The New Middle East, Trumpian Lingo, and Manhood Redefined

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen. Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You're here to listen to the star namesake. That's Victor Davis Hanson, who is the Martin and Ilya Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. And it's also the proprietor of our website, the blade of Perseus. It's addressed is victorhandson.com. I'll tell you why later in this episode.

Well, I think you should be a subscriber to that great website. We are recording on Saturday the 20th of December, but this episode will be up on Thursday, January 2nd, 2025. So we will say Happy New Year. And we will begin the this hopefully it'll be a great year. I have a feeling Victor might be great for America and traveling for other countries as they come to grips with

ideology, but we've got a lot of interesting things to talk about. Some of them are things from 2024 and 2023, of course, and I think we'll begin the show, Victor, by talking about UCLA and how it seems I've gotten off the hook from the Biden administration for its

Antics is the wrong word for it's the terrible way the administration at that school handled the riots anti-Semitic riots from last year. We've also have you know what tomorrow will be the 100th anniversary of an infamous speech by Benito Mussolini which drove him to power and we should get your reflections as a military historian and a historian about

Ilduche and plenty of other things will raise and we'll get to all of this victors when we come back from these very important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Happy New Year, my friend. I'd like to begin this with two getting your take on two related stories. If I could only find my paperwork, here we go. You know, some people have picked up and some comments about my heavy breathing and my shuffling of papers. You're sure it's not me. No. No, I think it's me. I think it's me. I try to mute myself.

Not enough. Hey, here's a Washington free beacon report. Biden admin, let's use UC University of California.

Off the hook, settled civil rights complaints alleging discrimination against Jews. President Joe Biden's Department of Education reached an agreement with the University of California system to settle civil rights complaints that alleged widespread discrimination against Jewish students. To do so, the university system agreed to develop voluntary campus quote unquote climate surveys and take other underwhelming measures in the agreement released Friday that would have been

December 27th, university leaders made no admission of wrongdoing. Instead, they agreed to provide training to campus police officers and employees responsible for investigating complaints and other reports of discrimination. Almost done here. They also agreed to create a plan to work with respective campuses to develop climate surveys. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah

They're going to be, that's not going to happen under the Trump administration. The people that have been mentioned, I won't mention their names for the Undersecretaries, the Department of Education, NEA, NEH, all of that stuff. They're not going to tolerate that. And remember what we do, Jack?

no college president when they see this anti-Semitic epidemic ever says, ever says, we've got to be careful and stop this anti-Semitism. They said, we have to stop hate, and we're going to be very tough on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Even though when you look at federal hate crime statistics, it's

half of them are directed at Jews. I guess what's happened on the campus is all of the leftist binaries, these Marxist binaries, victim, victimizer, oppressors, settler, imperialist, indigenous, they all work against Jewish people. So what the left does is they say,

settler people or colonial people, and they're in places where they don't belong. Therefore, Israel is a colonial, and we reject the 3500 year history of the Jewish people longer in the Holy Land. And in this mindset, if you are an indigenous Berber, let's say in Tunisia, or

Libya and the influx of Arab Islamic peoples in the seventh and eighth century, that's okay.

You're an indigenous person. If you say that Arabs and Muslims did not come into what is now Israel until the collapse of Byzantine control of the Middle East and over a long period of the late seventh, eighth, ninth centuries, and that that was one of many waves, that doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter because you see Jewish people are wealthy, they're powerful, that's what they think, and they are unique in the Middle East. It's the weirdest thing in the world. You can say, as Edward Said did, you can jiggle, suppose it keys in your house in Jerusalem and say you're a refugee 50 years later. But don't dare do that if you're Jewish and say, I lost my 300-year home in Old Cairo or Damascus.

Or a mom, you had no right to be there. That's an Arab country. But Arabs have a right to be in your country, Israel, Jews. Or you can't say, I want to ask a person when I was walking across campus in October, I really wanted to engage in a conversation with one of the demonstrators. So I said, well, you know there's two million Arab citizens, similar second-class citizens.

I said, I don't want to debate that. I don't think they are. But can I ask you a question? If you were Jewish and you said that you sympathize with the West Bank and you want to become a citizen of the West Bank and you and your family want to, you're not going to be settlers and enclave. You want to just go buy property in downtown Amman. I don't mean Amman, but downtown Jericho or Gaza City, would you be fully? No, of course not.

He was admitted. Nothing is ever reciprocal. Under this binary of white, bad, and people of color good, Jews were resented because of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. People said, this isn't right.

They're not victims. They're victimizer because they're white. They're victimizers. You can't. And then they got away with that because of people who were mostly showing this hatred toward Jews were in the same victimized category. So if you were Arab American, if you were Muslim,

If you were Jesse Jackson said, Jaime Town. If you were Al Sharpton that said, get your Yarmul on, come over here. If you were Reverend Wright and said, dim Jews. If you were Farrakhan and said, it's a gutter religion. I could go on forever. That was OK, because you're a victim yourself. So you would say, as soon as you were caught chasing Jews into a library, or roughing up Jews,

claiming that you wanted another Holocaust or yelling, then you just said, I'm a victim. I'm Muslim. I'm a victim of Islamophobia. And because by nature a college president, not all of them, some of the college presidents jack are like French.

When you see a conservative French intellectual or a conservative college president, they're the best of all people because they, they take on everybody and they live in a hostile climate and yet they don't compromise their views. Yes. Yes. So, but most of college presidents are invertebrates and they feel that they just do the math and they think, you know what?

The Jewish population is down to seven or eight percent. We lump them in with white. We went into repertory admissions here at Stanford. We only let in 28 percent of the incoming class was whites. Jews are now only seven or eight percent. We're letting in a quarter million people from the Middle East. The Middle East governments are giving as much money now as Jewish philanthropists.

I just don't think it's a, I'm not gonna go out and I'll end. And the whole third world, left wing, we know all the left wing faculty or anti-Semites, they hate Israel. And they can get away with, as long as they just say, the college president's attitude is, the subtext is, I don't know if they communicate that. They wouldn't be so foolish to be explicit, but their message is to the faculty and the students.

It's okay to hate Jews, and it's okay to be anti-Semitic, but you've got to understand something. You've got to have a victim card. When you do that, you've got to say that we are suffering from Islamophobia. You can do that. Or you can say that you're really not hating Jews, but you only hate Israel. But it would be better for me as a college president if you just said Netanyahu.

So when you're chasing Jews down and you're roughing them up and you're calling them names, you're tearing down pictures of the hostages, you're telling them to go to one side of the room, just say it's all about Netanyahu. But don't mention Jewish. Don't say that. And then you're home free. And that's what the rule is.

The colonialist tag on Jews. Settlers. They're trying to evoke the white settler coming in out west and taking the Native Americans land. That's what they're trying to do. But it could have a short shelf life. You were a Jew.

European Jew who survived the Holocaust that went back to your apartment in Berlin or wherever. Do you think you got your apartment back? No. Possessions that governments took from David Price Jones, our friend.

No, they would say SH something happens. Sorry. Right. And hey, especially if George Soros helped sell it, especially if George Soros sold your family furniture. Right. It was a young entrepreneur during the Holocaust. Yeah, you were getting back.

And, uh, Jesus, I had it five years ago, six years ago, tough, tough nookies. So no, it's only, it's only on the Middle East because of the Jews, because if you're a Cypriot and you say, you know what, you're never going to get back, Bella Pei's 20% of the Turkish population is now 35%. And that's gone. Just get over it.

If you're a German, there is no such thing as Konigsberg. It's Calangrad forever. You understand that? It's never going to be Danzig. It's Gdansk. That's Poland. We gave you a quarter of Germany. It's gone. If you're a Jew and you say you want to go back and live in Beirut, like you did, and you're great, great. No, no, no. It's not yours. There's no such thing, however.

If your grandfather lived in, quote unquote, Palestine, then you have a right right now of return. And that's just crazy. And we do that because of terrorism. We used to do it because of the American president or American intellectual would just tick it off, Jackie, go.

population, 500 million Muslims, Middle East, Jews, 11 million. Money-wise, Jewish people are very successful if they don't have the pectoral wealth of the Gulf, say, dang, terrorism.

There's no Jewish terrorism, they're going to hijack, kill ambassadors, hijack planes, you know, paint graffiti all over a veterans cemetery, shut down the Manhattan Ridge. And so that's what they did. And the college president was emblematic of that. I get to my office every morning, what do I not have to worry about?

I do not have to worry about a bunch of Jewish students rushing in here and crashing them. I do not have to worry about a bunch of Jewish students disrupting class. I do not have to worry about terrorism. The Jewish students at Stanford or Harvard are not going to go out and shut down a bridge across unless they're doing it for a Palestinian question.

I make the necessary adjustments and I will react to where my greatest exposure and worry about my own job bar. I'm not calling for Jewish people to emulate the tactics. I'm just calling for a little bit of honesty on the part of the college president or politicians, Joe Biden. It really wasn't if you think about it until Bill Ackman and people like him said, there's going to be no more money.

no more money to subsidize people who hate me. I'm not going to do it anymore." And that was hard to do because most of the Jewish American philanthropy money was on the left. So at first they said, well, he's just a nut. All our left-wing donors have the money. But now they're worried. And so they're starting to mouth nostrums or mouth that they're fair. But I don't know what it is.

I've had so many arguments. I'm 71 and I think I've had 100 arguments with friends, family about Israel and the asymmetrical treatment that it's shown in Netanyahu. There's been three great men this year. Donald Trump's comeback is the greatest comeback in the history of politics, greater than Bill Clinton's primary comeback.

Greater, I think it's greater than Harry Truman's comeback at 48. And greater than Richard Nixon, from 1962, humiliation in California would be present in 1968. And then there's Elon Musk. And the idea that he went into Pennsylvania, helped registered voters, went out, campaigned, used his money. He kind of nullified or neutered Mark Zuckerberg's 2020 gift.

And he, at the same time, he was doing that. He had this brilliant ex, this brilliant Tesla, this brilliant SpaceX. That was, and the third person was Netanyahu. He said, everybody blames me for October 7th. There was an intelligence fault, but I was at fault too. We should have been more vigilant. We should have had a more realistic appraisal. Just give me a chance and I will wage war on our enemies and do not believe their Hezbollah is invulnerable.

do not believe that Iran, you can't treat Iran as an existential enemy, do not believe that we can't reach the Houthis, even if we have to refuel, go all the way down, you know, across the red, near the Red Sea, and do not think that Hamas can hide under hospitals, mosques, good schools, and be exempt. I will also do it. And he did.

He's changed forever, the Middle East. If anybody had said a year ago, hey.

Benjamin Netanyahu will not schedule an election right now. He's not going to step down. He's not a crook. He's going to do this in the next 12 months. He is going to destroy Hezbollah as a terrorist operative. He is going to confiscate billions of dollars of weapons and from Hezbollah. He is going to destroy Hamas as a military cadre. He is going to help remove the Assad dynasty and make sure it's gone zip.

And he is going to destroy all of the air defenses of Iran, opening in the way for any Western country, including Israel, who wants to take out its nuclear facilities to do so within unity. He's going to do that all in a year. People would have said, that's crazy, you're delusional. That's what he did. Three great personalities, they all had comebacks. Elon,

Remember a year ago, Elon's an idiot. He paid $40 billion for exit only as a market capitalization. Yes. And now he can he opened the entire social media world in a way that no one had ever imagined. So

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Victor home title lock.com and we thank the good people from home title lock for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show Victor I know those names you just mentioned the three were comebacks. I want to add a fourth not a necessarily it's not a comeback but Malay the president Yes, Argentina has just wanted Tremendous thing. He's pulled off down there. So he deserves sort of a nod of yeah He deserves it. I mean he deserves

What was it, 140% inflation or something crazy like that? Staggering, yeah. Well, keeping on the topic of anti-Semitism, Victor, the New York Post has an editorial on, should there be a ban on masking? And you see what happens on these campuses, Columbia from Columbia University in New York to UCLA.

California, these riots in the streets or demonstrations in the streets, all these, all these folks have masks on. So here's a from the editorial of the post. It's absurd for the civil liberties crowd to oppose this ban. No one has a First Amendment right to hide this identity while terrorizing others in an in-person public speech. And those who insist that mask masking still has some public health purposes or in denial know

Next to no one does it anymore, except some people who loan in cars by themselves. I see that. You've got Ivy League bumper stickers. But the plague hasn't remotely returned. The nation ended racist, hoodwearing mob violence against black Americans. It must do the same to masked anti-Semitic mob violence. Victor, I have a feeling you might

Well, I mean, the health argument breaks down. If you were paranoid about the return of COVID or some type of virulent lethal virus, where the mask are being worn are not in doctor's offices. And nobody's talking about wearing a mask if you're the dentist. So in close quarters, in meetings, everybody knows if you want to wear a mask, go ahead. We're talking about in the public square and almost always outside.

And they have just piggy banked on two things, Jack. They have looked at Antifa, these protesters that are pro-homos. They look at Antifa and they saw that these kind of this uniform of Antifa, all black pants, black hoodie, and then the mask, shield them from identification. And what do we talk? Why? Because we live in a world where no one can get away.

from security cameras. And the only way you can function as a criminal is to put a mask on. And we saw that with Mangioni Luigi. Remember that we probably would have not ever found him if he hadn't pulled that mask down because he wanted to flirt with that young woman. And for a split second, we saw his entire face at his hostel or wherever he was staying. And so

We understand that Antifa knew that. And so they bequest, they're bequest to all radical groups was wear a mask. And then the radical groups piggybacked on the second legacy. And that was of course COVID and the quarantine. So then they can say, well, we're just victims. So we're yelling from the, we're chasing Jews into the library and we're wearing masks because we don't want to get infected from them. That's why we're doing it. We're worried about COVID.

And we're saying to you, no, no, no, no, no. I think they should just make a rule at all. Every campus that's to start off with, you cannot wear a mask in public. You can't because you're not going to disguise your identity. And we'll see what happens. But that's what it's all about. Everybody knows, criminologists have told us for years that when a person wears a mask, it emboldens his behavior. He's more likely to, you know what I mean?

creates anonymity and that means that you think you can get away with something. I never understood though the Middle East because when I would walk by and I'd see kids with mask on screaming, I never understood it because they were proud and they were wanting to get in your face and they wanted to yell and they wanted to identify from the Middle East so you'd think they wouldn't want to be identified.

But apparently they wanted their bachelor's degree or their diploma more than they wanted to be a freedom fighter, I guess. I don't know. The only time I can see a mask in public is if you're some type of counterterrorism or counter cartel and they'll go after your family or something if you're a law enforcement. Oh, now there's no need for it. But boy, I've talked to, I know some of the bank tellers at one of the banks I go to.

They don't like it. They really don't because when they see people come in, especially with a hoodie or some head covering and a mask, as one woman told me, she said, just four years ago, I would have been terrified. And now I'm supposed to not be terrified, but it doesn't mean the same person. There's just more people that are not bank robbers, but that doesn't mean there's fewer bank robbers that are masked.

Well, it's not a sign of manliness to wear them either, Victor. We're going to talk about the redefinition of manhood in the personages of Doug M. Hoff and Tim Walz as we look back on 2024. And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on December 28th, but this episode is the first of the new year up on January 2nd. You can find the show on also now video tape, even though there's no tape, I don't think, recorded on rumble. Look, you know, do go on rumble and search for the Victor Davis Hanson Show in case you're interested in checking it out.

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So Victor, I saw, so I can't find the link, but I saw some article towards the end of the year. I think, is this comical? But it was looking back at Doug M. Hoff and Tim Walz were the new poster boys of what manhood was supposed to have become in 2024. I would have thought that would have been settled by the

lecture results in November. We have more important things to talk about, Victor, but I just want to check that off. Anything you want to say about? I didn't understand it. So I'm trying to understand it. So as I understand, the subtext is on the left that they are rejecting traditional key man masculinity on the right. So they don't like

the Dana Y, the Joe Rogan, the mixed martial arts, all of that group. They don't like bikers. They don't like Clint Eastwood from a different generation. That type of in-your-face masculine, they don't like the Daniel Henny masculinity. If you see a punk who's threatening people, you step up to protect the weak.

I don't know if they like the immigrant that just watched somebody and the people who just watched that. I don't want to feed judge him. He just might be a pyromaniac and he can't help it. I don't know what that means, but apparently they have an idea of a more sensitive, caring masculinity that when you look at these real men, they look endomorphic.

endomorphic is not a slurge act, it just means a body type. Well, the posterior, yes, it doesn't seem like there's a strong backbone physically. And the maybe the, it's the word, the lower half of the anatomy is of greater size than the shoulders or something. I don't know what an endo more. But my point is,

M. Hoff and Waltz, then they must push these buttons of, and I guess the buttons are partly, they are helpers to powerful women like Camilla Harris, or his, remember Waltz's wife, kind of nutty, and I think they took her off the trail. She'd get out and scream and yell, and you got the impression that his leftward tilt, he ran as a congressional person, as a rural

Clinton Democrat and then this spouse kind of pushed him. So I guess one of the subtexts is that real masculine men seed authority or decision-making to the female spouses because they're confident in their masculinity and they don't have to have props like guns and cars. That's part of it. The other thing must be that

you have to real masculine men are entitled to certain sins because they're not in your face. So if you want to impregnate your nanny and arrange for her to have a child and then buy her a house and then cover it up for years, that's what a sensitive man does. Or if you want to lie about your military record, serially,

that's okay too because you're a sensitive male. So one of the elements of sensitive masculinity is that while you may sin and those are traits of the toxic masculinity and you're trying to overcome them. So you give a press conference and say you caught me. I tried to suppress this, but did you have an abortion? Did you pay? I don't want to get into the personal

details, that's a private matter. That's what they do. I guess what I'm saying is that they don't sin. All of their sins are washed away. It's kind of a substitute, a surrogate Christianity.

In the wokeness or sensitivity or feminism or whatever the ism is, it tells you that if you accept the tenets of belief in sensitive masculinity and you wore your entire life with toxic masculinity, then as part of that penance, you're allowed these sins that are washed away. You seek cover, you seek penance from it.

And you see that all over. Bill Clinton was a master of that. The guy was a complete serial womanizer in the most brutal and

No, I said that the other day. What? So that woman, you better put after you say allegedly raped or put some ice on that. Put some ice on a bitter lip and a fit of masculine passion of sensitive, he was a sensitive. And then the, you know, if you're a sensitive map, if you're term a sensitive man,

There's also, I'm sorry, audience. I didn't say the critical characteristic of a sensitive man in a new masculinity is you have to support feminist issues. Two of them, you have to be strong on trans chauvinism, and you have to be abortion to the moment of delivery. And if you push those two buttons, you're really, really sensitive. And that means that...

I don't know. There's a lot of people who have talked about – Elon Musk has talked about masculinity and fertility. Jordan Peterson has. But there's a lot of observers, I think, have made the point that if you want to look at a profile that threatens the United States existentially, it would be the epidemic of lonely men who have prolonged adolescence.

that are still in their late 20s and early 30s struggling with college debt. I'm talking about half the population that goes to college. But young men who are not doing what their grandfathers did, maybe some what their fathers did. But what I mean by that is they're not getting married in their 20s or early 30s. They're not having children in their 20s or early 30s. They're not buying a house.

and they're sort of in the cities, they're just sort of, once in a while they meet a very nice woman, they want to marry, the woman says, why don't you get a life, I can't marry you, you've got to get going. 55% of bachelor's degrees go to women now, and yet we're told women are oppressed in the university, and PhDs, if you look at PhDs in particular, things like art, history,

English literature, it's getting 50-50 if not more women. So the male, especially the white male who's not eligible for any set aside under the old woke affirmative action and this demonizes toxic masculinity, white privilege, prone to white rage, white supremacy, he's been told that since kindergarten now, this generation, and he's sort of like

Do you ever watch Game of Thrones, Jack? No, I did. It was a character called Theon, and he was castrated, and they call him reek. They destroy him, but he's suffering under all these things that he's done. So the white young male suffers under the idea that

He is responsible for the internal combustion engine, carbon imprints, Western chauvinism, the destruction of Native American populations, slave holding. He is singled out as the person who has to make amends for that. And in this generation,

And women want him to be sensitive. That means he shouldn't watch football. He shouldn't own a gun. He can't vote for Trump. And then he's not supposed to grow up. He's not supposed to get a job. He's not supposed to buy a starter home. And then on his weekends, try to remodel it. He's not supposed to

have a couple of kids and take one to Little League and the other one to volleyball. None of that. And the country as a whole looks at this fertility rate of 2.1 in 1998, and it's 1.6, and it's shrinking. And it's because there's a whole generation of these males. It's not just white males, it's males in general, but particularly white males, but males in general, let's say between 22 and 40, they're just not

They're not part of the body politic. They don't believe they have a traditional role to play. If you said to one of them, hey, if you said as a father or grandfather, you said to them, you got to get going, son. Hey, you got to get plug into the system. You got to go get a job, get a part-time job.

You know, try to get a starter home, try to, if you can, but in their defense, it's very hard to buy a home. Student loans plague you for years, and you're told that if you're an electrician or a master plumber or a sheet rock installer, that that's less prestigious, even though you will make more money. I don't know, it's a whole range of toxicities and the suffering, but we as a country,

When we say we need illegal immigration at both ends to be highly skilled engineers, we talked in last podcast, and I think George W. Bush said, we can't build back from the hurricane unless we have illegal immigration. He said that, George W. We need the labor. Well, there's a lot of these young males that are not fully employed. Why couldn't they do it?

and they're traumatized for some reason. I don't know what it is, but I see it among family, I see it among friends that you know people, and they were very bright young men, and they got college degrees, and then it was like, okay, I did what I was supposed to do, now what? And then they kind of date, they date for six months, a year, they live in, sometimes they have live-ins, they break up,

then they kind of drift for a while, but then when they get up close to the late thirties, they're kind of even done with dating. They're just sort of, and we need them. We need to encourage them and we're not going to get them back in until you have role models and people say, you know what, you guys, there's nothing wrong with getting married. There's nothing wrong with having children. There's nothing wrong with buying a house or you're not in the rat race. You're taking control of your destiny. You're helping your country.

We need people in the military. Join the military. We need coders. Get your engineering degree, but get on. This is a new era. We can do this. Don't worry about isms and geologies.

Yeah, you mentioned college debt, Victor, and there are any number of factors here, but that is so powerful that you would graduate with a degree that may or may not give you much chance of decent employment, and then you'd have the equivalent of a mortgage already, 120,000. I get so angry about it. I wrote about it, and the dime says, the only thing that works in the huge college debt is the amnesty's for.

because it's applied on equally. But my whole point is that we always hear from professors, oh, we might be laid off. Oh, there's not a job for PhD. I know I can tell you there wasn't when I got one. But my point is this. We never say we have any responsibility for having these young kids come in.

and telling them to major in particular areas and then not helping them get a job or not uprising them of the cost per hour of their education. I had a lot of minority students, in fact, almost all minority students, and poor people from my 20 years at Cal State. And we had a classics program. And if you're poor or you're working class, I always had to explain to the student, you're gonna spend seven to 900 hours to learn Greek.

or Latin. And it's incumbent upon me to help you. So we're going to try to use that new vocabulary and that diction and syntax to improve your written and oral language. And that will help you in any enterprise that you want to, to endeavor. And then I always would say, and if you do want to continue, I will help you get into a graduate school and get a job.

and I will help you get, I will call everybody I can because I have an obligation because you, you know, you're in a area where there's not a lot of marketability, supposedly. But there is a lot of marketability for people who can think analytically, write well, speak well, and we're gonna ensure you hit all of those requisites. And then we just have to match you up with employer who agrees with that. And that was about 30% of my time.

In fact, I can tell you that I spend maybe two hours a week at least with emails from the last 30 years from somebody who says, remember me, I was a student, I'm up for this, I'm that, that, that. But if you're gonna encourage somebody to take a lot of debt and go to this college, then the college is gonna take no responsibility. No college is gonna say, Mr. Smith,

Here's your financial package. We want you to come. We need students. We're short. We're faculty's ready to teach. What do you want a major in? I think I'd like to be a sociology major. Here is the job market in four years. Here it is in six years. Here's the compensation. Here will be the disposable income. Here's what your loan will cost to service. Here's the anticipated year you'll pay it off. You want to do it.

We do that with cars. We do that with houses. The bank says that when you take out a loan, how are you going to pay for it? What's your discretionary impact? What are your expenses? We never do that with students. So they just go, oh, college is the, it's the key to success and open. That's what my professors tell me. It is sometimes. Sometimes it's a pathway to prolong data lessons in the 40s.

like time burden. Well, let's change up a little Victor talk about a great communicator. And that's Donald Trump. And the fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books. I want to recommend it now for four reasons. One is there's a great review of your book The End of Everything.

in this particular issue. So, you know, you just high-fived you all along the way. It's not just book reviews in the time I review, but there are essays. And this issue has three essays, William Voguely and Charles Kessler and Chris Caldwell. And they're talking about the 2024 elections and Trump and what's happening with conservative movement. Anyway, I'd like to focus on Chris Caldwell's piece

And it's about Trump talking and how different he is. I want to read this here. You bear with me and then Victor.

comment on it or your own thoughts on how Trump conveys thoughts. Here's what Chris Caldwell writes in this essay. Even when he is not telling an actual man bites dog story, Trump has a gift from making things vivid. His language is a strange percussive beauty to it. People who love English often remark that it is a Germanic language with

ever ever since a Norman conquest of vast or words from the romance languages crude everyday objects have tended to keep their Germanic names while ideas and ideologies and newfangled abstractions get introduced into the language in their romance form a good English Pro style is generally considered to be a matter of balancing the two but Trump is not like that he has rightly been called materialistic in the sense that he cares about things his speech is concerned stuff

They are therefore full of blunt Germanic words. The only Latin word in his diatribe about Springfield was people. And that's a pretty down-to-earth word. Trump didn't say the metropolitan area or the population or the community. No, he said the people that live there. Trump tends to use Latin words when he is mimicking

a belittling technocrats and he squeezes them into a nerdy nasal point extra voice as he has when he irritated the Harris campaign smokes men who accused him of being a cognitively impaired Trump talks in a raw kind of tempo that goes well with music. This is a fascinating article. Yeah, I read it. Anyway, I always you know, I taught English and composition

couple of times, but I taught every year at Latin composition. And I would try to explain everybody the history of the English language, Anglo-Saxon. It was a mixture of European, Germanic languages, and indigenous Anglo and Saxon languages in the British Isles. And then the hierarchy of the Latin conquest

Latin. And so it developed a scientific polite vocabulary that was polysyllabic and latinate and then a crude English monosyllabic. So, and one of the examples you know is for terms that are embarrassing. So we have urination, which is a good Latin word and pith, excuse me. And then we have intercourse and the F word. We have defecation and the SH word.

We have, for the sexual organs, we have phallus and we have another word. And we have vagina and another word. But the bad words are all Anglo-Saxon. And the descriptive technical scientific is polysyllabic and latin. And if you use, I was trying to explain to students, if you use too many polysyllabic latin words, you come off as pretentious. If you use too many of the Anglo-Saxon,

You know, you don't say, I liked the Iliad. It was a big, good story. So you want to have some. It was intriguing. It was problematic. But if you use too many, you get to, as you said, you know, wish you washy. But Trump, what I liked about Christopher Caldwell is he uses that Latinic vocabulary to actually vary his own vocabulary by attributed to other people. So he will quote them.

And so there is a melodic, there's a very, what we call very ought to you in Latin, but it's not him using the polysolavic, it's him quoting it. And you can see when somebody writes a speech is when he's talking about an issue.

we're going to have a schedule of repayment for student loans and obligations. And then he'll stop the teleprompter and he'll go, big idea, gotta pay the loans off. And we were gonna continue and we can stagger these repayment and stagger the repayments, big idea. And he interrupts himself. Or what I liked, you know, there was once when he first came on the scene, I wrote an article about his tweeting. And a guy from CNN was writing about how horrible

Trump's tweets were. And he actually showed out, I didn't want to talk to him, but he said he wanted to come to Fresno and talk to me. So I met him in a shopping center. I didn't want him to come to my house. I met him in a shopping center in Fresno. And he said, give me an example. I said, okay, you ever notice when Trump would tweet, he'd say, uh, Hillary Clinton is a terrible crook and Bill is just,

All he likes to do is blank other women. And then he, like, sad. Or he'd say, the crooked Joe Biden family has got away with murder. Terrible, awful. He just have one word at the end. And it was such a variation in sentence, sentence link grammar. It was really, he had a natural flair for that.

And I don't know whether when he developed it because I was curious, I went back. Have you ever seen those interviews he's done, especially with Oakland people 25 years ago when they asked him if he was going to run for president? It was amazing. It was like he was an encyclopedia of data. I saw an interview about

He must have been 50, you know, 28 years ago. And they said, would you ever think of political office? And he'd say, we have very asymmetrical trade. And we've got to get back to commerce. And it was just, it was authoritative. You know, he had authority. He had sobriety. He was full of chock full. And then he developed this other element of just

you know, as if he's talking to a cement crew on his building or something. And that article points out out that he's able to, I like what he also says when he says, when he appoints somebody or he does something and he knows that people are going to criticize a Kimberly Garfler. He always use the word highly respected. She's highly respected among her peers, highly respected.

widely esteemed. And he always says this, that's another classical rhetorical trope. It's a variation of what we call, it's not very Attio, but it's deliberate hearsay. And you want to get something in that's inadmissible, but you can't

You can't say it yourself because it's outrageous, so you have to attribute it to somebody else. And then you're not responsible for its veracity. So whenever Trump says a controversial thing, he says, and he'll say something like, I don't know about Tim Walts. They say it's widely reported that his military record was suspect.

or he has no respect among his fellow soldiers or it was reported or they say, and that's a classical trope. Yes, he's usually right, but he attributes the general consensus as if he's only reluctantly schooling this information because it's widely known, widely reported.

We're going to talk about someone else who is famous or talking, classically, anyway, in his case. And that's Benito Mussolini. I don't think we've ever talked about Mussolini. Despite my heritage. And we'll get to that and also talk about Germany's invasion.

Russia and their uniform and that's how we will close out this episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show and we're going to do that when we come back from these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show. Happy New Year to everybody. This particular episode comes out on January 2nd. Now, on January 3rd, 1925, Benito Mussolini, a member of the parliament socialist, well, he had been a socialist, but he gave a somewhat infamous talk that kind of propelled him into his status as Ilduche, the fascist leader.

of Italy, even though Italy still had a king.

is uh, Victor a mighty well. Yeah. So Victor, I'm just generally about, you know, because Mussolini comes off in our own culture here and movies, whatever, it's kind of a clown and, you know, mock and comical figure almost. But I don't think he was comical figured necessarily to, uh, Italians themselves or to, to the Libya and Ethiopia and Somalia, which were, which were, uh, tormented by Italy.

So anyway, I'm curious about a lot of the any general thoughts about him. But also he started he started leader. You got to remember he was an editor. He was a newspaper guy. So he could write well. And he did interviews. And he met a variety of people and he emulated their style and he understood how people communicated with the public and he was writing. And he was a socialist communist on the left.

He was actually, even though there was some question he might have evaded military service for a while, he was a wounded veteran of the Austrian Front. So he had three days as a combat veteran fighting on the Allied side in World War I. And then he realized by the early 20s that the problem with communism was, as Hitler did, because Hitler was surrounded by Nazis who were former communists.

Even off in Rosenberg and Goebbels for a while had tallied with socialism communism. It was called the National Socialist Party. But fascism was, it squared that circle. It said that you could be a communitarian, but Italian. And so he understood that nationalism and collective pride in the country

was a force multiplier of communitarianism. So he created this idea of fascism, the Fashis, these rods that were bundled together, that we're going to bundle all the ideologies and all of the ethnic, and we're going to have an Italian movement, and we're going to

As Hitler did, we're going to be the national union. There's no reason for unions anymore because we're going to be the bulwark, protect the common man, and we're going to take the oligarchs and business people and make them serve the people. Of course, they will corrupt.

And Mussolini was corrupt. But the point was that he was going to have this nationalist movement and channel what the reason people didn't like communism and the commune turn was that there was no borders and that communism is going to be

It wasn't going to be nationalistic, chauvinistic. It was just going to be a worldwide global movement. Most people didn't want that. So he, in the 20s, he used his military service, the fact that he'd been wounded, his journalism experience, and this new idea that Rome will be the new center. It'll be Martin Ostrom. Again, the Mediterranean will be Italian.

and we will we found the Roman Empire and we're already half there. So we have Libya and we're our competitors in the late thirties who are going to be the French. The French Navy is predominant. We're gonna build, he built. Wow, 2030 cruisers, six big battleships. The Italian Navy was the second largest in the Mediterranean. Beautifully crafted ships.

Beautifully crafted with no operational capacity because they had no radar. They were not able to fight at night They were poorly commanded, but they were like all Italian craftsmanship very impressive same thing with their airplanes some of them were in flight spec specifications and capabilities comparable to the BF 109 or the submarine Spitfire, but they were

Not built in quantity and they weren't built for easy maintenance for example, but there was an Italian genius to them. So he thought that he and then when the war broke in the 30s, he went down as you know,

to Ethiopia, Somalia, and tried to, East Africa is basically the area, and he conquered it. He was very brutally used, poisoned gas, killed people, and then he looked at when the war started, he thought that the British would be occupied with Hitler, and he would make inroads into Egypt, so he started to go into Egypt.

And he didn't think under any circumstances that the British with this huge empire would have enough resources to devote to North Africa. But they did. And by 1940, his reputation was ruined. He was in retreat. And of course, Rommel came in and saved him in February, March, April of 1941. But it was right on the verge of the invasion of Russia. So Hitler didn't devote enough resources for Rommel to win.

but the Italians went down to defeat with Rommel and the Germans were wiped out and then he invaded, foolishly he invaded Albania and then on October 28th of 1940 invaded Greece, Okey, when he told the Greeks, you have to let me in, they said, Okey, no, there's an Okey day in Greece today, but he got bogged down in Greece, couldn't handle the Greeks, ferocious fighters, heroic fighters, they had natural terrain, it was in winter, it was stupid,

to invade on the verge of winter. Hitler had to bail him out, go into Yugoslavia, solidify his presence in Albania, then win the war in Greece, and he had to do it before he invaded Russia. And he lost with, if you look at the campaigns in France and the low countries in 1940, then he had to go into Yugoslavia,

and he had to clean up grease and then the invasion of Crete. He lost a lot of very valuable equipment, air transport, soldiers that really weakened him even though he had this huge force to go into Russia. But Italy was always, I don't know what the word is, Hitler admired Mussolini because Hitler didn't come to power until

1936. Excuse me, 33. And he didn't start to get ambitious until 36 with the Sarlan and then Rhineland Anschlusset followed. But Mussolini was there 23, 24. So Hitler grew up with the idea that Mussolini had taken control and destroyed the democratic republican process and created this fascist nationalist movement movement that really worked. And he admired him. And Mussolini was

I think ten years, eight years older than Hitler was. So he was Hitler's master. And then when the war started, the population and economy of Germany propelled Hitler into the preeminent position. And then from 1940 on, Hitler looked at Mussolini as a kindred spirit, but a drag.

Yes, we have to bail him out of Greece. Yes, he's going to send some people to Russia, but not enough to make any difference. Yes, we'll have to have a save him when the revolution tried to overthrow him in 1943. Yes, we'll go down to Egypt because he started a war with the British and he's losing. So that was the German attitude.

I think you've answered the question, but just to be clear, on Italy under Mussolini, militarily, interesting designs, et cetera, but nothing. Is there anything admirable about the Air Force, the Navy, the military? Did they ever win a war? Did they ever win a battle? I wonder, against the... You know, actually, units fought when we invaded Sicily in July of 43, some Italians

units fought very well. But even though they were all already, we had used actually the mafia and the mafia in places like Palermo to help us. But there were a lot of Italian, the Italian American exodus had made, there was a lot of goodwill toward America in Italy before the war started.

So they supported Mussolini, but when the war started and America came in late, then they had a real problem with it. But they did, some of them did fight well. They had a, I'm trying to remember his name, he was a commander, he was a fascist black shirt, but he was kind of an intellectual, and he was the head of the Air Force, Bauble, I think his name was. And he was a brilliant commander, and if they had made him in command of the Egyptian forces,

Instead of Graziano, they might have been able to win. He got killed in a mistaken identity where they shot him down, I think, over to Broker somewhere near there, killed him. But he was destined to take over from Mussolini. Ciano was his son-in-law, left these diaries, and of course they executed him.

But Victor, I have to correct you as an Italian mark. There is no such thing as the mafia. Now. That word is never used in any of the Godfather movies. That was part of the deal.

It was not to use that word. They probably made a deal with some locals to make the movie made. Victor, you mentioned, and I mentioned earlier about the German army, and unprepared for the brutal winter of 1941 in Russia. And as you just pointed out, of course, it was delayed in Beijing. Marberos was delayed by

needing to do things in Greece and Yugoslavia. But I've always been curious about the uniform of the German soldier, the winter uniform, or the lack of their such. Have the Germans been prepared by just warmer clothing? Would it have mattered, really, or was destiny never? How I don't think it would have got to remember that

Hitler's success of the 11 victories from 1930 to 41 were predicated early on, as I said, in A7. So we invaded Poland. We made it from three spots, from East Prussia, from occupied Czech territory, and from Germany. But even then he had the Soviet Union that came in 17 days to carve up. And the Poles fought ferociously for two weeks.

He lost 20,000 dead. And then he waited a while and had that fake peace. But then he went into Denmark three days. But he had problems in Norway. And had he not invaded France and diverted the British leave, he would have had some problems. He lost a lot of destroyers and had the British been more aggressive. It would have been really touch and go.

So then he invaded a very weak Belgium and Netherlands and Luxembourg. And then he hit France, which was socialist and the mighty French army. Everybody says it had crumbled in six weeks, but it did. But the French soldier, they killed another 20,000 Germans. And then he took a pause. So that was seven countries. And then he went into

Yugoslavia and Greece, and he went into Crete. But my point in all of this is with minor exceptions of the French who had maybe some planes and tanks that were comparable but not operated well, he had never met a truly comparable, highly technological enemy. And when he first met them in Britain, he

Göring assured him that the Bf 109 and the junkers and Heinkel bombers would destroy England like they had Warsaw and Amsterdam. And they came up against the hurricane, but especially the Spitfire. And they took appalling losses, appalling losses. And then the submarine

campaign, it was very successful for a year. And then they came up against sophisticated British destroyers, depth charges, sonar, you name it. The same thing happened when they went into Soviet Union. So at this time, he got caught. This wasn't just Britain. This was a country that had a population of 240 million people. It was 30 times the area of Germany

And it was going to quickly receive 25% of its GDP would be supplied by the United States. And Britain, and more importantly, it had a history of munitions that were westernized. And they were very sophisticated. So if you look at heavy artillery, say over 105 millimeters, and you look at tanks,

the Stalin tank, or especially the T-34 tank. Are you look at Kitushka rockets? Are you look at motorized divisions? We gave them 400,000 studibis, they baked 400,000 heavy duty trucks. So when Hitler went into Russia, they had a kill ratio the first two years or about eight to one.

and they'd lost about a million men at the end of 1941 dead or wounded, but they had killed wounded probably five million. And yet when they counted divisions, the workmen up to OKW, the number of divisions they identified, and they said, this is impossible. This is impossible. We have wiped out combat and effective

at least 40 divisions, 16,000. Maybe 100 divisions. They can't have more than another 100 or two. They said, no, they have 400 or 500 total divisions. So that army started to really grow given the population base, especially in Eastern and asiatic Russia.

And they weren't prepared for that. And they weren't prepared for Russian railroad, different gauges. The roads were terrible. All of their fighting had been in European countries, very close to Germany, Denmark, France, even Greece. And the Germans had pretty good weather. It was comparable to Germany. And the point I'm making is if you had a Mark III tank, you could get its service back in Germany and just put it on a rail, it would be there in a day.

French rail load system is very sophisticated. If you went into Greece, there was a lot of food that you could steal. They had tomato canning factories, et cetera. But when they went into Russia, they had no idea that if they did not win that war, in the first June, they only had 10 days in June, and they had to win it by October 1st. And they had no idea how far away they were from the base of support. They had no idea.

how many men and they had no idea the sophistication of the Russian military equipment. So by the end of December, they'd run out of gas. They were so far from their base. It was very cold. They'd always pride themselves that the German kit, everything about the German soldiers, uniform, his mass, his knife, his handgun, his grenades were superior to British and Allied models.

And really, when they met American soldiers at the beginning, they were too. But by 1944, Americans had more morphine. They had more sulfa powder in their kit. They had more food. And they were the M1 carbine. You can make an argument that's better than any ordinary issued rifle that Germans had. I shouldn't say carbine, regular M1.

They kind of shot their war. What I'm trying to get out is a German army was designed for intra-European conquest of the sort of 1939 to 1942 in which it performed brilliantly. But once it entered a global war with the United States and Russia, and all of these wide theaters on land, on sea, but in Russia, and once their economy was up against the United States,

they had no idea what they were getting into. So the United States basically won the war by putting 12 million people in uniform, but not having a very big army, only three or four million. That 12 million were in support, auxiliary, the Navy, and the Army Air Force. So that meant that the United States had enormous logistical advantages. They had

enormous advantages on ground support aircraft, tactical aircraft, strategic aircraft, and all of that lessened casually. So we came out of that war losing tragically 450,000 dead, but Germany lost 5 million and Russia lost 20 million.

And the British came out with about 420,000, much more per capita, but not in the same numbers, because they too were able to invest in a Navy and an Air Force and auxiliaries, and they kept the actual fighting on land to a minimum. And we only had a year, you know, in Europe, from June 644 until May 9th of 45. That really, but the Germans, they fought on the Russian front, all of

half of 41 all 42 all 43 all 44 and half of 45 and They had never see the temperatures were unusual that year at 41, but even the next winter was stalling grab and so What was cold in Berlin was not anything like Russia it was colder and the winter started earlier and ended later and The Russians understood that

and they didn't. It was very embarrassing for them to, you know, General Holder, they had an OKW said.

After 11 days, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the German army has defeated Russia in 11 days. And that was because they had marked, they were 1,000 miles from their embarkation. They had neutralized 4 million. They had people either killing them, capturing them, or scattering them. There was no organized Russian defense. They had the largest encirclement in the history of warfare, the Kiev pocket, 650,000 Russians surrendered

They had the goodwill of people in the Baltics in the Ukraine. They thought it's warm weather all the way to November 1st or mid-November. We're going to take Moscow. They were scheduled to take Moscow in August. So the Japanese were going to join because they thought it was time to join Germany and Russia was all through. And then they sputtered and they saw they were ill-supplied.

And the Russian soldier was tenacious and the Russian artillery and a Russian armor were better than Germany's except for maybe the 88 millimeter artillery piece. And that was very embarrassing for Hitler because he had to tell the German people the Russians are better equipped. They have better coats. They have better shoes than we do.

and they have very good weapons, and they outnumber is five to one. And they're on their home base, and we're outside Moscow, and they're only 600 miles from their factories. And we're 1200 miles from the German border, and more importantly, this is the key. We are fighting Russia. They are fighting us. This is all they're doing.

They have allies that are conducting a strategic campaign of bombing us. They're not doing it. They have the two largest fleets in the world, the American and the British on their behalf. We're not doing it. They have a submarine component. We don't. We just have a huge 12 million

man army and all we have to do is in the case of Russia fight Germany but Germany looked at this and they said oh my god these Russians are just fighting us they're not fighting the Japanese they're not fighting the Italians

They're not bogged down in the Pacific. They're not in the Mediterranean. The Americans in British have turned them loose on us. And they're supplied and they've told the Russians don't make for engine bomb. And look at us. We're trying to bomb Britain. We're trying to

to sink convoys all the way over there in Florida and New Jersey. We're fighting in Italy with our allies. We're fighting in North Africa, and yet we've got to fight these one-dimensional Russians, and they have all the advantages. So it was really stupid. They fought

The idea was they thought they won the war, and as Hitler said, we can make, think of the logic, we can make Britain surrender by attacking the largest military in the world. That was so stupid, but they thought they would defeat Russia as quickly as they did France.

And they said, there is a calculus from World War I that took us four years. We only got 70 miles into France. And yet we knocked out Russia in World War I by November of 1917, two and a half years, three and a half maybe. So that calculus means in World War II that if we knocked out France in six to seven weeks, which we took as four years and we never did,

then we can knock out Russia given the World War I calculus that Russia falls and France didn't, and it falls in three years. France fell in six weeks, so we can knock out Russia in three weeks, just like World War I. Well, that's quite a history lesson off of a question about a coat. When I wrote the Second World War, I tried to avoid two stereotypes.

I wasn't going to just accept the narrative the French army was incompetent and the French military was only had gears and reverse as people said and the Italians were incompetent. It was tragic as the French soldier was indomitable in World War I.

and French battleships, and they made the best destroyer in the world, the French did. You could argue in 1940, the best tank in the world was the Charby tank, and the Duente aircraft was just as good as a German. And yet it wasn't the French soldier or the French munitions industry, it was the ossified calcified French command. And there had been socialism,

in the schools where you could not teach Verdun. You weren't even allowed to save Verdun very often. That was considered a disaster, even though it was a brilliant victory, it cost them 800,000. And the second thing was they had a hard right to attain, to attain movement. They were sympathetic to right wing, and they didn't understand what Germany was all about.

But they did fight pretty well for six. And just to finish, when we came in, everybody thought George Patton was a crude, Trumpian figure. In many ways he was, but he was fluent in French.

He spoke French to the, he had enormous admiration for the French. He did not hate as Montgomery did the Gaul and Roosevelt hated the Gaul. He formed the first, he had two artillery divisions. He had people like Leclerc and Tessernet that were brilliant, French commanders, and he allowed them to take Paris.

And he worked so well with them. And when the French had American weapons and they had American allies from basically August of 1944 to May of 45, the French soldier was wonderful and was a big help to the Allied cause.

And when they went into Vietnam and Algeria, they lost both of them. But those were political losses. If you look at the World War II veterans who fought that war in Algeria and Vietnam, they were pretty tough people. You had recommended, and I read a strange defeat by... So if anyone wants to get an understanding of French mindset that led to the defeat, that's a recommended book from Victor in terrific books.

Hey Victor, we've come to the end with two things. So first is, you know, usual, I want to thank folks that sign up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter, I write with the Center for Civil Society. And it comes with 14 recommended readings of interesting articles I've come across the previous week. And if you want to get it.

recommend you do go to sibilethoughts.com and sign up and then there's the fact that people rate this show through apples zero to five stars and practically everyone gives fifty five stars four point nine plus average over thousands of people thank you very much those take the time to do that and then folks other folks a few leave

comments and we read them all comments on apple comments on victor's website the blade pursues and here's one it's it's a little bit of criticism but it's interesting so here's it's called it's titled philosopher king

I think it's really interesting. So he writes, or gee, need to get you to Detroit downtown. It's a sex, obviously we've talked about Detroit. It's disparaging. I've been to Detroit, but I haven't been to the Renaissance Detroit in the last four or five years. I'd like to go.

Well here it is, it's a success story and one of the best downtowns in the country. Me and my squeeze walk around go to shows and sports events, great dining, the whole town has been rebuilt as if a Roman emperor decreed it. There is a Roman reference in campus, Martius, to between rocket mortgage and its subsidiary bedrock and the Illich family.

a place has been transformed. So when I hear your disparaging remarks about Detroit, I want to take you on a tour there. But visit next time you're at Hillsdale. It's not far. Of course, you'd have to drive by that commie cesspool.

U.M. and Genuflect. I worked for Rockin' and Work downtown, and remember the place when it was a science fiction post-war wasteland worthy of a movie set as such. It's really incredible, even more so given. It's liberal DNA, and this is signed by the Weekly Objectives. Thank you, Weekly Justice. Interesting. So it's returning after World War II or in 1944, it had the highest GDP rate of growth in the United States.

Yeah, it supplied the war effort with every machine that had wheels. It came in second place for the 1968 Olympics, which were held in Mexico City. So that's how how I think it really shrunk when I they had that plan, you know, of 25% of the city was abandoned and they were having to send fire and

you know, police everywhere. So they began to just allow these abandoned blocks to go back to nature and shrunk the physical size of the city to reflect the population. So I think it's about 800,000 now. And it's, it has, it has far fewer racial, I think it's hard to imagine given its reputation, but it has

far less racial problems. I think they even have a white mayor. It's an ecumenical city. I admire it. I appreciate that comment.

And I don't want to disparage the effort. Even Detroit. Well, I bet it's a lot better. It's a lot safer to walk down town and cleaner than San Francisco. San Francisco, yeah. Well, Victor, as ever, you've been wonderful. Thanks for all the reflections. Thank you, everybody. Go East, young man. Hey, we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody.