Equal Justice Now and Then

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Hello, listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Welcome to our weekend edition.

We have a lot in store for you today.

We're going to talk about justice, the ancient Greek, talk modern U.S.

history.

We'll first get a little update on some news stories, but it should be a pretty exciting episode, so stick with us.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Rain and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We will take a moment to have a break and then we'll come right back to talk to Victor about some current events and then turn to our topic of justice today.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor has a website, victorhanson.com.

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Victor, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well.

Still,

I think somebody reminded me, I said I would kill, strangle, smash long COVID by November 15.

I hit five months, definitely improving,

got some symptoms, saw today in the news that

the vice president of Echo Health has become a whistleblower.

And

his

letter, I think, to Congress, when collated with Redfield, the former head of the CDC, is a blistering indictment of Francis Collins, the former head of the CDC, most of the people at the NIH,

and especially particularly Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergies, Infectious Diseases.

And his plaint is that

They knew that this virus was engineered at Wuhan.

They were subsidizing it.

They saw it as an asset

to engage in gain of function research, which was not legal legal in the United States.

And they obstructed information, dissemination of knowledge about it in a conspiratorial fashion.

So for all of us that have had COVID, I've had COVID twice now, and a lot of you have had it three times, and some of you have had long COVID.

When you feel down with it, you can remember that this thing was not a natural, as

a natural outbreak.

You know, I wrote about this in maybe three syndicated columns throughout 2020 and 21 based on a lot of things that people were writing.

And I got in trouble for writing it.

Where at work, people told me to stay in my lane and that this was a natural pangolin-bat induced, which was crazy

phenomenon.

It was really strange.

It was just like the idea that the vaccination was an ironclad barrier to any infection.

And Joe Biden said, you know what, it's going to be over by July 2021 because it's the gold standard.

And I don't know of any infectious diseases that's completely eliminated, maybe smallpox or polio, sort of,

but are tetanus.

But the idea that these

retroviruses or coronaviruses in this case can be completely eliminated with a shot in the arm, I don't think had much historical validity.

And so the same thing with the narrative that there just happened, sort of kind of maybe

a

level four Wuhan gain of function laboratory controlled by the Chinese military with no information emanating it about this infection.

Well,

Anthony Fauci was telling us that it was nothing to worry about, and he opposed a

travel ban from Wuhan or from China,

and he praised the Chinese reaction to it.

All of that's going to come out.

It's not going to be pretty.

And if you look at Anthony Fauci, he's a tragic figure.

You look at him on television today,

just look at that frame of him and then go back and look at pictures of him a year ago.

He's white, he's waning, he's wrinkled, he looks like he's a different person

because he knows he has a rendezvous with people like Rand Paul coming out.

Yeah, that's hope.

And I, I, you know how singular-minded I am.

I don't understand how every article, every speech, or it doesn't end with, and the Chinese did this to us.

I mean,

everybody sees it.

It's to me too.

They feel they did it to my friends.

I have a person working for me who's a wonderful person who's been ill with COVID lately.

And I just bumped into somebody who'd had it for five months.

I bumped into another person.

when I spoke not long ago for six months.

Another person wrote me and said 14 months.

And so it's something that's that we we don't even know that damaged besides the million people who died,

the hundreds of thousands that were maimed through the infectious phase, and the people who have long COVID, 10 to 20% of the infected, we don't have any idea the toll it took on this country.

And it explains a lot of the insanity that ensued.

And the idea that Anthony Fauci is still employed there is just, and he's praised to the skies.

And he's hitting all the cable news shows still

and he's basically an arm now of the progressive democratic party and he's terrified about the midterms and you can see why this is just a scandal it really is yeah well let's move on to the um just a couple of things that are in the news maybe a little update on the war in ukraine and martha's vineyard especially martha's vineyard what are your thoughts currently about that that well you know there

nesantis did something very brilliantly because he didn't do anything other than Joe Biden, except he did it in daytime with far less numbers and with far greater transparency.

So when the left said, this is human trafficking, we're going to sue you, this is horrible, he could just shrug and said, but you've been doing it for a year and a half.

You fly thousands of people at night.

You don't disclose where you're going.

You dump them off in communities in the hundreds at a time.

I'm telling you where they're going.

They're going to go on a bus to one of the wealthiest enclaves in the world.

So then the counter argument, well,

they don't want to, well, who doesn't want to go to Martha's Vineyard?

Edgertown

can hold, what, 250,000 tourists?

The whole Martha's Vineyard has a million people in the summer.

There's thousands of empty homes.

There's you could rent the Obama house and put 150 people in it.

You could put 200 on their lawn.

So everybody knows that sending people whose first act was to break the law and the second act was to break the law by not returning to their country of residence, the idea they're going to go to the zip code is not cruel and unusual punishment.

So everybody knows that.

And then it brings up the third issue that they're totally hypocritical.

They're all for sanctuary cities.

They had those people deported in 48 hours to another place.

And then they hugged hugged them and they went on social media bragging about how they could virtue signal their empathy.

But that was a real telltale sign about this progressive left.

And, you know,

I think where we are now is that communities like Malibu or Aspen or Napa, they don't know what's going to happen.

Maybe a bus will turn up.

Can you imagine parking out in front of Barbara Streison's home in that big walled community on the PCH and just say, you know what?

Go to it.

There's a nice beach there.

You can camp out, and there's lawns that border the beach, and you can put a tent there.

And you don't have to be their house cleaner or mow their lawn or clean their toilets.

That's what they don't know what's going to happen.

And of course,

DeSantis is now calibrating to what degree he's going to continue that.

If he sent them to Williamton, Delaware, and then they went out to the Joe Biden estate, that would be better yet.

And the idea that they can't handle handle 50 people, as I said on another podcast to someone, on this avenue that I'm living on, there's at least three residents in the immediate one-mile vicinity of where I live, where there's 50 people,

40 to 50 people living in one, what used to be a single-family farmhouse.

And I knew the people in every one of those homes.

And now there are Winnebagos, there's sheds, there's garages, there's shops, and they're all partitioned with porta-potties,

strong Romex wire.

There must be 40 or 50 people illegally living there, illegally in that they're violating every zoning law.

And they're not here legally from Mexico, or at least from country south of Mexico.

Nobody does anything.

And my point is, I guess we handle them pretty well because this is an impacted community.

Nobody's saying deport them or, oh my gosh.

I see them every single day.

I wave to them, you know, come to my front gate sometimes, one time armed with a pistol in his belt, but no problem.

I see them walking the dogs.

I saw one this morning.

I talked to him, and he was looking for his boss, he said.

And I pointed to the neighbor's orchard.

I said, I think they're out there working.

So we had a nice talk.

So they're everywhere, but 50 people is too much.

And

in this rant, you can really see the mind of the progressive.

The mind of the progressive is elitist, it's apartheid,

it's racist, and it's

class-focused.

And the way that they handle that is to create an abstract, utopian, virtue-signaling, performance, artist

caring at a distance.

And that's what they do.

So they talk about how sweet illegal immigration is, how wonderful illegal immigration is,

and they don't want anything to do with them.

And they get them out of their communities as quickly as possible.

And that's, you can apply that attitude to the hypocrisy about,

oh, the teachers' unions are essential to public education.

Oh, those charter schools are all right-wing nuts.

Oh, but I can't put my kids in the LA school district or the San Francisco school district.

You know, I just couldn't sacrifice them on the altar of consistency.

So I'm going to put them in a prep school.

Or I'm John Kerry.

And I'm quoting literally now, Sammy.

I have to have a private jet.

How can I address global warming?

Translated, I have to pour out carbon throughout the atmosphere to stop it.

I have to destroy the village to save it.

And that's what these,

you could apply this dissentist paradigm to everything.

Just say what everybody.

What doesn't he just say tomorrow?

in this midterm heated up campaign.

We suggest that anybody for the new Green Deal take a voluntary pledge not to fly in a private jet for five years, to do their part, and not to heat a swimming pool if they have one, or a hot tub, or to live in a house greater than 3,000 square feet.

And

if you oppose the Trump wall, then please, will you not build or tear down the wall of Nancy Pelosi around your Anapa estate or Mark Zuckerberg?

Just do that.

And you could see where this could lead to.

It could show the entire liberal project as a complete hypocritical exercise in privilege.

Yeah.

You know, you were just talking, you were reminding me of the beloved left Mr.

Kendi, who said you have to be a racist to be an anti-racist.

Who would believe that?

Well, he would, because it's worked, isn't it?

He's an obscure, mediocre academic, and all of a sudden he's a multi-millionaire on media.

And that's really the basis of the whole

diversity, equity, inclusion, isn't it?

It's a careerist agenda for people to jump and leapfrog up the cursus anorum to get a better, higher paying, more prestigious platform by claiming they are a perpetual victim.

And what they hate most of all is meritocracy.

And I'm not just going after so-called diverse people because

They have one argument, and that is the old boy network of who do you know and all of it.

They were mediocre too they were not purely merocratic but they've replaced it with

instead of incestuous contacts they've done it with race but the same idea that merit is not being applied

yeah

um so that let's turn then just for news update to the war in ukraine what is the latest uh thought what are your latest thoughts on that you know i wrote an article about how it with a whimper or a bang how it ends and I went through the alternatives.

And Putin had a speech today, this morning, as we record.

And it was pretty much what I gave the alternatives, I said there was, number one, the Somme continues, a war of exhaustion and annihilation.

Problem with that is even though he has 30 times the territory.

three and a half times the population, 10 times the GDP, he does not have more resources than the EU

and the United States combined.

By that, I mean they can give more cash, they can give more sophisticated and better weapons to the Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians are far more motivated, and they have a huge country of 40 million people.

So that battlefield may have a million people in the battle space, but that's not going to tax Ukraine yet.

Second thing is, or the second choice he could do, he could go full Chechnya and he seems to be wanting to do that.

That is every single hour, send a missile or a GPS bomb or something to destroy a power plant, a bridge, a highway, an apartment building, kill Zelensky and one of his bunkers.

He's doing that.

But the problem there is that Ukraine is huge.

You know, Chechnya was what, 8,000 square miles?

I don't know what Ukraine is, 250,000, but it's huge.

And you cannot level

Ukraine the way you could do Grozny and Chechnya around.

It took him 10 years, remember, to take over Chechnya, even though they destroyed Grozny in 11 months and I think 2002.

But so that was the

second choice.

The third is

he can mobilize the Russian people and say these are attacks on us now.

We're not just in Ukraine.

The Ukrainians are sinking our ships on international waters or hitting supply and fuel depots and they are inside Mother Russia across the border.

They're harming citizens that are Russian-speak, whatever propaganda he wants to use.

And they were going to call up.

I mean, he has 150 million people.

So

that is dangerous.

And that means, do they want to die on the altar of

Vladimir Putin's misadventure in Ukraine?

And most of them don't.

But he's bringing in, you know, the Wagner group and prisoners.

At some point,

if he starts to have a mobilization, he stopped today, all flights for males between 18 and 65 out of the country.

You can't get out.

But if he starts to draft people in St.

Petersburg or Moscow or any of these elite enclaves, the oligarch's kids, the general staff's kids, they'll have a problem.

And there's the other option, and that is he can go nuclear and take a tactical nuclear weapon and tell everybody he's crazy.

The problem with that is

We haven't seen that since Hiroshima, the use of a weapon in war, and the Chinese won't like it, and the Indians won't like it.

And of course, the Europeans, because of the fallout and shifting winds, won't like it, and we won't like it.

And he's not sure how he can use that tactical bombshell, so to speak, literally to strategic advantage, other than I'm crazy, stop it, or I might do it again.

And he's got...

generals who were sacked that are unhappy.

He's got oligarchs who are going broke that they're unhappy.

He's got a nomenclature that doesn't want their children involved in this.

So there's all these steps that he's going to have to take one or the other.

I'm a little worried that I don't know what our agendas in the West are.

And I hear it from my Hoover colleagues, and I hear it from the bipartisan, but I hope that they're mutually inclusive rather than mutually exclusive.

And by that, I mean

we want to clear out, I'm told, every single Russian soldier from pre-2014 boundaries.

That means we're going to encourage Zelensky to recapture the Donbass and the Crimea and get them all out.

And that requires a little bit of preemptory expeditionary force.

By that, I mean to do that, you have to stop the supply of Russian weapons to Crimea and the border.

And to do that, you're going to have to continue to use these raids into Russia and to sink ships on the Black Sea.

And you're going to feed into the Putin narrative that they're not attacking us anymore.

This is not 1904, 1905.

This is not 1939 in Finland.

This is not 1921 in Poland.

This is not 1980 in Afghanistan.

This is Napoleon.

This is Hitler.

They're going into Russia now.

And that might, we don't know what that effect will have on the Russian people if he's able to propagandize the war into

now a different war, an attack on Mother Russia.

So that's an agenda that we don't know.

And we don't know about nuclear weapons.

So we're saying he can't use nuclear weapons, of course.

And we can go in and attack, we being the Ukrainians and the suppliers, we can go in and attack areas inside Russia or in Russian waters or in international waters.

And we want every single Russian out.

And we're going to ensure that Putin in the process, as Lloyd Austin says, is so weakened that he'll never be able to do it again.

Fine, noble.

Just tell me how all of those can happen, and they're not contradictory.

Yeah.

Okay, Victor, let's go ahead and turn then to your article this week for American Greatness, where you talk about justice and equal justice under the law.

I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that article first, and then maybe we can move into a historical discussion of justice.

I think everybody's really worried that in our lifetime, I'm not trying to be melodramatic, this hallowed Western concept of equal justice under the law is in peril.

It's on the equal justice under the law is an is an inscription on the Supreme Court entry and it has a

you know, it has a distinguished history as the foundation of Western constitutional government going back to our founding, going back to the British and French Enlightenments, going back to the Renaissance Republic in Venice or Florence, going back to

the Magna Carta, going back to

the Roman Republic, going back to classical Greece.

Stop.

It doesn't go further back than that.

It's a uniquely Western contribution.

And there's a word for it in Greek.

It's called isonomia, the equality of the laws.

And it is discussed in

Aristotle.

It's discussed in Plato.

Isegoria, the equality

of an ability to speak openly in the assembly.

These are hallmark values.

And they are one of the criteria and are the definitions of constitutional government, whether that's a broad-based landowning republic, as Aristotle talks about in Book Four, or whether it's a radical democracy of landless poor as well.

So if you don't have that idea that if I or you, Sammy, goes and we make a rolling stop, some policeman comes over and says, yeah,

I kind of like you, that's okay.

And then somebody he doesn't like,

he finds or he tickets.

And then when you go to the justice, it's repeated again and again and again.

And it's something that's innate to human nature.

asymmetry, because everybody knows a judge or this or that or they're rich here or poor, this particular tribe, that particular tribe.

But the point is you try to stop it.

And this government, this administration has accelerated that human tendency.

And the result is that we do not have equal justice.

So you can take a hammer,

as we saw in that TikTok YouTube video, and you can go into McDonald's and you can threaten people, excuse me, a hammer axe with a blade on it, and you're going to be arrested and released the same day.

The same holds true if you play the knockout game.

The same holds true if you are James Comey and you say 245 times that you can't remember under oath, or John Brennan, that you lie under oath and say your national security agency has never spied on anybody.

Or if you're James Clapper, excuse me, and if you're John Brennan, you lie twice, twice under oath.

Or if you're the FBI, you lie and say, we don't have those subpoenaed phone records from our cell phone people that you wanted.

They disappeared.

Sorry.

Just disappeared.

Or if you're Eric Kleinsmith, you forge a document and you get a little slap on the wrist and you're practicing law again.

Versus you go after Michael Flynn on the perception that he is violating the Logan Act, which in its three century history has never once resulted in a single conviction, while John Kerry, for the next, I don't know, two years is going to be talking to the Iranians about don't worry about Donald Trump.

He'll be out and then we'll be back to the Iran deal.

So, the point is that we're in a stage now that the application of the law depends on criteria other than the facts.

And you can define that a lot of ways.

One is the Soros, so-called Soros DAs.

If you're in Chicago, if you are in New Orleans, if you're in Memphis,

if you're in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Francisco, as I said, and you commit a crime and you are considered a marginalized person, a person of color,

a poor person, then you are not going to suffer the full effect of a statute, a written law.

That becomes a construct.

Well, you know, the only reason that there's a law against smash and grab or hijacking a guy's car is because those wealthy white people don't do that.

And if they did it, there'd be a law against it.

So it's just a relative matter so here you can go right back out on the street and or you know what he took out progressive insurance he's a progressive so he may work for the government he may have done you know it's glenn simpson may have lied and like sussman may have lied but you know what we're going to get him in front of a DC jury it's going to nullify any evidence that's presented or we're not going to prosecute them or we're not going to indict them.

So Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden's laptop is, it's just a treasure trove of self-incrimination, isn't it?

Prostitution, felony drug use, conspiracy,

talks about illegal gift on tax transfers between the big guy and raking off Mr.

10%,

Peto Pete, or whatever his name was, all of this stuff.

And

it's not that it's of no interest to the FBI.

They sat on it to preserve the Biden name during elections.

So when I talked about equal justice under the law, the FBI is weaponized now.

The Pentagon is weaponized.

The DOJ is weaponized.

Just think about it.

Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice says that high-ranking officers, not high-ranking officers shall not disparage the commander-in-chief.

We've talked about this numerous times.

We had a general

who had a, you know, he was retired and he did not disparage a commander-in-chief.

He just said said in a tweet that jill jill jill jill biden

wife of joe biden was hypocritical to say there's three genders and then worry about women having an abortion was kind of a convoluted argument but he wanted to be make a joke about it the pentagon stopped his consultantship they fired him right there fired him now

Okay, that's the law.

He disparaged, I guess, the First Family.

That's what they said.

But it was an expansive interpretation of the law because he didn't attack the commander-in-chief.

But we know 10 or 12 admirals in general not only attack the commander-in-chief, they call him a Nazi.

They call him Mussolini.

They said he was an architect similar to Auschwitz.

They said he should be removed from power sooner the better, even though there was a scheduled election.

Many of them were on corporate boards with business from the Pentagon.

Did the Pentagon ever call them, sorry, we're not going to let that guy talk to to us or that guy has to be fired or we're going to cancel that contract.

No,

everybody knows it.

So you make the necessary adjustments.

And that's what the disequilibrium or the asymmetric, the symmetrical application of the law does.

It makes people cynical and it makes them fearful.

And they then gravitate toward a particular position for their own career survival.

Yeah.

You know, you're talking about, it makes me want to say what these people that should know the law,

the laws, especially that are around their own particular profession.

What's wrong with these people?

You know, why are they?

But, anyways, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back.

And if we could, I would like to look at justice in as it was bantered about, as it was thought over by the ancient Greeks.

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We're back, Victor.

The ancient Greeks, I know we have Aristotle who wrote politics and Plato, the Republic.

We have Socrates

trial by the Athenians.

I was wondering if we could get some

perspective on justice in ancient Greece.

Um, was it just like ours, or was it very no, it wasn't the words decay, we get decast from it.

And originally, with the rise of the Greek city-state in the eighth century, it was synonymous with what they called virtue or divine virtue.

So, if you look at a play like Aeschylus and the injustice done to Prometheus bound, it's framed in terms of what the justice of Zeus, and that people who follow particular dictionaries these are not Christian morals.

Remember that.

There's no, you know, do unto others as others do do unto you.

It's punish enemies and help friends.

But nonetheless, it was the

It was the idea that the individual avoid extremes, that they're pious in their life, and they follow particular protocols that aid the local community.

You marry, you have children,

you

follow the laws of your community, you serve in the army,

you pay what's required of you, you serve in

public boards and magistries and things like that.

And you don't lie, a Spartan idea.

If you lie, it's only on the basis to help Sparta is kind of

the exception, not the rule.

You don't lie, you don't steal, et cetera.

Okay.

And then it transmogrifies in the democracies.

Remember, there's 1,500 city-states.

They're not all democracies.

There's the Athenian model, there's a Spartan model, there's a Theban model, and they all have gradations of how many people can participate.

Athens is the most radical.

It abolishes the property qualifications and radically expands the citizen body.

And in Athens, then,

DK or justice is determined by the people.

And they have what we call popular courts, 200, 300, 500, 501, 301, 201,

that stuff.

And if they feel that Socrates is guilty of corrupting the youth and introducing new religion, even though he is indicted or he's put up to a popular court by people who are angry at him, because he was a little bit too conservative and his two conservative students went a little bit out of hand, i.e.

the 30 tyrants, et cetera, et cetera.

And when the democracy came back, they wanted to punish him under these propped-up charges.

So they got a popular court.

So, and that was criticized in classical literature, especially in Plato's Crito or Apology, or in Aristotle's discussion of the dangers of radical democracy and its conflation or its

warping of this sacred idea of justice.

Justice as

decided by a particular magistrate or a court or a permanent body of jurists or something like that, rather than just throwing it out into a huge jury.

And it was out of that conundrum that the Romans then decided to have written laws that were much more extensive.

and than the Greeks and turn over that arbitrary application of particular oral statutes.

Not that there weren't law codes.

It goes back to Crete.

There was the law court at Gordon, but they systematize it.

And it came to full fruition in the sixth century AD with the Justinian law code.

And that was a radical change because people could say, this person broke this law or this person has this right of habeas corpus or appeal because it's a statute.

and it's part of the corpus of Roman law.

Yeah, you know, you were talking, you said that Socrates was in front of a popular court.

Did they have other types of courts?

I mean, could they have tried him on, you know, in other ways besides the popular court in ancient Greece?

They had religion, the Areopagus, as we know from

the Oristae, is relegated to an aristocratic morals court where people could indict people for blasphemy or

going after Alcibiades.

They went after him in a popular court for supposedly disclosing the rituals of the

Eleusinian mysteries or the rites and rituals that involved Demeter and Cori and all of that stuff.

So there were all different types.

There were religious courts, there were popular courts, but

as Plato pointed out,

The evolution of popular government is always to be more liberal and wider and more expansive until it implodes.

And it's characterized by those quips of Plato's Socrates when he says, well, you know, why not?

Why don't the dogs and the donkeys vote?

I mean, who's going to, if you say that this person should vote and this person's excluded, then let's expand it.

And then what if the little dog yelps?

And that was very funny because you remember the last scene, I don't know if you remember our audience does in Game of Thrones when they have this little group of all the surviving houses.

And after the destruction of King's Landing, they don't know what kind of government they're going to have.

And they give the, it's kind of out of Herodotus about which is the best government.

But at one point,

is it Sam, Tarley, Sammy, or whatever his name is?

Oh, yeah, Samuel.

Yeah.

Samuel says, well, I think we should have the people.

And then somebody starts laughing.

They say, why not my horse or the dogs?

And then it's shot down.

But that's right out of the, the people who wrote that were pretty well versed in the Platonic corpus' attacks on democracy.

There's not very many positive things about democracy in surviving classical texts, despite the democracy's industry to insist that there's a whole corpus of lost

and not extant

support for democracy.

But when I look back

at all of extant classical literature, the only thing that I see that the Athenian model is superior, I see it in Euripides' plays, early plays.

I see it, or maybe the suppliants, and I see some grudging acknowledgement in Thucydides that democracies are very resilient after suffering military defeat.

But when you look at this entire text and you see what he's saying about the plague and the expeditions of Sicily or the destruction of Melos or the destruction of the men over 16 on Mytilene,

then you get the idea that what happened to him, i.e., 20 years of exile for nothing for a trumped-up charge, he came late by three days to Emphipolis.

That is sort of characterizes the fickleness of democracy.

That's in Aristotle, that's in Plato, that's in the so-called curmudgeon, the old oligarch, what we call pseudo-xenophon.

It's in a lot of the rhetoricians.

So.

Yeah, you know,

Plato's,

I don't know whether to call it disgruntled attitude towards democracy.

He's pretty well known, but is Aristotle the same or is he

a different take?

He's different.

He has a typology.

He's a systematic thinker, an empirical thinker.

He's not an impressionistic or mystical voice like Plato.

So he's not nearly the stylist Plato.

It's very hard to read in Greek.

But when you look at the politics, he will say, these are four types of oligarchy.

These are four types of democracy.

Here we go.

When he goes into democracy, he says the best democracy is what he calls an agrarian democracy.

And that is, there is a property qualification to show that people are, you know,

law-abiding or they're conservative or they understand the value of property or they're not.

acquisitive of other people's property or they're self-reliant or they're autonomous.

They don't come into, they don't, they're not an agora lounger, as the word Aristophanes uses.

They don't just sit there and wait for their dole to go in and vote for money as they were paid in the fourth century.

So he has these typologies.

He's not a big fan of restrictive aristocracy or even oligarchy.

It's broad-based, but there is a property qualification.

And he wants the citizenry to be independent so that they don't look toward government or they're not afraid of government.

And that was very influential in later Roman times.

The politics were of all in Cicero's De Repubblica, that discussion of what type of government is influenced by Aristotle.

Plato is not,

I mean, he's mystical.

He has a lot of influence on the later church and the duality of the soul and metaphysics and stuff like that.

I don't think anybody looks at the Republic and wants that authoritarian guardian, that type of strange applicant running anything.

Yeah.

Well, Plato seemed to have confidence that the philosopher kings would know true justice.

So at least everybody would go to court and it would come out as it should, right?

Isn't that what the idea is?

That we can get these guys who know everything that

I gave a lecture once.

I won't name

the elite East Coast undergraduate, and it was not controversial, but there were some boisterous students.

And they objected.

It was on agrarian democracy and the other Greeks.

And it was very, I thought it was very liberal-minded in the sense I was for constitutional government, but not radical democracy.

And there were some boisterous students that

didn't agree with me on something.

I don't know.

I'd co-written with John Heath, who was a very brilliant guy, and had helped me write this Who Killed Homer.

And they were, I think they were sent there by their faculty.

But anyway, long story short, they started to yell at me.

And I was trying to talk back to them, and they had no knowledge.

It was not that I was any smarter than they are, but you couldn't talk to them because when you would say, well, would you define democracy or oligarchy or aristocracy?

They had no idea what I was talking about or Socrates.

And one of the professors, an Englishman, came up

afterwards, and I'll never forget that.

He said, well, Victor, Victor, if it means anything to you, we wouldn't let one of those people in any door of a university in England.

So I thought, here's the aristocratic view.

And then my other very quick anecdote about popular opinion.

After I wrote Mexicornia, that was in 2003, I was asked to give a talk to some staffers on

Capitol Hill.

So I did a thing with Brian Lamb,

you know, on the book.

And the book is about integration, assimilation,

even intermarriage about, but not tribalism, and to have merocratic, measured

legal immigration.

And that would be wonderful, legal immigration, but not what we're doing now.

And I think it was pretty prescient because it warned that what we see now would be the norm if it continued.

But my point is, I was giving this talk

and this guy gets up and I was introduced as a classicist.

And this guy gets up and he is a staffer, an intern for Nancy Pelosi.

And he says,

I

object, this is racist.

And I said, could you please tell me why?

He said, well, you brag that you're a classicist.

You know, you look at and his eyes are spinning.

I keep seeing that

cartoon little, I'm going, yeah.

Yeah.

So you're a classicist, right?

And there it is.

And I said, yeah, there's what

well you you're an expert in class oppression that's what classicists are and i said no

they are they study the languages of greece oh i don't and then he got so angry that he jumped up and he tried to disrupt it and

and he ran out and they had pizza delivered for all the staffers and he grabbed like four bags four boxes of pizza to steal on his way out and they tackled him some,

you know, because they were pretty conservative, the staffers, and he tried to disrupt it.

And then somebody said, Well, Professor Hansen, don't get mad.

He works for Nancy Pelosi.

What would you expect?

But it was this idea that,

you know, that just the ignorance that he didn't even, I mean, can you imagine trying to disrupt a speaker and not even doing a minimum of research to ask himself what a classicist is?

He just heard that word.

He would have to be so ignorant to work for Nancy Pelosi anyway.

So there you have it.

I have a last question on justice and

our concept of natural law, or at least that's how I understand the basis of our own law, that there's a natural law out there, right and wrong in the nature of things that can be understood through logic.

Where does that begin?

How do we?

Where do we have the first discussions of natural law?

Well,

it starts in the Judeo-Christian tradition going way back, you know, prior in the Old Testament, that there are certain things that are naturally

induced into the human brain, imprinted into the human brain, that you know instinctively that society will not work if you lie or you steal or you assault somebody or you kill or murder.

and the prophet, all these books of the Old Testament, they'll tell you that there's special things that you can do that will damn your soul.

That's one tradition, and it won't combine with the classical Western tradition

probably until,

oh, the later Roman Empire, 400 to, and then Augustine.

But there is a parallel tradition, and that is almost platonic.

I think you could say it's platonic, that the souls that go through this

uh

transmission, you know, that they're cleansed of their body, they survive, and they're transmogrified back into another body, but they have

imprints.

And that imprint is they know instinctively what the real world is, the world of good and bad.

And the body then tends, because it has appetites, it tends to confuse or warp that.

And so we do things in the classical idea.

This is different from original sin and the devil and later Christ and God,

but we do things because we have to manifest our souls in a physical body and that makes us hungry or sexually adventurous or

vain or insecure.

And then we break these covenants that are in our brain.

But we know instinctively.

So when that guy took that axe and he went in, he destroyed that at McDonald's restaurant.

Or when this poor girl was murdered yesterday in Baton Rouge, an African-American male, we are told, was walking near the railroad tracks, saw her car park, and shot and killed her.

He knew that was wrong.

And he did it for other reasons.

Hatred, weakness, evil, but he knew he had to know it was wrong.

That tradition then combines in the latter years of the Roman Empire and it becomes the basis for Western morality that we all accept if you're secular that we have a tradition of laws that you have to obey because they're based on natural facts.

And

often, animals, John Heath, this author I mentioned that I wrote, he wrote a really good book on animals and the rational talking animal and how the Greeks use them

to distinguish themselves, i.e., humans from animals.

So I have four dogs.

And if I put, let's say, three dog food dishes, but I i put a t-bone steak bone in one of them

they will eat if all the food is exactly equal and they're separated they will eat and then the bigger dog will try to go kill or get rid of the little dog but if i put a bone in one of them it'll be a free-for-all

and i have one dog that

She's the biggest.

And what she does is she goes in and gobbles down to the point of making her sick her food and tries to just get it all out.

And then she looks around, sees the others who are eating very slowly, carefully.

She goes and takes theirs and then theirs and then theirs.

And that's what animals do.

Or when one of them is in heat, they just right in front of you start fornicating.

And

it's the first time you see this little kid, you don't know.

Or I grew up, you know, on a farm and first time I saw a horse do that.

My grandfather said to me, look away.

And so that's what animals do, but that's what people don't do.

And And we all know that because it's imprinted into us is what I'm trying to say.

And

that is our moral code.

So we know certain things.

And that's what these Soros

DAs,

Boudin, for example, he knew that.

Gascon, he knew that.

The guy in Philadelphia knew it.

Fox in Chicago knew it.

They knew that what they're doing is not tied to a natural, nor a religious, nor an intellectual code.

We know that if somebody approaches you at an intersection and breaks your window and points a gun at you and takes your car, that society can no longer function if people do that with impunity.

What they're saying is

your laws are a construct.

There was no natural basis for that.

You had a car and he didn't.

Therefore, you engage in a series of crimes to get that car that he didn't because he's a noble black male, let's say in this case.

And that's, I'm not just stereotyping, but this is the particular cases that are happening in San Francisco and in Chicago.

And therefore, he has a right to take what is his,

even though the law that you created discriminates against him.

And that's this whole basis for this critical legal theory.

And it's against human nature, it's against civilization's history, and it won't work.

And we know it won't work because people are leaving chicago in droves they're leaving san francisco in droves they're not saying hmm

i have to leave no they're saying i got to get out of here right now nobody's forcing me to leave but the society is forcing me to leave nobody's putting a gun to my head i'm giving up this beautiful city in san francisco because i can't take it any longer when i see feces and and

urine and drugs on the street or people people hitting each other or confronting pedestrians or smashing grab or car drive.

I can't take anymore.

It's not natural.

It won't work.

They know that.

And these are very liberal people that are drawing that conclusion.

Or they're saying, well, the contagion hasn't spread yet to Knob Hill or Presidio Heights

or Mill Valley.

or Belvedere, and we have private security patrols and we have, you know, walls and we don't let these people in, liberal though we are.

Sure, they've created their own justice system.

Yeah, they have their own justice system.

And believe me, believe me, and everybody should remember this, that George Soros in his own life does not follow the rules of the DAs that he funded and have power.

By that, I mean that he has a security patrol around him, that he has electronic surveillance, that he has armed guards, that he has walls, and that when he does business, he doesn't believe, even though he's a felon, convicted felon in France and can't go back into that country,

he does believe that when he has a contract or he has an order to buy or sell stock, that law will be honored, that they won't nullify it.

And that's the same with Nancy Pelosi, and that's the same with Joe Biden, and that's the same with all of them.

So they're using this experiment in nihilism and anarchy on the poor and the middle class.

And they're trying to whip up hatred.

I think it's deliberate.

I really do.

I think they feel that they want people to react and to buy guns and to say that this is our, you know, this is minorities are doing this or this is crime.

And then look at these racists.

They're trying to gin up dissension.

Or either that or they're stupid when they defunded the police.

I can't believe anybody would be that's dumb to take high crime areas and tell a

particular demographic that is an African-American male between the ages of 14 and 30 in Chicago or Baltimore or Detroit or Baton Rouge or Memphis or New Orleans or Los Angeles.

Just looking at statistics, I'm not looking at stereotyping, looking at the number of people who commit crimes versus their percentages in the general population versus the crime statistics in these cities.

I don't think they would ever, surely they knew if you told them there's not going to be any more enforcement because 30% of the cops aren't here anymore.

And if you're a cop,

think about it, and you look at the whole system of justice the last two or three years, you know that if some person in custody

is harmed, whether it's justifiable or not, your life's over with because the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago, you're going to have your picture in there in one nanosecond, and your address will be doxxed, and you will be on trial, and the chief police will put you, throw you out.

The only people are going to protect you are the police union, and they're going to be impotent.

The city council is going to turn on you.

So, what they're doing is

essentially, and I can tell you it's happening: is that when you call up and you say, My boyfriend's beating me up,

or somebody just carjacked

my Ford, or somebody's just broke a window in my store.

And if they're in a high crime,

basically the police are saying, can't hear you, didn't quite hear it.

We'll get back to you.

And then they get together and say, I'm not going in there.

That's a lose, lose, lose, lose situation.

If I go in there, I could get A, shot and killed.

Nobody cares.

B, I could be wounded.

Nobody cares.

Three, I could, to save my life, have to shoot somebody.

And that's the end of my career, no matter what the circumstances that prompted that shooting.

Or four,

I could make an arrest at great danger to my career and my person, take the person in to be arrested, and they will be released in 24 hours.

So those are four lose-lose, and I'm not going to get near it.

Very sad.

That's part, that's what's happening.

And Black Lives Matter, I think a person could say without exaggeration, have killed thousands of young black people, I mean children and innocent victims by forcing the city council members to defund the police and then to create a system in which the police, such as numbers that are left, are not going into these high crime areas out of fear of what we just talked about.

And therefore, it's open season on anybody who's young or innocent, or old, or helpless.

And there's a lot of people dying at 40-year highs, and nobody seems to care.

Nobody seems to care.

And I don't know what the people, you talk about justice, Sammy, but I mean,

what are you going to do?

I mean, when you get 30, 40 people killed in Baltimore and Chicago on a Saturday night, nobody cares.

Or you get a young little eight-year-old girl sitting at the kitchen table and a bullet goes through the wall and hits her in the brain, she's dead or you have contrarily a jogger who's jogging and and she's murdered and raped or there's other girl yesterday that just killed or

you know it's some innocent person who's shot and killed in a store we just i just saw the other night on fox news of all places i think he was an indian american an african-american guy came in he and he he gave him everything he wanted and he shot him in the head and executed him.

And when that keeps going, going, going, what do you do?

And

if you say, everybody's terrified.

Because if you say we could start by addressing the demographic.

So if African-American males between the age of 14 and 30 represent roughly 3 to 4% of the population, but they're mostly responsible for 50 to 55% of violent crime, let's focus first first on this group to save

first the African-American community upon which they first prey on.

You can't do that.

Can't do that.

So

the way the left-wing progressive mind works is, I would rather let these people die than anybody impugn my liberal integrity.

I just don't want to do that.

I don't want to do it.

I can see it with the CLIRIA Act, where I mentioned that before to you, that by law, every university has to quarterly, I I think, or monthly or semi-annually report the crime statistics within their jurisdiction so prospective students know what they're up against when they move into the dorms.

It happened from a case, I think it was in Philadelphia University, where a young girl was killed and the university knew it was a high crime area and yet did not inform parents.

Now they do.

Prior to George Floyd,

I get two or three of these from visiting professorships or my permanent job from the universities.

They're required to inform the university community.

And they used to be pretty explicit.

They would say, this suspect, and they would give you weight, approximate weight, height, race,

appearance,

was seen blank, blank, you know, entering a dorm, trying to rape a woman, raping a woman, stealing something.

They were based on descriptions.

And now, you know what?

They're not there.

They're suspect

seen near six catalytic converter thefts, description,

not clear.

And that's what they do.

And the universities have said, I am not

going to go down that path and be called a racist.

So I'm not, I'm going to violate the law.

That's what de facto they're doing.

And they're going to put a lot of people into danger who can't make the necessary adjustments to avoid that suspect that they have been warned about.

And it's against the law.

They've been fined, by the way.

The Trump administration fined a lot of universities for voluntary, I mean, for just non-compliance.

But it's just a loaded, it's really sad because we're just telling the American people there are certain things we're not going to do.

We're not going to protect you.

And if you're shot and killed, we're not going to talk about the the description of the person who did that or why they did that or how they did that.

You're just a victim, a necessary victim in this effort not to inflame tensions within society.

Yeah.

And, you know, you're acceptable losses.

That's what we're doing.

Yeah.

You know, everybody knows that if I get in this car tomorrow,

I'm looking out of

car and I drive into a very high crime area, not very far from me, and somebody shoots me.

Nobody's going to care.

And that person's not going to go to jail.

Or if they go to jail, they're going to be released.

I know that.

Yeah.

Everybody knows that.

Well, Victor, you've given me a whole new view of natural law.

And that it seems like if we abrogate natural law

and not fulfill it, right, or not follow its guidelines, then we create a society that's just havoc and chaos

and dangerous for everything.

I think of natural law when I walk down Market Street, and I don't do it anymore, but I did it during the COVID epidemic two or three times.

And I said to myself, ah, a violation of natural law.

That person has his rear end facing me, and now I'm watching him defecate before I turn away.

And that defecation will get on the sidewalk.

It will be washed into the gutter.

They will tell you that it's not true.

But when I flew into San Francisco, I see,

I don't know what the word, streams coming out of the gutter system, the overflow system, or maybe it's the sewer systems are not working, but they're brown streams.

You can see it.

And that is against natural law.

When I see somebody fornicating, and I've seen that in San Francisco, when I see somebody walk up and hit or kick people, that's against natural law.

When I see people urinating, that's against natural law.

And all of that stuff then is naturally illegal because originally in pre-civilizational times when these religious and tribal doctrines began to emerge and they were refined, modulated, adapted, changed, focused by formal religious texts, but most importantly by constitutional precepts.

When you see all of that, you say to yourself, this is pre-modern.

This is This is pre-civilizational.

And what happens in pre-civilizational time?

You get disease.

Oh, polio is coming back.

Oh, monkeypox is coming back.

And you get filth.

Oh, wow.

The bay that everybody used for 70 years, spent their lives cleaning up is now filthy.

Oh, wow.

The crime that everybody worked so hard to make it safe to walk around San Francisco at midnight is over with.

It's gone.

And they just threw it away.

They just destroyed it.

They destroyed the work of centuries.

It's really sad, Sam.

I mean, if you look at those movies of New York, just look at it in the 1940s or 50s or 60s, no, up to mid-60s, and it looks clean and people were walking at night and it was functional and you can't do that anymore.

All of the work, say, from 1980 to 2010.

I couldn't believe when I would go to New York, say, in 2009 or 10.

I would leave my hotel to go get some bottle of water, and it would be, I couldn't sleep, it'd be 12.

I thought this is really dangerous.

But I go out there, and it was all broad lit.

It was just like daytime.

It was lit up, and there were people jamming the sidewalks.

I would take the subway, they were clean.

There was no crime.

It was amazing, that achievement.

They destroyed that.

They've destroyed that in three years.

Yeah, they sure have.

And if you were a voter and you look at what's going on in the United States, the homeless, the crime, the dangers, and then you think, who did that?

Who did that?

And then, when you look at, when you fill up at the

tank, I did yesterday.

I could not believe it.

That little hundred dollar limit came up, and I wasn't full.

I had to go to another place.

And then I was talking to people, and they felt like they were

on the verge of a revolution train.

You know, it was $6.40 for diesel fuel.

And that was supposedly a great benefit because it wasn't $7.05.

Who did that?

That was intentional.

That was Anwar.

That was Keystone.

That was no federal leasing.

That was this ESG

try to discourage funding and investment and fracking.

They did that.

And so if people should remember, when they look at that border,

and they look at crime and they look at energy and they look at inflate, they did that intentionally.

That was part of a progressive agenda.

And

they were happy about it.

They're not unhappy about it.

They're only unhappy that people are talking about it.

They're mad at that Fox reporter they said today.

How dare he report on the border?

That's the crime, reporting on what's going on or complaining about it or saying that there's inflation.

I went to, I'll just close out this

little

rant, I guess that's the word for it.

I went to a food market yesterday and

there was, again, the usual scene of onlookers.

It's like the zoo.

Everybody goes in my community, we all line up and look at meat.

It's like exotic animals.

You know, you're behind, you're on the edge, and you look in there, and you see that these things are not being bought.

These little ribeye steaks, $16, $18, $20 a pound.

And they're thin as, they look like pancakes.

But they're starting to turn what, what's what's that purple maybe?

They're not red.

And they have that little expiration date.

So it's kind of like, hmm, I'll take that one because it's, because it's 20% off, but nobody,

they don't buy it anymore.

It's like an exotic phenomenon.

They can't afford it.

They literally can't afford it.

And

same thing with gas and fuel.

And you add in housing and rents.

Gosh,

they did this.

They did this intentionally.

And I think they're going to really be punished politically and electorally in the midterms.

I think all of this stuff about, oh, the red wave, or there's not going to be any 2010 Tea Party pushback or no more

contract of America, 1994 rebellion, it's all over with.

And everybody, Joe Biden is aviator Joe and it's doing, I don't believe that.

I think people are just saying, you know what?

I'm just going to keep quiet.

I'm not going to talk to people, but I'm going to vote.

And I'm going to get back at what they did to me.

Yeah.

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

I know we had the U.S.

American justice system, and I'm sorry if there's background noise on this, but the American justice system

to look at the history maybe a little bit.

Maybe we can talk broadly about these broad court periods.

But we'll take a break first and come right back.

Welcome back.

Victor, so just quickly, we don't have a lot of time.

You know, we have those broad court periods in American history, the early one, the Marshall Court, that was defining, and, you know, it went from 1801 to 1835.

And then the Tanney Court that saw the

Dred Scott case went from 1837 to 1864.

And the Warren Court too was quite long.

And I just, it is interesting that we have these long periods in which a certain

character defines the court.

And I was wondering if you had any reflections on, you know, the American justice system and that tradition.

Is the court a little bit too powerful, I think, is what my brain is thinking, but maybe not.

The problem is that, I mean, there was nothing in the Constitution that

delineated how there was a Supreme Court justice and a court, but it never said how large it should be.

And it never quite said exactly what its role was to be.

And so it took, you know, John Marshall, 18, I don't know, 1800, 1801 to 1832,

three decades.

Marlborough versus Madison, and that idea that the federal court had jurisdictions to declare particular laws

in

antithesis to the Constitution, not just at the federal level, but the state.

So you couldn't make a law that contravened the First Amendment or the Second Amendment.

And when they did make a law that said that the Jeffersonians, they were the popular party,

then John Marshall and his court could say, no, we have the power to overturn that.

And there was a lot of dissension.

Well, what do you mean you have the power?

Do you have the army?

How are you going to do that?

And so that was pretty much the status after Marshall that the Supreme Court gained by custom and tradition a power that the founders were not quite sure they wanted a Supreme Court.

They wanted a judiciary to have a check on the excesses of the legislature and the president, but they didn't spell out how that was to proceed.

Marshall did.

But for most of the federal court, when you say federal court, say from 1800

to, I don't know,

oh, probably 1930s,

you're not talking about an activist court.

It was just

basically how to interpret disputes on federal policies like tariffs and how the states acted with one another and each with the federal government.

So

if you look at those court cases, thousands of them, they were:

the state of Virginia cannot pass a law that says this because the Constitution says that, or Alabama is fighting with New Hampshire about a particular

railroad concession or something, and the federal government has a role.

Here it is.

That was what it was, that was

bought.

And that was pretty consistent.

But the Warren Court, that's that period, oh, between 1953 and I think, was it, he was there till 60.

69.

69?

Yeah, it was 16 years.

And by the way, before we bashed the Warren Court, remember that three or four of the justices, the most influential, Earl Warren himself, who'd been attorney general and governor of California, was appointed by Ike.

And

Justice Harlan, who was sort of conservative on something, was appointed by Ike.

And the first Brennan was appointed by Ike.

And

you get the impression that before we, you know, we say that

all of these justices were LBJ or appointments not true.

There were Frank Ferder and William O.

Douglas that were the most prominent, but they were...

they were FDR appointments.

And then we had Abe Fortas and Goldman that were LBJ, but the majority of the core,

Hugo Black, he was an FDR appointment.

He was very left-wing, but the core of the Warren Court were three or four FDR appointees, and then Ike.

Ike did it.

And under the leadership of Warren Court, they decided that they were going to take

the Supreme Court in an entirely new direction that had not been there in the Constitution and went well beyond the Marshall Court.

And they said essentially that we're going to take an expansive idea of all of the Bill of Rights.

And

if you say search and seizure, okay,

you pull somebody over,

if you don't tell them that they have a right to a lawyer or before their questions, an exclusionary rule, then they can't, you can throw out the entire crime.

And when it says separation of church and state,

there shall be no official religion.

We're going to interpret that that you can't have a prayer in your first grade class.

Can't do it.

And when you have freedom of expression, we're going to read, look at that and say you can have deep throat at the local theater.

So that was a rat, it was a radical idea that the Constitution was living, it was fluid, it was malleable, and experts with particular degrees and legal experience and enlightenment in the modern area were smarter than the founders.

And so they had to update.

so they really enlarged the power of the supreme court and they said to themselves we can't trust the american people because they're always a day late and a dollar short they're not progressive enough they're not enlightened they're prone to superstition they do things in their state legislature and the congress that we feel is illiberal and we're going to stop it and they we're going to stop it by fiat and that's what they did and they had a they had a brilliant

culture in Washington.

And by that, I mean they were able

to

create a Georgetown, I guess it's been called a Georgetown sensibility.

So when you had, as I said, that Harlan was kind of conservative, but he went liberal.

And Potter Stewart went liberal.

And Brennan went liberal.

And of course, William O.

Douglas went, you know, he hadn't been that left-wing to begin with.

And Frankfurter went liberal.

And Douglas went, and Black went liberal, hard liberal, because

they were in a city in which the aristocracy was left-wing in politics and the permanent government, and they were culturated and they didn't want to be excluded.

And so it's almost true that almost every judicial appointment that a conservative makes, with very few exceptions,

they tend to go left-wing.

Think of David Souter,

Roberts.

Yeah, Justice Roberts, Sandra Day O'Connell, Kennedy.

They all go to the left.

The only person I can ever remember that went right was that Kennedy appointment, Wizard White.

He went a little bit to the right, and they were angry at him.

But

it's just this phenomenon that the left counts on, that they have a cultural influence upon

the Washington Denizens and the court, that they're able to say to them,

when you watch NPR, when you watch PBS shows on Sunday night, when you read the New York Times book review, when you go to this particular restaurant, when you go to this opera or symphony, when you go to this cocktail party,

what do you see?

You see progressive, enlightened people.

And if you

want to be part of that, then you're going to have to make the necessary adjustments because we don't really, you know.

And so, if you're David's suitor, you just, you're not going to do what you were there to put,

what you were supposed to do, and interpret very carefully the original intent of a law as the founders envisioned it.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I think we're at the end of our time.

And thank you.

I'm glad that we talked specifically about the warrant court and sort of that growing liberalization or idea that the Constitution is

a living

document that

subject to all sorts of changes.

It's really led to lots of, I think, distortion of justice.

I don't want to be Plato.

Very powerful.

Yeah, they have more power than the entire U.S.

Congress.

They're able to do it.

I mean, just think in California where we passed a plebiscite.

Whether you like it or not, it's not the issue, but informed citizens twice voted that they thought that marriage was between a man and a woman.

And that passed because of strong minority support for tradition.

They didn't say they were against civil union, but that was thrown out almost immediately by a federal judge who himself was living with somebody, a male, and didn't disqualify himself.

And the same thing was true of Prop 13, everybody.

excuse me,

Prop 209, when people,

they immediately tried to dismantle the idea that you couldn't use racial set-asides.

And then they, especially on 187, where it said, if you are not here legally and you're in violation of the law, you shall not have federal support because it was obvious contradiction.

How can you, on one hand, break the law and then demand the law give you something?

And that was overwhelmingly a passed.

And I think it lasted three days.

And then a federal judge said, oh, can't do that.

It's contrary to the Constitution.

I don't know where it says that in the Constitution.

So that was their idea that they said that we alone, as sacred legal priests, know exactly what the original Constitution should, could have said at this particular point.

in our sophisticated era.

And if it didn't, if they didn't think that, then I'm going to put words in their mouth because they should have thought that.

And that's where we are.

Yeah.

Well, oh, go ahead.

Well, they come out of a particular law school and university system.

So,

you know, there's no, there's no counterfact.

There's when when Trump points conservative justices, and he did a lot, he's, he's,

he's going through thousands of justices.

There's not many more than he appointed, is what I'm trying to say.

When Joe Biden has now appointed, I think at a faster rate than Trump has, liberal justice, there's thousands of them of potential judicial nominees.

And so that's the difference.

And what they're angry about is they're basically saying to the American people, well, 95% of the law faculty are left wing and 95% of the lawyers are left wing.

And yet the Supreme Court is, you know,

six to three or five, four conservative.

That's not fair.

And that's what they're angry about because this has been their staple, this source of progressive power has been the Supreme Court and the federal appeals courts.

And for a little blimp, a little tiny moment in history, it has some constructionists.

And they're furious.

And that's why Chuck Schumer sits at the doors of the court and says, you don't know what's going to hit you,

Kavanaugh.

You don't know what's going to hit you, Gorsuch.

That's why an assassin shows up at the home of Gorsuch.

That's why Gorsuch is chased out of a diner.

That's why mobs show up at the homes of Thomas and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

That's why Kavanaugh was destroyed almost in his hearing.

They're attacking the court in a way.

That's why they want to pack it, because they hate it.

They hate it, not the court.

They love the court, but they hate this particular moment in the court's history.

And they're very adolescent and they're crybabies.

And they say, if I can't get my way, I'm going to break my toy.

And then that's what they're doing.

And

it's very funny to watch because they say, well, if we don't have this expansionist, you know, interpretive court,

fluid, modern, whatever we want to call it, then all we have is the Congress.

And we have the Congress now and the present, but we might, we need all three branches in case they, if they ever got the Congress back, we wouldn't have the court.

So the way they look at the court is

it's an accelerant of a liberal agenda.

They can do it by fear.

They view the Supreme Court the same way they view the Pentagon.

I love the Pentagon now in the FBI because they say the chain of command, bam, bam, bam, bam.

Woke indoctrination, transgendered surgeries, you name it.

Same thing with the court.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, it sounds like we really need to work, all of us, to reestablish

constitutional constructionism and

a

belief in natural law.

And maybe

the problem is the lack of deterrence now that the breakdown of the law has led to no deterrence out there.

So people are committing crimes at a much greater rate than might.

otherwise happen if there was at least a little deterrence.

So are you saying crime pays?

Yeah, it sure does for some people.

And that's really sad.

It's very sad.

All those lectures your parents gave you when you said, we went back from a football trip to Disneyland and dad,

I saw the quarterback or I saw the lineman.

He went into Disney place and took a candy bar.

I mean, I couldn't believe it.

Your father would say, Victor, crime doesn't pay.

Yeah, and we all have a sense of it's wrong.

So that young man

went back to

bed at night and felt guilty for taking one.

Why didn't you take one yourself?

The law was only there because some wealthy white rich guy arbitrarily made it because he's never stole a candy bar.

Yeah.

That's where we go.

Okay.

That's where we are.

All right.

Thank you very much once again for this Saturday or this weekend edition.

Just a whole new look on outlook on justice.

And I think we can save our justice system myself.

Thank you for all of your time, and I'm sure our listeners are also very thankful.

Thank you very much, and thank everybody for listening.

All right, this is Victor Davis-Hanson and Sammy Wink, and we are signing off.