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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is a Christmas edition, so hopefully, it will be heard either before or right after Christmas.

We hope everybody has a great Christmas day and enjoys themselves and is thankful for all the things that were given in this world.

Victor is a author, scholar, columnist, essayist, and political and cultural critic.

And of course, he is our favorite provocateur of the left.

He is also, and more seriously, I suppose, the Martin and Eulie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Today we've got a lot on the agenda, but we were going to finish up with Victor on his optimism of the things that we can do to change the course that seems to be laid by the left in this country.

And so we'll get to the news first and then we'll continue with that optimism after these messages.

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Welcome back.

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Please come join us.

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John Solomon, who is an investigative reporter,

has the mothership for for our podcasts, and his website is Just the News, and there's always current stuff coming out from John Solomon.

So, we highly recommend everybody look at Just the News website.

Well, Victor, I thought we'd look at some of the latest news today, and then we would continue on our journey of positive things.

The most current of the

Samuel Samuel: So, on the Ultra website, I'm trying to vary the topic.

So, some of them are angry readers, and this week I had

a,

I guess,

a defense against wiki lies, which try to doctor people's biography and make false accusations.

I gave it a kind of a test case in one column.

It's only available to Ultra.

And then I usually try to write every third week on farm life.

It's an apolitical.

And I guess we would say lost farm life, a world that's beneath our feet now.

And then military fair.

So this, and then contemporary events, but this next three or four postings for the next two weeks, and the Ultra is not going to shut down all holidays.

There'll be fresh material.

It's on what the U.S.

military does very well traditionally and what it does very poorly, especially lately.

And so maybe people would want to check in on that.

That sounds exciting.

Yeah, that should be something everybody should come in.

And you will have to subscribe at $5

a month or $50 and a subscription.

So we welcome everybody.

Victor, so let's look at the news first because there's some pressing issues, lots out there, but I would like to hear your thoughts on, especially since it's biggest in the news, the Samuel Bankman freed sentencing and bailout and the things going on there.

It's an atrocity.

I mean, remember everybody, the

federal attorneys out of Merrick Garland's Department of Justice bragged, bragged that they had a $250 million bail, the greatest in history, really, and they were really going to stick it to him.

But they didn't really stick it to him because if you or I

have a bail imposed and we don't have the money, we go to a bail bondsman.

And usually they charge 10%.

So I thought he was going to have to come up with $25 million.

He didn't.

He was just released because his parents put up part of their properties and some friends said that they would cover it if needed.

But that even raises more questions because where did his parents get assets?

I mean, they were well-paid and compensated professors, but she was the head of a huge PAC of which his company siphoned money to, and then she bundled dark money in Silicon Valley.

to give to hard leftist candidates.

But the point I'm making is they had a lot of real estate, and that real estate money came from where?

Because the news reports suggest that either they had a luxury condo in their own name from 800 to a million, or they were being used or willingly used to have their names on $16 million of property, which begs the question.

So the judge is imposing bail on their son, and they are saying they have enough assets so that the usual 10% in cash is not required.

But did the assets come from the illegal operations of their son?

If it is, and I don't know if that's true, I'm just, we have a circular process, and there's people sitting right now in a federal prison for five years in some cases for entering illegally the Capitol on January 6th.

And they were in jail for a whole year with no bond.

And they sat in solitary confinement.

This man perpetrated the greatest fraud in the history of the United States.

And I don't care that he gets in the slob costume and he looks down when his interviews and he gets a standing ovation from New York Times-affiliated audiences, or he goes on his little shtick about, oh, I was just trying to help people.

That was the whole point.

I wanted to make money to give it away.

I was going to give a billion dollars.

And meanwhile, he salted all of the necessary media companies he thought, and he dispersed money mostly.

And that was a lie when he said, oh, I voted to the Republicans.

I mean, he gave some, but

he acted as if it was symmetrical.

He just said that so he would get cover.

And then he understood what that bought him, that huge amount of money, 40, 50 million he gave in the last election, 10 million to Joe Biden.

I mean, all of a sudden, we hear suddenly, and I mentioned Hemingway the other night.

I mean, the Great Lion of Sun also wrote, how did you go broke?

Suddenly, I mean, gradually, and then suddenly.

Well, how did he, how did we know what he was doing?

Well, he was gradually doing it.

And then, as soon as the midterms were over, suddenly, they didn't want to announce that before the midterms.

They knew exactly what he was doing.

And then he was going to testify for six hours under congressional grilling.

And he probably would have had to name names, et cetera, et cetera.

And then mysteriously, all of a sudden, by accident,

I don't know, by design, Merrick Garland's DOJ indicted him.

And so that was the end of that.

He didn't show up.

And then Miss

Ellison, his partner, has decided to turn state's evidence.

But my point is that

I don't think the law is going to go after them in the way that they should for ruining the investments of over a million people and doing it deliberately because his PR tour was all predicated on the idea that even his garb was used to accentuate this profile that he's trying to project.

That I'm just

a 30-something kind of sloppy guy, and I kind of just don't know what's going on, and I'm just trying to help people, and I'm kind of a computer nerd.

No, you were deliberately setting up a fake company to transfer assets out of the private accounts of people who trusted you.

And then, in your Ponzi scheme, you were desperately trying to invest A

to make up enough money to cover what you were siphoning off, off, and then B, to disperse cash to buy influence and protection from the U.S.

government and the media.

That's what the whole thing's about.

Yeah, the timing of it all makes it also sound like he was kind of the useful idiot of the left, you know, in terms of what you just said.

Yes, although he's not an idiot.

Yeah.

He's a crafty,

he is beneath that t-shirt cutoffs,

sort of weird, bizarre look, there is a selfish greedy manipulator and every once in a while he lets it be known but every once in a while the camera catches it too and his head is down and his eyes are peering out he looks it reminds i feel like i'm in the movie the omen yeah well he's there's elements of his character that are satanic and everybody and his

The worst thing about it was when he was at the trial and he was being,

the bail was being posted, his parents were kind of smirking and laughing.

It's like, well, who

don't you know who we are?

We're cutting edge, leftist, powerful, affluent Stanford University law professor.

This doesn't happen to us.

He grew up on the Stanford.

I mean, this is how their attitude, it reflected that sense of privilege.

And

the subtext of all of this, as we talked before, is

this is a pathological triangle that's really hurting America.

In California, it's ruined it, but it's spreading to the United States, and that is Silicon Valley's $7 trillion of market capitalization and what that money buys, whether it's Zuckerberg $419, $419 million in the last election, or it's Twitter and the FBI.

That Silicon Valley monopoly with that kind of cash is a nefarious influence on the country.

And then you add next to it its mother, it's the embryo of it, Stanford University, and you look at what's going on at Stanford.

And I'm talking about the latest crazy names that you're not supposed to use and words and nouns and verbs such as American and immigrant.

And the president is under fire.

I don't want to get into that because the case has not been.

I mean, the issue is still up for debate and he's innocent until proven otherwise.

But nevertheless, that's something for a self-righteous university that's always accusing other people of being illiberal.

And then you add the Elizabeth Holmes, the Ranos connection, and many of her board members were upstanding Stanford-affiliated people.

And

they were picked for that reason to assure investors that the Ranos was up an up and up company.

And then you add in the two Bankman Freeds, and then you add in, what, Miss Ellison, the the Stanford graduate, and you can see that university in its huge influence and money and hard left politics offers a patina that excuses hand-in-glove criminality almost or bad behavior in Silicon Valley.

And then the third leg of the triangle, of course, is this is all done with the nod of left-wing politics.

So the governor, the senators, the representatives, the two most powerful people de Uure in the United States, two of the three most powerful people are from San Francisco.

Camilla Harris, Nancy Pelosi, hard leftists.

Add in Diane Feinstein, a senior

senator, 20 years

House

Judicial Committee Chair, Intelligence Committee Chair, Chinese spy under her employment, right under her nose as a chauffeur for, I guess, 10 to 15 years.

We can add in Barbara Boxer, senator, what, for, I don't know, 12 or 16 years, who is now or was until this year, a registered Chinese agent, throwing Jerry Brown.

And you get that picture of these hard left politics that has an agenda and Silicon Valley provides the money and Stanford provides the prestige and the cover.

And you put them all together and you get California and the future of the United States, that model.

Yeah, let's hope we don't go in for that that model in the future.

But let's turn to add to that stack of current news.

The FBI, who has sent their clarification of the shenanigans with Twitter spying, they say it was normal activity with a private company and that the accusations are the stuff of conspiracy.

What are your thoughts on that?

Well, I mean, it's clear now, thanks to Michael Schellenberger and and

Matt Taibbi,

until recently, Barry Weiss, I think she's dropped out and sort of kind of turned on

Elon Musk.

But nevertheless, in those series of Twitter communiques, it was pretty clear from the internal documents, prima facie evidence, not conspiracy theory, that the FBI

was spying on Americans and, but more importantly, was trying to ban in a variety of ways their communications, or at least diminish their accessibility to them.

And they hired Twitter.

They hired Twitter.

They paid Twitter several million dollars to work with them to

censor speech.

The FBI knew it couldn't do that because that's contrary as a public agency to the First Amendment.

So to get around that, they hired a contractor.

So Twitter was a contractor of the FBI.

And that was very important because they did this in part because of the election of 2020.

And they knew that Hunter's laptop

was authentic because they had it under their pos in their possession for nine or ten months prior to the election.

They suppressed all knowledge of it.

They helped, with a wink and a nod, John Brennan and James Clapper to assemble that team of dissimulators, former quote-unquote intelligence operatives, who swore to us that it was Russian disinformation.

And then they told Twitter, this is the line that we want.

It's Russian disinformation.

Okay, they got caught.

And now, when people are objecting to what they're doing, what does Christopher Wray and the FBI do?

They send a communique out saying that they haven't done anything wrong.

They're trying to protect us.

And this is part of disinformation and conspiracy theorists.

So I guess Michael Schellenberger, who is just taking documents and posting them along with Matt Taibbi, they're posting the evidence right there with very little commentary, some commentary, but that if you don't believe them, then look at the evidence.

And they're saying to look at the evidence and draw conclusions is conspiracy theory, which begs the question.

What the hell happened to the FBI?

It is completely weaponized, whether it's going after

trying to retrieve Ashley Biden's embarrassing diary that has an entry that she took a shower at maybe a little bit too old an age with her father, Joe Biden, and the FBI, go get it, go get it.

And they go after James O'Keefe in the middle of the morning, march him out with his underwears, or Peter Navarro is a conspiracy theorist, put leg irons on him, or John Eastman belongs behind bars, grab him.

Or go down to Mar-Lago and tell everybody that's nuclear secrets and nuclear codes and leak that.

and go into the Virginia School Board and start surveilling people because the National Teachers Union and Merritt Garden want you to.

And then when you, as I said before, when you look for correctives to that, you see Robert Mueller.

I don't know what the steel dossier is.

I don't know what Fusion GPS is.

And then you've got James Comey.

I can't remember.

That's beyond my purview.

I don't remember.

I don't know 245 times under oath.

Or you have Andrew McCabe four times to a federal investigator.

Oh, I didn't leak.

Nope, I didn't leak.

Nope, I didn't leak.

Somebody else did.

And then you have Christopher Wright.

Oh, I can't talk anymore.

Can't answer your questions.

I got to get on a jet.

Got a meeting.

He didn't tell them, did he, that he had to get on an FBI jet to fly to his vacation home so he could get out of questioning.

And I'm not even, we're not even getting in, Sammy, altering

a federal FISA warrant

or hiring a foreign national who was already in pay by Hillary Clinton, although hid by three firewalls.

So the question is, what will the FBI not do?

What will it not do?

If you want to find out

if there's a subpoena and people want phone records from the FBI in connection with the Mueller investigation, they'll wipe them clean.

If

you're James Comey

and you want to save yourself, you'll go meet the president in a private conversation.

You'll go right out and you will memorialize that on an FBI device, and then you will leak it to the New York Times just so you can destroy the president after you've lied to him and assured him he's not under investigation.

So lying, hiring a foreign national,

help...

creating or disseminating a fake dossier, trying to warp an entire election by suppressing information, going after individual American citizens by destroying their access to news dissemination, communications.

So it's time, isn't it?

It's time.

And they know it.

They know it.

That's why

they're desperate.

They're not saying

when they get in that boardroom, the FBI headquarters, Ray's not saying, look, we've been too partisan, we're too weaponized, we've got to stop this.

No, because they're going after individual agents.

They're suspending agents that they feel are quote-unquote conspirators.

If they've heard they've commented on January 6th, or they're whistleblowers.

So instead, the attitude is, this is going to come to an end because Biden is not going to be in power forever.

And they've lost the house.

Our guys have lost the house, and now they have power of the purse.

They can shut down a lot of the FBI operation.

So we've got to double down.

We got to double down.

Come on.

And that's what's scary, because they know the next Republican administration, whether it's Trump or DeSantis, will probably win the Congress because the 2024 senatorial map doesn't look good for them.

And when that happens, the first person, the first thing that's going to happen, and these presidents won't have a choice because of the popular outrage, will be the firing of Christopher Wray.

And then there will be a moment, come to Jesus moment, because then the Republicans in power will have to decide whether to break up the agency.

In other words, they'll have to decide whether after Mueller and after Comey and after McCabe and after Wray, there's a systematic pattern here.

And it's not an individual.

It's deeply embedded in what the FBI has become.

So the anti-terrorist division, the anti-smuggling division, the help with capital crimes across interstate lines, all of that will have to be farmed out to different agencies, or you'll have to take the headquarters and put it in Kansas City or something.

It can't go on like this.

It's an embryo for corruption.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back.

And I would like to hear your thoughts on Zielinski in Washington.

And then we'll turn to our project of what can be done for all the different

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This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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Well, Victor, what are your thoughts on Zelensky in Washington and his speech?

I think I reflect the general

that

everybody admires the resistance that of Zelensky.

He didn't take Joe Biden's offer the first week of the invasion in late February to get a ride out of the country, which the administration initially offered him.

He fought.

Everybody is angry at Putin.

100,000 Russians that didn't really want to go there are dead.

100,000 Ukrainians are probably dead.

50,000 civilians are probably dead.

That are not, you know, the 8 million people have left Ukraine.

We've sent over $110 billion, probably in aggregate.

Europe doesn't have any heat,

natural gas.

They're hurting.

It's a mess.

And he came over here and he gave this, you know, plea for more stuff.

But at some point,

he crosses that line and his plea for more stuff is that you owe us more stuff because our interest and your interest are exactly identical.

We're fighting your war.

Well, we've been dealing with a nuclear Soviet Union-Russia since 1949, and we know how to deal with them.

And they do some terrible things.

And they went into, they leveled Grozny.

They destroyed it.

I don't know how many.

We didn't go in there.

They went into Ossatia.

We didn't go in there.

Barack Obama let them get it.

If Barack Obama had been a little bit more vigilant rather rather than making a deal with Putin, as we knew with his hot mic exchange in 2012 in Seoul, South Korea, tell Vladimir that if he'll just give me some space, it's my last election, I'll be flexible on missile defense, i.e., don't invade while I'm up for election.

You can invade afterwards, and they did into Crimea and where they are now in eastern Ukraine.

And we did dismantle, didn't we, missile defense, which might have been of some advantage now, given Putin's threats.

But the point is, no one is talking about the damage and the death and the destruction and how it ends.

Because

when you listen to La Zelensky's speech, it was very clear that it will not end to the last Russian is out of Ukraine.

And that means the 70% Russian-speaking areas that were annexed and absorbed by Vladimir Putin in 2014.

I think in a perfect world, I would like to see that too, but it's not going to happen

because the Soviet Union, ultimately, former Soviet Union, Russia has 30 times the territory, 10 times the GDP, 3.5 times the population.

And

Zelensky has parity only on the goodwill of the United States and to a lesser extent, Europe.

And I don't think that's infinite.

And so at some point, he's going to say, how do I get all these Russians out?

Because that's the thing we want.

And some military planner is going to say to him, well, you have to hit all the supply dumps.

I know we're doing it, but they're marshaling on the border inside Russia, just like we found out in Vietnam and we found out in Korea and we found out in Iraq.

You can't win those wars when people keep supplying stuff across the border.

And we didn't win Vietnam for that reason.

We had a stalemate in Korea for that reasons.

We didn't do well the second time in Iraq for that reason.

And we had the same problem with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So somebody is going to say to him, you've got to hit all of those fuel depots and staging areas with U.S.

harpoon missiles or whatever, our drones.

And then somebody's going to say, you're going to have to take more of the Black Sea fleet out because they're supplying the Russians through the ports at Crimea.

That's what they're going to have to say.

And when you do that, if you're Russia,

you're going to say, that's not going to happen.

And

we know it's not going to happen.

So he's going to stop that.

And you say, well, he can't stop it.

He's inept.

They're incapable.

Yes, they are.

But that does not mean that one out of every two of their rockets won't work.

And I, you know, this gets me really angry when Biden and everybody in the intelligence committee say, oh, he's just using that nuclear threat.

Well, they did that too in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And we took it seriously.

And then afterwards, people said, well, it wasn't.

And now we know from archives, it was pretty close.

It was pretty close that we got to a nuclear exchange so i'm not i don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility i don't believe that a bunch of i don't know what would you call it civic-minded oligarchs civic minded four stars with family in russia are going to take out vladimir putin because they're afraid he might do something i don't think that's going to happen I think he's got so much power and he's ruthless.

He's capable of anything.

He's not going to do that.

To what extent do you think they, in Russia, they're in the conversation of we're just getting ourselves back into another Afghanistan?

Well, I think everybody knows that.

Everybody knows that.

But there's a little difference about Afghanistan.

That's what nobody talks about.

For most of the history of Ukraine, it was part of Russia.

And so

Russia looks at Ukraine the way we do probably Puerto Rico or even closer.

So, you know, if Puerto Rico tomorrow, it's the U.S.

Commonwealth decides it wants to join Cuba in a communist bloc

and Russia starts to send weapons to Puerto Rico, we're going to have a problem with Russia or China.

So they feel they have a certain,

you know, certain influence by historical reasons inside Ukraine.

I don't know if I agree with them.

I don't think most people do, but in their view,

their power grid, their food

importation, their energy pipeline, it's all integrated.

And they do not want that as part of NATO because they feel that NATO will be right on the border and

their own country.

They want a buffer.

That was the history of Russian grand strategy.

Whether it was Eastern Europe, it's always been we want a buffer, especially.

especially since 1871 and the unification of Germany.

They've always said, World War I, we did not have a buffer.

World War II, we did not have a buffer, partly because of Stalin.

But the point I'm making is that they have to have, they feel they have to have a buffer.

And if you talk about putting that country in NATO, it's never going to work.

Should never even talk about that.

And maybe the EU integrate it economically and make it prosperous, and maybe that will drift over.

and influence Russia.

Okay, go ahead and do it.

But the idea you're going to make a solid Western European country out of Ukraine right on the doorstep, it's a very provocative idea to an alien dictator with nuclear weapons.

And we don't talk about it.

So there has to be some kind of negotiated settlement over these disputed lands.

And

this weird Lindsey Graham

Joe Biden alliance and anybody who suggests that the answer is not killing another 250,000 people is considered conspiracist.

But ultimately,

Ukraine cannot win

unless it has a level of economic and military support that allows it to do preemptive and offensive operations, which will not be tolerated by Vladimir Putin, believe me.

He's not going to lose two more capital ships of the Black Sea Fleet, and he's not going to have people take out power grids or blow up Russian soldiers inside Russia.

So it's just, I know everybody's going to say, well, that's how you have to win.

He started it.

Yes.

I'm just telling you the reality.

And it's very strange, this coalition that has emerged where the left went from neo-isolationists and America's an imperial power to, why aren't we in there?

And I think part of it is that their hatred of Putin was justified, but they were not justified in alleging that

he was omnipotent and controlled the U.S.

election of 2016.

It's not to say he didn't try to interfere.

He probably did, but he didn't collude with Donald Trump, and they were humiliated over that.

So this is the surrogate issue for them.

They think, well, we were wrong maybe privately about Russian collusion, but we were right about Putin, and we're going to show you that all these alt-right people support him.

Well, the people who support Putin in the United States are a very small minority of the right.

I don't think people, anybody likes him.

There might be some people who say, well, he's for Christianity and he doesn't like gay marriage, but

that's not the majority.

People are worried that we have an open border.

We have an omnimus bill that didn't spend a penny on our border.

We're sending all these billions to the Middle East for border security and to Ukraine.

And we're just neglecting this country.

It's like Dickinsey in London about 1855, why why the British Army is in India and Zululand and everywhere.

You know, it doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, sure doesn't.

Well, Victor, let's then turn to our topic on how America can improve itself.

And we have topics left: tribalism, higher education, voting, and the DC swamp, and things that we can do to change things.

I would like to remind everybody that our first topic here, tribalism, and America turning to ethnic identity tribes,

is a part of a subject of Victor's recent book, The Dying Citizen.

So I highly recommend that everybody have a look at The Dying Citizen, this absolutely masterful argument about what's happening to citizenship in our country.

But Victor, what are the remedies for this sectarian movement into tribes defined by race or ethnicity?

To find that answer, you have to ask, why are people doing it?

And they're doing it for perceived self-interest.

So let's say BLM, to take one example.

Why are they doing it when there has never been a wealthier black American community, which is per capita wealthier than any majority black country in the world?

And why are they doing it when affirmative action is at its zenith?

And the answer is it's lucrative.

And we saw that with the architects of BLM that have all been discredited and have quit and ended up fabulously rich with homes and everything and embezzled that money.

And they knew they would do it with Al Sharpton-like impunity.

And so

there is something to be gained from being a victim.

Megan Markle's a victim.

LeBron's a victim.

Oprah's a victim.

Michelle Obama reminds us every day that she's a victim.

And so once

the country decided, its elite decided that it was going to divide the country into oppressors and oppressed and victimizers and victimized, then everybody who had a claim, however tenuous, of being a victim or an oppressed took that avenue.

And that's where we are now.

And so the elite,

that is, the Stanford law professors,

the parents of Mr.

Bankman-Freed or the presidents of Princeton or the CEO of Disney or these people are not going to suffer.

So what they do is they implement this woke ideology as a means of insulating themselves by projecting all of the sins of the United States they feel that are being brought up by these marginalized people, dash.

quote-unquote groups onto the mythical white, middle, lower classes.

So they are the demonized, they are the deplorables, the irredeemables, the dregs, the chumps, the clingers, et cetera.

And they are the semi-fascists, the on-Americans, et cetera, that Joe Biden.

And that way you sort of expunge guilt from you, and you have enough money and influence that your kid gets into Stanford.

Your daughter, if you're Dr.

Fauci, your daughter works for Twitter.

If you're an FBI grandee, you graduate like James Baker to the Twitter legal team and affirmative action and all that doesn't apply to you.

That's how it works.

And

the big difference, though, is that

nobody in the left really is saying anymore that white people are racist.

They don't say white racism.

Have you noticed that?

It's white rage and white supremacy and white privilege because they can't spot any

identifiable racism.

In fact, that's why we have this epidemic of fraudulent claims.

You wouldn't find a noose on every campus that turns out not to be a noose as alleged, or you wouldn't find the n-word written on a dorm room that turns out to be a fraud, or you wouldn't find Juicy Smollett's or Tawana Brawley's or the Duke La Crosse incident or the Duke volleyball if there was racism.

And you wouldn't need adjectives like systemic.

Why not just say racism?

But you have to say systemic.

Just like error, it's everywhere.

I can't see error.

I can't know where it is, but it's everywhere.

That's our microaggression, micro.

And that's what they're doing.

And so it's a lucrative business.

And there's no,

what's frightening about it is, I mean, nobody makes any effort to say that they're not racist.

So Kendi says that to fight racism,

he doesn't say you're a white racist.

He just you're a white rage person, you're a white privilege person.

But he says to fight the underlying racism, you have to be racist.

So nobody says

when you're in a hiring committee at a community college or a state college or Stanford, when you're, and you know that Prop 209 prohibits the use of race as a criterion in California and the Civil Rights Act in the nation, it doesn't matter.

So when you have somebody, people discuss, and I've been on these discussions 20 years ago, 10 years ago, we're going to bring bring in this person because they're not a white male.

We don't want that white male.

They just talk like that.

And then when they're out in public, they say, white rage, or you're Joey Reed, it's white privilege everywhere.

Or Mark Milley, it's white rage.

When Mark Milley says there's white rage everywhere, remember what he did?

That was in June, July of 2021?

He in Austin.

White Rage, where I've just got to understand it.

You got to read Professor King.

Okay, where is it?

And where is the data, General Milley?

Show us.

Show us, Mr.

Princeton Grad.

You can't.

And so he was projecting that

PC virtue signaling performance art of his own

onto the ranks.

And who was he talking about?

Oh, these kids from Tennessee, that guy enlisted from Bakersfield.

that woman who's a waitress in Dayton.

They have these enclaves of white plebeians in the military.

And that's what he was doing.

Not me, Mark Milley, because, you know, I'm for

repertory hiring and things.

And I'm a four-star and I'm from Princeton and nobody's going to touch me.

And so

it's that attitude.

And of course,

there's ramifications from it because.

What's going to happen with it, though, Victor?

Okay, I can tell you.

Let's look at this.

Let's see it play it out very quickly in the time we have left, very quickly.

So

you are a family and you are a white middle class, and your grandfather fought in Vietnam and your father fought in the First Gold War and you want to join the Rangers and your mom says, Not this pig.

You're not doing it, son.

Because I just heard Millie and I heard what they're doing about racial indoctrination, and you're going to have to go to a workshop and you're never going to get promoted because they're always going to promote somebody on the basis of race and gender.

And I've just looked at the statistics in Iraq and Afghanistan, and

they count data son everything except the dead.

And white males die at twice their numbers in the general population, so you're not going to go.

And that's already happened.

50%

of the recruitment has been met.

They don't have enough.

Maybe they're going to wait for robots.

I don't know, but they're not going to get that rubric to enlist in the numbers they used to.

And if you look at what traditionally is the profile, and I'm not trying to profile profile people.

I know people in the military have written me or said to me, Wow, that's horrible that you would even think of race in terms of the dead.

We're all American.

Yes, we're all Americans, but you people do it.

You people do it.

You just don't like it thrown back in your face.

And the problem is this:

that you take away that rubric and you're going to have to substitute somebody.

And it's not going to be Sam Bankman-Freed that's going to go over to,

you know, Kandahar or somewhere.

It's, you know, Bob Smith from Tulare, California, that you're going to call a chump and you're going to make fun of him.

And he's not going to do it anymore.

That's what's happening.

And then, if you look at the elite, so Stanford just released the statistics on their incoming class.

It's not me imagining I went to their website.

I can't believe it, but that's what they point.

I think it's 51% women, 52%,

and it is 23% 23%

white.

And there is a, usually it's 12% to 14% in most of these schools for legacies, and the majority of those are white.

So when you take all of those figures together, you're going to have about 12% white males, according to their data.

And many of those white males will be people who are employed at Stanford or they went to Stanford, but more importantly, they give $5 to $10 million to Stanford.

So, what I'm saying is, Sammy, there are no white males there from the working classes.

It's just, and you don't,

I'm on the campus, I don't meet poor white males at Stanford.

I just don't do it.

And to do that, you can't have SAT scores.

So, they're optional, because if you have SAT scores, it defeats the purpose of destroying meritocracy.

Because you have to say the SAT, when it doesn't give you the desired results, i.e., more Latinos, Native Americans,

and African Americans, in at least

proportional numbers to Asians or to whites, then you have to say it's racist, it's biased.

And they did.

And that means when somebody who is Asian or white does very well, the 0.001% who gets a perfect score, you have to reject 70% at Stanford.

And when you do all of that, then you get this stuff that comes out in the Wall Street Journal who's making fun of them.

And what are they making fun of?

This word list that America, you can't use the word American.

You can't use the word immigrant.

It's crazy.

And

it is.

And then you get out this statistic according to the Wall Street Journals.

Administrative.

positions and staff are about $15,500 and graduate and undergraduates and affiliate students about $16,000.

In other words, you have this huge overhead paying for one

administrator or staffer versus one student.

And in the old days, the faculty would have been outraged.

As a faculty member for 30-some years, I can tell you there's one topic that sets professors off, and that is they teach, they correct papers, they go have to publish, and they see these administrators that make so much more money.

And they hate them.

Sometimes it's justified, sometimes it's just petty envy.

It doesn't matter.

They are quiet because most of this surge in hiring was for diversity, equity, inclusion.

And they know that if you say one word, you're suspect.

So they're exempt.

But

believe me, there are a lot of diversity, equity, inclusion, and the new one, and belonging,

a czar or a dean or assistant provost of belonging.

And so that's where it's leading, and it's destroying meritocracy.

Eventually, what happens is then

the wealthy Silicon Valley person that's making, I don't know,

$5 million a year, there's a lot of them, and they think, wow, okay, this doesn't apply to me.

My son, I gave, but not all of them get in now.

I mean, it's nationwide.

There's 44,000 applicants to Stanford.

And I think it's a waste of money.

I think you're not going to learn anything there, but it has a cattle brand that these people and this insular incestuous group value.

So they will do anything, but they're not going to be always successful to get their child in.

And then they're going to start looking at things that are embarrassing, such as the bankman-freed parents that are in the news who are putting their house up, that we talked about, or as we talked about, Elizabeth Holmes, or this Carolyn,

what's her name, Ellison, Stanford graduate, or the president under fire.

And they put all of that together and the fact that their kids aren't getting in anymore and they're tarnishing the name.

And then they have these stories in Silicon Valley that they can't hire people on the basis of a Stanford degree because they can't do the work.

Because today at the university, admissions is synonymous with graduation.

And that's why at the city, at the

school in New York, they want to give everybody an A.

At Cornell, they want to abolish grades.

The big movement on campus right now is not spoken about.

But when you destroy test scores and you use racial criterion

and you bring in people that under traditional criteria have not earned that position for whatever reason, justified or not, then you have to do something.

You either have to adjust the grading or you have to start giving people C's and D's or you have to start flunking people out.

You can't flunk people out, and you can't give them C's and D's because that's a systematic pattern of discrimination in the eyes of the left.

So,

you only have one solution, either de facto or de ure, you have to abolish grades.

De facto means the professor says, I'm not going to die on the altar of wokeness, so I'm going to give everybody my class a V that should have had an F or a D or C.

Or you'd be de ure and you say, you know what, we're getting rid of grades.

But whatever you do, the employer doesn't care because he knows that when you bring out somebody from Princeton or Yale or Harvard, or they're not of the caliber that they used to be, not because of their race, just because there's no standards, no standards on admission, no standards on graduation.

So they either have to give a test of their own, or they have to hire from, as I said, a place like Georgia Tech for coding.

But there are consequences.

And

that's what that wasn't a quick explanation, but that's where it all leads to.

Yeah, but the positive about all this is that there are consequences.

Otherwise, it sounds bleak, but could be Davis Hanson.

The consequences are that when you get your property statement in the mail, it's going to be incorrect, as I've had.

The consequences are that when you want to go to the drugstore and you need to buy a shaver or antihistamines, it's going to be locked up.

The consequences are that if somebody calls you with a journalism degree and wants to interview you, they don't know anything.

The consequences are when somebody sends you a paper or an essay and wants you to look at it, it's illiterate.

So throughout society, when you send the message that there are no consequences to either criminal behavior or you can be paid to stay home or you don't have to meet the criteria because you always say it's racist.

Engineering examinations now are considered sexist.

Military physical standards are considered biased against women as far as special forces types of units.

So there's consequences to it.

And it means people have to ask themselves, why is it that the United States is not Mexico?

Why is it the United States is not Egypt?

Why is it that the United States is not Vietnam?

Why is it the United States is not Nairobi?

And the answer is meritocracy.

And all those places I've mentioned, you get hired or promoted or advanced or rewarded on the basis of you're a first cousin to someone.

You're a member of a larger familial clan.

You're from the same village.

You're from the same ethnic subcategory.

That's how it's done, but not in the United States.

It's come in from all over the world.

We don't care how you look.

We have one standard for everybody, and that's excellence.

And that's why we were so superior in every category.

But

as I said in that essay, if you wanted to destroy the United States, you couldn't do a better job than what the Biden administration with the border and inflation and energy, but also this tribalism.

Yeah.

Well, you addressed higher education as well.

But let's take our last break and then come back and look at the voting issue and then also the DC swamp.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, so the last two on our list of things in America that need to be addressed, and there might be methods by which we are voting and this whole new schema of voting where 70%, it looks like, are now

mailed out to the voters.

How they come back is another story.

But

what are we to do since COVID came on and this 70% where fraud is obviously so much easier with mail and voting?

Well, there's obviously two solutions.

They're not mutually exclusive, but you can do one or the other.

I think the Republicans control the state legislatures and the governors in 22 states, and I think they have majorities in 26.

So you can change the voting laws.

You can say that

you're not going to be mailed automatically a ballot in the mail.

I didn't request a ballot.

It came in the mail to me.

I don't want it.

But it came to me.

I should have to request it as an absentee ballot.

I won't be here.

But that's one thing.

You can outlaw third-party harvesting as it's outlawed in many states.

Yeah.

Shouldn't be able to go to somebody's house and knock on the door and say, I want you to vote for Joe Biden.

I'll be outside just, or I'm going to sit in your couch while you vote.

Hand me the vote.

I will deliver it for you.

You shouldn't be able to,

I don't think, early vote months in advance because key developments in the race, debates, late breaking news change the complexion of a race.

So if you're going to have early voting, maybe three days or two, but not a month,

and

you can't change the voting laws.

So on these mail, if you do have absentee ballots, you've got to have a correct signature or else it doesn't count.

You can't have somebody cure it, come in later and fix it.

You can't have an incorrect address.

You can't have a name on there that's not on the registrar.

You can't mail it in way after the deadline.

All the things that people are doing now, right?

Yeah.

So that would be one thing.

And if you can't do that, then you got to,

if you can't beat them, join them.

So, and I go back to that example you and I have talked about, that if you're, you're being out-hustled and you feel that you play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules and it's beneath you, then you have to do what Devin Nunes did in his last two elections.

It was brilliant.

He got his staff, he got helpers, and he said, these are what the left is doing to me.

This is how they're raising money.

This is how they're third party vote harvesting, and this is how I'm going to strike back.

And he had his own people going door to door, and he did exactly to him what they were doing, and he won.

And so the Republicans, until they can change the voting laws, are going to have to do that.

But it was all designed, wasn't it?

to, as we said, to dissimulate because they created this phony issue of voter ID and got the full anger and resources of the conservative movement to tell them that that is

a bogus issue.

When you have to have an ID for a check, surely the most important civic duty, you should have to show an ID.

And then they said, okay.

In the meantime, what happened?

They said, oh, what an idiot group these people are.

They fought us over 30% of the electorate.

Meanwhile, we just.

you know, buried them with the mail-in and early voting.

All right.

So the last thing is

the most egregious, I think, or the most deep-seated and problematic, and that is what we've been calling the

DC swamp.

So what can we do about the

politics being so incestuous to the DC Klan?

Well,

that's a...

Every single person is married.

In the dying citizen, I just show you how many news anchors are married to how many State Department officials.

And Ben Rhodes is the deputy

national security

advisor for Obama and his brother is the head of CBS News, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So how do you break up that incestuous bureaucratic mess?

And their idea is that we know more than the elected officials because we've created such a Byzantine, complex series of rules and regulations that a senator will never be able in his tenure, much less a House member, master it, so they have to come to us.

We're the Mycenaean clerks that know linear B.

Not even the Wanox in Mycenae knows it.

And we're the guys that know hieroglyphics.

Not even the people, you know, in the Valley and the Nile know it.

That's their principles.

So I,

how do you break it up?

Well, there's a lot of things you can do.

You can start to move cabinetcies outside of Washington.

We're in the age of Zoom.

It's not the 19th century where you had to walk across the street.

So let's put the Department of Agriculture in Fresno.

Let's put the Department of Energy in Houston.

Let's put the Department of Education in Laramie, Wyoming.

Let's break it up.

And they can commute all day long in Zoom, but they're not going to walk across the street to have lunch with their spouse or their brother or their cousin that is in this

mess.

And then

we should really enforce the perjury laws because these people, when they're caught at what they do, they simply lie.

McCabe lies to federal investigators.

Comey lies under oath with amnesia.

Mueller did.

Ray dissimulated.

Fauci,

when you look at that interrogatory, he just said he didn't know every time he would be forced to lie.

He just didn't remember.

And James Clapper, I just told

the least untruthful when he was caught lying about the NSA and John Brennan.

So if you really, and look what they did again to January 6th.

So if we were to say, if you go before a congressional committee and you testify under oath and it is contradictory to the facts or your prior testimony, or if you lie to a federal investigator,

we're going to prosecute you.

I think that would really scare people.

I was not a person that hated Bill Barr.

But one thing that got me, I admired him in many ways, but one thing that got me irate about him is when he said that Andrew McCabe, after lying four times to a federal investigator, should not be prosecuted.

That was just,

that was just unthinkable.

So we really have to make those people accountable.

And I mean that in all aspects.

If you are a general, and you are

retiring, why Why in the world would you be allowed to go into a defense contracting board right away when all of your subordinates are in the Pentagon and you're on a first-name basis?

And they know that when they retire, you will be able to help them get a job.

So, why not have a five-year cooling off period?

If you want to leave the Pentagon, you can't go on a defense contracting board for five years.

Why not enforce the

Uniform Code of Military Justice?

So, if you're a retired officer, you cannot disparage the commander-in-chief and call him a fascist and Mussolini and, you know, suggest he's Auschwitz-like or a liar who should be removed before his tenures, all of that stuff.

So, a lot of it is just applying the rules that we have to these people.

And I'd like to see a lot of them criminally responsible for the stuff that they do.

And that should be,

you know,

transparency and accountability.

And

ultimately, you have to shrink.

We have 2 million people that work for the federal government.

You've got to really radically shrink the number of federal employees or way too much.

And we should start abolishing cabinet sees.

I don't know why we need a Department of Education.

We didn't have one until, I guess it was Jimmy Carter.

But all of it, all this woke stuff is being fed by federal dollars.

And we could consolidate a lot of those cabinets, get down to six or seven of them at most,

and on and on and on.

It's very hard when you're a senator or a house member and your cousin, your brother, your spouse works for these bureaucracies, these power couples.

The power couple was really scary, but almost, and then where people go after government service, what do they do when they leave the White House staff or

their congressional term?

They're voted out.

They become lobbyists, or they become corporate board board members, or Silicon Valley is waiting there with a, you know, a James Baker-like billet for Twitter for you.

Just bring your FBI buddies with you.

That was the whole problem with Twitter and the FBI, that the people who had been working with Twitter, i.e.

their bosses, when they retired, they just went over to Twitter.

And they knew that in advance.

So

it's,

you know, we can't offer, as I said before, we can't offer a Justinian solution, call everybody into the hippodrome, and then close the doors and then unleash Belisarus and Narcissus to get rid of them.

But that's what he did.

Wow, that's a scary idea.

I'm just joking.

We're not going to be able to do that.

I know you are.

I know you are.

But it just shows you the desperation in historical terms, what people did.

And what we have now,

it's very similar to Louis XIV and the creation of that Versailles mob and who they were, that 5,000 of permanent people, or the El Escoro outside of Madrid during the height of the Spanish Empire, or the Kremlin.

The Kremlin, you know, it seems to outlast the Tsars, it outlasts the Soviets.

It's the same group of apparatchiks.

Yeah, sure.

Proximity is everything often in politics.

So you've got to break that up.

And to the degree you don't break that up, it gets ossified and calcified.

And it's like an amoeba.

It exists for itself and

it's nourished.

The scary thing is that it knows that the left supports big government and regulation and high taxation.

So it tends to be almost exclusively left-wing because those are the people who will allow it to expand and nourish it.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our time here today.

I would like to thank you for your enduring insight and clarity into the issues of our time and also for all of this wisdom on what what we can do in the modern age or what needs to be done so that perhaps we can keep America a

land of prosperity and a desirable land.

I know there's a lot of people coming into our land at this time, but they're not doing it.

for the reasons that the old immigrants did.

And I think that you've given us a lot of methods to keep the old America that prosperous, inventive,

you know, independent nation, a nation of independent thinking individuals.

So thank you for that.

And I think our listeners do too.

Thanks everybody for listening.

Much appreciated.

And Merry Christmas and happy holidays, even though you'll be listening to this probably right in the middle or right after

this festive occasion on Christmas Day.

Yeah.

All right.

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

Thanks everybody.

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