Immigration, Mass Murderer, and Campaign Strategy

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Hello, ladies, hello gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

The show is named for Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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We will begin our conversation today.

Shouldn't be a conversation.

I'll ask a question.

Victor will share his immense wisdom, but we'll talk about

border issues.

Ted Cruz, senator from Texas, held a hearing the other day, now this

late March, and Homeland Security

cabinet, whatever the hell he is, misfit.

Majorcas,

oh my gosh, there was a carpet bombing, a fist fight.

Not a literal fist fight, but it was a tough hearing.

We just learned he's coming out on 60 minutes this weekend to say, oh, there's trouble at the border.

I don't know.

Maybe he got religion courtesy of Ted Cruz.

But we'll talk about that, some issues with the Marine Corps, the terrible, terrible murders, school shooting in Nashville, and maybe another topic.

And we'll get to that, all that right after these important messages.

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

Victor, so I know you saw the

eclipse from the hearing last

week, last Tuesday.

It was

in the Senate, and Ted Cruz went at

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkis.

I mean, he just like ripped into him.

Here's, let me just read this briefly, Victor, from

This is the Texas Tribune.

It says, at the hearing, Mayorkis was grilled by Republicans, as he has been for the past year, over border issues, including the increasing number of migrant crossings, fentanyl deaths, and sex trafficking.

Cruz, who has been an ardent critic of the Biden administration official, was particularly fiery on his line of questioning, blaming the Secretary directly for crimes against children.

The children raped, they are at your feet, Cruz told Majorkis.

And if you had integrity, you would resign.

You're willing to let children be raped to follow political orders, Cruz continued.

This is a crisis.

It's a disgrace.

By the way, Victor, there was a lot more of that.

Majoris gave back to.

It was not how I guess we exactly want to see democracy in action, but Ted Cruz needed to call him out and did.

And finally,

I will shut up here in 15 seconds, Victor, so we can get your take on all this.

But

I just...

As we're recording, just before we recorded,

an article came out on The Hill.

The website is by Julia Shapiro.

It's titled, Majorkis, the number of people that are arriving at our border is at an extraordinary height.

So this is from

a piece that's coordinated with him appearing on 60 Minutes.

It seems like Majorkis, who has,

there's no problem.

I don't see any problems finally in making some admission.

Too little, too late, maybe 7 million illegal people over the border.

How many of them are terrorists?

How many people have died there, Victor?

Gosh almighty, it's a horrible thing.

Your thoughts, Victor?

Well, you got to remember that he was appointed by Barack Obama, and he was appointed to be, I think, the head of what we used to call citizenship and immigration.

And his purpose was to

give a front

to

green light illegal immigration.

So let's start with the basics.

The Democratic Party feels that they flip California, they flip Nevada, they flip New Mexico, they flip Colorado, and they still feel they can flip Georgia and Texas

and maybe Arizona, they're close, by changing the demographics and then watering down restrictions on balloting.

So here in California, there's 10 million,

there's 10 million missing ballots.

We had half of all of the illegal immigrants.

They look at California and they say, wow,

that state used to have eight years of Reagan,

eight years of George Dick Mason,

eight years of Pete Wilson, eight years of

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was kind of a rhino.

Wow, that was 32 years of desolation.

And then we have

eight years of Jerry Brown, two years of,

what's his name?

the guy that got recalled.

Ray Davis.

Ray Davis.

And then we've got

Newsom.

So

we're halfway there.

And what they look at is California's a model.

And the model was

change the Democratic Party for an open borders, get as many poor people as you can to come in, water down the election laws.

have them as loyal constituents because of your generous entitlements,

and

appeal to very wealthy people who are exempt from the consequences of their own ideology and that's the california formula can i can i add can i add gerrymander yes

yeah and have the un and have the unions uh bankroll everything yes and that's what they did and that's the plan so for that plan to work they need a constant infusion of illegal aliens start with that Because if they don't, what happens is in two generations, Mexican-Americans follow the plan, the agenda, the model of Italian Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

So that, as I say, if your name is Cuomo or your name is Giuliani, it's not an accurate barometer of your politics.

And we know that

Mexican-Americans,

if their name is Lopez and they're over 50,

It's increasingly likely that you can't necessarily gauge their political affinities.

About 40%

of Hispanics are voting for Republican or conservative causes, but when you go up in the age bracket, it gets 50-50.

And that's what the Democrats don't want.

So they want a continual stream of poor people that need help

and that can be sort of massaged into the voting electorate.

And so that's what he's doing.

That's his job.

That's his agenda.

And he all knows it.

But the problem with that is they got greedy.

So when Biden told people to come in and they thought they were going to get maybe a million a year, but they've had 7 million illegal entries and that meant there was death, destruction, 100,000 people dying of fentanyl, a virtual

gift to the cartels, et cetera, $5 million a day for the New York budget.

It started crime.

I mean, they say, you know, they got mad at Trump for saying we're not bringing the best people, but it's not so much the best people.

It's that when you have no audit whatsoever, you have no idea.

It's kind of like the open border of the 1840s to 1890s

in the old West, when every American criminal on the lamb, where did he go?

He went to Mexico because Mexico didn't enforce their borders or couldn't, and they got, they didn't get the best Americans, is what I'm trying to say.

And so that's this, that was his job.

So the problem he's having is it's an embarrassment in his mind of riches.

He's been so successful at destroying immigration law and destroying the border that it's become embarrassing.

There's just two, he doesn't know what to do.

So, when he keeps lying and saying the border is secure, it was almost laughable.

And that's what infuriated Ted Cruz, to have a guy look at him in the eye under oath and lie, say the border is secure.

What would he call not secure, Jack?

If you said to Majorkis, would you please tell me how you would define a border that was not secure?

What would he say?

A bunch of pro-lifers came over it.

Cubans, Cuban,

they don't like Cubans coming.

They don't like Eastern Europeans coming.

But so he's been a disaster.

And I think the only, he would be impeached tomorrow if the Republicans.

could

figure out whether that was going to help them or hurt them politically to do what the Democrats did.

I would impeach him right now.

And I know he wouldn't be convicted, although he would get a lot of votes in the Senate for conviction, not maybe 45 or so.

And that would send a message to those guys.

And all he had to do, the tragic thing is Trump tried and he was tied up in the courts.

DOD,

Homeland Security.

John Kelly, they all conspired against him.

But finally, he did start to rebuild all the shaky wall.

He had about 500, 400 miles that he reconstructed.

He started about 30 or 40.

I know people like Ann Coulter were very critical of him, but that was largely because he was dealing with Paul Ryan the first two years and he was being sued.

Once he got into the groove, I think

had he been re-elected, the wall would be finished by now.

And everybody said, well, it was stupid to say make Mexico pay, but I think there were people in that administration that had plans to tax remittances.

And had they done in the second term, had they done that, that would have more than paid for the war.

And so it's

Majorkis' job is to destroy immigration law, and he did.

And he knows it.

He knows it very well.

And look at all the bad things he's done.

He fed into the lie that his own Border Patrol people were whipping Haitian people coming across when they were trying to block their entry and not whipping them at all.

He never apologized for that.

Joe Biden

piled on that lie

and the morale.

We were talking about physical labor in our last podcast, and all those poor people that have to go out there every day and risk their lives.

And he shows no empathy for their safety or the hard work they do.

I have to believe that you,

all kinds of people are in touch with you, Victor.

I have to believe some

border agent.

I talk to a lot of them, yeah.

They email me or they want want to,

you know, they send me stuff.

And

the funny thing is, you know, that it impacts the Hispanic communities.

Here where I live, I had to go to the emergency room, kind of an emergency, and there were wonderful people there.

The nurses, the doctors were wonderful.

But you look in the parking lot and the waiting room and the people there, and they're overwhelmed.

And

when I drive around my

neighborhood, it doesn't even look anywhere like it did five years ago because there are so many people that are undocumented and they have nowhere to live and they are going out in the country and they are

renting a house and then they have trailers and shacks.

It's a squatter nation.

It is.

It looks like Appalachia around 1930.

And it's amazing that no one cares about that.

And here we are with, we're importing this massive poverty in California.

These wealthy people are doing it.

And I just can't get my, I just can't comprehend what these people that live from La Jolla to Berkeley along that coast are doing, mostly wealthy white and Asian people,

by creating this highly regulatory state that suppresses.

the production of electricity, of natural gas, of oil, of safe highways, of everything for this utopian

Davos agenda that they can afford.

And then at the same time, they import and they greenlight all this cheap help for their nannies, their cooks, their landscapers.

And then at five o'clock in the afternoon, they don't care how they live.

So, you know, when it's 110 here in Selma in August, they're all in Walmart trying to get free air conditioning.

Or you have a public pool.

It looks like people have never gone swimming before.

They're so desperate to go swimming.

And you don't know how to, they have no medical care.

They come across the border and they have have diabetes, they have heart problems, they have, and at a very young age,

one out of every four people admitted to a hospital in California for any reason whatsoever is found to have diabetes.

I don't want to be cartoonish, Victor, but the many, many illegal immigrants are working in

landscaping or some portion of them are.

Some jobs that require, say, tools, tools that require gasoline, things that will be forbidden

in a few years in California.

Cars that will have gasoline will be forbidden.

So, what's expected?

Come here.

We won't have the means to give you real work.

You'll be expected to drive Teslas that are impossible to afford.

And by the way, we're going to have solar power.

uh batteries and you're not going to be able to charge up your cars at night

it's just insanity

it is i I go to a local, I call it the arena,

where literally, Jack, it's five to six cents cheaper.

And it's lined up 24 hours a day with four Mexican people.

And there's a five-cent discount if you go in and pay cash, right?

So maybe it's 10 cents total.

And if you go there and you line up,

I would say 90%, it takes a long time to get gas because 90% of the people are not using a credit card because they want that cash discount.

And that shows you how poor people are and how desperate they are to be able to afford gas.

And I talk to them all the time and they just shake their heads.

And I want to think, I can't make this.

I look at this immigration thing, and then I look at the Hispanic people that are in the California legislature.

They're all

second to third generation.

Kind of, they came through the diversity, equity, inclusion pipeline.

They all clerk for very wealthy

left-wing people.

They all make a very good salary.

They're completely divorced from their constituents' concerns.

They don't care about the price of electricity, the price of gas, the price of heating, the price of air conditioning, whether the 99 freeway is safe or not, whether we have enough water, whether, and they have all, they just buy into all these issues they're told to by this selfish

coastal corridor politicians on the left.

And it's, you know, green, green, green, diversity, diversity, diversity, transgender, transgender, restricted, all this stuff.

And at some point,

I don't know what's going to happen, but the Hispanic population is going to have to wise up.

I'm not going to tell them what to do.

Who am I to say that?

But these people don't represent the daily struggles that they have to go through as middle class, aspiring aspiring middle and upper middle class constituencies.

The constituencies of their representation, they may be voting for somebody because that he or she is an Hispanic politician, but that person's constituency is not them.

It's somebody

in the coastal corridor, at least by the agendas that they seem to embrace.

Well, Victor, we have another troubling

topic to discuss, and that is the

shooting, the murders.

I'm going to call a shooting.

There were murders at the Covenant School in Asheville and we'll get to that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Before we get into our next topic, I'd like to recommend to our listeners that they visit regularly, I

said it correctly, VictorHanson.com.

That's the blade of Perseus.

Why would you go there?

Well, links to Victor's appearances on other podcasts,

the

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You'll find them there, links to Victor's many books that he's written or edited, and you will also, links to the articles he writes for American Greatness in a syndicated column.

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So Victor, a little spiel by me first, and then please have at it.

These shootings, wherever we see and learn of terrible shootings in America, seem to be ranked

based on race and based on intersectionality.

You know, a black man is killed by white cops, and America can burn.

A black man is killed by black cops, and we can have posturing that quickly disappears.

You have a white woman that's killed by a black cop, and you get silence, or maybe if it took place on January 6th,

there's even accolades.

But a woman masquerading as a man shoots six people dead in a school.

And what we get is quickly

spinning and something that seems to have gone already into the MSNBC memory hole.

So, Victor, I'd like to get your thoughts on how the media perceives, treats, disdains these

murders that happen

in America.

Yeah, you got to remember that the media is an abstraction construct for people.

And these people,

by and large, I mean, there's some people that make it out of the heartland, but by and large, they're left-wing people who went to left-wing universities whose value system is to live in a big urban corridor.

And to the degree that they're not from that

embryo, they want to be.

So if they grew up in,

I don't know, Indianapolis, they went to the, that was the dream of everybody is to get to the biggest audience or a network news.

That's where the money is.

That's where the prestige is.

That's where the ego is.

So that's who they draw in there.

And it's very hard to be conservative unless you're going to go just declare yourself.

you know, Fox and you'll go with that to that one station.

So

they have an agenda and they're not Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor and the rest of those guys, Eric Severay, they were leftists, but had some modicum of disinterested fairness.

These are hardcore leftists, not even progressives, woke hardcore people.

And

they have a message and they superimpose it on every news story.

And this particular news story, from the very beginning, it was:

we have a problem, Houston.

We have somebody who was a declared transgender, and she was a woman, and she went in and she killed six people and executed three little girls.

Executes a perfect word because that's what she did, that were nine years old, and they were at a Presbyterian Christian school.

So that doesn't look good for us.

because

that was pretty brutal.

But there are some things that we can leverage to salvage the story.

We can make her the victim because there's transgender violence, violence against transgender people.

And we'll take that manifesto.

We've had six manifestos that we know of in mass shootings.

Every single one of them was released within 48 hours.

But we're not going to put this manifesto because they're terrifying they.

the law enforcement and the pressures upon law enforcement by their higher ups, whether state or local or federal, and the media in general, that this person was pretty graphic in what she set out to do,

which was to pay vengeance upon the people that she felt would be unsympathetic to her transitioning or whatever it was.

And so they had two obstacles: how to deflect from empathy for the people who were murdered to the murderer because her political cause was superior to the victims.

So they did that in two ways, three ways.

They demonized Christians as basically intolerant, and that was all over social media.

We saw

the day I wrote and said, oh, they don't even have enough guts or empathy to cancel the April 1st day of vengeance, Jack.

Vengeance.

And they had all sorts of people volunteering on social media with guns and stuff to show you that.

And then they finally, at the 11th hour, canceled it because not because they wanted to or they thought it was inappropriate, just because they thought that it would not be wise temporarily politically.

And then the other idea was

they had to make the transgender person the victim.

So, and then the third agenda, of course, was the guns did it, not the shooter.

And to

accommodate those three agendas, they did not talk about the manifesto.

They don't want to discuss it.

They don't want to talk about the victims whatsoever or cover their empathy, have any empathy or show the tragedy that they're going through.

I don't even like the word tragedy because it doesn't really use the agency of the debacle.

and the horrific circumstances that this shooter put them in.

And then they wanted to run stories 24-7 about the unfairness of being transgender.

And that's what they're doing.

I don't think it's going to work because I think people, when they looked at simultaneously in New Zealand and they saw a transgendered crowd try to tear apart a woman, or they've seen how they go after

Martina Navatarova, or they go after the

J.K.

Rowland they offered for the Harry Potter series, or the way that they have stormed various public agencies.

It's not a nonviolent movement.

And it's, and the way that they have systematically destroyed women's sports for all practical purposes.

And I think there's going to be,

and remember that

we have a lot of scientific statistics.

on gender dysphoria.

And it's a very, very minute, it's not 1% of the population, it's like 0.2%,

0.2 of 1%, it's one-fifth of 1%.

And it was always dealt with

under the context of

mental and physical health.

It wasn't a political movement.

And I can remember when I first, 25 years ago, when I went to Stanford, I saw a person who was transitioning, a scholar that wore a dress, and there was no hostility toward them.

But

this has ballooned into the next civil rights movement, and it's now,

it has to alter the data, is what I'm saying.

So that it's incorporated a lot of things that were not originally gender dysphoria.

There has been a

disorder called transvestism, where heterosexual people, not just homosexual, but heterosexual people like to dress in the clothes of the opposite sex.

Everybody's known that's, as I said before on a broadcast, that's all through Petronius's satiricon.

And there has been transsexuals, and these were general,

you know, that wanted to alter their, that's in a poem of uh Attis poem by Catullus, about a person lops off his testicles in a rite for Sibyle.

And there's a passage in Diodorus about people who were born that were hermaphrodite.

Hermaphidites are good, Hermes and Aphrodite.

Right.

So that happens.

But this movement has tried to convince America that it's an epidemic.

And to do that, it has to proselytize and it has to what the right calls groom.

And

there's things that are about it are so bizarre because it was on the left, it was Hillary Clinton that talked about the children.

And we have been raising the age of consent over the last 50 years for sexual relations, consensual sexual relations.

We have really upped the penalties for

any type of older person having sex with an underage person.

If you download some kind of nutty, horrific pornographic material, you're going to go to prison.

Almost daily in the San Joaquin Valley, there's a story of some weirdo who's home and goes to some dark website, apparently, and downloads something, and they find him in a nanosecond.

So that's what the drift was.

But then along comes transgender, and suddenly we throw out that whole canonical approach so that there's now talk about,

well, maybe they're not just people who are under the age of consent.

They're not, we can't call that pedophilia or pederasty.

Maybe it's attraction to a minor rather than pedophilia or pederasty.

And then we're, we're also, this is even stranger, these drag shows where they keep saying it's just an art form, but it's almost daily that somebody goes to one of them and then downloads on the internet a man dressed up as a woman with children there.

And in the dance

routine, they're simulating sexual intercourse.

They're humping the air or they're touching their genitals or something in front of children.

And I thought that the left, given the trajectory of all of their lectures and sermons, that would be especially offensive.

But no, this transgender topic,

we saw that with black comedians.

It trumps the identity politics.

It's the now

holy grail of identity politics.

Well, right.

And I think, Victor,

Today is the day, as you mentioned, that was supposed to be this day of vengeance,

which I

would have assumed was going to to be a day of violence and riots in select cities and destruction, probably with no arrests.

But there seems to be a melding of the Antifa mindset, or maybe the actual Antifa,

with this

transgender activism community, which has already shown violence in other ways, where you have,

you know, the lesbian community does not, uh segments of them don't appreciate what's going on here the feminist community like you're not you're not a woman you're a man you still got a johnson going on here and some of those people at certain places they get beaten up and and well you saw only beaten up or vastly intimidated so this is really some testosterone and clubs and uh probably guns not probably we know there are guns because this this guy woman guy uh she targeted one of these kids specifically that a history.

I know that people, I wrote in a column that she had a history of

emotional disorders.

And somebody said, well, they don't have a red flag law.

I don't care whether they have a red flag law.

There's federal gun laws as well.

And the fact that she bought a weapon with a history of mental disorder should have been.

a wake-up call to somebody,

whether the gun owner or somebody.

Somebody had to see her or communicate with her.

And she was obviously

disordered.

And my point when I discussed this with Sammy was just simply two things.

If we had a federal law that said, if you go into an institution, K through 12,

a school, and you shoot somebody,

and you kill one person, you're going to serve a lifetime sentence with no parole.

And two,

and two, we enforce existing gun laws, just enforce them.

And if you have any emotional history or you're a felon, you don't get a gun.

And if we, and you're in violation if you possess them, that would be all we need to do, and it would stop, but we can't do that.

And three,

if you had a designated people within the school, ex-policemen, retired, that were just patrol, and would have uh access to a firearm and they could stop it immediately because these police were wonderful but it took them about 16 minutes to get there once they got there they were wonderful right they weren't like what we saw yeah yeah right but the counterpoint yeah but the point is it takes a while if you had somebody on site and you could see that in apparently some of the social media or email

messaging that she had that she passed up in a site that she felt was too secure.

And so, out of all that reality, the left then just, as I said, has an agenda that she's a victim, Christians are oppressive, and they got what they deserved, and we're not going to get to read what she wrote.

Well, I think there's, and there's more coming, not necessarily, you know, more school shootings, but this day of vengeance, this trans

violent trend, trendingness is, uh, I think is

you know, it's very funny.

In 1980, I watched this.

I was 26.

I just, you know, I watched this,

something like this go on.

You would turn on the news, and it was the Soviet Union was on the march,

whether it was in the Middle East or into Afghanistan or their blue water.

And then it was every single day the Iranian hostage crisis, every night.

And you would hear Jimmy Carter say something and they just, the Iranians hated Jimmy Carter.

They hated him more than Reagan because they felt he was weak and sanctimonious.

Right.

And then he was, yes, and then we had this oil crisis.

So I can remember

people, I would go to Philip on the way from back here to the farm and

People would have gas can, gasoline in their trunk.

It was really dangerous.

And there would be lines everywhere.

And then you would hear about the invasion of Afghanistan.

And then that was the summer that I started farming.

And I would go into the local ag store and I would see something I've never seen before or since.

That would be marks a lot, a marker pin with bags of pesticide or sulfur or copper crossed out.

You know, and price.

sits there for a month, they raise the price, sits there for a month, they have to raise the price because the replacement bag is so high and it was up to about you know 12

12 inflation and then you had interest rates and i didn't have a car and i had

a child so i went to go look at used cars and i can remember that guy put his arm around me and said well mr hansen we got a used pontiac

It's eight years old.

And for you, I'm going to give you a good deal.

We'll finance you for 17%.

How's that?

That was considered a good car loan.

Mortgages were, I don't know, 12%.

19%.

I remember they were up to 19% at one point.

Yes.

And then I had a rich uncle who was very greedy, and he used to come and chuckle while we were going broke farming.

I liked him, but he was very greedy.

I know people are going to be offended because they'll know who I'm.

You talked about him once.

Yeah.

I was the most sympathetic to him.

I liked him.

So I'm not saying that I didn't like him, but he would come and he'd laugh at me.

He'd say,

You're out there working all day.

You're losing money.

I'm getting 13% on my T bills.

And he had, you know, several million dollars in the bank.

So it was a, it couldn't go on like that.

And Carter was having all of these crazy,

you know, there was Burt Land, all of this other stuff.

And the country was going to hell.

And there was, here was this Reagan guy, and everybody said he had no foreign policy.

He ran,

he tried to run.

And as you remember, way back in

1968 forted with it again in 76 and for,

excuse me, in 76, yeah.

And for more than flirted with it.

Yeah, he tried, yes.

Right.

So this was the third time around.

He was too old.

He had no foreign policy experience.

He'd been out of office too long, grade B actor.

And I just watched that campaign.

And he said things like,

there will be no hostages.

There will be no gas line.

And

everybody thought, wow, he won't.

I have a plan.

He wasn't that specific.

But the point was they were dead even in May and June.

And he wasn't, he really didn't break it open

until

you know, like October, it started to break open.

And people just collectively said, I don't know what my politics are.

The Reagan Democrat, the blue dog, whatever you call them, these were union people.

It was kind of a foretaste of Trump, but to a much greater degree, they said, they can't go on like this.

Forget politics.

This man has destroyed the country.

And he was just saying crazy things about Israel.

Carter was.

He loved Sadat.

He hated Begin.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that this is similar, but to a much greater magnitude.

When you look at the border, when you look at Afghanistan, when you look at Ukraine, when you look at the new Russian China, Saudi, Turkey, India, Iran alignment that's growing, when you look at oil prices and gas prices and inflation and bank failures and the lowest, I think it's the nadir of racial relations.

I've never seen it in my entire life so bad.

And it was all self-created, is what I'm saying, by this man, Joe Biden, and his

cabinet of dunces.

And what I'm saying is that at some critical point, it can't go on.

And you're going to, I think that people are going to just silently, without much expression or

publicity, just say collectively it can't go on.

If you want the United States.

to continue, this guy and these people cannot continue because they're destroying the country.

And I think there's going to be a blowout.

If, and I think they know it.

And that's why, as we talked on earlier broadcasts, that's why they're going after Trump.

They want him,

they want him to be the nominee and they want to enfeeble him and ridicule him and

tie him up in litigation and be in jail and something, and then by default have Biden.

Well, you know, Victor, yeah, you're right.

We talked about that on our previous podcast.

And

this, the strategy of that can be seen many, many places.

Remember, Harry Reid, when he won re-election to the Senate, I think it was in

2010.

And there was a woman, I forget all the names here, there was a woman who was a really viable Republican candidate, but

Reed and company funded efforts to promote the

Yeah, it could have been.

I apologize to our listeners, but that's

how Harry Reid was re-elected.

You remember also

in Delaware, where Christine O'Donnell became the candidate.

It was a kook, and she beat Castle in the primary.

So funding the

most likely to lose in the general election candidate is a well-known Democrat strategy.

But maybe we should talk, Victor, about,

since you raised the 20.

Sharon, I think her name was Sharon.

Sharon, it was Sharon.

Yeah, but Sharon, she actually, she came to National Review once.

I must say she was a nice lady, but

it was like a

mucks of rocks.

She wasn't up to, she wasn't up to running against a man who got on the floor of the Senate and said that Mitt Romney never paid his income tax.

And then after

Mitt Romney lost, and he was asked about that because he had no no evidence.

He said it worked, didn't it?

Yeah.

It worked.

He was one of the most offensive, ridiculous, and off-putting senators we've ever had.

Yeah, terrible, man.

It's part of being corrupt, too.

That whole family was corrupt.

Yeah, on $150,000 a year salary.

They had every contract was either one branch of the family was a lawyer, construction.

They knew about all of the public works projects, and they all ended up very wealthy.

Well,

let's look a little now, if you don't mind, about 2024.

You mentioned

the box that Democrats are trying to put Donald Trump into.

But to see that he is the Republican nominee, two things come up I'd like to throw at you and get your thoughts on.

I don't think we've really ever talked much about Mike Pence, and I didn't, I mentioned on the previous podcast that the last couple of days, I was in Washington, National Review Institute had a summit, and Mike Pence was there and spoke.

And I was, you know, I liked Mike Pence, but I have to say, he really

was kind of impressive.

It's not like he hasn't been campaigning.

He's run for Congress.

He's governor.

It's not like he doesn't know how to talk to crowds, but

he seems to be gelling somehow.

Whether that means he even really stands a chance of being the nominee is beyond me.

But So, one thing, your thoughts about pence would be, I'd love to hear them.

Second, though, it's maybe a little

narrow of a thing, but Megan Kelly

was there and she was

on the stage with Michael Brendan Doherty, who's a great writer for National Review, and they were talking about things.

And you've been on Megan's podcast.

I recommend it to our listeners.

She's terrific.

Just a great, great podcast.

And it's very popular.

And if you were conservative and she's sort of right a center, you know, doesn't wear a Republican label on, but if I had a new book come out, I'd wanted desperately to get on that show so it gets, you know, to her large audience.

Well, somebody who has does not want to go on her show is

Governor DeSantis.

So she raised this.

You know, what's the matter?

I mean, I'm not going to give him softball questions.

I'm a journalist.

This is Megan Kelly talking.

And so we know DeSantis has this, I'm going to pick my

slots, because I'm going to dictate.

I'm not going to have people dictate to me when I appear, what I say, et cetera.

But at some point, I wonder, you know, it struck me when she talked about him.

It seemed like,

I don't know, it seemed like there's a little bit of

timidity?

Timidity is the wrong word.

Yeah, I'd start with, let's go through her and then him.

Sure.

Megan Kelly, I think, and I've been on her podcast, is developed into one of the best journalists in America because she is tough, she's sharp, she's intelligent, and she's very conservative, but she's fair.

And she's got a lot of data.

And I've never, I've watched her podcast, I've been on it.

I don't, I can't think of a

situation where she brought up some surprise quote that was taken out of context with the deliberate intent of trying to distraction.

She doesn't do that.

She tries to go look at a record and then look at what people, people she thinks are concerned about.

And if you take Ron DeSantis, okay,

so he's an ideal candidate.

So I'm trying to think right now what Megan would, given her history, would probably think.

And Megan, I think, would say, what are the people who are on the fence?

They don't know whether to vote for Trump or DeSantis.

What are they concerned about?

Trump, you know what that is.

Will he curb his excesses, tweeting, gratuitous slurs, da-da-da.

But what are they worried about?

DeSantis?

Ah, will he be seen by the never-Trumpers or the Romneyites as a way of the old Bush Republicans getting back as a conduit into the party, right?

And then we'll lose the new,

that's what I, I don't, I'm not, I'm just speaking hypothetically, but I think that's probably what she would ask him about, right?

And should

and should and should ask him.

And he's going to be asked that by everybody when he runs for office.

And so it would be the best thing in the world to prep for that, look at the book and think Ron DeSantis would say, if I was going to have a balanced interview where they were going to

allow me to extrapolate where I wanted to and where they wanted to, where should I really bone out?

Then he should have that prepared.

And then she could go back and forth and she wouldn't be vicious.

I know her.

She wouldn't.

She'd be fair.

So it would be actually, I think, a wonderful platform for him so that people would not say this is a Fox News softball, right?

Or something like that.

It would be, I think it would be, I think he'd handle it well.

So I don't understand that myself.

And I don't, I've never seen him in a situation where there was a negative question that he didn't do well, right?

Right.

No flaw.

He does.

Yeah, he does well.

So I think he should do that.

And it's not going to be a hit piece from her.

I know her.

She's going to be basically,

these are what Republicans are in a dilemma right now.

These are the questions they're asking me.

This is what I'm going to put to the candidate.

That's the long and the short of it.

He should go on there.

I think he'd do well.

I'd advise him to do it immediately.

And I think he should do more of that.

He needs to do that.

But I guess one of the things is the absence of that does start to

seem to start a sense of timidity, which again is the wrong word, but

at some point,

strategy can

fail.

And you should also notice that, yes, Trump does not go in CNN.

He doesn't go in MSCB he does softball stuff with Sean Hanny I understand that but Trump when he had those press conferences and they went after him that's when he did the best when they'd say oh how racist it is to use why are you using the China virus and he goes China China China was the people who created it this is you know Ebola Lyme disease China He was very good at that.

He was.

And I've seen him on clips, DeSantis, when they went after him about Disney.

They went after him the other day.

Oh, you lost.

And you haven't seen anything yet.

Right.

I'm just getting started.

And then when they pressed him on critical race theory and all that, he said, this is where Wolf comes to die.

I want to tell you that.

So he's good at that.

And

it would be good for him to do that.

Well, Victor, back on the other part of this, you know, I saw what I saw at the summit, so be it.

Whether Mike Pence performed well or not there, it may be irrelevant to the question.

But you have a sense of Mike Pence.

What are your thoughts about

him?

Maybe

just as Mike Pence

and Mike Pence as a candidate for

president in 2024?

He's a very decent person.

That's what I admire about him.

He's honest, he's fair, he's competent.

He's in an impossible situation because until 2016, I don't think

his political career was going to be going on beyond his governorship.

Do you?

I don't think so.

I don't know.

And that's not an indictment of him or criticism.

It's just that he was reaching an age where you'd look at retirement.

He'd had a successful congressional career.

He was a

a governor and he was a Midwesterner.

He reflected all of the bedrock values of the middle,

the Midwest.

And then Donald Trump appointed him.

Doesn't mean he has to be loyal to Donald Trump on every issue.

But the point is that Donald Trump

elevated him to a national level of celebrity, influence, visibility.

And he was a very good vice president.

President.

He was very sober.

He was extremely loyal.

And I think he was put into an impossible situation where Trump basically said, there was no way in the world that it was going to be constitutionally or politically viable for Pence to stop the Electoral College voting.

It just wasn't going to happen.

I like John Eastman, but it was not going to happen.

So then, this idea that he was disloyal was unfair.

All that said,

when you look at it, you say to yourself, had he not been associated with Trump and given this, would he be where he is now known?

and then he's there where he is now because of Trump, but

he can't be,

he's going to run against Trump, so he has to be critical of Trump.

But if he's going to be critical of Trump, then Trump's going to call him disloyal.

And so, notice what the problem with all these candidates are: Nikki Haley was elevated to national status by Trump.

Pompeo was a very, very solid, sober

congressional

person,

congressman, and then he was CIA director, and he was Secretary of State.

He did a wonderful, I thought he did a wonderful job.

He was terrific, right?

But it was because of Trump.

Hence, it was because of Trump.

And then it was a little bit more tenuous with DeSantis, but Trump, being Trump, was able to leverage that and say that he cried, he went,

and I endorsed him.

I think that's exaggerated.

Even the crowd in Waco didn't buy it because they went silent.

But the point I'm making is that all of those candidates have a dilemma because

they were not national brand names.

You know what I mean?

They didn't have a,

when you had

Obama running against Hillary, Hillary couldn't say, I made Obama or she worked, he worked for me, is what I'm trying to say.

And

it makes it very difficult to run against someone that the public might perceive as your benefactor.

That's number one.

And then number two, your constituency matters.

So Mike Pompeo has a congressional constituency, but it's very difficult to have a Secretary of State constituency on a national level.

And the same thing with Nikki Haley with these appointed offices.

She is not a senator.

or she was appointed by Trump.

And I know she was a governor, but she has more of that that than Pompeo as a congressperson.

And so does Pence, but they don't have a national constituency like Reagan did.

Reagan was not just a former governor.

He was a constituency for the new conservative Republican Party.

And they don't, you can't identify a national movement with Pence or Pompeo or Haley.

And I think that's what DeSantis is trying to do is to make a national movement associated with him.

And it's something like

i am going to continue the mega agenda but i'm going to get even rather than mad in other words i'm not going to say or do anything that distracts from implementing this agenda as quickly as possible i'm going to make perfect appointments i'm not going to have omarosos or you know scaramucci's or that's that's going to be his message

And none of the others who you mentioned are in a position right now, because they're not in office, et cetera, to do anything to

actually fight back or punch the folks.

I have empathy for them because I was thinking that the other day.

What can Haley or Pompeo or Pence do as far as legislation or policy enactment?

None, because they're not in office.

And then I thought,

where is their national ideological movement?

Maybe Pence is evangelical, or Nikki Haley is to resurrect the neocon movement, or Pompeo is to get the old Scoop Jackson hawkish.

I don't know what they are, but they haven't resonated yet.

And

DeSantis has a better chance because he's in office.

He's got a very brilliant record as governor, and he's trying to create a national movement of competent MAGA,

no detours, no cul-de-sacs, get it done quickly, go nullify this left-wing revolution by, you know, kind of like

Yunken in Virginia is similar.

He's a governor and his message is, I can appeal to suburbanites and everything.

I'm not going to compromise my conservatism, but I get things done and I know what has to be done and people will appreciate that.

So I think

of the three, of all the candidates, a Yunkin, a DeSantis

have the best shot against

advantage.

Right.

Well, Victor, we have time for one more topic to discuss today, and that's, I don't know, the sad state of our forces related to China.

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

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

And Victor, so many times in the last couple of years, you've talked about military,

Secretary of Defense, General Milley, the obsessions with

wokeism.

The priority of the military seems to be flying pregnant corporals to blue states so they get free abortions.

Meanwhile,

America is

at risk.

So the Marine Corps Commandant was testifying before Congress the other day, General David Berger, which I'd like to get your thoughts about him, Victor, but he said that the amphibious fleet is 35%, just 35% of what's needed to keep China at bay in the Pacific.

Never mind whatever else the amphibious fleet is needed for.

Victor, what are your thoughts about that assessment and any thoughts about

if you have about General Berger?

I know nothing about him, so I'd be interested.

Well, the Marine Corps has been the most resistant to woke, but it's still woke.

And we're kind of like the Byzantine army in the 13th, 14th century.

We're in decline, and our ends, our responsibilities,

we don't have the means to administer them.

That's just a fact.

So we're all over the world.

You know, I don't know how many deployments, 140 or something, all over with little outposts, but we're sort of like the British Army in 1900

or maybe 1850 when Dickens, as I wrote in a column, was talking about David Copperfield or

Bleakhouse, where the core of the empire was rotting.

That was our equivalent, maybe, of Portland or San Francisco or Washington or New York.

york and yet we're all over the world without the mechanisms running a 33 trillion dollar debt when we went into the first gulf war jack

91 the ratio of debt to gdp was 40 percent we owed 40 percent of our annual gdp aggregate it's 130 now

so

there's And then we have Biden in there with these enormous new social.

So when you keep adding to all the green agendas, all of the bailouts, all of the amnesties, all of the 7 million illegal, you just keep doing this, all of the benefits, there's not going to be any for

the things that count in the military.

And you have a 6% inflation, 6% to 8%,

and you have to increase in

spending by that, or you're cutting.

And we're spending, I think we're going to increase, it's about 3%.

And Biden keeps saying how he's rebuilding it.

But then you look at the billions of dollars that are, what is the military spending compared to China in things like retirement benefits and this seven or eight billion dollar of ideological instruction?

It means that you're not buying artillery shells, you're not buying more Patriot batteries, you're not increasing the F-35.

uh the the raptors you're not having enough ship navy is in the worst shape we should we should have four or five hundred ships right now.

If given what we are obligated, at least whether formally or de facto, obligated to come to the assistance of an Australia or South Korea or Taiwan or the Philippines or Japan, we don't have the wherewithal to do it.

And

we're just talking about the hardware.

The Marine general is talking about the hardware.

But

we're short one whole Army division in recruitment.

And the Heritage Foundation has a new study out on the status of the armed forces.

It's not hysterical at all.

It says they're still very competent, but they're being insidiously eroded by

turning off something that's been characteristic of our podcast: turning off a lot of people.

They're not as explicit as we have been, but if you read the report, translate it into politically incorrect language, it runs something like 75% of the people who die in our war, whether it's fair or not, whether we want to talk about statistics, are white males from the middle and lower classes, often from rural and southern states.

Okay,

these are the people who

Austin and the chief of naval operations and Millie have basically blanketly accused of being racist.

And these are the people who are the targets of all these indoctrination programs, diversity, equity, inclusion.

Okay, fine.

You want to do that?

They're not signing up.

They are almost entirely responsible for the shortfalls in recruitment and the loss of morale, along with the debacle in Afghanistan and the larger sense that we haven't really won any of these wars.

Iraq is a lot better off than Afghanistan, obviously, but the Libyan thing was a a disaster.

Afghanistan proved to be a disaster.

So you can't ask America to keep sending their children to faraway places where you don't want to win the conflict or you're unable to,

but

you're going to send them off under the cloud of suspicion that they're racist.

And then there's a great deal of animosity in the military.

And I can tell you that because I talked to a lot of officers off the record,

I would would say it starts somewhere around lieutenant colonel toward colonels that want to be one stars, one stars that want to be two stars, two stars that want to be three stars, three stars that want to be four stars, four stars that want to retire to a million-dollar consultancy, lobbying, corporate boardship.

And the sense is below lieutenant colonel that those guys that you know if they're a certain age, they're not going to make it.

And that's that's going to be the terminal rank.

But my point is this: that they feel that the wokeness is not sincere, that it was politically driven, and officers to be promoted will not be evaluated on military efficacy.

How many good landings on a carrier, how well artillery hits the target,

how

many

people can be deployed successfully without an accident.

And

it has terrible morale because when they see officers that are pandering to these woke agendas for their own promotion or maybe put it another way, their own survival, they lose morale.

And so it's like the commissariat, as I pointed out before, in the Soviet Union, or what you saw in Mao's arm forces, the Red Guard.

And then superimposed on this whole problem is that we have 370,000 students here from China, many of them in engineering, computer engineering, coding.

And for the last 30 years, they've just expropriated when they went back to China much of our technology.

So they've got a larger, they will have at the end of the year, a larger strategic nuclear force than we do.

They're going to have, they have more ships than we do.

They're making Matt Pottinger has an article out.

He was our military history group that China is apparently readying itself for war.

They're making bomb shelters along the coast opposite of Taiwan.

So

it kind of reminds me of 1939, 1940, 1941, when we were clueless, disarmed.

The army was smaller than Portugal's in 1940, 39.

And then we took an enormous hit in 41 and 42 until we woke up.

And I don't know if we can wake up.

I've always completely unable, we're completely unable to deter China from Taiwan, just a fact.

And maybe we can stop them, but we would lose probably a carrier, we'd probably lose 30,000 Americans.

And I don't know what would happen.

The only thing we have over their head is we could expel every student and every joint venture and kick out everything like TikTok and stuff, and then hope we could

go into a recession with estrangement from the Chinese economy, but maybe we we could recover better than they could and then i don't know what they do uh we had stephen kuei on our last podcast and he was

really telling us that there was gain of function research going on in wuhan lab from data that's been released that still

is

still is and unfortunately for us uh they're looking at types of viruses that would be up to 10 times more lethal than the coronavirus.

And

what do you do?

I know what you do.

You name a building at Holy Cross after Anthony Fauci.

That's what you do.

It's ridiculous.

Remember, he said there's no such thing as gain of function, that he was supporting

all these people.

As I said at that podcast, all the people who died from corona and people like me that was sick for nine months.

from a Chinese engineered virus, then to be told that it wasn't engineered or it was from a raccoon dog, some old story that Chinese data was leaked for that purpose.

It's really disgusting.

But my point, the larger point is that

we have gut check time.

At some point, some president's going to have to say, we're either going to have to cut our responsibilities and go into a Fortress America, or we have responsibilities toward NATO, toward Japan, toward Australia, toward the Philippines, toward South Korea,

toward Taiwan, and toward our few few remaining allies in Africa or South America that haven't been bought off by Chinese infrastructure.

And we're going to up the defense budget.

You know, it was Matthew Ridgway when they asked him about Korea, and he went over there after the debacle of the Yellow River, and he saved Korea.

And we were, they had to get Sherman tanks out of parks, Jack.

They had to, in America, they were starting to, at World War II, they were putting Shermans and displays at fairs.

They weren't producing anything and they had to beep them up.

They weren't as good as

T-34 Rushington.

So

it was the same thing.

And he said something that was very controversial.

He said, you have to have a big defense budget because it deters the enemy, but it also creates a muscularity in your own country.

So you don't fund things that are superfluous.

And you just don't have the wherewithal to,

you know, public Pentagon drag shows, or I don't know what all these social programs that we're doing, the woke stuff, or discussions of reparation, all of that stuff, not when your national security is threatened.

And I think he's right about that.

I'm sorry to ask this.

I know you may have just been making a broader comment, but have there been drag shows at the Pentagon?

That was a big issue that

Lloyd Austin was Matt Gates really pinned him down in congressional testimony.

He denied it and he wouldn't answer though.

So Gates kept saying, mentioning Air Force bases in which these things took place.

And he said the Pentagon doesn't approve.

And he said, does that mean you didn't fund it?

Does that mean he said, I just said the Pentagon does not approve.

But even if they didn't give the money, they gave the infrastructure and the facilities toward it, which is a de facto stamp of approval.

And Gates mentioned two or three bases

in which this was going on.

So

I don't know.

How has this become a religion in America?

It's just the drag show is the pinnacle of our culture now.

Well, I mean, it's that old canard

that about every,

you know,

About every 50 to 60 years in democracies, they go completely stark raving mad.

So during the Gilded Age, the 1890s, before the Big Big Bang panic, people were nuts.

And then the late 50s, 60s, into the 70s, they went nuts.

I saw it at UC Santa Cruz when I was an undergraduate.

They were completely crazy, Jack, completely insane, those students.

I sat in a class on the Peloponnesian War and saw these snotty-nosed kids from Beverly Hills come in and overturn chairs and say, you're getting out for the Vietnam Moratorium.

And about three of us said, this will be fun.

Try to make us do it.

And, you know, they backed off, but I saw that stuff.

I saw faculty members swimming in the pool naked with students.

It was just nuts.

I saw in the dorm people with drug, you know, marijuana, LSD, with price tags on the door.

And it was crazy.

And then the 80s came and we got out of it.

And now it's...

it's been our unfortunately we're in that 60-year cycle i guess and we're completely crazy right now.

And there's going to, and we just hope that we can sober up.

How does it happen?

It's just mass insanity.

It's like hula.

I don't know why all of a sudden at Duncan Yo-Yo, when I'm fourth grade, everybody's crying unless they had one.

And then when I was like six, everybody had to have a hula hoop.

And then when I was in graduate school, everybody had these crazy things called pet rocks.

with your name.

It was nuts.

And what were those little chia, whatever they were, those little plants?

Chia pets, yeah, they're still uh handy Christmas gifts, so yeah.

So, my point is they're harmless, they're harmless compared to a drag good.

We go

collectively, you know.

I don't know why everybody was wearing polyester pants suits, right?

Women and men, remember they were wearing those leisure suits,

the powder blue men's leisure suit with

and they go crazy.

Well, that's what we're doing right now.

We're since 2020,

we've been in three years of just mass hysteria.

I think it was COVID.

I think it was the George Floyd.

I think it was the hatred of Trump, whatever it was, it's destroyed the country for three years.

And I hope this is going to be like the 60-70 madness of Peter Zao.

Well, Victor, I hope there's a Reagan somewhere that says it's not in here.

Well, we may have one, but

we can't pick favorites on this show.

So

we're almost out of time.

I want to make an appeal to our listeners.

There's two books.

One I have and one I want to recommend.

Kat Timf, my dear, Kat Timpf, who many of you see on

Gutfeld.

I don't know, Victor, I know you were on Gutfeld once.

I don't know if Kat was on with you.

Yeah, she was.

She was.

And she was, I taught.

Oh, that's right at Hillsdale.

You taught her.

I think the,

I didn't.

I saw her.

She doesn't remember, but I actually talked to her once.

She was a student about my class.

I don't think she could take it, but I remember her seeing her on campus maybe, gosh, my first year or two, 2004 or 2005.

I don't know.

I have a vague memory.

I love Kat used to work at National Review and I'm close to her.

She's got a book.

So April 18th is an important day for

non-leftist women.

I don't know what the cat would call herself conservative, more libertarian.

Books coming out.

She's got a book,

Kat Temp.

You can't Joke About That, Why Everything is Funny, Nothing is Sacred, and We're All In This Together.

And she sent me an advanced copy.

It was very kind to her.

And then

the same day, though, of more policy interest, Heather McDonald has a book coming out.

I just saw this today, Victor.

I've already pre-ordered it.

When Race Trumps Merit, How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens lives.

Heather is a rock star.

And

I got to get my hands on this book.

I want to recommend.

So we talk about these issues.

You do, Victor, with

such grace and importance.

And I would think this would be the kind of book that our listeners would like.

If they're not familiar with Heather, she writes for

City Journal.

Yeah, she's wonderful.

Yeah.

She really is.

She's very courageous.

And

I remember that, and I've had some disagreements, I think, about the Trump canise in 2016 with her.

She asked some questions once when I gave a lecture, but they were very intelligent questions.

She's a polymath.

She likes about culture, art, everything, but it's fearless and she doesn't get intimidated.

Right, right.

I really like her.

I think she's doing a wonderful job.

You'll find her name on the masthead of City Journal, along with one Victor Davis Hanson, who's also a contributing editor.

And

I don't know, this is just sitting on my desk while we're talking.

We talked about California before.

They have a special issue out.

Can California be golden?

Again, the entire issue is dedicated to California.

I don't know that you've seen it, Victor.

I've just got it and I'm going to look at it, but that's

City Journal.

I saw it.

Yes, I did see it.

It's a good issue.

Oh, it's a terrific magazine.

Brian Anderson's a wonderful editor.

The

sad thing is that

it's Joel Kotkin, it's Ed Ring, it's Schellenberger, it's all these people from all across the political spectrum all have the right solutions.

They've diagnosed the problem.

They've told us what the therapy, the correction should be, they've given us a prognosis if we don't do it.

And they have no ability to stop the train wreck.

It's just, it's, it's the weirdest thing in the world.

Gavin Newsom is probably the worst governor we've ever had.

Maybe in American history.

Yeah, he's

really a not toxic person.

He really is.

Because he's got cocky.

He's cocky.

He's entitled.

He's spoiled.

He's a Bay Area rich kid.

And if you think something, I've got an article coming out in the next news about the Nexus Jack between Stanford University.

Silicon Valley and Bay Area politics is a model of this new Democratic Party nationwide of big money on the left, hard left politicians, and the veneer of culture and respectability and snottiness, snobbery that Stanford limit.

And you look at it all,

people forget that San Francisco gave us the most powerful politicians in the United States.

They gave us Nancy Pelosi.

They gave us Diane Feinstein, head of the Judiciary Intelligence Committee.

They gave us Barbara Boxer.

She's a Chinese lobbyist for years.

They gave us Willie Brown that ran California.

They gave us Jerry Brown that ran for president.

They're going to give us Gavin Newsom, who's going to run for president.

They control searches, internet searches, Apple, Google, Facebook.

Stanford gave us Bankman Freed

and the FTX.

They gave us Thuranos with Elizabeth Holmes.

They gave us the Stanford debacle at the law school.

They gave us

all sorts of scandals.

They have scandals with the president.

They have scandals.

They had scandals in the business school.

They had scandals before the law school, earlier law school.

And my God,

that

trifecta of Bay Area politics,

$9 trillion in market capitalization, Silicon Valley, and the new Stanford University is what defines the nationwide Democratic Party.

So you're writing this for

the new criterion?

Yeah, it's all done.

It's in typeset.

It's going to be in the next.

It's a very long article.

It's almost 6,000 words.

It's in the next issue.

I'm doing the final edits.

Okay.

Well, folks, be on the lookout for that.

Google the new criterion.

And I think you'll probably have to subscribe, but it's an excellent, excellent magazine.

Roger Kimball's the editor, and Victor interviewed Roger recently a couple weeks ago on a podcast here.

So check that out too.

Victor, we're almost out of time.

We thank our listeners who've hung in here all these months.

Some of you are new.

Thanks for joining us.

Hope you like it.

If you are listening over iTunes or Apple podcasts, you can rate the show zero to five stars.

You can leave a comment.

We read the comments.

Also, read the comments that are on Victor's website.

Some really interesting

comments are left there.

But for the ones on Apple, I'd like to share two

today.

One's from

Chief Mike H145.

Truly enjoy Dr.

Hansen.

Victor Davis Hansen truly is the blue collar scholar.

His humility is refreshing.

He is a farmer and Stanford professor, two vastly different professions, yet he does both exceptionally well.

I think that blue collar scholar should be trademarked, Victor.

Bumper sticker or teacher.

And then the other.

The other comments from MG123, exclamation point, Dr.

Hanson, his title.

I just wanted to say I really appreciate you.

I i love your podcast and the articles i read thank you for your voice please continue to speak and write i love your recent article in the epoch times i tell everyone about you encourage and encourage them to listen to your podcast thank you mg123 exclamation point thanks chief Mike H145 and everyone else who left comments, including those who say shut up, Fowler.

Victor, thank you for all the wisdom that you have shared today.

And we will be be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

We'll see you next time.