The Left, Leaks, and "Disinformation" Czars

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

We are recording on Friday, May 6th, 2022.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the namesake and star, Victor Davis-Hansen, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You will find everything, links to everything Victor writes, all his appearances at victorhanson.com.

We'll talk more about that in a little bit.

You know, we've been away, but illness, a little bit of technical things have conspired to keep Victor from commenting on current events, but we're back in the saddle and we're going to talk about the biggest event of the week and maybe in quite some time, in a time of big events.

And this is the assault on the Supreme Court traditions and the leak of a likely majority opinion that would overturn the abortion right in Roe v.

Wade.

And we're going to get to Victor's thoughts on that and more right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

So, Victor, it's good to be talking to you again.

And I think, even better is talking to you, is hearing from you and your thoughts on some of these really dramatic things that have been happening in America.

After we talk about Roe v.

Wade, we'll talk about this Nina Jankowitz, this Ministry of Truth position and kind of lunatic to me anyway, who's going to oversee what free speech is in the United States.

Just crazy.

But even more important than that is this Roe, the possibility that Roe will be overturned.

But we know that because somebody leaked a document.

So, Victor, you've taken on a number of things here in a new piece you've written for American Greatness.

It's titled Losing the People.

That's a question, question mark.

Then change the rules.

You talk about, Victor, in this piece, court packing, threats that senators have made against Supreme Court justices such as Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama calling for a new state so he can get four more liberal senators, assaults on the Electoral College.

So here's a little quote from this piece.

And then, Victor, if you will take on what you wrote here and give us your thoughts about what's happened with the SCOTUS Supreme Court situation, you wrote, so what is behind leaking Supreme Court drafts of impending opinions or seeking to pack the Supreme Court with 15 justices or ending the Senate filibuster or adding two more states to the 60-year-old 50-state union or curtailing states' rights to set their own balloting procedures or trashing the Constitution's electoral college?

The answer to these questions also applies to Joe Biden's promise.

to cancel millions of contracted federally guaranteed student loans simply by a pre-midterm election executive fiat.

And how can Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkis openly negate federal immigration law?

How can he welcome millions to cross illegally the southern border?

The answers are obvious.

Victor, share with us those obvious answers, please.

Yeah, I will.

I want to apologize to our listeners, Jack, real quickly, because the last two or three podcasts, I was kind of in a brain fog.

I didn't know what was going on.

I remember I confused the John Ford movie, Sergeant Rutleach is a Sam Peckinpaw movie, and I just didn't feel normal.

And then four days ago, I got COVID and I had, I guess I had been fighting it.

And so I want to apologize to people if I feel or I sound weird, but this is the fifth day I'm starting with COVID.

And I think I had been fighting it.

And one thing I noticed about this thing, it's not just the fatigue, but your brain is scrambled.

So if I sounded scrambled, I apologize.

I think there's two issues, Jack.

The larger one is

Biden has this tendency to appoint people to particular cabinets to undermine the purpose of the cabinetcy.

So if you have a Homeland Security post for Mayorkas, his job, he sees it is to make the border insecure.

If you have a Pentagon official like Lloyd Austin or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, and their purpose is to create deterrence for the United States, then they give us Afghanistan or the two existential dangers purportedly is climate change and white supremacy, and

we lose deterrence.

If you have transportation secretary like Pete Buttigig, one thing we know that he will not do is build more roads and bridges.

And I could go on with Energy Secretary and everyone.

So it's in that context.

that we have this disinformation coming out of this new Homeland Security disinformation post.

We know that the person who will run it, she will be a master of disinformation.

And that's the way Biden operates.

I shouldn't say Biden, but the people around him who tell him what to do.

It's almost that we got to undermine these institutions, recalibrate them for a more socialist or diversity, equity, inclusion nation.

And that's really scary is what they're doing.

As far as the leaked memo, a couple of things that struck me is we really haven't seen that in the modern era.

And two, there was was no outrage on the part of the left.

So it was consistent with this attack on the Supreme Court that started really in the George Bush administration because once they started, they being the Republicans started to appoint really conservative justices.

I mean, no more Bruce Souters or Justice Kennedy, but people like Scalia, Analito, et cetera.

Then the court started to move back to a strict interpretationist or constructionist view, and and that set the leftoff on fire.

And the result has been, you know, Chuck Schumer getting out in front of the court and saying, you know, you're not going to know what hits you, Gorsiech.

You're not going to know what hits you, Kavanaugh.

What does he mean by that, Jack?

Does he mean what's going to hit them?

You don't know what

you're doing.

You don't know what you're playing.

All that stuff is really an implied threat.

And then we saw during Kavanaugh hearing, people going in the elevators, into the Senate proceedings, sort of the stuff stuff that they objected to on January 6th, the disruption of a congressional process.

And now with Jin Saki cannot even come out and say it's not an ethical or moral or proper thing to go to a chief justice's home, surround the home and scream and yell at them as they publish the addresses.

And so this is a sustained attack on the court.

And that was what my piece is about.

When they don't like something, they that left,

and they cannot win a public majority public approval for their position they either do one of two things they try to change the rules get rid of the filibuster pack the court get rid of the electoral college bring in two more states you name it or they try to change the demography and as i said in the piece it's very ironic because the hispanic voter is moving in historic fashion to the center and maybe even the center right.

If that should happen, they will close that border in two seconds.

And then second, all they're doing is setting precedents for the next Republican president.

So the more power they invest in executive orders and fiats and ignoring constitutional checks and balances, the more a future president will say, I'm just doing what they did.

We've already had one precedent, Jack, that is that.

If a president loses his majority in his first term at the first midterm, then the out party, the opposition party will impeach impeach him and he will not need a special counsel report they will not need lengthy hearings they will not need cross-examinations they will impeach him and that's the legacy that biden may look at if he loses this midterm victor i'm not a priest nor do i play one on tv or podcast but i just want you to know i offer you absolution for your forgetfulness sergeant rubber thank you i thought i thought it was getting seen out it's okay by the way that extremely popular episode and I think we should do more of that.

But let's, if we can stick on the Supreme Court for a second, Victor, this sense that it can be intimidated, it's been proven that it could be.

I mean, we had Justice Roberts, so Chief Justice Roberts, I think it's pretty commonly known and accepted that he flipped on the Obamacare decision.

maybe because of intimidation by the same Democrats who were Chuck Schumer's, the things he's saying now.

You know, Chief Justice Roberts seems to me very concerned that what the quote-unquote Roberts court, its position in history, maybe more so than even, you know, Justice Rehnquist.

Did Rehnquist care about the quote-unquote Rehnquist court as much as Robert cares about the Roberts?

I don't think so.

But the fact that it can be intimidated, I don't know that it will be in this case.

I hope and pray that the ruling that was leaked is essentially the ruling that comes out.

But the fact that it maybe could be intimidated has to do with the chief justice himself well yeah i mean if he didn't want to be intimidated he would call all of the justices in and saying i'm giving you 48 hours to talk to every one of your clerks

and then we're going to put them under oath under oath and they're going to swear that they didn't leak this and anybody who does not go under oath and agree to that is going to be fired and that would stop it really quickly he won't do that and we know it probably came from a left-wing justice.

Maybe the rumors are so do my ears, clerk.

But he's not going to do that.

And he probably will vote, I think, with the Democratic minority.

And so it'll be a five to four decision.

And then he'll think, well, that shows the court this balance.

And it was, and they had a gut-wrenching.

free exchange of ideas and principles on both sides.

And they came to a narrow decision rather than 6-3 that looked like, oh, a bunch of right-wingers have taken over the court.

That's how his mind works.

The only problem with that is he doesn't understand how the left-wing mind works.

And when they look at him, they interpret that magnanimity as weakness to be exploited, not as gratitude to be paid in kind.

So that's the problem with him.

And you meet John Roberts everywhere, really nice people.

And

they really do believe in the Marquis of Queensbury rules.

And I think that's wonderful for a Chief Justice.

But he's dealing with people who are absolute zealots.

And that's the way it is.

I don't quite understand,

Jack.

Maybe you can correct me, but the Bill Clinton bite-your-lip facade where abortion was going to be rare and unfortunate, and people regretted it, but you didn't want people with coat hangers in the alleys, that kind of approach to abortion, and you were going to stop it, you know, after 12 weeks at the most.

I guess we have the most liberal abortion.

You can abort in some states up to 24 weeks.

Is that right?

Or 22 weeks?

Up till in a number of states.

Six months.

No, up to partial birth.

Yes.

It's legal in some states.

It's insane.

It's murder.

But that was the Democrats said they didn't want.

And then all of a sudden, the last decade, starting with the Obamas, really.

abortion became almost a holy grail.

It was, this is really a wonderful thing.

And people started talking about it in reverential tones.

Right.

And

I couldn't understand that.

I mean,

you're killing somebody.

You're killing somebody.

Right.

I'm glad you mentioned Obama because he was a state, as we remember, he was a state senator and he oversaw a committee that he personally blocked legislation in Illinois related to an extremely rare case of a child surviving an abortion.

I remember it became a campaign issue.

Remember, Jack?

Yeah.

I mean, that's demented.

So the kid's alive, and what are you going to do?

You know, throw them in a bucket and let him die.

Another thing I didn't understand, Jack, was this left-wing resort to racism.

I mean, as I understand it, Blacks are, what, three times disproportionately, given their numbers in the population?

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

Or more.

Is it more?

I'm probably underestimating it.

I think they're almost 40% of all abortionists.

Yeah, where are the abortion clinics located?

They're not in Greenwich, Connecticut.

They're in the inner city.

Yeah, that's number one.

And then number two is the whole history of the American abortionist movement under Margaret Sanger, which was a eugenicist movement.

And then number three, every once in a while, a liberal icon lets out of the bag what's really going on.

Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, remember that interview she gave to the New Yorker magazine?

She said, well, what's the problem?

They're aborting the right people, aren't they?

And you get the impression that abortion is a racist idea because it's killing off young African-American children.

And the left has no problem with that.

Jesse Jackson, when he was pro-life, and he was, until he decided to run for president, condemned abortion as,

I can't think of the right, the phrase he used, but it was, you know, slaughter of blacks.

You mentioned Margaret Sanger, and she concocted the Negro project, the quote-unquote Negro project.

The roots of Planned Parenthood are very much in eugenics and race.

Anyway, Victor, that said, you talked about Jen Saki not condemning protesters, or of course the docks and the addresses we have now of the Supreme Court justices and the left's plans to protest at their homes.

And just quickly, Victor, I think some of us still believe when you think of the left, you think of flower children and all this kind of, all we are saying is give peace a chance, happy horse crap.

And what violence there is in America right now.

Take Dave Chappelle the other day, attacked on stage, right?

I mean, it's just one comic, one comedian, but we can't have comedy in America anymore.

The trans guy attacked him.

Of course, the violence in our streets 2020, I mean, the left is, it's violent.

They're violent

in the womb and they're violent on the streets of America.

And I don't, I still think this is not an idea that has gotten through the heads of a lot of people.

Just look at the expression on, I shouldn't say the expression, Elizabeth Warren, when she walked out and commented as she got into her car.

She was kind of aided by an assistant that steadied her.

I guess she was so angry.

And she just said, you know, she wanted to pack the court, but her expression was just so furious or that expression of Chuck Schumer when he was, I said earlier, screaming at the Supreme Court.

I think that was in March or April of 2020.

And it was after the Gorsuch debacle a few months later.

But yeah, the leaders are very angry.

And you see Obama, when he gets up on stage now, he starts to tense up and he gets very angry.

And Joe Biden has that reptilian look.

And then he gets angry.

You know, he says that the MAGA movement is the most violent or extreme in American history.

I'm thinking, oh, more than the American Nazi Party, more than the American Communist Party, Ku Klux Klan, SDS, Weatherman.

Antifa, BLM.

He just, that's just like a deplorable statement.

He just wrote off half the country, but he didn't care.

And so yeah, they're angry.

And what are they angry, Jack?

They're angry because they got everything they wanted.

They got the presidency.

They still, despite the Trump appointments, they still control the judiciary.

They have the Senate and they have the House.

And for 15 months, they've had the most progressive agenda we've ever seen since 1932.

36.

And what did it do?

It brought abject misery at the border, in foreign policy, in inflation, in energy development, in crime, in racial relations, and nobody wants it.

It's going to be a blowout in November.

And they're angry.

Why can't these stupid people appreciate what we're doing for them?

Don't they understand we have to be exempt?

We need private planes.

We have to have swimming pools.

We have to have our kids in private school.

We have to have fences around our estates.

How else can we help them?

That's their attitude.

And nobody wants that.

And so now they, as I said, change their rules, change their just anything, but they're angry, unhappy people.

And there is a mixture.

This is going to be controversial to say, but I do feel that there's some unspoken

or taboo subject that we can't talk about.

But this profile of urban young people,

and I'm talking in the early 30s to the late 40s, but you go to an urban setting and you live in an urban area and your life devotes around satisfying the appetites.

You go out to dinner, you go to a concert, your whole evenings are taken.

and you're upwardly mobile and you have this degree from the proper place and you're stamped with the BA, the JD, the MD, the MBA, whatever.

And you marry somebody of that social, economic, cultural malu, and then you don't have children, or you have maybe one at the most,

and you feel that you're making enough money now that, as you point out, you don't pay your student loans off.

Why would you do that?

But you're making enough money, you can divert attention to more important problems like diversity, equity, and inclusion.

That's a really toxic lifestyle.

When the time they get to their 50s, they're very, very angry, bitter people.

Unfortunately, I've had to spend my life around a lot of them.

And they're just angry, bitter people.

And the idea that, you know, you get married a little bit younger, you have children, you have your own home, you pay your mortgage off.

A debt that you incur is a debt that you pay back.

All of that, all of that,

that changes a person's behavior and attitude.

And that's, I think that's the root causes of a lot of the anger on the left.

There's just too many people who feel that when you get pregnant, you abort.

You get a condo or apartment and you don't buy a home.

And when you take out a big loan, there's going to be somebody, life of Julia, or pajama boy attitude that you're not responsible for.

And then when things don't get your way, you throw a teenage temper tantrum like Elizabeth Warren or Chuck Schumer.

And that's how you get through life.

And everybody gets back and says,

give them space.

We don't want them to come over to your house and scream at you in the evening.

Give them space.

They might burn down the federal courthouse, 120 days of rioting.

Give them space.

And that's how we react to them.

And Dave Chappelle, let's give him credit, Jack.

What did he say afterwards?

He said,

that guy tried to do it.

And I went right after, after I got up, I went over there.

got my licks in, he said.

And

I don't, I think the subtext of that is that the bodyguards came late, but they started hitting the guy.

And when they put him on the stretcher, he looked like they'd been beating him up.

But I don't condone that.

But the point was in the back of their mind, they thought, this is Gascon's LA County, and he will not prosecute this guy for that felonious assault.

So we're going to do it for him.

And that's exactly what happened.

He said, well, the gun wasn't real.

He's not going to be prosecuted for felony.

When do you have to?

have a gun to be charged with a felony if you go up and physically assault and try to hurt somebody.

That's a felonious assault.

And so there's pushback, is what I'm trying to say, John.

Pushback to all of this.

Well, Victor, some of the people who won't be pushing back are those who are sitting at home on their couches.

And we're going to talk about that in a little bit: the infantile

youth or adult

infants of America, which you've just touched on.

But before we get to that, we'll talk about Anina Jankowitz, the Biden administration's minister of truth.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Friday, May 6th.

So Victor, it's a little dated now.

Not too dated, though.

We haven't spoken about it.

Nina Jankiewicz is the kind of loon, one of many weirdos that seem to have taken

high positions in the Obama administration.

Alejandro Mayorkis, the head of Department of Homeland Security, was very defensive of this appointment.

I'm sure our listeners have caught her on

her TikTok videos with kind of harsh lyrics set to the tune of super califragilistic expialidocious.

Victor, the fact that there is even a ministry of truth, however it's being titled, in any administration, in any government in America is extremely troubling.

And then to have it head be this quasi-loon is even more disturbing.

Victor, your thoughts about Nina?

Sounds like the worst nightmare of what?

Abby Hoffman, Dave Harris, Jerry Rubin,

the whole 60s hippie movement.

Oh, the Nixon people are going to have an office of disinformation and they're going to, you know what I mean?

It's so weird that the left is finally where they always wanted to be, totalitarians.

And that is where they are.

They don't have popular support.

So they're going to take what, a 33-year-old Bren Maher graduate, and they're going to invest her with the power to adjudicate what is fake and what is not.

And they're all going to do it, Jack, under the ruse

that it's going to be directed at foreign terrorists.

But remember how that works.

Remember the Homeland Security under Obama said when people were coming back from Iraq, under no evidence.

We feel that the chief threat now is no longer Islamic.

terrorism.

And remember, they had all these weird rules.

They were extremism and overseas operations for the war on terror.

The people General Milley doesn't seem to care about anymore either.

Yeah, and they told us that the prime suspects were returning white male veterans, and there was no evidence.

And that was the very beginning of this.

It was the ruse was that we're interested in foreign policy disinformation.

And this is what they're going to say.

They're going to say these things are about Russian propaganda or Islamic problem.

It's not.

It's to try to label particular groups.

It doesn't even have to convict them or censor them.

They're just going to label them officially a disinformationist or a propagandist.

And then that person, no matter what they say, is going to be tainted.

And that's the purpose of it.

You're going to tell a 33-year-old that'll have, what, a Gin Socky-like press conference every once in a while, this is the disinformationist of the week.

And, you know, it could be Ben Shapiro, it could be you and me, it could be anybody.

And then we're supposed to say, but we're really not.

We promise we won't.

We'll do a podcast, Jack.

Let's do one on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And maybe, you know what, let's do one on Elizabeth Warren and say, you know what, we sympathize with her as the first Native American.

And then maybe they'll take that disinformation label away from us.

That's the whole point.

Right.

And why people on the left, I shouldn't say why they're supported.

It makes perfect sense they're supporting, but why they think that that doesn't embarrass them is really bizarre.

And they feel that they're so noble that any means necessary are justified by their noble ends.

It's really scary.

And this woman is a disinformationist.

She's the one that swore that Hunter Laptop's genuine computer incriminating the whole Biden family crime syndicate was a product of Russian disinformation.

She told us that the steel dossier and Russian collusion was a real thing.

Everything, every critical piece of news that was controversial, she aired on the side of the propagandist against the truth.

And now she's been rewarded for that for a purpose.

When he was under cross-examination about her appointment, you remember Mayorkas just said, I can't disclose how we, this is a committee.

And ultimately,

I'm responsible.

I'm the secretary and she's qualified.

And that was it.

I'm not going to answer any questions, basically.

That person,

Mayorkas, if they get the house, he should be the first person they impeach because he is abjectly impeachable because he has not enforced the law.

He's deliberately destroyed federal immigration law knowingly for cheap political purposes of letting in people who are illegally arriving in the United States.

They're not vaccinated.

They're not tested.

They're not audited.

There's no background checks and just lets them come in.

He knows he's breaking the law.

And he's the one that created this disinformation idea.

He did it to gain points with Joe Biden.

Just same thing, Jack, when Joe Biden was mouthing off about the Border Patrol on horses.

Remember that?

The mounted border patrol that were whipping innocent illegal aliens with their long reins?

Right.

And then he jumped and thought, I can do better than that, Mr.

President.

And he said, oh, this is horrible.

We're going to have an investigation.

Remember, Jack, that...

Secretary Mayorkas promised us a rapid investigation.

It took months.

When the investigation came back, it refuted everything the president and he had said and besmirching his own

patrolman, then he didn't apologize.

So he's part of the problem.

He explains Ms.

Janthewis's appointment.

He deliberately appointed somebody, as I said earlier, whose chief reason to be will be to undermine the idea of truth and will be a disinformationist.

It's the strangest thing in the world.

I remember I was at UC Santa Cruz as an 18-year-old, and there's this real radical guy, and nobody liked him.

There was some student council, I don't know if it was president, student body, and he came by, he said, I want you to vote for me.

And I said, Why would I vote for you?

And he said, Because I'm going to destroy it.

I go, What do you mean?

I'm going to screw things up so bad that this sham of a student council will end.

I said, Well, why would you take the effort to destroy?

Just don't participate.

Well, that's their attitude.

They want to

participate so they can destroy the very mission that they're supposed to protect in advance.

Right.

That's why a lot of Soviet overseeing governments in Eastern Europe, right?

The People's Republic, the Democratic Republic of, you know,

let's get involved in the democratic process to destroy the democratic process.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I'd like to raise a few things here.

We'll get to job quitting.

We'll get to the economy.

I should say, and we can talk about a number of aspects there.

But two things, if you don't mind.

One is I want to encourage our listeners to visit your website, victorhanson.com, and encourage them to subscribe because you have a lot of, you write a lot of material that is privileged.

It's called Ultra, and the only way you can read it, one can read it, is if one subscribes, it's $5 a month, $50 for the year.

And there's a lot of ultra material.

So if you love Victor, you love his writing.

You're doing yourself a disservice if you're not subscribing.

A little side hint here.

Mom likes it.

Mom likes Victor.

Get mom a subscription to victorhanson.com.

It's a quick thing you can do with Mother's Day coming up.

Although,

if this is broadcast after Mother's Day, you may be able to pull something out of the fire if you didn't give mom a gift.

And as Father's Day approaches, and not all, this may apply to mothers too, women who like military history.

I know on the website, you can find a link to the Second World Wars, Victor's best-selling book from a few years ago.

Probably about 100,000 copies sold now.

it's just a tremendous work.

And anyone who loves military history will love this book.

You'll find that and many other things at victorhandsome.com.

And then I want to make a recommendation.

Never do this, but there's a piece by our friend, George Nash.

George is the most.

lovely and wonderful man outside of Victor.

He is also a historian.

He's the historian of Herbert Hoover.

And of course, of some interest to you, Victor, being that you work with the Hoover Institution.

But George has a piece up on Acton Institute.

I can't give the link because, but go to acton.org.

Acton is the organization founded by Father Robert Sirico.

It's about free markets, et cetera.

But it's titled Conservatism and Its Current Discontents, a survey and a modest proposal.

So for our listeners who are interested in the state of conservatism, I think this is a very important and worthwhile and interesting piece.

And I want to recommend it.

Maybe on a future podcast, Victor, we could talk about that.

Now, that said, as I'm looking right now, it's Friday at a little after 11 on the East Coast.

Headline on the Drudge Report, April jobs up 428,000.

Another link, but participation falls.

Other headlines, Victor, right now, there are 11 million unfilled jobs in America.

The job quitting trend is growing.

And I don't know what else to say other than we have to move.

There's a nation of infantile adults.

If an adult is someone over 18, there are a lot of babies that would rather not work than work.

They're all sitting home and they're hoping their student loans will be paid off by the government.

Well, let's combine all those issues.

And we've talked about student loans before, but it just seems this is,

I don't know, do you think something is actually going to happen there?

Do you think Joe Biden is?

Yeah, I do.

I think he's going to split the difference between total amnesty and maybe something like ten or twenty thousand dollars he's going to give if he was smart he's not smart you know i oppose all of it but if he was smart politically he would have a cap on current income so if you were making over a hundred thousand dollars a year you would not get amnesty but of course then you run into the the paradox well what if somebody skimped and saved and you know and worked really hard and has three jobs and and makes 101 000 while somebody stays home making 20 000 working two days a week so once you get into trying to micromanage people's lives rather than just set a standard that everybody knows in advance what it is and whether you want to abide by or not you get in trouble and i know people in my family i know people all over the spectrum left right

black, white, brown, you name it, that don't feel they have to pay off those loans.

They just don't.

And they don't feel, I know other people, I see them every day that don't feel they need to work.

And I have this saga jack that I started with, you know, a little kind of burned part of my attic and then insulation removal, knob and two renewable, new roof.

Then all of a sudden the pipes were bad, new septic, new, and I've been doing this now.

It's driving me nuts for over three months.

But the big common denominator with everybody who comes out is the same thing.

It is some fanatically hardworking contractor,

maybe one or two of them,

and then maybe one or two loyal, hardworking employees, all of them who are making more money than they ever have made in their lives and have more business than they can possibly accommodate and are willing to pay rates that they would consider obscene.

Talking $25 an hour for on-skill and they can't find anybody.

They cannot find anybody they cannot get people to divorce themselves from the california entitlement covet you name the excuse but the entitlement industry or or if they can find somebody the person wants to be paid in cash at the end of the day every day so when joe biden bragged the other day about the unemployment rate doesn't matter what it is it's the labor non-participation rate or the labor participation rate.

It's going down.

And we're only like 62%, 61% of the available workforce is working.

And everybody says, well, look at the 3.6 unemployment rate.

Well, look at all the people who are not participating.

If they were participating, believe me, we wouldn't have, what, 1.4 negative GDP growth in the first quarter.

They could be helping us rebuild.

They could help us get out of COVID.

They could do a lot of stuff.

And I can tell you after having COVID for four days, the biggest frustration I have is I've been working each day in bed but it's not being able to work fully and it's stressful because you want to do so many things you have all these deadlines and things that are piling up you feel so terrible you disappointed people yeah i was going to be at that meeting yeah i was going to give that lecture i promised i was going to go on this tv thing and you just have to cancel because you're you know you're 101 temperature you're dizzy you're achy can't speak you sound terrible but i just don't understand that attitude that you're healthy the sun rises and you want to do what?

Play video games?

Yeah.

Nation of pantloads.

It's, I guess, what it is.

It's the nation of Julia's and Pajama Boy.

Well, Victor, it's that time of year, college graduation, and I'd like to get your thoughts on principle about commencements.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor College Graduations, you're a retired professor.

You have yourself been asked and have been the commencement speaker a few times.

But increasingly, to me, it's just me, and

sorry to our listeners who are disappointed with me

injecting my own opinions here.

But to me, the thought of commencement, given the march of ideology through our institutions, especially the academy, I think these things as a custom are more harmful to Western civilization now than, I don't know if they even were beneficial.

It was maybe the icing on the cake, the exclamation point of the period, you know, the end of the four years, now go forth and

become an honest citizen.

But I think they are.

places where wokeness is reaffirmed.

And of course, you know, conservatives need not apply.

None are invited to be commencement speakers at any colleges.

So those are my grumpy views of commencement.

Am I wrong?

Is there virtue?

Are they worth disdaining?

Any thoughts, Victor?

Former commencement speaker, Victor?

No, I think you're right.

I gave one

15 years ago at the commencement at St.

John's College in Annapolis.

I gave one.

to Pepperdine School of Public Policy.

I think I'm supposed to give one in two weeks at the Institute of World Politics in Washington commencement.

But there are certain rules I think that are important.

You shouldn't speak for more than 10 or 15 minutes.

And it should be on things of interest to the student, challenges, and give them some kind of confidence.

And that's about as close as you should get to politics.

So you should start with the idea that half the people in the audience would disagree with you if you want to get political.

So don't get political.

It's not an occasion where parents and people who invest a lot of time and money want to hear that they're wrong or incorrect.

And yet that's exactly what happens.

Stanford University, I won't mention the speaker as I know him, but he went to Stanford about five years ago and lambasted Trump.

And all I heard from about a quarter of the people I talked to were they got up and walked out.

This is one of the great moments of their, they felt their kid was graduating from Stanford and they were being addressed as if they were ignorant people who needed to be tutorialed, tutored on the evils of Donald Trump.

And that's what they do.

They do two things.

They pick commencement speakers that will politicize and give a harangue on, you name it, diversity, equity, inclusion, abortion, feminism, racism, transphobia.

Or they try to make a mockery of it and get some weird Robert De Niro to come, an actor,

or some kind of stand-up comic or a rapper, somebody whose very presence represents an affront to the people who allowed them to pick the speaker.

And that's supposed to be neat or funny or chic.

I don't know.

But it's kind of like the White House correspondence dinner, right?

Right.

Everybody thinks it's a really great thing and nobody cares anymore.

So when they say, I was a commencement speaker, what does that mean anymore?

That means everybody's a commencement.

Snoop Dogg has probably been a commencement speaker.

So it doesn't mean anything anymore.

Nobody pays any attention.

It's like, okay, give my kid the diploma.

Get the guy up there to give the talk, but don't do palal please no more than 10 minutes i'm typing to see if if snoop dog

ever was a commencement speaker uh well i don't have

i'll tell you what we'll

oh he did at breakfast he did holy crap yeah holy mackerel well anyway that's too funny and too sad at the same time well victor we A few more minutes here in today's episode.

The episode that we put up the other day about favorite movies and books, etc.

Actually, given the illness, that's something we had pre-recorded for when you were going to be away in Israel, which is still to come.

Anyway, a lot of it, it's only been up a day or two, a lot of great response to it so far.

And a couple people emailed me about books.

And I'm putting you on the spot here, but They were curious if you had ever read the Flashman series by George McDonald Fraser.

Have you read that?

You mean the not the Master and Commander one?

No, no, this is

kind of oh, these are the ones that were in the 1970s.

Well, this it's set in the late 1800s, but it's these are

Flashman.

Yeah, yeah, I have not, but okay, they were Napoleonic and early 19th century war novels and stuff.

Yeah, well, but comical.

So, well, anyway, you settle the answer.

You haven't read them.

No, I haven't.

But people were curious of your views on them.

I need to read them.

Well,

I haven't written, you know, I haven't read enough.

There were periods in my life when I've had a lot of illnesses.

I had, you know, like I said, I've had malaria, I've had anemic dysentery.

I've had seven or eight major operations, some of them overseas.

And in recovery, that's what I do.

I read novels.

And otherwise, I've always read, you know, non-fiction, mostly histories, prose histories.

So I can't speak with any authority on novels of the quality.

I wrote a novel, The End of Sparta, but I found it the most difficult thing to do.

Much more difficult than writing nonfiction.

Several of the writers were shocked that you even had time to read Victor.

So, well, with that said, we are approaching the very end of the show.

And one other thing related to our recent podcast.

I'm going to read two comments.

One is from the website.

Steve Moses wrote, You've Got Mail was a remake of a much better movie, Shop Around the Corner.

It starred Jimmy Stewart, not Carrie Grant.

So this is where I have to seek absolution because I was commenting on Tom Hanks and my recollection.

I was thinking of Sleepless in Seattle, which

is a remake of An Affair to Remember from the late 50s, which was with Carrie Grant and Deborah Carr.

So anyway, thanks, Steve, for the correction.

Now, we appreciate our growing audience and those who come to itunes who leave ratings.

Thank you very much.

And many people leave comments.

And here are two.

One states, howdy neighbor.

I first encountered Dr.

Hansen on Megan Kelly's podcast, promptly became his devoted listener.

I look forward to each new episode.

And I'm sad when all those on my list are Mark Played.

I'm a retired attorney living in the Sierra Nevada foothills and think of Dr.

Hansen as a friendly neighbor.

If that neighbor happened to be a brilliant and learned scholar and keen observer of our political and social worlds, I especially appreciate his understanding and respect for real people, acquainted with work and hardships that are unimaginable and of no interest to the ruling class.

My one dissatisfaction with the podcast is the delay in availability of episodes.

I crave Dr.

Hansen's insights on current events and would love to receive them sooner.

Thanks to Dr.

Hansen and his able co-hosts for all they share with with the listeners.

That's nice.

Yeah, it's nice.

I cut the name off by mistake.

I apologize for that.

But you know,

I said we had some technical problems, and it was the day that I actually got the full-blown symptoms.

And I was fooling around with the internet, and we have kind of a quota out here of megabytes.

And I didn't know how to, I do know how to exceed them, but I wasn't thinking.

I was like two seconds behind everything.

So Jack and I tried and tried and tried and I didn't realize it was my fault.

And then the ones that we did do a little earlier, I thought, this is very strange.

You know, I would get up and I'd go out, talk to the painters, or the guys who were pointing some men or digging trenches for conduit, all these major repairs.

And then I would get dizzy and I would come back.

I thought, this is weird.

So I would walk more and I thought this is, and I didn't know what was going on.

This went on for about a week.

And then suddenly it hit me that Sunday night.

I thought, wow, I've got a cold.

I've got the flu.

But it wasn't.

It was this weird.

What do we call it, Jack?

When you get sick with it, this is the second time I've had it.

Delta.

And by the way, I think this variant of Omicron is much worse than the Delta that I got in September.

But you get angry at the Chinese.

You think, wow, in some weird lab.

Or do you get angry at Anthony Fauci for his gain of function subsidies?

They really, somebody really engineered this little little sucker.

Absolutely.

So it would be infectious.

It would come back.

It would, it was like they thought, wow,

how can we make this thing so infectious?

And then just when we're going to kill it, it's going to switch.

You know, it's like the proverbial devil that has all these different guises and appearances.

And just when you think you've got your arms around him,

he...

he's got a mellifilous voice and says,

let me out of jail.

And it has a New York accent, Victor, like I do.

And and by the way the my our co-alma mater uh mochi and i uh

holy cross has just announced that it is naming the their new big steins building after after tony after the uh fallen away pro-abortion catholic who who helped fund a dis a disease that has killed millions is getting

to call it the gain in function medical school yeah shocking well it's not shocking that's the problem yeah by the way the the person who left that comment was signed it as Evil Potato.

So, well, thank you, Evil.

One of my great dreams is to retire in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

I have a little place up in the real Sierra higher up, but I don't get up there much.

And I'm kind of in a rut

besides the COVID rut this week, but it just seems that.

You know, you think, wow, when you're 63, you're going to say, no, no moths.

65, you need a little bit more, no moths.

And then you get this hyperinflation and all these stuff.

Think, well, I'll just go to 69, no moss.

And here I am, 68.

And I'm thinking, 71,

but you got to do it sometime where you're going to die without

being in Sierra Nevada,

Sierra Nevada.

I thought a couple of years ago, I was 62, I can, which I am now, I could just pack it in.

I'm like, there ain't no way for another decade.

I, you know, they just have to keep working.

Thanks, Joe.

We all brag that we're living longer.

What's the point if you're just working yourself to the very end?

So the bone.

I shouldn't.

Hey, we're kind of hypocrites.

Some listener is going to say, Hey, Victor, you just told us that nobody wants to work.

And now you're saying that you don't want to work.

Well, there is a difference.

If you worked your whole life since you're 16, can't you quit it when you're 65?

Remember your parents, that big move, retire when you're 55?

Right.

Well, especially, you know, what if you're an iron worker or a carpenter or, you know, working when you're 70 is

maybe you can do that as an academic, right?

You can, but the strain on the body.

No, you're absolutely right.

And I have a guy who's my age.

And

when I pick up things, I have a torn AC joint in one shoulder that I never took care of.

all these other adhesions from a couple of three abdominal surgeries.

And man, i don't know how he does it and he's 60 67 and he's out there working and there's people older i see out there working so my grandfather literally died in his bed at 86 after irrigating all day

and shoveling and so and my other grandfather had mouth cancer from a world war one gassing he got that finally did him in and he was out breaking horses when he was 79 and then he died so it's died six weeks later.

So it's possible, but the only scary thing is about non-physical labor, you think, well, I don't have to go out there and shovel or

carry with my back.

So I can go longer, but it means that it's predicated entirely on your cerebral responses, your cognitive abilities.

And that's something that is scary because you don't quite understand the erosion that's taking place.

The word searching or you, you know, when you get a cold or a temperature, it just shuts down when you get older.

So,

and that you can really see it in Joe Biden.

He's not even aware that he's in la-la land or Nancy Pelosi's in la la land or Diane Feinstein is in la la land.

But physically, they think, wow, you know, 80 is a new 60.

And you want to say, no, it's not.

Strom Thurmond was in la la land, but I think he was still reading.

I think he had enjoyment of youthful sex, though.

I mean, he seemed like he had a younger wife.

Yeah, he's remarkable.

Well, anyway, Victor, that's about all the time we have today.

I'm glad you're back in the saddle, my friend.

And thanks to our listeners for listening.

And we'll be back again in a couple of days with yet a new episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks, Jack.

Thank everybody for listening.