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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the host, host, and we are recording on Sunday, the 21st of August.

Victor Davis-Hanson, the star namesake, 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, where he will be off teaching as he does every year, last 19, 20 years.

He'll be doing that for a few weeks.

Of course, this podcast will continue.

Thanks to those who submitted questions, we are going to pre-record several episodes of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show based on your questions.

I have, I've got about 100 of them, Victor.

So plenty of them are damn smart.

Hey, lots to talk about today, Victor.

And I think the first thing I would like us to hear from you about is a really important piece you wrote for your website, VictorHanson.com.

And it's titled, How and Why Do Democrats Become Revolutionaries?

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, I think I'll get the plug in for the website up front here, victorhanson.com.

Everything you write, Great American Greatness, New Criterion, and other places, you can find it there, links to all the podcasts and other appearances you make.

And I think it's three or four times a week

you write an exclusive piece or a piece exclusive for VictorHanson.com.

So, folks who are listening, and there are many of you listening, this shows the numbers are

increasing.

It's like 50,000 downloads an episode now.

We're very high up there in the rankings, thanks to

Victor's wisdom and your obvious enjoyment of it.

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And it's very reasonable.

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So, one of the things you'd be reading about, reading, if you did that, is this two-part series, How and Why

Did Democrats Become Revolutionaries?

And Victor, I want to read just one line in there because this,

you know,

you bring out a religion aspect or a non-religion aspect to the arc of the Democratic Party.

And

there's just so much wise in this.

Let me just read this one quick paragraph.

Prices to them,

the the wealthy, became irrelevant.

The appetites of the blessed rich became overwhelmed.

They became bored with Jeths' mansions, Mega Yachts, exotic vacations, and fleets of luxury cars.

And in their boredom, and in their exemption from daily necessities, and in their segregation from lesser humanity, and in their material sensuality and ever-growing appetites, they became both guilty and atheist.

That is a really powerful

thought slash accusation slash description.

Victor, would you talk about that or anything else?

What prompted you to write this two-part series?

Well, I think we should remember that if you look at the Fortune 400 and compare the level of affluence and adjust for inflation versus 30 years ago, somebody today

worth $2 billion and a half dollars would be way up there.

in 30-year-old

adjusted wealth, and they won't be on the list today.

And

we've never even imagined wealth like Zuckerberg's or Bezos or Bill Gates when you're getting up to 100 billion or even over 100 billion dollars.

So the amount of globalization, and that was some globalization when people woke up in 2000 and they didn't have a market for 330 million.

I guess the population then was 260 or something,

but 280, but they had a market of 7 billion, 7 billion people for iPhones, Microsoft platforms, Amazon deliveries, et cetera.

And that money just poured in.

And a lot of these people felt that they only had a short time in life and they had no soul because they didn't believe that there was a hereafter.

Then where you are in the hereafter may be predicated on what you do in your material body and the here and now.

So they developed another creed, and that was humanitarianism or humanism, the idea that humans are all there is and that because of their great wealth,

they couldn't satisfy all their appetites.

And by that, I mean, if you look at magazines today, Yacht Magazine, Gulfstream Magazine, all of these things that we didn't even exist just 30 or 40 years ago.

And so what I'm getting at is that

our wealthy classes, I'm just not talking about the multi-billionaires, but the people who work for them seven

cycles down that were making not $100,000, but $600,000, or a corporate board person with an IPO that suddenly got $10 million or $20 million or $50,000.

But what I'm getting at is there was a satisfaction of the appetites.

People started to buy jets in a way that we'd never seen before.

People got larger and larger square footage.

They got bigger air conditioners.

They got swimming pools.

They got,

I don't know, $5,000 bags.

Oprah in Switzerland was looking at, what, a $38,000 alligator purse when she was accusing the person of racism because they didn't bring it down the shelf quick enough.

So the Obamas, I mean, Do you think Harry Truman, you think Bill Clinton even, as crooked as he was in $2,000 at that time, could retire and within two years or three years or four years, have three huge estates like the Obamas.

So there's money out there that we've never seen.

It gravitates to the people who were the beneficiaries of globalization and insurance and law and media and academia and high-tech, finance, et cetera.

It's professional sports, entertainment.

They have huge new global, and they have money.

And after their appetites are satiated, And, you know, was it Mark Zuckerberg and Obama have one thing in common?

They love Hawaiian Hawaiian estates and they love to preach to people about their illiberality and their lack of interest or care about equity,

diversity, and inclusion.

But my point is, they turned to other things, and that other things was a medieval effort to square the circle of their own privilege and feeling terribly guilty in the here and now that they're not doing enough for people that don't have their privilege without giving up any of their privilege.

So they did two things.

They started to fund these existential global nostrums, race, anti-racism, critical legal theory, critical racial theory,

diversity, equity, and inclusion.

environmental social government governance, ESG, and all of these isms and ologies were psychological mechanisms that squared the circle that they had a lot of money.

They understood they weren't going to be here forever.

They wanted to enjoy everything, but they have too much to enjoy.

So they want to fund things that they feel will make them feel good.

And the second part of that is they look at other people they cannot stand.

They fetishize the poor.

They say, these are romantic.

They're poor people.

We're going to help them.

We're going to set up this Institute for Social Justice.

We're going to give, if I'm Jeff Bezos, I'm going to give Van Jones $100 million,

et cetera, et cetera.

but

we believe just take some examples that the culprits for global warming are the middle class they're the guys that buy the ram 2500 pickups they have the jet skis they have the snowmobiles they have the winnebagos they're evil and they're white so they have white privilege we're white but we're not privileged They're privileged.

So we're going to call them deplorables and clingers and irredeemables and chumps and dregs.

And they smell up Walmart.

All that stuff we've heard from them.

And that's where the Democratic Party is.

So they take all of that money.

They don't call it dark money, but according to their own definitions of the Koch brothers 20 years ago, it is dark money.

They flood PACs.

They try to inject $419 million in the 2020 election to absorb the work of registrars.

They do all of this stuff that they used to criticize because they're kind of like Versailles people.

They're not subject to any of the consequences of their ideology.

And so therefore, they push that ideology.

And they push it because they feel they're not going to go to heaven, but they're going to feel while they're here on earth that if they do that,

then they can do other things.

It's kind of like Al Gore came up with that really brilliant idea.

of carbon offsets.

Remember that, Jack?

So if you're living in Beverly Hills or Brentwood and you have a 9,000 square foot home and you want that air conditioning going all day long and you just have to have your laps in the winter with your natural gas heated swimming pool, then you can do what?

You can buy an acre of rainforest trees and send a check in.

And some weird company will take their big cut and say that you have offset your natural gas heating bill

by buying, I don't know, some type of jungle tree that transfers carbon dioxide back into oxygen.

I never know how it worked.

That's literally how it works.

And the alternative, Jack, is,

well, you know, I'm a human being and I'm on the planet and I don't need 7,000 square feet house.

I can live in a 3,000 square foot house.

And you know what?

My solar panels don't heat up my pool in the winter.

I'll just kind of pass on swimming in January and February.

And you know what?

Today's travel, if I'm living in Malibu and I got to go to Dubai, you look at some of these airlines, the first class, it's pretty much nicer than a private plane.

Even I'll just go chauffeur to LAX.

wait in the VIP lounge, get on the first class ticket with my pod,

and I really don't need to use that Gulfstream.

They don't want to do that.

And so they feel terrible that they don't want to do that.

So they do all of these other things.

I wish there were more offsets because otherwise, there are, I mean, what I mean is official offsets, but there are offsets.

The offsets come at our expense because they're a George Sorrells DA offset and they are highest property crime per capita in the country and San Francisco offset.

And people

murdering the innocent in Chicago offset.

And some poor guy named Lupe Ramirez, who is trying to commute from Fowler to Mendota every day, 50 miles, paying $6 a gallon, $6.50 for his gasoline, offset.

That's what they've done.

Those are the real offsets.

They're policies that destroy the middle class and make them feel so good about

their isms and ologies that they can continue to indulge their appetite.

And

somebody listening thinks, well, you know, Victor,

you're mischaracterizing Bill Gates's Seattle estate.

You know, Victor, Leonard DiCaprio's,

his Gulf Stream runs on batteries.

It really does.

Or somebody's going to say, you know what?

You don't know anything about the 2,000-gallon propane tank the Obamas have at Martha's Vineyard.

It's actually 10 tanks tanks of 200 gallons, something like that.

Well, Victor, I do want to encourage our listeners to read this piece.

It's really

terrific writing.

I'm just going to, let me end, and we're going to move on and talk about another subject.

But here's just one

paragraph.

You talked about the guilt of the rich, and you said, instead, to assuage their guilt, to performance, art, and virtue signal their moral and intellectual superiority, and to showcase their wealth, they adopted causes of their make-believe world to fund the police, but fund BLM, champion a third gender, abort to the day of delivery, destroy the fossil fuel industry, and replace it with a wind and solar pauper civilization.

of vegetarians, of high-rises to the skies, with New York subway-like transit to bring in the sardines to their crammed cans.

That is terrific writing.

This entire piece is really exceptional.

I want to commend you for it.

And again, encourage our listeners to check it out.

So, Victor, a few more things we want to

hopefully we can get to today.

And one of them is,

well, one of them is Mitch McConnell.

So I would expect...

our listeners again this is being broadcast on the 25th so it would have have been a week ago today when you're listening.

That McConnell got some national news when he was speaking at the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, and he said, I think there's probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate.

He was critical of the quality of some of the Republican senatorial candidates.

I think that boils down to Herschel Walker in Georgia,

Oz in Pennsylvania.

And I'm missing, oh, I think the woman, I forget her name now, in Arizona.

Probably J.D.

Vance, he thinks, as well.

Well, maybe, maybe.

Yeah.

And so

this is a headline today and Sunday when we're recording.

Trump calls McConnell a, quote, broken down hack, end quote, after he doubted GOP chances in 2022.

And let me just read this.

Trump got his tweet on his site.

And then, Victor,

your thoughts about what Mitch McConnell has said.

And

is he right?

Is he a wet blanket?

But this is what Trump said.

Why do Republican senators allow a broken-down hack politician, Mitch McConnell, to openly disparage hardworking Republican candidates for the United States Senate?

This is such an affront to honor and to leadership.

He should spend more time and money helping them get elected and less time helping his crazy wife and family get rich on China.

Like, whoa,

holy macaro.

It's uh so that that tweet, Jack, encapsulated the whole controversy over Trump.

Yeah.

So

if he said broken down hack, everything he said about McConnell not helping the Republicans could have been, it's accurate, right?

Or at least it's a point of view that's legitimate.

I won't say what I mean.

But all he had to do was say, it's tragic.

that a once

highly effective statesman for the conservative cause.

Remember, McConnell was the one that said, I think, and I'm doing this by memory, didn't he say that his one purpose was to make sure that Obama was a one-term president or maybe a not successful president?

That's what he said.

I think it was in 2009 or 10 or something, 11.

But my point is that he was very effective in stopping a lot of the Obama agenda, and he was very effective in getting these Trump Federalist Society people through.

And he was very effective.

If there's one person that the country owes that this crazy Merrick Garland is not a Supreme Court judge, it's Mitch McConnell.

So there were positive attributes about him.

But he had a point that if you're the Senate majority leader and you've got candidates that won the primary, then you can say something like,

these are the people that the people voted for.

I am the nominal head of Senate Republicans.

I'm the minority leader.

There's 50-50 Senate.

And we are going to get these people elected.

And they're good people.

And they are.

But instead of saying what he wants.

On the other hand, Trump, why didn't he just say it's tragic what's happened to McConnell?

Mitch, get back to your older self.

Get back to when you were a robust defender of conservative values and get back to when you were key in me getting my nominees rather than a broken down hack and his family, all that.

See what I mean?

So there's two.

And that's going to be an issue coming up

in the primaries because a lot of people who are listening are ambiguous about McConnell.

They know that he did good yeoman service for the conservative causes because he understood, as nobody else did, the labyrinth.

of Senate rules and protocols.

He mastered them, even more so than disreputable Harry Reed.

So the fact that he's not at that level, he's 80 years old, I think, like Pelosi's 82 or 83.

So Trump could have emphasized that and been statesmanlike, but still got across the fact that he's derelict and not pursuing

a united front and getting back the Senate.

But he didn't, he lost that when he said he's a broken down hack.

Yeah.

And that appeals to the base.

I'm laughing right now as I read it.

Or I'm hearing it, excuse me.

I'm laughing.

It's funny, but it's not, it's something that Trump doesn't need to do.

Nobody's going to say that Donald Trump is wishy-washy, but he doesn't need to use those adjectives that will turn off 3% to 5% of the swing suburban voter.

And he doesn't.

So my point is this.

If you want to be a MAGA president and you want to have a tough agenda and you want that agenda, you don't want to water it down, you don't want to dilute it, you won't want to be a rhino, but you need, you need to enact it,

not just the base,

but key rubrics and demographics of the independent voter, then all you have to do is make it less offensive so that they can say to themselves, you know, crime is out of control, the border is out of control, inflation is out of control, gas prices.

I'm voting for Donald Trump at their cocktail party.

And somebody said, but he just said that he's a broken down hack and his wife.

See what I'm saying?

Yeah.

And he needs to do that.

He needs to do that to master the language of being tough and critical without adolescence.

And if he doesn't, then it's going to be very hard.

to go beyond the 45% rock solid support he has.

He can do it,

but it's much harder.

And I have people, you know, I've written about that.

Right, you have.

Hang up your Twitter gloves.

That was one of the first things I wrote.

And he needs to do that.

He needs to do that.

That's not the issue of Mitch McConnell.

And Mitch McConnell's, as I said, he deserves criticism because he's supposed to be a fire in the belly leader.

And I don't like

what

Chuck Schumer has done in his career.

I think it was atrocious that he got outside.

He started the whole attack on the Supreme Court in a sense of being in their face

and being personal and vindictive.

When he said, Gorsuch Kavanaugh, you sowed the wind, you will reap the whirlwind.

You will not know what hit you in front of a frenzied demonstration at the doors of the Supreme Court.

From that to showing up at Kavanaugh's house or to rousting him out at a dinner or for a, yes, I'm saying it, for an assassin to show up.

It's not that far from what he did.

When you say you don't know what's going to hit you, and you are going to reap the whirlwind, and there's nuts out there, then they're going to take that literally.

And so, but my point is: so, I don't like Chuck Schumer, but Chuck Schumer would never say, Oh, we've nominated the school.

No, my God, we're in big trouble.

So,

whether McConnell likes it or not, the job description of Senate leader of his party is to have a united front and to exude confidence.

And when he wants to do the other stuff, then he gets a bunch of reporters off the record and he whines and he sighs, but he doesn't do it publicly.

So he is culpable.

I agree.

He should be on the attack.

I mean, there's certainly take the Federman, whatever the hell his name is, running against Oz in Pennsylvania.

And I look, I don't think Oz myself is like the ideal candidate.

I don't know who the ideal candidate is anymore, but it's who the party picked.

But don't talk about why you're disappointed in Oz.

Talk about the lunatic he's running against.

Talk about the lunatic

that Herschel Walker's running against.

I mean, you put Federman

right next to Federman, right next to Oz.

Whatever you want to say about Oz, I have my disagreements with him.

But

he can finish a sentence.

Federman has had a stroke.

You can see when he talks, he's word searching.

He's at the level of Joe Biden.

And then if he were not at the level, he has this George Siles attitude about criminal justice.

And he's got a lot of crackpot ideas about legalization of drugs, all of this stuff.

And he's never, he's not going to go out and campaign, just like Joe Biden.

He thinks that even though he's been physically impaired, that he can win because he has a model.

And the model is the Joe Biden campaign, which was deleterious to American politics.

When one candidate sequesters himself and will not meet the people and the press.

And this is what he's doing because his level of diction and analysis and articulate, being able to articulate issues is at the Joe Biden level.

It may improve.

Stroke victims often improve, but he is waging a Twitter hit campaign and he will not face.

So yes, I think that Oz is privileged and yes, he has a lot in this and this and that.

But unless this guy can go out and meet him two or three times in a debate, he doesn't deserve to be senator.

And so Mitch McConnell should see that.

And he can say, I have my issues with Oz, but he's our guy and he's going to win because the alternative is frightening.

And he can say the same thing about J.D.

Vance.

He said, we got a candidate in Ohio who has been in the military in a combat zone, who's a sophisticated investor, who

knows the underbelly of America and

what real poverty is.

And I don't agree with him, but he is going to win.

I guarantee you that.

And he can do that with each one.

Blake Masters in Arizona.

He's a wonderful candidate.

You couldn't have a more informed, articulate person.

And to say that these candidates are iffy and to do it to a left-wing press is just suicidal.

Yeah.

It's Lynn Cheney-esque.

It's being in the hive there as

it does get into the DNA.

Hey, Victor, we've got some more things to talk about, and one of them will be the madness and violence going on in Mexico.

And let's get your thoughts on that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Hey, for me, Jack Fowler, I write a weekly email newsletter.

It's totally free, no risk.

Your name doesn't get on any list.

It's called Civil Thoughts.

I write it for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, where I hang my hat.

And I encourage you to check it out, subscribe.

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You know,

12, 13, 14 recommended readings, things I think you would be interested in reading as an intelligent American or Australian, Canadian.

You know, Victor, we have a global audience here.

So

you can sign up for that, civilthoughts.com.

And if you go on the World Wide Webs, folks who are hanging out on Facebook, I want to recommend you visit

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So there's also VDH's Morning Cup.

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So check that out on Facebook, VDH's Morning Cup.

Last thing, I so rarely mention this, and I should get flogged, but justthenews.com.

That's the mothership for this podcast, John Solomon's website.

So you may want to check that out also from time to time.

And one last little commercial, Victor, you mentioned stroke victims, talking about Fetterman in Pennsylvania.

And I'm just happy to say my friend, I think you know him, Bill McGurn, who's a columnist at the Wall Street Journal.

And Bill had a stroke in January.

And those who read the journal and enjoyed his weekly Main Street column out every Tuesday, it disappeared for a long time, but it's back.

Bill is recovering, slowly recovering, but enough to be writing again.

And actually, he's back on Fox

for regular appearances there.

So

he's a wonderful person.

He's got a great analytical mind.

He's one of the people who was not fond of Donald Trump, but examined the Trump agenda and its merits.

And where he felt that it was successful and needed, he would say so and he would be critical otherwise, but he was always fair.

I thought,

I'm glad to see that he's back.

He's a wonderful person.

Yeah,

it's great and heartening news.

What's not heartening in the news department, Victor, is the violence in Mexico, which

seemed to have truly ratcheted up.

Of course, it has ramifications for the other side of the border, if there is a border anymore.

And it seems to me to be a test of wills for true

running of

large sectors

of this country, including those sectors that

are

on the

border with the United States.

Yeah, that's it's it's it's madness going on there.

Victor, what are you, what are your thoughts?

Well, what's different now is the cartels had an unwritten

area of influence of central Mexico, southern Mexico.

You know, when you would have people, my neighbors would say things to me like, oh, I've got to go back to Oaxaca,

southern Mexico, south of Mexico City, and I don't know who's going to be in our house.

Meaning, we have a home, we came up here, and somebody's going to occupy it.

And if that person's connected with a cartel, we're never going to get it back.

That kind of stuff.

But this violence has moved north.

It's right on the border now.

Tijuana is under assault, right next to San Diego.

And

why is it under?

Well, it's every Mexican president is compromised by these cartels because they have the ability to influence everybody around them just because the amount of money they're making through smuggling and drugs is staggering.

And the second thing is when they're a left-wing president, you start negatively anyway.

But when you have the force multiplying effect of the cartels, and this is what you get with Ovidar, you've got a disaster.

But I blame Joe Biden.

I really do.

I'm not just dumping on him

just because he's Joe Biden, but when you open the border and you let in 2 million people last year and a million and a half this year,

people just say the border, and then you lie about it like Mayorkas and Biden said the border is secure, the border is closed, and it's not.

You have told the cartels, we're going to make you rich beyond beyond your wildest imagination, because they are charging people to be brought across.

And they're making a lot of money on fentanyl that's killed 100,000 Americans a year.

And they're making money on marijuana.

And every single aspect of an open border enriches and empowers the cartels.

Second, there are people coming across.

Donald Trump got severely criticized when he said, and you know, they're bringing this people, and then I suppose a few good people.

But the point is that there are people coming across who are gang members and who are establishing and reinforcing and enhancing gang-related activities inside the United States, whether that is defined by chop shops where I live.

or how prostitution and child trafficking in the area where I live, or whether it's vendettas and shootings where I live, or it's up in the mountains where I visit where there's marijuana farms or there's metla etc

and that

that is the osmosis that goes back and forth across this border and I can tell you there are people in California and Arizona and New Mexico who are scared to criticize the crime in their midst because they will whisper to you that is a cartel or a gang.

And in our interconnected world, those people who run things in Mexico have access to your phone number.

If your nephew is in a prison in California, if your cousin is living in a particular part of a city, they know.

And what that means is people are terrified.

I'm not talking about illegal aliens, talking about first generation, second generation Mexican American.

I'm talking about everybody in America is terrified.

So that gang influence with an open border has by a force of 10 magnified.

And I can feel it right where I'm speaking today.

And I'm going to be very careful because of my personal safety, but I can tell you, if I were to walk 20 minutes, I would find areas that no one listening would believe things are going on.

And they're going on with impunity.

And why they're going on with impunity, I don't know, but I don't want to say anymore.

And I confront people on my property

that are gang members and are armed.

And when I hear Joe Biden, or when I hear a Stanford professor, or I hear anybody else say, you're racist for saying that, I just assume that, like Joe Biden, he's building a $500,000 fence around his estate while he's blasting walls, or somebody is living in Menlo Park in a very safe area area with a private security, but they don't know what Americans, especially the Mexican-American community is faced with.

And just to finish this rant, if the first thing you do when you enter the United States is knowingly break the law

by not entering legally, and the second thing you do is continue to reside illegally and you don't, as 70%, don't appear for a summons.

And the third thing you do is you get documentation,

identification, social services under false premises that you're a legal resident.

That's a three-strike deal.

You don't want somebody who comes into your country uninvited, illegally, resides.

illegally and does things illegal to stay illegally.

And yet that is who we're welcoming in.

And that empowers the cartels.

They're getting so much money.

Right.

And they're getting closer and closer to the border.

And this is a tragedy because when you look at this, I think what was the latest poll?

60%

of

Democrats said this was an invasion.

60%.

And you look at it and you just say to yourself,

Wow.

Look at these pictures.

They're just walking across.

The federal government's welcoming them in.

There's no law.

This is like all of a sudden

stop signs don't matter anymore.

What if everybody was just doing rolling stops and just ignored the law?

Or maybe you had a holiday from the IRS.

You didn't file a 1040.

This is the greatest example of mass lawbreaking in our history.

It doesn't exist.

They've nullified a federal statute.

This is an impeachable offense.

If the Republicans do anything when they get the House, the first person that they should indict or call up, excuse me, indict, impeach is Mayorkis, the Interior, Homeland Security.

Second person is Merrick Garland for not enforcing the laws.

The third person is Joe Biden as the architect of this.

And they should do it not on vendettas, just on immigration violations.

I've never seen anything like it, where you destroy a whole element of federal law en masse.

And as I said before, in a very cynical but accurate fashion, the only thing that's going to stop this is if the Mexican-American community in this next midterms votes 50% Republican.

If they do,

then the left wing will say, oh my God, people from Central America and Mexico are starting to vote as if they're Cubans

or they're Venezuelans, and we don't want them anymore because

they show ingratitude because we gave them an open past to come into our country.

We gave them lavish federal and state benefits, and they vote against us.

Therefore, let's close the border.

And you know who there's precedent for that, Jack?

Because Mr.

Racemonger himself, Cesar Chavez, said to himself, these cynical and corporate agriculture barons, they and the Teamsters, and to break my union, they're opening the border.

That was all true.

To get cheap labor from Mexico to destroy the United Farm Workers.

I won't get into the United Farm Workers, Robert Kennedy Medical Fund, missing funds,

or their synonym connection, or all of the corruption of that corrupt union.

But nevertheless, he had a point, and he sent people down there who physically fought.

to keep the border secure

because he felt that if people came across the border, he called them, not me, he called them imported scabs.

And so there were people on the left who wanted a secure border.

And if you look at the 1992 and 96, and I've said this before, speeches at the Democratic Convention, go back and read Schumer, go back and read Harry Reid, go back and read Bill Clinton, go back and read Hillary Clinton.

The message was: we care about our middle-class Democratic union worker base, and we want immigration to be legal and measured.

That's what they said.

And they did that because they felt that they were losing their democratic constituency, and it was more important than the people coming across illegally.

The demographics changed that they flipped, but they will flip back if they feel it's not in their

border.

It is closed depending on two things:

to what degree does the left and the corporate right have the power to influence a president?

And that's and Donald Trump, they had the power to,

but he was immune from it apparently, because he was not part of the bipartisan political establishment.

But everybody should ask themselves: to what degree is the corporate right that wants cheap labor and the hard left that wants constituents hand in glove influencing a president?

And when

the hard left loses its support because

they feel that the Mexican-American community is turning on them and they can't win without a 65%

majority of that voting consent, then

they will be against open borders.

Yeah.

Well, maybe as you mentioned, this sense of a hostage situation of some Mexicans living in America hostage to the cartels, maybe that will prove influential to victims.

I had a person say to me, Jack, that she was scared.

I won't give any information about where she works, but I was a customer and she thought that I might know somebody that might help and just said to me that there were M13 Noreños, there were gangs that had origins in Mexico that were threatening.

her children in the schools and they she had contacted authorities and that person was deported and that person called her from Mexico.

Yeah.

And that person said, I can be back in a day, any day I want, so you better stop it.

Because when you have these, this porous border, you're taking 40 million people in northern Mexico and you are merging them.

That's what Mexifornia was about.

Right.

You're making a new state that's neither American nor Mexican.

People glorify and celebrate that, but it's very dangerous.

And people have the ability to transfer values that are Mexican values.

I don't mean Mexican-American.

I'm talking about values in Mexico.

Right.

And that means when you go across the border, the policeman asks for Mordita in a way they do not in the California Highway Patrol that are professional.

and other things.

Or when you go on vacation in the United States and you come back to your home, there's not a squatter in it with cartel connections.

But that type of culture, if you merge the two and you have an open border and you enrich the cartels, will start to appear.

And it's already starting to appear in southern United States.

It really is.

So the culpability of Maorcus and Biden.

By the way, an aside, Victor, we've talked so much about the FBI.

And last week, we discussed on podcasts about, oh, you can't, you know, the Democrat attack on people who are critical of the FBI.

And this is a, our leads have no problem being critical of another law enforcement agency, right?

The border, the border agents, you know, they can be vilified, but not the FBI.

So anyway, that's a good point because we've talked, um,

we've talked about the FBI's sins of commission, right?

And we've never talked about their sins of omission.

So why they are at Virginia school board meetings or while they're putting Petero Navarro in

leg irons or why they have a SWAT team at Roger Stones or why they're fixing FISA affidavits.

What are they not doing?

They're not looking at Jeffrey Epstein.

They're not looking at the Sarnay brothers in Boston.

They are not

looking at a gym coach that seems to have had a serial propensity to molest the athletes under his supervision in a concerted way.

So they do things.

It's a zero-sum game.

If the FBI wants to become the personal retrieval service for lost laptops and diaries of the Biden family, or if they want to go after

they're the enforcement arm of the teachers' unions, then they don't have enough manpower to do things like look at gangs coming across with evil intent at the southern border or people from the former Soviet Union coming in to Boston in a radical Islamist fashion when they were warned about it by Russian intelligence, or they don't understand that one of their marquee sports is corrupted to the core because

they're, I guess we'd say the word, they're preoccupied

with Carter Page.

Right.

They're worried about Paul Manafort.

They're worried about a PP tape in Russia.

They want to make sure that James Baker needs to talk to all of these media people before

the election.

They've got to make sure Christopher Steele is paid.

All of these, they want to affect an election.

They want to exempt Hillary Clinton.

So

it's a lapse in omissions and commissions.

We talk about the high-profile commissions, but we don't talk about what the FBI is not doing and should be doing.

I get really upset about this because I've written about it.

When I heard Merrick Garland, as I said, give that sanctimonious rant about how dare you impugn the DOJ

and FBI hierarchy, I thought to myself, Bruce Orr?

Bruce Orr?

Is that who he's talking about in the DOJ?

Sally Yates and Miss Sally Yates, the Logan Act?

Is that who he's talking about?

Rod Rosenstein and Were a wire to entrap the President of the United States?

Or is it Andrew McCabe, four times lie, et cetera, et cetera?

And

it's really something else,

this expert class, this

we are, that we talked about last broadcast about Fauci and lies and expertise.

These people are not experts.

They're not experts.

They may have letters after their names.

They may have big salaries.

They may live in the zip codes.

They may have nice titles, director of this and that, assistant counselor, blah, blah, blah.

But they're not experts.

They're ideological.

Well, Victor, we have a time, brief time, for one more subject.

And that's we talked a lot earlier today when we recorded another podcast about race in America, but there's some other things I think worth discussing related to some actions in Minneapolis and also at Berkeley.

And let's let's get your quick thoughts on these things right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show recording on Sunday the 21st.

The show's up on Thursday the 25th.

Victor, and I think

from time to time, the story you've told a few times on previous podcasts about how you actually met Martin Luther King when he gave a talk at a church in

San Francisco.

Grace Cathedral, yeah.

You were the last person squeezed in the door.

He patted you on the head.

You remembered part of the speech.

You recounted it to your family outside.

But this gets to the

vision many of us

bought into

for

America of people judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

And is Martin Luther King spinning in his grave now with

these things happening

from the left, not from the conservative, not from Republicans, but from the left?

Two things.

One, and I'm sure our listeners have heard both of these stories.

Minneapolis

will, if they have to fire teachers, which I don't know that anyone's ever fired a teacher in America, but if they have to fire teachers,

a white teacher with seniority would go before a black or Hispanic

teacher would be fired.

So fired by race is kind of an incredible concept.

The other thing is news that has emerged from Berkeley.

uh at the University of California at Berkeley.

By the way, did you know Berkeley, the Irish philosopher that the town is named after?

He came to America for a couple of years and he was trying to start a college here.

It didn't work pan out.

But while he was here, he had a plantation and he bought slaves.

He owned slaves.

I wonder if Berkeley would change its name.

The school would change its name over that fact.

But anyway,

there's an off-campus

house

and it's for people of color.

Yeah, person of color theme house, 30 room.

And here are the rules, some of of the house guests' rules.

So you want to go to the house, visit a friend there.

House members and rules should always be respected by all guests.

Make sure your guests understand our house values and uphold the theme of the house as you are responsible for their behavior.

Many POC, people of color, members moved here to be able to avoid white violence and presence.

So respect their decision of avoidance if you bring white guests, which means here's a space, you know, title for guests in common spaces.

Guests are allowed in common spaces, but please be mindful if there are house members in the room beforehand.

White guests are not allowed in common spaces,

etc.

Wow.

This is America, or this is elite America in 2022.

Victor, do you have any quick thoughts about these

that we haven't expressed earlier today on another podcast about

elitism and race in America.

Well,

on the teachers' unions in Minnesota, they were very clever what they did.

We're in a labor shortage, obviously, and

the schools have lost a lot of revenue, so they're hiring teachers.

So they said, well, why is everybody, oh, why are these racists so upset?

We're not laying anybody off.

Well, that was precisely the point.

They were putting through a new doctrine at a time when people wouldn't notice because they were hiring.

And

their protocol would be: when we lay off, we will not lay off by seniority, by race.

And they were going to do it now rather than during a recession, which, by the way, is on the horizon.

And so it was really disingenuous of saying, well, there's no crisis.

We're hiring.

Well, there is going to be a crisis because the people that you hire

under

the existing way that we do things in America will be first hired, first fired, whether you like it or not.

And this recession, if we have another third quarter of economic growth, it's going to go worse.

So you will be laying off and you will be doing it according to race.

I think they wanted to get it out.

And of course, the question is:

why are they doing that?

And they feel this is the whole woke movement.

The whole woke movement can be defined in two

simple tenets.

Number one,

all inequality anywhere as perceived, economic, social, political, cultural, is due to oppression.

It's not due to chance, fate,

individual decision-making, culture, genetics, anything you can think of, inheritance.

You know what I mean?

When I say genetics, I get ill and somebody I know who's obese doesn't get ill.

Nothing to do with that.

It's due to oppression.

And two,

this oppression can be remedied by a strong, all-powerful state that has infinite wisdom and can punish some people for current and connections with past oppression and even it out.

And that's what this is all about.

And when you talk about

wokeness and Martin Luther King, I never thought I would live in America.

I was, I think that was 1965, Jack.

I was 11 years old.

And when my mom pushed me in there,

I was the last person at the gates of Grace Cathedral, 1965, I can remember.

And he gave, if you're going to be a janitor, if you're going to be a car, whatever you're going to do, you be the best.

at what your chosen advocation or what is forced upon you.

It was a really moving.

And then he walked around the entire congregation.

I was sitting at the door, and he came by and shook hands with everybody.

And that was a very moving moment.

Just as an incident, an incidental, I just thought of this, that the Episcopalian

priest, a preacher, pastor, I'm not familiar with the terminology of Grace Cathedral in those days or now, although I knew,

I've known some.

Alan Jones is a wonderful person.

He's a friend of mine who was in charge of Grace Cathedral.

But

I think his name was James Pike.

Do you remember that guy, Jack?

I don't.

Bishop Pike.

Well, he was a big Chavez supporter.

He was one of the first

Episcopalian social activists.

And he got in a lot of troubles, I remember, because he divorced and he married.

And there was some question whether he was actually divorced.

And it was in the San Francisco Chronicle every day.

And he was there.

And I remember he invited Martin Luther King.

And I remember he gave this weird talk as well.

I was only 11, so I wasn't very knowledgeable.

And then he ended up writing a book on, or he was going to write a book on

Jesus and Israel, historical.

And he took his wife out and they just did the craziest thing.

They just took a rental car and they drove all the way out in the middle of nowhere.

and they got stuck and it was like 105 degrees.

And she hiked out and left him, I guess, to get help.

He was older.

And they never found him for like a week.

He died out in the desert.

It was the weirdest thing, but I can remember him distinctly.

If that's the same person who was giving the

peroration before King spoke.

And I think that what we've done since then, when you can pick your,

in some universities, you can pick the color or race race or ethnic background of your roommate.

Or you can say that these particular people are not allowed to come in the door at a particular

theme house at Berkeley.

Or we're going to say you can go to this graduation ceremony and you can't, and this group has a separate one.

And we're going to think that this is going to be Professor Kendi's good racism that is the only anecdote to the bad racism of people largely dead now.

And this is going to be effective.

So you're going to tell Professor Kendi and Mr.

Preceptor at the Berkeley dorm

and Mr.

Provost who's organizing the separate racial graduations.

You're going to tell somebody in northern Tennessee who's a forklift driver, who was born in 2000, 2000, 35 years after affirmative action, who is making the minimum wage and has nobody in his family that went to college, that he is the problem and that he enjoys privilege and that he, should he go to college, can't set foot into that dorm and must not have a separate, that's going to be a hard thing to do.

Hard thing to do.

And I know that they try to do it and they come up with all sophisticated theories, but ultimately it's racism.

No way way about it.

And they say you can't be racist if you're a member of a marginalized community.

And I don't think that's true.

And I don't think Martin Luther King thought it was true.

I remember when I was in my 20s watching a

Phil Donahue show, and he had on, oh, it was wild.

It was

blacks discussing black racism about blacks.

And, you know, as much as the one-drop theory is a preoccupation for so many.

But yeah, about dark-skinned blacks face-to-face, going at it with light-skinned blacks about, you know, desirability and the such.

And it was kind of an eye-opening.

You know, that's funny you said that because

David Mammet, who's a great writer.

Oh, I love him.

Yeah.

I do too.

And I've had dinner with him.

He has a piece.

I think it's up in On Heard

where I think that the great people at Powerline,

that's where I saw that link, so I read it.

But he talked about

a minor novel that he thinks is an unappreciated classic,

King's Blood Royaler.

I think that was by Sinclair Lewis.

And in it, he talks about the one drop that a person is discovered to be black.

And the gist of the essay is that

race is a fiction and that we should just, it's a superficial appearance.

There may be cultural reinforcements of

perceived racial distinctions, but they're cultural and they are malleable.

And the actual race thing is irrelevant.

And that's the way I've always looked at it.

That

it doesn't really matter to me what color the United States is.

I could care less.

It matters a great deal that the founder's vision is enshrined and everybody

accepts a protocol that makes it an exceptional country.

And by a protocol, I mean certain ideas about the economy, free market, private property, politics, the constitutional system, the legal order, culture, the nuclear family, the work ethic.

And if people accept that menu, And it doesn't, it's irrelevant.

Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

You know, that's that's it.

That's it.

Yeah.

And uh, I get a lot of criticism.

I think I was a target in that magazine Chronicles all the time.

And I can remember, I won't mention his name.

A guy came to one of my talks on Mexicornia and called me a

delutionist or something that I was advocating intermarriage and stuff.

But my point is, race is, it's always been irrelevant.

And

a delusion is like

deluding

the pigmentation or a traitor to your race.

Interesting.

There's a whole genre of.

Yeah.

Gosh.

I used to pay attention to it maybe 20 years ago, but there's a whole

genre of sort of conservative race-based writing in certain journals.

Right.

And I was always a target.

Yeah.

Well, Chronicles would be ground zero.

No, I mean, I was really a target.

Yeah.

And every once in in a while some people have showed up not anymore but in those more tumultuous days of the late 90s and early 2000s um

i was called an assimilationist and things like that so which i think is a good thing to be called yeah

but race it just it's not

um

you know it's culture culture culture culture culture amen amen well victor that's about all the time we uh have today and and today's uh podcast and recording is we're going to have some others between now and the next one that will be kind of current events related, probably about three weeks.

In the intervening three weeks, we're going to have some

six programs where we have taken viewers' questions and you're going to answer them.

Some of them,

we had over 100, so

we'll get to many of them.

We thank those who did that.

Victor, thank you for your wisdom.

Now, for everyone that listens, so many, the show keeps growing and growing.

And

no matter what platform you listen on, thank you very much.

Google Play, Stitcher, to those who are at Apple Podcasts and

leave rankings, one to five stars, and 99% are leaving five-star ratings.

Thank you very much for taking the time to do that.

And also those who leave comments, we thank you and we read them.

We read what you have to say.

I read one on our previous podcast that took me to task.

There are others that take me to task, but let's just stick to something that doesn't talk about me, but explicitly talks about Victor.

And this is from Bombara 96.

And it's titled From an Australian Sheep Farmer.

I'm a farmer from Western Australia.

I love to listen to your show while rehabilitating old blue blue gum plantations back into sheep grazing and cropland.

I particularly,

I added a syllable there, like hearing about the subtleties of Californian farming and the similarities of our vastly different lands, especially when it comes to water and forestry.

I also get a good laugh when you ridicule the rich coastal women who loves to loudly exclaim her virtue whenever she gives her Latina housemaid all of her old clothes.

Keep up the good work, Bombara 96.

I think Bombera, he does keep up the good work.

Yeah, good.

I remember that great movie, to remember, with Robert Mitchum and was it Robert?

No, it was,

yeah, it was Rob.

Wasn't it Robert Mitcham and Deborah Kerr, The Sundowners about sheep?

Oh, sure, yeah.

Yeah,

Peter Ustinoff was there.

Yeah, he was in it too.

It was a great movie.

And I'm looking out.

I can see

when, as soon as I peek my, take my head out the door of my blue gum

neighboring orchard that was planted in the 1870s when they thought they wouldn't have wood.

So everybody planted these Australian imported varieties of eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus, by the way, I'm finishing now, so I can

just came to my eucalyptus.

What does that mean, Jack?

Happy something.

Happy.

No, while you're good, you're close.

You is always good.

Yeah.

But it's, I think it's from Calypso, Calypto, the verb, and we have Calypso, the mythical goddess of the hidden one.

So it means well hidden.

I think it has something to do with a seed that is encapsulated, but somebody can check that.

I'm sure we will get a comment that has a statement.

When I was a great professor, students, the reason I mentioned that is students would always, I would always say at the beginning of class, name an English word if you can stump the professor.

And they would come up with a weirdest word.

I remember one person said squirrel

and I thought hmm but I didn't really because that was a French corruption through Latin back to Greek and I said I had had that before actually three years earlier a student had asked me that it's kind of a and it's some skia eros in Greek shadow tail

squirrel squirrel

yeah it is it is

but but so it's hard sometimes to trace the etymologies but it was good work for the students to try to come up with as many weird English words and find out how they were spelled the way they were and what they meant based on their Greek antecedents.

And you'd be surprised how much of the English language is not just Latinate, but has a Greek pedigree.

Yeah.

Well, I would expect us to get some

Victor, what are the roots of this word?

Comments left,

which is fine.

Leave them, folks.

Maybe we'll have, we'll do an entomology.

Wait, is entomology?

We have to be careful.

I'll just say an ending.

If you say a word like utopia, everybody thinks it's you, epsilon, umicron in Greek, good, right?

Topos, topography.

So it's a good place as a utopia.

No, it's from ook,

the word not ooh, but ooh in Greek, meaning no, meaning no place.

So a utopia doesn't exist, unfortunately.

It's a no place.

Oh, I wonder what ukulele means then.

but we'll figure that out on another podcast a dystopia is a bad place but it's based on the false etymology that a utopia utopia is a always good place where it's really an imaginary place well did thomas more understand that when he i think he did yeah yeah okay all right

well victor thanks as usual it's been It's a great honor to be able to sit here and host and throw questions at you and

to be a friend.

And thank you very much.

I hope you have safe travels to Hillsdale.

Yeah, it's my first trip with after getting ill.

And I think I'm going to go back Saturday morning, August 27th.

I'll be in Hillsdale, Michigan.

I'll be teaching an intensive class on strategy.

It's got everything assigned from Joe Minnie to Sun Tzu to Xenophon to Machiavelli to Klauswitz, selections.

And then I give a lecture, I think, that Friday on their new military history program.

That Hillsdale has some generous benefactors and they're going to really make a first-class military history.

And they can do it because they have a wonderful president, Larry Arndt, and they've got some very, very talented people, Mark Moyer and Tom Connor and a young professor Guterre.

They're just wonderful professors.

And I think they're going to have in three or four years, one of the best military history programs in the United States.

They're going to kick it off on a Friday evening lecture.

Well, safe.

I'm a little loath on the safe travel stuff, but you need it because of your experience.

Well, if I get back there, I'm going to eat my words and I say to them, oh, I'm so tired.

I can hardly walk.

I got brain fog.

And I quit and come home.

Then I hope somebody doesn't say, told you so, idiot.

But I'm going to try doing it and shock myself out.

Well, I hope you do.

And St.

Christopher,

please be crypto's companion.

What's there?

a different cell of the immune system?

Oh, well, that will.

I'm sorry.

I don't think they figured out that saint yet.

Saint Hygieia, maybe.

We'll figure.

Okay.

All right, my friend.

Thanks.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

God bless.

Thanks to everybody for listening.