The Eclipse of the Rule of Law and Universities

1h 12m

Listen in as Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler discuss Liz Cheney's father's attempt to help her decimated career, Merrick Garland's effort to rectify a "lawful" FBI, and why enrollments are dropping in our universities.

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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

That's Victor Davis-Hansen.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow at Hillsdale College, where he will be teaching in a couple of weeks.

We are recording on Sunday, August 14th.

This particular episode shall be up on the World Wide Web on Tuesday the 16th, which, by the way, Victor, as a Catholic, you know, that's the feast of St.

Helena, the mother of St.

Well, now, you know, Mother of St.

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Lots, lots, lots to talk about today.

And we're going to start off with Big Daddy, Dick Cheney, coming to the defense on the airwaves of his daughter, who is up for primary election, I believe, the day that this podcast will air.

And Victor has some thoughts about Dick Cheney's public commercials.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, my friend, yeah, Dick Cheney has cut, I think now, two commercials for his daughter, who is probably going to lose her Republican congressional primary.

In one of those ads, he called Donald Trump a coward and many other things.

I also called him the worst, essentially, the greatest threat to our republic in American history.

That's quite a, quite a charge, quite a charge.

Victor, what are your thoughts about

Cheney and Liz Cheney?

Yeah.

Well, I had mentioned with Sammy that I thought that he kind of gave the game away, that his daughter was supposed to be a disinterested interrogator on a House select committee to find out what happened on January 6th.

Instead, he just announced that she was point woman in stopping this existential threat, i.e., that's why she's on the January 6th, is to stop Donald Trump, which was not the purpose of that committee, at least ostensibly, or any committee.

You don't just go after one person.

You try to find out what happened.

But of course, that committee never did, and he admitted it.

But more importantly, when he says he's a coward, coward, Scooter Libby, who's a very wonderful person, and I've known him a long time and I like him, and he participates in our military history program, he was framed, if you remember, in the second term of the Bush administration, when Vali Plame and Joe, whatever's his name, Wilson, that flamboyant guy who was all over the media, just a complete loose cannon.

When the left wanted to get at whom?

Dick Cheney.

They called him Darth Vader.

They called him the Hall Burton crook.

They would say things, how did this guy make $40 million?

And how many contracts?

And they just were obsessed with Dick Cheney.

When he accidentally shot someone with a shotgun, it wasn't his fault.

They called him a basically, they wanted to indict him.

Right.

Okay.

And then Dick Cheney.

Dick Cheney was singular among the Bush crowd in voting for Donald Trump.

Said he did.

So did the late Don Runsfeld, another very good guy.

And we know Liz got her third ranking minority position in the House because she had voted 93 times with the president.

Okay.

So now he comes out and says he's a coward because

his daughter is going to lose this congressional seat.

And we don't appreciate how she singularly and heroically has taken on Donald Trump.

I get all that.

But when he said he's a coward, what I don't get is that when Scooter Libby, getting back to that, was framed, and remember what they accused him of: they accused him of leaking the covert status of Lowry Plain.

First of all, she probably wasn't covert because everybody in Washington knew that.

And then they said that he had misremembered a conversation with Judy Miller.

Okay, but we know that the special prosecutor, a comieite named Patrick Fitzgerald, was told

that Colin Powell knew who had leaked and talked about the status of Blowy Blame, and it was his own lieutenant Richard Armitage.

That was in the knowledge of the special prosecutor.

So he went to trial, and he tried to convict Scooter Libby of unlawfully disclosing.

the covert status of someone who wasn't covert.

And if she were convert, it was Richard Armitage.

And Colin Powell sat mute.

He did not say a word while that trial went on.

And he knew that they were destroying the reputation of somebody for a supposed crime, which his own lieutenant had committed and who had been constructed, as I remember, by Patrick Fitzgerald, not to disclose it.

In the end, they got him on, contradicted himself under oath.

Okay.

Everybody knew it was a setup, and nobody wanted to do what?

Commute or pardon Scooter Libby.

He became the shield of Dick Cheney.

In other words, as long as Scooter Libby was the vice president's chief of staff, the guy knew Washington so well and he had navigated it for so long that he was able to call and do what chief of staffs do, protect his boss from unfair attacks.

And he did.

And that was one of the reasons they went after Scooter Libby.

It was like a knight that you want to take away his armor, so then he's kind of flabby underneath.

So once they took away Scooter Liberty, bad things started happening to Dick Cheney.

They just attacked him and attacked him, and those attacks were not responded to.

Okay, so for all of that service and for the fact that he was framed, railroaded,

what did George W.

Bush do?

He didn't.

He didn't do anything.

He didn't pardon him at all.

He said, you know what?

The criminal justice, the I.E., the slanted biased Washington, D.C.

jury has spoken.

Okay, I get that.

You believe that?

And what did Donald Trump do?

One of the first things he did, that wasn't so easy for him.

He wasn't personally invested.

Where did the request come from to Donald Trump, who, with all due respect to Donald Trump, I don't think he, when he came in there, he knew much, if anything, about Scooter Libby.

But somebody came to him and said, This was a transgression.

They attacked a noted conservative.

They were after Cheney.

We want you to pardon this guy who deserved a pardon.

And Trump did it.

He got a lot of static.

So that wasn't a very cowardly thing to do.

If he's talking about cowardice, he might talk about George W.

Bush, who refused to do it.

Excuse me, Vic, didn't Bush do something that was.

He commuted it.

I think he commuted this.

Right.

But it came off as an act of disloyalty.

I think in an interview, Cheney said,

Bush left somebody on the battlefield.

I think they didn't speak for a while.

I think all that's got them back as friends is their mutual hatred of Donald Trump.

But my point is that for all of what you want to say, it wasn't a cowardly thing to do to stick up for Scooter Libby, who was central to the Bush-Cheney nexus in a way that Bush would not.

So that's number one.

And to tell you the truth, we don't know any more, any less about Donald Trump after January 6th.

I mean, if you hate Donald Trump, then you can say Russian collusion, impeachment.

Oh, January 6th was an insurrection.

If you support Donald Trump, you can say Michael Rosenberg said there were tons, I think that was the exact words of FBI informants at that Capitol.

There was unexplained information about or

unexplained and suppressed information about the shooting of Ashley Babbitt for months.

Officer sickness, there was a blatant lie.

He was not killed.

There was all sorts of irregularity.

There was nobody arrested inside the Capitol with an arm, a firearm.

Okay, there was no plan.

I can go on and on.

But the point is, whatever your point of view, you're not going to find any unpredictable behavior about Donald Trump, which begs a question.

They voted for him.

They knew that.

They supported him during the Russian collusion.

They supported him during the first impeachment, which Liz Cheney voted against, as I remember.

She thought it apparently was a fraud.

So all of a sudden, to take this one moment and then to retrospectively say that he's a coward and it doesn't make any sense other than

what the Greeks call the ITIA, the real cause, not the prophosis or the pretext, the real cause, the Thucydidean real cause.

And what is the real cause?

That a bright, upcoming middle-aged woman who had a lot of skills and political savvy like her father was on a trajectory to be number two in the house and eventually speaker of the house.

And she thought that it would be quickly shown that Donald Trump had done something insurrectionary.

And when the whole hysteria in the fashion of Russian collusion, in the fashion of this first impeachment,

in the fashion of the Hunter laptop.

When that hit, she thought that she could ride that wave as a firm Trump supporter, not a Bill Cristo, not a David Fromm, not a Kissinger, a firm Trump supporter who would be singularly brave and

morally and intellectually courageous.

And that would spark and even further promote her traditional conservative political career.

And she miscalculated.

At some point, somebody should have said to her, Liz,

this is a very complex thing.

This January 6th, only 10 people voted for

impeachment.

You don't impeach a president twice.

You do not try to try him when he's a private citizen.

You don't have a committee when the Speaker of the House disqualifies the minority leader's recommendations, we don't do that.

But more importantly, you've made your point.

I mentioned before, my representative, David Valladeau, made his point.

He voted to impeach.

I didn't agree with him.

I'm going to vote for him because the alternative is bad.

And David's been a good person, a good representative.

So my point is this.

Why didn't she say, I have spoken?

I felt strongly about this impeachment, but I'm moving on because this administration represents everything

that I oppose from radical abortion to destroying the energy industry, especially in places like Wyoming, to regulating people out of business, to hyperinflation, to the Afghanistan debacle, to an open.

She could have done all of that and she would have won re-election.

But instead, pride

and I think a little arrogance.

And they said, I'm a Cheney, and they wage war on Donald Trump.

And everybody who's done that, I can't think of anybody else who's succeeded in that.

Not Marco Rubio, not Ted Cruz, not Rand Paul,

not

Jim Avila or whatever the guy, the CNN White House correspondent.

None of them win.

And she thought she would be the first person to destroy Donald Trump.

And now she's destroyed herself politically, and they're furious about it, hence this commercial.

Well, Victor, two things, and we've talked about this before.

This is not her initial political miscalculation.

And that was when she wanted to take on Mike Enzi and unseen.

That was a bad mistake.

Right.

So it shows on her, you know, this is a lust for power.

He was a good guy.

He had a good conservative senator.

He represented Wyoming the way they wanted to be represented.

There was no need to.

She went out and she divided all the Republicans, and it was controversial.

Old friends fought old friends.

I know some of them that were angry with each other.

There was no need to cause that dissension.

Right.

Well, except that she saw someone looking back in the mirror who she thought should be a senator and maybe someday president.

I don't know where her aspirations end.

But it's a bad mistake.

And it's sad that Dick Cheney at 81

is calling a president.

You can say all you want about Donald Trump.

He's not the greatest threat to American democracy.

When Dick Cheney said that in this time cycle, just ask yourself, did Donald Trump hire somebody to conduct dirt?

Did he hire a foreign national through three different

firewall paywalls to hide his footprints, handprints?

to destroy Hillary Clinton?

No.

Did Donald Trump weaponize the IRS like like Barack Obama?

No.

Did he spy, order spying on the Associate Press reporters like Barack Obama?

No.

Did Donald Trump weaponize the FBI?

No.

All of these things happened either by these institutions' own volition or by the Obama administration.

or now is the Biden administration.

Does Dick Cheney really believe that Donald Trump created a ministry of truth like Biden tried to do?

Did he believe that?

Does he really believe that Bill Barr started ordering political opponents to be arrested in leg irons?

I mean, Andrew McCabe lied four times to a federal investigator, four times, and Bill Barr, Trump's attorney general, did not press charges against him.

He said to do so would be divisive, and he didn't do it.

So when Cheney says he's a threat, It's just so preposterous.

I feel bad for him because he's had a distinguished record, especially especially when he was a congressman.

He was a very effective congressman.

He really helped Reagan and the Iran-Contra thing.

It's sad to see this.

I blame his daughter to put her parents through that,

to divide everybody the way she's done.

And when this is all over, what's she going to do?

Roger Kimball wrote an essay today saying, future CNN anchor woman.

Is that for American Greatness?

Yes, it's a very good, as all of Roger's articles are.

It was very insightful, kind of a little bit ironic or sarcastic, but it was really to the point.

And what that's about basically where she's going to end up, unless she wants to run

an Evan McMullen third party spoiler candidate and hope that she can be, you know, a spoiler,

I guess, in the way of Ralph Nader in 2000.

Right.

Well, I mean, a spoiler in a close election is indeed can be,

she could take one or two percent and lose Trump a state or two.

Yeah, she would be famous and courageous if that's what she wants.

But ultimately, she's taken dynamite and blown up her career because she has zero support.

Did you ever have any dealings with Dick Cheney?

Yes.

I did.

Anything you can talk about?

I never revealed anything other than to say that I had written a book called Carnage and Culture.

and a book called An Autumn of War about

one book was about Western Civ

and war.

It was about why the West doesn't win every battle, but why it's able to project power under unfavorable logistics, manpower, time, etc.

And there were certain things about the innate Western practice of war that reflected a cultural advantage, not an insurance that they went.

Anyway, he liked that.

And out of the blue, I was a professor at the Naval Academy.

He told the Washington Post that he read me and all of a sudden there was, I think it was a first page story, but it was intended to attack him and me.

And it said, Dick Cheney cites basically a Fresno raisin farmer.

I got kind of in trouble because the naval cat, I was a visiting professor and you're not supposed to be political, at least if you're conservative.

Right.

And I had somebody call me and say, we don't want you to involve yourself in politics, which I didn't, I just ignored.

And then at that point, I had a lot of reporters who were, Dick Cheney was closed mouth.

And I had met him in his office once and at a dinner that the vice presidents, all vice presidents have a dinner where they bring people in on occasions.

And I was there with two or three much better known journalists.

But my point is that a couple of reporters heard of that and said, Did you go to one of the Cheney dinners?

And I got, just please, off the record, we'll just say a source says, can you tell me, is he we?

And I,

and I never said a word.

I respected that absolutely.

And then, you know, I wrote, oh,

not because of that, but before that and after that, I thought that he had been very unfairly treated.

And to be frank, I think in some part, the Bushes sort of

not maybe not by intent, but they massaged the news cycle so that the portrayal was that George Bush was kind of naive.

And he had been sucked into the Iraq war by Rumsfeld Cheney, who were neocons and had made this naive Texas governor.

And I think that construct, our narrative, was fed by the kitchen cabinet of the older Bushes, i.e., George H.W.

Bush himself, Jim Baker, Colin Powell, those people.

They had sort of suggested that Bush should not be blamed for the stalemate in Iraq.

It was the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis.

Right.

And they fired Rumsfeld, and Cheney tried to support him.

I had good relations.

I still, I have nothing.

I mean, I'm not, I've never been critical of him.

I was just shocked by that commercial.

I just thought that, as I said earlier, that it betrayed the assumed neutrality of Liz Chaneer as an adjudicator of what happened.

Now we see it's just an excuse to further an agenda to destroy Donald Trump, which out of spite she blames for the destruction of her own career.

Because,

so what's the update update this morning who endorsed

al franken al franken endorsed her yeah and i don't know if that's a joke or not it's not

and then when the roe versus wade came along

her the dobbs right yeah dobbs all of her friends when she kind of made a little meow

not a strong statement that you know she supported that overturn of roe versus wade right they didn't find her useful anymore and that was sort of a tip or a preview of what's going to happen to her vis-a-vis the left.

Because as soon as this thing is over, don't kid yourself.

They hate the Cheneys.

And this is another thing I don't understand.

They think that Donald Trump incited all this hatred.

But Dick Cheney,

as was George Bush, as I said earlier, they recall every, I wrote, missed three columns about the Hitler metaphors used, you know, and it wasn't just Michael Moore and Cindy Shea and all those nuts.

It was John Glenn and Al Gore that were calling Cheney and Bush, you know, Nazis, brown shirts.

So the whole thing, it doesn't make sense.

And

Donald Trump is not an existential threat to the Republic.

He sounds like he's Aaron Burr or something.

You know what I mean?

Right.

Yeah.

It was

really the worst of all time.

That's kind of

some kind of Civil War copperhead.

It doesn't doesn't make any sense.

He didn't abuse the Constitution.

He was the least.

One thing about Trump they don't understand is, A, he's the most inspected autopsy president in history.

And number two,

he's not a vindictive person.

He's got a memory of about five minutes.

And so people who have trashed him work for him.

And, you know, he says he's going to, he's angry, but he's still.

Steve Bannon on the phone basically said he was a buffoon and he's still friendly with steve bannon he's still friendly with corey lyn lindowski all of those people that he fired he's still

he's sean spicer and he get along so he doesn't carry a grudge everybody says he does but he doesn't

well victor um

hey maybe talking talking about carrying carrying grudges maybe merrick garland carries one or maybe he's just a nasty piece of work uh uh naturally so and let's talk about him the attorney general of these united states and his press conference the other day and what that leads into some fbi stuff and we'll get to that right after these important messages

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Okay, we're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I do two of these podcasts every week with Victor.

I'm a very lucky man.

And the other interlocutor is the great Sammy Wink, and she does two shows also.

And Victor has started to do his own hosting with some great interviews.

I listened to your interview with Raymond Ibrahim the other day.

Victor was terrific.

uh he's a great writer just he writes regularly for gatestone institute just i used to be on the board there he's he's terrific uh victor has a website by the way folks if you haven't heard this yet or maybe even if you heard it a thousand times already it's called victorhanson.com and victor writes an incredible amount of original content that for that website that can only be read if you subscribe to the website.

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So, Victor, here's what happened the other day.

Merrick Garland

gave a three and a half, maybe a minute.

It wasn't even a press conference.

Conference was a statement.

where he talked about the

raid.

Oh, that's another thing we should talk about, The raid of Mar-a-Lago.

And of course, he talked about the faithful adherence to the rule of law as the bedrock principle of our department, Department of Justice, and our democracy, blah, blah, blah.

So, Victor, that you know, that's the that is the crux of everything, the rule of law.

You were on commenting about this on Fox with Will Cain.

I think maybe he was filling in for Tucker or somebody, I'm not sure, but I saw the clip.

Yeah, it's the FBI is quite beyond redemption.

Yeah,

democracy is greatly at risk.

And

I see the Attorney General saying everything, you know, we're a wall.

Yeah, I'm getting sick and tired of people like Merrick Garland who

preemptively attack anybody that questions

this

permanent bureaucratic state.

Mr.

Garland, I want to like the FBI.

I really do.

But how can I write like the FBI

when its prior interim director,

Andrew McCabe, lied four times to a federal investigator, four times, according to the Inspector General.

He discussed wearing a wire to entrap the President of the United States to find incriminating evidence to take to the cabinet to get him out of office.

His wife was running for an office in Virginia and the recipient of Terry McAuliffe-Clinton money while he was investigating Hillary Clinton.

James Comey said 245 times under oath, I don't know.

I've had a call with the IRS before.

If I had done that, I'd be in jail.

James Comey had a confidential talk with the President of the United States in which he assured him that he was not under an FBI investigation, which was an outright lie.

He went out to his vehicle and recorded it on an FBI time and device.

He didn't even have the courage to leak it himself to the New York Times.

He used a third-party intermediary to cover his own involvement.

That was a crime.

James Comey, I guess under the influence of Peter Strzok, altered the report about Hillary Clinton Clinton to remove the word one word so she wouldn't be subject to a criminal prosecution.

Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were on the investigation of Donald Trump, openly said they had to find a way to remove him from office.

The FBI had subpoenas for cell phone records of people on that

investigating counsel, special counsel's team.

team, they were mysteriously wiped clean.

The FBI kept Hunter Biden's laptop under wraps to preserve Joe Biden during the election.

They knew, according to Senator Grassley's office, they knew from whistleblowers that the FBI, A, knew that it was authentic and B, that they were not going to release it.

In the last month, Merrick Garland,

The FBI has taken a former associate, Peter Navarro, a distinguished economic advisor, and put leg irons on him for the crime of doing what Eric Holder did, saying, I'm not going to participate in a House subpoena, not going to do it.

They have taken James O'Keefe out in the pre-dawn hours in his underwear for being a recipient, supposedly, of a diary that the president's daughter did not have stolen.

She just left it.

She abandoned it and somebody found it.

Happens all the time.

They went after.

I don't have any defense of Roger Stone.

I don't agree with him on anything.

But you don't tip off CNN and then show up and have a SWAT raid about a 66-year-old man and his wife.

You just don't do that.

I could go on about John Eastman.

I can go on about this congressman from Texas they just confronted.

That's what this FBI is doing.

Robert Mueller swore under oath he did not know what the Steele dossier, he did not know what Fusion GPS.

Those were the two names basically in the media that prompted his investigation.

Is he lying or is he senile?

The FBI hired Christopher Steele as a paid informant when they knew that he had participated in the Hillary Clinton campaign as a foreign national, which is illegal.

The FBI,

not just Kevin Kleinsmith, the FBI signed off on warrants that had been altered, Andrew McCabe and James Comey, to destroy the life of Carter Page.

That is a fact.

I could go on, but to say that anybody who points that out is somehow disparaging the professionals at the FBI, I'm getting really tired of it.

You know, I read UnHurd once in a while.

Oh, it's a great website.

It is.

And there's this guy, I don't know who he is.

He's Dominic Sandbrook.

And he attacked me.

And he said, well, I started it off.

Victor Hansen says that there's not the rule of law in Washington.

He's inciting a civil war, basically.

And here he says, Christopher Wray, this guy is an idiot.

He says, Christopher Wray is a Republican.

So what?

So is Lynn Cheney.

So was Bill Kristol, or was.

It doesn't mean anything.

Trump appointed Christopher Wr because he was in the pecking order.

And it showed that Trump didn't care what he was.

He just wanted to get past Andrew McCabe and James Comey and just said, who's next?

Right.

It doesn't matter whether the point is that Christopher Wray has not stopped any of this.

A lot of it's gone under his directionship.

Does Mr.

Sandbrook, if that's his name, does he really, really believe that there is a rule of law when James Clapper says under oath that the NSA has never spied on anybody and he perjured himself and nothing happened.

Or John Brennan says under oath he's never spied.

The CIA never spied on Senate staffers and he lied under oath.

He lied again about drone raids.

None of them ever had any criminal liability or culpability.

Does he think that Lois Lerner did anything wrong?

So this idea that we're supposed to trust this new incarnation of the FBI or the CIA or the DOJ, does he have any idea who Bruce Orr is?

Does he have any idea about these people, what they do, how they leak?

No sooner had Merrick Garland given this sanctimonious rant about the professionalism of the DOJ

and why it was perfectly legitimate to have this warrant

than somebody in the FBI or the DOJ illegally leaked to whom?

Wright Martin News?

No, to the Washington Post.

And what was the modus operandi?

You could have written the script yourself before you heard a word.

Nuclear secrets.

And then you heard what was going to happen.

Bombshell.

Walls are closing in.

And then we got in the usual actors.

So Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, Rosenbergs were executed for this.

And then Michael Hayden.

Remember Michael Hayden, the ex-CIA director?

So Mr.

sandbrook and mr garland there is no professional class the ex-ca director had already accused the president of the united states of being an architect of auschwitz when he put those cages from auschwitz on as if trump you know had done this this is a guy michael hayden who when the laptop was in the news came out with

Who?

Leon Panetta, James Clapper, John Brennan, the usual suspects, and said, we're 50 of the most distinguished intelligence officers.

And we can tell you that this is Russian disinformation at a time when the FBI, according to whistleblowers, knew that it wasn't.

And why not?

Not one of them had admitted they were wrong.

And they did that to warp an election.

So, you know what?

If you want to look at the FBI and the CIA in 2016, they warped an election.

They deliberately spread these lies about collusion.

And the collusion was based on Dashenko in the Brookings Institute and Donlin, a Clintonite, or Dolan or Donlin?

Dolan, Charles Dolan, the guy that worked for Hillary, who was in Russia collecting dirt.

Yeah, he was collecting dirt from Russian sources.

And they were trying to destroy a candidate in election.

And then we had the 2020 election, and they deliberately sat on a laptop.

And so they take an interest, and I don't listen to me.

I didn't write that the Trump supporters stink up Walmart and they have to be stopped and Andy has a plan.

That was FBI agents talking about that.

And Robert Mueller upset?

No, he staggered their departure so nobody would make the connection between Page and Strzok from his committee.

He never even told us why he reassigned them.

And so this is all going on.

And Merrick Garland can't even give a press conference without having his own team, DOJ-FBI, leak some lie.

And then we're supposed to believe, oh,

nuclear secrets.

Oh, my God.

So for a year and a half, Donald Trump has got what, codes?

Nuclear secrets?

And they're locked up in a basement at his thing.

And you guys have just thought, hmm,

we'll just sit around.

We've got those nuclear codes, but this week, this month, next six months, no, oh, midterm's coming up.

We better go Bad news.

Biden polling 39%.

Nuclear codes.

Let's go get them.

He's endangering the Republic.

Who believes that?

Can I bring someone to your defense?

Not that you need a defense, Victor.

And then a question about a piece you've written again on.

You wrote for your website, FBI RIP.

I'd like to ask something about that.

But John Yu, your friend of mine, who's also a fellow, a

visiting fellow at Hoover.

Of course, he's a law professor at Berkeley, co-wrote with Robert De Lahunte, who I don't know him.

You may know him.

I do.

I do not know him.

Yeah, he's a fellow at Claremont's Center for the American Way of Life.

They write a lot together.

Anyway, very end of a piece they've both written for National Review.

It's titled Why the Public is Skeptical of Garland's Mar-a-Lago Story.

And it's just simple.

It's a repetition in way of what you said, but here's others saying the same thing.

Same thing.

Since the 2016 presidential campaign, the FBI's standing in the eyes of tens of millions of Americans has plummeted.

The agency covered itself with shame.

John Hughes writing this for its role in the 2016-18 Russian collusion hoax.

Now its leadership is doubling down.

Instead of trying to rebuild public confidence, Garland's press conference and handling of the search are further undermining DOJ's and FBI's reputations.

If Garland won't refute this presumption of bias powerfully and in detail, Fair-minded Americans will assume the worst of him, his department, and the FBI.

Law enforcement depends on the rule of law.

There are not nearly enough FBI agents to actively enforce federal law all the time, nor would we want there to be.

Americans voluntarily follow most of the laws most of the time because they believe that prosecutors and agents enforce the law fairly.

If Garland cannot present a trustworthy account that justifies the search of President Trump's home, he will further undermine the country's confidence in the honesty, integrity, and fairness of federal law enforcement.

And, Victor, that gets back to

the crux of everything, rule of law and your comments the other night

with Will Kane on Fox, that I don't think we have a democracy anymore.

Yeah.

No, we don't.

I mean, it's not,

it's this permanent class.

And everybody said, oh, you're paranoid.

Look at the Pentagon.

Look at the Pentagon.

We had 11 four-star retired admirals in general.

They violated, as I said, a code in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that you cannot, even when retired, disparity.

I mean, Michael Hayden violated that.

McCaffrey did that.

McRaven said, Mattis said, they all used terminology that was in clear violation.

Okay,

so

that's just a little obscure Logan Act Act statute.

Fine.

And then what did they do with Gary?

Was his name Lieutenant General Gary Volinski or something?

Volinski?

What did he do?

He was in retirement.

He had a little contract.

Did he attack the commander-in-chief?

No.

He made fun of Joe Biden.

He said, you know what?

You're upset about basically a Voe versus Wade, but you also say you can't define a woman.

Ha ha.

And they've canceled and disconnected themselves from him for what?

Violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice by expanding that supposedly non-existent, non-applicable statute to include the spouse of somebody mentioned in the statute.

This is crazy.

And it happens everywhere.

And it reflects this larger

perception in government that

the media, the universities, professional sports, entertainment, the popular culture, the foundation, it is center, left, progressive, rich, powerful, influential, and you make your peace with it.

And if you don't make your peace with it, you can get a bad book review, you can get a book contract canceled, you won't be on a particular television, you won't be treated fairly by a New York Times, you'll be misquoted by the Washington Post, you will be a federal attorney, or somebody will go after you like they did Michael Flynn, you'll be bankrupt like Carter Page, they will destroy you.

And everybody knows that.

And that's why people, even look at that January 6th people.

No sooner had people had made fun of it.

Oh, haha, it's a joke.

And they went in there and flipped and gave them the narrative that Liz Cheney wanted.

And Vinnie Johnson or Thompson or whatever his name was, who himself had questioned the 2004 election, the chairman of the January 6th committee.

So that's where we are.

And this idea that Merrick Garland is going to blast somebody.

Why did he wait almost three days to say something?

Why didn't he just say, you know what?

I sent these FBI people after that SOB because he wouldn't give us back stuff that was illegal.

And he knows it, and I know it, and I'm proud of it.

And he could have done that the first hour.

And he didn't because he was worried, because he has zero political sense.

He shouldn't be in that job.

He's a complete partisan.

He sent the FBI in to monitor Virginia parents who were worried about critical race theory, why the border is wide open and there's traffickers and child molesters and terrorists coming across it.

No, that's not as important as finding Ashley Biden's diary or leg ironing Peter Navarro or spying on, you know, all the people on January 6th.

So that's what are framing, what, four people who said they were architects of kidnapping Governor Gresham Whitmer.

And we find out that two of them were acquitted and two had hung juries or mistrials, whereas there's 12, 12 FBI informants.

There were three times as many informants as supposed architects of the kidnapping plot.

And so what were they doing, the FBI?

And so, yeah, we've lost confidence in it.

And we love the FBI's people in the field, although I'm a little hesitant there because

You know, on Fox News, the mantra is, well, these are the architects in Washington.

They don't represent the culture.

Okay,

but where did Kevin Kleinsmith come from?

Where did James Baker come from?

Where did Lisa Page come from?

Where did Peter Strzok come from?

Where is the person who was the architect, as I said earlier, of the Michigan debacle?

They come from somewhere.

They don't all just, well, they weren't all just hired in Washington and stayed in Washington.

Well, that's where they end up after a long career, but who prepped them?

And where do they get so morally unbound?

You've had a, I don't don't want to say you've had a change like you've done a reversal, but you had talked before about un-Washingtoning the FBI, put it in Kansas City, things to that effect, get it out of this.

But in this piece,

the FBI RIP piece,

this is not an exclusive piece of the website.

This is a piece you wrote for American Greatness.

I think it actually may be your syndicated column.

It ends by saying, the agency has become dangerous to Americans and an existential threat to their democracy and rule of law.

The FBI should be dispersing its investigatory responsibilities to other government investigative agencies that have not yet lost the public trust.

It's a bit of a different tact.

It is.

You know,

I said that it should be moved to Kansas City or somewhere to get it out of these incestuous relationships of which Peter Strzok or Andrew McCabe or James Comey are represented, but I had had a lot of people write me and three of them were very sophisticated observers of the FBI.

And they said, if you mean move it in the sense of keep everything intact, which I didn't,

then that's not going to be enough.

You need to break it up because it has too much concentrated power.

There's really not a need for a national state police, in other words.

I mean, every state has a, California has a state police, but it's, it's can investigate, but it usually protects

judges and stuff.

My point is that this thing is so highly politicized.

I mean, think about it.

They were sending agents into board meetings when Merrick Garland was not even having them protect

Supreme Court judges when we knew that people were flagrantly violating a federal law, a felony.

by going out and threatening a judge verbally and congregating around their homes and he would not apply the law.

And then he has the gumption to say, How dare you criticize these professionals?

Or Christopher Wray comes out and says, I'm getting tired of attacking the FBI.

And he has this smirk on his face just a week earlier when he won't answer questions.

He couldn't even say the Russian collusion hoax of which his FBI helped start Ration Crossfire.

Nobody hired Christopher Steele in the government.

That was a Hillary Clinton Perkins code, DNC, fusion GPS private hit until the FBI got in on it, as we know from the Obama meetings on his intelligence briefings.

And so that was the FBI, and Christopher Wray knows that.

And then he gets in front of Congress.

He can't even say that that was a hoax.

And then he cuts short Senator Grossley and says, I have an appointment.

I've got to go.

And then he gets on his private jet.

his private jet, our private jet, and he flies to the Arian docks, is that right?

To a vacation spot.

He hasn't denied that yet.

That was the allegation.

And we're supposed to say, oh my God,

Christopher Ray said that we're being disloyal, we're unfair to the FBI, this highly professional organization.

I'm sorry, man.

I don't buy it.

Yeah.

I probably get a knock as my wife says,

I get a knock on the door.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, one last thing.

This is just my

little opinion, but irrespective of January 6th or Trump or any of these other issues, it always struck me when the riots started in 2020 that it seems the FBI must not have infiltrated Antifa.

A true threat to society.

Oh, that's a good question, Jack.

Yeah.

Do they infiltrate it or do they infiltrate it and were told not to?

Because we know, and I mentioned that in that column, 120 days, $2 billion in damage, 35 people killed you're worried about federal property on january 6th how about trying to storm the white house ground or burning up a trying to torch or burn down a federal courthouse or a a local police precinct or the historic st.

John's Episcopal Church that was planned and we know there were meetings planned and choreographed on social media, Mr.

Twitter, Mr.

Facebook.

We know that with impunity.

And you can't tell me that for 120 days, the FBI couldn't have been a little proactive and stopped some of that by arresting some.

There were 14,000 arrests.

And believe me, none of them were put in solitary confinement without being indicted with a formal charge for months on end.

There's still people in January 6th that are sitting there.

And where was the FBI during that entire period?

Or was it what

vice presidential candidate Camilla Harris said right after, about two weeks later, she said, this is not going to stop.

It's going to go on.

It's not going to stop.

And nor should it stop.

What was it?

The riots, the violent protests?

Remember all these Snopes, fact-checkers, and political?

They did about a thousand somersaults trying to change every word she said because they were afraid that she had done.

People had mentioned, you know, when Donald Trump said, go over to the Capitol and protest peacefully, right?

She didn't use the word peacefully peacefully, and that they were so worried that her words can be misconstrued as an advocacy of armed rebellion.

So, which it was, basically, when you look at what they did in Seattle with Chaz or whatever you call it, and they occupied in a whole area of downtown with Seattle with impunity.

No, I don't, I'm sorry.

Half the country, Mr.

Garland alienated.

And the irony about it all is that

he really empowered the Trump candidacy.

Not that Trump wouldn't have won the nomination, but I think there will be a heated primary.

But there was a surging DeSantis, and

I don't know what his purpose is.

I don't know who cooked this up.

I don't believe that he just did it.

The guy doesn't do anything on his own.

There was somebody in the Biden administration.

close to the White House that must have talked to him.

And this is so ironic because, you know, Bill Barr, everybody got angry at Bill Barr from the Trump base.

I understand that.

But I never did.

Not that I agreed with him on all of his decisions.

I think he should have indicted Andrew McCabe, but I had a lot of disagreements with him.

But he was very independent.

And he argued back and forth all the time with Trump.

He was so much more independent than Merrick Garland or Eric Holder, who called himself a wingman for Obama.

So

you see this left wing suddenly, we're hyper-patriotic.

And how dare you criticize the FBI?

And the only reason that they are supportive of the FBI or the CIA or the Pentagon is that they feel that they're chain of command institutions where when you order somebody to do something, they do it.

And that's what the left really admires about, not their ideology, their old ideology.

It's like.

Transgendered subsidized surgeries, the Pentagon can get that through.

Transgenderism, get that through.

Abortion Abortion atolls or sanctuaries.

Let's get the military to do it on base.

That's why they critical race theory, white rage.

We can get it.

These guys will just go right to it.

They'll cut a CIA commercial or an FBI commercial that you couldn't even dream at Stanford or Berkeley.

And that's why they like them.

We'll see one.

I'm sure we'll see something like that sooner than later.

Hey, Victor, we have a little time left and a big additional topic to talk about, and that is the decline in college attendance, which may not be the worst thing in the world.

And we are going to get to that, your thoughts on that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show recording on Sunday, August 14th.

And this show will be airing on justthenews.com, that's the mothership, and many other places on Tuesday, the 16th.

Victor, there was a very interesting piece.

You brought it to my attention, of course.

So this is from Powerline John Hendraker, and it's titled Good News from the World of Academia.

NBC News reports that college attendance is dropping.

The numbers are, I think,

4 million less students now than there were about seven, eight years ago.

And

I must recommend folks go to Powerline blog and look up this piece.

But

I'm not going to read this a very lengthy and wise

ending, but John says, I hope college enrollment continues to decline.

And he talks about the reality of the education they're getting and that it's, you know, it's really poor.

He also makes a comment here about

higher education run mostly by women is particularly hostile to men.

I've never seen it put anywhere that like black and white as a component of that's something that nobody wants to talk about because

we all we hear from the left is proportional representation.

About 54 3 to 56 percent on most campuses of undergraduates are women.

And when you look at the humanities and areas like literature or art, it's about 55 to 60 percent of PhDs and MAs are granted to women.

So number one, women have a voice, which I think is great in academia, but according to their own terms, they would say disproportionate because they don't represent the actual numbers in the population, be as that it may.

But more importantly, this is very analogous to the military, which is baffled right now.

Why is the army only met 40% of its in recruitment?

We can't figure it out.

And when you hear Millie and all these people, there's too many gang members.

People play video games.

We have a falling birth rate.

People are obese.

Oh, yeah, that happened two years ago, too, didn't it?

And three years ago.

But why now?

Didn't have anything to do with loudmouth Austin and Millie and the Afghanistan catastrophe.

Same thing about college enrollment.

So people are looking at these universities, people being

tuition parents, and they start to hear every day that there's $1.7 trillion in aggregate debt.

They have nephews.

nieces, children that are in their 30s and 40s that can't pay off these debts or won't pay them off or just are non-performing loans during COVID and they think they don't have to pay them off.

And then they make the connection rightly that when you tell the federal government, you guarantee these loans, no matter what we charge for tuition, room, and board.

And the government says, okay.

And

what happens?

They double the rate of inflation as far as their tuition increases.

So basically, the whole question of moral hazard is now onto the government.

And these are not all of them, but they're either very wealthy-funded public universities or mega, mega-endowed, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, that have multi-billion endowment, multi-billion dollars of endowment, and they're tax-free and they're not nonpartisan.

Their faculties give to the left-wing candidate about 90% of the time.

And so, a lot of parents have said

there's a labor shortage.

My son or daughter can go right out at 18 and make $25 an hour in an assembly plant.

They can get skills to be an electrician, a plumber, a contractor, a solar panel, mechanic, whatever, and get a pretty good living.

And guess what?

They're not going to, A, be indoctrinated.

by radical leftists that we have to pay for.

And then B, they're not going to have a prolonged adolescence.

So they take three, six, eight units and they hang around this university or college until they're in their 30s, don't marry, don't buy a house, don't have children, and in debt.

And maybe they will go out and they'll see what the real world is like and they will be a productive member to create a prosperous United States.

They'll marry, they'll have children, they'll get a house.

And this is all, and all of that message is attacked in the university.

It's all attacked, and they know that.

And I talk to them, Jack, because I get calls all the time from parents.

I get emails from people I've never met.

I go when I give a talk, somebody grabs me by the sleeve and says, can I just talk to you a minute?

And

it's just strikingly surreal how the questions about sending their children to the military dovetail with the same apprehensions about putting their kids on a campus a day.

I went down to Simi Valley and spoke to a group.

My wife was waiting in the pickup and she said, where were you?

And I said, I was pigeonholed by whom?

Well, all these people that heard the talk.

And they wanted to know about whether their kids should go to the military or they should go to college.

And that wasn't the topic of my talk.

And it was the same apprehension that, as one woman said, she grabbed me, she walked alongside and she said, How do I know somebody's not going to accuse my son of rape if he goes on a date or if he drinks, he goes to a party and people are drunk and they say something.

And then if they he's charged unlawfully,

they'll just have a kangaroo court.

And there's no rule of law.

There's no constitution.

There's no bill of rights.

And I said, yeah, that's right.

And if he objects to a professor ranting and raving,

you know, he's not going to get a grade.

And so I don't want him there.

I just do not want him there.

And then the next question is, where can they go?

And, you know,

St.

Thomas Aquinas, Hillsdale College, there's not very many places.

University of Dallas, there's a few, but not many.

And they're trying to, you know, a lot of people, Joe Lonsdale, a lot of great people are trying to do something with the University of Austin, this new college or University of Austin.

There's the project in Savannah, Georgia.

Ms.

Benedictine will throw that in there.

Yeah, there's a lot of them.

But the point is that

These universities are so top heavy, and we're not even getting into the diversity, equity, inclusion investment or boondoggle.

I had a mathematician alumnus send me this complicated schema where he figured out that the cost of all of the offices of diversity, equity, inclusion, the assistance, the overhead at Stanford University would increase the annual tuition by $5,000.

So, and it's very ironic because as a faculty member for years, all the faculty members do at a coffee break, I've gone to thousands of them, and they go like this.

Hey, Victor, I can't stand that fill-in-the-blank dean, associate dean,

provost for internal relations, assistant provost for external relations, dean of affirmative, all that stuff.

They don't do anything.

And they're usually the worst teachers and the most unaccomplished researchers.

That was the faculty, left-wing faculty gripe.

And now all of a sudden, to have an entire army of expensive administrators they can't say a word about.

They hate bureaucracy.

They hate people getting excused from teaching.

They hate people that go into administration that have no academic ability or record, and yet they can't say anything because they're diversity, equity, inclusion.

But my point about all this is

the university is not equipped to handle it because it 4 million students in a decade, and you're getting to ratios that I never thought would be possible.

You know, 55 to 60%

only go to college.

40% of high school people are not going to college.

We were told after World War II that college, and it was true, was a trajectory of upward mobility.

My entire family is, my grandparents, none of them ever went to college.

And then my parents did, and they told us we had to.

But when I look at the, you know, the generation that we spawn, I see a lot of people that have not gotten married in our extended family.

They have not bought a home because they can't because they're reeling under debt.

And then when you look at the Chinese government, the 380 to 350 to 340 down to 330 foreign students, which they really overcharge, they pay the full tuition, they don't give them any scholarship.

And that starts to decline.

I think it's going to be very interesting to watch.

And there's going to be a lot of civil strife within the university because there's going to be a lot of PhDs that are coming out.

They don't care about if a PhD from UC Irvine doesn't get a job.

They could care less.

Those programs are doomed.

But when you start getting people from major universities where there's not enough jobs because of declining enrollment and administrative overhead, and then not just proportional representation, affirmative action, but repertory representation.

where people who are white males will, you know, as it is, if you've ever looked at these diversity oaths, they're just like the McCarthy period.

Oh my gosh.

And then they're no different.

Here's what I've done in my past.

And if you said in 1952, I do not have to sign proof that I'm a loyal American citizen and I hate commies.

What's the difference if you said, you know what happened to you?

Moses Finley, the great classicist, was released from Cornell University.

That's how he got to Cambridge.

Some stupid loyalio.

And you know what they're going to say.

If somebody says, you know what, I don't have to tell you how I've spent my whole life encouraging diversity, equity, inclusion.

That's a private matter.

I'm not going to subscribe to a particular ideology as you frame it.

They're never going to get a job or they'll be fired.

There's so many things wrong with these universities and they've been so arrogant and they've been so well funded.

And there's only one last shoe to drop, Jack.

Which is?

Which is the wealthy alumnus has always said,

when I get that letter in the mail, I write a check.

And I write a check, a big one, for two reasons.

One, my family gets into that place.

And two,

the more that I enhance that name, that degree has followed me my whole life.

So if I went to Smith University and Smith University keeps, you know, finding a cure for this disease, or another Supreme Court justice is from Smith University, or Smith University is rated has a two pull surprise then they say wow you were at Smith University right we'll hire you well that's why they do it but if they get the impression

that

you can send your you're not going to get your kid in by sending him money because they don't have enough room especially if you're a white male kid Because by the time you go into repertory admissions, there's no room for, I mean, I think at places in the Ivy League, I know in other places, it's about,

I don't know, 16 to 20% white males down from their demographic of 33% in the general population.

That means that a lot of kids are not getting in whose parents give money.

And then when you also add in the fact that they see these crazy things, anti-Semitism, flagrant, Stanford University, my God, they had posters of Ben Shapiro comparing with insect spray as if he was a bug.

And nobody said a word until people complained about it.

So my point is they see this nuttiness and they say, I don't, when that happens and they drop off

contributions to these places, then I don't know what's going to happen.

Declining enrollment, public animosity, generalized,

whatever is

attacking.

the common American, the patriotic American who still uses common pronouns and

the efforts to put them back on their heels about biology and bathrooms and all this kind of crap.

They know it's being incubated on these college campuses.

So, like the, why would I want my son to go into the military?

Maybe this is, you know, a lot

lagging, but why would I want my kid to go into

college?

By the way, if they open their mouth and say they're conservative, you know they're going to get

a job.

I don't know.

It's something that I haven't spoken about it, but it's something that drives me crazy because almost every month somebody calls me or writes me, but I've had this and I've had these in-person.

I've had people come to my house.

I've had people come to my office.

And I've had people that knew my children.

And I can remember a real poignant scene where a person was dating my daughter.

And he said

she met him.

And he was a brilliant young kid, but of course he had no money.

He was a white male and he had gone to a state college, one of the 23 CSU system

campuses.

And he'd had a straight A BA

and he was getting an MA from a CSU.

And I knew the CSU campus.

And I can tell you that they had three faculty and classics that were just as good as anywhere.

probably better than Berkeley in some ways, what it's become or UCLA.

But anyway, let me finish.

And what he said was,

is there a chance that I could go to a PhD program and get a job?

I said, no.

And you see his face.

I said, you want me to lie to you?

I said, your BA and MA are going to be adjudicated by snobs.

So you can get into a PhD program.

You'll probably get a big fancy letter.

They're going to give you this, this, this amount.

But half of it's going to be student loans.

It'll take you five years to finish.

You'll have to teach a lot.

And then if you're doing everything right, you keep your mouth shut and you don't let anybody know you're traditionalist or conservative.

You might get a PhD from this type of university, which doesn't have anything to do with the quality, but the name brand.

It's like, you know, you're getting brown derby beer instead of Coors or something.

That's what the label will be.

And then you're not going to get a job.

Maybe you can float around and go from campus to campus or drive from junior college to junior college and cobble together a career but you'll be in your 40s and you'll be broke that's where this leads to right and my daughter got so mad at me she said why would you say that to him and she was right but i said to her she's passed away now i said susanna would i lie to him why would i lie to him yeah i've seen it happen i've seen it happen i've seen people i've talked to when i've called up or I taught at CSU, I've called up graduate chairman of PhD programs in ancient history, classics, archaeology.

And I said, I'd like to tell you that this person, well, what, what, is he a minority?

Is he a race?

Right.

And they said, Victor, so you want me to go out and limb and hire a white male from Fresno State?

I said, yeah.

Oh, come on.

And so that's just the reality.

And all of these dimensions are like a perfect storm.

The cost, the federal loan debt, the politicalization and weaponization of the faculty, the curriculum, the labor shortage right now.

You know, you used to say, go to college, you can't get a job, at least maybe it'll get better.

Well, now we're so labor short.

You can go out and make a lot of money.

Yeah.

So, it's

you're not making an argument.

It's not, and it's whatever you're, what you're saying is not anti-intellectual.

No, it's not.

It's the reality of the situation.

I'm an advocate of the humanities, and I spent my entire life with the advocacy.

I must have told 400 students to major in classics over 21 years.

And then every single one of them, I tried to help them get a teaching credential or go to business school or law school.

I did not want them to get a PhD in classics because I was worried about their future livelihood.

But my point is, I believe in the empowerment of the individual through knowledge and education.

But I'll put a little asterisk.

You can go online now and see in a way you couldn't.

You can get interactive lectures where people will will give lectures and answer your questions.

You can watch old videos of them.

You can go to Hillsdale's online classes.

You can do a lot of the stuff you couldn't do 10 years ago.

And that's another dimension we haven't even talked about.

I mean, it's not the same as being in a class, but if you want to go and have a bad professor draw and drag and

one no, and then you can go get a masterful teacher who through the marketplace survives because his or her lectures are engaging.

You can get that for nothing.

You know, if I may give a plug to a friend, David Bonson, who's a friend.

I know David, yeah.

Great.

He's just launched like a 30-part economics course because, and it's free.

And for people who want to learn what economics really is, that's, you go there.

So you're right.

Your courses.

I've done a lot of them on World War II, on the dying citizen, on the Peloponnesian War.

And more importantly, I've listened to some of them, especially the Hillsdale ones of faculty there.

My God, they're good.

So anyway,

we're in a revolutionary period.

It's analogous to the university after World War II, when it was sort of a sleepy little esoteric place of eccentric intellectuals.

And then the post-war money came in and worry about the Soviet Union, funded all these defense language programs and everything.

And then the GI Bill, and it just transformed.

And then everybody needed a BA to get a job.

And the things just exploded.

And then it contracted, of course, during the recessions that followed.

But now we're in a third wave where I think it's in deep trouble.

And these professors should be very conscious of what they say in class, what they do in class, how they treat people.

how long they're, if they meet their office hours, because now people for the first time are asking for cost-benefit analysis you know you may be the sterling professor of comparative literature but exactly what do you do how much do you get what's the quality of your classes how fair are you these are questions that have never been asked of faculty before curriculum accountability is a dangerous thing

that's a great word accountability

well victor that's uh almost all the time we have uh uh today and you're thanks for sharing all your

thoughts here.

And terrific.

I do want to share one thought of one of our listeners.

And again,

we appreciate our listeners.

And

many listen on via Apple or iTunes, Apple Podcasts.

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And the average is nearly five, which is an indication of general appreciation of the wisdom Victor shares now five times a week.

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Every morning after checking emails, I click on my podcast app to look for Victor Davis Hansen's latest discussion of America or world government, politics, or social affairs.

His insight is totally on the mark and his analysis of the effects of past history on ours is spoken with thought and clarity.

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And that opinion is representative of many,

many others.

So we thank them.

Victor, thank you.

I thank you.

Listeners, thank you for again for everything you've shared today.

And please know we will be back very soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Thanks.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

I much appreciate it.