America’s Education Crisis, the Left’s Victimhood Culture, and Trump’s Political Comeback | VDH

I think that the modern world, especially the education system, wanted to make people stupid. They didn't teach the Constitution. They didn't teach civics. They didn't teach ethics. They didn't teach classical literature. They didn't teach anything about American history. It's almost that they took the last 40 years of people and erased their brains. Then they put in its place your races, your sexist, tribalism, transgenderism, hate America, or founding was all. Everybody was exposed to that, and they had no weapons to counter it because they had destroyed rhetoric and logic. Because you say these people are idiots, and because they know nothing, the left succeeded in programming an entire generation. Well, hello ladies and hello gentlemen and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson in his own words on the daily signal network. I'm Jack Fowler, the host lucky man. I get to ask my friend, Victor Davis Hanson, oh, I am lucky. Lucky is you being alive and we'll get to that in a minute, but I get to ask Victor the questions. I'm confident you would want him to ask. We are recording on Sunday, September 6th, 2026. This particular episode will be up on Hail the Festival Day of Tuesday, the 8th, which is the official publication date of Victor's new book, The Counter Revolution, The Fallen Rise of Donald Trump, and the MAGA movement. Victor is a Martin and Eli Anderson senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College, senior contributor to the daily signal, his website, The Blade of Perseus. You can find it if you type in, victorhanson.com. It'll take you there. The website was recently redesigned and much sleeker, cooler, niftier, and you're going to see, if you've never been there before, these ultra-articles, and you can read them if you subscribe. Victor writes two ultra-articles a week and does one ultra-video a week for The Blade of Perseus, $65 a year, or you want to stick your toe in the water, monthly, $650 a month. Victor looks a lot older today than he was the last time we talked. Don't be depressed, Victor. We're real time talking on the 6th. Yesterday was Victor's 73rd birthday. We're going to talk to him about that, plus a ton of stuff, center right, or let's just say fed up non-lefties in England, saying we've had it, David Mammett, the great writer, has an essay that Victor's going to take a reflection on murders in New York, wacko lefties in America, the whole, the whole kick-and-caboodle move to all that when we come back from these initial messages. Female athletes are being forced to compete against biological males, sometimes without their consent or even their knowledge. In Washington, high school sophomore, Cali Keeler was sexually assaulted on the wrestling mat during a tournament. Only afterward did she learn her opponent was a boy who identifies as a girl. With the help of alliance defending freedom, Cali is bravely suing the state over a policy that not only allows males to compete in girls high school sports, but doesn't require schools to disclose that information to female athletes or their parents. Don't let schools put gender ideology over the safety of girls in sports. Your support today can help fight for Cali and other athletes like her, and for a limited time, your first gift to ADF will be doubled by a special matching grant. Well funds last. Text Hanson to 83848 or go to join ADF.com/hanson to have your gift doubled. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. So, Victor, yesterday in real time, September 5th was your birthday and you had a very interesting way that you spent part of the day. Why don't you tell us about that? I did. Paul read a good friend of mine and of course a distinguished scholar had a conference on the Revolutionary War and I had originally said I would do it until I've had these misadventures with my long. And so I did it by Zoom yesterday morning on my birthday and it was every time I deal with Hillsdale I get encouraged about the future of the country. I mean just and I mean their staff, whether it was talking to the staff about setting up the Zoom, anything. They all, they remind me of 19th century mindset, you know, that duty, patience, good behavior, proficiency, and the people who go to those lectures. I had questions afterwards and they're the same. If we're going to be saved, it's going to be people like those at Hillsdale and those that support it, whether the left likes it or not. But anyway, Bill McClay, that you and I, the author of the best-selling land of hope, and I was on the encounter, I am on the encounter board and with Roger Kimble, I mean when he published that, there were people who said this might, you know, who wants a corrective of Howard Zen, it turns out that half the country wants a corrective and it's beautifully produced, beautifully written. So he introduced me and he led a birthday song quite unexpectedly and it was a really ironic, witty introduction and I really appreciate that. You know, it got me thinking why he was talking. There was a very good donor that you and I know really well who donated money to Hillsdale to set up two endowed chairs. One in economics called the Walter Williams chair and one in history and they wanted to know if I would have sent he did to use my name. And of course I did because it helped Hillsdale. But when they appointed Bill McClay, I was really worried but not in the way people might think. I thought, oh wow, he's such a great guy and he's such a wonderful person. And now he's associated for good or evil with my name. And what if I get a speeding ticket or what if I do something stupid or I go on pierce Morgan and lose my temper and use DAN or something. So it really shocked me. I thought, wow, I can't disgrace, you know what I'm saying. So it put a responsibility on me. It was not that I was going to do anything but you never know. And then when I got sick, when I got sick last year and I actually didn't think I was going to make it to 73 because all of last year I ran a 100, 101 fever every afternoon and I had trouble breathing. I could feel something in my lung and the more I got cat scans and x-rays, they said it was pneumonia or non-malignant COVID residuals or damaged lung or valley fever, etc. But I knew it wasn't. I didn't know what it was, but I just thought I can't go on like this. I'm losing weight and I have a fever. And so I thought, wow, they had this thing named after me and I'm going to kick off. So what are they going to do? So anyway, what I'm getting at is when you get something named after you have a responsibility to make sure you don't impair that honorific title and hurt the person who is the recipient of that. Yeah. And I know that because Martin Anderson and Ili Anderson who donated to create my endowed fellow senior fellow ship at Hoover, I knew them. I once asked him, I said, Marty lived to be 99. I said, Marty, with all due respect, why did you have confidence? I was teaching at Cal State Fresno and you wanted me to come to Hoover and they wanted me to come, but you made it possible with your endowment. And he said, three things, Victor, three things. I thought he was going to mention a book or something. You're Swedish like I am. They're on priorities. Yes. Number two, you're named after a marine who died on Okinawa, Victor Hansen, and I was in the Marines at Choison on that long retreat. I'm a combat marine veteran. That's the proudest thing in my life. I said, well, what could be three? And he said, my daughter lives in Fresno and I have a long attachment to the San Joaquin Valley and people there. So you hit all three, a trifecta. And I said, well, did you like the other? I don't know what the other Greeks was, Victor. He said, I told you. I went over to John Racing and I said, is this guy legitimate scholar? And he said, yes. He said, okay. Well, he's named after a marine vet who died and he's from the area that my daughter lives in and he's Swedish. How could you go wrong? Yeah, that was funny. And he was a wonderful person. I really worshiped him. He was such a good person. What was his, well, he came, well, he came, he was very poor and he was a legal consultant. for a big bank who financed a big ski resort in California at Squall Valley way back in the 60s. But it was going broke. It was there, didn't it? Yes. So remember when we had the great Japanese takeover of Pebble Beach and Radio City, everybody said Japan ink was going to take over the world. Well, they had financing or they had an arrangement with the bank and then they wanted to get out. And the bank took possession but they didn't know what it was. But since he had worked on it for the bank, they came to him and said, "Would you like to have a payment in partial ownership thinking it was going to be worthless?" People didn't ski at that particular time. And then that John, so he did, and he had almost nothing, but that John, remember John Claude Kelly, the French skier? Yes. He was just so photogenic, handsome, and he kind of reinvigorated the ski all over the country. And so it took off. So then he ended up owning half of Squall Valley and he bought all of it, the land around it. And he was that smart. And then in Hawaii, you remember the big geothermal craze? All these hotels, all these properties bought it and then it didn't fizzle out. So they wanted to get rid of it. So he bought it. And then that was choice C. Front, C. Shore in Hawaii that he owned. And then he did something that was really scary when Britain decolonized all that beautiful land-lown Victoria and Kenya was owned by farmers and resorts. And they were being nationalized. They thought. So they all were leaving. And he fell in love with it when he went over there. So he said, I will buy you. I will buy your land. But he got it for, I mean, they didn't, they just wanted out. They were afraid. They were violent. So he ended up either owning or leasing a million acres. He was the largest landowner in Kenya. And he did something that nobody thought you could do. He got along very well with the Kenyan government. And they did not confiscate it. And they made a deal with them. They said, if you give up all thousands of acres, we will give you title to a very choice. I think it was seven or eight thousand acres right along Victoria, Victoria area. And he did. And then in his will, he gave it, because that's the way he was. He lived very simply. And he gave it back to a nonprofit foundation for wildlife and things like that. So when you saw him, he dressed very normally. He spoke kind of gruff, but he was one of the most kind magnanimous people. And he had a wonderful daughter, Chrissy from Fresno. And then the other thing I didn't mention, his son-in-law was a big lawyer in Fresno. And when he first met me, I said, well, my mom was a judge. And I remember very well your son-in-law's father. He had had a stroke. And I went with my mother to go visit him right across the street from where your daughter and your son-in-law lived in Fresno. So he got very excited about that. And I first met him. He said, hey, well, that's how you're going to be joining the Hover institution. And I'm going to be in Fresno. And now I want you to come by. So he was 83 or 84. He died at 99. And I went over there. And here he wasn't there. So his daughter gave me some coffee and I talked to her and her husband. And then he came in with running shorts, track shoes, and a t-shirt at 83. Well, I didn't get all the whole hang. I only did five miles. But he was in fantastic shape, jogger. And he would call me out of the blue. If I wrote something that was good, he loved it. I thought I should have done better. He gave me advice. I really liked him. I would have done anything for him. And he did everything from me. So that really affected me when you have somebody's name on the other end. I didn't want to do anything that would impair his name. Well, that's remarkable. I just had something. A guide Bob called me up once when I was at National Review. And he said, I want to endow a chair, Holy Cross, which is my alma mater, as you know, and his too. I want to, in the name of Bill Buckley. And I said, you can't do that. They'll take the money and put some commie in that position. So this is, you've got to be very careful about that kind of stuff. Well, anyway, before Victor, I'm going to, I'm going to talk about a little something. And then we're going to, then we'll talk about David Mammoth. But first to our viewers and our listeners, listeners, it's a national preparedness month. And this isn't just another made-up observance. It was launched in 2004 in the wake of 9/11, one of the worst attacks on American soil. FEMA within the Department of Homeland Security created it to remind Americans to prepare for natural disasters, deliberate attacks, and other emergencies before they happen. The goal is simple. Reduce loss of life and speed up recovery when systems fail. That's the why. Here's the plan. Go to preparewithvdh.com. During their national preparedness month event, my Patriot Supply wants to send you over $1,000 in shelf stable food and preparedness gear free. It starts with your flagship solar generator that's powerful enough to run your fridge, your medical devices, laptops, and phones, whatever you need to prioritize. And look, it's awesome that my Patriot Supply is going to give you $1,000 in free gear. But the real win here is this bundle is expertly crafted to give you backup power, a huge amount of emergency food, water filtration, and the gear you need to support any disruption. So go to preparewithvdh.com to see the details. It's your responsibility to care for your own. Do it today at preparewithvdh.com. We thank the good people from my Patriot Supply for sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words, which remind me there's also Victor Davis Hanson in a few words four times a week at the daily signal. Go check that out. So Victor, our listeners are going to have to just hear my voice a little bit again for another minute, offered up for the cells of purgatory folks. Our friend, your friend, and I'm a great admirer of David Mammat, the playwright and screenwriter and author. And he wrote a piece the other day, a national reviews. You were just talking about being uplifted by Hillsdale. Well, David is a little, he's got a little bit of the ER gene going on. And I know you can relate to that. And his essay was titled America History and Futility. And I just want to read its conclusion. And the Victor, you can, you know, I'm giving you permission to expound on it. So here's what David Mammat wrote, a contemporary remark that perhaps the pendulum will swing back. And that reason, courtesy, and patriotism will reemerge, but he was wrong. But he could only imagine their reemergence in those our contemporaries who understood these attributes as essential for a functional and prosperous society. But to the young, the American century is a disgrace. And the American dream, a shuck, history may be debated, but the irreducible core must be verifiable fact. And what effect is determined only by Big Brother? And here's his conclusion. I don't know if the United States will survive in a form recognizable to my generation. I can't even describe the current form other than that as a civilization split into two factions, one to crying and the other exploiting chaos. I don't know if prophecy as prediction actually exists, but I know like Cassandra, that if so, it will do so in no useful form. I don't know if the sun can actually supply enough power to run our cities, but I know there is nothing new beneath it. Kind of depressing there, Victor, but maybe he's kind of realistic your thoughts. Well, I'm prejudiced because I've always admired David Mammott. And I like him and I know him. And he's a very courageous guy. He was beloved by the left. He was a man, not of a hard left, but he was a liberal. And he finally got sick of it years ago, and of course they turned on him and they turned on him professionally. But he had such a talent and such a name that he persevered. And that essay is kind of a siren song. He's also saying throughout that essay, the problem with getting old is that you get disconnected and you become an observer rather than a participant because of the energy levels, physical and mental. And then second, you get philosophical and you get angry because you know what was destroyed. One thing that's a subtext, and I think it's true of all of us, some of us in the Boomer ministry, the Boomer cohort actually knew people from the 19th century. And I was blessed because my paternal grandfather, my maternal grandmother, my maternal grandfather were born in 1890, in 1889. So they came of age without electricity, without flush toilets, without tractors using horses. Everything about them from their world view was imprinted on their childhood in the late 19th century. So when I got to know them, when I was five, say to 20, when most of them had died, everything about them, their language, their accent, their comportment was completely foreign to the modern world. If I wanted to go outside my grandmother's, be careful out there, yonder, don't go out yonder. I'll give the dickens to you. What did that mean? Or I'll take a switch to you, ha ha ha. Ain't funny, McGee. She used to listen to Fibber McGee in the 30s, I guess. And there's the sunset, Victor. It's sinking in the far, far west tonight. All this, and they live by nature. They would, my grandfather would say that birds are nesting early. There's a big, there's a big wind stirring up in the south, and that's can't be good. Or we need to say something to moral lecture. And that's all there is to it. Now, Victor, there's two types of people in the world. There are those who pay interest and those who get it. You got to be on the right side of the ledger. I wasn't. Now that's all there is to it. And when you get a $20 bill you earn, it's a lot easier to spend it than to put it in the bank. So put it in the bank. All of that parsimoniness, shame culture, be careful. He would say, "I don't, when you got your license, I was worried. I don't want to drive in and see you drive by me in town with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth, or ink on your skin." You understand? He said, "I do understand." And then I had a Swedish grandfather. It was really, really tough. They had that bad seed notion. They didn't believe in therapeutics. There was a neighbor family that they were kind of affluent and every one of them had been in jail. So my Swedish, I said, "Why do they, is it because they had a divorce, grandpa? What, what happened?" Well, Victor, there's a bad seed over there. There's a bad seed. Now that one of them is no damn, excuse me, no darn good. The other one, not much better. It's just a bad seed family. That's just all, they're just bad seed. They were pretty tough, but they built the country. And they were their last generation, I think, before the therapeutic generation took a hold and modernism came. Not that I'm saying the 20th and 20th century weren't great, but David Mammoth remembers that too, that there was a different world. And I think, finally, to stop, I won't keep going, but he has it, if I were to read all the things he's written, and I read a lot of me, about every couple of months, he sends me an old book. He got out of bookstore, published in the 20s or 30s, and I read them, and they're the same message. And that wiped clean a slate. It was almost that they took the last 40 years of people and erased their brains, and it was completely empty vessels. And then they implanted, once they had done that, once they had done that crime of omission, then they doubled down and had a crime of co-mission, then they put in its place your races, your sexist, tribalism, transgenderism, hate America, or founding was awful. And everybody was exposed to that, and they had no weapons to counter it, because they had destroyed rhetoric and logic and classical philosophy. When they didn't just destroy the classes and put these dash studies courses, they went in like a virus to the host and took a philosophy class, or a Shakespeare class, and turned it into Shakespeare was gay, or Western history was about slaughtering India. Everything, and the result is you see these people that don't, it's not that they're hard left. They don't know anything. Where were to the sea? Well, I don't know. I don't know. Jews have no, they're colonial, they're settler colonialists. Well, what do they have a 3,500 year? The first time we ever read about Israel and literature, who is there? I don't know. And so that's what he's lamenting, and he's a very important voice. I'm glad that he takes, he's very in great shape, he works out, and he's he's a septiginarian, but he's in really good shape. And I'm glad he's going to be around a long time, because he's very needed, and he's absolutely right. The left tried to, just like out of 1984, turn whole generations into ignoramuses that didn't know anything, and they had no inductive reasoning, they had no context. If you said to some, if you say these words to people, if you said column or cornice, or you said 1776, and they don't know anything, you can see if you're all, a lot of us watch Fox News, and you have Johnny, remember him, and he goes out in the beach, and he says, who was the first president, the first Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, what's the capital of Washington? Miami? What was what happened in World War two? They bombed New York. No, they didn't bomb me. I mean it. Nothing. And then you, but you're wins from the you win because you say these people are idiots. And because they know nothing, the left succeeded in deprogramming or programming and entire generations. And they put in and that no nothingness because they had no defense, because they didn't know how to reason or logic, or they had no reference points. They could say, well, this is what Dante said, or this is what Washington meant, or I remember what Lincoln's, they had none of that. So then they put in it, you're, this is a safe space. This is a trigger warning. This is a theme house. And these people just nodded. And so they came out and they're sheep. And then you have these elite people who were the worst of all because these elite leftists, they did get that training from 19th century minds that are now in their 70s. But then they took that training and they blew it up for other people, selfishly saying, we're going to be the puppet masters. But we won't want these little mannequins, these puppets below on our strings to have any of the knowledge that we were given or they might revolt. Then every once in a while you'll see somebody at Prager University or someone who wakes up and then it's like a revolution. It's like somebody pulled apart the curtain and they can see, you know, wow, I didn't know what was going on. So that's what David Mammatt is trying to, he's very pessimistic about the modern world. And I don't know. I mean, you have an atheistic, agnostic, secular ignorance, ignorant generation raised on precepts that bankrupt, discredited social science. And then you get a, what's her name? Clancy Lindsay? Is that her name? Lindsay Clancy. Yeah, that's what you get. You get feminist out there supporting her or trying to raise you in a million dollars. Are you get a bill that says in Canada that if you kill your child in the first year and you can claim postpartum depression, then the severities for first degree murder are no more than five years. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You get a hatred of young life and procreation and infants and they're defenseless. And you get the attention turned to the cycle, cycle bubble and melodrama of the person committing the crime. You know, on that Lindsay Clancy, I don't call it stuff-factor because we should probably talk about that at greater length on next episode or maybe you and Sammy. But it's, we were told forever, we should talk about feminism in a little bit because Gloria Steinem died. So maybe this will be a segue later on in the show. But women are like men, right? Don't bring up anything about hormonal changes, et cetera. Except this is all about hormonal changes now. And, and she's a, a, a victim because of that. And you can, and, and to be lauded and you write that, go fund me. I mean, it's insane. The amount of money that's being sent. Nobody can fit, nobody can figure out who, and this, this network of victimhood, intersectionality, which victimhood outweighs the other. Illegal aliens or harvesting rare species are depleting oysters on your beaches in Connecticut. Who wins? The environmentalist or, you remember the, shooting of a young girl was at Staley, in San Francisco by the illegal alien that they just, yeah. Well, there had been a rumor that he had been shooting at sea lions. And for a brief moment, that one story came at, I don't know if it was true, but people were really angry. And so the local Bay Area, they squashed that story because they thought, oh my gosh, people don't, on the left, don't care that he murdered a young girl. But man, he shot at a sea lion. That's something. That is something. Yeah. Remember, Rush made a big deal of this woman. She was hiking and she was killed by a mountain lion. Yeah, I remember that. And there was a GoFundMe for the mountain lion. Essentially, a GoFund for the mountain lion. And nobody gave her rats but two to about the dead lady. You know, there wasn't a murder, you know, but et cetera, the displaced priorities are crazy, which it is anti-human. Yeah, let's bring up a murder thing in a second here, Victor. But first to our listeners and to our viewers, AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents, the full experts and criminals are using these tools right now. And I think right now, as we're speaking, to steal from you how it's called title fraud. Your property records are public by law. Your name, your address, even your signature. It's all sitting in a database anyone can access today. A cyber scammer pulls your records, uses AI to forge a transfer document, files it with your county and on paper, they're the new legal owner of your property. 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Victor Aaron Piacan Piacenti 32 year old woman going back to work after maternity leave little baby. She's murdered in time square by a crazy lady. Terrible terrible thing. And maybe that's where it could have ended. But it didn't end there. So and I just want to say a front. You know, this is a big story of people here all across nation. I may have met her and her husband. I certainly her her father-in-law and Frank and his family, Lisa and Ken Sullivan others. They are they are friends and they are huge listeners of this show just by coincidence. So I just want to put that out there. Anyway, this poor murdered young woman is now has become a subject for the left. Lexi Alexander who's a Palestinian American filmmaker shared a cruel meme about the murder of Aaron Piacan Piacenti after she was stabbed because she's comparing she's taking this as an opportunity since she worked for Bank of America to compare it to well she's just like the you know the head of United Healthcare who got murdered. So so the murderer is akin to Luigi Mangione. This is twisted. That any opportunity in America for the left of a real tragedy becomes an opportunity for them. They don't understand that when you break down laws, protocols, decorum for short term expediency. It's going to then you have no protection yourself when the pendulum's. It was best articulated in the historian Thucydides in the third book. I think it's passage 81-86 and he's talking about a revolution and he said they were killing each other off and there were no rules. There were no protocols. You could fathers could kill sons vice versa. Just a mere word of suspicion got you condemned and then he said people in times of ignorance and unrest will do away with the very traditions and laws that they will at some point seek a refuge in and that's exactly what she doesn't understand. If the left says that Lindsey Clancy can kill and then she can plead temporary insanity or if they say Luigi Mangione, a spoiled niebo baby, can lay in weight and ambush in a premeditated fashion and shoot a once middle class guy Brian Thompson in the back or if this woman with the two knives can kill a upcoming very successful mom plays by all the rules a wonderful person and earn oprobium not for the murder but for her for being the victim because she represents capitalism. What do you think Lexi Alexander does when she makes movies. She thinks she looks at the returns and she asks how much it's going to cost and how much it's going to make and hope she makes a profit. I think she does. How does Luigi Mangione wander all around the world really without getting a real job. Was it his family? Were hypercapitalists? Yes. And so how does Rokana give lectures and live in this house on a congressman's salary? Was it his father-in-law capitalism? Yes. How is it Hassan Piker can drive a $200,000 Porsche? Was it because he was a nipple baby? Yes. How can Mr. Mondame lecture everybody and have a beautiful came from Uganda and have a beautiful comfortable materialistic existence in the United States if it's not for capitalism. So all of these people it's all a big show. So they go out and they trash people and they destroy lives and then they pose that they're anti-capitalists and then you start to examine them and they're all privileged. I don't know. So how many Palestinian filmmakers, how many Palestinian activists, how many Palestinian professors, students have two things in common, three things in common. They all criticize the United States and they hate the United States and they want to change the United States but they won't to leave the United States. They want to leave their beautiful Palestine even though they say that they love the West Bank or they were living in Lebanon. They were living in Jordan or Egypt. They want to leave and they wanted to come over here but once they come over here they come over here because it's safe. It's free market capitalism prosperity. It's the rule of law safety. It's the first amendment freedom of speech. Then they come over and the left welcomes them as a new ally and they army destroy America as we know it and then they attack their host and the third thing they have in common they're usually quite spoiled affluent. That's Mondami. That's Ilihan Omar. That's Hassan Piker. All of them. They're very Rokana. They're all wealthy. First and second generation immigrants. AOC says she was poor. She's living in water, upper middle class Connecticut's a New York suburb when she came when she grew up for the most part. I think people are getting really tired of them. I always say that phrase and people say Victor they're not tired. I think they are. I think people are getting really, really tired of them. I don't know if it's going to affect the midterms or not but if the Republicans can we had a wonderful jobs report and of course I had read from the Wall Street Journal how horrible the jobs report were in June and July. Now we not only had a great 160,000 new jobs in August but they went back and said oh the prior two months have to be readjusted upward. So I don't know. I saw some tweet or ex-posts that said 77 leading economists all said this jobs report was going to be a disaster and every single one of them was wrong. Then what they do is see they say that and then they're allowed to use these adjectives or verbs. Surprising, shocking, unexpected. It's only unexpected and surprising because you were wrong and you were wrong because you were biased. Those were empirical. A lot of us said that at some point very soon if If you put $910, $10 trillion of investment, and you have companies that are the number eight or nine of the top 10 in software, in digital media, in AI, in bio and tech, in satellite launches, in space rocketry, whatever. And you have all of that momentum under a deregulated and a decreasing tax structure coupled with the greatest production of oil gas in the world, then it's going to happen. And it's starting to happen. The Iran war is a sidetrack. But at some point, this economy is going to take off. I saw, I saw Candidate Jack, and I'm trying to remember her name. She was on, somebody sent me a video over and she says, "We've got to get back to the Biden era of affordability." I'm thinking, you had a 21% aggregate inflation that averaged 5% a year, 5.1% or something, a year. And in addition to that, on staples of insurance and rent and cars and food and power, it was about 30%. And you're telling us that you want to get back to that period. That's just an ignoreamus, if I were a good old days. Let me throw two other, I do want to get to Gloria Steinem, but maybe we'll hold that off for the last segment, but you were talking before about the weird, confused intersectionality. So two gay guys were murdered, shot to death and two son outside of a gay bar. One of them has been pictured, he's wearing, he's a big pro-Palestinian activist. But the shooter was a Muslim that came to the U.S. from Gambia. Both of the victims were leftist activists. Now, the left, though, they can't acknowledge this. So the human rights campaign, that's the big gay advocacy group, the response to the death of two gay guys, to murder of two gay guys by saying, once again, we are reminded that gun violence, Rob's people of their lives, destroys families and devastates communities, cannot it, cannot admit that they were killed because they were gay and killed by a Muslim because they were gay. I guess I should say, well, once again, after what we saw in New York where we reminded of the dangers of knives acting on their own, you know, it's never the tool. Remember Shane's observation and he, Brandon DeWile says, well, you wear one or two guns. He said, one's good enough, but it's not the gun, it's the person who uses it. He says that to his gene Arthur when she came down, I wish you wouldn't do this. He says, the gun is only as good or bad as a person who uses it and that's true. And I don't know, this intersectionality, what the left doesn't realize is they're creating with this Islamist infatuation, a whole bunch of improvised explosive devices in their movement. So you have the black community, which is voting, black women vote about 90%, but there is a strong tradition that almost every black leader, whether it's Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, you name it is Reverend, Reverend, Reverend, the black church is worthy. And the black church is Christian and it doesn't, it's not going, I mean, they can tolerate black Muslims because it's kind of a wacky, irrelevant, deviant Islam. But they're going to have problems with mainstream Islam in their big tent. They really are because the Islamist movement does not truck with other religions, especially people like El Sayyid, who basically has said he believes in Sharia law, which means that you can't have other religions, period, at least you can't, you can have them if they're in a permanent state of subordination and inferior. And then when you have the gay people and the transgender people, they have no idea that they only are united because they hate middle class, white Christian, heterosexual, whatever it is America, but otherwise the Islamists hate homosexuals and they hate trans people. And they have a particular view of women. Now, if you're an Islamic Islamist, that is your, that Islam is the most primary thing in your life and you're a female and you come to a Western country, they will tolerate you being emancipated because you're doing damage for them on their behalf to the existing host. But once they go back in their own country, that's not allowed. That is not allowed. I don't know. I mean, you have female, you have females in Hezbollah and Hamas or the Houthis, but they're usually abroad. Their spokespeople abroad, when they're back there they're subordinated. So what I'm getting at is the Democratic Party has taken for some reason a reactionary, intolerant group of people that are hyper-Islamicist and Hassan Piker and El Sayed and others and put them in this party and yet the other groups that make up this coalition are not compatible with their, with Islamist philosophy. So you're going to see a lot of, yeah, but it's essentially, I hear everything you say and I will agree with you of course, Victor, but they seem to have folded because, let me just raise an example of a candidate here because I believe like this is the Democrat Party. This is not, these are not outliers anymore. William Lawrence, so he's the Democrat nominee for a very competitive Michigan seat and this is from CNN politics. He deleted all his ex posts because they're somewhat controversial. Let's see. What are you right here? He argued for a fundamental overhaul of the Constitution of the deleted post. Mr. Lawrence writing F, the nuclear family home, calling it an isolating individualistic, violent way of organizing society, that's the nuclear family. He envisioned a free, a world of free and open migration, abolish the Senate and he wrote a song last year about moderate Joe Manchin, the former senator from West Virginia. Our generation says F you for everything and his son, lyrics were hurry up and die so we can get started. But this is the Democrats nominated candidate for, for, yeah, he's a, he's a, yeah, he's a member. He's a official member. They all say, well, they're not so, he's a official member, like alien Omar is and like Montgomery of the Democratic Socialist of America, but they always say he's the local chapter, but he is a member, he's a vowed socialist, but I don't think, as I said in an article last week, I don't think that these guys had unique hard radical ideas and then they burrowed in like us, you know, SARS virus and took over the patient, sleeper cells, yeah, I don't believe that. I believe the Democratic Party from top to bottom radicalized itself, especially in opposition, blindly to Donald Trump and almost everything that Democratic Socialists are trying to do is simply to take the party and invigorate it with young radicals, but the issues were there for them to exploit. I.e. open border, pack the court, destroy the electoral college, bring in new states, get rid of the filibuster, change the foundational date of the United States, endorse and Tifa, endorse BLM, DEI, defund the police, mass amnesties, forgive student, that was Democratic orthodoxy. All these Socialists said is, well, we're just a bunch of Godflies of Downwardly Mumble, upper, once upper-class white people in urban areas we can't afford, with worthless degrees and a lot of student debt, but I'm going to say that the Democratic Party is pretty much where I belong, because it's not the old party of Bill Clinton or Harry Truman or John Kennedy, it's just like us. In fact, it's teaching us what to do with a trans thing and biological men and women, so I love all that stuff. But Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, these are old, bloody dummies. They have the right idea, you know, they say harass people, get in their face, go to an ice protest, go to the Supreme Court and threaten the justices, go to their homes and I like all that, but they need new blood, and that's the only difference. They just are coming out of the Democratic Party, really, and that's why, as I said earlier on the broadcast, they're not called Socialists of America independent Socialist or Doom. much less Republican. They're democratic socialists because they're Democrats, and that's Democrats are Socialists and Socialists are Democrats, but Democrats, they're one and the same, and they have been for about 15, 10 years, ever since Clinton in the straight. They were under, who said, spread the wealth? I think that was Barack Obama. And so you didn't build that is certainly a socialist. That was Elizabeth Warren in 2011, and then Barack Obama stalled it from her and went to town with it. And that's an old Marxist concept that when a person has wealth from hard work and entrepreneurialism, then you say, well, he had to drive on a public road, the utility poles that brought electricity to his office, he used them. So we have a right to take his money to pay back all the social stuff that he used, as if everybody doesn't use it. That's like saying, well, he's been on welfare for 20 years, and he lives in a house, and he drives a car, and he gets electricity from the state. So we're just going to subtract that from his welfare check. That's crazy. One last socialist thing to throw you, and we're going to take a little break, and then we're going to conclude with some glorious Steinem thoughts. But I'm sure you've seen these videos that have come out in the last week or so about this. It's either the DSA conference or Socialism 2026, maybe that's the same one. But up on the stage, most of the leaders of these things, seems like every other one is wearing a mask. If you want to see the greatest concentration of Americans who still wear masks in public, I think you go to a socialist event. This is not the most important topic in the world, Victor. But it seems it gets an appearance of being loons. But I also, I have a feeling it's really a middle finger to Donald Trump. If I'm wearing a mask, I'm showing you that I'm not you who are not wearing a mask, and I hate Donald Trump. I know I can conclude this some connection there. Any thoughts on that people? Yeah, I agree. But I also agree that people on the left that are socialists that wear a mask also don't want their identity. So if they want to be head of the school board, or then somebody can go on the internet and run a search on them. If they have a mask, it's like a bank robber. They're veritable bank robber. That's what they are anyway. They're a polite form of bank robbery. So when you go into a bank and you say I'm worried about the germs, you put a mask on, you don't know whether it's a criminal or what. But we used to think that people with masks in normal times had them on for one purpose. Other than the lone ranger, right? Yes, yes. Our Batman maybe to hide their identities so they could get away with something. But that's what I think about them. The other thing is of course they're paranoid about everything. They're paranoid about any little rumor that endangers their sense of safety, prosperity, security. They're hypersensitive. So the germ theory got to them a lot and they want people to fall. So when you all wear a mask, then you see somebody without a mask. You say that person is an enemy of the people. He's going to infect us and let's go after him. And so they love that mob mentality. Okay. Well, let's take a little break. And then when we come back, we will wrap up the show with your thoughts on the late Gloria Stein. We'll do that after these final important messages. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. I have a new book out on September 8th of this year. And I think you're going to enjoy it. It's called Counter Revolution. The fall and rise of Donald Trump and the mega movement. It starts right after January 6th and it details the lack of popularity of Donald Trump, the invective that he endured, the five civil and criminal trials, the effort to get him off the ballot, the raid on Marlago, the two impeachments earlier, one in which he was tried as a private citizen. And yet he came back. How did he come back? And why did he come back? I explained in the book how he defeated his primary opponents, how he was outspent. He had a hostile media and he defeated the Democratic machine and Camela Harris. It starts on January 6th. It ends pretty much now in May of 2026. What's the title about? Donald Trump is not a revolutionary. He's not a revisionist. He's a counter-revolutionary. This time around, he is not addressing just the symptoms of the progressive project of the last 50 years. He's talking about the causes. Not just an open border, but how to stop illegal immigration entirely. Not just crime, but sending the National Garden to make sure cities are safe. Not just an Iranian nuclear threat, but ending that threat that seven other presidents had identified that did not act on. Not just addressing the transgender issue or the Green New Deal, all of those issues that were so dear to the Democratic Party, but ending them, defunding NPR and PBS. So it is a counter-revolution to unwind and to roll back the entire progressive project of the last 50 years. I think you're going to like it. It's pretty interesting. It chronicles the greatest political comeback in our recent political history. Thank you very much. I'm Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own words, "Recording on Sunday, September 6th, but this is the big day of the public release, September 8th, of the counter-revolution, the fallen rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Victor, I'm wishing you as well, many of our viewers and listeners today, wishing you great success on this. And I have a feeling a lot of people will be fine at their front door at delivery from Amazon of this book. I think they'll like it. I mean, it's not an authorized biography. I didn't talk to people. I just as an outsider wrote what I thought. Half the book is the fall. It's not a pejorative term. It just said, "When they tried to destroy Donald Trump, they almost did with all of these lawsuits and raids on his home and debaliting him and coming on the heels of the steel forest and the laptop forest." And I looked at the data, his popularity. He was written off, and then I quote people and say, "He'll never be back again." Mitch McConnell goes, "It couldn't happen to a nicer SOB about Trump." And so I chart all the ways that he got back into power. And a lot of it was every time they went after him in an extra legal or unfair fashion, he gained one or two points in the poll. Yeah. Still think that was around. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. So I think they'll enjoy it because I was shot at what they did. And just today, there's a couple of articles about the New York Times who are trying to revive the steel dossier farce because they're embarrassed that people got it. Pulse her prize for advancing that lie. And now they're saying the recent release documents that just show how grigious it are. They've said that they've never proved that Donald Trump was not a Russian agent. I could say this. They never they never disproved that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Can you tell me that you can prove that he was born in Kenya? Well, 99% of the the evidence might suggest he was. But if I can say, well, there's some doubt, there's some doubt because he had a literary agent and he and he knew her very well and he wrote a book. And I bought the book and on the cover it said that he was born in Kenya. He knew it. He he approved it. His agent approved it. He wanted to be a foreign born author. So that's proof. He was born in Kenya. That's how they think. And they don't look at the evidence empirically or the weight of evidence. And Victor, yeah, to remind you know of the rise aspect of it, I'm just I get the sense to the time of year two years ago in Butler, Pennsylvania. And and that I'm just just shocking that he came within a micro-winch of being murdered. It's I don't know anybody alive. Now or in the past in his late 70s could go through three assassins and 80 go through three assassination attempts with another one thinking he was in Florida who was an all four cases of supreme. The secret service exchange or return fire are shot at a potential assassin. It's never happened before. We've never had an effort of partisan governors to try to strip a national candidate off their local ballot. We've never had banks collude and try to take an extra president and destroy him financially and debank him. We've never had social media companies deny him any access to of expression. We've never had five civil and criminal courtroom psychodromas to destroy a person financially, mentally, physically, you name it, politically, socially, culturally. And how he endured that, I have no idea. Whether you like him or not, you have to admit that there's a niche in anything that doesn't kill me, makes me stronger. Yeah, definitely. Defiance. If somebody had shot me and that bullet came five millimeters from my brain, I don't, and I was bleeding from a lobe that was shot, I don't think that I would put up my fist and say fight, fight, fight. Right. Yeah. Well, Victor, let's wrap up with this very simply, I'm a glorious line. I'm the great, and that's mean great. Like his brother say, the great Sammy Wake. She was a posing figure in American culture, founder of Miss magazine. She died. I think she was in her early 90s. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about her. And I just want to add, you know, to me, one of the great women of our lifetime was, uh, Phyllis Schlafly. And I don't, she came on one of the cruises. I, Victor, I don't know if you were on that cruise. I met her. I was and I went out to St. Louis and spoke to her Eagle form once and spent the day with her. She's, uh, I'm very fond of her God rest her soul. I didn't, the more I talked to her, I pled guilty. And I said that to her. She was a Renaissance. Didn't she go to Harvard Law School? Uh, that I don't know, but she's a lawyer. Yeah. She was a lawyer. She had four or five children. Yeah, big family. Right. Yeah. And she, I saw pictures. She was always an attractive woman. But when she was in her 30s and 40s, she was stunning. Yeah. And she was, she was a masterful speaker author. She was a Renaissance woman. Yeah. Gloria Steinem was a kind of a different person though. I know when she started out, it was, remember, it was equal pay for equal work. And, um, in those days, we didn't really say that, you know, um, even though women made more the same, uh, we, they didn't calibrate child bearing in all of that. They just said, if you're working at a job and you don't get the exact same pay for set, and there was an allergic to it, the other thing that made her successful was, I think she had been a former playmate, hadn't she? And, uh, that you have, there's, uh, yeah. And so she posed in the magazine. I think she was a bunny at, yeah, a bunny, not, not a playmate in the magazine. But what I'm getting at is we had associated feminism with Betty Frieden or middle-aged women that were angry. And here was a stunning, beautiful woman. And she was arguing for equal at the, and that was what gave her, and she was in New York, and she was in the media capital. That gave her her currency because she was attractive. She spoke well, and she stuck to the idea of equal, and that was during the equal rights amendment fight under the joint afforded mission. And everybody in the Republican Party, the Rockefeller, they all endorsed it. It was a, it was the state governors who said, we don't need this. But my point is, there was a point until she got in her middle ages that she kind of piggybacked on the lunatic issues and kind of lost residents. But originally, she was quite a dynamic figure. And then once she got all of this fame, every leftist cause went to her and said, would you endorse it? Would you write it? And she did. And she lost a lot of her appeal. Um, thank you for that, Victor. Uh, I guess we should say God rest your soul. Yeah, I feel bad, but rest all souls. But I will say, though, that part of the problem that we're having right now is with affluent middle class, mostly white women who make up about 57% of all graduates from four year colleges. And they dominate certain fields. And they have been told for 50 years that marriage is slavery and child wearing is not important. And the planet is to kind of quoting AOC, a product of that lunacy. And then they're unhappy because they didn't understand that marriage and child wearing and a nuclear family and friends and extended family is more important than your career. Or at least it's not antithetical, but it enhances your career. And so Philip slaves, Philip slavery for all her controversies now, she ended up a happier person. Right. And, and that's what feminine, you can see it with the democratic socialist women. I mean, they're very unhappy people. They're very angry people. And when you see, uh, AOC or you see Jasmine Crockett or you see any of them, they're very, very angry. And part of it is, I guess they feel that their career was everything and they didn't need to marry. They didn't mean to have children or stay. I don't know what it is, but there's something they'd miss there. And well, look at your mother, Victor, who was who, I guess, you know, she should be a poster. Yeah. I mean, for feminism, I mean, she got married. She two degrees, right? picked, picked grades. She was 17 years old. At 17, she was the first student body president of the high school. They never had a woman. And then she helped the Salma enterprise and people saved farms from Japanese, Japanese Americans. That was her crusade that they should not confiscate. And she got her father was a farmer and local farmers to help preserve the farms of, um, detain Japanese Americans for no crime, other than being Japanese Americans. And then she, my father was going to University Pacific. And she had a scholarship to go to Stanford. So she didn't take it. And she went to University of Pacific and graduated as did he. And then he went in the Marine Corps and they transferred him to B29s. And then she went to Stanford University. And in a year, I got another BA. And then she was one of the first women to go to Stanford law school. And then she had two Stanford degrees, a European degree. And when they were came to higher, she got, she got two offers to be a legal secretary. So she came all the way back to the farm and had no money married my dad. He was a high school teacher trying to get a master's degree to be a college which she did. And farming and they, they moved an 800 square foot home on the farm. That's what we grew up in. And everybody made fun of her. There's that crazy Hanson woman. She was quite beautiful too. And so she had a lot of suitors and in college, you know, and everything. But she, she stayed as a mom. And she, she had, she lost her first baby, Georgia Anne died. She had German measles. And they told her to abort. And she didn't believe in abortion. So she had the daughter, my sister. And it was tragic. She was blind and had a heart defect and died after a year and a half. And then she had my brother. And she was going to have, and then she had twins. And she had the record in Fresno County at the time my brother and I weighed 17 pounds. And she could, she could, she, she worked, no, together, together, together. All right. Still pretty big. Yeah. Yeah. And so then she raised us. And she believed that a mom should be home. So she did little legal work for free for farmers. They would come over and say to my father grandfather, raised it. Hey, Reese, isn't that that weirdo daughter of yours? She went, can she do my will? Can she do my irrigation? Can she look over my own? And she was doing all this free stuff. And then at the age of 40, they opened an appellate court and she went up and it was all male. And she we applied to being a one of the court attorneys. And they hired her at 500 a month. And I remember we were all, she had to drive all the way up to Fresno. We had no car. My dad went out and got a DeSoto station wagon with like, you know, those old things are huge or dodged with big fins and push button transmission. They rebuilt the engine and she was plugging along. And the next thing, the presiding justice said to her, this is the most brilliant brief I've ever read. And he hired her to be the chief attorney of the court. She did that for 16 years. And then Jerry Brown of all people pointed her because she was a Democrat, a superior court judge. And then she was one of the first female pellet statewide court judge and she was is going full blast and got a cancerous brain tumor at 64. So, but she was, she never, I mean she had, she wasn't, and then when we had, during the rough times of 83 to 85 when the market collapsed, we were going to farmer's market, and she was out there, she would meet, meet us in Santa Cruz with my dad, and we would pedal food for six hours at Cabrillo College in the parking lot for, I don't, eight years, and she would do that. And then I'd say to her, don't you think maybe, the weirdest thing was that right before she died, well, somewhat I had finished my PhD at 25, and I was farming, and she said to me, why don't, she was on the board of Stanford Law School overseers. And she said, you got your Stanford PhD, why don't you apply to law school, I'll retire, and you and I will go into practice, ag law, and I said I would rather die mom. But, but when I was a professor, I started at 21,000, I went back to her and I said, you gave me some very good advice, and she said it's never too late, you could be my partner. So she was one of the, I think she was the closest person other than my wife and family kids in my life, or for most of my life, she was the closest person. I don't know, I'll just finish by saying all of us that are listening, we're very careful not to brag on our parents because we all have parents and we don't want to say that your parents are better than anybody else is, but we also live in a time when it's chic to blame all of your problem, all of your foiled agendas, all of your discipline, your shipwreck of your dreams on your parents, our grandparents, and I've always said, what little success I have, I would attribute 90% of it to my father and my mother and my grandparents because anytime I got low or I felt I couldn't do something, there was kind of a tough lot. You better get going, you can do it, don't worry about it, don't take captive of your fears, you can do it, I know you can do it, don't ever give up. That was all I heard, all I heard, and when I was broke, and my father didn't have any money, but I remember once he came up to me in graduate school and I was living in East Palo Alto ghetto and $50 a month from my share of the rent for another graduate student and my share of apartment, and he said, you don't have any money, do you? And I said, no. And so he said, I'll be right back and he brought in this big box of frozen steaks and I mean 20 of them and says, I want you to eat protein. And then he opened his wallet and he said, you have any money? And I said, I have $15 and he pulled out for 20s and I looked at his wallet and it was empty. I said, you don't have any money, and you're up here, he said, don't worry about me. And he gave me everything out of his wallet and he always did that. So all of us have those stories about our parents, we're just reluctant to say it because we don't want them to be shalvanistic about them, but I think most of us, especially on the conservative side, can say that our successes were due to the greatest generation or whatever we want to call those people who were the children of 19th century people who were born in the 19th century. That combination of parents that were born in the 19th century with those values and then their children went through the depression and World War II and then they raised us. Half of us were no blank good because we were spoiled and we joined the 60s drug and the other half were able to withstand that because of our parents had gone through that turmoil and because our grandparents inculcated us in an early age with what the 19th century saw, morality. Glad you mentioned this craze and I think it is a craze, Victor, of late. Maybe I just, my algorithms and social media kicked this up, but there seems to be a ton of parents of people our age who are talking about how they've been cut off by their children. It seems to be, you know, in the world of therapy a great preponderance of blaming, blaming your parents for, and I didn't even know blame for what because most of these people seem to be very upper middle class, upper middle class, you know, what are they lamenting about? But it's looking for trouble and they're finding it. So there's the types that there, I was looking a lot of, that's interesting. So I went on AI the other day and I asked the question, how many, could you give me 10 names of Democrat, prominent democratic socialists that are very critical of their parents or the country or the establishment and tell me what their majors and college were and what their present income and it, you know, they couldn't do all of that, but it gave me a 3 or 4 names. And what I was getting at is their parents worked hard and saved from the, I'm talking about the boomer generation mind and then they raised, who raised this new two generations. But my point is they didn't go through any of the things, my generation didn't go through any of the problems that their parents or their grandparents, but these two generations did not want them to be, they tried to help them. And then that gave indulgence and then they, they screwed their lives up proverbially withdraw. And then they used this therapeutic mindset they acquired in college to raise two or three generations that now were plagued with, that have no idea about their great grandparents that went through the Depression of World War II or much less their great, great grandparents that were born in 1888 or something. And they're so far divorced from that and they've been spoiled. And now they start to see in their 30s and 40s and 50s, I'm living alone, I'm in an upper website apartment that's taking all my, my money, but I'm a senior editor at Alfred Kenob. I work for USAID and I only make 85,000, I can't live in Brooklyn. Oh, I'm in Boulder, oh, I'm in Austin and, and, and that little techie makes 400,000. I was at a, a, a fern bar the other day and I met a guy and he's an investor and he makes $2 million a year, but he doesn't, he doesn't know that I'm a senior executive, a senior charity worker for the homeless. And I'm better than he is. Well, you don't have any money and you don't, you, you're dependent on your parents goodwill and now you're trashing your parents for your stupid mistakes. Rich little has nothing on you, Victor. All right, I could, oh, I didn't do the whiny one, you know, I could, I could, they, they're all so, wow, you know that I have an English degree from Amherst and I'm here and I'm here in San Francisco and I'm, I'm, I'm writing, you know, I'm a PR writer for Facebook and, you know, and the techies come out, you know, nowhere and they get all this money and here I am. That's how I, I hear it all the time when I'm in Powell, though I, I, I go out for coffee by myself and I listen to it, picking up material. All right, we've come almost to the end. I want to thank you to Victor, although we're great, the wisdom you shared, but we have many, many comments from our recent podcast episodes and these are a few from you to Victor was talking about his head recently in the size of it and black, uh, poor speaker cabinet, 4145 writes, I have a finish round head. So okay, I, I, I don't know how the fins and the sweets compare the Noggins. Um, we also talked about a little about Luka Libre and wrestling and Victor, Ted writes, Bruno Sam Martino, baby, never seen anything like it. There were a number of wrestling comments, uh, Jay, Z M task 7431 writes, thank you, Victor Davis, Hansen, there are days I tune in and feel so much better after listening. You have a gift that allows you to explain subjects in such an understandable manner, so much common sense, keep up the great work. And finally, I'll have here Carolin O'Connor 85, 67 writes, love VDH and with every podcast, he just gets better and better. I don't believe this anyone today that can match those are very sweet, I just came up with something I said the other day, I couldn't remember Pepper Gomez's partner in this area. I don't think he was a national phenomenon like classy, Freddie Bellassia. Did you have it? Did you know Ray Stevens at all? No. Yeah. Well, I think he was a California. He was, he was, I, you know, the kind of guy that was, you know, doused and olive oil and tan and had blonde hair. That was all that. And then he's George type. And he always would talk all the side as my, I'm the hair, I came down to Fresno to see these pencil necks and these, these wet backs and I'm going to wrestle and then you'd have him and he was so horrible and then you'd have the one wonderful. Hello, I'm Pepper Gomez, and this is my partner, Luis Bateez, and he would come up and you go, you're knowing as well, we're going to take this, you know, this race Stevens, and we're going to make him apologize to the Mexican community. And I'd go, yes, yes. And then I'd go, I'd come home, and the bus would be late, and I'd say to the bus driver, you got a hurry, you got a hurry, Pepper and Luis are wrestling these Japanese Mitsuawekawa, and he'd made fun of Pearl Harbor, and then I'd go there and Pepper would go, or Luis Martinez go, he has no business, they shot it, they blew up our ships and my uncle fucked there, and we're going to pay him back, Mitsu, we're going to pay him back. And then I saw, I felt really angry, and then one day they had an interview on local TV with Mitsuawekawa when he was in his regular street codes, and he was the kindest person with no accent at all. He said, yes, I've come to Fresno, and I will be wrestling. And then I thought, oh my gosh, it's all a, it's all a show. He's Mitsuawekawa, and I felt really bad for rooting against him. I, my, I love wrestling, I thought it was entertaining, but my younger brothers to my younger brothers were huge wrestling fans. And so I took them to, on a Sunday afternoon, to Madison Square Garden for, there was, you know, like 18,000 people, there was, and Andre the giant, I don't remember, the only thing I remember is Andre the giant getting hit in the head with a folding chair, and blood coming out, and people behind me crying. I mean, they really thought, well, maybe he was really hurt, but it was quite, quite an interesting thing. I felt bad for those guys too, that they're really big guys, that they were like monsters, and then people would try to knock them down, and they were like giants out of mythology. If you could trip them, they couldn't get up, you know, you remember, do you ever remember Haystack Calhoun? How Haystack Calhoun, yes. Yeah, he was at what, he had wore bib overalls, right? And he was supposed to be an Appalachian or Ozark, and I, I like Haystack a lot. I think these guys got tormented through their lives. I remember the two, the Samoans, who were these two giants. I remember them. Yeah. So my neighbor, Pete, Pete is dead, but this is back in the Bronx, and he was, he saw them coming out of out of Madison Square Garden once, and Pete was a troublemaker, and, but he ran up behind them and punched them in the back of the head, and one of them kept running, and can you imagine how many times these guys are just targets for weirdos. I have a theory, I had a theory about big time, we call it big time wrestling, but they also call it luce libre, but free for all wrestling. But I had a theory that during the civil rights, because I was watching this as a kid in the 60s and 70s, that big time wrestling was a very valuable catalyst for racial relation, because I've noticed something that today's leftists say, well, these, everybody was racist, and that's 60s, they said they weren't. Most of the hero, I mean, they had the chic and Japanese guys who were trying to emulate World War II fanatics, but it was amazing how many black wrestlers and Hispanic wrestlers and non-white wrestlers were kind of the hero, you know, I mean, it kind of reminded me of the crew on Dr. Strangelove or a bomber show, you know, 12 o'clock, at least from a different ethnic group, and it really, at least in Fresno in those years, they always had it memorial auditorium, Pepper Gomez, Luis Martinez, and they had a black guy, I forgot his name, he was really good, and they were all trying to be as hyper American as possible, you know, and everybody loved them, and then they took it, deliberately took these guys with a dyed blonde hair and made them the enemy, you know what I mean? And they always talked all the corner of their mouth like they heard, and they always used the word "I'm here" and Fresno with his pencil necks, pencil necks, yeah, okay, that's enough. All right, Victor, you've been terrific, late again, happy birthday, congrats on the book, and for those who write me about civil thoughts, I want to say thank you, by the way, thanks, the number of folks wrote me, I mentioned my son got married and there was a lot of prayers and good things, that's good in here, did that. But go to civilthoughts.com, if you're not getting it, it comes out every Friday, email newsletter, 14 recommended readings, not charging, you're totally free, I know you're going to love it, civilthoughts.com, Victor's website, Blade of Persia, VictorHanson.com, do subscribe. You've been terrific, Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared, thanks folks for watching, thanks for listening, we'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Bye bye. Thank you everybody for watching and listening, see you next time.