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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

VDH is the namesake and star of this podcast, and he is the Martin Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha-Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He has an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

You will find it at victorhanson.com.

We'll talk a little more about that later in the podcast.

Victor, today we've got a lot of liberal dudes to talk about:

Federman, John Brennan,

Kendi, Schumer.

Maybe we'll even have room for David Brooks, but we'll get to these

very worthwhile topics right after this important message.

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

Victor, and I apologize to our listeners.

I'm in a hotel in Seattle.

At least you and I, Victor, are in the same time zone.

I'm here for a

MCing a gala for the Freedom Foundation, which you spoke at, I think, two years ago.

I think you

were during COVID, and they asked me to move to the other side of the hotel because they were doing wheelies right below and shooting.

Oh, they were.

I mean, they were shooting up in the air and they were doing wheelies.

They took over the intersection

below the hotel.

Oh, oh, that.

Oh, that.

I thought it was within the the hotel.

Like, there was some.

No, no.

The hotel was very good.

The hotel didn't have very many people there because of COVID.

And they just said, they knocked on my door about 11 and said,

we've got this Saturday night stuff down here.

And they're shooting.

And just for your own protection, would you move to the other side of the hotel?

Holy mackerel.

That's Seattle.

Yeah.

Well, this is a little, this is in Renton, I think, you know, next to Seattle.

And it's actually pretty, pretty nice here, though there was a gypsy or Roman, however I'm allowed to say it, wedding in the hotel yesterday.

Man, that was quite exotic.

Anyway, Freedom Foundation, great people.

They're fighting for First Amendment rights and against organized government union

government employees,

getting them their First Amendment Janus rights so they can withdraw their hijacked dues and keep them in their own pockets.

Anyway, Victor,

let's hear about what your views are.

You have an embarrassment of riches, huh, with all these names.

You want to start with Professor Kendi and his $43 million

center that is now under investigation by his liberal host, Boston University?

Aren't you shocked by this?

Shocked, shocked.

I have mixed feelings because after George Floyd died,

these corporations that go after sometimes their own employee, you know, if you're an airline attendant and you put a bag of potato chips in your pocket and go out and eat it on the way, you know, they get angry at you.

And then they give this guy 43 million bucks in guilt money.

What did they think was going to happen?

And that's true of all these things.

I don't know how much.

Did Jeff Bezos give

Van Jones $100 million?

I think he did.

Nobody's audited that.

So he had to lay off 20 of his lackeys and they're angry that they've lost their jobs.

And of course,

this is a guy who wrote a book saying that all white people were systemically racist and the only way to cure it was to be racist

and what he called anti-racism, which is racism.

And then all of these white liberals sort of said, please don't hate me.

And all these corporations said, please don't organize a Jesse Jackson-like shakedown boycott of me.

So here's a bunch of millions millions of dollars.

And I'm a CEO and I get all these millions of dollars.

So I don't really care.

So here, take it.

And then, shock, there's gambling in Casablanca.

What did you think?

Did he have any experience as a manager and administrator?

No.

He had one, he was a one-trick pony.

Was he a scholar?

And then, of course, the audits, the preliminary audits, say,

wow.

In two years, they've done maybe three little papers, or they're just doing op-eds and ranning.

No serious scholarship at all with all this budget, $43 million.

I mean, to be frank, the Hoover Institution has about $100 million, $90 million budget.

And I can tell you that

per million dollars per output, we are a lot more efficient than his think tank.

I can tell you that.

Because we probably each year publish thousands of papers, policy, briefs, books, et cetera.

What did he have to show for it?

Nothing.

And they didn't ask him to do anything.

So, in defense of Professor Kendi,

if you give somebody 43 million bucks and say,

does that make me not a racist?

Does that make me not a target of your anti-racist, racist campaign?

And he says, yeah.

And they said, okay.

And then later to say, well, wow, you didn't do anything with it.

And he's going to say, you didn't ask me to do anything for it.

You asked me, would I not call you a racist?

And I didn't.

And you asked me if I wouldn't stage a boycott of your racist practices.

And I didn't.

So what do you care?

That's what it was all about.

Well, nobody asked the

BLM founders what they were going to do.

They're all esconced in their homes, aren't they?

The thing about BLM, people don't know that Phyllis Queller is not all, the three women who started it.

It really didn't have much to do.

It was actually aimed at black males.

It was a gay, black group.

And they were arguing that in the black community, gays had not been properly accorded respect, especially women.

And then

these series of racial incidents

happened, Ferguson most prominently, and then they took off and they hijacked that little tiny group and they made it mainstream.

And suddenly they had 100 million bucks.

And the three women just said, I'm cashing in.

And they bought multiple homes homes and then they retired.

And then they said anybody was a racist who said that.

The common theme of all of this, Jack, is that the fumes of the George Floyd riot are starting to dissipate and people are waking up.

And whether it's the George Soros prosecutors in Oakland and Chicago who are blatantly racist and basically telling the victims of violent assault, it's your fault.

You were part of a

victimizing culture.

So your victimizers are innocent, and we're going to let them out.

Or it's all these DEI czars and apparat and commissars that all these left-wing faculty.

You know, when I was a faculty member,

it was

you went to a lounge, Jack, or you went to coffee, and this is what you heard, the first thing.

Man, that dean.

That provost Smith, that assistant

president, that aide to the pro dean, all they are is worthless.

They don't teach.

All they do is screw up things.

They're stupid drones.

I can't stand these people.

They waste money.

If you look at the actual, then they would quote data to you.

Every dollar that comes into the CSU system goes to administrator, da, da, da.

And then all of a sudden they rolled over and played dead when after George Floyd, they hired thousands of these people.

And they weren't like just the old boy worthless drones that kind of left the faculty alone and did nothing.

You know, the assistant provost for internal development and external relations, those kind of people with their six staffers, they just let the faculty alone and they said, basically, we don't do anything.

We get a lot of money.

We wear nice clothes.

And the guys with the elbow patches and the wire rimmed glasses, the nasal voice, let them go.

But not the DIEI.

They go and look at your syllabus.

They want to see your grading pattern.

They want to see the book list.

They're intrusive.

It doesn't mean they do anything,

but it's very funny how these people really got what they wanted.

It's like the IRSA agents, right?

We're going to hire them only 400,000 and above, but no, they're going to look into everything, including you.

So this is kind of a version.

I mean, it doesn't come after this.

They're coming after you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When I heard that, I thought, wow.

Do they really want to promulgate that lie?

What they're going to hire, if you go look at California, 1%

of the households pay almost 50%

of the income tax.

And

that's, you know, there's only 160,000.

So yes, they can go after those people, but they still have the other half.

And there's thousands of those people in the middle class.

And so,

you know, they audit.

And the people who are in that 1% that pay half of Cal, they're audited all the time.

They have targets on their back.

I've gotten a letter from the IRS that they wanted me to pay twice for each dollar I made speaking.

And then they said you were going to get an interest, one and a half interest per month.

I had to call my accountant to say, look, this was the speaking bureau that did this, and they are trying to.

He said, it's obvious, but it's going to take me a long time to talk to these people because they're incompetent.

And it did.

And then all of a sudden, he did a wonderful job.

And then all of a sudden, I get a letter.

Please disregard letter numbers.

Sometimes you are are no longer

required to pay anything.

And I hadn't paid anything extra.

And then

I think it was six weeks later.

This is to inform you that you have a rebate, that you overpaid your income tax.

And so my point is they'd look at every single person that they feel is in a higher income bracket.

So they didn't need those people.

So when they did hire those people, there was only one purpose, to go after the waitress tips, to go after the electrician that works on weekends, to go after the plumber who does barter stuff.

That's what they were after.

The guy on the street corner who's selling tacos or he's selling milkshakes or bicycles out here in the San Juan, that's who they're going after.

And they will go.

They'll get a lot of money going after those people.

Yeah, but the point here for me, anyways, it's kind of parallel to what's happening with the IRS.

You hire more agents.

They're going after everyone.

And the academy hire these DEI staffers.

And if you think, if you're a professor and think you're, because you're some lefty, you think you're a lefty, you're exonerated.

No, they're coming after you too.

No, and what I'm saying too is that this is very difficult for these left-wing professors because they got what they wanted.

They wanted this kind of stuff.

Right.

And they wanted repertory admissions.

So in the case of Stanford, there's 70, 80 of these, there's more administrative staff almost than there are students.

And that's what they got.

And yet they can't say anything in their usual rants, boilerplate criticism of administrative bloat because these people

are annoyed.

They're black and Hispanic for the most part.

And you can't say anything about them.

And these people are just...

boiling.

And the same thing is true of the admissions.

They wanted affirmative action.

They wanted these race-based apartheid like racist admissions because they thought, well, my kid went to sat camp.

I'm an endowed professor.

My son will have, I know the admissions officer.

I can navigate around this.

It'll only fall on the guy from, I don't know, it'll fall a guy from Mobile, Alabama, or Dayton, Ohio, or Lansing, Michigan, the poor white guy that we can caricature and smear as a,

you know, MAGA semi-maga, MAGA, ultra, MAGA fascist, whatever.

And then we'll just not let him in.

And they thought they could get around that.

And they could when we had proportional admissions, 67% white, no matter what, and then, you know, 12% black, no matter what.

But when you go to repertory admissions, as Stanford does with 20% white, And you have to take out of that 20%, Jack, athletes, legacies, donors' kids, alumni's kids, kid, the assistant provost kid, the guy that gives 10 million.

There's no room, not just for the white working classes, they're gone, but for the upper, upper, upper middle-class kid with 4.5 perfect sat, went to the best prep school in the Bay Area, that kind.

And so they got what they wanted.

And it came back to bite them, and just like these administrators came back to bite them.

Just like the guy in the urban hipster that lives in San Francisco that voted for all these Soros prosecutors.

All of a sudden he goes out and his audience got the window broken and he stepped in humanist greetment and he's walking down with his ankle skin-tight pants up to his ankles and his beautiful little suit up to his elbows.

And some guy comes in and hits him over the head and takes his wallet.

And he thinks,

where are the police?

Well, you voted for somebody that defunded them.

but

there's nobody who cares about me.

No,

this wasn't a crime.

This was a socially constructed act of defiance and redistribution.

And that's what happened to you.

Isn't it your own fault?

Didn't some San Francisco city councilman say it's your fault for leaving your given a car?

He did.

And now that, you know what, all the left-wing people are upset at him and they want to run against him.

And I think Elon Musk even said he'd give money.

But yeah, he said, and he also said,

if you would just unlock your car and don't put anything in it, then

you wouldn't be broken in.

But if you're going to lock that car, if you have quote-unquote property, what do you expect?

Had it coming.

And that hits a lot of left-wing people.

That's why they're leaving in droves, these cities.

It's really weird.

Finally, this woke revolution caught up to them.

So Dr.

Frankenstein's monster is now attacking the creator, and they don't know what to do about it.

It's too bad that we don't have an imaginative, creative Republican conservative candidates because, right now, and you sent me a good

article, Jack, by Michael Dougherty in the National.

They should be down at the border every day.

And they should say there's 8 million illegal entries in the last two and a half years.

This is not a border.

It doesn't exist.

There is no immigration law.

They destroyed it.

This is the most deliberate, willful

anarchy we've ever seen in this country.

They have destroyed the border.

They have taken the citizen and they've stepped on him and they've taken the illegal alien and they've said to him, we're going to kick people out of the U.S.

military.

They didn't get vaccinated.

But you, you, you, you come across without any vaccinations.

You fly in the United States and you better have a passport from a foreign country.

250,000 you want to fly in?

No passport.

It's really strange how they hate citizens and they love illegals, which begs the question,

why, why, why?

And I guess the answer is constituents, constituents, constituents, constituents, free labor, cheap labor,

hate the American working class.

Our agenda has no resonance anymore.

Nobody likes the Green New Deal.

Nobody likes the open border.

Nobody likes a Soros approach to

prosecutors in the major cities.

Nobody

likes the whole transgendered movement.

So we better get new constituents.

Is that it?

I don't know, but I've never seen anything like it.

Well, leftism is

at its core is destruction and sustained

Jacobins.

It's Stalin.

Mao, they're totally fine if 15 million people starve to death in China.

It always comes from the upper middle class.

It always comes from the upper middle class.

Well, that might be a good idea.

By the way, one last thing on Kendi.

The assistant director at that center at Boston University said, I'm just reading something here from Chris Ruffo.

The center lacked structure and the culture was

exploitative as she was asked to work unreasonable hours.

Quote, it became very clear after I started that this was exploitative, and other faculty experienced the same and worse.

So this is working for Kendi meant, I don't know, maybe there was sort of an academic plantation at this BU center.

Didn't you like, wasn't the New York Times that had something headline, something?

I saw it yesterday.

It said, Ambitious Center.

You know, ambitious center.

It wasn't ambitious.

It was just a way of shaking down people.

He was,

he was brilliant.

His name wasn't even Kendi.

He was born, I don't know what it was.

It would have been Henry Hill.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was like Ban Jones.

I mean, it was, it was, and then he grew, he drew, you know, he grew the

type of hair and the dress.

And then all of a sudden, he was an exotic person that would scream and yell at wealthy white people and say they're racist.

And then they would fork over money.

And then he would write up all these rants into a book.

And then they'd say he's Professor Kendi.

And they'd give him 43 million bucks.

But the methodology was no different than Jesse Jackson.

Imagine how many side hustles he had a day with these $20,000 45-minute Zooms.

Just this guy, boy, oh boy,

did he rake it in?

Victor, and the more they gave him, Jack, just to finish,

the more they gave that guy, they gave him every little

glittering gold ring that you could get in academia.

They gave him the Guggenheim.

They gave him the MacArthur.

They gave him a fellowship at Radcliffe, at Harvard.

They gave him a National National Academy of Education fellowship.

They gave him everything.

And that was a way to say, we are not racist and we feel so good.

But you know what, Professor Kendi, if you're going to take the money and you're going to blow it and do nothing with it, or and that's an optimistic version of what happened to it, then at least keep below the media, please, because it embarrasses us.

Because we go after other people who do what you do.

We have to,

but we can't go after you because you've created this exotic identity.

And so would you please just do us a favor, write a couple of papers.

We'll get more money.

We'll say it's ambitious.

That's where we are now.

They won't do anything to him.

Maybe in two years because people are getting sick of the post-George Floyd hysteria.

And I think eventually...

The admissions are going to go back to proportional representation.

I think the faculty hiring will go back to the old quota system.

And I think the Soros DAs will be gone in two or three years because people, they understand it's not sustainable.

But for right now, we're still in the midst of a Jacobin revolution and the metaphorical guillotine is still working.

Well, to think BU was once run by John Silber,

how it's low, it's come.

Victor, we're going to, you know, next, we'll talk about, I'm going to lead off of your immigration thought to Chuck Schumer, to John Fetterman.

They're all connected.

And we'll do that right after

this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Before we

move on to some of these other topics, I want to remind our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com.

That's the blade of Perseus.

It's Victor's official website.

You really should subscribe.

And when you do, you'll be able to read the ultra articles that Victor writes exclusively for The Blade of Perseus.

If you don't subscribe, you can't read them.

He just finished this nine-part

series,

The Strange and Dangerous People of the American Outback.

These are the

interesting characters that worked on the Hansen farm over the years.

It's

quite a series.

But, Victor, I have to tell you that on your website, you can also find links to your books.

And you know what I did this morning before this podcast started?

I was on The Blade of Perseus.

I saw that there was a link to your forthcoming book, and I purchased a copy of

it.

Not available till May 7th, but I want to encourage our listeners to check that out.

The end of everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation is there.

Now, it doesn't come out till May 7th, which is a long way off, but I still pre-ordered my copy.

So you can find that at the Blade of Perseus.

So

Victor, I just, I had brought with me here to Seattle, New York Post from the other day, headline, anarchy.

4,000 illegal

migrants crossed border in one day.

And that's, that's only at Eagle Pass, Texas.

And of course, this is a New York City newspaper.

Half the population of Eagle Pass, half of its population came in one day from Mexico.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I guess

greater than we've had now since Joe Biden took office, greater than the population of Tennessee.

It's a staggering number.

We've created

eight greater Fresnos since he of illegal aliens.

Well, you also have a, I think your most recent syndicated column was a great review of what the insanity has, what created it and what state we're at now, which I think is up to 8 million people.

So many people are

benefiting.

And the Mexican government needs the $60 billion in remittances.

And the remittances cannot be sent back by illegals unless the federal government gives them welfare and the states welfare so they can free up cash to wire back.

And they don't want

unhappy people from Chiapas and MichoCon and Oaxaca marching on Mexico City because they are the victims of discrimination and oppression.

So they say, march northward.

If you don't like Mexico, get out.

And we have all these employers and meat packing and hospitality, hotels, restaurants.

They want cheap labor.

And we have the Democratic Party that says, come on in.

We've got a new system called mail-in ballot

balloting.

And we don't really check.

And we just mail out the ballots.

All you got to do is go to the DMV or go to the unemployment office or the welfare office and give us your name and address.

You'll get a ballot.

And then register.

And nobody's going to check on it.

And we flipped California, we flip Colorado, we flip Nevada, we flip New Mexico.

With your help, we'll flip Arizona, Texas, and Georgia.

That was the Democratic.

And the La Raza says,

well, you know, by the second and third generation, Latinos are intermarrying, integrating, assimilating.

They're not zealous enough.

So we need new zealots right from Mexico so we can tell you that this is Aslan and that you're reclaiming the land that was stolen from you.

And so they are for it.

And who's against it?

I guess just us, the people.

And we don't have a voice because,

you know, there's no media.

You know, I was looking at Fox and you see these pictures and I

channel served MSNBC CNN and that were they don't show it right they don't show it and they'd rather show an invasion in Ukraine than an invasion in America you know I've written two columns that I got hate mail that I had to stop even picking up my hate mail one was affordable housing along the 280 corridor from Woodside to South San Francisco toward Half Moon Bay and that it was empty there was water there in Crystal Springs Reservoir.

We could have mass transit, and we didn't need to have eight or nine Hispanic families doubling up in one house in Redwood City when we could have affordable housing.

And you wouldn't believe what people wrote.

I have a polo field.

You know, I love them, my coyotes.

I see them out on the countryside, and we don't want this.

And then the second worst was something I wrote, I think, two years ago when this started.

And I said, there's about, I don't know, half a million dorm rooms in the United States.

It's summer.

Universities have legal centers there for legal aid.

They have medical centers for free health care.

They have unused big cafeterias for food.

And they have all these dorms.

And these people are in need of 360 degrees support.

So why don't we utilize them?

Universities need money.

They can contract with the government.

And then we can bring them in in May and maybe some can leave when school starts, but maybe they don't need to because it would be good for students to work with them and tutor them.

And you wouldn't believe the stuff I heard.

Racist stuff from left-wing people.

You're an idiot.

You're creep.

How dare you suggest that?

You want to ruin, you know, Harvard, Yale, Prince.

It was very funny to read that, but that would be a good solution.

Also, Victor, this is a few years ago.

Who am I?

I'm just a nobody, but recommended to the head of the United States Catholic Bishops with all these empty seminaries and some empty colleges.

Why not use these facilities you have at hand, which all have rooms in them for ghosts of priests and ghosts of nuns that aren't there anymore?

And you're making a big deal about immigration.

Put them up.

Put the people up in these facilities you own.

They're there.

And nothing.

The church has a big mouth, the officialdom of the church, the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church has a big mouth on these issues.

But when it comes time to putting up, it's not there either.

So, but Victor, can I, can we, can I on what we're still, I interrupted you, we're still on

what you're doing.

We're going to get to, yeah, we're going to get to the provincialism of the head, the New York Post is really to get into Chuck Schumer, who, you know, we have the, we've talked about on previous podcasts,

Mayor Adams, just,

you know, desperate that Biden stop it or do something.

And Chuck Schumer is

the Senate majority leader, and he's done squat for New York City.

So there may be some little commentary on that.

But then we want to hear your thoughts on Schumer

as the

head of the Senate and these decorum changes for the Senate to

make John Fetterman,

I don't know, stand, not stand out.

He'll stand out all the more.

I don't really agree with Peggy Noonan much anymore, but she wrote a good op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and she looked at the dress code.

In other words, Schumer buckling to one out of 100 persons in the Senate who wanted to wear his, I guess, their gym shorts.

And this, it looks like it's even dirty, this

weird sweatshirt with a hoodie.

Right.

And he buckled down and she was saying that this, she's right, that it sends sends a message to the United States and the world that we have no standards.

We don't require anything of our senators.

They can just walk out of the gym.

But in his case,

you can't dress down in the gym.

I mean, if he went to the gym, he would dress up.

He's dressed as low as you can get.

Right.

Yeah.

So,

and then

this state legislature candidate in Virginia that

basically films herself doing sexual gymnastics with her husband while she talks and solicits advice from the paid subscribers and then they they give it money to I guess for her campaign she said it was a good cause and then she's outraged that people put it on the internet where it was anyway but it had a paywall apparently and then she says she's lost her privacy and then we've had representative barbert bobbit burbert i can't remember i don't know how lauren bobert bobetta colorado yes and she's i kind of like her i met her once she i spoke in denver she had a firearm on her hip.

I think she had one of her sons there.

He was a very nice person.

But, you know,

she's kind of upset that I guess she's divorced.

She has four children.

I understand that.

Her husband felt empathetic that she was being blamed for her.

rowdy, raunchy behavior.

So he came out and said that he had been a serial philanderer, adulterer, and that this marriage was not because of her dating, but because of him.

And so that was noble, I guess, of him.

But unfortunately, if you're going to be a representative and you go to a public event, people are going to take pictures of you or they're going to have security cameras that they can focus on you.

So when you walk out, when you're reportedly vaping or somebody was, and you're with a boyfriend and you touch an area of his anatomy, and then when they ask you to leave, and then when you're walking out, you give them the finger, It's sort of in Fetterman, this woman in Virginia territory.

And so what do you expect?

And she had a very close election the last time.

Right.

And she got AOC out there, you know, commenting on it, AOC, who says, and we've talked about that before, that she was married until she discovered

she's not married, but she said she was married because apparently she discovered that if you're married, there's less conflict of interest, I guess.

Well, freebies,

the Benny's.

Freebart

travel and whatever, yeah.

So she's now a pot calling the kettle black.

And

you look at all of it together.

It's so raunchy.

It's really right out of the satiricon of Petronius, that novel I've mentioned before, written about 70 AD, kind of an allegory of the Emperor Nero.

And people in that novel are transgendered, they're bisexual,

they eat exotic foods, they have public sex,

they suffer from depression, impotence, they're gratuitously violent, they hip, they make fun of people who are middle class, who are legionnaires, there's crime everywhere.

So

they're just fixated on Biagra issues of impotence and sexuality.

And

the theme of that novel is that affluence and leisure have ruined this republic.

And it's turned into something that is completely unrecognizable, I guess, five centuries, three centuries, two centuries, just a century earlier.

But you really get this impression that we're $33 trillion in debt.

We scattered from Afghanistan.

We either can't or won't tell people from another country, you don't have a right to barge into our country as uninvited guests, breaking the law as the first choice you've made to come here.

And we can't seem to put people in jail.

I guess we had that problem solved when we built prisons under the three strikes, you're out phenomenon of the 1980s and 90s and the broken windows.

And then Donald Trump was partly culpable of that, Jack, when he also let a lot of people out claiming they had suffered from minor drug abuse.

Not all of them were.

Some of them were violent drug dealers.

But the point is that

everything is breaking down.

It's all falling down and it's all happening at an accelerated rate.

And it's hard to know who or what can stop it.

And now we get back to these individuals we were talking about.

Before

we've talked about

two of them, but how about David Brooks with this little tweet that he's at a New Jersey airport restaurant?

He shows a burger and fries

and then one little drink.

And he said, this is why people are angry at the economy because it's $77.

Is that it?

Yeah, 78, but 77.

78.

Yes.

And then he's trashed on social media because people show all these funny pictures.

You know,

they'll show a bottle of French wine with a sandwich and says, it's unfair that I had to pay $150 for this lunch and stuff like that.

But he didn't really tell us.

Yeah, he gave me like, I'm having a a hamburger and some fries or whatever, and it's $78.

Why did he not mention that when it was a drink?

Because did you see that the restaurant had a David Brooks special?

No, I didn't.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

They have hamburger and fries with one drink, and it says $78 slash discounted, $18.

But

why does it, why do people do that?

Why did he do that?

Is he because he's David Brooks and he feels that he's got to be

empathizing with the the working classes.

Maybe.

Bulbos in paradise.

I mean, he wrote that about yuppies, and then he said about Barack Obama that he knew two things when he sat down with him.

Remember what he said?

He said, I do.

Go ahead, though.

Most candidates,

they know retail politics and economics as well or better than I do, but they don't know political theory.

Now, that's something I know.

And Barack Obama knew it better than I did.

So when I looked over over there and I saw his pants, there was a perfect crease in them.

And then I concluded that this is a very singular, extraordinary candidate.

One, and two,

this candidate will be president and be a substantial president.

Yeah.

Okay, David.

So

that was your insight.

And we had one of the worst presidencies in history.

And another insight is,

you know what the working class has to put up to when they have to pay $78

for

hamburger and fries.

You really believe that because you've never been to Tulare and had a hamburger and fries in your life.

And if you did, you would see they're not $78 unless, unlike 99.9% of the middle class, when they go have a hamburger, they don't get expensive scotch and get drinking it at tall whiskeys.

Right.

yeah

so

anyway that didn't work out for him maybe he did maybe he he had just finished his second tall whiskey when he tweeted uh don't don't tweet and drive or don't don't drink and tweet maybe should be uh a rule for all of us well uh and we had john brennan that came up you mentioned yeah well let's can we we have to take a little break but let's get to him victor because that's really he and merrick garland should be in the on-deck circle so let's let's get to that uh right after this final important message.

Back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, you started to mention that famous ex-communist.

I think he went to Fordham University too, where I went for a freshman year.

You know, I got all these guys, Bauci at Holy Cross.

John Brennan, yes.

Wasn't he a Muslim for a while?

He thought he was.

Was he that?

Oh, wow.

He's a draft.

He thought he was.

And then,

well,

he's going to be promoted to a particular, what, homeland security.

Yeah, well, I can find the title of

his job as

experts group.

Yeah.

Domestic terrorism.

He will offer advice and counsel to Undersecretary for Intelligence and Analysis, Ken Weinstein, and counterterrorism coordinator Nicholas Rasmussen.

So is

a Biden

employee.

And I guess the requisite for that, Jack, is the Biden administration said we need somebody to monitor January 6th types.

So

let's see who we have.

Well, we have one requisite.

They have had to lie under oath to Congress.

Oh, wow.

John Brennan said that he never used the CIA to spy on staff, Senate staff or computers.

That's good.

But then he also said that not one person was killed in drone missions on the Afghan board.

Well, that's good, but we need more from him.

What else do we need?

Well, we need somebody to help coordinate 51 FBI agents, former intelligence people, and the government to lie right before an election and a debate so that they can prove that

Hunter's laptop was created, as I said earlier, by gremlins.

Oh, he did that too.

So that's good.

He's got two things going for him.

Well, we need somebody to be an intelligence officer that had his

security clearance yanked for saying that his commander-in-chief was a Russian agent or asset.

That's him, too.

And so that's why they picked him and then did O.

Clapper, because he has lied.

Not only did he lie under oath, he said that he lied under oath and said, so did Brennan.

He apologized, but Clapper said he gave the least untruthful answer.

And of course,

both of them went on to cable TV fame by promulgating two big lies that Donald Trump was a Russian colluder and that the laptop was authentic, and that's what they got rewarded for by the Biden administration.

Boy, it really reminds you that lying is a lucrative business in Washington.

Fauci gets in there and says repeatedly that there is

no evidence of a lab origin of the SARS virus, that masks have no utility.

They do have utility.

Two masks are better than one.

One is better than none.

Vaccinations are sort of ironclad proof of infectiousness and being infected, et cetera.

And he had nothing to do with gain of function research.

And wow, he's a national icon.

And so

it's an empire of lies.

It really is.

I mean, you look at Merrick Garland.

He gets in front of Congress yesterday and he just,

the first question, you said that you were two years ago that you were going to investigate and tell us how many people in the FBI were informants.

And of course, we have that.

Rosenberg article in the New York Times reporter that says they were everywhere.

And

he says, well, I don't know.

And then they said, have you ever discussed anything about the Hunter Biden matters with the FBI?

I don't know.

I don't think.

I can't recollect.

He didn't.

He was like Robert Mueller and James Comey on steroids.

And he was the Attorney General of the United States.

And if you or I did that, or any of our listeners, if the IRS called us in and said,

Did you ever get money from CAT?

I don't know.

I can't relate.

Did you ever

give this gift to somebody and not report gift to?

I don't know.

I can't remember.

You wouldn't last a second.

It's really funny how these people were supposed to be a constitutional republic and we've just created this Versailles-like elite that can do anything they want and lie in perpetuity and with exemption.

It's really scary.

And then

he starts, they all play, have you noticed this, Jack?

They all play the victim card in this victimized society so menendez is insufferable on this yeah and he says this is what they do to a latino and

they go after garland and he said

i i'm they said you your fbi went after traditional catholics and you said that you would investigate and you would do something about it and he said well it was a local matter he didn't do anything about it because they probably coordinated it it seems city to city which would require some

super

potentary that was watching all of this or ordering them.

And he says, Well, my family came from the Holocaust.

They suffered in the Holocaust.

How dare you about this?

How dare you ask me?

Yeah, I mean, this is so weird.

I think I'll do that sometimes when I get attacked.

I'm going to say, well, I had a grandfather and his family came from Sweden.

Does that work?

I don't think so, but

you know, I had a ruptured appendix.

Come on.

All the people with ruptured appendixes should they get a pass right yeah and i when i in the summer when i'm out on the farm and i get 10 one time and somebody asked me if i was italian so come on that was a compliment yes come on come on well i mean it's really this

well can i say something about the the catholic stuff victor is that yeah since i since i sort of you know trashed my bishops earlier is if you think about that that if it was one guy remember originally this was one guy in the richmond office Well, it wasn't, right?

So we have several offices.

If this was a crime, if this was some business with various offices engaging in similar activities and the FBI was investigating that, they would immediately come to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy going on, right?

That they were all coordinated.

I hate to use the word conspiracy because it makes it sound like a lunatic.

But so there clearly was a conspiracy within the FBI.

There was.

He responds to it by playing this

is

Holocaust.

It's crazy.

We know what the FBI is.

It was a retrieval service for the Biden family.

So if you lose a gun or you lose a diary or you lose a laptop, call the FBI.

They'll suppress any untoward publicity and they'll find it.

And they will punish the people they feel that are involved.

If you have a Latin mask, go after them because these people are anti-abortion fanatics.

If you're a guy and you've got a family and you go to an abortion clinic and somebody starts to push or assault your son and you protect him, then go after him and do a performance art raid.

If you're Roger Stone or Donald Trump, call CNN up, get them ready to film it, and then do another performance art SWAT raid.

That's what they are.

And they didn't used to be that way.

And then if you object.

to them, then all of a sudden the left says, oh,

you want to defund the police, you hypocrite.

No, this is is a completely rogue agency, at least the elite is, the hierarchy in Washington.

And we can preserve it by either breaking it up and giving particular divisions to particular cabinet sees, or we can move it out of Washington.

But you cannot leave it under its present form because it's corrupt and it's dangerous.

And

I don't know.

It's too bad there wasn't statute limitations online before Congress, or we could get Robert Mueller for saying he didn't know anything about the fusion GPS or the dossier that were the twin pillars of his investigation, or James Comey said he didn't know anything about the leaks or how, you know, Donald Trump this and that.

245 times he pled amnesia or Andrew McCabe lying by his own admission, four times to federal investigators, or Christopher Wray just saying,

I don't know, I got to get on my plane and go.

I have a business appointment where he takes the government jet to his vacation home.

So it doesn't seem to matter who is the FBI director.

The culture absorbs them, and either they want a particular profile of a director or the director is absorbed by the culture.

But either way, they cannot tell the truth.

Fauci can't tell the truth, and Brennan can.

So it's an empire of liars, and we've got to stop it.

Somebody's going to say, well, Victor, you just said it's an empire of slobs.

Well, he's both.

And then somebody's going to say it's an empire of perverts.

Yes.

Who's that bald-headed dress-wearing,

luggage-stealing creep from he's back in the news, isn't he?

I saw his face in the paper the other day, but I don't know what to do.

I think the woman that stole, that he stole all the costumes, I think she was suggesting they were ruined now.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I mean, who would want to buy one that is associated with him, him her brand

and so he didn't really get much of a sentence i don't think he's going to go to jail nobody gets uh nobody by the way then january 6th you go you go up you know and walk around with cowhorns and you'll be in prison for years

but you systematically go to luggage carousels and you spot out people on the plane and then you systematically steal

suitcases that are in the grand larceny or grand theft category and there's nothing they're going to do to him.

As a pathology, you wonder about back to the FBI, which is, I would think, would be doing the background checks on characters like him and come to the conclusion, like this guy's got problems.

He should not be hired.

He should not get clearance.

But who knows?

They're too busy going after Catholics.

In fact,

I don't think there is any background.

I think the whole problem is

the root cause of there is a theme to all of this.

It is that the people in the government, and for that matter, mainly in the private sector, reflect this revolution of the last 20 years, this therapeutic revolution, where they're not very well educated.

They don't read or write very well.

They've had no moral instruction, whether it's religious or it's ethical in schools.

They have no common civic education where they see themselves as part of a greater unity.

Instead, the popular culture and the educational establishment has told them that their country is flawed, that there is no good or bad.

It's a relative depending on power, Foucaultian view of morality.

Three,

that each person to succeed in this tribal society has to have some cachet,

whether it's sexual orientation or gender or race.

And you have to drive home that you're a victim of a victimizing class.

And whether you're Elizabeth Warren or Ward Churchill, you've got to find some cachet.

And that's pretty much the operative principles of this society.

And there is no absolute morality.

And the result is that, you know, Joe Biden can say

that he was a semi-truck driver.

His son died in Iraq.

He can say anything.

He says it every single day.

It's just complete lies.

And then Corinne Jean-Pierre will tell you with a straight face that the border is closed.

Mayorkis will say the border is closed.

And then Biden will chip in and say

the MAGA Republicans did this.

Even though in January 2020, on the eve of COVID, the border was secure.

It had the lowest number of illegal entries in about 25 years.

And yet he will continue to say that the 8 million who were crossing is MAGA's fault.

And that's just an utter lie.

They're all lying to you.

And no one seems to, you know, nobody cares.

Well, a three-judge panel cared about something.

I'm going to throw this at you, Victor.

I didn't bring this up, but I think you can wing this.

The same paper I was reading from the New York Post, it's about Jay Bacheria's victory in court,

which I think you must know about.

But he was

a federal court of appeals ruled earlier this month that White House, that the White House, Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control, and the FBI, quote, likely violated the First Amendment, end quote, by exerting a pressure campaign on social media companies to censor COVID-19 skeptics, including Stanford University epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya.

Quote, I think this ruling is akin to the Second Enlightenment, end quote, Bhattacharya told the Post.

It's a ruling that says there's a democracy of ideas.

The issue is not whether the ideas are wrong or right.

The question is who gets to control what ideas are expressed in the public square, end quote.

And Victor, this was a three-judge federal court panel out of New Orleans.

And

the lead person to try and suppress Jay's

early analyses of

COVID and its consequences was Francis Collins, who he wanted to have a swift and devastating takedown of Vaticheria.

So, anyway, he's a good friend of yours.

He's a great man.

And I think as we close out the show, it might be if you have any thoughts on his, this victory for the.

CJ, we were both speaking for the Hoover Institution in Dallas on Tuesday.

I had a long talk with him, and he gave a wonderful talk to the group.

And he went over, he reviewed actually this court case.

And he's getting an award, I think, from the Real Clear people.

He just got one one for the Isamazdad Award.

Yes, yes, he just got it.

And

what's baffling to me, he's a Hoover fellow and a visiting fellow, and I hope he will be someday a senior fellow.

I think he's more than qualified, should have been.

But

what's weird about the whole thing is if we had

fast in reverse, say, let's just pick an arbitrary date, 2019,

and you were on the Stanford University campus, and you were looking at the med school or the Stanford faculty, or you would have come across with the following three pieces of knowledge: that John Ioannides was one of the most famous epidemiologists in the world, that Stanford was enormously proud of him, that his commentary and

scholarly work had proven that had kind of broken the Theranos Theranose scam.

Remember that?

About the blood testers?

That one Elizabeth Holmes scam that one drop on a tester.

And he had showed that was impossible.

And he looked at the epidemiology risk of letting that thing get on the market.

And then you would have looked at Jay.

And you would have seen what he had written.

Both he has degrees in economics and medicine.

And what he had written about public health policy and epidemics and quarantines made him one of the most famous people in the world on that subject, and they were proud of him.

If you had talked about Scott Atlas, who was a Hoover fellow, and people, and he had been at the med school, he'd been the chairman of neural radiology.

That's a big word basically for a very important field about how you interpret MRIs,

CAT scans, and that's a science to it, and the technology behind it, and then the interpretive process.

He wrote the textbook, edited it in the whole field.

So he was, that was kind of a triad that Stanford was so proud that three of the top scholars in this particular field were world famous, and rightly so.

And then the epidemic broke out.

So you would think that people would come for commentary from these people.

And they offered it.

And they did not deny the severity or the potential dangers of the epidemic, but they did say certain things

that if you're going to have a shotgun approach and try to lock down everybody, you will not have the resources to protect those who in this particular SARS

to COVID-19 virus are going to be the most vulnerable.

So put all of your eggs in the convalescent home basket and people who have immunological problems and they're elderly and keep people away from them and

give them a lot of preventive attention.

But for people that are K

through 12 or 5 or 6 all the way to 40, do not force them into

isolation and be careful.

And I'm summing up what the three of them said because I read almost everything they wrote in the public sphere, and be careful about spousal abuse, alcohol abuse,

missed surgeries, missed diagnostic tests, suicides, et cetera, when you lock up 330 million people in solitary confinement, essentially.

And be very careful about the effects.

And we have people at Hoover who had also warned about robbing

six-year-olds, eight-year-olds, 10-year-olds of two years of schooling, because they're not going to make it up.

They're never going to make it up, in a sense.

And what was the reward for that?

They were put on government list.

People on Twitter who were being hired by the FBI were going after them.

They censored their thought.

They reviled them in the press.

They kicked them off any boards or organizations they were involved in.

You saw them on campus.

People would walk the other way.

They had security.

They had death threats.

By the way, including

good friends, good former friends overnight became.

They were the worst.

the worst.

And people who supported them, the same thing.

I think I wrote three op-eds in their support.

And I can tell you that next thing I knew, somebody had reported me to the Stanford Alumni Association for,

quote, out of his lane, practicing medicine.

He claimed that he was a doctor because somebody on an interview called me Dr.

Hansen, i.e.,

you know, I don't use that term.

I have a PhD in classics from Stanford, but I don't say I'm doctor, but this person had to, and I didn't correct him, apparently.

It's his business what he wants to call me.

But I never practiced medicine, but it was just because I had written in support of Scott and Jay.

And so they created a climate of fear at Stanford, and they're going to have to live that down.

And it was at the highest echelons, the president of the university did that, and the provost.

And that's something they should be ashamed of for the rest of their lives, what they did.

They tried to destroy the reputation of three of their most renowned faculty.

And all that they did, they were guilty of one thing and one thing only.

They advocated for policies that were contrary to Dr.

Fauci and the liberal consensus.

In Scott's case, he worked as a consultant for the Trump administration.

And that was all it took.

And the next thing, they went from being stellar people in the medical community to personi non-gratae.

That's what happened to them.

And Victor, they could have been wrong too, hypothetically, but still had the right to say it.

They had the right to say it.

But they were right on top of it.

They were right.

I mean, what you just said applied to Dr.

Fauci.

He was wrong on everything.

Right.

So was Dr.

Burks.

I can remember when I got this

two Moderna's, I thought, wow, I can do anything now.

Dr.

Fauci says it's 96% effective.

And then nine months later, I got Delta.

And he said, well, there's occasional breakthroughs.

But if you get a booster, and then all these people got boosters and they got it still.

And then

Scott said something that was absolutely true.

And he said the combination of

the two shots that had some efficacy, but more importantly, that people most people would not become seriously ill.

And

I wasn't seriously ill with my first or third bout, but the second one I got long COVID.

I was sick for a year and a half.

So my point is, he wasn't downplaying it.

He just said, whether we like it or not, there is something traditionally in medicine called herd immunity.

And when most people in the United States have been exposed to this virus,

in combination with vaccination, it will start to lessen and that the mutations will be more frequent, but less severe.

And he was right.

And then the next thing you knew, they were calling him Dr.

Death.

And all of these people hated their guts.

And I don't know.

We got to the,

it was very, and you know what's really weird about this is those people bear a lot of responsibility for creating the hysteria.

As I've mentioned that anecdote, I have a disabled granddaughter when my daughter was walking her, walking her down a sidewalk.

without a mask, with no one around.

And somebody came out of their house and yelled at her and started screaming at her so she would have one of her epileptic fits or it's not epilepsy but it's like a meltdown for Smith McGinnis she's missing a gene two genes I think chromosome two genes but my point is

that happened all over the United States people's lives were ruined with small business people that had illnesses could not get medical attention people

who

needed you know they they might have been very hot and they needed an air conditioning fix.

They couldn't find anybody to come in their home.

There was just a myriad of consequences to the Fauci Burke's approach and Francis Collins.

And then the whole time this was going on, they were communicating stealthily on email with Peter Dasick.

And basically their efforts were, let's how do we stop the impression that we funded this, we gave them expertise, et cetera.

Now we it's it's every week now.

Now we realize that there were CIA people, not all of them, but there were CIA people who were

entrusted to tell a lie.

In other words, their job was to put a lid on the idea that this came out of the Wuhan lab because maybe, just maybe the American Intelligence Committee found some usefulness in Dr.

Fauci's rerouting of expertise and money to Wuhan.

And there you go.

So it was who will police the police?

And they'll never,

you know, I don't know if they'll get their reputations back because I haven't seen anybody at Stanford University, the president.

And you know what's weird about this?

The president who attacked Scott and Jay

has resigned.

And why did he resign?

Because he said he'd never doctored a paper, a scientific paper, some 30 years ago that was co-authored.

And then he resigned and he retracted it.

So if he retracted, why did he retract it if he'd done nothing wrong?

That's a woeful decision on his part.

And yet this person was

impugning the medical integrity of two of his stalwart faculty.

And there's no apologies.

There's no apologies from anybody.

Well,

you know, maybe Hoover can make him that senior fellow, Victor.

That would be one way.

Though

Stanford needs to do something.

Right.

If we have a great, if anybody's listening and

you feel that you're a philanthropist and you want to endow something

at Stanford University's Huber Institution, you could do no better, believe me, than endowing a fellowship for Jay

Bachihara

because

he's truly a happy warrior, too.

His disposition is never malicious.

He's always smiling.

He's always upbeat.

I think he's a little bit stunned of deer in the headlights because all of these colleagues that had been so collegial and had admired him so much

turned turned on him.

It was almost like the Scarlet Letter or a McCarthy period or you name it.

It was just vicious.

The cock crowed.

And they tried to destroy Scott's entire career.

He had to get a home security system.

Any type of job offer or contracting work was withdrawn from him.

People attacked him viciously in print.

Fauci and Burks attacked him, made up things about him.

And they had no voice.

There were no, I mean, the major media didn't want, the only people who gave them a voice, I'll give credit, Laura Inglin was one of the first people.

Right.

And I think Megan Kelly did as well.

But no one else, and Peter Robinson in On Common Knowledge, he should be, he was really good on that.

And they gave them a somewhat of a platform to give their dissenting views.

And another person was Martin Kohlendorf of Harvard University, Swedish guy, and they tried to destroy his reputation, too.

I say they, who was they?

To quote

O'Brien and the wild bunch.

Who is they?

They?

They?

They are the CDC and the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease and the FDA and the federal health bureaucracies and big pharma, Pfizer, and Moderna, and the university academic

departments in the medical schools that get huge Fauci, $50 billion worth of grants and big pharma grants.

That's who they are.

Yeah.

Follow the money.

You'll find out who they are.

Hey, Victor,

we're just about out of time here.

Although we should,

it would be nice to have more because your wisdom is particularly wise today, in my opinion.

But as we conclude, as is our custom, I have a couple of comments to read.

We thank our listeners who, no matter what platform they're on, but if you're on Apple, iTunes, you can leave, you can rate the show zero to five stars.

Again, practically everyone is giving five stars for Victor's wisdom.

If they fall short a little, it's usually because, you know, Fowler wished shut up, but you know, sorry.

I apologize.

Some people leave comments, and I've got two to read today.

The first one

is titled Breath of Common Sense.

I love VDH.

He reminds me of my grandfather and his common sense and analysis of current events and politics.

I miss my grandfather who was a farmer as well.

His principles of honesty, integrity, and common sense will resound with many, the silent majority, if you will, i.e.

the deplorables.

When I listen to VDH, I have hope for America.

For people like VDH is what made and still does make America.

Great.

Thank you, Dr.

Hansen.

You are an inspiration.

This is signed caveat emptor 52.

And Victor, I have to admit, I read that in part.

It was not a very nice comment, but I did want to get the grandpa thing in there.

And then

the second comment is titled, Thank You for Flying Greyhound.

Quote, absolutely love your podcast and the wisdom you share.

Your recent discussion of air travel brings to mind a song you will enjoy in regard to this very topic.

Listen to Way, Way Too Much Bus on This Plane by Tim Wilson.

This is certainly worth the time.

Enjoy.

Can I interject here, Jack?

Because I have to have an airline update.

I know that you flew.

I flew Wednesday and I'm speaking now on Saturday.

Right.

And I could not believe it.

I won't mention the airline, but I was flying back to Fresno and

everything was going just right.

Okay.

A little bit late, taxing, but things happened.

And we were going to be on time.

And we were going to be on time.

This is a direct flight.

What?

This is a direct flight.

What could go wrong?

Right.

Well, there was a Shea Guevara looking person across the aisle and I don't know what he was an artist with his laptop open.

And when

the very polite and professional attendants said,

we are now in our descent pattern.

Will everybody put away their electronic devices and push forward their seats, make sure all of that rigor morale we all know so well.

He wouldn't do it.

He just, I mean, he looked like he was a revolutionary.

You know, the whole She Guevara look, he just wouldn't do it.

And they came and they did the, first the stern look, you must do this.

And then kind of looked, he got angry.

And then another woman came and appealed to the better angels of her nature.

Please, please, if you don't do this,

the whole flight will be endangered.

We might have to go back or, you know, I don't know where, Bakersfield, Fresno,

and you could he wouldn't do it and this went on for five minutes was he being silent by the way while he was no no he was angry he was angry and yelling and they were very professional and finally they worked out some sort of compromise where he was willing to close his computer and put it away and put up his trade tape but he wouldn't move his seat forward.

He still had it back.

I guess that's what he was allowed to do.

And I thought,

wow, when we get to Fresno, there will be air marshals to arrest this.

There was nothing, nothing.

And I guess it's part of this trend that, and when you go on,

you know, just that flight, because we were talking about air travel quite frequently on these podcasts.

And I know that it really strikes a nerve with people, but my God, when you're,

when you've got...

not 10 minutes to board.

Now they're starting to board wisely so, like 30 minutes.

Have you noticed that?

On the larger planes, and it should be done in 15.

And you get these people and they just come in and they've got an oversized carry-on and then they have their personal quote-unquote baggage around their shoulder that they can't possibly fit on the seat.

And they go to the back and then there's no room.

They're carrying a cup of coffee.

Cup coffee on their cell phone.

on their cell phone.

And then they swing around and try to put, and as they go back, they just, if you're sitting there and your overhead has got a little bit, they try to put in there.

And they swing around, hit you with their bag, and they don't say hello.

You see how they're dressed.

It's like slobocracy.

It's a Federman.

It's a Federman flight.

He's better dressed.

And this week,

it's almost a,

on Fox, they had the woman with the kind of the skin tight yoga pants.

Yeah.

And she just turned around and she, it was very obscene dress she had on.

She was screaming and yelling at everybody as she walked off.

At some point,

they either have to raise the prices or they have to have some code that they enforce because people are just going on there out of completely out of control.

And when you're on there, and

I don't want to make a prediction, but given that the prior one two weeks ago where we had a touchdown, as I

told you, that we were going down and then at the last moment we went straight up because there was a plane in our pathway and then we went into the apparently the trajectory of another coming in because we had to make almost a backflip.

Pretty scary.

And you get the impression that the entire system

has too many people.

too many untrained people working there, too many tired pilots, too many people who are air air traffic control

personnel that were hired without the customary math, science, maybe military background.

Maybe they were diversity hires.

I don't know what's going on.

But there's a lot of near misses.

There's near misses on the tarmac.

There are near misses in the air.

And it's only the rise of computers and computer avionics that saved us because we have more sophisticated radars that can warn and alert people to correct these mistakes.

But there's going to be some disaster pretty soon.

And I don't know.

I hope it doesn't happen, but there's going to be either a ground collision or a mid-air collision, or there's going to be somebody on the plane that is so violent or so disruptive that it starts to affect the pilot's ability to fly the plane.

And we're not capable of doing anything about it.

Well, it's a coarsening

of the culture we're talking about

the slobocracy, but it's indicative of

it's a broken windows theory of personal compartment.

It's the same theory.

And it's if you

don't respect the person next to you and you come in all sweaty and sweatpants and like a slob, or you bring a big Labrador on and the the dog passes wind next to the person next to you and you don't even care, then that lowers the standard of deviancy.

And then things accumulate.

And then people think, well, I really don't have to do the job 99% well because it's all negotiable.

There's no dress code.

There's no animal code.

There's nothing.

Did you tell me, were you on the plane with the miniature horse?

Yeah.

Well, I was in there and this big thing walked out.

And I said to the guy next to me, wow, they let great Danes on or I thought it was a Rottweiler.

You you know, I thought there was a limitation on the size of dogs, isn't there?

And he said, I think it's a horse.

It was in Chicago.

And I said, are you sure?

And then I looked, I went home and I couldn't quite, they said they had a list of pets that were banned, but little miniature horses weren't one of them.

I mean, they had like ferrets and stuff that were banned, you know, wild animals.

And I think they banned reptiles.

And peacocks, somebody trying to get on a plane.

Yeah,

they do let birds on there don't don't they yeah

I think they do but I think in the last three years I have sat next to five people that had dogs and one of them as I said it was some kind of pekinese decided that my leg was a female pekinese

so and I don't know whether they give them pills that make them constipated or because I've never seen one actually urinate or defecate, but I have smelled them and they pass wind a lot.

And this one just took both of his paws and grabbed my leg.

And then the woman said, Isn't he sweet?

Isn't he sweet?

And I said, No, he's not.

He's a sick old pervert dog.

So I don't know.

I just, it's, it's, I, it's, I apologize to Greyhound when I said that, but it's becoming like the Greyhound bus

because I don't remember any of that on a Greyhound bus in the 70s, and I took them a lot.

I remember that the drivers were professional.

They had uniforms on and the seats were pretty clean.

There was a few drunks in the back, but I don't.

And Victor, if you go to a Catholic Mass, you see people dressed in hooters, guys who should know better.

They actually...

probably went to Latin Mass when they were kids wearing hooters t-shirts, flip-flops, cargo pants, uncombed hair.

And this is people going to church.

I don't, if you go to a funeral and see how people dress at a funeral where you would think you, I really got to wear a dark suit or something.

They dress like they're going to the beach.

It's across the board.

But

I know I feel a little bit culpable because I came of age at 18 in 1970, 71, and everybody then was wearing t-shirts and Levi's.

So when I went to college, all our professors, they had flip-flops on, them wore ties and coats, and none of us were dressed up.

And then when I went to graduate school,

at Stanford, the professors in graduate school were casual, but not sloppy.

And then I don't think I wore a tie,

I don't know, until, and when I taught at Cal State Fresno for 21 years, I never wore, I wore a sport coat and a button-down shirt.

But

I guess I should,

and I could see the results of that when you dressed like students, then you got treated like a student.

You know what I'm saying?

There was no, and that was what we were told in graduate school.

We had to break down the hierarchy so that students felt familiar.

But pretty soon your office turned into a revolving door where students would come in and say, can I borrow those books?

Or, hey, I'm in between classes and your door was unlocked, so I just went in and sat down.

Is that okay?

Yeah, go ahead.

I don't care.

Oh, you have a little refrigerator?

Can I have a drink?

You have a Coke in there?

Yes.

Oh, I'm doing an independent study.

When I'm done, can I just sit there and listen to another person have an independent study?

Hey, you have a pickup, don't you?

Is there any way I could borrow your pickup to move into my apartment?

That kind of stuff.

And if you have a small program when you like the students and you need their enrollment, at least it was small in the beginning, then you're sort of one of the crowd because I was in my, you know,

late 20s, early 30s.

But after a while, you see that that was a mistake.

Well, right.

Familiarity breeds contempt,

as the wise old saying goes.

And there was a reason.

There were no consequences.

So I had a lot of students that I realized, even looking back, they had nothing but contempt for me, nothing.

And they would say that wasn't true.

But when you look at their behavior and, you know, the amount of, you know,

here's my MA thesis.

Would you rewrite it for me?

No.

Would you tutor me?

I have 10 independent studies plus four classes a semester.

And I'm doing eight next semester.

So I have 18 independent studies and I have eight semester classes.

I'm going to teach an overload.

That'll make nine.

Well, please, please, you can do it.

You can do it for me.

And you say, okay.

And then the next thing you know, you're there from eight to eight five days a week and then no one says thank you that was really good right and so at the end of 21 years of that you kind of get

and you know you try to to let to to teach stuff that's empirical with no

with no political content and yet you

the result of an inductive class is that you're self-critical of everything.

And then you find out, you read in the paper, this particular student is now who was perfectly inductive, had a wonderful education,

got tutored in a way that nobody would have ever been tutored at Stanford or Harvard.

And then all of a sudden that students woke and suggested that they were victims of racism.

It just mind-boggled me.

And that happened to me again and again and again, where students were from minority backgrounds, middle class, not poor, and they would want tutoring and they would want advice and they would want preference and admissions.

And they got all of that into graduate programs and stuff.

And then all of a sudden, when this woke wave came, all of a sudden it was, you know, I felt like I was deprived and this and this and this when I was, and they weren't.

They got more education than anybody did.

And that really was that of all the things that have happened in my life, that was probably the most striking to have had

probably three to 400 students over 21 years

that were in classics or ancient history or Western Civ or got a master's or wanted to get a teaching credential or went to graduate school or PhDs.

And a large percentage of them, I think I gave a lot of my independent studies and time and advising.

And yet when they came out,

suddenly at one point in their careers, they all went hard left with recriminations about the racist America.

Right.

And just couldn't fathom that.

I'm glad you were born when you were born, Victor, because I can't imagine you today going into

academia.

No, I was

given the experience.

I was graduating and my mother said to me, I'd like to retire.

I'm an appellate court judge.

You are at Stanford University.

Your first year of graduate school, you don't seem very happy in classics.

Why don't you just re I think you could do well in the LSAT.

You could fly.

And I had a colleague that did that.

The most brilliant person I ever met in graduate school or any school as far as was a fellow named Lawrence Woodlock.

He was a Vietnam veteran, wounded Green Beret, and he knew Greek and Latin like English.

And he was brilliant.

And he just sailed right through the PhD.

He and I, we got done with all the exams and everything in two and a half years.

And man, that guy went right to Stanford Law School after that.

That was the smartest thing he ever did.

And he became a very successful lawyer.

But my mother, who knew him and liked him, said, why don't you do what Larry's doing?

And you two guys could come back to Fresno.

I'll retire and we'll have our own law firm.

I think I should have done it.

But when I look back at the academic life, it wasn't

there is something about academia that's toxic.

And I've written about it and who killed Homer and Bonfire of the Humanities, but it stifles individualism.

It's fattish.

There's something

unnatural about taking a large group of academics and giving them lifetime employment on a campus where they're not, and they only work nine months a year and then they're self-governed.

They evaluate each other

and

it doesn't work.

And they get their summers off and

then the whole idea is they're victimized because they don't make as much.

Many people who live in their nice neighborhood or lawyers and doctors and they're very envious and say, you know, I have a PhD and this guy makes $300,000.

I only make $120,000 and I'm smarter than everybody.

And it's just, it just, and they're all left-wing.

And I look back at it.

Just to finish, I was very lucky because there was, I just happened to bump in.

He called me one day, John Racian out of the blue.

And he offered me a position at the Hoover Institution.

And had he not done that, I don't know what I would have done.

But he was, I was ready to retire and just quit and go try to farm again or something or be an independent writer.

But it wouldn't have been easy.

And he was a great man.

He really was.

Someday, Victor, and we do have to conclude, but you know,

I think we should watch

Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf and see.

I saw it not about a year ago.

It's applicable to college.

Yeah, I saw it about a year ago.

I saw it about a year ago.

It's

mostly.

I was very lucky, though.

I was very lucky.

Just to finish, I had a good, I had a colleague, Bruce Thornton, who came from a cattle ranch.

And I didn't know him.

He was 10 miles away, Washington Union High School.

And it just was weird.

He went to UCLA.

I went to Stanford.

We got PhDs, classics, and then we ended up coming back home where we grew up.

He grew up on a cattle ranch.

I grew up on a farm.

And we ended up meeting each other.

And we were both part-time.

And we didn't think we'd ever be full-time with white males.

And then we were colleagues for,

he was there for 35 years.

I was there for 21, but he was a great guy.

And he wrote 12 books.

And he's still, he's at the Hoover Institution.

But he was a wonderful colleague.

I don't want to end on a bit of not, but I had wonderful students.

In fact, two of them, Curtis Easton and Christy Easton, basically run the classics department today.

I had a brilliant student,

Katie Becker, who went to to Ohio State.

I had a brilliant student.

Gosh, there were so many of them.

And

they did really well.

And

so I shouldn't, they were in military history.

They were in classics.

They were in law school.

And high school teachers,

professors.

I think there's about 15 of them that are professors now.

Raymond Ibrahim, he was used to.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

He was a brilliant student.

And he was an imposing guy, about 6'4 and a bodybuilder.

And so you didn't characterize him as an academic, but he wrote very well.

He knew Arabic.

He learned Greek pretty well.

But people like that were worth it.

I mean, they were really good students.

And then there were just myriads of people that I taught in GE classes that were good.

They were working-class kids, all of them.

But there were these some that I just can't fathom, that, as I said earlier, that became woke activists and just manipulated the system and claimed victimhood when if you had gone back and looked at their trajectory, all they got were privileges and privileges and privileges and special attention and encouragement and constant recommendations.

And then to get all of that and to be very successful and then to declare yourself a victim.

And that the society was racist or prejudiced because you weren't white or something.

It just really bothered me.

Well, as you said earlier, you got to play the card, play the Swedish card, you know, sometimes, right?

Listen to the, all right, Victor, you've been terrific.

Folks, thanks for listening.

Really appreciate your support and appreciate those who go to Victor's website.

And I appreciate the folks who sign up for Civil Thoughts, civilthoughts.com, the free weekly email newsletter.

All right, for Anphil,

I think you'll enjoy it.

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great links from great pieces I've come across the previous week.

So do that, please.

Thanks again, all.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

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