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Victor Davis Hanson: The FBI’s Secret Trump Probe, Birthright Citizenship, and the WNBA’s Race War

90m 24s

Victor Davis Hanson: The FBI’s Secret Trump Probe, Birthright Citizenship, and the WNBA’s Race War

The podcast features a detailed critique of contemporary American culture, focusing on the WNBA’s increasing polarization, where racial and gender tensions have intensified around athletes like Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham. The host, Victor Davis Hanson, argues that the league has become a stage for performative conflict, with players, coaches, and officials targeting white athletes using transphobic and racially charged tactics. This reflects a wider societal trend rooted in postmodern, DEI-driven ideologies that prioritize identity politics over objective standards. Hanson criticizes the erosion of civic education, historical awareness, and national values—highlighting how these issues manifest in sports, immigration policy, and law enforcement. He blames flawed university curricula and critical theory programs for normalizing moral relativism, where accusations of oppression are used to justify harmful behavior. The discussion also extends to political hypocrisy, such as the misuse of birthright citizenship, the politicization of federal agencies, and the failure of institutions to hold individuals accountable. Hanson asserts that these dynamics are symptoms of a deeper societal decline, where identity-based victimhood replaces accountability and integrity. He calls for a return to traditional values, emphasizing self-reliance, historical literacy, and strong family foundations as essential to preserving American civilization. The episode critiques what it sees as a dangerous trend of moral decay, where systemic bias and performative activism have replaced fair competition and civic responsibility.

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FanDuel is now available everywhere in the U.S. So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are. Including these places. Make this your most rewarding season ever with FanDuel. Age and location restrictions apply. Product availability varies by market. See FanDuel.com for eligibility. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. That whole WNBA, people, they only go now, audiences, it's because of Caitlin Clark. And I guess the players who hate them also are savvy and they're thinking. So what we're going to do is every time we see a white player who's doing very well, we're going to hit them in the face when they're on the floor. We'll make more money than we ever have because fans will want to see us go out and beat up people. And then go on social media and stir up racial animosity. It's a circus. It's a sideshow. Well, hello, ladies and hello, gentlemen, and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson. In his own words, I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You're 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. He's a distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College. He's also a senior contributor to The Daily Signal, which is the producer on Happy Home, not only of this podcast, but of Victor Davis Hanson in a few words. They do that four times a week. They're about eight-minute videos. Check that out. Also check out Victor's website. The blade of PerseusVictorHansen.com is the address. Please do consider subscribing. There's tons of free stuff there. But if you're a fan of Victor, you want to read the two exclusives. The pieces he writes every week for the Blade of Perseus. And he also does an exclusive video every week. It's $65 a year. You just want to do it a month or two, go ahead. It's $6.50 a month. But take the whole year and you'll, it's discounted. It's like getting two months free. This episode, Victor, as you know, we are just talking on Sunday, August 9th. This episode will be up on Tuesday, August 11th. I'm told I should give the year also. It's the 26th. So much to talk about, Victor. There's an amazing amount of trans slash basketball craziness. We have Tucker Carlson's 10-point plan. We have another look-see, look-see, expose of the FBI going after Donald Trump in his first term. This is the Oxford comma case. This is a birthright citizenship. The president has put out an executive order on that. So much more to get your wisdom on, Victor. We will do that when we come back from these initial important messages. I'm Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI. We're working every day to make sure that AI is safe, secure, and aligned with American values. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson. In his. Own words. Victor, before we start, I'm springing this on you, but last night, Turner Classic Movies was Steve McQueen night. So it was about, I think it was 10 o'clock here on the East Coast, and Bullitt came on. And I've seen Bullitt now probably 20 times. It is such a great movie. You like it? I don't know if I ever liked it. Oh, I love it. Is it like a 15-minute car chase? Yes. I saw it not long. I watched the. Thomas Crown Affair and that thing. Both movies, there's something about how they're filmed. They're beautifully filmed. I could watch Thomas Crown Affair over and over. That chess game scene he has, that's a little. That's Norman Jewison. That was The Rise of Faye Dunaway. She had just done Bonnie and Clyde. She had that hit. And then Steve McQueen had The Sand Pebbles coming up. Yeah, he'd done The Great Escape. The Great Escape. Yeah, he was. But the scenes of San Francisco are just wonderful. I know. I always thought that was filmed in, what, 72? Maybe even late 60s. 60s. Yeah, late 60s. When we used to go up to San Francisco, I thought that was like the hippie movement. Everything was dirty. But today it looks pristine compared to San Francisco today. I don't think we have any idea the fall of civilization from the supposed fall of civilization in the 70s. 70s looked like, I don't know, utopia compared today, you know? Turner Classic Movies is reminding us of what life was like. We were driving yesterday, and it should have been an easy hour and 40-minute drive. And we get just past, on the 99, the highway of death, just past the last exit before our exit to get to the farm. And there's a bottleneck. We sat there. We sat there. We sat there. We sat there. We sat there for over an hour. And they shut down all three lanes in Selma. It made the national news. What happened? Well, a box truck, you know, one of those box trucks, medium-sized truck, had a flat tire or he had some kind of, and he had pulled over to the right lane. And a truck driver with a double trailer with 8,500 gallons of gasoline swerved over to the showroom. And he was hit in the shoulder and hit him and caused a huge inferno. Neither one was injured. But, you know, it's such a therapeutic culture. There's no ID of any of the drivers they didn't release, of course. So we don't know what the status of the person who caused the accident was. Was he here legally or not? I don't know. But he seemed to be, seemed, I want to make sure that's not confirmed, to be at fault any time you hit somebody that's safely on the side of the road. And then when they, one of the highway patrolmen said, this was, this could have been a lot worse. It could have been that two people, and this, you know, had a kind of a good end to it. I said, I thought to myself, no, it didn't. You, the main artery north to south in California for, I guess, 12 hours was shut down. I don't think it opened fully until 10 p.m. And it just ruined the Saturday commute or vacations. Thousands of people. And then it had this toxic, billowing gasoline, black fume as the whole trailer, its plastics, its rubber all went up in the air over Selma. And it's, what I'm trying to say is we don't really weigh all of the discomfort to the average citizen because we're so worried that we don't want to identify a driver who did it. And we don't want to allot blame who did it. And the first preliminary report said, well, he made an improper lane change. I don't know what that means. If it's what I see every time I go over to Sanford, it means some crazy truck driver is just the last moment moving sometimes with a signal and sometimes not, either from the middle to the left or from the right if there's three lanes to the middle. And the presumative assumption is, do you want to challenge 20 tons? Go ahead. So it's a very dysfunctional. So a little sidebar on how dysfunctional this state has become. It's everywhere, Victor. Similarly, maybe related, in my town, Milford, Connecticut, last week, a senior, an old lady was attacked by a young man just in a regular neighborhood. It wasn't like on the, it wasn't a sales, commercial strip, right? And what, he was 21, and he was shouting a la Akbar as he was beating her up. And two guys just happened. So you're reading the story, and you and I were like, okay, what are they going to, were they going to give this guy's name and say who he is and why? Nothing. None of that. None of that. And don't we deserve to know that? They had the other guy who, did you see the guy this week who just walked across the street and hit that girl in the face and then started, got over the black guy, and she was a young white girl, and he started screaming at her, knocked out. Chasing her. Yeah. And he'd been knocked. Nine felonies, more than that. And they knew about him. They let him out. And DeCarlos Brown has not even gone up for trial yet, because I guess he's mentally unfit. As if anybody is mentally fit who goes and slits the throat of a girl that's innocently, you know, reading her phone on the, I don't understand that. Yes, he is mentally unfit. Nobody normal does that. That does not mean he shouldn't face life imprisonment without parole. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I don't understand why. I don't get that. Somebody put up a meme, I saw it yesterday, of six or seven of these criminals of infamous final crimes and 54 arrests, one murder, you know, 37 arrests, et cetera. Just how frequent, like the guy in Northern Virginia who killed that lady at the bus stop. Like how many times do you have to get arrested and threaten society? When you When you go look at this and you think very rationally, disinterestedly, and you say, where does this come from? All roads lead to the university, the postmodern university. The schools of education that teach this, the DEI programs, the criminal, critical legal theory, critical race theory, critical law enforcement theory, all of these bad ideas originate there. Then they seep into the media, then they seep into the bureaucracy, and the people don't want any of them. And I'm getting, you know, I'm really going through a transformation as somebody who spent 55 years in the academic world. Not that I did it, you know, I didn't have other things to do, but it's a toxic experience now. I think on, except for the STEM courses and computers, science, all of the professional schools like medicine, I'm leaving law and education out. And the PhD program. But MBAs and all that stuff, there might be positive, but I don't see any positive thing the university is doing anymore. When you see Claudine Gay, did you just see her salary that was announced? No, I assume it's over a million dollars. It's over a million, but unless I read the article sloppily, she had some kind of bonus from the first year or something. She got, maybe had reached over $3 million. She should have been fired, summarily fired. She was a plagiarist. And they made her the president of Harvard University when they knew there were rumors that she had plagiarized. And so we'll talk about the Cambridge, Jason Arday fiasco, but the universities have no credibility anymore. None. They have no right to criticize anybody. They will not police their own. They just won't do it if it's a DEI matter. They just won't. It's similar, Victor. I just saw today, talking about Jason Arday, which we may get to in the next episode we record to give it a lot of time, but it kicked up, this investigation kicked up that the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore president for now for about nine years, name is Heidi Anderson. So her 1986 dissertation, which is on computer assisted instruction in pharmacy education, it's a nursing. Degree was a huge plagiarism lift from a 1984 paper by somebody else who was an associate professor at Grand Valley State College in MI. Bald-faced plagiarists. Well, if you can be a plagiarist and run Harvard, I guess you can be a plagiarist and run University of Maryland, Eastern Shore. But it seems like it's rife throughout the industry. I would just say if anybody is writing a PhD in social science and any of the title of the thesis or the application. The abstract has anything to do with the social sciences or DEI, I would just, I would, guilt by association, I'd be deductive and I'd say read this very carefully because they, most people from 2020 on in the university thought there are no consequences to normal transgressions because of DEI. And if you can say that you are a tormented trans person or you're, you're a victim of misogynist thought or homophobia or racism, whatever that critical race theory, white supremacy, any of that stuff, then you get a pass. And when you get a pass, human nature being what it is, you will take advantage of that. And that's what's happened in the last six years. And the universities think they were so neat and cool and they were bragging how they were the avatars of social change. And all they did was go over the cliff and destroy the rest of the world. The reputation had been built up for a century. Yeah. And create an army of leftist orcs also. So, yeah, unemployable, but demanding six figure salaries living in Brooklyn types. Yeah. Hey, Victor, let's talk about the FBI, but I just have to say for folks who are watching this, you'll notice over Victor's shoulder and you see over my shoulder, the counter revolution, September 8th. So less than a month away now, folks. So on Victor's website, you'll find the link and do order it. So I'm picking this off of Kane Koa the Great on X, and he writes, "Breaking. Classified FBI memos show the Bureau opened a secret probe on President Trump himself in May 2017, codenamed Oxford, alleging he was a Russian asset for firing Comey. Signed off by FBI General Counsel James Baker and Chief Bill Priestap. McCabe and Rosenstein were told it triggered Mueller. The problem was they already knew Russian collusion was dead. Agent Barnett, by early 2017, there was no evidence of collusion by Flynn, Page, or Papadopoulos. He called the whole probe collusion clue. Pick any person, any activity, called it evidence. Steele's own sub-source Dancheco was suspected of being a Russian asset. And told the FBI his info was hearsay. Three days after the Oxford comma opened, lead agent Strozek told Lisa Page, "No big there, there. The collusion case was dead." I remember that. Yeah. So anyway, this is, you know, yet another, ah, now the other, you know. I mean, it went from – all it was was phase two of Operation Crossfire. That was the Hillary Clinton attempt via Steele dossier to destroy – she had four – she had four paywalls, remember. Three paywalls. The DNC and the Perkins Coie. And then, ah, she did Perkins Coie, DNC, and then she had another one as well. And so you couldn't trace it back to her personally. But that, that second phase was after Obama was elected and when they all met in his office. Comey, Brennan, Clapper. And he ordered them to dig deeper. And that, that birthed this. Oxford comma. And the weird thing about it was they, they misspelled O-X-F-O-R-D, F-E-R-D. And I thought, why would they do that? Well, there was a dairy case, huh, in Maine called Oxford comma. A big sensational case and a lot of people wanted freedom of information. So they thought by just changing a letter that people would get confused and they would, they would just be sending – they would be requesting. They would be requesting stuff and some, for a dairy probe. So when all these people said, we want to know what this Ox, we heard something about Oxford comma, they would write Oxford comma, the right spelling, and they would get information from the government back about a dairy case and not this. I mean, they were widely, you know, I, I wrote when I read, I wrote something down to myself, just a note. And I said, any time you hear the letter, left get outraged about a transgression that Trump has done, it's pretty much a boomerang effect or maybe psychological projection. So they're now saying that Kash Patel weaponized the FBI. And that just tells me, no, you're still trying to hide James Comey leaking documents from a confidential call to Trump via the New York Times to destroy him. You're still trying to hide the fact that Andrew McCabe, the interim director, lied four times to federal investigators. You're still trying to hide the fact that the attorney, Kevin Clinesmith, forged a document and submitted it to the FISA court. Apparently, Andrew McCabe didn't stop it or he didn't check. And you're still trying to hide the fact. That Christopher Wray was totally out of control, whether sending people after anti-abortion people or school board meetings to see if parents were transphobic, you name it, or couldn't even tell us how many informants there were on January 6th. And of course, Robert Mueller claiming he didn't know what the Steele dossier was under oath or James Comey suddenly had amnesia 245 times. So it's a general thing that, I just start thinking of that. And so then I went through yesterday all the Democratic hysterias. One of them now, have you seen it? They're very angry because three state attorney generals have said, we don't care if Fauci committed a felony or broke the law on the federal level. We're going to look and see if he did it on the state level. If he called a state official and lied or something. And everybody said, you can't do that. That's a federal offense. Could I remind all you people on the left that Alvin Bragg was a municipal, a municipal prosecutor. Fannie Willis was a county prosecutor. Latita James was a state prosecutor. Somehow on November 18th of 2024, Fannie Willis' paramour ended up in the White House. And Michael Colangelo, who had just left the White House, had just left the White House. And he had just left the White House. And he had just left Alvin Bragg's New York, excuse me, Latita James, the state prosecution, left as a federal prosecutor to go where? To Alvin Bragg's. prosecution and on that same day they appointed jack smith a special prosecutor so they set the model that state prosecutors apparently can go after federal officials who may have broken federal laws because they went after trump and they used every lever they had local county state the extra thing they're angry about the irs they say trump might weaponize the irs do we remember lois learner in 2019 2020 she was denying she was running audits on non-profit conservative organizations so they couldn't really get certified so they before the election she didn't want them there do we remember the new york legislature passed a bill of attainder to basically target trump so that if a sympathetic left-wing congress committee and there were a lot wanted to look at his leaked leaked you leaked tax returns remember that they leaked trump's tax returns and then the state of new york said well if they want his state state confidential we'll send them to and they passed a bill to that effect and then i was reading about election denialism trump is still there was this new information about the 2020 election that you've alluded to that we should be really concerned about uh more people voted that may not have been qualified but i remember hillary clinton saying right after the election that trump was a illegitimate president i remember that jimmy carter said he wasn't legitimately elected stacy abrams toured the country for two years claiming that she was the elected governor of georgia even though she lost by 50 000 votes al gore said that george w bush was selected not elected that was remember that he's selected he's not elected the new york times is going to prove that so they looked at all the counties that al gore sued to have the count that the supreme court lost and they looked at the ballots and they said oh my gosh george w bush really did win and then we had 2004 when john kerry lost and we had members i think it was 35 house members said that they were not going to sanction the electoral vote in ohio i don't need to say that but i think it's a good thing that they're going to sanction the electoral vote in ohio i don't need to say about the politicized supreme court they had no problem when um they have done statistics about do conservatives vote overwhelmingly as a block on conservative issues versus liberal issues they found that i was looking at this 60 to 64 percent of conservative uh supreme court judges can vote predictably conservative but 70 up to 70 percent of liberal the three liberals of course uh the thing i like is the outrage about congressional subpoenas and fauci you can't subpoena a federal bureaucrat or a person working for the government and harass them like remember they they arrested peter navarro and put handcuffs on his legs and out in public and then they went after bannon and at least they said honestly i don't want to go i'm not going to go and what was the difference in fauci going and then 111 times saying i'm not going to testify so there's a precedent and then you know domestic spying we got to be careful about donald trump he's uh may spy on his enemies you mean like obama going after the associate press reporters or jack smith just going after not only the data on their phones senators and congress people but their text messages going to the archives to get them so all of these things that you see every day about the horrible things that donald trump is doing are mostly projection because they have done it in the past and if you i'm not defending if trump were to do some of these things but if he were to do it it was because they lowered the bar of it what's acceptable so much that it became normative behavior and it just reminds you that i know that they're socialists and i just don't think they have any ideology other than i'm going to a vague idea of a mandated equality of result and i'll do any means necessary to gain power to enact it but mostly to benefit myself yeah a quality of lousy result for everyone else as long as i have a daca by the uh yeah by the the shore shoreline hey victor let's talk about birthright uh in a second but first to our listeners and our viewers uh here's something you don't see every day a chance to win an almost 600 bundle of premium preparedness gear look a more self-reliant america is built by people who are self-reliant and self-reliant and self-reliant and self-reliant like you and me it starts with people who take responsibility make a plan and prepare before we're tested that's the idea behind my patriot supplies road to preparedness challenge it's bringing together americans who believe strong families should be independent capable and ready visit prepare with vdh.com enter to win and become part of the mission every participant has a chance to win a family of four starter pack covering food water power and heat it includes a one-week food supply for four personal water filters solar rechargeable backup power and off-grid cooking essentials enter the challenge at prepare with vdh.com one family receives the prize but every participant strengthens the mission this is your chance to be independent be prepared be ready join the road to preparedness challenge now at prepare with vdh.com when we thank the good people for your support from my patriot supply for sponsoring victor davis hansen uh in his own words so victor donald trump issued a few executive orders this past week but let's look at the one that would end birth tourism and this is from the uh from the preamble of it uh birth tourism operators use deceptive advertisements and inducements to entice foreign nationals to travel to the united states for the purpose of giving birth on american soil they promise citizenship access to public benefits and short-term stays in specialized facilities hotels or rentals but often fail to deliver on these promises these operators coach their clients to misrepresent the purpose and duration of their travel to consular and border officials to obtain visas authorizing entry into the united states failure to appropriately combat these schemes has resulted in thriving industries around the world that profit by enabling the the evasion of american immigration laws to obtain citizenship and other immigration benefits for foreign visitors and the exploitation of the women who travel here for the purposes of giving birth that's just one of the reasons cited in this executive order victor your thoughts on donald trump's action i don't think anybody believes that those senators and congress people that drafted the 14th amendment and the state legislatures that passed it had any idea that they were going to be able to The idea that this bill would allow people in mass to fly in, travel in, take any method of transportation possible in their ninth month of pregnancy and have a baby and then have that baby have all the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenry and then in many cases take them back to their country as an anchor and then apply for or to get a visa to take care of the baby here. That wasn't the intent of the, it was intended to clarify the status of Native Americans and ex-black slaves and it's been completely misused. Everybody knows that. The only way to deal with it now because the Supreme Court has ruled and there's no way in the world that you're going to get a two-thirds majority in the Senate and you're not going to get three-quarters of the state legislatures to overturn it. So. So the only thing to do is just to, I know Trump has issued an executive order, but yeah, just say if you're in your eighth or ninth month or six months, six months on, you're not going to get a visa to come to the United States from the following countries and just get a list of all the countries where this has taken place. China, Mexico, many countries in Latin America, Africa, and just say if you were in the, if you were pregnant in your sixth month, you are not coming into this country. And I think. Stop it. And then, of course, they would sue and say that was cruelty and inhumane behavior, but getting a visa to come in is not a right of a foreign national. It's, that's what Marco Rubio has tried to tell people. It's a privilege. You don't have to give visas to every Tom, Dick, and Harry to come in the United States, especially when they come in to abuse the system. And the thing about immigration, we all want legal diverse limited in the sense you can assimilate. People of self-sustaining autonomous individuals. But when you have masses come in here and they're abusing the system like we see in Minnesota or Los Angeles, or they're using it to get babies to anchor other people to come in, or they're defrauding the government. And you have no civic education to assimilate people. And as I said with Sam the other day, I think maybe it was with you. Twenty eight percent of the population. of California was not born in the United States. And when you add their parents, That is, and this first, so those are just first generation. But if you add their children, second generation, you get another seven or eight million. You get up to about 46% of this state's population. Either they were not born in the United States or their parents were not born. That is an enormous task of assimilation, acculturation, integration. That means you have to tell people we have a voluntary tax system. It's required, but the onus is on you. You must pay your taxes. If you open a little canteen on a crossroads and you're selling things, there are taxes involved. If you go to a swap meet, there are sales taxes involved. If you go into an emergency room, you should have an ID. If you engage in felonious behavior and you're convicted of a felony, you will be deported and leave. We don't do any of that. And here's. Here are the landmark dates of American history. Here's the Revolutionary War. You should know who Thomas Jefferson was. You should know who Abraham Lincoln was. You should know who Ulysses S. Grant was. You should know all of these things. The history of the United States is not the atomic Hiroshima and Harriet Tubman and the Japanese internment. These are important events, but they're not the story of the United States. But, you know, we're not making any of that effort. And we have chaos now. And I can see it in a town where most people are first or second generation immigrants. Many of them are wonderful. But they came legally and they're self-supporting. And they're hardworking. But when you have even a minority, a small minority, maybe 10%, but you have such a huge denominator of millions of people, like 12 million or 10 under Joe Biden. And that denominator says. If you're small, it's going to be a large number of people. And it makes life very difficult to live here. And what do I mean by that? I mean, if you're a U.S. citizen and your grandmother needs dialysis and you go to dialysis, it'll be crowded. If you have an emergency, you go to an ER, it'll be packed. If you vote, you're not sure that somebody did not get a mail-in ballot requiring no ID when he went to. the disability office and he's going to vote and cancel out your vote if you're down on the freeway you have no idea of if the truck driver is one of the 20 to 30 to 40 000 licenses your governor gave out to illegal aliens who had no training and didn't pass the test at least on standards that others did and he may kill you so that's what we're talking about yeah that's why people are very angry about it they really are i think for a lot of people victor we talked about before with with higher education and and here with birthright citizenship these uh mystic courts of memory of things from and attitudes from 80 100 years ago that are no longer the case i mean mr magoo is not in a raccoon coat and a pennant anymore college but we there's still this sense that that goes on and with birthright citizenship i think of this great movie with charles boyer and olivia de havlin hold back the dawn which has this kind of a side theme about birthright citizenship in it but you think at the time that people who came here they wanted to be americans they didn't want to exploit america and the dynamics are totally different now especially with the wealth we have a collective arrogance we think that we inherited such a strong country from our parents and grandparents indestructible nobody reagan was really the first president say we can lose what we have in one generation if the values are not passed on to the next and we haven't been passing them on and so we we can lose this country very easily and we're there's a large swath of this country where we've lost it and if you have i mean if anybody who walks into downtown los angeles under karen bass we've lost it it's no longer a civilizational when i was at teaching at pepperdine that would be you know a it was like navigating the third world it really was i had been to old cairo it was no different with the homeless on the street on the bike path it was just eating throwing trash defecating urinating in front of you it's medieval i mean if you don't believe me we have a record number of typhus cases in los angeles that's always a tip off of civilization going into reverse when rat population is allowed to proliferate and you have lice and then you get fleas and lice and you get spread of this medieval disease it kills hundreds of thousands of people if left unchecked but we we have this image about well that's medieval and you know what's else is so strange about the left is they really don't care about people because all during the covid the only thing that bi-coastal elite says you know what if you don't have a vaccination this experimental mr and i get covid it's your fault that was howard stern would do that every day and all the celebrities the left wing and then they would just they canned and ruined the careers of 8 500 people in the military who didn't want to get this experimental even though at the same time they were letting in 10 000 people a day without a health audit from all over the poorest regions of the world and no one said a word and no one said a word that the streets were fetid with infestations from homeless people and we had diseases nobody said a word nobody said a word about any of this and nobody said well don't you think the people coming in across the southern border should have a coveted vaccination if you're kicking out people who are in the military because they don't want one you don't even know you don't even have a if they have tb or what and so they didn't couldn't visit grandma in the hospital but you could go to a george floyd a rally uh with ten thousand people yeah they they didn't care it's all about power it's not it's a very people should remember the history of socialism and communism it's a very anti-humanistic anti-human philosophy it really is it it just sees people as collectives and they're all expendable for the greater good of the quote-unquote common interest people as adjudicated by a very wealthy privileged elite let me tell you how another another story how the wheels are coming off the bus victor and i mentioned this to you earlier but it's from a new york post article uh x hit the headline ex-con husband of new york police bigwig in custody after families drive by gang shooting so this has to do with the city of mount vernon which is right near uh the new york city it's right near the bronx and actually my uncle my father's brother was a priest he was the police chaplain for the mount vernon police department i'm sure he's spinning in his grave uncle gene they're spinning right now the story's says the ex-con husband of a disgraced westchester county police bigwig turned him in himself into cops thursday to face charges that the pair that's him and his wife drove their gangbanger son to a botched hit in the bronx james lackard 47 the husband of recently fired mount vernon deputy police commissioner jennifer lackard walked into the 44th precinct in the bronx city to surrender etc he was arraigned hours later on the same attempted murder and indictment lodged against his wife his wife the vice the police commissioner of mount vernon and a 20 year old son reputed slutty gang thug chase lackard earlier this week mom and dad drove chase to an attempted assassination hit outside the bronx county courthouse the other day this is and this woman why is she even a police commissioner you know what she's a di hire yeah that's the key isn't it she got that job and she said because the greater society is guilt-driven i'm going to interpret their magnanimity as weakness to be exploited not kindness to be reciprocated so i get to do whatever i want in the moment that uh i do anything that breaks the law i'm gonna and they try to enforce it upon me i'm going to write scream race remember fannie willis she tried to she went to the police station and she said i'm going to go to the police station and i'm going to She paid her paramour and didn't tell anybody $450,000, and they went on these junkets, and then she tried to tell us that she had no receipts, but that she had reimbursed them. And the reason that she had reimbursed them in cash was because of a historic racism against black people. I know a lot of black people. I've never had one black person tell me that they deal in cash and don't have credit cards or checks, as anybody else does. Unless they're committing illegal activities. But I'm really worried about it because I mentioned a couple of times on the Internet, there's a whole genre on YouTube. I guess you would call it race wars now. It's open. It's just open. And we saw the WBA. Did you see the hit on Sophie Cunningham by that day? Well, yeah, we should get into that a little more deeply. But that has become a race issue, immediately became a race issue. She was clotheslined by Dijon. Shanae, I forget her last name, Cambridge, something like that. Yeah, what I didn't understand was that here you had this player and she was trying to stop a layup. And usually when you want to commit a foul to stop somebody, you kind of run up behind them because they're going to make the basket. And she did make the basket. And you kind of grab their hips or something or push them a little bit. And then you incur a two-shot foul. And it's kind of an iffy thing to do because if they make the basket, you get one shot and they can get three-point play out of it. So you have to be very careful. But what was strange about it, she didn't even make an attempt. She just went up and conked her like her elbow. She clotheslined her. Yeah, that's a good term. And so my point is, what did she do afterwards? Then she was – they didn't call a foul on her at first. A minor foul. And then they looked at it and said it was a flagrant and they suspended her from that game. And then she immediately, almost instantaneously, goes on social media and said, white privilege. And I'm thinking, what does white privilege mean? You mean that you got a foul and you're so accustomed in the WNBA that if you're black you can do this and nobody will enforce it because you're 65? You view people not as individuals but collectives. And the – The league is 65% black and maybe 35% gay and this is a little enclave that you feel is protected and you don't want – And then I thought, if you think it's white privilege and you're so angry, why would you acculturate – culturally appropriate blonde hair? She had a big blonde wig. And I'm thinking, if Stephanie Cunningham had had dreadlocks when she did that, they would call her a racist. So what I'm getting at is, the whole thing is so imbalanced and we all just don't talk about it. Maybe it's because half of the African-American community is doing wonderfully in terms of purchasing power, everybody, they're reaching parity, but half are not and nobody wants to talk about that. But when you look at this WNBA, when it was formed in 1997 until – Caitlyn Clark came in 2004. It had lost $20 million to $30 million a year and more like $40 million some years. It was a charity of the NBA. And the owners bought that cheap franchises and they bought it not for economic reasons, as we saw with the owners of the Seattle team. And what I'm getting at is, at every level, it is weaponized. You see owners weighing in and trying to harass two young girls who happen – not to say anything about trans, just say that we support Sophie. And then you see a coach deliberately wearing a trans jacket. And then you see the players that are highly weaponized in racial terms and sexual orientation terms. And then you say the whole league is this way. And nobody knows. And nobody knows. And nobody knew about it because nobody cared about it. It was this little tiny Eddie over here from the River of American Sports. A little side Eddie. Everybody said this is – well, it's women's liberation and we should have two basketball leagues. And we know that the general public, women included, prefer to watch male basketball. But we'll – just to get them off our backs, we'll give them $30 or $40 million. $30 or $40 million. And they were taking buses. Three people watched. Yeah. We're flying economy and nobody said a word. And then all of a sudden this Caitlin Clark sensation that could hit three points from nearly half court or dunk a – she was amazing and she goes into this little enclave and is roughed up for being heterosexual and white. And then Sophie Cunningham who unfortunately for the NBA, the WNBA, is absolutely stunning. She's a blonde, beautiful bombshell. Tall, statuette. We ask, et cetera. And that made everything – she protected Caitlin Clark. And suddenly you had two white people who were the objects of these flagrant fouls. And even the referees were in the tank. They would never call it right. And even Sports Illustrated, they had a headline. Did you see it? Stephanie Cunningham has karma, karma, karma. In other words, she deserved that for honestly expressing opinion. About trans. And at some point, they don't play in places like Florida. You can see why. The Florida Attorney General already said that if they had played in Florida, he would have filed a felony assault charge for that foul on Cunningham. They play mostly in blue areas or purple states. But it's very funny how we have allowed – we're so critical of sports. You know, we had the whole Colin Kaepernick phenomenon, take a knee, and LeBron James lecturing us and all. And then we had this overtly racist and chauvinistic gay league, which was completely intolerant to anybody who did not fit that majority stereotype. Any minority who went in there and played and played well was an object of debate. And so, I think that's one of the things that we need to keep in mind. And I think that's one of the things that we need to keep in mind. In racist terms, and I'd say sexual orientation terms too, but it would reverse from what they – the usual cause of victimhood. And then, to top it off, Caitlin Clark, according to many economists, has brought in $1 billion in revenue, media endorsements, publicity, and all of them now are making $500,000 a year. From almost nothing. And they're flying first class or on private jets. They're all better off. And how do they look at that? They keep trying to injure this woman because they hate her more than the self-benefit. So, where did they get that? Where was that? Where did that idea come from? It came from – and the idea, I should define it, is that you should look at people in racial terms, number one. And number two, if you act overtly racist – whether you say the N-word or you go after and try to hurt somebody, you will be protected if you can qualify as a victim on the Marxist binary of oppressed, oppress, oppressor. And we're free to do anything we want as long as we're a victim. And we can prove it. And that's how sick the whole thing has become. And that's why you have a coach. What was in the mind of a coach who thought, I'm going to go across there and I'm going to harass these two young girls for having a support Sophie sign? Co-owner of the team. Co-owner, yeah. Yeah. Speaking of coaches, I want to bring up the coach of Sophie Cunningham's team in a second, but first, Victor, to our listeners and viewers. For nearly 3,000 years, the great books of Western civilization have shaped the way people think about courage, honor, war, duty, family, leadership, and self-government. Homer's The Odyssey stands among those great books. It's the epic of homecoming, exploring enduring questions about loyalty, temptation, kingship, marriage, and the good life. And that's why Hillsdale College offers free online courses on the greatest works of the Western tradition. These free online courses are taught by Hillsdale College professors and draw from the same great books and enduring ideas studied on Hillsdale's campus. In Hillsdale's newest free online course, The Odyssey, Professor Benedict Whelan guides students through Homer's masterpiece on his struggles to return home to Ithaca. You'll explore the trials, temptations, and choices that have captivated readers for nearly 3,000 years and discover why Homer's epic remains one of the foundational works of Western literature. Homer's epic has inspired countless works of literature and invites readers to consider some of life's permanent questions, courage and prudence, loyalty and temptation. In Hillsdale College's newest free online course, The Odyssey, go to hillsdale.edu slash vdh to enroll. It's totally free. Read the classics, study the West. Start right now at hillsdale.edu slash vdh. We thank the good people from Hillsdale College for sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. So Victor, interesting you mentioned the coach. So part of this, uh, uh, Dijoné Carrington, Sophie, uh, Cunningham fracas from the other night, the coach of the fever, that's Sophie Cunningham, she had a press conference afterwards and she's defending that Dijoné Carrington, the coach is a white lesbian woman, Dijoné Carrington's a black woman. This coach also was the one who could not talk last week about should a guy play in the league? What is a woman? And by the way, there are two former NBA players now, Ernest Cantor, Freedom, and oh my gosh, who's the other guy? I forget. Well, anyway, there are two former NBA players who are stepping up to want to play in the WNBA. He was a very bright guy. I listened to him. And he said something, well, for purposes of the NBA for a period of time, basically, I will consider myself a transgender. I have something to offer. I'll be a team player. I'll do whatever the coach tells me. If you're on record that you can't define what a male and female is, but it's an acquired, or you can profess your sex, then anybody can do it. All they have to do is maybe go through the motions and put a wig on. I mean, when Ward Churchill said that he was Native American, all he did was put on some buckskins and some moccasins, and presto, he got affirmative action. He got everything. When Elizabeth Warren said, race is just acquired, just like sexuality or gender. So I'm just going to say I have high cheekbones and weasel my way into a Harvard professorship where I'll be listed in the catalog as the first Native American professor. And so, and now, do you think universities I've talked to students, by the way, who've sent in DNA, a couple of them, DNA. You know, they've taken one of those DNA types, and they send them in to show they have 5% this or 3% this in this race-obsessed society. The other thing that was really weird, one of the coaches in the WNBA was complaining that there wasn't enough male, I mean, there were too many male coaches, and there should be more female coaches. But, in other words, she's saying that we want to bring in biological males into the league, and even though they may injure women, but we don't want male coaches because we can tell they're male. But I'm thinking, well, what if a coach just said, put on a wig and said, I'm female for purposes of coaching. It'll be interesting what they say to these males. Did you see that the commissioner said, we're taking, man, that commissioner must have been a former university dean or provost. It's complex and nuanced. Yes, they write, I don't know, there's an AEI, I know it has to be AEI that some provost thought up. This is a complex situation. We're taking the matter with the greatest and utmost sensitivity to all parties involved, and we're going to be nuanced in our investigations. It was just, this is not who we, you know, every time I see this is not who we are. It's just nauseating. That whole WNBA, I don't know what, people, they only go now, they being the majority, I don't care what race you are, but to the degree they have audiences, it's because of Caitlin Clark and Stephanie Cunningham, and I guess the players who hate them also are savvy, and they're thinking, you know what? We're going to turn this league into big time wrestling, or World Wrestling Federation. They make a lot more than we do, so what we're going to do, is every time we see a white player who's doing very well, we're going to hit them in the face when they're on the floor, put a fist on their jugular vein, we're going to clothesline them, and then we're going to say something provocative, and when one of the girls was on the ground, the player went over and did a Stephanie point at her, you know, like this, mocking her on the ground, and we're going to turn this into lucha libre, you know, everything goes, and we'll make more money than we ever have, because fans will want to see us go out and beat up people, and then get on social media, or, you know, harass them on the ground, like you were on a YouTube video, what are you going to do about it, huh? And then go on social media and stir up racial animosity, and it'll be street theater, and we'll make a lot more money, we're already making 500 grand, we'll make a million or two, that's what it is, it's a circus, it's a sideshow, it's a freak show. What happened to feminism, Victor, if we went back in a time machine, and the bra-burning lesbians would have, would you think they would want men even within 10-mile radius of them, never mind playing basketball against them, the concept of men shoehorning their way into women's sports, women-protected, Title IX-protected categories? I don't know, but feminism, feminism and the aspect of equal work, or equal pay, and equality of opportunity was long overdue, but mandated proportional representation, and chauvinism, and turning that in against a war against men, and giving them privileges, we have 62% labor participation rate, and a lot of the non-participants are males, who are home, and they think, I'm not going to get a job anyway, or they think you know, in terms of dating, well, you don't have to take a woman out and be nice to her, you don't have to take her on 17 different dates before you kiss her, you don't have to pay for the tab, you don't have to do anything, just call her up and say, hey, come over here, and come and visit me in my parents' garage, and then as far as sexual favors, and money, and obligation, there are none, there are none, you don't have to promise to get married, or promise to be faith, any of that, and what has that done to the male? It's completed a parasitic class of males, it really has. You want to now pose as females to repeat them. And then you get all these women that you'll read in Atlantic or Vogue or Vanity Fair about some frustrated far-left woman says, well, there's no men, there's no men anymore, they're just reprehensible, yes, and then you see the Wall Street Journal now that it's a big thing for Hollywood actresses to, to land a CEO, a financial, big, wealthy guy. Yeah, they're really prominent, so there are women. They don't have spaghetti arms. Yeah, yeah. Well, Victor, there's a little more trans stuff to talk about, and that has to do with the Massachusetts Democrat Senate primary, Seth Moulton, and if we have some time, also, we should talk about Tucker's 10-point plan, and we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages. Every state is home to a significant historic site that tells 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 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. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. We're talking on Sunday, August 9th. This episode will be up on Tuesday the 11th, carried by the Happy Home is the Daily Signal. You can see Victor's got the official hat there. And by the way, you can watch this on the Daily Signal. You can listen to it there, and every platform out there, you can catch this podcast. So, Victor, I made a note here. This episode is a transapalooza because there's so much insanity, but Seth Moulton sort of distinguished himself after the 2024 elections. He's a congressman from Massachusetts. He served, I think he was a Marine. He served several tours in the Middle East. And he was in a debate with Ed Markey, the incumbent senator. Ed Markey's been around, I think, as a congressman and then as a senator maybe since 1976, something like that, forever and a day. I think it was waiter at the Last Supper. So, in the after the elections, Moulton said, well, one of the reasons we lost is because all this trans lunacy. I got two daughters, and I don't want them playing against boys in school. Well, this was one of the most embarrassing mea culpas in the debate. He says, to the trans community feeling the weight and pain of the Trump administration policies, I deeply recognize your trauma, and I'm sorry if my comments hurt you. That was not my intention. I think he was, when he was blinking, he was blinking torture. He added, I am a proud co-sponsor of the Transgender Bill of Rights, a proud repeat co-sponsor of the Equality Act. I have a 100% voting record with the Human Rights Campaign. If you're in the trans community or you're a trans kid feeling the weight of the Trump administration and the Supreme Court, you matter. You're valued and I will always have your back. Any What are your thoughts about his performance, Victor? Translated, that means that a four-tour Marine captain, bronze star winner, who was, I was in bed twice since 2006 and 2007. That was a nasty time. And he was there the whole time in Iraq. He was there when they were going after the Shia militias. That was some of the nastiest fighting. So here's a heroic, decorated Marine, and apparently now he's in his late 40s, and he believes it's more dangerous to cross the trans community than it is to go into a firefight in Iraq where he displayed indisputable courage. And why was he afraid of? He was afraid of two things. Number one, this 0.001% of the population may show up at any point when he's walking through Congress, the whole purple hair, pride, all that stuff, and scream and yell at him and bird dog him, do what Maxine Waters told all left-wing people should do to Trump cabinet members, get in their faces at restaurants. And more importantly, he knows that this issue, even though it affects a very small number of people, is the civil rights issue of the left-wing urban metrosexual. And I mean by that the affluent, mostly white, but not entirely urban dweller who is the backbone of the Democratic Party, especially in Massachusetts where he is. And so he's running, he got redistricted, I guess. He's running against another longtime. Well, this is a Senate primary, so he's trying to step up. He's trying to step up, but he's running. I don't know if he feels his house seat, what I was trying to say, feels it might be redistributed. I don't think it would be in Massachusetts, but so he wants to step up and he's against it. So who can out-liberal the other liberal or out, you know. So he's kind of made a fool of himself because what he said was absolutely true, that if you have young girls and they're playing with biological males. We had a track meet here in Fresno not long ago of high schools and a trans athlete just dominated them. And all these girls who would have. Won medals and been honored as first place didn't. He just dominated them. And the left always says, well, there's not that many of them. So they don't make the argument there should be none of them in these sports. There should be no trans people dressing with young girls or any females in a locker room situation unless they've completely had trans surgical operations so that at least to the eye that they are of the opposite sex. They're female. But nobody talks about that. So he knew that. He knew that. That's why he gave an honest answer that was correct. And then he found out that it would come back and haunt him when somebody further to the left would try to demagogue him. And so then he just. It was like a re-education camp, you know. What do I have to do? I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Then he thought, ah, there's one thing we always do on the left when we get caught lying or we want. Trump. Trump did it. So he played the Trump card. I'm trying to battle Donald Trump's war on trans. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And you know what they should do? I think that they should just. I know that hurts a lot of people who live in blue states, but they should. Maybe they should just let blue states have their trans and red states not because maybe all these people need to know who have. who have daughters that they might have to compete against biological men and see how they like it. And they should do the same thing in the WB. I hope these athletes sue them and say, I hope that these two NBA people put on a skirt and put on long hair wig and, you know, falsies and they go into a press conference and say, we're suing these people for their transphobia. And then put. It would be incumbent upon them to prove that they weren't. I still think this is an 80-20 issue, even in blue states, many blue states. I know in Maine, which is. Maine's a little weird as states go. Gavin Newsom, remember? He said the same thing. He said biological men should not be playing. And he did that in a podcast either with. I think he did it with Charlie Kerr. Yeah. And he found out that that was nothing but trouble for him among this lunatic left. And he disowned those comments. He didn't disown them. He didn't disown the ones when he said capitalism doesn't work anymore. Right, right. Well, there's a group called, back in May, Maine Girl Dads that fought to get a referenda on the ballot. Now it's in federal court. But my gut tells me if that did get on the ballot, it would prevail. They're just guys who are like, we don't want our teenage girls, our little girls having to face guys in sports and similar things. So, hey, Victor, kind of, transed out here. Let's go to another old. It's the gift that keeps on giving if you want to have commentary on podcasts. And that's Tucker Carlson. So Tucker put out a 10-point plan for a new political party. And he did this at a. He gathered some people in Maine where he has a place. I know you know of it, speaking of Maine. Assembled were Carolyn Grace Moss, Moffa, Brian Glenn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker, Joe Kent, the recently, the national security guy recently got dumped. His wife, I guess, Heather Kaiser Kent and Thomas Massey. And they are there brainstorming for a new political party. There was a 10-point plan. I'm not going to read it here. I mean, there's some problems with it. You can just address that, I think, largely like, okay, this is. There's sensible things here. But what do you make of this political, new political party talk? Well, these are supposedly learned people. And they should ask themselves, when did a third party, A, ever get elected? And when did a third party do anything other than harm the party most likely, most akin to it? For example, in 1912, you had the successor to Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, up for re-election. He was, in those times, what would be properly called a Republican conservative. And he was running against a complete, wild, progressive Woodrow Wilson. And what did Teddy Roosevelt do? He created a third party and ran in the election and ensured that Woodrow Wilson would be president for eight years and destroyed Howard. We're still living with the consequences of that. What did Ross Perot, he said that he couldn't stand the Bush family and they were not really conservative and he was more liberal on abortion. But basically, he was much more akin to George H.W. Bush than he was to Bill Clinton. And he ran in 92 and he got 20% of the vote and he ensured that Bush was and he ensured that George H.W. Bush would not be re-elected. And then he did it again in 96 and he got about 10%. And Bill Clinton never got 50%, as I remember. The second time in 96, he got like 49.8. But he ensured, I don't know if people listening will think that was a great loss, but Bob Dole was, the Republicans lost again. 2000, Al Gore would have won Florida because he only lost it by a few thousand votes. But Ralph Nader ran as a third party green candidate and ensured in some ways that George W. Bush would be in. So Tucker knows that, that they don't win anything for themselves, but the whole point of it is if he can get a third party going, they will hurt Donald Trump. And then you ask yourself, if you read his 10-point plan, who has been closer to winning? Who has been closer to enacting it? Donald Trump or the opposition? Not even close. He's got a big thing about crime. Well, Donald Trump, you think that he's for no cash bail? You think he's for $950 of free shoplifting? Do you think that he's for defund the police? That he has the border? Do you think, who's done more than any president in history to get a wall going, stop, catch and release, deportation, and zero Tucker? And same thing he says on, he even says we want to have a food policy like our RFK. Well, where would that come from? Did he just come down with angel wings from heaven? No, he was appointed by Donald Trump. No one else in their right mind would have ever appointed Bobby Kennedy for anything. It only would take a maverick like Donald Trump to do that. And so when I look at it, and looked at those, eight of them, were exactly what he's getting with Donald Trump. The other two, foreign policy, you know, forever wars, but he wants to pay reparations to collateral damage. Tucker does. So if you go into Fallujah and somebody's shooting you and kills the guy next to you and there's somebody and they've taken over a house and you shoot back at him and the bullet ricochets off and hits somebody in the house who may or may not be sympathetic, then I guess the United States government writes them a check. That's what Tucker wants. So that was crazy. Then you think, well, the agenda is mostly what they got, so they would try to destroy Donald Trump or his successor. They try to destroy Donald Trump's last three years in office or they would try to destroy his successor, but who would that be? They say it's going to be J.D. Trump. J.D. Vance. He's leading in the polls. For purposes of argumentation, let's say it's not Mark or will be. It is J.D. Who in the Republican Party is closer to Tucker than J.D.? So would Tucker, would all these people say, well, we only did this, but now that J.D.'s here and my son worked for him and I know him and I like him, we're going to drop all this. After all, he said Israel can't kill itself out of the kill-off, you know. Kill its way out of its problems. So we're going to vote for him. And is that the point? So it is totally coherent. So what are the motivations? What would make them do that? Would Tucker have done that five years ago when he was on busy nights getting most nights between three and five million viewers? Tucker was. Anchoring the entire, making 20 million a year. I don't think so. Would Marjorie? Would Marjorie Taylor Greene have done that when she was camping out at Mar-a-Lago twice a month? Every night. I doubt it. I doubt it. Would Joe Kent, and I want to apologize. I said kid in an earlier broadcast with Sammy, but it's Kent. Would he, after I think he ran for Oregon Congressman Jack twice and lost, both with the, he came close and he had the endorsement of Donald Trump. Would he have ever been appointed as a Homeland, Security, National Advisor? No, no, he would never, he would have never been appointed. And was he going to go out? Yes. And you can go on, Thomas Massey. Would Thomas Massey ever have said that he is going to start a third party and say his third consecutive Congressional term when he's getting all his adulations? No. So what prompted them to do that? Well, Tucker, who flew all over the campaign year stops on Air Force One who had Trump's private cell phone number, who went to Mar-a-Lago, whose son was appointed by the vice president and part of the administration, he fell out. He called him up and he said, you know what? I don't think you should go to Iran or before in 2025 in June, it'll be World War III if you go to Iran. So my point is he was cut off completely. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, she started saying that, you know, Donald Trump, he's in the Epstein file. She didn't ever stop and take a deep breath and say, okay, Donald Trump gave me 85% of the agenda that I want and Joe Biden did not release one file for four years and Trump is releasing a million and a half files. But I'm going to take a deep breath and say, okay, Donald Trump gave me 85% of the agenda that I want and Joe Biden did not release one file for four years and Trump is releasing a million and a half files. But I'm going to turn on him. But she did. And what happened? Zilch. She looked at the polls and said, I won't even be nominated in Georgia. And Thomas Massey, why is he doing this? Well, because he said, I'm Thomas Massey. I'm the guru of the whole ultra-ultra-MAGA, what Joe Biden calls ultra-MAGA. I'm the guy that they all look to. I'm the pure MAGA guy. I can't be beaten. And he was primary in Tennessee. Right. In Tennessee. And how about Kent? He was saying, I can't make it as a congressperson. I want to be in politics. But I sure did, thanks to Donald Trump, who approves every high appointment. Tulsi Gabbard got me in here. Trump got me in here. And now I'm a national figure, thanks to him. But I don't like what he's doing. And I'm objecting to it all the time and I feel like they're going to get rid of me and Tulsi's going to leave and I may be back to failed congressional candidate. So they all have personal angst. And the other thing they have in common, as you know what it is, it's the Jews. Hubris. Yeah. The Jews. Yeah, absolutely. So the other thing was the Jew, he had to put in there that we don't have to obey a foreign, a foreign country shouldn't be dictating. I didn't know that Israel was dictating the Maduro rescue. I didn't know. I didn't know that Israel was dictating the Ukraine support for Zelensky. I didn't know that Israel was supporting the terrorists with China, war with China, or I didn't know that Israel was behind the Panama Canal standoff. I do know the Spanish blamed Israel for the Moroccans who invaded their African outpost, colonial outpost. It's self-interested because of personal disappointment that their lives were somehow radically altered for the negative and they blamed Donald Trump and therefore they're going to do something that they know never works, form a third party maybe to express their anger that Trump did not agree with them on 100% of the issues, but more like 80 to 90%. And I don't know that Trump, at least until recently, didn't agree with them with more than five. It's kind of like saying, "Well, I'm going to support the transgender movement. I like that about the Democrat. I like the new green deal. I like DEI. I kind of like that open border, but it's not Trump." It's incoherent. It really is. It's sad. The hubris gets me a little bit too, Victor, that I called him up by saying, "Don't do this on Iran," and he ignores me or disagrees with me. And this is now kissing up to you a little bit, Victor, but I know from what he's posted publicly and- I have never called him one time. The president is a great admirer of yours. But that's right. You would never presume to think to do anything like that. No. Anybody who knows that situation knows that the last thing you do as a nobody is call the president of the United States and say, "I think." If he posts something about you or he calls you, you show gratitude that he took that time for a nobody. But you don't think, you don't take on this sense that you're this major influencer and the president of the United States, my God, of seven- Not that I got you, Don. Let me tell you about- Yeah, there's seven. Hey, Don, there's seven billion people on the planet, but I am the most important. So that's why I'm telling you what to do on Iran. You can write that, you can do anything on a podcast, you can express your opinion. People are free to accept or reject it, but you don't think that you have the ear of the president. Many people do, but you don't naturally assume that. And when you do do that, and when you do go on Air Force One, and you do go to Mar-a-Lago, and you do. That intimacy gives you a false sense of self-importance. I guarantee you, you're going to be sorely regrettable when you find out that Donald Trump probably gets 500 calls a day from the most powerful people in the world, whether heads of state or Elon Musk or you name it. Yeah. Unsolicited advice. And I'm sorry, Marjorie, but I might have put you on hold, and I think she said once he didn't call me back. Hello? Wow. All right, Victor, we're going to wrap up here, but since you touched on J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio, you discussed that with Sammy on the podcast the other day, and there were a ton of comments, there always are a ton of comments, but there's so many comments about Rubio v. Vance, and I have not read every single one of them, but I think of the hundreds I read, they are all about, "I prefer Marco Rubio." I wish somebody could advise. J.D. Vance, I mean, Kimberly Strassel had an open comment about his supporters that trashed her, but she was trying basically to suggest something in his interest. Kim said that if you're vice president of the United States and you've got critical votes up on all these issues, and you might be the tie-breaking, but you can also influence people and give the administrations, lobby people, these seven or eight senators, it can be a possibility. J.D. Vance: Yeah. Kim said that if you're vice president of the United States and you've got critical votes up on all these issues, and you might be the tie-breaking, but you can also influence things or you're pushing a book that you wrote you're distracting from what the vice president's value is ex officio and the reaction to that was fierce she had to write a second column did you see that i did you know the call off uh but i i think the other day they were had this pseudo burrito war you know and uh i know mark thesen a little bit i know mark too yeah would you think he's fat i don't think he's fat and if he was and he kind of made fun of someone showed a picture of jd vance from like i don't know it was 10 12 years ago that he looked like he you know marshmallow man almost but yeah i mean and you know he's been very explicit about his religious conversion and i think i think all that's it's wonderful but i think what you just said about our comments suggests that people right now at this moment they just want people off social media they don't want them commenting on burritos they don't want them attacking people's appearance all they want is demonstrable competence and expertise so when they look at rubio they say to themselves who went down to panama and really handled that well he did who with his portfolio in latin america is doing well and they look at maduro worked out well they look that 70 to 85 percent of the countries in south america are flipping from left-wing anti-american to pro u.s conservative governments and when they when those leaders come to washington they go to see a spanish-speaking hyper conservative hyper patriotic hyper mega marco rubio and he's very discreet about it doesn't and then when he goes in front of congress he doesn't wave his hands and scream and yell like some people do he's just very commonly commonly dissects the crazy questioner yeah so they look at all that and they are impressed and the the irony and i feel bad for jay that was his forte when he went in that debate against tim waltz that was a brilliant dissection he just calmly said you're wrong and then he looked at him and he said you're wrong and then he looked at him and he looked at tim waltz's puppy dog face and he thought you know what this kind of pudgy guy in his tight little suit who's a buffoon on stage and is a compulsive liar about iraq and going to china he i have just beaten him on all the issues i don't need to disgrace him and humiliate him and then he was nice the last five minutes he was the whole time but he said and tim you would agree with tom and he said i don't need to disgrace him and humiliate him and then he was nice the last five you would agree with this and i think both of us agree he was trying to be that was a good thing to do he looked magnanimous and so he he's got a very brilliant wife so i just think that he doesn't need to do all this stuff yeah well let me as we close out here i have two related comments and we thank everyone who leaves comments and one of them is uh both are along these lines one is from c griffin rubio has strong leadership skills countries will respect and view rubio as a as an action man he understands when to talk and when to take strategic action jd vance is just a skilled debater that's what this person says the other one this is a little longer from liz perez 99 63 who writes i got out the vote for trump in the latino community not one latino i've recently spoken to is willing to vote for vance despite still supporting trump have heard a somewhat vague reason to vote for vance despite still supporting trump have heard a somewhat vague reason to vote for vance despite still supporting trump have heard a somewhat vague reason to vote for vance from don't like him to he seems racist to he hates jews from the more protestant crowd vance will lose in a general election to whatever awful commie the dems put up only white people like him white people only being willing to vote for you is not enough trump is not being wise the one who would win against democrats is rubio and not just because he's latino he's simply seen as more experienced and knowledgeable than vance even by white moderates too many people distrust vance what a shame we will lose to commie dems i don't i don't i i think that readers analysis was very incisive uh it was very astute but i don't agree that i think the white vote will be 50 50 i i i don't know any white people i know a lot of people i would say that a hundred people the last six months have called me or email me or text me that they're angry at jd vance and they're going to vote for rubio and i'd say 90 of them are white and the issues are a that they feel that the animus that he shows israel when he says they can't they can't it can't kill itself out of its problems or it shouldn't be they don't have to destroy all of beirut and all this but he never really says when you have hezbollah and they're shooting missiles and into civilian centers and they're hiding among human shields what do you do when they won't negotiate and they and they just keep doing it give me an alternate and he never gave them an alternate course of action and then after october 7th i just think i don't know i just think a lot of people are they hear settler colonialist genocide and they can think of all the places in the world that fit that to the t but not democratic israel and when they see that tag slung around the neck of israel they know why and it's not because of the evidence or any proof and when you compare october 7th what they did and mutilated and medievally i shouldn't say that that's a slur a medieval scholar wrote me and said victor please stop saying medieval right you said people in the medieval barbaric yes there's nothing wrong with calling them barbaric well the word barbaros you know comes from herodotus who said the greeks say that people they can't understand say bar bar bar bar bar bar bar oh okay let's just say people that cook babies in microwaves yeah or execute children in front of their parents or rape women who are either dead or dying or dismember people in front of their uh spouses anybody i mean they thought up a lot of things that nobody in their right mind could even conceive and then they bragged about it and and uh so i guess on that issue uh i don't think i mean there's a lot of people that are angry and then the anti-jewish stuff from thomas massey and marjorie taylor green and tucker and that whole spectrum of people that are angry and then they bragged about it and uh so i guess on that issue i mean there's a lot of people that are angry and then they bragged about it and uh so i guess on that issue with nick fuentes and all that and i think jd should have been come out in front and say you know what this party is one thing that separates us from the left is we are not tolerant of anti-semitism just we're not going to tolerate it and we have been traditional supporters of the only consensual constitutional government in the middle east and we're very lucky to have an ally like that and that amen so but he needs to say that at some point i think the train may have left the station hey victor we're way over but uh it was a lot of analysis here and that's what people like victor's analysis and he got a lot of it in this episode and i want to thank people who write me at uh my email well you'll get it if you get civil thoughts the free weekly email news that i write comes out every friday 14 recommended readings at the end you get my there's my email you can write me nasty notes whatever you want but i think it's a good way to end the show i think it's a good way to end the show but go to simple thoughts.com and sign up and it's again it's totally free we're not selling anything victor's website the blade of perseus victor hansen.com do subscribe if you're on x at vd hansen is victor's handle on facebook victor vdh's morning cup sign up for that and there's the great group the victor davis hansen fan club check them out victor you've been terrific thanks for all the wisdom you shared thanks folks for watching thanks for listening thanks to our sponsors we'll be back soon with another episode of victor davis hansen in his own words bye-bye thank you everybody 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 you can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition fan duel is now available everywhere in the u.s so you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are including these places make this your most rewarding season ever with fan duel age and location restrictions apply product availability varies by market see fanduel.com for eligibility gambling problem call 1-800-GAMBLER

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. The WNBA's recent cultural dynamics are being driven by racial and gender tensions, particularly around players like Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham.
  2. A growing number of coaches, owners, and players are using transphobic or racially charged language to target white athletes, turning the league into a site of conflict and performative activism.
  3. The discourse around gender and identity in sports is deeply influenced by postmodern educational programs, DEI initiatives, and critical theory, which have been criticized for enabling systemic bias.
  4. Critics argue that the current environment in the WNBA and broader society reflects a failure of civic education, with widespread lack of historical awareness and a decline in national values.
  5. The political and social chaos surrounding gender identity, immigration, and policing—such as birthright citizenship and misconduct by public officials—points to a broader ideological shift in American institutions.
  6. Victor Davis Hanson contends that the left’s emphasis on identity politics has created a culture of moral relativism where transgression is excused through victimhood narratives.
  7. He critiques the normalization of gender fluidity in sports and public life as a form of societal disintegration, contrasting it with historical American values of honor, duty, and self-reliance.
  8. The episode highlights a call for accountability in institutions, from universities to sports leagues, where misconduct and lack of consequences are being perpetuated under the guise of inclusivity.

Summary:

The podcast features a detailed critique of contemporary American culture, focusing on the WNBA’s increasing polarization, where racial and gender tensions have intensified around athletes like Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham. The host, Victor Davis Hanson, argues that the league has become a stage for performative conflict, with players, coaches, and officials targeting white athletes using transphobic and racially charged tactics. This reflects a wider societal trend rooted in postmodern, DEI-driven ideologies that prioritize identity politics over objective standards.

Hanson criticizes the erosion of civic education, historical awareness, and national values—highlighting how these issues manifest in sports, immigration policy, and law enforcement. He blames flawed university curricula and critical theory programs for normalizing moral relativism, where accusations of oppression are used to justify harmful behavior. The discussion also extends to political hypocrisy, such as the misuse of birthright citizenship, the politicization of federal agencies, and the failure of institutions to hold individuals accountable.

Hanson asserts that these dynamics are symptoms of a deeper societal decline, where identity-based victimhood replaces accountability and integrity. He calls for a return to traditional values, emphasizing self-reliance, historical literacy, and strong family foundations as essential to preserving American civilization. The episode critiques what it sees as a dangerous trend of moral decay, where systemic bias and performative activism have replaced fair competition and civic responsibility.

FAQs

Yes, FanDuel is now available everywhere in the U.S., allowing users to access sports betting no matter their location.

Age and location restrictions apply. You must meet the minimum age requirement and be in a market where FanDuel is legally available. Check FanDuel.com for full eligibility details.

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Recent viewership growth is largely attributed to the success of players like Caitlin Clark, who have drawn significant media attention and fan engagement.

Sophie Cunningham faced a flagrant foul and suspension after a physical altercation with player Dijoné Carrington, sparking debates about racial bias, gender dynamics, and enforcement in women's sports.

He believes universities have become centers of harmful ideologies like DEI and critical theory, which he argues have led to a decline in academic integrity and contributed to social division.

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