Leading and Misleading Men

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to get wisdom from the star and namesake Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is the

syndicated columnist, essayist, best-selling author, farmer,

classicist,

just everything.

Victor has an official website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

And we'll talk more about that towards the end of this episode.

We are recording on Saturday the 16th.

And I think, Victor, this is the last episode that I'll be with you before Santa comes down the chimney.

So maybe at the end, I'll do some Merry Christmas wishings.

But we're at the start, not the end and the start.

I'd like to get Victor's thoughts about a column.

written by a former student of his and the son of a dear friend of his.

That's Eli Steele, son of Shelby Steele, a great filmmaker and he's got a really interesting piece um in newsweek it's titled claudine gay that's the controversial president of harvard claudine gay is why i never check the quote-unquote black box it's really really interesting and we'll get victor's thoughts on that and a host of other topics right after we begin with these important messages

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is, I'm a big fan of Eli Steele, in part because I came to know him and actually

dealt with him a little bit a few years ago when he and his father produced the

documentary terrific documentary what what killed michael brown but um

he and his dad are working on a new documentary and in our last recording you mentioned like that what's at the core of all this racial

animus in america

it's really white guilt and this is the that's actually the title of the documentary that

eli and and shelby are uh and rita their mom working on so um okay shelby steel black man right well he's his dad was black his mom was white uh shelby's wife

rita is white and they have a child eli

and in america today eli's piece is is saying, you know, I am who I am.

I want to be determined by meritocracy.

But through life on the left, there was always this pressure for someone, and we've talked about it before, Victor, like the drop, the drop of blood,

to be categorized myself as black and then take advantage of that when I'm applying to college.

I, kind of well-to-do in my way, upper-middle class, let me take advantage of this while

Black Americans who really needed help were not in a position to take advantage of

these options, such as applying for school.

Anyway, he's got a piece in Newsweek.

I read the title earlier.

I just think he's dead on.

He says, you know, Claude and Gay

is the poster president, I believe, president for what's wrong with checking the black box in America.

Your thoughts, Victor?

Yeah, we've talked about this, about this racial fixation.

It's very funny how the left has has really dropped adopted the 116th drop because once you go down that pathway and you're going to fixate on race

then you you lead yourself into a cul-de-sac because you can't get out because you say okay

if you're part black you get all of these advantages in admission retention promotion hiring but

who's to say who's black?

Because you really can't tell necessarily by just visual appearance.

So then you have to get into, I guess, genealogy.

And the ultimate result of all this is you get Rachel Dozel who faked her black identity, or you get that Indian student who faked it, who bragged about it, or you get the Native American Ward Churchill.

That's the ultimate trajectory of where you're going to go.

And so I never understood why being one quarter black or one half makes you black.

And you can't, and I never understood all of these other,

these other very strange things.

You can be black, Jack, and be white looking.

Like I saw that rapper, Ice T, remember him?

He looks white, and so does Reverend Wright.

And yet I have neighbors who are Punjabis who are much darker,

but they're not considered, I guess, marginalized people in the same fashion.

I guess it's because they have higher per capita incomes than than the so-called white average income.

And then, as I said to Sam the other day, of all my friends in Selma who are Mexican-American, and you can't tell their

ethnic pedigree because they marry white people and therefore they have anglicized last names, you would never know, Jack, if they were Italian, Arab, Greek, Armenian.

Middle Eastern, you'd never know, or white.

They could be black, so-called black Irish.

You would never know.

And yet, if they just had a quirk and a Hispanic man,

if they had married the other way, that is, a white woman marries, so-called white, marries a Hispanic man and gets that name, then suddenly her children are Chicano.

But if they have a white name, then they might not look any different.

So the whole thing is

failing under the weight of its paradoxes and hypocrisy.

And I don't know why we can't just go back and say, we're not going to look at race anymore.

That was something out of our distant past.

And

when you've got black billionaires and

you've got a black president, you've got a black vice president, just forget it all.

And everything would be so much simpler, cheaper, and then you wouldn't have all this white guilt.

And if people want to, if the NBA is 75% black, and I don't care whether whites are underrepresented or Asians are underrepresented or the U.S.

Post Office has 22% black.

I don't care.

And so I don't really care about any of that disproportionate.

If MIT has all Asians, so be it.

If it's merucratic.

And maybe if I have a grandchild who wants to go to MIT, I'd say, if you want to go to MIT, you better study.

Or you may have an aptitude that's the highest.

And I can see diversity in thought, but I don't see the

advantage of just picking and choosing people based on their race for so-called,

and it just encourages racism.

We are more racist now than we ever were.

We're so

racial essentialism.

And it's just a tender box.

When you're on a campus, I literally...

When I get within 50 miles of Stanford University, when I go over each week, I get tense because I know that when I pick up the Stanford Daily and read what's going on, or I look at the free speech area and the Gaza camp, or I look at my emails and I read some statement from a university official, it's just, I just imagine that I'm in the Soviet Union.

It really is.

It's just,

it's so patently disconnected from reality.

And when, according to the Clari Act, when you have to report a suspected crime on campus, I just assume, as everybody does, that if there is the white male who's there, you'll get a full description.

And anytime there's not a description of a potential rapist or car thief or assault, then I just assume the person's not white.

And that's, it really, it's true.

Everybody knows that.

Same thing in the media.

So there's a cynicism about everything.

And

so hostility, too, Victor, towards the Eli Steeles of the world who want to, again, want to be.

the same name, Sage, last name, Sage Steele.

I don't remember her.

She was an ESPN dancer who's, or you know, sportscaster.

Yeah, I do.

Her father was

black, military, but mom's white, and she's vilified

for not picking.

But, you know, you have to pick.

Well, I don't want to pick.

I want to be Sage Steel.

I don't want to be Sage Steel Black woman.

And, you know, that you have crossed the line there when you do that.

again

i i i i had lunch with tom soul every two or three weeks for about 15 years and i don't think race ever came up except the absurdities of racial classification

and he was very funny and ironic you know about he'd say things that were brilliant and said victor

Before, when you were a young boy, did you go to a black physician?

I said, we didn't have any, Tom.

He said, well, you should have because it was so hard to get a fair shake.

They were just preeminent.

And then he said, after 2000, you have to be very careful because they were given meritic laxity, non-meritratic laxity.

And what he was saying was it was

anytime, whatever color you were, anytime that merit was not applied, you have to be cognizant of that and protect yourself.

So

I don't know where we're going to go with all this, but

if we don't change, it's not going to end well.

Well,

let's talk a little bit more about race, not only America, but Tunisia and one of your favorite actors, Denzel Washington Babufu.

So we're going to talk a little bit about movies, but before we get your thoughts, Victor, I do want to let our listeners.

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So, Victor, staying on the movie theme, we know you're, I think you've said your favorite actor is Denzel Washington.

And he is,

he's been cast to play Hannibal

in a forthcoming movie.

And he's being attacked by, well, by Tunisians.

For all I know he's going to be attacked by Americans too.

Because,

well, Hannibal

wasn't a black man.

Like, who gives a rat's ass?

Washington is such a great actor.

Anyway, Victor, any thoughts on this?

Well, you know,

when we had the Cleopatra movie, remember the black American actress that played Cleopatra, the Egyptian government got very angry.

Because after all, Cleopatra was

of Macedonian lineage, and probably over that 250-year

dynasty, there had been intermarriage with some local Egyptians, but there was no Africans at all.

In North Africa,

the Carthaginian Empire was founded in the 8th century by Phoenician

colonists.

So they came from what is today Beirut, Lebanon, and they sailed over to what is today

Tunisia, Tunis,

and they founded this city roughly at the same time as Rome.

And that's the foundational myth of Dido and Aeneas that's found in Virgil's Aeneid, that very famous love scene between the two, and then the fallout romantically between the two that sparks supposedly the historical hatred that manifested finally in the Three Punic Wars.

But my point is this: that

the Phoenicians were there

until their destruction in 146

by Scipio Aemilianus.

They were there for about 700 years, and they populated the coastal plain of Libya and Tunisia and even into Algeria and into Spain and into Sicily.

But they were Phoenician and then a Semitic people and then they were

they did intermarry with what we call Berbers who are there today.

Those are pre-Islamic and pre-Arab

indigenous people

of North Africa.

And

if you look at contemporary representations of

Carthaginians or what Romans thought Carthaginians looked like, we have some, I think, of these portraits

on wood.

They look, I guess, like a modern-day Arab or something.

You know what I mean?

They're darker, but I don't think you would call them if you wanted to get into

the sick racial classification as Negroite.

But my attitude about it is that I don't know whether Denzel Washington is 100% black.

And

it's clear that the Carthaginians were darker, if that's the point a person wants to make, than the Italians were.

So

you could say that Denzel Washington could look easily like a Phoenician Berber

military leader.

But that's it's irrelevant anyway, because

Denzel Washington is, I think he's the greatest living American actor.

And I have a really perverse

criteria for that because, I mean, there's some movies that were really bad, like that Roman Israel movie, I think in 2017 was bad.

And I know that people don't think the Book of Eli was a great movie, but I thought the way that he acted was brilliant in that.

Absolutely brilliant.

American Gangster, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

Man on Fire, that's my favorite.

It just,

God, it's, I don't know how he did it.

And

even when he's in movies that are not particularly, you know, demanding of the viewer, the equalizer, he does, he has, he brings something to it.

He's unpredictable on the screen.

You know what I mean?

He can lose his.

He's terrific in those movies.

Yeah.

He's just,

you know, when he has that scene in man on fire when he has the corrupt guy that they've inserted that thing in his hands that's going to blow him up and he looks at his watch and he says

time and he says i i i i need some time he goes time you i

i have all the time in the minute you in the world you have two point one minute two point two minutes and he walks away and it blows up and he has that way and when he was torturing that guy the the crooked um

mexican cop who was involved in the kidnapping and manfire.

And it's pretty gruesome, but the way he talks, it's just,

it's almost eerie that how he's able.

And the same thing was true when he was early in his career with

Glory.

So any movie with him in it as Hannibal, I think, would be great.

And I can imagine what he can bring to that role.

I mean, he can be mercurial.

He can go from very angry to very sensible.

He's just a genius.

And I'm looking forward to it.

And I've written about Hannibal before, both in,

I've written about canai and carnage and culture.

I got a new book coming out about the destruction of Carthage.

So I know somewhat about Punic culture.

And

I'm not sure that if you saw

Denzel Washington, he wouldn't look somewhat like Hannibal.

You know what?

Maybe if some kind of racial essentialist would say, well, he doesn't have Negroid features.

I don't know what that means anymore, but the value of him and that character, believe me, outweighs any consideration of his complexion.

Victor, if I may, just springing something here on you about Hannibal.

Not all battlefields are

equal when it comes to tourists.

Like Chancellorsville, this ferocious battle in the woods is

not the most easily observable if you're there touring, as opposed to, say, Gettysburg or Spotsylvania Courthouse, et cetera.

So I'm curious, are there any particular battlefields today

where Hannibal fought in Italy, Northern Africa, that are

for a military buff, are worth seeing?

And, you know, I mean, observable as I can see how the battle played out here.

I'm making an assumption that you've been to some of some of the battlefields in Italy.

I could be wrong.

Anyway, anything to

say about that?

He's famous

in the Second Punic War when he invaded Italy and came over the Alps.

And that pass at St.

Bernard, you can see, but it's hard to find out.

It's under disruption, but he fought four battles when he came in between 219 and 216, and he won all of them.

And they were at the river Trebia, and you can go there and see the river Trebia.

I haven't been to the Tychinas River, Trichinas.

That was a minor skirmish.

I have been to Lake Trassemane in northern Italy, and I've been, there's a pillar, I think, as I remember at Canai, you can see.

So you can see the battlefields, and three of them I don't think are under dispute where it was.

And Zama, where Scipio Africanus defeated him, is about, as I remember, I've been to Tunis about three or four times, and it's about

20 miles, as I recall, from the modern town of Tunis, which is itself the suburbs are incorporating ancient Carthage.

Ancient Carthage is destroyed.

It was destroyed by the Romans, and then they tried to re-found it by the Gracchi.

It didn't work.

And then Caesar, I think in 46 BC, founded something called

Carthago

Nova, New Carthage.

And it became,

you know, by the third century AD, it became, I think, the second largest city on the Mediterranean coast, other than Rome, Alexandria, maybe Antioch, Alexandria, then Carthage.

It had 500,000 people in it.

And

it really created a really, especially in the Christian era, you know, Augustine of Hippo, Hippo wasn't not very far from it.

So there was a whole Christian

Berber community.

I think you could say that Augustine himself was a Berber, or at least of Berber blood.

And so, yeah, you can go to Zalma today and you can see it.

And that's in, you remember the movie with Patton when he's in the North Africa campaign.

He drives, he says, take me out here.

And the guy goes, what's here?

And he said, don't you hear it?

And it's the, he says that he's been there before as if he was either Scipio or Hannibal.

But you can see these.

The thing about battlefields,

except for Waterloo, maybe, there's not a lot of commemoration.

So you have to really study and then you go out there.

And they're hard to get to a lot of times.

But once you're out there and you know exactly what the ancient sources say and you walk them and I'm thinking of the battle, I think I've been to 50 of them in Greece, the Battle of Leuctra, the Battle of Marathon, the Battle of Plataea, the Battle of Salamis, the Battle of Mantinea, one and two,

all of those.

And I've spent a good part of my life walking them and I've written about them, but it's essential to go to them if you're going to write about them, I think.

And

it's

in this new book, I have been numerous times to classical Thebes.

It was destroyed by Alexander the Great.

I've been,

I I think, five or six times to Constantinople, Istanbul.

I have been to New Carthage, that was destroyed, and I have been to Mexico City that sits on top of Tenochtitlan.

So, and that helped me write about it so I can see

the area and you can remember what you saw and didn't see.

And when you look at geographical accounts of the sieges, you have some idea that you're familiar with it.

Okay.

Well, thanks.

Well, Victor, we're going to to get your thoughts on two people of the left who seem to have surprised us, well, me anyway, I'll just speak for myself,

with their views on Israel and the border.

And those people are Chris Cuomo and John Fetterman.

And we'll get your thoughts on this, Victor, when we come back right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, you may have seen the clip and maybe have by now, maybe many of our listeners have.

Chris Cuomo, who has a show now on

News Nation,

who seems a little less cheerleady

than he had been when he was at CNN, but gave about a 10-minute monologue the other day.

And again, we're recording

here on the 16th of December.

He had seen, he had, I guess as a member of the media, had been invited to and attended a screening of,

what do you call it, an atrocity screening of what happened in Gaza and the kibbutzes and just totally, totally overwhelmed by

that and casting his,

you know, his, his feeling, not feeling now, his position that

Hamas

wants the total destruction of Israel.

So how can Israel not fight with that being, I hate the word context, but that's the freaking context.

That's the reality.

These people want to kill us, so they have to, the Israelis have to defend themselves in that.

It was a very powerful talk.

I don't know how influential it will be in convincing others on the left.

Another person on the left, I think it's true, he says, no, I'm not a progressive, but it's John Fetterman, who we've talked about many times on this podcast and made fun of on this podcast.

But he has of late been a little surprising.

I know it is including not only on the border,

on the madness

down south.

So anyway, Victor, your thoughts on these two points.

People have remarked maybe that the stroke had some kind of unintended or unpredictable stimulus on his brain.

I don't know what's happened, but he's not only been very good on the Israeli war, but he's been very good on the Israeli war in front of massive criticism of people come up and yell at him and stuff.

And some people have suggested that he understands that Trump is running four points ahead, five points in Pennsylvania, that it's moved to the right,

and maybe

he would be better in sync with it as their governor, I think, is more of a moderate Shapiro.

But I don't know what the cause is, but he's been pretty...

I don't know.

Doesn't it seem authentic?

It does to me.

No, I'm just saying that what other people, to me it does.

And I don't know.

Why on this particular issue, but given other things he said that were pretty left-wing during the campaign, that he's right on.

He's right on the border.

He's right on this issue as well.

He's right on crime.

He's been very good on crime about the prosecution letting out, you know, the Soros prosecutors, et cetera.

And Chris Cuomo, I wasn't a big fan, but I did watch that monologue, and he was genuinely upset and angry at it.

Even somebody that you know very well, and I'm not a big fan of because they attack me on his show a lot, Joe Scarborough, really tore into one of his guests the other day, who was a professor from Princeton, Gaudell or whatever his name, the African-American professor, about Hamas.

He did?

I didn't see that.

Yeah, you should watch it.

He just said, you know,

he just kept saying, they butchered civilians.

They tried to wipe them out.

This is after the Holocaust.

It's the worst day of killing.

What do you want them to do?

I don't think these.

So I think that Fetterman and Cuomo and and even Scarborough, for all of their left-wing sympathies, they understand one thing, that this is different.

When you go in and you break into a country and you don't hunt out the soldiers, but you hunt out older women, older men, infants, children, unarmed women, and you intentionally and by plan, rape them and mutilate them and cut off their breasts and put babies into ovens

and commit necrophilia and dismemberment.

You are pre-civilizational.

You are trying to tell the world that this is what you want to do to every Jew in the world.

And anybody who can't see that and can't see that Israel has to extinguish that, that whole idea, that whole ideology,

they're morally bankrupt.

And so, and Joe Biden is morally bankrupt.

We need to say to Israel, it's in your interest not to kill civilians.

And we know you were pretty humane.

You'd probably do a better job than we did at Fallujah and Mosul.

So we trust you and go in.

Our only request is

destroy Hamas as quickly as possible with the least cost to yourself.

And here are the weapons that we can give you.

And they will get it done.

And if you do that, then Iran and Hezbollah will not intervene.

And instead, we're giving them the opposite ceasefire.

If they have a ceasefire or they show any hesitation, Hamas will come out of the bunkers as victorious, and Hezbollah will start sending more missiles in, and Iran will start telling the Houthis to sink, try to sink ships, and we'll have a theater war.

And they're doing us and humanity a big favor about getting rid of Hamas.

And you know what?

If they defeat Hamas and humiliate Hamas, these protests will dry up in the United States.

They really will.

Especially if the Gulf states come in with their money and maybe Egypt and they have some kind of international consortium to rebuild Hamas under international supervision without, I mean, Gaza without Hamas.

So

the thing that's most startling, let's just be honest, Jack, the most startling thing about the whole thing are these people, the more they have a BA, MA, PhD, JD, whatever degree, the more bankrupt they are in this issue.

And the more they're centered in a university, the more amoral they are.

And the more likely they come from the Middle East, the more antithetical to American values they are.

That's just a fact on this issue.

And nobody wants to talk about it.

And they have to be refuted and they have to be challenged.

And everybody has to challenge them all the time.

Well, there's, there's,

I think we should, well, we'll talk later

about

some of these

chuckleheads at MIT, the board, getting challenged by that billionaire, Bill Ackerman, who's very active on Twitter/slash X and is

exposing some of the crap that goes on at the highest levels of these academic institutions.

But if I can ask you, spring something on you again, Victor, about, we're just talking about annihilation, your book that's coming out in May.

Is that what has to happen in Gaza?

I mean,

I don't see how

victory, quote-unquote, victory happens unless there's annihilation of

Gaza.

I mean, otherwise,

they have to destroy Hamas.

They have to destroy all the tunnels.

They have to destroy all the financial links from gutter.

They've got to get everybody who's living it up in gutter.

They've got to to get the people in Beirut.

And they have to destroy the hierarchy.

And they have to kill as many of the, they have to kill all the people who went into Israel.

And they do know their names now because of the vast numbers of prisoners.

And then they have to destroy that as an organization.

And then they have to find, and that's going to be elusive, enough money.

and enough international supervision to allow an alternate government to take in in there.

And And then in addition to that, they've got to give up on the sophisticated electronic drone cameras wall.

They've got to build a huge edifice along the Gaza border that goes down about 30 feet and it goes up about 70 feet and is impenetrable and then put all of their electronic gadgetry.

But when you looked, when I saw that fence and I saw that stuff when I first went down there on my first visit to Israel.

I thought to myself, oh my God, that is not going to stop people.

And it didn't.

And so they're going to, I think they'll get it done.

I really do.

And I think they're going to have more military

bases along the borders with Israel.

And it's going to be very hard for them to

do it again.

Remember, once

they get surprised, Yom Kippur war, they destroy their enemies almost.

And we have not had a conventional war after that.

Once they got surprised and they didn't know what they were in and they had a mediocrity Omer in 2006, once they got going and they

kind of really damaged Beirut to a degree that nobody would ever want that again, they haven't had a problem.

And they will do the same thing with Hamas

if we let them.

But

we've got a lot of people who are on the wrong side of this issue.

They're rooting for Hamas, literally.

And some people say, well, that's unfair.

It's just the Palestinians.

No,

you were rooting for the death and the destruction, the mutilation before the IDF responded.

You know who you are.

I walked out on, I think it was November 9th, and there were people out on the campus ripping down posters of captives, coming up to you as you walk, handing you literature, chanting River to Sea, writing chalk on the Stanford pavement.

And the IDF hadn't done one one thing yet and they were

they were giddy yeah were they wearing masks by the way some of them I mean uh and and 30 and 95 masks but the with

scarves scarf mats yeah I mean half of the half another thing people should do just be empirical

forget about the politics just ask yourself

here is a march in Washington of supporters of Israel here is a huge march of pro-Hamas Ask yourself, which group gets people arrested?

Which group shuts down traffic?

Which group defaces public property?

Which group is masked?

Which group screams about genocide and destruction?

And which doesn't?

And if you can make that distinction and transfer it to the Middle East, that's all you need to know.

Which side mutilates, which side mass rapes, which side sends rockets in without warning to kill civilians?

Which side, when they bomb,

drops leaflets?

And somebody says, well, look at all the numbers.

Look at all the numbers.

It's asymmetrical.

Well, then it would be very symmetrical.

All Hamas has to do is put their hands up and surrender.

Or even just take all of the hostages and say, you know, we screwed up.

We don't believe in hostage taking.

It's against the Quran.

Here's all the hostages.

But they won't surrender and they won't give up the hostages and they won't stop using human shields.

So what are you going to do?

Just say, oh, that's just a one-off.

Hamas says they won't do it again when their leaders say we're going to do it again, again, a million times.

And the guy in Beirut just said the other day that we're planning something right now.

Right.

Yes.

So I don't think they understand.

If they do it again and try it again, it's not going to be just Hamas that's going to be destroyed.

They're going to take out Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has been very quiet, very quiet.

They're looking at Gaza and they're thinking, this looks like Beirut in 2006.

It really does.

And it's taken us almost 20 years to get back.

And we don't want to go back to 2006.

And the world, and then they're starting to say, you know, the world hates us.

And the Europeans are sick of us.

Most of the Arab countries don't like Hezbollah.

And everybody hates Iran.

And even their patrons, China and Russia, don't like them.

And if anybody attacks Hezbollah in retaliation, I should say, and same thing with Iran, there's not going to be any public sympathy anywhere.

People look at those two countries and they say,

These people just cause trouble.

All they do is kill.

They're just a death cult.

They don't do anything positive.

Iran doesn't do anything positive.

It sells oil to supply weapons, to destroy Israel, to arm the Houthis, to take over the Lebanese government, to back back Bashar Assa.

That's what they do.

And I think there's going to be a reckoning, I really do.

And I think one of the things is we're going to look really hard on immigration and green cards and visas from the Middle East.

I don't know why we have the former Iranian ambassador to the UN here in the United States at Oberlin.

I do not know why at Georgetown we have a high-ranking former Iranian diplomat here.

All of them still have ties with a theocratic government.

I just think, as a matter of principle, we should just say, if you're from Iran at this unfortunate time in its history, you're not coming to the United States.

Just forget it.

And if you're here already, we're here.

Please.

And I think we need to say, if you're from the West Bank or Gaza, we just want to take a hiatus.

You don't like us, and we're kind of angry at you.

So let's just be friends, but don't come over here.

And we promise we will not go to Gaza or the West Bank.

I think we need to say the same thing about Syria and other countries there.

Just say, you know what?

You feel this about us, and we're not going to reciprocate with that level of hatred, but let's just have a little cooling off period.

You stay over there, and we'll stay over here.

How's that?

And then we need to pump oil like crazy.

And you know, the Biden administration's doing that now.

Suddenly, while they're telling everybody about climate change, they look at this election and $5.50 in California, and they're just, they've had another two million barrel, Joe Biden.

They don't talk about it, but they're pumping oil like crazy to win the election.

But it does have the unintended effect for them at least, unintended, that we're going to be more immune from leverage and coercion from the Middle East.

Well, you know, I'm glad you raised the Middle East.

And I mentioned Ackerman before, and MIT, we'll get to him.

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Hey, Victor,

we got a

it was on it was on X slash Twitter.

A question to you.

It came to me, but then the guy named Jack Stewart, he posted this the other day.

BDH, here's what he writes, sir, please help me understand this.

I know why the rich climate crisis elites like Kerry, John Kerry, are doing what they do, but why are the emir of the United Arab Emirates and others in the oil-rich, oil-dependent nations, why are they happily voting with them, the John Kerrys of the world, to eliminate their own source of wealth, oil?

Victor, yeah.

Is this just a game?

Are they just posing?

Yes, I think it is.

I don't have any choice.

They have a lot of investments in the West, and all of their technology and expertise comes from the West.

And they know it's not just that

they're joking around or they're not sincere.

The people in the West who are presented are not sincere.

They know better than anybody that nobody's buying an EV car.

And they know for now that, I mean,

privately, Saudis and the Emirates and Kuwait, they look at us and they think, why if we're going to eliminate fossil fuels, are you pumping oil to such a volume that our prices are crashing?

So obviously, when you tell us that we have to be weaned off fossil fuels and

you don't believe it, And because you can't do it, because nobody wants your electric car, you don't have nuclear power yet, you won't do anything else,

wind and solar won't do it.

So, the fact of the matter is, you know it, and we know it that you have to have oil and natural gas.

And we understand that you can't say that, so you should understand that we will

just mimic you.

But and then privately, we'll cut oil and natural gas deals.

That's what it's all about.

And

that's just the way it is until we get till we get everybody knew that even it's a finite commodity.

And even with our vast new holdings due to fracking and horizontal drilling, there's a finite number of cubic feet of natural gas and barrels of oil.

We get that.

But we have to use it to not to keep the middle class viable while we develop more efficient batteries, fusion power, hydrogen power, alternate sources of fuel.

But this idea that you're just going to buy fiat, nobody believes they're going to do that.

Nobody knows they can do that.

that

and

you know we have an electric car it's a tesla

it's going to be recalled isn't it

uh well everything is recalled yeah i saw what's that about why that's autopilot i don't have that one i didn't get that

i have the i have the ability to add it but i never did why would i want an autopilot that's it's a wonderful car to drive 70 miles a day to commute it really is but when you want to go 300 miles or for me, for me to take it over to Palo Alto 200, then I don't want to plan my trip.

You know, I'm going to have lunch here and hope there's an open supercharger.

Then I get to Palo Alto and I'll drive over to a supercharger.

I don't want to do that.

But if I can charge it here at my house, fine.

But as far as recalls, every car, I mean, I have

my Echo DeSon saga,

besides the turbo problem, it still has the

high pressure.

Oh, yeah.

Sammy, I was whining as Eeyore to

Sammy the other day because it's now five months out of the two years that I've had it.

Five months.

I haven't even had it.

Five months

it's been in the shop, either waiting for a part or it was fixed and they didn't fix it right.

So it's the whole concept of a turbo that all of these new pickups have six in six cylinder engines that can develop when they're pulling or when they're going fast, enormous amounts of horsepower by using a turbo, forcing the injection of oxygen and fuel at a fantastic high-pressure rate into the engine.

But it's no substitute.

It's a way to get power when you need it without having low gas miles per gallon.

And it's no substitute, believe me, for a Toyota

V8.

I had a 2006 Tundra Jack, and that thing just keeps running.

It's never had one thing go wrong with it.

It's only got a 4.7.

It's an old-fashioned V8.

It's almost 20 years ago, 20 years old.

I think it's rated only at 7,000 pounds.

You can take a 7,500-pound boat and go straight uphill with nothing.

And you take a new one that says, oh, it's rated at 12,000 pounds.

Don't try it.

I did.

And

they don't know how to fix them.

So when it broke the turbo, they fixed the turbo and then it broke again.

And then they can't get the parts.

I don't know if it's just RAM or DOT, but I made a big, big mistake.

I should have gone from the very beginning, right before they stopped making Toyota V8s.

I should have just gone in 2021 and said, I want a V8.

Toyota, and I'll pay whatever you have because that was the best truck I ever had.

I gave it to my daughter.

It's the only reliable truck.

I mean, I have this Echo Diesel.

It's useless.

And I'm betting that I'm going to get an email from some listener to say, I heard the podcast and I have

a Toyota V8.

Come in touch with me.

Come in touch with Victor.

What do I do with it, though?

I offered the dealer.

I offered the dealer.

I said, since I, it hasn't even, no, it was March 21

and 22, 23.

It's two, I don't know, it's two, a little over two and a half years, but it's been in the shop or it's either been home broken, waiting to get into the shop or actually in the shop waiting for over five months.

And

they don't have any compensation.

And I've talked to the dealer, I've talked to Ram, Mopar, I've talked to all of them.

And I've just very politely said,

You sold me this product.

You said it was going.

It was a wonderful truck when it ran for 20,000 miles.

It had 30 miles the gallon.

It had

a 32-gallon, you can get 800 miles on it without filling up.

It was a beautiful ride.

It was just a commute car, as long as you didn't try to tax it, I suppose.

I don't even think the turbo came on all the time.

But my point is this: that

I offered them, I just said,

you stood by your product.

You told me it would be wonderful.

I should try thinking about a diesel.

I did.

I paid an extra $3,000 or $4,000 over the regular Ram

V8 gas price.

Take take it just pay me the fix it it's fixed have my bedliner have my um

my bed top i put on take my twenty five hundred dollar warrior just give me the blue book price and then you know what i'll buy another i'll buy a gas ram from you if that makes you happy and and they won't do it so

and then and then you know they it's like everybody gets frustrated with the supply chain shortage you know the person i call says this is very important to us.

And we're going to stay on top of it.

We're going to notify the dealer and we're going to get this resolved and we will think about this offer you suggest and then nothing, nothing.

And then the dealer, the owner of the dealer said, I will be contacting you on a regular nothing.

And then the part said, we'll make sure we update you and nothing.

So it's just

like flying, it's like flying on the airlines and they say, you know, we have a little glitch.

We'll be, we'll be back up in 30 minutes.

Oh, it'll be two hours.

Oh, it'll be three hours.

Oh, you got to get deep plane.

That kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

I shouldn't mention that.

It's like taking that.

Somebody wrote me, they wrote Sammy on the website, but I think somebody wrote it's a dead horse or somebody said that.

What, about the travel travel?

No, no, the Echo Diesel.

Oh, the Echo Diesel.

Oh, sorry.

It's my fault.

You know, I I went over and it was, they said, you know, we don't have a V8 at the Toyota place.

And so I went over and the guy said, you might want to consider a diesel.

It gets so much better gas mileage.

And I thought, well, I'm not going to tow anything.

I'm just going to drive over to Stanford.

And for two years, it was wonderful.

I just went along the old by-roads at 55,

32 miles the gallon, no problem.

And then the turbo went out and then they couldn't fix it.

And then there's a recall in the fuel pump that says, I love the letters they send you.

This could be dangerous and cause injury under certain conditions.

And then you call and say, okay, I better get it fixed.

They said, we don't have the part.

You don't have the part.

Don't send the recall notice.

It's

weird.

I just don't remember American car dealers.

It's just.

And, you know, I've driven Hondas.

I've never had a problem with a Honda Toyota.

I never had a problem with a Toyota.

I know that I like to buy, and now I have this American Ram.

And I had earlier bought a Ram pickup 20 years ago, and I had a lot of problems with it.

So this is, I'm done.

And I, you know, I have, it's a long story, but

this kind of issue is applicable in many ways.

I remember when you were up in Maine a couple of years ago, you were going, and I happened to be there at the same time, and we couldn't,

you were going to

be interviewed by Tucker.

Yeah.

And I, and I,

the day or two before that happened, Sharon and I were up there for a week renting a house on something like, and we got a flat tire.

And then we were told, we may not be able to fix the tire till,

you know, another eight, nine days.

Like, but we got to be out of here in five days, but we can't find anything.

What happened to this country?

What happened?

This was the greatest country in the world.

They could fix anything.

They could get supply chain.

I can remember, I can remember taking a tractor in and having it fixed the same day.

I can remember that.

I don't remember any of this before.

I don't know if it's, we're no good, our generation, or the government's no good, or the corporations just hate their customers, the Bud Light, Disney, target at Factor, but they just treat you like crap and they can't fix anything and they don't know what they're doing and they don't care.

The only difference is, you know, I'll just give a plug.

I got so sick of all of this during this thing.

So I went out and I've never had, I went and priced all these Hondas and Toyotas, and they had a sale on the last generation of V6

SUVs for Lexus, right?

And it was no more expensive, really, than a passport.

And I bought one from Fresno Lexus, okay?

And it's a V6.

And I tell you, Jack, that thing, I have driven it everywhere.

It's got 20,000 miles.

It doesn't even have a hiccup.

And I hit a deer and almost almost got killed in it and it destroyed the sensors in the front took off a fender we took it over to fresno lexis they were going to get this fixed they took it to a body shop we had it back in five days and it's been wonderful so so if i wish that i when i i said to somebody as i left you guys you guys sell pickups

Do you have a pickup?

Can Fresno Lexis give me some kind of Toyota Tundra pickup on used car dealer?

Because you guys are wonderful and your product is wonderful, but that's the exception.

Yeah.

Well, proof again, by the way, that you hit a deer and almost died amongst the, that you

are indestructible.

Yeah, it was a victor.

I dodged two big deers with horns at five in the morning, going up once to 7,000 feet at 4.30 in the morning.

And then I dodged a fan and the fifth one hit me right in the fender, took out the fender, took out the sensors in front of the grill, and then rolled over.

And I stopped, and I'm having this mid-sized deer twitching on my hood.

And then I threw him off, and then I took some pliers and tore off all the shards so I could keep going.

I kept going.

And it was sad.

And you know what was weird?

I put him very carefully at the side of the road when I came back about seven hours later after working on the house.

He was gone.

Well, he was feeding a family of four somewhere.

So, you know, the circle of life.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's

talk about another dysfunctional place.

And this is

the higher levels, inner circles that run our prestigious universities.

And Bill Ackman, I said Ackerman before, I apologize, Bill Ackman, who's the CFO of Pershing Square.

He's one of these billionaires.

He's been very active and very vocal in public in this fight against

these college presidents

and anti-Semitism.

Well, he is, he should be a journalist.

He is tweeting slash Xing

about MIT.

So MIT quickly gave a pass to

oh my gosh, I forget her name.

The president there who was one of the three.

Corn Bluth, is that her name?

Corn Bluth.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, it turns out here, like,

what goes on?

Who runs these institutions?

And, of course, they have boards of trustees who are basically there.

So, I think so they could, as a matter of prestige, right, Victor?

I mean, nobody wants to become a member of a board of a

woke college and try to fix it.

But this, the chairman of the board of

MIT,

his wife has a nonprofit that MIT funds.

And it's almost, it seems like it's the exclusive funders.

So,

in a nutshell,

it is so self-serving.

So many of these board members at these

prestigious institutions

are self-serving in a way, whether it's prestige and not doing anything, or you know what, College, I have a my spouse, my wife, has this very important nonprofit.

By the way, what was her nonprofit about?

It was about selling DEI crap.

and uh so this is what this is the chairman of the board of mit this is the these are the kind of people that oversee these institutions that again claim to be prestigious but then also are fonts for uh the just

the destruction of western civilization so anyway victor it's no surprise to you i know but uh i just thought i'd put it out there and see if you had any any thoughts yeah i mean it's pretty amazing that this captain of finance

who's given so generously to Harvard has come out so strongly when

I think he's a man of the left.

Most people at Wall Street are at that level of wealth.

I know that he was a big backer of Bloomberg.

And the only thing is

he did.

He tweeted something during Kyle Rittenhouse, the guy who self-defense everybody is angry at, who saved himself by shooting that child molester, if that's what he was, one of them.

But he had defended him.

So I I think he's empirical.

He's defended Elon Musk, but I admire what he's saying when he exposes all of this,

I don't know what you would call it, corruption.

And then he's been really insistent that Claudine Gay has to go.

I think she will go eventually.

I don't think you can defend yourself from plagiarism.

And then when they They look at her career for the first time and she talks about her scholarly integrity and they see 11 anemic articles and somehow she translated 11 or four into Stanford tenure and then the other seven into Harvard tenure when everybody knows that that gets you no tenure at any normal public university and then

and then you add plagiarism and then you add her hypocrisy about what she did to write

well wait wait

is she like Obama I mean who didn't do anything to write so no scholarship but he was never constitutional he always told us he was a constitutional law professor they gave him a year off to write his constitutional book and what did he do he wrote about himself if he did if he did write it which he lied when he wrote about himself he lied about

people right he made up he made it all made them all up even his girlfriend said he was a liar yeah so and yeah so anyway we it's it's true so i admire the guy

and uh i admire any of the people who take a an active look at how they give their money.

If you, again,

if you have the wherewithal and you write a check to an Ivy League school or Stanford or Duke or Berkeley or any of these prestigious places, and you don't

very carefully say how it has to be used, and under the circumstances, you can take it back, and then you have to concede this is fungible so that whatever they save by your gift, they'll use to screw around somewhere else.

You're giving heroin to an addict.

You're giving gasoline to an arsonist.

You really are.

And

you're giving, you know,

somebody who has weight problems, you're giving them a pie.

And that's the problem.

And we've got to stop it.

We've got to get away.

We're never going to save our universities until we get away from this idea that you get branded as if you're annoyed at if you went to Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford or somewhere or Chicago.

That doesn't matter.

It's what you learned.

And we're learning very quickly that what they teach at these places is not competitive.

You can get a better education at the University of Michigan or Michigan State, and they are being DEI'd as well.

But you can get just as good, if not better, at half the cost.

So I think what's going to happen, just like a beer,

Just like a supermarket doesn't want Bud Light out on their marquee as you walk in the door, a big display.

I think it's going to get to the point where when you say you went to Stanford or Harvard or Princeton, Yale, people are going to look at you twice and say, hmm,

you got in without an SAT, you got in without meritocratic criteria, you got in for some particular non-merocratic qualification, you had a watered-down curriculum,

you were beneficiary of grade inflation.

The degree means nothing anymore.

We're sorry.

More than that, maybe Victor liked, oh my God, if I hired this person, this would be just a chance.

Central casting, yeah, for current.

I think I've told that story so many times of a Silicon Valley person who said, when you, I prefer the Georgia Tech coder because not only are they better trained than the Stanford coder now, but they don't camp out at HR

and lodge complaints about every, this generation is just, you know, they're just HR people.

And it's just so much easier just to, you know, and then when you have all these new colleges starting to appear and et cetera, et cetera, there's such an opportunity now for trade schools to step up.

And we're short plumbers, electricians, sheetrockers, roofers.

We need more people in those trades.

They're very well compensated now.

And

it's just, it makes sense that you should not.

You should not go to a four-year prestigious college, pay that kind of money and major in psych or sociology or ethnic study, anything with studies at the end of it as the suffix.

It's just like blowing your brains out.

It really is.

And we need to get rid of all the

DEI.

Just think of the billions of dollars you'd save nationwide.

You could have more challenging math courses, physics courses, medical school courses.

And

it would really be good for the DEI people.

They'd say, oh my God, the SAT's back.

I'm going to start studying, really prep, just like the you know the privileged so-called privileged do i'm going to do this i'm going to beat them at their own game i'm going to look at the asian model i'm going to follow it i think it was jesse jackson said 30 years ago i wish everybody would take a picture of an asian or video during a day and just copy what they do remember he said that and that would be that would be good for other minorities

and but you know it's

I think they've really,

they're committing collective suicide and they know it and they can't stop.

They're like an addict that knows one more injection and I'm going to die.

And they're thinking, one more speaker that we deplatform, one more library that we let Middle Eastern students swarm, one more testimony and we're all done.

And yet they can't stop it and it's going to happen.

And they know that.

They would rather be wrong and destroyed than thrive and be politically incorrect.

No tears would come out of these eyes, man.

Nobody's going to miss them nobody likes them nobody likes them anymore you know i don't tell anybody i went to stanford i really i'm not just saying that to act you know perverse or something or iconoclastic i don't

when i have my column or so i try not to have phd stanford i don't have it there the only the only time i ever mention is when somebody mentions it to me that they went there you know or they're bragging about i've had that a lot you know when i came from fresno state people would say at stanford well you know you're not a culturated Stanford

that.

Then I'd say, oh, yeah, I've been this place.

I know you.

I've seen the other side of your one-eyed jack face.

But yeah, but you don't want to, I don't try to,

that's why I really, didn't Pete Hexes, didn't he burn his Harvard BA degree?

I think he did.

Yeah, I think he did.

I like him a lot.

And so I thought that was pretty good when he did that.

Well, Victor, we've come to the

conclusion.

There were a couple other topics I wish we could have talked about.

Like, oh my gosh, San Francisco is kind of running away from its whole reparations BS that system money.

That system money.

They looked at the more money they gave the reparations,

they talked about the more people wanted more than more.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

And by the way,

I think hypothetically, if that had been done, I still think within two years, you know, most of the people who got the money would be broke again.

It's just, it's not, it's not a cure for anything.

Hard work and maritime.

I had a better way of giving

reparations.

If you want to give reparations, let's give all the families of soldiers who died in Iraq, Afghanistan, the First Gulf War, Korea, Vietnam, World War II.

Let's just give them money, huh?

Because they died for this country.

And they never lived very long.

But you see how our president treats the Gold Star families, right?

They're the heroes and the military.

Let's give, let's take the reparations and give some stuff to combat troops.

Yeah.

Give them higher pay because, boy,

they're the best combat troops in the world.

And what they're doing to the military is just

horrible.

Well, Victor,

we have a lot, a lot of listeners, and we thank them for listening, a lot of new listeners.

Also, so hope you're liking the wisdom that Victor cranks out now four times or four times a week, twice

through the bumblings and stumblings of me and two other times with the great, great Sammy.

Sammy Wink, those who listen via

iTunes and Apple can rate the show with stars, zero to five stars, and can leave comments.

Comments can also be left at Victor's website.

I don't think I think I forgot to talk about it, The Blade of Perseus, where if you want to read anything and everything Victor's written, you can do that there.

Yes, we do.

We cut the Medusa's head every day.

That's right.

It's hanging there.

But hey, you're going to try and read these ultra articles Victor's written.

About two or three a week, he does, and you're not going to be able to do it unless you are a subscriber.

Christmas is a couple of days away.

Give yourself a present.

Give yourself the present of the Blade of Perseus.

Five bucks gets you in the door.

It's $5 a month, but take a whole year.

It's fifty dollars discounted.

So you'll find links to Victor's books, podcast archives, and

again, all his other appearances on Megan Kelly and other podcasts.

And

yeah, the Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

You're depriving yourself if you don't go there.

Anyway, those who do listen on iTunes and Apple

can also leave comments.

And here's one comment.

It's titled Student Loans.

Thank you for your show.

You clarify things that many of us feel don't have,

feel, but don't have the words for.

Regarding student loans, I never got one when I was in college from 1978 to 1982 because I used the GI bill and my part-time job as a janitor to pay as I went.

I remember fellow students going to banks for their loans.

So did the banks then back the loans and make sure that the students were making progress towards a marketable degree?

That's a question.

We'll answer that another day.

Please keep up the good work of speaking truth to leftist power.

And that's been assigned by Bin called

Superman.

So, thank you, Ben Called Superman.

I hope you're wearing a cape.

As for me, we'll close this out.

Well, I'll let you know that Jack Fowler, it's me, I write Civil Thoughts.

Comes out every Friday.

It's a free weekly email newsletter that's published by the Center for Civil Society at Amphelt, where we are trying desperately to strengthen civil society.

And what is Civil Thoughts?

It is my recommended readings of 14 things, articles I've come across in the previous week that you, I'm confident, you will want to know about and want to read.

And I give you an excerpt of each article and a link.

So check it out.

Sign up at civilthoughts.com.

It's free and we're not selling your name.

We're not

exploiting.

No risk.

None of that.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Victor, this particular episode comes out on, I think, the 21st of December.

And

this is the last time I'll be on with you before Christmas.

I'm pretty sure Sammy.

will be with you before Christmas, but I'd like to wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and all of our listeners who

it's a great season.

Merry Christmas and joy, find family, find friends to be with.

And thank you very much, Victor, for being a great friend.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening, and Merry Christmas and happy holidays.

It's been a wonderful time that you've honored us by your patronage.

Thank you very much.

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