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That's Victor Davis-Hansen.

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Talk to you a little more about that later, right?

At the beginning of the show here, Victor, we are going to talk about reparations madness.

And we will get to that, your thoughts on it right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor, I just saw the most recent piece on reparations.

Actually, there's a very good one up on Daily Mail, which has kind of a wide view of how many municipalities and states are advocating this lunacy.

That writer

emailed me yesterday for a quote, but I don't think she used it.

Well, why don't you

have at it, Victor?

Okay, so reparations.

The last time we went through this, remember it was right prior to 9-11, and David Horowitz had written a good takedown of it.

And then we had 9-11, and it seemed compared to these existential threats, an absurdity.

So

start off with the idea, Jack, that we live in an absurd age, to use that term.

I mean, think about it.

We have Elizabeth Warren, who says she's Native American.

She's Harvard's first, what, affirmative action hire for Native American law professors.

That's true.

And then we have Megan Markle and Opa swapping stories in Montecito, mansion to mansion, but also who's oppressed more.

And then we had the Juicy Smollett defy the laws of chemistry with his bleach that never freezes and sub articles.

So it's an absurd age.

And it's even more absurd than the age of

Al Sharpton.

Remember if the Jews want to get it on and would tell them what, to pin their yarmocks on and come over to my house.

Remember that?

I remember that one.

He said, we taught astrology before Socrates and dim Greek homos.

Remember that?

So

it's even worse than that.

So you have all these problems.

So they say, we're going to give reparations.

Okay, who gets it?

Who gets it?

Do you do DNA tests?

Just make sure that you have what?

proper percentage?

Ask Elizabeth Warren how that went.

Or do you just say, you know what, some societies have done this before.

They have established rules of eligibility for racial categories.

So we're going to go back to the old South and start the one drop rule.

One black drop and you're black in reparations.

Or we can go to Hitler and say yellow stars.

We can have different color stars.

Or we can go to our Park Tide South Africa where everybody had a racial certificate to prove.

A genealogist will prove what you are.

Is that what you want to do?

And that sounds absurd and sick, and it is, because the idea is is sick so when you say you're going to give uh reparations to one particular group you're going to have to adjudicate who that group is and the casinos have had a terrible problem with people who say they're native americans they want to get 150th or 100th of the gaming royalties and they usually usually use the one drop rule or 116th rule that's how that's where we're we're at and then you know jack there's this um

there's this idea that even if you were African American, if you're Caribbean black, what's your claim on American money?

Or what would be Barack Obama's claim?

That he's half black, so he gets half a reparations check, but he doesn't get any because his father was outside the Jim Crow-slavery experience?

Are you going to do that as well?

So every black that can't prove that he was here for how many generations?

And then you have to ask whose culpability is it, Jack?

Whose culpability?

Who caused it?

I mean, this happened 158 years ago.

Slavery was over.

And I don't know.

There's six generations, 25 years in most tallies.

So your great, great, great grandparents who never owned slaves are going, you're the descendant of them, and you're going to give the

money to your taxes to a descendant of a great, great, great, great great-grandfather who was a serf.

So people who don't know anything about slavery

for six generations are going to give money to people who never suffered for six generations.

That's what it is.

And

I don't know.

I mean, in California in 1860,

I'd looked at this not too long ago for an article I was writing, and there were 4,000 black people in a state of about...

400,000, 1%, Jack, because California is the one that's the most advanced.

And so this state state was not a slave state, it was a free state, it was an overwhelmingly pro-union state.

There were no major battles of the Civil War, so it was completely outside that slavery experience.

And there was only 1% of the population.

So you're going to have the descendants of that 1%,

you're going to what

give

a million dollars, as some people said.

5 million, right?

In San Francisco.

So

what qualifies?

I mean,

so

we don't let people vote if you're a rapist or a murderer, convicted felon.

If you're a convicted felon, if you kill somebody, you rape somebody, you hit somebody over the head,

you get reparations.

You're going to mail the check to your cell if you've committed a violent crime.

Nobody's talking about that.

If you want to go back six generations, do you adjudicate?

So a guy whose great-great-great-great-grandfather was from the first Michigan when he went with Sherman through Georgia and he freed 25,000 slaves.

He's going to pay money.

And maybe, who knows?

Maybe somebody came and he's a descendant of a West African slave trader whose job and money, and we know that was a huge industry, was to take slaves from the interior of intra-black tribal wars and bring them out and sell them to the Portuguese and the...

the British and the Spanish.

Is that person, the descendant of that person's culpable?

What if you, I don't know.

So, and then there's these comparative grievances.

Once you start paying reparations, we did it with the Japanese, but they were within living memory.

They were the direct, the direct beneficiaries of reparations because they were the direct victims of forced relocation against the Constitution, not six generations earlier.

But are we going to say to Armenians, and how about Jews and Armenians?

Well, you suffered more deaths than any other

group put together when you came here.

There was over a million and a half Armenian and six million Jews that were killed.

And some of you got killed because we had very unfair, restrictive immigration.

So

we're going to pay reparations.

And by the way, there were zoning laws that said Armenians could not live in particular areas.

There were racial quotas at Stanford and the Ivy League that barred Jews from coming to school.

And so there's all of these.

Could you see an Armenian saying?

Yeah, well, I would say like freeze Turkish assets in the United States and give me their reparations.

Or say, you know, my grandmother came in 1915 and she wasn't let in.

I had to go back and she was killed.

I want reparations.

You saw what it leads to with the Los Angeles City Council hot mic.

Remember that?

The three Latino members and the union guy, and they were, that's what we're getting to.

And then

there's a so think about reparations.

The state owes me because

it's done something to me.

Jack, there might be a plus and minus ledger calculus.

So each particular group will have to be adjudicated on what they contributed or didn't contribute, and it will be in the collective.

And I don't mean that in the sense of an individual, I mean collective, just like reparations are paid for collectives.

It's if every African American is of equal merit in deserving a reparation.

So we're going to look at every particular group.

So why don't we do this?

Why don't we say, let's look at hate crimes, which particular group has suffered inordinately

and which has

inflicted inordinately?

If you look at FBI statistics from 2019, it turns out that African Americans have committed double the hate crimes of their demography, 12% to 13%, 25% of hate crimes are committed that are reported.

And it looks like Asians suffer inordinately.

So are we going to say, well, when we give the reparations, we have to deduct because there was a lot of destruction, toil, death committed by this collective against this collective.

Because we're not looking at individuals, remember, this

reparations.

And then,

you know, I'm on a roll, Jack.

I know people are going to be be offended by this, but it's reparations upon reparations upon reparation.

Remember that Heritage Foundation study that said the Great Society from its inception in 1965 till now was $22 trillion?

That was almost all entitlements and redistribution, much of it racially based.

And then you remember that Pigford 1 and Pigford II, the black farmers that got an aggregate of $5 billion?

And

maybe you can say to

you know

Joe Smith that is the son of the Oklahoma diaspora in Bakersfield who doesn't have one single parent that ever went to college and is making the minimum wage and has been subject to a lot of discrimination as the Okies were

that he can't go to stand he's earned it he's got a 4.5

he can't get into Stanford he's got a perfect

is that does he have reparations?

Said, you know what?

I never had any privilege.

I don't have any college mentors, but I can't get in because they're racially discriminating against me.

Is that a reparatory cause for him?

And does it deduct from the African-American reparation?

Said, well, affirmative action, court decisions, payouts.

Great society, we have to take that amount of money and then deduct it from the reparatory claim.

It has nothing to do with class, obviously, because,

I mean, there's some idea about, you know, net worth.

Is it going to be income?

Does LeBron get it?

The

means tested.

Is it going to be means tested?

I don't sure.

And then where's the money come from, Jack?

California says it's $25 billion, but it's actually going to be about $45 billion.

We can't, you know, like the federal government, states cannot roll over the debt.

So where is it going to come from?

And in the United States, we're

$31 trillion in debt.

Social Security Trust Fund is going to be bankrupt in 12 to 15 years.

So we're just going to, what?

We're going to

pay 12% of the population.

We're not going to pay anybody reparations.

We're going to borrow it at 5 or 6%.

And there's no statutes of limitations, obviously.

So it doesn't really matter of anything in the past, but maybe somebody would make the argument, well, wait a minute.

This issue was dealt with.

500, 600, more likely 700, according to latest statistics, were killed in the Civil War.

And more than half of them came from the North.

So you're saying that this country is absolutely responsible for chattel slavery in the South, but it fought a civil war where 400,000 people died trying to stop it.

And that matters nothing, nothing at all.

And do you really believe, finally, I'm going to stop because I'm getting kind of worked up.

Do you really believe that right now, at this moment,

when 50 to 55 percent, depending on the felony, of violent crimes are committed by about 4% of the population, African-American males between the ages of 14 and 40?

That's about 52 to 55 percent.

And they are about 55 percent of the victims of the 10,000 African Americans that are killed every day, overwhelmingly by other blacks.

Or if you look at 72 percent born out of wedlock,

and you know, I think it's 64, 65 percent grow up in one family, one parent households.

What I'm getting at is, do you really think that

giving a million dollars, 800,000 is going to stop these pathologies.

These pathologies were not created by necessarily the black community.

They were created by the great society that incentivized not getting married, out of wedlock births, et cetera, et cetera.

And Tom Soule has written eloquently of the structure of the black family prior to the great society versus after.

So the idea that you're just going to write them a check, write this particular group, and then we don't worry about the rest of these problems.

You think these problems are going to disappear?

All of a sudden, a person's going to get $800,000 and say, I'm going to get married.

I'm going to stay married.

I'm going to make sure I'm a father to my child.

I'm going to make sure nobody in my family ever commits a felony.

I don't think so.

I think there's deeper roots of those problems.

Absolutely.

No family structure.

It's a bi-coastal elite.

Write a check, and I'm done with it.

And

an elite black coalition with elite bicoastal elites saying, you know what, all of these deplorables are racist.

They always were racist.

We'll write a check for you guys, and we don't have to worry about it anymore.

And then, of course, finally, each group, as I said earlier, is going to have claims.

If anybody needs a claim, if you were going to go by this logic, As I said, the group that is systematically discriminated against and loses life-changing experiences in top universities that they have earned a slot.

And they are inordinately the victims of hate crimes in this country.

And they commit fewer crimes per capita or percentage of the demography than any other group are Asian.

And they have a history almost as checkered as the African American in terms of being oppressed.

They were blown up while they worked for the railroad.

They were put in camps.

They were restricted from immigration.

And yet we don't hear about,

and that's something that is well, let's let's yeah, let's talk about that in a little bit, Victor, because as you know, that issue has been percolating and kind of exploded in the last couple of days

related to Virginia.

So, if you are you, if you're are you finished on reparations?

Because

I better be because I want to maintain my job.

But, I mean, it's something you can't discuss.

I tried to be logical about how bankrupt this idea, and it's the pathway to the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda, believe me.

They do that.

California loses 300,000 people a year

and they are in the upper middle class tax bracket.

1%, Jack, of California households pay 50% of the income tax.

And that's still not enough.

As I said, we're 45%.

of the state income.

We're 45 billion probably in the hole.

And we have billions of dollars that are fleeing the state.

It's not just Elon Musk and Tessa.

It's all of these companies.

And do you believe if they pass this and it works out to what, $200,000 in taxes on people in San Francisco, if the city were to pass it, what would happen?

People would get up and leave.

Say, I'm not going to stay here.

I'm not going to pay all these taxes.

And they're going to leave.

Well, they are.

The people who pick this up are really don't know what they're doing.

They're only heightening racial tensions.

They're creating animosities.

The Latino community is

just

adamantly against this.

And there's no majority in California, no particular racial majority is 51%.

Yeah.

Victor, we've come quite a long way from the concept of the content of character versus the color of

skin.

So, Victor, though, you mentioned the Asian students getting hammered.

And let's talk about that right after these important messages.

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

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So that's VictorHanson.com.

Victor,

I'm an old friend of Azra Nomani.

And Azra used to write for the Wall Street Journal.

And she's a parent who lives in Northern Virginia.

And her child goes to this infamous Thomas Jefferson High School, one of the top-rated public high schools in the country.

It was one of the epicenters of the parents fighting back against these school board officials that helped Glenn Youngkin win the governor's election.

And since

that historic election, whether it was that

14 months ago,

this new related scandal has percolated, where these kids who have won national merit awards have had the information about those awards suppressed, not sent on to colleges.

The kids can't make the claim that they won the award, which, of course, could get some of them full scholarships, many of them

significant scholarships.

And it seems that what was happening at one school

has happened at at least 14 schools in Northern Virginia.

There are at least a thousand students.

Most of them are

Asian American, or many of them are, I should say,

are Asian American.

And this is intentional.

This is intentional by the school bureaucrats who want equity of outcome.

And that's why it's okay to suppress news of your merit.

It's funny, they call it merit, the merit scholarships.

Merit's dead.

Yeah.

Anyway, Victor, it's quite a demerit.

Yeah,

it hurts you.

Well, I mean,

it's famous.

It's an institution in America that juniors in high school take the PSAT.

And then

if they, until this aberration for decades, if students

do well on the SAT at a particular percentage, then they're declared national merit scholars.

And if you're a national merit scholar, then the offers of scholarships and admissions from the best schools pour in.

And people, I suppose, worked and studied to prep for these things, and they paid off.

And then these teachers or administrators or both on their own, Jack,

decided that this was not fully equal on the back end, the quality of results.

So they took it upon themselves to suppress that knowledge.

So they basically, I think, are exposed criminally, or I should say civilly, to huge lawsuits because there's probably a fantastic amount of money that was lost, an opportunity that was lost, by

them discriminating against people who did well and by association by Asians.

The Asian community, you know, there's a lot of problems

with finding justice.

First of all, we've recreated the Asian community.

When I was in college, there was a Japanese American, a Chinese American,

the Indian American.

The idea that

China that suffered 15 million casualties, deaths in World War II from Japan, that there was this ecominical brotherhood or the Vietnam community or this the Hmong community, they're no more

homogeneous than, you know,

a Serbian and

an Italian or,

I don't know, somebody who's Portuguese and somebody who's from Argentina with blue eye.

I mean, there's, right.

And it's just ridiculous.

So first of all, the Asian community, I don't know who is what, but I do know that especially Asian immigrants have this work ethos and they understand how America works collectively.

If I could stereotype that education and professions result in higher income and more opportunities, so they really push their children.

And the problem is that they are being punished as the good minority.

And you see young Asians who are at Berkeley or Stanford, and they're embarrassed because they're getting flack from the other minority group and said, you know what, the white people are using you as the ideal minority because they say to us, us, well, you haven't suffered like the Asians do necessarily.

And the Asians came here.

And look at the Asians.

If they had a lot of racism and they're outperforming whites on college admission scores and GPAs and income groups, they're one of 17 groups.

If you look at the 17 ethnic groups that outperform so-called white

so-called white groups in terms of household income, almost all half of them, two-thirds are Asians.

So the point is that

they're very dangerous, Jack, because they threaten the entire affirmative action identity politics woke industry, and people despise them.

They despise them just the way they do black conservatives.

And when I say people, I mean that industry and

its

icons because they look at these people that are Asian or they look at black conservatives or any minority that

does very, very well, well, and they'll think they're going to be used by the majority culture to say, see, racism was not an impediment, systematic racism or systemic racism or microaggressions.

It didn't matter.

And so

that's the problem.

And again, they have, I think they have legal writs and cause

against these school districts.

They should put all of any administrator that knowingly withheld that information should be immediately suspended.

Immediately.

Yeah, it's like racketeering, too.

I mean, they clearly colluded with each other.

The RICO,

McGurne, Bill McGurne, my old buddy, said RICO was made for guys named RICO,

but the Racketeering Influence Act is,

to me, this seems tailor-made for it.

I mean, they conspired to

seem like a criminal offense.

It really does.

And I think they were instructed to participate in the PSAT test and the national merit program, they were responsible, or they had,

I think, had agreed as part of their institution to at least give the results in a prompt fashion to the test takers, and they violated that.

So I think they're culpable, and

they're in a state that has a sane governor, so I think there will be consequences.

But it dovetails into this repertory question that we're talking about.

Right.

And that is

what

is, I mean, we have this idea that we go back six generations to find culpability to explain unhappiness or lack of parity that can't be ever attributed to an individual's choices.

It has to be a collective, okay.

But in the here and now,

we're discriminating.

We're racist.

We're using the power of the state, the school district, the university to destroy people's lives on the basis of race.

And we call that victory or we call that wonderful.

It's sick.

It's sick what we're doing.

And there has to be some consequences of it.

And when people say, we want reparations because my great-great-great-grandfather was a slave, then somebody else is going to say, I need reparations right now because I was systematically, racially discriminated against through a quota system that looked at my skin and said, this is not the correct skin, and your color is now the correct skin.

And we're going to give you something by taking it away from that person.

That's what it is.

And so

it's very dangerous because when you start looking at the history of Yugoslavia and the Serbians and the Kosovars and the Bosnians and the Albanians and the Macedonians, etc.,

you can see

the same ancient

blood writ against another group.

And it just magnifies and magnifies, and then people start to identify as their primary identification becomes their race.

And that's, it's, I don't know how we're going to recover from this because the left has just said to them, it's essentially said to the nation, we don't have a program socially, economically, politically, military.

We don't have a program that people want.

Everything that we do turns to gross.

We help cause the homeless program.

We are responsible for the spiking crime.

We are responsible for out-of-control, inflation, energy, and we can't get public support.

But we know one thing that we can turn each other against each other with race and inflame the situation and call people names.

And that's what they're doing.

And it won't stop until 51% of the population say,

not me.

I'm not going to participate in this.

Nope.

Call me any name in the world, but I'm not going to judge a person on the color of their skin, much less is my institution, my company, my firm going to do that.

And yet they're all scared.

And I guess ultimately they're scared of what?

Violence?

Is that what it is?

The 2020 type of violence?

Because a lot of this was accelerated after 2020, the 120 days of violence in the streets.

So

I don't know.

I mean, I want a country where we go back and we end we individualize people.

So if I see an African-American student, he's not African-American.

He's a person, just like a white student or an Asian person.

He doesn't belong to a collective.

He's not responsible for the collective good or the collective bad of that particular tribal group.

I'm not responsible for people who did terrible things that are white, and I can't claim credit for people who did good things that are white.

It's up to me.

I'm an individual.

And I sink or swim by my own.

record or lack of record of achievement.

Until we get to that point, we're never going to get over this.

And there's too much money to be made now and too much opportunity.

But we're getting to the point of absurdity, Jack, because race and class are no longer synonymous.

Not when you have a huge upper-middle-class African-American successful group and you have per capita incomes that are It's just startling in their gain.

It's been very successful when you turn American capitalism and the free market open to people and you have an equality of opportunity and you have civil rights legislation that says you cannot discriminate by the verses of race and you let people's natural talent.

Victor, there's too many people making too much money

on this stick now.

Diverse college,

equity, inclusion.

15,000 administrators are not all

DEI people, but a lot of them have grown.

And that's another weird thing that the faculty unions, the professors, they were always bitching about

administrative bloat.

But not when it came to these new SARS that started appearing after 2020 in droves.

Right.

Well, not only a colleges, every freaking school in America, and

every one of them has consultants coming at them out of the gazoo to offer DEI courses for kindergartners or whatever the hell.

I know

there's a lot of money being made out there.

I don't think the left understands what it's created because you talk to people,

and I'm talking about liberals in the Bay Area.

And if I go to dinner with them, or I talk to them, or I see them in various occasions, they just say things

matter-of-factly now.

They'll say things like, well,

my son goes to the menlo school.

He's got a four-point, he can't get in school, of course.

He's a white male.

They just accept it.

And when they see somebody else

with lower scores, these are left-wing people, mind you.

They say, well, that person got in because

of our racist system.

And they just accept it.

It's a very cynical, angry attitude.

And it's driving the country apart.

It's driving.

And you know,

we had people like Al Sharpton, who now has been an icon, but he hasn't changed from the Crown Heights violence and the Toronto Brawley that he stirred up.

And then we had Jesse Jackson and Jaime Town.

We had Farrakhan and Gutter Religion.

We had all these, Malcolm X even, you know, advocated violence against what, collectively against white people.

And we've had the Bull Connors and

their counterparts and other people like that.

But

the difference is

it was not

mainstreamed into the center of society.

There was not, it wasn't the corporate boardroom.

It wasn't Tiffany.

it wasn't the movie all-star game because, you know, Delta Airlines says so, stuff like that.

And it started with Obama.

I keep driving this point home when he created this, recreated or re-emphasized this word diversity, and he defined it by race, not ideological diversity or character diversity.

He just simply said, if you are not white, you're part of what was essentially an updated rainbow coalition.

And that really drove, and then when he started saying things, everybody says, well, you know, he was a great, no, he was the most smooth, slick, eloquent, mellifilous divider we've ever had.

When he started saying things like, my,

you know, my grandmother was basically a racist and was afraid of black men.

And the Cambridge police, you know, is culpable.

And police, everybody knows what the way police are.

And

Trayvon looks, would look, my son would have looked like Trayvon.

You know, what if Bill Clinton had said, ah,

this is

if there was a death or something, so this is the,

this poor young girl, this poor young kid would have looked like the son I never had, blue-eyed, what would people say?

Or a president said that?

It's just, it's incomprehensible if,

you know, if

somebody was,

I don't know, I don't want to get into it, but if somebody loses, sees a death and you identify immediately and say,

my child that I never had would have looked just like that child, meaning they would have been something superior because on the basis of their race, and you identify only on the racial aspect.

It's a very sick society.

I think everybody should realize that.

When you think back to Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, George Zimmerman was half Peruvian.

And all he had to do.

Yes, all he was create, they created a new word in their parlance, the New York Times.

They doctored, remember they doctored CNN, they doctored the photos to airbrush away the cuts on him.

And then they doctored the 9-11 tape that they released so that it sounded like he was more racist or racist at all.

But my point is, all he had to do was play their game, the Elizabeth Warren game.

All he had to do was say, my name is not a Germanic George Zimmerman.

I have one drop.

In fact, I have 50% drops.

I am not white.

I am, my name is not George, it's Jorge.

And my name is not Zimmerman of my father, who's Germanic and sounds too white, but it's my mother from Peru, Mesa.

My name is Jorge Mesa.

And he could pronounce it that.

All he had to do was that.

And then the story would have been Hispanic versus African-American.

And that would have been the end of it.

And that's how sick this society is with the nomenclature.

And that's why everybody understands that.

That's why you have an Elizabeth Warren.

That's why you have a Ward Churchill.

That's why you have a racial dozen.

That's why you have all these people.

And

when you look at college admissions, one of the biggest problems that these admissions officers have is black, Czech, Latino, Czech, white, Czech, mixed race, Czech check.

So people are checking mixed race.

And a lot of the admissions officers know that these people are not mixed race, but it's, and a lot of them are white.

And so like if Stanford has 23% white and it has 15 or so mixed race, a lot of those mixed race are probably white people.

But the point is,

what do they do when somebody says mixed race?

And how do they ascertain they're not?

Because you know what?

They're scared to death to

call that person up and say, you know what?

We've got a good tradition from the old South, or Hitler has some pretty good genealogists, or the DNA will really make the apartheid system work.

And we're going to use this.

So we want proof that you're of mixed race.

Because once they go down that line of authenticity and trying to find out and verifying a claim, then you get into spooky, eerie, crazy territory.

Yeah, 23 and me, I'm 7% Tanzanian.

Who knew, right?

Now, give me my scholarship.

Absolutely.

And that's what they don't want to do.

So they would rather not talk about it.

And so they let that slide.

And

the funny thing about all this is

when I walk across the Stanford campus after 2020, and I see that when you're letting into the new class, 23%

so-called white, and the year before, I think it was 40%,

and you're changing,

you want to visibly change the student body because you're racialist.

Then you look at the people who are going in and out of the administrative buildings at the very highest echelon.

And this is true of all these IVs.

They're mostly white.

I know there's a black, a woman who's now president of Harvard, but the most, the people who are doing this, is what I'm saying.

They operate on the premise that they have reached the pinnacle of their career trajectory and they're untouchable.

Or even if they were to be fired, it doesn't matter.

They're in their 60s, they've made money,

they've got everything they want, and they're never subject to the consequences of their ideology.

What I mean by that is the provost of Yale or the president of MIT or the dean at Stanford, their children never come into the house and say, you know what, Dad, I had a 4.5, I studied every day,

I was an Eagle Scout.

I had a perfect desk.

I didn't get in anywhere that I wanted.

And the father says, well, these are the principles we play by.

So, you know, there's nothing wrong with Cal State Fresno.

It's got a good nursing program.

It's got a good ag program.

I want you to go down to Fresno.

They don't say that, Jack.

And they say, oh.

That's not going to happen to you.

I got on the phone and I called old Bud and I called Bill and I called Frank and we knew that's how they do it.

Same thing with Silicon Valley people.

And so it's basically a creation

of

white people, very wealthy white people, to go after the white working class, the clinger who are expendable and can be quota, can be have quotas applied to them so that they can free up space.

for basically African-American, Latino people who don't meet their own criteria.

And I'm not going to say whether criteria is valid or not, but it's their criteria.

I didn't make it up.

They make up the criteria.

They abide by it.

Pressure is against it.

It doesn't result in the proper fully correct results.

They change the criteria for some groups, not for everybody.

And then they say, oh my God, we only have 5,000 slots.

And we're going to have to take the 12% up to 18% or the 10% up to 16%.

Where does that come from?

We're going to take it from the white male, but we've got all these Silicon Valley people giving money.

We've got all these deans, we've got all these provosts, we've got all these wealthy alumni.

We've got to get their kids in.

So we'll just take it from

Bill Smith and Merced.

He doesn't need it.

And that's what they do.

It's a class thing.

It really is.

As most things are.

Well, Victor, just speaking of people of

Asia,

I I'm always a little perplexed when India was considered part of the

Asian American,

separate, but regardless.

That started in the 1990s, I think, or maybe about 2000 later.

I think it started under the Obama administration.

And I could see it, how it filters down to the here and now, because

I have a lot of Sikh neighbors, Punjabi neighbors.

I know them.

It's a wonderful community.

But I noticed something that when

Punjabis were considered part of the Asian collective or part of the non-white group, they became very sensitive to that, that they were now

an official kind of minority.

And both in the positive and negative sense, in the sense that they felt they were being discriminated against, which they were.

as being overrepresented, but also that they felt that they could have claims against the majority culture because they were oppressed as non-whites.

And

that was a very peculiar situation.

Right.

Well, since Indian Americans are part of

a minority, you would think someone like Nikki Haley wouldn't get better treatment from the media.

But

let's talk about her.

And let's do that, though, right after

this important final message.

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

So, Victor, that was a long and awkward way of me trying to get into this next matter.

Nikki Haley has had an interview or two this past week,

and she

walked up to the edge of saying she was going to run for president.

She was a successful governor of South Carolina.

She, well,

you can give your opinion.

I seemed to be a successful ambassador to the U.N.

under president appointed by President Trump.

I don't know that she cuts it or not.

Obviously,

if you run for president, you're running against other people.

But Victor, I'd be interested in your thoughts of Nikki Haley as somebody who

could be president of the United States someday.

All these candidates, the way to look at all of these these candidates in the Republican, and there's not going to be as many on the Democratic side, I think.

We'll see, is

what is the one thing they have to overcome?

So Donald Trump, what does he have to overcome?

He has to overcome that it's not that he can't govern.

It's not that he doesn't have a great agenda.

The MAGA thing works spectacularly.

It is to what degree can he stop going down the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs, the attacking and

awful, you're crazy, you're ugly, that kind of stuff, the personal invective.

If he can stop that and stop what he did with Ron DeSantimonias and

Mitch's wife and Junkin's name sounds oriental and change the Constitution to reverse the last,

all that stuff that was unnecessary, if he can control that, then he's in good shape.

What is it about?

Ron DeSantis.

Ron DeSantis has a superb record of governance.

He's a very strong conservative.

But the question about him was, does he have the fire, the Trumpian fire in the belly?

I think he saw that.

He went after the Martha's Vineyard people.

He went after Disney.

He went after the school boards in Florida.

He did everything to show people that he was not

the Jeb Bush type of Republican that was going to bring back into the fold the Never Trumpers.

So he did fulfill that.

And that's why I think he's rising in the the polls.

That was the doubt that people said about what is Pompeo's one thing he has to true.

Well, it's very hard for a Secretary of State.

He's a wonderful man.

He's got a great record as Secretary of State.

But if you don't have a constituency, that is, you're not from a major elected,

you haven't held a major elective office.

Congress, former Congressman, it's very difficult for them to be elected to anything.

And he has not been a governor or a senator or et cetera.

So he's a Secretary of State, sort of like William Jennings Bryan,

four times run for president, and he was made secretary, but he doesn't have a constituency yet.

If he can create a constituency, then he will be.

So what is Nikki Haley's challenge?

It's a long-winded getting back to what your question was.

And it's simply, is she a rhino?

Is she

smooth?

She's articulate.

She can say she's combative.

She did a wonderful job in the UN.

And the question is,

does she believe in the new conservative Republican Party?

Or is she going to take us back to McCain-Jeb-Romney-

And that's what she has to prove.

So she will, I think, look for incidents, issues, policies,

occasions where she can show people that she's genuinely conservative.

And then how does this all boil down?

On the right side, you have 8 to 10 to 15 million people who will vote.

And they did bolt against McCain, and they bolted against Romney.

They didn't show up.

And that's why they lost.

They created the blue wall.

You can call them whatever you want, Reagan Democrats.

You can call them,

I don't know what you'd call them, Reagan Democrats, Blue Dog Democrats, Perot voters.

Whatever they were, they were conservative and they did not vote for the Republican ticket.

And you need them all.

There's no margin.

And then there's eight to ten to fifteen million I guess you call them soccer moms swing voters independent voters and they get repelled by

Trump's you know he's an asshole or you ugly or that kind of stuff right

or posting Melania's picture next to Ted Cruz's wife and saying see my wife's that in the primary that kind of stuff so you've got to get you've got to get both those groups and the candidate who do who combine those two groups while holding on to the mainstream will win.

And so they each have challenges because they each tend to be on one or the other side of the ledger.

And Trump, to get that independent suburban voter, has to show that he's disciplined and he's not going to waste time in a Twitter war or making fun of somebody's looks.

And

then there's a natural thing, too.

Yeah.

You know,

some people are great one-on-one, great in a small room.

I was at a lunch with Mike Pompeo a couple of years ago with this organization I was on board on.

He was terrific, but I think in a larger audience, it dissipates.

And some people rise to the occasion with larger audiences.

Scott Walker was great in a small crowd.

Big crowd, TB?

You know, so that's what everybody says that they don't want to come out too early and say, I'm for Trump, I'm for DeSantis.

Because they remember 2016, Scott Walker was the ideal candidate.

He was in a purple state.

He took on the teachers' unions.

He was fearless, and yet he got up on the stage and they dissected him.

And he didn't do well.

He pulled out very early.

He had zero support in the polls.

So we don't know which of these candidates is going to do that.

So it doesn't make any sense right now.

for the majority of voters to say, I'm for this person, for this person, until you actually see them interact and go on the attack against the left and have these debates.

And so that's what we're looking for.

And I always remember that.

It was funny.

She came up the other day in a weird context.

Just came to my mind.

You remember that crazy woman on the view, Sonny Hoston?

Yeah.

And they had her on.

Do you remember?

Oh, about she said that she was using her name falsely.

Yeah, it was so weird because her real name is, isn't it something like Nimrata?

Nimrata Haley.

I mean, her husband's not Indian, but so she just took Nimrata, and they always called her Nikki.

It was a derivative of her Indian name.

And this hosting was saying how funny and how she tried to acclimatize herself to white culture.

And then somebody said, this is what I'm getting at, well, your name is Sunny.

And

it's not connected.

I think her name, I think she was half African-American or Caribbean and half Latino.

And I think her name was something like Asuncion, but it had nothing to do with Sonny.

So she was actually projecting what she had done and taking a commonplace American nickname, Sunny, and using it instead of her more ethnic, true name, which apparently she thought was too hard to pronounce or she was embarrassed of, and then projecting that onto Nikki Haley where it didn't fit.

It was very strange.

It is Nimrata.

You're right.

That is very strange.

It's a sick, it's a sick, it's a sick, we're a very sick society.

We're alien right now.

We're so obsessed with this, you know, we've got to be like Rwanda.

We've got to be like Yugoslavia.

We've got to be like Iraq.

Let's get going.

Quicker the better we get there.

That's how we're.

Well, let's

talk about one last quick political thing, Victor, because we don't have all that much time left.

And that is an election.

That isn't even an election yet.

And that's

in Indiana with Mitch Daniels,

who, you know, I got to be honest, I'm not sure that he, he may have said something like, I'm interested in running for Senate, in the Senate seat.

And Jim Banks, who is a three-term, four-term congressman, young guy, and he was in the previous Congress, he was the head of the Republican Study Committee in the House.

He was the chairman, very conservative group, and he's going to run.

And

there's been a lot of outpouring of organizations or,

well,

political, politicos, but and the Club for Growth attacking Mitch Daniels.

Now, Mitch Daniels,

to my mind, maybe yours will find out, was a successful governor of Indiana, and he was a very successful president of Purdue University.

He was

really against the grain of the way the culture has been changing in academia.

He stuck by free speech.

He kept the cost flat for students over the tenure of his

term there.

He's the guy, you mentioned before,

you mentioned Mitt Romney before.

And I was at something at Yale,

Yale, William F.

Buckley program at Yale.

It was an event there in November of 2012, right after the election.

And it was so discouraging.

Remember, I mean, Romney, you thought he had Obama on the ropes, that debate.

And Mitch Daniels was the speaker.

And actually,

he was terrific.

He was terrific, but it brought out some anger.

Like, why the F didn't you step up and run for President?

That was because of the, as you said, the wife matter, right?

Well, I didn't say, but yeah, that is true.

But well, anyway, I'm blathering, and I should shut up.

But others say he's a successful guy, but the ferocity of some of the attacks on him already

because

I don't understand at all.

And

he had a problem with his wife.

They were separated and she had an involvement.

And it made him actually look noble, I thought.

He handled it with a great deal of character.

But in our ethos, if a woman goes, leaves her husband, then there's something wrong, and that's crazy.

So I thought that that shouldn't have been a campaign liability or a decision that suggests, but I think he felt that he had children and he couldn't run.

But

he's a superb, he was, as you say, he was a superb governor.

I had a, you know, I've met him two or three times, and we at the Bradley Foundation, we honored him with a Bradley Award.

I can't talk about the discussions of that, but I think everybody agrees that he was a spectacular governor and should be rewarded accordingly.

But it was very funny.

I'll relate very quickly before we finish

an anecdote.

I was a visiting professor at the Naval Academy in 2000, 2003,

right,

as you know, when the lead up to the Iraq War and then the April invasion, March and April, excuse me.

And it was very controversial, but right around, oh, the end of April, when the statue fell and George W.

Bush's

ratings were about 70%, there was a sense of euphoria that the war was over.

National Review,

you remember your, what was her name?

She was a wonderful person.

You know, that was your Washington.

Cato Byrne.

Yes, Cato Byrne was in Washington, and she wanted to have a dinner of National Review affiliate people in that area.

And

Mitch

Daniels was, remember, he was the head of OMB, Office of Management, and the Budget for Bush in the first two years.

And in case they had all of these grandees there, and I don't know, because I was writing, I had been riding for two years for National Review, I was invited.

So I drove up from the Naval Academy to Washington.

There was this very nice restaurant, and

I don't think it was a sign seat.

I just ended up sitting next to Mitch Daniels.

And this was before he was governor, I think, right?

It would have been.

Yes.

And

everybody was toasting the victory in Iraq.

And,

you know, they were all excited.

It looked like it was all over with.

And there were some members of the Bush administration, I think, were there, as I recall, too.

And

they were, I don't know, they were very ecstatic.

And I think he was on, he was there.

And I introduced myself and he introduced, and

I remember that they had confirmed him.

I mean, it was like in those days, 100 to nothing.

And he was on the national security, but he was quiet.

Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet.

Everybody was ecstatic, and he didn't look trouble.

So I said, is there anything wrong?

And he said, we're spending too much money.

And

we're on a trajectory where we're going to double the debt.

That's what the left does.

We don't do that.

We can't afford that.

We've got to show the country right now that we're physically responsible.

And I said,

well, we just had this war.

And he said, it doesn't matter.

We've got to balance the budget because we're sending the wrong signal.

If we're in power and we're spending like drunken sailors, then what do you think the left is going to do?

And he almost forecasts perfectly the doubling of the debt under Bush, 80% almost, and then the doubling under Obama and then Trump.

So I said, well, what are you going to do?

He said, I'm going to resign.

I'm going to go back to Indiana and run for, and have a physically sound ship.

And I saw him later.

I talked to him on another occasion when he was, and the first thing he did when he got to President Purdue was said, the tuition is too much.

We're increasing the rate of tuition tuition beyond the rate of annual inflation and it's intolerable and it's not fair and there's too much blow and we're not going to charge more.

We're going to cut and we're going to live within our means.

And he did at Purdue.

He started a whole phenomenon

that he said and he said to me, if we can do this, then

other comparable schools that are in competition will lose out and they will do it and it will snowball.

and let the market start to play.

And the market has not played because of student loan guarantees by the government that basically gave the green light for universities to raise their tuition.

It was really,

it was wonderful.

And so I was very impressed with him and he just sat there while everybody was celebrating.

He was not sullen at all.

He was very smiling.

But I was sitting next to him and during the evening, I was really intrigued by him because

he was worried about the, and I just, I remember I said to him, he probably wouldn't remember, and I said, you know, the sinews of war is money.

It's a famous quote from Cicero.

And I said, you're probably right.

And he said, we spent a lot of money on this war.

Well, this was only in the first year, you know, first three months.

It wasn't.

It was still war.

It wasn't nation building yet.

Yeah, it wasn't the trillion-dollar plus.

And he was already worried.

And he said, oh my God,

we're coming out of a Democratic administration that with Genrich and Clinton, whether you agree with them or not, whether we should have raised taxes or they balanced the budget the last two years.

I mean, and he was giving credit to Henry H.

Ann and Clinton.

And he said, now we're not doing that.

And I'm very worried about the message it's sending and it's going to start a spiral.

And of course, here we are now, as you and I speak, $31 trillion in debt.

And

had he been a president, I don't think we'd be here at all like that.

Well, I hope the good people of Indiana give him and anyone who wants to run the chance to run.

And,

you know, it's it's funny, the Club for Growth, once upon a time,

what happened to them?

Well,

they've been in Washington a long time.

Or also, the head of the club, I can't remember his name.

It's terrible.

He was Dave McIntosh, who's from Indiana.

Maybe there's something there.

I don't know, but it seems to me that, gosh, people from conservative, fiscal conservatives and conservatives in general from Ohio and Iowa and Indiana and Michigan and Wisconsin, that's the bedrock of the country.

When you see a conservative from that area, you just have a natural trust in them.

And why you would try to attack somebody before he'd even announced for the, what would be the, what was the sin that he wanted to balance the budget?

And you might have to raise taxes?

Is that what it was?

I don't know.

Well, he had way back, he had said, let's put social issues,

let's not prioritize them because we do have to deal with

the budget.

And look, I'm a social issues guy, but

you have to pick your battles and you prioritize things.

And I think he was generally right.

There's no reason you couldn't push some of the social issues at the same time, focusing on not bankrupting our grandchildren.

I think that's the point.

It wasn't when I talked to him, and I'm just thinking back 21 years ago, he wasn't ignoring social issues.

He just said it won't matter if we're all broke.

And I think at the time I was talking about him, I said, I can remember they were saying, remember they were saying the Iraq war was going to cost, I think, trying to remember the Secretary of the Treasury, or maybe it was one of the

Lindsay, I think his name was, was saying it was, I don't know.

Oh, Larry Lindsay got in big trouble because he said it was.

And Paul Wifowitz, remember they they grilled him and he said 50 million and

200 million.

And he I remember he said

he said this is and he was a member of the administration.

He said, I can't, I have to, I have to be honest and I'm the head of OMB and this is going to cost,

it's not going to cost $100 or $200 billion.

It's going to cost half a trillion dollars.

And he had penciled it all out.

And I think he was trying to say that I can no longer work for the Bush administration because my calculus is antithetical to theirs and I have a responsibility to the American people.

So I'm going to resign, but I'm not just going to go crawl away.

I'm going to go back to my home state, find a natural constituency that agrees with me and run for governor, and then use that as a national platform to warn people about debt.

It's exactly what he did.

So I think if he were to run, it would be very helpful.

Whatever Mitch Daniels has, you're right.

Whether it's on the

political level or

the academic level, he has been a rock star.

He has.

He's a wonderful person.

I can't say enough about him.

And he's the kind of people we need.

And

he doesn't have to talk about socialism because he is conservative

in the traditional sense of the word.

And

need a lot more people like him.

Well, Victor, you and I have been plagued in this broadcast by background noises of dogs, yours, mine.

George over here is making a little bit of noise.

So let's

time to end the show anyway.

I'm looking out my farm window and I see four

half-breed and sort of Queensland healer, Australian cattle dogs, and they're almost ready to eat and they're angry and they're giving me dirty looks.

It's dinner time.

So I got to get along.

We'll get you there.

We thank our listeners.

Hey, I'll be quick.

Jack Fowler writes Civil Thoughts, free weekly email newsletter.

You can sign up for it at civilthoughts.com.

It's a publication of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

Thanks to all who listen, visit victorhansen.com.

Thanks to those who at Apple Podcasts or iTunes rate this show.

And some, thank you, those of you who leave comments, which we read.

And here is one.

Thoughts on Turkey.

That's what it's titled.

I was taking my Saturday walk and listening to the latest podcast by Professor Hansen and Sammy Wink, when VDH started to give his thoughts on Turkey, it was a well-informed explanation of the dangers he sees in Turkey being a member of NATO and its potential conflicts with Greece and neighboring countries in the region.

He also mentioned the ties Turkey has with Russia and Iran.

After my walk, I came home and saw a front-page headline in today's Wall Street Journal that the White House wants to provide Turkey with F-16 fighter jets.

To quote VDH, whose podcast was days before the headline, it's pretty scary.

That's the quote.

That's FJK363.

Thank you, FJK363, for your kind comments about Victor and all others who have done the same.

Thank you, Victor.

And I hope you have a great rest of your week.

And to all of you, God bless.

And thanks for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Much appreciated.