Conservatism, Education, and Small Towns

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, but the star and the namesake namesake is Victor Davis-Hansen.

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

Haven't talked to my friend in a while.

He's been away, but while he's away, much has happened.

Some that's made the headlines, some that's important that hasn't made the headlines.

And on that, I think we'll start

the

show today, Victor, by getting your views on

a somewhat important within the conservative movement document that's come out.

It's called the Statement on Freedom, Conservatism.

And it's of interest, but I think

it's worthy of your observation.

So let's get them and get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'll mention a little later, at a little more length, Victor, that you have a website, The Blade of Perseus, and that can be found at victorhanson.com.

And folks should be going there regularly, but more on that later.

So, Victor, a number of conservatives,

who used to be my colleagues at National Review, many of whom you know and I know, have cobbled together and put together a statement called the Freedom Conservatism, Statement on Freedom Conservatism, where they try to

lay out a future list of 10 principles of where the conservative movement should be going.

It hearkens, they say, the authors of it, they say, to the Declaration of Independence, and also then to what was once a pretty prominent statement of principles of conservatism from back in 1960 when the movement was just getting started.

That was called the Sharon Statement.

It's called Sharon because it happened in Sharon, Connecticut, at Bill Buckley's family home.

That was quite an influential document.

Anyway, this document is out there about,

it's kind of written in opposition to the national conservatism folks.

Matt, if I'm, and I'll be quiet here in half a second, Matt Contanetti, who

is at the American Enterprise Institute, has written an analysis of it for the Washington Free Beacon.

So with so many prominent people signing on to this, Victor, I was

a little stunned that it hadn't gotten more attention from the actual signers.

But anyway, it's out there hanging around, waiting for your thoughts.

What are they, Victor?

Well, you know, sometimes I don't think we can keep it straight.

There's paleoconservatism, neoconservatism,

national conservatism, and freedom conservatism.

So let's make a typology.

We know paleoconservatism, that was kind of brought in the prominence of Pat Buchanan more in the modern times.

And he made a good argument that Donald Trump appropriated a lot of it.

And that, remember, was kind of a reactionary idea.

We go back to we're a republic and not an empire, but it was mostly, not all, but mostly directed at border security,

U.S.

interest number one, no foreign entanglements, no

optional military operations in the Middle East with dubious cost-to-benefit analyses, et cetera.

And then we had the neoconservatives that after the fall of

the wall and the end of communism, the idea was in that void, America was going to,

that was sort of a Robert Kagan,

Bill Crystal, David Fromm.

And that had a lot, Jack, remember that was a lot prominent in the national view?

I supported some of it.

It was, yeah.

And it was to go out after 9-11 and particularly and spread conservatism.

And then we had national conservatism.

And that was

kind of a

it was a little bit paleo-conservative, but the emphasis was on national concerns, American first.

And that was sort of came to prominence with Donald Trump.

And primary four or five tenets were get the border first before you worry about anything else, close it, national sovereignty.

Break up the power of these imperial bureaucracies, decentralize the government, cut it back, but not,

don't go down the radical, libertarian, laissez-faire,

the Bush's, let's just talk about capital gains, tax, deregulation, tax cuts.

Not that they oppose those.

Indeed, Trump enacted them, but it was more, let's make sure first that people have jobs and livable social security benefits when they retire, et cetera.

A little pro, Victor, on the almost industrial policy, pro-yes.

Yeah, that's a very good point, Jack.

So that the government would kind of come into the free market vis-a-vis foreign trade.

And that, of course, set this, that was the intellectual defense of the Trump Chinese policy, that we don't just turn over our national policy with China to the corporate elite that don't seem to care about patent infringement or copyright and theft or dumping of currency or

racking up huge surpluses at our expense.

Okay.

And then we have this freedom, conservatism.

I think you mentioned liberty, pursuit of happiness, foundation of prosperity, full faith and credit,

a nation of laws, not men, Americans by choice, and

out of many, one.

And I think if I was reading the article that you cited, and then I had read the manifesto, and it's sort of, there's some elements on it that are pretty good that

we all are Americans and we have had some checkered racial

challenges but now

uh we're all united by freedom and so we have to have certain values in the declaration and the constitution that have to be and you know civic-minded and these are going to apparently

uh

trump uh tribal interest

And then there's going to have to be no ambiguity about

America's role in the world as the beacon and custodian of freedom.

That's a little tricky because

in the past, when we've done that, we've kind of got

into places where we didn't want to be.

And then freedom.

And then there's a that, I think, the 10th and a lot of the others, Jack, are really directed at the university,

social media, this idea that you use the government, like the FBI, to contract out with Twitter to suppress free expression, or Google rigs the order of its searches for ideological purposes, or you can't speak freely on campus, or if you're accused of, I don't know, sexual harassment in an Ivy leak school, you don't get any due process, Bill of Rights protection.

So, all of that is,

I'm trying to, in my mind, I'm trying to distinguish it from neoconservatism.

And

it doesn't seem to be all that much different in the sense that

it's national and it praises the United States' singularity and we want to be unified and we have to be engaged in the world.

I guess what I'm trying to say, Jack, is if you took all of these manifestos and you applied them to Ukraine, it seems like the freedom conservatism would be supporting the policies right now of Biden, but egging him on a little bit more, right?

And the national conservatives would be sort of in the,

oh, I don't know, Laura Ingram's group or maybe Tucker Carlson and wanting to pull back, maybe get him some arms for defensive purposes.

But then the freedom conservatism would see this as a chance to score big against Putin's anti-freedom bloc and to promote Ukraine.

And so it all sounds well,

but I'm not sure it's such a big thing.

I think it's written in reaction to Donald Trump.

And I think

I agree.

It's sort of, yeah, it's just, you know, we have to, we're not going to have economic freedom if we have huge debts.

Trump ran up the debt.

We're not going to have national,

excuse me, we're not going to have conservative freedom if everybody's hooked on entitlements and the social security system is going to go bankrupt and yet people

don't plan or they're dependent on it.

We're not going to have freedom if we start losing major allies that want to be with us because on-free countries bully them or invade them.

We're not going to have freedom if

there's consortia

that partner with the government, industry and partnerships, social media.

So it is a little bit more libertarian and it's a reaction to Donald Trump.

I guess I was trying to, when I read it, I was trying to see which politician would embrace it the most.

And I suppose it's something like Nikki Haley, maybe?

I don't know.

Somebody like that who's kind of a hawk on foreign policy or Tim Scott, maybe, or it's not quite Tom Cotton.

He's a mixture of national and freedom, but I don't quite understand what the purpose was other than to try to give

an intellectual rallying cry that you don't have to follow the MA people.

onto Trump and that would be a rallying cry for the non-Trump continued

next election.

I wonder if two things and get your opinion on.

One, I wonder if the

signatories of this statement would have applauded Donald Trump's speech at Mount Rushmore in 2020,

which is much more of a

talk about patriotism less than this.

That's one thing.

The second thing is there's a, I found somewhere else that

the signers have agreed to have like a three-part obligation.

And one has to do with the part of this statement that is about the promissory note, essentially, you know,

American blacks.

And I'm quoting now about the obligation.

Many who descend from victims of slavery and segregation now face economic and personal hurdles that are the direct result of this legacy.

We commit to expanding opportunity for those who face challenges due to past government restrictions on individual and economic freedom.

And to me, I think

we have had 50 years and trillions of dollars of government destruction of the black family.

And

this document doesn't speak about that's the real problem, I think, facing

that segment of America that hasn't been able to make good on the promissory note.

So I'm I'm not.

I think this was a kind of a jack kemp.

We're going to go and have enterprise zones, and this is going to be directed at people who haven't been successful in the American project.

And then they had a little, as I remember, they had a little throwaway line, but we don't, we oppose discrimination or racial bias by anybody.

Okay, that sounds good, but I don't quite know what they're doing.

I like the idea about they're not, we're not going to run up debts.

And Trump did, Obama did, Bush did and that that was good and but right

you know

the the problem that i had with it the foundation of prosper uh prosperity and private cronyism that that sounded good but

we kind of had that we kind of had it with George Bush's enterprise zones and we had McCainism and we had Romneyism.

And a lot of people

thought that was trickled down.

Not that it was, but I'm saying, I don't know.

I guess what they're saying is

we got to get the government out of

trade policy.

We got to get the government out of the Federal Reserve policy.

We got to get the government out of everything.

And that sounds great.

And they're right about bureaucracies, but they don't seem to,

when they talk about too much regulation and bureaucracies, that's an old saw.

We all know that.

But what they don't really talk about is the weaponization of our bureaucracies.

What's new is we've never had the IRS, the DOJ, the CIA, the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence all using the levers and power of government to pursue one person or one party and go

and exempt and go full hog,

whole hog with the other party.

And they don't seem to,

that's not in there.

And then, so it's kind of a lot of banalities.

I don't think it's going to go anywhere.

I suppose, I mean, what would be the purpose?

So, they're going to be in a debate stage, and somebody says, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, if Rubio runs, or Ted Cruz, or do you are you a national conservative?

Are you a freedom conservative?

You know what they're going to say.

I'm a conservative, and I love freedom, and I love the national project.

So, it's it's

with,

you know, it, there's a problem with National Review doing this and any group.

Well, like I said, National Review didn't do it.

I think it was

scientists from National Review.

Yeah.

But, yeah.

But I just don't think a bunch of thinkers are going to issue an ideology, an ideological statement that's going to make much influence.

That's all.

I just don't think it is.

I think it would make more

whoever the

folks that wrote it wrote it.

It's there.

It's out there.

Folks should go find it, read it.

You may be inspired by it.

You may not be.

But I'd like to see a day where 120 or 200, however many folks who sign this come together and

want to make a case for conservatism

that

has religion in it.

This document is totally devoid of, you know, God is the person that wasn't invited to it.

And the irrelig, we talk about problems in America, the skyrocketing irreligiosity of America

and then the family there.

Remember, I think it was, what was it, the foundation of prosperity or pursuit of happiness.

They were talking about families, loving families, communities, meaningful work, raising educated according to their values, corrosive.

Yeah, we get all that.

But at some point, you might want to say,

The nuclear family is the basis of fertility in this country, whether you like it or not.

And we're shrinking.

We're 1.6 and we have a lot of communities where there's no fathers.

But this idea, this Jack Kemp idea that if you just go into Detroit and you put so many industries there,

it's going to offer so much opportunity that everybody's going to go work and it's going to be like it was in the 1950s.

It's not going to happen unless you have another social cultural agenda as well.

And it has to be pretty blunt.

It has to say you're not, if you're going to be a single mother and

you are not going to pursue work and you're just not going to stay home and have two or three kids by two or three different husbands.

It's not going to work.

The husband is not there, the father is not there, but

there's nothing.

It was kind of pulling.

It was more or less, I suppose, that the economic agenda will solve all problems.

And our problem right now is not one of, there is inequality, but it's not one of national prosperity, as they think.

We're still the richest country in the world.

I just drove back across California.

I mean, I was passed

on the freeway by people in Teslas and Mercedes.

They were going 80 miles an hour.

They were of all different colors.

And I pulled in at a couple of places to stop.

Everything is packed.

People have money.

The Biden's economy, I don't think, is any good.

But we're at such a level of affluence and leisure

that I don't think saying saying that we can just deregulate everything is going to give us more prosperity.

The sickness in America is the destruction of civic education, the destruction of traditionalism,

destruction of the family, the destruction of marriage, the destruction of all of that.

And it falls heavily.

It's a legacy of the 60s where the upper, upper, upper, and middle classes, mostly white educated people, experimented with social pathologies from drugs to promiscuity to

commune living to

not judging one's lifestyle and when that filtered down to the lower middle classes and the poor it was disastrous they had no safety net

so anyway All right.

Well, thanks for your views on all those things, Victor.

I think

we can ratchet up the, it may be short, but we can ratchet up the

on our next topic.

And that should be the U.S.

women's soccer team.

And let's get to that right after these important messages.

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Well, they are performances too.

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All right, Victor.

There they are.

The U.S.

women's soccer team.

Our ladies, they're out there.

Before a match with the Vietnamese women's soccer team and their respective country's respective anthems are sung.

The Vietnamese are...

singing their hearts out and look at the American team and most of them are standing there in some sort of form of a protest.

I think three women were singing.

We've seen this before, Victor, but I think it really gets to a lot of Americans.

Like, wait, you're America's team, and you hate them.

You represent America, and you're out there in the public, and you hate America.

That's how it comes off to me anyway.

What are your thoughts, my friend?

Oh, well, I mean, it has zero, zero.

Wasn't that at the opening match of the World Cup?

And I think everybody just

booed them or

they were very angry.

And

after all this psychodramas with Colin Kaepernick and all of the L.A.

Lakers, and we've gone through all this post-George Floyd stuff.

What's the purpose of it?

What's the purpose?

Is it saying if they had any conscience or they had any values, they just rip off their U.S.

insignia and say, we're citizens of the world.

We're Davos.

Just print Davos on the back and say, you know what?

We don't represent this toxic country.

Now, we are the wealthiest and we're most privileged and the most free women in the world.

And if you look at our lifestyles, you can see that we have advantages that no other woman in the world has, but it has nothing to do with the United States.

It's just organic.

And that's their attitude.

And nobody really wants to believe it.

And

when you have communist Vietnamese that are much prouder in their country

and than they are.

And then, then, remember, I think it was 2019.

And, you know, let's be honest, that the architect of it was that Megan Rapineau, right?

Who became really a multimillionaire with her endorsements when she came out as gay.

And she

kind of hinted that there was an ideological,

I don't know what it would be, stamp that the LGBTQ community was heavily influenced by or influenced from the women's soccer team.

And they were synonymous, at least in her advertising, her little dyed hair, and I'll never put my hand over my heart, I think she said, all that stuff.

And

it goes nowhere.

They get rich in their narrow constituency and they get fame, but they don't care about anybody else.

And nobody.

Let's face it, nobody feels that whether the women's national soccer team, given their record and what they say and do, has any connection with them at all.

I could care less.

I don't care if they win or lose.

If they can't even have the decency to salute the flag, I have no...

You see, what I'm saying is that they have a nation of 335 million people.

And if they say,

we don't want to associate you symbolically or iconically, then of course the people in the United States can say same here.

Just go out and be orphans.

You know, just go out and get a national, why don't you get Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and be the Facebook team or something?

But they never do that.

They're so hypocritical.

They use this little birth and this perch as if they represent us.

And then they get publicity by being edgy and by disowning their own country.

And then they get endorsements in this hyper-capitalistic world.

And they get a lot of money and they get a lot of press and media attention, which is worth a lot of money.

And they never make the connection.

It's because of the United States.

They're ingrates.

They have no gratitude at all.

Yeah.

Rich ingrates.

Rich ingrates, yes.

Yeah.

Hey, can I throw a curveball at you?

Yeah.

I didn't, I just, it just dawned to me.

I wanted to talk to you about this, but I didn't let you know.

And you didn't talk with Sammy about the,

I didn't get to listen to all your podcasts, the resignations of the various Stanford, the president and the, and the dean?

No, we did not.

Would you, Would you venture?

Well, I mean, we, Mr.

Tesser Levine

resigned about three days ago.

I was traveling, and everybody knew it was going to happen.

So,

to remind our audience, I don't know why it came up again, but three decades ago,

there had been allegations that a team of scholars, of which he was one,

he had co-written a series of articles in which I think he was more or less in charge of translating a lot of their findings into pictures and illustrations, and they didn't really represent

a finding that could be replicated.

Okay.

So they put data in there that didn't really confirm what the experiment and data, I would mean in the illustrations as well.

So why is he, they're going after him now?

Well, he's an old white guy who's tied up with corporate, not old, he's younger than I am, I think, but he's

he's got a, he was very wealthy in the, in the Silicon Valley genetic, research, medical, corporate culture.

And he's white Canadian male, okay?

And as we know, from the vocabulary scandal at Stanford and the woke scandals and the law school scandals, Stanford feels that it's transitioning,

transitioning with 15,000 administrators and 16,000 students, transitioning with a boast that it only let in 20% of the incoming class this year was white,

transitioning in the sense that we don't consider the SAT valuable, but in fact, we feel it's detrimental and probably inherently racist.

So we got rid of it.

So that's the transition, and he didn't fit that.

And so maybe the motivation was different from

what did him in was his own laxity.

Then he, the cover-up is always bad, too.

If he had have just come out maybe a year ago and said,

I was wrong on that.

It wasn't a mortal sin.

But in the world of science, you have to correct every inaccuracy.

And so I want to withdraw that art.

If he had have done that, I think he might have survived.

But instead, he wrote these very embarrassing apologies.

I don't mean in the modern, but in the classical Greek apologia, that he said, this is, I'm not guilty.

I resent what the Stanford Daily is saying about me.

I really, and then he couldn't square that circle.

So then he was going to have one of the board members involved in the investigatory committee, and that wasn't going to work.

Somebody who bought stock in his company.

So they finally got a disinterested law firm who got the necessary expertise and they found him.

Not damning.

I mean, they didn't say he was a fraud.

They just said his methodology did not adhere to scientific principles.

And while he may have not promulgated that deliberately, or he may not have known that at the time,

when it was brought up to him,

rather than contesting something which was clearly, he was clearly in error, he would have been advised, it would have been advisable for him to make the necessary correction.

That was what they said.

And if you're president of university and

you're supposed to be the epitome of scholarly integrity,

you can't exist.

So now we open it up.

And remember, this is on top of the

person.

Well, the

provost quit,

the second number two.

And then we had a diversity, equity, inclusion czar in the law school who

Steinbach.

Yes.

And she

apparently ambushed

our judge, our judge, a country's judge, a federal judge, because when he came in and they shouted him down

over LGBTQ trans issues or whatever it was, they were prepared for him.

And she mysteriously had a written text prepared.

So when they were screaming and yelling, which she must have anticipated or even colluded with, and she sympathized them, and then all of a sudden she took the podium and read this thing.

So, the appearance was that

I'm going to sandbag this invited guest, this federal judge.

And then, when you add in the Phillips of we hope your daughters get raped, and that kind of screaming at him, it was a disaster.

Then, we have the bankman-freed cryptocurrency scandal.

He's on campus and has two parents,

two members of the law school.

There are allegations.

I'm not confirming that I know that they're accurate.

They're allegations that he was transferring valuable real estate monies to them at a time when his house of cards was starting to fall.

So basically, people who had given him money, he was not candid with and ruined their lives, but there was still fumes of that money, and he made sure it went to his parents in the form of real estate.

And then we had two other members of the law school.

One attacked a female Latino lawyer that was

defending Johnny Depp, said some very

terrible things about her.

We had another one who testified in Congress and,

I don't know, bizarrely, Jack attacked Baron Trump and said he's not a Baron.

That was just crazy.

And then we had the vocabulary.

We at the university are not supposed to use the word American or immigrant, da-da-da.

I could go on.

There's all kinds of, and what is the symptomology is that there is nobody at the top

that can be a heroic figure and say, not this pig.

This university is not owned

by a bunch of 18 to 21-year-olds who are passing.

through for four years.

They're important, but they do not own this university, nor does the

couple of thousand faculty who happen to be here at this time, nor do the administrators.

It belongs to the people who went there before, the active alumni, the people who support it,

and the restrictions they accept when they take federal money.

And they have a voice too.

And they are in big trouble because a lot of the people, whether they're law school alums, they feel that their brand is tarnished.

I'll give you a couple of anecdotes, of what I mean.

I was at a place where a lot of the alumni came up and asked me about this recently.

And one of them said, my degree is not going to be worth anything because if you let in people by race and you abolish the SAT, then Victor, you know what the faculty has got?

They got three choices.

They either have to inflate the grades, they either have to water down the curriculum, or they either have to keep standards and grade standards and curriculum standards, and they're going to be called a racist if their grading doesn't fit DEI guidelines.

And that will mean the university is not after meritocracy or excellent.

He had a good point.

And so they're worried about the quality.

They think the law school embarrassed them.

The president embarrassed them.

So now we have an intern,

president, Richard Salier.

He's a classical scholar.

So I have come across him.

I mean, we're in the same field.

And It's kind of interesting at Hoover because the classics department has always been kind of hostile to Hoover.

But if you look at the number of PhDs in classics and you look at their publication record, Jack, they're much more impressive than the Classics Department.

And by that, I mean we have Barry Strauss, the Cornell ancient historian at Hoover.

We have Bruce Thornton, who's written nine books on classics at Hoover.

We have Paul Ray.

who has written the definitive history of the Peloponnesian War.

He's got a visiting Hoover appointment.

And we've got my assistant, David Berkey, who just wrote a book, a Yale PhD in Classics.

And that's six of us.

And so when you look at the quality of classics here, and you look at it, the classics department, which is woke,

it's not, it's kind of ironic.

And then we have, so Richard Salyer is a classicist, and all of us at the Hoover Institution know who he is.

He's a very solid scholar, and he's going to be an interim president for a year or two.

And then we'll see what happens

when the search, the whole key will be the search committee as it always is in these things.

But, Stanford, when you, I voted an article for the new criterion, and I had pointed out when you add what I just mentioned and you put it into the Theranos formula, where we had a former Stanford student, albeit a dropout, but some very prominent Stanford-Hoover people on the Theranos board,

and it's an $8 billion Ponzi scheme that's melted down, resulting in she and her co-conspirator CEO are going to go to prison.

And we have all these people, some of them the most illustrious people in the United States, that were on that board.

It doesn't reflect well on Stanford.

None of this reflects well on Stanford.

And people wanted to want Stanford to be reflected well upon.

I mean, it birthed Silicon Valley.

It was Stanford Research Triangle, all these great Stanford professors.

And, you know, I wrote a book, Who Killed Homer with John Heath, and we were kind of kidding around.

I mean, it was serious.

We were worried about classics, but the ability to write that book, or we both went to Stanford and the classics department.

We had our criticisms about old fogies, but.

My God, when you look back at the 12 seminar requirement or the Greek and Latin composition requirement or the three-hour site translation in Greek and Latin languages, or the three-hour Greek history and Roman history, and Greek literature and Roman history.

And then you look at the PhD oral exam, and then you look at then you have to be certified in French and German.

And you look at all that and compare it to today, it's very different.

And so I look back at those guys, and I think,

you know, I was only 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.

And I thought, well, this is, these people are pedantic or the boring.

But when you get older, you think, wow, I'm really glad I had people of that caliber that knew so much.

I mean, that's a rare quality to go in and give a report in a class, and you say something like

you say,

you mention a word in Apuleius' golden ask, and the professor says, you know, that a word appears six times in late Latin literature, and he can cite each word.

You're talking about a corpus, 50, 60, 70 million words.

And so that type of learning is being lost, but they did transfer it to one more generation.

And our generation has not been successful in passing that legacy on.

So all of these are issues at Stanford.

And I think

it's either going to save itself or it's going to slide into permanent mediocrity.

I'm a little curious about the Stanford-Hoover dynamic.

And I don't want to get you in a rat hole or into trouble.

And I hope it's of interest to our listeners.

But mentioning the uh current classics professors at at the school compared to the stature of of uh those who are hoover fellows does take if if you could take ideology out of it do you think the typical stanford professor looks at hoover and that big building that you know dwarfs the campus looks at it with some degree of jealousy.

I know there's hostility there, but is there jealousy there?

Well,

a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution has to be tenured via

the appropriate department at Stanford, first of all.

So you either are full professor or a full senior fellow is what I'm saying.

So they understand that we have the same academic standards and much higher because if you...

If I have to be tenured, I have to be tenured by the classics department on one element of my life, and that's my PhD work and my journal articles that are peer-reviewed and academic books.

They are not evaluating me on public commentary, books on contemporary issues.

In fact, those might be a liability.

But if they tenure you and they have to tenure every one of us, that is, they have to pass on a recommendation to the provost.

that we satisfy the academic credentials at Stanford University at the highest stat,

then that's the beginning for us.

In other words, we're not going to hire a person in classics that wrote a dissertation called Warfare and Agriculture and the Other Greeks, or even a war like no other.

That might get me tenure, but it's not going to get me tenure at Hoover.

So we have to tenure them for purposes other than Stanford tenures them.

You see what I mean?

And what are those criteria?

Can you run a major policy program?

So in my case, we have a military history program and contemporary conflict big.

We edit and produce Strategica, but you have to have something that affects the contemporary political, cultural, social, economic, military scene.

And then you have to offer commentary, writing on contemporary political, cultural issues.

And you have to, every once in a while, write a book that is not just a narrow university press book.

So we have dual.

And so, in

appreciation for that, we don't have to teach.

You can be a joint appointment if you'd like.

But, you know, I have been a visiting professor at Stanford.

I got a PhD there.

So I would prefer to be at Hillsdale.

So I've always said I don't want to ask them.

I don't think they probably would have wanted me anyway, but I want to go to Hillsdale College in my month off.

And I've done that for 20 years.

But we have joint appointments.

But the point you're making is we

make a higher salary than full professors, at least in the arts and sciences.

I'm not talking about the medical school or maybe the business school.

And we don't have to teach.

And we, if you look at the,

it's right in the center of the campus, and there's no more iconic symbol of Sanford than the Hoover Tower.

So when you're up there and you're in the 11th floor and you can see San Francisco,

it's a rare office.

And we just built two, basically $200 million, one $100 million building, another $100.

So it's got state-of-the-art facilities, got high salaries.

You do not have to teach.

So, yes, I've had this happen in my last 21 years where people have said to me, oh, that's a right-wing thing.

Hey, is there any chance I can get in?

That kind of schizophrenia.

And we have, we just, I should say, I mentioned Josiah Ober, the classicist at

Stanford, has just joined us.

So that's seven, seven PhDs in classics.

And we're all,

we're not just all writing policy, we're writing about the ancient world as well.

And so I think if you were to rate classics departments and you looked at the quality of the Hoover classics faculty with Barry Strauss, Josh Over, Paul Ray,

Bruce Thornton, myself, and David Berkey, I think we would have a much stronger faculty than almost any university, but I'm prejudiced.

So, and that's not just true of classics.

So, when you look at the economics and you see John Taylor, John Cogan, Michael Boskin,

John Cochlin, Josh Rao, and you see that group of people, and then you look at universities, do they have people of that caliber?

I'm not even mentioning because he's

93, but when you have Tom Soule there, Tom Soule is brilliant.

And we had Milton Friedman.

When I got there, the first person I talked to was Robert Conquest.

I love Bob.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

I mean, and then

I bump into Shelby Steele, who, I mean, if you're talking about the two greatest students of race relations in the late 20th century and early 21st, it's Tom Soule and Shelby Steele.

Yeah.

So I, and, you know,

Condoleezza Rice is the director of the Hoover Institution.

So if you compare her stature with

the president of Stanford, I don't want to be deprecatory, but

on the national scene, on the educational scene, she's a much more influential figure.

So when you add all of that in, and then when you look at the

Stanford only, Stanford has about $35 billion endowment.

We only have about $900 million, which is huge because we're very small compared to them.

But when you look at the overseers at the Hoover Institution, they're as illustrious, if not more so, than the ones at Stanford.

I mean, they're not as wealthy because there's not as many of them.

So what I'm getting at is

it's a force to be reckoned with.

As long as

we have to stay true to the mission statement, there's two things that everybody has to do when you take money from somebody else in a nonprofit sense.

You have two overriding commands.

If you violate any one of them, then you are nothing.

You're nothing.

And the first is you have to find what the mission statement is of your organization.

And in our case, it's freedom, limited government, free markets.

And

by association, war, revolution, and peace.

And that means deterrence in foreign policy.

And the second thing is you have to honor donor intent.

So if a donor comes in and says, I would like to give $50,000 for this particular program, because, well, you don't take the $50,000 and say, ha, he gave it to me.

I think I'm going to go bring this guy in who doesn't quite believe, or I'm going to go expand it in areas.

You don't do that.

You do it once and you have no credibility.

And if you can't do that, you say to him, I can't do that.

I'm sorry.

And then you get a reputation at Hoover that you will not spend one dime unless it reflects donor intent and it's consistent with the mission statement.

And we've had people in the past who haven't adhered to that and we've taken a hit.

But I'm very confident recently, it's,

my gosh, it's growing.

Its budget is expanding.

We're having the candidates come out and we're getting some superb senior fellow conservative appointments.

that are coming in.

And I know we've been under attack, but I think we've turned the, I just think that it's a very exciting time to be there, especially in the military history program.

Yeah.

Well, we are going to record another podcast, and we're going to talk about that and Strategica on the next one.

But

it's great, great news about Hoover, and interesting your perspective on what's going on at Stanford.

We've got, Victor, a little time left for this podcast.

Then there's a controversy

that's taken over America the last week or so, and that's about bad small towns, evil small towns.

And we're going to get your views on this right after this final important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I want to give myself a little plug, Victor, if you don't mind.

Okay.

I give it my permission.

I appreciate it, my friend.

It upsets some of our listeners to hear me talk about myself.

No, they don't.

I was at an event and I met so many of our listeners, and they're just wonderful people.

I mean,

they give ideas all the time.

And if they're critical, they're critical of me more than you or Sammy.

But no, no, my gosh.

Go on.

Hey, she go visit the Victor.

Well, we're talking about other things.

The Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club, which is on Facebook.

Great people.

There's just some occasional.

I wish Jack would shut up post there.

And then if the list is.

I see.

I wish Victor would shut up.

No, no, my gosh, Victor.

Victor, you have no clue how beloved you are there.

i mean they call it the victor davis hansen fan club after all um so hey but seriously though when you're on facebook check that out and maybe join if you're on twitter at uh vd hansen that's victor's uh handle again i mentioned the blade of perseus and and for me um i write civil thoughts a free weekly emailed newsletter i do that for the Center for Civil Society at Amphil, where we are trying desperately to strengthen civil society.

I offer a dozen plus recommended readings.

Here's, Victor wrote this great piece on this.

Here's the link.

Here's a short excerpt.

I think you'll like it.

And a lot of people have been turned on to other publications or sources for information through Civil Thoughts.

So go to civilthoughts.com, please, and sign up.

Victor, last topic.

Jason Aldian, I hope I said it right.

country music singer

has a song try that in a small town with a video that showed clips from the nastiness and craziness of 2020 riots in the streets.

Of course,

anything that the left disagrees with immediately gets the brand of racist, but it set off this conversation.

It's not a conversation, this diatribe by elites about the evils of small town, which I don't think is anything new, Victor, as a classicist, as you were talking about.

but great hostility from

uh from the chattering classes about

this guy this song small town america and his response

was go screw yourself it was kind of heartening anyway victor you're from a small town and i am well it's gone i grew up in a town of 6500 and now it's a bedroom

it's a bedroom community of fresno so it's much larger about 20 000 but i'm still out in the same house in a rural area.

But it was, there's a couple of things that his name is Jason Aldian, isn't it?

And he wrote that song and he said, we don't do this in this town and we don't do that.

And he had, I guess the video got in trouble because he showed pictures of the violence of Antifa and BLM.

And therefore, if there was somebody that was not white in the video, then he is a racist.

But he doubled it.

He didn't.

He didn't apologize.

And I think that's

what we all are doing now.

Nobody is apologizing anymore.

It's like I could get back to that 1984 commercial.

Remember, the woman runs in with a ball and chain.

She throws it up into the Apple Big Brother window.

That was that Apple commercial.

And that's what people are doing.

They don't care.

And we saw that with Target.

We saw that with Anheuser-Busch.

We saw that with Disney.

We saw that with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

And his point was that

don't think that your urban values and your urban fad and you're decriminalizing the police and you're smashing grab and you're carjacking and all of this stuff is what America is about.

And thousands, millions of small communities and families across the country,

more than 51% of the people don't buy into this.

So we're going to let people be reminded that the left may have Google and Facebook and the Washington Post and the New York Times and NPR and the

LA Lakers, and Hollywood, and Netflix, and the corporate boardroom,

and the Rockefeller Ford.

They have it all, but they don't have the people.

And so he knew that.

And he just,

you know, the thing about woke is very strange.

If you have confidence that you can break through the woke barrier, this is like the sound barrier, right?

Now,

you can fight woke and you can lose and really get hurt.

But if you think you can break through it,

that is either by force of character or celebrity, like in his case, if you break through it, then you're exempt.

You just say,

hey, my song is going, you know,

it's great.

And we're not going to buy Hannaheuser-Busch.

What are you going to do to us?

Go ahead.

We'll say whatever we want.

And you can say, you know, Mulvaney, Mulvaney, Mulvaney, it's not going to help you.

We're broken through.

We don't care anymore.

We can tell you we don't want a cod piece on a child's cutoffs.

It doesn't matter.

You can say anything you want about me.

And that's the attitude that he has.

My only slight tweak is I grew up in a small town.

So

I was in high school from 1967 to 1971.

And it hit hard our high school, the drug Vietnam counterculture.

We were not immune to it.

I mean, we were kind of

five years back, what hit San Francisco in 66, 65, hit Selma in 70 or 60.

By that, I mean, there were four or five people I knew very well that were OD'd on drugs.

And I know other people who took drugs and later in life became dysfunctional.

homeless or out of our small hometown.

But more or less, we had a kind of familial upbringing and a face-to-face society, you know, that famous sociological canon that if you can go into a town and you can recognize every single person by face, maybe not by name, but by face, and usually that's defined by sociologists about 5,000 people.

And Aristotle talks about the ideal polis as well in the politics.

And that's the ideal, that once you get beyond a community where you don't you go in and you see strangers repeatedly then that has less social cohesion but even though we had a face-to-face society and i meant by that if i drove to town

i probably

by the time i was 18 knew every single person's face you know what i mean

but you did yes i did i did and my parents did everybody and that created a shame culture as well and remember in the late 60s and 70s, there was no,

oh, you're a poor little juvenile.

So you break into the sporting goods store in Fresno and you steal stuff.

It is Jock Smith, 17, resident of 248 Palm Street, Selma, was caught last night in a sporting goods store.

That's what they did.

Well, I have a feeling that's a real story that you just changed.

Yeah, wow.

And then there's another one.

Jose Lopez was

when people came to put out a flame at his house, they noticed a heroin injection kit.

He lives at South McCall Avenue.

You know, that was the kind of stuff they did.

And so everybody was, and then they, oh man,

your dad got caught with an injection kit.

Ooh, they would say things like, u que la, what happened to you?

It was shame, you know, and not just from the white minority, but the Hispanic majority, very traditional community.

And it was, and that really,

everybody thought, I thought it was brutal and unfair.

You know, I'd come on to my mom.

Why do they publish people's names in the paper?

They're just trying to shame it.

I've just, you know, I just read the crucible.

This is terrible.

And that was an idiot.

So,

and, you know, my mom was kind of a conservative.

She said, well, there's some value with shame after all.

But I was shamed in that kind of community.

My grandfather would always say to me, I would go walk with him as we turned on bowels with these metal twisters.

And he said, you know,

I just went to town, and that Wilson boy had that ugly cigarette dangling from his mouth.

Can you believe that, Victor?

And I knew his grandfather.

I thought, oh, I never want to have a cigarette dangling from my mouth.

Or he'd say,

I saw some boys out here, and there's a bunch of beer bottles.

And I went out there in the afternoon.

And I swear to God,

that's the Wilson boy.

He was just out here on a Sunday drinking in my vineyard.

Do you know anything about that?

And I thought, hmm, I remember that Wilson kid said, hey, Victor, do you mind if I drank in your vineyard?

So it was that kind of, it was that lifestyle.

And it was really, it was, you know, it was very constricted.

And I know,

and some people, when the cultural tsunami hit us we were 200 miles from san francisco when that hit us hate ashbury and

you know all of the jefferson airplane grateful dead take drugs draw all that stuff hit us people that there were a lot of vulnerable people and they their lives were destroyed And they were not always the poor.

In fact, you could make the argument that a lot of the majority of Mexican-American kids, I think, weathered that better because they had a more multi-generational family unit.

In those days, they did.

And a lot of the poor white kids and even the affluent white kids

got caught up in it.

So, even when this is a linkly explanation, just to say that, yes, he's right.

Small towns are more stable and we need to champion that, but they're often vulnerable as well.

Partly because people say, I can't, I got to get out of here.

I remember I always say to my mom, when I turn 18 and go to college, I'm never coming back here.

And she said, promises, promises, Victor.

I came back eight years later and never left.

But my point is, everybody wants to get out of a small town.

You go up to a big city and you there's, oh, I'd be anonymous.

Oh, if I did something, nobody'd know about it.

Oh, you can, there's all these opportunities and appetites.

I can be a sinner and go to hell.

That kind of nihilism when you're young, but not in a small town.

Yeah, even in, by the way, Victor, in a big city, maybe, I don't know that New York City is unique, but it does have a lot of neighborhoods that are very geographic and

5,000 people type of things.

And yeah, you walk down the block, you know everybody.

It's weird to live in a, in a small, you know, it's not a small town, but a neighborhood of Woodlawn and the Bronx really is in its way.

And you want to get out of there.

This society is schizophrenic because the

transitory nature of it, the idea that we're rootless, that we're anybody's, that we can live anywhere, any place, people,

it's the law of the marketplace.

So you're out there, let's say in Fresno, California, and you're doing a great job as a small CEO and somebody discovers you as a real talent and you just root your family up or you just zoom off to

Louisiana and run a company, or you're you're a doctor and

you're at Stanford Medical School and you get a name, and they'll suddenly say, Oh, wow, you could go to the Anderson Center in Texas, and you go.

And the result of that is that the country has a meritocracy and it just finds people from everywhere, not just in the United States.

It roots them out, and then they all move, and their value system is based on compensation, title, and to be fair, the excellence of their work.

And we all benefited.

But there's a price to pay.

You have to have enough people who are somebodies, and they live in some place rather than anybody's that live in any place because they root the whole country.

They're the people who say

they turn on the news

and they see

a Chris Matthews in the old days or Rachel Romani and they say, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to fall from this crop.

Or

They see,

they just,

they're there to remind the transitory bicosta elite that

what ultimately what keeps the country running is some guy out in the Middle West, Bakersfield, Dayton, you name it.

He gets up at five in the morning, he has his coffee, he gets in that truck, and he drives all the time.

He doesn't steal from it, he doesn't kill people, he doesn't drink while he's driving.

And then there's another guy who's out there.

He gets up at 4.30 in the morning.

He goes up and he gets his big chainsaw and he cuts timber.

He's out there farming on a tractor up and down, up and down, up and down, back and forth those rows all day long, quiet desperation, heroism.

And those people keep the country moving.

I wish I could say Mark Zuckerberg and Elon, they do too in a way, but the funny thing.

Yeah, but Victor, and those are the ones when they go home after an exhausting day of work and turn on the TV, and it's, you know,

Ferguson is on fire, or Baltimore is on fire, you know, eight, 10 years ago.

And they were the ones

to blame for all that.

You know, that's

part brought around the, you know, the Trump movement is

an article about that.

Why?

How to start a conspiracy theory.

It comes out Monday.

You just lie to people and you have asymmetrical application of the law.

So that guy works all day and he sees, you know,

all these leftists saying, oh, January 6th,

forget about what happened.

All he sees is a bunch of violence that goes in the Capitol.

The Capitol is supposed to be closed.

He says, let's punish them if they broke the law.

And then

he thinks back and said, wait a minute, I saw May, June, July, August of 2020.

It wasn't one day.

They carved out whole areas of Washington and Seattle.

What was it called?

Chas and CHOP, where they wouldn't even give it back for 21 days.

They killed 35 to 40 people.

It wasn't one day hitting an officer.

It was 1,500.

Yes, the Capitol is iconic, but they went after a police precinct.

They went after a federal courthouse.

They went after the St.

John's Church.

right across from the they went after the white house grounds and tried to storm it and you know $2 billion,

not the desecration of the Capitol.

And when the administration at the time said, well, you need federal troops, they said, no, we don't want them.

It's a summer of love.

And then all of a sudden they ring the Capitol with 20,000 federal troops.

So what I'm getting at is the average person says, I don't mind you punishing somebody.

Don't shoot Ashley Babbitt for the misdemeanor of going through a broken window when she's unarmed.

But if you want to publish somebody who goes in the capital, he's not allowed to go in on

a holiday, and you go in there, yes, then charge him with illegal parading.

If he does some damage,

charge him with that.

But don't stick him in solitary and try to trump up, you know, 10 years in prison when you take all these 14,000 other people who were arrested for doing far more death and destruction and not to punish them.

They all got off, basically.

Yeah, thanks to Kamala Harris

helping with their bail, right?

Yeah, and psychologically, Marin, this is going to continue, and it should continue, and it's going to continue to Election Day.

Remember that?

Yeah.

And all of a sudden, they're going to look at January 6th and see if Donald Trump said, go over to the Capitol and assemble and protest and do it peacefully.

And she says, keep going.

It's going to continue.

And then we have these completely intellectually corrupt, quote-unquote, fact-finders.

well she said that but she was referring only to the non-violent aspects she didn't mean the violent oh no she wouldn't do that's what that's where we are she's so nuanced yeah so that's why people get angry they get angry

they get really really angry when you don't apply the law symmetrically when they see fauci

Write and a redacted email came out, Jack, the last 10 days where he uses the word gain of function in Wuhan.

And then he goes before Rand Paul and he says that this is not gain of function and he wouldn't fund it.

He's lying.

Yeah, we can't go into this now, but you see the news that came out the other day, and maybe we should talk about this on our next podcast, but that

we are still giving money to that laboratory.

That laboratory is run by

the People's Liberation Army.

Yeah,

but

if I was on the Stanford campus, which I was, and I said in March, which I did,

that there was a high likelihood that the virus was associated by that People's Liberation Army Virology 4 lab, and it was less likely that it was a pangolin or a bat, then you get in big trouble.

Right.

And now all of a sudden, oh, yeah, yeah, of course, sure.

Sure, Tom caught and they went after him for saying it.

Now, no, it's, oh, yeah, we never said that.

Of course, it's related.

And same thing with vaccinations.

I just got my long COVID.

These people at the Ivy League are saying,

well, maybe sort of kind of maybe perhaps just

to note that when you flood your body with spike proteins and this new mRNA genetically

transformative vaccination, it might increase for some susceptible people the symptoms of COVID.

I mean, that's a theory, but they're saying it now.

And there were doctors, you know, in that frontline doctors who said that, and they thought they were Satan incarnate.

So this is so fascinating.

And they destroyed the lives of all these people for this narrative.

And it was basically a political narrative.

We're going to shut down the damn country.

We're going to make everybody be vaccinated.

We're going to destroy the Trump administration.

We're going to change all the voting laws so 70% don't vote on election day.

And if you dare object, you're a denialist.

You're an insurrect.

And There were a lot of lives that were destroyed.

That

guy at Harvard, Martin Kullendorf, they went after him.

Jay Bacharia at Bacharia at Stanford, they went after.

I keep talking about

no apologies.

No.

Millions of kids who've had their

lifetime of education effed up.

Millions of people who just sat there in their cubicle and they had a prostate tumor or a breast tumor growing, growing, growing.

They couldn't get a doctor.

A lot of people, their heat went out and they could not get a Home Depot person to deliver a gas furnace.

A lot of people who had severe psychological problems, they needed help.

And they went nuts cramped into that apartment.

And then to be told that You have to follow this or you're a criminal.

And then you turn on your TV and Gavin Newsom's at the French laundry boutique restaurant with all of his lobbyist friends with no mask telling you that you were going to be arrested if you didn't wear a mask.

And then you see Fauci at a baseball game, pulling down his mask,

and Gavin Newsom doing it in a Dodgers thing.

And then all of a sudden, these trusted medical authorities that we all trust and we must honor, they suddenly come out with a communique: hey, you stupid people, you better wear that mask or we're going to arrest you.

But if you go out into the street with a BLM banner and you got megaphones and you're screaming and shouting and you're protesting sometimes violently, that's okay.

We give you an exemption because we have now issued a communique that it's more psychologically injurious to your health, to your health.

than it would be physically injurious to your health if you were to stay in your apartment and say, sorry, BLM, sorry, Antifa, I can't protest today because the government said we're in lockdown quarantine status, so we can't do it.

What a joke.

Yeah.

Wow.

Well, Victor,

we have come to the end of this podcast

where we do a little business.

And that's to thank our listeners and those who have visited your website and who've signed up.

thank you all for doing that.

No matter what platform you listen to this,

the Victor Davis-Hanson show on, we thank you.

Oh, I just heard Stitcher, which I always mention is one of the platforms, is shutting down at the

end of August.

So if you listen on Stitcher, thank you.

We can't say that too much longer.

Those who listen on iTunes and Apple can rate the show zero to five stars.

Practically everyone is giving you, Victor, five stars.

If there were 10 stars, they'd give you 10.

Some leave comments.

Um, I'm gonna have a comment from Twitter.

Let me give the Twitter comment.

Someone wrote me directly on Twitter, MM Dean2.

And I'm not, you know, I rack my brain to try to think who this was and haven't come up with it yet.

But he writes, Hey, Jack,

I went on two NR cruises, had dinner with VDH, amazing.

Tell him I taught math in an LA USD, which I guess is

Los Angeles

high school, 99% Latino for 30 years, aping Escalante.

That's Jaime Escalante.

I remember this fellow, I talked to him about this.

Oh, you did?

Okay.

So he says, we had 100 plus students.

It was fascinating.

Yeah.

He said we had 100 plus students taking AP calc with 80% passing.

We worked their asses off.

The key was the test.

So he wanted you to know that.

I mean, I look back at my students.

Gosh.

You can give me any student of any ethnic background.

If they're disciplined, they want to study classical languages, they excel, every one of them.

And regardless whether they're white, poor, white, rich, white, Asian, poor, Hispanic, wealthy, Latino, black, you name it.

I've always believed that,

you know, I'm not attacking Charles Murray, but I've always believed if there is a difference in IQ,

which he postulated, and he's a scientist, and I'm not, it's of such a minor nature compared to what the role of culture is.

Right.

By that, I mean, you can give it, you can, if there's five or six IQ points difference or 10 between different rates, it doesn't matter.

It's culture.

And you can adapt that if you have motivated students that want to learn and you give them the necessary and the correct type of education.

And that's what's if you're a third grader and you read a lot,

your future is brighter than if not.

And I think it's things like, you know, what happens in a typical household that makes that happen.

And that's a really

good thing.

I would see some guy that looked like you came out of San Quentin

and the guy was a genius.

You know what I mean?

It happened to me all the time.

And that really taught me.

And I knew that before growing up here, because I've written about people, you know, that were landscapers or mechanics that were reading.

And they, not that reading is, is inherently more noble than welding.

I'm just saying that we have this weird idea that this particular profile is necessary to get, to run the country.

And we have people all walks of life that are extremely bright.

Right.

And they sometimes, when they want to get a formal education, they excel.

And they can.

It's not a racist country, believe me.

You can excel if if you want, if you want to work.

Yeah, well, as a guy says here, you got to work your high knee off.

And as you did, you worked yours off when you were, you know,

studying chemical classes.

I came from what was called a very poor high school.

I thought it was pretty good myself, but I was told when I got to the new campus at UC Santa Cruz that it was a very poor high school and it would be very hard for me to compete.

But I noticed something very quickly that all of the kids from Palos Verdes and Pacific Palisades and Marin County of the California kids, they liked to stay up at night and they like to drink and they liked to party.

And all you had to do was come back from your class, call your parents, go into your room, get your books, go to the library, come back at 11 at night and just keep doing that and you could surpass.

And I can tell you there were people that both had a lot better education in high school than I did, and they had a lot more natural aptitude than I did.

But it was all about discipline and work.

And, you know, maybe I look back and I think, wow, why didn't I get drunk?

Hey, remember that time there was the Latin class, everybody went skinny dipping.

Why didn't you go and join them?

You know what I mean?

It's like, but you think, well, that's not what you were there for.

Your parents were sacrificing.

Your whole family would got you there.

Your job is to do, to excel.

If you can't,

I think that's

what most people do.

I can't.

The image of the classics class skinny dimming is

well, that's now wait a minute, because uh

in those days, UC Santa Cruz was not considered, you know, Florida state or Long Beach state as far as attractive people.

Yeah, they were 60s weirdos.

And then there you say classics, it narrows it, but I can tell you that I am now 69 and I wish I hadn't gone to that

nude bull party because there were some beautiful women in our class.

Yeah, well,

I've met Mrs.

Hansen and she's beautiful.

So

you're a very fortunate person.

Well, I hope she doesn't listen to that.

No, she

let us pray.

Areas.

But I can tell you, I've never done, I haven't ever gone to a skinny dipping party.

Well, that makes two of us.

And on that note, Victor.

It makes most of our listeners, I think, unless one guilty party wants to write the Angry Reader and confess.

Oh, well,

I should just add: if you do subscribe to Victor's website, there is a new Angry Reader posting, and that's where Victor takes on.

Before I leave, I had a couple of people write me.

I think there's one or two that

Sammy posted.

They asked me

why, yeah, why did you do this?

It's so foul.

This guy is so crazy.

What's the purpose?

Because he doesn't even have an argument.

And the purpose is to remind people that most people on the left that do stuff like don't have an argument.

And that's just representative.

I could have put 20 more, but the point is, I'd like people to remember there's a lot of people out there that are absolutely blank, blank crazy, and they're foul-mouthed, and they don't want to argue.

And, you know, I just was at a place where I debated one of them, and

not foul-mouthed, but just dogmatic.

And so that's what they write.

They don't have an argument, they just say blank, blank, blank capital letters,

exclamation points, bad grammar, schatology,

the F word, the S word, all in lieu of an idea.

Why do you have a 10, 10 checklist?

I gave him a 10.

Man, I was, gosh, I thought, wow, this is a work of art.

He's got exclamation points.

He's got capital letters.

He's got capital and small in the same word.

He's got the ad hominem.

He's got the no argument.

He's got the all, I think he had eight, eight.

you know,

say something about your mother also.

Is there something

like pornographic,

pornographic, eight words and two sentences?

And he's fine

if it's real.

It's a great talent.

Angry readers.

I haven't given Tims very often.

Well,

all right, Victor, you've been great today.

We've talked about some great topics and gone down some very interesting, not rabbit holes, but very worthwhile tunnels.

And thanks for shedding the wisdom that you always do every

episode.

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

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.