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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the weekend edition, and we like to do something a little bit different on the weekends.

And this weekend, I thought maybe since we're getting very close to graduations for everyone, we'll talk a little bit about America's youth and especially those in universities and graduating.

It would be our first topic.

And then we will turn to Boeing leaving Chicago, their headquarters leaving downtown Chicago.

Maybe a little talk about the Dave Chappelle attacker and the presses that just don't seem to be able anymore to be neutral.

And so maybe we can have a discussion about why that is.

Victor is the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He has a website, victorhanson.com, and we welcome everybody to come join it

with all of the

material that's particular to the website, his ultra articles.

And there is at least 2,400 to 3000 words each week in exclusive ultra content for the website so we would like to see everybody there victor how are you doing today very good i'm fighting the post covet fatigue but i'm hanging in there sammy all right and let's take a moment for some messages and then come right back and you can let us know what's at the top of your mind we'll be right back

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Welcome back, Victor.

What's on the top of your mouth?

Before we get into our youth and university students, et cetera, what's anything that you would like to talk about first in the news?

I know that we have the Supreme Court and we've talked a little bit about those protests and

the Ukrainian war, of course, but anything that's struck me.

I kind of combined, you know, in my

fever-induced madness the last week, I started to think of things.

And, you know, when I was listening to to Biden and all these people, you know, we're going to do this and we're going to do that.

We're going to print $40 billion and give Ukraine more power to it.

Okay.

But the whole point is that we're just as our parents were.

We're the same country that built the Hoover Dam.

There's still people like that around us.

We're the same people who got in B-17s and flew into instant death over Schwanford.

We're the same people who created the California aqueduct.

I don't think we are.

I'm really starting to worry about that.

And the reason is, is that the more we talk about all we're so great and diverse, and I just look at certain vignettes that the world is seeing.

So what if you were looking, you were a Ukrainian or a Russian or a Chinese

subject or a Taiwanese.

So all these countries are going to be affected for either negatively or positive by us in the way that they used to be.

You know, the United States was a no better friend and no worse enemy, to quote Plutarch's life of Sola.

But just think of it for a minute, Sammy.

I was just thinking, so they see what?

The Saturday night blood report from Chicago, 10, 20, 30 people killed every day, 800 a year.

And what?

Or they see a vignette of San Francisco with spending a billion dollars to put homeless people, I guess, into hotels, which they trash, or this whole homeless population on the streets as if it's 1950s Calcutta, India.

Or

they look at the homes of the Supreme Court justices with these people screaming and yelling purportedly with the idea they're families.

And then they're issuing threats to Supreme Court justices as if we're some kind of, I don't know, third world country.

Or they're babies.

baby formulas missing from the shelves.

I mean, I was in dictatorship Greece in 1973 during the Arab oil embargo, and that's the last time I can remember there was nothing on the shelf.

But the idea that you don't have baby formula and this government and shipping it in pallets down to store for illegal aliens breaking the law and getting free things that American citizens can't buy?

Or are we going to see diesel semis just park because the truckers can no longer function at $7 a gallon gas, excuse me, diesel fuel?

So these are what's striking me is that the fabric of shelter and safety.

I mean, you really want to have a picture of downtown Seattle or downtown downtown Denver and say, this is what makes America great?

It's starting to unravel.

And as it starts to unravel, it reminds me of Dickinson in London as the British Empire was all over the world.

And of course, that's what the MAGA movement was about.

But this arrogance and impotence is what I guess I'm trying to say.

The idea you fly a pride flag or you have a gender studies course at Kabul at the moment.

you are fleeing in terror of the Taliban and turning over $80 billion and a billion dollar embassy and a $300 or $400 million refitted Air Force base.

And yet you're infusing your cultural assumptions on a pre-modern society, but they're stronger than you are.

You know what I'm saying?

So it's a disconnect.

Yeah, it seems to lack self-reflection on the part of those people who think somehow that these policies are putting them at the forefront, that they can't see that future generations may judge them as harshly, if not worse.

Yeah, that's that's what it is.

That's exactly what it is.

There was an op-ed in the Washington Post by a young student who said that they should change George Washington University because he was a racist and get rid of the Churchill, this and that.

I thought to myself, USOB, would you last one day in sub-freezing?

temperatures where people dying of cholera and dysentery at Valley Forge?

Would you?

And what happens to you when you're in your 50s and you get a kidney stone or

you need prescription glasses or you have cats?

You think those people just died and they did things and they built this country.

I'm in a city in the East Coast and I'm walking around.

It's basically the downtown is empty, but I see these beautiful buildings that were built and I think, who were those people?

I feel like I'm...

you know, in the dark ages of Greece, maybe 900 BC, and I'm looking around every once in a while.

I bump into a tholos tomb or the Mycenaean Lion Gate, and I say, Who are those weird people?

I guess they were the Cyclops, they were the Olympians.

How do I?

We can't do those things.

We can't build that.

What are these funny writings on these tablets?

Magical letters.

I mean, that's where we're getting at.

We're getting into a dark age, and we're looking back at the remnants of a colossal society that we can't match.

So we hate it and we flail at it and we lie to ourselves.

But boy, the stuff of a society is shelter, affordable housing, building materials.

It's food.

You better build some aqueducts more.

You should better build some more reservoirs in California, California.

If you don't have food, you have nothing.

It's fuel to move.

If you can't move, you don't have a civilization.

He just canceled, Biden just canceled more offshore leases and as well as in Alaska.

So you need fuel, you need fuel, you need shelter.

You have no society unless you have security.

I think

police and abroad a military that doesn't fold like a tent in afghanistan while it gives lectures about diversity and and inclusion and equity of people i think quentin tarantino has a brilliant sort of little vignette about that impotent young generation i hate to say this he gets the young kid who's supposed to be helping the fbis in that elevator and in true romance and he starts saying when the gun gets pulled out in the elevator, he just starts cowering in the corner saying, somebody fix this.

Somebody get me out of here.

I just want to get away.

And I just get a feeling that when this generation gets put up against the wall, you know, the gun's out, they're going to just

need somebody save me.

We know what Tony Blinken did.

We know what all the Biden advisors did in Afghanistan.

We know what they're doing with the Iranian deal.

Please, please go back in this Iran deal.

Please, please just make it all go away.

That was, Tarantino wrote that screenplay for Tony Scott.

That was a brilliant movie to own the mass.

And we know what they do.

We know what they do with the border.

Just come across.

Just, we don't want to deal with it.

Just take it away.

I mean, if they had serious people, they'd say, let's get together and let's finish the wall, hold our noses, stop the immigration, illegal immigration problem, then we'll adjudicate it.

Or they'd say, what happened in Afghanistan?

We better go back to military efficacy and lethality and not social engineering and the military.

Or they would say, you know what, for now, let's build Keystone

and let's start, we open ANWAR and get those frackers moving, give them some more federal leases.

We would say, you know what, you can't print any more money.

You got to raise interest rates, tighten your belts.

We've got to shock this economy back to normality.

They're not going to do that because they're A, ignorant and B, they're arrogant.

And so it's going to,

wait to, wait to Gen Saki's, people like Jin Socky don't have a baby formula.

And they make fun of people, working class people who can't get baby formula.

And they think it's cute that, oh, they don't have their baby formula.

Hmm.

They're not natural breastfeeders like we are.

Ooh.

They don't like the little aliens.

formula with these racist deplorable they all are very smug but they have never been up against it and the working classes in this country have been up against it They know what it is to drive all day long and make no money.

They know how to get on a tractor for 14 hours and live on nothing.

They know what it's like to be under a house and fix a sewage pipe.

And they don't want any more lectures from this pampered, irrelevant generation that's running the country into the ground.

So I was just thinking of that.

That was your answer to your long answer.

You know, it does take me into what I was hoping to talk about because I was looking at some articles on youth mental health as

on the decline.

And suspiciously, this is written after Elon Musk bought Twitter.

And of course, one of the things that they blame for mental health being on the decline now is social media all of a sudden.

But I think that that opinion has been out there for some time, even before Elon Musk.

And the other thing that youth are putting in so much time to study, or at least some of these youth are hours and getting perfect grades and getting perfect SAT scores and doing all the community service, and yet they can't get into universities.

And the one article I was looking at, a young girl with impeccable credentials, couldn't get into her first 10 universities.

So she still didn't know where she was going to go to school.

And the article was talking about how it's adversely affecting our youth.

You know, what are these kids going to do?

Are they going to start just giving up on this education thing?

So I thought that those two articles were kind of interesting.

What this country is doing is they've taken about 50 universities, undergraduate and those with graduate programs, and they said, these have magical cattle brands and we stamp you with it.

Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, or whatever, and Amherst,

Oberlin, whatever.

We stamp you you brown, and then you're set for life.

The old boy network kicks in.

Now, we're not going to monitor any of the curricula.

We don't really know what you do.

Once you get in, that was the screening process.

You worked hard in high school.

After that, they can feel as guilty as they want and water down the, that was the system.

And the old system, I can tell you that a student who graduated from Hillsdale College was better educated than from Princeton or Harvard or Yale.

But never mind.

That was the system.

They played by the rules.

Now the system is diversity, equity, inclusion after George Floyd.

So we're not going to be proportionally representative.

We're going to be disproportionately repertory representative.

By this, I mean, if you're 11 to 12% African-American population, we're going to have 11 to 12%

in Yale or in Harvard.

But if...

After George Floyd, to make up for the sins of your awful ancestors, it might be 16, 17, ditto Latinos, Latinos, ditto women, 55%, whatever.

And the only group left you can take it out of are white males and to a lesser extent, white female.

And you got to add legacies in there and you got to have athletes.

So essentially, these 50 or so institutions that brand you for a career trajectory are saying, well, we're not going to, our kids are protected.

We know the admissions officers.

We know the dean.

We know the president.

We got money.

But the upper middle class professional, you don't quite cut it.

So you're the sacrificial lamp.

And then we're starting to see that merit no longer is there.

No more SAT.

You have to, if you're letting people in that wouldn't be admitted under prior criteria, and those prior criteria were somewhat serious and valid.

So now you're letting these people in, and then we have a whole chain of events that follow.

The professor says, I'm not going to die on the altar of diversity.

I'm not going to give this, this, this student C's because they weren't prepared, and then show that I have a habit of, I don't know, discrimination against marginalized people.

So they lower their standards.

And the medical school does, and the business school, and the law school.

Okay.

Well, maybe the standards, this is what we're going to learn, Sammy.

Maybe the standards were phony, but we'll learn because they're not there anymore.

So people are watching this, these institutions explode, and they have two reactions to it.

Do I want to pay $100,000 a year for that?

Maybe my kid can go to Ohio State.

Maybe he can go to UC Irvine.

And it's just as politicized, but it's a a hell of a lot cheaper.

Maybe my kid can go to vocational.

Hey,

I make $700,000 a year and I'm a suburbanite in Hillsborough and I can't get my house remodeled.

And all of a sudden, the king of the hill is that contractor.

And those guys on the roof are making 70 bucks an hour and they're the go-to people in Palo Alto if you want to get a new home built.

So maybe we've got our values screwed up.

So we're in a process of revolution.

I think a lot of people are going to say, go to a vocational school, go to two years to JC, then transfer, but don't value those cattle brands.

And the first comes to shove will be this.

And that is when we start to see a number of faculty teaching at these universities that are not just insane, but incompetent.

We're starting to see that.

And when a person comes out of Harvard Medical or Stanford Medical School and doesn't know anything, and that will be down the road.

And when the same thing is true of the business school and the law school, and then you're going to see a complete deer in the headlights reaction.

And so far, there was what they drew, there was imaginable line between the humanities and electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, where you didn't go down the destroy merit route.

But I think it's even filtered into the hard sciences and math and engineering and technology courses, the STEM courses.

And if it has, then we're done for.

It's kind of like what happened on the cultural revolution under Mao, you remember that if you mouse certain platitudes in the little red book, then all of a sudden you were picked and that awful guy with glasses that could speak English and German and was a physicist, you put him out in the country and made him hold weeds.

Or the same thing during the commissariat in the Soviet system.

where hacks came out of the woodwork.

Remember, I'll just finish this rant, is when you create a non-merocratic ideological system, as we are doing, every mediocre, marginalized talent comes out of the woodwork and says, I am more zealous than that guy.

I will rat out that person.

I went on the internet and found that tweet.

I heard him say she,

and then that's how they operate.

And that's what's happening right now.

And look at the people around Biden.

They're completely, they don't know anything about oil or gas.

They don't know anything about economics.

They don't know anything about the military.

They don't know about anything about anything.

And the record speaks for itself.

Yeah, it does.

Victor, let's take a moment to hear some messages and then come right back and talk about what you might say to the youth, given all of those things that we've talked about for this.

part of the year, this season, if I can call it that, of graduation.

So let's listen to some messages and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

And just to finish on our youth, I know I asked you about their mental health, but actually I would like to hear if you have a message for those who are in fact graduating right now and what you might tell them as they go out into the big wild world that we have today.

I am going to give a graduation address, if I can keep my voice, and I'm going to do it Saturday night in Washington, D.C.

And I'm going to tell them, tell them, that's a bad, arrogant thing to say, I'm going to suggest to them that while things are going to hell, it's an exciting time to be alive because we're going to need people with old ancient wisdom that understand what deterrence is, that understand that when you print money and it chases too few goods, you have something called inflation, that evil people in the world treat magnanimity as weakness to be exploited, and compassion is as something that's superfluous, that will never be returned in kind.

And so I'm going to try to tell people that there have been periods like this in the world.

And if we were alive during Caligula's reign or Nero, I mean, the whole Augustan principle had collapsed.

It was just being destroyed.

And then all of a sudden come this guy called Vespasian and his son Titus.

And then we get into Nerva and the five good emperors.

We get a hundred years of resurgence.

470s, the whole Western concept of romanity was destroyed.

And lo and behold, the Eastern rigid Orthodox Byzantines at Constantinople, within 70 years, they'll produce the Justinian law code in Santa Sofia, and then for a thousand years, civilization will thrive where it could not in the West.

Or think of Britain.

I was thinking of that the other day.

What if you were a British subject in July of 1940?

The indomitable French army had just collapsed.

The entire European EU, today's EU, was under the control of Germany.

Italy, Germany, and Japan, and the Soviet Union.

Remember that under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact since August of 1939, the Soviet Union was on the side, basically, of Germany.

And America was isolation.

There was nobody but Britain, and they were starting the blitz.

Why didn't they just do what a lot of people wanted in Britain collapse?

But they wrote, I mean,

it really was their finest hour.

And, you know, the same thing about World War II.

We went over there and we helped defeat the Nazis and we defeated the Japanese and we had the world's great economy and everybody else in Europe and Asia was flattened and there was no powerful China then.

The Soviet Union was wrecked.

And all of a sudden, communism started to sweep the globe and the United States under Harry Truman said, nope, we're going to go right back and rearm and Korea, Vietnam, all of that catastrophe.

My God, we won the Cold War.

And Reagan, you know, said, gosh, right in the fumes of the Cultural Revolution, when everybody was in the United States, we were saying, you know, drop in, tune out, drop in, drop out, et cetera.

Timothy Leary.

And this old-fashioned confidence that we're going to, you know, morning in America, everybody made fun of it.

And so I admire these graduates.

If they have that attitude that they can go out and they're going to thrive on adversity and they're going to rebuild this country, because after all, Sammy, it's all self-induced.

Think about it.

Are we short fuel?

No, we have more gas and oil than anybody in the world.

Are we short food?

We have no baby.

No, we have the most effective agricultural sector in the world.

Is it because we don't have a military?

No, we have the most sophisticated military in the world.

Is it because our universities don't have, no, they have $50 billion endowments like Harvard or 30 billion like Stanford?

So these are self-created, self-induced pathologies.

No volcano, no tsunami, no foreign war, even COVID.

Nobody did it to us.

We're doing it to ourselves, and therefore we can correct it.

So it sounds like your message is don't lose your head in all the madness, but dig in and approach everything as rationally and as

rationally as you can, right, to these students.

I think that's a good message for them, that they shouldn't become apathetic because of the the whole nature of things in their universities and the disaster that we've been seeing in the last year with the Biden administration.

Yeah, is that fair to say?

Remember, I mean, people make fun of if, you remember that Kipling poem?

I'm just trying to remember, if you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of, what was it, distance run, if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue.

And you mentioned, the reason I mentioned it, because you mentioned if

you can bear to hear the truth spoken, if you can dream, if you can think, if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those, I think they called them imposters.

I think it's the first line is what I'm trying to think.

It's if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

Biden sure can't.

He can't keep his head.

He blames everybody but himself.

So, yeah, that's what I was trying to say.

All right.

So let's make a turn here to the

world and the Boeing's headquarters are being moved from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia.

I think that they're trying to get away from the crime in downtown Chicago.

I don't know if Arlington, Virginia will be a better place.

It seems to me that if I recall right, that city is a lot more calm.

But I think there are two topics here.

First off, is corporate America seeing its way beyond some sort of righteous stand on diversity equity and inclusion or that culture that woke culture that they have and two just the whole state of chicago that a whole headquarters is being moved out of it i don't blame them myself but i don't blame them and i blame them because corporate america gave a shot of adrenaline to the woke movement, as we know from Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Cola, that complained about the voting laws.

Remember, they had the move the All-Star Game and American Airlines and Delta Airlines and Disney.

So they thought this is the wave of the future.

We have no independent, discriminatory, critical mind.

So we're just, and I mean discriminatory in the the ability to fathom bad from good.

But my point is that that they all piled on, didn't they?

And now they've discovered, I don't know, two or three things traditional america is pushing back as we saw in florida against disney number two well

hillary clinton remember after she lost she bragged i don't know if you remember this but she said hey everybody i want all the big blue states i want all the big cities i want all where the universities are where the money is where action is i.e trump got the deplorables and so that was the corporate idea that they were going to have headquarters in san francisco and Chicago.

And guess what?

The left got everything they wanted.

And those cities are unsafe.

They are broke.

They're full of homeless people.

And if you're a CEO or you're a minor CEO, you're anybody, you can be killed on the way to work.

I think there was a story not long ago that certain companies have told Denver they're not going downtown.

because you know we can talk all we want about woke and everything but basically you're saying if it's so filthy dirty

and it's so dangerous, then why would our employees want to deal with it?

They have to come to work.

They need the infrastructure.

There is no infrastructure in Chicago now.

It's death alley every Saturday night, every Friday night.

And it's lapping, you know, we saw this poor culinary student shot and it's starting to lap into good neighborhoods.

And

Boeing says, where are you going to get workers to live there?

And believe me, he wouldn't have gone into Virginia had Yunkin not won.

And then he's looking at Virginia, the CEO, and he's saying, you know, it's not near Washington.

We have defense contracts, but you know what?

It seems to be in a period where it's going to go back to good governance.

And so that's what these corporations are starting to look at.

And I think you'll start to see a lot of questioning about Silicon Valley.

They're already leaving to places like Austin, and you can see Tennessee is a place as well.

And I think Los Angeles is losing, is really bleeding because these cities are unlivable.

They really are.

They've been destroyed by left-wing progressive mayors.

I mean, Lori Lightfoot is insane.

She's unhinged.

She had a call to arms.

She said, I have a call to arms about the Supreme Court decision.

She's got no experience with anybody who has a family and

try to buy a house and live in Chicago.

She doesn't care.

The thing to remember is these people don't care.

Biden, Pelosi, they don't live like normal people do.

They don't have the hardships and the challenges and the issues.

They're protected by their money and their influence and their name.

And nobody really fathomed that because they said they were left-wing.

Left-wing for them is an insurance policy.

It's an amendment clause that says, you know what, if I have a bad tweet today or I say something illiberal tomorrow, I'm safe because they know I'm left-wing.

Yeah, and it seems to me that these officials like Leichfitt, who seems delusional if she's going to run again, if you ask me, but they seem to just think, oh, I just smile and deny anything that doesn't look good for me.

And that's how the job's done.

And I'm going to stay in it and I'm doing a good job.

And why is she there?

She's there because she ran on being black and gay and female.

And it was never a question of policy.

And so that's, I mean, let's face it.

Not that there's a lot of mediocrity.

I mean, there's a lot of mediocrity people in the Daley family, believe me.

But what we got to the point was, we had an African-American woman appointed to the Federal Reserve.

Nobody talked about whether she was qualified or not.

They said the first black woman that's on the Federal Reserve.

And then we had a new press secretary to take Jen Circling Back Sake.

And guess what?

What did she say?

She's the first black

female gay woman.

We have no idea what her background is, other than she still believes in the age of supposed disinformation.

She still believes that Stacey Abrams apparently won the election, lost by 55,000 votes for the governorship of Georgia.

And she believes that Hillary Clinton really did win in 2016.

And she's going to lecture us about why we need a department of disinformation.

Yeah.

And so that's what happens when you, but getting back to that same, you know, that same, I'm a member of the inner circle, the apparatus in the Soviet Union.

I was on the long march with Mao, whatever this political feed is, then it trumps every other criterion.

And so they got what they wanted.

They got in every single major city, you have a woke mayor or a woke county or city prosecutor, you have woke police, you have everything you want.

And the problem is nobody wants it now, not because they're racist or sexist, but because they just can't walk across the street without fear of of their lives, or they feel that all of these city employees are living in a fashion that they couldn't, or the streets are filthy, or the more gun control they have, the more people get killed by guns.

But why don't we see recalls happening of these people that have such disastrous policies like this, Lori Lightfoot?

At least they tried to recall Gavin Newsome.

I know it didn't work, but

nonetheless.

It's very simple: that you had so much wealth and so much competence and infrastructure and development in those cities.

I'm walking around Williamton, Delaware.

I look at these beautiful, they're mostly empty, but these beautiful buildings.

And the same thing with Washington.

Who were these people?

We talked about earlier in this broadcast.

And so there's a lot of rot in there to ruin.

And by that, I mean, you can take a lot of rot.

So Lori Lightfoot inherited the financial and trading and commercial capital of the entire Midwest.

Everything from agriculture to precious metals to ores to steel to cars, everything.

It's hard to destroy that.

And just through her, she's doing her best.

Gavin Newsom inherited, my God, the most beautiful city in the world.

homes that were 100 years old, infrastructure that had been developed, a port, all of that.

It's hard to destroy.

Now, he's doing his best.

If you go there, it's unlivable and there's homeless people, but there's a lot of rot there.

Same thing with Los Angeles and Gasco and the attorney.

So that's what I'm saying is that, and we're reaching that critical mass, aren't we?

You can make the argument that basically from 380, I don't know, 360 AD, it was over for Rome, but it took 100 years.

because there had been so much brilliant talent invested in the infrastructure and the laws and the traditions and customs that,

you know and there's so many pockets it's still half the country so these cities feed on san francisco when i go up there i just get in line on either pacheco pass on the ultimate pass and get behind these huge trucks and what are they bringing in they're they're bringing in food and plastic pipe and shingles and two by sixes so these cities are being fed by people who operate in very different circumstances than they do.

And so it's going to take a while, but we've never seen such nihilistic cannibalism is what I'm trying to say.

And they're doing their best to destroy the accumulated labor and capital of a whole generation.

Yeah, nihilistic capitalism is the word for it.

Well, Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and then come right back to talk a little bit about the French elections and maybe what they show about

right swing of politics.

But we'll be right back after these messages.

Welcome back.

And to once again change the subject a little bit, maybe a little bit a lot without a segue, I was looking at the French election results came back, and the Marine Le Pen, who is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen,

received 41% of the vote to Macron's 58%.

So he seems to have wiped her out.

But my question is, does the 41%,

which is quite a lot, even if it's not gonna get her the presidency, is that a significantly high vote, even if she lost?

Yeah, I think it is.

I mean, it wouldn't be if she was kind of

unpresentable like her father was for a variety of reasons, or she was in her 60s or 70s, but she's in, I think she's in her young 50s, 52, 53,

and she's got a message.

And the message is that a corrupt aristocracy masquerading as if they are socialist are running France into the ground and the quality of life is slipping and they have not a clue about how to deal with radical Islam or immigration problems or a static ossified economy.

And it's time for a radical change.

And And four out of 10 people said, you're right.

And that's pretty revolutionary for France because most of the turmoil has always traditionally come from the left.

And so we'll see what she does.

And then sort of like the first time around, people mentioned Brexit.

And I think people are starting to get acculturated, but we'll see.

If you had said Donald Trump in 2014 is going to run in 2016, people would have laughed.

They laughed in 2015.

They laughed in 2016.

They're laughing now that he could ever come back.

What's happening in the West in general, general, in the United States, I think in particular, is we're living in an empire of lies.

So everybody has a private reality that's empirical, and they adjudicate things that they feel is evidence.

And then they have to have a public facade of lies.

And so in France, you say that France is an economical, wonderful society that's diverse, but privately you don't want to go into certain suburbs of Paris or you'll get killed.

Or you'll say,

we are enriched by different cultures, but you tell Jewish people not to dress or behave in any way that could be seen as Jewish because you cannot no longer be protected in the major cities.

Or

you,

you know, you have to pay a certain amount for fuel or for electricity because the way it is.

But everybody doesn't think it doesn't have to be that way.

Here in the United States, when we live and we talk with people we trust, we just look at the world empirically and we say, you know what, Afghanistan was the worst humiliation since Vietnam in 1975.

But publicly, we say, well, this is unfortunate and there was a misdirection and there was strategic ineptitude.

Or we say to ourselves,

you can't walk into a major city at night.

It's like the 19th century or the 1960s in America.

You can't do it.

But you don't want to say that because that could be termed, what, illiberal or even racist.

Or we say,

this is such a, our deans, our provosts, our department chairs said, we live in a racist society.

This is horrible.

And white supremacy, and we just say that, say that every single day,

you know, at Dartmouth or Amherst or,

you know, UCLA or Stanford.

But secretly, we know that we're all trying to say that we're Hispanic or Latino or Black when we apply to college because we understand that discrimination goes in a different direction than what the official rule is.

I mean, if you don't believe that, if you're one quarter Latino or you're a third African-American, would you really want to apply as a white person to Harvard?

I mean, maybe you would.

80 years ago, 100 years ago, you'd say, I'm white, because it was a racist society.

But is it a racist society now that you wouldn't dare say that?

When people get caught passing for a particular race, it's not like the 19, was it 1947 movie Pinky?

It was kind of a tragedy about a black person that was white or the human stain, that Philip Roth novel about the lead character.

But now it's just the opposite, which shows you that it's still racism.

But the difference is if you're a racial Dozel

or you're Elizabeth Warren, or you're Sean King or Ward Churchill, what are they doing?

They're passing for minorities.

And no minorities are passing as they used to for white because white under racist auspices often brought privilege.

And now under different auspices, not being white brings privilege.

They call that payback, but actually it's the same attitude, the same ideology that we're going to obsess over your superficial appearance.

Yeah.

Well, on that superficial appearance, although I don't think this man would

buy into that, we had the death of one of our California representatives or former representative, Norm Yoshio Minetta, who had been in the relocation camps for the Japanese.

He has been a Secretary of Transportation under George W.

Bush.

He participated or was instrumental in bills such as the Transportation Efficiency Act and the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which created the TSA and the American Disabilities Act.

And so he did participate in some very significant legislation as well.

And I was wondering what your thoughts were on this man who I see as an old-time Democrat, who said before he joined the Democratic Party, which he finally did, but when he was just out of the relocation camps from the Japanese, and one of his friends was telling him, hey, you know, this, you got to join the Democratic Party.

He said, why would I do that?

they put me into a relocation camp and so sort of had a very broad view that most of us don't see given his years and his experience in the united states and i thought he's a very interesting man and of course i'm a californian so it's one of our representatives what are your thoughts

well i guess you would say that he's what he represents and the individual particular life he lived.

He had an exemplary life.

As you said, he was put in the relocation camps.

I think he joined the Army and Navy after World War II.

He was in that generation born in 1930 that were young children during World War II.

They had this belief in America that it would honor the aspirations and the idealisms of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

So whatever the discrimination, they always felt that it was a lapse.

or a weakening or a retroaggression in a otherwise great system that they wanted to be a part of.

And they faced real racism and hardship.

They weren't like the present generation that has not, but yet feels the system because it's not perfect, is no good, and should be destroyed, basically.

And so that's the big difference.

I think he was, I don't know, the longest serving transportation secretary.

And he served in a Republican administration, George W.

Bush.

He was there on 9-11.

So he was the one that gave the order, rightly or wrongly.

And I think it was right on retrospect that all airplanes in the sky should just immediately land no matter what.

As far as that, you know, I'm just remembering from memory now with Roosevelt.

Roosevelt signed the executive order, let's face it.

And the McClatchy newspapers, especially the Sacramento B, got its wish.

C.K.

McClatchy II, I think, was the person who wrote op-ed after op-ed about putting people in relocation camps.

And then there was, what's his name?

Was not a good person, John McCloy.

He was one of the wise men.

He was assistant secretary, what I guess they call it war then, rather than defense.

He was a big player.

And

who was the attorney general at the time and later during, was governor during World War II?

It was none other than liberal Earl Warren.

So that was a democratic liberal idea.

And, you know, they had, this is interesting, as I remember, they had discussions about the one-drop rule because There were people who had been intermarried.

And so what if your grandfather was Japanese or only one parent was if you're half or quarter what see anytime you use racial discrimination you butt up against a reality and that reality is okay then give me your criteria mr racial fixator and it's hard and i think they took the one drop rule or at least a lot of people did in other words if you had anybody in your family who was japanese you went to the camp that started by the way you know after the civil war the civil war i think the ante bellum south was one quarter.

If you had a grandparent that was Black, then you were Black.

And then after the Civil War and into the 20th century, the idea came, well, if you have one drop, then we're going to call you Black.

I know that because

remember Hallie Berry, the actress?

Yeah.

Well, she had a big fight, a custody fight.

I'm just doing this off the top of my head, but she had a custody fight with her white boyfriend, and she was half black.

And so their child was one quarter black.

And she said to the judge, or remember, it was reported, I want custody because this child is black.

And of course, her boyfriend said, well, he's half, you're half white, and I'm white.

So, and what does it matter anyway?

And she said, I evoked the one drop rule.

She did.

She was one drop black, therefore she's black.

Just the opposite of the racist intention, but racist in itself.

And so that's where we're getting.

You can just imagine, I'm getting off on a tangent from a good man, Norman Minetta, but that's what they did with the Japanese.

And I think that's what colleges do now, don't they?

I know if you want to be Native American, you can apply to the Department of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Affairs.

And if you can show that one of your grandparents was Native American, then they give you a certificate.

that you're one quarter and then you can present that to universities or to jaw uh employers or to particular tribes as certification.

And then

they only require, I think, 116th.

And so remember that came up with Kevin McCarthy's brother-in-law.

He was a contractor in California.

He claimed he was 18th Native American.

He got a minority set-aside contract.

And that was a big discussion about it.

In this racial fixation of ours, we're all trying to go back and employ the methods of the Confederacy.

And I'll just finish by saying, if if you came from Mars and you walked around America in south of the Mason-Dixon line, let's say in 1860, 61,

and you flew back and you came to California in 2022, you say, my God, it's the same thing.

They're both obsessed with race.

They talk about one-drop rules and their percentages.

They use race

to

leverage privilege.

They both hate the federal government and have sanctuary areas where they say that states' rights apply, not the federal government.

They are both one-party societies where only one party is in control.

And it's kind of a hereditary party.

In our case, it's wealthy families, you know, the Jerry Brown or the Pelosi's, the Newsom, that run things, just like the plantation class.

And

they talk of succession, that they don't want to be subject to this awful federal government.

There's been, is it two or three articles in the New Republic and Nation magazine about blue state succession, that they're so much smarter and better and wealthier that they don't need the red states and they want to succeed?

Wow, let them do it.

Yeah, a lot.

Well, I know.

I mean, most people, but the question is, then what happens if you're stuck in a blue state that succeeds?

Yeah, true.

It'd be sort of like against slavery, but be stuck in Alabama for your entire life.

Yeah.

Well,

in my case, I don't have loyalty to California, believe me, if it were to succeed, because it's antithetical to the Constitution now, the state's whole method of governance.

Back to Norman Mineta.

He still is sort of a fair, I would like to say a farewell to the old Democrat because he did work with Republicans and

across party party lines all the time.

So that was a better age, I think.

And

look at the Japanese American experience.

There were the Asian Exclusionary Acts, et cetera, et cetera.

But that generation, especially as World War II faded, they said to themselves, we came over here, our ancestors did, because there were opportunities here.

We understood that the majority culture was white, 90%.

And we understand what that would be like in Japan, which is 99% Japanese.

So if you think that this was a nuclear racist society, if in 1910, a bunch of white people from Oregon and Washington decided they were going to go become Japanese citizens in Japan, good luck.

In fact, good luck today and try it.

See what happens to you.

So

they understood that.

And they said, this country is different.

Majority populations always are distrustful of minority populations, but this one has a self-correcting constitution.

And the declaration says all men are created equal.

So they have better angels, the better angels of their nature.

They understood that we could improve.

So they came here and then they looked, sized it up and they said, ah, this is a merocratic society.

Even though they discriminate, we're going to educate our children at above parity.

above the mean, above the median.

And if there's professions and those are high paying, paying autonomous positions of money and influence and independence then more power to japanese american they thought and so all during the 50s and 60s and 70s you had japanese orthodontists and doctors and x-ray experts and when you look at japanese american statistics on income compared to the white average, much higher.

If you look at criminality or imprisonment or arrest, much lower than the American mean.

That was their way of saying, this is how you deal with racism and prejudice.

And they just beat the system.

And then once you beat the system, it sort of disappears.

And, you know, I grew up in the Central Valley where there were a lot of Japanese American families.

And I can tell you in the 1960s and 70s, it had pretty much worked that their incomes were as high or higher than non-Japanese, that people dated who were not Japanese and intermarried.

They had not done that in the 50s, and they had not done that in the early 60s.

But by the 70s and 80s, they were doing that.

And now the community is almost all assimilated.

And so for good or bad, it is.

And so that's something the left hates.

And the next generation of Asians who went to the university were taught a very different message that this is such an inherently racist, horrible country that you have to join the left and dispose of this country.

It can't be changed.

Norman Manetta was from a different generation.

He was very, very successful.

And he was successful because I think his creed was to be better

than the competition.

And he had the ability and the desire to do so.

Yeah.

All right.

Victor, thank you very much.

I think that in general, I know that conditions are not so great in our country today, but your talk today was inspirational in the sense that, as you said, it it doesn't have to be this way.

We have the ability to change things just as they've been changed for the worse, at least in the last year and a half or so.

And I thank you for that.

Well, thank you, Sammy, and thank everybody for listening.

If I sound stuffed up, it's because I am.

And if I sound stuffed up, it's because I'm just coming out of COVID land myself.

Wow.

Okay.

All right.

Well, thanks, everybody.

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