Masks and Mimes of Politics

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

Victor, the star namesake, 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.

You know, Hoover is located at Stanford University.

That it is.

The big eyesore, right?

And you see Stanford people look at that beautiful tower and think, if only we could get rid of this.

Yeah, that comes up all the time.

Why is that tower in postcards of our university?

And I can tell you firsthand that almost every year I get a letter from my syndicator.

Do you really work for Stanford University?

And I said, that's who signs my checks.

And they say, we're getting a lot of alumni and professors from campus claiming that you're lying, that you're affiliated with Stanford.

Mean they turn on Fox and they get so furious, or they listen to this podcast and they claim that Hoover is completely autonomous.

Promises, I wish it were.

It used to be almost, but unfortunately, ever more closely, it's now merged.

I mean, it always was part of Stanford, but we had some firewall, but they are collapsing.

We're much more integrated with Stanford as far as our fellows go.

I think we're up to about 75% of the fellows of joint appointments.

So it's part of Stanford, and they do not like that when they see people like Scott Atlas or Shelby Steele or Tom Soule.

or myself have an affiliation with Stanford.

And what happens is somebody is walking, you know, walking along the airport or in a hotel and they happen to see a Fox News or they happen to read a column and it says Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and they say, oh my God, I graduated from Stanford.

That can't be true.

And then I think on a couple occasions, I've had to send, you know, a copy of my contract and stuff to show that I was employed by Stanford.

These people are very strange people, the left-wing, bicostal, wealthy elite, and they're so prestige conscience and snobby that they feel that even though they've done more damage to the stanford name and we'll get into that in a second but nevertheless they go after hoover affiliates there can be no room for anyone who is not totally complicit with the ideology of of the left so there's no no room on campus well there is for the time being who knows when in 20 years from now if hoover wasn't part of stanford anymore if witherspoon or some of these other institutes you know that robbie george has say at uh james madison Center at Princeton, if they were totally ruled out, would anyone be surprised?

I don't think so.

But we're going to talk, Victor, about we raised Stanford.

There are two matters that are newsworthy of recent.

And one is that a Stanford I.T.

department or cabal, whatever the hell, has created this document called the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.

And we're going to get your thoughts on this, Victor, right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This podcast finds its happy home at justthenews.com, John Solomon's website.

And Victor has his own website.

It's his official website.

It's VictorHanson.com.

And we'll talk about that a little later in the podcast.

So, Victor, I have a feeling most people

who listen to this show have probably heard the news sometime last week that

the Stanford IT

community, information, technology, it's IT community.

It's not like the modern language department, weirdos, or the

strengths in the.

That's a very good point.

Yeah, that they've created.

This is started earlier this year, but this whole campaign titled The Elimination of Harmful, Harmful Language Initiative.

One example, you can't say the word American.

You shouldn't say the word American.

You could say U.S.

citizen, which I find funny, Victor, because they bring up citizenship, but don't, don't say, don't say that.

A whole host of

don't say disabled, say this or that.

Victor,

the control of language, the abuse of language is so much part and parcel of the ideology of the left.

This is another manifestation of it.

What are your thoughts?

Well, I mean, the left used to be very, very careful that they would never, never be associated with George Orwell's 1984.

So they used to remind us that, you know, every time the Pentagon said there was collateral damage in Vietnam, they would say, that's a Orwellianism to suggest, you know, that it's sanitary rather than thousands of people were killed when the bomb missed.

And so, you know, they didn't say things like good think or double think or new speak or crime think, all that stuff.

And they do now.

They've become what they hated.

And this list of words was pretty, I mean, they had things like you can't say sold down the river.

Have you ever heard somebody say he sold him down the river?

Because that was originally supposedly a term used of slaves that were sold from broken apart in their families, etc.

And you're not supposed to say abusive relationship because that's neutral.

You have to have an abuser and abused.

But they got

attention because basically they got rid of two words.

One was American because they felt that that privileged

Americans in the United States and other people were Americans.

Of course, they never really told us that other people don't identify as Americans.

People in Mexico call themselves Mexicans because they feel that is the word, not Aztec, but Mexican is the real word that

was indigenous of Nahutu languages.

So when Cortez came, you know, they he met the Mexica, not the Aztecs.

And so

nobody else identifies with Americans, but nevertheless, they think they should because we're privileged.

And same thing with the immigrant.

And so that got some attention.

What was missed in all the attention were two points.

One was this, as you pointed out, was not the sociology department, psychology department, gender studies department.

It was not a diversity, equity, inclusion administration.

This was IT people.

And that reminds us that everybody who have not been engaged in this woke revolution don't understand that it's not going to stop with the English department.

You know, it's not just this University of Chicago English department for a year says they're only going to take people who study black studies.

It's not there.

They want to get into engineering and computer science and informational technology.

And that's where they are now, and we're dropping standards.

So that

brought attention to the fact that the old, you know, the old shible of, well, you know, affirmative action and woke and all this won't affect airline pilots.

And then you think, well, wait a minute, United has a program where 50% of their new pilot training will be based on woke criteria.

So yes, it's going to affect everything.

And that's going to be very dangerous because

The reason we had 5 million illegal entries is this country works in a fashion that other countries don't because it's not tribal, it is merucratic, and we're destroying that every single day.

The other thing is it's wider, Jack.

It's

Sammy and I talked about the triangle between Stanford University, Silicon Valley, and Bay Area power politics that have so destroyed California and to a certain extent the United States.

But what we're getting at, Stanford, and I'm an alumnus of Stanford, so I supposedly I should be worried, although although I'm not.

It's got a really bad reputation lately.

If you just count the ways, think of it.

So they published this list.

What's an alumnus going to think?

I'm asked to give a million dollars to Stanford so that they can publish lists that say that you can't use the word American.

Or, you know, some guy 75 years old says, you know, I fought in Vietnam.

Or my son's a colonel in the Marine.

They can't use the word

American.

Or somebody is an immigrant, is very proud of being an immigrant, and they can't say that they're an immigrant.

And so that is counterproductive.

And then they look at more and they say, wow,

Sam Bankman Freed

grew up in the Stanford campus, and he was taught by his parents the utilitarian

code of ethics, in other words, that anything is justified by the noble ends, any means or methodology necessary to get to those ends, which he put into practice.

And then the parents were very, I guess you'd call high-profile.

I'd heard of them.

They were very in the news on the Stanford campus as ethics professors and then basically in the law school.

She was a big bundler of Philicon dark money, channeled it into hardcore left-wing candidates.

He was a, I think he was a consultant with Elizabeth Warren on fairness in contracts and things like that.

And

they were recipients of several million dollars in

FTX money from their son, which is going to be very interesting because they said they put up money for bail, but they really didn't put up the $25 million, $10 million.

But they and other people so far on name pledge real estate and one wonders where they got the money for the real estate, whether we're in a circular pattern here of getting money from their son so that they can get assets so they can bail out their son.

Maybe it was just their Stanford home.

And then we go to the current president who

we don't want to judge, but he's under investigation for doctoring scientific illustrations in some of his jointly authored papers.

But a long time ago, Jack, but just mysteriously,

it arises now and there's scuttlebud or suggestions that because Harvard is now path-breaking with the first black woman and Stanford has had just white males, it's time to get rid of him because of his gender and race.

And they went back through his past and found a discrepancy, and that will be a lever to remove him and get a person who fits the woke criteria.

And we have Elizabeth Holmes, who was not long ago charged with 11-year prison sentence for her $8 billion Ponzi scheme that was called Theranos, Theranos.

And that took off.

I won't mention the names, but they were some of the most prominent people at Stanford University and the Hoover Institution that were on her board, who didn't have a lot of expertise in

blood testing machines, but did have a lot of high-profile public prestige that would have attracted capital.

That whole thing collapsed.

So, Stanford has, and then we're not quite done, Jack.

They announced, as I said to Sammy, the new class of 2026.

If you go to their website, it is listed as 23% white, down from 26,

52% female.

The legacies will largely come out of the white male, and I don't know what the legacy is, how much you have to give, somewhere between 5 and 10 million probably.

And they announced that they're not going to release the number of people who were admitted to Stanford who chose not to take the SAT, but they did admit that those who did take the SAT

and the 0.1%

who got a perfect score, which is almost impossible to do, they rejected 70% of those people for the crime of being perfect.

And so

if you think about it,

Stanford is going to have about 12% white males.

We have one more Stanford story.

As you pointed out to me earlier,

Stanford has

commissioned a study to what, is the right word, apologize for its pre-war policy under Wallace Sterling and others who wanted to restrict the number of Jews,

even before World War II, but even after.

And that was because when it started to be competitive with East Coast universities and it was harder to get in,

Jews overperformed, so Stanford thought, and they were getting a lot of Jewish people with high test scores or high grades.

And that was more than their 3% in the population.

So they just had to stop.

So they stopped it.

And they're apologizing now.

And virtue virtue signaling and performance are their regrets.

And as this essay pointed out, well, why would they do that?

Why would they apologize?

They should brag on themselves because they're doing the same thing right now.

In other words, they're going to say, they should say, hey, you know what?

A little while ago, we had too many Jews at Stanford and they were crowding out people of color.

So we just restricted them.

And then we evolved into our present admissions.

And now we're doing the same thing with whites and Asians.

And And we're just as proud now as we were then.

But if you take them at their word, if they regret being discriminatory and they're sorry for what they did, then they should be what?

Sorry for what they're doing to

88% of the white males who applied and Asians as well who are underrepresented based on their grade GPA and SAT scores.

But they're not.

So what they're basically saying is: we were anti-Semitic, racist, whatever term you want to use, anti-religious bigots in the past, and we regret it, but we don't regret that we're the same right now in the present.

So, we'll have to wait 40 years, and then we'll someday apologize for all of the discrimination we're using today.

Add it all up, Jack, and it's not been a good year for Stanford University because it's birthed some of the great pathologies

around.

It's a mother load of Silicon Valley.

So, when you want to say to yourself,

where did all these people come from in FTX, or where do they come from Facebook or Twitter?

Well, they're people like Caroline Ellison, the head of Alameda, who now has turned state's evidence to rat out Sam Bateman-Freed.

She's a Stanford graduate.

And you'll go into the high ranks of Facebook, high ranks, and you look at the board members at the Stanford Board of Trustees.

It's all Silicon Valley.

Victor,

the discrimination

episode you just talked about,

anti-Semitism in Stanford's past and the obtuseness of its ongoing current

bias against white males and Asians.

I'd like to refer our listeners to a website called Minding the Campus.

And our old friend,

late friend, John Leo, I love John.

John was a wonderful, wonderful guy.

Oh, gosh, I loved him.

He was a great journalist.

And

he was at the Manhattan Institute and he left there and he founded Minding the Campus.

John passed away earlier this year.

Anyway, at that site, John Rosenberg wrote a piece

about this obtuseness that

Stanford has on discrimination.

This was brought to our attention by,

I must say, I should go to Minding the Campus more frequently, but the good people at Powerline, which is the first website Victor looks at every morning.

Powerline blog.

I do.

I just love what Scott Johnson and John Henaker and Stephen Hayward post.

That's wonderful.

Yeah.

Hey, Victor, if I can get back on the

language question, and this, you're a philologist on top of a military historian, an ancient historian, syndicated columnist, best-selling author.

I like that because when I went to go apply for a job after farming, I went into Cal State Fresno, and the chairman at that time looked at my transcript.

And he looked at me and he said,

You're a philologist.

You're trained in the Greek and Latin languages, the history of the land.

I looked at your seminars.

You're very narrow, narrow.

What do you know about

our students?

I said, well, I was born on a farm.

I'm working on a farm.

I'm unemployed.

I need the job.

That's enough.

But he thought I was too narrowly trained.

Well, you know, you're just trained in the core of Western civilization.

So it's pretty narrow.

Victor,

I have a prejudice about American English.

I think it's a very versatile and growing language.

This is a stupid analogy, but if you had...

We understand what yada, yada, yada means now.

I have a feeling if you said

something to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, yeah, yada, yada, yada, they would have had a clue what you would talk about.

Franklin Roosevelt even wouldn't have had a clue.

So it's a growing language.

It evolves and grows.

I don't know that all languages do.

I remember, do you remember like 20 or 30 years ago, the French got, they were pissed off that that had crept into the French language was the hot dog or other kind of English expressions.

Well, the French Academy, you know, the 100 and the French Academy, they are guardians of language.

And

their basic reason to be is to acknowledge great intellectuals, but it's also to preserve the French language in the sense of globalization.

And that's just a synonym for Americanization.

So whether it's aftershave

or things like that, they have a circumlocution.

locution and they're going to use it.

So their idea is to keep the language pure because if you don't,

all of these European countries have something similar.

The British are much.

I mean, the Oxford English Dictionary has everything in it.

I'm sure if you looked up H-O-Ho, they would find it, you would see slang for a prostitute in the United States or something.

They're much more expansive.

But these other European languages, German and Spanish, and

even though I think Spanish is almost as widely spoken, if not as widely spoken in the world as English, and Italian, they have efforts to preserve the language.

And that means to find new words for computer and internet and

social media.

They can't use these English words because of the,

you know,

it may come from a hatred of America down deep from the English.

It does in some ways, but it also,

all these things are not hard and fast.

Everything is fluid.

Ponte Rea, as Heraclitus says, all things flow.

And what I mean by that is

there's nothing to guarantee that the United States 50 years ago will have its dominant role in the world because it was a combination of the inheritance of the British Empire and the American dynamism, North American dynamism, that made English everywhere.

But Britain is in decline.

It has no empire.

And the United States is losing global clout.

And so maybe a lot of these words

can be Chinese.

Who knows?

And

the dominant economic cultural engine in the world usually

is,

you know, it's because of

its language reflects that.

And the same thing happened in Latin.

When if you were in,

well, let's just take an example.

If you were living in Spain in,

I don't know, 200, 100, during the five good emperors, say 120 AD,

and

you would address your horse as a equus, equus.

But by 500 AD, you would probably be calling it a cabalis, which is modern Spanish caballo.

And the same thing happened in Latin.

The Latin language started to disintegrate, and then there were local varieties that picked up the slack.

And the same thing happened

in the Greek world.

the Byzantine Empire started to fall apart.

Oinos for wine became crossie or soma became the word for arton bread.

And regional dialects, slang, dropping of cases, simplification of conjugations, the use of pronouns for

inflection, especially

in prepositional phrases, et cetera, et cetera.

That all makes it simplified.

But it represents, language represents the dynamism or the decline of a particular dominant power.

And that's happening as we speak.

And you can really see it in Stanford University.

If you just think a minute about its sway, it reached, I think, its pinnacle somewhere between 1980 and 2018, in the sense that it birthed Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley in turn showered it.

So its endowment soared up to $30, $40 billion.

Its graduates peopled all of Silicon Valley.

It had sweetheart political support from Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein,

and it was in its heyday.

And so everybody wanted to be its and now

when it practices systematic discrimination and when we're talking about all of these things that I just mentioned that have happened just in the month, I don't think it's going to be

a preeminent university.

I think it's true of the other Ivy League.

So we're in general.

So it gives a lot of opportunity.

So if you're a startup company in Silicon Valley and you've got a new app or you've got a new search engine or you've got a new service,

you know, the equivalent of a Lyft or DoorDash, and you need coders, are you really going to go to the IT department that sends out this list?

Or

would you rather go to Texas AM or Georgia Tech and hire a coder?

And I had a lot less money, probably, too.

So I think that's already happening.

Oh, you know that.

You know some

gifts.

I know.

Not a tiny thing either.

Very brilliant guy.

He's one of the most successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

And when I mentioned this, that this would be be a hypothetical, he corrected me quite kindly and said it's a reality.

And everybody knows it.

And everybody knows if you have a degree from Stanford, it doesn't really mean anything anymore.

And the point is, it's not about race or gender or anything.

It just, everybody should remember this: that if you destroy the standards,

it doesn't start and end with admissions.

So you have now 12 to 14 percent white males, and you probably have about 25 percent Asians.

And if you were to look at the criterion on their grades, the quality of their high school institution, the number of AP courses, their SAT scores or community service, then they would be reflecting the demographics in the case of whites.

And in other words, there'd be 33% as used to be, or 40%

or more,

and Asians would probably be 30%.

Okay, so they're deliberately discriminating against those groups and they're bringing in more Native Americans, but especially African Americans that are probably up to 14, 15%

of the admittance, even though they're only 12% of the population, Latino, ditto that.

And altogether, you've got

a population that is, say, 70,

I don't know, we'll say 77% non-white.

Okay.

To get that number, I want to be very careful because I'm not trying to be racialist at all and racially obsessed, but to get that number,

it's not me doing that.

It's Stanford doing that.

Stanford is now not requiring the SAT, and they won't disclose, as I said earlier, who took it and who didn't that got in.

And the reason they're not doing that is if they were doing that, they would have to allow people in, which they're doing,

up to 200, 250 points lower than the people they're rejecting.

And that would cause outrage.

So they're just making it under the guise of COVID optional.

And that's now a permanent, apparently, policy, or at least they say it's in effect indefinitely.

And so they're letting students in that they didn't worry about during K through 12.

What do I mean by that?

I mean, Stanford University didn't say this high school in Detroit, this high school in Baltimore, this high school will be a feeder of Stanford.

So we're going to get Google people and Apple people and Lisa Job and Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg to give them money so we can be more diverse by not lowering the admission standards by tutoring African-American or Latino youth, you know, in sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, first grade.

They didn't do that.

They did it suddenly and abruptly when you apply.

So what does that do?

Well, it does one thing.

It radicalizes the campus.

So suddenly you have safe spaces.

Suddenly you have dorms that are predicated on race.

But most importantly, you're bringing a lot of people there who feel

that

maybe they didn't get in according to traditional standards and they have committed themselves to proving that traditional standards were exclusionary and racist.

Okay.

And then they take courses.

And the courses were, of course, geared toward people, say, 10 years ago who got in with high SAT scores and perfect GPAs from very rigorous high schools.

So then you're telling the faculty you've got to change your grading policy because we didn't know it, but it was racist.

So you're going, you can't, if you're going to read Dante, then you don't read the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradisio, you just read the Inferno.

Or if you're teaching Homer,

you read the Iliad, but not the Iliad and the Odyssey and then Hesiod.

You just do that.

And if you start to grade in a particular fashion that is detectable to the 15,000 administrators on campus, which are about one administrator for every student, we're told, Wall Street Journal published that statistic, but it's available on Stanford's own internal website.

then you have a pattern of discrimination.

So then the faculty make the necessary adjustments.

No tenured faculty member, believe me, is like Harvey Mansfield going to stand up and say standards are absolute across time and space.

Even Harvey had to give two grades, one what they earned and one what was necessary for them to graduate.

What I'm getting at, Jack, is that we have conflated in America the graduation and the admission standard.

So they're one and the same.

So once somebody gets into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford, that is a birthright to graduate.

Because if you don't graduate, then it is just as racist as not getting in.

And once you get in, you are guaranteed graduation for the same diversity quotas.

To facilitate that, you have to give them the grade to graduate.

And that means you have to alter your standards and you have to alter the faculty.

And most importantly, you have to alter the rhetoric on campus.

And that has to be as a new school, as I said, with Sammy in New York or Cornell or all of them.

You have to attack the entire

infrastructure of grading.

It's all racist.

The whole caboodle is.

It's racist, standards, it's exclusionary.

You want to get rid of it all.

You either give us all A's or we get rid of it all and just have pass and fail because it's our university now.

And we'll see how this works.

When you look at USC and they've done this,

and they

removed one of the best college presidents in the history of higher education, it's Max Nicias.

Nicias, they have found in the last three or four years that their annual giving has nosedive

because

people who graduate are self-interested and they want their institutional brand that's with them for the rest of their life to mean something.

They want to say, I graduated from Stanford Law School.

I graduated with an MD from Stanford.

But if it gets known that that doesn't mean anything anymore, then they're not going to give to that brand.

And you're going to start.

And of course, this will be very gradual because these institutions have so much money that it will take a long, long time.

You know, there's a lot of ruin, as Adam Smith said, in a society.

So if you're Stanford and you're paying for one administrator or one administrator staffer for every student, and you've got to keep them busy, and they're monitoring diversity, equity, inclusionos of every applicant, and they're going, look into syllabi of every professor, and they're examining everything that's said in public, and they're trying to find ways to excuse shouting down speech.

That's a full-time job, but it's a huge drag on your budget.

And you're not spending things on, you know, and you look at the research.

If you read the Stanford Daily or the Stanford official publications, Stanford Today, you will see that the number

of news stories about scientific research or research in general that does not have an equity, diversity, or diversity, equity, inclusion element or belonging, they call it.

It's almost nothing, almost every single thing.

As I said, take long COVID.

It's not, there's a breakthrough drug that's going to cure long COVID.

It is statistics show research maintains.

Investigators have proven that this community of color did not get the same as this group.

group.

And, you know, it's kind of frozen in amber

if you give statistics

on the identity politics.

Once you go tribal, in other words, then you suffer or you survive with tribalism for good or evil.

Once you say you're not an individual, if I say I'm Victor Davis Hanson, I'm a white man, then I suffer.

by what's good and bad about white men.

But I would never do that because I have as many friends and enemies as white.

I don't identify with white.

I'm not embarrassed of being a white male.

It's just, it's incidental to who I am.

You know, if I go out to lunch with Tom Sowell, I don't consider myself white and him black.

Right.

But if you do, and they do,

then you've got to look, and they quote statistics, then you, there's a lot of statistics out there that are bothersome.

So you look at anti-Semitic hate crimes, it's largely African-American males.

Don't say that, though.

Don't say that.

It is statistically.

There was an article about that the other day that was published.

If you look at leaders on the public realm, I know Donald Trump was stupid enough to go to dinner with Nick Fuentes, but he didn't, you know, he apologized later and said he wasn't anti-Semitic.

But

just look at the leaders of the African-American community lately.

There is

Farrakhan, who said that Hitler wasn't that bad.

There's Kenya West, a big mover and shaker in rap music, who said Hitler wasn't that bad.

And that he was.

I have to interrupt.

Did you see Whoopi Goldberg double down on her madness?

Yes.

I was getting to her, and she basically said that,

well, she said that we were in Ukraine, didn't she?

But she talked about the Holocaust as well.

The Holocaust, yeah,

and deprecated, didn't apologize.

And then we've got Jesse Jackson.

I mean, going into Jaime Town.

And then we've got Al Sharpen and put on your yarmerk and come over here

after

the Freddie market.

Then we've got Reverend Wright, as I said earlier, damn Jews won't let me talk to Barack.

So it is endemic in the African-American community.

And you look at the knockout game and attacks on Jews and look at the FBI statistics.

Don't listen to Victor.

And you will see that the terrible white people are underrepresented as a demographic as perpetrators of hate crimes, and African Americans commit hate crimes at about double their numbers.

And so these are statistics that you really don't want to talk about, except when they're pathological.

If you look at suicide,

suicides by race, I think that you can argue that Native Americans and whites have by far the highest suicide rate.

And I think you'll see that black Americans have the highest murder rate, but one of the lowest suicide rates.

But whites have one of the lowest murder rate, much lower than their demographic, but much higher in their suicide rates.

And nobody wants to talk about that.

And if you look at life expectancy in the last five years, you will see that most groups made sizable gains, except Native Americans and whites.

whose

life expectancy did not grow over, I think, over the last 10 years by two years, but maybe a year.

And they're not doing very well.

And if you look at, as I keep saying, if you want to look at all the Pentagon statistics, which I have looked at, because they always publish the number of officers who are black or Latino or this or the women, if you look at the dead, White males died at about 75, roughly 75% in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Up to 35%, the population, that's almost double, more than double their number.

Nobody talks about that.

So, what I'm getting at is you don't want to talk like that, what I just did.

You don't want to do that because

you're just erasing an individual, a brilliant individual of any color, and you're putting them in for good or bad into a particular tribe.

And yet, if you're going to do that, and you're going to go down that roll, then we're going to look at everything.

So, if you say,

I have never been a slave, and I want money from people who never owned slaves going back six generations,

then

I am going to examine all these things.

And some white nut is going to say, well, we spent $10 to $20 trillion on the great society as reparations.

Or the African-American crime rate is about 52% of all murders.

It should be 12.

The difference between 12 and 52 is you're disproportionately represented in violent crime, therefore you have reparatory obligations.

That's what's going to happen.

And you're going to get into a war, a bellum omnium contra omnis, a war of every Hobbesian war of everybody against everybody if we go down this tribe.

That's the ultimate trajectory of tribalism.

And we know it because it happened in Rwanda, it happened in the former Yugoslavia, it happened religiously-wise

in Iraq.

And believe me, it'll happen here if people like Stanford University, if institutions like Stanford

to insist on it.

And

it's very strange that people can't see that, but

where we're headed, that we're

including the donors, Victor.

If this whole enterprise was 20-year enterprise,

most kids go now pre-K or in daycare

of some sort.

So from when they start there to when they graduate, it's supposed to be about knowledge.

It's about branding at the end of the day and now at the beginning of the day too.

And the money bags would

expanding Stanford's endowment from 30 billion to 31 billion or 32 billion.

They really gave a rat's patoot about the education aspect of it, about the branding.

They'd be helping the kid in the second grade learn because there's a hinge point there.

You know, you're in third grade or fourth grade.

That's where their money would would be and should be.

As I said to Sammy, I did that for 21 years.

I started from scratch with help from Bruce Thornton, a classics department program at Cal State Fresno, and I think that 80% of our students were non-white.

And my theory was

if I was able unfettered without administrative blockage to offer a curriculum and to spend time tutoring, remedial tutoring to make up for some of the shortfalls of high schools that were less than competitive.

I could take any student and in six years teach them Latin, Greek, Western civ,

epigraphy, archaeology, numismatics, you name it, Greek and Latin composition, manuscript.

I could get them as prepared as anybody from Andover or St.

Paul's.

And we sent over 50 to Ivy League programs over 21 years.

You can do it, but it's not easy because, first of all, the people in that, as we've seen from the Roland Fryer case at Harvard, brilliant economist.

I think Glenn Laurie said he was the best mind of all economists of his generation, and he unfortunately sinned by finding that his research resulted without a proof of systematic police racial discrimination.

And once once he did that, his entire life was scrutinized and he had made an off-color joke.

The current president of Harvard tried to fire him.

But so

when you do that, your criticism comes from the minority, marginalized, guilty, white liberal industry, and they'll try to destroy you.

So my biggest problem.

was radical students and radical professors whose whole careers were bent on proving

systematic racism and exploitation to such a degree that a person can never recover without enormous repertory efforts.

And yet all these students were doing better than white, so-called white or Asian students that didn't take

these courses.

And so

that was considered a threat.

So they go after those people.

Stanford is very short-sighted because not only is it going to turn out IT graduates and

pre-med graduates that are not competitive and will have to have compensatory or repatory exceptions made until they reach parity.

And they may reach parity.

You know, you can graduate from Stanford Law School or, I mean, you can go to Stanford Law School and not meet the criteria and maybe you'll end up the same as somebody who didn't meet the criteria.

I'm not saying that's not possible, but what I'm saying is you take a great a much greater risk that your brand now will be associated with people that did not do the same level of rigorous work a decade earlier.

And that's going to be known to employers, that's going to be known to everybody.

And then the second thing is the bread and butter of Stanford University, whether you like it or not, is a profile.

And that profile is an Asian or white liberal, left-wing professional, often in the bicoastal corridors.

And they can be lawyers, they can be doctors, they can be CEOs, they can be entrepreneurs,

and they can be quite wealthy.

And their kids have been Stanford groom for years, like Stanford Camp, Stanford Math Camp, Stanford Coding Camp, you name it.

And they have an expectation that if they take that kid and they drill it into them night after night, that they're going to do their homework and they're not going to be happy with a 3.9

and they get a 4.3 and they're not happy with a 790 in the SAT, they got to get an 800.

Well, that type of student gets into Stanford.

But when that student doesn't get into Stanford because of his race, and another student that didn't do that does because of his race, or

somebody in the 12%

pool, the white male 12%, gets in,

but they didn't have the same scores as somebody else, but their parents gave, they were a legacy and they gave a ton of money, then you're destroying your alumni

funding base.

They're not going to give money.

And I can tell you, I can't, I don't know, I can't enumerate the number of people who have talked to me about this.

And they all say, I'm not doing it anymore.

I'm not going to give them a dime.

No way, no way.

My grandson's son worked his entire life and they don't want him.

And, you know, we'll see what happens, but it's a golden opportunity for schools that were always just as good.

And I'm not just talking about Hillsdale.

I'm talking and I'm not that were always just as good, you know, as Wellesley or Brown or Oberlin, who are woke now,

for these other schools to stick with standards and they will start to shine and be.

They do already.

They do already.

Victor, I've hired, when I was at National Review, I hired a lot of people and the Hillsdale, Thomas Aquinas, and even King's College in New York City, which is proximate and kind of having troubles too now.

But regardless, they had academic standards.

St.

John's is another one.

Yeah.

That were good.

I just know that anybody graduated from St.

Thomas Aquinas or Hillsdale College

had a level of

fluency in the English language.

They had some foreign language expertise.

They were very good writers, effective writers.

A work ethic also.

Work ethic.

They

had certain

attitudes about morality and ethics and religion.

They were completely dependable.

And that's not true of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford.

And if you don't believe me, then who produced

Sam Bankman Freed, MIT?

Who

produced his sidekick, Carolyn

Ellison?

Who produced Elizabeth Holmes

Stanford dropout?

Who produced all these people?

Where do they all come from?

Who gave a private office and a desk to Jeffrey Epstein?

Harvard University did.

And

so

they have been coasting, and they don't understand that things can change.

And I've been watching USC, and I've been looking at some of their fundraising

levels and what's happened to their brand.

It's very interesting because under Nicius,

the former president,

it was almost startling, Jack.

It was like when I was in high school, USC

was kind of the football place.

It was in the ghetto, basically in Watts.

You know,

you associate it with great football players like O.J.

Simpson and beautiful cheerleaders and all of the people who couldn't get into UCLA.

And UCLA, when they played USC,

they would, and when USC played Stanford, and you know how Stanford band was, it was obnoxious.

They would chant, they would chant at football games.

I went to it, you can't get into Stanford, couldn't get into Stanford, that kind of snobbishness.

And then suddenly, under MAX, my God,

the test scores and the GPAs to get into USC were pretty much tougher than UCLA and equivalent to Berkeley and Stanford.

And the money started to pour in for top-notch programs, and the campus was starting to transform into a beautiful campus, and

they were getting the support of the African-American community because they had such a fair policy and they treated their staff and students so well from that community.

They were just on a trajectory.

Is that where

some of the actors who went to jail?

Yes.

Was that related to trying to get into USC?

Absolutely.

And Stanford too.

We didn't, I was trying to be kind to myself as an alumnus to Stanford and not mention selling admissions.

You know, it's very funny about all of these things, about cattle bands.

I won't mention any names, but when I came in 2003,

23, to the Hoover, I retired from Cal State Fresno.

I was offered a job there at Hoover.

And a prominent Hoover administrator who did not go to Stanford, I was coming from Fresno State, and he came to meet me.

And it was not the director who was a saint.

John Racian is a saint, but it was another director.

He said to me, you're going to be confused up here.

We don't take

state college.

Last guy we took was Shelby Steele from San Jose State, and you're no Shelby Steele.

And you're going to have difficulty.

You're in the big leagues.

And I meekly said, well, I was a visiting professor at Stanford in classics.

Oh, yes.

That was just a year or so.

And you went to the behavioral side.

Big deal.

You're a Fresnostic.

And I said, well, I graduated with a PhD.

And it was so condescending.

And then he kept lecturing me and lecturing me that day was I was walking around about this is how we do it.

And you're in the big leagues now and you've got to up your game.

And finally, I said, you know, I have a first cousin at Stanford graduated.

My mother graduated with a BA and a law, JD, LLB, I think they called it in those days.

I had an aunt who got a BA and MA.

This was before, this was in the 40s, and they never mentioned it.

It was just go to Stanford, come back to the farm, big deal, who cares?

And might have helped them.

My mom became a judge.

My aunt became a community.

It may have helped them.

But the point was when I was all I can associated at Stanford PhD, when I would prove vines some of my friends that were pruning with me I used to prune and get paid by I would to pay piecework I would prune a hundred vines to see how long it took me average out about seven dollars an hour and the guys next to me as they saw me pruning hey Victor

they said you went to somewhere like Stanford are you an idiot or what you're out here pruning with us what did you learn

and they'd laugh and I said ah I learned to write Greek and they'd say oh that's really gonna help you prune a Santa Rosa plum tree.

It was just a joke.

And it didn't mean anything.

And so now, and this guy was lecturing me.

And it just reminded me that all of this,

it's like a Chevy brand or Coca-Cola.

And the universities have played on that.

And it was okay if it was connected directly to achievement.

You know what I mean?

So you were in Silicon Valley 10 years, and you hired a guy from Stanford with a PhD in electrical engineering or a BA in electrical engineering or computer.

That guy was, or that woman was brilliant, and they could take and revolutionize your company.

I don't think they believe that anymore.

And so they're going to live or die by the quality of their product.

And all of the prestige is not going to matter anymore.

And the more that they try to talk about prestige, like this guy did to me, the more ridiculous

they become.

Well, the 30 billion will carry them way past their

life probably

i think everybody knows we're in a revolution jack there's a lot of people out there i think the covet really wise people up when they looked at that 1.7 trillion and those universities just shut down and didn't refund money for tuition room and board and then people

they wanted to get a plumber or an electrician or they wanted to get a carpenter and they couldn't get them and they were paying 50, 60 dollars an hour and these people were in

high demand, they were competent.

And this

kind of drone class that was Zooming was completely dependent on the Amazon driver, the plumber, the painter, the cement layer.

It really changed.

And then with Zoom, people said, you know what, I don't really have to go to that campus.

And then they started to get woke.

And then people, if you go on the internet and you search, say, Western Civ lectures, you will see all these freelancing people.

and you can go on and take classes.

Hillsdale's got a whole university online.

You can just take wonderful classes, superbly illustrated, videoed, just as well as would you either do that or go to Stanford's history department and get lectured how toxic you are as a white male.

So, whether it's vocational training or alternate

internet or up-and-coming Hillsdale alternatives, or just going to work and avoiding the $1.7 trillion aggregate student debt.

We're in a revolution.

And this year, 650,000 fewer people went to college.

And if you look at the last two years, it's well over 2 million.

They're losing about 7%.

And it's not just demographics.

It's not just demographics.

The collapse will start, the big collapse of these institutions.

Hey, Victor, we we have another, it's almost an hour we've been talking about some

that's we have to make a little room for our some of our sponsors, and uh, we have another topic to discuss.

So, how about we will we will talk about um an important piece, worthwhile piece anyway, in the American Conservative called um titled Anti-Woke Isn't Enough?

And we'll get Victor's thoughts on this right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor's official home on the internet is victorhanson.com.

I want to encourage you to go there and you'll find links for everything Victor has done, other appearances, on podcasts, etc., pieces he's written for American Greatness and other places, a syndicated column.

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As for me, Jack Fowler, I write a free weekly email newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

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It is in desperate need of being strengthened.

So what is civil thoughts?

It's my

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So, my good friend,

I had found this piece in part of my search for worthwhile pieces to put in civil thoughts.

And it's by

Matthew Schmitz.

It's written a little earlier in December for the American Conservative.

It's titled Anti-Woke Isn't Enough.

And its point in a nutshell is: you know, there are certain anti-woke liberals out there that range from, and I know you want to, you'll add some context to this, Victor, like Barry Weiss.

Oh, Barry Weiss and

Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald.

And on occasion,

we see clips up on the web of, oh, did you hear what Bill Maher said yesterday about so-and-so?

And these

anti-woke liberals have become embraced by the right,

certainly appreciated that they're speaking on behalf of the truth.

Even Jon Stewart, remember Jon Stewart going on, I think, Colbert show and say, frickin' the frickin'

COVID,

you know,

the military installation is right down the block

from this open market.

Of course, COVID came from China.

So when these things happen, we tend to,

on the right, get, oh, we appreciate it.

But there seems to be a sense from some that the anti-woke liberals are becoming the folks who are setting the policy for the right or the direction of the right.

And this is a

the conservative movement has somewhat experienced this in the past.

I don't want to fully get into it, you know, neoconservatives who were kind of liberals, who then became very influential amongst the conservative movement.

So

his premise here, again, Matthew Schmitz's piece in the American Conservative is: okay, good.

They're anti-woke, but you know what?

They are not in a position to say where conservatism should be heading.

Victor, any thoughts on this?

Yeah, I think what's going on is that Matthew Schmitz, and I think he writes for this Catholic-oriented compact magazine, doesn't he?

An editor with Sohab Almari and those guys.

Yeah, which is a weirdo, excuse me.

I mean, they got some communists writing for that thing, too.

Yeah, but some of them are MAGA people, and they're sort of not libertarians on the right and not

liberals on the left.

So they're conservatives and they're religiously orientated.

But I think their argument, as I understand it, runs something like this.

The ultimate trajectory of left-wing liberalism is wokeism because it allows or embraces relativism.

It has a tendency to favor a quality of result.

The affirmative action was part of the civil rights movement from the very beginning, and we are at the logical conclusion or the ultimate expression of affirmative action.

In other words, all the things that these liberal converts to semi-conservative believe in was innate, baked into liberalism.

It always was.

And

basically that is a quality of result mandated by an elite and necessary means to achieve them.

Now,

you mentioned some names, and the question is, why did they wake up?

If I was

a cynic, I would see Barry Weiss woke up because they made it impossible for her to have her blue chip New York Times column.

They kept cutting it or censoring it, so she had to quit.

And they were glad that she quit.

They drove her out.

And Matt Taibbi is a really brilliant journalist, Rolling Stone guy, very left.

But he wrote a memoir about his years.

I think he had something to do with Exile magazine, which wasn't really a nice magazine.

But he wrote some things about women that were pretty repulsive.

I don't think, I think he's a wonderful guy, but the Me Too destroyed his career.

They really did.

These are things from the left.

Bill Maher has been a target of the left lately.

And

when you had that conversation with Bill Maher and Mark Cuban the other day, Mark Cuban's a man of the left, and he basically said, I had to leave California.

I had to.

I couldn't do business.

The regulatory climate, the taxes.

And by the way, San Francisco, they were laughing, is uninhabitable.

And so what I'm getting at is

these converts, and another one is Andrew Sullivan, who was,

you know, he's a very opportunist, he's an opportunist.

He was a very staunch conservative.

And then during the Obama years, he drunk the Obama Kool-Aid.

I think he had a marijuana conviction.

He was not, he didn't endanger his citizenship process.

They found him useful.

He was damning.

He was for the Iraq war.

Then he damned everybody that was for it.

Then he went, and then guess what same thing happened they went after him in other words all of these people have lost a leg or an arm to these left-wing cannibals right and they've been maimed by them and so they've got religion yeah yeah and now they're thinking you know what as i used that image before we we are in the laboratory this

liberalism birthed its logical frankenstein monster the woke monster and the woke monster goes after people who are male.

It goes after people who were white.

It goes after, let's be candid, people who are Jewish.

And it went after Barry Weiss, and it went after Mount Taibbi, and

it's going after Bill Maher.

And you can't reason with these people.

So this author, Schmidt, is trying to say,

yes, it's good to have people who wised up, but

they have not wised up enough earlier or later to understand that the liberalism that they embrace inevitably embraced this.

It's almost like saying that Danton and the revolutionaries did not want a constitutional monarchy.

It was inevitable that from them came

the Jacobins or that the socialist under Kerensky rather than having a constitutional democratic republic, that socialism was going to birth a variant called Bolshevism.

Because it's the left, and that goes back to Platonic philosophy, you know, when I keep quoting Socrates, and I think it's Agorgius, he said,

they're not happy to the dogs and the donkeys vote.

And the point is, once you get into this, we're going to have an equality of result and we're going to share and make everybody equal, then there's, as Tocqueville said, there's no end to it.

Because you can always find somebody a little bit not equal because of so many variables that are the in the matrix and therefore i need a little bit more power just a little bit more this time to make sure that that person over there gives something to this person over there and how that ends up is it's it's logical that stanford university would say ah

that asian kid who came from cambodia And his mom has him at that kitchen table since he's eight years old studying in a one-bedroom, poorly heated apartment.

And he's so disciplined, and he is a violinist, and he's got all the criterion.

But everybody can't do that.

So we're going to take away from him and not, we're going to punish him, and then maybe elevate somebody else.

That's what liberalism finally becomes, always.

And so these guys are warning the conservative movement to say, yes, embrace these people.

They are allies on, but they're saying they're allies on particular issues at this moment, at this time.

But do not count on them when it comes to

partial birth abortion, just to take an example.

Or don't count on them

wanting to build a wall at the border or something like that, because they're not conservative.

And you can really see that, you know, I thought the neoconservative movement was fine in the sense that

I had always defined it as Irving Irving Kristol and those guys that came out, especially of the Jewish American New York group, you know what I mean, that in the 50s and 60s.

Norman Pedoritz.

Yeah, Norman Pedoritz.

And those guys were different, though, than the generation that followed them, the David Frums, Bill Kristol.

Those guys were social conservative.

And this new, but don't consider the neo, what is now neoconservatism anymore as conservative.

It's not.

It's kind of like Max Boot, let's fight this war or let's do this, but that's about it.

You know, it's neoconservative has been distilled to take American power and manpower and money and go abroad and change things.

And that's about the only thing I can see that's conservative, whereas before

I had tensions with it about the border because I used to write about closing the border.

I wrote Mexico

as an article in 2002, and I was really attacked by neoconservatives.

In fact,

you know, the guy who did

Broken Windows, Wilson?

Yeah, James Q.

Wilson.

Yeah, James Q.

Wilson.

He wrote a very devastating, I thought, unfair review of my book in Commentary Magazine, Mexicornia.

And he was for basically.

And then, I don't know if you remember, I think it was on a national review cruise.

You had Robert Barkley on there once at Wall Street.

No, no, I didn't.

Barclay?

No?

No.

No.

Well, it was another another cruise that I was on.

But anyway, I was with him, and he was a very wonderful, nice person.

He had, I think, advanced prostate cancer.

Right.

And they had me in a panel, and we were supposed to debate illegal immigration.

This was maybe 2000, 2001.

He played the race card on you.

No,

he just said that

if he had his dream, there would be no borders.

And I said to him, well, would you live in El Paso or San Diego or Yuma, Arizona, when you announced that?

He said, What do you mean?

And I said, Have you ever been in an area where people who have come in illegally and residing illegally and have illegal

certificates, licenses, fake SS cards, whatever?

And if you were doing this illegal, illegal, illegal, and you're from southern Mexico and you haven't been exposed to a host who had confidence in his own values, and you were not asked to assimilate or integrate,

then you're going to have a social chaos.

It's not going to be the upper west side or east side of Manhattan.

Let me tell you that.

And so he got very angry.

And so I asked him, When would the border close?

I'll never forget what he said.

He said, You'd let the market adjudicate.

Yeah.

And when

if you get 10 million people come across, then wages will go down to $2.

And then it will not be competitive with Mexico anymore.

You know what I mean?

It'll be the same.

So people will stay home.

And I said, well, how long will that take?

30, 40?

He said, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter how many people.

So there was no cultural sensitivity to the enormous amount the taxpayer would have to pay to give parity.

Or the American worker who would get screwed over in the meanwhile.

And it was very funny because when I got to the Hoo Institution in 2003,

four,

a donor, a very nice guy, said, Could I have you, if I rent a restaurant and I have you go up, would you sit at the table with me and debate Milton Friedman, you two guys on immigration?

You know, I was only 49.

He was like a god, right?

So I went up there, and it was just stunning that I had just had this debate with Robert Bartley just a few months earlier, and he gave it to me the same.

And the same thing, let the market adjudicate.

And I've had that debate with libertarians maybe three or four times.

And I said, you don't really care about the social-cultural ramifications of allowing 20, 30, 40 million people coming in under illegal auspices with no meritocratic basis, no audit, no background, in violation of law, no English facility, no high school diploma,

and

no confidence on the part of the host to integrate them melting pot style.

You have no idea what that's going to do to this country.

That was the argument.

Yeah, you know, Victor, we,

going back to National Review,

NR had always been very strong

against open borders, against illegal immigration.

But Peter Brimelow wrote

the beginning of his book on

immigration as an essay in National Review.

And we got into it with the journal.

Bartley was dead by then, but they did play, I mentioned before, playing the race card, but it became pretty sanctimonious on the editorial end of

it.

Who it was.

It was either David Osman, who's a wonderful guy.

He was the Wall Street Journal editor for a while, then Max Boot was.

But one of them allowed me to write, asked me to write the argument for enforced borders and meritocratic, diverse, limited, legal immigration only.

And I, you know, $200,000 a year or something.

And I made that argument.

And he said, this is one of the first times we've ever published something like that.

So I felt pretty good about it.

They televised one of their editorial meetings, and it's gone from the web now, but they had it up, and they were mocking the Ash Review and attacking us as racists.

I mean you actually using that term knowledge.

Oh, I know it.

As I said earlier, I walked to campus one day and I got the voice of Atsalan and all of a sudden my picture was on the front page with crosshairs from a telescopic site, enemy of the people.

And

according to the left, that's inflammatory and dangerous.

And yet

nobody cared.

And so I went to the Fresno Fresno County Library and gave a talk once, and I was stormed.

I went to the University of Oregon, and people disrupted, and that was the end of the lecture.

So I got that a lot.

And I got a lot from the right, too, believe me, just what you're talking about.

A lot of very critical reviews that I was a protectionist, I was a xenophobe, I was a nativist, everything.

I don't think anybody writes that about now when you look at what's happening at the border.

No,

it's gone, but I don't recall anyone saying, oops, I was wrong.

Or, yeah, I helped destroy Middle America by bringing in excess labor.

That was,

I think in 2003, you were never going to, it was going to be like it is now.

I think at the end of Mexifornia forecast, it's going to be like it is now.

And I said, you're never going to stop it because the Mexican government gets rid of people it doesn't want because it doesn't want to pay them social equity or, you know, subsidies, welfare.

And then it gets 60, it gets 30 billion, Central America gets 30 billion in remittances.

And they count on people coming across the border, getting a job, and getting American health, education, food, legal, educational subsidies to free up income on

not very impressive salaries to send back to Mexico as the largest source of foreign exchange, larger even than oil sales.

And when you have the Mexican government and you have corporate America, meat packing, hospitality,

restaurants, agriculture, landscaping, depending on cheap labor, and then the bi-coastal elite with

aristocratic lifestyles, nanny, gardener, cook, et cetera, all cheap, and you've forsaken the union, and you have the Democratic Party wanting to flip states blue, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, soon, Arizona, maybe already, Texas.

You put all of those interests together, and there's nobody standing up for the border.

None.

You know, I would go to a talk and give this talk at a Hoover retreat, and all of a sudden the questions would come, Jack, and it was like the guy who had a big corporation was attacking me.

And then the woman who had three,

she would say her Linda and Maria

and, you know, Emilina, Emiliana, they're all my best employees.

And I give them my used clothing and she would attack me.

And then all of a sudden, there'd be some left-wing person that says, you're racist.

And then there was nobody speaking up for the quiet American that

you know, the

rule of law.

Yeah, it was just, it was, I finally quit speaking about it about 2010 yeah and i just said you know this is just well this is unfortunately proved right uh victor uh hey we're we are way way over and which is fine because this has been a uh you know an avalanche of your uh wisdom and observations which is what our listeners want that's why they listen to this this podcast so uh victor uh we have some other had some other things made of raised.

We'll raise them on a future podcast.

I would like to thank our listeners who are, even if you're new, if you've been here all year, and this is the last recording that will be up in 2022, what a year it was.

Thank you very much.

If you're new,

thanks for coming.

Hope you'll stick around.

Visit Victor's website, VictorHanson.com.

If you listen via Apple Podcasts on iTunes, you can rate the show zero to five stars.

Practically everyone gives it five stars.

Thank you very much, those who do that.

And also for those who

leave messages, leave comments.

We read them.

We take them to heart on

Apple and also on Victor's website.

Lots of people leave comments there.

Here's one comment that was left on

Apple.

It's from Let's Go Brandon Now.

The great voice of reason in the 21st century is how it's titled.

Victor Hansen is an American treasure as he helps us navigate present-day issues through the lens of an historian.

Those who repeat the past are condemned to misery.

A Stanford professor, he fearlessly speaks the truth in the face of the negativity he has received from the institution.

This is a pretty good one to read, given what we've talked about today.

I recommend this podcast without reservation for those seeking the best for America.

Let's go, Brandon, now.

thank you very much.

Thank you, Victor, for,

well, being a friend, for all the wisdom you share, for letting me host this podcast.

I

hope that 2022 gets in your rear view mirror very quickly with all

bad year for everybody, but I hope

long COVID.

It was pretty long, but I know

no COVID 2023 for you, VDH.

So for me, I hope to lose 50 pounds.

I'll go down.

Well, I can tell you how to do it.

You just get long COVID and you lose your taste, and I have lost 30 pounds.

Oh, well,

I may try a different route, but if it comes to that,

I'll embrace it.

Thanks very much, Victor.

And to Sammy Wink, the great Sammy Wink, thank you for,

you know, I'm glad to be able to pair with you on these shows and to our listeners.

And we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Thanks so much.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

It's much appreciated.

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