← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
Loading summary
Transcript62 lines
- [00:00]
Advertiser
Question Ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the Internet for anyone to see? More than you think. Your name, contact info, Social Security number and home address, even information about your family members, all being compiled by data brokers and sold online. I recently found a solution. It's a great service called delete me. DeleteMe is a subscription service that removes your personal info from hundreds of data brokers. Delete Me isn't just a one time service. DeleteMe is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the Internet. Delete Me sends you regular personalized privacy reports showing what info they found, where they found it and what they removed. To put it simply, Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping your and your family's personal information from data broker websites. I just signed up. It couldn't have been easier. And as soon as I hit submit, I felt what you'll feel. Relief and even a sense of justice. I've taken control of my data, take control of yours and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners today. Get 20% off your delete me plan by texting Victoria to 64000. Text Victor to 64000 that's Victor to 64000 message and data rates may apply. See terms for details.
- [01:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our Saturday edition where we do something different in the middle segment and this week we're continuing on the seven wonders of the Ancient world and we'll be looking at the Giza pyramids. But before that we have news stories. Sam Bankman Fried's parents are looking for a pardon. Trump has signed legislation the Guantanamo Bay might be open for illegal immigrants that are criminals and lots of other stories. So stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [02:16]
Advertiser
New Year Fresh start Optimize your nutrition this year with Factor. Factor has chef made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. They're dietitian approved and ready to heat and eat in two minutes so you can fuel right and feel great no matter what life throws at you. Factor arrives fresh and fully prepared, perfect for any active, busy lifestyle. Hey lose up to eight pounds in eight weeks with Factor Keto meals based on a randomized controlled clinical trial with Factor Keto results will vary depending on diet and exercise. With 40 options across eight dietary preferences on the menu each week, it's easy to pick meals tailored to your goals. Choose from preferences like Calorie Smart or Protein plus or Keto Factor can help you feel your best all day long with wholesome smoothies, breakfast grab and go snacks and more. Add ons. Reach your goals this year with ingredients you can trust and convenience that can't be beat. Eat smart with factor get started@Factor Meals.com Victor 50 off and use the code Victor 50 off Victor 50 off to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. That's code Victor 50 off@Factor Meals.com Victor50OFF to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box.
- [03:47]
Narrator
Your weekly dose of romance and drama has arrived. Season 29 of the Bachelor is here and Grant Ellis, certified hottie and former day trader is trading his day job on Wall street for a second chance at everlasting love. New episodes drop every Monday at 87 Central bringing you fresh twists in Grant's journey to find his soulma. This self proclaimed mama's boy is all grown up and ready to invest his heart. Will his playful charm win over the house full of hopefuls or will the competition prove too intense? From heartfelt moments to adrenaline pumping dates, each week brings new surprises in the mansion. Will Grant find his perfect match or end up with a broken heart? Tune in every Monday at 87 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu for new episodes of the Bachelor.
- [04:38]
Victor Davis Hanson
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com Please come join us there. We have we're revamping the website and the subscription is 650amonth or $65 for an annual fee if you'd like to join us. So those are new prices but we'd be happy to have you there. And so Victor, there's lots going on in the news before we get to the Giza pyramids. Sam Bankman, Fried's parents apparently are looking for a pardon, strangely from Donald Trump.
- [05:23]
Guest or Co-host
I don't. That's shameless if you think about it. I have an apartment. I go over during the week to work at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford campus. So their home was in maybe a mile, half a mile radius. And I remember the paparazzi's helicopters that were very visible and noisy when remember he was under. Sam was under house arrest and then he violated the conditions of his parole and he went to jail. I had followed both Professor Bankman and Professor Freed, they were at the Stanford Law School. Stanford Law School's got a reputation. Some of you people listening, remember the Judge Duncan incident when they shouted down a federal judge and some of the law students rushed the podium. Then the Stanford DEI officer hijacked his lecture, blamed him, sided with the agitators that were violent and then one of them said, I hope your daughter is raped. That whole terrible incident. And by the way, there were members of the Stanford Law faculty who testified and made fun of, I think it was during the first impeachment they made fun of Barron's name. They've done all sorts of things at that law school and they've had a precipitous drop in alumni support because of that reputation. But she, Mrs. Fried, or should say Professor Freed was known as a bundler of stealthy silicon money. So if you wanted to give to hard left candidates, not mainstream hard left, but you didn't know, want your fingerprints on it. She was the bundler that. And even though she was a law professor, he was also very involved. And then when Sam Bankman Fried created this pyramidal hoax Ponzi scheme, they were both intricately involved and had transfers of property worth 15 or 16 million dollars. They're both being sued now for various alleged crimes. But here's the point. In the 2020 election, Sam Bankman Fried was the second largest individual donor, direct donor to the Biden campaign. I think he gave over $60 million. I'm not saying that the PACs like Mark Zuckerberg 419 weren't great, but direct sorrows than Bankman as I recall. And they were vicious, vehement critics of Donald Trump. So after he created this Ponzi scheme, Sam Bankman and he got his parents involved and again I'm not going to prejudge them, but allegedly they were deeply involved with, with his scheme and it collapsed and it destroyed a lot of the investors who had given him so much money during this cryptocurrency and wouldn't have had they been transparent about their actual financial status. Now they want a pardon from the very president they tried to destroy in every aspect of the word. Are they insane or is that just intellectual arrogance shared by the academic mind? We are so brilliant, we are so impressive that even our enemies that we despise will want to help us because of our intellect and our morality. It's just mind boggling. And you know, if they want to get a pardon, maybe they should go the RFK route, spend a year and a half campaigning for Donald Trump, widen the MAGA base, the Bankman Friedmans. We've been. You can do a Brett Stevens, remember Brett Stevens, a New York Times columnist, He said, well, I'm never, never Trump. I was wrong. I thought we could crush this guy. Yes, he was crude, he was charismatic, but we didn't understand he appealed to minorities and the middle class and we didn't. Maybe they could do that. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
- [09:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
I doubt it. Anyway, back to the story. So Donald Trump had a victory this week in, well, not really a victory. I guess he settled a case with Zuckerberg and Facebook where he got deplatformed and was paid out.
- [09:39]
Guest or Co-host
25, 25 million victories just keep rolling in. And a lot of these prior enemies of Donald Trump who had either tried to ban him from social media as Mark Zuckerberg did after January 6th, and we've discussed how they destroyed Parler and Rebecca Mercer's attempt to try to give an evenhanded, truthful voice for conservatives social media platform and that Google and Apple and Facebook conspired to deny app access to it and that he had put 419. Now all of a sudden he's worried about Donald Trump. So he shows up at Mar a Lago and now he says, well, I'm not going to fight this suit anymore. Yes, we did deplatform you. Yes, you were not guilty of anything. Yes, it was an arbitrary decision. We'll give you the 25 million if you drop the suit. But this follows some earlier suits we had. I think his name was Zachary Young or some. He was an Afghan helper. He was a former military veteran who when he heard about the plight of our contractors and our loyal Afghan interpreters, tried to get them out. And CNN kept defaming, defaming him. And then when he sued them and he won $5 million for defamation, but we don't know what the punitive damages were. That's disclosed. It could be a megadeal. Neither side can tell us. But in those internal communications, they were just vicious, abhorrent what they said about him. Of course, this follows George Stephanopoulos $16 million settlement to Donald Trump because on 11 occasions he kept saying, donald Trump rapist, Donald Trump rapist, Donald Trump rapist. Even though he'd never been convicted of it. That was very clear in the E. Jean Carroll suit that he was guilty of sexual assault, which can be like that. And judge, the judge in that case should have been cited because he had used the word rape. And that empowered George Stephanopoulos. So they lost that suit. And then there may be a. I think CBS is going to settle because CBS took the Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes and they said they were going to play it in its entirety. And then they selectively edited. So in their view, anything that they felt was poorly articulated or factually incorrect, which is a lot, they've been cutting. And then they released it and promoted it almost as if it was a campaign contribution to her failed efforts. So Donald Trump said this was a fraud, this entire interview, and it was used to hurt me. And four years ago they would say that's absurd. But now they're looking at the tempo of the nation. And the judges in the lawfare movement are embarrassed, especially after we look at Judge Mershawn, Judge engoron and Judge McAfee in the Fannie Willis case. They all have shown themselves to be biased and they will be reversed. And the people themselves are tired of lawfare. So these media conglomerates are thinking to themselves, we're on the wrong side of public opinion and he could win big. So let's just settle it and get over with it and get down on our hajj to mar a lago and make our peace. That's what they're doing.
- [13:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
I mean, come on.
- [13:24]
Guest or Co-host
That's what they're doing.
- [13:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
I know it is. VICTOR I would like to take a moment to welcome our sponsor, Native Path. Native Path collagen is a single ingredient formula with no fillers or artificial sweeteners. Plus it's third party tested for heavy metals, ensuring purity and safety. Completely flavorless, Native Path collagen can be added to anything. Coffee, smoothies, oatmeal, you name it. Its peptide formula makes it more bioavailable, meaning it's absorbed more easily and mixes perfectly without clumping. And you can get six or eight packs at a fraction of the price of other brands. Visit native getnativepath.com backslash Victor and start your transformation today. That is G N A T I V E p a t h.com Victor and I have to say that I do love the products that they have. They have a wonderful night drink with collagen in it. It's honey and it's. It's honey and chamomile and it has collagen in it and I add lemon to it and a little bit of honey and it's so tasty. Nice warm drink for the evening and it puts you to sleep and it's got, sorry, melatonin in it. So thank you. Native path for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show. Victor. So let's go on then, Donald Trump. A couple of things that we haven't talked about yet in our Friday episode or in this one is that he passed the Link Lake and Riley act, so he signed it and he opened Guantanamo for the worst of the criminals of illegal immigrants that are being arrested. And I was wondering your thoughts on either one.
- [15:12]
Guest or Co-host
Well, in Guantanamo, he's getting already a lot of criticism and that goes back 20 years to post 9, 11, when suspected, I should say suspected in quotes, in the sense that certain al Qaeda people who were picked up in Afghanistan and abroad were brought to Guantanamo so it would not be inside the United States and subject to US Criminal law in its entirety, although the agencies like the CIA were. But the point is there was waterboarding you. So everybody said they torture them, torture them, torture them, tortured them, and therefore Guantanamo is forever cursed. And then there's a lot of people like Mayor Karen Bass, to take one example, who were aficionados of the Castro regime. And so Cuba has a soft spot in the leftist mind and Guantanamo was an imperialist outpost, you know, so they don't like anything to do with Guantanamo. So why would he put these criminals and these are the worst of the worst. These are the murderers, the rapists, the assaulters. And why not just send them back to his country? Well, he can't send them back to Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala because these regimes are hostile to the United States. In other words, why are they here in the first place? Did they just say, oh, I killed a person in Venezuela, I'm on the. No, they were let out of prison for the most part because these hostile left wing regimes. And we've seen the megaphone in Colombia, it's crazy. And we saw Mr. Obrador, who bragged that the 40 million who had come in over the years were a beautiful thing and that they all should vote if they were citizens. But he didn't make that specification. They should vote against Republicans, but these regimes will let them out the moment they get home. So Donald Trump for the meantime, wants him off the street. So this is a transit place. In other words, he's putting Colombians and Venezuelans, other people from illiberal regimes. And then he's telling their government now, I'm going to bring him back home, but he needs to get leverage over them and tell them rather than just swarm them with criminals and have them come right back and have to repeat the process, which is costly. He's saying, I'm going to hold him here and this is what we're going to do and this is what's going to happen to you. So he's formulating punitive actions should they be preemptively released. And they will be unless he has enough deterrence. And so that, that's what's going on there. Your second question, the Lake and Riley act, which that was a no brainer. Any republic, any Democrat that voted against that law is going to face opposition in a purple state. How the laws just simply ends. It's a, it ends neo confederatism nullification. It just says that any jurisdiction, local, state that has criminals under detention or arrest them and those criminals are subject to violations of federal immigration law need to give those people to the federal government and not shield them. And so this brings up a larger question of this whole neo confederate. Now why do I use the word neo confederate? Because the left really in its Democratic legacies is starting to appear like the democratic party of 1859 when it started to nullify federal laws. It had happened in 1832 when Andrew Jackson had to take federal troops and tell South Carolina if you resist paying tariffs, the government had put tariffs on goods and you try to defy us, we're going to use troops to force you. And then of course, what caused the Civil War was precisely this, that states like Alabama, Mississippi, but especially South Carolina once more said that federal jurisdictions within their domains were their property. So a post office or an armory were not federal. And more importantly, they said that state law trumps federal law. And so what I'm getting at is this is a very reactionary, illiberal idea that these 600 jurisdictions can tell the federal government we pick and we choose which federal laws because they really don't mean it. They really don't mean it. If Provo, Utah or Cheyenne, Wyoming or a city in Florida like Tampa says, well that's a good idea, we're not going to enforce the EPA jurisdictions. If you want to buy a handgun, we're not going to. We're just nullifying federal law about gun registration. The whole thing would unravel. So it's all predicated on the idea that we're going to break federal law and privilege state law over federal law. But nobody else is going to do that because if they did do it, we'd be back in the Civil War. So that's what's really illiberal about it. And that brings up a larger question. They are illiberal. If I would say to our listeners, what are four or five elements of confederatism around 1865. I would say one was federal nullification, nullifying federal laws. I would say two was the one drop rule that they were fixated on racial purity in the old south, but they didn't really know how to define it because people might be indistinguishably black because of the nature of slavery and the slave owners and sexual intercourse between master and slave, etc. So they had this problem. So they came up that if you were 1 16th genealogical speaking, you were black. That's exactly what we're doing now with the Democratic electorate. We're trying to trace to the nth degree Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas is a good example. And as I said on the earlier broadcast, I talked to a student that said he sent in his DNA. So it's racial essentialism, just like the Confederacy. And then we have this condescending idea that there's a subservient helot class. Helot's just a term that refers to the spartan form of indentured servants in Messenia for the most part, but also in Laconia. And what I mean by that, we've had all these people come out in Los Angeles. One of the so called czars that Karen Bass has appointed from the business community to help build. He says if you deport, we're not going to have a class to build our homes. And they're all worried about all of us. Wealthy people depend on illegal aliens and a few send them back for breaking the law. Then we would have to pay higher wages to attract people back into the workforce. Because remember everybody, we have a 62% labor participation rate, 62% of able bodies. We're not talking about people 70s, we're not talking about tenure, we're talking about people in the prime of their life. 62% participate, they go to work. So that other 38% might be drawn into the workforce if wages went up. But of course it's the idea, well, we want cheap labor from Mexico and Mexico likes to give us cheap labor because they get 63 billion. That's a very confederate, a very very, very, very confederate idea. And as is a pyramidal society of plantation owners and slaves and no middle class. And if you look at California, it is a pyramidal society. It's a hard left state with a elite on top and then no middle class. And the largest poverty rate in the United States, 21% of Californians live before the poverty rate. One out of three welfare recipients are in California. We have the highest number of homeless people of any state. And it's very confederate. It's very ironic. But they. The Democratic Party in some ways hasn't changed.
- [23:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. If we could turn then to another condescending thing, just to use your word. We've had accusations against Caroline Levitt and J.D. vance that they are really just de.
- [24:03]
Guest or Co-host
Oh, my God.
- [24:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
Appointments by the View said that about Caroline Levitt and Stacey Abrams said it about. About J.D. vance. And I was wondering your view on that.
- [24:14]
Guest or Co-host
Well, this before I answer that there is a panic among the DEI movement. If you were Stacey Abrams and you were confident in your ability. Remember, she's lost every major election she's run, and she's an election denialist. She paraded around. She lost the gubernatorial election, I think it was 2018, by 50,000 votes, but yet she said she was the actual governor because of quote, unquote, fraud. This is exactly what the left said, destroys the country. And they attacked Trump for it. But they paraded her around as an icon, and she was one, along with Karen Bass that might have been the vice president candidate. But they thought, wow, we're stuck with Kamala Harris because bad as she is, she's better than Stacey Abrams or Karen Bass. And that was borne out by later events. So she's saying DEI and she's angry as an elite. Elite person, as is Whoopi Goldberg. These are multimillion dollar people. Stacey Abrams had all these PACs. She's been cited as well as misusing campaign funds. But my point is they feel that they don't have confidence in their own ability. So they want to always play the race card that I, because of the history of slavery or Jim Crow for the last 60 years, I am in 60 years now of affirmative action. I get a perpetual pass that has nothing to do with class and people are tired of it. And you've got to remember that 48% of Hispanics voted for Donald Trump when he knew he was going to dismantle DEI. And 26% of black males voted for Donald Trump when he knew that. So a lot of minorities don't want that stigma. And so how do they react against it? They start blaming people. So then they say poor white JD Vance got di. But how did he get it? He paid for his graduate school. Not with claiming. I mean, would they Please tell me what white people get if you're white. I'm speaking as someone who spent 50 years in academia and 22 years at the Cal State system. When I would apply for. I'd had. I think I spent. I sent 51 people to top notch, mostly Ivy League universities and law, medicine, PhD programs. And this is when I called those people at those programs. I would call them up and I said, I've got a wonderful PhD candidate. She's got four years of Latin, four years of Greek. I had her take a master's program. I gave her independent instruction in Greek composition, Latin composition. I made her learn Italian, German and French. And if you can just admit her and you know what they would say her, well, that's good, but is she a minority? I had one student who was brilliant and I tutored him and I called up a university, AN Ivy League PhD let him in and he came in when he got this extraordinary offer and he said to me, I lied about my age. I'm not 24, 23. He was in his 30s and I'm an illegal alien. So I knew what that meant, that that was not something the universities would object to, they would love. So I just double checked and I called up this Ivy League university. I said, I just want to inform you that your applicant that will be joining you in a month is actually not a US citizen. They said, great, that's wonderful, he's undocumented. So I, in that period, every single time I had a white male, it was almost impossible to apply. I could get them into PhDs or law schools that were what the elite and snobbish fashion would call third or fourth tier, but not at the top places. It was almost impossible. I had this guy, I'll just say his name was James. He was an authentic natural genius. He was very strange. And James, if you're listening, you know who you are. I mean, he was kind of an isolationist. He lived alone, he admired the Dark Ages in Europe, but he was an authentic genius in sars, language facility, in Latin. I had not. I had, I'll just, I'm not going to use. I had a girl, woman named Christie, and she was comparable with her knowledge of languages, classical Latin and Greek. But he was amazing and by any standard he should have been admitted to Harvard or Yale. He got a, he got a. Almost a perfect GRE score. He had straight A's. I couldn't get him in to the school and I would get so angry and they'd say, white, white, white, white, male, male, male. So let's just get rid of this idea. Stanford University, after George Floyd let in, according to their website, not Victor. Now maybe they're wrong and they're lying, but it was 9 to 10% white males. That demographic is 35% almost of the population and every other racial category other than white males, women were overrepresented or at least equal, not white males. So this idea that he has, he got the GI Bill of Rights after he went to a combat zone. J.D. vance, and then he came back and got the GI Bill to go to Yale Law School. What is the argument about the press secretary, Ms. Levitt, is that she's DEI. On what grounds? Whoopi Goldberg. I guess she's saying that I was a trailblazer. Me, Whoopi Goldberg. No, you were never a trailblazer. You came in well after women's liberation from a very early age. Color Purple. Go all that you were given. All. I mean, I'm saying you're giving special preference, but you were giving a quality of opportunity and you took advantage of it. You were talented. But this idea that she's not because she's white is absolutely insane. And if you look at her performance or even. I'm not a big fan of Jen Psaki, but Jen Psaki was a far better press secretary and Karine Jean Pierre, who was lost, and Ms. Levitt is a far better. As was Ms. Huckabee, as was Kayleigh McEnany. And I only say that because when Corrine Jean Pierre was appointed, the first thing they did not say is she is a skilled journalist. She had been on, I think MSNBC or cnn and she is absolutely a razor. No, they said that she is the first black female lesbian. That was the first thing they said. And so Ms. Levitt, if Whoopi Goldberg and the women of the View believe that she's a DEI candidate, would they please tell me what angle she used to get that job? Because when you look at her at the screen, she's the youngest press secretary in US history. I just turned the TV off before this broadcast. She was like a band saw all those reporters ask these questions. She has no. She has no binder. It's all up here. She boasted, my binder is my brain. But they don't like her because she's attractive, she's well spoken and she's 110% Trump, and she answers all the questions. So this is going to happen more and more and more. And I just hope that people who have been beneficiaries of DEI can come to the conclusion that this was a moment in American history where its negatives far outweighed its positive for the recipients of it. And now they are liberated from it. And they, when they. By their own merits, and many will by their own Merits excel. No one's going to say, well, you got the job because of your race or gender or sexual orientation.
- [32:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, Victor, we're at a break, so let's stop for a few messages and then come back and talk a little bit about the pyramids at Giza. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. You can find Victor on social media at X. His handle is at Victor Hansen. Sorry, his handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. So please come join him there. Well, Victor, I'm anxious to hear about why the Giza pyramids are part of the Seven Wonders of the World. And then their extraordinary.
- [33:24]
Guest or Co-host
I think technically, according to Diodorus and others, in the Hellenistic, early Greek period. But later in the Hellenistic, it was the Great Pyramid at Giza. I'm going to use the Greek names, not the Egyptian pronunciation, but it's the Great Pyramid that's associated with Cheops of. I think it's the fifth dynasty, but it's roughly, my gosh, it's 2500 years before Christ. We're talking about 40. It's the oldest by far of all the seven wonders. And you know what's ironic about it is the Great Pyramid at Gaza of Cheops is the oldest, oldest by far, Seven Wonders of the World. But it's also the only one that's extant in full. You can go there today and see it. It sits next to the Sphinx, which is dated within 30 or 40 years. And we say dated because we've had elements within the pyramid that have been found, wood especially, that we've radiocarbon dated. And the thing about that is you can't tell exactly when that piece of wood was put in there, but you can tell how old it is. Now, it could come from a 200-year-old tree, but it gives you a framework, I think, between 26 and 2400 years before Christ. These were funeral tombs and they were analogous to the much later mausoleum at Halicarnassus that we talked about of King Mausolus. In other words, in the fourth, fifth, the old dynasty, not the new dynasty. We say old is around Giza, which is about. At least when I went to Cairo in the 70s, it was 20 miles outside. Now it's incorporated almost. But the new dynasty moved down to Luxor, way down, I should say up the Nile, given the topography of Africa and it was known in antiquity. So the first person that noted it was Herodotus. There's a long passage in Diodorus who wrote in the first century, 30 BC to 10 or 20 AD and they both remarked as travelers, they had seen it. Now, today, when you go there, there's these blocks. It's made out of limestone. It's 400ft tall, I think, until, I don't know, one of the early cathedral. It was the tallest in the world at 400ft. And it's huge, the mass of it. I think people have counted 2.3 million blocks, and inside, they're made of limestone. But what was even more remarkable, they melted some of the limestone down to finish it. So they put lesser blocks and rubble, and then they paved it over so it was shiny. Today, there's just a few pieces and then the pyramidion, the little cap which is missing. And it's missing on most. It's missing on most pyramids. But today you can go there. I went there in 1974 and rode a camel at that time. You could climb on it. Today, it's a felony. And people who do it, and they still do it, but they have to pay the guides. But it's a lifetime ban, I think, from the Egyptian government. There was a very famous case of a German tourist that got caught recently, and they banned him from life, from returning because he put it on the Internet and everything. But the point is that when you would go there, there were these people would come up to you. Bakshish. Bakshish. And one of the things was, I can climb from here the 400ft in less than 10 minutes. And I will bet you money, I think it was 10, maybe 15. And then, you know, you're there and you're a student, you don't have any money. But we all got together, there were five of us, and we put in $5 and $25 was a lot in 1975. We said, there is no way, because the blocks are not like stepping stones. They're like the height of a person. And it's dangerous because, you know, you know, they're not. They weren't intended to. They are. They're only 2 millimeters off from the base in a straight line to the top. And they're. They. Each side represents due north, due south, due east, due west. So it's situated. But nevertheless, when the finishing, the casing, they call it, fell off or was taken off, it was used for, you know, lime for houses stripped. It's very dangerous. And this guy came and we thought, well, one of. I won't mention his name at the time, but I think his name. Well, I will. Steve Was it Steve? Yes. And he tried to go up three blocks when no one was looking. And he then counted up what he thought and he said, there's no way you can't do it in less than 40 minutes if you were a great athlete. He was a very good athlete. This guy was an expert. So we bait and he just jumped like a gazelle. And then he got up the top and he goes like this, waves to us, points at his watch. And then he said, so then we thought, well, how quick can he get down? So we were yelling to him, we'll pay you another 25 if you can do it in five minutes. And he didn't hear us, but he jumped down just quick inside. There are three passages you can go today through. We went through the so called smugglers Passage. I don't think they call it that anymore. It's the main entrance. You go up a few things and the Egyptian government had it lighted and wood railings and it goes into the interior tombs. There's three or four of them. They're made of granite, so they had to get that from up the Nile and float it all the way down. We know that because hieroglyphics have been found that detail the exact way it was built. In a nearby excavation, I think that was in the 90s, they actually found a description of how they cut the blocks and they found tools. So modern archaeologists took a block roughly of the same size, and then they used the ancient tool replicas because they found these ossified tools. And you know, you took a chisel and you split it split a little crack. And then you put wood shivs inside where you wanted the cut, and then you poured them with water and the water would expand and then break it over a day or so. And anyway, they figured it out and they had bandsaws to finish it off. Long, long saws. Some of them were 15ft long, I think. But in any case, they figured out how long it took that and how many then, because they knew the number of blocks on the Great Pyramid. As I said, over 2.2 million. They could figure exactly whether they really did spend 100 years or something. And they came up with something like 13 years with a workforce of 40,000 people. So it wasn't astronomical and it was very efficient. So they could pretty much tell. There's also a passage in the subterranean underneath. I think it goes down over almost 200ft. Yeah. And that was. All of these have been plundered, except every now and again they get more sophisticated X ray Technology and they find another pocket or passage. I think they had found a red room not too long ago. But you can walk, you can go into the smuggler's passage. And it's been plundered. Even in the old kingdom was plundered. So when you go into the actual Cheops tomb, you can see the sarcophagus. I think the lid is broken, but you can see where it was. It's still there, but everything else has been looted. A lot of it turned up over the centuries. People entered private collections and people in the Egyptian government. So if you go to the Egyptian museum, you can see one of the strangest things is nearby. They, you know, they thought they were going into the underworld. And people have suggested that these tunnels were trying to hit water. And because there's also some air shafts long to let air in. But maybe they weren't air shafts. Maybe they were escapes from the spirit to go up, they thought, or at some of the subterranean passages got pretty near the water table from the nearby Nile. So the idea was you're going into the river of the Dead and they found a ship. And it's huge. It's in the Egyptian Museum. They reconstructed it. An Egyptian archaeologist. It took him about 14 years. So it's the largest of the seven wonders of the World. It's the oldest and it's one of many dozens of pyramids. There's the Saqqara stepping stone pyramid not too far. And these are the Old Kingdom. Chefron's is right next to it. The, it's almost as big, the two big ones. And then you can take the train or boat or something and go up to Luxor, the Valley of the Kings in the new dynasty. And there's even, there's more impressive. The Sphinx is nearby. That leaves us with six of the seven wonders of the World. And we're going to do the, the one that was the most controversial in the Hellenistic period. It was the Hanging Gardens of Babylon because few people had actually seen it and Babylon had been destroyed and there was sort of, what was it? The reconstructed gardens. Was it the original garden of Nebuchadnezzar? And Saddam, of course, wanted to be an Iraqi nationalist rather than just a pan Arabist. So during his regime he began, and we'll talk about that, making blocks with his initials on them and tried to rebuild the hanging gardens, but in a very inexact. So I was there, I think in 2006, and one of the Black Hawk people we were going by, I was embedded and that came to mind. When we had this tragic crash, what it was like to ride in a Black Hawk helicopter at night in a combat zone and how good the pilots were. But we flew over it and people pointed it. And then the next day there was a Humvee going out there anyway, near there. So I didn't get right there, but I got very near it and could see it. But we'll talk about that. To conclude this series, I saw an.
- [44:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
Article about maybe a few months a year ago on the Saqqara pyramid. And they were looking at some new excavation where they thought that they. Because they're always wondering, how did they get these huge blocks up? What was the, how were the workers doing that? And the article said that they had found a water shaft, that they thought that they were raising those huge blocks, some of which could be the size of a car, up through a water system. Yeah, but they didn't. It wasn't.
- [44:39]
Guest or Co-host
There's all these theories. There's a theory that they had dissolving types of salt laden rock salt and then types of ores that would dissolve with water. So they made these big ramps, huge ramps. And then they, they pushed them up and then to all around it. In other words, the pyramid was not that tall. They didn't have lifting devices like the Greeks did, but they would surround it with this dissolvable earth with rams. And so each course it was just added like a volcano, you know. And then when you're done, they began. They were able to get water to it and dissolve everything that melted. That was one theory. And I'm not sure if that's right or not, but that pyramid is. Nate, all the pyramids outside of Cairo are made of limestone. And limestone, it was very cheap there. And so they didn't. It was the problem they had was when they wanted to make the royal interior tombs everlasting, because they knew granite would last a lot longer than limestone, they had to get granite, and that meant they had to bring them from the, on the Nile River. And some of these blocks weighed tons. You know, the other thing about it is this is a little bit more controversial, but when you have autocratic societies, pyramidal societies of an elite, usually a theocratic elite on top, you see this and you see it in periods where there's no constitutional or consensual government. So we talked about the mausoleum at modern Bodrum, or ancient Halicon artists. That was in the Hellenistic period when King Mausolus was an absolute ruler. And that was from the kingdom of Artemisia a couple of hundred Years earlier, a dynasty. And the same thing about the pharaohs and the same thing about the Aztecs. They have these huge pyramids, but you don't see civic labor and capital invested in these monumental burials or sarcophagi or mausolea in a democratic or a consensual government. So you don't see that at Athens. You don't see that in Greek city states. You see temples to the gods, but they're functional. They actually have the, the, the rear of the temple, the Opus Thomas has a iron grill and you can see the city's gold inside there, the reserves, so that everybody knew where they were. And so you could come up, you could worship the deity Athena or Zeus or Artemis, depending on the particular city. Each one had their local patron God or goddess, but they also were functional archives and treasuries. My point is that most people, if they have free will, will not vote to spend this enormous amount of money on the burial site of a theocrat. In fact, in the Greek city states, they had sumptuary laws that were, we know, from inscriptions that forbid extravagant gravestones because they thought that that was a misapplication of the city's collective resources. You couldn't. It's kind of like today in a cemetery. I go to, I go to Hillsdale every year and I walk through a cemetery. I'm just fascinated. And some of the gravestones are enormous. The Confederate War era, that's all you know. Now we just have flat slabs and you can mow over it. So we had our own de facto sumptuary laws. But it shows you that the only societies that create these monumental, non functioning, non productive projects are theocracies or autocrats, autocratic governments. You see it in the modern world today, Saddam Hussein and all of his things that he used for himself and his family. And you don't see it in societies where people can be free and vote.
- [49:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
Just one more question, not to be too extraneous. I know that the Mycenaeans had very large walls and they had the same.
- [49:08]
Guest or Co-host
Issue, so called cyclopean walls.
- [49:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. And they, the same issue was how did they get this? And I know that they think they built it by ramps of dirt all the way up. Mycenaeans were inspired by the Greek Giza pyramid. Or did they get any information from.
- [49:26]
Guest or Co-host
Well, we know that everybody, we're referring to this early period in Greece. At one time we were thought that they were Semitic peoples that had inhabited Greece before today's Greeks who had a very different Alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicia, the alpha to omega alpha, because Mycenaean linear B and the earlier linear A, which we don't know who those people were. They were probably Minoan or pre Mycenaean. They were. They're very different. They're part phonetic and they're part hieroglyphic. And that, that is directly influenced by Egypt, as is a lot of their art. And until maybe 650 in Greek art, you see those Egyptian, we call it Egyptian statuary, where the arms are folded so they don't break off. There's no realism. And then in painting, somewhere in Greek art, around 550, you see the disappearance of the Egyptian eye. The Egyptian eye is simply the eye as you're looking for forward. But when you have a profile, they still use the Egyptian eye, even though the eye doesn't see that because it's a convention. And they haven't mastered the idea of showing an eye from the side. My point is that these were societies that were somewhat like Egypt. They had borrowed from Egypt. They had contact with Egypt somewhere around 1650. They're in a series of volcanic eruptions on Crete and Santorini. These Minoan settlements that were very much affected by Egypt were destroyed. And what we now know as Greek speakers, Mycenae we call them, they were Greeks, but they were not classical Greeks or city state Greeks. They came in, appropriated the Minoan civilization, modified their script into linear B, which is Greek. We didn't know that until 1953 with the decipherment of linear B by Michael Ventris, the architect. And then they militarized it so that all the walls that you see, the Mycenaeans didn't have walls. That's why they're supposedly a matriarch, matriarchic peace loving every. All the people on the left love the Minoans. They hate the Mycenaeans because they were warlike and they built these Cyclopean walls. But here's the catch. They were so centrifuged, centrifugal, and so top down that if you decapitated the elite, and sometime around 1150 or 1200 BC that elite broke down. So nobody had the expertise. According to the linear B data that we have on it, all the farm, all the weapon, all the farm material, all the weapons, all equal. They were all centrally brought up to palace stores and then redistributed. It was kind of like communism. But once that elite was decapitated, nobody knew how to write, nobody knew how to run these huge architectural projects. And we went into a dark age. And when it re emerged around 700, it was very different. It reemerged as decentralized, what we call polisis or polis city states. And that was the beginning of Western civilization. And these people didn't know what the Mycenaeans. So that is also the beginning of Greek mythology in around 700. And what do I mean by that? So you're walking around Greece around 700, and one day you fall into a Tholos tomb, or the next day you're in a forest and you see this huge Cyclopean wall. Or you go to the site of Mycenae and you're plowing one day and you pull up all this gold. Or one day you're out in the field collecting olives and it rains, and all these linear B tablets show up. What do you do? You say these were gods and they were Zeus, but you're also matching that physical remnant or archaeology with a folk tradition. So once you have a cataclysm and we don't know what caused the end of these messiahs, then that is the catalyst for myth. It's like all these apocalyptic, you know, water world and all these end of the world or the Mad Max. And you make these myths about a. So these Greeks then, in the Dark Age is not the city state. They thought, wow, somebody was here because the population fell by 90% and they were. Agriculture was stagnant. It was mostly a livestock. There's a little bit of remnants of the Dark Ages in the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's a tripartite society. I mean, there's Mycenaean Dark age and contemporary 700. But the point I'm making is when you can't make sense of monumental architecture or remnants of a lost civilization everywhere in your midst. And you combine that with a folk tradition that you grew up that said, well, once upon a time there were all these Cyclops, and they built these big walls and they went to Troy and there was a guy named Achilles, and there's a guy named Ajax and they went to Troy. Well, some of those names appear in a linear B. So these were Mycenaean functionaries, bureaucrats, generals. And then when the society decided it would be sort of like we get a nuclear, you know, bomb, and all of a sudden we. Petraeus. Petraeus. Petraeus. And then pretty soon Petraeus, who was a just a general, then he becomes Lord Petraeus, who led the great expedition. And they exaggerated and then it's codified. When you have an actual civilization because of the reintroduction, I shouldn't say reintroduction of writing, but a introduction of a much superior script, Greek. And then we codify all these myths and that's the end of mythology because there's no longer an oral tradition and it can be, you know, nobody. So all of this has an ancient aura to it when it's codified in the Iliad and the Odyssey and Hesiod. You don't make up myths in a literate, civilized society unless you're a cult figure or a nut. It's always about an earlier time that you're trying to explain something that's disappeared and was more majestic than your own society. That's a long, windy answer to the pyramids.
- [55:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's okay. That was wonderful. Let's go ahead and take a break, though, and we'll come back to talk a little bit about retrospective pardons and executive orders and then also the hysterical style of interrogation of these new cabinet members. Stay with us, and we'll be right back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. We are now producing video podcasts, and you can find them both on rumble and on YouTube. Just put in the Victor Davis Hansen show and you should come up with that show in either case. So, Victor, I was wondering if you could, because we've been hearing for months because Joe Biden pardoned executive orders have been very frustrating for the last years. And then now Donald Trump is in and he's got lots of executive orders and he's got droves of pardons. And I was wondering a couple of things. Has it always been this way through presidencies and what has changed? And is this a good or bad precedent? And I know that's a lot of questions.
- [57:01]
Guest or Co-host
It's more of a Democratic phenomenon. If you go back let's go back to Donald Trump has pardoned he had about 200 pardons in the first, I think I'm doing this by memory. But and then he had 1500. So he's got about 1700. Joe Biden had about 8000. Then you go to Barack Obama, he had about 2000. And then George Bush had, I think, 200. So my point. And Bill Clinton had, I think, about 2000. I take that back about Obama. I don't think I think he was lower than that. But Bill Clinton had 2,000. So what I'm getting at is of the last four or five presidencies, about 80% of the pardons came in just two, the Clinton administration and the Obama administration, and not in the Bush administration And even with this mass pardon by Trump, it pales in consideration to the numbers. And we're talking about clemencies and pardons, reductions in sentences and actual exonerated. They're free to be, they're free of penalty, any incarceration or criminal activity. So it's unusual. The last, the Biden, nobody had ever pardoned their family like that. That was new. And they hadn't done. And the preemptive pardons for 10 years of all activity, even though there might be crimes, we could wake up tomorrow and somebody can come forward and said, you know what I got to Admit now in 2009, I should say during the vice presidency of Joe Biden in 2015, I didn't really tell you, but I got a check for $2 million as a money man for the. But Biden doesn't matter. The Bidens will not be indicted. They have a preemptive pardon. Not after the pardon. So Joe in his last years can't grift anymore, but he doesn't need to. He's already gotten. According to the Comer people, Representative comer, they've got $30 million in foreign shakedown. So it is unusual. There are good pardons. And I think a lot of people are getting a little worried that Donald Trump is running. I'm not, I'm happy. But there were so many egregious violations of norms under Biden that the accelerated quick recension of all of them seems radical. It's not radical, everybody. It's back to common sense. There were three or four protesters. Two of them were women. They didn't do anything violent. They just assembled outside an abortion and the FBI came and got them and put them in jail and made them incarcerated and they had to wear ankle braces even when they were let go. And when they remember when they grilled Merrick Garland, they said, well, why are you doing this? I think it was Senator Lee from, Mike Lee from Utah. Why are you doing this? You have all these people that are bombing anti abortion headquarters, are violent and these people are peaceful, these anti abortion people. But the pro abortion are not. And he said, well, the pro abortion people are easy to find. They're in daylight and the other people are kind of terrorists and they work by night. Think of that admission. The real dangerous people would be hard to catch. So we don't catch them. And the people who are easy, we go after them. And they try to. It was all about the left had wanted to make a point and so they weaponized the entire government. They really Did.
- [60:40]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. So we'll just take it as a very bad prep.
- [60:43]
Guest or Co-host
That's what I'm out of this.
- [60:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
You know, it seems.
- [60:46]
Guest or Co-host
Well, I mean, you say you're not going to do it, and then you ask yourself, well, we're not going to weaponize the government. Cash Patel is going to be really challenged because he's got people who broke the law, and we know some of them did. We know that James Comey leaked a classified memo. We know that he claimed he was couldn't remember 245 times he denied Payne Christopher Steele. We know that Andrew McCabe lied four times. I'm one of the few people on the right that liked Bill Barr. I don't think he was. I think he was naive about the left, and I think he could have done a little bit more. But he was very good with the Mueller investigation. But he made one mistake. When it was brought to his attention by the inspector general that Andrew McCabe, I think, on four occasions had lied under oath to federal investigators about leaking things. He said, well, he. Why punish? They should have put him, and they should have brought him for perjury. And they didn't. They did not. And so when Cash Patel's going to find stuff that the FBI did, and then what does he do? Does he. Does he. If they're still within the statute of limitations, does he try to indict them? And they say you're weaponizing the government. No. You're just trying to bring it back to the norm. That was really a horrible confirmation hearing. I thought with Adam Schiff, he really embarrassed himself when he said, turn around. I just did a video for our website about. It was horrible. I thought I wanted to yell out when I was watching that. You scoundrel. You scoundrel. When you were censored, you were censored. Part of the modus operandi of a House censor. Remember Representative Paula Is her name Luna from Florida? She wanted to charge him 25 million bucks. But anyway, part of the ritual, this rare occasion when your compatriots censor it, you have to go up to the dice as they read out the censure and Kevin McCarthy. And then Adam Schiff got everybody to yell and scream and boo. So if he wanted that reciprocal treatment when he said to Kash Patel, turn around and look at the Capitol police that you wrote about, he should have had everybody in the galley start yelling and screaming at Adam Schiff. That's what Adam Schiff did. They treated him very unfairly. He did wonderfully. Cash Patel and It was just under further argument that you've got to get somebody in there to clean out that mess of perjurers and people who broke the law. Adam Schiff is a sui generous. I've never seen someone who is more shameless. He was censored for lying about the Mueller investigation. He was censored for lying about the whistleblower that he said he had no contact with. And the first impeachment he was. He lied repeatedly. Michael Horowitz found with the minority so called shift memo and it still has not fazed him and people voted him in as our senator.
- [63:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
Wasn't it our Nevada senator who Senator who said well it worked, didn't it?
- [64:01]
Guest or Co-host
That's all it was Harry Reid when they said I remember that doing this by memory but I remember they said to Harry Reid in the 2012 campaign in the critical last few weeks, you got on the floor of the Senate and lied and said that Mitt Romney had not paid his income taxes and that you had had access by elite and that was not true. And he said it worked, didn't it?
- [64:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
So sad.
- [64:28]
Guest or Co-host
He was one of the worst senators in the history of the U.S. senate given his whole family became quite wealthy in the the way the Democratic machine controlled Nevada.
- [64:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, very sad. Victor, I'd like to take a moment for our sponsor Hillsdale College. Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses. That's right, more than 40 free online courses. Go right now to Hillsdale Edu Victor to enroll. There's no cost and it's easy to get started. That's Hillsdale Eduardo Victor to enroll for free Hillsdale EDU VDH learn about the works of C.S. lewis, the stories of Genesis, the meaning of the US Constitution, the rise and fall of Roman Republic, or the history of the ancient Christian Church. With Hillsdale College's free online courses, you might be particularly interested and enjoy Hillsdale's course the Second World wars taught by Victor Davis Hansen and Hillsdale President Larry P. Arne. This free seven lecture course will help you to understand this massive and complex conflict in a new way. It will give you a clear picture of why the war was fought and how the allied powers ultimately triumphed in order to save the west from a new form of tyranny. The course is self paced so that you can start whenever and wherever. Go right now to Hillsdale Eduardo VDH to enroll. There's no cost and it's easy to get started. That's Hillsdale Edu VDH to enroll for free Hillsdale Edu VDH and we welcome and. And love the continuing support.
- [66:20]
Guest or Co-host
Yeah, I have to go. You know, just. I have to go to Hillsdale. I shouldn't say I have to. I want to go, but I've been invited there three times in 2025, so I'll be there on March 3rd and 4th. Mark Moyer is holding a military history conference and they've asked me to speak about World War II in film. And I'm going to talk about great movies like Patton Bridge Too Far that depict events in World War II. And then I have the senior class and the university asked me to give the graduation address. So on May 10, I will be giving the graduation address for Hillskill College in 2025.
- [67:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
And then that's a big honor too, because they voted for you to do it. The senior.
- [67:06]
Guest or Co-host
This graduating class traditionally votes for the person they want to speak at is. I've spoken once at St. John's that was a wonderful experience, their graduation. And I gave the graduation speech to a college in Napa, once in Anguin, California. And then I'll be there the first week of September, my annual 10 days where I give guest lectures and meet with students and give interviews and meet donors and things. So it's really had a lot of national attention as the epitome of what a university should be, a college should be. And I think we're going to see some radical changes in higher education. And I guess the theme would be if you people just did what Hillsdale did and just did a few simple things and not have one course with a dash with the word studies following it, therapeutic class, you'd be in great shape. And you just honored the Bill of Rights and you enforced equal opportunity and banned racially segregated graduations or safe spaces, and you ensured free speech. You might regain your reputation. My experience is that under Larry Arndt, when I first got there, it was struggling because of the prior. I don't want to get into it, but the prior president had some difficulties. And over that 22 or 23 year period, the faculty got sizable pay and pay for productivity, not just pay. And the faculty is wonderful. There are so many scholars of an international reputation. And then there's a complete makeover of the college. I think they've invested over a billion dollars. So it has national. It has the greatest, the most impressive shooting range of any college in the United States. And it has, I think, the largest chapel, or I would call it a cathedral. It's huge. And then all the facilities are new and they're. And so. And then the Endowment is. Everything about it's been successful. And I have very favorite place. Another one is Pepperdine, especially the School of Public Policy. Pete Peterson. Jim Wilburn did a great job. So is Pete Peterson. And it's a wonderful place, Pepperdine. I wish I could say that about my other billets that I've been visitors, but I. I will politely decline.
- [69:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, Victor, so let's turn then to the interrogations broadly of these new cabinet members. They've been pretty hysterical, I guess is.
- [70:00]
Guest or Co-host
The word you want hysterical side.
- [70:02]
Victor Davis Hanson
But no. Yeah, the paranoid Warren yelling at Cash Patel, not allowing him to talk, or even Bernie Sanders and his onesie thing. I don't. You know, it's just the Democrats make themselves look crazy instead of just asking somebody questions rationally and following up on those questions. They want to just.
- [70:25]
Guest or Co-host
No, I went back. I was curious. I went back and looked at the Republican questions of Biden's nominees. One of them wasn't. There were two. The FAA guy didn't even know how long a jet Runway was. And there was another person that was rejected, but they were sharp, but they were not like this. They were not hysterical. Elizabeth Warren was just. She kept interrupting Bobby Kennedy and yelling at him. And if you just took a pause, you just said, am I listening to this correctly? Elizabeth Warren is attacking Bobby Kennedy because he is skeptical and less trustful of the pharmaceutical industry. And I. And then he just demolished them. He just said, you know, a lot of these, all the people in this committee get pharmaceuticals, and Bernie, you're the number one, and Elizabeth, you're number two. And he got. He went crazy. Oh, these are from the workers. No, you're affiliated with the pharmaceuticals. They spend $250 million in political campaigns, as Bobby Kennedy testified. Tulsi Gabbard will be the most difficult because she has some things she said that will offend people about Syria. But she'sthey were going to get her that. She had said that we shouldn't overthrow the Assad regime, but she handled that masterfully today. She said, you people tried to overthrow him. And the way you tried to overthrow Mubarak and the way you tried to overthrow successfully Gaddafi. And how did that work out? You put the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and Libya is a mess and Syria is now a mess. And the person that we put in the terrorists was a big advocate of 911 and cheered on everybody on 9 11. Now he's running Syria. So she was pretty good, I thought. Adam Schiff embarrassed himself. Tim Kaine embarrassed all. Every one of them embarrassed behind all of this was Chuck Schumer, who was being criticized by governors for not being harsh enough, believe that or not. And again, 37%. So they took a poll contemporaneously with Quinnipac, and they looked at this. It's been going on for two weeks. And it's no surprise that 37% of the population that's it has a favorable impression of Democrats. And that's because they look at those people and they say these are ossified hacks. And Robert Kennedy Jr. Made a good point. He said, this is all happening because I endorse Donald Trump. Had I come before you and been nominated by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, you would be supporting me. And I think also if he had have been, Rand Paul, would have been supporting him and others in the Republican Party. And it's, it's just vicious. And then when Carolyn Kennedy, we talked about that, wrote that scurrilous letter. My God, she said he was a sexual predator. And she, she got all of the. The one thing I couldn't understand. She said that he was responsible for all the addictions and travesties of the. Does he.
- [73:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
Of the Kennedy family.
- [73:49]
Guest or Co-host
Okay, an unborn conceptual Robert F. Kennedy made his uncle JFK deflower a virgin in the marital bed when he was president, made him get addicted to painkillers, and made him have an affair along with Robert Kennedy's father with Marilyn Monroe. That was Robert Kennedy before he was born. And then I thought, well, who. What? She said all these terrible things. So I thought, wow, Carolyn Kennedy is finally coming forward. I regret that she's picking this occasion, but she's obviously being disinterested and empirical and she's going to examine the Kennedy pathologies. And then silence. Nothing. Nothing. I thought, well, wait a minute. Who was the biggest alcoholic in the US Senate? Couldn't be Ted Kennedy, could it? And who was the only senator in the history that we know of that was directly responsible for. I would say kill somebody, get in a car. You're drunk. You go over a bridge. You haven't. You're going out for a tryst. You run into the water, you're drunk. She's in there. And then you swim out and swim away and she's there in an air pocket, slowly drowning. That was her. That was her uncle. So if she's going to criticize. Did Robert Kennedy ever do that? The whole Kennedy thing is. I think it doesn't help him at all to have the name Kennedy anymore. What helps him is he's trying to top stop Two pathologies, obesity and diabetes. And that is a base on food selection and exercise.
- [75:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
Nobody could disagree with that.
- [75:35]
Guest or Co-host
That's got to be, you know, Kash Patel. I mean, he's going to get confirmed thanks to people like Adam Schiff. The questioning was so unfair. And when he said, when he ordered him, it was kind of racist in a way. You know, it was like, you turn around and look back at those Capitol Police. These are the people you defamed. And he said, I'm not going to do that. You know you're lying. And Cash was right. He said, you know you're lying. And what he meant was the Inspector General of the United States government, the Department of Justice, found out that your memo was a pathological lie. And he found out that you were lying when you said that you had no contact with the whistleblower and Mr. Vindman, that cooked up the impeachment. And he found out you were lying when you said that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians serially and repeatedly. And that got you finally censored. So Adam Schiff should have been the one that people were questioning. Cash did it very well to keep his temper. And he's going to be confirmed and I think he will be met, I hope, with all the people who are culpable will submit their resignations. The Washington centric left wing remember what the FBI became. Very shortly it became a retrieval service for the Biden family. And by that I mean somebody said, what do you mean retrieval? Okay, Ashley Biden lost her diary. And we've got to get it because in it she admits that she, as a, I don't know, 12 or 13 year old, was taking naked in the shower with the President of the United States. Got to get that. Oh, James O'Keefe may have it. He didn't. Let's go roust him out at 2 in the morning in his underwear and intimidate him. So they did. Oh, Hunter. Oh, my God. Hunter lost another laptop, but this one's bad because it's got nude pictures on it. It's got him with a gun, it's got him using coke, it's got him with prostitutes. They've got him nude. But most importantly, he has text messages in which he refers to his father as the big guy and the 10% recipients of foreign bribery money. Where is it? Oh, this guy, this repairman has it. So we'll go take it from him because he confiscated it because Hunter never paid the bill. And after the bill is not paid, his labor is recompensed. By possession of the item, which probably was. So the FBI went and got it. And then they said, oh, my God, this thing is authentic. We better sit on it for a year. And then, you know, Anthony Blinken calls up Mike Morell, former CIA interim director. Hey, that laptop is really going to hurt us, because Trump's going to spring it on this last debate. This is 2020 in October. What are we going to do? And then Mike Morell says, well, you know, I'll round up 50 intelligence authorities that swear that it's Russian information, disinformation. But we'll use the word information because that won't say that. And we'll say it has the hallmarks, because we know the FBI, our buddies in the FBI, have it, and they've told us it's authentic. So we got to lie. And if you think that Leon Panetta is not capable of lying, he lied. If you're thinking James Clapper is not capable, he lied. If you're thinking that John Brennan is not capable, he lied. And the best thing that Donald Trump has done, of all those executive orders, the one that I admire him the most is yanking the security clearances of everybody who signed that lie and tried to warp an election. And then the election happened. And when you look at that debate, I went back and looked at the YouTube of that debate. It is shameless. When Donald Trump says, we all know what's on the laptop. We all know you were getting money. He said, that is a lie. 51 intelligence authorities, how dare you. It's like it was all set up. That warped an election. A polling firm, albeit conservative, found after the election, of those that knew about the laptop, it affected their vote, and it might have meant as much as 7 or 8% of the electorate. It was horrible. So, gosh, all of the things they've done. And the FBI was, oh, I last forgot one thing before we finished. I said they were a retrieval service, but I only mentioned the diary and the laptop. Remember the gun that his wife or his. It was his. After he seduced the widow of his brother and then got her hooked on heroin or dangerous opiates, Then he was very dangerously brandishing a gun around children. So then she threw it in a dumpster, and the Secret Service then, I think enlisted the FBI, and both of them went out and tried to find it. Unfortunately for Hunter, they found it very close to a school. Somebody transient had found it. And so if you have a problem in the Biden family and you're missing diaries or guns or laptops, you Just call up Christopher Wray and say, you know, get your boys out there and get it. And then he says, I can't do it because Merrick Garland called me up and said I got to go after parents at a school board meeting. And then after I do that, I've got to go arrest these 74 year old women that were peacefully protesting at an abortion clinic. And then I'm too busy because I got to organize a SWAT raid at Donald Trump's home in Mar a Lago. But I'll still try to do it. That's what the FBI has become. And there was a Rasmussen poll that recently asked, what is your confidence in the FBI? 46%. I think 29% had very unfavorable, not just unfavorable. So when Cash got up there and said that, almost 60% of the American people have lost all confidence. By the way, if you look at the Reagan Foundation's polls of the military, it's the same thing. Those were the two most cherished institutions among Most Americans say 30 years ago, whether it was George H.W. bush, George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. But what they did to the Pentagon and the FBI and weaponizing them is lost. It doesn't matter what Victor says. You can say, well, the retired generals had a right to call him Mussolini and Hitler. Okay, but that's not what I say. It's what the people think. And the people have lost confidence in the Pentagon and especially the FBI. So we'll see what Pete Hecseth and Cash Patel, I know all of you that are listening, at times you kind of get, you're thinking to yourself, Trump just said the bullshit word and he kind of did a lot of executive order. And they're saying this, just take a deep breath. We are emerging from the most politicized, weaponized, dangerous, period. That's the truth. And the correctives have to be draconian to get this country not to the right, but back to the center. And you'll have to do things that they call right wing because they were socialistic and nihilistic. So we're going to see a lot of things, but just they need to happen. People have to go to work.
- [83:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
So Cash Patel is going to be put to the test of five days, reversing the mockery the Biden's made of.
- [83:12]
Guest or Co-host
The FBI and he's got to tell everybody to go to work five days a week and it can all quit. Yeah, he's going to say, you know what, there's an executive order. Any federal employees? So all you FBI guys that were involved in the Mar A Lago raid and you were involved and arresting grandmothers at abortion clinics that were peacefully demonstrating. And all of you that surveyed that showed up on January 6th stood out like sore thumbs. All of you have a chance to quit and you get paid for nine months. So Sayonora CEO wouldn't want to be you.
- [83:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, let's hope it works. Anyway, Victor, let's go. For our last thing, I wanted to share some images that your. David Mamet.
- [83:56]
Guest or Co-host
David Mamet.
- [83:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
I just want to look at two of them he sent especially to you. They say to Victor, from David Mamet. And this one has a Santa Claus and his unique drawing style. The David Mamet's drawing style, it says, titled Santa Claus in Hollywood. And Santa Claus is saying, better watch out, better not cry, better not shout. I'm telling you why, you'll be blacklisted. That's the first one. And the second one is it doesn't have a title except it sort of has in quotes his dimples. How merry. And then he has Noam Chomsky saying, we can no longer afford to consider this a merely rhetorical question. And I was wondering.
- [84:45]
Guest or Co-host
Well, I got to know David Mamet originally through my friend Shelby Steele, who was a good friend. Friend of his. David Mamet, if everybody doesn't. He's a Pulitzer Prize and Tony winner. And he had a stellar. He's, I think in his early 70s. He lives in Santa Monica, so he's living on the front of the disaster of California. And he was, I think he would say that he was a red diaper baby. In other words, he was brought up by socialist parents, Jewish parents. And he had this metamorphosis. He looked at the left wing project and he saw that it was illiberal and it was dangerous. And he had a lot of authority because some of our best known movie that. I think that movie he was both a director and a screenwriter. Hijacked. But he wrote the screenplay, I think for the Postman Always Rings Twice, the Untouchables, you know, bring enough. Obama stole his line when Obama said he went to Philadelphia and he said, yeah, I tell you guys, we got to be with Romney. You got to bring a gun to a knife fight. That's what we do in Chicago. Yeah, Barack, you took that from David Mamet and he wrote a series of play, American Buffalo. So he's probably one of the top three playwrights in the United States. His screenplays were very. And he was a director. And I've had lunch with him, I think twice. He's enormous physical condition. He looks like he's built like he's 50 years old. And that's good because he'll have a long life, I hope. But every once in a while he'll send me one of his cartoons. And they're very funny, they're very witty.
- [86:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. They're very personalized to you. That's what.
- [86:28]
Guest or Co-host
Yeah, I've always liked. He falls in a category of certain celebrities. And Tulsi Gabbard, it's very hard. If you're a never Trumper, people are not going to go after you and try to destroy your career. They're not. They just don't want anything to do with you. But if you're a left wing person and you're apostate, they're trying to destroy Robert Kennedy. They're trying to destroy Tulsi Galba. They tried to destroy David Mamet. I think he wrote that book Brain Dead Liberals. And, you know, they did the same thing with John Voix. When I would teach at Pepperdine, I got to know John Voight a little bit. And he was the sweetest, nicest guy. He had this unique ability to say the most critical things of leftists that were shocking and great, but he did it with a smile and he was so kind. And I'll just finish by relating something. Everybody who's lost a child gets very nostalgic when you get older. And I was asked once to go speak to a large group, I think it was in Beverly Hills, and John Voight was there. And I took my daughter who's passed away, Susanna, and she was a student at Pepperdine. So we went there and everybody mobbed. I was at the head. I was in this huge living room. It was a very palatial home. And I was going to speak, but of course everybody wanted to look at Jon Voight and be near him. So my daughter got lost in the crowd as she walked up and there was nowhere. The way it worked was I was to speak. Why people went to a buffet and got their plate and were sitting down. There might have been 50 people in this. So she. Then he saw me come in with Susanna and he said, hello, and this is my daughter. And then he got mobbed. So then I started my speech and I looked out and poor Susanna was all by herself in this corner of a kind of a. I don't know what it was. It was an anteroom. And Jon Voight looked over there and he walked all the way over, got up from the center of attention and walked all the way and sat down with her and talked to her. And of course all these people tried in the middle of my talk to follow him, but he just kind of not waved them away, but he just made it clear he just wanted to talk to her. I've never forgotten that. And he, he once text me or he called me, he was going to go on Bill O'Reilly for the first time. And so he had all these great ideas. He's really a smart guy. He's very brave. He took on. And so I said, well, he said, I said, you know, when you go on, you have to be kind of sober. And yes, of course. And then he went on there and because he neglected all my advice, it was really good because he was animated and he was fiery, but he did it in that soft, wonderful voice of his. He's a guy that there's about three or four of these celebrities I bumped into now and then. And I really like David Mamet, I really like John Vo and one of my favorites is Dennis Miller. I used to go on his show a lot, his radio show. And they really went after him and he was very, he's a great guy. He's a wonderful guy. He's spoken at the Hoover Institution before he waved the fee. He was just very generous, magnanimous person.
- [89:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
I saw him one time at a show in Las Vegas and he was just the amount of political material and the non stop jokes every second.
- [90:03]
Guest or Co-host
His only problem was he had such a brilliant mind and he had a photographic memory and he would tell these great jokes, but sometime they were lost on people. That was one, he's a football. And I like that idea because if you didn't know, you tried to think about it. But that being said, he had a huge audience anyway and that was kind of funny because he had been a star as a person of the left on Saturday Night Live and then when he went gravitated toward the center, center right then people got furious and disowned him. And you can be an apostate on the right and you cannot be an apostate on the left. If you try it, you're doomed. You really are. And I know that people go after Liz Cheney. Now, I have no animus toward Liz Cheney, but part of that is she gives it back. She says terrible things about Republicans and that it calls into question if you're a politician more so than a celebrity, then when do we believe you? Now or before? You know, she's third ranking Republican and there's two types of Never Trumpers. In ending, there's a Never Trumper who say, I am a stolid conservative and I agreed with most of what Donald Trump did, but the messenger was so distasteful for me that it I couldn't vote for him, even though I agreed with his message. I don't agree with it. It's absurd. But that's very different than saying the messenger is awful and therefore I'm refuting the entire message, even though he is advancing things that I told and raised money for and was enriched by my advocacy for all Donald Trump's positions. And that's what, in other words, my hatred of Donald Trump is much greater than my love for the conservative idea and the traditional American. And that's all of the Never Trumpers almost now.
- [92:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
And that's insane.
- [92:04]
Guest or Co-host
It is insane. I like what Bret Stephens, the arch Never Trumper, he wrote a New York Times mea culpa and he said, I'm never, never Trump anymore. And we thought that he was so awful and we thought that he did things that nobody else did and then he didn't, we'd realize he didn't. And we thought he was a racist and he thought he was this. And, and people vote more blacks and Hispanics than young people voted for him. That was the big thing about Never Trumpers. He's a racist, he's a sexist. Young people hate him. Yeah. Okay. Why do they all vote for him? And you can't answer that because he wasn't. Anyway.
- [92:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
And on that crazy note, we're going to end this episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show. It's our Saturday episode. Thank you. Thanks to our audience for joining us.
- [92:56]
Guest or Co-host
I should thank you, everybody. I realize I've been moving because I've been freezing because we turned off the heat so it wouldn't be so loud, 50 degrees here.
- [93:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
So, yeah. So thanks to everybody and thanks to you.
- [93:10]
Guest or Co-host
Thank you, everybody, for listening.