Biden's Record and Republican Campaigns

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor Davis-Hanson, VDH, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaking of Hillsdale, Victor's just back from Hillsdale Cruise.

I haven't talked to my good friend in a couple of weeks, and we're going to get some fresh back in the USA perspectives from Victor on a couple of topics, including the Biden lunacy, Bidenomics, and affirmative action cases and other things.

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Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host or second banana.

I think I forgot to mention Victor.

It's been so long since I've recorded.

I don't know what I'm doing.

I was up for 25 hours trying to get back.

Oh, okay.

Well, you don't know.

I don't know.

Two wrongs will make it right.

I know.

I'm going to be 70 years old and jet lag is all of a sudden jet lag.

Before it was no problem email.

You're not 70, Victor.

I'm going to be 70 on September 5th.

All right.

You should have given the date out because people are going to drive by your house.

And somebody came by yesterday.

Someone drove by.

Yeah, I came in.

I mean,

well, I have a story about that at the end of the podcast.

I'll tell you about it.

Somebody wrote a message.

But just let me mention two things quickly before we get into bodynomics.

One is that Victor's website, official website, is theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

And we're going to talk about that a little later.

You should be subscribing.

So, Victor, I know you and Sammy have recorded some podcasts

in your 25 Hours of Waking.

And I know you covered some Joe Biden stuff.

But one of the things I'd be interested in your take on

is

Bidenomics.

Now, I know you were maybe we can preface this by getting

a quick description of what you did overseas.

I think people might be curious about that.

But you were oblivious to the news, and I'm sure you heard that Joe Biden was going to be running on Bidenomics.

He's proud of it uh yet we have uh manufacturing reports uh industry you know manufacturing sector reports are in and everything's down everything's a disaster and this guy's running on his proud economic record and we also victor have

aside from bidding on economics we have biden foreign policy which you may also want to comment on janet yelson It's over in China, bowing more than one.

You know, those little funny devices that keep bowing like they're trying trying to get water out of a glass?

And she bowed so many times to these

to these commies.

So, Victor, we have binomics, Biden foreign policy, and you can fill us in a little about your grant trip.

Well, I don't understand this Bidenomics.

He's bragging on it.

My colleague at Hoover, Michael Boskin, wrote a very astute, incisive takedown of the whole Biden economic record.

But I mean, since he took office, Jack, food prices in aggregate are 35%

higher and gasoline is $2 a gallon higher.

That's after he substantially reduced the strategic petroleum reserve and never really replaced it.

And

we're now starting to see that job growth is, despite all this inflationary pressures, is starting to slow and GDP is starting to slow.

So what I'm getting at is that we have to put it in perspective.

He printed $4 trillion

in two and a half years, $4 trillion.

And he poured it in at a time

when there was renewed demand as people came out of COVID and there were supply chains and he created a rampant inflation.

That in turn

forced the Federal Reserve that had been so promiscuous in printing money anyway.

Before this,

they had to raise interest rates.

And I don't know, they haven't been able to stop the inflation.

It's still,

he keeps saying, I don't understand it.

He keeps saying, I reduced inflation this month.

I came down.

That's like a guy who drinks six martinis every night and then he brags, you know, I have two less tonight than I did last night.

Right.

So, I mean,

Bidenomics would be an object of shame, of reproach, of disparagement.

But he keeps bragging on it.

And I don't get it.

And then I read these crazy Washington Post, New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and these people just inadvertently, offhandedly, nonchalantly, they say, well, we know Biden,

despite

criticism of his age or his cognitive lapses, he has an enviable record.

No, he doesn't.

People can't afford to take a mortgage out at 7%.

The inflation rate is not just 5%.

fossilized percent, it's aggregate.

It's on top of what the price was last month, the two months before, a year before, two years before.

So it's a disaster.

$10,000 a household.

Yeah.

And the standard of living is crashing.

And so I don't get it.

Why he would, but I do get it in the sense if you were Joe Biden's handlers, you say, you get in a room and you say, hey,

let's do the foreign policy.

And they'll say, yeah,

but we had the skedaddle and the 50 million billion in arms stuff we left behind in Afghanistan.

That was a disaster.

Well,

maybe

Russia?

Well,

we don't know what's going to happen in Russia.

All we know is we've given a million artillery shells and we've depleted our javelin stocks and we're not reproducing them.

And that's kind of characteristic of our administration that we print money or we give away stuff and then we don't replace it.

Well, how about the Middle East?

Well, Robert Malley, our Iranian delegate that kept trying to resurrect this disastrous Iran deal,

he's been put on leave, Joe.

He's violated confidentiality.

He's let people look at classified documents.

He's alienated Israel.

And our policy toward Israel has given light between America and Israel, and the Palestinians have jumped upon it.

And so the Middle East

is a mess.

And Abraham, the Abrams.

Abraham Accord is inert.

Okay, okay.

Well, how about China?

Well, you know, China sent a balloon across.

We didn't do anything.

They embarrassed Jake Sullivan.

Remember in Blinken in March when we came into office in Anchorage?

And then, you know, they kind of lied about the COVID.

We're trying to help them a little bit and didn't really press them.

We swallowed the pangolin lie, tried to help them out.

But they did send 4 million people here.

After they knew it was infectious and you couldn't get out of COVID unless you were coming to America or Europe.

Okay, well, then we don't do the foreign policy stuff.

We have the border.

No, we don't have the border.

We have 7 million illegal entries.

We have Mexico telling people what to do inside the United States.

Well, we have the crime issue.

No, we don't, Joe.

Crime is exploding.

So,

my point, Jack, is maybe they think the economy is not as bad as the crime problem, the foreign policy disaster, the border.

I don't know.

But I wouldn't say, I wouldn't brag on binomics.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I do indeed.

By the way, I think I called

Janet Yellen Janet Yeltsin.

So that wasn't a Freudian slip, but.

Oh, you're getting into the Russian collusion, Hope.

Maybe I am.

Anything more about, you know, she's she

traveled to China just on the heels of Blinken traveling to China.

By the way, I saw some, a clip of New King, which was on Maria Barnaromo's show on Fox Business.

And I didn't know this, but Blinken prior to this administration

was receiving a million-dollar a year salary, I guess, through one of these Biden centers at

the money came from China.

Absolutely.

That was what funded it.

That was what funded it.

And Blinken had no idea.

He had no idea.

He never knew there was a classified vice presidential or senatorial paper illegally stocked anywhere near that.

He didn't know.

Just like he had no idea.

He has no memory that he called

the former director, interim director of the CIA, Mr.

Morrell, and he said to him, can you round up 50 intelligence, quote unquote, authorities to lie for me and say that this authentic

laptop in the hands of the FBI that hasn't been able to suggest it was Russian disinformation is exactly hint, hint, hint, hint, Russian disinformation.

So I don't know who's more problematic, him or Jake Sullivan.

Jake Sullivan was involved in the Russian collusion mess.

So

it's not very, it's not, it's not a good story.

The idea that these people could be returned to power for another four years is even scarier.

So

well, Victor,

I don't know if you discussed this with Sammy again.

I haven't listened, been able to listen yet to what you discussed with her on some of the podcasts you've recorded this weekend.

But if you haven't talked about your trip, do you mind giving us a little glimpse of

where you went

with Hillsdale and who else was there?

There was about almost 600 Hillsdale people.

A lot of them were new.

So it was, I think it was the largest Hillsdale, I don't want to speak because I'm not an authority on it, but I think it was the largest group of Hillsdale travelers they've had, and they had hundreds of people waiting in the waiting list.

And it's reflective of this reality, Jack, that people have lost confidence in higher education, both left and right.

They know that their children, if they go there, they'll be indoctrinated rather than educated.

If somebody accuses them of a crime, they won't have Bill of Rights protection.

They will have segregated dorms by race.

They'll have segregated safe spaces.

They'll have segregated graduations.

The curriculum has to be watered down when you get rid of the SAT score.

So Hillsdale is an atoll.

It's a beacon.

It's a voice in the wilderness.

And people are applying like crazy and they're getting support.

And that was reflected in the group there.

They're very, very intelligent people that came.

I mean,

the questions, when I would walk around the ship or on land, the question wasn't,

who's going to win the election?

It was, would you comment on the

1956 Suez crisis?

And then that kind of question, non-stop.

So the people were very, very learned.

Hillsdale is very, very successful.

The president, Larry Arne, is in top shape.

He was giving a lot of lectures.

I don't know how he did it.

He gave seven or eight lectures.

Very good.

We went to Turkey.

I have mixed.

I first went to Turkey 50 years ago when I was 19, 20.

And

it's very disappointing, Jack, because it's no longer Ataturks Turkey.

The Ottoman legacy is paramount.

And I like Turkish people.

So when you go there and you see them, they're very friendly.

But

the idea that Santa Sofia, Hagia Sophia, the largest church in Christendom for...

you know, a thousand years,

is now a mosque in violation of UN

directives.

Not that I support the UN all that much, but it was a historical UN site and now it's a mosque.

And Autaturk had made it a national,

an international monument.

And that was very depressing.

The city is huge.

It's the largest city in Europe.

It's vibrant.

There's Turkey and then there's Istanbul.

There's, you know, it's a different country than Turkey.

Turkey is poor.

It's going through a lot of crises, but Istanbul is

a Europeanized city.

It's historically the, you know, it's the valve on the Black Sea, and it takes on enormous importance right now during the Ukraine war.

The Russian fleet has to go back out through this narrow Bosphorus and out the Dardanelles, and

Istanbul and Erdogan control it.

He's trying to back away a little bit from Russia.

because he has no particular principles in this war.

He just wants to be on the side of the winner and he doesn't know who's going to win.

So he's giving arms and support to both sides.

We went to Pat Moss, St.

John the Divine, where he purportedly wrote Revelations.

It's a beautiful little island.

I've been there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a very, I think, I think National Review under your auspices has gone there.

And

we went down the Dodecanese islands.

I get kind of sad there.

We stop outside of Izmir

and

got very very sad to see ancient Smyrna,

site of the 1921 collapse of the Great Idea, the Megala idea, the idea that Greece would reform the Byzantine Empire and the wreckage of World War I.

They were kind of sold out by

Lloyd George and the British, and their supplies were cut off.

But that's near here and near there.

But when you're out there on the ocean, you look at Smyrna and you think of the city was burned down and 30 or 40,000 Greeks were butchered.

So the history is everywhere.

It permeates that.

Rhodes is a beautiful place.

It's a tourist.

It's very popular.

We were there on a Saturday.

It was just jammed.

I mean, you could hardly walk.

But tourism is by far the greatest earner of foreign exchange for Greece.

Been very successful.

The Greeks.

They're kind of in a renaissance.

I know they're broke and the German bankers supposedly have them over a barrel, but you wouldn't know it being in the country.

And by that, I mean the roads, the infrastructure, the tourism.

it's all professional.

When I first went there in 1973, if you went to a hotel, you had a Turkish toilet, it was not that great.

It's not like it's comparable to California now.

And we

also went to Santa Rini.

I mentioned that to Sammy, kind of a big mistake

because of the tourism there in the summer.

It's my rule was always never go to Santa Rini after June 15th or before October 1st.

Cypress.

I'm going to start

Cyprus is, we went to Paphos and Cyprus and went to the gorge.

That was nice.

Again, there's a sense of melancholy when you go to Cyprus.

In 1974, I had gone to Falmagusta just for three days, I think, on Cypriot Air from Athens.

I mean, I was a student, I was 20.

Beautiful city, site of the great siege, Marc Antonio, Ragadino.

It was stuffed with straw when the Ottomans took the city in 1571,

right before the Battle of Lepanto, tragedy.

And the Turks owned the northern part.

And of course, the Greeks were left with the less prosperous.

And 50 years later, it's booming.

In the north, not so much.

Went to Israel.

Israel was on the eve, and you could feel it.

We talked about that with Sammy a little bit, of the Jenin

incursion.

And by the way, we were watching,

I watched all of the BBC coverage, Jack.

It was just incredible.

I mean, they had Bennett, the former prime minister, resparing with his BBC hosts.

I've never seen it so blatantly anti-Israeli.

It was almost a caricature.

It's basically.

A bunch of people, terrorists, had planned terrorism in

Jenin,

and they were killing Jews, maybe almost 50 this year.

And the fact that they finally had enough of it and retaliated, and there were some killed that were 17 years old, they classified as children,

children.

And

she said, the host said that,

well, the UN says they're children, and what do you do?

Is that your policy to kill children?

I get good credit, the former prime minister, who said, what would you do if a 17-year-old put a gun and tried to shoot your family?

She kind of shut up at that.

But

when you go there, the idea that it's going to be

Palestine to the sea one day is just ludicrous.

And as I said before,

I don't understand Israel.

It's booming.

It's the anti-Western paradigm.

And I mean that as a compliment.

Infertility.

declining population, pessimism,

municipal, urban blight.

That's the West now, uncontrolled immigration.

You go to Israel and, you know, London

should go over there from San Francisco, the mayor of San Francisco.

She should take every mayor and go over there and just say to the Israelis, can we follow you around for about a day and just watch what you do and take pictures of what you do?

Because we want to emulate it, because there are no homeless people here.

There's no excretement.

There's no smash and grab.

There's no carjacking.

And yet it's a much more densely populated country than is the United States.

And it's quite diverse.

You'll see Jewish people from Ethiopia.

You'll see them from the Middle East.

When you see an Israeli, you don't know what color they are by their appearance.

They can be blonde.

They can be blue-eyed.

They can be black.

You name it.

And there's over.

Yep.

And there's over

20% are Arab.

And for all of the hatred of Israel, they don't seem to want to.

And not all of them were there when this ui state was created so there's a hundred thousand that come in every day and if it

if the palestinian radicals are so convinced that israel is a satanic force and don't go in there every day but they do

and it's uh it's a juggernaut and it's a successful country and my only fear is that every time

a left-wing administration comes in and they try to distance the United States from Israel, the Palestinians jump in that abyss and they take advantage of that, or the Iranians do.

And so that's very worrisome, especially there's a kind of a relationship they had with Putin, vis-a-vis Syria.

Putin basically is a triangulator.

So in his way of thinking, some of the pressure he has on his allies in Syria and Iran are vis-a-vis Israel that I can let Israel do certain things because we control the airspace, the Russian Air Force does.

And they had protocols.

And now with the Ukraine war, it's very touchy, both for us and for Israel.

Then we went to Crete, and

Heraklion is the ugliest city in Crete.

I mean, it's not Haggios, Nikolaos or Hanya, but it's much different than I was there 50 years.

I've been there 10 or 15 times, and each time

it's becoming

a more touristy, but also a more functional city.

So

it was nice.

Kanosos,

I didn't go out to Konosos.

I've been there enough times, but

I walked around the city a lot.

And then

we went to Athens and there was a post-trip.

I gave a lecture.

We went up to Mycenae and outside of Noplion and then, of course, around Athens.

And as I said,

German freeways, Swiss board tunnels, airport.

I know that Athens is 4 million and Greater London is 8 million, but if you want to go in and out of the Athens airport vis-a-vis Heathrow, I would prefer Athens any day.

Heathrow is a mess.

As far as security, it's dysfunctional.

So

the only thing I noticed, as I said, that by the time we got up in the morning and got home.

to the farm it was about 25 hours and if you don't sleep at all it's very hard to sleep yeah what a whole damn It's been three and a half days, so I feel like I'm still failing.

Well, the old thing about you need a vacation after a vacation may be applicable here.

But it was, I, you know, it was another Hillsdale success.

I, I, uh, you know, they have, they're increasing.

They're in a very strange situation, Jack.

Higher education is in crisis.

All the students have an aggregate $2 trillion in federal.

loans that they're not really servicing.

30% are not servicing those loans.

Right.

The demographic is down.

Fewer people are going to college.

A lot of people are questioning the value vis-a-vis the cost of a bachelor's degree.

And here's Hillsdale.

It's up to 1,600, 1,700 students projected to go to $2,000 billion endowment, billion-dollar investments in new infrastructure, waiting list.

Their biggest problem, as I see it, is they're going to have,

they have a regional, they have, because they're a Midwestern, they have a regional flavor of working-class kids that are very, very bright.

And they're going to be overwhelmed, you know what I mean?

With people who did not get into Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford.

Oh, and also, Victor, maybe people who just don't even want to apply to Stanford.

Yeah, and I don't know if they want to go to Hillsdale.

I think they can manage it, but I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't know how to manage it because they're going to get, I think they're at that point now, seven, eight, 9,000 applicants.

Right.

And they all want to go there because of the quality of the education.

You go to the bookstore at Hillsdale, you don't see the word studies.

There's no Dash studies.

There's no leisure studies.

There's no ethnic studies, Black Studies, Women's Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, none of that.

And when you look at the books that are ordered in the curriculum,

if it's English, you know, it's five plays of Shakespeare, it's a play of Ben Johnson, or it's novels of Dickens, or if he says modern literature, it's Hemingway, Steinbeck,

Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe.

It's just different.

I mean, it's what it should be.

And that is going to be an increasingly,

that's an enticement for parents, regardless of their ideology.

It's kind of, I think they're kind of in the situation that a Texas or Florida is, you know, vis-a-vis

out in in-state migration.

So Florida is worried, Texas worried that they've been so successful that people from California will go there to, screw you know and screw it up, just like they screw everything up.

It hasn't been my experience when I go there and when I talk to people leaving from here, they seem to be the most conservative.

But I think Hillsdale

is dealing with that challenge that a lot of the people now who want to go there ideologically may not,

I mean, they may be sick of what their ideology did to them when Boomerang back and bit them.

But that doesn't mean they'll give up that ideology when they go to a conducive, successful place like Hillsdale, if you know what I mean.

Yeah.

So they're going to have to find a mechanism.

I shouldn't say they're going to have to.

They've already, no doubt, found ways to make sure that they're not flooded by left-wing students.

Right.

Well,

it should be an incentive to, as it has been in Florida with DeSantis and the new College of Florida, and we'll talk about DeSantis in a few minutes.

Or, you know, there should be

inspiration.

Hillsdale should be an inspiration to turn around existing institutions or build, as our good friend Dan Mahoney calls them, you know, parallel polises

as the University of Austin.

Yeah, we've talked about that a lot.

And I have no answer to that dilemma.

Whether, you know, I have mixed feelings about it because when I went to Stanford in 1975, it was, I know it was centered left, but it wasn't intolerant.

By that, I mean, I had 12 faculty members in the classics department, and they were all left-wing.

And yet that their left-wing politics never came up once.

And I was the only conservative, I think, maybe another guy that I knew, brilliant guy named Lawrence Woodlock, absolutely brilliant conservative.

But it never came up.

And they were completely fair and disinterested.

And there was just rigorous standards.

So, my point of mentioning that, Jack, is do we just say that

this generation now owns Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford because they're there, physically occupying it.

The alumni don't own it.

The Board of Trustees doesn't own it.

The people who fund it and make it possible don't own it.

We just write it off because a bunch of spoiled brat kids that are privileged have decided they want to play Jacobin for four years, and the faculty is in la-la land and they're tenured.

And we just say, well, you know what?

They're hopeless.

They're all left-wing.

We're just going to make another start from scratch.

I think we should do both.

I think we should fund his,

give as much money as we can to Hillsdale.

Make sure that we, University of

Austin, things like that.

All of them, we should.

Rollins, I mean, what's, you know, the new one in Savannah.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think it is Rollins.

Yeah.

Jordan Peterson is involved with it.

Yeah.

Stephen Blackwood, really good guy who's doing it.

But my point is, we should do both.

So we should say, in my case, where I work, I should say, you know,

Stanford's not yours.

It's not yours.

I work there too.

I went to, I'm an alumnus too.

My mom went there too.

My aunt went there too.

My cousins went there too.

My nephew went there too.

So who says that you get to be the representative of just because you're shouting down a federal judge at the law school, all of a sudden Stanford belongs to you?

Or you write some lunatic ad hominem op-ed in the Stanford Daily?

Or, you know, you have an ignition scandal, or your

Elizabeth Holmes and you, or Stanford Dropout, or your Sam Bankman Freed's parents, they don't own Stanford.

So that's my attitude.

There's a lot of people that are really nice, great, brilliant people that are alumni of Stanford, and they're very upset about it.

Well, Victor,

obviously, you know a lot more about this and have thought more about this than I have, but to me, the

lowest hanging fruit and I think it's pretty high up for low hanging would be public universities where you have

states with a Republican governor and Republican-controlled legislatures.

And if they're going to reign and still let their boards of regents, et cetera,

turn out or create or tolerate

left-wing public universities, then

that's criminal to me.

But that's where...

But there's more control.

You're right about that because they come from the direct taxpayer's pocket.

And they should be the first line of defense against wokeism.

I will say this.

I think I've mentioned it to you, Jack, that

I probably have spoken, oh, I don't know, 20 times a year

at universities until recently, at least, maybe for 30 years.

It started in 1989 or 88, 84, actually.

And I would tell you that that the worst receptions I have had have been at conservative universities.

University of Tennessee, I got booed.

University of in Texas, I know that's a liberal university, I got a lot of hostility.

Washington and Lee, I had a bad time.

University of Southern Alabama and Mobile, I had a bad time.

Berkeley, not at all.

I went out to Cornell recently with Barry Strauss to ask me, not at all, no problem at all.

So it's hard to predict.

I i think what happens with conservative universities

uh

they the faculty gets into a garrison mode and they they overcompensate or they're more radical because they feel that they're wounded fawns in a sea of conservative darkness i don't know what it is but yeah

there's no guarantee what i'm trying to say that if you go to a conservative state you're going to be in a conservative university.

It just doesn't happen.

I went to the University of Memphis once, and believe me, I was surprised how left-wing the questions were of the faculty that invited me.

And so I was never invited back.

In all those places, I was never invited back.

But the point is, I've had some hostile, hostile receptions, and I'd say 70% of them have been in red states.

Well, Victor, I mentioned Ron DeSantis a few minutes ago, and we have to.

We don't have to, but we will get your thoughts about his current political standing.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.com and use code audio for 20% off your first purchase.

That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com and use code Audio at checkout.

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

I'd like to recommend,

in fact, I'd like to urge our listeners to visit the Blade of Perseus.

You'll find the web address is victorhanson.com.

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So Victor, let me give some current polling polling numbers off of Real Clear politics.

I'm going to read a little passage from a Wall Street Journal article.

And this is all about

the current state of

2024 elections and Ron

DeSantis'

current political situation.

So, from Real Clear, I'm looking at it right now.

The national polling average, these are all averages.

On the GOP side, you have Trump at 53%, DeSantis at 21%, Pence at 6%,

Nikki Haley at 3.

And even to pick a state, Iowa, excuse me, New Hampshire, Trump's at, amongst Republican voters now, Trump's 44%, DeSantis 18,

Chris Christie, nearly 5, Nikki Haley, 4.

Nationally, by the way, the Democrats, Biden is at 64%,

Robert Kennedy is at nearly 15%, and

Williamson is at 6%.

What the hell else is there here, Victor?

General election matchups.

This is interesting.

Trump at 44.1,

Biden at 43.5.

Okay.

And then Biden is actually in this polling data ahead of DeSantis, 43.6 to DeSantis 42.6.

Last thing, presidential job approval

averages.

Approval is 42.6.

Disapprove is 53.5.

So Joe Biden's in a weak place.

Trump's numbers are rising.

DeSantis' numbers are declining.

And here, Victor, is

a section from an article in the Wall Street Journal from this past weekend,

which talks about that DeSantis' campaign has stalled.

And here's what it writes: his support in national polls has stayed flat despite increased travel and advertising and widespread expectations that he would be a formidable challenger to Trump.

Signs also have emerged that he is struggling to gain traction in the

states that will hold the first

nomination balloting.

A recent poll of New Hampshire voters showed DeSantis having lost 10 points since the previous survey in March, while twice indicted Trump.

gained five points.

While DeSantis clearly sits in second place and many Republican voters say they like him, an expansive field field of candidates makes it harder for him to consolidate support.

Among those looking to move past the former president, he is trying to sell himself to

Republican Trump foes, many of whom are moderate.

At the same time, he's appealing to Trump's fans by portraying himself as more conservative on key issues.

Victor, I think it's fair to say DeSantis has stalled.

You may have a different opinion.

Has he?

What ramifications?

What sense do you make of this?

What thoughts do you have?

Well, I mean, he's not gaining traction and the pundits are going crazy, but you got to remember that I don't think the, is that the South Carolina primary is now one of the first at February 24th?

And I think the Iowa caucuses are not until January 16th.

So we've got, come on, we've got.

half of July, August, September, October, November, December.

We've got a debate coming in maybe August and September.

So there's plenty of time.

And

it's kind of a punditry thing to go back and look at prior

primary races and see who was ahead at which particular point.

And none of them really did well.

But all that said,

I think DeSantis thought that he had to prove

because he was the object of a lot of rhino interest as a non-Trump that he was conservative in the sense of socially conservative.

And then Trump gave him an opening on that by attacking him on issues like spending, Disney, abortion,

maybe even transgender from the left.

And so that,

so now

he

is seen to the right of Trump.

Okay.

Maybe not by Trump supporters, but, and the media is really going after him because the media is,

you know, they don't, they hate Trump's guts.

They just cannot stand him.

And they're afraid that the very fact that he would be the nominee is so chilling a thought that there would be any chance that he could, that they will try to destroy him.

And so what I'm getting at, Jack, is there's a lot of known unknowns.

We know

we know what's coming up, but we don't know what's going to transpire.

We don't know what Jack Smith's going to do.

He's going to leak.

He's going to smear.

We know the script from the Robert Meal investigation.

Then we've got this nut

Alvin Bragg.

And then we've got Letita James.

And we've got Fannie Willis.

So we've got four people whose mission, they get up in the morning thinking, how can I destroy Donald Trump by warping the law?

And they go to bed every night saying, I didn't do enough.

And so that's one thing.

The second thing is,

I don't know when DeSantis plans to pivot, but he's going to have to pivot.

By that I mean

rather than getting in, he's proved that he's the non-woke candidate.

He's proved that with what he's done with New College.

He's proved that with the Disney Wars.

He's proved that with the transgendered stuff.

Okay.

And he's earned the ire.

So nobody can make

a argument that he's a rhino.

You can make that argument about Christie, Haley, the others, but not him.

That's been established.

And that was not established in the mind of voters.

Okay, but it hasn't helped him yet.

But what he has to do is he has to take a deep breath and say, why did I win by over a million votes?

Why did Cuban Americans who vote overwhelmingly, voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, for example, or against me four years ago, why did they vote for me now?

And the answer is clear, that he had a paradigm of fiscal responsibility, economic liberalism, less government.

He didn't raise taxes.

He balanced budgets, and he was confident.

And he won by a huge margin.

So those are the two things that he can say.

And what I mean is he needs to take his Florida paradigm now and forget about whether he's the anti-woke

candidate or whether you know he's going to do to left-wing corporations like Target, like he did to Disney.

Just put that on hold.

He's established that.

What he needs to do now is have a contract with America and say, Look, this is what we're going to do.

We're not going to borrow money.

We're not going to, we're going to get maybe it's a Simpson-Bowles paradigm that can be re-updated or something like that.

But he said, this is a pathway to a balanced budget.

I can do it.

And then he's going to have to say,

We're not going to use credit cards in the broadest sense of the word.

If we take one drop out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, we're going to put two back in.

If

we have a budget, we're not going to borrow.

If we send a million shells to Ukraine, you better believe we're going to make two million.

And we're not going to be dependent on masks and protective equipment and anything from China the next time because they will do it again.

We will have another virus.

So if he talks like that and conveys that sense of being in control, and I'm going to do to the United States what I did for Florida, I think he will rebound.

And the second thing is

he's got to emphasize that he wins, and he does.

So he was elected to Congress.

He's won twice to governor and he's saying, you know what?

I know that

people like Donald Trump.

I know it, but I win and I get even.

I don't get mad.

I get even.

And so if he can nationalize the campaign, and emphasize the economic,

I guess you would call it blueprint for America, contract with America.

He's got to be kind of specific.

People don't want to do that because they feel they're tied down, but he has to have a plan to get to a balanced budget, a simplified tax code, economic growth.

This is what I'm going to do.

He's done a lot of this,

but the press goes after him on these social issues.

the transgendered issue, the gay issue, the Disney issue.

And he's good on that, but that's not what he's best at.

You see what I mean?

He's best at, I'm going to control the border.

I'm going, Mexican president Mr.

Obador hates my guts.

He's interfering and telling you to vote against me.

There's a reason why he's doing that because he wants an open border because it's in his interest, not ours.

And

he, when he talks about Ukraine, he's got to say,

Mr.

Zelensky, and we all want him to defend Ukraine.

That was a terrible thing to invade, but

we cannot sign on for an offensive, preemptive attack using F-16s or Abrams.

Every time Joe Biden gives a lecture that he will not give an Abrams tank to Ukraine because it would be too provocative and it might be used for offensive counter offensive purposes, or he won't give an F-16 or he won't give cluster bombs, he does it.

And so we're going into a insidious escalation with a nuclear power that sits atop 6,500 nuclear weapons.

If he does that, I think he'll be okay.

In the case of Donald Trump,

I think Trump has got his magic 40 to 45%

of the national electorate.

But the question is, can he convince people that I like and I know I work with a lot of them?

They're really good conservative Republicans.

And they'll come up to me and say, hey.

If Trump gets the nomination, I'm not voting for him.

And I'll say, I'm just dumbfounded, jack i said you mean

you have no appreciation of what the 2016 election did

i'll i'll i'll say

do you think we would have got kavanaugh or gorsuch

uh do you think that comby barrett you think we would have had the affirmative action vote or religious freedom votes or any of this stuff they don't care it's just trump They're completely deranged on that topic.

And I don't see how he gets to 51%.

And that those polls polls are revealing that.

So what Trump has to do is to sit down and say, I need 5% of the voters.

I either have to get them by getting a huge turnout, huge, much bigger than he got a huge one in 2000.

But that's not, they're going to, they're going to make sure that it's a non-election day vote.

That's what the left will do.

They want 70, 80% of people in most states not to show up on election day.

So the authenticity of the mail-in or early ballot is somewhat questionable.

But he needs to get either that out or he's got to

appeal to the independent voter in a way that

Republicans have had a lot of problems.

As I said, I keep saying that,

you know, Jack, they won four out of five elections.

They won with Nixon twice and they won.

With Ronald Reagan twice, and they even won with George H.W.

Bush, and then Caput,

except for George W.

squeaky vote, 50.3% in 2004 over John Kerry.

They lost seven out of the last eight elections in the popular vote, popular vote.

Not since George H.W.

Bush in 1988 have they won 51%.

So something's wrong there.

They can't get that popular vote.

52, like, you know, Reagan, 58%.

That was the 1980.

And then you look at Dick Nixon in 72, greatest landslide in history, 60.1%.

They don't have that ability.

Part of it's not their fault.

They're being outspent because all the money now in the United States, the big money, the hyper money is on the left.

They've had open borders and de facto amnesties and all of that stuff.

The institutions are controlled by the left.

But my point is this,

that Donald Trump has to find a formula.

Not in the primary.

He doesn't care about the primary.

But if he's going to be the nominee, he's got to have a formula that gets that 4% to 5%.

So when he does a tweet with all capital letters and, you know, it's bullshit this and all that, which, you know, people like you and me don't mind, but it turns off a lot of people who are otherwise sick of what Biden's doing.

And that's reflected in this poll.

A Republican candidate should be 20 points ahead of this guy, Biden.

He's a complete failure.

Even the New York Times and the New Yorker and the Washington Post and Google and Facebook and Hollywood and academia, even they should not be able to save this guy.

And yet he's the most corrupt president we've ever had.

He's the most cognitively challenged president.

He's the most unlikable president we've ever had.

And his record is dismal.

And yet he's running neck and neck with Republican putative candidates.

Yeah.

And so that's, I'm trying to,

I wanted a primary.

Everybody said, said, who are you for?

And on this tour,

they were mostly all conservative.

I shouldn't say they were all conservative, 600 on Hillsdale.

So as part of your responsibilities to lecture, you're also to eat dinner on occasions with, oh, I think there were 10 people at the table.

And

the topic came up,

you know, constantly, DeSantis.

And I would always say,

who do you support?

And

I would say, and it was eight to two for Trump.

And this is people who like DeSantis.

And I would then inquire, why

would you want Trump?

And it was all retribution.

He won't bend.

He's going to go after these people, what they've done to the United States.

They see him.

as a way to get back at the Muellers, the Comeys, the Brennans,

the Bidens, the Hunters, all of that mess, the two impeachment.

But Donald Trump's got to understand that it's not about him.

So when he gives a rally and he talks for 30, 40, 50 minutes about all of the sins that the left

has done in vis-a-vis himself,

that's not going to win the 4% to 5%.

So that's where we are.

I'm curious with the Trump, I know this is all anecdotal, but were the

folks you were talking to who were favorable to Donald Trump, was there a noticeable percentage of them who were hostile to DeSantis?

No.

No, not at all.

Not at all.

They would give money to DeSantis.

Not at all.

Their reactions were one of two things.

Why doesn't he just wait four years?

Or is there any way, Victor, he can run as vice president?

That was a rhetorical question.

They know they answer better than I do.

They're both from Florida.

So that would be impossible constitutionally unless somebody changes their residency.

Or they would say things like, I like DeSantis, but we're at a point now where it's going to be whoever the Republican is, it's going to be open warfare.

They're going to try to compete.

They'll try to destroy him.

The media will go nuts.

They're already talking about packing the court when they don't get their.

These people are not Democrats.

And if you

and

myself, I like all of the Republican candidates.

I like, except I couldn't, I would have problems voting for Chris Christie.

Yeah.

I really would, just because of his character, of the way that he is,

what's the word, Jack, fluid in his

fluid.

All I can see is him hugging Obama 2012 day before that.

So

I like Nikki Haley.

I like Mike Pence.

I like

all of them, but

I would, I like better Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.

So that's going to be it.

And then the third consideration is

in

2016,

the Republican challengers all had it right.

Rubio had it right, Carly

Fiorina, Cruz, they all had it right.

They just said, if we can unite, we have more.

And they couldn't do it.

They could not do it.

And

part of it was momentum that Donald Trump.

Part of it was he was a master.

Everybody said that he lies.

I don't care what they said about him.

When he got on that debate stage, he crushed people, just the sheer force of his presence.

And so Ron DeSantis' challenge is,

you know, you saw it with Joe Biden.

He would not, after that,

when he went into South Carolina, he was not going to be the nominee.

There was too many candidates.

So he had to consolidate.

And so all of a sudden,

Mirabil Diktu, strange to say, all of a sudden, Pete Buttigig,

not me.

I think I'm going to quit.

Elizabeth Thorne, I think I'm going to quit.

Bernie, I think I'm going to quit.

I guess he promised them.

Basically, he said, I'm non-compost mintes.

I don't know where I am.

I don't know what I'm doing.

just put some strings on my back and you be get the puppeteer and you get to run the country.

But I I have to be the figurehead, the puppet.

Maybe that was it.

So he got rid of the opposition and consolidated Nevada and South Carolina and won, even though people thought that after the first initial primaries, he was the dead duck.

That'll be something to watch: whether DeSantis has the political leverage or wherewithal to unite behind him.

If he can win, if he were to win the Iowa caucus of New Hampshire, South Carolina, then he could combine people.

know, and then, but it's going to be very hard because we keep forgetting that Donald Trump is an incumbent in this, in a way.

He's in a Grover, Cleveland

state where he's missed a term, but it's very hard to on seat.

It would be as if right now

there were, instead of Robert Kennedy running against Biden, there were six or seven different candidates.

And there wasn't Robert Kennedy.

I mean, Robert Kennedy's never held political office, but you had six or seven, you know, Newsome and Gretchen Wilmer, and, you know, I don't know who, maybe one of the

Cuomo,

Andrew Cuomo, whoever, they were all out there.

And

they would all say, we can't have Biden because Biden doesn't know where he is.

But as long as there's a lot of them out there,

it's very hard for any one of them to win.

And I know you're going to say, well, Kennedy's all by himself.

Well, for now he is.

But I,

and he, but he's not,

there are very admirable things about Robert Kennedy Jr., but he's not a politician in the sense of prior experience.

And more importantly, I don't think he's going to be all alone very long.

I would imagine that sometime around August or September, if Joe fails at this geometric rate.

And just the other day,

it was, we're fighting, you know, we're helping the Ukraine fight the Iraq war, Jack.

I didn't know it was Iraq.

And he turns around, he goes in the opposite direction.

He forgets where he is.

He can't follow a teleprinter.

He has that

aggrieved look, like he's angry.

He has those little mini steps, like he uses elbows as if like they're little wings or something.

He's some type of

avian creature.

I don't know what it is, but I would be very surprised if that guy is going to be the nominee.

Yeah.

You know, you remember, and we need to move on and talk about affirmative action cases, Victor.

But,

you know,

Ted Kennedy almost knocked off Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 76 almost knocked off

Joel Ford.

The case, and they were more viable.

incumbents than the current incumbent is.

So why?

It was a different system, though, now.

I mean, it's a little different.

By that, I mean, we've never had a president that is a toe pawn.

So they deem him useful.

As long as the media can put up a patina that he's functional, that's okay with them.

They're not, I mean, we were driving home the other day, my wife and I from the Sierra.

And we were listening to Sunday talk shows.

And you wouldn't believe what these Democratic people say, Jack.

He seems very forceful.

If I was 80, I could just pray that I would be as hail as Joe Biden.

Or what does it matter that he has an occasional lapse given that spectacular legislative record?

I mean, it's just fantasy.

But the point I'm making is

they like him like that because they've never had a left-wing agenda like this.

And if Elizabeth Warren was on TV every day, or Bernie Sanders was on TV every day, or AOC was on TV, they wouldn't have been able to get any of it.

But good old Joe Biden from Scranton got it into the White House.

And for a while, he's been able to promulgate that agenda until people wise up.

You know, I met so many people, Democrats, of course, but Independents and Republicans, they were so frustrating.

They were smart, nice people, and they all voted for Biden.

And why do they do?

Because he's a healer.

I said, no, he's not.

He's an SOB.

He's a mean SOB.

He's a plagiarist.

He's a liar.

His family is a crooked.

Oh, no.

No.

Joe's a moderate Democrat.

He's going to bring the country together.

And

that's what his role was.

That is what his role is.

That's what these think his role will be, to get a hardcore, most radical left-wing agenda since 1933 into law, any way necessary.

And they like him because they can manipulate him.

And he's predictable.

He's predictably not there, is what I'm trying to say.

Oh, he's predictably not there.

And you've got, before we end, we had the latest riff by Kamala Harris on culture.

Did you remember that?

The words, the new latest word salad.

Yeah.

And she said she thinks about culture in the morning.

And then she

that laugh.

That was, that was really creepy, by the way.

It always is creepy.

And she doesn't.

Well, I mean, in the morning comment,

I don't know what she was referring to, but

I kind of thought she was trying to be piggy to use a technical term.

I had a professor.

I won't, I got to be careful because he may still be around, but he was a classics professor.

And

he was, he reminded me of Kamala Harris.

If I would go, we would have during the semester, if you took a course, each person had to come in and he would evaluate your textual criticism.

I don't want to get too specific, the nature of the course, but it was very philological.

And he would say this.

Now, Mr.

Hansen, getting back to the referent, which is very important for the class, which is essential to your

evolution as a classicist, which brings back the nature of the course.

And the nature of the course is integral to what we're talking about today.

And it will be very important in your future, which brings back the necessity of our meeting today.

That's what he would say.

And it was pure Camilla Harris.

Pure Camilla Harris.

That's what

he would take an hour to tell you nothing.

And

I walk out of there and someone would say, well, how'd your

your session go with Professor so-and-so?

And I said, I don't know.

I have no idea what he said.

Yeah.

She is a verbal kaleidoscope.

That's all I can.

I have no idea what she's saying.

She has no idea.

All she knows is this.

Even though she's in her, what, 50s, she knows that when she was 30

and hale and sexier, that she could blink her eyes, say nothing, but articulate it pretty well.

She doesn't stutter.

She has that kind of therapeutic approach and delivery.

And culture is a very important thing, it's who we are at the moment.

The moment is now, it's something I think about every morning.

That, and that worked.

I guess it seduced Willie Brown, it got her a lot of things.

But at some point, you reached your level of incompetence, and she reached it.

She has winners for the U.S.

Senate, and ever since then, it's she's a

woman of

we'll ruminate another time more deeply about

Kamala's morning glow.

And

we've got to get to the bottom of that someday.

Hey, Victor, we're going to take a little break and come back and get your final thoughts for the day on some of the recent Supreme Court cases.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

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

Victor, I'm going to hold off on one case and put that on the next podcast we record.

And that case

will,

well, it's not a victory.

It's related to academic freedom.

It was actually a lower court case, federal case, which where

I'll call it our side took a punch in the eye.

But as the Supreme Court term ended, there were a number of

important decisions, obviously, and big victories.

And one of those was the affirmative action cases related to

college admissions, a case related to Harvard and University of North Carolina.

Justice Roberts wrote the

ruling that

threw out the use of race as

an acceptable grounds for consideration.

Clarence Thomas wrote a very significant,

not dissent, concurring opinion.

And

gosh, now I can't remember her name.

I should have had her in front of me.

Very.

Well,

the three, the

Kagan, Kajanji Brown.

Brown, yeah, yeah, Brant wrote the

Brown wrote the leading dissent opinion that was kind of mocked significantly on the right.

But anyway,

you may want to talk about any of these things,

the text of the rulings themselves, but your thoughts about the general outcome, Victor.

Well,

it's

affirmative action is dead.

There were so many things wrong with it that it was sort of a corpse that they finally buried.

But it's been,

I don't mean that it was inert.

It did a lot of damage.

it will do it if it would ever be resurrected but i mean as an idea it was so full

of inconsistencies paradoxes hypocrisies you can't really say that in the united states that because six generations ago there was slavery

and that maybe, maybe not one of your ancestors six generations ago was a slave, and maybe one of your ancestors was a slave owner and a part of very, you know, we're talking about 400,000 slave owners in 1861 in the Confederacy.

But that allows you to,

and then Jim Crow that followed and so-called race, you know, racism today, systemic, that allows you to be racist.

And that's what affirmative action was, because

if you go to a black theme house and you say, you know what, this is a black theme house and I'm a Stanford student and I want to be in it.

No, you cannot do that if there's a safe space at the university of colorado you can't sit there if you want to go to a latino graduation and you're not a latino you're not going to feel welcome and so

that was

that's contrary to the declaration i mean so that wasn't that was ossified it wasn't going to keep working then there was the problem jack that they dealt with who is what in a multiracial society and that who is what was never answered So you get fakers like what?

Elizabeth Warren and her high cheekbones, Harvard's first indigenous professor of law, Ward Churchill,

you know, the long hair and the beads and the whole get up, or all of these people.

Who knows?

Are you a quarter?

Are you eighth?

So inevitably, you were going to have to either get a DNA test or go back to the old Confederacy's antebellum South, maybe 116th roll, one drop.

So that was racist.

That wasn't going to work.

Then you were destroying meritocracy.

So you had, just to take one example, the Titan undersea explorer that blew up probably because of faulty construction.

But

the,

was the name Stockton Rush or something?

The designer, he was quoted post-mortem, kind of sad.

I don't want to, you know.

Non diquare malon de mortuis.

Yeah, never speak ill of the dead.

But my point is, he said,

we don't want a lot of old white guys, right?

We didn't want a lot of old white guys.

Well, you didn't get a lot of old white guys, and the damn thing blew up because he said that we don't want a lot of old white guys from the military and submarines.

It seems to me, if I was a new,

newly formed, undersea, very dangerous type of

operational company, the people that I would want were people from the U.S.

Navy who worked with submarines at great depths.

And I wouldn't care what race they are.

If they were all white, too bad.

They were all black, too bad.

But when you, what I'm getting at, you can see that we're not just joking around anymore.

This isn't not,

we're not 1990s that the English department doesn't have enough of this person, this color, and that color.

We're talking about United Airline pilot training.

We're talking about deep-sea submarining.

We're talking about everything based on race, this obsession, and it's at war with meritocracy.

You throw out the SAT scores at all of these universities that we depend on, not English or classics or history, but I'm talking about what we do in the general cultural framework, but I'm talking about electrical engineering or computer engineering or medicine.

And you start to pick people by the color of their skin and you're back.

to you're regressing.

You're back to Middle East tribalism.

There's a reason why when when you get off the plane in Libya

or Jordan or the West Bank, it's not Amsterdam and it's not race.

It's hiring your first cousin or someone who looks like you are a member of your tribe first

rather than on the qualification.

And

so that was something that made this

obsolete.

And then

affirmative action was creating under wokeism a new chauvinism.

So all of a sudden, people

like Oprah that had become a billionaire appealing in an ecominical fashion to mostly housewives that watched her for 20 years where she didn't really talk about being black, but just talked about issues that were of interest to people of all colors.

Suddenly she was woke and lecturing America on their race.

And there was Barack Obama who...

2004 convention, we're not red, we're not blue state American, we're not black, and everybody was fooled.

And then suddenly he comes out of his mansion, Hawaii, Calorama, Martha's Vineyard, and lectures us how horrible the country is.

He just did that with Tim Scott,

Megan Markle, LeBron James.

It was just surreal what

the evolution of affirmative action into this woke anger.

This, what was her name?

the singer of the national anthem that really changed the lyrics of her day.

Or she's done it before, but it came into the popular culture.

It was just full of hatred.

And so that's a logical evolution

of affirmative action is where we are today.

It really increases racial polarization.

And you can really see it when you could not explain.

You talk to people who support affirmative action and you say to them, okay.

There's 12 different ethnic groups that make more than white people.

Are you trying to tell tell me that 10% of Black people

are better or worse off than the people of East Palestine?

And I'm talking about very successful Black Americans and high incomes.

Are you trying to tell me that Asians that were excluded on immigration or were blown up on railroad

1860s construction site with faulty safety guards or were put in internment camps by the Earl Warren FDR nexus in California?

You're trying to tell me they didn't suffer?

Or when I was growing up, there were zoning laws against Armenians.

They couldn't live there.

Maybe not as severely as the black experience.

But why then are you discriminating against Asians as

your necessary foundation for affirmative action?

And they couldn't answer that.

They could never answer that.

They could never say, well, we have to discriminate against Asians because they're too successful and they're too successful

because

they only put them in camps for a year and a half.

That was why.

Or they're too successful because they're too white.

Well, why would that be?

It's not racial.

So, and why, if you think they're too white, why do they excel?

on SAT scores and GPAs per capita vis-a-vis white people.

They can't answer.

They couldn't answer any of that.

So the court just kind of shrugged and said, this fossil, it's time to get rid of it and we'll be better off.

And people will hate our guts and they'll scream hi-hay

to high heaven.

And then you look at the polls, and even black people are almost split evenly.

Everybody else wants it over with.

And five years,

if we can get rid of it, we'll think, what in the hell were we doing for 50 years using racial bias?

The only thing that I have is not original to finish this conversation, but someone who unfortunately has been in academia for 50 years,

I can tell you that I know the academic mind as if I know my own right hand.

And I can tell you that they will,

from the moment this ruling, I shouldn't say from the moment, Jack, in advance of this ruling, they were finding ways to break the law.

And they will find ways to break the law.

They will, maybe if you're GPA and they won't say, well, if you got a 4.0 from from

Sacred Heart or Palo Alto, it's the same thing from getting it from Malaga High School.

We don't want to judge, or they'll do that.

They won't allow rankings of comparative GPAs, or they won't use GPAs, or they'll use an essay or something.

Or at Stanford, as one person said, you know, Black Lives Matter, he wrote it 100 times.

You're in.

Something like that.

But they'll find it.

Maybe they'll take a Neek and take it to the, what do you call it?

I can't think today, Victor.

i'm sorry but the the uh legacy um i hope they do i really hope they do because

and everybody listening to this should really think about this it would be a wonderful thing

that wealthy white kids who are connected with harvard or yale or princeton or stanford or duke don't get in if they're not qualified because their parents either know the president or they're on the board of trustees or they gave a bunch of money.

That would be a wonderful thing because that would really shock.

Because most of those people, not all, are left-wing as well.

And they are for affirmative action, even though it disenfranchised the whole white working class.

Any kid from Bakersfield that had a 4.5

and a perfect SAT score, If he was the son of a forklift driver, he was not going to get into Berkeley or Stanford.

He wasn't going to do it.

But if he had a 3.5, 3.2,

88 percentile, and his dad was a big Silicon Valley grandee and gave 10 million to stay, he would get in.

And they should get rid of that.

They really do.

That would be a wonderful thing to do.

I agree.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of this, except for the things we do at the end.

And you mentioned earlier,

you're just home or sleepless, and someone's knocking on the door.

And

I have to read something here from a comment left at the Apple podcast platform.

And we thank our listeners no matter what platform they listen to, this podcast on Stitcher, Google Play, iTunes slash Apple.

You can rate the podcast from zero to five stars on Apple.

Practically everyone gives the podcast and Victor's Wisdom five stars.

Many people leave comments, and here's one:

Hansen's Farm.

While you have been on your Hillsdale college trip to the Mediterranean and Aegean, my wife and I stopped by your farm last week on our way back from viewing the magnificent waterfalls of Yosemite.

We could see your beautiful almond orchards.

And what may be the farmhouse that you have spoken much about?

I enjoyed your oratory on fruit farming.

By the way, that was a terrific podcast on growing plums.

That dropped this weekend with Sammy.

I shared that talk with my wife to help us both understand why our peach tree is producing so many tiny peaches.

By the way, have you ever mentioned that the town just north of Selma is named Fowler?

I know that, by the way.

And our friend Big Mike lives in that.

I was born in Fowler, four miles away.

Oh, you are?

Oh, okay.

Big Mike and Joan live there.

I tipped my house and said to my mom and dad, Hey, if you come to Fowler, we can deliver both of your twins for 50 bucks each.

Oh,

I'm serious.

Well, let me wrap this.

I tip my hat to Jack, Sammy, you, and everyone who makes the podcast possible, as well as Hillsdale College for the online courses that introduced you to many of us.

And this is signed by Parabolus, Parabellus.

So thank you for that,

sir or woman, and Victor.

Yeah,

you're a

you know, people travel and some people say, oh, that's the world's

biggest ball of twine and stopping by your house.

A lot of people stop by

sometimes it gets interesting.

Well, sometimes it gets interesting.

Well,

as long as everybody leaves happy and there's no gunfire exchange, that's a good thing.

Victor, thanks so much for sharing all this.

Well, thank you.

And thank everybody for listening.

Okay.

Thanks, folks.

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

Bye-bye.