helped make the university's DEI rhetoric cost-free.

The international share of freshmen at Georgetown nearly quadrupled from 3% in 2004 to 11% a decade later, with similar numbers at Berkeley and Yale.

The growth in undergraduate enrollment at Yale during that decade was fueled almost entirely by foreigners.

In the same period, the number of incoming foreign students at Ivy League schools rose by 46%.

But Victor, that's about money also.

They're paid full boat.

But another thing is that the universities use this as evidence that they fill their quotas, you know, for promoting diversity, etc.

So, you know, if there are quotas for, in my mind, maybe yours and most, you know, folks who don't like quotas, but you think, okay,

these are being used for the poor

minority Americans, the poor black kid, the poor Puerto Rican kid, et cetera.

But they're not.

They're being filled by

foreigners.

No,

it's exactly what you said.

It's worse than that.

They're used at the expense of our own students.

And I saw that in academia.

It was about 2008 or 2009.

When I started in academia, there was something called affirmative action.

And it was, I didn't agree with it, but the rationale was to address the historical biases toward the African-American community, which everybody felt was a unique case because of slavery and Jim Crow.

They understood that the so-called white majority, like all majorities in every country, try going down to Mexico if you've got blue eyes and blonde hair and you're a gringo.

They

made it hard on people to be accepted.

But the black history was an exceptional case.

Okay.

So we gave special preferences.

What do I mean by special preferences?

If a person was African-American, they had 550, they were admitted into a university as if they had 700 on the SAT, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay.

And then it expanded.

And when I was a graduate student, it started to have Latinos and then Asians that were one part.

And the idea was that there were other groups that felt that they had rival claims.

Okay.

And remember, this whole time, the largest group numerically who was poor was

the white lower classes.

And I say that because I grew up in an area that was predominantly Mexican-American with one exception.

The Oklahoma diaspora that sent over a million people to California centered in the area from Bakersfield, California, up to Fresno.

And I grew up, most of the white people that I grew up with came from Oklahoma.

They were second generation,

and they were dirt poor.

And they had no history of people for the most part.

They were very successful now in the third and fourth generation, but at that time,

60 years ago, they were very poor and

they got nothing.

Okay.

Around 2008 and 2009, Obama introduced this new idea that had been hanging around in the universities, but no one took it too seriously, called diversity.

And diversity said you don't have to prove historical grievances against the majority white population to get repertory admissions or preferences in hiring or retention or any of that.

You just have to be non-white.

Two things happened almost immediately, Jack.

The first thing was

that the victim class grew from 11 to 13 percent African American to 30 percent.

And it wasn't just Latinos now.

It was anybody who could claim that they were not white.

You could be from India.

You could be from Indonesia.

You could be an aristocrat Italian Argentine.

You started to see this proliferation at the same time of a Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren.

Warren.

Everybody wanted to get into it.

You just had to fake some type of identity, whether it was complete fakery like Elizabeth Warren, the first Native American, supposedly law professor at Harvard, or you were a second or third generation Latino, you were indistinguishable from somebody who was Italian or Greek, you didn't speak Spanish,

and you started to trill your R's or put an accent in your last name.

And I saw that hundreds of times.

And all of a sudden, the diversity thing.

And then when you started to probe that, you would see that 16 or 17 ethnic groups, Arab Americans, Punjabi Americans, Korean Americans, had a much higher

per capita or per family income than did so-called whites.

So it was very hard to prove

they were the losers of American society on the basis of their race.

In fact, people got very, very angry because people would point to Punjabis and say they are as dark as blacks, and yet they have a higher income than whites.

So how is it that racial prejudice barred them from upward mobility?

Those were the types of back-and-forth arguments you heard.

And so

this is how we got to where we are.

During the Obama administration, we expanded the cultural Marxist binary from

12%, 88% to 30%, 35%, 65%.

And then everybody was, you know, millions of people were victims and they outgrew the number of victimizers.

So there wasn't enough victimizers anymore because the white population, as I said, had the highest number of poor people in absolute numbers.

And in terms of other ethnic groups, with the exception of Latinos and blacks, it didn't have the same income.

And so

there wasn't enough wherewithal to fund the repertory demands of this new group.

And that's pretty much where we are right now.

And it's not working.

It's failing.

And so I don't know what to say about the whole thing, but

I can't, I don't think it's sustainable.

And I think people are getting sick of it.

And it's not financially sustainable.

There's not enough taxpayers to continue to give all of these preferences to people in hiring and promotion and DEI and all that.

It doesn't work anymore.

And how you can say that LeBron James's kid is a victim and someone who lives

in East Palestine is his oppressor doesn't make any sense anymore.

It's absurd.

And then when you put on top of that the disparagement, chomps, dregs, crazies, hobbits, deplorables, irredeemables, clingers that we hear from John McCain and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

It just everybody knows that now.

It's kind of like a rotten door that you have to kick in and then it'll just crumble.

But it's it just the facsimile is there, but nobody believes it anymore.

Yeah, more more chump bait, by the way, Victor.

Two headlines from the last couple of days.

New York City, the city with billions of dollars in debt, is going to come up with, I think, a $53 million program to give

food cards to illegal immigrants.

The migrants, the same migrants that are beating up New York City cops so they can go buy food at Bodegas.

And then we found out the headline the other day,

I'm not sure who wrote it, maybe Breitbart.

The state of Washington used,

I think, $340 million

of COVID money to give $1,000 a month

payments to illegal immigrants.

We did in California.

That's why the four guys that beat up the cops, kicked them in the face, got out on bail, not, excuse me, got out without bail.

Where was the state they headed to?

It was California.

$500 million, we're $68 billion

short.

And there are bills in the legislature to increase the tax rate to 16%,

even though we lost 250,000 plus leaving the state and 1%

pays half of the income tax.

And now you're going to tell that 1%,

you're an idiot, you're a sucker, you're stuck here.

So we're going to increase your rate so that it's 16%.

And with a 39% federal, you are going to pay almost 60% of your income because we have to give things like $500,000.

$500 million to people who broke the law, entering, broke the law, residing.

And that's not going to work.

The money's not there.

So in New York, when they think they're going to do that, Eric Adams, Hoko, where do they think the money's coming from?

People are leaving New York.

They're leaving it quicker than they are.

You know, it's not just Sean Hannity.

You go to Palm Beach or you go to any, when I used to speak in Florida, I just spoke there in December.

There was one thing that just struck me.

Almost everybody I met was from New York or California, but mostly New York.

And a lot of people were were doing financial, their financial business online from Florida.

And they didn't want to go to New York.

And I'd say, why don't you want, what happened to New York?

Well,

I have a condo or a home, but I don't go there.

And you'd say, he said, the taxes are too high.

It's too dangerous to walk around.

There's no quality of life.

I'm tired of it.

So I love Florida, the free state of Florida.

That's what they say.

Free state of Florida, free state of Florida, free state of Florida.

Yeah, half of Connecticut's financial

hedge fund eyes are down there.

We use that term doom loop, but when somebody says doom loop, what they mean is that

you get into a cycle and you only have one way of solving it.

And you know that the way you're solving or the drug or the medicine is making the patient worse, and yet you have no other choice in your limited imagination.

So you know that when you tax, tax, tax, and you regulate, regulate, regulate, and you combine that with your progressive idea of not disturbing the homeless and giving them free injection sites, and you're going to have repertory committees, and you're going to let the smash and grabber and the carjacker out on bail the same day without bail.

You know that that is driving people away and you know that you're losing your tax base and you know you have to raise taxes, which in this loop will only drive more people away.

And there's nobody who can throw the hammer in the television screen, Ridley Scott's commercial, and just say, you know what?

We're going to stop.

We're going to take three or four really tough years, and we're going to cut taxes, and we're going to be humane, but we're going to bring the, we're going to have a big, nice village of small little cubicles that are humane and hygienic, maybe 100 feet with a bed square feet, and there'll be running water, and there'll be toilet sewer facilities, facilities and we're going to make people live there, but they're not going to live on the street and endanger the public health and safety of the law-abiding citizen.

And then they're going to have to say the same thing about crime.

You know,

I'm sorry, but we tried letting everybody out of prison.

We tried getting rid of three strikes.

We tried all that.

We tried to empty the prisons during COVID, and this is what we got.

So if we have to build more prisons, we'll do it.

But we're not going to let you hit somebody over the head or destroy somebody's life and get out.

Sorry.

And then we're going to have to cut taxes to bring you back in.

And we're going to have to cut the bureaucracy into a weakened balance.

And that would be very hard to do because any politician who did that would be in big trouble.

We'll see if Donald Trump gets elected.

He's going to have to make some decisions like that.

And I don't know if he's...

given some of his campaign positions.

He says he won't touch Social Security.

I'm somebody who has a good salary and I'm on Social Security and I think they're going to have to and I pay a big tax on Social Security and I pay a big premium on health care, but I don't know what you're going to do.

The idea that

it's not sustainable any longer, what are you going to do?

You're going to have to do something.

You're either going to have to limit the growth of the benefits or the inflation guaranteed rises or tax Victor more.

I don't know what you're going to do.

It's not sustainable.

And Trump's going to have to in the first term he did a lot of wonderful things, but one of the things we didn't do was

address physical irresponsibility.

He's going to have to have that something like the

Simpson-Bowles Commission to be revised.

Alan Simpson had a good idea,

three levels of taxation,

cut the bureaucracy, but then go to a balanced budget slowly and stop the monster.

And

it's not going to keep going.

Everybody said that

the Biden economy is great.

It's great.

The Biden economy has low unemployment and growth simply because of two things.

One, he dropped all of that stuff about we're going to shut down natural gas and oil, and he started draining the petroleum reserve, but more important, he started pumping.

So when you look at,

he didn't increase it the way Trump was going to, but we're almost, if not at, the Trump level of oil and gas, and he doesn't like to talk about it.

But he knew that was central to the economy.

And second, he printed $6 to $8 trillion.

We're $35 trillion in debt.

And he flooded

this economy with money.

And I don't think that's going to be sustainable.

Everybody said we're not going to have a recession.

You know, there's technological improvements.

We're much more efficient in productivity.

Not when you print that kind of money.

So we'll see what happens.

I hope we don't have a recession.

But

we have

one last higher ed-related topic to get your views on, and that's Harvard mega donor Ken Griffin, and we'll get to that right after this final important message.

Back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

I mentioned at the outset,

our regular listeners have heard this many times, but we have a lot of new listeners, and that is Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

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Go to the blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

So, Victor, Ken Griffin,

who I guess if you had to cast him politically, is believed to be center-right as opposed to center-left.

But he is in the news last week for coming out.

Over the course of his, he's a Harvard graduate.

He's given Harvard half a billion dollars in donations.

But he says last week, until Harvard makes it...

very clear that they're going to resume their role as educators of young men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues.

I'm not interested in supporting the institution.

He told this to CNBC.

I just want to say, Victor, that not even a year ago, and I was kind of shocked by this because I think many of us are thinking, oh,

all this stuff is reaction to October 7th.

But the madness has been going on for decades.

I mean, damn it, Bill Buckley wrote God Vincent Yale 70 years ago, you know, so it's not like any of this is new.

But Griffin gave $300 million to Harvard less than a year ago.

And at the time he did it, he praised Harvard as a great institution, committed to advancing ideas that will shape humanity's future while providing important insight into our past.

I mean,

what happened

between April of 2023 and now?

Okay, Claudine Gay and other

quite public stuff, but you know, the guys like him have really been funding this madness over the years.

I'm glad they're, they've had their come to Jesus moment, but it's

a little disappointing to see how much conservative money has bankrolled this.

So

there's a couple things going on.

You asked why Ackman or Ken Griffith

or all these people have

suddenly woke up one morning and they said, oh my God,

these institutions are

woke, they're anti-Semitic, they're illiberal.

I'm not going to give them.

And then you say, well, this was all apparent to anybody.

All you had to do was pick up any newspaper on the center right or read any.

I've been writing about it for 50 years.

You know, I wrote one with John Heat called Who Killed Homer, I think, 30 years ago, almost.

And people, you know, Closing of the American Mind.

tenured radicals, Roger Kimball's brilliant book.

That was all known.

So the question is, why?

Why, why, why, why?

And the answer is, why did they keep doing it?

I don't want to give too much information about somebody I like a lot who is a, let me just say this.

He's a board, he was a board member on a major institution, an elite university.

And I asked him this question

because he was very sensible, bright, very successful, very, very successful.

And if I could decipher what he said,

is that

his name was on buildings and all of his family members got into this institution.

And

he thought that was a great deal.

He had a lot of money, didn't miss it, so what am I getting at?

For some of these people, 50, 60, 80 million is not...

is not a lot when you're worth a billion or two billion or three billion, number one.

Number two, these universities have the most sophisticated development teams in the world, Jack.

And they are obsequious and they're flatterers.

So they hunt out very, very wealthy people and they say,

what are you into?

What are you worried about?

What in the world bothers you?

And the billionaire says, I don't know.

Climate change.

Well, we have a center for climate change.

Or he says, I just don't think that

racial relations are working.

We have a center for race and society.

Well,

I don't know.

I just think that there's questions about diversity.

Well, we have a DEI.

Or he'll say, you know,

well, I think a lot of my success was due to I had a really great history.

Well, we have an endowed professor of history.

And then they give the money, and that is the end of the relationship.

In the sense of this, they don't follow the money, Jack.

They have no idea.

They don't trace the money.

They don't call up Harvard and said, the Bill Smith endowed professor of literature, you hired somebody who's doing the art of rhetoric in transgender males in fifth century Athens.

I didn't want that.

They don't do that.

They don't check.

All they know is that their daughter calls them up and says, your grandson is applying to Harvard or Princeton or Yale.

And they say, okay, I'll make a phone call.

And the development people say, well, if he's got the minimum qualifications, he's in.

And by the way, don't you want to endow another?

And that's what they do.

So they need to,

if they would,

the legacies are just as pernicious as the DEI racially based,

racist admissions.

And that's one of the reasons these people do it.

They keep doing it.

And I think now, for the first time, when they look, because these people are business people, they look in a cost-benefit analysis.

They put They get a little piece of paper and they say, plus side.

Kids, grandkids, relatives get in and then they're set for life because the old boy network projects them or propels them out of Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, you name it, Berkeley, into

a very successful career.

And then they say, second, my name, and I'm known as, even though I'm a hyper capitalist and people think I'm a cutthroat in business, I'm known as a philanthropist and a big liberal.

So my name is the Harvard, you know, the Bill Smith Center for Judicial Review at Stanford, something like that.

And, you know, you go on these campuses, it's everywhere.

Everything is named.

And, you know, when we're all dead, they change the names.

They do.

They really do.

They did at my institution on a building.

So they, and so that's the plus side.

And then they see

access, the third plus, they say,

I can call up the president of Harvard.

I'll just call, ring him up and say, well, you know,

I have a good friend and he's going to be in the area.

I want you to take him out to lunch.

That kind of stuff.

And then they look at the downside.

They say, hmm,

it's getting a little bit radical.

If you were to implement all of these

university nostrums, it would make a very hostile climate for how I make money.

And I don't like some of the things they're saying.

And up until now, the left side of the pluses was greater than the right side of the deficit.

Not now.

Now they're looking at and say, oh my God, these people are mean SOBs.

They are racist, they are anti-Semitic, and they're not teaching.

And the people who coming out of these universities, I don't want to hire because we hire them.

The first thing they do is they go to HR and they start complaining that they are victims and they don't know much and they won't learn and they're just a pain in the ass.

And I'd rather have somebody from Georgia Tech or the University of Eastern Michigan or Cal State, Long Beach.

At least I wouldn't have these problems.

And that's where we are.

And it takes, and that's why they didn't wake up.

And now that's why they're waking up.

And I don't know how long.

And the $64,000 question, Jack, is what are the universities going to do about it?

Well, they have a couple of choices.

They can say, well, we got $50 billion from these guys over the last 50 years and screw them.

We don't need anymore because we're getting so much money that we can fund it forever.

Or they're thinking, uh-oh, we're growing at a,

we're spending at a rate that's not sustainable given our endowment income and we might be taxed.

So we need more money and we're going to have to either lie more efficiently and effectively with these guys and tell them that they're mistaken, that Yale is not illiberal.

It's a very...

It's a very open, free society at the Yale campus.

Or we're going to have to lie like that, or we're going to have to change.

I doubt it's going to change.

Not with the present faculty and constituency and student body.

Not when you have, as you pointed out, 20 to 25 percent of some of these campuses' students are foreign students.

Right.

And not only the elite institutions that I mentioned it before, the state colleges.

My kids all went to UConn, and you know, UConn wants the full

tuition paid by these wealthy children of Chinese Communist Party leaders.

And

by doing that, it means another kid from Connecticut whose parents pay taxes can't go to that school.

Anyway, Victor, speaking of schools,

I'd like to take a minute to welcome back Hillsdale College, where Victor is one of the professors in three of the over 40 free online courses taught there.

That is correct.

Here is the first course he teaches,

American Citizenship and Its Decline, which is based on Victor's book, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

The second course is The Second World Wars, which is based on Victor's best-selling book, just like Dying Citizen was also best-selling, by the same name.

And then the third BDH course, which is partly based on his book, A War Like No Other, How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

That's titled Athens and Sparta.

The courses are seven to nine episodes long.

They're self-paced, so you can take them whenever and wherever.

So go to hillsdale.edu slash

VDH to start.

It's free and it's easy to get started.

That's hillsdale.edu slash VDH to start.

Hillsdale.edu slash VDH.

and we thank the good people at Hillsdale for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, as we round the turn and head into the home stretch of this episode, one last thing to get your thoughts on.

The

decision by the federal court to delay the Donald Trump election subversion trial.

It's being postponed.

For all we know, it may not happen before the election.

Any thoughts on this or anything related to lawfare?

Well, they have a big problem.

They really do for all the media propaganda.

Everyone knows that if Donald Trump had just said in January 2021,

This ends my political career and I'm not going to get involved either in another race for president nor am I going to enter the political

arena with editorials or opinions.

I'm going to go back and do The Apprentice.

Fanny Willis, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith, E.

Jean Carroll, none of them would have done any of this stuff.

Or

if Donald Trump had said this, oh my God, I had an epiphany, Jack.

I'm going back to my old self in my 30s when I was either apolitical or a man of the left.

I think I'm a liberal again.

What can I do to help the left-wing cause?

It wouldn't exist either.

So everybody knows.

And why do I say everybody knows?

Because Alvin Bragg is going after him for a crime that has no victim, that he's going after him overvaluing real estate that he says, and most people dispute, that he's never done that before with anybody else in the cutthroat.

real estate market.

No one's ever had this happen to them there.

And the bank has no complaint.

They're not a victim.

He paid the principal.

He paid the interest.

The bank made a profit.

Everybody was happy until Alvin Bragg leveraged this.

You know, I should say that Letita James did.

Alvin Bragg then, she did that.

And then Alvin Bragg went in and he said, Stormy Daniels, non-disclosure.

He didn't do the right paperwork.

He tried to say

this is a campaign finance violation.

Forget about Hillary and the steel dossier and all that stuff.

And he would have never done that.

And then Fannie Willis,

a phone call where he said, you know, I know there's 10,000, 12,000 votes somewhere, find them.

They're there.

And all of a sudden, he's an election, you know, Stacey Abrams person.

And the same thing with Jack Smith.

He would have never been appointed a special counsel if Donald Trump was not.

an opponent of Joe Biden.

And then we go to the merits of the case, like I said.

And in the case of Jack Smith, look at this, Jack.

Here we have a guy who takes the stuff out and puts it in Mar-Lago who has, in theory, the right to declassify it.

And so basically, we're saying Trump is an arrogant SOB and he's stupid because all he had to do was fill out the forms and declassify this stuff, and he didn't do it.

And then he took it to his home, and then he bragged about everybody that he had it.

And he had some conspiracy theory that these documents one day would show that Hillary Clinton or somebody was guilty or their laptop.

And okay,

that is usually handled bureaucratically or through

warring lawsuits, but it's not a criminal offense.

It never has been, unless even when you're Mr.

Berber and you work for Clinton and you go in there and you stuff something down your pants, which is a crime, they let him off pretty easily.

And then

technically, I think it was in his socks.

Okay.

I thought he put it in his pants crotch.

But anyway, and then you had

Does anybody really believe that that rickety garage where the Corvette is, when you look in there and you see all these boxes in the back, and this man was senator and he was vice president taking this stuff out and Hunter probably had access to it to brag about his

knowledge of the inner workings of U.S.

policy and he didn't have the right in any case to declassify it.

Does anybody think that was more secure than Mar-Lago?

So that's where we are with all of these.

And people are saying,

it's a complete joke.

Then there's a force multiplier.

That's not enough for the left.

So then they have to start going state by state and trying to get Donald Trump off the ballot.

And so when you get away, you get, you just,

if you find one honest judge, which is hard to do these days, but you find a couple of honest judges for a moment,

you say to yourself,

there's no there there.

This is completely political driven.

It's warfare against Donald Trump.

And it's going to blow up, just like the 51 intelligence authorities.

Remember, we've talked about Leon Panetta.

What's his reputation now, Jack?

After he swore that that laptop was a Russian product of disinformation and then arrogantly denied that he was ever going to deny it.

And where's he now?

That's what all these people are looking at.

And look at the judge and the lawyers involved in the Eugene Carroll.

They're trying to tell the United States that a woman who says she was sexually assaulted nearly 30 years ago, but she cannot remember whether it was 94, 1995, maybe 1996.

But I can tell you that I was because I had this particular designer dress on, but it didn't exist at the time that I was supposedly assaulted.

But I didn't say a word.

In fact, I tweeted that The Apprentice and Donald Trump was my favorite show.

But you know, it was just an accident that the same Bergendorf from

Goodman or whatever department store was an episode of Law and Order where a woman is flirting in the lingerie section, and she goes into the bathroom, the dressing room, and they have some kind of tryst.

And all of a sudden, she's got claims against him as a victimizer.

Oh.

That happens all the time.

It's just a coincidence that my narrative was exactly like that.

And oh, by the way, I had a phone app in a little game that I I made called How to Break Up Couples.

And it was who could be, in her words, the greatest purveyor of evil, evil, evil.

And oh, by the way, I had my case thrown out because it was over the statute of limitations.

Except a left-wing state senator bailed me out.

And he passed a special law that said for one year only, you could bring a suit against a sexual assault that was well past the statute of limitations.

So I took advantage of that.

And I have

$83 million in damages because he ruined my career because I'm no longer a columnist at LA magazine.

But the editor testified she must have been lying when she said I was fired for good grounds that had nothing to do with Donald Trump.

So there's where we are with all of this stuff.

And finally, it gets so overwhelming that you're going to start to see a lot of this.

You're going to start to see judges say to Jack Smith, well, we're not going to speed it up.

And we're going to start to see judges say, eh,

we don't really need this hearing so quickly.

And we're going to start to see, eh, we'll take a little look at Fannie Willis because maybe, just maybe after she campaigned, as did Letita James and did Alvin Bragg on the promise to get Donald Trump, she did hire her stealthy boyfriend who was married, and there's a messy divorce suit that she tried to help squash.

And then he got, I don't know, $650,000, including billing for 24 legal hours in one single day.

And he coordinated with the White House, apparently, and he not only was mentored by the White House, he charged them $250 for being their student.

And then they went on junkets all over the country, and then she denied it.

And that doesn't look very good.

And it's Gene Carroll, it's all of these sorry cast of characters.

And what they did was, and this is what's so funny, is they started all this in August of 2022,

and Donald Trump was at his nadir, if you remember that.

DeSantis was running neck and neck with him, and there were other candidates mentioned as well.

And they created such an outrage, not just among MAGA people, but among moderate Republicans and even some Independents.

And they just shot him up in the polls.

And they said

this can happen to anybody in the United States.

If you're going to go after a billionaire with resources and you're going to do this to him, and it's one of the reasons that he may have unusual support in the black and Latino communities, because they look at him and they look at that mug shop and they'll think,

yeah, they've done this to me too.

So I don't know.

And, you know, that's where we are with all of these things now.

You look at them, there's no, the E.

Jean Carroll thing was outrageous.

It really was.

I don't know what happened.

He says he'd never met her.

I don't know if that's true or not.

I'm just looking at whether that case was actionable, and it wasn't.

It really wasn't.

And if it was actionable, that means that anybody in the United States

who is prominent and wealthy can have somebody come out of their past 30 years prior in Kavanaugh fashion and say, I don't know when this happened.

I have no idea.

And I've lied about the circumstances, even down to the dress I wore.

And there happens to be a TV show that has the same narrative as I, and I used to praise you publicly on Twitter, but I want 83 million bucks from you.

And I got a wealthy Silicon Valley lawyer that hates your

entrepreneur, Reid Hoffman, who hates your guts more than I do.

And he's going to fund me with a staff of lawyers that's going to bury you.

And that's where we are.

And that can happen to anybody now.

And I think all of that.

Yeah, these liberal judges and liberal juries juries and liberal prosecutors and liberal plaintiff lawyers, they should

take a deep breath and see what they're doing in the United States because it's unrecognizable what it is.

It's just a message.

Everybody knows it now.

It's just there's such an asymmetry.

You look at Hunter Biden's treatment by the DOJ until a judge caught them at what they were doing.

You look at people that are thugs.

It's basically in America today,

if you have an ideological

bent that is known, then you are going to get much greater deference from the legal system than if you're considered conservative or you're not a member of a favored group.

And everybody knows it.

Just a fact.

Look at the protesters on January 6th.

Look at the protesters on May, June, July, August, September 2020.

And ask yourself, why the disparity?

And another Another parallel to the Confederacy

of the left.

I mean, a white man would not have been convicted of harming a black person in the South in,

you know, last century, right?

Same thing.

It's amazing how the left has become.

I wrote an article about, I think it was a new criterion last year called the New Confederates.

And you look at every issue of the Confederacy and the antebellum South.

Think about it, Jack.

Racial essentialism, same thing.

Racial institutional, racial bias, yes.

The one-drop rule, one-sixteenth, that allows you to be in the old South it meant that you were a particular race and to be punished.

And now in the new Confederate mind, it means you are of a particular race with 1 16th and to be rewarded.

Nullification of federal law, just like South Carolina with sanctuary cities.

And look at the economy of these blue states.

They're very Confederate.

They have a huge capital, big, big, big wealthy class, California, and they have an entire impoverished class, like the underclass in the old South, and there's no middle class.

And that's what's happened to New York, Illinois, and California.

They are Confederate to the core.

And that's so ironic.

Well, Victor, you've been terrific as usual.

And many of our listeners think that we know that because those who listen through iTunes and Apple can rate the show and do.

Practically everyone gives you five stars, zero to five, but you're, and the average is 4.9 plus.

So thanks for those who take the time to do that.

And some leave comments also.

We read them all, even the ones that...

that say get rid of Fowler.

I'm not going to read that one.

I get those, but they say get rid of Victor.

I'm going to read three today.

Two shorties and

one different.

This one is titled Always Relevant, Always Inspiring from MDE357, who writes, thank you for the vast wealth of knowledge you contribute to our nation and our world.

Then Ron Bulldog one

titles his comment an amazing and gifted person and he writes, I am 87 years old, and I've never heard such great views and common sense on so many different topics.

Victor is one of my go-to podcasts.

Thanks for all you do to make common sense out of so many complex problems.

I hope I'm 87 someday and have some go-to podcasts, Victor.

And the last one.

17 years from now, I don't think I'll be able to speak if I'm even here.

Victor, you're indestructible in every way.

Admit it.

Okay, the last one is titled Sunny.

This is kind of cool.

I love the show.

Fan of BDH for more than a decade.

Eeyore has the most brilliant perspective on humans.

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

My reason for commenting is Sunny,

each week you lather us with your voice.

Warm honey lathered with melted butter.

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

Anyway, keep sharing.

Are you suggesting that Sammy's voice is more mellifilous than your Bronx accent?

No, no.

No, it's

complimenting you as Sonny.

You, Victor, are the warm honey lathered with melifilizer.

Oh, I thought they were talking about Sammy's voice.

No, no.

But, you know, I'm reading this on pancakes all of a sudden.

I had a little

internet

for about two seconds that went out and I just heard Sonny, Sammy, and I thought it was.

You thought, yeah, yeah.

Well, Sammy's wonderful, and Sammy's everything about Sammy's wonderful.

Anyway, this is signed by Daryl from Wyd Bay Islands.

So thanks, Daryl.

Victor,

for me,

folks, if you're interested in what I do besides mumbling and interrupting, Victor, I work for Amphil, which and I'm a senior fellow at the Center for Civil Society there.

And we are desperately trying to strengthen civil society.

And one of the things I do is I write a free weekly email newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

I give you,

it comes out every Friday, and it's 14

recommended readings.

Hey, here's a great piece I came across earlier this week.

Here's a link.

Here's an excerpt.

I think you'll like it.

I get a lot of

nice emails from folks who are enjoying it.

So be one of them.

We're not selling your names.

No risk,

nothing transactional about it.

So anyway, thank you, Victor.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Victor, thanks again for your wisdom.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening again.