Trump, South Africa, and Dilbert

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Victor Davis-Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You will find the happy

of the Victor Davis Hanson Show at johnsolomons, just thenews.com.

Speaking of John Solomon, Victor, I saw him and several other people this past weekend.

I just got home yesterday from Washington.

I was at CPAC.

I didn't hang around.

I left early Saturday morning because I wanted to get home.

So I did not see Donald Trump speak.

But, you know,

we will go over what Donald Trump said Saturday, March 2nd, and get your views on that.

And maybe we'll talk a little about CPAC also.

We'll do that right after these important messages.

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

So Victor was, it was nice to

bump into John there, just talk to him for a little bit.

Saw some other folks.

Devin Nunes had a nice talk with him for about 10 or 15 minutes.

I was there for business purposes, a couple of days.

Got to get home to my wife and family.

And when the president or the former president speaks, you know, it's very tough to get in and out of the building.

So I got out of Dodge early.

But that said, I want to read, if you don't mind, Victor, just so our listeners have some context here.

This is from Newsmax.

Their coverage of what the president said.

And Victor, your thoughts about

the president's remarks and how that helps him or hurts him

for the 2024 election.

This is per Newsmax

highly weighted speech at CPAC on Saturday night, spoke about the battle for our lives against both Democrats and establishment Republicans, and told an enthusiastic crowd that they had been engaged in, quote, an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hated it and who and want to absolutely destroy it.

End quote.

He also swore that the Republican Party, quote, is never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Roeb, and Jeb Bush.

We had a Republican Party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots, and fools, said Trump.

We're not going back to people who want to destroy our great social security system, even some in our own party.

I wonder who that might be that wants to raise the minimum age of social security to 70, 75, or even 80 in some cases, and are out to cut Medicare to a level that will no longer be recognized.

I'll be finished here very quickly, Victor.

Trump also declared that we're in a Marxism state of mind, a communism state of mind, the sinister forces trying to stop me, silence you, and turn this nation into a socialist dumping ground for criminals, junksies, junkies, Marxist thugs, radicals, and dangerous refugees that no other country wants, etc.

He said a lot more, Victor.

A lot of this rhetoric is

pretty good.

He was well received.

There was a straw poll at the convention.

CPAC is considered, I think, a Trump organization, and not in any official way, but it's very pro-Donald Trump.

He won the straw poll conducted there, I think 64, 25, something like that.

Ron DeSantis in second place of the attendees.

Last thing I'll say, Victor, before I shut up, which is what most listeners want, get your opinion on

take on Donald Trump's remarks, was that CPAC itself

as an event was

somewhat very noticeably diminished in size and scope than it had been in the last few years, even the...

uh even last year and which may be in itself a reflection on not matter how popular people at the convention felt donald Trump was, but it may be a sign of

some disdain with CPAC's association with Trump.

I'm not sure, but it was very noticeable.

That said, Victor, what's your take on what Donald Trump had to say at CPAC?

Well,

I listened to a lot of it.

He talked for over an hour and a half, wasn't it?

I think that was at least an hour and a half long.

So I would say that 45 minutes of it was very powerful because he gave not only a

diagnosis of what everything

had gone to hell under Biden, the border crime, energy self-sufficiency,

Afghanistan, foreign policy,

all of that, homelessness and all that.

And he had some, you know, as people pointed out, he had some pretty powerful stemiles that we have people who fought for us that are on the street, and we have luxury hotels in New York at the tune of a billion dollars a year, it's going to cost for people who broke the law as their first act in coming to the United States.

And their second act was residing here, and yet they're rewarded for it.

That was very powerful.

But

the other 30 to 40 minutes, it was problematic for two reasons.

One, people do not want to replay 2020, only to the extent I make one caveat, they want a free and fair election in 2024, and they want to learn from that.

So if you're going to bring up the midterms, but especially the 2020 election, it has to be in the context of this, we're going to have 70% of the people vote on election day, not 30, or we're going to try to get the states to have the voter IDs, or we're going to outlaw, have a national effort to outlaw in most states or all states, third-party vote harvesting or automatic

ballots mailed out or suing

to override the state legislature in cherry-pick courts.

So he did that a little bit.

But when you go back and say you're cheated and all that, what that does, Jack, is that personalized all his grievances about the system.

And

the rest of America has grievances about the system.

So he's not the only wounded fawn.

So what he needs to do is say this election

was not as transparent as it must be.

This, this, this happened.

And it's not about me.

It's about the system.

And we cannot go on as a nation unless the majority of people are audited and transparent and vote on election day.

And we can't have an automatic ballot.

And we're in California.

There are 10 million ballots that are unaccounted for.

They mailed out.

They have no idea where they went or where they were even used.

So you can't have that, but he didn't do that.

And then the other problem, Jack, was that

he has, you know, Karl Rove has been unremittingly negative.

You know that.

I know he used to counsel Trump.

So there was a period in which I thought they had had a truce, but he's been very critical in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

His message has been

We're in for a catastrophe because Trump may win the nomination and he can't win the general.

So we have to stop him now.

That's his message.

It's pounded into everything, baked in, I should say, to everything he writes.

And Jeb, you know, Jeb Bush is not a major political figure.

And he mentioned Jeb Bush because Jeb Bush has said nice things about Ron DeSantis and he feels Trump does.

That's the kiss of death.

Okay, we get that.

And then Paul Ryan is on the board of Fox News, and Trump feels that they have ostracized him from appearing there, or they're negative about it.

Okay.

But the problem is that

the Republicans have not got at the national level 51% of the vote.

They have not done it since 1988

when they defeated Mike de Kakis.

And then, even more telling, Jack,

is after George H.W.

Bush won in 1988, then

in 92, he lost.

The Republicans lost, and incumbent president lost.

In 96, a stalwart establishmentarian Bob Dole lost.

In 2000,

Al Gore, the current vice president, won the popular vote.

In 2008, Barack Obama won the popular vote.

He did the same thing in 2012.

In 2016,

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

In In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote.

So that's eight, right?

Eight.

And so if you can't win a national election, then something's wrong.

And the problem with this is that the corrective to the establishment of a Dole losing or George W.

Bush losing the popular vote or,

you know, Mitt Romney losing the popular vote or John McCain should be a Donald Trump, but he lost the popular vote twice as well.

So, what I'm getting at that is,

and we have to analyze that.

So, Bob Dole and John McCain and

George W.

Bush and Mitt Romney lost the popular vote because seven to eight million people, as we know, the irredeemables, blue dogs, Republicans, Democrats, whatever, parole voters, sat out.

They sat out because they felt the Republican establishment was squishy on the border.

It was squishy on crime.

It was squishy on social-cultural transformations.

They were fighting optional wars.

They did not win.

In a cost-benefit analysis, they were deemed wasteful and blood and treasure.

Okay.

So Trump comes along and says, these people can't win the popular vote because they can't get these people out.

So he gets them out.

But in the process of getting them out,

the people that they had brought into the party, not enough to win, never enough to win, never enough to get 50%, but that 3% to 5%,

call them what you want.

Soccer moms, suburban housewives, professional women, childless women, unmarried women.

We have executives, whatever that suburban

moderate Republican is, you need a percentage of them, like 50%, to win.

And Trump could not do that in 2016, and he could not do that in 2020.

So you would think that when Trump outlined that we can't go back, and he was perfectly correct with that, he would have an exegesis that explained how he was going to go forward and win 51% of the vote.

And he should have said something like this is what I'm getting in this windy rant.

He should have said something like this, Jack.

He said,

if you let people across the border and 7 million of them, and you allow 100,000 people to die, which is twice almost the same number as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and 12 times more than died in 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq, that is a national crisis.

That's a war.

And we're going to stop that because we're all Americans.

We cannot lose 100,000 Americans to fentanyl and to open borders and to take money from poor the social services and rent hotels, as he put it out.

And that would be a message that would appeal to independents.

But he didn't do that.

And so when you say palm iron and jebbush and all this, you're not winning over that three to five that want to be conservative.

They don't like.

the crime wave.

They don't like the big spending.

They don't like the open border.

But they want a reason to express that don't like

by being ecominical.

Now, I'm not that person.

I don't give a blank, blank.

I think you need to really.

So I like the attack on the left for destroying the country, but I'm not stupid enough to think that that 5% to 8% or whatever that percentage is, and I know a lot of them because I work with them.

They're capable of joining the base to vote for a candidate.

Well, and they have, Victor.

They have.

In state elections, you know, a year ago.

Well, but I mean, take take the national, take the presidential election out of it.

You know, all across the state legislatures and governors, Republican, these people were voting Republican,

but as you pointed out, not at the

presidential election.

You know, in the 2022 elections,

the number of people who voted for a Republican candidate, I think, was 3 million more than those who voted for a Democratic candidate, even though they didn't do very well or not as well as anticipated.

So that's what I was.

So 45 minutes, you know, it was pretty tough stuff.

You know, I'm your,

I'm your,

I think he said at the end, I'm your re, your

redeemer, I mean, I'm going to

redemption and revenge and vengeance, and I'm going to bring back what they did to us.

Right.

So, but this all sets the stage because he got 62% of the straw poll at CPAC.

I don't know if that matters much because that was the base.

He has to win that.

And if

DeSantis had given a very good speech, which he's capable of, and if he had worked the crowd, and would he have got 30 or 40% at a Trump base event?

He might have.

I don't know.

And then so that's.

Do you think it was,

I mean, CPAC is just, it is a convention.

Okay.

It's not the be-all and end-all, but still it is a place

probably outside of now turning point USA, I think, is starting to compete in its way with its big conventions, but it's probably the annual place for conservative politics to take place.

So I don't think the straw poll really matters.

I mean, Rand Paul.

uh or or

his dad i think actually won the straw poll and you

but do you think uh um

DeSantis not appearing was...

No, I think he's okay now, but he's in danger of becoming a rulie Giuliani.

Remember his late, late, late announcement?

Right.

And by the time he announced it, it was too late.

He'd already lost the momentum.

He's coming off a big win in Florida, and you can't insult the voters by saying, thank you for supporting me as governor.

And now I'm going to leave this job in two years.

So you have to massage that reality somehow by waiting, waiting.

But as I said earlier, in an earlier broadcast, there's a magic moment where

this constant attack on DeSantis from Trump will reach a crescendo, and you'll have to reply to it.

And if you don't reply to it, Trump will say, look, he's weak.

He's weak.

I'm strong.

He's weak.

And so to allay that, you are going to have to do what you do.

But

the way he's trying to deal with that, as I understand it as an observer, is: A, he's trying to say, look at my record.

I don't have time to attack anybody.

Conservatives are my friends.

I'm an 11th commandment Reagan guy.

I don't attack other conservatives when there's so many other leftists that are trying to destroy the country.

And I found that to be very successful in Florida.

Look, look, look at the results.

Look at the inward migration.

Look at the margin of victory in the midterm.

Look, look, look, look, look.

He can do that.

And then he can say, that's so yesterday.

We don't want to go back and replay all these melodramas.

I understand they treated him so terribly.

And I really am empathetic to the president.

And I've been on record of supporting them, but those are his

psychodramas.

Now, ours are different.

They're for 2000.

We have to look forward.

And then he's got to say,

and you know, when we talk about MAGA and Make America Great, I'm a child of the middle class.

I live the middle class.

I was born into the middle class.

My parents were in working class communities.

That's what I am.

And I understand that I've lived the life that I advocate.

And I said, and he could even go so, and if the 10 attacks get very, I'm not taking sides here, I'm just trying to analyze it.

If it gets very negative, then he can say, you know what?

I don't live the lifestyle of Biden or Trump, something like that.

But that's later on if these at some point, I don't know where that point is, Jack.

It may be July, it may be August, but at some point, if he's going to be president, he's got to announce and then he's going to have to step up and reply.

What's lurking is this nutty district attorney in New York about the Stormy Daniels and the special counsel about the raid and the Georgia grand jury.

All of them

are construct.

I I mean, there's nothing there.

There's no there there, but they're all capable, given their hatred of Donald Trump, to send forth an indictment.

I don't think it would ever result.

I'm not even sure it would result in a trial, but I don't think it, there's no way it would, unless he got in front of a D.C.

jury, a conviction.

But again,

he's got some problems with those.

And I don't know how that's going to work out.

It may work out in his favor is what I'm trying to say.

The sheer hatred and the abuse of of institutions for political purposes.

Victor,

not to belabor a point you've made about the suburban voter, and it's a catchphrase, but I think it's a real phrase.

And

this is the margin of victory.

And if you, of the few bright spots in the

in the 2022 elections, one was the pickup of some congressional seats in New York State that were peripheral to the city.

And I agree with you, you know, as you look at Donald Trump's speech and maybe what he should have said.

I would think a continued focus on the cities and how terrible are major cities, their decline, their just

total freefall in some cases.

It matters to the, even though the suburban voter doesn't live in the city, you know, you don't live.

I don't live in New York City.

I live two hours away commuting time, but still, the pull, the psychological pull of New York makes you think, you know, what goes on in New York affects me.

And that applies to Chicago, Atlanta, whatever major city.

So the suburban voter is very influenced by the life of

the metropolis they live near.

And why not focusing on that?

As opposed to the New York City.

Well, he did say, yeah, he did say that New York,

he mentioned, but it was in a negative.

It wasn't we're going to restore New York.

It was how bad New York is.

And everybody knows that this trickle-down leftism, when applied to big cities, results in corrupt mayors.

The cities are unhealthy.

They're violent.

They're medieval.

They're lethal.

Nobody knows how to stop the defecation, urination, fornication, injection of the homeless.

Nobody knows how to stop it, or they don't want to.

Everybody knows that defunding the police, no cash bail, what Sorrels funded district attorneys, radical changes in jurisprudence, that all destroyed deterrence.

And the result is you've unleashed a whole class of smash and grab, carjacking, stealing, burglarizing, executing, assaulting, and vacancy.

And, you know, it's weird.

It's the felonies have become misdemeanors.

The misdemeanors are now infractions.

And the infractions are lifestyle choices.

So it's just a devolution.

And the middle class that can get out, leave, kind of like the Questian class in fifth century Rome.

They went out to fortified sanctuaries in the countryside.

And then the poor, the lower middle class, they just have to hope they can get, we reach peak woke.

It's not going to get any worse and it has to get better.

And then the wealthy who caused it, they feel that they can navigate around it or they can profit from it because they have so much wherewithal.

And it's kind of, you know, it's a sign of, let's admit it, it's decadence, it's civilizational decline.

And nobody puts it in those cosmic terms, but

it's a weird,

what's going on in this country, it's kind of tripartite.

It's pre-modern, where you talk about the cities as you raise the issue.

They're pre-modern.

It's barbarism, it's crime, it's filth, it's vacancy, it's an it's the form at Rome grown over with weeds, It's the open border, the Danube and the Rhine down in the south.

It's the whole

return to pre-modern, pre-civilizational.

And then that's post-modern.

And these are the people, it wasn't by accident.

I mean, we could stop it tomorrow, but it's this woke elite bicosaw that was enriched with globalization and had so much money and privilege.

They thought that they could experiment on us as lab rats, whether it was climate change or banning natural gas or transitioning or drag show, whatever it was, they felt that

they know, Jack, if you had a drag show 10 years ago and you had little babies there and two-year-olds while a man was gesticulating and about sex or simulating sex on a trapeze or whatever he was doing, they would be the big advocates of the children, kind of the Nancy Pelosi refrain.

I did it for the children.

Now they don't care about the children.

And so

it's really

an elite problem.

They're the corrupt mayors in all the cities that did this.

They are the sociologists, the psychologists, and the universities who told us this was normal.

And they're really, you know, when you look at what they've done, we have a whole class of young men that are holed up in their parents' home or living together in apartments.

They're not marrying.

They're not having children.

They're not buying homes.

They're not getting full-time jobs.

They surf the net, play video games, that are addicted to porn, or whatever it is.

And that's the result of this elite culture.

And then we have a third challenge besides the pre-modern and the postmodern.

It's kind of like the late, I'm writing a chapter right now on the fall of Constantinople, so excuse me, but

it's like the Ottomans looking at Byzantine and just thinking, wow.

we can't get through those walls.

They're the most impressive marriage of science and engineering in the history of civilization.

But the people that are manning them are not the same people that have lasted for a thousand years.

So, our enemies look at us and they see our technology and our wealth, but they said, you know what?

These Americans are not the same people.

We learned that in Afghanistan.

We learned that with the Biden family.

Whether it's North Korea or Iran is going to test us, like you won't believe that China is going to test us.

They think we're decadent.

We're divided.

And, you know, we're, they look at,

and I'll just finish by saying

the civil rights, nobody talks, have you noticed this, Jack, that none of the people in the marginalized community talk anymore about the 1964 Civil Rights Act or Martin Luther King.

Right.

They talk a little bit.

And I think it's because they don't believe.

what he said.

I think they believe the opposite.

They believe that everything is the color of your skin and not the content of your character.

And they don't like the 1964 civil rights.

They don't mind the segregation of it.

It was just the wrong people being segregated.

They like segregation.

And I say that very carefully, not inflammatory, and inflammatory.

If you look at separate graduation, separate theme houses, separate segregated by race special spaces or safe spaces, or you look at hiring and admitting people to school by the, they like that, even though they know that it's all contrary to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But they don't like that anymore.

That's why they never mention it.

And it's really sad because it's almost like we reverted to Jim Crow.

And you can really see that with the open disdain for East Palestine.

I mean, Pete Buttigieg did not want to go there.

He did not want to get near there.

It wasn't just that he felt he would be yelled at.

It wasn't that.

He does not like those people.

Okay.

they may even think they had it coming to him.

They do think they have it.

They've written that.

They said, Well, these are the people who voted for Trump.

He deregulated, even though a wheelbarrowing went out, it could have been a break that Trump had lax standards on.

They deserved it.

So, yeah, that's the problem with this country: is that the left is no longer liberal, it's fascistic.

Yeah, and uh,

when you look at all these problems, it's just amazing to me that this marriage between

prudism, Victorianism, Puritan, puritanicalism, I should say, and then

raunchiness and pornography.

So we're going to, you know, we're going to fire you if you say gal or honey at the water cooler, but we're going to have a Super Bowl extravaganza where the performer Rihanna grabs her vagina in front of 120 million people and then simulates masturbation while she's pregnant, and that's okay.

And or we're going to have men dressed up as women that kind of twerk in front of small children, and that's okay.

But

we're going to be very, very

careful if you go on a date and you say the wrong thing or something.

So I can't quite figure it out.

And if you say, and I think you should say it, do that.

So if you say the N-word, I think that's a fireball, it's a terrible thing to say.

I think if you say, call any woman a whore or a bitch, that's a horrible thing, and that should have consequences.

And I think if you threaten to kill a policeman or you encourage, that's a horrible thing.

But what I just said entails the entire thematic content of rap music.

In other words, if you told today's major rappers, you can't use the N-word because it has deleterious effects.

You cannot call women whores and bitches.

And you cannot even implicitly suggest that you'd like to kill Popo.

You can't, I don't care if you're Jay-Z or Kenya West or

Kendrick Lamar, none of that.

They feel that their whole industry would collapse because it wouldn't have the authenticity that they demand.

So it's a pretty sick thing because if anybody else said those words, anybody, they would be dead for it.

And so what we're getting at, we're living in a schizophrenic society and everybody knows it and they know what's going on.

And it's, I don't know what's going to happen, but I know it's not sustainable.

Right.

You, you can't have 55%

of all

commercials, or maybe it's 60 now, of African Americans

by intent that are 12% of the population.

Or you cannot, say, you're knighted airlines and 50% of your new hires.

And these are all normal endeavors.

I have no problem with it.

But then when you look at the spike in crime rates and when you look at the murder rate as committed by African-American males, it used to be 50% of all murders.

It's up to about 60%.

And when you look at interracial crimes and hate crimes, we don't even go there, Jack, because we know it's disproportionately on interracial crimes and hate crimes African Americans.

And we don't dare talk.

What I just said,

I'll probably be in trouble trouble at Stanford University.

But the people who would say I'm in trouble know that to be true and they make the necessary adjustments.

So you have a society where the black leadership cannot say,

and I only say black leadership because that's their self-referential term.

They feel that they're in the black caucus.

They're the black leadership.

And they talk in collectives.

Us for white supremacy, white privilege, everybody's the same by race.

Okay.

Once you go down that pathway, then you say,

there's 10,000 people who were murdered,

African Americans, and we're going to have to do something about it because 96% of the perpetrators were African Americans.

We are overrepresented in hate crimes mainly against Jews and Asians by about two to three times our demographics.

And I know that interracial crime is rare.

It's only about 8% of violent assaults.

But in those 8%, we're six times times more likely to be victimizers than victims.

So we want to address that.

No, I don't hear a word.

Not a word.

Not a big word.

Victor, this leads into

another issue that's come up of late, and that's Scott

Adams, who's the cartoonist of Dilbert.

And there's something going on in South Africa I'd also like to raise.

And let's get to these

related topic follow-up right after this important message.

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

So, Victor, on the South Africa thing I'm mentioning, and I haven't apprised you of this ahead of time, but there's a Helen Andrews, who I think is just one of the most wonderful writers in

America and the English language.

Helen is a senior.

She was the editor at the American Conservative.

Now she's a senior editor editor there.

She wrote a piece before the American Conservative last week about South Africa covering.

Now, there is a country that truly is on the brink of collapse, and it's race-based in part.

There is an electric, I think the electric utility there is called SCOM.

And we have heard about the rolling blackouts in South Africa and people just can't get electricity.

And part of that that has

come about because of

mandated race

hiring.

So, you know, every other person has to be black.

It does not matter.

There can only be

less than 50%.

It has to be less than 50% white in the upper management, et cetera.

So,

as the years have gone on, this has become

a rolling ball downhill.

More people are being hired

strictly because of race.

There's nothing to do with merit.

And it has affected not only

the major electric utility, but the water utility.

There's no people that know how to manage, and water is not unimportant, right?

You know, you need to treat the water.

You need scientists who understand

how not to poison things.

The healthcare system is in collapse for the same reason.

So, anyway, and I want to pick on South Africa, but when you have a race-obsessed society,

these are the consequences when hiring is

by race, not by

competence.

It's a real disaster.

This is dangerous because this is not Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, a very small populated country.

This is 60 million people.

I think they have

two nuclear power plants.

And I think I just read half of their sewage system is not operable.

So if that country, which I think it used to be 17 or 8% white, I think it's down to 7% or 8%, Jack.

Most of, I mean, over half of left.

So that system that's no longer merocratic, and I don't think it has, I think it's gone beyond race.

I think it's tribal now that particular tribal people whose first affinities are with a particular tribe don't hire other people of mixed race or black on the basis of merit.

They hire people that have more blood ties in the tribal sense, which compounds the racial discrimination.

But the point is that, yeah, it's unwinding and it's going to have enormous ramification because it was the economic powerhouse of Africa.

And that's no longer true.

It's going to be the poor man of Africa and it's going to drag Africa down with it if the Chinese don't move in and see opportunity.

I mean when they already are.

That's where the lack of merit and the destruction of the meritocracy ultimately leads us to Venezuela, where it was ideology,

and to Bolivia, where it was tribalism, or whether it's South Africa and it's race and tribe.

And wherever that happens, when you choose or select or hire or admit on criteria other than merit, then you're going to suffer what is inevitable, and that's civilizational decline.

And we're doing that in the United States right now.

And we know we are.

We know we are.

They had the FFA, Federal Aviation Administrator, and he was being grilled by Congress and the Senate.

And he was asked some basic questions.

And I think there were 10 of them.

I knew a couple of them myself

about safe distances that they must maintain.

And all he didn't know one, not one.

And the question is, why is he being appointed at the head of all airline safety in the United States?

And I think it was because of his race.

And so it's also unfair to African Americans who are superbly qualified because, you know, it's kind of like if you used to go to Stanford and you got in on your merit and yet you met a bunch of jocks and you met a bunch of wealthy kids that were legacies.

as it used to be true, then you were under suspicion that you didn't really, it wasn't really a merit-based universities.

And then in the 60s and 70s, Stanford kind of ended that.

I I mean, they kept some legacies, of course, but they made it very merucratic.

And the irony of all this, when we talk about standards, standards, standards, we're talking about these institutions that established them.

You didn't do it, Jack.

I didn't do it.

The FFA had standards.

And where do those standards came from?

They came from a very, very dangerous aviation budgeting industry in the 1930s and 40s.

You know, you and I know that in the 1960s and 70s, airline crashes were common, especially in private aviation.

That has largely been eliminated, partly through computers, but partly because of increased standards for pilots and training and professionalism.

And it's kind of like the broken windows fallacy that if you let a window be broken, another one will be broken.

If you let people come in New York and you know try to clean your windshield and block traffic, then more will do it.

Well, if you're in the FFA and you continually tweak it around, say that standard didn't matter and this standard didn't matter, it becomes same thing with the military.

Right.

And, you know, the military is an amazing thing because it was announced Friday that the Army,

they're 26% down.

Several tens of thousands of people have not joined.

And when you look at the statistics to the degree you can find them, the great falloff is in middle-class white males.

And it's obvious that they're not joining the Army in the numbers necessary for the Army to be sustainable for two reasons.

One, they feel that after the misadventures in Afghanistan and to a lesser degree Iraq, that either they or their parents feel that they're going to send their children to optional military engagements, which are going to be run by incompetence, where even tactical success will not be translated in lasting strategic advantage for the United States, and their child will die die for nothing.

That's how they feel.

But more importantly, they feel they're targeted and they're found guilty of what?

Of being white or privileged or biased or as Mark Milley said, rage.

And you'd think that after Afghanistan and after our difficulty in Iraq,

kind of like what happened in the Korean War, after the Pusan

perimeter and T-34s, you know, scattering American soldiers and the idea that after 1945, we were so sick of war, we just dismantled the military.

And then, you know, they were trying to get Sherman tanks out of parks that were there for monumental purposes.

They were so shorthanded.

And then they put in, you know, they still didn't have an answer to the T-34 tank, you know, eight years after it appeared for the first time.

And Americans, draftees were not.

capable of fighting North Koreans in China.

And that lasted about six months.

And then you know what?

Matthew Ridgway, they just completely dropped all of the civilian protocols and the nice life, and they went to war, and they were very lethal.

And so

it's kind of sad because our military now is not up to stopping Iran from becoming nuclear or

if we choose to stop them from absorbing Taiwan.

I don't think we're up to it.

I don't.

Not what I've seen in Afghanistan and not what I've seen from the commanders.

Too many generals and high-ranking commanders have a bifurcated agenda.

A, while you're in the service, you

hold your tongue and you promote on the basis of diversity, equity, inclusion, and you're rewarded with promotion accordingly.

And two, you broadcast that record of promotion and wokeness when you retire and you're rewarded accordingly with the defense contractor billet, whether on a board member or as a lobbyist.

And both mean that you're going to be 60 years old and very, very wealthy and prominent.

And if you speak out against woke and you say this is not leading to battlefield efficacy, you're not going to get promoted and you're not going to get a corporate billet when you retire.

And that's a fact.

And everybody knows it and the rank and file know it.

And so they've got a big problem.

We do.

It's not they, it's us.

And you would think that Afghanistan would have shaken.

What's so strange is we're giving all this money and weaponry to Ukraine, and nobody talks about those acres and acres of stuff just left there in Afghanistan.

And so they're connected.

They say, well, it'll take five years to restore our javelin, or we're short armored vehicles, or wow, we don't have enough artillery shells.

And you want to think, well, yeah, because you thought you were at the end of history and you guys didn't, you either didn't vote for appropriations for armament, or to the degree you did, they sidetracked it into woke stuff or social justice causes.

Or you let it, you let, I don't know, five, 10, 20, 40, 60 billion dollars and stuff rot and or go on the international terrorist market and Kabul.

But there's no discussion of that.

That's what gets me so angry.

Or no, or no, in advance, honor.

We've talked about this before.

No one resigned in advance of Biden's terrible decisions to say, listen,

this is going to come back and harm America and harm the free world.

I, General Milley, I'm not going to be part of it.

I resign in order to try and force the situation.

But none of those guys could think $85 billion

of hardware is not going to come back and harm America.

But I know, it already is.

We just go, oh, there it's gone.

No big deal.

And

we got to build more and give it to Ukraine.

We just gave it to the Taliban.

Didn't, I mean, we gave it to the Taliban.

We gave it to Ukraine.

We give it to everybody, but we don't have enough of it.

And then we borrow money to make it.

And then we,

you know, it's very strange what's going on.

It's end of days, really is.

It reminds me, Yellen goes over to Ukraine and says, we're going to give them $10 billion.

And Joe Biden says, hey, we're going to forgive what, $500 billion in student debt.

It's not their money.

Those are legislative decisions.

You just don't give $10 billion if you're the Secretary of the Treasury.

Who said you can do that?

Is that an appropriation by Congress?

I don't know of anyone that says we're giving them $10 billion in addition to the $120 we gave them.

I don't know of any legislation in Congress that says that you're going to go into a contract between a federal agency and a person and then nullify that contract and exempt a person.

I think that's a statutory matter.

And so,

and more importantly, fiscally, economically, monetarily, do we have the money?

No.

We're just printing it.

It's, and you can't, I guess why people,

I think people are listening, our audience gets very frustrated with this because it's like we know reality,

we know the symptoms, we've made the diagnosis, we know what the prognosis will be if we don't intervene with therapies.

We know what the therapies would be, but we can't do it because it's considered too hard, too complex, too racist, too sexist, too well.

I don't know what it is, but we can't do it.

We're paralyzed.

The medicine is deemed worse than a disease.

Well, Victor, I mentioned earlier, Scott Adams,

he's the cartoonist or was a cartoonist for Dilbert, the very, very popular, long-running daily comic strip in

what was left of America's newspapers about

office life in America.

And he's very active on social media,

has been for a long time, very conservative,

likes to stir things up.

He has a podcast and

there was some poll.

Rasmussen did some poll about the statement, it's okay to be white.

And

approximating a majority of blacks had disagreed or were

not positive about

such a statement.

I don't know that polling about such a statement.

I don't like the phrase myself, it's okay to be white.

I mean, I'm not going to be polled on it.

Of course, it's okay to be white, but do I want to be polled on it?

Why do you poll me about that?

That sounds like there's some.

Anyway, he spoke out about this on his podcast, and he essentially

kind of shocking.

He said, But you know, we should stay away from blacks.

Blacks are racist, something to that effect.

And he was

summarily his comic strip was killed.

So today, though and this is sunday again we're recording on the 5th of uh of of march uh wilfred riley who is a professor of history i think you probably have dealt with wilfred riley at university of tennessee that one yeah uh or kentucky or kentucky yes yeah he wrote a book on uh

pseudo uh

hate crimes

and he he is not uh

uh defending the scott adams um uh response here

But he does say, you know, what is happening shows that we're not having an honest conversation about race because, and I think he was somewhere in his Riley's piece, he talks about some line that,

oh, oh, who's the guy?

This is terrible.

I can't remember his name who runs the Daily Wire.

Ben Shapiro.

Ben Shapiro, yeah, yeah.

Ben Shapiro

said, look, if Scott Adams was a black cartoonist saying

something,

a line similar, but about what everyone knows

he would have gotten a job and a position on MSNBC and become highly paid.

So we're not having an honest conversation.

That's not a supposition.

That's not a supposition.

That's a fact.

Ely Mistel, the black Harvard-trained lawyer, said on the air, on the air.

When COVID is over, I'm tired of white people.

I'm going to keep away from them.

I don't want to see them.

And there were no ramification.

I looked at the transcript, and there's two,

I think everybody has two reactions.

The one is what they did or the reaction to him and then what earned that reaction.

So I'm a little skeptical that when he said he's ruined,

comparing very small things to very big things, I've had a,

I guess you would call a syndicated column through Tribune Media.

It has different names now, the Media Services, but it's the Chicago Tribune.

And I think I've had it for 17 years.

And it goes up and down, you know, because newspapers are failing and the editorial pages.

But what I can tell you is that I also have a paywall where you, and we've talked about Ultra, where I try to give an original content three or four times a week, maybe, I don't know, sometimes 3,000 words a week.

And I can tell you that that is more successful than the syndicated column.

So when he has his paywall and given the publicity from all of this,

and I given the decline in revenue from newspapers, I will bet you that his income and his exposure and his name recognition increases, not decreases.

And that's not to justify what they did to him.

I'm just telling you that the

mechanisms of woke are not what they used to be.

It used to be if the New York Times went out of you and the Washington Post and your syndicator canceled, you were done for.

You couldn't just go into Substack and get a paywall and then be an autonomous.

But he's got his own podcast, he's got his own paywall, he's got his own subscribers, and he's gotten millions of dollars of publicity.

And I have a feeling that he will do,

at least in terms of income, he will do better, although they've damaged his reputation.

It reminds me very

similarly that when we were at National Review, John Derbyshire, Derbyshire, whom I like, I've met him, and boy, I've just listened to his exegesis on mathematics, and he's a genius.

But he wrote something for Tackies magazine.

Do you remember that?

About

it.

Yeah, it was right when Todd Nahisi Coates was writing about the talk.

In fact, I wrote something, not like his, but I said that if you're going to give the talk to young African Americans who fear the police and that the stack, the deck is stacked, then

there are other talks that when the crime rate of all violent crimes, 55% are committed by 12%

and probably 3%, if you talk about males that are African-American under 30, then other people will have a talk to similarly stereotype.

But he went a little further.

John did.

And I think I didn't.

Rich Lowry fired him, and I didn't agree with the manner in which he did.

I thought they should have suspended him.

Well, I must take, I was the publisher at the time, so I was part of that.

And so I'll take the blame too, in part.

But I mean, I wrote, I thought I should support Rich's decision, and I accepted it, and I wrote that.

But I also wrote something similar, but not like what he wrote, that people had a, if you're going to stereotype people like Todd Nahese Coates do, then everybody's going to stereotype.

And one of the stereotypes will be if you think that white policemen inordinately pull over blacks, not on the basis of demographical data on crime per commission but on just irrational racist fears i don't know if that's true or not i don't believe it is but if it is and you're going to warn people then you're going to have other people who say i'm looking at the data not the race the data i don't care if they're green i don't care if people are purple but if this particular data point on violent assault is vastly overrepresented from the demography then i'm going to make sure i know where i'm going.

He did that.

But what got him in trouble was, and this is what got

Scott Adams, he went one step further.

And in the case of John, he said if he was driving, and we call, because I want to be fair to him, because I like him and I respect his knowledge and erudition.

But when he

said that when you're driving by black people, keep away from black people in crowds.

But if you're driving and you see black people stuck on the side of the road,

he said he wouldn't stop stop and help them.

Right.

And I thought, you know,

because he said there was a greater mathematical risk that you could be in trouble.

If he had just said this,

that

because of our crime-ridden society, do not pull over for anybody

when you see them on the side of the road.

I don't care if they're white or black, it would have been okay.

But when he said black, it seemed unduly callous.

So if you have a black pregnant woman and she needs help, you're going to callously drive by.

And so that's what Scott added.

He said,

if

the people who said that

white lives matter, or it's okay, excuse me, it's okay to be white, plus the

people who said it's okay to be white,

it wasn't okay.

And the people who didn't disagree or they were, I don't know, I guess the whole nuanced percentage was 47%.

Then he advised that he would not have the same, because he was, he even identified as being black sometimes.

I feel like I'm a black person.

He was very fair and liberal and progressive.

But he said, I'm not going to do that anymore.

And then he compounded that by saying,

and I advise.

other white people, if 47% of this demographic thinks it's not okay to be white, then you shouldn't be around them because they are a hate group.

Well,

at that point, he was done for in our culture.

But if you actually, it was clumsy what he said and it was stupid what he said.

But what he said,

it doesn't matter whether it was clumsy or stupid or what his intent was.

You have to examine what he actually said.

He was saying that,

and I think this got him in trouble.

I don't believe that the people, I do believe that there was a group that said it's not okay to be white.

I don't know what that was, 25 or 30 percent.

Right.

The other group that said they didn't disagree with it.

I weren't sure.

I'm not sure that they just didn't say, you know what?

I don't like people saying it's okay to be white because I feel that that's chauvinistic, whereas.

It's okay to say it's okay to be black or black lives matter because we're a discriminated group.

Yeah, black lives do matter, but I don't want to say black lives matter

because it means it's exclusive.

That's the intent behind it.

And that's what he was saying, that our in post-racial, post-modern society, it doesn't really matter anymore about your historical grievances because we're so mixed up and we're so multiracial.

We have so many agendas from everybody that you're just going to have to have a standard from now on that nobody identifies by race in a chauvinistic fashion.

Right.

Okay.

And so

that's what got him in trouble.

But I don't think he's going to be as harmed as he thinks he is.

I really don't, because there's going to be people who are so sick of woke

and there's going to be people who knew what he tried to say that they're going to be empathetic and it's going to come to their attention who didn't know who he was.

And they are going to listen to him and he'll get an increased revenue and audience.

And that's going to make people even angrier

on the woke side.

Yeah.

The days of, and if you think about it, Victor, Jimmy the Greek, right?

That's quite, that might be 30 years ago when that happened.

But yeah, you were, you're right.

You were, there was nowhere to go.

You were canceled and unemployable.

Look at Howard Kosell.

Remember he said to a receiver, look at that little monkey go.

I thought that was awful to say.

I don't know if he meant it in the racial context, but that he was done after that.

Right.

They got him off football very soon.

And Jimmy the Greek, they got off.

And, you know, it's it's because of the university critical race theory and its embryonic form said that people in marginalized community can't be racist and therefore they can't be held to the same standards.

It gives us an Al Sharpton.

So an Al Sharpton was on television blasting Scott Abdens, who said, tell those people, tell them Jews to put on their yarmica and come over here if they want to fight.

Or

dem homos in Greece, we were building the pyramids and we had Reverend Wright said, they won't let me talk to Obama.

Dim Jews have got him and there's a Jewish weapon and goddamn America and all that stuff is okay.

And so, I mean, we wrote an article not too long ago.

I just went through it.

The New York psychiatrist that went to Yale and said she dreams of shooting white people.

Ellie Mostel, I mentioned there was a New York Times columnist that said that whites were responsible for most of all of the ecological disasters, every bad thing there was.

They were toxic and lethal to people.

And

the point is they all had in common generalizations and stereotypes where there were no individuals.

They were just an anonymous collective and they were all pathological.

And

it's okay.

But at some point,

if that's okay, it's like what the hip-hop industry is doing to the end market.

You're going to have to keep what the hip-hop,

what they're going to say is

then the African-American leadership is going to have to say when Sonny Haustin gets on television to a multi-million person audience and says Republican women voting for Trump are like bugs that want to go to get sprayed by RAID, i.e.

the chemical genocidal simile, or Whoopi Colward dismisses the Holocaust as a bunch of white people fighting.

And that's okay, and they get a slight slap on the wrist, then because there's only one standard, one way that's not universal, it's not sustainable.

It's not sustainable.

And the same thing with the N-word.

If you are in the rap music or you're in the NBA and you say that we have a self-proprietary ownership of this word and we're going to use it in our own particular usage, but all you ignorant people out there cannot emulate us, then it's not sustainable.

They should not use that word.

And they do.

And they feel that it gives them greater authenticity.

The richer they get, the more removed they are from the inner city, the more they become suspect that they sold out.

So the more they to fabricate pseudo-authenticity, they use ghetto language like ho and the n-word.

Well, Victor, we've uh we've gone a long time on these two topics, but we still have to get to one more thing.

And uh,

who am I to tell you how long you can talk or not talk?

I'm over.

No, no, no, but we want, no, no, no.

I want to let our listeners know that Victor has been digging a ditch and he's found things.

And we'll get his take on this right after

this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis.

Hansen Show, Victor's official website.

You've heard this before, unless this is the first time you're listening to this podcast.

Well, there is a thing called VictorHanson.com.

And that's the brand name there is the Blade of Perseus.

I heard Sammy say that the other day, and I feel negligent, Victor, that

I've never said that.

I've just given the web address, but the blade of Perseus, Victorhansen.com.

Why should you go?

Because that's where everything that Victor writes, and I do mean everything, can be found.

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thank you for those who have signed up.

Victor, you've written a piece for

The Blade of Perseus, Agrarian Archaeology.

And as a classics major and an expert, you did indeed get to engage in some true archaeology of a classical nature when you were studying.

But as a farmer, there's a lot of digging that goes into your life too.

And you would digging up some land lately, and you've come across something.

It's a beautiful piece that it's part of the ultra pieces.

But tell us what you came across.

Well, you know, when I was a graduate student in classics, often people take a year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and you learn topography, geography, epigraphy, but also archaeology.

So I had a sojourn in ancient Corinth, and I was with other students and marvelous professor Charles Williams, Nancy Bukides.

And we dug.

And one of the things you notice, Jack, is when you start,

you see 20 at the first six inches is stuff that people drop and it gets, you know, rained on mud and then

dust and it gets impacted and it's about three inches and that's her candy wrappers that are plastic or plastic bags and you go down six inches and you start to see metal things from the World War II or even the early and then you go down a foot and you get into glass and trash so you can tell the by the level

what society and in classical terms you go basically Byzantine and then Roman and then classical Greek and then Archaic Greek and then Mycenaean.

And each time you get to a layer, you get thinner and thinner.

You know what I mean?

Fewer artifacts.

And that tells you about how old the civilization is and when it appeared.

You don't really get before Mycenaean, maybe Neolithic in some place.

Well, I always had the same idea, but when I came back home,

I noticed that over the last 40 years that I pulled out maybe three or four plots with vines, and Thompson Cedar's vine will go down 18, 20 feet.

You knock over a huge walnut tree or a Santa Rosa plum trees, it'll leave a huge crater, maybe five to eight feet deep.

Or you drill a well

or

you do post holes for vineyard posts for the wire to be wrapped around.

That'll go down six feet.

Or you're digging trenches.

I've been digging a lot of trenches lately because I rewired my home and I got rid of all the overhead electrical stuff.

And the old, old trenches were not, not, they just had wire buried.

You know, that was very common in the 60s and 50s and 30s.

And I tried to rewire it and put conduit.

My point is that there's, I would find, and I just did a sewer line myself.

I helped dig it to an annex.

And I found the first top level reminded me of 30 years ago when my children were small.

There were little toys like a.

a plastic soldier and you might find his arm or a doorknob off a house that my daughter was made of porcelain.

She used to play with.

She'd pull it out.

I found it.

And then when I get lower,

maybe two feet, I start to find things from the 19th century of my grandparents.

So I saw horseshoes and I've seen bits and pieces from bridles.

And then when I got down to a little lower, I saw my great-grandfather and the 1880s.

The 90s, I actually found about 30 years ago a hubcap to a wagon wheel.

And I didn't know what it was.

I had a guy working for me the other day, and he found something when we were digging.

And he went on the internet and

identified it as a 19th century type of tool that people used to sharpen tools and to measure things, calipers, and two of these things.

And I had no idea what they were.

And on and on.

And then a funny thing happens, Jack.

And sometimes you see, I found, you know, skeletons, like somebody shot a coyote and buried it in 1880, or somebody shot a rabbit or something like that.

But right around three feet, two to three feet, nothing.

In other words, you go down four feet, five feet, it's pure.

It's pristine.

And that tells me there was nobody here before they came in 1870.

And everybody said, well, there was Native Americans and you stole upon them.

Yes, but there was nobody in the San Joaquin Valley.

It was 110 in August.

There was no water.

There were no dams.

There was no pine flat, Millerton Lake.

There's no irrigation.

That was all created in 1890 to 1910.

I can remember my grandfather telling me that even though he was born in 1890 in the house here, that his grandmother, Luciana Davis, told him that when they got here, that was she and her sons, which was my grandfather's father, Cyrus Davis.

There was nothing,

just hillsides hillsides of Lupin.

And there was a little Artesian pond.

And that's why they settled here.

They bought it for $4 from the railroad, which was about a mile and a half away.

And they got these sections free from the government.

And they sold it for $4.

If you improved it, you had about 20 years, I think, to improve it.

And they could come back and check.

And if you didn't improve it, you had to sell it back.

Of course, they had a lot of riots and killing.

As we know from Frank Norris's octopus, who wrote about an incident, not very, the muscle slew slaughter, a tragedy right down the road from me.

But my point is,

there was nobody here.

There were no Mono Indians.

They were up in the mountains.

There were no Tulare Indians.

They were down to the south along the Tulare Lake.

So it's really unique to think that you can dig here.

And you can see the history of your own family in one place through six generations.

But then when you get down to the next layer, you don't find anything.

Nothing.

I don't find Spanish bits.

I don't find bullets.

I don't find coins.

When I go down, I don't find stoneware or pottery from Native American.

Nothing.

I've never found anything.

Very few people could say what you're saying.

So there's got to be, even though you're the fifth or sixth generation, there's got to be some pride in that and that your family came here.

And

would it be wrong to say tame the land?

Am I going to get in trouble?

Oh, no, yeah.

I mean, that's what I always think of that because

I get really tired of this white privilege stuff and

of my generation that everybody of a particular group is a victim and everybody's a victim.

When I used to walk around as seven or eight years old, I'd see the mosquito abatement come in.

And, you know, those are districts where they have the right to come on your property and they have a tank of oil and they spray every standing water.

And I'd say, God, Grandpa, why do they just come in here and spray everything?

He said, boys, I want to tell you that when I was a little boy, my father got malaria and his mother got typhus.

And that was very dangerous out here.

And boy, when we got them.

And then I said, well, why do, why does the county dog licensing officer, they just come in and check our dogs and they check to see if we have license?

It's none of their business.

He said, boys, when I was a little boy in 1896, there was a rabid dog that got loose and it bit two people and they got rabies.

And then I'd say, oh my gosh, I didn't know that.

And then I'd say,

wow, why are these ditch tenders, these communal ditches?

We have communal ditches, but they're underground now.

But when I was a little boy, they were above ground and underground.

But the ditch tender was a man of principle and authority, and he could come in and make sure that you only took the water down one foot for 24 hours, you know, for each acre of land you had in this complicated, and it was shared.

You didn't cheat.

And I said, Why does he have so much power?

And he said, Boys, when I was 10 years old in downtown, I saw a running gun battle between a man that opened the gate when it wasn't his turn, the other farmer, and he named the names.

I can't say them because they were prominent families where I live, or at least the name is.

There's named parks around.

And he

told him that he was going to get him.

And he shot with a shotgun.

And the other man shot back, and he chased him down the street and killed him.

So after that, we had ditch tenders.

They're very important.

They're an element of civilization.

So, yeah,

I had an oral history and he had diaries of every year of his work.

I have 50 of them.

And it's a very different, it's a window into a whole different world.

That's why Victor, in some of those movies, like Shane, which we've talked about a lot, you have to have a little sympathy for the family that came out, the guys that came out.

We tamed the land.

We came out here.

We risked our lives.

And now you guys have to.

I remember that

my grandmother, one time

she was 82 and she burped and vomited.

I thought, oh, that's so gross.

I was 10.

And my grandfather said, your grandmother was the most beautiful woman in the world.

She was born in 1890.

We got married in 1911.

And then she got an

esophagus infection.

And it rotted her esophagus out.

And there was no way to cure it, boys.

So we had to take a long syringe, about two feet.

And when I moved back in after being at graduate school, I found it in an old cupboard jacket.

It was a ball, you know, those syringe ball things.

And

the nibble on it was about two feet long.

And he would smash up food and then squirt it going right into her stomach.

And then he said that when she had her first child, my aunt, she ruptured her appendix.

And they didn't know what to do.

They couldn't operate.

I mean, they couldn't theory, but she was out in the country and they just palliative treatment.

They kept her in ice in her head.

And after three months, her fever broke and her body formed a cyst around it.

And that cyst didn't break until she was, I can remember when it broke.

And then she had bowel cancer and bowel obstructions.

But he was trying to tell me that

life for me in 1963 was heaven.

And we had no idea of the disease and the death and destruction they witnessed to come out of nowhere from Missouri in 1870, right out of the Civil War, when they were kind of fighting.

They were northerners and they came to get away from that intersectional violence after the war.

And his grandfather had died.

His grandmother came.

They had three boys and they lived.

And we had the house, Jack.

I'll just finish on this.

It was 600 square feet, 600 square feet.

And it was down from this big house.

Right.

And

it had a wood floor, but it was made out of,

the roof, it was made of bark, bark, from trees.

And the side was not lumber.

It was just, they did themselves some eucalyptus.

And eucalyptus is not a building material.

It was just, so it was a bunch of these half-round logs for siding.

And then they had bark shingles.

And then they used can openers, you know, the round can openers to plug in all the holes.

So there were all these metal things that were nailed.

And then it was.

The interior was plastered with newspaper and I guess starch and sugar, kind of like paper mache.

And so I would go in there as a little boy and I'd look at these things from 1910 and 12 and read the wallpaper.

And it fell over.

And I think 1984, it just, it just fell.

We should have restored it, but it just fell over.

We were digging a well and the well collapsed and we went, we went and got a guy, a big rig to blow it out.

And all the sand thing went down the hill and knocked it over.

But God, they lived like that.

That's considered a tiny house.

You know, you see these shows, tiny houses, 600 square foot.

Mamba Mia.

You know, I got all these really weird stories when I was a little boy and said, oh,

1916, that's when we got the

pump was electrified.

And we didn't have enough money to hook it up to the house, but we had a pump for the ag.

And then 1939, we got rid of the windmill on the water tank and we

put the house and we had a water inside.

We got rid of the pump and the sink.

You know that in 1932, 3028, we got a septic tank.

We built it ourselves.

We had one indoor toilet and everything was a monumental advance

from

barbarism.

Violence, cheating, death, destruction.

And it was very incremental.

So when I go down

the road,

and this will be controversial, and I see

30 dogs in a,

I see an old farmhouse with maybe three Winnebagos outside and five Lean Twos and 50 people living there, mostly illegal residents.

And I see 30 or 40 dogs, and I've been bit by one, and there's no licensing, no rabies, and I see standing water.

We're in a big rain right now, and I see standing water.

all over because the people are not draining it and that's an incubator of mosquitoes.

Or I I see no building codes, no building inspector.

I see Romex just strung like without conduit, just strung from Winnebago to Winnebago from the main house.

Or I see port-a-potties all strung out.

I say this is civilization in reverse.

It's not incremental.

It's rapid.

And I think everybody realizes the work of civilization is very slow.

and incremental.

The destruction of civilization is very rapid.

Even if you disagree with an act, you should know that the care to create the statue of Stonewall Jackson, whatever you think of him,

and the pedestal and all that, was a lot of work.

And the effort to destroy it in one day and just take it out at night, lift it off is very easy to do.

It's very hard to build a federal courthouse.

It's very easy to torture it.

And so that's what I don't, I think these iconoclasts, these statue destroyers,

they should realize that they're the work of anti-civilization.

Well, Victor,

we're out of time, except to say thanks to our listeners, no matter what platform they listen to the Victor Davis Hanson show.

And

if you do listen on iTunes or Apple Podcasts.

you can leave a rating zero stars five stars somebody somebody left one star the other day i don't know.

They're belly aching about something.

Well, it's, hey, that's their right.

But most people leave for five stars.

Probably I'm speaking too long.

No, no.

Victor, Victor, you can't speak enough.

I know there are people that actually

at CPAC,

number of people came up to me.

Someone actually, are you, are you...

Victor Davis Hansen's Jack Fowler.

I'm like, yeah.

By the way, nobody's ever going to say,

are you Jack Fowler's Victor Davis Hansen?

I hear it all the time.

I hear compliments of both you and Sammy all the time.

Sari, of course, Sari.

Oh, I heard something.

I haven't told Sammy this.

I heard a person at, I spoke, I was at the Bradley board meeting in Flagstaff.

I'm a member of the board, and a stranger came up and said, I love your podcast, but why are you so condescending and mean to Sammy?

You just don't take her serious.

I said, I do.

No, no, you don't.

Be nicer to Sammy.

All right.

Nice getting a lecture.

Hey, I have to mention, I'm going to read a comment that somebody left, but that reminds me at CPAC, just a terrific lady, Patricia McLoyne, who works for this place called, I'm probably not saying it right, Doc, Doc Emet Productions.

And they have a, they have a

a documentary coming out.

It's called Civilization, the Danger Zone by Gloria Greenfield.

And you weren't.

I was in that, yeah.

Yeah.

So she was a big fan of yours and of the show.

So that's Doc Emmett Productions.

And also some, I just want to say

to Patrick, Shane, and Nora, who were big fans also.

I said I'd mention their names.

So I did.

Anyway, Victor,

B.

Bubba writes this on

Apple.

Like Rush for me.

Quote, in the early 90s, I got off work around noon one day and found Rush Limbaugh on the radio.

It was the first time anyone on the radio was saying exactly what I was thinking.

Listening to Mr.

Hansen was the second time.

Thanks for sticking your neck out for us, B.

Bubba.

Be Bubba, you're welcome.

Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared today.

And thanks for listening, folks.

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

Bye-bye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.