Martha's Vineyard, Ron DeSantis, and John Ford

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star and namesake, Victor.

Davis Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and he's best-selling author.

He is a farmer, a classicist.

And I think, and I've always thought, Victor's one of the best political analysts writing and thinking in America today.

And we've got a number of political issues and questions we're going to discuss on this particular podcast.

I'm down in Atlanta, beautiful Atlanta.

I'm here for the State Policy Network Convention, Great Association of these state think tanks that are fighting for liberty.

But it's always good to make some time to talk to my dear friend and one of the smartest people out there, Victor.

So, my friend, we're just a few days after the great Martha's Vineyard caper held by Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, and let's start talking about that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

Victor, I'm out of practice.

I'm supposed to say up front to

victorhanson.com, the website.

And I'm going to talk about that a little later.

So

folks, be prepared.

Get your pen ready.

Take notes.

Hey, Victor, I just have to babble a second.

I've been to Martha's Vineyard.

I don't know if you ever have.

Have you?

Never.

Never.

Well, one,

probably 20 years ago, my college roommate said, and he had three kids.

We had three kids.

And we, you know, approximate as the crow flies, not so far.

Hey, let's go there.

And we went for a week, rented a house.

Of course, it was a week.

Bill Clinton was still president.

The place was crawling with media.

The most interesting thing to me about it was Martha's Vineyard is where Chappaquiddick is, the island.

And you cannot buy anything on Martha's Vineyard with Chappaquittic on it.

I'm sure if I went to Selma, California, I'd be able to buy hoodies and t-shirts and whatever that says Selma emblazoned on it.

But you cannot buy anything with Chappaquiddick because the Kennedys have

a real live conspiracy theory going on.

They don't just only kill people in their cars.

They try to suppress it.

But

it is a liberal nirvana, has been for years.

And as we know

from the most recent news, Governor Ron DeSantis, kind of following in the footsteps of Governor Abbott in Texas, has decided to send illegal immigrants or undocumented workers or whatever they are to, he flew them, to Arthur's Vineyard.

And the outrage, just a few terms, and I'll shut up, Victor, and your analysis of it, but some of the terms used to attack DeSantis, who today, I believe, on Meet the Press was being recorded today, one of Chuck Todd's last shows.

All the guests were just slamming him.

Inhumane, human trafficking, scandalous.

kidnapping, felony.

Those are just some of the nicer terms used to describe what DeSantis has done.

So Victor, I called it a stunt.

In a way, it is a stunt.

I think it's a terrific political move.

You may disagree.

You may think it

has other ramifications.

What are your thoughts?

Oh, no, I think it was brilliant because for two reasons.

One, it disrupted the left-wing psychodramas, and that is the January 6th.

committee and then we had the raid and then we had the phantom of the opera biden speech and now we're back to january 6th and this thing just just took over and gobbled up a whole week of news.

And that was really important that they do that.

And then the second thing is it forced those people to defend it.

I mean, to defend what they're doing.

And they can't.

And so they say, well, this is mean.

And they're treating migrants like commodities.

But of course, that's what they're doing because they can't continue that line of argumentation.

Because

whereas DeSantis delivered 50 during the daylight hours, they do it at night, the federal government, and they

fly in thousands to communities without anybody knowing it.

This was open and public and transparent.

And then the other thing is it's something that we talk about all the time.

And I use that kind of hackneyed phrase, they're never subject to the consequences of their own ideology.

And finally, somebody puts them on the spot where they go panic

and they have all these people there and you think, wow, they have 14,000 people.

I mean, I live in a community jack of 20,000, Greater Salma now.

It's merged with Fresno, I think.

I don't live there, but I live outside it.

And we are ground zero.

And there's been a lot of people bust in or find their way into Fresno County during this 3 million onslaught.

And I can tell you that you can handle them.

They said, we don't have the facilities to handle them.

Well, what do you think Salma has?

Its per capita income is $13,000 a year.

And I can tell you that if I step outside right now and walk a quarter mile, I can see on the left side of the road, 30 or 40 people living in what used to be a farmhouse in its ground.

They have Winnebagos, they have shacks, they have garages, they have sheds.

Across the street, there's probably 20.

Ditto.

Go down the street, there's ditto.

Go the other way,

about a mile, ditto.

That's what people are doing all over the southern United States because of Joe Biden's policy.

And no one says a word in Martha's Vineyard.

And now they say a word.

And we learned that

it's a, I guess what I'm trying to say is it's a peephole into the dark mind of the left.

And it's very hard for them to reveal whom they are.

But they less than 48 hours, they had them all out of there.

And if any other community had done that,

If one of those planes had landed at night in any other community and they said, you guys are going to be bused immediately out of our community.

This is immoral that Joe Biden is dropping people like commodities at an airport outside our community, they would be called racist.

Why didn't they?

I mean, I'm serious.

I'm not being a, this isn't a character.

Why didn't they say 50 people will not impact one of the wealthiest communities in the United States?

Right.

And why didn't the Obamas and all of these actors and celebrities get together and say, look,

I've got a nine-car garage, have one car space, and it'll be an eight-car garage.

Another person says, Well, I've got a gazebo out there with running water, and I had a pool, shower, and bath, and they can camp out there.

Why didn't they all get together and do that?

It would have been very easy to do.

That's what they're doing on my avenue.

They don't want to do it.

And that question is raised then: why not?

Why do they not want to do it?

And here we get to the heart of the whole sick, upper-class, wealthy, left-wing white mind.

This entire virtue-signaling, progressive woke movement by our bicoastal elite is a psychological mechanism to square the impossible circle that they are not comfortable with poor people, with people who are not in their socioeconomic class, and let's be frank,

then with white people.

And

this really lays it bare.

I think this is going to be the start of a new phenomenon, Jack.

So I would suggest that DeSantis and Abbott, along with the other governors, say, you know what, we're on to something.

So

why don't we have a campaign that says, if you

want to support the new Green Deal, everybody takes a pledge not to set foot either as an owner or a renter or a passenger in a private jet given that carbon footprint why don't we take a pledge that if we're really warming up the planet everybody takes a pledge not to heat up a swimming pool or to cool or heat more than 2 000 square feet and especially not more than one home If you are going to criticize charter schools and praise the teachers union, then you should put your children in the public schools.

Why don't we do that?

It would be very easy to do.

This could start a whole new chapter in accountability.

And I think finally, we're getting conservatives that are starting to think in bare knuckles fashion, Lee Atwater fashion for a change.

And this may, I think, DeSantis has really improved his image because his image before this was competent.

highly educated, punched every right button as far as experience, demeanor, temperament.

But the Trump people said, well, he doesn't have fire in the belly and he won't confront the left like Trump does.

And we're starting to see that with the Disney matter and this, that he does.

He does it very well.

So it's been a big plus for him.

I've been just listening, driving today, listening to these people like Juan Williams and these other people try to rationalize it.

They can't.

It's amazing.

They say things like, this is racist.

You can't just drop people off.

And then they stop and they look like, you know, their eyes have those little cartoon spinning things on it.

And they catch themselves thinking, uh-oh, I just admitted that I don't like what the federal government and what the left has been doing.

And that's exactly what's happening.

And another thing that's going on, this is part of this entire left-wing panic.

And we talked about this,

and I talked about it with Sammy.

If you go back to the 94 and the 2010 midterms, right about two weeks after Labor Day, you had these narratives.

I went back and looked at them, and I think somebody wrote about it.

And they're all the same.

The Republican surge, the red wave seems to be faltering.

Did the Republicans peak too early?

Unusual blue strength.

Latest polls show.

And that was all a media and left-wing poll-driven effort to depress fundraising and turnout and disappoint Republicans.

And I think conservatives are in a really great position.

And all of this is a smokescreen that the pollsters do, as they did in 2020 with a lot of the Senate races where they said, you know, everybody from Susan Collins to Ron Johnson, Florida had no chance to win, no chance to win.

They were all ahead the whole time.

And so that's what I think the Republicans are starting to get on to it now.

We all said,

you and I talked about it.

Why don't you nationalize the election and get off this January 6th, the raid, the Trump problems, and make every Democratic candidate say, I am for the border, I am not for it.

I am for what happened in Afghanistan, I'm not for it.

I am for printing money, I'm not.

I am for the new Green Deal, I'm not.

But this makes it really clear because now that issue of an open border is in everybody's face.

And they need to keep doing this with every one of those issues because they're not winning issues for the left.

And Joe Biden is not a winning president for the left.

And the commentariat looks silly right now.

Yeah.

But Victor,

the same Chuck Todd, didn't he hear from Kamal Harris the previous week that the border is secure?

The border is secure.

And then she looked outside of the vice president's residence and lo and behold, there were illegal aliens right outside her window for a brief moment.

And she got closer to an illegal alien at her house than she ever did at the border because she doesn't go down there.

And yeah, so,

and

I've been for two years hearing from people in my community, almost all Mexican-American, that

when you have people crashing the border, you don't have advanced placement in your school.

It's hard to keep doing it.

You have English immersion or bilingualism, or you have gang problems, or you have over-tax federal services or social services.

And every community has been dealing with that.

And all of these white liberal people like Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein and Gavin Newsom that live in these walled and luxurious estates in places like Tahoe and Napa or Jerry Brown and Grass, they don't deal with it.

They never deal with it.

That's why.

They advocate it.

It's a psychological mechanism to relieve their guilt of their basically apartheid existences.

And they feel really bad that they hang out with each other.

And it's not so much a question of race as class because the Obamas are especially culpable.

I was just listening to an old clip of Michelle Obama.

It was just disgusting when she said she was at some forum and everybody gave her a loud applause.

We said, Oh, you know, and we were in Chicago, and then people like us who played by the rules, we moved into a new area and everybody left.

And I'm thinking, well, why didn't you stay there then?

If you moved in the community and it was so great and everybody left, why aren't you there now?

And why don't you live in Chicago?

If you went there and you say, well, all these white people,

you're there.

You got what you wanted.

You got a mention in Chicago.

Why didn't you have to go to Lily White Martha's Vineyard or Lily White Hawaii or Lily White Calorama and build these multi, you know, thousands of square feet.

I bet if you counted up all the square feet that the Obamas have, it's about 30,000 square feet in their three mansions.

And for her to say that people leave, if they did leave, and I'm not sure they did, but if so-called white people left, it's for the same reason she left.

And if it's the same reason that LeBron is in a mansion and Nova is in a mansion,

and it's because of crime, not race.

Crime.

Absolutely.

To try and talk about it.

Look, people.

Where I live, the Bronx, as we know, you know, in the 60s and 70s,

in what's called the South Bronx, there were significant enclaves of white people of all ethnicities.

The Grand Concourse, where the famous sucker punch took place,

that was a well-known Jewish enclave.

But a lot of people got out of Dodge, as you right, because of crime.

But yeah, they left, blacks, minorities moved in.

But for her to try to equate, like, she moved into a neighborhood, and it was like some every Archie bunker on the street got out of town because the Obamas moved to town.

That's such a, what a load load of crap.

Hey, Victor, I got to correct you on, if you don't mind.

Yes.

I think this will be the first time I've ever, and maybe the last.

You know, Martha's Vineyard is a haven,

has long been the black elite resort in America.

I only knew that because of

Lewis Henry Gates.

Remember after the psychodrama, that's his

when he donated the plastic handcuffs to the Smithsonian.

Yeah, the Beer Summit.

Yeah.

And the Beer Summit.

Then he was, didn't he say that he rode his bike out there to Martha's Vineyard or something?

He was stayed there and

he was,

he, he mentioned, he's mentioned many times that he hangs out at Martha's Vineyard.

And then I think Bill Clinton mentioned that,

oh, a few of his African-American friends were there as well.

So it's not, it's not.

it's not just lily white.

It is almost lily white, but it's wealthy.

Right.

Well, it's it's class, but I do think some of the opprobrium for the residents of Martha's Vineyard who couldn't wait to get rid of these 50 people,

it's a little, the pigmentation is not so white for who's behind that.

Think what they could have done.

They could have said,

well,

since we have no immigration law.

And the first thing these people did was break the law when they entered illegally, and the second thing they did was reside illegally.

Well, then the third thing we're we're going to do is hire them illegally.

So we need a lot of help in Martha's Vineyard.

And the Obamas could have said, you know what?

I'm going to hire five Venezuelans to help my five-person landscaping crew.

And then somebody at the restaurant could say, I'm going to have and get them employed.

But if you did that, then

some wealthy white person would say, oh, wait a minute.

Where were they going to live?

Do they have kids?

Are they going to be in the schools?

What's going to happen?

And that's how, that's why this, I think everybody should realize that modern progressivism, which is different than the old Harry Truman JFK Democratic Party, it is a phenomenon that came with

just historic levels of wealth that had never been seen in the history of civilization in or globalized by cold stool, whether it was the Facebook wealth or the Google wealth or the university wealth or the Wall Street wealth or the financial sector wealth.

When you have that 8 billion person market, there were certain people who, and then their subordinates.

So it used to be a CEO might make 2 million.

That's what a mid-level Facebook person makes now.

When you have that kind of money and it insulates people and it gives them a sense that their ideas,

their values are also exalted because they make more money and therefore their ideas should be made more important.

And that's really the root of what we're, this whole woke movement is a a wealthy person's domain, whether minority or white.

And it's a top-down revolution imposed on the middle classes by people who are not subject to that ideology.

And you really see it with the illegal migration.

And also, Victor,

this may be a stretch, but because it was September 11th, I happened to be watching some of the National Geographic.

It does a pretty great job on September 11th with a number of documentaries that airs.

One of them was about Gander Airport up in Canada that took in hundreds of flights.

They had to land there.

They, you know, all incoming flights from Europe, many of them landed there.

And here's a small community that had thousands of people that it had, they had, they could, you know, they were there.

They couldn't go anywhere.

And, you know, communities can house people,

thousands of people.

You can find ways to do it.

I can tell you, I've seen it, Jack.

Yeah.

So why do they have to get rid of these people overnight?

Because they don't want them around.

I can tell you that if you go to Fresno, Tulare, Kings County, the Nexus where I live, during the entire destruction of family farming between 2000 and 2015, when you really ramped up vertically integrated corporate agribusiness and most people could not make it unless they had a particular size operation, say 2,000 or 3,000 acres minimum.

Okay, when they left, their land was purchased or leased, and their farmhouses, most of them were very modest, 1,200 square feet, 1,500 square feet.

They were rented out by the corporate person to usually Mexican-American contractors or hired men who then subleased it.

to people who were here illegally.

And by sublease it, I mean if these were acre or two acre home sites surrounded by the corporate farm, then they strung Romex, they got port-a-potties, they put shacks, they took the tractor shed and divided it and partitioned.

And there's 30 people living there, 30 people right down the road from me.

And I, you know, Laura Logan came out here and did a documentary and I tried to say to Laura, you have to be very careful, Laura, because

And she couldn't believe it.

We went around the area and she said, my gosh, you've got hundreds of people living here in single family multiple single family residence i said i know it and she said well this is california isn't it highly regulated i said no california was never highly regulated it was hyper regulated for the middle class and that's who people go after for revenues but for the poor it's a completely wild west as one regulator i think i said to you jack when I was looking at my solar panels, they said, instead of hounding me day after day to put on 44 panels, why don't you cross the street and go down a quarter mile and look at the Romex and the lack of sewage

and illegal dwellings on a single family parcel?

And he said to me, are you stupid?

There's no money there and nobody would listen to me.

And I don't know if I'd come out alive.

And so

communities are impacted, influenced.

affected all over the United States when you put in 3 million plus people within 18 months, but not Joe Biden and not Nancy Pelosi and not Oprah and not LeBron and not the Obamas.

But now this was just a small little token gesture, brilliant token gesture to say, see,

this is what people in Rome, Texas, Roma, Texas have to put up with.

This is what Yuma is under siege.

This is what El Paso deals with.

And these communities are largely minority communities.

And they, and you say, well, we, I think Juan Williams said, well,

the whole story was the federal government gives them money.

And if the federal government were going to cut off, ha, ha, well, they don't give them enough money.

They give them a token amount of money because it ripples throughout the society and it causes housing shortages.

It spikes crime.

It becomes empowerment for the cartel.

I could go on because I see it firsthand here.

And when I look around,

and I won't mention names, names, but some of people that I know who are very, very liberal, who left this area, they're very supportive of illegal immigration, but they don't live here anymore.

They would never live here.

They don't want to live here.

I like living here.

I really do.

I find people, I don't like illegal immigration, but when I meet immigrants, I meet them every day.

That's the only people I see.

There's sort of, if you can distinguish from somebody that's not, if you see somebody tattooed with a teardrop or 13 or something, I stay away.

But that's the minority.

And I see all the other people, and they're very poor, but they're very can-do.

And sometimes it's frustrating as it would be for anybody to meet somebody from an alien culture for the first time.

And a lot of people, when I mean that, I mean they're right from Oaxaca, Mexico.

But when somebody runs out of gas on my avenue avenue and I go out and give them gas,

I wish they hadn't come illegally.

I wish they were not residing here illegally.

But given all of those things, it's a can-do situation.

And the first generation will vote Democratic, probably illegally voting.

The second generation, they'll send their kids to public universities and they'll be brainwashed and vote left-wing.

The third generation in 50 years will vote Republican.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I have a little more.

You mentioned El Paso.

There's a counterpoint to that related to

these

actions of Abbott, Governor Abbott, and DeSantis.

And there's a little more about DeSantis we should hopefully talk about.

And let's do that, but right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

So, yeah, my reminder, dear listeners, is that you visit VictorHanson.com.

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It's called ultra.

For example, right now there's a five-part series on raisin farming.

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You're going to do it.

And when you do do it, finally, you're going to say, why didn't I do this before?

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So, Victor,

the mayor of El Paso is a Democrat.

And he has been sending illegals to

northern cities by bus.

But he's not being accused of human trafficking, kidnapping, etc.

It's kind of interesting whose ox is.

Well,

we know why this whole fur

happened is because it was Martha's Vineyard.

And that was the place for this elite to congregate.

And they feel it's their private little sanctuary from the rest of us.

And somebody intruded and embarrassed them.

It embarrassed them because they did not want them there.

They did not want to see them.

They did not want to talk to them.

They wanted to do the following.

Go to a little tony little hall, put them there for a few hours, take pictures of each other as they brought in food and clothing.

and then put them on a big happy face bus and wave and then take pictures as they're waving and put it on Twitter and Facebook.

That's what they did.

And that's what they always do.

And everybody else pays the price.

If America could just make the left subject to the consequences of these disastrous policies that they force on everybody else, it would really radically change America.

This party is not the party of the middle class, Jack.

It's the party of the very, very wealthy.

and the subsidized poor.

It's really ironic because everybody has been told that I don't recognize a reply.

Party.

Every time I hear a Never Trumper, a Charles Sykes, a Bill Crystal, a David Fromm say, I don't recognize the Republican Party, I don't think you would recognize it because your Republican Party was a Mitt Romney, John McCain aristocratic party that wasn't interested in the middle class.

And so when I hear the left say, I don't recognize,

you don't, but we don't even know what the Democratic Party is.

It ceased to exist.

It is not a party of the middle class.

You just ceded that that entire class to this new Republican Party, and you became this Facebook, Google, Wall Street, big media, big sports, academia, this rarefied, wealthy elite.

And you exercise influence that's not commiserate with your numbers.

You don't have the majority of the population, but you do have all of these levers that we keep talking about.

from social media to K through 12 to academia and so on.

And you can really see how they influenced Jack with these soros prosecutors or these foundations that, or they outspend.

Do you really believe right now that a McCain fine gold bill would find one Democrat that wants it?

They don't want dark money.

They love dark money.

They outrage the Republicans two, three to one.

Oh, much more.

Look at that Arizona Senate race with Blake Masters.

He's just being swarmed.

And Ron Johnson is being swarmed.

That's the new Democratic Party, such as it is, using the word Democrat.

It's a wealthy professional class, and it's bizarre.

And so everything they talk about, the right, I don't recognize.

That's a projection, a psychological projecting their own values

that they're not comfortable with onto other people.

And that's issue by issue by issue.

And we never saw a better example than in Martha's Vineyard.

Right.

It's like almost like, you know, you pro-life don't care about babies, and, you know, except when they're pre-born, you know, you don't care about them after they're born.

These SOBs don't care about, where are the Catholic, I'm Catholics, I'll just pick on the Catholics.

Where are the bishops that

in front of their, you know, chanceries have Black Lives Matter signs and the like and various others, you know, lefties who put these ornaments on their lawn signs?

Where are the Catholics with their abandoned rectories and convents?

Why aren't they using these facilities to house and put up?

Put your money where your mouth is, put your facilities where your mouth is.

But they don't.

Not only Catholic, you know, United Methodists, whatever, all these other bleeding heart

mainline Protestant groups,

they all have

those signs in front of their churches,

but they don't.

So, this Martha's Vinya thing, I think, has truly exposed not only these rich

elites in that particular place, but the whole range of virtue virtue signalers on the left who've made

defending illegal immigration a priority, but they haven't done a thing to help an actual person.

All right, Victor, who wants to know, I think I've babbled enough on that, but let's just get your opinion, if you don't mind, before we move on to some more political things about DeSantis and how he's doing politically.

And I want to make a little counterpoint.

Maybe it doesn't deserve it, but

again, we're recording on Sunday the 18th, and Donald Trump spoke yesterday.

He had a rally in Ohio.

I just saw a headline, and I don't have it in front of me even, but kind of, I think, me-centered again.

He actually was pretty crude.

I said some lines

about JD Vance.

I was really disturbed about that because

he said that, you know, he kisses my ass.

Yeah.

And that was, and then he says, you know, then he kind of corrects himself.

I looked at the tape and then he says, well, our MAGA family loves JD, but he couldn't, that's the problem with Donald Trump.

He can't resist this, uh-oh, there's a big crowd here for JD vans, but I want everybody to know that they're here only because of me.

And we're going to see a lot of that with vis-a-vis Ron DeSantis.

You're starting to see another couple of indications that there's a sea change going on that the media won't speak about because they're afraid about it.

But when you look at the amount of money that Ron DeSantis has raised,

it's equivalent, or now I think it surpasses Donald Trump.

And when you start looking at people like that New York columnist, Times calls him and said, I actually miss the

wise cracking charisma of Donald Trump compared to DeSantis.

And you're starting to see a subtle shift.

where the left is saying to themselves, wow, we're spending all this time destroying Donald Trump.

And we got him on the January 6th and now we're going to reopen the January 6th committee.

And we got him on the raid and we went into this long, long, melodramatic back and forth on evidence and FBI.

But in the meantime, this Dissentist

is performing these things that are really helping him.

And he is.

insidiously taking the reins of the Republican Party and showing them various strategies about how to deal with the left that we haven't seen in 30 years.

And so I don't know what critical mass it'll be sometime after the midterm.

But if DeSantis keeps this up and can find ways to be even more inventive about not just illegal immigration, but crime and other things, and bring these issues in a way that cannot be ignored.

He will A, really help the Republicans nationalize this race so that all 464 or whatever they are, Senate Senate and House races are a referendum on Joe Biden.

But more importantly, he'll be the de facto front runner.

And we can say, it's kind of funny, Jack, when everybody says, should Trump run or not run?

Yeah, he'll probably run.

But we don't, this isn't a backroom deal anymore.

And so it's not the Democratic Party where all of a sudden Joe Biden, and Jim Clyburn make a deal and everybody faints like musical chair Elizabeth Warren, but they all get out of the race, and Bernie's bought off, or whatever, and he's the nominee.

They're going to run, and

we'll see what happens in New Hampshire, Iowa, New Hampshire, and these early primaries.

But that will decide very early on because that's where the money will go.

And the money right now is starting to trend to DeSantis.

And I think he's going to run.

Yeah, I do too.

And

I saw some headline today about Pompeo,

I think he was speaking in Ohio, also, who is kind of made it, he's intimating clearly that he's going to

run.

Now, he's been obviously toying with this since he,

you know, since his

2021, early 2021, but I think it may become, becomes more pronounced now with the sign of Trump weakening.

I'm not saying Trump's weak, you know.

but he's he seems to be weakening and that uh

i i expect

if this continues that they're going to have some high-level strategy sessions with merrick garland and biden and elizabeth warren and bernie and the all the obama people and they're going to say look

let's hold off maybe on indicting donald trump because he may if we damage him too much these other people are running now against us and they're drawing attention to the issues and the subtext is that you can be MAGA without Trump.

And that would mean they get the down, the upside of the MAGA agenda, which everybody agrees with, but not the downside of this Donald Trump personality.

So that's what, and I'm not trying to, you know, endorse any candidate.

I'm just saying from an outsider's point of view, I think the left is right in the middle of having a come to Jesus moment, that their strategy is just about

self-evidently not the one that's in their interest.

And so they're pivoting now and starting to really attack DeSantis.

Pompeo is a great guy.

I know him a little bit.

I think he's one of the best Secretary of States we've had in a long time.

He's very, very well-informed.

He's well-spoken.

He looks great.

He's lost a lot of weight.

Everything about him is,

he has one problem, Jack, and that is he's never been, he doesn't have a constituency.

He hasn't held a statewide office.

He's been a congressperson, a very good one.

But we don't have a history unless you're a general or a celebrity or you're a billionaire.

I mean, you either have to be Trump or Ross Barot or you have to be

Ulysses S.

Grant or Dwight Eisenhower if you're not a politician.

And we haven't had a congressperson or a Secretary of State very frequently rise because you don't have a base, a core constituency.

He's trying to do that with sort of moving in the evangelical borderlands and getting

that constituency that maybe DeSantis would not

have.

But right now,

I would just be neutral and say that if you look at DeSantis and Pompeo and Cotton,

And I know Haley will probably run.

They're all so much better than Buttigig and Corey Booker and that group.

Elizabeth Warren, retreads, and Hillary lurking around on the edges.

Poor Buddhaj, I think he had to change his pants over this, the

almost rail strike and

the crisis that we had.

Yeah, we've never

had somebody that incompetent.

Never really knew who the truth is.

We only hear about the Secretary of Transportation when there's a problem.

And with him, whether it's the

price of gasoline and the inability to drive or the Port of LA Wild West scenario or the supply disruptions of baby formula or the rails, the potential, it's all bad.

Yeah.

By the way, Victor, if we just, let me just throw some numbers out on a new poll and see if you have any thoughts.

And if not,

we'll move on to other topics.

But NBC did

an issues poll.

It was out today.

I'm looking at a New York Post article.

It's saying that as we head into the midterm elections that now Republicans and Democrats are are even

and but by issues uh here's where the population breaks on um you know between parties take border security 56 of voters uh think uh republicans have the better handle on that issue only 20 democrats the economy it breaks 4728 towards republicans immigration 4629 to republican crime 4522

Cost of living, 43.29.

Then, as you get into numbers that prefer that

Democrats have preference, protecting democracy, Democrats outpace Republicans 40 to 33.

Education, I'm a little surprised education, 40 to 29.

I'm not.

Well, well, let me let me

just let me interject.

Yeah, and interject on education.

That's usually about 55.30.

So it's gone down.

Yeah, but

I thought we had, we, Republicans, had,

really made some significant gains, especially, you know, look at the Virginia elections, right?

Young people, they have, but my God, they're up against the largest, most powerful union in the United States, a teachers' union.

True.

And every time they try to reform education, they say, you're attacking teachers.

You hate the small schoolroom.

How dare you?

So it's very hard, but they're making inroads.

Well, Victor, one last political question, and then we're going to get on to

some movies.

But the last political question has to do with Lindsey Graham, senator from South Carolina, who surprised a lot of people by introducing legislation

in the Senate that would track.

the Mississippi law that was the substance of the Dobbs decision, decision, which overturned Roe v.

Wade, 15-week

a ban on abortion after 15 weeks.

And

it got a lot of attention, a lot of attacks, some interesting support.

Do you have any thoughts about this as

a political move?

I don't think it.

There's only one political move.

that the Republicans have where they can win on this issue.

And that is

their

systemic, if I could use that left-wing word, their way that they look at this from A to Z is it is always where it should be.

It's a matter for the states to decide.

And within that context, they are the party

that supports life.

And the Democratic Party and the people in it will,

in their own states,

vote to terminate a life in in the third trimester in a more radical fashion than any left-wing European country.

And that is the issue.

I won't get into incest and rape or anything.

I'm saying that is the political reality.

You just say it's up to the states, but we are not going to allow in any state that we can control to murder a baby with a heartbeat, et cetera.

Don't even say anything about incest or rape or the first,

don't talk about that, because that's where you get into some problems i'm not talking about principle jack you just asked me about politics where the politics are and so when lindsey graham says a

that at this particular time he wants a national law to protect life fine but what you're doing whether you're sincere or not or whether you agree with him you are playing into the hands of

what the left has been saying.

The left has been saying, they want to take away our right to choose.

And the right has been saying, no,

we want to let you decide on your own in your state what you want to do.

But we urge you very strongly not to kill life.

And that's where they can win.

But when Lindsey Graham says, we're going to force all you blue states and all you left-wing people,

we're going to force you not to have third trimester abortions, then I agree with that, but not politically at this particular time before the midterm.

It's not wise.

Okay.

Well, Victor.

You may disagree with me, but it's going to lose.

Yeah, no,

I think it will probably prove

counterproductive.

But

anyway, Victor, you love movies.

You love Westerns.

Our listeners love.

hearing your views on cultural matters, on entertainment, on music.

and we're going to get your thoughts

about your three favorite westerns right after these important messages

we're back with the victor davis hansen show so victor we've we've mentioned these films before

and uh i i

myself can't get enough of your take on them but

i i think it's fair to say well well, I don't know if it's your three favorite Westerners because I know the Wild Bunch was that's a separate category.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't even know what that is.

It's some that's one of the most brilliant movies ever found.

Sam Peckinpaw's 60.

That was William.

William Holand was a great actor.

And of course.

Right.

And you saw him in Sabrina or you saw him in Stalag 17 or Bridge on the River Kawai.

He was wonderful.

But there was something about that role at that period in his life that was stunning.

I think it was

performance.

Yeah, that was a dark, dark because these people were killers, but they had killers had more principles than people who were not killers.

Right.

And that's what Peck and Paul was trying to say about that, about the West and even the present.

But it's in a separate category.

Okay, well, let's go into the category with these three movies, and they are

Shane,

Searchers, and High Noon.

So, Victor,

tell us

what do you want to convey about what you like about Shane and its importance?

And I do want to have a little say, I want to add a little something before we get on to the other movies.

Well, that was filmed The Year I Was Born, 1953.

And George Stevens was a wonderful director.

I mean,

he did Giant.

I think he did The Big Country, too, but he did More Than Mary.

He did a lot of great film.

But in that particular film, everything came together.

It was in Jackson, Wyoming, Jackson Hole.

It was just beautifully filmed, widescreen, technicolor.

Alan Ladd, you don't really associate him as a Western hero.

He's only about 5'7, 5'6.

But there was something about the way he played that role.

And Brandon Wilde's first role.

And then Gene Author came out of retirement and went back in after that.

There's that tension between she and Shane.

And it was just, that was Jack Paulance's, I think, his first real role.

He was brilliant as Wilson, but

it had that Sophoclean motif that there are these communities, and it resonates in the searchers.

And we'll see in a minute with the earlier film High Noon, where,

and that was a theme of Sophocles' play.

He was writing about the onset of democracy in Athens and the gradual withdrawal or recessional of the aristocratic code.

And what happens in those movies is these townspeople represent civilization and the march of culture, law, orders,

institutions, but there's something about that that's not equipped to deal with pure evil.

And they know it.

And so at certain times in crisis, they need somebody to come in.

And Shane literally comes in.

He rides over there.

And all of these guys, not all of them, but most of them in these Westerns, They have a dark past and Shane has the buckskin on and they're usually from the south and the lost cause and they're losers in the sense that they bet on the wrong side and they're ostracized but there's they represent that southern dueling martial code of honor so he comes in and of course they're suspicious and he tries to

make it and he tries to say you know what i can function in a civilized society and of course he can't And ultimately, because that civilized society is paralyzed, it either does not have the equipment or the will to do something that would be contrary to the march of progress and civilization, and therefore evil thrives.

And he comes in and sizes up the situation through that two hours and finally comes to the conclusion.

It's almost like a savior complex that I can solve this problem, but in the process of solving this problem, I'm either going to get killed or wounded, but I surely will be ostracized because you can't have a killer killing even three evil people that were going to destroy this community.

And so I'm going to do it.

And it's something Clinice would, you know, he picked up with Pale Rider almost exactly, emulated it in a lot of his movies.

But he says, I have the skill sets that will save this community, but doom me.

And when he rides off in the sunset, you don't really know how injured he is.

He's got one arm that seems to be.

useless and he's been shot and you don't know how far you know he rides off into the snowy mountain he's going to make it or not but the point you do know is that these type of people are quiet.

They have a certain dignity.

And when it comes down in the ultimate moment, you can count on them.

And boy, he kills Wilson, the loud, ostentatious

killer, and kills him very easily.

And he kills the other two Riker brothers.

And it's that.

Ajax Filotides image.

And it really resonates in High Noon,

the earlier film in 51 right we can talk about that too you just made a you know a great i never saw it this way because i love there's another great western the oxbow incident yes and you know what i've always there was so something in the back of my mind bothered me about it but it's that it's that henry the henry fonda character let it happen right he did yeah he did yeah and you and he let it happen and you would think that he would have stopped it he could have stopped it and shane would have stopped it, I think.

Right, exactly.

But and the same thing, it's a little different.

And John Wayne hated

high noon.

It was two years earlier in 51.

But this is the high watermark of Westerns, the mid-50s.

They were brilliantly, that was the genre.

It was coming after World War II, and it was a troubled world.

And people wanted reassurance in the Cold War that their values were

still there and that they were something they could rely on, the American hyper-individual, and they could.

So, but in high noon, John Wayne hated it.

I know he took the Academy Awards, I remember, for

Gary Cooper, who couldn't make who won best actor.

And, you know, he's kind of quipped.

I wish I had got the role.

My agent misled me about how important that role.

I turned it down, but he made Rio Bravo, I think, as a counterwhat because he thought it was sort of blacklisting.

But it's really not.

It's about a sheriff

that has done every single thing the townspeople wanted.

It's Thomas Mitchell, the kind of, you think he's a sympathetic spokesman for the community, but actually he's a cowardly blowhard.

He's just more eloquent than the other people who just, you know, are cowardly.

But essentially,

he's got his dark side too.

He lives with, he's had an affair with Katie Girardo, a very successful Mexican-American businesswoman.

And you don't quite know the whole story about him, but

he cleaned up the town in a way that everybody is so happy.

He meets this beautiful Quaker.

He's going to retire.

They always retire to be storekeepers, you know,

in Westerns.

And as he starts to write out, he realizes that they're going to come and get him.

And they're going to come and get him and destroy everything he's done.

And it would be

what, useful to get out of town.

So he almost does that and then takes the advice of his wife to keep going.

And then he says, I can't do it.

It's a little bit ambiguous whether he comes back because he has a code or he's worried about the town, but it doesn't really matter because he comes back.

And then he finds out that all of the people that he helped and the law, the order, the institutions that are now civilized are not civilized because they will not come out and risk their lives the way he had to create them.

And ultimately, it's going to be him and him alone not Lloyd Bridges not uh Lon Cheney Jr.

it's not Harry Morgan not Harry Howard wasn't that oh yeah pathetic yeah yeah it's it's none of those he's hiding behind his wife's skirt right the other room it's going to be him and his courageous Quaker wife Grace Kelly and

when he meets these four people, it turns out that he's been beaten up right before.

Everything is going against him.

You think he's writing writing his will out.

He hears her making coffins while they're cleaning his face up.

Lloyd Bridges almost killed him in a terrible fight, which I think was filmed with Gary Cooper doing the actual scene.

And the point I'm making is that when he just in almost superhuman, heroic fashion kills three of them, then she kills the other one.

He doesn't want any part of this.

It's like Shane riding off in triumph, but

Zinneman made it a little different.

And that is

he, Shane was subtle about it.

He's just saying, you know what, I can't, I really like these people and I really help these people.

And I understand they don't want me.

And I understand that's a paradox.

But the greater good that I did outweighed my personal pick about it.

So I'm leaving, even though Gene Arthur.

If I stay, Gene Arthur would probably like me and that would be disastrous for the entire valley.

So I'm not going to be there.

And he leaves.

But with this, he leaves, but he makes this gesture that I suppose got John Wayne mad.

Well, he takes this,

you know, they all come out to congratulate him.

And then he takes the badge and throws it down.

And I don't know how, I mean, I can understand theoretically how the director thought that maybe he was commenting on the cowardice of the blacklisting and only a few people were like,

you know, Will Kane, that they were going to meet the mob, but it's a little different.

It's not,

it's

Will Kane is not a, this is what I'm trying to say, Jack.

Yeah, I don't know.

And the people who were operating with the Communist Party or were helping the Communist Party, whether it's the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, et cetera, they're not heroic.

And they did not build civilization.

They helped tear it down.

And so that was a great movie.

And it was the black and white, it had a, it had a, all of these, you know, we've been to Jackson Hole, you have, everybody's been there in Wyoming, and it's just stunning to see that even today.

And remember, Shane, there were scenes, I think, in high noon in Columbia, up in the Sierra Nevada, the train and all that.

I know a lot of it's solid and set,

but it's

that same narrative that when things get very tough,

you're on your own, and there's only a few people, a few select people who can be on their own and don't lose their nerve and have the skill sets to triumph for the benefit of others with a full realization that by taking on that responsibility, they have essentially doomed their career, their life.

And they're willing to do it

not because they want to be liked or remembered, but because of their own particular code of honor.

And

when I said the wild bunch was in its own category,

It's kind of a warp category because they're killers and their code is we're not going to let one of our friends die and be humiliated and butchered, not with these creepy people.

And if we have to, and we're going to take them out with us.

But it's a little, it's a little different.

Yeah, that's fascinating.

So, like, it's not a Western, but just the other day, for the first time ever, I watched that Michael Caine movie, Get Carter.

I've seen that movie.

Yeah, I have.

It's a good movie.

Yeah, it's, oh, it's wild.

And it's this, it is, um, yeah, a real bad guy with a sense of honor.

You know, he's trying to.

I think they made, they made two remakes.

Yeah, they, yeah, but the Michael Caine one was the best.

Oh, it's terrific.

He's a great actor.

And then the third one you mentioned is the searcher.

And I think that's the last of that, what I call it, triad of great westerns in the 50s, the 19, I think it was 56, John Ford movie.

That's, it has, that has the same eerie similarities that you don't really know much about this.

John Wayne, that beautiful scene where he rides up to this isolated homestead, and immediately you get this dark idea that he's from the Confederates side, that he's got kind of a Confederate shirt on.

He's got this gold,

$20 gold pieces.

He's been in Mexico fighting somebody, and there's some weird tension between his brother's wife and him.

And then

he's a killer, and you need a killer like that on the range.

And then at some key point, when he's trying to find Becky or Natalie Wood, her sister is killed and raped.

It's just a disaster.

At some key point, he changes and he starts to see himself as rather just as a vindictive menace that's going to even the score against the Native Americans, what they've done to the settlers.

He starts to see that he has a role to play in.

keeping civilization on the frontier alive by bringing back this young girl that was kidnapped, acculturating her, not killing her.

And at the end, he changes completely from wanting to shoot her to putting his arms at great risk, of course.

And he delivers them.

And then at that great, I think that's one of the greatest scenes.

Is it the Sons of the Pioneers?

That little clip cuts and he walks out the door.

And you can see so many directors have copied that walking out the door with that black scene and then the light coming from the door.

And he has that weird walk and he holds his.

I guess he's injured his arm or he's holding his arm from that wound.

He'd had that wound earlier.

Yeah, that was also some homage to the actor, Harry Carey.

Not the son, Harry, but his dad.

I didn't know that was a mannerism of his in acting, but I guess it was.

He was really a great, he had that, John Wayne had that strange walk and then

he was wounded.

And then he walks out and he's, it's exactly like Shane going up in the mountains or Will Kane.

getting on that buckboard.

It's like, okay, I did it, but there's absolutely no place for a person like me who was a vindictive killer and had to kill the scar and the people necessary he didn't right shoot him like everybody goes in the house and they close the door on him at least with shane the kid is you know shane come back

but uh yeah john wayne is really like they know he can't be back they know he can't he can't be in with civilized company right but they also know that he can't be with civilized company until he saves civilized company right

and you know that's why i got in trouble because I mentioned that motif a little bit with Trump, not that he's a high noon or Ethan Edwards searcher character, but there were elements that Donald Trump was

a complete renegade, outlaw, pariah.

But he did survive the Manhattan real estate market and the corrupt unions and the corrupt social justice warriors and the corrupt politicians and the corrupt environmentalists.

And he built stuff.

And to do that, you have to have a certain skill set.

And that, and you don't want to get in the ring with that guy, as we learn,

a Twitter fight or back and forth, because he's been in a big-time wrestling ring.

You know, he's been in the mud.

And he had those skill sets, but he knew that to push that agenda through the swamp administrative state, whatever you want to call it.

And what was that agenda?

It was close the border.

He did.

Get growth without inflation.

He did

restore deterrence and NATO spending.

He did reach peak oil and gas production in history.

He did keep unemployment in peacetime at historic lows, especially minority.

He did

that.

He did that, but in the process of doing that, like a gunslinger, he had certain traits that people started to notice, but only

noticed when the tide was turning and they had the luxury of living in a successful economy, safe streets in their major cities cheap gas and peace abroad there was a reason that vladimir putin after all went in to ossatia 2008 eastern ukraine crimea 2014

uh ukraine again in 2022 but not from 2017 to 21.

and what i'm getting at is that The only difference was between Trump thinks that he can

use those skill sets for the common good and people are going to appreciate him despite the fact that he's not a participant in civilization.

Right.

And they don't ever do that.

And he can't quite reconcile.

That's why he tweets or he says these things that are almost tragic comedy.

Well, don't people know what I did?

Yes.

Don't people know that I gave everybody cheap gas and there was no crime and there was no border crossing and I stopped the finton.

He always, he wants to remind us ad nauseum, but he doesn't understand that he did that with skill sets of calling Anthony Fauci, like I said, throw a ball like a girl, or saying that Liz Cheney is an idiot.

Or, you know, you can't do that in polite society.

And so he's, he doesn't understand that he was effective because he was a renegade, but when a renegade achieves success, there's no place for him anymore.

Because then people have the luxury of saying, things are back to normal.

It's civilized again.

Thank God that guy who gave us deliverance is now in the Grand Tetons, or he's walking out that door into the desert, or he's thrown down his badge.

And notice that nobody came.

What was great about High Noon, nobody said, no, Will, don't throw it down.

Please don't throw that badge down.

They were glad to see him good too.

They were shocked that he was rude, but they didn't swarm him and say, stay, stay.

Right.

Well, they'd have to live with their own hypocrisy,

right?

And notice that Van Johnson, none of those guys.

Van Heflin.

Van Heflin, excuse me.

Van Heflin and Gene Arthur, they're not, and all of the other settlers, they're not going out there and saying, you know, following where's Brandon DeWyl,

you know, oh, he ran after Shane.

Let's go get him.

And Shane, we've had a conference and we want you.

That doesn't have any role in that movie.

Right.

And the same thing with the searchers.

As he starts to go out, a bad director would say,

wow,

maybe the

Swedes and all these people would say, wait, they're looking at him.

He's walking away.

Come over here, Ethan.

Have something to eat.

We owe you a lot.

No, they don't want him.

They don't want anything to do with him.

And that's what Trump never understood, that those four years saved the United States from a lot of disasters as we are witnessing now.

And

but there was a point where the entire organized society, society, left and right, the swamp, the never-trumpers, the left, the institutions, the media, academia, Silicon Valley, go read Molly Ball's Time article that I keep constantly referencing, that February 2021, where she used the word, I think rightly, conspiracy to get rid of him, that he didn't understand that, that he had done a wonderful

role.

If he had just after losing that election, said, you know, there's something about this election that was fishy.

But I understand that.

You guys changed all of the laws in March and April of 2020.

And that's fine.

You made it impossible to have a fair election, in my view, because only 30% would have voted on Election Day under your new rules that overrode the legislator's prerogative.

But you know what?

I'm going to go down in Georgia and I'm going to camp down there and I'm going to get every MAGA person I can to vote and I'm going to get every swing voter to vote and we're going to get

these two Republican seats and we're going to stop these two socialists from Red State Georgia.

And had he done that, he'd be sort of like the settlers thought of Shane or Hainu.

But to do that, you have to be, remember, the tragic hero doesn't win in the end.

He's a self, is almost like a Christ-like figure, even though that's blasphemous to admit someone so sinful has someone so divine.

But the point is, you have to be able to see that you have no more role to play and that you're going to be hated to be effective.

And Trump never quite, I'm not saying there's not a second chance in American life, but he never understood that

Lincoln understood that.

Lincoln understood that everybody hated him, and they did.

And he had to do certain things to save the Union, and they wouldn't appreciate it until after he was dead or after the war was over, either one.

And he was a tragic hero.

Victor, you

let me just recommend to you:

you wrote about this several years ago in National Review as an exceptional essay about Shane and

the searchers.

So I just recommend on your website, victorhanson.com, maybe you can

put it up top because

I think there's a great piece.

There's one author that

I never think got

his full due.

And I want to make sure I remember his name because I've met him.

I think his name, he was a Claremont scholar.

Was it John Martini?

He wrote a series of essays about John Ford movies and the tragic hero.

And it was just phenomenal.

John Martini, I think it was, but I'll remember his name before we cut or in the next one.

Okay.

well i've uh i've just googled uh john martini but uh

no not is it morini maybe no i'll remember i should know that because i know him and i've met him john morini i'm sorry okay and he was a he's a professor or he was emeritus professor at the university of nevada in reno and uh he writes on the american he writes about america from a tragic point of view and of all the people that and that's a wonderful as everybody knows the clermont institute despite all of this disparagement that it suffered,

is a wonderful place.

Don Marini has really written a lot of things about the Western.

And I met him once and talked to him.

Okay.

Wow.

Very cool.

He taught at the University of Dallas also, which ACC.

He did.

Another good person to read is Bernard Knox.

He wrote.

the famous classes.

I knew him a little bit when he was older, and he wrote a wonderful book on Sophoclean tragedy.

And he pointed out those seven plays, whether it was Antigone or Oedipus or Philippides or Ajax.

It was that same theme about this aristocratic values, and

aristocratic in the sense that it wasn't malleable, it was fixed.

And they were living in malleable societies, and they needed somebody with fixed values to show the hypocrisies of.

But once they found that character, that character was not going to end up well.

And I think a lot of American directors really were influenced, whether George Stevens or John Ford.

And you can really get that scene.

Another great movie we didn't talk to.

I know we're running out of time, was A Man Who Shot Liberty Balance.

The same thing.

John Wayne has a role to play.

And the role is to get rid of Lee Morgan

and get him out of there because Jimmy Stewart is not up to it.

And either is the townspeople.

You can't reason with pure evil.

And Jimmy Stewart thinks you can.

And finally, when he understands you cannot, he doesn't have the skill set or the temperament to get rid of him.

And he will be killed unless John Wayne steps in.

If John Wayne steps in, then his world is destroyed because Vera Miles is going to marry Jimmy,

is going to marry Jimmy Stewart, not him.

Jimmy Stewart's going to be the hero for doing nothing.

you know and then john wayne cannot take credit because it's against his martial code as as a fair fight that he had to shoot this guy.

But he has to shoot him in the dark to give the credit to Jimmy Stewart because he understands the march of civilization depends on statehood.

Jimmy Stewart's the only one with those skill sets, which he doesn't have, to make this a humane society.

So he's going to sacrifice his life, basically, his woman, his career, his honor, and burn down his

burn it down.

And he and Woody Strowe, who's also in

the early 1960s, an outcast because he's an African-American in the frontier, and the two of them are going to sort of just stay there as

gone from a heroic figure to a tragic figure.

Right, Hermit.

Yeah, it's a great movie by John Ford.

I love that movie.

It's terrific.

Edmund O'Brien, a great Ronald.

Yeah, Wild Bunch, too.

He was

Wild Bunch.

Just wonderful actor, underrated.

i i i i advise all of our uh listeners that

you know you could do no worse than just

just spend

you know

spend

three weeks of your life every evening watching movies from 1945 to 1965 absolutely you could start with best years of our lives and end up with ombre with paul new

yeah those are they're they're great movies yeah i watched this you know i had a little spare time the other day, and I'm a Turner classic movie junkie.

And Walk in the Sun was on.

I just thought, oh, that's Montgomery Cliff.

Yeah, that was George Stevens, too, wasn't it?

I'm pretty sure.

No, no, I'm sorry.

Walk in the Sun, the World War II movie with Dana Andrews.

I was thinking of the Theodore Dreiser, you know, American Tragedy.

Right.

I'm at the wrong time.

But

Dana Andrews is sort of like Bill Holden.

He was just a wonderful actor.

Oh,

he was terrific in this movie.

And of course, the best years of our life.

Just

I'm a big Daniel Andrews fan.

Andrews, we really, yeah, we've got to wow

you way over.

So I want to thank everyone who's listening.

And I want to, as we do at the end of the show, I want to read a comment left on

the Apple Podcast.

Thanks for

whatever platform you listen to.

program on thank you so much you can leave a comment at apple podcast we look at them.

And I always like to read one.

Here's one from CW956.

And it's titled Just the Facts, Ma'am.

I listen to every episode, especially because I get information that is reasoned and fair.

As an added bonus, my vocabulary has improved over the past two years.

But this past episode.

titled to bring down a house of cards i listened to it three times wow when he starts on the truths of how he could change things he just nails it you're the he by the way, Victor.

And he's just speaking his stream of consciousness.

I have those feelings, but can never put them into words so eloquently.

It's nothing like mispronouncing the word eloquent.

What a gift.

I hope this podcast has a gigantic

following.

Thank you, CW956.

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

And thanks, everyone, for listening.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Thanks.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.