Artificial Intelligence and Human Error

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Hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Welcome to the wisdom of Victor Davis Hansen.

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, we've yet to talk or get some at least preliminary thoughts from you on AI, which is everywhere, artificial intelligence.

Everyone's talking about it one way or another.

I must say, I am, as I am on many issues, confused, wondering, should I be afraid?

Should I be heartened, et cetera.

But we'll get we'll...

get your initial thoughts on that.

And we've got, oh, I don't know, Don Lamon to talk about some of these these wonderful pieces you've written for your website, VictorHanson.com, called American Graffitis, the three-part series so far.

So there's a lot to talk about on today's episode.

And we will get to all this and more right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor, I came back to Milford, Connecticut from Washington, D.C., where I was the last two days.

It just was a terrific conference put on by the Calvin Coolidge Foundation.

Coolidge was inaugurated, not inaugurated, he was sworn in.

His presidency began in 1923.

So, this is his centennial year.

So, the foundation put on a really wonderful two-day conference.

Amity Schlays, who many of you know, Amity is the president of the foundation, award-winning, best-selling author, winner of the Bradley Prize.

Amity and her team put on a great conference.

But

what's the relevance of Coolidge?

Calvin Coolidge

is a truly diminished man from the perspective of many historians, but he was truly a great president and one pretty much.

in line with the founders of the country rather than

more recent presidents whose

interests is more celebrity, et cetera.

But it was really terrific.

And one of the interesting things that happened, Victor, and I'm just going to get into AI, is I met your colleague,

John Cochran, one of your fellow fellows from the Hoover Institution.

I chatted with him a little bit.

He was up on a panel on economics, comparing

the economics of the 1920s to current times, really quite interesting.

And

he made just a short comment, but it was about artificial intelligence and AI.

And he said, see, I'm pretty upbeat about that, what its effect is going to be for the American economy, American society.

He didn't elaborate on it, but it got me thinking, you know, when we get back

on Saturday to do the show, I'd like to, you know, just pose this to you briefly, Victor, because we've never discussed AI.

And so I'm just curious, are you like me, Victor?

Are you still sorting this out?

What are you thinking about?

I am, and it's kind of embarrassing because

one of the locus classicus of AI is Stanford University.

And

I work there, and

when I'm there, I

usually alone.

I eat alone and I go down University Avenue or other places and I see these robots, right?

I see.

I was down in Santa Monica the other day and something bumped into me and I turned around and it was a movable box and it had an antenna on it and it was navigating to deliver food for someone.

So I've seen this a lot lately and also

I talk to people who are still actively teaching and I teach every year in the fall as you know at Hillsdale and I haven't encountered it yet but these artificially composed or robotically or artificially intelligence composed essays.

that

professors are getting increasingly.

So it's going to be

a problem.

John Cochran is one of the brightest guys I've known at the Hoover Institution.

I've admired him, not only his intelligence, but during the whole Scott Atlas tragedy when the university turned on him.

And by the way, Scott was proven correct, as we're learning from the Fauci erosion.

John was one of the few people of my colleagues that would speak out on behalf of Scott and Scott's right to speak out freely.

So I've always admired John Cochrane and I respect his work.

He's very accomplished, originally at University of Chicago

economists.

But

I guess I'm somewhere in the Terminator state, right?

So

when I see all these robotic ideas or I see these things

that they're going to replace people or soldiers, you wonder if

if somebody can program into it a spontaneity.

And I'm not sure that's, for now, I'm erring on the side of that humans create them, and so they're going to be as bad or good as humans, only they're going to speed things up.

That's what technology does, but ultimately, it's humans behind them.

And so that's going to be militarily.

I've been a little bit more interested.

And it's not that they're changing the rules of war, they never change because human nature is constant throughout time and space, but it cuts down the reaction time available.

In other words, when you have these automatic systems

and these rapid calculating mechanisms, et cetera, you don't have much time to make a human decision because

everything is speeded up.

That's true of our society in general, but especially with artificial intelligence, how it pertains to war.

And from what you're reading about Ukraine, it's starting to get into the, if this thing continues, it's starting to get, you're starting to see systems that are getting pretty eerie over there.

And I think that it's going to be sort of like the Spanish Civil War, a laboratory for a lot of spooky weapons to come online.

And they're experimenting, both sides are experimenting rapidly.

I think you could almost make the argument that the way they're fighting with the types of weaponry and drones and use of computers and observation, online observation, et cetera, is much different than it was just a year ago.

Victor, you mentioned, I think you said bad humans.

And I don't know if Don Lemon, or

I prefer how you pronounce his name, Lamone,

qualifies for that.

But this character, and this is, we're going to get into him and Nikki Haley, but this character had been in some trouble already for kind of bullying or whatever,

treatment of his colleagues on the CNN morning show.

I don't know who watches it.

I don't know anyone who watches it.

I hear like 300,000 Americans do.

So, you know, so they got some eyeballs.

But

on top of the contretemp with his colleagues, then when Nikki Haley announced that threw her hat in the ring that she's going to run for president, he criticized her for being a woman not in her prime.

I think Nikki Haley's in her 50s.

I don't know what in your prime is.

I guess you got to be 20 20 years old.

Certainly Joe Biden is

well behind the shelf life of anything being prime.

So he attacked her.

I believe today he's apologized.

I think CNN put him on unpaid leave.

I'd like to be put on unpaid leave someday.

I don't understand.

I don't understand.

Yeah, I don't understand that concept.

So you're being punished.

by being paid and then you don't have to work.

So all the people who play by the rules get paid, but they have to work.

It doesn't make any sense.

I've never understood it.

Yeah, you, it's the employer says you're so detestable that I'll pay to get rid of you.

Is that it?

And you can see that the incentives are all upside down.

So, a person can be outrageous with the idea that he'll be on unpaid leave.

It doesn't make any sense.

I've never, I've never agreed with it.

I thought it was stupid.

Yeah, well, it's sort of to twist that expression, you know, nice work if you can get it.

So, hey, work that's not working, you're paid is terrific.

So anyway, Victor, he,

yeah, so he's, I'd like to get your thoughts on

this character and Nikki Haley.

But also, also,

she's, he's, Don Lamone is not the only one sticking it to Nikki Haley.

Of course, the gals

Whoopi and company on the view

attacked her.

And then Ann Coulter, who comes out of the woodwork every once in a while to

carpet bomb somebody she's done it to trump and now she's doing she's done it doing it to ann call to nikki haley she said the other day in some she was on mark simone's radio show nikki haley should quote go back to her own country end quote where they quote worship rats end quote she also ann coulter also called nikki haley a bimbo and a preposterous

creature.

So I don't know.

Nikki Haley may not be

many people's preference for president, Republican candidate in 2024.

But

gosh, if she was the candidate, I think

that would be fine.

I'm not, who cares what I say?

I'm not endorsing her, but she's not a bimbo.

She's not preposterous.

By the way, she was born in America.

You know, she was

about go back to your own country.

What do you think about all this Lamon and Coulter and any and any thoughts you might have on Nikki Haley yourself as a candidate?

Well, Don Lamone is a character.

He's kind of, he's entered Jesse's small, same kind of affected accent of his last name, Smollett, Jesse's Smollett territory.

He's a character.

It's a joke.

He

would not be there if he was not black and gay.

He knows that.

He doesn't have very much talent.

He was from an upper middle class family.

I think his dad was an attorney.

He's not discriminated against.

He's not a marginalized person.

He's used affirmative action for his own career trajectory very successfully.

But when you look at actual accomplishments, he's always saying crazy things.

And, you know,

wasn't he in the black hole that this airliner disappeared in the black hole?

And then he was talking about Muslim travel bans.

I remember that white people, they should be white travel bands.

He got a little bit of attention when he called Donald Trump a racist because of the Haiti remarks that Trump made.

So he tries to be a performance artist.

The problem is that when you had Brian Selter and Chris Cuomo, all of those mediocrities, and they tanked the CNN to such a degree that they actually had to fire some of them.

He should have been the first fired, but because of his protected status, he wasn't.

And so then he's been, I guess, demoted.

When I say demoted, I don't even, those people make so much obscene salaries that I don't think they get demoted at all.

But he's in the morning.

He has no audience.

He's with two women.

They're both brighter than he is.

He doesn't like them to talk.

They embarrass him by just normal conversation because

he can't, you know, capture the spotlight.

Everything about him is odious.

And

he's one of these people that has no achievement.

He hasn't.

achieved anything.

So when he says this about Nikki Haley, we have this, he says, go Google it.

Any ignoramus would say, if he was even going to comment on her, he was trying to say that she shouldn't be making fun of people over 75.

He could have said that.

He could have easily said that.

Instead, he had to say that she was past her prime because women were past her prime.

And all he had to say is if he thought that in some weird way, I suppose he was saying that from the onset of menstruation to menopause, women are in their prime years of child.

you know, they can raise children, they can produce children, they're fertile, but after fertility, they're not able to have children.

That's about all you can say, because I mean, whether it's Queen Elizabeth or Queen Victoria or Margaret Thatcher,

you name it, there's been a lot of very brilliant women.

There's no difference in the sexes as far as ages and decline.

And most women, by the way, I couldn't understand when he said that because I was looking back at all the people I've known, and almost in every case, the female member of the marriage has outlived the male member and I've got this nightmare that I have all these friends their wives drive them right

as they get into their 70s and I right I don't and that's just what happens so and they're the same age so this idea that women are past their prime but I go down the highway when I see a guy in his 70s, his wife is driving him.

So I think, well, what is he talking about?

He didn't know what he was talking about.

And so

he's angry because he knows where he's headed, Jack.

Where is he headed?

So he's headed to be fired because he's talentless and he makes a lot of money.

And he thinks he has, like every person who's suffers from hubris, he doesn't understand that there's such a thing called nemesis and it's going to, it's got him now.

And he's going to be fired and out of a job.

And if you and I had this conversation two years from now and you said, What do you think of Don Lamon?

I wouldn't know who you're talking about.

And

he knows that.

And that's he's a junkie for adulation, and he's not going to get any very quickly.

So he's saying these things to draw attention.

So we're talking about him, and everybody else is talking about him, even though it's in a negative context that Don Lamon would rather be caricatured and ridiculed, at least mentioned, than be what he otherwise will be, is completely irrelevant and obscured.

As far as Nikki Haley, I don't understand

the animus toward her because she was a good governor.

She was very effective at the United Nations.

She has this ambiguous relationship with Donald Trump in the sense that she owes her elevation from a southern governor to a national figure because of his appointment of her as the UN representative.

And she did at that job what a lot of very effective people have done, women.

She's kind of like, she tried to emulate, and I think it was successfully done, Jean Kilpatrick, who, you know, nobody knew who she was till she took that forum and she let

the UN have it and exposed the hypocrisies of all these American critics.

And so Haley was doing the same thing and it had the same results.

She became a household word, but nobody can do that for much more than a year or two.

It's an exhausting job, no doubt.

So that's where she is.

And she's, so what is she, what's her candidacy?

Her candidacy is she's trying to tell

the Jeb Bush,

Mitt Romney, old Republican country club set that I

can take you guys back into the party and I can get up.

I'm about, I can go about as far MAGA as you can stomach and I can do that.

So I think that's her angle, that she's going to run and say to moderate Republicans that, you know,

didn't quite like some of the stuff that Trump did, the industrial policy or, you know, skepticism about cutting Social Security that Trump had.

They were more the Paul Ryan constituency.

She's saying that she can capture and veneer it over with MAGA.

And I think that's what her.

her are she's kind of a john bolton person that type of person neoconservative hawk so I don't know.

As far as Ann Coulter, I've met her.

I think she's in a difficult position because,

look,

she's got two famous political positions.

One was

an unfettered adulation of Mitt Romney.

Remember that?

Mitt Romney could do no wrong.

Mitt Romney was a saint.

Mitt Romney should get the nomination.

He got the nomination and he tanked.

And he, since then,

with all due respect to Mitt Romney, his political,

what's the word, his political career has gone all downhill.

He's been humiliated by Donald Trump.

He's angry at Donald Trump.

He wanted Donald Trump's endorsement to run for Senate.

He got it and he immediately bit the hand that fed him.

He votes with the Democrats.

He looked ridiculous.

He looked like Cadmus and Tiresias out of Euripides' Backey when he was out on the BLM march.

Remember that?

Exactly.

I was just going to say that that's the real disappointment.

Yeah, he was.

And yet she's telling the conservative movement, I am the most conservative person around.

But she was for Mitt Romney, and he's an embarrassment.

And then she

spent much of her

life in 2015 and 2016 trumpeting Donald Trump.

Remember that the book had that strange God something or Trump?

It was just fanatically dull Trump.

And then she had a falling out with him over, I guess, my immigration and blamed him.

But if anybody goes back and looks at 2017, 18, 19, before we really stopped the porous border, All you will read, and I've done it because I looked at it very carefully for the dying citizen.

All Trump was trying to do was close the border.

And he was two things stopped him.

Three things stopped him.

The Democratic opposition after he lost the House, number one.

Two, the courts.

He was sued every single day.

And three, the administrative state

within the Pentagon,

the DOJ, Homeland Security.

They all sandbagged him.

And yet he finally did close the border.

She should see that.

But she blamed him

for not closing the border quick enough.

So then, as far as the racial stuff,

I don't understand that at all because Nikki Haley is a U.S.

citizen, and I don't think Nikki Haley's been to India any more than a U.S.

citizen.

I don't think she knows anything about, any more than you know anything about Ireland or Italy, or I know anything about Sweden.

So I don't quite get that.

And I suppose she's angry that somebody who's second generation

should not be the arbiter of

iconic names as you and I talked about statues, because she did, she was an iconoclast in South Carolina.

She dismantled stuff, right?

And she went along with the woke movement on that.

And I don't, but the way America works is, remember, it doesn't really matter how you can be, came over in the Mayflower, or you can cross,

come in legally, but the way our system works, you're just as much American on the first day you're a citizen than if you've been here six generations.

You can criticize that.

You can say, well, they don't have the acquaintance with the traditions of America that my family does, but that's the way it is, like it or not.

So for her to say that she is more American and Haiti doesn't have a right to, you know, a moral or spiritual right to take down a statue, you can disagree with her, but this idea that, and I don't know what the bimbo is, that is she's saying that she's.

I don't either.

It's crazy.

I mean, if you're saying that she's an attractive Republican candidate, is it Christian Rome, Christine Rome that way?

Christy Rome?

No.

Yes, actually, I saw her.

Excuse me.

She was at that conference.

Yes, she's a very beautiful woman.

Yeah, she is.

Would Anne Coulter say that?

I think people said that about Ann Coulter when she was younger.

But that was stupid as well.

So I think that

I have a soft spot for Ann Coulter for this reason.

On that tragic day, September 11th, 2001, I was scheduled to give a talk at Hillsdale College on George Patton and his legacy.

So I got in three in the morning, I got up, I went out to my

six o'clock flight, which I guess was nine o'clock, and I got out on the tarmac and we started to take off.

And we were about,

I don't know, 1,000 feet, and the pilot announced that there had been a private aviator hit the World Trade Center.

And for some reason beyond his comprehension, he said, I don't know how this would affect us, but we have to go back to the airport.

So we turned around.

I didn't make it to Hillsdale.

We landed.

And then, of course,

in that time period, the truth came out and they locked down the airport.

And I was sitting in the airport.

You know, I had written columns for Wall,

you know, I wrote a lot for the Wall Street Journal.

Journal, but I was teaching eight to 10 classes a year at Cal State Fresno, and I was trying to write a book every year.

I had three small kids.

I was farming.

It was just a really hectic time, and I get a call out of the blue from Rich Lowry, your colleague.

Great guy, Rich.

I've always liked Rich Lowry.

He called and said, Would you like to write a column?

And I said, Well, what do you mean, a column?

You mean like one?

And he said,

No, we'll see if if you can write to couple this week and next about 9-11.

I never really done that on a regular basis.

And so the next thing I knew, I did that for 20 years and never missed a column.

And I asked him in that course of the conversation, why did you call me?

And he said, well, I liked your book, The Soul of Battle, but we had to let Ann Coulter go because she wrote a column just filed suggesting that

we nuke Mecca and convert the survivors.

And we can't print that.

So we need somebody,

an additional person to write.

So that's how I got into National Review and the column business

because of that.

And then she was very critical, I think, of you guys at one point.

Yes, I was, go ahead, you can say it.

Okay, so she was looking at, I suppose, Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry, and they were all in their 30s or 20s at that time.

Yeah.

And she said they were girly men or girly boys.

Girly men.

Girly men.

I guess I was a girly man also.

Okay.

All you guys were in your prime, and that's what she said.

But anyway, it was her implosion that allowed me to go.

But I didn't feel

too bad because she had a lot of success with a lot of the books she wrote.

And you can go back in old clips and see her

predict that Donald Trump is going to get the nomination and win.

And everybody looked exasperated on these panels and thought she was crazy.

But

she had good political instinct.

I think she's now a performance artist.

So she said these things because, like Don Lamon, we're talking about them.

But just to sum up, I have no animus toward her.

I think she would say that she's been diminished in some ways, partly to her own efforts.

Maybe not.

I don't know what her readership is.

I haven't seen a lot of books she's written lately.

I think if she just went back to square one and wrote the kind of books that she wrote, some of them were pretty good.

They were interesting.

They sold well.

And forget all of

sensationalism and just try to get calculated

analytical commentary, she would be back where she was.

I don't understand the contours of people's careers, what makes them popular or not popular.

Well, Victor, don't you ever become a performative artist.

I try not to.

I crush my soul if that happens.

A wise voice once said to me, my mother,

and I was

34 or 35, and I had, I was teaching, I was in bad shape, I had mononucleosis, and I wrote a book called The Western Way of War, and John Keegan wrote the introduction.

It was published by Alfred Knopf, which is kind of weird for a Fresno State professor, farmer.

And it sold very well.

And I got royalties for about $20,000.

And my mom said, just to remind you, if I were you, I wouldn't leave this farm because there will be, if you continue at what you're doing, you'll probably write more, you'll make a little bit more money, you'll get a little bit more attention, and don't let it go to your head.

So stay on the tractor, go to farmers market, pedal fruit,

but don't be part of that world.

She had graduated from Stanford and Stanford Law School with a judge, and she lived in a small farmhouse till she was 60.

Wise advice, yes.

Yes, I think it's wise advice.

Everybody needs to keep that advice.

You know, it's sort of like the emperor or somebody during the triumph.

The slave runs behind him and whispers in his ear, sic transit gloria, so goes glory.

It's going to be vanishing.

Yeah.

VR, as my mom always told me, I don't want to quote my mom too much.

I'll sound like Joe Biden quoted.

That's no.

Hey, Joey.

My dad told me, hey, Joey.

But mom always said, remember remember to be friendly to people

for the intrinsic value of it, but for the more practical.

If you want to be practical, when you ascend,

you always will descend.

And if you're nice to people on the way up,

they'll be nice to you on the way down.

Yeah.

Amen.

I mean, it's good practical advice.

It's nice if it comes honestly also.

But I know a character or two who

kisses up and pees down, and that makes them easy to

Someday I will write my memoirs.

And I have at least 10 people when I was in my 30s and 40s writing books and columns and trying to travel.

And I would bump into them.

And

they were pretty well known in the conservative pundocracy, but not just conservative, radio, T V, and they were absolutely rude, dismissive, arrogant.

And then their careers didn't do too well after a point like everybody's career and they had written me about would you please do this would you please burb my book would you please uh come to my panel would you please have me victor i should get the bradley prize yeah right yeah yeah yeah stuff like that and that's it's always you know don't they have any shame but yeah and i always tried to be magnanimous and and tried not to remember the way that they had acted so you want to you never know you should yeah when you have to i have students that show up in my office all the time and I try to as much as humanly possible talk to them and meet with them and I have people show up at my house and even when I can't do anything you have to say no or you're busy with some

some

sense of humility and gratitude and always ask yourself what would you do if you were in that person's place right and

it's important well i victor i hope i hope none of this this forthcoming memoir recounts events that happened on a national review cruise because

I would weep.

I would weep.

Well,

I think one or two did, but they were not affiliated with National Review.

How's that?

I know who they are.

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

So, Victor, you know, I didn't,

I'm going to spring something on you here.

This is bad of me when I do this.

Normally before the show, I talk, I say, here's what we're going to talk about.

But I just noticed I had a note about

David Harsani, my old friend and colleague at National Review, he had a column.

That's right, it's in your sweet spot.

It's titled James Clapper Can't Stop Lying.

And

once again, we heard this from one of the, I don't remember the guy's name you do.

He was on Brett Baer's show, one of the infamous 50-plus signers of that letter.

And oh, you know, well, technically, we didn't say this.

And Clapper, who's one of the most egregious of these creeps,

is attacking

the Washington Post, which has reported on this.

There was message distortion.

All we were doing was raising a yellow flag.

That's all they were doing.

We're just raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation.

No, if you read the letter very carefully and how it was reported by their intent,

it was...

designed to tell the American people that you can go ahead and vote for Joe Biden because his son has been a victim because a bunch of Russians in collusion with Donald Trump, wink, nod, wink, nod, have stolen his laptop and now they're disseminating it.

So they said it fit the Russian disinformation model.

And then they had one little caveat.

And then they, you know, we can't prove it.

But then at the end, they said, and it's time that Donald Trump got the Russians out.

So the whole thing was that the laptop was

disinformation.

Now, as far as James Clapper, this is a former director of national intelligence who went before the United States Congress and swore under oath that the National Security Agency does not spy on American citizens.

That was a lie.

That was perjury.

And when he was caught at it, He said, I gave, quote, the least untruthful answer.

So he admitted that he lied.

He also, at a key time when Donald Trump was going abroad and conducting foreign policy, he said that he acts as if he's a Russian asset, i.e.

that he's a traitor.

Any empirical examination of the Donald Trump record, whether you like him or not, killing mercenaries in Syria, getting out of an asymmetrical Russian missile deal that was at our disadvantage, sanctioning oligarchs, flooding the world with cheap oil and crashing Russia's oil price.

You name it, selling javelin missiles to Russia, to Ukraine to be used against Russia.

Any of that stuff, compare that to Hillary Clinton, what she was advocating with the reset as Secretary of State, or what Biden is doing.

And remember, nobody invaded anything anywhere in Ukraine on Donald Trump's watch.

That is the record.

And so he is a known liar.

He

defamed the commander-in-chief as a veritable traitor.

He misrepresented the record.

And here's the thing to remember about the letter that he organized.

That letter came out

in just weeks before the 2020 election.

So we're over two years.

And has anybody, has he said this before?

No, he hasn't said anything.

He hasn't said a word.

So why is he saying this now?

He's saying this now because

Hunter Biden thinks he's going to sue and his lawyers

were embarrassed in a catch-22.

How can you sue and say that he's being defamed by material that you say is Russian?

It's not his.

In other words, how can you sue the New York Post or these other people that had the computer?

It's basically aimed at the owner of the computer shop.

How can you say in a lawsuit, you have this computer and you're releasing information that is

what?

Fake?

If it's fake, then it's not his fault.

Fake information?

No.

You have to say that it's my information.

And then the lawyers the next day say, oh my God,

we inadvertently, Cunner, we inadvertently said that it's genuine.

And Joe Biden is still on record during the debate of 2020 of saying it's Russian disinformation.

What are we going to do?

Well, let's amend it, saying if it were accurate.

So that's why he's coming out because the consensus is now clear from Hunter Biden himself, has admitted, basically, for the first time that this thing is, and he looks like an idiot.

He had two years to come clean.

And he only comes clean now.

And he doesn't really come clean at all.

And so

he's a person who's done,

between

him and John Brennan,

who was a co-organizer of this despicable letter that ruined the reputation of 50 former intelligence operatives and officers who swore to us that this was Russian disinformation, kind of, sort of, yes, no, believe us, right on the edge of an election.

And, you know, there was a right-wing poll that suggested that people, to the extent they knew about the laptop, had they known the truth, it would have, they felt, affected the election.

And people have criticized that poll.

But the point I'm making is they helped change an election, or at least they thought they were helping to change an election.

And they knowingly, they knowingly lied to the American people, just like Brennan had Trumped James Clapper because he lied two times under oath.

He lied and said that there were no collateral deaths on Obama assassination

hits along the Afghan-Pakistani border with drones, raptors, et cetera, et cetera.

And he lied and said that the CIA had not monitored the staff

Senate staff computers, which he knew was a lie.

And he apologized and he admitted that he lied on two occasions.

And so you had two known

high officials that should have been prosecuted for perjury, lying under oath to the Congress, then organizing a group of their cronies.

There were some pretty embarrassing names.

Mike Morrell was on that.

And Michael Hayden, remember him?

Former CIA director.

He's known for what?

He was the one that when they went in to the Trump House and had the raid, quote unquote, is it Michael Beschloss, the presidential quote-unquote historian, said that, remember the Rosenbergs, i.e., maybe he should be executed or gassed, Donald Trump?

He, we tweeted that and said, like it.

And of course, he compared the Trump border cages that he inherited from the Obama administration as Auschwitz-like.

So he's totally destroyed.

And then Leon Pinetta was one of them as well.

Mike Morrell was one of them.

So

as a rule of thumb,

any of those 50 people who signed that petition saying that that laptop, which was demonstrably Hunter Biden's laptop, the evidence was was there.

Tony Bobolinski, before the election, had gone on CBS News and confirmed that those emails that appeared were genuine, that came from him and were sent to him.

It was indisputable.

They did that for ranked political purposes, maybe even to get a job in the incoming Biden administration.

They should be,

you talk about ostracism, they should be ostracized from all further appointments.

They have zero credibility.

Zero.

He's a despicable character.

He really is.

We talked.

I raised it a couple of podcasts ago just about the sheer volume of material on this laptop.

And for this thing to be some

like a

Russian espionage operation, let's create this podcast.

Let's create all this content and put it on this.

It would have taken a whole freaking division of some Soviet

spy agency a year just to concoct this crap.

Oh, they couldn't.

And then to have the scenario where it's going to be left somewhere.

How would they know all these personal emails between the various Biden people?

How would they know that actually Joe Biden really did get 10%?

How would they know all of that?

And it's even getting worse now with the latest revelations that Hunter Biden felt that he had an end.

I don't know, it was with this McGonagall person who is now, he was fired, FBI director of counterinsurgency in New York, who was working with Albanians to find dirt on other Albanians to help and get cash money, which his girlfriend ratted him out for.

But apparently, he was also monitoring Chinese oligarchs and reassuring them.

or he or somebody like him, apparently.

Joe Hunter Biden was bragging that he had an end with the FBI and could tip off these Chinese oligarchs.

And the oligarchs got very angry at Hunter because when they got to the United States, the treatment, which they had been guaranteed would be good, was not good.

And therefore, Hunter's FBI contact did not do as, I guess supposedly, as they were paid.

But the point I'm making in this context is that just take the word Biden and put Eric or Don Jr.

Trump there, and they would be in prison right now for this stuff.

Can you imagine right now if this whole Trump family had this laptop, had all of these tax consequences of giving money back and forth among the family, of the income that

the lifestyles versus the actual reported income versus

all this other stuff?

I mean, there's felonies on that laptop of prostitution, illegal drug use, etc.

It just baffles my mind.

It really does.

I think a lot of us that are, maybe some of you who are listening are just shocked.

You woke up one day and you said, what planet am I on?

This is not the United States that was based on blind justice and equality of the application of the laws.

It's not.

These people are completely lawless and there's no consequences whatsoever.

There's no consequences whatsoever.

They pick and choose somebody.

You can be, you don't have to be in the Capitol.

You can be walking around and you're going to be arrested for illegal.

You could be the pro-life guy in Pennsylvania who's minding his own business.

You can be, yeah, you can be, and they can ruin your life.

You can be going to a Latin Mass in Virginia.

And these people have total exemption.

They let them do anything.

It's just amazing.

This crooked Biden corrupt cartel.

And I, gosh, the things that were on there that they admitted to, both legal and moral sins.

I mean, you remember back in with a cousin about procuring women, and she says, no, Asian.

And he said, I don't want Asian either.

You know what I mean?

And prostitutes.

It was racist.

My God.

And then you had the diary where the daughter admits that she took a shower too late in age, I guess, with her father.

And then we had this crazy FBI retrieval service trying to

put the laptop on ice to influence the election and then trying to retrieve the diary and putting James O'Keefe out in the hallway in his underwear.

And then it just boggles the mind what's happened to this country.

Yeah,

I think this

these folks touch on all the all the deadly sins are part and parcel of this.

I feel just as one tangent,

I feel that way about Stanford University.

I'll be very candid.

I graduated with a PhD there.

My first cousin who grew up with this as a sister went there.

My mother and her sister went there for both undergraduate and graduate degrees that were awarded.

My nephew went there.

So I have some family ties with it.

And yet I look at this university right now, Jack, and I don't know if you followed it, but.

It's pretty incredible.

The president is under investigation.

And I don't want to prejudice the investigation, whether it's accurate or not, but he's being accused.

And he's a multi-multi-millionaire, very big player in Gentech.

I think he was on the board of directors, if not a vice president.

He's in a lot of corporations, a lot of boards.

I think he was on the Google board, like the former president is now on the Google board.

And my point is this, is that he's being accused of doctoring scientific papers 30 years ago.

And I don't know who's telling the truth, the Stanford Daily or him, but it's astonishing.

Then I walk outside my apartment, I hear a helicopter, and it's the paparazzi trying to

surveil the Bankman-Freed family, right?

He's under house arrest right on the Stanford campus.

And his parents were,

his mother was a bundler of $60 billion

for, you know, Mind the Gap for dark money in Silicon Valley that she was channeling to, she's she's a professor of law.

She was doing this.

Her husband is a tax advisor for

left-wing progressive legislation, especially Elizabeth Warren.

And then he gets a $250 million bond and he doesn't, that's 25 million, 10%.

If I get pulled over tomorrow or any of you people listening with a DUI, you're going to pay 10% down to a bondsman.

He didn't pay 25%, but guess what?

We learned that the former dean of Stanford Law School and a Stanford professor put up $500,000 for this guy.

And then when you think this is the bad, then you read that a Stanford professor, she's been tweeting attacks on the Hispanic lawyer that represented Johnny Depp, saying that I hope her body,

that she dies and her body's eaten by rats.

And then we had the other Stanford professor.

Remember her?

She would testify during the impeachment trial.

I think it was the Judiciary Committee in which she said, well, you know, Donald Trump may think he's royalty, but Baron Trump is no Baron.

Attacked a 13-year-old kid.

And then we had this word list from Stanford of euphemisms where this body of administrators supposedly confined to tech usage, but it was on their website that you couldn't use words like American, citizen.

Immigrant.

It was just the biggest embarrassment.

And then last year, this kid's going to graduate from Stanford Law School, and they send out a bogus letter as if it's from the Federalist Society saying, hey, Federalist Society members, we've decided that, you know, we've redefined insurrection and a form here for a riot,

as if it was kind of like a January 6th.

It was all bogus.

It was just a fake letter that was supposedly coming from the Federal Society.

I don't know if it was a joke or what.

And then

When you have all this, we birthed Elizabeth Holmes and Thuranos.

So it wasn't just the the Bankman Friedman, Free, who grew up in the Stanford campus, or the head of Alameda Investments, which was his girlfriend, Kathleen Ellison, who was a Stanford student.

But Elizabeth Holmes was a Stanford student, dropout.

I used to see her on campus all the time, Jack.

Bankman Fried had the sloppy get-up, right?

The mad Einsteinian look for effect.

The unwashed.

Yes, the unwashed.

I'm the kind of

rebel genius.

Hers was just the opposite.

She went full Steve Jobs, all black, immaculate, blonde hair, and she would be escorted by some of the most powerful men.

I would go to these retreats and I'd see her or I'd see her on campus.

And this was, there were so many people with Stanford affiliations were on the Theramis board.

There were so many people that were involved with Bankman-Free that had Stanford credentials.

It's just, And then with the president and the law school and this word list, it just keeps coming day after day after day.

You ask yourself, what is the common denominator?

And the common denominators are an excessive amount of money that

flows in from Silicon Valley, excessive amount of money,

an exalted, prestigious, I don't know, that's narcissistic view of yourself and woke and woke.

I'll give you one last example.

They just released that one of the kids that got in the incoming class for his essay.

You know what his essay was?

100 times.

Yeah.

Yes.

He wrote it 100 times.

Yeah.

He didn't write an essay.

He wrote it 100 times.

And they just released the

incoming stats.

It was 22%.

22% of the incoming class was white, of which probably about 10% were white males.

white males are 33 percent of the population whites are 67 to 70 percent they used to have proportional representation but even more fascinating about the entry is that as i said earlier the sat

is optional and yet they will not release this you can take it it won't do you any good because they rejected 65 to 70 percent of all the people who scored perfect score.

That's 1% of sat takers get everyone right.

And Stanford was bragging that they in the past they've rejected 65 60 to 70 percent depending on the year wow

yeah it was almost but they won't give you the score of the people who got in right if they took it they won't tell you well you let in 12 or 1400 people or what three three percent jack three percent but they will not tell you whether they took the sat and that's for two reasons one is if they were special admits for minority status they did not want to tell you if they took that test and what the score was, and if they were legacies, very wealthy, wealthy, privileged kids who didn't have to submit a score.

So it worked both ways.

In the past, the big obstacle, if you're very, very wealthy and you're connected to Stanford or Harvard, and you want your kid, and he has to have an a minimum SAT score, right?

Well, he doesn't now.

And the same thing is true of special admits, but they won't release either one.

What they have essentially done with the admittance policies of these Ivy Leagues and universities.

They've said we're going to repertory admissions,

and we're using race and gender and sexual orientation as factors.

And the one constituency that we can have disproportionately underrepresented are whites, especially white males.

And because that percentage is going to be,

I don't know, a third to a half of their percentage in the general population.

We don't have room for any working-class white kids that get perfect SAT scores.

I'm sorry.

But we need them for athletes.

We need them for children of administrators and faculty.

And we need them from big-time donors.

And that's the only slots we have.

So if you're out there in rural Indiana and you studied all through high school and got a 4.5 and did all the Jeep, you're an Eagle Scout, you did everything, you aced the SAT, you're not going to get in.

We don't want

the wrong, you're the wrong.

Yeah, unless you're 320 pounds and can play offensive line.

That's it.

Yes.

What they say to that kid in Indiana is you're the wrong color.

You're the wrong gender.

You're the wrong class, class.

You don't have enough money.

And you don't know anybody.

You're a nobody.

And we define diversity in a different way.

You would be diverse, but that's not the kind of diversity that we want.

And so when I walk across that campus, I just assume now there's not one working-class white male kid on that whole campus.

Those treasured spots are given to, they can't be wasted in their mentality on anybody other than a legacy, an athlete, or a child of a Stanford-connected person.

There's too few to go around.

Victor, I've said it before.

I just hope anyone who's listening who has an alumnus of Stanford, who's a conservative,

and has left money in its

or her will to change your will.

There's so much conservative, I know some degree of conservative money from Stanford alum goes to Hoover because it's kind of a psychological alternative.

Why should I be giving money to this woke factory?

But there's still conservatives who give money to Stanford who, you know, decide their own.

All I try to do, I try to honor donor intent.

When somebody is generous enough to

donate to the Hoover Institution's Military History Working Group,

I'll swear to God that I will honor that donor intent or I won't take the money.

So

if they want a conservative visiting scholar, that scholar will be conservative.

If they want traditional military history non-woke, it will be that way.

But if a person is thinking of giving money,

There's schools you can give money that you don't have to go to such extremes.

St.

Thomas Aquinas College is one.

We've talked about this before.

I'm affiliated.

I'm

prejudiced because I teach three weeks a year at Hillsdale College, but I've watched Larry Arndt

presidency since I first was hired in 2004 and I visited earlier.

And anybody who goes there and sees that campus will be astounded.

Both the physical plant has been utterly transformed.

The faculty are comparable, I think, to the Ivy League.

I look at the names of the faculty.

They're distinguished.

They publish.

And when you go on the campus, it's like being in the 1950s in the positive sense.

Everybody gets along.

It is diverse.

I see people of different races, backgrounds, but there's none of this anger.

anger.

And there's disagreements about politics.

And I've had students that were left-wing there, and not a lot.

But my point is that there's no acrimony.

There's a general understanding you're going to be civil to somebody.

And that education is, there's there's a totality of civic education so you're going to be mannered you're going to take an oath you won't cheat you're going to be kind to people you're going to be religious you're going to learn how to use a gun in the in the responsible sense all of these things that build the total person that we used to count on everywhere is only there now

And so I would suggest, boy, if you want to give some money, call up John Servini or Mark Kalkoff or Larry Arn or one of those people at Hillsdale College, because that's where your money should be invested.

Well, Victor, you mentioned going to school in the 1950s, and I think we'll close out today's program by looking at your website, victorhanson.com, and some terrific pieces you've written called American Graffitis.

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

Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Our home on the internet is justthenews.com, John Solomon's website.

Speaking of the internet, if you're on Facebook, visit

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come up and find all kinds of historic links of where Victor's been and where he's shared his wisdom.

And what the heck else on Twitter at VD Hansen.

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And then there is VictorHansen.com.

That's Victor's official website.

So Victor has written rights constantly, exclusive material for this website, VictorHanson.com.

You got to subscribe.

It's five bucks to get in the door, 50 bucks for the year.

And there's a terrific series that he's in the midst of writing.

I don't know if it's at the end of it, Victor.

There are three parts.

It's American Graffitis.

So most of us have heard

that

the film from the early 70s, it's marking its 50th anniversary.

I think it was a great film.

I loved when I first saw it.

I was only 12 years old, but

you grew up not in the sweet spot of that movie, which is based on the early 60s.

I was younger.

I was on the tail end before the 60s.

Right.

So

you breathe the air of American graffiti, you know,

and you share.

So it's it's about

generally where you actually grew up i'm sorry i just got to tell you our listeners uh

there there's some scenes of you recounting your youth victor is this is terrific what about these makeshift boxing matches yeah another anecdote about some guys you knew they were robbing uh a gas station that you were at and one of them his mask fell off and everyone knew who it was frankly

this is a great series let's talk talk about it.

Yeah, I mean, Modesto is about 80 miles north on the 99.

The 99 used to be before I-5, the only really lateral north and south.

And we live two and a half miles from it.

And

this backwater rural community that I grew up in was five years behind the coast.

So I went to high school in 67.

I graduate in 71, and I went to UC Santa Cruz.

And when I went there, I had no idea that it was what was going on, you know, the 60s.

It didn't really hit us is what I'm a little bit, but not much.

And so it was still American graffiti where,

you know,

everybody had to have a 56 or 57 Chevy.

It couldn't have a shifter on the column.

It couldn't be automatic.

It couldn't be three.

It had to be four on the floor.

And if 283 was okay, but you had to get a 351 if you were anybody or four, whatever it was, 27 or 23, I can't remember.

And everybody cruised on Saturday night.

But one of the things that happened, there was a really, the guys hung out, and everybody was played football and they drank beer.

And

my parents were very strange.

They were all, you know, my mom had gone to Stanford Law School, my father, the University of Pacific, they had

jobs, and my dad farmed and did, he was an administrator.

And

my grandparents were very central in our lives as farmers and very multi-generational family.

But my point is that

I think my parents were trying to tell us that you're going to participate in the rough underbelly of America because most of the kids were pretty rough.

And I would go in on Saturday night with our friends and when you got 17 or 18, it was illegal, but people were...

out, they'd go out in the country and drink.

And one of the guys had the idea, we'll have a professional boxing.

And I mean, they did professional ring and admission and referee and betting.

And you'd go in there and then, you know, you'd have to, if somebody said, I challenge you, you'd have to duke it out.

The 99 was where you met the real world.

So a lot of kids worked night shift.

In those days, they had all-night service stations, much more because there was no serious crime.

But we would always feel like one of our friends was at an all-night service station.

It might be hazardous.

So, you know, people would cruise around town.

They'd go to the bowling alley downtown, the neighborhoods.

Usually they knew where the 10 or 12 prettiest girls lived and drive by to see if they were out on the lawn in the summer or something, talk.

And then they would end up late at night at one of these service stations.

There were two or three of them near the 99.

And you would talk to people coming off the 99.

That was your way of meeting new people.

But I mentioned some of the weird things that went on.

Some of them were pretty, they were violent and illegal, but not anywhere near now.

And what do you do when you're with a bunch of people and you see a lot of people go completely crazy and demolish a car, for example?

And my mom would always say to me, okay, you're going to go out with some pretty rough guys tonight.

So what are you going to do if?

And that was always I was always aware of that.

But in one case, I have to be very careful for because these people are still in my community in their 60s.

But nonetheless, I know them all.

But some of them went nuts and destroyed a car.

A poor man dropped it off.

It was not working.

He came off the freeway.

They got drunk.

They decided to destroy it.

He came back.

They all fled.

I was there alone with the intendant, and he came back, and his car was demolished.

And I was trying to console him and get a police.

And I didn't know if it was stolen.

I didn't think it was.

The other people who destroyed it said it was stolen.

But it was just constant,

I don't know what it was.

It was a young, it wasn't rebellion against the country.

It wasn't a rebellion against the Vietnam War.

In 1971, there were no, basically, there was just about no land troops.

The volunteer

army had been passed, so none of us were going to be drafted when we turned 18.

I was 17.

Or actually, I was,

I guess I was, yeah, I was 17.

Well, it was, it was, one thing thing it definitely wasn't, was not, was solitary.

You, you were, no, you were with big groups of young people hanging out, and it's quite different than what life was like.

And they were all the middle class.

There was no wealthy people, and there were no really poor people.

Everybody could scounge together a car.

We were weird.

Everybody thought we were weird.

And I thought we were weird.

Because here we were all, you know, I'm living at my grandparents' house that I kind of grew up in.

It was next door to my, house.

But we had a little tiny house.

It was 800 square feet.

And then my dad just built a house next to it for three bedrooms of like 700 square feet.

So you had to walk out in the rain between the two houses.

We slept in one house and walked in the kitchen, the living room, and the other.

And they had salvies, but I could never figure out what the money went for.

I don't know if it was for farming or what, but we didn't have very much money.

And then cars, my dad was this Swedish chauvinist.

So he imagine in the 60s, he was buying these imported Volvos used, like a Volvo 455, a Volvo 555, whatever it was.

And then we drove them when he would get to the next one.

We would drive them, and nobody knew how to work on them, but we did.

And so when everybody was having these hot rod cars, you know, that were hyped, you know, that were really hopped up.

And we had this little putt-putt 70 horsepower Volvo.

Although I think the girls liked it more than they did the hot.

They thought it was kind of cute or neat or something.

But it was a very strange time where,

you know, I got most, I think I got three Bs in high school, but that was not something you bragged about.

You did not brag about that.

And

you had to show that you could play sports.

And if somebody pushed you and wanted to fight you, you had to be able to defend yourself.

And if you didn't, then there was no, I mean, nobody was going to come to your aid is what I'm trying to say.

And then you had to be aware that any given time, there was,

you know,

some people could get drunk and drive.

And

they were people

did stuff that you didn't approve of.

I didn't use drugs, but.

You know, I'd have a beer with some of them, but I didn't try to drink myself into a stupor 24.

Who could drink a case that was at seven o'clock.

Hey, Victor, I'll pick you up at seven o'clock.

And by midnight, I'll have 24 beers under my belt.

Well, that's almost liver toxicity, right?

I never understood that, Victor.

Yeah, I never, I never.

You mentioned you, because how could you drink 24 cans of water?

I don't know.

I don't know if they did or they just poured them out, but they always say, Hey, I finished my case.

I got my chorus cases done.

How about you guys?

It was always competition.

And then it was always, you'd be there.

And all of a sudden, some guy, hey, Victor,

he said you were a wimp.

What are you going to do about it?

And I said, What do you mean he said I'm a wimp?

He said, Hey, Rodney said you're a piece of crap.

You got to go fight him.

Why would I want to fight him?

You know, and they'd say, Well, don't ask, go hit him, you know.

And, and that was, you know, and then some girl who was,

you know, it was just, it was very tough.

It was, uh, it was sort of,

you know, and then I had this, these.

But in hindsight,

it was enjoyable.

Yes.

You're not.

I had some of my closest friends.

I still see them.

Yeah, it was on Jero.

There was a camaraderie that...

But it was also juvenile.

They got into their heads that there was a witch up on the Kings River.

Seriously?

Yeah, seriously.

They said, you know, there's a witch up there.

And one guy, you know, half of us were Mexican-American.

And one guy said it was the Virgin of Guadalupe, not a witch.

But they actually, we'd get in cars and drive out there and then walk along this pier out in the pitch of night at one in the morning on the river, waiting for the witch to come out.

And then somebody said, I see her.

There she is.

And they'd all run back.

And it was just kind of juvenile, too.

But there was no shooting, killing,

mash and grab, carjacking.

But it was, it was, you had to show, you, it was, when I got to UC Santa Cruz and everybody had long hair and they were smoking dope and it was, hey, what are you doing?

Hey,

where are you from?

I'm from Pacific Palsai.

It was just a whole different world.

It was, it was this hippie, you know, when I was in, so what you would do is you'd go over to a guy's house and,

you know, at eight o'clock at night.

My parents let me go out one night a week on Saturday night, even though I had a car.

My brother and I shared an old Volvo, twin brother.

And guys would be lifting weights, right?

And they'd say, Hey, Victor, can you do 200?

I couldn't.

But they were, and then I'd go over to Santa Cruz, and it was just the opposite aesthetic.

You wanted the skinniest little arms you could have.

You wanted to have the most effeminate voice.

You had, you didn't take a bath, you didn't work alone.

These guys would like take three showers a day and take a gallon of brute and pour it over their head.

And they didn't drink beer.

It was wine and dope.

And

talking about books.

And one time, I'll finish with this story.

I was getting so frustrated with all of this UC Santa Cruz stuff, left-wing, chase posters down the hallway,

you name it.

I mean, it was right during the Cambodia thing.

I just couldn't take it.

And they were all arrogant, wealthy kids.

So I invited all these guys up.

They all came up and they went to a party.

And

what do you do?

You see Santa Cruz party among hippies, you know, it's like you sit around and you get a hookah and I guess you just smoke dope and then you pair off and have sex with some anonymous person or something.

And so they come in with tight t-shirts,

you know, kind of boots and Levi's and baseball caterpillar hats.

And they all look like they can't look like little Arnold Schwarzeneggers, right?

Yeah.

And they go into this room, they go, Hey, what's happening?

Oh, I don't know, man.

Where are you from?

Hey, lighten up.

Hey, where's the beer?

Where's the cores?

Where's the chicks?

And then, and then they ended up, of course, trashing the whole place.

They got in fights.

I went to bed, and somebody called me up and said, Hey, one of your friends from that god-awful Fresno area just threw a sofa out the window, and somebody was in it.

It wasn't too high.

And so the next day, the provost called me and said, who are these strange creatures?

Creatures is the word he used that you invited up here.

And I said, they're just people.

And he said, well, I would like you, if you promise me that these people will not come again, I won't charge you.

Because I didn't do it, you know, for the broken sofa, but it was a culture shock for them and the host.

And I couldn't, I never navigated.

I, you know, I'd go five days a week, my freshman years, and it was all 60s hippies, Grateful Dead, marijuana people,

that nasal voice I couldn't stand, left-wing politics.

And then 180 miles back in Salma, it was, hey, Victor, let's have a beer.

And, hey, I got a job at Fruhoff Trailer, or I'm working at Calcan Cannery, or, hey, I got a great job at Del Monte.

You know,

all married, you know, at 19.

And it was just too much to process.

The beer was Coors, right?

Always Coors.

Yes, always Coors.

I don't know if it was true, but they said it was never what it had to be refrigerated.

Remember?

Oh, Coors was always a big in the East Coast.

People would say, you can't get Coors.

You heard about it.

They didn't have preservatives in it, supposedly, and they had to keep it cold.

Everybody drank Coors.

I didn't like Coors.

The one beer that they all made fun of, they called it piss water.

And they hated it, it was Olympia.

And it was much less, I thought it was, had less of a hop taste.

It was more watery.

I liked Olympia.

So I would always say, hey, is anybody having Olympia?

Oh, man.

Look at him.

Hey, everybody.

Look at Victor.

He's drinking that piss water.

He's a wimp.

What the hell's wrong with him?

Take it from him.

They're still making Olympia, Victor.

Next time I go out there, I'm bringing you a case.

I didn't fit very well, but I like, I,

I, uh,

well, you know, when you get older, you look back at your, you look back at your parents and you think, my God, what were they doing?

You know, because there was a country farm school

K through A with all white and ethnic farmers, Armenians, Greeks, Japanese.

It was very, and then there was the Westside school that was 95%

Mexican-American, and we were right on the dividing line of the school districts.

And my mom insisted that we go to the Hispanic school so we saw diversity, I guess.

But we were like eight white people.

You know, my brothers, two brothers, and a few people.

And the white people that were there were very poor.

And boy, it was tough.

But I ended up having lifelong friends that were Mexican American.

That was

my friends today I went to high school with and grammar school, kindergarten with.

I still see them.

But I don't know what my parents were trying to do is what I'm saying, because given they had left the farm, and apparently

after they died, it must have been that they

went, my mom went to Stanford, and my dad, you know, he was in

the Army Air Force, but he went to University of Pacific.

And they situated themselves with wealthy coastal people.

And whatever happened, they didn't like it.

And they retreated back to this little tiny insular.

And they wanted us not to get,

they wanted us to go to school and be professionals, but they did not want us to adopt that culture.

They wanted to have agrarian values and small town and friends and be able to take care of yourself in a very practical sense.

And they were pretty, but it was pretty tough sometimes.

I mean,

they were right, though, and it worked.

It was just a very funny time.

My brother, I remember, walked down one day and a guy pulled over and he was really huge and beat the hell out of my brother.

Just saw him on the street.

And in those days, think about it.

So my dad

just took it upon himself to find this guy.

And

the police arrested him.

And so my dad goes to, I won't mention which town, it's a little rural town.

He goes to the jail.

And the police says, that's the guy that did it.

And so my dad walks in.

He shouldn't be able to do that.

But they said, you know, they didn't know him.

He didn't have any special access or clout.

They just said, your son got beat up by that guy, Mr.

Hansen.

My dad was huge and he liked to fight.

And so he went in there and he said, So you beat up my son.

And the guy goes, Yeah, and I liked it, or something to that effect.

So he said, Well, let's settle it right now.

They're going to let me in your cell.

So I got they're going to let me in your cell and I'm going to come in that cell with you and we're going to have it out.

Okay.

And I just went nuts.

And

he,

the next day, his mother and father came out with some kind of paper saying they were going to sue us because he was his,

my dad had threatened him.

And then my mom said, you know, I'm a lawyer.

Oh, my gosh.

Just stuff like that happened every day in this crazy place.

Yeah.

Well, I never met your dad, of course, but I want to testify to your, when I visited earlier last year and I saw on your wall, you had a note, a letter from the football, the giants, the New York football giants.

Your father, like they're not sending letters

to little, little tiny guys.

So he's, he, he had a trial.

I think he got $500

for one season with their farm team.

And then he decided that he took too much damage.

He hurt his knees or something.

I don't know what happened, but

it was.

Anyway, that was an American graffiti childhood.

Everything in that movie I could identify with.

Well, Victor,

it really is a terrific series of pieces, as is all the ultra pieces you write for

VictorHanson.com.

So I want to recommend it, folks.

I hope we lifted the lid a little bit.

You see what you're missing if you're not subscribing.

Victor, that's about all the time we have.

We'll do the usual end of show.

So thanks to all who listen, regardless of the platform you listen on.

When you listen via iTunes or Apple podcasts,

you can rate the show zero to five stars.

Practically everyone is five.

Thank you very much.

We appreciate that.

Hope that means we're providing content and

Victor's wisdom that you really find engaging.

One person who left a comment, and I want to read one also from the website, but here's one that somebody that left a comment from Apple.

It's from Don the Painter and it's titled Encouragement.

Hi, Victor.

We are about the same age.

Truly enjoy listening to your podcast.

I'm a believer and your work reminds me of Ephesians 5, 14, 16.

You are truly redeeming your time on earth.

Blessings to you and your family.

A highlight of my life.

would be to

run into you in a home depot aisle and have a good chat or coffee.

Hope I see you in heaven, Victor.

Your words have anchored so many Americans to the truth.

Don, the painter.

That's really cool.

That's nice of him.

I hope I make it.

I'm trying my best.

I hope you make it to Home Depot.

Now, listen,

off your

victorhanson.com, here's a comment from Jill Clark,

who writes, so part one and two here are absolutely wonderful.

I read this with a smile on my face.

I think so many of us, regular Americans, live similar lives.

My dad worked for the Attorney General's office as a litigator in Salt Lake City, but we had a family paper route to pay for our summer trips.

Dad would wake us up early on Sunday to help him roll and deliver Sunday editions of the Desert News.

That was our family's equivalent of peddling a fruit done by the Hansen family.

I'm a middle school teacher and worked with my own 16-year-old this summer at our local

MLS soccer stadium in a food cart, trying to teach that kid the value of work, any work.

Thank you for doing the grueling work of writing articles like these to remind us of how great America was and is still, hopefully.

That's from Jill Clark.

Thank you, Jill.

Victor, thank you for, again, all the wisdom you shared.

It's a real honor to be able to do this show with you twice a week.

I'm sure Sammy feels the same.

And folks, thank you for listening.

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

Thanks for listening.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.