← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
The Victor Davis Hanson Show
The By-Gone Era: Free Felons, Sanctuary Cities, and University Protestors
01:19:38
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- [00:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [01:42]
Jack Fowler
Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I am Jack Fowler, the host. You are here to glean wisdom, great Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Victor is a best selling author, a columnist, a farmer, a military historian, a classicist. I don't know what you are, Victor. Everything.
- [02:14]
Odin
My name is no man. Odin.
- [02:17]
Jack Fowler
Okay, Mr. No man. He's got Cyclops.
- [02:22]
Odin
They yelled, the Cyclops. Who's killing you, Cyclops? He said, Udin. Nobody. Odysseus said, when they, when they ask you Cyclops, Polyphemius, who did this to you? You say that it was I, Udin. And he said Udin, didn't He said nobody. That's Greek for nothing. Nobody.
- [02:39]
Jack Fowler
Well, Uden has replaced Eeyore.
- [02:41]
Odin
Udes is actually the masculine. Udin is the neuter.
- [02:46]
Jack Fowler
There's going to be any Odin around here. It's me, Victor. So he's got a website. The blade of Perseus. Victorhansen.com later on in this podcast, I'll tell you why I believe you should be subscribing. We are recording on Sunday 16th February, and this particular episode will be up on Thursday, February 20th. A lot of interesting topics to talk about to get Victor's wisdom on. I think the first one I'm interested in is, is new attorney General Pam Bondi and Victor's take on her in her role and we'll get that. Victor's views on that. Maybe link that up to some of the stuff going on at Bowdoin College and anti DEI stuff. Obama's library is having trouble. Boo hoo. DC home prices are crashing because the bureaucracy is many of them are finding themselves jobless. Lee Zeldin, EPA all kinds of stuff to get Victor's wisdom on and we will start when we come back from these important messages.
- [03:55]
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- [05:54]
Odin
Hanson show ready to optimize your nutrition.
- [05:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [07:23]
Jack Fowler
We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, I like this Pam Bondi. What are your thoughts on her so far? Maybe a week, week and a half and off.
- [07:34]
Odin
There's one thing I don't understand. Why wasn't she nominated first? And Matt Gaetz, I mean, if you look at their careers in comparison, she was eight years as the attorney general of Florida, very conservative. And Matt Gaetz had this the only thing I can think of is the conspiratorial exegesis that Max Gates a was a sacrificial pawn. So they threw him out into the lion's den where they devoured him and then they got their fill. And then Trump thought they were all satiated so they would be too full of Matt Gaetz's meal to go after other people or they would distract or there was an incriminating report about Max Gaetz, these alleged responses about him, accusations, etc. About his personal life. And that was going to be damning. And if he got out of Congress ahead of the sheriff, it would be good or that he had a conservative seat so it wouldn't matter. In three or four months they'd get a replacement. There were all these different scenarios, but they all had one thing in common. Pam Bondi, if you wanted a conservative dynamic, a, you know, charismatic person, she was obviously a superior choice to Matt Gaetz. So it worked out all in the end. Everybody got confirmed. I think cash will be as we speak by the time people are listening to us, he will be confirmed. And she's doing a wonderful job. The only thing she's going to have to her biggest challenge right now is that there were people in the prior administration who committed felonies. But you have to you can't go out. Here's what I'm trying to say. You have to make sure that the felony is what you're going after and unusual. So if they committed a felony and you usually go after those felonies, then you got to go prosecute them. But you don't prosecute them for the felonies that mostly you find on prosecutable, cutable, you know what I'm saying? So what I'm saying is if Donald Trump, if it hadn't been for Donald Trump, nobody would have gone after him for overvaluing and he didn't overvalue his real estate portfolio. So when she goes after these people in the FBI or whatever they are, make sure that you're going after them in a symmetrical way, that anybody, not just the people who tried to destroy Trump, are guilty of that type of crime. But I think she's doing a good job. I really do. I think it's. I never understood why we. This neo confederate idea of sanctuary cities and state nullification of federal law, how AOC can give a seminar, a webinar on how to resist federal law. That's a felony to harbor an illegal alien. I know that is. There's a statute, federal statute for that. So when you had the governor, wasn't it New Jersey was boasting that he was going to have an illegal alien in his garage and he backed down. But they really need to tell people if you try to aid and abet somebody to commit a felony, you're, you're guilty and we're going to go after you. And I think that would stop it. In all these cases, you don't have to go after everybody. It's that encourage the others attitude.
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Jack Fowler
Hang one.
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Odin
Well, yeah, the British only had to hang one, Admiral, and everybody straightened up.
- [10:51]
Jack Fowler
I had a little note here. Boston, how depraved our big city mayors. And this is the, the headline. I forget where this story was from, but ICE Boston has arrested a Guatemalan illegal alien charged with multiple counts of aggravated enforceable child rape in Massachusetts after ICE says their detainer request was ignored by the Essex County Superior Court due to sanctuary policy and he was released. So to me, this is the, this is the, the depravity of. And the consequence of the depravity and a target for her or the federal government to prosecute these people who are allowing mag into our streets.
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Odin
It's terrible. The subtext of all that is, is when a judge does that or a prosecutor doesn't charge them or the city council or the mayor pass or they have laws that protect them. It's these people will not prey on us. We have, we live in zip codes and we have security and we have mechanisms to insulate us from the consequences of our own ideology. So they're going to go out in the inner city, they'll kill some poor white guy, some poor Hispanic guy, some poor black guy, but they won't hurt us. They never do. So we'll feel good about ourselves and the rest will be out of mind, out of sight, out of sight, out of mind. That's what how they think. And if they did, if the ramification, the problem in a place like California is that the forces of decivilization are such. It's very hard to shield yourself as people in San Francisco are learning. So.
- [12:32]
Jack Fowler
Their new mayor, yeah, they have.
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Odin
A new mayor, but he's got, he's got public opinion behind him, but he's got a defunded police, he's got people who got 30% vacancy rate. He's got falling home prices. He's got people who don't want to live there because they're afraid of crime, that doesn't know what to do with the homeless people. Essentially, he's got the people who are angry at what they voted for, but they don't. They're not angry enough not to vote for it. So they vote for these people like in Los Angeles. And then they get this stuff, what you'd expect. And then they, you say, well, why did you vote for it? And then, well, my parents did or I don't know, or maybe it's not that bad or maybe it won't happen again. Why would anybody vote for the mayor of Chicago or the governor of Illinois, who, Kathy Hochul in New York. Yeah, but they do it. And they the whole blue state model of high taxes, pension obligations, unfunded pension, and the billions of dollars defunding the police, homeless people on the street, abandoned business, chastising small, driving out businesses, it doesn't work. Unionized schools, it's all a decivilizational project. And yet people still vote for it. They don't have a. It's not going to change. There's a lot of racism in that and that people will not vote for a white male reformer in the inner city. In all those big cities, once in a while they do. And the only time they do vote for a white male. They're not reformers. They're part of the problem is that Portland crazy mayor, that Minneapolis crazy mayor. Yeah, I don't mean just male or white. I'm just taking somebody that because of their race or gender, they're not going to be favored by the left, whether it's gays or trans or minorities or women or whatever. But they need some. If, if that is true, that allegation I made, then you need a conservative Hispanic conservative gay, conservative Latino conserv woman who they can't. The voter then can't be accused of being a sellout, that the person will be a technocrat, sort of like the mayor of Detroit. He's doing a good job.
- [14:48]
Jack Fowler
Well, the victor you mentioned, since you're mentioning California and I'm, I'm trying to find my note. Oh, Gavin Newsom. Yeah, I want to. Maybe I should just throw this out there about Gavin Newsom. Is he, is he folding? Is he.
- [15:04]
Odin
I don't know.
- [15:05]
Jack Fowler
Sometimes he seems like he's genuflecting, scared. And then he goes back to Gavin Newsom. Here's a headline from Passive Aggressive from the Daily Mail. Gavin Newsom finally falls in line with Trump as he makes shock migrant move after AG Pam Bondi's threat to sanctuary cities. The first couple of lines of this article. California Governor Gavin Newsom has taken the first step toward falling in line with President Donald Trump's immigration policy just days after sanctuary cities are put on notice the Democrat will veto a bill. May have happened, by the way, by the time this episode airs from woke politicians in his own party who sought to limit state prisons cooperation with immigration agents as ICE carries out Trump's mass deportation scheme. Newsom has long boasted about the migrant protections offered under California sanctuary city laws.
- [16:00]
Odin
We're not at the beginning of the end, we're at the end of the beginning. As Churchill said here in California, to take the Hispanic community. They know that the typical profile of a Democratic Latino popular, popular candidate usually is they went to a UC campus, they were a staffer in Washington, they imbued all of the trans gay green energy, new green deal, DEI woke stuff. And they came back and said that I am a. They played up their Laraza credentials and they got everybody to vote for them because they were Democrats. And now they don't. Now we're at the end of that. And people understand that they don't represent what the Hispanic community wants. And what they want is low inflation, affordable gas, affordable housing, plenty of water in the state, affordable electricity prices. We've double the price of PG and E electricity in the last eight years. We want our reservoirs full. We want more reservoirs. They want that. They don't believe in high speed rail and all that crap. They want good freeways, you know, three lanes in every direction. And they're not getting it. And so we'll see if they can rebel. But otherwise they're not. It's not going to change until it gets worse. GAVIN Newsom the thing about all this, they know what they're doing. When J.D. vance addressed the Europeans, JACKSON I looked at their faces. They were angry, not because of what they were doing, but because he knew what they were doing and they knew that he knew they knew. So they were basically saying, okay, you're telling me the jig is up. You mean we can't run up big trade surpluses, get subsidized defense from you, not meet our NATO obligations, have our open borders? We can't do that. We can't be anti American anymore in theory and then in fact always call you in when you need you. But why not? We know what we're getting away with, why you caught us. But what's wrong with getting what we're doing? And then they get angry. And the same thing here with the blue states. They know what they're doing. They know that the homeless thing is a mess. They know that deficit spending doesn't work. They know you can't let water out to the ocean. They know you can't have anybody like Karen Bass in charge of anything. They know that you can't have the water and power person making $700,000 and draining the lake on top of Pacific Palisade. They know all that. But they get angry when people point it out to them. GAVIN NEWSOM Everybody knows what he's doing. He was brought up as a child privilege in an old liberal Democratic household with privilege and wealthy friends that subsidized him. But he knows deep down inside that this left wing paradigm doesn't work. But he knows that he has to say that to get elected. And now he's worried that Trump is, he thinks Trump is crazy. He really does. And he's afraid of him. And he thinks that Trump just might, might just say if you're going to break federal law, you're not going to get federal funds or if you're not going, you can let water out to the ocean. I'm not going to give you federal disaster relief. As I say, I drive over every week and I see the San Luis Reservoir and it's slowly inching up. He said it was fill all the reservoirs. Jacques are full in California. No, it was only about 65% full. Now I went by it the other day it's about 80%. So Gavin's doing his best to tell the environmentalists sort of, kind of maybe we're not going to coin and give you 90% of all the water. We'll let you have 80%. 70%.
- [19:31]
Jack Fowler
Victor, I just want to take a moment for our sponsor Quince. Quince has all the must haves like Mongolian cashmere neck sweaters from $50, iconic 100% leather jackets and versatile low knit activewear. The best part, all Quince Items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. And by partnering directly with top factories, Quince cuts out the cost of the middleman and passes on the savings to us. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices along with premium fabrics and finishes. I love that. You should love that indulge in affordable luxury. Go to quince.com Victor for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Quince Q U I N C E dot com Victor to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com and we thank the good people from Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, do you, I know you've talked about some of this with, with the great Sammy Wink and by the way, I want to stay, stay in Pam Bondi land and mention environmental. We're going to talk about Lee Zeldin a little bit and green money. But has the initial results of Doge clarified? For a nation that probably believed government was getting its beak WET, taking its 10% off the top, whatever you want to call it, that it's really much deeper than that and that government itself may be completely a shakedown of the taxpayers money to fund. I mean I just get this sense like the enormity of the, of, of the misappropriate.
- [21:35]
Odin
I think, yeah, I think everybody who's listening is like all of us were kind of bewildered. What is the theme? What is the, the holistic exegesis that explains all this? And I think the closest we can come to that answer is there is a lot of left wing theories in the world that don't work and they would never survive in the private marketplace. So then government becomes a receptacle of failed ideas and failed people. So if you really do believe you want to put trans agendas in traditional Islamic societies or Sesame street in Syria or you want to give As I said, $40 million to the Wuhan lab, nothing that anybody if they were to learn about would ever support, then you, you have These programs and these people and they function like the foundations and academia, they try to transmit the hard left message that otherwise would not sustain itself. That's one thing. The other thing is kind of more pernicious that the more money they spend, they don't care what they do. They don't care if it's bad, they don't care if it's good. They don't care if the program is inane or it's relevant, useful or not. They just know that it costs money and therefore somebody is going to have to pay for it. And that somebody is too wealthy for their own good and they're going to raise taxes. They would look at that $37 trillion debt. You listen to Bernie Sanders or Warren and any of those speakers, they always say this, millionaires and billionaires, they're doing it. They're going to cut the people for millionaires and billionaires. That's all they. But it's really the taxes are on the upper middle and middle classes. So they believe, like Barack Obama said, you know, to Joe the plumber, I believed in spread the wealth. That's what they believe. They think that if you gorge the beast, then people have to pay for it and they don't want to cut it because then they think you can't raise taxes. And what they don't understand is at a 38% tax rate in a blue state where you have 13.3 like California, and then you have Medicare taxes and payroll taxes and you have penalties on certain levels of income, you can easily get up very quickly to 60% of your income when not make a lot of money or at least make some money. But in California, when you have $2 million for a coastal house of 1200 square feet, it's nothing. So it's a way to advance a progressive view. Put a pride flag on the embassy or George Floyd mural or gender studies program at Kabul that no one in their right mind would ever do, whether in Afghanistan or here. They would not do it or give money to Hamas. No one would ever do that. No one would ever do that. Or charge 60% overhead as Stanford University did for an NIH grant, where the guy's probably working at home on his computer for his grant from the NIH and then go out and solicit the money from the Bill Gates foundation, say, oh, we only, yeah, yeah, we only take 15% overhead, but for the government we'll take 40, 50, 60%. And then when you take it back and say, you know what, you're going to have to get 15, just like you get from private organizations. Oh, you gonna kill. People are gonna die, Jack. They're gonna die. If that. You know, privately. You talk to anybody in the medical school or anybody to take that topic at Stanford, they'll tell you that it's a, it's a con and they're happy that, that they're gonna go back to 15% or 20% or something like that overhead. But what I'm getting at is it's a way to keep a lot of people on the left employed. 90% of all this money, the 6,000 journalists, it was going to cost a quarter of a billion dollars. Reporters Without Borders, they're all left wing. 8% of the budget of the BBC, that's all left wing. Even Voice of America. I mean, I know that Kari Lake is there now, but most of those people are left wing. I listen to Voice of America sometime. This left wing.
- [25:40]
Jack Fowler
Well, our friend Brent Bozell may be taking over there. The parent.
- [25:46]
Odin
Yeah. Is he in charge of Carrie Lake? Are they a co. Equal.
- [25:52]
Jack Fowler
He would be in charge.
- [25:53]
Odin
Does he have the job that Michael Pack used to have in the first. Michael Pack was the head of something pbs maybe.
- [26:01]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. This is the parent of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio China. Those, those kind of off.
- [26:13]
Odin
These people are very ignorant. I mean, Rachel Maddow said the other day on the air that the 400 billion dollar cyber truck armored contract that supposedly Trump quid pro quo gave to Elon Musk and she was ranting and of course she, she doesn't even make a rudimentary effort to check the facts. That was approved by Biden. Same thing about inflation. They're all giddy and saying 21 days. And Trump hasn't reduced inflation when the 20 days of the last inflation report, not the 10 days, but 20 days were Biden. So there. It's kind of pathetic. And then I saw that actress Sheryl Crowe said that she sold her Tesla, gave it away, and she's going to take the money and give it to National Public Radio. But if you're against federal subsidies of a politicized group like Musk, why would you give money to a politicized group like NPR and pbs?
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Jack Fowler
It's so damn important. Let the. These big lefty endowments, I think the top 20 foundations in America, you know, that was a very leftist.
- [27:23]
Odin
One of the most sobering, sobering moments. I've been on the Bradley foundation board, which is one of the largest conservative, along with the SCAFE board, philanthropic foundations. And at one point I think with the Bradley Impact Fund, our public disclosure show we have about 1.3 billion. And we, you know, if you get an average return of 7 and you put 3 in for inflation or something, you get a 4%, you can spend. So it's 40 or 50 million. But my point is we thought we were something. And then we had a presentation by the wonderful Cleta Mitchell and she showed us it wasn't the top 20, Jack, it was the top 30 or 40. We were like, I don't know, 70 in foundation endowments. I mean the Tides foundation, the Rockefeller, the Ford, the Gates foundation, the Sorrels foundation, you're talking 20, $30 billion, some of them huge. It's like all that foundational money.
- [28:25]
Jack Fowler
It's like with endowed universities, the money is there. Why don't you spend the money now for what you need? But the priority of the grant making foundations, I'm not saying this applies to Bradley, but I know it applies to the lefty ones where they're supposed to spend a minimum of 5% of their assets, including administrative costs, and they actually spend less than 5% because in grant making, and yet they're making, you know, 8% interest on their corpus. So they're, they're growing every year. And that's a third party to grow.
- [29:04]
Odin
When we're at the Bradley foundation about every year, our director, Rick Kraeber, great guy, says we're going to follow the mission statement. So this is what the Bradley two brothers wrote that they wanted to envision by this foundation. And then we read it again, and then he says, now everybody examine your role and the people you around you. And are you. And we'll in the next meeting and are we following the mission statement? Next thing, are we following donor intent for the Bradley Impact Fund? Donor somebody gives money to the Bradley Impact Fund, does the money get dispersed in a way that reflects his ideology and intent? And then we say to ourselves, are we spending? I've been on the Finance Committee. Are we spending exactly legally what we were obligated to as a proportion of our endowment. So it's all transparent and it's all legal and it's. And every time I get a letter and somebody donates to the Hoover foundation, and sometimes they call me, sometimes I write them a letter back, I always say we're going to do two things. We're going to honor donor intent and the donor intent will reflect the mission statement. The mission statement is smaller government. Smaller government, individual liberty, free markets in the context of war, revolution and peace. And we will advance that broadly. And then the second thing is, anytime you want to find out where the money is going and how it is spent, you call me and I will give you a complete transparent this. If you give me $1,000, I say, well, this was airfare for this particular participant in a meeting. This was $250 honorarium for a particular essay in Strategica. This was the help pay the benefits of a secretary. I will tell you that. And if you do that, then the donors will have trust in you. But if you treat them as silly or they're usually put it this way, I'm not being reductionist, but if a person makes a lot of money and they didn't necessarily inherit it all, they're not dumb, they're pretty smart. Now, you can object that they use their intelligence to make money. I don't object. I kind of think that's good. But the idea that an academic would be condescending or try to subvert the donor intent, like what they're doing with the Ford Rockefeller foundation, it's a crime. It really is what they're doing and how they're spending that money on illegal immigration and everything else. Yeah.
- [31:47]
Jack Fowler
And has been for a decade. You know, Ford, Pew, MacArthur, the major foundations.
- [31:53]
Odin
Every one of them is contrary to what the original donors envisioned their money. Pew.
- [31:58]
Jack Fowler
Pew is on the back issue, back page of the first ever issue of National Review. Good luck. Go get another hardcore conservative.
- [32:05]
Odin
And is one good thing was I remember the Olin Foundation. Jim Pearson, I think, was the director, and I think he was. It was designed to go out of business. Right. To spend all of that.
- [32:16]
Jack Fowler
He didn't go out of business because John Olin himself saw what had happened to Ford and Bill Simon. The Simon foundation also Sunset. Yeah.
- [32:29]
Odin
And it's a good idea.
- [32:31]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. There's a good philosophical reasons for sunset.
- [32:34]
Odin
Everybody should remember what the left mentality Is. They get PhDs, JDs or MDs or MBAs, and they think they're in a professional class. They live in a particular zip code, they have a particular car, they have particular refined tastes. They go to Europe and out of that matrix, they make a little money and they think they're smarter than everybody. So when they get on a foundation board, they think to themselves, this guy was a capitalist. He didn't even know what he was doing. He was just a money grubber. So then he did a tax break and gave us all this money. But he wasn't enlightened. I am enlightened. I will use the money in the way that he didn't even envision or if he had been smarter, he would have agreed with me. That's how they think. Because I can. I've talked to them before. Well, they are just, they have contempt for the donor class. Like, I can see it every day at places I work, I see this contempt for the donor class. You should never do that. You should honor their intent or don't take the money. Somebody gives you something for a conservative foundation or think tank or project, don't try to outsmart them. Just say, this is what you want. This is what we can do. If you think that is what you want, then give us the money. If you think it's not what you want, don't give us the money. And then when you get it, don't try to play games with it like USAIDaid did.
- [33:53]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, right. Well, let's talk a little more about that, the taxpayer being the ATM machine for all these lunatics and we'll do that. Victoria. Talk about Lee Zeldin, some green money and an interesting take on the media when we come back from these important messages.
- [34:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [35:45]
Jack Fowler
We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show, reminding our listeners and informing our new listeners which we do have. And thank you that Victor's website, the Blade of Perseus, you'll find it@VictorHansen.com is a place you should be visiting frequently and even subscribing to. Victor writes two exclusive pieces for The Blade of Perseus every week and he does one video exclusive for the Blade of Perseus. Plus there's a ton of other things there. Archives of these podcasts, links to other the articles Victor writes for American Greatness Syndicate columns sell their appearances. So if you're a fan of edh, you need to be checking this out, you need to subscribe. It's $65 for the full year which is discounted from the $6.50 a month otherwise to pay. So do subscribe, do check it out. Thebladeoferseusviktorhansen.com Victor I want to start off here in this segment of the show with and we'll talk about Lee Zeldin and some of this green money. But this bouncing off the comments about the media. I saw a very interesting post on X by Lane Smith Scott and it was a take on how the media is a diminished economic field, but it wants the money, it needs the money. So Lane Scott writes, the first step to understanding the left, funding media outlets, et cetera, with taxpayer dollars is this. The digital revolution caused a lasting recession in publishing, media, academia and even law and science. These fields used to support upper middle class wages. Now they do not. They don't. But the people who work in those fields still believe they deserve that kind of of money.
- [37:41]
Odin
They do. And I've had talks with as you know, Jack talks with okay. And leave them. Basically what happened was. Basically what happened was in the last 20 years, things like what we're doing now podcast. I used to have a podcast and it was under the aegis of the Hoover Institution. It was very prestigious, but it had nothing to do with my market value. Right. But. And that was what podcasts were. They were the Time magazine podcast or the Atlantic Monthly. And then people realized that with a computer you could go out there in the open arena like a Joe Rogan. Right. And you could compete with these brand name and nobody cared about the brand name. They cared about the quality of the podcast. The same thing with publishing. Oh, I, you know, when I first wrote a I, it was 2000, Jack. 2004, the Chicago Tribune, really good guy there asked me to write a weekly column and I've never missed one week since. Two in 20 years, not one.
- [38:51]
Jack Fowler
You never missed any deadline.
- [38:53]
Odin
I've never missed any National Review twice. And then once a week. I've never missed a single American greatness one since I started 2021. And that was through Long Covid or sinus operations. Yeah. Or bike accident or anything. Kidney stone operations. Ruptured appendix. But anyway, what I'm saying is that when I started, I had to go to this Chicago Tribune and they had to interview me. So I was at Hillsdale teaching my first year, and I drove over there to Chicago, completely lost. I went to the Tribune building. They took a picture of me. I had to go in and meet six of the editorial boards. And then get this, when I went back, they wanted me to see if I could write productive ideas in 700 word columns without running out of ideas. So I had to send them a op ed for seven days in a row, a different one, before they took me on. Now, that syndicated column, if you look at the number of magazines, excuse me, newspapers that are in existence, about half the newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News or the Bend, or they're not there anymore or their editorial pages have shrunk to nothing. So I've gone from maybe 60 newspapers down to very few at the same time that is happening these traditional outlets. So it used to be if you were a New York Times columnist, a James Reston or somebody like that, or William Safire, you could govern and lord over. Or you were on CBS News and you were Eric Severide, you came on for, you know, 10 minutes, or you were John, you were God. And then all of a sudden there's substack or there's free press, or there's all of these wild prairie fire outlets. And it's based on, I keep using that term, lucha libre. Just a free struggle out there in the marketplace of ideas. Now a lot of people say, well, they don't have the criteria. They use foul language. They're stupid. They're just trying to. That's what the elite say. But the voice of the, the, the judgment of the people is ultimately in the page views or. You know, I've been asked to write a. I mean, to do a five minute video, I think. You're on the board of the Daily Signal, aren't you?
- [41:28]
Jack Fowler
Of the foundation? Yeah.
- [41:30]
Odin
Yes. Oh, yeah? Nothing. Well, Rob Louie asked me to do it. Wonderful guy. And so I've done it for a month. And we were discussing compensation. My attitude was, it depends, you know, I'll take the offer you offered me, but ultimately that offer will either be inspired or not inspired. It'll be too generous or not generous enough, depending on the response.
- [41:52]
Jack Fowler
So the response is off the chart, by the way, listeners.
- [41:55]
Odin
Yeah, we're getting about 500,000 viewers per.
- [41:58]
Jack Fowler
5 minute cumulative a week.
- [42:01]
Odin
It's, it's, it's. Yeah, we have about 1010 million since I did it. But my point is I didn't, I didn't want to say I want this amount of money because I'm going to wait after a year, if I can still do it, to see whether it's in their interest, in my interest. But that's based on what we. But the old paradigm that you're at a flagship big name and you get a big $300,000 salary and it's not based on your readership is out the window. And the same thing about cnn, if you're, oh, I'm manners and Google, who gives a blank? It doesn't matter. And same thing with network news and prestige, and they don't understand that. Same thing with universities. Now, I'm a professor of English literature at Stanford University. Who gives a blank given what you're. If you give 80% A's and you don't have the satisfaction and you have racial quotas that say that only 9% of your students are white males, and there's something like Pepperdine or Hillsdale College or Thomas Aquinas or any of these schools that have better students, and that's what matters. That's what people will finally understand. I think right now, a person understands if you're going to interview a Stanford history major or a Hillsdale, you better hire a Hillsdale major. I've seen both of them. The other thing is I had a very good friend that was kind of a capitalist. He was a wonderful guy. He, I won't name him, but he, he founded, I mean, he refounded Dreyer's Ice Cream and Haagen Dazs. He was just wonderful. And I once asked him, do you guys, do you hire Harvard, Yale, Stanford? And he said, well, no, but there is one thing that they're useful for. And I said, what are they useful? Well, they have the SAT and they have comparative rankings of GPAs. So if I hire somebody and I know that they were admitted merocratically, I know that they have aptitude, I can train them how to do business. But I need, I like the idea that they've done my preliminary work. And I said to him at the time, I said, well, his name, I'll just give his first name Gary. I said, gary, what happens if they ever eliminated the SAT? Or they just said that any A4 point mattered, no matter where you went to high school? And he said, well, why would I hire him? What they learned is of no value, basically. He didn't say it was of no value, but he said, I'm not interested in what they learned. I'm interested in what I can teach them to run my business. And I can teach them to run my business if they have aptitude. And they tell me they have aptitude because they look at these hardworking kids that get 4.0s from good high schools, or if they didn't go to good high schools and they get 4.0s, I can see it on the SAT score, but I'm not going to ever do. And he could not envision what we. He passed away, but he would never be able to envision what we're doing now. So that was really Harvard brat running.
- [45:04]
Jack Fowler
Bud Light into the ground, right?
- [45:07]
Odin
Yes. Or on incompetent or what?
- [45:09]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [45:10]
Odin
Mark Andreessen said in that very insightful interview he did with our friend Ross Duth do thought. Is that his name?
- [45:19]
Jack Fowler
Doubt it.
- [45:20]
Odin
Doubt it. Yeah. He said we were hiring all these Harvard people, and in 2012 and 13, they wanted to get ahead and they were bright and they wanted careers, and then all of a sudden, 2020, they were all woke and they wanted to destroy our company from the inside. And that's why we don't want them anymore.
- [45:38]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, but they still, they want the money, they want the big pay. So.
- [45:42]
Odin
Yeah, so the world is always changing. And I said to my wife once we were going over the end of the books, and I said, this is a column I write. This is my salary. This is from speaking, this is from books, this is from articles. And I always said, this is going to dry up. And that will dry up because it's a completely fluid situation we're in now. For good or evil, it's. It's no law in the arena. So I said, I've got to find a new revenue stream to make up for one of those. And I've always been right about that. I've had so many things that a person have called me and said, you know, we can't do this anymore. We can't do this, or something like that. So you always have to have backups. But it's a very exciting and dangerous time right now. And what you're talking about, talking about in this business of journalism, opinion, journalism, public intellectualism, inquiry, observation, there is. There are no prerequisite rules. You can be, you can be a Rhodes scholar and a Harvard graduate, but if you can't maintain an audience, nobody want, nobody cares. And that wasn't true 30 years ago.
- [46:55]
Jack Fowler
Forty years ago, you're damn straight. And by the way, on needing the backups, as you know, many of our listeners. No, some don't. But I used to run National Review, and once upon a time, Victor, we had some significant income streams. Cruises, publishing, kids, books, use credit cards with affinity credit cards. And these things are all gone now as revenue streams. And you, you're. You know, you have to be aware that as you are, these things are not going to last forever. And not only not forever, they may not be here two years from now.
- [47:31]
Odin
So I think maybe it was because I was farming all those years. I grew up in farm or with people who were my grandparents who never gone to college. They were very poor. But I was always ingrained with something I would guess you would call market value. They didn't use that term, but it was your own. You have value, and that's ascertained by what you put in, what you produce the results, not your name. I remember my grandfather once said, now, when you go into town, I've got a good reputation in this community. It was like 3,000 people then. And if I. Anybody calls me up and say they see one of those ugly cigarettes sticking on your lip or they find a beer can in your car, you've just shamed our whole thing. So I. You. That's your obligation. I don't want to hear that about you and what he was trying to say. We're going to. You might. You're part of the Davis family, but we don't want you. It doesn't matter. It's what you do. And I think that's really important. I always think that at Hoover, I say to myself, am I conducting? There was a wonderful director there I could really learn from. John Derace. I worshiped him. John Racin, who hired me in 2000. And he sat me down the first day and he said, you're from Cal State. Fresno. I know you got a Stanford PhD but there'll be people who'll be skeptical because we hired you from Cal State and there were. But we have four obligations. And when you come here and you fulfill these obligations, then you are worth what we pay you. When you don't, you're not. I said, well, what are they? He said, I want you to be a public intellectual and write op eds. I want you to be doing. You have to do that. And I said, okay. He said, I want you to write a book in your field every two or three years. Or at least a good academic or a popular book every two or three years. I said, okay. And then he said, and you must, when I tell you I want you to go to Palm Beach. I want you to go to Dayton, Ohio, to raise money at a retreat. You're going to go. You're never going to call me up and say, I don't feel well, or this. You get on the plane with me and we'll go. I said, fine, fine. And then he said, you have to have a program, and this is war, revolution and peace. You're a military story, and in two or three years, I want you to get a big program. And he said, to the degree you can do that, then you earn your salary. To the degree you don't, I don't know if I can fire you. You'll probably be tenure, but you will be marginalized by me. I will consider you a mistake. And so that was I. I tried.
- [50:05]
Jack Fowler
To do a man, but I think.
- [50:07]
Odin
Try to do all those things you've.
- [50:08]
Jack Fowler
Done, all that you have accomplished. What.
- [50:11]
Odin
What, John, I. I always say to myself, did I write enough books in the 22 years I was here? Did I write enough columns? Did I have a big enough program and did I raise enough money? And then I can say that I earned my salary and I helped the institution.
- [50:27]
Jack Fowler
A lot of other people's salaries.
- [50:28]
Odin
Yeah, well, I hope the institution. That was my job. He said that to me. We want to make the institution respect it. And I really liked him, and I felt I would. And so what I'm getting with this whole conversation, everybody is kind of drifting off because of me. But what it's really about is all of us, according to our station, the old idea of titles and pedigrees and resumes, they operate still. But this is a globalized world where you're judged on your results. I kind of like that. I kind of like the press secretary. She's 27.
- [51:04]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [51:05]
Odin
She went to. Isn't she from a strong Catholic family?
- [51:08]
Jack Fowler
She is, and went to St. Anselm College up in New Hampshire.
- [51:12]
Odin
And she's only 27. And she is based. She gets up there every day with people in their 50s and 60s that want to destroy her and embarrass her and attack her president. And she gets up there without. They ask her, where's your binder? And she said, my binder is in my head. And she gets up there and she goes to war with him. And she's trans. I think she's doing a great job.
- [51:34]
Jack Fowler
She's, I think, a symbol of the difference of Trump 47 and Trump 45. And not to knock Sean Spicer, but you remember the chaos of the. Of the White House press briefing room when Trump was first elected and now the, you know, the confidence.
- [51:52]
Odin
The big change is Trump said to everybody and he said this, so I'm not putting words in his mouth. I came there without experience of swamp and I was given names and there is not a Rex Tillerton in this administration. There's not an anonymous in this administration. There's not even people that I like and respect, like Bill Barr, but disagreed with Trump on major issues. Whether you like it or not, these are committed people that are on the same PA as Donald Trump. So when he goes to work, he does not have to worry about somebody in the Commerce Department or the Transportation or Scaramucci giving a late night, you know, interview saying that Trump is an idiot, or Tillerson saying that Trump is stupid, or John Bolton saying that there's none of that. And that's why it's different. Everybody get up in the morning. These cabinet and agencies had and they say not, how can I disrupt, differentiate myself, Nuance, ignore Donald Trump, but how can I be a force multiplier? And that makes a big difference. Whatever you say about Obama, he had, you got to admit. I mean, I was on, as I mentioned before in this podcast, I was on the American Battlefield Monuments Commission. That was a. It was nonpartisan. And I. He got elected and, man, I got a letter within days. It said, you will surrender your passport immediately. You are now to resign your position. He just cleaned house on anybody that George Bush appointed. And then he went into the DOJ and cleaned it out. And he never had any internal apostates that went and wrote memoirs. You know, I mean, he, he really didn't. I mean, Gates did it. Who? The DOD wrote a memoir that was somewhat critical of him, but most of it he didn't until afterwards. And then when the Republicans do it, they think that's mean and vindictive, but that's what Democrats do.
- [53:48]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Well, we can round out this section of today's episode. Victor, I mentioned already Lee Zeldin, Environment, and I think many folks know, but in case some don't, that the head of the epa, through the Doge effort, he discovered that the Biden regime had funneled 20 billion to Democrat NGOs after leaving office. This was Greenhouse gas reduction fund money that went to NGOs. Why? To fund the salaries of activists. And similarly, the very interesting piece in City Journal, which is a great publication, one of the best magazines in America. Victor's a contributing editor to it. It's published by the Manhattan Institute. And James Meigs writes a piece where Trump must undo Bide environmental justice agenda and the same thing. It just ends with so much cash sloshing around out of public view, it's no surprise that much of it made its way to groups controlled by seasoned Democratic Party operatives. And Victor, when that it goes to groups, it really goes to people who want a lot of money to be paid to be activists. And the taxpayers have bankrolled this style, this high life of leftist activists. So any thoughts?
- [55:24]
Odin
Yeah, it's about this talk about market realities. When you have things that do not have market reality and the greatest example of that is wind and solar power for the most part that shut down at night and are expensive and they have to waive, then you have to make exceptions. And if you make exceptions, you gotta lie about it or be less than transparent. I think that Lee Zeldin said there was a memo where somebody called these gold bricks off the Titanic. In other words, this departing administration was just throwing out all this funny money to all of these activists that had no market value and they were going to push these projects like Solyndra that would never work and we didn't need or would hurt the economy but would keep them active and critical and left wing and feeling good about themselves and otherwise they were unemployable. And that's. Everybody wants to know why these people hate Trump so much and hate Musk so much when they're doing things that they know needed to be done. Even that pod Save America crew of Obama potters I was listening to the other day, they said and I saw clips as well that they should have done that. They should have done more than that. And remember Obama created the Simpson Bowles Committee commission to reform the tax code and get us and suggest cuts to get us to a balanced budget. And had we done that and he accepted their 2009 recommendations, we would be almost, I think I saw the figures the other day. We'd be about a $8 trillion deficit right now. That would be it. And we'd be slowly but surely going to not only balance budgets but which we already would have obtained but paying down the debt. And yet Biden's attitude is I don't care about the welfare of the country. I just want to print a bunch of money and help my left wing friends. Or maybe I shouldn't say Biden, Dr. Jill's or the Obama's attitude. And again, remember everybody when you get a president like that or programs like that, that they start wasting money and throwing it away when they know that it won't be good put to Good uses. They do that not just because they're selfish and greedy, but they want people to pay for what they're spending. And that involves circulation or redistribution of assets. And remember, throughout history, I can cite chapter and verse in Roman history, whether it's Catiline conspiracy or what Sallust wrote about it, or Solon and the sesectia, the shaking off of debt. If you have debt and it is unsustainable and it happens, it happened in Germany, there's only three ways to get rid of it at a certain point. One is to print more money and pay off your creditors in worthless cash. And that's what Germany did in the 1930s. Another one is to renounce the debt. And countries like Argentina and others have done that, where you just tell foreign investors, well, we got valuable stuff here. We've got oil, we've got farmland, but screw you, we're not going to pay what we owe you. And then they'll say, well, if you don't pay what we owe you and you confiscate my property, your federal. I have all these U.S. bonds, and you're saying you're not going to renumerate them then. And you say, well, you'll come back. And that's the second thing. And the third is you go into the private sector and confiscate capital. And we've already seen Elizabeth Warren, I think, and Bernie Sanders say, wouldn't it be nice if all these billionaires and high millionaires that we just said to them, after a certain amount of money, we're going to take it from you and we'll give you credit and the Social Security. Take your IRA for every hundred thousand dollars you have in an ira, give it to the government to bail out Social Security, and we'll give you two years of Social Security credit, something like that. And we're going to get close to any of those three remedies if we don't control spending.
- [59:22]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. And plus grow the energy economy. Yeah. Hey, Victor, again, it's. It's February 16th. I'm looking out my window here. All I see is snow, ice. It's cold. But just because it's cold outside doesn't mean, dear listener, you need to stop grilling. Not if you have the right grill. And that would be a Solaire infrared grill. Solar infrared grills heat up in just three minutes, perform equally well in the cold of winter as in the heat of summer, and grill food much faster. The Solaire infrared grills, Victorons heat your food directly, not the air around the food like conventional grills do. The intense heat also results in the juiciest food you will ever taste from any kind of grill, gas, charcoal or otherwise. To get the great taste, it's all the heat in solar infrared from besthotgrill.com it gets hotter than anything you've ever experienced during the season. Try the Solaire Infrared Grill now with the demo program. Don't be left out in the cold. Learn more about the USA made Solaire infrared grills@besthotgrill.com that's besthotgrill.com and we thank the very good people from Solaire for sponsoring the Victor Davis Sanson Show. Victor, I want to get back to a Pam Bondi thing with Bowdoin College, but let's do a little political quick thing first because we have to take another break. And you mentioned Obama. We've mentioned Obama a lot. And there's a headline here, if I can only keep my papers in order. Victor. So we're not torturing the good listeners of the show. It has to do with his. Well, I'll just say it, his house.
- [61:12]
Odin
It has to do a presidential library. I'm really.
- [61:14]
Jack Fowler
It certainly does. This seems to be surprising.
- [61:17]
Odin
It's a world project, of course.
- [61:20]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [61:20]
Odin
Yeah. He confiscated a, he confiscated a choice spot from a very popular park and nobody wanted him to build it there in Chicago. And then he got a postmodern architect and built something like the Tower of Babel, one of the ugliest billies in the world.
- [61:36]
Jack Fowler
Oh, my gosh.
- [61:37]
Odin
It's horrific. It just, and it's typical Obama. It has to tower over everything else so you can see it from a distance and be reminded of its ugliness. And so then he, he, the thing about exemption and the idea of penance exemption is that once you give people exemptions, they take advantage of it. So when he told us he was a community organizer and he was DEI and he was, that meant he didn't have to follow what he was saying. So now we're learning that a lot of the what DI employees and contractors that have toiled so hard for this ugly monolith haven't been paid correctly or they haven't been hired.
- [62:15]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. There's a $40 million racially charged lawsuit filed against the museum or whatever the hell it is by a minority contractor.
- [62:25]
Odin
Kind of sweet.
- [62:28]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. So the DEI is boomeranging a little bit on Barack.
- [62:34]
Odin
I wonder if he built it his Ohahu, his met outside Honolulu. Where was it? The beach. He built that beautiful home right on the beach.
- [62:49]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [62:50]
Odin
Why does he always like beachfront property like Martha's venue when he told us they were all going to be underwater in 10 years? And I hope he had DEI contractors on that.
- [63:00]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, well, the cost of this monstrosity, Victor, it sounds like the same people who budgeted the California train line budgeted this initial cost of $350 million. It's now standing at $830 million. The whole concept of these massive presidential libraries, I just. I just find it perverse.
- [63:25]
Odin
No, it's testimony to vanity. We should stop that whole idea and then we have to pay for it and we help pay the foundation. It's just you don't really need it. You really don't. Maybe they should just make a huge thing in Kansas called the Museum of the Presidents and make a big rotunda and each person gets a slot. But, but you can all go there. But it's. And I like the Reagan library and everything, but Nixon library, da, da, da, da. But I don't see the point in it. I really don't.
- [63:57]
Jack Fowler
All right, well, one other quick item before our break and then we'll have some another topic too. But Victor, here's a headline from the daily mail. Washington, D.C. housing market plummets as Doge lays off thousands of federal workers in November. According to the Daily Mail article, November, the median home in the nation's Capital was worth $699,000. By February, that has dropped to 2020%, bringing the price down to $560,000.
- [64:28]
Odin
Where are they going to go? I guess, are they going to leave Northern Virginia? I don't know.
- [64:33]
Jack Fowler
I don't know how you could afford.
- [64:34]
Odin
To live in 75,000 workers have been laid off.
- [64:37]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, they never tell us why.
- [64:41]
Odin
I mean, they never tell us where these people that were headed for retirement anyway in a couple of years, were they going to be transferred to other jobs? They don't tell us. So instead we just get all of these. Fox News had their roaming reporter on the street interviewing Washington D.C. people by random. He asked what they thought of the layoff. What did he think they were going to say? You know, everybody in Washington is a federal employee. They were not happy.
- [65:09]
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor, it's the one area in the country that when other parts of the country take hits on housing, the housing economy, it doesn't. And it's your tax dollars. Fair listeners are making that, that happen.
- [65:25]
Odin
I was just thinking some, I'd look at my check where I work or I get my estimates. I have to pay on, you know, non payroll income. I Just think if I was not living in California, the amount of money I would have extra and then I'd say, but yeah, but you get wonderful public school. No, but your transportation. No, but it's so safe here. No, but you have no homeless problem. No, but you have wonderful fire protection. No, but the police are ample and good. No. So what do we get from it? Nothing. Except a beautiful paradise they turned into purgatory. So it's. Gavin Newsom is going to go down. I mean I have no intrinsic dislike of him, but he's going to go down as a. Not even a tragic figure, as a failed figure. He thought he was going to get on his little surfboard and ride the progressive wave and just do nothing. He didn't understand that the wave was collapsing beneath him.
- [66:29]
Jack Fowler
Well, he's. Yeah. For all the time he's spent on as a headlines and the debate with, with DeSantis and the attention he's gotten and his interest in being the next President of the United States. Victor, there's a poll out. I don't know who put it out, but I saw this online. If the Demo. If the 2028 Democrat presidential primary was being held today, for whom would you vote? They gave about 18 names. Kamala Harris is the first 36%. This is about, about 450 people voted. Pete Buttigieg is the next in line.
- [67:13]
Odin
He's the savior of the Democratic Party. I hope, I hope he's coming on.
- [67:17]
Jack Fowler
He may be. And then Tim Walls at 9 and Gavin Newsom, the just aforementioned is at 6%. And I mean, I don't know who the hell is their bench, but Gavin Newsom is certainly not resonating with, with.
- [67:31]
Odin
Everything'S not working out for Gavin. The debate with DeSantis did not go well for him. The feud with Trump did not go well with him. There was a sense that the LA fire was poorly handled and the Paradise Fire, the campfire under his directorship, were disasters. The farming group doesn't like him. The Silicon Valley people think that California is over regulated and over taxed and they're drifting rightward. No, no one really likes him. And because he represents something that's antithetical to the demography of California, which is I think it's 16% now Asian and 45% or 50% Hispanic and a lot of poor whites. And he represents privilege and elitism, I don't think that goes well demographically. And then he's from an area, when they look at that area of that Bay Area nexus and the zip codes they think, what do those zip codes give us? Well, let me think. They gave us Senator Barbara Boxer. They gave us Senator Dianne Feinstein. They gave us Nancy Pelosi. They gave us Jerry Brown. They gave us Kamala Harris. They gave us Willie Brown. They gave us Gavin Newsom. And what did they all do? They overregulated, raised taxes, gave us woke dei, et cetera. And maybe we need something different than that. Least Silicon Valley people want to make money and they adjust. But politicians are immune from that. So Silicon Valley is going. Silicon Valley, there was a triad like that, and I wrote about it and we discussed it in the New Criterion. Stanford University in Berkeley gave this area their intellectual fides and they trained the professional class. And then there was the Bay Area politician machine that had taken over from Los Angeles and the Chandler newspapers and all that. And then there was Silicon Valley money. $9 trillion in market capitalization. And that gave us the present California tragedy. And now it's all broken apart because all of those Bay Area politicians, Sherry Brown, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Diane Barbara Bach, they're all ossified. And the people that came after them are total nincompoops. Whatever you say about Dianne Feinstein or Jerry Brown, they were smart people. You can't say that about Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom. So they have no benchmark. And then you look at Stanford and Berkeley and they're really under the gun now. Whether it's overcharging the government or di. Or racial anti Semitism on campus, they're under the gun. Then you look at Silicon Valley and they are drifting, slip sliding away to the right because they say we can't do business in this state. We can't compete with Austin. We can't compete with the Research Triangle, not with these rules. So we either got to relocate or tell these crazy people they have to change, but we're not going to give them any more money.
- [70:43]
Jack Fowler
Your lips to God's ears. Victor, we have one or two more things to get your opinion on and we will do that when we come back from these final important messages. We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Thanks for listening, folks. We are recording on the 16th of February, and this particular episode will be up on February 20th. I mentioned several times now about Bondi, and this has Bowdoin College and some of the shots fired across the bow by the President with his executive orders and threats by the Attorney general. And it's caught the attention of some people. So Bowdoin College, the headline, Bowdoin College students suspended over Palestinian protests In just a couple of chunks from this piece, Bowdoin College has suspended eight of the students involved in an on campus protest over the weekend related to Palestinian rights. Roughly 80 students set up an encampment at the college's Smith Union hall on Thursday. According to a student who is a member of the steering committee of Students for Justice in Palestine, the encampment prompted the college to take the student ID numbers and threaten discipline. Long story short, eight of them, they were given a deadline and eight of them missed the deadline and the school has now thrown them out of the school.
- [72:15]
Odin
The biggest shocking is it? Yeah, the biggest story there is a subtext. I use that term a lot, but this time it's very apt. If you were to poll these college presidents privately, you hate Donald Trump or like him, they would say they hate Donald Trump. But if you really got them to speak the truth, they would say Donald Trump has given them a great, great Boone. In other words, he is the monster that they can use to keep their he's the boogeyman. So what basically happens on these campuses? These radical pampered students from upper middle class and very wealthy families in the Middle east come over here and they wear their scarves and their flags and they scream and yell and then these useful idiot American students feel that they're part of the di cool set and they follow them. But now what Donald Trump is and the and the university deans, provost, presidents and faculty are not necessarily by nature a very brave, courageous bunch. They're timid, they put their fingers in the wing, but now they have clout. So all they have to do is they call in the Palestinian protesters and said, you went after that person. Or what they did at Bo Doyne or. But what they did at ucla, they went after students, just went after a Jewish member of the Board of Regents. They went to his home and they defaced it and screamed and yelled. So the UCLA president, chancellor, we'll see if he's telling the truth, says they're going to be held accountable. What that means is the dean or somebody calls them in and says, look, look, I really don't want to do this, but I'm forced to by this horrible Donald Trump. He's a right wing fascist Hitler, racist. But nevertheless, we have a new rule and that says that anybody here on a US Federal State Department student visa who is currently not in school shall be deported. So you broke the rules and I'm going to have to listen, put you on suspension and you're not going to have a visa for a semester. And I just hope and pray that that racist, monstrous Donald Trump doesn't find out about it, but he might just do that. So then the idea is that that guy goes back and says, oh my God, I might have to go back to my beloved Syria. Oh my gosh, I might have to go back to Tripoli. Oh, I don't, I love Cairo. I just don't want to live there. And I might have to go back because of this visa stuff. And that's what's changed everything. And I keep saying, you know, I walk across the Stanford campus, it's quiet as a mountain lake. It was so boisterous and noisy and all these tents and all this Hamas protesters would get in your face and all that. It just vanished. I think it's because Donald Trump had an executive order about anti Semitism and breaking student rules or committing felonies. So if you commit, if you're here on a student visa and you commit a criminal violation outside of campus, then you're going to be deported. If you are here on a student visa and you are suspended for violating a campus statute and you're no longer currently a student, you're probably going to be deported. And they know that. And the weird thing about it is they love they being immigrant students, visitors, whatever term, they love to come over here and they love to say that they're outsiders and victims and under the DEI protocols that, you know, we've gone beyond affirmative act, they're victims. So they try to make people feel guilty, they scream and yell, they adopt all these left wing platitudes and they think that the host is so stupid and weak and timid that they allow it and the students join them, but they know it's a fraud. All it takes is like the emperor has no clothes. It just has somebody's little kids, they're all naked. The emperor has no clothes. He's stark naked, buck naked. And so all people say is, wait a minute, you're a visitor. I didn't know that. You're a visitor. And you keep saying how great the Arab world is, and Jordan, you love it, and the west bank, but you really don't because you're here and you're a visitor and you're a guest. You're in my house, so you have to be nice to the host, but you're not. So why don't you go back home?
- [76:39]
Jack Fowler
Let us pray. Hey, Victor, one last quick item. I found this on the Bongino report, which is Stan Bongino's aggregator website. For those of people, I think who used to rely on the Drudge Report.
- [76:54]
Odin
The Drudge Report I looked at the other day just to see it. It is awful. Yeah, yeah, but I don't mean awful ideological, just full of lies. Trump Trump's first three weeks, utter disaster. Polls dropping, people wandering around, complete failure. Public sick of him. It was stall lies.
- [77:19]
Jack Fowler
Well, for those who want aggregating, I suggest Bongino Report. Also our good friends at Powerline blog. And then Real Clear Politics still very, very solid, very good. But Bongino had a. Had a link to a story that says new evidence in the 2024American Family Survey found that 37% of conservative women from the ages of 18 to 40 reported being satisfied with their life. Only 12% of liberal women in the same group said they felt the same way. That's a big difference. That's a big difference. But nothing surprising. Anyway, Victor, we can end with your thoughts on that.
- [78:02]
Odin
I think being in academia for 50 years and in professional circles, unfortunately, and then juxtaposing that to farm life, I would say that the blue state, blue city, blue paradigm is it guarantees unhappiness for women. It tells them certain lies. It says to them the more sexual partners you have, the more you'll be sexually satisfied and confident. It tells you that there's nothing unusual about being promiscuous. It tells you that two or three abortions are normal and it's nothing to feel bad about. It tells you that you're only going to be fulfilled not by having children, because you can say that they're going to come in as AOC'd into a smoky, dirty, carbon filled atmosphere. But not having children will empower you and you really don't want to be a partner with a man or something like this. And you can continue to be youthful. And the other paradigm says human nature hasn't changed since we were born into this planet and we're all going to age and you're going to need a lifelong partner or at least a long distance partner. Children are important. Loyalty to your family or your family name is important. Roots are important, Religion is important. And don't buy all this trend that they're this socialist, Marxist cultural evolution. And to the degree that people follow the traditional program, they say this isn't. He's not saying I think they're happier. He's saying what they say. They say they're happier. Now, you can say that they suffer from false consciousness or something, Marxist paradigm, but the people who got everything they wanted the Kim Kardashian mode, I guess. I don't know what it would be. Something like that, or the Hollywood mode or the, the academic woman mode or whatever. They're not as happy. And I won't mention any names. I was in a faculty meeting once and we had a feminist, I think she had, had five or six live in boyfriends, never married, no children. She's deceased now. But at the time she was very young and this was, I'm talking 40 years. 40 years, 42 years ago, I had just been hired. I was 30, 29. I went to my first meeting and all, and I said something and under her breath she said, what a f. You idiot. What an idiot he is. And I didn't say anything. And then next year, every time I said something, she'd turn to somebody. What an idiot, she said. And so once I came up to her, I said, you feel like you're empowered, single woman and you say things like that all the time. So why don't you just list me Think what I, I think I should say what I, you know. So I said what I thought of her. I said, you are a very failed person. You've never published a single article. You're a very poor teacher, you're neurotic, you are undisciplined, you're, you're foul mouthed, you're promiscuous, you're undistinguished, there's nothing other than you can do than speak basically your native language and you're pathetic. And she started, broke down in tears and screamed at me and reported me to the dean and everything and said, that was old mean. This is the person after she said all these four lane, four letter words. And I said, why are you doing this? I thought you were an empowered woman and that you're out in the marketplace and you're got your armor on, you're an Amazon, you're fighting male toxic masculinity. But for three years all you do is whisper in front of everybody that I'm an idiot or use the F word. And then everybody looks at me and I never, I'm very polite from the old school, you think, but this is what I really think of you and this is what everybody thinks of you, even your friends. Think about this. She started sobbing. The weird thing about it all is that after that all happened for, until I left, she was actually much nicer to me. You know what I mean? Hi, Victor, how are you today? How's Classics doing? And so she was not a happy person. And I, that's a lot of what's going on with those rallies. You know, when you see. I know I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but when I see all these trans demonstration, those people that went to that city council of trans people in screenshot. Yeah. And then you see a lot of these anti musk things where the, the female congresswomen get up and they say f you Musk. And you look at the people. They're not happy people. They're not happy people. And maybe this, this survey reflects that they think they're not happy people.
- [83:10]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [83:11]
Odin
And it's, it's. I, I don't know. I think everybody has to have some form of stability in their life or sometimes I'm not willing to talk, but I'm, but you have to have.
- [83:26]
Jack Fowler
You, my friend, are the stability for many people. You are indeed. You've provided that. So we, we are. We have come to the the conclusion of this show, except for the usual business to thank folks for, for listening, especially to thank folks who have taken the time on Apple to rate the show 0 to 5 stars, pictures 4.9 plus from 7000 plus people. Thanks for taking the time to do that. And for those who leave comments on Victor's own website, the Blade of Perseus or on Apple and we read them. Here's one. It's a little longer. It's from N. And then the underline commsa bdh My favorite Erudite. I love your podcasts. I learn new information from each episode. One of the things I really enjoys listening to Victor tell stories from his life. He tells them in the same manner my father used to tell stories when I was young. BDH draws you in and really captures your imagination through his colorful descriptions. Like the smell of patchouli incense when his father moved him into the dorm. His beautiful plums that were ruined by a hailstorm. Or the little pond his grandmother loved, which has sadly become a receptacle for garbage. It is detritus and wet diapers walking upon lovers, quote, unquote, lovers in his orchard who seem rather perturbed by his rude intrusion.
- [84:50]
Odin
That's a euphemism. Lovers. Fornicators.
- [84:53]
Jack Fowler
I hope you'll continue your hilarious impressions of politicians. My husband and I crack up whenever you did imitations of Biden. Get off my lawn. Too funny. I love listening to the podcast, but I'm excited that you're now producing videos. Lastly, I like the fedoras, Victoria. They look good on you. That's from. Thank you, Kamsa.
- [85:14]
Odin
So thank you. Because I don't have hair, anything looks better than a bald skeletor head. You're too much, Victor.
- [85:21]
Jack Fowler
Hey. Okay, I want to thank the people who go to Civil thoughts. Go there. Civilthoughts.com Sign up the free weekly email newsletter I do for the center for Civil Society. I share 14 recommended readings, links and excerpts of great articles I've come across today, the previous week. I think you'll enjoy it. So that's me. Victor's VictorHansen.com Go subscribe there. And thanks everyone for listening. And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye bye.
- [85:51]
Odin
Thank you everybody for listening. Much appreciated.
- [85:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
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