The Lame-Duck Period: Right Revolution, Left Devolution
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December 26, 2024
TLDR: Discussion about Elon Musk's shake-up, Biden's pardons and student loan forgiveness, potential job applicants for Trump, Fauci's position at Georgetown, bomb attack in Germany, Left in San Francisco, and being a guest in foreign countries.
In this episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show, host Jack Fowler and Victor Davis Hanson engage in a captivating discussion covering a range of timely political topics, including Elon Musk's recent controversies, Biden's pardons, and societal changes reflected in left and right dynamics. Below, we summarize the key points and insights from their conversation.
Key Topics Discussed
1. Elon Musk's Influence and Attacks from the Left
Victor discusses the current stance of Elon Musk, who has emerged as a polarizing figure in the political landscape. Highlighted points include:
- Musk’s various contributions, such as advancements in electric vehicles and space exploration through Tesla and SpaceX, are overshadowed by targeted attacks from the left.
- Critics claim Musk lacks an elected position yet argue about his influence, notably after his acquisition of Twitter (now X).
- Despite these criticisms, Musk’s success brings increased scrutiny and highlight the stark contrast between him and other billionaire allies of the left.
2. Biden’s Controversial Pardons
The conversation shifts to President Biden and his recent wave of pardons:
- Biden's decision to pardon over 1,500 individuals is critiqued by Victor, pointing out the lack of oversight and consideration of the victims.
- There are discussions about whether these pardons are politically motivated and aim to disrupt the narrative surrounding criminal justice.
- He emphasizes the potential chaos that might arise from these pardons, reflecting a desire to undermine the Democratic establishment as they exit office.
3. Reflections on Education and Student Loan Forgiveness
The episode dives into educational policies and student loan forgiveness programs:
- Biden's recent initiative enables the forgiveness of billions in student loans, tying into broader criticisms of the educational system's inflation and exploitation of student borrowers.
- Victor argues that this strategy is unsustainable, and institutions should bear responsibility for their financial models that have led to skyrocketing tuition fees.
- The consequences of federal funding grants have driven up costs without adequate accountability, affecting future generations.
4. Impacts of Cultural Dynamics in America
The discussion also tackles changing cultural dynamics:
- Victor contemplates the implications of recent societal trends, noting that traditional liberal ideals are being eroded by a new extreme leftist agenda.
- He discusses how the political landscape is evolving, particularly concerning victimhood narratives and the societal acceptance of obesity and health concerns as non-issues.
5. International Issues and Domestic Implications
The episode concludes with reflections on global incidents impacting domestic sentiments:
- Victor reflects on a terrorist attack in Germany that involved a Saudi immigrant, linking it to broader immigration policies and societal tensions.
- He highlights the need for stricter immigration controls and accountability for immigrants in the context of how they assimilate into their host countries' cultures.
Valuable Takeaways
- Elon Musk's Role: Despite the left's attempts to undermine him, Musk’s impactful innovations signify a shift in how success is perceived in the tech industry.
- Biden’s Administration: The implications of Biden's waves of pardons demonstrate a chaotic approach to governance that may have long-lasting political ramifications.
- Student Debt Crisis: The necessity for reform in the educational sector is clear as the student debt crisis continues to grow and affect future generations.
- Cultural Resilience: The changing tides in cultural acceptance reveal a deeper ideological battle that continues to evolve as America navigates complex political landscapes.
This episode encapsulates the current political climate in the United States, where traditional ideologies are being challenged, and the consequences of recent policies are yet to fully unfold.
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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You're here to listen to the wisdom of Victor Davis, Hanson, who is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the way in a Marcia Buskey distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College. Victor has an official website, the blade of Perseus, its web addresses, victorhandson.com. We are recording on Saturday, the 21st
of December. This particular episode will be up on December 26th. I guess this is the second day of Christmas, so.
Is it two turtle doves? Something like that Victor. And it's, I think it's the first day of Hanukkah today. Happy Hanukkah to our friends and late Merry Christmas to those of you who we did not wish, who did not hear the previous podcast. We've got a lot to talk about today. A lot of Victor's wisdom to glean and we're gonna start off getting his thoughts on Elon Musk who is under great attack
from the left. And Victor's thoughts on that will be coming up right after these important messages. We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show. Victor is... I need an apple.
Apple. Oh, I love apples. I love Victor. Not as much as I love M&M's, but I love apples. Well, I'm in my vitamins. So, Victor, you have some thoughts you want to share on Elon Musk, who is the bad boy now. He is the bad boy. And I think it was Whoopi Goldberg in this age of litigation. I'd be very careful. But I think she
suggested on the view that JD Vance and Musk had taken over and they were going to get rid of from. If I get rid of you mean? Yes. And what they're trying to do, the left, everybody knows what they're trying to do. They're attacking Elon.
on a variety of fronts that he's not elected. Well, he's actually an appointee now of an actual federal. He's going to be a federal official along with Vivek, at least on an advisory board. And we're trying to drive a wedge by leaking about him and did it, so that Trump and he fight. Remember, in the left-wing mind, as I said in the earlier broadcast, it's perfectly okay for George Soros to flood the zone
with $100 million to get hard left, defund the police, destroy the jurisprudence of their cities, prosecutors. It's fine for Mark Zuckerberg to get 419, but you cannot do that if your Elon Musk can get $250 million to get out the boat in Pennsylvania, for example. That's a cardinal sense. So they hate him because they feel that he had a real role.
and they're going after him, and they want to have Trump turn away from him. And they don't quite know what to do with him because they keep, you know, they, as I said last time, Van Jones went on this tirade about these unleaded millionaires and billionaires. But the source of their anger is that
Hey, you guys, ever since Bill Clinton, the billionaire class are ours. If you go in the Fortune 400, all of the top names are left-wing. If you look at the size, the magnitude of these wealthy dynasties, the Bloomberg dynasty, the Zuckerberg dynasty, the Lisa Jobs dynasty, the Google dynasty,
All of them, the Amazon diamond. They're all on our side. The Reed Hoffman, they all are on our side. But this one guy, he was on our side. You know, we loved him. He was going to displace fossil fuels with this wonderful Tesla. He was just good. And now we hate him.
because he crossed us and he bought Twitter. So then the question is, how do you adjudicate Elon Musk? And I think that the reason Donald Trump won, I really do, was that in this process of four years of his recovery, his comeback,
uh... he was let on uh... his supporters i should say were not censored and they had a social media platform what do i mean by that face book was hostile instagram was hostile google searches have political
motivations, the order of your Google search will reflect a prior ideological agenda. So all the conservatives had, there was true social, Devin Nunes was doing a wonderful job, but as far as the sheer bulk, Trump lost that 88 million followers when they kicked him off.
And they kicked him off. It was almost like a trust. And it should have been subject to antitrust. It was four days after January 6th. It was school. I mean, Facebook kicked him off and then Facebook cooked him off for two years, as I remember, and Twitter abandoned for life. But so when he bought that, everybody thought was gloating. They said, Oh, what an idiot he spent. He paid 44 billion. It was only worth 20. He's going to lose money.
and they didn't understand Elon Musk that he's worth what? 500 billion since he bought it. His wealth has doubled because of the increase in stock prices of his privately held companies and Tesla. I think Tesla's bought up to 420 something to share. GM is 50.
It didn't bankrupt him, but more importantly, it opened the whole online social media communications. There are no FBI agents now who were working with Facebook to suppress news unfavorable to Democratic candidates. It just revolutionized everything. And you can go on to X now and say what you want as long as it's not defamatory or
obscene in a way you couldn't do before. It was all left wing and the government was involved in, as you know, the FBI. And it was a revolving door. They hired James Baker, FBI counsel, who's making, I don't know, $200,000. Suddenly he's working for Jog Dorsey at Twitter. He's making $7 million. So he was one of the people who, as legal counsel, who approved this whole idea of the FBI kind of merging with
the old Twitter. So he, he revolutionized social media in the United States. Then he took Tesla and I was looking at, you know what the two best selling cars are in California? No. The two models of Tesla. Two. Yeah. The Y model is the number one selling car in California. And of all of the cars that the combined Tesla lineup is I think number four or five in the country.
And that's things like Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes, GM, Ford, Chrysler. It broke into that. No one had ever done that before with a startup.
And everybody in the left now hates him, but I just got back from Palo Alto and Menlo Park. They've all got new Teslas. They're everywhere. In fact... It wouldn't be cut dead without one. No, they can say they hate him, but they know that of all the electrical vehicles on the market, the Tesla is by far the best. My wife has one. I don't understand how to drive it as well as she does, but
It's flawless. And then you go into the space rocket that the X rocket, SpaceX rocket, it's bigger than that. Remember we were told, thank God. And when we went to the moon that we had something that no one ever had had in history. And that was that Saturn five huge rocket and people announced that no one
Soviets were never going to go to the moon because they didn't have the wherewithal to get the capsule up there. But this was a revolutionary breakthrough. But in terms of size, you put them side by side, that huge tall 360. It was larger than the Statue of Liberty.
SpaceX is taller, it's like 30 or 40 feet taller, and it's got more thrust than this huge Saturn, and there's no more of those. They just disbanded them. They made the greatest rocket in history, and they said, eh, we're done. I think there's only one of them left that actually works.
And maybe it's in the museum, I don't know, but he, he revolutionized the space industry and he took over from NASA and it's profitable. And he revolutionized the satellite industry. He put in more satellites in all the countries in the world put together last year. And the tunnel. Yeah. And then he went in. So Tesla, nobody could break into the car market at that level.
Social media, he revolutionized, he revolutionized the space and he's working on enrolling. Whatever you think about him, his life has benefited millions of people. And the irony of it is he has done more to advance the alternate fuels industry than any leftist megaphone. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, any of those people that are attacking him now,
talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. He did it. And he saved NASA from itself. And he saved social media from himself. If he hadn't have opened up Twitter, the next Republican president would have gone in there and so tightly controlled that because it was working as an agency of the US government. Right.
And we know now from Mr. Andreessen's revelations on Joe Rogan that they had even scarier ideas should Harris be reelected and by the Biden continuum that they were going to control and pick and choose who got to do what with artificial intelligence based on their fealty or lack of toward the Biden administration and then the Harris administration.
I don't understand, I understand that they don't like him because he's powerful and he's in apostate. But he said the last thing, I don't know if he was trolling you, but he said yesterday. What? He said, well, I'm not just a partisan. I am going to back Democratic candidates that are saying in the primaries. So think about it.
So if you're going to run and you think you're going to be outspent by Reid Hoffman and George Soros and all those people, now all of a sudden, Elon says he's going to spend money to give you a shot in the Democratic primary.
Well, I'll throw out one candidate idea on that. But first, I just want to take a moment, Victor, for our sponsor factor. There's no sacrificing quality for convenience with factor. Weekly menus offer ways to treat yourself to a restaurant-like meal experience with gourmet-plus dishes that feature premium proteins and seasonal sides like broccolini, leeks, and asparagus.
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And we thank the good people of factor for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Two things Victor, I'm throwing this at you. This Congressman actually from the Bronx, Richie Torres, who's a Democrat, who's been calling BS on much on the Democrats, particularly on the insanity of the Israel hate. And he is now going after Governor Hochl,
There's the election and for governor in New York is it will be in 2026. I could see him. He's kind of refreshing in an odd way for Democrats. So he may be somebody that Elon Musk might get behind. But anyway, there's that and Victor, the other thing about Musk, you
I think with his going into Twitter, excuse me, X and cleaning out what 90% of the staff may have exposed, but maybe this is part of the hatred. Like by showing there's a bureaucracy in the social media world that might lead to resentment of people who wear their jobs or you take the FBI type. So we're looking for secondary careers. Like there may not be that many careers to be had if the
Well, we all know what they're doing Mark Zuckerberg. I think Google and Mark Zuckerberg's
Meta, they, they respectively buy up what 100 startups a year. They have this huge cash, so they just go out and they just buy up, buy up any competitor and they absorb them and they have market monopoly. I think 95% of the world searches are run by Google. It's just fine except they're completely ideological and they interfere with free expression.
As I said, anything you want to Google, just see what comes up on it. And it will have a left-wing tinge. And if you want to find a disinterested result, you're going to have to go five pages in before you'll find it. And so he opened that up. And that is quite an achievement. And they hate him for it because they
They were controlling Silicon Valley, and that was the next medium. And they had the old media with the Washington Post and LA Times and New York Times. They had all three network channels. They had PBS. And I know Fox offered a different point, but Fox and a good night had three and a half million people. If you add up all the left-wing cable shows and the three networks in public TV, you get 20, 25 million people.
So they have all the cards. The thing about the left, you've got to remember, is anytime somebody speaks up with them and claims a minority voice, I don't mean in terms of ethnicity or race, just power. If they have three million format, then you go after them. How dare you? So you know, when Van Jones went after,
billionaires billionaires when he went after Elon Elon I think pointed out and a lot of other people did they counted the number of billionaires who gave to the respective candidates it was about 88 billionaires for Harris and about 55 for Trump a billionaire himself So in their way of thinking that is outrageous. How can he get 50 billionaire? They never look at themselves
And so he goes on there and tweets 10, 12 times a day, and they just hate it. They hate it. They hate it. They hate it. Well, I'm just a mere thousand there myself. So hey, Victor, I know you've talked to you and I a little bit. And then I know you have with Sammy about
these Joe Biden pardons and how schemy and disturbing they are, but you have some more thoughts to share on them and we'll get those thoughts when we come back from these important messages.
We're back with Victor Davis Hanson show recording on Saturday December 21st and this episode is up on February February December sorry folks December 26th
Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus. It's addresses VictorHanson.com. Go there. Hates the 12 days of Christmas. If you haven't gotten yourself a Christmas present, get yourself a subscription $50 a year or $5 a month. Why would you want to do that? Because, well, Victor,
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and archives of these podcasts. There's so much there, but if you're a fan of Victor's writing, you're going to want to read his ultra pieces. So go to the blade of Perseuson and do subscribe. Victor Joe Biden's 1500 plus for all we know that it's not over yet. He may have more, you know, diseased Christmas presents to hand out in terms of pardons.
to various creeps. I have some thoughts on this, I'd like to ask you about. But first, you have some, you're kind of put off by these pardons of people that might be on death row. Well, Joe Biden said he was asking his one of his final interviews, maybe the final one, because he has disappeared
and getting back to ban Jones accusation that on elected people are running the country, i.e. Trump and Elon Musk, I mean, he don't, I don't mean on elect, he means that they have not had, they shouldn't have formal authority, but I would remind him they don't have formal authority. All Joe Biden has to do, right now everybody, is get to work at six
George W. Bush had his suit and coat and tie and he was on the job at six in the morning. And all he has to do is do that. And no one will say a word. He is President of the United States. He goes to Notre Dame and he can say to Donald Trump, you're not invited, whatever he wants to do, but he doesn't. He can't. And so that's in that vacuum, people are coming in and the most logical person to come in is the elected president and his advisors, one of whom is
a Renaissance man in charge of trying to save us from ourselves and spending ourselves into oblivion. And so the question is, not whether who is president, i.e. Donald Trump is president, but who is making these pardons? We have no idea. Does anybody think that
Joe Biden says to, I don't know, his chief of staff, hey, you met this guy. He's committed a bank. There's 40 people on death row right now on the federal federal. He has no authority over state, but he he killed the prisoner. And I think I went through and looked at them. And most of the people there have were in robberies where they killed somebody or they executed somebody in prison.
And the racial disparity, there's the most on death row are white people because they represent the majority of the population. And then black people and Latino people together are more so they're overrepresented in their demographics. White people are underrepresented.
but in actual numbers there's more of the forty than the other two separately but not combined so i don't think there's a racial motive but what he's uh... who gets to go to death row or not but what i'm getting at is he doesn't know the individual circumstances he doesn't know the families of the bank guards that were executed he doesn't know the kidnap people uh... how they suffered or were tortured by these people he didn't care he just thinks
I'm going out now, and I don't believe in the death penalty, so I'll just cancel all this legal jurisprunes adjudication, penalty for get the victims' families. I'm out of here. And then the 1,500, I don't know about the judge who was taking bribes to put juveniles in this horrific private-for-profit prison. I don't know about the Chinese communist resident alien who was downloading porn. I don't care.
That's his attitude. And then there was these stories circulating that Jill had a burn it down with, I guess burn it down philosophy is and think about it. Payback. Yes. Nancy Pelosi and the Obama's engineer this with input from Hikeham Jeffries and Schumer. We have no loyalty to the Democratic establishment now. Donald Trump
We've detested for our entire lives. We want to hurt him. We want to hurt the democratic establishment. And they were all disloyal to Joe. So we're going to go out and we're going to make things even difficult for our own party. We're going to pardon people. We're going to lie about six times. We said we wouldn't.
Pardon Hunter. We're going to punter. We're going to pardon Hunter and they did. And we're going to sell off that wall and we're going to try to have a little tweak in it to really get them angry. Five dollars a ton or pennies on the dollar will just sell it off. Ha ha ha. There's your wall. Remember Joe said not one foot. Am I going to build?
So they're trying to be mean spirit and at least the old guys. The Clinton administration, when they left office, they stole some stuff that they lifted some furniture in China, or they took off some buttons on the computer. So they took the W's off and they wrote, you know, they wrote little pop up windows that said screw you and they opened their computers. They left little notes and books that said F you. They were just petty.
These people are different. They're really trying to harm people and harm the transitions. And they've got Trump fuming, which is what they want to do. But he's going to be, he is going to be known for two things, Biden.
They carried off the greatest presidential deception, and yes, I'll use the word cabal and conspiracy in history. They got a group of insiders to put a wall around this man, and they didn't tell us when he was in the White House, when he was not in the White House, where he was, what time he came to work, what time he went home. In fact, it wasn't just that they didn't tell us they lied about it. They lied about it.
And the basic premise now is, oh, Victor, they have 50 people. Talk to the Wall Street Journal, they said, and the New York Times is not. Yes, and why now?
Why now? Because these reporters said we didn't say anything because they were going to deny access to us. We would have had no presidential beats if we had told the truth. So he could hurt us. Now he can't hurt us. He's not there. He has no power. He's going out. So we'll blab. And have you seen that guy, Chris Salisa, what's his name and CNN? They go now on, they go on like podcast and they go like this. Oh my God.
Thank you. I'm honored to speak and now looking.
Something, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
Is there any more metaphors I can use that somebody hasn't used? I know what I'll do. I'll just say he's Albert Einstein. He exhausts me. Somebody said that he exhausts me. As a quin Jean-Pierre, I go in there, I'm just tired. That dynamism and that power.
They wondered, you know, he could help. Well, if you lie about us, you get an exclusive interview. Yes, you will. We'll give you a tip. We'll give you a. So now, Jack, they cannot be helped by Joe Biden and they cannot be hurt by Joe Biden. So they're telling the truth and they're telling the truth because it's going to be very clear and it can no longer be hidden that he is completely senile.
and he cannot function as president and people are going to go back and say do people lied to us and you were part of a conspiracy to injure the interests of the united states you let this man carry the nuclear codes next to him he was making existential decisions now we know why we left fifty billion dollars of fifty million billion dollars of
weapons to terrorists. Now we know why we were having daylight with Israel and we were crashing. Now we know why we borrowed seven trillion. Somebody was doing this, but this guy couldn't have been doing it. Who were these people? We want to know who made these decisions. Was it Michelle? Was it Barack?
Was it the consortia of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, the squad? Who was it? Jill? Was she the con, but they're not going to tell us that. They're not going to tell us who they eat at the Wilson is at this generation. I have to think Jill is the greatest villain here. I mean, Joe Biden. Excuse me. It's Dr. Jill. Dr. Joe. I forgot. Victor, back on the pardons,
He's not in a position to say, oh, you know, that judge in Pennsylvania, Scranton, who screwed the kids over and et cetera, et cetera. Let me see his record. Or did he even know there was this Chinese, Chinese spies, et cetera? How many were there? 1,500 of them. So somebody's bodies, plural, are putting this smorgasbord
low-lifes in front of me signing pardons for them uh... yeah it works like this jack would pro quo is here no uh... it works like this he just said i'm gonna pardon people and i have to criteria for pardon
Whatever they can do for the Biden family or the larger friend and associate of the Biden consortium, I'll do it. And whatever makes people angry, because I'm going to be a puny little Samson that's going to pull down the temple with when I go out. Give me as much chaos and nihilism as I can.
and make it symbolic and the more egregious the pardon the better. Wait till we get to the last 48 hours, Jack. I expect Ashley Baden, Biden. I expect Jim Biden. All of them get pardons. They all get pardons.
They know they're going to get pardons because if they don't let pardons when you write a check and you say we payment $250,000 Somebody in an honest DOJ if the statute of limitations is not over is going to say wait a minute You transferred $250,000 to your brother Did you pay gift tax on it? Did you pay income tax on where did you get the money? Did you pay income tax?
Did, can you show me the loan document where he loaned you the 250? Did he charge interest? If he didn't charge interest, it was a gift. Did he pay gift tax on it?
So they're going to ask a lot of questions. So I think they're going to give him one of these unusual, historically rare pardons that they're going to pardon all the Bidens for anything they may have done from 2014 when he got on his plane and sold stuff to their foreign interests till the present. Anything that's on cover. And that's his attitude. If you can glaze Chaney, we'll get a pardon from the Biden. She's so angry, isn't she?
you want to say Liz, oh, calm down. Why are you so mad, Liz? I don't understand it. You, you ran Washington for, I don't know, you were, I think that thing was appointed in, in was it May, it started of 2021 and it went for over a year. And
Liz, you kind of engineered that Kevin McCarthy couldn't pick people that historically has been the prerogative of the opposite party to fulfill the minority appointees. So you just said, I'm not letting any of my associates, we're not going to let anybody on here unless they're like us. They've had to vote for Trump's impeachment the second time and they have to have no political future. If you have that, you can come on the committee.
And there were no takers, and the other nominees were normal, and they didn't want them. So did she sublong perjury? Did she obstruct justice? Did she witness tamper? I don't know the law. Apparently she called this Cassie hostage enough and said, you know, I really think you want us.
turn state evidence. And this is what I think you should do. And her lawyer wasn't present. And that was on due influence on a whip. And then the question is, do they usually prosecute that in February? I don't know. But she seems to feel that she has criminal exposure and wants a pardon. And I think she'll get one. And then there's going to be another dilemma. If you were Mr. Vanden, if you are James Comey, if you're
Andrew McCabe, if you're Christopher Ray, if you're Anthony Fauci, if you're Francis Collins, if you're John Brennan, if you're James Clapford, do you take these pardons or not? Victor, you mentioned loan. You mentioned
the Biden family loans, which is a nice little jumping off for loans, because once the student loans, because we have yet another effort by Joe Biden or whoever is making these decisions to wipe out student loans, 54,900 student loan borrowers are getting 4.28 billion in debt wiped out this month. This has some
the program called the public service loan forgiveness program which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers after 10 years of qualifying payments blah, blah, blah. I don't know why nonprofit workers, you and I are very involved in nonprofit institutions. I don't know why they should get some special
I don't know why any of these people should. They took the loan, as Calvin Coolidge said, to the Europeans that wanted reparation relief. They rented the money, didn't they? And the point I'm making is this.
The universities, once this program came in and guaranteed federal loans, if you look, you'll see a sharp increase in the rate of tuition inflation. They had a captive market. They told these young impressionable 18 year olds just as if they were selling cars. This is the thing. This is the thing. They didn't say this to them.
If you come into our university and you, it's about $60,000 a year, room board intuition. If we give you 240,000, these loans are not cheap. They're 6%, 6%.
You're going to be paying $15,000, $20,000 in interest alone. And these are the majors that we offer. We have 50 majors. But this major, this major, this major, this major has a 50% unemployment rate. This major, this major has an average per capita, first to five-year employment rate of, I don't know, $65,000. So we're going to give you all the information you need
This is how much each class cost you when you come to our university and you go into debt with this federally guaranteed loan. And oh, by the way, we have a $30 billion endowment and we are not going to give anybody any break. We're not going to guarantee your loan. We have some scholarships, but basically you're in the government. You're with the government.
And so that was a situation that transpired. And it was, I don't know, fraudulent loan. It was misleading that the applicant never got any counseling. And as someone who goes into the local car dealer, I usually, when I buy a car, it's usually I say to myself, Victor, it will be about five hours, minimum.
And then you get a stack of papers this big. You've seen it. You just sign, sign. Are you aware of the interest rate? Yes. Are you aware of how long it's going to take you? Yes. Are you aware of the monthly payment? Are you aware that
we have the right to take the car back from you. Are you aware that we have a GPS device that we can contact our car? And are you aware that you do not own this car? Unless you pay? Yes. Are you aware that you were of cognizant mind and we are financing you and lending you the money? Yes. All of this stuff, they don't do that with 18 year olds, not at all. So they've got their subject to
to a lot of correction. And I think they're very worried. And the universities are now scrambling like crazy to reach out to Trump. And I just don't think he's going to be a simple thing. And before anybody says, well, it's because I have a bunch of young people who know. There are people like JD Vance who went to Yale Law School and a lot of them. They know the Ivy League. That's the way they don't like it because they went there. And they've seen that other side of that Jack.
One I Jack and so I think there's going to be a lot of reform and it could be And we're going to get the federal government other than forgive loans. We'll just get out of it And we'll tell everybody you know what? Here's tables about what you will be making as a master electrician a master drive wall master plumber master diesel mechanic Here's what you will be making when you factor in your two hundred thousand three hundred thousand dollar
college education, and it's up to you now, but we're not going to subsidize it. And I think it's going to be radical. They're just going to, and I think they're going to tax endowment to it. Maybe not all of it, but they're going to start to tax endowment, say over five or six billion dollars, because they're going to say to the universities, you're not nonprofit.
You've got all this profit money and you're spending money and all sorts of stuff that has nothing to do with education. 94% of your faculty at Stanford University gave money to one party. You have no free speech. You don't respect the fourth and fifth and sixth amendment when somebody's charged with a crime on campus.
They know that. They know that. It's institutionalized anti-Semitism. And so they're very scared right now, and they should be. And Trump, they think Trump is a Yahoo. They don't understand that Trump represents reform and a cultural revolution. And I can just give you a little tidbit. I don't have any influence at Donald Trump. None. In 2016, nobody called me.
and said, Victor, Trump got elected. Can you help me get a job? No, nobody in 2020 called me. Jack, I have answered seven or eight calls a day. Hey, Victor. Do you know Trump? No, I don't get involved. Victor, do you know this? Hey, and I always say this, wouldn't you for Romney or in Utah? I remember what you wrote. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was then.
So my point is it's culturally acceptable now to be for Donald Trump. He has got seven or eight applicants for every single job, 25,000. He's got 100,000 people. And these people are not stupid. He's drawing in the most intelligent, highly educated, yes, Ivy League trained people who want to participate in this counter revolution. And they're very skillful.
And it's not going to be like the first administration. There's not going to be a New York Times op-ed, it says anonymous. All workers staging a revolution, we're trying to contradict Donald Trump from the inside, haha. There's not going to be Rex Tillerson state. Marco Rubio is not going to say Donald Trump is stupid, as Rex Tillerson did. You're not going to see the DOD try to resist the
the executive branch, and you're not going to, the White House, and you're not going to see someone, as John Bolton, who will wink and nod, oh, yeah, I don't want to say anything about the impeachment. I got a memoir coming out in about a month or two. Yeah, you'll all be in there. But I don't want to go on record about what the real don't Trump is like. It's all going to be in my book.
And then the news count goes, Bolton reporting, shocker book to come out, Bolton's book promises, starting revelations about don't remember that, all that stuff. And that's not going to be here this time. It's not going to be here this time. There's not going to be a Scaramucci. There's not going to be an Omarosa. There's not going to be a Cassidy Hutchinson. He's got people who are very skilled, but they're also very loyal and they're committed to overturning this cultural revolution.
And the left has no idea about that. One of the claims against him, Victor, for running that why he could not be reelected from Republicans was that he could not staff an administration. That was the claim. And I think he's got just the opposite problem. He's got everybody in the conservative movement. Did you read Brett Stevens the other day? May I call Paul?
I did not. What did he do? Oh, Brett Stevens. It was a typical never Trump. I'm sorry. I was wrong. It starts out with, you know, you list all the terrible things that you got right. And then it says, but it doesn't do any good just to be
blanketly rejection of us because he did some things. Yes, he left he left with a 1.3 1.2 and inflate. Yes, the quad the word was quiet. Yes. So let's all just can't we just get along? That was that we're not we don't need to be automatically hating Trump. I'm no longer a never Trumper. That's what he said. So the never Trump he destroyed. Yeah.
Mitt Romney, he destroyed Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney came on and said, hey, Mitt Romney, didn't it? Wasn't it true that Donald Trump's going there? What do you think about this cash? Well, he won the election, and he said he was going to win change, and we usually accorded the president his appointees, and that's what he's doing, so I have no problem with it.
So that was Mitt Romney. And they're all doing this now. So they all want jobs. They all want to do it. And we don't know how it's going to last because the left is just taking a pause. They're exhausted.
They're saying to themselves, well, somebody tried to kill him. We call him a Nazi. We lowered the bar of assassination attempts by calling him out. We got him off the ballot almost in 16. We had these, you know, Eugene Carroll cost him 80 million and Latita James got him up for 370 million and then
Alvin Bragg's got a sort of Damocles over his head when he gets out of office. Oh, Jack Smith did his best. Fanny just got removed from the case for Fanny for lying under oath, et cetera, et cetera, and poor. I like Nathan Wade, by the way. I did. I liked him because they asked him that question. Did you take money or go and he just looked at the, what, two minutes?
What are the consequences of being aid, being silent, being blind, telling the truth? I've got to pause and think about this. Anyway, all of that stuff didn't work. None of it worked. And now the left saying, and we got Joe Biden, they caught us on this lie. I am done. I can't take it anymore. They're in their fetal position for about a month or two. Donald Trump
violate every element of the Logan Act. Just take over. I know you're a private citizen. Just save us. We do not want to lie anymore. We try to destroy you. You're still standing. So go to it.
We'll slander and smear you and defame you in about 60 days, but we have no leaders. Everything we wanted is pulling 20%, 30%. The whole thing blew up. The country's a mess. We understand that. And Joe Biden is a waxing effigy.
indeed wax and i i i read he is going to make one last trip victories going over to to meet the pope i had two more was a stay there in the case of a couple of pardons uh... hey listen uh... speaking of of uh... before of education
headline about one of your favorite people, give you a chance here to reflect on him. Here's the headline from the college fix, the great college fix, which is created by John Miller.
It's a professor at Hillsdale. Fauci holds several several professor titles at Georgetown, but never teaches the article begins. Dr. Anthony Fauci is a distinguished university professor in quotes at Georgetown University, but does not appear to have taught a single course since his appointment, nor does he have any future classes scheduled. And it also goes on to say he is a at the O'Neill
Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown. He is a distinguished senior scholar, but the fix went through all the course catalogs at the school. There's no evidence that Fauci has taught any classes at all. He did. Did you see his proposed class that he was going to offer?
No, I did not. Yeah, he was. It was called, uh, how to evade U.S. gain of function law by, uh, routing 600,000 to his crony, but to a crony, Peter Dasek, who will then manipulate Lancet with a phony investigation and make sure the money ends up in gain of function biomedical.
Level four virology lab in Wuhan and three units with a midterm and a final and You're welcome to take it. He pulled it off again the thing about Anthony Fauci that we all forget if we just forget all of the acrimony All of his career just start from my fresh slate
and say, was this virus a gain of function? Yes. Did the United States lend expertise instrumentation and money
with consultation to the Pentagon for whatever reason, good or bad? Yes. Did money circulate and was this instrumentation and knowledge and money done below the radar? Yes. Was this against the law in the United States? Yes. Did Anthony Fauci authorize this? Yes. Did this manufactured virus with the help of U.S.
influence, input, money. Did it escape from this lab? Yes. Did this virus show a genetic imprint that it was almost impossible to match in nature? Yes. Did this virus kill somewhere between 50 and 100 million people and make another 200 million very, very, yes, presto arro?
There you are, QED, Wad, Eric, Demestron, that was what we were trying to show. So just think of that process. And when you think about it, good old Uncle Anthony is right at the very center
of this virus. You take Anthony Fauci out of the equation and you could have a good debate whether this Wuhan virus would have been created because I don't think that the Chinese themselves had that level of expertise without Western help and in particular American help.
Somebody authorized that American health and that helped was not just Peter Dossack 600,000. It was okay. The consultation, the communication, the expertise to be transmitted to that lab from Americans. And he knew about it. I know he knew about it because if you look at the corpus of his messages, he was very worried about that from the get-go.
And that, I'm not, I mean, I know that he said wear a mask, don't wear a mask, wear a mask, wear two masks, wear one mask, social distancing. I don't know where it came. We just made it up, six feet, all that. You know, the booster road will not make you infectious and you will not be okay. Those are all errors of stupidity and competence, sloppiness, you name it. But the origins of the virus, he had a hand in.
at least according to the evidence. And he suppressed evidence of that. And when he was asked by Rand Paul under, oh, did you subsidize help foster gain of function research? He said, no. And I think that's why he's going to be the number one person in line for a pardon. A pardon? Yeah.
You know, a few weeks ago, Victor, I was up in New Hampshire on business, and I stopped to see old John Sanunu. I don't mean to come home, but he's in his mid 80s. He's a great guy. I love him. Of course, he came on a few national review cruises. That's how I got to know.
And he said come by and we had coffee. So we're just talking about this or that and folks should remember he was the chief of staff for George H. W. Bush and I asked him about Fauci and he said Bush wanted him to be the head of NIH.
He didn't like fauci love to put it that way did not like him and but push and wanted this and fauci actually turned it down and and soon you said he's confident it was because all the money he was already making through his job from from royalties from these.
Multi multi multi multi millionaire. Yeah, he's probably the luckiest or the most abusive and Used his job and government his wife were among the two highest federal employees in the country. Yeah, as far as compensation goes so he and he was
You know, he and Birx was, she was, I don't know who was what their respective roles were. I think she was incompetent where he was malicious. But that's just my own speculation. But I do think that the evidence we had Stephen Quay on here and he went, he went through chapter and verse about the genetic sequence of the virus and how hard it would be the cleaverage site, the spike for all of that he went through. And then the mRNA vaccination, all of that he went through.
And Fauci knew that when he was promoting that, that there were real problems with the mRNA vaccine. And I'm not saying that history won't show that it saved more lives than it damaged. It could very easily.
And the quarantine, I think, we do know the quarantines probably took more lives than would have been lost, at least if we look at the Swedish one. But that's disputed too and controversial. But it's not controversial that he was intent on seeing gain of function by virology take place. And if it could not take place in the United States, he knew that it could take place in China and he wanted in on the results, maybe for a patriotic purpose.
He was communicating with the Pentagon supposedly. They probably wanted to see what the Chinese as if you could ever trust anybody in the Chinese Communist apparatus, which was very naive. But whatever the particular motive, good or bad, he had a role in fueling fostering that type of research that led to COVID.
and he won't talk about it. No mea culpa from him. And then he got carried away with this cult of personality where finally he was reduced to coming into his office and he had on there the little fauci bobblehead dolls, the paintings of him. Remember that? All of that cult of the personality. And he was Saint Fauci. I guess he was kind of like paradise lost. He was
The Divine Fauci, I am the science and Scott Atlas was the fallen Lucifer going into the, they really went after poor Scott and they tried to demonize him. Waiting for my alma mater Holy Cross to take his name off the science building. Victor, I do have something to chew the fat over with you over, but first, first,
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show. Victor, so close to you. It's San Francisco story. Okay, here's to me. I'm speaking from Gloria Selma. Well, it's close to Connecticut. I'm known to go to work at one each week at Palo Alto. Yes. I've been with you as we've stepped over. Yes, I did one too many national review retreats in San Francisco. Yeah.
You have a right to remain fat, says San Francisco's weights are as her hefty pay packet is revealed. This is from the Daily Mail. San Francisco Department of Health's new weights are has gone viral for her proclamation that quote, no one has to be healthy and quote, Virgie Tovar 42 longtime activists.
for body positivity and that acceptance was hired this week as a consultant by the Liberal City's Health Department, et cetera, et cetera. I'm so glad they have the money to spend on this, Victor. Any thoughts? I mean, they're broke. They have a deficit as does the state, and they find ways of wasting their money and then raising taxes, which is why tourists can't afford to stay there. It's not only not safe, but the room tax and the
Regulatory climate is such that it's very expensive just to eat or to go into San Francisco and there's no bang for the buck anymore. It's a beautiful city, but the injection, fornication, urination, and defecation are right in your face. What's weird about this is this. It's the 180 degree about face from the left.
It went from liberalism and naive passivity and idealism and utopianism to this hardcore Stalinist, Jacobin, cultural revolution stuff. And what I mean by that is in the old days, your Democrat who would rail in Congress would say that food companies are killing us with high fructose sugar.
They're putting all these fat additives in. We're not eating health, kind of like RFK, that we may now demonize. But then all of a sudden, in the Marxist binary, they created fat people or obese people. You can't say fat. They were victims.
And so you don't dare say that someone who's five, five, remember Oliver Anthony, rich man from rich man from Richmond? And he said, you can't be eating something when you're five, three and weigh 300 pounds. That got him in trouble. But the point I'm making is that
Now, if somebody is obese, it's not okay to say, what's your diet? What's your exercise? Do you realize that when you're carrying that type of weight, it stresses your cardiovascular system? You understand you're running a greater risk of cancer, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, and if you don't think it's important for your own health and longevity and sense of
home and helping your family, then maybe society at large, that you could help society by not being, you know, that's one thing I think about all the time at 71. Can you exercise today? Can you avoid sweets? Because the health system doesn't need Victor to go in there all the time. That's right. So my point is this new malice type thinking all of a sudden it turned everything up. Now the obesity is okay. You're not, you don't mention it. It's the same thing with children.
They said before, you know, takes a village, children, you know, we have to protect the children. Remember, Hillary, when she ran, got to protect the children, the children, the children, the children. And then all of a sudden it's, well, we have to protect the trans people and the graphic gay instruction books and the library. And if a kid, if a young kid sees it, well,
Even the age of consent is now a question. There's a whole movement that you should lower the age of consent and children need to explore sexuality and all of this stuff. And then you go into the pharmaceuticals. It was always a lot. It's a big form.
They're just pushing all these unnecessary drugs, all these very dangerous hormones. And then there's the AMA, that awful American Medical Association. They're condoning, if not fueling surgical procedures that are not just not necessary, but very dangerous. And they're making all this money. And then we hear that
Well, if you have these drugs, they're wonderful. It's okay. They can, these powerful hormones that you take at 10 or 12. And there's nothing wrong with lapping off too breast or testicles or these life changing optional survey. And we don't really care if a person changes his mind or not. It's 16. This is important. And then you think, wow.
don't you distrust big form and then we get into the morning after abortion pill whatever you want call it sure seventy eight eighty ninety times out of a hundred it's safe but it's a prescription drug should be because uncertain cases
terminated fetus will not be fully expelled and that can cause sepsis. So you need to have a doctor make sure that the patient is in good health and after they take the pill reports back to the physician that there's no complications from aborting and all of a sudden they're pushing the abortion pill without prescriptions.
So, in this, and that's what's dangerous about DI and Woke. It has this iron-clad, maoistalinist.
agenda, and it destroys any opposition from left or right. It's turned on classical democratic liberalism. It loves big pharma. It loves optional dangerous surgical procedures. It loves using dangerous drugs that are not proven they can be used safely without prescriptions and doctors consultations. As long as it promotes this agenda, and what is the agenda?
that half the United States is victimized on terms of sexual orientation, gender, race, you name it. And we are here to empower that group. And that's the only thing they care about. All the other classical liberal positions have been destroyed. We talked about gun controls and other ones. Gun control, you've got to ban handguns. You've got to ban them.
You just can't, or if you're not going to ban them, they have to be registered. Oh, he made his own handgun, and there's no, it's not in the federal registry, so you can't trace it. And he just blew off, blew the back out of a health care. I like that guy. I'm glad he used that gun. He didn't have to register it. I didn't care. It's all I care about as he shot the right guy. So much for gun control, not one peep out of the left about this is another reason we need gun control.
people who make their own guns and cannot be licensed. So that's what the Democratic Party has become. Well, and we love the FBI. Victor, we've got one more. I love the left day. I wouldn't cast Patel. I don't
Oh my God, what is he going to find in those folders? The first one he's going to go on his desk and he's going to see ABC and he's going to pull the one that says P Patel. And he's going to say, oh, this is a memorandum that Cash Patel is a dangerous insurrectionist. And we need to monitor his emails and phone calls, even though he works for the House of Representatives.
Victor, we've got one more thing to talk about, not too pleasant, albeit when we come back from these messages, it's about this terrible terrorist attack in Germany, but there seems to be much more going on in that country. We'll get your thoughts on that when we return from these final, important messages.
We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show recording on the 21st of December. Now this show, again, it's up on the 26th and for all we know much will have happened between when we're recording and when you're listening. But two days ago, Victor, as many of our listeners know,
a Saudi Arabian transplant, a doctor in Germany drove through a crowd at one of these Christmas markets, which are big deals in Germany. And there's an excellent story. I recommend folks go to the Daily Mail and check it out. From last report, five people.
our dead murdered, but there is already a great stress going on in Germany, a fearfulness about that some Muslim eruption is about to take place. There was another town, I think it was Essen, where they have these Christmas markets all of a sudden, boom, like for an hour, there was this parade of
of Muslim men. Shouting Allah Akbar to Christmas shalpers. Yeah. Yeah. But Jack, you gotta remember, they were only retaliating to all those Christians that went in during Ramadan and says, said, Jesus is King, Jesus is King to them. I forgot about that. I forgot about it too. I don't think it ever happened. Yeah.
There's some question about I've read all sorts of motivations that no one knows the truth yet. People say, well, he left Saudi Arabia because he was an atheist and he was welcomed into Germany and he reciprocated that magnanimity with death.
but what did he do it because he hated all religion because he was an atheist or did he do it because once he got to a Christian country he removes he re-islamicized and he was now an Islamic zealot and more of a zealot because he had been an apostate before and he couldn't stand the social isolation that he itself who knows and who cares he just a killer and he shouldn't
you know, he shouldn't have been led in the country. He should have, they should have audited, but adjudicated, they should have monitored, but they're not going to do that. But I do object to one thing you said, Jack, you said that, that he staged an attack. I didn't find that end. I read Reuters. I read the associate press, associate press. I read the Washington Post, New York Times. It didn't say he did it. It said a car drove into, and car drives into
Christmas celebrants. Car kills two people. Car wounds, the car did it. Because it didn't say that he did it. It just said that a car did it. And he apparently was behind the wheel, just kind of at the mercy of the car. I didn't say it was self-driving, but in none of those press accounts that it say, Saudi immigrant drives car into crowd kills, maims,
dozens of people, it doesn't say that. It just says the car did it. So I expect the German government to, I don't know, they'll drive in the BMW and they'll drive it up on a ramp into the witness chair and they'll say, Mr. BMW car, how many cylinders do you have and why did you kill these people? And the car will say, I don't know.
I can't explain it. And then they'll call the man that was driving and say, I don't know, the car just took over and forced us to go in there. I'm not kidding you. If you read those accounts, that would be what you would, a person from outer space would conclude. It's a larger question though, I think, of reciprocity that
People in Europe now, they're starting to see certain truths very slowly that Christians are not doing that to Muslims, that Germans are not eager to go to the Middle East and immigrate. And I think this would be very controversial, that it is still much better for a
Muslim to live inside Israel than it would be for a Jew to live on the West Bank. And that a Arab can be inside Israel and a full citizen with a higher standard of living and more civil liberties than his counterpart in Gaza in the West Bank. And if they Jew just said, you know what, I don't like Israel. I'm not a settler.
I'm just going to go over and live in Jericho and be a citizen of Palestine. He would never be accepted at the same commiserate level. So there's this reciprocity. And one of the subtexts was I was watching some of the debates in the German
Boont, Reichstag, whatever. And Elon Musk wrote the alternative, the AFD alternative for Deutschland, that so-called right wing. They usually don't even call it right wing. They call it racist, Nazi, but it is an anti-immigration. It's kind of like a MAGA movement, but a little bit more extreme.
and I don't think magazine stream at all excuse me but the point I'm making is that they were they took the occasion of this tragedy to tell everybody that this group will never have power you'll never sit here one of the speakers you'll never sit here in the parliament and that's just
You know what the public reaction is going to be as it is all over Europe. Why are they doing this? They come from the Middle East, they're poor, they have no freedoms, and they come over here. And then we say to them, yes, the fault dear Caesar is not in the stars, it's in us. It's in us. We empower people. We had a 18-year-old Egyptian visitor, foreign student on a student visa, we're at Georgetown.
And they just uncovered the faculty was going to kill a bunch of Jews and attack the Israeli consulate. Why did they let him in? Was there any background check? And will he be deported if he's found innocent or guilty? Well, he could carry out a sentence. You're never going to get respect from the Middle East until you insist on a quota behavior. And when you insist on that quota behavior, you will be liked by the Middle East.
If you tell a student from the Middle East, you are a guest of the United States of America. You have a student visa. You are going to be adjudicated on your behavior. If you come over here from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, West Bank, wherever, and you go to Georgetown, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, we expect you to follow the rules of our society and legal system. If you break them as a guest,
If you break them, you break them, you're gonna go home. You're gonna be prosecuted and you're not coming back. And if you would do that, the message would get out and then you would not see students from the Middle East trashing the Stanford President's office, occupying the Manhattan Bridge, the Bay Bridge, shutting down traffic, defacing the federal cemetery. You wouldn't see any of that.
I lived overseas off and on. If you counted the cumulative months, it was close to three years. And I can tell you, I was driving in Greece once, and it was during the oil embargo, and they had even and odd license plates, right? If you were a tourist and you rented a car, you got a piece of paper that said that you're
last digit on your license plate allowed you to go both even and odd. So I was driving in the Peloponnese. It's actually driving by my, I was driving by myself or no, there was another guy with me. And I got pulled over by a Greek policeman. And it was kind of nice in Greece that they still had guys that looked like Roderick Furt or something. Only he was on a motorcycle. He had roots up to his, you know what I mean? He had that kind of
YMCA looked at the hat and the boots and he was all dressed in black leather and he came out and I spoke some Greek but he spoke some English and basically he said you broke the law and I said I'm so sorry I'm a guest in your country but I showed him all the papers and
He got very angry and he said, and Greek, this is not fair. You're a zenos, zinni. You're one of the zinni, zinni. You're a foreigner and you're getting rights that we don't have in Greece. My family can't drive a day. Why do you get to? And I said, I think it's for promoting tourism. I don't know. They just said, if I rent the car, I can drive on either eat or even raw days. He was very angry.
And then I said, I apologize. I agree with you. I don't think it's fair. You should treat everybody. You, you're a citizen. And then when I said that, he got very happy and he said, I'm sorry. I did not know that you had these papers, but you have the right attitude. You are a guest in our country and you like Greece and you didn't want to break the law. I said, no, I didn't. And I don't think I did break the law, but I understand. And it was like the every month I was in Greece or it was in
other countries, I always was afraid to offend the host. Right. You know what I mean? Every time my parents sent me a new pair of Levi's under the dictatorship, they would bring you in and they'd say, these Levi's, are you going to sell them here? And they would, you know, $10 pair of Levi's in 1973, they put a $10. I said, no, no, I'll do it. And I would be even afraid to wear a new pair of Levi's.
Because we were all that way. We all respected the Greek government. We did not want to break their laws. We did not want to be sent home. We did not want to offend the cultural sensibilities that they said, Victor, you're going to have an apartment from, remember this, from one thirty to three o'clock, you are not going to make a noise because it's siesta. You're not going to hang your underwear outside the window. You're not going to have your t-shirts, you know, dry in the wind on a clothesline.
you are not going to, on Saturday, Friday nights, make a lot of noise to disrupt your neighbors. You're not gonna try to get up at six o'clock in the morning and bang your pots. Remember this. And that was the attitude. And why can't we insist on that here? I don't understand. If I may, Victor, because because you live so much time overseas, if you had done something wrong, you would have thought it would have been natural to never be
allowed back into the country. Yeah. That's why one of the reasons I was, besides I had respect for my host, I wanted to come back and I didn't want to have something. Even the visa that you had, I had a student visa sometimes, but a couple of times I went over and there was a 90 day, I think it was 90 days and you, and when you left, they would tell you, okay, you're not coming back in if you don't have a visa and they would punish you. And I was very careful and,
I led a couple of tours there. If you go to a Greek archaeological site and you lecture, it's against the law to a foreign group. You have to have a permit from the National Archaeological Service because they're trying to protect the union of
guides, right? Yet hire a local guide for your group. So when I took a group from Cal State, we had 30 people. I went all the way up to this consulate in San Francisco and I filled out all these pages and pages and I got
a past with my picture on it, kind of a passport that allowed me to speak at archaeological sites for five years, I think it was. And I use that on two occasions. So every time I go to an archaeological site, some guide would see me and she would mostly were female. And she see there was no other Greek with me guide.
and then she would call the police. And then the police would come and they would escort me in Olympia or Delphi down to the police station. And they knew, and as he said to me, I have to do this because the guides are very powerful. They're more powerful than the police union. So we're gonna make you walk in front of them. And then we would get to the police station and I'd show him all this documentation. He'd start laughing. Great job. I'm so happy you brought your people over. It helps the tourist industry.
and carry that all the time. I appreciate it. You don't know how many foreign groups try to cheat and they don't have papers. So that's why the guides are angry. They have to have a living. They have families. I said, I understand entirely. And he said, if I were you, as you walk out of this site, go up to the guides and give them a little tip. So I would do that every time. But the whole point I'm making is that
There's something in classical ideas that goes back to Homer and the Zenos. You treat guests very well and guests treat the host well. And you don't come over here and suddenly inflict, impose your views on your host and start demanding, especially when
You're the host has been accused, not us, but Europe of imperialism and colonialism. And they are so sensitive about it. You don't play the cultural imperialists. And that's what these students from the Middle East are doing. And I say that with certainty, because I walked across the Sanford campus for four months. And I would see students from the Middle East come up to me and scream and yell at River to the Sea and try to give me literature and then argue and yell.
And I thought, you know what? I would always say the same thing. There's a rule at Stanford. You can't camp overnight. You were obstructing the passage of 16,000 people to the student union. They have a right to walk and be unimpeded. They have a right not to see people sleeping in front of them day and night. Now, you may think that's genocide. I don't care, but you're a guest here. And I would say that to people. I did it on two occasions and they got really freaked out.
Well, what was you talking about? And they got freaked out because they had no respect for their host. Because their host would probably say, is it okay if you stay four months, do you like me? Please, please, please. And that's the wrong attitude.
New sheriff in town, Victor. By the way, I hope so. Donald Trump, I wouldn't. He's a, he's not going to tolerate that. And you know what? He's not going to tolerate that because he represents the majority of American people are fed up. Yeah. And they don't like to apologize nonstop there. They have nothing to apologize for.
nothing. And you can see that with the people around him. They're not going to be, oh, he doesn't like me. Oh, we'd have fewer student visa. They're going to tell the universities, we know what you're doing. You're bringing people over here who are not, you're not no background checks and you're charging them a premium full tuition, room and board to make money. And then you let them break the rules, not just of your campus, that's your business. If you want to run a
lawless campus, but you will allow them to come off your campus and shut down our freeways, shut down our bridges, deface our monuments. And then you protect them. We're going to arrest them and we're going to charge them with felonies and we're going to yank their student visas if they do that. And then to encourage the others, as the French say, you'll only have to do it once or twice. And I think the words already gotten out. Campus are very quiet right now.
They know that this Trump is coming in and they will be on a plane in two seconds if they break US law. Let us, let us pray. Hey, Victor, uh, first of all, I got to wrap my head around the image of you doing some sort of, you know, low grade perp walk and increase because you're here. The policeman. It was at Olympia. It was at Olympia, the most and Delphi, but the one in Olympia, the guy walked me and he was
very nice and he got into the office and he asked me if I wanted coffee and I showed him that I bought all these papers and I was just like 20 pages with stamps on everyone and he just said ah he doesn't matter I don't want to see them just sit down Mr. Hansen have us some coffee just we got over 10 minutes
And the whole point was, we got to make sure the guides think that I'm yelling and screaming at you and you're going to be in jail. And then he said, well, okay, 10 minutes up, we're going to walk back. So we walked back and he walks over to the guides and I said, well, what did they say? And I said, I said that you were severely humiliated, that you felt terrible, that you almost were jailed. So he said, on the way out, getting the tip, they're good people. They have a union. They have families to feed.
Oh, man. So every time I went to the that was the second site, I stopped. I was only 2930. I don't know what I was. First tour ever led. And after that, every time I got to the agarala, I got to Sunien. You name the site that I went to. I went right over to the archaeological warden of the site. I showed him all the paperwork. And then I went over if I saw for him.
tour, I went over to the foreign guides. I mean, the Greek guides. And I said, I'm very sorry, but this is an American group that would not have come here. It's a university group in Cal State. And we're not taking business away. They're not tourists. And would you like to talk to us? And sometimes it would actually come over even, you know, and I said, you know what, I feel really bad. Maybe you want to talk to us and we'll give a tip. So they would come over and I tell everybody, why don't you get them $5?
And then they would get ecstatic. They'd make, you know, a hundred bucks. So that's what you're supposed to do, especially in a wonderful country like Greece. People are so friendly. They've had such a horrific history of being killed and slaughtered by the Ottomans and World War II by the Germans. And they're still there and you have to have some, they're kind of like their Israelis, the Kurds, the Armenians.
that no matter what the world does to them, they don't, you know what I mean? They persist and they all live in bad neighborhoods and they're all small populations and they're all persecuted for it. They're like Israel. I just think if you're an American, whatever your politics are, you should look at Israel and you should look at the Kurds and you should look at the Greeks and the Armenians and the Cypriots and say these are unusual people in very dangerous neighborhoods and they have a long illustrious history
And for the most part, they're democratic and they're trying to be just and civil in a very difficult place where their neighbors want to destroy them. And we're going to lend them our support. And when we go visit them, we're going to make sure that they're happy with us. That's always been the Lebanese into that equation. Yes, the Lebanese are wonderful people and they're in a very dangerous place.
Well, Victor, you've been, uh, terrific. You know, you're just this anti-E or Victor is just, uh, I know I'm talking. I'm going, we're going from topic to topic and I'm.
I'm upbeat. I don't know what happens. Donald Trump will do that. I mean, I thought that just something about this past year, as it closes, that the things they did to him, the things they tried to destroy him, it would have destroyed. I was just always put myself, I think all the should in his place. I'm just thinking, if I got up in the morning and they had find me, you know,
$400 million if I was reading that I was Hitler that people were happy they almost killed me if they were taking me off the ballot and I knew I hadn't done anything wrong.
I couldn't take it. I mean, David, you have to be in court. I was supposed twice, just to mean deposed. Something is very unnerving. I've been a witness in two court cases, and it's not fun. And he was there the whole time. Not only was he there, he went out into a bodega and talked to me. Anyway, whatever people's politics are, you've got it. He's an indestructible force of nature.
Well, Victor, people, as you know, leave comments about you and the show. And here's one from the Blade of Perseus, Jim Ehrlich, Ehrlich writes, the genocide
of the Volga Germans was done by the Communists right after the Russian Revolution. My family left Russia in 1912, and anyone who stayed died from starvation in 1921. The Communists took their seed, corn, and livestock and left them to die. I follow Victor, and he is one of the few people that mentioned the plight of the Volga. It was even worse than that, because there was a residual population along the Volga.
I don't know if it was two or three hundred thousand. They had been there from, I don't know, post medieval times. Installing after the war was out, they forcibly removed them.
and starved them to death. That was not just during the revolution in the 1920s. That was after during World War II. They considered anybody who spoke German or had German ancestry. And there were very few of them were ever found to be pro-Hitler. Sort of like the Japanese. It was much worse than the Japanese internment. They destroyed and killed the Japanese internment.
Nobody died. No, there was no killing. There was not one single Japanese American that was ever found in the United States to engage in espionage. There were in Hawaii, but not in the continental United States. And yet we put them in camps. And thanks to the McClatchy newspapers and fortunately, role one and FDR.
Well, Victor, you've been terrific. And I want to thank you for sharing all the wisdom you did. I want to thank our listeners for listening. I want to thank those who write me to say, hey, Jack, I get civil thoughts. I like it. So go to civilthoughts.com. That's the free weekly email newsletter I write that has 14 recommended readings. I think you'll enjoy it. So visit Victor's website, the blade of purchase. By the way, if you're on X,
Act V.D. Hansen is Victor's handle. Victor, again, terrific. Thanks for everything. Folks, we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye-bye. Thank you everybody for listening.
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