Bucking the Law: Winners and Losers

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, the namesake VDH, that's Victor Davis-Hansen, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

That's its title.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

I'll tell you more about that.

later in the program.

And I will also tell you more later in the program about our sponsor today, which is Field of Greens.

Lots to talk about, in particular on Victor's mind, as he expressed to me as we were preparing for today, was to talk about immigration.

Yeah, an old topic, except as it keeps getting worse

at the southern border.

So we'll get Victor's views on that and topics such as, let's see, what else we have lined up, Victor, Sam Bankman Freed,

Harvard trying to sidestep or trying to find a way to sidestep the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action in

the

applications,

and Blue Dog Democrats who have turned that

caucus, what's left of it, into a front for Antifa.

But we'll get to these topics right after these important messages.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, bowl and branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my bowl and branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights.

And they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bolin Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowlandbranch.com slash Victor.

That's Bolin Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Victor.

to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply.

and we'd like to thank Bolin Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.

Well, I have found the secret serum and its vibrant Super C Serum.

The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers.

Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients, including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and age spots with Vibrance.

I just began using Super C Serum last week, and I love it.

My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh.

And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.

Give it a try, and you'll love it too.

And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.

Go to vibrance.com slash Victor to save up to 37% off and free shipping.

That's Vibrance.

V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E.

Vibrance.com slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

So, Victor, immigration is on your mind.

It's always been on your mind.

I mean, you are the author of Mexicornia, after all, and author of numerous essays on the plight of immigration and how it affects our sovereignty, et cetera.

But you'd like to address the recent doings

at the border.

Victor,

tell us, all of us, me, your listeners, what's on your mind.

Well, you know, we've had 7 million supposed illegal entries.

I don't know if that means entrance,

but those are apprehensions or at least guesstimations of people crossing the border.

And we've had this heat wave that recently led up.

And so we had temperatures of

110, 112.

Donald Trump was libeled for having quote-unquote cages at the border when he tried to enforce it, even though the cages, if they're not cages, but the facilities were built by Barack Obama.

And And now these people who cross illegally and reside illegally are out in the hot sun.

And then we've had, I think, 6,000 arrests.

Yesterday, I'm speaking on a Sunday.

So I think on Saturday, they announced 6,000 to 8,000 detentions in one day.

So we're back to normal.

We have all the usual characters, the Mexican government, the left.

etc.

But

the more I'm thinking about, I mean, we had a couple of,

I think, two or three child molesters, sexual perverts that had been arrested for pedophilia in the United States.

And I thought to myself, if you have sex with a 12 or 13 or 14-year-old

child or pre-teen or early teen in the United States,

you're going to serve a long sentence and you're going to be a registered sex offender.

So how could a person

who committed that crime be let go and go back to Mexico or Latin America and then come back in again?

I don't understand it.

And

this is a state where Gavin Newsom, you know, was, even though he didn't follow his own cannons and never wore a mask unless there was a camera on him.

But

we have all these strict rules, and yet here in California,

there's no audit, there's no check.

We gave $500 million to illegal aliens during the COVID break.

Here in my hometown, we're a drop-off point this southern Fresno County for people bused in.

And it's markedly perceptible that you're seeing people that are not

just arrived 20 years ago and haven't bothered to address their status.

I mean, you're talking about people

right from southern Mexico.

And I see it a lot when I fly into Fresno Airport.

There's at least three flights that come into the Fresno International Airport, known proverbially as FAT,

that

come from Mexico with people getting off.

And it's just a way to come in.

Nobody checks them to see if

they're legal or not.

So my point is this.

We have this mythology that illegal immigration is not is a moral idea.

It's just a bunch of hardworking people and they're coming here and they're trying to join the United States and they want to be citizens.

No, it's not.

And the people who welcome that are the moral left and the people who oppose it are right-wing racist, homophobic, nativist, sexist,

prejudicial, racist, right.

But nothing tells you more.

And Bill Maher made this point.

When you had Eric Adams, you remember him, Jack, when he was out at the buses shaking hands of the migrants?

And And same thing with Martha's Vineyard people when they first arrived and for the photo op.

And now they're just inundated.

Martha's Vineyard.

I mean, these wealthy white people got rid of them very quickly.

It's like, no, we're not going to do to Selma or Dainuba or Reedley or Fresno what you're not going to do that here.

You're not going to make, you're not going to have El Paso.

We support what's going on in El Paso.

We dreamed that thing up.

We like open borders, but it's for you, not us.

So nobody's coming in who's illegal to Martha's Vineyard unless he's going to be by himself, male, and a cook.

And then he gets out of the island

or Martha's Vineyard, wherever he is at night

after his work is done.

So that was their attitude.

Eric Adams now is angry at Joe Biden.

He thinks it's costing him $10 billion.

The black community is outraged.

The black community is saying that the the illegal community commits crimes of violence at an inordinate and disproportionate rate.

I think the immigrant community would probably say so do African-American youth, as we talked about, but that's here and there.

But I want to get back to this idea that it's a moral enterprise.

No, it's not,

because

people are coming knowingly, knowingly.

They're not Ellis Island people.

They're not people from India or from Mexico City who've applied and are waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting legally.

They have made the decision that they are more important than all the legal applicants.

And they're just going to rush the border.

And once they get there,

they don't say to themselves, we have to get out of this cauldron of Mexico.

It's just corrupt.

It's impoverished.

It's insecure.

So I'm going to plan this and I'm going to

try to learn some English.

I'm going going to make sure I'm self-supporting and I'm going to try to do it legally.

No, it's just I'm going north and as soon as I set one foot across that border, then I have grievances, whether explicit or implicit against the United States.

If it's explicit, I will join the entire left-wing marginalized people movement, as if the United States discriminated against me when I was in Chiapas.

But if it's implicit, then I think that I deserve certain things from you.

I deserve a hotel room and I deserve a phone and I deserve not to follow any stupid summons that says I have to go to some stupid hearing.

And if I commit a crime, I expect to be in a sanctuary city and not deportable.

That's the attitude.

And maybe not by all, but it's sure.

And what's the impact on Americans?

Well, yes, for the upper middle class and the wealthy, you get cheap labor.

You have landscapers, you have nannies, you have cooks, you have people to, you know,

treat people in rest homes, hotels.

But for most people, it's a very costly social service expense.

And that is expressed both in money, in budgets.

But also, you can see it in these communities where I live that if you had AP classes, maybe you won't have as many because you have to have English as a second language.

You're going to go backward where we were 30 years ago.

If your child doesn't speak Spanish anymore, maybe somebody will import a cartel or an M13.

I live on an avenue where there's at least three gang activities, M13, Norteños, and Sereño.

And believe me, when I hike in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I'm very, I do not want to run into somebody from Mexico that's cultivating marijuana.

There's some arguments that the Aspen Fire, at least some fires in the Sierra have been started by cartel members.

And when I walk at night.

What do you mean, destroying their competitors?

No, or just

random fires.

Yeah,

you know, harvesting the plant and burning

the debris and stuff.

But when you walk out here in the Central Valley across country, as I do at night, you don't know who you're going to,

I don't know who I'm going to encounter.

And I encounter somebody who speaks no English whatsoever in my own country.

I have no idea whether he's legal or illegal.

And if I see somebody with a gun, which I have seen, I don't know if it's registered or not.

There's no audit.

And yet I have to go through all those audits as a citizen.

When I'm walking, or I used to ride a bike, I quit doing that after being bitten and bitten.

When I get bitten by a dog, and I was bitten on at least three occasions, I had no idea if the owner licensed the dog.

There's no rules.

And so it impacts when I go to a store and I wait in line.

There's three or four people ahead of me who speak no English.

And they have EBT cards.

And they're not one, Jack.

There are three or four of them.

And some of them are not valid.

And you have to go through them and wait, wait, wait, wait.

And

my point I'm making is this, is that if you start to look at the whole illegal alien phenomenon, it's not a moral enterprise.

$60 billion is sent back to Mexico, largely by people here from Mexico.

But to free up that cash, you have to have a generous entitlement.

So your health needs, your food needs, your housing needs, your legal needs, your educational needs are all subsidized by the state.

That frees up

cash to send back Mexico, $60 billion on taxed.

My biggest criticism of the Trump administration is they had a chance to put an excise tax on remittances.

Anything sent out of this continental United States to Mexico should have had a 10% tax on it.

And that would have got Mr.

Obador's attention.

So why is all this happening?

And why everybody's against it.

When you look at that border and you see these people just swarming, everybody says to themselves, I talked to them, how can this happen?

We have a border patrol.

We have a whole body of immigration law.

How can people from a foreign country just stick their tongue out at us and walk across and we take it?

Why?

Well, the Democratic Party is one.

They always say comprehensive immigration reform.

They got that from the Simpson-Missouli Act of 1986, where they hoodwinked Reagan into saying, pull back the border patrol from the border, don't enforce the border, let the employer have an I-9 form, and then we will make sure about we're having legal only immigration.

That was the mantra at the 92 and 96 Democratic Convention.

And they completely lied about it because they saw that

when people come en masse in the millions and they're heavily dependent upon government for entitlements, they reciprocate whether illegally voting, and believe me, a lot of people vote where there's very little audit, or their children will vote.

And it's a long and short-term investment in a new constituency for a party whose message does not innately capture 51% of the people.

And then, of course, you have the employers, and that's not just farming, it's meat packing, it's hospitality, it's restaurants.

They want as many,

and you can see why they do, because your proverbial Johnny doesn't want to do it anymore.

You know, when we were in high school, if everybody that I knew in high school who was 16, 15, 16, 17, 18 had a job, everybody, whether it was working on a farm after school or in the summer or bagging groceries, they don't do that anymore.

So they need labor, they say, these employers, and they lobby to de facto not enforce the law.

Then you have the La Raza constituency, and that's not a very big constituency, but it's heavily dominated in the Jorge Ramos media and in academia.

And it's sort of, well, this is kind of ironic, isn't it?

The Mexican War took away the southern United States, so we're now taking it back.

I don't believe it will be taken back because a lot of people assimilate and integrate eventually.

And then you have another constituency, the Mexican government.

As they said,

this is the largest source of foreign income in Mexico.

It's more than oil, it's more than tourism, and they do not want to tamper with it.

And there's another 50 billion going to Central America.

So, in their way of thinking, it's

we're not going to give health, education, or welfare welfare subsidies to indigenous people in southern Mexico.

Do you think we grandees in Mexico City are going to do that?

We can't handle that problem.

We're just going to tell them to go north, and you guys can handle it.

And then, once they get across the border,

you know what happens?

We've noticed something.

They don't hate us anymore.

They never wave a Mexican flag in Chiapas or Oaxaca,

but they sure do in L.A.

And they like us when they don't have to live in in Mexico.

And they're a powerful expatriate community.

And we expect that has beneficial relations and influence the federal government of your country.

And more importantly, we remove a force of social discontent, whether have them march on the border than Mexico City for equality.

And the other thing is,

if

the United States

is

going to pressure us on immigration if the United States is going to job.

All we have to do is just cartels?

What cartels?

There's no cartels.

We don't have a problem with cartels.

We've stopped that.

Oh,

they're sending billions of dollars of fentanyl and they're killing 100,000.

Well, that's your problem.

Tell all those people in the Midwest that are suicidal or whatever their problem not to take fentanyl.

That's your problem.

Yes, the Chinese are giving us the raw materials.

And yes, we have special cartel cartel factories.

And yes, with a wink and a nod, they've corrupted most of the Mexican government.

And they're going across the border, both making billions with trafficking in humans and billions more trafficking in drugs.

And so let me just finish by saying, if everybody thinks a minute and says, who is the most existential enemy of the United States right now?

Oh, it's Russia.

How many Americans has Russia killed from, let's say,

I don't know, 1800 until now?

Very, very few.

It's China.

How many Americans is China killed?

Well, you can argue they helped kill a million with the Wuhan virus, they being the People's Liberation Army that oversaw gain of function research with a wink and a nod help from Anthony Fauci and Peter Dasik.

Or were they killed perhaps 10,000, 20,000 Americans of the 36,000 that were killed in the Korean War.

But they don't kill 100,000 a year.

The Iranians don't kill 100,000.

The North Koreans don't kill 100,000.

Mexico's government knowingly allows cartels to operate and to create factories whose sole purpose is to take raw ingredients of fentanyl and recombine them, not just in fentanyl tablets, but in Xanax, in Atavan, in Persica, Sitkat, and hydrocodine.

Anything that a youngster will take and doesn't think it's fentanyl may be fentanyl.

And we're losing 80 to 100,000 a year that are dying.

And they're not all fentanyl addicts.

And we don't do anything about it.

It's an act of war against the United States.

And all, and let me just finish without being too negative.

Donald Trump finally figured out, and it's in his plan.

If you read it online, and I read DeSantis, it's in his.

It's in Raswami.

It's in Pence's.

It's in almost all the ones that I've read.

You finish the wall, makes it more difficult to enter.

You start deporting anybody in the United States who is here illegally.

during the last five years.

The rest you can adjudicate, but you have to deport the people people who knowingly broke the law the last five years that came across en masse.

You deport anybody who in the last 30 years came in illegally and committed a felony and has a felony record out.

And once you do that, then

the 10 or 15 million that have been here for say 20 years, 15 years, hardworking, they're employed, they're not on social services, they haven't committed, they can apply not for citizenship, but for a green card, green card.

And you make it an ironclad rule that anybody who climbs over the wall or digs under it will be immediately arrested and deported.

And finally, you tell the 550 jurisdictions in the United States, state, federal, county, city,

that if you knowingly

violate federal immigration law as a sanctuary city, then we're going to cut off federal funds to you.

It It may be highway funds, it may be law enforcement funds, it may be welfare funds, but you're not going to play South Carolina in 1836 or in 1860, 61 and nullify a federal law.

You're just not going to do it.

And the whole thing would be solved.

It would be solved.

But you know what?

I had a reader who wrote me this, and I had written about 20 years about it again, and it reminded me their attitude now in Mexico Mexico and the United States is homostasis, Jack.

And by that, I mean not just osmosis with a mexifornia border, but homostasis, that at some magical point, the southern belt of the United States will culturally, economically, socially, politically, security-wise resemble Mexico.

And when it gets to that point, there will be no reason for people to cross that border because the life on the northern side won't be any different, i.e., any better than on the southern side.

And I can see it happening already.

When you have that number, it's not,

it's nothing, it's not a racist, it's not a nativist argument, but when you take 10, 20, 30 million people and you send them north en masse over a very small number of years and the host has no confidence in the powers of assimilation and integration, much less civic education,

you're not going to get a well-integrated population of immigrants.

And in California, 27% of the state hasn't been born in the United States.

And that's a Herculean task of assimilation.

But if you don't have confidence as a host and you let people come in en masse, then they're going to replicate

the culture of Mexico.

So that means when I go down a country road or in some cities, not nearby, and I go by a home I expect to see anywhere from 15 to 20 cars I expect to see shacks I expect to see non-operable trailers Winnebagos all with illegal Romex with dogs that are not licensed are not

vaccinated when I go down i won't name that if i go down a quarter mile and i make a right turn i expect to see on any given day a brand new refrigerator, a dryer, a washer machine, all kind of dangerous if a child would walk in, you know,

and be walking by and open the door and got trapped.

And then I see wet garbage.

I see tires.

I see people dumping it.

When I come back from town and I make a left turn onto this avenue near my home, One out of 10 times I will see a car almost stop dead in the road, almost hit, and the person is looking around and has their trunk or the back of their pickup open and they're throwing stuff out, trash.

I guess the attitude, Jack, is

I'm new to your country

and

I learned that I'm a victim and all you people living here, it's your duty to pick it up because I'm not going to pick it up.

I'm not going to buy into your stupid garbage collection.

I'm just going to throw it out on the side of the road.

And by the way, you know, there's a nice standpipe over there and there's a nice fence around that farmer's house.

I'm just going to spray paint it with the Norteños, Sereños, M13 gang insignia.

What are you going to do about it?

And that's the attitude.

And I don't see how we're going to get out of it until you close the border, close the border.

Yeah.

And

the whole problem vanishes because if you let in 100,000 a year from all over the world and immigration is legal, it's diverse, and it's merucratic.

So people are coming in with education and English and skills, then you have no problem.

But

I don't see we're ever going to fix it.

Victor, California, where you live, seems to be a specialized sponge

for this.

But I think it's, as they say, coming to a neighborhood near you, reading a piece yesterday in the New York Post of August 12th is an article about a hotelier,

very fancy hotel owner, owner of a fancy hotel, I should say, in the New York City area, telling Mayor Adams, oh, don't worry,

I can help.

I own a hotel up in Messina, New York.

Now, Messina, New York is the next stop, is Canada.

It's on the St.

Lawrence River.

I do not understand any of this, Victor.

What's the Christian aspect here of taking 150 to 200 people people and dumping them up in Messina.

What does that do to Messina or many rural areas or small towns which are already depressed economically?

It's been cataclysmic, as you've explained many times in California, but this is

much more than a border issue anymore.

It's coming to all towns and neighborhoods sooner or later.

So,

and one other thing, victor and we can talk about this another time maybe our next podcast i read a piece about uh

by the there's a new book about the afghanistan withdrawal and just how how disastrous it was and there are 65 terrorists who have been led into the country with this with the vetting process right we have 65 taliban terrorists who come into america illegal immigrants or maybe they're illegal immigrants because they were allowed in and they've disappeared into the the into the mist.

God knows how many.

I don't know.

I've come through the southern border.

I don't understand the immigrant philosophy.

I really don't.

I'm not speaking collectively without exceptions.

But when a person

put it this way, I lived for almost three years in Greece.

I had no desire to be a citizen of Greece.

I was an American, but I had this idea that I was a guest in that host country.

And I was meticulous about not breaking the law.

So if I was driving a rental car and I did a lot, and I saw a Greek throw trash out, I never threw trash out on the road in Greece.

If I was walking, I picked it up.

I felt so lucky to be in that country.

such a beautiful country, and the people were so nice and wonderful that

I respected every single law.

The idea that I would go to Greece and my apartment I rented in Papadima Mapundalu, Papadia Montapulu Street, excuse me, and Osias Macross Street and Dinocratus Street over the years, the idea that I would throw trash out on a street in Athens as a guest, it's just incomprehensible.

And so I don't understand how, or if I came...

to Greece, I would not, and I was a poor student.

I had no money.

And the first, first, second time I went, I was married.

And

we had a budget of $450 of expendable income.

That was it

for a month.

And the idea that I would go in and register for public assistance and get three or four cards and then go through them and see which is expired and hold up a line of Greek.

So why I was speaking English to and use it to buy potato chips, right?

Exactly.

I wouldn't even.

So I want to dispense with the idea idea of the noble immigrant.

The noble immigrant is the person who comes here legally.

And when they come here, their prime directive is to become an American.

Nobody put a gun to their head.

That was a free will choice.

The noble immigrant is not the person who the first thing they do is break the law by crossing illegally.

The second thing they do is break the law by residing illegally.

And the third thing they do is trying to find some type of identification to make themselves eligible for particular stuff.

When you look at California and when you see this huge illegal population, and you drive down all these rural intersections, and I can think of three right near me, and you see, you can buy almost anything, Jack, now

you can buy food, you can buy drinks,

all sorts of beverages, You can buy flowers.

You can buy candies.

You can buy bicycles.

You can buy tool.

And you know what it all has in common?

There's no sales tax.

None.

None.

Nobody pays sales tax.

You have a huge underground economy.

And I'm not even getting into cash wages.

It's very hard in Central California to hire someone without paying cash.

So what I'm getting at is this is not a noble enterprise.

It hurts the United States.

And I wish that we can just stand up to Mr.

Obador, the socialist Marxist government of Mexico.

And when he says, I want all of my expatriates, isn't it a beautiful thing that 40 million of my expatriates or

my ex-citizens are now in the United States?

Not if they entered illegally, but when he says, I want you to vote Democratic and I want you to vote against Donald Trump or the nominee of the Republican Party.

What would happen if,

let's say, Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis said, hey,

I want

all of

you Mexican citizens who I'm going to deport back to Mexico to vote against Mr.

Obador, who caused this problem.

And by the way,

You 1.5 million American citizens that are in Mexico, and some of you have dual citizenship.

I want you to vote against Mr.

Obador.

What would you think they'd be very safe?

I don't if any president said that, and yet he did that.

It was right, just direct interference.

We talk about Russian collusion, that was called Mexican collusion, and nobody said a word.

And I'm so tired of the Mexican government lecturing us when they're sending

a

product that's killing 100,000 Americans, and they're sending seven and eight million people across that border in the space of less than three years.

And they're doing it deliberately for their own particular national interest.

And they have the gumption to lecture us.

I'm also very angry at the immigrant, not all of them, but the immigrant that comes across and breaks the law and breaks the law again and breaks the law the third time and then suggests to us that I owe him or you listening owe him.

You don't.

You don't owe anything.

You didn't ask.

You're not doing that.

You're not going to Mexico illegally.

You're not going to Canada illegally.

You're not going to Europe illegally.

And if you're not doing it, the least you can require is other people not do it.

Much less are you coming into a country illegally and telling that country what you deserve.

Right.

They're like participants in a de facto revolution here.

And if they're into revolutions, why don't they stay home in their blank hole countries?

And if they need a revolution,

engage in it there.

Why don't they read Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis on American expansionism of the American population, that it stopped a revolution by

going west?

Maybe they can say, you know what?

There's something to it.

When we go north, it stops a revolution.

But maybe we want a revolution.

So, hey, everybody, don't

immigrate.

Maybe it's the same thing we should do in California.

Don't leave California.

stay here and get rid of these destructive forces that are killing us.

But when you leave Oaxaca

or,

you know, Michokan or Chiapas or anything down in Yucatan and you come up here, then

there's a lot of those little towns that are deserted of their male

heads of families.

It's a very disruptive thing for Mexico.

They'd be far better off staying there because Mexico is a very wealthy country.

Anybody who's been there can see that it's got lush soils.

It's got a hospitable climate.

It's got natural resources like oil.

It's got every natural gas.

It's much wealthier than Japan or Switzerland.

So all they have to do is just say, look, Switzerland, we don't like you Americans, so we're not going to emulate your system.

Okay, then you just say,

I'm going to send a delegation over to Switzerland or to Japan and see what they're doing.

And I'm just going to blueprint it here and we'll be much wealthier than they are.

Go ahead and try it.

But

don't keep your culture and then start lecturing us about how racism and colonialism and imperialism have destroyed your aspiration.

Uh-uh.

No, it's something else.

It's not race, it's culture.

It's the Mordita, it's the cartels, it's a lack of property rights, it's a lack of a free market economy, it's a lack of an independent judiciary, it's a lack of government transparency, and it's an acceptance of corruption.

Well, I look forward to

a future VDH, American Greatness, I say, the Noble

Immigrant, a bogus.

I think I wrote one three years ago called The Amorality of Illegal Immigration, but I think I'll update it because it really gets me angry, especially when Mr.

Mayorkis, who is a neo-Confederate nullificationist who's deliberately nullifying the federal law that he was

appointed to enforce when he starts lecturing everybody about the nobility of the illegal immigrant.

I wish they'd all come to his home and he would have to deal with it.

And I think

I'm kind of in a bad fit because

on Friday, I was driving back out of my hometown and I made a left turn and I almost hit a car.

And it's a deserted country road coming to my home and the car was parked Jack in the middle of the street right with two wheels on each side of the white line and he had his trunk open and he was ready to throw all of his trash out yeah

and so I thought wow you you just break all the traffic laws you just sit here and how hard is it for you to go pay you know $38 a month to get garbage service or go to the dump and pay $30 every couple of days.

But why would you?

I didn't understand the mentality.

What is the mentality?

It's like, I come to the United States, I'm a visitor, so beautiful country, but I'm not going to follow its laws.

So I'm just going to go along this beautiful rural road with all these hardworking farmers that have these beautiful almond orchards, and I'm just going to throw everything out there on the trash.

And if I keep doing it, it'll pile up.

But you know what, Jack?

It never piles up.

You know why?

Because those people don't want their property to look like it's third world.

So they go out there in their pickups and they clean it up.

And then therefore, the person who stopped right in front of me must think, well, that's what they're supposed to do.

My job is to throw trash on their property.

And because they have more than I do and they're colonial, imperialist, Yankee, gringo racist, then I'm just going to throw trash all up and down on their property.

Yeah.

Remember when the liberals

50 years ago, Victor, were all into the Keep America Beautiful, rightly so, I think, to some extent.

That's the biggest Indian, but that's the biggest

intersectionality paradox is because all these left-wing people won't let, they don't like people to log stuff in the forest.

They don't like people to hike in the forest.

They don't like them to have Forest Service cabins, all these custodians of the forest.

But you tell a left-wing Bay Area liberal that there are hundreds, hundreds, if not thousands, of cor cartel-related gang members that are up in the foothills and the mountains of California growing illegal weed and polluting streams and using dangerous chemicals and meth labs.

Oh, I don't know anything about it.

Or you say there's a lot of raw sewage and tijuana that floats right into California.

Or if you say there's a lot of people coming across the border that are trafficking against the innocent young women, all these liberal issues just vanish.

Oh,

I got to go look at my intersectionality chart.

And everybody has a point.

Let me see, green,

people of color, women, environmental,

wow, they contradict each other, which gets more points so that I can be quiet about it.

And that's how they think.

Well, Victor, we...

We've got to move on.

We've got a couple of other topics.

I hope maybe we'll throw one overboard for the next episode.

But before we move on to the next topic, which I think we should look at Harvard's attempts to circumvent the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action and college enrollment, I'd like to first

take a moment to let our listeners learn more about today's, the sponsor of today's episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, and that's Field of Greens.

I know that summer travels can make it hard to get the recommended amount of fruits and and vegetables.

That's why I take Field of Greens because it's the whole organic fruit and vegetable, not a watered-down supplement.

And it's backed by a better health promise.

Each ingredient in Field of Greens has been scientifically chosen to support the health of vital organs like your heart, lungs, and kidneys.

Others support your immune system, blood pressure, and metabolism, and also support healthy weight loss.

You need Field of Greens.

Let me get you started with 15% off.

That's correct.

I said that.

15% off.

It's a terrific offer.

Visit fieldofgreens.com and use the promo code Victor, V-I-C-T-O-R, that's promo code Victor at fieldofgreens.com.

And we thank Field of Greens for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So you just got back from summer vacation.

Maybe you might have even had to book two rooms because of your snoring.

Some vacation, huh?

Snoring can be an underlying cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even memory loss.

Here is my advice.

If you want every night to be a true vacation, you need to get yourself Zipa.

That's happy Z spelled backwards.

Zipa is a doctor-designed mouthpiece that not only moves your jaw forward but is also the only device with a patented tongue seat belt to keep your airways open and the snoring away.

The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.

Zipa was proven in a 600-patient clinical trial and sold over half a million units.

From now until the end of October, show your family you actually care by purchasing a limited edition Pink Zipa.

Not only will you save $10,

but Zipa is on a mission to raise $50,000 for breast cancer research and they will donate another $10,000 to the Susan G.

Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Go to zyppah.com and use the code PINK or text VICTR2511-511.

Put your snoring on a permanent vacation and help a worthy cause with the snoring device we trust by visiting zyppah.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.

Remember, Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.

Text fees may apply and we'd like to thank Zipa for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You might be wondering, when is the right time to add collagen to my diet?

How about today?

Calagen production starts to dwindle in your 20s.

By the time you've hit your 50s, decreased collagen contributes to wrinkles, sagging skin, and joint discomfort.

Native Path Calagen can help.

It's packed with only type 1 and 3 collagen fibers, the ones your body needs most for healthy joints, skin, bones, hair, nails, and gut.

Plus, it's third-party tested for purity with no fillers, no additives, and no artificial junk.

Two scoops a day of Native Path delivers 18 grams of protein.

Mix it into your coffee, tea, or any drink.

It's completely flavorless and easy to use.

Right now, get a special deal at a fraction of the retail price, plus free shipping.

Available at getnativepath.com slash Victor.

With over 4 million jars sold, thousands of five-star reviews, and a 365-day money-back guarantee, this is your moment to take control of aging before symptoms get worse.

Go to getnativepath.com slash Victor now.

Supplies are limited and demand is surging.

And we'd like to thank NativePath for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

So, Victor,

looking at this weekend's Wall Street Journal, big op-ed piece by Stephen McGuire, and it's titled, Can Harvard Discriminate with Essays?

So, let me just read a little bit here from the piece.

He's talking about some colleges, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which those were the two

litigants in the recent Supreme Court case.

They've looked for ways to keep,

here's what it says.

Meanwhile, Harvard has looked for ways to keep discriminating, and so have many other institutions.

They focus on one sentence in the court's ruling, quote, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected.

his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or

otherwise, end quote.

Harvard responded to the decision by citing this line in isolation, suggesting it would treat it as a loophole.

The university said it would comply with the law, but reaffirmed its commitment to diversity, commenting, quote,

we will determine how to preserve, consistent with the court's new precedent, our essential values, end quote.

One more little paragraph here, Victor.

Other institutions responded similarly, indicating they would follow the law, but look for ways to skirt it.

Now that applications for fall 2024 2024 are open, it is evident these schools are willing to risk further litigation by using admissions essays to continue to discriminate using race and other identity characteristics.

Victor, are you surprised that Harvard and other colleges are

taking this loophole and are going to try to drive a truck through it?

No.

And for

two reasons,

they had a recent article I read.

Did you see that by that Harvard law professor, Tushnin, I think his name was?

I did not.

And a guy at San Francisco State, Belkin.

And they just said that given our legal wisdom and our mastery of American jurisprudence, you can just ignore anything the Supreme Court says, especially on affirmative action.

Just forget it.

We're smarter than the court.

So that's the attitude of these universities.

And I can tell you,

I taught in the Cal state system from 1984 to 2004,

2005.

And in 1996, the state of California overwhelmingly passed Prop 209 that forbid the use of race as a matter to adjudicate hiring promotion admissions.

And so in 1997 and 1999, I was the chairman of hiring committees and I got the the memo from the dean.

Would you please select two members of your department?

So I did.

And I went, and then I got this other memo and it said, this is your affirmative action officer.

So I said, oh, I'll see what this is about.

So I go in and I said to the affirmative action officer,

well, what are you here for?

And she said to me, we're here to make sure you have a diverse group.

I said, oh, well, because everybody's a leftist, you're here to make sure that there's people who are conservative.

No, no.

I'm here to make sure there's not a lot of old white guys.

And the, I said, that's against the law.

That's against state law.

Well, no, I think the federal government allows you to do that.

So we just nullified it.

And the whole, that was just a joke when it was, it came up with prop

again two years ago.

And they overwhelmingly

accepted the idea of a race-blind California.

But you got to remember the academic mind, it always believes it's intellectually superior and morally superior to the average citizen.

So it has a right to nullify whatever it doesn't like.

And so what are these essays?

Just imagine, listener, you're out there

and you're working in this commissariat and you're on the admissions committee at Harvard or Yale or Stanford and you get two essays.

And one is dog roll.

Or maybe it's like the Stanford kid who wrote Black Lives Matter, what, 100 times?

And he got in on that brilliant idea.

But it's grammatically incorrect.

There's misspelled words.

It's incoherent.

But it's, I am committed to diversity.

I've been in my own life.

And it's proof positive that that student's not able to do work at that university, as at least as it used to be.

So

defined.

And then there's another one that's just perfectly, it's brilliant composition, analytical, analytical, inductive, and it says, I believe that diversity transcends superficial appearance, that it's in the soul and the mind of all of us.

So we want as many different types of people.

We want geographical diversity.

We want intellectual deserves, as well as race.

We want all, who do you think is going to get in?

Well, it's the person who just goes down the traditional race and gender, not the other person.

And when you throw out the SAT, this is, so what are we down to?

These universities are not saying anymore, Jack, that when you get a 4.0 from my old high school, Selma High School, and you get a 4.0 from Paulos Verdes Estates or Palo Alto, which is much more rigorous and can be,

that you're going to give that the more rigorous high school added weight.

No, we don't do that anymore.

Nor do we have the SAT or the ACT.

So

they were using, well before the Supreme Court, they were using criteria other than merit, i.e.

race,

to adjudicate who gets in or not.

And now

that the Supreme Court says you can't do it, they're just going to have these essays and they're going to say, well, we'll be diverse.

But if you don't really know the quality of a particular GPA file or application and you don't have a test score to collate it, and you can't grade or

adjudicate the value of the essay on normal analytical grounds, then what are you doing?

You're letting people in by your own admission, wouldn't have gotten into your university 10 years ago.

And then what are you telling your faculty?

It's your choice, flate your grades, water down your curriculum, keep your standards, and we'll call you a racist.

And that's pretty much what's happening to these universities.

The only good thing that I can think of is when you look at polls now, the public support of universities has gone from about 55 or 60 percent down to about 30 percent.

And that's because of what we're talking about now, but also, you know, things like Stanford's yelling down a federal judge and students.

who are well heeled yelling that they'd like to rape his hope that his daughters get raped and are disrupting people at Middlebury, etc.

cetera.

People are sick of that.

When you add into the equation $1.7 to $2 trillion in student loans and majors that have not educated people, so it's kind of a joke when people go on campuses and they ask

students,

what does the 4th of July signify?

Who won the Civil War?

Who were the combatants in World War?

They don't know.

And yet they're arrogant.

So

that admissions policy is like throwing a stone into a pond.

It's not the end, it's the beginning.

The ripples come out and they start to change the entire university and it's happening.

And employers know it's happening.

And maybe

it's good because

I used to think that mass higher education was the key to civilizational progress, but now it's moral regress and ignorance.

And so maybe it'll encourage more Hillsdales or new colleges in Florida or experiments like the University of Austin or people fighting back to retake their universities.

But I can tell you what, in the short term, it has eroded public support for,

I don't know, government subsidies of loans,

non-taxation.

of endowments, you think when you read about all this, that anybody wants to say to Harvard, yeah, you should have 60 billion and you should have an income of $50 million

a year.

That, excuse me, 60, yeah, 6 billion, excuse me, not 600,

6 billion dollars on a good investment, $8 billion, and we're not going to tax one penny of it so you can hire more diversity people and sue the Supreme Court with more corporate lawyers that you hire.

I don't think the people are sick of that.

They don't want that.

And I think the only good thing, too, is if you have

letters after your name,

B A, M A, Ph D, J D,

M D, Esquire,

B S, whatever,

they don't mean anything anymore if they're from those schools.

I don't see the big difference from, and I see a lot of young people.

I can tell you right now that if I talk to a Hillsdale history major that's graduating, the amount of knowledge they have versus a Stanford history major is not even close.

They're equally, they equally have good aptitudes, but the training you get at Hillsdale College compared to Stanford is a joke.

Right.

Well, Hillsdale is,

we want to educate you.

And here's the Harvard question that, you know, that students will have to, this essay that they will have to answer.

It's, Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body.

How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?

So the premise to that, Victor, is not,

this is a place of ideology and posturing a position.

It's not a place of imparting knowledge.

Yeah.

Why don't they just, and when you start lying, why don't you just say Harvard is an institution that has long practiced racial discrimination, especially anti-Semitism, to keep its student body non-diverse.

And now we have a new manifestation of that where we are once again using criteria other than merit to exclude large swaths of the population.

Do you agree with that or not?

That would be an intellectually honest question.

Yeah.

Because

the only, and then the only other thing about it is

not all, but I would say 55%

of so-called white students that are applying

from their prep schools and top-ranked public schools or from liberal households.

And according to their own ideology, there's no place for them.

Because if I keep beating that drum, but you look at the Stanford 2000 website, you look at the incoming class of 2026, and it says 20% white.

That's legacies, athletes,

children of faculty, et cetera.

And I think it's 53% women.

So you're down to about

8% to 9% white males, and maybe 7% of white males that don't have any inside track.

And I would have bet you that of those 7% or 8%,

5% to 6% are from liberal households.

But that's not the real issue.

The real issue is of the 45,000 people who applied, probably 25,000 of them met the old standards, and they're not getting any of them getting in.

So what is your Bay Area left-wing?

I love the Ivy League.

My children will be

more successful.

They'll network better.

They'll get a better job.

They'll have a more prestigious cultural malu about them if they can get a Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton degree behind their names.

And they didn't get in.

They didn't get in because somebody took my abstract policies that I always vote for seriously and they enacted it.

And I didn't quite have enough clout

to make sure my children were exempt from the ramifications of their parents' ideology.

So they're suffering.

And now they're going to have to go, I don't know, they might have to go to UC Irvine.

Great school, but it's not what I wanted them, Caltech, Stanford, Yale, Harvard.

So maybe

that might change.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

maybe we'll have time to squeeze in two things, but at least one, and that will be about you get your thoughts on what's become of the blue dog Democrats.

And we'll get to that and talk a little about your website right after these important messages.

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

Yeah, Victor, I've forgotten.

Did I talk yet yet about the Blade of Perseus?

I don't think I did.

Let me do that then.

The Blade of Perseus is the official website

of Victor Davis Hansen.

Did you know that, Victor Davis-Hansen?

I think you did.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

Go there if you're a fan of Victor's writings or you want to know where else Victor's been, where was he this week?

Oh, he's on Megan Kelly's podcast or he's on this radio show.

Well, there are links to those appearances.

The archives for this podcast are there.

Links to his books, links to his American greatness, essays and syndicated columns.

But

for the true Victor Davis-Hansen fan, and I think that's probably everyone listening, there are ultra articles.

They're called Ultra.

They are exclusive writings.

Victor's exclusive writings for the website, two or three a week.

If you're not subscribing, and that's $5.

for a month gets initial gets you in the door discounted $50 for the year.

you won't be able to read them you'll see the headline you'll click like how come i can't read this by the way there's the most as we record there victor has just finished a five-part series the u.s is in real decline and then he's begun another uh series more personal

it's called the great weasel scare which i think is pretty cool and um we learned about coyote inferno holes and your aunt's nickname for you victor Twinny.

I like that.

Was your twin brother also Twinny?

Or did he have a different name?

Or we were plural.

They called us sort of like

the Atriidi,

they would call the Twinnies.

Where are the Twinies?

Where are they?

Where's 21 and 22?

Well, anyway,

those are all.

If you love Victor's writing,

do go there.

VictorHanson.com, The Blade of Percy's.

For me, Jack Fowler, I write civil thoughts.

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

It's a free weekly email newsletter that I write for the Center for Civil Society, and it gives 14 recommended readings.

Here's the link.

Here's an excerpt of great articles I've come across in the past week.

It always ends with a terrible joke.

typical bad dad joke, but that's not the reason we're getting it.

You'll like it.

A lot of people who listen to this podcast have signed up and they've written me and they're very, they've become fans of it.

Uh, not selling the name, it's just for the good of the cause.

So, check that out, civilthoughts.com.

Uh, what did I say we were going to?

Oh, the Blue Dog Democrats, yeah, Victor.

So, um, there are no Blue Dog Democrats, yeah.

Well, they, they, they imply they still are.

Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, they were that,

you know, when I was growing up, there were the

we had a guy

who was

House

majority leader, B.F.

Sisk,

and And he was a, I think he was a tire salesman.

He became congressman for years.

And he was pretty conservative.

And I think in those days, they had to be from the South.

They call them boll weevils, but they were Democrats.

Yeah.

Yellow dog.

Yellow, yellow dog.

I'd rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican.

And the blue dog was their,

I think it's the left will make you so angry you'll turn blue or something.

But

anyway, the point was there were a lot of Democrats that on social issues were as conservative as Republican.

And the only difference was they were for more government

spending, basically.

But on matters of supporting Israel or U.S.

military, they were indistinguishable from, and there's not very many left.

I think one of the guys that started the Blue Dogs was in Stockton, Modesto, not too far.

Gary Condick, remember him?

Oh, sure, yeah.

Right before they kind of framed him, he was in a scandal, right?

Yeah,

he didn't do anything.

He had an affair with this young girl, attractive girl, that then later was killed.

And they just smeared him and said that he was responsible for it until they, then years later, they found the murderer and they never really apologized to him.

But he was a conservative San Joaquin valve.

That used to be here in the valley that all of your congresspeople, Devin

Nunes is one.

We have three congressmen.

I'll shoot just to break them down.

Devin Nunes was one, and now it's McClintock, and they are staunchly conservative Republican.

And then we have a Republican, David Valdeo, right next to the district.

And I'm kind of right in the middle of all three districts.

I've been in all three in the past 30 years.

And then he voted against,

he voted for Trump's impeachment, and he lost it to, and then he came back, but he is a moderate Republican.

And then the other is Jim Costa, and he, I think he's one of two members of the blue dog

group, and he was from Fresno.

And what does that mean?

That means on things like getting water for agribusiness or

highway construction or

small businesses that these blue dog Democrats are pretty much like Republicans.

But as the party went further, further left and the hierarchy, especially the Diane Feinsteins went left, the Pelosis went left,

the Obama administration went left, they got, they had to start be going left themselves or they were shut out of quid pro quos from their own party.

And the result is that now

there are no blue dogs.

There's people who on certain issues are more local than national, but they're not going to go against the Democratic left wing.

The party's unrecognizable.

And they know, you know why you know that?

Because they keep accusing the Republican Party of what they're guilty of.

Matt Taibbi's got a good kind of essay that everything's flipped.

And class is now more important than political ideology.

That the Republican Party is the class of the middle, is the party of the middle classes.

And the Democratic Party is a class of the real wealthy and to extent the subsidized poor but i don't think that they'll call themselves blue dogs to get elected but they're not and this group that says they're going to revitalize it what they mean is we're not from the big cities we're just left-wing people who believe that

kind of socialism will appeal to people in rural areas well victor let's get squeeze one more thought out of you on a headline disgraced ftx founder Sam Bankman-Freed gets the shock of his life as judge revokes his $250 million bail and orders him to jail after he leaked Star Witnesses' love letters.

That's a reading from a Daily Mail online.

You know, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about how he dodged some judicial bullet, but I don't know, maybe a speck of justice to one of America's most notorious billionaire slob frauds.

Your thoughts, Victor?

Well, I think he thought he could get away with it because after George Soros, he was the second largest donor to the Republican, to the Democratic Party.

And I think he, had he not been caught, he probably would have given over $100 million in 2022.

And he was, I mean, he was a big donor, but I never understood this.

So they got rid of his campaign financing statue exposure.

But I think he's looking at even more penalties now besides jury tampering.

But what I didn't understand is this.

Here's a guy who out Madoff, Bernie Madoff, and almost brought down the entire cryptocurrency industry.

It was a toll fraud and was tapping investors' accounts in this Alameda investments to make up for his

wild speculation.

And the guy was in his 20s

and he didn't know anything about the world.

He was just kind of a nerdy tech guy.

And his parents were radical leftists.

His mother was a Democratic bundler for Silicon Valley left-wing money.

His father was a professor as well.

Both of them were Stanford law professors.

So he grew up on the Stanford campus.

And I can tell you that I have an apartment there.

And during the week,

I'm not apparently not very far away because when all this broke, I could hear all these helicopters and they were going around, you know, the paparazzi taking pictures of him while he, I guess, stomped around his backyard.

But my point is, this, I couldn't figure out what person who had done all of that damage,

why did they turn him over to house arrest for the custody of his parents and let him use a computer?

It made no sense.

That's how he made his fraudulent money on a computer.

You would think that if you're, I would have put him in jail.

You know, I wouldn't put him in San Quentin, but I would have put him in a a jail.

But if you weren't going to put him in a jail, wouldn't you at least have him no access to electronic appurtenances?

So he couldn't

do what he's charged doing.

And he's charged with,

I guess, he was taking things off his computer that were

fire correspondence with this Miss

Ellison, is her name?

And that was the head of his other branch, the Alameda branch,

who was also speculating with other people's money and going broke.

And then he was trying to tap this, and they had exchanges back and forth, some of them of an intimate nature because they were boyfriend and girlfriend or whatever you call it in that circle of friends.

And

he got a hold of those messages, and I guess he was trying to give them to the New York Times or did give them.

And the point would be what?

Well, the point would be, since she's turned state's evidence, I guess his theory, I'm just speculating, would have been, hmm, I'm going to let all my left-wing media friends that I used to support and whom I know know that this woman who's turned against me and joined the government at one time wrote me the following.

And you should think about that, her testimony.

You know, see what I mean?

And he's trying to tamper with a witness in the sense of denigrating the witness.

And so what an idiot.

And he's now lost his freedom.

And for the first time in his life, he's going to be not in his parents' backyard or not in his mansions down in the Caribbean.

And it couldn't happen to a nicer person.

The judge in this case, I must say, I know a little about Lewis Kaplan.

He's a senior judge and even a Clinton appointee.

But there was a

great shakedown case, a guy named Stephen Donzinger, who tried to shake down Chevron for billions of dollars in Ecuador.

And it ended up, the, oh my gosh, 60 Minutes did this piece on him, et cetera.

But it was all a scam.

And he ended up,

I must applaud Chevron because most companies buckle and they pay the, they pay the tribute to make it go away, but they fought.

And it ended up in a case against Donzinger in federal court against in front of Judge Kaplan, who

Donzinger was convicted of engaging in essentially RICO.

So

he paid a price, but then Kaplan wanted the New York

Southern District, the federal prosecutors to charge this Donziger for

racketeering, and they didn't do it.

And there's a very little-known clause where a federal judge can actually then hire

a private law firm to to prosecute somebody, which he did, because this guy was so outrageous, Don Zelda.

And so, so he's before,

Sam Bankman Freed is before the wrong judge to F around.

Yeah, well, and think about this: what is the judge going to make of this?

That here's a guy who went to prep school and he went to, I think, MIT,

and Miss

Ellison went to Stanford,

and he's sitting at home where he grew up

that is the home of two Stanford, not economics or history, but law professors.

So do you think that at one moment of their lives, Mr.

Law Professor or Mrs.

Law Professor Bankman Fried would walk in and

put their head into his room and say, hey, Sammy,

I know you're on your computer, but remember, there's such something called witness tampering.

So if you're talking to Miss Allison or you're talking to

the New York Times, do not mention witnesses and try to warp either their testimony or how their testimony is perceived.

Because if you do, they're going to take you out of daddy and mommy's home and you're going to be in jail.

And it's nice here.

So please don't do it.

We're legal experts.

We're not lawyers.

We're law professors.

We write the textbooks.

And so trust us.

Why wouldn't they say that?

Or maybe they did and he didn't listen, but he had two Stanford law professors and the house in which he was confined.

And yet he's tampering with witnesses, so the allegation goes.

It just shows you incredible arrogance.

And I think he must have thought, well, wait a minute.

Joe Biden got it.

I gave a lot of money to Joe Biden.

And I gave a lot of money to all these congressional and senatorial candidates that were successful.

So they owe me.

Well, Hunter almost, you know, the sweetheart deals exist.

Hunter almost got one.

So federal Judge Blue.

I think the same

is right.

It's just really weird when you think, remember Conrad Black?

I mean,

they unleashed Patrick Fitzgerald against him.

And

they just overcharged him with felony, I don't know, 16 or 17.

And they waited and waited and tried to bankrupt him until he got down to one or two.

And then it was, they got a Chicago jury and they went after him for nothing.

And this

guy

is,

I mean,

the idea that you wouldn't have him in jail or that he could from his home tamper, you know, witness tamper, it makes no sense.

and I don't mean it was special prosecutor.

Patrick Fitzgerald was the federal prosecutor in Chicago, right?

I guess he was also, he had also been

Scooter Libby, the Scooter Libby.

I think I might have told you in the past, he was, he and I went to high school together.

Yes, I wouldn't, I wouldn't brag about that if I were you.

I just have to state it.

What he did,

just before we leave, remember what he did to Scooter Libby.

Scooter Libby, he says

Valerie Plom, is that her name, Plame?

Plame, huh?

Yeah, that he disclosed her

confidential secret CIA status and whether she had that clearance or not is disputable.

But we do know that Colin Powell's deputy, and Colin Powell was in the Bush administration as Secretary of State, told Colin Powell

that he had disclosed it.

Right, Richard, whatever the hell, I forget it.

Armitage.

Richard Armitage.

And Colin Powell had that knowledge and sat still and mom

while Patrick Fitzgerald went after and convicted Scooter Libby

for nothing.

And he was not the perpetrator.

And that was known to the Bush administration, and they did not pardon him.

It was dawn.

There was something, yeah,

didn't, wasn't there some, it wasn't a pardon, it was some,

did they do something half-assed with Scooter Libby?

Oh, I think they clemency or something, yeah, not a full pardon, which was uh, you know, Chaney, because Libby worked for Cheney, which, well, whatever, we can't go down that.

But I mean, my God,

when Colin Powell knew that

his own assistant was the person who was guilty of what an innocent man was being charged with and didn't come forward.

You know, it didn't, it was just shocking.

I couldn't believe that.

Well,

it's a town of game players, and they are experts at it, some of them.

Well, Victor, we're almost out of time.

And as

is the custom here at the end of this, our episodes, I'd like to note,

thank our listeners, and particularly those who leave comments on Apple and iTunes and rate the show, which you can, from zero to five stars.

We thank those who do take the time to rate it.

The ranking rating is over, the average is over 4.9.

So thank you very much.

Some leave comments, and we thank those who do.

We read them.

And some leave comments too.

Many people leave comments on your own website, Victor, Blade of Perseus.

And I want to read one from that website about a show, an episode that you and Sammy, the great Sammy Wink, just

recorded the other day on the 11th of August.

It's titled Rapinoe, Private Property and the Truth About the Revolution.

That's the title of the podcast.

And in that podcast, you talked at some length about

a significant piece you've just written for American Greatness about the revolution we are in.

And here's a comment on that podcast from Spartan Pete, who wrote, another insightful gem.

If one day, God forbid, this great country is taken down.

Today's podcast transcript

can serve as the abstract for why and what happened.

America is in need of a Churchill-like leader to rally the spirit.

and fight of the majority.

Is it too late?

Thank you, Spartan Pete, and others who leave comments on your site, Victor, the Blade of Perseus, and those who leave them on iTunes and Apple.

And thanks, everyone who listens, no matter what platform you do listen on.

Victor, you shared a boatload of wisdom today, as ever.

Thanks very much for that.

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

Thanks very much for listening.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

See you next time.