Zucker, Truckers, and Things That Make You Pucker

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are recording on Thursday, February 3rd.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, Victor Davis-Hansen, the namesake and star of the podcast, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, also a best-selling author of many books.

The Dying Citizen, his most recent one, Victor is a military historian, farmer, and I think America's premier political analyst.

So we've got a ton of stuff to talk about today.

The first subject will be about America all gloomy and America steeped in nihilism.

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Hello again, folks.

No talk of angels today, Victor, okay?

Okay.

So I made my peace with the angel Mike

and the non-existent Mark.

Oh, you're on it.

Good.

You're on a nickname basis with them.

I like that.

I am.

I need every archangel I can get.

So, Victor, I know you saw this pretty important Gallup survey that came out earlier this week.

And I just want to, I'm going to torment some of our listeners because I want to say some of the numbers that came out in this poll.

and then that will lead into the new essay the new major essay you've written for american greatness on joe biden and the uses of nihilism but here's the data from the gallup poll and it's titled americans offer gloomy state of the nation report so the query was people's satisfaction with this or that topic or area and Here's one, just the lead one, for example.

The satisfaction in 2020 with the size and power of the federal government was 38% of the population.

Now it's down to 32.

So, here are some other satisfaction numbers.

The way income and wealth are distributed in the U.S.

and our system of government and how well it works, only 30% of Americans are satisfied with that.

That's down from both of those things, 43% just two years ago.

The size and influence of major corporations was 41%.

Now it's free falling, down to 26%.

The moral and ethical climate, 32%, now 20%.

Here are some other areas.

The nation's military strength and preparedness was 81%.

Right now, only 61% of Americans are satisfied.

Kind of mirroring that on the question of security from terrorism, only 47% of Americans are satisfied.

That's down 21% in two years.

Here's some other big drops.

The state of the nation's economy from 68% to 33%.

The nation's energy policies, 44% to 27%.

And the last number, the nation's policies to reduce or control crime, 47%

now, 24%.

I have a feeling if this poll was conducted a few months from now, we would see all those numbers even lower.

So, Victor, this, I think, this gloomy numbers mesh very well time-wise with an essay that you wrote for American Greatness.

I encourage our listeners to visit the website and read the piece.

It's also on your website, victorhanson.com.

So, Victor, you wrote the title Joe Biden and the Uses of Nihilism.

And just quickly, I just want to read a little thing here that what you wrote.

And then talk about this essay.

Talk about if any of the poll numbers you want to comment on that, please do.

You wrote, Victor, as they figure out the themes of the present madness, Americans become troubled as they attempt to fathom the characteristics of the ongoing nihilism.

And then you cited three things.

One, that people, Americans, are feeling that the catastrophe of 2021 was no accident.

Number two, that the nihilism intentionally targeted the despised middle class.

And number three, that ordinary citizens feel the law has utterly vanished.

Victor, this is an important essay, really good essay, meshes very well again with the data we just saw from Gallup.

Your thoughts, my friend.

I think one of the things we try to do, Jack, is to

put these incidents that seem inexplicable, such as the open border or the deliberate curtailment of two to three million barrels of oil, or begging the Saudis or the Russians to pump oil or Afghanistan into a context of what's behind it all.

What's behind it are,

in the terms of personnel, it's the squad who has inordinate power, for they don't represent very many people.

And then there's Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders,

and there's the Obamas in the shadows, of course, and there's Jill Biden, Jill, and they are the progressive shield around Joe Biden, who otherwise I don't think knows.

And they represent in turn the upper, upper, middle class, bicoastal professional classes, corporate class, academics, lawyers, financiers, et cetera, insurance,

all that.

And then they in turn represent the real power behind the Democratic Party are the zillionaires, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Mike Bloombergs, the George Soroses,

the Jeff Bezos,

Lisa Jobs, all of those people that have an inordinate amount of money.

We're not talking about a billion or two, but 30 or 40.

So we know who's what their agenda is, and it's a utopian dream.

In socialist terms, it'll never apply to themselves.

They push it because they feel they have the influence, clout, and money never to be subject to the consequences of what they advocate and insist on for others.

But I was interested in what the ideology is about.

And I was trying to argue that a lot of these people feel that the nihilism that we see gives them opportunities.

In other words, in normal, calm times, nobody would ever vote for any of this stuff.

When you see smash and grab and it's not being addressed, or you see carjackings, or you see $5

gas, or you see

2 million people crossing the border and being flown to various locations at night without disclosure to the public, or you see that disaster in Afghanistan, or you see 7% per annum inflation, which is probably about 10 when you add into the consumer price index what's not added in, the two most essentials of life is fuel and food.

But in that anarchy and chaos and nihilism, then they can say things that in normal times would be absolutely absurd.

Like, I'm only going to pick a black woman.

And if you disagree, you're a racist for the supreme court slot just as i did for the vice president slot or gin sacki can say you know i agree that spotify was right to try to censor rogan a little bit but they got to do a lot more and get out on it and you know basically silence that guy and

when you look at some of their initiatives they're not upset about the price of gas going up They blame the Saudis here.

They blame the Russians for it, but they're not upset to the degree they could stop it tomorrow.

All they'd have to do is green light the pipelines, go get a bunch of frackers and oil companies and say, what do you guys need?

You got open up federal leasing, open up Anwar, tell the bank stop discriminating against oil.

They could do it, but they're not going to do it because it's so, and everybody would traditionally think, Jack, well, it's so bad

that They've got to come up with something.

Well, no, it's so bad that they're going to try to push through in a desperate attempt before the midterms or the end of the Biden term, things that otherwise we wouldn't even consider.

But, you know, like a national, nobody would have ever thought that we'd have a national vaccine mandate.

Joe Biden himself thought it was absurd.

But that's where we are.

And it's going to get worse and worse.

So they're doing things that in normal times would be impossible.

But during this period of complete shock and confusion that they brought about, anything's possible.

The impossible is doable.

Victor, is there there some, as a classicist now, put on your classicist hat, the word nihilism, does it have anything, context that we might need to better understand or does it just mean nothingness?

It's nihil, nothingness, and it's, you know, it's a root of non and that non-negative root in Western Romance languages.

But it became popular, I think it became popular in the Enlightenment period and then in the 19th century is kind of an existentialism and the idea that modern man has no purpose in life other than just to live one more day or to satisfy the appetites.

There is no hereafter.

But nihilism is directly correlated in that Western literary and cultural tradition with things like atheism, depression, cultural pessimism, globalism.

It's a kind of...

Nihilism is a sort of milieu that Orwell was trying to describe in 1984, I think.

relativism.

And the result is that, you know, the person who's not a nihilist, who believes in patriotism and family, community, and religion, and moral responsibilities and rights don't come without responsibility, they are passe.

They're the mock.

And so that's what nihilism is.

And so that's what this is all about.

I mean, when you look at it, whether, you know, we're going to have a Super Bowl coming up and we're going to have, as I, as I also wrote in this piece that you introduced, Eminem and Snoop Dogg and Lamar Kendrick, Kendrick Lamar, they all have three things in common.

They've all had lyrics talking about doing violence to the police.

They've all had lyrics that deprecate women in the most violent fashion and use the N-word.

All three of them have in the past, and Eminem at least once or twice.

And then they're all worth over $100 million.

Terrible nation we have.

Yeah, that's what we'll be doing.

National Entertainment in two two weeks.

Some of them may have actually even murdered people also.

So

Victor, one last thing about this piece.

You wrote, so in a vast multiracial democracy of tribal competition and tensions, Biden has done his best to turn Americans against each other and has succeeded in a fashion that would have made his old Dixiecrat Senate mentors.

Robert Byrd and James O.

Eastland, proud.

Yeah, Victor, we've talked about this before, and you've written great recent essay on the kind of confederating of, as a word I'm coining, on what the left has really done through Biden as their, the Trojan horse as

Donald Trump called him.

Yeah, you know, we both have in our lives the arc of racial integration in America and improvement in America and these affairs in our own families.

They're more like what we might joke about as the League of Nations, as opposed to growing up just a bunch of my neighborhood Irish Catholics.

Things are much more complex and much more melded.

And yet in this time of true improvement of race relations in America, this guy has come and really done a 180 on us.

Yeah, he has.

We've got to start with the premise, though, that old Joe Biden is the old Joe Biden.

This is not an aberration.

It's just a diminution of his abilities, but not his essence.

He was always racially obsessed, even if it manifests itself in politically correct wokeness.

I mean, this is a guy that I wasn't exaggerating.

He bragged on Eastland, the segregationist.

He bragged on Robert Byrd.

He bragged that George Wallace quoted him favorably.

He talked about the jungle, talked about his vulnerable mom being at the, you know,

danger, i.e.

of black thugs, probably.

This is a guy who, you know, we've gone through it, Jack.

It cannot stop.

Put you all in chains, first clean, articulate African-American, the donut shop, the corn pop sagas.

And then more recently,

you know, he said junkie and you ain't black.

And he called one of his subordinates boy.

That's who he is.

And he's got a nasty streak to him as well.

I mean,

lying, dogface, pony soldier and fat were exactly what he did to Bork and Clarence Thomas and Tara Reed, probably.

He's not a nice person.

And we've talked before about the lies he promulgated about the poor truck driver who had that fatal rendezvous with his wife that led to her, you know, a car crash.

So he's not a nice guy.

And what happens a lot of times with senelity, it pulls off that veneer that we all have and it accentuates your characteristics.

I had a very sweet grandmother.

And she was a pioneer that grew up on the New Mexico frontier, one of 12 siblings, very dirt poor.

And she came out here when they lost everything and cut apricots in my grandfather's little shed.

And he married her when they were 20, 21.

And

she was the sweetest person in the world.

And when she

got Alzheimer's, she died at 91, but she, I should say, 93, she stayed, my wife and I took care of her.

And when she completely lost cognizance, and

she would go outside and wait for the stagecoach, or she would come up to me and say, you got the horses saddled, Victor.

We got to go to town.

I'll ride Bearbrock if I have to.

And she was back in 1910 or 1890 when she was born, that era.

But my point is, he was always sweet.

She was smiling.

She was, and then she had a brother who was just the opposite.

He was a cowboy too, but he was mean-spirited.

I won't mention his name.

And when he started to lose it, he got really angry.

You know what I mean?

He got really angry.

And he would come out here and say, You got some pennies on the ground that I can find, and I'm not going to pay for that damn garbage.

So I'm just dropping all my garbage in your garbage can.

How's that?

You know, that was how he was.

And I think Joe Biden's veneer has been stripped off, and we're seeing them the way he is in the raw.

I mean, this is a guy, if the stories are true, that used to sort of think it was cute to swim naked, remember, in front of Secret Service women on guard.

And then he charged us, the government, us, the people, $200,000, was it a month to rent a shack so they could have sort of a communication centers where they guarded him.

And as I pointed out in a piece that came out today, I mean, $3.5 million were given by Russian-related concerns to Hunter Biden that was funneled in to the Biden family through the mayor, I should say, the widow of the mayor.

of Moscow.

Yeah, so he's not a nice guy.

And he's mean.

He's got a mean streak in him.

And he exaggerates, he lies,

and he's a creation, he's a figment, he's a construction of the media because they have created this guy in his basement during the campaign.

And now they don't know what to do with him.

They've created a Frankenstinian monster that is turned on them and has threatened to destroy their entire party.

I mean, turning on him, I meant by being completely like a president, like no other president we've seen in the first year.

Everything, he has the on-midas touch.

Everything he's touched has turned to draw us.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's talk about Canada.

Let's talk about the truckers.

Yes.

Victor, does this uplift you in any way?

What do you think about what's happening?

Yeah, when I wrote a book about the end of small farming, Fields Without Dreams in 1995,

I made the point that we are desperately in need of entrepreneurial, independent, disconnected from government or corporation people.

And when you lose small farmers or middle-sized farmers who have to depend on their own cunning and skill and they don't get a salary, you're losing that independent minority voice that speaks up at the school board meetings, for example.

I mean, not that people who are teachers like myself or work for a firm like the Hoover,

not that we can't be independent, but innately, every single day, your mind races with inventory or debits versus income, et cetera.

And it's a very tenuous existence.

And one of the people that I mentioned in that book were, thank God we have independent truckers because they're always in war against that margin, you know, price of diesel fuel, maintenance, weather, et cetera.

And they're very vital.

I get very frustrated at them in California when they get in the left lane of a three-wane freeway and barrel down at 75 miles an hour.

But nevertheless, they're independent, rugged individuals.

And so when you see them protest like that and finding out they've had it, and what I mean by they've had it, they're saying to North America,

wait a minute, we didn't do well during the COVID lockdown.

We were the guys out there when COVID-1, when the Delta II, when Omicron 3 came out, and we delivered your food and we've delivered your fuel and we delivered your furniture.

And while you of the bi-coastal ruling class were zooming in isolation.

And, you know, we provided all of the materials that allowed you to disconnect and be safe and make more money than you could ever imagine, which we know happened the last two years.

And for them now to be demonized by the media and the left, I thought the left always liked working class people.

They don't.

And there's a I think there's a little bit of element of racism here because they're white, mostly.

I think there's some that are not, but they are using the same vocabulary of deprecation they do of the deplorables and the irredeemables and the clingers and the dregs and you can you can feel it and see it and you see that elitism expressed by trudeau who lies about them and and caricatures them and hides from them and i mean think about he's in isolation now asymptomatic with omicron and he's writing about all these little nostrums think about it he just got a vaccine the booster his third and then he gets infected.

And he's telling us to go do exactly what he did so we won't get infected.

He never makes that connection.

Science.

Yeah.

I mean,

how many truckers every single day are in that cab and they're barreling down the road with a load of heating fuel or they've got, you know, 20 tons worth of Home Depot refrigerators and they start to feel a little sick and they probably have a 99, 95 point.

Do they pull off the road and go into an urgent care and take, get an Omicron test, find out they're positive, then shut down their rig?

What do they do with the rig?

Do they just pull over?

Do they just say, hmm, it'll be fine.

Nobody steals anything off rigs these days, do they?

I'll just park my rig because I have a fever and I've got maybe Omicron and I'll go fly home back to Nebraska or something.

They don't.

They keep going.

And that's something the ruling class doesn't do.

So yeah, I have an enormous respect for them.

I mentioned before, my late father-in-law was a trucker and he was just a great man.

And they do have so much regulatory onus put on them.

They do.

And when it was tough years, years of negative income.

And you would understand that as a farmer.

And they take great risks.

So we have our bellies full.

America loved, I know we're talking about Canada, but America loved truckers.

What's

those trucker movies back in the 70s and 10-4 Good Buddy and all that stuff?

Well, this sort of leads into we're talking about COVID and COVID-related things.

So there was a study news about a meta-study and analysis by some economists at Johns Hopkins University looking at multiple studies of COVID policy.

And the conclusion was that the lockdowns, the stay-at-homes, the masks, this was amounted to bupkis.

Zero, I think a zero, not 2%, 0.2%

effect on mortality rates related to COVID, never mind all the other consequences that came from these drastic measures.

And the conclusion was we can never do this again.

These protocols, whatever you want to call them, protocols for dealing with the pandemic were truly disastrous.

And the information is right there, staring us in the face.

Of course, while this is happening, other people are preparing, you know, just continuing on insane policies that are affecting health of children, the health of everybody, mental health, the economy.

So anyway, Victor, I know you saw reports about that Hopkins study.

Do you have any comment on it?

Yeah, I do.

What you just said, if you had said that and I had agreed with you, which I do, But just quoting as you did, if we were doing this a year ago, we'd probably be kicked off all of our platform and nobody'd be able to say, because that was sacrilegious to say that.

You could not say that.

You could not say that COVID originated at Wuhan.

You could not say cloth mask had no utility.

You could not say any of this stuff.

You had to say that the vaccines were ironclad, 100%, 360-degree.

24-7 protection against the virus.

That's what it was.

And now we're learning that all of that dogmatism was at best contextualized.

And at worst some of it was a lot of it was not true and so that's what we've learned now that the medicine is turning out to be worse than the disease and you can see it i mean you haven't been able to go to a doctor to get an appointment and when i do go now for all these checkups i'm 68 i do my annual checkups All you hear is that they're overwhelmed.

And I went to go see a urologist not too long ago.

And I waited three hours and he apologized.

I didn't expect apology because i saw that he was overworked and he just mentioned in passing all the people who had prostate and bladder cancer that had been undiagnosed and now they were coming in with real problems and that's happening with heart and everything and that's the rule and

you know i know so many parents whose children have regressed i think the crime rate has gone up i think people the inability to recognize a person's face has had a collective psychological you know price to pay on society.

I think it's helped spite crime.

As I said the other day, I was in the bank and everybody had a mask and the teller remarked to me and said,

two years ago, the police would be in here.

And now she just doesn't know who's who behind a mask.

And it frightens her.

So I just think that all of these things that were originally well meant and were going to be the flattened the curve, they became kind of a litmus test of who is politically correct, who is part of the elite, who's going to obey the woke movement.

Somehow they got fused into all of that.

And the person who had legitimate skepticism was also fused into a deplorable or Neanderthal.

And now

it's joining the same family as the Russian collusion hoax.

It's joining the same family as the pangolin and the bat Wuhan origins hoax.

It's joining the same family as the Ukrainian phone call that Trump had no reason to ever suspect that there was any wrongdoing by the Biden family or that Ukraine was deeply embedded within American politics hoax.

And so it was a hoax.

Not in the sense that they didn't mean well, but the idea that you could stop this mutating virus by destroying the economy and keeping people locked in their homes for nearly two years.

It wasn't going to happen.

And people who said it wasn't going to happen, that it wouldn't be successful, I can tell you that a lot of them are at Stanford University where I work, whether it's Dr.

Yannides or Jay Bacharia or Scott Atlas.

And people did their utmost to destroy those people's reputations and careers.

I can tell you and test firsthand.

I heard people say things.

I saw things written in the paper.

I saw collective signatures.

They were no different than the out West, old West mob that lines up outside the jail and wants to execute the suspect.

That's how they acted.

And I think a lot of people have a lot of accountability that's due the rest of us.

Well, they have it probably with their banks filled with money.

Victor, let's talk about three related situations.

Let's take them on one at a time.

And these are the cancel world, cancel fights that are going on.

Let's start off with CNN and Zucker, who resigned.

He wasn't fired over not acknowledging that he had an ongoing affair with a colleague, top colleague at CNN,

with some folks coming out now like KD Kirk, saying, Well, you know, he always gave her these jobs because she was his lover, and that precluded other people, maybe the women from rising through the ranks of the company.

I think Megan Kelly went after that also.

But this seems to be this situation as a payback.

It's all so interwoven with Cuomo's that Chris Cuomo had knowledge of this situation and used that as leverage over Zucker.

And that allowed him to put his thug of a governor of a brother on regularly to distort our policy.

I mean, this is not just a simple little office love affair that did not have possibly significant consequences.

Any thoughts on this?

Yes, exactly right.

There's three or four, I think, main points.

You're absolutely right.

The guy was being blackmailed.

Everybody knew what he was doing,

and they kept quiet about it because they wanted to leverage him for their own particular agendas.

The prime one, which was the Cuomo brothers, wanted access to CNN's reporter sources.

What were the rumors they were hearing about Andrew Cuomo and his viability?

How could they preempt that?

How could they give him favorable colours?

Yes, Zucker knew that.

He greenlighted it, and that was probably because of his own exposure.

And then, number two, this is not confirmation of what we all know about CNN.

It is not a news organization.

It is a bunch of social misfits and pathological personalities.

I mean, these are the people who hired Kathy Griffin, who head up the head, the decapitated head of Donald Trump.

These are the people that Anderson Cooper, who says, you know, I think he said to Jeffrey Lloyd, well, you would support Trump even if he crapped and blank, blank right on the table.

These are the people who, you know, hired that, I guess it's Reza, what's his name, Aslan or whatever his name was, their religion editor who ate human brains on film and said that Donald Trump was a piece of blank.

These are the group of reporters, I think they fired two whole groups of them that wrote those false articles about the pinging communications with Axios Bank in Russia and Donald Trump's tower office.

And they talked about how people were going to go in and testimony and spill the beans on Russian collusion.

Never happened.

These are the guys, remember, they had one pedophile.

They had another person

who was sexually indiscreet.

It goes on and on.

And Don Lemon's being sued for sexual harassment.

So it's a creepy organization.

And they're usually wrong.

And they're fused with the Democratic Party.

And they've got...

you know, it's just not a nice bunch of people.

They're analogous to MSNBC.

And so that's another thing to remember about them.

And then third, I mean, come on, this man is an adult.

The woman he's having an affair with apparently was living next to him.

Their kids are families.

Their spouses knew each other.

They're both divorced, probably because of their affair.

But they're adults.

Who gives a blank, blank what they do?

I don't.

And if you say, well,

he's in a position of power.

How much power does the president have over the vice president?

They're all making millions of dollars.

They're all not judged on their skills.

It's who you know, how you network.

Who cares whether they're blank-blanking each other?

And if that's wrong, then maybe she should be fired too.

If it's wrong that he said he didn't have a relationship with a subordinate, and had he said that,

said, look,

when he had to fill out his ethics card or whatever it was for his latest promotion, he had said, yes, I am banging my subordinate.

Excuse the language.

and he had been upfront, maybe he wouldn't have been fired, or they wouldn't have had that pretext.

But this idea that I don't know what it is about humans now, but this idea that an adult human male and an adult human female who are among the upper, upper, upper, upper one elite of a sophisticated postmodern society, they have a sexual relationship, a Congress, and then they violate whatever relationships or vows or commitments they have to their own spouse.

That sordid cesspool is their problem.

I don't see how it's any of our business.

I really don't.

And so the idea that we're shocked, we're shocked, and he's going to give this fake

over the years, our relationship evolved.

I think the other partner to this relationship said, and when COVID came along, we transformed our relations if the virus made him nuts or horny or something.

So it's a joke.

And everything that comes out of that man's mouth is a lie.

It really is.

And he's destroyed CNN.

You know, if you and I had this conversation just eight years ago during the Obama administration, we would say, oh, it's just kind of an irrelevant center-left news organization we watch once in a while when we're stuck at an airport.

And now it's not even that.

It's just, I don't know what it is, but it's a joke.

Yeah.

It's a network that's obsessed right now.

And for the last year, it's been obsessed about January 6th.

But remember, it may have been eight years ago.

I forget the date, but when that airliner disappeared from Singapore, they spent a month or more.

All they talked about in CNN was dumb lemon.

Yeah.

Like, was there some black hole it went into in the sky?

I mean, literally, literally, yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

I think he was watching Star Trek or something.

By the way, you forgot to mention Jeffrey Toobin before.

I'm glad that you mentioned that.

A guy masturbates on a Zoom in front of his feminist CNN people and violates every canon of liberalhood.

And it's a question of, hmm, he's an elite, he's an Ivy Liger, he's one of us, he's witty, he's sarcastic, he's skeptic,

he's a sour puss.

We like people like that, he really goes after the right, but on the other hand, he pulled his phallus out, put his hand on it, and then glared at women apparently.

So, which of these ideologies wins out?

And they, nah, you know what, utility always wins out.

He's more valuable to us than not.

So they put him back.

Well, that's a perfect lead into what may be the next utility punishment, if it is.

And this has to do with Whoopi Goldberg from The View, who made some outrageous statements about the Nazi treatment of Jews.

And she may have been the last person in the world to

understand Adolf Hitler's perception of the Jews as a subhuman race, but contrasting to this Goldberg situation, and she apologized.

She had some, the head of the ADL, which I think was its own kind of scandal, come on and, you know, say, okay, all right,

you've apologized, which she did.

But then ABC, which produces the view, has suspended her for two weeks, and now she's irate about that.

Meanwhile, separate matter, Ilya Shapiro,

who was writer-center, has written any number of pieces over the years for National Review, for example, but he was appointed to a high position at the Georgetown Law School, which was kind of shocking in itself that that happened.

And then he tweeted about Biden's comments on appointing a black woman to the Supreme Court for Justice Breyers' departing seat.

And he wrote that Biden should nominate an Indian woman, a Sri Srivasan.

I'm sorry if I'm obviously mispronouncing it.

And then comment, this is Shapiro commenting on a tweet, but instead we'll get a lesser black woman nominee.

He apologized, but now immediately at Georgetown's law students reacted, demanding his firing.

He was immediately suspended.

So he's in this investigation, suspended animation space right now.

So anyway, Victor, I don't know that exactly comparable, but to people who have been, well, they're just in the center of public comment about this cancel culture.

So Victor, you have any thoughts about either Philbert or Shapiro?

Very quickly, quickly they they are related and they raise a third issue i think john podhoris wrote an essay yesterday about why doesn't she just go if she's so down on jews why doesn't she just go back to her karen johnson name i mean goldberg is usually considered a jewish name why did she fabricate a name i don't understand these people you know there's snoop dog and there's van jones and there's Whoopi Gold.

Why don't you just use your regular name?

I don't understand it.

I mean, it's back to the 1940s in Hollywood, but these aren't really big glamorous stars, you know,

that are named, you know, Zazinski Kropaski or something that you want to help the public get through.

So it's very ironic that she takes upon this Jewish name and then she shows herself not one iota of knowledge about the Jewish experience.

I know that if I said I'm Victor Steinberg and I wanted to make my name, the first thing I would do would be learn about Jewish culture.

Now, the second thing is if she wants to opine about the holocaust and hitler and race i think jack that a virtually ignorant ramist like her within about five minutes could get on google and say hitler holocaust jews and out would pop a passage or two from mein camp or from alfred rosenberg the architect of nazi pseudoscience on race and it would say something to the following that one of the great efforts of the Nazis was not to allow Jews to say it was a religion, because there were a lot of secular Jews, a lot of secular Jews in Western Europe.

And Hitler's main emphasis was that these people are not religious.

It's not a religion.

It is a race.

And they went to the extent of measuring noses and measuring jaws.

I mean, they were really sick.

And they created this.

And everybody knows that.

And she said, well, they looked up, they were just white people.

They looked alike.

Well, no.

I mean, that was part of the problem.

She, in the sense that when there was an integrated society and people were secular, they had to use a yellow star because they couldn't distinguish them.

But they make it very clear in Nazi ideology that when they went into Eastern Europe, they didn't really have that problem because there were Orthodox Jews still, or there were people that had not become secular.

So they had Jewish appearances in the sense of beards and clothing and fashion.

But the point was that it wasn't just white versus white and they were indistinguishable there were people in the nazi hierarchy that made it a science to go after every single aspect

and there were people who appealed to hitler and they said you know my jewish wife my wife has one quarter jewish but you know what look she's got some blonde hair so that proves she's not of the jewish race entirely can i have an exemption it was a six everybody knows that and for her to say it was just white on white we we know what the subtext was.

The subtext was postmodern critical race theory: that white people are all oppressors and there cannot be white victims.

There can only be black victims.

That's what she was getting at.

And, you know, this introduces another very controversial topic, but think of marquee African-American leaders.

I use that word in quotation marks, but what does Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan.

Haime Town?

And yeah.

And tell them Jews.

Remember Al Tell Dim Jews to come over here with their yarmakers on?

Yeah.

And Jaime Town and Farrakhan, the gutter religion.

And remember Illian Omar.

What'd you say?

It's just the money something, you know, about the Benjamins.

Remember that?

Yeah.

So they all have this anti-Semitic.

And the women's March, Linda Sasseur, and all the black leaders that were with, and all there has been about five athletes so at some point whoopi goldworks would say i think we in the black community that our leaders have to be very careful about repeating these tropes of anti that because they're anti-semitic stereotypes and i'm guilty of that but instead what did she do she went on to colbert's show and kind of doubled down on it and her main thesis is well it was a bunch of white people and and what was the purpose of that well you know when white people kill each other off that just happens but it's not really a racial until they attack black people and i'm black so i can't be racist so i can say whatever i want because she didn't just say it people there disagreed with them and she doubled down and acted as if they were ignorant it was she was she was very very fired up and what's his name colbert gave her the opportunity to do it too we know you're your blanks in a ring come here and we'll give you the opportunity to absolutely clean up the mess which i don't believe in everybody says this: I don't believe in cancel culture, so I don't want her canceled.

Well, why don't we just have this rule?

I don't believe in cancel culture each, but when you see people that attack Joe Rogan and they want to cancel other people, and I do believe in it, I'm more Old Testament than New Testament there because it's not going to stop unless they do.

They have some price to pay.

And when she says she leaks out that she may quit, I mean, no offense.

I'm 68.

If I say, I'm going to quit my job, i'm gonna quit this podcast what's the future so you're a 67 has-been actress i mean it's not as if she's possessed of internal beauty you know what i mean that never ages so she's not going to go get a leading role in hollywood she's kind of funny she's kind of witty off the wall for that midloo but if she loses that billet she's done with

And she knows it.

But so don't do all this braggadachio that she's a victim.

And

just what all she had to say was, you know what, I shouldn't be talking about the holocaust because I don't know what I'm talking about, I won't do that again.

That was all she had to say, she couldn't do that as far as Ilyas Shapiro.

I think he was the first to admit that he inelegantly,

and that's not a euphemism.

He was, it wasn't elegant how he tweeted.

What he meant, if you look at the context of what he was saying, was that he's not a progressive, but if he were a progressive and you use progressive scholarly standards of jurisprudence, then the person, this Indian American scholar and judge, who I think was the chief of the Court of Appeals, it's the sort of the bench that goes on usually to the Supreme Court, he would be the logical choice, both by his experience on the bench, his auctoritas, and his scholarly acumen.

But unfortunately, because in the web of identity politics, I'm just extrapolating, but this is pretty much what he said,

that that would be impossible because someone Indian American, although he's considered a marginalized person, his intersectionality point tally is not as high as an African-American woman.

And therefore, because Biden in racialist fashion pre-selected the gender and the race, and he therefore limited the number of people who would be eligible for Supreme Court appointment to 7% of the population,

then he's going to end up with somebody lesser qualified by nature, and they will be African-American.

This goes because those are the only people who are going to be in there.

And so what he was saying, of all the people out there on the progressive side, this guy is the best, but you can't pick him.

So you're going to get somebody

less qualified.

And by the way, because Joe Biden has predetermined what that circle will be, that less qualified person, it could be anybody, but it's going to be African-American.

But he wasn't equating being African-American with less qualifying.

But that's how, because lesser qualified, he used the adjective right in front of the noun.

Then the question is: this dean, you know, the dean went from being ridiculous to absurd.

I mean, when the students, all these people said they cried, they needed to eat.

The dean offered all, I thought he was going to be like the guy at Chick-fil-A and wash the feet of the students.

And, you know, he offered them free food.

I mean, these deans and provosts are pathetic.

I'm a little disturbed more controversially because that center of conservative,

there is a center there that is well funded.

I think Randy Barnett is a wonderful scholar, good conservative.

That was sort of this new idea to bring somebody like Ilya Shapiro.

And yet, I know there's legal cases and there's lawyers involved,

but at some point, that center is going to have to say, this is the person we want.

He hasn't done anything wrong.

And he's going to have to say to the dean and to the president of Georgetown, I need to know what your rules are at this university in the professional schools on the undergraduate, because there have been people here, professors, who have said during the Kavanaugh hearing, and this is another legal matter, so it's not extraneous, that Kavanaugh and the people support him should be killed and their corpses mutilated and they face no repercussions whatsoever.

And you've had other people who have been very, very explicit in a way that makes Ilya Sapiro look like an amateur, and nothing happened.

So I want to know, but we haven't had any of that yet.

And so the guy is left dangling in the wind.

On a personal note, I have to confess that when I was a professor in my early 40s, Bruce Thornton and I, they called us because the ISI wanted to

Intercollegiate Students Institute.

Yeah, studies institute study intercollegiate studies institute wanted to have sponsors and we just signed up it came in the mail i never thought they'd contact a guy from fresno state or anything but they did so we went back and we we had mentors assigned to us

and one of the mentors was ilya shapiro who was a senior at princeton university on his way to university chicago and i forgot all about it and then i got back Six months later, he called and he was a Russian immigrant.

And I think his mother had passed away or his father had passed away or his mother one of the two and he needed a place to stay and he wanted to get first-hand experience i said if you come out here it's going to be very different mr shapiro well he came out for 30 days jack and stayed on the farm and talked to my children tried to get them more interested in school of course really yeah yeah

and i had a good time with him i we teased each other all the time he would say you know you have to do more education with your children and i said they tell me when you because i had them do a lot of projects on the right when you hammer you hold the hammer your hand right next to the hammerhead it's not going to work that way you hold it way down at the bottom my son was pretty big guy athlete he could do you know two strikes he'd hit the nail and iliad do seven but it was that kind of good rapport and i liked him and then well i had some people here that he met that were Mexican-American.

He spoke fluent Spanish.

He spoke fluent Russian.

He spoke fluent French.

So he was a polymath and he he was very educated.

And the idea that he, whose family fled as Russian Jews from Russia, communism was a racist is absolutely absurd.

And so there was a petition for professors.

I thought it was law professor.

I never saw it, but when I did finally get one, I signed it.

And I think they've got hundreds of people who are outraged at that.

And finally, I said it brings up a larger question.

Sandy and I talked about it a little bit, but you know, Jack, it brings up this question about the right.

how do you react to these things and what you're going to do when you take power and we're down to two schools and the figure of trump looms over the whole debate for good or evil and the one school i guess i would call it the paul ryan school says we don't do that we don't cancel people out.

We don't go after people like they went after Ilya.

We don't tear up the State of the Union address.

We don't impeach a president twice.

We don't get out in front of the Supreme Court like Schumer said, hey, Kavanaugh, hey, Gorsuch, we're coming after you.

We don't disrupt the Kavanaugh hearings.

We don't do to Kavanaugh or Clarence Thomas.

We don't do what they did to Clarence Thomas or

Bork or Kavanaugh.

We won't do that.

We're not going to impeach Joe Biden twice.

We're not going to try him as a private citizen.

We're not going to cook up something like the Russian collusion.

So that's the standard Republican reply.

But this new populist nationals said, we're tired of playing by the, we're going to be just as crazy as they are because we believe in the Old Testament as much as we do in the new.

And I'm telling you that they interpret magnanimity as weakness to be exploited and not generosity to be reciprocated.

And we've done this and done this and done this.

And look what they do.

So maybe when we take power, we're going to, for a while, at least teach them the errors of their ways.

We might want to say to them, you know what?

We've got 58 senators, and we think you were right about that filibuster.

It was a bad idea.

Maybe we should just get rid of it for five years.

And we think we were really right about those, you know, two new states.

We're going to divide up California and get four more senators.

I think you were right also about a national voting law.

We're going to pass something that says that IEDs are required in every state and override state laws.

I think you guys were kind of right also

on the Supreme Court.

You know, maybe you're right.

Maybe nine justices are too smart.

So we're going to ram through 15 justices and we're going to appoint six of them.

How would they like that?

And I'm not advocating any of that.

I don't want to see happen, but you can see a divide in the Republican Party between those who say you have no deterrence now.

They don't respect you.

They're going to go right back and you've got to make them pay a price for it.

How this applies to what you brought up was, well, the one school says to Whoopi Goldberg, we didn't make the rules.

You cancel people out.

If you had your way, you'd get rid of Joe Rogan for life.

You were attacking him before you said this yourself.

So I think you should be fired.

And then when you sit home and stew, you'll think about what you people do to people.

But rather than just say, oh, we're so sorry, we shouldn't have, we don't believe it.

We're high principled, they're going to do it again.

And then there's other people who would say, to,

you know, maybe you should say to the law dean, you did this to Ilya Shapiro.

We're going to have a boycott of your school we're going to do this we're going to contact all your donors we're going to go after your job do they want a world like that and maybe they they feel that world is never going to be like that with accountability because we always say you know blessed are the meek and we believe in the sermon on the mount we're sort of like busy defenders on the walls of constantinople asking for penance for each muslim infidel that's and then the other side is saying to the same army kill one of those guys on the wall and you get 72 virgins while they're asking for three years of wearing a you know a

sticky shirt if they happen to kill one invader so that asymmetry is going to be very interesting and yeah victor the bible as we i've said on other podcasts it also says to every season and some people are have not realized that the seasons have have changed and they change politically and the other thing is you know maybe once upon a time there's more left versus right disagree you see those old pictures of Republican leader Martin with Democrat Sam Rayburn and this sense of camaraderie.

But those days are gone and gone in large part because of Senator Joe Biden's antics making politics so.

I think it's sort of like, look at immigration.

One side of me with a little angel on my shoulder.

And it's got, I feel like I have no angels in it.

Well, I have feathers on one side of me and it says, well,

you know, we had an open border.

So when the Republicans come back, they'll close it.

And then they'll finish the wall.

And then we have 2 million people here.

They're being flown at night.

So let's just move on.

And then the other side of me, it's kind of a red union suit,

a little horn on one side of my ear.

And it says, no, you don't understand.

They'll never get the message.

These people broke the law.

They came in across the border.

They had no background checks.

They deliberately knew it was a pandemic, and yet they crossed that border without a vaccination and without a test.

The same criteria that we force people in the United States and the federal workforce and the military.

They know what they're doing.

So they broke the law.

Unless you disrespect the law, they need to be deported.

All of the people who came in since January 1, 2000,

January 21, 2021 should be deported.

So there's that tug, because if you don't do it, you make fun of the law and you have no deterrence.

And if you give the rest of amnesty, you feel good about yourself, but you basically condone a massive disregard for the laws of the United States government.

Right.

And as you've written, the destruction of what it means to be a citizen.

Yeah, Victor, we have one other thing to discuss, and that will be the Spotify wars.

And we'll talk about them right after this message.

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So, Victor, last subject for today on the Spotify wars, we have Joe Rogan, who's one of the top podcasters in America, now getting into a kerfuffle over, of course, over COVID.

So, these old artists, or I think if I was a teenager, I might call them old fartists, but they're demanding cancellation.

You know, these guys, Neil Young and

his former bandmates, Crosby Stills Nash, Crosby,

Big Booze Hound, who drunk driver, hit and run guy himself.

These guys, remember back in the day, they were the counterculture.

They were the radicals.

They were sticking it to the man.

And it seems now in hindsight, they were probably subservient to Big Brother, the man, all along.

So, Victor, Joni Mitchell, also, I love Joni Mitchell.

I like her music, but her politics are insane.

She too is, I'm pulling off a Spotify, take my, unless you get rid of Rogan.

Victor, these lefties who are demanding cancellation, these lefties who are countercultural, demanding the death of the First Amendment in America.

What are your thoughts?

Sammy asked me that in a podcast.

and I think you've hit on it, and that is they were always this way.

They were always narcissists.

In the 1960s, it was the man or the establishment wouldn't let them satisfy whenever they wished their sexual appetites, their drug appetites, their alcohol appetites, their self-indulgent appetites.

And they just wanted to do whatever they wanted.

And they had the money and they so they were going to do it.

So if Neil Young wanted to go play with a rock of cocaine in his nostril, and he didn't care what the impression that made on impressionable young people that watched him.

If David Crosby wanted to have sex with every goopie he could and he drank himself into a stupor and he ruined his liver, he didn't care that he was going to go get and try to get onto a liver transplant list and get a transplant.

He didn't care about that.

That there's a lot of people that can't get livers that don't drink.

So they were always selfish and now their ideas as they age and they die and they feel feel that

they're still self-important, they're still legends in their own mind, they're still wealthy, they say to themselves, well, I'm still interested in me.

And me means I don't care about those damn truckers that are out there fighting COVID.

I don't care about those little six-year-old girls that have to wear masks all day long in their preschool.

I don't care about those 18-year-old athletes who have no chance of getting a serious case of COVID and might have a greater chance of getting myocarditis from a second Pfizer shot?

I care about me.

And these people in the abstract threaten me because they don't get a booster.

It doesn't matter about the science, it's their narrative.

So they're back to their same old me, me, me, me, me first.

And whether it's the man in the 1960s or the deplorables now, they're going to do that.

The other thing is, they're going to put themselves first, always.

And then the thing about it's so weird though is joe rogan

has 200 million downloads a month

so probably the biggest star of all of them we've all listened to him i as i said before i listened to neil young since 1970 for the last 50 years you know i like cinnamon girl i like you know

Southern Man, I didn't like what the lyrics necessarily was so self-righteous, but I like some of the things, the heart of gold, all of those things.

Everybody, so he's the biggest of the all the stars and he has i think six million downloads so

everybody in the liberal media is going oh my crosby stills and nash oh my joni mitchell niles blunga oh man well i'm sorry but nobody knows who they are and all of them put together are probably about one week of Joe Rogan's download.

So Spotify wants to be on the right side of the PC culture and they'll put a few little, you know, tis tis in there, but they're not going to touch where the money is.

And the money is with Joe Rogan.

They should ask themselves, how did a guy who was a sitcom author and sort of

mixed success announcer of martial arts or whatever, how did he become so successful?

And how do so many people hang on their words?

And how do they become so irrelevant?

And I think the answer is he doesn't take himself too seriously.

He's open to new ideas.

He talks about what people are concerned about.

And they're still hitting that same old Jane Fonda drum.

It reminds me of one person, though, if I could go off topic very quickly is

Bob Dylan.

And the reason I say that is, do you remember, Jack, the first year of Obama's presidency when Louis Henry Gates was going home to his very nice home in Canada?

Oh, yeah, right.

And he didn't have the key, so he broke in and somebody called the cops.

Right.

Poor little officer came over there.

He had no idea.

Lewis Henry Gates.

And so he was going to arrest him.

And then he threw a tantrum.

Remember, they had you screaming and yelling and you're racist.

And then remember Obama weighed in and said, this is racist.

And this is what police do all the time.

I think he even gave his little plastic handcuffs that were on him for, what, a minute?

He donated them to the Smithsonian's History of Slavery.

So it was one big psychodrama.

Yeah, they had the beer summit at the White House.

The beer beer summit, yes.

And then Obama, that was one of his first cracks in the fake veneer of Obama when he went after the police for that.

And of course, if Louis Henry Gates,

if somebody was breaking into his house and he called the police and they did come late or not at all, he would say it was racist.

So there was nothing to do with race.

But nonetheless, at almost the same period, within a few weeks or months, I can't remember, Bob Dylan was giving a concert.

Remember that?

And he...

Oh, in New Jersey, right?

Yeah, he stopped walking around by himself.

Right.

And he walked down the street and he looked like a bum.

He had no ID.

And the cop also didn't know who Bob Dylan was.

And he pulled him over.

And they took him down to this.

It wasn't like, you know, they let him go.

They took him down to the police station.

They did, right.

And bedraggled old man.

He is a bedraggled old man.

And he didn't get mad.

He kind of laughed.

He went to the police station.

They said, Where's your ID?

And he said, I don't have one.

Huh?

And they said, Well, why are you down here?

Well, I'm going to play for this big crowd.

They didn't believe.

And then somebody recognized him and told him who he was.

He's the father of modern rock in a way.

And they all wanted their pictures with him.

And they took him in an escort back.

And he just made it in time for the concert.

And remember his attitude about the whole thing?

Are you going to sue him?

Do you feel like you were wrong?

Do you think this?

No, I think I'd probably arrest a guy like me, too, if I was walking around with no idea the way I look, kind of, you know, bedraggled and kind of wandering off.

So he had a good sense of humor about it.

And he didn't, and I mean, that was the difference.

And that's what's so weird about, you know, he's not, he's not a doctor near man of the left, Bob Dylan.

He's not.

I think he's actually, at some point, became a born-again Christian and takes God more seriously than that.

And you remember,

just as a final Phillip, you remember when Neil Young was that way for about, I don't know what it was, it was like six months.

And I want our readers to correct me because I'm not, I'm doing this entirely from memory 40 years ago.

But I think there was a period when Reagan came in or when Reagan was running for office, when our Canadian friend said something to the effect that,

why are they giving back the Panama Canal?

Remember Reagan ran on that?

And maybe it would have been the first time he ran in 76 against Jerry Ford, but it was that period when he said some other things that were very, very right-wing, Neil Young.

And they just, they unloaded on him.

Right.

And he was quickly advised, you know, you're going to ruin your constituency and you better, and then he kind of apologized and it never had his afterthought.

And then George W.

Bush came along and he got revitalized and Bush's Satan incarnate and he was off to the races again.

But for a brief moment, he was kind of like that.

Yeah, it was his

Camelot.

Well, Victor, hey, yeah, anyone who wants to leave a review at iTunes, and many people do, we thank the folks that do that.

We thank everyone who listens and who subscribes on whatever platform you do.

Thank you very much.

Someone may want to give Victor the correct information if he's incorrect here through a review at iTunes.

You can correct me too.

I know I said

Srinivasan was a woman and not yet anyway.

He's a guy.

Speaking of the iTunes reviews, as we walk out the exit here, I'd just like to mention one.

You were, Victor, talking about some of Joe Biden's plastic surgery things a couple of episodes ago.

And this one is from DGTRO4129.

I don't know what that stands for, but it's titled Plugs Biden.

It's like a nickname, Plugs Biden.

Quote, great to hear Biden's plugs.

brought up for the first time since the great rush passed away.

So we thank DGTRO 4129 for that review.

Everyone else who leaves reviews, we do read them all.

Appreciate very much.

Appreciate your listening.

I miss Rush.

I should say that.

I miss him all the time.

Terribly.

I would wake up some, you know, my time Pacific and he would text me and it was always something funny or he was a very smart guy.

He had a great attitude about things.

And he was.

He was very resilient.

What I liked about him was this almost unawareness of sophisticated punditry.

You know, you'd mention something about it, who's this guy, Victor?

Or I don't know.

why would i worry about this i mean for a guy that kept up with all of the political scene he wasn't interested in the pundits you know what i mean by that he didn't he didn't care who was feuding with that person or that or this or that he did he didn't yeah we had a an experience and i i can't give any details but it came back no i don't care about that as in he was not into let's call it gossip it just was unimportant to him and kind of refreshing that he acted that way and it was part of his distinction i know he was he was i remember once i said so-and-so really wrote a whole article about me and the guy and he said and the guy was pretty important in the the never trump stuff and rush wrote back who is he and if you know who he is i don't and if you were to tell me who he is he doesn't matter

damn well i mean damn well he had a good sense of distance and perspective well victor that's all the time we have for this episode so thank you again, my friend.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

We'll be back soon with a new episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thanks.

Thank you for listening, everybody.