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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

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

Just making a note, we'll talk about this later, but Victor's official website, the Blade of Perseus, can be found at victorhanson.com.

Victor, plenty to talk about.

I know you were at Stanford the last few days.

And, well, why not begin this podcast by talking about the fallout from the fracas a few days ago week ago at the law school and there is fallout from that like to get your thoughts about that Victor and we'll get to that and plenty more right after these important messages

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So

Victor, since last we spoke about the incident, and it's more than an incident

at Stanford Law School, where

Judge Duncan was invited by the Federalist Society to speak.

And as many people, probably everybody knows,

it was interrupted.

The law school,

the law school's DEI assistant dean, interrupted the students

there were protesting, cursing, you know, everything we've come to

expect awoke law school students.

Duncan has fought back since.

He's been apologized to by the dean of the law school.

She's been attacked because she apologized.

The president of Stanford has apologized.

And then there's been some reporting by the Washington Free Beacon and other entities about...

Who was there?

Who were these protesters?

And they've been outing them to some degree.

And then those protesters don't want to be

you're violating my free my first amendment rights by by naming me you know it's just so this this madness ensues and it brings i guess greater truth and therefore greater shame to stanford university victor you were just there

i know you know some of the players who were involved.

What are your thoughts about the

role of all of this?

Everybody should realize how far we are from sanity because

the federal society invited Kyle Duncan, a distinguished federal judge.

And his sin was that in a case involving a violent offender, this violent offender decided that he was going to transition.

And he decided that he, you know what, he was going to identify him with his pronouns at the time of his offense, basically.

And he wasn't going to play that game.

So he was going to speak.

And the, as you know, the dean of diversity, equity, inclusion

was ready for him.

So wrote a pre-prepared speech criticizing him on the expectation that the students in the law school would get violent and fight.

And I mean, violent in the sense that,

I mean, Jack, they call him scum.

They said, you scum.

And one person said, I can find the prostate.

You can't find the CLIT.

And And they screamed at him.

And it was a mixture of

typical Stanford.

Three things everybody has to realize about the Stanford student, the left-wing Stanford student.

Number one, they're bullies.

They're bullies, bullies, bullies.

They scout and scream.

And they do that only when they're in the number.

I've dealt with them before.

Number two,

They're wimps.

So if anybody says, if you want to disrupt something

and you want to violate the canons of Stanford, then we're going to identify who you were.

We've got a video of the whole thing.

And there were people on campus that said, well, what good does it do for

the law dean to apologize or the president of Stanford University apologize and then to say that these people violated our own rules when you're not going to punish them?

And you're not going to punish them because you're afraid of these little kids.

And then the third is they're arrogant.

They're elitist.

So among the slurs that they said to, I don't know if it's a slur, but among their intended slurs, Jack, was that they said, you couldn't even get into Stanford.

Can you imagine that?

The pseudo-Marxists that are, you know, March, long live the proletariat, you couldn't get into our elitist little group.

And so that was how schizophrenic they were.

And then when they don't want...

They don't want their names to be released.

Or like Antifa, we're the revolutionaries, but we're not going to show our faces.

And

that that was

pretty bad.

And as I said earlier with Sammy, I mean, this was on the heels of another Stanford professor saying, weighing in on the Johnny Depp trial and making derogatory remarks about the Mexican-American female attorney, basically saying she was sluttish.

Call me girl or something, and then saying that Johnny Depp should be killed, that his body should be eaten by rats.

That's a professor.

And then you had the other professor making fun of Baron Trump.

And then you had the Federal Society attacked earlier, Jack, a year ago, when a student

sent out a phony memo from them saying they were going to organize an armed insurrection.

And then we had the Bankman

Free parents who were both Stanford Law professors who, as I said earlier, the New York Times reminded us that they were far more intimately involved with the Ponzi scheme of their son than they had let on via donations donations that he had given to the mother's left-wing dark money bundling operation,

mind the gap or whatever it was called, close the gap.

And then

we had the father who was an advisor as well, and somehow millions of dollars of

ill-gotten

real estate ended up in their name.

And this is all, as I said earlier, superimposed on the vocabulary list everybody's talking about the snitch list where you rat out somebody who uses the word American or immigrant.

If you hear a professor say that, then this was all on the heels of the 22%.

They admitted they only let 22%

of white students in in the same period, Jack, in which they made a big performance art apology.

that they were no longer anti-Semitic, that they did not distinguish they they admitted now in the 20s and 30s they excluded people on the basis of their religious or ethnic identifications, but that was so horrible, they would never do that again.

And yet they released

a few weeks later that there's only 22%

admitted of a demographic that's about 70% of the population.

And we had the admission scandal, remember, where the saving coach was trying to pocket millions of $6 million to get students into Stanford.

And we have the president, the president of the university is under

pressure to resign because allegedly he doctored in an article 30 years ago.

I'm not qualified to adjudicate whether that's fair or demagogic.

But my point is that as a person at the Hoover Institution and a graduate of Stanford, they all think that their reputation is so wonderful and that if you're at Hoover, you can't sully their name.

I have just the opposite.

I don't tell people I went there.

I don't feel like it's a badge of honor.

When I I went there, and that was 50 years ago, I enrolled as a graduate PhD in 1975 student, but I had all Germanic, English, Austrian,

Irish professors.

And they were all top trained, and it was no nonsense.

There was no theory.

There was no Marxist, there was no woke, there was no critical waste theory.

There was no Foucault, Derrida.

It was just you're going to be the best Latin and Greek scholar we can produce.

And you're going to know literature and history and archaeology and numismatics and epigraphic.

And if you don't like it, then you quit.

And if you don't pass your exams and you don't pass your courses with the kind of grades that we expect, we're going to flunk you out.

They flunked out half the people.

And that was the idea.

So it was, it was, but I don't, that doesn't exist anymore, is what I'm trying to say.

So the new Stanford, I have no affinity with.

And it's kind of sad in my case, as I said, that my mom was a little farm girl out here.

And she begged her father to mortgage 40 acres so she could get the money to go there.

And she got a BA from the University Pacific.

Then she went back again, got one from Stanford, and got a JD and became a lawyer from Stanford.

She was on the board of visitors of the law school.

That doesn't exist anymore.

They destroyed it.

They're getting a lot of pressure from alumni.

And that was why they issued the apologies, because they don't want the donor class to stop paying.

So

what's the

we know we know that the medicine for them is worse than the disease.

We could stop it tomorrow, Jack.

All you'd have to do is, this is the Stanford policy.

No one disrupts an invited guest.

If you disrupt an invited guest, if you heckle, if you try to prevent the speaker, whether you're a dean of equity, inclusion,

whatever, or a Stanford law school, then you're going to be expelled for a semester or a year or permanently, depending on the egregiousness of your crime.

That would stop it.

And then if you said,

if you were a donor, you say, I'm not giving any more money.

No, no more money.

And then if the Republicans were to take the Senate and they were to say, you know what, these universities have lost their way.

They're toxic influences on our youth.

They're indoctrinating them.

They're not civil.

They're not educational.

They're not following the Constitution.

They're violating the First Amendment.

They're violating the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Sixth

Amendment, when people are brought up on charges of harassment or something.

And you know what?

They're going to have to pay taxes on their endowment.

So if Stanford's got $35 billion and it gets $3 billion in income, then you're going to have to pay $1 billion.

And then if you had to pay $1 billion, you might not have 15,000 administrators for every 16,000 students.

So

Vic, you know, was there any news about,

and maybe there isn't, the DEI, the assistant, I forget her name, the assistant.

Her name was Tarana Steinbach.

No, she did not apologize, but

the law dean who gave an anemic apology, they lined up on both sides of the hallway when she went to class the next day and tried to stare her down.

I think they dressed in black, and then two-thirds of her students walked out.

So

they put junk up on the walls, walls too, I think.

Yes, it's empathetic for the

DEI dean as a hero.

They love her.

She planned the whole thing, Jack.

She planned.

She knew that when the speaker was invited by the Federal Society, that they were going to protest.

She wanted that protest.

So she wrote a speech in advance.

So and at a key moment, when the crescendo reached the proper moment, then she was going to appear as if she was some type of magical creature and say, stop heckling.

I am the diversity, equity, inclusion.

And then she was going to turn to him and say, give me that podium, which she took.

And then she read a free scripted written in advance attack on the judge.

And then they got very happy.

And then after she's done, she said, you can leave.

And half of them then made a big perp walk out.

And that was what they did.

And then they attacked Judge Duncan because they said he wanted the confrontation.

And oh, you can't show our pictures.

We showed all the pictures of the Federalist Society student members.

We plaster their names.

I walked that way to my apartment from the Hoover Institution.

I walked right through the Walla School and you can see the names of the Fed Society.

They were up there, but you don't dare put our pictures up.

It's kind of like the Antifa stuff.

We're going to have 120 days of rioting and 14,000 of it.

But oh, mommy, please come and get me.

These meanie policemen, we spat on them, we threw crap in their face, we hit them, we put lasers in their eyes, but they arrested me.

And now they're going to publish my name.

And if I get a felony,

I can't go to Amherst, and then I won't be able to go to Harvard, and I can't get into the bicoastal elite.

That's how they think.

They're not nice people.

By the way, they are not nice.

There were two U.S.

Marshals

at the event, and they had anticipated maybe something was going to go wrong here.

My understanding is Duncan, who I don't know,

but seemed, I'm going to tough it out here.

And they were worried about him even after the half of the idiots left the room.

The other half was still so nasty and threatening that they got him out of there.

Yeah, I mean, they basically,

if Joe Biden and Merrick Garland applied the standards they did to January 6th, I mean, they did the same thing at UC Davis.

At UC Davis a week later,

Charlie Kirk.

Charlie Kirk went there.

And what was unusual,

they tried to burst in.

They tried to do the same thing.

But the difference, it was the same thing.

It wasn't the DEI administrator that hijacked.

It was the president,

chancellor of UC Davis.

Right.

And he gave a lecture.

And when he, I think it was basically character assassination when he said he was, basically, said that Charlie Kirk was a hateful, known,

I don't know, revolutionary, awful person, and he shouldn't be here.

He said he called for the murder, lynching, or whatever, of Trans.

That was in the Sacramento Bia, a McClatchy paper, and they had to retract that, by the way, when he threatened to sue.

So, what is new in the 60s, as I said, you know, you marched on the president if you were a radical, his office.

These are top-down.

The president of UC Davis, the chancellor,

said things that were intended to stop Charlie from speaking and incited that violence.

And according to the left, that's conspiracy.

And

he caused a violent confrontation on his own campus.

If you're the D,

the diversity, equity, inclusion at Stanford and you're an administrator, you helped disrupt an event contrary to your own school's regulation.

But if the president of Davis breaks his own rules and the diversity czar of Stanford breaks their own rules, then what do you expect the student to do?

Next time they get some trans speaker, if some conservative person goes to there, what would happen if a trans speaker says, I'm here to speak why we need mandatory

operations of a student, 12 or 13-year-old wants a trans, she should not have parents, and there are people who have that.

Or, I'm going to have a drag show for kids.

I think that's great for kids.

And some conservative person goes there and says, Shut up, you're crazy.

What are they going to do to that person?

You know what they're going to do, they're going to expel them.

Right.

So, these people are morally and intellectually bankrupt.

They really are.

They're not nice people.

They don't believe in the rule of law.

These are not Jack 18, 19-year-old undergraduates at Stanford.

These are people in their 20s and 30s.

They are adults, adults.

They are people

learning the American legal system.

They're supposed to be devoted as guardians of the law, and they're not.

And I think they should either sanction the law school, the American Bar Association should, or they should put a moratorium on it, just shut it down for a year.

and then have an internal investigation and see why students are disrupting classes, why they are disrupting disrupting lectures, why they are obscene, why they were yelling to a person, you suck, mentioning sexual organs, calling him scum, and how can they get away with that at a university?

And that's not going to happen.

Right.

Well, Victor, plenty more stuff is happening in your great state there, the golden state.

There are reparations

being planned in San Francisco.

There's a great, on the conservative side of things, a great

analysis that's just been released about corporate support for Black Lives Matters and other radical organizations.

And

so let's get to a kind of a California jump ball right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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So, Victor, two things.

One is our friends, and I'm very fond of the Claremont Institute and the folks there, the Claremont Review of Books, they publish that.

It's just a terrific journal.

Charlie,

Charles Kessler, I was going to say, I was almost a Charlie Sykes.

I couldn't be a more opposite person from Charles Kessler.

But they've created the at the Center for the American Way of Life, they have just released a great database on

corporate funding for Black Lives Matters and other associated organizations.

And I sent you the link for this, Victor.

I got to reveal a little something.

And folks might be staggered.

There's

$82 billion dollars that have been allocated you name it whatever major corporation pepsi

uh nike

it's hundreds and hundreds if not thousands 82 billion so i send it to victory that's it must be a mistake 82 million no it's billion so of course the the website was was attacked it was it was um launched this past week was shut down by some cyber attacks but claremont folks got it back up so that's one thing And on the

little north of where Claremont is, up San Francisco, this past week has been rolling out over the last several weeks, Victor.

Debate within the city council for reparations for blacks.

There are some criteria for who is a black and who's a San Francisco black.

But

if this proposal became law,

it would cost the citizens of San Francisco, who's ever left, many billions of dollars to fund this insanity.

So, Victor,

take one, take both, please.

And you're remember that, I think everybody remembers, remember that African-American

retired policeman?

I think it was in St.

Louis, and he went down to check on the store, and they killed him and they shot him.

Correct, correct.

And then I think in that same period, there were, I don't know how many people were shot.

There was somebody in Las Vegas that was shot during that rioting.

And I don't know.

I think he was Greek American.

He was attacked.

And what I'm getting at is all that violence that we don't talk about now,

that was all engineered by Antifa and BLM.

And we know that BLM absconded with millions, the four, the three women who founded it.

They were gay black women.

And remember that BLM started, Jack, before the George Floyd as a gay feminist organization that was antithetical, they said, to black toxic masculinity.

That's how it started, as a Marxist.

The three women were Marxists, and then they became capitalists when they bought these homes near Malibu Canyon Road, and I think it was in Georgia, and they absconded with the money they had, et cetera.

But when these had, when these, why were the corporations giving money?

Was it because they felt idealistically that BLM was a civil rights organization?

Or was it they felt that the more that they let people know that they had donated, then the more that what it was kind of like Jesse Jackson in the 1980s.

Remember the racket he had where he would go to Toyota or people and say, give us money and we won't pick at you.

Yeah.

And the ranks.

So

push, operation push.

Yeah.

And that's what they were doing.

They were paying protection money in the billions, apparently, so that BLM would leave them alone.

And I just keep thinking of who were these people?

They were mostly wealthy, bi-coastal white people who live in very nice homes.

And they live in a lifestyle that protects them from the ramifications of their own ideology.

And they were using somebody else's money, the stockholders' money.

And then they gave it, and then they bragged that we gave we at,

it Disney, we at Nike, we at American Airlines, we are for social justice,

and we're going to get, and we sponsor.

Yeah, that's what they do.

And they don't care about the consequences, who it hurts or who it empowers.

And that was a very interesting summer of 2020.

It really struck me when in May and early June, when we had those two big demonstrations and 1,100 healthcare workers said, basically,

all that stuff we told you we'd put you in jail for for if you didn't social distance and you didn't wear a mask.

Black Lives Matter protesters can go out and they get right next to each other.

They can breathe, yell, scream, no masks, no social distancing, and they're exempt because if they had, if they couldn't do that because of the quarantine that we forced on everybody else, the psychological damage would be worse.

And at that point, the whole thing collapsed as far as I was concerned, the whole veracity of the left and quarantines and lockdown, all that.

It was all just politics.

It was a bunch of, you know, deplorables are going to have to be kept in their homes, like in their caves.

And then all of the choice and noid groups can go out and do whatever they want, whether they're wealthy or BLM or Antifa or whatever.

That was pretty much that summer.

You want to go take a downtown Seattle or Washington?

Go ahead and do it.

You're exempt.

You want to walk around with a loaded AR-15 in Seattle?

Three people get

shot and whatever that was called, chaz or something, fine.

Kyle written a house?

Well, we're going to go after him, put him in jail.

That's how the system works.

And it wasn't like that before, but it's all about asymmetry.

And

I don't know how to stop it.

I really don't.

I don't know.

You can't, whatever your politics are right now, forget whether you're Republican, forget whether you're Democrat, forget whether you're liberal, forget whether you're conservative, forget, forget, forget.

You have one choice.

Are you going to vote for a woke Marxist revolutionary agenda or are you not?

That's it.

And what do I mean by that agenda?

I mean, do you want to defund the police and let people out who are violent criminals the day they commit assaults?

Do you want your cities to be torn apart by

homeless defecation, urination, fornication?

Do you want 7 million people you have no idea who they are coming across your border?

Do you want to stop energy independence?

If that's what you're for, then vote for the woke, but you're going to destroy civilization in the process.

Victor, can you see the

whatever it's called in San Francisco?

Is it the Board of Supervisors, whatever the version of the city council is there?

Can you see them voting for to approve a significant reparations?

Only in the sense sense that

they want $5 million reparation payments.

It's easy to vote for it, but where are they going to get the money?

They're broke.

The state said they had $25

billion shortfall.

Remember,

we had all that federal money.

We had $100 billion.

But it looks more like $45 billion because what's happening, Jack, is that about five things are in a perfect storm right now in California.

Number one,

about 300 to 500,000 people are leaving, and most of the middle-class people have already left that were entrepreneurial.

So you've got to remember in California that 1% pay half the income tax, which is half their state revenue.

They're gone.

They're 10 million.

They're gone.

This is Ronald Reagan voter, Pete Wilson, Schwarzenegger.

Next level, the high professionals in the coastal corridor, they're leaving too.

they're not necessarily conservative.

These are the tech people, the banking people,

the corporate people.

They're leaving and they're taking billions of dollars with them.

So our revenue base is going down, down, down, down, down.

And we've got

one-third of the welfare recipients in the United States.

We've got

We've got one-sixth of the population, or one-fifth of the population population lives below the poverty line.

So when I drive across California every week, and I see the underbelly of California, it's like a third world country.

So it's not, and you know, it's at, it's, it's at a war with agriculture, it's a war with timber, it's a war with mining, construction, manufacturing.

And it was all predicated on Silicon Valley, had $9 trillion of market capitalization.

And these great universities,

USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Caltech, Caltech,

UC Irvine, they were bringing in all these foreign students with all this money, and that's drying up.

Colleges are shrinking.

People are not going to college in sufficient numbers to support their overhead.

And Silicon Valley is laying off people.

And you look at Silicon Valley Bank, that's the future.

And so the state is in a crisis right now.

And that deficit is going to get bigger and bigger.

So if somebody says they're going to, and San Francisco says, all of you San Franciscans who have never had a slave and you have no one in your family in five generations that had a slave, are going to pay $5 million

to people who have never been a slave and don't know anybody in five generations that are a slave.

And we have no idea to tell who is actually black, whether it's 1 16th, 1 8th, 1 12, unless we're going to use old Confederate one drop rules.

And we don't know whether Jamaicans and Africans, I don't know if you come from Jamaica, or do you pay or do you get, Jack?

Were you the son of a plantation owner that had slaves?

If you come from, I don't know, East Africa, West Africa, are you going to pay reparations?

Because your ancestors sold slaves to the slave traders.

And

what are you going to do with every other group?

And so a guy comes across the border illegally from Mexico and he's going to pay out of his paycheck.

And it's not, it doesn't, the thing is about California, Jack, is there's only five four to five percent African American and there is only about 37%

so-called white people.

The rest of the state is Hispanic and Asian and mixed race.

So,

and the state was a free state.

It did not join the Confederacy.

It joined the Union.

It was anti-slavery.

There had never been a slavery, slave in the state.

So now they say, well,

there were zoning restrictions against African Americans.

Well, there were zoning restrictions against everybody.

They had Armenian restrictions, Arab restrictions, like any other majority culture in the 19th century.

And so everything about it is absurd.

And they know it.

It's just a shakedown.

And, you know, every once in a while, the Heritage Foundation comes out and gives us a price tag for the great society transfers.

It's up to about 20 trillion plus, right?

So according to the people in San Francisco's logic, you would say, you know what?

Affirmative action and all these welfare, they went inordinately per capita African Americans.

So those were reparations.

And when you look at Stanford's admission policy and you have 22% white, and you look at what's going on in the Oscars, you're into a repertory compensatory process already.

And so this is just monetizing what's already de facto.

It'd be like some white person who was a mechanic from, I don't know, Indianapolis saying, you know what?

I couldn't get into the University of Indiana University, even though I had a straight, because I was white.

I got passed over as a fireman because I was white.

I didn't, and then I have a, I want to sue because this was racist.

And I don't know anything about my great-great-grandfather walked, looked with the, you know, the Indiana volunteers to fight with Sherman.

So I don't know what this is all about, but it's going to, it's not going to go through.

It's going to cause a lot of dissension.

It'll never happen because we don't have any money.

We're broke.

Yeah.

Victor, would you, would you

take what you've just said and weave into it the piece you've you've written and people can find it on on your website and you wrote it for American Greatness.

And I think it's your syndicated column.

Are we the Byzantines?

You write about the fall of Istanbul and

what happened at the fall of

the end of the

Roman Empire in the 1400s.

Yes, very sad.

How it compares to what we're going through today.

Well, we had this word, this adjective Byzantine, that said a pejorative adjectives says overly bureaucratic or corrupt, but that's very unfair.

When the empire fell officially in 476

with Romulus Augustus,

kid emperor, it did not fall in the east where the wealth was.

And so

under Constantine, but then later under Theodosius, and then on, especially

under Justinian in the 530s, it had a renaissance and it reclaimed half the empire.

And it codified Roman law, the Justinian law code.

It built Haggia Sophia, the greatest church in the world for 900 years.

And then it was the largest mosque in the world for another 200 years.

And

it was an amazing culture.

It kept alive classical learning.

It was technologically adept.

It built the most sophisticated fortifications in the history.

of urban municipal fortification.

It was impregnable.

And it went on like that for a thousand years.

It survived the Fourth Crusade, where the Franks and the Venetians

hijacked the Crusade and instead sacked Constantinople and destroyed the city.

And for 50 years, hijacked the empire.

And it was weakened after that.

But the point is that it was a bastion of Western culture and society right on the Bosphorus, right at the entrance of the Black Sea.

And it was renowned.

The city was like no other.

And with the rise of the Seljuk Turks in the 1300s and then the who became the Ottomans, they wanted it, but they couldn't take it because they had high technology.

They had Greek fire that was kind of a precursor to napalm.

They could shoot out of pressurized tanks as flamethrowers.

They had superior galleys.

They were masters of fortification.

They were very clever diplomats, playing one side off.

Well, anyway, the point I'm making is in the 15th century,

in the 14th century, they had a plague, the black plague, but they really took a big hit.

And they emptied the city and they barely recovered.

And they were barely recovered from the Fourth Crusade.

And a city of 800,000 was down to 50,000 people.

Grass was growing in the lawn.

And finally,

Mehmed the Emperor, 21-year-old kind of a punk, and

he's Erdogan's hero, of course, now.

He was eyeing this, and he had made a deal with Constantinople.

They said, basically, the Venetians can come in, the Genovese can come in, the Ottomans could come in.

We're going to be an ecomenical new type of empire.

We're going to let people trade as they want.

And we'll keep the Bosphorus open.

We'll be neutral between West and East.

And the Ottomans said, no, we're going to take it.

And nobody had ever taken the wall.

So they came in April 2nd of 1453.

And by May 29,

there was only 7,000 against an army of 180,000.

I've been reading, you know, rereading the modern Greek accounts and some of the Italian.

It's very sad, Jack, to see this wonderful culture in this deserted downtown of Constantinople.

with grass growing in the streets, and they can't get enough people to help them.

And the Ottomans are kind of like the Chinese.

They're rising, rising, rising.

And they're saying, we're the new power.

We're going to take over.

And yet they almost stopped them.

If they hadn't had one breach in the walls, the Ottomans were ready to go home because it was getting summertime and the plague season and they couldn't feed everybody outside the walls.

And then they had a freak accident where they attacked the Venetian contingent.

And they were able to kill some of the most marquee Venetian mercenary helpers, I should say.

But Western Christendom didn't help them.

I mean, had the Venetians or the Genovese or the Franks or the Germans or the British,

had they come in number, they could have stopped it.

And so that was the end of Constantinople.

It was renamed.

Can I ask you, Victor, like, why?

Was there a,

was that too bad?

Or we don't have the, there's no interest, or they did not see the consequences.

They had a big fight,

Christian exegesis.

It was centered around whether the Holy Ghost was part of the Trinity or not, whether he was a silver.

Yes, that part.

And then the liturgies were fighting.

And then there was bitterness about the

Fourth Crusade where Western Christians did, you know, killed all the Byzantines and vice versa.

But what I was getting at in the column is it was the Byzantines were very unrealistic.

They had this sense that we were a majestic culture.

We've been in control.

We saved Western civilization.

We've been here for 1,100 years.

We can't fall.

We're sophisticated.

We have the greatest city in the world.

But

they weren't creating wealth.

They were taking gold fixtures off the wall and melting it down.

They were inflating the currency.

They didn't understand what the Ottomans wanted to do.

The Ottomans wanted to obliterate them.

And they kept thinking, well, you know, why would they want to get rid of us?

We have technology.

We have learning.

They're parasitical off of us.

They can trade.

We'll help them.

No, they hate you for what you are.

And I was trying to suggest that in America today,

we're $33 trillion in debt.

And like the Ottomans, like the Byzantines, we have no borders.

They couldn't control their borders anymore.

And like the Byzantines of old, we're inflating our currency.

And we just kept thinking the China, the Chinese, man, they don't understand.

We're Americans.

We have Star Wars.

We have video games.

You know, we have Facebook.

We did Twitter,

we have Hollywood, and you want to say, no, we don't have Hollywood.

And the NBA is a joke, and the Oscars are a joke, and the Tony's are a joke, and the Grammars are a joke, and Stanford, and Harvard, and Yale, and they're a joke.

And all these places that used to give us scientific research and wonderful medicine and the best business schools, they're all woke.

And they're predicating their meritocracy on race, gender, and ideology.

And that can come very quickly.

And there's nothing that says you get up in the morning and say, I'm an American, man.

I deserve to be the most powerful country in the world.

No, you only have 330 million people.

Chinese have 1.4 billion.

And right now, when we look at Ukraine, half the world is against us.

There's a billion point four Chinese, there's a billion point four

Indians, there is 150 almost million Russians, there's 80 million Iranians, 25 million North Koreans.

I don't know what it is, 85 million Turks.

They don't like us.

And if you look at South America, Brazil, Argentina, they're on the side of Russia.

And we're in debt.

And we don't.

We've had five near crashes on our airline system.

Five.

And anybody who's been in an airplane lately and watch how the ground crews operate or how the plane deals with old-fashioned turbulence or how people treat each other on the plane, it's third world.

And so, and I, if I were driving today, like I did, across the San Joaquin Valley from I-5 to the 99,

and I said, I'm not in the United States, you would think that I was in rural Mexico or maybe South America.

The homes are no different.

There's, or if you walked along, I could take you one block around, which is about a mile and a half down an avenue whose name I won't mention, and you would think that we were in Haiti because along the side of the street, there's sofas.

There's a new,

last week, there was two ovens.

There's hot water heaters, there's wrecked cars, there's wet trash, and it's like eight feet tall.

And people just throw it there, and nobody picks it up.

It just happens.

The only thing that is very neat now, in a very ironic way, Jack, is when somebody runs a stop sign and that's very common or gets drunk and kills someone, the family appropriates that public side of the road, you know, and makes it what we call in Greek an iconostasis.

It's

a shrine, you know,

with a cross and flowers.

And guess what?

It's absolutely meticulously kept.

It's beautiful.

It's got a little white picket fence.

It's got candles.

It's got a cross.

It's got a picture.

And they're everywhere on the side of the road.

And no one throws trash in them.

But other than that, they throw trash everywhere else.

And so what I'm getting at is people in the community are capable of creating safe spaces that are hallowed and clean, but not when it's not in their interest to.

And they don't care about the landowner over here

or the conditions.

So it's,

you know, I'll give you an example.

When I go into town, I say to my wife, okay, it's going to be interesting.

So I had to run in the other day and I came back and I said,

this is what happened.

I went into the local town and I went through the alley where the mailbox is for the main post office is.

And it's one way, Jack.

It's very narrow.

You go in and there's a mailbox on your left.

You go down the window and I make my turn into,

and a car car is coming at me at full speed against the wrong way,

and I have to go at an agonal and it was so narrow that she could not get around me.

So I got out very politely and I said, you know, this is one way you almost hit me.

And she, in broken Spanish and English, started swearing at me and angry and got in her.

and got on her cell phone like, you know, I don't know what I did.

I was going in the right direction, but I had the audacity to say, you're breaking the law.

You're breaking the law.

And then I went into another to get gas.

And

I, uh, the first gas pump had a little, you know, a plastic.

It doesn't work.

And I turned around when the other one doesn't work.

And then there was a line there.

And in front of me, another car cut in front of the other person.

They almost had a gunfight there.

They were screaming and yelling.

And so I thought, wow, this is

very strange.

And then I took a car into a car wash, my third incident, and the car stalled.

It was a

Tesla and it wouldn't go into neutral.

They had locked the wheels and it took me about a minute to, you know what I mean, to get it back into neutral.

Right.

And I thought I was going to get beaten up.

There were cars screaming and yelling and people got out because there were fought maybe five cars.

And then I drove home and as I drove home,

there was a guy stopped on the side of the road.

And I wanted to go by a pond to see if

they were letting the water out to the ocean or they were going to recharge our water table.

Of course, the pond, we've had the wettest year in history, and they're not letting the water recharge fully.

They're letting it out the ocean 10 million acre feet down the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers.

But anyway, there was a guy parked right in the middle of the road.

And I turned on a right turn, and he was ready to unload a lazy boy chair right into the water.

And I stopped, and then he got back in the car.

But he even had a blinking light, his backyard light.

His back lights were blinking to let everybody know that he was parked in the middle of the road.

Can I ask you a question?

Where you live, how difficult is it to legally throw away

a lazy boy chair?

Is it that big of a deal?

Right.

You know, what do you mean?

Everybody does it.

Well, I mean, it's protective.

You can bring it to the dump.

You know, like, is it that?

Oh, I see what you mean.

No, it's 15 bucks, 20 bucks.

There's dumps everywhere.

There's dumps everywhere.

You can do it anywhere.

But why would a person do that?

They think when they don't really like the country, they don't care about the country.

They don't care about the people who live there.

You know, I always, my wife and I walk around.

We always see these things, you know, like child's toys floating floating in a beautiful pond or a frog coming out of the pond, you know, sitting on a bunch of plastic bottles and or, you know, a hawk flying over a strip car.

And we ask ourselves, what is the mentality of the person who did that?

Right.

What is it?

And like, I'll give you an example.

About a month ago, I'm doing my morning 5.30 walk, and a guy pulls up with his wife in little back road, way in from the road on our property, or what used to be my brother's place, you know, and it's right near mine.

I walk over there and he's looking around.

And I said, What are you doing?

And kind of broken English, he said, I'm looking for a bicycle.

I said, Are you serious?

And I look in the car, he's got like seven garbage bags, right?

And I said, Well, is your bicycle in the garbage bag?

And I said, I think you better turn around and go back.

Okay.

And he gets angry.

What I like about all, they get angry at you.

Right.

And so it's...

You male Karen there.

Yeah.

You're a child.

Well, I guess.

I mean, it's civilization in reverse.

That's what it is.

It's like being on the walls of Constantinople.

And I know how this ends.

It doesn't end well.

And the Chinese or the Ottomans, I mean, the Chinese know what they think of us.

They look at us and they think, you know what?

We've got 340,000 students lapping up your technology.

And they're taking your engineering and your computer science and your math and your physics.

And they don't care about the racial makeup of the faculty.

They do not care about woke.

They just want to get all of the expertise they can and get back so they can beat these people that think, they think like the Ottomans thought of the Byzantines, and we have contemporary accounts of what they thought.

These people don't enjoy the lifestyle.

They didn't earn it.

They're generations before.

They're parasites.

We're going to take it from them.

They can't stop us.

That's the Chinese attitude.

And we got all these Americans and are like kind of Byzantines fighting over words, you know.

Whoa, whoa, what's your pronouns?

Who gives a blank about your pronouns when we're in an existential war with the Chinese?

you know and that's what their attitude is we're 33 trillion in debt and finally you know that the infer

uh medned said, he said, look, okay, we're outside your walls and maybe we can't take them.

Maybe you're counting.

You can give us 800,000 gold florins,

Ducats, and we'll leave for a while.

And

the Emperor Constantine says, well,

even if we,

he says to everybody, even if we could raise it, it was more than the aggregate worth.

In 550, they could have paid it that day, but they didn't have it.

And then they thought, well, even if we did have it we paid it we don't have the ability to stop him next year because they were flat broke and

that's kind of like the united states where 33 trillion dollars in debt and janet yellen goes over to what kiev and says i'm going to give you 10 billion dollars and then joe biden says i'm going to up to i'm going to forgive with a wave of the hand 500 billion dollars for student loans and then gavin newson says oh i'm going to give 500 million

or these corporate i'm going to give this and then all of a sudden you hear well wait a minute,

the Silicon Valley Bank doesn't have any money.

Right.

And the government's broke.

And Joe Biden says it's covered, but he's lying like he does every day.

He gets up in the morning.

And so

it's kind of,

I get very depressed when I'm reading this, this chapter.

I'm trying to write about this phenomenon of Constantinople and what it meant to civilization.

because I really believe that it was a viable civilization.

And today you would have a Hellenic,

you know, Greece, the border with modern Greece is not that far from Constantinople.

And that was the West.

And I think it would be a more, I think that Greece is a more positive influence on the world than is Turkey today.

I just, maybe I'm prejudiced.

I'm just going, I mean, the Greeks are not saying, Mr.

Erdogan, when you wake up in the morning, you may have a flight of missiles descending on Istanbul, as he is about Athens.

Right.

They're not

cutting a deal with you with Putin.

They're not doing all of that stuff.

But you might have said that 40 years ago also.

Yes.

I would, even though

Greece was very anti-American and Turkey was very pro-American.

But there's still, I can tell you, as a person who's been to Turkey 20 times,

that when you go from Greece to Turkey and Turkey to Greece, it's a very different experience.

Really?

Very different.

Yes, it is.

I've never...

Do you have a minute to tell us?

Go ahead.

It's a difference

between going into an Islamic country.

And I don't mean this about Turkish people, but Erdogan has said that he's trying to reject the Attaturk legacy of secularism and Westernism.

Right.

And he said that people should have never,

they should have made, he made Santa Sophia the greatest church in christendom for as i said 532 till 1453 the greatest church in the west he made it into a mosque it was a world as united nations heritage site it had the greatest biggest dome the

dome in the world until uh the the the vatican dome it was the largest church until the 17th century church in seville spain and he made that a world he made that into a mosque just like the ottomans did and

he doesn't like any of things that ataturk did he wants to make he said that right and so you can see churches are closing down there's not very many there's not freedom of speech it's not

i mean you go to the greeks it's like the united states right as far as freedom goes right

europe it's europe it's not it's

and

whatever

yeah i i'm not i'm not saying that the crusades were wonderful i'm not saying westerners were not without blame i'm not saying any of that all i'm saying is that the byzantines represented a different civilizational influence on the world than did the ottoman empire and when that was lost that was a tragedy and it had effects throughout history

And Greece was occupied, it was only seven years later, and they stormed Mistra, Mistra, and they begged them not to do that.

There was no reason they had to do that.

And they took over Greece till 1821.

And they suppressed everything.

They went in and destroyed everything.

And it's sort of like the occupation of Jerusalem before 1967 when the Israeli army went back into Jerusalem, that all of the Jewish tombstones were being used as urinals, and people could not go into Jerusalem, certain areas.

And it was just different.

So when I go to Israel today

and I go to the West Bank, the affluent areas of the West Bank, or I fly into a country and then I go to Israel, it's different.

That's all.

You can say whatever

you want.

It's free.

The people are free.

And there's a lively debate.

And the economy works and the infrastructure works.

And when I go to Israel and somebody comes up and I'm speaking at a group with a group or something, and somebody is

an Arab-Israeli citizen and they're critical of what I've said, and they said, I don't know anything what I'm talking about, and Israel is a horrible place.

And then you say to them, well, you live in Israel.

You can see Jordan or the West Bank.

Why don't you go back?

Oh, I don't want to go back.

And was it your family here?

No, I came here in 1978.

Why do you want to live here then?

It's the same thing.

We have the phenomenon.

I know people have come across the border and they're attacking the United States all the time.

Right.

And you want to know why are they doing that?

Why would you come to a country you don't like?

Why would you romanticize a country you fled?

All these questions are so obvious, but in our censors.

Society, we're not allowed to ask them, you know?

And so we're all afraid of saying things.

But there's a reality out there.

There's There's a reality out there.

And

I think the Mexican-American community knows a lot more what that reality is than the Anglo community of California because they, most of the ones that I know that are Mexican-American citizens of California are hyper-patriotic.

They are so happy to be here rather than in Mexico.

They do not want any of their kids to go back to Mexico.

And when they're children, I just met a student this this weekend who was an intern from a small Mexican-American town.

There was no more bright, patriotic.

She'd been in the military.

And

the immigrant that comes here and understands you have to assimilate and you have to love the country you chose to,

more than the country you rejected, that's good.

But when your host,

the bankrupt, bi-coastal elite, tell an immigrant, you're coming into a toxic place, and we're going to indoctrinate you to make you sure that it's even more toxic.

That's that's that's bad news.

That's what the left does,

Victor.

Amongst the bad news, you said you mentioned that about five minutes ago, something about

India, and

we should talk about that on another podcast because it really troubles me.

I thought India was part of this

coalition to press back against China, but now

you know, India was, India was our

emergency.

It is, I mean, it's a demographic, it's, it does well, it's a democracy of sorts.

Modi is kind of pro-Western, but the problem with India is that it's poor and it's pressed with China on one side and Russia on the other.

Russia was its ally during the whole Cold War, and they're getting cheap oil.

They're getting oil

they can't believe how cheap it is.

It's half price.

And China now tells India, you don't have to fear us anymore.

The fear is the United States.

And the problem with the left is the left goes around the world and it starts lecturing people as it, you know, and what I mean, what do I mean by that?

I mean, going into Kabul and waving the Prague flag from the embassy or painting George Floyd Murles on the sides of.

you know, streets or having a gender studies class in a traditional society.

And, you know, I just said I'm for free open societies, but I'm not for going into other people's countries and trying to make them into Americans in 10 years.

So what we do is, Jack, we lecture.

We lecture, we lecture, we lecture, and we talk down to these countries.

And we don't think we're talking down because we're doing it from the left.

We don't have pith helmets like British imperialists.

We're not corporate

exploiters from oil companies.

We're the left, the diplomatic, the NGO, the professor.

They go over to the woke military advisor.

They go over these countries or the India and they say, you can't, you've got to do this.

You have to be more enlightened about ethnic minorities.

You have to, India has to be more about

transitioning and you've got to be,

you're wrong here.

And we start lecturing them.

And finally, they get sick of it.

And they said, we look at your country and what do we see?

We see you've fled from Afghanistan.

We see see that there's human excretement in the streets of San Francisco.

We see Washington,

D.C., they're carjacking and smashing and grabbing.

We see New York, they're throwing people in the subway.

We see Stanford University Law School.

It looks like a third world riot.

You won't even let a federal judge speak.

And we're not impressed.

And we see that you're broke.

And we see your banks are failing.

Yeah.

So that's what they look at.

And we're so arrogant and we're not doing very well.

And that was what did in the Byzantines.

They were arrogant finally and they had such a wonderful legacy.

When you look at the reigns of Justinian or Leo,

Heraclius or any of these great emperors, what they did, they invested, they built infrastructure, they were balanced budget, they were very adroit with their diplomacy.

If they saw two enemies, rather than taking them on at the same time, they would turn them against each other.

They were very smart people.

And we, all we're doing in Ukraine is creating a super anti-American alliance.

Yeah.

You know, how we ever, I mean, did Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken

and Susan Rice, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden get in the room and they thought, hmm, I got a brilliant idea.

Let's make sure that Iran is an ally of Russia so that Russia will no longer

let

Israel reply to Hezbollah.

So Hezbollah will have a hand.

And then Kamala says, Well, why don't we give the Palestinian Hamas people 800 million?

That's a good idea.

Well,

what if Russia starts to give enriched uranium to Iran?

Well, that might be a balance of power.

The poor Shia, the poor Persians, they've been exploited by the Arabs.

Well, let's get Saudi Arabia.

We broke them off.

We destroyed the Abrams Accord.

And maybe we should encourage an alliance with iran it's basically what john kirby said and then well china it's a stable we'll put them with russia they'll all be together that'll be good and turkey well you know i don't if i was turkey you know they're poor little turkey it's the only islamic country in nato and yeah they should have a veto over whether sweden or finland should join and you know what uh If they want to sell, make a little money and sell some drones to both sides of the war in Ukraine that's great and they can break the sanctions and those awful Greeks you know will let's just we cancel their pipeline with natural gas with Cyprus and Israel but let's encourage that's how they look at us

and they've created I mean they created they dreamed this thing up and it's yeah

it's who dreamed up the I 15 years ago, there was no homeless person.

That wasn't an act of omission.

That was somebody who dreamed up in a university a new attitude attitude toward the homeless.

And smash and grab, carjacking epidemic, that was some criminologist at some left-wing universe, and I shouldn't say left-wing, a university

that came up with critical legal theory and critical punitive theory.

And so,

yeah,

that's what's doing us in.

And then the people who are not doing us in, that's the guy that gets up.

the poor guy who goes up on a line up in a wintery day and makes sure there's electricity, or the guy when you're all locked down pulls up in your amazon truck and he delivers your refrigerator while you're making you know $500 an hour on a zoom screen we make fun of those people yeah and they're the backbone of the country and that's what Joe you know Biden calls them what semi-fascist

ultra mega

right

well victor we we've we've

we got We've got to talk about one more thing and quickly at that.

That will be Strategica.

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

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

I apologize to our listeners if they hear the snoring dogs in the background, but you know, there's nothing we can do about that.

God bless them.

Dog is God spelled backwards.

So, Victor, Strategica is the online journal for the Hoover Institution that you oversee.

And there's a new edition out.

It's about tanks.

And there's been a lot of talk.

You've talked before about, well, I don't know if on this podcast, previous one, about, you know, 1,000 Abrams tanks are supposed to go over.

That's what Ukraine wants.

So are tanks

over?

There's been a lot of debate, the value of tanks.

And you have three pieces here by Peter Mansour,

Williamson Murphy, and

O'Murray, and good old General McMaster,

who make the case why the tank matters, matters now, and why it, when it had its bad moments, so would say,

in

military history in the last century, much of the reason for that was not because of the tank, but because the tank wasn't coordinated right with infantry.

So anyway, Victor, it's a really interesting trio of articles.

Could you tell us about it?

Um, uh, and reminding folks, Strategica, you can, you know, Google that, you'll find it on the Hoover website.

Well,

as you know, H.R.

McMaster was sort of the hero of the greatest tank battle since World War II

in the first Gulf War, where I think they destroyed 31 Iraqi tanks, T-72s.

And Peter Mansoor was chief of staff to Petraeus, but but he was a colonel in charge of armor

brigade.

And then we had Williamson Murray.

He's the foremost

historian of the Luftwaffe, and especially the idea of Blitzkrieg and air support for it.

So they wrote,

The subtext of this, Jack, was that everybody had seen these javelin missiles, and they were the modern equivalent of a Panzerfaust.

And they were penetrating these Russian tanks,

mostly upgraded T-72s, 55, 60 tons.

And then, you know, they were $5 million a tank.

And these things cost about

$400,000.

So the idea was that tanks, and then drones were, you know, hovering over, and then they were going underneath tanks, or they were going down on top of them and blowing them up.

And so people said the tanks are over with.

And what they're trying to argue is that there's a response and a counter-response throughout history between the defense and the offense.

But you start with the

preliminary truth, and that is a tank is an armored weapon that people get in that fight people that don't have armor.

And yes, there's periods that the people who don't have armor can find devices, panzerfiles, javelins, drones, to attack these tanks.

But the tanks aren't stupid.

They have counter-responses, i.e., they have electric jamming devices that can drop drones, i.e., they have reactive armor that can

blow back the strike.

They have new uranium, depleted uranium or choblam armor that's ceramic

between high-tensile steel.

Or they have extended 120-millimeter, both rifle and smooth bore weapons that are getting increasingly lethal with a longer range so they can hit the person, the object, the target, before they can even see the tank.

And as a result of that response,

that counter response, I should say, then you're back to square one, which is that some people are armored and protected and some aren't.

And that's their point.

And that's an argument.

And what, you know, what and one thing I took away from the whole discussion is that there's essentially three great tanks.

I'm not talking about the Israelis, Merkova, or the

Ahmada or whatever it's called in Russia, but there's three great tanks in the world, the Leopard tank of Germany, the Abrams and the Challenger.

And they're upgraded.

But you know what's funny?

They're all kind of like the German tiger tank.

In other words, the Challenger and the...

Leopard, the German tank, are about 60 to 65 tons.

And the Abrams kind of like a king tiger, about 70.

They all have the same 120.

It's kind of like the 88 millimeter.

That was the gun par excellence in World War.

Now it's 120 millimeters.

I know, I think the British is rifled, the others are smooth bore, but it's basically the same weapon.

They have about the same number of inches of armor.

They have

ceramic and

high-tensile steel.

They have reactive armor.

They have the same look to them.

The only difference

is the sophistication of the software.

And the Americans use aviation fuel.

So an Avams runs on jet fuel.

And that gives it

a bigger payload, i.e.

they're heavier, they're bigger, and they have more secondary weapons, machine guns, and they can carry more armor, but

they don't get 350 miles to the tank.

They only get about 260, and it's much much harder and more expensive to supply it with aviation fuel rather than diesel fuel.

Just wake up in our electric.

Yeah.

And so I'm sure that there's a program in the Pentagon as we speak that some crony that was either a former general or former friend of

Joe Biden has an electric tank company and they're spending billions to see if they can plug it in like a Tesla, but that's

and that will fail.

But my point is that it hasn't really changed that much.

So you always have

what they're trying to say, these three very gifted offers, is that there's always going to be, oh, tanks are outmoded.

And they're saying, no, they're outmoded for a day or two, a year or two, a phase or two, but then they develop a counter response and you're left with some people are in indestructible, movable platforms with very powerful guns.

And unfortunately for the others, they're not.

And when

you get a fleet of tanks, a modern tank, 200 of them, in a brigade, challengers or leopards or Abrams, and that's what they think was going to, the subtext of this, to use that word one more time, is

Ukraine, if you can get a brigade of Ukrainians that know how to use them and they have air support and drone support,

and artillery support, they can just plow.

You can't stop them.

It's kind of like the Western Front when you, I mean, there was only 1,500 Tiger 1s built, 600 Tiger 2s.

And if you were in a Sherman, which is a wonderful tank, it was for ground support for infantry.

But if you just happened on that day, you got up in the morning and you had 50,000 Shermans, but you had, it was your number was up and you were against the Tiger, you were dead.

Right.

And you can say, well, the Tiger has one hour of maintenance and one hour of operation.

The Sherman has 10 hours of operation and only for one hour of maintenance.

Sherman is easy to take the transmission out.

Sherman is practical.

Sherman is reliable.

Sherman is more comfortable.

Sherman has an escape hatch.

Sherman was a great tank.

Yes, it is.

But if you end up with one of these clanky,

kind of broken down a lot, even a Panther or a Tiger, you're dead.

because they have impenetrable armor and they have up

they have up-powered guns and they're going to destroy you and so my point is when that's kind of what what a new abom or a new challenger a new leopard is it's kind of the equivalent of a king tiger in world war ii that works that's completely reliable that is absolutely uh dependable that has

but it'll have the same battlefield superiority.

And when you turn them loose, this is what all these tank commanders in the West were thinking.

Russia has nothing like this.

If we can get them 500 tanks and train them and have an offensive where they just sweep through, they'll go all the way to the Russian border because you can't stop them.

That's their dream.

I don't know if it's accurate or not, but that's what's behind this.

So, tanks,

it's a

volley against

the world is now adjudicated through computers and drones, and that's war.

No, they're saying it's still machine guns and grenades and mines and tanks.

And if you want to win a battle on the ground, you got to have tanks.

Well, Victor, thanks for your wisdom on that and everything else.

Before you, that was so obvious

to say.

Before we conclude, I do want to recommend to our listeners to visit civilthoughts.com.

And you can sign up for the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at Anfil, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

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And I offered dozen plus readings, things I've come across in the previous week.

Here's a link.

Here's an excerpt from this essay.

I think people who are intelligent will like it.

It's not transactional.

It's free.

We're not renting.

the email list, etc.

So that's civilthoughts.com.

Victor,

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I apologize again for snoring dogs in the background, but at least they weren't barking.

Mine aren't barking.

No, they weren't.

No, they're well-behaved.

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