Why Does LeBron James Disrespect the Country That Made Him Rich? | Victor Davis Hanson

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And he makes, well, I think, $40 million a year from his Nike endorsements. And he probably makes another $30 million in other endorsements. And his salary makes $100 million a year. And he's a popular icon. What is this beef with the United States? What did it do to LeBron James? Did it ever say to him, we're not going to cover you? You won't get endorsements because you're black? No, it didn't do any of that. He treated him like anybody else. And his ability in basketball made him one of the richest people in the United States. And he can't even stand for two and a half minutes, three minutes. I'm not asking he not make money. I'm asking that he appreciates it. Well, hello, ladies and hello, gentlemen. And welcome to Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. We are recording. We are recording on Saturday, October 24th, 2026. This particular episode will be up on the World Wide Web, brought to you by The Daily Signal on Tuesday, October 27th. Speaking of The Daily Signal, Victor's a senior contributor there. He's also the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. His website is TheBladeOfPerseus. You'll find it at VictorHansen.com. If you haven't been there yet, you're going to you're going to be thrilled if you're a Victor fan. Tons of free stuff. But then there's also exclusive material, which you can read two articles a week, one video a week. If you subscribe, it's $6.50 a month or $65 for the full year, which is like getting two months free. Again, that's VictorHansen.com for The Blade of Perseus. Victor, we are going to talk today about FBI agents who have. Arrested for suppressing, lying to Congress about the Hunter Biden laptop, the Smithsonian in trouble, not only for attendance, but also giving the proverbial middle finger to Shelby and Eli Steele for their new documentary, A White Guilt. Asra Nomani from the Fox has another great report out about who's behind the riots now spreading over Europe. LeBron James being a total excuse my French asshat during the playing of the national anthem before the game this week and trouble for in Democrat for Democrats, it seems in Minnesota. Maybe if we have time, the billionaire tax in California not seeming to go over with the populace, according to polls. So we have all that to get Victor's wisdom on. And we will do that when we come back from these. Initial important messages. Truth is under attack in our culture. People are embracing lies about gender. They're rejecting the sanctity of every human life. And the government is even punishing people for saying what's true and right. But the biblical principles on which our country was founded, they still matter and they must be defended. Alliance defending freedom is on the front lines of this fight. They're standing in courtrooms across the country, upholding truth and your right to speak it. But they rely. On help from friends like you to do this work. Your gift to ADF will be matched by a special grant while funds last. Visit join ADF dot com slash Hansen or text Hansen to eight three eight four eight to make twice the impact. That's join ADF dot com slash Hansen or text Hansen to eight three eight four eight. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen. In his own words, Victor, first of all, I want to say to our to our viewers and listeners, thanks. We have so many. It seems so many new viewers. We won particular episode from last week had close to three hundred fifty thousand people view it. So if you're new to pay no attention to the host, pay attention to the star because he is a font of wisdom four times a week here and also separately four times a week. Victor does another show. For The Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hansen in a few words. So, Victor, if I can get my notes together here, let's talk first about the FBI. If you're game for that again, if I can only find. Oh, here we go. Two former FBI officials charged with making false statements about Hunter Biden's laptop. That's a headline from The Epoch Times. Two former FBI officials have been charged with making false statements about a laptop. But belonging to Hunter Biden, son of the former president, according to court documents unsealed on October 23rd, Nicole Flores and Bradley Benavidez, if I'm saying his name right, were each charged with lying to Congress because of false statements they made to a congressional committee investigating how the FBI handled its probe into Hunter Biden, et cetera, et cetera. Victim, Victor, victim. Sorry, you are a victim, but Victor. What are your unsurprised, I think, thoughts? I know the left says, well, now the government's been weaponized. It's not being weaponized. All of these investigations, whether it's Ilya and Omar or these FBI agents, either had their origins with the Biden administration and were dropped or were deliberately never prosecuted, even though there was culpability there. And what did these two people allegedly do? They went up to Congress and they were. Under oath. And they were asked a series of questions, mostly pertaining to two items. Number one, the FBI had in possession for over a year by the time of the 51 intelligence authorities letter, basically, although it was carefully worded, saying that Hunter's laptop was a product of Russian disinformation. OK, so they knew they knew that that was false. They had already. Authenticated. Anybody who looked at the laptop and there were things on the Internet that were leaked out. You knew that it was authentic. Everything about it, the picture, it could not have been doctored. So they they deliberately misled about that lie. And then the second thing is they were working the FBI with social media, especially the New York Post, to suppress that story because they were terrified as the. The last debate came in 2020, and Joe Biden was not prepared to answer all the incriminating questions that had arisen from that laptop. Mr. Big Mr. Ten percent. I always pay dad's power bills, the checks that were, you know, they were repayment or something. They were income that were disguised as some type of other nontaxable remittance. So the point was the FBI. I was working with social media, the old Twitter and Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg has testified about this to suppress their role. We know now that I guess name was James a Baker or James Baker, the FBI legal counsel, then went to work for a social media company. I guess it was the old Twitter, something like four or five hundred thousand. So they at one time there were eight to ten FBI agents working with social media and some of them retired. You get the the idea what's going on and they lied about it. I don't think they're going to get out of it. I really don't. But it's part of the scary thing that the Biden administration and the left did, and that was take the government and use its powers to discredit opponents of the existing administration in the White House and really work the and it had been going on for a long time under James Comey. We can remember that. We can remember Andrew McCabe's reference, according to Stroke and Lisa Page. We can't let this happen. We have an insurance policy. I guess that was the Steele dossier. So FBI was I hate to say it, but it was corrupt and under James Comey and Andrew McCabe, James Comey, remember on 200 and almost 250 occasions went before the House Oversight Committee and just flat out lied. and said he didn't know, he couldn't remember. Andrew McCabe said on four occasions to federal investigators he was not the source of these opportunistic leaks that he deliberately did leak. So he was lying, I think on at least one or two, they put him under oath. And then we had Christopher Wray, the third person in this line, and he was going after parents at school board meetings. He was lying about Antifa and said it wasn't a terrorist organization, it was an ideology. He was going after anti-abortion people. And then we had Robert Mueller, who was the first in the four of these four despicable FBI directors. He was the one that after he ran the Mueller investigation, he was asked under oath, could you please tell what role the dossier played? The dossier that was leaked prompted his appointment. And Mueller said, I don't know anything about it. That was a complete lie. You know, Victor, this institution could be so willfully, intentionally become agents of a partisan, partisan agents. I don't know if this is so much partisan or is it ideological or is it practical in the sense, like we've talked about many times with generals, leading generals, that their goal is to get that, like Baker gets the job at the FBI. I think in every FBI, there's a tendency to want to conform to the perceived politics of the White House. And it really requires a director not to cave in. We'll see how Kash Patel resists that pressure. I think. The important thing is, they all. And I'm saying it's even true of the military. When you get to a certain level in law enforcement or certain, like a police chief or an FBI administrator or a one, two, three star general, as opposed to a private captain, you know, corporal, sergeant, you become left wing. Because you deal with people who are left wing. You deal with people who are left wing in politics more, in the media more, and you have consultants from universities more. So they're left wing. So it's kind of like the old Soviet Union. Most of the people in the Communist Party didn't believe any of it. Or they didn't even know what it was. But to be part of the nomenclature, they had to say they were members. So that was what the FBI, Lisa Page, Stroke, McCabe, Christopher Wray, they may have registered as RINO Republicans. But they were basically. More on the left side of the ledger. And they thought they could engrace themselves by using the agency to go after Trump. The other thing is that. We've talked about this so much. Trump was a sui generis. He was a special case. They hated him. They hated him because he was an outsider. They hated him because he didn't look. He didn't talk. He didn't act like a normal president. They hated every aspect of him. And they lost their minds. And you can see those. They lost their minds. Those text exchanges between Stroke and Page and other people who appeared. You know, I went to a Walmart and I could smell the Trump supporters from here. Blah, blah, blah. It was irrational. They didn't bring him to stand by while he diminished the value of elitehood. Remember that whole Comey narcissistic egomaniac, megalomaniac performance in 2016? With Hillary Clinton. Did anybody not believe that she used a home-cooked server in her closet somewhere in her home against the law to transmit State Department messages? And did anybody not believe there was a dozen or two that were classified that was even more dangerous? And did anybody not believe that her devices were under subpoena and she broke them, smashed them? And she cleared out. And she cleared out her emails that were subpoenaed? Why did she do that? Because she knew she could get away with it. And she knew that she was culpable. And she would have lost the election on that alone. And so the FBI, James Comey basically, I'm putting words in his mouth, but he basically said she's culpable. But no prosecutor would go after Hillary Clinton. Well, Victor, there's a related story here. It has to do with France. And it's from Azra Nomani. You talked about Azra last episode. She is a senior writer, editor at Fox News. And she's a great investigative reporter. I may have added an extra syllable there to investigative. But here she posted on X and she links to her Fox article. Let me see. Here it goes. In 2020, former FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that Antifa was, quote, not a group or an organization, end quote, but rather, quote, a movement or an ideology, end quote. Well, last weekend in France, I saw their flags in the riots. I was there when Andy Ngo, I'm never sure how to say his name, NGO, built a beat investigating Antifa around the world. I knew there was more to investigate behind the idea that Antifa was simply an ideology. So I spent long nights this past week buried in telegram and signal chats, online dispatches, Instagram calls, etc. Here's what she said. What's the network behind all this violence in France and other countries? 287. This is Antifa. 287 groups and local chapters. 50 were explicitly Antifa and anti-fascist groups. 27 communist, socialist, Trotskyite groups. Just 27 were the youth groups out of the 287. 24 labor unions and 11 Palestinian solidarity groups, etc. Victor, I've mentioned this before. The FBI that infiltrated the mafia, that infiltrated biker gangs, cartels, never seems to have infiltrated Antifa, which is one of the worst causes of disruption and violence in the world. And back to her, I can't find it now, the statement, yeah, about Christopher Wray. But essentially lying that this thing doesn't exist is just a thought. He knew what he was doing, and that was what he was supposed to do. He was instructed by the White House, whether it was explicit or implicit. He knew what he was going to do. They really went soft on Antifa. And I think it was partly because they were upper middle class, college educated white kids. And they had a lot of parents that were, you know, connected. And most of the bureaucracy, most of Hollywood, most of the entertainment, most of universities, most of them, as I said, the media, they're all left wing. So it was, I mean, when you had Joe Biden night after night saying what nights white supremacists are the chief terrorist group. And you came up with that pathetic FBI aided kidnapping of. Suppose a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer or something. That was about it. And then they had to creepy reinterpret the Charlottesville that Trump said that, you know, there were good people on both sides. However, I condemn. And they just left all that out and lied. They were in search of a. They were in search of this bogeyman white supremacist, and they didn't they didn't touch Antifa. They didn't touch BLM. I don't know why the fraud division of the DOJ didn't because it was across interstate lines. They didn't go after the three women that were the original founders of BLM because they can't account for what, 100 million dollars. And they ended up with palatial, not palatial, but upper upper middle class homes and very expensive areas with accoutrements. Why didn't they go after them? But they all they all either had ideological or DEI exemptions. And it's people should remember this because if they come back in power and take the House and Senate, this will be a foretaste of what's coming in four years if they win the presidency. And they had that crazy blonde middle aged blogger who said, I think, today that she wants she wants to keep firing, firing like a gun at J.D. Vance. And we had that strange news account, Jack, about Data Republican, who had a pretty good reputation. And she says she's uncovered text emails of retired military officers, generals, bureaucrats, wealthy people who are all planning to stage violence and then evoke a reaction. I had to speak the other night. and somebody asked me that. And I said, I'm not up on conspiracy theories, but I don't even know if it's a conspiracy theory. But when you hear people talking about wanting to shoot at the vice president openly on a podcast, then anything's up for grabs. We're not opponents anymore. We are enemies. So, hey, Victor, we're going to talk about basketball in a second, but first to our viewers and our listeners, most people know there's chlorine in their tap water. How could you not when your glass of water smells like it was filled at the local pool, but they drink it anyway, because they've been told it's what keeps the water safe. What they haven't been told is what chlorine becomes after it is added to your water. And what we found is why we filter all our water here at the Fowler House through Cove Pure. Chlorine isn't even the biggest problem. Chlorine levels in your water are regulated, but what's not regulated are chemicals that form when chlorine reacts with naturally occurring organic matter in your water. Particles from rivers, soil, plant matter that make it through the treatment process. 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The National Anthem is playing. Victor, this guy just, I think he hates America. Doesn't he love China, too? Anyway, what are your thoughts about this? Yeah, I mean, the NBA didn't do anything to him. The NBA makes a half a trillion dollars. Excuse me. Well, they make about a half a billion, at least, and it might be more in China. And he makes, well, I think 40 million a year from his Nike endorsements, and he probably makes, another 30 million in other endorsements, and his salary makes 100 million a year. So, what is it? And he lives in a big mansion, and he's a popular icon. Did it ever ask him to go to the Gulf War? Did it ever say to him, we're not going to cover you, you won't get endorsements because you're black? And his ability in basketball made him one of the richest people in the United States, and he can't even stand for two and a half minutes, three minutes. So, he has to practice his elitist golf swing, and then he practices his free throws in front of everybody, and they all eat it up. And then, it's hard for me to comment because I think I have not watched an NBA game in 20 years. I can remember Magic Johnson. I can remember Kevin Hart. I can remember Larry Bird. I can remember Jerry White. That's about it. I quit watching a long time ago, and they subsidized with their Chinese money the WNBA, and I watched about four games online, and it's corrupt from the top. The top management is all left wing. It's not diverse. 30 or 40 percent of the players identify as gay when the population is about 8 percent. 60, 70 percent African-American when the population is about 12. I'm just using the left's nomenclature about proportional representation. There's no diversity of opinion. Everybody's left wing. So, if Sophie Cunningham sounds like she's moderate or center right, everybody demonizes her. The referees are partisan and incompetent. The coaches are partisan and incompetent. It's a very physical, thuggish game. I know you're not supposed to use that Indian word, thug, but that's what it is. People are trying to rough up Kaitlyn Clark. She's been emasculated psychologically, so she can't even say anything now about what's going on to her because she's hated, for a particular reason. She's brought probably several, over a billion dollars in new attendance revenue, new media coverage, and new advertising revenues to all the players. So, their lives have materially been vastly improved, and they hate her for doing that because they think it's racist. So, they would rather be poor and not have her in the league than all better off and have her in the league. That's how much their hatred is of her. And I think, I think this little bump that everybody got, they got attention, it was kind of like a mossy boulder. I've used that metaphor before. You turn it over, it looks really kind of neat from the outside, then you turn it over and it's not very pretty to look at. The more you learn about the WNBA, the more you learn about its ideological extremism, its intolerance, its incompetence. On the intolerance front, did you see that? I saw it just this morning. I think it happened last night in Portland. A woman had one of the X, Y, X, X, anti-trans, was escorted out of the, she didn't want to leave. She didn't say anything to anybody. She came, I think if you had a, you walked into any arena in America and had a shirt on that said, F Jesus, they would, no one would escort you out. But if you have something that says, essentially, I believe in biological women through that symbol, X, X, X, Y, they'll take you out and nothing you can do about it. While people taunt you as you're being taken out, so. Well, I guess it would be as if, if you think of a counterpart sport that's predominantly not integrated, not by statute, but it'd be something like hockey or NASCAR. And they've had black players in them. In the case of NASCAR, the player in question, the player in question, he had to invent a hate crime about the rope on the garage. So there were too many, there were too many victims and not enough victimizers. So with this huge white crowd, he could have, if he felt that it was racist, he could have at least found a real incident rather than saying a rope on a garage that I've had, I have two garages and I can tell you I have ropes on both of them. And sometimes when they dangle down, they might hit somebody or tangle. I've made a little loop on that. I've made a little loop on them, but apparently he thought that was a media event. But what I'm getting at is it's not both ways. And, um, it's just another divisive part of American life that, that it's race, race, race, race, race, race, sexual orientation, sexual orientation, sexual orientation, which would be okay. But then you spread cap the, the, and socialism, and then you spread capitalism and, and they're all getting rich on a free market that they hate. LeBron's a man on the left and he's, he's a capitalist par excellence. That's all he does is sell his name and he doesn't do anything for the Adidas. I mean, excuse me, the Nikes, he doesn't do anything. He just puts his name on it, but he does do something because his name is, it's marketable. And so I'm not asking he, he not make money. So funny because the right, I mean, the left just, just hates Trump because they said he's not a businessman. He just goes all over the world and he sells Trump and they splash it on a hotel and they pay him $50 million. Well, yeah, they do it because they think they can make money. It's like LeBron James, no different. But the difference is that Trump isn't trashing his country the way that LeBron James is. And I think it goes back to Colin Kaepernick. He was the one that really started the idea that right after the, during the George, but before, but during the George Floyd, it became acceptable for you if you were a DEI person to mock, ridicule, despise symbols of your own country. And that would be kind of popular in popular culture. And that's what's happened. And they've lowered the bar so much. But you see from France, if nobody really wants to defend the country in which they live, then you get something like France where everybody joins in. And you ask yourself, when you watch for five weeks, all those people in the street tearing down utilities, destroying the roads, tearing the sidewalk, looting stores, nobody's working. Who's going to support all that? Who's going to make their food and their fuel and their clothes and singling out Jewish stores in Marseille and then to be destroyed and singling out Israel? Islamic stores to be saved. This is right out of the 1930s Germany. Nobody says anything. We're coming to a, I don't know what it is with the left because it's not Bill Clinton's democratic party. It's not, not even Mike Dukakis. It's something very different. And it's, it's dangerous. It's very, yeah, very violent. You saw in, in Australia, that member of parliament, Helen Haynes, attacked by some far left activists and she had to get both her legs amputated. I mean, this, these aren't slaps in the face. These, these are people want us dead and buried and they'll dance on our graves when, when that happens. And it's, it's because they're losing. They're looking at the United States and they're thinking, wow, two to 4 million people are leaving Minnesota, Michigan, New York, California, and they're going to, I don't know, we're going to have to go back to the antithetical states where there's deregulation, less government, less taxes, better infrastructure, better education, better race relations. So that's the irony of the whole thing. They, they concocted DEI and then you create, uh, this tribal intertribal warfare with everybody. And from my experience, some of the worst racial relations I've seen in the United States are in California. Yeah. I really do. I, I, I see all these different groups fighting with each other and they try to unite themselves, not by, um, they don't even, they, the only thing they unite that we hate all hate, you know, white male Christian heterosexuals. If we have that in common, you're on our team, but the team is disun, is in disunity. Well, along those lines, Victor, two things with California. Let's talk about one. Then I've got to do a little business, but, and then we'll come back to the other, uh, Bill Whalen, your, uh, somewhat of colleague at, at Hoover. He, where he and, uh, Leo Haney and do run that California on your, your mind. That's a great podcast. Both are really sharp students of California politics. The best two in the, I think in the entire state. Yeah. If folks are interested, go to the Hoover website and you'll find it. Uh, but, uh, uh, Bill wrote a piece the other day, the presidential seal of disapproval that Trump, Trump is on the Calif. So what unites the left is hatred of Trump manufactured. If need be on, there are any number of ballot initiatives in California this year, but the point of Bill's article is the one thing that's consistent through all of them is say the, the, and the opponents of the left, whatever they're for or against their position is to bring Trump into these, um, propositions that have nothing to do possibly at all. With Trump, but they tie him in. They want to make it socially and culturally unacceptable to say in public that you voted for Trump or you will vote for somebody Trump approves of. And then they think it's quite ironic that Trump, I looked at the, um, second term midterm popularity the other day on real clear politics. He's right where George Bush was in 2006 at around 40 to 41%. 39 to 40%. And he's one point less than Barack Obama was in 2014. So the point I'm making is for all this hatred of him and neither Bush nor Obama had such media hate, uh, neither Bush did not even have the media hatred and the left attack that Trump had. And still he's about where the last two and Biden, I don't was even lower. So he's right where the last three presidents were. That's what our system is like in your second term during the midterms, people get dissatisfied because you didn't do all the things that you said you were going to do. But that's, that, that said, what Trump is saying when he says, everybody think I I'm on the ballot. And it's really kind of cute. The network news anchors say, ha ha, what an idiot. He's, he's 40%. So he's, that's not what he's saying. The subtext of that is I've lost everybody. They're talking about me, whether I'm on the ballot or not, it doesn't matter. They're going to try to tell everybody that I am on the ballot, but I am talking to a particular subset. And the subset is the mega voter who voted in 2024. If they will come out with the same voter participation as they did in 2024, which is almost impossible in the midterm, but if they were to get near it, he would win. And when I say he would win, I mean, his name would win. And these candidates that are in close races would win. So it's all about turnout. That's what he's doing with all these rallies, et cetera. And, and, you know, Iran is doing their Iran is just about Iran is doing their most. They say that now they want a nuclear weapon and everybody agrees in Iran, they want a nuclear weapon. And now they say that they have a new secret weapon. And now they say, if we hit them, they're going to destroy the Saudi oil fields. And then you look at it. And finally, this last week, they're getting 22 to 24 million barrels, either out of the straight or through the Red Sea pipelines or the Gulf of Oman, which is very funny, Jack, because there should be no oil crisis right now. And the oil markets, I know they're going higher because they think there's going to be a war. After the midterms, but, and I can understand it takes a while to get through the system, but essentially the same amount of oil is leaving the Middle East now that except for Iran that it did before the war. And the United States is up production. Venezuela's up production. Most of the OPEC, UAE is up to production. So this psychological boost to oil prices won't last that long. But my point is that everybody thinks the Iran war is going to destroy Trump. And I don't think it is. I think the oil is going to crash within a few weeks after Iran is, they will be hit after the midterms. There's no doubt about it. And I don't think they have anybody, they're tankers now on the open sea that they filled up at the last moment. They're all empty. They can't get anything in, out of it. They can't get anything out of it. The subtext of the Xi, Putin, Trump meeting is Iran. He's going to cut a deal and say to Putin, let's just have a peace where the armies are in place and Ukraine won't join NATO and we can arm it. And you turn your attention back inward and don't try to go further West. And in exchange for that, you will have Crimea and the part you took already, which Ukraine did not have the wherewithal to recapture and which for all the rhetoric from Europe, nobody from, nobody in a cappuccino bar in Amsterdam was going to put on a NATO uniform and go over there and say, I want to get the Crimea back. They can talk all they want, but they weren't going to do. None of those guys out in the street of Paris were going to get on NATO uniforms and say on to Moscow. So I'm sorry, but it wasn't going to happen. And he's going to try to cut a deal. And when that deal is cut and the war is over, then Iran is not going to be resupplied across the Caspian sea or through the rail or highway links. That's the idea. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but that's what he's doing. And then the oil will, it'll crash. It'll go way down. And I think the economy will, as I said before, it will go, it'll really take off psychologically, but we'll see. And that's why part of the left is so desperate because they're looking at this. And the more that I read about AI and I listen to people where I work at, it's, it's scary about the productivity increases. It's just amazing. And in things that I do, I'm kind of researching a book on the classical world, and now I just ask myself, well, what was the population in 350 AD in the Roman Western Empire? Bam! What was, and I've forgotten, which had a greater proportion of people who crossed the Danube, the Oscos or the Goss, the Vandals or the Huns? Bam! And I'm not saying, and that's just surveying articles or books on it. And if you go to Grok behind the paywall, it's even accurate, a lot more accurate. So it's saving billions of dollars in efficiency. And when you get cheap oil and this AI, the left is getting paranoid because I think they feel that there is a possibility that just as the Western Hemisphere kicked out the Chinese and the Russians, freed the Panama Canal, got rid of the Chinese. The communism in Venezuela stopped the export of criminals into the United States and of the 32 nations, 33 in the Caribbean and in Latin America, all but four are pro-Western. And they're afraid the same thing could happen to the Middle East if Iran were to fall. If Iran were to fall, Hezbollah would be dead. Hamas would be dead. The Houthis would be broke. What does Yemen make? What product do they make? Where do they get the money for these sophisticated missiles and drones? Where do they get the money to supply 100,000 people don't have to work? They get it from Iran. So that's what's at stake. And once Iran is gone, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, Jordan, all these people are going to not worry about their Shia minorities. They're going to say, you know what? I'm not worried about you. You're a minority in my country and you're not getting money from Iran and you're not getting all that propaganda from Iran. You're getting the opposite from Iran. So the stakes are very high that we never talk about. But it's a good chance that if that Iranian regime were to fall in the next two years, it would, and along with Latin America, the United States would be in the most powerful position in foreign policy since World War II. And nobody's talking about it. They just say, well, victory. Don't get on that again. Somebody came up to me where I spoke at Hoover and said, don't give me that Sunnybrook Farm stuff. Iran war is lost. Another person said, you made a silk purse out of a sow's ear with Trump. And I said in my talk, I'm not going to try to praise Trump. I'm just going to try to tell you what he has done. And it's not been perfect. But what could happen from what? What could happen from what he's done? And it's really revolutionary. What was the first comment? Don't give me that what farm stuff. What was it? Sunnyvale Farm? Something like that? Sunnybrook Farm. Sunnybrook Farm? Okay. Well, that was somebody who I don't think is a fan. But I shouldn't mischaracterize it. 98% were very favorable. Yeah. Well, as well they should be. Well, to our listeners and our viewers, if you're like millions of other Americans. You have problems sleeping. Maybe your head's at the wrong angle. Maybe you get too hot. Maybe your mattress feels like it's made of concrete. And you're sinking into it. Or you're sinking into it like it's made of quicksand. Stop suffering now. Take the first step towards a great night's sleep. And try GhostBed just like I did. Just like Victor did. GhostBed is engineered to help reduce. I think you like it. I do. There you go. It's engineered to help reduce the reasons your sleep gets interrupted. It's designed to relieve pressure, help regulate temperature with cooling technology built into every mattress, and support your body. Better still, GhostBed is made in the USA. With GhostBed's 101-night sleep trial, you can try it at home because the real test of a mattress is how you feel in the morning. If you're waking up sore or tired before the day even starts, then check out GhostBed. They're offering VDH's audience, listeners, viewers an extra 10% off their lowest prices of the season. So go to GhostBed.com slash VDH and use the promo code VDH. That's GhostBed.com slash VDH promo code VDH. And we thank the good people from GhostBed for sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Promised. Did you want to say something? Oh, I thought you were about to say something. Well, I mean, when you're talking about GhostBed, I suffer from two minor maladies. One is glaucoma and one is acid reflux. And a long time ago, the internal medicine, and I have a really wonderful internist, a new one I've had. I really like him. And he said, you should sleep with your head propped up. And for years, I had pillows. They looked like Mount Everest. You know what I mean? And I would. And I would wake up, and they'd fall all over and knock over lamps and everything. And then the second one, I have a really brilliant ophthalmologist. I can mention her name, Dr. Judith Nebbitt. She's like the top of the field. And she's always giving me little tips about pre-glaucoma, et cetera. And one of them is prop your head up. So now I just push a little button with my hand. And all of a sudden, the reflux kind of goes away. And I've had two major sinus surgeries. And that seems to be a lot better when your sinuses are propped up. And then reflux is a lot better. And then after this lung cancer surgery, you don't want to lay flat and get stuff coming from your, I don't know what you would call, the detritus from not having lymph nodes and an open cavity in your lower chest. So it solves a lot of problems very easily with it. As they say in the 1950s, with a touch of a button. Touch of a button. Well, I'm just surprised to learn you only had two maladies, Victor. I thought you had many more. My body has pretty much had it, I think. Your body's like the petrified forest. It's always, it's not going anywhere. You're going to live a soul. Here's a headline. I don't know where I got this from. Majority of California voters oppose billionaire tax new poll shows California voters are souring. On a proposed billionaire tax of more than half opposing the measure, while a contentious voter ID proposal has sparked a razor-thin divide in the deep blue state of New California. Post poll reveals proposition 40, a proposed one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires, faces opposition from 52.6% of the voters compared with 34.5% in support, 11.5% undecided according to a new poll by McLaughlin. Victor, are you surprised that there's a negative? No, because there's a certain way to interpret these kind of counterfactual polls. So we had Prop 209, and then we had, I guess it was Prop 13, efforts in the past, for example, to ban DEI, racial discrimination, and they passed overwhelmingly. Part of it was we have a large. The Asian community is now about 15% of the population, and they're very meritocratic, and that helped on those particular issues. But when you have a multiracial, multicultural state in which 27% of the people were not born here, and when you add the second generation whose parents were not born, you get up to 44%. 45%, kind of like Canada. And then in addition to that, you have people, 21% on the poverty level, under the poverty level, highest, I think, in the country of any state. And then on top of that, 50% of all the births are Medi-Cal, and 40% of the state is on Medi-Cal. So then you're told. And then you're told, well, wait a minute, we're a big fat goose that lays golden eggs. And the golden eggs are your 50% of. Basically, it's the subtext. One out of every two births basically is welfare, and 1% pay 50% of the income tax. So if you kick us out, you're going to lose billions of dollars. And we're going to take the jobs with us. And then you're going to do what next? You're going to go after the people who are worth 100 million, and then when they leave, you're going to go after 10 million, and then no. So I don't think the voters are sophisticated to get the entire argument, but basically they've put their hand up and, who's going to pay for all my stuff? And before with the racial, ethnic divisions, they were saying, my tribe should. should get stuff, but that tribe is getting stuff. So let's have no tribes get anything. stuff because it was too hard to. There were too many, as I said before, when 209 and 13 came up again, if it was 13, I forgot the second vote. And it's in the legislature again, they're trying to override both of the ballot propositions. But my point is a lot of people said, I want my tribe, my village, my people, I want them to get stuff. And then they realized that there's too many different stuff for too many different people. So they just said, let's just quit it. Don't do that. And their self-interest, the same thing with this tax. They said, who's going to pay for all this? Who's going to pay for my Section 8 housing? Who's going to pay for my food stamps? Who's going to pay for my WIC card? Who's going to pay my EBT card? Who's going to pay for my legal assistance? Who's going to pay for my default on my PG&E, where I'm part of the 25% of PG&E users that doesn't pay his power bill? Oh, taxes. But there's only. And then the commercials say, well, there's only 1% of the population that pays it, pays half, and you're driving them out of state at the rate of 250. And they see the state as getting poor. It really is. They're just the. Proposing of the tax, I think, has already done great economic harm to California. Yeah, they've lost. And I don't like to be a social Darwinist, because there is a lot of very ignorant people who make a lot of money, and a lot of people inherit it, and a lot of people get money through divorce. Steve Jobs, widow. Jeff Bezos, widow, didn't make that money. Maybe they could argue they helped their husbands at one time make it. But to make that type of money, you've got to be pretty smart. And when you get rid of those smart people, you get rid of Elon Musk. If you were stupid enough to do him harm, or to regulate him into oblivion. He launched more of these satellites, last year than the entire world combined. And all these kids that hate him, that scroll all day like mindless zombies on their phone, you're doing that because of his satellite system, for the most part. And you can say you hate Tesla, but when you get in the Tesla, it's pretty amazing. I mean, I can be on the coast, and I can charge my Tesla 200 miles a home. I can tell where it is anywhere in the world. It's an amazing product. So I think people are starting to realize that a little bit in California, because the state is broke. I'll just give you an example. Friday, I left from Palo Alto. It's 184 miles to my farm. And I said to myself, if everything went right, and it's not a traffic hour, it's 940. In the morning, it should take, as it used to, 50 years ago, when I was 23 as a graduate student, 51, 52, it only took two hours and 45 minutes. That's 65, 70 miles an hour. But then I said, it can't happen. It's California, and it's 2026. So we're just, you know, zooming along, no traffic. And then, bam, I look at my phone, and it's red. You know, that red thing on the screen. And I'm like, oh, my God. I'm like, oh, my God. I'm like, oh, the traffic. And what I like about California, you never really know what happened. Is it a wreck? That says it's a wreck. Is it construction? It says it's, and then it just, you just sit there for 30 minutes. And everybody, you know, it's, California doesn't have driver's etiquette. So when four lanes go into three, it's Mel Gibson and Road Warrior. It's, the truck drivers, because they're under such criticism now, because of the 20 or 18,000 illegals in California that, so they have either tinted their windows so you can't look in when you're, or they have little window shades they bring down, so you don't know who they are. But there, one guy, I was, he was just, he looked like a little snake. His little second 40,000 pound was just wiggling across, and he slams it on. And then it ended. But there was no, I don't know what caused it. I guess there was a wreck. So then we're zooming along. Well, you know, it's, that can happen. It's 11 o'clock, but there's, there won't be any traffic. And then we get on the next section, which has hadn't, hasn't changed on 152 since I was 18 in 1971, when I first went to UC Santa Cruz, I would drive it. It hasn't changed at all. It's still too low. It's still too low. It's still too low. And it's just crazy. And we start to go, I thought, wow, we, we made it. We'll get to the Pacheco Pass and then stop. And there, you know, a car came by pulling a wreck car that I just thought, there's so many bad people here. And if you have 27% of the population that wasn't born here, you maybe have 15% of the population doesn't speak English. Or they doesn't know, they don't know road protocol. And then you add the eight, the youth today are not really taught very much about etiquette or driving consideration. I don't know what the fuel is, the mixture is, but that thing was stopped for another 30 minutes. And then we go by and I thought, it's California, Jack. So I thought, let me examine as a detective, what could be the causes of our 30 minute, when we got to the point on my phone where it said it was, I looked to my left and there was, I looked to my right and there was all this equipment for road work, you know, I said, they were always, but there was nobody there working. That can't be it. So then I look at the other side of the road and they had just finished the road and there were signs, construction, California always does road work. Uh, at the time, most people drive because it would be mean to do it, you know, on a Sunday morning for somebody. Um, and then next thing I, we start to crawl along. I thought this is, and then you wouldn't believe it. A major thoroughfare. There was 30 yards of the most sickening trash you can imagine. Wet garbage, uh, sofas, car seats all along the road as somebody has just dumped it. So I was thinking, well, maybe people are rubbernecking or maybe it was just dumped in the middle of the road. Could happen. There's no consequences in California for doing that. You're just doing your own thing. And then all of a sudden it's gone. And then you go on to the Peck Pacheco pass and you say, well, it's very rarely. And then all of a sudden it's road where you're on deluxe. You go up hill or downhill and the trucks are all in the right hand. And traditionally they stay there because there are gears and everything. And they start just without warning going in the left lane. And then that caught, there's only two lanes. It's been that way for 50 years. Nobody, and that's causes a chain reaction. And then you have these guys darting, and it, the whole, I mean, I sound like a 73 year old grumpy guy, but it's different. So that thing that took almost five hours, uh, four and a half hours. I want to suggest Elon Musk, let you do the beta testing of his flying cars, Victor. So maybe I would like to be able to get you back and forth. One of the questions that came up after I gave this lecture was why are you still in California? And I get that a lot. And I guess it's, I, you know what I mean? It's, it's kind of like the, the Germans have invaded France and it's June now, 1940 and everybody's fleeing. They're trying to get to Algeria or to Britain and all there's people still in this, in their little French Hamlet and said, well, surely the army of France will stop them. Right. And they'd stay or, uh, and that's how I feel. If you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you stay too long, you can't get out. No, it's too late. Yeah. Well, you, you are fifth generation also, right? There's something about the heritage of, uh, yeah, it's, you know, they, I, I was told by my grandfather, he wanted to go to college for the first time and he's, his mother died and his father went into depression when he was 20. He was only 21. He had no money and he lived in a, we had the house, it was 500 square feet, little shack they built with, you know, it had newspapers for wallpaper until about 20 years, 30 years. It was here on the ranch. It just fell apart. And he stayed here and he said, you know, and then I gave it to your mother and, and then she gave it to you and then you should give it to the next person, but it's becoming an albatross. And I, I have, I really poured most of my money that what little I made into it with very little return. and psychological return, which is all that really matters. But it used to be each person in the generation tries to make it a little better, but I'm not sure that my kids can do that. Well, Victor, we have to take a little break and then we have, I have a bunch of topics, but we'll just pick one. And I think that will be the Smithsonian. It stinks. And we'll do that when we return from these final important messages. I already knew you, Smithsonian. Stink-sonian. Many Americans are going to have a big wake-up call. We have never seen net migration as high as it has been in the last few years. This year, there have been more people coming to the UK in small boats than ever before. You did an extreme thing to the country. Britain is facing a migrant crime epidemic. We don't actually know where they're coming from, who they are, how old they are. Why would you let in millions of people who are unvetted if not to change the country from within? There is no other word for it. Demographic replacement. England's a blueprint for America. It's coming. It's just a blueprint. Thousands of daily migrant crossings. A political earthquake threatens to reshape America. We are showing there is a new path for politics in our country. Not all cultures are the same. You cannot ban Shadia. America is a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants. We're a nation of immigrants. The Immigration Crisis. Watch now on the Heritage Foundation's YouTube channel. Hey, folks, we're back with Victor Davis Hanson. Did you say the Smith-Zombian? I said Stink-sonian. Oh, I thought you said Smith-Zombian. Smith-Zombian. Well, zombies might be needed to populate it. Two stories here. One, Jeffrey Anderson at City Journal did a piece on the dwindling attendance. And since the Smithsonian has become pretty woke over the last decade, its attendance is, let's see, in 2018, 28.5 million visits. And in 2020. 25, 14.9. So this place is a stinkeroo. But then also, we've talked before about its ideology, and the president has gone after them. But our friends Eli Steele and Shelby. Eli wrote this on his sub stack. Bear with me here, folks. White Guilt Museum Ghosts White Guilt Documentary. So Eli writes, In August, my father, Shelby. Steele and I asked the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture to host a public screening of our new documentary, White Guilt, followed by a conversation with the two of us. The museum has done this for other films, like 13th and I Am Not Your Negro. Instead of an answer about a public screening, we were sent an event rental application. Unsure of what to do, we filled it out. Then we were told our dates were unavailable, even though the museum's public calendar showed nothing on those dates. When we asked about other dates for a public screening, we were offered a private rental for $35,000. We clarified that this is not what we had asked for. We wanted a public screening at the Oprah Winfrey Theater and said we were flexible on dates. The museum has stopped answering us. There's no way in hell that the Smithsonian is going to give Eli and Shelby Steele any attention for their documentary. They suffered too much. They get a double whammy because the black community, I don't mean all of the black community, I mean the elite black community that's 90% left, feels that if Eli and Shelby Steele were successful, they'd be out of business because the clotting gays of the world would not make it. And in their place, as people adjusted to the absence of, you know, DEI or affirmative action, you would have really a different type of person in the black community who could excel and would excel on their own merits. In other words, once affirmative action was gone and DEI was gone, and people would say, my gosh, there's no reason we can't have private schools with uniforms and mandatory Latin in our school. And it would work as it does with other communities who had traditionally not been given until later. Lately, under Obama, DEI kind of replaced affirmative action, but the Asian community didn't get it for a long time. And so the black elite hate them. But the people who really hate them are the white affluent liberals because they feel uncomfortable around anybody who is not in their class or their race. But they feel so bad about it, they construct a cosmic, leftism, which is DEI. And they say, I just want, I feel so bad I live in Malibu, and I live in, I live in Burlingame, and I feel Presidio Heights, and I should be talking to people of color, but, you know, I just don't feel, you know, my children all go to prep school in Stanford, and we have such a beautiful home, and we go to the south of France every year, but how do I, how do I square that? Oh, I know. All those evil white supremacists in East Palestine, Ohio. I hate those people because they're racist. So I'm going to construct all these special programs for people of color. And if my children don't get into Harvard or Yale, I'll just call up, you know, the guy I went to Harvard Business School with, and he'll help and get them in. That's how they think because I know them very well. And so they really do not like the Steeles because the Steeles are basically, he's saying you people created white guilt and that has been a detriment to the progress of racial relations in this country because it makes you implement programs for your own selfish mental satisfaction and tranquility that fall heavily upon the black community. And the black community is not blameless. They allow it to happen. And so they don't, there's no constituency except normal people and the Smithsonian. Doesn't want normal people going to their museum. They would rather, if you said to the museum directors before the recent guy was fired or resigned or retired or whatever term he used, would you like to have 16 million people come and see all your leftist anti-American stuff? Or would you like to have 29 million or 30 million come each year and celebrate their common Americanness? Americanness. And they would say, I don't want that. And so that's what you have. And I quit going when I went to, I used to love to go to the Smithsonian. And then I saw the little subtext. It was like going to the San Diego zoo. When I was a kid, it was the best zoo in the world because it had natural first zoo really in the West to have a natural habitat. The last two times I've gone, it was the spotted three horned elk is a rare species due to climate change. And then they'd have, the spotted yellow one eyed python used to be ubiquitous in Uganda, but due to climate change and urbanization. And then it said the weird, the very rare snow Asian one-eared tiger was plentiful and due to post-colonialism climate change and urbanization. And it just got so boring. You know, they used to have all these details. This snow leopard waves so much amount that he was, he was the apex predator. He had rivals and all that was gone. And that's what I felt like I was in the Soviet union. Every time I went there. Yeah. And they'd have exhibitions, the Norway rat, poor Norway rat exterminated by humans. Well, it reminded me of somebody. There was a very prominent, I won't give any names who was a developer and he's very prominent in the state. And somebody said to me, I was with two or three people and they say, you know, that guy, he's a felon. He got, and then the other guy said, yeah, he, he committed a major crime. I think he, he killed off about three acres of four toed lizards when he, his bulldozers didn't realize it was a four toed lizard was there. And he was a micro mini species or something. So. Yeah. That's a, that's like two paths to jail by, uh, here we had some toad little thing and, uh, it's, it stopped. And you put, but they won't the, the critters like the, the, what, what the hell is the Delta smelt, you know, little Delta smelt. He's the canary in the mine. Come on, Jack. When the Delta smelt gets not enough oxygen, it has nothing to do with the 35 municipal districts full of left-wing people, Bay area, whose sewage is dumped in. They treat it sometimes a lot of times, but sometimes they get a little out of hand and they do have a lot of oxygen. They have homeless people in Oakland and they do have them in San Francisco. So in the mornings we know everybody's asleep. The little crews come out and they often put a little chlorine in the water and they spray the sidewalks. And I don't know where the feces goes. They don't know, but it tends to go in the storm drains and then it raises the nitrogen content of the Bay and then gets into the Delta with all these sewage districts. So the little smelt doesn't get enough oxygen, but it's the farmer's fault because. they take clean mountain water And they raise food and feed the nation, but they should let it go into the Delta in greater numbers so they can counteract the nitrogen of all the nice, ecologically-minded good people. And the little smelt is the one that's a referee. He's kind of like a referee at the WNBA. All right, Victor, we're going to wrap this up today on top of all the wisdom. We have had so many comments on some of these recent podcasts, and I've got five of them here. I'm going to read them quickly. DTWB8M writes, how should I spell non hippus porcus in Latin, which Victor always quotes? It is not this pig. I have found many translations, but I would like to know how a classicist of Victor's experience would spell it. I need a coffee cup with this on it. N-O-N, non. H-I-C, porcus, like porcine, P-O-R-C-U-S. As I remember, I've seen it two or three places in Latin, but I think it's in the Petronian banquet where the freedmen are talking. And what's left out is an ellipse. It's non sum hic porcus. The sum is left out. So we say in English, not this pig, but we mean I'm not this pig. Meaning I'm not. I'm not going to be this pig roasted or this fool or this victim or served up on a platter. Thank you. So DTW, you've got your spelling. Rosemary Whiteley writes, I love that people listen to you from other countries. You're the best, Victor. I'm praying you stay healthy, body and soul. Jimmy Olsen Blues, who's a friend on X With Me, Jimmy writes, I cannot believe and accept the Democrats. Marxists. Muslims are going to take Congress. Please vote. I am worried. Love to Jack and VDH. Two more to go here, folks. This one's a little longer. Watch TV of Paris and then say, I'm not voting on the price of gas. I'm voting on the future of America. Jay Harbo one writes, Mr. Hanson, I'm reading the William Sherman's memoirs. He says, I'm not only impressed with the general's great writing ability, but all with the places he went in his youth that I, too, have been and with all the place names and with all the surnames that echo familiar to me. I'm also impressed how divinely placed in time Sherman was. It seems to me that God had heard the prayers of the president and put this Jacksonian man's role into the salvation of our precious republic. And I'm only starting on chapter two. So anyway. Grant was the was the premier general, perhaps. But if you want to read somebody who was a geostrategic thinker and was talking about. What was different between Grant said you have to destroy the army of Robert E. Lee and he did. Sherman said you have to see where the Confederacy gets their money and where they get their support. Only three percent or two percent own slaves. If you go down into the south and you target the slave owning iconic plantations and you don't touch average people's homes, but you destroy the armories and the Confederate government's property and the slave property. And you free the slaves and you employ them as pioneers and you march right through the areas in which they said southern chivalry will never let the Yankees get here. And I'm not trying to demonize the south because I'm just saying that Sherman, who was the first president of what is now Louisiana State University, liked the south. And he felt that it was a very nice group of people, but it was insurrectionist. And he had a way. He had a way of materially, socially, economically, politically denuding it. And he made a 50 mile swath. But it was mostly, no, they didn't create a lot of rapes. They didn't murder people, but they did destroy railroads, infrastructure and plantations. And that was what he intended to do to humiliate. I'll just finish with this. There's a scene in his memoirs where he comes to the vice president. Of. The governor of Georgia, Hal Cobb, had a beautiful mansion and slaves state, and they all come out to Sherman and the daughters are beautiful and they're all there alone. Hal Cobb has fled to Savannah and soon we'll meet. I mean, Sherman's headed that way. And they say to him, don't burn this. And why would you burn this? And he says, well, your governor's saying that I'm a Cossack and I'm a. Terrorist, but I got to ask you a question. If I'm such a terrorist, why did he leave his daughters here to plead for his livelihood and he's fled? Could it be that I'm not a terrorist and that while I'll destroy his livelihood, I'm not going to let one hair on your head be injured and you're under my personal escort to Savannah. So he was he was a philosopher is what I'm trying to say. And he was he was he was a very. Very brilliant guy and he saved the union. Also sounds like we all hear you should read Grant's memoirs. But Grant was a beautifully written memoir, too. But Sherman's, too. Yeah, sure. Grant might have. The difference is in classical terms, Grant had the Hemingway or the attic style short sentences. Right. Very succinct to the point. Sherman was that had the Asiatic or the more flowery style. But and Grant talked about military operations with a. Sharp precision and Sherman is talking about anthropology, geology, culture, for example, about the Mexican War. He said the best thing that ever happened to us is we did not incorporate Mexico in the United States. There was just too many people there that would not be acculturated quickly enough. Just things like that all all over there, all over his his memoirs. But put the two of them. And I mean, the South. The South had brilliant generals, but they didn't have the most brilliant generals. When you put George Thomas and Philip Sheridan and William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, you have four people that were certifiable geniuses. Then you can't beat those people. I apologize if the noise came through this. I live like two miles from Sikorsky helicopters. Those Blackhawks are flying over the house. What have you done? I don't know. I feel sick. I feel safe. We're going to end this these comments with one from Ohio RN 34 short and sweet. She says, I think it's a shade. I always hate when the show ends. I could listen to Victor and Jack all day long. All right. Well, yeah. Well, Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared. I want to thank folks who do subscribe to what I do. Sybil thoughts. That's a free weekly email newsletter comes out every Friday. Fourteen recommended readings. You go to Sybil thoughts dot com. Sign up. You'll start getting it. It's free. We're not selling your name. I know you're going to like it. Thanks for all the wisdom you shared. Thanks, folks, for watching and listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hanson in his own words of the Daily Signal Network. Bye bye. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. And also check out my own website at Victor Hanson dot com. And subscribe for exclusive features in addition. Observe the North American dad fifties great polo collection. Remarkable. No haggling. No hassle. He's still on. On the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana dot com. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is fifteen dollars a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at Mint Mobile dot com slash switch. Upfront payment of forty five dollars for three month. Plan fifteen dollars per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. 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