End the Year with Hesiod and 2023 Highlights

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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

This is our weekend edition and this weekend is the last episode in 2023.

So we are going to have a look at the worst news stories and the worst people of the year and the best people of the year.

So stay in it for that.

But before that, we're going to look at a few news stories to finish off our news agenda this week and then talk about Hesiod's works and days.

So we'll get right to the news stories after these messages.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor at his website, VictorHanson.com, or find him on social media at

on X at V D Hansen and on Facebook Hansen's Morning Cup so please come tap into Victor's wisdom in either or all of those places so Victor we just had a few more things that we wanted to cover after our Friday news roundup that we didn't have time for so we're there would be maybe a quick back and forth just some small stories the first one though is just really recent that Victor, Victor, sorry, Victor, not you, but Trump was banned from the main ballot.

Once again, a administrator making a decision.

You mean Maine, not the Maine ballot, but the state of Maine.

Yes, yes, yes.

Sorry, yes.

Yes.

And that's going to be an effort in about 25 states.

And the idea is to create momentum.

They know that most of those states are blue states, but again, the theory or the agenda or

the desire is to destroy the, because in one-third of the Senate's up for re-election.

So the idea is if you get Trump off the ballot, a lot of supporters.

It doesn't take much in these tight races for House and Senate or governor are not going to show up, and then the Democrats will win.

Because I don't think it'll affect the Electoral College to that degree.

I think it's going to be overturned.

But when I say I think, that doesn't mean anything, Victor.

It just means that everybody's saying that.

Because there's no alternative.

The only alternative, I think Jonathan Thurley, I was listening to him on the radio, and his point was

if the Republicans start doing this, and he prayed they would not, then that might deter them, but it would just go tit for tat.

And I had said that earlier, it descend into

what it is.

I mean, the center is not holding, is what I'm trying to say.

The center of the Democratic Party?

No, the center of the country is not holding because

there's not enough.

It used to be when there were craziness in the 60s, you could always, the silent majority, there was the majority of students, majority of faculty, majority of the public, majority of everybody who didn't go crazy.

People can say, well, you went to UC Santa because, yes, I had liberal professors.

They were all liberal, but they were not nuts.

And I got a wonderful education.

They didn't go tell you to go out and protest and break stuff.

They told you the opposite.

So when I can remember going to a lecture with the famous art historian Mary Holmes and Jasper,

Rose were swarmed by people who said, who are you to say this is art?

Kind of like a nihilist, anarchist student, and everybody got angry.

The students said, shut up, get out of here.

And they were disciplined.

So the center is not holding.

And that's the problem.

There's not enough.

I mean, there's...

People should say this is absolutely absurd.

You don't take the leading candidate in the Republican Party and the leading candidate in the general election and say that you're going to take him off the ballot for

saying that a piece of property that's worth a billion dollars, he said it was worth $17 million 10 years ago.

That's absurd.

Or that he can't call and say there's something wrong.

He hasn't a right to call just as Hollywood celebrities have a right to tell the electors to renounce their constitutional duties and become false electors, which they did in 2016.

Just like Hillary Clinton has a constitutional right that says Donald Trump

is not a legitimate president.

Just like Jimmy Carter said he is an illegitimate president.

They said that.

Yeah, I know that.

And just as Stacey Abrams said, I'm the real governor of Georgia.

Will somebody want to prosecute her for insurrection or election interference?

Just as I hate to say, Mark Zuckerberg has the legal right, apparently, to put $419 million to absorb the work of the registrars.

So these are all bogus.

They're all bogus.

But there's not enough people that speak out.

There's not enough normal people anymore.

Partly it's because we're polarized.

Partly they took over the education system, they being the left, turned it into a indoctrination, and that was a zero-sum game.

So you lost out on critical investment and time and real, you know, STEM courses, histories.

They don't teach it anymore.

Yeah.

That's grim.

Well, another story that didn't make our news roundup or we didn't have time for was Japan apparently is providing the U.S.

with some Patriot missiles, which strikes me as interesting that we need to be supplied by Japan.

But do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, it's interesting for two reasons.

What happened to the United States that used to supply Japan and supply the world?

We can't make them anymore.

We don't make them anymore.

We have too many people on TikTok.

We have too many people in the basement playing video games.

We have too many people taking their clothes off on Instagram to get paid.

We don't have a productive,

intelligent workforce anymore.

So we're not making things.

We have supply chain problems on everything, from chemotherapy to

radiation dye for MRI scans.

And so that's the problem.

We shouldn't have to ask Japan.

We should just say, you want patriots?

We got scores of them.

That's what we do.

We make patriots.

We make them like P-51 Mustangs

in World War II, but we don't.

And Japan is trying to be a good ally because, you know what?

130, 140 people, and they're sitting right next to this monstrous state.

This communist, Dalinist, aggressive, amoral, evil government under the communist.

And they want to destroy Japan.

Well, yes, they have a lot of reason to hate Japan given World War II.

Yes, well, they do.

They do.

But this government that is running Japan is not the militarist government.

That was destroyed.

And by the way, anybody,

when you talk about, oh, Hamas, poor little Hamas, that is how Japan became a liberal society.

We did not screw around with the Japanese militarists.

We hung Tojo and blew up the militarist

and defeated and

humiliated that government and anybody who was near it.

And that's what you have to do with Gaza as well.

Then maybe the Gazans will come to their senses, as the Japanese did.

But the point I'm making is that

they want us to help.

They don't have any nuclear weapons.

Of course, they could make nuclear weapons.

I think they have enough fissionable material to make about 1,500 of them in about six months.

They would work like tundras and Hondas and Lexuses, not like North Koreans.

But my point is that if we don't protect them,

then they'll go nuclear because they have to.

Look at what's right next to them.

And so Mr.

Chi said at a recent meeting with Joe Biden that it's just a matter of time, they're going to take Taiwan.

And Joe Biden didn't say a word, apparently.

Wow, that's so sad.

Well, speaking of our enemies, Russia also has a story where a political opponent of Putin apparently fell out of a window, according to the Russian presses, from a heart attack.

You know, that's very funny because

everybody knows in the last five years 10, 12, 15 notable

Russians who were opposed to Putin or whom he didn't like fell out of windows, right?

Yes.

And then they always say they had a heart attack or they had a stroke.

So why do they keep doing it?

Why don't they run them over with a car or shoot them or inject them with plutonium or something like they used to?

Because they want everybody to play this sick game.

Oh,

he just happened to fall out of a window.

Hmm.

I wonder why that happened.

So they're doing it intentionally.

When I say that, the same modus operande.

Right?

The same way of killing people so that everybody knows that every time you hear a guy fall out of the window, A, Putin did it, B, he did it for a reason to create deterrence, and C, we say it is a heart attack.

Yes, or some other.

And it's kind of a cruel game we play.

Yeah, it's terrible.

That's what it is.

Yeah.

Another cruelty is that there's a lot of different places

investigating all of the different diseases that are coming across the border.

And I came across an interesting quote from your colleague Jay Bhattacharya, and he said that polio and leprosy are almost certainly imports to the United States.

And of course, he didn't want to say directly the illegal immigration, but that's

they are not being checked for diseases, and we do have cases of polio and leprosy.

Yeah, go ahead.

Leprosy, or as it's known, Hansen's disease.

Yes.

It comes from where?

Rural Mexico.

It doesn't come from the United States.

There's only a few places in the Western Hemisphere where it's found.

And they're in Latin America.

I remember my children went to a very impoverished

rural grammar school and they had a person with Hansen's disease.

It's treatable.

Yes, they did.

And it's treatable.

Wow.

Among other things, like wooping cough, that was common.

A lot of people brought all sorts of things up from the border.

Of course, when you say that, you're racist, you're just saying they're bringing infection.

No, I'm not.

I'm just saying we bring 8 million people from the poorest regions in the world, and they're going to come up here and one of, I won't mention physicians, I won't make the city, but one of the physicians I knew very well got tired of treating them because of the diseases that came up and he was in you know a rural office and people came up with all sorts of things that he had not seen from malaria to Shigala to Shigala and all of these weird things.

And he was on the front line treating them.

And no one ever said to them, hey,

no one ever says, we just kicked out 8,500

members of the armed forces.

Many of them, almost all, had had COVID and natural immunity, but we kicked them out because they did not get a vaccination.

But we're going to let 8 million people in without any worry about vaccinations, health care.

Do they have tetanus

vaccinations?

I don't know.

Do they have whooping cough?

I don't know.

Do they have polio?

I don't know.

Do they have smoke?

I don't know.

Measles?

No one knows.

Typhus, typhoid, yellow fever.

Nobody knows.

Nobody cares.

Because that's what DEI does.

DEI warps every single issue.

Every single issue ultimately comes down to, well, what are you saying about that?

That is racist.

No, it's not.

It's racist to bring people in based on their race.

Because believe me, if they were a bunch of Viktor Orban

Hungarians or Poles, we would not let them in.

Nor should we if they were coming across an 8 million, right?

Yeah.

But this is what's going on, and no one wants to tell the truth about it.

When Majorkas or Biden just lie and say the border is secure, what they're basically saying is we were importing people to change the demography of the United States.

and to some degree to give cheap labor for our corporate friends, but mostly to change the demography and to bring in voters to support issues that otherwise we do not have 51%.

That's what it is.

Nothing different.

And I don't know why the blue states are angry.

I guess it's because

Eric Adams used to, remember he used to offer water.

He would go meet them at the bus and say, oh, this is, we're a sanctuary city.

So I thought they were happy and now they're angry.

I suppose they feel, well, we don't need them here because all the conservatives have fled to Florida and Tennessee and Idaho and from Illinois and from New York.

So we're all blue now.

So why do we want more blue dependents?

But when you see 8 million people, that's not the end of it crossing the border.

They don't reach heaven.

That's the beginning because they need health care.

And our system, if you go to a doctor, I had an appointment.

It's one year I had to wait for a cardiologist.

I used to go to a urologist.

I won't mention any names or the city where I go, but it was every three to six months for kidney stones.

Now it's check your prostate, all that stuff.

It's about three minutes you see him, and

it's packed.

And

many of the people cannot speak English.

When I go to the emergency room during my bee sting, I got pretty good care, but I was the only person that spoke English, I think, other than the staff and the doctor.

None of the patients did.

And it was just jam-packed.

Yeah.

And so when you let all those people in, the schools are going to be impacted.

The health care, everything, it's going to cost a lot of money, hundreds of billions of dollars.

And we're already printing $1.7 billion this year.

So the center is not holding.

There's going to be a hard rain that's going to fall next year.

Really is.

Yeah.

Well, we'll see what happens.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back for a talk about Hesiod's Works and Days.

This is a little bit short on our first segment, but Hesiod's Works and Days, I have a feeling, might take a little bit longer.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

So Victor, I know that Hesiod's Works and Days are

a seventh century, early seventh century, is that right?

Poem.

And it's a poem, and I read through it, and I was interested in some of the topics.

And so I think what I would ask you broadly is just how are we supposed to think about this?

Because it is a lot of practical advice, although it's not exclusively that.

And, you know, for us in the modern day, how does it apply?

Well, I wrote about it, I have a chapter in the other Greeks that was published 30 years ago.

I wrote a big book, Other Greeks, and I have a chapter called Hesiod's World.

So he was writing as a contemporary of Homer, but Homer wrote about, as we talked about, the Odyssey and the Iliad were about epics, epic adventures, epic fighting.

Hesiod lives in central Greece in a place called Boeotia, but up on Mount Helicon.

I've been there at Askra.

It's not too far from the ancient site of Athespia.

And it's not wretched, as he says, you know, terrible in winter, terrible in summer.

It's not.

It's a very beautiful place.

And when you go up on the mountains, you can see Delphi and Thebes, etc.

It's one of the highest mountains in central Greece.

And he lives about a quarter of the way up.

Okay.

And whoever he was,

He wrote a didactic.

A didactic is a fancy word for a poem about instruction.

And because 90% of the people in the pre-industrial world were agricultural, he wrote a

poem about farming.

And he wrote it right at the beginning of the city-state.

After the end of the Dark Ages in Greek, 400 years following the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces, there was an uptick in population around 750 to 800.

That's when he may have been composing, probably composed this orally like Homer did.

That is, he didn't write it down, but memorized it, although he was the last generation, probably, so, of the oral bar, so it probably was written down.

I think the name Hesiod means somebody who, he a me, Odos, he throws out songs, and ostensibly it's a it's anger at his no good, worthless brother.

Yeah.

And

he's saying that

the cure to all problems is erga upon

erga, epi erga, epi erga, work upon work upon work.

You work, work, work, work, and here's how you do it.

So he tells you there's a season and a time and a month to fix this, plant that, harvest that.

He actually gives you a paradigm of what the economic life was like that caused the city-state revolution, if you think about it.

Triad, olives, grain, grapes.

Grapes give you raisins, they give you wine, they give you fresh fruit.

The wheat and barley give you bread, they give you porridge, staple.

Olives give you soap, lubricants for your axles.

Olive oil,

good sense of protein, and you can consume olives all year long.

So it's a triad.

They all harvest at different times, so they don't overlap.

You can have an economic...

So there's a whole paradigm that created this agricultural bounty.

And I mapped it out.

And a lot of the evidence for that is in not only the Odyssey and Laertes' form, but Hesiod's form.

So it's a poem about 800 words, 800 lines, excuse me, and it's in dactylic hexameter.

Most of it, if not the vast majority, is written in Ionian

dialect of Greece.

Like it's pretty, if you know Homeric Greek, then you can read Hesiod very easily.

There's a little bit, I don't remember any Boeotian, but there's a little bit of Aeolic.

That's a dialect of Greece that's in it.

And it's basically about Perseus, his brother, and he fighting over the land and how crooked the people down in the valley are at Thespia, not the valley, but around the corner.

And they're bribe-swallowing people.

If a person works in a world onto his own and he has a plan, he can become prosperous.

If he's lazy, if he goes in as an agora lounger, so to speak, if he just worries about the city or he worries about being envious, then he's going to fail.

And in this short poem, he brings in some very famous myths that we have nowhere else at that time.

So he gives us the myth of Pandora,

all gifts.

That's what the word Pandora means.

And he basically said that we had five ages of man.

We had a golden age when everything, it was kind of like the big crock candy mountain.

Then there was still a good age of silver.

We had to work.

And then things got a little worse, and the bronze.

But then we had the heroic age where people fought, but they had substance to them.

And now we're, unfortunately, in his time, in the Iron Age.

there's disease and strife and war.

When we opened Pandora's box, all of these came out as we were warned they would.

We weren't supposed to open according to the various myths.

But there was hell peace at the bottom.

Help.

Hope.

Excuse me.

Cut that, Robert.

So there was El Peace,

hope at the bottom of the chest.

And that's what keeps us going.

We can always hope that next day will be better.

And that myth, and the five ages of men is in it.

There's a really good one about strife where the

falcon or the hawk grabs the game bird and says, I'm the stronger.

And the game bird said, Will you let me go?

Whatever I do, I can do whatever I want to you.

And it's sort of a parable of the Melian dialogue,

a precursor.

It's about realism.

You've got to accept there's certain unfairness in the world rather than whining about it.

He also introduces a very important idea that there are two types of jealousy:

the good jealousy, Aries,

and the bad one, Thonos.

So, if you want to get an example of the bad jealousy, go to Britain.

Socialist Britain, you walk by, you see a Bentley, you say, how did he get that Bentley?

Is anybody looking?

I'm going to kick in the fenders.

Bad jealousy.

Good jealousy, you're in the United States, you walk by, you see a guy in a Mercedes, you think, wow, that's a nice car.

You see the driver.

You don't want to kick it in.

You want to go talk to him.

You say, how did you get that?

Well, Mr.

Anson, it was $120,000.

I said, well, how do you finance it?

I'd like to get one.

How much do you make?

I don't make that.

How much do you make to buy it?

Well, I make $300,000 a year.

Well, how would I do that?

Give me some advice.

That's the good envy.

The suburban rat race, what socialists said the suburban rat race was.

We're all going to be...

in little paper boxes, so to speak.

Remember that song from the 60s in Daily City?

And then we're going to see our neighbor and we're going to say, Look,

he doesn't have any oil on his driveway.

We're going to clean our driveway to make sure that it's as clean as his.

Oh, look, they just got a new Vista Cruiser Buick station wagon.

We're going to get a better one.

That was the good Envy.

Yeah.

And he talks about that.

So it's a snapshot of a revolutionary time in Greece where they're coming out of a pastoral, underpopulated, depressed condition where riding has been lost, civilization

has been lost, and now the city-states emerging with a very vibrant agriculture based on private property, wide-scale land owning, equal distribution, and very productive graft, new graft, new types of crops, new types of agricultural strategy that are creating surpluses and wealth.

And he's trying to give us advice about that.

But in the process, he's kind of like Wendell Berry.

You know, have you ever read Wendell Berry's novels?

He's kind of a leftist.

I used to get nice letters from him, but he's a very smart guy, and I always admired him.

And he tried to create a corpus of work about morality based on farming.

I try to do a little bit in two books,

almost, I guess, getting close to 30 years ago, Fields Without Dreams.

and Letters from American Farmer about what you can learn from farming as far as values, morality, the country.

And that's what Hesiot's trying to do.

He's trying to say, if you work on the land, you will develop an ethos, and that ethos is conducive for civilization.

Yeah.

He has a long,

in the beginning, he talks often about Daiki.

I hope I said Daike.

Dike.

Justice.

Yeah.

Can you give us a little discussion or what is he trying to convey about?

Well, he's trying to go beyond the Olympian gods.

Remember, there's 12 gods, and Dike

is the purview of Zeus.

So

Zeus dispenses justice.

But by the 750, remember, these mythologies go back to the Mycenaean period.

These mythologies do.

And they are elaborated on, adapted, rejected, enhanced during the Dark Ages.

But during civilization in the West that begins around 750, Western civilization, there's already skepticism.

What he's trying to do is translate an old Olympian idea of an anthropomorphic god, Zeus, who gives you justice.

And justice is not really justice.

It's,

did you insult somebody?

Did you help your friends?

Did you punish your enemies?

Were you

moderate in your behaviors?

Don't insult somebody.

Speak softly.

But this new justice is inanimate.

He's saying that Zeus has allowed, he uses the vehicle of Zeus, to create an all-encompassing justice that's absolutely necessary for the city-state.

And that has things like don't lie, don't cheat, don't break the law,

show reverence to the gods, be pious.

Treat people the way you would like to be treated.

It's pre-Christian.

It's not completely Christianity, but

it's a new idea that there are innate laws of nature that we can detect that are central to getting along as humans.

And he calls that decay.

And he uses the vehicle of Zeus, but it's more than just the God Zeus.

Yeah.

He seemed to say that if you live on the straight path, that your society will be governed by decay.

And so I thought that was kind of.

I think everybody understands what he's talking.

He talks about Eubris causing Ubris is arrogance, innate, overweening arrogance.

And if you're arrogant,

then you are going to

create a

nemesis that is a divine retribution, and then Ate, there will be complete destruction.

Oedipus called on the gods by his arrogance, but he caught the god Nemesis.

And so

he's trying to say, be moderate.

I think all of us understand that whether you believe in the Greek idea of nemesis or the Eastern idea of karma or the American idea of payback's a bitch

or the colloquial Western term, what comes around goes around,

that there is some inanimate force in the universe.

We don't know.

Maybe it's divine.

I think it is, that watches everything.

And there's something in Hesiod called the

optimalos

to

Zenus.

The eye of Zeus sees everything.

Yeah.

Sees everything.

Sees everything.

Once when my mother was up for a judicial appointment in the 70s,

Jerry Brown was governor and he was a Jesuit and people were leaking that he knew Greek very well.

So just as a lark, my dad, because it was a very contested appointment, they never had a woman as appellate court judge in this area.

I think there was only three in the state.

So my dad, who was a practical old guy, I mean, He's really great, I worshipped him.

And he said, well, you know, you spent all that time

reading Greek.

Can you write it?

And I said, yes, I can.

Actually, I was pretty good in Greek company.

He said, I want you to write a letter to the governor in Greek and say,

I want my mom to be an appellate court judge.

And here's why she was qualified as a superior court.

And I said, well, dad,

superior, appellate, these are modern concepts, but a good...

He said, well, don't you know how to translate them into ancient ideas?

I said, yes, I do.

I had Lionel Pearson teach me Greek composition.

I had Anthony Robacek.

I had Mark Edwards.

So these were just names of classicists.

And I had been kind of ridiculed.

So I sat down one day and I wrote out the entire letter to Jerry Brown.

And I mailed it to him.

And guess what?

Jerry Brown wrote me back in Greek.

Wow.

And you know what he wrote?

What?

Two lines from Hesiod.

The eye of Zeus sees everything, great and small.

And two months later, he appointed my mother one of the first female appellate court judges.

Yeah.

Did I have anything moving my letter?

Probably not.

He was probably going to do it anyway.

She was a conservative Democrat.

It was a good time to do that.

She had three kids.

She came from a farm.

She had two Stanford degrees.

It didn't reflect badly on him.

No, not at all.

But he did do that.

In later years, he would call up and he would mention that to me.

Usually when I wrote a very negative column about California, he would call out of the blue and rail.

You're wrong about that.

You said that we inherited paradise and we made it into purgatory, and Texas had purgatory, and they made it into paradise.

That's crazy.

Why don't you go over to Texas if it's so great?

He was kind of kidding.

I must say that although I disagree with him politically, I liked him.

I still do like him.

He called me up not too long ago, last summer.

Well, you also mentioned Pandora, and I was kind of

interested in that because

Hesia describes it as a box that the gods gave all gave

the

gods all gave gifts to.

And he said, Be careful of those gifts, they're not good for you.

And what I was

interested in is that he sounds like the gods are out to get humans.

Like they're out to cause all sorts of harm to humans.

The Greek gods are not moral gods.

Yeah, I know that.

They're enforcers of certain roles.

So they're promiscuous.

Cheating on, if you're Zeus, you cheat on Hera all the time and try to get away with it.

If you're Aphrodite, you're slutty.

You're beautiful and slutty.

If you're

Hephaestus, you're a smithy and you've got a crooked leg and people make fun of you.

So they're cruel.

They're just...

men that don't die, they're athonatoi, they're deathless, and they're stronger than we are, they're immortal, and they're strong, and they enforce a particular code.

They reflect the code of Greece.

And what is that code?

It's pre-Christian.

It's not Sermon on the Mount.

It's not Turn the Other Cheek.

It's sort of what Gibbon was calling classic.

Gibbon thought that the advent of Christianity, of course,

was in part responsible for the lack of martial readiness on the part, because they were too pacifistic.

I don't know if he's right.

But the point is, if you're a Greek and you make these gods, whether you made the gods reflect that, you just had this code and you created gods, or whether you really believe that they created you, if you did believe that, you were pious.

If you didn't, you were a sophist or a rationalist.

But anyway,

they were to enforce an order as they saw it.

If...

People get away with bad things, it's bad.

So you punish your enemies.

You don't let them get away.

You don't give them parole.

And if you don't help your friends, who will?

So that's what the chief moral barometer was.

Help your friends, punish your enemies, work very, very, very hard.

Do not be arrogant.

That's one of the worst things you can do in classical morality.

But be boastful, loud, arrogant.

The world will not work if everybody's that way.

You cannot be a slave to your appetites.

Socrates, Maiden Agon.

But why would the gods be slaves to their appetites?

That's a good question.

A lot of people said that, well, the Greeks were so confident, they were so capable, they were so accomplished, they made gods that were less than they were.

They had that confidence.

They didn't need a Jesus,

so to speak.

I don't subscribe to that, but again, that great line in Euripides' Bacchae where Cadmus and Tiresias tell the god Dionysus after he's...

destroyed basically the whole house of Cadmus and Pynthias has been decapitated by his own mother when she's crazed with Dionysic fury.

They say, the gods should be better than we are.

God should be better than men, not worse.

Basically, you're worse, Dionysus, than we are.

And so we don't need you.

But so I want, if people go to read this, they're probably going to note a remark that Hesiod seems to say that the,

you know, overwhelmingly, that the gods are going to put things in your way that are going to trip you up.

And you don't get the same senses, for example, in the Homeric epics where Athena is on Odysseus' side.

If Poseidon's not, at least she's good to him, right?

So Yesio doesn't have that.

And this is the collective.

There's no individual heroes in this.

This is...

Everybody.

That's what makes it so different.

This is every man.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are about great people that do things that most people cannot do.

And they get certain exemptions.

And that one of the greatest exemptions is the gods help them, right?

They have patron gods.

Athena, Odysseus, right?

Yeah.

Thetis, Achilles, etc.

Okay.

Hera likes Paris.

Paris likes Hector.

Poseidon likes the Trojans, etc., etc., etc.

But this is more about

the way the world is and he's its time.

It's not a, I'm going to be the final generation of a long

father to son, grandfather to grandson, or blind bard to blind bard tradition of oral poetry capturing the exaggerated accomplishments of Mycenaean lords before the fall.

This is,

we're in 750 BC,

and this is a whole new world, and we're being very successful, and we've got to transition

from an aristocratic order of the dark ages ages of ponies and herding and

gift-giving to a more sophisticated, much more highly populated Greece, one that would be recognizable for the next 2,500 years.

So it's a pragmatic handbook about how everybody should behave.

So he wants to just

tell people to just expect that the gods are going to cause problems for you in this world.

And so as as you're living, you want to be very aware of that.

He's saying you get up in the morning and Oscar on the Mount Helicon

and you go to bed that night, you're going to have a hell of a day.

You're going to get, it's going to be cold.

It's going to be hot.

You're going to get bit by an insect or a snake.

You're going to have somebody quit.

You're going to have somebody try to steal.

Maybe it'll even be your own brother.

You may be sick.

And these are all the ills that gods gave us.

This race of iron.

We're in the iron age.

We're not the golden age.

But, but

if you keep your nose to the grindstone and you keep out of the affairs of busybodies and agora loungers and you just work, work, work, work, and you don't cheat people and you don't let people cheat you,

you can obtain prosperity and success for all of that.

It's kind of like, you know what, when I read that the first time at 18,

I read it, I think, at 20 in Greek,

it was just almost like word for word from my maternal grandfather, who was the one to

he was the third generation here.

He was born in the house I'm living in in 1890.

And his father

had come here with his grandmother in 1870.

And they had been generation, that was, he died in his bed in 1976 at 86, but that's all he told me.

If you work very hard, or

I would come home from school at 10, I'd say, hey, my parents were at work, and

I would take what my aunt called the wheel, my little bicycle.

Hey, Victor, you got the wheel today?

And I would ride down to this house, and then my grandfather would say, how did it go today?

But he didn't just say, how did it go today?

It was, I think it's time to irrigate.

I think it's time to pick up walnuts.

So we were always working.

And he would say, just as he said, you know, there's something innately noble about work.

Work, work, work, work, work.

Yes.

And I'd say, I was a smart ass at 10.

I'd say, well, why don't we just, if it's so noble, why don't we just pound in vineyard steaks and then take them out and pound them again?

And he said, that's kind of silly, Victor, because we don't have time because we can't even speculate on things like that.

There's so many things that we have to do.

We have to do it the right way, the first and only time.

There's no margin of error.

And then he would say, now go get your gun and go lay down there in the vineyard and shoot those woodpeckers that are making holes.

I thought of that today because I've been on vacation.

I'm cleaning up all these eight buildings.

And I was trying to deal with a woodpecker.

And I thought, I have been shooting you SOBs since I was 10 years old.

And everybody's dead who wanted you dead and you're still here.

And I'm 70 for 60 years.

And you still come.

And then that little woodpecker actually flew out of the hole.

He was inside the attic of my outdoor restroom.

And I thought he was saying to me, well, you've been here six generations, but so have I, because you killed my great, great, great grandfather.

And we're here to stay.

So it's that kind of

how to live with all these things.

Yeah.

Well, he does say a few things in there that I was curious about.

He said that they made

a drink with wine and water, and it was one part wine and three parts water.

That's pretty sad.

Remember that their wine was a concentrate.

Yeah.

It had the dregs and everything in it.

Oh, wow.

And it was strong.

So usually sometimes it was one to ten.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And it was not designed as Americans to have a couple, toss off a couple of

cabernets at seven o'clock.

It was watered down.

People drank it all day, apparently.

Oh, wow.

Because that was kind of a preservative that made the, you know, it was hard to get clean water.

And especially vinegar.

We know that Romans drank vinegar and water, wine and water.

It was kind of a way to

clean the system and stop bacteria in the water.

Yeah.

He also said, and I'm just wondering if this was true from your experience with grapes yourself, that you leave grapes in the sun for 10 days and 10 nights.

Is it that about right?

For raisins.

To make them into raisins.

Yeah, the only thing is that that word, as I remember it in Greek, is staphys.

And as it's used in some of the agricultural writers, they had,

and we don't, because we had to store and ship them.

So it depends on the weather.

So when you put grapes, say, on the 1st of September, a 22-pound paper tray,

it will turn into a raisin pretty much at 15 degrees moisture, 15 points of moisture, and that means it's storable.

It has to be below 15 or won't store.

And it should have about 20 brick

B-R-I-X sugar.

And then it makes a raisin the kind you see in your raisin brand, okay, or sun-made raisins.

But that 21 days can be shortened.

It can be shortened if you take the paper tray and turn it over, called flipping a tray, turning trays.

get one good tray, you grab it on the top and you flip it over and then the green side is up.

You gotta be careful because they can burn.

You don't want to, if it's 108 and you're on day 12 and you try to turn them and they'll turn into caramelized raisins in two days.

They're no good.

So it's somewhere between 10 and 12 to 10 and 20 days.

And of course when the dew starts in late September it's very hard to dry.

They can rot.

But what he's talking about, 10 days, I think They had in the ancient world, there's a lot of debate about it, something between a grape and a raisin that that might be storable for a few months or a few weeks.

You've seen those, we call them frog bellies when I was farming.

I have seen

those.

Those are raisins that are purple.

Grapes that have been out there in the sun for 10 days and they're purple, but they're kind of squishy still.

They're not hard.

You know what I mean?

So when you eat them, they kind of

have kind of grape juice, but they're kind of raisins in between.

And I think they did that a lot.

But maybe that's why he means 10 days.

I have seen, I have made raisins in 10 days, but it was always I picked at the end of August

and it was 108.

And I got those 10 days of longer days.

But usually if you pick them on the 5th of September or 6th or 7th, then you're talking 21 days.

If you're stupid and you go to the last possible day to get insurance on the 20th of September, you will get a beautiful, heavy, sugar raisin.

They're beautiful.

And they will weigh 30% more, and you'll make money.

But you're really risking that because you're not going to be 21 days.

It's going to be 28 days.

It's going to be not until mid-October, and that's when some of the rains come in.

If it rains on the ground, you're all done for.

This is the old way before they were trellised above, you know, high level.

Yeah.

They dry on the vine now.

Yeah.

And then the last thing, because we do need to get to our worst and best of 2023.

But very interesting.

He said the marrying time is basically 30 years old.

Give or take a few years.

I mean, usually we think that older civilizations

got married a lot earlier, although he did say the woman was five years beyond puberty, but the man was 30.

Yes, well,

that's true in Greece today.

That the man is usually 10 years older, but when he says five

five years beyond puberty,

puberty or menstruation can be as young as 12 or 13.

So he's talking about a woman 16, 17, 18 marrying a person that should be 30.

And why 30?

Because that's given him time to grow up.

He's not a prolonged adolescent.

And apparently, by that time, he's got his farm, he's got his wagon, he's got his two donkeys, and he's got a barn full of grain, right?

He's a man of substance, and he can afford to get married, and the dowry then comes with it.

Yeah.

But

it's not talking about women getting married at 30.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

That's Roman decadence right out of Petronius and Catullus and

Petonius.

He's not very flattering about women.

He doesn't say much about them, but one point he says, you can't trust women.

He's pretty short about the things he said.

I think it was trust.

That goes back, it's not so much women in general.

It's just this physical society where

you you succeed or fail by muscular labor.

You have to be smart and crafty, but you have to be strong and physical.

And women can't compete physically, no matter what the trans community says.

I should say.

They can't, so they have to use guile.

And that's where Calypso, you know, Calypso,

who

entrances people,

means what?

Calypto.

means to cover or to make secret or make hidden.

She's an art, you know, that's where they are.

That's what her art is.

Yes, and that was the complaint against women through sex sex or seduction, they get their way.

Whereas men are just open to club you over the head with a big stick.

Yeah, sure, and are ready to believe anything.

So that's a good target for women.

So they must get along really well, even according to Easy.

All right, well, Victor, let's take a break and then we'll come back for the worst and best of 2023.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

We're back.

So, Victor, let's start with the big thing.

Like, what are the five worst events of 2023?

Let's go over them.

What are your thoughts?

October 7th.

Big.

Everybody should get this straight.

Israel was not in Gaza.

It was not colonializing Gaza.

It asked Egypt to take it over.

Egypt did not want it.

The Gazans had been, what they would say, Jew-free since 2005.

They'd had an election.

They voted for Hamas.

They never had another election.

And they got billions of dollars from Europe, from the United States, from the UN.

And Israel subsidized their power, water, and stuff.

And what did they do with it?

They built a labyrinth, a multi-billion dollar tunnel city.

And

they went in on October 7th and they butchered 1,200 people.

They raped, they desecrated, they mutilated.

There's a new video out from the IDF.

And it's horrible.

You can read about it in Powerline.

Even the people in the New York Times that don't like Israel were shocked.

What did they do?

As they were raping women, they were killing them at the same time during intercourse.

They sodomized men.

They cut off breasts.

They tortured women as they were raping them.

Who does that?

Who does that?

And that is really important for people to realize what they did because

they were rooted on.

They were supported by people here in the United States on these campuses.

They really were.

And that was before the IDF ever lifted a finger.

So for about 20 days, the people at Stanford and Harvard and Yale and all these universities who were saying, River to the sea,

smack the F and Jew, swarming, Israel hadn't responded.

They were just exhilarated on news of this.

And you know what?

I'll be very brief, but these people were educated.

But then, is that a surprise?

Castro was from an

upper middle class.

Dr.

Castro, right?

She Guevara, upper educated class.

Mao, Mao was from a peasant family that had become affluent.

Trotsky, upper, upper, he was really wealthy.

He was from a very wealthy Jewish, Ukrainian

Russian family.

Very.

Lenin, upper, upper, upper middle class.

Ho Chi Minh, very prosperous and very educated.

All of them have one thing in common.

That revolutionary spirit of killing people to make it equal comes out of wealthy people who are educated and they feel they have the time and they have the money that they feel guilty about their inequality and they want to make it all equal, but they want to make it equal with two qualifiers.

We need the power to do it and you were going to get it and we're going to be exempt from what we force other people to do.

And that's what happened.

And so people should remember that October 7th was

an ugly scab and we tore it off with this horrible mutilation and killing.

And underneath there was a putrid,

smelly wound of anti-Semitism that had been there a long time.

And the big story was that the Gazans were not innocent.

Five or six hundred of them in this latest account were

They came with makeshift swords, knives.

They raped, they killed, they looted, They

spat on people who were hostages.

They were cheering.

They voted for Hamas.

I don't see that they're innocent at all.

No, no.

Who's number two up on your list?

I think December 5th.

Somebody says, well, Victor, it was just three college presidents,

president of University of Pennsylvania, MIT, and Harvard.

Yeah, but they were collectively illustrating what is higher education.

And all of what I just said, they could not condemn.

They didn't condemn it.

Even

they couldn't condemn harassment of Jews.

We didn't get anything at my university really condemning October 7th till the December 5th testimony.

Then all these college presidents got paranoid.

Oh,

I don't want to end up like Liz McGill.

I better have a memo, not in our name.

You know, that kind of stuff.

So they really revealed to us

what their values are.

And the values were this.

We have decided in our cultural Marxist binary that the non-white are victims forever, no matter how wealthy or privileged they are.

And all of the white people are victimizers and oppressors, despite many of them having no privilege and no money.

And that's because we're racist.

And that's basically what it is.

And if you get that in your mind, you can understand their testimony because they lied to us under oath.

They said to us, it depends on the context, whether we publish people, punish people who are sane, from the river to the sea, and Jews and genocide, all this stuff.

In other words,

well,

yes, they're calling for the destruction of Jews and they're harassing Jews on campus and they want to destroy Israel, but you know,

that's just, you know, students will be students.

However,

if you dare say that that about a trans person

or a Latino or a black, well, we will expel you by the time you blink your.

And they know that, but they lied about it.

And they said,

it depends on the context.

Partly true.

They should have said this if they had any soul to them or background.

They would have said this.

Well, it depends whether we

punish people for calling for the genocide or the complete destruction or the murder or hate crimes.

It depends on the context of whether they are a marginalized minority or not.

If they are,

and they are the subject of that attack, then the attackers will be expelled.

If they are the attackers, then we'll contextualize it as well and say they didn't really mean it.

That's what it was all about.

And they really did damage.

I don't think Harvard, as I keep, I wrote in a couple of pieces today, or this week I should say, Harvard can either be the preeminent university in the United States, or it thinks it is, or it can have a plagiarist and somebody who doesn't tell the truth as its president.

It cannot have both.

And the longer she's there, and the longer that board is there,

it's just bad news.

Every student who's been expelled will say, I didn't plagiarize as much as she did.

Every professor who is denied tenure as an assistant professor with one book will say, at least I had a book.

She never published one.

Every person who

feels that they're Jewish will say, she couldn't even,

she gives us a memo every week when she was dean.

She couldn't even write a memo until they kind of shamed her.

And then only then she wrote a memo.

She hates us.

That's what they think.

Yeah.

So

that was a terrible day.

Yeah, that was a horrible day.

It was like 9-11 all over again.

They kept playing it.

Yeah, and you can't believe it.

And

what you don't, you always either overlook or you don't talk about is the one that said, well, I have to see actionable conduct on genocide before.

That was just mind-bogglingly.

Well, they all basically said,

we have to see how it translates into conduct.

Yeah.

And that's when Ms.

Stefanik said, Stephaniek said, do you mean you have to see somebody

dead?

And I guess the answer is yes, if they are Jews.

God.

And so.

And then the other thing, of course, was Liz McGill was forced to resign at the University of Pennsylvania.

She should be.

but if you look at her,

I looked at her

VIDA compared to Colleen, Claudine

Gay, there's no comparison.

She has been dean of Sanford Law School, she was an administrator at the University of Virginia, she's got a lot more publications, it's not even close.

So if a white woman with far more substance is forced to resign for her ridiculous and embarrassing performance, then why does Claudine Gay be exempt?

And they say it's racist if she was fired.

No, it's racist that she's not fired.

All right, and number three.

What do you have?

Number three, I was thinking about that.

I think it's this outrage.

I had a toss-up.

It's outrage at either this open border where people are 8 million just walking across every day, and you look at them and we're told they're starving,

they seem very well fed,

they have clothes, they have cell phones, and they're just breaking the law.

And everybody's saying, this can't happen.

What's going on?

And it's the same thing abroad to collapse these two events.

And to number three,

we've had 120 attacks on Americans in Syria and Iraq with nothing.

And then they've taken over the whole Red Sea, the Houthis have.

Iran is saying that they run the Eastern Mediterranean.

And what does Lloyd Alston do when he has a little tit for tat?

He wants to

reassure the world, he said.

We responded in a way that was measured and proportionate.

No, no, we don't want to be measured and proportionate.

We want to be crazy and disproportionate.

We want to let Iran know you do that again, you don't have any idea what we're capable of.

You like that power plant, it's gone.

You hit another person, you like that nuclear facility, it's gone.

You like that harbor with those warships, they're gone.

How do you like that?

And we're not going to ever tell you we did it.

We're not going to tell you when we came and when we leave.

We're just going to tell you one time.

Every time you do that, there's going to be a disproportionate.

And we have a lot more reserves than you do.

And if you start terrorism in the United States, then that's going to be equivalent with something we won't mention.

And the problem will be solved.

Yeah.

Up for number four.

I want to add some lightheartedness.

I thought...

One of the worst things, because I've been to San Francisco two or three times this year, and it is a hellhole.

I don't care what anybody says, whether it's the cars with the signs that say please don't rob me, the windows open, or it's the escrement or it's the guy walking by, you're walking by, hey,

cut your throat,

or it's the defecation, injection, urination, fornication.

It's just a hellhole.

And they said, don't exactly, no, it is a hell hole.

You go 30% of those stores.

No, 40% of those stores.

I walk by, they're beautiful buildings.

They were built during the tech building.

They're all empty.

You can't, everybody, it's just a mess.

And yet, Gavin Newsom cleaned it up for President Qi.

He did, for the Chinese dictator.

So he's basically, and then we ask him, he said, yeah, people are going to say, I just cleaned it up for the Chinese dictator.

Well, that's true.

I did.

I know.

And then

he sure was.

He didn't.

It would have been all right if he cleaned it up for the Chinese, and then he kept it clean.

Yeah.

Because it shows that he had the ability to do it.

But basically, he's saying, I will be insensitive to the needs of the homeless and the criminals.

I wonder how he stopped the carjacking and smashing grab for a week.

I bet it was pretty tough.

He put up a bunch of fences so you couldn't see anything.

So that was pathetic.

It was almost as pathetic as his performance in the DeSantis debate, where he just lied all the time.

Yeah.

And then what about number five?

Oh, number five.

I got to get.

I was reading the Satiricon the other day.

It's a beautiful Latin Petronius.

It's a novel written around 60 AD, but this is Petronian.

And this was the aide,

the senatorial aide, decided that he was going to have sex,

anal receptive sex, without a condom, and he was going to film the act in a hollowed Senate chamber and post it on his social media.

And then when people criticize, you say, you just are trying to attack my type of love and the person I love.

As if that showed a caring relationship that somebody sodomizes somebody in a Senate thing for performance art screwing.

And it was decadent.

And it was in the Senate.

And it was kind of a commentary.

We talked about it at the time.

And it was a whole range of transsexual guys showing their breast at a White House event or a little Easter bunny twerking as if

he or whatever the little bunny was was fornicating.

It's, you know, it's Petronium.

Yeah, it sure is.

It's summed up.

These are not existential crises or

major developments.

They're just psychodramas, things like that.

But they do reflect the status of society.

It does.

The first thing he did was play victim after he victimized all of us by desecrating the Senate chambers.

So let's turn to the worst and the best.

I think let's just do quickly the worst, like people that would be on your list.

And if I could do three and you do three, and we can see which ones are, I would say Hunter, Sam, Bankman, Freed, and Greta van Thunberg, is that her name?

Let's see.

Greta van Thunberg.

She was the one who, right out of the gates, news, Hamas kills, murders, rapes.

tortures, decapitates.

Yeah, I'm for Hamas.

That was what she was.

And, you know, I'm Swedish, so I don't claim her.

Maybe I hope she doesn't claim me.

Of course not.

Yeah, I was pathetic.

And then you said Hunter.

Yeah.

People forget about Hunter.

I mean,

in the laptop, I got the copy of the laptop.

The whole, somebody sent it to me, a really nice person sent it to me.

And there's stuff in there.

I mean,

selfies, we talked about the Biden family doing all these sick things.

Frank Biden, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Ashley Biden, they all have a propensity to

swim naked in front of Secret Service women or take selfies of them and have them end up on,

I guess you'd say they ended up on pornographic gay sites or Ashley Biden's diary confessing to

showering at too late an age with her father and Hunter.

But the worst thing about Hunter was he he did all of these things.

He even was a racist.

He said no Asian and this back and forth with his cousin or

sister was, oh, don't worry, I won't get you an Asian.

They were procuring for their own cousin.

But it was...

I guess with Hunter, it was every depravity, drug, sex, prostitution,

racism, it was all there.

And yet, and now

he's...

talking about leaving the country or they're going after him.

He blames everybody and everything except himself because he's a selfish SOB.

Yeah, he didn't say he's leaving the country.

He said he's going to be forced to leave the country.

Who was the third one you had?

Sam Banklin for you.

Yeah, well, I have a little special relationship because he kept me up a couple of nights because he was under house arrest about a quarter mile, half a mile away when the paparazzi helicopters were trying to spot him.

as he was what trying to influence witnesses on his

can you imagine the guy the biggest financial thief in American history and our liberal court system allows him to go back to his parents' house who were knee-deep in his shenanigans themselves $16 million

this and that and father whining about why he didn't get a million instead of a quarter million

and

they were so self-righteous the mother was a bundler of Silicon Valley for progressive.

The father was a progressive tax lawyer.

They were always lecturing about equality.

Sam Bankman Bankman, Freedom, and they were the greediest people in the world.

And they destroyed a lot of lives.

They really did.

A lot of people invested in that and destroyed them.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer person.

Yeah.

And, you know, just honorable mention before we move on to the best, because we want to talk about the best, but Menendez with the gold bars in his house and sewn stuff into the city.

I don't understand that because he was charged during the Obama and how he usually works with the left.

They all know these guys are crooks and they let him go until they cross them.

He crossed Obama on their RAND deal.

You remember that?

Because he has a large Jewish constituency.

I say that only because he has no principles.

He wouldn't support Israel if he had.

It's just because he thinks it resonates with his electorate.

So he crosses it, and what's happened?

They find out that he's going to be bribery and he did all, and they put him on trial, and he got off with a hung jury so you would think

I'll tiptoe around I'll be very clean I won't get an in and no he's got gold barges he's got money he's got this weird new wife that he went to the Taj Mahal and filmed his getting on his knee and asking it it's just out of the satirical

once again I had one addition and that's this

of all the reprehensible academic scenarios, you know what the worst was?

It was that professor at Cornell,

Russell Rickford, and he's out with his bullhorn or wherever he is to a crowd.

And he has the news on October 7th that Hamas with hang gliders and boats and civilians and bulldozers have gone into Israel and they're slaughtered 1,200 people in the kibbutz.

And there had already been news of rape.

And he said he was exhilarated.

Remember that?

I'm exhilarated.

I thought, wow, you're a professor of history at Cornell.

And by the way, I think his father is James Rickford, or John, excuse me, John Rickford, because at Stanford, where I work, I think his father is the father of ubonics.

Remember, the Oakland School District said they were going to create a new language, recognize a new language, and I think that was in the 90s.

They called him in as the expert who tried to tell us that it was a

separate language,

but as equal, I guess to use the old racist language, separate but equal.

But so that I thought that was, I mean, how can a person be a professor when he hears of mass murder and he's exhilarated by it?

Yeah.

And I think he's just on, what they do is

they put him on leave for about a semester, pay him so he doesn't have to work, and then they'll bring him back.

Yeah.

And we would, of course, include Fauci, Majorkis Newson, if we had more time to talk about stuff.

Fauci's, the walls are closing in every day.

We talked about his subordinate who said he was awake at night, remember?

Because he was asked to lie about the pangolin and the bat when he knew it came from the COVID lab, and he knew Fauci had funded that circularly through Echo Health and other

expertise and instrumentation he'd given this lab.

And so basically his subordinate thought, wow, if you do the ultimate calculus, this guy is at the heart of the creation of a virus that infected 2 billion people and ruined the American economy and killed a million Americans.

And yet he's, remember, he said, I don't need God.

I don't need religion.

I am the science.

I am the science.

My little bubblehead toy that he has.

Remember that picture of his office?

Everything was him.

And he was just a mediocrity.

He didn't really publish all that much.

He was a public health expert.

He had no expertise in immunotherapy or anything.

But he was just, oh, it's just.

I know.

So

let's turn to the best, right?

So who are your top best people of 2023?

I like Elon Musk.

I know a lot of people don't like him, but he didn't have to lose $20 billion.

He saved Twitter.

And whatever you say, it is different now.

There's no suppression.

As soon as he came out and said he wasn't going to vote for Biden, all of a sudden there's a story every week about about Teslas.

And you look at the story very carefully, and there's about 10 cars.

But they hate him, and they're trying to destroy his company.

It's the world's greatest, I think it's the largest

sales of any

other car maker or Teslas.

And in addition to that, his SpaceX is a very important, it's working.

I've never seen one person in so many different fields that takes enormous risk.

And for all of his eccentricities, his kids, his wives, his girlfriends, his off-the-wall comp,

he does it really to make things better for people.

He does.

And so I admire him a lot.

He's number one.

Who's number two?

I'm trying to get people who are a little obscure.

I really like this judge, Mary Ellen Noreka.

She was the one

when the prosecutors and the DOJ and the IRS had cooked this whole thing up that Hunter was going to, you know, they had just sat on these statue of limitations.

And there is no statue of limitations for serious, major tax fraud, but they said it wasn't serious and major.

And he was scot-free, and the whole Biden family was off to the races.

Ha ha ha ha.

Pay your, remember Joe Biden has said, pay your fair share, except if you're, you know,

my daughter, or my brother, or me, or Hunter.

But that judge stopped it.

She stopped stopped that plea plea bargain deal she said wait a minute this guy has all sorts of legal exposure we have whistleblowers so I thought that was quite brave because she will pay a price especially when Merrick Garland who's a mean

S-O-B S-O-B and has been never he was like somebody who was crushed in his failed bid to be a Supreme Court, maybe justice, maybe he's never gotten over it, he's traumatized.

Yeah.

Who's number three?

I like Tucker Carlson.

You know, everybody's angry at him, but,

you know, he got into UFOs and all that.

But night after night after night, he said things that were pretty accurate.

He said that we were not going to win.

Our strategy was not going to go to Moscow.

It was kind of dangerous.

that it was probably the U.S.

or the U.S.

knew about blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.

The Ukrainians probably did it.

I think the Ukrainians did it.

He was right about that.

I remember him years ago when he came to Hoover.

He was a very different person, and I think he's developed a sincere populist concern for the majority of working class people.

And to get that point, and he's hated by all the people he used to work with at the Weekly Standard, the Never Trump people.

And he kind of created an honest show.

You could see he was going to be fired.

You could see it.

Because he was asking questions about January 6th that were way ahead of the crowd.

Informants, there was a lot of them.

Here's the evidence.

Ashley Babbitt, unarmed, misdemeanor offense, shot.

I think he even said the word murdered.

And he was saying the word murder to get in the reaction because that's what the left says when a policeman shoots an unarmed felon suspect.

So he brought all the things to the attention.

And I think it'll be very interesting when they did this with Bill O'Reilly and Megan Kelly left but they I think Megan Kelly rebounded pretty well she's got a hit podcast and I've been on it it's very Bill O'Reilly actually has a large audience you know everybody yeah but they're out of the limelight Bill is Megan's not but I think Tucker's gonna make it I really do I think this new venture will work yeah and that's what's gonna make people hate him even more how about number four

well we were talking about Fauci.

So the antithesis of Fauci were two people

that were colleagues of mine at Stanford, and I'm prejudiced because of that fact, because I know them both, but Jay Bhattacharya,

the Stanford immunologist, PhD and MD,

and he's now a Hoover visiting fellow, and I hope he would...

somehow we can make him permanent, and Scott Atlas, whom I've known for 15, 20 years,

and who was

a public policy expert, and they very early on,

the Great Barrington Declaration said the lockdown will do more damage than

the virus.

What you're doing is ensuring higher suicides, missed cancer screenings, economic damage, spousal abuse, drug abuse, you name it.

And we're not going to recover.

Kids are going to lose too.

Let's just concentrate on people who are vulnerable over 60.

Be very careful about the vaccines.

They're untested

in terms of what we usually test.

They have efficacy to stop the lethal first forms of the virus.

But this idea you're going to keep getting booster and booster and booster and booster and booster, it's unproven.

Be very careful.

There will be side effects.

They were right, both of them.

Mask.

If you've got a messy, messy COVID coughing, then a mask has some value in close quarters.

But the idea that we're going to

mask the entire population is going to have damage in itself, both health.

Everything they said was right.

And they were demonized.

I saw it unfold on my campus where the medical school went after both of them.

In the case of Scott, they tried to take his medical license.

In the case of the university, they censored him.

The faculty senate censored him.

They were

personae non-gratae.

It was horrible what they did to them.

And yet they never gave up.

And now

they're completely exonerated.

I shouldn't say that.

They were were right.

And I've had people come up to me and say,

colleagues and people I knew

on the Stanford faculty.

I'm glad that Scott, I was outright about it.

And I thought, well, you were one of the people who signed the petition, you know, censoring him.

I can't believe that.

So

I

deserve to be.

They were really.

And if there's a Republican victory,

If it's Trump or DeSantis or Haley,

I just hope

that Jay Bhattacharya is the head of the CDC or the NIH and Scott is HHW or whatever.

He's HHI, Health and Human Service, HHS, excuse me.

And then maybe John Ioannidis was another one.

He was the big, the triad that were completely right.

They all need to be directing now.

I think there would be no better head of the National Institute of Health than Jay, and no better HHS secretary than Scott.

And John Yannides should be running the CDC.

And we would get out of this Fauci

depression that we're in.

Yeah.

So do you think, oh, go ahead.

Oh, go ahead.

Do you think then Netanyahu should be on this list by any chance?

You know what I get so angry about?

Yes.

This is what I get so damn angry about.

Every single article in the mainstream media starts out with,

yes, this was horrible on October 7th.

And across the political divide, there's consensus now.

We don't quite understand it, but there's consensus among the left, the center, and the right that they have to destroy them all.

But it wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for Netanyahu.

So he's blamed for being too naive, even though all three branches of the military intelligence, this domestic and foreign intelligence, all of them failed, as well as his administration, to see what Hamas was up to.

Maybe policies made them more inevitable, but I am so sick of saying, of intruding and interfering with the domestic politics of Israel.

This administration has made it clear that they do not want this person, and they tried to interfere.

And

Tom Friedman, whoever it is, any liberal person cannot talk about Israel.

in any rational fashion without then saying that Netanyahu's the problem and he should leave.

And they don't understand that, like Golden Ma'ira, he was surprised, Yom Kippur, and like Golden Mair,

she punished the people and they won that war.

And he's going to win the Gaza War.

And then when he wins the Gaza War, when a lot of people want to quit, both in Israel, some, and in the United States, he's the object of enormous pressure.

Because he's not out of it.

Because you've got thousands of people on the northern border that are homeless in Israel.

Because Hamas is, Hezbollah realizes that they have only a brief window.

As Hamas goes down the drain, they're trying to step up rockets attacks, Iran, and we're not deterring them.

The United States is not telling Iran, you allow Hezbollah to start another war, you're not going to like what we're going to do.

That's all you'd have to do.

But I think in February, Hamas is going to be history, and now they're going to have to deal with Hezbollah.

Not because they want to.

But my point is: since October 7th, somebody should say what Netanyahu has done wrong.

He's done everything right, he's withstood every pressure.

But they can't finish a sentence without.

He's kind of their Trump, and they're deranged about him.

Yeah.

So I give him a lot of credit.

A couple more are obscure people to finish.

I wrote a 5,000-word analysis of

Oliver Anthony, the new country Western western blues,

bluegrass, I should say.

And he wrote Rich Men North of Richmond.

And I analyzed it.

It was kind of funny how he did Miners

on an Island and Real Miners Who Dig or Rich Men, Rich Mund.

And it had a lot of brilliant couplets in it that went beyond rhyming.

And

it had a good sound to it.

He has a good voice and it was sincere.

His story was inspirational.

He didn't go immediately try to cash in.

He's not kind of a,

I don't know, fluffy country Western person that's kind of mainstream.

And he took a lot of

attacks that were unfair about him, that he was white,

supreme, all those lies about him.

And he was bewildered by it all.

He just basically said, I just wanted to write something sincere about how the working class is being destroyed.

And it was through globalization and elites in Richmond, north of Richmond.

And that was Washington, D.C., right down the freeway from him.

So I thought it was an artistic achievement, and I liked his life story.

And I think anytime we see people like that that speak out against this bicoastal, elite, credentialed, godless, amoral, global population, it's important because they don't have our best

in their intentions are not our intentions and their desires are not ours and what they envision is not what we envision.

It's kind of a nightmarish control of everybody.

And another person swimming against the current is Riley Gaines.

Swimming and swimming is very cute.

Double entendre.

Double entendre.

Yes, she was at...

She was at San Francisco State.

And they trapped her in a room and tried to physically destroy her, trap her, and she was courageous.

She just gets on television, she just says what she wants.

And the power of her persona is, besides the fact she's very well spoken for a very young woman, she's very attractive, she has a record of being an accomplished, so she's genuine, authentic, but she's courageous.

Remember Aristotle said in the Nicomachean ethics that

The most important virtue is courage.

Without courage, you can have no other virtues.

Kind of like some of the founders said,

well,

we don't even really need

a Bill of Rights because we have the Second Amendment.

If you have the right to bear arms, you can always get your freedom.

Well, the equivalent of that was Aristotle.

If you have courage, then everything falls into place.

And so

she doesn't back down.

Her basic message is biological males have a muscular skeleton system that is different than women, and it gives them enormous innate advantages.

Forget about whatever you say about hormones, they are not women.

And they are taking advantage as mediocre athletes in male sports.

They are taking advantage.

Women, when they transition to males, they don't do well in male sports.

Do you understand why?

Because they are

biologically different.

And so, why wouldn't the inverse be true?

These people are capitalizing and manipulating women.

And they are destroying 50 years of women's accomplishments.

They're destroying their records.

They're destroying their competitiveness.

And in some cases, where there's young girls and they're teen, they should not have to take their clothes off and see somebody parade around with testicles and a penis in front of them.

And

10 years ago, that would have been a felony to do that.

And so she's, I admire her.

I really do.

I admire anybody who comes out of the middle classes, you know what I mean, or from their bureaucracies and says, no, not this pig.

No hick porkus.

I'm not going to take it anymore.

I'm going to tell the truth.

And I think Judge Nureka and Tucker and Jay and Scott, Oliver, Anthony and Baby and Riley.

And then I like the idea that Netanyahu doesn't back down.

He says, I'm going to destroy Hamas.

He didn't say, we're going to deal with it.

There's going to be measures taken.

We're in discussions.

He just said, we've got to destroy it, and they're monsters.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Victor, thank you for this.

Thank you for the entire year of 2023 and all of your commentary.

Yes, it's been a great year.

We had a good year.

We ended up this week on political podcasts.

Did you see that?

We were number two in the nation for about a week.

And then today, as I speak, I think we're number six.

Yeah.

And we're kind of the only people.

I mean, the people ahead of us are usually NPR or Pod of America, people with studios and guests and salaries and engineering.

engineering.

We don't have anything.

We're just here.

Looking things up on our computer.

Salma, California doing, you know, ad hoc mic.

I would like to thank a couple people who have been, have reached out this year, if I could.

Yeah.

Carol Harris of Harris Farms has been really supportive of us.

And, you know, John Harris, the farmer, and some of you know Harris Beef Ranch Hotel Complex.

I can say this without reservation because I've been in this valley.

Of all the successful big farmers, I say big,

say in the thousands of acres, that is a rough and tough business.

I don't know how people do it, but of all of them, there is no one with higher integrity and morality than John Harris.

He's honest as the day is long.

He really is.

I've known him a long time.

I really admire him.

I admire Carol Harris a great deal.

And they've been supportive.

I have some great colleagues colleagues at the Hoover Institution.

Gosh, I don't know what I would do without colleagues like Scott Atlas,

Peter Robinson, and his engineer, Scott Emmergut.

They were great people.

They've always,

it's just a joy to work with people.

And then I have a great staff.

Megan Ring,

she's my chief of staff.

David Berkey helps me.

He's the editor.

Basically, I say I'm the editor-in-chief, but he does most of the work.

He's the managing editor of a Strategica full-time job.

I've got Bruce Thornton from years at Cal State, who's a Hoover Fellow, and he does all of the editing for us on the magazine.

And we have a really brilliant young researcher, and she's helped on a lot of things I've been writing as far as checking facts and things.

And I did Morgan Hunter.

So I've been really blessed with the staff I have at Hoover and the colleagues there.

And it's an atoll.

in a sea of madness at Stanford.

And so I've been very fortunate that people have been supportive because I've been in hot water for speaking out in the way that Scott has.

And Neil Ferguson as well.

And did you mention Megan Ring?

She did you all together.

Yes, I said she was our

basically our chief of staff.

She does everything.

She calls me up.

I'm like somebody who just wakes up and I look at my email or my calendar and I think, oh my God.

Then she calls Victor, Megan,

at 8 o'clock.

You were going to do this.

At 8.15, you've got this.

At 9 o'clock, you have a deadline due at 9.15.

And bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

And then see you tomorrow.

And she points me in the right direction as if I'm a robot.

So I appreciate that.

So

I.

You also have some Russian scholars at your work, friends, that have been really informative about the Ukraine war and things like that.

That has really been helpful, I think.

Yes, we have at the Strategica.

I'm very lucky.

I'm in the 11th floor of the Hoover Tower.

I know somebody mentioned that in a really nasty letter.

Oh, you're in an ivory tower.

It's not made of ivory.

And

I have two scholars there.

One is H.R.

McMaster, who I've known a long time.

I was with him in Iraq as an in-bed.

And the other is Steve Kotkin, the Russian biographer, who's a brilliant guy, absolutely brilliant.

Wrote that first volume.

The second volume is coming out of Stalin, Monumental Biography.

That's great.

So I've been...

We have all kinds of people who come in the military that have been really good friends.

Mark Moyer,

Edward Lutwack,

Andrew Roberts, Neil Fergus.

They're all good people.

I've been very fortunate with them.

I've been very lucky in my life,

and I owe a lot.

I owe a lot to my parents who sacrificed and sacrificed and both died pretty early.

Shouldn't have.

I have two wonderful children, Bill and Pauline.

And I'm glad that Pauline's helping me out.

And Bill is

always, he's just a wonderful son.

I've been very lucky to have him.

I had a wonderful daughter who passed away, Susanna.

We were very close.

We talked every day.

But I've been very lucky.

And I have a great audience.

I was looking at all the snail mail and email that comes to the website.

And to me, it's about 400, 300, 400 a day texting.

I can't possibly answer it, but almost 99.

I put the angry reader up, but most of them are.

I really like the Echo Diesel.

Hey, Victor, I got a part here I can get you.

They're always helpful.

Yeah, they are.

And there's people, I have a doctor, a medical person, owns a company in Los Angeles, Richard.

He's all, when I had long COVID, he wrote me every day with new ideas, supplements.

I don't mention their last name because association.

And then there's a guy named Gary who from the Bay Area.

I don't shouldn't say Bay Area, but he knows everything about.

trees and arbiculture, viticulture, you name it.

And he writes me really funny things.

I really like that.

I got a guy named John from Chicago.

He's a businessman.

And boy, he's had a lot of rough times and it doesn't phase him a bit.

He used to take my daughter on the trips.

He was one of our travelers when I had the Al Phillip Victor Hansen tours.

We have one left.

And he would give my daughter advice about business.

Very, very wise guy.

Al Phillip, my gosh, he's a great partner of 20 years that does our trips.

He and I are partners.

I love Hillsdale.

I have Tom Conner, Mark Kalkoff, best friends.

Larry Arn's been a good friend, president of Hillsdale.

You can't think of all these wonderful people.

Pete Peterson, the dean of Public Policy School, Pepperdine.

And

I've been very lucky.

One of my close, you know, I get to talk to Roger Kimball because I'm the chairman of the board of the Bradley Oversight of Encounter Books, and Roger is the editor.

And what he's done with Encounter Books is like

when I first got on that committee, I mean, wow,

it was the A and now it's Z.

It's just booming and it's profitable.

And he's got all these major authors who've been blacklisted by the major publishing companies.

And how he does that,

he reads all the manuscripts.

And he writes five columns a week.

And he runs a new criterion.

I don't know how he does it.

I don't.

But it's amazing to see him do that.

Yeah.

So I hope in 2024 that I,

and I

prayed, I did, there were so many, I got to think Dr.

Sam Pappas from Hillsdale.

When I had the, I was in the depths of, I could hardly walk with long COVID.

I had high eye pressure.

I could not smell.

I couldn't taste.

I had the grossest yellow tongue.

I had neuropathy and I talked to him.

weekly and he gave me some of the best advice is just calm down you have an inflammatory state caused by the spike protein.

We don't have to give you massive, but I think if you take these supplements, they will help.

And I got on a program, I think I'm 90% well.

And I owe it to him.

So

anyway, I think at the end of the year, it's good to show gratitude.

And of course, all the listeners, because never in my right mind,

when we left the Stanford platform, the classicist, and came here, and then we left the National Review, Jack and I left for obvious reasons.

We started from nothing.

And the idea that we have this huge audience now and we're, you know, on the political podcast in the United States, we're second, third, sixth, fifth, fourth,

given the resources that we they're kind of meager

as far as our audio equipment and studio and everything.

And our biggest problem is Spot and Spike and Sport and Gracie that sit here in the window and look at me just when I want to make a statement start screaming and barking and biting.

So, anyway,

we're very lucky.

We're very lucky.

And yes, thanks for Jack Fowler.

You guys do.

I didn't mention Jack.

We would be lost without Jack.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yes.

All right.

And thank you to the audience.

Once again, I know Victor is thanking you.

We are so appreciative of your listening.

And we have to go to the next one.

I want to say one last thing, though.

Oh, go ahead.

There are people who have been very generous as far as supporting institutions I've been associated with.

Oh, yes.

And my gosh, Vic Trioni of the Winemy family from Santa Rosa, and Jim Jameson, the polymath, multifaceted business person who's everything he touches turns to gold.

He always takes risks.

Roger Hertog, the philanthropist in New York, and one of my closest friends, Rebecca Mercer.

I helped tutor her kids for 10 years.

And they're a wonderful family.

She was the object of a lot of unfair reportage, but she's one of the nicest persons in the world, very

helpful to a lot of people.

So I've been very lucky in the support that

Jeremiah Middlebank, he's been helpful, all of them.

And they really came in handy when things got a little hot at Stanford.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

Well, thanks, everybody, and we'll see you in 2024.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.

Thanks, everybody.