The Western Paradox

1h 11m

Listen in as Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler examine Ben and Jerry founder's "stolen land" comment, French riots and the illogical of illegal immigration, the Dutch government dissolved, and the court case forbidding Biden administration to collude with social media outlets.

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Transcript

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Hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the second banana, the big banana, Victor Davis-Hanson, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This podcast will be up the day before

Bastille Day.

And we're going to talk about some French stuff.

We're going to talk about ice cream,

communist ice cream, and some federal rulings.

We'll get Victor's wisdom on all these

things.

And we'll start with ice cream, Victor, okay?

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I need to remind folks first, the Blade of Perseus, that is the name of Victor's

website.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

You should go there and you should subscribe and I'll tell you why later, why you should be doing that.

So Victor, Ben and Jerry's.

I have never eaten that crap because I do,

I draw the line.

It's a

politicized ice cream.

I love ice cream, but you know, screw them.

So on the 4th of July, the head of Ben and Jerry's, socialists who founded, who sold it, I think to some British company, the head, though, said, oh, it's terrible.

Celebrate the 4th of July in this country that has, you know, taken taken land from the indigenous people and we should be

returning our land to the Indians, although they said Indians.

And I believe it suggested

land where Mount Rushmore is.

By the way, on a side

left now associates.

Well,

I think they associate Mount Rushmore with Donald Trump because he gave that speech there in 2020.

And now it's kind of that the whole place has got the cooties.

Of course, there are four dead white men up there also.

Anyway, anyway,

the tribe that

had the land, the tribal land where Ben and Jerry's headquarters are located in Vermont said, all right, you know what?

Give the land back.

So a little bit of hoisting on the petard.

You know, we're recording today on Sunday the 9th.

Again, I said this will be up on the 13th.

Who knows what will transpire in the intervening days.

But Victor,

I think it's disgraceful what this company said and attacking America on its birthday.

But I think it's wonderful

this response

by the tribe.

So your thoughts, my friend.

Well,

I mean, I think the land that is under...

Indigenous peoples' reservations is larger than

30 individual states.

I mean, not all of of them together, but the total tribal lands are larger than 30 states are individually.

So it wasn't as if there's not land.

And

nature, God, fate, Nemesis has a way of evening things out.

So when I drive to the Sierra and I see, on the way up to the Sierra and I see

Table Mountain, for example, I see multi-millionaires everywhere.

So things, I mean, it's not as if

this is not quite what everybody says.

I mean, there's reservations, there was a lot of tragedy, and that's what happens, isn't there, when cultures collide.

And I'm not just talking about so-called Europeans and Indigenous peoples of North and South America, because

the Lakota Sioux didn't exist in a vacuum, did they?

They fought the Cree, they fought the Pawnee, they fought the Caio, and I say fought, they didn't just do flower wars like the Aztecs, but they fought wars of extermination.

And to romanticize that is crazy.

So they were very warlike, they were Spartan-like, and their creed was to defeat the enemy and take prisoners and slaves and women and get more

hunting ground.

And that's what happened.

And then they met a tribe they couldn't defeat, which was called the Europeans.

But this idea that Indigenous people were peaceful, pacifistic, one with nature.

Nobody's ever tried to camp out in the Sierras for a week.

That's not what it's like, believe me.

So we romanticized this.

And for these guys who sold out to what, Lieber Brothers, Jack, I think it was.

And they

sold out.

Yeah.

And Unilever, sorry, Lieber Brothers, Unilever.

And

they got nearly a billion dollars or more.

And they're sitting pretty, and

they live on land that was quote-unquote appropriated.

And

it's just typical that the modern left-wing mind is never subject to the consequences of its own ideology.

So it starts to lecture.

And this is if it was sincere, Jack.

Because have you heard of Ben and Jerry lately?

I haven't.

And I don't know what this little tiny, tiny subgroup of this huge global corporation is doing, but it seems to me that maybe,

I mean, you say you don't buy Ben and Jerry's, I don't, but not because

they're left-wing necessarily, although that's another reason not to buy that.

But who wants to buy a bunch of cookies or these crazy names they put on it?

You know what I mean?

And

so I think.

The purpose might have been just to get back in the news.

We're Ben and Jerry's.

We're on the left.

If you're a left-wing person, buy our ice cream.

We're on the cutting age of progressive thought.

We're still here.

We sold out.

We're very wealthy, but

we're not

necessarily corporate.

We're guilty.

We feel bad about all the money we have and all the carbon emissions we emit.

So every once in a while, we have to pay medieval penance by sounding off about Hoi Paloy and stupid white people that took Indian lands.

And it doesn't affect us because we're wealthy and blessed and morally superior.

And now we're in the news.

I think that's the

sum of it.

Well,

I hope they lose their headquarters of land.

That's

not going to happen.

I know it's not, but one can dream, Victor.

One of the things that's not going to, you know, it's so weird is just as an

aside very quickly is that

when I go to these university people and these academics, I know they have a lot of of power and

they can rig your Google search and

they're really smart people that make all this money and privilege and they live in big houses.

But when they keep saying white rage, white praise, like the genocide,

they never are around white people.

They're not.

They're not around the working white classes.

Because if they were, they would see that it's not going to happen.

You're not going to tell some guy who works 14 hours a day, you know, as a framer or an electrician or a plumber on assembly line, that he is no good.

He is a racist, and he's going to give up everything.

He doesn't have very much to give up.

You know what I mean?

And so when you start screwing around with a white working class, it's not going to happen.

But only people who are privileged and spoiled and protected and insulated think that because they never are around them.

They hate them.

They hate them, they hate them, they hate them.

They don't want to be associated with them.

But they don't know them.

And,

you know, someone who grew up right in the middle of the Oklahoma diaspora of working white people, poor working white people and Mexican-American people, I can tell you that when I was in seventh grade, eighth grade, freshman, senior, and high school, if I got and everybody got in a fight and that working class played, if you got in a fight with a white working class person, you better be careful.

They were not to be screwed around with.

I can tell you that.

I got in very few fights, but I can tell you that the ones that I did with the white working class, and I came from a farming family that was sort of working class, they're very tough people and they don't, they're unapologetic, they're not guilt-ridden.

And so

these are the people who, as I said, died at twice their demographic in Fallujah and Taji and Hyman Province, Hellman Province, etc.

We keep getting this elite narrative.

You listen to Joy Reed or you listen to LeBron James or you listen to all these Oprah or you listen to Joe Biden and you know and you get this idea that these they're drags, they're chomps, they're semi-fascists, they're clingers, they're deplorables.

They don't know those people.

They're very hardworking people and they have a lot of dignity and you don't screw around with them.

And I don't think they understand that.

By the way, Victor, back on the indigenous, wasn't it the oldest remains of any body found in North America?

Wasn't it

a quote-unquote white person, not a member?

Remember the

I remember that.

And then they forbid further research on the body because it's just totally.

there's been a lot of DNA suggestions that indigenous people, you know, when the Bering Strait land from Asia, there's a lot of suggestions that

that's indigenous people have Asian DNA, et cetera.

Yeah, I don't know, but I do know that

when Europeans came here, unlike

titles of books like The Conquest of Paradise, it wasn't necessarily paradise.

And I'm going back to Hernandez because when he got in 1590 and he landed at where Veracruz is today,

the True Cross, and he did his 140-mile walk fighting all the way to Tenochitland.

What he saw with indigenous culture was not pretty.

It's very sophisticated.

In some ways, the Aztecs were not like European levels, but sophisticated.

But

human sacrifice,

cannibalism, feeding corpses to animals, animals, you name it.

And

sacrificing children and having their beating hearts torn out and then holding it up in front of people.

So,

there was a reason why 1,500 Spanish cutthroat conquisadors defeated an empire of 4 million, and it wasn't because they were gods.

It was they had a lot of indigenous people's help that did not like what the Aztecs were doing to them.

And the same thing is true.

The Sioux were very feared because they were merciless to other indigenous tribes and that's what the story of history is it's not therapy it's not right it's not a storybook it's it's not melodrama psychodrama it's tragedy right you read you read you you see the movie the black robe or what the french jesuits went through you're like holy crap this is like sadistic uh well that's what they felt it's it's tragedy and this romanticization of history and the present is it's again,

it is a peculiar subset of the American population.

It's mostly white, very affluent, strongly academic, bi-coastal.

They write these things and they rewrite history.

They hire, fire, they function in academia in the corporate boardroom.

And it's a very altered,

strange, medieval view of the world.

I mean medieval because these people are among the most privileged and selfish people I've ever met.

And they create an entire psychological veneer where they condemn other people.

They talk about their terrible this and that as a way of squaring the circle of their own selfishness.

It's true.

It's a guild too.

This is the, getting back to Ben and Jerry's again, but I mean, if Ben and Jerry, as you pointed out, that was the whole theme of the story.

The indigenous

leader said to them, if you really feel so good about it, give back your headquarters.

And they'll never do that.

And, you know, if Barack Obama feels that this is a racist society and the only way around it is community organizing, nobody put a gun to his head and said, you have to live in Martha's Vineyard, exposed to the ravages of climate change on the coast, or you don't have to live in Calorama.

And you don't have to build a brand new home and fight with local green protesters on the beaches of Hawaii.

You can always go back to your fourth mansion in Chicago.

Yeah.

And then you can walk the streets on Saturday night in Chicago and you can tell everybody it's a racist country and try it.

Just go ahead and do it.

But this idea that you're at Martha's Vineyard and you open your big mansion's door once in a while and you sound off about how horrible racism is, but then you don't want to, you know, you don't want to get near it.

near the problem.

And that's the problem is not a lot of white people killing black people.

It's whack people killing black people.

That's the problem.

If you value a life as a life as a life.

And so that's, yeah.

Well, Victor, I mentioned French Jesuits.

Let's talk about France, if you don't mind.

And I want to encourage our listeners to

seek out a

publication.

It's called Claremont Review of Books.

It's published by Claremont Institute.

They also have a website where they publish other materials to the American mind.

But Chris Caldwell, who's just

one of the best writers and thinkers in America, and he writes an essay for every issue of Claremont Review of Books, which is a quarterly.

And I think Chris is one of the best

thinkers out there or observers and analysts of what's going on in Europe.

He has written a number of pieces from Hungary and other places, but his most recent piece in the Claremont Review of Books is on France and

France's ongoing George Floydian

riots and maybe free fall.

I'm just going to read a little

passage from his essay, Victor, and then

your thoughts on this and France in general and whatever you want to say.

So here's what Chris wrote about Macron and his handling of the situation.

Of course, Macron's predicament is not unique in every European country.

There are people mad at the capture of institutions by elites, infuriated by the lockdown of public spaces and the run-up of debt under COVID, and uneasy about being dragged even deeper into the Ukraine war.

But France is the first country to reach the stage where its leaders can no longer scare up the resources they need in order to quiet the electorate down.

And this threatens to make the country ungovernable.

I think that's, you know, France ain't no piker of a nation, Victor, but that it may be ungovernable is

quite a troubling

thing.

I think your thoughts, the day before Bastille Day, Victor, your thoughts.

Yeah, I mean,

we, France was, Mr.

Macron was always attacking Victor Orban, wasn't he?

And Victor Orban said the other day, Hungary doesn't have this problem because they have legal-only immigration.

And

that article by Christopher Caldwell is very present because it came out before the collapse recently of the Dutch government, partly on immigration, and before what we've seen in Sweden as well,

where the Swedish embassies are being attacked all over the world by Muslims because a Muslim heretic burned a Quran in Sweden.

And so there has to be some way to put this in perspective because

remember, Jack,

de Gaulle pulled out all the Pied Noise, all of the Frenchmen from North Africa, Morocco and Algeria, in that savage war of peace, so to speak,

colonization project of 150 years.

Some of those people lived there six generations.

Okay, they went to France, they gave up, and it was a brutal colonial imperialistic war.

We get that.

And then a lot of people wanted to come to France from North Africa.

And given current demographics, more are coming.

And the French either cannot or will not assimilate them.

Are the

they're not all from

North Africa.

There's a lot from southern Africa too, sub-Saharan Africa, people from Chad, for example.

or Niger, and they're coming up and they want to go to France and they want parity and the left wants them to have parity and you don't go from

rural Chad

to Paris and you get parity in one generation when you're not there legally and you don't speak French and you have no education.

So you clean toilets.

That's the immigrant.

And so now people are frustrated.

So the person who was killed had been in contact six or seven times with the French police.

He had run through stops before.

They knew who he was.

They told him to stop.

He didn't stop.

Cop says he tripped.

Who knows what happened?

He endangered the police's life by just zooming right through after they had stopped him.

And he was shot.

And then we had George Floyd Redux in France.

What was different than this is this logic.

I think people are

are getting angry in France and they're getting angry in Europe and they're getting angry in the United States.

And the question is, why?

And

I think it's the illogic of illegal immigration.

If you think about it,

so just think for a minute.

Europeans were in Algeria, they were in Kenya, they were in Rhodesia, they were in Vietnam, and they threw them out.

And they had reason to throw them out, so to speak.

It wasn't their country.

And then transitionally, and maybe a little bit more peacefully, they threw them out of India.

They threw them out of Libya.

They threw them out of Egypt.

We get that.

And I guess the idea was,

and then they wanted to go to Europe.

So what was the logic?

Was it, we hate you and we hate yours so much

in our country that we're now risking our lives to join you in your country?

Remember that, it reminds me of Subic Bay when we had to leave the Philippines.

You remember that?

And

there was those mass demonstrations.

Remember that great placard that guy had?

It said, Yankees, go home and take me with you.

And

or maybe it's,

you know, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Vietnamese were fighting the French, or

in the 50s, when they were fighting the British, or they were kicking the French out of Syria, or the British out of Egypt, it was our country for ourselves.

But now it's like, keep out of our country, but don't keep us out of your country.

It doesn't make sense.

And it's, so what I'm getting at is that illegal immigration

is absurd.

There's a fallacy.

The immigrant wants to import his own culture and he seeks to retain it in Europe.

But he knows if the ensuing culture, that is his own culture, were to become the dominant culture, then he wouldn't want to be there, would he, Jack?

Because he voted with his feet to leave his own culture to go to a foreign culture.

So why wouldn't he integrate and absorb it?

Because he knows

that

if North Africans go to France and they Xerox Algeria,

why would they stay in France?

They've already, they're there, they fled there precisely because it's not Algeria, right?

It's the same thing with Mexico.

I had a very astute conversation with somebody not too long ago, well, a few years ago, from Mexico, and he said, I'm here because I reject the protocols of Mexico.

He didn't quite say it that, but I want to be here.

So I don't want

to bring Mexico here other than food or music, but I want a different paradigm.

And what he meant was an independent judiciary, a constitutional system, the rule of law, the protection of private property, that, a multiracial society.

And he said, why would I recreate Mexico when I fled from it?

And that's what people

don't understand.

And then there's this old idea, it goes back to Homer, Jack, about the suitors in the

22nd book of the Odyssey.

So Odysseus is away.

The suitors go to the house of Penelope.

And the whole subtext, besides, you know, they shouldn't, they're eating out,

they're eating the substance of the house.

of Odysseus while he's gone, is that they violated the ancient idea of guest and host, Zinnia.

So

when people

come to France, I know it's brutal, and I know you're going to be a third-class citizen until you're highly educated and you compete with Frenchmen who have been born there, but nevertheless, you're a guest, and sometimes you're an illegal guest.

You don't tell the host what the circumstances are.

And

somebody comes to your house, Jack, and you and so you're sitting there and somebody walks in the door and says, I kind of like your house.

I want to go to dinner.

And oh, by the way, I don't like your furniture and I don't like the food you serve me.

You're going to throw them out.

You know, and that's sort of what's happened with illegal immigration so insidiously.

And you can really see it in our case with Mexico when this Andres Manuel Lopez Obedor keeps telling people in the United States, don't vote for DeSantis.

Don't vote for Republicans.

And the United States is bad.

If it's so bad and you think people are being treated, don't let them come here.

You're exporting millions of people.

You're losing human capitals.

Keep them in Mexico.

But don't have them come here and then tell the United States how awful it is.

And then you know what else is so weird about this?

There's another subtext.

And that is...

It kind of reminds me of H.G.

Wells's.

Did you ever read The Time Machine and The Eloy?

They're kind of post-human.

They're these weird effete creatures that live on the surface.

And they kind of coast on the fumes of, you know, their once distant past civilization that's been wrecked.

And then the Morlocks are the people who do the bad work.

And

it's kind of a racist stereotype.

So forget that part.

But there is a sense that the immigrant comes to these European or North American countries and they think, you know, these people are inert.

They're inert.

Their demographic is low.

We're going to take over.

Muslims are going to control France in 30 years.

These people, I have no respect for them.

I don't, they never say I have no respect for them.

I don't know why they're so much more successful in my eyes.

I say in my eyes, because they wouldn't be there if it wasn't in their eyes.

So they have a dilemma.

They say, you know what?

These Europeans have had it.

They're transgendered this.

They have nude beaches.

They're corrupt.

They don't even believe in Christianity anymore.

We're going to multiply and take over.

and our culture, Islam is more dominant, haha.

But they never ask, well,

why were they so wealthy and successful in the first place?

That makes me want to be with them if I hate them so much.

And so

there's a sense that they have contempt for the host.

I think Mexico has contempt.

You can really see it when you get an American president or a European person.

like Macron that appeases them.

So you would think that Obador would love Barack Obama and love Joe Biden because he gave them everything they wanted, but he treats them like crap.

He just says, you know what?

I'm going to send 7 million people into you, Joe, and you can't do anything about it.

And if you be careful, and I'm going to send fentanyl across the border, and we don't care.

It helps the economy of...

Mexico.

If you get 100,000 Norteños, gringos, that's your problem, not mine.

He asks utter contempt.

And then somebody says, no more, Donald Trump.

And we're going to, if you don't stop it and put troops on the border, we're going to renegotiate this North American trade agreement, North American.

And all of a sudden, Obador has respect for Trump.

So you can get the impression that when people defend their civilization and they define it and they cherish it, then the people who are coming respect them more.

But when they let them do whatever they want, then they have nothing but contempt.

It's that old

saying from India, he hates, why does he hate me?

I haven't done anything nice to him lately.

And so that's what's also behind what Caldwell is.

And it's happening in Sweden and it's happening in Holland and it's not happening in Budapest.

It's not happening in Singapore, Jack.

It's not happening in Beijing.

They know that it doesn't happen there.

China now is getting very, very wealthy.

Why don't they go to China?

Why don't they go to China?

They never say a word about China.

Nobody from the Middle East ever says that the Chinese are anti-Islamic and

we're going to go there and protest the Uighurs because they'd shoot them.

Or they know that the Chinese are a mono-racialist country.

And they only do it to countries that are liberal and accessible.

and humane and liberal.

And that's what's so weird about this Western paradox.

It's almost a disease in the West, that the more that they are liberal and open and transparent and constitutional and prosperous and secure, the more people want to come and the more people have contempt for the host that lets them come without any conditions or qualifications.

They never say to the immigrant, okay, it's very hard to come here.

You must know French.

You have five years to see if you qualify.

Anybody who is here illegally is going to be sent back.

If you speak French and if you develop skills and if you're self-supporting and if you sing the Marseille and you want to be a French person, we don't care what color.

If they did that, I think they'd get a lot more respect.

It's almost like the Westerner is post-civilizational himself.

I'm not blaming the immigrant necessarily completely.

It's the host as well.

He's lost all confidence in his homeland.

He doesn't, you know, he's lost confidence in his traditions, his values, his very future.

And I just don't think.

Civilizations collapse, and you're writing a book on that, Victor.

He's unable to defend his civilization, Jack, because he can't even define it.

Can't even define what it is.

And so now you have these people in this absurdity in Paris that have caused over a billion dollars in damage.

They're violent.

And what's the subtext?

I want to stay here at all costs.

I have to be with you people I hate.

I just have to.

And don't you dare send me back to where I came from.

I don't want to go back there.

I hate you in France, but I want you to be.

And you know what else?

Finally,

in the mind of the illegal immigrant in Europe, it's this.

I want to come over and I want to.

This host is decadent.

It's falling.

I know it's wealthy.

I don't know why it's wealthy.

I don't know why these terrible anti-religious values or anti-traditional.

I don't know why they make people wealthier than we are.

We're morally superior, but they're wealthier.

And we want to come in and be part of it, but we don't want to be part of it.

We want to be separate, but we want all of the attractions and benefits of the host, but none of the responsibilities.

But

this is what's really surreal and kind of sick.

We want to make sure that we're never 51% of the population.

Because if we're 51% of the population, we have Algeria or we have Morocco or we have Chad or we have Somalia or we have Ethiopia and we don't want that.

So we want these Europeans around to create the paradigm that brought us to us in the first place, but we have contempt for them, and we don't want to be fully part of them, but we don't want to get rid of them either.

That's what's so, it's just so baffling.

I'm not integrating people who assimilate.

There's a lot of people from the Middle East who are very successful, and they understand this, and they want to be.

full-blooded, full citizen French people, and they do wonderfully.

But not enough of them, or you you wouldn't have what we're seeing in Sweden.

And they keep pushing it.

They keep thinking, you know what?

These are not the Frenchmen that fought with Napoleon.

These are not the Swedes that invaded Russia under Charles XII.

These are not the Dutch that ran the world basically for 50, 60 years.

These are decadent, inferior.

They've had it.

Maybe, maybe not.

They keep pushing it, and I can see, I can envision a point where they're going to get a French government that says, if you're not legal, get on a plane, you're out of here right now.

Even though they need the labor, they'll get to that point if they keep pushing it.

And Chris Caldwell, he was on the Hillsdale trip.

He's a very brilliant guy.

He's underappreciated.

He's very astute.

He's very low-key.

He doesn't...

toot his own horn, but

he writes some very brilliant critiques of

Europe and the inconsistencies of Europe.

And with the American, he gave a lecture on the trip, both on this topic and also on Ukraine.

It was very fair on Ukraine, but

it was all the inconsistencies and paradoxes that people don't want to really discuss about the Ukraine without being in any way defensive of what Putin's doing.

It just wanted to put it in a larger context.

So he's a very good asset this country has.

I hope we can see.

I had no idea he was on the yeah, he was.

I just had a long conversation.

We walked together up the long donkey trail up to Santorini and had a conversation with him.

I'll tell you a story about that donkey trail someday.

And it involves a broken leg.

Hey, Victor, you mentioned

the Dutch situation, and we're going to get some of your

expanded thoughts on that

beyond illegal immigration, because there's also

a significant farming-related farming issue.

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Yeah.

Two brief anecdotes.

My father, when he was 11 years old on a farm, his father broke horses.

You know, I don't know if you've ever seen a horse-drawn hay rake.

We have one on the farm still, but they were very dangerous.

They have these long curved spikes, and he was climbing up as if he was going to,

you know, imaginary horse.

And he was

like, he fell, and he screamed.

And my grandfather came out, and the hay rake

point went through his liver out the other end, and he was impaled, screaming, and he was hanging kind of a foot above the ground, three feet above the ground, impaled.

And

they

had to take him, and he lived, of course, I'm here.

And

they repaired his liver.

And he said that it was so expensive to go to take him to Fresno and operate.

They didn't buy any horses that year to break.

And everybody blamed him.

I can remember being on the beach with my father, and you wouldn't believe a 1930 operation to save his liver.

It was just, it looked like he had stitches from his navel all the way back around him, 360 degrees.

I think,

and your father almost played pro football too.

He did, despite all that.

Yeah, amazing, amazing.

And I was, my wife and I were eating with a surgeon, a very well-known liver, I mean,

liver surgeon, we were, and he was talking about what livers look like that are unhealthy.

And this is three or four years.

I was having a genotonic, and he pointed out, and he said, I'm like that.

I said, well, of course, a gen and tonic is good for you if you have one every three years.

No, no alcohol is good for you.

And he went into a very detailed description of yellow livers, green livers,

anything.

And

he was kind of joking that he could tell the color of the diseased liver by the number of drinks that a person had.

But even small,

moderate,

in his opinion, I'm not dispensing medical knowledge at all, but in his opinion, even moderate drinking had an effect on the liver.

Well, I'm going to lay off the sambuka and the quanto for a while then.

Hey,

Victor, about the Dutch government, which has collapsed.

It was a typical European government with a coalition

mostly on the left.

But in March, these things have, I think they'd be inspirational.

That's hopefully why we're talking about it here, inspirational to the American conservatives.

We did talk last year about the Dutch farming situation where

these rules by the Dutch government based on

EU rules to severely reduce nitrogen,

which

meant that the government was taking over Dutch farmland.

By the way,

it was one of the most flagrant examples of imminent domain, but based on

not because of a freeway or an airport or even economic development.

It was based on this globalist idea of carbon emissions or.

Yeah, climate change BS.

And they also want to, you know, get essentially this part where they get rid of the cattle, get rid of the sheep because they fart.

And someone wrote that

the Dutch have the like the second biggest exporter of food in the world.

I find that kind of crazy and hard to believe.

But they were a massive agricultural country and to have 20% of it to be taken away.

And the farmers protested and they were driving their tractors to The Hague and the capital.

And there was an election in March, and they are the largest.

They created a new party.

I forget the name of it.

It's BBB of the initials of it.

And

they're the largest, but they're not a majority.

So this happened in March.

Like people are like, screw you up.

You're going to take back our government.

But so

we're going to have to do that all this, too.

We were at one time, I think we're still the largest milk, you think Wisconsin, everything, but it was basically from Southern California up to Chico of dairies.

And there were two immigrants that excelled at it, Portuguese and Dutch.

When I grew up, every dairy here was Dutch, Dutch American, and some, a lot of Portuguese.

And they were fanatically successful and they knew everything.

But the point I'm making is that

these people who draft laws like this to go after farmers or dairy people, they have no idea where their food comes from.

They have no idea how tenuous it is.

They got a little glimpse during the COVID lockdowns.

But you take somebody like Dutch dairy people, who are the most skilled, astute dairy people in the world as far as ecological protocol and production and efficacy.

And you start lecturing them when China's opening one big coal plant a month, and you think that because a cow passes wind that somehow these people are culpable and you're going to destroy what was the trademark industry of Holland for centuries, it's total insanity.

And it's only the product of an academic mind or an urban mind or a completely secluded mind to think that you were going to take these generations, these farmers who have been doing this for six, seven, eight generations and just suddenly in your lifetime say, you know what, you're bad people.

We're going to get rid of you.

No, you're not going to get rid of them that easy.

They're going to fight back.

And I think that's what we're seeing.

We're seeing that a lot now, Jack, on so many different fronts.

We have all these elites.

and they get in their little faculty lounges and their government carols and their little situation rooms in the corporation, and they come up with all these ideas.

And we're going to tell you.

And you can see that there's another, you can see what's happening to the Dutch farmers with the American military.

It's the same thing.

These guys in the Pentagon think, you know what, we're going to get this appropriation through the left-wing Congress.

We're going to have gender days and drag shows and all of this, and we're going to talk about white privilege and white rage and white supremacy.

We're going to have Mr.

Kendi's books required.

We're going to promote people on diversity.

And we're going to go after this Rubik.

Oh, this Rubik that overwhelmingly is misrepresented and overrepresented and dying in all these God-forsaken places.

And they're not signing up.

They're not signing up.

And now, you know, the Pentagon's blaming them, Jack.

They're saying, oh, it's veterans that did it.

The veterans caused this.

It wasn't.

It wasn't Lloyd Austin's lectures.

It wasn't Mark Milley's incompetence.

It wasn't the debacle in Afghanistan.

It was not the race, race, race, race, gender, gender, gender obsessions.

It was the veterans are telling their children not to go.

Well, wonder why.

And the same thing about Holland.

You keep pushing these people, and

you're not going to have any milk.

You know what I'm saying?

Right.

Nor will the rest of the world.

But then, you know, down deep, does Klaus, whatever the hell his name is, Schwab.

Schwab, yeah.

The great reset, Mr.

Schwab.

Yeah, telling everybody.

Yeah, I think it's either

dead bodies of soil and green, one or the other.

Look at what Joe Biden did.

He came in, and we were the world's largest oil producer.

And he said, let's no more Anwar, no more Keystone, no more federal leases.

And then the midterms, and then $250 on average, went up to $4 almost.

And here in California, it went from $275 to $5.80.

And all of a sudden, the midterms came.

He said, uh-oh, drain the petroleum reserve, open up federal leases, forget what we did.

Hey, you frackers and horizontal, you're not public enemy number one, because I can't get elected without you.

And suddenly we're back to producing a lot of gas and oil.

Why is that?

Is it because Joe Biden suddenly think, hmm, climate change wasn't that important?

I was misled.

No.

It is you go after an essential sector of the economy and hardworking people that are very good at what they do.

You try to cut off their funding, their banking.

you try to destroy them, and your country doesn't work and you don't get elected.

And so the same thing with timber people and all these forest fires you're seeing in Canada.

We saw them here in California.

You don't take care of the forest.

You don't let lumber people and lumberjacks do what they do best, clean out the forest so you don't have these conflagrations.

And

it's really weird how this

death-bound class off in the clouds, you you know, up in the sky, I should say.

They're not deskbound.

And they point down and they come up with a new enemy du jour and they say, this person's an enemy.

We don't need them or we're going to show how powerful we are.

We're going to go after them.

And then all of a sudden it's like,

well, where's my gourmet dinner?

And where's my stainless steel European refrigerator?

And where's my oak floor?

And I need these things.

Who are these deplorables and irredeemables?

Don't they know that I need to be?

I'm dying.

That's rightly mine.

By the way, Victor, one last thing on

the meat and dairy,

anti-meat and dairy front.

And this reminds,

will remind you of the great farmer,

Mayor Bloomberg of New York.

This is another.

I was pretty cruel to him.

I felt bad.

I kept quoting him.

Just drop a little grain in and it just grows to stock a week.

It's not brain science or something like that.

But at least while he was mayor,

the city was much safer.

He was a good mayor.

He was just Rudy Giuliani 2.0.

Yeah.

But the current mayor, Adams, who was under his domain and the domain of the

horrific attorney,

district attorneys in New York City's boroughs, he came out the other day attacking meat and dairy.

And remember, Bloomberg wanted to

have a war on soda.

They always do that when they can't do something.

Remember, Bloomberg couldn't get the snow out, so he went after max drinks or double drinks.

Right.

Big gulps or whatever.

But city, the crime is going through the roof.

And this, this chooch is

focusing on the purpose of the purpose.

I never understood the attraction of Eric Adams.

I never did.

I had all these, I would turn on the television or I'd meet people in New York and they'd say, oh, he's, he's, he's not Bill DeBlatt.

No, he's not.

I mean, he was famous.

Remember the clip he said that when he was running, they had an old clip and he said, I'm going to take on the crackers for you.

I mean, he was always a racialist.

And he told that

just recently, he shouted down that poor Holocaust survivor who was 85 and called her basically

a white supremacist racist or something.

And he's got mass, mass quitting of the NYPD or quitting in droves.

There's an article about that today because he's turned them off.

It's a disaster what he's done.

And I don't understand that, well, he's not that bad.

I guess the logic is that

present-day Manhattan can't get a Michael Bloomberg or Rudy Giuliani anymore.

So you have to settle for an Eric Adams because he's not that crazy Bill de Blasio.

By the way, he just announced that his wife has returned to her lesbian affinities and they're both going to be swingers and everybody's gaga about it.

Yeah, it's uh they're not getting divorced.

They're living in the same house and uh they still love each other.

What uh

he's another uh

what's the word?

Chooch.

His real name.

Yeah, I mean, he's

he's like Barack Obama.

He's Barry Dunham, or and then he's become,

what was his real name?

William Wilhelm,

Warren Wilhelm, Germanic.

And he suddenly woke up one day and said, I can't be a diverse candidate with a name like Warren Wilhelm.

That sounds too Germanic.

So I'm going to take my grandmother's name or something.

I'll become Bill de Blasio.

Yeah.

He took a recovering city.

And we've talked about this before.

I mean, I grew up there.

New York really was

a bad,

awfully bad place

and was a much better place.

And it can get much worse and it probably will.

It'll get back.

Meanwhile, though,

we won't be drinking milk and eating hamburgers because of Mayor Adams.

Hey, Victor,

we have some time to get your thoughts on.

I promised this on our last recording, some

important lower, lower court federal cases involving academic freedom and and the Biden administration's abuse of social media.

And we will get your thoughts on these issues, Victor, right after these important messages.

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So, Victor,

yeah, two, two, two important cases.

One was a three-judge panel, which

is a

punch in the nose of to

conservatives who had enjoyed some pretty good

Supreme Court decisions late last month.

But there was a lower court

panel that ruled two to one

in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The case is called Porter v.

Board of Trustees of North Carolina State, and two to one ruling against the professor Steven Porter, who he had been, and I'm reading here now from an article, he'd been removed from a degree program for complaints he made during a 2016 department meeting in a spring 2018 email to colleagues, and in a personal blog post written that fall.

What did he sin of Victor?

His quote, he wrote, the field of higher education study is abandoning rigorous methodological analysis in favor of results-driven work aimed at furthering a highly dogmatic view of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

He also called an academic conference in his field a woke joke.

So why could he, what did the court rule?

Well, he was fired.

And he was fired because of a lack of collegiality.

quote lack of collegiality.

And this two to one, this judicial, federal judicial panel said, yeah, it's okay.

A college can punish a faculty member.

It can fire and punish him because of a lack of collegiality.

Victor, I know you have traips in the fields of collegiality.

And everybody knows what that word means, collegiality.

It's a junk word.

It's a nothing word.

And it's used very frequently when you have nothing on somebody you want to get rid of.

And I've had it used against me when I was a visiting visiting professor.

I won't name the university, but I was there and some people thought I was too conservative.

So I had the chairman come up and said, we don't find you collegial.

And that's part of our academic community, is collegiality.

And I would say, well, did I,

what were my teaching?

Well, your teaching is very good.

And I said, how about my scholarship?

Well, you've written a lot of books.

How about mentoring students?

Well, you have a lot of independent studies, but you're not collegial.

And I was introduced to the word when I was, my father was farmed, and then he became a community college administrator.

And once there was a kind of very successful, competent physical education teacher that he had hired when he ran the evening division of this community college, and they didn't like him, and they wanted to fire him.

And so my father made a really

fundamental career choice whether he could keep being advanced as an administrator or defend this guy.

The guy was very controversial.

So my dad decided to take on the vice president and president of the community college in defense of this guy.

And he would come home every night.

I'd come back from grammar school and he would say to my mom, who's a lawyer, they say this person's not collegial.

What does that mean?

I want to know the legal definition of collegiality.

And my mother would say, well, does he shout?

Does he use obscenity?

Does he not show up?

No, no.

She said, it's just a junk word and it's going to be actionable.

You'll win and he'll win in court.

He did win in court in those days, but it was the opposite of academic ease

for

not being collegial is being sober and judicious.

I had a professor say that to me.

He said, I wish you were more sober and

judicious.

And uncollegial is not being sober and judicious.

I cannot imagine anyone more sober than you, Victor.

I don't know.

I'd said to the person,

I, you know, I'm living on a farm and I drive all the way over here.

I leave at nine at night and I drive at midnight and I get up at five in the morning.

I come in here early and I tutor kids for you.

And I just won this award.

I did all, I went through the whole narcissistic CV to him.

It didn't matter.

I wasn't collegial.

And speaking to someone who, along with my colleagues, Scott Atlas and Neil Ferguson was brought up before the Stanford Faculty Synod a couple of years ago.

There was nothing there.

I mean,

and I guess the subtext was, wasn't collegial.

It wasn't collegial.

That's what academics use when they have nothing on somebody and they want to get rid of them.

My only astonishment is that any court would fall for it.

Because

a good justice would, or he would say to the plaintiff or somebody, he said, well, can you define collegial?

What did this person do?

Did he he spit at somebody?

Did he disrupt a meeting, throw down a chair?

Was he like the,

did he disrupt a class?

Was he like one of those students at Stanford Law School that shouted down somebody and said, I hope your daughters are raped?

No, he wrote a letter.

You just quoted it.

It was perfectly collegial.

It just offered disagreement.

And it shows you they have no confidence in their own ideology.

If you can't withstand

a little minute challenge like that, because your whole artifice would crumble, then who are you?

I mean, if you, what the person should have said when he got the letter is, this is, we respect your minority view, and it's a dissident view, but this is why it's incorrect.

And this is why we believe that diversity, equity, inclusion is very successful and it enriches us.

And here's the reasons, one, two, three, four, and then addressed it.

That's all they had to do, but they can't do that.

They have no defense.

And they feel that if if one little crack starts to widen it's like a winch

the academic mind is like your windshield when you get that little nick you know a stone comes up you get that like a little bb through and you think ah it's nothing and then the next day that little crack goes up near your mirror and ah it's nothing it won't shatter and then the next day it's two feet long that's how they view dissidents they feel you know what we're very vulnerable we're like a glass windshield and that little thing doesn't seem like much but if we let this guy get away with it that thing is going to grow and grow and then shatter one day that is a great great analogy that's how they think yeah well

there's one other um one other um

judicial decision worthy we i hope of your of your uh commentary victor and this was again we're recording on

on Sunday the 9th, and this

is a decision from the, I believe,

July 3rd, or maybe it was the 4th of July itself.

Reading an article here, a federal judge blocked the Biden administration officials Tuesday from communicating with social media companies as two Republican state attorneys general challenged the legality of the administration's efforts to curb disinformation.

U.S.

District Judge Terry Daugherty, who was appointed by Trump, granted a preliminary injunction barring a wide swath of officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Justice, State Department, and the FBI from communicating with the companies.

The Republican AGs of Louisiana and Missouri are suing the administration over what they describe as a, quote, campaign of censorship, end quote, in which the Biden administration allegedly, quote, coordinated and colluded with social media platforms to identify disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.

Victor, God only knows what's going to happen.

There's another subtext,

but that's

kind of,

yeah, I cheered when I read this.

There's a subtext to that, too.

These social media companies and government, it's very incestuous.

It's the peacetime or the civilian counterpart.

to the revolving door when you get into the Pentagon and you have a whole legion of subordinates and suddenly you retire and you get maybe $170,000 pension, but it's just not quite enough to live the way you deserve to live.

And then, you know,

rate the honor, somebody calls you up and says, I'll pay you $2 million if you push one of our weapons systems.

And then you get on the phone, you call all these, you know, captains and colonels and majors in your career that are now generals and in acquisitions.

It's the same thing.

Remember Twitter, for example?

The FBI paid them $3 million

to,

they hired, the FBI hired them out on a contractual basis to identify misinformation, disinformation.

Then lo and behold, Jack, 11 of them, I think it was 11, the FBI ended up working for Facebook and Twitter and places.

And in fact, the general counsel of Twitter, remember

the FBI general counsel,

James Baker, I think his name was, and he was making pretty good salary, about $200,000.

And suddenly he was one of the engineers of this collaboration to spot disinformation and misinformation, gave a lot of money, not his money, our money, to Twitter, Jack Dorsey's Twitter.

And the next thing we know, he ends up as general counsel making, what, $7 million a year?

And so that's how it works.

There's a revolving door between, and they had that same person in EPA that was fired by Obama for using a pseudonym and then sort of lying about it.

And then she went right to, I think she went to Apple.

That's what left-wing administrations do.

They use Silicon Valley billets like the Pentagon uses defense contractors.

And they've come up with these words that we hadn't really seen very often, disinformation, disinformation.

And this is very ironic because this was the left that we told the American Civil Liberties Union, and they said free speech, they wanted, you know, no more band in Boston,

pornographic, explicit materials, you name it.

They were for it.

It's on license expression.

And then all of a sudden they thought, you know what?

We're losing the American people.

We're losing the American people.

They're not with us on the gender stuff.

They're not with us on affirmative action.

They're not with us on open borders.

They're not with us on appeasement overseas.

They're not with us on globalism.

They're not with us on crime is just a construct.

So, we've got to change things.

We either have to change, you know, the Supreme Court packet, electoral college, junket, bang a new school, or we have to work with social media and the means of communication and start partnering with them.

And then we'll use these words to smear, slur any expression that we find not useful.

And that's what they do.

And so,

and the final irony, Jack, is what is

now you cannot pick up a journal or an online news aggregation or some informational website without hearing somebody with a PhD, MD, very renowned, Harvard, Yale, Princeton.

What are they writing, Jack?

They're saying, oh my God, there were more side effects to the mRNA vaccination than they let on.

Oh, my God.

They were never really bulletproof protections from infection or infectiousness.

They always had a brief shelf life given the nature of coronavirus.

Oh my God, it wasn't ever really proved that masks were worth the time and trouble that we thought it was.

Oh my God.

Why did anybody think that a pangolin created this virus at Wuhan?

And that was all actionable offenses that would get you fired.

And suddenly it's orthodoxy.

And that's what's so scary about it it's just like

just like

winston in 1984 you know all of a sudden the the the narrative changes in reality or trotsky is in every newspaper in the soviet union and then a whole legion of people are racing his picture in every magazine or using scissors and cut and paste and that's what the these people on the left do all the time on the orthodoxy of the views victor and it's transaction it's really scary it's really scary It's like, yeah.

But it's good to see some play.

I saw, did you see this video, David Spade and Dana Carvey, this back and forth now making fun of Fauci and COVID and making fun of all the absolutes from early on?

And ends up.

That was my only.

I mean, I had some criticism of Trump, but that was my major Trump.

I understood why he didn't fire him because of the, he was, you know, being impeached and he had enough troubles.

But when that guy looked American in the eye and said, there's no evidence that masks work, and maybe it'll make you feel good.

But other than that,

and then when he flipped, he never found any new evidence

that they worked.

But the European, the UN, the consensus was he had to do something because they had no idea what else to do.

So something was better than nothing.

And then suddenly it was.

You have to wear a mask and you've got to wear two masks if you can.

That's even better.

And then he started making fun of people who didn't wear a mask.

Of course, he didn't wear one in a baseball game.

But the point I'm making is

he didn't know it.

He was a supposedly

pundit grandee.

He was the expert on public health policy, and he was just all over the map.

Mask good, not bad.

Vaccinations, ironclad, boosters better, not so, not necessarily true.

And then when he was caught,

he went to the platonic noble lie.

I had to lie because because if I had said masks were valuable, then everybody would have gone out and bought them.

And there wouldn't have been enough for people like me, healthcare providers.

So

guy should have been fired at day two.

And then when he started going on all the left-wing talk shows, and he was,

he did a lot of damage.

He really did.

He really did.

And we're going to pay for that for a long time.

And I don't mean just missed doctor's appointments, cancers that went under detected,

suicide, spousal abuse, alcoholism, drug use, wrecked economic agendas, wrecked businesses, children that will never be the same because they lost two years of schooling.

None of that.

I'm not talking about that.

And higher numbers, like Sweden shows us,

of deaths

in countries that had complete lockdowns and countries that not.

Besides all that stuff,

he really discredited

the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the CDC, the NIH, all of that.

I had real great confidence in all of that.

And now

you're going to turn them into political organizations.

I know it.

You know what?

To show you how brainwashed I was, I got the two mRNA vaccinations, and I've had COVID now three times.

Three times.

I had the Delta and got over it, and then I had the Omicron that gave me long COVID.

And then

in January, I had COVID again.

But my point is this, is that I bought into that.

I thought, wow, I'll get the mRNA, Anthony Fauci, all these.

And there were people who I really respected that said, I wouldn't get that.

They don't have enough tests.

It has side effects.

And I thought, oh, they're kind of paranoid.

But everything they said was accurate.

And now we know that the number of side effects was much greater than was disclosed.

I'm not saying

they didn't have efficacy and they didn't save lives.

They may well have done that, but they didn't tell us the true story.

There was an article just the other day.

I'm on a long COVID information list about, this was an, I think it was an Ivy League researcher who said that there is some suspicion.

They've always told us if you had long COVID, It's because you didn't get the vaccination.

And people who were not vaccinated had a higher propensity to get long COVID.

Maybe, maybe not.

But they don't really tell you whether natural immunity would have done or not done the same thing.

But that's what they say.

And then, you know, if you get a booster, it may make you feel-I don't, I think that's crazy to flood your system with spiked proteins.

But I'm not an expert.

My point is this: now, Jack, there are people writing in the mainstream medical community that maybe sort of kind of possibly

for some immune-susceptible people, the vaccination may have led to a hyperimmune response and long COVID.

Right.

So if you had...

You see these stories about pregnancy deformities, and you're like, what the hell?

You would be fired if you'd said that under although.

And now all of a sudden we're supposed to think, wow, you ruined a lot of people's lives professionally, their character.

What they did to Scott Atlas is a crime.

It really is.

And what they did to other, Martin Kullendorf and other people, Stephen Quay,

Peter Curry, all of them, they just demonized and demonized.

And then all of a sudden, they showed, well, that was then.

This is now.

Yeah.

Move on.

Move on.

Well, Victor, we've come.

We have to move on.

And

yeah, I know.

Well, you'll take a nap after.

Well-deserved nap.

But I do want to thank our listeners who have, particularly, those who have

go to either iTunes or Apple to rate the podcast.

And

the vast majority of people give it five.

You can do zero to five stars, and most people give it five.

And it's over 4.9%.

Thank you

for that, for

honoring Victor's wisdom that he shares four times a week, twice with me, twice with the great Sammy Wink.

Some people leave comments.

I'm going to read two comments.

that were left on Apple.

One is from Curious About Motives, and he writes, Victor's Tales of His Life.

That's the title.

And he writes,

Whether about farming or early life, your personal stories are so great.

Reminds me of another era when we didn't have much, but we're content.

I appreciate that you are such a down-to-earth person.

Oh, could be that conservatives have a brighter outlook in life, on life in general.

That used to be the norm.

I listened to all your podcasts with great interest.

Keep it up, Curious About Motives.

And one final short one that's just titled My Secret Life with VDH.

I realized I was quoting Victor a little too much, too often, when a woman in my neighborhood.

Hey, wait a minute.

I think Sammy quoted that the other day.

Oh, she did?

Oh, yes.

That's scary.

I can't, I can't, you know what I mean?

It's like.

Oh, that's all right.

I didn't catch it.

I may be mistaken, but I think she did.

Well, that's Sammy never, Sammy never quotes letters like, and but she did that one.

Well, this is funny.

So, okay, well, I'll leave it to, I'll leave it to people to listen to Sammy to do that.

But Victor, yeah, you have

you have your groupies, a lot of them.

And they, for our, far, behind my son that actually

I have my hate groupies, too.

Well, well, that's, you know, they, they'll, they'll.

I encounter them once in a while.

In airports, right?

I know.

Hopefully not on.

In airports and other places.

I gave a talk the other other day for a candidate not too long ago, and there was a guy in the room that just would not stop.

A personal ad home.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh.

Well,

we'll talk about that offline.

I'm curious about that.

Hey, Victor, we've got to wrap it up.

You've got to sleep.

Mrs.

Fowler needs something.

Oh, I need to say civilthoughts.com.

Folks, check it out.

Go there, sign up for my free weekly email newsletter, Civil Thoughts.

Thanks very much.

Victor, thank you for all the wisdom you shared today.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you again.