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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to get the wisdom from the star and the namesake.

That is Victor Davis Hanson.

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

We are recording on the shortest daylight day of the year.

It is the 22nd of December, so

it will only get brighter from here on in, Victor.

I don't know, brighter for every country.

I always feel better after the

uh

the winter solstice yeah well so do the romans i mean the fest the saturnalia and and all of the christian you know christmas all these uh

classical societies and religions all felt around december 21st was our december 21st they were kind of more inaccurate right they felt things were getting better because the day got a little bit longer

well we'll see i don't know 2024 things will get better or worse, but we'll have to pray.

Hey, Victor, this,

as ever, much to talk about.

And I think we'll get started on some political things before we return to your thoughts on Harvard.

We have some

New Hampshire polling to get your thoughts on.

Comments by our esteemed president, Joe Biden, about Donald Trump's,

I don't know, screw you by the Colorado Supreme Court.

We'll get your thoughts on those things and more, Victor, right after these important messages.

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I'm back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, Christmas is now

yesterday, I guess, even though we're recording on the 22nd.

This particular podcast will be out on the 26th, Tuesday the 26th.

And that is Boxing Day in England.

It's also the feast day of St.

Stephen,

who is known from the great Christmas carol, Good King Winces.

Listen, if we have time later in this podcast, maybe we'll get into that because I think there's

something to discuss relating to philanthropy in these college situations we have now at Harvard, and we'll get to that too.

But Victor, first,

we have some, I've seen headlines

about that Nikki Haley is now within

four points of Donald Trump in New Hampshire.

Of course, some real clear politics, their averages are much further or farther apart.

Someday I'll learn that, the difference.

Chris Christie is still in the race, 10%.

There have been folks saying, look, Christie, if you're the anti-Trump candidate, why don't you get the hell out of the race then?

Stop being the spoiler like you were four years ago, or was it six years ago, I forget, eight years ago.

So

we have that.

Victor, I mean, any thoughts about the Republican side of the 2024 race?

And

when you finish your thoughts on that, let's talk about Joe Biden.

Well, I think Haley and DeSantis' strategy are pretty clear, Jack.

I think DeSantis will win handedly over her in Iowa, and maybe she'll win over him in New Hampshire.

And they'll go in to,

in the beginning of the southern trek, you know, they have South Carolina and then Bouton, Nevada, all these states will determine who has the

who's second.

And what does that mean?

It means their strategy is based on the idea that Donald Trump will be tied up in court or it'll be all off the ballot or something.

And then the Republicans will turn to an alternate candidate.

But will

an alternate candidate get more delegates than Donald Trump?

I don't think so, at least at this point.

But you never know.

You never know.

But that's their strategy.

It has to be their strategy.

You can't blame them.

It's the only strategy there is.

And

she will appeal in more Rhino states or more northeastern states, and he will appeal in more of the base states.

And I think the number to watch is, does Vybach and Christie and

anybody else on Determined have more

and DeSantis and Haley all together?

Do they have more

aggregate votes than Trump does?

And at this point right now, even in New Hampshire, I think they don't.

But it's getting closer.

But that resonates back to 2016 when

John Kasich and all of the other Rubio and Cruz, they all made that argument.

If we just unite, Donald Trump has not won 51% of a particular primary vote, and they could never do that.

So it didn't matter.

But that's what I think people look at.

Do all these candidates together together have more votes than Trump?

And then would they all get out and sort of do what they did with Joe Biden on the Democratic side?

That remember

in South Carolina, they just essentially said,

butt a jig,

you're going to leave.

And Julian Castro and Corey Booker and Elizabeth DeWarren

and Bernie.

And by the time that

primary in Nevada and et cetera, they were all out and they all got promised certain things.

I think the certain things were they were going to run our country

through this facade called Joe Biden.

Speaking of that, speaking of him,

I should say, by the way, he canceled,

I don't even know if he does press conferences anymore.

I don't think he does.

He can't.

It's a traditional one end of the year, which was canceled for, I don't know, there was an ice cream cone in the Delaware basement.

Who knows why?

Yeah, he knows the press can't lie.

They can't even lie anymore that he's muscular and cognizant, forceful like they used to.

No, he's not going to do it.

But you have some thoughts about him.

Yeah,

I'm getting real.

I think a lot of people are getting really angry at him because

it's not Uncle Joe.

It's not old Joe from Scranton.

It's a mean, nasty person.

And when he went around the United States and he did, there's clips of it six, seven, eight times.

And Sammy and I talked about that.

Pay your fair share.

Remember the whispering, pay your share, share, all that.

And then we find out this week that his daughter hasn't paid her income tax.

Hunter hasn't paid her income tax.

His sister-in-law hasn't paid her income tax.

Her brother hasn't paid his income tax.

And then we have this story.

I think it was in John Solomon, one of our platforms that we're on, or the platform.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but he was talking about that guy.

You remember Hunter references he's the effing most important guy in China, that Patrick Ho.

Right.

That there's some evidence that in FISA surveillance, the Bidens, maybe even Joe Biden came up in

some of the conversations that they were tapping that guy from.

So he's got a lot of exposure.

He's a hypocrite.

And then

why did he the other day, when they were asking him about, do you think Donald Trump is guilty of insurrection?

That's important that the President of the United States not pass judgment on somebody

facing,

and I

backtrack,

not even facing legal exposure on a charge which he has never been charged or indicted, and much less has he been proven guilty.

And yet, here we have one of the most momentous cases in our history.

of a state trying to bar somebody, not I shouldn't say somebody, the leading candidate for president in both parties, according to the polls.

We haven't seen that since the secessionists did that to Abraham Lincoln, 1860 election, 10 states did that.

So

why would you say that?

More of the candidates.

Yes, he is guilty of insurrection.

That's what he said.

Right during the court, court's going to be hearing it.

When the president of the United States says to the country that his chief rival who is ahead of him in the polls, is guilty of insurrection.

And the Democratic Party has tried to get him off the ballot.

And now, what will be a number of states for insurrection?

And the court is hearing that, and he hasn't been charged with that.

That's just

Joe Biden.

I mean, that is a horrible thing to do.

It's awful.

And I think people,

when

you keep that at home, and then you look at this border, Jack,

and there was like a quarter million people who crossed in November.

A quarter million.

It was

eight, 9,000 a day.

And we know that we've had 12 and 15 in December.

It's going to be 300,000.

And

I said that, Sasami, what do you do?

You just.

What are they saying?

Is Joe Biden saying, I'm just breaking the law?

I took an oath to swear to enforce the laws.

And one of them was not to allow people to break federal immigration law, but I just broke my oath.

What are you going to do about it?

What are you going to do about it?

That will take years to adjudicate eight, nine, ten million people that have come across that border.

There were 17

people who came in November who were in the terrorist watch list.

Why are they coming?

if not to commit terror.

And so he just does that and nobody says anything.

He's an absolute insurrectionist.

He's trying to destroy the law, as we know it.

He's trying to destroy the border.

And he has the audacity to say that a candidate who's leading them is an insurrectionist.

And at the same time, all this is happening.

He, we learn now that he pressured Merrick Garland to appoint Jack Smith to go after Trump.

He said...

AIDS said he was increasingly frustrated with Garland, who acted more like a judge than a prosecutor.

So you have his prosecutor at the same time as all this is happening with yet another legal exposure, Jack Smith, who is also in the Supreme Court trying to fast track and eliminate the normal statutory

according to the statutes on jurisprudence, you go to a federal appeals court, and he doesn't want to do that.

Or why?

He's had three years.

Why didn't he do it very expeditiously earlier on?

Why did he wait wait now?

Were the charges new?

No, they were known, according to him, Jack Smith, they were known after Trump left office.

But he waited and waited and waited and waited.

And then

they

appointed him and he waited and he waited and he waited.

And he wants now to get them out as quickly as possible before the election to hurt

the person who appointed him, Joe Biden, via Meyer Garden, to hurt his opponent, Donald Trump.

So you add all of this up about Joe Biden, and he's a miserable president.

He really is.

He's unethical.

He's hypocritical.

He's mean.

And I haven't seen any president like that.

And you know, there was another story this week that

Claudine Gay has her job maybe because of Barack Obama, that he was calling the people on the Harvard Board, and one of them is Ms.

Pritzer, who he appointed to a cabinet position, and he was saying, don't fire her, don't fire her, don't fire her.

And so what I'm getting at, you get the impression

that

Barack Obama is doing what he always dreamed of, dialing it in from the basement.

And it's really weird is that when he, as long as he had to run for reelection or make sure

the Democrats Democrats weren't hurt in the House or Senate, he feigned this idea that he might be centrist, he never was, or an old liberal.

But now there's other people that take the downside of his hard left socialist agenda, and that's what it is.

He's pushing his foot on

the leftist accelerator, and he's using Biden as the culpable vehicle.

In other words, yeah, we destroyed the border.

Yeah, we destroyed criminal jurisprudence as we knew it.

Yeah, we got John Kerry's green initiative.

Yeah, we got it humiliating Afghanistan.

Yeah, we've ceded the Red Sea over to the Houthis.

Yeah, we finally got to appease Iran as I always wanted.

And guess what?

Joe Biden takes the rap for it, but I'll get the credit 10 years from now for fundamentally changing America.

And that's where we are.

Victor, two other things about Biden relating to law, respect for the law and crime.

When it comes to crime, he issued some

executive order or waved a magic wand and forgave

federal

those convicted of federal crimes related to smoking marijuana not not not

selling it or growing it but

otherwise

prosecuted and charged and convicted of that crime and gone

and then

this is a daily this is a I'm reading a headline here from the Washington Examiner

President Joe Biden bragged Wednesday about defying the Supreme Court over student loans and appeared to slip up verbally in doing so.

The Supreme Court struck down Biden's $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan in June, ruling it illegal, blah, blah.

But since then, Biden has pushed forward with several smaller rounds of cancellation.

Quote, I went to the Supreme Court to eliminate student debt out there, Biden said to applause at a, he was in Milwaukee.

Guess what?

The Supreme Court ruled against me, but I still got 136 million people's debt relieved, end quote.

I thought he was a constitutional lawyer at the University of Delaware or someplace.

Anyway, Victor, any thoughts about

those last two items?

Well,

they just show the fluidity with Joe Biden.

So

right before the midterms, he tried to to give everybody amnesty.

And why did he do that?

So that young people would turn out to vote.

I mean, student loan amnesty.

And even though he knew that was illegal, he did it.

What he's doing on the border is legal, and he did it.

And yet he says that, and he said that we're in threat.

He had a little rip the other day that it's not, the danger is democracy, that the Constitution is in danger, I guess, from Donald Trump.

But he picks and choose when he attacks the court.

When he wants a left-wing agenda before an election, then he doesn't give a damn about the court's autonomy or integrity.

Or when he wants Jack Smith just to ram something through and to steal and destroy the traditional appeals process.

He doesn't care.

And he will attack the court.

He's already said that Donald Trump's an insurrectionist, Jack.

If the court says, how can he be an insurrectionist when you haven't tried him with that charge and therefore you cannot take it?

He will attack the court just the way that Chuck Schumer attacked the court.

They do that all the time.

So I guess what I'm saying is for all these points you brought up and the other ones that I mentioned, we're getting to a point now where the left is basically saying to America, I don't care.

I don't care about Russian collusion.

I don't care about the alpha being

hoaxed.

I don't care about the Russian disinformation.

I don't care about the impeachment,

second impeachment, trial as private.

I just don't care.

You get it?

I don't care.

I don't care about any of this stuff.

I do what I want.

And

that's where they are.

And their whole political agenda is now that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist.

And therefore, Fannie Willis and Alvin, Greg,

and Letita James and Jack Smith and the Colorado

people,

justices, they're all working in concert to show us that they can do whatever they want.

And they can try him on, they can either find him guilty without trying him or they can find him guilty with a left-wing jury, a left-wing prosecutor, a left-wing judge on a trumped-up charge.

They'd never charge anybody.

And while this is all going on,

we're supposed to say,

yeah,

Hunter,

yeah, he was the bagman.

And

as Devin Archer said, Joe was the brand.

And they got some 50 million bucks.

And Fred and Jim Biden made out like bandits, and we're not, and they're not going to, anything happened to them.

That's what we're presented by.

And now we're looking at an election that is coming up, and

it's going to be 2000.

I know I quote her essay too much, but it's going to be Molly Ball's 1920, excuse me, 2021 February Time magazine essay all over again.

All the same players are going to get back into it.

Right.

And I don't know what you do.

It's just, it's, it's like,

I wrote this article, you know, Nihilus versus Civilization.

They don't want to make the border porous.

They want to destroy it.

They do not want to

lessen penalties for crime.

They want to abolish crime as we've known it.

They don't want to gradually transition to energy.

They want to destroy fossil fuels.

They don't want us to be leading from behind or

subject to the United Nations.

They want to just destroy

U.S.

foreign policy as we once knew it.

No other explanation for what's going on in the Red Sea or with Iran or in Afghanistan.

And I don't know quite, I said to Sammy, they were like 19th century anarchists.

But it's hard to know how to deal with all this because

given all that then they project and say everybody on the conservative side is an insurrectionary or i don't know you know it got so bad jack even the washington post

even the washington post wrote an op-ed the editorial not the single op-ed writer

that the colorado

effort to ban him was bogus right and even the new york times if you read that article on claudine gay it basically says that

if she's exonerated after this latest round of charges, they're not going to have any credibility.

They can't expel.

They'll get all kinds of lawsuits.

The next time that somebody cheats and they expel the person and they do do that, I think there were 62

that were reprimanded, expelled, suspended, or had their admissions revoked.

What are they going to do?

They're going to just sue.

And they didn't even investigate the first ones.

They just said it came from artificial and chat this, CPI, chat.

You know, that was who discovered it.

And it was just bogus.

And they didn't even really look into it.

They just did it pro forma.

Now they've got these other charges.

And

if you just stop, I guess what I'm saying is if you just stop and take a deep breath, what is happening in the country?

Harvard University has a president

who has not written one single book.

And of the 11 marshmallow articles she wrote, about eight of them under question, including her dissertation for being

plagiarist, plagiarized, large paragraphs, sentences, were everything.

And they know it.

And

they're in a forum in front of the Congress where a white woman has already resigned because she didn't have the moral intelligence or fortitude to say that if you go on my campus and you call for the death of Jews, you're going to be reprimanded, expelled.

She couldn't say that.

And Claudia and Gate couldn't either.

And so,

I mean,

17% of early admissions are down.

Okay, we talked about that with Sammy, but they have destroyed their brand.

They really have.

It's a joke.

Yale has when you have 80% of the grays are A's.

It's really weird to see these institutions that they tried so hard to take over, and then they had them.

They took over.

They took over over the city council and the mayorship of Chicago.

They got what they wanted in New York with a governor and

a mayor.

And you look at the latest statistics on red to blue states, it's just, it's like a stampede.

So I guess it's the on-midas touch.

Everything these people touch, they destroy.

They destroy cities.

They destroy the FBI.

They destroy the DOJ.

They destroy U.S.

military deterrence abroad, they destroy the recruit recruitment of the U.S.

military.

They destroy everything.

And this DEI,

yeah, I think it's a lot of...

That's what they want to do, right?

I mean, chaos is their objective.

Yeah, it is.

But

this DEI is an accelerant because at its basis,

it's absolutely racist.

And it's destroying meritocracy.

And everybody knows it.

And there's no better example.

There is no way that Harvard University would appoint a white male who had

11 articles, period, as a political scientist.

And if they did make that mistake and he went before Congress and said he would not basically discipline people who called for the killing of Jews and destruction of Israel, they would have fired him.

And if they didn't fire him for

a meager, almost non-existent scholarly record

and for

moral cowardice before the world,

they would have fired him for lying and said that, you know, it depends on context.

And it doesn't at Harvard.

They fire, and as we just said, they expel people all the time, not just for plagiarism, but for quote-unquote hate speech or hate expression.

And if they didn't fire from all that, can you imagine a white male at Harvard who had allegations of

plagiarizing 60% of all of their scholarly publications, including their dissertation?

What would you do?

They'd be gone in two seconds.

I watched it unfold at Stanford.

As soon as they dug up a 30-year-old charge, and by the way, they dug it up against the Stanford president because they were hoping to get a DEI president in his place.

And they may well do that when they have the search.

But

that little psychodrama lasted about nine months.

And

compared to what Tesser Le Levine did at Stanford, compared to Clodio, it was minor.

Nobody said he plagiarized.

They hired an outside law firm, and they said, well, he may or may not have enhanced illustrations and graphs and things like that that exaggerated the findings that he had helped co-author.

But there were other authors, and nobody had said he'd done that in other aspects.

And yet

he was fired, or basically, I don't think they use that term in academia.

They just say you have to leave, and then they give a speech about they want to retire, they were planning to leave anyway.

So we're watching the destruction of a whole generation of institutions, and it's all being done by the left.

And, you know, even James

McCharter McWhorter, the half-African,

he has a piece in the New York

Post where he's

calling on her to quit.

And he says that she's basically incompetent.

She has no scholarly credentials that would have warranted the appointment that she enjoys.

And she's dishonest, and she's morally weak.

And he's calling for her resignation.

And then we have Alan Dershowitz, who the left used to love.

And he says that for one of the few times in his 60 years at Harvard, they would not publish a letter to the Harvard Crimson.

Right.

And he had to publish it in the New York Post.

It was basically that

she is basically an anti-Semite because when asked if you were going to protect or extend the protection that

you do to blacks and Latinos and trans and gay to Jews, she just said she wouldn't answer the question.

And the answer then is, no, I'm not, which is based on the actual imperial record of her tenure as president.

She's never spoken out about anybody.

So,

you know,

they just destroy everything they want.

Right.

Well,

go ahead, Victor.

Oh, you go ahead.

Well, I was going to say, there's,

I have to read something, but we have some other um

other takes on her um that i think we need to get to one is

uh eli steele we talked about in our last episode and then there's also some

you know some drama with a donor there at at harvard but i i just i just wonder

it's troubling a little bit for me but i'll ask the question uh later but and then we talk about the march through the institutions i think we should get your thoughts also on

something going on in the Catholic Church.

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Okay, Victor,

two other things related to Harvard

and to Claudine Gay.

And let me just read this

Eli Steele

tweet.

And Eli, as we've, you know, talked about him before, but you know him.

You taught him once upon a time.

He's the son of Shelby Steele, and he co-produces these great documentaries.

And they're working on one right now, White Guilt.

Anyway, Eli wrote this the other day.

To To understand Claudine Gay,

one must understand that she is an imposter victim.

She didn't suffer slavery or segregation, yet she cloaked herself with their victimization as she walked one of the most privileged and protected paths of diversity, later DEI, to power.

This identity politics version of black power is her power.

That is why she, an ideologically driven being, was confronted with the horrific and undeniable victimization of the Jews, she lacked the morals to treat everyone by the same standard.

To do that and to truly embrace the victimization of the Jews would mean admitting that her life's path was wrong.

Her only aim is to protect the black power that greased her path to the top despite her profound, profound mediocrity and immorality.

I think Eli is terrific and it's a really great and interesting perspective that

he presents there, Victim, Victor, that she's an imposter victim.

Any thoughts on that?

Yes.

I mean,

Eli was a student of mine when I was at I am

this last semester, a visiting professor at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine.

A great, great program.

Eli was a wonderful student, perfect.

Perfect

record in all exams.

And

he really hits on something that's a taboo subject.

It isn't just that the DEI

industry demands,

makes all these demands on institutions that they should have preference, preference

over people based on their gender or race or sexual orientation.

But they never acknowledge that they have been beneficiaries of that.

They always continue.

For them, it's always 1870, and they live in the South as a sharecropper under Jim Crow.

That's what they want us to think.

There's no progress.

There's systemic racism.

They always have to come up, Jack, with these little tiny adjectives, don't they?

Micro,

they don't have any aggression, so it's micro.

They can't see racism because it's like oxygen.

You can't smell it, you can't see it, so it's systemic.

And

there's no sense of, wow,

I got a lot of consideration.

I got a lot of leverage based on my race.

I was, especially for those who were born into middle and upper middle class circumstances.

And this is just a wonderful country to do that for me.

It's never that.

It's this is a racist country.

And that's what Colin Glay is.

That's what

Eli was trying to say.

There was no acknowledgement of any gratitude to the system, the country, anything.

And when you go, when you live on the campus or you work on these campuses and you see the DEI

landscape or milieu or environment, it's always anger and hostility to the American institutions, to the American way of life, to the American middle class, you name it.

And yet when you actually look at what America does,

They,

whether it's, if you're a DEI applicant, they're going to add, add, if you still have an SAT, they're going to add 100, 150, 200 points to your score.

It's if it's like the Soviet Union.

We do so many things.

And Claudia Gay never says,

wow,

I said the exact same thing as the University of Pennsylvania President Liz McGill.

And

she's much more distinguished, if you look at her publication record, than I was.

She was dean of Stanford Law School.

Wow.

She clerked for the Supreme Court.

Justice.

Wow.

They fired her, but they didn't fire me.

She never has any self-awareness of that.

And so then she gets, what did she do when she came out of that hearing?

She went back and pushed the DEI button and all the DEI faculty wrote all this stuff.

Please don't fire.

Don't dare fire her, etc.

And that's by the way, Victor, similar.

A number of the people she she plagiarized did the same.

Some of them did.

Not Carol's

Carol did, and she called for her resignation, and rightly so.

Yeah.

Well, why wouldn't they?

She's the president of Harvard.

So

she exercises more power than any academic in America.

So if you're a professor at Harvard or you're a professor somewhere else, And you say she plagiarized me, I call for her resignation or I call for her to be summarily punished if found guilty.

You might be up for a grant.

You might have a kid that wants to go to Harvard.

She might make a phone call.

That's how it works.

So they're all timid and scared.

And she knows it.

And that's why she exercises the power she did.

Right after George Floyd, she started on her soapbox and she never stopped.

And I don't know.

I mean, At some point, people are going to say, let me think now.

These DEI

activists, all they talk about is race.

They have convinced us to have racially segregated spaces inside a campus.

They have racially separated graduation ceremonies.

They have racially segregated dorms.

They collectively

demonize people.

like white privilege, white supremacy, white rage, white this, white settler, white, white, white, white, without any knowledge or appreciation.

There

are 270 million whites and they have various ethnic backgrounds.

They can be Armenians, they can be Greeks, they can be Poles, they can be left-wing, right-wing.

They're hard to stereotype, and yet they do it, and exactly what they resent other people of doing.

And as far as Jews go, of any particular group, if you look at the FBI hate statistics of which group commits commits more hate crimes than their demographic representation and which group suffers more than their demographic percentages.

It's blacks as perpetrators of hate crimes and Jews as recipients.

What I'm getting at is at some point,

if somebody is acting in a completely racist fashion, verbally or by behavior, or,

you know, accusing people of being racist when they're not and has been the beneficiary of basically racist policies, then the whole thing is racist.

And everybody can't say that.

They can't say that.

You go to a university and you have the Cleary Act that says by statute that if some suspect is seen on campus committing a crime to protect the university community, it was enacted after a person killed a young woman and the university knew that he was in the area, then they were supposed to print a full description.

I'm at a university where almost weekly, daily, I get descriptions of suspects.

There's no compliance with the law.

You don't get a complete description.

It's usually the

victim can't remember, the victim couldn't give a gift, except when you had a so-called hate crime, which the Stanford Conservative Law Review said didn't happen at Stanford.

I can't ascertain that.

I won't weigh in whether they were exaggerating or mistaken or absolutely correct.

But what was funny to me is when that suspect supposedly was hit by a racist, guess what

they said the description was a white male with a dirty beard, dirty blonde beard, dirty blonde beard, not a blonde beard, a dirty blonde beard.

But if he saw the face and the skin color, then why not the license plate?

But he couldn't see the license plate, just one letter, he said.

And then this all came out, and you can look at it in the Stanford Review about his past accusations.

But my point is this.

If you have all this asymmetry

and you say that to one particular group,

you can say all you want about Jews.

You can say, river to the sea, we won't do a thing to you.

We're scared to death of you.

But you're DEI, you're people of color, and the Jews and the Israelis are white.

And you can say river to the sea, you can call further destruction, and we won't do one thing to you on campus.

And then we will go before Congress and we will lie to the U.S.

Congress while under oath that says it depends on the context before we act when you call Jews, call for the Jews.

extinction, even though we are lying because we know that when somebody says something awkward about somebody black or Latino or trans or gay, we do something.

But these stupid congresspeople, we're just going to lie right in front of their face.

It's context where we know the only context that matters is when we're talking about Jews or white male.

And I think that

is the same as Target putting cod pieces on children's underwear or

Duncan

What's his name?

Declan Melvaney and his Bud Light ads or the Disney trans movement.

It's something that destroys the brand because people finally get sick of it.

And I think people are really sick of higher education.

I really do.

I think that, especially elite higher education, I think they're going to put their,

I think you're going to see something analogous, Jack, to the blue to red state

stampede.

We can talk about that, but there's a little bit of a

there's a new study out, but I think you're going to have a stampede on universities.

I think a person who lives in California, you know, when they look at UC Berkeley or Stanford or USC or UCLA, they'll say, hmm, I'd better send my kid to the University of Tennessee or University of Texas or something.

Yeah, well, I'm going to move out of state anyway.

Yeah, or

your University of Idaho or University of Wyoming or University of Utah, somewhere that's a red state, any geographical locale, because if they send them to one of these blue state elite campuses, they're going to come back unrecognizable in a semester or two to their parents.

Well, I have a personal thought on that, Victor, also.

And we have

one other

Harvard angle.

Let's get to continue this right after

this important message.

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

And Victor, I do need to read something also.

But since we're talking about universities, right, I'd like to take a minute to welcome back a sponsor of this show, and that's a great college, Hillsdale College.

To our listeners, especially our first-time listeners, did you know that Victor is one of the professors in three of the over 40 free online courses at Hillsdale College?

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And we thank Hillsdale for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So Victor, I

mentioned before that this particular episode of the show is out on the World Wide Web on Tuesday, the 26th, St.

Stephen's Day.

St.

Stephen

is the name from the famous and beautiful carol, a very popular carol, about good King Wenceslas.

He looked out on the Feast of Stephen.

This is the Feast of Stephen.

He saw a poor man, and it's a great little story about the king helping a poor man.

So it brings to mind charity and philanthropy.

And that's just a day.

We're on this day.

So that's my lead into this story.

And it's about Harvard.

And it's titled Billionaire Pauses Donation to Harvard amid plagiarism, anti-Semitism scandals.

And this is, his name is Lynn.

Blavotnik.

He's supposedly worth $34 billion, Russian-born.

I assume he

made some of that in the madness after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But he and his family foundation have given over $250 million to Harvard over the years.

So he wants to pause it.

Now, that's

Victor's

the pausing.

I'm glad

donors are pausing or stopping.

But the pausing until Harvard rectifies this

recent horror about anti-Semitism, I don't get how some of these philanthropists

just don't understand how they have bankrolled this stuff for years that produces this.

I've talked to a lot of Board of Trustees members in my lifetime at a variety of universities and many of them elite, Jack.

And the mentality goes like this.

I'm I'm not going to be the only conservative on this board.

I'm talking about conservative board members.

That's going to cause me a lot of pain.

I'm just going to sit quiet.

But I know one thing: that a lot of my success on Wall Street or in my

elite law firm

or my medical career or my investment portfolio was because I have a Stanford MBA or Harvard MBA or I have a JD from Yale.

And

whatever you want to say about Princeton, whatever you want to say about Stanford, I have eight, nine, 10 grandkids that went there.

And so for them,

and then when you talk to them politely and you say, have you looked at the curriculum lately?

Have you looked at all the things these people are doing on these, they don't care.

They really do not care.

And you can see that with the Harvard Board of Trustees.

Do you really believe, Jack, of all those distinguished people on that board, when they looked at that, if they even looked at that evidence of plagiarism, do they really believe there's such a new word called duplicative language?

Do they really think that you invent an entire phrase out of whole cloth just for Claudia and Gay so you don't use the word plagiarize?

Then she duplicate, she duplicated the language of some sense.

They invent language, right?

I mean, remember

white Hispanic or, you know, they

do.

So they know that, and they're not going to say a word unless

if Carol Swain or John McWhorter and other people, the pressure starts to mount and they start to dribble, dribble, drible.

And then when they put their finger in, they think, you know what, there's more pressure on this side and that.

But you can't.

ask people to do what they're not capable of doing.

And the people on the boards of these elite schools are there for a reason.

They are handpicked by the president and their friends on the board, the president's allies on the board, and their task is to protect the president.

And in

consideration for the protection of the president, they are given particular perks.

And usually it's admissions for their relatives and

advertisements for their own resume.

I'm on the Harvard Board.

I'm on the board of trustees of YA, that kind of stuff.

And you can't ask them to exercise independent judgment.

They won't do it.

They won't.

I've had this conversation with one or two of them, and they will not do it.

They'll feel bad about it when they leave the board, when somebody comes up to them, but

they won't do it during the actual...

And so they pause.

So Mr.

Blavinik, his answer is, do I really want to cut my ties with Harvard just because they're anti-Semitic, Semitic?

I'll put a little pause and let them think about it.

And I know the academic mind, they're greedy to less obese, so they will want that money from me, and then they'll apologize,

cut my associations,

maybe all my family ties.

No, I can't do that.

And

we'll see if other ones do it.

They don't understand something about the left.

So we have some very prominent donors, and many of them are disproportionately Jewish, right?

It seems that way.

The ones that are active, I don't mean all the donors.

I'm just talking about the donors who are upset.

Right.

That'll make sense.

And they're, yeah, and I would too,

given they're anti-Semitic indoctrinate, but they don't understand how the left, they think they're going to put pressure on these people.

And they are, some of them, but the others are going to say, well, these are just wealthy, elite, white people who have settler mentalities and they're exercising their white privilege to hurt a person of color.

That's how they look at it.

And there's nothing that the DI and the Palestinian and all these

post-October 7th protesters won't do.

Shut down a bridge in San Francisco when there were three organ transplant trucks that were delayed for hours?

No problem.

What was the latest?

Go to the Lincoln Monument and deface the Lincoln Monument by pouring fake blood on the steps and then the reflecting pool?

No problem.

Shut down the non-happy

yeah

or go to that black congressional yes

go to a black and use the word outside the n-word yeah use the n-word there's nothing they won't do the hard left and the palestinian group and they won't do it and there's a demand

A lot of these student groups are demanding that when there's a ceasefire that they get the university to pay for a round trip to go back and see Gaza and then come back.

Why don't they give it a one-way ticket?

Because that's what they want.

Why don't you just say, you know what?

You hate Jews so much and you hate Israel so much, you shouldn't have to deal with pro-Israelis in the United States or Jews.

Just go back to Gaza and help.

Help go or go to the West Bank or go to Egypt.

Try

Syria seems like a nice place to me.

You like Iran?

Go to Iran.

Maybe Iraq.

How about Yemen?

They seem to be in the news lately.

It's a good Muslim Arab country.

Go there.

But don't come over here

on a student visa and then break all the rules or chase down Jewish students at Cooper Union or go into the Weidner Library and disrupt people while they're studying and intimidate them and scream at them.

Or don't come over here and go into a largely African-American group and start calling people the N-word.

And

what I'm getting at is all these discussions we've had today, they're premised on one,

they assume, I should say they assume one premise, that the left, especially the pro-Hamas left, can say or do anything.

You name it, anti-Semitism, no problem.

Disrupt progress.

you know, disrupt the progress of traffic or disrupt everyday life, no problem.

Desecrate the Lincoln Memorial, climb up and tear down a flag flag on Veterans Day, go in front of the White House and throw pain or put your fingerprints over the marble.

No problem.

We'll do it anything.

But no one will ever say, but if anybody ever says something like, call me whatever you want, but you're not going to do that.

You are not going to do that.

I think this whole balloon would

blow up.

And you can apply that across the board to the Biden.

madness.

If you had a Republican president, and I don't want to, I know people get angry if I say Trump or just say any of the three, although I'm not so sure Haley would.

But if you had DeSantis or Trump, let's just use those for the purpose.

And they just came into office and they didn't make it, they didn't say anything.

I'm going to do this.

They just, executive order on day one, we looked up on the news and here where the wall was being built, right?

All the way to

all the way to the Gulf.

And then all of a sudden, you started to see people deported who had broken.

Yeah, like 20,000 of them in the first week or two.

And then all the screaming and yelling, this is unfair.

You're right.

Just go back to your utopias.

You left.

It would all stop.

It would all stop.

People would say, you can't do that.

And you said, you can't do it.

You broke the law, not me.

And the next time somebody went into an outlet store, five or six people, and they started breaking display cases and grabbing shoes and computers.

And all of a sudden they were met at the door, you're not leaving, and they were put in handcuffs and they were charged with grand theft, five-year prison sentence.

They would stop.

In other words, there's no support for all of this.

There's no support.

And if Hunter Biden actually got a fair judge and he looked at all of the evidence dispassionately and they found what it was, and he didn't make a big deal out of it.

He said, I'm going to punish.

He just said, you know, according to the statutes, you're going to be in jail and you're going to, I don't know, five years, ten years, if that's what the,

if they just stood up to all of this,

it would, it would dissolve.

Like it dissolved in the 70s.

Yeah.

And it later on.

One of the things you talked about earlier about back on the, you know, getting out of college, I'm not going to apply to Yale or Harvard, et cetera, and go to state colleges.

Just a practical matter.

So many of these, my home, I have five kids, they all graduated graduated from the University of Connecticut.

And not as much as, I'm not even going to go down that road.

I'll just say there are a,

as we've discussed before, there are a tremendous amount of foreign students at our state colleges because some of them, because they're paying full boat.

That's why.

And so

it might even

people

opting for state colleges that are already, I think at this point, unfairly treating the children of the taxpayers of the states because they well we we had that in we had that in california when

when the university of california before there was a court ruling was charging students at the california i was a professor and it was a lot of students were upset about it we had a lot of students we had an equestrian program we had a wonderful physical therapy program we had a wonderful nursing program we had a wonderful engineering the Cal State Fresno Business School was very good.

So we had a lot of

out-of-state students and they were paying three times the tuition.

And yet if you were an out-of-country student,

we had a student body present with an illegal alien.

And they were not paying out of state.

They said, well, they live in California.

Yeah, but they're here illegally.

They're not U.S.

citizens, but they're not even green-collar.

And you're charging them one-third that you charge a U.S.

citizen that doesn't break the law right across the border in stateland Nevada.

This is crazy.

And I wrote a couple of columns about that.

And, you know, when you write

for, I don't know, 40 years and you read your mail, it just gets so wearisome because, oh, you're a racist.

How dare you say that?

And you see, it's like a Pavlovian automatic response.

So you can't discuss all these things.

And

it's so strange.

And it's not racist to discuss them.

It's the opposite.

When you look at video after video after, I'm not just talking about Fox News.

I'm talking about Yahoo news.

I'm talking about Google news of the smash and grab crimes in,

I don't know where, L.A.

or San Francisco.

It is inordinately, and inordinately means the number of perpetrators is much larger than their representation in the population.

Black males make up about, young black males make up about 4% of the population.

But when you look at the people who are committing these crimes, these violent crimes,

the knockout game, smash and grab,

mass looting, swarming, it's inordinately young black males.

And yet you cannot say to a member of the black community, I think Among all the issues that we're worried about the black community, that you don't have parity in this particular education opportunity, We're willing to work, but you also must realize that young black males are committing crimes since George Floyd at an astounding rate given their demographics.

What would people say if you do that?

I'll probably be brought up before the Stanford Faculty Senate for saying that, but it's racist not to point that out.

It really is.

Nobody talks about that.

Have you noticed anybody saying anything about that?

I haven't.

And you're never going to solve the problem of crime or why people do that or what is the messaging that suggests that it's okay.

Is it critical race theory that says that the law is just a construct and has no moral basis?

Is it the

DEI radical fringe who says that this is a form of reparations or tit for tat that all during Jim Crow, I guess in the South, people were robbed of their dignity and their wherewithal.

So why can't their great-grandkids go out and rob somebody in Portland, Oregon?

I don't know.

But I want to hear some kind of theory of what it is.

And then when you juxtapose that with reparations, it doesn't make any sense.

Did you see that on the reparations?

We talked about it last

episode that San Francisco is pulling up the drawbridge on that.

But New York State, Governor Hochul, is creating a reparations commission.

I know.

And the one in California can't pay the rent.

And they all

money.

We have 65.

I said in this program, we had a 20, a $30 billion.

I think it was about three months ago, Jack.

I casually said it's going to be $45 billion.

I got about five emails that, why do you lie like that?

It's going to be, it's $55 billion.

It's getting up to $60 billion.

Yeah.

I thought I saw $68 somewhere.

I think Money Magazine did an analysis of why it is so big.

And it's why, just what you think.

It's the spending, but it's the 280,000 people as well who left California in the last 18 months.

And the people who are leaving, and everybody knows this is true because you know them.

These are the upper, upper middle class and the wealthy.

They are high tailing it out of here.

And we are bleeding and hemorrhaging billions of dollars, hundreds of millions, billion.

And we're down to less than 1% that pays 50% of the income tax.

We can't talk about.

And instead, we're spending more and more and more money.

San Francisco is broke.

Los angeles broke fresno all the cities are broke the the the state can't there we have prop a proposition which i endorse

uh in fresno county to fund the crumbling infrastructure of cal state fresno it's falling apart and the only way to apparently is to get a one-quarter uh cent property uh increase in the sales tax which i i cut a video supporting it because the the the state either won't spend the money that they gouge us in our taxes or the money that is spent is misappropriated to other things that are unnecessary.

But boy, when you teach there, I taught there and when I retired, the whole campus was crumbling.

And that's true of a lot of these campuses.

So it's very strange where you have these high, high taxes

and you have these enormous expenditures, and yet the roads in California are among the worst in the United States, and the bridges are terrible, and the water projects and the aqueducts are decrepit, and the schools are decrepit.

And it's almost like a rule: the more you tax, the worse things get.

Yeah.

Well, the solution to that is a train from Bakersfield to Merced.

So that's.

Well,

it's

three and a half miles, four and a half miles from my house, and I haven't been able to use Mountain View Avenue to go to the west side in, I don't know, five years.

Yeah.

My whole street is shut down.

Yeah.

Well, it's be another decade and more.

Well, Victor,

we have maybe time for one more quick thing along these same lines, I guess.

And

we'll get your final thoughts on such right after these last important messages.

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

I was a bad boy, Victor.

I forgot to mention at the beginning of this episode, because there are always a lot of new listeners to the show.

The numbers keep growing,

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Its web address is victorhanson.com.

And I encourage our listeners to visit.

And you will find links to Victor's books, past and forthcoming.

the archives of this podcast, Victor's other appearances on other podcasts and radio shows, shows, et cetera.

I think, Victor, they're up on the website now.

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Also, that's the blade of Perseus, Victorhanson.com.

Victor, one last psychology, race, madness

topic.

And

this is from the Daily Mail.

I'm reading a story that's out today.

A woman has filed a lawsuit against the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire,

claiming she was ousted from her job as head of the school's diversity office because she is white.

Rochelle Hoffman, 36, says she was forced to resign as interim director of the campus's multicultural student services office shortly after being promoted because of racial discrimination in a civil lawsuit.

Hoffman claims students told the school's former vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion and student affairs, what a title, person's name is Olga Diaz, that a white woman was not suited for the role.

No surprise here, Victor, the woke were getting eaten by their own

ideology.

When I went on that little excursus about racial relations, I'm very pessimistic.

We had a former NFL star who said that he was tired of white sportscasters talking about the quality of athletes, 70% of which are more than that in the NFL are African-American.

So he wanted to have, did you see that,

a white versus black Super Bowl?

And

what if somebody, a white person, said that?

I mean, it would be

because white people used to say things like that.

And that was what.

this the whole Jim Crow and the civil rights was all about.

So here we are, a 360, a full circle.

So what it does is it really casts into doubt that a whole effort.

It says that this is what it was all about,

you know,

marching in Birmingham and doing all of this just to come on 360 degrees so we could replace one sort of discrimination with another.

Is that what it is?

Is that what South Africa was about too?

If you read what's going on over there.

It's really depressing because it calls into question a person's whole life.

I mean, mean, as I've said before,

my parents were very strong Democrats.

They drove up in their old jalopi all the way to San Francisco to go to the Grace Cathedral to hear Martin Luther King, who was in San Francisco in 19, I think it was 1962.

And we waited.

And then an African-American family called my father up and said they didn't have from Hunters Point.

Could we go?

So we diverted and we went there and they weren't ready.

We waited four hours, three hours, and we finally got our whole station wagon had about nine people in.

We got there.

We were all too late.

And I was

kind of being an aggressive little bastard.

I was at the front of the line and my parents pushed me in and closed the door.

And when they closed the door and I was all alone, and it just happened that Martin Luther King was walking in at that time and was, you know, I shook his hand, everybody right by the door.

And I heard this.

be all you can be speech.

You know, you're going to be, you're going to mow the lawn.

Make sure that you mow the lawn better than anybody else.

And all of that experience,

where does it end up?

Does it end up with clotting gay?

Does it end up with separate races and dorms or Super Bowls?

It's just, it's not sustainable.

And

there's too many people.

When you look at what's going on, there's just too many people doing too much damage.

I mean, you've got Mark Milley, you know,

white rage, white privilege.

Read Kendi, call up your Chinese counterpart.

You've got Clapper, you know, Donald Trump is a Russian asset.

No apologies needed when he's found out not to be.

All of this incremental, insidious attack on these, tear down the Arlington Monument, Reconciliation, Civil Rights Statue,

rename this, do this.

It's just a constant.

I think there was some professor.

Do you remember this?

It just came out.

I was just reading it in a panel at, it was in, I think it was in Minnesota.

This is the University of Minnesota?

Yeah, wasn't it?

This woman said that the goal, her goal was to end the settler project in the United States and give all the land back.

We are, yes, we are a settler project.

That's what this nation is.

I thought, well, who would pay the taxes to pay your salary?

Who would pay the taxes to pay your salary?

And it's just an assault constantly on all of our institutions, on

two genders, on Christmas.

you name it, you can't, on Christmas presents, everything.

And it's not that some people are glued to the news.

I'm not glued to the news.

I try to read it every day.

I just want to be left alone.

Everybody does, but they don't leave you alone.

It's not enough that you can't say, you know what?

Half the country thinks that Donald Trump is crude and mean and a buffoon.

Okay.

And they don't care whether he had a good four years or not.

They just don't like him.

And they

don't want to vote for him.

Fine, have an election.

But just don't change all the voting laws right before the election, as they did in 2020.

Or don't try to take him off the ballot.

Just let the people decide.

And

it's not, you know, it's,

I don't know what

you get to the point where you don't really know.

You turn on a television, you look at a movie that just came out, or you see what's, it's all the same.

At some point, somebody's going to say, if you don't stick up for the United States and you don't say it

doesn't have to be perfect to be good, and you don't say it's better than the alternative, nobody's going to say it.

They are attacking American shipping, they're attacking all the wills of civilization in the Red Sea.

We're not doing anything.

Iran is feeding all of this hatred and violence in the Middle East, and we're not doing anything.

And at some point, somebody's

right.

But you also,

you, not you, Victor, but one, me, lack the confidence

to think,

okay, this dam is going to break.

Because you know, people are fed up.

And we've seen things, you know, Bud Weiser and Dylan Mulvaney and people were pissed off.

Excuse me, I didn't say that anymore.

I said Declan.

Excuse me, it was Dylan.

Well,

I'm not acquainted with

the guy in the sports bra in the bubble bath.

His gender doesn't bother me.

It's his attitude that really bothers me.

Yeah.

But, you know, we see,

of course,

every home is staggered by inflation and by dynamics.

And yet

2022 elections are what they were.

And we think, well, that's going to be a manifestation of people's,

I'm not going to take it anymore.

And then the 2023 elections in Virginia and Kentucky, well, you would have thought they might be.

How about electing the mayor?

Give the credit to the mayor in Chicago.

He told everybody what he's going to do.

He did exactly that.

Said he was going to open up the city to illegal rents.

He was going to attack, basically, keep defunding the police.

And he was going to create a racial spoil system to the degree that not, and he's doing just that, and they voted for it.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

So that's what is,

that's what's kind of, you know.

yeah well i'm not i'm not i don't know if the wave is coming and uh

just the

just the amount of effort and time and capital to undo all this how do you get 8 million people authenticated and credentialed or background checks or health checks or

thrown out thrown out and revert to a legal-only merocratic immigration system again what you do with hardware what would it take you would need a John Silver or SAF Iwakawa in every university.

And then you would need,

you'd have to have a revolution.

What would it do to this idea that people from 50 million people come from foreign countries, and when they arrive here, they don't know anything about their host other than he's magnanimous, and they start throwing paint on the Lincoln Memorial, or they start defacing the White House wall, or they think they can go around and push and hit Jews.

Or, I don't know where this came from.

How do you unlearn all that?

How do you tell somebody who's a biological male with testicles and a phallus that just because he says that he is female, that does not give him the right to go in with his muscular skeletal advantage and destroy women's sports records?

How do you do that?

How do you just say, what, I guess, just say no?

No, no, we're not going to do it anymore.

It was kind of like network, you know, the movie.

No, we're not going to take it anymore.

And I don't want to just rant because there's a lot of things that are great that are going on.

And I just want to finish with one thing, though.

I had a guy who got kind of angry at me and he wrote a letter.

And this is something that we all, okay.

So this is the last thing I'll say today.

Okay.

Let's see your show.

Do whatever you want.

Well, he got mad because I say Democratic.

And he said

Democratic

is an adjective.

They're Democrats.

So you should say Democrat Party.

No.

Those parties, I know that everybody wants to say Democrat, right?

Because they don't want to say the Democratic because they don't believe they're really Democratic.

Small D.

Okay, I get that.

But there's two different parties who deliberately chose their titles.

The Republican Party said Republic because they wanted a consensual federated system of representatives to be emphasized because they didn't trust the mob and they looked more at Rome, the Roman Republic.

The Democratic Party felt that that was not democratic, so they used a term from Greece, democracy.

But democratic is the adjective from democracy, and Republican is

the adjective from Republic.

You are a Republican, or you're a Democrat

is an adjective.

And if you are like a Democrat, it's Democratic.

And I don't, a Democrat is a noun, and a Republican is a noun, and they are also ad.

But the democracy, because of the classical Greek I-K-O-S, does not serve as well as an adjective in the noun.

You can say, I am a Republican, and I believe in Republican government, but it's awkward to say, I am a Democrat and I believe in Democrat government.

You see what I'm saying?

You have to make that into an adjective.

And just because you say Democratic

doesn't mean that you're naive, stupid, you're helping the left.

You know what I mean?

Victor drank the Kool-Aid.

Yeah.

Oh, I get so tired of that.

So tired when people correct me and say, Victor, it's the Democrat Party.

They're not Democratic.

I know that.

That's why when I use a capital D.

But the

Republic, Republican has a noun, Republic, and then a noun-dash adjective, Republican person,

Republican ideas.

Democrat, democracy, noun.

Democrat is a noun, and you can't say Democrat ideas.

You say Democratic idea.

It's just...

It's hard to say.

Maybe you can say the word Democrat conserved by extension as an adjective, but it doesn't work that way with that particular root so that's why well somebody uh somebody's just been schooled by uh the great professor well what i'm saying is and i i i confess that my dogs are going crazy

that's all right because i i can say i can tell you that i understand people on the left say ha ha we're we're the democratic small d because we believe in republicans uh they can't say republicanatic or whatever fragment

what would that be but anyway that that was something i wanted to get off my chest because i've been reading all the um personal email i got today hey hey you must need a whole day for that my friend oh i do i mean the same writer got angry for me using the word but

i've written i understand that when but can be a bad qualifier you know oh but i was thinking but b-u-t-t but uh well no i mean you know like yeah

homas is a terrible organization a at massacres b at rap rap but

it does have you know yeah i understand how that's used but that's not how i use it and wow any well it's uh somebody needs a hobby out there so victor uh we thank that you've been great of course it's been a little a little uh a little down but uh you know this is reflection of marriage

the reality of uh of our

you got to be up because a lot of people write and say that they they listen to us jack when they're doing exercise and they feel upbeat.

And today,

I think part of it was I had to go to the mountains 7,200 feet.

I drove up

to my house up at Huntington to check it.

I had let the

I won't go into how it happened, but a door was open and a window was open and the bill went the propane to astronomical levels because you have to have it at 50 degrees and the lights were left on.

And my gosh, I got all these letters from the power company.

You're way over your

allotted.

You're going to pay, of course, but you're over.

Right, right.

So I had to go up there and do it.

Well,

I'm going to send you some.

My wife and I, when we got up there,

there was nothing open at 7,200 feet.

The car said,

warning light, your fuel is low, 20 miles left.

And of course, we didn't know whether up and down, we were curves, curves, whether the tank was just reading that 20 miles because the light went on.

Usually when the light goes on, you have 50 or 60, but this time it said 20.

So we were trying to coast back down to the next gas station 21 miles away.

Oh my gosh.

That's

a little anxiety.

I came charged to yell at it and scream.

I had lunch today, by the way, with

a fan, a guy I'd never met him before.

bob haskins great guy anyone want to meet because of the show and then he said he was inquiring of me about your car and the truck oh yes yes i have news jack

i have news what is it i don't know if it was a mention of my echo diesel but i had been in vain that i had got nowhere with the dealer and My wife went over.

There was a check on the truck.

And yes, the cab is off.

And it's sitting there.

And we now passed one month waiting to get into the dealer.

And then

we're way past two months, three months, which is on top of one month earlier and one month for the turbo part.

So we now have, we're getting five and a half months out of 24 months.

We haven't had the truck.

So I wrote all this.

I got nothing.

And then

I got a letter.

And I had given them all solutions, right?

Right.

And I was angry.

I wanted it to appreciate it because of the time I didn't use it.

I told it was very dangerous.

My son was almost killed when the whole car shut down.

And then when it started throwing out, after it was fixed, certified fixed, it started throwing out, suddenly started leaking coolant at a very dangerous rate, heating up.

So

I think it might have been because you and I mentioned it.

I don't know.

But all of a sudden, they get a nice letter from a very nice person that says,

we cannot accept your request to substitute a truck for the truck that you don't have.

However, however, we are willing to repurchase your truck back again.

And, and I don't know what the price will be, but I wrote back and said,

if you were to buy the truck back, I would like the fair price, it's in great shape.

I would like the fair market price

with five months plus of depreciation

added onto it, but I had no vehicle.

And the fact that I was coerced, cajoled, convinced, willing, whatever term it is, I bought a very expensive extended warranty.

And by the way, when you buy a seven-year warranty, it's not seven years.

The fact it gives you five, you're buying two.

You know what I mean?

Yes.

I have a double warranty.

Neither warranty did any good.

And the two together seem to be worse.

I think you were cajoled then.

Go ahead.

Okay.

So anyway, and then I said I put an expensive bedliner and top, and I would like all that into consideration.

And if they did it, I would be willing to buy and replace.

I need a truck,

a Ram truck, gas,

5.7 Himi.

And I got a letter back saying,

you are now processed onto the next division, which is adjudication of the value of your truck.

So

I haven't heard about the adjudication of my truck, and I'm sure it'll take another two months, but at least I passed the initial hurdle.

No, we're not going to give you another truck.

Yes, we're going to try to repurchase your truck.

Okay, but we have, before we repurchase your truck, your truck has to be fixed so it can be repurchable.

So it's sitting there trying to be repurchased by the people who will soon own it, but don't want to own it yet because they, the future new owners of the people I bought it from in the first place, don't have their own part to put in the truck so that they can purchase it from me.

And they do not want to purchase it from me as is.

In other words, they don't want to be me owning a truck that's inoperable.

Maybe the parts along the railroad tracks in Los Angeles are somewhere.

No, it's in Los Angeles.

I've been told

it's in Los Angeles, so it will be there in about three days.

Well, hopefully later.

No, no, no, no.

I was told that a month ago.

And I call in.

It's in Los Angeles.

It's going to be here in three or four days.

It's on Los Angeles.

I haven't quite heard, though.

I'll check up.

It's on Los Angeles.

Los Angeles, pretty big place.

I saw Gavin Newsom with his fleece vest going out there with a picking up things, right?

Yeah, the Wild West looting of the trains.

Well, maybe my part, I should go down there and try to scrounge around the packages on the ground from the looting.

Maybe my little turbo, all it is is a turbo, high-pressure hose.

I mean, I could probably go to an off-place and get it and invalidate the warranty.

It would work fine, but can't do that.

Anyway, I'm making progress.

And I

think that in another year, I'll have a truck.

Well, next year, which maybe is just a few days away.

Yeah.

All right, Victor.

Hey, folks, folks, rate the show on iTunes and slash Apple zero to five stars.

And there's a 4.9 plus ranking.

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

Of course, thank you for listening, no matter what platform you listen on.

Thanks, especially to those who leave comments, which we read.

Some of them make me cry.

Time for Fowler to retire.

But here's one from Ruben Muma.

Ruben Muma, who titles it, The Most Sensible Perspective on World Politics.

I get excited when each episode comes out.

I listen to many political commentators on podcasts.

And while I enjoy them, I don't always agree with every perspective.

And VDH always makes sense.

Thank you and God bless you.

Thank you, Ruben Muma.

And again, all who...

uh leave comments and thanks to those folks who sign up for the thing i i write civil thoughts the free weekly email newsletter contains 14 recommended readings, great essays and articles.

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Victor, thanks for all the wisdom, even though it might be a little glum, more glum than usual today.

But thank you for that.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

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

Wait, you have something else you want to add?

I just wanted to say Merry Christmas, have a wonderful vacation, holidays, and

Victor signing off.

Again, thanks for listening.