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

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 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 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. [Music] Well, hello ladies and hello gentlemen and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. I'm Jack Fowler, Victor's friend. I'm here in Millford, 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. In this episode, it will be up on Thursday, August 6th. That'll be my Dota's birthday. Happy birthday, Mary. God knows how many things are going to happen between today. And then, but the topics we have to discuss with Victor today include this Simon and Schuster giving a book contract to some like Violentite, Semite, an update on Iran and Saudi Arabia's role in trying to keep Donald Trump from fully engaging. Could we fully engage as a news report out today about deficiency in our missiles? 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 Marsha Busky 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 online program, and that's Victor Davis Hanson in a few words. His website, The Blade of Perseus, you can find that at victorhanson.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 $6.50 a month, or if you want to discount it, take the full year, $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 the galley of his forthcoming book, The Counter Revolution, The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump in the Magda 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 rip around and ready. And 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 Hanson for The Daily Signal. I have a new book out on September 8th of this year, and I think you're going to enjoy it. It's called Counter Revolution, The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump, and the Magda Movement. It starts right after January 6th, and it details the lack of popularity of Donald Trump, the invective that he endured, the five civil and criminal trials, the effort to get him off the ballot, the raid on Marlago, the two impeachments earlier, one in which he was tried as a private citizen, and yet he came back. How did he come back? And why did he come back? I explain in the book how he defeated his primary opponents, how he was outspent, he had a hostile media, and he defeated the Democratic machine and Camela Harris. It starts on January 6th. It ends pretty much now in May of 2026. What's the title about? Donald Trump is not a revolutionary. He's not a revisionist. He's a counter-revolutionary. This time around, he is not addressing just the symptoms of the progressive project of the last 50 years. He's talking about the causes. Not just an open border, but how to stop illegal immigration entirely. Not just crime, but sending the National Garden to make sure cities are safe. Not just an Iranian nuclear threat, but ending that threat that seven other presidents had identified, but did not act on. Not just addressing the transgender issue or the Green New Deal, all of those issues that are 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 Scene. 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 US military has used virtually all of its long-range precision missiles during the Iran War. Stories to see the US Army is 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 US 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 in the sedatorial begins by saying Saudi Arabia reportedly convinced President Donald Trump to call off the planned massive attack on 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 US policy, it needs to act as a full-fledged US ally and deliver, whether by somehow getting around to truly reopen the street of Hormuz and denuclearize, or by committing major financial and military resources to a serious military campaign that forces Tehran's hand. Victor, those two topics, your take on what's happening today. I think the Wall Street Journal is absolutely right. 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 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, 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 matter is they urged us to deal with the problem. And they did nothing. Saudi Arabia has three Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, gutter, 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. You're trying to tell me that what 1400 combat aircraft of our allies and ours could not deter Iran from hitting Saudi Arabia or hitting Kuwait or keeping the straight clothes. 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 and exile, maybe under the shot's sun, and get a wide group of Iranians, and 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, go. 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 thought 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, 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. 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 street if that's what they're going to do. But we need, 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 and 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 Navy's combined. Its army was, it had 250,000 people in it when the war broke out in Europe. 19. 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 million people. 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 and just four years. You're telling me we can't make missiles and artillery shell. 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 Newtson 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 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 it's fully operational within say eight, two and a half years it's producing a bomber every 63 minutes. We built the the Burma route abroad. We're building mulberries. We're building the fleet as you say. The pentagon did not exist at the beginning. No, we're building two years. Two and a half years. So it's staggering. We built a golden gate bridge. We built the golden gate bridge and the bay bridge from 32 to 36 simultaneously. And then in the height of the depression. So we can do it 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, a three-toed lizard somewhere or we don't, we're not going to be a high-speed rail and promised 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. But so 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 widely allies. Why would we ever trust Pakistan? Pakistan, why would we ever trust Pakistan when they had been laud and 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, why don't trust Egypt anymore either? Why would we trust Turkey when they said they're going to send missiles into Athens? They're 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 in military attaches at a university. It was the first time I'd ever spoken since my operation. I might have been kind of 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, "Okay, in a perfect world, Donald Trump calls you up and says, Iran has all of your cities in missile range. 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 a prime mover of terrorism and I'm going to go in there and use our golf partners facilities and our carrier force and neuter this threat. Would you like to help us?" I said, "What would your reaction have been?" "No, we would have said no, okay?" 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 my crown? Would my crown have leaked it or the AIDS around it?" They said, "Yes." They all leaked. 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 my crown 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 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. You didn't know who was who." It was a mess and the Gaddafi's were actually reforming. They weren't as horrific as they had been and you bombed them and then you asked 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. 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 at night or they had to have their cappuccino in the morning before they took off. So you wanted somebody to fly 80% 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, there is 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 I think all of us, we 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. None. So you're not going to get any help from the UK. The UK as we know it, our associate Mark Stein has an essay today and he basically says that when he reviews the demography that in 20 years there won't be 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. Western. Or I hear some of these truly woke policies coming out of Australia. You would have thought this was great about Australia. It's very, it's very worrisome. I don't think the numbers are at a critical mass, but they're growing. What is a common denominator, everybody? Why is this happening? It's happening because the left doesn't have an agenda that people want. They do not want, they don't want these radical open borders. They do not want the destruction of fossil fuels. They do not want socialism, and they're rebelling. 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. 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. If 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. 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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 844-790-9191-844-790-9191-9191 or visit, protectwithvictor.com. History rewards those who take the long view when 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 to our good listeners and viewers, can you, can I ask you about your health? Would that be okay? Yes. Victor, do you have anything you want to share about your health? Yes, I got my third blood biopsy yesterday, DNA, and it was negative, so what does that mean? A mucus, I'm not trying to act like I know anything about medicine, I'm just parodying what I was told, but a mucus adenoma, carcinoma is very rarely with this G12R mutation found in the STX deadly mutation found in the lung. So there are worries that it might have been 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 signeterra of 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 will show up because that type of mutation shows up 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. And that was important because the mukenous 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 mukenous adenoma mutation that you have might have shed a slower. In other words, some escaped and it just kind of was in a state of suspended animation, or it had muken around it, and you couldn't see it. But after 210 days, it's acknowledged that it does shed. So this was the crucial one, and it hasn't shown up. So I have another one in 90 days, but they're good news because they're geometrically not erythmetically calibrated. So when you get one negative, the chances are not just five percent, they go much higher as you go down the line, so the second less chance in the first, third, a lot less chance in the first and second. The next one, if it would be negative, then on some type of AE paradigm, it goes something like 40% recurrence, 38, 35, 25, something like that. So I think I've gone down at least 10 or 15 points on these percentages, which I, you know, they're not real numbers that are. Well, that's good. You have to look at it some way, if I had got a positive, you and I would be talking right now, what's the future of the podcast and everything, because it's irrelevant compared to your health. So millions, and they are millions who've prayed for you and still pray for you. I think that's, I can't speak for God, Victor, or the Pope, or all I can do is, I think it's tremendous. 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 transfusions. And I have a feeling that as 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 wing, my arm winged, like, not a crash landing either. No, I was, I had running landing on the balcony of my house and I woke up. That was so funny with other things. I saw a lot of people that I wanted to see too and I was out in my family. Well, well, maybe when you were flying around Victor in that state, you might have seen some flock drones. So I'd like to, I've been wanting to explain to the audience the difference between a flock drone and a normative drone. Oh, a flock drone has a, I don't know that it's all that different, it tries to capture your movements. Let's talk about flock cameras. Yeah. This is affecting a lot of communities. And it's affecting mine in Millford, Connecticut. And all of a sudden their cameras showing up everywhere and the police 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 Millford, Connecticut. And it's a big deal in hundreds of communities in America. Many of them are fighting these flock cameras saying they're violations of the Fourth Amendment. They don't 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 have captured 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 of 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 alderman meeting last night in Millford, 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, so I said, you have a right to private. As 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 have the municipality and there are many small towns in 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 hot, that hell, I just got three tickets, you know. But I don't understand 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, uh, or was it Missouri Supreme Court and they're not going to face the death penalty. And we've, 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 you're 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-biting person to make us feel. Well, you've been through, you've talked about that in your own experiences in Selma but there's golden those hills right there. Yeah, I mean, but we're going to, we're going to turn the sense of traffic violations in my community. I think within a month, they've brought in like an extra million dollars of that had not been there the previous month. So the, if this is a bunch of issues, it's not only position cameras at roadways, now it's flock drones. And the difference in flock is that flock say as an indifference 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, what they're doing. 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 another conservative entities. This is a violation of Fourth Amendment rights. And again, it's, 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 was taken by the Chinese or whomever, you know, perished the thought that we could even think that this flock data gets into bad hands. So, it is scary. Yesterday to take you one example, very quickly, I talked to my daughter and I said, I have to go into the house when I feel better because there's some pipes and stuff. So I'm thinking, now 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 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'd 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 popped a text with her phone number with an ad before and after that. How were they know that? How do they do that? Big brother is listening, watching, etc. 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. So they're listening to us. I'm afraid the refrigerator in the toaster listening also, but you never know. Anyway, I'm glad we got this out there. Folks should, you know, look into these things. I think it will be likely outraged to Victor. Before we take a break, I think I'd like to get you to, 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 at a Seattle game. Seattle storm. I think I'm sure the Seattle storm. Yes. Seattle storm. 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, you know, the Gilder layman library in New York, Dick Gilder. Not George Gilder though. Not George Gilder. No, George is still at the kickin', but 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 Keaton 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. 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 for trans with advertisements or a message about trans. She was also whining that there's too many men still in women's coaching and the women don't get a chance to dominate the field as they should given their women. So, you need, obviously 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? Aside from the fact that I don't think were ever going, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think in my lifetime or anyone's lifetime were 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 then nobody wants it. The other thing and I talked a little bit about with Sammy about it is I wouldn't look at about six AI estimates. If you ask him 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 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 one billion dollars in added capital revenue and value free advertising. 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 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, 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 percent black, 60, 65 percent, and it's 30 to 40 percent gay. And now you have the two women. And Sophie Coneyham, 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 and a clip somebody sent me. She's doing bikini layouts. And she must be six two 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 file these two girls because they are our meal ticket. And they're bringing us more money. We ever imagine the crowds 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. She got Sophie Coneyham got hit really hard in the face. And they called a foul on the perpetrator. Yeah, she got elbowed in the shop. 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 jacket, you see a co-owner going across and yelling at two small girls. And you get the impression what? It's just too toxic. It is tribal. It is racialist. It is. It's got a sexual orientation. 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. Or not, or not say this is a league for biological women. There's something about that Victor. It seems I can be totally wrong. I have no data on this. But my God 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 women as opposed to your wife, my wife. I think it gives them additional numbers. I think 2% of the population is lesbian and 0.001 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 want to go somewhere where race is incidental and it's not it's not obsessive and we don't talk about sexual orientation and we try to 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 where I was watching this whole circus, I thought of Alexis Tukvill's, Tukvill'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 it'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. Well, that's covered. Covering was in the commandments. That's a democratic socials of America's agenda. Party of the eighth commandment. So all or ninth of Catholic, I forget these things. Well, Victor, we're going to take a just 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 stories, 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 historic sites dot heritage dot org to start your adventure today. We're back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words on the daily signal network. Victor's a senior contributor at the daily signal. I want to remind you that his again his website the blade of persios victor Hansen dot com check that out and if you're on X at VD Hansen is Victor's handle. If you're on Facebook VDH's morning cup, there's also the Victor Davis Hansen fan club there. Great people. They have tons of Victor videos and all all such. So Victor, two stories. One is that punk Cornell Austin Franco who he came to some controversy earlier this year. We said, well, I'm not interested in working for Jew when I graduate from from school and and Cornell tut tutted him and it seemed like they were going to not allow him to come back but indeed they did. And then he went on your friend, not your friend. Pears Morgan, sorry. We have a strange relationship with Pears Morgan, but Pears Morgan interviewed him and this guy was just like he is unsufferable punk. And actually I read a piece in the New York Post, I think two days ago his own family, his mother and father, he comes from a great, very wealthy means, but they've thrown him out of the house. He's not allowed back. Yeah. Big guy saw the picture. He had a very big house. Yeah. Yeah. So mommy and daddy are even tired. Probably. Yeah. I mean, they just released today hate crime statistics in Mondommies in New York. Did you see that more than more than half or a Jewish against? We're a 10% of the population. 10% yeah. So like 60, a close to 60% of the hate crimes are against Jews. So when you start talking like that, a lot of people listen. And then they act it out. And there's not a lot of people saying you should be ashamed yourself for your disgusting or your, and especially if we had that Palestinian author that Mondommie offered an illustration for her, his wife's offered an illustration for her book. She was in the news. She's, you know, let's talk about it. Yeah. She said that they were Jews have always been parasites. They had no business in Israel. They want to be, she wants to destroy Israel. She used a horrible. It was very Nazi like vocabulary. They need to be eliminated parasites. It was, it was a Jewish supremacist cockroach. Cockroach. Yeah. Yeah. Mondommies was ruthless, soulless ghouls. Her name is, by the way, Susan Abul Hawa. So yeah, things like that, that's been mainstream. And that didn't stop. But she's getting, she's in the news because she's getting a book contract. Yes. She's getting book contract. Because of that, Simon and Schuster. Yeah. Simon and Schuster. Good Simon is a good Jewish name, right? So it's socially acceptable now. And this, this is very strange, everyone. It's happened in about five years. Go back to 1919, 2019. And if I had said, I'm Victor Hansen. And this is the Nostradamus broadcast. And I make predictions. I predict that within six years, Jews will be attacked, half the, 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. He'll say he wants to go after wider 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 Carl, make another prediction. Tucker Carlson is going to have Nick Fuentas, who says that June should be basically eliminated. And you're going to have a guy in my nastodomian prediction. I believe there'll be a guy running for Senate with a SS-Totankov tattoo on his chest. And they will still want to nominate him. And that there will be no disqualification of office. He will be disqualified because of his physical violence against women, not because he's a Nazi fan, I suppose. Okay, I could go on and on, but nobody would believe it would have happened this quickly. But then in Germany, 1933, 1934, Jews were starting to get the message, but nobody thought you'd have crystal knot 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 very quickly. It's like me too, all of a sudden, me too is about Harvey Weinstein and all of his crimes and his grotesque testness. And next thing they're going after, Garrison Keeler and Charlie Rose, and everybody, Al Franken and all these people who were Randy, but in the premise of the whole thing is that every single woman in Hollywood who goes up to an apartment, a hotel room with a director has no idea what he's what he's there for, he has no, 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, they should have reported it, they should have reported him, but they didn't. Yeah. They didn't. But if the, 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. And we can ignore that. Yeah. What's her name? Tara Reed. Yeah. Yeah. She was demonized and said that she was crazy and you know, she was, she was, she was made it all up. We have a phone call by her mother, I think the, to the Larry King show and just recited my daughter has been sexually abused by a, a very well known senator. So that was, then there were five or six other women that came, but 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 have, 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 a pro. That's how they think got to break some eggs to make an omelet school of thinking. So if we're going to let's end up because we're going to be a little short today, schedule so tough, but this is a positive story and it's, it hasn't gotten much play. Alabama's Tuskegee University Demand students wear business suits in a new controversial 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 black university, 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 and quote Brown says the updated dress code also bans quote revealing clothing and class to the cafeteria or an official settings like convocation along with banning bedroom shoes, bonnets or do rags to class or the cafeteria. Quote the goal here is not meant to restrict you from enjoying the Tuskegee experience, but to prepare you with a solid foundation for the workforce you will enter once you leave Tuskegee Brown added. I don't know who Dr. Mark Brown is, but I like this guy. Yeah. I think it would be wonderful. I think the road for success of every group that has been shown discrimination has always been self-discipline and to be more disciplined, better educated, more law body than the majority and that's how they win a probation from the majority. So when you look at Greek immigrants or Italian, good example is Italian immigrant. They had the mob in Mafia, so what did Italian immigrants do? Most of them were hyper, law-biting, educated, Scalia, Giuliani, Cuomo, you name it. They all excelled in politics, science, etc. And then they overshadowed. So in the black community, we have almost half of the murders in the United States are committed by about 3% of the population, and we have this horrendous, new phenomenon of jamming stores. But we forget that traditionally that paradigm applied to the black community. I can remember, when I was in 5, 6, and 7, we had a lot of Ford tractors and my grandfather did not want to call the Ford distributor because it was very expensive for them to come out. So he'd say, "We've got to call Mr. Thompson." And this African-American guy about 6, 4, solid muscle with an absolute immaculate blue jumpshoot with his name on it. He worked for a mechanic company, and I think he did freelancing. He drove out in a car. He would put the Jubilee there. He'd put his meticulous toolbox with a little blanket. He'd have all them out, and then he would turn it on. He would do a little diagnostic test, and he'd say, "Mr. Davis, you have your overhead valves or a shot, I need to take this engine out and I'll take it home and we'll rebuild it and come back." And then it was like watching a surgeon work. I think he had 12 children, and they lived in a very small house. Of those 12 children, I know that at least 6 of them were college-educated, 7. One of them was a student body president behind me. The one ahead of me was vice president of student body. They were all fantastic students and athletes, discipline, and then he had a profession about him. We were afraid to call him by his first name. We always call him Mr. Thompson, because he was a consummate professional. I can tell you, we have a lot of gang activities here, nortenials, serenials. I can tell you, my father started a vocational training center. It's still there, and the idea was to have a junior college campus that was going to be trained, plumbing, mechanics, electricity, you name it. Body and fender. It was a huge campus, and it really trained people. There was a Mexican-American faculty member, and he was teaching people how to overhaul diesel engines. I think his name was Cruz, I won't give him his last name. Every morning, the school started at seven o'clock. People had to show up, and guess what? Cruz came there at 6'30, a macular grass before he put his jumpsuit on, with a tie and shirt. He brought out a special little container, an American flag, perfectly floated. He had been in the military, and he grew it up, and it flew, and then every evening before my father went home, Cruz went out, without anybody asking him to take the flag down. He spoke perfect English. He spoke beautiful Spanish. He was a wonderful instructor, and he was just so disciplined. He was immaculate. He never said his word. He was the epitome of what then was pretty typical of the second generation Mexican immigrant. What I'm getting at, this phenomenon of the '60s, it also hit the same thing with white people. We had white people out here that were from the Oklahoma diaspora, and I can remember Delmas Marshall. He'd come and knock on the door and say, "Mr. Davis, my family has come here for three weeks to cut the grapes, and we'd like to live in this." They had a little housing 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. We had this idea that this high minority crime rate, it's a result of the liberality and the great society of the '60s. People in the '50s that suffered discrimination, their way of combating it, was to be more disciplined and better as. 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, then you take the late, we talked about this before, late 40s into the 50s, this parody or near parody between whites and black. Yeah, it's a nuclear families rising incomes, stable, home ownership, all these things were quite real for black America. In other words, they didn't talk about reparations and what was owed them or they didn't know what torquing was, they didn't know any of that. All of that in some ways was imported from the white a hippie culture. That was toxic to minority communities, that idea of these upper, upper middle class, affluent white people growing their hair long, walking barefooted, not using deodorant, passing wind and public in class, smoking marijuana, using a vernacular FU as this promiscuous sex drugs, the whole UC Santa Cruz experience that I saw. And they set the standard, and yet the tragedy of it, they had resources to fall back on. So if they got hooked on dope, they could go to 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. Well, Victor, I didn't raise this to pick on Tuskegee. What 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, I do. Lovinliness of America in planes and air flights. It came very quick. I can remember the first flight. I was 18 years old. I'd never been on a state. And I flew to Yale University for the summer Greek program. And my parents permed 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, what 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, this guy is wearing no underwear in shorts. This guy has, you know, sandals on his feet stink. This person is eating the chili boat right next to you. And, 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. And then, you know, and then chaos, chaos, you know, I'd get on there and I'd say to my wife, I don't think I'm going to make that 25, 45 minute connection Denver, because there's 14 wheelchairs. 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 and wheelchairs will be the last to get off. And, no, no, no, everybody got cured. The miracle, was it a Catholic miracle or something? Yeah, they prayed to, they prayed to Saint wheelchair because all of a sudden the 17 jumped out like they were spry and ran out first. And there is no Saint wheelchair. We will find the patron saint of wheelchairs. But anyway, that's that I said, no, I literally said to myself, no, my ass. I'm not going to do this. Miracles, miracles. It made me, I used to go sometimes when I couldn't get 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 an experience. Well, Victor, we're almost at the end here. I just, I haven't read any comments for the last few episodes. Let me just read a few quickly. Spartan cheer host is Victor, you've got the most flattering compliment. I think a person could get what someone tells you, their children know who you are. That was very moving. Thank you guys for a great show. Sammy, you looked lovely as ever. My low B good rights. I have been waiting for this review. This is of the of the Odyssey. Thank you, VDH and Sammy. I will go to, 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 and new criterion 5,000 words. Oh, okay. On the movie. Okay. Well, along the same lines on the movie, L Lindley, 100 rights. I enjoyed your commentary on the movie version. I've 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. 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. An Odysseus is the trickster whose wanderings are an attempt to do this. I think I probably got more from you and Peugeot then going to the movie. And then the final, and I think this is really dead on from Debra Levine 2869 rights. Whenever I hear Victor speak, there is a special piece that flows through his soul and out to mind forever grateful and blessed Victor. I really do believe Debra is on how a lot of people feel about this podcast when they hear you talk. So Debra, why feel the same? I think I'm alive because I could feel better coming the other way. Yeah. So well, thanks Victor. Folks, thanks to those who write me, who get civil thoughts. The free weekly email newsletter right right for the Center for Civil Society. If you're not getting it, go to cybalthoughts.com. Sign up, easy peasy. 14 recommended readings were great, interesting articles that come across them the previous week. And we are not selling your name. Thanks Victor for all the wisdom you 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 victorhanson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.