The Obscene and the Obsequious

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We are on the Friday news roundup and we have lots of news this week.

So we'll be looking at New York City cops that were attacked by illegal aliens and the truckers in Texas and the Razor Wire controversy and lots, lots more.

So stay with us and we'll start with those stories.

We'll be back.

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Victor, we've got lots on the agenda, but the first thing is really tragic to watch

the New York City cops that were beaten up by illegal aliens and they were they found them, arrested them and let them out.

yes and they're still looking for others but why would they look for others if they're just going to let them go I don't know I mean

I wrote a column about three weeks ago called A Culture and Collapse but it is I mean what do you have to do to be arrested and I can answer that rhetorical question

We know that if you came to the United States illegally and you resided illegally and then you created several felonies by resisting arrest and attacking law enforcement, you're not going to be in jail.

We do know that if you protest at an abortion clinic peacefully and they deem that you've instructed the ability to go in and out without obstruction, you're going to go to jail.

We do know that if you were on the parade ground on January 6th, not in the Capitol, not actually confronting the police, just circulating, you may go to jail.

So I don't really think we have jurisprudence as blind just, it doesn't exist anymore.

That was the contribution of the Obama administration and then

accelerated by the Biden-Obama's plural administration.

And they really do believe that as leftists, socialists, whatever term woke,

that they have a God-given right to achieve their utopian ends by any means necessary.

And one of those means is subverting the justice system and applying one set of rules to people and another to another group of people.

And that's what they're doing.

But it begs this larger question.

We have 8 million illegal entries.

We're going to have 10

by the time of the election.

What is the purpose of all this?

Is it I just I used to think it's a long-term investment in constituencies that will for a generation support the Progressive Project given they're getting massive defective defections from blacks, Latinos, of course the white working class.

I think it's more immediate.

I think they're going to swarm in 8 to 10 million people.

They're going to register in places like California where it will matter for the down ballot, but other places as well.

They'll go into the disability office, they will go in to the welfare office, they will go into the housing office, and just by the fact of asking for a state service, they automatically register you.

DMV, motor voter, and they will get a ballot mailed to their address.

I think that's the idea.

And then when anybody objects, they say, racist, racist,

xenophobe.

And I think that's the attitude.

I think they're just terrified about the next election.

And so.

Well, what's this show then of doing things?

So

I know that this border controversy, they're saying, well, we can't do anything without Congress, and everybody knows that that's bogus.

But

they seem to be trying to suggest to their own voters that they are doing something by doing nothing.

I don't quite understand their actions.

What's happening is this, that

they know that the law is the law is the law, and it's the same now as it was under Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump,

after he fought all the legal battles, after he fought all the defections within his own administrative state,

and by November of 2019 closed the border, period.

And he did that very easily and those protocols are in place.

All he has to do is say no more catch and release,

apply for refugee status in Mexico, call up Obador and say, you know what?

Don't let people in on your southern border.

or we're going to deport people massively and dump them in your country, as Trump did,

and start working on the new section of the wall.

And we'd have no problem.

He doesn't need legislation.

So that's bogus.

So your question is, why is he feigning concern suddenly?

It's an election year.

And the Republicans have woke up late, but did wake up, and they began bussing people to other cities.

And they knew the liberal, progressive, left-wing mind.

And it's always

I'm going to virtue signal and performance art my superior morality with the condition that I never suffer the consequences of my own ideology.

And now they are.

So they love illegal aliens.

They have 550 jurisdictions that are sanctuary cities, states, counties.

And they got their wish.

And now they're overrun with people who are here illegally poor and with no background checks.

They are, they have, they're fentanyl smugglers.

They're violent, many of them.

They're defecating in parks.

They're leaving bottles of urine on footsteps of nice homes.

and they don't know what to do about them.

And they're Democrats, so they're telling the black community is saying, you know, we don't get this treatment.

Latino community is saying, you should go down the Rio Grande Valley, look what's happened to our communities.

And it's, I pick up the Fresno Bee or one of the websites of the local television, local news, every single day.

It is

Hernando Huerta,

two suspect murderers, and this is in my own hometown,

which you could,

everybody when I went to high school did not have a key to their home.

And I see every day that there is a hit and run, there is this, there's this, and every single one of them is illegal aliens.

And

they don't usually even list the address.

They don't know where the address is because they live 40, 50 in places around me where they have Winnebagos and people run out to them.

And when you say that, if I were to say that where I work, 200 miles away, they'd say you're a racist.

But the people at the Stanford campus who support this,

they live in Atherton, they have private security, they live in Woodside, they live in Hillsboro, you name it.

And they don't live on the front lines.

And when they live on the front lines, they get a different attitude.

And now it's going to be a close election in key states.

And Joe Biden wants to feign concern.

Period.

There's a poll out that has Joe Biden ahead, and I know this is very early, but nonetheless, his feigned concern seems to have bumped him to 50

over Donald Trump's 44 percent.

So

that's, I guess, why I was asking.

I mean,

it seems to work to feign this with most people.

I don't think that poll, it's an outlying poll.

And

more importantly,

the inflation, it's based on the idea that inflation is cooling, and there's an expectation that things might get a little better.

But he can't change the reality that commodity prices for food, rent, fuels,

new cars, things people really are affected by have gone up 30% since he came in.

And it's not going to change.

And now he's going to get the Federal Reserve will give.

The more the Federal Reserve gives big lectures that it's apolitical, the more likely it is to lower

interest rates before the election.

So we know that.

We do know that.

They were talking about that a month ago or so, that they were making it really bad right now.

But as we move into the summer and fall, they're going to just bring them down.

But what I said with the outlier poll, if you go to the Real Clear Politics website, he's 13 points down.

13 points down.

Think of that.

Yeah.

And

that's things like left-wing, you go, gov.

Let me just read you a poll.

I'll look it up right now.

Here's the daily costs.

This is approval, disapproval.

I'm not talking about Trump Biden.

35%

approval in the daily costs.

38% in Messenger.

44% in U-Gave.

And look at the disapproval: 54, 56, 55.

57, 58, 57.

That's an incumbent.

And when you look at the

head-to-head polls, you can see that almost all of them have Trump ahead.

Almost all of them.

I'm not saying that means anything,

because Trump will be

people said that in 2020.

And

I think a lot of the MAGA supporters have to get prep for this.

Mark Zuckerberg is going to spend more than $419 million million as he did in 2020.

He's going to spend a billion dollars and they're going to absorb the work of the registrars and they're going to have mail-in drop boxes everywhere.

And they're going to mail out ballots.

And the rejection rate will be less than 3%,

0.3%

in most states.

And they're going to blanket.

They're going to use their four times the amount of money of the Trump campaign.

And they're going to run commercials that he's killing women by denying, even though he was the most liberal of all the Republican candidates.

And he's much more liberal on abortion than Joe Biden used to be when he was old Joe

from Scranton, working-class Catholic, supposedly.

And we're going to hear that January 6th, January 6th, January 6, and then

we're going to get gavel, gavel coverage of Letita James, Alvin Bragg, Fannie Willis, Jack Smith.

And

have you noticed one thing?

We don't hear anything about Fannie Willis.

I mean,

that was a white

DA office and they were prosecuting, say, Barack Obama and he was a candidate, that would be, I mean, you would have 50 pages of coverage in every major newspaper about how corrupt this old boy network was.

So it's very hard to overcome all that.

Yeah.

It is.

There's no margin of error.

And I wrote a column about that.

No margin of error.

Trump cannot afford to lose his cool.

and that's what they want him to do.

His campaign is very professional.

It's much more professional than last time.

And they know there's no margin of error

given what they're up against.

Well, given all the troubles of Biden, it's no surprising he referred to Trump as the sitting president.

Maybe that was some Freudian slip.

He wished he was the sitting president.

It's true in a way.

He's more a president as not a president than Biden is as a president.

Biden,

you know, he was,

I keep reiterating, I'm not trying to be ad hominem in a mean way.

He's not a nice person.

He never was a nice person.

He was a plagiarist.

He lied in the 1988 campaign.

He lied in the 2008.

He said that Barack Obama was the first black person that could speak well and who was clean.

He was always a rogue.

He really was.

And now with the dementia,

there's no veneer of normality.

It's been scraped away and that putrid wound beneath is Joe Biden.

So he gets up there and he starts yelling about MAGA.

Donald Trump, he was just remembering

Donald Trump said that the people who died at Normandy were suckers and they were fools.

And that was an attack on

you or whatever his name.

Bo.

Attack on him?

He died of natural causes from a brain tumor.

And it was...

He didn't die in combat.

World War II was 80 years before he died, 75 years.

But he just animated, he just spouts off this stuff.

And we'll see.

We'll see what the reception is when he goes to East Palestine.

What's he going to say?

I wanted to come here a year ago, but there was no election.

And you people, I've already lost you.

I don't like MAGA.

You're semi-fascist.

You're ultra-mega.

So I've called you chumps and dregs.

And Barack has called you clingers.

And Hillary called you deplorables and irredeemables.

And I don't know.

John McCain said that you were hobbits and crazies.

So I'm here.

Bye.

See ya.

That'll be what it is.

And didn't the mayor of the city, East Palestine, tell him he shouldn't come or something to that effect?

Something to the effect that he honors the presidency.

He wasn't going to be personal, but he didn't think that Biden was coming for any other reason but an election year.

Yeah.

But he's lost the...

You can see all of the barometers how he has lost the white working class.

Look at the military.

The only

demographic that is way short, it's not Latinos, it's not blacks, it's not women's, it's not gays, it's white working class males are not joining the military.

And that's because of the Biden Pentagon and what they do and what they say.

And you look at any

poll,

he has lost the white working class.

And the so-called white people that are 67% of the population, population, he's got the independent swing voter, maybe, and he's got the bi-coastal elite that have the money.

And that's about all.

And that's the only people he caters to.

And that's why he talks about climate change non-stop.

He just stopped liquid natural gas exports to Europe, which I thought being economical.

And he talks about our allies and Trump's an isolationist.

You know, John Bolton wrote an op-ed today about how Trump is the isolationist and he's this.

Trump warned them about natural gas.

He tried to ship natural gas to Europe.

Biden is cutting off our allies at a time when they have no other source of natural gas.

So

this obsession, it's almost a sickness, this hatred of Trump and his supporters.

I get back to that Bolton

op-ed today.

It said, well, he said he was tough on Russia.

He was.

He said, well, all he was

raise sanctions.

I said, no, that wasn't all he did, John Bolton.

He sent javelin missiles.

And Obama wouldn't send them.

He sent javelin missiles to them,

to Ukraine, to stop Russia.

He killed 200 Russians.

That's pretty risky in Syria.

The Wagner, what later became the Wagner group mercenaries.

He got out of an asymmetrical missile deal that people had been begging us to get out of.

He got out of it.

He got rid of the whole idea of reset.

And

this is at a time when people were accusing him of being, as John James Clapper, a Russian asset.

And he was a fool for the Russians.

He was stronger.

I could go on all the things he did to Russia.

And then Bolton can explain one central truth.

Why did Putin go into Georgia, Ossatia, in 2008?

Why did he do that?

Because the Bush administration was racked by setbacks in Afghanistan and stasis in Iraq and high oil prices that was crushing the economy.

And we were headed toward a recession and Russia was flush with cash.

And he knew that Bush was in no position to do anything, given his popularity was about 30%.

Why did he go in 2022?

Because Joe Biden had said he wouldn't object if it was a minor invasion.

Or did he ask,

he told everybody

that Afghanistan was a great logistical success.

Putin looked at that.

He looked at all these things and that's why he went.

Why did he go in 2014?

Because we had appeased him.

Who was we, Obama?

Just go back to the hot mic in Seoul in March of 2012 when he said, tell to the Russian president, tell Vladimir, give me some space.

I'll be flexible in missile defense, i.e.

he canceled it.

This is my last election.

election, and Putin gave him a year or two, and then he invaded.

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Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about truckers to the Texas border and American soldiers killed in the Middle East.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor on X at V D Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

Victor,

we've had a lot of truckers, the Canadian truckers a couple of years ago, the Germans truckers shutting down Berlin a few months ago.

French farmers have done the same thing in Paris, the main roadways.

And now our truckers in Texas trying to support the Texas military or Texas cops on the border when Biden obviously is working against them.

And I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that, on those movements.

Are they going to work?

I mean,

what did they achieve?

Well, people hate truckers,

the bicoastal elite.

They're independent.

They're self-employed.

The majority, I'm not talking about people who work for a large corporation, but the independent trucker, they cannot stand.

He's like

a vanishing species, and they are jacks of all trades.

They're mechanics, they're business people, they're drivers.

They understand weights and loads.

And so they're a very independent, rugged group of people, and they don't don't like to be pushed around, and they are empathetic to people like them that represent American individualism.

So when they see something like the government is doing, and they have these huge trucks, and the country needs them, they feel they have political leverage.

So that they start to mass.

I don't think that the trucker's going to the border or what that's going to work because

it's just not going to work.

It's a long way to go.

It's a huge, long border.

But

what's interesting is the hatred they incur for even attempting it.

The Canadian Trudeau just freaked out about, and now he's been slapped down by the Canadian courts, but he hated them.

In Europe, they hate them.

But as this

Western project in Europe, the United States becomes globalist and uniform and

orthodox, you really need independent voices that speak out against the globalist idea.

And these are one group of people who do.

That's why they're despised.

We make fun of them.

Well let's then turn to the Middle East and recently we've had three American soldiers killed in Jordan at a military base.

Biden's

Kirby has said President and I will not tolerate an attack on our troops.

And I was wondering, oh sorry, that was Lloyd Austin who said that.

So I was wondering what your thoughts were.

Iran incidentally has replied back to that and said it's not looking for a war.

I like it when they say

we're not going to tolerate.

They've tolerated 170 attacks.

I'm not asking for a war with Iran, but they are.

They're going to get a big, fat, ugly war with Iran.

And they're almost ensuring it's going to happen because

when they came in, as Jake Selvin said, the Middle East was quiet.

So you tell the Houthis you're no longer terrorists.

Here, Hamas, here's millions.

Trump did it, not us.

We like you.

Here, Hezbollah, we'll help you in the Lebanese government against the Israelis on natural gas rights off the coast in the Mediterranean.

Hey, Iran, please let us back in the Iran deal.

Please, please, please.

John Kerry wants to get back.

Oh, Iran, you're losing 80 or 90 billion dollars and you can't supply Hezbollah or Hamas or the Houthis with missiles.

We'll come and help you.

You can sell all the oil to anybody you want anymore.

No problem.

Replenish your stocks.

Send them around.

And

we got some hostages.

We'll pay you $1.2 billion apiece.

How's that?

And that's what we did.

And

I just wish that Biden had spoken about the theocratic anti-Americanism in the same tone and substance as he did the Netanyahu government.

That's a trademark of Biden.

He will always

speak more highly of existential enemies to his country than he will

people that he has a personal dislike of.

So you get him on MAGA or Netanyahu, he loses temperature, his eyes freeze up,

he slams the phone down on him.

But you get him on Iran

or Hama, he doesn't get that animated at all.

And so

we've appeased them, and now Hezbollah and Iran are saying to themselves, What is the magic number that we can get away with?

Is it 10 strikes on American installations?

Hmm, let's try it.

Oh, it's 30, 50, 80.

Hey, let's try 100.

Kill a few Americans, wound 10 or 20.

Let's go big time.

140, 150, 160.

And then they killed three and they've injured over 40.

I think they've lost six altogether now

and perhaps 80 or 90 wounded.

And they're thinking, okay, we hit kind of a plateau.

Let's just pause, say, you know what, we don't want a war.

And we'll wait for John Kirby to say the following.

One,

and we know what's coming.

One,

the United States will respond at a place and time of its choosing.

Two,

the United States,

although condemning, we condemn Iran for supplying weapons to these groups, has no direct evidence of Iranian involvement.

Number three, it's not our purpose to have a wider war.

And maybe four, or we will find a proportionate response.

And that's just a way of saying, hey, you guys, you got a break.

And then go at some point, Iran is going to do something very stupid.

The Houthis are going to sink an American warship, or they're going to unleash Hezbollah,

or

an American ship is going to hit a mine, and we're going to have to act.

And this did not have to happen.

All they had to do was say, Donald Trump messed up the Middle East publicly and then privately, man.

As Jake Sullivan said, there's nothing going on in the middle.

We'll just keep all of the Trump policies and attack him publicly, and we'll get all the credit.

And that's all they had to do, and they couldn't do that.

No.

Well since we're in the Middle East let's continue with the United Nations Relief Workers Agency for Palestine.

Apparently there's been more than 12

of their workers that actually participated in October 7th by

aiding the Hamas in abductions, munition supplies, attacks, and even murders.

And so I was wondering your thoughts on United Nation workers.

And I'm glad that we've suspended payments to that particular agency, but what are your thoughts?

I don't know.

I mean,

so the UN goes into the Middle East and it has this, you know, relief agencies, and who is it going to employ at Gaza?

It's going to employ people who are pro-Hamas.

or are connected to Omas.

So

if we didn't find Hamas people that were involved in the UN and on October 7th, we'd have to invent them.

Because that's who the UN is.

Just look at the UN votes against Israel.

Just look at the people that do it.

And you know what?

The Europeans, believe it or not, were quicker to cut off this relief agency than we were, the Biden administration.

And they did for a while.

introduces a larger question.

This is 2024.

Can anybody think of one positive thing the United Nations has done?

When you have Iran on the Human Rights Commission or North Korea participating in these discussions on equality or freedom, it's just a joke.

So we have two choices.

We should cut them off, three choices.

Just let them do whatever they want and cut them off.

Number two,

just say

we're going to leave.

We love you guys.

We just don't want to to participate with you anymore.

We're going to have a group of, I don't know, 10 or 12 allies that are the United Democracies or the United Federated Republics, Japan, I don't know, Australia.

And we're going to have an alternate group.

And then three,

you know, you're not worth fighting with.

We'll throw you through coins, but get that headquarters the hell out of New York.

I know it brings us money and everything, but it's just an eyesore.

So take it and take it where your people are.

Take it where your source of support is.

Go to Lima, Peru.

Go to Nairobi.

Go to Johannesburg.

Go to Beijing.

Just get out of here and go with your constituencies.

And I think that would be a good thing to do.

Yeah, I mean, it's like,

didn't we learn anything about the League of Nations?

Woodrow Wilson's bankrupt idea that at least the Republicans stopped us from joining.

And then what did they do in the 1930s?

Every time Mussolini took one of his new cruisers or battleships and he was going down

through the Suez Canal to murder people on the Horn of Africa and Ethiopia and Somalia, what did they do?

They didn't do anything.

The British and French fleets could have blown the Italian Navy out of the world.

The UN didn't do anything.

They just said, Mr.

Mussolini, would you please not use your Navy to kill innocent people and bring troops to destroy these indigenous people?

They didn't do anything.

They didn't do anything about the Rhineland.

They didn't do anything about the Tsar plebiscit.

They didn't do anything.

And so they went out of existence.

And then what did we do after World War II?

We just said we're going to do League of Nations 2.0.

And that's what we did.

And the only time it's ever worked

is during the Korean War when Russia was abstaining or had stormed out because they wanted to admit communist China or they wanted all of their republics to count as individual countries and they were out and there was no veto in the Security Council and UN nations supplied some help in Korea.

End of story.

You know, I was reading on this and I think that Brendan O'Neill would agree with you, but he summed up this UNRAW

debacle quite well.

He said, in truth, the UNRAW has helped to institutionalize a Palestinian politics of grievance, increased both local and global hatred for Israel, and provided spaces in which Gazan Islamists have been able to indoctrinate a new generation with their Jew hate that masquerades as Palestinian liberation.

I thought that was a lot of clarity at the end of his article and spiked.

I think everybody has to, it's a good point.

Everybody has to realize that the United Nations, the WHO,

the American universities,

the elite especially,

they're all bankrupt morally,

politically, economically, culturally, socially.

They're bankrupt in the sense that they're really a negative force in American life.

They indoctrinate young people to hate Jews, to hate Israel, and to become perennial victims.

And then they create bogeymen, oppressors, and victimizers.

And that's all they do it in the international view,

and then they do it on the domestic.

And I have no problem if that's what they really believe.

But they don't really believe that.

At least they don't, their actions don't support it.

Take Rashid Khalidi.

Remember him?

He was the professor that got a big endowed, a foreign money endowed professorship at Columbia.

And he gave a big talk in LA right during the 2008

campaign.

And he was a big Obama buddy.

And Obama said, praise him to the skies, and they taped it.

And the Los Angeles Times would not release that tape.

They leaked everything else, but not that tape, because it would have shown Obama was in bed with, I don't mean that literally, but a big supporter of Rashid Khalid.

The other day, they interviewed him.

And here he is at Columbia saying it's all settlers.

It's a settler mentality.

It's a settler mentality.

If it's a settler mentality, and he said, this is the United States trying to stay in the Middle East.

Think of that statement for a second.

I'm Rasheed Khalidi and I'm an immigrant and I think that the Zionist settlers are doing the work of the United States to keep them in the Middle East and we want them out.

Okay, you want them out.

If you want them out so much, why did you go to the heart of darkness in the United States and take a big fat, lucrative professorship at Columbia?

Why do you do that?

Why does Ms.

Talib and her family, why did they come over to the United States if they hate it so much?

Why did Ilyan Omar come over?

She said her dad said it was a trashy country.

She just the other day said her main allegiances are with Muslims and the Somalis.

Why do they do this?

Why do they hate this system, but they can't keep away from it?

It's like an addiction.

To them, it's heroin.

It's sort of like, oh, I hate it and what it's doing to me, but I just got to have it.

And it's the same thing on the DEI.

I don't understand that at all.

It's Joy Reed, and we'll talk about her again, but, you know, cultural appropriations.

Cultural appropriation.

And I remember when she got her read-out show, she gave a big

rant about she was going to wear indigenous hairstyles or African-American hairstyles to show that she was going to recalibrate what it was to be a powerful, black, secure woman.

I have no problem with that.

I do have a problem when she gets on there and she starts stereotyping people by their race

after the Iowa primary.

Do you remember what she said?

That all these white Christians were overrepresented in the demographic?

And she said earlier she was so happy that the number of white people was declining.

And so

she's so anti-white that she does what?

After giving a lecture about how beautiful she's going to be with her own,

she wears a hairstyle that is a blonde, straight hairstyle.

I have no problem with it.

I think that's great.

But not when somebody says they basically hate white people and that hair is an

indication of your revolutionary features.

And if some white liberal put dreadlocks on one day, she would be the first to say cultural appropriation.

So what I'm getting at

is that the more people abroad and here at home hate the Western project and they trash it in the United States,

the more they want to be around it, the more they're fixated.

And we should remember one last thing.

There's no guarantee that this project continues.

It relies on each generation being a link in a long chain and the weakest link will break and the whole thing will fall apart.

And that's happening because we're raising generation after generation that for 10 to 15 years have been indoctrinated.

And they're indoctrinated with the idea they're oppressed and they're victimized, and there's this mythical

so-called white group of overdogs that created this horrible country and this terrible constitution,

guilty of all these things.

And

they don't like it.

They don't like it so much that what?

They want to be a part of it.

I just don't get that.

These 8 to 10 million people that are crossing the borders are told that the United States is a Yankee gringo country that stole their property.

Why would you want to come here?

Why would you want to come here?

It just makes no sense.

No, absolutely not.

Well, Victor, let's go to a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about some of our leading black women since we're on that subject.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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Welcome back.

So, Victor, have you heard about this Harvard's diversity and chief officer?

Her name is Sherry Ann Charlson.

She's been accused,

and I don't know if it's proved, but it's not hard to prove plagiarism of 40 different instances of plagiarism.

I was wondering what you thought about that.

Well,

first of all, why do we even have this position for her?

See, I work at a conservative, it used to be conservative, maybe it still is, Hoover Institution.

And

there are

at least four prominent African-American scholars there, okay?

There's Tom Sowell, who I think is the best economist, the most accessible economist, the most common sense economist in the country.

And then there was Shelby Steele.

He was an absolute brilliant stylist, pro-stylist.

And he was, anything you see that's derivative about race and white guilt, it came from Shelby.

And we had Condoleezza Rice, who came from a poor family in Alabama, excuse me, a middle-class family, very successful tight family group,

self-made,

very young provost,

wrote learned Russian pianist.

And then we had Chiron Skinner, Harvard PhD, worked for Trump.

What am I getting at?

In every one of those cases,

those scholars were superior to people in their field, regardless of the race.

What I'm getting at is it's clear that you don't need this.

And why do you need this is, in the words of Tom Sowell, it fulfills, and Shelby Steele, it fulfills some need on the part of white guilty people to virtue signal.

So you don't really need it because if you look at a Roland Fryer, for example, or Glenn Lowry,

some of the smartest, most brilliant people in the United States are black.

And it would be just like saying,

you know, we're going to make sure that there's 60%, or we're going to make sure there's 12% black people in the NBA.

You think they need to be that way?

No.

And so, first of all, we don't need to do this.

And second, as people have pointed out, when you do do it, human nature being what it is, there's no deterrence.

So when you start reading about Claudine Gay and this DEI person,

or what Fannie Willis is doing, or some of the Soros-backed prosecutors who have been in scandal, it's not because they're black, it's because they understood that they were quote-unquote victims and then they were shielded from consequences of their behavior.

Very similar to the Jim Crow White South, where if you were a good old white boy and you were in an interracial situation, you didn't have to do anything.

You could just rely on your skin.

And this has been very detrimental.

And so what I'm getting at is when you see a DEI person who plagiarizes and plagiarizes and plagiarizes, or a president who plagiarizes

continually,

then you know what they're doing.

They're basically saying, I can do whatever I want because a bunch of guilty, elite, wealthy, white, bi-coastal people will protect me.

And I'll call people racist who don't.

And it's the worst thing in the world for anybody when you remove deterrence and that's one of the it involves tenure once you tenure somebody earlier in their career and you say you have lifetime employment you know it's do you think they're really going to

do you think they're really going to continue to be productive

I can tell you when I was at the California state system when a person was on tenure this is what when you walk by their office here's what you saw in their door

they had pictures of them their scholarly work they They had pictures of them at conferences.

They had references to their articles.

And then when they got tenured, it all disappeared.

They had pictures of their kids or some of these, you know, sunflower posters or something.

So what I'm saying is that human nature being what it is, when you remove a deterrent, that means accountability, and you can rely on innate physical

circumstances to alleviate any exposure, that is, your superficial appearance, then you're just asking for a clouding gay or DEI person doing this.

Yeah.

Well, if we're going to continue on then, Corey Bush, who is being investigated, she's one of our congresswomen, is being investigated by the DOJ for billing the government for her husband's

services as her security guard, I believe.

And apparently, this is, he wasn't ever a security guard, and she's made a lot of money for him.

So I think everybody's worried about it.

Did you have thoughts on that?

Well, I mean, it was very ironic, wasn't it?

She was a big defund the police person.

So

she has posed as a squad type of oppressed black woman,

but she really has the values of a bicoastal liberal white elite.

And she's using her office to pad her own lifestyle in the same way as Fanny Willis.

Both of them have one thing in common.

They pose as victims of an oppressive system to leverage their careers and then once they achieve a position of administrative power

then they featherbed their own nests usually by,

I don't know what's the word,

hooking up with joining opportunistic men who qualify as black, as DEI people, and then at the expense of the public treasury, a public purse, and then always on the expectation that what I just said will earn the sobriquet

racist, racist, racist, we're exempt, you're a racist, you're a racist, as if she was a victim of segregation when she grew up as a pampered person in the civil rights movement.

It's been 70 years since we had real true overt oppression.

And so again, getting back to my earlier point,

when you take away that, just

If you have somebody like Tom Soule who doesn't believe in special treatment for anybody,

and he understands his job depends on productivity and

cultivating his natural talents rather than playing a victim,

then you get one of the world's greatest economists.

And it's not hard to figure out.

And when you don't do that, whoever it is, you say you're a particular victim and we're going to make allowances for you.

And by the way, you only have to specialize in victimization studies, black studies,

this studies, that studies,

then you're going to get what you get.

It's just like 2 plus 2 equals 4.

It doesn't equal 5.

Anytime you set up this DEI situation and you tell these people you're going to police victimization and racism, they're going to find it.

And then nobody's going to police the police because they're exempt.

And that's the situation we created.

It's all based on one thing, money, money, money.

If you have this huge university system and there's tens of billions of dollars, trillion dollars nationwide in endowments,

and you don't tax the income on it, and you pour federal dollars without any accountability into these universities, and then you subsidize their inflationary tuition

by putting a $2 trillion student loan subsidy in place.

And then to top that off, you have 25% of the students are foreign students because you're sending billions of dollars from China and the oil Fed Middle East, then you get a lot of free floating dollars.

And Harvard can afford to pay somebody probably a quarter million dollars to what?

Find racism.

And if you don't find racism, you're not doing your job.

And if you have to find racism by plagiarizing, it's okay because nobody's going to dare do anything.

Do you think anything's going to happen to her, Sammy?

No.

I don't.

Because they already set the standard, didn't they?

So Claudia, everybody, I wrote a column and I said, Claudine Gay's resignation is not the end, it's the beginning.

Because what did she present the political science with?

I'm Claudine Gay.

I'm a full professor of political science, and I have

plagiarized over half my work.

It's all been proven, it's there.

And any one of you who did this would be fired as a professor.

And now I'm a professor, and guess what?

I have established at Harvard.

You can't expel a student for doing a fraction of what I did anymore without expelling me.

And this DEI person is going to say, what?

You're going to go after me when the president of Harvard was a plagiarist and now she's a professor of political science?

Why are you picking on me?

Go fire her.

And that's what Harvard has done to itself.

You know what's really, I don't think people have remarked about that.

In the last two years,

Harvard has done more to destroy its reputation

than anything that's happened in the last 400 years.

And Harvard has done more to destroy the reputation of higher education with help from Yale, Princeton, and Stanford than any

possible thing their enemies could have done.

They have created an entire new conversation.

And it's not just coming from the right.

It's coming from

the donor class.

It's coming from the middle class parents of white students, white males who are straight A students.

They took the SAT, they don't have money, they don't have privilege, and they don't get into these universities on the basis of their race.

And they've created an entire constituency that looks at them.

And their only defense, Sammy, was this.

Okay,

we're going to have DEI.

We're going to have racial segregation at graduation and dorms.

We're going to have racial prejudice at admission.

But you know what we're going to do?

We're going to be so preeminent

in STEM and literature and law and medicine that you'll have to go along with it because we're going to ensure American preeminence by our

DEI policies.

And the opposite is true, isn't it?

Where faculty all over the United States are whispering, and you can, some of them don't whisper, what am I going to do with this new constituencies that are coming in without SAT scores?

And they're coming out without comparative graded

GPAs from their high school.

All they're basically being admitted on is their diversity statements.

What am I going to do?

Inflate my grades, water down the curriculum, bring in new courses, gut courses?

You tell me what I'm going to do.

I don't want to be called a racist.

Tell me what I do.

That's where we are.

Yeah.

Well, let's finish this podcast with Governor Newsom because he said, and it's probably short, I think, maybe.

He said something

very

obsequious and groveling

about Joe Biden at his nadir.

And he said

that Newsom himself will go to the end of the earth for Biden.

And he also said Biden has a record of accomplishment and is, quote, a man of character and a man of decency in a recent interview.

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.

I'm just, I'll just tell you where I am.

Like, I'm afraid this guy's going to be our president next year this time.

It's scary.

Hard call.

Who would be worse?

Michelle Obama or Gavin Newsom.

Remember everybody, Gavin Newsom was the mayor of San Francisco when all this started.

And then he was lieutenant governor when it accelerated.

And now he's governor for five years.

He's had

24 years to screw up the state.

No one has screwed up.

the state more than this Bay Area entitled little rich kid who has no record of aptitude or accomplishment.

Wait, even more than Arnold Schwarzenegger did?

Oh, oh, Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like Ronald Reagan compared to Gavin Newsom.

Arnold Schwarzenegger for two years was a conservative until he started saying things like girly men.

He thought he was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I'm going to take on the nurses' unions and all this.

And they just crushed him.

And then he just said, please, please, I'll be left-wing.

I'll give you all the green stuff.

And then his wife, no doubt, knew what he had done earlier.

And she,

whatever the relationship was, it had an influence of pushing him to the left because as soon as he left the governorship, Mirabel addicted, oh my God, I found out that Arnold fathered illegitimate kids in my own bed.

I didn't know that.

We're going to be separated and divorced.

They knew that.

Part of the deal.

And that she

had over him, that he went hard left.

But Gavin Newsom, Gavin Newsom was there with with it.

He said he was going to spend $10 billion and solve the homeless.

He spent $20 billion and it got worse.

He went into Target the other day.

He never goes into Target.

He wanted to be a man of the people.

So he goes in there and he sees a person walk out with all this stuff.

And he says, they just walked out with all this stuff.

I'm paying.

Why don't they pay?

And the person didn't know who he was and said it was the governor.

The governor was letting him do it?

Is that what you mean?

Yes.

And then he does a little YouTube to get angry and reply to this.

Because

he actually lived outside his bubble for a second.

And

he doesn't know anything.

When he does a debate, and you saw the debate with DeSantis, he comes off with his slick hair and all of his clothes and his gravelly tough voice and he prances around.

He has all the one-liners and the zingers memorize and he just lies his head off about how great California is.

And when he's told 285,000 people left, he said, oh, well, that's, you know,

and then they said, you have the highest gasoline taxes.

Your roads are the worst, almost the worst.

You have the second or fifth highest sales tax.

You have the highest income tax.

Your schools are rated.

They give him all the tax

information and all the statistics that show what a hellhole he's created.

And he just,

no, that's not true.

And then after about 10 minutes, it's like, okay, I love my cue cards.

I'm all done.

I have no more zingers.

The guys who prepped me, now what will I do?

I'm a deer in the headlights.

And that's what he was the last 40 minutes with the DeSantis debate.

No, that's not true.

Oh, there you go.

That's all he says.

Yeah, but I'm afraid that this empty suit will make it through.

And in a democracy, the mainstream media can get him elected.

Here's what we have to be worried about.

That is a very real possibility.

There are 55

million people who were not born in the United States that are living here.

27% of the population of California was not born here.

These people are not electrical engineers coming with a huge business from Belgium, okay?

Or from the Netherlands or from Japan.

No, they're mostly poor people and they need assistance.

And then we have 30% of the population lives paycheck to paycheck.

About half the people have zero savings.

And in their view, they don't care who the person is.

It's who will expand welfare, expand free stuff, and they will vote for him, absolutely.

And anybody who suggests that we're $35 trillion in debt, that the interest on the national debt exceeds the defense budget, it's not sustainable, we're ancient Rome,

you're a racist.

You're cruel, You're heartless.

That's where we are.

So, yeah, they would have to, they don't care who he is.

They just want to know if he's going to keep doing the democratic thing and print money and give it stuff.

In California, we're running a $60 billion

annual deficit.

We have $300 billion, maybe more, in unfunded liabilities we owe.

in pensions and obligations and bonds.

And there's no way to pay it back because 1%

paid half the the income tax.

1%

out of 41 million people pay half the income tax, which is half all of the revenue.

And they are bleeding at 200,000 plus

every year.

They're going to Texas, they're going to Tennessee, they're going to Nevada, they're going to Florida.

And when they go, then everybody says, well, where's the money?

Well, the money went because you taxed them and you gave them less than,

I don't know what you, less than nothing.

You gave them no social services they pay they say I paid 13.3 income tax I paid all this gas tax I pay that you know 11 12 percent sales tax with every all the add-ons the housing is the most expensive in the country you don't let people build new homes but but look at my schools there are 44 in the country in test scores The 99 is the most dangerous highway on miles driven in the United States.

My gosh, PG ⁇ D and Southern California, Edison have the highest kilowatts in the continental United States charges.

How can this be?

I'm leaving.

And then what's our attitude when they're leaving?

Good riddance.

We want to get rid of you.

And that's what we're in a death, we're in a doom loop, a death spiral.

And you know, another thing about California that Newsom knows but won't mention,

and this is something that no one talks about.

We have the largest underground black market in the country.

By that I mean

almost anything you want to buy.

You want to buy a rake,

you want to go buy a meal off the side of the road at a kitchen, mobile kitchen, you want to get a rack of clothes.

I can tell you that within a five mile radius, I can buy anything you want with no sales tax and the people selling it will pay no income tax on that sale.

And I can tell you another thing.

If in California you want labor, the person has an attitude.

They will come and say, I will work in your yard, or I will saw down that tree, but I want cash, or at least partial cash.

And that's because even the middle class pays 10%.

And what they're basically, so what they told the wealthy people, what am I getting at?

Why do these people leave?

Why would I like to leave if I wasn't 70 years old in this place?

It's because the people who are paying the tax cannot do that.

They get a check and it has the deductions and they are in an income that the IRS and the state franchise tax board looks at.

There's no write-offs for them.

They're salaried.

They can't.

They don't want to cheat.

And yet, when they want a service done or when they buy a commodity, they're faced with this dilemma that the person says to them, I need cash.

Oh,

you have a leak onto your house?

I'll do it for $50 an hour.

Cash.

Oh,

you want to pull over on the side of the road and, I don't know, have a burrito or a hamburger?

Fine.

Pay cash.

And that's what's really destroying the economy, one of the things.

Nobody says it.

It's all an exempt industry.

Who wants to go after that group of people, anybody?

So

it's,

I guess what I'm saying is that the DEI thing that you say that you're going to go after the white oppressive class and who's victimizing so many young people and so many immigrants are coming into the state

and mostly from the southern border.

We had the highest number of illegal aliens for 30 years and

the state does not have a mentality that says, oh, you're selling on a mobile kitchen.

We want to see your sales tax receipts.

We want to see if you filed an income tax.

Or they don't go down to a huge swap meet down the road and say, could I please look at your receipt book?

I want to see how many things you sold today.

They don't do that.

And to do that would be racist or something.

And I won't mention names.

I have a good friend who said, I took some deductions and I got caught.

And I said, well, you're going to be in trouble.

No, I'm not.

I'm not a

fill-in-the-blanks.

And I saw him later and I said, So did you get audited?

And you, yeah.

Did you get fined?

Nope.

Why?

Because I'm not like you.

And that's what happens.

And it's something that we don't talk about because it seems so outrageous or racist or something to say that.

But it's, if California wanted to get rid of its $60 billion

deficit and they don't want to change the practices that drove all the high-earning taxpayers away, they could still get out of it.

Tomorrow they could say, We're taking the state franchise tax board and we're looking at self-employed income and we're going to go after people.

And you know what a good thing to do with?

Just go and look at all the people who bought new pickup trucks, myself included.

Just go look at them and see these 80, 90, because that's what they are, 70, 80, 90.

And then ask the person, where's the income that

paid for that?

Yes.

And you will not find the income.

No.

You won't find the income.

You won't find the income on the house.

And if I have to go into a bank and get cash because somebody says to me, I'm not going to do a job unless I get cash, I'll stop there.

But if I were to do that and I would talk to some of the tellers that I know and I would ask them,

How much money do you think people come in and ask for?

I would imagine, because I've seen people do it.

It's not $5,000, it's not $6,000, it's $10,000, $12,000, $14,000 in cash people take out.

And I know that's true because when I go to the different banks in this area, this larger Fresno County area, I see people who come in and they have somebody or two or three people accompanying them.

And they are taking out large amounts of cash.

Are they criminals?

No.

In the sense that they're not violent criminals, they're not breaking normal statutes.

But what they are doing is they are running businesses or they have

homes or whatever it is, and they have people who will not work without cash.

And it's 3.5% on 5% in California on employment, but they can't find labor of people who will just say, write me a check for my service.

They can't find it.

And so they're using large amounts of cash.

I can see, I see it all the time.

And I see,

the other day I I saw a guy take out, I was, you know, depositing that check and I looked over and I thought, wow,

the bill's coming.

And then I looked around, there's a guy about six, five that looked just like him that was with him.

I thought,

well, they don't seem gay.

He was his bodyguard because they were walking, you know what I mean?

Because if you're carrying around that kind of money, you don't go to the bank by yourself unless your strategy is to be nondescript.

So I don't know.

I think there's a huge black market economy in California that is, for a variety of reasons, is exempt and they just tolerate it.

Yeah.

Well, that's the end of our podcast today.

I wanted to finish up with a comment by a viewer.

He wrote and he titled it, Bastion of Sanity.

And very quickly, he said, your discussion of Greek philosophers was welcome break from the discussion of grifter Joe Biden.

So thank you.

And that was from T.

Gambogi.

I hope I got that right.

And Victor, I was wondering if you had any preview of what's going on this weekend with your historic cultural.

Yes, I do, because I don't like talking about the contemporary.

We just do that on one show mostly.

So I want to, remember, we started with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, then we moved to the next great writer in the Western canon, Hesiod's Works and Days.

I didn't do the Theogony, didn't have time.

And then we moved on to Greek lyric poetry,

Sappho, Alcheaus, Simonides, and then last week we did the pre-Socratic

philosophales and

Heraclitus,

Empedocles.

And this time we're going to look at the beginnings of historiography or historians, and that would be the great triad of the fifth century who wrote from Athens, not necessarily born in Athens, but who wrote from Athens, and that would be Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon.

And then I hope

at the next one we would do the three great tragedians, their work, how they, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus, the nature of their work, the extant plays, how they rate with one another, and then

three weeks from now do Aristophanes and Old Comedy, and then we would move in to the fourth and third century.

And maybe we can talk about some of the we haven't talked about oratory, so I really want to talk about the

ten Attic orators and then orators that we know in the fourth century BC.

What we're doing is we're moving very slowly, but I hope comprehensively through Western literature, then we will go into Rome, and we're going to the Hellenistic period and then Rome

and then the so-called early Middle Ages.

and then Middle Ages,

Renaissance, Enlightenment,

and post-Enlightenment, contemporary literature.

I'm not qualified to talk about the literature of 2023 because I don't think it really exists.

And

I hope we can do that.

We did that with military history for a year, and we finally went from the Battle of Marathon to

the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

So I hope to do that.

And then we try to talk a little bit about farming.

because it's a lost profession.

So I want to say a few things about farming.

All right.

Well, thank you very much for all your wisdom today.

I was especially appreciative of our your discussion and warning about our empty suit governor and our failing state.

So thank you very much.

I hope Californians are listening.

Thank you everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.

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