Trials, Psychodramas, and Captain Queeg

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Hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

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

College, Victor's official home on the World Wide Web is VictorHanson.com.

And we're going to talk about that a little later and why you should be subscribing to that.

We've got, as we always do, a lot of topics.

I hope we can get to most of them, Victor.

I think the first one worth talking about this morning, I'm sure our listeners want to hear your views on this, is

Kevin McCarthy.

Will he become

Speaker of the House?

And what your thoughts are on the small Republican contingent who seem to be fighting him.

Not seem to be.

They are fighting him.

So let's get your thoughts about that.

And we'll talk about Jimmy Lai, Chinese dissident, and other things right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

Victor, Kevin McCarthy, who you know well.

I know he represents the district adjacent to you.

So, I mean, you actually know him, know him somewhat well.

Speaker presumptive, but maybe not.

There are five Republican congressmen.

Here are the names.

Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Matt Goetz of Florida, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Bob Good of Virginia, and Matt Rosendale of Montana.

By the way, there may be another one in the wings.

I don't know, but it's my understanding.

There are five congressmen who are saying they do not want Kevin McCarthy to be the Speaker of the House.

That seems to be close to the

such a close.

The numbers between Democrats and Republicans are so tight that that could be the margin of victory.

I've seen Mark Levin go after this cabal, a bunch of losers or weirdos, whatever.

He's gone whole hog after them, and maybe rightly so.

Victor, what are your thoughts about this little contingent that want to

kneecap Kevin McCarthy?

Well, I mean, there's a couple of things.

Kevin McCarthy's not Mitch McConnell for number one.

I mean, the criticism is not so much that he's a rhino, but that he doesn't have the skills necessary to be an effective speaker.

But he's only going to have five or six votes from, you know, on any legislation.

And so what these five are doing is they're holding the entire Republican Party hostage, and they're saying, we're not going to vote for him

unless you move to the right in your committee selections and the type of procedures and legislation you introduce.

Okay, we understand that.

But if you think about it, it's kind of nihilist

because

who's their candidate?

I don't see any other candidate.

They know there's no other candidate.

So if they vote against him, who are they going to get?

Are they going to get Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic person?

People have talked about Liz Cheney being Speaker of the House.

So what's their end game is what I'm trying to get at, because I don't see there's an end game there.

I can see they're pressuring them, and that's a legitimate political tactic.

But ultimately,

who else is there?

Matt Goetz?

You think he's going to get a sufficient amount of votes?

No, none of them are going to get votes.

Nobody they want is going to get votes.

Nobody they want to get votes is going to stand up as an opponent.

So it's entirely,

I don't know what you would call it, performance art, showboating, virtue signaling.

I don't know what it is, but it's a distraction.

To the extent that it reminds McCarthy that he's got a large conservative minority within the Republican House membership that wants him to stick to MAGA principles.

It might be valuable.

But at some point, they got to get down to business.

This is a distraction.

By the way, Victor, I'm springing this on you because I didn't send a link, but I just saw a piece.

Gosh, I don't know who, maybe Byron York.

wrote it.

Yeah.

Anyway, it's about ear, but well, no, it wasn't Byron.

It was about earmarks, though.

It was a folks.

They're in their caucus yeah yeah and i i if you don't mind uh here springing i've always felt that earmarks are are this okay they're small right it's this million dollars for this traffic corner here in this town etc

um just bringing back

home the money that was sent there but to me it uh you know the million bucks is a bribe for for much greater onus on on taxpayers and future generations i i personally, people don't care about my views.

I strongly oppose earmarks.

What are your thoughts about that?

Earmarks are like nuclear proliferation, that once somebody starts to do it, then the other candidate who was against them or his principal says, you know what, I'm going to be primaried or in two years I'm in the general election, somebody's going to say, that I didn't bring home the bacon to my district.

So therefore, even though I don't support them, I'm going to get some type of earmark or federal slush fund money.

That's what it is.

That's the whole logic.

And it's designed to, let's face it, it's designed to get incumbents, which are about 90% of all house races the incumbent wins.

It's designed to perpetuate the incumbency.

of the house.

And they got rid of it at one time and then they brought it back.

They're starting to bring it back and it's a mistake.

There's something wrong with this whole class.

I mean, what kind of system is there in the house that allows somebody like Nancy Pelosi to become a multi-multi-hundred, 200 millionaire person when she has no outside income, supposedly, other than her real estate husband, whose whole career is predicated on

being one step ahead of

the PAC when it comes to where federal allotments and federal funding and federal acquisitions and real estate deals

involving the federal government are there, or or when there's legislation pending

before Pelosi, and nobody knows what it is except her husband.

And then he reacts accordingly with his investment portfolio.

So the whole thing is corrupt.

And

it always has been.

Being corrupt doesn't mean it's not effective.

But what I'm getting at is at some point when you owe $31 trillion in debt and you're talking about spending more and more and more, and all of these people

are clueless about it.

And all of a sudden, you know, the interest rate's up to 6% and you're servicing this debt of $31 trillion.

You know what's down the pipeline.

They're not paying any attention to it.

It's either we're going to have to make massive cuts in Social Security, massive cuts in Medicare, massive cuts in the defense budget.

or you're going to have to,

I guess, even though the going rate of interest is seven percent you're going to have to only offer two or three percent on t bills nobody's going to buy them or you're going to default on them that's about the three alternatives and nobody talks about this the fourth alternative something like the old simpson bulls gradual reduction in spending simplification of regulation in the tax code and in 10 years getting to a balanced budget That was considered conservative because while it did have a pathway that had we adopted it when Obama inaugurated the commission, remember he was bragging in 2009 and 10, these people were going to get us to a balanced budget.

They came back with it and he just renounced it, his own commission.

But had we got there,

it still did not address the debt.

We're still carrying this huge debt.

And I guess the idea about the debt is we're paying it, we're going to service it in inflated dollars.

I don't know what's going on, but something's terribly wrong with the Congress right now and the executive.

And that's why people are really getting cynical.

Well, Victor, there are heroes in the world, principled people.

One of them is Jimmy Lai.

And Jimmy,

if I may, for hopefully just half a minute, I've met Jimmy a few times because he's the godson of Bill McGurn, my dear friend.

Bill's a columnist at the Wall Street Journal.

He used to be the Washington Bureau chief at National Review, where we first worked together 30 years ago.

Jimmy was a hero in Hong Kong.

By the way, he's still a hero.

He, an entrepreneur who started a retail, big retail chain and then started the Apple Daily, a terrific freedom-loving paper that was sticking it regularly to the communist regime.

You know, the dynamics, we could have a whole show on Hong Kong and should this turnover from the British returning

its colony to China.

By the way, there there were lands outside of Hong Kong that

England had a 99-year lease on and had, you know, 99 years was coming.

It had to return this to the Chinese government.

But Hong Kong did not have to return, but it did.

Hong Kong had

a 50-year

pledge to be treated as a

place of free enterprise, et cetera.

All those promises made in a treaty by the communist government, of course, slowly one by one, have been

denied and forgotten and abused.

That led to protests from a few years ago.

Remember the big millions of people in the streets of Hong Kong before

COVID affected everything in the world.

Jimmy Lai was at the middle of it.

Jimmy Lai is a billionaire.

He could have run away.

He didn't.

He stuck it out with the people in the streets.

He was arrested for violating the national security laws.

And he will face, his trial begins next week.

I think he's one of the two great heroes right now.

There are many heroes in China who've stood up to the regime.

I know you and Sammy have talked about what's going on in China lately, but Jimmy and of course Cardinal Zen, the Catholic leader of a 90-year-old Catholic leader who was charged and convicted with some petty crimes also.

But they're not, but they're standing tall for freedom.

These are people who believe in freedom, free press, free enterprise, et cetera.

Their real voices are in Chinese jails.

It's remarkable.

Anyway, Victor, Victor, I don't know that you've ever,

I'm kind of thinking you probably have not met Jimmy.

No, I never met him.

I just remember that he was sentenced 14 months in jail back in 21.

And I think these sentences keep piling up on him.

Yeah.

And, you know, when Britain made that deal, Nobody believed the communist government was going to allow two systems and a vibrant free market, not just state-free market, but a vibrant free market with constitutional government.

Nobody believed they were going to do that.

In fact, I would ask our listeners, can any of you think of one agreement that the communists, whether it's in North Korea or Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union or the communist Chinese, one agreement that

they've ever honored?

I can't think of one.

That's in their

own.

That's in their Stalin Pact, Victor.

That's one that Joe Stalin honored.

Well, I mean, I pointed that out in the Second World Wars.

Right.

Joseph stalin made an agreement with every one of the six belligerent every one of the other five belligerents uh japan they had a non-aggression pact of april 1941 and they adhered to it until the last two weeks of the war they had one with the nazis they adhered to it and by extension with the italians and they never they never honored one agreement with the allies that saved them, Britain and the United States.

So that was what the the great irony of Stalin was.

He kept his word with all the evil people, and he treacherously turned around and stabbed in the back the people of the Allied world that had sent him 20, 25% of his wherewithal in the war.

So that's how you just look at this thing.

Anybody who's hard left has an ideology that says our noble, superior, moral, ethical ends justify any means necessary to achieve them.

People don't count.

Your word doesn't count.

Honor doesn't count.

It's just equity.

That's what's so frightening about these people.

And even not just communists, but the gradations of the left leading up to communism,

whether that's Marxism, socialism, progressivism, or hard left democraticism.

And you can really see that with this

bankrupt bankman-fried family, all of them.

You know, we've just announced in the news that now we realize that they didn't have have the parents.

They didn't have just one apartment.

They had $16 million in real estate.

Did they pay gift tax on that?

Did they pay income tax to get that kind of money?

I don't know.

But the father's a law professor where I work, and he's a quote-unquote tax lawyer, a tax equity lawyer trying to refashion the tax code.

in his scholarship to make sure that it shows equity.

Does that show much equity?

Trying to buy $16 million

in luxury real estate property in the Bahamas with somebody else's money.

Victor, surely the Stanford Faculty Senate is going to take him up on charges, won't they?

Nope, not one chance because, again, they're all.

I did Fox and Friends this morning,

and Pete

Hegseth, whom I very like, I know you know much better than I do.

He was discussing this new college fix report that

six universities have no Republicans

in

their departments, 30 departments, not one.

But what's interesting about the poll was they were University of Alaska, University of Oklahoma, Ohio State, University of Nebraska.

They weren't Harvard, Stanford, Yale.

And the point was that the wokeism has permeated even so-called conservative schools.

And as I pointed out today, the problem isn't that there's not one Republican.

The problem is that the 99% Democrats in these particular departments and 93% are no longer Democrats.

And there was an associated poll when faculty were asked: what is your

political ideology-outlook?

Is it Democratic, socialist, Marxist, communist?

75% of that faculty said they were Marxists or communists or socialists.

And

they're woke.

And woke doesn't just mean that they're hardcore progressive.

It means they're activistly, they're activist progressive.

They want to change the nature of the United States radically so.

And I don't know how many of those, Jack, are

sort of like during the French Revolution or during the Bolshevik Revolution or the revolutions of 1848, where they just say, you know,

I got to go teach my English-lit class or my German introductory German class, so I'm just going to act woke.

And that's my indemnity insurance.

So that if they ever come after me, if somebody ever accuses me anything, they're going to say, well, he's one of the good guys.

He's woke.

Let him go.

This is a long, windy explanation of the faculty senate at Stanford.

And so those professors took out insurance, woke insurance, so they know that whatever skullduggery they were engaged in, they're not coming up before the Stanford Faculty Senate because it's an ideologically bankrupt institution.

And they do know that if you're Scott Atlas or you're Neil Ferguson or myself and you didn't take out woke insurance, then they're going to go after you for nothing.

Whereas they have this big elephant in the room that their so-called tax lawyer and their so-called utilitarian ethics lawyer, law professor, what did they do?

They engage in perhaps one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in U.S.

history.

Engage in the sense that

money was transferred by an employee of

their son's cryptocurrency consortium into his mother's

Mind the Gap

dark money pact that funnels Silicon Valley money with very little publicity into the hard left candidacies in the midterms.

And more importantly,

they had their name on the deeds of $16 million in real estate.

So

these are just the minor little means necessary to get to the moral and ethical ends.

They would say,

Victor, I just want our listeners to know two things.

You mentioned the college fix.

That's what you were talking about today.

It's a great website.

John Miller,

my colleague, former colleague

at National Review, and John runs the Dow Journalism program at Hillsdale College.

He's done that for about 20 years.

John's one of the best men I've ever met in my life.

Good, good man.

College Fix is a great website.

I encourage our listeners to check it out.

And also to circle back on Jimmy Lai, I would like to recommend also that the Acton Institute, which Father Robert Sirico founded

over,

I think, 25 years ago,

which is an effort to defend free markets, has long been associated with Jimmy because prior to Jimmy Lai becoming a figure of leading the protests in Hong Kong, he was also a global advocate for freedom and free markets,

a great advocate of Hayek and Milton Friedman.

They have produced a documentary called The Hong Konger.

It's about Jimmy Lai.

I recommend go to thehongkonger.com.

It's website, go to Acton Institute.

And I believe folks will be inspired by

this

great man who's, again, enduring trials in communist China right now.

He's a great threat to the regime.

Victor, we've got a lot of other things to talk about on today's shows.

And one of them is this three-part series you've written for

your website, VictorHanson.com, Left-Wing Hysteria and the Art of the Psychodrama.

And let's talk about that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Encourage our listeners, I mentioned at the very beginning of the podcast, we're going to talk about victorhanson.com.

And I want to recommend you visit it.

And you will try to click on this article.

It's one of these three articles called Left-Wing Hysteria and the Art of the Psychodrama.

And guess what?

You won't be able to read it unless you're a subscriber.

It's $5

to test it out.

$50 for the year discounted.

And Victor writes a significant amount of exclusive material they call ultra ultra articles for his website victorhanson.com s-o-n.

I think there's the equivalent of two books a year worth of original content so uh please please check that out you'll also find links to uh

the books every book that victor has written which is probably about 15 or 20.

How many books have you written, Victor?

I think it counts.

I had a couple of e-books.

I don't know if those will count.

If I count those, it's probably around 28, if not.

Traditionally published books, about 26.

I think quote George Bush.

Yeah, two or three.

I've read 26.

Wow.

Oh, that's right.

Raymond Abraham.

Well, I co-authored one with John Heath.

And when I say I co-authored, I really

benefited from his excellence and expertise.

Who Killed Homer?

And then the three of us co-edited something called bonfire of the humanities a collection of essays and then i co-edited or i co-authored with heather macdonald and other

another scholar uh about immigration illegal immigration the immigration fix it was a long those were just essays that were compounded together by the manhattan institute well that's victorhanson.com so uh and quickly on may uh jack fowler the uh i'm a senior fellow at the center for civil society at american philanthropic and i write the free weekly email newsletter, Civil Thoughts,

provides a dozen-plus recommended readings of articles of worth that I've come across in the previous week.

Here's the link.

Here's an excerpt.

It's not transactional.

It's just recommended reading that I think intelligent people will like to see.

And it's gotten great feedback.

There's no risk, no charge.

So if you'd like to

read it, get it, subscribe.

Go to civil thoughts, civilthoughts.com, sign up.

And again, that's a function of the Center for Civil Society.

And we are damn intentional on trying to strengthen civil society in America, which is, which needs it desperately.

So, Victor, in your three-part series, Left-Wing Hysteria and the Art of the Psychedrama, I'd like you to talk about it.

But here's maybe you can focus on, in the second part, you write about, which is close to home to me from New York City in the Bronx.

You go after

Al Sharpton, who's really an archetype for a lot of things in this country.

Here's what you wrote:

in some sense, such psychodramas all followed from the 1987 35-year-old successful archetype of the teenage Tawana Brawley, supposedly kidnapped for four days, defiled with excrement and graffiti on her naked body, sexually assaulted by four evil white men.

Among them, as the insane narrative descended into absurdity, purportedly Assistant District Attorney Stephen Pagonis.

That evil fantasy eventually propelled the tax-avoiding, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and racist Reverend Al Sharpton to earn the current-day Lucre as a MSNBC cable TV

habitu,

however, I never knew how to say habituate and former non-stop visitor to and advisor of the Obama White House Victor.

That was some sort of perverted

Lewis Carroll kind of situation.

No, it was.

I mean, it was what was interesting about Tawana Brawley was you could not fabricate a more impossible, unlikely, illogical narrative than she concocted, that she was kidnapped by these white men, that she, and they put excrete men and they scrawled over her and they raped her,

but she had no descriptions of them And the types of injuries she was

describing were not backed by any forensic evidence.

And then,

as the psychodrama occurred and kept, you know, escalating, instead of apologizing and downsizing it to, well, maybe I was raped, they started to get crazy.

It was like the Say Them Witch trials.

And this assistant district attorney, Steve Pagonis, hadn't done anything.

The only good thing about it was he sued for libel and won.

But as of now, I think she's only paid 1%.

She never paid him the $150,000, probably up to $500,000 now, but she never paid him.

And Al Sharpin never really apologized.

In fact, at one point, right during the middle of the Obama administration, this is very relevant to our listeners because we're coming off a week when Donald Trump stupidly had dinner, whether it was an ambush or not doesn't matter,

with this Fuentes character and Kenya West.

And I don't know if Milo was there either, but the point I'm making is that Fuentes, Nick Fuentes, is an abject anti-Semite.

And people roundly criticize Donald Trump, even though he's not an anti-Semite, because we know that he's the most pro-Israeli president.

in the history of the country.

And his

son-in-law is Jewish and was a principal advisor.

His daughter is a Jewish convert.

His grandchildren are Jewish.

But nevertheless, that was a legitimate criticism of him not to have dinner with a person who's

two of them that are

have said things that you could interpret as admirable about

they admired Adolf Hitler.

Okay,

go back to Obama.

And Al Sharpton would not apologize during the Obama administration.

He said, I have nothing to apologize for.

Nothing.

I didn't know she was lying, meaning I don't care whether she was lying or not.

I was going to use that to propel my career from a Roton former road manager for singers and a phony preacher into a nationalized national Martin Luther King figure, he thought.

And he almost pulled it off because he smoothed and kissed up to Barack Obama.

So here's what I'm getting at.

So Barack Obama, one of the most frequent visitors to the White House, not one dinner, was a person who was abjectly anti-Semite.

He said, dim Jews, tell them Jews in Yarmouka to come over here.

Remember Freddie's Market and the people that died and the Jewish person who was killed?

He was deliberately inciting violence against Jewish people.

He said that he said the Greeks were homos.

He lied about Egypt, that these were African Americans,

and the Greeks were all homos.

Any impossible, crazy thing, he embraced.

He didn't apologize.

And yet he was the most frequent visitor.

to the White House under Barack Obama, who never disowned him because he thought that Al Sharpton had street cred and would galvanize not 70%, 80%,

but 96% of the black vote.

So in swing states and the Philadelphia precincts, he would get 30,000 votes in a precinct to zero.

And he did.

And that's not the end of it.

He also opposed in 2005 with who?

Louis Farrakhan, the most anti-Semitic, pro-Hitlerian figure in American public life.

And the only reason we didn't know that during that election of 2008

is because they suppress the photographer willingly suppressed that photo at the request of the black caucus

during the campaign during the election and during the subsequent eight years of the Obama

we're talking about

Obama with a picture of Obama yes with a smiling Barack Obama embracing a smiling Louis Farrakhan okay

And so nobody in the media said anything.

So when I look at this reaction to Fuentes, and I'm happy that conservatives condemn that,

but I don't believe this outrage by the media because they've never shown it before when Obama just embraced two of the most known anti-Semites in the United States.

And, you know,

I don't want to be generalizing, but it's very hard to find a major

marginalized people leader on the left that has not been anti-Semitic.

And the left should remember that.

Let's go down the list.

We've got Al Sharpton, Czech.

We've got Louis Farrakhan, Czech.

Remember Jesse Jackson, what he said when he got to New York?

Yep.

Hymy Town.

Hymetown, Check.

And then we have the squad and all of the Benjamins and Ilyan Omar, Czech, and Linda Sashur, check.

You can go all the way down.

And so by the way, Victor, I checked Joe.

I mean, somebody who wants to empower Iran, which which wants to destroy Israel, I have a feeling that's kind of

galactic.

I mean,

there is a small fringe that is reappearing on the right under Fuentes and these white supremacists.

They're very small, but anti-Semitism is mainstreamed in the Democratic Party, and they know it because they feel.

Remember 2013, it wasn't just the knockout game.

It was knockout the Jew.

That was the street game in New York.

And they said that.

And those awful YouTube of Orthodox Jews and Hasidic Jews just being flattened.

And that still is going on.

And if you look at hate crimes today,

young African Americans commit twice the hate crimes of their demographic.

And if you use males between 12 and 40, the percentage goes way up because twice

overrepresented by a magnitude of two is all African Americans.

And if you look at Jews at 2% to 3% of the population, they make up about a half of the hate crimes.

So there it is.

And that's all coming from the left.

And so, yes, everybody should condemn Donald Trump.

That was stupid.

And when you add or compare with his other stupid statements about Glenn Young with a Chinese name and

making fun of Mitch McConnell's wife, he doesn't have the discipline that is necessary for him to be an effective candidate at this point.

And he's going to have to change and become much more disciplined.

He's going to have to fire a lot of these staffers.

Anybody who doesn't know what Kenya West is doing or Nick Quintus is doing

shouldn't be in the

political business at all.

And yet, they're apparently enemies of Donald Trump, and they can't even shield him from these crazy people.

But what I'm getting at is that Tawana Brawley thing started it all because what was important about it, they, when confronted with the evidence that it was false and that she made up everything and that associates of her

had told people that she made it up, and no one believed her.

And Al Sharpton then said later he didn't care whether it was true or false.

He believed her because it could have been true.

That set the stage.

And right after that,

we had a whole whole succession.

We had the Duke La Crosse psychodrama.

We had Covington Kids psychodrama.

We had another Duke volleyball psychodrama.

And then we had this.

Yeah, we had the psychodramas of all psychodramas.

We had the juicy smollett psychodrama.

And then

I think there's been, according to statistics, over 200 rope incidents.

Remember the NASCAR rope, where we had one at Stanford University, where ropes start appearing or the N-word starts appearing.

And the great majority of these, these are concocted psychodramas.

And why did they all start occurring?

Because that Tawana Brawley established a principle that if something is alleged and is proven to be a hoax, it doesn't matter under the Foucaultian relativism on the left.

They say, well, in this particular case, the rope was planted.

Okay, you proved that.

In this particular case, the student did write the n-word on his own dorm door.

In this particular case, no one heard the n-word at a volleyball.

In this particular case, no one raped the stripper who performed for the lacrosse team.

In this particular case, you can't defy the laws of chemistry by throwing bleach in subarctic temperatures and having it not freeze in case of Juicy Smollett.

But

as Al Sharpton showed us, it's possible it could have happened.

And if it could have happened, it would have happened and it will happen.

And therefore, this concocted

psychodrama was a teachable moment.

It was valuable because it brought our attention to it.

And there's nobody has ever been punished for these things.

She was convicted in a civil suit, but she never paid.

And Al Sharpton never paid for years.

He was convicted.

I think he paid his $65,000 when people raised money.

And by the way, he's talking about Donald Trump's tax returns.

The Obama DOJ and the Obama IRS finally

went to him and they gave him a sweetheart deal to get out of all of the tax money he'd robbed the taxpayers.

So

it's these psychodramas, and I was writing about them.

There's a lot of them.

And it was an entree to a larger phenomenon on the left, and that is, I think everybody should remember that they have an agenda

that no one wants.

No one wants socialism.

And that's what the Progressive Democratic Party is promoting now.

They do not want an open border of 3 million people coming across without an audit.

They don't want...

this destruction of fossil fuel industry.

They do not want these Soros DAs and these high crime cities.

They do not want want six to eight percent annual inflation.

They do not want the transgender craziness.

They do not want something like Afghanistan.

Okay, so if they don't want that, how do you retain power?

You have to have psychodramas.

And

we've had a lot of them, the 2008 meltdown.

terrible but that thing if you go back to the origins of it that was as we know now a product of fannie and freddie meltdowns, that is, federal loan guarantees for subprime mortgages given under pressure from the left to loan money in a wildly speculative real estate market to people who did not qualify because of historical injustice.

So they would get a mortgage and the government would back it.

And then we started to have defaults.

And then we had another psychodrama.

And one of the psychodramas that that we see

right now was

suddenly we had Russian collusion.

That is, Donald Trump won the election in 2016.

So collusion, collusion.

Collusion excuses everything.

We can go forge FISA documents if we have to.

We can ambush Michael Flynn.

We can become election denialists.

We can be Rosa Brook and write articles and say that there might have to be a military coup.

We can do all of that.

And even if it didn't happen, it could have happened.

It could have happened.

That's the point.

And the same thing is true about COVID.

That's a psychodrama.

And the psychodrama was, okay,

this is not a terrible flu.

This is not dysentery.

This is not typhoid.

This is a teachable moment.

So if you're Hillary Clinton, she said, under the guise of COVID, we could get single-payer health care.

If you're Gavin Newsom, under the guise of COVID, you could have a, quote, more progressive capitalism.

If you're Klaus Schwab, you can write a book called The Great Reset and COVID-19.

Or you can be Anthony Fauci and recommend that all rental agreements should be suspended for an indefinite period.

You don't have to pay your rent to your landlord.

Who knows how he's going to collect it and survive or make improvements on the house?

And that was a, you know, in my hometown, if you were selling flowers in a mom-and-pop store,

good luck.

You're shut down.

If you go to Walmart, you can get all the flowers you want.

And that was a moment where the left really got a lot of power.

And more importantly, they changed voting laws in a way that will never go back.

It's now not 30%

mail-in early, 70% election day.

It's 70 early voting, 70%

mail-in voting.

And they manipulated that system under the guise of the COVID crisis.

And then, of course,

you had January 6th, and we know

a guy guy with cowhorns and paint and a bunch of buffoons that go in and trash the Capitol should all be punished.

But the idea that they were armed insurrectionists, not true.

There was nobody inside the Capitol with a firearm.

The idea they had ties that were going to kidnap people, no, that was from the security police that was left there, the Capitol police.

No, Ashley Babbitt did not attack anybody.

She was unarmed and shot entering a window, probably a serious misdemeanor or minor felony.

And yes, the officer's identity was hidden.

And yes, according to Mr.

Rosenberg at the New York Times, there were plenty of FBI.

He's a very left-wing journalist, so he got caught on the Operation Veritas ambush interview.

And he said there were many, many, many informants, none of which Christopher Ray under oath would tell us anything about.

And yes, Officer Sicknick was not killed violently by a Trump mega person.

And yes, the House under the Pelosi leadership did not release communications between her office and the security police.

And yes, following the January 6th psychodrama, they militarized the capital.

And we hadn't seen that since Jubal early approached it during the 1864 raid on Washington.

30,000 troops, Bobbed Wire, and all of a sudden, insurrection.

Democracy democracy dies if you don't vote for Biden.

And so that's how they operate.

Every time there's a natural or a concocted disaster, it becomes a chance to

aggrandizement of power.

And you don't talk about the message.

You don't talk about, did anybody in this election ever talk about on the left?

This border policy is in everybody's interest.

Inflation is a good thing.

It spreads the wealth around.

We don't want to have cheap fossil fuels.

We want to go back to the Steven Chu,

$8 a gallon European-level gasoline, and we're on our way to it.

And Afghanistan was a really good thing, and we're proud of it.

They don't do that.

Instead, they say these people are insurrectionists.

They say

every person in America is going to die in a back alley that wants an abortion.

It's death against women.

And then there's the positive, I mean, the different type of psychodramas, and I had a whole section on these typologies.

And that is right before the election, there's always the October surprise, right?

And that can be what?

Amnesty for marijuana convictions.

It can be amnesty for student loans.

It could be draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

And we, in our infamous folly, say, well, nobody's going to fall for that.

And they do.

It can be Roe versus Wade,

demagoguing that.

And then there's the November surprise after the election.

Who would have known, Jack, that after the election

the left was going to appoint a special counsel to investigate Donald Trump?

Who would have known after the election the FBI would leak that there were not nuclear secrets in codes at Mar-Lago?

Who would have known that?

No one would have known that.

Joe Biden didn't know.

They didn't know that at the White House.

No.

So that's how they gained power.

And it's the playbook that the Maoists did in 47, 48.

It's what the Bolsheviks did in 1917.

It's what the Robespierre brothers did in 1792, 93.

Because nobody wants that agenda.

Before we go on to our last topic, you mentioned

Foucaultian relativism.

Did I get that right?

And what is...

Michelle Foucault, yeah.

And he was a very influential French philosopher, mostly came to prominence in the 1980s

with Lacan and Derrida.

And

they were the rage of something called postmodernism or post-structuralism.

He wrote a seminal, quote-unquote, work on the penal system.

It was the law was constructed

and did not reflect human nature in the sense that a crime can't be defined as a crime against civilization or against human nature, but it's a construct that the wealthy do.

It's a father, everybody says, you know, it's Herbert Marcusea, but it's actually, I think, not just the Frankfurt School, but the French postmodernists that really accelerated this wokeism in the 80s.

I was teaching as a visiting professor.

Stanford's classics department in 1991 and 92 and this behavioral sciences in 92 and 93, and you could really see it.

That was during the Bellow,

Saul Bellow, Bennett.

Right.

Book of Virtues.

Yes, it was that fight, that culture war that everybody was engaged in.

Jesse Jackson went to Stanford.

Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.

That was the first

World War of wokeism.

And then there was a pause.

That's a great.

And then we had the World War II.

And wokeism, we thought we had beaten wokeism back.

No, wokeism had made substantial gains, then called an armistice

during the Reagan and George H.W.

Bush years.

And then, of course, it came back after George Floyd and renewed fury.

But the first

assault was the importation of French postmodernists.

So all of a sudden, you started to see in every field in the university,

who is to say that's the the truth?

My truth, I have a truth, and my truth is just as important as your truth.

Your truth is the truth of status quo Orthodox American society, but it's really not.

It's really the truth of your white, male,

Christian, heterosexual.

racist, racist, biased, and I'm not going to accept your truth.

There was even things like, you know,

postmodern architecture.

Who's to say that a right angle is more stable than a slant 30-degree or 45-degree angle?

Who is to say

two plus two equals four?

Right.

It's, and they don't, there was no natural truth.

And so that was the basis that in this therapeutic society that we see today, that people say these ridiculous things.

Well, I'm just my truth.

It's my truth.

No, there's no such thing as my truth or your truth.

There's a truth.

It could be your interpretation of the truth, but that doesn't make it true.

And that was what happened.

I saw it,

you know,

that's what's behind this whole transgendered idea that a person can construct an identity that has no connection with reality or nature.

When you look at Foucaultianism and

what Michelle Foucault did,

it's a natural trajectory to a biological man who says, I am transitioning and now I am a woman and you have to accept me as a woman.

And I even have tampons.

And you know what?

There's going to have to be a tampon dispensary in male bathrooms.

And everybody says, well, noon, would you please explain to me how a man with testicles and a penis with no ovaries, no womb, menstruation?

And they can't.

And so that's what I mean.

By asking the question,

it shows that your problem in that you are have to do.

Yes, I'm a classical empiric.

I think I'm a classical empiricist, but I'm not.

I'm not really an inductive, disinterested thinker.

When I just said that,

that reveals my heterosexual, white male, imperialist, colonialist prejudices.

That's how, and that's, you can see what it is, it's nihilism.

And look how it's permeated the entire society.

So as we speak, if you're going to apply to Harvard or Yale or you're not going to have an ACT or SAT because

that's a framework of assessment that was constructed by fill-in-the-blanks.

White, male, privileged, wealthy,

has nothing to do with actual knowledge.

Who's to say that that knowledge should be privileged over this knowledge?

Who's to say that there's such a thing as grammar or syntax?

Why do you say you can't say, hey, ain't folks, instead of people and do not, does not?

So there is no such thing as grammar.

There's no such thing as syntax.

And history is the same thing.

Right.

You know, and that we saw it during 9-11.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

Right.

So there is no standards.

There's no absolutes.

It's relativism.

It goes all the way back

2,500 years back to the sophist.

It's no different than Gorgias and all the rest of the sophist.

And

well, Victor, I like that premise of the First World War of woke and the Second War.

Well, that is a really interesting way to frame things.

And I will expand on that in

future writings.

Each time we fight it and we think we've won, they have made advances and they're ready for the next hot war.

And then we have a Cold War.

And they've almost won now.

They control all the universities.

They control the corporations.

They control Wall Street.

And I'm not just exaggerating or spouting off.

I'm trying to be empirical.

They controlled

Walt Disney's company.

They control American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola.

Just look what they say.

They control the NBA.

I thought they didn't control Major League Baseball or the National Hockey Hockey.

That NHL, that tweet, too.

Yeah, they took over that.

And that was a very funny tweet because

he was saying that the

NHL is too white, which it is, not too white, but it's white because it's, you know, northern

United States and Canada, and it's a cultural thing among people in very cold climates.

And there's fewer blacks that grow up and play hockey.

But the corollary was never mentioned.

He was saying that it was implicit.

plicitly racism that it wasn't proportionally representative or even repertory representative.

And I thought to myself,

okay,

then the NBA is 74% NFL, 75% African American.

So what remedy are you going to do to make the NHL look more like America?

Because whatever you come up with, we can use for the NBA.

We can use for the NFL.

And then it's, and it's going to be against merit.

So this is how sick the society is, Jack.

If you say

what that idiot said the other day, that he was going to bring in more people who didn't look like white males into the NHL, he was basically saying we're not going to use merocratic standards.

Because if you did use merocratic standards

and you wanted to have more black hockey players, then you'd start in kindergarten and you'd have first grade, second grade, third grade.

It's a very viable way.

It would take about 20 years, but you could do it.

Just like you could have, you could tell every little white kid, you're going to play basketball, basketball, basketball, not hockey, not soccer, basketball.

And you could probably increase the white proportion of NBA players, but they don't do that.

They just say instantly, right now, we're going to bring in black hockey players, and the quality will decline if you don't do that.

The same thing if you said.

Where are the Chinese hockey players, though?

I mean, what does this end up?

Exactly.

If you said right now, the NBA is going to be 70% white, 13% black, 10% Latino, 8% Asian, the quality of play would decline because there's a natural winnowing out process.

Just like that today's NBA would beat the NBA of 1948 or 50 when it was exclusionary of blacks.

The level of play is much higher because it's totally merucratic.

It's not based on race.

Right.

And that's, but it's never symmetrical.

It's never symmetrical.

Well, Victor, we have time for,

and we're going to have to extend the time because it's a good topic, but we're going to talk about a piece you wrote, your essay, recent essay for American Greatness on Captain Quig.

And we will get to that right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We're recording on Saturday, December 3rd, and this podcast is being aired on justthenews.com and other platforms on December 6th, the feast day of St.

Nicholas.

Victor, you wrote a really intriguing

essay comparing Donald Trump to Captain Quig, who's the main character of the Kane Mutiny.

If I just let me set this up

quickly, you've made other fictional comparisons to Donald Trump that I think have been pretty important, give a pretty important perspective.

Shane, from, of course, the movie Shane, and then Ethan Edwards, who was the John Wayne's character in The Searchers.

And here, now you've talked about

Trump as Captain Quig, who, for folks who have have seen the movie

The Cain Mutiny, is the captain of the ship who's very troubled,

who faces an insurrection, and

there's a naval

trial, and Quig is kind of broken by this whole process in the end.

And I first read your piece, I'm thinking, this is not

the, you know, Victor, what are you doing here?

This ain't the greatest comparison.

I mean, there's culpability, whatever we call it, contributory negligence on Queig's behalf or his own fate.

But then you make the point as you continue reading your, I think, exceptional piece.

You're writing about the book, The Cain Mutiny, which is quite different than the movie.

The movie is a terrific movie.

I don't think anyone can question it.

But

that was the best role that Jose Ferreira ever had.

It was brilliant as Barney Greenfield.

Yeah, he was, he was, even though he won an Oscar for

Cyrano a couple of years earlier.

But so, Victor, Victor,

yeah, I went out and bought the book.

I haven't started reading it yet, but

for those of us, and I assume most people who are listening have probably seen the Kane mutiny, would you dispel us of what prejudices we might have about Captain Guig, who's really differently portrayed in the book, and how that compares to Donald Trump?

Well,

to make sense of the Trump phenomenon, I've tried to use different at various times reference.

One was Sophocleon Tragedy,

and we have seven

surviving plays of

the playwright Sophocles.

Everybody knows the Oedipus Rex, but there's also the Antigone.

Probably people know almost as much.

But there's other great plays like the Philoctetes and Ajax, and it's all about an old-style Athenian or Greek that no longer has a place in a modern democratic society, but they have certain admirable absolutes of loyalty, persistence, heroism.

But

when they pursue those to the nth degree, they cause chaos.

And so they're only good for particular moments.

And that is also reflected in the genre of the Western.

We've talked about this before, but the Magnificent Seven, High Noon.

Shane, the Searchers, Man Who Shot Liberty Val, they all, especially the John Fords, but also George Stevens' Shane.

They pick up that theme that when there is a paralysis in a community

and the democratic ethos doesn't produce the old

style individualist

go-my-own way disruptor, they bring him in from the outside.

In the case of Shane, the Cattle Barons, in the case of the Magnificent Seven,

Eli Wallach and the Banditos,

in the case of

Manor Shot Liberty Valence, Lee Marvin and these cutthroat cattle barons again.

In

the case of High Noon, these murderous four people are going to come back and kill townspeople or kill the sheriff or Grace Kelly, etc.

And so then you get this particular person, and he handles the problem, usually through violence.

But the method that he handles the problem is antithetical to the civilizational pretenses of the community.

So when he starts to solve the problem, the community says,

at least we're safe now.

And that was summed up in that great line at the end of the Magnificent Seven when the old man

He's talking to Eil Brenner and Steve McQueen.

He says, you were like the wind.

You blow in, the locusts are gone, then you blow out.

And

if they had more time, they would thank you.

And he says, yeah, well, they'll be glad to see us go, too.

And the point is, we're done now, and we are antithetical to a stable, peaceful, ordered society.

And they take off just like Shane takes off, just like

Ethan Edwards walks through the door at the end of the searchers, just like

Gary Cooper throws down his badge, doesn't want anything to do, and goes off in the buckboard, just like Antigone dies, just like Ajax commits suicide.

So I was trying to, and I think that

explains a lot of the Trump phenomenon.

But there was another reference, and everybody remembers the movie, The Cain Mutiny.

And

in that movie, which reflects part of the book, there's these kind of young

educated officers, and there's this old Navy Humphrey Bogart Quig.

And the guy is a neurotic, and he's paranoid.

And he has to count, you know strawberries and ice cream all this stuff okay

and they get kind of a cabal and so they make fun of him he does things that are kind of dangerous he's not talent i'm not saying he's donald trump in that aspect trump had actual achievement but in the movie the theme is had they uh during the trial, had they not conspired to magnify or to increase his paranoia, but to lessen it and say, you know, Captain Quig, we're here to help you.

Or when he did something crazy, like, you know, pull out too soon during a drill and not get close enough to shore with his destroyer, they said, Captain Quigg, that was pretty good, but they didn't do any of that.

Instead, they conducted a mutiny and Jose Farrar exposes it.

But in the book, it's even...

more dramatic because the Fred McMurray character who was humiliated at the trial, he gets an assignment similar to Quiggs, and he's even worse.

He can't do it.

And his point is that, okay,

you're a novelist and you're a writer and you're in the same position, but for all that education,

you're worse than Quig.

And the other, the young guy, I think was Herman Wupp.

I had the fortune, he was in a club that I was in, and he died, I think, at 103.

This was about 2016.

He was probably about 100.

And I walked up and gave a talk to this group and he was there and I talked to him or maybe it was earlier 2015 about the novel.

And I was suggesting that maybe the young person in the movie who's the Princeton graduate was him because he served on a minesweeper and I think a destroyer escort in World War II.

And he went through a lot of combat mission, I mean, you know, landings while in the Navy.

And he sort of,

I think his answer was more that it was a composite character.

But the whole theme, to finish this analogy, the whole theme is that Donald Trump may have been reckless, he may have been crude, but if you had not, when he came on the scene,

if you had not ambushed Michael Flynn, there was no reason for the, there was no such thing as a real Logan act.

It was an ossified concept, and yet they framed him.

There was no Russian collusion.

There was none, none, none.

If you hadn't taken $40 million and unleashed Andrew Weissman and Robert Mueller for 22 months and just lied and CNN and MSNBC day after day after day about bombshells and walls are closing in, if you hadn't done all of these other lies about he was

inappropriately feeding fish or

in the Tump Tower, his computer was pinging it in connection with a Russian bank or Michael Cohen, his fixer, was in the Czech Republic.

He was in Eastern Europe fixing collusion deals.

Why, the whole time Hilly was doing, of course, through Tony Dolan and Toshinko, et cetera.

If you hadn't done that, or if you hadn't just said, okay,

he kind of was a little out of hand on that call, but basically he was saying that If the Ukraine wants offensive weapons that Obama didn't give them, and I will give them, I want to make sure they're not transferring money to the Biden family.

Just guarantee you're not doing that.

So I know that it's transparent.

He did it in a crude fashion.

If he hadn't, but that was no reason to impeach him.

I could go on, but what I'm getting is they acted in the same way that the officers around Quig acted.

In other words, they played on his paranoia, his neuroses.

They attacked him at every single instance.

They gave him no room,

no benefit of the doubt.

And then when this was happening, unlike Quig, but

their reaction was dissimilar.

He had almost ended with no help at all.

His own administrators and the cabinet sees against him.

He rebuilt 500 miles of rickety wall and was ready to start new walls and would have closed off.

He had almost closed off as it was illegal immigration.

He got right before COVID, he got 2% growth with 2% inflation and 3% unemployment.

For the first time in U.S.

history, we were energy independent.

The Abrams Accord was brilliant.

I mean, Barack Obama got

a Nobel Prize for nothing.

But wow, Trump had Saudi Arabia ready to go and Kuwait and Somalia, all the Jordan and Egypt, they were all poised to recognize Israel and end the state of affairs in

opposition to Hamas and Hezbollah and Syria and Iran.

That was a brilliant thing.

He got no credit at all.

He only had peace in the Middle East and

for years in the fire.

And you can say that he was reckless on January.

You could say that Donald Trump, they're out there protesting and you're still denying the election.

There's a cause and effect.

You shouldn't do that.

But

he said, if you're going to assemble peacefully, he didn't call for violence.

His people didn't attack and kill anybody.

You know, the five people died.

One died naturally

that wasn't a protester.

The other four died.

uh maybe one through violence and one we know through violence so if they had to even lie about that.

And so my point is that what if when he,

Donald Trump was inaugurated and the left said, okay,

what if they treated him like the right does Joe Biden?

That is, they made fun of him, they oppose him, they attack him and op the legitimate political, but no one said, like Rosa Brooks did in an influential essay in foreign policy, no one said, we got to get rid of this guy after 11 days.

We have to impeach him.

If that doesn't work, we've got to get the 25th Amendment.

If that doesn't work, we have to have a military coup.

And maybe, what if Obama, Madonna, didn't say, I dream of blowing up the White House?

Or they didn't have this kill chic where they try to snoop dog

this Kathy Griffith and their

experience

troop in the Central Park, cut off his head, burn him, blow him up.

What if they didn't have all that?

Just normal political opposition.

And what if they didn't file impeachment from the first 60 days they were going to 35 people in the house wanted to impeach him?

What if they didn't do that?

I think

he wouldn't have been as neurotic.

And that's what Herman Wuk was trying to say about Captain Quig.

It was kind of a shock in the movie, but he's building up to it, I think,

less dramatically, but more holistically in the novel that you get more hints of it, that when this mutiny is going on and they're forming it and they're keeping diaries and they're tutoring themselves in pop psychology, and Jose Ferrari will really nail him, are you a psychologist, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?

What they're saying is

you are deliberately neglecting your role as an officer in the U.S.

Navy to support your captain, no matter how flawed he is.

And whatever he was, he was not criminally minded.

He could have been functional because he was functional through the whole war and the old Navy and the peacetime when nobody wanted to join the Navy.

So it was a good model, I think, for parts of the Trump experience.

And yet they didn't do it.

Instead, what happened?

Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe wore a wire,

and they were trying to entrap the president as some kind of 25th Amendment nut.

The Senate brought in Bandy Lee, as Yale psychologist, to say that he should have a straitjacket and be carried off mad hatter-like.

Instead,

they had

this crazy Logan Act with Obama holdovers.

Instead,

we heard that Donald Trump was crazy to the extent that he was forced to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which he aced, not one wrong.

And you know what?

Where's the principle?

Where's the principle that this, if that was the precedent, where's the principle that would apply to Joe Biden?

Are we going to impeach him for what's on Hunter's laptop or not enforcing the border?

Will he please take the Monterey cognitive assessment?

Are we going to sabotage his appointments and see if we can set perjury traps with the FBI?

Is Mr.

Ray going to have a private meeting with Joe Biden and then record it on FBI material and then leak it to

the New York Times while he's assuring Joe Biden that he's not under investigation.

Is that what we're going to do?

So that's what they did.

And they destroyed the Trump administration.

They didn't need to do that.

They could have opposed him.

And then the election came, why not just have a regular election?

Why not just have an election like we've had for the last 232 years?

Why did they radically change the voting laws?

Why did Mark Zuckerberg have to give $419 million, as outlined in Molly Ball's time essay, to warp the turnout in key pre-selected precincts?

Why did they have to modulate the Antifa and BLM protest, according to HERS essay, to wax

during the Trump years and then to wane right before the election when Joe Biden would probably, they thought, be elected and after his election to cease them entirely?

So that's what I was trying to point out.

And yeah, it's easy to say that Trump now is, you know,

he's doing things that are Trumpy.

And he has Kane West and Fuentes, and he's saying to Mr., you know, he's making fun of Mr.

Yunken and he's making fun of all people Ron DeSantis.

But part of that neuroses and paranoia was the actual behavior.

And by what, I'm not excusing Trump, but what I'm saying is if you applied all of that to Joe Biden, not just making fun of Joe Biden's dementia, but in concrete, real ways, if you had somebody right now said, I am anonymous

and lied and said, I am a high official in the Biden administration.

And in this New York Times op-ed, I pledge to you people that Joe Biden is dangerous.

He's non composment.

And my role will be to subvert.

and overturn every one of his executive actions.

I will try to undermine him for the good of what would happen.

I think they'd hunt him down and find him in one minute and arrest him.

Right.

He'd be vilified

on the MSNBC and CNN.

Whereas if the shoe was on the other foot,

he'd be getting a contract from those places.

So that's what I tried to do in that piece.

I think a lot of people misunderstood it in two ways.

They said, well, Trump.

was successful and Captain Quig was incompetent, but that was not the parallel I was trying to emphasize.

And I pointed that difference out.

You made the difference, Victor.

Yeah, no, that's why I would have been one of those people who you could say that about if I had only read the headline as opposed to reading the entire essay, which is available at American Greatness, where you write twice a week.

And it's also on your website, victorhanson.com.

So terrific piece, folks.

And especially if you're a fan of the movie.

I was looking up while you were talking.

I thought, maybe, maybe Turner Classic movies might be showing this in the next few weeks by chance, but it's not.

They usually show it like three or four times a year.

I hardly

recommend it.

It's one of the best courtroom dramas because

you don't really think that's going to happen

when Quig is destroyed by Jose Ferreira, who's just ruthless and points out his weaknesses and the poor man collapses.

And then for the first time,

you really, well, there had been hints earlier, but for the first time, you're very sympathetic to him.

Right.

And when they have that

celebratory festivity afterwards, you don't really think he's going to come in here and say he was ashamed of what he had to do to Quig and then just trash all of them.

Yeah, that was a very powerful scene.

That's one of the best scenes in courtroom drama.

Yeah.

It reminds me of Jack Nicholson, A Few Good Men, when you think he's this nut and horrible person, and then he gives this great speech about

you guys are all asleep while I'm down there and you, you know what I mean?

You need me because I'm right on the edge of the Cold War nuclear front down there in Guantanamo.

And it's a brilliant speech.

Well, Victor, we've,

I can't say we've gone over because this is, you've been terrific.

And the more you, the merrier.

So, but, but, but we are out of time other than we'll perform our typical duties here of gratitude for our listeners, numbers on this pod, for people listening, this podcast continue to grow.

Actually, the number of podcasts continue to grow.

Victor had a really great

interview with Scott Atlas last week.

You'll find it at, again, justthenews.com or victorhanson.com or whatever platform you listen to.

Find that.

I listened this morning.

discussion you have with your old colleague from the classicist my your friend my friend troy sinek about grover cleveland Really, really, really excellent listen.

So five, four times a week, twice with me, twice with the great Sammy Wink, and now an extra one.

It's

Victor Monday through Friday.

So what else?

Oh, we've got some great

comment or two I'd like to read from folks who have

left

reviews.

zero to five stars on Apple Podcasts.

Still again, many, many, many, many people, vast majority, 99% of even five-star reviews.

Thanks so much for that.

Here's

two people who left comments at Apple.

I'd like to read these.

One is from Safe again, who says, courageous interview with much appreciation for the interview with Dr.

Atlas.

That will help anyone involved with research, which is systematically being politically corrupted.

I had followed his work and was appalled at what was happening

to the ability to critically think.

Wonderful.

Political timeline descriptions viewed through history.

Always learn new ideas.

Check every day to hear his new thoughts.

This is from Safe Again.

Thank you, Safe Again.

And then also from

Cool as Shiz

writes title, this comments, his or her.

So thankful for a voice of reason.

Mr.

Hansen, always tune in to hear your crystal clear observations on the awful state of politics and society as a whole when you are on Fox.

So, I was delighted to find out you had a podcast where I can listen to you for a good hour straight without interruption.

You are a breath of fresh air that is sorely needed.

And I am amongst an ever-growing number that is immensely appreciative for it.

Keep on doing what you do, sir.

Cool as shiz.

Thanks, cool as shiz, for that.

Thank you, Victor, for all your wisdom you shared today.

Great to hear all these thoughts.

And thank you, folks, for listening.

We will be back,

excuse me, there.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thanks.

Thank you very much, everybody.