Wheeling and Dealing in Europe and at Home

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Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. This is our Friday news roundup, and this week we've got lots of news in Ukraine and in Europe and

Speaker 2 Russia and China with rights to minerals in Bolivia. So, we'll get to those stories first when we come back from these messages.

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Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Speaker 2 Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 2 He has a website, VictorHanson.com. It is called The Blade of Perseus.
So please come join us there. You can find all of Victor's writings that are for free with American Greatness and other journals.

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Speaker 2 So, Victor, the first thing I wanted to ask you, just sort of an update on what's going on as far as the peace deal in Ukraine and then also the mineral rights that Zelensky has agreed to, apparently, to the chagrin, I think, of his own people.

Speaker 2 But I was wondering any updates on that?

Speaker 4 Well, Donald Trump was considered a neo-imperialist because he said that a larger percentage of the money we gave, and it's in dispute, he says $300 billion.

Speaker 4 Some people say $250 billion, some say $200. Zelensky, for some reason, said he only got $100 billion or less.
So there's a discrepancy.

Speaker 4 And then the question is, how much of that money were loans and how much were outright cash? And Trump has made the allegation that the Europeans had a higher percentage of loans

Speaker 4 and they weren't candid about it. That was the implication than we did.
So he wants to recoup

Speaker 4 some money by having rare earth minerals. I don't quite understand

Speaker 4 the logic because there's going to be a lot of rare earth minerals in the American West.

Speaker 4 Places like Wyoming, Montana, the Tehachapi Desert in California, we have a lot of them.

Speaker 4 And under Trump, they will be allowed to be exploited. But the point is twofold.
It's not just to get the money back that we gave Zelensky. It is to

Speaker 4 get to make a deterrent because he's basically saying that if you bring Western and particularly American investment in and they build infrastructure and they pay you they have a concession, they get they'll pay you some money for it, and they'll pay you not as much money as you'd like because you owe them money for a while.

Speaker 4 But then that is a deterrent because it's very close to where Vladimir Putin invaded in the Donbass. It's not western Ukraine, it's eastern Ukraine.

Speaker 4 So the point is: if you've got hundreds of American business people there, and Putin decides after he swallows his prey this time, he's going to digest it in five years, do it again, it's going to be a little hard because they're a de facto tripwire.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 that was the point.

Speaker 4 Not just to make money. he he does seem though that

Speaker 4 if you look at the six to seven trillion dollar budget we have and we're running over a trillion dollars deficit and we need to get that down

Speaker 4 because we have thirty six trillion dollars in aggregate debt that

Speaker 4 and he doesn't want to raise taxes because he feels he won't grow the economy so he has a tripart I guess a

Speaker 4 tripart strategy and that's starting to obsess him as it should because we're it's unsustainable to debt. Number one is to cut.

Speaker 4 Elon Musk said there were two trillion dollars. I don't think there'll be

Speaker 4 two trillion dollars in cuts. We'll be lucky to get a trillion dollars.
But that's a lot, a trillion dollars. And it sends a message we won't be growing government for a while.

Speaker 4 And then he wants to have tax cuts and deregulation

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 foreign investment.

Speaker 4 And that, he thinks, will

Speaker 4 get GDP up to

Speaker 4 3%,

Speaker 4 low unemployment, low inflation, so you'll get more revenue. And we did get more revenue under his first term, but we didn't stop spending.

Speaker 4 And then third, he's coming up with all of these methods of making money, tariffs,

Speaker 4 this

Speaker 4 gold card where instead of a green card you pay $5 million

Speaker 4 and there are people who s apparently there's a couple hundred thousand people who have that kind of money and want to come to the United States. And so he is suggesting that if you have 200,000

Speaker 4 and they pay $5 million, you can see you're getting up to a trillion dollars. And that would be revenue right away.

Speaker 4 A lot of people object and say, well, we're only letting wealthy people in. Maybe, maybe not.

Speaker 4 I don't know if that comes at the expense of other green card holders or not, but it's a far cry from bringing in 12 million people under Biden and almost all of them whom need to be on federal assistance.

Speaker 4 And the idea that instead of bringing in people on federal assistance or state assistance or local extents, you're bringing in people who have capital that creates taxes and jobs and everything.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 that's what it's all about. And we know what the outlines of the Ukraine, we've talked about it before.
It's just now down to how far will Vladimir Putin go back to the February 24 embarkation points.

Speaker 4 In other words, he's going to have the Donbass, he's going to have the Crimea. Everybody knew that.
John Bolton said, Why would you say he's going to have it? Or why would you say he can't be a NATO?

Speaker 4 Those are negotiating points.

Speaker 4 It's like me, as I said, it's like me with a bunch of cards, and I'd say, I have a full house.

Speaker 4 And you look at my face and you say he's bluffing.

Speaker 4 So if we tried to say

Speaker 4 we're going to put Ukraine in NATO, or we're going to

Speaker 4 give them the weapons and manpower to take back Crimea, they know we're not going to do that.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, you know, I saw a

Speaker 2 Gallup poll that had the number of

Speaker 2 Ukrainians that wanted to end the war. And it was, I don't know the exact number, but it was over 50%, upwards 60.

Speaker 2 But then the other question was how many of them would be willing to give up territory to the Russians to gain that peace? And there was, of Ukrainians, only 12% said they were willing to.

Speaker 4 When Mr. Zelensky saved Kiev and he was riding high as the international rock star with his T-shirt and ex-comedian status, he went and negotiated three or four times, sometimes on Turkey's auspices.

Speaker 4 And he could have had a deal where I think after the Russians had been humiliated, they would have gone back to where they invaded.

Speaker 4 But he didn't take it because there were people that were saying, if you stop them from taking Kiev, now you can take back Crimea and the Donbass.

Speaker 4 And there were very naive people in the West egging them on and saying, you know what, the Russians are done for. I heard that Putin's going to be

Speaker 4 the Wagner group and all these people, they're going to get rid of him. That was crazy talk.
So they should have made a deal then.

Speaker 4 That's what Trump misspoke when he said that this should have never started and you started it.

Speaker 4 What he meant was you should have cut a deal right away when you had a ⁇ were from a position of strength and not weakness. But we all know what it is.

Speaker 4 It's just a question of how far back is he going to go. He's going to keep Crime.
He's going to keep Donbass. Zinsky was willing to admit that in 2022.

Speaker 4 And then he's not going to be in NATO, but he's going to be stronger than any other NATO power.

Speaker 4 And he's going to have battle-hardened veterans.

Speaker 4 He's going to have supposedly Europeans there on the front line with American financial interest and then then a backstop of the United States Air Force, I guess.

Speaker 4 So I don't think that Putin will be going in again. And maybe you'll have peace.
This is the worst disaster since Stalingrad. It's about

Speaker 4 1.4 million dead, wounded, captured.

Speaker 2 Victor, I would like. Oh, sorry.
Did you have more to say?

Speaker 4 No, just missing. Missing, missing.

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Speaker 2 So Victor, I wanted, since we are talking about rights to rare earth minerals, China and Russia recently, this is about a week ago, but they gained rights to lithium deposits in Bolivia and bought them from the state-owned company that had control over them.

Speaker 2 And Bolivians were out angry. And I thought this showed two things.

Speaker 2 One, that the socialist government is making a lot of money, probably for its own cronies in the government through this government-owned agency and that they are willing to sell off these things to Russia and China which is I don't I don't know how dangerous that is I mean everybody wants lithium these days your thoughts on that

Speaker 4 all these third world countries think that you vite you invite in the Chinese and then they build you a port or a freeway or an airport or a harbor and then they do it for your their goodwill or they do it to create greater business.

Speaker 4 They don't. They want to be paid back.
I think China sent them a bill for over a billion dollars.

Speaker 4 So then the next thing they do is they infiltrate within the society itself and they probably pay bribes off to members of the government and then the government gives them concessions.

Speaker 4 And the concessions are they can profit and get their money back. So their point is they have 1.4

Speaker 4 billion people and they have a finite amount of resources. So they sit down with the Central Planning Commission and said, where's the beef? Where's the wheat? Where's the precious metal oil?

Speaker 4 Where's the gas? Where's uranium? And they say, these are the places in the world that they are.

Speaker 4 And then they say, you go out and build them a bridge, you go out and build them a railroad, you build them, and then when they can't pay, then you get a concession. And that's what they're doing.

Speaker 4 And I don't think it's going to work because you can see it in Africa. They're very they're not liked.
They don't the Chinese do not go in and

Speaker 4 integrate within the community. They stay in compounds.

Speaker 4 And they're because they're from a communist country. They're watched.
They can't really

Speaker 4 freely talk and freely intermingle with the host population. So they were like the Russians of the 1970s.
I went to Egypt in 1973 when I was

Speaker 4 21?

Speaker 4 20.

Speaker 4 No, excuse me. Yeah, it was 1974, right after the Yom Kippur War, and

Speaker 4 Sadat had kicked out the Russians, but they were still there giving them munitions for the just-completed Yom Kippur War. And I was at a restaurant

Speaker 4 having coffee with the Russians, and a bunch of Russians came in. They were loud.
They were all, they had a separate table, three or four tables, and no one would speak to them. And so that...

Speaker 2 Wait, you just said you had a conversation. You were having a conversation with the Russians.
Who were they?

Speaker 4 Oh, they were speaking English.

Speaker 2 Oh, they were. Oh, so they were with Russians.
So nobody, well, the people you were talking to, nobody would come to the European Union.

Speaker 4 I was at a couple of seaside restaurants in Alexandria and then later in Cairo. They were all over the country.

Speaker 4 When that Sadat said that he expelled the Russians right before the Om Kippur War, that was kind of a lie. He didn't.

Speaker 4 He just said visibly, we're breaking, and everybody said, well, they'll never attack Israel because they don't have any weapons.

Speaker 4 But if you look at the actual weapons shipments, the Russians were, that was all a roost to get the guard of the Israelis down, and it worked.

Speaker 4 One of the big secrets of the Yom Kippur War was the Israelis were surprised because they had felt that the Russians were done with the Egyptians, because they announced that, but they didn't.

Speaker 4 So after the war was over, they let people in who sent $100.

Speaker 4 If you were a student, you had to send it in advance, and they kept it and gave you that when you arrived in

Speaker 4 Egyptian pounds.

Speaker 4 And so I was there for two weeks. I got malaria, so I was was very ill.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I would sit at the cafes and listen to people, and there were Russians there, lots of them. But every time they came in as a group, the Egyptians that were getting up would get up and walk away.

Speaker 4 And then I'd ask the waiter,

Speaker 4 what's wrong? I thought they're your ally. And I said, we don't like them.
They stick together. They're rude.
We don't want anything to do with them. We like Americans a lot better.

Speaker 4 And I thought, this is crazy because we were their enemies. And there were hardly any Americans.
And then Egyptians would sit down and say, Are you Americans? Isn't Nixon going to let us come back?

Speaker 4 And aren't you going to be able to come back to Egypt? And etc., etc. So

Speaker 4 there is something called the ugly Russian and the ugly Chinese.

Speaker 2 I thought this was interesting too in light of

Speaker 2 J.D. Vance's trip to Europe.
It seems to me that part of Vance's agenda or his presence was to be

Speaker 2 a warning, perhaps, or an effort to try to address the China expanse throughout the world of that belt and road, trade and belt, belt and trade initiative, I guess it is.

Speaker 2 So I thought, you know, here they are off into other countries looking for minerals and getting mineral rights.

Speaker 2 And that's the thing about South America that's been worrying Americans for a while is the expansion of China there.

Speaker 2 I know that Rubio addressed the ports that are controlled on both sides of the Panama Canal by the Chinese. So

Speaker 2 just a look into what China is about.

Speaker 4 Their attitude is,

Speaker 4 well, in the South China Sea, in the areas around China, you have our enemies that you're arming and helping, like Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Australia.

Speaker 4 So we're going to go into your territory, forget the Monroe document, and we're going to develop.

Speaker 4 It's the same strategy that the Russians used in the 60s when they tried to put nuclear missiles in Cuba under Khrushchev. And that's what they're doing.

Speaker 4 They're trying to infiltrate all of these governments and eventually get concessions, which they're doing, and then get ports and then get control and then bribe the governments to make them.

Speaker 4 And almost all of them are socialist governments now. It was 30 years ago, everybody said, you know,

Speaker 4 they were all kind of melee open, you know, open market, free market governments, and they're not. And China is encouraging that.

Speaker 4 And then the idea is that the next state, when they get to digest all that, the next stage will be they'll have military bases. And this is a way, they think, to pressure us in our backyard.

Speaker 4 And that's what they're doing. And these socialist governments think it's kind of neat, but then they find out that dealing with the Chinese is not like dealing with the Americans.

Speaker 4 And Donald Trump is a disruptor, so he goes over to Europe or he sees people and said, Oh, we're getting ripped off, and NATO, they don't make their 2%,

Speaker 4 or we're going to buy Greenland. That's all to create the chaotic.

Speaker 4 He's like, as I said in an earlier broadcast, he is like Patton running across Europe with armor. And then they bring in the infantry, and that is Marco Rubio, Waltz, and J.D.
Vance.

Speaker 4 And they say, let me explain what he's doing. Let me give you the details.
And then J.D. comes in and he talks.
He's very,

Speaker 4 Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance are very well spoken.
And they're kind of the infantry and they consolidate what Donald Trump did and they develop it.

Speaker 4 And so now they're talking about to the Europeans, this is in your interest.

Speaker 4 If you can relieve us from some of our military responsibilities, at least on the tactical level, then we can redeploy in Asia, which is in your benefit, because you are at the mercy of China as well as we are.

Speaker 4 And it's kind of like what Obama kept saying we're going to have an Asian pivot.

Speaker 4 All that was rhetorical. That just meant we're going to cut the defense budget and draw down in Europe, and then we're going to talk about going to Asia, and we never will.

Speaker 2 Well, the last thing before break is that,

Speaker 2 as you and Jack talked about, the German election

Speaker 2 saw that the ADF won the right-wing, the second, I guess if you could call it placement, second place in the election.

Speaker 4 15% of the vote, 150%.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and the Christian Democratic Party was first. So they were, they appointed their chancellor, and I think his name is Friedrich Merz.

Speaker 2 And I'm curious because Christian Democratic Party is considered center-right, and then the second went to the ADF, which was very right-winged and very much a Donald Trump agenda, as you and Jack talked about.

Speaker 2 But what do you see for the future under this MERS?

Speaker 2 Some of the things he's saying do not seem very center-right at all. They seem center-left.

Speaker 4 You have to start with it-with a reality that they're all of their parties, as in Britain, are

Speaker 4 an order of magnitude to the left.

Speaker 4 So our Democratic Party

Speaker 4 is their

Speaker 4 Democratic Party is their

Speaker 4 center

Speaker 4 center.

Speaker 4 Yeah, our Democratic Party is their center party. We have nothing comparable to their left-wing parties.
Our Conservative Party is what they call their version is far-right, crazy Nazi.

Speaker 4 So what do I mean by that? There is no political party in most of Europe that can be for Second Amendment rights that we have or no abortion until the,

Speaker 4 although they're better on abortion than many states, but no late-term abortions,

Speaker 4 skepticism on social issues, on drugs. They don't have any of that.
So they're all over. So they're

Speaker 4 Christian Democrats. They're not Republicans.
They are Clinton Democrats of the old style. They don't exist anymore.
Or maybe even further to the left, Obama Democrats.

Speaker 4 And then there's the Green Party to the left of them. We don't have a ⁇

Speaker 4 their Green Party exists in the United States in universities. But it's not.
So he's not a conservative.

Speaker 4 Not at all, Mertz. But

Speaker 4 he has been listening to what Trump said. He doesn't understand the art of the deal.

Speaker 4 And when Trump says all this stuff about Zelensky and da-da-da-da-da, then he starts to get upset and he says, we're going to have to forget the America. We have to step away from it.

Speaker 4 Doesn't he understand? That's exactly what Trump wants him to do. He wants him to get mad and then to up his defense spending and defend.
And if he would come, and what is he going to do when he says,

Speaker 4 well, this is a new strain of Americanism and we're going to, we Europeans have to get together.

Speaker 4 Well, first of all, there's a lot of people in Europe that are closer to the United States than they are to to Germany.

Speaker 4 And so I think Eastern Europe has had a long history with Germany, and so has Western Europe.

Speaker 4 Number one. And then, number two, when he says he's going to move away from Germany,

Speaker 4 well, we in the United States will say, promises, promises. So, well, what are you going to do, Mr.
Mertz? I'm going to move away and we're going to get an independent.

Speaker 4 And I want those 40 bases completely out, and I want those 50,000 Americans back home. Promise? The next thing.
And you know what?

Speaker 4 We're running an $80 billion surplus with you, and we don't like sending stuff over there to you, so we're going to go back to no promises? Promises?

Speaker 4 And you know, that's that's he that he has no leverage, is what I'm trying to say. And he destroyed his economy.
He didn't do it, it was Merkel, but

Speaker 4 they just the left did it, Schultz did it,

Speaker 4 so did Merkel. They have zero GDP growth.
Their energy is four times ours. They have an open border.
They have more foreign-born than we did. All Trump and Vance were trying to say, we went there.

Speaker 4 We did this. We suffered under Biden.
We had open borders. We had hyperinflation.

Speaker 4 We tried to clamp down on fossil fuels. We were pacifists abroad.
We got out. We were humiliated.

Speaker 4 We've done what you've done. It doesn't work.
Trust us. Use us as a lab rat.
Why are you doing this? It's collective suicide. And he took it the wrong way.

Speaker 4 If he takes it the wrong way, then it's his business.

Speaker 2 All right, Victor, let's go ahead and go to some ads, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about domestic issues. Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. I think one of the interesting things this week is that Dan Bongino was appointed as deputy director under Cash Patel.

Speaker 2 And I was wondering your thoughts on Dan Bongino.

Speaker 2 What is your feeling about how he will do his job or his status?

Speaker 4 Does he have more tattoos than Pete Hekset?

Speaker 4 Yes. Because

Speaker 4 Pete Hekses, when he was in Europe, he had an appointment with the Polish defense minister. And earlier, the minister had said something to the effect of he looks like a tattooed freak or something.

Speaker 4 So I think Had said canceled his meeting with him. And now they're going to get an FBI assistant director that has more tattoos than he

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 the left

Speaker 4 doesn't quite know what to do because they said the problem with Cash Patel was that he wasn't a law enforcement officer and that he was in

Speaker 4 national security, not FBI investigations. So then he picked someone who was a New York City cop and who had been in the Secret Service.
So that's about as law enforcement as you could get.

Speaker 4 NYPD is the best place in the

Speaker 4 best place in the United States, and Secret Service was the high echelon. So they've got this guy that meets all their requirements.
But the problem is

Speaker 4 and he's also well-spoken. I think he's got the number of fifth rated podcasts in the country.

Speaker 4 He's probably stepping down from $5 or $6 million of income. And anyway, my point is that

Speaker 4 when he comes in, he's already said he was talking about Adam Schiff and collusion. But just as

Speaker 4 just before we started, there's a story today that James Comey, according to a whistleblower, it's not anybody, it's not been confirmed, but he had honeypot.

Speaker 4 I guess that's a euphemism for getting FBI female agents. Sounds like one of the bad James Bond movies.
And getting these attractive FBI agents to infiltrate as close as they could to Trump in 2016.

Speaker 4 And then they were going to tinker around and find evidence of Russian collusion. And then that would help the

Speaker 4 crossfire hurricane. So think about that.
You know, Comey's been on TV a lot trashing Trump.

Speaker 4 And I know they go back and forth, so I'm not saying that he didn't have cause to, but he's got a lot of culpability. He testified 245 times to the House Intelligence and Committee.
I don't know.

Speaker 4 That wasn't part of my purview.

Speaker 4 I'll get back to you. I'll check back with you.

Speaker 4 It's an interesting question, but why ask me? That's what he did. And then he went to the president and said,

Speaker 4 I need a confidential conversation with Mr. President.
Okay.

Speaker 4 No, we're not running an investigation.

Speaker 4 The FBI does not investigate the President of the United States. And then he goes out in the parking lot.
He gets his little pad. Here's the conversation.
Here's the crazy things that Trump said.

Speaker 4 How do I get that to the New York Times? Oh, I got a friend. Hey, don't tell him that I gave it to you.
And then he sends that conversation.

Speaker 4 And then Trump says, you know, that's the kind of person he is. And then he says,

Speaker 4 Hillary Clinton, he says she destroyed 30,000 emails. She destroyed her devices.
She was using an illegal server.

Speaker 4 There was some classified information on those emails. That's a felony.
However, no prosecutor in the world would indict her. And you're thinking, well, wait a minute.
You're an investigator.

Speaker 4 You're not a prosecutor. The FBI is not a prosecutor.
You are tasked to investigate something. Then you give your

Speaker 4 findings over to a prosecutor. That would be Loretta Lynch.
who had just been on the tarmac with Bill Clinton. And you're supposed to say there's a case here that she broke the law.

Speaker 4 Then let Loretta lynch. But you're acting like you're judge, jury.

Speaker 4 He reminds me of

Speaker 4 who was it? It was judge on the E. Jean Carroll case.
Judge Kaplan. Was he judge, jury, and executioner? I think he was.

Speaker 4 And he said, this is a statue of defamation, and I'm going to examine what evidence can be in.

Speaker 4 I'm going to

Speaker 4 judge how the case goes. I am going to be the jury and convict you, Donald Trump, and I'm going to be the executioner and decide you owe $88 million.

Speaker 4 And that's what he did.

Speaker 4 I think I'm not sure they did that in the Letita James case as well. But

Speaker 4 that's what Comey did when he was FBI

Speaker 4 investigating Hillary.

Speaker 2 So I take it you have high hopes for Dan Bongino's appointment appointment as deputy director.

Speaker 4 Well, it's another question because Cash Patel under oath said he's looking forward. I think I'm quoting him.
I'm not going to look back.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you're not going to look back, Cash, but what do you do when people that are whistleblowers who were tormented or hounded come forward now and they feel liberated, or people that they drove out of the FBI or

Speaker 4 to come to work for you, and they lay out this evidence, and

Speaker 4 it's not about people who were pardoned, and it's not subject to the statute of limitations, then you have a duty to pursue it if there's a criminal act there.

Speaker 4 And the FBI was

Speaker 4 I mean, you get to the point,

Speaker 4 what were they incapable of?

Speaker 4 All the last four directors either lied outright and admitted they lied, like Andrew McCabe,

Speaker 4 or claimed amnesia under oath, like James Comey, or I guess I don't know what

Speaker 4 Robert Mueller was doing when the catalysts that got him the special counsel position were the Fusion GPS creepy people and the Dossie. And they asked him that under oath.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I didn't get into that. I don't know anything about it.
And then Christopher Wray, did you have FBI informants on January 7th?

Speaker 4 I have no evidence of that. We're going to investigate.

Speaker 4 Did you surveil

Speaker 4 parents at school boards on the prompt of Merrick Garland, who got complaints from this teachers' union?

Speaker 4 That is a local amount. I will investigate.
I will get back to you. And did your people go after traditional Catholics? If they did, it would be wrong, but I'll investigate it.

Speaker 4 Did you people arrest people and have SWAT-like raids at their home for protesting peacefully an abortion claim?

Speaker 4 Well, remember what Merrick Garland said? Well, the difference is that we go after, we have the FBI go after anti-abortion protesters

Speaker 4 because they're peaceful in the daylight and we can see them. But we can't go after

Speaker 4 terrorists that go after right-to-life people because they work at night.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 you fathom that. I can't.
And

Speaker 4 that's what they were doing at the FBI, all of them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Cash is going to run a completely different FBI.

Speaker 4 People are really, I got a professor, I won't maintain his name. He sent me a whole bunch of stuff saying that Donald Trump had basically been a Russian source for 30 years.

Speaker 4 And it was very convoluted. And I thought, well,

Speaker 4 why not just say that Joe that Bill Clinton got $500,000 from the mayor of Moscow to give a speech at the same time his wife was Secretary of State, and they were getting millions from Russian oligarchs to the Clinton Foundations, and she freed up North American uranium, uranium-1, for the Russians to get 20% of the supplies of Canada, the United States.

Speaker 4 Or why not say that the Air Force II was going to Russia, China, Ukraine under Biden? But

Speaker 4 it doesn't make sense that there's this asymmetry, that we know what the Bidens were doing, we know what the Clintons were doing, and yet we're told that

Speaker 4 We're told that Donald Trump is a Russian asset, a Russian puppet. If he's a Russian asset or a Russian puppet,

Speaker 4 why did he wipe out the the Wagner group? Why did he do all these things that convinced Putin it would be a stupid idea to invade Ukraine on his tenure? Nobody ever answers those questions.

Speaker 2 Well, hopefully Cash's FBI will be completely different. And speaking of cleaning up in Washington, Tulsi Gabbard, who is, I think it's the National Intelligence Institute.

Speaker 4 Yeah, she's the head director of NASA. She had John Radcliffe's old job, director of national.

Speaker 4 That was formed after 9-11, and it didn't really work because the idea was you were going to make an intelligence Tsar because there had been a paywall.

Speaker 4 So the FBI did not talk to the CIA under Clinton. And supposedly, they had evidence that would have prevented the 9-11.
So George W. Bush said, we're going to infiltrate all of these separate agents.

Speaker 4 There's a defense intelligence agency. There's a national security agency.
There's the FBI. There's the CIA.
And we'll put in the middle of the the spider web a director of national intelligence.

Speaker 4 So they'll all feed him all of this, and then his staff will make a kind of a paradigm or a synopsis or summary and give it to the president.

Speaker 4 They'll all be told, and you know how that was going to work. The FBI, I'm not going to give them anything because we found this.
They'll take credit and the CIA, I don't trust the FBI.

Speaker 4 And what's the Pentagon? They were all at odds. So it never worked.
But that's the theory of her job.

Speaker 4 She's very good because she has a very mellifilous vo uh voice. She's attractive, she's charming, but she has a backbone of steel.
So

Speaker 4 she can smile and put a stiletto in you, and that's good. So I think she will go after a lot of people within her agency.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Apparently, she's going after a bunch, over a hundred, that she is terminating because they were on a sex chat that was platformed off of the National Intelligence Agency's computer somehow, and they were sending, you know, obviously

Speaker 2 some pretty racy stuff across the waves to each other.

Speaker 4 And I was wondering, she's happy doing that because Chuck Schumer said that it was unfair to ask federal employees to name five things over a week period that they did, a week's period, or they did, but they had time to talk about sex.

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 she's going to fire them.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 this whole hysteria about these federal employees is really something.

Speaker 4 It's not like Elon Musk said, went to West Virginia, told everybody that was coal mining for five generations, ten generations, like kill Hillary Clinton, you're just going to have to find a new job.

Speaker 4 Or

Speaker 4 Joe Biden went to Pennsylvania, I think it was, about fracking, said, you've got to learn to code.

Speaker 4 That was pretty heartless, but they're really angry about all of these federal employees that have it.

Speaker 4 You know, when I was young, that was the argument. My mother was a state employee as a judge, and my father worked for a community district.

Speaker 4 And the idea was, maybe not as a judge, it took her her whole life to be there before she, and she passed away, I thought, quite young. So the point I'm making is

Speaker 4 the argument was we won't pay you as much as you could get in the private sector, but you will have job security and better benefits. Well, now they make more, make one and a half times more.

Speaker 4 And we've created this idea that it's sacrosanct to be a federal employee, that you're untouchable. And anybody

Speaker 4 who differs with you is heartless.

Speaker 4 I don't like that morality.

Speaker 4 I like the morality: if you're borrowing 30s, you owe $36 trillion and you're borrowing $2 trillion, then you're borrowing money to pay employees that are not working in many cases.

Speaker 4 And I'm more worried about the poor guy guy in a tractor who's trying to pay his taxes.

Speaker 2 Well, you know,

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 2 administration, of course, is talking a lot about Doge and increasing efficiency, and they're targeting, or they seem to suggest quite often that DEI has destroyed efficiency, brought on mediocrity, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And that's probably true. But I think DEI has

Speaker 2 a deeper impact on our culture than just the mediocrity, which is bad enough. But it's challenging the whole concept of Western civilization ultimately.

Speaker 2 And I think that that's something that is interesting is this DEI diversity, equity,

Speaker 2 and inclusion is saying that all that Western civilization was created by white guys, so it's no good. Let's throw it out.
It's got targets all over it.

Speaker 2 And that is ultimately going to be detrimental to

Speaker 2 us here in the West. And I was wondering if you could talk about it.

Speaker 4 It's very dangerous. You're right.
But

Speaker 4 take the person who is the most, I think, the most racist on the DEI, and that's Jory Reed, who was just fired.

Speaker 4 So her family, why did they, if it was true, this is so toxic? And the same thing with Ilyan Omar and Masheed Talibi

Speaker 4 and even AOC's parents who were immigrants. if it's such a bad place, don't come.
But they all want to come here because they know it's not a bad place.

Speaker 4 And then they know deep down inside it's a good place compared to Mexico or the Caribbean or the Arab world. And it's very easily definable.

Speaker 4 There's about eight or nine things in Europe, but especially in the United States, that they don't have.

Speaker 4 There's a free market economy, there's an independent judiciary, there is a Bill of Rights, there is a constitutional system of governance, free market, as I said, economy. There is a

Speaker 4 long tradition of self-criticism and self-reflection. So it's constantly being questioned and torn apart, sometimes nihilistically.

Speaker 4 And women are treated well, and gays are treated well.

Speaker 4 Everybody aspires to capture the idealism of the Declaration of Independence.

Speaker 4 And that's not true in most places. So they come over here.
And why DEI is really toxic because it's obsessed with race.

Speaker 4 So it says if you're not white, you're part of the Marxist binary on the good side of being the victimizer and not the victimizer.

Speaker 4 So we have all these people who immigrate, who have no experience with the American system, but because they claim they're not white upon arrival, these are people who especially came in under Biden.

Speaker 4 They feel that they're eligible for compensation, as if

Speaker 4 the country is racist when they set one foot into the country.

Speaker 4 I just crossed the southern border. I need affirmative action.
I need DEI. Well, what did you suffer?

Speaker 4 Well, I will start suffering because if it's, well, if you will start suffering, go back to Chiapas maybe, and you won't. It's so incoherent, and they know that.

Speaker 4 And they know this system is the only one that.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 right now we have about 335 million people. China has westernized its economy to copy ours, but they haven't gone the whole way with freedom, self-criticism, judiciary, the whole thing.

Speaker 4 They have 1.4 billion. Our GDP, depending how you analyze it, you could argue is still greater.
What does that mean? That means that one American is producing goods and services.

Speaker 4 in greater number than four Chinese.

Speaker 4 And there's nobody in America, maybe business captains of industry, they invest in China so they can produce stuff to send back here, but we don't have 330,000 American students that are studying in China.

Speaker 4 Nobody is breaking the door down to get into China.

Speaker 4 So they know all that. And so it's just, it gets back to a sense of, I don't know what it is.
It's insecurity. I mean, when Joy Reed used to give these big lectures about

Speaker 4 indigenous culture and that she was going to be a path-breaking black woman who would wear cornrows and indigenous hairstyles.

Speaker 4 And white people had culturally appropriated them. And then the next thing you knew, she had straightened her hair and had blonde hair dyed.
And that was great. I thought that was great.
But why this

Speaker 4 emphasis, you know what I mean? According to your own ideology, you wouldn't want to look like a white blonde woman.

Speaker 4 So there's something, it's just so incoherent, the DEI, critical race theory, and it leads nowhere.

Speaker 4 It's a colossal waste of time and energy and resources, capital and labor, but it's also a sin of commission because it impairs productivity. It disrupts productivity.

Speaker 4 If you're a professor, they monitor your syllabus. You have to go to a workshop.
Why do I have to go for two or three hours every year and go through these little videos? You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Video comes in and and I see a guy in the office. It's the same thing every year at Stanford.
A guy's at the office

Speaker 4 and a young woman walks by, attractive in a short dress, and he looks like this.

Speaker 4 And then he says, hi, babe. Stop.

Speaker 4 And then you have A, B, and C.

Speaker 4 He is committing an act of sexism. B, it's okay.
He's just an old boy network. He doesn't, C, he needs to get with his buddies and see if he was right.

Speaker 4 D, he should go ask her out for a date if he thinks she.

Speaker 4 E,

Speaker 4 he should call the diversity, equity, inclusion officer. People should to get counseling.
And you don't even have to. It's just the whole thing is like that.
I thought every year I do it, I say,

Speaker 4 Am I in North Korea? It reminds me of the original Manchurian candidate with Frank Sinatra

Speaker 4 and Lawrence Harvey. I feel like Lawrence Harvey, I'm being brainwashed with the cards.
And it's just pathetic.

Speaker 2 Have you ever tried answering the wrong thing to every single one of the questions to see if they'll send the thought police after you?

Speaker 4 It doesn't matter because you miss it.

Speaker 4 It's like T-ball. Nobody fails.
So, yes, I have. I've done an episode where I did it and the little thing flashes up.

Speaker 4 Good try.

Speaker 4 Unfortunately, we need to have a little tutorial and then they add to that segment about five minutes and then flashes up here is what you need to know go try it again so if you do it again they said uh you'll just be in warp land the rest of your life and it's like the uh when you get a ticket in california or most states you have traffic online schools and you know you just say

Speaker 4 man i know the traffic code i know the speed limit i'm not going to listen to this crap and you just speed through and then all of a sudden when they ask you they say what color was the red dress of the presenter?

Speaker 4 And you think, gee, I know that you have to stop when a bus has a red blinking light and a sign, but I never, I just skip through it. We'll go back.
And that's what these are. They're schedules.

Speaker 4 So you can just answer the questions,

Speaker 4 and then you just sit there with it. You have to have two computers when you do it.
One that's there, and then you just work on your own stuff.

Speaker 4 And then you wait, and you look over, and it says, Okay, you can go to the next section. It's so cynical.
I have never met one person,

Speaker 4 left, right, male, female, DI, non-DI, whatever, whoever felt that that was a positive experience or a helpful experience. And I don't think the people who give it to us believe that either.

Speaker 4 It's kind of like a loyalty oath, you know, I have never, have you ever been a communist? No.

Speaker 4 Or on the other extreme.

Speaker 4 The diversity statements, you know, you apply for school and it says, what have you done for diversity? And I talk to Stanford students. I talk to students all the way.

Speaker 4 People write me, and it's sort of like

Speaker 4 when I was in high school, I thought up an idea of how to deliver food at homeless kitchens in the inner city. And then they go, and there's no way to adjudicate that.

Speaker 4 Or I went over on a program to Uganda to help with clean water projects. And that's, my father works at USAID, that kind of stuff.
It's just all

Speaker 4 nobody that's what you don't want to have an Eastern European Cold War society where everybody's cynical because they just are sick of the orthodox stuff.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, let's go ahead and go to some messages, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about uncovering fraud in the U.S. government.
Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. You can find Victor at his social media outlets.
On X, he is at V D Hansen. And on Facebook, he is at Hansen's Morning Cup.

Speaker 2 And then you can find him, too, for his podcasts now on video, on YouTube, and on Rumble as well. And we're putting them onto Spotify.
So hopefully we can get links out to everybody on the website.

Speaker 2 So come to the website as well.

Speaker 4 That's a message we're learning.

Speaker 4 We're learning, everybody. We're trying to learn the discipline.
discipline. We're rookie podcasters.
We're just out in our old,

Speaker 4 our old, we're in my old annex when I was a little boy. This was the manger to my right.
Yeah. All the little animals fed here.
It's got about a four-foot ceiling on the other side of the wall.

Speaker 2 Well, since I am engaged in a lot of this technology that we're expanding into, I'm finding that we're not the only ones that the technology world is changing so fast that everybody feels like they're beginners at new times.

Speaker 2 So, well, Victor, let's look at

Speaker 2 a couple of scams or potentially what sound like scams or at least favoritism.

Speaker 2 Senator Shelton White House's wife, Sandra, had a lot of self-employed income from the Ocean Conservancy, which received about $6.9 million.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 2 Senator Shelton not only introduced legislation, but also, of course, voted on it. I'm not sure if this is a conflict of interest or not.
They investigated it and said it wasn't.

Speaker 2 But your thoughts on that?

Speaker 4 As they said in a wild bunch. Who is they? They?

Speaker 4 Who the blank is they?

Speaker 4 They cheated us. Who's they?

Speaker 4 Who investigated them? Sheldon.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I can't believe that the sharpest critic in the nomination processes and of Elon Musk Musk and Doge has been Sheldon Whitehouse. And he keeps saying the same thing.
This is terrible.

Speaker 4 There's no fraud. There's no special concessions.
This is transparent. This is just a bunch of wealthy people that are got guns.
Elon Musk is corrupt. He's got.

Speaker 4 And it turns out his wife was the head of some kind of nonprofit. I think she has a PhD or something in oceanography.

Speaker 4 And she was overseeing the distribution of money from the federal government and parceling out to particular needy groups while he was in there saying that anybody who would cut these programs, either because we didn't have the money to fund them or they weren't evaluated as effective or the people who were running them had quid pro quo relations with the government or the people they were doing, was lying.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 this whole thing that Elon Musk, it's like the best way everybody to look at it, it's a big piece of granite rock, and you're you're hiking, and you know you shouldn't turn it over.

Speaker 4 It looks shiny, it's kind of granite, it has pyrites

Speaker 4 glistening, and then you just think, what is under there? Is it a snake?

Speaker 4 And so you take your foot and you kick over this rock, and the next thing you know, you see centipedes and black widows and all these slugs that are all slimy, maybe a snake or a fossilized toad, and it's really gross.

Speaker 4 And then you think, I'm just going to put it back. I can't deal with it.
And Elon Musk turns it over and said, it's time to get a pressure washer and blushed it. And then he wants to

Speaker 4 sweep away and clean up everything underneath. And that's why they're angry about it.
He's upsetting the natural ecosystem.

Speaker 2 And we're all loving it.

Speaker 4 I'm really worried about him because just was it yesterday a woman got a young woman got on was it TikTok or was it YouTube?

Speaker 4 She did a little video and she said two things: that she wanted to kill him and that she hadn't paid income tax in eight years. And I hope, Mr.

Speaker 4 IRS Inspector that's in the iCloud or wherever you are, you're everywhere.

Speaker 4 I have paid about 55% of my income or maybe 60%

Speaker 4 ever since I was a professor because I'm paranoid about the IRS. Not because I do anything wrong, but I didn't believe in writing off desk or travel, any of that.
I just paid.

Speaker 4 But the idea you wouldn't file

Speaker 4 income tax for two years, one year, six months, I get paranoid if it's within a week of the deadline. I always try to pay by March 15th.

Speaker 4 And then I get worried. But the idea you get on there and you brag and they didn't catch you for eight years.

Speaker 4 And then these

Speaker 4 These people are supposed to be very sophisticated critics on the left. And are you stupid? You go on and you tell the nation that you haven't payday

Speaker 4 and you insult everybody and the IRS is not going to come out. They went after Pete Hexett when they were running.
They are the most politicized group in the world.

Speaker 4 They're going to get, I can guarantee you that when somebody saw that, they got on the phone and said, where's the IRS auditor?

Speaker 4 And that's going to happen.

Speaker 4 But they are lowering. They did the same thing with Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 We had retired four-star officers and general. Hitler, like Hitler, like Mussolini, Mussolini, Mussolini, liar, liar, liar, Michael Hayden, Auschwitz, Birgenthau.

Speaker 4 He's architect of Birgenthau, retweeting all that. You know, when he got shot, he retreated,

Speaker 4 retweeted some terrible things. Then you had the New Republic with a picture of his face on Hitler.
And then you had Joy Reed and Rachel Mountain.

Speaker 4 I'm studying Nazism and fascism all of a sudden, a deep dive into.

Speaker 4 And what they did was they lowered the permissible.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 there there were a lot of people out there. And then they coupled that with

Speaker 4 the Secret Service. And they said,

Speaker 4 I think if I tried to do something terrible to Donald Trump, I would be a national hero. The left would canonize me forever.

Speaker 4 And two, after that first assassination attempt, it looked like they're pretty incompetent. And after the second one, they're really incompetent.
You got close.

Speaker 4 I can do better than both of those weirdos. And every nut will come out.
So if you want to demonize,

Speaker 4 and I mean this sincerely, you

Speaker 4 are what spray painting Tesla's, you're throwing rocks into Tesla's windows, you're trying to destroy that brand, you're threatening to kill him, you're going to bring out a lot of crazy people.

Speaker 4 And it's so ironic because this is the left. It said words, Cornell West, words matter.

Speaker 4 Remember, Sarah Palin just said, this is a map of all of the congressional districts that we must win, and she put a little bullseye on each district. Remember that?

Speaker 4 And they said that she was responding.

Speaker 4 Gabby Gifford, she was responsible for that. It was crazy.
Joe Biden has said bloodbath. He's used that term.
We're going to have a bloodbath.

Speaker 4 It's getting very scary what they're doing. I don't know what their strategy,

Speaker 4 their long-term strategy is to win five or six House seats and immediately impeach Donald Trump. And that's what they're going to.

Speaker 4 But the short-term strategy is to drive his popularity down by calling him Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, must, must, must, oligarch da-da, crooked, that.

Speaker 4 And then they have a map of thousands of federal judges all over the United States and state judges, and they have them rated one to a hundred, who's the most loony left-wing, and then go over there and get George Soros or somebody's money, Tides Foundation, and sue in that court to stop him.

Speaker 4 And then it'll have to go up to a district appellate court, and then maybe, maybe not to the Supreme Court, and it'll eat up two years of the Trump administration, just like Robert Mueller.

Speaker 2 Well, there's one more thing in terms of fraud, just so people can know what's going on. And on Power Line, Scott Johnson

Speaker 2 quite often does things about Minnesota or Minneapolis. And so there is a massive case of scams on the COVID money that was made available.

Speaker 2 And there was an organization called Feeding Our Future that gave out millions to these places that said they were giving

Speaker 2 meals to children, many of them in Minneapolis. And they've caught at least, well, they've got a whole bunch of people that have been indicted.

Speaker 2 But the two that I saw, they said they were giving meals and they made millions and in fact order woman quarter of a billion dollars 250 million yeah and the woman that was running the feeding our future asked for 1.2 million in bribes before she would give the millions to one of the constituents that was supposed to be feeding somebody it was four one woman had a small cafe and i think she said she was feeding 4 000 a day if you do the math by an eight hour day she was claiming basically that there were 500 people eating every hour in her small establishment, which is impossible.

Speaker 4 And there was no audit. The other thing is, we talked about DEI.
Does anybody believe

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 if during COVID there had been, I'm just taking the example of East Palestine where working Appalachian whites who were discriminated against by the Biden administration.

Speaker 4 Does anybody believe that if there had been a big

Speaker 4 $250 million project to feed people in East Palestine, which I think would have a lower per capita income than Minnesota,

Speaker 4 do you think they would have got away with this? No. They would be in prison now.
But this is DEI, and Elena Omar was the symbol of, you know, she's untouchable

Speaker 4 because she's a cause celeb. And I say untouchable, I don't mean that because of her race.
I mean that because there's, Scott Johnson has shown there is credible evidence for purposes of immigration,

Speaker 4 I should say for purposes of immigration fraud, she married her brother and got in to the United States as a wife of a U.S. citizen.
And then she denied it and all of her denials never held up.

Speaker 4 And they said, stop it. She's a woman of color.
She's an immigrant. You are xenophobic.
You're racist. You're massage.
And that was it.

Speaker 4 And so this is protected because the majority of people involved were Somalis.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 if you're going to have 15% of the population not American-born, or you're going to have, in the case of California, 27%,

Speaker 4 then that's an enormous project. of civic education.

Speaker 4 You've got to tell everybody, this is the Constitution, this is the protocols, these are the songs, the stories of the popular culture going back to the rebels. We don't do that.

Speaker 4 We give them the opposite.

Speaker 4 You are here,

Speaker 4 and immigration is now a DEI project, and you have claims against this evil white group of majorities. And it's really

Speaker 4 the message is so contradictory and incoherent because it says this.

Speaker 4 This country was created by these awful white males, and they created this system and these businesses and these infrastructures.

Speaker 4 And they were toxic, and we've got to destroy it, but we want to get in on it.

Speaker 4 So, whatever they did, we want to get out of Somalia. We want to get out of Chiapas.
We want to get out of Haiti. We've got to get into that system they created.

Speaker 4 And if you say, well, they didn't create it, black people built the White House, and then don't say they created it. But you always say they created it.
So if you created it,

Speaker 4 then why do you want to come here? Because

Speaker 4 what did they create? And all they do is they feed into the idea that Western or American culture are synonymous with white people, and they're not supposed to be.

Speaker 4 They're the ones that are saying they are. It's an idea.
That was the idea of the Constitution. Everybody is created equal.
All men are created equal. He didn't say all white people.

Speaker 4 The logical trajectory of the Constitution is anybody can be an American as long as they accept the Constitution and they will be treated and expect to be treated equally under the laws. But

Speaker 4 they racialize everything, and then once they raise it, it's sort of like they're painting the floor and they're just mindlessly,

Speaker 4 and they paint and they find out that they're in the corner of the room and they can't get out and they have to walk over the wet paint.

Speaker 4 Oh my god, I said that all these horrible white people dominated the United States and they did all these terrible things, but my family just came from Africa, Latin America. Why did we come?

Speaker 4 Well, maybe I should make a new narrative. Well,

Speaker 4 they didn't dominate everything. There were 10% of the population was antithetical to the evil white men.
So they created, and that's why I came, because they created a good

Speaker 4 alternative. But it's contortionist.

Speaker 4 And now we're in a counter-revolution and it's being swept away.

Speaker 4 It couldn't be swept away if it was absolutely true. The reason that their revolution revolution is failing and Trump in just 30 days has crushed it is because it was never valid or truthful to begin.

Speaker 4 Nobody ever believed it. Nobody ever believed the lies.

Speaker 4 Did you believe that a biological male was indifferent? I mean, no difference, I shouldn't say indifferent, but no different than a biological female? No.

Speaker 2 You didn't have to see that.

Speaker 4 Does anybody out there in our audience believe that?

Speaker 4 That these tall, muscular men who claim they were women, does anybody out there think that if you have a 15-year-old shy girl and she's in a swimming team and she by necess by needs

Speaker 4 she's got to undress and put her clothes on after her swimming suit, does anybody really want a biological male next to her?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 No, no, no. So does anybody believe that we have an epidemic right now of females that have transitioned to males and they're dominating male sports as men? Yeah, biological biological females.

Speaker 4 I don't know one. And yet they just saturate us with these absurdities.
And then they wonder why 80% of the people doubt them. And then trying to,

Speaker 4 rather than trying to discover why 80% of the people disagree with us, it's 80% of the people are transphobic. And that's how their mind is.
And they're just getting more and more isolated and angry.

Speaker 2 And I'm glad that Elon Musk is showing that this DEI and all of these issues are connected with all sorts of fraud as well.

Speaker 4 He calls it the mind virus.

Speaker 4 The woke mind virus. He was basically saying,

Speaker 4 you guys in the United States government have a Twitter problem. When I bought Twitter, I overpaid for it.

Speaker 4 I understand that. But I went in there and I saw all these people loafing around at home, and everybody told me that if I cut them, Twitter would die.

Speaker 4 Everybody told me that if I changed this brand name Twitter to X, it would die. Everybody told me if I got off censorship, it would die.
It didn't die.

Speaker 4 And maybe you can say, well, it's not making him money. It wasn't ever supposed to make him money.
It was supposed to open up the entire social media, which it did.

Speaker 4 And if you don't think that when Jeff Bezos says today that he's going to do a new Washington Post editorial page, and he's only going to have calmness to reflect two themes, libertarianism,

Speaker 4 i.e., free markets, and individual liberty.

Speaker 4 Why did he do that now? And Mark Zuckerberg says he's not going to work with the FBI and partner with him anymore, and he's not going to censor anyone. That was all due to Elon Musk.

Speaker 4 It was. If he hadn't bought...
Can you imagine? I don't think that Trump would have won the election

Speaker 4 if they had still had the Twitter, because they'd still be working with the FBI and censoring stories like they did the laptop.

Speaker 4 And James Baker, who was the FBI counsel, would still be working for Facebook.

Speaker 2 Victor, let's go to maybe some lighter subjects, although on this same thing, trying to change the culture. Still,

Speaker 2 even with DEI voted out, not just in the United States, but also the strong movement against DEI in England.

Speaker 2 And we have in Parliament though, still the Labour government has taken out pictures from Parliament of many of the great heroes of England.

Speaker 4 Lord Nelson.

Speaker 2 Lord Nelson, Duke of Wellington, Churchill, Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert. They've taken them all out, replacing them, I guess, with

Speaker 2 images of slavery and things that needed to be changed, I suppose, is what the idea is.

Speaker 4 Well, if you believe that it's good to have a Navy

Speaker 4 given time and space, what other person are they going to put in there?

Speaker 4 Could you just give me somebody who's not a white male who was a great naval commander that saved Britain like he did at Trafalgar?

Speaker 4 Or if you didn't have the Duke of Wellington, I think they would have lost the Battle of Waterloo. I really do.

Speaker 4 I think it was John Keegan that wrote that people who saw the long nose of Wellington kept fighting as he rode back in front of the lines.

Speaker 4 And Churchill, they would have lost the war without Churchill.

Speaker 4 Halifax was hell-bent on trying to find some way of using Mussolini to come to a deal with Hitler both after the fall of Poland and then even after the fall of France. It was Churchill who

Speaker 4 was

Speaker 4 the only one there. There was no Roosevelt and Stalin was on the other side.

Speaker 4 So I don't know who they're going to come up with if they think those issues like the survival of Britain are unless they believe that it was bad that Britain survived and they've destroyed it and they're going to create a new hero, a new pantheon, and that British...

Speaker 4 They took down pictures of Elizabeth I.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I don't understand these people because they never give us an alternative. They never give us an alternative.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think Harriet Tubman was great in the Civil War, but if you want to know if you believe that the South was wrong and it should have lost the war,

Speaker 4 William DeComcelman did a lot more than Harriet Tubman, believe me. He was the one that broke the back of the Confederacy.
And yet,

Speaker 4 along with Ulysses S. Grant, if you're a DEI advocate and you feel that these evil white people own slaves, then you would love Ulysses S.
Grant because he killed more.

Speaker 4 slave owners than anybody in a series of battles. But they never think like that.
They just...

Speaker 4 I guess, what I'm trying to say to everybody is that if you spend a lot of your time in life talking about race, race, race, inequality, inequality, inequality, equity, equity, equity, equity,

Speaker 4 intersectionality, intersectional,

Speaker 4 then you're not doing the other things. You're not reading history.
You're not know nothing about literature. And every time you meet these people,

Speaker 4 they don't know anything. And one of the weirdest things, just to finish this, Rant, is

Speaker 4 DEI was most heavily entrenched at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford,

Speaker 4 the elite places, and they took the biggest hit. And what do I mean by that? When I hear Joy Reed say that Alvin Bragg

Speaker 4 was a proud person with a Harvard law degree, how did that guy ever get a Harvard law degree is what I want to know. He didn't know anything.

Speaker 4 He had to get co-Angelo from the Department of Justice to go join him and refashionist.

Speaker 4 It was incoherent.

Speaker 4 All he did was say, I'm going to call him names and say Donald Trump is a racist and then jury pick a jury in Manhattan. But the law, he didn't know anything about the law.

Speaker 4 And so what I'm getting at is that these schools that let in people that, not all, but let in people on the basis of their appearance.

Speaker 4 And then made the necessary adjustments for curriculum and grading to make sure that, because

Speaker 4 if you're admitted as a DI, you're never going to be flunked out.

Speaker 4 They are invested in you, and you're never going to be expelled, you're never going to be suspended, and they're going to graduate you.

Speaker 4 And that means they're going to have, they have to change the standard. Stanford gave 80% of all grades, basically almost 80% A's.

Speaker 4 So if you're an employer in Silicon Valley, a guy comes in, he says, Here's my transcript from Stanford. I had an 80% A's.

Speaker 4 The guy's going to go,

Speaker 4 well, why why not 95? Because every person who's come in today has 80%

Speaker 4 A's.

Speaker 4 You know, and he's going to say, we have a coding test, or we have an electrical engineering test we have to give you, and we have to have an analytical test. So, you know what we do?

Speaker 4 We didn't want to make it. We're just going to do the GRE graduate record exam.

Speaker 4 That's not fair. Well, we're going to have to do it because we can't trust your grades.

Speaker 4 You can't get around human nature. It's just there.
It's just over the millennia, that you have to quantify education or excellence. It's hard to do, but you have to have some quantification.

Speaker 2 The most cynical thing I've heard from the pressure to inflate grades in these universities is I had a student that I was helping to tutor a bit, and she had a class where the professor just gave her 100% of the points in every assignment.

Speaker 2 She said she felt cheated that he didn't even look at her work probably

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 there was no discretion.

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, I shouldn't, I don't want to give the game away, but I did have a student. I won't tell you what year or what place.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 the student

Speaker 4 took an exam

Speaker 4 not under the exam conditions. And that happens in every class I've ever taught.
And as somebody who's a grandfather of a disabled child, I can understand that. So

Speaker 4 I'm very always

Speaker 4 willing to do that. I don't ask for doctors.
I just take people at their word.

Speaker 4 But this student was not the top of the student.

Speaker 4 So when I looked at the, and I never have given them my entire life,

Speaker 4 I swear to the Almighty, I've never given a multiple choice. Scantron test.
I've always had to write something out just because I wanted the students to actually write something.

Speaker 4 I'm not saying that multiple choice tests cannot be valuable. I just never did it.

Speaker 4 And I asked some major figures of antiquity,

Speaker 4 and I always do say 10, identify the following 10 out of 15.

Speaker 4 So who's Alcibiades? Just write a paragraph.

Speaker 4 This person, for the first time over the

Speaker 4 quarter,

Speaker 4 it was brilliant. The answers.

Speaker 4 And then just as a lark, I said, it almost sounds like a Wikipedia, you know. And then I went on Wikipedia.
It was word for word, word for word, word for word. Did I do anything? No.

Speaker 4 And is that unfair to the other students that I gave lower grade? Yes. And why did I not do anything? Because I'm not stupid.

Speaker 4 Because if I had have done something, I would have been called fill-in-the-blanks. And I'll leave it at that.

Speaker 2 Well, that brings us to our last subject today, which has something to do with that.

Speaker 2 Poor old Joy Reed, as everybody probably knows, there's been lots of discussion out there on the internet and on the channels

Speaker 4 about her

Speaker 2 being canned, and that her audience was only 150,000, if my sources are right, less than 150,000. So you can see why she was canned.

Speaker 4 It's about the size of Merced.

Speaker 2 But according to Rachel Maddow,

Speaker 2 she was

Speaker 2 racist of MSNBC for having done this, not a ratings

Speaker 2 decision. So that's just crazy.
But Maddow has made her name this week.

Speaker 4 Yes, I heard her. So Rachel Maddow, until recently, was making $30 million.

Speaker 4 I think she went down to $25. And

Speaker 4 she goes in one day a week.

Speaker 4 Maybe she's going for the first 100 days a little bit longer. So she was on TV blasting her own employers for being racist and

Speaker 4 treating the staff

Speaker 4 poorly that they had to lay off, right?

Speaker 4 Okay, Rachel, and you're a communist socialist, you make $30 million.

Speaker 4 Let's say that a staffer, a young staffer, makes $100,000

Speaker 4 a year.

Speaker 4 Your salary would pay for, what, 300 staffers?

Speaker 4 300 people

Speaker 4 could make $100,000? Why don't you just do that? Why don't you say, you know what, I have made $30 million for 10 years. I put it in my IRA.
I am in the 00001%.

Speaker 4 And there's no billionaires' tax or millionaires' tax in this country. And I don't need it anymore.
I only come in,

Speaker 4 I don't know,

Speaker 4 40 days a year.

Speaker 4 I'm so bad that these racist people laid off these staff. They were making $100,000.
So just take all of the money you were going to pay me and hire 300 of them for the year.

Speaker 4 Is she going to do that? No. And then you're starting to see something, aren't you?

Speaker 4 And I don't want to get in racial terms, but you're starting to see that some of the loudest soapboxes for DEI are wealthy, bicoastal, East Coast, West Coast, highly educated, professional white people.

Speaker 4 And they always lecture.

Speaker 4 And the stupidest thing I ever said career-wise, I was farming. I finally got a call to be a part-time teacher at Cal State Fresno for $500 a month to teach two Latin classes.

Speaker 4 So I went in there, and I was a white male, and they were, the philosophy department was all white males. And there was a part-time teacher.
I think I've said this before.

Speaker 4 And he came to me and he said, I really would like to get a job. But they have used me to teach at one quarter of the salary they get, meaning the full tenured professors.

Speaker 4 And I said, okay, I looked at his background. I thought it was okay.
So I just happened to see a professor who happened to be very well known.

Speaker 4 And I said to him, he's deceased now, so I'm not going to speak ill of the dead.

Speaker 4 But he said, I said, you know, Professor so-and-so, I just got here, and this young philosopher said that he wants to know if he's ever going to be full-time.

Speaker 4 And he's very good, because I teach in a class next to him. I can hear him lecture during my break.

Speaker 4 And they said, no, we're not going to ever hire him.

Speaker 4 We're promoted. And then that was the first time I ever, I didn't hear,

Speaker 4 we're committed to affirmative action. This was 1985, 84.

Speaker 4 He said, we have eight white males, and we're not going to do that. I said, that's noble.
And I said, how long have you been here? So I'm in my 30th year. I said, so you're resigning.

Speaker 4 He said, what do you mean? I said, well, you just said you had too many white males. And

Speaker 4 you're pretty well off. So you've been here 30 years.
You had your shot, and you were probably hired when

Speaker 4 if your claims are correct, that it was a racist-rigged deal when you were hired, then you shouldn't have been here for 30 years. But this guy is applying when being a white male is a disadvantage.

Speaker 4 And doesn't he get five of your years? So why don't you resign your position and give it to him? Or, better yet, resign your position if you feel so strongly and hire a woman or a minority?

Speaker 4 You know what he said to me?

Speaker 4 I don't think you're tenured.

Speaker 4 And I said, No, I mean, he said, I know the chairman of your department very, very well.

Speaker 4 And I got back out of class. I went to class.
I got back. I got on my old pickup.
I went home. I kind of thought, what does that mean?

Speaker 4 I saw my dad. He was out in the farm welding.
And

Speaker 4 I said, I got that question. He said,

Speaker 4 he never criticized me. That's what it was wonderful about.
He never said that was stupid.

Speaker 4 He had such a great disposition, my dad. And he said, well, young man, I was 29.

Speaker 4 He goes, get over here and help me with this.

Speaker 4 He was trying to build a fruit sorter. He said, come and help me with this, and we'll talk.
And he said, you're going to get it. When do you go up there? And I said, I go up there tomorrow.

Speaker 4 He said, you're going to have an interesting day. So I go up there and the chairman comes up and said,

Speaker 4 did you talk to the chairman of the philosophy department? I said, yes, I was just, he said, did you insinuate that he wasn't qualified? I said, no, I didn't.

Speaker 4 He said, well, you know, you're going to be up for evaluation. And so I got my first evaluation a month later.
And you know what it said in my Latin class?

Speaker 4 Professor Hansen comes to us from Stanford University, and he says he's written a book. It was there.
The book was published. It was on my file.

Speaker 4 He says he's, which is not really required at the CSU system.

Speaker 4 I did notice a flawed teaching style.

Speaker 4 He did not have mastery of the chalkboard. So he was not able to put his ideas in

Speaker 4 a legible script on the chalkboard and integrate the students to the chalkboard. And when I mentioned this to him after class, he said, quote, are you serious?

Speaker 4 I did,

Speaker 4 because that's what he was lecturing about. I said to him, I just gave a lecture on Herodotus

Speaker 4 and his style versus Thucydides and the relationship between the two, and you're worried about my use of the chalkboard?

Speaker 4 And I almost got fired. That was all from a question

Speaker 4 to a philosophy professor about the unfairness of everybody has to be subject to affirmative action except the people who are for it and white males with the most salary and the most years of service.

Speaker 4 I still remember that.

Speaker 4 Lesson, how Victoria is.

Speaker 4 He needs to learn how to use the chalkboard.

Speaker 2 Well, I have some readers of your work and listeners, actually, in this case. And this listener says, Dear Professor Hansen, I really appreciate your podcast and have learned much from them.

Speaker 2 However, in a recent podcast, the bygone era free felons sanctuary cities and university protesters you mentioned in regard to the 2028 democratic presidential primary that pete buttigig

Speaker 2 um he quote he is the savior of the democratic party apparently you said that and then yeah i did i hope that my voice had a certain modulation to it hold on she said and you read and you said i hope

Speaker 2 and she says, I was not sure why you would hope for this man to lead our country in any future response.

Speaker 4 Wait, wait, wait. That is key.
I did not say I wanted the person to lead the country. I said, I want that person to be the Democratic nominee.

Speaker 4 And I want,

Speaker 4 dear listener,

Speaker 4 I'm sorry if I wasn't more explicit. It's very hard to be ironic because,

Speaker 4 you know, parody, irony,

Speaker 4 maybe my voice wasn't. I said something like, promises, promises, let's get Pete Butticig nominated.
And I want him to be nominated because he's a fool, and his only experience was being

Speaker 4 the mayor of Indianapolis. And I'm not making fun of you in Indianapolis.
I think it's a great city, but he wasn't a good mayor of Indianapolis. That's my point.
And then he went.

Speaker 4 He was part of the coup, and I can use that term loosely, that put Joe Biden in. Joe Biden lost the first three caucuses in primary.
He was going nowhere.

Speaker 4 And then James Clyburn, the South Carolina primary, was coming up, and he got together with the Obamas.

Speaker 4 And they said, this guy, we're going to lose because we've got idiots like Pete Buttigig and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Spartacus and the Castro brothers and Amy Kopuchar.

Speaker 4 And they're all left-wing zealots. And they'll never beat Donald Trump.
And they said, well, what are we going to do? And we've got to resurrect old Joe Biden.

Speaker 4 They said, well, Well, he doesn't know where he is. He hasn't won anything.
And they said, You get all the other people, get them out, and you ask them what they want. Bernie, what do you want?

Speaker 4 I want your agenda to be hard laughed. Okay, Elizabeth Warren, what do you want? I want this.
What do you want, Castro? I want an open border. Spartacus, what do you want? I want DIY.

Speaker 4 That's what they did. And they made this, as I've called it before, a waxen effigy.
And that was Joe Biden. And then he won.
He won Nevada. He won South Carolina.

Speaker 4 And then they all pulled out with an over 30-day period, and they crowned him the nominee. That was what happened.
And so

Speaker 4 I would have preferred, yes, I confess,

Speaker 4 I would have preferred Pete Buttigig to have been the nominee in 2020, because I think Donald Trump would have more easily defeated him.

Speaker 2 Yes, of course.

Speaker 2 So just to finish it off, and you've kind of addressed it, I personally think, she's saying, I personally think this would be a disaster for our country, not only morally, but politically politically as well.

Speaker 2 Sincerely, Hannah, and her last name is Pombo. So thank you, Hanna, for listening to us.

Speaker 4 All I can say is, maya culpa, maya maxima culpa. If I misled you, I'm very sorry, but I think you and I are in 110% agreement.

Speaker 4 Neither you nor I want Peter Budjik anywhere near a seat of power unless we want to get a lecture about racist clover leaf on-ramps.

Speaker 4 And that's what he'll do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you, Victor, for your words of wisdom today.
And thanks to our audience for joining us, taking the time with us. We're very appreciative.

Speaker 4 Well, thank you very much. And thank everybody for listening.

Speaker 2 This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.

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