Victor Davis Hanson: Socialism Sounds Better Than It Works

late night bites with friends already hard to beat that first too hot bite of fries you couldn't wait for followed by ice cold pepsi now that hits different suddenly the energy kicks back in the night goes longer and the laughs don't stop because pepsi brings out more flavor more fun and more of the moment food deserves pepsi grab a pepsi zero sugar today everybody should realize what marxists are they like violence they say they're for the people and they want to empty oh we want it we don't we're going to abolish the prisons if you're a homeless person and you go into one of mondami's stores and it's 30 percent and you do what you do to a capitalist owner you get your little trench coat and you open it and you start putting steaks in there they're going to go after you and they're going to prosecute you they're capitalist is what i'm saying that masquerade as communist i only say that because they live like capitalists they're wealthy people robert and princeton i bet they could house 20 000 people and so you should tell the undocumented or the homeless your champions want you at the university tutor you so you can take free class what they never do that hello and welcome to victor davis hansen in his own words this is our friday news roundup and we've got lots on the agenda the primaries from tuesday michigan kansas and missouri are three of the states that we're having primaries so we'll have a look at them first and then we'll turn to a cambridge university professor who has been caught for plagiarism stay with us and we'll be right back with those stories 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 explain 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 camilla 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 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 guard in to make sure cities are safe not just an iranian nuclear threat but ending that threat that seven other presidents had identified but that did not happen not just addressing the transgender issue or the green new deal and 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 hansen for the daily signal welcome back victor davis hansen in his own words you can find victor at his website the blade of perseus the url for the website is victorhansen.com and it has everything that victor writes there and including links to his books and victor you have a new book coming out i do the counter-revolution it is on your right side above you and i have a copy above me um oh no it's right behind my back so i think that's the copy you're probably looking for yes this one and it explains how donald trump had an interim period where he was not president and he came back to be elected president and his first year and a half as president and starts with the fall of america and i think that's pretty interesting i don't think our people and i didn't know myself the links to which the left went to destroy him how he went stood them all won the primary at the point after january 6 he was polling 32 percent uh santas was polling 15 points higher as a probable candidate in the primary and then he endured five civil and criminal suits the raid on mar-a-lago the de-balloting freezing his bank accounts you name it they did everything and how he came back and then how he the campaign of 2024 is kind of funny really when you look at all the money that camilla harris paid oprah and all of that stuff and the garbage ad and the mcdonald the mcdonald ad was just brilliant uh so i i go through that and then the first that he's not addressing the symptoms of the progressive project is not just lamenting like most presidents oh they took over k-12 oh we have to slow down what they're doing the universities you know the border we can let a few he just ended it it's the causes of the progressive project we're going to go after the universities we're going to go after the smithsonian we're going to go after pbs we're People have so much power when their agendas are so unpopular and people don't want them. And whether it's 12 million illegal aliens or defund the police or trans women in male, female sports or it's the Green New Deal, you name it. They poll 70, 60 percent at most. And yet they still have power in the corporate boardroom, K-12, popular culture, the foundations, the media, the universities, popular culture. Why? And so I talk about their capture of those industries. And that's what Trump is trying to do. He's trying to go to those places like PBS and USAID and go to the causes of their power and eliminate them. All right. So you can go ahead and preorder that book. It comes out September 9th. So go ahead and wherever your favorite bookstore is, see if you can get a copy ordered. All right, Victor. So we had primaries speaking of lots of money spent. And I think in Michigan they had the largest amount spent on a primary in ever. And that was about 80 million. And that primary was between Haley Stevens and Abdul Aziz. And apparently Haley Stevens spent up to 70 million dollars and she lost. It is it seems to. Well, I was wondering your thoughts on that primary in particular. It seems to me it's a bellwether for the problems in the Democratic Party because they really split the Democratic Party split over those two candidates. If you look at the number of Michigan voters. Republican, independent, Democratic and those who voted for Said, it's a very small number, relatively, but they got organized for the midterms. And it's very funny because if you are a socialist dash communist, and I'm not using that as a pejorative term is when when Mondami says that he wants to seize the means of production or take property from people. If he finds their poor landlords, et cetera, et cetera, and the agenda of the Socialist of America has take over utilities, break up agriculture, corporate, you know, seize people's property. So it's not a it's not a slur. But the thing about all these people is if you're an activist like Hassan Piker or these other democratic social, then they come across as communist. However, if you're. Running for office, you come off not even as a social. So he was renouncing a lot of the things he was going to do. Oh, they're just I'm just going to do this. And and then when they take office, they are not even socialist. They're communist. And so he will be if he's the elected senator, he will have a communist agenda. The other thing is. We we think these people are so charismatic and young. I listen today to AOC and they had clips of her on YouTube when she went over to the Security Council. She was like a deer in the headlights. She couldn't even explain U.S. foreign policy. She just says, well, and yes, she couldn't talk. And she's not well-spoken. She's not well-educated. She doesn't have a lot of experience. I don't see her as a dynamic. I see her more like a Kamala Harris candidate. And then everybody said, Hasan Piker is the podcaster of the left, and he's brilliant, and he's tough. And I watched seven or eight appearances where he's not behind this microphone. And what he does is he takes his phone, his cell phone, and he just looks at it. And then he looks at the crowd, and he says, like. It's like, you know, he looks like like, and, you know, he looks like, you know, and he likes. And he looks at the, like, the phone, like, you know, talking, you know what I mean, like, like, and that's what he does. He can't, he has a vocabulary of about maybe 800 words, 300 more than Kamala Harris. But I was just stunned at how poor he comes across when he's not reading a script, and he can't talk extemporaneously. He has to get his talking points. And so these are not a formidable group of people. They keep saying they're so talented. And when you saw the head of the Democratic Socialists with Shannon Bream, I felt sorry for her. I mean, she, Shannon Bream just said, these are, basically, these are communist positions. And you thought that she would try to, yep, yep, agree with that, yep, yep. And so, and there's the other thing about them. They're so arrogant. Here we are in the 200 and going to be the 238th year of the republic. And these people come over to this country not as immigrants of the past that came legally. They were gracious. They wanted to assimilate, acculturate, integrate. They loved the system. They wanted to adapt to it. Hassan Piker and El-Said and Mondami and Chevalier and Kuros, they come over here either in the first or second year of the republic. They come over here either in the first or second year of the republic. In fact, when they see a real illegal alien, they panic. And that's what's so strange about these boutique cocktail socialists. Well, on the issue of violence and violence, Israel is a particular target of these people. In Missouri, Cori Bush lost her bid for the office she was running for. I think it was a representative office. Revenge against AIPAC, the American-Israel political, and they, I forget. We got it wrong. We said political action committee last time, and that was wrong. But anyways, she vowed revenge against AIPAC. Hassan Piker, I was watching him, and he was blaming AIPAC for most of the money, which they probably did put into the election of Haley Stevens. Yeah, if somebody says you're going to dismantle the Jewish state. Yeah, absolutely. I can't. Where else would they put their money? But anyways, I was wondering, on that score, their violent reaction seems mostly against Jewish institutions. If you took the candidates they just enumerated, we're going to go after whiter neighborhoods, or white people are going to have to pay reparate, all the stuff these people have said, and you just put in Hispanic or black, they would call you the worst racist in the world. These people are racist. They really are. And we are a multiracial society now. And we, you know, we're what? Seven to eight generations from slavery, and five from Jim Crow, and four or three from the civil rights movement. So you've got most white people grew up in the age of diversity, equity, inclusion, dash, affirmative action. And they just keep doing this. White, white, white, white, white, white, white, white. We had this candidate for governor of Wisconsin. She was trying to explain, almost apologize. She married a white guy, and her child's whiteness is near here. What if somebody said that? What if you had a white guy and said, well, I married a Korean woman, and I guess I can, you know, I'm ambivalent about it, and I can, Koreanism is next to me now, and it would be horrible. And they just keep doing it and doing it and doing it, and they don't understand that they're creating, right now, when you look at the internet, I've been studying this. Each morning, I spend about 15 minutes looking at sites on the internet. And the internet, and they are creating, they fuel somebody like Nick Fuentes, but they are creating a, not a Nick Fuentes, but a mainstream people. They're not racist. They're just sick of it. And they're tired of it. And it's, I don't know where it's going to, you can see it in Europe first. Europe's about ready to blow in Britain. And especially what you saw in Spain. And the left doesn't understand how they sound to people. They don't understand that. And when it gets on Israel, I was listening to him about that. And I wanted to say. You were listening to Hassan Piker, right? Yes. And El-Sayed, what he said about it. You know, criminals. Why don't they arrest, why didn't, if you want to arrest somebody, why don't they arrest the next time anybody comes from Iran to New York who's responsible for that government that butchered 40,000 people? Why don't they arrest Chi? He's got a million people in a concentration-dash labor camp. Why don't they do that? Why don't they bring in the Sudanese government and the Ethiopian government for genocide? Why don't they bring in the Azerbaijan for ethnic cleansing? And they said, well, these are Jewish apartheid. Why don't you bring in the 23 Muslim countries, unlike Israel, that have in their constitution? You must be a Muslim. How about the 17 that says, if you are a Muslim and you're an apostate and you leave Islam, you're going to be prosecuted. Nobody does that in Israel. So, all of that stuff they said, ethnic cleansing, you know, you think, well, Turkey's cleansed all of northern Cyprus. And he's Turkish. Hassan, since you do this, since you do this and you blast white people and you blast Jews. You blast Jews for ancient supposed sin. Let's talk about your pedigree. How about the Turks? They went in 1922, 23 into Smyrna and they burned down the whole city and they ethnically cleansed every Greek that had been there some of the time for two and a half millennia. And so there was not one Greek really, except a few bishops they couldn't kill quick enough. They got out. That was the Turkish government. How about the first and second Armenian massacres? They took a million people and basically said, walk out in the desert and starved them to death. Nobody talks about that. What do they think they do to the Kurds? It's open season on the Kurds. So, this guy comes over from Turkey where he was raised. His parents came over, had him and he went back. So, he was an American citizen and he starts lecturing on settler colonialism and white people. And he is from a country that of the last hundred years has the most despicable human rights. This record of any other country and has engaged, except for Nazi Germany and the World War II powers on the axis, has engaged in mass scale genocide. And we have to listen. And we have to listen from Ilhan Omar, whose father was a colonel in the Saeed-Berry genocidal government. And the reason she's here is not because she was poor and she wanted an opportunity and her family said, let's go to America. No, she was with a lot of refugees that were on the wrong side and they had backed a dictator who killed 200,000 people. And the people and the relatives of those people and the people opposing Berry who threw him out wanted revenge on people like Ilhan Omar's dad. So, then she said, we're going to be facing reprisals for all the violence we inflicted on other people. We better go to America. And once she got here, then she acted like she was a third world peacemaker. No, you were an aristocrat, a wealthy Somali, and you were on the wrong side of genocide. Your father participated in an army that conducted routine genocidal missions. And we have to listen to you. Then we have Miss Kiros from Ethiopia. Same deal. We have to listen about reparations. Why don't you talk about Ethiopia as what it did to people? Same thing with Claudine Gay about Haiti. Don't talk about injustice. Talk about Haiti. And what they do to people. So, what I'm getting at is it gets people really angry when immigrants come here either in the first or second generation and they start lecturing Americans on apartheid and genocide and war crimes. And they all come from countries that they wanted to get away from. Or, in some cases, they participated in the genocide. Or at least they aided and abetted it. And they're exempt. And when they campaign for office, they say, we want Medicare, medical help for everybody. And things like that that are so duplicitous. What does she think that half the budget right now goes to social services and welfare? And I can tell you, I have been in three or four cities. I have been in emergency rooms for the last two years. And I can tell you one thing. The number of people in. Emergency rooms and hospitals and doctors who don't have insurance, private insurance, are about as many as those who have insurance. And they get the same care. I've gone into an emergency room with cancer and I was told I had serious pneumonia and I sat for three hours. Why, people ahead of me complained about they were depressed, they had hangovers, they twisted their ankle, and they were all, as the person said, you're the first person that has private health insurance. And they got good care. And I was operated on a hospital where many of the people in the waiting room where I was getting pets and CTs at $5,000 a scan couldn't speak English. And so give me a break, this myth that people don't have access to health care. All right, Victor. 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They're easy to store and simple to prepare. But don't put this off. Strengthen your food security today at preparewithvdh.com. And we'd like to thank My Patriot Supply for sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Thank you. I could say one other thing. I got an interesting email from someone. Three days ago. And he said, Victor, what is the theme of the Democratic Party? And what is all this about? And I said, because you said, you've said they don't have an agenda. Well, they don't really tell you. The socialists do, but the Democratic Party doesn't. So, I thought about that a long time. And it's basically, if I don't get my way or I don't get what I want, that's because I'm a victim and I want to change the system. And that includes almost everything. If I came into the country illegally and I'm completely on audit and I have no legal right to be here, then I'm not going to go back and try to redo it legally or try to remedy that. I'm going to say the system's unfair and we shouldn't have ICE. If I want to go to Harvard, Stanford, Yale. Duke, and I can't get a 780 on the SAT, then we're going to drop the SAT. Because it's not fair because it doesn't work for me. And what's important here is why was there a border in the first place? Why was there an SAT in the first place? There's a purpose. And the same thing on politics. We didn't win the 2024 election. So, let's get rid of the Electoral College. Let's get rid of the, you know, the Philadelphia. Let's get two new states in. We'll get four senators and let's pack the court. But if it was the Warren Court, we would not pack it. If, you know, if Kamala lost the popular vote, but won on the Electoral College, we would like that to stay there. If they want to bring in two right-wing states somewhere, we don't want them in here. And if we're in the minority, we want that filibuster. If we're in the majority, we don't. And so it's an adolescent mindset. mentality that anytime I don't get what I want, rather than looking inward, you get angry and you say, this is unfair, this is racist, this is prejudice. And that's what really, it's really a war against the system of rules, the rules-based order, meritocracy, that everybody plays by the same rules. And when you can't get something, you look inward and you're critical of yourself and you say to yourself, I can give you one example. I didn't speak French in graduate school, but you had to pass a German and a French test. And I was studying French, not spoken, but to read it. And my parents called and said, we got a big storm in 1976 and raisins, and we're going to lose everything. So I drove the middle of the night down here and for the next, and I left my PhD. And for the next eight days, all I did was go out and put a backpack on my back and they had something called Captan, which was a dry powdered fungicide and Botran. And I walked up, you know, 90 acres every three days with my siblings. And we, I don't know if it caused cancer or not, but we blew that stuff to save what we could. Then I ran back and the teacher, the professor said, well, you're scheduled for your French tests. And I said, I haven't read French in two weeks and I'm not ready. I said, I don't care if you're ready or not. You put it down here and we need, you need to take a French and German test before you can advance. And so I took it. I thought I did really well. But this particular professor, when I walked into the test, asked me in French, was I ready? And I said, I don't understand what you're saying. He said, how can you take a French test when you can't speak French? I said, did you, did you read what it said? You have to be able to read French. You don't need to speak it. And he said, every trained intellectual, every man that's in academia, every woman should know French. You'll go to France. You will seem like the bumpkin from Fresno if you don't speak. I said, all I want to do is take, so I took it and I looked at it and it was 95% correct. And he said, you know, I can't pass you. I said, why? And he said, you don't speak French. I said, if I had got a hundred percent, would you have passed me? He said, I would have had to. Instead of going to the chairman and saying, oh, this is unfair. I took that and every single day I read Camus' La Peste in French. I read The Three Musketeers in French. I read everything I could. So then when I went in next time, he played that little trick with me. He was a friend of mine. I liked him, not making fun of him. And I said, I don't understand. I understand some of what you say, but I'm going to get a perfect test. And I did. And he passed me. But the point I'm trying to make is that was how I was taught and people listening to us were taught. If you don't succeed, try, try again and double down your efforts and don't question the system unless it's blatantly Jim Crow or something. But this generation, this therapeutic empathetic generations, they all blame the cosmic. I, well, I have a B.A. in environmental studies from Duke and I'm here in Austin working for a very prestigious NGO and I can't get a loft condo. It's because of this capitalist system. And that's their attitude. So you have all these wealthy people that are frustrated that they don't get enough. How much do you think Mr. Saeed makes a year? He and his wife. I have no idea. Uh, 500,000. No, I think he filed a return for well over 600,000. He is the one upper one, one, 1%. And he's talking about the evils of capitalism. He's like the Mondami is the 1% in Uganda. When he's, when he said he was going to tax seven second homes, you know, that were vacant. I had an idea. I thought, wow, your parents have a beautiful home. You have a rent subsidized apartment. Who's living in your Lake Victoria, empty Uganda, vacant home. So vacant homes are taboo here, but not in Uganda when people are really poor. Come on, Zoran. There's a lot of poor black people in Uganda and you're a part of the 1% elite. You were Indian community and you had a second home and it's empty. Now, what did you, did you want to go retroactively? I don't know. I have a surcharge on it. So you can help Ugandan people. Why don't you just let them live there while you're not there? That's how silly these people are. Yeah. Yeah. He should put his assets where his mouth is. There's another thing though, that Francesca Wong, sorry, who is running for governor in Wisconsin, another issue that comes up with these races. She was being interviewed and they asked her if she was for banning police and ICE. And she said, not, not right now. And they asked her about banning Thanksgiving and she wouldn't answer and said she loved being a cook. So I'm also impressed by their, I don't know if you can call it hypocrisy, but that they think one way and they would do things to ban ICE, to ban the police, but they pretend like they're not. Yes. When she was saying all those things, she had her hair pulled back in militant form. And she was, had a crisp kind of, and now she must be medicated. I think she's had bipolar and now she's had her hair down. And I just, I love people. Did you say that you wanted to, I don't remember. I just loved family gathering. Well, did you, you seem to have talked a lot about white people. That's only because I was worried about my own child. I think it's good to be by, that's how she is now. And as I said earlier, every socialist runs as a progressive moderate Democrat. Then they get in office and they say, I'm not going to be a socialist. I'm going full commie because I have power now. And remember, um, the socialists become communists and they are ruthless. They don't care about if somebody goes in, if a poor black guy, Hispanic guy, not to single them out, but to make a point about Mondami, if they go in, as I said, to his market and they start knocking things off the racks like homeless people do sometimes. And then they look around and put some decongestants in their pocket and grab some apples. That security is going to bang them on the head and they're going to go march them off to the commie DA. And they're going to say, Alvin Bragg, we want to got this guy and sing, sing, open it up just for him. That's how they will do it. They really will. They are utterly ruthless people. Since you brought up Mondami, let's turn to him first before we go to the Cambridge professor. His CEO of New York City's Economic Development Corps has said, stated this about his grocery store. And I quote, we are looking to make sure we target New Yorkers, whether it be a sort of library card-esque thing, and also manage who's buying and that it is focused on everyday New Yorkers. So she introduced the idea of we're going to have some sort of ID. And then Mondami had to roll that whole idea. That was very funny because somebody else got questions. You pointed out, what if you're not from New York and what if you're not poor? Yes. And she over here is going to talk about, you know, the idea of having IDs. And the funny thing is the left wants IDs for everything. They want them. If you want to shovel snow and get a job for Mondami, you got to have an ID. If you want to go to a Bruce Springsteen, you got to have an ID. You got to have an ID, but not voting. No, no, no. They don't believe that's very important at all. And that was, that was pretty funny. All those contradictions. It's going to be funny because his whole point is to break capital. He's going to have to have a lot of money. He's going to have a lot of money. He's going supermarkets by having the state pay for the rent and the billing and the insurance so that the city, the city, I mean that as a state, they will have an edge. But what he doesn't understand is it's going to be communism. So the employees are going to be, oh, I'm so tired as they walk and shelve at half point because there's going to be no incentive unless he has little medals like people's hero. Lettuce Bundler gets the hero of the republic working award, you know, or he gets the Mondami medal for courage and getting the most baskets back to the front door like the Soviet Union did. But they're not going to have a lot of incentives to work or keep it clean. And it's going to be a disaster. And they're not going to put private places out like they think they are. And then you're going to have the homeless people and they're going to the homeless people are not going to go in there and say, I love Mondami because he lets me defecate, urinate, inject, you know, and fornicate on the street. He's a great guy. They're going to say, hey, I hear you get free food over there and nobody does anything. Let's go over there and get some stuff. And that's going to be very interesting to see. Yes, I agree. Like every other government program, it's going to be run like an entitlement for the employees rather than anything that it's intended for. So since we're on Mondami, he's also, this week came out, his universal child care plan has shown that it's going to cost 50% more than he thought, a whopping $9 billion annually. I don't know where he's going to get the money from. Oh, I know where he's going to get the money from. He's going to take it from other programs, probably the police and things like that. I guess there was no health, there was no child care anywhere in New York. I didn't know that. I see people go out in the street in New York on almost every night and they swarm places. So they must have child care, right? People are up there at midnight. Uber has a brisk business in New York. So something like that. They act like all these things don't exist. That's what's so funny. You know, they asked, Martha McCallum had that guy from Venezuela who they took his whole family's property and they'd wiped them out. And they had this socialist who was just, he, this guy was, you know, he was a Spanish speaking native Venezuelan. And he was saying that 8 million people had been ethnically cleansed basically and had to flee that had capital. And here was this little, you know, this guy who was a Spanish speaking native Venezuelan. And he was saying that he was a spoiled brat American socialist, giving him a lecture on why socialism would work. And it was just insane that she had no answers at all about how capitalism worked or profits and that people, you know, it's a meritocratic system and it gives more goods and services at a more affordable price because it takes advantage of human self-interest and tries to use that for positive profit. And she was just, it's, it's, they don't even take time to read or study or anything, these people. And they're all, it's funny, every time you see a socialist, not all of them, but so many of them are upper middle class white people whose parents are professionals and they're downwardly mobile. They're sinking down into the lower middle class because they borrowed a ton of money to get a worthless degree. And they're, you know, they're, you know, they're, you know, they're and they like the nightlife. They like the big city charm and the culture and all that. And they, they don't, they don't have any money and they want to live like, you know, their Ro Khanna's wife, or they want to live like Ms. Mondami, or they think they're Hassan Piker with his Porsche. And they, I mean, those people in some ways were capitalists. Well, Victor, since we're on government and the ineffectiveness of government, via the socialists, there's a epidemic in LA of typhus that is carried by fleas on rats and it's getting worse and worse. And so they've had the worst year yet in 2026. And reading the New York Post article, they can't keep the streets clean and they can't, they find it difficult to kill the rodents because the state legislation has made the effective means of killing rodents, you know, illegal. Well, why doesn't Karen Bass just tell the rodents that it's against the law to do that? And the state doesn't like it. You know, I was mentioning about the democratic socialists, their ideas to change the rules when you don't like it. And they don't realize why the rules were there. It kind of reminds me, Plato wrote four critical dialogues about the trial and conviction and death of Socrates. And in the Crito, he's been sentenced to death. He's going to have to drink. So, his friends come in, Crito and others, and they say, we can break you out. And then Socrates says, but there's a reason when you get convicted that you have to be punished. And all of a sudden he says, he makes the laws talk. And here's what the laws would say. And then, hoi nomoi, the laws start talking to him. So, you didn't object to the laws until you found out you enjoyed their protection. You lived in this sufficient place. You lived in this sufficient sophisticated city. Then when it went away, you want to get rid of them and violate us only because of your, why do you think we came, we came over centuries? Why do you, why do you think we're here? We're not here just to kill you. We're to deter people from breaking out of jail, or we're trying to deter people from breaking the law. And you broke the law according, whether you did or not, a jury of your peers found you guilty. It's, and so he accepts this sentence. And there are ancient laws. And one of them is the law of the world. And one of them is lice cause typhus. And so since the medieval period, we have discovered in the West that you take sewage and you transmit it into a sewer far distant from drinking water. Number two, that you do not let people defecate or eat or throw garbage on the street because it attracts rats who have lice that spread typhus. And so the great typhus, one of the reasons that you could argue that, um, the Byzantine empire failed was in the sixth century under the Renaissance of Justinian. This was Hagia Sophia, the Justinian law code. They had an outbreak of a plague, bubonic plague. At least we think it was bubonic. People have argued it might have been typhus, but it was spread by lice and it destroyed half a million people. And finally they had nowhere to bury them. They were putting them in. What I'm getting at is there's ancient laws that cannot be violated and we've been violating them. We're letting people on the street defecate. And I've seen it in San Francisco and other places where they defecate on the street. Urinate, you can smell it. And I've seen people in San Francisco fornicate. And I've seen people in jail. And I've seen people who defecate, and there's ancient laws that say that's not healthy, not just for you, but for people around you. You put that syringe on the sidewalk, a child could step on it and that happened. If you are sick when dysentery and that feces is put on the sidewalk and somebody walks on it and then they walk into a hotel carpet and then a baby is walking barefoot on the carpet, you can spread that. That's why we have 500 years of medical practice and hygiene. Hygiene, a Greek word. We know how to stop that, but it took about hundreds of millions of deaths to understand how they spread. And we just threw it out. And the left came in, ah, we don't care about the Hippocratic method. We don't care about symptoms, diagnosis, therapy, prognosis, the Western medical tradition. In our infinite wisdom, we're empathetic. And we're not going to tell Joe Smith that he can't lay a hand on a baby. We're not going to tell him that he can't lay a hand on a baby. We're going to tell him that he can't lay a hand on a baby. We're going to tell him that Joe Smith that he can't lay a hand on a baby. We' I grew up in a farm, so I'm very practical. The first thing that goes into my mind when I saw the Spanish influx is, where do they defecate and urinate? I didn't see any porta-potties. Where do they get 50 ounces of water per day? Where is their food? Where is their shelter? And that whole mountainside was going to be covered with feces and urine and people getting hurt and falling. And so, empathy is always abstract with the left. They never look at the concrete. So, when Karen Bass says that she's the expert on homeless and the homelessness has just skyrocketed onto her, what she basically said is, I've exposed millions of Los Angelesers. I've exposed millions of Latinos to infectious diseases that were conquered 500 years ago, 400 years ago. And she did. So, people got, I remember the city worker who got sick. She was working in City Hall. And she got sick and she had, I think, a welt or a postule on her leg and she almost died. And she didn't, they didn't know what it was. It was typhus. And she got it from the homeless people right outside L.A. City Hall. And so. You can't violate these laws. They're there for a reason. Public health is there for a reason. And they think they can, shoplifting laws are there for a reason to deter people from destroying property and private business. Well, Montadami's going to find out all the troubles he's going to have. That's what I liked about the old age when I rebelled, you know, as a kid. Yeah. We had this principle and. Eighth grade and it was high school and everybody wanted to wear it because the Beatles came out and it was 1967. And the rule was you couldn't have hair touching your ear. And so I had hair touching my ear and so did my twin brother. And the vice principal called us in. I said, you got to cut that. And I said, I'm not going to cut it. He says, there's age old rules that we don't want lice in your hair. Yeah. Because they can. Yeah. Red disease. look at all these women. Yes, but women know how to wear long hair. They shampoo. I said, no, they don't. I said, don't argue with me, Victor. Tomorrow you're not staying on campus. So I had to go back to the barber who had just given me a haircut. And he said, haircut, you paid me $1.25. I'm not going to do it for free. So I had to pay him another $0.75 and cut it just touching it. And then I went back and the vice president came up to me and said, it's touching. I said, come on, you're kind of a tyrant. He said, no, but I'm going to do your break. Watch this. He brings out of his pocket, a little pen holder, and there's a scissors in it. He goes, and cuts it because you pass. And the point I'm making is all that generation had been in the army and they'd gone through all, you know, hygiene and you don't want to get people infected in a big dormitory. And there were rules there. I'm not saying that they, we're always right or wrong or couldn't be modulated, but this arrogance of this generation that we're going to throw away centuries of rules of decorum and behavior that prevented us from dying and getting infected and killing each other. You know, they really think that human nature is a walk in a tulip garden or something. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Especially with our growing cities, the population size. Did you see what, that was so funny. I just, remembered it. They were quoting and criticizing Trump and they said that he had said the cities were dirty. And did you hear those socialists? Yeah. Wasn't, was it Piker? And they said, well, Donald Trump says that all the blue cities are dirty and they're filthy dirty. And then they said, well, he doesn't like dirt, does he? And I'm thinking. That was Hassan Piker. Yeah. Yeah. I thought you could say a lot of things. You could argue they're not, not dirty in some cases, but you're basically saying that because Donald Trump likes things clean, that that means he's paranoid about dirt. You didn't say that there weren't dirt there. In fact, he gave Trump a compliment. He's not like us. He wants a clean city. They were, they were actively complimentary. They were like, he likes things clean. He's weird. He likes to take a shower and wear clean clothes. All right, Victor. Let's go. Let's go ahead and take a break. And then we'll come back and talk a little bit now about the Cambridge professor. And we will look at some collaboration of retired generals between the U.S. and China. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Every state is home to significant historic sites that tell the American story. But not every site is telling that story honestly and fairly. That's why the Heritage Foundation created the Heritage Guide to Historic Sites. This interactive guide equips American citizens with the tools they need to tell the American story. And it's a great way to get to know the tools they need to enjoy the sites that depict some of the greatest moments in our nation's history, analyzing them for historical accuracy and provides resources for families or educators planning a visit from Mount Vernon to Independence Hall to Gettysburg and more. Americans deserve transparency, and sites that steward our history faithfully deserve our gratitude. The Heritage Guide to Historic Sites invites every American to rediscover the places and stories that define our nation, whether it's across the country or in your backyard. Visit historicsites.heritage.org to start your adventure today. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Victor, I forgot to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Nellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution. And his association with Hillsdale is he's the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. So Victor, a professor at Cambridge by the name of Jason Arday has been caught for plagiarizing not just his thesis by 188 sentences, but also articles that he wrote after that and fraud for showing or saying that he worked for the University of Ohio, the University of Durham. And the University of Glasgow, which. Everything was. Go ahead. But just one thing for your listeners, that this comes from an article from the National Review, and boy, was it brutal. They went through everything. You know, Claudine Gay didn't really deserve tenure at Stanford in political science. Then she went to Harvard and had no scholarship. But in the aftermath of George Floyd, there were rumors she'd plagiarized her thesis. And nobody did anything. And then they fired her. And, you know, the Duke Lacrosse thing was a big joke. The woman involved, who was later convicted of murder, had, you know, confessed that it was all she falsely accused, even though the academics never withdrew their support for her. We know about Juicy Smollett. That was a big fake. But these were one-dimensional fakes, one-offs. You know, there's one aspect. This guy always. He lied about every single thing, about his medical condition, autism. He couldn't speak until he was, what, 11 or something, that he ran. Did he say he did 35, 33 marathons in 35 days? He ran 300 miles in three days, and he did 35 marathons in 30 days. And then he said his cumulative distance was at 600, I don't know, 60,000. I don't know what it was, but it would be a world's record. And then he just plagiarized this book. So everything he said, oh, he didn't go to Ohio State. He didn't go to any of these places. And he made it completely up. And every time they had crossed, they just politely, well, we don't want to be rude, but we saw something. Could you clarify? You're a racist. You're a racist. You're a racist. No, please, please, please don't call me a racist. There's anything but that, child molester, but not racist. And he got it. He's 37 years old, and he's at dawn at Cambridge, and it was complete fake. And it's two things. It's a commentary on white guilt, and how paranoid they are to be called racist, and how these operators really grift them. And the other thing is how corrupt academia is. It has no standards whatsoever. To make him a full, what we would call a professor here in the United States at the leading university, along with Oxford and Britain. I mean, I grew up in academia where we in the United States would follow who was going to be the Regis professor of Greek at Oxford, or the Regis professor of ancient history. And there would be about eight or nine candidates. And then when we would be graduate students or young professors, we would get in the lounge and argue back and forth. Well, he's written three books. Well, he wrote 17 seminal articles. Yes, but he reinvented the entire idea of the Mycenaean language, this kind of stuff. So they were such coveted places, so hard to get, and the rules were so. But today's academia, it was just a joke. I mean, he was a complete pathological liar. And all he had to do was call people racist. And plagiarism, I mean, gosh, it's everywhere now. And that's a rule. You can't. It's an ancient rule. You can't. If everybody didn't follow that rule, you wouldn't have anything authorship. Everybody would just steal from somebody. You know what I'm saying? Somebody wrote me the other day, a good friend of mine, and said, somebody on TV was parodying what you said. And I thought, yeah, but I didn't write it down. And there's no plagiarism laws. So I don't care. Maybe it's a good argument, and the person repeating it, all more power to them. But if they had taken a written word from more than. But see, it's the same idea that the rules never represented anything, that a world is chaotic when everybody plagiarizes and invents stuff. And Caltech, in an adjacent article to that, has a whole team now of experts. So when you write your letter and you do the typical generational letter, I want to go to Caltech, because when I was 16, I went to Zimbabwe and dug a well for poor people. But then I had to rush back to teach violin to a Hispanic group. And then my brother, who is trans, I had to protect him from bullies. And then during this whole time, I did a lot of coding, and I started two startups. And then I wrote a seminal work on linguistics. That's what they'd send in. And oh, by the way, I don't want to mention it, but I am a person of color. So they have like five experts that go through all those letters. That's wonderful. And so you can't do that. And what's the ancient principle deterrence? Once it gets out that you can't fool Caltech, the work for them will be easier, because people won't do it. But human nature being what it is. But all these ancient rules that we just throw away, whether it's. it's. lice on this infect you, or whether it's plagiarism, or it's shoplifting. You know, Glenn Reynolds on Instapun, he's a really good guy. He's a really smart law professor. But he uses this word unexpectedly when something happened. Like, he'll have a little article that will say, San Francisco reduced all theft below values of 950. And then they had an article that said they were surprised unexpectedly that crime went up. Or the IRS decided in some cases not to audit tips, but unexpectedly they found that there was a huge loss of the treasury from tip. And it's that, and then I was laughing, but then I actually started looking for that word. And he's right. It appears everywhere in the mainstream media unexpectedly when something happens that's completely logical for anybody other than a leftist fool, you know, an imbecile. And they use the word unexpectedly. And it's really funny that the left always, and they're not self-aware, you know what I mean? They're not self-aware at all. That is so true. So, yes. And again, that was, the name of the professor at the University of Cambridge was Jason Arday, if anybody wants to look it up. And I, two shakes or two. His memoir comes out. Hand out to National Review, because that article just ripped and tore and tore and ripped. Yeah, somebody mentioned Baron, what was the Baron's name? They wrote a novel about him in the 18th century. Munchen. Munchen. Malchester. Munchen. Munchen. They made a movie. But that was a famous novel. And it was about this German aristocrat. And he's sued, as I remember. The author who remained, like in the 18th century, I think it was, or early 19th, he was anonymous. He was afraid of getting sued. But he took all of his lies and he made a satire that the Baron had gone to the moon, the Baron had fought off alligators and stuff. It was really funny. But this is, he's a Baron. He's a Baron like that. It's completely fabricated. Yeah, you know what? That was on a list of people who had signed a petition on behalf of Jason Arday. And on it, the National Review mentions, too, they said, oh, the people who signed were that guy, Hitler. And I love fraud as well. So, I don't know. That's a shame. He'll pay. He'll be like Jussie Smollett. He'll pay no price. And then the left will say this. Well, Jussie may have gone confused about the details, but what happened could have happened. It could have happened. Right. So, Jason could, he could have met racism that unjustly accused him of something he didn't do. Now, maybe it didn't, but it could have. They always use the optative move. Yeah. All right, Victor. Let's turn to a completely different subject. There is a Sanya initiative, and it is, it brings together retired generals from China and the United States. And Natalie Winters did a report on it, and she found that they had been working for more than a decade, but that this whole Sanya initiative was funded by the China Association for International Friendly Contact. Friendly Contact. Friendly Contact. Which was just a friendly contact. It was a front for intelligence collection and conducting propaganda according to a U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission of the Trump government. I don't understand it. So, you have all these distinguished four-star admirals and generals, and the Chinese come up and go, would you like to meet with your Chinese counterparts now that you're all related? I mean, you're all retired. And you can meet semi-annually, maybe, at a very plush conference. Yeah. And we will have a small stipend. And you will go there, and the Chinese person will say something like, I'm just imagining now, but no doubt they did. You know, when I was Chinese chairman of the Southwest Quadrant of Air Defense, I never really knew how far this SAM-17 would go when I hit a plane. Did you ever have that? Yeah, I had that. And that's what they talk about. And we're supposed to think that's normal. It would be like somebody called him in China and said, are you a retired classics professor? I said, yes. We're going to pay you $50,000 to go over to China and talk to Chinese retired classics, just to have brainstorming. And then the guy started asking me questions like, do you live next to a military base in Lemoore? Do you, you know what I'm saying? Or something like that. Why would I be so stupid to do that? That's just insane. I related that Fang Fang thing, you know, when she came up. But I made sure the door was open and that my assistant was there. So that's when I really thought that Eric Swalwell was a complete idiot. Because she wasn't that attractive. She wasn't that skilled. And she was so blatantly conniving, switching her accent. Anybody would see that. So don't these generals see that? I would comment, but I know a lot of four-star generals. And I'm kind of in hot water because during the first term, I got very angry when I wasn't trying to support just blanketly Trump. But if you are a retired general, and if you must follow as courts have held, that even though you're retired and subject to recall, you must comply with the military uniform code of military justice. It came after Douglas MacArthur started trashing Harry Truman. And it tried to get the Air Force and Marines and everybody on the same page. I think it was 1952 or three. But on Article 88, it says, no general officer shall publicly disparage the commander in chief or the cabinet office. Okay. And what did you see when Trump was there? Trump was there. Mr. Four-star, I won't mention. He's Mussolini. Mr. Four-star, he conducts the border like they did in Auschwitz. Mr. Four-star, the people on the other side of the beach on Normandy were, I never thought we would be kind of like the people on the other side of the beach, i.e. Nazis. Mr. Four-star, he's a liar. Mr. Four-star, I think he should be removed sooner than later when there was a scheduled election coming, meaning no election. So then I thought they weren't prosecuted at all. But then I asked myself, because we're getting to the rules, has anybody heard a four-star attack the president? I haven't this time around. I haven't heard one four-star say that Donald Trump, as they did in the past, is Hitler-like, Mussolini-like, a liar, a fascist. I'm quoting Mark Milley and all the other ones, McCaffrey and all of them. They haven't said a word. And I think the reason is that they think there's deterrence now that if they do that publicly, that Pete Hexeth and the military will file a complaint under Article 88 and prosecute them. And that's a court-martial offense. So there was a rule for that. And the rule was if it was enforced, people, you can't have retired officers calling Obama or anybody that, you know what I'm saying? But they thought Trump was an exception. And once they didn't enforce a rule, it got completely out of hand. You had Mark Milley, remember? He was, after he retired, but before Trump took office, he started talking about Trump in interviews as the worst fascist he'd ever seen. Fascist. And then as soon as Trump came in on the 21st of January of 2025, he zipped his mouth. Now, why did he do that? Because he knew that he was breaking the law under Biden and Biden approved of him. He knew that he was breaking the law under Biden and Biden approved of what he was doing. But somebody in the Trump administration would make an example of him. There's a reason these laws exist. You should try to follow them, no matter who you are. It's an unwritten law that when you retire as a four-star general, you should not go meet with your Chinese counterpart, especially in China, if they did so. You shouldn't take any money whatsoever from the Chinese government. I mean, I don't think if Hitler in 1938 said to George Marshall and a lot of people, you guys are organizing your army and you've got some Billy Mitchell, I remember him. Why don't you meet us in Austria and we'll talk about the Luftwaffe with you in America? You think anybody would do that? That would be nuts. And so I don't know why they do it, but I have to be very careful because I know a lot of generals and I criticize them for what they were doing. And I've said also, I think it's wise when people say we need to broaden our procurement beyond Lockheed and General Dynamics. Dynamics, Northrop, Raytheon, Boeing, and start looking at these startup companies like Anduril and others. I don't mean startup in the sense that they're small. They're billion-dollar companies, but they have a different approach with quantity, not just quality. So instead of a $120 million fighter, they're trying to get $5,000 drones. We need that diversity and procurement. And one of the ways you can get it is you can say that we're not having retired, forced star generals rotate into corporate defense contracting lobbyist positions or on board members, at least, say, 10 years. I'm not saying they're doing anything illegally, but it just protects them, too. When you come out, don't go work for a defense contractor because they're going to hire you so you can call up your subordinates who still respect you as their commanding officer, even though you're retired, and they will give you on-due. Consideration. Yes. And it is interesting, though, that this. And I'm sure I'm going to get an email about this in about five minutes. Sanya Initiative. It was called the Sanya Initiative, so I'm sure these generals were introduced to it as the Sanya Initiative. And how would they know it was funded by the Chinese Association for International Friendly Contact? Do you know what I mean? I mean, and then that that was a front for gathering intelligence and propaganda. Why do you think any university would allow the Chinese government to set up a Confucius Institute on their campus if it wasn't to spy on Chinese students and hold them to account if they got too friendly or they were using them to conduct espionage? I think they're all closed down now. They caught them doing that. You shouldn't. You should be careful, but it's hard to always know. Yeah, when people. When you write columns and you're an op-ed writer, you will get people that will write to you and say, this is. You did a great job. I love that column. By the way, have you thought about this? And it's some product, weapon that they want you to push. And then they will offer you, not money, but, you know, when they see you, why don't you get on the plane? You know, that kind of stuff. Or have you ever thought about real estate? Real estate, Victor. You know, here's a good thing you might want to. You don't want to do any of that. None. Can't. And you don't want to be rude about it either. Oh, how dare you? Just say, you know, that's so nice of you to offer. Because it is nice, but you can't do it. You just. There was a very famous, I won't mention his name, columnist who was lauding the Department of Education's outreach program, and he wrote a weekly column. And then it turned out that he had a huge grant from the Department of Education. That was paying him. So, there you go. And it ruined his career. Yes. Wow. So, maybe it should. Well, Victor, you were talking about Hassan Piker having a vocabulary of about 800 words. And we've often said things about Kamala Harris. And we had her. 500. 500. And we had a viewer write to us by the name of Royce. And he says, Victor, you made me laugh. You told Sammy that Kamala Harris' vocabulary was 500 words. I'm not sure this is accurate, but AI said it was 426 based on her public speaking. Oh, my gosh. I wasn't trying to be. You're overly generous. I wasn't trying to be just mean. I was. When you study classical languages, if you have a good professor, and I had excellent professors, they would tell you that noun, verb. predicate, nominative case, verb, accusative case. And then the basic words that can describe reality, I saw you, he is big, so that you could read baby Greek, they'd all say, we would like you to have a 500-word vocabulary. So, you could just string together like C-spot run, like the McGuffey readers we used to read in first grade that were. Still in circulation. And that's what she had. So, as soon as I heard her speak, it was all repetition, and it was all monosyllabic, you know. I was border czar. I was space czar. I was vice. I am vice president. And it's just a word loop. And then she would recycle it. And Hasan Parker is the same way. I thought he was going to this eloquent Socratic figure that. But every time I see him now, he has this. As I said, he just looks at his phone for the prompt, and then he says, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, as you know, as you know, you know, like, like, like. Saturday night, they did so many skits on that, you know. The guy with the name, you know, like, wow. I thought he would know that. Or maybe he can't help it. Maybe it's an affectation, or it's a tick or something. Yeah. You made me think of that woman that used to come on Gutfeld that would imitate Kamala Harris. She was almost perfect at it. Yeah, she was. She was. And she may come back if Kamala runs again. Yeah. Yeah. So you talked about how you had students that were very qualified, and then you had a minority group student who said he didn't have to perform as well because he wasn't going to have any problem getting in. So you thought that was good or bad? Well, I have a Michelle Azar who is writing about that, and she says, I know a little about that because that was my own thinking until just a few years ago. When that's all you know, and that's all you've been told, that's how you will think. I'm not condoning that thinking. I'm just trying to put context into that young man's words. It's awful that he thought that way. But I. I also understand where he's coming from. Rather than assuming the worst, i.e. that he was a complete jerk, he may have also been a product of his environment. Christ has helped me see differently. But it wasn't overnight, unfortunately. It took years. I completely agree that thinking perpetuates the soft bigotry of low expectation thinking. It's wrong. But that has to come through education. And honestly, Jesus. We are. Entitled to nothing. I tell my kids that all the time to be thankful for what they've been given instead of ticked about what they don't have. Only through Christ can we embrace most fully this humble attitude. That's my two cents from a formerly crazy Latina liberal young lady who now has 10 amazing children and is happily married. Yes. Ten. Ten. That's it. I've only, you know, I must have had in my career. Five hundred African-American students. I only had one who said that. She was a girl who had gone to Wellesley and had kind of washed out and gone back to Cal State Fresno. She was from kind of a wealthy family and she wanted to make up the courses she'd had at Wellesley so she could, she could go back. And there were Latin courses and she would come in. And she was so sweet. well-dressed, perfect grammar, Dixon's syntax, and I'm going to really ace these. And then she would flunk the test. Every one. And I would say, you're not going to pass this. You're not studying. She'll say, well, I don't have to study. I said, why? She said, I've been damaged. I've been traumatic because I'm black. And that's the only person ever said that. All the rest were just normal, like anybody else. But somebody had told her that. And I said, that's going to destroy you. You're never going to do anything if you believe that. And that's the worst thing a person can do. It's not just about race. It is to feel that you're a victim of cosmic forces. Sometimes people are, but if you believe that, it becomes obsessive compulsive. I learned that when we had a really bad financial year and a neighbor, I said, the price of raisins dropped from $1,400 to $400. And I think we're going to go broke. And this neighbor, I thought he was going to say, yeah, I know how it is. You know what he said? I hope you do. I said, why? He said, I saw you're painting your house. You're doing a good job for me. I said, what do you mean I'm doing a good job? Because I'll own it next year. I said, why would you own it? He said, because any idiot could see that Thompson seedless were overplanted. So I didn't, I pulled in my horns and was very careful. I saw you boys out there. I said, we were pruning our own vines. You were riding around in a truck. He said, I farmed 1,200 acres. You farmed 180. You should be out there pruning, but you're not going to make it. And I'm going to own that house. And I was really shocked at that. But he said, don't make excuses because the price fell. Prices fall. And then I got curious. So I went into my grandfather's diaries every single day for 60 years, 1930. Thirty-one. I don't know how I'm going to feed the kids the price of raisins that was, in 1921, $300 a ton. We just sold for $31. $31 for cattle feed. And he lived. He made it. Survived. I don't know. I'm not suggesting that the capitalist system cannot be cruel. But you've got to find a way to survive without blaming others for your predicament. All right. Well, Victor, on that, we'd like to thank our audience for joining us on this Friday. And thank you for your wisdom. Yes. If I sound a little hoarse, it's not just that I have some lung problems, but we are in a dust bowl. I've never seen the heat so hot and the dust from almond shaking, almond sweeping, and soon almond picking up. We live right in the middle of a 40-acre orchard, so it's zero visibility out there. All right. And I'm whining. But, Victor, you should have taken your own advice. That's not because you're coughing. You would have, you know, overcome the problem. All right. Victor, thank you for that. Yes. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off. Thank you for watching and listening. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. 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