The transmogrification of Biden

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

We are recording on Friday, the 14th of January in the year 2022.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, Victor, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, author of so many bestsellers.

The latest is The Dying Citizen, and he writes a lot of original material for victorhanson.com.

We'll talk more about those things in a little bit.

There's so much to talk about today, Victor.

So much has happened this week.

And of course, to me, and I think to you, the big issue is Joe Biden's collapse, political collapse, and the outrageous speech he made in Georgia about voting rights.

And let's start off talking about that, but right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, the traditionalist Victor.

Remember, Joe Biden was elected.

Wasn't he going to be a unifier, right?

And yet he went to Georgia.

The devil goes to Georgia, and I guess the doofus goes there also.

And he made a speech about pushing this, federalizing election laws, about attacking the filibuster.

And in the course of the speech, he attacked the majority of Americans.

And Victor, you and I in the past, we've discussed some of these public support for election integrity.

I mean, there is no strong support for federalizing election law.

There's lots of support on a state level for tightening election laws, and that cuts across race, party, et cetera.

But all these people have just been deemed racist or equivalent of Jefferson Davis and others by the President of the United States in a speech that many, even the liberals, will say attack and condemn him.

So, Victor, let's talk about the speech first, and then we can get into Biden's free fall in the polls.

Your thoughts on what he said in Georgia.

Well, I think nobody quite figured out what his

strategy was because there was no way that he was going to get rid of the filibuster.

It wasn't going to happen.

And, you know, they they can count both better than you and I can, Jack, but everybody knew Manchin and Cinema were on record.

They weren't going to do it.

So I guess the idea was to go down there in some sort of performance art to put pressure on him, but that wasn't going to work.

So he was just going to embarrass himself.

Stacey Abrams, a lot of the black civil rights people didn't show up for various reasons.

They alleged that maybe they thought he wasn't doing enough or this or that, but probably it was they didn't want to be associated with his, what they anticipated correctly was a buffoonish performance.

And then when he gets in and he calls half the country essentially and their representatives treasonous, i.e.

Confederate renegades like Jefferson Davis, he doesn't even know who Jefferson Davis is.

I mean, does he have any idea who Jefferson Davis was?

This was a man who said, I'm going to form a separate nation based on racial superiority that the U.S.

Constitution lacked and should have had and the protection and extension of slavery in the Confederacy.

And is that what he says?

That people who want to show an ID?

The day that he spoke, I went to Walmart here in a very low-income area, and three people who were impoverished, could not speak English, all pulled out their IDs and wrote checks.

What is so hard about?

You have to show an ID in Joe Biden's own state.

All over Europe, you do.

And for years, you've done it.

So there was no meat to his argument.

And the other thing is, when he starts invoking history, you think George Wallace, well, Biden used to brag in the 80s that he had been acceptable to George Wallace.

He bragged that he was a close friend, remember of Senator Eastland and I think it was Fritz Hollins, the segregationist at one time.

And so here he is, this Delaware Democrat who is demagogued that his state was quote unquote at at one time a slave state with a whole history of offensive racial slanders and smears ranging from the President of the United States is the first clean articulate black to belittling more recently a disc jockey as junkie or you ain't black

or calling one of his own subordinate but senior still senior employees when he's down in the south calling him hey my boy here,

and I won't even get into the corn pop.

So with all of that baggage, he has a lot of gumption to call half the country racially insensitive, but not just that.

Compare it.

It raises also, Jack, a larger point about the historical ignorance.

This came on the heels of Kamala Harris comparing the January 6th.

riot to the 2,400 or 2,500 somewhere in there of people who perished at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, as well as the 3,000 or so who died on 9-11 without any context.

How is that the same?

Is it by magnitude of deaths or

did it precipitate a radical change in U.S.

geostrategic policy?

What did it do?

And how was it different than May 2020 when Antifa and BLM stormed Lafayette Park, tried to break into the White House grounds and get their hands on Trump, who was evacuated to a bunker bunker and injured dozens of Secret Service agents.

Just tell us how it's different or torching a federal courthouse.

And they can't do it.

It reminds me of Nicole Hannah-Jones, the architect of 1619, the brilliant journalist Pum historian.

And what does she do?

She tweets out that the Civil War started in 1865.

when it finished.

I mean, if a person doesn't know the dates of the Civil War and she's held up as a superior historian so that we should all bow in obeyance and change our foundational iconic date from 1776 to 1619.

What kind of Orwellian world do we live in?

And so it was just a disaster.

And I think what has happened, Jack, is that Biden

is surrounded by his wife, by this Ron Klane, by the Bernie people, by the Elizabeth Warren people, by the Michelle Barack Tag team, and they funnel him talking points, appointments, and they're all race, class, I shouldn't say class, or race and gender, diversity, equity, inclusion agendas.

And then they get on Twitter and everybody says, This is so great you're doing this.

And they hear from the squad, but they're in a toll communications bubble.

They have no idea how they sound.

They have no idea what the country thinks of that.

And he was doing this as his popularity was at 35% and on the way down.

So the last three months, we had annualized inflation rates of 9%.

I mean, December was 7%, but it was climbing every month.

And product prices were even higher.

So

we have 2 million people almost that cross the southern border.

We have a whole vaccination mandate that imploded, but would have put 4 million soldiers and federal employees at an inferior status vis-a-vis mandatory vaccinations than illegal aliens breaking the law.

So I won't get into Afghanistan or we've, you know, i drove home today from palo alto and i'm diesel fuel was 520 a gallon in california and premium gas was 510.

and he can't talk about any of this but race race race and even where are the consultants jack the old-time you know tough

Democratic guys with a cigar that come in and say, hey, man, look at the polls.

Look at this poll here.

This is not what the American, they poll 3% or 5%.

That's not what you should be talking about.

You got to do gas prices.

You got to go inflation.

You got to go immigration.

They're talking up Hillary.

Yeah, they are.

Doug Strowman knows.

We'll get to that in a little bit, but that's what they're doing.

Victor, well, let me ask you two questions on conservatives and others all of a sudden criticizing him.

And, oh, this, again, this was the guy who was going to unify us.

And, oh, he's really gone too far.

Let's get in the time machine and go back to October of 2020.

I'm sure you would have no surprise that this man, this Joe Biden, would give this speech.

It's a surprise to a lot of people.

It's not a surprise.

A surprise to people I dare not mention their name who told me they were sick on the conservative side, they were sick of Donald Trump.

tweets and his demeanor, quote unquote, and that Joe Biden was a known quantity.

He was a moderate, which was a lie.

He was a known plagiarist.

He was a known prevaricator, a known liar.

He's a known character assassination.

He had a whole history of racist comments.

He was a plagiarist, and he invented his dossier.

He was a completely inept and mediocre senator.

And suddenly this guy was transmogrified, not just by the left, who thought he was a useful vessel to carry their agenda across the finish line, but the never Trump right.

Nobody in the right mind ever knew, thought that.

That's why he failed in what, three

runs to be nominated for the Democratic Party.

And everybody said, they look at him, Jack, and they say, wow, the guy looks presentable.

This is the last 40 years.

He's from

a moderate state,

as he says, a slave state.

That's not what I meant, but that's what Biden would meant.

He's been in the Senate Foreign Relations and the Senate Judiciary Committee head.

And on paper, they think, and then he opens his mouth.

I remember right in the height of the insurrection as the surge started to work, he wanted to trisect Iraq.

Let's make the Kurdish country and let's make the Shia country and let's make the Sunni country and they'll all live as happy neighbors.

And

I know Robert Gates is quoted to death, but he was behind every,

he's been wrong on every diplomatic strategic question in the last 30 or so years.

That's what he is.

So it was no surprise.

And I'm surprised it took this long for everybody to start to see that he's a total disaster.

And what you're going to see now, Jack, if you know, Sean Trend, that very skillful pollster and statistician on Real Clear Politics, had a brief note.

And he's got that model that we all refer to or look at based on the president's popularity level and certain types of candidates they're running.

It's not so clear yet, and a couple of other criteria.

And then he forecast the midterms.

And when the president gets down to 35%, and of course he made the exception that we don't know that all the new polls will show that.

And right now, currently he's at 41, but even at 41%,

the number of seats that one will lose is staggering.

We're up to on the model of 40 or 50 seats.

And it's not going to get any better.

If you can think of anything, I've been trying to rack my brain, Jack.

to think of one thing

he's done that's been positive for the country that he can run on and i can't think of any and then i'm trying to rack my brain and think what is the scenario in february march april may june july august you know the next nine and a half ten months that looks pretty good for him and all i can come up with is well maybe covered's omicron variant will

de facto as some people outliers i guess said will serve the purpose of a

booster and it will infect so many people with enough herd immunity for a while that, in addition to the people with the booster or the two shots, whatever, we might see the end of it.

And then he can, as he always does, can take credit for it in August or September.

Or maybe

you can think of anything else.

I don't know.

Maybe we'll get in a national crisis in Ukraine or Taiwan, and it'll actually rise to the occasion.

Other than that, I can't see anything.

Gas prices, the border, the economy, race-related, I can't see anything that's going to get better.

They're going to get worse.

I don't want that to happen.

Right.

And then there's two more years for them to continue to get worse up to the presidential elections.

But Victor, let's talk about 2022.

And then let's, if you don't mind, we can talk about Hillary because she was on the agenda of things to look at today.

And you wrote a piece.

I want to recommend to our listeners to visit victorhanson.com.

Again, it links to everything Victor writes, pieces he writes for American Greatness, his appearances.

But there's a lot you write that is exclusive.

It's called Ultra, and that's behind a paywall.

It's a very cheap paywall.

Recommend folks subscribe, $5 a month.

But want to pull, let's talk about something behind the paywall, Victor.

Actually, there are two things you wrote.

This is a two-part series.

There may be more coming.

It's what will the 2022 midterms look like?

So the first part, and I don't want to give everything away, but I wouldn't mind if you would talk about what you wrote here about how republicans just talk about the republican ad blitz for this year going into the elections what do you think they will well you wrote here what they you think they all look like thing is you can't have a society

the glue that binds a society together is security and you cannot have a society when there's no law And I mean that on every facet of the manifestation of law.

I mean, if the police are defunded and there's not enough of them to arrest people,

or they're told not to arrest people committing crimes that are politically incorrect, like shoplift, politically correct, I suppose, like shoplifting.

Or when they are arrested, the DA drops the charges and they're released.

Or when the DA does prosecute them, he reduces the charges to minor misdemeanors, gets a guilty plea, no penalty, no incarceration.

Or when they are arrested, indicted, sent to trial, convicted, they're let out early from incarceration.

So, if you have that scenario, there's nothing.

And you're starting to see it.

I mentioned earlier, you know, Joseph Epstein writing that essay in Wall Street Journal that his Chicago world that he has written so, you know, movingly about over the years is dead.

It's destroyed.

He's afraid to go across the street.

He's afraid to go get takeout food.

And, you know, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles,

when the sheriff of Los Angeles tells people, be careful if you come into my city, we cannot protect you.

And I'm looking out my window without giving away to me at a crack house, not a crack house, but at an area where there's significant gang activity, and I'll leave it at that for my own safety.

And everybody knows it.

Nobody's going to do anything.

And

so.

That's the aura.

That's the landscape in America now.

And so what are the Democrats going to do?

Are they going to say, I vote, I'm a Congressperson, I want to be reelected.

I voted against that crazy defund the police.

I want to lock those guys up.

They're not going to do that because the squad would call them a racist.

And then the truth that's not to be spoken is that, you know, we talk about hate crimes, but the vast majority of hate crimes at this particular moment in our history are African-American young males attacking Asian Americans, mostly the elderly.

And everybody knows that.

And yet, nobody will speak that truth.

And so, at some point, we're going to have to have a national conversation because we have two divergent things happening.

We have an effort by all of America for unity after the George Floyd death.

So, whether it's increased affirmative action admissions,

or an effort in Hollywood to get greater inclusion of African American actors, or more commercial time for African Americans, or you name it, new TV shows, popular culture is reacting to this.

Okay.

But at the same time that this ascendant effort has been going,

there has been a sharp uptick in crimes committed by African Americans.

And specifically, 12 cities have an all-time homicide rate and all-time high.

And Chicago's up to 800 murders, and it was in 2021.

And yet there's absolutely no discussion of this.

None.

And yet, I just got back from a very wealthy enclave in the coast where I would say 90% of the people are left-wing.

And what I just said would, they would say, would be terribly insensitive.

And yet, in private conversations, that's all they talk about.

That's not a sustainable situation.

For everybody to think that there's a reality out there that you cannot discuss, so you're going to make efforts to deal with that reality without touching, you know, with more people in a commercial or a TV show, but you're not going to discuss this elemental factor.

And if somebody's going to have to discuss it, you know who that's going to be.

It's going to be Republicans, either Donald Trump or a candidate.

And that's very closely connected to a border.

People, you know, were indifferent when there's 50,000.

I wasn't.

I wrote Mexico over 20 years ago, but they thought, you know, 50,000, 100,000.

It's a big country, 250 then, 300 million, 330 million people at various stages.

And, you know what, that's not a lot of people.

And, you know, we need a lot of workers and it's no problem with me.

But when you get up to 2 million on top of 20 million who are here illegally, on top of 50 million

that are here, whether legally or not legally, but they're foreign born, then you have a monumental challenge of assimilation, integration, and civics.

And when the host is sending sending the message to somebody who's fleeing poverty and violence, that the place you're coming to is a terrible place, it's racist,

then you've got the concoctions for a disaster.

So, are they going to run on that one?

And you know what the Republicans are going to say, Jack.

It's

we're going to close the border and finish the wall.

They should.

I'll just give you one more, just randomly that I wrote as I remember.

Another one was,

you know, energy.

The problem about the high high price of gas on the coast up to $5

is

it was self-induced.

There's no Arab oil embargo.

There's

no destroyed refinery.

There's no hurricane that overturned all of our offshore drilling.

There's no, even crazy Governor Gavin Newsom hasn't stopped all oil production in California.

So what was it?

Well, it was the president of the United States, and he deliberately stopped new leases on federal lands.

He deliberately jawboned banks and lending institutions to cut back on so-called dirty fossil fuel producers.

He deliberately told crackers and horizontal drillers that their days were numbered to great applause in the green community.

He deliberately put

all of ANWAR after hundreds of millions of dollars investment off limits.

He canceled Keystone and other pipelines.

And he did this at a time when we were emerging from a strict lockdown where people were starting to drive again.

And then he did it by printing money.

So you give people a lot of money

and you give them pent up demand and you don't give them supply, you deliberately restrict supply.

Then you have to ask yourself, what was he thinking?

Or was this part of the unrealized dream of Stephen Chu?

Remember him?

$10 gas in Europe levels, was it going going to be a good thing?

And even Obama had to shut the guy up because he was so detrimental to their agenda.

So affordable energy, security, a secure border.

And I went on with seven more.

Well,

this is part one.

I just want to now encourage folks, you know, you have to subscribe.

It's what will the 2022 midterms look like?

And part one is Victor's thoughts of Republican, what do do you think Republican attack ads will be in Democrat response?

And then another part that just came out today, and I think, Victor, we should have a separate podcast on this.

And this is called an agenda.

It's essentially a new contract with America.

It's 10 points.

It's terrific, very thoughtful.

We don't want to give it away here now, but let me just bring back what you said on energy.

And as a nexus of things, Russia, the Russia pipeline into Germany.

Germany, which is also self-inflicted,

but could use our natural gas.

So if we can't pump the natural gas to ship to Germany, what's the point?

Ted Cruz introduced a bill to put sanctions on Russia related to the pipeline.

And of course, the Democrats, who are busy attacking the filibuster, filibustered the Cruz sanction bill and it went down to defeat yesterday.

What if I let's say it's now October 2020?

We were doing podcasts.

What if I said the following to you and our audience?

Now, I want to predict something if Joe Biden is going to be elected.

Listen very carefully.

Joe Biden will cancel all the pipelines he can.

He will put Anwar off.

He will cancel federal leases.

He will pressure lending institutions not to help the oil and gas industry.

He will threaten the oil and gas industry and say their days are numbered.

He will do this at a time when we have rampant inflation.

He will do this in time, as I said earlier, with pent-up demand.

And then when your gas in some of the most popular states in the union goes over $5,

he will go over to his advisors and they will ask Saudi Arabia, or rather blame Saudi Arabia and Russia, and they'll say, will you please pump more filthy, dirty carbon oil, you carbon polluters, because we need it because we will not get our hands dirty producing what we have, which is more than you have.

Would anybody have believed that?

Or they'd say, man, Victor's gone completely nutty.

Biden would never do that, even in his diminished state.

Yet that's what, that fantasy is what is reality now.

It's so ironic, Jack, because on the 11th day of Trump's presidency, There were, I won't mention her name, I've mentioned her name a hundred times, but an abominable Pentagon lawyer wrote an article in foreign policy 11 days in and said Donald Trump is an existential threat.

There's three ways to get rid of him.

Let's get, think about impeachment, nah, too long.

25th Amendment, nah, sticky.

Ah, military coup.

What if he gave an order and the military echelon said no?

She's pretty prescient.

But my point is, think of that.

And then compare his first 11 days, what evidence he would ever give to the idea that he was mentally not up to snuff, given what we've seen for Biden for 11 months, and she and Dr.

Bandi Lee, the Yale psychiatrist.

And where is Rod Rosenstein's successor and Andrew McCabe's successor?

So we can get the deputy attorney general and the acting head of the FBI to get their little wires and go in and listen to Joe Biden and see how crazy he is and then go tell everybody.

Well, that's what we did with Trump.

And, you know, the final question is: where's the Montreal cognitive assessment?

You know, can if you give Biden a picture of a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus, he goes, Can he tell them apart?

I mean, I looked at it, I saw a version online.

Does he know the difference between a jackrabbit and a coyote?

I don't know.

Well, he knows the difference between chocolate and vanilla when he gets his ice cream cone, maybe.

Or flavored meta-musil.

Victor, we mentioned Hillary before.

So, Biden's the outlier poll, some folks call Quinnipiac poll just released the other day, Biden's approval rating is at 33%.

As we've discussed before, and among other things, these tests have not materialized.

Empty shelves, galloping inflation, the supply chain chaos still exists.

He barely gives press conferences, which may be a plus.

The foreign policy is totally in the crapper.

We have serious economic pessimism.

So there's no question why his number would be so low.

And I believe we'll just continue to get lower, which now brings us to Hillary Clinton talk.

Well, he's unpopular.

Harris is unpopular.

Who's going to run in 2024?

So the Hillary talk chimes up.

Just at the same time that

the Maxwell Epstein trial story, you know, post-trial for Maxwell, we now see on Daily Mail a story about how many times Epstein was at the White House, the Clinton White House, bringing young women with him there.

So, I mean, the Clintons are back and carrying the same old stink on them.

But there's talk.

Hillary 2024, Tan rested ready.

Victor, what are your thoughts about this?

Well, we all know that if you're worried about a 78-year-old Septuagintarian who's going to be 80 when he runs for office, and he's going to be maybe challenged by a 78-year-old Donald Trump, then the answer is to get a 74-year-old who will be 77, who is in more frail health,

it looked like in 2016, when she almost fell over than either one of them.

And if you think that Donald Trump was sort of rough speaking, and you think that Biden says ridiculous things, and you want somebody who writes off half the country as deplorables and irredeemables, or goes to West Virginia and promises to shut down their entire coal industry.

Or if you're worried about Hunter Biden as a Democrat and the damage he does to Joe, then you'll bring in rediscussion of what?

The whole Russian collusion pay firewalls with DNC hiding Hillary's money and Perkins Cole hiding the DNC's money and Glen Simpson hiding Perkins Co.'s money and then getting it all to this has-been wannabe British spy, Christopher Steele.

And if you don't think that's good enough, we can always talk about Uranium One and the North American uranium supply.

And then we can throw Bill Clinton and the Lolita Express in there.

So that's what you get.

And what do you get in return for her?

I'm so tired.

I'm so tired today.

The fake voice, the performance art.

You know, and I was listening, Doug Schoen

did a i think it was a fox interview and i read his column and what was so funny about it was i don't know if it was tongue-in-cheek or not

Because he said, you know, basically, well, yeah, she doesn't, but compared to Biden, she looks pretty good.

And yeah, she looked kind of left, but people can reinvent themselves if they need to.

And she's flexible.

So every single criticism that was voiced to him, he admitted, but said that, yeah, but she's better than the alternative.

What happened to the bent?

I mean, if you look at the Democratic field, I thought we had this young generation.

We had Kamala, and where's Julian Castro?

And where's Beto?

And where's Corey Booker?

And we can even bring out Elizabeth Warren.

He's young in comparison to these other people.

Where are they?

They were all, we got a great glimpse of them in the 2016 primary.

Why don't they get moving?

It's a very funny thing.

They have no bench at all.

They have no talent.

And I think a lot of it's to do with they had this entrenched, corrupt Pelosi,

Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Durbin,

Senate hierarchy, and they were out of touch with the new race and gender and diversity inclusion equity group of people and these people just have swarmed them because they had no ideas that they didn't want to defend or they didn't believe anything.

When I heard about the squad, I thought, well, Schumer's an old pro in leftist politics, and so is Durbin and Feinstein and Pelosi.

They'll just put a lid on all that.

They couldn't because they had no ideas and they were corrupt, most of them.

And so

I don't know.

It's

the one good thing, Jack, is look, look how the country is running on autopilot right now.

I mean, we're not doing very well, obviously, but we're not completely destroyed because we don't have a president.

Or if we do have a president, it's a counter-president.

We can call him an anti-president.

What I'm most worried about is right now, Vladimir Putin and the Communist Chinese Party are doing things like the following.

Hmm.

On the plus side, they've got a demented president.

Their country's torn apart by the woke divisiveness.

They've got high inflation.

They're destroying themselves.

The universities are becoming Maoist.

So it's a good time.

We might not ever have a time.

And then they pause and they say, hmm, but they've got 6,500 MOOCs.

There's got to be some people that are not a general millie who will call us and tip us off.

Can't count on that all the time.

And there must be some competent people.

And people are still getting up at five in the morning and driving to work.

So this is a powerful country.

So we might have some downside.

That's what they're doing right now.

Let's talk about a lie.

I just lied.

I lied about something.

I said I wasn't going to talk about your contract with America ideas.

And I just want to go to the last one.

It's 10 ideas.

You say 10 commandments were good enough for God, and 10 such political commandments should be sufficient.

You mentioned, in part, loss of tax-free status on income from university endowments over $10 billion.

And kind of, we've talked about that in the past.

I think it may deserve a repeat, but I'm curious as why income over $10 billion as opposed to, you know, maybe even something a little more,

you know,

no tax write-off to any college that already has an endowment of $2 billion.

Well, it was all,

it was what was doable.

I would like a billion dollars, but it's like taking your net in a pond and seeing how many fish you can get into it.

You get the big ones.

So, who has an endowment over 10 billion?

It's basically Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, isn't it?

Maybe Texas, or, and that's a public university and stuff like that.

But yeah, it would be good to have down to a billion or two

because the principle is that they are getting income as a nonprofit and then they're not honoring the First Amendment.

You can't go into a university and give a speech without being yelled down and having some wishy-washy noodle, wet noodle provost contextualize why you got ran out of town.

Or you can't be a student and have a date that went bad and you were kind of a cat and a mean person, and you didn't call your partner the next day.

And then, six weeks later, you're hit with a sexual harassment suit.

Could be true or not.

But the point is, you won't know whether it's true according to American jurisprudence because you won't face your accuser, you won't call witnesses, you won't have cross-examination.

And before your verdict is reached, you're going to be expelled from the university or at least put on suspension.

And so, if they're going to do that, then why do we have to pay for it?

And that's what we're doing when their huge portfolios are bringing in all this money.

And notice when I say all this money, it was like a nanosecond.

George Floyd, woke movement.

Oh,

we've got collectively, we universities have a billion dollars for these new diversity, equity, and inclusion czars at 200.

fifty thousand a year.

And where was the faculty?

You know, they're always saying, oh, we teach too much.

You know, at, you know, a major university, you teach one and two or two and one,

not like the CSU where it's four or five a semester.

But nevertheless, where are they?

They always bitch about administrator.

They didn't say a word.

They didn't say, and they're always so protective of their curricula.

I was.

I didn't like some guy calling me up when I was a professor and saying, hey, Victor.

Clarence is one of our best CSU tackles.

And you gave it, he's going to get a D or an F.

Yep.

Well, you've got to help me because if he gives that, that makes him ineligible.

And then, and I said, well, you know, to the coach, you put my name on a no-go list.

It's not my fault that he was stupid enough to take my class.

If he's stupid enough to take my class because he's not going to get a C, I can't give him a C.

But you didn't like that stuff.

But so why did the faculty roll over when the diversity people, I've had these people's, you know, their predecessors call you up and say, so-and-so is the first in her family to go to college and got a big Pell Grant or whatever, and your grade will imperil her future.

And that could be construed as insensitive.

And so that's what these people do.

Or now they do things like, well, we've looked at your syllabus.

And, you know, I just noticed something, Professor Hanson.

What does Homer and Virgil and Aeschylus and Sophocles and Thucydides and Xenophon all have in common?

Well, they're white males from ancient Greece.

The course is on ancient Greece, sir.

Well, can't you have some women?

Well, I have

a selection of lyric poets, but we only have about a thousand lines of Sappho, but I'd like to teach Sappho.

Well, there's any more?

Well, I say, well, you give me some.

Well, I don't know anything.

You don't know anything, but you're telling me what I have to put on the syllabus.

That's where we are now in this university.

And they're not going to like it, but they're not going to say anything about it.

They're going to, oh, I know academics like the back of my

ancient hand.

And it's like, it's like

they're waiting for some stupid person to commit suicide on the altar of faculty integrity and free speech and break through the, you know, tear down the wall.

And then they'll say something, but they'll never be the first person to do it.

It's intimidation and fear.

And

the whole woke movement understands them.

They really have sized up academics.

Well, Victor, we have time for one more topic, and it's going to be about corrupt politicians.

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

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show, the traditionalist recording on Friday, January 14th.

It's the end of a really jam-packed political cultural week in America.

Victor, on my own behalf, I do want to recommend to our listeners listeners to check out Civil Thoughts.

Go to civilthoughts.com, subscribe to the newsletter that I write.

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

It's free.

I think it's informative and I think folks will like it.

So, Victor, you mentioned before about corrupt Pelosi, some news is out there about

her son cashing in on the various things.

It's just the place where so many people enrich themselves wildly.

Josh Hawley, I saw him on, I forget what show on Fox last night or maybe the night before, discussing a bill to ban lawmakers from trading stocks.

Do you have any thoughts about the efforts by federal law or regulation to ban lawmakers from dallying in this stuff?

Well,

I think it was, how long ago was that?

I think it was a few years ago that Clintons were estimated at being worth $120 million.

My question is, so you come out of the White House broke.

I'm just giving him this example because you talked about lawmakers and she was shortly to be in the New York Senator.

And you're in a state, say New York, where the income tax and

Medicare supplement tax and the federal income tax can get you up to about 55%.

So

how do you make $120 million

in less than 20 years net and have it?

Worth?

That's hard to do.

And that means you leverage your influence to corporate people.

And what do they do?

They talk to you about investments.

And what do you do?

You tell them stuff about investments.

And how do you know?

Because

you have inside information.

Well, how does that work?

How did Harry Reed's boys and his son-in-law become multimillionaires?

Because if you wanted a federal contract or if you wanted to do business in Nevada, you needed Harry Reid's permission.

How did he become a multimillionaire?

Because he knew exactly where the next federal money for the clover leaf was going to be or the dam or whatever it was.

And how did Pelosi become a, I guess she's worth well over 100 million.

And how did Diane Feinstein, she's worth over a billion, the woman whose husband had sizable Chinese investments while her chauffeur was working for the Chinese communist government.

And so they have all sorts of avenues to access knowledge and either to use it themselves for their financial advantage in the stock market or to wink a nod when people pay them exorbitant fees.

I don't understand this.

Why do our biggest defense contractor boards, the Northrops, the Lockheeds, the General Dynamics, the Raytheon,

why do they always hire four-star admirals and generals that are leaving the service?

What's the theory behind it?

Why would they pay them such astronomical sums?

And the answer is that they come and they have still have, you know, they have all sorts of liaisons and associates and former subordinates that are still there.

You call up and they familiarize yourself with the acquisitions process.

So that's what we call the administrative state, these people who go into government poor and they come out wealthy.

And that's what Pelosi did.

And

the one thing I have to say that might be original about all this, Jack, is that it's really smart.

If any of you listeners are out there thinking of going into politics as a way to get rich, it's going to be hard to be a Republican because you're going to be under scrutiny.

You got to have your money before you get in there.

But if you're a Democrat and you're like Pelosi and you're a social justice warrior, or you're like Elizabeth Warren, a house flipper who found, you know,

that she was really a lot more left-wing than she thought, you're not going to have any scrutiny.

We don't really care how Nancy Pelosi got that huge San Francisco home or that Napa Valley estate or any of that.

It's none of our business.

It just happens because she's on our side or Barbara Boxer or any of them.

And it's the same thing with diversity.

We used to get lectured all the time in California about diversity, diversity, diversity.

And the three most powerful women, all women, in a state that's about 50% men, all lived in the Bay Area, which has about 30, 20% of the population.

And they were all of the same age and the same economic bracket, Boxer, Pelosi, and Feinstein.

And yet we were told that this is proof of diversity.

That's how the leftists think: that once you are on their side, they take care of business.

It's a good insurance plan for all you young kids out there that are in graduate school and you want to be a professor, for all you journalists that want to finally end up at the New York Times one day or Washington Post or Bullister Prize for all young Hollywood directors.

Buy woke insurance.

That's sort of a couple of traces of footprints, fingerprints on the social media that you're outraged by oath keepers in January 6th, or you're furious about collusion that really happened.

General Milley planned, right?

Yes, absolutely.

Look at General Milley.

You know where General Milley is going to end up.

Although, I don't know.

He's so inept, it might be a liability to be so flagrant when he comes out.

He might have to wait a year.

It's true.

Well, Victor, that's almost all the time we have.

As we've become our custom now, the end of the program, I'd like to read a review left on iTunes.

Thanks to everyone who gives the ratings, the five-star ratings, and the folks that do leave comments, we read them.

And here's one.

It's a little long, but I think it's worth it.

It's from a John G.

hyphen 007, the agrarian i had an epiphany that's what he titles it i found vdh in november as part of an ongoing search for more authentic news and wisdom i listened to the agrarian episode and came away in tears let me explain i emigrated from the uk to california over 30 years ago and in many ways have lived the american dream i grew up in an upper middle class family but my family hit rough waters during my teens got a decent education but was largely out on my own came to california in 1988 with very very little money, tried to start a couple of businesses, but it wasn't until my mid-40s that I was successful.

Anyway, even though I now have enough money to retire, I found that I am unsettled and still working.

One of the things I enjoy a lot is working and sweating in my yard.

I grew up in the country and used to do all kinds of chores as a kid with my parents telling me.

it was good for me.

When VDH explained that the Greeks most respected the combination of intellect and physical labor, that put me in tears.

Suddenly, I understood who I am and why I am more comfortable hanging out with blue-collar guys and at the country club.

This has made me realize that I am meant to work.

Thank you, VDH, for exposing me to the Greeks and giving me insight into my own psyche.

That's John G

007.

That's pretty cool, Victor, I think.

It is.

It's pretty sweet.

And I want to thank him and thank our audience.

You know, when I go over to, I just got back this morning from where I work on the coast.

I get my blood pressure starts to go up when I go over there.

And I have a lot of really wonderful people that are colleagues at the Hoover Institution.

So I'm not talking about that institution per se.

But when I go to restaurants or I go out on the street or I go to stores

and I see that environment there of this.

or the way people drive or the way they talk or the way they act and that upper, upper, upper, upper, woke, Karen type Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Stanford culture.

Then I come back to Southwest Fresno County.

As soon as I was zero visibility, I got up at five o'clock in the morning just so I could drive through the fog to get out.

And then I get out here, and you don't have to worry about all that.

You see somebody, and they don't drop reference points to who they are or where they went to school or this aristocracy.

And it's just, you know, you talk to, I had a guy,

I had a huge tree.

I'm just going to finish very quickly that was over 100 years old.

And it had a six foot diameter.

It was probably at one time 60.

And when I watched these two guys go, they were like heart surgeons.

I mean, this guy had a 36-inch hanging up in that tree, yeah, chainsaw with one hand, and he was just zoom, zoom.

And then we had a rope and they were lowering these huge 500-pound stump sections.

And it was like, I thought, oh my God, they're going to get this thing done in three hours.

And they did.

And then I said, man, that was a work of art.

And he said, what?

No, that was just what he does every day.

And we don't, we give those guys no appreciation.

We never do.

We don't compensate them like we do.

These people that Facebook, I mean, compare that to some person that's got a,

you know, a woke BLM flag on his desk at Facebook sitting behind this thing and then putting on, I mean, it's just such a contrast that this country has such wonderful muscular people who are smart and they think and they use muscles at the same time and they're everywhere.

And yet we don't even appreciate them.

We have this artificial, phony, bicoastal, artificial class.

You know, the people in the media and the New York Times and PBS and Stanford University, this, this, and this, and professors, this studies at Harvard.

And it's just, it's completely phony.

same thing with the military you know we have these guys that come on with all of these 25 pounds of medals and ribbons and then we see some major or captain or sergeant and they're just different you know right

and so i think we've got to really remember that especially on the on the right because that was the one thing trump did and people may not want to hear it but he

He was like that Apple commercial in 1984.

He threw that chain and ball and chain through that screen and destroyed the consensus that the Republican Party would always remain a group of silk-stocking, golfing, aristocratic investment, yelling and screaming about the capital gains rate rather than, you know, a guy on a lathe in Youngstown, Ohio.

And that's where it needed to be given the Democrats.

And now it's there.

And it's been a wonderful thing to watch.

Well, the Bible tells us so, Victor, too every season.

And some people have not gotten the news yet that it's

a different season.

No new

Jack.

All right, well, thank you, Victor, for another terrific episode, and thanks to all who listen.

And we will be back soon again with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

God bless.