Standards, Identity Politics, and Covid

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Hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Happy New Year to everyone.

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

We have a lot to talk about today, We're going to start off with meritocracy.

We're going to get to that right after these important messages.

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

My friend, you know, normally, Victor, we read comments at the end of the podcast, and they're normally comments that are auditory or have worthwhile things to say.

But there's a comment that came up last week that I think is important.

I'm going to read it and get your thoughts on it because it really

is

an important and almost a frightening issue.

And it's, I don't know the name of the person that wrote this.

It's read the subject.

I don't blame him or her for using a different name.

And it's titled Meritocracy versus

Quotocracy.

So let me indulge me, indulge us, listeners, because it's important to hear this and hear Victor's reaction.

Hello,

I will preface this with a heartfelt thank you to BDH and his host for creating such a wonderful podcast, et cetera, et cetera.

Now on to my comment.

I feel it necessary to mention that our meritocracy is on life support, if not already gone.

I'm a military dentist, and I was a 2020 graduate of dental school.

Both the undergraduate university and dental school that I attended still gave grades and class ranks as of 2020.

But there is a push in undergraduate and postgraduate education to do away with grades as a measure of competence.

As a matter of fact, schools like Harvard School of Dental Medicine utilize a pass-fail grading system.

In 2012, the National Board Dental Examination, a standardized exam that all dental students must take to qualify for state licensure, was changed to pass-fail with the ability to simply retake the exam if you fail.

This is also the case with individual state licensure examinations.

I know of no student during my tenure to fail out of school as you are given the chance to recycle classes if somehow you do receive a failing credit.

I can think of only two students that did not graduate after they were accepted and in both cases each student had multiple criminal charges accumulate before the dismissal.

In reality, the filter between the licensed dental health care provider and the dental school applicant is the school's board of admissions.

And it seems there is a trend in university admissions to satisfy DEI quotas over merit-based applications.

I fear that sacrificing meritocracy directly impacts the quality and quantity of health care available to the public.

Victor,

this is about teeth and damn teeth are important, but I have to believe that the same trend that Read the Subject is telling us about happening in dental schools is happening in other fields where we're going to say, geez, I don't want that person performing brain surgery on me.

And we've talked about this that in the 90s, 80s, 70s,

we said affirmative action.

Everybody praises it in the bicosta elite community, but they're not stupid enough to apply it to doctors, surgeons, nuclear plant operators, United Airline pilots.

They are now.

United has a, I think it's 50% of their trainees will have to be diverse.

So now we're doing this.

It's not proportional representation in med schools.

It's repertory, compensatory admissions.

In other words, the African-American and the Latino old quota is now beyond their numbers in the demographic, I guess, to make up for systemic racism or whatever Mr.

Kendi and others call it.

Okay.

But

I think everybody's under the impression that just affects emissions.

No, that's when the problem starts, not when it ends.

The problem is that these universities were set up on meritocratic bases,

not racial bases.

So if you want to go to UC Berkeley's medical school or you go to Stanford's medical school, you will see

Asian Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans,

Japanese Americans, Southeast Asian Americans, Indian overrepresented.

I don't like that word, that's theirs, not mine, in the general demographic, because of excellence and preparation on, as distinguished by

GPA at distinguished, you know, quantifiably good high

colleges, SAT,

MCAT, all of this stuff.

And then you throw that out.

And what do you do?

When you admit people that can't perform at that standard because they're not as well prepared, okay,

so what do you do?

And we talked about this in relation to Stanford's release just, I think, two or three weeks ago, that 23% of the incoming class

are white, which means about 12%, if that, white male.

You take away legacies.

And there's no white work, for all practical purposes, there's no meritocratic white male working class student at Stanford anymore.

You can't, it's, they're just not allowed to be on campus.

So, what do you do?

Do you

adjust the course content for people who were admitted that would not have earned admission on the old standards?

Or do you change the grading system?

And the answer is you do both.

And they're finding out, Jack, that that in medical schools like undergraduate institutions,

if you inflate the grading system, it's still not enough.

It's still not enough.

So you have to go to a pass-fail.

And that's what we're seeing at Cornell.

We're seeing at the New School in New York.

There's an effort to say,

once we have students

that we admitted, for

non-quantifiable criteria that we feel that they're victims of systemic racism and they're actually very brilliant

and they haven't been able to show that because all of the testing and grades and the society at large is racist.

But once they get on campus in this nurturing embryo, they will excel.

Okay, they haven't excelled.

So then you attack the system on campus as being biased.

And then ultimately, to get the results that you want that people graduate and you have to go to pass-fail.

And more importantly, is what we're seeing on universities that's not being discussed is the collapse between admissions and graduation.

They're now synonymous.

In other words, when a student is admitted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton Law School, business school, med school, if they have these graduate programs, then that is a birthright to guaranteed graduation.

And to guarantee that student graduation,

then you have to do what we're talking about, lower the exams.

And then the next thing, remember, it's a chain reaction, Jack.

You destroy the admissions criteria.

Then you have students there on campus physically.

So then you have to accommodate them by destroying the grading system.

And then you go to professional schools.

You have to destroy the admissions to professional schools.

Then when they're in professional schools, you've got to destroy the grading system.

And then what?

Well, then the ultimate apparition of

wokeism is you destroy the licensing boards.

And they're already going after the bar exams.

They're already going after the medical licensing exams.

And the net result of it is that we're a tribal society.

This is what distinguishes America and the West in general from everywhere else in the world.

We were a multiracial society under one culture.

But we don't hire our first cousins as they do in much of the Middle East.

We don't say that this clan will be first in line.

We just

let it go.

And so if you've got 75% of the NFL is African-American, more power

to African-American athletes.

We don't say, well, this is unfair to Asians.

Why aren't we having Asian quarterbacks?

In fact, when we had a few Asian basketball stars in the NFL, the African-Americans, some athletes got very angry and said

they're getting too much attention, as if they were affirmative action, you know, for crowd purposes.

And that's kind of a complaint against the 20%

or so of white NBA players.

Well, they're just there because they're tokens.

In other words, our professional sports are merucratic and everybody knows it and they're better off for it.

And I don't care what the racial component is of the league.

And apparently they don't either.

And it's, you know, it's very funny that

we have this idea that if you're a popular singer or you're in commercials or you're in a professional sport and you're overrepresented in your demographic, that's fine.

That's wonderful.

That's diversity, even though it's not very diverse.

NFL is not diverse.

But

otherwise,

it's unfair.

Medical school is not the same.

And so it's so contradictory.

And so, you know, there's all these demands on we need more black coaches or we need more black basketball coaches, but nobody ever says we need at least 12% African-American coaches to reflect the 12% population.

No, they say we need 50%, 60% because we're overrepresented.

But then no one says, well, if you're overrepresented and you believe in quotas and you believe in affirmative action, then why don't we have more Latino running backs?

And where is our Asian sinners?

Why don't we give them a chance?

And the answer is because they didn't make it.

They're not as good

on the floor, on the field.

And you say, well, that's your definition of what is good, but you set up the standards.

Maybe

they have insidious ways.

A poor white guy from Appalachia that's five seconds or something, maybe he has ways of dribbling or calling plays plays that you don't appreciate because of your slanted standard.

That's where we're going.

But it's only one way, is what I'm saying.

And ultimately, and I think we're seeing it.

You know, I keep saying suddenly, and then, I mean, gradually, and then suddenly,

we're starting to see that this has been going on and it was accelerated after George Floyd.

And we think there's a lot of rot to quote Milton Friedman, who quoted Adam Smith.

There's a lot of ruin in a society and a layer of fat that you can burn.

Yeah, well, let's look at you yourself, Victor.

I mean, I know you teach at Hillsdale, you've taught every year, but you're your regular when you were at Fresno, uh, teaching in and out, day in, day in, day out, that's two decades ago, right?

So you're much, much more, even then, though, we you must have been feeling knowing these pressures about, say, grading and

the decline in meritocracy at that point.

Well, I mean,

when I started teaching in 1984, I had a syllabus.

And when I retired in the spring of 2004,

that syllabus was one-third of the required work of what I had in 2004.

Because

as the student body profile changed and my grading system stayed the same.

I went from,

I don't know, 25% A's, 25% B's, 25% C's, 25% D's.

I would have been, I don't know, 75% F

because we were letting in students from quote-unquote underserved communities.

And I think now Cal State Fresno, the last statistic I saw, is 18%

white.

Well, I mean, the so-called white community is about 45% of the population.

So that's an underserved, but it's not underserved.

That's the point.

So what I'm getting at is, what do you do?

So I had some wonderful students that didn't speak English.

I mean, they literally didn't speak English.

I had a guy that I tutored.

I tutored and, you know, I would find a Spanish word, he'd find an English word, and he was in my Latin class.

Required, he wanted to continue.

I had some brilliant minority students that were more than prepared,

best students I've ever had.

But the majority of students were from underprepared high schools and they were not able to do CSU work at the level that was traditionally expected of them.

And then we had to lie.

And that's why I retired.

You just had to lie.

And you would ask the administration, we want to know how many special admits you're letting in that do not fulfill the minimum GPA and the minimum SAT score.

We want ACT.

We want to know who they are, how many of them, so we can find out what we're up against.

And they wouldn't release the information.

And we had a group called the Group, the Group quote, the history professor started.

And he said,

wow.

He would write an email.

He said, do you guys have people in your class that are on an eighth grade reading level?

And we'd say, yeah.

What do you do?

What do you do?

And then they get mad and ask the administrators.

And the administrators said, No, we're not getting touching that.

We're not going to tell you that.

And they just kept admitting, admitting, admitting.

And then I had a really wonderful student, it was a great guy.

And

I gave him a grade that he earned.

And I got a call from, you know, the EOP

Affirmative Action Underserved Committee person.

He said, Victor, what the hell are you doing?

This person's the first person in his

family to go to school.

He has a job.

He's coming all the way up to Fresno from this rural community.

Gave me the names, pretty close where I live.

I said, I'm coming up from my rural community too.

Yes, yes, but you gave him a D.

If you, he's not going to get a 2.0.

His scholarship, Pell Grant's in danger.

I need you to change that grade.

I said, I can.

He earned it.

He said, well, you don't like him?

I said, I love him.

He's a great guy.

I try to tutor him.

He comes in my office every afternoon.

And that's why he didn't get an F, because we got him up to a D level.

And I said, if he takes a class next semester, he can take it over.

And we can get him up to a C level, but I'm not going to change the grade and I'm not going to dumb it down.

And of course, I was dumbing it down by requiring less leading.

So I had a lot of those experiences.

I haven't, you know, I had a

wonderful dean from Spain, Luis Costa, and I had a student that every time

she spoke, she had to self-identify.

She said, as a Latina, as a Latina.

And I say, please don't do that.

Whether you, she goes, I just don't think that the Odyssey appeals to me because it's a culture.

I have nothing in common.

And I said, okay.

Then maybe you should learn about it.

It might enrich you if you don't have anything in common.

We don't just study things we have in common.

I don't have anything in common with it either.

It's 2,500 years old.

But she goes, well, it's a Latina.

And she just kept doing that.

And so finally I said,

Gracie, please don't do that anymore.

It's alienating the students.

It's putting emphasis on you rather than

on the material in class.

I want to hear your views.

So if I ask you a question,

why is Achilles sulking in his tent?

And is it hurting the Achaeans?

Or is it necessary to show the bankruptcy of this tribal system where Agamemnon is kingly, but he didn't deserve it based on his performance on the battlefield?

Or this is part of the character development of Achilles, or he's a tragic hero that he knows that he has to go out and save the Achaeans, but by doing so, he will die.

Can we discuss it?

Well, as a Latina,

and I'm not picking on Latinos, I just said, okay, if you do it again, I'm going to identify.

And so

she did it again.

And I said, well, as a white man, is a white male.

and she looked at me, and the class looked at me.

I said, as a white male, I'd like to talk about Sophocles this week.

And I did it for about a week as a white male,

just to show you how absurd the tribal politics.

And I got a call from this wonderful dean, and she, of course, wrote me up.

The student complained that I was insensitive to marginalized people.

He goes, Victor, Victor, Victor, what the F are you doing?

I said, I'm not doing anything.

And he said, why are you causing me this trouble?

He was a wonderful guy.

He's just passed away now.

I love him.

He was one of the best people around.

But he was kidding me, but he was serious.

He goes, don't do this.

And I explained how it arose.

He said, you're not going to change students.

You're not going to, are you going to fight this?

This is the new reality.

Everybody identifies by their tribe.

Get with it.

I don't like it any more than you do.

He had a Spanish surname.

He was from Spain, so he was protected.

But he said that to me.

So that's where we are.

And that's what's sad because

where we've been for a long time.

That's where it is.

And that's exactly what Martin Luther King said he did not want to see.

He did not want to see people talking about the color of their skin.

It was the content of their character.

And that if everything

was on a level playing field, everything would even out.

And what he meant was that in some areas, you would see African Americans overrepresented, Latinos underrepresented, whites overrepresented.

It was just going to be there, but it was going to be based on meritocracy.

And each different group would assimilate, they'd intermarry, they'd integrate, and race would be incidental, not essential to who you are.

And we've just gone down a pre-civilizational

tribal fixation, very Confederate.

And it's 116th.

Yeah, the 116th drop rule is basically what Native American gaming

organizations use to ascertain whether or not Bill Smith is really 116th of a particular tribe that gets, you know, gets dividends.

And when you apply to

Harvard or Yale, I think it's 1 8th to 116th, although they don't say.

But the point I'm making is we're not meruced.

And that's what people do in the Middle East.

That's what people do in Latin America, that's what people do in Asia, and that's why in multi-racial societies or multi-clannish societies, they don't function because you're always hiring somebody on basis other than their ability, proven ability in the past to do the work.

And when you want to address over-representation, which can be of some problem for a merocratic society, then you start at kindergarten.

And so if you really cared about marginalized people that were not amply represented in medical school, you would go down to kindergarten and you would cut out all of the race-based therapeutic indoctrination.

And you would say, as

you would say, as many people were educated, my rural, when I went to school, I was, I think there were seven of us that were not Mexican-American in West Salma.

The teachers said, we're going to make you all successful.

I mean, you had to speak perfect English, perfect grammar, perfect,

and guess what?

All of those students that came out of that school system who are in their 60s and 70s are very successful.

They don't need any affirmative action.

And that would be the goal.

So instead, we're just doing it, it's almost as if somebody wants to be a racist.

If you said, How do we make America racist, race-obsessed,

and we make sure that people,

when they're admitted, or have to have special standards because we feel they can't do the work in a racist condescending, we would come up with this system.

Well, Victor, I don't ever want to have brain surgery, but, or any kind of surgery, but I sure as hell don't want to have it 10 years from now when the kind of, as this guy was

not alluding to, as he was warning, and as you've warned before, you know, we're just going to have people involved in very delicate best, what was once for the best and brightest will now be for.

Do you really think that Al Sharpton and Jory Reed and Professor Kendi, if any of them has a major oncology problem,

that they go and they go into a major medical building and they say, I want somebody operating on me who looks like me.

Or I want to know if

this surgical team is diverse.

or do they ask that question?

I don't think they ask that question.

I really don't.

And

I think I went to three specialists this year in association with COVID.

All of them were from India.

All of them.

And they were excellent.

As far as I can tell, they were excellent.

And I have no problem with that.

I have no, I go, I've gone to Dr.

Cha in Reedley, California.

He's a Korean American.

He's an excellent dentist.

And

he's got a, he's a medical doctor, he's an

dental surgeon.

He's excellent.

He's, when I had a catastrophic bike accident, he did implants.

He did, he's just excellent.

Do I care what his background is?

Do I care there's more Korean or Japanese or Chinese dentist or orthodontist or dental surgeon than there are numbers in the population?

No.

I don't.

I could care less.

And do I care that there's

40% Asians at UC Berkeley?

And I would like to see them 50% if they earn their slots.

And if so-called white people who have a superficial resemblance from me can't do the work, I don't want a quota that says, wow, whites are 45%.

They have to be 45% represented.

I'm upset at Stanford about the 23%

white, not because of the color of their skin.

I don't care if there's 5%,

if that's what they earn.

But that's not the case.

Not when you turn down 70% of the people who had perfect SAT scores.

Right.

Amazing.

Well, Victor, there's a lot more to talk about today.

You know, so many of your favorite people, Tony Fauci and Pete Budiges and others have been in the news of late.

I know you talked about them on a recent podcast with Sammy, so we won't go over the...

the same territory again.

But another favorite person, Michelle Obama, was out this past week and we're recording again on the 30th.

And she talked about her decade of disdain for her husband.

And maybe we'll talk a little bit about her and then get on to Jay Boccheria and some of the concerns he has for forthcoming epidemics.

And who knows, there may be time for another topic to discuss.

But we'll get to all of these, some of these, anyway, at least, right after these important messages.

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

The happy home for the Victor Davis-Hansen Show is John Solomon's website, justthenews.com.

Go visit it.

Speaking of visiting websites, visit victorhansen.com.

That's where you can find all of Victor's writings and and links to his appearances.

I don't think there's much Fox,

much of the, I shouldn't say all, but many appearances, your appearances on other, on other podcasts in particular.

Much of what you,

not much, a lot of what Victor writes is exclusive to the website, that website.

And you're going to try and click on some of these pieces that he's written and you're not going to be able to access them.

You're going to see, oh, Ultra.

Well, what's ultra?

Well, that's exclusive.

And you need to subscribe in order to read it.

My prediction or my assessment is that Victor writes the equivalent of two books a year

of exclusive material for the website.

So five bucks gets you in the door, $50 discounted for the year.

You've got to do it.

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Victor, by the way, before we bring up Michelle Obama,

and speaking of you writing, and speaking of you writing books,

I'm making a prediction that you have a New Year's resolution, and that's to complete the writing of your next book, forthcoming book.

And I bet you're going to be doing that in the first few months of 2023.

I have to.

Yeah, I had long COVID for eight months and I got way behind.

I got sort of brain fog and vertigo.

And I thought each page I wrote the next day didn't look very well.

So I'm back on the track.

I'm getting much better.

And

could you take one minute to tell us what the book is about?

Well, I talked about it, it's about,

you know,

most times when nations go to war, it doesn't end in the complete destruction of the losing civilization.

But sometimes it does.

And the classic example is in Thucydides' history of the island of Melos.

And he has a long, famous discussion called the Melian Dialogues, where they delude themselves into thinking, I think at one time the Athenians,

they scoff at them, the Greek word for hope is Opeace.

And they say,

you're relying on Lpis,

a dangerous comforter.

The Spartans are right over the horizon.

Maybe they can resist and all this.

And they're pretty cruel.

And it's it's an argument for realism, I suppose, and the moral bankruptcy of realism as well.

But that Melian

attitude gets,

why do certain states, why did Constantinople have to be completely

ethnically cleansed of all Byzantines and the Byzantine Empire was gone on May 29th?

1453, Black Tuesday.

Or why did Tenochtitlan, the entire Aztec civilization, die with the destruction of Tenochtland by Hernan Cortes from April to November of 1521?

Or why did Carthage, it wasn't enough that the Romans defeated Carthage or besieged it.

Why did they wipe out, I probably killed over 300,000 of them, enslaved the rest, leveled the city?

And

why did classical Thebes, the scene of, you know, Oedipus Rex and Antigone and all the great myths in Greek

folklore were centered on Thebes and it was the site of the Theban hegemony and it produced people, you know, like Apamenondas the Theban.

A lot of great Boeotian poets were from that area, Praxilla, Hesiod, etc.

Why did he wipe it out?

In 335, Alexander the Great.

And so it discusses what are the decisions that the besieged, are they realistic about the odds?

Would they rather die on their feet than live on their knees, including their children?

Do they delude themselves thinking there's always going to be Spartans that are going to come over the horizon and help us?

Or do the Carthaginians think, wow, the Numidians may flip and join us?

Or maybe the Aztecs think, even though we've sacrificed thousands of young children from our allies, they're going to come and help us.

Or maybe

in the case of Constantinople, maybe Christendom will finally unite.

The Pope is forced.

Maybe there'll be more than just 900 Venetians.

And so you delude yourself.

And then either you have weak commanders.

Or how did you get yourself in that position in the first place?

That your entire civilization is

synonymous with one city, the collapse of the Byzantine

back.

to Constantinople, the collapse of the Aztec Empire back to Tenochetlam, the Theban-Boeotian hegemony confederacy back to the city itself of Thebes.

And then what are the lessons from it?

So then you look at, do we have such a thing as a one-bomb state?

Could it happen in the modern world?

I think it can when you have,

we're fighting, we're hoping that Zelensky wins.

And whatever our differences are about the strategy, I think most people see, rightly so, Putin is the aggressor, thuggish aggressors killing people,

reign of terror.

But

when he talks about nuclear weapons, he's not bluffing.

I don't think he is.

And if he gets an extremist, he may do that.

And he's got the ability to destroy Ukrainian civilization as it is.

I mean, it's already being rendered back to the Stone Age.

We forget that.

There may be 100,000 casualties already.

90% of some of the major cities don't have power.

8 million people have fled.

It's a complete dependency of the EU and the United States.

And not too long ago, Mr.

Rafanjani supported, purportedly said that Israel, he liked Israel because

half of the world's 20 million Jews were in Israel.

And therefore, it was a one-bomb state.

Does anybody really believe if Iran

gets a bomb, it won't use it?

And somebody will say, you know what, we may lose 30 or 40 Shia, Persians, 30, 40 million, but we will be

famous in Islamic history as the Shia, not the Sunni and the Persians, not the Arabs.

We got rid of the Zionist entity.

And it's possible.

And there's a, and so in the Taiwan, right?

It's possible.

Taiwan is another example.

It can cease to exist.

And I think not just physically, but the culture of a free China.

And the same thing.

Mr.

Erdo-Yan the other day said, he thought about sending missiles into Athens after all of that 400 years of oppression and death and destruction from the Turkish occupation and he's talking he's flying 70 80 uh overflights into the Aegean he's now talking about Samos and Rhodes and all the Dodecanese islands and the northern islands as maybe kind of not really Greek

and maybe they should all be demilitarized and you can't fly up and intercept a Turkish jet and if you don't like it we will send send a missile into Athens.

And there's only,

what, 12 million Greeks in the world that are, you know, in Greece.

And we have the other country, the Kurds, the Armenians.

The Armenians are really endangered now

with their neighbors.

So what I'm getting at is there are

wars going on, and there are nations that are in vulnerable states like Carthage or Constantinople or Thebes.

And by studying these ancient examples of the

merciless invader and what they had, what they intend.

And one of the themes of the book, I think, will be the more stout and effective your resistance.

And in the case of Tenochtitlan or Constantinople,

it was for many months.

The more, and in Thebes, even though it was only a day and a half, they killed 600 Macedonians.

So

no matter how fierce your resistance, it only whets the appetite for complete destruction because the besieger or the attacker

feels justified that the resistance

was so fierce and they're going to be retaliatory.

And do you believe them when the Romans say, give us 200,000, all your armor, 200,000 suits of armor, all of your catapults,

burn your fleet.

And they do it.

And they say, oh, by the way, now that you gave us all that, we have another demand.

You've got to to leave the city and destroy it and relocate, you know, 15 miles from the coast.

At that point, they said, if they're going to do this, we might as well die and fight.

And we're fought for three years.

So I'm trying to figure out when this rare occasion, it's not very common in war, but when it happens, it's absolutely existentially the end.

And the book's called the end of everything.

I hope it works.

Sounds fascinating, Victor.

I really look forward to this.

Hey, let's talk about,

let's spend maybe a minute or two, or however long you want.

My favorite person, your favorite person, Michelle Obama.

You know, this past week, I forget who the heck she was talking to, but came out that, you know,

yeah, she really couldn't stand her husband for a decade because they had kids and he was,

you know, preparing his political future.

Hey, she had a future too, but kind of sidetracked because

a child rearing had happened.

But she spoke very forcefully and publicly about the disdain.

And it came off to me as almost contempt she had for her husband.

Now, it's not like a lot of people don't have contempt for Barack Obama, but I thought it was a really kind of strange thing to come out publicly with.

And so, why do we want to talk about Michelle Obama?

You know, I do think there's she has some potential future

political role in America if she wanted.

She is beloved by so many on the left, and yet she's such a,

I don't know, a nasty piece of work.

What's wrong with saying you've never been proud of your country?

Or they always raise the bar.

Every time we do the right thing, they raise the bar on us.

Yeah.

Never been proud of this country till Barack ran.

This is a mean country.

And she ventures out every once in a while, Jack, from her Calorama mansion, her Martha's Vineyard mansion, her new

Hawaii mansion, never her Chicago

gigs, but they still.

And then she lectures the country about how unfair it's been to her.

And she's married to, in her defense, she's married to a narcissist and she knows that.

And she doesn't like that about him.

And she feels used that she was supportive, et cetera.

And then she wrote this, if she did write and completely, and it wasn't partly,

completely ghostwritten, her memoirs that sold fantastically.

And

she's got a lot of anger.

And

I don't want to get into what their relationship is or what the tensions are, but she's always

You know, the late Christopher Hitchens, I don't know if you read that article about her Princeton thesis.

I knew him pretty well, and he sent it to me on a PDF.

And he said, I'm writing about this.

Can you read it?

And when I was half done, he wrote a column and said, It's written in a language that no one has ever seen before.

But the thesis was all, it was an attempt by someone who didn't master the vocabulary to import a Foucaultian, postmodern

power machinations,

post-structural type of vocabulary to explain

how

the African-American alumni have to be involved to create the right mentality and watch out for patronization by the white.

It was all about,

you know, it was never, I got a full ride to

Princeton.

Right.

And I didn't have to have the same SAT scores or GPAs as other students.

And therefore, I feel this country is trying to do something right.

And I'm going to try that.

I'm just going to concentrate on being, you know, instead it was just full of this litany of anger and you did this and you owe me this.

The thesis was.

And it was suppressed for a while.

And it's just, you know, it's just at some point,

you know, if you want to go after Donald Trump's, Trump's transcript, fine.

They went after his tax rate.

Well, then why don't you just release Barack Obama's Occidental transcript or his Columbia transcript or his Harvard law?

They don't do it.

So it's this asymmetrical idea that just, it just bothers people.

And yes, when you look at the field, I was on

last night on Raymond Arroyo.

He was substituting for Laura, and we were talking about the poverty.

He was asking questions about the, I was with Doug Sho on the Democrat Clinton night and he was talking about the yeah the poverty of the Democratic field for 2024 in

comparison to Nikki Haley who had a record of accomplishment as governor or Mike Pompeo who was I think a superb secretary of state or the magnificent work of Ron DeSantis or Mike Pence was a very good governor and he was a good vice president.

I know people will find that controversial, but he was.

And Donald Trump had a wonderful four years of governance.

And so when you look at that field, it's accomplishment, accomplishment, accomplishment.

And you want it.

And if you say, well, we want to widen it to women or minority.

Christy Rome did wonderful as a governor, and so did Tim Scott.

He's a wonderful senator.

He's got all sorts of great ideas about Senate.

He's been authoring legislation.

But when you look at the Democratic field, you're back to 2000, aren't you?

You're back to 2020 on that stage.

It was pathetic.

You had a choice between socialist, Elizabeth Warren, shrill, angry, you know, with a high cheekbones, faker.

And then you had Bernie Sanders, the old Marxist, honeymoon in the Soviet Union.

And then you had your identity politics people.

You had Pete Buttigig of no accomplishments other than being a mediocre mayor of South Bend.

And then you had Corey Booker, Spartacus.

And then you had Camilla Harris, who would spend a fabulous amount of money and get zero delegates.

And you're going to add to that pool because they're going to be back, and you're going to add what, Stacey Abrams

and Eric Adams.

So the point is, if you're in the Democratic field, it's not meritocratic.

It's going to be based on identity politics.

So if you were a left-wing version

of Ron DeSantis

and you had a successful successful record, i.e.

you were Gavin Newsome, and you didn't destroy the state of California and send into flight 380,000 people a year, but 380,000 people were trying to get into California because you were a Pete Wilson,

Ronald Reagan, Pat Brown Democrat type governor, the elder Pat Brown,

then you still wouldn't get the nomination because you're a white male.

And he knows that.

And I don't think he's going to run because nobody's going to nominate a white male.

And remember how Biden got nominated?

He was picked up by Jim Clyborne.

Sammy and I were talking about that.

And he was rescued from sure defeat because he was the face of moderation and non-craziness.

And he was going to fake it out like he was a uniter and a moderate.

And then in exchange for being elected, he was going to hand over the agenda to the Bernie Sanders, the Obama, Elizabeth Warren squad wing.

It's not the wing, it's the party.

And that's what he did.

But

yeah,

when you go down that route, Michelle Obama, I mean, if you're going to go that route,

who has greater name exposure?

She does.

And she will wink and nod and say, you get Barack back.

They love Barack.

I mean, over the...

Obama tenure, he lost 1,100 state and local important offices nationwide for his party, but it doesn't matter.

And

he basically strangled any recovery from the 2008 meltdown.

Right.

And no need to talk about the hot mic.

Tell Vladimir, I'll be flexible.

He dismantled missile defense in Eastern Europe and the Czech Republic and Poland would have been very valuable right now.

And he let

Putin just walk into Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

And

that's exactly, he kept the terms of the bargain.

He He said, give me space.

I'll dismantle missile defense.

I'll be flexible.

But this is my last election.

I need some space.

And Putin behaved and he got re-elected.

Putin wanted him to get re-elected.

And for all the psychodramas of the first Trump impeachment, it was Obama who canceled offensive weapons.

He wouldn't sell any javelins.

It was Trump that did it.

Yet we impeached him for selling offensive weapons because he delayed them two weeks on that

I don't want to mention Lieutenant Colonel Vinman.

I think

think about him.

And he cooked up the entire impeachment and used this quote-unquote whistleblower as a vicarious mouthpiece, but it all came from him.

And then he bragged that he was offered, what, Secretary of Defense for Ukraine, and you have the Ukrainian ambassador interfering in the 2016 election in a pro-Hilly fashion.

And then I don't even want to get into Burismo.

And so,

yeah, I mean,

Michelle Obama will be, there will be a lot of pressure on her because this field, Camilla Harris cannot run a campaign.

We know that.

She tried it.

It was a complete failure.

She can't be a national leader.

We know that.

She can't even finish a sentence.

And she can't plead dementia like Joe Biden did.

It's just a mess of repetition.

She uses a vocabulary of about 900 words.

Unity is very important.

And I'm going to speak about why unity is very important because because we have to understand that unity is very important because unity and important.

And that's what you hear every single day.

And then she whines.

She does the Michelle Obama.

This is not fair.

I'm going to,

this isn't fair that they assign me to the border.

And her husband, you know, gets angry and says that they give her the bad job.

So she doesn't get good press.

She fires her staff.

She's not going to be president.

Stacey Abrams is not going to be president.

She's never won any statewide and much less national office.

She's a train wreck.

She even owes money on her campaign.

She raised $100 million and still went through it like nothing.

Still lost, lost at a greater margin than she did the first time.

And then she still wined.

And Corey Booker is Spartacus is never going to.

And Pete Buttigig is.

All we know about Pete Buttigig is whenever there is a transportation crisis, Port of LA, trains going into the Port of L.A., Southwest Airlines, 5,000 canceled flights, he's not there.

He was there, he won't address it.

He will talk about racism in the clover leaf system or freeways.

Right.

But nothing about the problem.

He is a total sanctimonious, self-righteous, incompetent.

And who else?

So, yes, I think there's going to be, you know, who

I used to talk to him and text him almost every evening.

We had a really good relationship the last, was Rush Limbaugh.

And one of the last things that Rush said to me was,

Victor, there's going to come a time very soon where Michelle Obama will be drafted to run.

And he explained why, just what we were talking about.

She had that memoir.

It's best-selling.

She's sort of the political version of Oprah Winfrey.

A lot of independent women find her her comfortable as long as she obeys the golden rule.

And when she was in the 2008 campaign and they unleashed her because they said she was a Harvard law graduate or brilliant and all this, and she started in on, they raised the bar on Barack Omni.

Every time we played by the rules, they raised the bar.

I've never been proud of this country.

It's a downright mean country.

I was shopping and, you know, some person

asked me to get that packaged.

And that was when she starts that, then they have to take the hook and yank her out and say, Don't say that,

because you don't know how that comes off to the independent voter.

So, if she can practice discipline and not go into her natural mode, she might.

I don't think she's she's a as you say, her natural mode is she's a hater.

Actually, I think if she had been around in 385 BC or whatever it was, she would have been one of the people, generals, you know, demanding the utter destruction of a city.

Well, you can't talk about that because

I'm sorry,

it's considered racist, but nobody wants to talk about people or people.

And there are people in the white community, there are people in the Latino community, and there are people in the black community that are racially obsessed.

And we know that Jory Reed is a racist.

And

Michelle Obama is racially

obsessed with racial differences and perceived slights and culpability about what she calls white folks.

That's the term she used.

She said it the other day, not too long ago.

And so, yeah, I mean, she's racially obsessed.

That's certain taboo subjects we know that we don't talk about.

We don't talk about transgendered swimmers.

If you do, your career is over with.

We don't talk about the post-spike in black, teenage, middle-aged youth crime rate.

We're in a national spiral that's disproportionate to that demographic in the general population.

You can see it anecdotally on TikTok or YouTube, or you can look at the data from the F, it's there.

It's a black male youth crime wave.

If you mentioned it, you are racially

illiberal and you can't do it.

So we all just don't talk about it.

And we don't, and unless you're in the comments.

And when you don't talk about something in rational, then you get the racist out.

Because if you look at any of these stories of a waffle house that swarmed or a shooting, and then they have the comment

section, give them notice.

Yeah, I do.

It's right out of

Dixie.

It's racist.

I mean, that's some of the worst stuff you can imagine,

stereotyping of African-American.

And that's because of the repression.

If people would just report the news, don't try to suppress this particular rubric, demographic, and then, you know, if this person is a white male, put a big full-page picture of him.

You know, just don't

just act normal.

It'll all even out.

People are people.

But

I tell you, when you censor climate change is another, if you climate denialist,

another thing is if you suggest that 70% of mail-in early balloting cannot be verified at a level that's necessary to guarantee confidence in the electorate.

And then all of a sudden you're a denialist.

Well, you know who's a denialist,

Victor?

Jay Bacheria.

And we've got to talk about him.

We've got a little time left in this podcast.

And let's get your views on something he said this past week, right after these important messages.

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

Jay Precheria, who's the

great Stanford scholar.

By the way,

I may have mentioned this on a previous podcast.

Earlier this year, I was out

at Stanford and I had dinner with

our great friend Scott Imbergut and Andrew Robertson.

And Jay Preceria was there, and I'd never met him before.

And

I could not,

you could not meet a nicer guy than he's a wonderful person, soft-spoken but very

oh yeah yeah and and recounting what happened but he recounted what happened to him personally uh given the studies he had done on covid early on was just you know i guess i say shocking i shouldn't be shocked but it was it is shocking anyway of course he's been proven so right he was on fox the other night and his concern now is lessons learned from this disaster victor i know you read you've told us every morning, you spend a goodly amount of time reading studies related to

COVID

in so many ways.

And

there is a tremendous amount of stuff to be learned from this, how not to do this the next time, how not to be about containment and lockdown and shutdown versus what we should have done.

So Jay was on Fox bemoaning this the other,

worrying about this the other night.

When the next pandemic comes, and there probably will be some next pandemic, are we going to repeat the screw-ups we've done?

Thank you, Dr.

Fauci and company, or will we learn from them?

He just expressed his fear and the segment ended.

But Victor, do you have any thoughts about

Jay, about lessons learned, and will we do better next time?

Yeah,

I think part of

my bewilderment about J is that if you were empirical, I could use the old simile, if you came from another planet, and you looked at people who, A, were qualified in health policy and understood the economic and political ramifications of it, who had some

molecular

biology expertise, or they were immunologists or epidemiologists, then you would say for all of those different fields, I think the leaders on health policy are probably Scott Atlas in virology, epidemiology, virology or infectious diseases, Jay Bachari and John Iannides and Michael Levette maybe and how cellular biology and diseases.

And they're all at Stanford University.

All at Stanford University.

And yet they were all pariahs.

They were all pariahs because they said things that were A, true, but more importantly, that dovetailed with what Donald Trump was angry about, that he felt that he had been hoodwinked and hijacked by Burke's and Fauci and given in to them, and their policies were proving disastrous, sort of down the Chinese model.

And

so what they're worried about is this,

that here's what they warned about.

They said the following,

that

get a shot,

but and get a shot and booster if you want to.

It's probably good because they lessen the severity of the disease.

There are certain cost to benefit.

things to be aware of.

If you're a young male, maybe you should not, you're not going to get severe.

You might want to hold off on the vaccinations.

Maybe, maybe

It's an open scientific question.

Germany is now, I think, barred Moderna shots for people under 18.

But they do have efficacy, but they're not going to stop you from being infected nor from you being infectious.

They said mask, if you're in close contact with people and there's droplets and you're in a hospital,

wear a mask.

That's why surgeons wear masks.

If masks didn't work, a surgeon wouldn't wear a mask during brain surgery.

They do for a reason, but that's a limited reason.

If you're in your car, don't wear a mask.

If you're in a room and you're not next to somebody or outside, you don't need to wear a mask.

And there are downsides, psychological, when children can't see faces, when you're a bank teller and somebody comes in and everybody's got a mask, et cetera, when you can't breathe and you're bringing in particles.

If the mask is aggregating the vira on the surface of the mask, and constantly, they pointed all of these cost to benefit.

It was always cost of benefit with them.

All of them.

And then they said, if you shut down the economy,

then you're going to have ABCDEFG,

economic downput, psychological problems, spousal familial abuse, suicides, drug and alcohol problems.

And you're going to have lack of, if you don't, if you shut down the schools, the students are never going to recover.

All of that, they told us they were all right.

And yet, when you see them now,

why isn't anybody saying we were wrong?

You were right.

Nobody is.

We're right back to

a nation of Karens, quote unquote, where, you know, we have the mass patrol and you've got to get, these universities are talking about mandatory.

We had one booster, Fauci said, one booster.

And then he said he got it.

You know, he said, then another booster.

And I think he got, he got COVID.

And then he

Paxlavid or whatever it is and he got that and then it rebounded he got it again it came back and now we have the third booster fine get five of them I'm not sure that that'll hurt your health it could but maybe it'll help you not die from it but then we're not going and then you know Jay and all these people said let's take a and we talked just talked about that the last let's take an empirical view on things like ivermedicine new study as we said last hour shows you that it has efficacy and safety.

Nobody would believe that, but it's a meta-analysis of 69 studies.

And there's all sorts of therapeutic agents that incrementally would help you fight COVID.

And, you know, when I got the really bad case of COVID in May, and I've got the syndrome of long COVID, I talked to a couple of doctors and they were kind of unanimous.

They said,

well, you know, these are not cure-alls, but they have a good safety profile.

And I'm not advocating anything, but they said, you know, quercetin has some value.

Pepsid has some value.

And they named seven or eight.

You don't have to take them all, but they may amelerate.

And they gave me links to scientific studies.

But you don't get any of that, Jack, from this establishment.

And so.

That's what they're upset about.

We didn't learn anything.

And so if we have a new strain coming in from China, and it turns out to be virulent, I don't think it will, but we go back to the severity that we had, they're going to do the same thing again.

They're going to leave Target and Walmart wide open, and they're going to go after every little small business person and shut down their flower shop, their shoe shop, their flower, everything.

And they'll leave, and they'll say, just go to Walmart with 150 people in there, and you can buy your flowers and shoes there, but you can't go into this shop.

And then we're going to have the most strident, self-righteous, sanctimonious

hypocrites.

And we're going to see Gavin Newsom back at the French laundry.

We're going to see Nancy Pelosi back at her hairdresser.

We're going to see Newsom powling around without a mask down with athletes in Los Angeles.

We're going to see Witner's husband, you know, wanting his boat out on Lake Michigan or whatever it is.

It's all going to happen again because we didn't learn anything from it.

And we know we didn't learn anything because we demonized the people who warned us.

I haven't heard anybody

say that Scott and Jay were right, except the people on the conservative side, but they were, and they were attacked Mercip without mercy.

So I think that's why he's worried that it's going to come, something like it will come again.

And the Wuhan lab still exists.

It's still there.

And you can believe that they are doing gain of function research, the Chinese communist way of thinking.

It's, well, we screwed up this time, next time we'll do better.

And that's the benevolent view of what happened.

So we'll see.

That is,

I'm on the dark view on that one.

Victor, thanks for all your

suggesting that the People's Liberation Army had virtual control over the lab, Jack?

I feel that

a

political party

that doesn't

give a rat's ass about 50 million deaths in China over the since, you know, since they took took over and whenever it was in 1949, don't have a problem with

spreading disease.

As if it kills some Chinese, so what?

But if it really kills and destroys our enemies,

it's a tolerable, it's a tolerable are you suggesting that for 12 days they allow people they knew were infected to fly into Europe, the United States, but they could not leave on direct flights from Wuhan, but they could not go from Wuhan to any other Chinese city by rail or plane.

That's what I'm suggesting.

Yeah.

Terrible God Almighty.

So you're suggesting that no animal has been found in the wild with the SARS virus?

What is that?

What is a pangolin even?

I have no

clue.

Anyway, primitive mammal, like a platypus or something.

Tastes like chicken.

Victor,

thanks to our listeners.

for hanging in here with us all year.

I think we're almost on close to year three of doing this podcast at various places.

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Victor Davis-Hansen is your official home for the things you do, Victor.

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Victor deserves 10, but five's the limit.

Um, some people leave comments, we read them, and here's one.

And it's titled The Classicist: Three C's and More.

And it's from Platmom.

I thank the Lord for VDH, Jack, and Sammy.

I would have lost my mind these past two years without the common sense and wisdom, the courage it takes to speak the truth.

A movie which explains all the hypocrisy and doublespeak of the left is my man Godfrey.

William Powell and and Carol Lombard showcase the absurdity of the wealthy looking down on the forgotten man, the difference being a chump really needs a job for dignity.

You know, by the way, that movie, the script for that was written by

Maury Riskind.

I didn't know that.

I've seen the movie.

I like William Powell.

He's wonderful.

Oh, he's terrific.

He's because remember,

his last role was, oh my gosh, now I can't remember.

It's the Navy comedy with

Mr.

Roberts.

Yeah,

he's really good.

But Maury Riskin was a great anti-communist, and he was in the original first issue of National Review in 1956.

He actually had two pieces.

And Alan Riskin is his, you may have remembered his son, who was the editor for many years of...

of Human Events.

But that's not the reason for liking My Man Godfrey, but it is a great movie.

Turner Classic Movies has it on on every once in a while.

Got to recommend people try to catch it.

Um, Victor, hey, I hope you and uh

Mrs.

Hansen and the great Sammy Wink and all our listeners have a happy new year.

Even though people are listening to this, 2023 has begun, but as we record, it's not there yet.

But I'm very grateful to our listeners, I'm grateful for your friendship, Victor, and for all the wisdom you share.

So, we'll, you and I will be back, I guess, next year.

Next year.

We'll see you next year, John.

See you next year, my friend.

Another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Thanks so much, folks.

Thank you again, everybody.

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