From Feminism to Twitter

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Hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and the namesake of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show is, of course, Victor Davis-Hanson.

And he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We'll talk about it later, as we always do.

Hey, there could be some first-time listeners here.

There ought to be.

And VictorHansen.com is the place where Victor hangs his hat on the web.

And he's got a lot of his original writings there, exclusive writings there.

And we're going to talk a little more about that later.

A lot to talk about today.

And I think the first issue we'll look at is feminism.

Feminism.

It's the 60th anniversary of the feminine mystique and there's a great piece.

Well, Naomi, our friend Naomi

Sheafer Riley has a wonderful op-ed up that I think it looks at, hey, after all these years, why are women still so unhappy?

And let's get Victor's thoughts on that.

We'll be right back, folks.

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Okay, we're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So, Victor, our,

yeah, Naomi, who I've I've known for many years.

Actually, Naomi's dad was my

political science professor at Holy Cross, way, way back, David Schaefer.

Her husband is Jason Riley, as many people know him from the Wall Street Journal and Manhattan Institute.

He's on Fox a lot.

So, anyway, Naomi is a a wonderful, wonderful writer.

She has a piece up in the New York Post, Why 60 Years of Feminism Has Not Made Women Happier.

And this is based off of the 60th anniversary of Betty Ferdinand's Feminine Mystique.

And

I'm not going to,

I have to read a little thing here.

This surveys

have been done, you know, that.

about the happiness level after all this year of

women.

And here's what Naomi writes: only a little more than half, 58.6%

of women respond yes.

While they're responding to, all things considered, has feminism benefited American families?

That's the question.

A little more than half say they yes.

What's interesting, though, back to Naomi, is the people who said yes also tend to be among the least happy and fulfilled.

In survey after survey, it turns out that people who espouse a secular worldview, people who identify as liberals, and people who never attend religious services report the lowest levels of personal satisfaction, but they also report the highest levels of support for feminist ideals.

Indeed, as feminism's influence has grown over the past half century, women have become less happy.

You know, this is not just a throwaway thing in a small column.

This has been a huge cultural force, and the consequences are significant.

I don't know why this does not get more attention.

I'm glad Naomi wrote this column.

I think it's important.

What are your thoughts about the consequences of 60 years of American feminism?

Well,

there's innate consequences of the...

biological and cultural differences between men and women, and then there's the particular American adaptation to that.

And what she's saying is, don't believe what men say, but when you look at various polls or surveys, what women say that they're not happy.

And the reason they're not happy, they're having a number of cultural civilizational burdens put on them under the guise of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem's idea of liberation.

In other words, what she's saying is that

if they have a natural impulse to marry and have children, and if the society puts a pressure on them, either cultural, i.e., you're not really fulfilled or you're not really a success unless you've got a title or letters after your name, degrees, and you're making this amount of money, or you're not really fulfilled unless you're out of the house, then at the same time, there is an instinctual idea to have children.

How do you balance those two things?

And if you add to that equation that most social scientists, even left-wingers, agree that when the illegitimacy rate went from 10% to 15% in the 40s and 50s up to as high as 50 to 70, depending on the cultural or racial group, and the lack of two parent households and illegitimate is skyrocketed.

So, what they're getting at is that much of our social turmoil, whether that's defined as poor educational systems, less parental control, higher crime rates, higher mental mental health issues.

All of those, in a sense, are a result of

not having a two-parent household with one parent there to nurture that child and to be with that child in those very important formative years, but to, and she uses the word socialist, that it's hand in glove, i.e.

feminism, with the socialist movement where those tasks are are farmed out to the government.

So the government comes in and raises your children in daycare or pre-daycare or pre-kindergarten, whatever term, and life of Julia, all the way through.

And the parent doesn't have control, and you end up with something that

we saw with Youngkin and the Virginia School Board fiascos.

So that's one of our arguments.

And I think it's true.

The other thing is that

innately, there is a desire of humans to reproduce themselves.

It's in our DNA, and it has to be, or the country will, and the nation nation or the world will implode.

And so, how do you balance that idea that women have children?

No matter what the transgender movement says, it's women that have children.

And that requires a burden, and it's also a pleasure, and it's a responsibility, and it's a wonderful thing for women.

And

how do you accommodate that when at the same time you're putting other pressures on them to be away from home and to

be doing something other than to raise children.

So that creates a sort of schizophrenia.

And it's very hard.

And so that means that women work, they get up,

and there's a chance that they're not going to be married their entire life.

They have to go to work.

They come home.

And guess what?

Their husband comes home and somebody's got to do the dishes.

They don't really share because men being men, they have additional housework, they have children, and they have the job, and they're getting frazzled.

And so she's arguing that there has to be some accommodation psychologically, socially, culturally, for women who say, I'm educated, I'm aware, and my primary responsibility is producing good citizens because

my husband is going to be the primary breadwinner.

It doesn't mean I can't have a job, but there's going to be large portions of my life when I'm going to have my primary responsibility.

It's very interesting to me because I might have mentioned before that I had a grandfather who who had three daughters in this house that I live in.

And he thought that they wouldn't be able to take care of his little 135-acre ranch.

So he sent them to Stanford University.

And they got not only bachelor's, but advanced degrees.

And then they came home.

And how did they balance in the 1950s both?

And in the case of my mother, I won't get into her sister.

You know, she had two BAs from University of Pacific and Stanford and a JD from Stanford in 1946.

And what did she do?

She came home and she came back to a little tiny farmhouse, 800 square feet on the corner of the ranch with my father, who made $2,100 a year farming and is a part-time teacher.

And she had three kids.

And she did not use that Stanford degree.

If you could use it, I don't think a woman with a Stanford law degree in the 1950s got much of a job other than

being a cleric.

But she was 40 years old before she went back back to work.

And we were in the second and third grade.

But I have the most wonderful memories of being age, you know, from my first memories at four

all the way up to, you know, eight, nine with my mother home.

Because,

wow, she would

introduce composers to us, and we had to dance with her around the room to Chakowski or Peter and the Wolf, or we sang songs from South Pacific, or she taught us how to play baseball,

or she taught us how to ride bicycles, or she taught us the scientific names of plants and how to garden.

And then she went to work, and she got up at five in the morning.

She drove all the way to Fresno in these old beat-up cars, and she came broke down half the time, it seemed.

And she came home, and we came home alone.

We came back to the farm.

In those days, it was perfectly safe.

I had wonderful grandparents that we rode our little bikes around the ranch back to my grandparents' house and we came home and she came home absolutely worn out.

That's

what kind of legal work was she doing?

She was a principal.

There was a new, she was 40 years old and the governor, Pat Brown, created a new court called the Fifth District State Court of Appeals.

And there was a wonderful judge named Phil Conley who was married to Phoebe McClatchy.

And they were hiring and she went up there and applied and she was 40 years old and she'd been out of law school for 17, 18 years

and he hired her and that was just unheard of and she was the court attorney in charge of his law clerk or his law assistant and then she did that for 16 years until she was in her early 50s and then she was appointed by Jerry Brown as a superior court justice and then

three years later, she was a, I think she was the second or third woman to be a state court of appeals justice.

And then she died very early in her 60s from a brain tumor.

And she was on the state court of appeals on the fifth district.

And she had a wonderful life and career, but she tried to balance both of them.

And she really took a huge chunk out of her life to do that.

And so every time people,

but I would be in a crowd or something, or people would be over young lawyers.

And what she did was she had kind of a mentoring system in the Central Valley.

So if you were a young woman and you graduate from Bolt Hall or Hastings or San Joaquin College at Law or McGeorge and you wanted to be a law clerk in that period when it was very hard for a woman in the 70s, then you went to Justice Hansen and you clerked for her and she had all women almost.

Not that she discriminated against men,

but she was an advocate of that.

But people would say to her, wow, what would you have done if you had just gone from law school, as if you could in the 40s?

And she would say, I wouldn't,

the best prep for being a good judge is to have lived on a farm and been involved with your father and husband in farming.

raising children and dealing with them on a farm.

And that was what made me a,

I think, a good judge.

So all of these experiences, you can't quantify is what I'm trying to say.

That

on our traditional metrics, that we tell young women, you've got to go through this cursus of norm.

You've got to go to a good school, you've got to get a professional degree, then you've got to go get this job.

Oh, and by the way, you have to have 1.6 kids, two kids or one, and then you've got to split this, and you've got to do this, and you've got to do this.

And we're putting so many burdens on because we don't value what's really important.

And then, if you read, you know, I mean,

Camellia Pallia, for all of her eccentricity, was a really brilliant writer.

She was demonized by feminists, but she made a, in Cultural Personae and a series of essays, she really pointed out that

early on, there were some brilliant artists and philosophers and playwrights and historians that saw in this Western paradigm that there was a partnership.

And her main thesis was there was something brilliant about men, but also toxic.

And it was important for women

to not just be, you know, playthings or servile, but to have some

chance of either self-education or tutorials to be able to talk to these husbands, but more important, to restrain their innate excesses.

In other words, to suggest that we want you to be creative, we want you to be dynamic, we want you to be forceful, we want you to be an adventurer, we want you to get in a ship and sail across the ocean, but be careful, have some compassion, have some mercy, have some balance.

When we raise these children, we want you to make them physical.

We want you to make them audacious.

We want you to make them to take risks.

But we also need somebody to say, wait a minute.

You don't have to do that or don't be and that was the role that women played.

And then

feminism, she argued, came along and denigrated that absolutely central role of a partnership.

And one of the reasons was not just as Naomi Rowley is talking about, unhappy women, but we started to get unhappy men.

And

there was no balance in their life.

And whether it was, you know, shooting people in

shooting people in Chicago or certain traits, and we started to not have that partnership.

And then when feminism took over, rather than seeing the positive aspects of maleness,

we demonized maleness.

These feminists who were competing as men in the workplace for jobs and spoils of capitalism and a whole thing.

they began to denigrate their competitors rather than their partners.

So we came up with this idea of toxic masculinity, which had a deleterious effect on young men.

Today they've been so demonized.

And what she was saying was:

you want masculine men, and you want masculine men in the context of

confident and assertive female partners.

And between the two, you get the perfect balance.

You take women out of that equation and you say that they're the equal of men and they're going to act like men, then not only are they going to be unhappy, contrary to nature, but you're unleashing men

in the excess.

And so, that was a very radical

idea,

although it had support throughout Western culture and literature.

And she was demonized and treated very terribly.

She's a brilliant writer.

I don't agree with her politically, but it doesn't matter because she was so talented.

And she still writes, but that was one of her arguments.

And the other thing, just very quickly, Jack,

so

there was a critique of feminism that sex was a subvervient service so quote unquote males sowed their wild oats and then the poor virgin had to stay home with only one sex partner in her life where this cad came back first of all that was a caricature of what was true i think my grandfather literally never saw another woman except my grandmother right and that was sort of the way americans were most americans But the point I'm making is that so when the female adopted

the sexual ethos of the male,

and as if she were a biological male, the woman who was pregnant, so if a woman was to be promiscuous at the same degree as a male, then there were consequences biologically the male didn't face, i.e., pregnancy.

And a male, if part of the species genetically is trained instinctually to bond with a child, and the male is telling the female every time she gets pregnant to get abortion so she can go back into the sexual cycle again very quickly, then she gets an abortion.

She's told, but culturally, that's a wonderful thing to do, and that makes you equal with a man and empowers you.

But instinctually, she has second thoughts of terminating a life.

And the male doesn't have that responsibility.

Kind of a powerful.

He's off the man.

Right.

Yeah.

I remember, I won't mention any names, but there was a friend of my parents, and he was a teacher, and he was kind of a CAD.

And I was in high school going into college, and he came over one day.

He was teaching at a community college.

And he said this to me, hey, I hear you're going to UC Santa Cruz.

It just opened.

I said, yeah.

I said, you're going to have a ball.

I said, why?

And he said, women, they're going to have sex just as much as men.

There's no requirement.

You can do whatever you want.

I mean, it's not like you're going to have to go spend $5,000.

And I was kind of dumb at Selma High School, rural high school.

I go, what do you mean?

And my mom was listening to this, and she was appalled.

She goes, stop right there.

And my dad was kind of laughing at it.

He goes, no, no, let me finish.

So you go there, Victor, and you don't have to go out to dinner.

You don't take a girl out to dinner on a date and then gets to make out.

That doesn't happen.

No.

And if you get her pregnant, she gets abortion, and you don't have to

court.

I said, Court?

I never heard that word.

He goes, No, they come to you.

And so, I got to UC Santa Cruz, and guess what?

I watched this thing, and all of these women in the co-ed dorm were insisting as feminists that the sexual

the sexual revolution had liberated them.

But then I started to notice things that we were UC Santa Cruz in 1970, 71 was one of the first places with a very strange virus broke out, herpes.

And there was a team that came and we were interviewing everybody in the dorm if they knew anybody or they'd seen this mysterious, insidious virus.

And then that was one of the first places after Robe vivoade during my college career where you can get an abortion on demand.

And I watched this stuff go on.

It made me.

read Greek and Latin more and more and go home and work on the farm more and more on weekends.

The point is, as an observer of this, I thought, man, this is destructive.

This is a godsend for males because I would watch these creepy guys that kind of got stoned.

And then they would meet women, and you wake up in the morning.

You're up there, you know, taking a shower on a Sunday morning, and there's a guy and a girl in the co-ed bathroom taking a shower together.

And then a week later, he's with another girl.

And then a week later, he's with another girl, another girl.

And he's not spending any money.

He's not taking any care of the person.

He's not taking them out he's not and when you mentioned that to the guy and I used to mention that I go what the hell are you doing and they'd say oh wow I'm way beyond what you guys do in Fresno ha ha I'd say well what would that be and he goes well you you go get your car and you go ask her for a date the next Saturday and then you go take her to a dinner and then you take her to a movie and then you're lucky if you make out and then it's kind of like a reward you spend money and it's you're buying sex i said no maybe you're trying to develop a relationship with somebody you might be compatible with.

Oh, well, there's no better way to do that than to F them, you know, and that was the attitude.

And it was destructive.

It was absolutely destructive.

And it was passed off as liberation.

Yeah, the melody.

That's melody lingers on.

No, that's

a terrific rant, Victor.

I don't know that you've ever had a bad rant.

Thanks for that.

You know,

we're going to move on,

talk a little about politics.

A lot of people have already voted in America, but still a lot

believe in showing up on quote-unquote election day and actually voting on Election Day.

So

pre-election politics is still pretty pertinent.

And Victor has written a

most recent syndicated column is called

something about switcheroos, which I don't know how that's in the dictionary yet, Victor, but switcheroos should be in it.

I thought that was a Bronx term, the great switcheroo.

Well, it could be.

I mean, look, I heard P.T.

Barnum or something.

First cousin of 23 Skidoo, I think, something like that.

But hey, anyway, the switcheroos of the two parties is the column.

And

we're going to get Victor's explanation of what this switcheroo is right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, while you're talking, I know I'm going to look up and see if P.T.

Barnum ever said anything about switcheroos.

Maybe it was W.C.

Fields or somebody.

I don't know.

It sounds more like W.C.

Fields.

Anyway, my grandfather.

Oh, it's a, it's, it's, uh, I think everyone knows what it means.

The switcheroos of the two parties.

So, Victor, this is a piece you write for American Greatness, a shorter piece every day, every once a week, and that becomes your, that's essentially a syndicated column that gets syndicated.

And your contention in this piece is that the two parties, the Republican Party and the Democrat Party, have changed.

They've maybe taken a piece from each other.

And by doing that, there are going to be profound consequences.

And we're going to see those consequences,

I believe we will.

in a week.

Victor, what are the switcheroos of the two parties?

Well, let's take the caricatures of the Democratic Party for 100 years versus the Republican Party.

The caricature, that is the attack on each from their counterpart.

The attack on the Republican Party was a silk stocking, blue stocking.

I don't know which is the right adjective, stocking, but the idea was.

Silk stocking was the old Republican district in Manhattan that John Lindsay,

so was the silk Stocking District.

Yes.

And Upper East Side?

No?

Yes, Upper East Side.

Upper East Side.

So the idea was that the Republican Party was the Tom Dewey or the Rockefellers or people like that were aristocratic.

They had money.

They had the bushes.

They had gone to the right schools.

They

were very polite.

They were taught New England manners.

And when they lost, they did so nobly.

And they didn't stoop.

Maybe George H.W.

Bush had to get Lee Atwater in there, but usually they would, you know, they lost nobly, sort of like Mitt Romney in 2012.

Okay.

And the, and they didn't appeal.

They were always called racist or elitist.

And then when, and, you know, and when they campaigned, they always wanted to lower the capital gains rate.

Not that that wouldn't be a good thing, but that's what they were fixing.

And we're going to reform Social Security.

That was good, too, because

it was unsustainable.

But unfortunately, those were easily caricatured positions.

And the Democrats were the working man, the lunch bucket, the union guy at the steel mill.

That's who we want to make sure he gets.

Social Security and disability and workers' comp, we called it.

And we're going to make sure he got the GI Bill and we're going to make sure he has federal housing support.

It was all good.

Okay.

And if you that went on until the 1990s in the case of the Democrat, you look at the Hillary Clinton and Bill spoke at the 92 and 96 Democratic conventions.

Third way, remember that, Jack?

Third Way Democratic populism.

Dick Morris's strategy.

Absolutely.

Close the borders so you don't bring in illegals.

Cesar Chavez doesn't want them either.

We don't want to bring in illegals because they drive down wages and they hurt the union man.

Remember that?

And we had all these guys like, well, you know, Mayor Daly's an SOB, but he's our SOB, that kind of stuff.

And

that's not true anymore.

The Democratic Party is a party of the subsidized poor and the upper, upper, upper professional classes and the very rich.

And I'm saying that on hard data.

You look at zip codes and how they vote by income, or you look at congressional districts per capita income, they're all blue.

And when you look at billionaires, or you look at the Fortune 400, and you see who's on there and what they're doing, and who is what, it's the left, the left in professional sports, the left in the corporate boardroom, the Disneys, the Delta Airlines, the American Airlines, and what their CEOs say.

And they are pushing this woke revolution.

Okay, the Davos Cloud, they're all billionaires.

That party, then, is the party of the utopian elite that's never subject to the consequences of their own ideology.

They have become the caricatures of the old Republicans, and they're going to suffer the same fate as a minority party.

So in this election, what I'm suggesting is that old Democratic lunch bucket issues.

Can I support my family on the salary I'm making?

Can I afford a home?

Can I afford to fill gas in my tank?

As my wife and kids and me safe when I go downtown,

no, no, no, no.

Do I have a good chance that I'm not going to lose my job because my employer is going to hire somebody cheap?

No,

no, no, no.

Just this week, Sun Valley had some people flown in from Peru, and the argument was: where are they?

These are illegal aliens.

And why are they undercutting wages?

We can't have housing for people who don't have enough money in Sun Valley, Idol.

So that's the Democratic Party is it, and that's why Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates,

Jeff Bezos, they're all leftists, Lisa Jobs, and they all have wonderful utopian ideas because they don't worry about filling their gas tank except their private jet gas tank.

They don't worry about the schools that the middle class goes to or the indoctrination because their kids are at prep school and they're on the board.

And if they're being indoctrinated, it's because they want their kids to be indoctrinated they don't give a damn about public school kids if they make fun of walls that doesn't mean that barbara streison won't have a big wall around her place on the pch

if they want to make sure you have climate change climate change climate change that's because they live in 70 degree weather or they're like al go and they got a huge electric bill if they say that taxes aren't bad, that's because you're John Kerry, you can move your boat around to skip, you know, or you can be Al Gore and sell your cable news before the new capital gains rate takes effect.

They're hypocrites.

So, and the Republicans suffered from all that.

Now, the Republicans have seen this void, and they said, nobody's speaking about the chumps and the dregs and the irredeemables and the deplorables and the clingers.

And lo and behold, the much caricatured billionaire Donald Trump saw that on that stage in 2015.

And they had a very impressive list of on-hands governors, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio was a senator, and then none of them saw it.

And he basically said that we're going to be a Jacksonian nationalist populist party.

And we're going to oppose free but unfair trade.

We're going to oppose open borders that drives down wages.

And we're going to oppose optional military engagements that don't result in strategic resolution but fall inordinately on the working classes who have to go there and fight those wars.

And we're going to try to reform Social Security, but not say a word about privatizing it because a lot of people count on it.

And

we're going to try to lower taxes on the middle class as well.

We're not just going to lower capital gains.

So that was the kind of the message.

And it became a democratic message, kind of, in the sense that it was for the middle class.

And then the mace, this is really important.

The main thing that came out of that MAGA agenda that everybody characterized, it's it's so funny, Jack, because it substituted class for race.

So, why the left was saying, you're racist,

you're xenophobic.

Suddenly, 40 to 45 percent of Hispanics were voting for MAGA candidates.

I think it could be in some races, 50 to 55.

Now we're looking at 20% of African-American males will vote Republican.

That would have never happened to John McCain.

The only person who came close was Jeb Bush on the Hispanic vote for a while.

He was married to a Mexican-American person.

But the point I'm making is that once you say you're for the middle class, all the middle class, then people start to say, I'm in the middle class first, and I'm black, second, or I'm brown, third, or I'm Asian, 15th, right?

And it's an ecumenical message.

And what are they doing?

They're doing the old 116th drop rule that, oh, we're ASO.

We got to worry about Oprah and Megan Markle and LeBron.

They're the victims of racism.

No, they're not.

They're some of the most culturally privileged and pampered people in the United States.

So those parties have switched.

And the result is we're going into midterms in a week.

And guess who is talking about?

You can't afford hamburger at the store.

You cannot afford to fill up your tank.

You cannot afford to buy heating oil this winter.

You cannot be safe in your own neighborhood anymore.

The Republicans are.

And what are the Democrats talking about?

They're talking about the concerns of the very elite.

Let's think about it.

Climate change.

Men should be able to, biological men are not biological men.

They can compete in women's sports.

Drag shows.

That's really important in schools.

We got to make sure that Joe Biden just met with a transitioning male to female.

Yeah.

He said that was one of his

interests.

So they have gone into the boutique of the wealthy.

Abortion is a concern for everybody, but they don't want that to be a concern of everybody.

If they did, they would support Roe versus Wade and allow the people, the people, the Democratic people, the Demos, to vote in their individual states to decide how they, the Demos, cared about about abortion.

They don't want that.

They're talking about a national abortion law.

That's what they're angry about.

And that national abortion law, believe me, will be abortion now,

in the past, and forever to the last day possible of birth.

That's what they want.

And you know who doesn't want that?

The average person doesn't want that.

And so they are not democratic.

And they have switched, and they're going to pay a price because they're going to lose in this midterm because the middle class has no more affinity, no more affinity, no more affinity with Maureen Dow, no more affinity with, I don't know, Kamala Harris.

They're not going to listen to Corey Booker.

They don't listen to Oprah.

They don't listen to the Obamas.

They don't listen to John Kerry.

They don't listen to Al Gore.

They don't listen to all these multimillionaires.

Right.

It's funny.

Obama was,

as we're recording, again, today, Sunday is October 30th, and he's been out on

the stump for some candidates up in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

But

I can't see

how he moves the needle for any candidate.

And I'm going back a little bit, but I remember when he,

oh my, it was the special election in Massachusetts that Scott Brown won.

And Obama was like a total freaking dud out there.

Actually, I think he

hurt the cause.

The one cause he actually helped by campaigning was in England when he attacked Brexit and it

guaranteed the passage of Brexit.

Everything he did,

people forget about Barack Obama.

He came in with a super majority in the Senate.

He lost the most seats, except for 1938, than any president in history, 63 seats.

And by 2014,

he had lost the Senate, he had lost the House, and he'd lost 1,100 state, regional, and local races.

People had turned on him.

His popularity was in the low 40s.

Just like where Trump's was, if not lower.

And then he did a brilliant thing in 2015.

He saw saw the unpopular, high-negative Hillary, and he saw the unpopular, high-negative personal Trump, and he saw the media tearing down Trump and Tump tweeting back.

And he thought, people are going to get sick of this.

So, you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to check out.

I'm not going to do anything my last year.

I'm going to play golf and I'm going to be above it.

And people said to themselves, hey, you know what?

The longer I don't see or hear Obama, the more I like the idea of Obama.

First black man articulate.

And as Harry Reid and Joe Biden, the ultimate racist, said, oh, he's, you know, he doesn't have to talk like a Negro.

He's articulate.

Well,

that role he played.

He played that I'm going to be an acceptable, iconic figure, but I'm not going to get down into the mud of this campaign.

And you know what happened?

He came out every once in a while, very wishy-washy, neutral, and he left office at about 50%, if not higher.

What he really wanted to do, and he went to Georgia Jack just as an excursus, and he said that Herschel Walker was a celebrity that wanted to be a politician.

And that was projection because he was a...

politician always that always wanted to be a celebrity.

Absolutely.

And he wanted to be wealthy and he wanted, that's why he brought all of those rappers, he brought all of the professional athletes, he brought the movie stars in there all the time.

He was starstruck.

And as soon as that guy, he was cutting deals that last year that would have got Donald Trump impeached.

Netflix, advisor for this, book deal.

He had everybody coming in trading on the prestige of authority of that office.

He left, and guess what?

Four years later, the guy was worth over $100 million.

He owned a $7 to $8 million Calaroma mansion.

He owned, I don't know what it is.

You can't believe the left because if you look at that 40-acre Martha's Vineyard estate, 2,000 gallons worth of propane and tanks,

they said it was only worth $12 or $14 million.

It's worth more than that.

40 acres on Martha's Ziney.

Yes.

They always do that.

Remember, the lying is innate to the left.

And so they just, and then he went to, that wasn't enough.

So he had a Chicago mansion.

He didn't want to live there anymore, of course, because the conditions of which he advocated had left Chicago.

And, you know, it was gangland again, like the 1920s.

He wanted nowhere near it, but he did want his big monument to himself, where he pushed that self-indulgent, narcissistic library in a very historic park that had a lot of community people outraged.

And then he went and got his fourth estate in Hawaii.

And what is his curses of norm after doing all of that?

He starts to read and he discovers that these leftists, they said, you know what?

This could have been done with Barack Obama.

We could have had open borders.

We could have had transgendered athletes.

We could have had no bail.

We could have had defund the police.

We could have had shutting down.

Remember, Barack Obama said, I'm going to shut down coal and your energy electricity.

He didn't do it.

We could have had Stephen Chu.

Remember, he said, we want to get gas up to European levels.

He didn't do it.

But Joe Biden, good old Joe, the guy he made fun of,

don't count on Joe.

He always F's it up.

Remember that?

He's out-progressed, out-left Obama.

And so Obama got really jealous.

So he, every once in a while, what he does is he ventures out of his estate and he'll go to a funeral and he will give a harangue and hijack the eulogy and talk about the Jim Crow relic called the filibuster, which he used in 2006 to filibuster Justice Alito.

Thought it was great then.

And he will start sounding like he is Barack Obama back in Chicago, get in their face, showing up outside of the executive, bank executive's house, yelling and screaming with a megaphone that he's redlining.

That's what he likes to do every once to one or two days.

But you know what?

People don't listen to him anymore.

They know that he's sold out, that he's a wealthy guy.

He doesn't care about anybody but himself.

and he doesn't make any sense.

And the party moved on and became more left, and he didn't lead his crusade, and he left it to a non-composment,

doddering old fool that's getting the country further left than he ever did.

And he's jealous, and so he says stupid crap like Herschel Walker.

And he said, you know, just because you're a celebrity and you're running for Senate, that doesn't mean, you know,

you're qualified.

Are you going to vote for Herschel Walker to pilot a plane?

Just because he, I thought to myself, well, we have a candidate in Pennsylvania, Barack.

Do you want him to pilot a plane?

You have to be able, you know, is that what you're saying?

Why should we vote for John?

He can't get on a plane.

Never mind, pilot.

Yeah, getting on him would be like going to the guillotine.

And so,

I mean, that's what he is now.

He's reduced himself to a sellout caricature, and he knows it.

And he can't give up his estates.

He can't give up his private jetting.

He can't give up going out, you know, and seeing all these friends from Hollywood on their yachts.

And every once in a while, he has to go and get his street cred back.

So he dips his toe into an election.

He sounds,

you know, he's got that fake southern African-American patois that he goes back to.

He's sing-songy kind of.

and he starts, you know, and no one pays any attention.

And

it's been really good for Herschel Walker.

I predict that Herschel Walker will win by three to four points, and Barack Obama will help him enlarge that.

Do you think Hillary?

And let's just talk about one old blast from the past.

She's stuck her nose in

more pronounced in the last week or two.

First of all,

one is mouthing this uh democracy will die if republicans win essentially this or you hear this on msnbc and cnn and then what the hell else was she uh babbling about oh the elections will be stolen yeah i like one thing she did though you got to give her credit okay okay all right so they're all election denialist i mean think about it i mean jimmy carter said that the election was rigged in 2016 and trump was illegitimate she said it was he was illegitimate Jill Stein, you know, sued.

So Barbara Boxer said the election was illegitimate in 2004.

I think Benny Thompson, the head of the January 6th, he's an election denialist.

He voted not to accept

Ohio's results in 2004.

Raskin is illegal.

Raskin.

All of them is.

Yeah, he wrote a book about, I don't know, remember that?

Dick Cheney that had stole the election.

So that's his, that's Liz Cheney's new pal now.

But my point is that they're all election denialists.

But she did something unusual.

She not just denied that Donald Trump was legitimate.

She didn't just join la resistance,

la résistance, la résistance, I suppose, if she's using the Italian or Spanish or French form.

But,

and she didn't just say, hey, Joe, Biden, if you lose the popular vote, don't accept it.

The election's rigged.

But she's doing, she's preemptively, as a, she's a preempting election fraud.

So she's saying that

two years down the road, if the Democrats lose, it's rigged.

Yeah.

That's pretty creative.

Why not do it six years?

Right.

Why not, you know, do it 10?

Do you have any doubt she has a, she sits around with some kind of crystal ball in her house with like a

weekly board?

She does this.

She sits there in that big house and she thinks all of her ill-gotten uranium one

and all her ill-gotten gains, all the Russian collusion, and she's the face of Dorian Gray.

That woman has been

going back to

all of those rigged, petty, minor little scams when she was in the Rose Law Firm and her cattle trading futures.

Cattle trading futures.

I read the Wall Street Journal and made $100,000 from impossible chelsea's education yeah you couldn't replicate it no one could rose law i don't know where the law i don't know where those law records oh i was vacuuming the floor in the white house and they showed up on the floor who knew it

and all of those scams and then she was senator and they remember they part they pardoned the puerto rican terrorists so she could have the puerto rican vote then she was second and then she had this

think about that Victor.

Think about that.

The people that shot up Congress and actually shot and killed Congressmen

was a priority to

free them.

That should come up in some degree.

She was going to be the brilliant senator from New York.

And then

she ran in 2008.

Remember 2008?

Then she had the Boilermakers and Bowling Hillary, and she was your working woman.

And then she's, I don't think,

I don't think Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Remember that?

And then all the left turned on and said, we hate Hillary.

She's going to deny the first black man the chance.

And she wouldn't concede.

Remember that?

She actually were holding out from Michigan.

Michigan defied something.

Their delegates didn't count.

They didn't count.

Yes.

And then she got in and she thought, you know what?

I'm Secretary of State and we're not going to worry about, you know, a million here, a million there, Bill Clinton going off on the Epstein jet and all.

We're not going to worry about it.

We're going to make big money.

And so people thought, she's Secretary of State now,

but she's going to be president for sure.

So I'm going to invest her.

So all of a sudden, we hear that she signed away, what was it, 20% of North American Uranium 1 holdings and to the Russians.

And all of a sudden, Bill Clinton's getting $500,000 for a 20-minute talk in Moscow.

And then

we hear that after she leaves the Secretary of State, she's getting, I think I wrote a column about it, was $100,000.

It was for 15 minutes.

She was, she, I know, she spoke in my kids' UConn up here in Connecticut.

200,000 bucks.

Yeah, she was really spiking universities.

Gosh, she was getting these horrible.

honorarium.

I mean, they were obscene.

So she was the biggest.

And then she moved moved into that mansion and she had that list of corporate gifts.

You know, that they were,

this corporation should give me this silver and this person should give me this place set, that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

So she was always a grifter, always.

And what is she doing now?

She's sitting there

in her mansion.

And to know her is not to like her.

And she's thinking, I did everything right.

I'm a multi-millionaire.

My daughter married kind of a weird guy from a a weird family, but she's a multi-multi-millionaire too.

And I didn't divorce Bill.

I need, I'm still a Clinton, even though I know that

he made me a multi-multi-millionaire and he made me what I was because I used his name.

I dropped the Hillary Rodham crap as soon as I went national.

So I'm not Hillary Rodham anymore, or not even Hillary Rodham Clinton.

So she looks at her life and she says, but you know what?

I lost the presidency two times.

And that should not have happened in a fair and just world.

The first time I was robbed by this upstart from Chicago who played the race angle, and my husband was right.

Remember that, Jack, when Bill Clinton reportedly, I think it was in someone's Ted Kennedy's memoir, someone said, Bill Clinton said,

That guy would have been serving us coffee just a few years ago.

Yeah.

And now he stole Hillary, you know, he stole Hillary's nomination.

That was a sure thing.

She had the money.

She had the Hollywood.

And then Barack Obama, he was sort of, you know, like Frank Sinatra in those old cartoons.

Remember those Looney Tune cartoons where Bing Crosby is the crooning rooster?

And then Frank Sinatra comes in and steals all the chicks.

Well, that's what Barack Obama did.

He came in and he stole all the chicks from the old rooster.

singer crooner.

And so she blew up.

And then she thought, you know what?

I got to wait eight best years of my life for my term because this guy's going to get reelected.

And I'm going to go.

So she did a secretary of state.

Keep your enemies, you know, closer than your friends.

Obama was right about that.

And then she ran.

It was a sure thing.

And then he stole the election with the Russians and I lost.

And then I could have run again, but

they talked me out of it.

And I could have beat Trump, but they wouldn't let me do it.

So Biden came along.

Look at him.

And now what am I doing?

I'm in my mid-70s.

I'm drinking too much.

I'm at my, and I'm just angry.

I'm angry, angry.

So Chelsea and I will do some TV shows and I'll weigh in.

I've written so many memoirs that the last one didn't sell a book.

No one wants to hear it anymore.

When I speak, nobody listens, but I could have been president.

I should have been president.

I will be president.

That's what she thinks all day long.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that was

the unhappy.

We began with talking about feminism and boy, oh boy, if that was the unhappy feminist, it's Hillary Clinton.

Hey, Victor, I think we have time

to talk about one more

topic.

We'll talk about big tech.

We have news about Zuckerberg, news about Elon Musk, and let's get to that right after these important messages.

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communicative weekly thingamajig epistle, I'll call it.

So, Victor,

big news, the last

couple of days.

Again, we're recording on the 30th of October.

Elon Musk has purchased Twitter.

He is firing people to the great delight of any number of folks who have seen Twitter as a very intentional bulwark against free speech in the public forum.

A couple of headlines that have come out today:

Daily Wire.

Elon Musk set to unleash the purge at Twitter after a request made to managers from

PJ Media.

It's happening.

Elon Twitter's, Elon's Twitter just fact-checked Joe Biden's official presidential account.

You know, something that never happened before.

So we have this.

So we have Musk

now taking over Twitter to the great outrage of many on the left.

And any number of of celebrities have said, I'm off Twitter.

Go find me at Instagram.

Okay, that's one big tech thing.

The other big tech thing is

Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg, who, as we know, his Zuck bucks

helped dement the 2020 elections by taking over

local town, municipal city clerk, and other election official

operations.

But I'm not crying.

His metaverse project

has seen, and Facebook, whatever you want to call it, has seen significant hits on Wall Street.

I believe he's lost $80 billion.

That billion would be $80 billion this year.

Guy still has $40 or $50 billion left, though.

Can't really cry for him.

So anyway, there's some thought there that, well,

hey, you know, Facebook, the great Leviathan, maybe it's not that great

Leviathan.

Twitter, another lefty Leviathan.

Well, it's not that way anymore.

So, Victor, here's a jump ball.

We have about five minutes left.

Given these big tech trends or

things that have happened to these dudes and their institutions,

do you still believe that Congress, let's say Republicans take over Congress,

should a Republican Congress still find ways

to restrict Silicon Valley and its control over some of these public forums for free speech?

It's not that they should find something.

They should just treat it as they do other people without the exemptions that they do presently give it.

And I mean that in two contexts.

Number one,

they are public utilities.

If you say

that Pacific Gas and Electric, to take the California example, or California Edison, cannot do what they want because everybody needs electricity, and the electricity must flow on public lines across county and even state line.

Therefore, it has to be regulated.

Then, my God, they're using the public airspace.

They're communicating through the cyber world.

They don't own the cyber world.

They don't have a monopoly on it.

They're using a and you secondly say that people cannot exist in a sophisticated society without access, whether they're they're doctors or engineers or whatever,

with searches.

And if you know that Google is manipulating those searches based on ideological grounds and the order in which they present your results, or you know that Mark Zuckerberg or

Twitter are using their social media platforms to suppress some information like Hunter Byte, which laptop, that can affect the way we live, then

they're using a public utility in

a way that's not necessarily public in the public's interest.

So they should be treated like we do the gas company or anybody else.

And so what would that mean?

They would not be able to censor people and they would not be able to do the things they do, or they'd be subject to government oversight.

Everybody's going to say, well, you're going to get a bunch of left-wing people.

Maybe, maybe not.

The second thing is,

Mark Zuckerberg owns about 200 companies.

So if you're a startup person in Silicon Valley or Austin and you have a company, and it even remotely is a communications company, he's going to come after you.

If you're right-wing, and that's rare, they're going to destroy you because we know from Parliament, they just won't let you on the apps or too social.

Google just now relented, but they will try to destroy you.

But if you're left-wing,

they're going to buy you out.

And they're kind of like the 19th century railroad.

So yeah, they need some government oversight.

And as I said earlier, I think Sammy and I talked about it.

What they do is, as soon as you get a Republican Congress and president, they talk like they're Milton Friedman.

Hey, we're your Carnegies, we're your Rockefellers, we're the guys that build America because we weren't restricted.

We believe in your free markets.

And then when they get the Democrats in, they say, it doesn't matter.

I know you guys want to regulate everything, but more money goes to you.

We put $419 million in to warp the last election, so don't we press that because you're the benefit.

That's what they do.

So yeah, they need to be broken up and they need to be regulated.

Those are supposedly unconservative things, but they do because they're buccaneers and they're really dangerous entities given the money they have.

And you look at the market capitalization of Apple or Google or Facebook.

And gosh, they're way, I mean, they're like the top five or top eight in the world.

And so they kind of ruin California because California, as I said, is,

you know, it's basically a product of the middle class leaving, illegal immigration coming in, and those trillion-dollar companies running the state for their own particular utopian agendas that they're never subject to themselves.

But yeah, they need to be regulated.

And Elon Musk, they despise him, and that's so ironic.

I do believe in the classical concept.

If you're a Buddhist, you know karma.

But if you're you're a classicist, you believe in Yubris that incurs

nemesis or divine retribution that ends in Ate or complete destruction.

And so they were bragging on Elon Musk.

He's a guy, you know,

who's cool.

He has a star link.

This is a weird next age type of internet.

Wow, Tesla, Tesla, Tesla.

Well, those billions that he's made are going to use to bring Twitter back into the normative range.

And again,

the final thing, Jack, is that

deep down inside,

they don't think that Elon Musk is going to do what they did, Jack Dorsey.

They don't think he's going to go and take Twitter and he's going to start suppressing embarrassing things about Donald Trump the way they did about Biden.

He's not going to do that.

They know that.

And he's not going to kick off.

He's not going to, if somebody writes and says, if you get the new booster, you have 100%

protection from any COVID variant.

We know that's a lie.

But if somebody writes that, he's not going to censor that.

But what they're afraid of is what they're always afraid of.

They're afraid that he might do what they would do if they took over a right-wing company.

And that is, they would be thinking, wow, I know what I do if I took over True Social or Parliament.

I would blank it up.

And that's what they're afraid of.

Just like they're really afraid.

There's an article today, two of them, damning Kevin McCarthy and the House because they might impeach somebody over the bogus charge that Joe Biden might have gone to the Saudis and had a secret deal which they reneged on to pump more oil before the midterms.

And therefore, he was putting his own political agenda ahead of the national interest of the United States in the way that he had also canceled student loan debt without a vote of Congress, which he just lied about and said he passed by one or two votes.

Again, an example of putting your political agenda over the national interest,

a crime in which we impeach Donald Trump for a purported phone call.

And they think that, and they are terrified because they're afraid that if the Republicans take the House, not only will they clamp down on

some of these social media excesses, but they might do what Democrats most surely do.

They might impeach Biden.

We might tear up the State of the Union address.

They might start subpoenaing people that you couldn't get out of the subpoenas.

They might keep the squad off committees.

They can do all the stuff that the left taught us how to do.

And they can even get rid of the filibuster, which Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer said, and Kamala Harris said that that was going to be their main agenda in the next Congress.

And so that's what they're scared about, that Republicans might do what they do, and that makes them stay up at night.

As far as Mark, final comment, Mark Zuckerberg,

I mean, that's

just a classic literary topos that here's a guy that gets all of this money so suddenly, and he's immature, and he thinks it's because his genius,

and he's not saying he's not a bright guy, but he gets this obscene amount of money, 100 billion, maybe at one point.

And then he goes on this cockamini idea that everybody's going to wear, what, $1,500 helmet or something.

And then they're going to put on these visors or these headphones.

And then they're going to go into this alternate world where they're going to be dizzy

and they're going to get vertigo where they live and explore their fantasies when you can just open up a laptop or look at your phone and do all that anyway, almost.

And he's going to give up or he's going to lose his edge on the one genre that made him a multi-billionaire to take the profits and go into another that's going to destroy him.

So it's perfect nemesis.

And of course, Elon Musk is sort of doing that, except that he's going into a proven genre.

And he's going to say, it doesn't make money, but it's very influential.

And it will make money under me because I'm going to take the Bay Area group of people and I'm going to fire those guys that have all those perks and are left wing.

It's very funny.

There was a bunch of people that were punking the Washington Post and others because after the firing notices came out, a bunch of guys

sort of said they were Twitter employees and they interviewed them.

And I don't know if you saw that, but they said things like,

like, how can I make my Tesla payments now that I don't have my Twitter salary?

Or for

solace, I look at my Michelle Obama memoir.

Who would ever think anybody would be so stupid to say things like that?

So they took them seriously and they were lamenting that these poor people were now suffering victims.

Yeah, well, it's that is suffering for the 1% of the 1%, I guess.

So that was the point of it.

Hey, Victor, that's about all the time we have other than our

usual end of the show.

Thank you to our listeners.

And

just, I don't mean

to belittle by saying usual, but we are grateful that people listen and the numbers grow and the responsiveness and the communications are plentiful and growing.

Folks that listen,

whatever platform you listen on, thank you.

Stitcher is one, Google Play.

Many people listen through, of course, through iTunes, well, a few, it still exists, but Apple.

podcasts and on that platform you can rate the show from zero to five stars and most people,

I'd say 99% of them have left five star ratings and appreciation of Victor's wisdom.

And many people do also leave comments, which we read.

And some have

very good suggestions, which we try to follow.

Here's one comment left by Raijor, R-Y-J-O-R.

It's called Keeper.

Podcasts come and go on my daily list, but VDH has been a keeper for a long time, since the days when his shows were in separate podcast channels, not only entertaining and edifying.

I actually feel smarter after listening each day.

Victor is a true national treasure.

Thank you, Rajor, and you are correct.

Hey, Victor, thanks.

Thank you, everybody.

Yeah, it was a terrific show, terrific wisdom.

Hey, we'll be back

again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thanks again.