The Resistance: Anything Is Possible

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

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

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

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

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

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

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

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

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

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

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

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

The patterns are clear.

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

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, the star and namesake.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This particular episode will appear after Memorial Day, but we still want to honor in some way all those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.

Hope we'll have some time to do that at the end of

the podcast.

Victor, though, this couple of, I mean, so much has happened

this week and news is breaking about a debt settlement.

I don't know if we should really talk about that since who knows what the particulars of that will be.

But I think a good place to start our discussion today is about the Department of Homeland Security's program to fund colleges and other institutions to attack conservative media and conservative organizations.

And Victor, let's get your thoughts on that right after these important messages.

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

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

The colors, the fabric, the design.

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

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

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

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

I've been sleeping like a baby in my bowl and branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So join me.

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

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

That's Bolin Branch.

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

slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply.

And we'd like to thank Bolen Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works.

Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property, and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So, when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to home title lock.com/slash victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple lock protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home, titalock.com/slash Victor.

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

First, Victor, I do want to apologize.

There's a snoring sound in the background.

That's my dog,

George.

I'm sorry.

He's got

are you trying to suggest that the Victor Davis Hansen podcast does not have professional infrastructure?

We are a garage band of podcasts, Victor.

So

remarkable.

Someday, someday we'll be

reached up.

We'll reach the big leagues.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know,

often, I think probably right now, this podcast is in the top 10 of the political podcast rankings of the country.

So not bad, Victor, but then it's because of you.

So

never mind the way this is recorded or engineered.

So, Victor, I want to read this article, the beginning of an article.

And this comes out of

an investigation by the Media Research Center.

And it happens, folks, that Victor and I,

roughly two weeks ago, had lunch in Washington.

We were both there for the Bradley Prize award ceremonies.

And prior to the awards, we had lunch and we had lunch with Brent Bozell, who's the founder of Media Research Center.

And Brent told us there was some bomb that they were about to drop, exposing the government's

funding of anti-conservative, anti-conservative media efforts.

So here's the story, Victor.

Let me just read this and then please you have your

give your analysis.

Headline is how Biden's Department of Homeland Security is weaponizing an anti-terror program against Christians, conservatives, and the GOP.

Media research free speech has learned how the Biden administration is weaponizing a government-funded anti-terrorism grant program in an effort to destroy conservatives, Christians, and the Republican Party.

Under the Trump administration, the quote targeted violence and terrorism prevention grant Program, TVTP, was used to prevent terrorism, but it was revamped under the Biden administration and renamed to provide funding for localities to combat, quote, all forms of terrorism and targeted violence, end quote.

Instead of focusing on preventing actual violence and terrorism, the program is now being used to target the entire spectrum of the political right and Christians through quote media literacy and online critical thinking initiatives, end quote, and other so-called training seminars as part of a coordinated effort to make America into a one-party system.

One last paragraph here, Victor.

The University of Dayton, one of several grantees to argue groups, including the Heritage Foundation, Fox News, Christian Broadcast Network, Turning Point USA, Prague U, National Rifle Association, et cetera, et cetera.

The DHS, Victor, to round this out, gave out 80 grants at the behest of Alejandro Mayorkas,

who called this program a high priority.

I think about 40 million bucks has been allocated to this, Victor.

I apologize to the listeners for the long read there, but that's the setup.

Maybe many of you don't know this is going on.

It is.

It's truly troubling.

I don't think we are surprised, though, that this Biden administration is doing it.

Victor, what are your thoughts?

Well, my first thought is

what Napoleon said.

If If you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna.

If you're going to impeach Alejandro Mallorcas, impeach him.

You had a lot of reasons to impeach him.

He deliberately and systematically destroyed federal immigration law, and he would not enforce it.

And when you let somebody continue to do that,

then you would expect that he would also make high priority of taking millions of dollars, I guess you said $40 million,

and go after people, including that list, list, I think, was the RNC.

So here you have a Democratic president funneling money through Homeland Security to go after or to monitor or to demonize its political opponent, the Republican National Committee.

But more importantly,

Prager U.

I've done videos for those, and in fact, two of them have been banned by YouTube, but they were just on Vietnam and Korea.

It's a historical series that offers a non-woke, non-PC alternative.

So this thing is pretty wild.

And I remember watching some news accounts of that this week, where one of the participants in this government-funded conference bragged A, that he was in Antifa, and B, that what he was advising the congregation there was quote-unquote illegal.

So that seems to me a conspiracy to commit a crime.

Maybe they could even get him on a racket.

They could even get him on a racketeering charge.

But it's as someone who paid 37% of my income all the way to probably April or May, I work.

So all of you listening, you worked from January to April or May and got nothing.

And you gave it to the federal government that funds stuff like this that is nakedly illegal.

But then

The other thought I had is, what does illegal mean today?

There was a story,

Lulemon, that company that's headquartered in Atlanta, I think, they fired two of its managers who called 911 on

habitual shoplifters.

Right, it's Lululemon.

Yes, Lululemon, yeah.

So

we're entering a brave new world now where what is the law nominally is not, in fact, the law.

We don't know what is illegal or what is not illegal.

If you're on a subway and somebody is threatening people and he's, it turns out he's a career felon and he has 42 arrests and you try to subdue him to protect people, you're going to face manslaughter if he dies.

And on and on and on.

There's a big case in San Francisco right now where we had a transgendered black shoplifter, habitual criminal threatened a security guard who was also a black security guard, thought that he was being attacked, shot him while the person was in an act of committing a crime.

And there was an outrage

from the trans community that he was not charged with murder.

And to the credit of the new DA in San Francisco, she didn't charge him with murder.

She didn't charge him at all.

But my point is that we're so far over the cliff that we,

anything is possible in this country now.

The laws we once understood it no longer exist.

And in this case, the idea that the federal government would allow an end would pay an Antifa participant to brag that he was advocating things that are against the law.

And it was about creating dummy groups, disinformation to use the leftist word.

The other thing about all this is where does all this stuff come from?

Where does the idea that you're going to

create internet apparatuses to go after Prager University or Breitbart News?

And the answer to that is the same place where we got this idea that a biological male with testicles and a penis and a muscular skeletal male body could just declare himself female and then sweep all of the awards in a female sport and destroy the aspirations of hundreds of girls or women.

And the answer to that is the university.

That's where it all starts.

Critical race theory, critical legal theory, critical gender theory, all of that, which then begs the question, what are we doing with these universities?

And we're going to talk later about

University of Florida, New College, Austin, University of Austin, perhaps.

But my point is that

something has gone terribly wrong with our universities, and they are indoctrinating and they're not teaching people.

So we are creating people to be ignorant activists, ignorant and arrogant activists.

They don't have time in the school day to understand history or philosophy or literature or science or math because they are spending their time on

non-existent disciplines such as

black studies, gay studies, leisure studies, environmental studies, and they're all activist studies is what they are.

And so

we shouldn't discount that, that the time span, the trajectory from the faculty lounge where two tenured, nine months out of the year working professors with maybe 10 to at most 10 to 11 hours a week in class are dreaming up ideas and then getting grants to write about them.

And then that's craziness in that laboratory called the university to the federal or state government and to us, I think is about three or four years.

That's what's so dangerous about it.

And that's why on this podcast, we've talked so often about why in the world we do not tax university endowments because they're not nonprofits?

Why in the world is the federal government deny?

Why is the federal government backing student loans when they're $1.7 trillion

in arrears?

And more importantly, all they do is shift the moral hazard and ensure that the universities up their tuition faster than the rate of inflation.

Why do we do that?

And

so we could easily stop it.

We could just say, you know what, the government's out of student loans.

If you want to have student loans, you better tell the student how many years

it takes to graduate and what happens when they default on the loan that you back for your own tuition out of your endowment.

And that would really end, I don't think Stanford would have 16,000, Stanford University wouldn't have 15,000 administrative staff if the students had no student loan.

I may be wrong, but ultimately the whole point of this is it's the university, the college, higher education that does stuff that prompts or fuels conferences like this.

Well,

and

creates business majors who then go on to become the heads of Lululemon or the marketing.

My wife, I was, well, but on the Lululemon thing alone, just to get my wife's fetching on the air, I told her about this earlier.

And she says,

you know, she doesn't shop there anyway, but says, screw this place.

Like, why am I, why would i shop there anyone who shops there is subsidizing the permitted thievery it's just like shopping at target it's which as we know and i know you've talked about it before victor and you all had a great conversation the other day with megan kelly on her podcast but it's fine permissible for thugs to go and raid target and we're supposed to shop there and essentially subsidize this and if you have the temerity as you pointed out as of an employee to try to stop it, you're going to be fired.

I mean, it's just freaking insanity here.

It is.

And

I think what's happening right now, though, we're right in the middle of a counter revolution.

And when you're in such a state, you don't know what's going on.

But

Sammy always asks, you know, about positive news, but there is some positive news.

And that is the conservative traditional American.

is waking up this week and thinking, you know what?

I have power.

I didn't know that I did.

I don't, I,

I have power.

Bud is selling on Memorial Day a case of beer for $3.99, Jack.

They can't give it away.

They can't.

Well, it's going bad.

They have to get rid of it.

And Target is panicking.

Is it $7 billion or $8 billion?

They've lost in stock and sales.

As of today, $10.

Disney.

That's a lot of money.

That crazy Iger guy who said he was going to come out of retirement to save the company has only made it worse.

It's in free fall.

And the point is that everybody out there knows that when they do this, Target puts cod pieces on children's clothing, or Bud has this Mulvaney character nominally,

incidentally hawking beer, but really in the commercial, I just watched it, he brags about how many days he's come out.

And that's supposed to make you think, wow,

I'm sitting in

a bar in downtown, take Dayton.

I'm in Dayton, Ohio, and I see on the bar TV that Mr.

Mulvaney says

it's 185 days since he's been a woman.

I'll go out and buy that beer right now to support his transgenderism.

That's crazy.

And everybody's waking up now and they're thinking, not this peak.

I'm not going to do this.

And they're finding out that they actually have power.

They have power because they're the majority.

And all they have to do is focus it.

Focus it.

And they don't like to boycott or ostracize

Argo.

But once they do, they're very, very effective.

And a lot of these are women, especially on Target.

You go into a Target and majority of the shoppers are mothers who are buying things for their children, especially in the summer, back to school.

And you get them riled so that when they walk in there with their three-year-old or two-year-old and they're looking for children's uh girls playsuits and they see a fold-down cod piece for testicles and a penis in the women's section and they are told that there's no difference between a transgendered woman and a real woman and then they think well if there's no difference why do they have cod pieces suddenly now on these

and they get angry And I think, yeah, the other thing is very quickly, and Sammy and I talked a little bit about it.

it, where does this come?

I think this is really important that we all go to, you know, what the Romans called the fons and the orego.

The orego,

the origin and the font.

Where does this start?

Who thought this up?

Where did Target get this idea?

Where did Bud get this idea?

They are drawing people from the university, in this case, the School of Business.

And don't think

that the School of Business is some right-wing enclave under assault by a left-wing universe.

They are completely woke, politically correct, and they are churning out masters of business degrees that go right into the corporate world, especially from the so-called elite colleges, Harvard Business School, Berkeley's Business School, Stanford Business School, you name it.

They go right into the highest ranks.

They have never sold a bar of soap in their life.

They've never driven a delivery truck in their life.

They've never had to stock a shelf in their life.

They've never had to run a 7-Eleven in their life.

They know nothing about business, but they go right into the hierarchy of these corporations.

And when they arrive with this university imprinted indoctrination, they start doing things like, hey,

There's a bunch of old white guys and, you know, they're all dying off.

We got to reach out to the transgender.

That's a huge constituency and even bigger are the people who support it.

Let's get Mulvaney in here.

Talk about how many days he's been a woman.

That'll be a big seller.

Or they'll think, wow,

I mean,

I'm brainstorming at Target.

I just got my MBA from Stanford, and here I am in the halls of corporate power.

I got a suggestion, Mr.

CEO.

Why don't we put cod pieces on children's clothing?

It would be a big winner.

As soon as a mom saw that, she'd just think, wow, there's an ad in the paper for a cod piece at Target.

I got to go there.

That's where I'm going.

I'm not going to go to JC Penny's or something.

I'm going to go there and get that cod piece for my daughter.

That's that is insane.

And that's what these people are from the schools of business.

Well,

you know what?

I can't talk too much because of my position at the Hooper Institute,

but I will say one thing: that when you look at job applicants

in economics or business, the traditional fields that everybody focuses on, which are absolutely essential for the running of this country, finance,

trade,

currency, interest rates, fiscal policy.

They're not so common anymore.

They're hard to find people with PhDs and MBAs in those areas of concentration.

You know what they are?

They're called cultural economics.

How many black people are Uber drivers?

What is the rate of promotion of transgendered people on Wall Street?

That's what they're studying.

And when they get into the halls of power, they have no affinity, whether abstract or real, with the consumer.

And now we see whether it was canceling the all-star game a couple of years ago in Georgia.

or, you know, United or American Airlines, they all take a hit.

But this time,

they look back the ceos and they said ah you know what

it's going to be like a quarter maybe i don't know a month of down sales but the publicity will be good because all the left-wing community will rally to our stand they have never experienced a permanent hit and this thing is going on and on and on rippling through right victor if i may it's not only the initial act the the the mulvie mulvaney commercial or the initial exposure of this cod pieced

outfit, which is also for

women as opposed for children, but it's the responses that only make it worse.

Bud's response was a lie at first, and then trying to recoup its image with the Clydesale horse and the 9-11.

faint and then recently I think in the last week or two they've created some new commercial like Bud with Harley-Davidson, and no one's buying it.

And

they're angrier, yeah, because they're angry at the lie.

And then they think,

you guys are such ponies.

You think we're going to fall for that?

You're insulting us even more.

The Bud Driver thinks, okay, so you're running Clydesdale horses.

Well, why in the hell weren't you doing that six months ago?

You're only doing it because you screwed up.

You hate Clydesdale horses and what that represents.

You love this stuff.

And now you're, and you hate us, but now you want our money.

So now you're running Clydesdale.

And they're saying, collectively, screw you.

Same thing with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It reminds me so much, these corporate lackeys, of what the Soviet Union did, you know, for most of its lifespan.

They issue the party line.

The first L.A.

Dodger communique was how they were going to celebrate diversity and trans people on this Pride Day.

And they were going to get the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and how wonderful this group was.

And then the counter-revolution came, and

they kind of dropped it.

And then they did the communique.

Don't remember the first communique.

This is now the operative communique about, we're sorry, we're so sorry.

And then some guy, they brought in probably some accountant, a guy who's really knew something and said, you know, well, this is the number of Latino Catholics that come to our game.

These are the traditional American constituency.

These are the fans.

I'm sorry, but somebody didn't tell you that the constituency that's going to come out for Pride Day to celebrate women dressing up and simulating sex acts as nuns and priests is very small.

Okay, let's get.

Let's do that.

And then the Hollywood stars call up, the Malibu people, the LA Philanthropic Donor class, and then they send in another communique.

Oh, sorry.

Well, it's just like the Glydesdale horses.

People say, you know what?

Screw them.

Screw them.

And I think that's going to happen more and more and more.

I hope so too.

And I hope, but I think everybody, we're still, we're still getting a number of our, go ahead.

We're still getting used to the fact that

In this country, it's very hard to acculturate yourself to the fact that it's the Pentagon with its woke stuff when Lloyd Austin flat out lied to Matt Gates under oath when he said there were no drag shows on these bases that were being subsidized.

Or it's the FBI when Andrew McCabe lied four times under oath.

Or it's the corporate boardroom that is doing this.

And everybody says, well, corporations are conservative.

God, I remember Coca-Cola and I remember General Motors and Goodyear Tire.

They were emissaries of American.

No, no, they're not.

The FBI is left-wing.

The Pentagon Brass is left-wing.

The CIA is left-wing.

They have all been body snatched and they are woke.

And it's very hard for moderates and conservatives to accept that, that the corporate boardroom and Wall Street are with especially with ESG are doing stuff that furthers the decline and decay of this country.

And

it's just mind-boggling because they are on the same wavelength as these transgender performance artists or Black Lives Matter, which is a crooked, corrupt organization, or Antifa.

And if you think I'm lying, there's an Antifa person there bragging at the conference.

It's being subsidized by the U.S.

government, bragging that he's advocating things that are illegal.

Remember when Nixon's enemy list mattered to

the left, Victor?

No, just read.

I always take my club and beat this dead horse, but go read February 2021 article by Molly Ball, Time magazine, bragging how the

CEOs and corporate boardrooms and corporate America aligned with Antifa, DNC, Silicon Valley Money to turn on or turn off the demonstrations.

And it was all coordinated.

It's all there.

And she, it's not me.

She uses the word cabal and she uses the word conspiracy.

But her point was that Wall Street and the corporate world thought Donald Trump was a danger to their way of life or their values.

And so they joined these various left-wing groups to ensure that there would be a lot of money and a lot of effort to change the way we vote.

I'm not talking about traditional politicking.

I'm talking about the change the way we vote by funding things like true get out the vote, i.e., drop boxes, or more inclusivity, or i.e.,

ballot curing, ballot harvesting, that kind of stuff.

That was corporate money that did that.

And

it's, I think they really, they were much more effective when they were under the radar and they were just in the shadows trying to subvert things.

But now their arrogance and UBIS got such that they're out in the open, openly doing it.

This character at Disney, Bob Iger, you know, he came in after they fired the other guy out of retirement as if he was going to be a savior.

And he's more left-wing than the guy they fired.

And he's into a mono-to-mono macho thing with Ron DeSantis.

And he's trying to,

he's going to run that.

He's going to run that company in the ground.

Walt Disney would roll over in his grave if he knew that guy was the CEO, CEO of his company.

Yeah, I think Walt Disney was a subscriber to National Review.

And I know his brother was a donor.

And one generation of the family even has gone perverted.

Never mind the people you've hired.

Victor,

you mentioned

DeSantis.

I mentioned New College.

And we have a couple of stories.

Maybe we'll just mash them into one.

Scott Atlas gave a commencement speech at New College, and what happened to him, and then

Ron DeSantis versus Trump, it's all kind of goes together, and let's get to that right after these important messages.

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

Well, I have found the secret serum, and it's vibrant, super C Serum.

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

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

Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and aged spots with Vibriance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's Vibrance.

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

Vibrance.com slash Victor.

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

So you just got back from summer vacation.

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

Some vacation, huh?

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

Here is my advice.

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

That's happy Z spelled backwards.

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

The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.

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

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

Not only will you save $10,

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

Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Go to zyppah.com and use the code PINK

or text Victor to 511-511.

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

Remember, Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.

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

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

I was negligent, Victor, at the outset of the show.

I usually say that you have an official home on the internet, the Blade of Perseus, which has a web address of victorhanson.com.

And I would like to recommend to our listeners, old listeners who have heard this many times and still have yet to do it.

New listeners who are curious.

Oh, I didn't know Victor had a website.

Well, he does.

He writes a lot for it, a lot of original material exclusive to the website.

And you should subscribe.

They're called ultra articles.

There's many other things on the website, links to books.

By the way, look for the link.

for the Second World Wars, Victor's best-selling

history book of, I think it was about six or seven years ago.

I just want to recommend it.

It is an exceptional book and makes an exceptional Father's Day gift.

So do consider that.

But anyway, you'll find books, Victor's other appearances on other podcast radio shows, but you won't be able to read the ultra articles.

Subscribe.

$5 gets you in the door.

$50 discounted for the full year.

That's victorhandsome.com.

So Victor,

Let me take it this way.

We have this Federalist

article by August Mayrat, who describes what happened, what Scott Atlas said when he gave the commencement speech at New College of Florida.

And for those who don't know this, New College of Florida is a liberal arts school that earlier this year, Ron DeSantis,

as governor, empowered to do so, threw out the Board of Trustees and put in a conservative board of trustees with his

the end game here is to transform this woke college into, I don't want to say a Hillsdale, but just a good liberal arts college, not something that's hell-bent on turning your children and grandchildren into communists.

So

the new president,

I forget his first name, Corcoran.

He's the former Speaker of the House

in Florida.

They invited Scott Atlas to give a talk.

And here's what happened.

Scott Atlas was heckled at

the commencement.

Hey, it's still a leftist school.

They got a board of trustees that's become conservative, but the student body's still woke.

If you don't mind me, Victor, here's what Scott said.

And I think it leads into the next part on DeSantis and Trump.

Scott Atlas said: Under two administrations, Trump and Biden, the United States' management of the pandemic was a failure in deaths per million against the worst compared to all our peer nations.

A straight line of increase in deaths per day from March 1st, 2020 through April April 2022.

Two full years, no change in the slope of that line, even after the vaccine became available on December 16th, 2020.

Now, this is back to the reporting.

My right says, such brutal honesty drew loud booze from the crowd.

Toward the end of the speech, students eventually drowned out Atlas, shouting, wrap it up.

Ironically, this happened as Atlas encouraged his audience to save their country by committing themselves to the truth.

And here's the final thing I'll read, Scott Atlas.

I'm quoting him.

We desperately need leadership that unites, not divides.

Leaders with a moral compass, who know right from wrong, who believe in strong family values, leaders who are not afraid to defend our precious freedoms, America's hard-earned freedoms that uniquely provide opportunity, sought by millions the world over, leaders with integrity, or this country as an ethical society, as a virtuous society, as a free and diverse society, is in serious trouble.

So, Victor,

Scott's your pal.

We've talked about him before on the show.

You had him on a special podcast.

I think that's, he gave a great speech.

And I'll shut up in half a minute.

It layers into DeSantis and COVID, because obviously Scott's,

where he was a warrior, was on the true effects of the shutdown, the lockdowns.

Anyway, After DeSantis announced this past week that he was running for president, Donald Trump attacked him, and he attacked him in part many ways.

In one way, he was saying Florida's record on COVID was one of the worst in the nation's.

And DeSantis punched back.

He was on the Glenn Beck radio show, and he said Trump handed the nation over to Fauci, which I think is

quite a punch.

And

it is true.

It was handed over to him, although not intentionally handed over.

Anyway, Victor, we have this college.

We have DeSantis Trump.

We have Scott Atlas.

Big ball here.

What are your thoughts on all this?

Well,

there's so many issues here.

The first issue is

the left

has now

formally

and de facto redefined free speech as heckling.

And this is happening at every campus.

And administrators won't stop it because they feel that you can interrupt somebody and heckle.

I should say, excuse me, not somebody, people on the conservative side.

If a bunch of conservative students from a review, let's say Stanford Review, went into a climate change public lecture and went up to the podium and screamed and yelled and said, I hope your daughter's right, they would be expelled.

Let's get that clear.

And they should.

But this is an asymmetrical practice.

But heckling now to the left is their new fad of free speech.

So they thought they can.

with impunity, scream and yell and ruin the graduation ceremonies for other people, which they did with impunity, which they did.

So that's the first thing that's going on.

The second is there's been a lot of research this year.

And just this week, a study came out, I think it was a guy from the University of Edinburgh with an American colleague, and they did a meta-analysis of all global accounts.

I don't mean accounts, but scholarly studies of the lockdown,

of the lockdowns.

And they came to the conclusion that

a complete lockdown and mask wearing, in terms of deaths per year from any cause, did nothing.

In other words, if you locked down your entire country or you opened it up like Sweden and you looked at the number of excess deaths per year, there were no more excess deaths in Sweden.

And in fact, Sweden had a lot of less excess deaths.

That was number one.

Number two corollary, and we had a scholar at Stanford at the Hoover Institution that studied extensively the effect on education.

And the meta-analysis of these studies show that depriving children of two years,

two formative years, and their early education is not recoverable for years, for years.

And in the case of high school and college, it will affect the country as this kind of like a rat in the snake as it works its way through.

And three, there's been a lot of studies that

spousal abuse, alcohol abuse, increased

incidence of cancer from misscreenings, suicide, they've all gone up.

And four,

the George Floyd riots, which I think did more to damage this country than anything since 9-11.

That was a product in part, not all, but in part because of the paranoia, fear of COVID.

Shouldn't say paranoia because there was a legitimate fear, but locking that entire economy down and doing it selectively, selectively.

And by that, I mean, if you go out and demonstrate in May and June, excuse me, early June of 2020, and you're breaking the curfew and you're not wearing a mask, and you're contrary to all the tenets of the lockdowns and quarantine, But you say you're marching for black lives.

You will get 1,100 health care professionals to say that that's more important for your mental health than the worry about all the idiots who are locked in their house following the quarantine.

So all of that together, that

unequal

application of the quarantine, it was a downside.

It was terrible.

It did damage.

And we know that's true.

You know how we know it's true?

Nobody's taking credit for it.

Anthony Fauci shut the country down and used to brag.

You don't see Anthony Fauci today saying, I want to hold a press conference.

There's a lot of erroneous information, misinformation, disinformation going around there.

And it suggests that my lockdowns, my quarantines, my mask wearing, my suggestions you wear two masks, my suggestions you get three boosters, all of that.

did not mitigate the effects of the virus.

That's just crazy.

There's no evidence.

He doesn't do that.

What does he do in state jack?

instead he says there's been a lot of misinformation around that i somehow played a prominent role in shutting down the economy and quarantining the whole country and and suggested that you know two masks were better than one i don't remember me ever doing that so nobody is taking credit for it and that should always tell somebody that

The policy, even if it was well-meaning, was disastrous for the mental health and the sanity and the stability of the United States.

Just the Zoom culture, just the Zoom culture that arose.

When you walk down

any major downtown, just go into Los Angeles or San Francisco here in the West Coast at peak commute time, they're empty.

That was a result of the lockdown.

The riots were the result of the lockdown.

A lot of these pathologies were.

And I don't think we're going to recover for years.

And the people who advocated it will

take ownership.

So now we end to the third ripple, and that is DeSantis

and Trump.

I don't understand,

and I wrote a book called The Case for Trump.

I don't understand what Trump's strategy is in attacking DeSantis on the lockdowns.

And when he said DeSantis had a horrible record

of deaths, well, the only way you can calibrate deaths

from COVID is by deaths per 100,000 or per capita.

And even if you didn't adjust, Jack, for the fact that elderly people were the most prone to die and per capita, there was the most elderly people were in places like

Arizona or Florida.

That was not true what he said.

He didn't have the third or fourth.

I mean, there were states like, you know, Arizona.

I think it had the highest number of deaths per 100,000.

West Virginia, New Mexico, Alabama, Tennessee,

Kentucky, New Jersey.

And if you, you know, if you keep going,

it was not that much different than Georgia.

New York was, I think, 398,

and Florida was 403 deaths per 100,000.

There was no difference, but there was a difference.

And that is Florida kept its economy open.

It grew.

It brought hundreds of thousands of people kept arriving to go to Florida.

They wouldn't have done that if it was completely locked down.

It was criticized.

The people who are criticizing DeSantis, this is what I don't understand about Trump.

He's criticizing DeSantis for shutting things down.

I guess initially, when DeSantis, for the first three weeks, it was, you know,

stop the

epidemic or flatten the curve, so to speak.

Everybody did.

But after that, people were going to what they called the free state of Florida because it was more open and he was getting criticized for that.

Remember, they were saying he's going to kill everybody.

They had that ridiculous.

Killed by Trump.

Yeah.

Remember, they had that.

crazy guy that was dressed up as black with a black hoodie and a scythe walking along the beach to remind everybody that you were going to die in Florida because it was open.

It's nuts.

I remember going in 2020 to Florida a couple of times.

It was wide open.

And

why would Donald Trump then attack a place where he lived where he knew that?

And DeSantis says, well, you get,

I have empathy for Donald Trump because when the epidemic broke out,

Who do you bring out?

I mean, he thought, I guess everybody did, that Anthony Fauci was nonpartisan, that Berks was nonpartisan, that the left wasn't really promoting the lockdown for purposes other than health, but to destroy the economy of a sure-to-be-elected Donald Trump, which they were.

So he brings these characters out and they're around him and they counsel him.

to do all of this stuff against his instincts.

So he does it for three weeks and then they say, look, it flattened the curve or something.

and they continue and continue and the media and he feels that if he were to buck them uh he would have a public relations disaster i don't know what the reason was i'm just giving you a rationale but the point i'm trying to make is the record is clear donald trump was an advocate of a much stringer quarantine and lockdown than was ron de santis just a fact and the number of people per hundred thousand who died in Florida was roughly around where New Jersey or New York was of a similarly or not too different from California, a similarly populated state with one big difference.

Florida has the most elderly people per capita of any state, retirement community, and they were the most vulnerable.

And yet, A, they kept the economy open, they grew, they had low unemployment, good GDP, and people flocking there.

And B, they did not lose any more than the states that were completely locked down, despite C, they had a lot of very vulnerable populations.

There was nobody sending active COVID patients into rest homes like Andrew Como's 15,000 who died in New York.

Didn't happen in Florida.

So

I don't know.

I don't understand

what Trump is doing there.

And it brings up this larger question.

We talked a little bit about Sammy, about the strategies of of both candidates as we get into

the fierce primary, now that we,

primary contention, is now that we have two declared candidates.

It seems to me

that

there should be some type of red line.

That is, Donald Trump attacks DeSantis up to a point.

That is,

you don't completely mock him.

You don't distort the, and Ron DeSantis criticizes up to a point.

So I have a list of check, check, check.

Is Ron DeSantis personally attacking Donald Trump?

I can't say, is he making fun of his name?

Is he making fun of his physicality?

Is he suggesting

he was guilty in any of these crazy frauds?

No, he's not.

Is Donald Trump doing that?

Yes, he is.

He's the Ron DeSantis.

He pictures, you know, maybe he was a groomer, all of this stuff.

Next category.

Are each of them

defending their record

and attacking the other record?

Okay.

Ron DeSantis did not bring up the fact that Donald Trump outsourced the quarantine and the lockdown to Fauci and Burks.

And he did that out of politeness.

originally, because he did not want, I'm not, I haven't talked to him, of course, but I don't know why he didn't, but I'm glad he didn't, because I think Donald Trump was under coercion and pressure, and he didn't get a lot of support from Republicans, a few that said, don't listen to those guys.

But what turned out to be a disastrous policy took shape under Trump's advisors.

And that's why in that graduation address, Scott, Scott Atlas, Jack, he didn't say

the policies of the Biden administration have been disastrous.

He said the policies of the Trump and Biden administration, speaking as somebody who was in the Trump administration, the Trump administration, what he was saying was, I was there in the White House.

I pleaded with Trump and his advisors not to listen to these idiots, Fauci and Burks, because they were going to destroy the economy and create a multitude of pathologies that would ripple through here for generations.

And I wasn't listened to.

And so when Donald Trump says that Florida is one of the three or four worst states, and that's not true, then he gets the retaliation from DeSantis, which begs the question.

I think what we're seeing now is a strategy that Ron DeSantis knows that it is not going to help his nomination

attempt,

nor should he be nominated the general election if he starts attacking Trump personally or unfairly or even fairly, but savagely.

However,

if Donald Trump attacks Ron DeSantis unfairly and gives him an opening for a counter assault,

then people will think, well, he got attacked on that.

He's studying the record, which finally,

you know, begs the final question: well,

why would Donald Trump attack something,

somebody, something, some issue where there was not support for it when he knows that that would invite a counterassault where he was

where he was?

So when he says Ron DeSantis, you know, on the budget, well,

Ron DeSantis just went back and said, you spent seven to eight trillion dollars in four years.

You out-borrowed Barack Obama.

And,

you know, and

why he does that, I don't know.

But Donald Trump,

when you look at that four years,

it was very successful.

And where it was not successful, physical discipline, building the new section of the wall,

it was because of, I think, legislative realities, getting rid of Obamacare as promised and replacing it.

John McCain sabotaged that,

or bringing in lunatics as appointments like Scaramucci, that type of appointment, or all those people in all these cabinets that kind of turned on Trump.

And all of those cases, you can make an argument that Donald Trump, given his brothers, would have built the wall if he hadn't had internal betrayals and concentrated judicial activism to tie him up in the courts.

Or you can argue that he listened to a lot of Keynesian economics

experts who said, you know, during the COVID lock, we got to borrow and print a lot of money.

Whatever it is, there's a context there.

But if you're going to go attack DeSantis, then there's no context as far as he's concerned.

He just turns around and says, well, I don't care what the reason was.

You borrowed $7 trillion.

You were a big spender.

Republicans don't do that.

I don't care what the reason was.

You built very few miles of the new wall.

You fixed the old wall.

good, but you didn't do the new one.

I don't know what the reason was, but you locked down the whole damn country.

And that's so

I think Trump's advisors are making a terrible mistake.

Every time they attack him, DeSantis personally, or something, they should ask themselves, what is going to be the return fire?

And where are we vulnerable?

And wherever we're vulnerable, we're not going to get into those areas because it'll just invite an attack from him.

And right.

I don't, and somebody's going to say, well, sound political advice, Victor.

Well, somebody's listening, say he's 30 points down.

Well, he's 30 points down because he hadn't declared his candidacy.

And there's going to be a lot of people lined up behind him, and they're not just big Jeb Bush donors, believe me.

Because I get calls from them or emails from them constantly.

And Trump's people are this idea you strangled DeSantis in the cradle, I don't think is good advice.

I think you debate him on the issues and you say that basically there's a strategy here both have to, that both are employing.

Donald Trump's strategy should be,

I have been in the White House for four years.

He has not.

I created the MAGA agenda and reformed the Republican Party.

He agreed that I did that because he

was elected governor on the MAGA agenda the first time, thanks to me.

I value loyalty.

He was my student.

Therefore, he can run and I'll be happy to support him.

In fact,

after I'm president for four years, I will be willing to pass the baton to him.

That should be his main efforts in criticism.

And DeSantis

should be

wealth.

We all agree the MAGA agenda within parameters is the proper recalibration of the Republican Party, but we have an age issue in our hands, whether we like it or not.

Joe Biden is 80.

We're looking at Diane Feinstein, what we see there.

We saw Pelosi.

Donald Trump will be 78 years old.

He'll be in his 80s.

And why not get fresh leadership that would be more muscular with this agenda?

That's one.

And then a second tact is: I get

even.

I don't get mad.

So yes, Letita James is on a vendetta.

Yes,

Alvin Bragg is on a vendetta.

Yes, Willis is on a vendetta.

Yes, Jack Smith is on a vendetta.

But who gave him the exposure?

Because with the left, you have no margin of error.

You've got to be more holy and sanctimonious and clean and everything than Caesar's wife.

You can't give any indication.

And so when they try to go after me, and they will,

they will have a less easy time.

It'll be far more difficult.

There will be no strippers in my past, that kind of stuff.

That's the second argument that he gets.

We don't like the word technocrat, but he gets things done rather than talks about it.

That's the second thing.

And the third is we've got to win elections.

The Republican Party hasn't won 51%

since George H.W.

Bush beat Michael Dekakis Dekakis in 1988.

It's lost seven out of the last eight

popular votes.

Trump came in with the House and the Senate and the presidency, and

we lost in the 2018.

We lost that margin of error.

In 2020,

we lost everything.

And so we Trump lost the popular vote in 2016.

He lost a popular vote in 2020.

He got killed in the 2018.

The 2020 were a disappointment.

We should have had a big margin in the House.

We didn't get the Senate.

That's a legitimate form of attack.

And he can extend that to all of them.

And as I said with Sammy, I mean,

George H.W.

Bush lost in 1992 to Bill Clinton.

And he lost in 19,

Bob Dole lost in 1996.

And George W.

Bush was elected, but he lost the popular vote in 2000.

And he barely got 50.3,

barely squeaked by a mediocre and EP candidate like John Kerry in 2004.

And John McCain got smeared in 2008.

And Mitt Romney got beat in 2012 when he should have won.

And we didn't get the popular vote in 2016.

And we didn't get it in 2020.

But I win elections.

That should be

his third strategy.

And then that would be a good debate.

Each of them have three strategies.

Go to it.

But this idea that you blame Ron DeSantis for the free state of Florida, that he somehow has a terrible record on COVID when your own advisor, Scott Atlas, is down there at New College giving an address where he faults both the Trump administration and the Biden administration for not listening to a policy that he advocated, but which Ron DeSantis adopted doesn't make sense.

Yeah, and it's fair to say Scott Hatless has been proven right by the evidence.

And the more that he's proven right, the more he's hated.

Right.

And all of those students that turned his back on them, if you asked them

graduating students with bachelor's degrees, if you said to them, you turned your back on him,

you heckled him, you said, wrap it up, and you ruined the graduation ceremony.

But I want to ask you a question.

Would you please, in one minute, summarize the Burke's

Fauci attitude toward COVID and how what the social health policy was?

And would you summarize Scott Atlas?

They could not do it.

None of them could.

They don't know anything.

They just sit out there yelling because they think Scott Atlas is a right-wing guy now.

And Fauci is some kind of left-wing heartthrob.

Fauci is going to go down in history.

you can see it in his face.

There's key moments when that guy knows he's in trouble.

I don't mean, you know,

I don't mean criminally exposed.

I don't mean

right now he's going to go broke, but he looks at his legacy and somewhere, some place,

someone is going to tell the truth with the expertise to prove it.

And they're going to say to Fauci,

you

sent money and expertise and know-how

on

enhancing viruses, and you deliberately skirted U.S.

law through your partner, EchoHealth.

And that money and the expertise, maybe even the instrumentation, ended up in Wuhan.

And you know, that was a leak from that lab.

And you tried to cover it up with your cronies at the CDC and the NIH, because we have the emails, redacted though they be.

And most of your policy then was based on misinformation and misleading the American people that this was a pangolin bat hybrid, but you would never, ever tell the truth because you, not us, you felt it was self-incriminating.

And you secondly adopted a series of policies, which you yourself in the past, in past administrations, you had said would not work.

And why did you change your idea about masking and complete lockdowns and quarantines and all of that?

Was it COVID was more dangerous in H1N1 or Ebola?

Whatever it is, give us a reason why you changed, but you did change.

And now that we enacted and you got your way, and we've learned that it did enormous damage beyond COVID to the country,

why won't you man up to it?

And that's so much exposure on his part that I think it's going to, his legacy

terrible.

Does he want to say, I thrilled, I thrilled having the power to do these things, which i think is the essence of of an honest explanation by the man who was uh essentially the venture capitalist for for covet you know through through the those grants hey victor we have um we have a little time left we're going to take a break and we come back at your thoughts about uh quickly i would say about new college as a transition and a forthcoming college in the process of getting launched, the University of Austin, and then take a few minutes to have a Memorial Day, a proper Memorial Day remembrance.

And we'll do that after this final important message.

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

This is Jack Fowler.

I apologize for if you can hear it, the snoring dog in the background, but you know, better George is snoring than barking.

So, Victor,

the previous uh conversation got off the ground by talking about new college and i mentioned what ron de santis did um just quickly if you have any thoughts about the uh virtues or not of him doing that in this place and then also

any thoughts you might have uh about the university of austin which is percolating and it's i'm sure i'm going to get his name wrong but pano canelos who is the he's the president he's the former president of the St.

John, University of St.

John, which is one of the great classical books colleges.

I don't know if this is the one in New Mexico or the one in

Maryland, but

to me, as conservative, someone looking for our friend Dan Mahoney talks about a parallel polis, the need to create alternate institutions.

It's hard to recapture an institution like DeSantis is trying to do in Florida with new College, but creating a new institution.

Anyway, both are inspiring.

I find it.

And what are your thoughts about this, Victor?

Well,

they're a little different.

Ron DeSantis was taking New College, which kind of billed itself as an experimental, sort of a UC Santa Cruz type of college as Santa Cruz was envisioned.

And then he recalibrated it.

In other words, he rescued it from its woke kidnapping.

But there was the extent, there was the infrastructure there.

And so now the left is angry because he did what they did.

And his attitude, remember, is

that when you take a political,

a politicized, a weaponized position or issue to nullify it, you have to.

get rid of the person or you have to get rid of the idea.

And then you have to assume the left will say, well, you're doing what we do.

No, you're restoring it back to the middle.

And that's what that's a hard argument to make.

So, on critical race theory and all that, he said, We're not going to teach that.

And I said, Well, you're telling us what we can teach, and you said that we can't teach.

And then you have to make the argument and said, Well, you're not teaching history, you're teaching propaganda.

So, I'm not going to allow you to teach propaganda.

And if you want to come back and offer another type of course that's on the history with a nice chapter on slavery or Jim Quill, we'll do that.

But see, it's a harder argument to make.

So, he's being attacked because he's stalking

New College with people who are not going to allow the left to take it over.

And

that somewhat gives him a little bit more negative press coverage from the liberal media.

University of Austin

is different because they are starting from scratch.

There is no university there.

And

they've got a very, you know, very prestigious group of people.

I have some colleagues that are involved in it, Neil Ferguson, his wife, A.

Ann Hersey.

I think Larry Summers is in there.

I don't know if Steven Pinker left or not.

And their idea is to create a new university from the ground up.

But when you start looking at the endowments of even small liberal arts colleges with enrollments, maybe of 160, 1800 people or 2,000, I'm talking about Brown or Smith or Wesleyan or Wellesley Wellesley or Kenyon College.

You got multi-billion dollar endowments

to run those budgets.

And so

will people

give

very wealthy people, let's face it, will they give millions and millions of dollars to fund that?

Are they going to get some donor who's worth 50 billion and gives them a billion dollars?

I don't know, but they're going to need money like that to be a flagship university.

And

it's going to be very, very difficult to raise money.

And which

begs another question, is this the right strategy

creating a university ex milo versus DeSantis taking over one?

And so we go back and forth.

Are they mutually exclusive?

No.

Should you found new campuses everywhere?

Or should you say, you know what?

They don't own Stanford University.

They hijacked it.

The alumni and some of the well-meaning faculty and students could have a right to take it back.

And that's what we're going to do.

So

do you just abdicate or do you start a new one?

I think you can do both at the same time.

And this is an example of a two-pronged approach.

I have a few, and you can see that

New College will be much,

I think, much more quickly a conservative or disinterested college and will be up and running more than University of Austin, just because

it's so hard to do that.

I know that Hillsdale College is

they have satellite learning centers, but every time it's been broached to form a new campus,

if you look at the Hillsdale infrastructure,

what Larry Arndt did at Hillsdale, he built a billion dollars.

I mean, I'm not going to be too critical of his predecessor, but I went to Hillsdale in the 1990s and spoke.

And that college is

BA

and AA before ARN and after ARN.

Because before ARN, there were subterranean classrooms that were moldy.

There was brick, brick, they were ugly.

The faculty was overworked and underpaid.

And after Larry Arn, the campus is stunning.

It's beautiful.

It's got one of the largest cathedral churches on, not just on campus, anywhere.

It's got all these programs.

It's got a world-class marksmanship program.

They've got world-class facilities.

It's a pleasure to teach in the classrooms.

And

then it's got almost a billion-dollar endowment.

And so, how do you replicate that?

If it was to replicate it, it would cost a couple of billion dollars.

And that's why it's hard even for Hillsdale to replicate that.

And of course,

thomas aquinas did that but they got an existing school they did when it expanded in new england yeah so if you had to build all that from scratch yeah that's uh and then the other thing about hillsdale is its model of not taking federal funds i don't think these other court these other campuses are going to follow that just simply because it's not just

Well, we're not going to take federal money.

It's

we, the federal government, are going to go after you if you do that, because that means we can't get your hands on our budget.

We can't have affirmative action.

We can't go into your books and see what you're doing.

We can't mandate an affirmative action, all of that stuff.

And what does it mean?

It means they're vindictive.

So it's not just, well, Hillsdale doesn't take money from the federal government.

It means that a guy with a GI bill can't go to Hillsdale and use his GI bill.

A guy with a federally guaranteed loan can't go in there with a federally guaranteed, They're that petty.

It's any

remote role of the federal government in financing a student or a scholarship, they say no, you cannot go to Hillsdale and use that money.

So the government's not neutral.

It's an active enemy of Hillsdale, and yet it survives.

And the $64,000 question is

how many Hillsdales A can exist and how many can be well run like that?

And that's a tough question because

Hillsdale raises anywhere from $200 to $300 million a year, well above what they need because they're in this massive rebuilding program, infrastructure, endowment.

The faculty have a very reasonable teaching load.

They're very well paid now.

They're excellent.

I'm just, I'm not trying to give a.

Right.

You know, being very realistic.

Yeah, I've been there.

I've been there 21 years and I go there.

I used to go there five weeks.

I'll probably go there just a week this year.

But I went there when I was 49 years old and taught two classes, you know, five days a week for five weeks, a whole commess, three or four hours long.

And I watched the students who were wonderful then.

And I looked at the infrastructure that was okay.

But now when I go back there,

The caliber of student is, I think, superior to Stanford or any place because it's merit-based admissions and everybody wants to go there.

And I'm saying everybody, even liberal parents whose kids have 4.5s in perfect SAT, when they get turned down at Stanford or Harvard or Yale, and they do because of their skin color, they apply to Hillsdale.

Hillsdale's biggest obstacle is to...

is to retain their conservative traditional image because they're being swarmed now by people who are left-wing.

wing.

And

their attitude is, well, I'm left wing and my policies destroyed American education and they boomerang back on me and my kid didn't get into where I wanted.

So I'll go to Hillsdale because I know it's safe.

It won't be PC.

They won't use racial discrimination and it will have a rigorous competitive curricula and wonderful faculty who are scholars.

But I'm still left wing and they have to be careful because that would ruin their

they They can't censor a person just on their politics, but they have to be very careful that they don't bring in a lot of left-wing bicostal people.

But my point of all this is, it's very hard to do what Hillsdale did.

And everybody would like to see a Hillsdale medical school, law school, business school type of paradigm.

And they're doing that.

They have all sorts of

academies and curricula that they issue forth that people can adopt in private school, charter schools.

but at the university level it's very very difficult and

so we're going to see an effort increasingly either to create a new campus or to create uh

a new existing campus i mean to recalibrate or reboot it and we're going to see efforts to to see if you can make a campus that you know will never turn left wing because you're never going to take any federal money and that's very hard to do.

I think the other thing we can wish for, Victor, and before we get to your Memorial Day remembrance, is that

Republican states that have Republican governors and Republican legislatures and have control over their state university systems would make some efforts to de-wocify those colleges under their control.

Well, you're absolutely true.

What I don't understand is,

so New College now is in Florida and it's protected by the government there and the University of Austin will get a very favorable reception from the Texas legislature and the governor

but Hillsdale College is in enemy territory the state of Michigan is it goes after it all the time it's a it's a blue state and it does not like Hillsdale for obvious reasons and yet it thrives so

it's if you were going to found a college you can't go to a blue state, supposedly.

But maybe Hillsdale can teach people how to do it.

I don't know.

The only problem with Hillsdale is trying to get actually get there.

Maybe someday there'll be an airport.

Well, I had a dream.

We had a, you know, that was a very controversial proposal, but I won't mention any names involved.

But there was a couple in the United States near where I live that had an estate

on the white waters of the Kings River, River, one of the most beautiful spots in the world,

hundreds, thousands of acres, and they were willing to partner with Hillsdale and create a second campus.

But the problem was

that once you deal with California and you look down the road and then you try to replicate a mother campus in Toto in California, then you come up with, well, we have to start from scratch with infrastructure.

We have to build dorms.

We have to build classrooms.

We have no income coming in for tuition.

We've got to then have an endowment for the satellite.

And then when we look for help,

we look at patterns where they've existed.

Well, there was the St.

John's in Maryland, Annapolis, but then what happened to the St.

John's in Santa Fe?

In other words,

there's not a record of

When you have a successful college and you replicate it, does the replication compete with the mother campus or does it add?

And nobody really knows.

But anyway, the point I'm making is the cost factor was so enormous to create from nothing that both the landowners and Hillsdale decided to put it on hold.

Right.

I'm hoping one day it might happen, but it's,

I, I, I was, I was involved just

in the negotiations and I don't fault anybody.

It was just a, it was just a, I had no idea how what, and that's why I'm very sympathetic to what they're doing at University of Austin.

And

there's other places that are trying to do it as well.

There's just so many obstacles and money, money is just going out the door before you get any coming back in.

Well, we'll see on our next podcast, Victor, we'll talk about

some journalists' thoughts on California turning red.

Maybe that would be the precedent for

conservatisms,

academic conservatism spreading in California.

All right, Victor, we just have a few minutes left, and I would like to, again, I talked about your book, The Second World.

Wars, and the preface to the book begins this, with this.

The more than three dozen missions carried out by my father, William F.

Hansen, and a B-29 bomber over Japan were a world apart from his cousin's experience.

Victor Hansen's war ended in a fatal May 19th, 1945, rendezvous with a Nambu machine gun nest on the crest of Sugarloaf Hill with the 6th Marine Division on Okinawa.

Both fought in a way foreign to their other cousin, Robert Hansen, who worked as a

logistician in Iran, ferrying American military freight.

to the Russians.

That's how your very important book begins, Victor, mentioning and essentially a tribute

to your family member who you're named after.

Would you, would you, and I think it's fitting, you know, it's Memorial Day.

This is the day we remember those who

paid the ultimate sacrifice, gave the ultimate sacrifice, gave their lives for their country.

Would you tell us about him?

And if you don't mind, I know there's a story about someone who served with Victor Hansen and a ring.

Well, you know,

I was born in 53 and I'm 69.

So my early years were,

I was born eight years after the end of World War II, and then another 10 years.

I was 18.

That's the same distance today as you're looking back to 9-11.

So it was very, everything was saturated in those years with World War II.

I would get up on a Sunday morning and they'd have Bull Halsey narrate.

uh submarine documentaries every sunday morning you know i don't know what was called up in the deep or something but it was a wonderful series about what the U.S.

Navy Submariner Corps or TV shows would be combat or the gallant men or 12 o'clock high.

And

movies were the longest day.

I think that was 62 or what.

So everything was saturated with World War II.

It just was a

360-degree 24-7 experience.

And personally, when I would have Christmas or Thanksgiving, we would have these extended families because they were, you know, they were farm-like.

And

here would be my father, and they didn't like to talk, but, you know, they would talk about World War II,

not to brag on each person's service, but to compare stories.

So

he would say something

about,

you know, flying

40 times over Tokyo in a B-29 or

Korea or mining in the harbors of Yokohama.

But 40 combat missions and then emergency landings in Iwo or

people in his crew.

And then

my aunt's husband, who was up in the Aleutians, would say, well, this is what it was like and how cold it was.

And he got accidentally shot in the arm by a soldier.

And then he would tell that story.

And then Bob Hansen, a guy from Kingsburg, they would say, well, you know, Bob was doing convoys to bring in Russian to give Linlease material and driving trucks and supervising to get the stuff through Iran into Russia.

Then my mom would say, oh, my poor first cousin, Hope, was killed with a bullet to the head, you know, right after Normandy.

And then suddenly, you know, up with Belden Cather would come out, his brother, and he had dinghy fever in the Philippines campaign, was disabled.

So everywhere you taught, and then my grandfather, the old Swede Frank Hansen, would say, say, Oh, wow, you know, you boys had it really rough.

You had it so much rougher than I did, you know, with my Lewis machine gun in World War I.

And they'd say, No, no, granddad, you know, you got your lungs eaten out with phosphine gas.

We didn't suffer like that.

It was that way, it was just all the time.

But

which never was mentioned was that

Victor Hansen,

who

was

my father's first cousin, my grandfather, great-grandfather, had four boys, and they were all kind of big Swedes in a little town called Kingsburg.

And

two of the boys, Frank Hansen and Victor Sr., were, you know, they were, Victor was blind.

He got blinded in a sulfur machine accident.

His wife died during childbirth.

So their son only had one son, who was kind of the same size, a little bigger than my dad, was 6'3 and 200 pounds.

He was about 6'4 and 2'10.

They were tight ends.

They went to University of Pacific and played football, graduated there, and then they decided to join the Marines together as officers in this new 6th Marine Division, which was supposedly going to take a large number of people with bachelor's degree and incorporate all of the information learned by the 1st Marine Division

from

Guadalcanal, et cetera.

So they sent them to Guadalcanal to be trained and everything.

But as I in an earlier broadcast, something happened with, I don't know what it was.

They wouldn't speak about it.

Someone hit an officer.

Someone took the rank.

And my dad got transferred out to a certain death in B-29s or so, he was told.

And then Victor, who was basically my dad's brother, they were that close

because he was, again, he had no parents and he was a single child.

He was kind of raised by both my grandfather and my grandfather's father, Nels Hansen.

So anyway,

he went through the entire Okinoa campaign, April's Fool's Day.

They landed and the Marine Corps, as you remember, it went up to the north of the island.

They cleaned it, cleared it, and the army got

was going southward.

And people failed to realize that Japanese strategy, as they had learned after Tara and Iwo, was not to defend the beaches, but to dig in.

They had a year to do it, two stories, three stories down in solid coral with cement, reinforced concrete cement and machine gun nest everywhere.

So, and to seed them the northern part.

So, the army got in trouble.

They've sent down the 6th Marine Division

and

it got down there in early May, about a month afterwards.

And suddenly, Okinawa, the headlines were, if you look at, and I looked at, you know, and I wrote about it, early April, Marine Storm Okinawa, conquest soon to

meat grinder.

And suddenly all hell broke loose.

The fleet couldn't had to back off because there were thousands of kamikaze raids.

It was the largest loss of life in any single battle of the U.S.

Navy.

5,000 seamen were killed.

17 major ships were sunk.

aircraft carriers were disabled.

It really affected the campaign.

And nobody had really seen kamikazes at that level because they were only 350 miles in Japan.

And they were kind of like a cruise missile.

You take a human brain.

It was much more complex than a V V1 rocket as far as navigation.

And you put a 500-pound bomb and a zero could still go 300 miles and put it about eight feet above the water.

How can you stop it?

And it just wrecked heavy.

And then, of course, there were no Marine senior officers.

And when they got to the Shuri Line, they said, we got to go around them.

We have to have amphibious.

No, no, no, no.

You Marines are, you know, you're going to go head on.

So they sent the 6th Marine Division head-on against the Shuri Line.

The army couldn't break it.

And they ended up at a place called Sugarloaf Hill, the final last redoubt of the Japanese.

And

his regiment

was very successful, and they took Sugarloaf Hill, and he was killed in the last hours of the last day of that successful storming.

And they weren't able to bring his body down for a day.

I only say that, I think I mentioned it before because

I wrote an essay in National Review about it.

But

when I started to write about it, I wrote an article about it, and I got his commanding officer, I think Robert Sherrill, who was 93, he wrote me a letter and enclosed.

He said there was another person, another person wrote and said they had called my grandfather from San Diego when they came back with his personal effects in 1945, I think,

December, when they finally got the division, what was left of it.

And the 6th Division was rendered

combat insolvent.

It was no longer combat ready after that.

16,000 people.

They had a blend of 1st Marine veterans in there.

And the 1st Division was there as well.

Read about it with the Old Breed by E.B.

Sledge or Goodbye Darkness by William Chancellor.

Manchester, a little bit less reliable, but it destroyed the 6th Marine Division.

And nobody in my family apparently wanted to talk to him.

And so he never got some of his effects.

I grew up, when I grew up, they named me after him.

So they gave me all of his stuff.

I remember going down to a little tiny farmhouse in Kingsburg, and my dad handed me all his stuff: Louisville Slugger, baseball mitt, baseball hat, baseball spikes, briefcase, books,

a couple of leather jackets, all from Victor Hansen that were sealed, that my grandfather had sealed in this box.

And

in any case, they sent me a ring that they had cut off his finger, and that person had had it from 1945 until 2001.

And he was still alive and sent it to me.

I won't get into the names or details, but I still have that.

It was a, and I'm a classicist, so who would think that what would be the odds that it would be a Roman soldier, a military, an emulation of a military ring from a Roman legionary?

But anyway, it was, it affected that, all these discussions about World War II, but it was always

you didn't speak of it.

And then weird things would happen my entire life.

Like all of a sudden in my 40s, a woman about 75 showed up at my house.

And my father had passed away, and

she had been his high school girlfriend.

And her husband had died, and she just came over all the time.

And she would sit down in the house and she would talk about their first date.

They're very innocent, you know, in those days.

And she would say, this, she wrote this letter and that thing.

And then she would hand me a letter.

And then I would show her the letters they gave me.

uh from him and

then one day she said we need a monument to your whole family.

They all got sort of wiped out by World War II, or your grandfather was gashed, your father had some problems,

Victor was killed.

So in Kingsburg, California, in the park, there's something called Hanson Corner.

It's not because they were just, there was a lot of military veterans, but that was their homestead.

And when my great-grandfather, my grandfather

gave that land with his brothers to the city of Kingsburg, where the homestead had been.

And on the corner of that land, there was a stone marker now.

It says it has a little story of the family.

But

it was quite an experience to hear about all the things.

When I wrote about Okinawa in Ripples of Battle, I got all of his letters out.

And

it was all pretty amazing about

what a generation.

And he wrote to my grandfather and to my great-grandfather, his grandfather, and he'd say, dear grandpa, dear Uncle Frank, guess what?

Gee whiz, I'm training in Camp Lejeune.

It's so exciting.

And then the next letter, we're out in Guadalcanal.

All those boys who died secured the land for studying jungle.

I've gone from 220 to 180 pounds.

Dear Uncle Frank, is there any way you can get me a 1911 semi-automatic pistol?

They say you have a greater chance to live, but they're so expensive.

Here's the address of a place in Fresno.

You can find one and draws a picture of it.

And then next one, is there any chance that,

or, you know, I'm very sorry I didn't send my $50 this week that I promised I'd send back to the family.

I had to buy special boots for the campaign.

It's pretty amazing.

I only mentioned this on Memorial Day because We have this great chain of American civics, and we cut it off somewhere around 2000 to 2010, and now we're completely disconnected with Memorial Day.

By that, I mean, if I were to go onto the Stanford campus where I work, and I would just happen to bump into a student, and I would say to them, could you just tell me

what happened at Okinawa, or could you describe what was Pearl Harbor?

I'm not talking about a high school.

I'm talking about a flagship.

I don't think people could tell me that.

And

if you said you think everybody should salute the flag or have a repertoire of american songs god bless america america the beautiful no they would say no but yet and this is what the killer is

the whole idea of free speech

dissent capitalist economy, you walk through the Stanford parking lot and you see, I'm not kidding you, you see Lexis, Mercedes, Tesla.

These are not 50-year-olds.

These are 18, 19, 20-year-olds.

This whole material bounty, freedom, affluence, leisure, it was all predicated on certain type of people

that, and in Victor's case, they had no money at all.

I mean, he was an orphan, basically.

And to take somebody who just won a scholarship and just graduated and send him to a god-awful place like Okinawa.

Read about E.B.

Sledge's description of what it was like there.

And then they die for all of this stuff.

And then people don't even know anything about

D-Day or the balls or anything.

They can't tell you about Juneteenth, but they can't tell you about...

Yeah, they can tell you, much less going back to what happened at Gettysburg or Shiloh or Antietam.

They don't know anything.

And they take it for granted.

And it's really sad because I don't know if they were ever going to re-inculcate that because it's not that they're just ignorant, but they're ignorant in a very pernicious pathological sense.

That if you say to them, you're ignorant because you should know about this, they say, well, that was just a racist white war or something like that.

And they're, you know, I had this, I'll just finish by, I had a student once, I taught a class in the history of war,

and I mentioned the Hiroshima campaign, Moshiba bombing, and I was not pro, let's drop nuclear bombs on people.

But I said, these were the reasons not to bomb Hiroshima with a nuclear weapon, and these were the reasons to do it, and you can decide.

And this person goes, Well, they just did it because they were Asians.

And I said, Are you sure about that?

You don't think they wanted to stop the war?

And I would say to them, They dropped it August 6th,

and Okinawa was not just declared occupied occupied and the campaign over in late June, but not until July 12th when they made the final.

So you're saying six weeks later, after 50,000 Americans had been wounded and 12,000 had been killed, and Okinawa was just a fraction of the 7 million Japanese who were ready to resist the invasion, you don't think that was one of the considerations?

No.

And I said, how about this one?

That if you take the number of Chinese and Asian Australians, English Americans that were killed every day by the Japanese Imperial Army that had 2 million people under arms when the bomb was dropped, and you prorate the number of people they killed, it works out to about 20,000 a day, a day.

So maybe they wanted to stop this Japanese killing machine that was

murdering innocent civilians.

And they stopped it because after those two explosions, they surrendered and then people were not being butchered in places like Southeast Asia or the Pacific or China.

How's that?

Nothing.

He didn't know anything about that.

I don't know about that.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't think the Japanese killed people.

I don't think we did.

Oh, my gosh.

You know,

you can't, if you say to a college student today,

the one army in World War II that, in terms of killing people,

civilians and soldiers, versus how many people were lost, civilians and soldiers, what was the most lethal military?

It was the Japanese army.

Japanese army killed more civilians and

soldiers,

Chinese, Asians in general, Pacific, British, Australian, Canadian, Americans.

versus

all of the ones they lost in combat and all the people who died on the Japanese mainland, it still had the highest care-kill ratio, more than the Russian army, more than the German army, more than the American army.

People do not understand that.

So, wow, you know, you can say that the

Americans may have killed a million people in World War II.

I don't know if we did that.

I doubt that.

But the Japanese were responsible probably for 20 million dead,

15 million to 16, 15 to 16 million dead in China from 39 or even going to the United States.

Victor, I think someday a 50-question Victor Davis-Hansen test on American history would be a good thing to put forth into the world.

It's very frustrating.

It's very frustrating.

I mean, I'm an ancient historian, so I don't even, I don't even think that a student might want to know what the Battle of Marathon or Thermopylae was like, or what was the significance or, you know.

But if you don't know what Gettysburg is.

It's just, it's just, and what did we get?

And and for for junking destroying that entire legacy and knowledge of history and what it meant for the formation of the western society and Americans in particular, what do we get in exchange?

Professor Kendi,

who's a racist, or

Mr.

Mulvaney lecturing us about how many days he's transitioned to a woman on a bud commercial.

That's what we get.

So I don't know what's going to, you know, it's very important.

No society can exist long if it doesn't believe that it's exceptional, it's better than the alternative, or that it has a distinguished legacy that makes it singular.

If you're a society and you say, well, we're racist, we're sexist, we're horrible, we're horrible, we're horrible, we're horrible, the rest of the world goes, yeah, I agree with you, you're right.

And if there's no longer any reason for you to exist, then you don't exist.

Well, Barack told us, yeah, we're exceptional.

We started.

The more you get older, the more you, I'll just finish with this today.

The more you get older, when you look at who took an obscure idea of diversity and mainstreamed it as everybody who is not white now suddenly has a claim against the majority, all 30% of America.

And we are not exceptional.

And we're going to look at everything in racial terms for a change.

And we're going to reject Martin Luther King.

And we're going to go into the Middle East and say, you know, Iran is just as valid as Israel.

When you look at the whole

totality of our problems today, domestic and foreign, they can be traced right back in large part to Barack Obama.

Amen, my friend.

All right.

We got to wrap this up.

I'm sorry to say that because we should have a special show on him.

Not that we haven't talked about him a lot in the past.

Victory, at the end of these podcasts, right?

What do we do?

We thank our listeners for listening, no matter what platform they do that on.

And those in particular who listen on iTunes and Apple and can leave ratings, zero to five stars.

Many do, mostly five stars, the average of the show over now two years, 4.9 something

stars.

Thank you very much.

Those who leave comments, thank you for taking the time to do that.

And please know that we do read them all.

And here is one from outdoor painter Gwen, who writes headlines, just love VDH podcasts and writes, Victor, love these podcasts.

I do have to say that the septic system one should come with a warning, LOL.

I spent some of my youth working on a ranch.

I love when you talk about the challenges and dangers of farming.

No one understands what ranch life is really like unless they lived it.

I can relate to the memories versus the cost of upkeep.

When I look at our ranch, the orchard is long gone.

Dad had the trees pulled as the cost to spray-based

California agricultural requirements was often times more than the value of the crop.

So he pulled them, pulled them out, and ran cattle.

Thanks for these podcasts.

Love the history and your ability to relate them to today's events.

Your voice is so important.

And I look forward to learning something new with each episode.

Love your Raisin Farmer segment and your insights on all things.

Best always to you and your family.

Georgia W, that's outdoor painter Gwen.

We thank you.

Gwen, Victor, you were great today as ever.

Thanks very much for all the wisdom you shared.

Thanks to our listeners for listening.

Do visit civilthoughts.com and sign up for the free weekly email newsletter.

I, Jack Fowler, Wright, for the Center for Civil Society and American Philanthropic.

You'll love it.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.