Classics, Myths, Inflation and Disease

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Hey, ladies, hey gentlemen, this is Jack Fowler.

I am the host of the Victor Davis Hansen Show and we are recording on Sunday, March 6th, 2022.

Victor is the star and the namesake.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and he's the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor, we've got a lot to talk about today.

We're going to start off with why classics, despite being something that the poor, minorities, immigrants, just can't deal with.

That's what the left tells us.

But that seems like it's a lot of hooey.

And we'll get to your thoughts on the whoey right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor, I thought it'd be good to start off talking about the classics.

You happen to be one of America's great classicists.

You know something about this.

So there's a book by a man named Roosevelt Montas, actually a professor, who at 12 years old, he came to the U.S.

from truly abject poverty in the Dominican Republic.

So here he is, a poor teen in New York, brown, black, dark.

And he came across a garbage heap.

And on top of that, there was a book by Plato.

And he took it and he read it.

Today, Roosevelt Montas is a Columbia University professor, and he's an author of a recent book, came out late last year.

It's called Rescuing Socrates, How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.

So, Victor, back to my point, brown teen immigrants, you know, they're incapable of reading the Greeks or about the Greeks.

They're capable of understanding the classics, of being inspired by dead white males.

That's what the left tells us.

That's what even many professors, as we've discussed on previous podcasts, even some classics professors are starting to talk about this.

So, Victor, I wanted to ask you about your thoughts about Roosevelt Montas, his book.

I'm not sure if you've read it or not, but what you've heard about it and what you know about him and this theme of somebody of his background embracing the classics and the great books.

Yes.

And I have not read the book.

I've read accounts about the book and the the synopsis of the book, but it seems to be juxtaposition to another Dominican Republic immigrant, Daniel L.

Padilla Peralta.

I want to get that right.

And he made a big splash recently when he was involved in the Princeton sort of witch hunt against Joshua Katz.

And he was involved in a lot of very radical ideas about ending requirement of Greek and Latin for a classics major, which is sort of hard to believe.

He staked out ground in an opposite fashion.

And I'll get to the other book with Montras in a minute.

And Padilla Perualta says, as an immigrant, yes, he came here undocumented, i.e., illegally, and yes, he was residing here undocumented, i.e., illegally.

And yes, he went to prep school.

And yes, he got to Princeton with his entire way paid for.

And yes, he got his entire PhD program paid for at Stanford.

And yes, he was hired under extraordinarily unique circumstances to go to Princeton as a faculty member.

And yes, he has an exalted position in the field with only one academic book, which is unheard of, which is his thesis.

And yes, all of that translates to what a racist, horrible, wicked place the United States to do all that to him.

And that's basically it.

And they do all this to him because they fooled him into thinking that classics was enlightening and the western tradition of empiricism free speech tolerance of secularism reason and rationalism

the chauvinism of middle class free market capital all of that he thought was racially blind and it offered a paradigm for people like him to plug into.

But then he was sorely disappointed.

And most importantly, Jack, this has nothing to do with the hard left bent of academia

and the eagerness of what I would stereotype, maybe unfairly generalize is the wealthy bicostal white male elite that still, and the white woman elite, and maybe to a lesser extent Asian elite, that likes people to trash their culture and then inordinately rewards them for doing so.

And so the other approach, rescuing Socrates, is just the opposite.

Same background,

same underprivileged upbringing, same arrival in the United States, and then same exposure to the great books.

I think in his case, it's mostly Plato.

And I think he listed, is it Freud, Marx, and Augustine, both writing in support and in contrast to them, but they were influential upon him.

And he comes to a different conclusion that these are not privileged texts or constructs of white male hierarchy and supremacy, but once they're written, they're out there.

And these ideas then are liberal art ideas.

They're humanism and they allow people to think on the basis of ideas rather than tribal considerations.

And they're unique in that fashion and they make a big difference.

And I can just say that as someone who spent 21 years, and I was hired to start a classics department when there was no Greek offer.

There was only one class of Latin.

And I think eight years later, we had four classes.

And I think we were offering 32 classical languages and related translation courses a year, not to mention ancient history as well.

And they were all for minority students.

I don't mean all in the sense every, but that was who our students were, mostly Mexican-American, Southeast Southeast Asian, African-American.

And I would call poor whites, the children of the Oklahoma diaspora, underprivileged, marginalized.

And the idea was that we're going to give you an education that will sharpen your grammar and syntax, will allow you to speak and write effectively, will make you look at the world empirically rather than prejudicially, that you will worship the god induction rather than the liar deduction.

And we're going to give you auxiliary tools in archaeology, philology, epigraphy, language, literature, history, philosophy.

And out of that, you will be so well educated that you can do anything you want, whether you want to go to law school or classics or PhDs or business.

And we don't really prejudge either that or what your politics will be.

And that was what classics was designed, I think, to do.

And I think rescuing Socrates probably is an affirmation of that in a way that Padilla Peralta is not.

And one thing I want to say, Jack, in this topic is if you are a young academic, please, please, please do not virtue signal and performance art that you're on the barricades of cutting edge defiance and rebellion because you're a marginalized, non-white male, heterosexual

person.

Right now, all the rewards of hiring, admissions, promotions, tenure, publication, media coverage go to someone who can self-identify as non-white male, left-wing, marginalized person, et cetera.

It's not brave to say you're that.

That's where the rewards in the profession lie.

I'm perfectly willing to say that 60 years ago, it was just the opposite.

If you were an East Coast elite, wealthy white male, you sort of dominated the profession.

That's not true now, but it would be as if somebody, you know, I don't know, in the 1950s, a white male classicist said, and I'm really against the cutting edge because I'm writing about why white male Ivy League educated people should dominate the profession.

That's really racy and out there.

No, it's not.

And so I get a little tired of that self puffed up blowfish self-importance.

And I'm looking forward to reading Rescuing Socrates.

And I will do it next time.

Maybe I can talk about it.

Okay.

Well, Victor, let's stay in the culture area while we're on it and move to a new piece you have, big essay in the new Criterion, which is a great magazine.

It's not monthly.

I think it only comes out 10 times a year, but it's a great publication.

Our friend Roger Kimball is the, I think he's the publisher and the editor.

But you have an essay in the new issue that just came out.

It's called The Mythologies of Black Lives Matter.

It's a big, meaty, intelligent piece of reporting, piece of analysis.

Victor, would you talk about this essay you've written for the new criterion?

Yeah, Roger Kimball has something called Rider in Residence.

You're required.

to write four essays.

And I wrote one on classics, I think you and I discussed.

And then one obituaries on great classicists, and then I wrote another one, Western Civilization.

This was the fourth one.

And this was on BLM and it was before the recent disclosures about the financial improprieties of its leadership.

And I basically, Jack, tried to explain what is it about BLM that suddenly, if you look at the polls, it polls negatively almost in every category.

And whereas it was 60% approval rating right after George Floyd, it just died.

It has a negative view.

And I've tried to explain that empirically.

And I suggested that, first of all,

it never caught on its message that you're going to privilege Black lives, the very title, and it was created by these three women who did not create it.

They did not create Black Lives Matter, Ms.

Quellars and the other two.

They did not do this just as a generic Black activist, Chalvinistic advocacy group.

They did it specifically, as I mentioned in several quotes in the media, as an advocacy for women's issues who were women and being black and being gay.

So they were going to self-critique everybody, including the Black movement that they felt might not be sensitive to women in general or Black gays in particular, and especially not to both.

Okay, and then we had the Trayvon Martin and the

Michael Brown Ferguson, and then it just exploded.

It still wasn't very well known.

It was very controversial, and they had a lot of bad publicity, you know, pigs in a blanket, burn the police, all that stuff.

And then they just capitalized on the George Floyd death.

And they got, I hear 100 million, but I think it's far greater.

And I went through what happened after that.

Number one, we don't know where the money is.

I predicted that before we've got these recent disclosures.

Ms.

Quellers, I think, ended up getting four houses worth over three or four million dollars.

She lives in Lily White Topanga Canyon.

First thing she did was build a security fence around her domain.

And then she retired into riches.

And the other two are gone, gone with the wind.

I don't know where they are.

And nobody else does.

And they've outsourced BLM.

And what has BLM done?

Well, besides being an orchestrator of the 120 Days of Variety in summer of 2020 that got 35 people killed and $2 billion in damage and 1,500 police officers injured.

They've been very vocal about, they've attacked the New York mayor, who's a liberal, because he mentioned they might want special details to hunt out high crime areas.

That was a taboo.

They've gone to the Indiana school district and lectured people, young people, and they get paid a lot for this, Jack, that crime is a construct.

And it's something we've talked about, that white, wealthy, privileged people make the laws.

It's along the old French revolutionary idea that the only reason it's illegal to steal bread is because wealthy people don't steal bread.

And therefore, they made a law that says other people shouldn't steal bread.

That's their attitude.

And then It started to implode.

They looted the organization.

They had no accounting.

And they started weighing in on some issues, Jack, that were absolutely both ridiculous, but very revealing of what their values were.

So we can go down the lists.

They kept claiming that Kyle Rittenhouse was, they were the ones behind that this was a racist indictment of America that he was exonerated.

Remember, he was running away while a mob was chasing him and one man was armed and pointed a gun at him and he shot him white male.

And another person tried to jump on him, shot him white male.

Another person came out of nowhere to attack him, white male.

And all of them had some brushes with the law and some of them, a lot of them, including child molestation and certain perversities.

And that somehow BLM said was a referendum.

They were, you know, on race relations.

It's sort of like Whoopi Goldberg saying the Holocaust was just between a a bunch of white people and she didn't care about it, but she wanted to weigh in on it and tell everybody, or Nicole Hannah-Jones now angry at Ukraine because it's about white people.

Well, this was about white people, but BLM did a little bit more than complain.

They tried to expropriate it as a question.

And then the next thing that happened was the Waukesha shootings, which was about race.

63 people injured, five killed by this crazy fellow that ran them down with a felonious history, with a history of anti-white racism.

And no sooner had he had done that than a BLM affiliated guy came out of Milwaukee and he went to Walker Show and he said, Look,

this is the beginning of a revolution, I'm afraid.

And he had BLM people there.

So that was another.

bad optic moment for BLM.

And then we had the Juicy Smollett trial finally.

And the more Juicy got, and we talked about that, the more that he got on the stand the more he lied and the more they sliced him and diced him and he still maintained as we remember jack that at two in the morning he threw bleach that defied the laws of chemistry did not freeze somebody threw it at him and he somehow fought off these mega-hatted racists that were mad about his spectacular career in what empire and he did it holding a cell phone in one hand and a sandwich in the other which he maintained maintained through the tremendous brawl.

And he somehow managed to escape with his life, but he really kicked their butt, the two intruders, who in fact were his two African, I mean African from Africa, American trainers, who he hired to do this.

And BLM weighed in and said that his guilty verdict for concocting this whole bizarre self-serving psychodrama was true.

And it was showing you how racist.

And after that, they became a caricature of themselves.

And now they're known as a large sort of a black version of the Lincoln Project.

They're just grifters.

And they're trying to make money for an elite.

And the elite has cashed in and got out ahead of the posse.

And now the local BLM affiliates are trying to do the same.

And they're just waiting for another George Floyd incident so they can go to Pepsi or, I don't know, American Airlines or Delta or somebody and said, if you don't give me this, it's a much more refined effort than the old Jesse Jackson shakedown of Toyota or something like that.

And that's what I was trying to delineate and quote them with their own words.

But it was fascinating to me that they started out as an advocacy for black gay women.

And then they expanded beyond that when it became opportunistically lucrative to do so.

Yeah.

You and I are in the wrong business, my friend.

That's nice work, if you can get it, how they've cashed in.

Hey, Victor, we're going to talk about farmers' lives matter, or classicism lives matter.

Yeah, raising farmers.

Hey, Victor, you've got a new piece up on American greatness.

It's called the Biden Inflation Octopus.

It begins with this sentence: the Democrats will suffer historic losses in the November midterms.

And we're going to get back to this piece right after this important message.

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

We're recording on Sunday, March 6th, 2022.

So, Victor, last week there was a solid jobs growth report.

I think maybe over 600,000 new jobs.

But despite that, I don't think there's any way that we are going to be heading off or avoiding a Biden recession, call it what you will.

But the current spiraling inflation is now slamming the typical American family.

I saw some report on Fox News last week.

$5,000, average American family, $5,000 a year is the hit they're taking because of inflation.

So about this piece you have on American greatness titled the Biden Inflation.

octopus.

Victor, would you tell us about the piece and how the arms of this octopus are not only choking America, but also choking the political fortunes of the Democratic Party.

You know, I had been looking at data and at 7.5% annual inflation rise last month,

which doesn't really reflect the fact that the things that are the stuff of life, such as cars, such as houses,

such as foods, especially meat,

such as lumber and such as gasoline and the aggregate have gone up about 15 to 20%.

I don't think people really care that your accountant charges you 4% more this year than last.

They're worried about the stuff of life, and that's gone up far more than 7.5 in aggregate.

And we don't really understand what it does to people.

And that's what the article

was about the psychology of it.

It makes people feel humiliated.

When you go to a car lot and you need a car and you see that Honda Civic and it says 26 000 sticker price and you used to negotiate 10 off and all of a sudden it has a black uh marks a lot and it says above it 4 500

in addition to that you feel humiliated when you go to the store and you look at a tri-tip and it's 40 bucks you feel stupid when you're filling up your car and the gas pump stops at a hundred dollars and you're only three quarters full you feel like a stupid fool.

When you go to the lumber yard and you, which I did this week to get a four by eight sheet of plywood, I felt relieved, Jack, because it was $52.

I know it had been eight 14 months ago, but I felt, wow, it's not $96 anymore.

So I was an imbecile.

It has that feeling of people.

The other thing it does, inflation,

It's a Hobbesian reduction to every man for themselves.

I have this ancient ancient house that's falling apart.

So I decided to get everything fixed in a 12-month period.

Wiring, plumbing, it all needed to be done.

And it's expensive, but you can't find anybody to do it.

And the only people you can find are employed, but they're moonlighting.

So they often want to work at odd hours.

Okay.

And they want cash.

which means they double the cost because they're not going to pay taxes, but you can't do that.

And every man then feels like I gave a lecture not too long ago, and somebody asked me why I charge more than I did four years ago.

And I said, I paid more for everything else.

And I'm not going to be the last person standing in musical chairs when the music stops.

And then all of a sudden, I'm just going to charge the same when my airfare, my gas, everything has gone way up.

And so the guy said, I didn't think you would do that.

Well, why wouldn't I do it?

Not that I want to do it, but that's the panic mob psychology that once somebody price increases another person, everybody will do it.

And if you don't do it, you're left out as a musical chair.

So I went through all of these psychological things.

I thought I would have a bigger reception than it did, but you know, an author never knows, Jack, when you write a column, which takes off and which doesn't.

Usually the ones that you're most fond of don't, and the ones that you kind of regret do.

And so I've had a couple that I didn't think were very good this last month that really went viral, but I thought that one was pretty well crafted.

But then I wanted to take a break from Ukraine and talk about inflation.

But when you think about the Sturm and Drang of war versus the dismal science of economics, it wasn't a good time to write about it, I think, because I don't think a lot of people read it.

But it's about the human side of inflation.

And then finally, it's who did this?

Right.

And it was self-created.

So I think people think, A,

the Bidenites are crazy.

They believe in this bankrupt modern monetary theory, this fool's goal that you can print money and get prosperity.

Or B,

they're just incompetent.

They don't know what the hell they're doing.

Or C,

hmm, anybody that has a Passbook.

account or money in his wallet when you have seven five and higher inflation you're only getting 2% on your money they are losing money and that's good and anybody who owes a lot of money and he's paying a car loan or a house loan at 3% when inflation is set, they are making money.

And this is what Barack Obama wanted to do in 2008 when he said he wanted to remember to Joe the Plumber, spread the wealth.

And so this is what inflation does.

It eats away at accumulated money.

And when you tie it to low interest rates, which we've never really done before, usually it sees a commiserate.

rise.

It really takes away from people who work and save and people who borrow get cheaper interest.

I don't think it'll last because I think as soon as this

Trump printed over a trillion dollars in 2020, Biden two and a half trillion with more to come.

And when that funny money is exhausted and people chase too few goods,

then they're not going to buy it anymore.

It's getting too high to buy stuff.

And so when that happens, they're going to have to raise the interest rate and print less money, and then they're going to have a recession.

And I think that's going to come at the end of the year.

Yeah, your piece is not only about the psychological feeling stupid, as you did say, but the very last line of this article, I think, is terrific.

Come November, Americans will rightfully blame him, that's Biden, for willfully damaging their lives.

So I think that's laid in there too, that not only am I paying this price at the pump, but this guy did it.

And maybe this adds to the stupid part, and we elected him.

Yeah, we did.

Although in the voters' defense, he stayed in his basement and said he was going to be Joe Nice Guy from Scranton, which was also a myth.

He never was a nice guy.

I'm not sure he was really that much from Scranton, but nonetheless, he didn't really inform the American public what they were doing.

It was a stealth campaign.

And they thought, well, at least he won't tweet.

And at least he'll just sit there because, and I talked to people, Jack, who voted for him, who were convinced the fact that he was cognitive challenge was good because he wouldn't be able to do anything.

And you'd get Trump's policy, which they approved of, without Trump, which they didn't.

The truth is that for all of Trump's combativeness, he doesn't hold grudges in, you know, a Hatfield-McCoy fashion.

He wants to make a deal all the time.

It's today.

I have a friend or enemy.

Tomorrow, I'll make a deal with either one of them or against either one of them.

Just whatever the market will bear.

But Biden does.

He's a mean sob he always was you and i have talked about the bork hearings the clarence thomas hearings the racist uh

quips that he's made the making fun of obese people making fun he does it all the time i'm not saying that trump has been nice to stormy daniels when he called her horse face and stuff like that but joe biden is not the antithesis of that and yet people voted on that basis and we're reaping what they sowed indeed the whirlwind well victor let's talk about more spending.

This would be on military.

So there have been a few columns in the last week or so, calls here or there, full columns.

My former colleague, Rich Lowery, wrote one calling for a massive and necessary U.S.

military buildup.

Of course, you didn't hear that in Joe Biden's State of the Union speech.

Our annual debt is running neck and neck with our federal budget, so it's hard to see where the money for a military buildup comes from, even though it may indeed be truly necessary.

So if you don't mind, let's presume that there is a general will to improve our military.

That's maybe a big presumption given the Democrats.

And let's presume, too, that there are fiscal limits to this overall project.

Victor, taking air, Navy, infantry, missile defense, and all other major aspects of warfare and defense spending.

If you had to prioritize spending for military buildup because of fiscal constraints, what would some of your top priorities be?

Well, I think everybody realizes that the Navy is way too small.

I think it's down to, what, 250 active ships.

And part of it's the Navy's fault.

They went for this idea of a $14 or $15 billion carrier and these two or three billion dollar super frigates and all of that.

But nevertheless, we need more ships.

And I think we need more inexpensive, smaller platforms, sort of the World War II idea than putting all of our eggs in one basket that a Chinese missile, you know, that cost 100 grand can take out, you know, going six inches above the ocean at night.

And so I think that's one thing.

I think we need a lot of drones.

We have these $150 million planes, but for $150 million, we might be able to make 150 drones for each one of them.

So, more anti-missile defense.

The problem I have, and I'm for Jack, more spending on defense.

I'm not quite in the Matthew Ridgeway school that when you vote for increased defensive spending, you eliminate federal spending other places that'll be wasted and entitlements, et cetera.

But a lot of people feel that way.

But anyway, my point is that I don't know how much money is being spent on perks and retirements and medical care and social justice and wokeism, but I do know that the overhead, whether it's 30% of the military budget or it's 20%, it's higher than anybody else in the world.

And so when we say that we're spending all of this money

vis-a-vis the Soviets or the, you know,

I don't know, the Russians, we really aren't.

We're spending money on non-monetary.

And of course, somebody's going to listen to that and say, well, Mr.

Hansen, that's why we have such a good military, because we pay so well.

We have such benefits.

We have great,

okay.

But Afghanistan surely wasn't a sign of that.

So I'm worried about that.

I don't know if new money will address the crisis, Jack, we're having in command.

I don't know whether that's because of.

ROTC or Officer OCS, Officers Candidate School, or the Naval and the air force

and West Point, the instruction there.

But something is wrong when we are not creating independent maverick commanders that want to win and are schooled and interested in military efficacy.

That when we get these politicized people who navigate between Washington and New York, and their resumes are, oh, I was in the National Security Council.

Oh, I was the Army Work College.

Oh, I was in the Pentagon staffer.

and they're not, you know, head of the 101st Airborne or something.

I'm just really worried about it because I think we're getting a bureaucratic idea to war.

And you look at World War II or historically in American history, what won World War II were mavericks and eccentrics and nuts.

And I'm talking, as I've said before, George Patt and Lucy Truscott, Matthew Ridgway in World War II, and in Korea, Curtis LeMay, all of those people, even to in some some regards, Douglas MacArthur, William Tecumseh Sherman, a Phil Sheridan, a George Thomas, all these guys.

And they're not products of strict orthodoxy, although some went to the military academy.

So that's what's really important.

The hardware is important, more of things rather than cheaper things.

But my gosh, if you've got this woke General Milley School of Generalship, we're going to lose, lose, lose.

And I think also, this is another dead horse.

I'm going to apologize to everybody.

And I know that I'm going to get another email from an angry general, but you can't be in the military

and you can't be in a position where your views are going to be publicized with the expectation that you're going to go back on to or be appointed the first time to a defense contractor corporation that's doing business with the Pentagon and will put you in a either as a lobbyist or a board member with the expectation that that vast labyrinth of contacts will be financially attractive and you have market value for drawing on them when you're a civilian retiring.

I just not, there's too many conflicts of interest there.

It's a free country, but there has to be some idea that if you take up high command, you promise a hiatus when you retire five years before you go on a corporate board or you become a military lobbyist.

But I mean, when Secretary of Defense is on Raytheon's board, was, and now we're discussing the need to get missile defense, there's a conflict there.

And I don't know why we don't.

It's baked in the cake, though, isn't it, Victor?

I mean, let's say you develop a product X that would be important for military or national security or intelligence needs.

There is no way America, the proper agencies are going to consider it or buy it.

And let's assume whatever this thing is, this widget is necessary.

There's no way that it's going to happen unless retired top-level officers are involved as lobbyists, as board members, et cetera.

It's just not going to happen.

Well, in the old days, in World War I and World War II, it wasn't, I know there was personal prejudice and egos attached, but they had trials.

And when they wanted to have the M1, they had people shoot it or the 1911-45 45 and they adjudicated it in actual trials and same with fighter planes and there were alternatives to the b17 and the b29 that were not viable and they found that out in trials not just corporate lobbying and we kind of did that with our strike fighter and all that stuff but It's too incestuous.

It just is.

And you can see it in the government in general and the Pentagon in particular that people say things now, whether it's vis-a-vis China or whether it's vis-a-vis

woke issues that are predicated and massaged on where they're going to end up in the civilian world.

And they do not want to be controversial in particular, but in general, they don't want to be considered conservative because that's contrary to the corporate ethos.

And that conditions things.

People react to,

you know, I see it in my own field.

I've seen it in academics for years, that academics, they just understand that all the rewards, whether it's good book reviews or publishers or conference, whatever the rewards are to the winners, they're from the left.

So they make the necessary adjustments.

And I don't know.

I just think if we're going to spend all this money on defense, and we are spending a lot, and a lot of it already goes to pensions and social concerns and indoctrination now, then if we're going to spend it on weapons, we need to get outside voices, small companies, mavericks, new ideas, and get them in there.

We can do it.

If you look at the history of American armament, things like the P-51 Mustang, it was absolutely brilliant, the M1 rifle, we got very good weapons in meritocratic trials and considerations.

It wasn't insider stuff.

We got some bad ones, but that was usually considered bad and people objected.

But I just don't think this is going to work.

You know, it's just contrary to being an admiral or a general.

The corporate mentality does not jive with being an independent commander.

Independent commander has to be outspoken.

They have to risk themselves.

They've got to say controversial things.

And they have to be judged on whether they bring results.

Nobody wants a loudmouth that's a lousy general.

but they've got to perform.

But when you start predicating your speech and your activity and your viewpoints on your post-retirement career, as if you've hit the jackpot, then that comes at the cost of battlefield efficacy.

Right.

And you can see it.

It's not me saying it.

Look at the brilliant Afghan withdrawal.

Look at the brilliant Libyan bombing.

Look at the brilliant, I don't know, pacification of Iraq.

Look at...

all these brilliant things that supposedly were going to be easy and they didn't work out.

And And maybe that's why we have a crisis in command, whether that's the political or the military leadership or both.

But something's wrong.

I think you're going to get more than one email from an A.

Yeah,

I think they, I used to have a lot of friends that were generals.

I wish I still did in a lot of ways, and they're very angry.

I understand that, but I'm not going to stop talking about the dangers of the corporate board and the revolving door and the politically correct virtue signaling performance arts statement.

So, if you have a retired general and he says the president of the United States is a Mussolini and that violates Article 88 of the Code of Military Justice, I'm not going to say, I better not say that.

I know that guy, or I'm not going to do that.

And that's what we should all do.

Something went wrong.

I know that Donald Trump may have been a catalyst for it, or maybe he tore off the scab and what was beneath there we saw wasn't very nice, but you can't have a dozen retired generals with enormous influence of their subordinates in the ranks and start calling for any reason whatsoever the president of the United States, a Nazi, a Mussolini, an Auschwitz-like prison guard, what do you name it, a liar, all of that stuff.

I've written three or four articles where I quoted verbatim.

both the Article 88 statute and the violations of it.

And there was nothing, no consequences.

Well, Victor, we've got time to talk about one more thing on today's podcast, and that will be the CDC's decision to declare it's over.

We'll get to that right after this important message.

Hey, we're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Before we move on to COVID stuff, VictorHanson.com.

That is Victor's website, which has anything he writes, you'll find there.

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And consider signing up.

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You'll find links to Victor's various appearances, other podcasts, his books, The Dying Citizen.

That's a great link there to order it if you haven't already.

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So Victor, COVID, the crisis, the need for lockdowns and laws, need for proof of vaccinations, boosters, the tormenting of school kids.

You've seen the pictures of the wind section of elementary school bands and track athletes performing, running the mile, and they're doing it with their face covered.

All of a sudden, poof, it's over.

The mandates are over, but the play acting isn't.

It was, we could talk about Ron DeSantis if you want.

He came came out, he mocked what he called, and others have called COVID theater the other day.

Still, though, many are playing COVID theater.

And I think typically at places where people are allegedly intelligent, more so than elsewhere in the population, i.e.

college campuses.

Just last week, I was up, happened to be at my alma mater.

I had to stop on a campus.

I was going up to see Dan Mahoney.

Dan's up in Worcester, Massachusetts.

And I went to Holy Cross, which I have to admit was also the alma mater of Anthony Fauci.

But everybody, everybody I saw there coming out of the student center was wearing a mask and going in was wearing a mask.

And this was after the Edict.

So also, Victor, and the Stanford Review, that's the, and you've written for the Stanford.

Yeah, I have.

It's the Conservative College.

They're wonderful kids.

They're very bright, very brave, a lot of them.

There's a kid named Mark kid, a student, Mark Huerta, and he's writing a piece called Freedom Day.

Stanford's mask mandate is gone, but students still mask up.

And let's see, he says, I went to the gym on the morning of Wednesday, March 2nd.

I estimate that 75 to 80% of the people were still working out with their masks on.

At the dining hall afterwards, a similar percentage of students still wore their masks while getting food at the buffet, even if they took off their masks as soon as they sat down to eat.

I assume there are some people try to eat with their masks on.

I don't know how they do it.

Anyway, Victor, we have the end of the mandates.

We have still COVID theater going on.

We have Ron DeSantis stepping out publicly and attacking it.

What are your thoughts about this fizzle?

Well, I'm a cynic.

I think it's called.

Really?

I think it's called midterms and sluggish economy and inflation.

And somebody went to Joe Biden, and we can read all of these accounts about political insiders and internal polling.

But they basically told him that his COVID policy is highly unpopular and it retards economic growth and you got to junk it.

So then it was always a political, I think it was a political decision when the bureaucracy wanted to hurt Trump anyway and shut down the economy.

And I said to myself, when it's in their interest politically to open up the economy, the science will make the necessary adjustments and it has.

And, you know, I mean, I'm saying that because Anthony Fauci told me and 330 million other Americans that wearing a mask was ridiculous.

And then he said it wasn't.

And then he said two would even be better than one.

I could go on and on.

And where is Anthony Fauci now?

He's gone with the quarantines and the mask mandates, I guess.

He's gone.

I've seen him.

They say he's on YouTube, low-rated

do-it-yourself TV now.

He's such a...

He's like a moth attracted to the light of publicity, but he's not being listened to by anybody.

And I think he has a rendezvous.

I'm trying to remember what that guy, the Congressman Rory, wasn't he when he gave it, he made a statement and said,

it was kind of, I don't know what I'd make of it, but he basically said, now, Anthony Fauci, you may be gone, but you've got a rendezvous with us when we take the house because we're going to have some hearings, i.e., you're going to explain to us how some

CDC and Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease Money got routed to the Wuhan lab and why you covered that up.

And we're going to be talking to you.

And so I think he played his hand too long.

He didn't get out of the game in time.

He could have, you know, gotten out, but we've got a million dead.

And we were told basically that it was Donald Trump's botched idea, botched policies, botched this, botch that, that it killed 350,000 people.

And now that Joe Biden was coming, it was going to wane.

And the scientists were saying that, et cetera.

We were going to really have a tight quarantine.

We were going to have a lot of masks.

We now had the vaccinations.

We had the new pharmaceuticals.

And guess what?

We had 650,000, almost double die under Joe Biden, which wouldn't, it's not his fault, except he gave us the proposition, the narrative that it is his fault because he said that Donald Trump was responsible for these deaths.

And so here we are.

And I guess what I'm saying is, I keep talking about poor Scott Atlas and the injustice that's been done, but I went back and looked at some things he said.

They were quite prescient, Jack.

They were blunt in Scott's fashion, but he basically said that a certain magic moment, the Delta variant would get so many people infected and the shots, the back, and he was a proponent of the shots, that you would have herd immunity.

And I think now we have an actual 80 million people who have tested positive for the original or Delta or the omicron but that suggested maybe 3 million didn't even get three times that number didn't get tested that's the figure people have used so you might have 250 million americans with herd immunity and then you're getting up to another 150 that have had at least one shot or more more than that so what i'm getting at is the number of people out there that haven't been vaccinated and have never had COVID is very small.

So that little viral, those little viras, they bounce around, they're hitting people that are ready for them.

And they're not making people that sick to the point that they don't really know that they had it.

And so that's what we all thought.

And what is Fauci doing?

He's on these, as I said,

I just saw a clip of the other day and he was trying to find relevance, Jack, by talking about Ukraine.

And he said, the unknown story of Ukraine is that it has a high tuberculosis rate and therefore there's going going to be a tuberculosis

outbreak.

And I thought, well, are you going to go over there and give them a mask?

Or what are you going to do?

It's all these people.

It's like John Kerry saying, the real story about Ukraine is climate change.

It's all these publicity moths.

When their flames are extinguished, they go around anything they can find.

And Ukraine is one.

So they want to get back into publicity to warn us about all the things other than it's a life and death struggle for people to repel a vicious invader.

That's it.

And there's a lot of things in life that are peripheral to that, but they're not the story now.

And so I don't know if he did it by his arrogance of being there for 40 years.

He started out with a semblance of being nonpartisan, but he connived behind Trump's back.

I understand Trump was boisterous, bombastic, but he undercut him.

He ended up just being an exclusive guest at CNN and as a court gesture to just reify their anti-administration narratives as they went into the re-election cycle.

And I can't think of, if you can think of something, Jack, anything that he said

about the virus and the pandemic that proved efficient or oppressing, I'd like to know.

Did he come up with some new protocol?

I mean, did he have a protocol and say, there's people who say that Pep said, here are the data.

He never got up there and just said, these are therapeutics and some will help you and some won't.

And then don't demonize people.

And so I, yeah.

You mentioned Scott Atlas and the kneecapping of Scott Atlas, who was trying to show the broader effects of the lockdown, which we now see from some studies.

I've had tremendous impact.

No, John Hopkins studies show, absolutely.

He said that Scott went through the whole gamut.

Scott said, it's not good for children not to be able to see faces.

They learn to acquire speech by looking at people, actually mouth words.

They lose their fear of people when they can see their entire face.

He said society doesn't function when people are wearing masks.

There are health difficulties breathing through that all day and oxygenation levels.

It doesn't have any usefulness as far as the studies show with most but a few masks.

And as a neuroradiologist, he just said these are the types of procedures that if you don't do and you don't have done, you're going to get a huge spike in cancers that were treatable that aren't, or heart conditions that were treatable that aren't now, or everything from,

you know, from an infected foot because you didn't get your pedicure if you're an older person.

to somebody who didn't have an abscessed tooth taken out that ended up very serious.

So he outlined it and for that, and he did in a blunt way, which was admirable, I think, but for that, he got demonized by Stanford University, which is highly ironic.

I mean, they keep saying because the four people in the United States who were voices

in the desert were Michael Levette, the Nobel Prize-winning Stanford immunologist, and Scott Atlas, the Hoover Fellow, and Jay Bacharia.

the Stanford immunologist, and John Yannides.

And they were all right, and they all suffered enormous damage to their reputations nationally in general and Stanford in particular.

And nobody, nobody on the medical faculty, nobody in the university ever apologized to them.

Never.

It's never going to happen either.

Now, all of a sudden, it's like sort of like being, you know, an animal farm when you look at the barn and, you know,

all of a sudden the commandments have crossed out.

You know, all of a sudden, mass good?

No, mass bad.

Oh, vaccine mandation, boosters are the boosters.

Well, you just got to get the booster.

There was a story the other day.

I don't know whether it's right or not that there's some evidence that the RNA vaccinations altered DNA samples in the liver.

We were told that was the one thing we were told would never happen.

I don't know if that's true, but I just think that, you know, they when Biden just went around, get the booster, get the booster, get the booster, get the booster.

Never.

Well,

if you've had COVID, get an antibody test.

Not that that's the only marker, but it gives you some idea of natural immunity and it might be as good as the booster.

But he couldn't do that.

And so

I got the booster, and I thought, and the reaction was terrible.

And I thought, wow.

Yeah, I got the second Moderna.

I'm not going to bring up the disease.

I'll take it.

Well, I had the second Moderna and I got COVID.

And I would rather have had

what I went through with the second Moderna was worse, I thought, than the Delta.

Getting it.

I had a higher fever with the Moderna than I did the Delta, second shot.

And then, as I said before in a class, when I saw that I had almost 2,500 antibodies

and some doctor was saying, People are going to tell you now to get the booster, I said, why would I get the booster?

And as I talked to another doctor, he said, all viral immune, not all, but a lot of viral immunizations, whether they're flu vaccine or COVID, for a while, then some people that have a low normal white blood count, they can lower that white, normal, white blood count from, say, four down to three or two and a a half.

It won't, you know, if you're right in the middle, it won't hurt you.

But for 20 or 30 percent, as your body gears up to create the antibodies, it weakens your white blood count.

And people can have that for three weeks at a time when they think they're super protected and they go out.

And that explains, I know so many people that got the booster and then they got COVID.

And I think part of it was their bodies, they have low white blood counts and their bodies were reacting to that.

And we don't know that.

I'm just speculating.

I'm not going to hear it to offer medical exegesis, but I know that for a fact is true because I've talked to physicians, I've read the scientific reports, that is definitely true of flu vaccinations, that for a while it can lower your resistance if you are low normal on white blood count.

And it takes about three or four weeks to get back.

So when people get the flu and they say, oh, I got the vaccination, I got the flu.

It was not.

the flu virus.

It was your body's reaction that allowed other viruses or some type of cold or something to get when you're not in tip-top shape.

And I think a lot of people that are very

wise and well-informed

have a lot of problems with getting the booster.

And, Jack, we're not even talking about young kids.

We know now that the CDC, as we know, did not give us the full data on the susceptibility of kids, say, 5 to 12, to COVID infections or the dangers of people, young males that were were 18 to 30.

We haven't got that full data, but from what's leaked out, I think you can make the argument that if you were 19 years old, it would be

wise not to get vaccinated because you were not going to get that sick from COVID if you did get it.

If you were 5 to 12,

it might be not wise to vaccinate people and then shut down all the schools.

Twisted.

Twisted.

Yeah, we destroyed a whole generation of students.

And the universities came out like bandits.

They charged the regular tuition and they did not provide the product.

And Walmart and Amazon and Target came out.

Independent small business people got killed.

And right now we've destroyed the work ethic in the United States.

I can tell you.

being on the phone for the last 60 days, would you please come out and help me crawl under the house and fix this big three-inch cast iron pipe?

Would you please, please come in and help me dig a septic tank?

No,

I can't get to it for eight weeks, but I'm on, you know, I need to get cash.

Right.

So we, that's what a lot of people are.

I had a painter the other day I talked to, and he said a guy said to him who had no painting experience, I'm willing to do it, but I want $300 a day, a day,

and I want it in cash.

So with no experience, lovely.

No experience.

Well, Victor,

we got to wrap up here because we're

almost out of time.

So

I don't know what we're going to ever talk about if Anthony Fauci disappears.

I just saw, you know, I saw today the number of people in California that died of COVID.

It's a tragedy, but it was 49 people.

We have a state of 41 million.

So the idea that you're going to permit, and we've known from the CDZ, the average death involves a person with three to four comorbidities.

So the idea that 41 people died today,

yesterday in California, and you've got to shut down the economy or make everybody get a booster or get everybody with a mask.

In a cost-to-benefit analysis,

it would be much better to work on the comorbidities, I think.

Right, absolutely.

Well, Victor, I'd like to thank our listeners, and there seem to be a lot of newer ones because there's a rating service of various podcasts.

And the Victor Davis-Hanson show today, earlier today, was number eight in the nation.

And of the shows that we're, and we're typically in the top 20, I think always in the top 20, but we are the one show of these leading shows that is sort of, you know, garage band kind of production operation that it's, we love the folks that handle all the technological stuff for it, but it's, you're not in the studio, I'm not in a studio, you know, so it's done.

It's done.

Are you suggesting that my Amazon delivered microphone is not quality merchandise?

I'm just

not in a half a million dollar studio.

Or my 100-year-old desk is not

professional quality.

Well, I'm sure great things have been written on that.

My MacBook Air with all the dents in it is not recording this well.

Victor, it's part of the charm and allure.

So I'm just kidding because I know what's going to happen.

Sammy's listening to this and she's going to say in our next interview, see, I told you you needed a big studio.

Here's my idea.

I don't think that's how Sammy talks, but that's a good attempt at an impersonation.

Yes.

All right.

Now.

At the end of the show, we read one of the comments because we do read the comments, actually.

And folks on iTunes, thank you very much.

And here's one left on iTunes the other day.

It's from CT86, and it's titled, Thank You.

Quote, I can't yet say I have read all his books, but I'm working on it.

I love his.

I think the his is you, Victor, because I haven't written any books.

I love his perspective.

I've always loved history and can't wait to learn more.

So far, I have given two copies of The Dying Citizen to family and one copy of The Second World Wars Away to a fellow school bus driver.

Thank you for the podcast.

I appreciate the time and effort and haven't missed a single one yet.

That's CT86.

And thanks, CT.

That's very nice.

I deeply appreciate that, especially the idea of people that are out in the world like a bus driver.

And then it's hard to read and then to be physical during the, I did that farming for so many years.

And that's very admirable.

Yeah.

So, well, thanks to him.

Thanks to everyone who listens and leaves comments.

Visit VictorHanson.com to see more of what Victor writes.

And we'll be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jack, and thank everybody for listening again.