The Daniel Penny Controversy and the Coming End of Nihilism

Summary

The Daniel Penny Controversy and the Coming End of Nihilism: A Detailed Summary

Podcast: The Victor Davis Hanson Show
Hosts: Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler
Release Date: December 12, 2024

In this compelling episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show, hosts Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler delve deep into the contentious Daniel Penny case, explore the broader societal malaise of nihilism, and dissect recent political and social developments. The discussion is rich with insights, historical parallels, and thought-provoking analysis, providing listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand.

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1. The Daniel Penny Trial: A Case Study in Modern Injustice

The episode opens with an in-depth discussion of Daniel Penny, a New York subway rider whose actions have sparked nationwide debate. Penny, a Marine veteran, intervened in a situation on the subway to protect fellow passengers, leading to his arrest under controversial circumstances.

• Deadlocked Jury and Continuing Charges:
  Jack Fowler mentions that as of December 6th, Penny's trial jury was deadlocked on the main charge, prompting the judge to postpone deliberations to consider lesser charges (06:42).

• Victor's Analysis of the Legal Proceedings:
  Victor critiques the handling of the case by the New York prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, labeling him as a "radical feminist prosecutor" who selectively prosecutes "victimizers." Victor argues that Penny acted heroically by attempting to subdue a threatening individual, and questions the racial and societal biases influencing the trial (07:31 - 13:20).

• Historical Parallels and Societal Impact:
  Victor draws parallels between Penny's case and historical incidents like the George Floyd tragedy, emphasizing systemic failures and the erosion of community-driven heroism. He asserts that the left's reaction to Penny's actions exemplifies a broader societal trend towards nihilism and the dismantling of civil courage (13:20 - 25:03).

Notable Quote:
"In any other normal place, he would be a hero." — Victor Davis Hanson (12:32)

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2. The Decline of Modern American Society: Nihilism at the Forefront

Transitioning from the Penny case, the hosts explore the pervasive sense of nihilism sweeping across American society. They attribute this decline to a combination of radical progressivism, ineffective governance, and cultural disintegration.

• Cultural and Political Decay:
  Victor reflects on New York City's fluctuating status over decades, attributing recent declines to policies under leaders like Eric Adams and Brian DeSantis. He laments the loss of order and the rise of chaos, drawing historical comparisons to Constantinople's cyclical prosperity and decline (15:03 - 19:00).

• Public Discontent and Systemic Failures:
  The discussion highlights public frustration with systemic issues such as uncontrolled immigration, skyrocketing living costs, and inadequate responses to disasters. Victor emphasizes that nihilism thrives when people see no value in preserving societal structures, leading to increased chaos and lawlessness (19:00 - 25:03).

Notable Quote:
"They like nihilism, they like destruction. They don't like the country, they don't like the civilization." — Victor Davis Hanson (21:18)

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3. Political Accountability and Federal Workforce Issues

The conversation shifts to political accountability, focusing on New York City's Mayor Eric Adams and Senator Joni Ernst's recent report on federal workforce inefficiencies.

• Mayor Eric Adams Under Scrutiny:
  Victor critiques Mayor Adams, questioning his political maneuvering and ability to address the city's challenges. He expresses skepticism about Adams' alleged shift towards Republican ideologies and his handling of immigration issues (15:03 - 19:00).

• Joni Ernst's Report on Teleworking and Salary Discrepancies:
  Jack Fowler introduces Senator Joni Ernst's report highlighting rampant teleworking among federal employees and significant disparities in salary locality pay. Victor interprets these findings as deliberate attempts to cut costs and decentralize federal operations, furthering inefficiencies and eroding trust in governmental institutions (58:15 - 65:38).

Notable Quote:
"They have no idea what somebody in New York who's threatening people in a subway has in his coat pocket." — Victor Davis Hanson (13:20)

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4. FEMA's Response to Hurricane Helene and Infrastructure Failures

Victor and Jack address recent criticisms of FEMA's inadequate response to Hurricane Helene, underscoring systemic failures in disaster management.

• Critique of FEMA's Preparedness:
  Victor references James O'Keefe's investigative series exposing FEMA's poor disaster response, particularly in North Carolina. He highlights the grim reality of residents enduring harsh winter conditions without sufficient support, attributing the failures to bureaucratic incompetence and political indifference (50:03 - 57:38).

• Broader Implications for American Governance:
  The hosts argue that FEMA's shortcomings are symptomatic of larger governance issues, including inadequate federal oversight, bureaucratic bloat, and a lack of accountability. They stress the need for systemic reforms to prevent future disasters from being mishandled (50:03 - 57:38).

Notable Quote:
"They are setting themselves up for two reasons." — Victor Davis Hanson (63:03)

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5. The Murder of Brian Thompson and Media Reactions

The episode touches on the violent murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, and the ensuing media frenzy.

• Media's Hostile Response:
  Victor criticizes figures like Taylor Lorenz for their vitriolic reactions on social media, suggesting that the left-wing media is complicit in demonizing business leaders. He contends that the media environment has become toxic, fostering an environment where violence and destruction are glamorized (40:19 - 47:03).

• Societal Desensitization to Violence:
  The hosts discuss how media narratives have desensitized the public to violence, framing it within political agendas that undermine societal cohesion and promote nihilistic tendencies (40:19 - 47:03).

Notable Quote:
"This left wing movement as we see with the 120 days of murder and arson and, and looting and destruction in 2020, as we see all over the world, it's coming from the left right now." — Victor Davis Hanson (42:04)

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6. Airline Industry Inefficiencies and Customer Experience

Victor and Jack share personal anecdotes and critiques of the U.S. airline industry's inefficiencies and poor customer service.

• Operational Failures and Passenger Frustration:
  Victor recounts numerous instances of flight delays, overbooked flights, and inadequate customer service, illustrating the systemic issues plaguing the airline industry. He emphasizes the lack of accountability and the decline in service standards as major contributors to passenger dissatisfaction (67:07 - 73:28).

• Comparative Analysis with Historical Standards:
  Drawing a nostalgic comparison to the pristine service of the 1960s airline industry, Victor laments the erosion of quality and professionalism, attributing it to cost-cutting measures and lack of investment in customer experience (72:12 - 73:28).

Notable Quote:
"It's a mess." — Victor Davis Hanson (70:53)

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7. The Path Forward: Combating Nihilism and Rebuilding Society

In the closing segments, Victor and Jack offer a glimmer of hope, discussing strategies to combat societal nihilism and restore America's greatness.

• Emphasis on Personal Responsibility and Community:
  Victor advocates for individuals to take personal responsibility in fostering community, maintaining traditions, and resisting the pervasive tide of nihilism. He highlights the importance of cultivating genuine friendships and supporting moral frameworks to rebuild societal cohesion (73:51 - 77:02).

• Optimism for Future Prospects:
  Despite the bleak outlook, Victor expresses optimism that the current wave of nihilism will wane, paving the way for a renewed sense of purpose and national rejuvenation. He calls for a collective effort to rejuvenate America's foundational values and system of governance (73:51 - 77:02).

Notable Quote:
"For the first time in a long, long time, I think we all have justified hopes that the madness is waning and the nihilism is ending and we have a chance to make America healthy and great again." — Victor Davis Hanson (73:51)

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Conclusion

This episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show meticulously dissects the Daniel Penny controversy, linking it to broader societal issues of nihilism and systemic decay. Through incisive analysis and passionate commentary, Victor and Jack challenge listeners to recognize and address the underlying causes of America's current challenges. The discussion not only critiques existing problems but also offers a path forward, emphasizing personal responsibility, community engagement, and a return to foundational values as essential steps toward national revitalization.

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Note: This summary excludes all advertisements, introductory remarks, and non-content sections to focus solely on the substantive discussions between Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler.

Transcript

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[Jack Fowler]

Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You are here to listen to glean wisdom from the star namesake, 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. He's also a syndicated columnist, military historian, bestselling author, classicist, philologist, farmer. Victor's got a website, the Blade of Perseus. Its address is victorhansen.com later in the show, I will tell you why I think you should be subscribing. We are recording on Saturday, December 7th. It's a little late here. Getting dark here in Milford, Connecticut. Victor it's still sunny and probably warm back there.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

The sun just broke out after the fog.

[Jack Fowler]

Oh, well, congratulations. Very happy for you. Well, I hope we have an hour plus of wisdom, and I know we will on today's episode, which should be up on the 12th of Thursday, the 12th of December. Victor we'll start off the show today by talking about getting your thoughts on Daniel Penny, the brave New York subway rider who, for all we know, Victor, between when we're talking today and when this episode is out, his legal fate may have been decided, but there's still much wisdom to glean on how he's been handled. And we have Josh Hawley attacking airlines. We have Jodi Ernst, the senator from Iowa with a really troubling study of federal workers. That and more. And we'll get started with all that when we come back from these important messages.

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[Jack Fowler]

We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, Daniel Penney, Yesterday, Friday the 6th, it was the jury in his trial, his insane trial came back deadlocked on the main charge and then the judge sent them back. Take the weekend off, come back Monday and consider some of the lesser charges, which I think is something that was not supposed to happen at all. Given his initial instructions, Daniel Penney protected fellow citizens of New York City. I would know as somebody who took the subway, who's been taking it for years, what a nightmare. It can be there anyway, Victor, this is an ongoing injustice. Your thoughts?

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Well, I think everybody's gamed it. They've dropped, as you said, the most serious charges. But unfortunately people thought, as I understood it, that that meant that he might be more likely to be convicted of a lesser but still serious charge. And then everything about it was, I mean it's in New York and then apparently you're under the auspices of Alvin Bragg. The prosecutor in question has a long history. She's kind of a radical feminist prosecutor. She has a history of going soft on certain people, murderers, murderers that she has arbitrarily, I guess envisioned as victims, the victimizers. And so they go across and yet they didn't. They waited, I think Jack, for two weeks before they decided to prosecute him. They brought him in. He didn't know that Neely had been killed. He explained it very calmly. He was not happy about it. He was telling everybody that he thought Neely posed a threat. There were people who were non white because I mentioned that, because some of the demonstrations at the prosecutor's office to make sure that he was indicted had a racial component to it.

[Jack Fowler]

Black lives matter.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Yes. White man and the Neely person was threatening people. And he had a long history of mental disturbance and some violence. And so this man volunteers and some of the people said why didn't he just leave the other subway? Well, why didn't Neely just leave? A law abiding citizen has a constitutional right to be left in peace on a subway. And if somebody comes in there and threatens to kill people and harm them. And the point was that when he intervened to save people, there were people who were not white, I think a black and Hispanic person who helped him. And I looked at the Video. They were pretty tough themselves. And so that creates deterrence when somebody. It's unfortunate that Neely died, but when you go repeatedly 40 some arrest and you keep pushing the envelope, pushing them, something's going to happen. And so now I think his uncle smells money, is suing Donald Daniel Penney.

[Jack Fowler]

Family members who did nothing for him.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

While he was alive, nothing for him was alive. They smelled money. The whole thing is a commentary on the sickness of modern American society and particular degree woke radical progressivism in general and New York City in particular. Just a cesspool by any other standard. In any other normal place, he would be a hero. And it's still not clear what killed as it wasn't with George Floyd. It was the same situation. George Floyd was under the influence of fentanyl. He had some amphetamines. He had late stage heart disease. He was recovering from a recent bout with COVID And it's not at all clear that the officer in the Minnesota, Minneapolis police killed him by putting his knee to subdue him. And if he had not tried to pass, getting off topic, but if he had not tried to pass counterfeit currency, if he had have obeyed the police when they got there and just stayed in the car and not been confrontational, he would probably be alive. Same thing with Neely. All he had to do was after he threatened people and people said stop it. If he just stopped. But he didn't want to do that because he assumed that these were sheep and he was a wolf and he was going to bully, bully, bully them to the extent that he was cognizant of what he was doing. He had drugs in his system and it's just if he's convicted, it doesn't even matter at this point, Jack, whether Penny is convicted or not. The left made their point that if he's convicted, no one will ever lift a finger for anybody in a subway. But if he's not convicted after what they put him through, people will say, you know what? This is a clear case that I could stop this person from hitting this woman over the head, but I might be acquitted. But they're going to destroy me. And Antifa and BLM are going to show up and they're going to sue me. I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to sit back there like Katie Kitty Genovese.

[Jack Fowler]

Genovese, right.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Yeah, yeah. We're just going to watch it happen. So that's what they want. That's the city they want. That's the city they're going to get. But he's a hero, and he is in half of America's mind. And I think he'll. He people will. They're donating to his GoFundMe. I think it's several million dollars now to help him get through this. And he has not tried to. He was not like Kyle Rittenhouse. Kyle Rittenhouse was similar, but he. The things that he said in his demeanor sometimes were braggadocio. You know what I mean?

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

It wasn't. Penny's much different. And I was somebody who thought Kyle Rittenhouse got a terrible deal and they went out to demonize him because he was white and he had a gun. And the people that he stopped from trying to kill him were themselves, in one case at least, culpable child molestation. So. But this was even more clear cut. This was more clear cut than the George Floyd case, that Kyle Rittenhouse. This was just black and white. And I don't mean that in a racial sense. It was just clear that this man stepped up, tried to put a person in a headlock to stop him. He didn't know whether he had drugs in his system or what his mental and physical. All he knew is if this person continued, somebody could get hurt, and he wasn't going to sit there and watch this person hurt people.

[Jack Fowler]

This is a crime in our world in the wrong place. If you take your manhood seriously, it's very courageous.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

He has no idea what somebody in New York who's threatening people in a subway has in his coat pocket, whether it's a.38 or a Glock or he has no idea or a knife. But just to step up there and take that risk, he should be commended. Yeah.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, Victor, there's a couple of other New York City things to talk about. One is the embattled mayor of the city, Eric Adams. So New York's election cycle is the year after the presidential election. So in 2025, there will be mayoral elections. Adams is a former police officer of the city. He is under federal investigation and actually charged with certain financial crimes, chicanery related to Turkey and getting upgrades on flights, and God only knows what the quid pro quo on this was. However, I think he's found a friend in Donald Trump. And even though he invited, seemed to have welcomed early on the illegal immigrants that were coming into New York City, he is now quite adamant to get them the hell out because of the unrest they're causing throughout the city. Not only the crime, but clearly political unrest. Anyway, Eric Adams is thinking of becoming A Republican. He's been chattering about it a little bit.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I'll have to see that to believe it. I think he asked him if he was going to become a Republican. And the latest iteration of that was I'm an American politician. That's what he said. I'm a. I belong to the American party. I love this. It was very noble what he said, but I haven't been a big Eric Adams fan because he demagogued the illegal immigration issue before the Martha's Vineyard redirect. So he was out there, remember when the bus pulled up in that sort of emblematic moment, and he had his cameras around from his PR department and he was. Was handing out bottled water to illegal immune. That they got on the bus and he was thinking, there's going to be about a thousand of them. I'm going to shore up my DEI support and act like this is a warming city. And then people like Governor Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis said, well, if you think that's a good thing, then you can relieve us. And they started busing them up there. And all of a sudden he thought the world was unfair and he didn't understand the left. The left tolerates no apostates. And so they thought they were going to punish him. And suddenly he said, we can't handle this. And next thing he knows, he's indicted for his past quid pro quo supposed activity on behalf of the Turkish government. But when he ran for office, remember he had that speech where he said, I took on the crackers.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

In the police department. I thought that was a racist thing to say.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

So.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, it was.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

He doesn't know who he is. He tries to act like he's an ex cop and there he's a law and order person. He doesn't know quite what the minority, the majority population of New York is at the election has kind of shocked him. He's thinking, where is 51 of my voters? Or they couldn't be Trump voters, but maybe they want a closed border now, or maybe they think this illegal immigration is taking. On the other hand, I've got these left wing crazy people. How do I cut the difference? That's what he's thinking. He doesn't have any. I've never heard him voice any longstanding principal position. That's what I'm saying.

[Jack Fowler]

Right.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I never thought I'd say that. But Mayor Bloomberg was a lot better.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, he was. I mean, in part because he carried on with Giuliani's.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Lassio was worse. And Bloomberg was better. And I say that as a farmer who resented Bloomberg saying, drop a seed any idiot can.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, even with our own nation as a whole, domestic tranquility is one of the first promises of the Constitution, and that's what we want. Law and order and Bloomberg and Giuliani. Despite Bloomberg's pressing for criminalizing Big Gulp sodas and the like, he did carry on the broken windows policing.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

That's a good point. Everybody should remember that material progress is not linear, it's cyclical. So you could make the argument that New York City was a much better place to live in 1950 than it was in 1972 or 73. The first time I went to New York was 1971. I was a summer student at the Yale Greek and Intensive program. And I took. I didn't know what I was doing. I was right off. I'd only been in college one year, and I went into 1971. I went into downtown New York and I thought, Madison Square Garden. I went to all the little places, and I thought it was a nightmare.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah, well, it was.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Then Giuliani cleaned it up and kind of. That lasted till Bloomberg. And then now. Then we de Blasio came in and ruined it. And now we're back to the 1970s cycle. Same thing in the country at large. And kind of like, you know, Constantinople was. If you had gone and looked at that city at 550 AD, it was a paradise. If you looked at it at 1440, it was in chaos. So, so much for a thousand years of technological progress. And it all depends on each generation keeping up the traditions that were successful. And a lot of them, some don't. Our generation is very culpable. We took a wonderful inheritance, and we took paradise and turned it into purgatory, if not hell. And New York's no better example of what's happened, Victor. This nihilism, Jack, is so baffling. I talked to people yesterday when I was speaking, and one woman at my table, she was very sincere, and she made a good point. She said, I just have to ask you a question. Just answer me a question. This is after my talk. I said, yeah, what is the question? She said, why are they doing this? Just tell me, why are they doing this? I said, well, we do define this. The border. 12 million people, 350,000 criminals. A million people which are already under. Why? Why are they letting people go in all of our cities that riot and burn and kill people, why do they let them out the same day? Why you go into a store here in Los Angeles and they just let you loot. Why are they doing this? Why do we go into the food market and all these prices we've had for 20 years, nobody can afford them. And I said, because they like it. She said, what do you mean? I said, that's what Dirty Harry said. Why is this. Remember the Scorpio killer in that movie? He said, why does he do it and why do you think you know he does it? And he said, I know why he does it. He likes it. And, well, they like nihilism, they like destruction. They don't like the country, they don't like the civilization. And they think if they create enough chaos, they can come into power and destroy it.

[Jack Fowler]

Biden was the perfect vehicle for that because he was predisposed to enjoy chaos.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

He was predisposed and he was also. But he was a very clever politician. He always would veer our tact a little bit to the right and even beyond the right. He would talk about being from a slave state of Delaware or could you old people with the corn pop saga. He could always play, act like he was my mother was. I'm not going to let this country. I grew up here. I don't want my mother in a jungle. Racial. Remember that?

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

So he was just a despicable person. He always was. But he demagogued every type of issue. And so we're in a period of decline and it's a question of whether we can get back out and back on the trajectory of improving things.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah, I mean, happy days are here again. To some. I don't know. Happy days are possible again.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Everybody I saw, you know, it's so funny, everybody. It's happened to me. I've been very happy and upbeat. I didn't think it would affect me this way. But the more that I saw that campaign, the last two months of Harrah's and then the donors and then post facto, the payoffs to Sharpton and OPA, the $20,000 deficit after blowing through two and a half billion of her own campaign and PAC money, and then some of the things that they wanted to do. We were really lucky. Divine providence saved us and Donald Trump's energy level.

[Jack Fowler]

I still think we have a great cultural fight on hand and we're in a better position than we were a month ago to fight it.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

But you have to have people that when you go and when you send your daughter to a school, there's not going to be a biological male in the shower room. You're going to have to Have a situation where you're not going to have your 18 year old kid have a transvestite dance party on a military base. You're going to have to be reasonable where your society is not allowing viable fetuses. They're not fetuses, they're babies, living beings to be killed in the birth canal and say, well, it only happens 10,000 times a year out of a million, it doesn't matter. And we have to have a situation where we're not sitting on a gold mine of rare earth materials for electric, batteries, oil and gas. And then we won't touch them because we think that we're morally superior and we're going to let the Saudis deal with a dirty goo or the Chinese mined this or that. If you're going to use something, then produce it. If you don't want to produce it, don't use it. So my view of all you people in your private jets, if you don't want oil to be produced in California that don't fly out of California, just don't do it. I go to the San Jose airport sometimes and I look at those. That looks like a whole U.S. air Force gulf Stream citations. They're just all out there. And most of those people are radical environmentalists thinking you better start producing oil to fuel that thing because I don't use it. And my friends and everybody I know in Selma doesn't use it. And we're for producing oil. Oil for you. So. But that's what we're talking about with this nihilism. It's, it's just angry, you know, it's like that. Rooting for the. What's the, Is it the. Are they rooting for the killer who shot the United Health CEO?

[Jack Fowler]

Well, we're going to talk about that a little later. Yeah, yeah.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Taylor Lorenz, I saw that. She said, I'm not rooting for him. The fact that I want somebody to, to pay the consequences doesn't mean I support. Yes, it does.

[Jack Fowler]

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[Victor Davis Hansen]

So anyway, we had our college presidents and they were three of them, mit, Penn and Harvard. And they were presented with the clear evidence of antisemitism and either could not or would not do anything. They remind me of people, you know, in the 1930s that said, what do you want me to do about it? And we have a 900 page report by four or five liberal professors at Stanford where I work, and they conclude that it's not safe physically or mentally healthy for a Jewish student to be on campus. And what were they going to do about it? They're not going to do anything because it's a matter of numbers that under the woke reparations type of admissions where you have these universities letting in 9%, 10% of the student body is white male or 20% white, as Stanford Braggs, or 30% as Yale. When you have those quotas, you're not going to have a lot of Jewish students. And when you're welcoming DEI and remember what Obama did, he got rid of the idea of the black white binary and historical affirmative action repertory efforts. And he included first Hispanics and then under the last two years of the Obama, they just said DEI is everybody who's not white. You can be a multimillionaire Brazilian, you can be, you know, you can be from the most corrupt family in Jamaica. You can be the Heir to a song cement fortune in Haiti, like Claudine Gay. But you're oppressed. And my point is, when you go and you make campuses with people who feel they're victims, and you make the Jewish student the ultra expression of white privilege vis a vis the Israel's settler colonial lie, and you set yourself up for a lot of people, especially from the Middle east, when you have what we have, 500,000 foreign students in our universities, they think it's open season because there's very few of them. The Jews have gone from about 25 in their heyday in the Ivy League campuses and comparable universities down to about, I don't know, 7 or 8%. And the middle east students have soared. There's a couple of things, though, that I think everybody should keep in mind. What makes people angry about this, and Trump kind of rode on this was another issue that Trump wrote to his success, is that they come over here to the extent they're green card holders or student visa holders, I'm not saying they all are. And then they attack this country and they use and enjoy its freedoms and they support a custom protocol culture that they don't want to be in. So it's almost like, I want your freedom of speech, I want your constitutional Bill of Rights protections. I want to be in a society where women have an equal opportunity. I want all of this, but I want to champion what, from a distance, what the values are among the Palestinian Authority, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Syrians, everywhere in the Middle East. If anybody can interrupt me and say, no, Victor, there's a lot of democracies in the Middle east other than Israel, just name them Turkey. I don't think so. So that's what gets people very angry, that they're such hypocritical people. And then they are so anti American in speech and comportment that you think, well, how can we help you get away from us? Just, we will pay your ticket to go back to the Middle East. Then you won't have to go out and occupy the Manhattan Bridge or defeat face a federal cemetery of veterans in Los Angeles or kill a Jewish man on the streets of la. We'll help you do that. You don't have to do that. Just go back and say, I finally got free of the Great Satan. I got rid of all my unpleasant experiences, I don't have to see any more Jews and I'm free to be back in the Middle. But they don't do that. Yeah, it's like the Boston City council member we were Talking about she pushes all of her anti American DEI buttons, but she's here and she's an immigrant. So that's what really gets people angry, that there's such a disparity between the protester in Europe and the United States and the advocate of free speech and horrific speech and what they are able to do. The other thing that gets people really angry is how many. If you're. There's 2 million. 2 million. 2 million Arab Israeli citizens. It's about 20% of the population, if not a little bit more. So if you're Jewish and you say, I would like to live in a historical area in the West Bank, I'm going to go buy a piece of property, you should do that. You have no protection. Does anybody really think that if you're an Arab Israeli, you're in much greater danger than a Jew is in an Arab country? I don't think so. It's this disparity. Everybody gets angry about the disparity that these people are going to write an intifada magazine about displaced people and we've got. Well, you're worried about the oppressed of the world that have been displaced. How about the wagers that have been taken out of their home and are in a camp? 2,1 million in China or the 20 or 30,000 Cypriots were injured or killed in 1974 and maybe the million of them that were displaced that are still can't go back into Turkish occupied Cyprus. Or how about the Volga Germans that were ethnically cleanse about the same time as the creation of Israel by Stalin? I could go on and on. How about the 14 million Germans, some of them were opposed to Hitler that walked back from East Prussia and eastern Germany when Stalin stole Poland and gave it to Western Ukraine and then they gave East Prussia to create Poland. Does anybody in Germany today say, oh, I'm a refugee from 19, 1947. That's when my family was forced out of my 500 year home in what is now Poland. Does the world sympathize? No, it's only the Palestinians are refugees and only the Jews are oppressors. Not the Chinese, not the Russians, not the Africans, not the Arabs who ethnically cleanse Jews. It's only the Jews. So that disparity is what drives people crazy about the whole issue. And we'll see. I think that the country that has the best chance of democratizing is Iran right now because as we talked in our earlier podcast, they are so humiliated that theocracy and they are so inept and they have spent so many hundreds of billions of dollars over the years funding Hezbollah and the Houthis and the Assad government and Hamas and and the per capita income standard of living is just retarded. It's retarding. It's from what it was. It's going backwards. So let's hope that maybe the Iranians will do what they did in 2009 under the auspices of Barack Obama, the Green Generation, where he sat mum for 11 days before he said a word.

[Jack Fowler]

Of encouragement fresh from his Nobel Prize.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Peaceful why are you guys doing this? We're trying to have a historical detente with your oppressing theocratic mullahs. You're just not on the right page. You can't be democratic. I've got to get credit for talking to the theocrats that hate us. That's what his position was.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, Victor, you mentioned a murder in the streets of New York, the CEO of United Healthcare, and the reaction to that, and we're going to get your reaction to that reaction when we come back from these important messages.

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[Jack Fowler]

We'Re back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor's got a website, thebladeofpersesvictorhanson.com go there and you will find links to so many things. Victor's appearances on other podcasts or shows, the archives of these podcasts, to his weekly essays for American greatness, his syndicated column, to his books and to the Ultra articles, which are the pieces two or three times a week that Victor writes exclusively for the Blade of Perseus. To read them and you're going to want to read them because you're a fan of Victor, you need to subscribe $5 a month discounted for the full year at $50. And while I'm telling you about Victor things, if you're on X, his handle is Dhansen. And Victor writes essentially a mini essay every week on X and on Facebook, the the VDH's Morning Cup. And there's a great group there, the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club. You might want to check check them out. So Victor Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, murdered in the streets of New York last week by an assassin. Between now when we're recording and when the show is out on the 12th, that person may have been found. There's lots of clues, evidence anyway, leading to hopefully his capture. But okay, good, good, we want that to happen. But the immediate reaction from so many you mentioned Taylor Lorenz and many others on social media, just disgusting, sinful, satanic snark. Any thoughts? Victor?

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Well, I mean she said right after she said and people wonder why we want, we want these executives dead right after this person was shot. And then when they Had a backlash on social media. She said, I use the we. I didn't mean me. I just said we as a country. But we don't want them dead as a country. It was her and people like her. And then that was proven and reified when people joined in and commented, yeah, you're right, we do want them dead. And it was the party of peace, the kumbaya group on the left. But the point is that there is no such thing anymore. This left wing movement as we see with the 120 days of murder and arson and, and looting and destruction in 2020, as we see all over the world, it's coming from the left right now. The antisemitism in the United States. This is not a kumbaya party. They feel that any means necessary are justified because they want diversity, equity, inclusion and equity. Equity is what I'm getting at, an equality of result. So in their view, they don't want to know about, I'm sure that health concerns can be too profitable, they give their managers too much money. But basically under our system we have the one place in the world that develops most of the drugs that save people's lives whether you like it or not. And in their way of thinking, they should all be free for everybody and you should never, yeah, get sick in.

[Jack Fowler]

Canada, get really sick in Canada and see what happens.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

They don't understand the principle of insurance too. As I was talking to these local insurance people, as I said this last week, and whether it's fire insurance on homes in California or it's property liability or it's car insurance, no one can afford it anymore. So when she says the insurance companies, well, they just, they're not. Many of them are losing money. I don't know if the health carers are, but other people are. And some of the problem is fraudulent claims and lack of state efforts to put out fires. And they just said, you know what? We don't believe California will put out forest fires and save people's homes. We don't believe that the system really cares about preemptive efforts to stop natural to disasters. We don't believe the California population basically is completely honest. We believe that a person in California is more liable than other places to light his kitchen on fire or ram somebody in the parking lot and say that he was hit. So we're just not going to deal with you. Whether it's true or not, we don't care. We're not going to deal with you. So on healthcare, one of the reasons it's going up is I think it's Obamacare and it's the socialization of men and the lack of competition. So that. And that's one thing. But I can tell you in California that my life as a patient has radically changed because every time I go into a specialist, I don't wait 40 minutes. I can wait an hour, an hour and a half, and the room is full of people who are obviously not US citizens. And if you're taking 12 million people that have never had a healthcare provider and you're adding them to another 20 million who've never had a health provider, and there's now not. I was told that a reader pointed out that there was not 63 million non US born, but 80 million. Now, those are enormous numbers. We're letting it. We let in 12 San Francisco under Biden, 12 times 12 cities the size of San Francisco. And somebody has to handle that because we're a fair and just society that offers parity. So, yes, there's a lot of costs for health insurance. Just go into my hometown early morning out of the United Healthcare and see people in line waiting to get in. And who pays for that? Who should pay for that? But. But that's what she was. She doesn't think about anything. It's just, you know, and I speaking at somebody who'd been denied coverage on certain things, and I didn't always have good health insurance until, you know, recently. So it's.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, it may be the broader health issue and Robert Kennedy, etc. My wife, who did all the shopping and still does the shopping, but we had five kids, so there's less shopping now. But she would always get behind somebody with.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Don't get me started.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah, I know. I'm sorry.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Rick did.

[Jack Fowler]

I'm sorry.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Cold food for less. And I was behind. I wasn't behind, but I was within distance of looking at shopping carts, and there was seven or eight, and only one did not have soft drinks. And there was not any Diet Coke. Not that Diet Coke's healthy. It was all fructose corn, corn drinks.

[Jack Fowler]

I mean, we have an obese diabetic nation.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Yeah. I go in there and I say to myself, is there 10% of people that are not obese? And the answer is no. Almost everybody there is obese. And so everybody has a responsibility to try to be healthy. Not just to be productive and live, but to keep the cost down for other people. I try to go as little as possible to a doctor. I really do. Just because you don't want to just jam up the system when you're really going to need it. Then you go, but you know, I know that's not wise, but you've got to there's so many people that are coming into the system for the first time and they're taxing the system and then the people are blaming people that run the system. And maybe they are not coupled, but some of them obviously, I don't know about the United Healthcare CEO, but I did notice that in the media they're trying to demonize him. They get into his personal relationship with his estranged wife or separate wife as if he was some kind of demon and he was a middle he had.

[Jack Fowler]

It coming to him is the essence.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

He had it coming. That's what Taylor Lorenz was basically saying. With people like this, what do you expect? So there you go.

[Jack Fowler]

Any means necessary Victor I want to talk about another depressing thing, fema. But first, want to take note of our good friends at best. Hotgrill.com Football's back. So is tailgating. And whether it's Friday night lights Saturday, college or pro Sundays, Solaire Tailgate Infrared Grills Set up fast. Heat up quickly, only three minutes to searing hot temperatures. Just like the big backyard Solaire's on which Victor cooks steaks. A Solaire grill will make you the master of the tailgater with the juiciest, most flavorful food in the parking lot. And the fast grilling times leave you more time to enjoy the pre game festivities. They also cool down fast so that you won't miss a minute of the game. The USA made Solaire anywhere, everywhere and all about Infrared grills are portable and perfect for any grilling on the go. From picnics to camping RVs to boating, but especially tailgating. Amaze your tailgating friends with the great food you grill with your Solaire Infrared Grill. Learn more about these fantastic grills and Solaire's Try before you buy Demo rental program at best hot grill.com that's best hot grill.com besthotgrill.com and we thank the good people at Solaire for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor I haven't been to a tailgate in a long time, but I did go to a footprint. I may have mentioned this once before. I went to a Yale football game as a guest of my old friend Dick Morris. That Dick Morris. Yeah, and his family. And they put on. Oh my gosh, it was terrific. What a spread. There's nothing like a great tailgate. You won't tailgate in the hills of North Carolina. So James O'Keefe he of the video has is doing a series right now uncovering the ongoing FEMA horrific response to Hurricane Helene. And if I may, I talked to my old friend Neil Freeman and Neil has been affiliated with National Review and Bill Buckley. Neil was the first producer of Firing Line. Neil was Bill Buckley's aide on his top aide on his when he ran for mayor in 1965. I have, I have the poster behind me here of Bill's mayoral campaign. Neil. Neil lives near Asheville, which was pretty much decimated. But up in the mountains of North Carolina, they've been devastated too. And still two months plus after Victor pathetic response from fema. And we've seen these stories also of, of officials disallowing certain kind of homes, forcing people to live in tents. It's a frickin. It's winter is here, you know, is upon us.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

So the response, it's a demographic.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah. Maybe they had it coming to them too. I don't know.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Some of them have Trump signed. That's a mortal sin. But the point is they're east Palestinians, right. They're people from East Palestine. And Pete Buttigieg was scared to go there for months when they had that toxic cloud. But Biden, I don't know. Did he ever go? I don't think Harris would feel comfortable there. So there is a particular demographic in this country and that's open season on and that is the lower to middle class. I don't see I don't mean class by any accurate description of them. Just talking about economic. I'm talking about income levels and people who make less than 30 or 40,000 a year who happen to be white and they happen to be members of the working classes and they happen to be as rural as they are urban and they happen to often be not on the two coast and more to the south than to the north. But there are people, as you know, in upstate New York where you live and where I live in the San Joaquin Valley, that are dire poor in that demographic. But the Uni party has decided that that particular group can carry all of the sins of all of the complaints of the left. In other words, when you say white as Millie was talking about white rage and white oppression and white supremacy and what we hear in these indoctrination courses that we all put up with in the university, the white bicoastal elite feels exempt from any complaint about their illiberality because they can say no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's those guys. It's the deplorables. It's the dregs, it's the chumps, it's the irredeemables, it's the clingers, it's the garbage. That's who it is. And once you've demonized that whole demographic, then nobody cares. So they just basically said it's kind of a bad, it's kind of a mountainous area. There's a bunch of poor white people up there, they don't like us. I don't really want to go in there. And pretty much that person who they fired for warning people not to lend assistance to a Trump, she kind of encapsulated that, said that it was not her, that it was common policy. And then she came up with the perfect victim victimizer paradigm where she said, well, I'm not a victimizer. Those people are dangerous, they might be armed. It was just to protect our workers. I was just concerned. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that demographic is, as I said, the dispossessed. And the only time we want those people around is you want to go to a hell hole like Fallujah or you want to go to Helmand province or. On the first time I was sort of embedded in a blackhawk and I looked up on my right and here's a 19 year old that fit that demographic perp with a 50 caliber machine gun with no protection at all, flying at night on a blackhawk. Or when I was embedded the second time when I talked to one of these soldiers, that's who goes there and that's who at double their number. And so that's the only time people want them. And now they're not joining. But that is. It's very strange how we romanticize every other group and then we demonize this one particular group. And believe me, that particular group is as disliked and dislikes the white bicoastal elite. They're not racist people. If you ask somebody from that area or areas in the Oklahoma diasporas, do you get along more with a Mexican American guy you work at the plant with or a Nancy Pelosi type of person, they will tell you the person they work with the plant with. And that's what Donald Trump, that was his genius. For all of the political science professors who said it was impossible, he did substitute class solidarity for racial tribalism. And a lot of black people look at that. They're more empathetic, I think, to stuff like that. The white lower class than the white wealthy people are because they could see they're in the same boat.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, the best trump card, a white liberal could play was I'm not a racist. And if racism is being downgraded as an arbitrating thing, they've lost their cachet, they've lost their Trump, the value of their Trump.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

You always have to have Daniel Penneys that have no money, a Marine veteran, then you can go after him or you can go after the non existent white men maga thugs that were ghosts that didn't exist, that attacked Juicy Smollett or the Lacrosse spoil brats or the Covington working class Catholic kids. You always have to, if you're a white progressive elite, you always have to find one person that you can virtue signal and performance art that they are racist. And then you tell your Hispanic and black elite, oh, I mean I'm even more, I'm more muscular on racial issues than you are. I condemn these people because I know them because I'm white. No, you don't know them at all. Here is about. They are much more close. They understand Mexican and black people the same economic circumstances much better than they want to understand or do understand you. Yeah, somebody said once to me, I think I repeated it. I won't mention the person. He's pretty well known. He said, if you think about it, most of the pathologies in the United States, past and present, grew up and were disseminated by white wealthy people who are never. That's why I always say never subject to the consequences of their ideology. But basically he was saying white academics, white media, quite corporately. Yeah, they're the ones that design all of these things. And why they do is an object of mystery. Whether it's to deflect their own guilt because they live quite segregationist and privileged and secluded lives from hoi polloi. Maybe that's it. They find inner penance by attacking other white people who are not racist and calling them racist. Or maybe they just don't like poor people and most of the people in the United States who are poor by numbers are white. I don't know what it is, but they do not feel comfortable.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, fighting racism is. And Shelby Steele has written about this. It's always about the, it's about the white liberal and how they feel about themselves.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

He was so far ahead of everybody and I don't think people understood the profoundity of what he was saying. He wasn't simplistic at all. He examined the mindset and the mentality of a self satisfied, sanctimonious white affluent liberal and all the damage he does to this country by mandating all these other programs that he knows will be pernicious to the people who participate, but which will bring him psychic satisfaction at a safe distance.

[Jack Fowler]

Well Victor, we've got one last big topic to get your thoughts on and it's sort of along the lines of what we just talking about. We could add the muscular classes here to the type of people disdained by our elites. And Joni Ernst, the senator from Iowa has a report about working from home. Muscular classes can't work from home, they have to work from work. We're going to get your thoughts about her report report when we come back from these final important messages.

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[Jack Fowler]

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show recording on Saturday, December 7th. This particular episode should be up on Thursday, December 12th. Joni Ernst has a report released yesterday or the day before. It's titled out of Office Bureaucrats on the beach and in Bubble Baths, but not in Office Buildings. In fact, I'm going to read a chunk or two here from the executive summary. Bureaucrats have been found in a bubble bath on the golf course running their own business and even getting busted doing crime while on t taxpayer dime. Members of President Biden's own cabinet claim to be on the clock while being out of office and unreachable. Just 3% of the federal workforce teleworked daily prior to the COVID 19 pandemic. Today, 6% of workers report in person on a full time basis, while nearly one third are entirely remote. Most federal employees are eligible to network to telework and 90% of those are. One other thing I just want to put here from her audits are finding as many as 23 to 68% of teleworking employees for some agencies are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay. Some employees live more than 2,000 miles away from their office, but in cheaper places than where they're claiming they live. Victor, this is a I'm so happy she Joni Ernst did this report. This gets in line, of course, with the doge efforts that Elon Musk and Vikram Swami are promoting. Also, Victor oddly gets in line a little bit with I think your thoughts about, you know, why does everything have to be centralized in Washington? It's two different questions. Coming to the office every day is.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Well, I think they're setting them up for two reasons. They're setting themselves up. Number one, Ramaswamy and Musk want to cut and everybody said, you know, we're already lean. Well, this just proves their point. A and B, they want to decentralize, as you said. They want to take the the FBI cash said that he wants to put the headquarters somewhere in the center like Kansas. So if they already they've already granted that argument by saying we're not going to come to work and we don't. All these buildings in Washington are empty, so we don't need them. So why not disperse them closer to where people want to live and maybe the federal workforce would be happier. So put the Department of Agriculture in Fresno, put the Department of Energy in Houston, put the Department of Interior in Salt Lake, put, as I said, the FBI, put it in Kansas City, put the CIA, I don't know, Miami or something. But get them out of Washington and then maybe Virginia would turn into a normal place again as far as its housing prices and blue state lockstep mine think group. Everything good would accrue from it. And if you have a bunch of federal people that are trying not to go to their offices in Washington, then just get out. Same thing with the federal workers in general. I mean these will be that when they start cutting, everybody should put on your seat belt because you're not going to. If they cut half of what they say they're going to cut and they make these changes on the border, you have not seen what's going to happen. You can have 12 million people come in here illegal and they've only been here three and a half years. You can have 500,000 unaccounted minors under Joe Biden. You can have 400,000 convicted felons. You can have a million and a half people who have already been deported with all the paperwork done. But when you start deporting a few people, CNN is going to rush down there. This is this young little kid. It has to go back to Mexico. They won't tell you about the parents. They won't tell you anything. And that is going to be the narrative. And you're going to see some federal employee. I worked for the federal government for 28 years. Years. And I can't. And I've lost my job. And it's going to be very hard to continue that hundred first hundred days we talked about. They're going to have to do it.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah. You know, I just wonder, Victor, about. You mentioned the narrative and yeah, there's a narrative and there's still not an unpowerful media. But I just wonder if people, the I don't give a rat's patoot what see CBS News, NBC, etc. Have to say.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I hope so that and I hope it's. They've had the same experience as I have had with the Homeland Security people, national transportation, the people at the airports. You know, when you go in there and the line is a quarter mile long out the door and you see 15 people just sitting around talking before they want to open up another line to get in through security or you go to the dmv, state office and there's A line out the door and you see 15 windows and five of them are open.

[Jack Fowler]

That airport thing, you sound like Josh Hawley. Did you. I mentioned this to you. Josh Hawley was channeling Victor Davis Hansen in part the other day when a number of the executives from most of the airlines were testifying before Congress. And he just reamed them left and right. Generally about the very poor experience. What a poor experience it is to travel in America today.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I talked about it. I said to myself, what are the most incomprehensible things you could think? And whether it's, I have an hour connection in Dallas, I get into a plane and the guy takes off and said, oh, by the way, we didn't have enough fuel in Fresno. We're going to Stockton to fill up. Or I'm flying back from Chicago at 11 at night to Fresno. And the guy says, hey, Fresno doesn't have enough fuel. We're just going to spend an hour in Denver to top off our tanks to get back here tomorrow. And then you stay there three hours or you go with and there's somebody screaming and yelling and you know, arguing and arguing and arguing and arguing and arguing and no one stops her from screaming. Are you suddenly on your way to. I won't mention a couple of my favorite cities, but there's 25 people with wheelchairs to get on the plane and then all of a sudden they get cured halfway through the flight when they have to meet a connection, they want to get out to the curb and suddenly there's no wheelchairs. Or they tell you, they tell people, the Fresno airport, do not take this, this is a Canadian regional jet. Do not take a big lower back in for the. Please check it. And then you get in, you have a close connection and there's all these people with this one and a half foot clearance. They got a three foot thing and they think this square peg is going to fit in a round hole. And then they kind of, oh, oh, what's going to happen? And they say, we told you not to check it in. You know what I mean? It's just everything about it. Or, you know, I was on a plane not too long ago and we were, we came in 20 minutes early, but we ended up getting off 20 minutes late because they couldn't find a birth. And then when we did find the birth, I think anybody in the plane could have parked the skybridge better than the person was operating. I felt bad for him. He just kept bouncing off the plane. He could not connect. And you think if you have 300 people on this plane. Wouldn't you think you could have one person that could connect? So the whole thing is a mess. And the only reason that people are not dying like flies is it's all kind of automated now. It's much safer the planet in the sense that they have autopilots and they're kind of like electric cars and transponders and they can find the airport signals. They almost fly themselves. But you do need these great pilots when you get into bad weather or tricky landing conditions. But other than that, we're very lucky that the technology is saving us from ourselves, because these airlines are poorly run and they're arrogant, too.

[Jack Fowler]

Victor, what was the. What was your record for the most wheelchairs you've seen?

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I think I gave myself away. 17. Yeah, that was 17. And the other day I was in Fresno. They've kind of stopped it, though, a little bit. I give them credit. I was on a flight and there was only six. And I think they have to have a doctor's excuse or some. Something, because before it was just incredible. They all got in wheelchairs, and it was so patently that they just wanted to get the overhead space, you know what I mean, for huge things. And then they would go there and then they would get out of the wheelchair and walk and then they would run off the plane. I mean, I'm not in every case, but it's just. It's pushing so poorly. Run. You think that they just said to everybody, if you check your bags in, it's free, and if you don't check your bags in, you're going to have to pay a premium. Then you would board in half the time.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Or if they just told people what to do before they boarded. You have to go in there. You have to shut your. Everybody shut your phone off before you go in. Everybody will not be on a phone when you're trying to board. But these are simple things they can't do. And then the people, you know, I can't believe these. Have you seen these 50s commercials? Every once in a while they're on the Internet of, you know, Pan Am, a 1962 or something like that. Everybody's dressed like they're going to wedding, and the planes are very dangerous in that period, but very clean. And you go in now and it's like the Greyhound bus station. I mean, I. It's either yoga. It's either yoga pants where I fly. It's either yoga pants or sweatsuits, and it's some type of very smelly food. You know what I mean? Like a foot long hot dog with all this dressing on it that people pull out of their purse or something. And it's just like the bleachers at a baseball game. That reminds me of the depot at Amtrak in Fresno.

[Jack Fowler]

Something's wrong with America when Jack Fowler is the best dressed guy on an airplane.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Or me. Or me. I was on a flight not too long ago and there was a woman that came in and I was in business class and she looked like she was so well dressed with one of those thousand dollar professional power suits, you know she had on. Yeah. And she had her hair turned. Very attractive. Young woman, about 40, professional. She had a valise, you know, and one of those. Ever seen those guys on the plane? They open it up their suitcase and it has about 17 little compartments.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

And they have, you know, towelettes, they have hand cleaner, they have pens, computers, every type of a curtain. She had all that and then she was looking at me and she pulled out these towelettes and I swear to God, she scrubbed the tray, she scrubbed the drink tray, she got up and scrubbed the seat, she scrubbed the screen ahead of her, she scrubbed everything. And I just was laughing and she kind of gave me a dirty look and I just said it's no use, it's no use. You're in a germ factory. So I wouldn't. I don't even cry. She did start smiling. She thought that was funny.

[Jack Fowler]

That which does not kill me makes me stronger maybe. Hey Victor, We've come to the end of this particular episode. I just want to thank our listeners for listening and for those particularly on Apple, who rate the show zero to five stars. And Victor gets five stars from practically everyone. Thanks for taking the time to do that.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

It's a very good time to be alive. It really is. It's a very exciting time. And we all watch with anticipation what's going to happen on January 20th. But for the first time in a long, long time, I think we all have justified hopes that the madness is waning and the nihilism is ending and we have a chance to make America healthy and great again.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, Santa Claus is coming. So maybe he's got a big. Maybe he's got the greatness in his bag.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I remember winter was coming, the Game of Thrones, that's what I felt like. Winter is coming. But now I feel it's summons enchanted evening.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah, well, listen, Victor, I got one thing I got to read here from. Because someone left a comment on Apple and they're praising you and it's titled Friendships plural by Mitch 1762 and he writes. Dr. Hansen, I really loved your thoughts on friendship. Friends are the family we choose. I've been blessed with quite a few 40 plus year friendships. As you said, they don't grow without cultivation. If you're in the market for another friend, I would enjoy being yours. Thank you for your thoughtful and measured mini lectures on our daily happenings and your history lessons. You are a gift to us, Mitch.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

That is such. When you're young, you don't appreciate them. But I've had lifelong friends and one of my closest and oldest is Bruce Thornton. I try to talk to him every week. And I have three old friends. I mentioned Charles Gerges was ill and I feel really bad. I haven't seen him lately. And then I have my closest friend from graduate school, Larry Woodlock, and I have to see him. I know that he's disappointed in me because he thinks I went probably to the dark side. And then my co author, John Heath, who was a beautiful writer. We just haven't connected. And three or four years. I try to call once in a while, but you have to develop once you have good friends and they're tried and true, you have to make the effort to make sure those friendships persist. And you can't be hypersensitive. You have to be the one to make the approach and work at it.

[Jack Fowler]

I totally agree. I have a great friends, Ken and Lisa and the friends of Sharon and mine from high school. And they, guess what, Victor? They are huge fans of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Victor Davis Hansen, everybody try to work on friendship. I have a lot of friends at Hillsdale College, at Pepperdine, at Hoover. And I've been very blessed with good friends. So I try to work on it. I don't mean work distasteful, but you just can't get caught up in yourself. Yeah, you've got to develop.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, you're. You're easy to be a friend with Victor, because there's no diva in you. There's a little Eeyore in you, but there's no divas.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I'm getting over the Eeyore. Somebody said that to me. Somebody said, this is the first time I've seen your teeth in five years.

[Jack Fowler]

All right, on that note, thanks everybody. We'll be back with another episode soon of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye.