← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
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- [00:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [00:33]
Jack
Texts like a shared inbox.
- [00:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [01:47]
Jack
Hello ladies. Hello gentlemen. Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen show. Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He is a military historian, a classicist, a philologist, a farmer, professor. I don't know what you're not. Victor. Everything.
- [02:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
The hardest of all is farming. Yeah, much harder than being a professor or even a writer. It's the hardest thing in the world.
- [02:17]
Jack
Someone put a picture of you. Someone yesterday on Twitter. Maybe it was today. A picture of you from one of your earlier, earliest books. Of you on the phone in a very dirty outfit.
- [02:31]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, that was a New York photographer for the Free Press. Oh no, you know what? That. Excuse me, that was Jane Smiley wrote a review of. She wrote a review of a book that I wrote. It wasn't the other Greeks. It was Fields without Dreams. And it was very complimentary. She later hated my guts and wanted to retract her preface to the land was everything but Fields. Out Dreams is about losing money and farming. All the people are met and they've sent this photographer out. And as I remember, I picked her up at the new the Fresno air terminal. But I was I was working on the farm, and so I got off a tractor, drove up, got her, and then I said, I will get dressed. Just stay here outside. She said, no, no, no, no, no. You got to be like this. So I just took it like that.
- [03:19]
Jack
Yeah. If that was an everyday picture of you, I would just think, oh, my gosh, what does it mean to be a friend?
- [03:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
I was in bat when I. I was 25. I got my PhD. I came back and I did not cut my hair or shave for about a year. And then I just farmed the whole time. And I looked at my Social Security. I always do that. When they see, you know, your prior salaries. Do you ever get that thing?
- [03:41]
Jack
Yes.
- [03:42]
Victor Davis Hanson
And 80. 80. 1980 was 6100, 7200, 4500. But it was kind of a good time. I had. We had canned, dried every. We had all these canned food. We did. We had dried tomatoes for the year. We did all that stuff. We. We dried all of our apricots, our figs, and when we. We preserved them and lived on nothing. I had about five cars. I had a 1970 V6 Dodge pickup. I had a 1964 Volvo. I had a 1968 Ranchero. Remember those? And it had a 289 V8 in it. I had a. My dad bought it wreck for me. It was a Pontiac LeMans 1972. So I had like four. Yeah, I had like. Oh, and I also had a nineteen nineteen sixty seven Buick Riviera that my uncle sold to me for two thousand dollars. I paid him off by the month. And I had all these cars here. I had five of them. And then I would. When one would go bad, I would use the other. And then there was always two that weren't working. And there was a lot of guys that on the farm that were really good mechanics, and I learned a lot from them. So I kind of, you know, I would change generators and carburetors, but I got them all running. And then one day, my wife and three kids were in a town, a country town, Reedley. And it was like 105. And the car broke down on the railroad track as they were passing. And it was that huge electro boat. So I said, that's it. And I got liquidated all of them for maybe $900. And then I went out and bought a Mazda van on credit. That was the first new car I'd had.
- [05:40]
Jack
You know, your life would have been so much easier as a farmer if you could only follow the Michael Bloomberg drop a seed.
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Victor Davis Hanson
What did he say drop a seed?
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Jack
Stick your finger in the ground, Drop a seed.
- [05:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I wrote about. I was merciless to him when he, when I said that. When I see these guys farming, you talk to them. They are expert welders, they are expert mechanics, they are expert truck drivers, they are extra tractor drivers, they are expert agronomists, they're expert accountants, they're financial planners. You know, you talk to them, the guys that really know what they're doing there, it's something. Gosh, I'm not talking about the corporate agribusiness, Those guys are smart too. But I'm just talking about the guy that does everything on his own property and there's not very many left of them. Kind of like independent truck drivers. You know those guys that have their own truck, My father. And they know how to fix it and they know they have little calculators in their mind about the price of gas and the price it costs them per mile. Perch the load.
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Jack
I would stay also on top of every state, they had to buy the amount of gas for that state. So if you were driving halfway across the country, you had to juggle all these numbers.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I used to talk to those guys that would transport fruit all the way from California to the New York supermarkets and they would tell me about the idiosyncratic state gas prices, rules, how much it was costing them, where they slept, which truck stop. But they had it all down to the bottom line.
- [07:03]
Jack
Yeah.
- [07:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
Anytime you have somebody who's independent like that, they're really valuable in a consensual society because you need at least a minority, minority of the population. Outspoken, eccentric, self employed. Right. That was what was weird about Trump is that he had that background that he had dealt with. No offense about your home city, Jack, but crooked politicians, crooked social activists, crooked environmentalists, crooked city politicians, crooked union, all of them.
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Jack
Right.
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Victor Davis Hanson
And how to build a building with dealing with all those people, I don't know. But he did.
- [07:38]
Jack
He did. They couldn't fix the rink at Central Park. He said, give me. He did it in like five minutes. Hey, Victor. We're going to stick to agriculture and actually agro terrorism. We had tried in our previous recording. I said we were going to talk about this Chinese communist madness and Gordon Chang had some thoughts. So we're going to get your thoughts on that, Victor. We have, hopefully we can get to. We got a lot of things to talk about. High speed rail in California. Douglas Murray has a great column on leftists, martyrs and University of Florida. A big to do down there. With the election of a president. So we'll get to all these things first with the ChiCom efforts to kill us by food or kill our food when we come back from these initial important messages.
- [08:33]
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- [10:21]
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- [11:47]
Jack
We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I don't think I mentioned your website, the blade of Perseus. Victorhansen.com later on, I'll tell you why you should be subscribing to Victor. Also, I'm not sure, I think maybe you possibly talked about this a little with the great Sammy Wink. But Gordon Chang, who is a I'm sure many of our viewers and listeners know him, he's on Fox a lot. He writes a lot, writes for the Epoch Times, all sorts of he's on.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Our military history working group, too, at the Hoover Institution.
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Jack
That's right. He writes for Strategic Frequency.
- [12:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
He's been one of our foundational members.
- [12:24]
Jack
Yeah. Well, here's a piece on FOX News about this, these Chinese students smuggling in this bioterrorism and a couple things quickly. He says, you know, they should be sent to Guantanamo Bay. They're terrorists. But he also makes a larger point that what this is evidence of to him is a de facto people's war. People's war is a very specific thing to China, but against, against the U.S. i mean, I think essentially saying they're, they're at war with us.
- [12:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, he used that term and that was specifically to the Maoist revolution against the Kang Shek government. And it denotes the idea there's no separation between civilian and military, that it's the people who each according to their task and ability, enlist in the noble cause. So what he's saying is that I'm just extrapolating here, but whether or not these two and they had, they had formerly been, I think, students at the University of Michigan and they had Lab rights there. And I think one of them was still an employee. And then the girlfriend fled back to China. But they were introducing this deadly fungus that was kind of like a last of us scenario that would destroy wheat and grain, soy and other staple crops of the heartland of America, but it was also toxic to humans, liver damage, et cetera. And they were implanting it in hopes that they would cause famine. And his point was it was kind of irrelevant, whether not irrelevant, but you don't really have to ascertain the fingerprints of the Chinese Communist Party on that operation, because when people leave China to come here and when they depart here to go back, they are interrogated by the Chinese Communist Party and all the information they glean, by statute, they are compelled to divulge what they know about the United States. And they are briefed before they get here. And in many cases, that creates a kind of a freelancing, independent. I'm going to get points with the Communist Party. And they think up plans on their own, which are usually coordinated, but not always. And there's always a subtext to the Chinese balloon story, or there's always a subtext to this. And we've discussed it. About 12 miles from here in Reedley, California, we had a city build its small town, agro town, And a person was driving by, connected with the government, city government. He saw some leak out of a packing house. It was where I had actually worked for a few weeks when I was 17. Lo and behold, they went in there and the first thing they saw was, I think, 200 dead lab engineered rats. Those are engineered rats, so they have the same DNA as human lungs and stuff, so they can experiment. And then they found these vials of, gosh, they were malaria. They were Covid. They were. They were every toxic chemical. And it was, quote, unquote, a Chinese affiliated company that was supposed to be competing with vaccination contracts, but it didn't sound like that. And they had been boarded up in Fresno and they had fled to what they felt would be an obscure location in a rural community. But here in this very safe, stable Readley, which is wonderful town, my wife is from that, from Reedley. And it was, my gosh, they had a toxic biochemical lab basically right in the middle of it, run by a Chinese national with a checkered financial and maybe criminal history. And it was kind of like these agro terrorists. And then just about a month ago, Jack, the Stanford Review ran a series of articles. That's the conservative newspaper. They were brilliant journalistic pieces by students and they basically interrogated Chinese students. And Stanford, like Harvard has about 25 to 30% of the students are foreign nationals. And there had been stories, as you know, that the Kennedy School of Government, it was kind of ironic, they trained many of the Chinese Communist Party apparat and we've had people that go over to China and they remark that they see these Chinese people brag about their perfect English and their heart. They compete with each. I went to Harvard. No, I went to Brown, I went to Stanford. That kind of American snobbery. But they're die hard communists and they come over here as children of the apparat to be educated and pay 110% tuition, room and board, make about 400 million a year for Harvard. But at Stanford it's even more dangerous because we are located a in a large Chinese American community where they feel they can blend in and not be detected. The espionage element. Small percentage, but a large number in actual numbers. And then in addition to that they have the protection of the campus. And then they are sitting next to $9 trillion in market capitalization of Silicon Valley. So they have all this technology they can appropriate. And the bottom line, this investigative series of articles in the Stanford Review was they interviewed people and they basically said yeah, there's students at Stanford and we are engaged in technological theft and espionage. And they explained why and they were debriefed when they get back and they were prepped before they came. And this was juxtaposed to the Stanford's history. We had, as I said on an earlier broadcast a few years ago, not much, much years ago, but a few, I think four years, six years ago, we had a People's Liberation army colonel who was a visiting professor of neuropsychiatry or something and was. And then we had a Confucius Institute that was a hub and then we had several million dollars of Chinese gifting that was not fully reported to the Betsy DeVos Department of Education. And this poses this question. There's over a million foreign students in the United States and given the selectivity of our elite campuses, in business programs, in PhD programs, in medical school, in law school, in government programs, we why are we privileging these people from illiberal, autocratic and anti American regimes? They can be from Iran, they can be from the west bank, they can be from Gaza, they can be from Syria, they can be from Iraq, they can be from communist China. Why are we bringing these people here? And the answer is they pay a premium and they are a money making source of revenue for these elite Universities and more importantly, they bring with them a hostile anti Americanism, at least maybe not individually, but their home nations insist upon it kind of dovetails with the ideology present on the campuses. And so this is a very emotional issue because when you talk about when Donald Trump talks to Harvard or Stanford or any of these campuses about the danger of unaudited foreign students from illiberal regimes and the twofer that happens, A, they appropriate scientific knowledge or government secrets and B, they being maybe 1% of a million 10,000 maybe and or maybe 5%. And then second, they go back with that expertise and use that expertise in government that is hostile to the US and why are we doing this when we have all this talent here that would love to go to Harvard Business School or Stanford Law School or, you know, the PhD program in physics and stuff. And I don't understand it. Yeah, I really don't.
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Jack
Maybe a little.
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Victor Davis Hanson
And that what I just said, if you say that, then you are dubbed a nativist xenophobe protectionist. You're just pilloried and caricatured. But it's a real problem. It really is.
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Jack
I think it has a more acute sense that even at a state university here at you in Connecticut, University of Connecticut, probably not the percentage of students from China as there are at Stanford or Harvard. But I don't know, Victor, my taxes are paying for this school system in this state. I would like to think there is a benefit of the doubt for the, for the students of this state to go to the University of Connecticut. But you're right, if they're paying full freight from China, they're going to take care of me.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I won't mention that the university I taught as a visiting professor a few years back for a number of years. And the person who hired me is no longer alive. So it's not a reference to the current administration of this particular university. That's wonderful. And this guy was a wonderful person. But I was teaching a graduate seminar and I had maybe 50% of the class was, are mainland Chinese students and very affluent. And the idea that I could go over to China, even if I'd spent five years trying to learn Mandarin and compete and it would be impossible for me. And I'm supposedly a linguist or a philologist, but so they didn't have good English capability. So when I gave a test, they would just naturally, under exam conditions, just group together, right? And they would just discuss things in Chinese and I would have to break them up and say, no, no, you can't do that. And they said, well, we're Chinese. And I said, you can't do that. And then I would go talk to the administrator, and he said, my hands are tied. These people pay a premium room, board, and tuition. And so I liked them all, but they were just oblivious. It was like. And you could tell that they were very, very wealthy and entitled, and they were not going to listen to some peon professor tell them they couldn't do this.
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Jack
Yeah.
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Victor Davis Hanson
And then this administrator said to me, well, Victor, do you feel that their collaborative effort increases their score? I said, no. I mean, they have so much linguistic difficulties that you're talking about some person getting an F, some person getting a C minus and D. And then basically it was, could you give them a C or B minus? So that was disturbing. And then I came to, like, a couple. I never understood, by the way, whether they were brother and sister or boyfriend and girlfriend or operative agents or what. But they were just inseparable. But they would come for advice and they would say to me, this is a very dangerous place. Could you. And they had a little map on their phone and said, point out the places that you wouldn't go to in Los Angeles. I just said I wouldn't go to any of them myself. But then they wanted to know which car they should buy. And they asked me to compare the BMW, the Range Rover, and the Mercedes. Oh, nice. And I said I had no idea they were out of my. And then, like a week later, the young woman drove up in a beautiful Mercedes and asked me. And she said, I really want to thank you for picking this out. I said. I didn't say anything. I said, they're beyond my payment. And she said, well, I was going to buy a Mercedes, and you didn't object. So I thought that was approval. But my point was, I said, well, how do you afford this? And she said, my father is a very important man in China, in our province, provincial official. And so you get the impression there's a lot of people from the Middle east and from China that are not representative of those countries, that they mirror image the elite of American. But the difference is that our elite come out of a consensual society. And their elite, to be an elite, have to cut deals with autocratic governments, and they're basically owned by those governments. And they're here not on private money, but on money that's either, quote, unquote, public or extorted from the public. It's not healthy. It's not healthy. And I'm not a xenophobe. Or anything. But there's no reason why you would have 20 to 30% of the population at these very elite graduate programs and even undergraduate when you have 340 million Americans and a lot of them are underprivileged and they would do just as well on competitive SAT or GRE or LSAT or msat. So I just don't understand it. I don't. It's just baffling. And this is what you get University of Michigan affiliated agro terrorists or Stan Stanford PLA operatives or Fang Fang, who came up to my office and told me, as I remember, and I want to be careful because somebody should check it. But as I remember, she told me she either. I think she graduated from Cal State Hayward because she had a Valley girl accent. She turned down like that after a halting American accent. I saw the other day, just in reference to Fang Feng, who was kind of the flack for the San Francisco consulate and was a busybody, apparently, because that's what she informed me, that she went to all the political organizations meetings in the Bay Area. But did you see where Eric Swalwell was referencing her? And he said he was proud of that. Did he say that?
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Jack
No, I saw him being commented on.
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Victor Davis Hanson
But yeah, he said something that he was not ashamed of his liaison or something. God, he's a buffoon. Charlemagne. The God really kind of tore into him. That's. Isn't that a contrast between the two?
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Jack
I think he's more famous for having a flatulence at a public hearing, but.
- [26:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
He'S sort of a refined version of Tim Waltz.
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Jack
Yes. Hey, Victor, People are right to be frustrated with the cost of health care. Prescription drugs in America cost more than they should and more than almost anywhere else in the world. World. And that's why President Trump's new executive order to lower drug prices is such a big deal. It's smart, long overdue, and puts patients, not corporations, first. But while that change is being rolled out, let me tell you about a pharmacy that's not waiting around. All Family Pharmacy is stepping up now offering 20% off all medications through June 30, so you can stock up and stay prepared. Whether it's ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, methylene blue antibiotics, or just your daily prescriptions. They've got over 200 essential meds, no insurance needed. They work with licensed doctors in all 50 states. To get your prescription and ship it right to your door, go to allfamilypharmacy.com Victor and use the code Victor20. That's V I C T O R the number two, the number zero. To save 20% today, this is what healthcare should be. Affordable, accessible, and back in your hands again. That's allfamilypharmacy.com Victor. Use the code Victor20. And we thank the good people from All Family Pharmacy for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, my son, one of my sons at UConn, all my kids graduated from UConn, all five of them. But one of them did have, as a roommate, as a freshman, a kid who was the son of a mayor of a Chinese city with over a million population. I have a feeling he's probably 100. Cities like that. But he was such a brat, this guy, this kid. He was so entitled. And they had this. He. I asked him when we were moving in. Well, tell me about what do you do? And I have an uncle I go see. We see our uncle every weekend in the. In the stores. Connecticut. In hindsight, I'm thinking it had to have been the handler for all the Chinese.
- [28:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I mean, I don't understand this. During the Cold War, when we were in an existential rivalry with Russia, we did not have Russian students over here, nor did we send a lot of Americans over there. I think there's only 12,000American students in China right now. So why don't Mr. Garber, the president of Harvard, why doesn't he just look in the mirror and say, mirror, mirror on the wall, Tell me why there's 30% of our population are foreign students and we have a high number in the Kennedy School of Government and our graduate programs from Communist China and to what degree they are connected or not with the Chinese Communist Party? Because if he doesn't ask himself that, then could he at least say, is Harvard or Stanford partly culpable for the 1 million Weggars.
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Jack
Right, absolutely.
- [28:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
That are being tortured and encamped in this facility as slave laborers, Are they partly culpable for the destruction of independent Tibetan culture? Johnny, what's his name in Hong Kong, you know that we just honored Jimmy Lai. Jimmy. Excuse me, Jimmy Lai. Are they responsible for suppression of free speech that had been a commodity of Hong Kong until the Communists expropriated by. Or the lease ran out in Hong Kong, Any of these things. And not to mention, not to mention the Silken Road or the Belt Initiative where they're exporting Third World people or this racist country that would not, you know, they don't. They have certain racial laws and exclusions. Do you feel that Harvard or Stanford, that you are contributing to this. When you come over here and profit on educating the children of this communist apparat, or for that matter, the Iranian theocrats, or for that matter, people in Gaza that promote Hamas, this terrorist organization you feel are Lebanon, that promote and follow and are part of Hezbollah, do you feel any comfort?
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Jack
Yeah. Especially if you're into disinvestment in Israel. If you can be about that and you're not about disinvestment in China, something's quite out of whack there.
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Victor Davis Hanson
It's insidious and it's going to destroy this country until we get wise about it. It's another thing about Donald Trump. People, you know, they can say all they want about him, but until he arrived on the political scene, the basic attitude was laissez faire. We're going to let our corporate entrepreneurial class go into China and get joint partnerships and they're going to make a lot of money. And the fact that after about eight years, the Chinese are going to master that joint venture, expropriate it, steal the money and then get the technology is okay. Because the wealthier they are and the more entrepreneurial they are, they will develop into a consensual society. They will have the Western affluence, affluenza they used to call it, and they will be consensual. That is completely discredited at every element of what I just said. And all that close corporate partnership did was enrich a bunch of oligarchic, aristocratic, dictatorial, Orwellian people. And they do horrendous damage throughout. They pollute everything that they get involved in. The World Health Organization, the origins of COVID you name it. In fact, you could argue that the Chinese are responsible for more American death than all the Americans lost in World War II. If you accept that 1 million people died of COVID and there's somewhere between 10 and 15 million people that still have debilitarian illnesses, long COVID side effects from it, and they don't take any culpability and we don't hold them to account.
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Jack
Tell has gotten hold of some of Anthony Fauci's devices. Phones, at least. Phones, maybe. Maybe. And they'll be delving into that to see where his fingerprints are on any of this. I. I don't know.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I think that the day after he discovered the. The. That the virus was not only in Wuhan, but it was starting to spread to Europe and the United States, and he had that frenzied exchange, remember, with Francis Collins, basically, we have to be very careful how we present this because they might blame us for circumventing the laws against gain in function research by going to Peter Dasak at Echo Health and we had our. Basically that's what he was doing. But there must have been conversations about that off the record, you know, and those were beyond. Would he be foolish enough to do it on his government phone? And I can tell you one thing, I know Cash Patel and he's not the sort who's going to do a James Comey and say this would be too controversial or it might be self incriminated. So we'll just kind of lose it somewhere. Yeah, no, it'll be released. There may be cracking, a congressional committee.
- [32:53]
Jack
Yeah. They may not be full fledged cracking or even baby cracking but at least we'll have some, some info there. Hey, Victor, sticking to higher ed University of Florida. It's just gone through this drama. Okay. The former president of the, of the. We just talked about the University of Michigan, Santa Ono, who was a real lefty up there for whatever the hell reason.
- [33:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
I didn't understand that story at all.
- [33:22]
Jack
Yeah.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Let me tell in Canada and the United States, he had a record of being a DEI extremist.
- [33:28]
Jack
Yeah.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Why would the University of Florida make him the finalist and think he was the.
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Jack
He was. Yeah. The only. He was the sole finalist.
- [33:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
I know it.
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Jack
But thankfully the state, there's some other state body overseeing that that nuked it in part. I think Governor Rick Scott and some others started. So what the hell are we doing here? This guy's in DEI maven.
- [33:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
You know, at the Bradley Awards two weeks ago in Washington, I sat next to at one of the pre award dinners that Bradley put on. We honored the recipients and I was at the table with Chris Ruffo and people were politely disagreeing with him about the Trump efforts with Harvard and saying that we were. Trump was may or may not be too intrusive. And at one point he turned to me and said am I right or wrong? And I kind of weighed in. Extremely pro crisp. But I.
- [34:22]
Jack
They've got a brand name to protect. Victor.
- [34:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes. But he's doing, he's doing very valuable work and he's taking a. He's paying a huge price. As he recited at the awards that people have gone after his family, they've sued him, he's taking on the whole left wing progressive project and DEI is their heart and arteries of the whole system and for him to go right after it. And the story's not over yet with dei. Everybody's announced prematurely its epitaph but well, how many, so many people invested in it. It's going to be very hard to.
- [34:52]
Jack
Get rid of Harmeet Dillon, who was also at the, I mean, she's got everybody in their crosshairs. It's amazing.
- [35:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's amazing how Trump, the Trump people were able to draw on the knowledge of all these people. HERMET Dillon, I would not want to cross her because she's very learned and alive. She's very used to suing people on behalf of people's civil rights. And as a prosecutor, she knows exactly what people are doing and more importantly, she knows exactly how they hide what they're doing. Yeah.
- [35:24]
Jack
Yes. Well, we, we have a, a Rhode island judge who's doing hinky things to get your take on Douglas Murray has a, I think a very important column to get your again, also to get your, your take on Victor. And how about. We'll get to those when we come back from these important messages.
- [35:49]
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- [38:13]
Jack
We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show recording on Saturday, June 7th. And this this episode will be up on Thursday the 12th. And I hope on Thursday the 12th, Victor himself will be nicely recovering from.
- [38:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
His Roto Rooter episode. My Roto Rooter will be over with.
- [38:33]
Jack
All breathy.
- [38:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor's got pounding will be gone to take you immediately.
- [38:40]
Jack
Well, the swelling must go down.
- [38:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
I've had it done before. The aftermath for the first days are worse than the the days before, but it alleviates quickly.
- [38:50]
Jack
Well, Victor's got a website folks I mentioned earlier, the Blade of Perseus. Consider subscribing. In fact do subscribe. It's 650amonth, discounted $65 for the full year. And why you would do that is because there's so much that is offered on the site. Links to Victor's articles, weekly essay for American Greatness, weekly syndicated great column books, these podcasts, other appearances. But Victor twice a week writes an exclusive article for the Blade of Perseus and cuts an exclusive video. And if you're you're a VDH fan, you will want it. So do subscribe or Father's Day is coming up. I think it would make a great Father's Day present for your the husband, your husband, your uncle, your father, whatever. So do think about that. And and also I said links to books. I mean if dad's a military historian buff, go look at get the second World Wars. I mean I think that would be an award winning Father's Day gift. So Victor, here's a headline. Major Democrat Donor Became Judge Ruling Against Trump. That's a weird headline. But anyway, a federal judge who was ruled twice to Halt executive actions by President President Donald Trump previously gave about half a million in campaign contributions to Democrat. The judge U.S. district Judge John McConnell of the District of Rhode island will also preside over yet another case involving Trump. That case, by the way, Victor, involves sanctuary city status. So this guy, you know, can I just, I know I've been talking too much and I'll shut up in a second but one of the greatest federal judges of our lifetime was the late James Buckley and he was a friend, a dear friend. I love Jim, God rest his soul but he, I remember even as a 90 something years old senior status judge, he left his house actually he had a house on the Buckley estate up in Connecticut and his sister Priscilla lived in the main house and she had a political event there. And even though Jim didn't live in that house because he lived in a house on the estate, he left the property because he thought there could be absolutely no connection between a federal judge and any sense of fundraising or any sense of.
- [41:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
My mother was a superior court judge of Fresno county and then she, I think she was the second female state appellate court judge and she would not discuss any case if I asked her about it. Absolutely not. And then she gave me, she gave all of us a code of behavior and she said if you drink, if you drink and you drive not because it was, it wasn't that it's going to embarrass me but it's illegal. It's illegal. It's illegal. And tax you are not to. I remember I said well you know, I'm a professor mom and I could I have a little crappy little office. You know, I've had it. I made it out of plywood and everything. I think I'm going to write off the plywood. No, you're not full time farming. That is an illegal write off and I don't want you audited. So it was, I really thought I was kind of paranoid about that's and I think that's important. But there's about 750 as I understand it, lower the lowest rung. I'm not making fun of that judge. It's very important the district judge with because they're set up regionally. You know the ninth district court of that's a circuit judge, circuit judges but they are set up regionally unlike the Supreme Court. But this idea that what was occasional or episodic in the past that you sued to stop an administration and the Republicans did it but not. There has been more lawsuits right now in the first 130 days against Trump to district judges than the whole Biden four years put together. And this was all preplanned that Mark Elias and all the Democratic operatives and the Soros Fund and their affiliates, all that money was set to, as they say, pounce the moment Trump took office. So you have about 750 judges, probably 450 are left wing. Their rulings, their scores on the liberal index are all known to this and they are cherry picked and they just trade places. Use Judge X, Judge Y, Judge Z, we used him last week, we'll use this guy. And then these people feel that given whom they associate with and given the media that interviews them are the situations that they will be iconic if they rule and stop the evil orange Donald Trump orange man. And that's what they do. And they know they're going to eventually be either reversed or stayed because they overshot their jurisdictions and their authority. But basically, for now, the most powerful people in the United states are these 450 judges who can stop an elected president and stay all of his executive orders, everything in a way that we've never seen before.
- [44:04]
Jack
If this guy was a Republican and the shoe was on the other foot, do you think we'd be hearing calls for impeachment?
- [44:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, we do hear, we have a good example of that because the judge in the E. Jean Carroll case was left wing and he was the one that fined Donald Trump, I think 83 million. And then judge Engoron in the Letitia James case was a Democratic liberal judge and he fined, originally it was 450,000. 450 million. I think the appellate court reduced it down to 3, 70 million. That's still on the books. He's appealing that. And then we had, so we had Engorant. Then we had Judge Merchand, remember him and his daughter was a Democratic, made a fortune trading off his name. And that was in the, was that the Alvin Bragg case? And then we had one kind of slightly conservative judge Justice, I forgot her name and the Jack Smith. And everybody got angry. Remember that? And they said she is a Trump operative, she's an. In other words, their whole, their whole ideology was that all the judges have to be Democratic supporters, if not donors, they all have to be partisan. And if anyone isn't, then he's a Trump sellout and we should object to that. And that's what they're doing. And I don't know how you stop it. The Supreme Court, I think, will step in at some point and say, you're not going to cherry pick district court judges. And if you do cherry pick them, their rulings are not going to apply to 340 million people outside their jurisdiction. You know what I mean? It's not going to happen.
- [45:37]
Jack
I think you have to gain a super majority in Republicans in House and Senate to then pass a bill to restrict what areas federal judges, which they're entitled to do, you can restrict the judiciary, but it has to come from a congressional law.
- [45:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
It does. And what we're seeing is a titanic struggle, everybody from what people want, the popular mood in the country on all these issues and that reflection of that popular mood in control of the House and Senate, the presidency and to a lesser extent the Supreme Court and the institutional resistance for causes that are unpopular and antithetical to what people want. And that's the courts, the administrative state, the foundations, K12 higher education, the media. And they don't have any popular support, but they have enormous institutional power and they check what the popular elected president wants to do in a popular elected Congress. And they have insidious ways. And they can raid Mar a Lago, they can try to get Trump's name off the ballot. They can take a laptop that they know is authentic and say it's Russian created and suppress information for a year. They can partner with Twitter to suppress information about it. They can go do the Russian collaboration. They can turn the Secret Service into a private retrieval service for the Biden family. Whether it's a lurid missing diary of Ashley Biden or it's an illegally gotten gun thrown in the dumpster of Hunter, or a laptop that was left and abandoned at a computer repair shop. They can go after the repairman and try to destroy his life. That's what the Secret Service does when it's politicized.
- [47:22]
Jack
Totally forgot about that diary with the, you know, daddy's showering with me and.
- [47:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
I'm giving him to a heck. Are you objecting to it? A teen 12 or 13 year old girl showering with her father. Are you objecting though?
- [47:34]
Jack
I'm very narrow minded, you'll forgive me.
- [47:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
Do you remember the Secret Service ex Secret Service agent that wrote a memoir or a series of articles that said one of the reasons that she was reluctant to be assigned to the Biden family vice presidential detail is he had a habit of getting out of the pool naked in front of her and walking around, prancing around?
- [47:54]
Jack
Yeah.
- [47:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
Something was. And then when you collate that, remember when he ran in 2020, had to issue a series of apologies to the women that he had hugged. All the cardinal sins of the left that had just tried to destroy Kavanaugh. Joe Biden had surpassed those allegations in one week. And of course they dealt with all of them the way that Hillary dealt with the bimbo. Eruptions shall pass. Kathleen, Willie. Remember cat was hung from a tree.
- [48:25]
Jack
Terrible people. How these people all die. Hey, Victor, before we. I have to read something but just quickly. I'm gonna throw this in there. I didn't tell you ahead of time. Your quick comment, if you don't mind. James Carville lecturing Jews. Did you see the clip of him?
- [48:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
I mean he is old fashioned anti Semitism and the most crude raw sense that the only reason Jews, you know, only reason they go over Trump, not the anti cinema because they just want to. They want to get. They want to get a tax cut. Greedy little bastard. That's what it basically was saying. I can't listen to him because every other word is F U blank or S H I. And he's crabby, he's angry. And for the one second of insight you have to put up with 10 seconds of lunacy. He's, you know, he's just pathetic and he's, he has no power. He's out. He's from an. His basic message is I ran, I ran Bill Clinton. Yeah. I went the center, you know, we did 100,000 police officer. We balanced the budget and we were rolling along and then we went. I don't know what happened. The left wing took over and we got to go back to where I was and that's how it, you know, he's just a. And then there are people that were from the Clinton era that make the same message, but they're kind, logical people like Mark Penn, the pollster, when he talks about Hillary Clinton's message and why she deviated and why the Bill Clinton message was successful. And when I say successful, remember, Bill Clinton never won 50% of the the vote either. Not even in the reelection part of it. And remember if Ross Perot had not run in 92, but even in 96, he got 9.5% of the vote. If he had not run in those two elections, it would have been very close. And even though they ran too, I mean you can make the argument that George H.W. bush and Bob Dole were not dynamic candidates, but still. So it wasn't a pop. But it's hard to listen to him. And this anti, you know, anti Semitism, it's pretty. That was just. Nobody said anything about it. You know. You know, Tucker's had people on his show that he shouldn't have had on in the sense that I don't know if he knew what they were going to say but when you had Daryl Cooper basically saying that Churchill was a terrorist and there wasn't, you know, they mussed their hair up a little bit in Ukraine but it wasn't really a plan, the starvation plan to kill Jews and Ukrainians. It wasn't premeditated and you know you have people like that but boy they pounced on him and maybe deservedly so, but they. When Carville. I didn't hear any reaction to that. Did you?
- [51:16]
Jack
I did not. Maybe the reaction will be from Jewish donors. We'll say enough of you clowns.
- [51:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. And I didn't. They. There was also a suit at Columbia that was thrown out by a liberal judge that the students, you know made the argument and you had those videos of those students being harassed when they went into the the library and stuff and they law that was thrown out. And so I don't know where it all goes but the, the Jewish ratios at the Ivy League and places like Stanford, it's declining like this.
- [51:47]
Jack
Yeah. Well if I was a Jew in America today, and I'm not, but I.
- [51:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
Would be.
- [51:54]
Jack
I'd be afraid maybe. Afraid.
- [51:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well we can. Mr. Mohammed Soliman.
- [52:00]
Jack
Yeah, well let's. We will get to him right after I tell our listeners that Delete Me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online. At a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Delete Me is the best solution that I found to protect my personal data. Deleteme isn't just a one time service. Delete. Delete Me is always working for you. Constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the Internet. Deleteme, which by the way is one word. Delete me knows your privacy is worth protecting. Sign up and provide Deleteme with exactly what information you want deleted and their experts take it from there. Have you ever been a victim of identity theft, harassment, doxing? If you haven't, you probably know someone who has. Delete Me can help take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners today. Today get 20% off your delete me plan by texting Victor to 64000. The only way to get 20 off is to text Victor to 64000. That's Victor. Just six message and data rates may apply. And we thank the good people of Deleteme for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show Victor, let's get to Colorado via Douglas Murray, who's got a column in the recent New York Post. It's titled Lefties Learn how to Get Away with Martyr. And the newest martyr is the daughter of the scumbag who was Molotov cocktailing Jews in Colorado. Your your thoughts about that, Victor, if you want and broader this whole the martification of these mangione and others by the Democrat Party.
- [53:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
And yeah, I was on Laura Ingram on Thursday night just a few nights ago and this came up. And the thing about Mr. Suleyman and his five children and his wife was first of all, they were all, all here illegally and knowingly illegal. This came up with the ICE incident in Los Angeles where and on cnn Scott Jennings was sparring as usual with these crazy people on cnn. And they all are under the impression, the authorities in LA, the people that are sympathetic to Mr. Soliman, that it's not a crime or an offense to be here illegally. And they always say, well, it's a civil offense. Well, it might be crossing the border inadvertently, but when you reside here illegally, usually you have to have some form of identification and usually that identification in some ways is fraudulent, but it's still an offense. Whether it's a criminal offense or a civil offense, it is a crime to come here illegally without permission. If you don't believe that, just camp out at the LAX SFO airport at customs for about five hours and see the number of people who will be taken into a room because they have no passport or they snuck on or something's wrong with something, they got in here somehow. So the point I'm making is that the left seems to think that these people, both the perpetrator and the family, have a perfect right to enter the United States on a tourist visa, extend it and just be resident illegal aliens here. That's number one. And number two, the lawyer was just horrific that he enlisted because no sooner was the arraignment than she started to suggest that Donald Trump was like Nazi Germany and he was treating this would be burner of Jews as if he was a Hitlerian figure. And what was so shocking and amoral but that she that was completely opposite that the people in Germany burned Jews, burned their bodies, sometimes burned them alive, but usually after gassing them, but they used fire to incinerate Jews. And here was Mr. Soliman, who I would have to thank. He tried to get a gun. He wouldn't, but there was some connection. He knew that there was a special emotional resonance with burning Jews and That's what he tried to do. Except the only difference between him and, and the satanic people at Auschwitz or Treblinka is he tried to burn them alive. And yet his lawyer was suggesting that he was a victim and that the people who were trying to stop this family and him in particular were somehow Hitlerian when the Hitlerian person was him. Then we got into the second question about the family and of course Douglas Murley was trying to point out that the. But the left's Pavlovian response is always how do I feel good about myself and morally superior to the state, all the other people? By trying to always side with the person who is the so called underdog. And how can I always do that from a safe place? So this family who was living in a smaller house, why this father was planning this by his own admission for one year and who had stated in addition that he would postpone his campaign to burn Jews until his daughter graduated because apparently that might hurt her graduation. So he was aware of the consequences on his family. We are supposed to believe that his wife and all five of them knew nothing about this. And we'll see that could be possible. But there'll be an investigation and they all will have a social media trail and there will be people who knew them and there will be testimony and we'll see. But even if there isn't, even if there isn't direct knowledge of it and they knew about it, then they're still here illegally. Just as in Los Angeles, even if the ICE was not arresting cartel members or drug dealers, they're here illegally. And if you don't believe they should be deported, then why have a border? Just say, you know what, anybody can come in and stay. Maybe you will say that. The other larger question that Douglas Murray, I thought very adroitly explained in that article was this is not unique to Mr. Soliman. They have a rogues gallery, the left does. So they took Abrego Garcia and this, they sent him back. That was very smart. As John Yoo pointed out that the Trump people said, you know what, we're not going to argue anymore that he was ordered to deport. He's already been adjudicated. And the only reason that he didn't go back to El Salvador, he made this preposterous claim that he would be in danger because the cartel was threatening his grandmother. So let's just bring the blank, blank back and we'll have a real inquiry into who he is. And we don't even have to prove the obvious that he's an M13 gang member. We don't have to prove the obvious that he struck his wife, threatened to kill, she thought threatened to kill him, kill her and hit, you know, broke his kid's computer. We don't have to prove any of that and we don't have to even prove that some of his code conspirator said that he was in the reason the cartel was after him because he was indirectly involved with a hit on one of their grandmothers. And that might have been. We don't have to do any of that. Let's just look back at. He was in a car with eight illegal aliens, speeding, breaking the law and the car was registered to a known trafficker. And he did that. And now it's alleged, we learn that he really never was a Maryland man, family man, construction, upstanding. He was a trafficker. That's what the allegation says. And the co conspirators. I think I heard his lawyer say something like, well these are core conspirators and they have something. Yes, that's the system that you use yourself. That is what everybody uses. You try to get evidence by a lighter sentence. So don't attack necessarily an institution. They can be true, they can be false, these testimonies but it depends on to the degree they can be corroborated. But apparently some of the people in league with him are going to testify that he was a trafficker and a lead in the trafficking operation. And if that's true, he's no longer a Maryland man. But that doesn't stop them. They are now. He is a cause celeb because it makes they think Donald Trump look bad. So all of the left wing pieties, you don't touch women. This guy is a woman beater. You don't endanger children. This guy smashed possessions of his own children. This guy woke his wife up in the night to beat her. This guy was a gang member. This guy was a human trafficker. This guy trafficked women and minors. These were all Nancy Pelosi emotional. We did it for the children. I'm voting for the children. It's for the children. No, no you're not. This guy is public enemy number one if half these things, the latest are proved. So they have idolized him because they think he's an underdog. And they've idolized Mr. Soleimani, the anti Semit Jew burner. And now they did it with Luigi Mangione, the assassin. This is a pretty premeditated murderer who set up a middle class guy who Worked himself up to an executive and he blew him apart and he premeditated it. And because he was good looking and because he was kind of left wing and he came from a good family and he was, he wore nice clothes and he was kind of hip, they have made him into a lionized character and they have no idea what the public thinks about all of this. But I hope, I hope that there is the ghost of Lee Atwater still floating around at midterm time, because it would be a wonderful commercial to show Luigi Mangione with a little description for a second or two and Mohammed Suleiman with a second, with his shouting his anti Semitic epithets with his. It was kind of like a, what, an ad hoc Jerry rigged flamethrower that he had a hose and stuff. And have a little clip of him and then have a clip of Abrego Garcia and put all of them there in the car with the traffickers and say, these are the heroes of the left. And then I would juxtapose those scenes of 10,000, 8,000 people storming the border each day and said, this is what you want, this is what you're going to get in the midterm.
- [62:42]
Yeah.
- [62:43]
Jack
And folks in LA attacking ice.
- [62:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes. Attacking the things. And maybe we could have a nice outburst from Representative Bowman letting off the fire alarm. Or we could have Ms. Talib addressing a crowd that stormed the Rotunda, which sort of got the January 6th people in big trouble. Or we could have Jasmine Crockett rant about white people. There's a whole menagerie you could bring up, and I hope they have people that will remind us what it was.
- [63:13]
Jack
Like, like the word menagerie. That's terrific. Terrific. A bunch of animals. All right, we've got one or two more quick topics to talk about on this episode as we head around the hometurn. We're recording the day of the Belmont. So head around the home turn into the stretch and we'll talk about some quickly about California high speed rail project and, and the FBI and Roman Catholics and Hollywood and Roman Catholic than Catholics. And we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.
- [63:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [65:08]
Lumen
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- [66:56]
Jack
We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor spent just a little bit on this if you don't mind. And I do mean little on the high speed rail project which we know. These massive Stonehenge on crack monster things in your near your actual home, the train to nowhere. Well, the Trump administration, I don't know if they've done it now between when we're talking and when this podcast is airing, but secretary of Transportation. Oh my God. Duffy said we're going to cut off.
- [67:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
Sean Duffy.
- [67:30]
Jack
Sean Duffy. We're going to cut it off. No. No. Federal aid, they were counting on billions to this high speed rail project. And without that Victor, I do not see how they can lay a single mile of track.
- [67:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
I live on a particular avenue where five miles away, it crossed. It shut down our avenue, as I said, for four or five years. Now when you go over the overpass, you look down and there's not one. There's the bed established, but there's not one foot of rail after. I guess it's. From its inception, it's about. I guess it's about now. Boy, it's over 10 or 12 years. The original cost was something like 40 billion. Now it's estimated at 3 to 400 million to go from Los Angeles through Tehachapi all the way up to Sacramento with a lateral, basically where Los Banos is to get into the bay area. And remember, everybody voted for this bay area idea. Then the bay area county said, not in my backyard. You're not going to build it here. You, you go down to those rustic yokels in the San Joaquin Valley, they're broke, they'll bite it up. So they came up with the idea of about 150 miles from Bakersfield to Merced. I think you listening? Many of you don't know where Mercedes is. You haven't heard of it. You may have heard of Bakersfield, but it's not a high traffic. So some of the preliminary estimates have already showed that if somebody right now was to fly down from another planet and say, here, here is a brand new completed high speed rail line from Bakersfield to Merced. It's all paid for, it's yours. It would lose hundreds of millions of dollars over because it wouldn't be profitable. Because no one who can get in a car and drive a little over two hours at 70 miles an hour even on a decrepit freeway would get on this thing. And from what we've seen about who operates the BART system and the unions and the light rail in L. A would you really want to be on this new experimental technology, given the people who would probably direct it and run it because they're going to be incompetent and it's way over, it's about $20 billion. So now the question is, what do you do with it? And what they did, Jack, so everybody knows, is they immediately deliberately took a high trafficked areas and built those overpasses. First. So every, the 99 is bumper to bumper between Sacramento and Bakersfield. So when you see the Fresno thing, it's a, it's, it's well over two or three miles of going over the skyline of Fresno. And then Highway 41 has, you know, it's a four lane highway. And now they have that to show everybody. And they've done that. So the idea was we're going to show everybody that we're. It's all ready to go. But what they didn't show you was the, the real system in between those cities and it's nothing. And then the other thing is they went into an area of Kings county that is the most picturesque, beautiful farmland in the world. It has ancestral oaks. And they went right through it. And they had to pay top dollar. I'm talking about millions of dollars of eminent domain and legal cost. They put businesses out of, you know, family, multi generational businesses in Fresno out of business. They paid hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the rights. And it's parallel to the Amtrak. And the idea was you can't use the Amtrak right away because it's so fast that you have to have a line that, you know, the curves wouldn't. They would derail it. And then the bridges are, they're not fabricated or engineered to hold a regular passenger train. So there's no use is what I'm trying to say to everybody. I'm kind of exasperated because I can't even imagine. You would spend $30 billion and you would build Stonehenge and then people would say, okay, you destroyed all these farms. So you had a guy with 500 acres and he had to get across to his peach orchard from his plum orchard. He had to drive nine miles to. And we paid him eight or nine million bucks for the land that we destroyed. And we destroyed all these ancestral oaks that if you took a chainsaw you'd be in jail. We did all this stuff, we put all these people out of business and now we can't use it. We can't use it for trains, we can't use it for freeways. And how much is it going to cost to blow it up? I don't know. Are you just going to leave it there as a reminder, like Stonehenge, of the primitive society that once lived here?
- [72:07]
Jack
Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes with the Statue of Liberty?
- [72:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, it's going to be like a Mycenaean Tiryns or Mycenae. We're all going to. Who is that civilization that Built that. It's going to be here forever.
- [72:20]
Jack
Yeah.
- [72:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
These people, I don't know how government, if they're corrupt or stupid, but who. Who goes to work for them? And I say that not in a condemnatory passage, because I can tell you, when I was growing up, Jack, the most brilliant people you'd meet were things like Caltrans engineers and California Water Project designers and architects. I mean, they built that massive California Aqueduct, and they got it from inception to implementation, five or six years. That San Luis Dam is beautifully engineered. You go up to the California, the Big Creek project of Huntington, Florence, Lake Edison, Lake Huntington, Lake Shaverly. It's just like a genius. And that was a private enterprise, Henry Huntington Project. But what I'm getting at is I don't know what happened to our generation, but it's stupid, it's incompetent. And we're kind of like Dark Age Greeks. From about 1200 BC to 700, we're kind of wandering around, who are these guys that did it? Who were they? Maybe we'll call them Apollo and Ajax and Achilles, these heroes, because we'll make myths about them. Oh, my gosh. They built the aqueduct. Well, how do you fix it? I don't know how you fix it. Well, how do you run. I don't know how you run it. Well, how do you do anything? I don't know. There was a race of demigods and they're all dead now, but they're myth, mythological creatures, like centaurs or something. And they did this. But we don't know who they are. But we only know that they were horrible people. They were just horrible people. They were racists and transphobes and homophobes and colonizers and expropriators. And they were horrible people. And they did all these horrible things, but we liked the horrible things they did because we liked their airports and we liked their aqueducts and we liked their dam. We can't make them anymore. We can't even repair them. That's what we are.
- [74:12]
Jack
Well, every month will be Pride Month. Hey, Victor, one last topic.
- [74:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
It is Pride Month, isn't it?
- [74:17]
Jack
It is, yeah. Two Catholic stories. One is that Senator Grassley has uncovered far much evidence, far flung, from what we originally believed, about the FBI under Joe Biden investigating Catholics. Because, you know, traditional Catholics who worship like they were, they were potential terrorists. And that was out of the Richmond FBI office. It was an infamous famous memo, but turns out it was circulated. Yeah, well, we believe it was circulated to over 1000 employees and discussed by other field offices in cities including Milwaukee and Louisville. So this. This crap that Christopher Ray said, you know, kind of like was an isolated thing. And he didn't say he was one lunatic, but that was the impression. It was just. This was a much germinating issue within the FBI to see practicing Roman Catholics as a threat to the country. Then one other thing, Victor, if I may spring on you. There's a Apple TV show I don't watch. It's called you'd Friends and Neighbors. It stars John Ham, and they just had an episode out the other day where he and another woman character enter a Catholic church and they go to the tabernacle where we Catholics believe that the consecrated host that we believe is the actual body of Jesus Christ. This is what we believe. He took it out and then he gave it to. He dipped it in jam, and it was just a desecration.
- [75:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
He did a Gretchen Whittemore thing.
- [75:49]
Jack
Worse. Worse, because she did a Doritos chip. But he was taking an actual host, filmed it. And. Victor, I. I can't. What does Apple think? What does Apple. Apple Corporate Apple.
- [76:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't know. I mean, why do they hate. They're kind of like Robespierre and the Cult of the Divine Being or the radio, even. Robespierre and the Jacobins said that there was some value in religion, even though they tried to destroy it. They killed over 6,000 Catholics, the Jacobins did. But they hate religion and they hate. I think they hate the behavior. They don't like people who are religious and live by the Ten Commandments and are civil and traditional. They just don't like them. And they feel that all of their aberrant and alternate lifestyles and behaviors are what makes life diverse and interesting.
- [76:39]
Jack
I guess even though we buy their phones and buy their Apple computers, you know, they're still. I wonder if they. If they wanted to be edgy, would they. Would Jon Hamm on his show take a Koran and burn it or step on it?
- [76:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
You know, it's very funny. I tell another of my father's story. She drops me off at UC Santa Cruz, and I mentioned he went in the bathroom once and there was people in coitus. But there was. It was so crazy when he dropped me off at the dorm. So I came home Thanksgiving and my mom said, well, how's everything going at the dorm? And I mentioned all these crazy things. I had a roommate who had spears, arrows, swords, and told me that he was going to execute me.
- [77:22]
Jack
What?
- [77:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, he did. I put his head in the window and closed it and put a belt. I was a restaurant in high school, so I could protect myself. He turned out to be. They threw him out. They put him in a mental ward. I would visit him. I actually liked him, but he almost. We had a knockdown, drag out fight. But he turned out to be a very good person. Years later, I met him anyway. And then there was a guy who. There were people shooting flaming arrows from the dorm at people. I would walk to class and there was a big hollow in a redwood tree with this young girl without shoes or anything, but kind of a sheet, which. She lived in the hollow. So you'd see her and she'd like wave to you from the tree. And it just. Then I would see the essay Salvatore Dali. They had this amphitheater and they were always saying during the camp, burn it down. And then this woman who would yell all these things. I was driving down and she was hitchhiking with this designer luggage. And she asked me if I would take her in this broken down car I had to the San Jose airport, which is where real long way away. And I said no. And she said something to the effect, well, it's not the San Jose airport that you use. Meaning it was a private jet. And she was. But she. And anyway, I was telling my. At Thanksgiving, my mom was trying to make sense of it. My dad just sat back and said, well, what he's trying to tell you, Pauline, is that he went to the Fresno Zoo and he saw the giraffe and the zebra and he saw the lion and he saw the hippo and it's the same thing. He just is. He's been at a zoo the whole time. I don't know what. What. You know, I hope he didn't feed the lions or something. He doesn't get in the cage with him. But he's been at the zoo. Simple as that. That's all there is to it.
- [79:02]
Jack
It was a menagerie. This was a brand new, relatively brand new school too.
- [79:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
It was brand new. It had only been opened when I got there, five years. My brother was older. He went there. He was only 14 years. I. And the weird thing about it was they had raided the Ivy League school junior faculty, right, who wanted to break away from traditionalism. So I was like this country hick. And I met this wonderful professor, John lynch, and he was a classicist. And he said I was taking his Western Civ required course. He said, you write good essays. Why don't you study Greek and Latin and I said, what? And the point I'm making is for all this hippie stuff, I had Yale, Harvard trained people who were trained by the old group, not the hippies. So they were the most famous philologists in the world, had been their professors. So they knew Greek and Latin, like English, and they taught us. They were very disciplined. So when I got to Stanford university in the PhD program, even though some of my contemporaries had had prep school Latin, English and Greek, I had as good or better Greek and Latin because I was doing composition in undergraduate. We write in Latin and Greek. So I look back at that and yes, it was crazy, but that particular seam was I got a wonderful education and they corrected all your essays minutely and they were some of the best professors in the world. But the whole climate was crazy. It was insane. And I only got in one one really bad. Except when my roommate fight was I was walking down with a couple of guys. We wanted to watch this demonstration. They were walking from the campus down to the courthouse to demand that there be a moratorium on something because Nixon bombed Cambodia or something. Everybody said to me, hey, there's going to be a lot of girls walking down there, and some of them will probably go topless. So there's about five of us, and we were kind of misfits from the Valley. There was a guy from Merced, a guy from Stockton. So we were kind of just walking along parallel to them, and they got by the campus had a cows, you know, because it was grazing at 22,000 acres. So they would rent it out to livestock farmers. And they got next to these cows and they started free the cows, liberate them from domestic tyranny. And so they went over and they started to push down the post and let these cows who had been slaughtered on the road. So we were all from kind of rural areas, and we, you know, grew up. So we said, if you do that again, we're going to beat them. And we got started pushing. And that's where I got the term spaghetti arms. A guy said to me about antifa. He said, this is going to be easy because these people are spaghetti arm terrorists. But the point I'm making is it was. It was a raucous, crazy time to be at that place. When I look back at it, it's so baffling because juxtaposed to that hippie counterculture, if you just went to class and you picked the right professors, there were some brilliant professors there. And I got really well trained in classics. And when I went to graduate school, I Got all the coursework done in two and a half years. It's because of them. And it was really good. I mean, I went in there and the first day, the chairman of the graduate PhD program said, well, have you read any Euripides? I said, yeah, nine plays. Have you read Sophocles? Yeah, four plays. Have you read Neeschus? Six plays. Have you read Herodotus? Half of it. You read Thucydides? Three books. Can you. And then they had a test to place composition as a graduate Ph.D. and he said, well, you haven't had composition, so everybody has to write in Latin Greek on this test, and it will tell us whether you're exempt. And so I took it. And he called me back in and said, you got everything right. I said, so I don't have to take it. And he said, no, that was just verbiage. You're going to take every composition class. And I was so happy I did because the teachers that taught us composition were brilliant. And I learned even better how to write Latin and Greek, which helps you read Latin and Greek, but all moot. Oh, you don't have to know Greek. And then in graduate school, I have a soft spot for Stanford University. Excuse me. Because of the professors I had. They were from Austria and England and Germany, and they were all philologists, and they were. No nonsense. You know what I mean? You couldn't go in class and said, I was depressed last night. I didn't read 1200 lines of Sophocles. No, no, no, no, no. It was. And they turned out some very accomplished classicists out of that program. And today it's Theory and. And Foucault and Gender Studies and no Greek and no Latin, and all these programs. Sad.
- [83:55]
Jack
We hate to end on a sad note, Victor, but alas, I was trying.
- [83:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
To be happy and upbeat about praising people that were in these.
- [84:02]
Jack
Well, I think people are upbeat hearing that you stuck someone's head in a window.
- [84:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
I only did that for survival because I said to. I called my dad and I said, this guy says he's going to hit me when I'm asleep, and he's got all these weapons. And he said, you better just. He said, you're a wrestler. Don't get in a boxing match because he may not know how to box. Just wrestle him, take him down, put his head in the window and put your belt around it, and he can't get out. And then tell him not to do it anymore. And he said, don't go tell the deans there. They're just as bad as the students, they won't do anything. My mom said something about vigilantism and all this.
- [84:39]
Jack
Your dad was a college administrator, so he.
- [84:42]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, he was. He had a problem. Was. He was also 6, £420? Yeah, he was. He. I don't want to go on, but I would say his mission in life was to intervene when he saw some bully picking on someone. And he did that quite a lot in my life. And some of it was really good, but some of it was a little bit because you didn't know if the person was armed or something. Something, you know. Yeah, you know, he'd always say something to the fact, you really like doing this to people, then why don't we just settle it now? And I wasn't as big as he was, so when he said, why don't you settle? And the person I'm talking about was six, three. And he was a hippie, but. And he was very nice person. He was not well. He was taking massive amounts of drugs. And after we did this. This knockdown fight and I kind of, I think, got the best of it, then we sat down. I said, you wanted to do this every night or you want to be friends? If you want to be friends, you got to get all the weapons out. And then shortly after that, they incarcerated him in the mental hospital. And I dutifully visited him three or four times a week. In fact, I did something, I should confess I feel bad about. You couldn't bring in anything because it was a padded room, top floor place. But he loved Taco Bell. And he said, victor, if you really like me, would you bring in burritos? The beef bean burrito. And I would get about four of them and then hitchhike over there and put him in my coat and then I'd give him burritos. I liked him and I really. I'll just tell you. His first name was Jack. And he was a wonderful person, but we had it out and he terrified me for my first quarter there. And then he was gone. He was gone, by the way, Disappeared.
- [86:25]
Jack
You talking about your father before? I never tell you this. Whenever you talk about him, I have an image of like John Wayne. I just.
- [86:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, you know what? It was funny. He reminded me of Bill Holden, the Wild Bunch. He was the same type of talking like that. Yeah. He was very sweet to people, though. I don't want to give the impression he was brutish. He was very. Every time anybody has bumped into me, they always say what a sweet person he was. And how kind he was and how upbeat he was. But I don't think you can fly at 20, 21, 40 missions, you know, over Tokyo.
- [87:02]
Jack
Yeah.
- [87:02]
Victor Davis Hanson
And six, you know. Yeah. Nine hours on a cramped B. 29. Nine hours back. Crash in Iwo Jima twice and lose 14 of your 16 planes and be normal. And the stuff he would tell us when he had a couple of drinks that they gave him, you know, amphetamines to keep them up and kind of sleeping pills to get them. And then he. He had my sign that I inherited it from him. And he had sinus infections with the altitude, and they would give him sulfur powder. He'd sniff all the time. I don't know. I think he went through. And then his brother, first cousin was adopted, was killed. And I think he had a lot of. I worshiped him. I still do. I won the lottery with parents, both of them. I just feel, well, we'll all meet.
- [87:49]
Jack
Them someday, I hope in a better place.
- [87:52]
Victor Davis Hanson
I believe so. Yeah. I was very lucky, though. I look back at it and everybody thinks. Not everybody looks fondly on their parents.
- [87:59]
Jack
Yes, I know that.
- [88:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
Especially my generation. They blame all of their imperfections or disappointments on a parent's culpability. And it is true that that depression, World War II generation was pretty tough. But they were tough mostly in a good sense, is my.
- [88:14]
Jack
Yeah.
- [88:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
He would walk in, last story on a Saturday. We'd work after school. And it would be like 5 o' clock on Saturday. And we had been, I don't know, working with my grandfather, picking up walnuts, chainsaw. And then we would sit down like two hours before dinner. And so he'd walk in and say, okay, this is the Old Men's Retirement club. And you're in your soft little recliner chair, and you think life is just sort of relaxing and we're not done with it. Sergeant First Class William Hannah has the orders on the door and they're spelled out in detail. Victor. So you go there and it'd say, Victor, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Get. Replace shingles on top of roof, Victor. I want you to hose down patio. Victor. Go out and pull weeds out of driveway. And then he'd have the time frame. Five o' clock, finish. 5:30. And it was kind of a joke. He wasn't a martinet at all. He was a work. That's that whole Swedish culture. That was the thing that was weird about it. Kingsburg, California. They work. I don't think anybody ever worked like those people. Kind of drove my mom Crazy. They were just workaholics. Go to a funeral. Yeah, he died. Go home. Yeah, he's dead. Yeah, he worked hard. No, he never slept. Yeah, he was working hard. He was a good man. He. He paid his bills. He worked hard. It was work, work, work, work.
- [89:39]
Jack
This will be the last episode you and I talk about before Father's Day. So this is a good one.
- [89:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
Way.
- [89:44]
Jack
You found a good way, too.
- [89:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, it was timely because I always think of him all the time, but I. I think of him all the time. Every day, actually. And I'm 71. I have been doing that for a lot. I miss him terribly. It's really been, you know, it's kind of sad. I'm 71. I act like a kid. I miss my parents. And I had great grandparents too. Yeah, I was very lucky. I feel like most anything I've accomplished was due to them.
- [90:09]
Jack
Well, you frequently attest to their. Their wonderfulness, so don't. Don't. I don't know anyone who so publicly shows respect for their parents as you do, Victor. We're going to close it out here. Except for me to say thank you to the folks that go to civilthoughts.com sign up. Put your name in there. Put your email address. You sign up for Civil Thoughts, which is the free weekly email newsletter I write for the center for Civil Society and It gives you 14 recommended readings. Comes into your inbox every Friday. It's free and we're not selling your name. I know you'll like it. Civil thought. Go there and sign up. Thanks for those that do. Thanks for everybody who has.
- [90:52]
Victor Davis Hanson
And Jack, just as a final reminder, what we're going to go through a lot of our questions next time, right?
- [90:58]
Jack
I asked the good people at the Victor Davis Hansen fan club at Facebook to send in questions and I got of a sense ton of questions. So we're gonna record.
- [91:06]
Victor Davis Hanson
I haven't seen them yet, but I will answer them.
- [91:09]
Jack
Well. Okay. I'll show you in advance.
- [91:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
Okay.
- [91:12]
Jack
Two or three episodes of Victor's recovery. Episodes from. So we'll.
- [91:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
It won't even be a recovery. It'll be a blink.
- [91:19]
Jack
Okay. Victor's blink.
- [91:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
I gotta be careful of you brisk. His nemesis will hit me, but I. I expect to recover very quickly.
- [91:26]
Jack
Well, thanks, Victor.
- [91:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
I got a wonderful ent surgeon. He's a. He's really good. He did it last time and he's brilliant. Dr. Jerome Hester of Menlo Park. I shouldn't advertise that, but he's. He's a great guy. He really is. If you have an ent problem, I would go to him.
- [91:42]
Jack
I hope Saint Blaise is watching out with him on the fateful day.
- [91:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
I wanted to be a Sanctus Naso, but he said he doesn't exist.
- [91:50]
Jack
Yeah, it just doesn't. Victor, thanks very much. Thanks folks for listening. Thanks for for watching. We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye bye.
- [92:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you, everybody.