The America Left, the War in Gaza, and Other News

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Welcome, America, to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Today, we are looking at the news of the week.

This is our Friday news roundup.

We've got lots on the agenda.

Of course, the war still going on in Gaza, of course, which will probably be a long and extended war.

So, we'll look at a few things on that.

And the American left.

We'll start with those topics.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

We're back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, The Blade of Perseus.

The URL is victorhanson.com.

That's v-i-c-t-o-r-h-a-n-s-o-n.com.

And please come join us at the website.

Victor, I know that you recently wrote a tweet that went really

went out to a lot of people.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about it.

I know it's on the left wing incoherence and maybe you can let us in on a little bit more.

Yeah, I was just watching the news and I was just thinking, are these people sane?

that are demonstrating?

I'm talking about the pro-Hamas

from the river to the sea demonstrators, and they seem to be made up of three groups.

One are first-generation immigrants from the Middle East.

Two are

Middle East students on visas, or work permits, in other words, are not U.S.

citizens, they're guests in our country, and third are students.

But when you look at them, they're yelling, Genocide Joe, Genocide Joe.

And when you look at the polls, an anemic Joe Biden has gone from about about 42% approval down into the 30s.

And a lot of it seems to be that in the youth rubric or cohort where he won by 25 points, he's only ahead by one or two.

But it's not because people feel that he's too liberal.

They're angry about

his support for Israel.

So they're out in the street and they're really angry.

And on Veterans Day, they tear down flags.

They swarm the Manhattan Beach.

They bridge.

They shut down the Golden Gate.

And when you watch this, you're saying, and your point electorally is to what?

The 250,000 Arab voters in Michigan, you want to not vote.

Okay.

And who do you think is going to be the beneficiary?

Joe Manchin?

No.

Cornell West?

No.

A Republican like maybe Lynn Cheney or Mitt Romney is going to run?

No.

It's going to be Donald Trump.

And what I don't quite understand about it is that

of all the people in the United States, if Donald Trump is elected, he's going to do two things.

He's going to cancel student

visas of people who break the law, and he's going to revoke visas of people who break the law.

And he's going to have a travel ban.

He had it before of any country, Middle Eastern or not, that is is a known supporter of a terrorist organization.

He did it before.

So what I'm getting at is that

all these people are out in the street in the safety of America, and we are the host, and they come over here, and they want to be free and prosperous and secure,

which they can't be in their home.

And rather than show gratitude for our magnanimity, what are they doing?

They're attacking their president and attacking our institutions and calling for genocide.

And the net result of it is they're going to get elected someone who's going to say, you know what?

I know exactly what you're saying.

And I don't want you in my country because you're a guest and you've abused your, what we call in Greek, zinnia,

the customs of guesthood.

And bye-bye.

I've done it before.

I'll do it again.

It doesn't make sense.

And then the second thing I was thinking, so this Representative Dan Goldman, he's from New York.

He's this left-wing guy.

He's a very, I think he's a trust fund.

He's very, very wealthy.

He's their point man in Trump derangement syndrome.

So the other day, and he's been very vocal about his support for Israel, which is good.

But

they painted his office in Brooklyn.

They vandalize it.

And what did they put on it?

Blood on your hands.

Free Palestine.

Da da da da.

You know,

fill in the blanks.

And so what did he do three days later?

He tweets out, or he says, or he tweets out, and then he's quoted, Trump is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy.

And here's the signature line.

He has to be eliminated.

Ooh, elimination rhetoric.

Threatening somebody's death, he later apologized.

But my point is,

that's a disconnect.

So he's saying, I'm out there supporting Israel and my own party is defacing my office, but I'm going to go attack and say he should be deliminated, the guy who is what?

The biggest supporter of Israel in U.S.

history.

So what did Drump do?

I mean, does Goldman know?

that he was the only president to move the embassy to Jerusalem.

Does he know he cut off all the money for Hamas?

Did he know that he said the Golden Golden Heights can be Israelis

in perpetuity?

Did he know as soon as he got in, he said the Houthis are terrorist?

Excuse me, as soon as Biden got in, he said they're not because he lifted the terrorist rubric that Trump had put on the Houthis.

Did he know that Trump got out of the Iran deal?

Did he know that Trump burnt the Abraham Accords?

Did he know that Trump killed Soleimani?

Did he know that Trump had the travel ban?

I mean, if Dan Goldman's rhetoric was sincere, that we must support Israel, there's no man in America with power who's done more for Israel than Donald Trump.

And he just said he should be eliminated after they went to his office and defaced it and attacked him for being for Israel.

It makes no sense.

No, but our existentialist philosophers have told us that humans do things that don't make much sense.

I know, but it's

but usually

it's not so absurd.

Yeah.

It's Foucaultian, I guess.

And then my third thing, I can't believe.

So

the military is short, somewhere between 40 and 50,000,000 recruits, right?

And maybe it has something to do with the fact that they're going to spend 270 million, or they've already spent some of it, but by next year they will have spent 270 million.

Some of our, I mean, that's a lot of money on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

But they're not very accessible because they kicked out 8,400 veteran officers and enlisted men.

And what was their crime?

They said the MRNA, the MRNA vaccine, the inoculation, would not protect you from being infected, and it wouldn't protect you from being infectious to others.

Therefore, there was no really need to take it.

And they felt that it had side effects for people who were healthy males, young, and robust, i.e., people in the military.

So now what are they doing?

They're saying, well, what happened?

We don't have enough soldiers.

Mark Milley and Austin, and

everybody went to Congress and said, white rage, white supremacy.

And I guess we offended

the rubric I keep saying, that died at twice our demographics in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And then we offended them further by kicking them out of the military because they didn't want to get a shot, which has proven that they were right and we weren't.

And maybe we got them offended because we spent $270 million making sure they wouldn't be promoted on the basis of meritocracy.

And now what are they doing?

They're saying, well,

just forget about the fact that we kicked you out of the military because you wouldn't get this Moderna shot.

Just forget the fact that we're spending $270 million on the premise that you guys are toxic.

Just forget the fact,

just forget the fact that you die at double your numbers in combat.

We want you back.

We want you back.

And we're willing to pay you back pay.

I think we're going to will.

And so would you please come back after we've insulted you?

We want you because deep down inside, I think your guys are the best soldiers we have, and we need you desperately because the world is heating up in Gaza, Ukraine, and Taiwan, and we're short.

And our generals, like Mark Milley,

they're calling their Chinese counterparts and warning them about their commander-in-chief.

Or the retired generals are calling the commander-in-chief Nazi or Mussolini.

So the whole thing is in chaos.

So please, please come back.

That's painful.

The whole thing is just painful, painful, Victor.

I'm glad I haven't read your tweet.

I confess I haven't read it.

I just put it up, and I think it had 100,000 views in the first hour because people were so upset.

Yes, they did.

It was madness.

It's just sheer madness.

It's like the end of Bridge of River Kwai.

Remember

when Alec Guinness is trying to destroy the British effort to blow up the bridge, he collaborated with the Japanese, and finally, the only thing that saves them is that he's blown up and he falls on the plunger and it blows up his bridge that he built for the Japanese Japanese killers.

And

the doctor says, madness, sheer madness.

That's what this is.

Madness.

Absolutely.

Yeah, that was a strange movie.

I mean,

I'm glad that the train went off the

bridge, the blown-up bridge at the end.

I would have been really frustrated if that wasn't.

David Lean was a brilliant, he was a genius.

I mean, who can make movies like Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kawai and etc., etc.?

I even liked his big flop, Ryan's Daughter.

I never saw that one.

Kind of ended his career, but I thought it was a good movie.

Well, Victor, let's turn to other news of this week.

Netanyahu seems at this moment, while we're recording this, meeting with his cabinet to discuss a ceasefire in exchange for some hostages.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that.

Is that a good idea?

Well, militarily, it's not a good idea, strictly militarily, because,

as I said earlier, he is attacking the spokes of this tunnel wheel, and he is driving them into congregations.

In other words, he's ink spot here, ink spot here, ink spot here of assaults, and they're starting to coalesce.

So you don't want to lose that momentum, and you don't want to give the impression that you are negotiable.

On the other hand, unfortunately, wars are not conducted strictly on military strategy and rationale and agendas.

So he's got, on the one hand, the world community,

that mostly means Europe, and the United States, and they are pressuring him to

have a pause, a ceasefire for humanitarian aid.

Everybody knows the humanitarian aid, the fuel and the food goes to Hamas, and everybody knows right now in those tunnels they've got fuel and food they won't give to anybody.

They don't want, they want their own people to die.

And so everybody knows that.

So the pressure suggests, and he's got domestic pressure, because all these poor families have had, you know, these hostages.

And if they're underground, and so many of them are elderly or young, if you took any person in their 70s or 80s, or anybody two, five, and seven, and you stuck them in the dank tunnel, right?

Yeah.

They're probably going to die.

So there is a time, so you want them out.

But the problem is that that's why they took the captives.

So they could meter them out as sort of inanimate object currency, and then they would buy days to regroup and spread.

And so, what are they going to do during this ceasefire?

The Hamas people are going to go crawl like little,

I don't know, moles or gophers over to South Gaza, and then they're going to pop up in one of their little trap doors, and they're going to mingle in with the crowd and get away.

And that's the point.

So, I guess Israel has decided that

they have a list of all of the people who are the architects and they never thought they can get all 50,000 and they would like them to get out.

Maybe that'll be easier for them to blow up the tunnels.

I don't know.

But for public relations

and they feel that it's absolutely essential both for domestic and foreign public opinion.

So we're probably going to see a ceasefire in some hostage negotiations, which will be good for any hostage negotiations.

The Hamas is not just cruel and pre-civilizational, but they're stupid.

So when these hostages come out, are they going to say,

well, I was treated very well.

I really like Mr.

and Mrs.

Hamas.

No, they're not.

And there was tapes coming from the hospital with all our useful idiots and the BBC and seeing, well, where's the evidence that they were using this Sharif hospital as a Hamas headquarters?

And you have a tape now with a Thai person, another hostage running down the hallway.

We knew from an Amnesty International report years ago that this had been the headquarters of Hamas.

Everybody knows what it is.

They found a tunnel entrance on the hospital grounds.

That's what they built the tunnels for.

Reminds me of that movie Paint Your Wagon where they dug tunnels all around this gold mining town so that gold that would fall through the wood and saloons they could

collect.

Yes.

And then all of a sudden the entire town just went, just sunk down 30 feet.

That's what's going to happen.

Yeah.

If they collapse these tunnels, that whole city is going to just, you know,

collapse 50 feet, 100 feet, 300 feet.

Yeah, and they also have a British doctor who is

no longer in the hospital, but he said that there were parts of the hospital you just did not go to and you did not talk about anything.

They're killers.

They'll kill you.

They're killers.

Everybody was on the street who's protesting, they're killer.

You're protesting for killers.

You're protesting to Nazis.

They're a death cult.

They're SS.

That's what they do.

That's their stock and trade.

That's their culture.

That's their currency.

They kill.

They kill people.

When they went into Israel, they had a perfect opportunity, if they're going to go to war, to go attack all the IDF camps.

They attacked a few of them, but they did it and executed people.

soldiers.

But

their main intent was to kill, kill civilians, kill old people, kill babies, mutilate rape.

That's what they are.

They're killers.

You can't deal with them.

It's like trying to deal with the SS.

Yeah.

Well, to turn this to a more academic level, which maybe your listeners don't want to have, but I just wanted to look in Foreign Affairs.

There was an article why Israel missed October 7th, but part of it was dedicated, or the last part, to what Israel needs to do.

And outside of, obviously, the operations in Gaza and to face down the threat of Hezbollah, They said that the Israelis need to follow policies that help their European and Arab state supporters who face pro-Palestinian support of their own constituencies.

And I thought that was sort of interesting that they felt that

the Israelis should be worrying about these states that are copying to their pro-Palestinian constituencies.

And I was wondering if you had any reactions.

There was a widely quoted

paper.

Wasn't it called Why Israel Slept or something?

Maybe

it was Foreign Affairs?

Yeah.

Where those two generals,

Why Israel missed Avental, yeah.

And like all

essays that are coming out

from the center left, it was an attack on Netanyahu.

I mean, it was a little bit fairer than just the usual boilerplate, because

Netanyahu occupies the place

in Israel that Trump does in the United States.

He creates a derangement among people, their hatred of him.

But my point is that they did a lot

blame to the Mossad, the IDF, the intelligence communities for allowing this to happen.

And we've talked about on these podcasts why it happened, and they just reiterated that, that people had a sense of laxity.

They trusted too much in technology, they should have had an old-fashioned big wall, they had taken the IDF out

in strength from that area, which was the most logical point of incursion.

They fell for Hamas's

non-electronic propaganda that they picked up and thought was genuine, where they were communicating by phones and

informants, etc., that they wanted to be peaceful, they wanted to make a Singapore, they were not going to fight these.

That was all for sham.

They did that for a year.

They fell for it.

Anyway, it was good as an exegesis of that,

besides the fact that

the subtext of the whole article was Netanyahu, who has to go.

But

they did say that

you can't deal with Hamas.

I was surprised at that.

You can't deal with them.

And they have this idea

that

if they go go halfway to the world community, they bring in humanitarian food, they rehabilitate the Palestinian Authority, they bring it in, they have an international group, they get moderate, then it's going to be workable.

It's not.

It's not going to be workable.

And I think they don't understand

that

the Saudis and the Jordanians and the Egyptians and the Kuwaitis and probably people in Tunisia, all of those people want them to destroy Hamas.

Destroy Hamas, destroy Hamas, because they're terrified.

They're illegitimate in the sense they don't have public elections, public support, and transparent elections.

So they feel that Hamas,

which translates in a political sphere to the Muslim Brotherhood, will overthrow them.

So they want Israelis to be both damned.

and then

to do the job of getting rid of Hamas.

In 2006,

there was a high official in the government at that time in the U.S., and he had some of us go talk to him.

And that was right during that Lebanese war.

And he said something I'll never forget.

He said he tried to give Israel as much time as he could

because he was getting pressure from

moderate Arab regimes that were saying so cynically to our government,

tell the Jews to kill Hezbollah and get rid of them, get rid of Nasrallah, and we'll give you three more days.

And then they didn't do it.

Elmart, that president, didn't do it.

And then four days, then five days.

And finally, they said, if you don't do it, we're going to have to come out and damn the Zionist entity and say we stand with our Muslim brothers.

But we don't want to do that, so kill them.

Get rid of Hezbollah.

And that level of cynicism, I've never forgotten that.

I think it's true throughout the Middle East.

And so that article doesn't quite realize that, well, it does, it says they have to get rid of Hamas, but the degree to which they do that in an overwhelming fashion and quickly and effectively with

not losing a lot of casualties themselves, suffering,

will be the most important thing.

Yeah.

Well, the second thing about that article that I noticed that at the very end they seem to be very optimistic that it would be like the Yom Kippur war in 1973, that after it's all done and the smoke is cleared, there may be some

peace agreements that will come about.

I don't think so either.

No, and the reason that is that

why that article is flawed with all due respect to the authors was

They look at the Yom Kippur, which happened 50 days to almost to the day of this war, October 8th, I think it was, 1973.

The difference was this.

Yes, they were right that after being surprised, as they were this time, the IDF recovered.

And yes, they almost destroyed the whole Egyptian Third Army.

And they humiliated them.

And yet,

that was the basis that they could say, well, we recovered.

And the Arabs can say, well, yes, you recovered.

And maybe or maybe not we're going to beat us.

But you've got to admit that our surprise attack worked and you were scared and we killed a lot of you.

And so then they said, okay, let's negotiate.

And the Israelis said, if we get out of the Sinai, will you be peaceful?

And they said, yes.

But here's the point.

They were dealing with a recognized state, a guy, and they were a recognized moderate called An-Mar Sada.

Does anybody think that Hamas or the Palestinian Authority or Islamic Jihad is a regular state?

Do you think that the people on the West Bank are angry at Hamas, who killed a lot of them when they took power?

No.

You think Abbas is a moderate?

No.

So they don't have anybody to deal with.

None.

And you think that the Saudis or the Egyptians want to come in there and rule Gaza?

What would they want to do that for?

They might want to give money on the premise that,

you know,

keep away from us.

Put it this way.

When I read that, I thought, is there any Arab state that has ever taken in Palestinians who were in this death cult

that

are happy with it.

So I can think of three off the top of my head.

There was the Kuwaitis.

Remember them during the Gulf War when Saddam invaded their country and took it over?

Remember how the Palestinians in Kuwait were applauding?

Their own guest workers in Kuwait were applauding, and on the West Bank they were siding with Saddam?

And what happened?

After we expelled Saddam, what what did the Kuwaitis do they expelled every Palestinian from Kuwait and sent them back to the West Bank I can think of another example remember the Jordanians they were Palestinians and then somewhere around 1967 to 73 they invented this new term called I'm a Jordanian that lives on the west bank of the Jordan River.

Therefore, I'm separate.

But before I'm separate, we're going to make all the Jordanians Palestinian.

So they attacked the King Hussein, the present king's father, Black September.

Remember that?

And what did he do?

He didn't do what the Israelis did,

the elder King Hussein.

He didn't drop leaflets.

He exterminated them.

And he got rid of every one of them out of Jordan.

He said, you know what?

Get back over there, and that's your place, but do not, you're not going to be a Jordanian.

We don't want you.

And then we have a third example.

When Yasser Arafat went into Lebanon, which was a pretty stable place.

I went there in 1973, I think, in the fall.

They had an American school there.

Beautiful Cornish, Shirlong,

and then the Palestinians, the PLO went in there.

And the next thing you knew, it was a war zone.

And it has been that way ever since.

The Tunisians had them, and they got rid of them.

So anytime you, any country that brings in Palestinians regrets it.

Not Israel, not the West.

I'm talking about Arab countries, whether they're Kuwaitis or Jordanians or Tunisians or Lebanese.

So they don't want them.

No.

And they don't want them for a reason, because they're nurtured from the day they're born to hate and kill and be nihilist.

Well, Victor, let's take a break and come back and talk a little bit about the rules-based world order that was

by Obama and Biden.

Stay with us.

We We hear that all the time.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and you are listening to our news roundup.

So,

Victor, we have

a.

I was reading in Barry Weiss's Free Press that the U.S.

doctrine under Obama and Biden has been that the United States is the disruptor and aggressive power in causing instability in world affairs, and its retreat to allow all the world to get on without the United States would result in a rules-based world order.

But it seems that it hasn't turned out that way.

There is no such thing as a rules-based order.

That's like having a bunch of people in a bar saying, we're all going to follow the rules.

There is no rules.

The rules are the strong dictate to the weak.

The only person that ever had a rules-based order was the strong, and we were a

transparent constitutional system.

So we enforced the sea lanes could be open, communications and travel,

and you couldn't invade and cross a border.

We did that.

Not the Soviets, not the Russian Federation, not the Chinese, not anybody in Latin America or Africa or Asia.

We did that.

And we created it.

And we created the UN.

The UN has no rules.

Can you think of any time other than the Korean War, and that was only because the Soviets were sitting out because of the China question that they didn't veto something?

So, I mean, did the UN ever stop a war?

No.

Did the League of Nations?

No.

Does China follow the rules-based order when it took over the Spratly Islands or it gobbled up Tibet or it put a million Uyghurs in camps?

No.

Did Putin?

No.

Who does?

Just us and the Europeans.

So it's not the rules-based order.

It's the Western paradigm.

Period.

So the United States is the enforcer of that.

Period.

And to the degree we want to get active and carry that burden, and there are rules.

When we don't, they're not.

So let's look at what happened on October 7th.

Where was the world community?

I'm not talking about what Israel...

retaliated.

There was a week when they didn't do anything.

So did the UN and the rules-based order said, you know what, Mr.

Hamas,

you broke the rules-based order.

You invaded another country at a time of peace and holiday, and in the morning when they were sleep, and you raped and mutilated, and you committed necrophilia, and you beheaded.

You did things that we hadn't seen in the modern rules-based order world.

And you broke the rules-based order world law.

So we're going to do what to you?

And did they do that?

No.

They didn't do anything.

They didn't do anything except attack Israel in the rules-based order UN and the rules-based order university.

They didn't do anything.

And then they waited and waited and they thought, come on, come on, Israel.

Reply, reply so we can attack you.

And then Israel attacked.

And people could not make the fundamental difference is.

Going into a country in a time of peace and a holiday and slitting somebody's throat and raping them after they're dead is not the same as dropping a leaflet and saying, you are being used as a shield by killers and we have to deal with a killer so please get out of the way.

They can't make that moral distinction because they have no morality.

And so there is no rules-based order.

It's a jungle.

The world is a jungle.

And look at book five, Thucydides' history.

It's the Melian dialogue.

The strong dictate to the weak and the weak suffer as they must.

And I'm not suggesting that.

That's a good thing.

It just has to be a lot of fun.

I still believe Thucydides didn't think it was a good thing.

No.

But he was saying that if anybody doesn't believe it doesn't exist, you're going to get a lot of innocent, nice people killed.

That's what exists.

That's what these people are.

And it's only the United States and some young kid, 18 in Kansas, who's willing to ruin his life in the sense that he could be maimed or killed and serve his country that keeps the rules-based order, or at least a semblance of it.

And why you would, getting back to our earlier one, when you had precious people like that and you would expel 8,400 because they didn't want to try an experimental genetic engineering vaccine, I don't know.

But those are the type of people who enforce the rules-based order.

Every time I hear that word, it makes you mad.

Well, it always comes from a person who says it like this.

Well, Victor, what I'm very worried about is that Donald Trump,

Donald Trump, doesn't really know or believe in the rules-based order.

I can't believe that you voted for him because he's just trampled on the rules-based order.

Just so your listeners know, Victor was trying to imitate a nasal voice.

No, I wasn't.

I was trying to, if I wanted to do a nasal, I hear that too.

It's more, wow, you know, there's a rules-based order.

Oh, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I hear that from students.

I'm talking about about normal people, the rules-based order.

Normal people.

You're trying to suggest to me.

You're trying to suggest to me that this Obama-Biden doctrine is going to fall by the wayside and not hold mustard to the Monroe.

They didn't believe in it.

Barack Obama made a joke about predator assassinations at the White House correspondent dinner.

He said, you guys want to date my daughter?

Hey, predator, you'll never know when it's coming.

And

he admit, well, we killed a lot of people we shouldn't have killed.

Yep, that was a violation of the rules-based order.

And you did it because you thought in a cost-to-benefit analysis, it kept the United States and the rules-based order safe.

Okay.

But don't lie to us and say that you followed the rules-based order.

Well,

I have to hand it to Roger Kimball, who has, in The Spectator, written an article that had a positive spin on Hamas and the October 7th barbaric killings.

And he said that it's academia that has been around since the 1960s, these left-wing bastions, were finally shown their true colors.

And those are my words, but I'm basically paraphrasing what he said.

And that the academic institutions have clearly failed, the leadership of them has clearly failed as they were more worried about the left opinion than right-wing parents or donors because they were so well endowed.

But they are now being assailed by their donors, and they're thinking twice, is what his article suggested.

And I was wondering your thoughts.

I know the academic mind, and I think it's wonderful that people are not giving money and fueling.

It's like giving fireworks to a kid, or pouring gas on a fire, or giving heroin to an addict when you give money to these elite universities.

But unfortunately, they think, whoa, we're at Harvard.

We have $60 billion.

What if somebody doesn't want to give us $50 million?

We've got enough for the rest of our lives.

And we've got the government subsidizing all these student loans and we've got tax-free endowment income.

You will not affect them.

until you tax their tax-exempt income on their endowment.

Then you will get their attention.

And when you get the government out of the student loan business, and they have to use their own endowment to back up their loans.

So, but Roger is right that it tore a scab off that showed a putrid wound beneath.

Just all these college presidents, they just,

I mean, they cannot tell the truth.

They say things like,

Well, we don't want to weigh in because that's not our, yeah, that's what you always do.

You weigh in on trans issues.

You weigh in on abortion.

When the 2016 election came at Stanford, you offered cookies and milk and little stuffed animals for students that were hurt about Trump being elected.

I'm serious.

And I got a little note as a Stanford member that, you know, if you're traumatized, there's areas where you can find counseling.

So you weigh in on everything, except.

You can't weigh in when somebody crosses a border and kills 1,400 people.

You just don't want to weigh in on that.

But you will weigh in when that country retaliates, then you'll weigh in.

So they just make it up as they go.

You just start with the principle that

these universities, the faculty and the administration, are aberrant in the sense that no one else in society has lifetime tenure.

No one else goes from high school to college to graduate school to the university in a long sequence that we could call prolonged adolescence, where they're not out driving a truck or a tractor or a caterpillar or a forklift or plumbing or doing like they're not in the real world and they're protected.

And so it's all theory, it's all abstract.

And it's easy to do that because they're not going to be in a kibbutz when somebody comes across the border with a

little head camera and a cell phone and slits your throat and takes your picture as you're dying and your last gas.

That's just something that

they don't want to think about.

They're too proper and prissy to think about that.

But that's what happened, and they were condoning or supporting the people who did it, either by their silence or overtly.

And I say overtly, and somebody says, Victor, that's so unfair.

No, it's not.

The professor at Cornell said he was exhilarated.

And one at Davis said he was so happy that we should follow Jewish children.

And a professor

down in LA hit somebody over the head.

I guess the sidewalk killed him because it said the paper, as I read it, said, protester falls and dies.

And you would never know that somebody hit him over the head who was a professor.

A professor hit him.

And the sidewalk didn't jump up and hit him and kill him.

The professor did.

So, and

where I work, we had a professor say, Jews, get on that side of the classroom and leave your.

That's what,

that's just the stuff we know that's not the everyday mantra that they that they infuse so yeah that's for the university people and Roger's completely correct that to the degree that people are seeing this

it's pretty

I don't know

it's a good thing exhilarating to use their term to see that people but I am kind of

when I see people say oh my god I gave money and I can't believe this

and I'm thinking well Ben Shapiro came to Stanford and they plastered the quad with Ben Begon raid posters as if he was an insect and they were going to use pesticide.

And Judge Duncan was shouted down at the Stanford Law School and people screamed out, rape your daughter.

Hope your daughter gets raped.

That was there before October 7th.

So it was there.

All you had to do was open your eyes.

But this was so egregious that they couldn't hide what they feel.

And I think that's new, that they just said to the country,

we support a death cult.

We support the modern version of the SS.

And we are unapologetic about it.

And we don't care if we're hypocritical.

We don't care if we never protest about the Uyghurs, or we don't protest about Darfur, or we don't

protest what they're doing in Somalia.

We don't protest any of that.

We just protest this because they're Jews.

That's it.

That's pretty much what they told the country.

Yeah.

Well,

if we can move on to another left-wing

activity, and that is

Elon Musk has a lawsuit against the radical left media matters, or at least he's filing it, as doing things beyond the pale and accusing his ex, formerly Twitter, of having advertising next to neo-Nazi

neo-Nazi posts and such.

And I was wondering your thoughts on what's going on with Elon.

That's my question.

Well, I mean, if it's he wrote a tweet and he basically did it very clumsily, but his point was

that

I think he was trying to say that the whole DEI network was attacking

people.

in stereotypical fashion who were white.

That's what we just had

a glimpse into the DEI industry in Ohio, and people just say outright, they're not going to hire people who are white.

That's basically, everybody knows that's true.

And Elon Musk was trying to tell people who were shocked about Israel, i.e., he should have said ultra-left-wing Jewish Americans who are now shocked but who had supported and are on record for supporting DEI,

etc.

But he didn't quite say that.

He said Jews.

well,

he blended the two in a very clumsy fashion.

So, anyway, Media Matters was calling him an anti-Semite and then allegedly

said that Elon Musk was giving white supremacy pro, I guess, I don't know, neo-Nazi stories next to the ads that certain companies play.

So then they went and

contacted the companies to boycott, and they were big, people like Amazon.

Yeah, I thought it was like Target and Amazon and several of them.

And Elon Musk, if he's countersuit, it just seems so incredible that it can't be true.

But he's alleging that they just cooked it up themselves and created this story and then

placed these companies and juxtaposed them and then took screenshots of it and acted as if this was commonplace dirigor.

And it wasn't.

If that is true, and I'm not qualified to adjudicate that, but if it's true, it seems like he has grounds for a huge lawsuit.

I don't think he's an anti-Semite, by the way.

No, I don't either.

I think he doesn't understand the matrix a little bit of

what's going on.

I don't think it's liberal Jews supported DEI.

I think it's all liberal bicultur elites did.

And in this particular case, the Israel-Hamas-Gaza thing was embarrassing to a subset of that group.

But there's going to be other things that are going to be just as embarrassing to non-Jew left-wing people, such as

I know so many people who are left-wing, support DEI, and their kids can't get into Harvard or Yale.

They can't get in.

They have perfect SACT scores.

SAT is not required.

They have 4.5,

so what?

GPAs?

It's diversity statements and impressionistic.

And yet now they're very upset at the whole DEI thing.

It's racist.

It's against white people.

Yes, it is.

But you didn't really say that until it affected you.

Yeah.

Well, you know what they're saying.

That's what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, you know what they're saying about this, though, that Media Matters is just an arm or part of the weaponry of the left, and they're trying to take out X, the former Twitter, completely because because it's the only, this is what right-wing commentators are saying, it's the only social media platform that is free speech.

It is.

And that's there.

It is.

But he does use algorithms and, you know, they do monitor it.

They do.

But it's the only one that has a semblance.

He's not hiring.

He's not Jack Dorsey

and working with the FBI.

That's true.

And getting $3 million from the FBI to censor people's news and then hiring the chief counsel for the FBI and paying him five or six million a year.

He's not doing that.

And that's what they did.

And they are shameless when they accuse him

of running something that's less than

upright when they have destroyed the whole social media through their corruption.

And,

you know, it's so funny about this naivete.

When I was 29, I got, I went,

I was farming.

I went back to academia.

I did not know what to do.

I went to the closest campus.

I had never really been there.

there.

Cal State Fresno, 29 miles away.

I walked in, I got a job part-time, and within about six months, another part-time professor came up to me.

He was very good.

I won't mention his name.

I think he's still alive.

And he said, I've been here for 10 years.

They will not hire me.

I said, well, have you written?

He said, I've written just as much as they have.

And I said, do you have good teaching evaluations?

He said, yes, I do.

And I said, why not?

And they said, well, there were eight white men, and now they want to be diverse.

And so they're applying it retroactively.

And

they'll never hire me.

They told me not even to apply.

So I said, well, I'm going to apply.

And if I happen to get the job,

so I would talk to him.

And then I finally got hired three years later as an assistant professor without tenure.

So like an idiot or smart or whatever, I went to the chairman.

And I said to him, Well, if you think that you want, that you've had white privilege, I didn't use that term at the time, but I think if you have this quota and you don't want to hire this colleague of yours that you apparently think is a very good teacher because you keep hiring him and hire him, and he's getting about 30 cents on the dollar, he's a part-time teacher.

In those days, he didn't even have benefit.

So I said, why don't you do this?

How long have you been here?

And this person said to me, 25 years.

I said, don't you think that's enough?

So what do you mean?

I said, why don't you resign and give your position over to a person who's marginalized and then hire him because he's written more than you have.

And I thought that was logical.

That person, I cannot, I can still remember it.

He started sputtering.

He started using the F word.

He melted down.

He,

every time I saw him on campus for the next 20 years, he got so angry.

I was on a

committee for sabbaticals and he got up and said,

well, I vote for this person because I got a sabbatical for my magnum opus.

I said, now, what would that be?

I've never heard that you published one thing, because that was after 20 years, we still didn't get along from my statement.

And I'll never forget it.

He says, yes, I do.

It's Xeroxed in my office.

I said, it's Xeroxed in your office?

He said, yes, all 500 pages.

I said, so you just wrote out a little essay and you bought, you Xeroxed it and you put two little slap two things on, you call it a book, and you're qualified to judge people about whether they should get time off of research.

But the point I'm making was,

this was, gosh, I'm 70, this was 40 years ago they were doing this, where they were an old white, privileged group of people who had been beneficiaries of their own so-called privilege were suddenly changing the rules of game and disenfranchising a whole younger generation.

And they never, ever thought that it should apply to them.

Well, now these things are starting to apply to them, and they are outraged to a point.

They being the liberal white male.

Yeah.

Well, if I'm to talk about people who are

being

assailed by the left, I need to address Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., who also just recently a New York Times article came out that he examining his finances and they basically concluded that he was a muddy, grubbing capitalist and opportunist.

And those are my words, but basically the whole thing went to that.

I was shocked at that because, I mean, the New York Times is saying that he's a money, he is a piker compared to Michelle Obama.

She made $12,000 a minute.

740,000 euros just giving a little speech on diversity, equity.

Oh, nope, not equity, diversity and inclusion in Berlin.

Barack Obama's worth $100 million

minimum.

That's all he does is grift.

Hillary Clinton,

before she ran in 2016, she was the grifter par excellence.

She just went to every Wall Street firm and shook them down for donations.

And Bill Clinton gave a talk for $500,000 in Moscow to a mayor why his wife was selling out uranium rights as Secretary of State to the Russians.

And the New York Times said nothing.

So all of a sudden, there's this RFK, and what's the subtext?

He's got 20% or 25%

of the support.

He's not going to win any primaries, but

they don't know what to do with him because he's got supporters.

And they look at maybe Joe Manchin might be running, and there might be a congressman who's a serious candidate.

And then there's Cornell West, and they total them all up, and they say a constituency here, a constituency there.

Joe Biden might not win.

Then the second thing they do, I was listening to, somebody sent me a video of Joe Scarborough, and he said, when Trump

gets elected, he'll kill people.

And I thought, okay,

what has he ever done?

Did he weaponize the FBI?

Did he weaponize the CIA, the IRS, the DOJ?

No, he was very naive.

You guys did it.

But the point is, again,

why are they saying this about RFK?

They're paranoid because the subtext is that Donald Trump might be elected.

And they're thinking, if I were Donald Trump and I suffered

the way Donald Trump has, and I suffered an account of people like me, when I got in there,

I would be the worst SOB possible and I would pay back my enemies in Conan the Barbarian, barbarian, ravage their women, take their lands, burn their villages.

That's what they think.

They think.

So they project that onto Donald Trump.

Surely he's going to take revenge on us like we would if we had that chance.

I don't think he will.

I really don't.

He's never done it before.

He's talked,

he's never, I mean,

he gave Anthony Fauci a Medal of Freedom.

He had Burks in there.

He didn't, I mean,

he had all those people that he had anonymous in his administration.

He had all of these people who were undermining him.

And all these people who used to work for him are all, they all wrote memoirs about him.

They all said all of these things.

But one thing they didn't, they said he was crazy.

He made fun of soldiers.

He did all these horrible things, but they don't tell you the subtext.

Subtext was,

I was kind of retired.

I wasn't in the news.

I was controversial.

So he brought me out of retirement as a general.

He brought me in as a former official, cabinet official.

He did this, and then I became famous because I attacked the person who brought me back.

And then I wrote a memoir.

And he never really did anything.

What he did was he tweeted things like he's an idiot, he's a fool, he's a traitor.

But he didn't do anything.

These guys don't tweet anything.

They get you.

They do Russian collusion.

They do Russian disinformation.

They do impeachment.

They try you as a private citizen when you're president.

Sure.

They do all of it.

They rig the IRS.

They get the FBI, the CBI goal.

The media all after you.

If you're a president on their team and your daughter loses a diary, your son has a laptop, or he drops a gun in a garbage bin, they will get the FBI to be retrieval.

Yeah.

Victor, we need to take a break and then come back and we'll talk about one more story.

I know we're kind of up against a time limit in California about Assembly Bill 1253.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

We're back.

So, Victor, Assembly Bill 1253 has passed and has been signed according to, I'm not sure if Governor Newsom has signed it, but according to the website I looked at, and on October 7th

of this year,

AB 1253, and it raises income tax

for the highest

level of income tax.

It's going to raise the California state income tax to 16.8%.

That's incredible.

And most of the news that I read, they just keep saying, well, people are just going to start fleeing this state.

They are.

They lost 500,000 Californians in two years.

But you've got to remember that that Joe Biden raised taxes to 39.5, and so then you get up to 16, and 49.5 plus another 6,

you're 55%.

And then you've got payroll tax, you've got Obamacare, Medicare, and all of that.

You get up to 60% with property tax, gas taxes, sales taxes.

Yeah, easily.

And they don't care, though.

You've got to remember that if you were to say to them,

well, you drove out at 13.3, 500,000 people in two years, if you go up to 16,000, you're going to drive out a million.

They say, yes, that'd be great.

Absolutely, because you know what?

Housing is too expensive.

They would just leave.

When I wrote The Dying Citizen, I quoted a Silicon Valley guy who said exactly that.

I want to drive these people out.

Make room for people of color, he said.

And

it's not just so-called white people that are are leaving.

People of all different backgrounds, all different ideologies are leaving because they can't afford to live here.

And we have created a medieval

bifurcation.

And that is, we have people in the manor and the castle, the keep,

and these are the coastal elites that make a million and up, and they don't care.

Maybe even more than a million.

You care at a million if you're losing half your income or 60% of it.

And you're in California and a house cost a million bucks on average.

But my point is that they feel the hyper-wealthy will stay

and the hyper-wealthy probably will.

It's a beautiful state.

And then the poor will be subsidized.

And so therefore,

the only

known unknown about this is what will 45% of the state who are Hispanic do?

And I'm talking about the highway patrolman, I'm talking about the city councilman, I'm talking about

the head of the DM, I'm talking about the professional Hispanic class that makes between 100 and 200,000.

And when they get into that tax bracket,

what are they going to do?

The other thing to remember is

I'm sitting in southwestern Fesno County right now, and I've said this before.

If it gets so

I can go on a Sunday morning two miles from my home and I can buy anything I need I don't do it want a shovel want a lawnmower want a bicycle it looks pretty new to me at this huge swap meet there won't be any sales tack

I can go on the corner, I can get food on the corner, I can get clothes.

I was driving down back from Stanford the other day and I went to a well-known West Side crossroads and I thought, wow, rakes, shovels, chainsaw, they're all there.

And you know what?

They look brand new.

Where did they come from?

Hmm, maybe Home Depot was losing some of them.

I don't know, but the point is, there's no income tax, excuse me, sales tax.

So when you have, and these people are not paying income tax, California has the biggest black market underground economy in the United States.

And part of it is because the income taxes are so high that people are not paying them.

And I found that out when I was trying to fix this ancient house of mine and I would go to these contractors and they'd say, sorry, it'll take seven years, ten years, 15 years.

I'm just being facetious, but usually it was about a year.

Oh, we'll wire your house and rewire it.

It'll be about a year.

And then, but you might want to contact one of our employees.

They kind of moonlight on weekend.

And then,

you know, anybody.

I'm not just saying electricians.

I'm talking about plumbers.

I'm talking about roofers, I'm talking about sewage, I'm talking about cement, you name it.

Everybody is working on weekends and they want to work for cash only.

And I thought that was really awful because, as I said to a lot of people, first of all, I had to pay tax on every single penny of that income.

It took so when I pay you, if I were to pay you $30 an hour, I would have to make $65 an hour.

And second, I can't write that off.

And yet

you get to have cash and you don't report it.

Well, that's a huge, but it's partly because of the income tax is so high.

And why would you do that?

It's just nihilistic.

I think they really do want to drive everybody out.

I think their attitude is in the legislature, hmm, there's some nice homes in Montecito.

Hmm, I like those Atherton estates.

It's kind of like Dr.

Javago.

You remember that big, beautiful mansion where there's eight old bankrupt aristocratic families living there?

Yes.

It's like, well, we're going to make you leave, and then we're just going to squat and take it over.

Power to the people.

And then you're going to say,

and then they're going to say, well, wait a minute.

We took our grimy hands and strangled the neck of that goose and there's no more eggs.

Because I don't think the people that are leaving are dummies.

They're the people who make businesses and have ideas and are creating a company.

Just think what California would be.

It's going to be $40 billion this year short.

How do you do that?

You have the highest income taxes, the highest gas taxes, the third highest electricity bills, and I think the fourth highest sales taxes, depending on the county.

And you're short $40 billion.

And Texas and Florida have no income taxes at all, and they have running a surplus.

And everybody wants to go there, liberals included.

And you have paradigm, a natural paradigm.

I'm not offending Texas, but you go out in West Texas and you pair it to California.

That is purgatory, a natural purgatory, and they made it into a human paradise.

And we took a human paradise and made it into purgatory.

That's hard to do.

And why you would continue to do that,

there could be no other explanation other than you're just downright mean, and you want to destroy.

certain people because of your envy and anger that they have more than you do and you feel that you want it and you deserve it.

Well, there is a socialist element to it, but I think that the mechanism is that the

Democrats in the state government are paying a boatload of money in entitlements to people who are voting for them and voting them in, and they raise taxes so their representatives have the incentive to raise taxes, and then they just keep on supporting the money.

It's not just that, it's also more insidious.

It's

you we're going to raise taxes so we have entitlements to give you stuff, but we're also going to give you an exemption.

So you want to open a little side-by-the-road restaurant or you want to sell milkshakes or you want to sell shovels,

we're not going to tamper with you.

And you want to go to the local food market and bring out five EBD cards with different names.

And I've seen it happen almost every time I go there.

We're not going to prosecute you for fraud.

Just not going to do it.

And you want to work for cash, and you know, you're a caregiver, you're a nanny, you're a cook for a private wealthy private family, and you get cash, we're not going to investigate that.

So it's more than that.

It is we're not only going to tax the upper middle class, but we're going to apply every single regulation.

If they live in Menlo Park, or they live on the San Joaquin River in Fresno,

or Sacramento River in nice, big, beautiful home, and their mailbox is three inches too short,

we're going to thread tag that house.

Out here where we are, you can have 50 dogs and 10 without one license or rabies vaccination, and you can have 10 Winnebago around your house with Romex strong and port-a-potties and no septic, and we won't do a thing to you.

That's the other flip side of it.

And that's how people survive in California.

Public entitlement, 55% of all births are Medi-Cal.

So public entitlements,

cash income, and exemption from the law.

Those three things can give a person a pretty good middle class existence.

But you play by the rules and you report every dime you make and you pay 13.3 and soon to be 16

and you have these regulations, you just

I don't know, I feel like I walk around like a lot of people with a big target on my back.

Yeah.

'Cause you're you're taught you're targeted.

They hate your guts.

They really do hate you because they don't care for how you make you know, if you make the money honestly and you have ideas and you're trying to create money for your family or friends or whatever, they hate that.

And there's not, they're going to, you know, it's

what can't go on won't go on.

And so you can already see it in the state.

When I drive in California, I try to avoid going to a public

rest stop, restroom.

I try to avoid

if I go to my regular route, I just assume that it's going to be 30 minutes of delays.

I just assume, I just factor in California.

And I used to walk all around at night.

I don't even think it's safe at night when I walk around the Stanford campus.

I look at the university saying that there was an armed robbery and there was this and that and catalytic converter thefts.

So it's a whole different world out there.

They created it.

They wanted to create it.

That was what the anarchist and chaotic mind wants to do, the Antifa mind.

Cause

well we've gotten all the way from left-wing incoherence to further incoherence, left-wing policy.

Yeah, they're determined.

They hate the person listening to this, the productive, hard-working, traditionalist American.

They hate who you are, they hate your success, they hate the fact that you're not guilty.

They hate the idea that you can make capital out of nothing.

They can't stand you.

And they want to, you're a sheep, they want to shear you for a while, and then they want to cut your throat and eat you.

No, you won't have any more wolf.

Okay,

that was just figurative, I think you mean.

I don't know about that.

I think they want to take every big, fat, productive sheep and shear him down to his skin and then strangle him and roast him and eat him.

Well, Victor, we're going to have to leave it there.

I know that we're up against a time limit today.

Oh, I admit that.

Yeah, okay.

And thank you very much for all the wisdom today and help with the modern politics.

We're going to come back on Saturday with a little bit more on the news of the week and maybe a new topic for the weekend episode.

So join us on Saturday as well.

Thank you, Victor.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

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