Why Free Speech is So Costly to Republicans

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

We are recording on Monday, March 21st, 2022.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

The starring namesake Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is the author of the recent best-selling book, The Dying Citizen.

You can find a link for that at victorhanson.com.

More about that later.

Victor, we're going to begin today's discussion talking about the insanity at the border and how this is just yet another issue of an imploding Biden administration.

And we'll do that right after this important message.

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So, Victor, last week in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo, a cartel leader named El, I think it's El Huevo, Gerardo Trevino, he was arrested.

By one press account, his arrest was a big blow to the Northeast cartel, and rival gangs sought to immediately fill that power vacuum.

They did it with gunfire.

I think some of those bullets made their way across the border and into U.S.

buildings, maybe even people.

This comes, by the way, Victor, as ICE released findings that showed record low, record low deportations of illegal immigrants in 2021, which was a year probably of record highs of illegal immigration.

All this, Victor, has not been lost on American citizens and voters.

It may have been lost.

on Joe Biden.

We know in his 50 years involved in politics, he's never been to the border, not once by his own admission.

Much more happy nowadays in his basement in Delaware.

Victor, it's another sign.

Let's talk about your thoughts on what's happening at the border and how that and other issues show that it's all caving in on Joe Biden right now.

Yeah, it is.

I mean, he lost one country, Afghanistan.

He could lose another one, Ukraine.

He may lose a third, Taiwan.

And he's lost the southern United States, it seems like it's a fourth.

I mean, when you have Novo Laredo in open warfare and it's right on the border and 2 million people have crossed

and it looks like another 180,000 are going to flee from the cartel violence.

And you have a president, Obador.

I mean, what is it?

Hugs.

We believe in hugs, not bullets.

And he's a hardcore Maduro Chavez person.

And we had corrilled him with Trump, who threatened him with trade sanctions unless he patrolled his own border.

And we got to the point, despite the left's.

incessant howling about racism, xenophobia, protectionism, nativism.

We got to the point where we had a secure border.

And then, just like he did with energy, he just said, what did Trump do to achieve that success?

And how can I undo it methodically, seriously, and have failure, which I'll call success?

So he stopped the border wall.

He

brought back catch and release.

He ceased putting pressure on Mexico and he got 2 million people across.

And now it's utter chaos.

And so, what is the Majorca doing at the Homeland Security?

He's asking Jack for volunteers among the border people.

If they'll come forward, because he's scared stiff as the midterms start to tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and this Novo Loredo

metropolis blows up, they're going to get a surge across the border.

Then it's going to be bad optics for the midterm.

So now he wants the border patrol that he accused, remember last summer, of whipping people, which they didn't do.

He said they were whipping poor migrants in the river.

So now after insulting them and cutting them back, he wants them to voluntarily stand up and help him control the border before the midterms.

It's the same policy as shutting down energy production and then begging all the countries that we insulted, whether it's Putin or Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or Iran, that none of them necessarily we should be buying oil from, but we're now begging them.

So this is a very strange mentality, Jack.

I don't know if it's deliberate, if it's an anarchy, or it's just incompetence, but it's nihilistic.

It really is.

It really tears at the fabric of civilization.

If you don't have a secure border,

if you don't have police that can guarantee the general safety of people in the major cities, if you don't have a deterrent foreign policy, if you don't have a currency, and an inflation rate that are tolerable, and if people can't afford to move, then you don't have a country.

And this man, Biden, is systematically whoever, Biden is a quote-unquote construct.

I don't know who's doing it other than their hardcore leftists, and they feel that they're going to have a historic loss in the midterm.

So they're putting their foot on the accelerator and trying to push through everything they can, but it's very scary.

Victor, let's go a little north.

Just for our listeners, we're a little crunch for time today,

but we still have a lot to talk about.

So, on a different topic, which is elites at Ivy League colleges, there's now a national story.

By the way, it's national everywhere except New Haven, Connecticut, whose local media won't report on this.

So New Haven is the home to Yale University.

And I think most of our listeners have probably heard about the protest at the Yale Law School.

Last week, there was a debate on civil liberties, and one of the participants was Kristen Wagner.

She is from the Alliance Defending Defending Freedom, a conservative organization, and she was the lead counsel in the masterpiece cake shop Supreme Court case that this poor guy, Jack Phillips, out in Colorado, who's still being harassed by these lefty bureaucrats, but it was a win for free speech or a win for religious liberty.

But she was at Yale to have this discussion, a debate on civil liberties.

law students, there were over 100, were there.

They shouted her down.

They tried to stop the discussion.

One of the students said that he or she, I'm not sure what, was going to, quote, literally fight you, bitch.

The administration of the Yale has done nothing about this.

Federal judge, well, I think it's Lawrence Silberman, caused some interesting news in the after effect of all this by saying these students who yearn, of course, we all know they need to get clerkships, federal judges, appeals courts, U.S.

Supreme Court.

These people think they themselves are likely to be future U.S.

Supreme Court justices.

He said they should be denied these clerkships, which are important to climbing up the ranks because they have showed a disdain for free speech.

Victor, it's, I think, a disgraceful event.

Your thoughts on it.

Well,

there's nobody in charge of the insane asylum.

This was an event to promote two different opposing views, and it was held under the auspices of a law school, which is supposed to teach the country that jurisprudence is based on the First Amendment.

And you had Yale professors there.

I think the dean of the law school was overseeing it.

Or there was a maybe assistant dean.

There was somebody in the capacity of administrative authority who was there and oversaw it.

And then when they burst in and shouted down and made it almost impossible to conduct, and people reported that, then they got the left-wing media, of course, to say that didn't happen.

And then they produced a video that showed that it did happen.

And it brings up a larger issue, though.

If this generation's legal scholars don't believe in the First Amendment and they are at these Ivy League, blue chip, supposed law schools, then they're not blue chip and they're not Ivy League and they're not anything.

They're no different than something out of the Soviet old Soviet Union or contemporary China.

They don't believe in free speech.

They really don't.

I'm just not saying that as a talking point.

They believe that the race, LBG, TQ, green agenda, you name it, is so important and their exalted aims are so moral that they can use any means necessary to do that.

Of course, if this was a liberal talk on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and a bunch of skinheads walked in there and screamed, they would do a January 6th on them and have them in solitary because these people are fascist.

And it brings up a larger issue that I think everybody listening should really ask ourselves, because we're in a dilemma.

On the one hand, we know that statistics show that over a 30 or 40 year career, a bachelor's degree within reasonable limits will improve your income.

And we know that we age and we can't hammer nails in our 70s as well and make an income as people can maybe in their 70s do what we're doing right now.

That said, is it really a good investment?

for a young person with limited means to borrow a quarter of a million dollars to pay for these educations and then have these majors, DASH studies majors, legal studies, critical race theory studies, LBG2Q,

queer studies, women's studies, Asian studies, black studies, leisure studies, peace studies,

and not really be educated.

And then that would be debatable, but it's not debatable when they're not only ignorant, but they're arrogant and they come out not disinterested, but partisan zealots.

And this is at a time when this country is in dire need of very sophisticated, skilled truckers, plumbers, electricians, roofers, framers, you name it.

We don't have those type of skill that are the muscles of this country.

We don't have enough police.

We don't have enough fire.

They don't make sitcoms.

Maybe they make sitcoms, but they don't make drama stories about the high quality of academic work.

I mean, they used to have paper chase or something like that, but academic movies or academic drama TV show, they're not very interesting.

because these people have an inflated view of themselves as if they're on the cutting edge of,

I don't know, theory that's going to help the United States.

No, they are nihilists and anarchists.

They do not believe in the Constitution.

And I think people should just shun them.

I really do.

And I'm speaking at someone who is affiliated in a quasi-sense with Stanford University.

It's the same at Stanford.

I can tell you that they do not believe in free speech.

And until the alumni target their donations and with the idea that if you target their donations, they will find a way to warp it.

If you say, I want this to go for the promotion of civics or American values or Western Civ, they said, Yeah, we'll do that.

Give us $5 million.

We'll endow a professor of Western values, and then he'll be LGBQ and BLM and Antifa stuff.

So, you have to be very careful

in delineating what you want to do.

Or don't give them money, give it to a conservative school.

I mean, I have a conflict of interest because I teach it two or three weeks a year at Hillsdale, but Thomas, St.

Thomas Aquinas, but do not feed this this monstrosity of the modern left-wing elite university and try to suggest to them, if you don't reform and if you don't guarantee citizens of the United States that they have rights of due process, freedom of speech, immunity from search and seek, you name it, the constitutional package that we all enjoy.

If you don't have it, and we don't have it at many universities, then they should not be tax exempt.

And those huge multi-billion dollar endowments should be taxed.

We should really have a public campaign to get rid of tenure and say you'll have a five-year renewable contract.

And maybe we need a national SAT test, just like we have a bar exam.

But this just have a standardized test that say the BA in the United States will mean something.

Just like you have a teaching credential, you just have to, if you're going to have a BA, you have to have a minimum level.

I know they're getting rid of the entrance SAT.

But they used to say at least, we don't trust high schools, GPAs.

They're of such different calibers.

We need a standardized test so we can get some idea of minimum qualifications.

Well, we don't trust individual universities anymore, so we need a minimum standard that they all must adhere to before they can say they have a BA, just like a wiring code or a plumbing code.

But it's so weird about academics, they feel that they are exempt from every code, from every protocol, from every expectation of politeness and gratitude and civility, and yet they lecture everybody about that.

So I get really angry because I see it in the abstract and the way that we're talking.

And then where I work, I see it every day.

And something has to be done because they're doing a,

you know, when you see a poll that says that young people on the left basically don't want to fight to defend this country if it were invaded.

Where did they get that idea?

I will bet you that the people who in the majority have college educ are college educated or they're in college or they have degrees, but I I don't think it's coming from the muscular classes of any ideology because they're too attuned to the reality of what a good country this is and how hard it is to live one more day.

But when you send kids to college and you give people lifetime contracts of tenure and you flood those universities with tax exempt money and they have no accountability and they're not transparent about their admissions or hiring or retention or tenure policies, then you have a prescription for the monstrosity that we have.

Well, Victor, let's stick on the monstrosity and let's move to another Ivy League institution, and that's Cornell.

And I'm going to read just briefly from a piece on the College Fix last week.

I recommend to our listeners to visit the College Fix.

It's a terrific website that daily files any number of stories about the madnesses across the country in the academy.

This piece is titled Cornell to Hire Social Justice, quote, equity librarian, librarian, end quote, for science library.

This is by Logan Dubil.

That's who wrote this.

Cornell University is working to hire a quote critical pedagogy and equity librarian end quote for man library, which is focused on life sciences, agriculture, applied social sciences, and human ecology.

An online job description states the position will, among other duties, quote, evaluate source credibility, end quote.

The position is part of a cluster hire.

We will say cluster, it could be another word, but cluster, a cluster hire to, quote, facilitate equity and inclusion and pathways to social justice, end quote.

The Ivy League University's website states blah, blah, blah.

So Victor's

Uber Lefty

is going to run roughshod, I guess, through Cornell's science library.

They might even find an agricultural work by someone named Victor Davis Hansen, and by virtue of it being written by him, may throw the book out.

Well, that's happened.

I mean, yeah.

I used to walk by the Chicano Law Library at Stanford and see my book there as target number one, Mexicornia.

But

look, there's a lot of issues there.

Very quickly.

Science is not something.

When Dr.

Fauci said, I am the science, or when you read those exchanges between Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci about really getting ahead of their critics and and trying to not tell the truth about their involvement in what would really be called fairly gain-of-function research in Wuhan or Peter Dosix and his phony Lancet-sponsored investigation.

You can see that science has been corrupted.

And that's very important, Jack, because for years, all of us, myself especially, have said, well,

this is the plague on the universities.

So Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Caltech, MIT, these are great places, Cornell, but they have a corrupt humanities.

But thank God they're not in mathematics and engineering.

They are.

And that's scary because they're more important than we are in some sense.

Because that's what makes airlines run.

That's what makes atomic energy work.

That's what makes solar panels generate.

And if you start to fudge there,

you're in big trouble.

It's sort of like Stalin's

engineering projects in the Soviet Union.

Remember, that was a disaster.

or hitler's certain ideas about architecture or mussolini's ideas about archaeological restoration if you go to some of his the italian sites in the mediterranean see what he did and that's what happens when you have ideology trump and science the second thing very quickly is these are all these policies

It seems to me that ultimately, when you look at them, they're all wealthy white people on the coast.

So when you, I know that they're starting to have people of color and marginalized people and women,

but when you look at all of these college presidents, I'm not sure that, you know, white males are 35% of the population.

I'm not sure that there's not more than 35%.

I think it's sort of like the reverse NFL, which is about 75%, way overrepresented as far as African Americans.

I have a feeling, and that's very funny.

It's the same idea, Jack, because in the NFL,

African Americans make up 75%.

They're always calling everybody racist and they want equity and they do this and this, but they are, you know, five times, six times overrepresented according to their use of the word over.

And the same thing is true of college presidents.

They're always lecturing everybody on diversity and equity and inclusion.

but they're overrepresented.

So why don't we just have a little rule that says, and most of the universities that are private and exclusive, we'll just not have a hiring freeze on white boys, white men for a while.

Just stop it until we catch up and see what happens.

Because I think it's a peculiarity of the current contemporary left-wing bicostal mind that they always urge ideological nostrums and medicines on people, that they're never subject themselves to the baleful consequences of their own ideology.

And if you did that, they would stop that real quick.

because they do not want to be subject to the laws they enforce on other people.

And then finally,

it's just just gibberish.

It's kind of like what Orwell talked about in the abuse of the English language.

What does diversity, equity, and inclusion mean?

Why don't they just say diversity and say, we want to have quota for people that aren't white?

And then for equity, why don't they just say we want forced mandated equality of result?

And for inclusion, let's just say that we want to exclude white people from certain groups so that they get empowered.

And that's what it is.

Anybody that's taken those mandatory diversity workshops knows that.

Anybody who's been in a university and had LBGTQ Day, Black Women Day, Hispanic Latino Day, knows what that's about.

And they're open about it.

This is kind of like

we went to a curve, like a bell curve, and we hit assimilation, intermarriage, and integration in the civil rights movement somewhere around, I don't know, 1995 to 2000.

And now we peaked and we're going back back and mirror imaging the ascent as we descend back to a court of racial segregationists, chauvinistic, your race and appearance mean everything.

I think we're getting to about 1960 now.

And if it continues to go, we're going to have a tribalized, segregated society.

And just because somebody has suffered in the past doesn't mean that they are not capable of making sure other people suffer just like they do.

In the Aeschylian sense, that's a fragment from Aeschylus.

Don't have the sins of your father visited upon the son but that's exactly what they're doing but it assumes of course that all these terrible white males that are bogeymen every boogeymen everywhere bogey men whatever that they have some genealogist that's traced their lineage back to some white slave owner with a whip in alabama circa 19 1860 or bull connor that's not true but it doesn't matter so this is is not going to end well, is what I'm trying to say.

There's violence all over the world, Jack.

And boy, if you can't do the basic fundamentals of a civilization, provide people with cheap, affordable food, make sure they can move and be transported, have a secure border, have an educational system that gives people instruction in disinterested and empirical education, and have a method where people of different appearances can get along, and you don't have a country.

And all the Leah Thomas's and all the 1690s psychodramas won't matter.

And we're starting to see that with COVID, plague, war in Ukraine.

That's what happens.

That's the basic building blocks.

And we're not doing it in this country.

And that's what is really scary.

These people that are blabbering about diversity, equity, inclusion.

They don't understand that people that talk like that are people that talk like AOC on energy or people who talk like that about agriculture, or people who talk about that, about deterrence, and they all have their counterparts on the left, they get their way.

And you have a country that is reverting back to fourth world status.

And I think if they would come to southwestern Fresno County and drive around the rural parts, they could see that we shouldn't brag about the United States as so wonderful, because in many parts where I live, it looks like a third world country.

In fact, about a mile from here, I could show people things that they would not believe as far as the way people are living and what they're doing.

And so, and that's because we're neglecting the fundamentals of civilization and we're pursuing these irrelevant things that's going on at Cornell.

Well, Victor, we're going to return to this subject of free speech.

And you and I, we've been doing this podcast here and at National Review and other places for a couple of years, and we've complained regularly about that there's a free speech problem in America.

but it wasn't necessarily true that there was until the other day.

Do you know what happened, Victor?

Yes, I do, but I'm going to let you, because we had the paper of record.

Yes, right.

The New York Times has declared America has a free speech problem.

Thank you, New York Times.

We're going to talk about that editorial right after this important message.

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

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A few notes.

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That's a tremendous amount of content.

So, okay, Victor, all that said let's get back to this um new york times editorial forgive me listeners just let me read the first few sentences here and then victor please your thoughts on how shallow it may be how missing the point how sanctimonious whatever your thoughts may be and here's how it begins victor for all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country, the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

This social silencing, this depluralizing of America has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear.

It feels like a third rail, dangerous for a strong nation.

and open society that is dangerous.

And here's the last paragraph I will torture our listeners with.

How has this happened?

In large part, it's because the political left and the right, don't forget that, Victor, it's also the right's fault.

But what about the loop?

Yeah, are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture.

It goes on and just goes on.

There's actually, it quotes some, there's a poll associated with this editorial, Victor, and it found that only 34% of Americans said they believed that all Americans enjoyed freedom of speech completely.

And the last piece of data here, 84% of adults said it is a, quote, very serious or somewhat serious problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation.

Victor, what do you think of the New York Times finding this problem?

Yeah, left and right.

There was all those Mormons that were storming Yale Law School, weren't they?

And, you know, this is this whatabouts is my former colleague, I'll be blunt, Jonah Goldberg, wrote something about the same, that it's a left and it's a right, or as we say in Greek, men,

dear, on the one hand, on the other, you're getting nowhere when you say that, because I don't think a bunch of right-wing people control Google and Apple and Twitter.

I don't think they control the major print media, and that would be defined as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the LA Times.

I don't think they control the three major networks, NBC, ABC, CBS.

I think they control one out of three of the cable, Fox, but not MSNBC or NBC.

I don't think they control the universities.

I don't think they control Hollywood.

I don't think they control the NPR or PBS.

I don't think they control the corporate boardroom.

So this idea that it's both sides, well, it doesn't mean that the right is morally superior necessarily, although I think it is, but I think they don't have the ability as the left does.

So that is just hogwash.

The second interesting question that you asked, and you were right on the money, Jack, is why?

Why now?

I mean, these are the people who pushed out Barry Weiss, right?

They've got a whole list of columnists that they have fired their science writer.

They have fired so many people at the New York Times that weren't woke.

So there's two or three reasons for, and this Matthew Rosenberg, remember what he said, the guy who just basically for a year said that January 6th was a

insurrection, a coup d'etat, revolutionary movement.

He just told us, these are the signs and symbols that I saw at January 6th.

And he gets caught off tape and said,

the whole thing was a joke.

All these people, my colleagues at the New York Times, grow up.

So what is happening now is two things, Jack.

Three things.

One, the midterms are coming up.

and they're going to lose.

And one reason, not the major reason, that's the economy, inflation, the border.

But one reason is people don't like them.

They don't like to be told what to do.

They don't like to be told they're stupid.

They don't like to be looked down on by that nasal twang.

Well, you know, I just don't think you're honoring the LBGTQ issues or I have problems.

That stuff.

They're just sick of it.

And the New York Times knows that.

And they're a representation of that.

Number two,

the revolution is eating its own.

I mean, we're full Jacobin phase now.

And,

you know, Danton has been guillotined and Robespierre has got his hand on the guillotine rope.

And those people at the New York Times, and there's still some white males there.

And maybe there's a couple of closet liberals left.

They're thinking, oh my God, they have fired everybody.

They're going to come after me.

And these people are stupid.

These are what Ben Rhodes said when he said that these reporters know nothing.

They're 20-something.

We just feed them and they're going to get rid of it.

We got to stop this.

So they're sort of like thermidors that say, we got to stop it before they kill us.

And the third, and I think the most important thing maybe is I think that they are worried now that all of these conspiracy theories have blown up.

And I wrote an article today about it in American Greatness, but remember the whole conspiracy of Russian collusion?

And we know now that it was Hillary Clinton who paid the DNC, who paid Perkins Coe, who paid Glenn Simpson, who paid Christopher Steele, who paid this crazy guy at the Brookings, Ashinko, or whatever his name was, and her former employee, Anthony Dolan.

So basically, Hillary hired Russian sources via Dolan because they were being fed stuff to

create.

a lie about Donald Trump.

It was a complete circular.

And that's come out now.

They're worried about that because they said it was collusion.

And then we had that gaslighting with the, remember Jack, the Alpha Bank, the Pings?

And now we learned from John Durham that there was no pings, that actually it was Hillary Clinton writing a check to the DNC, writing a check to Perkins Co., writing checks to Michael Sussman

and probably Glenn Simpson, and then hiring techies to go through the private communications of candidate and president-elect Trump and finding a ping.

and not telling us it was a one-way communication from the Russians and it was to a Trump server kind of like white noise or I guess we would call it clutter couldn't even communicate back and they knew it but they called the FBI and dumped it on them so then they went to the media and said look the FBI is investigating because they didn't tell them that they had told the FBI and of course that's why these things are going to get get some of them indicted.

But again, that was a conspiracy of them alleging a conspiracy with Trump.

And then I think some of the worst is January 6th.

I mean, we've talked about it was buffoonish.

It was a riot.

The people who desecrated our capital in the sense of tear things up, they should be arrested, they should be punished.

But these people are in solitary confinement, some of them haven't been charged.

And they're looking at, I mean, they didn't do as much damage to the Republic as Jussie Smollett did.

If he had gotten his way, he would have helped cause a race war almost.

And he's out on, he's out now, or all of these people are out in San Francisco.

They're committing felony or the 120 days of 2020.

But nevertheless, we were told by the left, this was a democracy dies in darkness riot.

20,000 soldiers plus came out in the streets.

And now Michael Rosenberg, as I said, he wrote, I read those articles.

He had one about, well, I'll tell you what these symbols mean on these flags.

Then he gets honey.

trapped by Operation Veritas, hidden Mike, 60 Minutes Ambush, the old Mike Wallace technique.

And guess what?

He just laughs at the whole thing and says, you know, we had fun.

These people took themselves too seriously.

It was a big psychodrama.

There was FBI informants everywhere.

So conspiracy to allege somebody is a conspiracy.

I'm getting on a roll, but I'll just finish very quickly.

Remember the laptop, the lapdogs?

Remember that Jack?

50 retired intelligence operatives were right before the election when they found this in a Delaware, I guess it was a Dwellington, Delaware computer store.

And they said, oh my God, Russian disinformation.

Now, we can't say that, but we will say it is likely sort of kind of is Russian.

And guess who signed it?

The two architects of that letter, James Clapper and John Brennan.

And they had two things in common.

One, they were both paid respectively by MSNBC and CNN to go on there and spout hatred of Donald Trump and to wink and nod about their sources as if they had some authoritarian knowledge.

And two, they have both lied under oath to Congress about intelligence matter.

Brennan on two occasions saying that he'd never spied on Senate staff or computers and there were nobody ever killed as kletl damaged and hit drone strikes on the Pakistani-Afghan border and Clapper saying the NSA never spies on anybody.

And they were the architects of that letter.

And that helped because remember, Twitter squashed that, Facebook squashed it, the New York Times squashed it.

And now the New York Times, as we said earlier, is saying, guess what?

Laptop was true.

I guess we didn't know it.

But it's true now, 17 months later.

And you're thinking.

Just like the free speech thing, Jack, you're thinking, hmm, let us count the ways of this confession.

Why would these disingenuous, dishonest people suddenly feign some type of morality?

And there has to be three alternatives.

One,

they think Hunter Biden is going to be indicted for tax fraud, and that trail is going to lead to Joe Biden.

And they don't want to be saying that the laptop is fake when the U.S.

government is indicting them from information on that.

Two, they're saying like Harry Reid, it worked, didn't it?

So it's over now.

We don't really have to keep saying that the laptop was fake.

We're not going to apologize because it worked.

We got Donald Trump out of office.

Or three,

we should have some eerie music here, Jack, sound effects.

Three, Joe Biden may be expendable.

He served his purpose.

He's a complete.

embarrassment.

He's destroying the Democratic brand.

So we're going to say the laptop was authentic all along.

And unfortunately, Joe Biden turns up a lot in there and he was being written checks from everything to his electricity to his cleaning bill by Hunter's Shakedown Company.

And he never reported that income.

And he's just got to go.

So,

oh, you know what I thought, Jack?

What, Victor?

I can't stop.

I noticed

very quickly.

Remember Molly Ball's time essay about how the conspiracy saved the election?

You mentioned her in your American.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You remember how right after the election, we would talk, was there fraud?

And I think I said, well,

I don't believe the Kraken and Sidney Powell and all that, but I do believe they inordinately and probably illegally used bureaucratic edicts and they went.

cherry-picked liberal judges to overturn the constitutional right of the states to make election and balloting laws.

And the result of that was 102 million mail-in and early ballots.

And the error rate went from 4% to 5% normally in most states to just a fraction of that.

In other words, triple the number of mail ballots or quadruple it and the error rate decreases by a magnitude of 10.

Voila, you get 7 million ballots that otherwise would have been thrown out.

Okay.

And stuff like that.

And I got a a couple of emails that said, oh, you know, I was listening to you and you're conspiracists like everybody else.

And in fact, Jack, I will confess that I was brought up on quote unquote investigation by the Antifa member of the Stanford faculty, Mr.

Palumbo, who said.

The poet, right?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I don't know, quarter million tweets to his credit.

And he

organized, you know, shut down the San Mateo Bridge, got over 70 Stanford students, but he's a moral exemplar on that campus.

And he suggests that I was for saying what I just did, that I was a conspiracist challenging the integrity of the election.

And guess what?

Molly Ball writes an election and she said, they just want this to be known.

They're so giddy, basically, about what they pulled off.

I'm going to tell you what it was.

And she used the word conspiracy about 10 times.

CEOs, yep.

They started mouthing off about, you know, social justice.

Antifa BLM, or what she called activist on the street, oh, they just toned down everything.

They're not going to embarrass Joe Biden.

They're not so principled, they can't get something out of it.

So they quieted down.

Remember that October, November?

Suddenly the riot stopped that had gone all summer long and really were embarrassing the left.

And then Mark Zuckerberg and the morally superior Silicon Valley.

And she details from A to Z what they did.

just what we're talking about to warp that election.

And my point is that all these people have alleged other people were conspiracists, and that is a psychological Freudian projection.

Whether it was Alpha Bank or the Russian collusion hoax or the first impeachment or the January 6th hysteria or the election hysteria or Hunter's laptop hysteria, they created a big lie and then said the other people they lied about were liars.

And it really has really damaged the United States because if if they hadn't have done that they just had just taken a deep breath said some people rioted in the capital let's make sure they pay the price let's beef up security let's investigate the videos let's see what how this happened they just couldn't leave it alone they had to say this was a coup and we're going to make these sobs and they lost half the country because nobody believes the media anymore nobody So that New York Times thing about canceled, you know what it reminds me of?

I think it was Effie Adcock wrote a book called marcus crassius multi-millionaire and the one of the triumvirate first triumvirants marcus crass he got his head cut off at kerai in i think 53 bc but you know how he made his money he would pull up with his slaves who slaves a good word for these servile people in the media but he pulled up with fire brigades and then it was always questionable whether he knew where the fire was going to you know take place maybe maybe not but they would pull out and then they'd stick their hand out and say do you want it out?

So here's the money.

So now the New York Times, after being an arsonist in the sense of promulgating all this destructive thing, just saying, oh, let's put it out.

Buy our magazine.

We're sober and judicious inheritors of the New York Times traditions.

It's disgusting.

It's pathetic.

They did so much damage to people's lives.

They should pay.

They should write an editorial and say, we are so sorry about Russian collusion.

We destroyed the country over that.

We're so sorry about that alpha bank.

We should have never reported that.

We should have told you that Hunter's laptop was authentic.

We think there was a lot of abuse of collection laws and engineering and a lot of Jane Meyer's dark money that went on in the 2020 election.

We're so sorry.

And they're never going to do that.

And Victor, we need to talk, have one very brief end of the show conversation, but I did want to add to everything you, laundry list list you gave, was not only did they control Google, Twitter, Facebook, suppress news say about Hunter's laptop, but they also killed Parlor, an attempt to create another outlet for free speech.

Not they, the New York Times, but this is the Mayeu of America in the last year.

He did.

And

right after January 6th, riding high, not that they believed that it was really a coup d'etat.

When you looked at that motley group of people, you know,

there are a large number of people that were just crazy.

And some of them were egged on by the FBI, but nevertheless, that was the occasion they used, what they use in the left-wing parliaments is pounce.

So Parliament woke up one day and it had no apps.

And Google and I guess Facebook and Apple and all of them shut it down.

These are the people who are always lecturing us on morality and they make John D.

Rockefeller look like an amateur as far as a monopolist or arnold mr carne carnegie they do they're 19th century monopolist cartels and they destroyed anybody that they

that was a very good point you made because all of this is about power and money and they were very scared that after the election and a lot of legitimate worries about the conduct of the balloting, people were flocking to parliament.

There were some projections that they might have 10 to 20 million Twitter followers that was swarming in there, and then they shut it down, destroyed the company.

And there was no reason to do that.

If they really believed in, you know, long-haired guys in flip-flops and tie-dye t-shirts that just kind of hang out in Palo Alto coffee shops and go on the corner and create new code and that's really brilliant and they don't they're not IBM guys with square ties and flat tops.

If they really do believe that, then they wouldn't be cutthroat monopolists, or they wouldn't have people living in Winnebagos all up and down El Camino and all over Mineral Park that work for them.

Well, we're going to come back after this message, and I'm hoping I can get Victor to talk about in just two minutes tractors.

Okay, Victor, yes,

let's make that commitment.

We'll be back right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

As for me, Jack Fowler, the host, I'd just like to recommend our listeners, if they're interested, you can sign up for the weekly email newsletter I write, Civil Thoughts.

You can do that at civilthoughts.com.

It's totally free.

And I run the Center for Civil Society for American Philanthropic.

And that's center for civil society.com.

Victor's piece that he just talked about, The Conspirators, that is at American Greatness or any number of other pieces.

Victor writes twice a week for American Greatness.

So Victor, I'm springing this on you.

We need something to close the show with.

And I just wanted to, if you see if you could wet the whistle a little bit of our listeners, you wrote a two-part ultra series on your website about tractors.

I have a feeling you were thinking about tractors and the connection between American men who could fix tractors.

And then when they went to war, they could fix tanks and the Germans could do that.

Yeah.

So I don't know if that was

the back of your head inspiration, but you wrote a wonderful two-part series about tractors and the farm.

Could you tell us about it briefly?

Well, very briefly, you know, I had studied classics from 18 to 25, just non-stop, two years in Greece.

And I was so burned out when I got my PhD.

And there were so few jobs, I came back, and I'd grown up in this farm and driven a tractor, but I sort of got obsessed with them.

And I didn't teach for five years.

I just farmed full-time.

And we had all these old tractors and we bought some new ones.

And I got really, I mean, I was never the tractor driver of my twin brother.

He was a masterful tractor tractor driver, mechanic, everything.

But I did all the jobs, the PTO jobs.

We post hole diggers or put them on a spray rig.

I calibrated all that.

I had rippers on it, tandem disc harrows, you name it.

We even made a custom grape steak pusher on a tractor using the hydraulic system.

And I really got to appreciate this was one thing at a time when California was being flooded by Japanese cars that we did really well.

And when you drive a 9N, which is only a putt-putt 15 horsepower, it came out in 39 or an 8N during World War II, and you hear your grandfather, we got that 8N finally in 46 held up for the war, or that the Jubilee was for Jubilee, had overhead valves, and it had about 30 horsepower.

And that was something else.

That was, I had a PTO shaft, power takeoff.

That's the little crank shaft.

It extends to the back of the tractor and by its rotation can power all all sorts of implements as well as just dragging them.

And with the hydraulics, you can lift up and down the implement and then you can have machines generate within the implement.

And then I also got a respect for them.

They're very, very dangerous because they're inherently unstable and they have to be to pull these big weights.

So you've got these huge tires and then you've got this huge...

high torque diesel now engine and then you've got small tires in the front and this is before we really had ubiquitous four-wheel drive.

And then you have tractor weights, big, heavy, 50 to 100-pound weights that you put on the bumper so that the thing doesn't flip on its back.

Some guys, you know, want to go faster or they have problems with compression, and they take those weights off.

That's okay if you go straight, but if you go on any elevation, they can kick up.

And we had, we're one of the last farms in this area that were never leveled when they had the big equipment in the 1950s.

My grandfather was a hopeless, romantic, and maybe not economically rational,

but it was a beautiful farm.

It had rolling hills and a pond and tree-lined alleyways.

It was right out of

some kind of Bruegel painting.

And

when you tried to go disc some of these vineyards, you had to be very careful.

All those things were tipping.

And sometimes these old tractors, we had an I wrote about the finished up, we had an Alice Chalmers, a huge hundred and for huge for vineyard or the tractor.

These aren't the Combine or the big 250 horses of the Midwest, but or the big D12, D all the D9, all that stuff.

But it was a huge tractor and it popped into gear all the time.

And one day, one of us came in, filled up the diesel.

Diesel is not explosive, so you can, they usually left the tractor on, shouldn't, but they did.

And it was in neutral.

And he went to get a drink and it popped into gear and has kept going and it it went right up the side of a you know the treaded front were like an animal's claws and i talk about animals and tractors and it just started to claw its way up to the track to the uh side of the shed and it got to a critical point jack where either it was going the sheer weight of it was going to break down the wall or it was going to tip over backward and because there was no implement on it and

it it just died and so it just stood there for a split second, almost straight up, and then it just slowly sank back.

Stuff like that happened all the time.

And I'm just thinking of all the people that I knew growing up in this farm.

They got injured.

I mean, my brother got his tip of his finger cut off.

We had a display once that wouldn't come out.

So one of us got the bright idea that we were going to heat up the grease and then we could get a big huge ratchet on it and take the display off.

It was the outer display, but it was so corroded and broken that the grease became a noxious gas, a compressive gas, and it was a closed system and it blew the disc off like a big round shield about five feet across the shop and hit some one of our neighbors in the chest and knocked him flat.

And it was just stuff like that happened all the time.

I mean, it wasn't, I mean, all the time over 20 years, but when you remember three or four of those dangerous accidents.

So whenever I drive now and I see a guy out there all by himself,

just to finish, I drive to Palo Alto once a week, every 10 days, and I try to go out through Fireball or through Manning Avenue, San Joaquin.

You just look at those vast west side fields and you look at those guys on those tractors and they're going up and down, up and down for hours at a time.

And I know that now they have cabs and it's quiet and air conditioning heating.

But still, it's just sort of like riding a horse, I think, in the 19th century all by yourself.

But in those days when I was doing it, we had no ear protection.

You had no cab.

You had no filtration system.

So I think right now my twin brother's deaf.

I'm deaf.

I have to have hearing aids.

I can't hear at all.

And it was for five years of that roaring in your ear.

and then getting sick from the chemicals without protection.

But you were out in the air, is what I'm saying.

But just putting that bead in the middle of the tractor, right down the vineyard row, one inch on one side, one inch on the other with a tandem, you know, 9.3-inch disc, wham.

And

you relax one second, you'll take out five or six vines.

So

I developed a respect when I would watch these guys.

zip around in a massive 285 zoom zoom zoom not even i had a guy named casey jones or my neighbor to watch him drive a tractor jack it was like a Rembrandt painting.

It really was.

He just went straight down the row, hour after hour after hour.

And you would look how he disc, and that line, you could look like a laser, not one zig or zag, and not one vine taken out.

Then you looked at that tractor when he came out of the row.

And my tractor was old, it had leaks, hydraulic.

That thing was immaculate and was older than mine.

He was a master mechanic.

I really developed a lot of respect for that guy.

If only you had listened to Michael Bloomberg and stuck your

music to him.

Stuck your finger to him.

I've got him.

I got him in the ultra, so that's funny you mentioned it.

He's been ultra eyes this week.

Just, hey, you know, it's a process.

It's just a process.

You just go over there and you dig a hole and you drop a seed, and Presto, you have corn.

I'm thinking, yeah, Mike, it's just like you call up your stockbroker.

you say, I want to buy a thousand shares of Amazon, and presto, you're a multi-millionaire.

Is that how you did it?

Life's easier with the, with a billion dollars.

We're at the point now where we share with our listeners our gratitude for their listening.

And we do read your comments on itunes.

Where, by the way, this week passed and also last week, we were the number eight show in the nation for number eight podcast for politics so thanks to those who listen and the new folks who are coming aboard so let me read two um comments left it's titled jack fowler has become a bore and it's it's fine wait wait wait who said that well it's elite elite rummy and he says love v dh but jack fowler's become too quippy and frankly he's a he's a boar that drags the shows down he's the kind of guy you would never want at a dinner party Sammy, on the other hand, is great.

Lose Jack keeps Sammy.

So thank you, Elite Rummy.

But then now there's this one from Rob KSF, Truth Bombs, Write Down the Smokestacks of the Leftist Liars.

That's what it's titled.

And Rob writes, where Dennis Prager is our...

armor and moral guide.

VDH is the patriotic culture warriors, heavy artillery, decimating leftist lies with common sense and lessons from 2,500 years of history.

His methodical destruction of every leftist distortion through repeated bullseyes are just what we needed to never back down, to always tell the truth and win back the country from those who would destroy it.

God bless him, his family, and his farm in Selma, which I hope he never leaves.

Thanks, Rob, KSF.

Thanks, Elite Rummy.

I wouldn't invite me to a dinner party either.

Wait, Jack, I just have to finish with one thing.

I want everybody to know I don't set the agenda for what we're going to talk about.

That's 100% Jack's choices.

Sometimes I don't even know what he's going to talk about.

I usually don't know what he's going to talk about.

So my point is

that if he was not interviewing me and being a partner, I would be talking like, well, let's analyze the 17 different.

And what he does is he thinks Victor has got, he's a circuit board.

He has all these buttons buttons on it and I'm going to push this one and set that nut off and he understands what I'm passionate about what you're passionate about so I if the reason that we're gaining geometrically a larger audience is he knows what you're interested in and more importantly he knows that I'm interested in as you are and what some things I'm interested in, you're not interested in and he knows that.

So he doesn't announce.

So I'm always asking Jack, hey, Jack, can't we have at least one class on the manuscript traditions of Aeschylus suppliants?

Because I took that class in graduate school and I really thought I knew something about 100 lines of the suppliant.

Listen, you do that.

Thank you.

I wasn't setting you up there, Victor.

And I don't think you're a nut.

And that leads me to recommend to our listeners, if they didn't catch your recent conversation with Sammy

about Latin and Greece.

We did.

Greek.

It was a terrific listen and why Greek may be an easier and more precise language than Latin.

I think it was fascinating to listen to.

Can I say something in ending?

Yes, go ahead.

I'm going to value Greek and I'm going to imitate an ethnic accent, but I'm not doing it out of stereotyping.

I want to make that clear.

It's out of admiration.

It's somebody who barely spoke English.

But I used to prune vines because we had all these different size vineyards and we paid by piecework.

And the going hourly rate was seven dollars an hour six dollars an hour and i would want to see if they could make nine dollars so i would prune you know three or four rows and see how fast and i would try to work as you know not really fast not really slow and then i would find out how many vines i had done and calibrate but i would always go with a mexican-american guy probably from Mexico, legal.

And one day he said,

Victor,

they told me you have like a doctorate, a phd

i said yeah i do well what is it in electronics plumbing i said no it's in greek what

quick you speak greek speak greek to me i said i can't it's a dead language so you went to get a phd and you can't speak

i said yes i cannot speak what did you do that for how many years did it take you and i said four or five and i was getting like weepy jack right i'm sorry it was four or five

How much did it cost?

And I said, well, they paid if you did.

So you, well, what did you do during those five years?

I said, I, you learn to speak a language, but you don't speak it?

I said, well, you can write.

Well, then write it for me.

He said, well, you don't write it because it's dead.

You only write it to learn how to read it.

Oh, my God.

Why are you allowed here?

You're pruning.

Look at you.

Yeah.

You're pruning just like me.

Did I have to get a PhD?

Whatever you call it in Greek to do what you're doing.

I said, no.

I was like 25.

You're an idiot, Victor.

See, that guy thought you were a nut.

Right.

He was a genius, I tell you, because he was a very smart guy and I admired him.

I still do.

But I had never had anybody talk to that, like shaking me, you know.

You know, those movies where the guy, where the private is going around, and then the sergeant goes, you're a terrible soldier and slaps him five times.

And then the soldier says, thanks, Sarge, I needed that.

Right.

That's how I felt.

Well, we'll get you speaking Greek someday, my friend.

Well, that's all.

Thank you.

I got to go.

I went over a limit.

I'm sorry to everybody.

You can do whatever you want.

It's your show.

It's the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Thanks for listening, folks.

Thank you, Victor, for sharing.

Thank you.

Thank you.