Landmines and Legacies

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Speaker 2 Hello, welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor is a military historian, a political commentator, and he writes a lot for his website on farming and agriculture.

Speaker 2 I particularly enjoy his articles on dogs and the Queensland Healer, which is my favorite. His website is victorhanson.com, and you can join his website for $5 a month or $50 a year subscription.

Speaker 2 And you can get a free subscription and get on our mailing list, which we send out newsletters with his current articles quite often. So please come join us at the website.

Speaker 2 Well, there's a lot going on in the news today, Victor, and a lot of it is on Biden's criminality, if I can put it that way, or potential criminality.

Speaker 2 And we're going to have a look at those things when we come back after these messages.

Speaker 3 We'll be right back.

Speaker 3 Welcome back.

Speaker 2 And Victor, so we've got Biden in the news today.

Speaker 2 He said they, the,

Speaker 2 I guess, they're not really charges, the

Speaker 2 inferences against him on his

Speaker 2 classified documents. And then just recently, $50,000 in rent from his son, which doesn't seem

Speaker 2 completely legal, if I can put it that way. And so, some interesting things.
And so, I'd be wondering if you could tell us your thoughts on

Speaker 3 Biden. There's two issues, and one is the classified papers.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they're not going to put Joe Biden in jail. They're probably not going to impeach him.
They're not even going to charge him because,

Speaker 3 and this

Speaker 3 is just going to be symmetric. So, I think Mr.

Speaker 3 Special Prosecutor, who's looking at Mar-Lago, that's out the window. That is not going to happen now.

Speaker 3 If he dares to indict Trump on that, I think that there would be, well, I won't say what there would be, but it's not going to happen that he was going to indict Trump and not Biden.

Speaker 3 So that's off the table. I think anybody in their right mind, when they look at videos of Biden's home or garage and they compare him to Mar-Lago, they'll see it's much harder to get into Mar-Lago.

Speaker 3 And he was an ex-president, so he had more security security there than an ex-vice president, and

Speaker 3 he can declassify, and Biden can't. We've gone through all that.
So what is the issue then?

Speaker 3 The issue is Donald Trump is, I think, now relieved of culpability.

Speaker 3 I don't mean to say that Biden shouldn't be prosecuted because

Speaker 3 he took documents out as vice president. And this is the key question, as well as the Donald Trump matter that exempts Donald Trump to be symmetric.

Speaker 3 We don't know what those documents are other than they leaked. And we don't know who leaked.
We don't know who had access to them, but they leaked.

Speaker 3 They were involving Iran, Ukraine, and Great Britain.

Speaker 3 And it's very interesting that right before this was announced, the Iranians were very angry about the collapse of the Iran deal, and they should be, because they were greedy.

Speaker 3 They had a great deal that was so unfair to us, but the Biden administration didn't really care. They were held in on any agreement for a variety of reasons.
We can get into later if you wish. But

Speaker 3 they said they were going to release names of people

Speaker 3 who were involved in the West who were pressuring them to have that deal because they claimed they bought them off. So we don't know whether that, and that was 2015.

Speaker 3 And so Joe Biden Biden was a big proponent of that. And so he has documents that he took out in 2017 that pertain from 2013 to 2016 to Iran.

Speaker 3 He had some with Ukraine. We know, we know that this was the high point, the best moment for Hunter Biden's profitability right during this period when Joe Biden was vice president.
And those

Speaker 3 years and the fact that they're Ukraine drawed attention. Why were they looking at these documents? Now, they claim they, being the administration, that he was working on a memoir, he's harried.

Speaker 3 It was just so difficult to get out of the office. But if he was doing research, he being either Hunter or Joe Biden or both, about the Ukrainian government or investment, that's serious.

Speaker 3 And so I expect them not to ever release what these documents that were classified in these three locations pertain to.

Speaker 3 These people are perfectly capable of saying Donald Trump had nuclear codes and that's why he brought them out.

Speaker 3 He wanted to profit on them.

Speaker 3 They can make up anything they want, but with Joe Biden, it's a different story. So I don't think they're going to do that.

Speaker 3 There's a final issue, Sammy, and that is it's kind of like the break-in that wasn't a big deal with Watergate, but then it involved the cover-up and all that. So when people

Speaker 3 saw

Speaker 3 that these documents were laying around the Delaware house and they were laying around the garage, the first thing that came into everybody's mind is,

Speaker 3 well, the Biden family, Ashley Biden's diary that we just left when she moved out, and then it was, it circulated and got in the hands of all these people. And then there was the laptop or maybe.

Speaker 3 a series of laptops that were just abandoned by Crackhead Hunter. But the question is,

Speaker 3 once this thing was found at certain locations, the first name that came up was Hunter, because he was doing business and he needed classified information.

Speaker 3 So it was Hunter, who had no security clearance, unlike his father, was he going into

Speaker 3 the garage? Was he going into the library? Was he going into the annex? That's what people were asking initially.

Speaker 3 But that inquiry started to evolve this week. And then they said, well, wait a minute.

Speaker 3 Let's see if Hunter had access in this time period. And then lo and behold, just as the matter of Watergate led, led, led, led up, up, they said, wait a minute.

Speaker 3 Hunter listed the Delaware house where the documents were found as his principal residence, that he was staying there.

Speaker 3 And then people started searching, especially Miranda Devine, but Devine on the New York Post, but others, and said, my gosh, he was paying rent.

Speaker 3 He was paying rent at $50,000 a month.

Speaker 3 And people said you'd never pay more than $3,000 or $4,000 a month in Delaware for anything of that caliber house. So the question was: was he, see how this is leading?

Speaker 3 Was he taking this rental quote-unquote agreement as a mechanism to funnel the big guys 10%?

Speaker 3 Okay, so then the next inquiry said, well, if he was paying 50% to Joe Biden, then Joe Biden was obviously on his public returns. Remember the debate?

Speaker 3 He bragged that he had released them and Donald Trump hadn't? Then Joe Biden, and he hadn't released the full returns, but he didn't list this income as 50,000. That's tax fraud.

Speaker 3 And then the next inquiry escalated, and then somebody found out that the house of Joe Biden's, that Hunter Biden was renting for $50,000 a month, that Joe Biden was not paying income tax as a landlord recipient of that monthly cash.

Speaker 3 Hunter

Speaker 3 had said

Speaker 3 that he owned it in another transaction. He used that ownership, but Joe said he owned it too.
So who owned it?

Speaker 3 And who's that's a fraud to say that you own a piece of property, whether it's for collateral or any government document, when you don't own it.

Speaker 3 And how can you pay yourself rent if you own the house, which he didn't do, but he lied that he did. So what I'm

Speaker 3 getting at is

Speaker 3 when we looked last week and we discussed this, that Karine Jean-Pierre was not transparent. And she just kept saying, it's all over.
It's all over.

Speaker 3 Talk to the special counsel. I can't comment.
It's a legal matter. And we knew that special counsel couldn't comment.
So she was saying, screw you. Nobody's going to tell you anything.

Speaker 3 The reason why she was doing that is for the reasons that I just discussed, which leaves us with, what's next?

Speaker 3 Well, what's next is

Speaker 3 who actually looked at the documents? Who found the documents?

Speaker 3 How does the Biden family explain such exorbitant rent, if that's accurate? How do they explain that Joe Biden did not pay income tax on the rent? How do they explain that both Hunter and Joe

Speaker 3 at various times claimed there were owners and on and on and on? It reminds me so much of the Nixon problem. It just went from one psychodrama to the next to the next.

Speaker 3 And so the original break-in was of little value as far as his enemies were concerned. And the same thing with these,

Speaker 3 you know, sloppy taking out things. If he had just said, and he couldn't because it's not true, but if he had said something like, oh my God,

Speaker 3 I was working on my memoirs, and here's footnote number 89 that shows you that I had reference to this, and I'm going to have an outside person look at it to show you. And I didn't know.

Speaker 3 And you know what? There could be more. This is terrible.
He would have taken a political hit, and that would have been the end of it. But when they stonewalled,

Speaker 3 it was a, it's kind of like a crowbar, this whole document, garage gate matter that opened up or pried open something they had kept shut.

Speaker 3 And on the other side of that door, that it pried open, you're getting into the entire what everybody listening has known for five years: that the Biden family is utterly corrupt.

Speaker 3 They use the office of Joe Biden as vice president to leverage foreign governments for cash, and they distribute it in nefarious ways among the family consortia.

Speaker 3 And they did not pay full income tax on that income.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know, Joe Concha wrote today an article where he asks the question, will Biden think twice about running for re-election? What is, do you think some of that is

Speaker 3 yes, absolutely. So the question that people on the right have said, I think legitimately, they're saying, well, wait a minute.

Speaker 3 These people

Speaker 3 knew about this apparently on November 2nd. They claim that's well before the midterms.
And they didn't announce, of course, as they always do with the Sam Bank-Manfried and the

Speaker 3 other scandals about economic data that was flawed. They don't really give you the true story until after the midterm.
Or they warped the election by

Speaker 3 amnesties for marijuana or student loans, et cetera. So we know all that.

Speaker 3 That's not the problem. So what is the problem is that they knew before the election

Speaker 3 that Joe Biden had a problem, and they thought that they could finesse it until after the midterms, and they succeeded.

Speaker 3 And then they thought, obviously, if they kept it quiet, Sammy, think about that.

Speaker 3 Think of all the scrutiny and all the back and forth between the candidates and the parties and they kept it quiet, just like they did Bankman-Fried.

Speaker 3 Then after the election, they thought it would be no big deal. Or did they?

Speaker 3 Who decided to come clean?

Speaker 3 Who notified the press? The lawyers did, but how did the lawyers find out? What I'm getting at is somebody leaked this.

Speaker 3 And why would somebody in the Democratic side leak it unless they wanted to weaken Joe Biden?

Speaker 3 And so that's the point that I'm making. So I think they feel

Speaker 3 that any candidate can beat Donald Trump. They used to think that no candidate can beat Donald Trump except Joe Biden.
That's why he's in the White House. They created this fiction.

Speaker 3 that he was competent. But now they feel after two years of misgovernance that he's a complete bumbler and he can say anything, anytime, anywhere.
And they want him out.

Speaker 3 And I think they're, and you can see that, my gosh, you can see that with these reporters on CNN and MSNBC and NPR.

Speaker 3 And they're all asking questions in the White House report,

Speaker 3 White House reporters room, they're asking, they've never done that before. Usually it's what flavor ice cream did you have today?

Speaker 3 You know, how's Jill feel about her new dress? That kind of stuff. But they were actually asking questions.
And I think they feel that,

Speaker 3 you know, when he says all these lies about he's a civil rights activist, and he said it again, that he went to black churches. He grew up basically as a Puerto Rican.
He makes these things up.

Speaker 3 And he said he was arrested.

Speaker 3 And that's all, they can't deal with it anymore. They said, man, this is just

Speaker 3 too much. We got to get rid of this guy.
That's one theory. And I think there's something to it.
I don't think this is a very disciplined party.

Speaker 3 They're not like the Republicans. When they, you know, that speaker, we talked about that before, when they were nominating Donald Trump or Byron Donald,

Speaker 3 they were voting for Hikem Jeffries every single time without one defection. And they have an ironclad media nexus.

Speaker 3 You know, Adam Schiff has been completely immune from any consequences for his pathological line. They rally around people.
They don't care about being hypocrites.

Speaker 3 So I don't think this was an accident, is what I'm saying, that the news came out when it did.

Speaker 2 No, it doesn't never is an accident, it seems like. And also, the presses seem to

Speaker 2 suggest that

Speaker 2 the Republican dissension shows that the party is weakened.

Speaker 2 And that's on that other other subject of your you know the democrats have no dissension and the republicans always have a little bit of a squabble here and there and i think it just shows independent thinking but if you go read the rest what left-wing presses they often say that it shows a weakness in the republican party yada yada you know trying to no i don't think it does i i think most of the reforms were pretty i think everybody kind of agreed they just didn't agree the mechanism by which they achieved those reforms because they basically held the speaker hostage.

Speaker 3 And as I said earlier, I had no problem with the first, you know, three days, but after that, you were fueling the Democratic advantage. And I don't think, and I think it ended in time.

Speaker 3 So now McCarthy's got the right-wing base, the mega base, everybody's united. Yeah.
And he's going to have investigations. And the only,

Speaker 3 I think the only disagreement will be is one of strategy, not ideology.

Speaker 3 People will be saying, hey, wait, if we just have 20 different investigations, we're going to be exhausted and people are going to get exhausted, even if the news is so incriminating.

Speaker 3 So we've got to have an alternate agenda, positive agenda. We've got to introduce legislation and make the Senate and the President reject it.
We have to talk about

Speaker 3 how we're going to use our power to shut down the government next time they send a budget. So these are going to be questions that are going to be asked, but it's strategic.

Speaker 3 I think they're more united actually than they have been in a long time. We'll see when

Speaker 3 we have the fight for the RNC. I don't think there's going to be, you know,

Speaker 3 I don't know who's going to win, but I don't think it's going to be that acrimonious.

Speaker 3 Harmette Dillon versus McDaniel.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Ah, wow. Do you think Carmen would be a really good

Speaker 3 person? I know her. I met her and I like her, yes.
I don't know, I know that she's had a lot of legal consulting and business with the RNC.

Speaker 3 I don't know if that's going to, her opponents will say it's a conflict of interest. I don't know, but I think she would be,

Speaker 3 I have no problem with Ms. McDaniel, Rona McDaniel, except I have a general theory that if you lose

Speaker 3 the 2018 midterms and you lose the 2020 presidency and you don't do very well as promised in the 2022,

Speaker 3 then you've got to resign.

Speaker 3 And the captain of the ship goes down with it, and you take responsibility.

Speaker 3 You know, it's like in farming.

Speaker 3 If you get hailed on one year, you lose your Santa Rosa crop, you get rained on the next year, and you lose your raisin crop. And then the third year,

Speaker 3 you make a bad bet, you plant 30 acres of of nectarines that are too big or they're sour.

Speaker 3 I wrote about this in Fields Without Dreams. You can justify every mistake as it was unseasonable hail.
It was whoever gets rained on an inch in September in California and Central Valley.

Speaker 3 But after a while, it builds up and you don't belong there. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 3 I accepted. I saw that.
I said to myself, I'm 26. I'm farming with my brothers, 180 acres, and

Speaker 3 we are very tough times. It was a very hard time.
That's what I wrote the book about, but I made strategic errors about certain things.

Speaker 3 I either picked too early to avoid the rains, or I picked too late and got rained on, or we had varieties of tree fruit that were not compatible when I should have been planting almonds.

Speaker 3 But at some point you say, you know what?

Speaker 3 I have certain, to quote the guy you remember and taken, be careful, I have a certain

Speaker 3 set of skills.

Speaker 3 I had a certain set of skills I thought that were more bookish than they were

Speaker 3 agricultural. Not that I was a pretty good farmer, but the actual,

Speaker 3 I didn't have a business sense. I've never had that.
I mean,

Speaker 3 I've never known how to make money is what I'm trying to say. And I don't mean that

Speaker 3 in envy or deprecating those who do. I say it in admiration of the people I know who have that ability.
And I don't. And I wish I did.

Speaker 3 But I can get by, but I don't know how to invest and buy when to buy real estate, when to sell, whether you should buy bonds or stocks or T-bills. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 It's just like when you're writing books on the ancient world or military history or 5,000 words a week, your brain is just so cluttered.

Speaker 3 that you just kind of stumble around and you get something in the mail and says, oh, your $10,000 in the bank is getting 0.3%.

Speaker 3 You know what I mean? It's like, you're an idiot, Victor. You're losing 6% of it a year.

Speaker 3 But it reminds me of that line in Juvenile, the Roman poet, when he said that the poor guy, he had the poor, I forgot the guy's name, it wasn't Romanius or something.

Speaker 3 He had very little, but when the fire came, he lost that very little.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, speaking of making money, and again, not to deprecate those who do because we have admiration for that, but

Speaker 2 San Francisco Reparations Committee is going to give $5 million to each black longtime resident and grant forgiveness of debt because of systemic repression.

Speaker 2 And the criteria for that is you need to be born in San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and a resident of San Francisco for 13 years. You need to be able to prove that.

Speaker 2 Or you need to have personal or direct descendant of someone incarcerated by the

Speaker 2 failed war on drugs in the 1970s and forward. They also want to include annual payments to low-income recipients of $97,000.

Speaker 2 And I was wondering what your thoughts were on this.

Speaker 3 I don't know what to say when they say they throw out these words. Hey, $5 million.
We're not not 10. We're not 20 million.

Speaker 3 $5 million is more than most all Americans make in their entire lifetime. And the state is anywhere from $25 to $50 billion short this year.

Speaker 3 And the state has about a trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities and various pension programs, for example.

Speaker 3 And so this group says, well,

Speaker 3 we're owed this.

Speaker 3 And and without any what without any distinction of class so does london breed or does i don't know willie brown do they all get money

Speaker 3 so does and does it expand from san francisco statewide so lebron and and over get money so there's going to be a it's not going to happen because they don't have the money and if they try to make it happen

Speaker 3 The African-American population has gone from about 12% in California down to 3% or 4%.

Speaker 3 It's mostly a Latino state. And I can guarantee you that the so-called Hispanic community is not going to, and the Asian community is not going to be for that, okay?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 3 Everybody, they're going to say, every single tribal group are going to say, poor white people are going to say, I never had anything.

Speaker 3 My grandparents came out from Oklahoma. They're going to say, I worked my entire life.
I got nothing.

Speaker 3 I don't have the money to pay somebody like LeBron money.

Speaker 3 Or the Asian community say, hey, they blew us up in the railroad. Don't cry me a river.
And then the Latino community is going to say, you know, there was the Chuco riots.

Speaker 3 And everybody has complaints about everybody.

Speaker 3 And then the other thing is if they keep pushing it, and this is what I've warned about,

Speaker 3 I wish the African-American radical community understood that they're in a locomotive going over the cliff. They keep pushing this reparations.

Speaker 3 And what they're doing is they're identifying collectively this identity. I am African American.
We're all African American. We're not individuals.
You know what I'm saying? We're not individuals.

Speaker 3 And once any tribe does that, if you keep saying white, white, white, white, white, white, white, then you're responsible for Hitler. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 And you're not just responsible for Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright brothers and Carnegie, but you're responsible for the extremes as well.

Speaker 3 So if you're going to say black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, and we've been persecuted, persecuted, and we need this, and somebody's going to say from another tribe, okay,

Speaker 3 well, we've had about anywhere from $15 to $20 trillion in Great Society programs since the 1965 Civil Rights Act, the Great Society.

Speaker 3 These have been cash transfers that disproportionately went to the African-American community. And they're going to say, well, we didn't get job opportunity.

Speaker 3 Well, and then the next one is, well, you had affirmative action.

Speaker 3 So there were literally hundreds of millions of people in the last half century that didn't get into particular schools in which they had earned according to the schools,

Speaker 3 earned admittance according to the school's own requirements. So they weren't hired at a job.
And they're going to say, look at all the money I lost and my entire life was changed.

Speaker 3 because we started to give racial preferences. So a group that's had racial preferences in the last 50 years is saying that doesn't count, nor does great society.

Speaker 3 And then if you want to go on the negative side, a tribal group is going to say, you know what, I have a better idea.

Speaker 3 If we're going to take people by race and look at their income and what they owe and the history, let's just say that every single tribal group, white, Latino, Asian, we're just going to look at the crime rate and see if it's disproportionate compared to your demographic.

Speaker 3 And if it's disproportionate, we're going to calculate how much damage that has done to society and assault, rape, murder, property damage. You want to do that?

Speaker 3 And because 55% almost of violent crime is committed by 12% of the population, that's an enormous amount of capital and death and destruction that this country suffers.

Speaker 3 And it's disproportionate. I'm just talking about crazy hypotheticals because I think this is crazy.
But I don't think people can say, oh, you can be crazy and demand 5 million.

Speaker 3 We're just going to, you know, that's, I think people have a right to say, okay, we're going to be crazy too. And this is the poll from affirmative action, disproportionate crime, and this is that.

Speaker 3 And then every group will have to figure out how much they can calm the other group. This is what Yugoslavia turned into.

Speaker 3 It's not headed in a good place. And it keeps going.
We keep talking about it on these podcasts. I've written, I don't know, too many articles.
I get so much pushback on them. But

Speaker 3 tribalism and identity politics are pre-civilizational, and they never end well.

Speaker 3 And as I keep saying, they're like nuclear proliferation. Once one tribe goes nuclear, the other tribe has to maintain deterrence.
We just had an incident in

Speaker 3 New York with this crazy

Speaker 3 Soros DA, where a Jewish

Speaker 3 protester, there was a Palestinian demonstration, counter-demonstration, yelling, and this Palestinian almost beat the crap out of this guy, assault. And he was let off with almost nothing

Speaker 3 by the New York

Speaker 3 New York attorney. Yeah.
And so there is a lot of things to be worried about. One of them is anti-Semitism.

Speaker 3 And when you look at the federal statistics, as I said, on anti-Semitism, it turns out that proportionally, demographically, Jews are the most likely to suffer from a so-called hate.

Speaker 3 I don't believe in hate crimes in the sense that I think crimes are crimes.

Speaker 3 But if you think that that's a legitimate enhancer, so if somebody comes up to me and shoots me and says, hey, you cracker, or doesn't say it, it doesn't matter, I'm dead, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, but maybe if you believe that, okay, but according to that philosophy then and that law,

Speaker 3 Jews are the most disproportionately attacked. And guess what? Who are the two groups that are the most disproportionately,

Speaker 3 it's Muslim youth and African-American youth, are the most disproportionately as perpetrators of hate crimes.

Speaker 3 And no one will talk about that. Nobody talks about that.
We just, we just, we have a crime epidemic right now that is disproportionately

Speaker 3 involving young African-American males, but since George Floyd and we destroyed police deterrence by defunding the police, ostracizing the police, defaming the police, creating new laws that hampered the police, no bail, letting people out, emptying the jails under the pretext of COVID, whatever.

Speaker 3 We have an open crime spree.

Speaker 3 And it's not people from Utah doing it. And it's not the Hmong community or the Laotian community.

Speaker 3 If we're going to look at, if we're going to be stuck in this tribal seat, it's the African-American single male who is disproportionately accounting for about half of these crimes when they make up about 6%, 5%

Speaker 3 of the demographic. And we don't talk about it.

Speaker 3 And so that, and I don't want to talk about it, but they keep, when you bring up the story and we hear it every single day,

Speaker 3 you know, what do you do?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Victor, well, let's go ahead and take a break for some messages messages and come right back.
There's one thing I forgot that I forgot.

Speaker 2 There's one thing that I think you forgot to note in this five reparations story, but we'll come right back and talk a little bit more about it. Let's listen to these messages.

Speaker 3 We're back.

Speaker 2 Victor, your community has one of your community colleges, Colobus Community Colleges,

Speaker 2 has a chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, and they're sponsoring a speaker on February 6th at 6 p.m. at the Clovis Community College.
It is Daniel D. Martino.

Speaker 2 He is a Venezuelan citizen, well, he's a Venezuelan born and raised in Venezuela, and he now has earned degrees and he's working on his PhD at Columbia University and is a freedom activist.

Speaker 2 He's coming to talk

Speaker 2 at 6 p.m. on February 6th.
You can text

Speaker 2 a RSVP to 559-492-7282. That's 559-492-7282.
And they would like to hear from anybody in the valley that would love to go.

Speaker 2 Please come to the Clovis Community College.

Speaker 3 You know, it's very funny, the community colleges of Central California, one of the more conservative regions, whether it's the Bakersfield City Junior College, City Community College, as well as Clovis and Readley College as well, near where I live, they've all had

Speaker 3 kind of courageous efforts to bring in conservative speakers. And they don't, I mean, the opposition to them does not come from the student body.
It comes from the administration or the faculty or

Speaker 3 the board of trustees or something.

Speaker 3 There was a terrible comment from a bakersfield uh board of trustee members about somebody in the community college

Speaker 3 said something about let's just eliminate them it was terrible but it's it's not the students oddly most places it is the students but in central california it's been my experience lifelong that and i taught here for 21 years

Speaker 3 that the Oklahoma diaspora student and the Mexican-American student and the Southeast Asian diaspora are inherently conservative people.

Speaker 3 I know that they're subject to a great degree of propaganda by faculties, but they're pretty much 50-50 politically on these campuses, and that allows these functions to occur.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, on the reparations in San Francisco, there was one thing I thought that didn't get mentioned:

Speaker 2 what are they going to do with people who say they identify as black and fulfill all of the other criteria?

Speaker 3 Well, you can construct an identity. We're told in Foucaultian

Speaker 3 logic that, you know, it's everything is a construct. So you construct your sexuality.

Speaker 3 You can't say you can't, you can't have a guy with two testicles and a phallus saying that he's a woman because he takes

Speaker 3 hormones and not say that,

Speaker 3 you know, you can say

Speaker 3 you could put in tanning lotion. Just as you could put it this way, Sammy, I think it would be easier for me to look Hispanic.

Speaker 3 And, you know, my dad had kind of a, they called him, quote unquote, a black Swede. That was a word like black Irish.

Speaker 3 He was very dark. And I have two brothers that are blonde and blue-eyed and Swedish.
And I have brown eyes and sort of olive skin. not so much anymore because I'm ancient.

Speaker 3 But my point is, I think I could very easily get very dark in the summer.

Speaker 3 And I think I could look, it'd be much more, I think it's easier for most people, I don't want to personalize it, to look like somebody.

Speaker 3 When I see somebody from Armenia, when I see somebody from Greece, when I see someone from the Middle East, when I see,

Speaker 3 as I said, in Armenia, I can't tell them the difference from most Mexican-American people. Not at all.
I can't.

Speaker 3 And I'll go.

Speaker 3 And so my point is: yeah, you can just construct anything you want. And the only way you're going to stop it, and they're already doing it.
So when you say

Speaker 3 blacks or how you ascertain, how do they do it? Well, they have remedies for this. Because when you say, well, how are they going to be eligible?

Speaker 3 Well, how are they going to be eligible if you're at the Chicancy tribal group? And you want, you claim you're Native American.

Speaker 3 And by that claim, you can make several hundred thousand dollars a year as a member of a tribe that has a gaming license.

Speaker 3 So, my point in getting at these people think they're so clever, but ultimately, when you play this game, you have to go back to remedies that have a horrible legacy. And we know what they are.

Speaker 3 They're yellow stars that you get genealogists, and they check you out. And they said, you know what?

Speaker 3 You are one-eighth Jewish, so you're going to wear a yellow star and get on the train to Auschwitz. Or they say,

Speaker 3 you had a great-grandparent

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 actually great-great-grandma,

Speaker 3 1/16th, the one-drop rule. And as I said earlier, people still talk about that, the one-drop rule.
There was a court case where one of the litigants said, My child is black.

Speaker 3 I believe in the one-drop rule, and I should get custody because I'm black.

Speaker 3 Haley Berry, and she said, My white husband doesn't doesn't deserve custody because my child has got some black blood. But that's what you're getting to is what I'm getting at.

Speaker 3 Because it's a lot easier to cross racial lines and is gender. And we've already crossed the gender construct lines.
We just say, you are what you are.

Speaker 3 Put on, if you're a man, you can keep your testicles and phallus and your big post-puberty body and your muscularity, and you can play women's sports.

Speaker 3 And if you're arrested, you can go into the women's block. If you you take hormones and wear women's clothing.
We used to call that transvestism,

Speaker 3 at least the clothing part, from vestis in Latin. But

Speaker 3 race, I don't see why race would be any different. So they're going to have a terrible time.

Speaker 3 The only way they're going to be able to do it is evoke Confederate-era rules about who's black and who's not. And then,

Speaker 3 you know, ascertain that by DNA badges and authenticate it.

Speaker 3 and so it's already some of the most vocal uh black activists to be frank you wouldn't know that they were african-american i wouldn't know that the reverend right would sometimes and

Speaker 3 ewie newton and

Speaker 3 a lot of the most vocal african-american radical people have been those who would be the most easy list easiest confused as being white

Speaker 2 and so it's it's and with other groups it's the same story you would never it seems yeah it seems like on the streets it would probably be the opposite of the or they would use an opposite brown bag test right meaning people who don't have the in on all of the you know ways to determine who's black and who's not but they're they just do it by vision

Speaker 2 if you are

Speaker 2 lighter than the brown bag then you don't qualify as African-American.

Speaker 3 I don't think that's

Speaker 3 that with government. Yeah, but they have to see when you have the government take over, you have to have rules, and the rules will try to figure out.

Speaker 3 But the point is, we have a horrible legacy of people in government in Europe, the United States, and other places that have already in China, and they've already figured this out and they've come up with formulas.

Speaker 3 And these very liberal people, ultimately, as the Native American tribes are doing, they're following the 116th rule.

Speaker 3 And that's what's happening.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 3 you're going to get more Rachel dozels and more ward churchills and more elizabeth warren i mean how vases is it to say well i am going to be the first woman law professor that's a native american because i have high cheekbone i know a lot of negative native american people that don't have high cheekbone but that's what she said That's crazy.

Speaker 2 Well, let's turn then to the subject of

Speaker 2 universities. I know we talk about this quite often, but I wanted to talk about the new universities coming out.

Speaker 2 And I know that there's a lot of technology institutes and healthcare, etc., but there are some new liberal arts schools that are going to be starting up or already are started up.

Speaker 2 The University of Austin is starting this summer, and it has an interesting board that has been brought together. I think it was founded by

Speaker 2 Barry Weiss.

Speaker 3 I hope I said his name right now. She's one of the people.
There's a lot of of them

Speaker 3 that are on their organizing board. And

Speaker 2 Larry Summer and David Mammet as well are on the board.

Speaker 3 Yes. And, you know, they have a, I guess, what we call board of trustees.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the president is very well known, Panel Canelis. And my colleague, whom I have a great deal of respect for, Neil Ferguson, he's on the board.
And you mentioned Barry Weiss. And

Speaker 3 I've met and I like a great deal Joe Lonsdale, the entrepreneur. He was

Speaker 3 in Palo Alto. He's moved.
I think he was involved with the Palanter

Speaker 3 creation.

Speaker 3 I've talked about Scott Atlas a lot, but nobody was done

Speaker 3 a more greater injustice than Joe Lonsdale. He was actually teaching

Speaker 3 voluntarily for the business school. I think it was a business school.
And he dated a very, you know, sophisticated woman, just like he is.

Speaker 3 And they had a romance, and then it went bad, as romances go, and then she alleged certain that she was somehow a victim of this relationship.

Speaker 3 And then Stanford deprived him of his individual liberties and barred him from the campus. And he sued, and of course he won in court, but they inflicted a lot of damage on him.

Speaker 3 And he was completely innocent. And so, and the same thing, the people, all of these people have stories.
And I think that's one of the reasons why they're going to be motivated.

Speaker 3 My colleague Neil Ferguson,

Speaker 3 his crime was

Speaker 3 he was asked to participate as a conservative advisor to

Speaker 3 a lecture series at Stanford. And one of the students was complaining to him that the other side, the left side, was being

Speaker 3 overzealous or was unethical in the manner in which they adjudicated the speakers. And he joked and said, you'll have to use OPPO research joke in a private email.
And that private email was leaked.

Speaker 3 And all of a sudden, the headline said, Professor fellow Hooverite Ferguson trying to dismirch young Stanford students.

Speaker 3 And they went after him. Very weiss, they just yanked, you know, they almost forced her to quit because...

Speaker 3 They kept censoring him. I mentioned Joe Lungsdale, but they...

Speaker 2 Larry Summer, too.

Speaker 3 Larry Summers, yeah, they fired him and basically asked him to leave. I want to be careful how I use fired versus resigned.

Speaker 2 What did he say? He said something like women, just generally speaking, don't go in for the math, maths and sciences or something to that effect, which is true.

Speaker 3 No, he quoted statistics. He said, you know, you can say all you want about nurturing, but there are particular talents that people gravitate to.

Speaker 3 And he didn't really say say it had to be necessarily just aptitude, you know, but he, but, you know, he said women go into art history or psych more than men.

Speaker 3 And men, and he mentioned that 55% of the PhDs, I think, in many of these disciplines are women, but that wasn't enough. So then he tried to, I think he gave them $50 million.

Speaker 3 And the more concessions he offered, the worse he was. And then they have, you know, they have a board, not just a board of trustees.
I think they they have something called the board of advisors.

Speaker 3 And they have a lot of,

Speaker 3 you know, really well-known people that I think will be very, you know, Arthur Brooks and

Speaker 3 Neil Ferguson's spouse, Iun, Ursi IUE, Glenn Lurie,

Speaker 3 Jonathan Haight, Nadine Strosen. I don't know.
They have a lot of people that are.

Speaker 3 They've all had experience with what the left is capable of. And that's very important because you mentioned Larry Summers was one of them, David and David Manette.
Now,

Speaker 3 you have to have some experience with the left, I think, to be really motivated. The key will be is that the sheer cost of this, and they're promising half the tuition of a regular university,

Speaker 3 and I don't think they're even worried about being accredited. I'm not sure how that's going to work, but they're not requiring a PhD, that may be good.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 3 and I think their view is the entire edifice of higher prestige education is rotten and it's falling apart. And all we have to

Speaker 3 just sneeze and it will go down. And I keep on that.
I mean, just since Jack and I talked about it in an earlier podcast about Stanford University, you know, I was there,

Speaker 3 Sammy,

Speaker 3 eat my weekly visits. And as I was coming in, there were...

Speaker 3 I think it was helicopters over the student. I live in an apartment near the residential section of campus.
And these are

Speaker 3 these are paparazzi trying to photograph the Bankman-Fried home. It was pretty loud.
You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 those two professors, and they're in trouble on their own because of the financial transactions of did they get assets

Speaker 3 transferred to them from ill-gotten sources in that son's corporation? Did they use those as collateral? Did they pay taxes on gift? All sorts of things. And they're sophisticated.

Speaker 3 One of them is sophisticated. Then we had the Elizabeth Combs, and now we have, as I said earlier, the list of,

Speaker 3 you know, the list of no-no words that are supposedly Stanford feels or terrible, like American and citizen and immigrant. We had a law professor.

Speaker 3 I don't know if you remember this.

Speaker 3 I was just thinking of it right now when besides the Bankman Freeds, we had another Stanford law professor who said to Donald Trump or said during the Kavanaugh business, I think she testified and said, there's nothing royal or noble about Baron Trump.

Speaker 3 He's not a Baron or something. Attacked their son.
And she got in back and forth with

Speaker 3 Melania.

Speaker 3 So it's almost every single day, whether it's the Thuranos or whether it's the president's being investigated or whether it's the Ben Shapiro posters or the outbreaks of anti-Semitism

Speaker 3 or the overtly racist themes.

Speaker 3 It's just what I'm getting at is

Speaker 3 why there is a University of Houston project as their own.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 2 well, yeah, and so the University of Ralston,

Speaker 2 I know much less about that, but I know that they're dedicated to creating independent thinkers. And so they want to equally free their curriculum of illiberalism.

Speaker 2 And I was wondering, do you know much about that? I know that it's

Speaker 3 Stephen Blackwood. I've met him a number of times.
He's very gifted. He's been very methodical.
I think they have had their first cohort of students.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they've had all of these places are going to be inundated by faculty applications and student applications.

Speaker 3 And when you, I mean, you mentioned, so getting back to the University of Austin, I mean, Richard Dawkins, Tyler

Speaker 3 Cowen, and, you know, they've got Joshua Katz, my friend, the classicist at Princeton that was so terribly treated.

Speaker 3 It's kind of like the luminaries of some of the most talented people in the United States that have been ostracized or demonized by their inferiors, you know, their intellectual inferiors.

Speaker 3 And so they're going to draw talent. And just as a general rule, I have dealt with people at the Stanford Daily, which is left, and I've dealt with people at the Stanford Review, which is right.

Speaker 3 I've had students come in from both sides.

Speaker 3 I can tell you that the conservative students are much more traditional in the way they approach learning.

Speaker 3 They're much more likely to take languages and philosophy in the traditional sense, not the world classes. And the result is these universities are talent

Speaker 3 scarce. The more prestigious they are, the

Speaker 3 less they produce. So there's a the only problem is money.
And that is, are people in the United States going to stop giving to Princeton and Yale and Stanford? And that's one question.

Speaker 3 Are they going to say, you know what, every time I write them a check, it goes to a diversity, equity, inclusion industry on that campus.

Speaker 3 And there's 15,000 administrative staffers, administrators at Stanford, and there's only 16,000 students. Do I want to complete feed that monster?

Speaker 3 Or should I just break clear and start giving to Hillsdale, more to Hillsdale, and the University of Austin and Ralston and St. Vincent's used to be pretty good and St.
Thomas Aquinas?

Speaker 3 They can do that. But until they do, it's not going to stop it unless

Speaker 3 your alumni donor who's a traditionalist says, you know what? I've got a save Stanford. I've got a stave Princeton.
So I'm not going to give it to any of them unless I can.

Speaker 3 specify how it should be spent. And that's going to be difficult, as we learned with

Speaker 3 Bass family that gave to Donald Kagan's Western Civilization program over, you know, 25 years ago.

Speaker 3 What happened to that? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, they gave, I think, as I recall, I'm winging this 20 million plus for a Western Civ class. And pretty soon, the family, as

Speaker 3 Donald Kagan was a saint. I knew him very well.
He was a wonderful classicist. He wrote a wonderful four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War.
He was a legendary teacher.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he really,

Speaker 3 I've never met anybody who was more

Speaker 3 pro-American and patriotic than he was. And that was hard in an academic society.
He took on everybody.

Speaker 3 He never preempted. He was defensive.
But if you went after him, he did not cow.

Speaker 3 And he basically said to the family,

Speaker 3 Yes, I will have your money and we will have a traditional Western course. And it was well funded.
And then, of course, you know what the left does. Well, why don't we get involved?

Speaker 3 We have all of our left-wing centers, but we can't allow you to have one. So why don't we have the Western history of fill in the blanks, right? This group and that group.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 basically, the Bass family said, that's not what we gave the money for. And then Yale said, well, you can't tell us how to set up.
a Western Civ. So they said, screw you, I'm taking the money back.

Speaker 3 So they did. Oh, did they? Good.

Speaker 2 I'm glad they could take it back.

Speaker 3 I thought, wow, they've lost it.

Speaker 3 But when you're dealing with these monstrosities, they have, you know, 60 billion, Harvard or Stanford, 35 billion, Yale, 40 billion.

Speaker 3 It's such a huge money. It's not just that.
It's tax-free, the income.

Speaker 3 And yet they raise the rate of tuition above the rate of inflation each year.

Speaker 3 There's just something really bad about, I can't get my, I can't describe it to the listeners.

Speaker 3 There's just, if you're on those campuses, there's something terribly gone wrong because when you look at the, go to the bookstore and you see what the books are being ordered, or you talk to the faculty, or you read the daily newspapers, this woke virus,

Speaker 3 it's a very strange

Speaker 3 kind of Orwellian Soviet totalitarianism, but it's it's fueled and energized by this money, this globalized money

Speaker 3 that's come into tech and law and media, and the Soros money, the Zuckerberg money, the Gates money, it's the Warren Buffett investments, and it just saturates everything.

Speaker 3 And so you keep thinking these people are anarchists, they're

Speaker 3 socialists or worse, but they're wealthy and they love money. And you can see that with the Bankman-Fried family.
She was bundling, the mother was bundling over $60 million

Speaker 3 from Silicon Valley to pour into the DNC. And they, why did they need a luxury Bahamas apartment and $16 million in real estate in the Bahamas, if that report is true? So they like

Speaker 3 these Marxists or socialists or whatever, they like utilitarians, I think the word they use. They like nice things.

Speaker 3 They like nicer things more than most people like or have nice things.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I think they have the patina of the woke people have the patina of we're just trying to be nice and you want to be mean.

Speaker 2 Basically, that's what they look like.

Speaker 3 That's what Orwell said, you know. It's, well, he said two things.
The pigs were at the end of Animal Farm walking on two legs and eating with the farmers, right?

Speaker 3 They really wanted to be decadent humans all along. That was just a path to power.
And they didn't live the lives they profess, but they were always,

Speaker 3 and that's in Orwell too, they're always making the person that objects to extremism as the extremist because they move the goalpost so far that if you dare say, well, wait a minute, critical race, oh, wait,

Speaker 3 how dare you suggest that we can't teach this freedom of the class when you know that if you say that

Speaker 3 any

Speaker 3 positive thing about the Christianity or the colonial experience or the exploration of the American, they will stop it.

Speaker 3 But they make you the extremist. And so they go so far to the left and they institutionalize that that just a normal statement in the center becomes inflammatory.

Speaker 3 And what basically people say, we don't want to have our children taught that one race is better than the other or that you can collectively demonize the white race. That's critical race theory.

Speaker 3 That's what it is.

Speaker 3 It says that basically racial white supremacy and white privilege and white rage adjudicate all law, all education, all culture, all society.

Speaker 3 And you won't understand them unless you understand that principle of white privilege. And that's demonizing an entire race without any evidence.
They never produce the evidence.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, oh, go ahead.

Speaker 3 Did you have? Oh, go ahead. Okay.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, we need to take a break, and it is Martin Luther King day today. So I thought maybe we could come back and have your thoughts on Martin Luther King.

Speaker 2 So everybody hang in there and we'll be right back.

Speaker 2 We're back.

Speaker 2 I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 2 Victor, so it is Martin Luther King Day today, and I was wondering what your thoughts on King, the meaning of his legacy is.

Speaker 3 When he started in the mid-50s, very young, and then he came to prominence in the late 50s and then the early 60s, he had this ecumenical message.

Speaker 3 And that was, and it was biblical.

Speaker 3 It was located and constructed in the Christian landscape of turn the other cheek. And so he...

Speaker 3 He referenced Gandhi all the time, and he said basically that

Speaker 3 we're not going to use the tactics of Bull Conner. We're going to expose the tactics of Bull Conner or Lester Maddox or George Wallace.
And the

Speaker 3 second gospel, he said to the white majority, at that time, 88% of the population or more, he said, live up to not my ideals, to your ideals.

Speaker 3 The Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal. I didn't write it.
The African-American community, you wrote it. And you professed that this was going to be a city on the hill.

Speaker 3 So that was a very powerful argument that

Speaker 3 allowing the southern states after the end of Reconstruction to institute Grant Jim Crow or within the northern states to have zoning laws, et cetera, was contrary to their own principles.

Speaker 3 And that caught on and it won him enormous support.

Speaker 3 The irony was that when he was killed tragically,

Speaker 3 that argument that it's not the color of our skin, it's the content of our character was no longer resonating in much of the African-American community because the Black Panthers and H.

Speaker 3 Rap Brown and Ewey Newton and the Al Sharptons of the world, all of those people had sort of hijacked the civil rights movement. And it was burn, baby, burn, and we had the rioting and all of this.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 That was a divergence after his death, and I think he would have been able to thwart that, but after his death, there was a bifurcation.

Speaker 3 And the number of people who wanted compensatory or repatory action and sometimes violence won out. And the people who were for assimilation and integration and intermarry, all those people lost out.

Speaker 3 And so today, it's very ironic, isn't it, that we have a national holiday for Martin Luther King.

Speaker 3 But if you look on

Speaker 3 in popular culture, the iconic people, if you read what Megan Markle was saying, or LeBron James, or the people on The View,

Speaker 3 or Ta Nahitsi Coates, or Professor Kendi,

Speaker 3 that's not the message.

Speaker 3 The message is that you people are always racist, and this society is racist, and no matter how well or much progress, it's racist, it's systemic, and it requires people constantly to make race explain everything.

Speaker 3 And so the result of that is: if you told Martin Luther King, they would say that people who are obese are victims of racism. People who exercise to reduce obesity are practicing racism.

Speaker 3 Everything is racism. I think he'd be bewildered by it.

Speaker 3 Part of it is a testament to the success because when you look at the disparities in income,

Speaker 3 even with the violence of the African-American underclass, male, the disparities have started to close. And

Speaker 3 not just in the African-American, I think in our crazy, wacky racial categories that we seem fixated on, I think there's 17 ethnic groups that have a higher per capita income than do so-called whites.

Speaker 3 Highest suicide rate, as I said last time, is Native Americans and whites. So he would be shocked at that, of the progress that's been made.

Speaker 3 But the more progress it is made, the more anger it seems that occurs. And remember, we get back to that.

Speaker 3 He was trying to say, live up to your

Speaker 3 own standards, but he didn't say white people, he didn't go to the Malcolm X, your white people are devils.

Speaker 3 He became more, when King died, the memory of Malcolm X, I think, was more powerful in some, in much of the African-American communities than was Martin Luther King.

Speaker 3 I know when I was at UC Santa Cruz, they had a, I think it was College 5, an unnamed college, and they were demanding, protesting, not that it be called Martin Luther King, but Malcolm X College.

Speaker 3 And I know that most boulevards in major cities, they have a Cesar Chavez and a

Speaker 3 Martin Luther King Boulevard, but that's,

Speaker 3 I think that's not quite representative of where the civil rights movement, if that's the proper term, is right now.

Speaker 3 And Barack Obama had a lot to do with it because he was the one that started talking about, look, LeBron looks like the child, the son I never had,

Speaker 3 and the police are systemically unfair and racist. And my grandmother, every time a black man walks, she locks her door and she's a racist.

Speaker 3 And Michelle has never been more, Michelle said she'd never been proud, never been proud of the United States until Barack came along and said, downright mean country.

Speaker 3 That just permeated them.

Speaker 3 Everybody never, they gave him a pass and gave him a pass.

Speaker 3 And then he came up with this corny word diversity, where he tried to create the old rainbow coalition of Jesse Jackson by defining 65 to 70 percent of the population as them

Speaker 3 and the diverse other had nothing in common, any more in common with each other than they did with white people, but they were now a unitary bloc because they weren't white.

Speaker 3 And that's that started this whole snowball of nice word metaphor snowball. It started this whole idea of

Speaker 3 white rage, white privilege, white supremacy. And so

Speaker 3 human nature being what it is, you're not going to have somebody say in class,

Speaker 3 white privilege, white privilege, white privilege, white privilege, white rage, white rage. Hey, let's go have a Coke after class.
That's not going to happen. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Speaker 3 You can't keep doing that and then be ecumenical at the same time. It doesn't work.

Speaker 3 And so what's happening in this country, half the country, or 70% of them, you shouldn't say 70% because a lot of this racial fixation came from the wealthy, white, left-wing, bicosto elite.

Speaker 3 They're responsible for a lot of it.

Speaker 3 But a large percentage of the country said, if you think I'm so privileged

Speaker 3 and I'm not, and you think I'm so full of rage, and I'm not, and you think I have such supremacy and I work at Walmart, then I can't help you because that's all true, untrue.

Speaker 3 So I'm not going to worry about it. Sorry, I don't feel guilty.
I have nothing. And, you know, there's more in actual numbers, there's a lot more poor white people than any other group.

Speaker 3 So when you lump them in together with Bill Gates, it's white people or

Speaker 3 your Yale professor, it's just absurd. Yeah, it sure is.

Speaker 3 Just as absurd of saying somebody who's in Saturday night being shot at in Chicago has the same values and the same aspirations as Oprah Winfrey or the same lifestyle as LeBron.

Speaker 2 Well, I have one last thing because we're coming to the end of our hour.

Speaker 2 The historian Paul Johnson died at the age of 94 this week. So he was a prolific writer.
I know that I've read his world history book, which is an excellent textbook for world history.

Speaker 2 But I was wondering what your thoughts were on him.

Speaker 3 I didn't know him very well, put it that way, but I had a great deal of admiration for him because he wrote for The Spectator.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 that famous book that he wrote, Modern Times, was very famous.

Speaker 3 I read a lot of other books that I don't know if everybody, they would probably not come to mind, but I remember I read a really good book he wrote at the time on the Suez Crisis, the Suez War.

Speaker 3 I reviewed a book he wrote on Napoleon. I think that was in 2002-3.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he was a pandemic.

Speaker 3 I don't mean pandemic. I mean,

Speaker 3 he studied every type of people,

Speaker 3 every source. He was a polymath.
And so he wrote almost on everything.

Speaker 3 He wrote a lot of, he wrote a novel or two. He wrote a religion.

Speaker 3 But I think that the two things that made him famous were that book in the 80s, Modern Times, which he

Speaker 3 resented, and then a history, kind of like Andrew Roberts, History of the English-Speaking People. I think it was called a history of American peoples or something.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he wasn't treated that well by the establishment. Those books were by smaller publishers in some cases.

Speaker 3 I went on a couple of, I was invited, I think when they were national review cruises, one or two. I had a very, if I could relate it, kind of a very strange

Speaker 3 encounter with him. He had a wonderful wife.
She was such a nice person, very bright, and I think was integral to his astounding success.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm 69 and I've written, I think this will be the 27th book. And the idea you could write 50 or 60 books,

Speaker 3 because they make them take two to 3,000 hours. You do the math and you have no life, right?

Speaker 3 I feel sometimes like with the call, I have no life and I'm missing, I missed out on a lot, but the fact that he doubled that almost, or maybe he did, is incredible.

Speaker 3 But my point is,

Speaker 3 I wrote a book that was, I thought, pretty good. It got very good reviews, even from left-wing reviewers,

Speaker 3 A War Like No Other, and it was

Speaker 3 how the Peloponnesian War was fought.

Speaker 3 And Random House published it. It sold very well.
I was very happy. It got almost no negative reviews, but Paul Johnson wrote a very negative review.

Speaker 2 Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 And it didn't even have anything to do with the book. It was just, well, this is a

Speaker 3 leftist. I don't know why.
And I didn't know this. So I was very, and the publisher couldn't figure it out.

Speaker 3 And so I was on this. And so he was on it.
And every time I turned around, he walked the other way.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 he didn't want to talk to me. When I was a speaker, he was a speaker.
So finally, I sat down with him. I introduced myself.

Speaker 3 And he just said, well, I guess you're mad about that review. And I said, yeah, I am.

Speaker 3 And I said, you know, he goes, well, I was mad at you. And I said, well, I don't review the, I mean,

Speaker 3 I disagree with an old friend, Max Boot, but I would never trash a book that he wrote. He's a good historian.

Speaker 3 If he wrote tomorrow a book on military history and it was a good book and I was asked to review it, I would give it a good review. And I've done that.

Speaker 3 But my point is, I said, well, why did you do that? He said, it was personal. And I said, well, I just, I had reviewed your Napoleon book.

Speaker 3 I didn't think it was a great book, but it was a pocket small history. Or, you know, it was very well written.
So I reviewed it very well.

Speaker 3 And he said, yes, I know. So I felt really bad.
And then he said, but

Speaker 3 this is why I did.

Speaker 3 You had a blurb by Christopher Hitchens on that book. So he read it and he enjoyed it.
And you must be a friend of that monster.

Speaker 3 I know him. I've known him a while.
And he said, you go ask him why I did this.

Speaker 3 So I was curious.

Speaker 3 So next time I saw Christopher, I said, hey, I got to ask you something.

Speaker 3 He was in Palo Alto at his wife's mother's house. I said, could you tell me why your blurb got this terrible review? So this is a funny story.
I'm going on to blowing.

Speaker 3 But he said, I got to go home to Atherton and I'll be back for coffee and I want to show you something. So he went back and he came back and he had a Xerox and he handed me three pages.

Speaker 3 It was in the spectator. It was somewhere, the New Statesman, maybe.
It was a review of Paul Johnson's life, his work.

Speaker 3 And I swear to God, Sammy, that was the cruelest, most personal invective I've ever read.

Speaker 3 And given Christopher's considerable literary talents, it was funny if you like dark humor. It was a, and this is all by memory, so maybe the listeners can prove or disprove what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 It was sort of Christopher's following Paul Johnson on a given day, and he was following him. And he said, he ducked into his mistress' house.
He ducked in and he was reeling at the club drunk.

Speaker 3 He was spouting off racism. And it was just, it was.
It was devastatingly mean, you know. Yeah.
I had no idea about it. So I said, well, do you have any regrets? When I read it, I had coffee with him.

Speaker 3 I said, Christopher, you have any regrets? No, of course not.

Speaker 3 He's a bad guy. And I said, he's done a lot of good.
Why'd you write that? And he said, I said, I wouldn't write. And he goes,

Speaker 3 that's why I'm Christopher Hitchens, and that's why you're Victor Hansen. You wouldn't be able to write that.
And I am. And that was intended as a put-down.

Speaker 3 He was like, every time I had dinner with him, I knew him pretty well. He was like a,

Speaker 3 I don't know, a serpent in the good sense. You know what I mean? He was like strong and funny and creative, but you never knew when he would jump across like a, and bite you.

Speaker 3 He was coiled. And sometimes, and then when, of course, the Trump phenomenon came, I saw him and he was very angry about that.
And

Speaker 3 kind of like members of my family, I suppose. But he didn't, I didn't talk to him much, although I did.
I tried to keep up when he was very ill. He was very courageous when he was ill.

Speaker 3 But that's so funny that Paul Johnson reacted that way yeah to your book because of christopher hitchens yeah whoever heard that the blurb was of course you don't get the you don't call the blurber up at least at least you're not supposed to so what happens is the editor calls you and says i need uh for this book

Speaker 3 i need greek historians i need public intellectuals i need people

Speaker 3 in the general society and give me five names of each, right? So you give give five names, five names, five names. Then they get together with their promo team and decide which ones has more buzz,

Speaker 3 lift, or whatever term you use to get the book known.

Speaker 3 And sometimes it's very embarrassing because if you give the names of, say, five Greek historians and they use two, or five public intellectuals, they use two, or five politicians and they use two, then the other people who sent in their blurbs will call you.

Speaker 3 Hey, Victor, love your book, but why in the hell didn't you use it?

Speaker 3 I spent a long time on that.

Speaker 3 And then you call the editor. So, why didn't you use that? We only have so many space, and we'll put it on the paperback on the inside cover.
All the that's what they do. Yeah, but nobody ever says,

Speaker 3 well, maybe I shouldn't be that. Nobody ever says I'm going to review this book badly

Speaker 3 because

Speaker 3 I don't like the blurber, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that just seems really a little bit strange, but he was a brilliant historian nonetheless.

Speaker 3 He was brilliant. He had a, as I said, he had one of the nicest

Speaker 3 spouses I've ever met of a major writer like that.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he had enormous, I watched him for both those, I was with him, I think, two times for 10 days.

Speaker 3 And, you know, on a cruise, when you're speaking and people come up to you and they bug you and you drinking, people, and he he was drinking heavily and he was but my point is that he never said and I can I would can

Speaker 3 how do I put this you can really tell the character of a person who has had some public attention the way they treat people and he never said get away from me I'm busy I could name you 20 writers I know or pundits or television commentators who say stuff like that.

Speaker 3 He never did.

Speaker 3 He was solicitous. He met with everybody.

Speaker 3 And I never saw, I saw very few people because he was slight in stature that drank that much without, I know Christopher might have said that he showed the consequences of his drink. I never saw that.

Speaker 3 He was perfectly

Speaker 3 crystal clear at dinner and

Speaker 3 he gave good talks and I was very impressed with him. But that was just a quirk that that he seemed to be embarrassed about.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, it's amazing given what you've just said about him. He made it to 94.
That's a good life lived, that's for sure.

Speaker 3 He got the present, again, I'm winging it. I think he got the Medal of Freedom by George W.
Bush. And that was in response to his history of the American people,

Speaker 3 you know, 15 years earlier. But think of that.
I think it was in 2002, maybe? when he was 73 or 72.

Speaker 3 So what if you were at 72, I'm 69, and the idea that

Speaker 3 I'm going to get an award

Speaker 3 for all the stuff I've done, but I'm going to write another 10 books

Speaker 3 in the next 24 years, that just seems so mind-boggling. I don't think I'm going to be 94.
I'm not going to make it, but the idea that I would work and

Speaker 3 a fourth of your life, a third of your productive life is to come after 69.

Speaker 3 70, in his case, 72. Because he wrote some wonderful things in the 70s.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right. Well, Victor, we're at the end of our time.
I'd like to thank you very much for everything today.

Speaker 2 It was great, as always. It was very

Speaker 2 insightful

Speaker 2 commentary on everything.

Speaker 3 We covered a lot today. Yeah, I know.
It's very strange times. I hope our listeners realize that we're all, I think you do better than I, we're living through historic times.

Speaker 3 We're in the middle of a woke revolution.

Speaker 3 We are, gosh, we've had so much fundamental changes to the way that we vote, the way that we access information. And up has been down, and the old down is up.

Speaker 3 It's just, it's mind-boggling what's happening. And

Speaker 3 we have to get through it and remember the wisdom of our ancestors who died on the premise that they were going to pass on something far better, and they did.

Speaker 3 And we don't want to be the first generation that breaks the great chain of being and inherits something and then screws it up for our kids. But we're well on the way to do that.

Speaker 3 So, everybody, stay healthy and keep fighting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, keep the fight up. Thanks to all of our listeners, and thank you, Victor.

Speaker 3 Thank you, everybody.

Speaker 2 All right, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.