From Oil Reserves to Gun Control and Education

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Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is the Friday News Roundup where we look at the events and stories from the week.

Today, we're going to talk about Joe Biden oil reserves being sold,

CEOs stepping down from companies, the Dallas Cowboys, or a new alliance of the Dallas Cowboys or partnership with a coffee company that's in the news.

So those are some of the stories that we'll be looking at.

So stay with us.

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Victor, I know I always start with asking you how you're doing.

And so I'd like to do that.

I know we are going to talk about Biden and the oil reserves first, but did you have anything else on your mind?

Well, I think all of us are very concerned about the national situation because

it's in free fall and they're not going to stop and they're going to double down.

And they've tried that everything is okay.

That didn't work.

And then Putin did it.

Trump did it.

Oil companies did it.

That didn't work.

But the theme is.

Screw you.

If I'm Nancy Pelosi, I'm going to go to Florence and have a good time.

If I'm Gavin Newsom and I'm not going to fund any trips to Montana with California money, since they're too illiberal, screw them.

I'm going to go to Montana.

Or if I'm Hunter Biden, screw you, I'm going to live in a $20,000-a-month Malibu rental and make the Secret Service pay $30,000 a month to watch me with no visible means of support.

Or if I'm the Obamas, I'm going to give you another lecture about how racist, illiberal, sexist you are from one of my three mansions.

So that's where we are.

Of course.

And personally,

let me see.

I'll go through my ER wine.

I'm on nine weeks of this long COVID.

And I've had, I went up to 7,200 feet.

I thought it would help.

And I was, because the air was so clean, but the altitude, boy, I've done this for 16 years and it never bothered me.

And I almost felt like it was negative.

And so then I came back and.

I don't know what it is.

You're taking supplements.

You try to do stuff.

I tried to work in the yard.

I tried.

And then I just crashed today.

Yeah.

So I'm back to square one.

But I have a lot of empathy for people.

The result of it is, is that you try to remain upbeat after nine weeks.

Yeah, they sure.

But I don't want to be on the negative side.

So I'm just going to keep reading about it and

be upbeat and it'll get better.

Try to get over it.

Yeah, I think that it will get better.

So let's turn then to the Biden presidency.

It seems to have taken on new hues, if I can put it in terms terms of color, this week with the polls are in the low 30s.

And I know that that's been a while.

But also we're seeing that as the midterm elections approach, that his own Democratic allies are not wanting to be associated with Biden.

And the example I would give is the opponent to J.D.

Vance in Ohio.

Overtly,

Tim Ryan.

I didn't want to give him a name on purpose, but nonetheless, Tim Ryan has overtly not shown up when Biden has come into his district.

And so I was wondering what your thoughts were on this new hue to the Biden saga.

Well, I mean, I think everybody listening is confused, and there's a disconnect, isn't there?

Because

Joe Biden ran on, I'm going to unite you.

I'm a familiar commodity, I'm a

centrist, and I'm not the knuckleheads scary people in this Democratic 2020 primary.

I'm not Elizabeth Warham.

I'm not Corey Booker.

I'm not Kamala Harris.

I'm not Beto, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm not Bernie Sanders.

So then he gets into power.

And there's various theories of what happened, but he was a useful vessel, I guess, that Jim Clyburn

got the marginalized people vote, the African-American or Latino.

I don't know what they call it, but they got him over the finish line.

And then he was expropriated, wasn't he?

And the left took over.

And I don't know if that was Hunter Biden.

Remember Hunter Biden's old correspondent said, My dad will do anything I tell him,

or whether it was his left-wing children or grandchildren.

I don't know what happened, or whether the left just called in their chits, but he went hard left and he did everything they wanted.

He destroyed the border.

He went into hyperdrive on the the New Green Deal

and he got what he wanted.

He cut back oil.

He cut back pipelines.

He cut he jawbone against financing

horizontal drilling and fracking.

He shut down ANMOR.

He canceled Keystone and he got what he wanted.

He got high oil prices, which was good, he thought.

He told us that Afghanistan was a big success.

And then he

endorsed Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and we got a whole revolt in the school what i'm getting at sammy is he did all of these things that were hard left this was the dream of the progressive movement to get either a diehard bernie sanders or somebody who was non-compost mentes that could be manipulated into that agenda okay so they got it and now the implementation of their long cherished policies and protocols have led to a popular backlash.

Nobody likes any of it.

They don't like the DAs.

They don't like paying six dollars a gallon for gas they do not like having to be dismissed from the military without getting a vaccinate for not getting a vaccination and looking at people poor across the border with no vaccination they they're angry yeah and then so this is what i'm getting at so the left then says it's biden's fault it's biden's fault he he he wasn't a good communicator and they're starting as you pointed out to defect from him but the problem is them they yeah they're they're the ones who got their dream so what they're basically saying is this

we want a left this is 2020 we wanted a left-wing agenda we want a left-wing agenda but none of our true blue policy

you know leaders bernie sanders or elizabeth warm they're not viable politically so we use joe biden and he was very pliant and we got our thing through.

And guess what?

Everybody hates our policies and they're failing and they're destroying the country.

And we're going to blame Joe Biden as the spokesperson for them.

It doesn't make sense.

They're going to say, well, you know, Joe Biden's real problem with the public is his son and family, Hunter, and the diary of his daughter and his cognitive problems.

And it's not their policies.

That's what they would argue, I would imagine.

They're going to argue that.

They're going to argue that.

He didn't communicate.

That's what he's arguing.

He fired his communications director this week and he didn't even say goodbye to her

in a way that he did to Jin Saki.

At least she left and thought, I'm not going to do this anymore.

It's a hopeless task.

And then he praised her.

But my point is, this is that they can blame him,

but they know deep down inside that even though they're more articulate and they're more cognizant, they didn't get the nomination for a reason.

In other words, the Democratic voters themselves would have rather had an impaired Joe Biden than a sharp Elizabeth Warren.

So they know deep down inside that it's their policies and that even if they were articulate and they were directing them, they wouldn't be popular because they don't work.

So now they're blaming him, but they don't ever look in the mirror and say, you know what?

We've got to moderate these things.

They don't work in the real world and they offend and alienate people, especially the middle class.

And it's fatal to a Democratic Party that has transcended into a party of the very wealthy because it shows that we don't care about gas.

And we have all these people freelancing in our party, like the senator from Michigan had said, oh, I got a Tesla.

Why don't you get one?

It worked perfectly.

I don't have to fill it.

I just went whiz by people in gas lines, you know, or that type of bleep that let them eat cake and they can't help it.

That's for sure.

That's who they are now.

Yeah.

Well, we expect then to see more of this in the future.

Do you think Joe Biden will be asked to step down by his own party eventually?

I mean, what's the fate of him?

Is he going to make it another two years after the midterms or will he be, you know?

Well, it's sort of like, isn't it the paradox of Aesop's fable of the cat, the mice, that they were being devoured, so they wanted a warning.

So the little mice get together and somebody raises his hands and says, you know, if we put a bell on that cat, we would get warning.

We get back into our holes.

And then everybody pointed to him and said, do you want to do it?

And nobody wanted to do it.

So they all think in theory that we've got to get rid of this guy.

He's a liability.

He's bleeding us.

And then everybody says, Well, you do it.

Yeah.

And they're thinking, hmm, how do I do this?

Because the Constitution says I can't get rid of Camilla Harris at the same time.

And she pulls the same or lower.

And so what you're seeing now is kind of a gopher broke.

They're saying to Camilla Harris, look, nobody likes you.

You're incompetent.

You have a vocabulary of a thousand words, but you're all we have.

So we want you to get out there.

And so go out on be our point woman on the border.

Really do it.

Be our point woman on school shooting.

Show empathy.

Just go out there because you're all we have.

And that's what they're trying to do now.

They're trying to rehabilitate her.

Yeah.

And he has no support in the Democratic Party.

Yeah, it's really weird because even Axelrod, David Axelrod, said, you know, the country's out of control and Joe Biden is not in command.

I blame people because

in November, for all of Trump's foibles, his policies had worked.

We had steady growth, low inflation, affordable energy, strong defense, deterrent foreign policy, a closing and finally closed border.

And they voted him out of office or something happened.

I think a lot of it was...

I'm not suggesting fraud, but the very fact that we went from 20 or 30 million non-election day ballots to 102 and there was not a commiserate rejection rate in fact the rejection rate as i said fell by in some states by a magnitude of 10.

but whatever the cause was people knew that joe biden was not cognizant they knew that yeah and they didn't care the democratic party said doesn't matter it's even better because we can manipulate him and he has this facade old joe biden from scram and then Independents said, you know what, he said he's going to be a NITER and I just can't take Trump's tweets.

And then never Trumpers were euphoric and thought you know what they thought in our transition from pseudo-conservatism to

transparent or flagrant liberalism he's very good he's a way of sort of transitioning me to where i always want to be and then everybody voices in the wilderness said the guy is he's nuts he's crazy he can't finish a sentence you put him in there with in the White House, it's going to be a disaster.

Yep, it sure is.

And if we can turn to one of his current disastrous actions, the oil reserves.

So

a president can release oil reserves in times of emergency, and we often see that happening.

And such could be considered a time of emergency now with our pandemic and our recession coming on and the super, uber high oil prices.

But he's selling it off to China, Europe, and India, not all of it, but he is giving good portions of it of this oil reserve that is intended.

And now I'm getting to a point where it gets me a little angry.

You know, he's giving what should be brought to the United States to other countries.

And what do you think of that?

Well, I mean, you listen to these people.

They sound like free marketeers, don't they?

Libertarians.

Oh, every oil is all fungible.

So if we give it to the Chinese, they will buy less from, I don't know, on the world market and and then the price will drop.

No, they'll just gear up their factories at 110% if they have cheap oil.

Yeah.

Because they're getting it cheap from Russia anyway.

So I think everybody should realize that, you know, we have this strategic petroleum reserve.

I don't know what it is, 800 million barrels.

And, you know, we burn, I don't know, 20 million a day.

You can go 10 days is 200.

You can go 50 days or 40 days, 60 days, depending on how full it is, just on that reserve.

But otherwise, if you take out a million barrels or a million and a half, you only have about a year and a half, two years.

So that's what we're doing.

We're draining it.

So if you're going to drain it, it's supposed to be for a national emergency, not to salvage Joe Biden's midterm prospects, which is why it's being drained.

And the funny thing about it is, and this is disputed, but anywhere from three to five million barrels are going to the Chinese, even though we're upping our production.

And so it's Alice in Wonderland.

It's a 360 degree circus because we have the Democrats and Biden and the left who always said we need more, we need more taxes on fuel.

We need more taxes on fuel.

We need more taxes on fuel to discourage driving.

And then all of a sudden, you know, Biden says, oh, your Republicans are trying to obstruct my tax.

reductions on federal gas tax.

Well, that's what you want.

And they're not trying to do it anyway.

And he gargled that message anyway.

And then they're saying, we want to draw on the strategic petroleum reserve so you can have cheaper prices and you can drive more.

But that's not what they want.

They want you to drive less.

They say that all the time.

So, and then the Chinese is the same thing.

They, you know, why would you export to China anything given its human rights record and the fact that we are short oil?

So

how do you distill this into a simple exegesis?

The simple thing is they are a bunch of elites.

They have a utopian vision for how we should arrange our lives they got a once in a million chance in a person's life to enact that because of all of the covet lockdowns etc etc changes in the voting law they got their wish they for one of the few rare times in history they started to implement it and very quickly during this 2021 implementation Exactly what would happen happened and everybody warned them.

They warned them on energy, they warned them on inflation, they warned them on the border.

And now they realize that it blew up.

People are sick of them.

They're going to vote them out of power this November in two years.

And suddenly they're reversing and blaming Putin and Trump.

And they're renouncing all the things that they really desire.

If Trump was president right now, they would be on him like crazy, but they would not be telling him to cancel federal gas tax or reduce it.

They would be angry about drawing out the strategic patrol.

They'd be delighted that gas is so high.

But

it doesn't seem like their efforts to lower the price of gas are doing anything.

I mean, opening up the strategic oil reserves doesn't seem to be

anything to gas prices.

If you consume, I don't know, 20 million barrels a day.

What is 1 million barrels a day going to do?

Yeah.

It's not going to do much.

And if you're going to pay six dollars a gallon for gasoline here in California and you get three at eight cents, ten cents reduction, what's that going to do?

Nothing.

These are all symbolic acts to show that Joe Biden from Scranton cares about you when we know he doesn't.

And so they have an agenda that just doesn't work.

It doesn't work.

It doesn't work in any aspect.

And they know it.

And yet they want to push ahead with it.

We saw that very early in Biden's term with Afghanistan in 21 and then

the Yunkin and the school, the election, and the school board.

You think they would have backed off from critical race theory?

You think they would have sort of seen what was going on in Afghanistan and kept the bag on it?

No, they never back off.

Yeah.

You know, not to turn to the dismal sciences and scientists of economics at the Hoover Institution, but your colleague John Cochran had an article that basically showed that a a

decrease going to interest rates and whether that can help the inflation, that increasing the interest rate did not have a downward effect on the consumer price index.

In other words, average goods that are bought by a household over many years.

And I wonder if my point and what I'm trying to get to is

these actions that are intended to affect the everyday life of people adding oil to the oil market or increasing interest rates such that

that puts some pressure down on prices as well.

I mean, it's going to cause a recession or it has the potential to cause a recession, but it would the idea is to bring.

consumer prices down.

They don't seem to have that kind of effect that once consumer prices go up, in other words, they're staying there and that everything else kind of has to reach a level level where the real price of things drops, you know, does that make sense?

No, no, no, it's like a rat race.

To use an inverse simile, it's like, you know, a bunch of lobsters in a bucket and they're all after each other to get out and they climb on each other.

And inflation is the same thing.

Everybody, once you get in that mindset, everybody feels screwed.

Hey, I just paid $6.

Hey, I just saw my health premium.

Hey, I just bought a piece of meat.

I can't afford it.

So, you know what?

I'm going to charge $2 more an hour to pour cement.

I'm going to go on strike if I'm a bus drive.

That's what their attitude is.

They don't, their attitude is: I don't care what the interest rate is.

I don't care what the anti-inflation policy.

Right now, I'm getting screwed.

I'm going to get my stuff.

And you create a kind of a hysteria.

And, you know, I lived in Greece in 1973 and 74 when the inflation rate was over over 30 percent.

And I lived through the Carter inflation of 12 and 13 percent.

Everybody should remember when it hits over 10, people start erasing.

I don't know what they do in the computer age, but the inventory, the stock that's out there for the consumer, if it's, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 days, they'll keep changing the price on it.

That's a good indicator.

And we're getting close to that.

Right now, when I go into Home Depot to buy billing materials, I look at the prices and they've gone up within a week.

And they do it a little differently.

They don't write with a Marxalot pen and cross it out, but you can, if you're careful, you can see how it's gone up.

So, and John Cochran has written a lot.

He's a very astute economist.

He's a wonderful colleague.

And he's written a lot of warnings, as has John Taylor and John Cogan and Michael Boskin, all of the Stanford economists.

They warned you.

They warned you, meaning us.

And they said, if you keep printing money and you keep adding to the money supply and you keep subsidizing labor non-participation and you keep cutting back on the price, the availability of energy, and

you have supply chain, you're going to create a classic inflation catastrophe.

And that will be funny money chasing too few goods and services.

That's what we have.

And then they've argued, and John Cochran has said this.

He said, there are ways to break inflation.

And the crudest and the most effective is to raise interest rates.

The problem with that is if the inflation rate is 6% to 8% now, it's been higher than 8%,

then traditionally you have to have an interest rate two points higher than the inflation rate.

The interest rate on a home right now is about 5%, 6%,

and 4% to 6% on other stuff.

It should be about, I don't know, 10% or 12%.

And what Biden's team is doing is they let this monster out of its cage, inflation, and they don't know how to put it back in unless they whip it back in with a recession.

And so we're going to get in a very strange situation where the momentum for inflation is going to continue.

But as the interest rates climb and we have a little bit more discipline on the money supply, we're going to see a cutback in consumer spending.

We're already seeing it because this $5 trillion will be spent very quickly at $6 a gallon gas here in California or, you know, $15 a pound for meat or whatever services are being charged to consumers.

They're going to go through this money.

And when they do, there's going to be a lot of employers who say, you know what?

I'm not going to go out and hire right now.

Why would I go out and hire for this last little gasp of inflation-fed consumer spending?

I'm not going to do it because if the airlines think if I hire a bunch of extra airline attendants and I can even find them and pay them astronomical multi-year contracts, this thing is going to blow up between January and June of next year.

I'm going to be stuck with a bunch of employees or have to go through the reverse process.

So, a lot of employers,

even though there's this, as I said, this last spurt of consumer spending, they're not acting accordingly.

They don't want to

find a payroll, I have to pay a payroll when there's no consumer, I mean, much less consumer demand.

And so we call all the stagflation and say that sometime, I think, from January to June of next year, and I think we're in a recession now.

We've already had one quarter of negative growth.

And I think we'll have, in this second quarter comes out, we'll have a second one, zero and negative.

And we're going to be in a recession.

And yet the prices are going to still be high, but they won't stay high for long if we have a third and fourth quarter, which I think we will.

By December, there's going to be some people getting laid off, and there's going to be people who said, you know what, all that funny money that was printed, my 401k that skyrocketed that I borrowed against, that check that came from the state, this check that came, it's all gone.

It's all gone.

Like when I went to Vegas or I flew across the country at exorbitant prices, or I rented a car that I couldn't afford,

or, you know, da-da-da-da-da-da, they spent it.

I can't keep filling up the tank at $6, you know, 150 bucks for my car so i don't have any money and i'm not going to spend i can't i'm not going to drive that much i'm not going to buy that much and then the suppliers and the service industries will have to lay off people yeah and that'll be a risk yeah there'll be a recession do you expect i don't expect prices to fall much so i think the people who are suffer the worst are fixed income people and usually that's our retired population they will suffer the worst

They get hurt in inflation, but they will benefit in a recession if they have a guaranteed income, which Social Security people and some defined benefit people do.

Yeah, that's true, but I don't expect to see prices fall.

I just expect to see stagnating economy.

But

I wish, I wish it was.

Oh, I went, I would disagree with you politely.

I went through the 70,

I would call it the late Nixon period, the early Carter period, and the early Reagan period.

And when that thing crashed, I saw Thompson's Seedless Vineyard go from 16,000 an acre to 3,500.

I saw the price of raisins go from $1,400 to $400,000.

Palms go from $30 to $6,000.

I saw a diesel fuel crash.

I saw people calling me up and saying, you guys bought a tractor in the 80s.

I got one.

You want to buy it?

I went to buy cars on time

and people would say, why don't you move up?

Well, you know, and then I saw interest rates and the interest rates were sky high

and no one was buying and they had incentives and the prices started to crash.

Yes, but did you see, I mean, prices to the producer were crashing, but did you see a comparable decrease in price for grapes in the supermarket?

Finally but it's never commiserate because the producer always gets screwed, especially the farmer.

He's squashed.

He's on the bottom of the pyramid.

Sure, he's got a perishable product.

So he's got to go with what he does.

He has zero leverage.

He has to borrow money all year to produce the crop.

It's perishable in many cases.

He's dependent on brokers that make far more than he does.

But in most cases, prices will go down as the money supply constricts and people start to lay off and interest rates start to go up.

I mean,

if you get up to 9%,

let's just take a million dollar home that's overpriced, say in California.

So if you see a million dollar home, that could be a thousand square feet, easy, depending on where it's located.

Just a cottage, but they're over a million bucks.

The people are buying them because 2% or 3% interest.

You know what I mean?

And they may have, I don't know, just to take a, they may have a 4,000 month payment.

You go up to 9%

and that goes up to

12,000.

You think a person's going to buy that million dollar home?

They're going to say, you know what?

I have to pay $4,000.

That's it.

And I'll either do it with cheap interest or I'll do it with a cheap price.

But if I don't get either one, I'm not going to buy.

And that's a chain reaction.

It's kind of like in demography where all of a sudden the fertility rate is crashing out to 1.6.

And it was 2.1 just 20 years ago.

And yet we're at the peak of 330 million people, but we're going to start reducing our population unless they don't, the floodgates of immigration keep opening up.

But my point is, it's like turning a huge liner in the ocean.

It takes a while.

And we're starting to see that when you raise that interest rates and you have inflated prices of homes, the first symptom you see are homes that are not selling.

They're longer on the market per day, you know, 50, 60, 80 days.

And then the next thing you'll see is you'll see slower.

And then the final thing you'll see is a price reduction because people are in that, as I said, that herd mentality.

I had a realtor in May who told me my house was, I could not believe it.

I bought it for 600,000 three years ago.

They said it's worth 1.9 million.

I got to get 1.9 million.

And then somebody, the realtor says to him, you know what?

You missed the boat.

The boom is over.

People are, oh, no, no, you're a bad realtor.

I'll get another.

And they go on.

And then finally, it's like five stages of acceptance of death they admit that it's over yes the housing market is is that way where you see these drastic drops in prices i and but i'm thinking more of a consumer price and meat chicken eggs well essentially those prices they're the last because people need them but

shoes, clothing, accessories, vacations, eating out, that will be the first that people start to cut back on.

And they already, I think, have.

I think you can, you can, if you look at what restaurant owners have been saying, they're not expanding, not cutting back yet.

But just a month and a half ago, they were telling us that it was booming.

And I think the next thing you'll start to see is this historic high in airline travel will start to go back.

And I don't think the airlines are being honest with this, because I think already they know that, and because they're getting squeezed by high energy prices, you know, airline fuel, et cetera, and high wages.

And they know that it's going to cut back air service next year, and they do not want to hire new people.

And so they would rather get yelled at for misconnections or people not showing up for work or cutting routes.

But if they really were confident right now, they would be hiring like crazy, even though there's not a lot of labor.

Yeah, sure.

Okay, Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and then come right back and we'll talk about CEOs and the Dallas Cowboys.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

Victor, I wanted to look, because we are talking about the economy and we're seeing a lot of these CEOs step down or at least high-ranking officers in these companies like Starbucks, Amazon, Kickstarter.

And even in the last few years, if you took that, Bezos, Jeff Bezos stepped down from Amazon, Bob Eager stepped down from Disney and Twitter's Jack Dorsey as well.

And I was wondering, you know, why are these CEOs or these people that are running these companies, why is this becoming a thing?

I mean,

we can generalize it, I mean, are they just afraid of making bad decisions or having to make decisions during a pandemic slash recession?

Or is it an indication of the system just being fully broke or maybe a little of both?

What do you think?

I think they realize that

they look at the Biden administration and what's ahead, and it's dark and gloomy.

It's not just a recession, but they're in a no-win situation where a minority of the population, maybe 30%,

is loud and obnoxious and boycotts them and screams at them.

And not that that would happen if they would stand firm and say, you know, you're Koch or Delta Airlines, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to get out of Georgia because they have a voter ID.

But they don't do that, do they?

It's because they're scared of their woke employees or scared of a minority of the population.

And so they think, on the other hand, if I go through with these woke agendas like Disney, I could lose 20% of my stock or I could have a big drop off in attendance, which is happening.

And so

they don't know what to do.

And because they're company men, they always do what is the perceived majority opinion.

And they understand that it's not woke, but the woke majority that actually expresses opinion or boycotts, it is the majority.

So that's one thing.

The other thing is we haven't hit, we're just starting to slow down.

A lot of them have contractual bonuses, severance pay, retirement, da, da, da, da.

And they think, you know what?

I waited a little bit too long on the crest of the wave, but I don't need these headaches.

I'm 61, I'm 63, I'm in good health, I can get an $18 million retirement bonus.

If I do it now, I don't have to deal with all these crazy people that work for me and in the public.

So I just want to get out.

And that's what's happening.

And I think you're going to see more of of it.

As time goes on, yeah.

I think I'd say another thing.

I'll be very careful of what I say is that we're in this woke movement where a person's skin color, their gender, their sexual identity is essential to who they are rather than incidental.

And so we're making a lot of decisions on what we consider repertory admissions, repertory hiring, repertory advancement, repertory promotions.

That's fine.

And everybody is blaming white supremacists.

So these old white male executives are targeted.

And they try to, you know, they're kind of like Euripides wrote a play.

It's a brilliant play called The Bacchae.

And in it, Tiresias, the character Tiresias, the seer,

and Cadmus, the aged king, they think, you know what?

Everybody's

mystified and into this in drag almost.

They're mystified by this crazy Asiatic god, Bacchus, which they call Dionysus, Bacchae, Latin Bacchus, but Bacchae, it's an onomatopoeic word, Baba Baba Ba, Bacchai, Bacchac, Bacch Bacch Bac.

Everybody's going up the mountains drunk and they're doing all sorts of things.

So they want to get in on it.

So they start, they don't want to get in on it.

They just don't want to be isolated.

So these two old men dress up like they're Bacchans

in the play.

And it's sort of like, can you fix my dress?

Can you make me look effeminate?

Can you make me do this?

But they don't really believe it.

They're just doing it.

And that's what a lot of these executives and older people in that despised category of white male are trying to do.

They're trying to say, what do I have to do to be acceptable?

But at some point, one of two things are going to happen.

Somebody is going to say, I will take my record against your record.

And so some DA is going to say, here's my city and here's what I do with criminals.

Now, you tell me and you look at your woke person i'm not talking about race or gender just ideology

and you tell me that la is better you tell me that san francisco is better you tell me that chicago is better or people are going to say okay you're so critical lori lightfoot how's chicago running under your direction Okay, Gavin, you're going around the country.

You want to talk about the homeless people, the price of gasoline, your drought, your forest fire policy, your school test score rankings, your crime, property theft per capita, statistic consent.

And they're going to say, you know what?

Why don't you shut the blank up?

Because you're so critical, you woaxers of the so-called establishment, which gave you, I suppose, the infrastructure which you inhabit.

And now we want to see some, we want to see the results.

Where are they?

Where are they?

And I don't see them.

I don't see that, what's her name?

Is it Corinne Saint-Marie or whatever, Pierre?

Jean-Pierre.

Jean-Pierre.

I don't see that she's any better than Jen Saki just because she's black and she's gay and she's a woman.

I think she's incompetent.

She seems to read from her notes.

I feel sorry for her because, A, she has a hopeless job of trying to make Joe Biden look presidential.

He's a mess.

And second, she has no experience.

And third, she doesn't have the skills to do the job.

And she knows why she was appointed.

And Jin Saki, for all of her obnoxiousness and I'm circling back and evasion, she was an effective apologist for an incompetent president.

Yeah.

Okay.

So my point is,

where is the new revolution?

Where is the new enlightenment?

Where is the renaissance when you get rid of white males?

I don't see it.

I think it's more.

Is that the argument?

That That argument can be made.

You can say, you know what?

This university had a bunch of incompetent old white males.

So we're going to have people who aren't old white males.

And if they're incompetent, they're no different than the other people.

But that's only true to a point because there is a university, after all.

Somebody based on merit did something right, and somebody built a bridge and somebody built a dam on merit.

And so, what I'm getting at, if you get rid of meritocratic criteria entirely and you get into these these woke decision-making criteria then people are going to say to you where's the beef let's see how things are much better so joe biden can't open his mouth with saying look at my cabinet it is overrepresented it's got more gay people it's got fewer white males than any other cabinet okay

so

what's the point is gas cheaper is the border more secure is the united states foreign policy more deterrent that's what we want to know and so what I'm getting at is when you push this agenda, then you assume that the people who are being chosen in part on criteria that are not merucratic, A,

are still as Merocratic as the old white guy who was an insider.

And that's not always true, but it could be true.

But B, you're suggesting that they were going to be superior.

And that's why you're getting a new group of people with fresh ideas or underrepresented can be true in some cases.

But so far, when I look at Joe Biden's cabinet, I'm unimpressed.

I don't look at the color of the people's skin.

I don't look at the gender.

I just think they're incompetent.

But they do.

They tell us no.

They're not incompetent.

They're diverse.

And so I think that's what we're seeing now

at the next stage of this woke movement.

People are going to say, okay, you're diverse.

We're using non-meritocratic race, gender, sexual identity criteria, but we expect things to get a lot better because you said that this white supremacist, white racist, white male, white Christian male, heterosex, whatever you called him, was incompetent.

And at 70%

of the jobs, which represents roughly, you know, the so-called dominant population are 35% in the case of white males.

But if you're going to go by repertory criteria, Let's see what you get for it.

I don't see, I look at the paper or the internet every day, and I don't see that we're in a big renaissance right now.

No, I really don't.

I don't see that either.

And then the people who are very competent that I see in the world of arts that are non-white males, they're being hounded.

They happen to be ideologically incorrect.

You know, I see African-American intellectuals who are really brilliant, but they're being attacked and trashed.

Clarence Thomas has got some great ideas.

He's being trashed by liberals.

So So I think people better be very careful that the system

until basically 2008 when Obama came in was merocratic.

There was affirmative action that was starting to be proportionally representative

and it was merocratic.

I know there's an old boy network, which I always despised, maybe because I was never part of it.

Nevertheless, when you destroy that and you bring in different criteria, let's see if they work.

And I don't see things getting better.

I wouldn't know.

No, no, no.

It doesn't.

Speaking, though, of the challenge to wokeism, or in your case, you were saying, well, these CEOs are just getting sick of it and quitting.

But we do find that the owner of Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys has recently partnered with a company, a coffee company called the Black Rifle Coffee Company.

And so openly, I guess, approving of guns.

And this left-wing article I was reading said, Well, this is really tone-deaf and bad timing, but I don't think the owner is really worried about that.

In fact, I think he has all sorts of things that his company does, his Dallas Cowboys company does

to support veterans, first responders, men and women in uniform.

And he seems to be pretty oriented to what right-wing people would appreciate and doesn't seem to be apologizing for it.

What do you think of this Dallas Cowboys?

Well, as I understand, Black Rifle is a veterans group, and they chose that term because one thing they all at one time had in common is they used probably an M4, an M16, or an automatic military-grade weapon that was black.

And so Black Rifle is sort of an iconic, you know, it's in your face a little bit, but we're all veterans and we all have had to go into life and death situations.

I think that's sort of the message.

The problem right now is that in some of these, not the majority, but some of these cases, there's people using semi, semi-automatic weapons.

So when you say black rifle and you endorse it, you leave yourself open to understandable criticism.

But I don't know.

If you didn't have black, does anybody really believe that Jerry Jones endorsing a black rifle means that he's promoting mass shootings and that has led to mass shootings?

I don't think so.

The other question though is, and I probably will get a lot of criticism for this.

I grew up with guns my entire life.

And I remember, I'll give you an example.

We had a rule in my house that we could only use bolt action 22s with a clip.

And sometimes they were pumped 22s.

I don't know what they were called.

It was 1893 Winchester 22.

You put the bullets down the tube in the barrel.

You could have the eight or 10.

Or if you had a shotgun, it was a pump and you could have, I think, four

or five.

It was kind of a law then.

But my point is this, that I had, I won't mention any names, the person's probably still alive, but I had a friend in.

high school who was kind of reckless.

His dad was kind of reckless.

So he came out with an automatic 22 and an automatic shotgun.

And we would always hunt quote unquote varmints.

And my dad ran out of the house.

He goes, what the hell is going on?

And I said,

I'll use the word Mike.

His name is not Mike.

I said, Mike's got this new gun.

And he was just shooting everything.

Like a machine, you know, it was a semi-automatic.

And my dad goes, you have any idea where this went?

That bullet, it travels a mile.

And why are you shooting like that?

What are you shooting?

And he he was shooting you know canaries he's shooting anything that moved but the point is that he was doing it much more quickly and he wasn't reloading even though it was these were semi-automatic weapons my point is this that we were 16 or 15

and 17 i think i don't think a person 17, 18, 19, 20 really should be able to go buy a semi-automatic, high-powered weapon.

I know if you can't drink, I don't know if a person should be allowed to drink at 18 to 21, but if you can't go buy a beer, I don't think a 21-year-old, a 20-year-old or 19-year-old should be able to go order a gun that says a high-power.

I don't think that's going to have any effect because these people who are obviously deranged are around family members.

And the family members are aware of it.

And they don't know whether, either they don't know whether they should call authorities if their son or grandson is crazy and dangerous, or they're afraid of them, or they sort of like the idea.

I don't know what it is, but they don't contact authorities frequently enough.

And there are some cases when these kids are able to buy the weapons before, in some states, below 21.

And I think it would be, I don't think there should be a national law, but I think it'd be wiser if the states at least up the

age when you can buy a semi-automatic gun with a you know a large clip and i don't think it's going to make much difference no but i understand why people don't want to do it because they feel that if they give in on that issue then the next issue then it'll be a descending gun control but i grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood and everybody had guns everybody had guns and on saturday they'd say hey victor let's go out to the west side and you go out to the west side they roll down the window let's shoot this and they shoot anything that moved

and anybody that had a semi-automatic oh look at this i got a 2200 yeah it was dangerous yeah it was really dangerous there's something much safer about a bolt action or a pump or a single shot rifle for someone under 21 i just believe there is just like it's much more dangerous to

seems to me that have somebody under 21 drinking Yeah,

exactly.

You know, since you've got into gun control, I had a question about that.

They usually say, well, if you have gun control, then there won't be guns.

There'll be less violence.

Number one argument.

Number two argument for gun control people is that,

well, America is behind all the other, you know, industrialized countries or sophisticated countries in the international order.

And I was looking at that, and it's kind of true that largely in America, that you can buy a gun without a permit, or at least to some extent you can, or you can buy with a permit, but you don't have to have any special reason for that permit, right?

And if you look at the European countries, you could buy a gun, but you have to have a really good reason for buying it.

So, it is true that the European countries or the countries that are most highly developed seem to have laws.

And the implication is that they have less violence because of that.

And we could have less violence.

And I was wondering how you would address that issue.

Well, most, not all, but most of the people who are shot by another person with intent.

I'm not talking about accents or suicide.

A large number of the shooters have weapons illegally.

There's 330 million people.

There's probably a billion weapons out there.

So how are you going to stop somebody in Detroit or Chicago from from getting a weapon?

I just don't see how you're going to do it.

If I can see how you can stop them using it, all you have to do is go back to stop and frisk.

Or just when you see you pull over somebody, you say you run a background check.

And if they're a felon and there's a gun, you arrest the person and you create deterrence.

But we're not willing to do that.

So we're in this Orwellian situation right now in which

You know, 800 people are shot and killed in Chicago every year.

And we have 30 to 40 people in mass shootings.

And yet we're looking at the mass shootings.

I understand that because the people who are being shot are not, I mean, there are people who are innocently shot, and I'm saying everybody's not guilty, but a lot of the shootings in a big city is gang-related back and forth.

I think Lori Lightfoot said that, or maybe that Karen James, or whoever was the DA, said, you know, this is just a shootout.

I'm not going to charge people.

But my point is: this is that people

might agree not to sell a semi-armatic rifle to somebody under 21 if the left would compromise and say, okay, we're going to make it a mandatory year in jail for anybody that is a convicted felon with a record that is in possession of a firearm.

How about that?

Yeah.

And they're not going to do that.

They're not going to do that because they would feel that people that are marginalized to use their vocabulary would be disproportionately arrested.

And their view of the world anything that's not proportionally represented except maybe the post office or the nba or something is racist and they don't want to arrest people who are doing the shooting yeah and uh i'm perfectly willing to you know create a deterrent atmosphere for young people so this shooter He goes out and he shoots people on the 4th of July, and then he kind of dresses up like a woman escape.

And then we learn all this information that he gave his social media i think he even drew a mural you know yeah well the point was he was i i know he was using drugs or antipsychotic drugs or marijuana but whatever it was is there was also a component that he knew nothing would happen to him that he would be considered crazy if you had a i think if you had a capital felony and it said if you federal crime to shoot more than, I don't know what it would be, sort of like a policeman, and there was a deterrent that people either got a life sentence or capital punishment, you could deter a lot of this.

But I think a lot of these young people think, you know what, nothing's going to happen to me.

Yeah.

Nothing in extremists is going to happen to me.

But, and they think we're going to, I'm just going to be in a psych ward or I'm going to be considered, you know, I'll be in prison, but I'm going to be noticed.

I'm going to be mentioned.

I'm going to get attention.

And it would be better if they were shunned and put in solitary for the rest of their life after they kill some innocent child.

Yeah, you know, you mentioned social media in this, and it seems to me social media platforms, I mean, they can make algorithms for all sorts of political opinions they don't like and they want to take things out and that kind of stuff.

Why can't they?

Because both of the Texas shooter, the guy that shot 19, and this recent 4th of July.

July in Illinois, who shot six, were on social media saying and talking about things that they were going to do it seems to me can't they have an algorithm that pops these people they don't want and they go they they send them off to the you know police and security so they keep an eye on them no the left doesn't want to the left has one filter it's ideological and i mean that sincerely so if you're donald trump we're going to get you off twitter if you question dr fauci that's an ideological for them that's ideological because they believe that dr fauci is iconic of their shutdowns and quarantine and federal control.

And anybody who challenged that is, you know, a dissonant quack or something.

So, no, they don't really want to take the time and effort to ensure there's not crazy, violent people advocating torture and death to others.

They just want to do it ideologically.

I don't know whether that is a political decision or it's just one of laziness, or they don't want to be sued or something.

Their attitude is so strange.

You know, it's like if you're a conservative political commentator, it's, you know, and you say that Hunter Biden's laptop is not Russian disinformation, but it's really his, then get off and sue us if you don't like it.

We're a private company.

We have the right to do that.

But if you're somebody in there talking about how you're going to kill people, oh, we better be very careful.

And I don't understand that at all.

But it's an ideological political question.

Yeah, okay.

Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and come right back and we'll talk about the Arizona choice bill for schools.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

Victor, I I noticed that Arizona passed a broad-based bill so that people could choose at least to go to private schools and they would get vouchers or refunds from the government for what it pays normally for a child for the full year.

And it seems to be paying, at least according to the article I read, 90% of the private school costs.

So that seems like a really good turn for education, maybe.

What do you think?

Well, I mean, it's pretty radical because it's basically a savings account, isn't it?

So people, I guess it's calibrated for income, but you're right.

They have, I don't know, what is $6,000 to $8,000 a year, which is about the tuition.

And so the teachers' unions are saying this: you're going to destroy public education because we're credentialed and we are professionals.

And if you allow every parent to make a choice to opt out of the public schools, what's going to happen is you're going to get a bunch of upstart private, unregulated online and homeschooling and private parochial schools and they won't have our training and expertise.

Okay, there's an argument to be made there.

It sounds logical, except why are they doing this?

Why do people want?

Because especially after the Zoom age of the quarantine, they saw the public schools and they know what the School of Education teaches and they see the literacy and the computational skills of teachers and they're not impressed.

So what I'm getting at is a BA is not a BA BA of 1970, and a teaching credential is not a teaching credential of 1970.

And we're seeing increasingly teachers who don't have the basic skills that allow them to teach young people.

And as a result of that, or because of it, they go off topic and they tell their little personal narratives.

And they often have a racial, or they have a gender or a sexual identity, or they have an ideological or political, but whatever the particular slant is, it's not a sonnet and it's not the Pythagorean theory and it's not a Doric column.

They don't do that anymore.

And a lot of parents want them to do that because they went to school before the fall.

The fall was somewhere in the 21st century and they're thinking, I've seen what these people are doing.

I don't want my children in the school and yet I pay taxes and I have no choice.

And we saw what happened with the school boards.

When you try to go to the school boards and object to critical race theory, then the FBI puts people in the audience to monitor you.

And Merritt Garland could indict you, I guess.

So the point is, in Arizona, at least, they said, you know what?

It's a free-for-all.

It's an arena.

It's every school for itself.

And we're going to, the chaff will be blown away.

the wheat from the chaff because we'll have national selection.

So yeah, it'll be rough.

It'll be kind of scary in the beginning.

There'll be startup fraudulent schools, but people are wise.

And ultimately, you will get a core of good schools that people want to put their voucher or their savings account money into.

And you know what will happen?

The public schools in response will get back to what they were supposed to do, or they're not going to have anybody there and they're going to be laid off.

And so teachers will say to themselves, you know, I just keep upping my salary and upping my salary, but the test scores of my students keep going down, down, down.

And the number of hours devoted to actual instruction gets less and less.

And then you'll start to see Maverick principals, and they'll call in teachers and say, you know what?

I do not want you to talk about yourself.

I don't want any more personal stories about who you are

or what you believe in, none of that.

I mean, they can be incidental, but I want you to teach.

And if you go off topic, I'm going to get rid of you.

And I have to get rid of you because we don't have any money now.

Too many people have fled because they don't like you.

They don't like what you're doing.

And I'm going to try to make sure that we all still have a job.

That type of thinking will emerge, but it will be messy.

It'll be

really messy.

Boy, I can't.

It's messy now, but it's messy in a different way.

It's out of the, it's the media doesn't cover it.

Right-wing reporters or conservative parents will post on TikTok or something, or they'll see a Zoom that their kid recorded some nutty teacher.

But

what's going on in the school is largely hidden from the general public.

But they will, the media being left-wing and insane, will go out and they'll get every example of a startup parochial school and start to attack it.

But I think it won't work.

I think people have had it with the public schools.

And I say this, you know, I'm not giving a personal narrative to be indulgent, but I went to Jefferson School in Salmo, and it was a very small school from K one through three.

And then I went to Eric White School from named after a principal from four to two through six.

I would say that the student body was 90%

Hispanic and maybe

5%

poor than poor white Oklahoma diaspora, and then maybe 5% or 4%

farmers who lived near town and they were not in the rural, rural farm schools where they were mostly

diverse Japanese, Armenian, so-called white.

But my point is, I got a great education from Mrs.

Whiteley and Mrs.

Redden and Mrs.

Wilson and Mrs.

Shipman and Mr.

Montoro, Mr.

Cow.

They were all great teachers.

They were competent.

And they never went off topic and they didn't get political.

We didn't know what their politics were.

I imagine they were mostly Democratic, but we never heard that.

And it was strict discipline.

And all of the people that went through that grammar school did very well.

I know them.

They're in my age.

They're 68, 69, 70.

And they hold positions of respect in retirement.

They were school teachers, they were principals, they were federal and state employees, they were cops, they were insurance sales, they were very successful.

And they went through that.

That was what the public schools used to be.

Can you imagine just if you were a public school teacher to say this, okay, everybody, it's Friday.

It's one o'clock.

You have 20 minutes to go into the little schoolroom library and pick a book.

And it better be a good book.

And when you bring it out, I'm going to give you another 10 minutes to sit down and then I'm going to inspect it.

And so we went out, we ran in, and they were all books like poetry of Robert Frost or biography of Lou Gehrig or something.

We'd all bring them out.

And then the teacher would say, Okay, now for the next hour on Friday, you're going to read that and you're going to write a book report every week.

You can take it home if you want.

And they were monitoring you and they did that.

And then they would discuss it.

And the teacher, this was in fourth grade, fourth grade.

The teacher would say,

Okay, Victor, you're reading the biography of Lou Gehrig.

Who was his teammates?

What was the difference between Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig?

And you would try to think.

And then the teacher was thinking ahead of you.

And And that was,

when you were in a science class, Mrs.

Shipman would point up the sky and say, that's a cold front, that's a warm front, which is it?

And it was just, gosh, it was just grammar, diagram sentences, all of that.

And this was a minority community.

that was not represented proportionally necessarily.

The teachers were very poor.

They were mostly poor white, but we had Hispanic teachers.

But the point I'm making was nobody worried about that.

It was only the quality of education to help people ascend be upwardly mobile and i loved going to school and yeah it was gosh it was sort of it was so different than these kids that you feel terrible they're not being exposed to this or well you were being taught by people who had education they had real facts and things to talk to you about these teachers now are indoctrinated and so that's part of the time they spend in the classroom i mean i'm sure they're teaching a little bit, but they're

absolutely right.

And it's the same thing in graduate school.

The pinnacle of classical education, or could you say classical scholarship, was probably between 1930 and 1970, that 40-year period.

And I had these foreign-born professors at Stanford in the PhD program, and I would go, you know, I think they thought I was crazy, but I would ask them questions.

Did you ever meet A.W.

Gom, the author of the historical commentary on Thucydides?

Did you ever meet Maurice Bauer?

Did you ever meet Moses Finley?

Did you ever, you know, and I would go on, you know, on and on.

And they would say, yes, I did.

Yes, I did.

I had a class from him.

And I had a class from Herman Frankl and Edward Frankl.

And I had a class from Dennis Page.

And then you would ask them, did you ever really read Thucydides in Greek with Gom?

Yes, I did.

And

you couldn't believe it.

And it was not, oh, I'm this or I'm that.

It was all about the field and scholarship.

And the criticism was it was narrow and in isolation, I suppose.

But they felt they were giving us the tools that if we wanted to venture out beyond our field, we could be articulate in oral and written composition or oral diction.

And I would go into the American School Library and I would look at these great works of archaeological, you know, Benjamin Merritt, W.K.

Pritchett in epigraphy, or T.

Leslie Shearer at the

Agora excavations, or I would think of, you know, all of these giants of archaeological and epigraphical research.

And then I would talk to these elderly people that were in the library.

Did you know T.

Leslie Shearer?

Did you know William Densmore Sr.?

just junior did you know and what were they like and oscar winaire and you and they had all of these accounts of them and they had created modern American archaeology and epigraphy and in Greece and in the United States but it was not what you're reading about in graduate school today it wasn't

and there were overwhelmingly I mean in many of these fields especially pottery women were more included than men so it wasn't like it was just this old white guy thing that maybe it was aristocratic and as a farm kid I rebelled against it and I think people thought I was kind of crazy but they were not unfair to me.

In other words, if I took an exam, they didn't deliberately mark off because they thought I was a hick from Fresno County.

They thought that, but they didn't have that prejudice intrude into their estimation of your work, at least their written work.

So, what I'm getting at is we're not crazy.

We're not nostalgic.

We're not, I guess the Latin term is laudator tempores acti, you know, just an appraiser of the time past.

We're empirical.

and i can tell you that if you get a phd in classics in 1980 you can not only translate greek and latin at sight you can write it greek and not latin prose i don't think that's true today i think it's not true i think if you graduate from high school today you're not going to know anything compared to somebody who did it in 1960.

and so there has been a gradual but steady decline in undergraduate education k through 12 and when you try to mention that you get attacked as a racist racist or a reactionary.

But of course, who is this hurting?

Who is this hurting?

It's hurting people who are trying to be upwardly mobile, African Americans, Asian immigrants, Hispanic immigrants, who want to be successful and they need the tools and the quality of opportunity and that chance.

But when they do not get superior instruction and they get ideological instruction, all that does is that cements their their sense that, well, I'm not getting a good education, so I'm not going to be competitive, but I am getting the tools to complain why I'm not competitive.

And that's a double dose of tragedy.

Yeah, it sure is.

Maybe this Arizona bill will make a little dint in that.

We'll see, even though it's going to get messy, how they do in Arizona.

So it'll be an interesting case.

I think the other way that it's going to get messy is they're going to come out with not just worry about the public schools, but that the public schools are giving an inferior education to the charter schools and the private schools that are going to be getting more and more students.

I have a feeling.

And we'll see that it's going to be a two-tiered system, one for families that can get their kids to these special schools and those that have to settle for the public education.

No, that'll happen, but that'll happen on earning system.

Yeah, sure.

So we'll see it.

It's probably going to be very messy, but hopefully it will be turned for the better for Arizona.

Victor, this is the end of our podcast.

So, I'd like to thank you and the listeners.

Thank you, everybody, for listening again, and hope to see you or hear you or talk to you very soon.

All right.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.