To the Left-wing, N-U-T-S!

Basketball game, crushed it, and the day's just getting started.

Now, kicking it with my crew.

When I need a quick snack, GoGo Squeeze Active Fruit Blend with Electrolytes pouches are always in the starting lineup.

Made with real fruit and select electrolytes, and mmm, so tasty.

From workouts to hangouts to whatever's next, I go with GoGo Squeeze Active.

Snag yours on your next store run, available on Amazon.

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and the namesake Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He has a home on the internet.

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and its web address is victorhanson.com.

And I'll talk to you more about that later.

Let's talk about Joe Biden and his terrible re-elect numbers, and then also his excuse-mongering for the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

And we'll get Victor's thoughts on that and plenty more right after these important messages.

Wherever you go,

whatever they get into, from chill time to everyday adventures, protect your dog from parasites with Credelio Quattro.

For full safety information, side effects, and warnings, visit Credelio Quattrolabel.com.

Consult your vet or call 1-888-545-5973.

Ask your vet for Credelio Quattro and visit QuattroDog.com.

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

So, Victor, I'm sure you saw these stories, and let me just throw these two up.

And you expand, expand, expound, expand however you feel

wish to.

So, Biden's re-elect numbers, less than one-third of voters think that Joe Biden deserves re-election.

That's according to a CNN poll.

His,

separately, is, I think I saw the other day on Real Clear Politics, his approval rating is still pretty crappy, around 42%.

The other story, pretty simple.

Biden administration blames Trump in part for chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal.

Victor, I thought it was a wonderful success, wasn't that?

The spin until recently, but blaming Donald Trump for what happened in Afghanistan?

is kind of what they were trying to deliver.

Yeah, I listened to John Kirby.

He's really transmogrified from

a nondescript bureaucratic former rear admiral into just a political hack.

I mean, gosh, when I listened to him explain, he was bragging on how well the withdrawal went, it would be as almost

Churchill rather than resigning after the Gallipoli disaster, which I think, you know, it was strategically perhaps misdirected, but it would have worked had

the British forces not just

stayed on the beach and

didn't show any aggression.

But my point is that he accepted that as a disaster.

He didn't say, well, they withdrew from the beach.

They got back on the ships.

It was a wonderful withdrawal.

Or even, you know, when you look at Dunkirk, That was a wonderful withdrawal, but it was still a complete military defeat.

The entire British army of 300,000 plus had been driven out of France in a way that never happened in World War I.

And Churchill reminded everybody, this was

a very able way to preserve things, but it's a terrible defeat.

It's not a victory.

And yet here we are when we look at those aerial pictures of MVs and artillery platforms and all these equipment just lined up and we just handed it over.

We handed over a $300 million outreoutfitted Bagwam Air Base, the biggest in Central Asia.

We handed over a billion-dollar embassy.

We just left and just we got we left Americans that are now under house arrest or worse, we left thousands of people that we worked with that have been either been killed or they're in hiding.

And for him to stand up there and say that this was not a defeat or not a humiliation or it's Trump's fault.

And Trump had a plan.

It was to keep the Bagman air base and about 2,500 people there and to provide air support for the cities.

So,

you know, it reminds me, I don't know if you remember, Jack, but I just thought it reminded me, it was sometime around 2011, and people were getting sick of Barack Obama.

Instead of just letting the economy work, he went in and he over-regulated and he kept kept spending and borrowing.

And we didn't get out of the 2008.

And I think GDP was under 1% unemployment.

I don't know what it was.

It was 8% to 9%.

And they kept asking him.

And I remember so well Charles Krother, the late Charles Crotheimer, he was just obsessed and angry at Obama because he kept blaming.

George W.

Bush, or he said he had bad luck, or he said there were natural phenomena.

Remember, earthquake somewhere, and this was all, and he did that for the next eight, next five years.

It's the same thing.

Why does he just say it was a mistake and it's not going to happen again?

But they always blame somebody.

Blame, blame, blame, blame, blame.

That's part of the psychological baggage of the left.

I don't understand it at all.

I mean, every politician tries to blame their predecessors, but this is getting ridiculous.

I mean, it's kind of gaslighting.

You know,

it's just absurd.

Well, even Kirby and they have to connect the dots between that withdrawal and chaos around the world, the

new

Axis forming against America, the war in Ukraine.

They have, don't they?

I mean, they're not going to admit it, but

they've got to connect those dots.

So I guess blaming Trump is

some sort of psychological bomb on that reality.

They just blame.

You know, I mean, Clinton did a little bit, but and every president source says I inherited a mouse.

That's part of politics.

But I don't remember George W.

Bush in 2004 or 2005 when the war started to go by blaming

Bill Clinton.

I don't remember it.

He did not,

The

trade towers weren't hit because of Bill Clinton.

That never

actually called for unity.

And same thing with Trump.

He blamed Obama,

of course, in the beginning for the border and things, but by 2018, 19,

he was talking about his own accomplishments.

And

Biden has never ceased this.

It's always Trump's fault.

It's all everything that's bad, and yet he's gotten his way.

I can't think of it, they gave him his legislation.

They gave him everything he wanted.

They warned him that if Build Back Better and all this stuff, the inflation reduction, it was all bogus, it would be bad.

Larry Summers warned him, don't do it.

Don't borrow $5 trillion more.

Don't subsidize people not to work.

Don't open the border.

Don't bring in 7 million people that are going to need vast amounts of social service support.

Don't do it.

And he did.

And then he said, you did it, not me.

It's just childish.

childish.

Victor, about those re-elect numbers,

we're a year,

a year or so from now, the last major primaries

will have been held.

I think Joe Biden is going to be the candidate again.

I think that's

the process of elimination.

Because they're looking at the 2016

field.

That was the last time they've had an open field and they're checking the boxes.

They say, oh, Mayor Pete, nah, he's uploaded everything he touches to turn to dross, supply chain, rail cars, airline mess, Southwestern.

He doesn't know what he's doing.

He's a joke.

And I think, Bernie, nah, Bernie, even when he was in his, you know, mid-70s was over the hill.

Now he's 80.

He's got to say, you don't replace an octogenarian with another octogenarian.

How about Elizabeth Warden?

No, she's never,

she's too angry.

And she's, how about Corey Booker?

No, Spartacus never really caught on.

And they've gone, Amy Kobujar, she was, no, she's kind of a weirdo.

So they don't have anybody is what I'm saying.

Gavin Newsom.

Gavin Newsom.

Yeah,

he's going to Florida.

But no, Gavin News.

Anybody who's followed that guy's career, he's just an epitome.

He's a classic case of a,

you know, here's the left has one point when there is a hereditary aristocratic white privilege nincum poop mediocrity and he is he is a parasite on the getty family

and i shouldn't say that because they get quid pro quos through his political career but he has all these little businesses and when they get in trouble he calls biden and says save the silicon valley bank i've got three three or four businesses and a personal account that's who he is he doesn't he was was, you know, he said, we're not going to go to Montana, any places that don't represent pangender rights.

But I got to go to Montana.

Right.

I'll just sneak out.

I'll take my private guard, even though you're not supposed to pay uh state employees that go to these taboo states.

Every person wear a mask.

Well, I won't, I won't wear one at Bench Laundry with all my wealthy lobbyists that I'm conducting business with so that they can get contracts for my vast welfare Medi-Cal state.

There's they're burning, it's burning.

Well, it's climate change.

I kind of got rid of the logging industry.

We don't believe in preventive.

And now, you know, it's flooding.

And

he's just inept.

So there's nobody, Jack.

There's nobody.

It's Kamala Harris or Joe Biden.

And that's a tough one.

Would you rather have a non-compos mentes

person who doesn't know where he is or someone who does know where she is, but she's very dangerous?

Oh, my gosh.

And that's what they do.

And so that that explains, I think all the listeners know it, that explains the interference in the Republican primary.

I think it does.

They have nobody to run.

And so they look at the Republican primary and they say, essentially, it's going to be DeSantis versus Trump.

Our polls show us, they think, even until the recent trial, that DeSantis might be a more effective candidate than Trump.

But because we hate Trump and because we do want him to win because he hasn't won the popular vote in 2016 or 2020, and we can defeat him, we're going to A, give him empathy by tying him up with indictments that are very unfair.

And then

we will have him a nominee that will be hemorrhaged to death because all during the campaign season of 2024, he will be appearing in court.

And he may have gag orders, et cetera, and he will not be a viable candidate.

And that's their strategy.

And then they're going to carry Joe Biden in a litter again across the finish line.

I know there's not going to be a COVID lockdown, apparently, but they'll find some reason to keep him in the basement.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Maybe they'll put a soft serve ice cream dispenser down there.

Hey, Victor,

there's been a lot of chaos abroad, not only in Ukraine, but in Iran

and in France.

france seems to be on the brink just like we seem to be on the brink and let's get your thoughts on that right after these important messages

we're back with the victor davis hansen show Before we get your thoughts on what's going on in France, Victor, I'd like to remind our listeners to visit victorhanson.com.

That's the blade of Perseus.

And when you go there, you will find links to Victor's various appearances, these podcasts, the archives of them, links to Victor's books, links to the articles he writes for American Greatness, the syndicated columns, and also the pieces he writes exclusively for his website.

And they are ultra articles.

You can only read them if you subscribe.

If you're a fan of Victor's, if you love what he has to say, not only orally, but through the keyboard, you've got to subscribe.

There's a tremendous amount of content that's produced on a weekly basis by Victor.

So that's five bucks to stick your foot in the water, stick your toe in the water,

50 bucks for the year.

Do subscribe.

VictorHanson.com.

So

Victor, France seems to be in chaos, although it seems to have been in chaos before in the last few years.

There's a push to increase the retirement age, and it has just blown up politically.

I think France suffers from any number of other non-unimportant issues

roiling beneath the surface, but

is it on the brink?

I have a feeling all Western civilization is on the brink.

Why shouldn't France be on the brink too?

Anyway, Victor, your thoughts about

France is always on, France is always, you know, from les Miserables on, it's always at the barricades, so to speak.

But this is a little strange because Macron, who's sort of a Davos geopolitical, globalist dandy,

has kind of finessed everything by his Gallic style or supposedly.

reminds me a lot of that Bill Epian.

Remember him, the aristocratic foreign minister they had for a a while that hated George W.

Bush.

Same type of person that gravitates to power in France.

But,

I mean,

their version of Social Security, their pension system is broke.

And all he's doing is saying, you know,

he wants to bring back, is it 65 he wants to go back down to?

I mean, he wants to raise it to 65.

I thought it was 64.

64, yeah.

And so, I mean,

I'm 69, and I don't think I can retire.

And I know most people can't.

And so,

I mean,

what does he want to do?

What do the people protesting want to do?

They want to

how do they want to save the system so it doesn't go broke?

Because French are not having 2.1 children per family like most of Europe and the United States.

It's just not there.

So there's not going to be the basis to do it.

Is it sort of

just have a drink on the Titanic and get your big pension and then then when it goes broke, you figure you've got enough that you can hoard it when it goes broke.

Or

when it goes broke, you'll just get, you'll get a cut anyway.

So why not, why cut early?

Is that it?

Or you can get some French millionaires, there's not very many of them,

to pay the tab.

I don't know what the logic is, but if there's sound, if the actuarial tables and the physical tables show it's impossible,

it's not that much to

work in your mid-60s.

It doesn't seem to be a big problem for most people in the world because of longevity and stuff.

I had long COVID.

I had it May 1st.

I worked every single day.

I supported my, I fulfilled my responsibilities, and I think a lot of people do that in the United States.

And so it's kind of, when we're facing it, we're going to face the same thing.

And when this happens in America, will people then say, I'm not going to work until I'm 65 or 66?

Can't do it.

But you're not going to have a choice because your children, like everybody's children, are not getting married at 21 and they're not having three children anymore.

And those kids are not being productive.

And the people who are young, the other thing they don't talk about is there's radical changes in our system and the French system when they expanded these retirement systems to disability.

And

that was okay, but they expanded the notion of disability to dyslexia dyslexia and all sorts of non-life-threatening conditions.

And we've got a lot of people on the Social Security and the French do and the Europeans do that are not elderly, but they're piggybacked onto the systems.

Right.

And there's not enough payers.

Kind of analogous to the whole victim-victimizer, the Jesse Smallett, you know,

phenomenon where we want to have so many victims, but there's just not, we're not producing enough victimizers anymore.

Right.

You know,

in this country, Victor, in a practical sense, if I may, I was on a housing authority in my town of Milford, and there was a senior

complex, and you can no longer have senior housing in America.

It has to be senior/slash/disabled.

And disabled can mean

a very

sad situation, say

a 40-year-old woman who gets multiple sclerosis, right?

That could be, and deserves to be cared for somehow.

But it could also be a 27-year-old

drug addict and drug dealer who's disabled because of the drug addiction.

It's just ridiculous.

And that's part of the growth of the victim industry in America and how we care for people.

I think it's this reflection that

it's outlined in Aristotle and it's caricatured in Aristophanes and it's in Cicero.

But the problem with constitutional systems and democracies in particular is that you have the people voting for their own social services.

And so the politicians know that no politician ever got elected by saying, we don't have enough money for this program, so we're either going to have to cut the program or raise taxes.

They all got

George W.

Bush, one of the ways he tried to avoid dropping down into the 20s was remember the the prescription drug

he added to the Medicare package, and then he went into, you know, no child left behind and all of that stuff.

And the idea was to lard it up and give more stuff to more people.

And then that would make people feel, but nobody wants to offend the electorate.

And the electorate always, and their attitude is even more ambiguous.

It's sort of like,

we want more stuff and we don't want to pay for it,

but we know that if you're stupid enough to listen to us, we'll all go broke.

So we don't want you to listen to us, but we want to yell and scream at you.

So it's very ambiguous because people are not stupid.

They know that something has to be done.

And

I don't know.

Well, let me ask you.

Go ahead.

Well, I was saying about our country is that we don't go after to the same degree the ultra-rich as we do the upper upper middle class, the people making between $200,000 and $600,000.

We don't go after the, we go after them.

They're the bread and butter tax target.

We don't go after some of the big guys

that, that, you know, because even Trump, you know, he had all these losses, but he didn't pay income tax for some years.

And he could have paid a minimum tax because his lifestyle was still very opulent.

I'm not criticizing, just if you have a very opulent style and you go, your portfolio shows you went from $1.4 billion to $1.3 billion you still should pay 25% I think on the money

yeah if anybody else is yeah or the most liberals most

uber rich are lefties and they take their money and put it into foundations that they use to fund political causes essentially political causes hey Victor I was going to ask you a French question though and I didn't talk to you about this ahead of time but just now I'm curious since we're talking about France and I'm

so you, the military historian, and you who also have done any number of your annual

trips abroad.

And I know next year you're doing a French Normandy

trip with about

100 or so people.

But outside of Normandy, what is the most interesting military site in France?

Somebody who's

I want to go I want to go see some some World War I battlefield sites, etc.

Is there anything after Normandy that's particularly striking to you?

Verdun, for example.

Yeah, Verdun, I think everybody should see Verdun.

It's kind of scary or eerie, especially the ostuary where there's all of this

skeletal remains of the unknown piled up there.

It's immaculately kept.

And

I think if you could include a little

sidetrack across the border to Brussels, right outside the city, there's Waterloo, and you can really

if you go there, you can really get a good sense of the Battle of Waterloo.

It's pretty moving.

If you go to the Ardennes,

up near the Belgian border, you can really

get a good idea of St.

Mary of Glise and the Battle of the Bulge, and then you can also see where the Germans came in in 19 earlier, not just 1944 in mid-December, but in 1940 and May.

And then, you know, there's a lot of, they're not quite as impressive as the American cemetery at Normandy, but we have, I was on the American Battlefield Monuments Commission, and we have

the American

cemeteries in Belgium are really impressive.

I mean, it's eerie, but

especially at the, and there's one at Saint-Avold, I think it is, the Lorraine military.

And then there's one, I think everybody could go to the Moose-Argonne Cemetery of World War I.

The World War I are on, if you look at the data, I remember from the Commission, it's sad that the World War I

cemeteries, which were really the impetus for the American battle monuments, they're not as well traveled.

Saving Private Ryan changed the entire dynamic, and Normandy now is one of the biggest tourist spots in

France.

But, you know,

it's

those American military cemeteries.

You can go to the American Battlefield Monuments website and get a list of them in Belgium and France.

And they're not very hard to get.

One of them is kind of hard to, but most of them are pretty easily accessible.

So I would go to Verdun,

go to Waterloo and Brussels, go go up to the Ardennes and see

Bastogne, for example.

And

some of the things, yeah, you could go to, I mean, Normandy, you can, it's not just Normandy, there's 50 miles of beaches.

You can go to Sword,

Utah, Juneau Beach,

and Utah Beach as well, the other four beaches.

and see one of the mulberries.

And so it's

pretty amazing.

Yeah.

Well, someday, if you ever extend these trips out beyond 2024,

I may

cash in a few policies and go on one.

So, Victor, let's move on.

Interesting, strange, weird topic.

Of course, it has to do with cancel culture.

And this is a headline from

The Spectator magazine, not to be confused with the American Spectator.

And it's titled, The National Audubon Society Considers Canceling Itself.

And in a nutshell, John Jacob,

is that his name, John Jacob Audubon?

Yeah.

Is it John Jacob Astor or John Jacob Audubon?

John Jacob Astor.

I know.

Well, anyway, let's just say Audubon.

You know, a man of his times, which is, he owned slaves.

He was no great advocate of emancipation.

I think there's actually some writings by him there that he was

against emancipation of slaves

and that he was, there's a line in here, he was a plagiarist and a fabulist.

Yet one of the more beloved nonprofits, environmental groups for ages is the Audubon Society, right?

Where I live in Milford, we have an Audubon Center at the,

where the Long Island Sound and the Housatonic River meet, bird sanctuaries, places for looking at birds.

Of course, Audubon's artwork

has been very important to

science, and I think also to art.

So growing up, Audubon, oh, yeah, he was the artist.

Well,

his

slave-owning reputation has caught up with him, and the Audubon Society itself considered, it did not do this, but it had considered...

changing its name to cancel

what it's named for.

There's still

board members who are who are trying to promote that.

So Victor, I don't know that there's much to say except

shaking your head and say this is not unexpected.

But

do you have any thoughts on this?

You're a man who's written a lot about birds, by the way.

Any thoughts about this

idiocy?

Well, it's part of that same,

it's that same self-centered self-absorption where you wake up one day and you say to yourself, hmm, I haven't done much in my life, but let me go back through history and find out people who did.

And I'm not going to have a ledger on the left and right, pluses and minus.

I'm just going to look at the right side, the minus.

And then when I find a minus, I'm going to get some publicity and cancel them out.

without any awareness of what people might say of my generation.

And so that's what they're doing.

And they feel that this is sort of like the transgendered movement.

It's a fad that you go back and you try to virtue signal performance art your way into

attention by saying, I am so virtuous that this man who lived and was very active in the 1820s, 30s, 40s, I think he died somewhere around 1850 something,

I am so morally superior to him.

Now, I couldn't go out on my own without a down sleeping bag and a sophisticated tent and camp out like he did.

And

I couldn't draw like he could, and

I wouldn't devote my life to that, what he did.

But I can sure tell you that

right now I have no desire to be involved in chattel slavery the way he did, supposedly.

And that's the attitude.

And then

you say to these people, and I've asked people politely that have these views.

So, what are the people going to say about you in 150 years?

That you supported a million abortions, 7,000 or 8,000 of them that were outside the womb?

And you extinguished a human life in the birth canal?

And what are they going to say about that?

Or you have 600,000 people defecating, injecting, fornicating, urinating on your streets of your cities?

Or

what are you going to say about that?

Or, you know,

you engaged in gain of function viral research where you took lethal viruses and the sole purpose was to make them more infectious and lethal, and you subsidized that and it killed a million people.

What are you going to say about that?

So it's all based on

the supposition that the accuser would never be accused.

And,

you know, that's where we are.

And the weird thing about it is that

it's all under the pretense that we have greater morality.

Maybe we do in the cosmic sense, but I can guarantee you, Jack, if I go to Home Depot, which I have gone to a lot, and I have lost my wallet on one occasion,

get this.

I went and I had a big tree

and I had a cart, two carts with trees in them.

And I put my wallet on the counter and I went back five steps and I turned around, and it was gone.

There was nobody there, it was gone.

And I asked the checker, and she said, I don't know, I don't know, never saw it.

Why don't you go look in lost and found?

I said, It was just here.

And I looked around the scan.

There were three people.

I said, Is that,

did you see my wallet?

No, no, no.

Okay.

So, anyway,

five minutes later, I go to

wallet and it's there.

It's on the other side of the store.

Guess what?

It has my license and my drivers and my credit card.

Zilch.

Everything else, one credit card, all the other credit cards, everything else is stolen.

My point about all this is: if I had gone to the Selma hardware store, 1962 in Selma and I'd lost my wallet on the counter, that would not have happened.

And I can tell you that I have lost my wallet in my town one other time, and I got about five calls from people

that turned it in.

A family and then another family found it, and they turned it in, and I got calls.

But I don't, my point is that we are so cosmically moral, but on a personal level, we're amoral.

And as far as crime or the responsibility to turn in things that are lost, it's now, hey, he's a sucker, I need this more than he does, or something like that.

Yeah.

Or I can tell you that I first flew in an airplane.

I was 18 years old.

I'm like an idiot.

I took the Yale intensive Greek program.

I wanted to be a Columbia Classics major, but I didn't know that till the end of my first year.

The professor said, go to Yale, they have all summer long, and it was all graduate students in their late 20s taking Greek.

So it was very difficult.

But my point is this, I flew in a plane.

I'd never been in one.

I can remember it to this day.

It was a United Airline.

It was beautiful.

It was clean.

The food, I was in economy.

They gave nice food.

And today,

we're

such a more moral, sophisticated society.

When I go on a plane, it's just people look like they're dressed at a Halloween party.

I mean, it's just, and I go to the, use the restroom and the person that is in there before me doesn't clean up their mess.

So there's tissues on the ground or the sink is full of soapy water.

I look at the toilet seat and it's dirty or they haven't fully flushed.

Yeah, the slobification of America is really

a troubling thing.

Well, Victor.

So my point is that I think before we go after Mr.

Ottobahn, we could do a lot better in our own lives.

Yeah.

Well, let me stay on some canceling issue here, and then we'll talk about something that's happened in Massachusetts.

And then there's a very interesting story, too, that we can conclude a program with about chat GPT and how it's really can be

dangerous.

I mean, the jury's not out on artificial intelligence, but there's some signs of nefarious things that it's being used for already.

But on the Massachusetts

story, this has to do with the town of East Hampton.

And the headline is East Hampton rescind superintendent job offer over use of the word ladies.

Now, last podcast, Victor, I thought we might get to this, and I made a joke at the beginning of that podcast.

Not a joke, but I begin the podcast by saying ladies and gentlemen.

And I didn't know that was a bad word.

So here's quick on the story.

East Hampton is rallying around a superintendent finalist.

who said his offer to lead the city's public schools was rescinded after he referred to women as ladies in an email, an act some school committee members reportedly viewed as a microaggression.

Dr.

Vito Peroni said the school committee rescinded its offer in an executive session last Thursday, about a week after it had voted 4-3 to hire him.

According to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, which first reported the story, the decision hinged on Peroni's use of, quote, ladies, end quote, in an email sent to committee chairperson Cynthia Kwiesynski over contract negotiations, he told the newspaper.

Kwicinski did not immediately respond, blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, later on, so she said, this was a microaggression to use the word ladies, and we can't have a personal.

This is, you got to be effing kidding me.

This is fiddling American, Jack.

This is fiddling America.

So

you say ladies, and you're out of a job when a Chinese balloon went right across the United States and surveilled all of our strategic bases in the Midwest.

You say that you're very worried about the use of ladies when the person who lodged that complaint would not walk downtown in Chicago or Baltimore or Washington or New York when it got dark.

You say, ladies, is a central issue that we have to fire this man because it's a microaggression when you know that any speaker that is not ultra-left

cannot deliver a lecture in a major university, the more elite and Tony, the less likely that will be nonviolent.

So,

and then when you look at abroad, the American dollar is just about ready to be junked as the world's currency.

We've created these alliances where Saudi Arabia suddenly and Turkey and Iran are all more friendly to one another than they are to us.

We're supposed to get upset that a person says ladies.

And

I don't know.

We're Neronian, you know,

if that myth is true, that he fiddled why Rome burned, but we are doing something that's just absolutely crazy.

We have the long priorities and emphases, and we got to snap out of it.

And we're just, I guess it was brought along by global affluence in the early 21st century, and we've just convinced ourselves that, hey, we're Americans.

We're the best.

We don't have to do anything.

I know we're racist and we're transphobic and we're nativist and we're protectionist, but we're still the best.

We have the best popular culture, the best music, best sports.

We just get to get all the stuff and have a great life and we're all going to die in our sleep at 90 with our best health care.

No,

this country is a very fragile, volatile experiment in history.

It's a multi-racial country that is trying to follow.

the core ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration.

And no other country has been able to pull it off.

A multiracial constitutional democracy-dash republic.

And we think we can do it, but to do it requires no, there's no margin of error.

It requires constant civic reinvestment and education, and we're not doing it.

We just want and then we're thinking, well,

I'm going to make a name for myself because we're going to fire a guy because he didn't say ladies.

Half the people in college can't read.

Quarter of them are using artificial intelligence to use their paper, but that is a central point because I can handle that.

That is a misdemeanor that I can do something about, but I can't do anything about the felonies.

I have a whole freshman class entering college that are illiterate because they didn't learn a damn thing K through 12, but I can't touch that because I have no idea what to do.

But ladies

or transgendered restaurants, I can address that.

And that's what we have.

You know, this

abuse of language, and it is that, is anyone who's read Orwell, 1984, War is Peace, etc.

This is a main

weapon of the left.

Changed pronouns,

as you saw it at

Stanford University, an IT department, what words, what terms can't be used anymore.

You can't be an owner of a basketball team.

You can't

get a master's because these things are all racially

loaded or races backfilled into it.

And it's just a typical frickin' Marxist tactic to pollute the language, use of language, keep people off balance, and change the dynamics of civilization.

Yeah, it is.

as old as they come.

I mean, in Russia, when you wanted to cancel somebody or

you just Trotskyize them.

You just said he was a Trotskyite, and you cut his picture out of every paper there was, and he didn't exist anymore.

Or you change, as you said, the language that was Orwell was talking about.

And

that's where we are now.

Language doesn't mean anything anymore.

The words don't mean anything.

What is

I don't know what racism is.

I don't know what transphobia means.

I don't know what homophobia means.

I don't know, there are no counterparts for those words.

I know that when Joy Reed gets on TV every night and says things that are

just abjectly racist, there's not a word for that.

Because if you say she's racist, they say they can't use that word against

a protected, marginalized member of a community.

So you can't do that.

But it's, I think everybody understands what's going on.

And I think everybody's going to have to ignore it.

Is there any signs they are?

I used to get memos, Jack, from administrators.

I've noticed that at the bottom where they don't go he, him, or they, there, you know what I mean?

You just get letters with the identification of pronouns.

I don't.

I used to at Stanford, but I've noticed some administrators have dropped that.

Yeah, if I see someone on LinkedIn wants to, you know, connect to LinkedIn and they even get into that, I'm like, no, no way.

I don't even care if you're he, him.

Why do you go down that route?

route?

It's crazy.

Again, it's

just pet rock faz.

That's all it is.

It's just a distraction from,

I mean, I was thinking today, I'm going to write it, as soon as we hang up, I'm going to write a columnist thought today.

We have completely destroyed the Abrams Accords in the Middle East.

Joe Biden hated that.

He hated the idea, as did Obama, that the moderate Sunni kingdoms would have more in common with Israel than the Hamas, Hezbollah, Assad, Iranian axis.

And he recreated that axis.

And now they've got Turkey in on it and they've got Russia in on it.

And it's a disaster.

And the reason is that you can see what's happening.

Once the Israeli left emulated the anti-Trump mania in the United States and they went after Netanyahu,

the radical Arabs said to themselves, hmm,

Netanyahu has got more protesters of his own, so we can get in on this.

And then more importantly, all the Arabs that are Sunni and Shia are now giving up on the United States, so we don't have to worry about that.

They're joining.

So let's go out and kill some Jews.

And that's what's happened.

And that's going to continue.

It's going to get really bad.

And Israel knows that if they call up the Biden administration because they don't have the interest of Israel as opposed to left-wing Israel because they're leftist, they're not going to get anything.

They're not going to answer his calls.

They're not going to invite him to the White House, even though he's the popularly elected leader of Israel.

So it's, it's, I don't know, we could do this for all day long, look at these topics, transgenderism, racial obsessions, foreign policy, Afghanistan.

It all has a common denominator.

And that is this left has everything they touch, they destroy.

And it leaves the question that you and I have talked about for the last year, is it by intent?

Or Or is it just incompetence?

Or is it a desire for chaos?

To bring the system down, you have to destroy everything on the presupposition that the wealthy people like Soros and the people who are doing this understand they can survive the ramifications and the consequences of their bankrupt ideologies.

Victor, I've used the word chaos a lot in this show, the previous one.

Is chaos something that came out of Pandora's box?

What's that?

is chaos something that came out of Pandora's box, or does it have some other

distinction in Greek?

Chaos, there's a god.

Chaos, it's just the void, and it's used later in philosophical treatises as

the gap or

void.

And out of that, it's kind of a nothingness that can't be described.

And chaos

in the sense of

a mess or trouble.

I think in a later

mythological account of Pandora, chaos is mentioned, but I'm not sure.

It's mostly diseases.

You know,

it's more mythological before the last thing that jumps out is help, peace, help, hope, excuse me.

And

it's, you usually don't see chaos in mythology unless you're talking about

the Olympians and then their parents, the Titans, and chaos is

the nothingness that existed before there was

a world.

You know what I mean?

Before the cosmos, it's always cosmos first and then chaos came before it.

It's a nothingness.

And I think Christianity picked that up too.

I think they used the early Christian fathers use chaos as to explain the world

God made the world, the period before God made the world.

What was that?

Yes, I actually know this word called tohu wabohu.

I don't know.

I remember that from my freshman religion class in high school, but yeah, it was the nothingness.

But we, the sense of chaos to me, is like bedlam, but maybe that's not its real,

it's as you just explained, not its real.

I think it's because it was nothingness.

So when you get chaos, you're into nothingness, a recreation of nothingness.

It's always

gea earth, and then chaos came before Earth.

It's kind of a philosophical trope to explain something like, okay, there's the wall was the end.

Well, what's on the other side of the wall?

Well, there's something on the other, another wall, then what's on the other side of it?

You have to come up with a construct that stops that debate and says, I don't have to explain anything.

There was chaos.

Get it?

It was always there.

And then civilization or man came.

And that's the idea.

And so chaos, in the sense that you're using it, is a reversion to pre-civilized behavior.

Okay.

Why is hope in Pandora's box?

I would think when Pandora's box, and I must say, I've never read directly, it's open, bad things happen, right?

Yes.

Why is hope part of the bad things that happen?

Or

am I misconstruing that?

Well, the word Pandora means all gifts, right?

And

so all the bad things come out, which are unleashed that Pandora stupidly opens.

But because it's in the works and days of Hesiod, but because there's

all these diseases and illnesses and types of death, and

actually, I think it's, there's a lot of words, whether it's a box or not.

People talked about it as a jars, I remember.

But you have to have something to hang on to that comes out.

So,

and that's in Greek mythology, you always sort of try to reify or make real

something that's commonly known or exists on its own, give it a word.

So why is it that when you get sick or your mother gets sick or you always say they're going to get well or you always hope that?

And that manifestation of the human mind of hoping against hope that is a gift that the gods gave that kind of says, okay, the world is going to be tragic it's short ephemeral another good greek word but uh

there's always going to be one good thing and it's going to be at the bottom you know it's expectation is a better word in greek um

it may be the expectation of something that can happen sometimes it's bad but often it's good

and uh

sometimes Sometimes a lot of people, I'm just going by memory now back to when I read The Works and Days and I taught it and I read the scholarship about it, was that there was a

I think Nietzsche said, I don't know who, maybe it was him, that the hope was one of the evils because of false hope, you know, delusion.

It was defined as delusion, empty hope.

Right.

That's what the intent was, that man is tragic and it's terrible and one of the last things that comes out is a false hope.

But I don't know, you have to

as someone who's had close people in my family die

before their time,

their natural inclination is when you're confronted with the data from the doctor, whether it was my mom with an early brain tumor or my daughter with leukemia, you don't want to accept that.

You want to think there's still people, if somebody says there's a 5% chance this person will be surviving six months, you say, well, there's 5%.

Or if somebody says, your mother has a meningioma, the good news, because it's encapsulated, bad news, it's it's cancerous and malignant.

And you say, well, what does that mean?

Well, 10%

can cure it, but it'll come back.

You think, well, that's 10%.

And I think Nietzsche said that was a curse when he interpreted,

you know, when he interpreted Greek mythology, but I don't think that was intended.

I think it was supposed to be what keeps us going, that you have to have some,

you have to believe that this whole woke thing is going to end right and that's what you're going yeah and i i can tell you that you ask sammy and if i i have someone that cattle

you know catalogs my emails and stuff a couple hundred a day some days

that i and my assistant get that's the biggest theme of all of them Dear Professor Hansen, we listen to your podcast, we saw you on Fox, or we read your call, and we agreed.

But why are you so bleak?

There has to be, I have to have something to hope for.

It has to be better.

And so it got to the point where Sammy

introduced: okay, we're going to have five minutes to start out of good news.

I heard, yes.

So

that's called

el piece.

It's from the verb el piso in Greek.

Yeah.

Well, you know, also in

the catechism, despair is a sin, and I guess hope is the flip side.

I'm guilty of it.

I'm not a depressed person.

I'm very upbeat, but people have called me Eeyore.

Yes.

You always have a dark cloud over you.

And it's always,

you wrote a good paper and somebody said it was good.

Well, I could have done better.

Victor, you won the powerball.

Yeah,

but my tree, the tree died.

Yes, that's

Eeyore.

Yeah, I get it.

Hey, Victor, we have time for one more topic, and that's, I wonder what the just aforementioned George Orwell would think about artificial intelligence, and we'll look at it

through this really troubling

situation concerning Jonathan Turley, who many folks know from Fox News and other things.

But we'll get to that, your thoughts on it right after this final important message.

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

Just a quick plug for what I do at Civil Thoughts, which is a free weekly email newsletter I write.

It comes out every Friday.

I do that for the Center for Civil Society at Amphil, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

And I give a dozen plus recommended readings, great articles I've come across in the previous week.

Here's a link.

Here's an excerpt.

I think you'll like it.

A lot of our listeners have signed up for it.

They do like it.

There's nothing transactional.

There's nothing.

We're not asking for money.

We're not selling your name.

So go to civilthoughts.com and sign up.

And I do believe you will enjoy it.

So, Victor, let me just

do what annoys so many of our listeners and read a little something.

But Jonathan Turley tweeted the other day.

He's a law professor at George Washington University, and he gives a lot of commentary about what's happening with the Donald Trump situation,

Trump being charged with crimes in New York.

He's on Fox a lot.

He writes to the New York Post a lot.

Here's what he tweeted.

He said, yesterday, President Joe Biden declared that it remains to be seen whether artificial intelligence is dangerous.

I would beg to differ.

Now, here's the headline, if you bear with me briefly,

at

the Daily Mail.

And

it says, chat GPT falsely accuses a law professor, and that's Turley, of a sex attack against students during a trip to Alaska that never happened.

In shocking case that raises concerns about AI defaming people.

Now,

this,

I'm going to stop reading this.

I'll just read the headline.

But an incident took place, it didn't take place, on a trip that didn't take place.

And the artificial intelligence article that wrote about this quoted a Washington Post story, which didn't exist.

And this is the potential of AI to create havoc.

And can you see this in the hands of people?

I want to destroy the career of that

son of a bitch conservative, et cetera.

Yes, we talked a little bit with Sammy about that one of my fears, or actually maybe it was with Megan Kelly or someone like that,

I was asked, are you afraid of artificial intelligence?

And I said it goes beyond the technological

predator

type of, you know, Terminator type of science fiction.

Terminator, I guess is the better

idea,

that you're going to have a robotic world that takes over mankind.

It's the people who create it, who are drawn to it, who do the type of research that facilitates it.

It's kind of like analogous to the gain of function virology.

Who does that?

It's a particular subset of virologists, researchers, who either are megalomaniacs that think they're going to alter nature or they don't care about humankind because they're engaging in a type of research, which is Mr.

Redfield, the former head of the CDC, when asked if there is any positive that have come out of gain of function that would justify the risk, he said no.

Well, the same thing about artificial intelligence.

The people who are engaged in that are either completely oblivious to the human consequences or they're hard left.

They're of a particular subset of a particular culture that gives us Google

altered searches or gives us banning on the original Twitter or gives us the the Facebook stuff.

In other words, you look at Apple, Facebook, Twitter, all of those big companies are hard left.

They're hard left in a sense that they use their enormous profits to, as Mark Zuckerberg did, give $419 million to warp the vote in pre-selected precincts.

or they pursue a type of ideology within their business, whether that is suppressing the laptop information or working with the FBI to suppress news or altering the order of Google searches to reflect a left-wing perspective.

Well, those are the custodians of artificial intelligence and it would be naive to believe that that ideology wouldn't affect.

And that's why probably you

have Jonathan Turley being the object of an artificial intelligence.

What would be the word scam, fraud, construct?

I don't know, completely made up, but you wouldn't have, say, Paul Krugman.

And I'll stand corrected if somebody said, well, actually, they do.

But we'll see.

And so that's what's scary is it's not just

anti-human, but it is

left-wing anti-human, right?

And I know

what artists are.

You've used, isn't it?

Yeah, I get maybe

one or two letters a month, and they'll say things like, you only had one daughter, you said you had three, because they'll find an obituary for my daughter who passed away, and

they'll just create it out.

Or they'll look at

there's minor people, they'll say, this person's worth this amount of money, right?

And they'll name some fantastic amount of money that I wouldn't, I mean, I wouldn't ever have in my entire life.

Or they'll mention that I played in a band, right?

And I think what those are, and I have somebody about every year or two go through a

Wikipedia just to get not the ideology.

I mean, I expect to be attacked from

the right and be smeared, but my God, they'll have things that I was a band member in junior high school.

I couldn't play an instrument if you asked me.

Not even the tambourines?

No, I have no musical talent whatsoever.

I'm completely enough.

And they'll even give the name.

And I have to assume that that's just some artificial intelligence

that took off on it.

And

it's just, it's just, and then,

you know, you talk to people who are teaching and it's getting to 10 to 20% of the papers are

artificial intelligence.

And then they have anti-artificial intelligence, what, detectors?

And then they have anti-detectors of artificial intelligence.

So the student can not only

have push buttons for themes and then the paper will be written, written, but then they'll have another program they can superimpose on that says, How do you disguise this to get by the professor's detector?

Change the vocabulary.

It's like the matrix here.

Yes, and you think at some point, 18-year-old college-bound student who's supposedly in college because they want to widen their horizons, would say, you know what?

The amount of time to write an artificial intelligence paper and then get a detector to shield me from the detector of the professor and maybe the anti-detector, anti-detector detector.

It would be just easier to

write the paper.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or give oral exams from now on.

That would that might that might

not from the teacher's perspective.

So, well, anyway, Victor, it's

the it's not a head scratcher.

It's to me, it's it's very troubling.

It's a it's a weapon.

People use the word weaponized.

Well, it's so easily weaponized, already has been.

And I'm sure there'll be a lot of people who will not get into this school or will have lost that job, et cetera, because people who have it out for them are concocting BS that looks pretty real when it's not.

Victor, we've

come to about the end of our program today, and we will do the things we do at the end of the program.

I forgot to do this earlier and on the last podcast.

I just would like to let folks know that the home, the happy home for this podcast is John Solomon's justthenews.com.

Why don't you check it out?

John does a

great reporter and lots of stories are broken there by him.

No matter what platform you listen on, Google Play, Stitcher, iTunes, Apple,

those places where you can, well, we thank you no matter where, but those places where you can leave comments and ratings, we appreciate and we read the comments.

You can do that on Apple and iTunes.

You leave zero to five stars.

Victor has a nearly five-star average

for this podcast.

A couple of comments here, Victor.

Just like to read two of them.

One is from

Wilson3, and it says a quick note to thank you, Victor, for your podcast.

A couple of podcasts ago, by the way, we were talking about the decline of certain cities in Detroit came up, and this prompted us.

I look forward to hearing your perspective each week.

When you began this podcast, you started out talking about Detroit and other cities.

I grew up in Detroit in the 50s.

It was a great city.

Detroit public school children got to go

listen to classical symphonies.

Art was everywhere.

School was great back then.

I got into Vanderbilt and UCD Graduate School.

Thanks again for all your great shows.

And that's from Sandra Williams.

Yeah, we've talked about Detroit a lot at that point.

You know, it was the powerhouse of World War II.

I mean, it was the place where all military vehicles were built.

And then in a world that was destroyed after World War II, it supplied the world with everything from caterpillars to pickup trucks.

And its GDP was, I think, higher than any other city in the United States.

As I said with Sammy,

man is much,

I mean, man is much more dangerous than nuclear weapons because Hiroshima today

looks like Detroit did in 1945, and Detroit today looks like Hiroshima did in 1945.

So it's very resilient.

Well, one more week.

The great society was deadlier than the

nuclear weapons.

Yeah, and

you've written how quickly this can all go

in a heartbeat.

And

Detroit

had been voted, well, came in second place to host the 1968 Olympics, which I think is a vote probably taken in 1962 by whatever association approves.

So this was the, you know, lost out to hosting the Olympics.

So that shows how great a city it was.

And by 1969, 1970,

it was,

well, I can't use the word.

Well, that's it.

We did talk about one other thing on a recent podcast.

You talked about

losing a significant amount of friendships in this age of Trump derangement syndrome and the like.

And this is a comment left by Kamachka 62 called Taking Sides.

I've experienced the same hatred from a colleague at one of my jobs.

I thought we were friends for years.

Then once he was overcome with TDS Trump derangement syndrome, he couldn't be around me without spewing his ideologies coming from the left.

I avoided being in the same areas and just had to stop communicating at all.

Victor, I think that's something everyone listening to this podcast has experienced in spades.

Somebody wrote me about that, a very learned letter and said, you mentioned that and you hadn't said anything

to my knowledge that would invite such ostracism.

I was thinking, I'm going to write him back, but I don't think it matters what you've said, what you've done.

It's what they think you are.

So

in my case, I just picked out the random number 16, but I was talking to my wife the other day about all the close friends that we've had from all walks of life

that have either

If you call, if I were to, I mean, I'm talking about best friends, a circle of 20, say, family and friends.

Right.

If I were to call them, if I hang up right now after this, and I call them,

if they will not answer the phone, or they will hang up on the sign of my voice, or they will be snarky about, you know what I mean?

And that's just the way it is.

And

I would never do that.

I mean, I have people call me all the time that I disagree politically with.

And

I don't have any problem with it at all.

I see former students that I tutored, I mentored, that I tried to help them with their career paths, even on into their 30s and 40s.

And

they're very left-wing now.

And

I never ostracized them.

Yeah.

Victor, if you ever need anything, you call me.

You know, I'll pay.

I will.

It's a great honor to host this show and to be a friend, yours, and to listen to the wisdom you so copiously dish out every week.

And by the, oh, I have to say, to folks who have not yet listened to Victor's interview podcast from about a week or so ago, record with Stephen Quay,

you have to go back and find it and listen to it.

It is truly, truly important

about what's gone on with COVID, what's still going on.

You should listen to him.

He has a very polite, understated way of

matter-of-factly saying something that's terrifying,

terrifying, accurately with data to support it, but terrifying what's going on in the Wuhan lab.

And it's America's aiders and abettors.

So, yeah,

very important stuff.

And he will be back.

Also, find the first, you interviewed him once before in August of last year, I did.

Yeah.

So, folks,

go to victorhanson.com, and that's Stephen Kuay, Q-U-A-Y.

He's a great scientist.

Victor, thank you very much.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

God bless all, and we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

Why does every recipe I try need 18 ingredients, including a jar of something paste I'll never use again, but will sit in my fridge for nine months?

I just want dinner in the oven fast.

That's why I love Blue Apron's new one-pan assemble and baked meals.

They send you fresh ingredients that are already chopped.

All you do is put it all together and bake.

That's it.

No chopping, no weird leftovers.

Just delicious, easy to make meals.

Get 20% off your first two orders with code APRAN20.

Terms and conditions apply.

Visit blueapron.com slash terms for more.