Wheeling and Dealing in Europe and at Home

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No missed calls, no missed customers. Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
This is our Friday News Roundup. And this week,

we've got lots of news in Ukraine and in Europe and 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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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
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.
And then you can also get the Ultra material by subscribing at $6.50 a month or $65 a year, and we would love to have you. 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.
But I was wondering, any updates on that? 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. Some people say $250, some say $200.
Zelensky, for some reason, said he only got $100 billion or less. So there's a discrepancy.
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, and they weren't candid about it. That was the implication than we did.
So he wants to recoup some money by having rare earth minerals. I don't quite understand the logic because there's going to be a lot of rare earth minerals in the American West.
Places like Wyoming, Montana, the Tehachapi Desert in California, we have a lot of them. 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 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'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. 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. 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.
And that was the point, not just to make money. He does seem, though, that if you look at the $6 to $7 trillion budget we have, and we're running over a trillion dollars deficit, and we need to get that down because we have $36 trillion in aggregate debt, 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 tripart strategy. And that's starting to obsess him, as it should, because it's unsustainable, the debt.
Number one is to cut. Elon Musk said there were $2 trillion.
I don't think there'll be $2 trillion 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.
And then he

wants to have tax cuts and deregulation and foreign investment. And that, he thinks, will

get GDP up to 3%, 3%, 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.
And then third, he's coming up with all of these methods of making money, tariffs, this gold card where instead of a green card, you pay $5 million. And there are people who, 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 and they pay $5 million, you can see you're getting up to a trillion dollars. And that would be revenue right away.
A lot of people object and say, well, we're only letting wealthy people in. Maybe, maybe not.
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 who need to be on federal assistance. And the idea that instead of bringing in people on federal assistance or state assistance or local assistance, you're bringing in people who have capital that creates taxes and jobs and everything.
So 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. 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? Those are negotiating points. It's like as i said it's like me with a bunch of cards and i'd say i have a full house and and you look at my face and you say he's bluffing so if we tried to say we're going to put we're going to put ukraine in nato or we're going to give them give them the weapons and manpower to take back crime they know we're not going to do that.
You know, I saw a Gallup poll that had the number of Ukrainians that wanted to end the war. And it was, I don't know the exact number, but it was over 50 percent, over 60.
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 would be willing to do it.

Territory and territory are different.

Most of them, 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 I'm Turkey's auspices.
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. it, 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.

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 is going to be 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. That's what Trump misspoke when he said that they should have never started and you started it.
What he meant was you should have cut a deal right away when you were from a position of strength and not weakness. But we all know what it is.
It's just a question of how far back is he going to go? He's going to keep Crimea. He's going to keep Donbass.
Zinnsky was willing to admit that in 2022. And then he's not going to be in NATO, but he's going to be stronger than any other NATO power.
And he's going to have battle-hardened veterans. He's going to have supposedly Europeans there on the front line with American financial interest and then a backstop of the United States Air Force, I guess.
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 1.4 million dead, wounded, captured.
Victor, I would like... Oh, sorry.
Did you have more to say? No, just missing. Missing, missing.
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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. And Bolivians were out angry.
And I thought this showed two things. 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 know how dangerous that is.
I mean, everybody wants lithium these days. Your thoughts on that? All these third world countries think that 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 their goodwill, or they do it to create greater business.
They don't. They want to be paid back.
I think China sent them a bill for over a billion dollars. 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 some concessions.
And the concessions are they can profit and get their money back. So their point is they have 1.4 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? Where's the gas? Where's uranium? And they say, these are the places in the world that they are. 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.
And I don't think it's going to work because you can see it in Africa. They're not liked.
The Chinese do not go in and integrate within the community. They stay in compounds.
And because they're from a communist country, they're watched. They can't really 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 21? 20.
No, excuse me. Yeah, it was 1974, right after the Yom Kippur War, and 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 having coffee with the Russians and a bunch of Russians came in. They were loud.
They had a separate table, three or four tables, and no one would speak to them. Wait, you just said you were having a conversation with the Russians.
Who were you with? Well, they were speaking English. Oh, they were.
Oh, so they were with Russians. So nobody...
The people you were talking to, nobody would come over and talk to them? A couple of seaside restaurants in Alexandria and then later in Cairo. They were all over the country.
When that... Sadat said that he expelled the Russians right before the Yom Kippur War, that was kind of a lie.
He didn't. He just said, visibly, we're breaking and everybody said, well, they'll never attack Israel because they don't have any weapons.
But if you look at the actual weapons shipments, the Russians were, that was all a ruse to get the guard of the Israelis down. And it worked.
One of the big secrets of the yom kippur war was the israelis were not were surprised because they had felt that the russians were done with the egyptians because they announced that but they didn't so after the war was over they let people in who sent a hundred dollars if you were a student you had to send it in advance and they kept it and gave you that when you arrived in e Egyptian pounds. And so I was there for two weeks.
I got malaria, so I was very ill. And I would sit at the cafes and listen to people, and there were Russians.
There were lots of them. But every time they came in as a group, the Egyptians that were getting up would get up and walk away.
And I'd ask the waiter, what's wrong? I thought they're your allies. And 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.
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? And aren't you going to be able to come back to Egypt? Et cetera, et cetera. So there is something called the ugly Russian and the ugly Chinese.
I thought this was interesting, too, in light of J.D. Vance's trip to Europe.
It seems to me that part of Vance's agenda or his presence was to be a warning, perhaps, or an effort to try to address the China expanse throughout the world of that Belt and Trade Initiative, I guess it is. So I thought, you know, here they are off into other countries looking for minerals and getting mineral rights.
And that's the thing about South America that's been worrying Americans for a while is the expansion of China there. I know that Rubio addressed the ports that are controlled on both sides of the Panama Canal by the Chinese.
So just a look into what China is up to. Their attitude is, 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.
So we're going to go into your territory. Forget the Monroe document.
And we're going to develop. 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. 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.

And almost all of them are socialist governments now.

It was 30 years ago, everybody said, you know, they were all kind of melee, open, you know, open market, free market governments, and they're not. And China is encouraging that.
And then the idea is that the next state, when they get 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.
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.
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% or we're going to buy Greenland. That's all to create the chaotic.
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. 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. 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.
And so now they're talking about to the Europeans, this is in your interest. 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.
And it's kind of like what Obama, he kept saying we're going to have an Asian pivot. All of that was rhetorical.
That just meant we're going to cut the defense budget and draw down in Europe. And then when we're going to talk about going to Asia, we never will.
Well, the last thing before break is that the, as you and Jack talked about, the German election saw that the ADF won the the right wing, the second, I guess if you could call it placement, second place. Yeah, almost 21% of the vote won fifth of the election.
Yeah, and the Christian Democratic Party was first. So they appointed their chancellor, and I think his name is Friedrich Merz.
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.
But what do you see for the future under this Merz? Some of the things he's saying do not seem very center right at all all. They seem center-left.
You have to start with a reality that all of their parties, as in Britain, are an order of magnitude to the left. So our Democratic Party is their...
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. 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 although they're better on abortion in many states.
But no late term abortions, skepticism on social issues, on drugs. They don't have any of that.
So they're all over. So they're 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. And then there's the Green Party to the left of them.
We don't have a... Their Green Party exists in the United States in universities, but it's not.
So he's not a conservative. Not at all, Mertz.
But he has been listening to what Trump said. He doesn't understand the art of the deal.
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. 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 what is he going to do when he says, well, this is a new strain of Americanism and we Europeans have to get together? Well, first of all, there's a lot of people in Europe that are closer to the United States than they are to Germany.
And so I think Eastern Europe has had a long history with Germany, and so has Western Europe, number one. And then number two, when he says he's going to move away from Germany, we in the United States will say promises, promises.
So what are you going to do, Mr. Mertz? I'm going to move away and we're going to get an independent.
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? 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? And, you know, he has no leverage is what I'm trying to say.
And he destroyed his account. He didn't do it.
It was Merkel, but the left did it. Schultz did it.
So did Merkel. They have zero GDP growth.
Their energy is four times at 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. We did this.
We suffered under Biden. We had open borders.
We had hyperinflation. We tried to clamp down on fossil fuels.
We were pacifists abroad. We were humiliated.
We've done what you've done.

It doesn't work.

Trust us.

Use us as a lab rat. We were pacifists abroad.
We were humiliated. 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.

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

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.
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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 Kash Patel.
And I was wondering your thoughts on Dan Bongino. What are your feelings about how he will do his job or his status? Does he have more tattoos than Pete Hexas? Yes.
assistant director that has more tattoos than he and he the left doesn't 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 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.
NYPD was the 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, and he's also well-spoken. I think he's got the number of fifth-rated podcasts in the country.
He's probably stepping down from $5 or $6 million of income. And anyway, my point is that when he comes in, he's already said, he was talking about Adam Schiff and collusion.
But just as just before we started, there's a 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.
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 the 2016, and then they were going to tinker around and find evidence of Russian collusion, and then that would help the crossfire hurricane.
So think about that. You know, Comey's been on TV a lot, trashing Trump.
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 Committee. I don't

know. That wasn't part of my

purview.

I'll get back to you.

I'll check back with you. It's

an interesting question, but why ask me?

That's what he did. And then he went to the president and said, I need a confidential conversation with Mr.
President. Okay.
No, we're not running an investigation. The FBI does not investigate the president of the United States.
And then he says, Hillary Clinton, he says she destroyed 30,000 emails. She destroyed her devices.
She was using an illegal server. 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, wait a minute. You're an investigator.
You're not a prosecutor. The FBI is not a prosecutor.
You are tasked to investigate something. Then you give your findings over to a prosecutor.
That would be Loretta Lynch, who had just been on the tarmac with Bill Clinton. And you were supposed to say there's a case here that she broke the law.
Then let Loretta Lynch. But you're acting like you're judge, jury.

He reminds me of, who was it? It was Judge on the E. Jean Carroll case.

Judge Kaplan? Was he judge, jury, and executioner? I think he was.

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

I'm going to 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.

And that's what he did.

I think, I'm not sure they did that in the Letita James case as well, but that was, that's what Comey did when he was at FBI investigating Hillary. So I take it you have high hopes for Dan Bongino's appointment as deputy director.
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. Yeah, you're not going to look back, Cash.
But what do you do when people that are whistleblowers who are tormented or hounded come forward now and they feel liberated or people that they drove out of the FBI are coming to come to work for you and they lay out this evidence and 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. And the FBI was, I mean, you get to the point, what were they incapable of?

All the last four directors either lied outright and admitted they lied, like Andrew McCabe, or claimed amnesia under oath like James Comey. I guess, I don't know what Robert Mueller was doing when the catalysts that got him the special counsel position were the Fusion GPS creepy people and the dossier.
And they asked him that under oath. I didn't get into that.
I don't know anything about it. And then Christopher Wray, did you have FBI informants on January 6th? I have no evidence evidence of that we're going to investigate uh did you surveil parents at school boards on the prompt of merrick garland who got complaints from this teachers union uh that is a local man i will investigate i will get back to you and did you did your people go after traditional catholics if they did it would be wrong, but I'll investigate it.

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

Well, you remember what Merrick Garland said?

Well, the difference is that we go after, we have the FBI go after anti-abortion protesters because they're peaceful in the daylight and we can see them.

But we're't go after terrorists that go after right-to-life people because they work at night. We don't.
So you fathom that. I can't.
And that's what they were doing at the FBI, all of them. Yeah, cash is going to run a completely different FBI.

People are really, I had a professor, I won't name his name, he sent me a whole bunch of stuff saying that Donald Trump had basically been a Russian source for 30 years. and it was very convoluted and I thought, well, why not just say 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 one for the Russians to get 20% of the supplies of Canada and the United States? Or why not say that the Air Force Two was going to Russia, China, Ukraine under Biden? But 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 Donald Trump is a Russian asset, a Russian puppet.
If he's a Russian asset, a Russian puppet, why did he wipe out 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. 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 yes she's the head director of now she had john radcliffe's old job director of national that was formed after uh 9-11 and it didn't really work because the idea was you were going to make an intelligence SAR because there had been a paywall. 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.
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 spider web, a director of national intelligence. 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. 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 in the CIA.
I don't trust the FBI. What's the Pentagon? They were all at a odds, so it never worked.
But that's the theory of her job. She's very good because she has a very mellifluous voice.
She's attractive. She's charming, but she has a backbone of steel.
So 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.
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 computers somehow. And they were sending, you know, obviously some pretty racy stuff across the waves to each other.
And I was wondering, she's got a good start. They kept me doing that because Chuck Schumer said that it was unfair to ask federal employees to name five things over a week's period, or they did, but they had time to talk about sex.
Yeah, she's going to fire them. And this whole hysteria about these federal employees is really something.

It's not like Elon Musk said, went to West Virginia, told everybody that was coal mining for five generations, 10 generations, like Hillary Clinton.

You're just going to have to find a new job.

Or Joe Biden went to Pennsylvania, I think it was, about fracking, said, you've got to learn to code. That was pretty heartless.
But they're really angry about all of these federal employees that have it. 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. And the idea was, maybe not as a judge, it took her her whole life to be there before she passed away, I thought, quite young.
So the point I'm making is, 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 and make one and a half times more.
And we've created this idea that it's sacrosanct to be a federal employee, that you're untouchable. And anybody who differs with you is heartless.
I don't like that morality. I like the morality if you're borrowing 30, 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.

And I'm more worried about the poor guy in a tractor who's trying to pay his taxes. Well, you know, the administration, of course, is talking a lot about DOGE and increasing efficiency and their targeting, or they seem to suggest quite often that DEI has destroyed efficiency, brought on mediocrity, etc.
And that's probably true, but I think DEI has 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.
And I think that that's something that is interesting, is this DEI, diversity, equity, 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.

And that is ultimately going to be detrimental to us here in the West.

And I was wondering if you could talk about it.

It's very dangerous, you're right.

But take the person who is the most, I think, the most racist on the DEI, and that's Joy Reid, who was just fired. So, her family, if it was true this is so toxic, and the same thing with Ilhan Omar and Rashid Talibi, 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.
And they know deep down inside it's a good place compared to Mexico or the Caribbean or the Arab world. And that's very easily definable.
There's about eight or nine things in Europe, but especially in the United States, that they don't have. 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 long tradition of self-criticism and self-reflection. And so it's constantly being questioned and torn apart, sometimes nihilistically.
And women are treated well, and gays are treated well, and that everybody aspires to capture the idealism of the Declaration of Independence. 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.
So it says if you're not white, you're part of the Marxist binary on the good side of being the victimized and not the victimizer. 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.

They feel that they're eligible for compensation, as if the country is racist when they set one foot into the country. I just crossed the southern border.
I need affirmative action. I need DEI.
Well, what did you suffer? 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.
And they know this system is the only one that, I mean, 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.
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 in greater number than four Chinese. 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. Nobody is breaking the door down to get into China.
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, Joy Reid used to give these big lectures about indigenous culture and that she was going to be a path-breaking black woman who would wear cornrows and indigenous hairstyles 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 this emphasis know what I mean? According to your own ideology, you wouldn't want to look like a white, blonde woman.
So, there's something, it's just so incoherent, the DEI, critical race theory, and it leads nowhere. 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. 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? Video comes in, and I see a guy in the office.
It's the same thing every year at Stanford. A guy's at the office, and a young woman walks by, attractive in a short dress, and he looks like this.
And then he says, Hi, babe. Stop! And then you have A, B, and C.
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 d he should go ask her out for a date if he thinks he he should call the diversity equity inclusion officer people should to. And you don't even have to.
It's just the whole thing is like that. Every year I do it, I say, am I in North Korea? It reminds me of the original Manchurian candidate with Frank Sinatra and Lawrence Harvey.
I feel like Lawrence Harvey, I'm being brainwashed with the cards, and it's just pathetic. 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 at all? It doesn't matter because you miss it.
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 good try 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, you'll just be in Warp Land the rest of your life.

And it's like when you get a ticket in California or most states, you have traffic online schools. And you just say, 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?

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 scheduled. So you can just answer the questions.
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. 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, 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. It's kind of like a loyalty oath, you know, I have never, have you ever been a communist? No.
Or on the other extreme, the diversity statements, you know. You apply for school and say, what have you done for diversity? And I talk to Stanford students.
I talk to students all over. People write me, and it's sort of like 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. Or I went over on a program to Uganda to help with with clean water projects and that that's my father works at usa id that kind of stuff it's just all 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 well vict, 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.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show. You can find Victor at his social media outlets.
On X, he is at VD Hanson. And on Facebook, he is at Hanson's Morning Cup.
And then you can find him, too, for his podcast 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 so come to the website as well that's message we're learning we're learning everybody we're trying to learn the discipline we're rookie podcasters we're just be out in our old our old uh we're in my old annex when i was a little boy this was the 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.
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 all times.

So, well, Victor, let's look at a couple of scams or potentially what sound like scams or at least favoritism. Senator Shelton Whitehouse's wife, Sandra, had a lot of self-employed income from the Ocean Conservancy, which received about $6.9

million and

$6.9 million. I do not believe that.
And 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. But your thoughts on that? As they said in The Wild Bunch, who is they? They? Who the blank is they? They cheated us.
Who's they? Who investigated them? Sheldon, I can't believe that the sharpest critic in the nomination processes of Elon Musk and Doge has been Sheldon Whitehouse. And he keeps saying the same thing.
This is terrible. There's no fraud.
There's no special concessions. This is transparent.
This is just a bunch of wealthy people that are got and Elon Musk is corrupt. He's got.
And it turns out his wife was the head of some kind of non-profit. I think she has a PhD or something in oceanography.
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. So this whole thing that Elon Musk, it's like the best way everybody will look at it, it's a big piece of granite rock.
And you're hiking, and you know you shouldn't turn it over. It looks shiny.
It's kind of granite. It has pyrites glistening.
And then you just think, what is under there? Is it a snake? 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. 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 blast it.
And then he to sleep sweep away and clean up everything underneath and that's why they're angry about it he's upsetting the natural ecosystem and we're all loving it i'm really worried about him because just is it yesterday a woman got a young woman got on is it tiktok or is it youtube she did a 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.
IRS inspector that's in the iCloud or wherever you are you're everywhere. I have paid about 55% of my income or maybe 60 ever since I was 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.
But the idea you wouldn't file an 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. And then I get worried.
But the idea you get on there and you brag and they didn't catch you for eight years. And then 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 paid and you insult everybody and the irs is not going to come out they went after pete hexa when they were running they are the most politicized group in the world they're going to get so i can guarantee you that when somebody saw that they got on the phone and said where's the irs auditor put her and that's going to happen but they are lowering they did the same thing with donald trump we had retired four-star officers and general hitler like hitler like mussolini mussolini mussolini liar liar liar that michael hayden auschwitz bergenthau he's our architect of walking them we're not retreating all that you know when he when he got shot, he retweeted some terrible things. Then you had the New Republic with a picture of his face on Hitler.
And then you had Joy Reid and Rachel Mow. Oh, I'm studying Nazism and fascism all of a sudden.
A deep dive into. And what they did was they lowered the permissible.
And there were a lot of people out there. And then they coupled that with the Secret Service.
And they said, I think if I tried to do something terrible to Donald Trump, I would be a national hero. The left would canonize me forever.
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.

I can do better than both of those weirdos.

And every nut will come out.

So if you want to demonize, and I mean this sincerely, you are, what, spray painting Teslas, 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.
And it's so ironic because this is the left. It said, words, Cornel West, words matter.
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? And they said that she was, 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.
So it's getting very scary what they're doing. I don't know what their strategy, 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 do. But the short-term strategy is to drive his popularity down by calling him Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler,

must, must, must, Hitler, Hitler,

must, must, must, oligarch, that, and then they have a map of thousands of federal judges all over the United States

and state judges, and they have them rated 1 to 100, 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. 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.
Well, there's one more thing in terms of fraud just so people can know what's going on. And on Powerline, Scott Johnson 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. And there was a organization called Feeding Our Future that gave out millions to these places that said they were giving 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. But the two that I saw, they said they were giving meals, and they made millions.
And in fact, the woman who was... A 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 for that 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 smallest app, which is impossible. There was no audit.
The other thing is, we talked about DEI. Does anybody believe that if during COVID there had been, I'm just taking the example of East Palestine, we're working Appalachian whites who were discriminated against by the Biden administration.
Does anybody believe that if there had been a big $250 million project to feed people in East Palestine, which I think would have a lower per capita income than Minnesota, do you think they would have got away with this? No. They would be in prison now.
But this is DEI, and Ilhan Omar was a symbol of, you know, she's untouchable 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. 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. And they said, stop it.
She's a woman of color. She's an immigrant.
You are xenophobic. You're racist.
You're misogynistic. And that was it.
And so this is protected because the majority of people involved were Somalis.

And 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%, then that's an enormous project of civic education. 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 revolution.
We don't do that. We give them the opposite.
You are here, and immigration is now a DEI project, and you have claims against this evil white group of majorities.

And it's really, the message is so contradictory and incoherent because it says this.

This country was created by these awful white males, and they created this system and these businesses and these infrastructures. And they were toxic and we've got to destroy it, but we want to get

in on it. 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 got to get into that system they created.
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, then why do you want to come here?

Because 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.

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.

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 they racialize everything.
And then once they, it's sort of like they're painting the floor and they're just mindlessly and they paint and they find out that they're in the corner of the room and they can't get out. They have to walk over the wet paint.
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? Well, maybe I should make a new narrative.
Well, they didn't dominate everything. There were 10 percent of the population was antithetical to the evil white men.

So they created, and that's why it came, because they created a good alternative. But it's contortionist.
And now we're in a counter-revolution, and it's being swept away. It couldn't be swept away if it was absolutely true.
The reason that their revolution is failing and Trump in just 30 days has crushed it is because it was never valid or truthful to begin. Nobody ever believed it.
Nobody ever believed the lies. 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. You didn't didn't have to see that Olympic boxer in the mirror.
Does anybody out there in our audience believe that? 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 needs, she's got to undress and put her clothes on after her swimming suit. Does anybody really want a biological male next to her? No.
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 females.
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 rather than trying to discover, why does 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.
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. And that's he calls it the mind virus the woke mind virus he's basically saying you guys in the united states government have a twitter problem when i bought twitter i overpaid for it 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.
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. 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.
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 columnists to reflect two themes, libertarianism, i.e. free markets, and individual liberty.
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.
It was. If he hadn't bought...
Can you imagine? I don't think that Trump would have won the election if they had still had the Twitter, because they'd still be working with the FBI and censoring stories like they did the laptop. And James Baker, who was the FBI

counsel, would still be working for Facebook.

Victor, let's go to maybe some lighter subjects, although on this same thing,

trying to change the culture. Still, even with DEI voted out, not just in the United States, but also the strong movement against DEI in England.
And we have in Parliament, though, still the Labour government has taken out pictures from Parliament of many of the great heroes of England. Lord Nelson.
Lord Nelson, Duke of Wellington, Churchill, Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert. They've taken them all out, replacing them, I guess, with images of slavery and things that needed to be changed, I suppose, is what the idea is.
Well, if you believe it's good to have a Navy given time and space, what other person are they going to put in there? 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? Or if you didn't have the Duke of Wellington, I think they would have lost the Battle of Waterloo. I really do.
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 line. And Churchill, they would have lost the war without Churchill.

Halifax was hellbent 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, and he was the only one there.

There was no Roosevelt, and Stalin was on the other side.

So I don't know who they're going to come up with if they think those issues,

like the survival of Britain, unless they believe that it was bad that Britain survived, and they they've destroyed it and they're going to create a new hero, a new pantheon. And that British, they took down pictures of Elizabeth I.
Yeah. And I don't understand these people because they never give us an alternative.
They never give us an alternative. 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, William DeCumsew Sherman did a lot more than Harriet Tubman, believe me.
He was the one that broke the back of the Confederacy, and yet and you lit 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 slave owners than anybody in that series of battles but they never think like that they just that 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, intersectionality, intersectionality, then you're not doing the other things. You're not reading history.
You know nothing about literature. And every time you meet these people, they don't know anything.
And one of the weirdest things, just to finish this rant, is DEI was most heavily entrenched at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the elite places, and they took the biggest hit. And what do I mean by that? When I hear Joy Reid say that Alvin Bragg 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. He had to get Co-Angelo from the Department of Justice to go join him and refashion us.
It was incoherent. 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. And so what I'm getting at is that these schools that let in people, not all, but let in people on the basis of their appearance, and then made the necessary adjustments for curriculum and grading to make sure that, because if you're admitted as a DI, you're never going to be flunked out.
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. And that means they have to change the standard.
Stanford gave 80% of all grades, basically almost 80% A's. So if you're an employer in Silicon Valley, a guy comes in, he says, here's my transcript from Stanford.
I had 80% A's. The guy's going to go, Well, why not 95? Because every person who's come in today has 80% A's.
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. So you know what we do? We didn't want to make it.
We're just going to do the GRE, graduate record exam. That's not fair.
Well, we're going to have to do it because we can't trust your grades. You can't get around human nature.
It's just there, just over the millennia that you have to quantify education or excellence. It's hard to do, but you have to have some quantification.
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.
She said she felt cheated, that he didn't even look at her work, probably, because there was no discretion. 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, but the student took an exam 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 I'm very always willing to do that. I don't ask for doctors.
I just take people at their word. But this student was not the top of the student.
So when I looked at the, and I never have given in my entire life, 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.
I'm not saying that multiple choice tests cannot be valuable. I just never did it.
And I asked some major figures of antiquity, and I always do say, identify the following 10 out of 15. So who's Alcibiades? Just write a paragraph.
This person, for the first time over the quarter, it was brilliant, the answers. 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.
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.
Because if I had have done something, I would have been called fill in the blanks. And I'll leave it at that.
Well, that brings us to our last subject today, which has something to do with that.

Poor old Joy Reid, as everybody probably knows.

There's been lots of discussion out there on the Internet and on the channels about her 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.
It's about the size of Merced. But according to Rachel Maddow, it was racist of MSNBC for having done this, not a ratings decision.
So that's just crazy. But Maddow has made her name this week.
Yes, I heard her.

So Rachel Maddow, until recently, was making $30 million. I think she went down to $25 million.
And she goes in one day a week. 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 treating the staff poorly that they had to lay off, right?

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

Let's say that a staffer, a young staffer makes $100,000 a year, your salary would pay for, what, 300 staffers? 300 people 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 0, 0, zero, zero, one percent. And there's no billionaire's tax or millionaire's tax in this country.
And I don't need it anymore. I only come in, I don't know, 40 days a year.
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. Is she going to do that? No.
And then you're starting to see something, aren't you? 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, bi-coastal, east coast, west coast, highly educated, professional white people. And they always lecture.
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.
So I went in there,

and I was a white male, and the philosophy department was all white males. And there was a part-time teacher.
I think I've said this before. 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.

And I said, okay.

I looked at his

his me to teach at one quarter of the salary they get, meaning the full tenured professors. 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. And I said to him, he's deceased now, so I'm not going to speak ill of the dead.
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.

And he's very good because I teach in a class next to him.

I can hear him lecture during my break.

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

We're committed.

And then that was the first time I ever, I didn't hear, we're committed to affirmative action. This was 1985, 84.
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.
He said, what do you mean? I said, well, you just said

you had too many white males and you're pretty well off. So you've been here 30 years.
You had your shot and you were probably hired when, if your claims are correct, that it was a racist rig 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.

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. You know what he said to me? I don't think you're tenured.
And I no i mean he said i know the chairman of your department very very well 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 i saw my dad he was out in the farm welding and he's i, I got that question. He said, he never criticized me.
That's what it was wonderful about. He never said that was stupid.
He had such a great disposition, my dad. And he said, well, young man.
I was 29. He goes, get over here and help me with this.
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.
He said, you're going to have an interesting day. So I go up there and the chairman comes up and said, 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.
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? 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.
He says he's, which is not really required at the CSU system. I did notice a flawed teaching style.
He did not have mastery of the chalkboard. So he was not able to put his ideas in 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?

I did, because that's what he was lecturing about.

I said to him, I just gave a lecture on Herodotus and his style versus Thucydides and the relationship

between the two, and you're worried about my use of the chalkboard? And I almost got fired. That was all from a question 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 service.
I still remember that. Hard lesson, how victory.
Yeah, he needs to learn how to use the chalkboard. 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 I've learned much from them. 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 Buttigieg he, quote, he is the savior of the Democratic Party, apparently.
You said that. Yeah, I did, but my voice had a certain modulation to it.
Hold on. And you said, I hope.
And she says, I was not sure why you would hope for this man to lead our country in any futuristic election. Wait, wait, wait.
That is the key. I did not say I wanted the person to lead the country.
I said, I want that person to be the Democratic nominee. And I want, dear listener, I'm sorry if I wasn't more explicit.
It's very hard to be ironic because, you know, parody, irony, maybe my voice wasn't. I said something like, promises, promises, let's get Pete Buttigieg nominated.
And I want him to be nominated because he's a fool. And his only experience was being 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, 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.

And then James Clyburn, the South Carolina primary, was coming up, and he got together with the Obamas. And they said, this guy, we're going to lose because we've got idiots like Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Spartacus and the Castro brothers and Amy Kopasharar.
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. They said, 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? I want your agenda to be hard left.
OK. 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 DIA.
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.
And then they all pulled out with an over 30-day period. And they crowned him the nominee.
That was what happened. And so I would have preferred, yes, I confess, I would have preferred Pete Buttigieg to have been the nominee in 2020.
Because I think Donald Trump would have more easily defeated him. Yes, of course.
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 as well.

Sincerely, Hannah, and her last name is Pombo.

So thank you, Hannah, for listening to us.

Hannah, all I can say is mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. If I misled you, I'm very sorry, but I think you and I are in 110% agreement.
Neither you nor I want Peter Bajic anywhere near a seat of power, unless we want to get a lecture about racist cloverleaf on wraps. And that's what he'll do.
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.
Well, thank you very much. And thank everybody for listening.
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off. If you've been with us at all over the last six months or so, you are probably familiar with one of our favorite new brews, Wired2Fish Coffee.
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