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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Victor Davis Hansen is the star and namesake.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor's back from a little

trip straight from the airport to the microphone, justthenews.com.

That's our happy home on the internet.

As ever, a lot to talk about.

And Victor, a little dicey here.

I'd like us to begin talking about or me asking you about, you

addressing the issue of Jimmy Carter, who, as we speak, is in hospice.

He will, as we all will, pass away, but he is expected to pass away soon.

I don't know if it's days or weeks, but there's been a lot of outpouring, overwrought praise of this man.

And, Victor, I'd like to get your thoughts on that.

And

Raul Dahl, the revising of his children's books, and many other subjects.

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we're back with the victor davis hansen show so victor i'd like to springboard off of a piece of writing by andy ferguson

my old colleague uh at national review long long time ago andy's just one of the best writers out there he used to have uh he used to be a regular writer for many years for the weekly standard before it went under i I don't know if you may know Andy or not, Victor.

Yes, I know Andy.

I like Andy a lot.

He's just a good man.

So here's what he wrote the other day for the Washington Free Beacon, and it's about Jimmy Carter.

And bear with me in that, Victor, if you give your thoughts.

He writes: We human beings often react this way when we catch ourselves doing something that's in poor taste or otherwise undignified.

We break wind in a reception line, we tell a dirty joke with an earshot of a toddler, and then, and in our mortification, we turn on the motor mouth.

Hovering ghoulishly over the deathbed of a celebrated stranger for endless days, as members of our nation's press corps are doing, waiting for him to hurry up and croak already, and wandering the streets of his tiny hometown to find a resident who hadn't yet been interviewed half a dozen times by the BBC, is one of those circumstances of cringing self-embarrassment.

So we blather, we talk balls, we say anything to fill the silence that might call attention to the shabbiness of what we're doing.

We say things like, oh, I don't know, like Jimmy Carter moves humanity forward every single day, or maybe that he had the sweetest and best parts of our character.

We might even describe Jimmy Carter as probably the most intelligent, hardworking, and decent man to have occupied the Oval Office in the 20th century.

End quote.

Victor, personally, I'm sure Jimmy Carter is a nice guy, whatever, but I think he was a terrible president.

I think he was a terrible ex-president.

I think he facilitated a lot of anti-Semitic talk over the years in his ex-presidency, but he's being lauded as one of the greatest Americans of all time

as he's dying.

Victor, your thoughts, please.

Well, he personally, he led an exemplary life.

He was long married to one woman.

He worked for Habitat for Humanity.

Remember all those pictures of him with his blue work shirt and hammering away.

And,

you know, he said he'd never lied to us.

And when he did lust, he only lusted in his heart.

He told us about pretty women.

So, I mean, but that aside,

he did some things.

Well, if you go to his presidency, no matter what he says, it was an utter failure.

He managed, he gave us stagflation, that idea of high inflation and negative or almost flat economic growth.

We had the energy crisis under him again.

We had high, oh my gosh, high interest rates

and nothing worked.

And then we had the Middle East problem where the Camp David Accords was sort of okay, didn't solve the problem.

But from then on,

he favored the Arab nations and detested Israel.

So he couldn't stand Menachem Begin and he let that be known.

And then the Carter Center that he raised with a lot of Middle East money, he said that Israel, as I recall, was an apartheid state, which it isn't.

And if you don't believe that, go to Israel and go up by the Sea of Galilee and see how the Arab citizens of Israel live and elect people to the Knesset.

They made a prime minister before Netanyahu in the last

election before last, that party, the Arab party.

And you compare that to the way way blacks were treated in South Africa, and that's a travesty to even make that comparison.

So, his presidency was failed.

He said he had an inordinate fear of communism.

And when he came over, came into power, he was going to stop the Cold War rhetoric.

He threatened to bring all the troops on from South Korea, etc.

And it didn't take long

that the Russians went into Afghanistan in 1980, and we had the Iranian hostages.

And of course, they let them go

on the last day of his, I mean, they kept them until the first day of Donald Reagan's presence.

He, being sort of a narcissist, felt that it was directed to punish him.

It really wasn't.

That might have been a side benefit for the theocracy, but it was really because they were in utter fear of Ronald Reagan, because they knew he would do something differently than

did Jimmy Carter, which was nothing.

And then

he had a mean streak in him.

Remember, he said he was going to kick Ted Kennedy's ass.

And he had this bad habit of presidents, both Democratic and Republican.

Remember Bill Clinton and George W.

Bush?

That 16 years.

He couldn't be out of the limelight.

He had to show everybody that he was moral and he was upright and he was sanctimonious and self-righteous.

And he had a great presidency and you didn't believe it.

So he was going to be a citizen.

He was the first globalist

of the modern era.

And he toured the company, but he had this propensity that whenever a particular president, he didn't like Bill Clinton any more than he did George W.

Bush.

And by the way, he said, we talk about election denialists.

He said that Donald Trump was illegitimate.

Everybody remember that?

I'll say it again.

He said he was an illegitimate president in 2016.

And he denied the legitimacy of the 2016.

And he bought into the Russian collusion, which was a very amoral thing to do.

There was was no evidence for it other than the venom that he held for Trump.

But then the point is that when you have these presidents, and I'm just mentioning this because the left always talks about the Logan Act, the ossified inert 18th century law that's never successfully prosecuted anybody, but they used it against Michael Flynn.

But he, if there is such a thing, he violated

as a private citizen because

every time Bill Clinton wanted to do anything with North Korea, he went over to North Korea and started to do his own diplomacy.

And we had the problems with Iran.

He went over to Iran.

And when George W.

Bush, I can remember when it was Katrina, he was down there attacking the president of the United States.

for his handling of Katrina.

So what he did in his post-presidency was to set himself off against the current president and said, these are politicians.

These are people who believe in real.

I am a moralist and I'm going to be a citizen of the world and above all that.

But he sure didn't do that as president.

He was very concerned.

He was very concerned about his reputation himself, but he was a micromanager.

So he ended up not being able to get any economic policy that would stop inflation or encourage economic growth.

He did deregulate the airlines, which was great for a while, but I just got off a flight and it looked like a zoo on that flight, I can tell you.

And

at the airports, it just looks-I mean, I'm not sure that that was such a good thing

in retrospect.

But

he was a failure in foreign policy, was a failure on the domestic front.

Are you talking about Joe Biden?

Well,

in all fairness to Jimmy Carter, he was a better man and a better president than Joe Biden.

Joe Biden, I think you can argue, is the worst president of the 21st and 20th centuries.

Worst by far.

And what's striking about Joe Biden is I hear this, I turn on the television sometimes and I channel serve to see what the opposition is saying, or I look at oppositional mainstream media

and they say things, well, Joe Biden had a string of accomplishments.

He built back better.

He got the inflation.

Well, these are all just borrowed money,

stupid things.

They didn't do anything.

They were just channeling money for identity politics projects or green projects,

but they haven't done anything.

He's done nothing.

And Jimmy Carter, I mean,

Jimmy Carter should thank Joe Biden because until Joe Biden came along, he was our worst president.

And now Joe Biden has inherited that mantle from him.

So it's a mixed bag.

He was a man of faith.

He was a good family man.

He followed the law.

He didn't try to cash in and as ex-president too much.

He raised a lot of money, as I said, for the Middle East for his Carter Center,

which is sort of a sinecure for his friends.

But compared to, that was a misdemeanor to compare to what most ex-presidents do.

And look at Barack Obama and Netflix and all of this stuff that he's doing.

So,

but

as a politician, as a statesman, as a president, he was an utter failure, and he had a mean streak in him.

And that came out with his poorly controlled attacks on Israel, kind of on Jews, too.

I don't know where he got that, but the idea that calling Israelis

synonymous with South Africans was really a low blow.

I can't forget that.

I just thought that was one of the worst things.

He had people who resigned from the Carter Center, but as a whole.

His reputation for being the

great

creator of Middle East peace, which I think is a joke, but it may be one of the many reasons he can't stand Donald Trump.

But Donald Trump really was the instigator of Middle East peace.

Well, Donald Trump really did do something that all of his sanctimonious and highfalo-ey verbiage could not do, bring Israel and the Arabs together.

And Donald Trump, being a realist, went to them both and said, Look at this Iranian theocracy.

I can't figure out whether they hate you, Saudis, or you, Israelis, more, but your enemy of your enemy is your friend.

And you've got to settle this thing.

And

you settle it and bind up your wounds, and I will get rid of Barack Obama's insane diplomacy that tried to

favor Hezbollah, Hamas,

the Assad dynasty, and Iran, and some stupid, you know, Shia

crescent from the Mediterranean all the way up to Tehran and balance the moderate Arabs and Israelis.

And he did jump that.

And then, of course, Joe Biden, because he has

Obama holdovers, Lincoln, Sultan, all those people, they're resurrecting that Iranian policy, even though Iran is now firmly in the Russian-Chinese camp.

And one of the things,

just on a tangent, one of the things of the fallout, unfortunately, from this Ukrainian war, the Stalingrad or Verdun, is we've created, as I said, a new axis of China, Russia,

North Korea, Iran, Turkey, and probably India.

And Iran is in a much, and then, of course, Biden and Obama dropped the arms restrictions.

I think that was in Obama's last year.

And Biden kept that restriction,

that easing.

So they're selling arms to Russia now.

There's no international embargo of their arms market.

And they're a big arms country now.

They're building a plant in Russia to manufacture under Russian license, on Iranian license, drones.

And then, of course, the same left-wing appeasing attitude always has consequences because you you remember, was it 2000, 2011 when we lost a big drone that went down in Iran, and everybody from Dick Cheney to some, you know, some other people who were Democrats said, blow the damn thing up.

And he didn't do it.

He said that would be too provocative, Obama said.

And they took that drone and engineered it, reverse-engineered it.

And suddenly, they're a major drone

producer.

And so

this carryover of Carter, Clinton,

Obama, Biden,

it's very predictable about the appeasing nature

of this mindset.

And

I'm not saying that the Afghanistan war or the Iraq war were models of conservative diplomacy, but I'm just saying that

when these guys get in power, they're therapeutic and they're not tragic, and our enemies become emboldened, and they try to take advantage of this.

And then the correction is very dangerous, and that's where we are today.

I mean, that India could be thought of as an alliance with China.

It's just, I can't.

Oh, it is.

I mean, yeah.

I mean, India is saying, wait a minute, I got the Russians on my left hand, and I've got the Chinese on my right, and I've had border disputes, and this is a very dangerous dangerous part of the world.

And I'm going to get cheap oil from Russia, and I can sell them stuff at three times the price, weapons, and the Chinese are going to give me, we're no longer going to have a fight with the Chinese.

And I'm not going to get any more, Modi's not going to get any more moral lessons and moral lectures and sermons from the United States about human rights and all of this shortcoming.

He said, I'll take it.

And so he's taking it.

Yeah.

And that's that's the problem with the Obama-Biden nexus.

You start, then the people around him, you start lecturing people how they have to be more moral and more ethical, and they've got to respect LGBTQ and fly the flag,

the LGBQT, whatever it is in Kabul, get the George Floyd murals, get the gender studies at the University of Kabul program.

culturally imperialistic to the T.

And then you wonder why these people think that you're imperialistic.

And the left doesn't understand that, that there's nothing, nothing worse than to lecture somebody.

And everybody knows that who's listening from your own life.

There's somebody to lecture you who's weak.

And you'd rather deal with somebody who doesn't say a word and is tough than someone who's a loudmouth, self-righteous sermonizer then doesn't follow through, just like Obama.

If they move, if I get wind that they're moving that

around that's a red line oh yeah sure mr obam yeah

it's it's just by nature you know it's an attempt to cover up an inadequacy so yeah it is and that's joe biden to the also to the t the whole you know corn pop saga and the tough man joe when a reporter asks him that's stupid or no lie or

you can bet on it i'm not kidding or you know when i was this and i was there and i was doing this i'll take donald trump behind that gym and beat him up that's all just verbiage that's poorly masked as insecurity

hey victor one of the jimmy carter little thing you know he did have although it didn't happen until closer to the election year but he did have a a fight on his hands with the aforementioned

uh ted kennedy

um

there's no one other than I think marianne williamson who who was one of the you know 900 candidates for president last year and is

not a politician, announcing on the Democrat side,

there's no one yet who I may be reading the wrong newspapers.

No one seems to be making any signs of being the Ted Kennedy

of 2024.

You're not.

seeing anything yourself, are you?

No, remember, remember he said, I'll kick his ass.

And then what happened to Ted Kennedy was he was the least gifted of the three.

He was the most dissolute.

And that's saying a lot, given the lives of Bobby and JFK, but he was the most dissolute and had the least control of his growing appetites.

Ted Kennedy.

But he was on that, and I remember this very clearly.

And correct me if I'm wrong, if I've got the names wrong, but Roger Mudd had an interview with him and said, Why do you want to be president?

And he just looked like a deer in the headlights.

And he was basically saying, by his inability to ask that basic question of any candidate,

I don't know.

I'm a Kennedy.

I'm supposed to do this.

If it hadn't been for Chappaquittic, I would have been president.

But when he came in, and then there were stories about the Carters, I think, promoted a lot.

Remember, the whole Chapaquittic story started to come back again.

And that period that had been the news had been smothered, we learned even more gruesome details 20 years or so post facto.

It was pretty damning.

And

he was a poor campaigner, and he gave kind of a good swan-song speech at the convention, you know.

And that was the end of Ted Kennedy as a national candidate.

And Carter was ahead.

People should remember that.

I've been dismissing him, but in 1980, and correct me if I'm wrong, you go back to the polls in February, March.

He's running ahead of Ronald Reagan four or five points.

And the media doubled down on Reagan.

They said, you know, he's a governor.

He's lost two ties.

He didn't do well.

And when he ran against Nixon in 68, he came back in 76 and Ford beat him out.

He has no foreign policy experience.

He's dangerous.

He's just a Southern California creation of oil money and Hollywood.

He's an actor.

They had it down really tough on Reagan.

And then all of a sudden, Reagan's, you know, tough policies.

All of a sudden, in 1980, Carter's imploding economy and Reagan's one debate where he said, there you go again,

he just suddenly just surged.

And the same thing happened, believe it or not, in 84.

We were still dealing with the Carter legacy and Paul Voeekler had, I remember

going into the production credit office in Fresno, Kingsburg, California, and being told, well, Mr.

Hansen, we've approved your loan, and

it's a wonderful loan.

It's 13%.

And B of A was loaning at 15%.

And that was what Paul Vaucler was trying to break inflation.

And then Walter Mondale was ahead of Reagan in the poll.

And then all of a sudden, I think somewhere between April and October, the economy grew at a per annual rate of about 7%.

Right.

It's morning.

It's morning in America.

Yeah.

The tax cuts, the tax cuts kicked in, and the economy grew and all of the left shrill stuff.

Oh, this is the age of greed.

Everybody.

And then he just wiped out Mondale as he had, more so than he had Carter.

It shows you something that

democratic appeal to this is a racist, unfair.

country and the fat cats are oppressing everybody.

It's very effective.

And when you have such a stark contrast between a gifted leader like Reagan and a mediocrity like Carter and a nice mediocrity like Mondale and a good record that Reagan had,

it's still surprising that the left can do so well.

Well, Victor,

we're going to talk in a few minutes about Raul Dahl and what's been going on with the woke application to some of the more

important and popular children's literature of the last half century.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor,

Rauldahl.

I'm not the biggest fan of his because he was married to, oh, what was the actress's name?

Patricia Neal.

Patricia Neal, right?

I love Patricia Neal.

I did too.

She was so good in HUD as this long-suffering

woman that HUD kind of treated really terribly, the older woman.

Yeah, she was in the fountainhead.

She was really good.

She was really good.

She had an affair during the filming about with Gary Cooper.

He had an abortion.

Yeah, and he broke her heart.

Yeah, she should say something that's really obscene, but I go ahead.

I read a thing where she was asked to comment on Gary Cooper.

It was either her or one of his many.

And she said, he is hung like a horse and he can go all night.

Well,

I know that my father told me that when I was about 20 because he loved Gary Cooper.

Yeah, I said,

I was watching High New with my dad.

He said, That guy, the women loved him, Victor.

He was hung like a horse.

He could go all night.

And don't take it from me.

How would I know?

But he would, it was funny, really funny.

I like the word.

I really like Coop.

Yeah, he was terrific, terrific actor.

Well, anyway, I, my, I, I, Raul Dahl

kind of treated

Patricia Neal like crap, especially after she had, she

a very famous stroke where she was truly incapacitated.

That was when she was like, I never figured that out.

She was 40-something in her 40s, right?

And she was pregnant and she had a stroke, and everybody said she was, she was, had facial paralysis.

She was all through, but then she lived for like 40 years.

Right.

And he divorced her, I think, as I recall.

I think so.

But and kind of mistreated her, but he did.

She didn't.

But still,

he's a Scandinavian.

we all are oh

he's a normal i think he was norwegian from a norwegian family that grew up in britain his parents wanted him to go to english school so they stayed there

when his dad died he was pretty wealthy his father was very wealthy grew up wealthy and then his when his dad died i just used to read my kids liked his books right and i would they were kind of dark though i mean they were they were

dash uh and he wrote some of those uh alfred Hitchcock Tonight episodes, you know, I think even one or two.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, The Twilight Zone.

But

he

made a lot of money.

He inherited money, but he made a lot more money.

He was really, I mean, incredible.

I mean, just from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which most people, if they haven't heard of it or read it, it's Willy Wonka.

So just from that alone,

Phil Bank coffers.

I know.

And he got very angry at that film and disassociated himself and never sold another book during his lifetime.

But he was kind of, he was, I think, what was his cachet was, as I said to Sammy, she mentioned it,

he was a master stylist.

If you look at how he wrote, it was Tolkien-esque.

I mean, he really was a master of language, almost like Lewis Carroll.

He made up words.

And I said that to Sammy.

And I think that's what was so shocking.

about these mental midgets that post facto would dare

change his prose because that was besides his characterization and plot, that was one of his trademarks.

Right.

These people have no talent, and they're going in there and changing fat and women and all this crazy stuff.

And they're just they want his money, they want to sell the stuff, and they don't, as I said, they don't have enough courage to back off and say, you know what, I find this language atrocious.

So you

random house, Puffin, or whoever, you take that.

We're going to, we're going to give it to Hashed, or maybe they are Hashed.

Hashed owns everything, but we're going to give it to another publisher.

You deal with it.

But no, they don't do that.

They wait till the guy's dead and then they go on the latest fad because they think they're going to increase sales, but they won't lose sales.

Yeah, which brings up a larger question.

I think everybody is,

you know, I was at the airport

and

at a Bradley Foundation,

you know, the philanthropy board meeting, and I had four or five people came up, and they all said the same thing

with almost the same language.

Are you Mr.

Hansen?

I said, yeah.

And the only reason they wanted to know was this was what they wanted to know.

And they wanted to, it wasn't just me.

They wanted, they asked of everybody, apparently, when is this woke-nuttiness going to end, you think?

When are we going to get back?

And

I would say, well, we had COVID and then we had the crazy lockdown.

And that was the incubator or the embryo for this latent virus, this politically correct stuff of the 90s.

And it took off in that environment.

And it's going to, but I'm getting the impression now when you and I talked about the Stanford, remember the harmful word list?

Right.

And I think in our former colleagues,

there's an article about the snitching aspect of it, that they were going to, what, rat out people who use the wrong words like American or something?

Well, we, I had that lined up for another podcast, but we could bring that up now.

This is at Stanford University.

Um, this has just emerged.

Go ahead, Victor.

You go ahead.

You go ahead because you were the one that was going to, that you, I can't claim credit for it, and I'm there at Stanford.

I knew about the word list.

Right.

Tell it, tell our audience what they were doing about the enforcement aspect of it.

Yeah, let let me just, here's a story from National Review.

I'll just read these first three paragraphs.

A group of Stanford University, this I'm from National Review, and the writer is Jeff Zamari.

A group of Stanford University professors are pushing to end a system that allows students to anonymously report their peers for discrimination or bias.

The inciting incident was a, quote, protected identity harm, end quote, report.

Can you believe our colleges have these freaking systems?

Filed to Stanford last month against a student who was photographed reading Mein Kampf.

This reporting mechanism is Stanford's system to address incidents where a student or community member feels attacked due to their identity.

Faculty members didn't even know this system existed until a report was published by Stanford student newspaper.

I was stunned, said Russell Berman, a professor of comparative literature.

More than 75 professors have signed a petition to investigate freedom of speech and academic freedom at stanford with a view to ending the bias reporting system victor before you comment and i wonder how many of those 75 professors also people who signed up for on on things to attack you and nile ferguson and scott atlas we can figure that out i don't know but i know that uh russell berman

who was a former,

I want to be very careful about the title.

I think he's associate dean, but he's a wonderful person.

He's a Hoover fellow.

He's a German professor, and he was a traditional classical liberal who, over the years at Stanford, had a distinguished career, he saw where this woke was going, and he's been a very brave critic.

And when Scott Atlas, I always bring this up, so I don't want to beat a dead horse, but when Scott Atlas was under fire, Russell, along with John Cochran, was about the only person that I know of, except, you know, Jay Bachari and those guys, but non-medical person that spoke up on his behalf.

So he's so he's

been very brave.

And some of those 75 people I know, and I've talked to some, and I won't, just one or two.

And pretty much they say the following.

And I think this is important for everybody here because

we are losing these major universities.

We're about to, remember, we were into affirmative action and we were into political correctness, but the force multiplier was the virus, the lockdown, the George Floyd, the 120 days of unchecked rioting, looting, arson, and death.

You put all of that soup stuff together and you get what we have now.

And what one of them was saying was:

if you are into the third year

of repertory admissions

and you are letting in people, as I said before in this podcast to you, Jack, that by your own standards did not meet the criterion that you established.

Nobody put a gun to Stanford's head in 2000 to take an arbitrary year, 16, that you wanted to admit people that had 1600 SAT combined scores or 4.4.

But they did.

It was very selective.

So did Harvard.

So did Yet.

That was their standards.

Now they were hypocritical, of course.

They had some affirmative action, they had athletes, they had legacies, but they established their, and they were proud how many people they still are about rejecting.

But then for them to take those very standards and to destroy them and say, you know what, they don't matter.

They were racist.

We didn't know what we were doing.

We weren't inclusionary enough.

Now we understand.

So we're going to be repertory.

We're going to be compensatory.

We're going to let people in.

We're not going to, you know what?

We're not going to even

require the SAT.

That is racist.

So they've done this, Jack, for three years.

And when you start to look at the so-called white minority admissions at these universities, Stanford, it's 26, 24, 22%.

Well, did you see the new numbers just came out on that?

On Stanford?

Yeah, I did.

It is.

You were right, though.

It is 22%.

The

class of 2026 are white males.

Yes, and what they do is they count mixed race.

Many people who are Latino or African-American check mixed race so that that doesn't look like they have a large, larger number of Latinos.

But if you put the mixed race in with Latino black, it's huge.

The percentages, much larger than the percentages in the population.

Then Asians, you know, they're so afraid to be sued.

They are now allowing Asians to be somewhat overrepresented demographically, but still, in terms of

quality of the admittance application,

underrepresented.

But my point is: this: if you do this, then you have to make admission synonymous with graduation.

Because, as one person said to me, I have two choices.

I either water down the curriculum, so it's like a baby class,

or

I inflate the grades and I give people for C, for

F work, I give them C's and for C work, I give them B's and for B work, I give them A's.

And that's generous.

And if I don't do that, I die on the altar of standards.

If I have standards, then these snitches will go look at my grading patterns.

and think that I am systemically racist because a larger number of people, quote unquote, who are marginalized are not doing well in my class because I have quote unquote white heterosexual male privileged white rage standards.

That's what's happening across the country.

And so slowly,

incrementally, insidiously, we're destroying the meritocracy of these flagship universities that we counted on for not just

English professors or sociologists or environmental studies, but physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, computer engineers, geologists, those people,

or petroleum engineers, these are the top people.

And when we start tampering with that, then as we've said on earlier broadcasts, you get five near misses, or you get derailed.

You get Pete Buttigig.

So,

why is Pete Buttigig in

what were her qualified, what was his qualifications to be transportation?

And why would anybody be surprised that he's been an ungodly disaster?

Because he was there for one reason.

He was a sanctimonious, glib, gay man that couldn't shut up about it.

And that's the same way with Deb.

Sammy and I went, we went through all of the cabinet members.

And so when you do that,

I think everybody has to realize that these institutions, the Pentagon, Stanford, Yale, it's not you out there listening.

that made the original standards.

It was them.

It was the Pentagon that said you had to be able to run this fast and lift this weights because we've determined over long experience in war that these physical requirements were necessary to protect people.

And now we, not you, are destroying those and saying it's racist to have those standards or it's sexist.

And we, the Ivy League and Duke and Stanford, we set these standards.

And we now are saying that they were terrible standards and they were not necessary all those years.

See what I'm saying?

It's a post post-factor argument.

They are saying, you know what?

We didn't really train anybody that was any good because our standards that were so tough were bankrupt.

That's why we got rid of them today.

And they don't matter because we're going to turn out people and they're going to be just as good.

And you're going to say, well, wait a minute.

These people that you're graduating wouldn't have been admitted,

much less graduated from your own university.

Well, yeah, then we were wrong.

And

we overvalued the product and we unnecessarily created discriminatory standards.

And so nobody is going to buy that argument.

And we're going to see an incremental but insidious coarsening of the culture.

I can see it everywhere.

I don't, and it's not, I'm not just saying it's gender and race, it's everything.

It's the attitude that there is no accountability and no standards.

If you go to an airport and you fly

five times a month, you're going to have one person where you're landing, you're ready to go for a connection.

You'll see somebody in the Skybridge that doesn't know what they're doing.

I mean, they could not park that thing if the plane crashed into it.

You know what I mean?

They don't know how to do it.

They don't know how to do it.

I was on a flight not too long ago, and the person who had the code to open up the Skybridge so people could get their

carry-on that had been courtesy checked.

He couldn't do it.

They couldn't open the door.

Good luck with the connecting flight.

Yeah, yes.

Yeah.

And nobody, or you'll see people with everybody's yelling on a late flight, and you'll see the baggage channel and they're just talking in slow motion.

And then you wonder,

will this ever have consequences?

Yeah,

when they're pulling a jet into place to take, to take, go down the runway, it's going to hit a bus and injure five people.

And that's lucky in LAX

two months ago.

And so there's consequences, and you can see it everywhere that this country is,

you can see it at the very top of the Pentagon, you can see it in the FBI, you can see it in the CIA, you can see it everywhere, that

ideology

and gender and race are substituting for meritocracy.

And whenever you do that, you follow the Maoist or the commissariat Soviet model, and it leads nowhere but to oblivion.

And so, what's so sad about this, we're taking this legacy of all these wonderful people who died on Okinawa, or died on Iwo Jima, who were blown up in a B-17 over Schweinfurt, or died at Bella Wood, or

Shatu Thierry and

were killed at Gettysburg.

All of that sacrifice was incremental to give us the lifestyle and this wonderful, materially affluent opportunities we have.

And then we're destroying it.

And then we're making, we're not only destroying it, we are trashing and insulting, smearing and defaming the people who gave it to us in the most ingracious manner of any generation in history.

Right.

Well, Victor, while you were talking about

the grades, I was thinking, okay,

getting into the college, meritocracy is gone there, getting a grade, everyone's going to get an A.

But what about the situation where the where, and this must get the most exquisite for a professor, where you're approached by a student who's looking for a letter of recommendation to go to a graduate school when you know they got an A, but they really should have gotten a D,

and you're expected to write some glowing recommendation.

you've got, given

the tenor of what's going on on the campuses, you've got to write that glowing recommendation, even though you know it's a freaking lie.

And that was an art form, because

in my,

I think,

40 years at Cal State and Hoover, I've read hundreds of these letters.

And for all the faults of the academic mindset, they're pretty clever.

Because these letters are transparent by Freedom of Information Act.

So if they got a dud on their hands, they write a very clever letter.

They don't whitewash it until now.

And these were the letters you get.

Mr.

Smith entered our PhD program.

He came

from a very fine undergraduate program.

Our worries that he was ill-prepared in both Greek and Latin were somewhat relieved.

because of his solid B work.

It wouldn't be necessary to mention that he didn't turn in three seminar papers because later he rectified that and it goes on and on.

You know what I mean?

You describe how bad the guy is, and then you immediately said it didn't matter that he was so bad.

But you get the bad across.

Today, that's just,

I'm not going to die on that altar.

I'm not going to write something bad about somebody who's.

And you can really see it when you see the illiterate composition skills of this generation or letters that you get or campus mail

or

you see people on MSNBC or CNN or

they can't they can't put together coherent thoughts or you get people on the national stage like Pete Buttigig or Kamala Harris.

And I'm not trying to say, I'm not trying to defend.

the old white male competency because that was a corrupt system of who you knew and what class you were in.

All I'm saying is that the Wokesters focused on the one weakness of the old system, the old boy, who you know, help your friend, and

they emulated it, only they substituted race and gender and sexual orientation for contact and

wealth or privilege.

And it was really funny how they just said, hey, we have no objections that Tommy Smith grew up in Palace Verdes and his mom knew everybody in Hollywood and his dad was on the board of USC and they got this mediocrity in and pushed him into a big law firm when he got out.

We have no problem with that, that system.

We just won't like the idea that it's only for white guys.

So what we're going to do is we're going to get the government to come in and call it, well, affirmative action diversity and use the same methodology to privilege somebody on criteria other than merit.

And so

it's really sad that all these leftists and all these reformers just emulated the very system that they said

created unfairness and discrimination.

And they're no different.

Well, Victor, we have some political

data to talk about some new polling and the

heat heatening.

Is that even a word?

Hottening, heatening, heating up the Republican prime, 2024 Republican primaries.

And we'll get your thoughts on

this.

And if we have some time, maybe we'll talk about Elon Musk, or we might save that for another podcast.

But we'll get to this right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

I'd like to remind our listeners that VictorHanson.com is a place you should be checking out regularly,

regularly.

Someday I'm going to get that word right.

I need a little more H-less brain.

But

not only checking it out, but subscribing, because Victor writes a tremendous amount of original material, exclusive material for VictorHanson.com.

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That's VictorHanson.com.

So, Victor,

I'm looking at a Daily Mail story.

I think it's out today or was out late yesterday.

Headline, Ron DeSantis would win 2024,

Republican primary between nine GOP rivals and would beat Trump by 24%

in a head-to-head showdown.

New poll of GOP voters reveals

in this,

let's see, who the heck is this from?

I never heard of this polling firm, WPA Intelligence.

This is a poll conducted February.

Well, you, you,

I think it's a conservative poll that the left doesn't like.

Okay.

This is of a thousand Republican voters, not sure if

they were likely voters, et cetera.

But

it's significant.

DeSantis, 40% of the vote, Trump, 31%.

And then the rest of the pack, a few of them, let's see,

Haley, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pence are around 8%.

Liz Cheney is in the race at 5%.

Pompeo, Rubio, Hogan, the former governor of Maryland, and Tim Scott from South Carolina are all at 2 or 1%.

Head to head, yeah.

The poll shows that DeSantis

beats Donald Trump handily.

I'd like to say this poll was conducted before, and I think it might matter, Donald Trump, great political move, my thought, and probably heartfelt, went to East Palestine to bring some

relief to the people there and show some solidarity.

Anyway, Victor, you know, it's way, way off before Election Day, but

this looks

this poll looks impressive.

Your thoughts?

It does.

And we've talked about it before, Jack.

Donald Trump has charisma.

He's got magnetism.

People, as you saw, he was at his best in East Palestine.

It was a coup, basically a triumph that really revealed the poverty of the Bush buttigig

stuff.

And why doesn't he just do that?

Why doesn't he keep off to the social?

Why doesn't he not make fun of Glenn Duncan's name?

Why does he not go after Mitch McConnell's wife?

Why does he have to?

Because that's reflected in the poll.

And what he's dealing with at DeSantis is the midterm, is the 2022 midterm where he outperformed everybody on the Republican ticket in every state nationwide.

And so he's got this record.

So what Donald Trump, if he was well advised, would be doing is he would be doing in East Palestine every day.

He'd be down at the border and he'd be pointing to that wall and say, see this wall right here?

They're not coming in.

I did this for you.

And then he's not doing any of that.

I don't know why he's not, but he's not.

But what is DeSantis doing that reflects his increase?

Well, there's a couple of things.

He's handling Donald Trump very well, Jack, because the more that Trump calls him desanctimonious, et cetera,

he's magnanimous.

He doesn't reply.

And he knows that at some point,

and you and I don't know where it is.

He doesn't know yet, but at some point in the future, he's going to have to reply because Trump will intensify the attacks and he will look weak if he does not reply.

But so far,

I think he's...

I've been reading, I think you could collate his reaction to it as sort of,

if we learned anything from last November, it's we're successful when we unite Republicans.

That's what I did.

I got Dade County, I got Miami, I'm a uniter.

I don't have time to attack another Republican.

I don't know what Donald Trump is saying about me, but I don't have time to reply because I'm trying to build a majority coalition the way I did in Florida and imprint that on the nation.

That's a very good strategy to say that.

And that you don't have time.

That's kind of like Ronald Reagan said, right?

You know, we're on the same team.

Let's not attack each other.

Even though, you know, he did.

And then the other thing is he's got, you know, they're starting to have his campaign people, I think, who are pretty good, are

emphasizing that Ron DeSantis is not of the billionaire class.

He's not even the Joe Biden grifter class.

His parents came out of what, Youngstown, Ohio, or somewhere, you know, the Rust Belt.

He's got Pennsylvania roots.

Yes, Pennsylvania-Ohio border roots.

And he's a middle-class guy.

And so a guy who's got a MAGA agenda from the middle class is pretty authentic.

It's hard to say that he's sanctimonious.

Right.

And then the other thing is sign up.

I think they're all doing what Nikki Haley is doing.

And that is, you know,

the left wants to look at the back.

The left wants to replay.

disinformation.

The left wants to replay collusion.

The left wants to replay all these things.

We're moving on.

We've got an agenda.

They don't have an agenda in the future and they're failing in the present.

So all they got is their anti-Trump stuff in the past and they're going to beat it to death.

They're going to do the Mar-lago raid.

They're going to try to indict him in Georgia.

We can't worry about that because we're younger and we're moving on beyond these old guys that are fighting.

And, you know, at some point,

I think DeSantis will probably, Jack, if he gets personal, he'll say something to praise Trump.

He'll say, you know,

hey, whatever you say about Donald Trump, he gave us four good years of governance.

And they went after him, they treated him very unfairly, and they tried to destroy a good person.

But we don't have time to litigate that.

That's Donald Trump's litigation.

I can't do that because I cannot get angry at them.

I can't fight with them.

I got to stop them.

And I have a plan to stop them.

I'm not going to give you heat.

I'm going to give you light.

I'm not going to get mad.

I'm going to get even.

And that message that he's going to have a controlled burn, not an uncontrolled burn, and knows how to defeat them is a very effective way of

gaining in the polls and dealing with Trump.

So it's basically, I'm a middle-class guy, and I can't, you know, I don't speak to very wealthy people that are attacking me for being inauthentic because you know, I'm not.

And then,

you know, look at my record as my electoral record and my record in Florida.

And I'm not going to talk about the past.

I'm not going to fight individual battles.

That's for other people to do.

I'm going to unite Republicans.

And that is a very powerful message.

And the only thing that I can see, Jack, that is going to get questioned on.

It's kind of like Reagan in 1968, as I said earlier in 76.

They said Reagan was a governor and he didn't do foreign policy.

Well, Ron DeSantis was a congressperson, so he did, but they're going to want to know one thing.

And did you see that Wall Street Journal article by a very insightful and we all love Kim Strassel?

Kim Strassel.

Yeah, yeah, she's wonderful.

But she wrote an article saying that, and I think I want to be fair to what she was writing.

She was saying essentially that she likes DeSantis, but focusing on all the blunders that the Obama-Biden people did to get Putin into Crimea, which are true, i.e., the hot mic Seoul, March

2012, tell Vladimir I'll be flexible if he'll give me space, that appeasement in Syria, all of that led to the erroneous idea that Putin would face no consequences ultimately.

Short term, he didn't.

So he went into Crimea and he went in to the Donbass and the border under Obama.

And then Biden came in and humiliated us in Afghanistan and then said he wouldn't object to a minor offensive.

Then the first week he said he'd get Zelensky a ride out.

And DeSantis was very good, pointing out that we wouldn't be here.

But as Strassel was trying to say in this article, yes.

And now what?

And the alternatives are, are you going to go, Donald?

Trump said he would finish the thing.

And what did he say, 24 hours?

And that implied that he might just tell Zelensky, screw you.

By the way, Zelensky's latest stuff today, demanding more and more and more, and lecturing us about you'll destroy NATO if you don't give me.

We've given him $112 billion with another three or four each month.

So that's a bad idea to bite the hand, no matter how noble people are.

But my point is that Strassel was trying to say

that

the country has to have a strong defense and deterrent.

We're not going to be neocons.

So you've got to find a position somewhere between the blank check Biden and the neo-isolations, Trump.

And where is that?

And he's going to have to articulate that because I think that's, and I think he can do that, or a person in his position, because I'm not endorsing any candidate, can do that.

And I think that he can say, you know, that Ukraine has done the world a great favor at a great cost.

And that would be that they attracted the greatest military and humiliated it.

And that is no small feat.

But,

and then he has to ship to a humanitarian.

You know, this is the worst European war conflict since World War II.

It makes the Yugoslavian Milosevic thing look like a picnic.

There's been 200,000 dead on both sides and civilians.

300,000 may be wounded.

And it's not over yet.

So I think DeSantis needs to say,

this is a humanitarian, we're not going to fight this war to the last Ukrainian.

We don't want these people to get killed.

We want to stop it.

We want to stop it with honor.

We want all of it to stop because it's destroying European civilization.

And it's barbaric.

And we don't want another 50 to 100,000 dead because some pundit in Washington says it's in our longer-term interest to do this.

It may or may not be, but they're destroying Ukraine Ukraine in the process, a modern nation of 40 million people.

And so he needs to emphasize

that he does not agree with Biden because nobody is talking about the death and destruction and the ruination of Crimea and what

Putin will do this year because he's going to continue.

He's got 700,000 mobilized.

So we don't need any more pundits telling us how incompetent,

terrible the Russian military is.

You could say the same thing in 1941 from June 22nd all the way until December 1st.

Exactly.

But anybody who reads the campaign of 1941 and 42 or goes back to the Napoleonic understands what happens when the Russians screw everything up.

They pour the men and the machinery and people rally behind them.

And when they get 700,000 people there on the border and they're pushing, I'm not saying they're going to go to Kiev, but they're going to destroy and kill a lot of Ukrainians.

And so it's in, he needs to say, I think it's in the moral interest, you know, of the world, the U.S., to find a solution that stops the killing.

Right.

And, you know, that can be a third-party talk where India or somebody comes in and says, you know what, let's have a

let's return to the 2004,

go back to the 2014 borders, not the 2013 yet.

Let's just go, Russia goes back to the Donbass and they go back to the Crimea and we have a peace talk and we fortify and arm Ukraine to the teeth so that it doesn't happen again.

And then we adjudicate it.

And I don't think Russia's ever, I don't think they're ever going to give back

Crimea.

Russia is just given the historical ties to that.

And then if they press him, you know, that

he could also say,

what's the alternative?

If you sign on to the Zelensky agenda of getting every Russian out of every inch of Ukrainian soil to go back to 2013 when Obama screwed everything up,

if you do that, you're going to have to do some preemptive, dangerous offensive operations.

You're going to have to take out the supply chain to the Crimea, not just one ship, but all of the Black Sea fleet, and not just a couple of depots, but continue hitting Russian bomber bases, air bases.

They've done that before stealthily.

And

Victor, that might not be A possible, but if it were possible,

wouldn't there be the price tag in just lives would be half a million more dead, a million more dead?

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I think to sum up, DeSantis DeSantis needs to say that

I know the geostrategic, you don't have to lecture me about the geostrategic, but I didn't destroy deterrence.

I've already made that clear.

But I'm not going to fight this war to the last Ukrainian and see a nation of 40 million people completely destroyed

when you can stop it through negotiations and get back to where we were before the Obama-Biden people screwed it up.

And I'm going to, that's my point.

And I want to help them defend themselves, but I'm not going to give them the wherewithal to fight an offensive war against Russia to get every Russian out, because their interests are not identical with ours.

And we have people watching this, and one of them is China.

For all their verbiage and rhetoric, they like this going on.

They like Russia bleeding.

They like the United States emptying its arsenal.

They like Europeans terrified and emptying their arsenal as they look on Taiwan.

And they are saying to themselves, the longer this goes on, the more death and destruction, the more weapons, the more cost, the more people are going to get sick of stuff like this.

And if we go into Taiwan in a year or two, these people will not be up to this again.

We are, because we haven't lost anything.

And so

that's what I think that's the position that dissenters are going to take, because they're going to focus, like Kim did, more and more on foreign policy.

And he needs to step up.

And what I just said is correlating, it's not me, it's correlating things he said

in fragments.

It's been very good, but he needs to systematize that into a coherent vision of how the United States should act.

And unfortunately for Zelensky, this celebrity has gone to his head.

So he gets Sean Penn over there.

He gets

a bunch of hawkish congresspeople over there.

He gets Lindsey Graham over there.

He gets

Boris over there, the ex-prime minister.

And well, Victor, if I'm, and I'm no expert on anything in the world, but he,

his government, and in general,

whoever seems to run Ukraine, it is probably the most corrupt country in Europe.

Just ask Hunter and Joe.

Yeah.

So you have this celebrity marinating

and his wife is a kind of a vogue figure.

So my point is, yes, I like him.

Yes, I'm glad he stopped the Russians.

We all are.

We want, we deplore what Putin did, but that's history.

Now we've got to work with the reality.

And the reality is this man has gone to his head that he's some type of messianic figure that's going to lead.

He said the other day, and I'm quoting him, we're not going to stop till we're in Red Square.

Did you hear that?

Oh, no.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, he said.

And he said, when he's getting the most sophisticated tanks in the world, the leopards, the challengers, and the Abram, it's never enough for him.

And he wants F-16.

So he wants a major war with Russia so that NATO and the United States are drawn in and put him under their nuclear umbrella.

Let's be clear about it.

And he thinks that the people in Washington and the bipartisan neoconservative establishment will allow that to happen.

You can't just throw the rug from out from under him and say,

and in fairness to Donald Trump, he's not doing that.

He just said, our the deal, I'll go over there and negotiate.

And maybe he will, if he had that power.

But what I'm saying is, in the meantime, there is another position.

And that's what DeSantis should embrace.

And if he were to do that,

then he would strengthen his foreign policy, Fides,

and

people like Kim Strassel, who I think might be, I don't know, I don't talk to her on politics, but might be sympathetic.

I think that if I read between the lines in that al-ed,

it was sort of, I want you to do this so that they don't gratuitously attack you

and not having Ukraine.

And that's going to be for all the governors that haven't had.

I mean, Pompeo doesn't have that problem.

Haiti doesn't have that problem.

And Trump doesn't have that problem because they've dealt in foreign affairs.

And it doesn't matter what the position is, but when they look at a governor, especially one who's, as you quoted that poll, may be ahead in some polls, then they're going to put more and more, what are you going to do about Taiwan?

What are you going to do about Ukraine?

What are you going to, and he's going to, he's going to,

and they have to be very careful because

there's going to be a lot of people attracted to the DeSantis

for good reasons and for the idea that he's winning.

And

they want to hitch their wagon to a winner.

And there's going to be a lot of neoconservatives.

And I say that I used to be sympathetic in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I supported both of those interventions, even though we made colossal mistakes.

But this country at this point in its history is not capable of an optional expeditionary ground force or even major effort anymore.

We're just not

with the crumbling defense and woke military we have.

We've got to build it up again before we even consider that.

And we shouldn't consider these ill-thought-out, optional campaigns when we can be energy inefficient.

It sounds like that is a 15 or 20 year project.

It seems like it is.

It is.

But my point is he's going to be bombarded

with the

Bill Crystals, Max Boots,

all those guys that want back in, the Robert Kagans,

those people.

And then he's going to have the,

we don't want...

Zelensky's a crook.

We don't want to give him anything.

We hope Putin wins people on the way off on the other spectrum.

Between those polls, there's a lot of

that's where the majority of Americans are.

Yes, we helped you.

Yes, we gave you $112 billion.

Yes, we deplore Putin.

Yes, he's a thug, but we are not going to give you the wherewithal that will ensure another $3,000 to $4,000 to $500,000 dead.

We're going to give you enough to repel, but we're not going to subsidize and encourage and pay and help you direct a massive counteroffensive to get

what could be very quickly 700,000 Russians in your country out.

We want you to negotiate once they get to the Donbass and the Crimea

and go back to the 2014 where we were.

And then both sides have suffered terribly for Putin's tragedy,

his malicious attack.

But that's where we are.

And we're not going to risk World War III by subsidizing you to go to the Red Square.

I'm I'm sorry.

Your interests are not identical with ours.

Yeah, because you'll be expecting us to subsidize the rebuilding of the country after this.

Well,

what's the solution is

to destroy the entire Ukraine and say, well, we won.

Everyone's gone.

It's destroyed.

We've got 9 million refugees and we've got a half a million people dead and wounded.

And there's no GDP left, and the country's infrastructure is in shambles.

But there's no Russians now,

and who knows what there will be.

And so, and the other

thing that

really gets me angry is

the Pentagon and the Biden administration are basically telling us, the American people,

when you get a tiger and you wound him, and he's in a cave

or his lair, and he's licking his wounds and he's growling at you, don't worry.

He never lashes out.

He's perfectly, perfectly rational.

That's just a bunch of braggadachio.

He would never jump out of that lair in desperation, in pain, and try to attack you because he's in his lair.

He's defeated.

And I just don't believe that.

I really don't.

And that's what they want us to believe, that all that saber rattling is just a wounded tiger bending.

panting and howling at the moon, but he wouldn't dare jump out of his lair and do something stupid.

I think he would if it gets down to it.

Well, Victor,

we'll take up Elon Musk in California on another podcast because we're about out of time.

We come to the end here where we thank our listeners and particularly those who listen through iTunes and

Apple and who leave ratings.

Again, everyone's leaving, practically everyone's leaving five-star

reviews.

Thank you very much.

Some people write comments, and here's one.

I think it's kind of on point

to the conversation we've just had.

It's a little lengthy, but it's titled Nostalgia.

And it goes this, like this: Dr.

Hansen, thanks to you and all those on your team who published this podcast.

It's salt in the decay of our culture, and we need more.

I enjoy your historical commentary, but especially the application to what's happening today in the West and America.

I am a USMA, that's West Point, 2001 graduate, and your off-commentary on Uncle Billy Sherman, a personal hero of mine, brings back the smell of Thayer Hall and the cold gray days of Castle Grayskull and military history class.

I was in New York for my 20-year reunion.

I'm a Texan, but held my breath long enough to come up for a reunion and revisited Uncle Billy's golden statue on the southeast corner of Central Park.

I've always wondered what he would say about the opulence of his monument there.

Anyway, that visit reminded me of reading your books, Carnage and Culture and The Soul of Battle in the Hatch of My Abrams in Iraq in 2003.

I only recount all this to communicate to you the impact your scholarship has had on my own life as a combat leader and now a businessman in America.

I have immense gratitude for your contribution to our society.

Thank you.

Continue to press the attack till duty is done.

Signed by CRZY5, which kind of looks like crazy five.

Victor, that's quite

eloquent.

He's a masterful pro-style.

Yeah, but no, it's

very moving.

I always try to, just so he knows that when I go to New York, I try to go look at that

statue.

And there's also one in Washington, D.C., and it's quite moving.

I was just relieved when they didn't

tear that down.

Yeah.

Give him time, Victor.

After people ask him finally after the war, after he marched through Georgia

and it's often singing marching through Georgia, but the battle hymn of the Republic and freeing 40,000 slaves and offering 40 acres and a mule when he got to the Carolinas,

northern Georgia, whether he should or not, that's another question.

But

they asked him after the war to glory you know to

pontificate on he said war it's all hell boys right and that was very that was uh

that was very moving right and uh

you've seen that statue i think oh yeah it's on the corner of fifth avenue and 60th right across from

well it's at the at the corner of where central park is um

is that called is that the i don't know if it was called the grand army plaza or something i can't remember well there is a grand army plaza in brooklyn which is uh has a bit of a uh uh an arc de triomphe uh monument there but um

let's call it that anyway

so it's a beautiful little spot in new york city uh kind of hectic but he's really i really like uh that statue that was that augustus saint gaudin's that great american i think that was his name statue you know architect and uh sculptor,

Bronze Caster.

And I know that in Boston, there's that famous one of the guy in glory, Robert Gould, you know, that led the black troops at the crater.

There's a, he.

Right, there's a bass, yeah, that's in, I think it's in the Statehouse building.

Yeah,

I've seen that.

And then he did,

gosh, he did one of,

I don't know where.

Well, St.

Gaudens also designed coins.

I mean, he was just one of

the great artists of America.

Just

wonderful.

He's just wonderful.

And the idea that we had people,

whatever you think about the ideology, you had people who were so gifted in sculpture and

art.

And then we had these thugs that just went in the middle of the night and destroyed them.

I mean, destroying a statue of

Longstreet.

I'm no big fan necessarily of the ideology.

of Stonewall Jackson.

He was a mathematics instructor at the VMI,

Virginia Military Institute.

I think they just, I just want to finish with, I think they just got a crane and lifted a statue out, Jack.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think the new African-American, very accomplished, I think he's a lieutenant general.

He's a graduate of the school himself.

Graduate school, and he's got sort of a woke agenda, and they took that statue out.

When I visited and spoke there, Josiah Bunning used to be the superintendent there.

They would blow the cannon off, you know, in the morning.

And

gosh, it's

the past is the past, and the idea in the present you're going to go back and change it to control the future is a very scary idea.

This is doesn't have a very good, doesn't have a very good pedigree.

Everybody should very Soviet, and it was the basis of 1984.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, that Ministry of Truth, right?

I'll sign off with that kind of bleak thought.

Well, thanks, thanks, Victor, for everything.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Thank you.