Means and Methods of the Left

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is the Friday news roundup when we look at the news of the week.

We are recording on Tuesday, so a little bit earlier in the week than we are used to, but we'll look at some of the current news on the Ukraine, the Supreme Court protests.

We'll look to at the Women's Health Protection Act, and then maybe a little bit on the French elections.

So that's the agenda for today.

Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History.

at Hillsdale College.

We will take a moment for some messages and then we'll come right back and talk to Victor a little bit about how things are going on.

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And Victor, how are you doing today?

Well, I am doing very well.

I'm in day eight of being infected with COVID, and I've tested negative for, I guess, 48 hours.

And I haven't had a fever for 48 hours.

And just when everything's going great, I feel like somebody pulled the plug on me and I have no energy.

But

being always the non-Eeyore optimist, I feel that I am going to be fine.

And I'm headed Thursday to

Delaware to speak to the Intercollegiate Students Institute about my book and then at the World Policy Institute in Washington for a graduation address on Saturday and then the Bradley Foundation meetings.

And then I'm going to come home.

Sammy, and I'm going to have three days of rest and I'm going to go lead 110 people to Israel.

And I hope my

post-COVID strategies of rest supplements, I'm just being facetious now, but I'm going to be indestructible.

I don't understand why I got COVID because I had two Moderna shots and I had the Delta variant in September for three days and beat it.

And I went down to get a cardiology appointment and they told me I had almost 2,500 antibodies in October, but I didn't.

follow that up, I guess.

And I was speaking a lot.

I was traveling a lot.

I was getting four or five hours hours sleep a lot.

Now, Omicron is a new strain as well.

It's a new strain.

And from what I understand from my doctor friends that have called me, the Delta antibodies will not prevent reinfection, although they will prevent death.

And the Moderna two shots.

Yeah.

And I didn't get a booster because

why get a booster when you had 2,500 antibodies from a, they used to call that super immunity.

Remember that?

If you get two shots plus COVID?

For me, it was super dud immunity.

Well, I'm in COVID land with you, as you well know.

And I want to say about the development of virus that at least for me, their little virus didn't have a lot of precious bodily fluids involved.

And I would say that getting Norwalk virus was worse than getting this virus.

No, I've had the Norwalk virus.

I dissent because the Norwalk virus was a bolt of lightning for 48 hours.

and you had to be very careful with it because you would get diarrhea and vomiting and you get dehydrated but once you

you know if you were under good care at home or yourself and you drank a lot of electrolytes and water you would be weak for about five days but it was in and out this stuff is i don't know about you but

it starts the omicron it was is it seems different than delta in this way delta i had a deep dry cough this is a upper cough that's productive productive, wet, and it comes along with, you know, sinus and sinus headache and body chills.

But I had a high, I have a very low body temperature of 97.

And when you get up to 100, 101, that's pretty high for you.

And then I had weird things.

You know, you know, one day you think, hmm, I'll have a potato chip.

I haven't had one in a week and I can't taste a thing.

Or, wow, I have to take out all the dog crap off the lawn.

I'm really, that's really gross.

Oh, wow, it doesn't smell.

That's a pleasurable thing, though.

And you're, you know, you're walking and you get this excruciating pain in your heel.

That's plantar fasciitis.

I haven't had that in six years.

Oh, my God.

I have neuropathy in my feet.

I remember they used to call that hot foot when I rode a bike.

Where did all these things come from?

And I think it's your immune system, the cyclines and the leucotrines and the histamine get so wound up for with this virus

that it just creates a hyperimmune response.

And, you know, the weirdest thing, and I'll stop whining, is

I got no exercise for a week.

I still haven't.

I mean, I tried to walk, even if I was dying, I tried to walk about a mile in the morning and a mile in the evening, just even with a fever.

But my point is, I lost 10 pounds.

I thought, wow.

But I think it was from just laying there looking at the ceiling, aching and chills, and sweats.

And you're just, you know what I mean?

Your body is on fighting.

Your immune system is just pouring poisons to kill this thing.

And you want to say to it, calm down.

It's just a little virus.

You're going to kill me if you don't stop it.

You know what I mean?

Just slow down.

And so.

I think that's what was strange about it.

Yeah, I think anybody who has had it, the key to the whole thing and not dying from the covid virus is that you save your lungs and so whatever you need to do to kind of moderate the overreaction of your immune system you got to sit up i yeah i sat up as much as i could i stood and walked around i tried to cough up that stuff but not force it you know

And

I always take supplements because I have a condition called mastocytosis.

It's just too much histamine.

And I don't want to take pretisone.

And I even don't like to take singular because it kind of raises your eye pressure.

I have glaucoma, pre-glaucoma, glaucoma, whatever you want to call it.

But my point is this: that you can take a lot of stuff.

I take quercetin, luteolin, physetin.

I'm not advocating anybody, so don't do this.

And pine bark, just about seven or eight, what I call flavoids, antioxidants, antioxidants, and they reduce swelling.

And they have the same effect on your body, I suppose, as antihistamines, but they don't, they don't.

If I take a Benadryl, I can't urinate,

be frank about it.

So I take these and I have for about a year and a half, and they've just done wonders for me.

And if I don't eat high histamine foods and I stay, I don't even take antihistamines anymore and I feel, you know, 80% normal.

But this thing hit, and I started reading reading about long COVID.

It was just fascinating that a lot of the people who get long COVID, the doctors feel that it's an upregulated immune system that's pouring leucatrine and cycotine, then histamine into your blood.

And I guess maybe through your gut when you eat food or you inhale through your lungs.

And you don't need to do that and it won't shut off.

And you have to find mechanisms, whether it's sleeping or light exercise or meditation or supplements or some type of without taking steroids to shut that stuff off and get back to it.

And I can feel it.

You know, you just, I'll walk around and I feel like I've got a thousand pins and needles in my body, or I've got

just all of a sudden I'll have zero energy.

Or if I walk half a mile, I'm covered with sweat.

It's your immune system is what I'm getting at.

That's the key to this disease.

If you were not up to it, that is, you were a little heavy or you had some comorbidities or you're my age 68 you were in bad trouble yeah it was going to destroy your lungs and kill you so i really get angry about i was sitting there sick for this last seven days and thinking you know and when i hear people you know i one last thing about omicron is it's mysterious i know a lot of people with four shots that got it Now, they didn't get as sick as I did, but they got it and they did get sick.

And I know people with three, they got really sick.

And I hear that Vermont was the ideal state, 70% vaxxed, low, but they have one of the highest rates now.

Nobody can figure out: well, is it because people all went out and got vaxxed early, and now the vax is wearing off?

Or did the people who get boosters is it lower your immune system for 30 days or something?

And then they got boostered and they went out.

Or do the people who have prior immunity, it was to COVID original and COVID Delta.

And so it's those antibodies, T-cell memory, whatever they're not as good against this.

I don't know.

But every theory, every exegesis, every analysis of how many times have you had COVID?

How many shots?

How many boosters?

And can we find a pattern in which you didn't get it?

It doesn't compute with Omicron because there's so many variants.

Maybe looking to the future, it sounds like we're going to all be getting a little bit of COVID every year.

So we better wear it.

That's what's going to happen.

That's what happened with the flu.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I got it every year.

And then suddenly, in my 40s, my immune system had, you know, figured it out.

Yeah.

10 different strains of it.

And then I would just, I would get it for a day or two.

And that was it.

So I hope that that's what happens here.

So much.

Yeah, we better move on.

Dr.

Shakespeare.

Sammy and Dr.

Victor.

I'm sure I'm going to be brought up on charges by the where I work for dispensing medical advice, but I'm not.

I don't take whatever I said as a crackpot classicist farmer and not as medical advice.

Perfect.

So, all right, so let's turn to the Ukraine.

And I want to hear your thoughts on the war, on the current part of the war.

But also, I noticed that a colleague of yours, Neil Ferguson, has said that this, we're right in the midst of the Second Cold War, was what he, and I was wondering your thoughts on that.

He, his Second Cold War, the difference from the first is China leads and not the USSR, and the proxy war is in Europe and not in Asia.

But I was, those two things.

So

thoughts on that.

Well, Neil's a good friend.

We're colleagues at the Hoover Institution, and we've been through a lot together at Hoover, obviously

targeted by Stanford.

together along with Scott, Scott Atlas.

But I think what Neil is saying, and I've read iterations of this, is that we are in the same ideological struggle with a totalitarian philosophy.

The difference is this time it has metamorphosized from Russia to China, one.

Two,

it is now not so much a European as a Asian problem.

And three,

i.e.

China.

And three,

it's much more insidious now because it's more adaptive and less doctrinaire.

In other words, it's totalitarian, it's autocratic.

In the case of China, it's communistic, but it adopts and steals and emulates Western capitalism and technology.

So it has sophisticated parity in some areas.

I don't think they'll ever achieve parity because if you don't allow a person to speak and you don't allow a person to have an idea, ultimately in the long term, you're going to fall behind, but not in the short term.

So I think that's what he's he's talking about.

I'm very worried about Ukraine

because nobody's told me how it ends.

And I don't know how it ends, but

there has to be an off-ramp somehow.

And as one, you know, either it's going to be defeat of one side or the other, or it's going to be a negotiated 1918 type of armistice that won't solve anything until the next round.

But it's going to have to end one way or the other.

It might be like in a Middle East peace that we just go,

oh, we have four years and we'll just try it again.

That's what the Palestinians always think.

Maybe Putin will think that.

But it's going to be very hard for Vladimir Putin to say, I invaded Ukraine, a country just a fraction of my population and GDP and area.

And I bragged to the world that I had the most sophisticated armored vehicles, tanks, planes, missiles in the world, boats.

And I bragged that it would be a shock and awe-done deal like Ossatia and eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and I'm losing.

And I'm not just losing, I'm going to get 25, 35,000 Russians killed, and I'm going to wipe out my armor stocks and my missile stocks, and I'm going to get some very expensive ships blown up, and I'm going to bankrupt the oligarchic class in part, and we're going to be the pariahs of the Western world.

If he can pull it off, I don't know if he's going to accept that.

And if he doesn't accept it, what his terms of acceptance will be.

So we have to.

Yeah, you think Putin thinks like that?

I think he thinks I'm going to tear that country up.

Well, no, that's what I mean.

His way of ending the war is: okay, I wanted Kiev to the Russian border.

I didn't get that.

Okay, I wanted to institutionalize all the Donbass and the Crimea and areas that I'd stolen.

And then I can tell the Russian people now they're not breakaway republics that have come back to us.

They're part of Mother Russia.

I'm not sure he's going to get that.

So now what is he going to do?

He's going to say, you know what?

I made a desert and I call it peace.

Just like Tacitus said of the Romans, it's going to be a desert.

I'm going to just shell for the heck of it.

Whatever I want to do, one day, if some I see an UN official in that city, I got a big-mouth Ukrainian politician, I'll just blow it up, just send a missile in.

And whether he has enough missiles to do that, whether they're in the challenge and response cycle, they can knock them down.

I don't know.

Yeah, it seems like the Ukraine is doing really well destroying a lot of Russian tanks and their armor and such.

And so that's, yeah.

I wrote an article on that called Our Spanish Civil War, that this is a laboratory of new weapons for the next major conflagration.

And something has happened.

If you have a Ukrainian, and some of these clips that I get from people are pretty scary.

If you have a Ukrainian and he has a tube and he's got a sophisticated apparatus, which is basically a laptop and a telescope, you know, and he sees a target two miles away, three miles away, any target, and he's camouflaged

and he locks that on and it immediately gives that GPS coordinate adjusted to velocity.

And then that's transmitted to that tube and that tube doesn't have to be next to him.

You know what I mean?

It can be hidden somewhere else in the near vicinity.

Then you look at those things.

They look like little, they come out with little wings almost.

And then they, they're not drones.

They're suicide drones.

They're not quite missiles either.

And they go right out that target and they follow that target once they got the coordinates and then they don't give it up.

It's just amazing to watch them blow up helicopters, blow up tanks, blow up artillery pieces.

One person taking out, you know, I saw a clip this morning where he took out two, one person took out two helicopters, one big artillery platform and two tanks.

That's

$20 million of equipment and 10 to 15 lives of highly trained people.

One person did that.

And so I don't know how that translates, but in the history of warfare, there's always a challenge and then there's a response.

And for long periods, sometimes defense tyrannizes offense and then vice versa.

You know, you get gunpowder, then all of a sudden it's offense.

And then now we're into the idea of body armor, or you get catapults and you can knock down walls and you get, you know, earthen fillers in walls and it takes a gunpowder cannon and then back and forth.

But right now, we're in a decentralized cycle where individual people with highly sophisticated but easy to operate weapons can

cancel out what has been the dominant forces on the battlefield since World War II and that is heavy armor close to ground support from planes and helicopters and i don't know if we've dealt with that yet yeah we're seeing this in the ukrainian war that's very that's fascinating well victor let's take a moment for some more messages and come right back and we'll talk about the protests of supreme court well it's not even quite the decision yet, but the leak on what their decision on Roe versus Wade might be.

So we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, I was hoping to speak to you about especially the doxing of the Supreme Court justices in these protests and that the protests went to their house and houses.

And we have a U.S.

code section 1507 that says that's against the law and that these people should be fined and or imprisoned and so I find this interesting that we have still haven't seen anything happen to these people but what are your thoughts on this protest

well first there's the largest the larger landscape Where's the rage in the animus coming from?

That rage in the animus is there always with the left, but particularly they're looking at the midterm.

I've used that metaphor, I think, before with you.

They are tied on the railroad tracks with their own ideological twine and handcuffs, whatever.

And that locomotive is coming closer and accelerating.

And that's called the voters in November.

And they're looking around and they can't get out because they created

their own dilemma.

And you know what they're not going to do, Sammy?

They're not going to say, hey, get the Republicans and let's just get together and drop the politics and finish the wall.

And then we won't have this mess embarrassment in July of 2 million people trying to come across.

And you know what?

Just for now, let's just green light Keystone right away.

Just get that thing finished and open up Anwar, get a couple more million barrels in the system.

Oh, and by the way, let's just flood federal money into Seattle and

Los Angeles and San Francisco to hire police officers, give them a little boost just now, right before the midterms.

They're not going to do that.

They're ideologues.

It's like asking Lenin to suddenly become a capitalist.

They cannot do it.

And so what are they going to do instead?

They're going to scan the horizon and say, ah, January 6th, that commission, it's still there.

The walls are coming through.

We found a guy who, you know what, he says that was a conspiracy.

Let's get him.

Okay, that's not going to do it.

Oh.

100 million people are going to get COVID.

We might have to get lockdowns.

No, people are, they're done with that stuff.

And you know what?

That'll only hurt hurt Biden.

And by the way, don't remind him of that because Biden told everybody that the president is always responsible and should be removed if he loses 375,000 during his tenure, like Trump did.

And Biden has lost 600,000, so plus.

So don't go there.

And then they think, okay, okay, it's the Putin price hike.

That's who did it.

Well,

not really.

People were hurting because we were talking about

using the petroleum reserve or it was transitory inflation.

So we were already admitting it was bad before February 24th and the Ukraine war started.

So my point is they're looking for these things.

And now this week it's Roe versus Wade.

Hysteria.

And so that's the landscape that we're in that explains the anger, but they can't live and let live.

And I know that there's people in the radical pro-life that

stormed years ago, and they don't do it very often anymore, abortion clinics that were so-called legal, rather than just protesting.

A few of them did, not many.

But my point is this, if you say to the people, there's too many controversial issues that are not covered in the normal interpretation of the Constitution, therefore, according to the Constitution, the state shall have sovereignty in that issue of, you know, should you have an abortion?

It's not like should women vote, where the federal government intervenes and makes a blanket law.

Chuck Schumer, as you said, apparently thinks it is.

I think that's wonderful if he wants to do that.

If he wants to introduce a law that says that radical abortion up to the, you know, the partial birth abortion is what he's talking about.

If that's going to be the land of the law of the land and he can get the votes, okay, then I'll obey it.

I don't think he'll be able to do that.

I don't think he'll even get it.

I don't think he'll get 50 votes in his own party to do that.

But the point I'm getting at is that the left doesn't have a live and let live policy.

You know what I mean?

They can't say, okay,

we're in sophisticated, morally superior California.

We're in morally superior New York.

Everybody in Illinois is far brighter, far better people than Indiana and Ohio, just like we're far better than people in Mississippi and Nebraska and Wyoming.

And let them do what they want and we'll do what we want.

They don't think that way.

The right does.

The right says, I don't like the idea that they're killing people, babies that are, you know, not fetuses, they're babies.

They're killing them in California and I can't stop it, but I'm not going to have a civil war over it.

You know what I mean?

But not the left.

So they're going to, you know what's going to happen, Sammy.

They're going to, you think iver medicine was dangerous?

They claimed that hydroxychloroquine was dangerous.

Wait till they start mail ordering abortion pills to every single person that needs them on a website in Alabama or Florida or Texas, right?

Yeah.

And that's what they're going to do.

And they're going to say, I don't care.

It'll abort something.

And so what's going to happen is the blue states are going to start getting in the faces of the red states and saying, you've got to do this and this and this.

It's still a better bad solution than the bad solution of Roe versus Wade, which was just an edict by a federal Supreme Court judge.

This at least says,

there is nothing in the Constitution that says pro or con about abortion.

Therefore, it's a matter for the states.

Let the people vote on it.

If you don't like your state's policy, people, millions of people leave and change states every day.

Go to a, if that's an issue for you, go to a state that you want and feel more comfortable on abortion.

They just don't think that way.

Yeah.

Since you brought up Chuck Schumer's new bill, the Women's Health Protection Act, I was wondering, why do you think he's bringing this to a vote on Wednesday when it's most unlikely to pass or do anything?

Like, I don't understand the logic.

What is he going to do, Sammy?

What is Chuck Schumer,

the man who got out?

in front of the Supreme Court in, I guess it was March of 2020 and shook his fist right at the doors of the court, right in the head of a mob.

And that's a pretty volatile thing and said, Gorshich, kavanaugh

you

sowed the wind you're gonna reap the whirlwind you won't know what's gonna hit you what does that mean you're not gonna know what's gonna be hitting you what does he mean by that who's gonna hit whom that's what he said and that that was you know so how is he gonna

what's his purpose now oh we lost in the sense that the court we didn't lose the court just said we tried everything we tried to leak it illegally and then create a natural natural wave against these judges to threaten them we're even at their house now and we're intimidating them we're hoping that you know

one of them will cave

but it may not work so what's he going to do oh i'm going to get a national bill and i'm going to make it so radical that makes roe versus wade and i'm going to yell and scream and call everybody horrible names that's what he's going to do but nobody's going to vote i mean what's he going to do say i can't get the votes i can't introduce it no that's not how he gets votes.

I don't think he'll get even his Democratic votes.

He doesn't care.

He just wants to get on TV and scream and yell.

And so some crazy woman who dresses up as she's pregnant and fakes an abort, you know, horrible that protester in New York and pulls out a doll.

It was just so graphically.

She was near naked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was obscene.

That's the kind of response he wants.

And people get angry.

And maybe that will generate some appreciation for the democrats and the liberal

subtext about all this what is the subtext of all this when i was at 1971 i was 18 at uc santa cruz and it was right before and then i was there during rovius's wait and all of a sudden people started having abortions on campus 73 74 a lot we got up to over a million a year nationwide and

You know, I was a young kid who was stupid, but something told me it was not right, right?

And my parents were democrats but they told me it wasn't right so my point is this what changed when everybody was doing what changed was technology it wasn't morality it should have been but it wasn't suddenly there was something called ultrasounds and the left had said this thing this thing is a fetus and until it comes out and can walk around

if it is you know delivered tomorrow and

science, I mean, it didn't change the moral question, but it changed the public perception.

Suddenly, some woman, any woman who had a premature baby is five months, that baby could live because of new technology.

And more importantly, you could see

at eight weeks, nine, you could see this thing as this thing is not a thing.

It's a person.

It's a living thing.

And that really changed the public.

I'm not talking about the morality.

I'm not talking about my own views.

I'm just saying politically as a third party observer, that really changed people's perceptions.

And they said, Oh my god, I was pro-abortion, and now I can see that this is not a thing, it's a living person.

And that has brought up the

perception.

And where are we now?

We're about, as I read the polls, about 50%.

And 50%

says,

I do not believe in abortion except maybe with incest and rape.

And the other 50% says I want an abortion as long as I don't abort up.

I don't know how many weeks, I don't know what they do, but that's where

the center of opinion is.

I'm a little bit more on the restrictionist side, I suppose.

I am, I shouldn't say suppose, but that's where it is right now, where there's going to be some, there isn't going to be no compromise.

So it's an individual decision for people as a voters yeah and you know it's very weird about the left they say this is a woman's body and you can't tell people what to do with it well they told people i have a member of my family who was told that she had to get two vaccinations and the first one gave her a breath cyst

pretty clear and the second one an ovarian cyst and i had a special needs granddaughter who i did not want to get because of her condition and when she got these vaccinations she got some epileptic episodes for a while.

I'm not suggesting that,

you know, there was a cause and effect.

I will say there was literature that I read suggesting that this particular brand of shot for women gave false positives for breast lumps, and that the CDC and other federal agencies said, I think you should postpone mammograms for a particular period after a shot.

Now, why would they do that?

And so my point is there were legitimate worries about your body.

And so we had people who had COVID and said, I've had it once, I've had it twice.

I don't, it wasn't one of me.

I got the two vaccinations, but there were people who said, this is my body.

And the government can't tell me what to do with it because I cannot.

infect anybody more or less because I have had COVID and the natural antibody regimen is as good as the vaccination.

And you know what the left said?

Murder, apostate, you got to do this.

That's what they did.

So the thing that characterizes the left today is there's no logic.

There's no consistency.

There's no rationality.

I mean, they just explode, whatever the stimulus is, they react.

They remind me of a single cell amoeba.

They just bounce this way, then bounce, but they never say to themselves, what is the consistent position about a person's private health and the government?

It's never never consistent with them.

It's never consistent with the use of violence.

So they say to themselves, should you, as an American, get out in front of the Supreme Court building and scream and yell and threaten two judges with bodily harm?

You won't know what hits you.

Or should you go to a justice?

In other words, yes, as long as it's not justice, so to my ear or Kagan, right?

That's what they're saying.

And

the same thing on January 6th.

So a lot of conservatives said, you know what?

These people were treated asymmetrically.

I object to the lies about the death of Officer Sicknick.

I object to the lies of Ashley Babbitt.

I object to the censorship of information about how many FBI informants were in that crowd.

I object to the refusal to release the full video and internal communications about security.

However,

those who went inside the Capitol of the United States, even if they were invited in or whatever, and they destroyed things, I want them charged with felonies.

I don't want them in solitary confinement.

I do not want them treated inordinately.

I do not want them treated any more harshly than somebody over 120 days of rioting in 2020 broke a window.

I want the same treatment.

Not the left.

The left will say that was an insurrection, but going to a private home of a justice and screaming and yelling and threatening to the extent that they have to have security is not.

Or threatening, if you're a U.S.

senator and you're the minority leader in the Senate and you get out in front of the Supreme Court and you try to urge a crowd on

by basically threatening the lives of justices and said, you won't know what hits you, hit you.

Or you go into the Kavanaugh hearing and you disrupt it and you try to filter all through the corridors and confront senators to

that's okay if you're left.

Problem 120 days, no problem of looting.

35 dead things happen.

$2 billion, property is not really that important.

Looting, it's not really a crime.

Taking over a whole area in downtown Seattle, that's just chaz.

You know, that's just nothing.

And that's how their attitude is.

They're never now.

And you just recently had an article, The Exasperated American, about how Americans are starting to feel about all of these lies.

And I was hoping to get to that after we listen to a few messages.

So we'll be right back to talk to Victor about the exasperated American.

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Victor, your article on the exasperated American was pointing out a lot of what you've just been saying, but I was wondering, where are we seeing evidence that the American is actually exasperated by all the lies of the left?

Because, you know, I think there's a lot of people that still have the wool pulled over their eyes.

You know, oh, there are, but whoever thought

a year and a half ago when Joe Biden had all of Silicon Valley, Washington Post, NPR, New York Times, Wall Street, CEOs in Disney, American Airlines, United Airlines, Pepsi-Cola, LeBron,

NFL, Colin Kaepernick, Popular Culture, Jay-Z,

K-12, every lunatic university campus, all of that claiming that he was Cicero and he was a great uniter and the rogue, buffoon, evil, satanic, Luciferian Trump is gone.

Whoever thought that today he would be polling below 40%?

And whoever thought that none of his issues would be popular?

So they have had a sea change.

And it's not because everybody said, I'm a conservative now.

For some, it was, especially Latinos.

But a lot of them said, this can't go on.

I can't get baby formula.

I'm a long-haul trucker.

I can't live at $7 a gallon for diesel fuel in the western United States.

I just can't make it.

Somebody is an electrician.

I can't pay $130, excuse me, $180

for 12-2 Romex, 250 feet.

I just can't do it.

Some people are saying, I can't afford that house.

There's no way in the world I can afford that rent.

And other people are saying, I haven't had even a sirloin steak.

I haven't had in three months.

I can't afford $10 a pound.

I'll never eat it again.

That's what's happening.

Or people can't say, you know, in my entire life, a car dealer has never called me up and offered to buy my pile of crap used car, and they're doing it.

Or I have never gone to a new car dealer and they just sort of lounge around with no effort to sell me a car.

And I go out in the lot and there's three new cars and they all have a Mark's lot where it's four, five, six thousand dollars higher than the manufacturer's suggested retail price.

so these are new things new frontiers and people are scared to death do you think a person in the 40 million person california says to themselves oh i want to go up to fisherman's wharf i think i'm gonna go over to ghirardelli square so i'm just gonna take the kids and put them in the suv here in turlock or visalia and we're gonna have a grand old time we're gonna drive up to san francisco you know we're gonna go in june and we're gonna catch a giants game we're gonna park right there in the street, go over to see the tourist stuff, go to the game, come back out at nine that night.

Everything is going to be hunky-dory.

I don't think so.

I think they think, man, my car will be broken into.

Man, I'll be assaulted if it's dark.

Man, I got to make sure the kids don't step in human feces or some homeless person doesn't attack us.

That's what they're afraid of.

Yeah, but do you think that it is overshadowing the image that the Democrats always try to paint of the GOP as a bunch of dictators.

Yeah, I think it is.

I think, as I said earlier, there's only so many psychodramas.

The polls show that nobody believes Vladimir Putin is responsible for inflation.

Not when they told us that it was transitory before the war started and it's no big deal or it's a matter of Pelotons or something.

The polls show that they know that they concocted the border thing.

They wanted the border the way it is.

They like it the way it is.

They want millions of people coming through.

They love the disruption, the chaos, the future constituencies, they think.

So they got what they wanted.

And I think the people say that's not what I wanted, but I should correct myself.

That's not what I can live with.

And there's one other thing that we don't talk about.

And that is you talk to, I've been talking to a lot of Mexican-American people I grew up with.

And believe me, the number of people who say they've had it with the Democrats that I know, it's almost 100%.

And it's not just me, it's people that I see that are electricians and truck drivers and plumber.

They've had it.

And it's partly psychological and spiritual.

When you look at those protests, those abortion protests, and so you see these Catholic people, a lot of them are Hispanic in L.A., or you see the people in New York and they're seeing Ave Maria or something, and you compare that to the protesters, what they're saying and doing.

Or when you look at the doxing and the cancel culture, or you see the people, with their screaming and yelling at those justices' homes,

it's a contrast.

They don't like this profile of a young, urban, upscale, single person screaming and yelling at them as if they're a dunce.

And there's another thing that's going on.

Right now, all of these people that are screaming and yelling about critical race theory and critical legal theory and abortion, well versus what, all these urban angry people, they have to have oil.

They have to have gasoline for the cars.

They like to have people build homes.

They call plumbers to come and fix things for them.

They want to make sure that when they want that new kitchen, that somebody, they may not know what a two-inch drain line from their sink is, but they want that thing there now.

And they don't want a bunch of people from Honduras and Guatemala who are covered with tattoos walking around their neighborhoods, you know, in Seattle or Minneapolis or Beverly Hill.

They just don't.

And so it's...

Well, I hope you're right.

I hope you're right that the voter and the average person.

But people are tired of it, though.

That's what I'm trying to say.

They're exasperated.

They see these people and they say, you know what?

You created this mess and things don't work.

And you made fun of these people.

You call them deplorables and chumps and drags and clingers.

And yet these people are in short supply right now.

We got too many people like you.

We got a lot of sociology majors and unemployed six unit a year professional students.

And we got too many teachers screaming and yelling about their gender on TikTok.

But you know what?

We don't have electricians and plumbers and framers and roofers.

And you people need them more than they need you.

So that's what's happening a lot.

A lot of this is muscular classes, people are saying, you know what?

We're going to charge a lot of money now because we've had it.

You guys need us.

We don't need another.

I mean, how many dime a dozen half-educated third-grade teachers with pink hair they get on some social media and say, oh, I told my class today, you know, I just, who needs arithmetic, i.e., the subtext?

Who needs vocabulary, diagramming, sentence, or basics of, you know, vocabulary building?

Who needs that?

When you can hear me talk about my sexual ambiguity and how important I am, anybody can do that.

We shouldn't forget that that's a product of the university system and that's

a product they're putting out.

And if you look at what's going on in terms of hiring administrators, et cetera, they are still doubling and tripling down on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Universities or the corporate.

You're just starting to see, and I get private estimates, you're just starting to see a lot of very bright people

who are looking at the overhead on those diversity, equity, inclusion, all that stuff.

And they're saying, this person makes $250,000, this person has assistant, this person has a secretary,

and this is duplicating this and this.

And then there's a 30% retirement pension health care overhead.

And they're looking at that cost and then they're applying it to the tuition.

And it's about, in some of these schools, it's about $5,000 to $10,000 more per student.

And this is from the left who told us that the great evil on campuses are administrators.

Leftists hate administrators.

They always did.

Every time I would walk across a Cal State campus, the US Naval Academy, Pepperdine, Stanford University, anywhere, UC Berkeley, where I was visiting a lecturer at a professor, except for Hillsdale, everybody liked them there.

But everywhere else, people would say, that guy over there was a washout in the classroom.

They just promoted him to his level of incompetence.

He couldn't write a book if he had to.

Why do I listen to that guy tells me I have to have writing across the curriculum?

That's their attitude.

They had complete disdain.

And so now for the left to have all of these people slam down their throat with no accountability as administrators to be commissars and say to them, hello, Professor Smith, I'm a little worried.

I saw your syllabus.

I just want to make sure we have enough equity inclusion text there.

And you don't seem to be very comfortable with critical race theory.

Can you be a little bit more explicit?

I kind of bothered, we were kind of bothered about this idea of deadlines and pay-per-due at particular dates on your syllabus.

And, you know, I don't really think that we're adults now.

You have to come to class.

Do you really need that kind of stuff?

Yeah.

Well, I'd love to talk to you more on that because we just, in your area alone, the California Community College in your area, they just hire, and instead of hiring on as the president of that college,

an academic or somebody who has classroom experience and is a teacher and an instructor and very involved in the faculty, they hired on the student services vice president who has never done anything in the classroom.

And why?

Because he'll be a great diversity, equity, and inclusion person to further the agenda of that particular community college.

So, we'll just say one thing about that, if I could.

Throughout history, anytime you have these fads and these hysterias,

then you create opportunities for mediocrity.

So if you're in the Soviet Union during the show trials of the 1930s, and then you go after the military and you start executing everybody who built the modern Soviet military,

and then you start promoting on ideology, the people who almost lost the Soviet Union in the war in 1941,

from June 22nd onward, were all political general.

And they had to bring out the people from Siberia or who had been relegated to tide water or tide pool type things.

They brought them back in the mainstream.

They didn't want to.

They had to.

And the same thing about every in the 60s, I had so many professors, they put on wire rimmed glasses and grew their hair long and didn't take a bath at UC Santa Cruz.

And I thought they were.

I was to think that they were really cool and they were great professors because they saw an opportunity and they took it to hide their mediocrity under the cloak of being cool.

Well, this is what's happening right now.

So, every opportunist, every mediocrity, every person who cannot be a good teacher is going to be woke.

And every administrator,

where was a person headed who is a diversity, equity, and inclusion administrator prior to this, the woke?

What were they going to do?

They were going to what, major in gender studies or transgender studies or something, and then they were going to float around.

Yep.

They weren't going to get a job and no, they weren't going to get any respect from anybody.

And now it's like, I got to get in there.

I got to do this.

I've got to wrap that person out more than anybody else.

I've got to have five cancellation scalps under my belt.

I've got a dock.

That's what we're in right now, this revolutionary spiral.

And it's drawing everybody out of the woodwork who's a total mediocrity.

And I'm not going to get too close to my own career, but I can tell you that when I witness things firsthand, I say to myself, I can see where this trajectory is going following the George Floyd protests.

And I will predict to myself, Victor, do not get angry, but every mediocrity in your circle who does not publish, who does not speak, who does not appear in media, who doesn't write books, will now come to the fore.

And they will go after every single person who does.

And this is a golden moment for mediocrity.

And I have not been disappointed.

I'm not talking about a particular campus.

I'm not going to say anything more, but I can tell you that this is what happens in France in 1793.

This happened in 1917 in the Soviet Union.

It happened from 1966 to 78, 77.

in China.

It happened during the 60s in the United States, 1968 in Europe.

And when you have these revolutionary fluxes, you get a lot of really mediocre people who become revolutionaries because otherwise in calmer times are judged on their own achievement and merit, and they're found dismally wanting.

Yes.

Well, Victor, we have to call it quits here today.

Sometime we'll have to talk about what turns all of that around.

But I would like to thank you for all of your words of wisdom today.

What a great conversation.

Thank you.

And thank everybody for listening.

Yeah, and make sure that everybody comes to victorhanson.com and joins us at his website for all the writing, the ultra-writing.

It's a great deal.

The subscription, either $5 a month or $50 a year.

And we welcome one and all.

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

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

What a performance by Team California.

The power is ours.