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Hello, and welcome, and Happy new year to our audience, our listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We have a special edition, of course, because it's New Year's today, and we wanted to have a look back on the Orwellian world the left would have us believe in, and then look to what the facts and the evidence has shown us about what they've imposed on us through a very biased media.

So, that's on the agenda today.

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Welcome back, and we're very happy to be starting off the new year with a look at what is fact and evidentiary versus what was made up and fantasy and opinion and all sorts of other things in the last years, events, court cases, the ideas about Trump, China, Russian collusion.

So we're going to cover all of them.

But first, I would like to remind everybody that Victor Davis Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He also has a website, victorhanson.com, and you're welcome to subscribe for free and then get the articles and the podcasts that are available to everybody, whether you subscribe or not.

But the added content of Victor Davis VDH Ultra content, which is somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 more words each week, that lots of great stuff in it.

you have the option of having a paid subscription.

So we welcome everybody to the website.

How are you doing today, Victor, on this New Year's Day?

I am doing very well, Sammy.

It's very bleak, but wet, wet, wet with rain in the lower valleys of California and heavy, heavy snow in the Sierra Mountains.

And we were told in our long-range forecast that there would be no rain throughout December and probably throughout January.

We were going to be in a record drought.

Climate change had doomed us, and we are looking at probably the wettest December in 50 years.

Awesome.

So, that's a good news from California.

And so, maybe we can look at a lot of other good news for the country, especially as we pursue what the truth of things were today.

So, I have a whole list of things that we can go through that the left-leaning media has either told us lies or misinformed us.

I don't know how anyone or any of our listeners wants to put it, but I thought maybe we would start with all those court cases, what the left-leaning media would have us believe, and then what actually took place.

And I was thinking of the Brooks in Waukesha or Rittenhouse or even the Juicy Smollett case.

And if you would like to start with those, Victor, did you want to start with those or we have other, lots of other things on our agenda?

Fine.

And it's a good point that since the, well, not even the OJ trial, but going back to Sacco Nazetti and the Lindbergh trial, Americans have always been fixated on criminal trials,

sometimes, you know, in the case of the Scopes trial, civil rather than just merely criminal.

That was criminal as well, but

in a sense it was.

But what I'm getting at is they see these as arbiters or referenda on their country and these left, right, traditional, liberal, conservative, radic, whatever the dichotomy is, they play out in these trials.

And so more recently, we had the Rittenhouse trial.

If we were to believe the media,

a young 18-year-old did the following.

He committed a felony by using an illegal weapon, and he was not of an age that was legal to do that.

And then he compounded those transgressions by crossing state lines with that weapon and then he as a self-appointed vigilante he shot down in cold blood two innocents and wounded a third and the trial was about race that's what we were told if you knew the reality and you took a little effort i shouldn't say a little effort a lot of effort

because of the censorship that's imposed on us by the network news and pbs and npr cable news, et cetera, you would have found out that all of those were lies.

The gun was legal.

He did not transport it across state lines.

Notice the lines plural.

I don't think Illinois and Wisconsin represent a lot of state lines.

And he lived only 20 miles with his mother, but his family and his friends were actually in Kenosha.

So he was not a stranger to Kenosha.

Okay.

He killed two people that were physically assaulting him or wanted probably to kill him.

They were both white and the third person he injured and shot lethally was also pointing a gun at him.

So the jury found that a white person guilty of no other crimes had a legal weapon.

He was of an age legally to use it.

He didn't bring it in illegally to a different state.

He didn't bring it in at all.

And he was running away while a mob was chasing him.

And they were all white.

And every single one of his four attackers, there was also an African-American person who comes into the video and kicks him in the head and leaves.

He had a lengthy felonous record.

One of the felons that attacked him was a pedophile.

Another one had just been let out of a mental institution.

Another one had a lengthy arrest record.

And even the person he wounded had an arrest record.

And so that was the reality.

You would have never got that.

If you want to call it violence on violence, it was white violence on white violence.

And somehow BLM, and I say that literally, not figuratively, they were outside the courtroom screaming and yelling at the judge, trying to intimidate the jury, as were a lot of protesters.

If you went 48 hours, not far away, to, I guess it's 100 miles away or something, to Waukesha, Wisconsin, then you would be told the following that some type of SUV, I guess it's an updated Herbie the Volkswagen, was on autopilot.

And the SUV went into a Christmas parade of people, quote, people,

and six people were not killed, they died, passive voice.

And 62 people

were injured, passive voice.

It would take you a lot of effort to find out that the African-American driver, Mr.

Brooks, had a long history of anti-white racist hatred and had posted such beliefs on social media.

That a BLM self-appointed spokesman had said that this was sort of payback and the revolution had started.

And

he was the driver of the SUV and his victims were white as intended, and he was black.

That was not known.

If you go over to the Juicy Smollett case, we've talked about this before.

This is interesting because everybody in their right mind, when they heard it, knew that it was a fabrication.

But the local DA and the

black hierarchy of Chicago, and some of them had ties to Michelle Obama and the Obamas as once Chicago residents,

he was not filed.

He was just out in limbo.

And then finally, an outside prosecutor, an old-time, you know, Chicago Democratic insider who knew the law, thought this is outrageous for the city.

So

they brought him in.

And Juicy, being a narcissist and an egoist, thought that he could turn this into race

and say that he was the emblem of racist persecution, both official and private.

And then that narcissism led him to get on the stand.

He had never been on the stand against a seasoned prosecutor.

He was this time.

And lo and behold, we learned what we always knew, but Juicy couldn't lie his way out of it this time: is that he scouted out the proper scene of the fabrication.

He texts to make sure that his two Nigerian subordinates that he'd paid with a check.

He's a brilliant guy, remember.

He writes a check to his accomplices

in fraud.

And then we did learn that he was able to call his agent, hold his phone, hold his sandwich while he had a noose put around his neck.

But it didn't bother him because he beat off, Juicy being a big, muscular, tough guy, these huge white MAGA giant racists who, as I said earlier on a broadcast, patrol these neighborhoods looking for empire stars that are especially black and gay so that they can have bleach on hand and a noose on hand.

They pull them out just magically out of their pockets.

Gotta be careful, Sammy, when you go to Chicago.

Don't walk out at night because they might mistake you for an African-American.

And there's these patrols everywhere looking for people like you.

And that's what we were asked to believe.

And it just blew up.

And what did BLM say when it blew up?

It said that it was racist and that Juicy was still a victim.

And so this was what we learned in 2021.

If you were to look at the media, if you were also, you know, just a student of the, you know, just an average American, not a student of the media, I shouldn't say that, just an average American, you would be told that BLM is not, you know, corporate, love it.

It's a non-violent, has nothing to do with Marxism as it says it is.

It was not created by three gay women whose main intent was to stop what they thought was homophobia in America in general and among the black community in particular.

And it wouldn't be a profit generating organization for its leaders to allow them to have four houses in the case of Ms.

Collars, including Lily White, Lily White Toponga Canyon, where she immediately put in a security fence.

You wouldn't believe that CRT critical waste theory is taught in the schools.

We know it's not.

That's what we were told.

You know, we were told that January 6th, if you want to believe the 2021 meeting, here's the narrative on January 6th.

A lot of angry white conspiracists and insurrectionists plan the greatest seditionary act since the Civil War.

They planned it out meticulously.

Armed to the teeth, they stormed the Capitol and they killed a brave officer Sicknick and beat him over the head with a fire extinguisher and killed him.

And then four other people were killed in this insurrectionary attempt, which was egged on by Donald Trump that told him to do this.

Okay.

What's the truth?

It would take you five, I don't know.

It took, and

even as brave, Officer Sicknick was brave.

He was, he laid in state as this, he was a national hero, but he didn't die by violence, much less less violence from a Trump supporter.

He had a stroke, it looks like, a day late.

That took about four months to learn because after the Trump murder, Trump supporters' murder of Sicknick, then we got into the bear spray.

He was sprayed with bear spray.

Finally, it was natural causes.

And the other two people were trampled or they had heart attacks.

No one inside the Capitol was found with a gun.

No one to this day has been charged with racketeering, insurrection, sedition, treason.

One person and one person alone died violently, and that was a petite 105-pound woman, Ashley Babbitt, I think 14-year military veteran record, 14 years in the service.

And she committed the heineous crime of entering a window into the Capitol illegally.

And you can variously charge her with trespassing, illegal parading, I think some were charged with.

And she was shot dead as a suspect.

In America, when you're a suspect and you are not armed, and a police officer, law enforcement officer shoots you

when you pose no direct threat to that officer or anybody else, because there were armed people there with automatic weapons nearby that could have motor down if they thought she was a threat.

Immediately, the world sees this man's picture or a woman's picture.

We didn't.

We didn't know until he confessed that he did this and he had no consequences whatsoever.

So that was the story.

And these people who were in the Capitol, dozens of them sit in solitary confinement.

Some of them have been so physically abused, they've been moved out of their jail into other premises by lawsuits.

They're subject to solitary confinement, abuse from guards, and everybody from the ACLU to the New York Times who used to lecture us on Guantanamo and not having Islamically, culturally appropriate foods, is now delighted at the way they're being treated.

Not one has been charged with treason or insurrection again.

That's what we were supposed to believe.

Do we believe that Hunter laptop?

Remember that?

Right before the election.

Wow, Hunter's laptop shows that the big guy got us 10% from the Biden crime center.

No,

Hunter wouldn't be so stupid, the media told us, to leave a laptop.

This guy is all working for the Russians, or he's naively employed as a tool for the Russians.

50, 50 former intelligence officers swore that.

That was all over the media.

And they asked Hunter, is that your laptop?

Well, I can't say it's not.

So he's never denied it.

We all know it was his.

If you believe the media, you never got that, that it was his.

If you believe the media, they have a new term, the Russian hoax hoax.

The Russian hoax is a hoax.

Two hoaxes make a non-hoax.

So they don't care that their hero who hired the dream team, the killer, hunter-killer team, the all-star team, took 22 months and 40 million dollars of our taxpayer money and found nothing,

nothing.

And Andrew Wiseman was angry, and they knew this about three months into the investigation.

There was no collusion.

But in the process of this whole mess, we found out what, we didn't get this from the media, that Kevin Klein Smith, an FBI lawyer,

forged a document.

He's a convicted felon.

We didn't know that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were acting unprofessionally, that in the FBI's possession,

I don't know, inconvenient cell phones disappear.

I could go on, but that's what you would not get in the media.

Remember Joe Biden said, we don't get this in the media.

I haven't heard it quoted by them.

I'm going to end the virus.

Any president that has over 200,000 people dead on their watch deserves to be out of office.

That applies to him now.

He didn't end the virus.

All he can say now is, I don't think the federal government has any reason to be involved.

It's a state issue.

If you were reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Times, listening to NPR, watching PBS, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, not to mention,

you know, major blogs, you would have learned, I think,

that transgendered athletes pose no threat to women's sports.

They're just simply females.

A race can't be chosen, because we'll expose Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren when they try to construct the race, but you can construct your gender.

Seems to me it's much easier to construct your race than your gender because it doesn't require surgery.

But nevertheless, you cannot do that.

And people who do, you know, get severely criticized, but not your gender.

I'm not saying there's not people who were born that have mixed gender brain perceptions.

It's a neurological, maybe, if not a physical.

But this athlete who is breaking all of these records is considered a woman.

If you go to prison, you may have in your cell block someone with male genitalia who says he's a woman, who can be very violent if he attacks you, et cetera, et cetera.

But you wouldn't know that.

As I said earlier, I think it was with Jack Fowler.

So in the media world, Chris Cuomo is a professional journalist and then Andrew Cuomo is an Emmy-winning, courageous,

I don't know, truthfinder governor.

And that's what we learned.

And Donald Trump, that guy never gave him enough ventilators.

He never sent him medical supplies in a portable hospital at the Javit Center.

He never sent him a hospital ship to be used in times of extremists.

Andrew Cuomo never sent into pristine long-term care facilities, people with active COVID.

That didn't exist.

And that's pretty much where we are.

Yeah.

There's lots of other things.

There's a lot of things we're supposed to believe about Trump besides the Russian hopes and I guess peeing on a bed with prostitutes, but also that if he runs in 2024, it's going to be an insurrection or a community.

We've talked about that.

We've talked about that and you hit the nail on the head.

The way that the democratic, liberal, progressive, left-wing mind of this generation works is this.

We don't trust a constitutional republic because we can't get what we want on any given day.

There are too many checks and balances.

And occasionally we lose control of them as it is.

We've lost control of the old Warren Court is gone.

We've lost control

sometimes of the Congress and the presidency.

And therefore, the system is flawed.

But on rare occasions, we get it back.

So when good old Joe Biden from Scranton was elected president, we won the House and Senate, or at least became even so Camilla Harris could break a tie.

The system was resilient.

It warned us about Donald Trump and it disposed of him.

We impeached him twice.

The system allowed us to do that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

We had Robert Mueller do some damage.

That was very good as well.

However, Joe Biden hit 40% approval rating.

All of his agenda policies are below 40%.

And it looks like the Democrats are going to face a historic wipeout in the 2022 midterms and probably the 2024 election, although everything can change on a dime and who knows.

But

suddenly the system is wrong.

Now, we tried to change it by getting rid of the 180-year filibuster.

We're still working on it.

We want to junk the Electoral College.

That's true.

We want to have a national voting law that prohibits voter IDs and contravenes the Constitution's relegation of such balloting powers to the states.

We want to get rid of the stupid idea of 50 states in the union.

We need four more immediately.

We want to get rid of this crazy idea we're going to have nine justices when they're more conservative than liberal.

But the biggest problem we're having is that we're facing a coup.

And the coup is going to happen if we lose the house and the presidency.

That's what Donald Trump is doing.

And our gifted intellectuals, leaders, academics are all warning us as if on cue and mysteriously in unison that the system is broken.

Democracy doesn't work and we might have a coup as military officers have warned us in the Washington Post.

And by the way, the Senate is a broken institution.

Now, if we had 52, 48 margin, it would be a wonderful institution.

But we'd have to get rid of the filibuster first, but we can't because we're 50-50.

And we don't want Camilla Harris to be the one American to get rid of the filibuster.

And by the way, we're probably going to lose the Senate.

So now the filibuster idea is not so good because we're going to need it.

in two years.

But nevertheless, now the idea is a Senate is unfair.

It doesn't represent the people.

It gives the power to the states rather than the people.

Let's get rid of it because

Joe Manchin did not,

he played the John McCain role, but he didn't get the script right.

The script is you are a hero and a maverick when you fight your own fellow senators of your own fellow party.

And he did that,

Manchin, but he was a Democrat.

It's only good when you're Republican.

So he's not a maverick and he's not El Cid at the barricades.

He's a traitor and therefore he's a senator and he shouldn't have that power.

So we've got to change the Senate.

Can I ask you a question on all of those political positions from the left?

It sounds to me like ultimately they feel that if the system is more of a direct democracy, they're going to do better.

But it seems to me direct democracies won't necessarily end in their favor that way, as they so see it, right?

But everything they want to do seems to be headed for more direct democracy.

We don't like the Senate not being representative of population, right?

We want as many people to be voting as possible.

So we'll, you know, change all the laws so couch voters can vote as well.

And things like that.

Let's get rid of the Electoral College.

Let's get it more and more direct democracy, right?

And I think that ultimately it all pans out, a direct democracy might not go towards their agenda, whatever they see.

Well, they feel the following, that they know their agenda is contrary to human nature.

By that, I mean, if anybody of any persuasion is walking down Union Square in San Francisco and a person comes up and clubs him on the head and grabs his wallet on his way to breaking a window and looting a Nordstrom's or, I don't know, a very upscale store, they know that is wrong.

And when they're told that that's not a crime, or that's a voice of the oppressed, or there were social reasons that made that person do it, they may or may not agree.

But they know that if you don't deter that person, he's going to do it again in a cost-to-benefit analysis.

Okay, so their agenda is never going to get 51%.

The Bolsheviks never had 51%.

So they want power to enforce it onto other people.

And when they control the institutions of information and communications, as they do,

NPR, as we said, PBS, network news, cable news, blogs, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, K through 12, academia, Hollywood, entertainment, corporate boardroom, they got them all.

And then they don't worry so much.

But when they lose that, or that's not enough, and the people start to push back, then they want to get rid of the system.

And they don't trust direct democracy.

They say they do, but they want to get rid of the system, whether it's a constitutional republic or a direct democracy.

Because you know, they don't even trust a direct democracy.

Because in 2022, we learned that the Latino vote is not just 50-50.

That is, if it hasn't just metamorphosized from 60-40 blue to 50-50 blue-red,

but it actually is, say, 45% Democrat and 55% Republican.

And some of these apostates are recent immigrants, then you will not believe what you'll see.

They will want that border closed.

They will want IDs.

They don't care.

These people are counter-revolutionaries.

They don't know who Shea is or Fidel or Obador.

So, yeah,

they don't believe.

in the voice of the people, and they especially don't like constitutional checks and balances unless they can use the system.

That's what the the left is.

You've got to remember why they're that way.

The guys on the right are the tradition or the conservative, his idea is things have worked pretty well in the past because the United States is so prosperous and free.

So you don't want to be very careful to tinker with it, given that human nature is unchanging.

And if there's some problems, it's usually look to yourself rather than blame somebody else.

And you've got to worry about keeping your family off the dole.

You've got to follow the rules.

You've got to produce productive citizens.

And to do so, you don't have that much time for politics.

And you're happy.

If you are on the left, you feel that society has not appreciated your genius.

If you're an upscale leftist, or you have so much money that you feel you're never going to feel the consequences of your own bankrupt ideology, or if you're poor, you feel the system deprived you and that you have something.

But you're angry.

It's a 360-degree 24-7 panopticon you are politics politics politics you have a lidless eye you can't sleep that's what they are and they really do believe that because they're that way and they're obsessed with politics and equity rather than liberty or equality result rather than freedom they are our moral superiors because they care and they feel because they care any means necessary are justified to achieve those ends.

And that's just what Mao said.

That's what in the extreme case, that's what the European socialists said, that's what Stalin said and Lenin said.

And that's why they don't mind these contradictory arguments.

And on Monday, they're for their filibuster.

Tuesday, they're against it.

The blue wall and the electoral golly are great.

They fall.

They're horrible.

They don't care about consistencies.

Joe Biden can say, you know what?

You've got to have a president that takes charge.

This is a federal issue.

Or, you know what?

And anybody who says differently believes in the Articles of Confederation.

And then now just say,

federal government can't solve the problem.

They don't care about that.

Well, Canada, I ask you how strong you think our system is.

If they don't really care whether it's direct or constitutional as long as they're in power, do you see these crazy things like the Senate being, you know, somehow altering the Senate?

I'm not sure exactly how they want to alter it, four more or two more states or not to have or to have proportional representation.

Or do you see the Supreme Court, for example, being do you see any of that agenda making its way through in 2022 at all?

Or are they going to

stay on those?

They're going to lose the Senate.

So they know that.

So they're going to lose the Senate.

So they have until November then, right?

That's they have till November.

Well, they have until January of 2023.

So they're looking, they're calibrating, they're thinking, and all of these things are coming up.

Now, they cannot change two senators, although they've talked about it from the state, because that's in the Constitution and that's unalterable.

I don't think that can be amended.

They don't care about that.

They want to get a court case that says, well,

under one man, one vote of the Warren Court, when we made all of the House districts the same size, they weren't always.

They reflected natural contours.

But once they were 700,000, what is is today 750,000, essentially they all have to be that same population.

Therefore, the Warren Court and lesser courts said, well, if it's true at the federal level, it's true at the state.

So I'm in California, the state assembly, the state, you know, all these state assemblies have the lower houses of bicameral legislature, have to be the same size of constituencies.

Okay.

Then they did something radical.

The court said, well, you know, the state senate should do that too.

It's not in the Constitution.

That was a radical and very stupid thing to do because that gave people the fuel to say, wow, the California state Senate is every senator represents the same amount of people.

So why doesn't the U.S.

Senate?

Well, the U.S.

Senate's in the Constitution and the state Senate is not.

And that was done by a court single judge, not a law.

They are going to have trouble with doing that.

They could do the following, though.

They talk about the electoral system as well.

Yes.

You

amend the Constitution.

It's illegal what they're going to do, but that doesn't mean they can't do it.

And by this, I mean they have something called the National Voter Compact.

So they've gone around to all the blue states and they've said, would you pass in your legislatures?

a law that says your electors shall not reflect the state vote.

That's what they're supposed to do.

It shall reflect the national vote.

That's what we want.

Of course, that's unconstitutional, but they can get it through.

They're about 75% of the way.

I think they need about 60 more electoral votes.

So they can get about five or six more states.

And when they do that, think what will happen.

You'll have a national vote again where, let's say, the Democrats win the popular vote, but they lose the Electoral College, like 2016, but they don't lose the Electoral College because those electors of the states they lost.

And there will be some swing states, they will vote according to the national popular vote.

So that's how they get around it.

They don't like that, but that's the only way they get around because they don't have three-quarters of the states and two-thirds of the Senate to change the Constitution by amendment.

So that's the other thing.

And then the third thing is the filibuster is a Senate rule.

Now, that's tricky because you have a filibuster and can you change the filibuster by somebody who's not in the Senate, Camilla Harris, as a dividing vote?

And can you filibuster a filibuster vote?

By that I mean so they put up on the Senate, we're going to eliminate the filibuster.

The vote is 50, 50.

And then Camilla Harris says, well, I'll cast the deciding vote.

And they say, well, how can you change internal Senate protocols when you're not even a senator?

And she says, well, I do that on other laws.

And they said, okay,

go ahead and vote.

So she votes, is going to vote 50.

And they say, you know what?

We're going to filibuster.

You need 60 votes, not 50.

And we'll see.

It'll be kind of a chicken and the egg question.

But if it gets bitter enough, the only thing that will stop that is not what you or I say or what.

conservatives do or good justices do.

The only thing that will stop that effort is the left.

And they will get together and they will look at polls right around May and June

and then they will send out the talking points to

you know Don Lamon

and they will send it out to the New York Times op-ed pages and you will start to hear Nicole Wallace ranting and it will be the following the filibuster is an honorable and venerable tradition.

We should not tamper with it.

It allows the minority to have a voice to in opposition and that will be because they're going to lose the Senate.

So if they feel that they're going to have a 52, 53 Republican Senate, they're not going to give up the filibuster.

They're going to say the filibuster is great because they'll use it because that's the only way they'll stop Senate action on appointments and approvals and things like that.

They still have Joe Biden, so it's not like they're going to get the Republicans when they own the House and the Senate are going to get legislation through.

They don't have veto.

I mean, they can pass it and then Biden Biden will veto, but I don't think they have the Senate.

They don't have enough votes in the Senate to go override a veto.

Yeah.

Can we turn then to China and what we are to view China as for 2021 and what we might understand for 2022?

Yeah.

I.e.

the Uyghurs, COVID, their influence in international organizations like the World Health Organization and that sort of thing.

Oh, they're military as well.

If the left were to have it, we would think what and what is the truth about it?

Just say that we're Qi, we're the Chinese communist leadership, and we're having a meeting right now, the Politburo, and we're looking back at 2021.

And what would you think?

You would think the following.

They would say, my leader, what is the situation in Hong Kong?

It's no longer a problem.

It's not even democratic.

We violated that treaty with Great Britain.

We got it back.

Then we lied about it.

It's part of it.

We're going after all the dissent.

It's slowly being absorbed.

And then somebody said, well, what about Taiwan?

Taiwan is more vulnerable than it ever has been.

The United States is completely discredited after Afghanistan.

People in Taiwan are frightened whether the United States would even sell them the necessary weapons.

We fly over their airspace.

We go into their sea space.

They can't do anything.

And the United States is racked with social tensions.

And their own military, get this, guys, their own military's, I don't know, honorific advisor, the chairman of the Joint Chief, called us up and said, hey, I'm so scared about what Donald Trump would do.

I'm going to tip you guys off.

Can you imagine what?

If any of you did that, we'd have you beheaded.

That's what we're dealing with.

And then somebody says, well, what was the situation on the COVID?

Don't you think that we should be transparent?

No,

we just lied.

We said we had a phony committee thanks to Anthony Fauci's denial of gain of function research going on here.

He gave us money, Echo Health people,

they stacked the investigatory committee.

They came over.

We treated them like crap.

And they went out and told the world, oh, there's nothing here.

Move on.

So that was a great deal.

We had COVID.

And what happened?

Did we suffer?

No.

We sent everybody.

from

all over the world if they wanted to.

They couldn't, they could fly to Amsterdam, they could fly to Rome.

They could fly to New York or San Francisco.

A million people did.

But they could not fly out of Wuhan or go to another Chinese city.

That was brilliant.

They all got COVID.

They don't have the will to clamp down on people.

They have this crazy idea of civil liberties and freedom.

We don't care about.

And we're in much better shape.

Our financial reserves are better.

Our market share has increased.

By every economic economic barometer.

We are in better shape vis-a-vis the West than when this thing started.

It was a brilliant thing that happened.

That sounds like the reality.

The Chinese understand the reality.

They do.

And then they're looking at the internal dissension.

They said, you know, I know we have 400 million people that live in poverty and never seen a Western doctor, et cetera, Westernized doctor.

However,

it is stupid.

They have ruined their universities.

It's like we learned that the Cultural Revolution didn't work when we attacked everybody in the university.

They didn't.

So we kind of stole market capitalism from them and grafted it on to hardcore Stalinism, but we got rid of this stupid cultural revolution stuff.

But they

gave us what worked, and then they borrowed from us what didn't work.

So they're in a cultural revolution.

They're toppling statue.

They're renaming buildings.

They're canceling people out.

They're indoctrinating people in the first to 12th grade, just as they do in North Korea.

This country is tearing themselves apart.

So, what I'm getting at is they would say 2021

was one of the most successful years in Chinese history, especially vis-a-vis Europe, the United States, and in particular, the United States.

And they would say these people owe $30 trillion

in debt, and they are borrowing more and more and more.

And they're either going to blow up their economic system or inflate themselves into poverty or stagflate themselves into irrelevance.

But this has been the greatest

margin of advancement that we've ever had with the West.

Keep it up.

Thank God for Joe Biden.

I think they were worried about Trump.

They never knew on any given day what he would say, what he would do.

He was unpredictable.

He didn't trust the bipartisan establishment on foreign policy.

And they look at Joe Biden and they think, wow, he's A, enfeebled, good.

B, he's a puppet of hardcore leftist.

And C, he's very receptive to Chinese propaganda.

So this idiot really does believe that the, you mentioned the World Health Organization.

This idiot believes it's disinterested rather than our megaphone.

They really believe the UN is a noble and moral body and that will look at the one million Uaggers in concentration camps rather than whether Israel or not cell phoned enough people on the West Bank when they had a war to warn them that their bullets were coming.

And they really believe that we're wonderful capitalist partners in the

economy.

They do.

And then they think, you know what?

And what's even great about these guys, we are going to call them racist as if we are marginalized people.

You're racist.

You're racist.

You're racist.

You love Putin.

No, we hate Putin.

We can't stand.

Well, you just like Putin because he's white.

No, no, we hate him.

We love you.

And so we've got professors all over in the United States.

We had one at Stanford, professor, visiting professor of what, neuroscience that was a member of the Chinese military.

We've had violations of illegal gifts from Chinese companies, communist companies affiliated to universities that

they didn't didn't report.

And the United States is so racist that we're going to tell them, and they're so biased and they hate people of Asian ancestry so much, we're going to send 330,000 of the top elite of the Chinese communist apparatus to this racist hellhole.

That's what...

You think they believe that?

No, not at all.

They're just taking advantage of a very weakened United States, which brings me to China's military versus our military.

What would you say is the image versus the reality in each case?

Well, the reality is this, and I wrote about in a book called Carnage and Culture, there are intrinsic advantages if you have a Western military.

The free and open society brings enormous dividends for science.

So technology-wise, the West usually has an advantage over the non-West.

And in terms of military organization and discipline and rationalism, it has advantages.

And freedom is an advantage.

And dissent is an advantage.

So you can discuss policies.

You can discuss strategies.

It's not top-down.

You can see this during the Korean War when the United States went all the way across the world and fought on the very borders of a 1 billion person China and North Korea and really destroyed the people's army inside Korea.

And it did.

That's one of the great myths of the Korean War: that the Chinese military was so formidable.

After B-29s and artillery strikes got through with them, they lost a million people.

And they never went into Vietnam because of that.

So we have advantages, but what they're looking at is this.

They're saying, okay, we understand the Western military tradition.

Look at our soldiers.

They've got epaulets, they've got caps, they've got uniforms just like yours.

Look at our jets.

They have the same swept wing design, same type of propulsion.

Look at our missiles.

So we took lock, stock, and barrel your Western military tradition.

However, we feel that your self-criticism is nihilistic and destructive.

So we don't have that.

We're authoritarian.

And look at you people.

You,

in your search of impossible equity or equality of result, you've got, you're worried about whether you have the right uniforms for pregnant women.

You want to make sure that that you have women in frontline special forces or combat units.

Gay marriage is a big concern of yours.

Transgendered surgeries, that's a lot of overhead.

We don't do any of that.

And we don't think that it's conducive to battlefield readiness.

So we feel that you are cannibalizing yourself.

And while we've stripped you of all your best traits, we have not adopted that.

And the $64,000 question is: can they get away with it?

Either by our volition or is there intrinsic contradictions in that?

Can you adopt this Western system and then find that you don't have any plurality or dissension or criticism?

I mean, if you look at certain militaries, a couple of generals had just been allowed to say to Mein Fuhrer,

look, there is something called a T-34.

General Guadarian's right.

If we go into Russia, we're going to meet these damn tanks and it's going to be a hell for us.

Hitler himself said he wished somebody had told him, not including the fact that he told him that he'd shot him, probably.

And Stalin said, not one step back.

And they said, Marshal Stalin, comrade, we've lost 665,000 people at Kiev.

And he did that, lost 20 million Russians.

So there are problems with this system of theirs, but they don't see that in the short term.

So the answer is: how quickly can the United States reboot and say its people say

General Milley was a disaster?

Secretary of Defense Austin is a disaster.

We are not going to go through the ranks of soldiers and accuse them of being racist on no evidence and destroy morale of a rubric, i.e., country, rural, small town, mostly white America that dies twice the rate of its numbers and the population in hellholes like Iraq and Afghanistan.

We're not going to do that.

We're going to promote equality of opportunity.

We're going to be come down very hard if anybody uses race or gender to die a person of merited promotion.

But we're not going to be a tribal vandal or Osgoth or Visigoth army.

We're just not going to do it.

So if we can do that, we'll be okay.

I'm not confident that we're going to do that, though, because I think the left sees a military now and they say, you know what?

I think Elizabeth Warren says, she looks at the military and she said, and Bernie Sanders, they look at the military.

You know what?

I don't really care if the generals are in revolving doors.

So they come out of defense contracting corporations and they go into the Pentagon and they go right back, the retired general.

That's fine with me.

I don't really care that, you know, that there's an incestuous relationship between military lobbyists

and their friends that are still in the military.

I don't care at all.

All I I care is that they do not have the sturm and drag of the Congress.

And they don't have to fight.

They don't have to deal with Ted Cruz.

They don't have to talk about, you know, they don't have to talk to any of these right-wing senators or House representatives.

There's no Devin Nunes to shout back at them.

There's no Rand Paul I have to worry about.

They just fast track it.

They're not Democratic.

They have something called the chain of command.

Will you or will you not have X number of women promoted?

Will you or will you not find these people guilty?

Will you or will you not put this?

And they love it now.

Yeah,

as long as it's the left agenda.

Exactly.

They've taken it over.

They feel it's a people's army.

And remember, that's what every single, there's one thing you got to remember, whether it's Hitler or whether it's Stalin or whether it's Mao or whether it's Fidel

or whether it's Chavez,

any of them, Pinochet, right or left, any authoritarian, the first thing they do is go into the military and weed it out.

And

they make it very known and very clear that you will be promoted and you will be lavishly rewarded if you have a particular worldview.

But if your ideology, to the extent we know about it, is contrary to the states, then we're going to make life hell for you.

And that's all you have to do.

So what I'm saying is that when these lieutenant colonels and colonels look at who gets promoted and who doesn't get promoted and who's on defense contractor boards after they get out, that message is pretty clear.

If you sound leftist or you hate Trump or whatever the party line is, you're going to do well.

But if you don't, you're going to end up like this Marine lieutenant colonel, you know, or he mouthed off about Afghanistan.

He's been destroyed.

And who wants to do that when you have a wife and family and a pension and all that?

Yeah, definitely.

It's like academia, that people haven't made that point, but the military is resembling exactly where academia was 10 years ago.

And where it will be 10 years from now is where academia is now.

And you know, I was going to just turn to that subject, but if you don't mind, let's have a word from our sponsor first, and then we'll come back.

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All right, welcome back.

And Victor and I were just talking about the problems in academia.

So if we could go back onto our theme, what would our academics have us believe about themselves and what is the truth?

And I know that a lot of it is critical race theory and diversity, equity, inclusion.

And a lot of those things, whatever the word means on its face value, they don't seem to be following those things in the truth of it.

In other words, they don't seem to be diverse, equitable, or inclusive in these agendas.

So that's just an observation from me.

What do you think about the academic world, Victor?

From the age of 17, when I went to University of California, Santa Cruz, to the age of 25,

when I left Stanford University with a PhD in classics, I didn't have a break from it.

And I went to the college here in Athens as a junior.

I went to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens again

in Greece.

And so I know it really well.

Then I got so sick of it, I farmed for five years and then I wasn't very successful.

So I went back into it.

And so since 1984,

my God, I've been in this thing for 33 years and it's gotten worse every year.

And what do I mean by worse?

If I look at classics,

when I interviewed people for jobs in 1986, coming out of the marquee universities, they could read Latin and Greek very well.

By 2004, they could not.

When I started teaching, in 1984, I had eight or nine assigned authors in the humanities of the Western world.

When I left in 2004, I had one or two because the student body couldn't read them.

When

I

entered the university,

if there were certain censorship rules,

In other words, we had what was somebody told me was a nut.

It was a professor that every once in a while praised Christianity and he was considered an oddball, but he wasn't considered a racist, homophobe, xenophobe, et cetera.

He would be now.

So we used to have people that would tolerate conservatives who were a minority.

They don't now.

And we used to have some idea that you would be in a faculty lounge with a bunch of leftists and they say, Victor, you've got to really look at my student that's taking your Latin class.

And they aced the exam in my literature class, or I was on the admissions board, the guy got a perfect SAT score.

They wouldn't say that now.

They would say that the test is unfair.

They believe in equity grading.

In other words they would say to you now

oh

i've got a lot of people who might have in the past got d's or f's and if i give them d's or f's they're going to think i'm a racist

so what i'm going to do is give everybody a c and i'm going to call that equity and i'm not going to enforce rules or demerits or points and punishments, et cetera, except for people who A, don't turn in exams on time or B, don't turn them in on time or don't come to class, any of that.

That's all new.

And that is the logical extension of this radical Marxist, radical left agenda that has been with us for 50 years.

But it's now accelerated to a point where the people, there are no liberals in the university that are running it.

These are ideologues or totalitarians or progressives.

And

what I try to do is study the university.

I teach at Hillsdale College, which is completely antithetical to the modern university.

It represents the best of education prior to the takeover of these radicals of the universities.

But I'm just mystified by there is no free speech, that anti-Semitism is codified in the university.

I was walking across the Stanford campus and Ben Shapiro was to speak and I saw these posters of a bug spray, you know, like snuff Ben out as if he was some Jew at Auschwitz and they were using a gas for him.

No one said a word.

There's a guy on the Stanford faculty campus and he's a very loud Antifa associated loudmouth and he recommended reading to go to his website.

It's all anti-Semitic, not all, but there's anti-Semitic.

Nobody cares.

So what I'm getting at is don't believe that you can't engage in hate speech.

You can engage in hate speech, but it's got to be against people that are acceptably hated.

And when you look at certain pillars of the old university, university, I remember I was a little kid when Mario Savio said, we need a free speech area.

You've got to have it.

I don't know if that was wise or not, but they had a big fight at Berkeley.

They got it.

If you go to a free speech area today and you say, I want to praise Israel for its democratic institutions, or I really think we've raised a whole generation in America of an affirmative action, and we've got a lot of white male students that have never persecuted, prosecuted, persecuted, biased, or no prejudice.

They have no memory of the pre-civil rights era.

They have never been eligible for affirmative action.

They're not part of the old boy network.

They don't have money.

And you're calling them privileged.

You couldn't say that in the free speech without being booed or driven out.

And I can tell you, as somebody who's spoken at a lot of universities, hundreds of them in the last 30 years, I have been booed, I have been shouted down, I have had all that happen.

You don't have the due process, the Fourth and Fifth Amendment.

If you're in a university and you're a young man full of hormones and you meet a young woman full of hormones and you have a consensual sexual congress and there's alcohol involved on either party and there's no suggestion at the time of violence, but you are a cad or you're inconsiderate or you're selfish or you're just an awful person, and you do not want to continue that relationship that the other party, the female party, might, may or may not.

But what it, in the theoretical, if she were to continue that,

then she can file charges that she thinks now upon reconsideration or proper counseling that you were a sexual assaulter.

If those charges are filed against you on most universities, you will not be able to see your accuser.

You will not be able to confront her.

You will not have a lawyer be able in an inquiry to cross-examine her.

You'll probably have a lot of problems getting evidence of emails that you've exchanged.

And in that process, you will be escorted off campus.

If you are on a campus today, there's a federal law that says, and this was to protect women.

We've had cases where women went to universities and they did not know the relative crime status of the surrounding community or indeed the campus themselves.

A woman was killed.

And so in response to that, the U.S.

Congress and the president signed a bill.

It says that every university shall apprise students of the relative safety crime statistics, A, and B, when there is a crime committee, they will give a full description of the suspect.

And they did for a while.

And I would get them every day from Cal State Fresno.

I was a visitor at Pepperdine.

I'm a permanent person at Stanford.

That disappeared after George Floyd.

You do not get it.

You'll say that there was not enough information about the suspect.

Before they would say, they would describe everything about him to protect people.

But if the suspect was disproportionately and repeatedly not white, or was the suspects, I should say, were greater,

their profiles.

were more common as suspects than their relative percentages of the population,

then

now that's considered a systemic racist habit.

And they were willing to break the law to do that.

They've been fine.

The Trump administration fined them millions of dollars to various universities.

They don't care.

That's a cost of doing business.

So, what I'm getting at is a very illiberal place, very illiberal.

And I'll have students that will come up to see me at the Hoover Institution that are interested in classics.

And they'll say, you know, I read Google Scholar and you were ranked pretty high.

Or they'll say something, I read your book and I'm a classic student, undergraduate at Stanford.

And I always am very kind to them.

I'm very friendly.

And I'll say, the first thing I'll say to them, what would you like?

Well, could I read Greek with you?

I said, yeah, could I read Latin with you?

Okay, could I talk to you about my thesis?

Fine.

And then I always say this to them.

This has happened maybe 20 times in the last 20 years, more maybe.

I'll say, but before you do this, I don't want to put you in peril.

Would you go back and tell your advisors or your chairman that you are seeking tutorials?

And I won't charge you, of course.

That's my duty as a member of the Stanford intellectual community and academic community.

But just tell them that you're reading Thucydides with me or you're reading Xenophon or you want to read Libby or Tacitus and or you want help.

on your thesis advisory it's on a question of agrarian or military or fifth century athens and i'll never see you again and so this is goodbye and i said are you crazy i said just do it and i really like to i'm happy you made your acquaintance but i'll never see you again and that's always happened every single time and i've never seen the people they vanished in thin air they go back and they've been told do not go over and talk to that person and so i'm serious i believe you and i am absolutely serious and i've had people go to the victorhanson.com website.

I think,

Sammy, you know better than I because you've consulted as well.

But there's somebody who wrote in and said, you know what?

I can't mention this guy's name.

And I have a friend that said that they had to drop all references.

I'll put it this way, I won't mention names.

I don't want to give away the game.

But I've had a former student whose thesis was rejected.

And

this person, I won't mention the gender, the school, the age, wrote me and said, would you read this thesis?

It was a brilliant thesis.

It really was.

But I said, you know why this was rejected.

And the person said, no, I don't.

I said, you have about seven footnotes citing the other Greeks, a war like no other, a couple of scholarly articles that I wrote for refereed journals that are favorable.

And then you reference a particular idea of the Western way of war or agrarianism.

Now, you've got to change that.

And the person said, well, what do you mean?

I said, you've got to say that when you cite these books, you have to take all of the ancient references and use them because there's a lot that I found that hadn't been found.

But you've got to say, despite Victor Hansen's flawed analysis, there is an argument here.

Or in the text, instead of saying, as Hansen has shown, you have to say, as Hansen has never shown, just do it.

And they said, well, that wouldn't be what I felt.

I said, I don't care.

You want to get your thesis approved?

Do it.

And they did.

And guess what?

Presto, no problem.

So that's what academia academia is.

I don't want to sound self-centered or bitter, but I know this, I'm just talking about my own experience because it echoes.

I can't mention other names, but this is common.

And I've been in so many search committees, so many search committees where the dean has come in and said, hey, Victor, I don't want what you call the best candidate.

This was going to be a female selection, whether you like it or not.

That's just the way it's going to be.

And I've looked at the profile of your department and there's not going to be any more white people.

And then they've been cynical.

They said, Do you have a, I said, well, we don't have an African-American classicist or a Mexican-American classicist.

What do you want?

What do you suggest?

There's the pool has 140 people for one job.

But well, do you have me as give me a Spanish aristocrat?

You got a Portuguese guy?

You got anybody?

I just need anybody who's not white.

I had a person say that literally to me.

And what I've seen at Stanford or the Cal State system is scary.

And there's no consequences.

There's absolutely no consequences.

No, and it doesn't seem like, it seems like everything that used to be academic excellence is no longer interested in excellence.

No, and I talked to an old guy once at Cal State Fresno who was in retirement in the history department.

And he said, don't think that tenure will save you.

It will save people who are left, but not people who are right.

I mean, they won't fire you, but they'll make your life so damn miserable.

So here's the only way you can do it.

I said, what's that?

I have three kids.

I have a money losing form.

He said, you have to write so much and you have to be constant that they can't get rid of you because it would be embarrassing to them.

So just do it.

Do it.

Don't worry about anything.

Just do it.

When everybody else is at the lounge or they're talking, you go into your office and write.

And finally, they will find that you're too much trouble to get rid of or that people like what you're doing or whatever, but they'll they'll leave you alone.

And I found that to be good advice.

So I always give that to make yourself irreplaceable, even in their crooked moral system.

These people, remember what we're talking about, Sammy.

We are talking about a pre-selective group of people.

They're mostly from the coast, not all.

They're from upper-middle-class households.

Their parents are mostly professionals, and they have been drilled in that you get this and this and this, you got to go to high sats, you got to go go to sat camp you got and for their whole lives and the brilliant people in the family they go into the corporate world or they become doctors or they become lawyers the less brilliant people go into academia it's kind of like the old english system the first son inherits the manor the second person goes into the foreign service and the third person becomes the parson well the parson the ideologue goes into academia and they feel that they have have been shorted, that they're brilliant, but they only make $150,000 a year.

And that guy at 7-Eleven makes a lot more.

And he's not nearly as bright as their little toe.

So they have an inflated view of themselves.

They have an inflated view of their importance in the world.

And on campus, they are dictators and they run that place.

It's not very democratic.

And the higher you go up the food chain in academia from department chair, full professor to department chair to assistant dean to to dean to associate provost to provost to

president, it gets worse because it's a winnowing out process.

And they do things that would be actionable in the real world.

They do things.

We have rules against bribery, but I can tell you that you can walk into the door of most, and I know this as a fact.

If your child has the credentials to get into a Harvard, Yale, Princeton, et cetera, even though the people with those credentials do not get in because they're taking about one out of every 20.

And you flop down $10 million, your child will get in.

I guarantee it.

Yeah.

And everybody knows it.

Or if your child can throw a football 50 yards or kick a field goal from the 50-yard line, they will get in.

Or if they're of a particular race or a particular ethnic group.

Sometimes they don't even need those athletic skills.

They just get put on the row team.

Well, they can buy them, yeah.

Well, no, you have to be fair.

You have to pay.

You got to pay somebody a lot of money to bribe the coach.

Yeah, exactly.

One time, I'll just end this conversation.

I used what the Greeks call praetoradio, and that is, I promise I won't mention the fact that.

And when I was being attacked by the faculty senate, I used that rhetorical device by saying, I wouldn't want to mention the fact that Stanford University, who has accused me of being Trumpist, basically.

We wouldn't want to mention the ongoing sexual harassment problems in the business school.

We surely wouldn't want to mention, we wouldn't mention the bribery that goes on to buy admissions to minor sports.

We wouldn't want to mention the fact that the university has been fined by the Department of Education for accepting communist Chinese affiliated corporate money.

We wouldn't want to mention the fact that there's a Chinese military operative working on the faculty as a visiting professor.

We wouldn't want to mention the fact that there is anti-Semitic activity that is not, you know, in the dorm and on campus, that has not been objected to.

And I went on, and I got a lot of people that wrote and said, Is this a joke?

And I said, No,

it's not a joke.

And no more than a joke is than driving, you know, every once in a while.

You go into the A-lot and park, and there'll be some kid, as I said earlier on a podcast, that will drive up in a convertible BMW

and he will walk out with flip-flops in a nice warm day, and he'll have a big BLM sticker on his car, resist, resist with a fist.

I saw that, you know, I thought, wow.

Would you resist if I took your BMW?

Or maybe you can go over to East Palo Alto and ferry people to the protest or maybe tutor.

So it's kind of a masquerade or you can't take the university seriously.

And why we spec the university and why we have the greatest universities, it's not because of the English or classics or history department.

It's there's a little atoll called the business school and that's crumbling.

And

there's the

law schools.

The law schools have been overwhelmed.

Constantinople about 1480, they were overrun and you have the the medical schools and their walls have been breached and you have science stem engineering science medicine research and that's saving them but when you have mathematicians that are writing letters of protest that all meritocracy is starting to vanish in k through 12 on grading ends up they're worried but they give the reputation of the university and the rest are parasitical upon that reputation they're doing everything everything to undermine it.

And when that goes

and they are after the STEM

disciplines, they're trying to apply all their critical race theory there.

But no one makes an argument about why 2 plus 2 equals 4 and all the hundreds of thousands of other equations mathematicians teach, why that has to be considered white supremacy or somehow a Western culture that's antithetical to any people of color as they have it.

Nobody's ever made that argument, and nor have they with all the chemical reactions or all the biological knowledge.

There's no,

they have.

No, they have.

French suppose, Michelle Foucault, Gary Dalekan, they all said there were architecture that could

defy the laws of constructed architecture.

And of course, they never built a house, you know, with no right angles on it and stuff.

But they're challenging just what you said because they're nihilists.

You're right that you can't do that and have a society that works, but they don't want it to work.

They're anarchist.

And so what I'm getting at is if you go in to, say, the Department of Epidemiology to be relevant to current news, or you go in maybe to neurosurgery, or you go into chemical engineering at major universities, you're going to find real diversity.

There's going to be somebody from Taiwan.

There's going to be somebody from Korea.

There's going to be someone from India.

There's going to be someone from South America.

Okay.

There's going to be somebody from Africa.

Every country in the world, it's going to be real meritocratic diversity.

Why are they there?

And why are the countries that they leave in not very good shape?

And you can talk to them and they will tell you that in their own country, there is not a meritocracy, that people get promoted in advance based on tribal affiliations or family affiliations or a basis of bribery.

And they don't have freedom.

Or the society at large is, you talk to a guy from India, there's so many disappointments in your daily life from worrying about disease or the water or sewage or violence or religious intolerance.

They want to come here.

But when they're here, we benefit, okay?

But we're never going to benefit if they come here and they find out that we're replicating the conditions that they left.

They'll just say, I'm going to stay home.

Or our own people will not want to get.

And that's what's happening.

But not yet, not completely yet.

It's a good metaphor as they're in the keep.

The walls have been breached.

People are pouring over the wall.

What do I mean by people?

I'm talking about these ideologies, these sort of fume-like ghosts or zombies or whatever they are.

It's not that I've been watching Game of Thrones lately, but it's kind of this idea that we're going to destroy merit.

We're going to destroy.

excellence.

We're going to destroy all of your calibrations of test scores and arbitrary constructs of grading because they're not equal.

And when they get what they want, there won't be, I don't know what these people are going to do when the Antifa person gets, you know, a heart attack is he's looting or a BLM person walks out of a Nordstrom's full of, you know, loot and all of a sudden they have a stroke.

Where are they going to go?

Or somebody shoots somebody in Chicago.

Where are they going to go to get the type of sophisticated

medical care or science for their own benefit after they've destroyed the system that produces it?

I saw that.

I wrote about that in Mexico because I had seen people that were in gangs in parking lots outside of department stores or big stores in Salma that had been very rude to old, frail people.

These were guys covered with tattoos and everything.

And that came to me once when I went to the emergency room.

I broke my arm, I went to the Salma emergency room.

And lo and behold, there was a gang there.

I wrote about this, and they were covered with tattoos.

And there was the other gang that had inflicted the punishment on the victim, and they had to be separated.

The two gangs were in the ER.

And this kid was about 18, and he had been stabbed, and blood was gushing out.

And of course, my broken arm didn't mean anything.

And he was screaming and yelling like a child.

I'm not making fun of me, just going, mommy, mommy, madre, madre.

And he was doing, and his mother was screaming and cursing, where's the doctor?

Where's the doctor?

And then they were pointing at them and they were threatening and they were rushing around.

I thought to myself, so let me get this straight.

You gangbang 24-7 and destroy the very system of order and civilization and meritocracy.

But then suddenly in your hour of need, in extremists, you want magically to appear out of nowhere as if a genie clicks his finger.

Somebody with a master's degree from public health from Berkeley or an MD or a neural surgery advanced credential from Stanford, and they're supposed to come out of nowhere, and then they're supposed to do 24th century-level surgery on this stab room and spend a half a million dollars of collective U.S.

funds to save you.

And then we're going to patch you up, as we will, because that's the humanitarian thing to do.

Then you're going to go right back and destroy the sinews of the very civilization that did this.

And that's what was hard to take.

Yeah.

And that's what we're here.

That's the situation.

It's hard to take today, too.

Yes, Yes, it is.

Well, Victor, we're probably way past our time to close this off.

And I just wanted to just say that there are a few bright moments in the discussion today, and I can name a few, and you can name a few.

Josie Smollett was, in fact, convicted of five of six charges.

Rittenhouse was acquitted of all the charges against him.

So the system is starting to work, even if the

left is trying to present a scenario and a system that's quite opposite of what should be going on whether it's in academia or in our military as well and so i do see some bright spots of you know a jury that can see the truth we see lots of bright spots of the people as it were our democracy you know starting to catch on to the lies about Trump, the problems of the lies about China, etc.

So I think that there's a lot of hope for 2022.

I really appreciate that.

I'm sorry I interrupted you, but you're absolutely right.

We have to end on a positive note at the end of the year.

Gosh, it's every day there's reason for optimism.

I just literally two hours ago talked to a person who came from Mexico legally and built an entire business of tree trimming.

One of the most courageous people I've ever seen go up in a tree with his four employees.

And they come about every three years and I talk to him and we discuss things about what he's doing.

Very successful, very patriotic.

And he has more sense in his little thumb than the people I deal with every day in academia.

And

you're right.

You look at the polls.

People do not like a border.

They do not like what happened in Afghanistan.

They do not like these.

contradictory COVID mandates.

They do not like the idea that we're inflating ourselves into oblivion.

They don't like this stuff.

And they're making their voices heard.

They're not afraid anymore and they're wising up and they don't trust the media and they're angry at the military and they're angry at the FBI.

They trust and they love these institutions, but they don't like what's happening to them.

And so, yeah, it's very optimistic.

Everybody according to their station has to kind of not be afraid anymore.

And they have to say, you know, and it's easy for people who are older.

I'm 68.

So I'm not going to be here all that long.

And for people in their 20s and 30s, there's a lot more danger.

They have careers, they have families, many of them, people in their 40s and 50s.

You can't just ask them to go lay down on the railroad tracks.

But I think everybody, according to their station, has to speak up because this is very dangerous time in America.

We have people who do not believe in the U.S.

Constitution.

They don't believe in the Declaration of Independence.

They don't like the history and the traditions and customs of the United States.

And they want to destroy it.

And they want to destroy the people with them.

And we cannot adopt their tactics.

We cannot adopt their violence or their rudeness or their suppression of free speech.

We have to reflect our values and speak openly in a constitutional fashion in a free society.

And by sheer moral weight, we'll win, but not if we're silent.

Yeah.

That's optimistic, I think.

I know.

It's somewhat optimistic, but I think we are starting to say goodbye to that Orwellian world that our left-leaning media has created for us over the last few years while Trump was in office.

And now this first year of the Biden disaster, I think.

They kept trying to convince the people of something really great about the left.

And I think it's being exposed

at an exponential rate.

I really like the way you so casually write off the whole presidency.

I mean, I do emotionally, but you just say, oh, by the way, the Biden disaster catastrophe.

as if it's so self-evident that it needs no emphatic reference at all.

It's only one year, so maybe he'll change.

I got a person that wrote to the website, and he said I was interrupting you.

And this worries me because you're insidiously developing your own little persona as the voice of constraint and reason at my expense.

I'm going to have to fire you if you don't watch it.

Yeah.

Please don't fire me.

I'm enjoying what I do.

I'm teasing you.

I want to appreciate what you're doing.

And thank everybody for putting up for this in 2021.

Yeah.

Thank you to everybody.

And this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.