Election Epilogue: Taking Back Civilization

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Hi there, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is an author, scholar, columnist, essayist, political, and cultural critic, and our favorite election aficionado today.

This is set to be published on Wednesday, So it will be right after the election.

So we're going to look into a few topics on

and we're going to assume that the

Republicans took a lot of the House.

So if that happens, hopefully, this then will be on topics that

the the Republicans need to do if they take control of Congress.

And so we'll have a look at a few things.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We will take a moment for some few messages and then we'll come right back to talk a little bit with Victor on the

We don't know the results of the election yet, but we're hoping for a Republican Congress and we'll talk about that.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

Victor, I thought maybe with this one, since it's going to be published on Wednesday, that we might talk a little bit about those things that need to be shored up in our government by the Republicans that haven't been touched until now.

And so I thought we would start with that.

The first thing I'm thinking about and what perhaps I'm thinking about it because it irks me the most is the Wuhan lab and the lack of culpability of the Chinese and the Fauci connection to that Wuhan lab.

And I was wondering if we could start there and or on ESG.

I was just recently reading about Daniel Cameron, the Kentucky AG who is purging it from government finances.

And I thought that was a good example.

But either ESG or the Wuhan Lab, what are your thoughts?

Well, on the Wuhan Lab,

the problem with that is that the enormity is such that it's almost incomprehensible.

And what do I mean by that?

I mean, if you just...

Say you're an interplanetary traveler and you look at this, come to Earth and think, wow.

They built a level four biology lab with very little expertise.

They had to have the French help them.

The French bailed out finally when they saw how sloppily it was run.

They've had escapes.

It's under the aegis of the Communist Party, and they were engaging way above their ability to do it effectively, gain a function, enhancements of virus.

That means to make viruses more deadly, more infectious,

and more

complex than what you can find in nature.

And ostensibly, we do that.

It's out now outlawed, but we do that to find out the natures of vaccination.

But it's never in a cost-benefit analysis worth the risk.

That's why we've outlawed it.

So

they were engaging in this, and guess what?

There was an outbreak right near the lab in the same town.

And guess what?

They barred all flights to anywhere in China except international flights to Europe and the United States from Wuhan.

And guess what?

They won't let anybody talk about it.

And people who turned up involved in it are either dead or missing or unheard of.

We don't know.

There's no transparency.

And we found out all the other enticing tidbits.

Some of our interviews, you know, with Stephen Kuay, the microbiologist and virologist and researcher, but also and also

Nicholas Wade has written about it.

There's an article in ProPublica, the court of a liberal journal, and they all come to the same conclusion that it's just impossible that when you don't have the virus that appeared in nature and you got this lab right there where it was ground zero and they very, very quickly found that the sequence to make a vaccine as if almost they knew about the sequence in advance and were maybe working on a vaccine simultaneously at the time that they were enhancing this virus.

And then we find out that Francis Collins and

Mr.

Fauci

and Peter Dasick from EchoHealth, they were all involved in channeling money roundabout to enhance some of the research of these virologists.

It was against the law in the United States.

So we were giving U.S.

dollars to help create this miserable plague that has just about destroyed the U.S.

economy and has made a lot of people very, very ill.

And so when the Republicans come in, and of course you see the Democrats don't want to investigate it because it gets into a lot of sensitive areas.

One of them is their reaction

to the COVID pandemic with locking down the schools, the teachers' unions, destroying the economy, i.e.,

kind of enhancing the reaction because Trump was president and at work

and discredited the Trump administration.

They don't want to talk about it because they invested so heavily in vaccinations rather than therapeutics.

That didn't work out all that well.

They have worshiped Dr.

Fauci and the idea they would investigate and find out that not only was he negligent, but he was cognizant from the very beginning that there was a chance that the money that he had funded had somehow led to the creation of the SARS virus.

And so nobody talks about it, and people who did were demonized and called all sorts of names.

And if

the Republicans take the Senate, and I think when you listen to this, I'm hoping that they did, Rand Paul will be ahead of an omnibus committee, and he will start investigating and will find out what happened.

Yeah.

Yeah, I have a lot of confidence in Rand Paul.

You know, they'll be under oath.

They'll be under oath.

And maybe this administration will be, will have their feet to the fire.

The DOJ doesn't prosecute people if they're lying to Congress unless, you know, they're a MAGA person or they think Steve Bannon or somebody, but, you know, it's not.

James Clapper or John Brennan or Pete, Andrew McCabe, they lie all the time.

But maybe Fauci will not lie under oath when he's on national TV and they're going to read him the environacted emails in which he I think he called it a bright, shiny object, you know.

So that's one thing that will will happen.

That's one investigation that will go on.

And that will be something to see if they have the majority.

And they will work in concert with a house.

I think there will be a left-right, right hook, left jab.

I mean, one house,

I don't think they need to duplicate like they did in the past, but they can have simultaneous investigations of what?

Hunter Biden's laptop, calling people from the intelligence committee that signed that letter.

What information do you have that we didn't have that convinced you this was Russian collusion?

And where was the lab?

And whose hand, I mean, the laptop, in whose hands was it in?

And why did the FBI put it on ice?

And who did that?

And who suppressed information about it?

And what is on it?

And why didn't the

Biden DOJ prosecute or at least indict Hunter for

apparently a lot of felonies that were self-evident from the laptop?

And then they were going to read out loud some of the communications.

It's not going to look good for Joe Biden.

The only $64,000 question I have is: is the left going to play along with it as a way to get rid of him?

Yeah, I bet they will.

I don't know.

So the laptop will be something they'll investigate.

And the Wuhan lab, I don't know if Russian collusion is gone or not, but even though Durham was not successful to

you know, get indictments, I mean, convictions in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia juries, he still brought up some fascinating information.

Most, I think, relevant is that the FBI

knew that the dossier was false, and they knew that to the extent that they were offering Christopher Steele a million-dollar bonus to come up with one iota of evidence that they could take to the FISA court.

He couldn't do it.

They never paid him out.

And guess what?

They still took that dossier and told a judge it was authentic.

That seems like it's a racketeering charge or it's a conspiracy to defraud the U.S.

government or it's judicial malpractice.

And who did that?

James Comey, Andrew McCabe?

Are they going to have to come in and testify?

So remember, I think everybody has to also put it in the context: the Republicans do not have 60 votes in the Senate and they do not have the president seat.

So what does that mean?

That means that if the House passes good debt reduction or energy development, the Senate concurs and they send that bill to Biden.

He won't sign it.

And then he will veto it.

And then when it's a chance to override, at most, they're going to have 54 seats.

So, Victor, I was wondering if, given that the Congress has control of the purse, as we always say, if the following or pursuing the same kind of policies as the

Kentucky

Attorney General Daniel Cameron of purging ESG policies or

companies from the

government finances.

I guess that's what I'm trying to say.

The House of Representatives can stop, you know, they can just

not pass a bill.

They can defund the government.

That's what usually happens.

They can shut down the government because they can say no more money.

Yes, they can do that.

And there's other things that remember the way that the founders set the government up, each branch checks the other one and vice versa.

So what can the Republican Congress do?

They can

override or veto.

They don't have the votes to do that.

But they can not approve any of these high nominations and they can reject them.

And I don't think, given the way that the Democrats have acted and what they've said,

And they've tolerated people going to the homes of Supreme Court justice, they've talked about packing the court.

I don't think they're going to approve very many federal judges on the part of Joe Biden.

I really don't think they're going to do that.

I don't think they're going to approve cabinet level or sub-cabinet level appointments.

I really don't.

And so that's one way they can ask them.

The other thing is the big check is the power of the purse from the House, but it's also impeachment.

So I do think there's going to be an article of impeachment at some point.

I don't think it's going to be weaponized or politicized.

I think it's just going to, they're going to call in Mallorca's.

They're going to say,

did you or did you not follow this law, this immigration law?

Did you or did you not?

And they're going to ask Joe Biden that.

And then depending on what the investigations show about the Biden consortium, they'll find out whether there's grounds to impeach him for that.

And they will do that.

Will they convict him?

Probably not, unless things get really bad and it's so embarrassing that five or six

Democratic senators join the Republican majority.

Do you think that the Democrats are going to finally learn something from this?

And what I'm referring to, but what I want to refer to specifically is that if they can't be transparent, maybe they shouldn't do it at all.

I mean, if these guys get impeached for something they were doing on the behest of their

leadership.

You know, it seems to me that everybody should be thinking twice at that level of whether the leaders are right or not.

And if it's not transparent, I'm not going to do it.

You know?

But you don't think

if you impeach Merrick Garland and say you weaponize the FBI

and you

surveil parents or whatever particular, or you guys, you know, even though you weren't there when it actually happened, you knew that that laptop was still being suppressed.

And they went after whistleblowers.

There's things you can investigate.

It depends on what they find when they investigate and how clever or how competent they are in bringing out information.

And impeachment is, it's not what the founders wanted.

They didn't want the out party in the president's first term.

They didn't really like the idea that the out party, when it got a majority pro forma, impeached the president as a way of censoring.

You know what I mean?

Even though they knew they didn't have the votes in the Senate.

That's why they made it so hard to impeach a president.

Because you need

the two-thirds, but I think, you know, if two-thirds vote, you don't have them.

So

we've never convicted a president.

We've peached him, but we've never convicted them.

And so they won't convict Joe Biden, but they can embarrass him, and they can find out all sorts of things that are happening.

And so that's, I think, they're torn.

They don't quite know what to do.

And they have an agenda.

They want to be positive.

They want to press forward, but they're not going to be able to enact that agenda.

very well because of the veto power.

But they can make life miserable for the the left and stop all this stuff, except for executive orders.

And they can impeach Joe Biden.

And they can find enough information that if it was something like Richard Nixon, where Republicans joined to give them the necessary two-thirds to convict.

Yeah.

Well, you know, you mentioned Biden, and I was thinking that as this campaign.

Actually, to correct myself, I don't mean that

Nixon was convicted.

I mean that, or that he was impeached.

But once people started defecting, he knew that he would be impeached and he knew he'd be convicted, so he resigned.

Yeah, yeah, he sure did.

Speaking of Biden and

actually Obama, too, I thought that one of the things the election campaigns brought out was both of these, one a former president, and the other one, the president right now.

Joe Biden's cognitive problems, and then Obama, he's very strange, just seemed sort of like a gray-haired,

you know, stump speech,

fake southern accent.

And I don't get the feeling.

I mean, I don't know.

Maybe the left liked having him out, but he didn't really seem to do much for the whole thing.

He does the same thing.

And Jack and I talked about that.

He just lies.

I mean, he goes out and he calls people that they want to destroy older people by cutting their Social Security or they're selfish and they're corporate.

When he was talking yesterday about corporate greed and the greedy people, I'm thinking, what did Netflix pay you and your wife for your Hollywood script genius?

What, $50 million?

How do you afford 40 acres on Martha's Vineyard or Calorama Mansion or new big home in Oahu

plus your Hyde Park mansion?

How do you do all that?

Unless you're a corporate lackey.

And for him to make all of that money, And then every once in a while at a funeral or a stump speech to venture out, roll up the sleeves, get the fake accent and start lecturing everybody how amoral and morally inferior they are.

It's disgusting.

It really is.

It's so artificial.

And I think everybody's tired of them.

And, you know, it's...

They're all back to spec.

Michelle, remember, I've never been proud of my country before.

And it's a downright mean country.

And then they hushed all that up.

And we all love Michelle.

And then as soon as they went out of office, she started talking about white folks did this and white folks did this.

And

it's not going to work.

It's sort of, you know,

I think the Jacobin reign is over.

The reign of terror is over.

And I don't think they're going to be able, the thermidors are coming.

I don't think they're going to be able to

sustain this reaction against them because

they incurred hatred at so many and opposition in so many foci.

I mean, There's the parents who don't like their kids being indoctrinated with this drag stuff and transgenderism and critical race theory.

And then there's the civil libertarians that are just angry about the Ministry of Truth and working with Silicon Valley.

Then there's the independent business person.

And look what they did to the economy.

And then there's the fuel situation.

There's the high interest.

Everybody has a beef against this.

It's kind of like murder, you know, that

murder on the Nile.

Everybody's involved.

Everybody wants this guy out.

Everybody wants him out.

And they want the AOC and they want all of these people out because they're the on-midas people.

Everything they touch goes to dross.

I think that was Murder on the Orient Express, where they were all involved.

Not Murder on the Nile.

Sorry.

Murder on the Orient Express.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, Obama seems to me like an avatar of the Democratic Party.

He's just the perfect washed up fake

and uh you know i like you say that southern accent is so fake i don't even know how he went to southern hawaii was his grandmother was a bank president the one he threw under the bus and said was a racist but yeah he was and then he went to occidental and then he went to columbia the guy has never been in the private sector until now as a consultant

and he did one thing that was very brilliant and i mentioned that to jack Jack.

He sized up that people didn't like him.

And to see and hear him is not to like him.

But they liked the idea of a young, fresh African-American as president.

But they didn't like what he did.

So he was always pulling around the low 40s.

And then when the controversial Trump and the controversial Hillary locked horns and they threw mud back and forth, he just bowed out.

the whole 2016 and played golf and waved at everybody.

He loved it.

He had his, that's what he always wanted to do anyway.

He just wanted to wear his manicure shorts and his sunglasses and wave down in Southern California or Arizona and then let these guys fight it out.

I'm the president.

And he went back up to 50%.

And what he was doing that whole last year was cutting deals with book publishers for memoirs and for Netflix and innovative ideas at the Obamas.

And just ask yourself, this is a guy who, right on the eve of running for presidency, was basically

snookered by Tony Resco, a crook, who sold him a lot

and for quid pro quo insider advantage and later went to prison, not for that, but for things like that.

And that was illegal to do that.

He didn't report the true market value.

So part of it was a gift that he didn't report.

And he goes from there to hundreds of millions of dollars.

dollars and then he goes and blasts the corporate teat that he has suckled on and it just it's disgusting and i think people don't want to listen to it anymore like you look at everybody rolls their eyes so they're not

they're not going to listen to him and they're not going to listen to hillary believe that they're not going to listen to kamala or kamala or whatever she is on monday or tuesday and they're not going to listen to nancy pelosi and they're not going to listen to biden who

he's the second person that I kind of noticed in this campaign season.

He started to come out and he just, his, his cognitive difficulties seem to come out even more.

It's a hard question whether he's more impaired than Federman.

It really is, because

to open his mouth is a disaster.

So just the last 72 hours, he said that his son was killed in the Iraq war.

That was a lie.

He's lied about that before.

He confused the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war.

He swore that he passed the student loan amnesty on two votes.

He didn't.

He didn't even bring it up to Congress.

He said that gasoline was $5 a gallon, was half that when he came into office.

He just said that he cut the national debt in half.

That's just a joke.

I'm sure we own $15 million, billion, trillion dollars now because of Joe Biden.

So, I mean, he doesn't know what, as I said, he doesn't know what century we're in.

He doesn't know how many states there are.

He doesn't know where he is.

And it gets worse and worse and worse as he gets out.

And all he's doing is he's just going to a few blue areas, and they've carefully polled it.

And so he can say, post facto, I was out there stumping.

Otherwise, people are going to say, well,

it's your fault.

You were down at 39 and and 38 percent in some of the latest polls and you drag drag us all down then you hid in

in delaware so you're to blame he doesn't want that to happen but of course

he's not to blame it's it's the agenda it's the

it's what they voted for you really think that mr ryan ohio said joe i'm not going to vote for that Uh-uh-uh.

You think Kelly and Arizona said, oh, no way, I'm going to close that border.

No, they all voted for it and as i said earlier they

they won't change what they've done they won't man up to it and defend it and all they do is smear people and try to distract and i think it's not going to work people it's they've shouted woof so many times there's no woof and everybody understands that you're so right they're sick of it they're just sick of it every time you know i i you know this this is after the midterms and i'll make a a prediction that I have to travel Tuesday, and I have to go to the board meeting of the Bradley nonprofit, and then I have to go to Tucson.

But the moment I get back into a building, which I think will be late, I'm going to watch MSNBC and CNN till midnight.

Because that was one of the most gleeful things I ever experienced in 2016.

And let's see what they say.

Because I'm going to really,

I'm going to think, hmm,

this person will say voter suppression.

Who are they going to blame?

They're blaming the mayor of New York.

Have you known that?

Yeah, that was one thing I was going to talk to you about today.

They think Eric Adams will be the fall guy.

At least a CNN article said that, that he

set the Democrats up for a loss because he hyped crime and he played into right-wing narrative.

I know.

He hasn't done it.

I mean,

he's culpable for crime because

everything but murder.

And it's very funny what they're doing.

They're telling us two lies, the left.

They're saying, well, red states have higher murder rates than blue states.

Well, that's only because

there's blue mayors in these enclaves where all the crime takes place.

You know what I'm saying?

So you look at.

Texas, they're not killing in the suburbs of Texas.

They're doing it in Houston.

And

they have

a blue mayor.

And that's true.

And then the second lie they're saying is, well, murder didn't go up this year.

Well, how could it?

It skyrocketed the highest in 40 years last year.

And

if it keeps going up at that rate, there won't be anybody alive.

So, of course, it has leveled off, but the others haven't.

Rape, assault, burglary, armed robbery, they've all gone up.

And they've gone up above last year's record levels.

And of course, they're going to go up because the criminal knows they're not going to pay any price.

And they look at people as sheep and they're wolves.

And they think there's nobody out there, a shepherd with a gun that's going to stop me from, you know, devouring this flock.

And they just prey on people.

And they know it.

What's weird about it is you think at some point they'd have some morality and they'd say, this poor woman, we let out her husband that had beaten her to a pulp.

And we let him out after he did that, and he went and executed her in front of her, or this poor jogger.

You turn on these, you know, I was looking today.

I turned on the MSNBC CNN just to see how they talk about another jogger.

Remember the one before who was killed?

Yeah.

And

wasn't that in Atlanta, I think?

Yes, it was in Atlanta.

And this one is in Central Park, and it's the same thing.

Well, you know, you just don't jog at 5:30.

Why don't you jog at 5:30?

There's less traffic.

It's your city.

You have a right to jog.

It shouldn't be dangerous.

But all of a sudden they're saying, well, she went out there.

And so this guy who's been arrested 25 times and let out, of course he's going to rape and kill her.

It's just so sick and evil.

And I think people are trying to,

this election's about civilization, it was at the time you hear it.

And it's, this thing is not sustainable.

And I don't care what your political affiliation, your ideology ideology are, who you voted for in the past or who you will vote for in the future.

Right now, at this moment, according to your station, you're going to make a vote that's either going to make this intolerable situation hopeless or just give us a ray of light that people are going to say, I'm going to reclaim civilization.

And we're going to change the vocabulary.

We're going to take vagrants and say, no, you're not going to defecate on our sidewalks.

I'm sorry.

I feel bad for you.

But we're going to make a tent city and you're going to go out and live there, but you're not going to live on the public space.

I'm sorry.

You're just not going to do it.

And if you have to regain that confidence in your culture and your civilization, but if you don't have any education about what it is or where it came from or you despise it or for your own particular selfish reasons, you try to play a victim.

And you use all of these tropes to trash the very civilization that birthed and nurtured you, then maybe you won't do that.

We'll see.

It's going to require a lot of courage.

A lot of people are going to have to stand up and they're going to have to say,

not this pig.

Not this pig.

No way.

You can say whatever you want.

It's not going to work.

You know, just before we go to a break, I just had a quick one.

Do you think that Jill and the Biden's handlers will

try to resist any sort of effort to get him out of office by the 25th Amendment or whatever?

I mean, that's what I think the Democrats.

Oh, no, they won't.

No, they won't.

How that works with them is

if they feel that there's a move for the 25th Amendment, they will

ask around and they'll try to get a preview of the vote.

And then he would resign.

They won't ever go through with an actual impeachment of 25th.

We've never had a 25th.

It's a terrible amendment.

You can see that it's, you've got to go to the cabinet and you've got to find a get a vote from the cabinet officers for referral to Congress.

It's just,

it's a bad idea.

It's not going to work.

And the impeachment,

the only way that he will be impeached and convicted is if enough Democrats, if he gets down to the low 30s or middle 30s approval rating and we go into a full-fled stagflationary recession, which I think we're going to go into, unfortunately, and

he can be the scapegoat receptacle of all the collective stupidity of the Democratic Party.

And they can say, you did it.

And then they can drive him out from the community and he'll be the scapegoat.

And then they'll be purified and they'll say, you know what?

We didn't do that.

And there's been times before when they did that, because remember, they did that with McGovern.

I mean, he wanted to cut half of all the aircraft carriers.

He wanted to give everybody, I don't know what it was, $1,000 guaranteed income.

And he got slaughtered.

And guess what?

Next president was

1976.

He had a southern accent.

He was a liberal, but he faked it like he was a southern conservative.

And then when he turned out to be hard left, they lost it for 12 years.

And then they got together and James Carville and all those guys came out of the woodwork and they said, you know what?

We're not going to nominate anybody.

that doesn't have a southern accent.

We're not going to nominate another Dukakis.

We're not going to to nominate another Mondale because they lose.

We're not going to nominate another McGovern.

Jimmy Carter won because he faked it out like he was a conservative.

So we've got Bill Clinton and we've got Al Gore and they've got Southern accents.

And they did.

They won for

eight years.

And then Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000.

He lost the election, but he had a Southern accent.

And then

they did it again.

They nominated John Kerry.

Then finally, the left said we cannot nominate a white liberal from the North.

So we've got to find a savior.

And they found it in Obama.

But then they're going right back with Biden.

And I just think that that's the only hope for them, that after they crash and burn in the midterms and then the presidency, they get together and say,

you know, we're not woke anymore.

We're not Me Too anymore.

We're not the squad anymore.

We're not Elizabeth Warren Shrill anymore.

We're not Bernie Sanders socialists.

We're just the opposition party.

We're working within the boundary lines against the Republicans.

And

maybe they'll do that, but I'm not counting on it.

No, I think that the party will die out and another party will come emerge before something like that happens.

I could be wrong, but.

Ideologues are different.

They're not empirical.

They're driven by zealotry.

And they have a long history of being in the minority and still seizing power, whether it's the Maoists or the Bolsheviks or the Jacobins

or people in Coursai in the third book of the city.

They understand that, that they're the most zealous, that they don't sleep, they think 24-7 about seizing power for themselves.

And the opposition is sort of Marcus of Queensbury rules.

So they take power and they will never give it up.

unless they're forced to and they never change.

So these people are still, I mean, Joe Biden today,

just this yesterday and today, talked about shutting all the coal down.

And then Joe Manchin said, what the fuck?

What are you doing?

I'm already going to lose the next.

Now you're going to shut all the coal plants down?

There's no heat in this, in New England.

Why would you do that?

And, you know, that's because he's an ideologue.

That's why, Joe, he's, Biden's under the influence of the woke socialist movement, and they don't care about people.

They care about doctrine and their own power.

Victor, on that note, let's go ahead and take a moment for some messages and come right back and talk a little bit about

voting by mail and perhaps Gavin Newsome.

Let's go ahead and listen to a few messages.

We'll be right back.

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We're back, Victor.

Sort of a grim note that we ended on, but I think you're right.

But I wanted to talk too about the vote by mail.

That's the one thing in our elections that I feel, and I think a lot of us feel, is the biggest opening for fraud.

And I was recently looking at a history of

vote by mail, which I believe began in 2010 or somewhere thereabouts in Oregon.

But the article said that originally the Democrats were very suspicious of it and that voter fraud could come from it.

But then it switched to when Trump started accusing the left of massive voter fraud.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that.

Like, where do you think vote by mail is going?

Is it going to end up that there is a lot of fraud and disappear?

Or are we just going to go to the bottom?

I think it's one of the worst things we've had.

We used to have something called the absentee ballot.

It was about 20%,

15 to 20%, and it was people who requested a ballot because they were at work or they were ill or they were out of town.

And it was carefully controlled.

And then when COVID came along, the left started to look at this and they thought, you know what, we can change these voting laws so we can relax it.

What do I mean by change the voting laws?

I can give you an example.

All first and last name don't have to be there in some states.

If it doesn't match the registrar, they don't care.

If you didn't sign it or didn't sign it incompletely, it didn't matter.

Or if you turned it in a little late, or you can even send in some states an absentee ballot on the day of the election, which is just crazy.

and then vote harvesting you can have third parties you know knock on your door and here it is and we'll just wait around while you do it and here's the people to vote for fill it out we'll take it to the drop box or the registrar and it was funny you're right about that i i remember stanford law school got a bipartisan uh

they uh got a not a bipartisan but they got a committee to look at it they were leftists and they were shocked about the proposed changes in the california voting laws they said wow of course, they said the right would do it.

It goes, wow, we got to be careful because the right could steal an election because there's no safeguards.

And then when COVID came along and they saw how this money was pouring in, you know, the Zuckerberg bucks and how organized it, then they thought, wow, this is great.

We can master this.

And the result was,

depending on what rubric you use in most states, it was election day became a construct of 30%.

That was it.

And now what they're terrified is of this election round, when you look at the early voting and the absentee ballots, the Republicans are not that far behind.

And

that was their emphases.

And the Republicans will get 70% of the actual showing up to vote.

So we'll see, but we'll see what happened when people listen to this.

But I have a feeling that that's an indicator, along with the other indicator.

You know, if you ask somebody, you know, people who are afraid to tell anyone how they vote, and that's about 70%.

And so it seems to me that these rubrics are suggesting there's going to be a big Republican night because I think the Republicans understand

what this

idea of an absentee ballot is.

It's you have to have an absentee ballot.

You have no rules.

You have to accept them all.

You have to get the accepting rates from 5% in Georgia or Alabama or Montana down to 0.3.

And you've got to flood it by 10, you know, six, seven times more ballots and, you know, one-tenth of the rejection rate.

That's what that's, and if you don't do that, you're a racist.

You get into this Orwellian situation where you have a record number of ballots in Georgia and Stacey Abrams is saying it's suppressed.

So

it's a way of getting...

The way to look at this in the larger picture is the left has an agenda that's contrary to human nature.

It's contrary to the traditions of the United States.

They know that.

They feel that they can push it down people's throat, and they can do that through institutional power and the media and Silicon Valley and social media and computers and the internet and entertainment and K through 12 and academia.

And they're going to push that through and they have the money.

And then they can change the rules so that the popular expression doesn't exist.

And

I think they've kind of outsmarted themselves.

I think they have really turned a lot of minority people and poor working whites that used to be the base of the Democratic Party.

And none of these people like them.

They're even alienating Muslims.

They're even alienating Punjabi Americans here in California.

I've talked to a lot of them.

Because when you go to the heart of these communities and you mock religion and you force their children to be, you know, drag shows are okay and transitioning is something you should

encounter with your own children.

All of that stuff, and abortion to the last moment before birth, that's not something traditional faith-based communities like.

And it used to be, well, they're going to like it because they're people of color.

And we have decided that all people of color that aren't white are a ecumenical,

you know, the new demographic is destiny soon to be majority.

And they don't have an independent voice.

We tell them what to say, what to do, and then we give them federal spoil.

That's how it works.

Yeah.

You mentioned our

name that just sends shivers down my back.

Whose name did I mention?

I don't even remember.

I think you mentioned Gavin Christopher Newsom.

Oh, yes.

So

we wanted to talk about because Jack actually mentioned it, and you didn't have time in your podcast with him, that Newsom was saying as the campaigns were coming to a close that the Democrats were blowing their own message.

And I was wondering if you could talk about that and or anything you want on Gavin Newsome.

Well, Gavin Newsom

represents the malu that he emerged out of.

And what was that malu?

It was what it was a 100-mile radius that gave us, oh, it gave us Barbara Boxer, it gave us Nancy Pelosi, it gave us,

I don't know,

Diane Feinstein, it gave us Gavin Newsome.

These are all Bay Area people who grew up knowing each other and were infused with Silicon Valley cash,

whether directly or indirectly.

So, I mean, when he ran for the lieutenant government, he always talked about all the businesses

he created.

You know, I created this and I'm into hotels and was always my friend, my partner, Gordon.

It was Gordon Getty, who inherited billions of dollars.

And

he was,

you know, he was just part of that,

I guess you'd call it plutocracy or aristocracy, but he never went out on his own.

And then he just went right into politics, kind of, I guess he was a good-looking guy, and he had this Getty bankroll him.

And then he was mayor, lieutenant governor, now he's governor.

And

what has he ever done?

Just, I can't think of anything.

And what do I mean by that?

What has he ever done?

While he was mayor, San Francisco fell apart.

While he was lieutenant governor and Jerry Brown was mismanaged, California fell apart.

It really fell apart.

And I'm just not saying that.

There are rubrics that you can see.

When we were growing up, we did not have an annual carbon-rich forest fire,

smog cloud over the state that burned 60 million trees.

But we had a deliberate policy not to thin our forest, partly to save money,

so we didn't, and partly because the

lunatics on the coast from the universities said that the new forest management said that, you know, when you get a fire, it's pretty good.

And if it burns down a cabin or an ancestral fourth generation mountain home, well, they shouldn't have been there in the first place.

And the mountains are for people like us to put our hiking boots on and our pleated jackets and go once or twice a year up to the John Muir Trail.

Or we know somebody of the place at Tahoe or something, but it's not for Joe middle-class yokel to get his big Longhorn truck and put a Winnebago and tow it all the way up into the rarefied, beautiful air of the Sierra and get away.

It's not that at all.

And then you look at the high-speed rail, Nuff said, 15 billion down a rat hole.

And it's never going to be finished with no track it's it's disrupted commerce and life in the valley it's just a complete boondoggle and it also suggests what could have happened we could have had a rail that with two lines so you when you drive by the amtrak on the santa fe line you see the

train sitting there to on a sidetrack to let the others go why didn't we just do two tracks Why didn't we just do the Santa Fe two tracks?

Why didn't we just do six lanes, the 99, six lanes the 101, six lanes I-5?

It would be a whole different state if we had done that.

And then there was a homeless.

Why didn't somebody have the intellectual or moral courage to say, this is barbaric, this is a medieval city?

We're not going to do that.

Come up with some solution.

Make housing, deregulate the housing market.

Make it possible to add an addition on your house without having to spend a fortune

to all these bureaucracies in California.

Now, I drove by a housing development the other day, day, and you know what I saw?

I saw a guy on a tripod with a camera, and he was filming people building the home.

And it wasn't, he had an insignia, you know, back, he was one of the builders.

So, what he was obviously doing was just filming how they built the house because he knew that some legal team was going to come in there and sue him and say, Oh, I have a client that says you didn't put

something, something, so he wanted to have proof that he did what he was supposed to do.

Think of the cost for that

and that's everything in california and medi-cal have to burst in california or medi-cal we don't we just can't stop it dt cards dmv lost a hundred thousand votes it's total chaos and it's you know it's never in the history of the united states has a state required so much from a citizen in terms of property tax assessments, sales tax, income tax, and gas tax, and got so little in return.

And you couldn't stop it if you want.

I mean, in maybe a 20-mile radius, I would say there's millions of dollars that are changing hands down at swap meets on corners,

little

umbrellas you'll see in the California downtown where people are peddling.

They're not paying sales tax on that.

Nobody's paying sales tax on that.

There's a huge black market in California.

It is the most legal and most illegal state in the United States.

Because it's so hyper-legal, and I'm going to give another tutorial shout out to Justice Sotomayere,

because

de ure,

de jure, by law, it is the most hyper-legal anal retentive state in the Union.

De facto, in reality, people don't follow it.

Many of them don't.

Half of them don't.

So it's lawless.

Because you couldn't follow if you want.

They couldn't understand it.

A lot of people don't read English well enough to understand it or they don't have the money.

And so they just ignore it.

And then

the state people who made the laws say, you know what?

We had all of these fines

to really fine people for smoky pipe on their tailpipe or.

Their car was too loud.

We were going to really clean.

But then all of the poor people that we brought in, they can't do it.

So we'll just give them amnesties.

And so you look at DMV, they're always

invoking amnesties so you don't have to pay all these fines that nobody pays.

Yeah.

And, you know, I can add to your list, education is in shambles.

And didn't you recently say on a podcast that the state all of a sudden has 30 billion, I think you say, that it doesn't know where it is?

Nope, they don't know where it is.

That was

Chan's,

he's a colleague at Hoover.

I hope everybody will vote for him.

He may be the only Republican that has a chance at a statewide office.

He's kind of apolitical.

He's just

an economic sort of analyst, and

he wants to bring a team in there and look at the books

and then just say, this is not how you run a state,

which means he's competent, which means that if he's competent, then he's liberal or protectionist or racist or xenophobic.

I don't know what he is, because he's competent.

But

yeah, the state is,

this is what Newsom created.

And then every once in a while, you know,

he gets this gravelly voice and this tough guy image, and he attacks Florida, or he attacks Texas, or he says people want to come to California.

They're not.

They're leaving California.

They're leaving, leaving, leaving California.

California has one attraction.

27% of the population of California was not born in the United States.

And so, what that means is that for a lot of people in Latin America, South America, Central America, Mexico, Southeast Asia, however bad California is, given its natural beauty and it's part of the United States, it's still far better than where they came from.

So they will continue to come and immigrate to California.

But the people who are here and are culturated to what it used to be and what it could be are leaving.

Too many of of them are leaving.

Or they're aging and dying off.

And so I'm not confident about the future of it.

Just drive down the, just drive.

I just drove through Los Angeles and see all the way that people drive.

They're absolutely insane.

And

the contempt, look at the streets of downtown LA.

Look at Venice Beach.

Look at Santa Monica.

And

what would, Sammy, what would it take to have a governor who did the following, who said, we're going to make it against the law to camp out on a public sidewalk?

We have facilities.

They're not the Hilton, but you'll get a tent and a cot, and we will take you there.

And

it's going to be like an institution.

And if you have severe mental problems, we'll build mental hospitals and commit you and get you the care, but you're not going to sit there.

and do the things that you do and assault people right on the streets of our beautiful cities.

You're not going to do do that.

And if you go in and you commit a crime, just like you used to, and you get three strikes, you're not coming out.

And we can build the prisons, but we'll create a deterrent so you don't do that.

What would happen if somebody said that?

Yeah.

Well, we're going to go in and we're going to clean up the forest.

We're going to get timber companies to go in there and harvest trees that are sick or dying or need to be harvested.

And we're going to recreate a timber industry and we're going to recreate a mining industry.

You know what?

We have the fifth largest reserves of natural gas and oil of the 50 states.

We're going to reboot the fossil fuel industry because we have to, because we're the second largest consumer.

I think Texas alone only consumes more gas than we do.

And, you know, and we it's not very moral to tell other states to produce what we want, but we that we have that we won't produce.

And so yeah, you asked, you asked what would would it take for this?

I'll tell you what it would take if you want to hear the answer.

Yeah.

Not have so many Uber poor and not have so many Uber rich.

That dichotomy is a disaster for democracy and for

the

very fabric of our lives.

And how did that happen?

You know how that happened?

Globalization.

Yes.

Globalization created open border.

Open border and a highly regulated state that warred on the middle class.

So we had three things going on at once.

We brought in the world's poor

and then

these ports that looked out at Asia, LA area, San Francisco especially.

They had globalized skills.

They were the pillars of our educational system, Stanford.

Berkeley, CLAS,

this cognitive professional elite got very wealthy with a global market, especially vis-a-vis China.

And more money poured into that Bay Area than has ever poured in anywhere in history, $7 trillion.

And it created an entire class that said, you know what?

I'm a philosopher king.

And I can tell that SOV down there in Bakersfield or I can tell him in Merced or Modesto how he should live.

And if it's a little bit, a little bit inconvenient for me, it won't matter.

I'm so rich.

I'm not going to worry about it.

I can evade.

I can get teachers unions and unionization in every school.

I can get rid of charter schools.

I can war on homeschooling, but my kids are going to go to prep schools.

They're not going to go in the public school.

That attitude was created by that great deal of wealth.

And then the other people just said, you know,

I'm leaving.

I'm leaving.

I'm leaving.

I got to get out of here.

So that was the Doug Mason, the Pete Wilson, the Reagan voter, the Schwarzenegger.

They don't exist anymore.

They're gone.

They've enriched Idaho and Nevada.

When DeSantis says in Texas they brag, I'm glad that they brag, but part of it is that we don't even acknowledge that

that stereotype of Californians that come and screw up their state.

There are some liberal people that go there for strictly selfish reasons about finances and taxes, but the majority of Californians that are going were our best citizens.

And they're very talented and they have capital and they've really helped Florida and they've helped Texas and they've helped Idaho and they've helped Nevada and we lost that capital and brain drain that citizen drain so that you put all of that together that perfect storm and it's just

it's destroyed everything yeah it's very depressing it I don't see it turning around I don't know it's it's it's kind of like I don't know what the proper simile is Lord of the Flies it's a return to barbarism or it's I'll give you an example I feel like Odysseus you know, when

you see the Cyclops or the sirens or

the Lystragonians, so I went to get diesel fuel

and I went to

a place and a guy pulled in with a truck and a long trailer and he took up the entire three pumps

and he didn't speak English.

He just sat there.

And he had a huge tank and then nobody could get could get diesel.

He was there for 20 minutes.

So I pulled around and I thought, you know what, I'm going to go to another place.

And I got

behind somebody and the person ahead of me wouldn't move.

And I knocked on the window.

He didn't speak English and his truck was dead.

So I backed out and I went to my third Odyssean experience.

And as I was driving by, there was a very heavyset woman in a huge Yukon, and she was by the side of the road out of gas, maybe 50 yards from her goal of home Ithaca.

And she's stuck there.

And she has a very, very obese daughter who is alone pushing that.

Oh, my God.

And nobody's stopped.

And so finally, another person stopped, a woman, woman, woman.

And so 69-year-old Victor and the two kind of heavy, the daughter and the other person, we pushed that thing

for about 50 yards and we had to go up the ramp into the, you know, when she's sitting there.

And I said, well, why didn't you get gas?

And she goes, it's so expensive.

I never, I just,

I just drive around because the longer I drive around, I think the price will drop.

And I said, well, what do you mean?

She goes, I just can't go.

I just can't do it.

I just can't pay those prices.

And I said, but you don't have any gas in your car and you're out in the middle of the road.

That's so sad.

It is sad.

It's very tragic, but that's life in California.

And finally, I thought, you know, as I said to Jack, I went to Home Depot and all I wanted to do was, all I wanted to do, I thought, I just

feel like this is the business I chose.

I just want to get some wood chips.

That's all I want today.

Just four little bags for a garden.

So I go in there and the garden section's closed.

And I said, the garden section's closed and she said yes and i said why is it closed well we don't have anybody to work i said the garden section you only have one person there's only she goes well

off the record people walk out with stuff because we have kind of a garage door opening

i said okay I thought I'm here.

I'll go get some little micro light bulbs for some outdoor lights.

I go get them.

And there's no checkout.

As I told Jack, there there was nowhere to check out.

It's closed.

The self-serve, like four of them.

And then I said to the person, I said, Are these logs?

She says, Yes.

I said, Well, will you tell me when they're locked?

We don't know when they're going to be locked.

I said, What do you mean you don't know when you're going to be locked?

Well, we have people that just take things, and we don't want to let them know that certain times they can just go.

So we kind of just juggle it around.

And that was my other Odyssean experience.

So, I mean, when you look at it and you put it in context, it's

chaos.

And then this morning I walked out with my dogs and I,

you know, yesterday morning, excuse me, I did a long walk and I see there's a new garbage dump.

It's a beautiful pond.

It's part of...

our ancestry.

It's one of the few places in the San Joaquin Valley that was never farmed.

It was an artesian pond.

There's natural willows.

There's Mr.

Great Horned Owl.

There's Mr.

Red Tail Hawk.

There's Mr.

Coyote.

It's all there.

And guess what else is there?

There is tampons, there's underwear, there's car seats, there's paint, there's a person's whole block of trash.

That person just drove in recently and just stroke.

It's strewn all across the area.

It's just horrible.

How do you stop that?

I don't know.

It's people.

It's people.

And you, so that's California.

Nobody's saying,

look,

I don't care what your first language is.

I don't care what your race is.

I don't care how you look.

I don't want to know any of that.

All I want is everybody to be united on the same page.

I want all of us to speak the King's English.

I want us to rever our traditions that brought us all here.

And I want us to fix things together.

And we can't do that.

We cannot do that.

Be at least as good as our ancestors, which we aren't living up to these days, not in California.

Well, you know, I talk to people because I speak a lot in California.

And so, you know, you have to speak.

You're sitting next to a stranger at dinner.

And what do you talk about?

You talk about security system.

You talk about the price of gas or fuel or diesel.

You talk about who's been broken into and who hasn't been broken into.

You talk about what it's like to walk down in Los Angeles or San Francisco or places like Stockton or Fresno.

That's what people talk about.

It's almost, it's all survival.

It's kind of like the pre-civilizational Wild West, you know, about 1870 in a little town where there's gunslingers in the saloon and there's people shooting and fighting and the townspeople are trying to create civilization.

And most of the, in this reference, I'm talking because the majority and minority of the state are Mexican-American.

That second and third generation is emerging to take the responsibility to restore civilization because there's no one else to do it.

I mean, thank God for

intermarriage and integration and assimilation because we're deprecating the essence of race.

I think that's good.

But there's still a lot of people who were poor who are now middle class.

And as they become middle class, they remember what the state was right.

And they're trying to save it.

And that's why there's a Latino revolt.

Because they're saying, you know what, we came here for civilization because we didn't have civilization in Mexico.

We want civilization.

We saw it.

We grew up with it.

We're going to bring it back.

And then they're kind of bewildered, the leaders, because they thought, wow, the people who did this are the left.

The left, the people who we were so loyal to.

We voted every election for them and they destroyed us.

So there's a sense of betrayal as well.

Yeah, there sure is.

Victor, let's go ahead and take another break and come back and talk a little bit about education.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

And since we're on education, on education, we're on California.

One of the things is education.

I noticed in an article on Quillett by Harvey Silvergate,

I think he's going to be on the Harvard board of

University of Harvard.

He's running.

He's an old liberal guy.

Yeah, and he said he promises to fire

if he becomes, he will fire so many administrators that what is making university

expenses so high for people is the fact that there is administrative bloat and that his promise is to fire as many administrators as he can to bring down the costs of

I think at Yale there's one administrator or staffer for every undergraduate student and the CSU it got down time I retired 20 years ago plus it was

it was I think it was two

two faculty members for one administrator.

And in the time that I had been there, the faculty had grown by 3%.

Administrators had grown, I think, 212%.

That's before the woke movement.

So what's happened is it's very strange because it used to be the left, you know, they were in unions, faculty union, California Faculty Association, the largest union of academics in the world, the CSU's 23 campuses.

And they hated administrators, even though administrators came from their own ranks, because they said, you know, they don't do anything.

They're insects.

They're preying on us.

We teach four classes a semester.

We grade all these papers.

We don't have Thanksgiving or summer.

We're correcting papers or we're preparing for new classes.

You know, it's that academic wine compared to farming.

CSU professor, I found out was life of Riley versus being on an old Oliver tractor with paraquat all day.

So,

but anyway, I heard all this whine about that they did not like deans.

They did not like assistant provosts.

They did not like the president.

That was the way they did.

And then all of a sudden, this woke thing came, and they dropped all of their objections to these people who are useless that don't do anything.

All they do is adjudicate, regulate, oversee, and they really go after faculty because they look at their grading patterns to see if there's systemic racism, or they look at their syllabi to see who what they're reading, or they have a student that was in their class and feels that they were disrespected, and they call the faculty member and yet they're mute

because it's a huge amount of money.

It's several thousand dollars in tuition increases per student that they're paying for these administrators and they're not cheap, they're 250, 300,000.

And when you look at a lot of the statements of these diversity czars,

the type of person that goes in there is by nature fixated on race.

So they, their entire, it's almost impossible to hire them without finding a paper trail.

And the most famous was the Pentagon's diversity czar on Pentagon education programs.

And she had a whole history of racist outbursts.

And it's, it's just a total,

it's kind of like the commissar system in the Soviet Union or the Cultural Revolution, Revolutionary Guard, all these overseers that are not producing anything.

In fact, they're not just

a wash, just a waste of money, but they're hampering people who are doing productive and creative work.

And so, you know, if you have some immigrant students and you're teaching them Herodotus, and then you're trying to teach them

Cicero, and then you're going into Dante, and then to Shakespeare, and then you're going into Locke or Hume, and then you're going to go and maybe in the modern European novel, you might even try Camus or who knows.

But they're going to get some sense of language and

the vocabulary expansion, plot, narrative characterization.

They're going to have to write papers.

That's going to be a very valuable experience for an immigrant to be competitive in their skills vis-a-vis others.

And yet they'll attack that.

They'll say, well, what this person isn't woke, or this person doesn't represent this particular group.

And

no question about this, you know,

You don't assign Euripides' races over Euripides' Hippolytus or Medea or Bacchae.

You just don't.

I'm a big fan of Hesia's works and days, but when you teach Western Civ, you teach the Iliad or the Odyssey, but you wouldn't substitute them and put Hesia there, so you'd have more farmers.

Do you see what I'm saying?

Yeah, exactly.

So they're not using merocratic bases.

They're just doing it

as if they're a czar, and they've done a lot of damage.

I don't think anybody's been able to calibrate the damage that the woke movement has done.

And I mean by that, the billions of dollars, trillions of dollars in capital and labor, and hours and time just devoted to regulation and

God regurgitation, but not teaching and not science and not research.

It's just,

and I found it when I got this long COVID, you know, every, I try to understand what the science is about it.

So I try to budget maybe 30 or 40 minutes every day.

And as I said, I don't read the blogs.

I try to read blind papers to see which,

but when I search long COVID on, say, Google News, I said that before to you.

It's amazing how many articles are about

this particular community feels that they didn't get equity and treatment.

This particular community has been neglected.

How do they know that?

And the point is, the way that nobody's going to be neglected is to find a cure for it, right?

A pharmaceutical cure for it, or a protocol, or a way of life, or something that can help everybody.

But when they're spending so much time saying, did you get this and this and this,

it takes away from the problem, the solution.

Yeah.

Yeah, it sure does.

And as far as administrators are concerned,

they spend less time making the university efficient by managing enrollment, et cetera, and spend more time going to conferences about diversity, equity, and inclusion and monitoring, as you said, their faculty on those things and wasting the faculty time.

And that is a colossal amount of time that's just wasted and money that's frittered away and educations that are not had.

And it's very frustrating.

And I know how they elect the

boards of trustees for California, University of California and CSU and the community colleges.

We do elect them, but I don't know how they do that at Harvard since it's a private school.

It's a private corporation.

They have elections, but you have to be alumnus.

And then once the word, Dartmouth has a few conservative people, but every time they run,

they tend to represent the Harvard or the Yale that was

a model of academic excellence, but not the recent last 10-year graduates.

And then they get people in their groups say that this person is a racist and he will destroy affirmative action or whatever the lie or the slur against him is and they never get elected.

And if they do get elected, they're isolated.

And remember,

I'm not trying to be

libelous, but the university as it's evolved in the early 21st century is probably the most corrupt institution in America.

We saw that with the admission scandal where these minor sports were just shams for these parents that paid and said their kids had these skills that they didn't have and they got in.

But it's going to get worse because

there's certain forces that cannot be reconciled.

And the forces are that

People that have been beneficiaries of race-based quotas are pushing, pushing, pushing for more repertory percentages beyond their percentage in the general population.

At the same time,

the people who would be excluded have access to resources.

So their parents are saying,

I played by all the rules that you told me to play by when my kid was at Stanford camp at six years old.

He's got a 4.5 and all that, but he's colliding against this.

So how much money do you want?

Just tell me how much money.

I had a neighbor that came by once and he just said, tell me how much money it costs to get in to Stanford.

I thought that was absurd.

He was far more insightful than I was because when I started asking around people, I found out a lot of them were giving a lot of money.

And you know what gets me about the academic institutions are is that they're always

this moral shrillness and they're always talking about transparency and they're always talking about let's show everybody.

Why don't the admissions just show how they do it?

That's all they have to do.

Here's a thousand people we let into Yale.

Here's 2,000 we let into Princeton.

Here is the average SAT score.

Here's the SAT score.

We're not going to give them the names.

Here's the GPA.

Here's the, I don't know, community service trifecta.

And here's how much money was given in this person, this person's name, this person.

This is how many people got in as legacies because they were, you know, just put it out there.

They'll never do that.

They'll never do that.

And they, and you can i've met these people i've lived with them for 40 50 years of my life they will look you in the eye and they will be on a committee that you're on and they will give you the most sanctimonious self-righteous you're a racist we're going to hire this person who's black or this person's a woman and then no sooner do they do that than they will walk out the meeting and they'll tell you, well, you know, my son, my daughter, she's at Wellesley, my son's at Brown.

And I said, oh, yeah, yeah.

You know, I,

you know, I had a friend that was a professor there and I called him up and he helped.

And then

it's just the whole system

that they have just been officially trashing.

And they'll say things like, well, we need affirmative action to break up the old voice system.

I said, okay, break it up.

You don't need affirmative action, racial discrimination.

You just say don't use the old voice system.

They'll do anything to get their kids into school.

And yet they'll be very liberal.

So it's weird.

They're almost hierarchical and aristocratic.

And they want all of these

prerogatives of the capitalist system, but then

they outwardly, manifestedly, hypocritically, then accept.

the whole race-based affirmative action.

I guess the subtext is,

well, we don't want that sucker from Ohio.

We don't want him here anyway, that white working class kid.

So screw him, and I'll find a way to get my kid to get around the back door in.

I think that's how they operate.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Well, what I would like everybody to realize is, especially in California, is that these board of trustees are elected and it's very important.

Some of them are

ex-official.

You look at the board of regents.

Yeah.

They're appointed by the board of regents.

They're not elected, they're appointed by the governor, the state CSU board.

You're talking about the community colleges are elected, yes.

Yeah, community colleges are definitely elected.

So people need to get out and know and be part of those elections.

I know that they're small elections.

That's important because given the costs and the highest number of transfers we've ever had, that's a new paradigm where people are going to community college and transferring to the UC system here in California

as a third year, and they save half the cost.

And from what we can tell when people graduate from what studies that I've seen, if you say

Mr.

Smith went two years to, I don't know, De Anza Junior College, and Mr.

Jones went all four years to Berkeley or all five years, there's no difference in the quality of their work in their junior and senior year.

Yeah.

None of that.

No, there's not.

And there's no, nobody would even ask that anyways.

It's all going to say UC Berkeley on it.

Once they're out, right?

They're out.

Yeah, absolutely.

So that it's very important that the community colleges not follow the corruption of the state,

the CSU system and the UC system.

And

so be sure to get out and vote.

That's for sure, especially for those community colleges, because that is a mire

of wokeism that's really destroying.

I think I'm going to have to stop this conversation because I'm 69 and I went to graduate school at 21, right?

Yeah.

So that's 48 years of my life

as a stranger in a strange land.

From the moment I encountered what I, I don't call undergraduate when I was 18, academia, but graduate school, you saw it.

And then, you know, even though I took a hiatus for five years and farmed full time, and then I farmed, you know

simultaneously for a number of years that saved me by the way otherwise i would have ended up like these people but my point is that when you look at it and you see it it's very disturbing because it was sanctimonious it was self-righteous there was

there was mediocrity there was incompetence and the whole structure was not transparent.

And there was not a lot of empathy for the student.

It was always a cause or a political agenda, or it was

some faculty member of performance art or virtue singling.

But nobody ever said, here's Juan Lopez.

He's been here five years.

I'm going to make sure Juan Lopez is as successful as a kid at Andover or Phillips Academy or St.

Paul's.

And I can do that.

because I can teach him Latin or I can teach him classical history or I can work on his vocabulary.

I'm willing to spend 15 minutes after my last class and have Juan come in and tutor him.

But when you start to do that and you said that you're culturally appropriating or you're racist or you're trying to indoctrinate somebody when the very purpose, the very purpose was to make that person successful and competitive and speak beautiful English and write superb English prose.

You know,

I did that for 21 years and all of a sudden, I walked on the campus one day.

It was like the road to Damascus.

And I thought, wow, that guy just passed me.

He hates my guts because he thinks I'm a racist for trying to teach all these minority kids classics.

That guy just shouted me down in

an academic senate meeting.

Why am I doing this?

It's a complete, it's not, you know, and you just, and I just quit.

I quit.

I quit in a matter of retired in 24 hours.

And it was, it was the weirdest thing in the world.

It's sort of this institution is not concerned about their students.

They're not concerned.

And these faculty members are the most privileged people in the world.

It doesn't mean they don't work hard.

I have a lot of empathy for faculty who really do collect papers and they show up and they just don't, you know, they don't take it as a joke.

But compared to what people are doing right now, as I speak,

who are

you know, finishing a hard day of nailing shingles, or they're on their ninth hour in their semi, or they're pumping a a cesspool out,

or they're crawling into a crawl space under a house, or they've been six hours just doing repetitive work in a manufacturing plant.

Compared to that, these are the most entitled people in the country, and yet they're the angriest, and they're the most critical of their country.

I think I could say with all due honesty,

that after 50 years, the number of people who said in any context that this is a great country and this is a wonderful system, and we're so lucky to be alive right now, and we are so lucky to be academics that have choices in our daily life and to be around.

I could say that the total number is about 20 over 50 years, 20 people I could think of.

Compared to the people who said this is a rotten country and this is horrible, it's racist, it's sexist,

oh, this is the,

yeah, so.

So on that note, Victor, we're coming to the end.

And I think we're going to be...

I know I got to get on this before I become a complete mielist.

Maybe I can

whine and say it was the long COVID that gave me brain fog.

But I can't because I'm getting much better.

So

I don't know why I'm feeling better, but I'm getting more pessimistic.

It should be the other way around.

The optimistic thing is that these things can be changed in our democracy, but people really need to pay attention and get out and vote.

They do.

They need to vote.

I hope all of you, by the time you hear this, please say,

you voted.

You've got to vote.

You've got to vote.

Yep.

All right.

It's not going to change until you have a collective lion's roar.

All of us are just little mice going que, que, quink.

But together, when we do, we vote, it's like a roar of a lion.

And on that note, Victor, thank you.

Thanks to our listeners.

And thank you for all your wisdom this afternoon, evening, or whenever anybody's listening to this.

And thank you, everybody, for listening.

I have to travel, but I will try to do a podcast from a hotel room.

And it will be an analysis of the election.

How's that?

Perfect.

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