Revising Government, Rooting Out Crime and Waste

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Speaker 2 Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
I'm laughing because Victor's

Speaker 2 telling jokes. I'm Jack Fowler.
I'm the host of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Welcome to it.

Speaker 2 We are recording on Monday, the 10th of March. This episode is up on March 13th.
We're approaching the infamous IDES. Victor.

Speaker 2 Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where he's just come from. He survived it.

Speaker 2 He's here to share his wisdom.

Speaker 2 He's got a website, The Blade of Perseus. VictorHanson.com is the address.
Lots to talk about today with Victor student loans,

Speaker 2 Trump removing the security clearance for Perkins Co., Trump killing aid to South Africa over in its now rampant anti-white racism.

Speaker 2 John Kerry exposed for undermining FBI investigations into Iranian terrorists.

Speaker 2 Maybe he belongs in jail.

Speaker 2 At least for this bad plastic surgery, he belongs in jail. Pop-up non-profits, a real problem that we are seeing in the abuse of the 501c3 tax code by leftists.
to line the pockets of their pals.

Speaker 2 So much to get Victor's wisdom on, and we will get to that when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 2 Have a great day.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show. Victor, my friend, I'm glad you're still in the saddle here today.
We recorded earlier, but

Speaker 2 he's

Speaker 2 plugging through. Victor, I think

Speaker 2 it'd be wrong for me to say Donald Trump kibosh, the public service student loan program.

Speaker 2 But he has,

Speaker 2 by the way, the concept now that public servants

Speaker 2 who now make more money than your average American deserve to have their loans forgiven, their student loans forgiven after 10 years. I mean, gosh, my wife and I were suckers for

Speaker 2 not, for sending our kids to a state school where they could have gone to Holy Cross or, you know, something like that.

Speaker 2 I'm just glad that there's some Trumpian-ness being brought to this issue. Your thoughts?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, nobody in their right mind thought the student loan program would balloon to $1.7 trillion. I think 30% of the loans, especially after COVID, are non-performing.

Speaker 3 And, you know, it's directly correlated with two unfortunate developments in higher education. Number one, the average

Speaker 3 person that does graduate, it takes six years, not four.

Speaker 3 Half the people who enroll in college drop out and don't get any degrees. And third,

Speaker 3 The universities have raised their costs higher than the rate of inflation because they have a guaranteed

Speaker 3 source of cash, and that's the federal government that backs these loans for students. And the only way you're ever going to get out of the problem is you're going to have to

Speaker 3 tell the universities and colleges

Speaker 3 you're going to have to deal with the private sector. And we suggest that you put your endowments up as collateral.

Speaker 3 And then think of if you were going to Stanford University or Harvard or Yale or Duke

Speaker 3 and you were pre-law, pre-medicine, you know you're going to be making a million dollars one year perhaps, and you say

Speaker 3 to them,

Speaker 3 well, you know, I'm just going to take six or eight units. No, you're not.
You're not going to take six or eight units.

Speaker 3 You're going where and you know, I had some trouble after I graduated and that gender studies major, I can't get a job, so I'll pay you back when I can. No, you're not.
No, you're not.

Speaker 3 In other words, there would be accountability. If those universities had to pay,

Speaker 3 guarantee those loans when they defaulted, then they would advise the students about which majors were remunerative. They want you to get out of college as quickly as possible in four years,

Speaker 3 and they want you to graduate. And they would expedite that.
But there's no

Speaker 3 moral hazard is just not there.

Speaker 2 They would also not have as big an administrative staff on that. No, they wouldn't.

Speaker 3 I don't know what the Wall Street Journal defined as administrators, but not long ago they said there were 16,000

Speaker 3 graduate students and undergraduate at Stanford and 15,000 administrative staff people,

Speaker 3 one for one.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, Joe Biden, when he tried to cancel, as he, remember right before the midterms, he had that

Speaker 3 habit of draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and canceling student loans and trying to say that he was going to legalize marijuana for the youth vote.

Speaker 3 Well, the Supreme Court, Nancy Pelosi says, unfortunately, Joe, you can't do that. It's against the law.
It's just to give amnesties on loans and break those contracts. And then

Speaker 3 he did anyway, and it went through the courts and the Supreme Court ruled against him. Remember when he was still a candidate? He said,

Speaker 3 you know, I found a way around it.

Speaker 3 All you people who believe that Donald Trump is violating

Speaker 3 statutes and we're in a quote-unquote constitutional crisis. Should remember what Joe Biden did.

Speaker 3 He bragged to the nation that he would find a workaround, the Supreme Court ruling that said no president can arbitrarily cancel a student loan.

Speaker 3 And then you've got the issue that 60% of the people are not getting bachelor's degrees, and you're asking them as taxpayers to subsidize those who do.

Speaker 3 And there's an increasing cultural divide between people who are in school, in the universities and people who are not.

Speaker 3 And the old argument for universities with the general education program, the people who leave the universities are better educated, better read,

Speaker 3 more enlightened citizens that take their citizenship more seriously. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 I think everybody realizes that if you're 25 and you've been a master electrician for three years or you're a plumber, you know more about the world than somebody that's out at Columbia University screaming and yelling

Speaker 3 in pro-Hamas fashion. That's a character.
But

Speaker 3 the real world teaches people much better. The university is not this university of the 1950s and early 60s.
And it's really hard to justify the number of people that are in college

Speaker 3 because

Speaker 3 these courses are not there. They're not reading Shakespeare and Shakespeare courses.
They're not reading English literature. They're not reading history.
They're just not

Speaker 3 doing it.

Speaker 3 Those types may remain the same.

Speaker 3 You're not learning Greek in Princeton. No.
They dropped the Greek requirement at Princeton University because they felt it was too exclusionary.

Speaker 3 Too exclusive. Everything is exclusionary.
If you think about it, everyone, DEI is the most toxic idea because ultimately it's entirely nihilistic.

Speaker 3 It can make the argument that there's unfairness in every aspect of our lives,

Speaker 3 and therefore the government has

Speaker 3 a right and has the power to address that inequity and with diversity, equity, and inclusion. But

Speaker 3 they want it, you know, it's so funny. They want to make the United States

Speaker 3 in a way that if you made the NFL or the NBA that way, they would go crazy. If you said to the NFL and NBA, you're one of the most lucrative, prestigious,

Speaker 3 remunerative institutions in America. More people watch you.
If you make it to the NFL, you're going to be a multi-multi millionaire with endorsements. But you know,

Speaker 3 it's just not diverse. It isn't.
I mean, 12% of the population is African American, and maybe 65% to 70% are represented on NFL rosters. I'm sorry, it's just not diverse.

Speaker 3 And it's not inclusionary because there's a lot of wonderful Asian people and poor whites and Hispanics. Why don't you have some,

Speaker 3 you know, Cambodian tight ends and maybe some Hispanic quarterbacks? Why don't Roman Gabriel, I remember him, he was great. So let's have quotas.

Speaker 3 And then, of course, people say that nobody would want to watch it. They want the best.
Yes, exactly. They want the best people on the field.
And you can find ways of determining that, can't you?

Speaker 3 Merit. Well, you can't find out merit.
That's just a construct. Well, it's a construct if you're on the left, if you're talking about air traffic controllers.

Speaker 3 But it's real if you're defending the NFL for being not racially diverse.

Speaker 3 So people in the NFL believe that they have mechanisms to find the best people to make the most interesting games with the highest accomplished athletes. And the same thing is true with

Speaker 3 airline pilots or nuclear control people. You can find the best people through test and experience and stuff.

Speaker 2 I was always curious about you and Victor when you talk about sports,

Speaker 2 given that you were a farmer and teacher. I wonder when you ever had time to

Speaker 2 watch the NFL on a Sunday.

Speaker 3 I used to once in a while.

Speaker 3 Between 1980 and 84, almost for five years, I didn't do anything else, Jack. I got a PhD right before I turned 26.

Speaker 3 I'd written a book, but I didn't think I was ever going to go into academia again, so I was farming 180 acres with my brother and cousin.

Speaker 3 I was exhausted every day because we didn't have any hired men. You know, it was us.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I did most of the herbicide spraying, and

Speaker 3 I did a lot of the labor problem. My other brother did a lot of the pesticide stuff,

Speaker 3 we pruned, we tied vines, we did a lot of the to save money, but we'd get home at night, we were just exhausted. But I would watch on Sunday, I would watch football.
I used to,

Speaker 3 1980, 81, 82, 83, my favorite quarterback of all time was Jim Plunkett.

Speaker 3 He was a wonderful guy, man. He was at Stanford, and my dad and mom took me up there and watched him, and he almost beat USC.

Speaker 3 He was a wonderful guy. He was a noble person.

Speaker 3 I think his parents were...

Speaker 3 No, I never did. I did run out there when I was, I don't know how old I was, maybe in eighth grade or a freshman.

Speaker 3 We went to the Stanford USC game, and I ran out there and yelled his name, got close to him. Oh, I did meet him in the Bank of America in Stanford Shopping Center once.
Said hello to him.

Speaker 3 He didn't know who I was because I was of no interest, but he was a wonderful, he was a great person too.

Speaker 3 And he took an enormous, I think he played for the Buffalo Bills before he went to the Raiders and 49ers.

Speaker 2 Played for the Patriots too.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Buffalo, yeah, Boston Patriots. I mean, and they really

Speaker 3 beat him up. I mean,

Speaker 3 he was sacked.

Speaker 3 He was like this old, he was like some kind of rock, you know what I mean, or statue.

Speaker 3 He would just stand there, and these guys would, he was 6'3, solid muscle, and these guys would just take shots at him and bounce off.

Speaker 3 And then he had that razor arm. I mean, it was just like a laser.
I mean, it was, he was a great player.

Speaker 3 So I watched all that, you know,

Speaker 3 and then I lost interest in it. I couldn't, I was, I got it writing and

Speaker 2 it's only 24 hours in a day.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't have the time.

Speaker 3 And then football changed, too. It became too glitzy and

Speaker 3 all this. Take the knee.
I couldn't get into all that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, performance art began there, I think, actually.

Speaker 2 Hey, Victor, before we get your thoughts on, I want to get on Donald Trump and Perkins Co., I just want to take a moment for our sponsor, Quince.

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Speaker 2 We thank the good people of Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, again, at the risk of harming our listeners by having me read more, I just want to give a little

Speaker 2 clip here from Donald Trump's executive order killing security clearance for Perkins McCoy Co. Fusion GPS, the law firm.
Here's the course section.

Speaker 2 I'm just thrilled that he's doing this. The dishonest, this is an executive order.
The dishonest and dangerous activity of the law firm Perkins Co.

Speaker 2 LLP has affected this country for decades, notably in 2016 while representing failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Perkins Co.

Speaker 2 hired Fusion GPS, which then manufactured a false dossier designed to steal an election. This egregious activity is part of a pattern.
Perkins Co.

Speaker 2 has worked with activist donors, including George Soros,

Speaker 2 to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification.

Speaker 2 If one such case, in one such case, a court was forced to sanction Perkins Coe's attorneys for an unethical lack of candor before the court.

Speaker 2 Victor, there's plenty more in this executive order, but Donald Trump has knee-capped security clearance for this firm, and security clearance is pretty damn important for big Washington law firms.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I I don't understand it why they get any at all. I mean they're they're kind of dumping grounds for

Speaker 3 rotating top military with law degrees or diplomats with law degrees.

Speaker 3 They go back out there and then they go on television or they bat their eyes and say, my sources tell me or I have inside knowledge because they have security clearances. Why do they need them?

Speaker 3 I don't think they need them at all. I don't think that

Speaker 3 National Security Advisor Waltz or Secretary of State Rubio or Secretary of Defense Hexes that said,

Speaker 3 we've got to

Speaker 2 get a coherent policy toward Ukraine.

Speaker 3 I know what we need to do. Get those guys over from Perkins-Coey.
Get them over here. They've got security cleansing.
Call up Clapper. Call up Brennan.

Speaker 3 Those guys really, you know, call up some of the former generals. Maybe they can give us an insight.

Speaker 2 They keep up.

Speaker 3 I don't think that's going to work like that. They don't need to.
And remember, Perkins Coe,

Speaker 3 it was one of four links to hide the fingerprints of Hillary Clinton and something that was really illegal. It's against the law for a presidential candidate to pay money to a foreign national to work

Speaker 3 in their campaign. So she

Speaker 3 had the DNC

Speaker 3 give money to Perkins Coe, who gave money to Fusion GPS, who gave money to Christopher Steele. And they had basically, from Hillary to the DNC to Perkins Coe to Fusion GPS to Steele, four paywalls.

Speaker 3 And it was all to hide Hillary Clinton's connection with the Russian collusion farce and the dossier farce.

Speaker 3 And they were, the irony was he was also being paid at the same time to be a informant for the FBI under James Comey. So I'm glad that he's doing this.

Speaker 3 I wish they would lift a lot more of these security clearances. They're too promiscuous.
And just go into these cable TV shows and listen to these people start to pontificate,

Speaker 3 and they'll give you some kind of

Speaker 3 some kind of indication that they have sources and you're supposed to understand it's from a security clearance. And we have too many of them out there.

Speaker 3 We need to really restrict the flow of knowledge. So, the more that he can deny these to all sorts of people, especially if they have interfered in an election as they did.

Speaker 3 Everybody said, you know, in election denialism, election denialism. No, it was election interferism in 2000,

Speaker 3 interfering in 2016. We forget about that.
That Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to try to warp the election. And in 2020, according to Molly Ball in her Time magazine, February 2021 essay,

Speaker 3 that's exactly what they did again. They interfered in an election.
They had Mark Zuckerberg give $419 million. They modulated the protest on the street.

Speaker 3 She said that they censored misinformation and disinformation. That was a code word for the FBI partnering with Twitter to suppress information to voters.

Speaker 3 So it's been too much of that, and I need to clean it up. And And that's what Trump is doing.

Speaker 2 Right. Victor, it's not only, I think, what he did in this, it's that he did it.

Speaker 2 If a typical, let's say, even good Republican conservative had

Speaker 2 run for president and been elected, this wouldn't have happened.

Speaker 2 Only Trump would do this.

Speaker 3 No, if it had, let's say, if they did it to Mitt Romney, like, say, remember how Candy Crawley tried to rig that debate when he was trying to argue.

Speaker 2 She did try. She did.

Speaker 2 She did.

Speaker 3 And then she said, no, you're wrong.

Speaker 3 You're wrong.

Speaker 3 It wasn't terrorism.

Speaker 3 There was a film guy did it. That's why the riots cost.
It was a right-wing filmmaker. It wasn't.

Speaker 3 And Mitt Romney said, no, no,

Speaker 3 may I object? Well,

Speaker 3 he never followed that up. Nobody in the Romney campaign said that they were rigging the election.
They didn't care.

Speaker 3 Any other Republican would have had a committee of sober and judicious experts, and they would have said, let's refer these questions about security clearances and come back in six months.

Speaker 3 That's not who Trump is, for good or evil. When he's billing some big high-rise, he doesn't make a committee.
He steamrolls opposition. He makes a deal with

Speaker 3 roadblocks. And then he feels that

Speaker 3 the eventual product will be

Speaker 3 very good for people, and they'll overlook the messiness of the implementation and construction.

Speaker 2 Victor, I have to

Speaker 2 spring something on you here. This is mean of me because I usually clear this ahead of time.

Speaker 3 Why don't you give me, is it two Advils or Tamil Fu?

Speaker 2 I sent you this link. This is

Speaker 2 apropos of nothing other than while at Hillsdale, part of the reason you were there was to discuss war movies. This is

Speaker 2 a tweet, an ex post.

Speaker 2 In In an apparent violation of the President's DEI order, the American Battlefield Monuments Commission, which you were a commissioner on, still has a chief diversity officer who believes that DEI is quote-unquote imperative to preserve American battlefields.

Speaker 2 Can you believe that that commission had a DEI officer?

Speaker 3 Of course, you can believe that. They didn't when I was there.
No, I didn't. But I was fired with.
It's another thing that's funny.

Speaker 3 We had the

Speaker 3 five former defense secretaries, Secretary Austin, Secretary Mattis,

Speaker 3 Secretary Hagel, Secretary Perry, Secretary Panetta. And they said Donald Trump is firing, and this is an outrage.
And we've never politicized the Pentagon.

Speaker 3 I'm thinking, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Speaker 3 Not only did Obama fire generals and generals, many of the generals who signed the, one of them who signed the letter, and not only did Panetta interfere in an election and lie about the Hunter Biden

Speaker 3 authentic laptop and never apologized but they they fired all these generals but they fired 18 people

Speaker 3 Biden did that were on the service academy boards remember that he just came in and said you're fired you're fired they even fired H.R.

Speaker 3 McMaster he was on the West Point board and I was on the American battlefields Monument Battlefield Monuments Commission, and I just got a letter. It says, you will surrender your passport.

Speaker 3 They each gave us, you know, a diplomatic passport. I never really used it.
I never charged them one penny to visit.

Speaker 3 Half the American dead in World War I and World War II were buried abroad. I always if I was overseas and I was

Speaker 3 conducting tours, I always made an effort to take a side visit to

Speaker 3 the Hom

Speaker 3 Cemetery or if I was in Tunisia I went over and looked at the American cemetery there same in Italy but there was no need for diversity what would that mean I mean

Speaker 3 each year there was maybe one or two people who were found you know from a construction project or something they would find the remains of an American soldier and then they would have DNA But the whole point of the cemeteries, there was the most rigorous standards about about the Koria marble crosses and

Speaker 3 the shape of the cross and what can be and not put on the, can and cannot be put on the cross. And the whole point is these beautiful manicured

Speaker 3 cemeteries and everybody is equal. There's no It's not like a private cemetery.
One guy has a monument and another person doesn't, or there's an angel statue or a pyramid or a monolith or an obelisk.

Speaker 3 None of that. That's the whole point, that in death people were like they were in the army.
They were all equal as the Americans. So what would a DEI person do?

Speaker 3 The only thing that I can remember

Speaker 3 about my brief tenure on the committee was that the Europeans were trying to partner with us, peace gardens.

Speaker 3 Basically, after saving Private Ryan, and the Normandy battlefield became one of the biggest tourist attractions in Europe.

Speaker 3 And of course they wanted to have out in the parking lot some kind of utopian, postmodern,

Speaker 3 let's, you know, war is harmful for young kids and their other living things type attitude. And we were just trying to stick to the mission statement.

Speaker 3 So the mission statement was how to ensure that the graveyards reflect the dignity and the sacrifice of American soldiers and they keep to the mission statement as outlined in the original charter

Speaker 3 of the Commission. And I had mentioned that if Donald Trump really wanted

Speaker 3 to stop all that, then

Speaker 3 he could appoint Thomas Connor, a professor at Hillsdale, who wrote the book on the Commission, the American Battlefields Commission.

Speaker 3 He wrote the entire book on it and the history of it, its operation, its value. And he's a Trump supporter.

Speaker 3 He would be a nonpartisan, but he would be, if he was the head of that commission, he would do a wonderful job.

Speaker 3 And he would ensure, I can guarantee you, there's not going to be a diversity, equity, inclusion officer in that. They have a permanent staff that was very good, but why would you need someone?

Speaker 3 What would be the purpose to do what?

Speaker 3 How would you want to bring race or gender into the operation of

Speaker 3 cemeteries abroad?

Speaker 2 The Soviet way.

Speaker 2 The ideology must be everywhere and in everything. I mentioned before

Speaker 2 the chess club, the Soviet Union chess club, thought they could escape Marxist rule, but there was no hiding. Silence is violence and all that crap.

Speaker 2 Hey, Victor, we're going to get your thoughts speaking of racial matters, of Donald Trump's actions related to South Africa and

Speaker 2 a proposed bill by Senator Mike Rounds about U.S.

Speaker 3 land being sold to our enemies.

Speaker 2 And we're going to get Victor's thoughts on these things and more when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show on recording on the 10th of March. This episode is up on the 13th.
Do remember Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus. VictorHanson.com is the web address.

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Why? Because if you're a fan of Victor's writings, you want to read everything he writes.

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It's a monthly due.

Speaker 2 Please check it out early and often, like they vote in Chicago. Victor, here's a headline from PJ Media.
Trump slashes all South Africa aid sites anti-white government policy.

Speaker 2 A quote from the article, South Africa is being terrible.

Speaker 2 Excuse me, this is Donald Trump's post from Donald Trump on social media.

Speaker 2 South Africa is being terrible, plus, to longtime farmers in that country. They are confiscating their land and farms, and much worse than that, a bad place to be right now.

Speaker 2 And we are stopping all federal funding to go a step further.

Speaker 2 Any farmer with family, exclamation point, from South Africa seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to citizenship.

Speaker 2 This process will begin immediately. Exclamation point.
There are lots of all caps in this from Donald Trump on truth. This was a truth social post.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Victor, the wheels are coming off the bus there.

Speaker 3 It was inevitable, but

Speaker 3 because the government is a Marxist government, and the only thing I don't understand is they have the,

Speaker 3 I understand that you had to end apartheid, and that was a good thing that it ended, and I understand Rhodesia that became Zimbabwe,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 what they did in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe,

Speaker 3 was they destroyed one of the most productive per acre farming regimens in the world. And it was a big exporter of food.

Speaker 3 It was an anchor of all of Africa. And they destroyed it by driving out all of the British farmers without compensation and harassing them and shooting them.

Speaker 3 Or they could have done it gradually or they could have allowed them to have trainees to train

Speaker 3 Africans to help.

Speaker 3 But they just got rid of them and then

Speaker 3 They regretted it. They regretted it.
So South Africa looks at this and what are they doing? They're doing exactly the same thing.

Speaker 3 And the country, I think whatever your feelings are about Africa, everybody agrees on one thing. It's not working.
It's too violent. It's too corrupt.

Speaker 3 And it's destroying the infrastructure that they inherited and they cannot sustain it.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump cut off all foreign aid to South Africa. And I think, and remember, South Africa is a very radical country.
They always side with Hamas.

Speaker 3 They're anti-Semitic, they're anti-Israel, they're anti-American, they're anti-European, they're a very wealthy country, and it's probably the most corrupt country in the world. And

Speaker 3 I don't, but you know, when he says some of these people have been in South Africa since the 17th century, 18th century.

Speaker 3 So they feel that they would like to stay. And even though they're only 20%, they used to be 20% of the

Speaker 3 the so-called white boar and British,

Speaker 3 I think most of the British South Africans have l left. But

Speaker 3 he'll get he's getting a lot of criticism for that by welcoming in people from South Africa.

Speaker 3 But it would be a immigrant that would you know you bring people in who had skills, that spoke the language and probably had capital.

Speaker 2 I would think someone that has a thousand acre farm

Speaker 2 and is running it successfully I'm I'm not blowing smoke at you as a farmer, but

Speaker 2 you don't have to 1,000 acre. You could have a 188-acre farm, right? And it shows your skill set and value to the country you're coming to.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but the problem that Trump will have will say, well, they're white. You've got to remember how the left thinks.
The left thinks if

Speaker 3 85% of all immigration, legal and illegal, is non-white, that's normal.

Speaker 3 And if you were to bring in people from South Africa, that's racist.

Speaker 3 That's just how they think. And

Speaker 3 it's such a minefield that people don't talk about it. But it gets this

Speaker 3 it's not so much about race, it's a system. The British came in there and they had that horrific Boer war with the Boers, the

Speaker 3 early Dutch, and then they had a peace and apartheid was sort of a late phenomenon in the 30s and 40s and 50s.

Speaker 3 But my point is that they had this system of free market capitalism, a judiciary,

Speaker 3 constitutional government, and it was racist because they didn't let other people fully participate. Had they earlier done it very gradually and trained people, it might have avoided this.

Speaker 3 But nevertheless,

Speaker 3 It was a hotspot during the Cold War, so you had a lot of communist influence that were using race to make sure that South Africa was a revolutionary society and the part of the Soviet sphere, etc., etc.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 why do these people who are killing the white farmers and confiscating the farm, do they ever just take a minute, just a minute, second, and say,

Speaker 3 why are their farms working and why are they so productive?

Speaker 3 Why, why, why? And what can we do to make sure that all the farms follow in that vein? What is the protocol? Is it capitalism? Is it the rule of law? Is it an independent judiciary?

Speaker 3 Is it a meritocracy? But whatever it is, we've got to emulate it because it produces more food and it cuts down on disease and starvation. But they don't think like that.

Speaker 3 They don't. And

Speaker 3 that's when I never understood the squad when Omar said that she came here and she thought it was dirty. She remember that?

Speaker 3 She said something that her father and she thought that homeless people and it wasn't that great a place.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, this is a person who allegedly married her brother to circumvent immigration law.

Speaker 3 But when they, and she's been very critical of European colonialism and so-called white privilege and all of that, but

Speaker 3 just think away the racial compound and look at the culture. Why did they want to come here? They mean people who were not born in the United States.

Speaker 3 Why do we have 50 million of them who were not born in the United States? What's the attraction? Why did these 12 million people want to leave their own families, their lifelong homes?

Speaker 3 Venezuela, Bolivia,

Speaker 3 Taiwan, I mean China, mainland China,

Speaker 3 Taiwan, South Korea. What was it about this country that drew them here?

Speaker 3 And why do some people, when they come here, attack the system as racist and the people who created it as racist when they want a part of its fruition I don't understand that I mean when Obador said I think it's a beautiful thing 40 million Mexicans have come well why didn't they why didn't 40 million Americans come to Mexico

Speaker 2 well Victor we have another agricultural related question to raise with you but for I'm going to spring something else on you and I forgot to mention this in in advance.

Speaker 2 Hunter Biden's withdrawn his lawsuit about the laptop and all the excuses.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 I wanted our listeners to feel your expression.

Speaker 3 What did he say? Did he sell 27 paintings?

Speaker 2 When Daddy was president.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but then it was so unfair because he was doing such a great job. He was selling them, selling them, selling them based on his wonderful talent and getting 50-something thousand.

Speaker 3 And then all of a sudden it stopped because of Donald Trump, the right, MAGA, they were mean to him? Or did it have something to do with his father who was no longer president?

Speaker 3 And then we learned that the little gallery that said, well, there's going to be a paywall. Nobody will know who buys these and there won't be any.
That was a complete lie.

Speaker 3 The head of the gallery has... basically confessed that every single person who bought a

Speaker 3 painting of Hunters was known to Hunter Hunter Biden and therefore to the Biden family. And that was the only thing.
And then he's poor. He had

Speaker 3 his memoir. Remember, he said he sold 4,000 copies?

Speaker 3 4,000 copies is not a lot of copies.

Speaker 2 He was expecting a lot more income from.

Speaker 3 And then it went down to just $1,500. So he had to drop his lawsuit.
He can't sue the... Is it the computer person that...
Yeah. Yeah, that poor guy.

Speaker 3 He wanted to harass that person, and he was getting all this money. And I think, what happened to a sugar daddy friend that pays all his bills? I guess he doesn't see any utility.

Speaker 3 He was renting a home and he says that it was burned. I don't think it was burned, but it suffered smoke damage.

Speaker 3 Here you have a person who's on the wrong side of fifty and

Speaker 3 he's probably made in his life, he's grifted or leveraged at least twenty or thirty million bucks. And where that money went, I don't know.
I don't know how you can take that amount of money.

Speaker 3 You divide it among the family members. But still, he must have had five or six or eight million.
Did it all go up his nose? Did it go for prostitutes? Did it go for travel? I don't know. Divorce?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 2 he's lucky because, as his father told us, he is the smartest man dad ever met.

Speaker 3 But he doesn't have a marketable skill anymore, which means he must know that my only marketable skill was influence peddling.

Speaker 2 Victor, we're going to get to some legislation, but first I want to take a moment for our sponsor, Home Title Lock.

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Speaker 2 Senator Mike Rounds from South Dakota tweeted, Xed, commented.

Speaker 2 He has reintroduced the Promoting Agriculture Safeguards and Security Act, legislation to ban individuals and entities controlled by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea from purchasing agricultural land at businesses located near U.S.

Speaker 2 military installations or sensitive places. And Victor, your thoughts on that, but also I wonder,

Speaker 2 should there not be also some kind of

Speaker 2 national security eminent domain that takes these lands that have already, that China has already bought near U.S.

Speaker 2 bases and just boots them out, but in the good old USA buys them out while they boot them out?

Speaker 3 Gee, you mean we're going to argue whether the communist Chinese can say they've suddenly become farmers and they want to buy a bunch of farmland right next to a Miniman III missile site or one of our biggest Air Force bases.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's a no-brainer, right? But only in America would we think it's controversial.

Speaker 3 I think the whole theme of the Trump administration has to be reciprocity, reciprocity, reciprocity.

Speaker 3 We'll know if we're on the right track if we always ask ourselves this question. Would they let us do what we're doing for them?

Speaker 3 Can you go to China and can you buy, if you're a big capitalist, can you go buy,

Speaker 3 I don't know, 5,000 acres next to a Chinese submarine base, Air Force base? The answer is no, you cannot. You can't do it in Russia either.
So why would we allow that here?

Speaker 3 Same thing with the tariffs.

Speaker 3 If they have an 8% tariff, we'll have an 8%.

Speaker 3 It's a very good policy to have because it's not provocative. It just says that we don't really want to do this.
We just want to live and let live.

Speaker 3 But if you're doing this to us, then we're just going to mirror image you and apply your standards to yourself. So if you're Canada and you want a 258%

Speaker 3 tariff on butter, then we'll have one on your butter.

Speaker 3 And just make it

Speaker 3 equal. Same thing with Mexico.
If you're running, as I said last

Speaker 3 session, if you're running $260 billion in cartel profits and remittance

Speaker 3 profits and trade surpluses, then we're going to have to try to find a way to get that back to make it equal, not to our advantage. So

Speaker 3 it's very simple.

Speaker 3 Just don't buy farmland next to a military base and we won't do it to you. But if you do that, then maybe we'll do it in your country.

Speaker 3 And if you won't let us do it in your country, then we're not going to let you do it here.

Speaker 3 Amen, brother.

Speaker 2 It seems so simple, doesn't it?

Speaker 2 That's all Trump is. He's right about it.

Speaker 3 He's just a return to normalcy.

Speaker 2 Well, we have a couple other things. We're a little truncated here today.
We've got to keep Victor alive by not.

Speaker 3 Oh, sorry.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I have

Speaker 2 a well-timed cough, my friend.

Speaker 3 I've got to get some tape to tape these eyes open.

Speaker 2 We're going to ask you about John Kerry's hijinks with Iranian terrorists and a scandal of what are called pop-up non-profits. And maybe, if we even have a little more time,

Speaker 2 some action, legal action being sought on

Speaker 2 Joe Biden's cognitive decline. I mean, who the hell was signing all these executive orders when he was still president?

Speaker 2 We'll try to get to at least two of those things when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show recording on the 10th of March. And this shows up on Thursday, the 13th.
Victor, I wrote a note here: Wouldn't you want to see John Kerry prosecuted?

Speaker 2 The headline: Obama Justice Department, John Kerry systematically derailed the FBI probe of Iranian terrorists while pursuing a nuclear deal. This is according to whistleblowers.
whistleblowers.

Speaker 3 I remember during the Trump first administration, you would see pictures of John Kerry meeting with his

Speaker 3 Iranian foreign counterpart in Paris and places, where he was still doing de facto diplomatic work in preparation for the Biden administration, where he became, I guess, he was climate czar or something.

Speaker 3 He really thought in those years that he was going to be Secretary of

Speaker 3 the World, or he was going to be the UN Attorney General,

Speaker 3 Secretary General, excuse me, or at least he was going to get a Nobel Prize. And

Speaker 3 he's always been that way. He's always underperformed.
He had these enormous ambitions. I mean, he married an heiress, and then he had some affairs and divorced her.
She passed away.

Speaker 3 And then he married the heir to the widow to the Heinz tomato fortune. After I think her husband, John Heinz, the senator, was tragically killed.
And then he was flying all over the world

Speaker 3 in his wife's private jets, the company jets, while he was lecturing us about our carbon footprint being too large. But

Speaker 3 he really wanted to say that he was the person who got the Iran deal ratified and

Speaker 3 made into real action. And he was willing to do anything with that.
And he did. He did anything.

Speaker 3 And if somebody came to him and said, there's Iranian agents in the United States that want to kill a president,

Speaker 3 he just said, stop it. I don't want anything to get in the way of my ambition and my agenda.

Speaker 3 He's always been a very selfish person.

Speaker 2 Victor, you cross paths with a lot of people through life.

Speaker 2 You never crossed paths with him, did you?

Speaker 3 No, I had to give a lecture in Boston, though, once, and I wanted to go see where he lived. So I walked

Speaker 3 because I thought he was a man of the people. It was

Speaker 3 one of his many homes. It's quite impressive.
Yeah, he's so.

Speaker 3 No, I haven't had that wonderful experience yet. Just curious.
There are certain things that I hope I don't have to do before I die.

Speaker 3 One of them is to meet John Kerry.

Speaker 3 He lost me when he was testifying about how horrible Americans were in Vietnam and he kept saying Genghis for Genghis Khan.

Speaker 3 Worst time.

Speaker 3 It's the worst atrocities since Genghis Khan.

Speaker 3 Okay, young Kerry, we understand that you're

Speaker 3 an offense.

Speaker 2 John O'Neill, who took him down to San Francisco. I remember John.

Speaker 3 I met John O'Neill. I've had dinner next to John.
I like John O'Neill.

Speaker 2 Oh, he's a great guy.

Speaker 2 He came on a national review cruise, and then I had him as a speaker on a cruise just to re-reem that debate they did where he just destroyed John Kerry.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 God bless him. Special American.
All right, let's get into Biden here, Victor, with his cognitive decline.

Speaker 2 And the Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether White House staffers exploited Joe Biden's cognitive decline and issued far-left orders at the end of his presidency without his knowledge.

Speaker 2 The premise being:

Speaker 2 if this indeed happened, then what is the validity of this executive order, that appointment, that

Speaker 2 what do you call it when you let a murderer off death row? I can't think, given my own cognitive decline. Pardons, presidential pardons.

Speaker 2 Are they legitimate?

Speaker 2 If Biden himself, if evidence can be found that he actually didn't do it?

Speaker 3 It became a very important point when we learned that only one of his signatures was unique, that they were all the same and they were done by an auto-pin.

Speaker 3 But it just amplified what Speaker Johnson said when he, remember, I think one of the last weeks that Biden was in office, he went to see him about canceling liquid and natural gas terminals for export in Louisiana, his home state.

Speaker 3 And Biden said something to the effect, I did?

Speaker 3 I don't think I did. Yeah, you did.
You mean I canceled them? Yes. I canceled these gas terms? Yes.

Speaker 3 I don't remember. And he didn't.
And so

Speaker 3 they were just signing things, I suppose.

Speaker 3 Little elves that were working in the White House in the elf room.

Speaker 3 And I think it was like Obama said. You remember that famous clip? They said

Speaker 3 you know, all these little Obama fans said, wouldn't you would you like a third term? Well, I'd like a third term. I just stay down here in the basement and work out.

Speaker 3 And I call in once in a while and just, you know, not be identified or have to meet people, just order, and everybody'd run the country. That's exactly what he did.
He

Speaker 3 tipped us off. He and Michelle and the Obama crowd.

Speaker 2 They seem to be in a waxen effigy.

Speaker 2 He should be

Speaker 2 questioned by many reporters over the last two weeks or so, given the collapse of the Democrat Party, but Obama seems to be in hiding.

Speaker 3 Well, it'd be hard to find him. You'd have to go to the Chicago mansion and then it'd be like chasing a billiard ball going back and forth on a billiard table.
No, no,

Speaker 3 he's at the $15 million

Speaker 3 estate on the coast, the Martha's Vineyard pad, with the 2,000 gallons worth of propane. Oh, nope, we missed him.
He's at the Calorama, Washington Mansion. Oh, yes.
No,

Speaker 3 he's in his new home on the beach at

Speaker 3 Hawaii. And you'd say, no, he can't be there because he said that global warming would

Speaker 3 inundate all of our shorelines within 10 years. So why would he buy something like Martha's Vineyard on the coast or Hawaiian

Speaker 3 digs on the beach? There was another weird story about Obama that apparently a secret woman claimed that a secret service person assigned to his

Speaker 3 Hawaii mansion before he'd actually moved in was partying, inviting her to come over.

Speaker 3 And so the Obamas weren't there yet. I don't know if that's true or not, but that was a record.
That was the recording.

Speaker 2 The Daily Mail has been running a bunch of stories about the frailty of the man. We're not here to discuss these things with

Speaker 2 Barack Obama and his wife.

Speaker 3 He has a third-party visitor, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 2 interesting.

Speaker 3 I always thought, I mean, I thought that his lifestyle would be

Speaker 3 after he left, there would be an effort to pursue a different type of lifestyle, but it wouldn't be in the media.

Speaker 3 And then, after about 10 years, when his kids were grown up, he would just do what he wanted. Maybe we're reaching that point.

Speaker 2 It's America that we've suffered through this.

Speaker 3 Would you think it would be wrong that my wife and I are living alone here in our

Speaker 3 house, and I just invited some friend of mine, a guy, he just moved in with us.

Speaker 3 What?

Speaker 2 Are you suggesting anything on the board about that?

Speaker 2 You know, spice things up a little bit.

Speaker 3 Okay, Victor, I don't think that would be the right term.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the wrong kind of spice. Victor, this may be too much, and I hope it's not too in the weeds for our listeners, but you and I are both very involved in nonprofits.

Speaker 2 You've been on the board. You work for one, you've been on the board with the Bradley Foundation.
I work for a company, Anphil, that helps nonprofits. I've been on the board of nonprofits.

Speaker 2 And this is titled The Scandal of Nonprofits. And Lizzie McDonald, who I assume many of our listeners know, she's a reporter, terrific reporter at Fox Business News.

Speaker 2 She put this comment up on X the other day.

Speaker 2 Give me a minute here to read some of this. She writes, this is disturbing.
Biden and Obama Democrats created a new beast, the, quote, pop-up nonprofit shell, end quote.

Speaker 2 They suddenly launched to take in your taxpayer money, supposedly for things like climate change and illegal immigration.

Speaker 2 It's a major front for taxpayer abuse with accusations of grift growing by the hour. This is again Liz McDonnell writing.
Never saw it like this in decades covering IRS and taxes.

Speaker 2 Check out the tax returns for one of these pop-up NGO shells, the Climate United Fund, which got the biggest non-profit grant in history out of Biden's massive climate slush fund. It got $7 billion.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to read through all of this. Not a lot of money spent.

Speaker 2 A fraction of the $7 billion is spent. By the way, part of that fraction was given to Stacey Abrams.
It says

Speaker 2 there are these forms called 990s, right? That are tax returns for nonprofits. This

Speaker 2 slush fund has little to no details of how much its officers get paid that you typically see on NGO 990s. In fact, virtually no details, red flags that it's a shell.
Victor, this is

Speaker 2 bad in its own right. And, of course, now ideology has marched through nonprofits really aggressively.
Any thoughts on this as we go to the next slide?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, it's exactly

Speaker 3 what Doge is supposed to find out. It's fraudulent, and there's kind of a pattern to it, and that is

Speaker 3 a mid-level or low-level functionary in government, when their tenure expires, they go to work for an NGO.

Speaker 3 Usually it has something to do with diversity, equity, inclusion, green

Speaker 3 transformation, solar power, something like that. And

Speaker 3 then they master it.

Speaker 3 They stay there a year or two, and then they get smart and say, you know what? I'm going to make my own company. Sheldon Whitehouse's wife, we've talked about that, she was doing this too.

Speaker 3 She had a clearinghouse of money that he voted for. I think she distributed $14 million and shaved off $2 million for herself or something like that.

Speaker 3 And then they understand how it works, so they set up a dummy company and then they can say, Well, it's not for me,

Speaker 3 it's for the cause. And they usually do it in the last year of an administration.
So Biden is losing, he's going to lose,

Speaker 3 Harris comes in after she loses. Then all this money is

Speaker 3 gold bars on the Titanic, I think they called it. Just throw the money to these NGOs who are going to distribute.

Speaker 3 Stacey Abrams was giving people, what was her, she was on TV the other day, or she was in the news, and she said that she could justify all the money. She went from $100

Speaker 3 in her non-profit to, was it $2 billion?

Speaker 3 Two billion.

Speaker 3 What? Yeah, two billion. And she said she was doing this so that the poor the poor deserving people of Georgia would have of Georgia would have

Speaker 3 green refrigerators and appliances. Not Obama phones, but green so they could have all new

Speaker 3 j think of that. What does green mean? It means you go into Home Depot and every single

Speaker 3 refrigerator there by law has to have the power usage for the whole year.

Speaker 3 And then you go and say, we're going to buy the one with the lowest, and it won't make a bit of difference, but it will justify the scam.

Speaker 3 And then we'll just start to distribute these to our crony friends and take a huge overhead and make $700,000 or $800,000 for ourselves per year. That's what they do.

Speaker 3 How can you be for that when

Speaker 3 Doge is exposing this every day?

Speaker 3 and it's not that they don't know this is going on, when the President of the United States starts listing people 130, 140 years old that are getting this and that, Rubio shows you that I think Rubio just came out today and said 83% of USAID will be gone for good, and the

Speaker 3 residuals will be under his control in the State Department.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 2 it's just,

Speaker 3 it's what broke us. And

Speaker 3 So many brilliant political philosophers and political scientists from antiquity on have warned us that once you turn over revenue to unelected bureaucrats that are not accountable, not audited, they expand and expand and become more powerful than elected officials.

Speaker 3 And you'll never stop it. And I don't know

Speaker 3 if Elon Musk, the left is very worried because they've got a guy who created the first EV

Speaker 3 viable car and really is synonymous with EVs. And

Speaker 3 he saved NASA with SpaceX.

Speaker 3 He reinvented the whole social media with Twitter.

Speaker 3 And he's got one of the biggest artificial intelligence companies. And then they think he's in charge of cutting this waste, fraud, and abuse.
And then they've got Trump. And Trump's

Speaker 3 basically go-to it. He's not going to ankle bite him.
And that combo really gets him afraid because they're going to find stuff.

Speaker 3 I think they're just going to keep finding things that are shocking

Speaker 3 and keep the Democrats off. You get the impression that the left has been just stealing money from the government for years.

Speaker 3 I don't mean money, I mean hundreds of millions, hundreds of billions.

Speaker 2 Well, I think America has the stomach now to care.

Speaker 2 From the which we discussed on the last show, the polls following Trump's speech to Congress. I mean, Americans are not indifferent to this anymore.
So

Speaker 2 God bless them.

Speaker 2 So, Victor, we're going to round this out today. Again, we're cutting it a little short so our friend can take care of himself.

Speaker 2 I want to thank our listeners who take the time on Apple to rate the show zero to five stars. And practically everyone is giving Victor five stars.
Some are actually leaving leaving comments.

Speaker 2 I'm going to read two comments.

Speaker 2 This first one is titled

Speaker 2 Colonel USMC retired. Dr.
Hansen's insight, analysis, and commentary is just so spot-on.

Speaker 2 I was privileged to have served for almost four decades, including a tour as a professor at the Air War College. And throughout that time, I never encountered academic acumen like his.

Speaker 2 A true American treasure that should be on the top of each service's visiting lecturer list. And this is signed by DAO 1217.
That's pretty cool. And one, yeah, one other from Ali underscore 44

Speaker 2 titled American Treasure.

Speaker 2 Victor is an American treasure. Whether he's talking about politics, history, or movies and music, he always tells it like it is.

Speaker 2 I also love when he reminisces about his father telling him how great the Swedes and Swedish steel are. It reminds me of my proud Swedish grandmother who lived to be 110.
She was the same way.

Speaker 2 Quote, the Swedes have the biggest brains, she would tell me. They have the most innovative ideas.

Speaker 2 As an aside, I was wondering if Victor could recommend his favorite Civil War books and authors, as well as what's on deck for his own next book.

Speaker 2 I think we should bring up the Civil War books on another podcast. That would be a pretty good idea.

Speaker 3 The most

Speaker 3 stylishly written and engaging is Shelby Foote's. There's no footnotes in it, but

Speaker 3 it's a literary history of the Civil War that was pretty good.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 2 I can read

Speaker 2 all of them. Yeah, what's the book you're ⁇ again, I'm sorry, but the Greek book, the Greek book you have plans to write.

Speaker 3 I was going to write ⁇ well,

Speaker 3 the problem with getting influenza A is that all your plans, you think you're never going to get over it. So after five days of this 101 temperature,

Speaker 3 I've had all these people, you know, they say, what happened to you?

Speaker 3 You know, they write, are you going to do this tonight, Fox tonight? Are you going to do Newsmax? Are you going to, you haven't written any. I have over 400 emails I haven't even looked at.

Speaker 3 So the last thing on my mind is a biography. of a Paminondas.

Speaker 3 And there's not a lot of a Paminondas fans out there who are saying, Victor, if you don't write that biography of a Paminondas, I'm going to be really upset.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 and there's so many classes out there. I'm sure somebody's writing one anyway.
But I had,

Speaker 3 if I can get this book, another thing is I have a very tight, I just started on it for basic books, The Return of Trump or The Recalibration, or whatever the title we've come up with.

Speaker 3 But I was going gangbusters, and I haven't been able to.

Speaker 3 Every time I start to type, my head goes like I'm on a yacht or something.

Speaker 2 Victor, you should go, you should

Speaker 2 be aware that in two minutes

Speaker 2 you had to be on a pillow. I need to thank people who thank me for writing Civil Thoughts.

Speaker 2 That's the free weekly email newsletter I do for the Center for Civil Society, where we are trying to strengthen civil society. What's Civil Thoughts? It's a newsletter.
It comes out every Friday.

Speaker 2 It has 14 recommended readings. It's free.
We do not sell your name. There's no strings attached.
I know you'll enjoy it. So go to civilthoughts.com and sign up.

Speaker 2 Go to theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com, and subscribe. Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We will be back. I hope we will be back with a healthier

Speaker 2 Victor Davis Hansen.

Speaker 3 Thank you for listening. I'm sorry if

Speaker 3 Sammy and I have missed some pods. We're going to try to make them up.

Speaker 3 But Sammy's in bad shape.

Speaker 3 Sammy's got a flat tire.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 We'll see you guys.

Speaker 2 Bye-bye.

Speaker 3 Take care.