Liberal Liabilities, Conservative Assets

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and namesake.

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

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I am going to tell you why later in this podcast.

We've got many things to discuss.

The first of them, cackle, cackle, cackle.

Victor, I'm sure our listeners would thrill to your take on the beloved former California Attorney General and Willie Brown snuggle bunny.

And we will indeed get to your assessment.

Snuggle bunny, well, you know, maybe afterwards, after the cigarette.

We'll get to your assessment of Kamala Harris right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

You know, Victor, the very same America that twice elected a black man to be president, that's Rocco Hussein Obama, for those of you who may have forgotten.

You know, that same America is racist when it comes to our cackling vice president.

Did you know that?

Here's the beginning of a daily mail story.

It's headline, Biden's ex-chief of staff claims racism and sexism are the reason Kamala Harris is so unpopular.

Here's the just quick beginning of the story.

Joe Biden's ex-chief of staff has blamed Kamala Harris's poor approval ratings on, quote, racism and sexism, end quote.

Ron Klame, who stepped down as the president's top aide in January, said her critics were guilty of prejudice towards a 58-year-old former senator from California, the longtime Democratic political consultant, said in an interview that Harris, quote, takes a lot of grief unjustifiably.

I do think sexism and racism are part of the problem.

No question about it, Clean,

said Victor.

Is it not just possible that most Americans see Kamala Harris as a hugely annoying,

cackling, empty suit?

You know,

verbiage,

She talks, it seems like it comes through a kaleidoscope.

Yeah, I mean, she's a mystery to paraphrase Churchill, she's a mystery wrapped in an enigma because

she grew up with two PhDs as parents

in or near the Stanford campus where her father was an economic, Marxist economics professor, and then her mom was a researcher from India.

And then she lived in Berkeley.

She tries to say that she was bused, but she lived in an upper class, upper middle class existence and went to canada

and then

she came back to the bay area

and as you pointed out she was shepherded along by a man that was 30 years old older who was married and he

i guess moved in with her and he got her to be senator city attorney county attorney

started her on all these boards that she had no expertise but what i'm getting at is what recommended her and the idea that when she was young, she was supposedly attractive and she was half black and half Asian and she was a woman.

And so she was an identity politics candidate.

And

yet, in those days, during the late 90s and early 2000s, when San Francisco was

sort of moving to the nexus of Silicon Valley, that when Menlo Park and Atherton, Mountain View,

Sunnyvale, San Mateo were very expensive and there was no quote unquote sophisticated restaurants and nightlife as the city.

I watched it.

You started to see people by 2006 and 2008 moving to San Francisco and they wanted protection and they wanted stability and she was a a hardcore prosecutor.

She went after black kids that were truants.

She went after marijuana possession.

Kelsey Gabbard tore her apart in the Democratic primaries of 2016, as you remember, but she got, excuse me, 2020, she got one delegate, one delegate

after spending millions of dollars.

And then she essentially sat still.

And then we had the George Floyd, that changed everything.

So we had the riots and everything.

She was very vocal.

She said she wanted to help bail out people, as she did in Minnesota that had been charged with violent demonstrations, looting.

She said, and I think it was June of 2020, right before the Democratic Convention in which she was nominated, she said, and I'm paraphrasing, but paraphrasing very quickly, carefully by memory, she said,

it's not going to stop.

Nor should its students should it stop.

It's going to go all the way to Election Day.

And she was essentially, I know her defenders and her, you know, the politicized check factors and polyfactors, all that crap say, well, she didn't mean violent, but that was what it was.

It was violent every day.

So she had nothing to redeem herself except her identity.

And then after George Floyd,

the Cuomos got very angry because he promised in advance to have a black female as vice president.

Everybody thought that would be Stacey Abrams and Chris.

I mean, Andrew Cuomo was very upset.

This is before his fall as a sexual harasser and a guy who put 15,000 people with COVID into rest homes and killed a lot of people.

But at that, before that moment, he was the great hope to dethrone Donald Trump.

So what I'm getting at is there was nothing there that explains her rise from obscurity from a middle-class, kind of a pampered child of academics into an identity politics victim.

But she managed it.

But then when she became vice president,

people

detected quite

quickly she had a vocabulary, as I said, 500 words.

And she was sort of like those caricatures you see.

I mean, there was an old show called In Living Color.

Do you remember that?

With the Wayans Brothers.

They were brilliant.

That was so funny.

Yes, they had Damian Williams.

He was an absolute brilliant.

And he had a skit where he would go into the prison cell, you remember?

And then some naive, academic white person would interview him and he would go, the function of the connection of the theoretical explosion means that you're vital.

And he was just nothing.

So when I, her here, and she moves, she cackles, she moves her hands, but she just does that.

She just has a

repetitive word soup.

And she, it's embarrassing.

But what I don't understand is this.

She's obviously reading off a teleprompter.

So who is writing it?

Does she say to the speechwriter, I only have a vocabulary of 500 words.

I can't understand any other words.

So just repeat these monosyllabic words or a few polysyllabic words just again and again.

Or do she write it?

Or are they as bad or worse than she is?

And then after she's been pilloried and caricatured on Fox News and other venues, you'd think that she would care.

And then you've got this other added dimension where Biden regrets that choice, or I shouldn't say Biden, he doesn't know what he's doing, but the people around him do.

And then they don't regret it because they feel that it's an agnew choice that allows him to remain,

you know, if you had a Barack Obama type of charismatic character.

as vice president, Biden would be gone now.

Right.

But not with her there.

But then on the other hand, it's a double-edged sword because when he goes into the primaries, people are going to say, I can't vote for you, Joe, because you're not going to make it.

And

Nick Haley said that.

Did you say that, sorry?

Yeah, like if he's re-elected, he'll be dead before the next term.

Yeah.

I mean,

he's basically saying, you got to,

you got to vote for me because I've got, otherwise you're going to get Kamala Harris.

If I bow to race, she's going to bid.

And then on the other hand, he's saying, but if I have, if if I can't do it and I'm removed, then you're going to get Camilla Harris.

Right.

And nobody wants Camela Harris because she's not a sweet, nice person.

She's not charismatic.

She's gaffed.

She's a creature of identity politics.

Everybody knows it.

And they've given her various assignments.

I don't know whether to embarrass her or to give her an opportunity, but it was preordained that as borders are, or space czar, or

you name it,

funerals are.

She failed.

She hasn't done anything right.

And then you get people like Van Jones.

You know, if she wasn't black, if she wasn't a woman, they wouldn't be, no, Van, if she wasn't black, she would not be on the ticket.

If she wasn't a woman, she would not be on the ticket.

Trust us, she would not.

And if,

you know, if it's any, she was real, she was appointed

and then she, what?

I guess she was appointed to these offices, and then she did get elected senator into Barbara Boxer's seat.

But other than that, I can't think anything she did as a senator or as a candidate or vice president would warrant

any

being re-elected or anything.

This thing also, by claim,

you know, it's kind of obvious and maybe not worth all that much of your time, Victor, but that, of course, it's racism.

Look at her own staff, right?

I mean, the turnover there.

Are the people she hired who can't stand working with her, who have left in droves, are they racists?

I mean,

and

the go-to claim by Democrat leaders that essentially America is a racist nation.

Well, I mean, this whole thing is going to blow up.

the whole diversity, equity, inclusion, because

it's based on a lie that the United States in the year 2023 is an inherently racist society.

It's based on the lie that these universities that are losing millions of dollars have all of this cash, that they can hire these people who are a drag on efficiency because all they do is monitor people and add more regulations.

And it's a lie because nobody follows the consequences of their own ideology.

There was a story the other day that the historic black colleges, guess what?

They all have one thing in common.

They do not hire diversity, equity, and inclusion czars.

So they're not Howard, none of these universities, Spelman Howard, say, you know what?

We're just too black, and we need some Asians, and we need some Hispanics

and some poor white kids.

So we're going to get it.

They don't believe it.

So

it's just

something that everybody knows is not sustainable, but nobody wants to say the emperor is naked because he'll be called a racist.

Tucker did, and look what happened to him.

And so

everybody understands that it's czar, it's kind of like

the commissariat and the pre-commissariat during the czar period, or national socialism's ideological blinders, or the Maoists that try to censor speech or correct thinking, and they were all destructive.

And that's what this diversity, equity, inclusion is.

And

I think it's not going to work.

This is not a wealthy, fat country anymore.

This is a country on the razor's edge with no margin of error on crime or energy, inflation, interest, foreign policy, the military.

Can't make any mistakes anymore.

We don't have the wherewithal.

We don't have the surpluses.

We don't have the unity.

And the idea we're going to continue to invest and spend billions of dollars to monitor ourselves to see whether we're racist or not.

When,

you know, a guy comes from Mars, if you see an alien, he's landing here, he's going to say, How can you guys call yourself racist?

You have a border where you've invited in six and a half million people from southern Mexico and Central America.

People don't do that if they're racist.

So,

hey, Victor, you mentioned Tucker,

and I know you've talked about

his departure from Fox with

Sammy a little bit.

And I heard you on Megan Kelly's podcast earlier in the week, which was terrific.

She's been,

well, she's always terrific, but

her lowdown, actually,

her slap back.

Did you see her attack on Keith Olberman?

Yeah.

I mean, she just drilled him a new one.

I love Megan.

She's terrific.

But

I'm surprising you here, but this is Saturday.

And then there's been Tucker News coming out all week since you last discussed this.

Anything more to say about this, or should we move on?

There's some new stories.

Breitbart, I think Matthew Boyle had a little bit.

I think it's what I talked about with Megan and Sammy.

I think we're starting to get a narrative now that

there were four or five contributory

causations.

One was that

while Tucker was the highest rated

lead-in, and he led the evening's

spectacular triumph over MSNBC and CNN combined with Hannity and Laura Ingram, he didn't have as much

dollar-for-dollar advertising minutes as did Bill O'Reilly, let's say, or Megan Kelly, because the left went after him for that particular reason.

Right.

And the corporate overmasters look at that as much as anything.

Right.

So he was a little vulnerable.

There was a climate.

I don't think he was culpable at all with the Dominion accusations.

He really tore into Sidney Powell and the Krakens and all that stuff.

But it created a sense that we don't have any exposure anymore if we're the Murdoch and we're not going to have an exposure.

And then there was the Bongino, was

what I'm getting at is this populace, MAGA, grassroots, doesn't it?

It never set well with a guy like Paul Ryan, who's on the news corps.

And so I think what you're seeing is that the Murdochs are saying,

and then you have the private text messages whose corpus we have not looked at.

We just had a couple of leaks.

But apparently, according to rumor, and I don't know if that's even wise to mention it, that Tucker was very critical of his corporate overlords.

So I think they,

you know, to encourage the others, they wanted to fire the big guy, the guy that's carrying the network.

And they did it, I think, in a fit of pick, very quickly over the weekend or on Monday morning or something, Friday night, without thinking it through or thinking, well, we did this with Bill O'Reilly and we got Tucker.

So we do it with Tucker.

We'll get some unknown, brilliant guy who's waiting in the wings.

Or we did, you know, we lost Megan Kelly, but then we got Laura Ingram.

So we're bigger than anybody.

We're Fox.

And we've got to remind these guys.

But the dynamics of media.

Yeah, we're going to remind them they work for us.

And all you have to do is fire one or two, and everybody will step back in line and not attach us.

Or

we'll be a little nicer to Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or whoever they attack.

And I think that was it.

And then the weird thing is that Bongino and

tucker are apparently as we talked about with sammy they're apparently still under contract and we don't know whether that hampers their freedom to find other venues or not or whether they'll renounce that or whether they'll just not take these huge multi-million dollar payoffs left on their contract who knows

well

bongino has his own yeah significant sources of income and this uh and look i'm i would just be repeating what megan Megan said earlier in the week on her show.

She had Glenn Beck on.

It was a terrific show, but just the changing dynamics of what is media, what is cable?

And, you know, Victor, what they're not inventing more of is time.

You and I, everyone's 24 hours.

And I think increasingly people are spending it.

I'm going to listen to someone who I think is really smart, which is why, you know, Joe Rogan and Megan herself and Bongino and others have these platforms that are just

have massive numbers and they're making a ton of money.

I mean, who wouldn't want to do that?

Tucker or Victor Davis Hanson or anyone if they could.

You can be in control of your own destiny.

One of the just Philip, the whole thing is that what I couldn't understand when I read all of these leaks about why Tucker supposedly, purportedly, apparently got the Murdoch angry.

I could see if there were, nobody knows, if there were texts that they took personally and they had felt that they were friends.

But again, you know, you and I have talked about everybody writes stuff.

Right.

I've had a couple of friends in the past, I won't mention names,

that wrote stuff about me and they hit the wrong button, right?

And they had a name copied, but it was similar to mine and, you know, Macmail self-corrects.

And then I got this stuff and I didn't know whether it was a joke.

Right.

But I didn't take it.

I mean, I didn't take it too seriously.

But the point is, that was one of the leaks.

But the other ones,

I couldn't figure out because they centered on two, that he had gone after Ray Epps and was going to be sued.

And his January 6th, but

he had the tapes.

I mean, you can say that he played tapes that weren't full, but there was that one day we went through the tapes and there were people opening the door.

I myself, if I had been a demonstrator, I wouldn't have gone anywhere near going into the Capitol if somebody invited me in

because it was not open to the public.

But nonetheless, they did.

It didn't look too violent in that particular sense.

I think we all know now that when Hichem Jeffries or Joe Biden says five people were killed,

they're talking about people who committed suicide months after.

And the only person who died violently was either one

MAGA protester who may have been trampled to death, but we do know that Ashley Babbitt was shot on envoy, committing a misdemeanor of going through a broken window.

And yet, and Tucker said that.

And then the Ray Epps thing, I couldn't understand because he's suing.

There is,

I mean, Tucker just showed the tape.

He just has a tape and he says,

you've got to go into the Capitol.

And people yell feds to him.

Did you see that tape?

Feds, feds, fed.

Because they don't sus, they think that person is a provocateur.

And then we have the, you know, the

Operation Veritas disclosures about Matthew Rosenberg, the New York Times quote-unquote expert journalist on January 6th.

And he's having a drink with an undercover reporter for Operation Veritas.

And he says, quite casually, it was not thinking as a joke.

I looked around.

There were so many FBI informants that I knew.

This is a man on the left.

And then the fact that Epps was for a while wanted by the FBI, and then

he brags that he's orchestrated this.

So all Tucker did was to say, Mr.

Epps, I just took you at your own word.

You confessed that you wanted people to go into the Capitol.

You knew it was illegal.

You told people to do it.

And then you brag that you helped orchestrate this thing.

And as far as FBI informants, we know they were everywhere because a New York Times journalist knew them and said that.

So how that becomes a culpable, actionable suit against him, I don't know.

And the other thing I don't understand, Epps has become a folk hero to the left.

Yes.

And, you know, he's gone from FBI-wanted guy to folk person,

icon.

Right.

So the other final thing is, I didn't quite understand the glee of people who

wrote things.

I mean, there were things written about Tucker's

David Korn and David French.

I mean, it was just

amazing, the vitriol and venom that he was a racist and he was this.

Tucker, if you call him a racist, again, I think I mentioned that with Sammy.

That is based on one thing: that he took all of those books written 10 to 15 years ago, and there were three or four of them talking about the new demography and the new America, and that California and Nevada and Colorado and New Mexico were never going to vote red again.

And soon Arizona, because the key left-wing phrase, demography is destiny.

Remember that?

That was a left-wing NR.

And Tucker came along and said,

yeah,

that's what it is.

They're deliberately destroying the border to bring people who are impoverished, who need federal help, and will pay.

the left in their votes for an ex quid quo quo of open border.

And so they said he believes in the great replacement theory that we're replacing white people.

No, he didn't.

You did.

You created it.

You called it

demography as destiny.

Why did you use the word demography?

And why did you use the word destiny?

Demography means the makeup of a politician.

Destiny is a noun that means this is going to be faded in the future.

So the makeup of the population will be one particular way in the future.

That's your vocabulary.

That's your buzzwords.

And he just said,

This is what they're doing.

And then you said he was

believes in the great replacement theory.

You could have used it, you and the left could have used the great replacement theory.

Instead of having these books with demography is destiny, why not have a title that says the great replacement we're getting?

And I don't have to say that, Jack, because we have an AEI comment, if you remember, by Bill Crystal.

You remember that?

He was on a panel and he said, I don't don't know why people are so upset about illegal immigration.

You know, people get tired and they get worn out.

And we've got all these white working-class people with all these, and we can't bring them in.

And we play, he said it.

He did.

So

I don't know why people get upset.

Well, you're a racist, aren't you?

You're a Mexicania.

I mean, just for you talking about that, I got a lot of attacks for that.

And

I got attacked for two reasons.

One is I used a word that was a term of pride in the Mexican American, Mexican national gang culture

in the prison system where people said this is a Mexifornian bloc or we're part of the Mexifornia group.

And that's where I got it from.

I read articles about people who were bragging that they were in the penal system of California and they had a particular affiliation.

And then the other people took either that term from them or from my book.

They made a license right during the recall.

If you remember, there was Cruz Bustamonte and he was sort of revving up the La Raza vote.

And then people put on the internet a

picture of a California license.

And instead of California, it said Mexifornia.

And they had a, it was kind of a racist thing.

They had a Mexican face.

It looked kind of like, I think it did.

you know, what's his name, the candidate.

And then they had things like weight, Mucho and stuff like that.

It was stereotype.

It was racist.

And they put it everywhere.

And then people called me up and said, did you do that?

I said, no.

And I'm about as responsible for that as going to Cal State Fresno one day and seeing the voice of Otslan with my face with a bullet target crosshairs right in the middle.

Really?

Yeah.

And that was published.

And

I took the thing to our then president.

I said, what is this?

I said, free speech.

I said, okay.

Free speech.

Oh, my gosh.

Wow.

It's what they got Sarah Palin on, remember?

She said, she used the word crosshair, and they said it's

threatening people's lives.

Yeah.

Wow.

Well, Victor, you mentioned before

the emperor being naked.

And I think I should have at the time picked up on that and said, that'd be a great segue to talk about.

Hunter Biden saying, you know, who needs a circus sideshow when you have him?

And

we're going to talk about him right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor, the Ukrainian energy whiz and best friend of Communist China leaders, the guy who's been hailed by our president as, quote, the smartest man I know, end quote.

That's Hunter Biden.

But you know what, Victor, you could be smart, right, and still be a deadbeat dad.

Now, Hunter's little girl, Navy Joan, who also we could think of her, not only is Hunter's little girl, but she's the granddaughter of the president of the United States.

She lives in Arkansas, where there, you know, there's a postal service there, so I'm told, but the mailman never seems to deliver child support check with enough money in it.

Here's a Daily Mail headline from the past week, Victor.

Hunter Biden's baby mama accuses first son of posing as a destitute artist to lower child support while deploying stable of pricey lawyers and vacuuming up perks and loans from rich pals in as Arkansas court showdown looms.

Victor, that as we speak, it's forthcoming.

And Victor, also the salaciousness of all this aside, I'm curious if you think there are greater ramifications to Hunter Biden's, this baby mama suit, because I'm thinking, you know, if he's being forced out of the protection of the White House, he seems to be, is he living there?

I mean, he just seems to be inaccessible.

I think it might result in, say, like a processor for handing him over some document that's going to cause,

you know, have ramifications of a much larger nature.

So, Victor, is this just a salacious story or is there more?

There's a little bit more to it because we're always lectured by the left that they care about the children and they're more empathetic and they are more for programs and they're really tough on what they they created the word deadbeat dads.

So this,

I don't know what the word baby moms mean.

I see it, I guess it just means that you got a woman pregnant that you have no intention of seeing again.

She's the mother of your child,

but

she wants

child support based on news reports of Hunter's income.

And he doesn't want to pay.

We don't know how, we know how, we have no idea how much money Hunter has other than he's renting something at 10 or 20,000 a month in Malibu.

And there's stories of vast amounts of money that he was paid 40, 50 million in aggregate.

But it seems to me that he's got

income tax exposure.

He had a wild lifestyle.

He was borrowing money from his father.

And

his father,

in addition, has no intention when he says he has six grandchildren.

He has no intention of counting this child, this grandchild, as

one of his his own.

He just says,

I was thinking the other day, if

I have two children, surviving children, if I had a child, say my son, who is happily married with two children, but if he went out and in a youthful indiscretion, quote unquote, got a woman pregnant, if I can use that 50s term.

and she had a baby and they didn't marry and then he married someone else and they parted ways and maybe she was

trying to gouge him or shake him down for money.

I would still tell him, I think, or I would step in and say, that child is still yours,

no matter what the intent of the mother was, and that you have a financial response.

And I will help you pay a suitable sum

given

what the going rate is.

So that's what I don't know if she's trying to take half of what he's had, but if she's asking for what

she was accustomed to before she got pregnant or what other people in her circumstances do

when they need help rather than just trying to shake him down, then he should pay it.

And I don't know what

two issues there.

One is, as you say, what's fair for support, but the non-person, and this applies to the president, treating flesh and blood as a non-person is pretty damn callous.

Yeah, I mean, he does things that no other president, let me be very careful, no other

president has ever done and got away with.

Period.

If you have a diary that surfaces and your daughter says that she took showers with you to a late age,

you are in trouble.

If you are president of the United States and you serially call two of your assistants on two different occasions boy,

or you call an African-American journalist junkie, or you call another one, you ain't black,

and you have a history of that, put you all in chains and first articulant black,

you're in trouble.

This man is not in trouble for that.

Or if you have a problem that's so egregious, you have to apologize

that you seem to be attracted to teenage and pre-teenage women, and you hold them too long, you blow in their hair, you're in trouble.

Donald Trump is now being sued by a woman who claims she was sexually assaulted almost 30 years ago, but she cannot remember the year.

She cannot remember why she didn't scream, or she says she doesn't.

scream, she didn't make a commotion, and why she was laughing.

and it's a weird case but joe biden has something a little bit more damning he has a woman who worked for him

who had the added on us that he was the boss who she says sexually coerced her digitally raped her at the time she told people, including her mother, who called up on a talk show and documented that her daughter had been sexually assaulted by a prominent politician.

And this came at the height of the Me Too conundrum.

And what happened?

There's no lawsuit.

There's no trial.

There's nothing.

And people have dismissed it.

I think Kamala Harris during the debate, she said, women, remember this Senator Haroni said, women must be believed.

Right.

So they asked Kamala.

She goes, yes, I believe her.

I believe her so much that I want to be on the ticket with the guy who did it to her.

Right.

And that's what's so asymmetrical.

That's what drives people crazy.

They think, wow, these people

are, you know, they're the nomenclature of the Soviet Union or their Mao's inner circle.

They're not subject to any consequences

legally.

Well, I think that might be the rationale behind the next

issue I'd like to raise with you, Victor.

If we can stay on Hunter for a bit, because there are reports this past week that

federal workers who are whistleblowers are afraid to come forward with damning information

related to him and his taxes.

We've already discussed Hunter's allegedly getting a blocking from Merrick Garland and other higher-ups who can

obviously

assess and we can all assess how damaging a revelation of

first son's taxes will be for the entire Coraleone family.

Excuse me, I meant the Biden family.

Related to this anyway, is that

the head of the IRS

this past week was before the House Ways and Means Committee

with a chairman, Jason Smith, had a thing or two to say about this situation.

And Victor, if you don't mind, if our listeners don't mind, a quick slice of something from justthenews.com, which happens to be the happy home, mothership of this podcast.

Story begins, the tax writing.

House Ways and Means Committee took a key step Thursday to free an IRS agent to reveal to lawmakers his concerns about political interference in the Hunter Biden criminal investigation, as its powerful chairman pointedly admonished the agency's director to protect the whistleblower from any reprisals.

Quote, last week, a whistleblower came forward with troubling claims about abuses of power, end quote, ways and means, Chairman Jason Smith told IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel at the start of an oversight hearing on the agency's affairs, quote, we are conducting a review of this matter and we will go wherever the facts lead us.

I expect full cooperation from the IRS, particularly

with regard to ensuring this whistleblower is protected from retaliation.

End quote.

You know, Victor, okay, great comment there or great direct point made by the chairman of the committee, but I wonder, a la, what you just talked about before with

the president and his

digitally raping this poor woman and other things.

Do you think, what's your sense?

Is any justice going to come out of this?

Is a whistleblower going to come forward?

Is he going to be protected?

What are your thoughts?

I don't know.

I don't think so.

I think

they crossed the Rubicon.

So Merrick Garland, you know,

he's basically saying, screw screw you.

I mean, this is an attorney general that

when people committed a felony and mass

outside the doors of the Supreme Court justices, one of which was a transgendered assassin, and said his daughter, his sister, talked him out of trying to shoot one of the justices.

They were not charged with anything.

He was, but none of the protesters in the general melee were charged with anything and could not believe it.

And so when you have,

I think what they're doing is that when the FBI goes after traditional Catholics or goes after parents at school board meetings

or does, you know, performance art arrest on Peter Navarro

or Roger Stone or goes to the Mar-lago with the big raid or,

you know, grabs James O'Keefe out of this boxer shorts in the hallway or whatever they do, they send a message that it's asymmetrical.

And, you know, we're the retrieval service for Hunter Laptops Biden and Ashley Biden's diary and Hunter

Biden's gun, you know, the secrets of where he lost a gun that he lied about to get.

I guess the Secret Service was the point agency on that.

But the point is that it sends a message.

And so these whistleblowers are thinking, you know, this isn't the FBI of the Louise.

This is J.

Edgar Hoover's FBI.

And you go after these people, the left see this as a very important part of their agenda to intimidate people.

And of course, it's so hypocritical because during the Russian hoax of collusion, this Eric C.

Romella, Saramella, whatever you pronounce his name, he wasn't even on the call.

And yet he called up

Lieutenant Colonel Benman, the current arms dealer, and called him up and said, you know, this is what happened.

And then

I guess they colluded and he became the whistleblower.

And Vinman then became the point man who said, I don't know.

I can't answer that question because

it might imply who the whistleblower is.

Well, everybody knew the name.

It was published, but the left went so berserk.

They said, whistleblowers' name are sacrosanct.

What they do is heroic.

Don't ever, ever do it, or it's a felony if you try to expose them.

And now, of course, that was then, this is now.

And now whistleblowers are the worst thing they are because

they're not on the narrative.

They're in the IRS, they're in the DOJ, they're FBI, CIA, and we all know what those agencies are doing.

And they become weaponized parts of the

narrative.

The narrative is the only thing that matters, right?

It's the only thing that matters.

And that's been one of the big things in my life that's changed because,

you know, when when you grow up on Ephraim Zimblitz Jr.'s Sunday night or Saturday night FBI show, it's all guys with, you know, butch haircuts and black tinted sunglasses, and they're all G-men with narrow ties, and they're all straight, right-wing, and they're all hyper-patriotic.

And now you've got a very woke, politicized agency.

And it's scary.

I think.

Also, I'm not, I don't think the left is above saying to the people, the FBI is ours now.

So is the CIA.

And we were the watchdogs about surveillance, but you know what?

We like what they did with Twitter.

We like the idea the FBI hired Twitter and said, you know what?

These are things that we don't like.

Here's $3 million.

We'll call it disinformation, misinformation.

You go find it and then report who's doing it to us.

We want the CIA, and we'll call it an other government agency so you don't feel that the CIA is committing a federal offense by interfering in domestic surveillance.

It's not surveillance, it's misinformation hunting.

So, when you get to that level, it's pretty scary.

And that's why these whistleblowers know what the left is capable of.

And

that's what is so funny.

Well, Victor, what's also scary is what's

the life our conservative Supreme Court justices

have to live in 2023.

And we're going to get your thoughts on that.

There's a great interview of Justice Salito in the Wall Street Journal.

And speaking of great, your more fuller thoughts about a great conservative and a great man, John Raisian.

And we're going to do that when we come back from this final important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I would like to encourage our listeners to visit the Blade of Perseus.

That's the name of Victor's official website.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

And when you go there, you will find a plethora of Victor's appearances on other podcasts.

For example, I mentioned he was on Megan Kelly's podcast.

You'll find links to that.

He was Eric Metaxas.

Bumped into someone the other day.

Victor's, I heard him.

I heard Victor on the Eric Metaxas show.

It was terrific.

You'll find links to all these kind of appearances, Victor's writings for American Greatness.

Also, his writings that are exclusive to.

The Blade of Perseus.

Those are ultra articles.

To be able to read them, you need to subscribe.

And Victor has, he writes a ton of such stuff for the website.

I have assessed it as the equivalent of about two books a year.

And if you're a fan of Victor, you just need to subscribe.

So it's five bucks to get your foot in the door, $50 for the full year discounted.

That's Victor Hanson, S-O-N, VictorHanson.com.

Victor, the Weekend Wall Street Journal, published an interview with Justice Salito by James Toronto and David Rivkin.

David is a James, you know, Toronto works for the journal.

David Rivkin writes for it frequently.

He's a lawyer in D.C.

It's titled, This Made Us Targets of Assassination.

And this is, of course, is

a draft of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v.

Wade that was leaked to the media.

The culprit who did the leaking is yet to be found.

And that's Justice Salito in this interview gave his thoughts about that.

Actually, he said he had an idea who it was, but he also praised

whoever the chief marshal is of the Supreme Court for

concluding an investigation with all the powers at hand, which I guess were not enough powers.

Anyway, Victor, there's a...

Very quick little slice of this interview I'd like just to read and then get your fuller thoughts.

So

a few pundits on the left speculated that the leaker might have been a conservative attempting to lock in the five justice majority and overturn the constitutional right to abortion.

Quote, that's infuriating to me, end quote.

Justice Alito says of that theory.

Look, and quote, look, this made us targets of assassination.

Would I do that to myself?

Would the five of us have done that to ourselves?

It's quite implausible.

He adds that, quote, I don't feel physically unsafe because we now have a lot of protection, and quote.

He is, quote, driven around in basically a tank, and I'm not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force.

You know, Victor, I have a feeling if Justice Sotomayer wants to go out to dinner,

she will do so happily and unbothered, and she should.

And Kagan and same, but you know, the points

have a target on it.

Who says get in their face who who said that that was barack obama said get in their face that was maxine waters that said go into restaurants and service stations and go after them these were that that's that's what they do who was the one who said you sowed the wind you're going to rip reap the whirlwind who was the one that said you don't know what's going to hit you wasn't just chuck schumer minority leader of the senate at the time it was chuck schumer in front of a mob screaming at the door to call out by name gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

What did he think that that was going to happen?

Can you imagine right now

if

Rand Paul got a bunch of MAGA supporters and went outside the Supreme Court and started screaming, soda my ear,

soda my ear,

Elena Kagan,

you're going to reap the whirlwind.

You're not going to, you know, what hit you.

And then if a few months later, they started swarming their homes and assassin, what would happen?

They would go nuts and the FBI would have those people in jail in two seconds.

So he has reason to be upset because he understands that he can't trust the law enforcement agencies because they're weaponized because of the

DOJ.

The only thing that I don't understand, if he knows or he has a hunch who leaked it, and I always thought it was a left-wing person because I think the justices knew that if anybody leaked that earlier, they were going to be in danger.

So we wouldn't want to do that, as he said.

But why isn't the FBI investigating it?

Why don't they get Justice Alito and say, Look, you understand opinions very well.

You know how people argue.

You see people every day.

You know modes of English composition, expression, talking.

You have some certain ideas.

Would you please tell us why you think that person did it?

And we will investigate.

We'll put him under oath.

And if he lies or she lies, that's a felony.

And they will go to jail.

So, why don't they do that?

I don't understand.

And

I think one of the reasons is because they found that to be a useful, a useful crime, because they feel that by leaking it, it prepared a

big backlash that had legs or had

momentum in the midterms.

It helped them in the midterms with abortion.

They look back at it and they go, wow, that was good.

That really worked.

Whoever that guy was, it's kind of like the guy, Jimmy Carter's grandson.

You remember he infiltrated an RNC, I think, event when Mitt Romney said, you know, I can't reach 47, you know,

47%

are going to vote for me no matter what, against me because they get stuff.

And then that came out and it confirmed his aristocratic prejudices and biases, so to speak.

And that guy was a hero.

Right.

And that's how they view it.

Any means necessary because their ends are so morally superior that pretty much sums up the lamp

well victor um i mentioned before uh before the break we would also get your your uh thoughts about uh john raisin i just want to say and if you want to elaborate further

um i dealt a little when i was publisher a national national review and uh we we had uh the anniversary say of

firing line and firing line is owned by, now owned by, even though Bill Buckley created it, Hoover Institution owns it.

And John Raisian was the,

as you know, he was the head of Hoover for 25 years.

He passed away about two weeks ago.

I wrote a very brief

RIP, we call, you know, rest in peace for him, for National Review magazine.

And look, I wasn't close to John.

I've met him a few times.

When I dealt with him, he was just really a courteous man sweet man

and uh very much in admiration of the i called it the murderer's row like the 1927 yankees of

just

great thinkers that he assembled at the hoover institution and he to me to my mind he took an institution with a you know profound name but that had rickety finances and he secured it He gathered this tremendous collection, yourself included, of just great thinkers and let them be themselves.

That was like, what are we to do with?

He wrote some article, what are we to do about Robert Conquest?

It was a great, as you know, Soviet historian.

Well, we let Robert Conquest be Robert Conquest.

We let Victor Davis Hansen be Victor Davis Hansen.

And Hoover just bloomed under, blossomed and blue under him.

And then, if you, but if you tried to find any information on the internet about John Raising, good luck.

Go to Wikipedia.

Go sorry.

Find his name.

It is not there.

Tremendous.

Anyway, your thoughts, Victor?

He didn't brag on himself at all.

He started out as a UCLA-trained labor economist.

And

his mission when he got to Hoover, he was the assistant of Glenn Campbell.

He really wanted to accentuate free market economics, deregulation.

And

he inherited, but he also enhanced Tom Soule and Milton Friedman.

And then people like John Cogan and Michael Boskin and John Taylor and John Cochran came.

And when he was, Josh Row, when he was done,

you had seven or eight of the best economists in the United States all right together.

And that was the forte.

And then he, because of our mission statement, war, revolution, and peace, as expressed through, you know, small markets, individual freedom, and constitutional government, he started having a lot of foreign policy people.

So there was Condelee Rice came in, and George Schultz was sort of the point man on that.

There was Schultz, Conde Lisa Rice.

And

we had a whole foreign policy, Robert Conquest.

So that was the other big strength or forte of the Hoover Institution.

When I got there, I was approached in 2002, and I think I was an adjunct senior fellow in 2003, and then a senior fellow in 2004.

It was pretty much a lot of people had been retiring.

And it had been, up until John Racian, it had been kind of a paleo con small group that didn't the institution didn't have a lot of money.

And Glenn Campbell had been a fierce conservative that thought.

And after he retired, his aide, John, came in with the idea that I'm not going to gratuitously go to war with Stanford, but I'm not going to let Stanford infiltrate.

And what he was able to do, his great contribution, he reached out to people who were Stanford graduates that were now part of the

financial, legal, and technical side of Silicon Valley, real estate side, who had made a lot of money.

And he said to them,

Why give to Stanford when it's contrary to your ideology?

And

you can give to Stanford through us and give to us.

So we're not at war with Stanford.

We're just what Stanford should be.

And they have gone left-wing.

Well, that was a very appealing message.

So suddenly he got up, he got the endowment from, you know, $100, it was $200, $300,000, $400, $600 million.

And he started bringing in top flight people.

And the more Stanford tried to control him by saying, you know what, every senior fellow,

it used to be you had to have a unanimous vote of the senior fellows, but then it was you were, I think there were three of us, Peter Berkowitz, myself, and Tuwada Jaomi, that came through under the new system.

that you had to go into the department in which you would teach as a professor, even though you wouldn't want to teach there or they wouldn't want you, but they had to decide whether you were the top three or four in your field to give you full professor status, which translates into senior fellow tenure.

Well, that was a new thing.

And yet, John said, I remember he came up to him and he said, Well, they got a new thing here.

And you have to be the top three in your field, and Fuad and Peter are, and you are.

So there's no problem.

But it took a long time.

But his attitude was:

I'm going to bring in the best people that I think I can.

I'm going to raise as much money as I can.

I'm going to put the fewer restrictions as I must.

And if I bring in people who have character and are circumspect

and they write and they don't do things gratuitously wrong, I'm going to protect them.

And so.

he meant that.

And so when people would attack you from Stanford, Stanford faculty, I'll give you an example of what I mean.

Almost ritually, I will, I have, I still do, I write a syndicated column for the Chicago Tribune.

Now it's media,

you know, it's TMS, Tribune Media Services.

It has a lot of, it's gone through a whole iteration of different names.

But when you write that at the bottom, they want your byline, the Grandson's Hoover Institution,

Stanford University.

Well, every year people would say, that's not Stanford.

And they would write terrible letters to Hoover and to the Tribune to the point I'd have to show my contract every year that I was actually, you know, I get my pay stub and I'd show them that I'm being paid by Stanford University.

But

he would just say, it's not, it has zero effect.

Don't worry about it.

Or when I came to the campus one day and there was a headline,

Raysian should fire Victor Hansen.

And I thought, wow, in the Stanford Daily?

What did I do?

And I had written something about affirmative action that it was getting so arcane and Byzantine that you would have to have DNA to adjudicate in neo-Confederate terms which person's race was which.

And, you know, if you're one eighth this or one quarter this.

And I wrote a column and the knowable and quotable section of the world, Wall Street Journal, took that out as they do.

And I was happy they did.

But that got went viral.

And

all of a sudden, the daily had it there.

And then John called me up and he started laughing.

And he said, you know, this is going to be really funny.

They attacked you and you did nothing wrong.

And they have a policy that they have to print letters to the editor.

And I have a feeling they're going to get a lot of them.

Well, no sooner did he say that than Rush Limbaugh

emailed me and Rush said, this is an outrage.

And about six prominent conservatives did.

And the next thing I knew, Jack, they had like 600 letters and they were printing them.

And 99.99%

were things like, you spoil little kids at Stanford.

You know what you're doing.

You can't take it when somebody explains and challenges you, or you know that you're using race-based admissions and hiring, and you don't even know what the qualifications are.

And it's so Byzantine or convoluted, you don't know what you're doing.

All you're doing is having a rough approximation, like an old southerner in the south that that person's black or white.

And that's what you're doing.

And the next thing I knew, I got a little communication from somebody at the dating.

Can we just kind of, John called me and said, Victor, they ran a whole week and there's, they've got a lot more.

Can you just kind of say you don't need to have all these letters published?

I said, it's not my duty.

They either have a rule or they don't.

And he said, well, they like to print letters, but they got too many of them because it went viral in the conservative world.

And he was laughing about it.

And he thought this, and he had predicted it perfectly.

So I said, Well, what's going to do?

He says, We're not going to do anything, Richter.

They're going to get so many letters for being so obnoxious and wrong that they're going to regret the moment they ever put that headline in.

He said, All you got to remember, they'll never print a retraction, but they won't need to.

And that was exactly, and that's been my experience with him ever since, Stanford Daily.

But he was that kind of guy.

He was

very warm and casual, funny, and

he understood the malu of Northern California and Silicon Valley, and he was able to appeal to a lot of people who were socially moderate, but

fiscally and economically conservative, that the place that they should invest in is Hoover.

And so that's what...

The only disagreement I ever had was...

I wrote a book called Mexifornia.

It wasn't a disagreement with him, but there were some people and donors that said, you know, we like open borders, libertarianism, or something.

And he just said,

you're going to have to debate somebody on this in front of a retreat.

So I did, one of the other fellows.

And he said, just do it a couple of times so people see that we give both points of view and don't worry about it.

Yeah.

And then he would say things like, hey, have you seen your book in the Chicano Law Library?

It's in the window.

And so

he was very funny.

I took a lot of trips with John Rayson across the country to various Hoover events and to meet his supporters.

Good company, good traveling companion.

He was good.

He was a very big guy.

So if you got into a Canadian regional jet,

if I met him at a connection, he hadn't looked at the thing and he said, I'm not getting in that Canadian regional jet.

So do you either want to go ahead of me, Victor, or do you want to wait and I'm going to get another flight?

And I always said, I think I'll go ahead with you.

I'll go ahead and I'll meet you there because I can hang around.

So we did that.

But he was very soft-spoken and he wasn't a pushover.

If you kept pushing him and you misinterpreted his magnanimity, his weakness, then

you would be

surprised at the reply you'd get.

I saw him really cut the legs out from a couple of other people.

I won't mention their names, but there were two or three people in the very, very prominent.

in the conservative movement.

And they kept saying, you're going to do this and this, and this is how I want.

He said, You're not going to tell me what to do.

And bam.

So he was tough, he was kind.

And

I owe, as I said to Sammy, I owe, I think I owe my career after 49 to him.

I was a Cal State professor.

I was a part-time farmer.

I was riding out here in the farm.

And all of a sudden, my life changed.

And that was because of him.

Victor, I just, I want to repeat to our listeners,

and they can, again, they'll search in vain, but they should remember that

of those

truly important conservative leaders, John Raisian is one of them.

God rest his soul, just because you can't find him on Wikipedia, or there's no,

you know, he wasn't

prominent on Fox or things like that does not mean he wasn't doing

great things.

And taking Hoover, I think Hoover was always a great institution, just as an archive.

I mean, a great place for research.

And of course, the archives have grown and continue to grow.

He had a good point.

The way that we differed from

AEI or Brookings or Hoover, we were, for good or evil, attached to a university institution.

And the upside was we had these huge resources,

faculty and library, and then we had our archive.

The Hoover Institution is 104 years old, but it started as an archivist from Hoover collecting documents after World War I and giving them to them.

And it was six or seven or eight people who served the scholarly community by having most of the important documents of the Russian Revolution, especially from the white-Russian side.

I don't mean white-racial, everybody.

I'm talking about ideological white versus red.

And a lot of things, then when that was established, people started giving all of the documents, all of the immigrants and people who fled the West, whether it was a Hungarian Revolution or whether it was Chinese loss of the Chinese mainland, all of those documents ended up at Hoover.

And then people just, and so we were still a major archival service.

But somewhere in the early 60s, Alger Hiss had people there that were working.

And Herbert Huber looked at this and said, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I'm not going to put my name and my money.

And he endowed it.

He started it and turned this thing into basically a right-wing think tank, excuse me, left-wing.

So he went out and fought with the Stanford president and got a semi-autonomy.

And then he went nationwide and tried to find someone who was A, very, very young and B, very, very conservative, and C, on the economic side as he was.

And he came up with Glenn Campbell.

And Glenn Campbell was there for 30 years, and then John was, racing, succeeded him.

So by 2016,

there had been 60 years

of

Hoover as a think tank as well as an archive.

And in those 60 years, there had only been two directors.

Two directors.

And they ensured that it was a very, very conservative place, and they knew how to deal with Stanford.

Glenn Campbell, I was a graduate student there when he was there, and he fought with them all the time.

And his was a slash and burn approach, and John Rason was more of a rapier or a dagger,

very carefully.

But they protected the integrity and the autonomy of the university, of these think tank.

Well, Victor, thanks.

for your reflections there and thanks for all the other thoughts you shared today.

And we thank our listeners, of course, for listening, regardless of what platform you listen on, Stitcher, Google, Play, et cetera.

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We read them.

And I'm going to read one of them, actually, right now.

And this is titled,

Love the Show.

Was also raised on a family farm in a tiny town with few career prospects.

College was never an option due to poor grades.

But after a few signatures, found myself in the North Atlantic on a ballistic missile submarine fighting the Cold War at the age of 19.

Breaks my heart to see what has happened since those days.

I listen because it's nice to learn about the past and how those lessons can help us remain remain optimistic in the future.

Thank you for sharing your wisdom.

Signed Poseidon S-L-B-M.

He must particularly like your podcast with the great Sammy Wink, which began always with some positive thought.

So that's a great thing.

Thank you, Poseidon, man, for that.

Victor, thank you

again for the wisdom you shared.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

Visit Victorhanson.com.

Oh, for me, civilthoughts.com.

Go to civilthoughts.com.

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It's called Civil Thoughts.

I give you about a dozen plus recommended readings.

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Thank you.

Thanks all.

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

Thank you, everybody, and thanks for listening.