The Cuturalist: Encounters with the Intelligentsia

Welcome to the listeners of The Culturalist.

This is a part of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

The Culturalist is dedicated to events and people past and present that have influenced the way we live and the things we value.

Victor is a Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Welcome, Victor, and how are you doing today?

Very well.

I'm going to New York, which is always apprehensive for me given

flight.

problems, but also being in the Gotham City.

That's Gotham City, but we'll see.

This is our Saturday show, and we have something special today.

We're going to talk about intellectuals or the intelligentsia that you have had personal experiences with throughout your life.

But first, let's have a word from our sponsors.

Welcome back to Victor's Show,

and we're so glad to be here to be able to talk to you.

I've heard you so many times reference people that you've met in your past, for example, Gore Vidal or Pearl Buck or even Ansel Adams.

And then, of course, some of your current friendships with Tom Soule and Shelby Steele.

And I thought maybe today we would have a show so you could clarify the relationships and the interesting things that these intellectuals in your early childhood and then even in your later life that they've really brought to your experience and perhaps maybe even bring to your work.

I'm not sure about that.

But maybe we could have a discussion first, especially I've heard you talk about people who

came to your ranch in your early life when you were just a kid.

And I thought maybe we would start there to discuss some of those intellectuals.

Very fascinating way out in the Central Valley.

Seems almost far from civilization, if we might say it, but perhaps it's the more civilized place, right?

Yeah, in the 1950s, there was a little community college that's still there called Readley College, and they had a series of really innovative presidents.

In those days, community colleges were part of the, I mean, they were really part of the integral three-part California higher education plan, where you could go to Reedley College and then you could go to the best UC campuses.

They had none of these studies courses, but I mean

English and history, but taught by people with either PhDs or very distinguished MAs.

And they got retired faculty from UC Berkeley a lot to come down here.

And anyway, in that context,

my mother's sister had a BA and MA from Stanford and taught English literature, Chaucer, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare.

And my father, was a very strange guy.

He was an athlete, war veteran, and he was a teacher over there, but he was an administrator and he created something called the Readley College Forum Series.

In those days, we didn't have these mega celebrities.

So all of these distinguished public intellectuals, Louis Leakey, the anthropologist, Pearl Buck, the novelist of China, Rod Serling, Twilight Zone, Gorvidal, they would go on this tour of small campuses and they got grants and he was able to pay them $1,000, sometimes $1,500,

and he organized it.

But the problem was we're out in the middle of nowhere, and there was no motels in Reedley.

They flew into Fresno, so often we only had an 800-square-foot home, and then we built one next to it.

A thousand square foot never connected them.

So often there was this little thing called the Readley College Motel next to the campus.

But when they would pick them up, I would go with my dad after school, and usually they were Friday night or Saturday.

So he would pick them up in this little tiny Volvo 544.

It looks like a ladybug.

No seatbelts, nothing.

Pop, pop, pop, put, put, put, put.

And then they would sit and come to my aunt's house or our house.

We didn't have a very nice house.

My aunt had a nicer home.

And they'd have dinner and then they would go give the Friday night lecture sometime Saturday.

And then they would, the next morning, we would take them back.

And so I can remember Gorvidal, and he came in the late 60s and he gave a talk on why prostitution should be legalized along with marijuana.

And this is to a rural audience.

And my dad was, you know, a conservative Democrat.

A lot of people got angry, but he was very dapper, very young.

And he didn't, he seemed to, at our house or my aunt's house, we were sat around and he talked about everything.

prostitution was wonderful.

Masturbation was preferable to regular sexual intercourse of either sex.

You can imagine my poor aunt listening to this.

And he talked about novels he was going to write.

And it was pretty fascinating.

Another person, I mean, he had about 30 or 40 people.

They were quite distinguished.

Ansel Adams, the photographer, he came and he stayed at our house for two days.

He was on his way to Yosemite, so he did the lecture.

And then he went around the ranch and took pictures.

I don't know whatever happened to them, but a very small guy, bald head with this very strange beard.

And my dad asked me to show him the pond.

And he went down there and took some pictures but he only wanted to talk about politics.

This was, I think it was 1970, right during the Cambodian invasion and he was very, very left-wing and my parents were Democrats, so they didn't really care.

But he gave a very brilliant lecture on the art of black and white photography.

I can still remember it.

I think it was 15.

Another really interesting person was Pearl Bucket.

She had a handler and there was so everybody remembered the good earth, but in the 1960s, that was kind of a cult novel it was really good and there was a sequel sons and a whole bunch of that we all read and my father you know he was very busy guy he was he had been farming cotton and then he lived on the ranch and helped my grandfather and then he ran this series and he was a teacher and he was just worn out all the time and he asked me to read pearl bucks novels and then fill him in so i did

and she came and it got so big they had to put it in the gymnasium and i think there was 2 000 people there.

My poor dad, he worked so hard.

He was the head of the director.

Then there was the president.

I won't mention his name if his relatives are still alive.

Kind of what we call a creep, not like the old presidents had been there.

He was a new person.

And he just appropriated the entire entire

forum.

And so he said, Bill, I'll be announcing.

And Bill, and he got up and said, thanks to my efforts, I've got all of these unique people who have come in.

And he hadn't done anything.

He tried to cut it.

But Pearl Buck got very angry because my dad had called, my brother brother and I.

We went over there and set up all the chairs while she went in and she came up to us.

She was very elderly then.

She said, wow, you kids are doing all this for me.

How much are they paying you?

I said, oh, my dad runs it.

And my dad had talked to her and we brought her from the airport.

And so

when she was talking to him, she said, I want to say I want the man that brought us here to say a few words.

So my dad got out of the audience.

It's a very sweet person.

One of the people who was really strange was Rod Serling, Twilight Zone.

I was about 16.

I think I was a junior in high school.

It must have been like 1970.

And he came, he was very intense,

and he came to our house and stayed overnight.

My mom had us clean the house.

She worked in Fresno.

And so my brother and I,

I mean, we had to dust, clean, not that we didn't do that a lot, but in the yard and everything.

And it was such an unimpressive little farmhouse.

It was kind of embarrassing.

I think my mom was embarrassed.

But anyway, he was very interesting.

And we we just asked him about the outer limits.

That had kind of replaced, what do you think of the outer limits?

And he didn't want to talk about it.

And then we go through all the old episodes.

We all loved it.

He didn't want to talk about it.

All he wanted to talk about was the Cambodia invasion.

So my dad very politely said, Mr.

Sherling, we have a very conservative rural audience.

They're here because they listen love your work.

Is there any way you could constantly?

Oh, don't worry, Mr.

Hansen.

Do not worry.

This is not going to be.

So we drove him over to Reedley, about 12 miles from our house.

We get there.

And of course, we set up all the chairs, my dad and I and my brother.

And he got up and all he talked about was Richard Nixon was a criminal.

And

then question and answers, everybody said, but how about that one episode?

And then it didn't, he was a great guy, but he didn't do it.

But anyway,

those were people in my youth that by a fluke, it wasn't that my parents knew anybody, but they just simply had this little forum series and it was very well funded.

And if you were a celebrity in the 60s and 70s, $1,500 or $2,000 for an evening was amazing.

And he expanded it into opera singers and Maria Callas and all of these people.

And it was, it was, so I remember meeting all of them and then not really meeting because I didn't really have a chance as a young kid.

I remember my dad would get so angry at me because we made it a little earlier in the evening so people could go to Friday night football games.

And later we changed it, he did to Saturday night.

and so they could have a longer discussion and refreshments and I always said I'm not going to go to this and my dad would say this is so-and-so and this is Mark Van Dorn and he's a great intellectual critic and this is Mr.

Lovell the great astronomer from Britain

I don't care I want to go out with my friends and my mom said you're going to regret this so you're going to stay here and you're going to listen and you're going to act like a gentleman and I did and I always appreciated that.

Yeah.

Do you think Reed College has such intellectuals come out to talk at anymore?

Or do you think that was a unique time?

We're into equity now.

So in those days, the operative principle was that the population, the poor white Oklahoma diaspora that was in that region, the Mexican-American, a lot of Japanese Americans, the founding principle of those community college and operative principle, it really was race doesn't matter.

All of these people have the same genes as people that go to Harvard or Yale so we are going to uplift them uplift them notice the word up that we're all starting at some place and we're going to go somewhere higher so I remember my my aunt would read Chaucer in Middle English and then she would ask the students I sat in a couple of her classes and she'd ask them to compare King Lear to Julius Caesar or she would give a chronology of Shakespeare's plays or imagine reading Milton in community college in the San Joaquin Valley.

And by the same token, these lectures were very, they were not popular.

There were no celebrities.

I know, I think it was James Arness, and we begged my, because my dad had this big catalog with pictures, and the Foreign Service agency would always say to us, it's time to get, you know, gun smoke or kid.

And they were always like $4,000.

And my dad said, I'll blow the whole budget just to get a celebrity.

And my mom would say, no, no, Bill, no, no, no.

We want people who are of substance and so this went on for about eight or nine years and there was about six years so i don't think they could ever do that at reedy college nobody would know who they are nobody would want to go to it the way they is now but the principle was if you were poor or you were a minority or you were a victim of bias then the way to combat that was to have a superior education and you could get it for free then Everybody says, AOC wants free college for community college.

Well, it was free then.

Nobody made a big deal.

It wasn't any socialist project because there was no teachers' union.

They were very poorly paid.

And it was that operation, that operative idea is no longer there.

It's you are a victim and you have been subject to all sorts of isms and ologies and it's our duty to even the playing field and we have to lower the standard so everybody is what they can be and you can be whatever you want to be.

And nobody can be whatever they want to be unless they have the tools to achieve that goal.

You have to teach grammar and English and history and math.

And the operative, again, that word operative idea should be, we are going to allow people that don't have the opportunity and the capital to get a better education than those at Stanford or Harvard or Yale.

And we can do it.

But that was such a complex message, I guess, that we just jetsoned it.

Yeah, I think that the community colleges must feel that they are following the steps of Stanford and Berkeley with their equity, inclusion, and diversity agendas, don't you think?

Yeah, they do.

They just emulate, well, this is what's so funny because they're supposed to be egalitarian, but they said, and I've been to these meetings at the CSU, and they, well, Harvard's doing it, Yale's doing it, Stanford do it, we'll do it.

And if you say to them, well, yeah, but they're lunatic people.

They've never been outside their campus enclave.

Why would you ever emulate what they're doing?

And that's a heresy.

Yeah.

Probably was back then and is still now.

I don't know if things have changed.

I mean, I don't want to put a damper on anything, but it seems to me that

the leading schools were always the leading schools and they still are.

And even in their misstep, they're the leading schools, I guess.

Well, let's move on then to your academic career.

When again, you were encountered many leading intellectuals that had an influence on your outlook on life and just your work.

So I know that Bernard Lewis was one of your, we encounters our acquaintances long ago, but also we'd like to hear too about Tom Soule and Shelby Steele.

And I know you've had a few encounters with Milton Friedman, in fact.

So yeah, let me start with him.

I got to the Hoover in 2003

and that was right when Mexifornia came out.

And he would come up to me.

He had a little red sports car.

And I parked next to him once in the parking lot a couple of times.

And he wanted to talk.

And he was very, first of all, he was very pleasant to a guy who was, I think it was 48,

49.

And I came from Cal State Fresno.

Very short little guy.

But he was, you know, I knew all about him.

And he was the star at the Hoover Institution in those days.

But he took time to talk about immigration.

I talked about where I was from.

And he said, you know, I've been misinterpreted.

And I said, well, I thought you said the free markets had adjudicate immigration.

He said, I did at one time.

But you cannot do that with a welfare state.

In other words, that's a perversion or a distortion or a warping of the free market wages.

And what he was trying to tell me is that borders are secondary to the economic system.

So if so many people come across the border and the wages go down to a dollar an hour, then they will not come back to the border.

But if you're going to take that dollar an hour, $2 or $3, whatever the term is, and then you're going to add welfare, then they're going to come no matter what the prevailing wage.

And of course, we disagreed about that because I said, well, you may be misunderstood, but you're not calibrating culture in that process.

Who's going to be on the border?

Who's going to be in places like Fowler and Orange Cove and Selma when people are just swarming across the border without any authentication or legality or they don't know English?

They have no education or capital or skills.

So yes, they're going to lower the wage.

And when the wage gets lower, it'll self-correct.

But in the process, you're going to create horrendous problems in schools where advanced placement courses will be impossible for minority communities.

You're going to have to have English as a second language, which is a disaster as far as assimilation and integration, intermarriage go.

You're going to have just what we have now.

And then a couple of times, I won't mention the guy's name, a wealthy donor would have us go up to a very tony restaurant, and he rented the entire restaurant just to keep it quiet.

And he had dinner with Milton Friedman and myself, the three of us, and we would continue this debate.

And we never really talked about it.

And then a couple of cruises.

I liked him, though.

He was very, I was kind of disappointed in his memoirs that he and his wife wrote because they didn't talk about some of the great ideas that he had.

But we disagreed on immigration.

Another person that I, late in life, I was at the Naval Academy and Bernard Lewis wrote me a note and said, come to Princeton and have lunch with me.

And of course, he has a whole coterie of kind of neoconservative followers.

And then he would write me.

And he came up to the Naval Academy once.

I was on three or four cruises with him.

And I had a peculiar relationship with him because I really admired him, especially his later work.

But excuse me, before you go on, wasn't he the scholar of Islam?

Is that

Bernard Lewis was actually his original emphases were on the Ottoman Empire.

But from that, it branched out.

What went wrong made him famous because it was a collection of earlier works that were recalibrated after 9-11.

And he had written an essay right on the eve, I think, of 2001.

And it was sort of saying that you didn't do anything to the Muslim world.

They hate you because they have gone wrong.

And what he meant was, if I could just summarize his ideas, in the age of global communications, interconnectedness, cell phones, television, cable, TV, et cetera, they can see they being the Muslim world that South Korea is doing better, Japan's doing better, the Asian tigers, Chile's doing better, and we're not doing better, and we have oil.

And the reason is that rather than say, well, maybe

Islamism is becoming too doctrinaire or repressive, or always was, whatever your take on it, or you're not emancipating women, you're losing half the population, or you're not rational, you're putting ideological or religious religious theories and differences and beliefs and creeds in place of reasons, or you're not conducive to free market capitalism.

Whatever the take was, they did not want to go there, so they blame people for their self.

That was his thesis.

And it was very influential.

And he lived a long time.

And he was a big supporter of the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war.

But in one critical difference, that he believed, and this was very very difficult for people to understand because he was such an intellect, but he believed in realism in the sense that if you're going to go into Iraq, then win.

Because the ideology of that part of the world was that any magnanimity will be treated as weakness to be taken advantage of, not reciprocated with further kindness.

And the same thing about the Iran deal.

That's all a backdrop.

So my relationship with him was that He would write me little notes.

Why don't you write about this?

Because I was writing a bi-weekly column for National Review at the time and I'd written Carnage and Culture about cultural differences and the approach of war.

But what he was asking me to write about and what he was publishing were a little bit different, if you know what I mean.

In other words,

he had been a man of the left and he was writing for the New York Review of Books, the TLS, I think.

And he was a public intellectual that was acceptable to the left given his great erudition, his British background.

And yet in his older years, he had become very conservative and very interventionist, nation-building even.

But he was writing to me and saying, you're in a position that you can write this, and I'm not.

And

I didn't understand that.

I thought, wow.

Wait, he felt he couldn't because that would be the end of his career if he were to write some novelty.

That's what kind of I was puzzled by because his career, he had been retired from Princeton.

He was a senior figure.

He was the intellectual architect of a lot of the neoconservative thinking that governed the Middle East.

I'm not saying that in a culpable way.

I'm just saying that people who felt that they should be unapologetic toward the Muslim world because the Muslim world would be doing very well.

It has all of the resources, the talent.

All it has to do is make some fundamental change if it wants to compete in a global world.

If it doesn't, then the Taliban are fine.

You know, that's what they want to do.

Go do it.

But if they want cell phones and they want computers and they want all the rest, then they've got to go down to a path that's going to butt up against Islamic fundamentalism.

His critics on the right said that he distinguished between Islamism and fundamental Islam, and those suffixes and prefixes were necessary,

he felt.

And the right would say, no, it's innate to Islam.

If you're going to be a real Muslim, then you're going to have problems.

And he would say, no, if you're going to be a real Muslim, you can be compatible with the modern world.

And that was where the break went.

But speaking of, you know, Bernard Lewis,

there were, and Milton Friedman, there were other, a couple of others.

And of course, I was very lucky when I got there to meet Thomas Sowell.

And he wrote me out of the blue after about a year there.

And he was a virtual recluse.

And that was a very careful word to say because people said, well, where is Tom Soule?

And why doesn't he come in every day?

At that time, he was in his 70s.

early 70s.

But what I would always say is

he writes more than everybody put together.

He writes a book every couple of years.

His thought is if when you mention Hoover Institution, it's synonymous with Tom Soul.

And I said, if you're talking about actual fundraising, probably more targeted money comes to the Hoover Institution that can be used for everybody under his name.

And so we still do.

We would have lunch.

I don't think I've ever met anybody who was entirely empirical and not ideological in the sense that

his empiricism leads him to certain political beliefs, but he examines everything on his merit.

And

that trumps or surpasses friendship.

And I don't know if you'd get angry for me to repeating this, but there was an old professor of his that he hadn't seen in a year, long time.

And it was almost Tom's age at the time.

And he was in Palo Alto.

And I had heard of the person.

I don't want to mention his name.

And I thought, wow, this guy is a hardcore Marxist.

And Tom, I got there a a little early at this cafe and for annual or bi-monthly lunch in those days.

And we were sitting as we always do in the back, kind of shady area where we wouldn't be bothered.

And the guy, I said, Tom, this guy is an outright Marxist.

Well, you know, I never saw him that way.

He was a little bit older than I.

And I said, well, okay.

So the guy came in.

He was very nice.

And then he just started spouting this.

It was 2006.

It was kind of Marxism, but it was Marxism updated for the Iraq war and the surge and all that stuff, 2006 and 7.

And he just wouldn't stop.

And then Tom just said, everything he said was, I haven't seen you in a while, but everything you've said is so bizarre because it's not empirical.

And then he said, well, let's not.

talk about politics.

I came to see you, my old friend.

And Victor, I want to meet you.

And I don't want to talk.

This is what the left always does.

I don't want to talk about politics.

But, and he went in and in and in.

And finally, Tom said, you know, we didn't come here to talk about politics.

We came here to talk about ideas, and you're all you do is talk about politics.

And he hadn't seen him, and the guy got very hurt and said, Well, don't be offended.

And he said, We should talk to Victor because he's a guest, and he came here to meet you, and all you do is talk about politics.

And those were kind of the lunches we had.

That's why I liked him so much.

He was absolutely empirical.

Another person, though, we mentioned Bernard Lewis, but there was a person who I think in many ways was as impressive, or not more impressive, was Bernard Knox.

And he was a very famous classicist.

He wrote a great book on Sophocles.

He was the one, in some of these podcasts, I've talked about the tragic hero in the John Ford Western sense, but also in the Sophoclean sense of those seven surviving plays, the Antigone, the two Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus Rex, Pericles, especially the two that Bernard Knox mastered, the Philip Tetes and the Ajax.

And he was the one that really showed that there was a group of aristocratic thinking men and women in Athens as it became more radicalized in the fifth century and that their sense of dignity or sense of purpose was outdated and they were being passed by and therefore they could that themes could be resurrected in contemporary tragedy by looking at characters in mythology and Homeric poems that were noble.

That famous epithet of Ajax, nobly live or nobly die, I put that on the tombstone of my father.

And so he really showed us that there were certain people that have certain traits that in certain times or certain occasions are vital, especially as we come more radically democratic and egalitarian.

We need some people who will not bend to the popular will.

But that very salvation they bring us, whether it's Shane or Gary Cooper in High Noon or the Magnificent Seven or even in a six sense, the wild bunch but that ability to cut through everything and just go by a code when there are no codes anymore everybody makes the necessary adjustments for careerism or get along or to reflect the egalitarian equity idea then they're going to do things that are positive but they're going to suffer and then when things get better because of their agencies they're going to be destroyed or they'll leave

i'm sorry and so bernard knox showed this about the heroic

yeah so

He did.

And I got to know him because I wrote a book called The Other Greeks that was kind of a huge tome arguing, it was a history of agrarianism in the Greek world, but it was more or less trying to resurrect an old idea that had been very popular among the French and European scholars that Greece had not been a bipolar society of mass and elite, rich and poor, a Marxist dichotomy, but it had had a huge middle class.

And that was called the mesoi, the georgoi, the hoplitai.

There were all these different adjectives that reflected part of their role as a member of the assembly, a member of the farming community that was autonomous and self, you know, self-independent, and then a voter and also a warrior, a man that looked like everybody else in the phalanx with shield, spear, and hoplite armor.

And I had gone through all of that in German and French mostly, some Italian, and then I had taken the thesaurus of Greek literature, 55 million words, and gone through every word for those terms.

And just a whole huge amount of information came.

But I was under contract with Free Press Simon Schuster to make it a readable book.

And the result

was, you know, 200,000 words where I had, I don't know, 7,000 references to classical.

authors and the text in parentheses at the bottom of the pages and in addition to footnotes and nobody i mean nobody would really want to read that, right?

It was called The Other Greeks, but Bernard Knox wrote a long, long review of it and in the Washington Times and wrote me a note and then

also wrote, he would write me when I was at Cal State and said, well, how are you doing?

And so when I would go to Washington, I'd see him.

The last time, Christopher Hitchens, whom I got to know pretty well, He said, well, Bernard Knox wants to see you.

And he was at a rest home in Washington.

so we went over and got him and his wife brought him over and Christopher had this long dinner and I said Christopher he cannot we don't want to have him stay too long and so he stayed way too long and then we took him back but I had a very interesting conversation which brings up Christopher Hitchens I don't know how I got to know him but he kind of wanted to talk to me when he was alienated or isolated by the left for his support in 2003 of the Iraq war which I had supported and so

his wife had a home in Atherton, so we came out every summer to the Hoover.

So maybe for

until the Obama regnum, maybe till 2010, and there was a wonderful donor at Hoover that had funded him.

And I guess what I'm saying is that for about eight or nine years, we were pretty close.

He came down to my farm, and I know that he was...

on a lot of social occasions.

One of the funniest stories, I don't want to give away the names involved, but he was drinking and drinking and drinking and smoking and smoking and smoking.

And somebody at this group said, do you get any exercise?

I said, not if I can help it.

And he was a little bit overweight.

And he was getting into his early 60s, late 50s.

And this person was a very distinguished doctor at a major university.

He said, I'm going to have you run the test.

And so he did.

And then he called me up and said, Christopher, these are private matters, but Christopher has requested that you get this because you're always giving him unsolicited advice.

And here are his readouts.

And they were absolutely perfect.

I mean, oxygenation, red blood count, white blood count, lipid, cholesterol.

I mean, it was just stunning.

And then Christopher called me up and said, you know, my father, who was a distinguished military figure that had helped, he was on the cruiser Sheffield and it helped sink the Bismarck or finish the Bismarck off.

And Christopher was very proud of him.

He said, you know, he died of esophagal cancer from the mixture of alcohol, perhaps, and cigarettes, but not until his mid-70s.

So I've got a good 10 years or 12 years.

And then literally within six months of this conversation, he was diagnosed with this esophagal cancer.

So it was very sad.

But we got along pretty well.

But I noticed that when the Obama came in, he'd kind of drifted back toward his natural habitat.

And I think I'd become an embarrassment to him, although we kept in touch.

I liked him a lot.

I can't believe you were an embarrassment to anybody, Victor.

I was pretty rough around the rage.

I think I said to Jack at one time, he came down here and he was shocked that I didn't have the proper tequila for him.

And anyway, I mentioned it to Jack Fowler on one of our broadcasts.

And he said, Victor, Victor, Victor, I have to school you in your own landscape.

I said, I'm going to really show this Brit what the San Joaquin Valley is like.

So I took him into the rowdiest, most dangerous place of where mostly illegal aliens, a liquor store.

And he goes in there in Spanish and says, I want this.

And they said, yes, of course.

And they bring out, it was the dustiest, dirtiest old bottle.

The guy just took 10 minutes going around boxes and everything.

And he found this brand of tequila from Mexico.

And then he turned to me and he said, see,

guy has to come all the way from Washington, D.C.

to tell you about what is in your backyard.

Very funny.

And then, you know, when I would go to things, if I ever had to speak in Washington or I had to go someplace, I always asked him to be a guest.

And so we got to know each other.

His daughter, I think her name was Antonia.

She was very gifted.

She was taking Latin at the time.

She probably doesn't remember, but I'd go to their home in Atherton.

He had people there that were very interesting.

I remember one night I went over there there and there was Jerry Brown

and I thought he was going to snatch my Haugendas ice cream from me.

Everybody makes fun of Donald Trump eating Haugendas, but Jerry Brown had no rival as far as that was concerned.

Yeah.

And then finally, I'm trying to think, maybe

who else?

Oh, I have heard you talk before about Norman O.

Brown.

That's sort of an interesting.

Yeah.

Remember Norman O.

Brown?

He was.

Believe it or not, he was an obscure classicist, British, from a very wealthy family.

I think he had a mining, his father had been a mining company and engineer in Mexico.

But he'd gone to Oxford.

He'd got first in classics.

He'd gone to, it wasn't Wellesley, I think it was Ohio Wellesley.

I'm not sure.

But he wrote his thesis on Hermes the Thief about the trickster or the image of tricksterism and the kind of against the grain mythology in classical Greece, somebody who challenges the existing order.

And then he became a Freudian Jungian and he wrote Love's Body and a number of books like that, Life Against Death.

And that coincided with the hippie movement.

And he became this obscure guy in the middle of nowhere, became almost immediately

sort of like Kendi, Professor Kendi is now, or Tanehsi Coates,

or any of these popular intellectuals that come and go.

But he was a true...

because he'd been educated not in psychology or sociology, but in classics and languages, and he he spoke a lot of language.

He was very well educated.

And he came to UC Santa Cruz when it started.

And he was a friend of my mentor, John Lynch.

So when I started taking Greek there, he decided that he was sick of being a celebrity because, I mean, if you went to his class, people would come in.

from Big Sur or San Francisco, Haight Ashbury.

And this was in 1971, as late as that.

And he was trying to shed that image.

And I remember one time a guy came in with a paper-mâché phallus about three feet tall.

And he carried it, I know, and he said, I'm going to show you what phallic centric is.

And Norman O'Brown said, by Jesus, get out of my life.

Get out of here.

And the funny thing was that he had this image of this promiscuous, drug-laden 60s.

And he was providing the intellectual firepower for it.

But if you looked at his exact life, it was the most conventional.

He had a very conventional wife, very sweet.

He came in and very well dressed, kind of academic, casual, but he had the most beautiful top of the line Volvo.

And so did his wife.

And he would kind of interchange them, brand new Volvos.

And then he lived at Pasa Temple golf course in Santa Cruz with a view of the entire.

And he brought, so we went, yeah, we went once to his house and he'd say, here is where Marcuse sat.

And here, and he named all of the Frankfurt school that had come to see him.

And I remember he yelled at the student this guy with long hair was a really nice guy but he put his beer on this beautiful mahogany table he said where is your coaster

and I thought wow this is so strange because once there was a really nice guy I remember his name was Peter and he we were trying to translate Archilicas he didn't know Greek very well and he mangled it's very hard to mangle Archilicas because except for a few long poems they're very epigrammic and short and it's very pretty easy Greek and he said young man I I want you to decline the first declension.

And he couldn't.

Well, then go to the second.

He said, Well, if declension is not your game, then how can you be in Greek?

But let's get some conjugation.

Take the verb luo, which is kind of weird because Chase and Phillips, the American version, was paideo.

And this luo was a Greek word, but I think it was from that old Donaldson first introduction to Greek or something.

Anyway, he said, Luo, lues, lue, luo.

You can't even get it to the second person, plural.

Have you ever heard of luete or luusi, third person?

And we haven't even gone to the oblique.

We didn't go to the oblique cases, and we haven't even gone to the moods, the optative and subjunctive.

We don't go to the tenses.

Do you know how many tenses are?

He did this every single class to this person.

And this guy just was kind of a hippie, and he'd gone in there knowing very little Greek.

And he said, I wish you would leave.

And then he said, We are short electricians.

I had a man come to my house.

He didn't know what he was doing.

You would be good electrician model.

And so I took him for Greek lyric poetry.

He taught a class and there was no exam, no syllabus.

The exam was you went to his house and you had to recite a long Greek poem and he had another student check.

how accurate you were by memory, no notes, and the longer the poem, you could.

And I said to him, you're just rewarding people that have a mimic, Homeric or a retor

or a bardish sense, but you're not testing analysis.

Yeah, well, analysis is young man analysis is.

And so in the Lucretius, it was the same thing.

We read the Natura Deorum of Lucretius in Latin, and he was kind of cruel.

But when I look back at it, he was kind of right to make fun of the whole hippie movement that had made him fabulously wealthy because Love's Body and Life Against Death were bestsellers.

At the time, he was writing a book called Closing Time, where he was just obsessed with the end of Western civilization.

But he was also,

I think he had read Onion's Discovery of European Thought, but he was, Renault Schnell was a big hero, but he was obsessed with false etymologies because he was not a comparative philologist.

And so what would do is he would say, why

are your knees, why is it gonu in Greek?

And where do we get genitalia?

And those are not, those two terms are not linguistically, they have no affinities.

The word for gonad or English word and gonu.

But he would try to say, well, they're both round and you clutch your knees when you're in trouble and you have two gonads and therefore the same word.

And it would drift off into that false etymology.

But fun, false, but fun.

One time I was urinating in the bathroom.

Remember, I was only 18 or 19.

And he came in there and he urinated in the stall next to me.

He turned to me and he said, you don't like me because you sit back there and you feel out of place.

I said, I feel out of place at this whole nutty place, not your campus.

This whole campus has lost its mind.

And he said, well, then why isn't my a class of refuge for you?

Because I am a traditional classicist.

I said, because you fostered all this stuff.

He said, I fostered it.

I lit a match and I didn't know it was going to blow up.

And he said, I am turning to classics.

And you know what was so strange?

He lived to, I think, into his 90s because when i was at stanford writing my thesis i would go back to santa cruz because the library was very good and i could use it john lynch had ordered so many good texts there and i would see him and i remember i would go up to say hello and he had no idea who i was and he was not senile i mean it was just that i was just one of many students one of many students but i had three classes from him and he was a martinet too i mean he was a harsh disciplinarian yeah

but the way you tell tell it, and maybe it is just the way you tell it, he sounds like he became a caricature of himself, and maybe that was the price of fame, huh?

I think he

was sure he was an obscure classicist from Britain that his very conventional life, very wealthy guy with family money, and then he wrote these books.

He ventured in midlife, as most people do, to different disciplines.

And he didn't really realize that his let it all hang out

and the Dionysian side, according to Nietzsche, going back to Greek mythology and religion, was as necessary as the Apollonian.

And that's sort of discussed at length in Euripides' Bacchae, how those two ideas war within the psyche of Pentheus.

He was very big on the Bacchae.

One thing I remember, I was taking the Bacchae at the time from John Lynch.

I read it again when I was in Greece.

in another course and then he referenced it all the time.

So he was very interested in repression.

It's necessary for conventional life, but it will consume you unless you have an outlet for Dionysus.

But if you give in to it, and he would mention, remember the Catullus Attis poem about Attis finally becoming a devotee of the wild Sibyl and castrating himself, transgendering himself.

And he would always bring this up.

And so I think what he was trying to tell us, I have a very conventional Apollonian life, but I leave an outlet for it in my teaching.

And this has been misinterpreted: that my followers who made me rich, because he was very wealthy, these were bestsellers at a time when books were very lucrative for authors.

And not that he needed it, he was wealthy anyway.

But the people would line up, so we'd go to class, and there'd be three or four or five people outside.

They would find out where the class was.

And these are, you'd say, well, what are you doing here?

And some guy who hadn't taken a bath in a year would say, I'm guy came up from Big Surger because Nobby, Nobby, they called him Nobby, N-O-B.

Nobby's here.

And well, I want to sit in.

And then he'd come in and there would be four or five guys at the back.

And he'd say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Who are you?

And he'd get, do I have a roster?

And he would, somebody would help him shuffle.

And he said, I want to read names.

Your name is not on this roster.

Well, you know, hey, man, I just like you.

Hey, man, get would get, be gone, be gone.

You're disrupting an intellectual discourse here.

And it's so weird to see that.

Yeah.

And so let's move on.

I think you were going to talk about Shelby Steele, who as well is

kind of a unique character in all of the intelligentsia right now.

I had a very close relation, and I do, because we had a very similar background.

He taught at San Jose State, and I taught at Cal State.

Fresno.

So we understood what it was like to teach four classes a semester twice,

eight classes a year, and to have working class students and then the ideology of the faculty at those places, which can be further to the left actually than you see.

And they're overworked.

And yet if you do research and publish, people feel that almost in a way that you're violating the teaching ethos.

So that can incur you more problems and it can give you benefits if you publish at a CSU.

That's a long excursus, but I think people know exactly what I'm talking about.

And so we would talk all the time.

And this was a period, he had done the Benson Hearst PBS, one of the best documentaries, I think, about race in America.

And he had started out as very, very left-wing, and he had gravitated to a classical liberal.

And by that, I mean he was willing to look at everything on the merits, very close to Tom Soule.

But having those two as my two best friends, they were my closest associates for most of my career at Hoover has been a great gift to me because

what I'm trying to get at is that there are people who have theories and there are people who have ideas and there are people who talk all the time, but they're not empirical.

They don't look at the world around them and they don't look at the symptoms.

They don't come up with a diagnosis.

They don't come up with therapy and offer a prognosis.

He did.

And so his career was devoted to what is the exact data and what is the exact condition of race now versus 10 years earlier versus 10 years earlier versus 10 years earlier.

What did Booker T.

Washington say versus Frederick Douglass versus da da?

And out of that empirical tradition, he came to the idea that integration and assimilation and intermarriage would work for blacks just like they had for Italians and Irish at a time when that was very unpopular.

And so he was the object of a lot of vituperation, but he was very soft-spoken.

He grew up in Chicago.

He knew Chicago.

So the Obama prototype, as he wrote, was very familiar to him.

And Hoover was very lucky because for 2003 until very recently, the two most brilliant scholars of race relations in the United States were Shelby Steele and Tom Sowell.

I don't know if we fully appreciated that sometimes, but for me, knowing both of them and trying to be with them as much as I could as their friend, and likewise, I was very lucky.

Yeah.

Could we turn maybe to some celebrities that you might have known?

I know the celebrities are, well, celebrities.

And I was thinking a little bit, I know you've talked about Dennis Miller or Clint Black or even some encounters with John Foyt.

I was really lucky that I started doing

way a long time ago.

Dennis Miller Miller had a Burbank TV show in a Burbank studio.

I don't know if you remember it.

And I was not very well known, but he would ask me to come down three or four times.

And then after it was over, he'd talk.

I had been a big fan of his.

I really liked the idea that he was so, he's an intellectual.

He had an enormous vocabulary and he had all of these insights.

But he did it in such a go-way-the head most people thought when he was doing NFL, Monday Night Football.

But it really, it was challenging.

You know, it was sort of a very famous writer, I won't mention his name, told me, every time you write a column, put one word in that nobody's going to know, but no more than one, so that they can feel that they can, it's challenging and, you know, uplifting.

So he was sort of that way.

And then I would do his radio show a lot, like almost every other week for years.

And then I was in New York once where we did it and we just hung out for a couple of days.

I think that was during the Romney election.

He actually was, and he was going through this, not a conservative metamorphosis, but he was tired of the celebrity left and he had taken a big hit for that.

But he does a podcast.

I still have been on it a couple of times and it's just, he's just a wonderful guy.

I mean, he's somebody who

understands the left because that was the denominate culture.

of the profession that he's in.

And he knows the consequences and what the left is capable of.

and yet there's a little twist to that that some of his closest friends that he still likes are leftist

and i think there's a little bit of sense that while he doesn't really care what their politics are that they're friends i'm not sure that they always reciprocate and kind

but he's a very interesting guy and i always wish him well yeah how about clint black uh i get to know clint from a variety of venues

it's a long story but let me just say that we more or less text or talk once a week.

And it's not so much about politics, about culture, because he's a country Western singer, big singer.

And he's a very smart guy.

And

I'll ask him if I hear in the news he said something or something, or he saw me on Fox and says something he'll write.

Usually we get together about once a week, talk to each other.

And it's usually about history of country western movie.

Who is the audience for Country Western?

How Country Western music is changing.

Then he'll ask me, what is the status of, you know, punditry and things like that.

He's interested in just from a performative point of view.

But I admire people like that because I think he's in his 50s.

And yet, when you're self-employed and you're young and you become a big star, then what happens?

How do you persist?

There's very few that can do it, you know, Dolly Pardon or Willie Nelson kind.

But he does.

So a lot of people say it's beneath me to tour it's beneath me but he's a very earthy guy and he's a very hard worker and he's got a lot of practical common sense so I've always enjoyed talking to him and there's not any sense of haughtiness he's from the muscular classes the working classes been a good friend of mine I really like him and John Voigt he seems to have weathered the left-wing Hollywood scene somewhat well.

I mean, we hear all the time that I think there's a group called the Sons of Abraham

that are right-wing Hollywood celebrities.

There were.

And I spoke to them.

It was a group sponsored by David Horowitz in the early 2000s down in Los Angeles.

And I don't know if it's called the Wednesday Club or what, but there were a lot of them there.

And I got to speak and talk to them.

But it was strange because for four or five years, I was a visiting professor at the Pepperdine Graduate School of Public Policy.

And so I would get in my old Honda and go down Sunday drive.

I know exactly, it was 224 miles from my farm to the beautiful campus.

I'd get there Sunday, having office hours all Sunday night as if anybody wanted to come on Sunday night.

And then I would teach 8 to 12.

And then I would have an hour of office hours.

And then I'd have to run, get in the car, speed along Topanga Canyon Road or whatever, Malibu Canyon Road and get to 101 and then get to the 405 button then get to the five before the traffic started.

It's kind of a hectic.

And then I had a daughter, Susanna, who passed away from leukemia, and she was a graduate student there.

And so it was one of the nicest times of my life because I would get there, Sunday we'd go out to dinner, and then I'd see her really early.

We'd go to coffee, and she was take classes.

And then

during my class, she would just break in every two hours and say, oh, break, everybody.

You got to get the professor, give a break, and every hour almost and bring me coffee and stuff.

It was great.

But on Sundays, I had met John Voight

at these friends of Abe, they called it, and we got to know each other.

So during those years, once in a while, we would have dinner together.

At this time, he was very conservative, but he was starting to use those excellent acting skills and experience with the ideology of Hollywood in a political.

And the conversations were cautionary and I said you know when you do this he was very courageous he was a big enough star where it didn't bother him and we were talking about Fox News and going on Fox News in those days and he was very religious too I mean he talked in religious tones about what the left was sacrilegious and I think that had brought him some tensions with his family and people around him but he was unwavering what I liked about him was he lacked any pretension.

I'll give you one example and then I can move on very quickly.

I was speaking at a group for fundraising.

I guess it was for Pepperdine.

It was in Beverly Hills, as I remember.

I took my daughter who's in her 20s and she had met John, you know, at these dinners.

We had this restaurant in Malibu that I ate at at night.

And anyway, it was packed.

It was packed, not because I was speaking, because John Voigt was rumored to be there.

So when you get there, you couldn't even move.

And I had to go sit in the main room.

And people said, no, John, we've got a special table.

And my daughter was sitting all by herself.

I said, Susannah, she goes, I don't even think I should be here, Dad.

Gosh, I'm just going to go sit.

So there were a side room and she was sitting all the way over there.

And so it was just before I started to talk, John got up and goes, just a minute.

I got to go, Victor.

I'm not going to leave, but I got to go.

He got up.

He left his little table.

He walked all around and he went over and he sat next to Susanna.

So you remember me, Susanna?

John Voigt, you know, and he sat down with her.

And of course, the whole,

which I liked about about half the people moved over to that section from where I was speaking.

But that's the kind of guy that I found him to be.

Every once in a while, he'd call me and we'd talk about politics.

I haven't heard from him lately, but it really made those pepper dying years enjoyable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And maybe we can conclude, because I know you've talked about your friendship with Rush Limbaugh, which didn't start out as a friendship.

I think you were more like a consultant of his, or could you let us know?

Oh, I don't think anybody ever consulted Rush, but

it was weird.

Over the years, he would read my columns

and he was very magnanimous.

In other words, you know, when you read a column, you're all of a sudden getting a huge audience.

And he

would text me once in a while.

But maybe in the last five or six years,

we started texting a lot.

And each November, I would speak at the David Horowitz Restoration Weekend and a couple of occasions or I would go into the studio and talk to him where we'd meet.

And then he would ask me about the world of punditry because for a person who was so famous, I don't think people realize how much work he put into that.

He was very well prepared.

He was a voracious reader, but he was very suspicious of the celebrity world for good reasons and also the punditry world.

So a lot of the conversation was, How about this writer?

What's he like?

And you would think, well, what do you care, Rush?

And he'd say, well, this person wrote this and wrote that.

And so we would talk about these various strains of conservatism.

Of course, he knew them better than I did, but he had not been interested in the actual pundits in the way that most people thought that he would.

And he was just interested in the ideas.

We would talk about that.

And then it came into a habit, maybe,

oh, my time about eight o'clock, he would text, I would text back about contemporary things that were going on.

And then I have a very strange story.

When I wrote the Trump book, he wrote me and said, this isn't really a case for Trump.

This is an analysis of his candidacy and where he came from and why people voted for him.

I said, yeah.

And I said, well, the publisher chose my title.

Why Trump Won, they felt was not edgy enough and that the Trump voter wouldn't vote.

He said, well, it was a much better title, but

your publisher is right.

This is going to be selling.

And then he said to me, you know, there's a couple of books that are on that Amazon that I'm not in favor of.

And I'm going to mention your book tomorrow and just watch what happens.

And I didn't know what's going to happen.

And all of a sudden, I was out working in the yard.

I was running errands, talking to some people in Selma, and all of a sudden, somebody called me and said, your book's number one on Amazon.

And I go, what?

And then another person the next day it's number two on them and he he did that and i wrote him i said what are you doing rush and he said i'm trying to let people know that your books should be ahead of these other books other books are you know therapeutic and i'm sick of it but he was that way and he that's not what he was trying to do me a favor and he really got upset i think

toward the end of his life, as a lot of people did, with people who had

consulted him, asked for advice from him, been on his show.

Well, he didn't really have guests on this radio show, but tried to have mention of them

who had become vehement never Trumpers.

And in that critique of Trumpism, and Rush was like a lot of people, I think probably he was for Cruz in the primary to the degree that he led on.

But he saw that Trump's agenda was so much better than the alternative.

And the alternative is what we've got the first nine months that he became a supporter after the other candidates dropped out.

But he would write me something, said, do you know this person?

And I said, yes, I do.

And he text back or call or this person, do you realize that this person, blah, blah, blah.

I said, I know Rush.

His thing was, is there any honor anymore?

Is there any loyalty anymore?

Is there any sense of friendship anymore?

And what he was telling me in this array of maybe 15 people.

who had consulted him, who had benefited from him, who he had spoken for their groups or something.

They are now vehement anti-Trumpers.

And then in casual reference, they were saying that the Trump know-nothingness was a product of talk radio in general and people like Rush Limbaugh in particular.

And

he was kind of mystified by that because he put a very high premium on loyalty and consistency.

And people wanted to know why was he I got asked that.

I wrote an obituary for him after his passing.

I really missed him.

And I think we do miss him right now.

I mean, there's a lot of things you could say that the conservative movement is fragmented.

The Drudge Report sort of went to the left, and the Weekly Standard got defunct.

That coterie of writers, if you look at what they're writing at Bulwark, are now antithetical to a lot of conservative principles.

And then you had the Liz Cheney movement, the Bush movement, the National Review, et cetera, et cetera.

So this never Trump, while it was never great in numbers, the traditional levers of influence were gone from the conservative movement.

You could not go to the Drudge Report or even Fox News had a civil war during the election, so drop off.

So what I'm getting at is he was consistent.

People said he has principles of conservative thought and then he's willing to accept people that are heterodox.

or out of the mainstream if they adhere to those principles.

And I know he's a free trader and there are things about Trump's trade policy, but more or less, as he said, 90% of what Trump's doing is what McCain should have done and what Romney should have done.

And I supported them not because they agreed with 90% of my principles,

but because they were better than the alternative.

And that's what we're doing, isn't it, Victor?

And I say, that's exactly right.

It reminds me of farming.

You know, you get your crop in and you've got mold and you've got rot on a tray of raised grapes or you're picking plums and you've got four by fives instead of three by four size Santa Rosas, but you got your crop and that's all you can do.

He was a realist, but he was shocked at this all or nothing.

You know,

Trump excess Hollywood.

Trump this, I can't.

So he lived in the real world.

I think it's because he was a self-made person and he understood business and he understood how hard it is.

And he worked like a maniac.

I mean, I was looking the other day at some of the texts he wrote me, and this was after he was sick.

They were 10 o'clock my time.

And I would always write back, and I said, I thought Trump didn't sleep.

Do you sleep?

You know, and this is before he became ill.

He was just a wonderful guy.

He was very happily married.

And he's very generous to people.

People have the wrong impression of him.

They think that he was a blowhard or he was me.

He was a very sensitive guy.

And he asked me once, have you done stuff wrong in your life as far as your professional life, attack people you shouldn't?

I said, yes.

I said, usually it's people who attack me and they were weak.

I thought they were weak and they deserved to be smatted down, hit down or slapped back so they wouldn't do it to other people.

But whatever way of justification, I didn't have to get so tough.

But then he would say, now, Victor, You write about deterrence.

You have to have deterrence.

You have to have the impression that if somebody wants to go after you and be unfair and smear you, they're going to pay a price.

I said, I do have deterrence.

That's a code rush.

So we'd go back and forth like that.

And there were just things about him that I think I had not known until four or five years of getting to know him.

It's one of those people in life that when they disappear from the scene, you're not going to find anybody like them.

Christopher Hitchens and I had disagreements, but whatever you say, when he disappeared, you were not going to have somebody who would have three martinis or bourbon and a pack of cigarettes at midnight going home from dinner.

And then the next morning, you look at he wrote a 2,500-word book review.

Yeah.

He had just that ability and that natural

energy and energy.

And the same with Rush that could just go there three hours every day and sit there.

And he could be what?

A Las Vegas quality comedian.

He could be a rich little mimic.

He could be a shrewd political analyst.

I mean, you know, up in the Karl Rove League.

He could do it all.

And he had a persona.

One last thing about him is that it was so funny because a few times he'd have somebody pick me up.

They always came in a beautiful Mercedes and they were, none of them were white.

I only mentioned that because people accused him, but they were all people that he had inculcated into the conservative.

philosophy who worked and I don't mean just in the studio.

I mean they were had worked as landscapers and then they had built their own business and Rush would deliberately buy a new car and then give them that within a year.

And they worshipped him, not because he had been so generous to them, but because he had been, again, so empirical.

He did not care what a person's skin color.

He did not care about a person's class.

He empathized with people of all walks of life, but his main criterion was he wanted people to work hard and to be upwardly mobile.

And when he saw somebody with that spunk or initiative, then he went out and tried to help them all he could.

And when you lose a guy like that, and I'm not trying to suggest that his successors are not capable.

I'm just saying that they have a terrible dilemma because we're never going to see somebody in radio that had that ability.

Mark LeBen has a lot of ability, but he's a different type of radio host.

That type of radio host is an entertainer

in the middle of the day and has that level of analysis.

And you can count on.

Because when people were confused and they heard everything, they would say, what does Rush have to say?

And then they would be reassured because he was sensible.

Okay, we're going to have to leave it there on Rush Limbaugh.

Thank you so much for these scenes from the lives of our intelligentsia, if I can use that term a little bit loosely, where they seem to have all impressed you in some way.

Mostly their commitment to empiricism or their engaged in the material realities of their world and not separate from it.

I think that seems to me to be a big theme with you and that they're fearless of their critics to the extent that they have.

And if they're not generous people, they're really authentic people you seem to talk about.

I'll just end by saying, you know, that Plutarch around 100 AD wrote the lives of the illustrious Greeks and Romans, and he was looking back.

up to 600 years in the past.

He had to walk all the way to the Athenian library, he tells us, I think, in the life of Demosthenes.

But what he was trying to tell us is that you can emulate people or you can, and his were bad and good examples, and he compared notable or illustrious Greeks to notable and illustrious Romans.

Those comparative lives are very, a little bit at the end, they're very valuable to the extent they still survive.

But my only thing I'm saying is that when you see people, you can see things that affect you.

And if you find them worthy of emulation, then you try to incorporate that idea into your own life.

Not in the sense of copying, but just thinking, this person has a certain profile.

And they all shared one thing that made a big impression on me.

They said what they wanted.

Yeah.

And they seem to be a world away from our current therapist, ideologues, contrarians, celebrities, all image and no message.

Yeah, all energy, no message, and all

obsessed, obsessed with this globalist, materialist, celebrity, high culture.

So let's conclude it here.

I would like to remind people of your website, victorhanson.com, that you can be found on social media at parlor at victor davis hansen and on twitter at vd hansen and then on facebook at vd hansen's cup and those are three avenues by which they can find your writings and your podcasts like this one so we welcome everybody and thanks again for this great saturday discussion of all the intelligentsia in your lives so it's been very fascinating so we'd like to thank you for that Thank you, Sammy.

All right, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.