Sammy Wink (3:08)

Welcome back to Victor Davis Hanson in his own Words. Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Please come join him at his website, victorhanson.com you will find all of his writing and podcasts there. An option to be an ultra reader on the website that is exclusively for subscribers at 650amonth or $65 a year. And we'd love to see you all there. So, Victor, the decline of the west or those issues have been in the news recently, everywhere here and in Europe. And so it's not a news story, but I wanted to talk about all of these issues that come together sort of as a perfect stor and mostly start to reflect on where we stand now a year into Donald Trump's administration or almost a year into it. So I wanted to start with universities and I think the recent stories that have come out are Larry Summers step down due to the Epstein files. So the the sort of a MeToo movement fallout from that. The fraud and graft we've talked about in universities at the highest levels, Presidents and deans and the spectacle we saw last year of university presidents who are under woke aegises have refused to talk about the problems in their own universities. Before Congress they were testifying and especially about the censoring of individuals. Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth at MIT and then Liz McGill at Penn. And so I wanted to get your reflections on where the university stands, where our university system stands relative to is it part of the declining west, or are we on a point of change?

Victor Davis Hanson (5:14)

I should thank everybody before I start. Last week I drove down to Bakersfield. I was and I was on the Megyn Kelly tour and there were, it was there was all five or six thousand people. There was a huge crowd. I want to thank everybody in Bakersfield. We had a lot of listeners to this podcast, not the Victor Davis Hansen podcast, but the Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words podcast. And Megyn Kelly announced it. We didn't get in thank gosh to the debate she's having and or with Mark, the whole Carlson heritage. Markland so I was something but decline of the west. What is for everybody out there? West just means the culture or civilization that grew up in Greece and then was inherited by Rome, enriched by the third city of the western trifecta that was Jerusalem and the infusion of the Judeo and then Christian traditions. And we're talking about a process from the 700 BC all the way up to the 21st century. And then Western ism was spread largely by the French and British. So the Anglophone, Anglophonic move Australia New Zealand and Canada. The United States in these new world areas were spread by the British Empire and the same was of France. Some places didn't westernize completely. Africa, Asia, Latin America, not to the same. The Spanish were not as successful in incorporating the entire Western tradition in Latin America, although many parts of it are. And then we have the second thing to remember, declinism. And so there's been a long tradition of Western thinkers and we can point out a few in antiquity. The novelist Petronius in Roman era he was a Neronian and same. He was actually a confidant of the emperor Rome, Nero in Rome. And then there were the biographer Suetonius, the life of the 12 Caesars. It's pretty decadent, risque. How awful. These people for the most part were the dry cynical historian Tacitus, the ribald, satirist, juvenile, and put them together and they made a systematic critique. Remember that Western civilization is the only paradigm, not Muslim civilization, not Chinese civilization, that encouraged self criticism and freedom of thought. That tradition, you know, it was hand in glove, a part of consensual government. And even when periods in the west, when you in the dark ages of the medieval period where elected governments were rare, you still had people criticizing them. And then we get into the more modern critics of the west, they're mostly in Germany, the German pessimistic tradition. George Hegel, who wrote Study of History, Friedrich Nietzsche, man and Superman, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Decline in Oswald Spingler, the Decline of the west to a little bit of extent, maybe Arnold Toynbee A Study of History. And their argument was that we, all of us take the United States. We have combined free market capitalism that produces a plethora of consumer goods and materialism. And we are in consensual societies where we can speak freely and think freely. And at a certain critical point, the Germans felt it was somewhere in the 20th century or late 19th century. The ancients thought it was either in Athens in the late 4th century or mid 5th 4th century or the Romans thought it was right around the end of the Republic. These critics said, you know what, it doesn't work. Because people proverbially get so wealthy they lose the elemental notion of what life is about and they go into what they call decadence, Luxus and Romans, luxury. And then they speak freely and that speak freedom becomes nihilism. So if you were to take the pessimistic tradition, you say in the United States today, you know, everybody's well off and what do we get? We get the Kardashians I'm just, I'm not picking on the Kardashians, but kind of in name selfies, you know, semi nude people taking pictures of themselves to make money or we get free speech, we get people that all they can say is negative things about the United States. LATE NIGHT TALK SHOW HOST So in that tradition of criticism of the West, I don't like to just say the west is in decline or I don't like any general statement unless you can give some data or some benchmark. So is the west in Decline? Is the GDP of the west, I.e. the United States and Europe mostly together, larger than anywhere else? Yes. Is it, is the population in decline? We have about a billion people in the West. We'll get to dining. But the fertility is. It's not that the fertility is declining. It is, is it declining at a faster rate than the modern phenomenon that's going on in Russia or China? And it's not. But it is declining much faster in Europe than let's say the Middle east or Latin America. So we want to look at all of these. So let's look at higher education. Is higher education in decline and is it contributing? It wouldn't have mattered. 150 years ago, our universities were sort of refuges or atolls where a few elites conducted literature, history, scientific inquiry, religion. But now in the 20th century, late 20th century, half of all Americans go to college. So what happens in college affects them. And there is a problem, and that is in the last 50 years, immigration has included people from the poorest parts of the world. And we are bringing in about 54 million people who were not born right now in the United States. Plus we've had all sorts of other groups that have been outside of the mainstream. And the idea of education is we're going to bring them in and mass educate everybody. But in America, unlike other areas and the western experience, Germany for example, or Britain, that how do you do that? If you don't insist on K12 standards, then you promote people grade by grade and then they go into the university and they don't have the skills to conduct classes or to pass or to take classes in the fashion that the university said was necessary. So what do I mean? I mean, if I were to go look at a PhD program in my particular field in 2025 and look where it was, I don't know when I entered in 1975, well, I can tell you that the classes were more numerous, they were more difficult, the language requirements were more difficult, the ability to write in Latin And Greek was required. It was just much more rigorous. Why is it less rigorous? Because of contemporary education became therapeutic. It was the idea that, well, the purpose of higher education is not to teach people a whole array of facts and reference. What's the Pythagorean theory? How far is the moon from the Earth? What is Celsius versus Fahrenheit? Who was David Hume? All these things and all these different fields that were considered to make a person educated. Instead it was we were going to address unfairness and social pathology. So we started making classes. Dash studies, leisure studies, environmental studies, racial studies, black studies, Asian studies, women's studies, queer studies, peace studies. But they were deductive. They said peace studies. We're going to start with the idea war is evil and doesn't do anything anywhere. Now we'll find examples to prove that feminist studies, all men are sexist. Let's find books that that's the way it is in the universe. And in the process of that therapeutic mindset, you don't get people who are inductive and you don't get people with a lot of facts. And if you don't have those people, and if you don't have people coming in From K through 12 that have been taught in the traditional fashion, then the university has to do one of three things. It either has to give everybody A's and say they're just as successful as before. Look, they have a averages and then the quality of education goes down, the reputation goes down and we lose competitiveness. And then Donald Trump says I have to let in all these HB1 visas because we can't get anybody here who's educated. Or you have to create new gut courses. Just go look at a curriculum. You know, what are they? The ideology of porn, cartoons, radical Islamic feminism, Things that would never be in the curriculum before. They're just esoteric little micro studies. But they have a therapeutic purpose to critique basically white male Christian culture in the United States, Western culture. So the universities have become a huge area where the purpose is to train people in a particular ideology that's anti Western and anti American. And the result is you could live with that if they were educated, because they could self correct after they left the universities, and some do. But if they're not teaching math and science and biology and languages and philosophy and history in a disinterested and tough fashion, and they're giving A's or rewards for people who mimic the ideas of these professors, then the quality goes down. And we can detect it in a lot of ways. One is that foreign students test higher in Europe, but even in China, Japan, Korea. Number two, the employers are starting to revolt and saying we can't work with these people. I don't care if they have a Stanford or Yale ba They're not educated and they're looking at people at Clemson or Texas, any area where that has resisted the woke DEI equity virus, so to speak. The other thing is, in addition to the decline in standards, it's not cost effective. When the federal government came in about 20 years ago and said we're going to back student loans to give everybody a chance to go to college, the university said, wait a minute, you mean if Tommy comes in here and I tell him it's $10,000 a year in 1975 for four years is 50,000, maybe with movement, maybe it's 80,000, I don't know. But you're going to guarantee a loan so he can go to any bank in the United States and loan that money and then you will pay the bank if he defaults? Oh my gosh. Well, you know what? I think that we're going to build a new, I think we're going to build a new dorm. That's okay. And we're going to hire a couple of centers, a Center for Progressive Thought. Oh, the center for Gender Ideology. And we'll hire people who don't teach and then we'll have a rock climbing wall in all the dorms. And then we will have not just graduation, but we will pay for 15 different graduate the Hispanic graduation, the Asian graduation, the gay graduation, the black graduation. And they just kept saying, and the price of tuition, room and board increased faster than the rate of inflation because the government was here. The government then was on in hock for not 1 billion, not 100 billion, $1.7 trillion that they have to guarantee. And 30%, they don't call it a default, they call it a delay or they're not funk, they're not functioning loans. In other words, the guy says, well, you know, I got my B.A. in environmental studies. It took me eight years. The graduation rate is only 50% of those coming in. And whereas before it was 4.5 years in every, it's over six to get that half that people get a B.A. he says, you know, I don't get a very good job. I owe 150,000 at 6%, I can't afford 10 or $12,000. So in government I'll just pay a minimum 300amonth and they're never going to pay it back. And so the whole higher education enterprise is in danger. So why did it go on this long? Because people said, well, everybody has to have a B.A. if you're going to be at work at the DMV, you got to get a bachelor's degree in communications. If you're going to work, I don't know, in the Federal Communications Commission, you need a BA in journalism. And then people said, no, you don't. All you have to be is educated. And you can if you went to a really good high school in a year of junior college. But no, no, the universities insisted, so they certified everything. Meanwhile, half the country went into these areas, got nothing as far as their ability to speak, write well, talk well. And there wasn't enough people to do plumbing, electricity, all the things that make a society. We demonize those people, the trades. We didn't have trade schools. And now there's a big shock, because with AI, artificial intelligence, I didn't really know anything about it, but I've been trying to experiment the last week with it and just talk to it or write, type it in. Things like who was the Pamanondas, the Theban comes out like it's a little narrative. Or what would.

Sammy Wink (20:41)

How.

Victor Davis Hanson (20:43)

How would you reform government? And which departments of the cabinet seas would you eliminate? So you don't need these people, is what I'm saying. It's a very dangerous technology. Not because you're going to have a Terminator take over it, because the people who are putting the inputs in are all left from Silicon Valley. So it's bias and prejudice. But what I'm getting at is higher education for the bang for the buck is not worth it. We've got too many people that are wasting their 20s and 30s. It's a contributor to what I would call the lost generation. Those are mostly white males in the west, not even white males. There can be Asians in Japan, they can. It can be anywhere. But this phenomenon is not confined to America and they are prolonging their adolescence. They're not their mom, their moms and dads, to the extent there's two parents say, well, when I was 21, I was married. At 23, I had a child. At 25, I had my house. 27, I got a promotion. 28, we had three kids. 35, the mortgage was paid off and the kids playing video. But the houses are too expensive. And half of us that got these degrees didn't get jobs and we can't pay back the student loans. And if you date a girl, they may be dressed provocatively but if you have a sexual congress, I'm being euphemistic with them and it doesn't go bad, and they're going to call you up. In the old days, they would say, hey, you cad, you didn't call me after last night. And now they'll call me and said, you know, I was thinking about it and I talked to my women's studies professor and you sexually violated me, and I'm going to complain to university about you or something. So the males just say, you know what? And this is really. The consumption of pornography has gone really high because they are isolating themselves. 60% of the people at universities are women colleges. And this, this male is a lost generation. And that's hurting the West. So the education disaster is hurting us. It's too expensive. It's creating prolonged adolescence. It is dumbing down the country. And what we'd be much better for is saying, look, here is K12. This is a fast track to college, and you're going to take rigorous courses. If you don't want to take them or you can't do them, we have another track called Trades. And maybe at 10 or 12, we'll start letting you wire or plumb or do something and get you out at 18 as a skilled tradesman. But we are not going to dumb down all of these courses and then put you in the university and you can't do the work and then call everybody a racist, sexist homophobe and make them lower the curriculum to your needs rather than to the country's needs. Because we are in an existential race with China and other powers, and we only have 340 million people. They have 1.4 billion. India has over 1.3 billion. And the only way we can stay competitive is to be better educated and more adept at science and technology. And we can't do it under this present system in the West.

Sammy Wink (24:12)

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Victor Davis Hanson (26:41)

Like why don't you play a late lightning round?

Sammy Wink (26:44)

I'll ask you, okay, so how do we fit this into the paradigm? Larry Summers, he's retired because of the Epstein files.

Victor Davis Hanson (26:52)

Okay. Larry Summers, he was an economist, he was president of Harvard and he was a public intellectual did and he got in big trouble because he said at a conference on mathematics that the why women were underrepresented was not endemic racism or exclusion at K through 12, but because they had a different type of aptitude. He didn't say they couldn't be mathematicians. He just said that the brain genetically favors male in this particular area. But there's a lot of others in that women are superior to males. That's all you could argue with it. There's some research that said he that support that view. And he was cancelled. Canceled. I mean he had to resign. There was no free thought in the university after he resigned because he went to Harvard. Nobody really asked well what's so good about being president of Harvard? It was just then he started weighing in and then he was on all the boards and it was a platform because we in this country, we don't ask what does an actual president of Harvard, do we? Don't. So he became fabulously rich, fabulously famous, and he bumped into Jeffrey Epstein, didn't he? And then he. I don't think he did anything legally wrong. He just explained. He exchanged thousands of letters. And there were two themes. Give me money, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. And Jeffrey Epstein did to his wife. And then you've got all these women and you're an expert and give me some advice how I seduce this woman. So. But the subtext. What? Is Claudine gay? She was a Harvard president. Does that mean anything? Do they have. No, it means nothing. Somebody's gonna say, well, Victor, that's just a blanket unfair generalization. No, it's not. I was at Stanford University when I came to the Hoover and she was a political science professor and she was given tenured on really no major book at all. That scholarship then gave her a full professorship at Harvard, that non existent scholarship. And she became president. And she was a plagiarist. Plagiarist. Any other student who plagiarized like she did would have been expelled. And she stepped down. They knew she was a plagiarist and they made her president. She stepped down and she kept that fantastic salary that we're paying for all of us because we give Harvard tax free exemptions on most of its endowment income and they use it to pay Claudine Gay and a million dollars for a plagiarist in the political science department.

Sammy Wink (29:34)

And the congressional investigation that was going on, where these presidents showed up and they couldn't defend their policy against anti Semites who are harassing.

Victor Davis Hanson (29:45)

Yes, anti Semites. Well. Well, there. It's also, by the way, I don't know which ones Sammy's going to ask, but I can weigh in. They won't be as comprehensive if I had prep, but that's very easy to answer that the university has been letting in people who will pay more than Americans. Americans don't have the money to pay a quarter million dollars, so they need student loans. And foreign students usually don't get US backed food. But they come from the wealthiest areas in the world. The wealthy provincial officials in China, the Brahmin class in India, or in the case of the Middle east, the oil sheikdom money, whether it's dispersed throughout the Middle east and there's over a million of them. So the university says, you know, just lay off these students because they pay 110% and we need them. And then we've noticed that they're all anti American. The ones from China, they're very critical. And the ones from the Middle east are very. And they seem to be wanting to talk about the middle east to the degree they're not in engineering. So let's get people in Qatar and Saudi and all these people Kuwait and give hundreds of millions of dollars to us and we'll set up Middle east programs. And then they discover that these people are very, very anti American and very anti Israel. And they created a massive amount of, of a massive, I don't know what you call it, anger at Jews and anger at Israel from people who are very wealthy and pay a lot of money to the universities and their sponsors. Give a lot of money. So when they were asked about anti Semitism, let me think now, the little devil on their right shoulder said, hey, you can't mention, you got to remember that these middle east students are getting us a lot of money. If you say one wrong word, they might cut us off. And professor Jones over there, remember, he's get, he's getting that big $10 million grant from Kuwait. And then the little angel says, but you should say, you really should try to say that we're the embryo of anti Semitism all over the United States now. We let people say horrible things about Jews. We let them demonstrate for killers like Hamas. And then the little devil won. And that's what they.

Sammy Wink (32:17)

She said, okay, but then let's put the most recent thing in news about the middle east or one of the recent things, which is the Saudi prince, crown prince showed up here and said, oh, you know, all good is good with Donald Trump. We might have up to a trillion dollars in investment yield, quid pro quo. Yes, but that probably a lot of that trillion is going to go to universities, and it will.

Victor Davis Hanson (32:48)

The investment is business, so that if it is, that's a mistake. But ostensibly we are getting foreign investment to invest in u. S Companies and jobs. I don't think the university is doing that at all. They are getting money and they're not very efficient. How they do, how does that do? When you give 10 million bucks so you get 7%, you get $700,000 a year, 10 million gift to Harvard to set up the Mohammed bin Sallam something professorship and program. In middle age, you take the 700, you pay a guy about a half a million bucks to be a professor to teach two classes a year, and then he's going to write how awful the United States is. That's not a good investment. We don't really need that. That.

Sammy Wink (33:36)

Okay, so, but Maybe it won't go to the universities, but isn't it. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Victor Davis Hanson (33:43)

We're on number two.

Sammy Wink (33:44)

We're on corruption.

Victor Davis Hanson (33:45)

I need another example.

Sammy Wink (33:46)

Oh, you want the corruption besides the Maryland University of Maryland?

Victor Davis Hanson (33:51)

Well, you. Yeah, I want you to say that. How you can find things in the news that illustrate what I said, the decline of the west as exemplified by the universe.

Sammy Wink (34:00)

Yes. Okay. So. So I think that the corruption at the higher, highest levels of the university is problematic. Both probably from a moral standpoint. More than anything. Isn't moral conduct equally important to our freedoms and individualism and the.

Victor Davis Hanson (34:18)

Yes.

Sammy Wink (34:19)

Prospering of rationalism?

Victor Davis Hanson (34:20)

What did Harvard or Yale start out as? Divinity schools. All of these universities in the 19th century, whether you like it or not, their instruction was biblically Christian based. Okay. And it's not anymore. It's not that it's not. It's anti Christian. I mean, I'm not saying there's Bible schools related. There is, of course, and there's traditional schools like Hills Day, but they're the exception. If you go into a class and a person says anything, your professor and you said, I, I disagree, that's contrary to the Sermon on the Mount, but blessed are the mercy. What are they going to say to you? They're going to say, get out of here. You know, you probably are against trans people in, in female sports, something like that. You don't like gay marriage. That's what they're going to say. So there is no moral class. What they call morality is postmodern Foucaultism. And that is there is a morality and it's arbitrary and it is constructed. And that's our job in the university, to deconstruct it. It's constructed by wealthy, white, racist, homophobic, misogynist men who founded this country. So they made these laws. So I'll give you an example. Everybody in class, have any of you, because you're all wealthy here at Stanford, have any of you ever broken in to a store and, I don't know, stole sneakers? No, I haven't. No, I haven't. Well, some of the people in the inner city do. And you know why they do? Because they don't have sneakers. And you do and you have sneakers and you made that law that said they couldn't have any. Now you call it capitalism. So what I'm trying to tell you, we have a new ethics here at this program and it's called critical legal and critical race theory. And morality is not based on human nature or natural law. It is based on who is in power. And our job at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton is to find out who is in power and to deconstruct them and to say why they do things. Then everything makes sense. That's what they teach them.

Sammy Wink (36:35)

Yes. And it is a corrupt ethical system to abide by.

Victor Davis Hanson (36:41)

Well, I mean, where does that lead to? It leads to a young woman this week being lit on fire on the Chicago subway system from somebody who was arrested 49 times and he was let out. And why was he let out? Because of the type of reasoning I just talked about 49 times over and over again.

Sammy Wink (37:05)

Well, Victor, that is a fascinating conversation, which I know we could continue, but I want to turn because we have.

Victor Davis Hanson (37:11)

Lots of the next symptoms of decline.

Sammy Wink (37:14)

Yes. And that's this climate policy is working against the Western enterprise and the stories that we have today that are interesting and might indicate some change to a more practical climate point of view is Bill Gates wrote an essay where he said that the resources need to shift away from all this climate change, preventing climate change efforts to poorer countries. That was.

Victor Davis Hanson (37:45)

I don't want to rain on your parade.

Sammy Wink (37:47)

Yes, go ahead.

Victor Davis Hanson (37:48)

But he didn't change. He just said. He called up his accountant and said, I'm investing $20 billion in artificial intelligence. They said, that's a great investment. But you know what the biggest problem is? They need 100 gigawatts a year. 100 gigawatts. What's that mean? That means a big nuclear plant of a thousand megawatts every 100 of those. How about our wind and solar programs? No, they won't do it. They're too unreliable. They take up. It just won't do it, Bill, the only thing you're going to do it is clean coal or natural gas or nuclear. Well, then I'll have to change on climate change. And he did. And a lot of them are going to do that.

Sammy Wink (38:30)

And the prince or prince King Carl XVI of your Sweden, Brazil said Europe has reduced itself to only 6% of pollutant emissions in the globally.

Victor Davis Hanson (38:46)

So what is climate change is hurting the West? Because the west, it's called, as we said, declinism. When I was 18, if you said, what is this threat to the West? I can tell you, I can remember, I think it's the 1970 Newsweek cover. They had the Earth and it was covered with ice. And they said, the new ice Age. And everybody said, oh, my gosh, it was really cold this winter and it was cold last winter, too. We're going to freeze to death. What is what are we going to do? And then the second big thing, it was the population bomb. Malthus is our prophet and we're going to be people. It's going to be Soylent Green, all these movement, there's just going to be people popping out of every box. They're everywhere. So when I was at UC Santa Cruz in 1975, I went to a lecture and the person for a GE class and they said, class, you are the problem. You in the west, you white affluent students are consuming too much resources. So what we suggest to you is you only have one child and you adopt one. One plus one. And we don't want any breeders here. No breeders, no, I get to get mine. I get two kids who look like me. No, no selfish stuff. You just get one person because the planet cannot support. The United States will not be able to survive with 300 million people. And you'd say, well professor, Japan has 120. It's got like 10 times the people per square mile. Yes, but, yes, but they have a unique culture or something like that and they're going to die anyway in 50 years. That was what we heard. So the climate change is in a long history of declinism and woof, woof, woof, cry woof by elites. But nobody in the elites takes it serious. For them, if it was real climate change, Barack Obama, who said that our shores are going to be inundated by rising waters from the polar ice caps. There's more polar bears now than there was five years ago. He said they would be swimming here, you know, basically. And he built two. He bought a home at Martha's Vineyard on the coast and he just built one on the shore in Hawaii. Al Gore gets caught up and so does John Kerry. About every month some right wing reporter takes a picture of them and they're climbing out of their Gulf stream or they're, you know, Canadian jet, or I don't know, their citation 10. And they said, they run up to them and they say, and they always say the same thing, I can't stop global warming unless I get around, so I've got to get around. Well, you have to have 50 times of carbon footprint. The person, the average person does, yes, but the average person cannot stop climate change. I can, because I'm brilliant and I'm better than you. That's their attitude. And then you couple that with Bill Gates and all the techies that say, you know, I've got $100 billion and it's not fair, I don't have 500 billion and I will get it under AI, but not if these yokels bought that stuff. We peddled them five years ago on climate change. So that's just Western pessimism. And you know what, it's really sad because Europe, it destroyed Europe almost. Germany was the powerhouse of Europe. Its GDP was running 4 or 5%. Mercedes, BMW, SEMA, you name it. It was quality stuff that was competitively priced. And they shut down all their nuke they have, or they were going to all their nuclear plants, they shut down a lot of coal plants, oil burning, natural gas, and they put pan. Every time you go into Germany now you see a solar farm, but it's cloudy almost every day. And then the wind turbines are everywhere. And every time I go into California, I go over a pass, Pacheco Pass or the Altamont Pass, I look at those turbines, only about half are going, you know, they're working or my traffic has stopped for 4, 50 minutes when a big one little blade is semi and they're trying to replace it and they're not recyclable. And who is the big fat cat with a smile on his face and Alice through the Looking Glass, it's the Cheshire Chinese cat. And they're saying, we're all for climate change, we've got to stop it. It's going to affect us most. So we have been done something that you will really apprec. We're making panels and turbines at below the cost. Now we're going to dump them on the world market so you can all go wind and solar and save the planet. Now it will destroy your companies because you can't compete with us because we're subsidized. And that's the point, isn't it? We want to destroy your solar and wind industries and they almost have. And then we want you to go wind and solar and then we're going to build two coal plants a month and one nuclear plant a month and we're going to have have electrical cost at about one third of yours. And we're going to be able to export all of our goods to you much cheaper than you can make them. And we're going to build weapons much cheaper than you can. That's the whole point of the Chinese. And it's working because these idiots in the west fell for it and they.

Sammy Wink (44:14)

Censored people that were riding against that. So I wanted to just note, and if you have something to say about them, that a couple of the writers that were questioning the whole premise of climate change, Bjorn Lundberg, he's a very brilliant guy. Yeah, he was a skeptic of human induced climate change. So he wasn't saying climate change doesn't occur, but that it's necessarily human induced in how.

Victor Davis Hanson (44:39)

He said two things that were very important. He said there's regional and there's chronological variation in heat. And sometimes they can be long term, they can go over 20, 30, 100 years, but usually they're within a degree or two of the baseline and you can adjust to it without destroying your economy. And they called him a heretic.

Sammy Wink (44:59)

Yeah, they went after.

Victor Davis Hanson (45:00)

They treated him like they did when Scott Atlas said, I don't think it's wise to shut down all the schools because the people in it are not prone to get coveted and if you do that, it's going to destroy the economy and it will ruin their education for the next 10 year. Heretic.

Sammy Wink (45:16)

And he was right. And then Freeman Dyson, who was a critic of climate activists computer models. Yeah, he said that they were not necessarily based on empirical evidence.

Victor Davis Hanson (45:28)

He has more. Freeman Dyson, the physicist has more brains in his toenail than Al Gore and John Kerry combined. It's very tragic because you have to look at climate change, as I said, in this pattern of Western declinism where the elites who are affluent, they get very upset. They don't believe in a Christian God, they don't believe in any transcendence. So they feel, oh my gosh, I've got a billion dollars, I can do anything. I have the Midas touch now and I'm gonna die and there's no heaven, there's nothing. So I've got to make heaven on earth. But all of these stupid yokels and deplorables and clingers, they're just in the way. And they got these stupid snowmobiles and I don't know what snowmobiles, and they've got motor scooters and just. It's awful Winnebagoes. So we've got to ban all these people and then we've got to make it a 19th century paradise. So when I'm going to Yosemite, there's not one person there and I'm in the Sierra Club board of directors and I get to hike around for a day. That's the way it should be. That's how they think. I know them well because I've unfortunately had to spend 50 years with them. So that is another. Climate change is hurting the west because sum up, just like higher education is not making us competitive because it has a different political agenda than to create knowledgeable, inductive thinkers to power the United States ahead. So climate change has said all of your strengths. You still have more nuclear plants in the United States anywhere else. You've lost your competitive edge in nuclear engineering, but you kept up some of it with your nuclear carrier and submarine. And you can regain that if we redo the universities and you have created fracking and horizontal, you're up to 14 million barrels, you get up to 16, you can get gas down to $2 a gallon and that will supercharge the economy next year. So that's what we're trying to do in this counter revolution. We on the conservative side. Right.

Sammy Wink (47:41)

And then just to finish that, I wondered if you had some idea, how do you see the energy policy in the future, maybe just in California, Because.

Victor Davis Hanson (47:50)

I know, I think it's going to be the free market and there's going to be certain, you know, guidelines that you're not going to be allowed. I mean 99% of the pollutants are not in gasoline anymore or emissions. And you're going to see more and more sophisticated studies that can find just minuscule damage from the air, various areas. And you'll see restrictions, but you'll also see commiserately fossil fuels be more efficiently burned and more carefully and healthily burned. And we're going to be on a pathway using all of the above. You know, wind and solar. In some places like Arizona, it might make some sense for solar, it can augment, but it will not be the reliable fuel. You'll have to have nuclear, you'll have to have coal and oil and natural gas especially. And as you don't destroy your civilization and make it like we did in California, $6 for gas and destroy the lower middle class, which we did. I go into local Walmart in August and people are sitting there all day to get the free air conditioning. Can't afford it otherwise. And then you're at the same time you're developing what, fusion power, nuclear fusion, hydrogen. You're going to get a new technology. But you don't destroy your economy and your society because some wealthy crank billionaire or millionaire or grifter like Al Gore tries to scare everybody so he can become wealthier and more exempt from the consequences of his own ideology.

Sammy Wink (49:37)

Yeah, and I expect that his opinions and the opinions of a lot of.

Victor Davis Hanson (49:42)

So that's a good point. The west has got a challenge with the university one and with these climate change fanatics that are destroying the economy.

Sammy Wink (49:51)

It's third one we will get to right after These messages stay with us. Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can find Victor also at his X account. It his handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning cup are these podcasts are distributed on YouTube rumble and then in audio form from Spotify. And we have iheart as well and Apple podcasts.

Victor Davis Hanson (50:25)

Have we strangled the Victor Davis Hansen show imposter yet?

Sammy Wink (50:30)

Well, that is going to be a slow suicide.

Victor Davis Hanson (50:33)

I don't like him. I really don't.

Sammy Wink (50:34)

I don't like him either.

Victor Davis Hanson (50:35)

There's another one too. He spawned somebody that I've been seeing, people have sent me and it's the Victor Davis Hansen artificial intelligence has my head.

Sammy Wink (50:46)

Yes.

Victor Davis Hanson (50:46)

Spouting all of this stuff and there's.

Sammy Wink (50:49)

Not one person, there's many and it's.

Victor Davis Hanson (50:51)

One and a half or two times at the rate I speak so it's easier to digest. And they've kind of of my little frog voice I've had lately, you know, that's gone. But that's not me.

Sammy Wink (51:01)

Yeah, it's not him. And one of them I watched it had AI had mastered a couple of your, A few of your mannerisms and then it just kept playing those mannerisms over and over and over and over and it was so.

Victor Davis Hanson (51:13)

I was perky jerky. Gavin.

Sammy Wink (51:15)

Yes. No, Gavin actually was more interesting. Okay, so we're on to symptoms, to immigration.

Victor Davis Hanson (51:22)

And I could just say, remember what we're, what we're talking about are not volcanoes exploding like Mount Vesuvius or Mount Aetna destroying a civilization. We're not talking about World War III and atomic nuclear exchange. We're not talking about a super super coveted virus killing everybody. These are all human induced optional. These are affluent Westerners who choose, who choose to destroy their universities, who choose to destroy their economies by these climate hysterias. And we have another one.

Sammy Wink (51:59)

Yes. And that is immigration. And the way that it destroys the west in the United States is it brings in large populations of people who are not western and they come in and they live in places in big groups. And then it's a slow frazzling of the edges of what is Western.

Victor Davis Hanson (52:21)

Yes, we all. There's two things that we. And the west, especially the United States that had more immigrants. It still does. In all the world put together each year we had certain rules that we discovered in Europe had followed them. Europe really didn't get a lot of. It's, you know, it didn't. People left Europe because of overpopulation. And that was real before the Industrial Revolution. Or during it. So. So what were the American lessons? Immigration works when, one, it is diverse. You have people from Poland, but you have people from Italy. You have people from South Korea or Korea, but you also have people from Finland. Or number two, the people who are coming have some skill sets and they have mastered their language or they want to learn English. So in 1950, you didn't pick up the phone and hear Spanish first or Chinese second, and then English. It was just one language. Everybody was on the same page and they had some skill sets. Basic education. Number three, there was a background check. You did not let people in with tuberculosis or a long criminal record. Not like the border today where you just walk across and we say, we wake up one day, Joe Biden's gone. And we think, wow, we have 500,000 people here with criminal records that came under Joe. And Majorcas just lies to you. Oh, no. So you had a background check. So you had. And it was legal. So people went to their embassies or consulates and they applied for application to come into the United States. And then we adjudicated whether they were a subtraction or an additional addiction. Number four, there was some meritocracy, diversity, but also meritocracy. We didn't want somebody coming in, whether it's fair or not, that couldn't read and was fighting terminal cancer. Okay, hard to say that, but that's what we were. And then four, five, we believed in the melting pot. We were said to them, Mr. Immigrant, let me get this straight so there's no confusion. You want to leave your country, you want to leave all of your traditions, you want to come to this foreign country called the United States, and you say, you know English and you've got some education and you're going to do it legally. But we got to remind you that when you come here, you're going to be melted in with everybody. So you're going to be assimilated, you're going to be integrated, and you're going to be acculturated. Now, you can bring on your fashion, your food, you can bring in songs, you can bring in the periphery. We like that. That's called enrichment. That's why we drive down the road and we say, yeah, I have Chinese food today. Look, it's a pinata for Christmas. That's fine. But if you come in here, you're not going to be hyphenated and you're not going to have loyalty to your prior country over ours, and you're going to be fully Americanized. Within three generations. So your child. So my grandfather, who was born sort of on the way from Sweden, they were going to tell Frank Hanson and Nels Hansen, but if you come here, your grandson won't speak Swedish. They said, oh wow, that's not fair. He's going to be a Swedish the whole time. No, he's not going to have any loyalty to Sweden. Now he may like drive a Volvo and parade around like he's Swedish, but I'm sorry, he's going to be lost to you. But he's going to be an American. You understand that? Yeah, I understand. I'm farming rocks in Sweden. It's cold. Kingsburg, California is really beautiful. I want to be in America. And yes, my son will speak Swedish, but my grandson won't. I understand. It's called the brutal bargain. That's what it was and it worked. And then Teddy Kennedy and Philip Hart, senators, Democrats, around 1965. This is not fair. We got the New Deal, we've got the Great Society coming in and we've got the eight hour workday. We've got over. We've got everything we want wanted civil rights passed, but nobody wants our, nobody wants our radical socialist agenda anymore because we got the. It's a free market economy, but we've kind of softened the edges so we've got to import different people. So let's just stop all immigration from Europe and the former British Empire, especially if it's white and no more Europeans and we'll have family reunification and we'll kind of wink and nod about whether it's legal or not. Eisenhower, you know, had Operation Wetback. He called it very cruel word, tried to stop it, but more or less the idea was you don't have to be diverse. We can have 100% coming across the southern border. You don't have to be qualified if you don't speak English. We'll have an interpreter in court, we'll have an interpreter at the er, we'll have an interpreter on the floor phone. Now that anybody who says that will cost us is a racist. It won't. And if you come across, we're going to give you food stamps and a medical card and subsidized housing and legal and educational consulting. Anybody says that, that's a drain on our society and you don't have to integrate because you are a unique person. And the moment you set foot across this, this boundary, we want to tell you something that is a non white male Christian person. You have claims against this country. It is a racist country and it will treat you racist. So you, even though you weren't born here, if you apply to college, you're going to have preference over little Tommy Smith and a stupid little white family that live in a stupid little suburban house. And that's what we did. And it worked okay. When you had 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, 4 million, 10 million, then it got a little sticky. Then 30 million, then 10%, then 53 million people. And you get into. Well, who's to say that if just you come from India and you don't speak English and you don't read English and you came here illegally through Mexico and you flunked the commercial driving test in California 12 times. Well, that we're not going to discriminate against you. Who to say that was that you can't drive a truck. Oh, you don't want your name on your license. Fine. And then we let. That's. That's where we are now. And it's not working.

Sammy Wink (59:26)

No, it's strange and it is.

Victor Davis Hanson (59:28)

And in Europe, after what I've said is we are so far ahead of Europe because we were all once immigrants. So we still have half the country who believes in the melting pot and tries to get people integrated. But Europe believes in, you know, the aristocracy, so they don't particularly think you can be fully British or German or English unless you were born there. Fine, that's a great paradigm. I have no problem if that's what they want to believe. But when you bring in 16% of the population, not from the Christian areas of Latin America, but the hostile areas of, of Islamic Middle east, then you've got about four more problems on your hand. And those people are not integrating, they are not assimilating, they are not, you name it, they're not acculturating, they're not intermarrying. They believe that this is the Crusades again. And they're going to do through demography what they lost through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And you're going to see be increased hostility. And they're going to be a lot of people who finally say, if this illegal, unlimited immigration of people who hate us is going to continue, we're not going to commit collective suicide, we're going to stop it.

Sammy Wink (60:48)

Can I ask you how you think mom dummy fits in there? The new mayor of New York?

Victor Davis Hanson (60:53)

Well, he's a perfect example, sort of. He came in legally, so his parents were, in the university parlance, they were settler colonialists. They were originally from India. They went to Uganda, part of the elite commercial class. Did you hear that Mr. Mondami? You were what you accuse other people of being settler colonialists. You call the Jews and the Israelis settler colonialists. There's people in Israel that have been in Israel, Jews for 3,500 years. And, and this was the historic homeland of the Jews. Are you going to make an argument that the historical homeland of India was in Uganda? I don't think so. It was a British colony. That's how your parents got there as explorers. So yes, they come here and then they come here from Uganda via India and they say, wow, this is amazing. You can be a professor. You get like three classes a year. You get 250,000 bucks and all you have to do is make fun of the United States and attack it.

Sammy Wink (62:02)

And you get a whole vocabulary of whining.

Victor Davis Hanson (62:05)

Yes. And you get sabbaticals. And you really don't have to teach undergraduates. 50 students correct those papers every night. Not at Columbia. If you're an endowed professor and you want to make films, you can make millions and the government's going to subsidize half of them. Then you can have a kid like, like Zoron and teach him that he doesn't really have to get a job. He just floats around. He says he's one day he's going to be a rapper, the next day he's going to be help on his mom's film crew. Next day he's going to be kind of a gadfly political activist out on the demonstration. But the country is so wealthy that we're going to be millionaires. In fact, Indian Americans are the wealthiest minority in the United States. That's a problem because we have to be on the victim side of the oppressed oppressor binary. So we're going to say we were not white and subject to terrible discrimination. So I'm Zoran Mandami and I want to tell you something. After 9 11, my auntie who is Indian was discriminated because they thought she was, well, she was Muslim, but they discriminated. Greg Zoron. Hold on just a minute. 3,000Americans were murdered by radical Islamicists. Are you worried about their fates jumping into oblivion from the top of the World Trade center? All done by 19 murderous fanatic Islamicists. Can't you say one word? And you're worried about your so called anti who doesn't even exist. There's no record that you even had an ante at that particular time. You made that whole thing up so you could play on our DEI insanity. And you want to Be mayor. And you said, this is a city of immigrants. No, it's not. 65% of the people were born in the United States. In New York, 35% were. That's who we created out of the system. Nobody said to Zoron's parents or Zoron when they came here, oh, you want to come here, United States? Okay, and you speak English. That's a big plus. Men, you're educated. That's another big plus. Now, here's the Constitution. Here's this. And what's your attitude about you love the United States? Can you sing America the Beautiful? Do you? I don't know. Do you know what? The super bowl is just basic elements of Americana. And they didn't have the attitude when they came. As almost all immigrants today, I left my country because I want to come to America, not because it's perfect, but it's good enough and it's better than the alternative. And when I get here, I'm going to be a super patriotic American. No, he said, I'm God here. And it's got a capitalist system. And that's why I'm here, because it's a heck of a lot wealthier than any other country I've been in. But once I'm here and I can take advantage of wealth, I want to destroy it because I'm angry at it. They think they're too good. I'm envious of them. And that's what we have now. And so I would argue to finish the third symptom of decline, that we take legal only immigrants, that they are diverse, they have to come from all over the world. That might include Europe as well. We do not discriminate by race. We let in Hispanics, we let in Asians, but we also let in Africans, and we let in white. We don't let in white people. We discriminate against them and we let them all in. If they go through rigorous background checks, health checks, they can speak English, they have skill sets. And we say to them, when you come in here, you're not going to be wards of the state, you're going to be self. And we could probably get two or three hundred thousand, period a year. And who would be angry at that? The Democratic Party. They would say, hey, if we bring in people who can speak English and they have skill sets, and they took a test and they're all diverse and they can't form one big lobbying group, they can't all be Somalis in Minnesota that are poor and got a lot of little plans for Us in store. Well, why would we want them? Because our whole plan is to bring in poor people that don't like the United States and need our help. So we give them free stuff from the taxpayer, we take credit for it and they vote for us for life. Life. That's who's against it.

Sammy Wink (66:34)

Well, the last symptom that we want to talk about today, Victor, is fertility. And we know that the university and the rhetoric in the United States is, yeah, because of climate you don't want to have. AOC said that the world was going to end in like 10 years or something.

Victor Davis Hanson (66:53)

I don't know what it was. She said she wasn't going to have kids and have more AOCs. I thought promises, promises, that's a problem. I'm not just being unjust. If you look at fertility in the 20 so called red blue states, it's about 1. We average everybody about 1.73. Just in 1999 we were 2.1. I'm talking about people who were born in the United States, the fertility rate. So it was about 1.71. But in blue states it's about 1.4 and in red states about 2.1. So what's happening? All you people in Arizona, Florida, Wyoming, Utah, you're having like 2 to 3 kids and 4 million people a year are joining you. And you people in blue states, like where I am, we're having about 1.4 kids and nobody's coming here. Everybody's leaving. So our congressional districts, we're going to surrender unless we cheat like we're trying to in California and they've stopped Texas from trying to cheat for their conservatives. We're going to lose all of our congressional districts and our economies are going to be backward, but we've got to keep doing it. We got to keep getting left, left, left, left. Climate, climate, climate. So fertility is a big problem in Europe is worse. It's not averaging 1.7, it's averaging about 1.4. In some countries like Italy and Germany, I think it's almost 1.2. And why is that? I gotta be very careful how I say that. But traditionally declining fertility is commensurate not just with health. You know, childhood diseases killed most people. If you were in ancient Greece, you'd probably. A woman would have to be pregnant 10 times to deliver four births, to have the three births be successful out of the four and to have two children survive puberty maybe 20 pregnancies later. But with the industrial evolution, modern sanitation, healthcare, that's not true. But usually it's the emancipation of women that makes the fertility go down because they want to get in the good life with men and have a say in things and child rearing for affluent people, men and women, but particularly women because it puts more of a. I don't want to use the word burden, but more responsibility to physically have children and to nurse them and be just. It's a drag. They think that's what they're told in college. If you went to college and you said, hi, I'm Susie Smith and I'm from Utah and I just want to say in this class on American history that I'm here to do my patriotic part. I want to marry one of you guys in class. I want to get my BA in, I don't know, American Studies and I plan on having three to four children and raise them up to be good old red blooded patriotic Americans, law abiding. And that's my goal. And if I can do that, I made a wonderful country. I'm not mocking them. That is a noble thing to say. And that person will be demonized and say, get out of here. If you went in and said, if you said, hello, I'm Samantha Jo. You know, I just hear because of the patriarchy, it's so oppressive. And after six or seven boyfriends this year, I was so upset at them. They were just losers. And you know that my women's studies professors have suggested that because Donald Trump is going to try to take abortion away from us, I have to be very careful. And I'm considering transitioning, but I haven't decided yet. That's what who, that's the alternative. It's kind of like, like, it's kind of like the difference between Karen Jean Pierre at the podium and Carol Levitt, you know what I mean? It's Miss Sunshine, bouncy, happy, and has already had one baby and probably will.

Sammy Wink (71:21)

Have two more and super smart and right on top of it and responsive to the press.

Victor Davis Hanson (71:27)

So I don't know is fertility is very, it's very. To get serious for change. I mean I'm serious but. But I was too mocking. It is the barometer of a healthy society. When Rome had its greatest problems in the first century A.D. and the third century A.D. and you look at the Italian birth rate, it really plummeted. And you can see glimpses in the description of women in Plautus and Terence, but especially as I said in first century B.C. and A.D. literature that there's not an emphasis on the Italian agrarian model of kids and family and all that anymore. It's just. It's just not. And they're. Same thing happened in Greece and I think all of us just think, wow, look at my. My grandmother was one of 11 children. My grandfather was one of three boys. My maternal. My paternal grandfather was the one of. Of four boys. I don't know about my paternal grandmother because she died before I was born, but I think she had four sisters and my parents had three of us. One child was lost, my sister but early age and then my aunt and that family had two. Then my other family, my grandfather, the parents had my mom who had four deliveries, three survived to adulthood and then her sister had two and her other sister was crippled and couldn't have children. So that's a story. It just gets. Each generation gets smaller children. Yeah. And then we say, well, we're going to have immigration. That'll keep up for it. It would be energizing if it was, you know, as I said, diverse and.

Sammy Wink (73:25)

Legal and assimilation where they know civic. Civic culture.

Victor Davis Hanson (73:31)

I just did. So I. I just had to. I just had a company called me about a health prescription delivery or something. I don't know what it was, but it was not just a two minute, two seconds thing in Spanish. I could understand about 55% of it, but it was. Just went on and on in Spanish and then it paused and went into English. I think it was from the Bay area. Then it went into some kind of Asian dialect, Chinese or something. I thought why are we doing this? You know why. Why are we doing this?

Sammy Wink (74:05)

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show and at the end of the show. Yeah, we have others and we'll probably.

Victor Davis Hanson (74:12)

Neil Ferguson has taken the Economist. Not the same person as Neil, but another Ferguson. Ferguson's law says that when your interest on the dead debt is higher than the defense budget, you're in big trouble. But we declining defense is one of them.

Sammy Wink (74:26)

We worked on them on the Friday show. So we. We are completing or finishing up the discussion here. So I have some comments to one of our podcasts from YouTube and this was an interesting correction. It's by Boris Badep by Depp.

Victor Davis Hanson (74:46)

The name sounds impressive.

Sammy Wink (74:49)

Actually the music played by U. S Military against Manuel Noriega who loved opera wasn't very and and classical music was a playlist including songs from guns and Guns and Roses, welcome to the Jungle, Black Sabbaths, Paranoid, Van Halen's Panama and the clashes I Fought the law not Barry Manila.

Victor Davis Hanson (75:14)

Wait, that was a good movie. That was a good song. I fought the law on the law Fun. Yeah, I'll have to check that.

Sammy Wink (75:20)

The clashes version of that was very good as well. And the second comment, Stephen Parma 6463 My father was in the coast guard. They captured a German sub not far off in World War II. He's talking about they captured a German sub not far off the coast of New York. When they boarded, they found souvenirs from Coney Island Amusement Park. Some of the crew made it to the shore and spent the evening at the park.

Victor Davis Hanson (75:48)

I believe it. I believe it because we were. I don't know how to say it. We were just disarmed and we didn't know what we were doing in 39 and 40 and early 41. So we. We were sending, you know, all the. Everything was lit up and we weren't really patrolling German. They were neutral. So that was legal to do that if you were. We were officially neutral though pro British. But I'm sure there were Germans coming in and out. You know what I mean? I'm just looking in music warfare finally broke Manuel Noriego. So there's music torture. I'm just reading this. I didn't know. I never want to give inaccurate. It says all this says is heavy metal.

Sammy Wink (76:44)

There we go. Guns and Roses. Black Sabbath and Van Halen and the Clash, which is kind of alternative.

Victor Davis Hanson (76:53)

But I like I fought the law. I guess that was supposed to be a message to him. He fought American law.

Sammy Wink (77:01)

Yeah. I like though that this reader said. Noted that Noriega loved opera and classical music. So they.

Victor Davis Hanson (77:07)

I would be toward. I. I was never a fan of heavy metal. Wait a minute, just a second. Second. There was another story. It says if music could be magic for some. The use of loud Barry Manual music to drive away late night revelers from the suburban Sydney park is getting on the nerves of nearby residents. It is reminiscent of the US efforts to drive former Panamagan strongman Manuel Noriega from the Vatican Embassy where he took refuge in 1989. The local council castle in Sydney. See, I think that we're confusing two things. The music that we use when we. To get him out of his. His headquarters. And then we sent him and I think he went. Maybe he was in the Vatican Embassy in Panama. But this suggests. Well, they. I don't like Barry. I mean I like Barry. Que serra sera. Well that's Doris Day Alfred Hitchcock movie, right?

Sammy Wink (78:14)

Yes. And I can kind of the man who knew Too much but I can kind of sympathize with that being a little bit.

Victor Davis Hanson (78:21)

So I'm not sure that there weren't countries that use Barry Manilow because I think he was extradited. It said it was reminiscent of U S efforts to drive Noriega ago from the Vatican embassy where he took refuge in 1989. But they're using it in Australia when they want people to shut up and they're out leveling too late at night so they play but they say please I'll do anything but listen to that.

Sammy Wink (78:52)

Get that music away from me. Natalie Francis 7884 thank you Professor Hansen for the excellent content today. I also appreciate the library of books on the shelves in the background. A brilliant way to suggest what we should read without explicitly saying it Smiles.

Victor Davis Hanson (79:12)

There's Jeffrey Parker's History of Philip ii that's in Spanish. There's Churchill, one of my favorite historians and close friend Andrew Roberts Cambridge Ancient History was a great work. Douglass saw Southall Freeman was sort of a pro Confederate historian but he was very brilliant. Stylist Robert Solaris I'm just doing this ad hoc the Ecology of the Angels he was a student of a classicist Paul Cartlidge he was absolutely brilliant and he wrote kind of environmental history and then I don't know what happened. He just disappeared. Athenian Property that's a prosopography of all the famous families in ancient Athens by Professor Davies I could go on but Carl Sandburg's kind of not considered scholarly now but it's very readable of multi volume biography of Abraham Lincoln this is Norse translation of Plutarch's Live that was from the Latin who somebody translated from Greek and Norse translated from Latin so it's more not quite as exist. One of my favorite book Winkler's General Viticulture When I was farming anytime I would see a disease vine I ran over and pulled it off the shelf and tried to see if it was nematodes or some kind of dead arm or a mildew strain or something. But it was very. It's very great. It was a great work. I always thought when I was farming I never go back to academia so I'm going to write sequel to General Viticulture But I never did.

Sammy Wink (80:56)

Well thank you Natalie for that and thanks to our audience for listening today and bringing us into your household.

Victor Davis Hanson (81:02)

Thank you everybody for listening and viewing. And this was kind of a holiday detour from the news.

Sammy Wink (81:09)

Yeah.

Victor Davis Hanson (81:10)

But I hope you enjoyed it.

Sammy Wink (81:11)

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.

Victor Davis Hanson (81:15)

Thank you very much. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features. In addition.