How Progressive Policies Destroyed Oakland | Victor Davis Hanson

This is what you want. This is what people vote for. If you're a leftist Democrat and you're a socialist, you say Oakland's our place. They would say, come to Oakland. It's a wonderful place. It's a people city. Homeless people are homeless people. They have a right to be on the sidewalk and they defecate and inject and urinate, but that's not a big deal. We believe in green energy and we believe in open borders and we don't allow ice here and look at the result. And the result is that no one would really want to live there. Bernie doesn't, but there's three homes. Obama and his four, they wouldn't want to live there, but they support the idea of Oakland for other people. Well, hello ladies and hello gentlemen and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You were here to get some wisdom and analysis from the great Victor Davis Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College and a senior contributor to the Daily Signal, which is the home of not only this show, but Victor Davis Hanson in a few words, which comes out four times a week. We are recording on Monday, November 2nd. All Souls Day. And this particular episode will be up on Friday, November 5th. So obviously we are recording before the elections. We're not going to be talking about the elections since we don't know the results, but we have plenty of interesting topics. Europe's kids, why are they revolting? Or why are they in revolt, I should say. Maybe some of them are revolting also. Oakland, a hellhole. Some woke sports in the U.S. A dark night. A Dartmouth scholar being in the clutches of A.I., we'll say, and some other A.I. things. And I hope we can get around to George Washington's letter to the Hebrew congregation and its continued relevance. So we will get to all that when we come back from these initial important messages. Female athletes are being forced to compete against biological males, sometimes without their consent or even their knowledge. In Washington, high school sophomore Callie Keeler was sexually assaulted on the wrestling mat during a tournament. Only afterward did she learn her opponent was a boy who identified as a girl. With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, ADF, Callie is bravely appealing the state at the Supreme Court over a policy that not only allows males to compete in girls' high school sports, but doesn't require schools to disclose that information, but to female athletes or their parents. Don't let schools put gender ideology over the safety of girls in sports. Your support today for ADF can help fight for Callie and other athletes like her. Text Hanson, H-A-N-S-O-N, to 83848. Or go to joinadf.com slash Hanson to have your gift doubled. We're back with Virginia. I'm Victor Davis Hanson, in his own words, here on Friday, recording Monday. Always a little odd for me, Victor. I'm in Sammy's territory, but the great Sammy Wink will have, we will have switched places so she can get, will have gotten your analysis of the elections out on Thursday. So, Victor, let's start talking about Oakland, which I know you're very familiar with, and you probably have to dodge, dodged the bullets there or whatever. Yes, I have to drive through there to Santa Rosa once or twice a year, and if I get on an off-ramp, I am very leery. Yeah, get the, lock the doors. So, here's an article, really interesting article from City Journal, Sanjana Friedman. It's called Oakland's Experiment in Anarchy. I'll read it here quickly. What would happen to a city if its government effectively stopped enforcing laws protecting public space and private property? Oakland has been testing this proposition. You know, its violent high crime rate is four and a half times the national average. But in addition to that, in recent years, the city has also struggled to enforce laws against illegal dumping, burglary, car break-ins, and squatting. As a result, much of the city is buried under trash, according to a report. A recent government report which found that the city collects some 20 million pounds of illegally dumped debris. Also, Oakland has the highest level of property crime of any large city in the U.S. It solves these crimes at a rate of just 0.1%, not 1%, 0.1%, meaning that one in every 1,000 property crimes is reported to the Oakland police, and it results in arrests. These also become home to a shadow industry of squatter removal services, including one whose sword-wielding operators promise to help landlords reclaim homes from unauthorized occupants. Why? Because the city's sheriff's office takes months to act. This is what becomes and has become of a major American city, Victor. Your thoughts as a Californian or just as an American on this? Well, this is a lab test. We have candidates that are running as I speak, not as you will hear this, but I am talking on Monday afternoon, and they have told us that if you defund the police, if you don't, you had cash bail, if you don't arrest people for breaking the existing laws, if you feel that empty house, houses that are either up for sale or their second homes are not really the owners, but they are the communal property in which the dispossessed have a right to go squat, even though that's against the law. And if you believe AOC or El-Sayed or Mondami, who said he was going to go after richer, whiter neighborhoods, AOC said the chief existential threat in America is white supremacy. Ilyan Omar trumped her on that and said white racism. But the point I'm making is that this is what you want. There's very few white people. There's no white rage, no white supremacy, no white privilege, because there's no white people. Essentially, I mean, there are some up in the Oakland Hills in Piedmont, but that's a separate, almost a separate enclave. But Oakland itself is a DEI city. It has all minority police, basically. It has minority civic government. It has minority executive branch, minority mayor. And more importantly, they're all left-wing and socialist. So they did defund the police. They defunded the police. They don't arrest people. They feel squatters have a right. And this is what you get. And people are going to be voting on that. So really, Oakland's on the ballot. And this is their utopia. And they would say, not like you and I or our listeners, they would say, well, you're just an old white guy and come to Oakland. It's a people city. And yeah, we get our hair must up now and then. But it's a people city. And we get our hair must up now and then. But homeless people are homeless people. They have a right to be in the sidewalk. And they defecate and inject and urinate. But that's not a big deal. And property is not really property. It doesn't belong to people. It's communal. And we here in Oakland are a communal city. And we believe in green energy. And we believe in open borders. And we would really want to live there. And those that do live there would like to move. How close it is to insane wealth. And yet it is such a pre-Detroit type of city. Oh, I mean, if you go across the freeway into Piedmont, I had a very strange experience. I was asked to speak at a country club near Piedmont. And there were wonderful people there. But I had to get gasoline because I was trying to So I made a left turn coming into Oakland, Piedmont, into a service station that was completely closed down. So then I went further into the neighborhood. And I found one. But the person from the Middle East that was in the window had so many bars and tinted glass, I couldn't even know who it was on speaker. And two of the gas pumps were not working. So I was in line. And I was in the middle of the neighborhood. And I was in the middle of the And it was pretty scary. There were people coming up to me and asked for $5. Then I got out and went across the on-ramp, and I went up to the Piedmont area, the hills to the east of Oakland, and when I was looking for a parking place in beautiful homes, it's not very big, but I parked, and within, I would say, 10 seconds, a private security guard said, you do not have a sticker. What are you doing here? And I said, I'm trying to find this person I'm supposed to give a lecture at his house. Oh, I know who he is. Follow me. Get in your car. So then I followed him, and then he said, I had to show him my ID, and it was, like, wonderful in the sense, so they were two different antithetical communities right next to each other. There was no middle class that I could see of. Yeah. I had one experience in Oakland, Victor. I picked somebody up at the airport, and then he was hungry, so we went to a Denny's, and I believe the Denny's is now closed, but I thought I was in some kind of security operation. I've never been in a restaurant that seems so concerned about thievery or likely thievery, and then around it, there were chickens. Everywhere, running around the outside of the Denny's, and I thought, is this a major American city? I mean, there's nothing wrong with chickens. Don't get me wrong. And I'm sorry, but we're attacking Oakland because I know the former governor, Jerry Brown, who was also the former mayor there, occasionally listens to this show, and he might get— I think he was more or less, as mayors go, successful. I think it was a different place when he was there. But he doesn't represent the Democratic Party anymore. It's moved way beyond. Jerry Brown liberalism. It's into insanity right now. That's where I'm thinking about what these people are running on. Basically, you've got to remember the Democratic Party is an anti-Semitic party. It really is. Hassan Parker was right about that. No Jewish candidate could be nominated for their party nomination. If they did, they would have a civil war in that party. It's just not going to happen. And no one could say that they were for fossil fuels. Or fracking or a closed border or deportation or supported ICE, period. They will cut the military. They would do all—that's who they are. And Oakland is their model city. It really is. They don't want to live there themselves. And Spartacus, who grew up in a very wealthy neighborhood, wouldn't want to live there. And Kamala Harris, I guess she moved from Brentwood to Malibu, $20 million home, something like that. She doesn't want to live there. And Hillary and her mansion and Obama and his—they wouldn't want to live there, but they support the idea of Oakland for other people. Well, Victor, I have—let's go across halfway around the world from Oakland. Maybe it's not totally halfway. A very interesting article in UnHerd, U-N-H-E-R-D. I don't know if folks are familiar with this site. Douglas Murray writes for it off-frequently. It's a piece by Thomas Fazi. It's called, Why Europe's Kids Are Revolting. And let me just read the beginning here. It says, The triggers may differ—schools in France and Belgium, housing in Spain and Portugal, the cost of living in Italy, corruption and a mixture of the above in Serbia—but the root is the same. These are the protests of a generation that believes it has been robbed of its future. It's a conclusion that's hard to argue with. The social contract its parents knew, work hard and you will, at the very least, secure a home, be able to support a family, and be better off than those that came before you, has collapsed. For many young Europeans, without inherited wealth, adulthood means drifting from one precarious job to the next, earning barely enough to cover the cost of rent and groceries, let alone start a family, that is, if they find work at all. Meanwhile, they have watched the institutions that were supposed to give them a start in life and cushion its blows—schools, universities, health and youth services—wither under austerity and privatization. I don't know that privatization is the cause of all this, Victor, but there's much more to this article. It's very interesting. It seems more economic playing here and less spiritual, but are you in general agreement with this is the rationale for why these are percolating riots in Europe, or are there broader reasons? I think there's broader reasons. But Europe and the United States left are very similar, and they don't believe in progress. They say they're progressives, but they're actually regressives. By that, I mean, if you go to a progressive in the United States, leftist, or in Europe, and you say, well, there's a thousand acres here, and we have unemployed youth that are very frustrated that they can't afford five hundred thousand euros for a dumpy little flat, and we could, you know, we could build, I don't know, five thousand small cottages or high-density condos on this thousand acres. Would you approve it? No. No, no, no, no, no. And the people who would say no in the United States and Europe are people who are very wealthy, and they have a five-acre home or something like that. I mentioned to this audience once before that I get a lot of hate on this topic. About, I don't know, eight years ago, I was scheduled to speak at the Hyatt to a group, and I had written a column that week. I had gone to lunch with Tom Soule, and he had written, I think, about it. And we were speculating that in Redwood City, California, we would drive by through there, and there were four or five families per house. You know, you could see it. And these homes were very modest, but they were a million or two million dollars. And at that time, before they cleared it out, we went down El Camino, and there were huge Winnebagos parked, you know, bumper to bumper where people were living in, et cetera, et cetera. So I said, if you go down 280, you have a functional freeway. It's not like the rest of them. It still works. And you have a high-speed rail coming up 85 from San Jose, and you have BART, coming south. Why don't you have a big station, have the two meet, and then you have 30 miles of pretty open spaces and 50 miles to Half Moon Bay and Pacifica and the coast? It's empty. It's not farmland. It's, you know, it's hilly cattle grazing, and then at the higher elevations, it's evergreen. And we could put affordable housing, and then our poor and middle class who do the service jobs of the Bay Area could do what our parents did with Daly City. I remember when I was a kid, Daly City was affordable. Now it's kind of a luxury. Daly City was what the song, they put them all in little boxes, and they all looked the same. Remember that song by, is it Johnny something, Rogers or something? It was making fun of them, that they were kind of like just cookie cutter. I think they talked about a, is it Levitt's housing? Levittown on Long Island. Yeah, they were talking about that too. But the point I'm making is I got within 24 hours, I got about 500 emails. Then I went on that very day up to the NPR station and talked about that article, and they called in very angry. And NPR had me on because they kind of liked the idea of affordable housing. And the people calling were very wealthy. Then I went and spoke at the Hyatt that night, not on these topics. One of them crashed the, a very wealthy person came up with his son and says, people like you who don't deserve to speak. And he started shouting and they had to remove him. And his anger was that he had a beautiful woodside home, and he had five acres, and he loved his kit foxes that came in at night on his lawn. And the natural, he said there was a peregrine falcon that would patrol around, and he had a beautiful great horned owl in his yard. And he went on and on. And it's a beautiful, he paid, he had worked hard. And I think, I don't know, I said, how many square feet? Oh, it's only 7,000. And he was mad that all of these, and he was very liberal, of course. And he was very mad that all of these poor people might be in that corridor near him. I said that we're talking about a 10 miles or eight miles away, Crystal Springs Reservoir around there. Oh, no, no, it's people like you. And so who makes it unaffordable is not the right. They are for the developers. They are for housing. They are for affordability. It's not in my backyard leftist and regulators. And my daughter, I had a little tiny house. She lived at 1,100 square feet, and she wanted to put an addition. So we paid, went through the process. It was 10,000 square feet. And she said, I don't know, I'm going to pay you $10,000, Jack, just to get the plans, not the architect stuff, just to get it through with blueprints through the county and they were pretty actually nice about it but then we got a list of requirements you had to have every single building material had to have a net zero effect on the you know the sheetrock the wiring everything and it had to have a certain number of windows facing this way and that of course solar and all that so they are the ones that are regulating and making it unaffordable and when you combine the other element in this equation is that 50 of the people in this country go to school and even though the the paranoid universities i mean higher education schools college and even though they're paranoid that the demographics are shrinking and nobody likes what they offer at least for the amount they charge and they're lowering tuition at places like there's an article you know you mentioned that williams grinnell all these places some of them are cheaper now than public universities they're so paranoid but my point is this if you have half your population and they're getting a ba and a lot of the bas are not in computer science or engineering or biology or even classics or history but they're in the social some you know sociology dash studies this dash studies that psychology public policy and they're not a good there's not a market for that so you get half the country goes to college they go into debt most of them and then a large percentage can't get a job and even though they have a prestigious they think degree and then they waste their 20s and 30s working at low-end jobs they're downwardly mobile and they are the they're the fodder that the dsa animal eats on and it feeds them downwardly mobile people who can't buy a home and they're in urban enclaves where it's impossible san francisco i just talked to a person not long ago i think she was quite affluent and she said that the house during covid when san francisco was a mess remember and then afterwards i went in nine two thousand uh twenty three and most of the downtown was boarded up i went by the old twitter and it was boarded and now she said that a house that was three million was five million and then they put an offer it was seven million san francisco was just booming because of the ai revolution and the new mayor who was sane and but you can't build anything you know they're not going to build a new thing so that generation can't not they want to live in affordable areas in urban enclaves they want to live in portland seattle uh boulder washington dc san francisco bay area and that you can't do it they don't want to live in lawrence kansas they do not want to live in um kingsburg california beautiful city but they want to live where the action is and they can't afford it and yet they rub shoulders with very wealthy people and they can't afford it and they can't afford it and they're getting very frustrated and that's the stuff that is setting europe a fire and that's the stuff that's setting this united states a fire and that's why this election that you will now know the results when you listen to this uh the socialists have um they have a lot of resonance because resonance because they tell young people that these awful capitalists and billionaires are the insects that prey on them and that a socialist share the wealth or as i guess barack obama called it spread the wealth is the answer yeah the soviet answer soviet answer the vicious cycles victor the democrat party is controlled mostly by the teachers union they demand enormous relatively enormous salaries and no account local governments fund them then the democrats and the local government this happened to me when i first moved to milford here and i was running for office and and i won that election anyway too many people moving into this town with three and four kids so instead of if you had an acre and putting you know six eight houses on an acre they zone it so it's one acre zoning so if you so it makes it unaffordable but uh and and of course then there's well anyway it's it's it's all very self-fulfilling prophecy of unaffordability but you're right it's democrats are are the uh the instigators of this or i should say leftists are the instigators and the people who they're the instigators but they're never blamed by the people who suffer from them because of their similar ideologies so you can get any of these downwardly mobile urban metrosexual couples no children wasted 20s prolonged adolescence in their 30s can't buy a condo a loft apartment or even much less a house with a lawn and then you try to talk to them about it and they're like well i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't talk to them and say this is what the democratic party and the left did to you they'll say no this is what elon musk did to me this is what zuckerberg this is what bezos did to me not not the left no it was the left it was the left their policies and also they opened the borders we never talk about that jd vance does once in a while but you let in 12 million people and you just let them come in that's 12 million people and you let them come in and you let them come in and you let them come in and you let them come in and you let them come in and you let them come in and you let them 12 million rooms or apartments where are you going to put 12 million people per four year every four years and when you add in 53 million people that are currently living in the united states that were not born here half of whom are legal and are quite successful but the other half maybe 25 million is illegal and poor and destitute and they are in competition and the state favors them and extends housing to them and they are in competition and the state favors them and extends housing subsidies to them far more than they do u.s citizens that can't buy a home so trump was right about that that deporting people would actually free up housing space and it will but you've only deported three million of you you'd have to deport 12 million to get back where we were when biden entered office and because they've demonized iso man oh he's deporting every no all he's he's he's lucky to get 25 percent deportation deportation of the 12 million that came in we're only 25 he's not going to get the 100 and then you'd have to get 100 to undo what biden did before you address the problem of the last five administrations where you have 25 million illegal and you can address it any way you want but you have to address it some ways i saw an interesting prescription or a solution for that i'll i'll to our listeners and our viewers if you've studied enough history you start to see a pattern nations don't lose their way overnight they drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all today america is spending at levels once reserved for wartime we've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations and policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention more printing more distortion but here's the historical truth every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price the wise never waited for collapse they prepared for the correction and that's why so many thoughtful americans especially those nearing retirement or in retirement are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history physical gold not a speculation but as insulation our reputation matters and victor davis hansen in his own words why we're partnering with allegiance gold a company distinguished by integrity reliability and an a-plus rating with the better business bureau for years they've guided americans through transparent education and long-standing relationships built on trust and right now they're extending a special liberty offer to our listeners and viewers to help you get started with real gold whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank if you believe as we do that the best time to reinforce your position is when you're in a retirement account is before the storm becomes obvious call 844-790-9191 844-790-9191 or visit protectwithvictor.com that's 844-790-9191 844-790-9191 or visit protectwithvictor.com history rewards those who take the long view and we thank the very good people from allegiance gold for once again sponsoring victor davis hansen in his own words you know victor i was going to offer a solution to to the to getting rid of 12 million people i'll save that for another another show you were something i heard well someone just said essentially of those illegals who we know and we know where they are we freeze their bank accounts that simple freeze them and cut off their debt cards debit cards you want to kill people home get out if get out in 30 days we'll write your check and we'll send it to you wherever you go - Sweden's doing that, Sweden's doing that. They're paying people to go home. Boom. There was an economist, I was listening not too long ago, and I read a couple of articles about it. What was astonishing, he said, about the 3.4 revised GDP in the third quarter was there was no net immigration whatsoever, but there was a half a million deportations. So what he said was this. The Biden GDP, which in his third quarter before his midterm was about 3.2, was almost entirely based on the idea of either government subsidies for an additional three to four million people, or these three million people, some of them were working. But he said what was strange about this GDP growth, which was even larger than Biden's, it came at a time when there were fewer people because of deportations. In other words, as he said, this is what you want in an economy. You want higher productivity per each person rather than getting higher productivity by just simply adding bodies. That per capita productivity is what counts, not total productivity. And that's what we had been doing for a number of years. GDP was artificially inflated because we were letting in millions of people a year, whether they were paid by government handouts or off the books in the economy, no one knows. But it's pretty astonishing to be having deported or self-deported almost three million people and have GDP still go up. And I think that's good news. I don't know if it's going to play, it played, I should say, past tense in the midterms. What's funny about the midterms, just as an aside, was that in every aspect, the economy by the left's own reckoning was better than the Biden 2022 midterm, in which he stopped the red wave. He picked up one Senate seat, and he only lost nine House seats. He lost the House, but that was a very small loss, given the historical average of somewhere, between 28 and 30 lost seats every midterm. And I mean by that, his GDP was 3.2, Trump's is 3.4. His inflation rate in 2022 was 9.1%. And that was evident by November. Trump's will be about 3 to 3.2, a third. And his average was 5.1%. And the unemployment rate was better under Trump. So, and the price of gas, as we mentioned last time, Jack, it was $5 in July, June and July nationwide in 2022. It got down to $4, but it's about 4.30 right now. So, what is the difference? Why the hysteria about affordability? It's the media. All of those were temporary. Janice, you know, I've been in the media for a long time, and I've been in the media for a long time. I've been in the media for a long time. I've been on TV, the Treasury Secretary. There's just a little bump. It's just temporary. Don't worry about it. And Trump gets on TV and said, oh, it's fantastic. We don't know what the foreign investments coming, the tax cuts are coming, the deregulation. It's going to all descend in a big boom. I think he's right, but it's not the same selling is what I'm saying. The media has a lot to do with it. Yeah. As we go to press, so to say today, I just saw headlines about manufacturing numbers are terrific, but. Absolutely, they are. And with AI, and that's why the left is so. Maybe the left has genuine concerns that we'll all end up like Terminator and slaves to AI. But I have a feeling that it's more that the AI revolution is now in full swing. In the next two years, it's going to so increase productivity that it's going to make Trump's numbers look fantastic. And they don't want that. They don't want that. Well, AI may be having a positive effect on the economy. It's consternating in higher education, Victor. So here's a story about. Tell me about it. Yeah. Santiago Schnell resigns as Dartmouth provost over AI use. So he was an emerging leader. I'm reading from an article in the National Catholic Register because he was Catholic. And he had some notoriety a few months ago that he has come out forcefully for reform of higher ed. But he's an emerging leader in the push to reform U.S. higher ed. He's resigned as the provost of Dartmouth following an investigation into his use of artificial intelligence in published articles. And in an email to students reported in the Dartmouth, University President Sean LeBilock said Schnell had resigned and he was leaving the university after an independent faculty-led committee determined Schnell may have violated the law. And he said, Schnell has violated university policies when he used AI in select academic works and popular articles without proper disclosure. So he wrote pieces published in the Washington Post on the trouble of using AI in things academic. And the article was totally written by AI. I guess they have AI detectors, don't they? They do. Yeah. Yeah. Monitor. You can't be worried about AI in higher education when the provost is not telling people. I'd never used that. The only time I use AI, if I'm writing a column, I'll say, what are the published highs and lows with a genocide, quote unquote, in Gaza? Or how many lethal bombs have we dropped on? That kind of stuff. And even then, they're wildly different. You know what I mean? If you go to Grok, it's wildly different than T or whatever. But I can't imagine you could just say, I could say, I am doing a show with Jack Fowler on podcasting for one hour and 20 minutes. Here's the topics that we are going to cover. Would you please write a paragraph about each one? And people do that. I don't know. I've never used it, but maybe I should. I've never used it. I don't know how to use it. I don't know. Why would you want to use it? That's the whole point of writing is to use your own vocabulary, thought, craftsmanship, style. Why would you turn it over? Why would you turn your writing over to AI, which is a reflection of a particular demographic in Silicon Valley that is left-wing, nerdy, techie, and hate you? And that will be manifested in their writing. Yeah. I can't find the clip right now, but there was an article. I mean, I do find it. This is from Gatestone Institute that it's also bigoted. Against conservatives? Well, against Jews. Oh, I wouldn't believe that. Yeah. There's a study, a March 2025 study by the Anti-Defamation League of the four leading large AI models found measurable anti-Jewish. Anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli bias in every model tested. One detail stands out for its clinical precision, asked whether the American government orchestrated the attacks of September 11th. All four systems dismissed the alleged conspiracy theory without hesitation, but asked whether the Jews did. All but one wavered. Somewhere in their oceans of training data, the machines have learned that this particular. That this particular lie deserved a hearing. Yeah. Because calmly, a professor say it. And Harvard Yale professors say it. Harvard gives a medal to somebody who pushes Jews at graduation. So that's what they scan all these little articles. The Jew. What we have seen is unprecedented in American history. The Jewish community had gone from 70% liberal. The Jewish community had gone from 70% liberal, supportive of Israel, highly respected, and well-liked for their achievements, in a 15-year-old period, suspect of conspiracies to dominate all of the 19th century tropes. A small cabal is really running things. I guess, technically, Tucker calls it an ethnostate now. Israel, genocide, apartheid, colonial settler, knockout game against Jews. Ram a synagogue in Michigan, and then El-Sayed said, hurt people, hurt people. What about them? Hurt people, hurt people. As the next senator, et cetera. So it's pretty fantastic. It's pretty quick. I mean, fantastic in the sense of. Unbelievable, not good fantastic. And I don't know all of the origins of why now. It had something to do with October 7th, the weakness that they perceived in Israel, that they had tried this for years, sending in hit teams and assassins. But this time it worked, and therefore they thought it would continue. One thing they thought is that after October 7th, they just thought that Hezbollah was going to shoot 50,000 rockets. And they did shoot 20, but that took a long time. And they thought that the whole Jewish state would be destroyed by Iranian, Houthi, Hezbollah, and Hamas rockets. And there was jubilation is what I'm getting at, Jack. People said, oh my gosh, the Middle East is the Palestinian downtrodden are winning. This is so great. They've killed all these Jews. They mutilated them. They did shocking things to Jews. They're not immune. They're not all strong. We've got to go and keep this up. Well, I can't remember the name of the congresswoman who came out against the Democrat who came out against. Chase? Is that her name? El-Sayed. They hate her. Oh my gosh. I think I saw James Carville compared her to a used condom. He is so foul-mouthed. He is so crude. It's just disgusting what he says now. And he talks out of both sides of his mouth. He's on one hand, he's a Democratic Party. I don't think a Democratic Party is going to go over the cliff with a socialist. That's all it is going to do. It's going to go over the cliff. These people are not Democrats. They're socialists. Then you get a real hardcore socialist Islamist running. And anybody opposed it, a used condom. It's just silly. It's just disgusting. If that guy wins, I don't know. What's her. Is her name Haley? Yeah, it's Haley Stevens. Stevens, not Chase. So, yeah, but she had kind of wavered. She had said that she would support him, and then he didn't want her there because she had criticized his anti-Semitic ad. And did you see those. They were going on the Internet as well. At one of his rallies, that woman from Mongolia who was American, I guess, now, and she attacked that Jewish woman, knocked her down, hit her. And then she just went and called her all these racist names. And it was terrible. It was right out of the stormtroopers. And it's getting pretty crazy. It really is. Yeah, the violence is mostly coming from one direction. Hey, Victor, I have to read a spot here for our listeners and viewers. AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts. And criminals are using these tools right now 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 that 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. Then they can borrow against your equity and even sell your property long before you realize anything. And that's why we use Home Title Lock. They monitor your property's title 24-7, alert you of any changes. And if you're a victim, their team of restoration experts will spend up to $1 million restoring your title. So, when's the last time you checked your title records? You can do it today. Go to hometitlelock.com slash victor to get a free title history report plus a free trial. A free trial of million-dollar triple lock protection so you can make sure you're not already a victim. Somewhere right now in America, probably many somewheres, there's some dirtbag with his stealing Wi-Fi from a cafe and engaged in this kind of nefarious activity. And lots of people are victims of it. So, check out Home Title Lock. That's hometitlelock.com slash victor and use the link. And we're very, very appreciative of Home Title Lock for sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. By the way, Victor, you mentioned before AI about military ordinance, etc. I didn't send you this note ahead of time, but I just saw an article in the New York Post today. Last month, 54,000 Russians, casualties in the war with Ukraine. Less than one month. I don't understand it. I don't. I understand absolutely Putin is evil. Absolutely Putin is trying to recapture the Soviet Empire. Absolutely he caused all this. Absolutely he got away with going into Georgia under Bush. He got away with going into Crimea and the Donbass under Obama. He got away with trying to decapitate Kiev under Biden. I understand all that. But he should be stopped. But no one is talking in humanitarian terms. And it's funny. The left doesn't even talk about the human cost. It's just, we're going to fight whatever it takes. We're going to fight Putin and Europe. And then when you look at the anomaly, Europe has 500 million people. And they have some sophisticated arms industries. Russia has 140. And there's only 29. 29 million Ukrainians that have stopped them cold. And the Europeans are terrified. But if they would rearm, they could go to Moscow if they had to. But it's so or welling. And nobody cares about all these people. A lot of them speak the same language. They have the same orthodox religious affiliation. They look the same. They've lived in both areas of Russia and Ukraine in the same way. There's Ukrainians. It doesn't make any sense for this bloodletting. And it doesn't make any sense that the Western world, who every time there is a targeted strike of an Hamas leader, they yell genocide and they say nothing about the human cost on both sides in the Ukraine war. It's weird. It is very strange. We're going to take a little break, Victor. And when we come back from it, I have a couple of. sports headlines that may be worth your assessment. And we'll see if we have a little time for George Washington. We'll do that when we come back from these important messages. Many Americans are going to have a big wake-up call. We have never seen net migration as high as it has been in the last few years. This year, there have been more people coming to the UK in small boats than ever before. You did an extreme thing to the country. Britain is facing a migrant crime epidemic. We don't actually. We don't actually know where they're coming from, who they are, how old they are. Why would you let in millions of people who are undeaded if not to change the country from within? There is no other word for it. Demographic replacement. England's a blueprint for America. It's coming. It's just a blueprint. Thousands of daily migrant crossings. A political earthquake threatens to reshape America. We are showing there is a new path for politics in our country. Not all cultures are the same. You cannot ban Shadia. America is a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants. We're a nation of immigrants. The Immigration Crisis. Watch now on the Heritage Foundation's YouTube channel. Hey folks, we're back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own words, recording on Monday, November 2nd, 2026. This episode is up on Friday the 6th. You may be on this day, you may still be in a funk over what happened Tuesday, or maybe it's not going to be that bad. God, I'm saying my prayers tonight. Victor's website is thebladeofperseusvictorhansen.com is the address. Please do check it out. Tons of free stuff. But there's also the exclusive articles twice a week. Victor writes for The Blade of Perseus, and he does one exclusive video. And to watch them and to read them, you need to subscribe. It's $65 a year. If you just want to do a month at a time, $6.50. That's The Blade of Perseus at Victor Hansen. Okay, Victor, here's a headline. Don with it. Woke California college caves and axes mascot after 90 years. For close to a century, the University of San Francisco has warmly embraced the Don, a costume figure sporting a pencil-thin mustache and a green Spanish-style hat, who has roamed the sidelines in support of a host of sporting endeavors, while Don is a Spanish honorific denoting, the Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, reports that some students began to feel the phrase and the figure it celebrates shares too much in common with the history of Spanish colonization suffered by California's indigenous people. Yes. So you have a hallowed university, University of San Francisco. You've got thousands of alumni who have gone there without opening a word about the Don. You have administrators who are custodians. You have board of trustees. And you have a transitory community. cohort of students that pop in for four years, and then they determine the very nature of how that university is going to run. Not the alumni, not the board of trustees, not the president, and they cave to what a bunch of 18 or 19-year-olds say on any given day that are mostly pretty upscale to go there. And they don't, DEI, everybody, is very selective because if you would use their strategy, you would say the following. Okay, yes, if a college mascot reflects a barbarous incident in the past or habit of behavior, in any context, then we have to change it. Therefore, the Aztec San Diego state is going to have to be discarded, the mascots, because we know that about 20, 30 years before Cortez arrived in Tenochtitlan, they had a four-day human sacrifice that probably killed anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000. And the Aztec empire of 4 million, habitually murdered in a very grotesque fashion their subjects, children, and anybody who was conquered in war and taken captive, about 40,000 a year. And it was, I say it was barbaric because they took them up to Templo Major and they cut out their heart with a obsidian knife very carefully so that the artery was still connected. And they held it and, and they watched it beat, beat, beat, beat, as the person was watching his heart outside his body. And then they cut it out. And often they whacked off parts of his body and then they rolled him down the steps and people, they usually fed them to the Imperial Zoo or they dumped them in Lake Tenochtitlan. And that was pretty barbaric. It's right up there with, with people like, you know, Mao and everybody, but nobody has ever said that. Nobody's ever said, well, I guess you said, well, these were indigenous people, therefore end of story. The Israelis would say they're indigenous. Some of them are indigenous people, but not end of story. And I don't, I don't believe in DEI. I don't believe that there's any logic to DEI. I don't think they do either. They can't tell us whether Ward Churchill or Peggy Flanagan is DEI or Elizabeth Warren is the first Native American professor of law at Harvard. They can't tell who in a multiracial society that's heavily intermarried, who is DEI. And when they do know, they rely on the 1/16th drop of the old Confederacy. They don't tell us what determines a DEI victim. Is it a victimized group? Is it collective? Is it historical? Is it individual? They don't have anything to do with class. If you make a hundred, they say you, I'm black, Chicano, Asian, but I can't get DEI because my parents make $500,000 or have a net worth over a million dollars. Therefore, I'm not, no, they don't say that. They just say it's systemic racism. You can't see it. It's like error, but I can detect it. It's, you know, it's constructed insidious. It's everywhere. Systematic or systemic racism. And it's so incoherent. But if it does have logic, and Victor, you've pointed this out before on the DEI side. It's about power. Quit your job and give the job to somebody else who qualifies. It's about power, yeah. It's about careerism. Or colonization. If colonization is a real thing, then the institution should shut down. It shouldn't be on that property right there, right? I mean, if it has the logic to, it's where it should go. Well, I mean, I think I've told that story too many times. I walked to the Hoover Institution office and I said to one of my assistants, "What happened to Junipio Serra Plaza where the fountain, everything is, oh, it's changed. Where were you?" I said, "Well, what does it change?" It's Jane Stanford Plaza. And I said, "On what basis?" "Well, Father Serra, in the 18th century, whipped Native Americans." I said, "Native Americans whipped Native Americans. Native Americans whipped non-Native Americans. Everybody whipped everybody as a form of corporal punishment. Fathers whipped children." That was the going mores of the time. And they were trying maybe in their, I don't know, imperialistic settler colonial mind, but they weren't getting rich out of it, the early fathers. They've created the El Camino Real, they introduced the mission system, they founded a lot of California agriculture. Their intent was to save the souls of the Native Americans and bring them up to a European level of civilization. Yes. Was it condescending? Yes. Was it genocidal? No. If you want to talk about something that is more directly addresses your concerns about the other, then you can say that the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s from '65 to '67 imported hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers. And they were pretty indiscriminate about human life. And if they were blown up, they expected them to be blown up. And Leland Stanford, the founder for his son and honorific University of Leland Stanford, Jr., wrote a letter when he said that, "Now that we're done with the railroad, we've got to exclude these people. They represent a yellow peril." Okay. You're Stanford, you're a student, you're a faculty member. Which is the greater sin, the more recent written documentation that you're racist and you want to single out yellow people, or something 300 years ago about a Catholic father who suffered in great pain most of his life, and died poor and dedicated his life to the poor. Maybe it was misguided, but that's who he was. And the answer is simple. Except the same people who changed the name, Junipio Serra Plaza, were not going to change Junipio Serra Boulevard that runs through the campus, because a lot of very wealthy people live on that. And they liked the name. And they give money to Stanford. Nor were they going to say, "Let's change this to Chumash, an indigenous people university." Why not? Because they are careerist and they are intensely proud that they got into Stanford and they want a cattle brand that says Stanford BA on their back. And they would not want to graduate from Chumash University. It has no prestige. That's how hypocritical these people are. It's all about power. It's all about performance art. It's all about virtue signaling. Never things that are existential. And that's why they change these names, but they don't really change names that further their own. They can change Yale. They can change Harvard. There's all grounds you could do it, but they'll never do it. I don't know how many people I have met in my academic career of 50 plus years who would qualify as DEI people that let drop they were Harvard or Yale. But I'm sure they were Harvard or Yale or Stanford graduates. They were very proud of it. Within the first minute. Yeah. I don't say I went to Stanford University. They did. I've had people, "I'm a Stanford graduate. Did you know that?" I had a guy write me a letter during COVID and he was the head of the Stanford alumni group and he wanted to go after me and he was a Hispanic. And he said, "I graduated from Stanford." Okay. Big deal. So did I. What does it mean? Nothing. It means nothing. What you do with your life, matters, not what your cattle brand is. But they are just as. The DEI people are just as obsessed with prestige, privilege as the non-DEI people. And that's what's ironic about the whole thing. Yeah. Well, one last topic. We'll save George Washington for another day, Victor, but this is so. Echoes of LeBron James. This is about, "I'm not going to let it go. I'm not going to let it go." I'm not saying it. I'm not a soccer fan, but Mbappe meets his match as the headline. French soccer superstar, Kylian Mbappe, if I'm saying it wrong, I know I'm going to be mocked, has conquered many of the world's toughest defenses, but he met his match in the Chinese Communist Party. I bet he did. And the formidable combination of state power, corporate money, and nationalist outrage behind it. In a circulating video clip, he appeared to refer to Mao Zedong as a Chinese dictator. China's response was swift. State television reportedly stopped airing his matches and removed his advertisements. Three Chinese sponsors severed ties. State media denounced him. China's foreign ministry warned that remarks offending Chinese people would even meet collective resistance. He apologized that even Real Madrid, club that he plays for, and Spain's La Liga Sports League, join the apologies. The kowtowing, if I'm allowed to use that phrase, to China continues. You're not allowed to use that. I'm shocked. Sorry. Okay. Culturally insensitive, and you're appropriating words from a different context. You should know better. I suggest you should join me in my mandatory, overdue, violence in the workplace video that I have to do for Stanford this week, and I just didn't, and then I have my sexual harassment and DEI thing I've got to do, and then you wouldn't say kowtow. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah, well, what is there? What is there to say? Yeah. I mean, I don't know what to say about the whole thing, but this- I think, again, Victor, it's that this was the area, one area of life where you could just not talk about politics or whatever. You just watched a game. Well, I guess I should say, I don't want to just fluff it off. Our audience deserves better. Do you remember the Golden State Warriors coach? Was it Steve Kerr? I don't follow basketball either. I actually saw him a few weeks ago, but yes. Well, he, at one point during the George Floyd frenzy, was giving people lectures about privilege and racism, and he was supporting LeBron's take the knee, and he was virtue signaling all over the country, and then somebody politely mentioned to him that he was going to China and that there was. And immediately, there was a potential market there of over a billion dollars, and that the NBA was making tens of millions of dollars franchising Chinese teams, and NBA players were making a fortune, not just in endorsing Nike shoes in the U.S., but their subsidiaries in China, while they were holding one million Uyghurs in forced labor camps, while they had annexed. Annexed Tibet, and while they had forcibly aborted children. And by the way, I mean, I just had a discussion with a person today about this. China Today says, if you have a child who's disabled, something like my granddaughter, Smith-McGinnis or Downs or Cleflip or congenital heart, if you had a person like that, then under Chinese policy, you get a second chance, if you can demonstrate that they're disabled. Then you put them in a Chinese orphanage. Does China, that's building now the biggest fleet of warships in the world, do they send their crack team of surgeons, I don't know, neurologists, to help these kids? No. They put them up for adoption to a very adopted family. The adoption crammed market in the United States, and then Americans go over and adopt children with disabilities, and then American parents spend millions of dollars to make sure these kids are alive and they get necessary operations, often because they don't have much money, often on Medi-Cal. That's the government that I'm talking about that the NBA is in league with, why they lecture everybody that we're racist. That's LeBron James, especially. He can't even relax during the Star Spangled Banner. He is swinging his golf clubs or practicing his free shots to show the world that he hates the United States that made him a multi-billionaire, while he goes over to China and makes a fortune to a criminal state that is. It's a direct descendant from Mao Zedong's government. Yeah. He's one of the greatest mass murderers in history, and that's why the whole DEI thing is one of the most corrupt things in the world. When you saw the three women who founded it, and founded the Black Lives Matter, and then they all ended up, what? Taking the money and living in very nice digs. So human nature being human nature, but DEI is. We're going to see, for those who voted, voted for this, you're going to see. One of the things besides if they take the House is the impeachments, the subpoenas, and the end of all nominations should they take the Senate, you're going to see all these investigations, and you're going to see DEI, DEI, DEI everywhere. And then in two years, if they were to win the presidency with majorities that they may have obtained this week. You're going to see not 12,000 people come in, you'll see 20 million come in, because they will try to bank that number in case they ever have to have a Republican administration again, and you will see defund the police, green subsidies, cut back on fossil fuels. We will be not just not supporting Israel, we will be on the side of Hamas, Hezbollah, any authority. Mark my words. Yeah. Another Iran deal will be resuscitated. Yeah. Well, we hope to give them another 400 million at night, another pallet or two. Well, Victor, we're going to wrap it up here. I have a couple of comments to read from folks from YouTube, and I thank everyone who's taking the time to write them. We try to look at them all. Oh, it's pretty tough sometimes. Here's one from John Kujawski, who writes, "Victor, you're a man of great wisdom and American ideals. I just found you. I've been listening to you via YouTube and look forward to your message. It's right down the middle of what America is all about." Ralph Simon writes, "America could be the first country in history destroyed by something called the media. When 80 to 85% of the media becomes nothing more than the propaganda wing of one party, you lose the support of rational people." You were talking about Elon Musk the other day with the great Sammy Wink, and Secret Squirrel writes, "Elon and Victor are both righteous. Righteous dudes. I would agree with that." Tina Slonsky writes, you were talking about some mouth, oral issues, Victor, "The right side of my tongue," sorry, Tina, we're revealing this to the nation, "The right side of my tongue has been numb for over 30 years due to a botched wisdom tooth extraction, had a nerve transplant that did not take. I had to learn how to speak all over again." Let's not even talk about learning how to eat again. We've made the best of our circumstances, yeah, that are beyond our control. God bless you, Victor, and the great nation. So she's, like you, an oral victim. And then David, last one, David D. Darwazay, sorry if I mispronounce your name, "It is fabulously wonderful to see how funny and scathing Victor has become while still keeping his respectable academic credentials." So amen. Well, thank you. We try to offer academic things with Sammy on our Saturday show. Yeah. Yeah. And we talk about history. We don't use the vocabulary that I think all the candidates use today. If I've been a little bit sarcastic, I'm a little worried about what I've seen with El Saeeds and Mondami and that. Because anti-Semitism never comes with, you know, sharp teeth and growling. It always is a smile, smile, smile. Like Mondami and El-Said can't finish the sins without smiling or having a conversation. Yes, we'll have a conversation. Let's have a conversation about that. And otherwise, if you were Jewish and showed up at an El-Said rally, you'd be in trouble. Yeah. As we saw in that latest video. Yeah, you know what? I was going to raise it again. We should talk about a length next time, but Washington's letter to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, very famous, and I think one of the most important documents in our history. But the famous phrase about people sitting under their fig tree, and none shall make them afraid. So everyone should look up the letter and read it because it's a wonderful explanation of what America is. That's a good point. But it's the making afraid. Yes. What is scary about anti-Semitism today are the perpetrators are not in white sheets. They're not the so-called white majority. Right. The majority of the people involved are on the left, the people who want to be fair and quality of result. And many of them, like Mondami, like Ilyan Omar, like El-Said, like Hassan Parker, express anti-Semitic tropes from the refuge or the fortress of DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. because they are not white males and therefore the victimized cannot be victimizers. So they're free to spout anti-Semitic junk, trash. And all of us cannot criticize them because to do so would be racist. And that's what they get away with. And we're all afraid. We're all afraid and terrified. Oh, Ilyan Omar. Oh, she couldn't be anti-Semitic. It's a Benjamin's baby. It couldn't be El-Sayed writing to the Muslim. It was very funny. We had a Muslim Brotherhood candidate that won the election in Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, is that his name? And he writes, he gets a letter from El-Sayed or an open letter saying that basically you're not Islamicist enough. You've got to crack down on your opponents. And then when asked, he said, that has nothing to do with the price of eggs in Michigan. And that's what they say. It has to do with the country we may be living in for the rest of our lives. Yeah, I just hope people don't vote because they'll say, as one couple did at a recent donors event that I spoke at, we don't like his tweets. We don't like his language. We do not like his language. We do not like his tweets. We're not going to vote. We're not going to vote for his slate. We're conservatives, but we can't vote for him. I said, so you're going to vote for Tallarico? No, we're not. I said, yes, you are. If you don't vote, if you just leave it blank, you're voting for that because you're going to go out and vote for some candidates, but you're not going to vote for others that you feel reflect a Trump endorsement. That's a big mistake unless you think that your fortune will be protected. And I said, I have a lot less to lose than you do. I understand that, but I don't have any money. But I tell you that you're an enemy of these people, whether you know it or not. Self-righteousness is. Yeah, it reminded me of the Russian aristocracy between 1905 and 1917. They really did believe they could handle the Bolsheviks. And the more they virtue signaled and had them out of their country estates and glorified Lenin, they thought, he's not going to go after me. And of course, he went after all of them. Yeah, no, it's not an insurance policy big enough to take for any reason. No, no, no. They look at. Magnanimity is weakness to be exploited, not to be reciprocated with kindness. Sorry. Well, I've been treated kindly by people. They write me all the time about civil thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society. Go to civillethoughts.com, sign up. When you do that, on Fridays, you will get a lengthy email from me with 14 recommended readings. I have the link to the article. I have an excerpt you're going to like. I know you will. It's free. We're not charging. That's what free means. And we're not selling your name. So anyway, that's that. Check out Victor's website. If you're on Facebook, VDH's Morning Cup. Also, Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club. And on X, at VD Hanson. That's Victor's handle. Okay, Victor, you've been terrific. I hope when I talk to you on the other side of Tuesday, I will not be crying, but we'll deal with what we have to deal with. We'll see you next time. Thanks for everyone for watching. Thanks for listening. We will be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive content. exclusive features in addition.