Locking Horns In Politics

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

We are recording on Sunday, June 4th, 2023.

Happy Pride Month, Victor.

Victor Davis-Hanson.

I didn't like that tone of your voice.

It seemed to me homophobic.

Excuse me, transphobic.

Well, I have, maybe I'm both.

I'm

biphobic.

Hey, Victor Davis Hanson, who just spoke is the Martin Enely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

His official home on the World Wide Web is the Blade of Perseus with the web address of Victorhanson S-O-N.com.

And we'll talk more about that later.

We'll begin today's podcast by getting Victor's thoughts on some matters political involving Chris Christie and Donald Trump and political crudity.

And let's get Victor's thoughts about those things right after these important messages.

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

Victor, I must admit, before we get into these topics, I want to encourage our listeners to listen to the most recent podcast you've done, which I haven't.

I'm happy to admit again.

I haven't listened to them yet, but I'm excited to.

You and Sammy discussing recent political matters.

And then...

you also had an interview you interviewed heather mcdonald and the manhattan institute so i i strongly encourage our listeners to catch up with those.

Victor, I want to present to you a trio of political items that you can take apart as you wish.

One has to do with crudity,

and that's my word, but this is Congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost.

was at some concert in Washington, D.C.

the other day.

And from the stage,

he said

F,

not with the F, with the four letters,

Ron DeSantis.

And my thought here, Victor, is that we have just seen an increase in

vulgarity, crudeness

from our political leaders that kind of defies the

hopes and dreams

we had that all our leaders would be people like Washington and Lincoln.

Then we have Chris Christie announcing

that he will be running for president.

And the object of his effort will be to attack Donald Trump, who he used to advise, allegedly.

And Victor, the third thing is to me a little weird.

It's Donald Trump appraising this past week the announcement that North Korea will have a seat on the World Health Organization, which all our listeners know about the WHO,

not the band, but

the band of Marxists.

It's actually run by a freaking Marxist,

and who might actually

obtain

rights

to be given to them by the Biden administration, unless somehow Republicans in the Congress can stop it to almost have some fiat role over American health policy.

But who

has a North Korean on its board?

And Donald Trump

praised this i never understood the trump uh north korea um

uh kissy face stuff so another example of it victor three stories there what are your thoughts on any or all of them well

let's start with uh congressman frost there's so many things about that that are disturbing

uh

So he gets into this concert.

He's a congressman.

He's from Florida.

He's from a heavily

democratic district, obviously.

And he starts saying F, F, F.

And you know, what I don't like about it is this.

In the 50s, 60s,

F was a working class word, blank, the boss or that, but it was a, it had some effect because of its rarity.

What it is now is just a filler word, a fillip.

And you know what gets me really angry?

It's it's voiced by elites.

Oh,

when they

tweet or they do, they just add it like they're really psychodramatic, especially women use it a lot.

And it has lost all currency.

You know, what the F, you know, this kind of stuff.

That's the first, and it's kind of to me, it has the same repugnance as this new phrase, Jack, y'all.

You know, that southern

somewhat black patois when you have all of these nasal voiced, skinny armed, left-wing

inhabitants of the swamp in Washington or university campus, and they go, hey, you all.

Or you have very wealthy, elite black people who have never been to the South and do not live in the inner city, and they all have to say, you all, as if that's going to give them some kind of fee days.

And so it's like the F word.

It means nothing.

And so this guy just mouse off, and it's just

a further incidence of crudity.

And you know, and this is going to be more controversial, but we have really lost the ability

because of the systematic destruction of civic education in this country to inculcate with American values and traditions the legal immigrant and the second generation immigrant.

And we saw that with Miss Mohamed, who was born in Yemen, and she comes over to this country

and she is the beneficiary of financial support.

She gets a law degree.

And what does she do?

She gives a 24 gun blast at her host country that took her in.

And when I listened to that speech, I thought, well, what's the alternative?

The wonderful calm country of Yemen and its renowned treatment of women?

Or the lack of racial prejudice in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia?

Or is it the status of women in,

I don't know, Iran?

Is that what you'd like?

So in this case, this guy's mom, I think, is Lebanese and his dad

from Haiti.

And so

he's a son of immigrants.

And it used to be when you were a son of immigrants, you were hyper-American.

But when the host lost all confidence in their own values and thought it was mean or culturally appropriate to

I guess indoctrination, to allow immigrants and their families some idea of what America was before they got here and why they got here, then you get this type of stuff.

And we see that with the squad to

Talib and AOC when they have second generation, they don't have, they feel that they have more affinities with their parents' country than their own.

That's bothersome about this guy.

The other thing, Rocket Man and

Donald Trump goes back to a characteristic of Trump, one that I've never felt comfortable with, and that is to the degree Donald Trump

forges a personal relationship with a foreign leader and the foreign leader reciprocates in a friendly manner, then he transmogrifies that one-on-one until diplomatic success.

So in his case,

this guy

Kim was threatening the West Coast.

Remember that in 2016, 17, 18?

And Trump comes in and says, you know, little Rocket Man, I've got a bigger button than yours.

And all the left went crazy.

And then Rocket Man got paranoid.

And China told him to shut the blank up.

And so

they exchanged letters and they got to be friendly.

And friendly as you can be if you're the president of the United States and you're a thug, the head of a nightmarish communist gulag.

But out of that, then Trump,

he doesn't contextualize that at all.

He just says he's a good guy and da-da-da-da-da.

And he's not.

He's not.

And if he had of

if he had have said, screw you, Trump, then Trump would have said, you know,

he's a nightmare Stalin-like dictator of a failed state.

And that's, that's something that Trump.

It can be a strength because he has no preconditions on diplomacy.

So he can make strides.

Like I think he did with North Korea.

He didn't give up anything except the idea that he wasn't going to blow them up if they kept threatening us.

And we got good behavior out of it.

So I'm not criticizing it, but when you put, predicate everything on personal loyalty to his

godhead, then you get in domestically like his attack on Kaylee McInnan, you know, his former press secretary, who used to go up on that podium and just get attacked for one hour.

And she would extemporary

fight back.

And then, when they asked her for proof, she'd flip open her notebook and rattle off data.

And she did a really wonderful job.

She had

preventative breast surgery for breast cancer at that time.

She looks kind of frail sometimes.

And all of a sudden, she

downplays lead.

I don't know whether it was inadvertent or not.

The actual margin of Trump's lead in Iowa were DeSantis from 40 to 30.

And then suddenly, Donald Trump says, let the rhinos and the globalists have her and calls her milk toast.

It just,

why do that to somebody?

So that, so for people like me that are strong Trump supporters, we have been,

you just don't want to see that and you get tired of it, especially when there are alternatives.

And then Chris Christie, well,

I heard Chris Christie right after he was elected, and he spoke at a Hoover event.

And I don't know if you remember that period of, what was it, 2013, 14?

In that period, he was sort of like the ideal governor that Rick Perry was.

Remember, Rick Perry was going to sweep the field in 2000?

People were so excited that he was elected.

Exactly.

And the same thing with Chris Christie.

They said, you know, he's in New Jersey.

He got elected.

And then he started to let his ego get control of him

right before the midterms.

Remember that hug he he had with obama that that excuse me that was actually right before the election

the election itself that had to do with the hurricane but it was and that was unnecessary and then

and then there was the bridge call i don't know the full truth of the accusations but the idea that he shut down a bridge over personal pick and there were people in emergency vehicles that were affected was bad and then we had there was that damning picture of remember when the beaches were all shut down and he had his state residence and he's out there on the beach?

Oh, during and he's got this sort of rotund figure that it looked, it wasn't a flattering picture, it was a picture of self-indulgence, both uh enjoying himself at a time that his state was shut down.

And then

a guy like that shouldn't be seen at the beach

in the fashion that he was.

And then what I got most angry about, if you remember the first debate,

he and Giuliani and others

We're talking about 2020 now.

2020, yes.

And I had written

before that and after that debate, I had written and said, do not underestimate Joe Biden.

And by that, I didn't mean that he was cognitively all there, but I meant that he would take a week off and sleep 14 hours a day.

and get on a new nocturnal schedule, nocturnal for him being like eight at night.

And probably they would the day before pump him up with previgen and Adderall and everything, right?

And for a brief moment of one or two hours, he would be coherent.

And I had said that.

And then I thought, you know, when Trump got in the big argument and they canceled that third debate, remember there were all the evidence that was it named Steve Sater or whatever the guy was named, forgot his name.

And CNN had been lying and said that his account had been hacked when he wrote Scaramucci for advice about how to moderate the debate.

And he said, said, oh, no, that wasn't me.

And he lied.

And so there was a lot of pressure on Trump either to get out or to modify the rules.

And I think what he did, when they canceled the third debate, he should have demanded an extension from an hour and a half to two or three hours.

And I think that would have done Biden in because I don't think he could have done it for more than an hour and a half.

But instead, they gave him bad advice.

They said, be rude, interrupt him, rattle his cage, destroy him in the first 15 minutes.

And who was that?

It was Christie and Giuliani and a few others.

So they did.

That's what he did.

And he came off as a bully.

I thought he did.

I thought he had, and

that being said, I thought he had a wonderful, he clearly won the second debate.

He didn't do that.

He rattled off facts and figures and made Biden look silly.

And the problem was that, given early and mail-in voting, by the time of the second debate, 50 million people had already voted.

And so he really got taken on the debates.

But what I get angry,

Christie hit some of the cable network news as a commentator and tore Trump apart.

Do you remember that for the first debate?

And I'm thinking, USOB, you, you counseled him

to do this.

And now you're on critiquing your own advice when it blew up in Trump's face.

Not that Trump was...

you know, exempt from criticism because he didn't have to take the advice.

So I'm not a big fan of Chris Christie, and we know what he is.

He's a drone kamikaze.

He's a torpedo that's going to blow up.

So he's going to get on that stage this August and he's going to try to do what to Trump, what he invised Trump to do to Biden.

He's going to interrupt.

He's going to yell.

He's going to do like he, and he's.

got a huge ego.

He blew up the Marco Rubio campaign when, remember, he said, all you can do is recite the same thing.

And that was kind of a very, it was true, but it was very cruel in the way way he did it, yeah.

And so, after that, everybody thought, wow,

he's kind of a

kamikaze, man.

He's a suicide bomber.

You gotta, oh boy.

And when he announced that he's gonna run, all these left-wing commentators were just giddy.

Trump, he's gonna go after Trump.

He's gonna blow Trump up.

He's gonna do this.

And then the other thing is, I can you imagine the nicknames Trump

would give him?

I know, I know.

Well, we won't, we won't, we won't.

but i think there's a

i i

think trump abuses the idea of disloyalty but disloyalty is a little different than ingratitude and and mike what i'm saying is that christie was done finished kaput

he just did terribly when he ran for president he was obnoxious

He was repulsive in the way that he treated people.

Nobody liked him.

And he had no constituency.

I think he left the governorship of New Jersey with the lowest polls of any incumbent governor in modern polling history.

But my point is that

he worked for Trump.

Trump brought him in.

Trump tried to rehabilitate him and then he turned on Trump.

And, you know, Trump says, you know, Kaylee's disloyal.

No, she wasn't.

If you work for Trump,

And you do, and your tenure is over, and you can go ahead and do what you want.

You're not beholden to him for the rest of your life.

But if you are working for him and he is saving you from oblivion, and then you immediately in this same time period turn on him and actively try to

abuse him.

And, you know,

it's not like Kaylee missed me remembering 10 points on a poll.

This guy went out and actually tore apart Trump.

So I could go on, but he's not a favorite of mine.

I think the polls reflect that he's not a favorite of anybody.

Yeah, one other thing

maybe

not as bad as the

Obama hugging right

days before the 2012 presidential elections.

Do you remember when

Frank Lautenberg died?

Yes.

I think it was Frank Lautenberg.

And he appointed

as governor, he appointed a Republican whose name I totally forget.

I think he was the Attorney General of New Jersey, but he appointed him for a short term.

He could have appointed him for a full, like a two-year term, but he appointed him for a very short slice because he had this

act going on with Corey Booker.

He was very afraid that Corey Booker was going to challenge

him for governor.

Yeah, I remember that.

And so Republicans could have had

a Republican senator for an additional like year and a half representing New Jersey.

And instead, they had just a few months because Chris Christie was worried about

an attorney general, but you're right.

He was a nobody, right?

Nobody ever heard of him.

Right.

He just stuck him in there.

Yeah, which is, but it was still, it was like, wow, there's a vote.

And

so Chris Christie's concern for

broader interests and needs of the Republican Party or conservatism.

you know, I heard him in Washington.

He spoke to, as I said, a Hoover group, and we were told he was going to speak for 20 minutes and he had all these conditions that he had to be somewhere and there would be no questions.

And

he was going to, he was a very busy guy.

This was at the height of his popularity right after he got elected governor.

And he was the new governor.

Remember, he was a Republican that could win in a blue state.

He was a hands-on policy wonk.

He knew how to,

he was an old tough prosecutor, all that stuff.

He was, you know, he went after Jared Kushner's father and all that.

Okay,

I went there and he went on and he went on and he went on and he went on and he went on and he went on.

And the 10 or 15 minutes a lot, it was like 45 minutes.

And finally, they were saying, stop already.

You know, he wouldn't stop.

So

I don't want to be petty, but

his sole purpose is to draw blood from donald trump and enough blood that the other sharks on the stage will then turn on trump and devour a limb here or there

and but he has to be the first one to bring to to be able to draw blood and that's his role right period

oh no he has another role and that is if somebody else should win a haley or desantis or somebody then he would be rewarded with some type of cabinet position but i don't think a DeSantis would appoint him.

Gosh.

Well, I'm not going to make roll comments.

All right, Victor.

Well, thanks for those political

observations on those matters.

We have a few more issues

to bring up.

And one of them happens to be our teachers' unions and how they really dominated the policymaking related to COVID.

Some new evidence has come out.

And Victor, we'll get your thoughts about this story right after this important message.

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

What a performance by Team California.

The power is ours.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Before we get into this next topic, Victor, I'd like to remind our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com.

That's the Blade of Perseus.

That's Victor's official website.

Roam around the website.

You'll find links to all sorts of things, Victor's other appearances on other podcasts or radio shows, links to his books, at least descriptions of his.

books.

I think you can link on

the case for Trump and it'll actually take you to Amazon uh that you could purchase it um i i'll something about that in a second but you should subscribe and you and

one of the reasons for doing that is you will find when you go to the website there's a lot of stuff that victor's written as ultra articles important

stuff that you can't read unless you're subscribing it's five dollars uh a month or five dollars to get in the door fifty dollars discounted for the year so subscribe and you will be able to access all this exclusive wisdom that Victor's writing strictly for the Blade of Perseus.

As for the books, I'd really like to recommend with Father's Day coming up.

I don't know if Victor, if we're allowed to talk about Father's Day anymore.

You know, maybe

it'll be forbidden soon enough.

But while we still have it, it's coming up.

And if your dad or grandfather or whatever is a military history buff,

do

check out the books section on the website.

You know, get some interest there.

You'll find, I'll just name three books that I think you should then go to Amazon and consider purchasing.

And one of them is Victor's The Second World War.

It was just a terrific bestseller.

Carnage and Culture, The Savior Generals.

There are many other books Victor has written that are related to military history.

But if some that Dad in Your Life is a military history buff,

think about something Victor's written.

So, Victor,

let me find, I have to find my article here about this.

Here we go.

Here we go.

This is a headline from the Daily Wire.

Texts show teachers unions working with CDC director to keep schools closed.

And bear with me, folks, while I just read the beginning of this and Victor, we'll get your thoughts.

Newly obtained text messages.

Again, this is from the Daily Wire, show that the heads of both major teachers' unions personally texting then CDC Director Rochelle Walensky as the agency was putting together a scientific analysis of reopening schools during coronavirus, with the CDC making a key change that allowed schools to stay closed and appeased the unions.

On February 11th, 2021, American Federation of Teachers

President Randy Weingarten texted Walensky saying that she heard a quote-unquote leak from the New York Times about what was in the CDC's upcoming guidance and expressed concern that it was, quote, at odds with their discussion, end quote.

They're running with a full speed-ahead angle for reopening schools, Weingarten wrote.

She said the Times sent her a copy of the internal draft guidance that said, quote, at any level of community transmission, all schools can provide in-person instruction, end quote.

Hmm, arg, Wolensky wrote to the Union Han honcho the next day and i'll be finished here in a second listeners wolensky's agency released guidance that was different it said quote all schools have options to provide in-person instruction end quote that allowed school districts to stay closed while still saying they were following cdc guidelines middle and high schools and virtual only instruction unless they can strictly implement all mitigation strategies and have few cases blah blah blah it added so victor um oh of course weingarten wrote thank you

at the end of this so what was very important to randy guy weingarton head of the aft the other big union is the national social national education association um you know she ran roughshod over what i guess was supposed to be medical policy scientific policy but it was to appease the members of her union.

And that's,

of course, we know the the catastrophe that's created for america's school children yeah you would think that go ahead you would think if i was in her place if i get a

an email from some official of the teachers union and i respond back then i'm going to have an aide or myself or somebody said i want to hear from a parents group as well but if you don't do that and you're communicating privately in the way that Anthony Fauci was privately with Echo Health,

then all you're doing is substantiating all of these popular suspicions about the swamp, that it's a group of politicians, media, bureaucrats, and left-wing activist groups that are all connected.

And their primary theme is they're anti-democratic.

They don't want popular input.

And so.

All of those,

we've had people at Hoover have looked at this question and they have data.

It's pretty impressive that

we're not going to recover from it very quickly, that that two-year hiatus, in some cases longer, where children didn't physically go to a school or the teachers weren't engaging with them one-on-one

was

lost.

And it was lost at a very important age.

And it wasn't lost for any medical reason because we know now that

people from about five all the way up to 18 were in very little danger of getting a serious case of COVID.

Not that it couldn't happen, but in the case of males, say from 12 to 30, there was a greater risk from the vaccination than there was from a deleterious case of COVID.

So

she had no business coordinating with the teachers' unions.

And that brings up a final question.

I don't quite get this because I know a lot of teachers.

I have a lot of teachers in my family.

I'm a teacher.

But when you get a blank check just to stay home and you can teach on Zoom, well, then that's a joke.

It's a gift.

You don't have to drive.

You don't have to go into work.

And so as soon as this thing's over, then they all started

playing the victim.

Oh, my God.

We were under threat of COVID and we're not going to go back.

You're trying to kill teachers.

And I thought to myself, you remember that, Jack?

Oh, you're not going to put me in the classroom oh we're not going to have and i thought to myself who delivers your washer when when it's burned out some guy on amazon hey when you get a fuel pump that goes out on your truck which happened to me yesterday who brings that who makes it so you assume you expect all of the all hoi paloi all over the United States to get up every morning and cook your waffles at the restaurant and make your bed at the hotel and deliver gasoline at the service station.

Why you, the anointed one, would not dare be forced to go out in the big wide world and teach kids as you're paid, much more highly paid than the people who serve you every day, their landscaper, the nanny, the cook, etc.

So that gets that union.

That unionization really rubs people the wrong way.

Why do I say that?

Because we know that when state laws are overturned that mandate

mandatory, I should say when they require mandatory teachers' dues,

the union participation goes down to about 25%, if not lower.

In other words, if a teacher is given the chance of not paying $1,000 or $1,200, they will take it and get out of the union.

And I know that speaking as a professor in the California State University system from 1984 to 2005,

For the first period of my tenure, if you wanted to join the California Faculty Association, that was a voluntary thing, cost about a thousand bucks.

And I can tell you that they were in an impoverished union.

And when they would like to have pizza, you know, hey, there's going to be a pizza thing for the Union Friday in the lounge.

And that meant you go there and they had some,

I don't know, cheap Me and Ed's local company called Me and Ed's Pizza.

And they had no money and they had all these people and then

gray davis made a deal with him he

passed a law he was the forerunner of arnold schwarzenegger remember he was recalled 2001 and 2022

and he mandated that every and there's 25 000 faculty member give a t a due and that was about

you know it's over a thousand so it was over 25 30, 40 million.

It's more than that now out of your check.

And you know what happened, Jack?

Suddenly, instead of asking everybody to show up and so show solidarity and canvas the they didn't want anybody showing up.

It was private and they didn't have little meetings of pizza.

They had it at nice restaurants.

And then we started, yes, we started getting communiques from them that just on warning, if we don't have people of color elected to

this committee or this board, we have the right to pick people and override the election.

And they started doing things like that.

And the next thing I knew, I shouldn't say the next thing, the first thing they did, we had passed a law that said the CSU system shall institute merit pay, merit pay.

That was under Pete Wilson.

In other words, and that was striking too, because you'd be teaching and you'd see people who came in maybe for three hours, three times a week, and they were gone.

They were selling real estate.

They were selling cars.

They were lifelong tennis players.

They never published a thing.

They had terrible teeth.

And guess what, Jack?

All of a sudden, they were showing up.

And all of a sudden, the doors to their office were plastered with all of their resgest diet.

Professor Smith attended a conference this week in Boston, you know, on the door.

And Professor Jones was mentioned in a seminal article in a footnote and that kind of stuff.

And it was just a radical change of mentality because they were so desperate to get a merit pay that they were exaggerating anytime they sneezed.

But at least they started to show up.

And

then, guess what?

Excuse me, Victor.

I think you really knew a professor who bragged about being mentioned in a footnote.

I mean, that, that, you're not being comical.

That's not true.

I knew a lot of professors that brag about being mentioned in footnotes.

Wow.

I knew a lot that would like to brag and were never mentioned in footnotes because they never wrote a damn thing in their entire life and they were there 40 years.

But my point was that as soon as

Gray Davis passed the law that said you had to contribute to the union,

almost immediately merit pay was junked.

And then all of that brief spurt of so-called selfless industry for the students and for the scholarly community and for the university community just vanished.

And it was like, it was like a, and then not to be outdone, they had something called retroactive parody or something.

So those of us who had published a lot and got merit pay

never got merit paid again, but we had in our pay contract steps.

So there was, you were actually held back while the other people could catch up to you.

And so it was,

it was kind of like a French revolutionary union.

And wow, it was, that's, that's things, things are still

unions do.

In California, a couple of things, Victor, you know, listeners may know that the Supreme Court

ruled in 2018 the Janice decision.

I've written about it for National Review and some ensuing pieces, Shinar, but it was a First Amendment case.

But in practical terms, it said any government worker, which means a teacher,

has a right to their free speech, and they do not have to belong to the union.

They can opt out.

Actually, they need to be told

when, let's say you're new and you're applying for a job in Los Angeles.

County as a teacher, you're supposed to be informed of your Janus rights.

That never happens.

And like with a lot of these important Supreme Court cases, ensuing cases are needed for

the actual enforcement.

But in Los Angeles,

the rights of teachers are, in this regard, are suppressed.

You're right, Victor, when people are told that they have the right.

Well, it's massive.

And they clear out.

But now Wisconsin was one of the best examples.

It was massive.

uh flight from the union yeah it's and it's uh in some cases and not only beyond teachers, I know the Freedom Foundation, where you spoke there, I think, a year or two ago, that's their real passion.

And they have helped essentially politically bankrupt some

government workers' unions, SEIU, and others in Washington state and Oregon.

But last thing I'll babble about is that

in California, I don't know this is passed, but I think it's percolating through the legislature, is to give

teachers

a tax credit now.

They're so afraid of the teachers leaving the unions and government workers leaving the unions and therefore killing the cash cow for the Democratic Party, right?

Because that's what the union dues do.

They bankroll the left.

They will give a tax credit if you stay in the union, if you pay your union dues.

I don't understand it.

I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles, which was always one of, I would rather, and I've had, I think, nine root canals.

I would rather have a root canal or even an implant than go to the DMV.

You try to do it all online, but there's certain times they sent me my license stickers, which I paid for my new registration, but they forgot to put the year in.

It's okay.

I went over there and I tried to get a sticker.

I made an appointment and it was packed.

And I go to the door and they said, well, how do we know that you don't have two stickers?

I said, what do you mean?

And they said, well, we mailed it out i said i didn't get it i went online to make appointments so my point is i was looking at this woman talking to me and everybody behind the counter 20 people all over the building had bluish purple s-e-i-u

uh union t-shirts on and then on the back it said strike exclamation point

and i just said to her i was kidding i said wow you guys are

you're you're right in front of customers you're reminding us that you're going to strike as public employees.

And she goes,

how seriously do you want your sticker?

And I said, oh, you really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that was about five or six years ago.

And,

but I couldn't believe that government employees were wearing union t-shirts.

And I thought to myself, what if you were one of the people at this California DMV office who had exercised their right to get out of the union?

Would you still wear the blue t-shirts?

Because every single person had them on.

Or would you, you know, it's kind of like when

I have to be careful here because it involves where I work, but if you have a Black Lives or a Black Pride Day for employees, and it's basically a synonym for Black Lives Matter, and you're all on Zoom during COVID,

how do you

Do you put your name there, but not your picture?

If you put your picture there, do you have some Black Lives Matter insignia?

So you can see what we're getting to.

It's kind of Soviet in a way that when these unions or these employer groups or whatever group gets into the social realm and they try to get

a theme or a political narrative or an activist agenda

publicized, they force it down people's throats.

And then everybody reacts in a very frightened way or they rat on people or they say, We're scared, or we're,

you know, this, or we're going to, we're going to have a pride lapel, or we're going to have this for everybody.

But if you don't participate, what does that say?

And that's just, you know,

violence is violence.

That's what they say.

This all started with the idea of the oppressive, rich, and the 1%, the elite.

I get it.

During the 30s and 40s, unions, New Deal, alphabet soup bureaucracies.

That was the whole point.

And now it's gone to a Soviet level where these people are judge, jury, and executioner bureaucrats.

They have enormous powers over the individual.

They're very sensitive and they go out and try to destroy people's lives that criticize them, whether it's the FBI, CIA, IRS, DMV.

And they're not the friend of the average citizen.

And

they rule the, you know, the government worker unions rule the legislatures in many states.

what i can't take is a self-righteousness when i was at cal state fresno

and they were going on a strike or that we there were layoffs or there was some question whether we were going we had a pay freeze when the state periodically as soon as it was run by a democratic administration it would melt down and it had no money it couldn't borrow and california being california they would lay off people or they would freeze our pay and i can remember i think it was 93 they froze our pay for two years.

So we were working nine months and we were getting about $65,000 a year at that time.

I thought that was heaven.

And I would come home on the farm.

And that year we lost about $150,000 and had a mortgage.

And we worked, you know, you gotta...

That was my famous thing when I went to the land bank to negotiate the loan.

And the loan officer, very astute old guy, crusty, hey, Mr.

Hansen, how do you like?

I just figured it out.

You worked about 3,000 hours, maybe your job and everything.

Everything you made at your job paid for the amount you lost at your tractor.

Would you like to teach or would you like to get on that spray wig and pay $28 an hour?

How's that?

Ha ha.

Well, his point was that you either don't know what you're doing or have no business in farming.

You're losing money.

But my point is that I would see people all

around the countryside working like dogs on tractors, forklifts, picking peaches, pruning vine, you name it, and getting very little compensation.

And then I would go up to this place with lifetime employment, tenure, nine months out of the year.

And we had a quote unquote crushing teaching load of four semester classes, 12 hours required in the classroom of the 40 you're supposed to be there.

And it was like,

you know, there were wounded fawns.

Oh my God, this is horrible.

This is terrible.

Why are they going?

And that's something that's really hurt the academic reputation, this shrill, self-righteous, victimized, oh, don't dare.

I have a PhD.

Oh,

I'm on the trenches of social activism.

I'm teaching.

I'm threatened.

I could be infected any day by COVID.

I just, it gets sick of it.

I don't mind martyrs when they're real martyrs.

So if any of you guys are.

18-wheeler trucker and you're driving 18 hours or whatever you have to do and it's rainy or it's foggy and you're going over the grapevine i have nothing but admiration for you but i do not have it for whiny teachers because i've been one and i've been in both worlds and believe me i would rather teach to 58 students in Greek history and spend all semester correcting their papers than climb down in a 15-foot septic tank and shovel crap, which I've done.

And a lot of people do stuff like that.

So I'm really sick of all of that self-righteous stuff that comes out of these unions and teachers in particular.

Victor, you may have been a teacher.

You're not a whiny teacher.

Okay.

I was no, I was,

I didn't have a lot of friends when I was in.

I still teach.

I still teach.

I teach every at Hillsdale.

I'm going to teach at Pepperdine this year, but

I don't like whiny professors and teachers.

For listeners interested in what's going on in California broadly, but on this union stuff, I suggest

checking out the California Policy Center website.

They are punching above their weight, but

they're fighting a Goliath, but it's a great...

a great organization that takes a puts a lot of attention into these issues.

Victor, let's talk quickly, if you don't mind, and then we're going to take a little commercial break and have one more issue.

But I just want to get in here.

I know you've talked with Sammy and we've talked in previous podcasts about Bud Light and all this

just the insanity of woke corporate culture.

But I did want to get in, get your quick thoughts on this headline.

Bud Light will donate $200,000 to support LGBTQ business owners of color.

This is a piece from looking at National Review from two days ago.

This is the second year in a row that Bud Light is doing.

Let me just read this one paragraph quickly.

In 2022, Anheuser-Busch announced Bud Light's partnership with the National LGBT

Chamber of Commerce and a $200,000 donation to the Chambers Communities

of Colors Initiative.

and Anheuser-Busch just announced the other day that Bud Light's

continued partnership with this entity and another donation of 200,000.

So, Victor, you know, two things here to me.

I talk about intersectionality from the left perspective.

Gay, whatever, plus, and

business of color

must have a higher

kind.

I find it hard to imagine a higher accrediting on the leftist scale, but that it's by Bud Light

doing this in the teeth of of it of the public uh outrage at what it yeah it's it's

i i went in the supermarket the other day and and this little town that i go and you can see it that nobody is buying it and i guess they think that they've lost that constituency for good and it represents about 25 percent and because they're a multifaceted corporation they can write off Bud Light sales.

And while they would rather have the adoration or the approval of the Malibu

left-wing university crowd,

because there is no constituency of transgendered people of color, believe me, there's about 1% of 1% of 1%.

And so they are pandering because they feel that they.

may have

not been as enthusiastic about Mulvaney as they should be.

After, I mean,

he was kind of almost a terrorist in the sense that he blew up their entire company.

And he did it by

not talking about how tasteful Bud is or what a good flavor or what a good texture or how well you feel or what a cold beer.

He talked about himself when he did those commercials.

And nobody wants to hear about anybody's self, particularly that guy, because he comes off as a phony and self-indulgent and a narcissist.

And his transgenderism is secondary to that.

And then when you go into people of color, I think that is a larger question.

And we're reaching,

I think, a critical mass in this country when people are trying to say, okay,

we are a post-racial society.

It's been 60 years since the civil rights movement.

We are into the third and fourth generation.

We have people now who are in their 30s coming out of college, into the workplace, promotions, getting to positions of authority that have never,

never

been in any system of Jim Crow.

And the idea that you're going to fault one group of people for eight generations ago in the present, you're going to fault them for something that they had nothing to do with eight generation ago.

And you're going to reward another group for something they had nothing to do eight generations ago is just insane.

In the case of the

so ask yourself this.

What if the person said, Bud said, you know, we have a lot of loyal drinkers among the lower middle classes.

So,

and we've had East Palestine.

So I want to,

we want to help reach out to all the lower middle class, poor white people who have been loyal customers, who have small businesses.

So, we're going to give a $200,000 grants to lower middle class people of whiteness.

How's that?

How would people like that?

And my point is: well, that's racist.

Well, why?

Do you really believe that a person who's 22 years old in East Palestine has A, had privilege?

that he rages all the time, that he's anyway a supremacist, that he has a better life than Oprah or Eric Colder, or

what?

So, if you're, I guess, what I'm saying, if you go down that tribalist corporate path and you start identifying people of color, and by the way, how do you know who's a person of color?

Is who's a person of color?

A guy from Argentina, whose name is Mendez, it has blue eyes and blonde hair, trills azar.

Is he a person of color?

If he has a franchise, how do you know what makes transgender?

The person who in 2000, there was what,

20 out of 100,000?

In 2017, there's suddenly 50 out of 2,000.

Now there's 5,000.

Do we really believe there was an epidemic of transgenderism?

That there were all those many transgenders, 5% of the population that wanted, there's no data for it.

And so I guess what I'm getting at is that this, when they keep lying to us and using this Orwellian language of inclusivity, when it's exclusive, what they're basically saying is: we're going to give $200,000 not

to any of our sexual heterosexual people that we do not want to give, and we do not want to give money to anybody who is so-called white.

And in our infinite wisdom, our superb, brilliant corporate team that figured out and crafted this brilliant ad campaign with Mr.

Mulvaney can tell who is a person of color and who is transgender.

And that's the message.

And so people are just saying, count me out.

And so if they had 25%

steady loss every week, I think they'll go up to 30%.

I think they're corporate people.

So they've had their accountants come in with their computer programs and they've already told them that some magic number, 26 percent, 20, it's going to bottom out because that's an enormous multi-billion.

And then they've had another account that says that we can, I've studied 20 of these boycotts and they

crested eight months or in two years from now, it'll be gone.

That's what they're assured.

But we don't know because this is simultaneous, multifaceted phenomenon that includes the Dodgers and Target and Disney.

If you look at what Disney did to its franchises, the Pixar cartoon series, they destroy.

They've destroyed the Indiana Jones series.

They've destroyed the Marvel comic book series.

They're destroying all of their franchises by this woke agenda.

People don't like it.

Right.

And corporations come and go too, Victor.

If you look at the Dow, Fortune 500 or whatever companies from, say, 1980,

most of them are not.

around anymore.

And why

they will

persist forever, and then they antagonize the consumer.

Think about the Iger idea.

He was successful at Disney in the pre-woke period when they kept out of politics and then his successor dabbled with

woke and then he trashed him from the sidelines and convinced the board to bring him back.

And he was a full woke.

And so he has done more damage than his supposed failed predecessor.

And he keeps doubling down.

And

I guess you keep doubling down and you're going to get a lot of people angry.

And we're going to see

what the ultimate result is.

But if the left and the corporate keep doubling down on identity politics and keep tribalizing us and putting us into gender and sexual orientation and sex and race and ethnic background slots, when they have no ability to either know what the particular historical grievance against the majority is or what qualifies a person to be in that slot in a multiracial society, of which 50 million people were not born in the United States and another 50 million have mixed ancestries.

And it's just the height of arrogance.

And it's not going to work.

People are really, really tired of it.

Like you can feel it.

You can really feel it.

And I'm talking about,

you know, Barry Weiss and Elon Musk and Bill Maher and

Garrison Keeter, all these people who have been to some degrees victims of it, or they've had friends that have been victimized.

They just can't take it anymore, especially when

you don't qualify class.

So when Bud says this, you think, well, what if somebody's got a very successful business and they're very, very wealthy and they were born into wealth?

They're not hurting.

That's like saying the Duchess of Sussex is hurting because

she's half black.

Or, you know, that Mrs.

Mohammed, I couldn't believe that when she was addressing the city of university law school, and she went on Zionism and Israel and white supremacy.

And she had kind of a white shawl.

And I swear to God, that was the whitest woman I've ever seen in my life.

She was pure.

I thought she was an albino.

She was so white.

So I thought to myself, now,

what characterizes whiteness in you, white supremacy?

So you've got

a law degree from a pretty good school.

So you probably got some type of privilege to get in there.

It's very hard to do.

You're an immigrant.

So you came in to this country and you've done very, very well.

And now you're going to be a lawyer with a high income and you're very white.

So I think you have white privilege, if such a thing exists, and yet you're trashing it.

And

I don't get that at all.

And I guess what she's saying is those guys in East Palestine that have nothing, they have no white privilege.

They have white privilege, and she doesn't.

She's whiter than they are.

And so

I don't, I think when you start using these, it's so funny how the classifications of the old Confederacy come back, the one drop rule, the 116th rule about genetic or racial purity, states' rights, nullifying federal law, segregated spaces, segregation in the dorms, segregation in graduations.

It's so strange how the left to implement their tribalist agenda, they said to themselves, hmm, there's got to be models out there of smart guys that knew how to do this.

Well, there is.

There's South Africa and there is the old Confederacy and the antebellum south, and that's what we're going to do.

Maybe Dixie should be the theme song, yeah, of the left.

Um, no disrespect to my southern uh friends.

So, well, Victor, we have we have one more topic to bring up, and uh, that has to do with the uh students and loans and deferments.

And we'll get to that right after this final important message.

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

Again, we're recording on June 4th.

And Victor, I had wanted to bring this article up last week when we were recording previous podcasts.

We didn't have the time.

It's a New York, excuse me, Wall Street Journal, op-ed by Michael Toth, who is an attorney from Austin, Texas.

And the headline is the draft: Student Loan Forgiveness and College Privilege.

So as we're talking today, Victor, I know

the

Congress has voted, at least majority of both houses, to rescind this Biden rescinding of student loans.

He'll probably veto it, may veto it by the time this podcast is.

is aired.

There's a case before the United States Supreme Court on student loans.

So this will continue to play out.

But there's an an interesting case in this op-ed, a broader thing about

students.

Let me just read the first paragraph, Victor, and get your broader thoughts.

This is again by Michael Toth.

The Supreme Court is considering the fate of President Biden's student loan cancellation plan.

The economic significance of the case is obvious.

If the court holds that it is lawful, it will transfer more than $400 billion from taxpayers to student borrowers.

Even more significant is the foundational question at the heart of the debate.

What privileges, if any, should higher education receive in a democratic society?

Victor, this is about more than just this particular case right here and now in student loans, but it also goes back

over more recent American history of

deferments from military service.

Why was a student at Bresno State, why could he have a college student?

Why could he have a deferment while the guy down the road who was changing tires did not get a deferment?

What was it about being a college student that gave you this protection and now gives you,

if Biden has his way, the right to take money out of the pocket of the tire changer?

Victor, your thoughts about this.

Well, the idea was that after World War II, we had won the war because of technology and organization

bureaucratic principles and so we were going to ratify that and codify it with these new universities and they sprung up like rabbits everywhere and there wasn't enough qualified phds to staff them so we hired people abd all but dissertation and a lot of them were and we created phd programs out of nothing When I got to the university, they had not, the whole faculty was in their 40s and 50s, and they'd all been hired in the 1960s.

And they hadn't hired anybody in 14 years.

But they were, I don't want to criticize my former colleagues, but a lot of them were not very impressive.

So, what I, the idea was that we were all going to get a BA, an MA, a PhD, a JD, an MBA, and that would be a little certificate that we were now qualified to do certain tasks.

And those tasks, and there was some logic to it, at least in the science and math.

But the idea you're going to get an English degree or sociology degree rather than just study it on your own,

and therefore you're going to improve society, it's not true.

And the idea you're going to go to a university with like-minded people and it's going to be a Socratic experience of give and take in a free and open environment is not true.

It soon turned into indoctrination.

And then you're going to create tenure with lifetime employment and you're going to plead to everybody that you're threatened by the man or the right wing or christians to suppress your free speech and you need tenure so you can be bold when what happened 95 of the people were left and the only person who was going to be endangered was the conservative that 95 people percent of the people who had tenure would go pick on and try not to give him tenure and so it was a a shipwreck of our dreams.

When it got to the student loans, though, it created a lot of really toxic legacies that we're stuck with now.

Once the university understood where the moral hazard was,

that

the students who came into the university would not pay as they went, but they could borrow money from the federal government.

And everybody knows that the federal government is political and create a very strong constituency, 1.7 trillion.

I think now it's up.

The interest is accrued, so it's $2 trillion.

And that said to the university, hmm,

we can offer a lot of classes.

We can hire a lot of administrative, we can have a lot of programs, we can have a center for gender study, we can have a center for

the study of the other, we can have a marginalized persons

library, we can have, as Stanford does, 15,000 administrative staff.

And that overhead that pushes the cost of room and board and tuition over the annual rate of inflation year after year after year will be borne by the student because he will get a loan from the federal government and he can just keep paying.

And then once we we discovered that the universities were expanding without any concern for business principles and the government was ensuring the loan and the students were not graduating in four years, but six, eight, and half of them who enter college were dropping out,

never finishing.

And they had an aggregate 1.7 trillion and some of them 50, 60, 80, $200,000 loans.

And they were not paying them off and they were not being punished.

It wasn't like the IRS took it out of their salary.

And it became kind of a cult where you, I think it was right before COVID, it was 30% were defaulting on them.

And so it wasn't half, you didn't have to pay them back.

And there was no sense of honor.

And

all it did was, as I said, it shifted the hazard away from the student and the university.

And it fobbed them off on the taxpayer.

Had we gotten rid of the federal guarantee of loan, guess what would have happened, Jack?

That university would have said to the student, okay,

I know you don't have the 70, 80,000 to pay for room, board, and tuition, but we need that body.

So you're going to be get a loan from us, us, us.

And then their CFOs in these universities would say, get that guy off campus.

He does nothing.

He doesn't teach.

He doesn't do any research.

He's just a busy, bossy commissar.

We can't afford him.

And then they would have said to the student, look,

you're going to go here in four years.

These are our 28 majors.

This is the average income of each major that we found upon graduation.

If you major in these,

you will be able to, under normal circumstances, get a job with this salary, and you can devote this much to paying us back.

If you major in these,

it's going to be very difficult.

So we don't discourage you, but you have to have outside income.

That type of dialogue would have kept the campus sane, and it would have been lean and mean and it would have made sure that the students then would say uh-oh

that university is not going to let me default but they'll go after me wherever i am so you know what i'm not going to take three units here six units here i'm going to get the damn thing done and get out in four years

and

that would be that would have been that would have happened there was no sense i had a daughter who got she went to uh the school of public Policy at Pepperdine after her bachelor's.

And she went to Chile after her bachelor's degree and then to learn Spanish.

And then she went there.

And it was very expensive.

Women board tuition, like 80,000.

I didn't have the money.

So

I saved up and I paid cash for the first year.

And then the second year, she took out a $80,000 loan and I took on extra stuff to pay it for because she was, as long as she got got A's and she did she did very well and then she passed away suddenly and I it was right after she had graduated and the loan I think it had twelve thousand dollars and I got a letter from it

and I wasn't I mean but did I really want my daughter's memory to be that she was a slacker and had ripped off the government for money no so I paid it even though she had passed away I thought I deserved the government deserved it her memory deserved it she worked hard but I know all these people who are not paying back their loans.

And I don't understand the idea behind it.

You take money from the taxpayer who guarantees your loan and you default on it or you don't pay, then the taxpayer is stuck with one-third of $2 trillion.

And Joe Biden, then we have to put, finally, Jack, we put it in context.

Where did he dream this idea up?

He was looking at the 2022 midterms, and they were forecasting a disaster,

even though the Republicans were incompetent in the Senate.

They were looking at 50 seats he was afraid of.

They were going to lose the Senate.

So he started to do things.

Remember that?

He said, oh, oh, I never said.

that I did not cancel Anwar.

I did not cancel Keystone.

I did not cancel new federal leases.

I'm all for transitional affordable fuels.

So we're going to brain Supreme, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

And he did.

He took 30% of it right off right before the election.

He crashed gas by about 30 cents a gallon.

And then he said,

We're going to make sure that if you're in the Army, I'm going to have executive orders.

There will be way that boy, or you're going to be able to get a subsidized abortion anywhere.

We're going to give you leave.

That was another thing that he did right before the election.

And

one of them was student loans.

He just said, you know what?

By fiat, I, Joe Biden, president,

emperor, king, dictator, have the right to go into a private business transaction between two parties and cancel it.

I can do that.

And he can't.

And so

that was all politically driven.

And it worked.

I remember talking, I talked to a lot of conservative people.

I won't mention their names, but they said, oh, wow, that is so pathetic.

Begging Saudi Arabia, begging the Iranians, even begging the Russians and the Venezuelans to pump the oil that he tried to stop.

And now he's draining.

Everybody's going to see through that.

And then this idea that you're going to pay people to travel to places to get abortions in the military and all federal facilities.

And then giving the students, any student knows what that's about.

I thought, no, it's pretty smart.

It's pretty, and it's going to work.

And it did.

Not only for the student but then you know there have to be any number of parents who are also

be off the hook if they you know if they co-signed a loan just a general rule as a general rule we all have to change our view of the university

it is a petri dish of toxic ideas It is not an enlightened Socratic.

And I say that as someone who understands that our preeminence in the world is predicated on having superior calculus, mathematics, engineering, the STEM disciplines, computer, and that needs a university background.

I think we need things like nursing.

And but as far as the social sciences and humanities, you can either do it in two years or do it on your own.

But the idea that we're going to take four, six, eight years out of young people's lives and put them on these secluded places and indoctrinate them and indoctrinate them.

And then have these people with tenure who are completely unaccountable and they are not audited about whether they teach effectively or not or whether their research is sound or whether they even do research.

No accountability after their tenure.

And then when they commit egregious acts like turning over tables and insulting students on campus and getting violent with them or

hijacking a lecture like you saw at Stanford Law School and disrupting a federal judge.

When they do all of that, that that is all immune and we have to pay for it.

No, that's every bad idea, every bad element of wokeism, critical legal theory, critical penal theory, critical race theory.

That started in the university.

Germination from a bad idea in the faculty lounge to destroying people's lives in the real world is about five years.

And so I'm sorry, but it's not worth the cost anymore.

And we've got to come up with alternatives, either have to reform the universities or make new universities, but it's not working.

It's not working.

Yeah.

Victor, thanks for your thoughts on that and everything else that you shared today.

We've come to the almost end of our

today's podcast, where we thank our listeners for listening.

No matter what platform they do that on, and if it happens to be iTunes or Apple, Apple, you can rate the show zero to five stars.

And this show has a rating on average of over 4.9, which is pretty damn good.

And thank you for those who take the time to do that.

And for those who also take the time, additional time to leave comments, which we read.

Some of them make me cry because they're.

about my babbling, but that's okay.

I'm not going to read one of those today.

Here's one, though, from,

let's see, which one should I read?

This one's titled Memorial Day Thanks.

This is from

an Apple podcast listener.

Thanks, VDH.

Been loving your podcast for some time now.

I enjoy listening to all your conversations on antiquity and battlefield history across all ages.

My dad was a World War II vet in the European theater, also in Korea and Vietnam.

In the 60s, my dad was stationed in Japan, and we saw a beautiful culture and people.

Sometimes I found it hard to fathom dropping the atomic bomb.

Hearing the statistics about the numbers of people killed by the Japanese war machine reminded me that history is always complicated and never fully understood.

This is signed by Can't Find Name Not Taken.

But

anyway, Can't Find Name Not Taken.

Thank you

for the comment and for taking the time to do that.

Victor, one last thing.

I would like to remind our listeners to visit justthenews.com.

That's run by John Solomon, and that's the official home of this podcast.

If they're on Facebook, they should visit the Victor Davis Hanson fan club.

It's not official to this

podcast, but they're great people that are there.

I think they're about 60 or 70,000 members of that club.

And you'll find all sorts of links to things Victor does.

And

if you're on Twitter at VD Hansen, that's Victor's handle there.

As for me, Jack Fowler, I write civil thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter that I do for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, where we are trying desperately to save civil society.

And the newsletter, in addition to being free, has

more than a dozen recommended readings, great articles I've come across the previous week.

Here's a link.

Here's a healthy excerpt from the piece.

I think you will enjoy it.

Many of our listeners have signed up and they do.

So enjoy it.

And we don't sell your name.

There's nothing transactional.

So, Victor, again, thanks for all the wisdom you have shared.

Thanks for listening.

And thank you.

And thank you, everybody, for commenting.

And Jack and I, and the upcoming weeks,

we're going to devote three or four shows just to answering all your questions.

I'm really looking forward to it.

Right.

And we'll thank this while we're praising people and the great Sammy Wink.

So thank you all.

And we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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