Hallmarks of Civilizational Decay, Old and New

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayna Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is a military historian, classicist, rancher, farmer.

Sometime I got to figure out what's the difference between a rancher and a farmer.

Ranchers are more likely associated with livestock.

Yeah.

Do you call your place a ranch, though?

You know, it's funny.

Everybody, when I was growing up, said, can we come out to the ranch?

So, yeah, they used that, but it was actually, we never.

We had a lot of farm animals.

We had horses, mules, rabbits.

We all had rabbits, chickens, but we were all,

it was all tree fruit.

Honey.

At one point, we had

my two grandparents, we were farming both of them 180 acres of plums, nectarines, raisins, grapes.

Yeah.

Delicious.

Well, it was all good.

This man, Victor Davis Hanson, also has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

You'll find it at VictorHanson.com.

Please go there.

If you're a fan of Victor's writings, you will find links to everything he does, his weekly essay for American Greatness, weekly syndicated column, links to this podcast, the archives, links to his books.

And Victor, twice a week, writes

a piece, an article exclusive for The Blade of Purses.

He also does an exclusive video.

And if you're a fan of Victor's, you're going to want to see it.

You want to read it.

$65 a year, $6.50 a month if you want to stick your toe in the water.

We are recording on Sunday, September 21st.

This particular episode will be up on Thursday, the 25th.

There's lots of Donald Trump foreign policy and immigration issues to discuss.

Get Victor's take on.

And we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Sanson Show.

By the way, I'm Jack Fowler, lucky man for five years or so now.

Been

in the position to ask my good friend Victor questions that I think you, a fair listener, fair watcher,

would want to pose to him.

And Victor, let's get started with Donald Trump and the H-1B visa, which is $1,000 a year, Trump change for a lot of people.

And he added a zero, two zeros to that.

$100,000 a year.

What are your thoughts on the visa as a thing and on Trump's action?

Well, there's a lot of criticism of the visa.

It was supposedly for advanced degree people in

computer engineering, these rare skill sets.

And the idea was that if the universities are going to cash in and have a million point one foreign students here in the United States, and maybe half of them in engineering schools, rather than take that expertise back home,

after we have educated them, we would then give them green cards and then we would be enriched by their superior knowledge.

That was the idea behind it, so they could stay.

The problem was that the criticism of it was that

that didn't really happen all that much, and more importantly, they were importing people with BAs in computer engineering and paying them less.

So, they said there was a shortage of American coders, etc., etc.

This is even as AI is now starting to make them redundant.

And so, they were just bringing in people they said

that were necessary because they couldn't find any Americans and they wanted to be globally competitive.

And then the criticism against them was, oh yeah,

then why do we have so many unemployed skilled Americans in these fields?

So then I think what Trump is saying is,

well, I got all these people on my back, the employers, and they want this program to go, but I also know

that their critics have a point, so I'm going to split the difference and charge them $100,000 each.

And then they'll see exactly how valuable these people really are.

And of course the answer is, well, if you pay a coder $175,000 and you can pay these guys $120,000, you say $50,000, you can make up the money in two years.

So, but one other thing to the story is that people, when you look at the tariffs or the streamlined platinum citizenship, where you pay, what, $5 million or $10 million and get, if you're wealthy, you can get it, or this charge.

What Trump is trying to do, and I know that it's just piecemeal given the magnitude and comparison of what we spend, but I think he's looking at most of these acts as revenue enhancers.

That's why he looks at tariffs.

It's not just reciprocity or fairness.

He wants to raise money because we owe so much money.

And he does not want to cut.

Traditionally, the Republican, I think people said, if you want to balance the budget, you've got to control the growth of Social Security and Medicare.

You've got to put a cap on, can't go any higher than inflation or maybe half of it.

You've got to do something or cut back this spiraling disability where anybody who, you know, supposedly can't read as well at five gets disability.

You can't afford that.

But he doesn't want to do that.

So he doesn't want to touch the social programs, but then, and you want cuts.

And the thing about tax cuts is in the short term, they cause greater deficits, in the long term, they cause more revenue.

But to get to the revenue, you've got to go through a bad period.

So when you have these tax cuts and you won't touch Social Security, you're not going to make a lot of progress right now on a $1.9 trillion

annual deficit.

Unless

you can raise $300 billion from tariffs, that's what Scott Vesant said, or or you can raise $10 billion, $30, $40 billion from fees like these, or you can let Doge,

I don't know, Doge is up to $200 billion.

So that's what he's trying to do.

He's trying to look at the revenue side and not the cut side.

But

if you want to redo the defense budget and you want to

not cut Social Security, then you don't really have a lot of...

There's only so much Doge you can cut.

And that's the dilemma that he has.

And maybe he can grow, if he can get 4% GDP, he can grow his way out of it if he controls spending.

But we'll see.

Well, I'm slow, Victor.

I'm very slow.

And I see these issues as policy issues, the H-1B visa, because

I understand what you're saying.

I agree with you.

Donald Trump sees this as a revenue issue.

But

the perception perception is that it's

somehow an act of fairness.

But then, on other efforts, take, and I know you've been critical of Donald Trump saying he wants to raise the number of Chinese students to come to America from 300,000 to 600,000.

I don't know.

It's sort of, well, if you're going to be, if you're going to invoke justice here,

why don't you cut China as opposed to raising it?

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, I agree with you.

And if you think that 1 to 2%,

and that's charitable, are actively engaged in spying and you've got 3,000 spies, why do you want 6,000?

And

what would they do if you had 600,000 Americans floating around China and all in engineering?

I don't think that would be tolerated.

I think Americans are...

There's one common theme to all these, and that's just reciprocity.

All they want to do is be treated the way that people treat us.

And we want to treat them the same way.

So, China, we don't send balloons across your, we're not trying to buy up farmland next to your military bases.

We don't have 600,000 students in your country.

That's all.

And

I think that's what people want.

And China doesn't want that.

We don't create viruses

now that Fauci's out, I can guarantee it.

And then, you know, infect the world and then lie about it.

Has anyone in the Trump administration, if you're able to say, gotten back to you?

Because you've been critical of this increase in the Chinese student visas, said, look, Victor, you don't get it, or this is what we're trying.

Has there been any pushback?

I try to be independent, so I've had people tell me that.

I don't think I'm as influential to rank as somebody that they worry about.

I've had calls from people

of various sides.

But mine wasn't just directed at China, it's the 1.1 million students.

And part of my criticism was the cynicism of the universities that are gouging, they're raising their tuition above the rate of inflation.

And that's predicated on a student loan guarantees the federal government knows that there'll be a high default rate at that high price, and yet they still subsidize the loan so that the university can get away with it.

And then the other side of the coin is they don't give any scholarships to foreign students, so it's 100%, 110% in real dollars of pure profit.

And that's, and why are they doing that?

Because they're funding an enormous amount of administrators and special centers for this and programs for that.

Many of them DEI, they're not academic.

And they're no longer universities.

They're sort of a 360-degree toll.

It's kind of like when you go into Walmart and you see

the optometrist, the pharmacy,

the food, the toy section.

That's what the university thinks it is.

It's got your DEI office, it's got your psychological counseling office, it's got your postmodern literature center.

It's nothing to do with the actual instruction.

And so that overhead, an administrative overhead,

is dependent on government

money, so there's no moral hazard.

I mean, so when they default on those loans, I know they say it's only 10 or 12 percent, but the big scandal is there's a lot of non-active loans.

They're not defaulted, they're just not paying the interest.

And that's that can get up to 20 or 30 percent.

And so universities know that.

They just would take those huge endowments and they'd let people in and say, here's the loan, and you better pay or, you know,

we have to pay out of our endowment.

We're going to back your loan with a bank.

You go to the bank, take the loan out, and that loan will be guaranteed by our endowment.

I guarantee you that the graduation rate would be more than half the people who entered college.

I guarantee you that they would graduate in four, not six years.

And I guarantee you that the number of sociological, therapeutic, gobbledygooked studies courses would drop.

And they would have a guy, just like when you go to the car salesman and you go in the final little step and

they bring the guy out before he tries to sell you

undercoating

or theft device or special tinning on your window.

He brings out a big book and says, Now, are you aware that this is the amount of interest you're paying?

This is the amount.

This is your income.

This is what your disposable.

And they do, they go through, especially in California.

Well, they need to do that.

They should just get a student and say, you are a sociology major.

Here is the average wage of a sociology major after the completion of college.

This is the amount of money you will owe us.

This is the amount of disposable income you will have.

Bingo, you won't be able to do it.

So we suggest that you either pay more money upfront or you major in landscape architecture or something.

Well, one last thing on the China front, we're going to take commercial and then

raise another

international matter.

I just want to recommend, and I did not show this to you, Victor, but the James G.

Martin Center for Academic Renewal, very solid website, has a piece related to this.

It's why north carolina schools should be for north carolina students because north carolina taxpayers have created this exactly not necessarily why why is this for students from china or or

the middle east or etc so anyway i want to recognize i said that the other day at a local er where i had to go in for an emergency i thought

half the people here are not from the united states you know what i mean and we're we're the taxpayers in the most taxed country in the world like it's very hard to get service because

many of these people,

half of the people, don't speak this language of the United States.

And when I'm sitting in to register, I'm about the only person that has a U.S.

health

policy.

The rest is all Medi-Cal.

Was Dante Alighieri on your shoulder while you were there?

I don't want to be mean-spirited.

When somebody's ill and I see them ill, I have a lot of empathy for them.

But I'm just suggesting that

I guess what I'm looking at is when I look back dispassionately at what Mayorkas and Biden did, when they let in 10 to 12 million people and they swarmed various areas like the Fresno airport in mid-morning, two in the morning, four in the morning flights directly from southern Mexico or

what they did to New York or Chicago.

They did not care about people having to deal with that.

Or they let in truck drivers who do not speak or read English and gave them licenses.

The people who did that are not going to be killed on the freeway by a jackknifed car.

They are not going to have their family killed by an illegal alien.

They're not going to have to go to an ER where you're going to be in line for two, three hours.

They don't have to do that.

And they should have to do that if they believe in it.

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So Victor, Donald Trump is considering

making the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

I would have thought it already was, but it's not.

Long overdue.

You know, it was founded in the 20s in Egypt, and some of its creators came to the United States and didn't like the United States.

But its whole idea was that

with the erosion of colonialism, it was an anti-colonial movement, but with the erosion of colonialism, what was replacing it was Soviet statism.

It was the United Arab Republic, the idea that, you know, Nasser was all the Assads or Nasser, they were all,

they said they were Muslims, but they they were mostly secularists.

And

they were going to bring back, they succeeded in their vision.

If you went to an Arab country or Afghanistan or Pakistan in 1955, it would not be nearly as Islamic as it is now.

And so that was the idea, and it was anti-Western as well.

And it's a violent,

one of its credos is that political violence is accepted, especially when it's against the non-believer, the infidel.

I'm not aware of how emboldened Muslim Brotherhood people are,

but

I mean, the Egyptians,

Cisi has kind of banned them or doesn't want them, but they do embrace political violence.

Everybody knows that.

They do.

The Egyptian government's driven them out because of that.

And

all of the people who killed Sadat, I mean, they weren't Al-Qaeda.

Zawahiri was Muslim Brotherhood.

And so, yeah, I think that would be good that they did that.

And the same thing with Antifa.

But the answer to all these people is they just say, well, you know,

just because they don't like Israel doesn't mean that I'm not Muslim Brotherhood.

Or, you know, Muslim Brotherhood is just a generic term.

You know, we're Muslims and we're brothers, so you call us brotherhood and we're anti-fascist.

So if you shorten the name Antifa, it doesn't mean that I have spaghetti arms and I'm in a black costume and I have a mask on and I key your car and I beat up people who are at 90 years old in a wheelchair.

That's what they say.

So it's going to be hard to find organized cells.

You know what I mean?

Where they actually...

And I say that because when they went after promise keepers, proud boys, remember they said that they were terrorist organizations.

They really, and they were much less decentralized than these people are.

Yeah, General Milley is more concerned about them than he would be about the Muslim Brotherhood or

for four years.

It was white supremacist, white supremacist,

white, white, white terrorism.

And

that might have been true 30 years ago with the Oklahoma bombing or something like that.

But my gosh, Ruby,

it isn't true now.

Most of the terrorist acts the last 15 to 20 years are from the left, and yet he deliberately lied about that.

Well, many of the terrorist acts before that, all those bombings in the 60s and 70s.

It went like this, Jack.

It was left-wing terrorists, 60s, 70s, 80s, and then it slacked off.

And to the degree there was terrorism, it was probably 50-50 left-right, and then it went back to its norm

where it's overwhelmingly left-wing.

And somebody objects to that, just ask yourself: compare January 6th to

2020, and just do do the body count, damage count, officer count, arsons.

And if you don't believe that, then go look at the Tesla and see how many, I don't know, see how many Mercedes or BMWs were keyed by right-wingers.

Try that.

And let's, you know, remember that Barack Obama's guru, Bill Ayers, was one of these terrorists.

His ghost rider, I think.

He's ghostfrider.

All right, well, Victor, when we come back, we're going to talk about what?

Trump and Bagram Air Base and Tom Holman and migrant kids.

And we're going to do that when we come back from these important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show recording on

Sunday, September 21st.

This episode's up on Thursday, the 25th.

So,

Victor, here's as I juggle my screen here.

Trump threatens Afghanistan with bad things over Bagram Air Base.

Quote, if Afghanistan doesn't give Bagram Air Base back to those who built it, the United States of America, bad things are going to happen, Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Victor, what do you make of this?

Well, it's their land.

We had no formal rental agreement that I knew of.

It was just in a state of war.

But we didn't build it.

The Russians did, as I understand.

But we did put $300 million.

Trump is a builder and a businessman.

What drives him crazy when he looks at Afghanistan, his plan to draw down was pretty clear that he wanted to do it very gradually.

And when the Taliban got a little over anxious, he was going to bomb them.

And then there was going to be a residual force of about 5,000 Americans about 60 or 70 miles away in this fortified bunker, kind of like the man who would be king's

city up in the mountain or something.

They were going to have a completely defensible place.

And if the Taliban shot rockets at it or droned, they would hit back with air power.

And it was going to be sustainable.

And

China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, all of these strategic challenges

could be met by this particular base.

And then Biden came in and he threw away a $300 million investment.

He threw away a billion-dollar new embassy.

He threw away $50 billion

in munitions and parts and vehicles and planes.

And that Wolfkrump nuts.

So now he thinks, you know, I want to go back to my original, but it's very hard to put the horse back into the barn.

And most people in the MAGA movement would say something like, I'm sick of Afghanistan.

I don't want one, to quote Bismarck, it's not worth the bones of one American soldier to go over there.

It's a mess.

Let them be onto themselves.

They're selling our munitions all over the world in Terras Mars.

There's nothing redeeming about the Taliban.

We want nothing to do with them.

We don't want to go into that God-forsaken country.

We can manage without that airbase.

And so I don't think that's going to fit the Jacksonian.

I think he thinks it fits Jacksonianism that no better friend.

We're not looking for trouble.

We'll cut a deal with the Taliban.

We'll pay them rent.

They'll won't like us.

for all of our sins, they would prefer us to the Chinese, maybe, or the Russians, and nobody will come in if we got this huge air base there.

It's a win-win, but you're dealing with terrorists,

and you can't deal with these people.

We tried for 20 years, we did everything.

We went in and we routed bin Laden, and then we stayed, and we brought Karzai in.

We had a consensual government, we built parks,

sewer, water.

We did everything.

And their attitude was, you're an infidel, we don't want you here.

And this is our opium, and we have a right to sell heroin all over the world.

And get out.

And if you want to stay, we're going to kill you, and we're going to kill anybody that helps you.

And we don't mind death.

We have a cult of death, and we're going to fight, fight, fight.

And you

keep sending us people with bachelor's degree that email their kids every night at home and say, make sure you do your homework, that's going to be really bad for you, and we kill them.

But for us, we have a different view about the the afterlife and everything and we we feel there's paradise waiting for us when we kill you

and that and i think americans i'm not supporting criticizing trump or supporting i'm just saying that i my

when i gauge the tempo of the american mindset right now and i think i'm right about that i'm wrong a lot but i think in this particular case their idea about afghanistan is been there done that

kaput finished, period.

I don't want to go into that place again.

Let them have that.

I don't want Afghans coming over here unless they were helping us there and they are going to be hurt.

I don't want to go over there.

Just let them be and stew in their own juice.

It's tragic what they're doing to women.

We tried to have a gender studies.

We tried to have George Floyd posters.

We had pride flags and that cultural imperialism they didn't want.

So we're done.

And I think it's getting that way with Iraq, too, and Syria.

Well, I would hope most of the world, Victor, with the 12 million people coming

in the Biden administration, and because of the woeful state in their own countries, you have a feel for them.

But stay and fight.

Yeah, stay and fight.

And we don't want to go over to your country, so don't come over here and we'll get along.

That's the attitude of the American people as I gauge it.

I don't want you to come over here from Syria or Iraq

and for sure Gaza and the West Bank.

Please don't come over here, and we'll do our best not to go over there.

How's that?

You hate us, and we're indifferent, so just don't come.

And that's sort of our attitude.

And then their attitude is: no,

we hate you.

We want to kill you over there, and we want to come over to your country and get all the money and security and prosperity, and then trash it and hate it.

That's why don't you like us?

We know you like to be insulted.

We know you like to be whipped.

We're here to do that for you.

That's their attitude.

But I think people are done with it.

So I don't.

Baglam was a big mistake to let it go, as is the British, by getting rid of Diego Garcia, the island that's strategically located.

But the United States can endure without it.

But it can't keep getting involved in all these god-forsaken places and trying to teach people,

you know, I don't know, to be an American.

And they don't want it.

And you know they don't want it because when they come over here they want the money and they want the security and they want the prosperity but they want to be left alone they don't want to assimilate integrate

or become an American right away

they don't buy into e pluribus no they think

e pluribus unum for them is diversity equity and inclusion and they feel that we're stupid and we will

call them victims and give them exemptions and preferences and so they like coming over over here.

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i have garlic on my front door

okay all right here's a story a headline tom holman has an update on the migrant kids who went missing under the biden administration excuse me it's just under 25 000 found so far i think there were the number over 300,000.

25,000 found so far, Holman told America Report's co-host Sandra Smith, revealing the horrific conditions many of these children faced, with 27 of them sadly dying.

Many were in sex trafficking.

Many we found in forced labor, slavery.

I mean forced to work ungodly hours, not going to school, and of course not getting paid.

being abused.

So

we rescued thousands of children and President Trump is committed, I'm committed, that we're not going to stop looking for these children until we find every single one of them.

Victor,

I mean, this is Marquis de Saud must have had some role in the Biden administration.

And the Biden and the left's attitude is we would rather have these 300,000 young people exploited in the United States and don't dare try to find who they are and return them to their parents in another country.

We don't want that.

So

I think the left feels they're useful.

I don't understand.

It gets back to what remember Obama built these cages, and all of a sudden Trump inherited them to put

families or they weren't cages, they were just kind of detention centers, and then suddenly it was Trump did it.

And so it's emblematic of what they do.

They let in all these people, and they have no criminal background.

500,000 are criminals.

There's no health, whether it's measles or HIV or COVID.

You have no idea who these people are who are coming in.

And you let them all in, and that's a moral thing.

And then to try to rectify the situation, which is hard and complex and bad publicity, then that is amoral.

You can't rectify it.

So that's what they did.

It was almost like they dug a veritable landmine and put it in all over the United States and said, this is wonderful.

It's going to blow up under Trump.

Because correcting the problem was much harder than causing the problem.

It's very easy to say, come on in,

you're welcome.

Oh, you have measles?

We don't care.

Oh, you shot somebody in Oaxaca?

No problem.

Oh, you've got COVID?

Well,

we're not going to require you to have a vaccination to get in.

We only do that to the U.S.

military.

We kick the U.S.

military.

Colonels, majors, privates, if you don't get our vaccine, mRNA, we kicked you out, 8,500.

But we let in 8,500 people without a vaccination because you are more entitled than ours.

That was the idea.

It was the most bizarre thing I'd ever seen in my life.

Every night you'd see that, you know, 10,000 people swarming, and then you'd have this pathological liar, Mallorca's, and he'd say, the border is secure.

The border is secure.

Don't dare say the border is not secure.

They're whipping people.

They're whipping.

It was just...

It was awful.

It was an insult to everybody's intelligence.

And it's not not happening now, so that's wonderful.

There were just certain things under Biden and under the first Trump administration that people did and got away with, I could not believe.

Have you noticed another thing that's not happening, Josh?

I'm all ears.

Yes.

We do not have retired generals like Mark Milley.

He did call Trump a fascist, but Trump was not president yet.

But we're not seeing, as we did during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, four-star admirals and generals who will not be named saying,

and I'm quoting literally,

his detention centers are like Auschwitz.

He's a liar.

He's Mussolini.

He's got to be removed sooner the better.

He's like the Nazis on the other side of the beach at D-Day.

We're not seeing that.

You know why?

Because that's a violation of Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

And this particular military, under Pete Hexeth, I guarantee you, they have sent out the word that if you call your commander-in-chief a Nazi or Mussolini or a pathological liar or you advocate that he should be removed before an election or you say he's comparable to the people at Auschwitz, you are subject even in retirement to the Uniform Code of Military and you will be fined or court-martialed.

They've sent the word out and you haven't heard any of it.

The same thing about immigration.

They have told people all over the world, you're not going to be able to get in with the wall, and if you get in, you'll never be able to come in legally again if we catch you.

And that's why one million have self-deported.

So it's bringing back normality and common sense.

That's true, it is.

But it also reminds us that deterrence exists, that people don't do certain things because, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, they adjudicate whether the risk is worth the benefit or will it incur sure punishment.

And so, I don't know, a guy like General Hayden thinks to himself,

well, that was really neat to go on X and show Auschwitz and then compare it to Trump's border thing.

That was really neat, and I got a lot of really good things out of that.

And I just don't think I'm going to post it because I don't know what they're going to do to me if I do because I'm breaking the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

So,

who knows?

They might take my pension.

So, they don't do it.

And that's kind of a sad commentary, isn't it?

Yeah, quite.

Speaking of sad commentaries, let's return to Barack Obama.

And if about the Jimmy Kimmel situation, Jimmy Kimmel was his, my bro, my buddy, you know, Jimmy Kimmel.

There's a headline here:

Let's be clear about what's happening to Jimmy Kimmel.

I think that's quoting Obama, and I always hated that about Obama.

Let's be clear.

He said as he was going to be going.

He didn't say the arc of history is Brent Bimby.

Well, here's what

he put up on X.

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn't like.

And then this guy, Tactical Wisdom,

on X,

he reposted that and wrote, bro, bro, you literally had the FBI raid a reporter's house and tapped his phones because you didn't like what they said.

Shut the blank up.

Remember, I keep going back to that poor Missouri clown in the rodeo.

He went out one day with an Obama mask, and Obama sent the word.

And they fired that guy, and they banned him for life for just having a mask that

caricatured Obama.

There was a report that when Rose,

what's her name?

You know, the one that was canceled, Roseanne Barr.

So Roseanne Barr, yeah.

Yeah.

Obama.

By ABC.

Obama had called up and complained.

But they canceled her, and she had a lot more audience than Jimmy Kimmel.

And believe me, Trump is a business person.

Right now, if Jimmy Kimmel had 17 million listeners like Johnny Carson, he could say anything he wanted.

Trump wouldn't say anything, and he wouldn't be able to get rid of him.

And the same thing is true of Colbert.

He's got the highest rate.

Yeah, he's got like 2 million.

You can listen to both of them together free, and they don't have the audience that Greg Gutfeldt does taped in the afternoon for later airing that you have to pay for.

So that's the issue that it's a lot of people wrote that.

Joe Concha wrote a really good article.

It's not free speech.

It's a free market.

And these people were draining 30, 40, 50 million dollars.

I don't understand that.

All they did was come out with a band on the stage, and they had a $50 million budget.

And

they were losing tons of money.

So these executives said, wow,

those guys in Dayton don't want to buy it anymore.

Hmm.

That guy down there in Casper, up there in Casper says that the locals don't watch him.

So

the locals didn't want to buy the ABC product.

And it was slumping and it was costing them money.

and they wanted an out.

And so they basically said to themselves, Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel are crazy.

They're fanatics.

They say horrible things and they're losing us money.

So all we have to do is wait.

And when they say something really, really crazy, then we're going to pounce and say, you know, you're disrupting.

And then they'll blame Trump.

But it wasn't anything to do with that.

It was just money.

Disney would have kept Kimmel on.

If he had 10 million, they would have kept him no matter what.

And the thing is, the people who are arguing now were cheering on the fact that

Facebook and Twitter banned Trump.

He had none.

And then when he had Little Parlier, Amazon and Facebook and Google, they banned it.

They took his app.

You couldn't even get on it.

They destroyed it.

And then they partnered with the FBI, the old Twitter and Facebook.

Remember that?

They said that the laptop was

Russian collusion, and if the New York Post said no, it's authentic, they would not allow that on their platform.

And then they were a revolving door.

They hired about 11 FBI.

They hired James Baker as their lead counsel from the FBI, making $7 million.

They were merged with social media.

They used social media, the left did, to censor people.

That was their forte.

So,

Pastor Obama needs a jet back to

Colorama, and then, or Reverend Obama can go to Hawaii, or he can go to Martha's Vineyard, but he does this bad habit of, you know, looking online and saying to Michelle, you know, I got to weigh in on this.

Where's the jet?

I'm going to fly into New York, Washington, tell everybody how morally inferior they are that I am, and go back.

And, well, these black men don't, they're thinking about Trump.

They don't know what's good for.

They're suffering from Marxist false conscience.

I'm going to go lecture them.

And I'll fly back.

And that's what he does.

And he's a complete hypocrite.

He started the whole idea of the merger of government and media as a fusion to hurt their enemies.

And that's what they did.

And you know they did.

And,

you know,

if it's hands up, don't shoot, and we know it's a lie, doesn't matter.

The CNN anchor people will march around going, hands up, don't shoot.

Nobody complained.

So that's basically what all of these people who are mad now are saying is that Jimmy Kimmel has a God-given right to have 300 guests and one Republican, fine.

He has a God-given right to hate Donald Trump, fine.

But he doesn't have a God-given right to use the airways and say something in a time of national crisis that he knows is a lie, that the right-wing MAGA killed Charlie Kirk, and even that might have been fine, except he was losing Disney millions of dollars because he's talentless, and he's a broken record.

And people said,

When that thing came on, they said all across America, if they were watching that network, they said, oh, I got to go to bed.

Turn it off.

And that's what they did.

Johnny Carson never did that.

He was very careful.

He knew that.

He knew that it was in his interest not to come down on one side or the other, but to make fun of all politicians and not to make fun of them in a nasty way or in a way that was untrue.

And that's how he was successful.

And then the next generation, David Letterman and those people, Jon Stewart, they started to break down and then the floodgates were open.

Yeah.

David Letterman coming out like some prophet of old descending from meeting Jesus on the Transfiguration, Elijah, to attack what's gone on here.

But he was the one, you're right, you started that stuff.

Sarah Palin's daughter should have been raped.

And he was the one that gave us

the new late-night talk show as Mr.

Snark, Mr.

Cynical, Mr.

Sarcastic.

So every time he said something, it was,

he he didn't mean it.

It was supposed to be mean-spirited and you were supposed to be on an inside joke as he insulted someone.

Anything he said, even in praise, was not authentic.

He was a sarcastic, mean-spirited person.

And then we remember he had a special little room upstairs where he entertained guests and stuff.

It was kind of weird.

All of them were weird.

And now it's really the height of hypocrisy that these people who censored and deplatformed and thought that was great.

Somebody on the Internet had a

melange of Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris,

this person should be shut down.

This is disinformation.

They should prosecute.

Well, Jimmy Kimmel was one of them.

And you mentioned Roseanne by bar.

When she was canned, this was 2018 on the show that night, he said, ABC, to their credit, didn't waste any time.

They canceled their show today.

I'm not a fan of censorship, but this wasn't about free speech.

It was about consequences for saying something vile.

You can say what you want, but networks don't have to pay you to say it.

Actions have consequences.

ABC made the right call.

This is Jimmy Kimmel's.

Yeah, I did.

And what did you say after Charlie Cook?

You said that Donald Trump's mourning was like a four-year-old over a dead goldfish.

You compared him to a dead goldfish.

That is vile.

And Roseanne Barr had a bigger audience than you ever will have.

And so you were fired because you were vile and you were boring, and no one would pay anything to put an ad on your show.

So you were overpaid.

And we all will get back to this thing about, as I told Sammy, market value.

Everybody in every walk of life has market value and a free market system.

So we'll see what your market value is because right now you are a subsidy.

You were a court gesture that corporate America, Disney, thought they could afford to go out and entertain the hard left.

And the hard left then would not attack them so much.

So that was an investment, but it was not a market-driven.

Now it's a market-driven reality.

So you're out there, everybody.

Just think, everybody, he's like Steve Oberhellman, right?

Is that his name?

Oberman.

Oberman.

Stephen.

Oh,

Keith Oberman, yeah.

Yeah.

Keith Oberman.

And when they fired him, what was his market value?

It was Al Jazeera, I think.

Yeah, it was Al Jazeera.

And the same thing when any of these people are fired.

So you go out right now, Jimmy, and you lend yourself another $20 million contract.

I don't think it's going to happen.

Do you know Keith Oberman?

Go ahead.

No, it's true.

He doesn't have a market value.

And either does Jimmy Fallon, and either does

Colbert.

They don't.

Yeah, well, I think the networks themselves may

wager that Greg Gutfeldt makes less than each of those three.

Oh, I agree with you totally.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to come back, Victor, from a final break, and I'm going to ask you about the series you've done for The Blade of Perseus.

But before that, I'm going to ask you about what's it like to be a Venezuelan drug-running guy with a boat.

And we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.

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

Victor, by the way, I forgot when you mentioned Keith Alberman.

You remember he used to do this thing, worst person in the world.

And I was that one night because I had written something for National Review.

I was doing the fundraising drive online, and I said something to the effect of bad news.

It's like, you know, your daughter comes home and says she's

dating this guy named Keith Alberman.

So it's just a kind of silly little joke.

And he

mentioned you as the worst person.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

That's an honor.

Yeah, it was a great honor.

But he didn't have a very big audience ever.

He was just kind of deranged.

I felt bad for him because he would go on there and he would just start ranting and raving.

Yeah.

And it was.

He's really fueled by hate, that guy.

He was really fueled.

I think he just lives.

He's the kind of person that's not married, doesn't have children, lives in a little apartment, and is online all day, sort of like I guess Steve King, Stephen King

is the same thing.

They're just full of hate and they're captives of this this medium, the the online medium.

And

just

well

let's um let's talk about Venezuela.

Victor, uh shortly here and then I'd like to end the show with you talking about this uh series you've done for the Blade of Perseus.

But what do you think about Trump's actions or the United States' actions with these Venezuelan drug runners?

Is it cool to blow them out of the water?

It depends.

If we have actionable

intelligence that they are

a terrorist group that is bringing drugs in to kill Americans and they're in international waters, yeah.

But it's analogous to predators, predator attacks.

Remember Obama?

He even made a joke about it at the White House Correspondence Dinner when he said, if you're going to date my daughter, watch out, it's called Predator.

They know where you are, young men.

He thought that was funny, but he killed two American citizens, Obama did.

So you got to be careful.

The Commander-in-Chief cannot order the execution of an American citizen

without due process.

So you've got to make sure that these people from intelligence that are on these boats are not U.S.

citizens.

And I guarantee you, knowing the nature of the cartels, that they will find ways to put a lot of American citizens on those boats so that next time we kill them, they're going to list the names of American citizens that were killed, and the left is going to go crazy.

Even though they're bringing death to America, 70,000 people a year killed by opiates.

Well, Victor, I lied.

We have one other topic to talk about.

I forgot to

dropped it out of the chain.

This is Claudine Gay, our old friend, the president of Harvard.

So she is back in the news.

You would think she'd

go into hiding or find a, I don't know, a nunnery somewhere to just live out her years.

Harvard's disgraced former president has launched a blistering attack on her successor, accusing him of complying with the Trump administration's demands after she left the university in a shambles just two years ago.

Claudine Gay resigned after only six months as president, etc., etc.

While most Harvard presidents have chosen to keep keep their criticisms of their successors to themselves, Gay addressed the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies on September 3rd and ridiculed President Garber's work.

She told the crowd that the school had become compliant to President Trump.

Gay said, the posture of the institution seems to be one of compliance.

This is distressing, not only for those of us who are on campus and facing the consequences directly, but also for those of us in higher ed who look to Harvard for leadership and guidance.

What do you think of this plagiarist?

Nobody looks for Harvard.

Sorry, Claudine, nobody looks to Harvard for guidance and leadership.

And that's your little brief tenure, brief as it was, was a reminder why they don't, because you were a known plagiarist.

You stole things from other people.

to advance your political career.

If you look at your total corpus of publications, you should have never been.

She was up for tenure in the political science department the first year I got to the Hoover Institution, her second year.

She was completely unqualified.

There were a lot of people who did not want to tenure her.

It was a big fight.

She got tenured.

She went right to Harvard.

And then the DEI came in.

And what was her record?

She was a plagiarist.

She was at an institution that was anti-Semitic.

She could not stop the violence.

There was that famous scene on video where a Jewish student's walking and he's roughed up by somebody that's on this harvard review and then they what gave him an award 60 000 bucks for hitting a jew and

she was

a disaster when her congressional testimony showed that she was a mediocrity she

everything it depends it depends it depends she should have never been i think she's probably make she probably has one of the largest salaries at harvard now to get rid of her and she thought i am a black woman, I am untouchable.

If I plagiarized, it doesn't matter.

You wouldn't dare, that's for somebody else to worry about.

Me, I'm bulletproof.

No, no, I can do anything.

If I have a bad congressional testimony and I show that I'm morally bankrupt and I don't know the difference between anti-Semitism and not,

it doesn't matter.

They're not going to do anything to me.

If I have students at Harvard who are openly anti-Semitic or they're breaking the rules about protests, it doesn't matter.

If I take our admissions policy and I deliberately violate the Supreme Court rulings on banning racial preferences or civil rights statute, it doesn't matter.

I am Claudine Gay and I am a black woman.

That's what, that was her whole idea.

And then somebody said, you're right, normally, but this isn't normally.

We got a maniac called Donald Trump in the White House, and he's insisting for some crazy reason that we have to follow the Supreme Court ruling.

And our statistical analysis shows that we're letting people in with sizably lower SAT scores, markedly lower GPAs, less prestigious high schools on the basis of their race.

And we're in violation.

And this guy is crazy enough to start enforcing it.

And the more that he turns over the Harvard Rock, he sees that we have racially separated graduations, we have racially separated theme houses.

And so he's going after all this.

We're letting

transgendered go into

female sports.

We got a lot of exposure.

So they said, I know you are Claudine Gay and you come from a prominent multi-million dollar Haitian family, but we can't afford you anymore.

You're too much of a liability and you're too inept, and you're hurting our brand.

So you're going to have to leave, but we're going to pay you a lot of money.

But you're supposed to be quiet.

She's breaking that co covenant.

She's speaking out and attacking her predecessor out of anger.

But she was lucky that she was ever a tenured professor given her work.

I can tell you that

as a graduate student at Stanford and as a visiting faculty member at Stanford in Classics and as a member of the Hoover Institution for a long time.

I watched these tenure cases and I know what they are like.

To be at a Harvard, Yale, Stanford, whether it's bogus,

silly,

hypocritical, I don't know, but they claim that to be a full professor, you have to be the top one or two people in your field, or three or four or five worldwide.

To get tenure, it's almost impossible to get tenure in that six-year window unless you've had at least two books published, and they have to be well-reviewed.

She didn't do that.

She didn't even come close.

And she didn't do that to be a full professor at Harvard, and everybody knew it.

And the same thing about the admissions policy.

That's okay.

What Trump is saying to them, if you want to do that and violate the Supreme Court on admissions, go ahead.

If you want to violate civil rights, go ahead.

If you want to not enforce civil rights statutes and let Jews be the targets of gratuitous violence, go ahead, but we're not going to subsidize it.

So we're just not going to give you the money.

And if you want the money, you've got to comply.

And that's why she's angry.

Because each day that she's not president, she looks worse and worse.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's close out the show with your give us a little understanding.

A lot of people don't subscribe and should subscribe to the Blade of Perseus and the kind of things you do there in the Ultra articles.

And you've written a four-part series on the early Roman Principate.

Would you tell us, don't give it all away, but what motivated what's it about and what motivated you to write it?

Well, history's not linear.

We don't go from, you know,

impoverished and backward thinking to utopia.

It's cyclical.

And there's certain eras of history that resemble the others.

Not exactly, but the conditions are such.

And when the United States under globalization had world cultural influence, and we outsourced offshore, and we had all of this money enriching the bicoastal elite,

there were certain periods in history, like the first century Rome, where under Augustus and then

the so-called 12 Caesars, including Julius and Augustus, and then especially the period of the five good emperors, this was a time of prosperity, security, and enormous wealth, imported wealth.

And it was a time when Roman values of the old Italian agrarianism was inundated with people from all over the world.

And money was the common...

it was

admirable in one way that it was based on money and not birth any longer or your Italian ethnic identity.

So you could be like Tromalchio in a novel called The Satyricon, you could be from the Middle East and be fabulously wealthy and you would have status, anybody who had money.

But there were certain traits in this four-part story that started to pop up in the literature of the era.

Basically, the era from 30 BC to, say, 120.

And I'm talking about the poet Catullus, the novelist Petronius, the biographer Suetonius, the historian Tacitus, and especially the satirist Juvenal.

He was the one that gave us bread and circuses.

But what it was is when you inundate a society

with all of this money and

leisure, given this import of slavery and the economy, they're going to cater to their appetites.

And the old agrarian virtues that were backed by traditional Roman religion and hard work and being in the

legions that created this empire is going to fade.

And what do people do when they have too much, the elite, too much time on their hands, they're very wealthy, they do particular

things.

And they start to fixate on their mansions, kind of like the Wall Street mansion, you know,

and they start to fixate on food.

The more exotic, the more rare, the more expensive.

And

they start to look at wild spectacles of violence, like in the arena, gladiatorial fights.

And in their own personal lives, they don't stay married, and or they don't marry or they don't have two or three children and that was what Augustus was really worried about

or they're promiscuous or you empower women and the nuclear family becomes less important or people begin to experiment sexually so homosexuality becomes normalized or transgendered ism which appears in Catullus' poem the Attus poem but also in the Satyricon's novel, becomes normalized.

And orgies become normalized.

Bisexuality becomes normalized.

And

what is deprecated?

The man and the woman marrying, having children, working in a 10-acre vineyard.

Instead, it's huge estates, corporate agriculture, slave labor, kind of the Pompeii Herculaneum lifestyle.

And that appears, and then you had all these critics of it that wrote about it.

And a lot of it you have to be be careful because they exaggerate and they caricature, but they do point out that this is what happens when sudden wealth comes into a traditional agrarian society and a particular type of country.

And you can say that globalization did that to the United States.

And so our birth rate has gone from 2.1 just oh, 35 years ago to 1.6.

And the nuclear family is just barely the majority.

And the middle class is shrinking.

It doesn't buy homes.

It doesn't marry early.

It doesn't have children earlier.

Drugs are very popular.

And then we have all of these magazines and literature and online stuff about this very small elite.

You know

this is what's new in brownstones in New York.

This is how you remodel your Malibu beach home.

This is the type of heated pool you can have.

Granite's out now, and now it's

quartz.

and

you don't get oak flooring anymore.

It's got to be teak.

That kind of stuff.

And it's all over Roman literature.

And it's always presented as a symptom of a dying society.

One of the historians, Livy, was very famous saying that we cannot live with our sins and we can't live with a medicine.

The medicine is worse than the disease because it would require a moral revolution.

Catullus said, oh, Catullus,

he says to himself in a poem, leisure luxus is bad for you, Catullus, meaning you're not able to control yourself once you can do anything you want.

And we see that.

A perfect example is

the two things that on both ends of the spectrum, whether you're poor and homeless and you think you can do anything you want and commit 14 felonies with Carlos Brown, or you're on the other upper.

Gosh, that Tyler Robinson, there's a video that came out yesterday that he he was driving an Audi and got in a wreck a few years earlier what's that kid doing with an Audi and then he had this souped up charger or something where did he get the money to do all that where did he get the time he was a dropout so you get the impression that he was from the upper middle class and he used he used that money and leisure to do what

to kill somebody, to get into the furry trans relationship, to get on a sick chat list with people.

And then you have a reaction.

And what I was finishing with

at the end of it, with the 12th Caesars, you get Titus and Vespasian, and they say this can't go on anymore.

And then you get a period with the Emperor Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius, and Marcus Aurelius.

And it's a hundred years.

And it's what Gibbon called, if I was alive, this would be the most

enviable,

the best period to be alive in human human history.

So you had a hundred years, basically from 110 AD to 200, where there were not foreign wars.

There were some, but they were not existential.

There was not civil war.

The emperors were not assassinated.

They were not poisoned.

There was a moral renaissance.

So people settled down.

That lasted, and then you went into this other cycle again in the third century A.D.

So that's what I was trying to to suggest to people that all the things that we think are shocking sexually, lifestyle-wise, they're not.

They've all been there before.

The trans cult is

old and ancient.

And as I said earlier, you should all read about Gaitan.

Gaitan doesn't know whether he's male or female, and the people around him feel that there is no such thing as being heterosexual or binary or cis or whatever.

They are pansexual.

and you can read about it and you can see what the authors not us what the authors how they present that

these are Romans that are writing this and they're not presenting it in a positive light they're not saying it's morally evil in the Christian sense they're saying that too much money and too much leisure are too much for the human condition and they surrender to their appetites and they're not productive or they're not law-abiding or they're not moral.

That's what they argue.

I'm not saying that gay people are that way at all.

I'm just saying that the indulgence in these lifestyles and who are people made fun of?

That's what's really interesting in it.

When you see a Roman soldier on the road, they make fun of him.

At the dinner party of Trimalchio, when there's a guy who is a rag collector,

he's kind of presented as a stupid idiot.

There's a line in Juvenile when they said so-and-so had very little and that very little burned up.

And it's about people who don't have the money to buy the bottom floor, so they sold floors on top of each other.

Each person could build their own floor, but the people at the top would collapse.

And

it's about, you know, don't walk on Rome because these people just throw up their waste at you, and there's all these people in languages you can't understand.

And da-da-da.

It's instructive, it really is.

Sounds familiar.

It does.

Yeah.

Well, anyone who subscribes to your website, Victor Blade of Purses, can read these.

And frankly, there are hundreds of these ultra articles in the archive, so I hardly recommend it for any of your

fans.

Victor, we've come to the end, and I want to mention three things.

First, I write a free weekly email newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

You can go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

It's free, comes out every Friday, and it has 14 recommended readings of great articles I've come across the previous week.

I know people are loving it, and you will love it too, so do sign up for that.

Second thing I have to mention, back in Connecticut a week ago, I'm crossing a busy intersection walking my dog, and a guy in a truck lets me get to the other side, and there's a red light, and he stops and he opens the window and he says, I wouldn't hit you because I wouldn't want Victor to get mad at me.

And I'm like, What?

I didn't, and I didn't recognize them, and I maybe they're neighbors or not.

And I said, They said they love the show, so it's kind of interesting listener comment

on the roads of Connecticut.

But here's a listener comment or viewer comment from YouTube.

It's from Tony L.

Upchurch, who writes, No one's ever going to win a memory contest with the Wolverine, Mr.

VDH.

Reading his articles and following him for over 30 years has been the best free education I never spent money on.

Thank you, sir.

That's Tony L.

Upchurch.

Thank you.

So there are many more like that.

There are thousands of comments now every week.

We try to get through them.

But thanks, folks, for taking the time to leave them on YouTube, Rumble, Victor's website, Apple.

Thanks for watching.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks, Victor, for all the wisdom you shared today.

And we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Bye.

Thank you for listening, everybody, and watching now.

Thank you.