The Classicist: Reflections on Unsustainable Pathologies

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we are recording on Wednesday, January 5th.

Victor Davis Hansen, the namesake and star, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

And he is also the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor writes for American Greatness twice a week, and we will be talking about two of those pieces in this episode.

He also writes a lot of original material for his own website, victorhanson.com.

And in fact, there's a piece that he's written called Remembrance of Things Past.

That if we have time at the end of this podcast, we'll get to it.

The first thing, though, we're going to talk about, Victor, is Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley, once upon a time, Wonder Kind,

who was developing a company called Theranos.

It went south, Crimes committed, charges filed, trial just held, verdict rendered.

And we're going to see what that might mean to America.

Does this, what happened to Elizabeth Holmes, what she did, does this bespeak anything about Silicon Valley?

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

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show, The Classicist.

Victor, you're far from Silicon Valley, where you actually live, but your presence at Hoover, it puts you smack dab in the middle of it.

So you know it well.

You know many of the people that operate there well from Stanford.

It was an epicenter of Silicon Valley.

So this Elizabeth Holmes trial and verdict and everything that went on with Theranos, the blood testing company that was valiant at one time and is proven to be no there there.

Victor, was this experience, was her being prosecuted, was the conviction, any of this, what does it say about Silicon Valley to America, Silicon Valley being

kind of the

strongest political cultural force in our country right now?

Well, it was a complete refutation and damnation of Silicon Valley's culture and the way that it operates on every moral level.

And I think the key to understanding it was those, remember those series of devastating Wall Street Journal articles?

I think they were written by a guy named John Kerry Kou, I think his name was.

And he dismantled it.

And so did the Stanford epidemiologist John Yannides.

Together with the scientific analysis and the cultural dissection.

We found out very early what the whole thing was about and what was it about.

I can remember maybe it was 2013 or 14, we used to have Hoover retreats.

And on one of them, a very young blonde girl showed up.

She had an Indian-American boyfriend or associate, and she was being paraded around

by some very important people at Hoover.

I think we had four members of our community that were on the Theranos board.

And it was what was striking when I saw her, the first thing I said is, this is weird.

This young girl is just trying to emulate Steve Jobs.

She had on black skirt, black stocking, black shoes, black turtleneck, black thin coat.

And it was exactly like she was trying to develop a cult.

She was a Stanford dropout.

And there had been many people talking about an instant blood test, but the idea that you could just drop a, make a drop or two.

I can remember, I think, asking Scott Atlas, my associate, and other people at Hoover who had medical expertise: is it hard to make an instant blood analysis from a drop or two?

Because given the variations in blood by volume?

And he said, absolutely, it's hard.

There'll come a day when they can do it, but it's well beyond our ability now.

Everybody knew that.

And yet, I want to be very careful here, but instrumental in the growth of this, what became a $9 billion invested company, was the role of my colleague George Schultz, very distinguished and honored, late diplomat, former Secretary of State.

I think he held more cabinet posts than any one person in U.S.

history.

But on his initiative and his enormous authority and reputation, he was able to recruit, A,

some marquee generals, admirals, people from the business community, not very many people, but I would call them celebrity politicians, et cetera.

And he was able to start the ball rolling with his contacts at Bechtel Company and others, big corporate donors, I think Murdoch, Bechtel, all of these people poured in money.

And it was almost like a cult.

I say that only because

there was no there there.

No one ever said that this new testing, Theranos, which is a Greek word, I think it means something, you know,

guiding staff or something, as I remember from Greek tragedy, but, and Homer, it's a Homeric word.

But the point I'm making is there was never,

we have a billion dollars in market capitalization, and here is our prototype, and here is an outside auditor who's going to show how it works.

They never did that.

They even used different machines to adjudicate whether it worked or not.

And then the irony was that the grandson of George Schultz was brought in, I think, as an in-house auditor.

And from the Wall Street Journal accounts and from people I've talked to, he turned out to be a maverick, quintessential, honest man.

What I'm getting at, Jack, is he sort of blew the lid on the whole thing and said, there's nothing here that substantiates the billing.

And what do I mean by the billing?

They were telling people at particular chain pharmacies that you can get pregnancy tests, you can get genetic, you can get anything you want.

Just prick your finger, drop a thing, we'll give it to you instantaneously.

And there were people whose diagnoses that were wrong affected their health, and I think maybe even in one or two cases, their lives.

So it was no just scam, no Ponzi scam alone to skim off billions of dollars.

from this cult of silicon pseudo Steve job-isms

in using people at the Hoover Institution and in the greater Silicon Valley Valley to spread that hype, but it had consequences in people's health.

And it destroyed a lot of people's money.

I mean, they lost it.

And so it was no surprise to me that she was going to be convicted.

The only question I have is:

are people on the board who possibly knew or should have known that the company was not operating on transparent premises?

Are they legally responsible for that?

If so, to what degree?

I don't know if that's going to be pursued given their clout and influence and communities.

I know many of them, so I don't want to comment on it.

But there's something wrong with the paradigm that you start up a Silicon Valley company with a new idea, and rather you just put celebrity people on it who don't have the interest or the expertise to ask the hard questions of the CEO.

And I've been on a lot of nonprofits and boards, and believe me, I'm not trying to say it's an easy thing to do.

I've been on the Bradley board, the H.G.

Guggenheim board.

You have to ask a lot of questions.

It can make people feel uneasy sometimes.

But in this case, nobody did that.

So it had everything going for it.

Jack, it had the little catchy Theranos or Theranos.

And

it's kind of, I think it's cognate with apothenesco, the word for death and dying, and by extension, maybe thera therapy.

That root is a very rich root in Greek, and it's the idea that it's going to be a diagnostic tool that would prevent people from dying.

Perhaps that was the little cachet that she was looking for.

So it had a catchy little name.

It had the right zip code.

It had the right place as far as money pouring in.

It had the right sponsorship from grandees and senior statesmen and so-called wise men of America.

Edit Kissinger was on it, et cetera.

General Mattis was on it.

Everybody was on it.

And I can remember, just as an anecdote from my own point of view, a person coming up to me maybe 2013 and saying, it's too bad that you don't have a higher profile and you don't know the right people or that the right people just don't like you because there's invitations going out to this board.

And if you were to go on that board, you could get three or four or 500,000, I think it was, shares.

I can't remember.

It was a huge amount of shares in this company.

And for a brief moment, when it was capitalized at 9 billion, many of these people that I had known were quite wealthy.

I mean, really wealthy until the whole thing blew up.

And of course, when it blew up, everybody said, I had suspicions.

I kind of thought this would happen.

I didn't ask questions because I don't think that was my purview, that kind of stuff.

But I can tell you the buzz in 2012, 13, 14, and 15 was,

wow, this this is the hottest of the hot.

The offering that's coming up when this thing goes public will be dynamite.

Wow.

There's going to be people who are going to be multi, multi-millionaires.

You guys lost out and that kind of stuff.

So anytime you hear stuff that you should be suspicious.

And these two things.

It's too good to be true.

It's too good to be true.

Exactly.

And she was a quite, I didn't think she was, you know, just, I don't want to be chalvinistic.

I didn't think she was terribly as attractive as she seemed to think she was but she did have a striking image to come to a retreat and to be in all black with bright blonde hair and i don't think she could have been more than 21 or 22 or 23 i don't know what her age is now 30 something

and to be surrounded by men in their 60s and 70s and 80s that were just mesmerized by her.

I think that's the key thing there, that she was a brilliant marketeer, that she looked at Steve Jobs when he got up in those stages.

You remember?

And he took the little iPhone in his hand and the light came on and he pranced about with

the ear pods and everything.

And he said, this is what I can do.

And it was like an audiovisual extravaganza.

And so that's what she thought she was going to do.

And she pulled it off.

pretty well.

But unlike Steve Jobs, who was a technological genius and an even greater business genius, she didn't have those skills.

Victor, I'm going to mildly recommend a movie.

This is the white version of Steve Jobs.

It just came out on Netflix.

Don't look up.

I know it's caused some controversy and a number of people on the right.

This is a climate movie.

This is about this massive asteroid heading towards Earth.

But there is a, I find a great takedown of

big tech in this movie.

And there's a character in it who's a Steve Jobs type, but he's not, he's an all-white as opposed to all black.

So anyway, that's a movie recommendation.

Hey, let's move on, Victor, and now talk about Robert Malone.

So he is a man of great importance in the science community, immunology, RNA discoverer, so to say, although RNA is there.

a man with a lot to say about the things that have consumed America the last year and a half.

It's pathogens, viruses, and vaccines.

So he goes on Joe Rogan's extremely popular show.

He talks about his hesitancy about the COVID vaccines, problems with it, problems with how the government, CDC, and others put America, I think the phrase was mass formation, psychosis.

And boom, here's a guy with something to say about this critical debate.

And this episode is censored by the same big tech people we were just talking about.

Victor, you have any thoughts on this?

I just thought of something, though, when we were talking about Elizabeth Holmes very quickly, is that I remember a conversation where a colleague at Hoover came up to me and said,

what do you think of this

Elizabeth Holmes?

And you're a Greek scholar, Theranos, and Theranos, or however you want to anglicize the Greek word.

Isn't it important in Greek mythology?

And I would say, you know, Well, he's a minor deity that kind of, just as Prometheus stole fire, because the question was, isn't she a Promethean figure, Jack?

She's Promethean.

He was Gaga.

And that's why she named the company, because isn't there somebody in Greek mythology that stole medicines for the people just as

Prometheus has stole fire?

And there is, I think, as I remember, a small god.

And then etymologically, it's cognate to words like therapy and death and stuff that T-H-E-T-H-A root.

And so that was the type of mystique I was trying to capture.

Look,

he has been the most demonized person the last two weeks in the popular left-wing media of anyone.

And we're told that what he didn't finish his PhD,

that there were rival claimants for

the title of invented the RNA vaccination, that he's slick, kind of what we say about Elizabeth Holmes.

But

until he came out the way he did, he was a stellar member of the immunological vaccination industry.

And he had written papers that suggested that the RNA approach to mass vaccinations was something that would yield great results.

So what I'm getting at is that when he talks, there is some authority, but the main issue that people are talking about is simply this, that

the problem with vaccinations from the beginning was it was a tripartite

tool.

By that I mean it was, it

formed one function to give people some immunity, like a flu shot, in conjunction with government policies to ameliorate the spread of the disease.

And that would be masking in a crowded bar or office or not going out fully if you're 65 and older, and then in conjunction with therapies.

These would be drugs that would ameliorate the symptoms of the disease.

But what happened was it was billed partly by Trump, but partly by his critics that wanted to make sure it was not that way

as the end of everything.

You get the vaccination, there is no more COVID.

Now, that was very, it's going to be like the measles or the smallpox.

It's the end of it because we've got this new technology operation.

And so it came out, and everybody bought into that at the expense of,

well, shouldn't Andrew Cuomo have kept pristine these long-term care facilities in New York?

Shouldn't we discuss maybe monoclonal antibodies or plasma therapies or very early interventions, but even things like ivermedicine or hydroxychloroquine?

Or shouldn't physicians be calling for some type of off-label use of common cheap drugs like quercetin, the supplement, or maybe Pepsid?

We don't know quite their utility, but we do know they're non-harmful.

Couldn't people do that?

And it pushed out all of these other approaches.

And it pushed it out in another very dangerous way as well.

There were people who were getting COVID, rapidly getting COVID.

COVID, and we started to see that their antibody levels were comparable and persistent to those with vaccinations, and they seemed to have had developed and acquired immunity.

And so we knew that we were

having a two-pronged approach with vaccination.

One was artificial, one was natural.

But all of a sudden,

that was completely silenced.

the natural immunity.

And Fauci admitted he lied about it.

He said it was 60, 70, 80.

He kept raising the bar on the necessary herd immunity levels because he was terrified that a lot of people said, Well, you know, 99.5 people who are not over 65 or 99.7

don't die.

And I don't know about this RNA vaccination.

So if I get COVID, I've got natural immunity that is good or better than the vaccinated immunity.

And Fauci and the establishment said, if that were true, then people wouldn't get vaccinated.

So we have to say it's not true.

And that's a noble lie, just like we had to say that masks were of no utility when we believed they were.

Otherwise, the yokels yokels would go buy them and then we wouldn't have enough for nurses.

And so that's sort of how we got into this mess.

And, you know, we had the Silicon Valley, Facebook, social media industry doing their best to censor everything.

And the result is that No one believes anybody in government now.

We don't believe the National Institutes of Health.

We do not believe the Center for Disease Control.

We do not believe the Food and Drug Administration.

We do not believe the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that Dr.

Fauci

controls.

We don't believe them, Jack, because, and we should believe them, but we can't believe them.

Because if we were to believe them, we would believe the following.

Masks are not necessary.

One mask is necessary.

Two masks are better.

Wuhan Lab was not the source of the outbreak.

There is no gain of function research going on at the Wuhan lab.

The United States did not help subsidize gain of function research.

The United States would never circumvent laws by giving money to Echo Health in turn to function gain of function research under the auspices of the Chinese military.

China is doing a very good job in being transparent and controlling the disease.

Vaccinations will be, in most cases, 96% 96% effective against COVID and variants.

That's what we heard.

And now,

you know, I guess what I'm saying is if somebody has been vaccinated three times

and many have,

yes, and somebody has got COVID after two vaccinations and I have

and have high antibodies.

You can't really say that you're protected from Omicron.

You can say that you have a better chance of not being hospitalized, but why don't we just say that instead of Joe Biden, like that?

He's the proverbial, again, I hate to overuse a simile, but he's that old guy on the corner that's got that ryegrass, beautiful ryegrass lawn.

And every kid cuts across that corner sidewalk area and goes on his bike across that little two-foot grass and smashes it.

And he gets out on his porch and it's get off my mass, get off my grass.

And everybody knows that figure in their childhoods.

And his stick is mask, mask, mask, vaccination, vaccination, vaccination.

And he never, he never

offers nuance.

He never offers explanation.

So this is a long, windy explanation that when they get somebody like Robert Malone

and you put him on Joe Rogan, and he's advertised as, as I said, the architect of this new RNA type of immunization.

And he says things that the technology is unproven.

And

Joe Rogan suggests maybe there had been more deaths from it than all of the other vaccinations of our age put together.

And then you talk anecdotally to people.

And

as someone who was very, very sick from the second Moderna shot, and I could make the argument that it was

as severe or more severe than my experience for 36 hours with Delta variant,

then you know it's no laughing matter.

And then you have people in your family that you've seen get very, very ill from it for two, three, four days, and have had to have screens and x-rays and CAT scans and MRIs because of unusual cyst or gross that may or may not be associated with it in the eyes of a perplexed medical community.

We haven't had that discussion because to have that discussion means that you would discourage the holy grail of mass inoculations.

So Dr.

Fauci and these people believe they're Jonas Salk or Sabin and they're going to save the world and get Nobel Prizes from this wonderful new vaccination.

And I do think they did save millions of lives in the beginning with the first variant that was very effective.

The vaccinations were very effective.

But now

we're seeing the true nature of this, and it's going to be with us and it's going to mutate.

And at best, people are going to go in every winter and get their combo flu and COVID shot.

And at best, it's probably going to prevent 50 to 60 percent of them from getting a serious case.

And then there's going to be people who have had, you know, a bad strain of the flu or a bad COVID experience, and they're going to feel and argue that they have antibodies.

And that's pretty much where we're going to be, and life's going to go on.

Right.

But I think Marone is

all over the media.

And the problem the left has with him is he's articulate, he's calm, he's got a sense of humor, and he knows inside and outside big pharma grants,

how the billions of dollars that the federal medical industry controls in research allotments and grants.

He's not intimidated.

He's very articulate.

And so when he speaks, all we hear is, well, the guy never finished his PhD,

or the guy really, really, really, really didn't quite do the seminal research that led to the RNA Moderna-Pfizer-type vaccinations after all.

Or he co-authored a paper, or he was a sore head and he just walked off.

That's what we're hearing.

There's a big hit piece on him, I think, in the current Atlantic that I thought was kind of unfair.

Victor, I want to remind you that Joe Biden has three lawns.

And a security.

How many security fences?

Your tax dollars at work.

Victor, you've written two pieces for American Greatness.

You do that every week.

One is more of an essay than the other.

And let's start with the most recent.

That's the shorter piece that also gets syndicated.

And I want to encourage our listeners to visit American Greatness so they can read the pieces.

Also, Victor, you recycle them on VictorHandson.com.

So the first piece, Victor, is called, and I think this is the last piece you wrote in 2021.

It's titled The Ungracious and Their Demonization of the Past.

And it has a terrific final sentence.

You wrote, that's how it wraps up, not giving it away.

Never in history has such a mediocre but self-important and ungracious generation owed so much and yet expressed so little ingratitude to its now dead forebears.

Victor, give us a description of who the ungracious are.

You know what's so funny, Jack, is that this generation,

whether we characterize this generation as your average college student or college professor or the squad

or BLM or Antifa or the left-wing Congress

or the people who inhabit Twitter, they're always damning the past as pathological using their own

standards of judgment.

And the first thing that pops up is, okay, if that's an acceptable train of inquisition, what in the hell do you think people are going to say about your generation?

Let's think.

In 2070,

2090, when we're all dead and they look back, they're going to say, hmm,

you guys, with your rogue versus Wade,

you aborted 60.

million people

and as you did it science was progressing each year that gave a greater chance of viability for that quote-unquote fetus to be a human being outside the womb.

And yet you continue to do that.

Or, my God, you have over a million people who are living in filth as if they're in Dickensey and London in your major city.

Or my God, 8,000 African Americans slaughter themselves every year and you do nothing about it.

Or, oh my God,

the people people that you despise in four years created an economy in World War II that was larger than all of the major belligerents' economy put together.

They built a navy, ex nihilo, that had more ships and tonnage than all the world's navies.

And when they were done,

the Japanese Imperial Empire and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was absolutely destroyed, and the Third Reich was no more.

And what have you done?

Well, let's chalk it up.

Hmm, Afghanistan.

That was not the Nazis or the Japanese.

What did you do there?

You turned tail and ran and you spent, what, $15 trillion or something in time and expense in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And I don't see anything comparable to the generation.

that you are attacking's achievements.

Okay, what else have you done?

Ah, where's your Hoover Dam?

I don't see it.

We haven't built a dam in California, Jack, since 1983.

Well, who built the California aqueduct and that reservoir at San Luis and Folsom and Shasta that we make fun of?

Well, we make fun of them, but we sure as hell use them all.

We need them.

Did we ever fix the aqueduct?

Did we make the peripheral canal?

Did we have another 4 million acre-foot reservoir?

No.

Okay, they built the interstate highway system.

Where's ours?

High-speed rail.

How's that working out in California?

They went to the moon with primitive computers.

Did we go to Mars?

Hell, did we even go to the moon?

So what I'm getting at is that this generation does not believe that its statues are going to be toppled, and they probably will.

This generation thinks it is the

all and be all.

It thinks it's at the center of the universe and it has nothing to recommend it in comparison with other generations.

Think a minute, Jack.

If we're now this generation and it's 1918 1918 and we have a million people over in Europe and a million on the way and we get hit with the Spanish flu that killed more people per capita than COVID has,

what would this generation do?

Bring them back.

Get them off that line.

Quarantine the American Expeditionary Force.

You know, that's what they would do.

Is that what we'd get John Pershing to come back and testify and say, you know, would he have a mask on and a plastic shield like General Austin?

Is that what we would do?

What would we do?

I just don't, I can't see us doing that.

So what I was trying to say is that never has a

generation with so little accomplishments so been so hyper-critical of a generation that has done so much.

If everything is so toxic,

then why are 2 million people crashing the border illegally to live here?

And unlike most of the people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and the upper west side and Cambridge, Mass, I'm living at ground zero of illegal immigration.

And I can tell you that the people 300 yards down the road, all 50 or 60 of them that are living in about now 10 or 12 Winnebagos, and they've got horses and donkeys and goats and chickens all over the road and unvaccinated dogs and Romex streaming between this and open

toilets.

and they're completely exempt from zoning or law enforcement surveillance or arrest.

They are delighted to be in this so-called toxic country.

And compared to what they left in Oaxaca State, they feel it's paradox.

So I just don't see where this argument that this generation has gained the moral currency or the ethical and spiritual credibility to blast the past that gave them so much.

And this generation is going to do what, Jack?

Going to pass on 30 trillion plus

in

aggregate debt to the next generation.

I don't know how much that is, $200 and something thousand dollars per person.

And where did that money go?

Did it go for $88 billion to the Taliban?

Did it go to redistribution of funds?

Did it say, here's some more COVID money, stay home, you don't have to work?

It was largely entitlements.

They robbed from their grandchildren.

They did.

They're not saying it nicely.

They're not saying it too nicely.

And a lot of them rob from their grandchildren because they don't have any grandchildren.

That we're down to about 1.8

in collective fertility and our demographic is shrinking.

And we have a lot of very influential Americans whose idea of success is to get those letters after their name and then find a power marriage.

Marry someone of the credentialed and wealthy class, get the nice zip code, have no children, and live it up during your life, and then say, you know what?

I don't have any hen that's going to inherit.

I don't really care what the debt is.

So that's kind of reduction's view of things, but that's what we're talking about.

I was very surprised today, Victor, my Pope.

Sorry to stick Catholicism into this podcast, but a stop clock is right twice a day.

And the Pope is even right on occasion.

And he said,

there's something wrong with the society.

A man and a wife get together and don't have children, but they have pets.

And that's what they consider.

Pets are big.

Pets are big.

And it's not just cats and dogs.

It's really an exotica now.

There's all sorts of snakes and turtles and lizards and furry things, seals and ferrets and weasels.

It's right out of the satiricon.

Pets of people, too.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

And I don't know.

And then, you know, what's so funny?

And I said this, I think, in the article, that when you lump everybody together, and that's what you do when you condemn the past, remember what we're talking about, Jack?

We're saying that the past is awful because 96% of the original founders and the founding class and the pop were white.

And about 85 to 90% were white up until...

the early and mid-20th century.

And these are toxic people because of that.

And we can make them all collectivize.

And there are no individuals.

And that's who we judge.

Okay,

so in 2090, using that arithmetic, people are going to say, well, we don't judge individuals because that generation of 2020 taught us that.

So let's look at all these different groups by their superficial appearance and let's adjudicate them.

This group has now, let me go down the line, how many

Nobel Prize winners?

How many captains of industry that came up with brilliant new innovations that made life better?

How many brain surgeons?

How many very important philanthropists?

Okay, and this group has how, what was the per capita number of felons, rapists,

assaulters, murderers, and this pre, and that's what they're going to do because they're going to inherit this system.

You know, every once in a while, I slum by watching 15 minutes of MSNBC or CNN.

And if you listen to somebody like Don Lamon or Jory Reed, it's just an incredible experience because 10 years ago, nobody would so blanketly disparage a group on the basis of their superficial appearance.

But the way they use the word white is really weird.

They try to use whiteness sometimes if it's an abstraction, but sometimes they forget and the veneer comes off and it's white, white, white, white.

And white people do this and white people did this and white people do that and the awful white people.

And you think, wow, she's greenlighting this collective stereotyping.

So black people, black people, is that what she wants?

That people will say, okay,

I thought we got over that and we're going to treat people as individuals.

But you say no.

But you can't just say that this white person is part of an anonymous collective and is represented by only its sins and this person is not.

No, no, we're going to use your system and stereotype.

And does she want that to happen?

When you look at the proportional representation of what?

Hate crimes,

rare but existing interracial crimes, homicides.

Is that what you want?

Is that what you want to do?

Because if you do that, you're going to be hoisted on your own petard.

You really are.

Right.

Well, the Soviets wanted to kill the Kulaks, and then those who wanted to kill the Kulaks ended up dying in the purge trials themselves, right?

And eventually it'll come around.

Hey, Victor, you have another piece of the longer essay for American Greatness.

And it's titled The Truths We Dared Not Speak in 2021.

At the end of this terrible year, we are left only with ironies.

So Victor, this is one, as you do every week.

This is a big, meaty piece.

Talk about whatever you would like, why you wrote it.

But I just do want to say that it's not only the truths we dared not speak in 2021, but many of the lies that we spoke or were spoken, particularly by our media friends and cast as

truths.

And if there's any particular of the ironies you'd like to talk about, because you do give us quite a list of them.

So it's a great piece.

It's on American Greatness.

Folks, you'll find it on Victor's website too.

But either one, go visit it and read it in total.

You'll be short-selling yourself if you did not.

I saw the dossier online.

I looked at the fake scare capital letters and the fake intelligent report formatting.

And I heard that there was a Russian consulate that didn't exist in, I think it was Miami, and Michael Cohen, who had his passport, and he had supposedly turned up in Eastern Europe, and they didn't refute that.

And then I never saw footnotes in Russian sources.

And then I saw...

you know, he is being sued and he said he had no notes.

So the point I was making, it was very early on, Christopher Steele was a complete fraud.

He made it up.

And why did he make it up?

Because he hated Donald Trump.

He was a washed-up, has-been spy who had not been to Russia in over a decade.

And he was hired originally by Never Trumpers, his dossier, and then it was outsourced back to Hillary, who hid behind the DNC, who hid behind Perkins-Coey, who hid behind Fusing GPS.

And they unleashed this creep who had basically two sources, this guy at the Brookings, Dashinko or whatever his name, who is now indicted, and this Dolan character who was a Hilly aficionado and former subordinate in Moscow.

And they concocted this whole thing, and all we heard was the dossier, the dossier, the dossier, the dossier.

That was what James Comey used essentially for his fraudulent FISA applications.

That's what sparked Robert Mueller.

And what was left of it was completely torn to shreds by Devin Nunes' House Intelligence Committee majority report and the IG of the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz.

When it was all said and done, it was a complete fraud.

And how do we end up with this joke?

We ended up with a doddering Robert Mueller saying he didn't know what the, he'd never heard of the Christopher Steele dossier.

He knew nothing about it.

He knew nothing about the purveyor of it, Fusion GPS.

And then we had James Comey, the head of the FBI at one time, who hired Christopher Steele.

He said on 245 occasions, I don't know.

I don't remember.

That's not what I was involved in.

He knew nothing.

So the point was it was totally discredited, and it ended with a whimper, not a bang.

So you had these people, I think David Frumman, Atlanta, they have a new word jacket.

It's called the Russian hoax hoax.

It's a hoax that the Russian collusion hoax is a hoax.

But they offer no, they say, oh, well, you know, nobody really paid much attention to the dossier.

It wasn't the catalyst.

It was the catalyst.

Without it, there was nothing.

And to the degree they find one thing in there they think might sort of kind of be true.

Well, it's not completely.

So that's something that we can't just say that.

Christopher Steele was a pathological liar.

His lies were outsourced for pay to the FBI, who used it to seed it among the Clinton-Obama administrative state.

And I'm talking about everybody from Bruce Orr at the Department of Justice to Victoria Newland and the State Department, et cetera, et cetera.

And they, it finally weaselwormed, snuck into

John Brennan's intelligence menu that Barack Obama read.

So it was the beginning of this national tragedy.

And another thing that we all know and we can't talk about, and I mentioned this, is does anybody believe that you can keep printing two trillion dollars a year

and just add it up and add it up to 30 trillion dollars we're getting close to an aggregate national debt the venezuelans do the nicaraguans do the castroites do and where is how are you going to pay it back you're only going to pay it back in two ways you're going to either inflate the economy such

inflate the currency, I should say, that money's worth very little, or you're going to go take it from somebody.

And you can take it in a variety of ways.

You can up the tax rate, which Build Back Better is.

The income tax and capital gains rates will go up.

And that will discourage people from taking risk and trying to start businesses and create greater productivity.

You can do that.

Or you can just abolish debt.

You can just say, you know what?

You guys don't owe $1.7 trillion,

or you don't owe that on your mortgage.

Or if you're black or you're a marginalized person, you don't have to pay the full cost of this particular debt you incurred, reparatory

compensation.

So there's not a lot of good alternatives.

I lived through the Jimmy Carter era.

I farmed during the early years of Ronald Reagan's correction of it.

It's not a pretty thing to see what happens when you get to 12 or 13 percent inflation.

We know that we ended up between six and seven on an annualized rate, but believe me,

the things that went up versus the things things that went up a little bit were not symmetrical.

The things that went up a lot, like used cars and new cars, home heating oil, natural gas, gas for your car, meat, which the president just found out from his, I guess from his friend, said, hey, Joe, the meat's gone up.

Wow, I didn't know that.

Well,

that's what's happening right now.

And all the wage gains from a short labor market and increased wages have been eaten up by this.

And we don't talk about it.

Nobody says we're going broke.

It's not, you know.

And the other thing is we have spiraling crime, Jack, but there's no criminals.

So you read the paper and it says: if you have a nice range roller, drive the Honda.

If you have a business, make sure you got security cameras.

If you go out at night, be home by seven.

It's always on the onus is always on the victim.

It's never on, be proactive and get a police

force to go out in the centers of crime and arrest people or investigate murders.

Don't have on-ended cases, prosecute crimes, don't let criminals out of jail.

Don't reduce crimes to mere misdemeanors that are true felonies.

It's never that.

And it's always that we don't know who did it.

Who killed those people in Waukesha?

I guess it was the updated Herbie, the automatic car, the SUV.

It wasn't Mr.

Brooks, who was a black racist that hated white people and urged people to go beat them up and hit them and got in a car and was mad about the written house and tried to mow them down as if they were bowling pins.

You can't even mention his name.

You can't mention Spiraleene.

The only person who does it is Heather McDonald.

Day after day, she looks at the data and says, a lot of problems would be solved.

in the black community if we address that black crime is about 50 percent of all violent crimes of black perpetrators and of 13 percent of the demography.

And we can discuss and argue why that is, whether it's systemic racism or the legacy of Jim Crow and slavery or big government programs that try to corrupt the entrepreneurial spirit or benign neglect of the Moynihan, whatever it is.

But it's there,

but nobody talks about it.

And so what it is now is, Jack, That's the truth.

And what is the lie?

The lie is that you live in Portland, oregon or seattle or minneapolis or tony neighborhood of chicago you got your blm sign on your lawn maybe it's getting a little ratty now and faded you got your biden harris sticker in your car and you get carjacked or somebody breaks into your home or you're in a smash and grab store and they take your wallet and you just decide whether or not to take one for the team You just keep quiet about it or you say, you know what, this has something to do with the people that I voted for.

And then there's a lie about Biden.

When he gets on television, I saw him last night, Jack.

He is declining, as I said before, geometrically, not arithmetically.

Each day is twice as bad as the day before.

His complexion is almost reptilian-like.

It's completely, when you look at those pictures just 10, 12 years ago, he looked like he was a fit 70.

late 60s.

He looks completely different.

He walks like his arms or wings are some type of navigational instruments, his elbows.

They're like, he kind of flaps so he doesn't fall.

He takes these short little steps.

He gets on there and he gets angry and he kind of slurs and spits his words out.

He coughs.

He's, I am very empathetic.

I feel bad.

He has no business in bed getting up at six or seven and being told this is your menu.

And he thinks, oh my God, I've got a headache.

I ache.

I'm tired.

I don't want this.

That's where we are.

We don't, we're not honest about.

We sure were honest about Donald Trump.

We had the Montreal cognitive assessment given him.

We had, remember, was her name, Bandy Yee Lee, that Yale psychiatrist who was paraded around Congress saying that you need basically a straitjacket intervention to grab him off the street and put him in, you know, cloud cuckoo land, Donald Trump.

And not a word about Joe Biden.

Can't we just agree, give the guy the Montreal cognitive assessment, see whether he can pass it or not?

Where is Jack

Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein with the 25th Amendment wiretapping apparatus?

Why don't they go in and, hey, Joe, this is the acting attorney general, and this is the acting head of the FBI, and they want to talk to you.

And then, you know, wire what he says.

And

so everybody knows that, and nobody wants to talk about it.

COVID is sort of, we all have a rendezvous with COVID in one way or another.

Either we're going to get it or we're going to have to be vaccinated to the point that

we, you know, we have holes sticking out all over our body or lumps everywhere from so many vaccinations.

And I got a friend from Israel that told me he's on his fourth vaccination now.

And so that it's just ridiculous.

And we're all going to have to get it.

And as I said,

I didn't feel very well when I got it, but I didn't feel very well when I got the shot either.

But everybody knows that, that it's not suddenly going to disappear.

It may mutate into the common cold, and maybe there'll be some good out of it, that more scientific investigations and empirical developments out in the field from the therapies in reaction to the virus will create a whole new horizon of inoculations that may even end the common cold, but we're not there yet.

So that was kind of the irony.

And then I kind of just finished, you know, that I guess we'd call them paradoxes.

Why in the world do 2 million people walk across the border illegally, then reside illegally?

And nobody says, Mr.

Gomez, you just entered my country illegally.

And we are going to fire 4 million federal workers and U.S.

soldiers for not getting a vaccination.

Could I test you for COVID and give you a vaccination?

What would be so hard about that?

Especially when we know the Omicron virus mutant may have amplified by illegal immigration and open borders.

And then, you know what else?

It's an irony for all of Anthony Fauci and these intrusive federal workers.

When you, Jack, get sick or I get sick or our family gets sick, what do we do?

Do we go to the internet and say, this is what the CDC says to say we know it works?

No.

You're on your own.

If you call up and say, I want a monoclonal antibody, I've got a high fever, they're going to say, what race are you if you're in New York?

You mentioned New York.

Those are being doled out as are test kits, a very sophisticated scorecard, and one of the score contributors is race.

But you're on your own.

The government's not going to help you make these decisions.

Donald Trump was all too real.

Joe Biden turned out to be all too false.

How ironic was that?

Wasn't that didn't come as a surprise to you or me, but it didn't.

And that comes as a surprise to many conservatives is shocking.

How about all the ironies of all these people?

I know some of them who said, I'm getting all this money from the government.

I'm just going to stay home and not work.

And the more we gave them money, the less there was labor, the more there was shortages, the more we printed money.

And the more money they got, the less it was worth for them.

And that was kind of ironic, too.

And,

you know, was it Nicole Wallace on television who said she got three,

was it three boxes and masks?

And she, And another person said they carried infection rates in their pocket for reference by zip code or something, and they got COVID.

And who do they blame?

Do they blame Donald Trump?

Do they say, Donald Trump lied to me?

Joe Biden lied to me.

I lied to myself.

But they have to think somebody lied to them because that wasn't supposed to happen.

And that was kind of funny.

Yeah.

It's the unvaccinated villains.

And I ended, I think, as a piece by saying, you remember Michael Avenati?

He was the savior that came in during the Kavanaugh hearing.

He was a presidential candidate.

And he had Miss, was it Ms.

Schwink that said that she was gang raped or something?

And he was bragging about his sports cars.

And then now we find out that he was a charlatan crook.

And

I think they let him out for COVID, but he was indicted and convicted and incarcerated.

And then we remember, I'm just trying to remember all these people that were in our faces swearing all of these entruse to us.

And then remember there was John Brennan who said that Trump was quote unquote treasonous.

This is a man that lied twice under oath at Congress.

And there was James Clapper.

He said that Trump was a Russian asset.

And he, like his friend John Brennan, had lied under oath about the NSA's surveillance under oath to Congress with exemption.

And both of them, remember, had been telling everybody in CNN and MSNBC that Trump was a traitor.

And they wink and nod.

Oh, I have my security cleanse.

Wink, wink, nod, nod.

You see, I have this information in Adam Schiff style.

I can't disclose, but if I could, it would tell you that Trump is a traitor.

Then they go under oath in secret to the House Intelligence Committee, and they're asked deliberately, it leaks out.

Did you or did you not have information to support that public statement you said that Donald Trump is working and colluding in treasonous fashion?

No, I don't.

Okay.

In other words, when there's no consequences for lying on the public domain on TV, they lie.

And when there is a consequence for lying under oath, maybe to the House Intelligence Committee, unlike the U.S.

Senate, they decide not to lie.

Robert Mueller,

how did he end up?

$40 million, 22 months.

And he's under oath.

And they say the two keystones for the whole investigation were Fusion GPS.

and this deal dossier.

Mr.

Mueller, would you please elaborate on it?

I don't know anything about it, Jack.

We didn't, I don't know.

And then we had

a sad day for America.

Adam Schiff.

Remember how many times he lied?

Remember, he created a whole fantasy phone call as if it was a transcript during the first impeachment.

Then he lied about his non-connection with Andrew Vinman when he was prepping this guy and his office was working for him to be a quasi-whistleblower so the real whistleblower wouldn't have to reveal his information.

Then the other day he misread a communication about the January 6th.

He was collusion, collusion, collusion.

Dossier, dossier.

I don't think we even have to remember Christopher Steele.

I talked about him.

Andrew Binman was a weird guy, wasn't he?

I mean, he was so self-righteous.

And yet he was the person who really, in conjunction with the whistleblower, was shocked about this phone call because

he was a Ukrainian chauvinist and he wanted to make sure that Ukraine got as much as they could from the United States, understandably so, I guess he thought, because of Russian aggression.

But he was a man of the left, but the left had sort of disappointed him because the Obama administration had not sold offensive weapons to Ukraine as he wanted, but they hated, despised, demonic, despotic Trump.

administration had sold Ukrainian weapons.

So what was he going to do to be a man who was helping Ukraine was a man of the right and helping them far more than his heroes on the left.

And so we kind of concocted this idea that he listened in on this conversation and Trump held up military aid that was not held up permanently.

And that turned out that from what we later knew, anybody in their right mind would have legitimate questions about the Biden family's interactions.

with the Ukrainians and Joe Biden's boast that he could fire and basically hire and fire Ukrainian prosecutors based on their attitudes toward Hunter, who was a complete dissolute and crook.

And so that's how he ended up.

So that was the paradoxes of the year that all of the heroes of the left had feet of clay.

And are they going to learn anything?

No.

Every one of those people that I just mentioned in some way is back in the limelight as a heroic figure.

Their reputations among normal Americans no longer exist, exist, but among the left, they're idols and icons.

Well, Victor, I'm going to give you three minutes after this important message to talk about something you've written for VictorHanson.com.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show, the classicist.

This is a recording on January 5th, Wednesday, January 5th.

By the way, Victor, I do want to add that Binderman, who you just talked about, he always reminded me of that weird-looking Eliza Minali husband, David Guest.

You can go look him up at some point, but he's a strange, strange-looking cat.

Victor, you've written this wonderful piece for VictorHanson.com.

This is an exclusive piece.

This can be read in full by people who have subscribed.

It's the first part.

I don't know if it's of two or more, but it's called Remembrance of Rural Things Past.

And it's the title for this particular piece is called A Naturally Diverse Town.

Victor, in this, you write about what it was like growing up in a very diverse community.

You knew that guy was Basque.

You knew that guy was Portuguese and that guy was Mexican, that guy was Oklahoma.

But there was a lot less overt talk about racism or consciousness of their difference than there is today.

Not necessarily how that life is lived in your town, but certainly what's being promulgated by the white elites mostly on our campuses and who are running our media operations.

So Victor, would you like to talk briefly about what you wrote in this piece and what might be coming next?

San Joaquin Valley attracted farmers and farmers were of all different races and this was the most fertile country in the world, countryside, and the soil and the water and the air and the climate were perfect.

So if you were a farmer in Armenia or Japan or Korea or the Punjab or Mexico or the deep south, you came to this area and it was a free-for-all.

You could do what you wanted.

And by the 1950s and 60s, there was a general large middle class, lower middle, upper middle class.

But race was almost indistinguishable very quickly.

It was indistinguishable.

I know people look differently, but somebody would call up and say, hey, Victor, my uncle has the Armenian packing hat.

He's an an armenian guy hey victor i can get you on there and you would go there and you'd be with armenians or somebody would say to me hey victor i want you to go help me my dad has got a little tomato uh two-acre patch and he was mexican guy and you go there and everybody was speaking spanish or somebody else would say

you know would you go help me work on my tractor and he was a black mechanic so nobody cared because you're all in a race to survive literally it was an exit everybody lived in smaller homes.

Everybody worked on cars.

And there was only one divide, as I point out.

It was a class divide.

And it was an unfair stereotyping of two groups of people.

So you could use the word white for all the people I mentioned.

There were, I guess the left would say they were white Mexicans, white Portuguese, white Armenians, white Greeks, white Punjabis, white whites, but they had nothing to do with their white skin.

It was a frame of mind that your parents stayed married, you didn't get in trouble with the law, you were upwardly mobile, you tried to be, and you all intermarried and interdated.

But then there was another group, and those were of two constituents.

Those were people who had just arrived and not from northern Mexico.

People forget this, that when I grew up, people came from northern Mexico, and they were very educated.

They had high school diplomas.

A lot of them came legally.

They were proud of their Spanish heritage.

And then the second wave was from southern Mexico, indigenous people.

And when they started coming, they did not assimilate.

they did not have high school diplomas, and their children started in the 70s and late 60s, they were called chuccos.

They spoke Spanish, they didn't speak English, they went back to Mexico a lot.

They had kind of Frisco jeans to stereotype them and flannel shirts and headbands and beetle boots, we called it.

And they had social pathologies.

That is, their parents were divorced or they were in gangs and there was a lot of violence, switchblades, et cetera.

And there were the remnants of the Oklahoma diaspora.

And these were the so-called Okis that Steinbeck wrote about that came in the 30s and 40s, but their parents had never quite, as most Okis, been fully assimilated.

So they wore cowboy boots, cowboy hats, FFA jackets, jean jackets, faded blue Levi's before Levi's were cool.

The girls had teased blonde hair, boots, razor-sharp brush handles, and they would fight among themselves and with the Chuccos, but they were quote-unquote white, but they were not considered white.

They were subject, like Chukos, were to a great deal of discrimination and prejudice based on the appearance and their greater degree of what people felt was criminality.

They parked six, if you were an Oki family, had six cars parked on the lawn.

And that was the divide.

The good thing about it was that all of the people I just mentioned, although slower, I know them.

And they're pretty much fully integrated into the American middle and upper middle class.

In fact, I can mention people who were Chukos in high school that are very successful now.

And the same is for Okis, but it wasn't a racially obsessed group.

Nobody cared.

And the people who did care, we always have this word, you're prejudiced.

Your parents are prejudiced.

They'd say that to each other.

And then, if you wanted to date somebody in your group, believe me, Jack, if you were a white guy and you wanted to date a beautiful Japanese girl or Chinese or Korean girl, those parents would be as hard on you

as maybe

they were on a Korean boy who dated a white girl.

And the same thing was true.

I dated a girl who was Armenian and I dated a girl who was Mexican-American.

And I don't think I ever dated a so-called white girl when I was in high school.

And believe me, their parents rode me so much,

but not in an exclusionary fashion.

It was sort of ribbing joking.

So there was a community and now there is no diversity.

The town went from 6,000 to 25,000 because of illegal immigration.

90% of the population is from Mexico.

And the only divide is that most of the former immigrants from southern Mexico are now middle class, homeowners, professionals, government employees, and they're terrified about these people coming illegally, en masse, with records that nobody knows anything about, unvaccinated in the time of pandemic.

So there is a class divide, but it's between one group.

And then just very quickly,

I set up that model.

And then in part two, I'll talk about why we didn't have racial divisiveness.

It wasn't because we were condescending or we just papered over the pathologies of Grim Crow or something.

It was that there were all these civic institutions.

And I mentioned two of them.

One was the Great Pinewood Derby races we had.

cup scallops, but we're all shooting.

Remember those?

I had those.

And then the other was something called Fathers and Sons Night.

And that was kind of the product of American sociologists in the 60s who thought, you know what?

We've discovered if there's divorce or families are broken apart, they don't do as well.

That was a brilliant discovery.

And so we're going to have all these institutions and the PTA and the civic groups.

We're going to have fathers and daughters nights at PTA, fathers and sons.

And you took your dad came and then you went and everybody's dad came with their kids once a year.

And then they did, you know, gunnysack racing and bingo.

And it was an all-male bonding so that everybody would have a father figure.

And I kind of talk about in the final essay the ironies of my sweetie 6'4, 210 pound dad.

And looking around to see if he can challenge anybody or he had any affinity.

And his best friend ended up to be a guy that was 20 pounds heavier and two inches taller, African-American guy who was a wonderful mechanic.

And he and my dad were kind of rivals.

And then they ended up being really good friends.

Well, folks, that's where do you find this?

It's victorhanson.com.

You can't read it unless you subscribe.

Every week, Victor has several pieces up that are exclusive to subscribers.

$5 a month.

Stick your toe in the water, figure out what it's like.

Five bucks.

You like what you see?

$50 for the year.

And there's really a plethora of original content that you'll find there.

As for me, you mentioned,

you know, civic organizations, Victor.

That's where I work, American Philanthropic.

We are deeply concerned with strengthening civil society.

Actually, the institution there I run, the Center for Civil Society, you can find out more about that at centerforcivilsociety.com.

I also write a,

I don't know, I think a fun little weekly newsletter that has a dozen recommended reading items.

It's called Civil Thoughts.

You can sign up for it, civilthoughts.com.

We don't sell your name.

There's no, we're not selling you anything.

It's just some interesting reading that we think intelligent Americans would like to know about.

Victor, we have a nice comment from one of the reviewers at iTunes.

We're still a five-star average.

Thanks for those of you who do rate the podcast.

This is from Friar Dan.

BDH is a must-listen.

Victor Davis Hansen is a conservative intellectual with sharp and logical insight into many areas of life, culture, history, and politics.

I look forward to every podcast and always conclude with fresh thoughts and perspective.

I deeply appreciate Dr.

Hansen's strong intellect and his ability to place current events and philosophies into a larger historical narrative.

Thank you, Dr.

Hansen.

And I'm going to echo that, Dr.

Hansen.

Thank you for taking the time to uh discuss these important issues today on this episode of the classicist you can also hear victor on the traditionalist which i also host and then the great sammy wink hosts the culturalist so thanks for listening victor thank you for all the wisdom you shared and we'll be back again uh soon with another episode of uh the classicist go ahead victor you get the last word i get the last word yeah yeah i'm a tyrant go ahead

And remember, everybody, I want to thank you.

And remember one thing.

I think this is really important.

All of you guys listening, you believe at some times, I know I do, that we're the minority, that we don't have a voice.

They run Silicon Valley, the university's professional sports media.

You are the majority.

You really are.

You know you're the majority.

And there are going to be a reckoning coming.

And that reckoning is probably going to be in the midterms and then the 2024.

And what seems strong now is actually weak and will be revealed.

It's weaker still.

So So keep up your confidence.

You are the majority, and the future is yours, not the woke.

Thank you very much for listening.

I'm going to make handsome 2024 bumper stickers.

So there you go.

God bless everyone.

Thanks.

Thank you.