Fired Up

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, you've joined the Victor Davis Hampton Show.

Victor is a commentator and analyst of current political and military affairs.

He's also a classicist and a historian and has written 27 books.

He is then no surprise that he works at the Hoover Institution.

He is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow.

in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our Friday news roundup.

So we'll look at the news of the week.

And we've got lots of things out there to look at.

Tucker was fired, as was Don Liman.

So we're going to start off with those two.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

At a time when Americans are more divided than ever, Connecting America is a place where everyone can gather and express their opinions with no disrespect.

And what better place than a Jersey diner to host this show?

Because where else but a diner can you find a buffet of opinions, ideas, and real connections?

Connecting America, a brand new national program that aims to truly connect everyday people and is dedicated to showcasing ideas and embracing civil conversation.

We'll also include amazing ways to improve your fitness, health, and nutrition, revive your spiritual self, and give your home a makeover.

Connecting America streams live every weekday from 7 a.m.

to 9 a.m.

Eastern Time.

Our program is led by a group of award-winning journalists, including me, Jim Rosenfeld, plus Allison Camerata and Dave Briggs.

We'll also hear from America's psychologist, Dr.

Jeff Gardier, and former Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent Amy Kellogg.

Join us wherever you get your podcasts.

If you're 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 titlelock.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, titlelock.com/slash Victor.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I know that, Victor, we often start off our show these days with something positive.

So I was wondering if you had

something positive for us.

Something positive as i scan the horizon

yes well here in california this is a very strange onset of hot weather because there's water everywhere and there's lush wildflowers in the sierra the snow is still 60

70

more so in the high country not melted But that means in the scorching dog days of August, we're going to have full reservoirs.

And there's going to be the rivers are going to be running to the sea, unfortunately, but there's no storage.

And we're going to have something we've never seen in 40 years is the recreation, unfortunately, of Tulare Lake, the largest freshwater lake this side of the Great Lakes.

It's already 100 square miles.

And at one time it was huge.

And of course, it's the lakebed of some of the biggest corporate and most rich farmland in the world.

And a lot of it's going to be flooded and more is going to be flooded.

But all in all, it's a positive development.

Otherwise, when you look at the national scene, Sammy,

how about the economy?

No.

How about fiscal responsibility?

No.

Wasn't Afghanistan, like the Biden said, a success?

No.

The border, isn't it?

No.

But energy, no.

I filled up today.

Diesel was almost $6 a gallon and gasoline was $5.58.

So it's back up, back up.

And he's already taken 40% of the strategic petroleum reserve out for the midterm advantage.

So I'm looking for it with this clown, Biden, but I can't see any positive things.

I'm just worried that

how we're going to exist the next two years.

Yes, this is becoming a rabbit hole and a conundrum that's not so positive.

I think that our first topic is might be in some ways positive.

Tucker was fired from Fox News, and there's lots of speculation on the internet as to why.

And there's been sightings of him as on the golf course with his wife having a good time.

So

I think there might be something good going on.

We have

known unknowns.

We have unknown knowns.

But apparently

the text trove that was surfacing in the last lawsuit and might surface in the next two showed internal communications that suggested that Tucker

was not holding the Fox management in high regard.

And that was sort of a perfect storm.

And it's sort of, I think Howard Stern was mouthing off that you have to be a worker bee, but he, whom I don't agree with on anything, but he may be right that

these corporate billionaires do whatever they want.

And I think in their sense, they thought the bottom line is $770 million repaid.

We might have to pay more.

They're going to jump onto us.

And I think they should have fought that and tried to win it because that would have created deterrence.

Now everybody's going to jump in.

But I think they think these lawsuits are going to expose dirty laundry.

and they got angry at the things Tucker said.

I would say to all of our audience members, those of you who use school emails, university emails,

business emails, when you have gossip that people write you or what,

would you want that exposed?

And so what Tucker says to a person

that he knows and trusts and what he would say openly or what he feels is not necessarily the same thing.

But the Murdoch family, apparently, Rupert Murdoch himself was very angry.

And it was the spur of the

moment.

And one of the ironies is that when somebody was losing money, like Chris

Wallace, for example,

they had a big send-off to him when he went over to CNN.

And he was not any longer an integral part of the Fox lineup.

But with Tucker,

they just fired him that morning.

And I think they said, quote unquote, it's from higher up.

But

there's also another narrative, Sammy, and it goes like this.

And I've been reading it today and hearing it from friends.

Well, Bill O'Reilly had even a bigger audience the day that he left than Tucker did.

And they said that that would destroy Fox.

And it didn't.

Tucker came in and rebuilt the audience rather quickly.

And Megan Kelly was lured away for NBC.

And she was a, you know, she was,

she was right up there with O'Reilly, if not even getting close to a bigger audience.

And they said, you can't replace Megan Kelly.

Well, Laura Ingram came in.

And I'm not saying she replaced Megan or that

Tucker replaced

O'Reilly, but the narrative that's going, this is what I'm perceiving the narrative is, that Tucker will leave and then there'll be a Will Kane or Brian Kilmedy or something.

But I don't see that.

I see Rush Limbaugh going off the air tragically and I don't see anybody who's been able to recapture that audience.

Yes.

So, and there's another element to it.

It's serial.

The longer this disruption happens,

So they got rid of Bongino.

And if they're going to use the criteria who was more out there on the Dominion voting machines or election quote-unquote denialism than Judge Janine or Maria Bartella Roma.

All of those have more exposure than Tucker did.

And so there may be more of these.

And

so I don't see that there's only so many talents there is.

So you got the talented O'Reilly gone, and then you got the talented Tucker.

You got the talented Megan.

You got talented Laura came in.

But

when you you get rid of the talent, that's not always going to happen.

And we see that throughout movies, anchor.

Remember the 60s anchor man war?

There was Cronkite and Huntley Brinkley and CBS and ABC.

And

NBC's Fortune rose or fell with their anchors for that period where you had Tom Brokall and

Walter Cronkite.

Yeah, and you have Peter Jennings

and Dan Rather, those three.

They kind of

were the people who kept the networks going.

And when they left, it was kind of chaotic.

So I think they're going to have problems replacing him.

A lot of people say, well, they were boycotting him and the left hated him and he was reduced to my pillow at reduced rates advertising.

So he didn't bring that much money.

He did bring audience in.

The Fox Nation was successful and he anchored the entire

subsequent two hours of news, three hours of news, that he was the link.

So it was intangible all the ways that he enriched Fox.

And I think there's one more narrative that,

and I saw this in the American Spectator today that the Fox News has bent the knee to the left, that they are trying to get rid of Fox.

Yes, AOC is promulgating that, that she helped take his scalp.

Oh, really?

I didn't know that.

She's bragging about it that she didn't believe in cancel culture but she did believe in canceling cancel culture lean canceling culture

in this case of uh tucker carlson uh yeah i think that's true because think for a minute

take a deep breath and say okay the dominion just take the dominion

um and i had been on a show i think it was on louds when sidney powell was ranting and and when she left i said that I thought that the scandal was not the machines, but the changing of the voting laws legally, but dishonestly, I think, in March, April, and May under the COVID,

under the pretext of COVID to change a 70-day, 70% election day electorate to a 70% absent T-ballot or mail-in ballot early voting electorate.

And

that was fundamental in the election of 2020

but

i just take the dominion for a second that happened after the election so nobody is saying that these people who were going on and blaming dominion or those crazy conspiracies that it was communicating with venezuela or russia or china nobody's saying that changed the election right

They are saying that you owe us more than the net value of all of our market capitalization because we have been damaged.

And I would like to see if that's true, see, because in free speech, you can say things in the public sphere.

And I would like to see why didn't the Fox lawyers have the data that showed that right now Dominion has suffered X amount of canceled contracts or its market capital.

Maybe it has.

But it would have been good for them to continue that fight.

And I think Dominion really put them in a bad spot by subpoenaing all of these internal emails that they didn't want to exposed.

But think of that versus the laptop.

So you had the Federal Bureau of Investigation on a prompt of Joe Biden's deputy, Anthony Blinken, who called an old buddy, Michael Morrell that was a deputy director of the CIA.

and said, essentially, can you round up a bunch of luminaries, John Brennan and James Clapper, and have them draft a letter

swearing that the, not swearing, but they always have weasel words and escape clauses, but insinuating that this laptop is more Russian disinformation.

Think of that for a second.

They learned nothing.

They forgot nothing.

They had just been ridiculed and embarrassed for going with the 22 months, $40 million Robert Mueller Russian collusion.

So they go right back to the same well.

Only this time it's not collusion, it's disinformation.

They get the guys out there.

They prep Joe Biden.

He goes into the, this was all for the debate.

He goes into the debate and he cites,

he cites this letter proving that his son's laptop is Russian disinformation, which he knows is a lie because they had already leaked references from the laptop considering him.

And he could tell his son's style and what his son does.

He talks to his son.

He knew it was authentic, but he had that cover and he attacked Trump in for being a demagogue for even trying to mention it.

So then the whole thing turns out to be a complete fraud.

That did affect an election.

There has been a poll that shows that people, had they known that that laptop information that had leaked out was accurate and Joe Biden and the Biden cartel consortium were crooked and were influence peddling, they wouldn't have voted for him.

So that altered an election.

And when you add into the in into the stew that the FBI had hired Twitter at $3 million as a contractor to suppress information, which included the laptop story.

And the same was with Facebook.

So put it all together.

We are told that the Dominion was a really big story because a bunch of weirdos got on Fox News in their anger that the election didn't go their way.

So they said, oh, I bet it was the voting machines.

And then they sued.

And everybody's, you know, oh, wow, this is terrible.

But you had night after night after night, people at MSNBC, NBC, PBS, NPR, CBS.

CNN saying that there was Russian collusion and there was Russian disinformation.

And that was false and it was demonstrably false.

And to this day,

no one, no one,

no one says, I'm sorry, there was never any Russian collusion.

Adam Schiff still says there is.

And there was no Russian disinformation.

That laptop was authentic.

And then you get into the Orwellian situation where Hunter Biden's lawyer essentially is saying this in his suit.

You damage my client, Mr.

Computer Repairman, by disseminating the contents of this laptop, which is not to say that it was his laptop.

It could have been somebody else's laptop.

We don't know.

He may have just hated Hunter and took a laptop in the corner and said, that's Hunter's.

And then you want to say, well, why don't we have forensic and see whether it's his or not?

Well, they don't want to say that.

So it's silly.

But my point is, the laptop did a lot more damage to the electoral process than did a bunch of crazy people on on Fox claiming or alleging or insinuating that the Dominion voting machines were wired or rigged.

That's what I'm trying to say.

And I don't understand libel, culpability,

damaging a product when out of the Mueller investigation, you ruined the life of Michael Flynn.

You ruined the life of Carter Page.

You ruined the life of George Papadopoulos.

You probably ruined the first two years of the Trump administration, and there's nobody that's culpable.

Can't somebody sue and say night after night after night after night, that anchor, this anchor said Russian collusion, Russian collusion, Russian collusion, Russian disinformation.

They did.

The clips are on Fox every night.

I've seen them on

the internet.

There's about 20 of them, and they have never apologized for those lies.

Are you trying, are you suggesting then that you think the case against Fox by Dominion should have maybe should have been thrown out of the court or something to that effect?

I'm saying, well, it wasn't thrown out of the court because Fox capitulated.

And I'm saying that I don't think that Fox should have capitulated.

I think they would have won the case.

Because if you say

that in an editorial

free-for-all discussion on television, if somebody makes some crazy things, then

you can ruin a whole network because that person said something.

Tucker Carlson said on the air,

we've had Sidney Powell on, but she's got to bring data and she won't do it.

And so my point is that if that they backed out because the Dominion people had a strategy to subpoena of these embarrassing,

which were considered secret, interchanges and text and emails.

And that felt that that was building a case against Fox News itself.

And it was embarrassing Fox.

It was showing that Tucker was

the perception the Murdoch apparently had was Tucker was larger than they were, and he was insured, he was bulletproof, and he could do anything.

And they wanted to reassert control and say, look, we're going to cut him off at the legs.

And we don't like our employees talking about us that way to our other employees.

And so when you get down to all the sensationalism, prune it all away, you're basically saying

that you can't make wild, you can't say wild things on TV.

And if that's true,

because Dominion won, and you can't say wild things because they're going to hurt people.

Well,

that was the four years.

Who was the person who promulgated the ping and the alpha bank?

Who did that?

What was Jake Sullivan doing with that dossier-Sussman GPS connection?

What was Blinken doing with the morale connection?

What were Hillary Clinton doing, destroying devices or using classified

communicating in classified fashion over a homebrewed server?

So what I'm saying is that it's again, it's an example of the asymmetry.

But if we're going to get to the point where you're in a discussion on television and somebody says, well, what do you think about the election, Mr.

Smith?

And he says, well, you know,

I think there was something wrong, but

I say Mark Zuckerberg put $419 million and that was wrong and illegal and maybe it wasn't illegal.

And he sues you.

He said, you said I was illegal.

It's not illegal.

And we're going to sue your whole, I don't think, I think the principle was worth fighting for.

But what I'm getting is I think that the fact that

they settled so late in the game meant that they thought that the principle was worth fighting for until they got angry.

And

the way I view it from the sources I've talked to and the evidence that I've looked at is that they got angry.

It was an emotional decision where the very top, Mr.

Murdoch and his son, said, you know what?

I don't like the way this guy's talking about us.

And we've lost a lot of money for all this loose talk.

And we're going to lose a lot more in this loose talk.

Let's just get rid of everything.

And rather than saying,

take a deep breath, Tucker is the anchor to your whole empire.

He is making you more money.

I know his ads are not as lucrative as other people because of the boycotts and his controversy, but he brings traffic.

And if you cut him off, like the first day they cut him off, they lost more, almost as much as they had settled in the lawsuit and stock value diminution.

So I think that's where we are.

And is there anything to be Tucker is not, I mean, he's got a carpe diem.

He's got to seize the day.

We all have shelf lives.

So look at Jon Stewart.

When he left the comedy show or whatever it was, he was, even though he didn't have great ratings, he could have done anything.

And now look at him, right?

He didn't continue at that level.

Neither did Jerry Seinfeld, right?

And Bill O'Reilly kind of did.

His podcast is very successful, and so are his books.

And Megan Kelly as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Megan, when she left NBC, she could have faded away.

She didn't.

She immediately created a whole new Megan Kelly brand.

And I think it's even more lucrative to her and more successful than her Fox or NBC tenures.

But I think she was very wise in seizing the day.

And I think right now Tucker should

start his own streaming show, you know what I mean?

Or in league with another grandee of some sort.

And I think they would make more money and they would reach more people than three and a half million that he reached every night.

I do.

And I think he's got the ability to do it.

I think he does have great prospects, but

what do you think about then if we could add Don

Lemon to this?

I saw, can I, can I?

That's what, you know, the view was talking about these two firings, and that crazy Joy Reed or Sonny Halston, I don't know which one said,

I don't know why people are putting these two firings together because they're, they're in no way similar to each other.

And I thought, you are so spot on because Limmons is.

Yeah, not in the way that she thought.

Yeah,

you had the

firing of a big success and money earner and you had the firing of a money loser and complete failure and the one was at fox because of his ability to attract an audience don lemon could not attract an audience he couldn't open his mouth and according to a lot of the sources the interview was at Ramaswamy, the presidential candidate, he couldn't open his mouth without self-referencing that he was black, black, black, black, black, black.

And

it was just a crazy interview.

He was rude.

He was disruptive.

He was incoherent.

He couldn't even, he didn't really know what the Civil War was about.

He had no idea about the history of the Second Amendment, but that didn't stop him from being rude and insulting.

He insults women on the air.

He says crazy things.

And then he feels that if

Tucker's

critics think that Tucker felt that he was invulnerable, I'm not sure that's true.

It was at least based on Tucker's knowledge of the data, right?

That he was a big success.

If Don Lemon thought that he was invulnerable, it was not because of the data.

It was because he felt that they would not dare in the post-George Floyd period fire a black gay man from CNN.

And they were willing to take loss after loss with him, just so they would avoid.

But then when, apparently, when they saw Bongino go and they saw Tucker go,

then they saw Nate Silver was going to go from Disney, they just wanted to jump in and said, you know what, everybody's getting rid of people.

It's the new tight-fisted, shrinking market.

We've got to cut, and you can get a lot of stuff done in Rama Mail.

Never let a crisis go to waste.

And that's what they did.

Tucker had talent and Don Lemon had no talent.

I don't know how he ever got on TV.

He was obnoxious.

He was ill-informed.

The first time I ever heard of him, he was, I was channel surfing, and he was talking about black holes that were swallowing up Indonesian airliners.

Remember that?

Oh, yes.

I remember when that happened.

And he just, he wouldn't stop.

He wouldn't stop.

At least when Tucker talks about UFOs, he gets a guy in there from the retired general or a pilot and they show data, right?

Yeah.

But he didn't have any data.

No, he so just had his crazy idea.

I know.

Yeah.

But,

you know,

if

you think about it, if they could get people like Megan Kelly and Tucker and one or two others on their own show or their own network, they would, it would be ballistic.

You know what I mean?

I mean, they're doing well.

They'll do well independently.

It is kind of, you asked me at the beginning if there's any good news.

The good news is that

for all of the evil of the internet and all of the monopolies of the media,

this is kind of like the Wild West, 1880s.

Nobody can control it.

And there are mechanisms where a person with a microphone and a laptop can create a livelihood without being beholden to Fox.

or to a newspaper or to a particular radio show.

If you see what I'm saying, a guy like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, they've been able to create viable vehicles that are very much more lucrative than the more quote-unquote prestigious billets at CBS News.

I don't know who the,

I'm asking the audience.

I don't think any of us, if I ask you, who are the three prime time network anchors, I couldn't tell you.

I could tell you up to about five years ago, but it's irrelevant now.

And Joe Rogan or Megan Kelly is much better known with a bigger audience than

a anchor at CBS or NBC.

So that is a good news that people on their own initiative and talent and entrepreneurial defiance can really create and be the master of their own destinies.

So I imagine that that's what Tucker will do.

We don't hear as much about Bill O'Reilly, but I've been on his show and he does have.

He does have a large audience.

He asks insightful questions.

He's got books he's continuing to write.

I would imagine he's making the same amount of money.

And I would imagine that he reaches more than 4 million people than what he was reaching at Fox.

Yes.

So

that's something to think about.

Yeah, absolutely.

I had a small

subject here that was kind of tangential.

tangential to this.

And it was, I was reading in Quillett an article about how the news is always so bad, and it reminded me of us, where we try to start out positive.

But this

individual is writing that we often get a distorted picture from the news

about, for example,

crime or racism.

And what he meant, not the statistics and going up, but he meant, he says, well, you're

likely to get killed violently.

the chances that you would is 0.0006%.

And so he says everybody's watching

this news and it's all so negative.

That was him.

And he says it distorts the...

It does.

It does.

And that was an artifact of CNN that was a pioneer in what they called 24-7 news.

When I grew up, in ancient history, we all came home from work, or I came home from school.

My parents came home from work.

At six o'clock, they turned on Cronkite, right?

And they watched it for an hour.

And

there was actually 40 minutes, maybe.

And they had guys like Eric Severai that would give commentary, but

it was literally biased, but there was no time to hear about some person in Little Rock, Arkansas, or somebody in Fresno that got shot, right?

So, what happened with 24-7, they had to fill up that 24-hour news cycle so that any little incident in 330 million,

among 330 million people could be picked out and used as emblematic of larger pathologies because they're mostly bad stories.

But it doesn't really mean that that's going to happen.

That's what I'm saying.

And so I think there's a lot to that, that the news has has to concentrate in a national sense with 24 hours of shock.

And that means that you have to explore every nook and cranny of the United States, but you don't realize there's places where there's not much crime and there's not much violence and people get along

and we don't really hear about it.

There's a yeah, there's a lot of places really by that account.

I'll give you one example.

If I look at the Fresno Bee or I look at KMPH's website, right, local Fresno County, it is depressing as hell.

Every single day,

it's carjackings, shootings, bodies being found in orchards,

gang

rivalries that erupt at parties and kill people.

DUIs.

Gosh, that's terrible.

DUIs where the driver drives the wrong way, kills somebody, and leaves the scene of the accident.

Okay.

But I go to Fresno a lot, and I'd say in the last 10 years, I've seen two acts of violence myself.

And I've been all over.

And so that's the problem with 24-hour news.

Yes.

And

the other problem is that

The schools of journalism are totally corrupt and discredited.

They're biased.

They're not ideologically disinterested.

They don't train reporters in the fundamentals of reporting, sourcing, English prose and composition.

So the stories are poorly written.

You see things with misspelled words in major newspapers.

They don't understand what a source is, and it's gossip.

It's just the level of professionalism has gone way down.

So there's a lot less respect for journalists because they feel that they're extensions of the democratic or the left-wing agenda.

And

that's different than what it used to be.

You can say there's not one major conservative daily paper, not the Chicago Tribune, not the Minneapolis Star, not the LA Times,

not the

Washington Post or the New York Times, maybe the New York Post.

And that's about it.

And cable news, it's Fox and maybe Newsmax, but it's not, you know, usually on all of the cable packages.

And so

there's not a lot of alternatives.

No, but people are really turning to the podcast world, I think, a lot more than they used to.

That's for sure.

Yeah.

I'm amazed that when I go somewhere and somebody comes up to me three years ago, they would say, oh, I disagreed with you or I agreed with what you said in Fox or I read your book.

They don't anymore.

They say, I heard you say something on the podcast.

So I think podcasts as a genre are catching on because you can do

you know i'm not that you can't read something while you're on an exercise bike but you can be driving you can be lifting weights you can be jogging and you can listen to a podcast and get your information multitask

and that and i think that's that's the attraction yeah well victor let's go ahead and take a break and come back to talk a little bit about joe biden's announcement that he's running for the presidency in 2024.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

You're listening to the Victor Davis Hansen show.

You can find Victor at VictorHanson.com.

The name of his website is The Blade of Perseus.

And you can join us either with a free subscription to get onto our newsletter for all the free stuff on the website, or join us for a paid subscription and get VDH Ultra material, which of which there is lots.

And you can try it for a month for $5

or come on for a whole year for $50.

So please join us.

Victor,

what are your thoughts?

I want to say poor old Joe Biden's thinking he's going to run for the presidency in 2024.

Will he run and who will his vice president be, do you think?

Well,

ostensibly, what I would like to say is that he's in a jam

because

it's not COVID anymore.

So he's not going to do those drive-in movie type rallies where a bunch of cars honk, right?

Or he's not going to be in the basement because to do so will be an admission that he's non-compos mente.

So he's going to have to go through

a campaign of some sorts.

And by that, I mean the proper analogy is if you think he goes through the motions as president and he's much less viable

or visible than a normal president.

You're right, but he's still not in the basement and he doesn't like it.

He's exhausted.

But add two more years to that,

two years from now.

So it's going to be really a challenge for him to do that.

And I don't think he can do it.

That is go out on a real campaign.

That's number one.

Number two, he doesn't have anything.

And you saw that in his little video.

And you see it with his Jean-Pierre.

They never say

we have a great border policy.

They'll say Trump screwed the border up, but they'll never say the $6.5 million we let in was good.

They try to say that Afghanistan was a logistical success, but

they know that was a disaster.

They don't reference it.

They don't say

we are energy independent under Joe Biden.

When they talk about the high inflation, they say it's everywhere.

When they have the high interest rates.

So what I'm getting at is they don't want to claim what they have done.

And if he's not going to be a vigorous Obama charismatic type of character or Bill Clinton, what is he going to do in this campaign?

And we know what he's going to do.

He's going to be a construct, an artifact, an incidental candidate.

He's going to move his mouth and he's going to have his aviator glasses and he's going to read from a script.

But that campaign will be outsourced to Silicon Valley.

So maybe Mark Zuckerberg won't give $419 million, but they will raise comparable amounts of money and they will outspend the Republican candidate three to one, number one.

And the people on the media have learned nothing.

from Russian collusion or disinformation.

They're shameless.

They will go right back at it.

Every night, it will be some story.

And so about Donald Trump.

And so the narrative will not be, they will not defend their record

and they will put him out there, but he won't really be the campaign or the candidate.

He has one role and that is to be Joe Biden from Scranton, Pennsylvania, that has been familiar and doesn't fit the definition of the new Democratic Party as a revolutionary, socialist Marxist.

That's his duty.

But he brings in under that veneer or beneath that veneer a whole revolutionary agenda, but he won't talk about it because it's failed.

So what we're going to see in the next two years is

he will start campaigning at 11 in the morning and he'll quit at 2.

And then he will let the media outsource it.

And then they will get the DNC and they will get a bunch of grandees and they will get together and say we need to sue in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia,

Ohio.

We need to sue and make sure that there is no voting IDs, that there's third-party harvesting, that

you must count absentee ballots or mail in 10 days, up to 10 days after the election ended, or

there will be no necessity of checking a ballot versus a registrar's list.

That's what they're going to do.

And so they're going to raise a lot of money.

They're not going to defend the record.

They're going to go after Donald Trump.

And then

there's many legs of this new campaign strategy.

So what I'm getting at is leg one is money.

They're going to bury the Republicans because they have the money.

Remember, the left has the money.

Insurance, tech.

media, et cetera.

Finance, the corporate boardroom.

That's where the money in this country is, and they have it.

And number two,

they're going to

flood the legal zone.

They're going to wage lawfare to change the way that we ballot, just as they did in 2020 and

22.

Number three, they're going to create the mega monster.

They've already created the ultra-mega monster that even if Trump doesn't get the nominations, they will say that DeSantis is an ultra mega monster.

So they'll try to frighten people.

And then

there's another element besides lawfare and besides big money and besides outsourcing it to the media that they will use.

And that is they will use the administrative state.

We saw it in 2020 when the FBI suddenly produced this phony narrative that the laptop was Russian disinformation.

We saw it in 2016 when Jake Sullivan was very prominent.

It's kind of scary that we have the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State respectively seeding things in the 2016 and 2020 election to destroy their opponent with untruth.

But Jake Sullivan was deeply involved with Sussman and GPS and Glim Simpson to advance the steel narrative.

So they're going to, just like they did with the FBI and Twitter.

So just because Elon Musk revealed the skull doggry that they had hired the old Twitter for $3 million to censor things they felt not useful to the Biden administration.

And the CIA was involved.

Nobody's been punished.

In fact, James Baker, I think the legal counsel for the FBI is making up to $8 million.

He was rewarded.

So we're going to see the deep state in the employment of the Biden campaign.

And then finally, we know how the day-to-day campaign will be waged.

Donald Trump is right now looking at this

temporarily defanged Alvin Bragg, but this is going to go on till December.

Yes.

And then Letita James is going to try to suggest that he committed fraud by overvaluing his

real estate holding.

I don't think that's going to go anywhere, but it's going to be in the news.

And then we're going to have this woman who says that she at the lingerie, she

showed Trump, what,

like 1996?

Is that when it was?

It was just decades ago, and then he forcibly sexually assaulted her.

She's going to get a lot of play.

And then we're going to get the Georgia prosecutor about the phone call.

And then we're going to get the special counsel.

And they're going to be sequential.

And they will coordinate, believe me.

And from right about now, all the way to Election Day, they're going to wage an administrative state war against Donald Trump.

And the idea is to, A, give him enough empathy to win sympathy

and votes in the primary, and then to bleed him to death with a thousand cuts so that even

somebody like Joe Biden, who's not of this world anymore, he's living in another alternate universe, that he will win.

We all know that.

The question we all have is, okay, we know it.

We know their strategy.

We know their resources.

We've seen it before.

Can we stop it?

And that would entail mobilizing everybody to go to the polls, to watch people, to raise money,

to get the vote out.

It would entail all the media to be

scrutinized every single little gambit that they will do, like

another Russian disinformation letter.

It would require unity.

They have unity, we don't.

So we don't know how the DeSantis Trump

rivalry is going to pan out, nor should we, Sammy, because it's too early.

We don't want to have a candidate just run away with it.

We want two candidates to discuss things.

There was a rumor today, did you see it, that Trump said he wouldn't debate in the primary against primary opponents?

And then I haven't seen that confirmed.

And then Joe Biden said the same thing.

But that would be terrible just to

replay the prior election without debates in the primary.

Primary is when people really tell you how crazy they are.

And that's what we want.

And

so

we all know what it is.

Just can we stop what we know to happen?

Well, I was wondering about Kamala Harris as his running mate.

And recently she gave a speech at Howard.

And here is how she ended it.

Quote, so I think it's very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one to see the moment in time in which we exist in our present and to be able to contextualize it and to understand where we exist in history and in the moment

as it relates not only to the past, but to the future.

Another brilliant statement by Kamala.

Could she really be still the vice president?

Does he have no choice?

I got in trouble because

I said she had a vocabulary of 500 words.

I said that on the error, but I think that wasn't

an exaggeration, is what I'm trying to say.

And

she, I don't know whether

she can't think on the go or

the people who write this stuff, because sometimes it's teleprompted, know that she can't,

but it's just,

you know, it is

wash,

rent, spin, wash, rent, spin.

It's the same thing, just recycled.

And

it's not rhetorical.

I mean, there is, you know, when you say

for the people, by the people, of the people, that Lincoln S repetition is a rhetorical,

you know, it's a rhetorical device.

Yeah.

Forms of enumeration are always, there's all sorts of,

you know, there's.

tautology or there's a fancy word I'm trying to remember.

I think it's called antoclossis.

It's a Greek word for

repeating a word, but with a slightly different meaning.

But she doesn't know any of that.

It's just that she's lazy or she's incompetent.

And so she's a caricature.

And they can't get rid of her because she's a black woman.

At some point in the United States,

somebody is going to say, I don't care.

I'm going to...

remove or hire a person based on their utility and merit.

And you can call me anything in the world and I don't care.

But if they were to get rid of Kamala Harris, even though she's only half black and has not identified with the black community that much and is very wealthy and the child of two PhDs,

they would take a hit in the African-American community.

And they are anyway, because I think a lot of African-American voters are not going to give them 90% loyalty at the polls.

And so,

yeah, but I mean, think about their dilemma.

The problem with the Republicans is they have a candidate that won in 2016 and a guy who revolutionized the politics in Florida and was the most successful Florida governor in history, and they're going to run against each other.

The problem is not an abundance of riches.

It's an abundance of mediocrity.

You've got an 80-year-old senile candidate with someone who

is a joke.

She's nonsensical.

And so

it's going to be very interesting, especially if there's no primary debates.

And I guess Trump has said that there's not going to be, and so is Biden.

But can you imagine what Robert, I mean, he has a voice impairment, but Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

is right.

He would slice Biden to pieces.

And they're not going to allow that to happen.

And I think DeSantis and Trump would be fireworks.

It'd be wonderful to watch.

Yes, absolutely.

So I'm not a big fan.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan in annoying anybody.

Nobody gets that.

Nobody gets to be annoyed at.

We saw that in 2016 when a good guy like Scott Walker with a wonderful record, everybody, he was way ahead in the polls and he just flamed out.

And then we were all told in 2004 that Howard Dean was a new type of Democrat.

He was the first guy to oppose the Iraq war.

And then he gave the, yee-ha-ha, we're going to go, that crazy scream, and that was the end of it.

Then they brought out, you know, that fossilized John Kerry, ossified.

But we need to have primaries and we need to have debates so that people can see these candidates in action.

They really do.

And see what their agenda is.

But have you noticed that recently Joe Biden seems to be talking about, we want to be sure people's lives, you know, that people people are secure that something about security and he hasn't actually said policing but he's he's doing a hillary

attack yeah he can't give any data for two reasons one the data is all negative and he's the cause of it because crime did go up and murder did go up and hate crimes did go up and interracial crimes did go up and the border is a mess and the foreign policy is a mess and China and Russia are on the move and Iran is on the move, and North Korea is back to where it was.

So it's a mess.

So he can't give any data.

And number two,

he has constituencies that wouldn't let him have any data if he wanted, if it was positive.

He cannot.

What's he going to do?

Attack a Soros DA?

Can you imagine if he came out?

and said, I'm really critical of Alvin Bragg.

He doesn't understand.

He can't do that because he needs 90% of the African-American vote and 70% of the Latino vote.

And so he can't do that.

He's a prisoner.

And so he's not going to do any of that.

What he's going to say is: security is a good thing.

We're strong as ever.

We're back.

And the economy's roaring.

It's booming.

That's what he does.

I just heard him today.

That was almost verbatim what he said.

There's no data.

There's no detail.

There's nothing.

And so his view is they cut to the newsroom and then the anchor says well that was very good speech and we're going to have senator coons come in and he said i really liked his penmanship you know that's that's what they do yeah it's like obama's flavor what's your favorite flavor of ice cream

and so that's what they do and

the right says it can't go on It can go on until you destroy that paradigm.

And so what they need is a Reagan person who destroyed that liberal paradigm.

And he did, because he stole the whole Reagan Democrats from the Democratic Party.

And what they need is a dynamic candidate that can pick up an extra three to four of the suburban vote, maintain the base, and increase that eroding Democratic majority of Latino and black voters.

So you get up to about 45 Latino voters, 15 to 20 African-American voters.

You get another three to five.

And and you do that, and you will pick up seven or eight Senate seats and you have 30 or 40 House seats.

Then, if you have a good administrator who's experienced, then you can do stuff if you win the presidency.

I mean, quick, quickly.

And we'll see.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump had the presidency.

He had the House and he had the Senate.

He had not been a president before, and he had a lot of bad appointments.

But more importantly, he had people that despised him in his own party more than democrats so that john mccain hated his guts and he single-handedly sabotaged any reform or replacement of obamacare it was terrible what he did he campaigned on it and then he turned around just despite trump he he sandbanged that whole project that would have been very important because health costs have soared way above the rate of inflation under Obamacare.

Yes, I know that.

Victor, we are right on a break, but I wanted to just ask you a short thing because while you were talking, I remembered that Larry Elder announced his run for the presidency in 2024.

And I was wondering if anything in short you have on that you wanted to say on Larry Elder.

I really like him, you know, as a candidate.

So I was wondering.

Yeah, he's very bright and he's very quick on his feet.

The only problem is that candidates that have never held a particular office in the past and have never been elected

are not serious with one exception, and that is if they've got money.

So Donald Trump had money and Ross Perot had money

and Michael Bloomberg got himself on a stage because he had money.

It's been a billion dollars.

So I don't know how Larry Elder is going to have the wherewithal to overcome the fact that he doesn't have a constituency that's voted for him.

And that's going to be a problem.

What the Democrats are doing too, just to get finish that other topic, we saw that with Diane Feinstein in 2018 in the Senate race when it was clear that

she had a disability.

And

they, nevertheless, she ran and she won, I think, 63%.

And nobody thought that she would be able to do what she was supposed to do, but she would occupy that seat.

And it was irrelevant, just so she had that vote.

They did the the same thing with John Fetterman.

Everybody knew in the left that he was non compos mentas, he was not able, but he just needed to sit there where they handed him.

And the same thing about Joe Biden.

And so in their way, they have an agenda and it supersedes particular individuals.

They just need the people to be elected.

And they don't care whether they can talk or not, whether their mind is there or not.

All they have to do is occupy a space.

And like I go back to that old Star Trek scene where the, you know, this planet they try to impose national socialism on.

This guy does.

And then they take over from him and he's just babbling.

He's just a face on the television screen that's being manipulated.

And that's what they do.

That's what they do.

The Republicans don't have that discipline, that unity.

They really don't.

They're fighting all the time and they're young.

Republicans, yeah, Republicans

admire or value free thought and free thinking.

I think that's the whole problem with the.

And they're younger and they're more dynamic.

These Democrats are all, I mean, Dick Durbin's 73.

So is Schumer.

Clyborne is third in the House.

He's 82.

Biden's 80.

Einstein's 89.

Pelosi's 83.

And they're all remnants from the 60s.

And they're there because they kind of have their finger in the dike.

And the dike water that wants to burst out behind the dike is the AOC squad, those Elizabeth Warren type people.

And maybe Hakeem Jeffries

is the new type of leader that will be dominant in the Democratic Party.

And the Democratic Party is de facto a racial identity politics party.

That's its

identity politics.

That's what it is.

It's the transgendered identity.

It's Latinoed identity.

It's the black identity.

And it has a fundamental

paradox in it because it's run by wealthy white people from Silicon Valley and the eastern seaboard.

And they apparently encourage this,

this identity, racial

identity, you know, this separation, segregation, chauvinism, because they have the means and the wherewithal not to take it too seriously because it doesn't affect them.

They live in compounds.

Their kids go to the right schools.

They can buy anything they want.

They have security guards.

But they find it useful to

get power.

And when the power is gotten, they are in control.

George Soros is in control.

Joe Biden's people around him are in control.

And that's what they do.

Yeah, that's for sure.

It's not a grassroots thing.

I don't see a lot of black people in the street protesting because

they want more affirmative action or something.

It's an elite, an elite elite.

And I don't think they're out there protesting against charter schools.

Maybe they're whipped up by the teachers' unions, but they're not out there saying, you know, we have to have open borders and no charter schools.

That comes from the very, very wealthy bicoastal, mostly white elite.

Yes, absolutely.

And they're running a race against how long it will take their constituency to understand that the racial politics is very limited in scope and that their leaders are really after power and they could really care less.

Seems to me that's what the Democrat, you know, the tension is in the Democratic Party.

I could be wrong.

I don't know.

The problem they have is that

they would rather ruin things.

and be ideologically correct than to be empirical or disinterested.

So

they know that they are single-handedly responsible for $5.50 a gallon gas in California.

They don't care.

They have no concern at all.

You take a Stanford professor that's behind that or a Bay Area politician and you take them down here to San Joaquin or Five Points and you show them four Latino communities and you say, this guy has a $5,000 truck.

It gets 18 miles a gallon.

He's not causing global warming, but you are charging him $5.60 to fill up and he can't afford to get to work or he can't afford to run his landscape business.

They don't care.

They do not care.

You show them school districts in which not one person

can meet the minimum standards of

math proficiency or English proficiency.

They don't care.

They still want teachers union.

They still want no standards.

They still want lifetime tenure.

They don't care.

And

so far, the Republicans and the Conservatives have not been able to

make that argument to the middle and lower, middle and poor class that these people don't care.

They're rich, selfish bastards, and they don't care about you.

That's what's behind the solar wind agenda.

That's what's behind the elite transgendered stuff.

They don't care what it does to women's sports.

They don't care that a 12-year-old can be psychologically confused for years and yet be mutilated.

They don't care.

It's the ideology.

It's the agenda.

Yes.

Well, Victor, we need to go.

Oh, go ahead.

And.

No, it's just that nobody can break through and tell people that.

Everybody's afraid of being called a transphobe or a homophobe or a sexist, misogynist, racist, I guess.

That's why Tucker was unique.

He didn't care.

So when he said things that were insensitive, people keep saying, I'm reading all of these left-wing attacks on him today.

And they have, to show you how lazy they are.

They just get one article and they all copy it.

And they have three or four

thematic Tucker-isms that they feel says it's a racist.

He said about the Texas, excuse me, the Tennessee legislature that went from Mr.

Conciliatory, remember that, to the black guy that took over the megaphone.

He said he used a shop, a sharecropper's accent.

Was that insensitive?

Probably.

but when you look at tapes of that fellow early on and then six years ago and what he was that was a made-up falsetto voice a completely fake accent and it was done entirely for cynical political purposes and that was tucker's point and he was saying that and but most republicans won't say that they just they just can't do it

No, they can't.

They're too afraid of being called racist.

Yeah,

they have

they play by the Marcus of Queensbury rules, and they have not seen the underbelly of America.

They see the underbelly of America, they can say, you know what?

That was what's wrong with the under with the Never Trump movement.

It was all an elite movement.

It was all an elite movement.

It was all elite beltway people and media people and academic people who never see the underbelly of America.

So for them, it was just, oh, he insulted me, or I'm not going to be, I won't, I'm not going to say I could vote for that troll Trump, or his sensibilities are shocking.

But it was never,

this isn't a perfect world.

This is the Hillary agenda.

This is the Trump agenda.

For poor people who want a chance to make it, it's better to have Trump.

It's safer for all of us overseas.

They didn't care.

They don't care.

They don't see those people.

They don't care about those people.

You're right.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the green agenda and the middle class.

We've sort of brought those things up.

So stick with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson show and we were going to turn then to the green agenda.

I was reading an article in the SPICE.

website by Joel Kotkin

and

he was

addressing the green agenda and how it was going to change our lives.

And one thing that I noticed in the article, he wrote that the green agenda, and I didn't know this, is expected to cost $6 trillion each year for the next 30 years.

That's an absolutely incredible

amount of money.

And then his point was, they're going to be taking it all from us to do that and then expect us to cut back on our lives.

And he said, the elites want to save the planet and immiserate the common citizen.

And I think

that's kind of the theme.

It's very strange that they hate their own citizens more than they do the people who are their main foes ideologically on green issues, which are the Chinese.

They will never, ever.

lecture the Chinese on all of the coal plants they're opening.

They will never lecture them on anything, but they will go tell some guy in a tract house in San Jose, we're going to take away your gas stove

and we're going to take that diesel pickup from you, and we're going to get kilowatt charges up to 30 cents so you don't use the air conditioning.

In other words, they're saying we're going to destroy the modern middle-class lifestyle because we ideologically feel that it's contrary to

our green agenda.

What is the green agenda?

It's based on a theory

that demonstrable, but not great, but measurable, measurable heating of about a one degree over the last 150 years since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, that there's a relationship between the two

and not that the Earth throughout its billion-year history goes through natural cycles of ice and heat, and we're in a many

warming period that is not necessarily tied down, connected, joined by the industrial evolution and the result of man-made releases of carbon.

And so that's their religion.

And when you try to, like

this scholar Kunin, who did both Unsettled, when he tries to show you just that,

they freak out because

for them, it's a religious experience.

But

you don't remake society on the basis of religion unless you're the Aztecs or the Mayas or somebody.

And that's what they're doing.

They're making it, you can't talk about it.

You can't mention it.

You have to get rid of natural gas.

You have to build huge battery plants at mosques landing that blow up and catch on fire.

You have to charge so much for energy that people will cut back on their lifestyle back to the 40s or 30s.

And it's all predicated on the idea that the people who are driving this down our throats are never subject to the consequences of their own politics, ideology, programs, protocols.

They're not.

They're not.

I just got back from Silicon Valley, and I noticed that when I came home here, it was 90.

You know, it was like 68 there in Menlo Park where I ate dinner, 68.

And I drove around the neighborhood.

I got lost in that labyrinth around Menlo Park.

I noticed something.

When I see homes in the San Joaquin Valley, they all have air conditioners, either on the top of the house, on the side.

I didn't see one air conditioner.

And then it's kind of like my office.

I don't have, I've never turned on the heater, I've never turned on the air conditioner.

But people from that temperature zone, they dictate policy for the rest of the people who have days that are 40 degrees in the winter and 110 in the summer, but they don't care.

And they don't have long commutes.

They don't have long commutes.

The people in San Francisco and Menlo Park, they don't commute.

The people in Hollister do, or Los Banos.

The middle-class staffers or the middle-class service workers, they do, but not the grandees.

They have the money to live near these.

these places of employment.

So what I'm getting at is a lot of this woke revolution is based on the idea that a very

leisured and affluent class has the margin of error to afford these doctrines that fall so heavily on those who are aspiring to make it.

And that's what's so strange about because they advertise themselves as a party of empathy.

They're the party of selfishness.

Selfish people,

ideologically driven.

blinkered people that don't want to look at new information.

They don't want to have discussions.

They're religious in a weird sense and their God is green.

And it's really disturbing.

Joel Kawkins has been writing about this for 10 years.

I admire what he's trying to do.

He has three big themes that he tries to explore from a different angle.

And theme number one

is that we're a medieval California, that we have an elite coastal multi-millionaire group, and then we have peasants.

And I kind of wrote about that in a different way in The Dying Citizen.

And then number two,

that

you don't have to be some right-winger.

There would be a moderate stance.

You could build some clean hydroelectric plants still.

You could explore fusion nuclear power.

You could build four or five reservoirs to get water.

You could just say, you know what?

When we go to electric, we're still going to kill people on the freeway.

So let's take I-5-101 and the 99 and make sure there's six lanes of safe, well-designed roads to stop all this mayhem and carnage.

And you know what?

Maybe we can just enforce the laws we have in our big cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.

As someone who was just in San Francisco and not much earlier, just in Los Angeles, it's remarkable how these cities have committed, I guess you'd say, cannibalism or suicide.

They've destroyed themselves.

I don't know whether the old guys died off or they moved,

but there's nobody in control.

And everybody's afraid to arrest somebody because they know he's going to be let out anyway.

And everybody's making the necessary adjustments.

They don't go here or there.

They,

you know,

that's a big no-no, that the liberal is the most aware of the racial cauldron that he has created and the crime

problem.

Because I know a lot of liberal friends and they stereotype and profile like you don't know.

I mean, they will not go to a particular area at a particular time because of a particular people that's there.

And they will not put their kids in schools that have high minority populations.

My parents said, you know what?

We're not going to put you in the farm school.

Sorry, kids.

We're going to put you in the barrio school and you're going to learn to get along with people.

that don't look like you.

And it was pretty rough.

And I did the same to my kids.

I said, you're going to go to a public school and you're going to go to Selma High School and it's going to be tough.

But that's who the people are.

And you've got to be one with the people.

But not these left-wing liberals.

They don't want that.

No, of course not.

They want to call people racist whose kids are in the public schools and think that's important.

But that's a medieval, as I said, that's an exemption.

That's a penance.

That's some type of bargain they've made with their, I don't know, with their conscious, that

the more that I self-segregate, the more I don't want to be around the other, the more loud, louder I am in my virtue signaling.

And the more that I call other people names to hide the fact that the charges that I lodge against others are better and more applicable applied to me.

Yeah, I wonder when the middle class is going to

realize that this left agenda, whether it's the green agenda or the other things, that they're the ones being hit by inflation, by taxation, by overextension of the government, by the extension of entitlement programs beyond what it seems like we're able to pay.

They're being hit by lower wages, more unemployment, et cetera.

And I just,

when I was looking at what I was going to talk with you about today, I was thinking, what is the fate of this middle class?

Are they just going to keep going along with this?

Are we going to be roaming?

Well, first of all, they're shrinking.

Until Trump, they hadn't had a rise in real wages for 12 years.

And

housing is the percentage of people who were able to afford a house was declining and home ownership was declining, especially now with higher interest rates.

and

supply shortages that make homes more expensive.

So they're not, they're hurting.

They're hurting, hurting, hurting.

This president has done more to destroy the middle class.

Price of eggs, the price of meat,

price of bread, the price of everything, the price of repairing your home, price of gas, the price of a car, everything is higher.

And the security is less.

And

the taxes are higher.

on the middle class.

And so

they don't have a voice.

They had one with Reagan because he was a product of the middle class, or at least where he grew up.

And he was sociable.

He wasn't a mean guy.

And so he charmed, you know, 10 to 15% of the electorate.

That's how he won.

He just

took the old blue dog Democrat, the old Democrat and said, you know, I was a Democrat.

They don't exist anymore like us.

So vote for me.

And then he kind of tamped down on the excesses of the Republican Party that was caricatured as a golfing golfing aristocratic class.

And so although he golfed a little bit, you were much more likely to see Reagan with a chainsaw or on a horse or clearing brush on his ranch, you know.

And he had these buddies or pals that were

Secret Service liked him, and he had guys that were hung out with him that were not.

that you didn't see.

I mean, he had the kitchen cabinet and the wealthy people, but he was able to transmit this folksy charm.

But we don't have somebody like that that came out of the middle class and genuinely believes in the middle class and wants to use classic conservative principles,

sociological, economic, political, cultural, civilizational, to help the middle class, which is the majority of

students.

Instead,

it's fear.

It's like,

I don't want to be called a racist.

I don't want to be called

a snob.

I don't want to be called this.

I want to be called that.

So they don't call the Democrats out.

If we had good politicians, they'd say the Democratic Party is racist.

Racist.

All it does is fixate on the color of your skin for political advantage.

And you know why we know who is racist?

Because Joe Biden is racist.

From the corn pop stories to you ain't black to hey junkie to two times when he referred to an African-American subordinate as hey boy

through the racial jungle and all that stuff of the 70s.

That party is imbued with racial fixations.

And now you have a black elite that's absolutely racist.

And you can see that when

the poor artist, you know, of

Delbert got in trouble by saying something stupid that

because he saw a poll where African Americans polled that they didn't want to be around whites or they thought whites were toxic or whatever the poll was, then he countered that and said, I don't want to be around blacks.

He should have said, I want to be around blacks and try to convince them that segregation is the path to oblivion.

So when you see the Stanford

black students, Stanford Law School black students trying to threaten the law school by saying

that they're no longer going to recruit African Americans for the law school, or when you see the NAACP saying they're not going to go to Florida, they urge blacks not to go, that's a suicidal policy.

That is a suicidal policy.

They should be saying, we want to go to Florida.

We want to learn what the other side is doing.

The African-American community at the law school should be saying,

we want to recruit African-Americans, but we want to have tutorials.

We want to have professors come in to ensure that we're excellent at English composition or reasoning.

We want to be better, more sophisticated, more articulant than other people are, rather than just blame the system because you're afraid that you can't excel at something.

So

it's really sad.

That was one of the things about the Tuskegee Airmen.

I know they're overplayed, but if you read their saga, and a person who knows a lot about it,

Tom Soule, he wrote me an email the other day about it, and we had talked about it before.

But the point was that

I know there there was a lot of

in our age of racial identity.

They went back and sort of recalibrated the Tuskegee Airmen.

But if you look at contemporary accounts at the time, they had an excellent kill ratio against German pilots.

They had an excellent ratio when they were escorting B-24s of preserving the formation because of good fighter escort.

And the reason they did is when you look at their trainers, it was not, oh, the world's against us.

We want to make sure that African-American pilots have less hours.

We shouldn't have to have the same amount of hours as white pilots because we were, it was, we want more.

We want to be better.

And that's what they were.

And that's the only way to success in this country.

If you're going to fall in the trap of racial identity, then you better make sure that

you work harder than the other competition.

And that's...

And that's what we're lacking in the African-American community.

And we're lacking it in the white community that will say that.

And

I don't have any credibility.

I spent 21 years at Cal State Fresno with that theory, that I looked at the student body when I was hired and there was no Greek and Latin program.

There was no

humanities of the ancient world program.

There was no individual classics major.

And I said, I want to produce a bachelor's degree, independent major in classics.

I want to unite it with the ancient history component.

And I looked at the students and I said, these are working class kids.

They were either mostly Mexican American or Hmong or black or poor white.

And I said, I want to show them they can be better educated than somebody at a prep school because I don't think talent has anything to do with race or economic status.

And after 21 years, it was just an exhausting experience because the more that they succeeded And the more that they went to prestigious schools and the more they went into the upper class, the more the temptation was put upon them

by the therapeutic movement, the racially chalvinistic movement, the Latino, Chicano Latino studies, the blacks.

Hey, you've been blinded.

You're really a victim.

And you can go even further if you mouth the diversity equity.

So that was, I thought that I had done something, but I look back at that career and I think, wow.

I taught all those students that race was incidental and it meant nothing, and that they could be in four years of hard work, they could be as competitive as people at Sacred Heart or Castellea in the Bay Area with some wealthy homes.

And I think I did achieve that point, but I don't think that the students appreciated it.

I don't, when I look back, because so many of my graduates went into the diversity, equity, inclusions and flipped politically.

So once the temptation was, you're a victim, tell us you're a victim,

they did it.

But the irony was they were very well trained.

So they didn't need to do that because they were better trained than anybody.

Because we insisted that our faculty, that everybody gave a lecture class report without notes.

We corrected their grammar and their compositions.

We made sure that Greek and Latin focused on philology, grammar, syntax.

And it was pretty rigorous.

It was based on what I had been taught in graduate school.

And it was very successful.

We had great professors, too.

But I'm looking back and I'm thinking, that was so much, you know, so much effort.

You know, when

you go back to your office after teaching three hours and there's 10 kids in your class, or some kid says, you know, I'm short money.

I need some shoes.

Or another kid said, can I borrow your pickup?

Or another person said, my dad thinks it's a waste of time.

Will you call him?

That kind of stuff.

It was extracurricular outside the classroom that was necessary.

Or I want to drop drop Greek in the second semester.

I can't do it or it's a waste of time unless you tutor me.

Can you tutor me?

Okay.

And I had one time 17 tutorials per semester.

I remember 17 was the magic number.

My daughter, who would visit me once in a while, would drop in in my office and she'd always see students there.

She goes, how many tutorials do you have?

I said, I don't know.

And she goes, I'm going to count them.

So she went to my grade book.

She goes, you have 17 independent studies.

Well, I look back at all that, who wants to do all that?

See, that's the duty of the university to do that.

You shouldn't have to be an exception.

That should be the main course because it works.

And I can say when I still meet students,

they still are very, very well educated and they're very successful and they're very confident.

But I would say maybe a third of them that I meet, I think they're kind of ashamed of me because I was always conservative, but now they have gravitated into higher positions of administrative in education, for example, in which they have re-emphasized or rediscovered their ethnic fides in a way that I had suggested race was incidental and we should just not even discuss it.

But I think they felt that there were more rewards by just not just discussing it, by emphasizing it.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I think they probably appreciated it more than you might expect.

So perhaps you'll find that out in the future.

I know that your listeners

appreciate Yeah.

Every once in a while, I bump into a guy that I remember very well.

I did the other day when I gave a lecture.

I gave a lecture in

Madeira to an almond growers group.

And there was a couple of former students that

I remember them all too.

But

it was a very different photographic memory of yours.

Well, I did remember them.

Yeah, that's great.

Well, Peter, I know that your listeners appreciate your wisdom.

So do I.

And we're at at the end of the show.

So thanks to our listeners and thanks to you.

And thank you for listening, everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.