Boondoggles and Bombers

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, December 8th, which I'd like to remind our Catholic listeners is a holy day of obligation.

This is the feast of the Immaculate Conception.

Victor, we're not going to get into that.

Well, I was just reading, I'm writing a book with a chapter on Tenochtitlan.

I was reading about the Cortez two-year effort to conquer Tenochtitlan, which became Mexico City.

And almost every three days,

it's the feast of the

conquistadors have to stop.

And I mean, it's almost every third or fourth day.

Those feast days still exist?

Well, there's a difference.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, our last podcast was on the feast day of St.

Nicholas.

So there's a difference between what is a feast day and in Roman Catholicism, I'm sure some

of the Orthodox churches, days of obligation where you must attend Mass outside of Sunday.

On December 8th is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

So what's happening

on December 8th?

You're supposed to go to church.

It's obligation.

And

do you have a feast with anybody?

No, it's not a feast.

It's not a feast day.

But it's a holy day.

What's a feast day?

Do you actually have a feast day where you eat with people?

Well, it depends on your traditions, I guess.

You know, certain cultures will have, oh, this is the patron saint of our town.

It's the feast day of Saint so-and-so, and we have a carnival or the feast of San Jannaro in New York City, you know, or

down in the old mob district down there in Lower Manhattan is one of the more better-known ones, although I think it's kind of comical.

So

people.

I think you're getting back to the original meaning of feast.

It comes from Latin.

I think it comes from Latin festus,

which doesn't you know which means celebration rather than eating so well okay we get a fiesta you know fiesta from it i you're the you're the philologist i defer to you on on all these things so well um

anyway there's well there's a there's a distinction between uh uh the the holy days of obligation those are there are there are eight or so in Catholicism outside of Sundays where you have to go to church.

I think I mentioned that once about etymologies.

I had a class in Athens

when I was 19 or 20 with the great classicist H.

D.

Kittel, who wrote a best-selling book called The Greeks, among other books.

He wrote a good book on Sophoclean tragedy and one on hiking through northern Greece.

But he was in his 80s and he was a philologist,

and he would always ask us for etymologies.

I was pretty good at it.

There was about eight of us, but boy,

he was trying to get more and more difficult.

So once he said,

and we were in this tall building, there was a tree outside, and he said, almost anything

has an etymology, it goes back to Greek.

You wouldn't believe it.

And so I said, look at the squirrel outside.

Squirrel, it sounds French, right?

S-Q-U-I.

Right.

Okay.

Greek.

He said, oh, Mr.

Hansen, i.e.

Mr.

Smarty Pounds.

So squirrel is not a Greek word.

And I said, nope.

And he said, you know what skia means?

And I said, yes, it means shadow.

You know what oros means?

I said, it means tail.

You think this squirrel has a shadowy tail?

I said, a squirrels?

Skia Uros?

And he said, yes, it is.

And I, you know, we looked it up right there and he was right.

Well, that's you.

I'm not going to comment.

He would walk up six flights of stairs when he was 86, and

each step got slower and slower and slower and we were all

you know we were 20 so we were cutting up an advanced Greek class in Sophocles Ajax

no it was in the Oedipus but excuse me it was in the Antigone but we did look at the Ajax and Oedipus just peripherally anyway he was walking up the stairs and as he got slower slower he came in one day and he smiled at us and said

Oh, you think

I'm going to throw a bone to old Charybdis today?

Meaning Meaning, he was going to be in the underworld feeding the dog that guards the gates of hell.

Oh, sure, right.

And

he said, not this day, not this day.

He was a pretty funny guy.

Imagine teaching at 86, Victoria.

No, I couldn't even teach at 69.

I'm not a very good teacher anymore at all.

But my God, 20.

It was during the oil embargo, and they had no

Greece, it was boycotted as a NATO member of 1973 after the

Yom Kippur War, and you couldn't use your electric heaters.

It was barred because there was no metering.

You paid by, they didn't have individual meters for each apartment.

Okay.

And so he was so cold, his wife and he, and you weren't supposed to plug in.

And he had what they call hoopo gion.

It was below the surface.

subterranean apartment.

So when you walk, you know, those kind where you see the windows or where your feet are.

yeah.

So anyway, it was down there and it was nighttime and, you know, kids stay up late.

And you could see a red glow.

And we were all freezing to death.

And then we said, we should turn him in.

Oh, God.

You can't turn him in.

You can't turn him in.

Can't turn him in.

He's got to be warm

because he needs, maybe he's violating the rules, but can't turn him in.

There are people that live to turn in other people.

There was a Karen or two back in 50 years ago, in my experience, but we

talked him out of not turning in.

He didn't like Mr.

Kittle.

I like Mr.

Kittle.

Well, Victor, I need to begin the.

We've begun the show.

Obviously, we're about eight minutes into it, but I have to say we're going to talk about certain topics and not the Immaculate Conception.

I just

festus either.

Yeah.

But

we're going to talk about some suicide issues,

reparations,

California.

California.

And maybe even if we have a little time,

the new B21 bomber.

And we'll get to most, if not all, of these important matters right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Today should be when you're listening to it originally.

Anyway, it's aired on Thursday, December 8th in the year 2022 of our Lord.

So, Victor, you let's start.

I've got three suicide-y kind of topics.

I think we start at a broad national level, and then down to a cultural level, and then down to a personal level.

And the national level begins with a piece you've written implying suicide, self-inflicted death.

And it's titled, If You Really Wanted to Destroy the United States, and in this, you have,

I mean, from the very first word, there's like part one, it's a

10 examples of

self-inflicted national suicide.

I was doing a great facsimile of suicide.

Victor, would you talk about this piece and why you wrote it?

Well, I was kind of frustrated because everybody,

because of his Build Back Better

Near Win and the Inflation Reduction Act when, and then

his being Joe Biden, of course, his ability to withstand the Republican tsunami.

There were all they being the left, the media, the DNC, Nexus, they were all bragging that he's got a great presidency.

So I thought, you know, what if you wanted to destroy the United States?

You really wanted to weaken it, and you wanted to do it pretty quickly.

What would you do?

And out of that, I just imagined that you'd do pretty much what Joe Biden did.

And so I went through what you would do specifically.

I think you would just say, we have no immigration law.

It doesn't exist, and we don't believe in borders.

We're all one continent, one people, and we're going to let in two or three million people illegally, illegally, each according to some data that requires $10,000 to $15,000 a year in federal and state support.

And we're in a pandemic, and we're firing people that don't have vaccinations, and we're not going to test people, and we're not going to ask them to be vaccinated.

And if that's not enough, we're going to say, you know, we really didn't like that energy independence that we have for the first time in history.

So

since fossil fuels are too hot, we're going to destroy the fossil fuel.

We're going to cancel AML, cancel Keystone, never build the Constitution natural gas line to New England.

We're going to tell our allies, no EastMed pipeline.

No, if you're an African country like Guinea, we're not going to develop your fossil fuel industry anymore.

We're just going to screw fossil fuels over.

And guess what?

You're going to pay.

I just filled up yesterday

$620 for diesel fuel and gas was about back up to $5.15 in California.

We're going to get prices high like Stephen Chu promised.

And that's not the end of it.

That's the very beginning.

Maybe inflation was sort of good, Jack.

It was 6 to 7%.

Those who have money, who shouldn't, they have too much.

So it's going to be worth less.

And you're going to to spread, as Barack Obama said, we're going to spread the wealth.

And maybe

crime is just a construct.

You know, if there's a crime, as I said before in this broadcast, if there's a crime against stealing a candy bar or going into

Walgreens and taking a

shaver and some blades.

or some antihistamine, that's because wealthy people who make the laws don't do that.

So they make laws against things that don't apply to them, but apply to people who are poor or victims of various illiberalities.

So that's what our legal system is.

And let's just get rid of it.

So if you take an axe or something and you destroy something or you attack somebody in the subway, you can get out

on the first day.

First day of, I guess.

the first day you're arrested.

There's not going to be any penalties.

And maybe if

you really wanted to weaken the democracy or Constitution Republic, you'd go after the election system.

So you would add ranked voting and you would have majority voting like Georgia and you would have mail-in voting and early voting and absentee voting.

And the result would be that

there wouldn't be any need for IDs.

The Republicans are fighting just a silly battle over IDs when 70%

don't have any IDs and never will have any IDs.

And you're going to destroy the confidence in the system because you're not going to find the results, as we learned in Arizona for days or even weeks.

I'd get rid of, if I really wanted to destroy the United States, I'd get rid of the melting pot.

I'd bring in as many people from different backgrounds, maybe 50 million in the United States that were not born here, and maybe 27% of the population of California at a time when I would junk civic education, I would discredit the melting pot, pot, no more assimilation or integration, and I would emphasize

former Yugoslavia-like tribalism.

So we all identify by our superficial appearance and see how that works out.

If you really wanted to

destroy the United States.

So I went on, and it wasn't very original in the sense that I just systematically, whether it was crime or the elections or

Afghanistan or begging countries like Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia to pump oil that we have in abundance but won't

push or produce.

Or maybe going after the First Amendment, as we see with the FBI, colluding with Facebook and social media or what Elon Musk is doing now and his exposing what Twitter was doing.

or what campuses do with the First Amendment, or the way that we have no discussion at all about the origins of COVID, and we have this weird suicide pact in our foreign policy with China.

I just went through all the things that are going on that are destroying the country, and then I didn't answer the question, which a couple of people in the comments

I noticed were angry about because they said it was incumbent upon me to say whether this was deliberate or not.

Well, I mean, the protocol was deliberate, but the $64,000 question is when the the Biden administration destroyed the border and created inflation and destroyed energy self-sufficiency and humiliated us in Afghanistan, left all that stuff behind, that

greenlighted Vladimir Putin a few months later, and we see this new attitude toward crime, which is non-enforcement of the law.

Was that deliberate?

Yes.

Was it deliberately intended to destroy the United States because they hate it, or do they think they love the United States and this is saving it?

And I didn't answer that question

because I don't know.

I think there are true believers who believe it's going to make a fair and just society and they're just delusional, but criminally delusional almost.

And then there's people who just want to screw things up.

And I don't know the percentage how it breaks down among the people that support what Biden is doing.

It's interesting you mentioned the comments, Victor, of that,

of the piece, which, by the way, way the piece is your uh op-ed you write it for american greatness but you it's also up on your website victorhanson.com and um

so the comments are from the website and this one michael larkin he he he put a link in there for um something very similar that colorado governor richard lamb had done

seems like 30 35 years ago which is kind of weird because lamb i think was also at the time

well he was known for being, you know, governor of Colorado, but I think he was also quite an advocate.

We're talking about suicide in a way.

I know, but he was a very strange guy.

Yeah.

He called me up when I wrote Mexifornium in 2002.

And I got,

I want to say that this, I have done this before, this type of methodology, if you really wanted to do something, meaning this is how you do it.

But he did it too when he called me up about immigration.

He was just fanatic in the good sense about enforcing borders and the melting pot and everybody had to become a citizen through the normal process and greenlighting legal immigration and stopping absolutely.

And he was a Democrat.

And he called me and I was, he said, I'm going to be speaking and I'd like you to be, come to Colorado and speak.

So this is like 2004, 2003.

So I went there and he gave a talk and he said, if you really wanted to destroy the United United States,

but it was all on immigration.

And the last thing he said was, I wouldn't, I would ban Mexifornia.

I would not let anybody read it.

And

yeah, and I would go after the author, Victor Hansen.

So it was kind of funny.

I mean, he was trying to be very friendly by saying that the Mexifornia that had just come out was a great book, but it was kind of a surprise to me.

And I didn't know he was going to do it.

So it was kind of fun.

Oh, I get it.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it was good.

It was nice of him.

And I really liked that.

And I liked him.

Well, in the comments, I want to recommend go to the comments in this article, listeners, and you'll find the link.

It's like a two and a half minute lamb.

What I would do,

allow a lot of people in, make sure that you have bilingual, make sure we have no melting pot, essentially.

Say,

make sure that every community, not geographical community, but ethnic community retains its uh ethnic ethnicity as opposed to becoming americans you know so it was very it was really uh i don't think they have guys like him anymore you know in the democratic party i don't and he was could you could you imagine a republic well maybe one or two we could imagine a republican saying anything like that today you know uh no you know and he was

i i just remember the reason i brought him up he died i think it was last year and i remember reading his obituary he was in his 80s but he ran for president I think, too,

on that weird.

You remember in the 90s there was this third way?

Oh, yeah.

That it was going to be, you know, market capitalism, but social welfare and all this.

It was,

and he was one of those guys.

And he, I think they had something called the Reform Party that he ran on or something.

Yeah.

And

he, he was, he was the last generation of Democrats that were strong on defense and all that and then were starting to incorporate liberalism.

But after, I mean,

he was kind of like Jerry Brown during Jerry Brown's first term.

And then Jerry Brown, unlike Lamb, saw what was coming.

So he became woke in the second time he went around.

Right.

Well, interesting character.

And by the way, again, interesting piece, Victor.

So

let's move on to kind of the next suicide-y thing, which actually has the word

suicide in it.

So,

my friend

Naomi Schaefer Riley, who I've talked about before, I mean, Naomi's terrific soul.

She writes all over, but she frequently writes for the Wall Street Journal.

And she's got a piece in today's journal.

And today is December 3rd.

So it's the weekend edition.

And she has a very long

interview piece on John Agresto,

the

academic

and scholar.

And it's titled The Suicide of the Liberal Arts.

And Agresto has a new book out.

It's called The Death of Learning, How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do About It.

And Victor, I'm just going to read quickly two

little paragraphs from Naomi's piece and then get your thoughts about this broad theme that Agresto is making about kind of a defense of the liberal arts, but not the specialization of the liberal arts.

Here's what the piece says.

He, Negresto, classifies the death of the liberal arts as suicide, not murder.

Americans,

regarding themselves as practical people, have always been suspicious of the liberal arts, Mr.

Agresto says.

Today's inflated prices make them even more so.

Quote, a liberal education, thanks to the infinite wisdom of the university and college administrators, costs as much as getting an engineering degree, but with little in the hope of secure future recompense, he writes.

End quote.

Recent trends within the academy have exacerbated the problem.

Start with specialization, especially the growing prevalence of obscure theory and criticism, which tends to crowd out great works.

In the book, he asks, quote, If it was once hard for a graduating college senior to convince a prospective employer that studying Shakespeare and Cicero was useful, how much more difficult is the task when the fringes of graduate school are pushed down into the undergraduate curriculum?

End quote.

So, Victor, you are somebody in every way who is like immersed himself in a specialization in the field from the broader liberal arts.

But I cannot believe that Victor Davis Hansen, the classicist, does not think,

yeah, Shakespeare is important, knowing that, and military history is important.

The whole, you know, the broader range of liberal arts is is

an important backdrop to just general knowledge, not necessarily even college education, but general knowledge.

So, anyway, Victor, the suicide of the liberal arts,

is it committing suicide?

Yeah, it is because

you have all these fresh minds that come into college, and they've had no experience with the liberal arts, given the quality of their high school educations.

And when they first look at the Odyssey, or they read the Inferno, if it's taught well,

or if they read Beowulf or Gilgamesh or any work in what used to be humanities A and B, i.e.

from antiquity all the way to the present, they get excited because

they see great minds that describe the human experience in ways that are both real and abstract, and then they say to themselves, I'm not, I'm like Antigone,

or I have the same flaws as Oedipus.

So it's a way of taking a person's

confused reaction to the world around them and making order of it.

And it takes emphasis off the individual.

He says, I'm not the most important person in the world.

This has happened before.

Or I'm part of this long panorama of the West.

So it's a wonderful thing to do.

But

if you take that tragedy and that human experience, which is what is

the gist of literature, and you turn it into melodrama, and you teach it like, okay,

we're going to take the Odyssey, and this was written by a white male patriarch society.

So our purpose is to give a voice to Eumaeus, the slave, and we're going to find out who is culpable.

And we're not going to talk about Penelope in traditional male sexist one-dimensional terms.

She is

discriminated against, she's shackled, she has to be responsible for the house, she gets she's loyal, she's not promiscuous like her husband, who's off on a lark, this 10-year little return home from Troy.

And if you do it like that, then you destroy the beauty of it and the nuance of it and the ambiguity of it.

And you make it into a Stalinist tool to advance a particular ideology.

And in the practice, it's much easier for you because you're not going to have to know the text very well.

You just give the narrative.

And the student then just says yes, yes, because they need to get past the course, and you destroy the liberal arts.

And that's what they're doing.

There's no interest in it.

And they're not advocates for it because

they're facing a contradiction, Jack.

It is based on the university's FTE

processes, full-time equivalent enrollment, well,

you get points, even in private Tony's schools, for the students that take your class.

So no university can afford to offer,

let's say,

Pendar in Greek with two students unless it's subsidized by introduction to the humanities with 50 students.

But if you take that 50 students and you turn it into a dull, dry, propaganda, woke exercises, they're going to walk and they are walking.

And then you don't have the

FTE to balance the specialized courses, which is why Princeton University has just said, you know what?

You don't even need to know Greek.

You don't need to know it to be a classics major.

And that's what's happening in the liberal arts.

And it's very funny because it's not just suicide, it's cannibalism.

But it's a weird kind of cannibalism because the people who are doing this are tenured.

They have these positions no matter what.

They can't get rid of them.

But they've destroyed the field for all these PhD candidates who have been taught by people like them at the research universities.

There's no jobs.

And so they're trying to get a job, and there's no jobs because they've destroyed interest in it.

And they've made it, they've done the impossible.

They've turned a very exciting, wondrous experience into dull, dry,

drip, drip, drip Stalinist orthodoxy.

You know, I was on a farm and I was kind of a bookworm in a very rural small town school.

But when I went to UC Santa Cruz my first semester and I had this professor John Lynch and people like Mary Kay Orlandi, Gary Miles, it opened up a whole new world.

I took the core course and my God,

I had never read Sophocles.

We read

Antigone, we read the Odyssey, we read the Iliad, we read the Inferno.

It was just opened up a whole new world.

There was no ideology at this left-wing university.

There was no therapy.

It was rigorous, rigorous.

You had to write five essays.

They corrected your grammar, your syntax, your content.

And when you talked and gave your report, they corrected your grammar.

And then you had to know the text.

But it wasn't just gotcha type of courses.

It was this is what the tragic hero is trying to do in the Iliad.

This is the difference between Achilles and Hector.

These are two elements of the human experience.

This is what, why are Calypso or Circe?

What are all these outsiders?

Why are they so weird on islands and they don't partake in the experience?

This was really exciting.

I just, it changed my life.

But we're not doing that anymore.

And we're destroying this suicide and cannibalism.

We're destroying the humanities.

And these people are not well trained.

And one of the big secrets about wokeism is when you look at the grading policies and you look, i.e., they're watered down and they're called equity grading.

And when you look at the abandonment of the SAT or the GRE or the ACT

or the LSAT,

and when you look at the use of quote-unquote community service in lieu of GPA or SAT, or you make all high schools' GPAs the same in competitive admissions, or when students enroll, you just go off, off what we used to call OT, off-topic,

tell little stories about yourself and how

cruelly the world has treated you.

There's a common denominator.

It's easy.

It's easy.

So we veneer this and paste over this idea that it's wokeism, it's progressivism, it's readdressing injustice.

No, it's not, it's laziness.

It's laziness.

It's one big bull session.

And I really understood that when I retired at 49, it had started in 2004.

And I had noticed that when we had a classics position and we looked at the applications and we interviewed people for the first time, I hired as early as 1986, 88, 90.

And by God, when we had people, these 25 and 28 and 30, they were well prepared.

And if they came out of the University of Texas PhD program or the Yale, they were great.

But by 2004, it was very clear that when they interviewed, whether it was at the American Philological Association or they visited, they did not know Greek and Latin very well.

And their topics were irrelevant.

They were all about the poetics of masculinity or the construction of manhood, etc., etc.

And boy, you could ask them questions.

You could just say, why did the Mycenaean Empire collapse?

What's the Mycenaean Empire?

How far is Sparta from Athens?

Who was the architect of the Parthenon?

How did Athenian democracy work?

Why do we have more plays of Euripides than Aeschylus and Sophocles?

Why is Pindar a difficult poem, structurally, philologically, grammatically, syntactically?

And

you, why did Thucydides not finish his eighth book of the history?

And they can't answer that.

They could not answer one of those questions.

Very mean of you to ask.

Yeah, people would ask those questions.

I would teach kids, mostly first generation from Mexico, and the questions they would ask is, hey, Professor Hansen, I like...

I like Achilles, but

where in the hell is Thessaly?

What's that mean?

And you would have to know where Thessaly is, and you explain it.

But if you don't have any training in that, because you're woke and you're learning about, as we discussed earlier in an earlier podcast, Foucault did Michael Foucault's system of thought, or you're talking about post-structuralism or now wokeism, then you don't have time to do the essentials.

And you're strangling your own discipline.

You're destroying it systematically.

I have to believe most people think,

not

on the top of the head, at some level down deep, that if you have a PhD today,

I mean, you do, but I mean, if you're more or younger with a PhD, it might mean you're either

a weirdo or

a dumbass, even to some extent.

Just because you have a PhD does not mean you are intellectual.

And that we've heard over and over these kinds of what the thesis, this guy's thesis was on, you know, this kind of navel-gazing.

I tell you one, the guy who was was running, he was head of the religion department at Holy Cross, my alma mater.

It got this, got some notoriety a couple years ago, wrote his thesis

saying that the crucifixion was an incestuous, homoerotic act of God the Father sodomizing his son on the cross.

And you think, like, okay,

gosh, this is a freaking weirdo.

You know, it's like, what is PhD equals

weird equals lame?

You know, it doesn't imbue anymore the idea of knowledge.

No, I looked at where I, where I got my PhD, when I went to Stanford as a graduate student at 21,

1975,

I looked at the thesis and the theses in the library.

They were wonderful.

They were things like the historiography of a paminondis, meaning how do we know anything about him.

A guy named Gordon Shrimpton wrote a brilliant thesis, and they were things about the tribute system of the Athenian Empire.

But when I look at them, sometimes the latest ones,

they're just esoterica trivia on modern woke philosophy, and they're trying to go back and impose it on

the ancient world.

I remember when I went to graduate school, it was just a detour, but there was a wonderful guy, an Englishman, Mark Edwards, and he

came in, and everybody had to meet the chairman.

He was the interim chairman.

And I didn't know who he was.

I was 21, kind of a bumpkin.

He asked me who I was.

I was from UC Santa Cruz.

They were skeptical of that because there was no grade, you know, it was evaluations.

But I had all this Latin and Greek, and he was, he quizzed me on that.

And then he said,

this is a very hard program.

Do you have a problem?

I said, well, I go home on weekends to help

my grandfather.

farm and my parents.

So I might, he said, well, that's a bad idea.

What do you do in the summer?

And I said, Well,

I farm.

He said, That's a bad idea.

And I want to tell you why, Mr.

Hansen.

We expect you, and this was serious,

you have to have a reading knowledge of German, and you're going to have to pass a test.

You're going to have to have a reading knowledge of French.

You're going to have to have a test.

You're going to have a three-hour site translation

of Greek, a three-hour site translation of Latin.

To get this degree, you're going to have to, at a future future date, take a three-hour test in Latin literature.

And you're going to ask you essay questions about all of Latin literature.

The same will be true of Greek literature.

The same will be true of

Greek history.

Same will be true of Roman history.

And that's not it.

Then you're going to have to pick three topics, and we're going to quiz you on those in your orals.

And then you're going to have to have a defense of your

thesis.

And I said, oh, wow.

He said, that's not it.

You're going to take 12 seminars, and they're going to be in the specialty of the professor.

And they were things like the manuscript tradition of Aeschylus' suppliants, the origins of the Olympic Games, whatever the professor was writing about at the time, and they were the experts on.

And then I thought, okay, and he said, and you're going to have to pass a test in writing in Greek, Greek composition, or Latin composition.

We're going to give it to you tomorrow.

And

even if you don't, even if you do pass it, we're still going to have to take three courses in Greek and Latin composition.

And then he said, all those 12 seminars I just listed, we're not even going to let you take them for a year.

You're going to have to take a rapid reading course where you're going to read one Greek play a week.

So he lined, and I thought, oh, wow, what did I get into?

I paid my way.

And then I went to my little apartment.

And the next week, my parents hadn't talked to me in a week and said, how's it going?

And I said, well, I went to school at eight o'clock.

I came home at five.

I was in class the whole time.

And I went to the library and got all these books.

And it's 10 at night.

And I ate, you know, while I was reading at six in the evening.

And I'm not even half done.

I'm going to be staying up till two in the morning.

And then I got to get up at eight.

That's what I did.

And they wouldn't allow you to work because they didn't have any TA.

And oh, and he said, you're going to TA, but you're not going to TA your your first year, but you're going to teach three classes as part of your supplement.

And it was the most, and he said this, I thought this was funny.

Half of you, your class will drop out.

He didn't mean that tragically, but that's good because we make a mistake.

Everybody make mistakes.

People can't do this program.

And so I just had a big,

you know, sign on the wall with 13 exams with the dates over the next four years.

And then he said to me, and we want you because you're in Greek history,

you're going to have to go to the American School of Classical Studies, take a whole year to go there.

I said, do I get credit?

He said, no, that's in addition to this four years.

So for me, it was, when I got out of there, I, you know, I had been in school since 18 straight for eight years.

And I was dysfunctional.

I came back and farmed for five years.

But my point is this: that was a rigorous, rigorous program.

And then you were free to go.

You were, what the idea was that we trained you like a carpenter or plumber, and then we let you out with the assumption and the guarantee that you would know the classical languages, you would know the elements of classical scholarship to read in different languages.

You could know etymology, numismatics, archaeology,

epigraphy, etc.

And we turn you out as a certified stamped scholar.

That's not true anymore.

It's not true at all.

Now you're turned out as somebody who is woke and you understand all of the eddies and currents of oppression and who's the victimizer, who's the victimizer, who's oppressor.

It's deductive.

And it's going to milk this for 20 years and

live in luxury.

Absolutely.

And the person who doesn't do that,

you know, like all revolutionary movements, the person that doesn't do that is done for.

So then that's the whole point.

The minority that creates the revolution creates the conditions under which the people who don't want to join it do join it.

Right.

And the people who don't join it,

good luck.

They end up with Jonathan Katz at Princeton, who's fired with Penny.

Right.

All because he wrote an article saying that he, you know, disagreed with

black students taking over an office.

And it seemed to me almost a terrorist act, he wrote.

And then the next thing they knew, they did a

give me,

you know, give me the person and I'll find the crime type of Berea Soviet inquiry.

Well, we've got one more suicide-related topic to discuss on today's

podcast, and it's about Canada.

And we will get to it right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I would like to encourage our listeners to visit and subscribe to VictorHanson.com.

That's Victor's official home on the internet.

And you will find

many, many articles that Victor has written exclusively for that website.

They're called Ultra.

You'll go to the website, you'll click on one of them, and then you'll be quite disappointed because if you're not a subscriber, you will not be able to access it.

I believe there's the equivalent of two books a year worth of content that is exclusive to Victor's website.

Five bucks gets you in the door, $50 discounted rate for the year, victorhanson.com.

And by the way, while you're there, and this is before Christmas, and Uncle Joe, dad, whomever, military history buff, ancient

history buff,

click on the books,

every book Victor's reading.

Wait, did you say Uncle Joe?

I said Uncle Joe.

Well, Uncle Joe used to be Aunt Jane, but he.

I know, but Barack Obama said that yesterday.

Remember, he said that Herschel Waskor was crazy and he says all kinds of crazy things.

And he's like that person and your family, like Uncle Joe.

I didn't know that.

I'm just thinking of, you know, that was a Freudian slip on the part of Obama, because who was he referring to as Uncle Joe?

Uncle Joe Biden.

That lost his mind.

That was so strange.

Again, he was wandering around sort of on the White House grounds.

You see that clip with him with Macron?

Where he had a

43-second handshake?

And Macron's like, get the blank off my hand, man.

What's wrong with you?

Yeah, I think he thought he was going to provide stability.

It's going to get worse.

And so far, he's pulled it off on one premise: that Joe Biden was always a nasty SOB.

He was a blowhard.

He was a mean-spirited person.

He still is.

That characteristic, whether it's you ain't black or hey,

dog-faced ponies he's still that way but now

he's got the veneer that he has lost his cognitive abilities so everybody says

that's just old joe book biden man come on man he he doesn't know where he is so don't judge him he's got a path and the idea that he's not mean joe biden nasty when he says un-American and you're semi-fascist.

He calls people all of these names.

He's just Joe Biden.

He's just lost his mind.

So it doesn't matter.

Be cool with that.

Well, Victor, it's that's

that we have this

impaired, nasty SOB as leader of the free world is so damn discouraging.

But anyway, before we get on to other things, I do have to make a plug for something else.

CivilThoughts.com.

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So, Victor,

wow, the final suicide-related item here on today's podcast, I saw this piece up on

the Daily Mail.

And

I'm personally,

I'm Catholic.

I believe suicide is wrong, etc.

So it's a given.

I've always believed from 20 years back that this might prove relative to other kind of related issues like abortion,

something that will be far more dramatic

and maybe even apocalyptic in a society where age is increasing.

And

particularly in some countries like China, where the demographics are just going to be so freaking upside down because of their one-child policy.

How are you going to handle a nation of geriatrics?

So that's coming down

the pike, although in some places it's already here, where suicide in some countries has become is now legal.

Legal, why if you're disabled, but it's increasingly becoming, well, I just want to, I'm not feeling good, I'm going to go, just go off myself.

One thing, if you want to make that decision, still wrong by my view, but now in Canada, it's being it's like it's recommended.

So here's the story: disabled Canadian, and I'm reading the headline, disabled Canadian Army veteran, who's also a Paralympian, she attacks the Canadian government for offering to euthanize her

when she complained about how long it was taking to install a stairlift at her home.

Her name, Christine Gauthier, she testified at the Canadian Parliament this past week, December 1st.

She's a paraplegic veteran.

She sought help getting a wheelchair lift at her home.

A veterans of Canadian bureaucrat, a veterans affairs staffer, instead offered medically assisted suicide, she said.

Government probe found at least four other veterans who were also offered suicide as an alternative to providing some

physical

need related to handicap.

Trudeau, the prime minister, called the trend absolutely unacceptable and vowed to end it.

BS.

And final

thing, euthanasia has been legal for terminally ill patients in Canada since 2016, but last year in 2021, the law was expanded to include people with long-term disabilities.

Victor,

you know, government is, I don't know, this is going to become

soil and green or whatever, but government

has created this as a right now.

But when the government starts

dictating as opposed to the individual,

we are in for something truly macabre coming up for the Western world.

Once you legalize, institutionalize, normalize something that's wrong, like abortion on demand or youth, or in theory, euthanasia,

then the left is going to take that to the logical extent.

And so, and you combine that with a modern consumer society that's superficial like ours.

And basically, you're saying if a person is a military veteran and has physical disabilities and costs society more for her care,

then according to the bankman-freed utilitarian policies or utilitarianism in general, or the modern value system,

then they take too much.

and they take it away from these

deserving people.

So you get rid of that person.

And it's not that hard to justify once you go down that route.

I mean, that's what Hitler did, right?

He started to kill people.

I'm not talking about that when he got into the full-blown Holocaust.

I'm talking about the early days of Dachau when he went after people with

multiple sclerosis and

Down syndrome, etc.

If you were a teenager with acne problems,

you were killed in Nazi times.

And so you think that's Canadian logic.

So somebody like Kim Kardashian, who's sexy and young, 40s, that person is the ideal citizen.

And

the person who's a veteran or is older, who's done things and may do things in the future, if given assistance, is not.

And that's sort of what this, there's no morality or ethics to it.

It's just utilitarianism.

And so when we started out with the Roe decision about abortion, it it was to stop, everybody thought, a woman going to a back alley or a person that had

legitimate medical.

And that got down, you know, to

aborting nine-month fetuses in about 8,000 or 9,000 cases out of the million abortions a year.

So that's what you're going to do.

They always go to the logical

extreme.

And that's what the euthanasia is.

I think that's what Wesley Smith and the Discovery Center and all those people were trying to warn everybody about.

Once you greenlight something

that its defenders will claim can be limited, i.e.

a person's entire body is wracked by cancer or they have two weeks to live and

they're still getting radiation and

painful chemotherapy with zero chance.

So you're going to allow them a euthanase, okay, maybe you can defend that.

But once you do that,

then it's downhill and there's no stopping it.

And the same thing we learned with abortion, the same thing we learned with all these isms and ologies.

They all have slippery slopes, very slippery.

And we were, you know, just very quickly,

I was on Fox last night.

They were talking about reparations.

And reparations is the same thing.

Once you start discriminating

on the basis of race through affirmative action, and once you start playing God and saying that you can go back two centuries or half a century and you can level the playing field, if you just give somebody the power and an all-knowing odes, and I can say that person right there, Oprah, she may be a billionaire, LeBron James, but they have been discriminated now and they're their ancestors of slaves, then you get what California just did.

Got him a check.

Yeah.

Tell us about, so yeah, so let's get into that.

California has a reparations board

created by the legislature, very radical members, nine-member board.

They've come out with

a claim.

Again, I'm looking at today's December 3rd, the Daily Mail.

Every African-American slave descendant, I don't know how you

determine that.

Distinguish that, right?

Is to receive $223,000.

That's at a federal level.

I was a little confused by it at first.

I thought, like, was California going to spend its surplus?

It has no surplus.

It's $25 billion in debt.

Right now, it's a deficit.

This next fiscal year, they've gone through the surplus.

They've given gas subsidies.

They've given legal alien subsidies.

They've given COVID subsidies.

They're broke.

And Silicon Valley is melting down as we speak.

So they're broke.

1%.

of this population pays 50% of the income tax.

They're broke.

Victor, Victor, let's get Gavin Newsom into this a little bit.

The story prejudices me in this regard.

It's calling it California Governor Gavin Newsom's Reparation Committee.

So he's tied up with this.

I mean, as a legislature, passed the law, he signed it, but I have a feeling he's quite the advocate of it.

So

it's a California thing, but it's,

like many California things, I'm sure it would be aped by

other states or blue states will probably enact similar stuff.

So talk about Newsom in this respect.

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, he thought he was running for president, and he thought he was going to be the green person and the reparations person and the tribe.

In other words, every

left-wing thrill issue, he was going to be

the most extreme, and that was going to capture the new Democratic Party.

And it's absolutely absurd.

The cost is like 550 billion, billion, and it's like 220,000 for African Americans in California.

And think of it.

So

you can just imagine.

I mean, okay, what if you're one-quarter, one-third, one-fourth African-American?

Is it going to be sort of DNA badges where everybody's going to go in and get their DNA and say, you know, I'm 5% African American, so I want 5% of that $220,000.

Is there going to be, I don't know, means testing?

Is Oprah, is Megan Markle going to get it?

I'm half black.

I'm a duchess.

I need it.

And are you going to say to Jose Lopez on a forklift in Carruthers, you don't get anything.

You make 15 bucks an hour.

You work 50 hours a week, but we're going to tax your income and your payroll and all that income, and you're going to pay for this.

Or is it the what if you're African-American and you're in prison for killing somebody?

Are you going to get it?

Are you going to say, Well, I only killed somebody because my great-great-grandfather was a slave?

And once you start this repertory idea, why don't you go back?

And we'll go.

You know, when I was growing up,

it was

right after John Steinbeck, you know, I was born in 1953, and John Ford, you know, we were all with the grapes of wrath.

And

my grandfather used to say there was a Methodist, there was a Presbyterian, and there was a Baptist church.

And now we have Church of the Redeemer and we have Church of Christ and we've got Church of God and we've got these holy roller tents and we've got these itinerant preachers and we've got all these Oklahoma people coming.

He didn't mean it in a put down.

He just said it changed the nature of the San Joaquin Valley that Steinberg wrote about.

And so,

believe me, when I was in third or fourth grade, if you called somebody an oakie, that was the worst thing you could say.

And nobody wanted to hang out with the okies.

The people who were white thought they were better than the oakes, the third and fourth generation.

And the Mexican-Americans called them oakes and white trash.

And they were poor.

They were poorest Mexican people.

And they had weird accents.

And my mom, who was a Democrat, and she'd always say, if I ever hear you use the word the N-word or the O-word, O-word, Oki, not ever allowed to say that.

And so, are we going to go back and do that?

How about the people who came from Mexico and they beat up the zoo suitors in LA?

Maybe we can go back and do that.

And then the point is

we're going to do all of this, and then it's all under the assumption that this is an awful country.

And its negativities or its negativism is much greater than its positism.

And so on the ledger, we're found wanting.

So, why would anybody want to stay here?

Why would anybody come here?

Why would anybody want anything?

Because if you look at the commission, every single person in that commission trashes the United States almost.

Right.

And it's, I think out of 12, is there 10 African-American?

I saw one Asian guy.

Yeah, what happened to the idea conflict of interest?

You know what I mean?

So I'm going to vote for reparations, and I'm going to get $220,000 for myself.

Are you going to exempt because you're, I mean, I'm on boards, and anytime there's a conflict of interest, I say, I have to recuse myself.

I cannot vote on that funding for this particular group because I have been associated with that group.

Why don't they do that?

Nobody would do that.

Maxine Waters is going to get it.

She's going to get reparations given her Tony home and neighborhood and her financial gymnastics were the years with her husband siphoning off money.

That's where you are right now.

And it's racist.

It's going back to the past, way back, and picking winners and losers.

It's historically ignorant.

California was a free state.

There was never slavery in the state.

There was never institutionalized Jim Crow.

They had zoning laws that were racist, yes.

And they applied that in my town.

If you were Armenian American, you could not buy a lot in particular areas until the 1960s.

And that was birds of a feather flock together philosophy.

Wrong, yes.

But that was applied to almost every immigrant group.

And it wasn't just racially specific.

Believe me, if you were a poor Okie and you pulled into Fresno County in 1939 in a jalapi with that accent and some missing teeth and no money, people did not want you in their neighborhood.

Right.

And so we're going to go try to redress the past based on the principle that we're morally superior to the past.

And yet, when I look at this present generation that's standing in judgment and using reparations to condemn everybody and even out in the present, I'm saying to myself, Well, I don't see anything especially morally

positive in your culture.

I see,

you know, 40% of the homeless in California.

I see some of the worst schools.

I see some of the worst teachers.

I see the highest gasoline taxes in the United States.

I see energy the most expensive.

I see one-third of the whole state is on one-third of all the welfare recipients nationwide are in California.

21%

of the people in California live below the poverty line.

Hey, I see San Francisco has the highest per capita crime rate, property crime rate in the nation.

Let's address that first.

I sit six miles from high-speed rail.

I haven't been able to drive down Mountain View Avenue in three years.

I see a $15 billion boondoggle running parallel where people are dying every day on a crowded, dangerous 99 freeway that Gavin Newsom deliberately did not improve so he could practice his utopia.

I see poor people going into Walmart at 105 on August 10th because they get free air conditioning under the electricity rates today.

They can't afford to turn on their.

So there's

a lot of pathologies in the present.

And I do not see Californians building dams.

I don't see them capable of the California Water Project.

I don't think they can invent great universities like Caltech anymore.

I don't see that.

And

I'm sorry, but you know, they're not going to build the Golden Gate Bridge or they're not going to build San Luis Reservoir.

It's a very strange generation.

It is so hypercritical and sanctimonious of the past, and it is so wanting and mediocre in the present.

And they don't have any historical perspective to stand away and say, how do I look at myself compared to what other generations, given the challenges they had, did in history?

Because they would grade themselves an F.

So it's like a bunch of people failing a class and then telling everybody the professor is incompetent.

Yeah.

So sad.

What a beautiful state to be, to be

paradise.

They took a natural paradise and they took an inheritance that was paradise and they turned it into purgatory.

Well, Victor, we have just a little bit of time for one more topic and that that's a military topic and we'll get to that right after this final important message.

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We're back.

Quickly,

it seems like very interesting, maybe important news.

The U.S.

military has unveiled the B-21 Raider, a new stealth bomber designed to deter China.

What are your thoughts?

Well, I mean, I like the idea that we're going to build something that deters China, but I thought that we had a stealth bomber.

Remember the B-2

that is no longer there?

And it was kind of looked like this new one.

And I thought

that

we were kind of going.

going against the idea that you have a few number of assets.

These things are going going to cost $500 million.

And so if you build a, you know, they're talking about building 100 of them, $50 billion.

You lose one of them.

It's $500 million.

Actually, it says $700 million.

$7?

Yeah, maybe I'm out of date.

I just remember that that was when it first envisioned.

So

that was what was wrong with the B2, and that's what's wrong with the B1.

And they're too expensive.

And so what do we use?

We use B-52s.

Why?

Because they're cheap and they carry a hell of a big load.

And they've got long range and

they're updated with sophisticated electronics so that they can, you know, they don't have to actually go over the target.

So

we're in a world now where China is building massive numbers of small little missiles.

So if you've got a $15 billion

carrier with 5,000 people on it, and you go in the South China Sea, at 2 in the morning, you may be facing, I don't know, 5,000 rockets, maybe four feet long, six inches above the water, coming out of a battery, million, you know, thousands of batteries.

And they're going, how are you going to stop that?

This one has to get through, right?

Yeah.

And so when this big plane goes into China,

maybe it's going to face 600, 700 of these missiles, and maybe it's going to get 699, but one will get through.

My point is that

there is a logic that transcends this discussion, and that is you need a lot of platforms that are cheap rather than a few platforms that are expensive.

And we learned that in World War II when we produced thousands of bombers and thousands of fighter craft, and we didn't just focus.

And who did focus on a few platforms?

The Germans.

They built 600

King Tiger tanks.

They built 1,500 Tiger Ones.

They built 6,000 Panthers, and we built 50,000 Shermans.

And maybe you can say that the Sherman wasn't up to a Tiger, but the Sherman was never going to face a Tiger, basically.

It would be four Shermans, or they were going to face infantry.

So we came up with the idea that we're going to get good platforms and a lot of them.

So I would have much rather seen

you know, a $10 million drone, a stealthy drone with a huge charge on it, and that would have, with thousands of them, maybe on something like a cheap carrier,

just a platform with a bunch of them on, and then just let them all go into China at once.

So I don't understand this.

And it's, you know, B-21, we think of the experimental B-29,

which was the biggest, most expensive project in World War II.

But even then, they built almost 2,500 of them.

And so it's just, you know, I understand they're going to have two people, but when you look at the dimensions of it,

it's not really an improvement over, you know, its speed is about not that much greater than a B-52.

It's not going to carry as much as a B-52.

I don't understand it.

I really don't.

All it's going to do is earn criticism of the Air Force.

Can't there be some parallel program where they'll say, you know, if you guys want to do that, you can build 50 of them, not 100 or 20.

And we're only going to build, we're not going to build the whole thing as we sell from the Raptor, but we can't afford it.

But it just

can't we have another program where somebody says, I'm going to make a drone.

that's very cheap and it's going to have a it's going to be a suicide drone and it's going to go a foot over the ground, and it's going to go at a thousand miles an hour, and it's going to go into China if you need to.

And we're going to have about 10,000 of them.

Just doesn't, it doesn't, I don't see.

Is this the sort of topic we might see in a future issue of Strategica?

Yeah, I think so.

I think we've talked about China and the vulnerability of the U.S.

fleet to it.

I think if you talk to people in the Navy right now, take this other example, they will tell you that you can't take a U.S.

fleet carrier in between Taiwan and the Chinese coast in a time of tension because they can't guarantee it won't be blown up.

They don't have the ability to defend it.

And the assets that will blow it up are in the million-dollar range, not the billion-dollar range.

And you could lose 5,000 people.

$13 to $15 billion investment like that.

And that thing will take eight to 10 years to build.

So that's where the future is.

And we're seeing that in the Ukrainian war with these Iranian drones.

And you know what I mean?

They're cheap.

They were reverse engineered when they got one of ours during the Obama administration, but Russia is buying them like crazy and they're doing a lot of damage.

And there's a lot of them.

And but vis-a-vis the Ukrainians are doing the same thing.

And so it's important to have tanks.

And yes, but this war, as we see, is not a classical cursed tank battle.

It's javelins and it's light missiles and it's drones.

Not that tanks are still valuable, but even a tank today is only $8 to $10 million.

It's not, and that's at the high end.

It's not like this, $700 million.

I think the Air Force needs some new leaders.

I mean, this is just...

This is what the B, we had this fight with Jimmy Carter with the B1 bomber that's still in existence.

Then we had the stealthy B2 bomber that I guess went out of, it doesn't exist anymore.

It's in mothballs.

We had this with the Raptor Fighter, this idea that you make this very, very sophisticated advanced weapon.

But in terms of classical speeds and stuff, it's no more performative than earlier models, but it has all this

enhanced radar stealth ability and computerized stuff.

But I think we're starting to learn now.

You can take an F-15 and an F-16,

and you've got the platform, and you've got the engine and the power plant, and it's got a proven ability, and then you can refit it with some stealth abilities and a sophisticated computer system, and you can make a lot of them a lot cheaper.

And that may be the way to go, or at least to balance this.

This thing, this $700 million bomber is going to come at the expense of a lot of stuff that's not going to happen.

Right.

It's too much.

It's an opportunity cost, right?

It's going to be, I think originally I said it could be a drone, but now it's going to be a pilot with two people.

And so

people are people.

One person makes pilot error and you lose a skilled pilot and

$700 million investment in training.

And that's going to happen.

It does happen.

Right.

So I, it just, I don't know.

It's just, it's part of this bewilderment of the modern era, especially the military.

I just, every, all the news that comes out of the military today doesn't make sense.

Why is the Army only fulfilling 50 to 60 percent of its recruitment?

Why is Mark Milley still the chief chairman of the Joint Chief, given what he said, his wokeism, the Afghanistan catastrophe, his political activity with the Trump and the anti-Trump forces.

Why is he still there?

Why are we spending all this money on issues that are not having anything to do with battle efficacy?

Why are we still having this military-industrial complex in the sense of the negative part that Eisenhower warned us about?

You know,

he warned us about 60 years ago, 70 years ago.

Why do we,

you know, why do we, I should say 63 years ago, why do we have all of these generals still violating the code of military justice when they weigh in on political issues and disparage the commander-in-chief?

Why do they do that?

And it just,

it all has one common denominator.

It loses confidence in the military and support for the military.

So worth $31 trillion in debt, and Donald Trump increased the military budget and tried to get us back to where we were, and Biden's cutting it.

And what's the solution?

A $700 million bomber?

I don't see it.

Well, Victor, that's about all the time we have.

Thanks for those comments, by the way.

We want to also thank our listeners.

If you're new, welcome.

If you've been here a long time since we started this over two years ago, thanks for hanging in there there

week after week.

I don't think you think you're hanging in.

By the ratings we receive,

it's nearly five-star rating, 4.99,

as rated on

Apple Podcasts.

Folks are enjoying it.

So thank you.

Hope you're finding this worth your time.

There are five or so now a week.

I do two.

Sammy Wink, the great Sammy Wink does two.

And

Victor's on a tear now interviewing people for a fifth episode.

Yeah, well, let's tell you.

I'm not a very good interviewer.

No, no, Victor, stop, stop.

Your interview with Scott Atlas, really, really good.

I just listened to you with Troy Sinek.

Really, really good.

Troy was a good interviewer.

Oh, he's

I'm going to appear on Scott Atlas's new podcast.

So oh, good.

I'm looking forward to that.

Well, I'll tell you what, after you do that, well, you'll link it.

You'll link to it on your

website.

And I appeared on Megan.

I go on Megan Kelly's.

She's a very good interviewer.

Oh, she's great.

Yeah, I really love her.

After leaving NBC, people thought, you know, that she got a good settlement.

That was good.

But she's had a renaissance, man.

She's a good interviewer.

She's tough.

She's candid.

She's honest.

I saw her a few weeks back.

She spoke at the Yankee Institute dinner.

We talked a little bit ahead of time.

Her talk was terrific.

And

when I went up to her, I know she's a fan of this, of you and of this podcast, but I knew she knew my voice from this.

Maybe it was degrading quality of it.

But anyway, Victor,

not going to read a comment today from Apple, but one from VictorHanson.com.

Somebody

in response to the piece we've talked about earlier, if you really...

wanted to destroy the United States, Eric McGeer writes

this.

Sadly, much of this column could just as easily be written about Canada, the same devaluation of our country's past, the same crackpot green policies and suppression of our oil and gas industry, reckless governmental spending, and a mendacious, cynical governing party whose sanctimony and self-righteousness explain away its abuses of power.

Added in a heavily subsidized, hence lick-spittle media to provide cover, a docile electorate with little sense of the country's history and traditions, and an ideologically warped educational system at every level.

And we seem to be following the same path over the cliff.

As someone who once taught AP U.S.

history, I like and admire the United States and share Professor Hansen's dismay at the needless ruination of a very great country.

I can only hope that Ron DeSantis and a new wave of politicians worthy of their country can turn this around.

That's Eric McGeer.

Thank you for that.

Eric, and everyone else who leaves comments on Victor's website and on Apple Podcasts, I know we all here do read

all of them.

So thanks, Victor.

You were terrific today.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

I'll explain in another

episode the basis of the Immaculate Conception

that we started the show talking about.

Actually, I should tell it now, Victor, just very quickly.

It means that Mary, Mary, the mother of Jesus.

I understand that.

Oh, you do?

Okay, because I know the American Catholics don't.

A lot of Catholics don't.

Well, then explain it to people.

Oh, it's just that Mary was conceived without sin.

You know, the premise, the theological premise is the Son of Man could not come through a stained,

tainted vessel, the mother.

You know, so Mary had to be pure to be the mother of

Jesus.

So that's what we,

and it's so important a concept that it is considered today that

on which one must attend mass.

Yes.

And if you don't, it's a mortal sin.

So, anyway.

And it was the lore.

People in my high school, which is very, very restrictive in those days.

All of the males knew about it so they could convince all of the virtuous Catholic girls that there was nothing wrong with the sexual act.

It didn't have to be immaculate.

And

I think most of them failed in those persuasions because I remember the locker talk in the football and basketball baseball.

A for effort, D for D for deportment.

All right, well, very, very good.

Thanks, Victor, for everything.

And we will be back soon,

friends, with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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