Young and Latino Voters: Democrats Worry

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Hey there, welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is a scholar, columnist, essayist, political, and cultural commentator, and the unwitting provocateur of Left.

Welcome to his show.

He is also the, and more importantly, I think,

or I don't know, this is more important, but he is also the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

I am Sammy Wink, and today I have a little bit of a

cold or some bronchitis.

You left over.

California flu.

I got it.

Yeah, it's left over from the flu.

It's not the California flu, it's the southwestern flu.

It was early this year.

Yeah, it sure hit me for a good week.

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So, Victor, I understand understand you had it and you seem to be all the way recovered.

I had almost strangled long COVID and then it came out of the crypt in a new zombie form of a flu

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I didn't either.

I got the senior flu shot three years ago, and I had a really bad reaction, low blood count and everything.

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Did you get one?

No, I haven't received a flu shot.

You generally don't get them, but I don't want to, your audience should.

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the same principle applies to COVID boosters.

You might want to take the first 10 days and watch out.

Yeah, absolutely.

We cover.

Anyway.

Well, Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and come right back and talk a little bit about current news events.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

And, Victor, I wanted to start off with our youth and some cases that are impacting the young adults.

A case, and then also

an article I recently read.

In fact, let's go with that first, on young voters are not coming out as the Democrats expected.

And in a particular article

from MSN,

they said that they thought that this was because Trump wasn't on the ballot.

And so the anti-Trump incentive was not there for these youth.

And I was wondering

both what you think about that in particular, but also just about our young adults and the culture that we're seeing today.

I feel like politics is becoming very distasteful to the young adults that I encounter.

But

go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, I got to be careful about the youth.

The lyric poet Horace, I'm just remembering, wrote in, I think it was book three of the odes.

He wrote a couple of odes.

And we had that famous line that we, a generation worse than our parents, are bringing forth a generation worse than we are.

And so we all criticize the youth, but I must say that they suffered in education.

The last 15 years, it has been totally inadequate and bankrupt.

And so they don't have a general knowledge.

They're lacking two things: they're not inductive, so they're deductive.

They start with a premise and then they make examples fit that premise, whether it's global warming or critical waste theory or whatever.

That's number one.

And then they don't have reference.

So if I say to anybody under the age of 25, what's an Ionic column?

No idea.

Who's Leonardo da Vinci?

No idea.

What's the capital?

California.

No idea.

It's Sacramento.

So they don't.

So

you start with that premise, they're not as informed as prior generation.

And the second thing you start with is

the $1.7 trillion in debt, which was culpable, I think, for the university.

when they jacked up the rate of tuition higher than the rate of inflation each year, and they were therapeutic, and they didn't care about the people graduating

their job opportunities.

We have a generation of prolonged adolescents, is what Tocqueville warned us about.

They don't get married young, they don't have children, they don't buy homes.

And when you add it as a force multiplier, the economy, that

it's not growing in the way that it did in the 60s.

that it's for young people it's diminished horizons and what they react to it is they either stay home or they don't or can't invest in housing and things, but they do manage to spend a great deal of money on sneakers or entertainment or video games.

So

it's a lost generation.

It's sort of like the generation between World War I and World War II, which was better educated.

But nevertheless,

and then you

so there's a general problem there, and then specifically why they don't turn out your point or your suggestion that they don't have Donald Trump to vote against.

That's true in any midterm.

You usually have midterms that are diminished in turnout because the presidential figures for each of the opposite party are polarizing.

And

I know a lot of young Republicans didn't vote in some midterms, even though they did well, because they wanted to vote against Barack Obama.

He wasn't on the ballot.

And so the thing with Trump was they're not coming out as much.

But then, more importantly, third and lastly, if you're a young person, 21 or 22, and you've been told that the most existential questions in your life are whether you can terminate an abortion in month eight or month nine,

or whether you can keep smoking dope without worrying about being arrested if you've got a pound in your trunk,

or

the planet's going to be doomed in 50 years, so you shouldn't marry or have children until you are galvanized to address global warming.

Whatever those talking points are that they keep concentrating on or we're inherently a racist country and we have to have radical repertory action and then you go keep that in mind that's what you're told and then you go to fill up gas in california you're paying 640 a gallon

or you want to go buy a car you're going to pay nine percent on a car loan now or if you're going to buy a home if you have the money you're going to pay seven percent

or you go to the store to buy something and it's out of sight.

Yesterday's groceries two two years ago were $100 and

this time they're $150.

My favorite is dog food.

Canned dog food used to be $1.8

and now it's $2.

So

what are you going to do?

Are you going to

get galvanized to go out and vote for climate change and abortion on demand in every state?

I don't think so.

I think you're going to say, you know what?

I can't live.

And a lot of young hipsters and yuppies and metrosexuals live in big cities.

That was kind of the end thing: to go back to San Francisco from Silicon Valley.

If you're in rural Michigan, get to the new Renaissance, you know, in Ann Arbor or Detroit.

Or if you're in Chicago, it's a new horizon, or Giuliani and Bloomberg, New York, is a place to be.

That's not true anymore.

It's a dangerous place to be if you're a young person.

And so we see that a lot of this

young cult of things

based on crime-free life, inexpensive goods, affordable fuels, rents that are tolerable, that's gone.

And so what do you do if you're a young person?

You're not well-informed.

I think you do one of two things, Sammy.

You either just say, now pass.

I'm too tired.

I'm too lazy.

I'm not going to vote.

No big deal.

Or you might even say to all your friends, I voted for, you know, I voted for,

you know, whoever they voted.

Ryan.

were in Ohio.

I live in Columbus.

I'm a student.

I voted for Ryan.

Of course I did.

But then maybe a little higher than normal voted for

J.D.

Vance.

So I think something's going on there.

And of course, they need this vote, this youth vote, just like they need the black vote and they need the Hispanic vote and they need the independent.

voter because, you know, 65 to 70% of the country is white, middle class, and they have lost that completely.

They're only getting about 40% 40% of that rubric.

And to make up for it, they need extraordinary percentages.

And they're not going to get it from the Latino vote.

They're not going to get their 70%.

They're going to be lucky if they get 55.

They're not going to get 85% of the black male vote, I don't think.

I think they're going to get 80.

And so, and they're not going to get.

50-50, I think, in suburban independent voters.

So

it's all going to add up to them.

And I think, as I said before to you, once you have these swing elections, they break very quickly and they break very abruptly and they break very dramatically.

So you can go from 20 races all even, right?

But the same criteria apply to each one.

So when one starts to flip, then the flip, flip, flip, flip, because people come to collective, even though they're individuals, collectively, you can predict what they're thinking.

It's kind of like Trump in 2016.

He won Michigan by a few votes.

He He won Wisconsin by a few votes.

He won Pennsylvania by a few votes.

But

the same factors were in each of those states.

And people were the same, even given regional differences.

And once they made up their mind that Hillary Clinton was intolerable and they were going to take their chance on Trump, that mindset or that evolutionary thought was replicated en masse.

And that's what's happening, that a lot of people throughout the country are saying, you know, this time around, I'm sick of being lied to about gasoline prices about inflation about in crime and about the border and those are the four big issues yeah so i wanted then to turn to another thing that concerns our young adults and that is the affirmative action case that will come before the supreme court I think they're splitting it into two, one against Harvard and one against the University of North Carolina.

And they're both about the violation of the equal protection principle.

I believe that they're going to both be tried on that.

And the consideration of race in college admissions criteria.

So the cases are being brought that race shouldn't be considered in criteria.

And both Harvard and North Carolina are trying to are going to be on the side of defending it for affirmative action.

What do you expect to happen with?

Oh, I think they're going to reverse it because, not just

because of a couple of things.

John Roberts was always: let's go by precedent, let's not make waves, let's try to bring it together.

And after

what we saw about leaking Supreme Court memoranda with impunity, or swarming the home of Brett Kavanaugh, or an assassin turning out, or left-wing rhetoric in the Senate about packing the court,

or

et cetera, et cetera, or teaching Clarence Thomas or dragging his wife before the January.

I think they understand now.

You just do what you got to do and don't worry about it because they're going to hate you no matter what.

And so they're going to vote the principles of the Constitution.

And I mean, it's a pretty standard idea that you don't discriminate on the basis of skin color.

or national origins or ethnic fidees.

So it was always

that that was always true.

And then that's one consideration.

The second is affirmative action was envisioned to address the historical black-white binary when the population was about 88% white, about 10% black, and 2% identifying as other.

And what's happened in that 60 years, and think of that.

I mean, we're getting close to 60 years of it.

And we were told by all the justices at various times and various iterations of these decisions that this was a temporary fix.

And it turned out to be long-lasting.

And so now what they see is the Spanish professor with blue eyes and blonde hair from Madrid, who's his kids,

they're eligible for affirmative action.

The multi-practice orthodontist from South Korea, immigrant, who's making $5 million a year in his franchises, his kids are eligible in theory to put some places.

Should LeBron have children?

The Obama children, they're eligible.

So it has nothing to do with class, and it doesn't really have anything to do with race in the sense that

it just means that you're not white, except with the exception of Asians that you can discriminate against, apparently.

And that doesn't make sense, does it?

No, it sure doesn't.

You let people who are very wealthy and privileged that happen to be non-white, 30% of the population, could be those people in theory, and you give them special preferences.

but you don't quite.

You say, well, we want you to be successful, and you can't be successful unless we let you into Stanford or Harvard or Michigan or Ohio

because you're not white.

But these other people who are Asian from Vietnam or from India, and they're very diverse, believe me, in China, Japan, but they are too successful.

So the racism that held you back as a Latino

is not holding the Asians back.

And so we're going to punish them because they're overrepresented.

In our infinite wisdom, we're going to reward you because you're underrepresented.

That's a hard sell to make because if you're a racist country and somebody's very dark from the Philippines and somebody's lily white from Portugal or from Mexico City,

what's the criteria that you use?

Historical discrimination?

We put Japanese in camps.

Leland Stanford had Chinese press gangs working on the railroad.

Is that what we do?

What discrimination has the United States shown somebody who's crossing the border today?

Can you tell me?

He's crossing the border today.

He's 12.

Is he eligible for affirmative action?

Yes.

He's not going to meet any more discrimination in the United States than he did in Mexico.

In fact, he'll meet a lot less as an Indigenous person.

And then we have the other

problem, Sammy, and that is, so you're on campus and you're an affirmative action grantee, and this has been going on for 60 years.

And the fact of the matter is that

most,

not all, but the majority of people who are admitted to campuses, as we've learned now in the last 30 years of data, are not as competitive as the people who aren't.

It has nothing to to do with race.

If you're very, very dark skinned and you're from Mumbai and you're very, very light skinned, but you're a qualified minority that got in on affirmative action, while a person from Mumbai did it on test scores, he's going to do better in school,

just because he's got that record.

And so, what happens is the people on affirmative action then

have to,

that's not the end of it.

That was what we were told.

Once you let people into the university that have been historically discriminated and you open the door, then beautiful things happen.

You let sunlight in and the room blooms.

But it's the beginning because then when you lead, how about law school?

How about medical school?

Okay, you get into law school, medical school.

How about the medical boards or how about the bar?

And then how about the firm?

So it goes on and on and on and on.

And what you end up then doing is with the ridiculousness of it.

As I said before, you end up with Elizabeth Warrens, you end up with Rachel Dozel, you end up with Ward Churchills, you end up with Sean Kings on the one hand, or you end up with Barack Obama or Oprah, or you end up with Megan Markle.

And so there are so many contradictions.

I think the whole

Supreme Court is going to say this is a carcass that has to be thrown out because it's contrary to the idea of the constitutional and equality under the law.

It's racist.

It doesn't work, and it may have had a role in the 60s and 70s, but that role has now passed.

And

if people

really,

really want to have equality, not equity, but equality of opportunity and do well in the society, then when they throw it out, and I hope they do, then everybody, each according to their station, should mentor people.

You should see the African-American community say, you know what we need right now?

We need private schools, uniforms, mandatory Latin, sat camps in the summer, and we're going to show everybody that we will be like the Asian community and out-compete the majority on our own merits.

And then you'll see the world blossom with Shelby Steele's and Tom Soule.

And that can happen.

But

what I fear is that I know the academic mind very well after spending basically a half century in it.

And you know what they're going to do.

They're going to do just what they do here in California with 209, and then it was affirmed again with the repeal.

I guess it was of POP 16.

And you know what they're going to do because these people do not believe in the rule of law.

The university development, the university affirmative action, the university admittance, the university administration, they're going to find ways to undermine the Supreme Court ruling.

And they'll have to go to court to force it.

By that, I mean they'll say, we did not discriminate against Asians.

Now, we have a new criteria that we don't really care about violin playing, or we really don't care about being a Boy Scout, or we don't care about this.

They'll find a way to distort it, but they have to be watched because they're not principled people because they're going to try.

They don't, they see the left-wing mind believes, especially the left-wing academic mind, is that they're so morally superior that they'll always say that other people are not following the law, and then they won't follow the law if they find it doesn't satisfy their agendas.

No,

and they also will make up all sorts of things to get around um the supreme court's ruling because once you start inventing criterion or criteria for getting admissions into these colleges and universities you know what they're going to do you can put you know um leadership community service community service was the big

i was involved in my former job as a professor in the cal state system with a very very wonderful honors program.

And it was endowed by a wonderful family, local family, and it worked amazingly well.

And it did have an overrepresentation, probably just on the demographic of white and Asians, because it was entirely merucratic.

And it allowed people to go to this Cal State campus and get computer, free computers, free internet, even free tickets, free parking, free dorms.

It was wonderful.

And it was based on merit.

That was the intent of the donor.

And we had people in that program that could have gone to, they were literally turning down Berkeley and everywhere to go to CSU because it was all paid for and they were an elite.

And you know what happened.

People complained.

They said it was racist.

It was discriminatory.

And so then I started getting calls from people who didn't know me.

And they said, Professor Hansen, you teach in this program?

I said, I was one of the first of the four teachers.

And they said, my son has a 4.4

and he he has a 770 on the verbal and a 740 on the math.

He did not get in.

And so I would go talk to the director.

I said, I want to see the admissions.

Oh, you can't see.

I said, I want to see them.

And I would look at all the names and I'd look at the scores.

And I would call the person back.

And this happened three or four times.

I said, your child was about 15 or 16.

And we took 50 this year.

And your child is ranked 80.

And they said, how could that be?

if you said they're 16 in terms of GPA and SAT?

And I said, because of quote-unquote community service.

And they would say things like, well, he was an international rotary fellow, or he organized a cleanup crew at the local park, or he tutored kids that were disabled.

Didn't matter.

Community service became the mechanism that the university used to discriminate.

It was terrible.

And I put up with that for three years.

And then I said, not this,

non-hick pork, not this pig, can't do it anymore.

Can't lie to, can't lie to parents, can't lie to students.

I expect them to do that after this ruling if they do come down on the side of the end to affirmative action or that it is illegal.

It's very strange how they're just so blatant and so confident and so cocky about discriminating against Asians.

It's especially Punjabis.

I don't understand it.

I mean, we have this immigrant community.

As one of my Punjabi friends said, Victor, I'm darker than anybody in the black community

and especially the Latino community, and yet I'm discriminated against because I'm privileged.

And I said, it's not because of skin color, it's because you're too successful.

Well, why am I too successful?

I said, because you put a an emphasis on education and family cohesion and excellence.

And that results in students that do very well in college.

And so

in our multiracial society, we have proportional representation in all of these different fields, except they're always repertory.

So

as I said, if the National Hockey League is 78% white, then it's got to have more blacks and Hispanics.

If the NBA is 76%

African-American, that's fine.

That's perfect because of historical discrimination.

So we, being the Platonic Guardians, know how and to whom and why we discriminate.

That's their premise.

Yeah, that is.

And it's kind of very annoying.

Well, let's go ahead and take another break and then come back.

And I know that we've talked about Latino voters, but this time we have the Democrats critiquing themselves on why they're failing with Latino voters.

So let's take a break and come right back.

We're back.

And Victor, I was looking at, and this is from MSNBC because they were critiquing themselves.

And they said that in Florida,

the study or the article was really based on things going on in Florida, but it's a good test case, that Latino voters were going over to the Republican ticket.

And the article was sort of, you know, self-flagellating, saying the Democrats are failing.

And the Democratic Party chair in Florida, Manny Diaz, said that

they're not, the reason for it is they're not focusing on economic issues, which is what concerns the Latino community.

And they're on these, quote, useless culture wars.

And the political writer,

the

MSNBC writer

couldn't sit with that.

He wanted to say that, in fact, the Democrats have focused on economic issues and they have been avoiding useless cultural issues and

cultural wars, sorry.

And so it was kind of an interesting article in that the Latino,

the guy that's sort of the overseer of the Latino community in Florida was saying, the Latinos don't like these useless cultural wars.

They need to be addressed, economic issues need to be addressed to them.

First of all, Hispanic, Latino, whatever

we use,

that's like using the term white around

1880.

And if you said to an Irishman or an

Italian or a Greek or an Armenian immigrant, you're all the same, they would all argue with you.

But they felt that their ethnic affiliation was more important.

So what I'm getting at is if you're Guatemalan, you have nothing in common with a Cuban.

Or if you're an Argentinian, you're not necessarily have anything in common with a Oaxaca except the same language.

That's like me saying, oh, you're Swedish American.

If a guy comes from Sweden, you guys are really on the same page.

No, we're not.

I don't know anything about them.

So the Latino thing is a construct that was created during the 60s.

There are Mexican Americans, there are Cuban Americans, but the idea that they're a monolithic voting bloc is just ridiculous.

And number two, it may not be ridiculous if the Democrats keep going where they are because they may be able to...

not that they're going to collectively identify as anti-democratic, but that will be the de facto result if they continue.

And what do I mean by continue?

I mean when they start talking about one of their main issues is Joe Biden talking to a man in drag who says he's a woman and the transgender issue is the great civil rights issue of our time and we end up that female sports are absolutely destroyed.

Or

we keep talking to a Catholic population.

And that is something that's in common besides our language, the religion.

Not that there's not a lot of Protestant Hispanics, but boy, you tell people that abortion is one of the most important things of the world, and they're a devout Catholic and an Orthodox Catholic, they have to overlook that to vote for you.

That doesn't encourage them to vote for you.

And so, what and then when you don't talk about these bread and butter issues, you don't talk about the price of gas, or you lie to people and say that gas was $5 a gallon when Joe Biden came into office when it was, was, what, $2.39?

Or you lie about inflation's transitory.

That means you don't care.

And

then the Latino Hispanic voter, just like any other voter, says, why are they lying to me?

I know why they're lying to me because it doesn't matter to them.

I don't matter to them because they are an elite.

They're a Nancy Pelosi.

They're a Chuck Schumer.

They're a Bill Gates.

They're a Mark Zuckerberg.

They're a LeBron.

They're the Obama.

They don't care, this party of the rich.

And so

that finally filters down to the voters.

And they didn't talk about this entire campaign, they talked about three issues and only three.

They talked about abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion.

And they talked about Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and global warming.

global warming, climate change, etc.

They would not talk about inflation.

They would not talk about the border.

They would not talk about Afghanistan.

They would not talk about energy.

They would not talk about inflation.

And so now all of a sudden, from what this article you're citing, and there's thousands of them, they think in the last eight days, they're going to completely talk of, they're going to send Obama, they're going to send Biden, and they're going to talk about don't be fooled.

And they're going to take away, you know what they're going to say.

They're going to take away your social security.

Well, let's worry about that later until I want to fill up gas and be able to buy hamburger first.

Believe me, it doesn't work, and I keep saying this, it doesn't work when the Obamas,

you know, they step out of one of their four estates,

counting their Chicago little mini mansions in state, I suppose, and then start lecturing people how illiberal they are.

People are sick of that.

Ditto Hillary, too.

Yeah, and it's, I always find it a very strange thing that Obama really doesn't do anything until about the last week or two of a campaign season.

And then all of a sudden he's out there.

And I don't think that's a very effective strategy if he's hoping to be helpful at all.

Remember what he said when he was president?

It was a sympathetic interviewer said, what's your greatest liability, Mr.

President?

He said, I'm lazy.

He said it.

If anybody else said it, they would say it was racist.

But he is lazy.

He always was.

And he doesn't like to work.

When he was a senator, he did nothing.

And he didn't out-campaign people.

So

he doesn't want to go out there and barnstorm the country.

Why should he?

He's making $50 million a year.

He's got all these, his idea,

as I said with Jack, he's a politician that always wanted to be a celebrity.

And he likes the idea of infatuation and crowds, but he doesn't want to work for them.

He doesn't want to go out there.

He's not going to.

When he was a law student at Law Review, he was famous for the least productive Harvard Law Review editor in history.

When he was a professor of law at the University of Chicago, he was notorious for being lazy.

He was given a very generous fellowship to write his book on contract law.

Instead, he wrote a book about himself.

He doesn't do things that require work.

And he's been given everything in his life has been handed to him.

handed to him.

He grew up as an upper middle class grandson of a bank person who became a president.

And this idea that he just, you know, wow, we're going to lose.

Hmm, that might reflect bad on my legacy.

But, you know, I didn't want to get in there because Biden is kind of stealing my thunder by being more left-wing than I was.

But, you know, this will be bad for us.

So maybe the last week I'll kind of go to a couple things and call Herschel Walker a name or two or say John Fetterman is the greatest thing since sliced bread or something like that.

And then I'll go back and

dream up another, you know, write some, scrawl some stuff on a notepad about a new Netflix movie to make my 50 million bucks.

Yeah, and we won't hear for him for another 50 weeks.

No, we won't.

Not unless they get in bad shape and Joe Biden is not able to run and

they get in the back room and there's a lot of smoke and they and they say, we cannot, is it Kamala or Kamala?

I don't know which one.

It changes every week.

Miss Harris, it will be a disaster.

So they're going to draft who?

Michelle Obama.

And then they'll come out of the woodwork again.

Yeah, perhaps.

We'll see if that happens.

Well, speaking of the elections and what might potentially happen after it, I was wondering what you thought on when the Republicans take office, will the woke companies face some resistance from them?

And I'm thinking of the sort like Ron DeSantis, who took the self-governing district away from Disney World, or the 19 attorney generals in the states that are calling for BlackRock to justify its ESG policies.

So, do you think we'll see more of those things?

If the Republicans take the House

and the Senate,

they will run investigations.

They

will

look at antitrust and anti-monopoly legislation.

But more importantly, a lot of these corporations, they act like they're woke or they act like

they're conservative, but they have no ideology.

They just simply go with where the perceived power is.

And trust me, if they take the House and the Senate, they will go tack back to the center.

And if the Republican wins, with the House and Senate in two more years, then they will stop the woke stuff.

It also depends on the Republicans whether they're going to go back to Mitt Romney, Marcus of Queensbury rules.

But if they get some tough guys at the head of these investigative committees and they start looking at Hunter Biden and they start looking at the Biden corruption syndicate, and if they start looking at monopolies and antitrust, they revisit Anthony Fauci and Collins and they get really proactive, these corporations will really not try to be so woke.

Yeah, yeah.

I always wonder how much their clients can affect, for example, the PayPal

accident, as they called it, of saying that they were going to charge $2,500 for misinformation

from their clients.

And then

they got some blowback from that.

They did.

And I think with Jack earlier this week, we said that I said, I used the metaphor that they were the mad scientists and were the lab rats.

But the point I was trying to make is they never can be candid with the electorate.

It always has to be based on Ruse.

If Joe Biden had said

in 2020,

not that I'm going to unite us, not that I'm going to bring us together, not that I'm old Joe Biden's grant, but he said, you know what?

These people are semi-fascist.

They live in the shadow of lies.

And here's what I'm going to do.

Not just talk about climate change.

I'm going to get rid of it.

I'm going to shut down that damn animal.

I am going to be famous for having the fewest leases.

I'm going to get gas up to $5 a gallon.

I'm going to open that border like you won't believe.

That's what he planned to do.

But if he had said that to people, they wouldn't have voted for him.

No.

And that's because

ultimately, we're talking about an agenda that's contrary to human nature, to natural law.

Natural law says that people know that civilization,

it's innate and imprinted on our souls when we're born, to basically quote Plato:

that

society doesn't work if you walk in and steal stuff and walk out.

I just got back today again from Home Depot.

And my local Home Depot,

the automatic checkouts that have lines, you know, the ones you serve yourself on the little computers with your scanners, it closes down arbitrarily.

Wow.

I mean, you go in there and sometimes it just closes down, or the garden section has a wide open, you walk out, it's closed down.

So I asked one of the clerks, she didn't want to tell me.

And finally, she said, well, we have a big problem with shoplifting.

And so what they do is apparently they shut down sections at odd times so that the professional shoplifters don't know when they can just walk out.

In other words, they'll have to go through a security and actual checkout when there's very few checkouts.

That doesn't work.

That won't work.

A society won't work if people steal without consequences, contrary to what Nicole Hannah-Jones said during the 2020 riots when she said, oh, stealing stuff is no big deal.

It's not a crime.

So

the idea of no bail or if you steal $950, there's no real consequences or defund the police or empty the prisons.

There's no need for a border.

These are contrary to what we're born with and they know it.

Everybody knows that if you have male genitalia and you went through puberty as a male and you see this swimmer with these big shoulders

and little hips and big muscularity

and he has male genitalia and you put him in a pool with women that's not natural and it's not fair to the women oh not at all and then and he's going to destroy women's sports or if you put him on a volleyball court with that superior strength, he's going to spike it down some poor woman's throat and hurt her.

And that's what we're doing right now.

And people know that.

It's not contrary to, they know that you can argue maybe about an abortion, and I don't.

I'm against it, but that's because I'm a male and I don't go through the real consequence.

I understand that.

But if you're a woman in the first three or four weeks and you're not noticeably pregnant, the left can make an argument that I'm not getting into where I, whether I disagree with it, but they will make an argument that can sell that the woman has a right to what they would call miss a period or then abort that or whatever.

I don't think it's right.

But it's contrary to law to abort a fetus.

It is a survivable human being and people know that.

And so one of the reasons when you asked earlier about the abortion, as long as the Republicans were sort of back in their 2000s.

10 or 2012 mode where they were allowed to be demagogued as you know they want they were every woman who was raped or incest had to have a baby there was a few weirdos that got trapped in that that dialogue but once they turned that around and said no you want to abort people on the the day that that birth would occur people knew they were imprinted at birth that that was wrong they didn't do that dr gozna was a monster And everybody knew that.

So they have an agenda that is contrary to

facts, to nature.

People understand that.

Yeah, they sure do.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break and then we'll come back.

And I thought maybe we could talk about a film that I know that you like.

And

this is a surprise.

Yeah, it's a surprise.

And I think you'll like it, though.

But we'll come right back after these messages.

Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor's work is available at victorhanson.com.

The website's called The Blade of Perseus, and you can get a monthly subscription for $5 and an annual subscription for $50.

So it's an excellent deal.

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All right, so Victor, it is the 50th anniversary year

of The Godfather.

And I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about what you think made this movie so great.

Oh, let's think about about that.

Well, the first thing was that

to have a movie, you have to have good actors.

And so, when you put Robert De Niro and Godfather 2, or Al Pacino,

or you put Marlon Brando in the first one, you've got the best actors there were at the time.

So, they were brilliant.

And

then, the second thing is you have to have characters, and the characters can't be one-dimensional.

And so,

this saga shows the Odyssey of Michael, Corleone, and he starts out as an idealistic war hero that doesn't want any part of the family.

And then he gets drawn in and he realizes that he has a higher loyalty to his family.

When his father is shot, he gets further and further in, and then he realizes that he has skill sets that are beyond the other family members.

and he alone can save the family.

And then he crosses a line and he becomes

an evil person.

But there are elements of his, it's a tragedy that he didn't want to do this.

That's always a complex character.

Or you look at the same thing with the Marlon Rando, Don Corleone.

He has some admirable traits, but all in the context of violence and murder, killing people.

So he's a complex, ambiguous character in some ways.

Or you look at Fredo, and he's a tragic character.

Something's wrong with him.

He's inept.

He's not treated well.

But if he were treated well, he'd destroy the family.

So anytime you have a movie with these paradoxes or complexities that don't make it predictable, and even James Kahn, you know, I mean, he's the dynamic person, but you start to see why he gets shot and why he gets, he's impulsive.

And you can't have a person like that running the family.

And so that's you have good actors, then you have to have a good plot.

And the plot in Godfather I and Godfather II is how this family that overcomes all of these internal and external challenges and wins in the end, but in the process of winning, it loses what soul it had.

And yet, and so that goes on, that goes on for, I don't want to get into three.

I thought Godfather III was better

than

people said.

So you had a good plot, you had good characters, you had good actors, and then you

have to have dramatic scenes.

So the first one, when

you have the horsehead and the arrogant Hollywood producer, I think that was a caricature.

I'm just, because I didn't know you were going to ask this, so I'm going off the top of my head, but it was kind of an allegory, if not an exact

borrowing of Frank Sinatra and From Here to Eternity that revived his career.

And there were, you know, there was the Gambino family or one of the families supposedly pressured him to get that job.

But that was brilliant when the the guy thought he was going to really humiliate Robert Duvall.

And I should say of all the characters,

Robert Duvall is one of the best actors of all of them.

And when he very politely says, I want to get this clear, this is what you're doing.

And then he wakes up with this thoroughbred horse in his bed.

And then we had the other scene with the cocky.

southern senator or the Nevada.

You're not going to come out here, you Italians, and tell me what to do.

And they stage that where he wakes up with a dead woman

and

have him in his pocket.

So, all of these are classical Greek tragedies.

I mean, in the sense of arrogance, Earns nemesis leads to disaster.

And so, there's good scenes in those.

The screenwriting is really well, the dialogue is really.

I mean, think about so many famous phrases.

I'm going to offer him.

I'm going to give him an offer he can't refuse.

Refuse.

So,

or my favorite was Godfather 2.

This is the business we chose.

So

that Meyer, you know, Meyer Lansky.

Yeah.

But it also had a great anti-hero in Fredo, I think.

I mean, great.

I don't know.

He's an anti-hero, but he, you know, he, he just kind of took the show in many ways in all of his mealing out easily.

He went from being the protected dunce to that famous scene in Godfather 2 when they're in Cuba and they're in that awful

risque scene where they're showing this fornication and live and he says Johnny what's his name was here and he gave it away because he had said to Michael that he'd never met him met him before yeah and that was the end of it because then he was revealed as one of the snitches that who's inadvertently was responsible for Michael almost getting killed and then they and then they're going to kill him as soon as mother dies but that was that Godfather 2 was it was kind of a caricature of us in Cuba

when they're that scene where they're passing the gold phone around and ITT and all of these corporations are propping up the Batista government.

And then he assures everybody everything's okay.

And then he says, I just have to tell you that I don't think things are going to work tonight.

I'll see you.

Wouldn't want to be that kind of thing.

And then, of course, Meyer Lansky, Lee Strasburg character, my God, he was a great actor.

And

always threatening to have a heart attack any moment.

And then Blannie Michael.

So he's been threatening that forever.

You know, you always talk a lot about directors as well.

And I was wondering what you thought of Francis Ford Coppola.

Well, I mean, he is one of those,

he's not a reliable director in the sense that he didn't, he's not a, you know, I don't know how to say it, a George Stevens or John Ford, that everything he turned out was excellent.

Those are very impossible.

But when he was good, I mean,

when he was good, you couldn't be better.

I mean, think about it.

He had

two godfather movies that were great.

Didn't he do

Dracula?

I think he did.

Bram Stroker's Dracula.

That was really good.

And there's some other ones I remember.

I didn't like The Cotton Club so much, but it was pretty good.

And when we think, oh, you know, the,

what do you call it?

Apocalypse.

Did he do Apocalypse Now, right?

Yeah, he did Apocalypse Now.

And that was

that was

amazing, you know.

That was

smell of napalm in the morning.

So that was a brilliant movie.

And then he lumblefish was kind of funny.

And then he did Peggy Sue.

And I'm trying to think what he did that kind of disaster, one from the heart,

and the rainmaker.

And I don't know.

He did the conversation.

I didn't realize that he did that.

I didn't know he did that.

Yeah, he did.

Minion's Rainbow was a disaster.

So he, but all in all, when you put his

Oove, is the French, I guess, or we say if we're sophisticates,

when you look at Dracula and you look at Godfather 1 and 2,

you look at Peggy Sue, it was funny.

You look at Apocalypse Now, he's pretty damn good.

He's up there.

I have,

you know, I'm kind of prejudiced toward, in the modern word,

the Australian directors.

They were really good.

Peter Weir,

he didn't do a lot, but my God,

George Miller with the

Road Warrior series.

I think George Miller did those.

And then

those movies put

Mad Max movies.

Yeah, the Mad Max movies.

They put Mel Gibson on the map, on the movie map, right?

I mean, those were his first movies.

Yeah, they did.

And when you think of Peter Ware, my God, the year of Living Dangerously, that last wave.

And then there was,

what was that guy's name, Noyce?

He did that Clear and Present Danger.

I didn't like the salt that great.

But

there was

Bruce Brett, is it Burvesford?

He did a lot of really good ones.

I'm trying to remember Tender Mercies and

that one that he did,

the Black Robe about the French missionaries, remember in North America?

Yeah, that was a brilliant one.

That was really violent.

But

that was really,

I don't know, brilliant.

My My favorite movie.

Speaking of Peter Weir, he did Master and Commander.

Yes, he did.

That was like a really

great directors from Australia.

He didn't do a lot, but the ones he did

were really good.

I mentioned Bruce Beresford because he did one of my favorite movies of all time, Breaker Moran.

I thought that was just, God, it was good.

And

that was, you know, that was based on a true story of the Boer War.

It was really tragic.

And

so anyway, anyway, there was something about the Australian directors in the late 20th century.

They were kind of like the Americans coming out of Right on the Eve and coming after World War II.

You know, they were just when you see movies like

The Best Years of Our Lives or Shane

or

The Searchers or all of those fantastic

movies, you know, it happened one

or

all of them.

They were just brilliant.

That was a brilliant period of American films.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I know that Coppola wasn't going to take the godfather.

He didn't really like the novel very much.

And yet, he went in for it nonetheless.

I think he got talked into it because he needed the money, really.

Yeah, it's hard to know.

I mean, there was.

There were his competitors, if you think about them, Martin Scorsese.

um

i like a couple of movies better than corseti movies but i and then steven spielberg i'm not a big i mean i he not a big fan of him quentin tarantino got kind of tiresome but i know you like this one one of my favorite movies is uh once upon a time in hollywood

that final scene

yeah he that was

i mean gosh when that final violent scene with LeonardoCaprio takes a fire extinguisher.

You know what they always say about Hitchcock?

He made it okay to put a violent scene on the movie screen, but I think Quentin Tarantino made it okay to laugh while you're watching one happening.

I don't know.

It's a absolutely insane movie, but since he's retelling what

Oh, those Helter Skelter people did, and he's, they've made a mistake and they got to the wrong house.

house i mean everything just falls out at that point and it gets i know they make fun of frank capra but if you think about it i watched it the other night not too long ago this year it's a wonderful life the music it's just it's just a wonderful movie it wasn't considered that at the time but it was it was a brilliant movie and uh i don't know if it ever really i mean it it People think it's corny and all that, but the acting is great in that movie.

Thomas Mitchell is great.

Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, it's just something about that.

When you put all those directors, you know, with John Ford, stagecoach, how green was my, I'm not talking about his Westerns, How Green Was My Valley,

and Mr.

Is it Young Mr.

Lincoln, Grapes of Wrath?

And then you end up with that whole Western work and you end with Man of Shot Liberty Valence.

God, what a brilliant movie that was.

And I know this guy's mentioning Course Sorcerer, but, you know, but

the best movie I thought he made was Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

It was kind of a weird movie.

Steven Spielberg was, I don't know what

you mentioned, Alfred Hitchcock.

I know that's probably one of your favorite movies.

One of my favorite directors.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I didn't like Psycho that much, but

I liked Vertigo a lot.

That was a really good movie.

And Vertigo, Marnie was really good.

That had Artin Connery in it.

Rope was crazy.

I mean, it was good.

It was good, though.

And

Rear Windows, my favorite, I think.

That's really a brilliant.

It's hard to know with all these,

you know, when you look at all of these,

who these, you know, you try to compare these brilliant.

I mean, how, what would you put?

What was the British guy's name?

David Lean.

You know what I mean?

Gosh, who could produce

within

eight or nine years, The Bridge on the River Kawai, Dr.

Chavago, Lawrence of Arabia, my God.

Those are the three best epic movies of all time in some ways.

Yeah.

I know he had flops.

I remember I liked Ryan's daughter, but it was a flop.

But my God, that guy was a genius.

And

it's

so

I'm getting into this habit that probably listeners get sick of being nostalgic for prior generations.

And they're saying, well, that's just because, you know,

you're always trashing the present generation and you have this nostalgia.

No, I try to use criteria of characterization and acting ability.

And not that there's not some great new actors,

but my gosh, I'm a big fan of George Stevens.

He was really,

he introduced a lot of great actors.

I think he was the one that brought us Jack Pelass.

And

think about that.

My gosh.

And then he did,

did you ever see that movie he did more the merrier about the housing crisis?

That was really funny.

And it was.

No, I have to say I haven't seen that movie.

Yeah, he had some,

I don't know.

I think if you look, and I love that movie, you know, what was the name of it?

I remember Mama, or is that what it was?

And,

gosh.

And you think of all those great, and he, I don't even know the movies the guy made in the 30s.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I know that I like that Woman of the Year.

That was one Tracy movie I liked with Catherine Hepburn,

and uh, maybe it was a, I'm thinking of what was the name of it, maybe it was The More the Merrier.

He did the place in the Sun, you know, that Theater Dreiser version of America of his uh novel, American, the uh, American Tragedy, yeah, and then those two great movies, Shane.

And I think it was, you know, giant went on long, but it was a good movie, too.

But yeah, that was a very good movie.

I always enjoyed that.

It was funny to watch Liz Taylor, them try to make Liz Taylor look old towards the end of the movie.

Gosh.

Didn't do well as an I'm sorry, I'm sorry, contemporary actresses, but when you look at Liz Taylor on film when she was between 18 and 34, I just don't think you're ever going to match that figure, looks

for Lisma R, maybe the same to a lesser degree, but also

true of Natalie Wood was very beautiful yeah stunning so was Hedy Lamar Dorothy Lamar

well we could say the same

we could say the same thing to our men you're just never going to be able to replace Burt Lancaster

he was a he was a circus act actor you know I mean he was I mean a sick a gymnast what a great body

yeah he was but look at that I mean look who he had to compete with he had to compete with Henry Fonda Gregory Peck Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne.

Think about it, John Wayne was that

when he was bad, he was really bad as an actor.

But man, when he you gave him the perfect role that brought out the dark side in him, and then there were two great movies.

Anything that didn't bring out the dark side, he didn't do well.

But you put him in Red River or The Searchers, and it was absolutely brilliant, those

shows.

A little bit to a lesser extent, stagecoach.

Red River, he was brilliant.

Okay, okay, Victor.

We are going to have to call this quits today because we're at the end of our show.

I didn't prep for this.

So maybe I know a lot of listeners are saying you got the director's name wrong or something.

Yeah, we probably did, but otherwise.

Very good.

Thank you so much for all of your words of wisdom today on everything on our youth and the lawsuits that are coming up in the Supreme Court.

We'll look look forward to them.

So, thank you very much, and thank you to our listeners.

And I will finish, but I have a soft spot for very strange actors: Christopher Walken, uh, Jack Palance, Jurgen Crocknan, those type of actors.

I like Jürgen Proctano, yeah, he's good, and Gary Oldman is another name, yeah, absolutely.

All right, thank you, everybody.

Goodbye.

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