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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we are recording on Monday, March 21st, 2022.

Victor is the star and the namesake.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Please check out his website, victorhanson.com.

More about that in a little bit.

Right after these messages, we're going to talk about AOC and the House Progressive Caucus and their executive order demands that they have made on President Joe Biden.

We'll do that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So Victor, my friend, you've probably heard that the great AOC, oblivious to the political tenor of the country, is with her 98-member caucus.

This is the House and Senate Progressive Caucus.

They have a list of demands of Joe Biden, totally at odds with any polling we've seen lately, where America stands on issues.

And they want Joe Biden to issue eight executive orders or take executive actions, totally circumvent Congress.

And here they are.

Lower health care costs.

Combat the climate crisis and reduce fossil fuel dependence, cancel federal student loan debt, expand worker power, number five, invest in care, economy, jobs, and standards.

That means home health care so they can unionize babysitting.

Advance immigrant rights.

Number seven, regulate for economic and tax fairness.

And number eight, deliver on the promise of equal justice under the law.

And Victor, I could elaborate on any number of these things, but under that last one, deliver on the promise of equal justice under the law.

Here's what their statement says: Help reduce deadly force by police officers by establishing strict national

standards, demilitarize law enforcement by preventing the transfer of certain military-grade weapons to federal, tribal, state, and local police.

America is so done with just that issue, you know, defund the police, and yet AOC

and her Paisons at the Progressive Caucus are doubling doubling down.

Maybe they know something, Victor.

Maybe they think this is the only way between now and after November.

Forget it.

Forget it.

None of this is happening.

But executive action by Joe Biden is something they're demanding.

Your thoughts on this, Victor?

Yeah, it's funny when you have people in the legislative branch of government that are basically saying

we can't push through a non-democratic agenda, so let's override ourselves.

That's what they're saying.

In other words, let's have the president use executive orders to do what the Congress is supposed to do, but we would do it, but we wouldn't get the result we wanted, so we're going to nullify the Congress.

Sort of like the Iran treaty, remember with Obama?

It was supposed to be a treaty and need Senate ratification by 60 votes, and that didn't happen.

You know, when you listen to these people, AOC, and they say, we're going to do, we need to spend this, and we need to do this, and we need to do this, and we're running a $2 trillion deficit and $30 trillion in aggregate debt.

And we have what I think will be an inflation rate that goes from 7.9 on an annualized monthly basis to probably over 10.

You wonder what planet they're on.

You really do.

They're on hinge.

It's sort of like, you know, when you're a young wealthy kid saying, you know, I think I'm going to get a Malibu house.

And then I like a place, a ski place in Aspen.

And I don't know, I think I need a couple of Mercedes.

And they just talk like this.

And then, you know, the dad taps them on the shoulder and says, well, where the hell are you going to get the money?

And so they never talk about things like, let's increase national wealth by exporting natural gas to Germany.

Or let's increase national wealth by building a pipeline to streamline the delivery of necessary fuels.

Or let's talk about creating more productivity by deregulating this particular impediment.

Never, never, never.

It's always been what we think is our birthright.

And that means there is some person out there with all the money, but they don't even believe that, Jack.

They don't believe, let's Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

These people have so much money and we can just tap them.

No, because Mark Zuckerberg gave $420 million to warp the 2020 election.

So what they're really talking about is we're going to,

I guess you would say, not starve the beast.

Remember that?

Starve the beast.

And that was

cut taxes so there would be less revenue.

So then the government would grow.

They believe in gorging the beast, that you create such huge deficits that the real purpose is to tax the middle class that you could despise to such a degree that they're almost

non-existent.

They're getting close to that now.

Victor, one of those components, and we've talked about the student loan, the federal loan and the debt that many students carry.

But and this is cast in this progressive document as trying to help black and brown students who are disproportionately affected by loans that carry well into their

40s

as they're approaching more, more to be a member of AARP than they were, you know, SDS.

But yeah, Victor, I think it's in a backward way, a middle finger to the middle class.

I mean, what about those of us that chose to send our children to more affordable colleges because of debt.

Where do we, you know, why do my kids

are, you don't count because you see, the secret to the left is

that, like everything else, they project.

And the real weird thing about the left is they are starved for recognition.

They are snobbish.

They judge their own worth and the worth of others by these little cattle brands on the rear end that say Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, you name it.

That's what they really value.

So they're talking about huge debt, $200,000 of like AOC is talking about for, you know, people like her that go to Boston universities and don't learn much.

She doesn't know anything, but she's an international studies or something person.

And they don't care.

She's an economist.

Yes, economics major.

Economics.

And

they don't really care about a guy in Ohio who's, you know, working in a machine shop shop who says to himself, I can make $18, $19 an hour now, and I don't have a quarter million dollars in loan for my sociology degree or my environmental studies degree.

And I got started on life.

I'm 23, I'm married, I have a child, I want to buy a house in a year.

That's not what they like.

They think that's a loser.

What they want to do is sort of three units now, six units next semester, you know, go to the coffee shop, shop, change your major, transfer, and run up a quarter million dollars and then be 30 and unmarried and no children and no house and blame your self-inflicted life of Julia pajama boy lifestyle on them.

Them did it to me and them as the greedy middle class.

So let's forgive all of the debt, which means, Jack translated, let's forgive all those years where people had extended adolescence.

If you look, 50% of the people in college do not get a degree after six years.

They don't do it.

And you would think that they would accelerate that process given how costly it is.

But the more that they've jacked up the tuition above the rate of inflation, the longer it's taking and the more money the university, you would think the universities would sit down junior when he comes in his first day and say it's mandatory you come over here and talk to our financial person.

And then dad and mom and junior would go over there and the guy would say, like a used car salesman, and I bought a lot of used cars, I know how they talk, is, well, Mr.

Smith, this is the number of

years on average it takes to finish.

These are the courses you need.

Here is what it works out per class, about $282 an hour, something like that.

And then you have the interest on your loan.

And then this is the breakdown in your expenses this is your electricity in your dorm room this is your overhead this is what you're going to do and before you sign on the dotted line if you major in one of the following 80 majors this is the anticipated average income in three years that you will have and this is the debt you will have that's what the 17 pages of car loans are almost like now.

But they have none of that.

And so you get an 18-year-old who, you know, goes to the college orientation, his senior in high school, and some guy from the college says, college is everything.

You must do this.

And

we have a financial aid package for you, which means we've jacked up tuition room and board so high that we're going to give you 50% of it.

with loans and 50 with scholarship.

And the 50% you have with loans is twice what you used to pay 30 years ago.

And so they buy like a big fish, they swallow that hook in the line in the sinker.

And then they get very angry and frustrated in their late 20s that life didn't work out like they are.

And that's pretty much why we have a 1.7 fertility rate and home ownership is starting to go down again.

The first age when one marries is going up.

The first age when one has a child is in the 30s, not the late 20s.

And if you're an economist, these are not healthy signs of a robust society.

So, So, Victor, one of our more recent podcasts, we talked about a Wall Street Journal poll that showed much disdain from the general public for this laundry list of issues that AOC and company have just put out.

I'd like to talk about another poll, and this came out the other day, generic congressional ballot conducted by Rasmussen reports.

And we're about, I don't know, 230 days or thereabouts away from the November elections, although people will start voting a lot sooner than that.

Right now, according to this survey, there's an 11-point split favoring Republicans in the generic ballot.

And it's interesting that, well, Rasmussen reports analysis compares to what happened in March 2018.

At that point, Democrats had a six-point advantage over Republicans seven, eight months out from the elections.

Actually, as election day approached, the difference narrowed and it was a statistical dead heat.

But Republicans still lost the House, even in a dead heat.

So these numbers have got to be petrifying to Democrats.

And some of the numbers reinforce what we've seen in some other recent polls.

28% of Black voters, 48% of other minorities would vote Republican if the election were held today.

That is catastrophic, I think, from the perspective of Democrats.

Of course, independents are significantly leaning towards Republicans.

So any thoughts about this?

Yeah, what political scientists, and I say political scientists, that means they're academics, which means they're mostly left-wing.

What they're worried about is that of the rubrics you're talking about, but almost every other type of rubric.

So

because of the alienation the Democrats have suffered from the white working class, obviously.

They have inordinately relied on African-American voters, which are 12.5% of the population, or Hispanics that may be up to 15 now.

And they need margins of 70 to 90% in the case of Hispanics and over 90%, and they're not going to get that anymore.

And the reason they're not going to get it, they insult those constituencies' intelligence.

So they open the borders and flood people across, and those communities are impacted.

They tell people that are hardworking middle-class entrepreneurs, you're going to pay this for gas.

You don't have a green agenda.

You're going to do this.

You're going going to do this, and they make it almost impossible for a person to live.

And they're very wealthy, the people doing this, of course.

And they talk down to people.

Psychologically, people don't, I mean, a lot of it's psychological.

I don't think anybody of the bicoastal elite class understands why they're alienating minorities.

They think it's because of Fox News or they're not understood, but it's because of their attitude.

They're so arrogant and haughty.

And the way they, you you really think they're almost not comfortable with people not like themselves because the way they are condescending and that is going to lose them about 50% of the Hispanic vote and maybe up to 15 to 20% of the black vote.

And they can't win, Jack, with those numbers.

There's other rubrics you could look at as well, and that's the number of incumbent safe seats of Democrats that are retiring.

We're up to over, I think we're 31 now.

What that means translated is that people who would have been automatically elected, most incumbents, about over 90% are re-elected every two years,

but they don't want to come back because they know what's going to happen.

They're going to be in the minority.

They're going to lose these committees, control of these committees.

And you know what's going to happen?

They're going to have hearings and they're going to have hearings on January 6th.

They're going to have hearings on Anthony Fauci and COVID.

They're going to have the hearings on the border.

It's not going to be easy.

And then they're going to stop all of these crazy appointments if they take the Senate.

And I think they will.

And they don't want to be around.

That's another rubric.

Another rubric is that the president usually loses the first midterm, A, about 10 seats.

B,

whenever the Democrats have

put it this way, whenever the Republicans are less than minus five, the Republicans are even or gain seats, meaning that when you're down to minus 11, my God, the Democrats are going to, even if the Republicans were minus five, it would be about even.

If the Republicans were minus two or minus three, the Republicans would pick up seats, given they were a minority party.

But when the Democrats are down minus 11,

then you're really 16 points down from breaking even.

And so what a lot of these Democrats are thinking is this could be 1938, where we lose a historic 60, high 60s, 70s

and above seats.

I know that sounds impossible, but the public outrage about the border and inflation and energy and Afghanistan and critical race theory and this crazy crime wave.

It's just, I don't think they have any idea of the volcano they're sitting atop that's going to blow in November.

Yeah, I find it hard to believe that there is no one, maybe James Carville or somebody like that, might have an understanding, but he doesn't fit the intersectional tests anymore.

So maybe he's not to be listened to.

Speaking of listen to, we're going to continue to listen to you, Victor.

And when we come back from these important messages, we're going to hear you talk about Vladimir Zelensky.

He spoke to Congress, and you also wrote a column about him for American Greatness.

So let's talk about that right after these messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on March 21st, Monday, March 21st.

Victor Vladimir Zelensky addressed Congress this past week.

Did you see it?

Did you read the transcript?

What did you think of his performance or his message?

He has to toe a very fine line, Jack, because

everybody in their admiration of his Churchillian qualities

is

just shocked that Ukraine has lasted almost a month against this Russian juggernaut.

And then I think they thought that the logical consequences would be victory, and that may happen, let's hope.

But he's up against odds in terms of numbers and manpower that are three to one.

Maybe you need three to one if you're an attacker in traditional military historical terms, but it will be a long slog.

And as everybody kind of stereotyped now says, Putin has pivoted to the Aleppo-Grozny model.

What Peter Arnett said, I think it was a false, you know, I got to save the village.

I had to destroy the village to say, I got to destroy Ukraine to save it.

So he's trying to flatten these cities.

And I think what he's going to do now is basically carve off areas of the Donbas and what were primarily Russian-speaking borderlands and Crimea,

and then say to Zelensky, it's going to take you 30 years to rebuild your country, and you're not going to be mouthing off to anybody because I destroyed it and I can do it again.

That's his plan right now.

And he's going to talk about nuclear weapons, and he's crazy, and World War III, but he's not crazy.

He's just putting off the West so that they don't deter him.

It's a pretty good strategy.

So Zelensky's in a buying jack, and

he's done a wonderful job of uniting the people and he's a rock star in the West and he's galvanized Ukrainians and they're inflicting historic damages.

But he's got to decide at some point how do I translate that initial incredible victory and performance into long-term strategic advantage.

And that's not, I think,

going toe-to-toe with the Russian army for the next two years.

because he'll destroy his entire country and Putin won't give a damn.

So I think what he's going to do, and we know that the whole Ukraine doesn't join NATO, of course, they're not going to join now.

That was a red herring.

Putin didn't give it.

I mean, he didn't want him in NATO, but that's not the reason he invaded.

The reason he invaded was: I'm going to screw you over because I don't like you anymore.

And Ukraine, I think, is mine.

And if I can't take it, I'll try to take it.

But if I can't, I'll destroy it.

How do you like?

That's his attitude, nihilism now.

So, anyway, he's got to do a deal where he gets world backing and then he negotiates some greater strength.

If he gets some Sams and more Stingers and Javelins and gets into a better

save Kiev, then maybe he can say, let's have an international conference on Crimea and a plebiscite.

Putin will never go for that, but at least say that.

And I'll give you these slivers over there, and we won't join NATO.

And da-da-da, we'll join the EU instead.

And maybe he can, if the pulse of the battlefield starts to improve and Putin gets desperate, that might work.

A couple of last things, though, Jack.

He's very popular now because he has been constructed as the democratic, progressive, enlightened pro-Westerner.

And

Putin is not constructed.

He is the Prince of Darkness, okay, Vlad the Impaler.

So that was a good antithesis.

And it's kind of, we forgot now about January 6th.

We've forgotten about the non-mass wearers, the nanti-baxer, all of the usual demons of the West.

And he's a new demon, i.e.

Putin.

And so we're canceling ballets.

We're going after cosmonauts.

We're going after everybody.

It's Russian.

It's like the hysteria in World War II against Germans and Japanese.

Okay.

At some point, we don't want to be McCarthyites.

If somebody like Tucker Carlson says, I would rather put resources on our border, we call him a traitor.

And we just say it on the left as if that's, he's not a traitor.

You can disagree with him, but he's not a traitor.

So we're getting to a point now where there is going to be some unease if Zelensky,

this cutout caricature that he can't possibly meet because he's not Abraham Lincoln.

And the other thing is he's pushing it.

So when he starts yelling at the West or yelling at the United States, you've got to go in and you've got to have a no-fly zone and you've got to do that.

You don't have to do anything, Mr.

Zelensky.

We're 330 million people and we have our own security interests and they're aligned with yours now, but not entirely.

And we do not want to get into a no-fly zone over your country because our pilots are better than Russian pilots.

And yes, they will shoot them down.

But they're still not going to stop sending missiles.

They're going to go along the border in Belarus and Russia and send missiles.

And we can't go in there unless you want World War III.

And we may have World War III if we shoot down a lot of Russian planes on your benefit.

So we're not going to do it.

And the second thing is he shouldn't yell at the United States.

I know he's in a tough mind.

And then he's got this thing with Israel.

You know, he reminds us he's Jewish, but he starts yelling at Israel today.

yesterday and today.

You know, you've got to do this.

This is the Holocaust.

Well, it's not the Holocaust.

It's not 6 million people in gas chambers, okay?

And don't expropriate the Holocaust.

It's not the Holocaust.

It's a tragedy like Yugoslavia, where 180,000 people die.

And we're probably up to on both sides, maybe 20,000 or more, 30,000.

But it's not the Holocaust.

And then, second,

When you say it's the Holocaust, think of what the people of Israel are thinking.

Well, wait a minute.

We've got Russia basically running Syria, and they're giving all of these sophisticated weapons to Syria.

And we're right next to them.

And so we sanction Russia, and it won't make any difference.

We're a little country.

They're going to use that to go against us.

And when they have camps for terrorist operations in Syria, we hit them and the Russians look the other way.

They won't if we do this.

So the Israelis have national security.

We get another factor, Jack, and that is when Zelensky talks about World War II and the Ukrainians were the greatest friends of the Jewish people.

I'm sorry, that's not true.

Some were, but some of the worst atrocities committed against Jews in Operation Barbarossa in the first two months occurred in and around Kiev.

And the idea that all Ukrainians were sort of like Danes that protected the Jewish community It's not true.

A lot of Ukrainians cooperated with the Russia.

So when they tell a Jewish state, we're suffering that Holocaust and we helped you, they're not telling the truth.

And that hurts its credibility, not just with Israel, but with the entire world.

And so there's a final thing, and that is there has been too much interference.

between the United States and Ukraine and their respective politics and government.

On our side, we had no business going in there in 2012 and 11.

Victoria Newland.

I don't want to go through the whole story, but basically, we had members of the State Department that were in close connection with various members of the Ukrainian government.

We helped stage a coup.

We had a democratic election, supposedly.

We got the government Porchenko and then Zelensky we wanted.

And then we also,

in exchange, we got pressure from them to get more influence, to get more aid.

And we went into the barisma and the Hunter Biden

and the Ukrainian wink at nod.

And then we had the phone call, the first impeachment.

We had Alexander Vinman masquerading that he was not technically the whistleblower when Mr.

Karamella had been tipped off by him.

And he was the font of the whole first impeachment.

And he was offered the Ministry of Defense, which didn't look good for ukraine when binmen had alienated half the country and he kept saying everybody anybody who suggests that i have ukraine sympathies is a is disperching my war record okay i believe that but then why in the world three times did not once not twice but according to you three times they offer you the ministry of defense in ukraine unless you thought that was a great honor and you might have considered it maybe with a wink and nod once or twice or they wouldn't have kept asking you.

So, the point I'm getting at is: why don't we just butt out of the internal affairs of the Ukrainian government?

And why don't they butt out of ours?

Why don't their ambassador to the United States not write an op-ed in 2016 attacking one of the candidates, Donald Trump?

Why don't the DNC not hire a Ukrainian, former Ukrainian national to help massage the Russian narrative?

And why doesn't Mr.

Zelensky say, I appreciate everything that the West is doing.

I need more, but not attack countries that don't as if he's suffering a Holocaust and they owe him that, or the United States must risk World War III to fly into his country.

And then I'll give you a final take on it.

Why did he ban all opposition parties if he is the we didn't do that in World War II?

Roosevelt didn't stop elections.

And churchill had a coalition government and in the last year of the european theater he was voted out of office so the idea that when you're at war and you're a democratic government you can't have a political opposition is absolutely not true so he did do that he banned everything and so i think what i'm getting at is he should be very very careful because

His persona and his courage and his impressive eloquence has gained him so much empathy that when he bans political parties or he wags his finger and starts yelling at the United States or he tells Germany, you got to do this, or he screams that, I understand why, but it's going to lose that status and that'll be fatal if he does.

Victor, two things.

One, I'd like to let our listeners know that you have a piece from a week ago.

It's at American Greatness.

You'll also find it at victorhanson.com.

It's called Vladimir Zelensky's Classical Choices, and it's a very interesting look by Victor at the military situation through the perspective of some major Greek battles in the fifth century BC.

That's Vladimir Zelensky's classical choices.

The other thing, Victor, is you mentioned Holocaust, because you were talking about what Zelensky was saying, but there is a possible Holocaust.

that could happen and that is in Israel.

I was watching, we're recording on Monday, the 21st, 21st, and last night, stayed up a little late and caught Mark Levin's show on Fox, and he had Netanyahu on, and it really drove home just the scariness, the potential catastrophic things we're facing with the Saran deal that Joe Biden, with the help of Putin, is trying to restore.

Victor, one of the targets, of course, would be the state of Israel.

If Iran had nuclear weapons, who among us doesn't think they wouldn't try to nuke Tel Aviv?

That's a very good point.

And that dovetails what we were just talking about.

So we're in these negotiations with a government in Iran that's theocratic, authoritarian, anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, fanatic, that has a long history of hatred of the West, the United States in general, Israel in particular.

It's used supposedly, Rafanjani, it's controversial whether he said it.

It's a one-bomb state, i.e., that half the Jews in the world have gone to Israel makes the anti-Semitic task Iran much easier.

And, you know, we can take a couple of hundred nukes and still survive.

You can't take one bomb.

That's sort of the message that they give.

Okay, this Obama deal was a disaster.

Trump came in, basically scrapped it, put on these crippling sanctions, almost destroyed the Iranian economy.

COVID came in.

They didn't do very well.

And we had deterred them.

And now, of course, Biden comes in with that whole team of appeasers, and they're using Russian interlocutors.

So the Russians are going to basically be able to buy Iranian oil as a gift for their anti-American and biased mediation.

That's where we are.

So Israel is looking at all this, Netanyahu and the opposition, but in the government, they're saying to themselves, well, wait a minute.

If you sign this deal, what you guys are doing, you've driven Russia completely.

We had several workable relationship with Russia in the sense that we didn't like them and they didn't like us, but we had certain lines we didn't cross.

Now you've driven them onto the Iranian side and they're going to empower them.

And they have a nuclear umbrella.

And if we go in there because of your deal and have to take out that stuff before they use it on us, they may say to you, if you go in and hurt our client Iran, we're going to nuke you.

And they'll put Iran under the Russian nuclear umbrella.

And

so you can see

what's going on.

And getting back to the Ukraine vis-a-vis Israel, remember that I think it was in 2016

when the outgoing Obama, maybe it was 2015, but the outgoing Obama administration wanted that Parthian shot at Israel.

Remember, they wanted that resolution condemning them for quote-unquote settlements.

These are age-old things around the Jerusalem Hills.

It was just a gratuitous way of telling Netanyahu, we don't like you.

We're going to humiliate you.

Who voted for that?

They got Ukraine to vote for that.

So here you have Zelensky saying, how dare you not?

And by the way, the Israelis voted in the UN to condemn the Russian invasion, but they won't put on sanctions this tiny country.

And you have Zelensky pointing his finger at them and saying, I just dismissed all political opposition, but listen, you democracy, you're letting a Holocaust, and that's really bad because you're Jews and I'm a Jew and

you're allowing the Holocaust to go right under your nose.

And by the way, you need to sanction Russia, which is right across your border now, running Syria and is the main adjudicator of whether Iran gets a bomb that's pointed at you.

That's what they're doing.

And it's a little bit too much, I think.

And nobody's been more complimentary of Zelensky and Print.

It's very hard to run Ukraine.

It's a corrupt country.

But this idea that suddenly he's Winston Churchill is not quite right.

Winston Churchill was not treated as well by FDR in 1939

as we have treated Ukraine.

I mean, Linlees didn't really get going.

And we gave him 50 old destroyers, but we demanded bases in the Caribbean.

They weren't quite as old as everybody said.

But my point is that we were tough on England, which was an ally

and our best ally in a way that, and he didn't call up.

He complained bitterly, he begged, but he never attacked the United States the way Zelensky is shaming us.

And I understand why he's doing it because he's working with the Biden administration.

as vice president under Obama gave them blankets and no javelins.

So he has legitimate criticism, but he's got to find a way

to not alienate Americans.

If he keeps doing it, he's going to alienate Israelis.

I think he already has.

He's going to alienate Americans.

He's going to alienate everybody.

So he's got to, you know, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Can we consult on how we can stop together the Russians rather than, you know, and he's got to explain, I think Biden botched up the MiG deal.

We were supposed to give them F-15s.

The Poles were supposed to give them old MiGs.

Okay.

But they never really explained why going from 30 or 40 jets up to 80 was going to change the conditions of the war.

And that is how many of existing Ukrainian planes are in the air every day.

How many sorties do they fly?

How many have shot down?

How many of these new planes will be serviceable?

Who's going to work on them?

Do they have to be modified?

And to what degree is bombing taking place or missile launching right on the border of Belarus and Russia that you can't go in anyway?

That should be made clear to the public, and it hasn't been.

Well, Victor, we're going to end today's podcast by talking about NCAA March Madness, and I'm not talking about basketball.

I'm talking about women's swimming, and we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Folks should check out VictorHanson.com regularly.

Everything Victor writes is up there.

Some of it is behind a paywall.

It's called Ultra.

And Victor writes, I don't know, 15,000 words a month of exclusive content.

If you want to sample it, go ahead.

It's $5.

Check it out for a month.

You're going to like what you see.

And it's $50 a year.

You'll also find links to any number of his books.

One of them, Of course, the most recent bestseller, The Dying Citizen.

If you haven't gotten it yet, I've got one question for you.

What's the matter with you?

Go get it.

Click order.

As for me, Jack Fowler, I am the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

We try to strengthen civil society.

And if that interests you, go to centerforcivilsociety.com.

I also write a weekly free, free email newsletter with recommended readings.

It's no strings attached.

It's called Civil Thoughts, and you can sign up for that at civilthoughts.com.

So, Victor, for the first time ever, Americans have have been following NCAA women's swimming.

That is because the infamous Leah Thomas, the man who says he's a woman who's been swimming for UPenn's team, and I do want to note again that at least his last name, Thomas, is that of a man.

He won at a, I think, the 500-meter race at the NCAA finals.

I have to add a little wisdom that my wife provided.

My wife's been a competitive swimmer for 50 years, and she says, hey, the race he won, there's no question he was dogging it.

And she believes, in order to make it seem like he really wasn't crushing in his man's body, crushing all the other women competitors.

The second thing is he lost the race.

And her conspiracy, and I think it's valid, is that, well, he lost it because by losing, he can then justify the fact that he competes and can win.

So after the race, finally, some of the dam broke from other women swimmers.

We had heard things earlier.

They thought it was wrong that the man was competing against women.

But then parents got very involved.

And Victor, I'll stop babbling in a minute because you're the wise man here.

I'd like to hear, and all our listeners would like to hear your wisdom on this.

I just want to say, I think an opportunity had presented itself.

Many opportunities had presented themselves for some more concrete protest action against what was going on, this destruction of women's sports.

It could have happened.

Protests could have happened at actual races.

Parents could have stepped up ahead of time and complained.

Of course,

I don't know anyone who really approves of this other than trans activists, the NCAA, and college officials.

But anyway, here's what the parents, some of them wrote.

As parents of Ivy League swimmers from men's and women's teams across the league, we've witnessed firsthand the utter abandonment of women and girls this year.

We are furious, and most everyone in our community is furious as well.

Parents, coaches, swimmers, and rational, logical people know this is grossly unfair.

Female swimmers have not consented to this.

In fact, many of them expressly said no.

What response did they receive?

Be quiet.

A new ideology ruled.

Trans women are women.

No exceptions.

The girls' concerns, transphobic.

They courageously spoke to coaches about the injustice they faced in the pool.

They expressed how uncomfortable the locker rooms were with male nudity.

Leah Thomas still has his dangling participles.

And when they were turned away, they went to their athletic departments administration.

They were turned away again.

Victor, this is swimming now.

I don't know why it won't be girls basketball in a year or any other sport.

Your thoughts as we round out this edition of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Oh, I don't think anybody can rationally defend what Leah Thomas is doing, but now we're in a culture of fear and intimidation.

And the trans community has established itself, although

while it's far less than 1% of the population, and there is something called gender dysphoria that we're all sympathetic to, but they have been so active and loud and their tactics are such that they have got all of corporate America terrified of them.

And it's been a cause celeb, and nobody's looking looking at the actual moral landscape.

And the moral landscape is that a male with male genitalia who went through puberty and adolescence with male hormones and has got a male huge body has enormous, we all know that in terms of muscularity and size and lung capacity and heart size, enormous.

capacity that's why we have something called men and women sports women for all the women's liberation, nobody in women's liberation of the 60s said, we want to have women in the NFL.

Why don't we get to go?

In fact, I guess they can if they want, but there's no women in the NFL.

Why is that?

And there's a reason.

That's why male, I mean, if you get Bobby Riggs, maybe and Billie Jean King, but you need some old decrepit guy to, you don't get a young male, you know, against a woman.

Okay, we understood that.

So we understand what this guy is doing.

He's single-handedly destroying the concept of women's sports.

We've had track stars in high school and college do the same thing.

And it's very ironic because the liberal left community is for this and they've abandoned their prior support for Title IX equality of resources at universities, et cetera, public institutions, that they should be

gender neutral.

I know when I was at Cal State for 21 years,

one of the ways that they balanced the budget, we had an enormous female equestrian team.

And the idea was for each dollar, this percent goes to women, this percent goes to men.

There was not, you know, a lot of men riding and thinking, you know what, I can ride.

And so Mr.

Thomas, if we looked at him, from a guy from another planet, looked at him, they'd say he's male.

Okay.

Now what he's trying to do, though, I think your wife is right.

He's trying to almost play the victim.

Well, I lose some and

I have emotional, I get stressed and I lose.

And then when you look at the picture of the winner circle, you have the three women over on one side and he's there and he's kind of, you remember that photograph kind of moping?

Oh, everybody doesn't like me.

And he's now understood a great truth of America, and that is victimization pays dividends.

So now, after victimizing, in a very aggressive fashion, destroying women's sports, there's a tiny little backlash.

And now he's weeping around as if he's, you know, feminine and he's the victim of an alt-right cult almost.

And it's really disgusting to see that.

And

it brings up the second question very quickly, Jack, is that is that we're told by the left that society constructs artificial rubrics and values.

And they do that especially with gender.

So they say, this is female, this is male, but it doesn't have anything to do with biology.

It has to do with the power machinations of an elite white male, Christian, heterosexual, corporate elite.

Okay, if that's true, and he can be with two testicles and a penis, he's a man with a man's body, but he can say he's female after taking some female hormones and dressing up like a woman.

And we don't have a word now in the a good Latin word as we used to called transvestism, using the vestis or the clothes of a different of the opposite sex.

Okay, then everything is constructed.

Why do we get mad at Elizabeth Warren?

She had no DNA essentially saying she was Native American, but she thought she was.

She did it for purely reprehensible careerist reasons.

But why didn't we just say, well, if you want to be Native American, you can be?

She could pass much more for Native American than he could for female.

Or what was, remember Rachel Dozel, the woman who was the Northwestern head of an in

Washington State.

In the ACP, Washington State.

Ward Churchill did more than anybody to be Native American.

I mean, give the guy credit.

He wore long hair.

He wore a headband.

He got the buckskin, the moccasins.

He had the whole lingo.

You remember that?

Now, he lied.

on several affidavits that said he was a Native American like Elizabeth Warren did, but he went through a lot of trouble, and yet he was never, he was exposed as a fraud.

Why couldn't he just construct that?

Why can't we be what we want to be?

Why are these rules?

But why is it just apply to gender and not race?

And I think that's going to be a very interesting question because race is a lot more fluid than gender, I think.

Remember when we had George Zimmerman, Jack?

And all of a sudden, the New York Times, who's in this apologetic mood, apparently, and they they talk about cancel culture, they didn't like that binary that a Hispanic was fighting an African-American.

So they cooked up a word called white Hispanic and said he was white in a way they never did for Barack Obama.

They never said because he's half white, he's a white African-American.

And believe me, his mother, I guess she had come from Peru and her name was Mesa.

And I think his original name was George in the Latin size, Jorge.

If he had just played the victim role and said, I'm not George Germanic Zimmerman, as if he's on the Eastern Front in 1945, but I'm Jorge or I'm Jorge Mesa.

I'm Jorge Mesa.

And I was attacked by Crayvon Martin, but Jorge Mesa fought back.

That's what the New York Times was scared stiff of.

And they said basically that in not so many words, that George Zimmerman had constructed a fake Latino, even though he had been identified Latino.

He'd applied as Latino for job.

They said he had adopted a fake persona and they were going to correct it by calling him a white Hispanic.

He couldn't just decide what he was, even though he was half Peruvian.

And that's what shows you about the whole hypocrisy.

They don't have any rules.

They make them up as they go along, depending on the political necessities and efficacies of the moment.

And so.

He keeps it up.

If he keeps it up, there will be no female sports.

I just don't understand another thing.

Why don't they just have a category called transgender, a third category?

It wouldn't be

right.

But you know, for every 10,

there's 1% transgender people in the United States.

So for every 100 college meets, let's have one for just transgender athletes.

We have special Olympics.

Why don't we just do that?

I don't think they want that because they want the attention and they want to attack the norms and they believe that gender is socially constructed and that gives them a lot of political clout.

And

believe me, just for saying what I did, I will get the usual hate mail from transgender people.

They're not empirical.

They don't want to discuss it.

Well, I don't know how a misogynist could be more misogynistic towards women than this.

I don't either.

I don't know.

He's done more.

He, she

has done more to damage women than anybody.

He's destroyed the, in every little high school, every little junior high school, there's some young, brilliant, hardworking, athletic, skilled young woman who wants to get a scholarship to go to college, is practicing all day long.

And she's thinking, I have a rendezvous with a man and some meat.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.

But at some point, I'm going to have to compete against a man.

I'm not going to make it because there's always going to be one man blocking me the higher I go.

And it's not going to be a very gifted athlete.

This guy was what ranked what 430 or something in the United States, right?

So it's a way for mediocre male athletes who have transgender.

And even Bruce Jennerer, I mean, right, he's a big critic of it.

He should be the expert, he should be the expert upon it.

Well, Victor, hey, would you have a problem if someday I wanted to be Swedish?

I want to make a statement that

my father's side's Swedish, and there was a marriage where people were discussing whether my grandmother was Swedish or not, and probably Irish, but nevertheless, my point is this.

I've been watching Sweden, and I am going to Victor Davis Hansen.

How about Victor Axel Axel Hansen?

And I can put two S's, even though that's not very Swedish, but it looks Swedish.

Victor Axel Hanson, like Jesse Smollett became Smollett, as Dave Chappelle reminded us.

And

I'm going to start writing about, you know, Swedes helped engineer this British version of the javelin.

It's much cheaper.

It's not quite as effective, but

it's very lethal.

And the Swedes did that.

And Swedes have the SAB fighter.

And if you look at...

sophisticated science, especially military hardware, you can see our Viking roots.

They're very good on that.

And they want to join NATO and they're no longer, you know, pussyfooting around neutralists.

Well, you know, as we've got a plan for these podcasts when you're going to be away, and I think one of them we should do is seriously about Sweden as a military power.

It wasn't

a feared military power.

I think with Sammy and I were talking invasions of Russia, and I couldn't get enough about Charles XII.

He got on the way to Moscow with a small army.

I mean, he was definitely wiped out finally, but he invaded Russia.

You know, I was just in passing, I had to go to Kingsburg, which my great-grandfather helped found in the park.

It was the Hansen family.

And there's a little stone called Hansen Corner, and it tells the story of their original home and the number of people who went to war in World War I and World War II and either were maimed or died.

or served well.

Victor Hansen was killed in Okinawa.

My grandfather was gassed.

So the whole thing is there.

But I was walking, I just thought, you know, I'm going to walk down the streets.

I had to go run an errand.

So I just want to walk down Kingsburg.

And you can see everybody can say what they want about that played out white male, white rage, but you go look at that town and you look at other towns in the valley.

There's some that are unique, like Exeter as well, but there's something about that town.

And it's not me saying this.

When I have people say, Victor, i want to interview you or i want to go and i always say if the ranch is all i'll meet you somewhere and that's you know three miles closer to la so i go down to kingsburg because they have good restaurants right and i'll meet somebody and they'll say to me wow

this town is immaculate everything looks beautiful and it's that sweetish it is that that hard work anal retentive if i could call it that i don't mean that in a deprecatory but fastidious fastidiousness That's a wonderful word.

Yeah.

And it's just amazing.

And I was walking there and a woman who runs, I won't mention her name out of embarrassment, runs a Swedish gift shop, saw me walk by and she walked out and said, Victor, I just want to remind you there's a new book in Swedish, printed in Sweden, about Swedish Americans who founded colonies in the United States.

And your family is mentioned about Kingsburg.

And of course, I don't read Swedish, but over the years, it was really good for my dad before he died because he was a big Swedish chauvinist.

And I would get Swedish journalists that would come here once in a while.

They'd see a name, you know, they're looking for somebody, and they'd see Hansen.

And Victor's not Swedish, but it's kind of Nordic, I guess, Latin, actually.

But there are Russians in Swedes called Victor.

So they'd see the name, and then they would drop by here on their tours of the United States.

And my dad would talk to them, and he would get very excited.

And they would, he said, they're claiming us as Swedes.

And I said, well, dad, they're kind of hard up.

There's not a lot Swedes left the United States.

So

I'm about the last guy they could claim.

But the point of it all is that I've always been against that.

But now that we have identity politics and they've convinced me that our superficial appearance and our heritage matters,

and I always rebelled, as I said so many times, against rye crackers, Electrolux, vacuum cleaners, broken down Volvos.

I think I was wrong.

And I may buy a Volvo

again.

And I have not been to Sweden, and that's on my bucket list.

I think you should.

Yeah, I've been there, one of the National Review Cruises from way back.

Just a terrific, terrific country.

And by the way, Victor, you're the town.

I was there, I don't know, two years ago with Big Mike and Richard for dinner.

It is a lovely town, really.

It is.

It is.

It's got a higher price per square foot than any other valley town, and it's got a high per capita income and people go to shop there.

People are very polite.

And it's not, if people think this is a subtext where it's white, it's not.

It's culturally and ethnically diverse, but it doesn't really matter because the traditions of that town persist.

And I just have such weird memories, Jack, walking up and down down all of these shady lanes near the high school where my uncle lived and one of my aunts and listening to these Swedes with this thick Swedish accent and talking Swedish when they wanted to make jokes that I couldn't understand.

And my poor mother, who was Welsh, you know, Davis, my grandfather was 100% Welsh and Irish, she was as well, but she thought they were such peculiar folk.

She liked them, but she thought, wow, they're so clannish and they're so, all they talk about is hard work and then when she had my brother and i i weighed eight and a half pounds and my brother weighed eight five twins so she had 17 pounds and we have square heads wow uh that are size eight i think

i can't find in football neither one of us could find a helmet because we got these big big ugly square heads and my mom

She said, I just wish you guys were not Swedish.

You almost killed me.

And yeah,

so that's my Swedish story for today.

All right.

Moto Bene.

So, Victor, we close with a couple of things.

First, thanking our listeners for listening.

The audience is growing significantly.

We are, by some calculations, Chartable rates us these last week as the number eight podcast in the nation for politics.

Thanks for those who come and listen.

Please stay.

There are four BDH podcasts every week.

I do too.

The great Sammy Wink does too.

If you go to iTunes, if that's how you listen, please consider leaving a rating.

I think Victor deserves more than five stars, but five's the limit.

If you want to leave a comment, please do.

Anything you want.

By the way, we're soliciting comments.

I just mentioned before about forthcoming shows we need to pre-record when Victor's away for a period.

If anyone has any questions they would like to be considered for such a podcast, why don't you leave them there?

Or you you can email me, jayfowler, at americanphilanthropic.com.

I have one comment that I'd like to read.

I think it's really cool.

It's from someone who signs himself as Blue Man Dolt, Intellectual Integrity, Critical Thinking, Honest Analysis, stated courageously.

That's the title.

I learned about VDH from my son, who majored in international history at West Point.

Listening to and reading VDH's works has been indescribably enriching.

I wish I'd have discovered you sooner.

I'm a clinical psychologist.

I used to teach critical thinking, and it left me disheartened to see poor critical thinking skills have become among so many Americans.

I've started referring my patients to VDH's podcast and YouTube segments along with Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman as a way of providing them with good models for balanced, well-reasoned thinking.

That's pretty cool.

Blue Man Doll, thank you.

very nice i appreciate it

yeah so that's about it victor thanks again for sharing the uh treasure trove of wisdom that you share today as you do every time we record and we'll be back soon with another episode of the victor davis hansen show thank you thank you jack and thank everybody for listening

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