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Hello, everyone.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is an author of approximately 27 or maybe 28 books, depending upon how you count that.

And he is a political commentator, a scholar, and an essayist.

And

this episode, we're going to look into culture.

So we do politics and culture, but we're going to talk about a lot of cultural issues at the end of the year and some of his favorite movies and

actors and novels

get and more, and we'll get to that right after these messages.

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Welcome back, Victor.

So, this should be for me a lot more interesting because I want to hear about your favorites on all sorts of issues and

not issues, but on all sorts of cultural phenomenon.

And I was hoping we could start with actors because you have talked before about actors that you admire, but I was hoping we could keep it to three and we might go through several cultural topics and look at those

either works or actors that you feel are actors, sorry, either works or

people that you feel excel in those areas.

And so

who are your top three favorite actors?

Well, I think my favorite actor is Benzel Washington, because, I mean, I know that he's been in some bad movies, but he was great in Glory, if you remember him.

He was that private trip where he was sort of the troublemaker or the person who was trying to voice how hypocritical white America was at the time.

But

he comes around and he starts to understand the purpose of the regiment and everything.

But the way he

that he did it, and he was in a lot of, he was in that pelican brief, so I know that he was good.

But the two that I really thought, and I know that I mentioned it before, but Man on Fire is,

I think it's a classic, I really do.

And that scene that he got the most criticism when he's,

do you remember when the corrupt policeman says, you know who I am?

He says, Yeah, you're, you remember the Hermit, the brother

Herman Dodd, yeah.

Herman Dodd, he mispronounces like I just did, and the guy is being tortured to death and wants to correct his pronunciation.

But

And then when he does the whole guy, the whole Brotherhood's leader,

when he says, time,

I have all the time in the world.

You have 60 seconds or whatever.

Yeah, you have 48 seconds to think of.

The way he played that,

it was so authentic.

And I know a lot of people didn't think the Book of Eli was,

but the way he did that as well, there's something, he gets in a certain type of role, even that, what it wasn't well reviewed or received,

the first equalizer, but there's just something about him when he gets in a particular role

about,

you know, when he tries to re, a person will say something and he repeats it.

And the person says, and I'm, oh, you're a member of the Brotherhood.

Oh, yes, you.

And he just, he, he just jumps in as a natural person.

Yeah, he's very natural in all three of those movies.

He was in a movie, I'm trying to think, it was called Fake Safe House.

Do you remember that where he's that CIA people they think has gone rogue and he ends up dying?

But there's something about him, about his natural presence on the screen.

Another one is

I have to be careful about Gary Oldman because we're all, you know, he was just so brilliant as Churchill, but

I was first exposed to, remember that Tarantino wrote the screenplay for True True Romance?

Yes.

And I don't know what the guy was.

Was he supposed to be black or was he supposed to be a white guy that was acting like he's racked that thug?

Remember?

I think it was the latter.

I think he was supposed to be a white guy that

had some weird idea that he was a black guy and he was trying to act like that.

But that was my interpretation of the character.

That movie was brilliant because of the people that, you know, when they had that Dennis Hopper, they would never allow that when he insults the Sicily and ancestry of Christopher Walken.

And

my God,

Gary Oldman was one of the most frightening people you can imagine when he's in that scene.

And then he kind of replayed that role

in that movie.

Remember The Professional, where he's that crooked DIA agent and he's listening to

Beethoven when he's killing people and he's on drugs.

That's one of my favorite movies.

I love that movie.

Yeah,

it's just eerie how

he comes into a role.

And he was the same thing.

And speaking of Book of Eli, you remember, he's also that sinister,

but he has a way about him that makes a sinister character

in depth even more sinister because he's got some elements of his character that's interested in literature or he's interested in music.

And he even made Dracula

into a complex character that we hadn't seen before.

Graham Stroker's Dracula.

So I think he's probably right now,

I don't know, that's a hard thing to say,

the most accomplished English actor.

I really do believe that.

Well, he does.

You know what, though?

He seems to morph into his characters because that Churchill is a completely different character from those ones you just mentioned.

I would never even know that was Gary Olma.

I mean, physically morph into them as well as probably, you know, in character.

But no, he's just

amazing.

And I think he said something, remember he said something about, was it woke or something?

They went after him.

It was, was it, I don't know what it was.

I can't even remember.

Maybe it was something about race, but they turned on him.

And he,

so he's not a popular actor in the fashion he was.

I'm surprised they gave him the Academy Award for Churchill, but the performance was so stunning.

Yep.

And that getting back to that true romance, you know, I would just, it's, I have all this,

there are some great character actors that are working today, and one of them is Christopher Walken.

He was brilliant in that.

Dennis Hopper was a very good character actor, almost a major actor.

So was Alan Rickman who passed away not too long ago, a very left-wing guy, but there were certain roles.

Remember him and Quigley Down Under?

He was

as the evil

cattle lord.

And

I guess everybody can't, if you say who's your favorite actor, there's something about Anthony Hopkins that I think, I mean, everybody just deified him, but going way back in his career, remember he was in,

I first,

I first got,

I first came to know of him.

I remember it was not a necessarily, Richard Attenborough did A Bridge Too Far,

which was a kind of a didn't it was a very lavish production it had some brilliant uh

portrayals by edward fox i think it had a whole bunch of actors in there every one of them even robert redford that's he's not a good actor robert redford's not a good actor but he he

he uh played that role perfectly and

Even Gene Hackman with that kind of phony

accent was wonderful.

And I know know that everybody got to know

Hopkins through Silence of the Lambs series.

But I didn't think that was his, I mean,

it was brilliant, but I don't think that was the best.

And

he went way, way back.

I remember him in The Elephant Man and Young Winston.

Wasn't he in that E.M.

Forrester

novel turn movie,

The

End of Years or something.

I can't remember the name of it.

It was the end of

it was basically about the end of the old culture in Britain.

And he and the other servant Butler,

they couldn't.

Yes.

Yes.

And

Remains of the Day.

And Remains of the Day.

That's what it was.

He was in that.

He was in a bad, I mean, it wasn't a great movie, but he did a good job in Legends of the Fall with Brad pitt yeah well he was

but i liked him and you know what

it was a huge production it had good soundtrack and it didn't really catch on but i really liked that kind of um

meet joe black that was a rerun of heaven can wait kind of those series of movies yeah and that was a really good movie yeah he was excellent

yeah he was just

he was uh he was brilliant in that and everything he does has got a level of professionalism.

And

he's that tradition of, I think he's Welch, well, like Richard Burton.

They're all the best.

Best.

I know that as a pro-American, I mentioned two out of three were British.

Anyway, those are actors.

Let's move on because I don't want to.

Yeah, let's go on to the novels that you think are the best all-time novels.

Yeah,

let me think.

So I mentioned, I wrote a column not too long ago about a novel that is attributed to some person called Petronius Arbiter.

We don't quite know who he is, except Tacitus has a description of a Petronius, and I think it's the same Petronius, who was a confidant and arbiter elegantii, a taster of elegance, judge of elegance for the Emperor Nero, who had him executed, apparently.

But he wrote a novel, and we have, you know, it was 24 books in the epic tradition, but we have the middle part mostly, I think, 14, 15, 16.

Maybe the book was, you know, they closed it.

And the outer, it was kind of a dirty book in the Middle Ages.

So

it was stored away and the top and the bottom rotted.

Who knows why those three books?

But it is the most brilliant analysis and description of an affluent, leisured Western society and total decay in the Neronian period.

And it follows this odyssey of this little

bisexual guy called Gaeton, and then this supposedly impotent Encopius, and then this kind of criminal-minded Ascletos, and they're completely worthless people.

And there's this Eumopus, this old poet who's a complete lecher.

But the point is, they go around the Bay of Naples, Pompeii, area, the Herculaneum, probably Croton, down to the south, and they describe what Roman society, food, dress, sex, and Petronius is,

it's beautifully written Latin.

And I used to teach it in Latin, but it's very explicit, obscene.

But the point is that he's trying to show you when you have so much money as the wealth of the empire and slaves poured into Rome.

in the first centuries BC and AD, it's inevitable that old traditional agrarian values are completely mocked, destroyed, made fun of.

And yet

he's not just a cardboard moralist.

He's trying to show you the complexities of it, that the sheer bringing together of all these people from Gaul, from Numidia, from Greece, and this turbulent one million person city with all there are things that happen in it that are quite extraordinary, the level of intelligence.

But it's really an attack on the new goal rich, but the people who are attacking them from the sort of Italian aristocratic point of view are just as bankrupt as what he's trying to tell you.

And it's one of the most sophisticated analyses of a society in full free fall I've ever read.

You know, just the opposite is, and I have a, I have to be very careful because he's a very controversial author, is Newt Hampson.

He won the Nobel Prize right before the war, and he was a Norwegian.

And

he wrote a, you know, he looked, he was famous for his first book, Hunger and Pan, and I didn't quite like that.

They're kind of Kafka-like, stream of consciousness, you know, alternate realities, but it all came together in this novel, Growth of the Soil.

And it's about this guy, Isaac,

and he reminded me of my Swedish grandfather.

I mean, all he did was work.

And he goes up to the wilderness and he carves out a farm.

And a woman, I think he puts an ad, a woman with a hair lip, comes and becomes his wife and it chronicles his life.

And then a neighbor comes named Axel and he's the second part of the novel.

And they're very different, but

out of their work, and he has a guardian angel.

I thought this was really interesting that he has somebody that has some degree of power.

Geisler, I think his name was.

And

at each critical moment in the novel, he helps out.

He has no reason to help out Isaac, but he does.

But it's this idea that no matter what happens, there's always a solution, and it's greater work.

And as this novel builds, they carve out an entire wilderness area in northern Norway, and they create a settlement, and it becomes a town, and nobody really recognizes.

And he carries things on his back.

If he hears there's an iron stove that's been abandoned, he goes out there and puts it on his back and walks all the the way back.

And Hampson, the reason it's controversial is because,

obviously, if you look at that novel and look at the values, what he hated was

urbanized, powerful America in the 19, the Roaring 20s, so to speak.

And he, that hatred of America and that romantic idealization of an earlier agrarian world.

And I think one of the guys is Swedish, actually.

So

I've got a little

bit.

But anyway, my point is that he became a megaphone for Nazism to the degree that he wasn't just kind of a misanthrope.

He was not a very nice guy, is what I'm trying to say.

And after the war, they put him on trial.

And I think he was finally acquitted or given a light sentence, but he died in the early 50s.

But

of all those novels that he wrote, they were kind of the modern novel about what's inside a man's brain, psychological novel.

It was brilliant.

I'm sorry, what was he put on trial for after the war?

Was he a Nazi?

Is that why he's controversial?

Yeah,

he went to Berlin when Hitler wanted to meet him because Hitler looked at that novel and thought that it had German work values, you know, industriousness, and he wanted to...

They tried to appropriate him as a spokesman for Nazism.

And then during the Quisling government in Norway

and that was a very difficult time.

Remember the British had to evacuate and all that fighting.

Well during that whole period and of the occupation he was he was very sympathetic to and was a beneficiary of special treatment by the puppet government in Norway.

And so when that government fell during the liberation

he was on the wrong side.

And I don't know, there's a lot of literature why he did that and what was it about him, but he had a pathological hatred of the English-speaking world for some reason.

And

in that book, a sign of decadence is when a Norwegian or a Scandinavian migrates to America.

I don't know what, it's something about the existential struggle in that cold, hard, stony climate landscape and what it does to people and makes them

man against nature.

But it's a brilliant novel.

It's one of the best novels I think was ever written.

And then,

I can't go on too much, but everybody likes the, I guess there's six great novels, besides all the short stories, like, you know,

of

Conrad.

But that one book,

Victory, is just,

it's a kind of an auto, they're all autobiographical, but this person who is ostracized and travels all over the world and he finally becomes content with his separation from the world.

And then he sees there's this young, innocent woman, and he's

not that he's capable of affection, but he has this relationship sort of with her.

And then these people come.

There's always evil people, as you remember in Lord Jim, that come up the river or Nostromo, and they try to, and he finally makes it a choice to re-enter the world for somebody else's safety.

And

it's sort of a description of what the 19th century European world was becoming and why a person couldn't fit in that and what are the wages when you don't fit in that.

And it's almost a suggestion you have to get back into the game.

It's kind of a Homeric idea that you can't be Achilles and nurse your wounds against the unfairness of the system, even though it's warped you.

And like Achilles after the death of Patroclus, you've got to go back in there because you're going to have to save the Achaeans because they're going to lose to Hector.

And so it's, even though you're corrupted in the process, it's a great novel.

It really is.

I'll stop there since we seem to be doing threes.

Okay.

Let's go ahead and take a break and come right back and talk about musicians.

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Victor, we are on to threes here, and I would like to talk with you about your top or the best pop music

stars that you appreciate their work.

Well, you know, I kind of grew up listening to Van Morrison, and he was kind of a mix of English,

like sort of an English-Irish-dash

balleter.

And then he was heavily influenced by soul music and Black America

and the blues.

And he, God, some of those songs, Trupelo Honey was just amazing.

And that appearance he did, I think it was in the last waltz.

The way he performed, Brown-Eyed Girl, and all of those songs,

he was just, he has a beautiful voice.

He's a wonderful entertainer.

He brings all these different music traditions into

one

symphony, so to speak.

And he's still at it.

I can remember listening to him on AM radio in the 60s, and he's still at it.

And so

I have nothing, but I think he's one of the best pop singers that ever existed.

Another one is,

and I think everybody knows that, Ray Orbison, he had kind of a tragic life because he died before, I mean, he had, he,

we all grew up in high school and grammar school with Pretty Woman, and it was, he was, you know, on the charts and everything, and he was

right up there with the big 60s popular bands.

But I think what people forget is that,

my God,

he endured and he endured and he endured.

And

he had kind of a renewal in the 90s.

And then, you know, when he had that

one song, You Got It, Anything You Want, You Got It, and Love Hurts, Crying, Falling, all those blew by you.

They all had the same thing for someone who's kind of a shy person.

He wore those sunglasses.

He was pale white, kind of pasty, but they all have

unrequited love.

You know what I mean?

That's sort of like a sonnet or something

out of that period of English poetry because he's always,

you know,

silently suffering because this woman has, he's done everything where he wants to do everything for a woman.

And you don't usually hear that from a male singer, but

he died right

during his renaissance.

It was was kind of tragic.

So I've always liked him.

I should say that

I mentioned

black singers.

I think the greatest black singer of all time

was Otis Redding.

My gosh.

And he died so young and in a car, in a plane crash.

But, you know, I can't turn you loose and I've been loving you so long.

Trilital Tenderness, sitting on the dock of the bay.

All of those songs were wonderful.

He had a beautiful voice, and

he should still be singing if he hadn't been killed.

Finally,

I never liked him.

And I like him even less now as Bruce Springs,

because I think he really overdid that working-class New Jersey thing.

And he's now a billionaire, and he got involved in all these political things.

But when you look, listen to those, that album, you know, The Rising After 9-11, those songs he wrote almost spontaneously, they're wonderful songs, and then that Nebraska album.

And those were the two albums I thought were just sheer genius.

And it's hard for me to say, and that's another issue that all of our listeners deal with with actors and singers.

that we on the conservative or traditional side for the most part, and entertainment being on the liberal side, we have to be very careful because ours grata artists, you know, it's art for the sake of art.

And you have to suppress your personal feelings or political or ideological leanings when you see an artist that has antithetical views to your own, but they have real genius.

And that's hard for me.

But

you know what?

I liked that he did.

He did that

album with

the Seeger Sessions band where they did all those old folk tales and they had like John Henry, all the old folks.

Yeah, he did.

He did.

He did.

He had American folk songs from the 19th and early 20th century.

He did them wonderfully.

Yeah, they were wonderful.

He's got that.

He had all the skills.

He has a raspy voice.

I can't, I mean, I'm maybe cheating by going on three, but I've always liked Bob Dylan.

I've always liked him.

And, you know, I did not like his politics.

I do.

I don't think he has liberal politics anymore.

I don't know what they are, but

he's become, in his old age, very sensible.

But if you look at all of those songs,

you know, from Blowing in the Wind to Knocking on, no one wrote more songs that were more successful and more pleasant to listen to than Bob Dill.

I'm not talking about his voice, but and that just to end this conversation, that gets into Joan Baez.

Everybody hated Joan Baez.

I know that.

But

I think of all the great female singers that came out of the 60s, Joni Mitchell or Judy Collins or the rest of them, there was no one.

I can't think of anybody who had a better voice.

You know, that one song, and that one album when she redid all of, I think she made Bob Dylan, we've talked about that before, made him famous, but that one song, One Too Many Mornings, when you listen to her do it versus Bob Dylan, or

Restless Farewell,

pity the, I wrote a column and I had a little quote from I Pity the Poor Immigrant.

Yeah.

That song would be completely outlawed today.

And she even did things like You Ain't Going Nowhere, and that, I don't know, Play Sur de Moir, that medieval song, Pleasure of Love, you know, that's a beautiful song that she did.

And so she's just got a wonderful voice.

And she.

And so you have to appreciate that.

And

I really do.

So those were people I grew up with.

And I'm not acquainted with the latest songs, although I've been trying to listen to

some strange,

you know, this guy, Nick Cave.

And what was the name of it?

He did the soundtrack.

That was a very funny song for that one with

about Australia.

Do you remember that?

Yeah, and that guy's fighting with his brothers or something.

And

I remember the movie.

I don't know what the name of it was, but I just remember it.

Yeah,

that was a really great song.

And it reminded me of that.

It was kind of a one, well, he's very famous.

He's got a whole repertoire of good music, but that writer song, I guess that's what it was.

Yeah, that's what it was.

About

the whole nature is answering back, the wind and the earth.

But there was that one song.

I don't know if you and I talked about that one song phenomenon.

I think we did a long time ago.

The Four Non-Blondes with that Revolution song was kind of funny, but it has a good tune.

But also was that soundtrack to

the,

hold on,

you know, the Turkish movie about Gallipoli, and he goes...

Oh, the Water Diviner.

Yeah, the Water Diviner.

That was Christopher Fogelmark.

Love Was My Alibi.

Yeah, that's a great song.

I love that.

Swedish guy, I think he is.

And I didn't even, I mean, that was in his original language.

So anyway, those are some.

Some of the things that you like.

Yeah.

So let's turn then to

websites that you would recommend.

Websites.

Yeah.

Prejudice here because I know a lot of people that have websites.

Oh, yeah.

So I mentioned this before,

John Henricker and Steve Hayward and Scott Johnson.

If you look at Powerline, they have,

they aggregate

columns of the day, but then they discuss in depth some of them or some things in their own experience.

And they just give a level of sophisticated but accessible analysis.

They draw on their own specialties.

Steve Hayward is an expert on the history of the conservative movement and great quotes.

John Henrikers runs a foundation.

He's got the most common sense

you can imagine in a person.

So if you want somebody to give a common sense take on it, and then

Scott Johnson is wonderful.

They're lawyers, he and John, and

he's got also a really great repertoire of music, blues music, folk music that he brings into that website.

But I guess what I'm saying is if I want to get some idea of the absurdity of the left in a very

dispassionate fashion, and then you go to Power Line.

I recommend everybody does it.

I'm very fond of Real Clear Politics.

I know John McIntyre, one of the co-owners of it, but

it's kind of an interesting website.

I mean, I know now there's Real Clear Education, Real Clear Defense, Real Clear World, everything.

They're huge topics, but I guess the flagship is real clear politics.

And as everybody knows, their formula is one article from the left, one from the right, and then I guess they must have some type of computer tabulation.

And then the most frequent in the last week, the most frequent that day, I highlight those, they have polls.

It's just an all-service stop.

And it's not, I think probably they're more conservative, they're on the conservative side, but you wouldn't detect that when you go there.

So

those are the two that I try to go to first.

But I go to left-wing sites too.

And

the other one, I posted American Greatness, and

my colleague Roger Kemble writes, I don't know how he does it, he writes five or six a week.

They're very, very good.

And he draws on a whole lifetime of literary and artistic criticism.

So he's got all of these, it's not,

he's not name-dropping.

When you see him quote authors and pieces of work, he's just wringing it out of his head because those are his frame of references as he gets into his mid-60s, late 60s, he's got this whole wealth of experience.

And that's fascinating.

So I always try to read there.

Conrad Black is not

writing for American Greatness or National Review, but

he has what I would call the Asiatic style.

Remember in classical rhetoric,

there was Attic simplicity as exemplified by, say, the order Lysias.

And then there was

Isocrates or

Gorgias, the Asiatic.

That was the elaborate, ornate style.

And what would that mean as far as grammar?

That would mean complex sentences,

independent and dependent clauses,

a vocabulary deliberately not to show off, but to be more precise, and it would be more Latinate than Anglo-Saxon English.

And I guess when you would read 1,500 words, there'd be one or two words that rarely appear in the printed spoken English language anymore.

So it's just kind of a delightful experience to read him.

And so I try to read American Greatness, Real Clear Politics, Power Line.

And,

you know,

it's

just off topic a little bit, when I was thinking of these, it's very strange about how

the,

and I think Jack and I talked about this once.

I don't want to be repetitive, but some of the old go-to places for conservative affirmation are gone now.

They've disappeared.

And one of them was a drudge report.

Nobody quite knows why he went from being conservative news aggregator to far left.

I don't know what happened, but that thing is propagandistic now.

It's so hard left.

And

of course, the Weekly Standard had good writers, and it disappeared.

I think one of the most talented writers in America is Christopher Caldwell.

He writes for the Claremont Review, but he was an absolutely brilliant, one of the most insightful writers on Europe there ever was.

And he was the ball.

I think he was really the anchor of the weekly standard in some ways that's disappeared or it's gone to the bulwark or whatever that's called.

And then

if you want culture, if I could just

rush is gone.

We forget that, that three hours every day.

And Rush was an entertainer, a news commentator, but he had a brilliant insight into the leftist mind.

And

I used to be driving to work, and I'd always listen, and he'd say, now stay with me.

You got to remember what these guys are doing now.

Don't

even analyze to the nth level what the left was doing.

It was pretty funny.

Yeah.

He was a very good guy.

There's also, if people are, I'm pretty sure you must read this because you know the editor so well, Roger Kimball, but every time I want to read about some cultural issue, his new criterion is very frank about books and the

evaluations,

the analysis of new books out there and what's in them.

Well, I didn't mention that

because I had a vested interest.

So I didn't want to blow my own horn.

But I was a writer in residence last year.

And so that meant the writer in residence was to produce 30,000 words.

So I wrote, I think, six, 5,000, 4,000 word essays, one on three great classicists, one on the destruction of classics, one on Roman society, and I did mention the satiric on there, one on Black Lives Matter,

and then one on

the

striking similarities between the left and the old Confederate mentality, whether it was

sanctuary cities or federal nullification or fixations on one-dropped racial pedigrees.

And I just have one in this issue, and that's the last of that tenure.

It's on,

it just came out.

It's on why study military history, which is, you know, it's an old topic.

It's been done, but I tried to have some new contours to it in the age of woke.

And then I signed on, Roger asked me to do it this year, so I'm working right now as we speak on the first of the second year writers and residence requirement.

And the first essay is going to be on, and we've talked about this, it came out of these podcasts, and that is this weird triangle in Silicon Valley that I think has destroyed California, and it's about ready to consume America.

And on one of it is an academic academia.

That gives the prestige or the veneer or the sense that these people are above politics or they're scientific or they're antalytical when they're not.

And it's embodied in a geographical sense.

This triangle is in the Bay Area.

So that's Stanford University.

And whether it's some kind of voter true-the-vote project, the Stanford Voting Project, or it's drawing on Stanford-affiliated faculty or fellows for Elizabeth Holmes, the Stanford dropout Theranos-Ponzi scheme, or whether it's a self-righteous commentary of

the Bankman Freed law professor, mother of Sam Bankman Freed, and he's back on the Stanford campus now, apparently, on his

I guess, on the conditions of his release from custody for a while.

And they were very vocal.

Of course, she was a bundler of Silicon Valley millions.

And of course, I think they're going to have a tax problem when they try to explain how much property is under their name.

And what

Mr.

Bankman-Fried is a tax expert, and whether he paid sufficient gift taxes or however that worked.

I'm sure he found a way to evade them.

And then, in that whole matrix, we had the Stanford Vocabulary List.

Did you see that, Sammy, that just came out?

Oh, yeah.

And that was IT, as Jack pointed out.

It was not just the humanities center on campus.

This was informational technology.

These were supposedly quote-unquote scientists in computer studies and things like that, but you can't use American, can't use citizen.

It was just immigrant.

They yanked it.

They were so embarrassed.

And then there was the Ben Shapiro visit where they plastered the campus with this picture of a raid insect bottle.

Ben be gone,

you know, playing on the Nazi, gas, the Jew, get him out, motif on campus.

And the very liberal administration did nothing until there was an outrage.

And then we have the Stanford professor who's under assault right now, assault in the sense that the left is investigating him about prior publications that may or may not have been doctored

by him.

I think they were mostly computer-generated illustrations that reflected the argument of the article, but maybe they didn't reflect the actual article but went too far in trying to make a point.

It's resurfaced.

Obviously, he's a white male right now.

And so in the period of woke, when we're trying to make every college president an identity politics profile maybe that's one of the catalysts behind it but you put it all together and you've got real problems i'm not even going to get into selling admissions by coaches and business schools it's just a mess

but it does give it it yeah it's a mess from a to z and they know it and they've taken a wonderful university i'm the fifth person in my family to go there so i had some ostensible loyalty to it, but they've taken a once great university and they've ruined it.

And the class of 2026 has just been announced, 23% white, 52%

51, 52% women.

There's only 15% white male.

And I don't understand it because they're apologizing for their Jewish exclusionary policies.

of the past.

Well, they're trumping that.

They just don't want, they want Asians not to be there in any greater numbers than their demographic proportions, but they don't want any white males there at all.

They really don't.

When you're getting down to 12 or 13 percent, they're 35 percent of the country.

So it just and then that's that leg, and then the other leg is the corrupt Bay Area politics that runs the state.

Think about it.

Nancy Pelosi, Paul Pelosi made a fortune on inside trader and government projects and real estate acquisitions that her that his wife was right at the beginning.

Then we have Diane Feinstein with a Chinese spy, and then we've got Gavin Newsome, Nothing More to Be Said, or Camilla Harris.

Look at all those politicians out there.

Barbara Boxer, the Chinese registered lobbyist.

And then we go to Silicon Valley and

Elon Musk.

We see it's basically a subsidiary for the FBI,

that it's the investigatory arm of the FBI to suppress free speech and get around the First Amendment.

And whether it's Google arranging your internet searches on ideological criteria, or whether it's Facebook using its profits to warp the election by absorbing the work of state registrars, or whether it's Twitter suppressing free speech at the beck and call of the FBI, it's a pretty corrupt world.

And it's got $7 trillion to make that corruption pretty powerful.

You put all three together and you get the big money and the communications and the media.

You get the hardcore left-wing politics and you plaster it all over with nice, respectable academic prestige and you get a very toxic mix.

Sounds like a satiricone to me.

That would be unfair to the Roman elite, I think.

And they are, I mean, so I'm writing that right now.

I think it'll be in, I hope, in the March issue, but I'm very proud.

I mean, I'm very honored to be asked to come back, and I'm trying to do that.

I just have

my last book of this contract is late.

That's the end of everything, and about how societies disappear during war, some wars.

So I've got to get that done.

Well, I just wanted to put in a plug for the new criterion because I do think, not just for whatever reason, but because I really do think that they do great analysis of

culture out there.

I don't know how Roger Kimball does it.

I do not know how he does it.

He's the

editor-in-chief and publisher of Encounter Books, which has just skyrocketed.

We at the Bradley Foundation help it, but help is not the right word.

We support it, but my gosh,

it's selling a record number of books.

It's become the go-to place now for conservative authors that have been blackballed or ostracized or unfairly treated by the main New York woke publishers.

And I don't mean woke ops.

I'm talking about, you know, Doubleday, Alfred Knapp, Simon ⁇ Schuster, Random House.

And so, and then he's writing for, what, four or five columns a week for different venues, American Spectator, American Greatness,

you name it.

He's Epic Times, he's all over there.

And then he's the,

as you say, the editor-in-chief publisher of the new criterion.

Yep.

Okay, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come right back and we'll talk.

I'll give you a choice since this is our New Year's episode.

And we have, I will go either admirable politicians or non-Western movies that you thought were really good.

But give us a little bit, we'll give a little bit of time to

these important messages.

We're back.

Victor,

which is your choice?

Do you want to talk about politicians or non-Western movies that you like?

I'm a glutton.

Famous politicians, you said?

Well, the ones that you think are this, you know, are great politicians in our current time, I think.

Well, I'll do it very quickly because we don't have much time.

Tom Cotton, I admire.

I might disagree with him a little bit on foreign policy, but boy, he takes these issues and he's dead to rights.

He's fearless.

He's our expert on the Pentagon.

He's worried about what's happened to the military.

He's effective.

He's just a wonderful senator.

And as I said earlier, I had my differences with Rand Paul early on, but my gosh, when

his dissection of Anthony Fauci was brilliant.

And he's done a lot of good on matters fiscal.

And he's a financial conservative, budget conservative.

And he's a free ⁇ I know he's a libertarian, but he's a.

And I think he's just evolved in a way that

is quite stunning.

He's doing a lot of good.

So I really admire him.

And then, of course, I'm prejudiced because I'm a neighbor and I've known him for years, Devin

Nunes.

But you take away Devin Nunes out of the equation, there would be no Russian collusion investigation, or we wouldn't really know about it.

It would still be operating.

When he found out what was going on and he had that press conference, the whole weight of the media, the political world, the cultural landscape, they all went after him.

They tried to physically, I mean, literally destroy him.

And even his own party, when Paul Ryan had that ethics, Pony Ethics investigation,

and when he had that majority report, remember about the whole Russian collusion, and then Schiff gave that duplicitous and inexact and

error-ridden minority report, and yet the New York Times and Washington Post and all of the networks praised this prevaricator, Schiff.

And when

I would drive down the freeway, and I think I said that to Jack, you see those

posters, anti-Nunes with him, with Putin, or I'd go in San Francisco and I'd see in Windows donate to

get rid of Nunes, and people were raising money, $10 million plus, to go after him.

So, and he kept going.

My only criticism of him is, we need him right now.

It's not a criticism, but my gosh, put Devin Nunes at the head of ways and means, or if he could find a consensus,

if Kevin McCarthy said, I need another vote or something, Nunes would be the person to find it.

So he was a very gifted, courageous politician.

As far as foreign movies, I talked about it before.

My favorite is Das Boot.

I read the novel.

You know, there was a novel written by a guy in 1973, Das Boot, who you remember you saw Das Boot, right, Sammy?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I love that.

You remember the blonde Nazi guy who is supposed to write pup pieces about U-boat crew?

Yeah.

And

he lives and survives, remember?

But you kind of detest him.

But then he ends up to be anti-war

after he sees how wonderful these guys are and what a bad cause they're fighting for, and that they're all anti-Hitler, supposedly.

Well, that was based on a real person who was a Nazi megaphone

journalist.

And he did go on a

U-boat.

And I was in college when he wrote Dasput, and

it was a bestseller.

It's a wonderful Mui Jürgen Proctel.

Is that how you pronounce it?

I think it's Juergen.

Jurgen Tale.

Yeah, he's a wonderful actor.

He was in Dune, the first version of Dune.

Something about his face, it's kind of pockmarked, and the way he has a tragic look about him.

But that portrayal of the captain was brilliant.

Whether we very quickly to finish, Australian directors are just

wonderful.

I mean, Bruce Beresford and

others, but

I think he did Breaker Moran.

And I know that was propaganda.

It's about this special unit during the Boer War that

they lose a beloved captain, and he's apparently mutilated.

They don't know quite who does it, but they think the Boers do it.

And he kind of goes on a rampage, but

he

has executed two or three

Boer, and I think maybe three or four people.

And

Kitchener,

this is well before World War I

and

after the great Mahdi expedition, but

he decides that he has to draw the line and have them executed.

So it's kind of a fake trial.

I think Jack Thompson's the lawyer.

He was a brilliant lawyer and

brilliant actor and the role.

And they try to deliberately make sure he gets a bad lawyer with no experience, but he's got intellect and brilliance on his side, and he just absolutely shreds the British Army's

prosecution.

And yet, and they even, during the trial, there's an attack on the Boers, and these guys in jail save everybody, and it still doesn't save them.

And Breaker Morant, you know, he's kind of an older person in his mid-50s, and he's getting old.

He's a poet, and he more or less says he's at the point where the things that made him famous or legendary as a cavalry officer or a breaker of wild horses, he can't do anymore to the same extent.

So he's not going to really fight it, even though he's very principled.

That's the movie version.

And I think it's based on a book of the third person that was in the movie, the young kid that they try to execute, but they give him an amnesty.

He wrote a book later, and I read that book called Scapegoats of the Empire.

And it was about,

they never had the trial trial that was lost.

All the transcript was mysteriously destroyed or lost.

But this guy wrote how unfair it was, and then it became a cause soleb, because Australia, very quickly after, became independent.

At least it was a commonwealth and not, you know, when the Boer War took place, if I'm not mistaken, if you were a British subject, whether you live in Australia or not, the same, it was almost a unity.

And so once Australia became a commonwealth and sovereign, then they really really used this trial.

They were the only people really in the modern period that had been executed

for reasons other than desertion or something for atrocities.

The problem with me is that it was a brilliant movie.

It's one of my favorite movies.

It's a foreign film, as you said, but I don't think it.

I read Scapegoats of the Empire, but the more you read about it,

I think they were guilty, is what I'm trying to say.

I'm not sure that the captain was mutilated by the Boers.

I'm not sure that the minister they executed or the other, I think there was a German they executed, were necessarily,

you know, traitors or informants.

I'm not sure they needed to execute prisoners.

So you get the impression.

And then Raker Morant was kind of a

ladies' man.

Of course, he's that way in the movie, but he claimed he was a,

as I remember, he claimed that he was the long-lost son of a famous Admiral Morant.

And he had perfect grammar and diction, but he was kind of a fraud, but it doesn't mean he wasn't a great officer.

But anyway, the Australian

movie is sort of, in that sense, propaganda from the Australian point of view, but it's an absolutely brilliant movie.

And

it's,

I don't know, it's one of the, I'm trying to remember the actor's name, Woodward,

that played Breaker Morant.

And he had his own,

he had his own, he was in the Wicker Man.

And he's a brilliant actor.

He died sadly, I think, in his 70s from a heart attack.

He was a heavy smoker.

And he had a TV series for a year or two, or maybe longer.

But anyway, he was a great actor.

It was brilliantly directed, brilliantly filmed.

It's a great movie.

And what about your American non-Western?

Non-Western?

Yeah.

Why are you saying non-Western?

Because we've talked often or you've talked a lot about I know why you're saying it because the listener right now, oh no, he's going to say change.

Change.

He's going to say searchers, high noon, wild bunch, man of shot livery.

You've heard of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, there is a movie

that I like.

A lot of people like it.

It was based on an actual incident with these bank robbers in LA.

You remember that?

They had a body armor on and they made heat.

And so Michael Mann did heat.

And

that had,

that's a very long movie.

And I'm not a big fan of Robert De Niro, but he was great in that movie.

Al Pacino was over the top.

He went from Michael Corleani, very understated and then kind of wild and flamboyant at times.

He is interesting in that role.

And then, God, they had the woman who, what's her name?

Oh, Ashley Judd?

Yeah, Ashley Judd, who said, you know, I'm a dangerous woman the day Trump got nominated, remember?

I mean, inaugurated.

That's right.

She had all of that.

And

it's,

he has a very, you know, he did it with Miami Vice

and Collateral with Tom Cruise, Assassin.

Yeah.

Michael, he has a very,

and he did that thief, that first movie.

He has an ability to blend music

and action.

They're quite almost surrealistic.

It's really effective.

That last scene in that movie when they're shooting and then Robert Niro dies and he has that kind of strobe lights effect from LAX and they have the music.

It's really well done.

I like that movie.

I watch it

all the time.

I'm afraid, you know, if

the other favorite movie is, and I've talked about that, is

The Best Years of Our Lives.

I really liked Dana Andrews, along with Joel McRae.

I think they were two of our best,

truly American actors, you know.

Yeah.

That was a great movie.

Yeah, well, Robert De Niro plays an interesting part, you know, after you get tired of his Cape Fear, you know, kind of acting.

The problem with Robert De Niro is he's kind of like Jack Nicholson, and that is his best performances you get are when he's not acting, he's playing himself.

And

Cape Fear, I think that's the Robert De Niro.

That's Robert De Niro.

Yes, and

that's the problem with him.

When he's very brilliantly, when he plays a part brilliantly, and he does, and he's absolutely ruthless.

This is a guy who said he wanted to, what, beat, hit Donald Trump in the mouth, and they asked him, he just said F Trump and just got carried away and

yeah he has an interesting politics that's for sure yeah that's what's scary about certain actors that are that

when they play a particular role they're brilliant in that particular role but that's because they're not acting and he's one of those people

and uh And that's what's

somebody like Anthony Hopkins can play any role.

Gary Oldman can play any role.

Denzel Washington can play any role.

But certain people maybe play that role better than anybody else could possibly because

they're not acting.

They're just themselves.

And

that's what's frightening about it.

Well, thank you, Victor.

This will end our year, 2022.

It's been a great, great year for your podcasts.

And, you know, everything

that we talk about, you always say something different and something something new.

I'm always astounded by the breadth and depth of your conversation in these podcasts.

So

I thank you.

I thank the audience for always coming to us to hear usually the latest news or things on culture.

I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Yeah, I did.

I think next time in the new year, we'll talk once on agriculture, farming, and water.

How's that?

But in a way that's not just dry.

I think that'll be good.

That'll be good.

And

thanks, everybody, for listening.

And I'm sure that we're all going to think that 2023 will be better than 2022.

Something about 2022.

The border, the election.

It's just glad it's gone.

Yeah.

Well, we'll look forward to 2023.

Everybody, have a good time tonight.

And we'll see you in 2023.

All right.

This is Victor Davis-Hansen and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.