Listeners Ask Questions: Part 1

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

We are recording sometime in late August.

This is one of several episodes that will be airing while Victor is teaching at Hillsdale College.

Speaking of Hillsdale, Victor is the, well, let me, I got to get this in the order.

I always do it, Victor.

I'll confuse myself.

Victor Davis-Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

I'm pretty sure sure this podcast is going to be airing, I think, August 30th.

Anyway, while you're listening, Victor will be at Hillsdale teaching, grading.

I hope you're not going to be failing anyone, Victor.

These series of podcasts are based on questions that our listeners have sent in.

We've got hundreds of questions and

difficult to pick and choose, but hey, we've got plenty, and we're going to have some eclectic collection here on this first episode.

But before we get to those questions, there is just one matter of interest that Victor is going to be talking about, and that's craziness at the American Historical Association.

And we're going to get his views on that and then get to some listener questions right after these important messages.

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Ah, well.

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So, Victor, before we get to some of the questions,

I sent you, and I was kind of not shocked, but disappointed, depressed.

The suicide of the American Historical Association.

This is a piece

written by Philip Magnus for the American Institute for Economic Research.

And in a nutshell, the president of the association,

James H.

Sweet, who I guess wasn't an absolute lefty,

he

mildly criticized what he called presentism

in history.

We are taking the views of 2022 and implanting them on 1619, 1776.

For all I know, it's 44 BC, the same.

And of course, he wrote this, and it was a published column in the organization's magazine, and the onslaught came from the woke historians.

And then Sweet did, as what has disappointed many of us in these last couple of years of cancellation and wokeness, wrote a very

groveling.

I am going to say groveling.

Obsequious, Cody-ish.

There's this.

Drew bled so Ian.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

Oh, I didn't understand.

You know, here's another

institution of of uh an academic not profession it's not you know necessarily academic but you know american historical association we see these kind of things in medical associations trade associations just another one where where a wokeness uh seems to rule in the face of weakness victor um I'm sure there's a classical association that has

kind of mirrors this lunacy.

Any thoughts about this before we get on to a

question?

Just two or three general ones.

One is when you're confronted with a

totalitarian ideology, and that's what wokeism is.

It's an ideology that says all inequality, past, present, future, is defined only by oppression and not by other extraneous factors.

you have more money than I do, Jack, it's not because you work harder, you're smarter.

It's because I'm oppressed by some cosmic force.

Anyway, so

that's an ideology.

And when you have say them which

interrogators, or you have the McCarthyites in the 1950s,

here in my hand, I have the name of 209

suspect, you know, that not that there weren't, but when you are you have the Soviet show, you can't apologize if you're in the right.

You just can't do it.

And the more you apologize, the more they get empowered.

So Mr.

Professor Dr.

Sweet

did apologize, and he did so, as you said, in toadish fashion.

And it just incited them more.

We knew it, we saw it.

See, even he admits it.

So, he should have been defiant and said, Look, if you don't want me as the head of the American Historical Association, then damn it, have a recall election, see how far you get.

Maybe you will, maybe you won't.

I'm willing to take the consequences, but I have nothing to apologize for.

I'm calling.

And what was he calling for?

He was worried that we, in an overly injudicious manner, are using the values of the present to use history or the study of the past for contemporary political purposes.

And by that, he means that

if some pioneer in a wagon on his way to California wrote a diary and he used

an inappropriate term, then we condemn the entire Westward truck because it was was plagued by racism, sexism, homophobia, transgender, whatever.

But we use the values of an affluent, leisured society that has the benefit, supposedly, of a moral progression of over a century.

That's what

so that's what he was objecting to.

So he wasn't trying to excuse slavery or any of this.

He was just saying, if you put yourself into the mindset of the people at the time

and the physical conditions under which they lived.

Remember, in most pre-industrial societies, a woman might have to be pregnant 20 times in her lifetime between 15 and 35.

And then out of those 20 pregnancies, maybe 15 would

actually not be miscarriages.

And out of the 15, maybe 10 would come to full term.

And maybe out of the 10 that came to full term, maybe eight would be successful.

They wouldn't be breached or something.

And then out of the eight, maybe

five would live past the age of three and childhood diseases.

So that's what you're looking at.

And then if you look at the guy, the guy, the man, the husband, he was a farmer.

95% in the time of the founding were farmers.

And his life was basically getting up at dawn and going to bed at dusk, working out in the fields.

to live one more day.

And now you're going to go back and say, well, these people were oblivious to issues of transgenderism,

or they had certain

pre-modern ideas about ethnicity or diversity or influence.

And that's what he was trying to suggest.

And the irony, Jack, is that I think he's the same Professor Sweet

that is a man of the left.

I mean, he writes about

slavery and how Africans were forcibly transported to the Caribbean and

North and South America.

And he's at a very liberal history department, traditionally very, very left-wing at the University of Wisconsin.

So what we're watching is a man of the left, whose entire research interest

have been on woke issues, the exploitation of Black people as slaves in the New World, and thereby was selected as the president of the American Historical Association, just writes a wishy-washy, milk-toasty,

sober and judicious, mild little squeak about maybe we shouldn't go too far and use history as melodrama rather than tragedy.

And they just nuked him and he fell on his sword.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

I didn't mean it.

I had no idea how my horrible views hurt other people.

Sounds

reminiscent of the purge trials of the 1930s.

Yes, he should go.

He should go watch.

He really should go go watch.

We have some of those tapes of the show trials

that Beria.

That was the beginning of the Beria era.

He should go watch them.

He should go watch some of the Nazi trials when they brought most of the Nazis, the anti-Nazis that were tried were defiant, but some of them weren't.

He should go listen to those.

He should read accounts of the Say Then Witch trials.

He should look at the Inquisition and see what people said under those periods.

And it doesn't do any good is what I'm trying to say.

All it can do is protect his family.

So if he thinks, well, I have a son that wants to be a professor, and this is why I'm,

it won't work.

It will not work.

They will not, they're going to be in power.

They're going to say, well, we took down the head of the AHA.

Let's go to the next person.

Let's take down the president, the chairman of the Harvard History Department.

And then they brought in the 1619 project.

And we get, that's like an old dog bone.

It gets buried and dug up and then chewed again and usually when it's completely discredited they usually say well it was only white men that discredited or you know that you constructed expertise in your field or i never said it was history nicole jones it was only journalism it was it was decided it was intended to be provocative no it was intended to be pseudo-history so you could become very wealthy and famous and the New York Times could run it and we could inject it into all the school districts curriculum.

So that was that.

It's depressing.

It's mirrored image in every single learned society.

And it dovetails with the news today that Joe Biden is forgiving another round of hundreds of millions of dollars for student loan without any preconditions.

And you say to yourself,

Do you wonder why there are 4 million less students than there were just eight years ago?

Maybe it's because parents, this filters down to parents, and they say, oh my God,

do I want to borrow a quarter million dollars to put my kid into that place?

And the answer recently for half the country, nope, not this pig.

Non hick forkas.

I'm not doing that.

Well, I was,

as a parent, an idiot.

All my kids went to state school.

I paid the bill.

I should have seen that.

You weren't an idiot in the sense that until very recently, the lifetime earnings over a lifetime of work 30 years was higher with a bachelor's.

It is still, but not as much as it was.

And it has to calibrate the interest on the student loan if they weren't paid off.

Well, that's

no, I took no loans out.

And

I'm just

mimicking the popular complaint and a right complaint.

Like, why the hell should I or anyone else be paying these debts off?

I mean,

where's the money come from?

Fantasyland?

I know.

I did the exact same thing.

I looked at, I, you know, I was in my mid-40s and I said to myself, one, two, three,

here is going to be the tuition and they're going to overlap, but it's going to be a nine-year period.

And I'm going to need about,

you know, for each one, some, I think one year there were, well, there were never three at the same time.

Yeah, there were.

One year there were three at the same time.

And I said to myself, I'm going to have to come up with, I think it was $500,000.

And I said to myself, okay, I'm going to borrow this much and then I'm going to go out on the road and do what it takes.

Speaking.

And I flew all over the United States.

My daughter was very ecstatic.

She would have a little email and I would put money in the account and then she would pay off her student loan.

And she was almost there, almost there.

Another 10,000.

We're done.

So it was, that's what people do.

And now we're told that if you did that, you're a sucker.

Sucker, right?

Yeah.

And if you're out there right now and you're driving driving down 101 as a long-haul trucker, or you're on top of a roof right now in Fresno, and it's going to be 105 today, and you didn't go to college, well, you're paying for it.

You're paying so that the psych major that owes a quarter of a million dollars in his part-time teaching, six units, that you're going to help him forgive that loan.

And if you were another person, you're married and you have three children, and you were going to get a second car for your wife, and you decided instead that you wanted to do the patriotic thing and pay off your student loans at $500 a month.

Sorry, we're not going to give you anything.

You were an idiot because in Joe Biden's America, being thrifty and respecting your name and trying to pay off what you owe is the lot of a sucker.

Yeah.

Well, you're speaking to one, Victor.

Hey,

I'm speaking as one.

Let's call this, rename this podcast, The Suckers.

So, hey, we'll try and get in two questions here, Victor.

And one will be about aviation policy.

It may have a short answer.

Of course, you're someone who's been tormented by aviation over the last few years.

And the other question will be about civil war, not the civil war, but civil war.

And we'll get to the aviation question right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the Victor's Way Teaching episode, one of six that we are recording in advance of Victor's two-week term teaching up at Hillsdale College.

This particular episode should be airing on Tuesday, August 30th.

So Victor, this is the only person who submitted a question that requested anonymity.

And it's a little long.

It has to do with 5G and things like that.

And one of your favorite people.

No, not Anthony Fauci, but Mayor Pete.

So here's what Anonymous wrote.

My question show and tell item is about aviation.

I'm a Boeing 747 freighter captain and regular visitor to the United States, a country that I love and have long admired since childhood.

The recent rollout of 5G radio towers has had and is increasing to have a massive and as yet unrealized impact on radio altimeters.

And this is called Rad Alt.

widely used by aircraft the world over.

This is acute in the United States in particular, because the radio spectrum used by US 5G operators is much closer in frequency to the C-band radalt bandwidth.

Their power output is significantly higher, and the transmitters are not angled groundwards, as is required in Europe and elsewhere.

My question is why Mayor Pete, as Secretary of State for Transport, that's what he calls it.

We'll just call him Secretary of Transportation, has seen fit to sign off on this fiasco with no accountability.

Why has it not been

had broader exposure in the public arena?

And why are the American people seemingly content to wait for the inevitable hull loss due to 5G interference before their sense of shock and outrage is unleashed?

I fear it was ever thus.

I've been flying airplanes for 42 years, and I've seen my beloved industry advance leaps and bounds in terms of flight safety and evolution of culture across the world to be reflective of best practices often sadly in response to accidents with large body counts in historic terms this 5g c-band radio interference is on any reasonable analysis a massive leap into the dark ages put differently it is a clear and present threat to flight safety something ought to be done Why is a crash necessary to advance flight safety?

Victor, there's a lot of learning on that.

That's a lot of expertise that I don't have.

All I can say is that I've heard of this before and I've talked to people about it, and it seems to be that

the airline industry is worried because in these major hubs, this 5G new technology interferes with our altimeters.

And what's happened now is that I think the industry is trying to create filters or something like that to filter out and to make them immune from 5G.

And then the process of developing that technology, supposedly, I think they call it mitigation.

The phone companies are trying to say, you know, we're going to hold back a little bit or we're going to restrict service a little bit.

Can you guys come up?

And that was a FAA

compromise.

But I will say one thing.

It seems to me that anytime there is a problem

in particular industries, especially things like cell phones or

social media or the internet, the people that are worried about it are outgunned.

So I know it's a multi-billion, billion dollar industry, the airline industry, but they're up against cell phone industry.

And they...

They're up against 5G and they don't have a chance.

And the same thing is true of social media.

You're not going to be able to touch those people because they have $6 trillion in market capitalization.

They can do whatever they want.

It's kind of like 1880, you know, the Southern Pacific or the Northern Pacific Railroads or the Union Pacific.

I grew up with stories from my grandfather, you know, who said, well, you know, when we came, they sold us this land.

They sold to my grandmother for $4 an acre.

We had to improve it.

And we did.

And then they came in and they wanted to know whether we could, 20 years later in 1895, they tried to take it back and we proved to be it was theirs.

And they went over there at Muscle Slough, eight miles away.

They fought it out with the railroad.

They did.

And that's the basis of Frank Norris's great novel, The Octopus.

So I think we're in that situation again where there's enormous amounts of money.

And if Pete Buttigig is going to be the adjudicator and says, on the one hand, I'm the FAA and this is the airline industry and this is the 5G band signal lobby, and here are the airline companies.

I'm going to find a compromise that keeps everybody safe until either the 5G has the technology that it won't interfere, or the airlines have filters that will block it

for their own gauges.

He's not the person to do it.

I don't mean that just because he's a SOP, a fool, sanctimonious, self-righteous, and inert, but I mean that his record, his record, all you have to do is go down, fly over the port of Los Angeles, and it is a mess.

Whether you calibrate that mess by containers strewn all over the port, or ships out to the horizon backed up,

or supply delays, or you want to fly like I have to do Saturday, but the last two or three times I've flown.

If I want to go to Reno, it's what, 250 miles from Fresno.

It was an 18-hour Homeric Homeric Odyssey to get there.

I met Cyclopses and sirens on the way, believe me, in the airports.

And on the way back, it was, I thought I was between a rock and a whirlpool.

Right.

So my point is that the rock of sirens or excuse me, sirens, snakes, skilla.

And my point is that he's not the man for the job.

He wasn't appointed to do the job.

He has no expertise for the job.

He was appointed because he ran for president and no one wanted to vote for him.

And he was smug, as I said, self-righteous, sanctimonious.

And they thought they'd put him in there.

And he thinks he has future political possibilities and it would be better to keep him close than outside.

And then they would reward him for endorsing Biden.

Remember, this all goes back to the South Carolina primary when Clyborne took a inert.

He was like a, Joe Biden was like a bicycle tire with seven holes in it that had deflated.

And he just went out and got a pump and pumped him up.

And then Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieck, they all put little patches on.

And they said, we quit.

And then they turned around to him and they said, okay, we put a patch on you, you old tire.

Now you're viable again, but we're going to ride you through the election.

And here's the deal.

I want to be a cabinet member.

And then Bernie said, I want a socialist agenda.

And Elizabeth Warren said, I want a real lot of left-wing appointees.

And that's how it worked.

Okay.

That wasn't a very good answer, but that's all I can do.

That's no, that's

fine.

Well,

we may have time for also a personal question.

And there are a lot of personal questions that have been submitted.

I'm not,

it's about your musical tastes.

It's no musical talent, though.

Well, it's tastes, but let's hold that

and let's get to this civil war question.

This is from Tom, and this is addressed to former Hansen, Mr.

Hansen, Professor Hansen, great American citizen Hansen.

I write this question while I am listening to your podcast, The China Connection.

I'm very much

enjoying listening, reading, and watching you discuss what is happening around the world and in the United States of America.

I personally am not concerned about China or Russia.

Both countries are very secular religiously, and I think blowing up the world is not as probable as a lot of talking heads believe.

Both countries also have incredible problems within their borders, economically, population, and technically-wise.

So my question is concerning the United States of America.

I very clearly see this country sprinting down the road to a civil war.

Comparisons to the 1850s are pretty clear.

Will the Civil War be with states?

No, but it would be down the political divide.

Most Democrats are located within cities, so it would be a matter of encircling the cities and starving them out, tactically speaking.

I don't want that.

800,000 to a million people died in the first civil war, maybe more given infections, starvations, et cetera.

The only way I can see to prevent this civil war is with the media.

But that's controlled 90 to 10% liberal to conservative.

How can we clean up the media?

Or is it a case of the genie is already out of the bottle?

And this is Tom.

And if I may say before you take this on, I don't think Tom is, Tom is,

you know, back at

headquarters plotting the strategy for a war.

But, you know, it is a question on a lot of people's minds.

Like, we are getting to the brink of something.

And does that brink entail violence?

I mean, we have violence in the streets now, but like, what do we do?

Just sit here and

yeah.

Remember one thing, dear reader and jack and everybody listening this whole civil war porn myth that was not from the right that was from the left i know that readers worry about it but what do i mean by that and i wrote a column called civil war porn and then insurrectionary porn so ask yourself if you're a civil if you think a civil war is on the horizon, it may be, but who is prompting it?

Who wants to make revolutionary changes and ram them through?

Well,

who wanted to end a 233-year-old filibuster?

Who wanted a 180-year-old filibuster?

Who wanted to trash a 233-year-old Electoral College?

Who wanted to get rid of the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court judges?

Who wants to get rid of a constitutional prerogative for the states to be the primary adjudicators of voting laws?

Who wanted to get rid of 60 years of 50 states to get in four more centuries.

It was the left.

Who wants to do really revolutionary things in the street?

Who wants to,

for example,

swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices and not enforce the law that it's a felony to do that?

Who wants to dog people as they eat dinner,

as they rushed after Justice Kavanaugh, or as Maxine Waters advised?

And she was only retreading, believe it, you know, Barack Obama's 2008 call to get in their faces when he was in Philadelphia.

Get in their faces, he said.

And so who tears up the state of the union?

Who denies minority members of the House, the minority party members, that they can't be on a committee?

These are revolutionary acts.

They're all done by the left, number one.

Number two, so they're going to say, well, how about January 6th?

Well, let's look at it.

It was one day and it was a buffoonish riot and there's people still rotting in jail and nobody wants to be transparent about it.

This January 6th has no people on that committee from the opposite party unless they have no political future and they voted to impeach Donald Trump.

And there's not going to be any FBI people called in and say, would you please give us a number of FBI informants?

At the event, tell us what their role was and what their reports entail.

And then we're going to, we have nobody who said, who said that Officer Sicknick was murdered by a MAGA person?

And how did that false narrative become entrenched?

And what are all the private documents between the White House, Capitol Police, Nancy Pelosi, and the mayor of Washington that might explain why there wasn't enough security, A, and why you put more troops in to Washington after the threat was over with Bob Wyers since Jubal Early's raid on Washington in 1864.

These are questions.

And then let's compare that to the 120 days, 2 billion, 35 to 40 dead, 1,1,500 officers maimed, injured, attacked severely, and $2 billion of property.

That was a revolutionary act.

That was dreamed up by Antifa and BLM.

And if you go back and look at the stories in the Reggadaccio, not from me, but from them, they planned most of that on social media, including the May 31st assault on the White White House grounds, where they got close enough to breaking through that Donald Trump fled to an underground bunker, and the New York Times giggled, oh, Trump retreats.

So, the point I'm making is that if you actually look at the record, they're the one pushing the envelope.

And then, if you look at the literary record, such as it is, go read the New Republic, good leftist venue now, or the nation, socialist communist venue.

And what do you find blue blue exit and time to disengage and they are systematic calls that blue states are much smarter they have all the universities they have all the investment money they have all the tech they're the blessed people that look out on either europe or asia and they should quit they should get out or they are triumphalist it's only a matter of time before we went over america because we control ha ha ha the schools the universities professional sports entertainment Wall Street, investment, high-tech, et cetera, et cetera.

So it's all coming from the left.

And it's not coming from somebody who wrote that note.

He's worried that it's coming, but he's not advocating it.

So what does the left do then, Jack?

They do what they always do.

When they plant this Civil War insurrectionary bug, they project.

They don't want to be part of us, America.

They hate the Constitution.

They feel they're smarter and better and wealthier, but they don't want to say that they're neo-Confederates.

Although, you know what's funny?

Just as an aside, they are neo-Confederates.

They have adopted nullification, just like South Carolina.

550 jurisdictions are sanctuary cities where federal law does not imply.

It's sort of like they're in, it's sort of like a blue state mayor says, open borders today.

Open borders yesterday, open borders today, open borders tomorrow in good George Wallace fashion.

And they are the ones, they don't have big cotton, but they have big tech, where they have these multi-trillion dollar industries that kind of warp the local economy that run things as they do in California.

Well, California is run by big tech just the way that the old South was run by big cotton.

That's who they are.

And they project onto us that we're these gap-tooth, stinky

insurrectionaries that should rot in hell and solitary confinement and be abused by our jailers as punishment for being insurrectionary.

That's how they work.

What is really insurrectionary and revolutionary is going after a president of the United States and having a warrant that gives you free license to rifle through all of his documents and then not explaining why or what you did and then blasting anybody as unfair or illiberal for criticizing you and your agency while you're systematically leaking lies out to an obsequious press.

That's what Merritt Garland does.

That's a revolutionary act.

And if you think Donald Trump is a revolutionary, you should ask yourself, who was his lowest learner in the IRS who tried to deny nonprofits status before an election to liberal groups?

Who was his James Comey FBI director?

Who is his Christopher Wray?

Why didn't he raid Joe Biden?

Why didn't he raid Barack Obama's home?

He had missing documents.

They had a laptop, which they knew was.

Yeah, why didn't he?

Donald Trump said, you know what?

Eric Holder, he said he was a wingman.

He shouldn't have done that.

He was DOJ.

He didn't follow a congressional subpoena.

He just snubbed his nose.

Go find him and get him on the street and put leg irons on him, just like you did Peter Navarro.

He didn't go after John Podesta that was under a cloud and have a SWAT team arrest him.

He didn't do that.

He didn't,

He didn't round up a bunch of generals and say, you know what, Joe Biden is a fascist, Mussolini, all of that stuff.

So for all their talk about Trump, he didn't pack the court.

He didn't say, we're in control now.

We're going to end the filibuster.

He didn't do anything the left is doing.

Not that he might not have wanted to, but he didn't.

He was the most autopsy probe, dissected, examined, re-examined president in history.

And they are their insurrectionists.

Remember that.

They are the rebellious ones.

They are the ones that are pushing to radically change, or to use Barack Obama's words, we're only what, eight days before we can fundamentally transform the United States.

Yeah.

Okay, Victor, we are almost out of time,

but we're going to get to your musical preferences question

or answer to a question right after these important messages.

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For full safety information, side effects, and warnings, visit Credelio Quattrolabel.com.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This particular podcast, the Victor's Teaching at Hillsdale podcast, one of six we're doing.

We'll be airing on August 30th.

Yeah, Victor, we have a very brief question from Gary.

Does VDH enjoy music?

What type does he favor?

Do you?

Victor, are you?

I don't know.

I never heard you whistling a tune or anything.

What's what's what are your proclivities here?

I always listen to music.

I do it all the time.

And it's eclectic.

Okay.

So I think if I'm just doing this by memory, but if I have Pavarotti, Rigoletto, I listen,

one of my favorite, a lot of them are 60s groups, though, but people wouldn't remember The Wait by the band.

I play that all the time.

I like Bob Dylan, especially Knocking on Heaven's Door.

I had that as my answering for my my phone.

It's not dark yet.

I remember that song.

I play it all the time.

You know what?

I like leftist, nutty, crazy Joan Baez.

She had that one early album where she really, and people don't give her credit, she made famous Bob Dylan.

She took his brilliant compositions and then she recalibrated them to make them mellifilous.

If you, you know, those songs like You Ain't Going Nowhere or I Pity the Poor Immigrant or One Too Many Mornings, Restless Farewell, I like that a lot.

I even play

Peter, Paul, and Mary, 500 Miles.

I love that song.

Yeah.

I like that song.

I'm trying to remember who wrote it.

I'm trying to find it right now.

You hear that there?

I hear.

Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah, by the way.

Time to say goodbye.

Oh, okay.

I looked at, I just, Botticelli, is that his name, Botticelli?

Bocelli.

I just looked it up on the internet as we were talking because I couldn't remember it.

But that was a song I liked.

That's kind of a popular one.

I'm still going, so I'm doing by,

you know, what

you know that I like that one

from Puccini,

Gianni Zicichi, you know, old Mia Baba.

What was the name of that one?

It was a famous refinery.

Yes, yes.

Oh, really?

And then there was a weird group that was kind of a gay four,

what were they called?

The four non-blondes, what's up

revolution?

That was, I used to listen to that one, and my favorites.

Uh, I'm going crazy now.

That's all right, let's let's end it.

Association, yeah, I like Mark Knopfer, especially um, things that one album he did with Emily Harris on the road running.

I don't know it, you don't know Mark Knopfer.

No, no, I'm

Knopfler.

I think it's and I think it's K-N-O-P-F-L-E-R.

Emily, if this is goodbye Goodbye and On the Road Running.

And

I still,

oh, I was thinking of Joan Baez, that

Place here des Armour, that old medieval song that she plays.

That was a great song.

I had a daughter who passed away, and she, I always play this song in honor when I'm driving, and that was on the Colorado Trail.

It's a very sad song about losing somebody.

And I play that all the time when I'm driving.

There's a lot of

people.

Who sings that, Victor?

Well, you know, it's kind of an old Western ballad.

So like the Sons of the Pioneers.

Yes, they play it.

The Colorado Trail.

And

it's really a sad song, but it's about a young girl who passes away.

And it's, you know, I always have an array too, because, you know, I drive a lot to work.

So I play,

I don't know if I should say this, but I play the Magnificent Seven

Theme Theme song.

Yes.

That's the Marlborough Country.

That's the Marlborough Cigarette Theme song.

Exactly.

And I play

Tex Ritter, High Noon.

Okay.

And then all of a sudden, I get in the mood and I play left-wing Commie Jackson Brown, the pretender.

And my kids drag me to every concert that he comes.

I have a good friend, Clint Black.

I don't know if you.

And

he's a wonderful person and he's a wonderful musician.

Yeah, he's your buddy.

Killing time is killing me.

Yeah,

that's killing time.

It's killing me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I talk, and I talk to Clint as much as I can every couple of weeks, but he's been a wonderful friend over the years.

Oh, terrific.

And

to show you what kind of guy he is, he was coming to Fresno.

And there was a very wonderful student of my wife who has a physical disability.

You wouldn't know it by her enthusiasm and eagerness for life.

And

I just wrote him a note.

And the next thing I know, he said, here are the tickets.

We want you to, you know, and so we went to the concert last December and he invited her back, front row seats, back before, after the show, pictures with Clint, toured his bus.

You could not have, and we parked right next to it.

And he was the most considerate, compassionate person you could imagine.

He's just a wonderful guy.

And I try to listen to almost everything.

And for years, I've listened to him live.

And there's another song, though.

You know, I don't know if you ever saw that.

There was a movie with Russell Crowe, and he was about his kid.

What was it?

The Diviner or the Water Diviner.

And it was a great movie.

It was underappreciated.

But Love Was My Alibi.

That was a great song by a guy named Fogelmark.

Okay.

And,

oh, you can't play.

You can't play anymore The Night That Drove Dixie Down.

Oh, that song is by the band.

That's one of the great ones.

Yeah, Joan Meyer, of all people, made it famous.

They wrote it.

It's a great thing.

And I like 60s things, some of those weird songs from the 60s.

Like, remember Pro Co Harem, Whiter Shade of Pale?

Oh, yeah.

Did you like that?

Did you like the monkeys also?

Kind of, but I play that one all the time.

And then my children who are 40 and 38 give me,

I mean, they try, I try to tell them what to play, and they try to tell me, but they're getting older now, so they're not.

But I used to like Neil Young, so I play albums, you know, Cowgirl in the Sand, Heart of Gold.

That's okay.

I got kind of, yeah, it's great.

I kind of got over that.

That Colorado Trail was a guy who died too early.

I used to play all the songs, Cisco Houston, and he was a great, a great

singer.

And then there's certain songs that are not based that I just like, and they're not based on my,

you know, my like of the person's entire world.

Right.

Right.

You know, just particular.

Oh, you know what I was going to say before I do that?

I love my mom.

When I was a little kid, I was five or six.

And I have a twin brother.

Right.

And I have an older brother.

And my mom.

was kind of on a farm in an 800 square foot home and she kind of got depressed.

She had gone to Stanford, Stanford Law School, and she went home.

She kind of gave up everything and came back.

And my dad was a teacher and farmer.

But she wanted us to appreciate music.

So she would play Roger and Hammerstein's music.

And we had to dance with her.

Oh, my.

And so we had

some enchantment.

Enchanted

in Bali High, wonderful guy.

Washed that guy out of my hair.

South Pacific is just going to the great musicals.

Younger than springtime.

And anyway, I knew those, so I play that in honor of my mother.

And then there was a weird movie, an Australian movie about the Adeal with,

trying to remember it, but it was Nick Cave, that Australian, the writer song.

I played that a lot.

You know, I know that Neil Simone was a very problematic singer, but

who knows where the time goes?

She did a version that Judy Collins did.

That was also the theme song of a very good movie.

I don't know if it was Hobby or

it was about

the revolution in the shining path.

And somebody,

I always like You're So Cool.

That, you know, you know, that true romance movie

by Tarantino.

He wrote the screenplay.

Yeah.

Ridley Scott's brother did it.

And You're So Cool.

I play that all the time.

I'm getting on.

I'm getting into this.

Oh, damn.

Yeah, you listen to a lot of music.

I have Ray, when I'm coming back sometimes.

Ray Charles.

Ray Orbison.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Pretty woman.

You got it.

I love that song, you got it.

And then crying, love hurts.

I couldn't figure out.

Maybe somebody listens.

This is a guy who's a very conservative guy.

He had a big comeback.

Roy Orbison.

Is that right?

Yeah, Ray Orbison.

You know, he's kind of pure white with those sunglasses.

Yeah, Roy.

Yeah, actually.

He's a unique voice.

He does.

and he was wonderful and he writes the same song theme yeah whether it's falling in love or dream baby or blue by you or love face away whatever they are they're all about a guy like him who loves a woman who doesn't like him right and it's kind of strange i like that song uh my daughter susanna uh used to call me and she'd always play it to get me in a good mood.

Not that I'd ever know anything about them.

It was the Cranberries.

Remember them?

They had a song called Dreams and then Ordinary Day, Dolores O'Reilly, I think her name was.

She died tragically.

I'm getting back into my high school favorite.

He was one of the great tragedies of music, I think, modern music, when Otis Redding died.

He was just brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

And he died in that.

unfortunate air accident right when he was at his he wasn't even at his peak but you know the way his rendition of my girl Girl, yeah, or sitting on the dock of the bay, or try a little tenders, or what was that song, Fa, Fa, Fa?

And I've been loving you too long,

so I better stop.

But I like music and I play all the time, and um, this, this, Victor, a column by you on what's on my what I'm listening to, I think, would uh prove very popular.

You know what?

I also listened to, I listened, I said cowboy

music tracks, so oh i love i love the uh max steiner the one that he did for the searchers oh that that john wayne movie that is really good i think the sons of the pioneers you know they were in that right yeah they and

i'm not saying that i don't know 80s you know like the journey faithfully or blondie call me i used to or i used to listen to i don't like

who i i don't want to get into the the people that are very very political that i used to listen to but i can't listen listen to them.

Yeah, it's like Joni Mitchell, who's just terrific, but it makes me like not one of them.

Some of the people had the best voices were the Righteous Brothers.

Remember

Unchained Melody and

all of those?

They were just...

Van Morrison, gosh, Tupelo Honey, Brown Eyed Girl.

I listened to that all the time.

And for my father's memory, he was Ave Maria, Schubert.

I play that a lot.

Oh, he did?

When I'm driving.

Oh, okay.

I sing that.

I sing that on MS.

I'm getting kind of exuberant when you ask this,

but I associate these songs with moments, not in the present, not in the future, but in the past.

And every time I'm thinking of something,

I try to bring out, you know, I have a bunch of old cell phones or something.

They're on there and I just plug them in.

And I didn't, until I got a new pickup, I didn't have any way.

I had, you know, they weren't Bluetooth.

You'd have to plug them in and you could fiddle around.

And if you're driving 180 miles and you don't want to listen to the same news story 100 times, right?

You know, the other group I love was the Kingston Trio.

Yeah.

And

I played a lot of their

Tom Dooley.

I played.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a lot of, you know, the Mighty Wind, the movie.

I mean, the

folk music of America was really pretty cool.

And it's interesting how people.

I have a lot of those albums.

Folk music of the 60s, and they're the limelighters and the lemon tree by them.

I think it was Glenn Yarborough, it was great.

And then the Kingston Trio, John Baez.

I try to play all of those.

All right.

Terry McGuire, The Eve of Destruction.

I played that.

Oh, that is.

That's

Green, Green, Going Away, all those on the other side of the hill.

Green, Green, Going Away.

So

I try to be eclectic.

And lately, I've been, because I've had a kind of a chronic illness, I've been getting depressed, not depressed in the, you know, the serious, but just I've been attracted to Johnny Cash's last sorts of song before he died.

Remember that weird Kurt album?

Yeah.

Where he, where he, he, he wrote, I'm trying to find it.

I just found it online.

We've worn out his greatest hits.

He's just terrific.

My son, my son plays and he does a lot of Johnny Cash.

And I try to, you know, he does Danny boy and

streets of lovedo streets of lovedo is a great song it's very excellent it's terrific yeah that was it's been reworked so many times yeah it was a theme in uh the movie the baseball movie bang the drum slowly uh forgot about

it was you know another song i like and i really liked him was the marshall marshall tucker heard it in a heard it in a little love song is that what it was it's a great song i used to listen to the marshall tucker band a lot when i was younger all right victim now you have to,

we could, this conversation could be going on an hour now.

You turned me on.

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm not sorry because this is, it should have been just a whole podcast on musical interest.

So, hey, but Victor, before we go, I do want to read one comment from

one of our listeners.

And this happens to be a comment not on

Apple Podcasts, but on your website.

And it's from R.

Ellen.

And this has to do with the show we record.

You and I recorded recently about crime in America, which has gotten a lot of attention.

I think you were just terrific on it.

He writes, or R.

Ellen, I'm not sure, I guess it's he.

I taught adult education in a California maximum security prison for 25 years.

Nearly 100% of my aides and students were either Hispanic or Black.

I never met one who thought of himself as a victim of white racism or the system.

Often they would comment that the leniency they received in their own homes, neighborhoods, schools, et cetera, contributed to an attitude of contempt that led to even greater crimes as adults.

A routine commentary often went like this, quote,

My sister is an officer in the LAPD.

My brother works for Google.

I was the screw up in my home.

I put myself in this place, end quote.

Thanks for reading.

So thanks to R.

Ellen and the others who comment.

Many people comment on the podcast on your website.

And of course, many, of course, do on

Apple Podcasts and rate the show.

And we thank them.

Thank everyone for listening.

And Victor and I have a bunch more podcasts to record.

And we're going to get to that.

You're going to be listening to them.

We hope and pray.

And

I guess this is where we say thank you very much for listening to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, everybody.

We'll talk to you very soon.