The Classicist: Gruesome Newsom and Drossy Joe

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Classicist.

We're recording on Friday, August 27th, 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, and the author of its new weekly newsletter.

Civil Thoughts, go to civilthoughts.com.

Please, I thank you to sign up.

Get it totally free.

The namesake of the show is Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He's got a tremendously long biography.

You can find it at victorhanson.com.

That's his website, The Blade of Perseus.

On this episode, on The Classicist, we discuss some of the original things that Victor writes for his website.

By the way, That's premium content now.

So if you'd like to read this, you should subscribe.

It's very reasonable, very affordable.

And Victor writes a ton of content and it's exceptional.

So it'd be well worth your while.

On today's episode, we will talk about his recent essays for American greatness.

Does America Still Work?

The Drossy Touch of Joe Biden.

We'll talk about...

one of his premium pieces for the website, When Citizenship Dies.

And as we are wont to do on The Classicist, this is where we talk about things California.

And we've got this recall election coming at us now in about two or three weeks.

I'd like to get Victor's thoughts on anything new and exciting out there.

We're going to start with California, but we'll do that right after this message.

We're back.

with the Victor Davis Hansen show, The Classicist.

It's Friday, August 27th.

Victor, I don't know that there's a lot of kind of political junkie news about California in that there have been no new polls since we last spoke.

I think that's about two weeks ago, that CBS poll that actually had Newsom losing the recall, but I checked earlier today.

There's been nothing new.

Maybe you've spotted something locally.

The betting odds still have Newsom pulling this out.

75 to 25.

And, you know, we've given credence before to these online betting agencies that dabble in politics.

I do think one thing worth talking about, though, is the increased attacks on Larry Elder.

I think it's fair to say every other potential candidate who might prevail, should Newsom be recalled, Larry is the guy.

But this week, the LA Times and LA Times columnists went on a savage attack, and Larry's essentially being cast as the black face of white supremacy.

Also, though, Victor, this week it came out that Gavin Newsom, I don't know how you and I can't work these deals, but somehow he was gifted a house by his cousin and he did some mortgage deal and it ended up pocketing him $2.7 million,

just what's available to you and me and every other normal citizen of the world.

So anyway, this kind of upper class game playing that's come out and the attacks on elder.

Would you like to talk about any of that or anything you may want to share about the recall that we don't know about yet?

Yeah, I think this election is going to be about turnout.

And I think Gavin Newsom assumed that because he controls the Secretary of State, the registrars, it was going to be a shoe-in.

And then he discovered that when he started slipping in the polls, and he slipped in the polls, it was because the French laundry story that we're in a drought, we had all these terrible fires.

Gas is the highest except for Hawaii in the country.

COVID came back with the Delta variant after he'd assured us that this whole lockdown had prevented it in a way that crazy Florida and Texas had not.

And people got sick of it, sick of the hypocrisy, especially when he put his kids in prep school and then shut down all the people in the public schools.

And so when Larry Elder came in because the other Republican candidates, why they may have been competent and professional, they were not known.

They didn't didn't have name recognition.

And Larry Elder did because he's on TVs or radio talk show hosts, et cetera, et cetera.

And so they went after him.

They made it very important.

They said he didn't register property.

They said his taxes were a mess.

They said he, you know, showed off his gun in front of his girlfriend who happened to be working for one of his political rivals now, who happened to be a former call girl.

They did everything.

And then for a while, I think it's been working.

But now, as we get into this last two and a half weeks, I think people are going to say, wait a minute,

I know what they're doing.

I know what Gavin Newsom is.

And when we look at him, he is the epitome of what the left calls white privilege.

He was a creature of the San Francisco wealthy left-wing establishment.

the Gettys, the Pelosis, the Feinsteins, the boxers, and the money that supports those people.

And he really had no means himself.

He wasn't known as an astute student or professional or business person.

But he ended up with two very wealthy home, very plush homes.

If you go on the internet, you can probably find that he'll probably be late paying his property taxes.

So he's considered kind of a tough guy, like in the way of Joe Biden, but

he's privileged.

And when he tries to do these work videos or photo ops, where it's kind of like a guy who goes to North Face and says to the counter person, look, I'm a wimp and I'm privileged, but I need some work clothes.

Can you give me some?

But before you do it, I want it to have a really good fit and I want to make sure that the label shows.

And that's how he kind of lives his life.

And I think.

The irony about this is that California electoral politics are geared with one agenda and reality in mind, and that is that the Mexican-American voter is now 40 to 45% of the electorate.

And because the Democratic Party has radically changed the ratios of the state budget, where we used to spend maybe 35% on roads and highways and reservoirs and aqueducts and airports and 7% or 8% on Medi-Cal health.

Now it's just the opposite.

We spend the vast majority of the budget on education and remedial education.

And this reflects the fact that we've had into this date about 8 million people who came across the border, many of them illegally.

So when the DMV reports that they can't find 100,000 votes with motor voter registration,

Newsom laughs.

Or Jerry Brown.

Or when we find out that the number of votes issued, the ballots that were issued and the number turned in don't quite make sense, they laugh.

Or when we have voting harvested, they laugh.

But here's the irony, is that the people who seem to be the most sick of Gavin Newsom are a lot of Mexican-Americans, especially the middle class and the older people, not the young students so much.

And they're sick of him because they don't like his hypocrisy.

They work very hard and they put their kids in public schools.

And when he shut those schools down and didn't really explain, like, you know, in November of last year or January of of this year or march whatever the month was and whatever the particular covet it was always the same can't do it and then he said things like well this is a moment for to recalibrate progressive capitalism and then he got caught at the french laundry people said you know this guy is just a privileged little spoiled guy and i don't like he's not a muscular hardworking person so then you had to reflect what I'm saying is not just, you know, idleness, idle speculation.

Gloria Romero, who when I was growing up and followed California politics, she was the most radical Hispanic legislature.

She was the Senate majority leader of the perennial Democratic-controlled state senate.

She's endorsed not just the recall, but Larry Elder.

And she specifically said why.

She doesn't like his hypocrisy about keeping his kids at schools that were open the entire time, very expensive Tony prep schools, why he wouldn't extend that privilege to working class people.

So what I'm getting at in a windy way is that maybe all of this voter outreach is that he's got sort of a Cuban mentality developing in California among Mexican Americans rather than the old, well, he kept the borders for us.

He gave amnesty.

He gives us free stuff.

And white Republicans hang out in the golf course and are racist.

But when you put Larry Elder into it, he's a black Republican.

He's a conservative Republican.

He knows something about the working classes.

He's educated.

And I think that Newsom could lose, I don't know, he could lose 40 or 45% of the Mexican-American vote.

And that's why he's scared.

And that's why they're pouring money.

And that's why they're terrified that the voter laxity that they created could come back and bite them.

Victor, you write twice a week for American Greatness.

The one you wrote this week is titled, Does America Still Work?

And when I read that title, I thought first you were talking about labor.

So many people aren't working, actually working, but you're talking about the project of America, the C.

pluribus unum, is it working?

So let me just read the first few sentences here.

In Does America Still Work?

Victor, you wrote, for nearly two years, Americans have engaged in a great woke experiment of cannibalizing themselves.

American civilization has invested massive labor, capital, and time and an effort constantly to flagellate itself for not being perfect.

Yet neither America's resilience nor its resources are infinite.

We are now beginning to see the consequences of what happens when pre-modern tribalism absorbs Americans.

There are concrete consequences when ideology governs policy, or when we take for granted the basics of life to pursue its trappings.

Victor, what are some of these concrete consequences?

Well, we've been talking about them earlier in

another broadcast, and that is simply that when you feel

that your promotion, your career, your status within a profession hinges not on your degree of merit, but on your ideology, then you're going to react accordingly.

And so we've given the message through the Congress, through the media, through the cancel culture on social media.

We've said, we don't really care if you're a Navy commander, how many of your planes landed right where they should on the carrier on the first try, but we want to know what the ethnic and racial and gender breakdown is of your wing.

And if you can show us that you were pretty sensitive to diversity, inclusion, and equity, then we're going to promote you.

And we don't really care about anything else.

I'm exaggerating a little bit, but that's the message.

And when you're a CEO, that if you can weigh in, that people should not have to have a driver's license to vote in the way that they have to to go through security to get on your airplane, and then you're going to be woke.

But what you're really doing is you're not paying attention to the management of your airline.

And the same thing with Hollywood.

We have all these people who are woke, woke, woke, woke, woke.

And if you look at the scripts are coming, no, but they're losing audience.

If you look at the NBA and you look at the quality of play or the share of the television or radio audience, they're going down, down, down.

And they are woke.

But that seems to turn people off, especially when they're woke here at home against their own constituency, but they wink a nod or even don't say a word.

I should say, of course, don't say a word when they're Chinese paymasters, do all sorts of horrific things, like put a million and a half people in camps.

And so what I'm getting at is that America just thinks, you know what?

If you're a hammer thrower and you got to open your mouth every time and tell everybody how bad your country is, then you're going to come in 14th at the Olympics.

If you're a LeBron James and you can't, you have to have a photo op where you're reading Malcolm X or some stupid thing.

That's what you're going to spend your time on, then you're going to be in decline.

It's just that simple.

And if you're a general or an admiral and all you do is write op-eds and criticize and tell everybody how woke you are, then maybe you just don't know what's going to happen.

You really don't know what's going to happen if you pull out a bagwom in Afghanistan.

So I'm really worried about it because throughout history, This centralized ideological government doesn't have a good record.

We have certain, you know, the bureaucracy comes from bureau in France, and it was through the revolution and the Napoleonic era and this idea of a technocrat, that they were not going to be, you know, necessarily aristocrats or hereditary or, and it was kind of started out as a good idea, and then they created this huge bureaucracy, and then this huge bureaucracy had to have some reason to exist.

Or when you had the czars spies that were everywhere in the late reign of Nicholas, or when you had the commissars under the Soviets, or the ideologue, the Nazi indoctrinators under the Nazi regime, or even in 16th century Spain.

When you look at somebody like Hernán Cortés, he was more worried about his Spanish inquisitors who are going to follow him and audit him and see what he was thinking and whether he was a good Catholic or bad Catholic, or he insulted the king or did not, than military efficacy.

So it's not a good idea to do this, to have this big overhead of labor capital and money and time.

and that's what we're doing and that's what i was trying to write about i think that explains why people have come to the conclusion our roads are terrible but we're woke right gasoline is unaffordable but we're woke we have a 1.7 trillion dollars in student debt but our universities are woke we can't afford homes but the executives who build them are woke And they're starting to think, you know, it's not a coincidence.

There's a cause and effect relationship, that the more woke you are and the louder you are about it, the less likely you're going to be competent or you're going to operate under merocratic principles you know victor i think maybe we should zigzag here and go to the two-part piece about when citizenship dies you have written this for your website victorhanson.com it's uh premium content but i'm a subscriber so i can read it and even print it out and I think we should talk about it a little.

Folks who are listening should subscribe and they can read the whole darn thing.

But this is kind of related to what we were just talking about.

I would like you to address why you wrote this and when does citizenship die?

And you talk in this piece about the history of citizenship.

I think we've talked about that before in a podcast.

I think it would be good to hear you reflect on that again.

And then the very last paragraph of the part two, you write: a few pause to reflect that a large multiracial democracy is history's rare, fragile, and volatile artifact, or that until recently, America was the only nation in history that had even tried such an ambitious project.

Victor, I think that's one of the painful things here.

It's like, this is unique, what we have, and we're screwing the pooch on it.

Now, maybe you aren't, and I'm not, but certainly our overlords are.

That's kind of the theme of the Die In Citizen that comes out on October 5th.

I'm trying to remind people.

that just because we're here 233 years, it's not on autopilot because people worked at it.

We have multiracial democracies.

India is one or multi-religious democracy or ethnic.

We have Brazil is a multi-they don't work very well.

But the idea that you're going to put people from all over the world and they're going to have a common citizenship and their first primary and important affinity is going to be with the shared idea of citizenship and the Constitution rather than people who look like themselves.

That's not the natural way of things.

It never happened before in the past.

And when that did, people did attempt it in Rome in the late second century, during the Ottoman period, during the Caliphate, during the Soviet Union, they could do it, but only with a degree of coercion and force that would be intolerable today.

And so they forced an ideology down everybody's throats.

And they were not citizens, they were subjects or serfs of these imperial projects.

So we should be a little bit humble about what we're doing now.

We're unraveling the melting pot in assimilation, integration, and intermarriage, and we're now starting to revert to a very dark age idea of tribalism.

We should think back what tribalism is in history.

It's a migratory kin-based system.

the Goths, the Oscars, the Vandals, the Huns.

And they migrate in and out of areas where nations have no borders.

So there's not a particular landscape that people share within such limits.

They have common common ideas, customs, tradition, laws, culture.

They have no pretense that they can spread their culture everywhere.

They think it's because they cannot that it's going to be unique and successful.

And in addition, it's based on a middle class.

The middle class, remember, as the classics of Western civilization, whether it's Aristotle or Plato or Locke or Montesquieu, they all tell us the same thing, that the middle class lacks the insider grifting of the wealthy that always want concessions.

They always want to rub shoulders with the people in power so they can get advantage.

And they lack the envy and the volatility of the poor and the dependence on the poor.

They're autonomous, independent citizens.

They're skeptical of rich and poor, and they're the backbone of a democracy.

When you start to lose that, when you start to lose the idea that we have a border and a confined place in which to develop these ideas of multiracial constitutional government, and then you're reverting to a tribalism where we all start talking about color and this whiteness, whiteness, whiteness, whiteness.

I was over at Stanford and there was a professor that day

who said that mask wearing was a sign of white privilege whiteness, but so was resistance to white.

And I'm thinking, so we've taken this word whiteness and we've done two things with it.

We've applied it to every single white person, regardless of their DNA.

Is Barack Obama white?

I don't know.

He's half white, isn't he?

Right.

But it doesn't matter.

matter.

We're just going to say it's whiteness.

And then we're going to say whiteness is all bad.

Well, people are going to say, well, wait a minute.

All of Western whiteness was bad.

It was bad to have all of this scientific development.

It's bad to have a constitutional government.

It's bad to have an independent court system.

It's bad to have private property.

It's bad to have telephones.

It's bad to have Silicon Valley.

A lot of this was made by whiteness, if that's what you call it.

I don't call it that, but they do.

The second thing they don't understand is for every whiteness, there has to be the corresponding what?

Blackness, brownness, yellowness?

And just as you say that all whiteness is bad and you can get away with that and stereotype it, then can other people who disagree with you say, well, if we're now on the territory of stereotyping and we can make a value judgment on entire people without exceptions for individual, then maybe we're going to say all black people are responsible for an excessive crime rate.

And we're going to go right back, revert back to where we were during the racist times, the pre-Civil War and right after the Civil War or we can say the same thing so we don't want to use terms like whiteness brownness blackness yellowness because it's a pandora's box and when you open it's going to frighten you and it's retrograde so that was half of the book the dying citizen that was the organic forces that are destroying citizenship and the idea of I'm a citizen and I'm proud to be of the middle class and I'm proud to live in borders.

I'm proud to honor the traditions and customs of my ancestors.

I'm proud to have holidays.

I'm proud to honor the letter of the law of the Constitution.

And I don't care whether my neighbor looks like me or not, but he's a fellow American.

That is being destroyed.

And that's what that essay is about.

And then subsequent essays on the website, I'm trying to give a preview of the elite version because the elites are doing it, not just organically, like the middle classes and poor,

but the elites are systematically creating an administrative state where the unelected and unaudited and uncensored,

they're free to do whatever they want.

And whether they're in the CIA or the IRS or the FBI, it doesn't matter, or the DIA, DHS, even this HSS, they're all unelected and they're making laws as judge, jury, and executioner.

And they're applying to us.

And whether it's Jim Comey or Peter Strzok or Michael Hayden or James Clapper, they're all, they're enormously powerful.

Right.

And cash in on it, too.

Yeah, we have these evolutionaries.

These are the keen minds, the elites, the legal theorists.

And they're telling us, well, you know, Wyoming has 250,000 per senator, and California has to have 20 million to get a senator.

That's not fair.

And they don't understand that that's in the Constitution, the state, federal system.

Oh, we don't need nine.

Supreme Court justices.

That's only 150 years old.

Oh, we don't need 50 states.

That's only 60 years old.

We don't need that filibuster.

That's only 180 years old.

We don't need that electoral college.

That's only 233 years old.

Oh, we don't need individual state voting laws.

That's in the Constitution.

So they're trying to evolve.

And what do they want to evolve to?

They want to destroy the citizen and make him a subject of a totalitarian project where everybody is equal on the back end, the result.

And then finally, in the book, I talk about the globalists.

And these are people who feel that their natural affinities are with like-minded people abroad.

And they love the United Nations, they love the HWO, they love the EU, and they like them because they exercise an amount of power by fiat.

And they're never questioned, and they always do it for cosmic justice or cosmic equality or diversity.

And they don't like the United States.

They don't like the messiness.

They don't like the Constitution.

But they're citizens of the world.

That's where the word cosmopolitan comes from in Greek.

And they're very, very dangerous.

You can see cosmopolitans at work, whether it's Anthony Fauci having more trust in the Wuhan lab to do gain of function than to tell the American people why he's doing that and what he's doing it.

Or when you see the International Criminal Court being promoted by the United States government, or you see Anthony Blinken asking the UN human rights commissioners to come in to see whether we're, what, racist or sexist and examine American society, that's a surrender of sovereignty.

Believe me, a lot of people have wanted a globalist, pan-national,

intranational

world government.

Wendell Wilke, right before World War II, to utopian and Fabian socialist

of the turn of the century, people like Alfred Zimmern or Gilbert Murray, very brilliant guys, socialist Fabians, and it's never worked.

It's never worked.

When they tried it in the 30s with the League of Nations, Mussolini said, nope, I'm just going to take my fleet and go right through Suez and kill a bunch of East Africans and stop me.

But the League of Nations says you can't, tough.

Or when the Japanese said, we want to go rape Manchuria and steal lots of China.

And they said, you can't do that.

That's against the League edict.

Well, screw you.

I'll just leave the League of Nations.

It's never worked.

It's only as strong as its weakest link.

And there's about half the nations in the world who are not democratic.

Victor, we have about seven minutes left.

And so we'll talk about your other piece for American Greatness.

And by piece, I mean essay, The Drossy Touch of Joe Biden, that begins with you writing, almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross.

And in this, it's a very lengthy essay, you break down some of these.

I'm glad you could have used another word, Victor, but you used dross, so that was good.

You talk about the Afghan catastrophe, inflation fiasco, the border disaster, energy insufficiency, and the race calamity.

It's all very well worth reading, but then you get to this special section by my standards.

You ask the question, so why does Biden so willfully exercise this destructive touch that blows up anything he tapped?

And you give five possible theories, and at the end, you say they're not.

mutually exclusive.

Actually, I think they all may apply.

Would you talk about this essay, Victor?

And if you want to delineate any of these theories that answer that question, like why is Biden wired to have such a destructive touch?

Everybody realizes that the border is not what it was in 2020.

Inflation is not what it was.

It's high now, not low.

And we're not energy sufficient.

We were short 3 million barrels a day that we were producing.

And the ABOM Accords are gone, and our special relationship with Israel is under question.

We're funding the Palestinians again.

We're trying to get in the Randia with Paris Accord, all that.

So it is different.

And so there's a lot of choices.

One is that he's non compos mentes, fancy Latin phrase for not in possession of his mind.

And that's, he doesn't really know what he's doing.

I gave, I think, as I remember in that article, I said, if anybody's watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, when Bruce Dern wakes up and Brad Pitt's kind of saying, you remember me?

And he just go, ah, ah, what are you doing?

And Joe Biden does that.

He gets angry, but he doesn't really know what he's doing.

So some other people are running.

I don't know who that is, if it's Ron Clain or it's the Obamas or it's the squad or consortium of Chuck Schumer, Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders.

But that's one theory that things are so awful because nobody's in charge.

He just doesn't know what he's doing.

The second is that He just was always in mediocrity, but he was always insecure and he saw this wokeness.

And he thought, wow, they want to use me to carry him across the November finish.

I'll let him do it.

But then once he got across, he thought, hmm, I can be the real FDR in a way that Obama never was.

I don't want to be old Joe Biden from Scranton that was kind of a blowhard in the Senate and a mediocrity.

I want to go hard, hard left.

I want to get famous.

I want to be loved by somebody.

And that's a possibility.

And then the other is that although he's lost his cognitive abilities to some degree, he's just Joe Biden, what he always was.

And what was he?

He lied about his resume when he ran first time for president.

He stole things from Neil Kinnock, the labor candidate in Britain.

He plagiarized his speech.

He lied about his grades.

He was accused of sexual assault with Tara Reed.

He did a...

character assassination on Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.

I think Robert Gates has been very much quoted that on every major policy decision

that Joe Biden was involved in, he got it wrong.

So he's just what he is.

He's just always what he was.

He's just incompetent.

And now we've gotten a competent, unfortunately, that has power.

And then, you know, he's just on autopilot.

The fourth alternative is he just comes to work for a couple of hours.

He just said, hey, you guys, what did Trump do?

I'm doing the opposite.

Well, you know, he's got the Abram Accords and he's reaching out to a moderate.

Ah, just go to Iran.

That can't be right.

Or, well, you know, you don't have any illegal aliens coming across and the fence is nearing critical mass where it's going to get into areas in Texas that will willingly make, oh, just stop it.

Let everybody in.

Or, you know, we're the largest natural gas producer in the world.

We'd not depend on the military.

Ah, just stop the pipeline.

Stop ANWAR.

Stop the federal leasing.

Tell those frackers we don't need them.

So he's just...

Pavlovian in response to anything that Trump did.

And then finally, and a little bit more nefariously, I think I mentioned John Guillaume.

That was one of my favorite Star Trek episodes.

Some of the listeners know it.

The guy who was dressed up in the Nazi uniform, he's doped up and they're whispering in his ear.

Or it's key, I was going to say, King Theoden and Lord of the Rings, the king of Rohan, where he's been possessed and he's lost his faculties and the grima worm tongue whispers in his ear and he's possessed by him.

And that's sort of Joe Biden is held hostage because of the Faustian bargain that he made with the left, that he really can't renege on it because they got him elected by getting the left and the minority vote to vote for him, and then he owes them.

But I added a final twist, and I can't figure out Hunter Biden.

I mean,

okay, he's got all these porno videos,

he's got these text messages where he basically implicates his father as the 10%,

the big guy.

He leaves a crackpipe in a rental car, he impregnates a stripper.

He

has carnal relations with the widow of his brother.

He has lost three laptops,

and maybe one of them he thinks was to the Russians.

And you put all that together.

So you think that when his father was president, somebody would go to him and say, listen, Hunter, you are a genuine F-up, and everything you do is F'd up.

So you're going to behave for the first time in your life or you're going to destroy your father.

And then Hunter, as we get, I'm gleaning now from his own messaging to his family.

And he says, no, I'm not.

The big guy lived in a big, beautiful multi-million dollar home.

He's got three homes.

You think he earned that on his Senate salary?

That's

my whole family.

Yeah.

My whole family, this whole Biden family are grifters.

Right.

And I'm grifter Numero Uno.

And I made the money.

Joe had the influence and I had to sell the name, but somebody had to get in those damn planes and hang out with those crooked Ukrainians and then go to the Chinese and the Russians and deal with these people.

And I did.

And yeah, I smoked crack and I went through a lot of sordid escapades and I'm a joke.

But you know what?

If you keep pushing me and blaming me after I enrich this family, I'm going to do something stupid.

Like, I don't know, put a straw on my mouth and blow paint onto a canvas and call it art and then go to a New York gallery and sell them for $500,000 with anonymous buyers who are obviously people

from abroad or at home that want leverage with the Biden administration.

Ha ha anonymously, but we know that's not really anonymously.

So I think he's kind of holding his own father hostage in a way.

And I think he's going to be more reckless until they, and I think that explains why Joe Biden and his team will never, you know, just say Hunter's Hunter and he can do what he wants.

It's always, oh, hey, that's a lie.

Hunter would never do that.

And so you add all of those exegesis up why Biden is destroying things systematically.

And it's pretty depressing because they all have validity, I think, to some degree.

And he's not going to stop.

He's going to continue to do what he's doing.

And the left loves it.

Not just the anarchistic left and the nihilist left, but the progressive turn this into socialism left.

Well, Victor,

we got about one or two minutes left, and I'd like to save it for something.

So thanks for the discussion of this piece, The Drossy Touch of Joe Biden.

That's on American greatness.

So was,

does America still work?

Victor, I want to read one review of the show.

We thank our listeners, of course, for listening.

We thank those who go to iTunes and leave rated reviews.

One to five stars, if you leave five stars for Victor's wisdom, we greatly appreciate that.

Many people leave comments, and here's one by Lendersman titled Honest Truth.

We love capital letters, love everything Mr.

Hansen does.

So easy to understand, and he is unbelievably smart and accurate.

We first came across him from a Hillsdale College series on World War II, just fantastic.

So, Victor, you're also the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and it's around this time of year where you head that away and be going.

Tell us about what's going to happen.

Well, I'm going to leave it now.

I do that.

This is my 18th year,

and I have an 11-month contract from the Hoover Institution.

So when I started in 2004, Hillsdale asked me to teach a entire semester class over a period of four weeks.

I think I'm down a little over two now.

And I'm going to teach this semester World War II.

We got a lot of people come in from the community of all ages, and I let them sit in.

And I do that for two weeks.

And then I'm going to, as I'm doing that, I hope I can do it.

I've never quite done this before, but I'll be teaching four hours in the afternoon.

Then I'm going to do four-hour sessions in the morning and do an online course called The Dying Citizen about stuff that you and I are talking about, which will be in the book that appears with that same name on October 5th.

So I'm desperately.

Do you find time to sleep or what?

I'm kind of crazy, going nuts because we have our three podcasts, the culturalist and the traditionalist, and the classicist.

And then I do about 4,000 words or 5,000 words a week in writing with the two columns and usually a long book review or an essay.

And I live on a farm, so it's right during almond harvest.

And it's kind of hectic and dusty and dirty.

So I have not been sleeping very much, but I'm hoping to get all of this done.

And then by October, return to a normal life.

Yeah, to promote your book.

Oh, some degree of normal.

Well, Victor, I wish you safe travels there.

We'll find time to, hopefully, to record some podcasts.

Next week, we thank our listeners, victorhanson.com.

Go there, subscribe, and get the premium content.

If you do me a little favor, civilthoughts.com, you'll find my weekly email.

And that's about it, I guess.

So, we thank our folks again for listening.

And thank you, Victor, for all the wisdom you shared.

And we'll be back again next week with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Classicist.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody.