Victor Davis Hanson: Why the WNBA Is Fighting Its Own Stars

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 at some point sophie and caitlin and some wise investors are going to say you know what i want to make a league or i want to go somewhere where race is incidental and it's not it's not obsessive and we don't talk about sexual orientation the more you see the women's national basketball associate the more you do not want to have anything to do with it it's just too toxic everything about it is toxic it brings together the women's national basketball association the more you do not want to have anything to do with it the worst in american society it is tribal it is racialist the irony is it would rather destroy itself than benefit if it meant that they had to allow two white heterosexual women to continue to be stars in the league and the breadwinners for everybody they would rather destroy it well hello ladies and hello gentlemen and welcome to victor davis hansen in his own words i'm jack fowler victor's friend i'm here in milford connecticut i get to ask victor the kind of questions i'm confident you would want him to answer we are recording on tuesday august 4th and this episode will be up on thursday august 6th that'll be my daughter's birthday happy birthday mary god knows how many things are going to happen between today and then but the topics we have uh to discuss with victor today include uh this uh simon and schuster giving a book contract to some like violent uh semite an update on iran and saudi arabia's uh role and trying to keep donald trump from from fully engaging could we fully engage as a news report out today about deficiency in our missiles uh why is there a w in the wnba and i do want to talk about flock cameras so victor is the martin and ely anderson senior fellow at the hoover institution the wayne and marcia buskey distinguished fellow in history at hillsdale college this podcast finds its happy home at the daily signal which is also the home of victor's other uh online program and that's victor davis hansen in a few words his website the blade of perseus you can find that at victor hansen.com do subscribe you'll want to subscribe because twice a week victor writes an exclusive column for the blade of perseus and he does an exclusive video every week also tons of free stuff but it's 650 a month or if you want to discount and take the full year it's 65 that's like getting two free months of victor and behind victor and even behind me if you're seeing this on video is uh the galleys of his forthcoming book the counter-revolution the fall and rise of donald trump and the magna movement if you go on victor's website you'll find the link to that so order it now pre-order and it comes out september 8th victor i hope you're rip-roaring and ready and we'll get started we'll get started with let's start off with a rant and we'll do that when we come back from these important messages hello this is victor davis hansen for the daily signal i have a new book out on september 8th of this year and i think you're going to enjoy it's called counter-revolution the fall and rise of donald trump and the maga movement and 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 mar-a-lago 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 not a revisionist he's a counter-revolutionary this time around he is not addressing just the symptoms of the progressive project of the last 50 years he's talking about the causes not just an open border but how to stop illegal immigration entirely not just crime but sending the national 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 did not act on 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 we are back with victor davis hansen in his own words victor let me lump these two topics together first is a report from the daily mail today the headline is u.s military has used virtually all of its long-range precision missiles during the iran war story says here the u.s army has burned through nearly its entire arsenal of offensive precision missiles three sources familiar with the data have said these officials granted anonymity to discuss sensitive u.s. military matters told reuters that the stocks of army tactical missile systems and precision strike missiles have dwindled to new staggering lows so that's one topic victor and then related if i may there's a new york post editorial out today that says it's time for the saudis to put up or shut up in iran and this editorial begins by saying saudi arabia reportedly convinced president donald trump to call off the planned massive attack on the iran-israeli border with iran over the weekend will the kingdom now live up to the long-term obligations that ask implies that is if riyadh wants to help shape u.s policy it needs to act as a full-fledged u.s ally and deliver whether by somehow getting iran to truly reopen the strait of hormuz and denuclearize or by committing major financial and military resources to a serious military campaign that forces the iranians to act as a full-fledged u.s ally and deliver whether by somehow getting iran to truly reopen the strait of hormuz and denuclearize or look the gulf people with a wink and a nod wanted donald trump to bell the cat so to speak nobody did it they wanted it because iran was basically holding them hostage and they were terrified of it they were terrified it because it was much bigger than they are with 93 million people it had as much or more of a role to play in the situation and they were terrified of it because it was much bigger oil than they did these individual six gulf states and it was a radical shia theocracy and many of these gulf states had shia minorities that it was stirring up so its way of handling that threat was a to give it money under the table gutter was the conduit uh bribe money dangled and the second was to call in the united states every once in a while to help them but the fact the urged us to deal with the problem, and they did nothing. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Oman, they have 300 combat aircraft, and they're French and American state-of-the-art aircraft. Israel has 330. In the various bases in the Middle East that could reach it, including Turkey, we probably have 500 aircraft. Are you trying to tell me that 1,400 combat aircraft of our allies and ours could not deter Iran from hitting Saudi Arabia or hitting Kuwait or keeping the straight closed? I don't believe that. So my point is, I think what the Trump administration was planning, I think they were right, was they hit them very, very hard. And I mean hard. Cut off all of the access to overland trade with its neighbors, bridges, highways, take out all of the key port facilities, take out any type of power grid that was used for military assembly, hit Pickaxe Mountain, et cetera. And then to say, you know what? We gave the world a 10-year respite, and let's hope that we can have a. Government in exile, maybe under the Shah's sun, and get a wide group of Iranians, and then Then try to help arm the people and give them access to Western news and tell them that the regime is taking any money they can and robbing the people and trying to rearm and give money to Arab terrorists like Hezbollah or the Houthis or Hamas. And then in addition, keep up the economic sanctions, keep up the frozen bank accounts, keep up the embargo. They're losing 500 million and squeeze them until they break. And all we needed to do was just to take the main forces to go back and concentrate on the economy. And Israel was willing to do this. They said, if you want us to go in there, we will go in there, not the Gulf states. So maybe they think. Muslims don't attack Muslims. I don't know, but they're not reliable. And I think one of the results of all of this is after we neutralize Iran, I think we're going to look very hard about where we base our troops. I don't think we want any troops. And with the exception of the UAE, I don't think we want any troops bases anywhere in those countries. Maybe Jordan, maybe Israel, but not those countries. They're too duplicitous. They have too long. I mean, you think about Kuwait. Kuwait wouldn't even exist. It didn't exist in 1990. It was blotted off the map. It was the 19th province of Saddam Hussein's. And we sent a huge international force over there and liberated it. And what did we get out of that? No memory. No memory of what we did. So as far as the weaponry. We are no, I don't think we're in a position right now if China tried to take Taiwan, that we have enough drones and missiles to stop them. I think we will in one or two years because they have to take a quarter million people across the strait if that's what they're going to do. But we need to, this country is so much richer and bigger and more powerful than it was in World War II. But my God, when the war started. The United States Navy in the Pacific was smaller than the Japanese. The British Navy was the biggest Navy in the world. And four years later, it was not just the biggest Navy in the world. It had more ships than all the navies combined. Its army was, it had 250,000 people in it when the war broke out in Europe. 19th, it was smaller than Portugal. When the war ended, it had the highest rate of mobilization per population of any of the combatants. Russia had 240,000. They had 12.5 million. We had 12.2 million people under arms in a population of 140. We created, it was just astounding what we did. We created 350,000 aircraft in just four years. You're telling me we can't make missiles and artillery shells? We need to go on a Marshall Plan. I shouldn't say that. We need to get, well, George Marshall was one of the people who, In 1939 and 1940 and 41 got Roosevelt to get William Knudsen and Henry Kaiser and Henry Ford and the whole bunch of them to produce. We can do it, but we need to do it quick. And, um. Victor, if I may, along those lines, I was watching a History Channel documentary last night, and there was no Ford plant to build these major bombers, but to construct that plant and then to. It's fully operational within, say, eight, two and a half years. It's producing a bomber every 63 minutes. We built the Burma Road abroad. We're building Mulberry's. We're building the fleet, as you say. The Pentagon did not exist at the beginning of the war. No, we built in two years. Two and a half years. Yeah. So it's staggering. We built the Golden Gate Bridge. We built the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge from 32 to 36 simultaneously. In the height of the Depression. So we can do it. But if we just say, you know, we can't have a perfect regulation and we have to, you know, we might have to step on a three-toed lizard somewhere. Or we don't, we're not going to be like a high-speed rail and promise to, you know, hire X percentage of trans and this group and that group and that group. Just get it done for our collective safety and security. We can do it. One other thing, Victor. I should have written this down totally, but I didn't. There was a, talking about Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, and there's something in there with another country. I'm not sure which one it is. But these four nations that are allegedly our allies, but kind of wily allies. No. Why would we ever trust Pakistan? Pakistan, why? Why would we ever trust Pakistan when they had bin Laden sitting there under their own protection for years? Why would we trust Saudi Arabia after what happened on 9-11? Why would we? I think Egypt is the other one, by the way. Yeah. Well, I don't trust Egypt anymore either. Why would we trust Turkey when they said they're going to send missiles into Athens or going to blow up Israel or send troops into Israel? Why would we do that? And so. The answer is we've got to become much more powerful. Trump is trying to do it. He's reforming the economy, and we don't. I was speaking to some diplomats not too long ago and military attachés at a university. It was the first time I'd ever spoken since my operation. I might have been kind of, you know, debilitated, but I had my senses about me. And I said, why are all of you so critical? And I addressed the Q&A to a French member. And he said, well, you people just are basically cowboys and you don't consult us. And that's why we closed our airspace and our NATO facilities. And that's why Spain did. And that's why Italy did. And that's what Britain did. And that's why. And I said, OK, in a perfect world, Donald Trump calls you up and says, Iran has all of your cities in missile range. And he's it's behind much of the terrorism that is made your streets very dangerous. It's killed over a thousand of our troops. It blows up embassies. It's the prime mover of terrorism. And I'm going to go in there and use our Gulf partners facilities and our carrier force and neuter this threat. Would you like to help us? Would you? I said, what would your reaction have been? No, we would have said no. OK. And I said, then he didn't ask you because he knew correctly that you were going to say no. Let me ask you the second question. Had he called Macron, would Macron have leaked it or the aides around him? He said, yes, they all leak. I said, so in other words, you're telling me that we have to call European allies. And when we know in advance and they know in advance that they're not going to participate and they're not. Going to leak. I mean, they're going to leak. And so why would we do that? And he said, I don't know, but you could explain. I said, so we're supposed to call up Macron and say, we're not going to consult with what we're thinking of doing because you won't help us and you will leak. What would how that work out? But I said, you do call us when you and the British cooked up this idea, this misadventure in Libya and you bombed it for seven months and you didn't know who was who. And it was a mess. And the Gaddafis were actually reforming. They weren't as horrific as they had been. And you bombed them and you and then you ask us to bail you out. And we went over there and bombed under Obama. Then you said that Serbia was on Europe's doorstep and it was an existential threat to Europe and European values. So then you got your NATO coalition of the willing, as I remember, and you weren't going to do anything. Some of your bomb crews wouldn't fly. They wouldn't fly at night or they had to have their cappuccino in the morning before they took off. So you wanted somebody to fly 80 percent of the mission in a very cloudy, dangerous part of the world. And we did. And then you French wanted to go into Chad. And we thought, well, they're stopping Islamic terrorism. What do you need, froggies? What do you need? You need logistics. You need intelligence. You need refueling. We're here for you. So it's I. I think all of us, we've got to be very careful because we're not isolationists, but we need to be much better prepared, better armed, stronger. And just start with the idea that you're not going to get help from your NATO partners anywhere except if Russia invades Europe. End of discussion. None. OK. None. And you're not going to get any help from the UK. a Britain with a majority indigenous British population. He's right about that. And so that's just a matter of time. So increasingly, the United States is going to have to look at allies in our Western hemisphere or coalitions of the willing in Europe, Eastern Europeans, I don't know, Finland, maybe some of the Scandinavian countries, but not Western Europe. Or I hear some of these truly woke policies coming out of Australia. You would have thought this is one of our great allies. It's very worrisome. I don't think the numbers are at a critical mass, but they're growing. What is the common denominator, everybody? Why is this happening? It's happening because the left doesn't have an agenda that people want. They don't want these radicals. They don't want radical open borders. They do not want the destruction of fossil fuels. They do not want socialism. And they're rebelling. And these governments that are left-wing are doubling down. And they have destroyed Europe as an economic dynamo, which it used to be. It has no military to speak of until recently. And even then, it's going to take years to rearm. It has no borders. It has no fossil fuels. It's committing slow-motion suicide. Yeah. Well, let's talk a little more in a bit about the ways of the left. But first, to our listeners and our viewers, if you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations, and policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, and more distortion. But here's the historical truth. Every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. The wise, though, they never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction. And that's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history. Gold. Not as speculation, but as insulation. Our reputation matters, said Victor Davis Hanson in his own words, which is why we are partnering with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability, and an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau. For years, they've guided Americans through transparent education and longstanding relationships built on trust. And right now, they're extending a special Liberty offer to our listeners and viewers to help you get started with real gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank. If you believe, as we do, that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious, call 844-790-9191, 844-790-9191, or visit protectwithvictor.com. That's 844-790-9191. That's 844-790-9191, 844-790-9191, or visit protectwithvictor.com. History rewards those who take the long view, and we thank the good people from Allegiance Gold for sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Victor, before, I think I'm going to shift to flock cameras here in a second, but before I do, and I said flock, flock to our good listeners and viewers, can I ask you about. Your health, would that be okay? Yes. Victor, do you have anything you want to share about your health? Uh, yes. I got my third blood biopsy yesterday, DNA, and it was negative. So what does that mean? A mucinous. I'm not trying to act like I know anything about medicine. I'm just parodying what I was told. But a mucinous adenoma, carcinoma, is very rarely. With this G, G12R mutation found in the STX, deadly mutation found in the lung. So there are worries that it might have been, you know, metastasized elsewhere. I don't think it was, but in any case, they had the DNA of that. When they took out the tumor, they cut it up and they had the DNA. Under this new signatera blood biopsy, as I said earlier, they can run a test and find one cell of your primary tumor in your blood, which means. If it's found, that tumor will show up somewhere in your body within four to six months. And they know where it'll show up because that type of mutation shows up in, in my case, pancreas, liver, lung, or brain. So the idea is if you get a positive, then you usually do chemo or immunotherapy immediately, even if you can't see it on a scan. But in my case, my tumor is what they call cold. It can't be treated by either. So for me, it's kind of, when you get this blood test, it's really life or death in a sense, because if you find it, there's nothing you can do unless it appears in four or five months and you can cut it out if you get it quick enough. But it was negative. So, and that was important because the mucus sheds DNA much slower. So even though I was pretty excited about the 30-day and the 90-day test, there were people who suggested that maybe, the mucinous adenoma mutation that you have might have shed it slower. In other words, some escaped and it just kind of was in a state of suspended animation or it had mucin around it and you couldn't see it. But after 210 days, it's acknowledged that it does shed. So this was a crucial one and it hasn't shown up. So I have another one in 90 days, but they're good news because they're geometric. Not arithmetically calibrated. So when you get one negative, the chances are not just, you know, 5%, they go much higher each as you go down the line. So the second, less chance than the first, third, a lot less chance than the first and second, the next one, if it would be a negative, and on some type of AE paradigm, it goes something like 40% reoccurrence, 38, 35, 25, something like that. So I think I've gone, at least 10 or 15 points on these percentages, which I, you know, they're not real numbers that are, but it's good. You have to look at it some way. Yeah. I mean, if I had, if I had got a positive, you and I would be talking right now. Uh, what, what's the future of the podcast and everything? Because it's irrelevant compared to your health. So, but the millions and they are millions who've prayed for you and still pray for you. I think that's, uh, I can't speak for God Victor or, or the Pope or all I can, all I can say is I think it's tremendous. Uh, all I can say is I had no, I had no memory whatsoever of the first four hours that went superbly when the, the low and the cancer was removed. I had a lot of very strange rumors. The second one, when I just about died and they were frantically trying to transfuse six transfusion. And I have a person of faith, idiosyncratic as it is that all the people who prayed, I could feel it. So I was flying somewhere and I couldn't land. And then the fog lifted and I sort of landed my little wing, my arm wings, like not a crash landing. No, I had a running landing on the balcony of my house and I woke up. That was so funny with, with other things. I saw a lot of people that I, wanted to see too. And I was out in my family. Wow. Well, maybe when you were flying around Victor in that state, you might've seen some flock drones. So I'd like to, I've been, why don't you explain to the audience the difference between a flock drone and a normative drone? Oh, I, a flock drone has, I don't know that it's all that different. It, it tries to capture your movements. Let's talk about flock cameras. This is affecting a lot of communities and it's affecting mine in Milford, Connecticut. And all of a sudden there are cameras showing up everywhere and the police and, and bureaucrats saying, well, this is needed for safety and we can catch a murderer, et cetera. But what it does, it tracks you, your car, knows your car, your license, your images. And so it's a big deal here in Milford, Connecticut, and it's a big deal in a hundred, hundreds of communities in America. Many of them are fighting these flock cameras saying they're violations of the fourth amendment. They have a right to, government does have a right to know that I've gone to the grocery store. And then after that, I went to the beach and et cetera. But that's what's happening now. These cameras that capture this information, they retain it. And the police want to look at it, they look at it. And that's gone beyond just reading the license plate. That's when I first heard about it. Yeah, it's a facial, facial recognition, et cetera. And it's not just about cars. It's about anyone who, you know, walking around in the location. One guy, we had a huge Board of Aldermen meeting last week. And he said, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. In Milford, hundreds of people showed up. And one guy said he did an FOI request in just a few weeks. He had been tracked 128 times. So the government knows where you're going. You have a right to privacy. If I said to you, I'm not going to take my cell phone with me or my computers, I'm just going to get in a car and drive somewhere into remote places in California, they would find me? Well, it's possible that with flock cameras they could if the municipality, and there are many small towns and large cities that have them. And what comes from some of these things that are associated with these speeding cameras, too, is that all of a sudden people are getting, what the hell? I just got three tickets. What I don't understand about this is they're trying to get more and more sophisticated cameras to find criminals. But at the same time this is happening, they're never – that famous case where those two brothers butchered. Four people came up, I think in the Kansas or was it Missouri Supreme Court, and they're not going to face the death penalty. And we saw another person let out the other day that went out and shot somebody. So we're letting people – what's the purpose of finding people at a more sophisticated manner and a greater rapidity when the criminal justice system is letting them out? Because inevitably what will happen is the old – We can't deal with a felony, so we'll focus on the misdemeanor. Or we can't deal with a criminal, so we'll focus on the law-abiding person to make us feel. Well, you've been through – you've talked about that in your own experiences in Selma. But there's gold in those hills, Victor, yeah. But we're going to turn this into traffic violations. In my community, I think within a month they've brought in like an extra million dollars that had not been there the previous month. So this is a bunch of issues. It's not only position cameras. It's roadways. Now it's Flock drones. And the difference in Flock is that Flock, say, as a difference from a regular camera is the Flock has a computer software system that will immediately take that picture and correlate it with a database of either fingerprints or faces and can tell you almost immediately or car registration who the person is. Where they're going. So, hey, you know, you can't tap my phone unless you have a warrant. Why can you follow me wherever I go without a warrant? So it's a violation. A lot of people are arguing and the Institute for Justice is and other conservative entities. This is a violation of Fourth Amendment rights. And, again, it's happening in a lot of communities across America. And there's a lot of outrage amongst the public. And, Victor, we've never heard that data. Has been broken into or taken by the Chinese or whomever. You know, perish the thought that we could even think that this Flock data gets into bad hands. It is scary. Yesterday, to take you one example very quickly, I talked to my daughter and I said, I have to go under the house when I feel better because there's some pipes and stuff. So I'm thinking this was not on a computer. This is on my phone. I was thinking of getting one of these companies. That would come in and clean your crawl space and put plastic, you know, and then I could go on in there without, you know, breathing a lot of dust. And then if I got I'm at the point now where electricians or plumbers don't like to go under there. So I was going to do this. And guess what? Five minutes later, she sent me a picture of a company that did that. Did she do anything? No. She was talking on her phone to me and up pot. Popped a text with her phone number with an ad before your for and after that. How would they know that? How do they do that? Big brother is listening, watching, et cetera. Yeah, they must have. They must monitor people's phones and then the computer, whatever they mention an item, they it connects to an advertiser and then they send you the ad. Yeah. So they're listening to us. Yeah. I'm afraid the refrigerator and the toaster are listening also, but you never know. Anyway, I'm glad we got this out there. Folks should look into these things. I think you'll be likely outraged, too. Victor, before we take a break, I think I'd like to get you to let's talk about what is the point of there being a W in the WNBA. This incident happened a couple of weeks ago. I'm sure folks know about some young kids. They did a Seattle game, Seattle Storm, I'm sure. Seattle Storm, yes. Seattle Storm. And that was the co-owner, Celeste Keaton. Keaton. And her, by the way, the owner-owner is the daughter of Richard Gilder, the late Richard Gilder, who founded the Gilder-Layman Library in New York. Dick Gilder. Not George Gilder, though. Not George Gilder. No, George is still out there kicking. Anyway, so a couple of things here. The two girls, the young kids that came out to support Sophie Cunningham because she's talked about girls' sports should be about girls. The co-owner attacked her. Now, in the last couple of days, Sophie Cunningham has kind of replaced Caitlin Clark as the, I'd say, the favorite woman of many of us who care about these public figures. Not that you want to care about watching WNBA basketball. But she's being attacked, and the whole trans issue is coming up in WNBA, and various coaches, like, I don't know, I can't say who should be playing. Like, they will not say a biological woman should be playing for the WNBA. It's just absurdity. They know. I think Clay Travis said that he was going to buy a franchise and have only trans players. Would they let him do that? No. Because they would win every game. It was funny what he put up there. And the Minnesota coach who wore a jacket, I mean, that was with advertisements or a message about trans, she was also whining that there's too many men still in women's coaching, and women don't get a chance to dominate the field as they should given they're women. So, obviously, she was. She was walking into a logical inconsistency because she had had this jacket on that she wanted biological men in sports who would dominate it. And then she was angry that in her own coaching aspect, she would be dominated by men. So, why wouldn't she have the same concern about women that were players that she does about biological male? I don't think we're ever going. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think in my lifetime or anyone's lifetime we're ever going to see a woman transition to a man and play in the NBA. Does anybody believe that? I don't. I just don't think that's going to happen. And I do think you will see trans athletes in the women's because they're biological males at birth. And nobody wants. The other thing, and I talked a little bit with Sammy about it, is I went and looked at about six AI estimates. If you ask them how much money, media attention has Caitlin Clark brought to the Women's National Basketball Association, which is owned by the men's, and it runs a deficit until three years ago. And most of them. Most of them said in terms of increased attendance, increased merchandising, increased huge now advertising packages based on ratings of the Indiana Fever, and any team she plays sells out, they figure that she has been worth $1 billion in added capital revenue and free advertising. And as a result. And as a result of that, the perennially bankrupt teams are now starting to break even, if not show a profit. And they are upgrading their travel facilities so women are flying private. They're not on like a college basketball team on United or American Airlines. They've got their own private jets they're leasing. They've got upgraded salaries. They're getting bonuses. And what is. And what is the reaction to all of that? The one woman who's doing it all, it's not any white woman. It's one white woman who is a superb athlete, Caitlin Clark, probably the best natural shooter, passer that we've seen in that women's category of women's basketball in two or three generations. And she's magnificent. And now she has a sidekick who is very good. Blocker, shooter herself, Sophie Cunningham, and she's beautiful. And like Caitlin, she's. white, and heterosexual in a league that we didn't know because nobody watched it. But the more we watched it, we were told by various sportscasters, sometimes with making a joke, sometimes bragging about it, sometimes obviously hinting they didn't approve of it, that who knows their motivations. But they all agree on one thing, that the Women's Basketball Association, like the NBA, doesn't look like America, to quote the left. It's not diverse. It's about 60% black, 60-65%, and it's 30-40% gay. And now you have the two women, and Sophie Cunningham, when she did that, the point became a social media phenomenon, and everybody does it, and now she's got her name everywhere, and she's making a ton of money. And I saw her the other day in a clip, somebody said, sent me, she's doing bikini layouts, and she must be 6'2 or something. She's lean, but muscular and beautiful. Stunning, actually. And you can see what this is doing to the league. Now, a logical, rational person will say, we got to make sure we don't gratuitously foul these two girls because they are our meal ticket, and they're bringing us more money we ever imagined. The crowd's bigger. We're getting better exposure. We're getting our own media contracts. Or would the reaction be, I don't like white people. I don't like heterosexual people. I'm going to try to injure these people. And that's what they're doing. Sophie Cunningham got hit really hard in the face, and they called a foul on the perpetrator. On her? Yeah, she got elbowed in the shop. Right. Just like happened to Caitlin Clark. And then when you look and you say, well, maybe it's just the players. No, because you see the coach wearing a propaganda shirt. Jacket. You see a co-owner going across and yelling at two small girls. And you get the impression what? The more you see the Women's National Basketball Association, the more you do not want to have anything to do with it. It's just too toxic. Everything about it is toxic. It brings together the worst in American society. It is tribal. It is racialist. It's got a sexual orientation. It's got a certain chauvinism about it. It is projectionist. Everything about it. And the irony is it would rather destroy itself than benefit if it meant that they had to allow two white heterosexual women to continue to be stars in the league and the breadwinners for everybody. They would rather destroy it. Or not say this is a league for biological women. There's something about that, Victor. It seems, and I could be totally wrong. I have no data on this, but my gut tells me it's the lesbians in the league and lesbians seemingly more so in general that seem to have, I don't know, favor the trans involvement in things woman as opposed to your wife, my wife. I think it gives them. It gives them additional numbers. I think 2% of the population is lesbian and 0.0001 is trans, but they'll take them. And they feel that it's another victimized tribal group that they can join their coalition. But it's not going to work. At some point, Sophie and Caitlin and some wise investors are going to say, you know what? I want to make a league or I'm going to make a league. I want to go somewhere where race is incidental and it's not obsessive and we don't talk about sexual orientation. And we try to be good leftists and represent America at quoting who we are, who are we. We're America. We're diverse. We're proportionally represented. Use all of the left wing boilerplate. Of course, when you do that, you're racist. When they do it, they're inclusive. The other thing I was watching. This whole circus. I thought of Alexis de Tocqueville's famous aphorism. And I mentioned it before. I was reading him again the other day. And he says, America has a chance because it has autonomous, middle class, independent farmers, unlike the peasantry of Europe. And he basically says there's a peasant mentality that everybody would like to be poor and equal than some people to be. More equal with the additional benefit that everybody would be wealthier. So let's all be poor and equal and be the old NBA. Then let's be all better off. But some people like Caitlin and Sophie better off too much than the rest of us. Yeah. That's coveting was in the commandments. That's a democratic Socialist of America's agenda. Party of the Eighth Commandment. So our ninth Catholic. I forget these things. Well, Victor, we're going to take just a quick little break. And when we come back, we'll talk about some new examples of Jew hate. We'll do that when we come 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 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 they've learned. and make up half the crime victims of hate crimes in New York. I all predict that there will be a Muslim mayor of New York will say he wants to go after whiter, richer neighborhoods, and he'll have a hate list of people, enemies of the people he will send out and say, you're guilty unless you can prove in three weeks that you live in your home. And if you have a, you know, you have a house and we think it's unoccupied, we're going to list your address and name, and we're going to wink and nod and say, hey, squatter, hey, thief, there's an empty house with its name, and maybe that'll cause a mass sell-off of houses, and the people will have a chance to have affordability. And you would have said, that's crazy. And if you'd said, well, I think Tucker, I'll make another prediction. Tucker Carlson is going. He's going to have Nick Fuentes, who says the Jews should be basically eliminated. And you're going to have a guy in my Nostradamian prediction, I believe there'll be a guy running for Senate with a SS Totenkopf tattoo on his chest, and they will still want to nominate him. And that will be no disqualification of office. He will be disqualified because of his physical violence against women, not because he's a Nazi fanatic. A Nazi fan, I suppose. I could go on and on, but nobody would believe it would have happened this quickly. But then, you know, in Germany, 1933, 1934, Jews were starting to get the message, but nobody thought they'd have Kristallnacht two years later, and then pretty much the Jewish laws, and then it was too late to get out for some people. When it comes, it comes. It comes very quickly. It's like Me Too. You know? All of a sudden. Me Too is about Harvey Weinstein and all of his crimes and his grotesqueness, and next thing they're going after are Garrison Keillor and Charlie Rose and, you know what I mean, everybody. Al Franken and all these people who were randy, but, and the premise of the whole thing is that every single woman in Hollywood who goes up to a apartment, a hotel room with a director has no idea what he's there for. They have no idea why he's there. They have no idea that he is a creep, that he is a predator. They have no idea. And some of them did. And so they should. But if you're the Democrat president. And I'm not saying, they should have reported it. They should have reported him, but they didn't. Yeah. They didn't. But if the leading contender for the presidency who's a Democrat digitally assaults a woman, that's different. That's a different class. Wow. Of course. We can ignore that. Yeah. Uh, what's her name? Tara Reed. Yeah. Yeah. She was demonized and said that she was crazy and, you know, she was an idiot. She was, made it all up. We have a phone call by her mother, I think. To Larry King. To the Larry King show and just recited my daughter as being sexually abused by a very well-known Senator. So that was, and then there were five or six other women that came, but that was. That was okay because he did it for the cause. He did it for the cause, the cause of women. He was, well, he's good on abortion, Joe Biden. Well, he's good on the trans issue. So yeah, he fooled around a little bit. He might've, you know, been a little bit too much, but we'll forgive him because he's a vote in the, you know, he'll be, that's how they think. Got to break some eggs to make an omelet, uh, school of thinking. So, hey, Victor, let's end up, cause we're going to be a little short today. Uh, so. Schedules are tough, but this is a positive story, uh, and it's, uh, hasn't gotten much play. Alabama's, uh, Tuskegee University demands students wear business suits in a new controversial, uh, dress code. So let me just read this. I think I got this from the New York Post. Students at Tuskegee will be required to wear a business suit when arriving on campus this semester under a strict new dress code that also bans certain headwear, sparking a heated online debate. Tuskegee University, historically, historically black university, uh, unveiled the updated policy last week in a message from President Dr. Mark Brown to students and parents. Students must, quote, arrive on campus with a business suit and proper shoes for a business meeting, end quote. Brown says the updated dress code also bans, quote, revealing clothing in class to the cafeteria or in official settings like convocation, along with banning bedroom shoes, bonnets, or do-rags. for them. And there were four or five. And he said, when do we get to work? My family wants to be the first. And that was how everybody was. But we had this idea that there's this high minority crime rate. Well, it's a result of the liberality and the great society of the 60s. But people in the 50s that suffered discrimination, their way of combating it was to be more disciplined and better at what they did than the average American. And then to impress them so much that they would want to emulate them rather than to discriminate against them. And that's it. This should be a matter of great pride in the black community, how given post-Civil War, the constraints on them and racism against them, that still the 19. You take the late. We talked about this before. Late 40s into the 50s. There's parity or near parity between whites and black. Nuclear families, rising incomes, stable home ownership. All these things were quite real for black Americans. In other words, they didn't talk about reparations and what was owed them or they didn't know what twerking was. They didn't know any of that. All of that in some ways was imported from the white hippie culture. That was toxic to minorities. The minority communities, that idea of these upper middle-class, affluent white people growing their hair long, walking bare feet, not using deodorant, passing wind in public in class, smoking marijuana, using a vernacular, F-U-S-this, promiscuous sex, drugs, the whole UC Santa Cruz experience that I saw. And they set the standard. And yet the black people, the tragedy of it, they had resources to fall back on. So if they got hooked on dope, they could go to a rehab center. If they got a girl pregnant or a girl got pregnant, they had family resources. If they got arrested for possession, they had access to lawyers. But that type of behavior in the black and Hispanic community was fatal. Yeah. Well, Victor, I didn't raise this to pick on Tuskegee, but Dr. Brown here is saying that he wants to do for Tuskegee, I believe, is something that's applicable all across America. You've talked, when you were flying a lot, Victor, the slovenliness of America in planes and airports. It came very quick. It came very quick. I can remember the first flight. I was 18 years old. I'd never been out of state. And I flew to Yale University for the summer Greek program. And my parents put me on a flight. And everybody was well-dressed in 1971. And that was in the hippie period. They were all well-dressed. I got to the point, you know, where right before I became ill, I thought, I can't do this anymore. I'm sitting here, whether it was premium plus or first business class or even economy sometime. It would, I mean, especially economy, it would be people. I thought, wow, this person just came out of a yoga gym. She has no underwear. She's wearing a bodysuit. Oh, this guy, is wearing no underwear and shorts. This guy has, you know, sandals on. His feet stink. This person is eating a chili boat right next to you. And this person hasn't bathed in five days. This person has a see-through blouse. It was just, it was like a circus, a zoo. All the freak flags were flying. Yeah. And then, you know, and then chaos, chaos, chaos. You know, I'd get on there and, oh, I'd say to my wife, I don't think I'm going to make that 25, 45 minute connection in Denver because there's 14 wheelchairs and there's only one person. And then we would take off 20 minutes late. I'd sit there. Can they make it up? Can they make it up? Can they make it up? And, and then I do think people in wheelchairs will be the last to get off. And no, no, no. Everybody got cured. The miracle, was it a Catholic miracle or something? Catholic, yeah. They prayed. They prayed to St. Wheelchair because all of a sudden the 17 jumped out like they were spry and ran out first. There is no St. Wheelchair. We will find the Patriot St. Wheelchairs. But anyway, that's, I said, I literally said to myself, no mas. I'm not going to do this. Miracles, miracles. It made me, I used to go sometimes when I couldn't get a, a few times when a car was broken, I took the Greyhound bus back from Santa Cruz, once from Stanford. And, you know, it was three hour drive in those days. And it took about eight hours, but it was not, the people on that bus were far better dressed and acting than the people on the plane today. Yeah. It's a, it's an experience. Well, Victor, we're almost at the end here. I haven't read any comments for the last few episodes. Let me just read a few quickly. Spartan Cheer Ho says, "Victor, you've got the most flattering compliment I think a person could get when someone tells you their children know who they are." That was very moving. Thank you guys for a great show. Sammy, you looked lovely as ever. Milo B. Good writes, "I have been waiting for this review." This is of the, of, uh, the Odyssey. Thank you, VDH and Sammy. I will go to, uh, I, I'll go see it to have a comparison, but I really wanted to hear what the professor had to say before I did. God bless you all. I have a big one coming out in New Criterion, 5,000 words. Oh, okay. On the movie? Okay. Well, along the same lines on the movie, uh, uh, L. Lindley, 100, writes, "I enjoyed your commentary on the movie version. I have read the Odyssey and have decided not to see the movie because I suspected that it wasn't going to be the same Odyssey I read in my Greek classes in the Ohio State's Classics Department in the 1980s." That was a very good Classics Department. Well, I was also impressed by Jonathan Peugeot's lecture on the movie on his podcast, "The Symbolic World." He mostly concentrates on the psychological exploration of the theme. You can't go home again. And Odysseus is the trickster whose wanderings are an attempt to do this. I think I probably got more from you and Peugeot than going to the movie. And then the final, and I think this is really dead on, from Deborah Levine, 2869, writes, "Whenever I hear Victor speak, there is a special peace that flows through his soul and out to mine, forever grateful and blessed." Victor, I really do believe Deborah's on how a lot of people feel about this podcast when they hear you talk. So, Deborah, you are right. Well, I feel the same. I think I'm alive because I could feel prepared. You're coming the other way. Yeah. So, well, thanks, Victor. Folks, thanks to those who write me, who get Sybil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Sybil Society. If you're not getting it, go to sibilthoughts.com, sign up, easy peasy, 14 recommended readings, great interesting articles I've come across in the previous week, and we are not selling your name. Thanks, Victor, for all the wisdom you've shared today. We'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hanson In His Own Words. Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.