Beyond the Blinkered Blueprint

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.
I'm Jack Fowler, the host, Victor. That's Victor Davis-Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He is a classicist, a best-selling author.

I know recently, Victor, in part because of some of your appearances, once again, your book, very important book, best-selling book, The Dying Citizen, shot up through the Amazon ranks.

Hey, folks, if you haven't gotten that yet, you should. And you can find a link for it at victorhanson.com.
We'll talk about that. a little later in the podcast.

We've got a number of things we want to talk about. Some material that Victor has written for American Greatness, his thoughts on Justice Roberts defending the Supreme Court.

We've got some colleges doing their usual lunacy, Schmargasborg of things, and we'll get to them right after these important messages.

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Back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show. Victor, an issue you would like to talk about is Chief Justice Roberts, who has come out saying he wants to defend the integrity of the Supreme Court.

I must say, I must admit, I've not read up on this. I wonder, though, if anything.
It's kind of hard to

hard to imagine integrity when months after the leak of the Dobbs decision happened, there still doesn't seem to be a scintilla of justice that's happened. But regardless, maybe he discussed this.

Anyway, Victor, tell us what are your thoughts about what Chief Justice John Roberts is up to?

Well, I mean, I think he's trying to, in a very tardy and haphazard fashion, reply to this concentrated attack on the Supreme Court for the left.

I mean, I think Gorsuch said the other day that they were still investigating who leaked that early draft of the Dobbs decision, but that was a felony.

And we all know that if they name the person, A, they're not going to face any, even though they undermine the integrity and the legitimacy of the court in a sense by leaking that.

And they were mobilizing. the left for that.
And that person will probably be punished as leniently as Kevin Kleinsmith, who defrauded a FISA court with a false document.

But I think he's trying to say that you can't have a Senate minority leader like Chuck Schumer go to the gates of the Supreme Court in front of a mob and saying, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, you're not going to know what hit you.

You sowed the, you know, you sowed the wind, you're going to reap the whirlwind. That's just intolerable.

Or you can't have the president of the United States abroad to a Spanish host saying the court's willingness they're illegitimate. Or you can't have people like,

you know, Elizabeth Warren, a so-called law professor from Harvard, just beating this left-wing drum that after 150 years, you're going to pack the court to 15 justices so you can get predetermined decisions in your favor.

Or you can't have an assassin showing up on the

immediate vicinity of a Supreme Court justice's home and not have some editorialization from Merritt Garland, or you can't have mobs trying to threaten and intimidate impending rulings by Supreme Court justices at their home and not have Merrick Garland, for which that is a crime, at least enforce it or indict those people.

And you can't have a Supreme Court justice eating when people come in to harass them and to drive them out of a restaurant.

We're seeing things that we've never quite seen before, attacks on the court. And nobody did this to the Warren Court when it was a solid 7-2, 6-3,

very hardcore left-wing majority. But they're kind of like adolescents.

As soon as they don't get their way, then they always want to change the rules, change the rules, change the protocols, change the tradition. And that's what they're doing.

And Joe Biden is abetting it. The government is abetting it.
And it's going to get pretty scary. I mean, they're going after Clarence Thomas.
They went after Jenny Thomas. Their students didn't want,

I guess it was it, George Mason, or he didn't want Clarence Thomas teaching a class. And it's just non-stop.

And the purpose of it, Jack, is to incrementally, insidiously get to the justice's psyche with the carrot that it, well, maybe pull your punches a little bit. Maybe look like Anthony Kennedy or.

look at what happened to Souter, David Souter. Right, right.

Because it has happened before. It happened.
And this is, and then you know what? It'll work in reverse.

You'll be beloved in the Georgetown circuit. So

that's the carrot and stick approach that they use. And of course, if anybody did this on the right,

then they would be

charged with a crime.

Can you imagine if Proud Boys showed up at the home of Sodomair and Kagan and were screaming and yelling, and some nut with a gun? was found in that vicinity.

Can you imagine if Mitch McConnell went to the Supreme Court doors and screamed and yelled and said, Kagan, Sodomair, you're not going to know what's hit you.

You sowed the wind and we're going to reap the whirlwind to a screaming crowd. Can you imagine if,

I don't know, if Sodomair was having a steak in a Washington restaurant and a bunch of people swarmed in and drove her out?

I don't think that would be taught. So the left has two roles, and they're like juveniles or adolescents.
And

it's at some point, people have to call them to account. Like, I guess Biden or Garland or somebody who would call them to account.

That's kind of silly of me to say people, they're not going to be called to account. Yeah, Victor, I think they're

too busy chasing parents at public meetings,

school children, and worrying about FBI agents. But anyway, we got a couple of things we want to talk about.
One of them, Victor, is this terrific piece you wrote for American Greatness on

how bad how old

bad ideas become wonderful. Of course,

I don't remember old bad ideas being considered wonderful for conservatives, but they certainly seem to be so for

the left and not all Democrats, some Democrats,

a lot of Democrats anyway. Keynesianism was a terrible economic idea.
It's ascendant. Socialism, a terrible idea.
But there are are more insidious things.

Racism, good old-fashioned racism, loyalty oaths, nullification. These are some of the things you've written about in this piece, Victor.
So why don't you talk about these old, bad ideas

that are getting high-fived by the left?

Well, they have loyalty oaths, and they have the Joe McCarthy council culture where you just make blanket accusations against people like McCarthy did, and you don't,

you know, you don't have any data. And we saw that with Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin.
And we saw the loyalty oaths, half of the universities have you write a diversity, inclusion,

equity, and inclusion statement. And if you don't do it, or you do it in a way that suggests that you don't approve of that, you're not going to be hired.
So it is a loyalty oath.

And

I mean,

at some point here in the year 2022, are people gonna say, if you have a space on campus and certain races can't go, if you have a university-affiliated off-campus house that certain races can't go to, if you have a graduation that's predicated on race, if you have dorms that are predicated on race, if you can pick the racial profile of your roommate, Well, then what are you?

You're a racist. And the institution that promotes or allows that is racist.
and so

at some point people just have to call it out and you know we haven't

i don't know i thought we were done with socialism we saw how it wrecked countries especially in the post-colonial third world but this idea that just with a stroke of the pen you forbid forgive i guess it's going to be 500

billion dollars of debt and you destroy contracts. So what is a contract anymore? And we saw that with Fauci, who recommended that rent, that it was too dire

an epidemic for rent to be

collected.

So he basically, the federal government went into the private contract between millions of landlords and tenants and says, hey, tenant, you don't have to honor that and you're going to just stay in that

apartment building or you're going to stay in that house and you don't have to pay rent. Right.
Nation of squatters. Yeah.
Yeah. And

then we go back to southern nullification, where if you feel the federal government's law you don't particularly agree with, then you just nullify it.

And that's what we're doing with sanctuary cities: 550 of them just say, you know what, I've decided that in this particular case of immigration, no way, I'm not going to follow federal immigration law.

And they get away with it, even though that was the spark that set off the Civil War. You could go on, but you can see that all of these things that we grew up with that we were trying to stop.

You know, stop we get this idea there was a while under eisenhower and kennedy not johnson but not nixon but it came back under nuke ginrich and i'll give some credit to bill clinton that you were going to try to spend only what you had and for a few years two or three years we had a balanced budget that's out the window now it's just we're going to give Every day Biden gets up, he says, oh, here's some $500 billion for student loans.

Oh, here's another 50 billion for Ukraine. Oh, here's how you fight inflation.
We're going to spend another 400 billion on climate change. It's just crazy.
And just, yeah, it's lunatic.

And everybody looks

the world over at us, and they look at this country and they think, wow, this is the only country. This is the only country that can protect us.

This is the country that provides deterrence.

They look at Afghanistan and then they look at the streets of San Francisco

or they look at the way that we print money or they look at Chicago on a Saturday night or they look at the open border

every day now or they look at the streets of homeless people and all of what we've talked about and they think, wow.

This is not something that is a model for the world.

They look at the American university and they don't and they see these this American popular culture and they say, you know what, something's gone crazy. This country is rabid.

It's insane. Victor,

I think Charlton Hesson starred in just about every dystopian movie that there was out there. And

I mean, Soil and Green has become a joke for a lot of people. But still, we have visuals in our culture about what happens when the modern society decays.

But not only do we have it in our culture, we have it in reality. We have Detroit.
Detroit was just

such a great city once upon a time. It was actually the

runner-up to the 1968 Olympics. Mexico City won, but Detroit came in second place, which shows you, well, just how great a city was it that it

was at that point. But look at it now.
And I raised this to, you know,

I think

many of us, myself included, I'm just kind of afraid taking your, again, read this article, folks. You'll find it on VictorHanson.com.
You'll find it on American Greatness.

But, you know, what are we looking at? What kind of visual would we have in 20 years if this goes on unabated?

Never mind that we're giving money to the freaking Iranians who may blow up the world before 20 years

transpires. But, you know,

do you have a dystopian view for us about? Well, I mean, if you take a deep breath and you look at the 3 million people

that have crossed the border without being vaccinated, and you look at the thousands of people who have been dropped from the military who wouldn't get vaccinated,

what is that? What is the agenda? What is the ideology? What is the purpose of that to destroy the southern border? Why do they want people to flood into the United States without a back?

They say they want 87,000 IRS agents. Well, what if these people people come in and they're at the corner, a rural corner, and they're selling drinks and clothes and stuff?

And are you going to go after them for not paying taxes? So,

and where are you going to get the dialysis centers and the cardio center and all of these people coming in? That's only going to come at the expense of poor people already on public assistance.

And what about crime and culturation and the English language? And what is the purpose?

What's the purpose of fleeing Afghanistan and leaving billions of dollars in equipment and an embassy and an airbase? What was behind it?

Is it more than just Joe Biden wanting a 20th anniversary celebration? Is that what it was? Of 9-11?

What is the purpose of this crime where a person goes in and he hits somebody over the head and almost kills them, or he kicks a woman in a stairwell almost to death, and then he goes...

he's arrested and he's back out on the street. What is the idea behind it?

What's What's the idea behind California where you're going to not produce fossil fuel energy and outlaw cars and then tell people not to plug in their Teslas or not to build nuclear plants or more hydroelectric plants?

What is the purpose?

And when you look at all of these, what's the purpose of printing all this money and having and then money and money and money and getting this 8% to 9% hyperinflation that was deliberate.

So I don't don't know what the purpose is.

The purpose is either that these people are stupid and they're incompetent or that they're malicious and they feel they don't like the United States, they don't like the Constitution, they don't like, and they want to destroy it, and they want to,

in the cinders, recreate something like, I don't know, Venezuela or Cuba or

maybe...

a socialist country, but we're more socialist now than Scandinavia as far as take-home income.

I don't understand the nihilist agenda. Is it based on the hatred of America or a hatred of Americans? But it doesn't work.
They know it doesn't work.

I say that, Jack, because they don't want to live there.

They don't want to live on the border. They get angry when the governor of Texas buses illegal immigrants that they cherish and champion and praise.
But when they show up in a New York

borough or they show up in Washington, D.C., they get angry, not here. We don't want these people.

So I think think the whole thing is punitive. They hate half the country and they want to punish them, I guess.

A lot of it has to do with the radical transformation of the Democratic Party into the party of the hyper-wealthy. It really has.
We've never seen this before.

We used to have a limousine Kennedy liberal, but not.

The kingmakers of the Democratic Party are so wealthy now. They've got so much capital and they completely shield it from their crazy ideological agendas.

And

it's a nihilist time.

It's so similar to 1793, what we read about during the Jacobin year and how they tried to just destroy every single thing of the old ancient regime,

rename, topple, destroy the church, everything.

And then they ended up, or it's like Weimar Republic, and they end up with Hitler. They end up with Napoleon.
I don't know what the counter reaction will be. I hope it's just a Republican tsunami.

That's all. And I would remind our listeners that 10 seats isn't going to do it.
One Senate seat and 10 House seats is not going to do it. You're going to have to send a message.

You're going to have to get 50, 60 seats, six, seven pickups in the Senate. I don't know if they can do that given the power of the media and the wealthy and the PACs and everything.

Well, Victor, let's talk about one of our old favorite people. That would would be Anthony Fauci and some related things, some studies, not studies, I should say, a story that's come out about

some of the consequences of the lockdowns and the insane rules that were applied in 2020 and 2021, things that your friend and colleague Scott Atlas and others warned against.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show. Victor, a little quickie on

Fauci and then about

this article I mentioned. I I saw, I don't have it in front of me, but I saw some clip the other day about Fauci talking about boosters, some new booster,

and that, no, we don't have time to test it. And I,

right? We're science. We're science.
I am science. But

isn't that part of science?

Especially with drugs like this, isn't testing it essential to it?

What the frig? Are we all all getting? I don't know.

The RNA were sort of more like immunotherapy than they were traditional vaccines, and they weren't thoroughly tested. We know that the lipid packaging, the spike protein, they all had side effects.

And what I didn't get about it is every time he said something, and remember what he said, that after those initial tests of 96%

blockage of the virus, he said, don't worry about other people because you're now protected if somebody doesn't want to get vaccinated that's their problem

but that changed and then when they failed with the delta variant and then it was booster and then when the booster failed and remember each failure jack was we were told this was impossible essentially and then they get another booster and then

another and then they always had the blaming i see today they're saying to people well those who got long covet were more likely those who were not didn't get two shots i got two shots i got long covet in fact i got two shots and i got delta which they said wouldn't happen so i had natural and vaccination immunity and i got omicron and i've had it for almost five months this long covet but not supposed to happen is it i did what they told me to do and

so

this this science and Fauci and then

Scott Atlas comes along and you know he's tied to the hip with Trump because he's advising Trump. And he's got Berks and Fauci

saying mask on one day, no max on the next day. They don't read the scientific literature.

Fauci's controlling billions of dollars in grants, so all the doctors in the country are mouthing what he has to say in fear of the grants.

We see his emails that have been redacted about the complicity and gain of function. It's like a surreal nightmare.
And then Atlas comes along. We've talked about it before.

He says, you know, mask maybe if you're coughing with an active case it would be wise to wear one but otherwise they have little use oh by the way there is such a thing as natural immunity at least for a while oh by the way the vaccinations will not stop mutants but you should get them because they temper the severity of the disease but they do have side effects oh by the way you can't shut down the economy because and now we're learning he was exactly right we're looking at the death rate in these two years the total deaths it's gone up, and it's not a tributary just to COVID, especially the last, in the latest months, it's from cancers and heart problems that were not diagnosed or not treated.

It's, and you mentioned this, it's school children that are going, have completely failed entire years of learning. They have social psychotic problems, psychological problems.

So the toll of that lockdown was much greater than the virus itself, even though it led to the death of a million people. Right.

Go ahead.

No, I'm just saying that the results are in that states of locked down did not have a higher, a lower death rate on average than New York, a New Jersey, a Massachusetts, than Texas and Florida.

They're about the same.

And you say the results are in, and then there's a question of the results are bad and how reparable are they? I've dented my car. I can fix the dent.
Well, dent of yours.

just, we haven't talked about it, and I actually don't have any of it in front of me.

But while you were teaching, I'm sure you saw the stories about the test score, the national test scores that came out.

Just, you know, the consequence of the COVID lockdown on these students has been terrible for what their, their loss of knowledge and how a kid who's now your average kid has fallen behind dramatically, is it even possible to catch up?

That's just on, you know, learning. And the other thing I mentioned also was this piece in the Daily Mail.

It's an anecdote, but it's still a story that I'm sure is representative of many things.

Speech therapist reveals she's been inundated with a wave of COVID babies who can barely speak because of the pandemic shutdowns. Parents are paying up to $1,000 a month to repair the damage.

I know, Victor, in the past, you've even talked about your granddaughter who has

troubles, challenged, and the regret the the the imposition of these of the lockdown uh on the kids has just set them back so much so i i just wonder how how if at all any of this is um it can be caught up

i don't think it can in the case of my granddaughter the two years that she was out of school and trying to figure out what Zoom was, because she has special needs, Smith-McGinnis syndrome, a genetic deficiency.

She's never recovered. She's got meltdowns now and she can't, she can't, it's two years that she regressed.

And I don't know if it can be made up or not, at least within a few years it cannot. And I think it has some contribution to all of this crime.
And

I keep repeating that story. The bank teller said that

all the people wearing masks was very frightening because she never knew

which kind of mask was which kind of mask, i.e. which were the criminals.

And every time I look at where I live and they have videos of people going into stores and robbing and looting and raping and murdering, they all have masks on.

And that doesn't draw anybody's attention because there's a lot of people who are afraid of the virus or getting long COVID or whatever that wear masks still. So the whole thing was a disaster.
And

it was something the left. saw initially as, remember where we were.
We were in February of 2020.

we were coming off a record economy record minority low unemployment record almost record peacetime unemployment steady GDP growth no inflation record energy production the Mueller investigation the collusion the

fake Ukraine call impeach that was all starting to I mean that was still going on but it wasn't working and it looked pretty well that while Trump felt people felt that he was crude and he was volatile, that he also had been targeted unduly by the left and he was going to be reelected.

And this thing came along. And before we knew it, we were

in March and April. We were only in it two or three months, Jack.

And before we knew it, this, and Fauci is left-wing, this left-wing guy was basically hijacking presidential policy, given his name and stature.

And he was shutting shutting down, ruining this economy.

And then we were stealthily, as Molly Bell pointed out in Time magazine, we were suing state legislatures, laws, and the courts, overturning them.

And we were already politicizing this so that on election day, just oh, eight months after the onset of the virus, only 30% were going to vote.

on election day the rest would be early voting or they would be mail-in so it was a and it's not me, Jack, it's Gavin Newsom saying this is a moment we have to take advantage of to make a more progressive capitalism.

Or it was,

you know, Mr. Klaus

at the

Great Reset Davos group that's, you know, the Great World. The World Economic Forum.
Yes, this was a chance to really... recalibrate the entire world.

Or it was Hillary Clinton saying COVID should not be wasted. It's just, you don't want to let it go to you.
We have to redo health care. So that's what the left saw it.
And

it changed history. It really did.
And it did a lot of damage to the United States.

And

the thing I can't figure out is now I think all of the people who tormented people like Scott Atlas or they lied about the origins of the virus or they politicized it, they now know that it was more or less gain of function engineer with some moderate help from the United States that was rerouted to hide the origins of that funding from Dr.

Fauci.

It was too dangerous to do in the United States. It was well beyond the capacity of these amateurs at the Wuhan lab.
It escaped.

China hit it and was willing to increase the number of deaths to hide its culpability. Probably was an accident, but even that is not known.

And

here we are. And it probably did more socioeconomic, psychological, political damage to this country than anything since the Civil War.
Right.

And maybe take as long time to get over as the civilian. It is going to take a long time.
Yeah.

Well, Victor, we have just a couple of other things to talk about today. And I think one of them will be about

kind of well-known university, especially for people that follow basketball, St. John's in New York, Queens and Brooklyn.

One of those, you know,

member of the Big East. So people know from playing Syracuse and whatever, got, I think, made the final four once,

30, 40 years ago. Anyway, a

not elite college, but solid college where the

Donnie from Queens type might go,

solid middle class, the sons and daughters of cops, et cetera, Catholic school.

And

now there's a story out by

this is by Caroline Downey in National Review. New York College introduces critical race studies major for fall semester.
It's kind of like, wow, wow, St. John's is doing this.

Is everything outside of Hillsdale and Thomas Aquinas and a few others?

Are they all going a hell in a handbasket?

I'm probably playing too much into this because it's a local flavor for me, and I'm from New York City, as our listeners probably know. But I think it's pretty symbolic when a school of this

solid regard once upon a time has fallen into this trap, it's really a bad sign of where we're at in higher education.

Yeah, I mean, I think as I remember the story, they said they were going to address systemic racism. And of course, anytime you have to use the word systemic,

it's because it's

you can't see it, you can't feel it, you don't experience it very often. So it's like air.
You breathe it, but it's there.

So you have to tell you that you can't see it or see it, or you don't experience it, or you don't inflict it on people because it's systemic. You don't even know.
That was the whole Kindy thing.

You don't know you're doing it. It's group think.
It's group crimes. It's thought crimes.
And of course, and there's, I saw their little

media blitz. It was the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality.
And the problem is that it's a zero's some game, Jack.

So this would be something you would teach students if you wanted to indoctrinate them after they were educated.

But it comes at the expense of education. So they're not reading Plato's Republic.

They're not reading the Bible. They're not reading Dante.
They're not reading,

you know,

they're not reading Shakespeare. They're not reading modern novels.
They're not reading any of this. They're not doing science.
They're not doing math.

And I know that because the SAT scores are going down, and the time that people are in college is going up, and half of all students drop out. And so

it's like we're turning out these ignorant and arrogant students that can lecture the whole society about all these oppressions, but that's all they know.

They don't know anything else, and they don't even know that. I gave a lecture not long ago, and a student, I won't mention the university, a student got up and said,

and he started going, What do you do about deniers? And

don't you think that people who deny the election like Trump? And I said, Yeah, let's examine all of them, like Stacey Abram and the press secretary.

What's her name? St. Pierre.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And she was, you know, she was on it for a long time.
And I said, let's talk about Hillary Clinton. But he was just shocked, like I would ask that question.

I said, Hillary said that, don't concede, Joe Biden. Don't concede.
And the head of the January 6th committee in 2004 said, I'm not going to. I'm going to vote not to ratify Ohio.

And remember, Barbara Boxer said, oh, those computers were not good in Ohio that John Kerry really won.

So, the point I'm getting is they're so indoctrinated with one point of view that when they go out in the real world and somebody just meekly challenges, they have no rhetorical or intellectual or knowledgeable skills to defend anything.

It's just deductive theory. It's not to be discussed.
It's not to be challenged. It's systemic racism.
It's intersectionality. Okay, explain.

They can't because, like all indoctrinations, it's just dogma. And it's, it's, it's very expensive to send this kids to school.
So the St. John's, this professed, I guess,

Catholic school, they get together and they say, hmm,

there's a lot more colleges going, there's a lot more students than ever.

College is booming. This is a renaissance.
This is the time to have a radical new curriculum. No, it's a time when there are fewer students and they can't afford it.

And we just had this big giveaway default amnesty and the universities are under the gun. And why would they do this?

I guess maybe the logic is, well, the pie is shrinking, so we have to appeal to be more woke than our competitors. But

I don't know. Or maybe they want to shield the Catholic Church so people don't go after the Catholic Church.
Could you see 10 years from now?

I know I'm just throwing this at you, Victor.

I'm unprepared but the st john's of of america the colleges like that that uh a significant number of them will be just have disappeared oh yeah it's already happening we

the six to five thousand are shrinking especially liberal private

liberal private colleges they can't compete and we get you're getting trade schools

Everybody knows if you're 18 years old or 19 years old and you want to go two years to a trade school and be an electrician, within five years you can be making $75,000, $80,000 a year.

And you can do that until you're 60,

65. And they know that if you're a psych major, sociology, agendas, a critical race theory, a minor, or whatever it is,

six years,

that's the average time it takes to graduate. $250,000 in loan, then what are you going to do with it?

You're not any better educated. The electrician knows human nature.
He sees people in the job. He figures out how to work a

wire circuit. He's got skills.
He's got knowledge. He's in the real world.

And the old argument was: well, he's not educated in the empirical inductive tradition, so he won't be a full citizen, fully aware of his responsibilities

in the civic sphere. And the fact is, the university graduate won't either.
He's deductive. He's worse because at least the electrician will develop on his own, but he's without being indoctrinated.

These people are going to be damaged for life because they've been indoctrinated for four or five years. And they've been indoctrinated by whom, Jack?

By people who have 10 year and lifetime employment and

are sort of hothouse plants that don't function in the real world. And the universities are not market driven.
And at some point,

they're going to get a conservative president and a conservative Congress, and they're going to say, you know, we've got to raise the issue of moral hazard, and we're not going to make people who don't go to college subsidize loans so kids can spend six years into their late 20s, early 30s, longer still, paying off their loans, getting mediocre degrees,

propping up these

indoctrination mills. So we're just not going to do it anymore.

And if you want students to go to your universities, you sign the loan, not us because you're not we're not getting an education that's worth it i don't know why biden didn't do that when he had them by the neck he all he had to do was say if we forgive this debt then from now on you're going to issue new loans and you're going to sign as the guarantor

and you know if we're going to get rid of

why don't we get rid of tenure why don't we get rid of the teaching credential and let people you know have a master's we've talked about that why don't you have to take the sat or the act when you graduate and see how well you do without changing the s the sat what's the fundamental thing about all this jack why how can we put it into a finish now by a cosmic summation cosmic summation is the age-old

desire of the hard left to make everybody equal by result. And because people are not equal, that there has to be culpability, there has to be a crime.
So St.

John's is saying, we had the civil rights movement, we had equality of opportunity, we've institutionalized civil rights, we enforce civil rights, and guess what?

There's particular groups that are not happy and they're not doing as well as other particular groups. And when somebody says, well, we have to work on the culture and the government can't do that.

So we say this particular cultural paradigm of, you know, two parents, married, no illegitimacy, no drug use, no criminal activity, a particular attitude toward homework and discipline that will let the child have a more

promising future. We say you can't do that.
So it's trying to make people equal on the back end. And that's what this is.

And we're trying to say this is what St. John's is saying, this is a legitimate major.
And you're all probably going to get B's and A's. And then you're going to get through.

And it's not going to be like physics or calculus or

upper division German. You're just going to take these things.
We're going to pass you through.

You can really see it when you talk to young people. And I do a lot from that have graduated from various schools and they have no communication, written, oral skills, no ability to

computation skills. So that's the hidden story that all of this woke stuff came at the expense of real education that was dropped.

And it was dropped, Jack, I think, not just because this woke stuff was ideological and empowered agenda, but because it was easy.

And the professors just could rant and rave and they didn't know anything and the students didn't have to work.

So we dressed it all up as college, but it was just a bunch of, it's a BS session in a dorm room. That's what it was.
Yeah.

Well, we have just a little time left, and I have two quick questions for Victor, and I will ask them right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Want to remind our listeners to visit victorhanson.com.

You will find many articles there that, well, you just can't read because they are exclusive.

They're called ultra.

How do you read them?

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Sign up. What is it? It's a dozen or so recommended readings from the previous week.
There's no risk.

Your name's not being put on any

list of any kind. So one big, well, they're not two quick questions.
One's quick. Let's make this quick.
Victor, you've heard of Dollar General, the store chain? Yes.

do you know what you can't buy at Dollar General? A dollar,

right?

Almost, you can't buy anything for a dollar there. No, I know it.

I drive

to Palo Alto from my home and I go through on Manning Avenue between 41 and I-5. And there's a little town called San Joaquin, and there's a dollar store.

And every once in a while, I stop there for water or something. And

it's not a dollar.

It's not a dollar. I was reading this story about Dollar General that the new

patrons of the store en masse are $100,000 plus a year earners. Typically, it was folks earning $30,000,000, $40,000 a year.
But remember, inflation is transitory.

It's not impoverishing the upper middle class either. No, not at all.
Anyway, that's the Dollar General thing. Victor, the other question, and we do only have a little time.

I I should have asked this at the outset of the show, but I, you know,

I'm getting the sense of, you know, Donald Trump and like your view of his political standing, but I don't think

this Mar-a-Lago raid

drama is, I don't know, it doesn't seem to be playing out well. Maybe it's just a sense of

weariness,

drip, drip, drip, drip, drip.

Anyway, Victor, what are your thoughts about the political standing of Donald Trump today in September versus,

say, May? I mean, is the trajectory flat? Is it down? Is it up?

What are your thoughts?

I think it's flat.

And I think it has some reminiscence of the Georgia Senate race, where Donald Trump, obsessed about the election, suggested to his base that their vote wouldn't be recorded properly, turned off the swing voter, and they got too socialist in Georgia.

So what I'm getting at, Jack, is that he was done a great injustice with a stacked January 6th committee. He was done a greater injustice with a raid on his home.

He was done the greatest injustice by the leaks from the FBI about all of these stories, these pictures of how they had arranged them, obviously, on the ground.

And then he was done another terrible injustice with Joe Biden calling anybody who supported him a semi-fascist and an enemy of the people. So

how do you react to that? In the past, every time he's reacted to that,

it didn't work. So he reacts and says, this is stupid.
These are crazy. These are horrible people.
They went after Melania's underwear. They went after my health.
That's all true.

But just take a deep breath and say, what if he had done this?

In his tweets and his rallies, he said, I'm not going to fall for their bait. What I am going to do is nationalize this election.
So I want every one of you, each person,

your congressional race, your Senate race, there's 460 something of them. We want you to do the following.
We want you to say.

to everybody, every candidate, is the border preferable now or where it was? Do you like 3 million people coming across the border illegally?

Do you like gasoline being double the price, or at least now, even after the reductions, 45% higher? Do you like 8.5%

inflation gain? Do you like what you saw in Afghanistan? Do you like what's happening with crime and rape and murder and nobody's being prosecuted?

Do you like this critical race theory obsessions in our schools? Do you like what's happened to the FBI and all these agencies? And if you don't like it, then don't vote for this agenda.

These people will deny it, but that representative, that senator of yours is for this agenda. It's not about me.
It's about you. And I'm not going to talk about all the bad things they've done to me.

I'm going to talk about all the bad things they've done to you, you. If he did that,

He would win the House and they would win the Senate and he would be in the driver's seat in the primary.

He may be, but what he's doing is he's obsessing over the things that have been done to him and he's ignoring what's happened to his own constituents. And they are more important than he is.

And so the raid hurts him. January 6th hurts him.

But

these policies hurt everybody else. And he's got to show empathy for that and take away the attention from himself.

But instead, he's tweeting every day and he's some of his, you know, he went after crazy Paul Ryan.

He misspelled his name and he just said, you know, Fox is running commercials against me and it's Paul Ryan's fault.

That's not an issue. Right.
Everybody has a right to run a dishonest ad. That's what Fox just puts it out in the market.

The left loves to get under his skin by buying time on Fox to run dishonest ads. And then he blames Paul Ryan for being on the board of Fox.
Okay, but that's not the issue.

The issue is the border, inflation, energy, deterrence, race, crime. Doesn't he understand that?

And so, what he's doing is, he's, if he continues to do this, he's what's going to happen is collectively the conservatives are going to say, okay,

you did a great job. He had a great four years, but I'm an exhausted.
I'm exhausted. I can't go through this again.

So I am going to vote in the primary for DeSantis, or I'm not going to just privilege DeSantis. I don't know, Cotton, Pompeo, Haley, who knows? Right.

We don't, you know, we have no idea right now until they perform on the stage. Right.
I thought Scott Walker would be a great governor in 2006, but when he got on the stage,

it was disappointing. Wow, wow, yeah.
Yeah, so we don't know. But my point is that

I think

he's exactly what the, what I don't understand is this.

I don't quite understand.

I understand why the left is doing the January 6th, the raid, the semi-fascist, all this stuff, because they don't want to talk about these issues.

But I don't understand why they want to destroy Donald Trump when I think they know that DeSantis will be a stronger candidate. I don't, I, and I think he will be.
I agree with you 100% on that. Yeah.

So I think right now, if you had the New Hampshire primary, I think that DeSantis would win. And I don't know.
And I think it's going to be reflected in the money.

I think he's going to get a lot of money raised. And that's why I get these.
I don't know if you do, Jack, but I'm on some list with the

do you get these Trump ads every minute now? They just swarm your email, ask

money. I get probably five texts a day.
Yeah, and very

various emails. Yeah, I do too, and it's just frantic.

And so, Donald Trump,

it's not about you, it's about your agenda, it's about your supporters, it's about the people who even opposed you, it's about the country. So, when you go to have these rallies and when you talk,

you say, we've got to stop the influx on the border. We've got to save the country from criminals.
We've got to have a fiscal policy that stops inflation. We've got to pump oil.

We've got to frack for our national security and for the middle class. We can't let these people prey on the weak and the innocent, these career criminals.

And if I'm president, I swear to God that I'm going to stop it.

And as far as the raid, as far as the January 6th, they're just doing this to go after me so that I can't help you.

And I'm not going to talk about, but I will prevail and I'll fight my fight, but it's not going to intrude on your fight. If he did that, if he did that, he'd be in the driver's seat.

But he's done just the opposite. He's obsessed about himself.

And today, Ty Cobb, who was a very good lawyer, you know, the old Type Cobb they made fun of. And they said, oh, Trump's got a bunch of Jay Sicolo and Ty Cobb and all these old losers.

Well, they they just beat the pants off the dream team. But he said today that Trump was a narcissist.

And then you've got Bill Barr, who's a decent enough guy, and he's kind of making a mistake by going on the left-wing cable shows nonstop.

But he's criticizing Trump. And his criticisms are not just based on, you know, bitterness that he was fired or quit or whatever happened, but he makes some points.

I think he's wrong in a lot of them, but the point is Trump needs people to say the opposite of what these people say. He can't just, we,

you know, he just can't, Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon and a few other people are not enough. He needs to have people

across the spectrum to say

Donald Trump was treated terribly and we and he's now trying to save the agenda and save the, and they're not saying that. Right.

They're amplifying the idea that he's too controversial or he's too volatile. And he's doing that.

I'm very worried because I think he did a lot of good.

But if he continues on this, he's going to take, he's going to make victory in the midterms very hard because he's going to turn it into two things.

A, not a peep about the most disastrous first two years of a presidency in the last 150 years. And two, all about Donald Trump's hurts and what people have done to him.

And people don't want to hear that.

The referendum on

Donald Trump, as opposed to a referendum on Joe Biden. They don't understand the raid.
The people think the raid is outrageous. They think it's terrible what Mueller did.

They think the hoax, but that at some point,

they want to use that for the purpose, the agenda, the cause, not Donald Trump. They want to say the FBI is out of control.
The DLJ is out of control.

It just happens to be after Donald Trump, but it could be me it could be you but he makes it personal 100

he can't do that because he's he's doing what the left wants there's a bunch of left-wing people think of it this way jack they're in a room and they're going like this okay

what's what do we got some guy in and said oh we got nothing look at joe biden the guy can't finish the sentence Well, did the semi-fascist stuff work? No, it didn't pair.

It didn't pull well. Well, can we

revive the January six? Nah, you know, Liz Cheney bombed. She's out.
It's not going to come back. Well, how about the raid? Can we leak some more stuff? Well, we did the nuclear stuff.

We even went through the bathroom drawer. We got the medical records.
We can do a little bit.

Well, what are we going to do? Well, let's come up with a new cycle. Let's try to get half the country.
Let's get some phantom of the opera sets. And then we got to,

then they turn, then they turn to Garland or somebody and say, well, when's the indictment coming? Damn it, we need the indictment. Can't we we get that? Well, it's coming.
It's coming.

We got to space it out because we're not quite near the midterms. And then the other person says, well, at least we haven't talked about the border and energy and inflation and energy.

That's how they talk.

And just as soon, sure as that sun rises, there will be an indictment or there will be bombshells, walls are closing in, leaks about it.

We know what's happening. Right.

And you know, Jack, it's a Saturday we're recording, and we know that there's going to be a psycho-melodrama coming up this next week because the Phantom of the Opera Triumph of the Will speech is now stale.

And

it did its purpose. It got Joe Biden is not 38.
He's 41, 42, still dismal. But that's what encourages them.
They say every time we talk about Trump, every time

we don't talk about the failure of Joe Biden,

We go up a little bit. So that's what we should expect.

And I don't know why Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell don't get together and say we're going to nationalize the election and every single race will be on the issues.

And here's our contract with America. Maybe they say they're going to do it.
I hear they may, but

September 10th. It's not a lot of time left.
We're running out of time. And people are voting already, most likely.

They're already starting. Yeah.
And people are sick of Biden and they're sick of the agenda. They just want some hope that the alternative will not, you know,

start screaming and yelling about, you know, crooked this and stupid this. And

you can really damn what Liz Cheney is doing without calling her whole family names, right? Right. And that's what people want.

They want somebody to be tougher on her even than Trump, but not expose themselves to ridicule. And the left, I don't know.

The left, there is such a thing called Ubris that invites nemesis, and the left thinks they're so smart, but what they're really doing is making the case for a DeSantis candidacy. Yeah.

Well, I wouldn't mind that personally, but hey, Victor,

we are.

I'm glad I asked you the question because that was a terrific analysis. And thank you for that.

I just want to, of course, course thank our listeners for listening those who listen and on occasion say yeah i'll check out this itunes or apple podcast um function of rating the show uh thank you for those who do that especially those who leave five stars which is about 99 of those who do rate the program uh some leave comments and we like to We read them all.

We like to read one at the end of every show. And here is one from Courtney in the Books.
And it's titled A National Treasure. VDH is a national treasure.

I've read a few of his delightful history books and then found out he had a podcast.

He gives us, those 40-year-olds, a recent perspective that we may not have had when he references Gorbachev, past inflations, etc. I find it fascinating to listen to his insights.

I love how he is not only in academia, but is humble and worked the land and enjoys those who are everyday Americans in the workfield. And it says and

S-H-A-M, which I'm not sure what that stands for. I got to look that up.
I hope that's not Sammy. Anyway, S-H-S-A-H-M, all capital letters.
I'll figure that out. Anyway, thank you, VDH.

Keep these podcasts going. I'm thankful you keep trucking, even though you have struggled with long COVID.
Courtney in the books. Thanks, Courtney.
Victor, thank you.

Thank all our listeners for thank you, Jack. Yeah, well, you're welcome.
It's great. It's a great honor.

I'm talking to Victor Davis Hansen twice a week. I mean,

people would kill for that.

Oh, I do,

especially if you were a public. You should see the looks I get at the airport when somebody starts to walk toward me.

Well, I remember you'll tell the story another time, the guy that knocked your hat off. But hey,

we gotta, we gotta end this. So thanks so much, Victor.
We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. Thanks.
Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody.
Thanks.