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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hampson Show.

Victor is a scholar, columnist, essayist, and political and cultural critic.

And today we're doing a news show.

This will be

airing

on Monday, which is a little bit unusual for us, but there's so much news out there.

We need to take a look at it.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Neale Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's available on his website at victorhanson.com.

That's H-A-N-S-O-N.com.

And it is called The Blade of Perseus.

Come join us there either to, I think they have a word called lurking, either to lurk or sign up for a free subscription subscription and get on our newsletter and um then you can also read the extensive vdh ultra content for the price of five dollars a month or fifty dollars a year so please come join us there lurking we have a lot on our agenda yeah don't they call it lurking when you yeah i mean i've been i i think uh i've not signed up that web website ace of spades i think once said that i was a lurker which is true i like i go on there sometimes because they've got beautiful pictures of you know renaissance painting cooking it's really a it's really a imaginative and conservative website it's really well done and i like it but i don't think i'm lurking i openly announced it i mean i i i i think i mean they they they have a expressive vocabulary, but who cares?

Yeah, but if you're, I guess you're a lurker if you don't comment or you don't sign up for a subscription.

But I've told people, people have asked me, do you ever go to Ace of Spades?

I said, yeah, all the time.

So I don't, I'm not lurking.

I think the term's used a little loosely, however.

Okay, yes.

You're going to ask me how things are going and I'm telling you.

I am, but wait a second.

Snow and rain depression.

Yeah.

Well, let's take a break for some messages and then come back and talk about that snow depression.

We'll be right back.

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We're back?

Yes, Victor, I was going to ask you about that.

The weather is getting like Ireland in California.

Oh, it's much worse.

It's more like, I don't know what it would be.

I have a picture.

I don't, I have a house and I can't get up there.

And now that's open, I have to go on a trip tomorrow.

So I'm not going to get up there.

But the picture is the garage, the garage door is almost completely, it's above the garage door, but on the sides, it's up to the roof, and there's eight or ten feet of snow in the roof.

It's a well-built house, so I'm hoping that it will withstand this.

But the problem is

it's scheduled for five more days of rain.

And I don't know which is better.

There's a warm rain coming.

Would it be better to melt the snow and then flood onto the side of the house or to just pile it up and crush the roof?

So, but I've never seen anything like it.

And this is quite ironic because

in January, I think,

I think, wow, you were kind of paranoid.

You went up there all of December and January, you plowed,

you had somebody dig the roof off.

Did you really have to do that?

We'll probably have nice sunny weather like last year.

And I'm glad I did it because it gives you some chance.

If I didn't, it'd be 40.

I think the cumulative feet at Huntington Lake is somewhere

well over 55 feet of snow.

And it's cold, too.

It's been very cold until this is kind of a warmer rain, but

it's just stunning.

I've never seen in my lifetime so much rain and snow.

And then I juxtapose that to the

to the shrill warnings that we're in global warming and it's a permanent drought.

We've been told that the whole time.

There's nothing you can do about agriculture is doomed.

We're not going to give you any water for it.

Your groundwater no longer, as the state constitution mandates, is your own.

You're going to change that.

It's racist to have groundwater rights.

All of this stuff.

But I mean, they can't accept that this is very, very wet and very, very cold and very, very snowy.

Yeah.

And didn't you get a letter from the PG ⁇ E about your use of electricity in this very cold?

And isn't that a strange thing to be in a state that wants to turn all to EV vehicles?

And yet they're trying to tell you right now, sorry, you shouldn't be using this much electricity because we'll have rolling blackouts.

They're just doing what these insane utility boards tell them to.

And they're mostly staffed by ideologues and very wealthy people on the coast.

And so when they say, oh, you know what?

Natural gas is a pollutant.

Well, we used to have natural gas because it was A, clean burning, B, cheap, and C, it gave us

another source of fuel.

So we had the idea was when I grew up, we're going to have nuclear for 10 or 15 percent.

We're going to have hydroelectric for 10.

We're going to have

oil burning, coal burning, and natural gas.

And now we've sort of got rid of oil, coal, natural gas.

We still, I mean, not for electricity, but in the home.

So,

and then my grandfather, when I was a little boy, a guy came here, a salesman, and they said that California by 2000 would be completely

serviced by nuclear power plants.

And it would be so cheap for electricity that you wouldn't have to meter your

use.

So he was very cold.

He was in his 70s and they had this big old house.

So what they did was they hired this electrician.

He put in 14, 14, count them, 220 circuits.

And they're still under the, I can see them when they run under the house.

They're in cables.

Very well done.

And they put Thermidor 220 heaters.

And that didn't happen, of course.

And those were so expensive to run.

And electricity now is over.

So I, when I rewired the house, I could pick up those circuits.

So I just disconnected them all, took the heaters out.

And then I had 15, 220 circuits I could break down to 110 or whatever.

And anyway, my point is that now they're going back to that.

A very expensive use of

energy is electricity.

And so I don't understand it.

I mean, it's all based on the idea that these people who set policies do not have a middle-class existence, kids, worries about car payment.

They don't.

They just, and they have this utopian idea that, oh, I'm riding my bike down the Menlo Park.

Oh, you know, I'm walking.

over to the market in Woodside.

This is the way the world works.

Why can't those rubes down in Fresno or Bakersfield or up in the foothills know what they're supposed to be doing?

They're not on the plan.

It's really condescending, but we'll see.

They want us.

Tesla, remember, is

the best-selling car in California.

And yet when you look on your little Tesla map for Tesla superchargers, it's almost impossible to go on a long trip.

There's not enough of them.

I mean, especially east to west, rather than just down the main I-5-101-99.

We're going to go to east-west like I do.

It's, you know, it's not very easy to do.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, let's turn then to the president of Mexico, Obrador.

I think his name is Lopez Obrador.

I hope I don't have that wrong.

He has a, yeah, he's got a lot of names, but he has a really strong following among Mexicans, of course, but also Mexican-Americans.

And he's recently striking back at Republicans who have been calling for military intervention with the border.

And

part of their argument is that fentanyl is coming over the border.

And so he said, why don't, quote, why don't they fight the distribution of fentanyl in the U.S., the cartels in the U.S.

that are in charge of distributing fentanyl?

And he claims that we do not produce or consume fentanyl in Mexico, which everybody knows, I know, which everybody knows is bogus, but he did say that.

And then also

he was going to tell all the Mexican-Americans that are in America not to fight, not to vote for Republicans.

They're the ones doing it.

So Andres Manuel Lopez Obador is a hardcore socialist communist.

And most of the people who came to this country from Mexico came from, in the last 30 years, they came from Oaxaca State or Chiapas or

they didn't come from northern Mexico as they did before.

So they tend to be poor and they were his constituency.

And remember, Joe Biden, as I've said before, went down there and not only did he guide a shaky Joho down the stairwell, but he said, this is, we've got 40 million

Mexicans, nationals that are living that have come to the United States.

And he was...

he was warning Biden,

this is a constituent.

I don't think it is because I think think at least 45% of Mexican Americans, and that number grows when you close the border because of intermarriage and assimilation integration, are not for open borders because it affects them directly in a negative fashion.

But he is now saying that they don't produce it.

What he means is they don't create ex-nealofentanyl.

They assemble it in tablets.

So they get the raw product from China, and then they have their stamping machine factories, and they stamp out pills of various different colors to look like regular types of opiates.

And because if they had an identifiable fentanyl, say it was purple, right, with a big F on it, then we could say, don't take that.

And we would have a just say no campaign about fentanyl.

It would be plastered over all the TV.

Every parent would say, I don't care what you do, Johnny, when you go to that party, do not take a purple pill with F on it, fentanyl.

So that's what they, so what do they do?

They just deliberately disguise it to make it look like everything else.

And they're doing it in Mexico, and he knows it.

And we've had some kind of, I don't know, controversial,

you know, controversial, what do you want to call it, cries from Lindsey Graham and Crenshaw down in Texas that maybe we're at war with Mexico.

And I wrote a column saying, you know, they've killed 110,000 Americans this past year and over a decade.

They've killed over half a million, it seems like, from ODs.

When I say they, I'm not excusing us, but when you are deliberately disguising a deadly drug to look at something 50 times less potent, then you know what you're doing.

You're trying to kill people, or you either don't care, or you're just selling the product.

But either way, it doesn't matter.

And so they've said, you know, we're going to call the cartels this and we're going to call them that.

We're going to put them on terrorist watch lists.

We might have to use the U.S.

military.

So then he said, you know, we're not, it's your fault.

You know, it's you, you people take it.

And I'm telling all my,

he's, you know, he's got this machismo thing.

I'm going to tell all my people, basically, all the Mexican marriage, as if they

and they should vote for

Democrats.

But think of the logic.

Think of the logic.

So

Obador

and the La Raza movement have said that when people come across the border illegally

and

they reside here illegally, that

they're a real Lord, they want to be Americans.

So as of now, you have to be a U.S.

citizen.

So what he is saying is that Mexican Americans, and what generation would that be, one, two, three, four, five, six, who are voting, he said vote,

their primary loyalty is to him.

And that he said, so he's just nullifying all of his verbiage that we've heard, that, oh, we're sending the best people in the world and they're going to assimilate and they're true America.

And that's what the left says.

But then he says, I'm going to help the left because I'm going to be a foreign leader who has control over U.S.

citizens because they would rather identify with me than their current government.

And it's ridiculous.

And

what we should do is what Jack and I talk, I think we talked about it before, stop it tomorrow.

All you have to say is, Mr.

Obadore, we give you $60 billion.

The 25 million people that have come here illegally, primarily the largest constituency for your remittances, they send it out.

And they send $2,000 or $3,000

uh four maybe per person and the people who do that are primarily on some top of type of federal assistance health education and that frees up their cash for you so we're going to tax it ten percent and if they can't prove they're a citizen twenty percent and we're going to finish the wall because we like you so much and we don't want to bully you.

So you go your way, we'll go our way, we'll build the wall, finish it, and then it will all be legal and you'll like it and we'll like it.

You won't have to send people.

You won't lose the best and brightest according to you.

And you can't, you know, he's always saying, oh, we did this for you and we did this.

So just don't do any more for us.

And we'll be happy and you'll be happy.

And then if there's these cartels still send this product and deliberately package it and stamp it out to kill people, then we can label them a terrorist organization and try to expedite them.

But as I said last time, it's going to be very hard when the head of drug enforcement has just been convicted of drug running for Mexico.

And so when he says that, you know, I mean, he's in a New York, he just was convicted in a New York courtroom.

So he didn't talk this way.

I think everybody should listen to this.

When Trump went down there and talked to him, even though he was a hardcore leftist, he didn't say one negative thing about Trump.

You remember that?

He did before Trump went down there, but he didn't, he hasn't hasn't since.

He's talked about Republicans.

But he is, Biden has opened the borders for him.

He said, come on in.

And

what's his attitude toward Biden?

He humiliates Biden.

He humiliates him.

And why did he not do that to Trump?

Because Trump told him, we're going to have remittances.

We're going to renegotiate NAFTA.

And you better stop it.

And if you want to be a refugee, you apply in Mexico.

And you don't allow, you put the people on the the border because we do not want those transits from Central America.

And he respected that.

He liked Trump in a certain sick way because he had respect for him, because he did what he would do.

When you're weak, people, that's what I think people have to remember.

Human nature being what it is, that when you're weak,

and you think you're being magnanimous, that magnanimity

is considered something to exploit, not to reciprocate in kind.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break in this, our Monday show, and we'll be right back to talk a little bit about Colin Kaepernick.

Stay with us.

We'll come right back.

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We're back, Victor.

So, Colin Kaepernick is trying to sell a new book,

which is reminding me.

It's normal in a comic book, isn't it?

Something like that.

But he has said

his parents up,

his upbringing was quote-unquote problematic, and that there was a perpetuation of racism by his parents.

So it's ringing of

Prince Harry's spare novel.

Yeah, sure does.

All these very, very well.

It's here we are with First Lady Michelle Obama saying, remember I had to lift a short woman asked me to lift something and she was white and she was expecting me to do it.

And, you know, I can't trust people in America.

This is a racist country.

My daughters can't, I'm afraid they're going to be attacked, even though African Americans under the age of 30 who are violently attacked are primarily attacked by other African Americans.

He doesn't say that.

I'd never been proud of my country.

Then we had to open, I mentioned that before, the lizard bag and the Swiss boutique, and that was racist because somebody didn't bring down the $37,000 purse quickly enough.

Well, I mean, it's the Megan Markle syndrome, isn't it?

That very affluent people in this country identify primarily by race rather than class.

And so when you do that,

then you get this paradox of very privileged people who have had everything given to them, or they've worked hard and enjoyed the good life, and yet they still want to use race as if the class doesn't matter.

So you get into these Orwellian situations where Michelle Obama comes out of, I don't know whether she's in

her new Hawaii multi-million dollar mansion,

or I know she's not in her Chicago mansion, but she may be in her Calorama $9 million mansion or her 30-acre seaside estate at Martha's Vineyard.

And she starts lecturing America how racist it is.

Folks did this and my daughters aren't safe.

And then got

Oprah with her $37,000 lizard bag she wants to see in a Swiss gift shop.

They don't give it to her.

That's racist.

And then Megan Markle says, you know, she lives in a $14 million mansion and with private jet, and it's racist because some staffers said that they didn't know what you, their child, might be.

And then you've got Colin Kaepernick, and he's half white and half black.

And why does that make him black?

Or why does that make him white?

Why can't he just say he's a mixed heritage?

But he's now,

I don't know.

Now he's looking back at his life.

And that's always a tip-off to a person's character.

when they're in their 30s, 40s, and they get to the point where the downhill slope is

as much as the uphill or it's shorter.

Then they start psychologically looking at things that didn't work out quite the way they wanted.

So he was going to be, he would never say this.

Remember this when he was a Super Bowl quarterback and he was the heartthrob of San Francisco and the 49ers, the only Esparting quarterback.

The only problem, the only controversy he ever had was using the N-word for which he was fined.

He did.

Yes.

Not anybody else.

He did.

And so then things didn't go well for him.

And then he got a girlfriend who was a radical, this, that.

And so all of a sudden, in typical American fashion, he says, you know,

I can trace back all of the difficulties I had.

that didn't allow me to be what I should have and what I deserve to be.

And it was my parents.

They were racist.

I used used to have, you know,

redlocks, or I don't know what he said, certain type of hairstyle.

And they said, please don't do that.

That's kind of thuggish.

Oh, there it is.

I didn't know at the time.

But thanks to, I don't know, Professor Kindy's book or something, I now can go back and say, and everybody's tired of that.

Why don't we just be people?

And why do these very, very wealthy people

of every race, every

particular group, why do they all have to, at some point in their life,

bring up the racial card and play the victim, Juicy Smollett?

Why couldn't Juicy Smollett said, okay, I had a good run at Empire, now I'm going to go on?

Why did he have to cook up that race thing?

And that's what I don't understand.

It gets, everybody's really tired of it because it's racist.

Victor, what I noticed about this is, and why I sort of saw it as similar to what Prince Harry did, was that he seemed to be complaining about his life as a teenager was not perfect with his parents, just as Harry did with his brother.

And it's every time these very wealthy people do that, it seems like welcome to the real world with the rest of us.

I mean, nothing's perfect when you're a teenager, especially with your siblings or your parents, you know?

And so when they bring it out and act like, ooh, hocus, pocus, oogie, boogie, right?

This is what happened to me, you know?

And everybody else is thinking, all right, well, we know all sorts of people that have a little tussle with their brother or their parents don't.

Why didn't he say, because I felt that my white adoptive parents and I was put out for adoption by my white mother, and that was the nucleus of the racist.

trauma that I suffered when they told me that I shouldn't wear this particular type of hairstyle to school, he could have said, I wish I had have been, because he's reduced everything to race, Sammy.

Everything is to race.

It's not character.

There's no individuals.

It's all collectives.

So why didn't he say,

they didn't give me a chance to grow up with my African-American father.

Why didn't if I had just

been with my African-American father, I could have resonated racially with him.

And I would have been fine.

I would have had a much better life.

It would have been wonderful.

But I had, you know, kind of these anal, retentive, northern white people.

And

he never does that.

And these people of any race that do this, they never do that.

They never do that.

What I'm saying by that is, why didn't Harry and Megan say, you know what?

These people are racist, this whole country, this royal family, and we don't want anything to do with it.

So we're not going to be the Duke and the Duchess.

No way.

We don't want any money from them.

We're never going to take their name, their family ties, whatever, and try to monetize that.

Do you really think that Harry is worth $100 million to sign Netflix?

Do you think that before Megan Markle met Harry, she was a multi-multi-millionaire top-notch actress?

No.

So in other words, they melt that until they got everything out of it, and then they trash it, just like Colin Kaepernick.

He was brought up in a stable family.

For whatever his criticisms were, he was well educated and he had parents that loved him.

And then when any little thing goes wrong, they go back, but they don't have the intellectual or moral fiber, courage to renounce what they're attacking.

They never do because they want it both ways.

And why didn't Barack Obama, when he says, oh, my,

when people, when an African-American man walked down that street and that door closed,

she got, when he walked, that door closed, she closed her car door because she was racist.

Remember that?

They were under the bus.

Why didn't he just say this?

I had an African, an African father, and he's back in Kenya.

And if I had just been raised by him,

rather than this racist grandmother, and who was the racist grandmother, she started out as a clerical worker and worked and worked and worked and became a bank vice president.

And when she died, Barack Obama and his sister, I think, inherited about $300,000 or $400,000 each.

And in addition to that, she sent him to prep school, prep school on her wages.

Her husband wasn't much of anything.

He didn't really work that much.

She did.

She was the center of that family.

And yet for him then to go back and and throw her under the bus, I don't understand that.

If they want to do that, that's fine.

Just throw her completely under the bus and say, you know what?

I don't want your money.

I'm mad that you sent me to prep school.

I would have been better off in Kenya.

Look at my half-brothers.

They're big successes in Kenya.

I could have been one of them.

But he never says, maybe, just maybe, just maybe some of my success wasn't from my mother or father.

It was from my grandmother.

And maybe she sacrificed and helped my mother send me to prep school.

And maybe that prep school gave me a level of training that made me competitive at Occidental.

As lazy as I was, and as a big doper as I was, I still had training from prep school.

They never say that.

No, all these people don't.

It's just, I think it gets people so angry.

And then the final thing is there are divides in this country, but traditionally they've been from,

they're about class.

They really are.

Are we really going to think that Colin Kaepernick

or Megan Markle or Oprah or Michelle Obama have it rougher than the forklift driver in Tulare, California that happens to be part of the Oklahoma diaspora?

I don't think so.

I'm sorry.

I've met forklift drivers in Tulare County that were very poor and their lives had not had the doors open to them that Oprah and Michelle and Megan and Colin have had.

It's just not going to happen.

And if you don't believe me, just look, why don't you somebody just ask Stanford University, just to take one example, would you please show me the SAT and the GPA scores of those people who chose to take the SAT?

It's now optional.

And I will guarantee you that if you have white males who come from lower middle class families, that is, they don't have any money for SAT camp.

and they don't have any connections and they're not the children of alumni and they had top top scores and top GPS, they're not going to get in.

And I bet you five bucks if you have an African-American applicant who is well connected,

parent may be a diversity, equity, inclusion, doctor, lawyer, whatever, of the upper, upper class,

he's going to get in even with a lower score.

So don't tell me that it's such a biased situation.

It's not.

And what's really sad about this, when everybody starts to do this and to identify by race, you just destroy any class consciousness and you destroy the individual.

There are no individuals.

There's not a nutty white guy and a nice white guy.

There's not a creepy white guy.

They're just white.

And the same holds true to Latino and black.

And that's what's very dangerous because what you have just talked about is the stuff of tribalism that leads to Yugoslavia and Rwanda, because you don't make any distinction.

There are no good or bad individuals.

They're just part of a collective.

And the Democratic Party is really pushing this.

And Obador really picked up on that when he thought that all of the Mexican-American people that are voting, that is U.S.

citizens in the United States, will vote as a complete tribal collective on his prompt.

And he just made the case of right-wing nuts that said, hey, We can't have illegal migration because Mexico will be calling the shots.

You know what I mean?

It's like, well,

I always thought you were a conspiracy nut, but now what Mr.

Obador kind of said you weren't.

Yeah.

Well, doesn't this

raise issues?

I know you wrote The Dying Citizen and you talked about tribalism, but it seems to me that people are more easily

corralled into tribalist

associations than they are into

thinking of people as individuals and treating them as individuals.

I mean, you know, the Enlightenment idea that humanity is super complex and everybody's a individual

is being super, you know, replaced by an easy thing, which is, ooh, I'm, you know, white or I'm black or I'm female, I'm male.

Back to Plato's laws, there's a passage where Socrates says, what?

Birds of a feather flock together.

He was talking about commonalities among age and being Greek and old.

But what he was trying to say is there are certain innate

biophysical, psychological

affinities.

And you can see in the animal kingdom, you know, you see in a wire, there's blue jays and there's mockingbirds, and they don't get along very well.

And so the Enlightenment said, that is pre-civilizational, that's tribal, and you have to look at the individual.

And so

did Christianity.

And it was an ecumenical.

Some great religions do that.

So when you go back and you self-identify and you say, I'm black, I'm white, I'm Latino, I'm Asian, and I don't understand the Asian thing because that means you're from the Punjab or you're from Japan or Cambodia.

Is there any commonality there other than

way back, a geographical affinity among ancestors?

I can't see any.

But

this is a race-fixated

generation, and it's not going to end well.

It's not ending well now.

We haven't talked about Scott

Adams, but he was the

cartoonist that Willie went over the top when he was saying if this poll is correct and African Americans either don't think it's okay to be white or don't have an opinion, meaning they probably don't object to it, then I'm going to go my way.

And I suppose African Americans will probably say, well, you know, if they don't,

if they had a poll and said it's not okay to be black, then they would say the same thing he did.

And there you have the ingredients of a bifurcation.

It's already happening.

And it's, you can't just

part of the problem, Sammy, is that we're now in the year 2023.

The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.

So we're into the sixth decade.

And that means that children in America that were born in the late 60s or 70s, they're getting in their 50s and 60s.

And they have never known what it was like in this country, white or black.

And a lot of them have only known affirmative action.

So if you're a white kid that's applying to college in,

you know, 1980,

you just assume that this affirmative action has been going on

82, 83 for 20 years.

And you don't know anything about Bull Conner.

You've never heard of him.

All you know is that you're being discriminated because of your skin color.

And now you're in your, you know, you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s.

And so, but yet the civil rights activist or the identity politics, they're frozen like in their amber back to the 60s.

And they can't give it up.

Because if you say to them, we're going to

have an ecumenical

content of your character, not the color of your skin society, they look at themselves and say, oh, oh, you mean we don't have a black caucus?

No, you don't.

You're just an individual, and you succeed or fail on your own merits.

And they don't want that.

Not the identity politics person.

Well, Victor, we're going to have to apologize for your dogs.

They sound a little bit

worried today, huh?

It's raining, and

there's a little trace of lightning, and

they're psycho-Queensland dogs, so I apologize.

Of course.

Of course.

Okay, so Nicholas Wade testified before the House Select Committee on COVID, and he got a tongue-lashing from the Representative Mifuni about his book that Mfuni took offense to.

What I was struck, and I was wondering if you could talk to us about that, but also I should

tell your listeners that what is striking is that Mfuni

didn't want to let him respond, although he did get some time to respond by the speaker.

But go ahead, your ideas on.

In this hearing, I mean, you asked me about Nicholas Wade.

He was a very distinguished writer for Science and Nature magazine.

He's 80.

He's been writing for the New York Times for 30 years.

He's a man of the left.

And apparently, when he went to

corroborate what Mr.

Redfield said from the CDC and these other guests, who had all given scientific and policy arguments that pretty much confirmed that this virus, the SARS virus that caused COVID-19, came from the Wuhan lab.

And it was obvious that it has.

And it was obvious that Mr.

Fauci and Mr.

Collins and the establishment tried to destroy the careers of people who objected to it.

And that the left, the people who were interrogating Mr.

Wade and others, Mr.

Redfield, they themselves had been participants.

And now, of course, they're backing off, but the entire Democratic congressional contingency had all said that it was racist because they thought that to even question the pangolin-dash-bat origins of COVID, because it was a 2020 campaign year.

And they thought that it was valuable to story Donald Trump's administration because he said it was the China virus, China virus.

Okay.

And so, and rather than listening to the message and then refeuding, say, Mr.

Wade,

we have other data.

We have this.

He said, well, I didn't know I was going to come in here and you were a racist.

And, you know, like an 80-year-old,

what?

You wrote this book that said that people of color were, and they've suffered so much, and they were.

And he didn't write it.

What he did was

he

went back and looked at the contentious use of race

as a barometer of ability.

And he rejected the old eugenics, you know, that race determines everything.

But then he said that we've gone too far with the anthropological nature and culture is everything.

And so in this book, and everybody remembers the contentions that, and it was kind of like Charles Murray, who went much farther.

Charles Murray said that race race actually determines in the bell curve intelligence, but Wade didn't really do that.

He just took science,

scientific articles by people

who had rejected the Charles Murray and the earlier eugenics arguments, but they had said there are traits in the human character that are not explicable entirely by upbringing or environment or culture, that it is genetic.

And of course,

any idiot knows that's true because if your father was a major league baseball player and your mom was a major league basketball player and your neighbor's kids were two little nerdy professors, you're going to be more likely to be an athlete.

But you can't have that in America today.

The subtext, of course, is you can't dare say that this thing came from the People's Liberation Army's lab.

And so they went after him and they called him a racist for this book he wrote nine years ago, A Troublesome Inheritance.

And the poor guy was trying to explain.

And then Mr.

Mufumi came in, okay?

And he piled on.

Nothing about the testimony.

Would you please tell me which scientist you quoted?

Would you please tell me why you think

hasn't there been a pangolin somewhere that had COVID?

Wasn't there a bat somewhere?

How far is the bat environment from the Wuhan lab?

Weren't there people that we can trust that said that that they that this none of that?

Because that would take.

So he just did what they all do.

He said, You're a racist.

You're a racist, you're a racist, you're a racist.

And so, if you're going to attack the messenger,

then

you know, attack the messenger.

He should have said, I would have said, well, if you're going to attack the messenger, Ms.

Dr.

Ruiz, I remember that when you ran for Congress, people accused you of being a hardcore Marxist activist, that you were reading letters letters about from Mumi, the cop killer, Mumi, the cop killer, what a racist country.

And now what do you say about that?

And then I would have turned to Mr.

Mufumi and said, you know,

I'm not a racist, but I think you're a sexist.

And I resent having to be questioned by you because you're a sexist because you ran the DIN W NAACP for eight years.

You left Congress.

And guess what?

They had to let you go.

You resigned under pressure.

They had to pay over $100,000 for your sexual exploits that you were accused of serial sexual harassment and having a sexual liaison with one of your employees.

And they fired you.

And you're going to tell me that I'm somehow illiberal.

He could have said that, but we never do that in America.

That's what was such a travesty about it.

And,

you know, when you go before Congress, it's just a joke.

And none of the witnesses ever pauci does he he attacks uh rand paul i thought he had a perfect right to and they went back and forth but mr wade is an 80 year old gentleman he thought that you know that they wouldn't do that i suppose i thought he they're professionals one was an md one was a former director of the national association for the advancement of colored people

and i say that because that's the title of the group with full knowledge that a person not very long ago who was an activist said colored people by accident for people of color and she's she was put through the ringer and had to resign from her position even though a national organization has that very nomenclature so yeah you know this is these are the times we live in

well victor let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back to talk a little bit about uh the creation of a new school on the university of north carolina campus and the trouble that they're having with creating it.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

You're back at the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and we,

University of North Carolina, the Board of Trustees, is creating a school called the New School for Civic Life, and it's going to be dedicated to principles of free speech.

And the accrediting institution is raising flags because they say it's not a faculty initiative.

And I was wondering what your thoughts about that.

It's not a faculty initiative.

As someone who spent most of his life, unfortunately, in academia, I can tell you of all of the initiatives that were not faculty initiative.

Believe me, they come down from memos from the dean who wants to get a job somewhere else.

And

he says something to you like, I think we have to have racial sensitivity training that wasn't a faculty initiative that came from an administrator so that is or it comes from the public so when i was a professor and i've you know i've been a visiting professor at three or four different institutions and i can and i watch stanford university every day i'm at the hoover institution i can tell you that

Community pressures, national political pressures, administrative pressures are just just as much a catalyst for a faculty program than the faculty himself.

If you polled all of the Stanford faculty, left-wing as they are, and said, do you want to do four to six hours of mandatory diversity, equity, inclusion-dash sexual harassment training?

They would probably say no.

Do you want to have this snitch program?

That's what they're doing at Stanford right now.

where a student can snitch you, snitch on you and say that you're insensitive without identifying themselves.

Does the faculty like that?

No.

That came from outside sources.

The idea that

this is somehow illegitimate because the faculty didn't do it, but it brings up a larger question that everybody should be aware of.

And it has some resonance with

Ron DeSantis.

So, what the left does is they come into a program and

it's a center for this or a center for that and it's very left-wing and they mandate it.

I was on the, I was a chairman of the general education committee.

So there were people who would come in there and say, we're going to mandate this, that you have to have this ethnic studies course and it's got to be taught this way, basically.

Okay.

And then when you finally say,

I don't think we're going to teach this anymore.

They said, this is against free speech.

You're telling the faculty member what to do.

do that.

You're a libertarian.

You're a Republican.

You're supposed to speak for free.

And Ron DeSantis is saying you can't speak, teach critical waste theory.

Well, no, he's saying that

the school boards can't mandate that you push an orthodoxy down the throat of somebody that says that white people are evil and they're toxic and are masculine, all of that.

So what they do, that's such, so predictable on the left.

It goes back all the way to the French Revolution.

So

they alter the playing field or they skew the balance so much that when you try to partially correct it, then they go hysterical.

Same thing with Disney.

Who in the hell ever heard of a huge corporation who said, we're going to replicate Disneyland in Disney World, but it's going to be bigger.

But for us to go to Florida and think of that, where else can we have year-round weather and beauty?

But Florida, we need Florida.

We don't want to go to humid Alabama.

Florida is where we want to go.

But for us to go there, you're going to have to seed, seed, give us this territory.

And I mean, give.

We're going to be the municipal government.

It's de facto ours.

And everybody said, okay.

They bring all these jobs and everything.

But

once they start going beyond that original understanding and interfering in government and trying to attack a state government on the issue of transgenderism and trying to brainwash their own employees and acting as a political player and actor in Florida, then why don't you just treat them like anybody else?

In other words, why give them that concession?

Make them pay taxes, make them fix the roads.

It's not their land.

And that's what Ron DeSantis did.

And then they said, oh, my God, he went out and he's a Republican.

He's for free enterprise.

And he went out and punished.

And he tried to make them toe the line on a particular propaganda point.

No, he didn't.

He just said, you know what?

It's free now.

Everybody's up for grabs.

Disney, any other corporation, go to it.

You want to go and tell what everybody should think.

If that's what you want to do, go ahead.

But you're not going to do it by getting special exemptions from the government of Florida.

And that's what he did.

And the same thing in North Carolina.

And that's why people are upset.

If you

push the political

position so far to the left, and then finally somebody says you're just brainwashing people, then they say, oh my God, you're trying to tell people what to think.

It's so patently obvious what they're doing.

And people have to, they can't, I mean, there are all these faculty groups, you know, that are trying, that were for free speech, and now they don't want to, they want to criticize Ron DeSantis.

I mean, critical race theory is not designed for free speech.

If you are in a critical race theory session, and you are a high school student, and you say, but

weren't 700,000 people killed during the Civil War over the issue of slavery?

And were not 400,000 fighting to liberate slaves, and weren't half of them from states in which there were no slavery and some of maybe a third had never seen an African American in their life?

And maybe, isn't that something?

They're not going to let you say that.

They're not going to discuss that.

They're going to say, what?

No,

you're disruptive.

You're racist.

You're combative.

And so he's saying, we're not going to let you do that anymore.

You're going to teach history.

And yes, you can teach slavery.

And you can teach Jim Crow.

And you should do that but we're not stupid we're not going to have a suicide pact so you can indoctrinate a whole generation to make them into race mongers that's what he's doing and i more power to him more power to him yeah well victor we're at the end of our show and i wanted to read one of your

um

subscribers um

comments to you.

I know Jack does this quite often, but I thought this was very nice.

It's thanking you actually for your thoughts and conceptualization of people and events that has helped her to connect the dots.

And this is her.

She says,

I am better able now to put things in perspective and find myself less likely to scream at the news.

I love how you discern truth and demonstrate the real consequences of socialist policies, regulations using the family farm.

In closing, I remember the first

article I ever read of yours.

I can't even remember what it was about, but I do remember thinking, who wrote this, and started searching for more.

The only other person I had a similar reaction to was Yitzhak Perlman.

The first time I heard him play, I was in tears.

God bless.

So I thought that was very nice.

I think that's nice.

I would just add a quick Phillip to that is that I think one of the biggest problems we have in this society is that too many of us, and I am connected now, like everybody listening, we're connected to a particular job and it has particular job securities in many cases, teachers, government employees, and we're divorced from nature.

And then when we see these people that are independent truckers, or they're farmers, or they run a 7-Eleven, or they try to have a lumber yard, We don't appreciate what they go through.

But if any of us had to do that, and it was very important for me because

at 17, I graduated from high school and I went off to the coast for four years, and then I went to Athens, then I went to graduate school.

And in that eight-year period, I'd forgotten what it was like to grow up on the farm.

And I would talk to my grandfather on weekends.

He'd kick, you know, can you come down and help me on the farm?

I would.

But I thought, wow, he's grouchy.

He's not mellow like everybody on Stanford or UC Santa Cruz.

He's always pinching pennies.

He's got a big ball of string in the closet.

He's got a big barrel of used staples for vineyard staples that he still saves in the 1930s.

He's got all of these little habits.

His

railroad engineer, Bib Over,

all that.

And then

I

started farming.

And all of a sudden, after about two months, I said, my God,

there was $8,000 that went out today.

There was a tractor mechanic working on the Massey.

The pump went out.

There was a pump guy.

The worker's comp came in the mail that's due.

And there's a crew pruning.

And there's no income.

It's not going to be for four months if we're lucky.

And oh my God, we better start saving.

And then I found myself within three months being just like him, just like him

and that's important for all of us in this postmodern society to realize that there are these people still out there that have no job security and they work against nature and like this snow that's that's going on right now in california and this cold rain and it's going to do a lot of damage but there's people out there right now are in cats with huge plows that are going up all over the sierra to try to clear the roads and some of them are they're not all state employees.

They have little businesses.

And that's very important for a representative republic to have independent voices, the self-employed, with nothing is guaranteed except their own ability, intelligence, muscularity, whatever it is.

And when you have those independent voices, then you have an audit.

Or you have some check on the rest of us that are in this big borg, this blob, where we get up in the morning and we say, hmm, I hope that they deposited my $352 a day or whatever my salary is prorated at today,

whether I did a good job or not, right?

Yes.

That's where we are as a society.

And then we start condemning people and looking down on them and judging them.

But boy, without an independent, autonomous individual.

who succeeds or fails on the degree of their own ability, you don't have a republic anymore.

You've just got a bunch of sheep and then you have an elites that tell them what to do and they nod.

So more power to these people.

You're scaring me, Victor, because California is definitely making it very difficult and is very antithetical to anybody who's an independent businessman, that's for sure.

Well, it is.

I think I got in really big trouble when I was at Cal State and somebody said to me, I had a member of my family say this once too, but somebody said to me that we were in a faculty group and they said to me, this guy is, you know, he's not, he's outspoken.

He was talking, they were referencing another professor and he's, he's going to act like that.

Why doesn't he just go get a dead-end like run a 7-Eleven?

And I said,

I was farming at the same time.

I said, excuse me.

Excuse me, I know you very well.

If you were given a 7-Eleven and you owned it and it was paid for, you would lose it in about six weeks.

Do you know anything about security?

Do you know how to price the product?

Do you know anything how to fix things when the cash register doesn't work or the lights don't work?

How about security when somebody comes in?

And how about your employees?

Do they steal from you?

Who do you hire?

And

how do you do your taxes?

Could you do any of that rather than just get a check for

12 months, which we do as professors, even though we work nine.

I know that they say, well, it's not paid, you don't get paid in the summer, but it's prorated at a pretty high rate.

And we can't be fired after six years unless you're some kind of child molester or something, or you're a hardcore conservative.

Leftwood looks at both equally.

But my point is that I couldn't believe that because The person who runs an independent store,

they're kind of like Einsteinian.

You know what I mean?

They have to have so many skills.

It's just incredible.

And these people who create these businesses, and nothing is guaranteed.

Look at Elon Musk.

I mean, I know he came from a prosperous family in South Africa, but he's into everything.

And he's, he is nothing is, nothing is insured.

No, and he makes everything he does, he's making successful.

That's what's incredible.

You know, he's

think about what the left's value system and because they're for big government and the bureaucracies and the state, and they hate the individual.

But you think that Al Gore

or all of his billionaire class, or the billionaire John Kerry, who married into it the second time?

First time he was only a multimillionaire.

There's something ingenious about that.

Well, I mean, something, a low genius, yeah.

There's a certain animal cunning about that.

But the point I'm making is, for all of their green rhetoric, have they ever done anything for climate change?

No.

For all the talk of all these people on the campus about Ukraine, Ukraine, have they ever done anything?

No.

And they hate Elon Musk, and he's giving them Starlink, which is essential to their drones, their communications.

He's doing it for free.

And the Russians can't stop it.

And as I said, Most Californians, the majority of cars sold are Teslas now, number one

product, automotive product in the state.

And so he did something and he created, you can say, you can argue about whether long-term, they're viable electric cars, this or that, but that's what the left said that we needed.

He produced it in the private market.

He wasn't Al Gore that Demographogged it and tried to make a buck off polar bears, right?

and lied about it or jetted around the world in his private jet and said, I have to get places quicker, more quickly, like John Kerry.

So, and that's why they don't like him, because they can't control him.

That's one of the reasons they hated Rush Lembaugh, because he just wasn't a anchor person for a network news.

You know what I mean?

Or he didn't have a, he wasn't a Chris Wallace that just has been there forever.

And had, I'm Chris Wallace.

No, he got up every morning and he had to entertain an audience for three hours.

And to the degree that he could do it, he was paid.

And he was paid when advertisers advertisers said, I want to buy into that guy.

He's got talent.

And if he couldn't do it, he was nothing.

He built everything he had himself, and he was outspoken, and he answered to no one.

And maybe you can't have a whole society of those people, but without them, you have nothing but sheep.

And that's what's scary, because I look at

this country, and more and more people.

are plugged into this board.

They really are.

And they just want to do that.

That's why we have the woke movement.

When I I look at people at

Hoover, when I saw, and I didn't know him that well, when I saw Scott Atlas, I mean, I was a colleague with him for years.

I liked him, I respected him, but

we were not in the same places at the same time.

But when he started speaking out, I thought, I admire that guy because everybody is angry at him.

And everybody is calling him names, and he still doesn't care.

And the same thing with John Cochran, the economist, same thing.

And I admire that.

And so, but it's rare.

And so when you see it, even if you don't agree with, I mean, Nicholas Wade is, I don't know,

he's a man of the left.

I wouldn't agree with him.

Matt Talibi, the journalist that's exposing everything on Twitter, he's attacked me.

I don't care.

I admire that guy.

He's got journalistic courage.

And,

you know, it's rare.

I don't like Bill Maher.

I was on his show once.

He sabotaged me.

And the producer said, they're going to ask me about that.

And I got on there and all they started doing was

attacking, oh, you're Cheney's puppet.

But now,

the fact that I don't care what particular political position, the fact that he's challenging the orthodoxy is very important.

And not just to be a contrarian.

And you can, you know, when I hear all these attacks on

Tucker Carlson, well, he's been showing these

videos, and you and I pointed out, you pointed out to me, and I agreed with you, that he should have emphasized more that it is not a good thing to go into the Capitol building when it's not open to the public, because that is a violation of the law.

So people were not just sightseers.

They were people, however, they had been enticed to go in.

You probably make the argument that the Capitol police were scared and they thought they had to do that, but you shouldn't go in something that you know is not open to the public, period.

But after that,

when he shows that Brian Sicknick was walking around when people said that he had been killed violently by a fire extinguisher, or when he showed that everybody was running out and not just Josh Hawley that they had selectively edited, or when Mr.

Cowhorns, who I think is guilty probably of a class three felony, but he's not a violent insurrectionist.

And when he's walking around talking to the police, they didn't grab him.

And you know what I mean?

I don't think anybody.

So there were points he's made at you, but yet they want to destroy Tucker Carlson.

They think he's Satan incarnate.

It's insane.

That's true.

He proved a lot of the things they had said were just out-and-out lies, which has been a great thing.

Chuck Schumer on the floors of the Senate.

We talked about that.

My God, he was trying to get him silenced.

And these people,

they're scary on the left.

They are not Democrats.

I keep telling people that.

The Democratic Party doesn't exist.

It was hijacked by Jacobins.

These are hardcore neo-Marxist activists.

And they do not believe in consensus.

They do not believe in free speech.

They believe in a party line that has to be parroted and destroys anybody that is not on their radical equality of result agenda.

They're scary.

And so anytime any of us see any of these people that have the courage to speak up, we should appreciate it, whatever their politics are.

I think that's really important.

I really like that Redfield guy.

I don't know what his politics are.

I'm sure they're left-wing.

He's a bureaucrat.

But he very carefully,

methodically, when asked, he didn't volunteer.

He wasn't trying to smear Fauci or Colin.

Just when they asked, he said, well, that was the narrative, and they were not going to allow people in the scientific tradition to question it.

And you can draw your own conclusions why they did that.

And what he was saying is they were self-interested.

And they had a narrative that protected their own lapses.

And who knows?

I listened.

I turned that off after about 20 minutes because I just said to myself, it starts at A.

The whole narrative is crumbling.

And it ends at Z.

And Z could be, and that's where Pauci is terrified.

Look at his face now.

He looks like he's aged 10 years in six weeks.

He thinks that Z is that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins knew that it was illegal and it was very dangerous to have anal function research in the United States.

So they cooked up this idea with their buddy Dasik how to get the research results if you funded it in China.

And that impetus and the materials and the know-how and the mechanisms, which we don't talk about, that was filtered in through us to that lab

killed a million people in the United States.

Draw your own conclusions about a person's degree of culpability if you're funding gain of function research on the sly without anybody knowing it to a third party and a gain of function result of partial funding from you results in a virus that escapes and kills a million Americans.

And with that, we should.

With that,

try to end on an optimistic note.

And I think the optimistic note is this: that all of these things are being exposed by the House committees.

So I'm very happy about that.

Tucker's done a great job, that's for sure, too.

So we have a lot of things moving forward at a good pace, I think.

So thanks to all the listeners for listening.

We really appreciate you.

And thank you, Victor, as well.

Yes, I'm out to go punish Spike, Sport, and Spa.

All righty.

We'll see everybody later.

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