Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show your home for open, honest and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly, welcome to the Megan Kelly Show. I've been waiting for today's interview. I've wanted this from the beginning, from the launch. We finally got him. It's Victor Davis Hanson. Good luck finding a bigger brain. He is brilliant. And all you need to do is tee it up and sit back and listen. I made my job very easy to tell you, Victor.

He's at the Hoover Institution.

It's he's the Martin and Ellie Anderson, senior fellow out there. And he's this great combination of citizen farmer and professor and overall teacher, you know, of of us all.

He's the fifth successive generation in the same house. Just to give you a feel for how his life has been. He grew up in a raisin farm. He's an almond farmer now.

He's a professor of the classics, got a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz back in seventy five, went on to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, then a Ph.D. in classics from Stanford 1980, registered independent, though certainly he sounds conservative and he's still in California doing his thing and prolific in his writing of books.

And his podcast is amazing. You can you can download I listen to his podcast all the time.

And if you're even if you're a liberal, if you're looking for a smart conservative view and somebody who's married to facts, you should listen to him.

Right.

He's a very smart guy to to learn from all sorts of expertise in warfare, in the classics and so on.

So you should you should check out his podcast, but you should listen to this one, because this is an overview of America. Twenty, twenty one. And you're welcome. Stand by. I want to talk to you about Martha Stewart and Marlee Spoon, if you're like me and you are intimidated by cooking, they are going to make your life so much better. Here's what happens. They deliver the container to your house and it's got all the ingredients for a bunch of meals inside the container with idiot proof directions.

That is what I need. If you don't believe me, go Google Megan Kelly Bacon and you will see my efforts at cooking and how dreadful they usually turn out. But Marle Spoon, I can do and I did do and it was delicious. So you get to select your meals from a new menu of twenty nine deliciously different recipes every week. All the recipes can have just six simple steps and ten ingredients. Oh my God, this was made for me.

Thank you for understanding me Martha. And they could be prepared in about 30 minutes. Ordering is super easy.

They show you the pictures, you can see what your meal is going to look like and removes the burden of grocery store shopping, which nobody wants to do right now, and meal planning, which you also really don't want to do. Like just do it once, once a week, then it's there in your fridge. You take it out and you cook everything you need except for like whatever some random spice everybody's got in their kitchen, like pepper is in there.

So they make it super easy for you and it's delicious. Oh, my God. I had these amazing chicken tacos and they had this red cabbage that came with them.

And I was like, I don't know how I feel about red cabbage, like a salad.

It's like all I wanted to eat. I put the chicken. I didn't eat the tortilla. I put the chicken, put the red cabbage, put the sour cream. I put the marinade on there. I squeeze some lemon juice, as Martha told me to do. I don't deviate. It doesn't work out well. Unbelievable. I had to stop myself from eating the whole bowl. So good. And I promise you, you're going to like it.

So check it out, because we're all tired of cooking the same old same dinners every day and go to the grocery store with the mask and all the restrictions.

It's like a hassle. Right? So Martha Stewart's going to help you. She's one of America's favorite chefs. She's going to make dinner for you while she's going to give you the stuff so you can do it. She's going to kind of hold your hand. So if you're tired of the same old same old, go to Mali, spoon, dotcom, Mali spoon.

It's MHRA laowai spoon, dot com. For a variety of chef designed dinners from Miss Duart and Meghan Kelly. Listeners will save one hundred dollars over your first four orders and get free shipping on the first delivery. Use the code Kelly. That's code Kelly. And just imagine eating deliciously different chef quality meals every day. The week they tell you the calories, they tell you everything.

Martha Stewart and Marle Spoon make it possible. Go to Mali, spoon dotcom today.

Victor Davis Hanson, what a pleasure to have you here. Thank you for doing this.

Thank you for having me, Megan. I'm thrilled.

So I read everything that you write. I listen to your podcast. I listen to both of them.

And I just love what you have to say because you have such a unique view on the world. And I think it's because you're really a farmer at heart who is super smart, super well-educated, but never lost touch with the common man. And so in a lot of ways, you are the most sage man alive at this moment because you can understand what's happening in the world in a way of a lot of our leaders cannot.

That's my impression of you. So let's start with this. No truth. Let's start with Biden. So I feel like we are watching his cognitive decline. What do you think?

Oh, I agree. And unfortunately, I think it's occurring at a geometric rather than just arithmetic rate. You can see by clips just three years ago, he was a different person than when he first announced his candidacy. And I really blame journalists for that. I think there were clear indications throughout the primary debates, and I think it was pointed out by Cory Booker and others that Joe Biden had cognitive issues. It was ignored because he was considered the savior of the Democratic Party from an unwinnable left wing surge that wouldn't beat Donald Trump.

And then more importantly, in the general campaign, he he just campaigned. He outsourced his campaign to the media, essentially, and Democratic operatives and silicon money and big Wall Street money and stay ensconced in his basement. That was not an exaggeration to the degree that we had an interview. He had an interview like you and I are having. I would have had if I was Joe Biden, I would have demanded that you give me all the questions beforehand and I would have people outside the the camera, you know, helping me answer those questions.

So it's it's sort of reminds me of Woodrow Wilson's last year or two, actually, last 15 months when Edith Wilson didn't tell us how ill he was and he was basically comatose for much of the time, or FDR when he ran for his fourth term. He didn't tell us about his high blood pressure, maybe melanoma, a variety of illnesses besides his paralysis. And he he died as everybody expected he would early in April of his fourth term. And I just don't think we've ever elected a president that this was known from the outset rather than during his tenure.

Where do you see this going?

I mean, what do you expect is going to happen with. You know, because that's that kind of thing only gets worse, it doesn't get better, and we have a young, vibrant vice president who couldn't get the nomination herself. She wasn't even wanted by the Democratic Party.

But where do you see this going? I think you hit you, you hit the nail on the head, we all know, I think, where it's going, and that is when we get little indications that the media at some critical point will say investing in the lie or the legend that, Don, that Joe Biden is completely attentive and capable of handling the job is is a greater downside than telling the truth. And they're starting to say to talk about things.

And sometimes these issues are that he missed a prompt. I think Politico ran a story about that. And then we also had the Democratic congressional leadership whispering and finally acting about nuclear codes in his possession and that it doesn't look good for the media. They have to play by these rules that are humiliating to them. And yet they created this Frankenstein monster. I don't mean that the deprecatory way, but this absurd situation. So where's it going? I think at some critical point in six to 12 months, people are going to step in and Kamala Harris will be the source of a lot of the rumors and and the need for action if she doesn't have necessarily a good relationship before she was named vice president, as you know, with the Biden.

Do you think that's why so far he has gone pretty radical left, that he's trying to stave off his own party, pushing him out and replacing him with his number two? Yeah, I've said that a couple of times, and I and I think it's kind of contrary to conventional wisdom that he was in some kind of vessel that carried her, carried the socialist agenda across the finish line unwillingly maybe.

And it was a devil's bargain between the two. He got to be president. They supported him. He got elements of his agenda. I don't think that's quite right. I think he feels liberated to the degree that he is aware of it, that he's going to be a one term president. It's not going to run for re-election. He doesn't really care, I think, too much about the midterm elections. He feels that through executive orders and a very thin margin in Congress, he can get this agenda through an agenda that he's going to get through is, I think, evident from his executive orders on the border, on energy development, on foreign policy, on appointments.

And I think he resents the idea that he was the understudy of Barack Obama for eight years when he was a senior statesman. And now he's going to go down in history as the one progressive that really did get the Obama agenda through in a way that the more heralded and charismatic Obama never did. And then there's an element also in addition to that, I don't think he's up to the fight with what the left brings to to any type of fight.

I don't think he's able withstanding that media, Silicon Valley entertainment celebrity nexus.

Now, I know that you've said you think his executive order so far, his appointments so far are the most radical and polarizing of any recent president. What specifically what what jumps out at you? Well, if we just came from Mars and we looked at the border, Joe Biden is essentially ordered ICE not to enforce federal immigration law, even though he's sworn under the constitutional oath to enforce the laws as written and passed on and authorized. He hasn't done that.

And he's given a message to people south of the border that if they break US law and they come across the border in a way that was not true the last four years, they will be given de facto amnesty. He's told people that it's very dangerous not to wear a mask, almost unpatriotic Neanderthal like he's threatened the governor of Florida with imposing a travel ban should he not comply with federal orders. And yet we know some of the people coming across the border have covid and there's no testing, there's no background checks.

There's nothing that's pretty radical. He stopped a pipeline right after years of acrimony and years of debate when it was in progress, when even the administration of Barack Obama's EPA could not find a deleterious effect of that. In fact, most. Disinterested observers think it'll save save energy and will decrease the likelihood of an oil spill, yet he just canceled it and he's talked about going in back into the Iran deal when he's been given on a plate the chance of a lifetime in the Middle East with all of these Arab countries sort of making an enemy of my enemy is my friend alliance with Israel.

And the more we know about Iran, it's not doing well. Its economies in shambles. It's got a lot of enemies and its terrorist appendages. We're starving for cash and that he wants to revive that because of this ideological zeal on the left for a Persian Shia tilt that we saw under Obama. This is not I can't even get into things like Title nine or the transgendered issues or what we're seeing with abortion. But the social cultural issues are going to be, I think, more radical than Barack Obama.

Remember, Barack Obama ran in 2008 deep skepticism of things like gay marriage, and he promised not to. What he said at least, was very centrist compared to Biden. And so I think. And then when you see the appointment. At the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department or even General Austin, who's he's a he's a renowned soldier, I have nothing but praise for him. But what he's doing right now is basically applying an ideological litmus test and going through the ranks of officer corps to see if any of them don't pass an ideological litmus test.

I'm really worried. I'm worried that there's no there's no check on this. When you have a conservative or reactionary president, you always have the media there to 24/7 shout that when you have a leftist who's one of their own, whether it's Barack Obama and surveiling, you remember the AP reporters. I remember you were yeah. You you talked about James Rosen from Fox having his communications somewhat known to the administration. There was no outcry. Same thing with the IRS.

But when the left is doing this and there's no outcry, it only emboldens them because they will grow contempt for the media. And you saw that with the Iran deal when we were told by Ben Rhodes that the media knows nothing, just an echo chamber. And I think they have contempt for this media and they think they have a pass to do whatever they want. But where are the Republicans, especially when you mentioned, like the Equity Act, that's going to make sure trans girls, boys, it's confusing language designated boys at birth can compete against girls in track and so on.

It just this when I was a fox, these issues would have been dominating our news cycle every day and there would have been very prominent Republicans speaking out about it nonstop. It seems like a lot of this stuff is just getting slipped through without without too much objection. No, I agree with that, and I don't know why that is, I think some of it has to do with the Trump factor. That said, I'll just take an example of a natural leader that we would think the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, now the minority leader, we would have thought that he would have been out front on those issues.

But I think his animus for Trump or his unwillingness to be seen as a, quote, right wing person, I think there's also this temptation, a lot of Republicans, that if they seem moderate or they seem centrist on social and cultural issues and something like the Hill or political will write a puff piece on them. And that's a temptation that kind of weary after the Trump years. They just don't want to go out and fight those cultural issues, those cultural wars like they used to.

And so the left knows that. And it's funny, though, because all of these left wing movements that we've seen in history, the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins in the French Revolution, they never have 50 percent support. We know that there's not fifty one percent support for having biological males and girls sports or Denine First Amendment and Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights to students accused of sexual assault. We know that from polls. Same thing on the border. But the Democratic Party feels that it can create a new consensus by authorizing and then institutionalizing something as fact.

It's over now. It's fact. Get used to it. And that's their attitude. And people are afraid of them. I guess they're afraid because of the council culture or the sheer power of these cultural levers. I mean, there's Wall Street, there's celebrity culture, there's Hollywood, there's professional sports, Silicon Valley, the traditional media, the new media, foundations, academia. You put all of those things together. And even though they're small, no wise, they have enormous amounts of capital and influence and influence to the public.

It doesn't seem like Democrats, other than people like AOC, really want things like what we saw in New York City last week, which is you're not allowed to refer to parents as mom and dad anymore. You're not allowed to refer to the kids as boys and girls at all. To the point we have to substitute in new language. If a book refers to a girl as a girl or a boy as a boy, I just I don't think that most Democrats want that, but they don't speak out.

No, and I think part of it is the leadership to be sort of ageist, Nancy Pelosi or Clyburn or Hoyer, they're they're in their 70s and 80s. And this movement you're talking about, the hard left or the neo socialists, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, is a youthful movement and they're acquainted and adept with social media. And they have a whole different culture than the leadership itself. And that leadership is emblematic of mainstream Democrats, middle aged Democrats in general.

I think how that works out is they think, I don't want to get into these issues with these young guys. All I know is they're motivated and they communicate well and they've got large future audiences where different country demographically, they appeal to this group. And I'll put up with whatever they do to keep me in power and. Right. And I think that that's pretty much what explains that. I think I have members of my family, siblings that are pretty hard left.

And I know that they were raised by my parents in a way that an environment in which we live out here in the farm, that these would be antithetical. But they're just straight party people. So whatever the party says is tolerable because it's going to prevent Donald Trump from coming back or a right wing Republican or whatever bogeyman they have. I want to talk to you about what you've referred to as the WOAK pandemic in a minute, but I don't want to leave immigration yet because I I know this is one of your issues, and I think you can help us understand it.

So what what I see is, you know, obviously the surge happening at the southern border, Biden's reversed Trump's zero tolerance policies. And now you have Texas Governor Abbott, who just came out and said last year the Border Patrol apprehended ninety thousand people in the entire year in the Rio Grande Valley. This year already we're at the beginning of March. They've had already over a hundred thousand apprehended in that area alone. It's very clear that I guess there are a number of factors are very clear that that folks feel emboldened by Biden's more relaxed policies.

And I don't know where this is going to go or what what is the big game plan here by the Democrats?

The game plan is that. Electorally and demographically, they feel that once somebody comes illegally without a high school diploma, the vast majority don't have high school diplomas and they come in mass and without diversity. So they're all coming from south of the border. And for the most part, they're from Central America and Mexico. Then they're going to be permanent, loyal constituents when they get amnesty and their children are born in the United States for the Democratic Party. And they look at what's happened in California is flip from a state of Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson, George Deukmejian and Arnold Schwarzenegger of governor to a supermajority in the House.

The state legislatures, we don't have one major, won't have any I shouldn't say, statewide office holder, who's Republican. And they see that model and they think Nevada has now adopted it. New Mexico has Arizona is just about there, if not there already. Colorado is there. Texas is the next big prize, Georgia. And they feel that it's it's a winning strategy. They don't feel that their message that the issues that we've talked about already, whether it's transgenderism or are they open borders or the stimulus package or all of these things are necessarily winning issues.

But a changed demography is because things people will say, well, even people who come here illegally know that they tax social services and they don't know English and they burden the schools and. Yes, but is anybody ever been to walk of Mexico? Whatever the United States is in, whatever crisis it's in, it's heaven compared to southern Mexico. And so when people tell me why I'm leaving California, because it's unlivable, because we don't have money for roads and highways and you can't use social services.

And the public schools have so many second language programs, there's not enough advanced placement. Many of these people are Hispanic themselves. I always say to them. And so it's worse than macaca. And the answer is, no, it's not. And so where is it going? I think this is one of these issues that everybody's been complacent in four or five interest. We know that the Democratic Party wants a change. Demography. We know that a Latino elite believes in these La Raza mythology that they can be.

And even though they're quite assimilated and they love consumer capitalism, they can be an opposition group that demands reportorial action from larger society as victim. And we know that the American Southwest, if you're upper middle class, you can live like a 19th century English lord with cheap help, doing your laundry, doing your lawn, caring for your mother, cooking your food, taking care of your children. That's I. I grew up with none of that. And yet when I go to Palo Alto, where I work at Stanford, I see all of these colleagues that have all this help.

In a way they probably wouldn't have they if they had to hire someone else other than someone who's just arrived here from south of the border, and then you have the employers, the largest. It's not farming me when I was going if it was farming, but it only constitutes about 20 percent of the jobs that are taken by illegals or meatpacking, but especially hospitality, hotels, restaurants, landscaping, meatpacking. So the Republican conservative constituency is in on it, too.

And then finally, the main tesser in the mosaic is the government of Mexico. The government of Mexico gets about 30 billion dollars. South American governments get another 30, 60 billion dollars. It comes in to Mexico from remittances. And it's very cynical, Megan, because their attitude is I just sent you the poorest people that we don't want. And they're indigenous people. They're not the Mexican elite that always boast the degree of their pure Spanish ancestry in a very racist fashion.

But once they get up here, living on the minimum wage is very difficult. And yet the Mexican government expects them to send two or three hundred dollars a week back to their families because the Mexican government either can't or won't provide social services and we, the taxpayer, provide the social services for the Mexican illegal immigrant. So then he's freed up with cash to send back to Mexico. I once talked to a Mexican professor, very brilliant woman, who really despise the United States.

And she said to me, Victor. It's a wonderful system for us. We all of dissidents and all the people are unhappy and social justice, they leave, they don't march on Mexico City and you have them and then they bring us remittances and we don't have to spend social services on it. And then we can call you racists because they don't have parity with the average American. I mean, we say it's because of their skin color. And when they do have parity, they have a romantic view of Mexico and they're firm supporters and stalwart post expatriates that support better relations with Mexico the longer they're not there.

So she spell it out pretty clearly for me. I once wrote about it in Mexifornia, book about it. But yeah, it's insidious. And I don't know how we're ever going to to stop it until second and third generation Mexican-American people and Hispanics say, you know what, I live in said California. I live in Stockton or I live in a suburb of L.A. And when we bring so many people in that are non diverse in mass and they don't know English and they don't have education or my child's public school experiences is altered.

And it's not safe for my son to be in this neighborhood when we have gang and cartel people coming in from Mexico. When that happens and starting to I think you'll according to the polls, at least it's already happened, then you'll see some changes coming up in one second.

Here in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The view on immigration is, you know, we're in favor. We're all immigrants. More is better than less. Well, Victor's been living a very different life out there in California for a long time and has a different experience of how it might not be the greatest thing.

Certainly illegal immigration into the country really might not be the greatest thing and might have real life consequences for our friends on the southern border.

So we'll get into how he has seen that manifest where he is. We'll get back to that in just one second. But first, this.

I've been saying all along that thanks to paint your life, I had the perfect present for Doug, and I finally gave it to him for our anniversary and he loved it.

And why not? Because I nailed it. I nailed it. Thanks to the folks that paint your life, this is a organization where you take a family photo or some whatever, some photo that you love. It means something to you. And then you give it to paint your life dotcom and then they will return it to you. After having a professional hand painted into a portrait at a truly affordable price. They'll frame it for you. If you want.

You can actually pick the artist you want, if that's what you like, or they'll figure it out for you if you prefer. And as a super user friendly platform that lets you order a custom made, hand painted portrait in less than five minutes, super quick and easy. Get the hand painted portrait in about three weeks. So give yourself a little lead time if it's for like Mother's Day, which is coming up. This is ideal for your mother, honestly.

Just get like you, your family, your kids, whatever. And I promise you, it's really good. I was like, hope it doesn't suck is like an appetizer.

And I don't want to have to say it's good and it's not.

I wholeheartedly endorse it. I'm telling you, they're super talented and I love my painting and so does Doug.

It worked out, Alex, so consider it for our anniversary and I am what I am anyway. It makes the perfect gift. It's meaningful and it's personal and it can be cherished forever. So check it out. You got to go to paint your life dotcom and know this. There's no risk. If you don't love the final painting, your money gets refunded, guaranteed. And right now is the limited time offer. You can get twenty percent off your painting.

That's right. Twenty percent off and free shipping. So to get this special offer, text the word N.K. to sixty four thousand. That's EMK to six four zero zero zero. Text EMK to sixty four thousand. Take your life. Celebrate the moments that matter most. The numbers are stunning. I mean, this is from The New York Times that border agents encountered a migrant at the border about seventy eight thousand times in January. That's more than double the rate of the same time a year ago, higher than in any January in a decade.

The number of migrant children in custody has tripled in just the past two weeks, like they're they're they're running across the southern border.

And Biden, who ran on a more humane policy and being the anti Trump is he's in a pickle because he no, I don't know that he thinks we can accommodate all these people here in the United States through an asylum seeking process or any other process.

But he's supposed to be the anti Trump, the welcome or the kinder, gentler president. So. He's got to let him across and a lot of them are coming in. Absolutely, and we know now that that 11 million figure of permanent residents who are not here legally, that's been there for 20 years, and finally, finally, MIT and Yale did two consecutive studies and the number is somewhere between 19 and 20 million already here who are not of legal status.

Joe Biden, along with especially Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, if you go back and Bill Clinton and you look at their speeches in the nineteen ninety six Democratic convention twice and even Barack Obama in 2008, it was all strong borders. And we don't support illegal immigration. And the reason was twofold. One, they were afraid of their union support and their unions felt that that drove down wages, especially the SEIU. And then second, that they felt that the numbers weren't that large to make an effect at the polls.

That's not true anymore. They've lost the union, working class, lower middle class white voter. They feel they've lost them or is irrelevant or is doomed demographically or whatever the reason, they don't appeal to him anymore. And then the numbers are so large, as you point out, that they feel that this is a constituency that's going to be the backbone of gaining and retaining power. And so I don't I don't know how the only hope that we have is you have to have faith in American institutions and even in extremis, when they violated laws and there's so many numbers that there's enough people who realize that without the melting pot and without legality, then we're nothing more than the Balkans, which is going to descend into tribal warfare where there is no rule of law.

And that's already happened. If you cut in places here in rural California, it already has happened.

How so? Well, if I get up in the morning, like this morning and I walk out along Mountainview Avenue and DeWolfe Avenue in my rural neighborhood on my farm, there's this morning there was a sofa and a dishwasher thrown on the side of the road. If I were to call the California a Fresno County sheriff appx because I see a Hispanic name with a garbage that's with it, they will not come out. There is no rule. If I did that and somebody saw me or I left my phone bill or power bill with the garbage and say a sofa or I would be in jail if I walk through if I go into town and I want to use social services in the way that I used to, and that means go into a Department of Motor Vehicles office.

It's not it's not practicable. You cannot walk into a local Central Valley DMV office and get service. You have to make an appointment now, weeks and weeks ahead. If I want a basic service, I have to assume that I won't. It will. It'll be in Spanish. If I go into the dry cleaners, all the stores around it will be in Spanish. The owner of the dry cleaner will not speak English very well. And so that's that's a reality.

And if I'm walking on to my almond orchard and I see somebody that doesn't speak English and he has an AR 15 and he's sitting on the side of his car, I have no idea whether he's a cartel member or he's just a nice guy that's getting paid a bounty to shoot coyotes illegally. But that that's the reality. And I know that the people that I work with at Stanford and this is what this very if I were to tell them that.

Then I would be a racist, an old white, bitter person, and they're so woak, but then when you look at how what it means, it means that the entire Bay Area, whether it's Harker's school or Castalia or Sacred Heart or the Menlo School, whatever it is, they're growing because all of these Silicon Valley elite that are so wealthy do not dare put their children in the Redwood City schools or the eastern Woodside School District. They want their kids in lily, white, Asian and white prep school.

They want to use people to clean their home and they want to sound very virtuous in doing so by in the abstract daming, a mythical outright white racist was against illegal immigration. But they don't want to live next to the people. I'm speaking to somebody whose two brothers have Mexican, one had a Mexican-American wife, the other has Mexican-American children. And I grew up with and I think there were seven of us that were not Mexican-American and my first grade all the way through seventh grade.

And when I get up in the morning, I choose to live here, but I don't see anybody who's not Mexican-American. All my friends are Mexican-American. So it's not these people. And I think that's very important, Meggan, that a lot of this elite left is some kind of strange psychological mechanism where they construct an abstract caring or empathy is sort of a medical exemption. So then they don't have to live with the other that they champion because they do not want to put their kids in the same school.

They do not want to live next to them. They do not want to entertain with them. They don't want to be friends with people.

That's so interesting because I can tell you here in New York, of course, the opposite extreme geographically and and just so far removed from the border that people don't understand it.

You'll hear a lot from the liberals up here.

I am an immigrant. I come from a family of immigrants and they skip over the part where it was done legally.

And they think that people who are along the southern border who are complaining about this are just all a bunch of xenophobes and racists without understanding that not only is there some real danger there, but there are genuine economic and societal consequences to having what is effectively an open border. Yeah, there is.

I mean, when my daughter was in high school, a person hit us, rame t boned us and then took off running. And we weren't hurt that badly, just shaken up. I went and tackled him and he was arrested. And the next the the officer told me to leave. And the next day when I filed insurance, there was no record of that arrest. They let him off because I guess they knew him or he was related to the local police department.

And I've had since nineteen eighty now six incidents. I count them where people have run off the road intoxicated and torn out either vineyard or almond trees. Had one just two months ago and the car is there in the vineyard or the orchard and it's destroyed usually and the person is either intoxicated in the car or they've left. And when I ask officer to come out, I'm told that under no circumstances will you be able to impound that car and they come out and pound it.

And that's the last I ever hear. There's no compensation. There's no insurance coverage. And that's something that happens all the time. Why won't they do it? Well, one of two reasons they give me. One is it's so ubiquitous and frequent that it would be futile to do so and to they don't want to be a high profile officer who goes after the quote unquote, undocumented because that would stigmatize them within their department or deny their promotion or maybe even come to the attention of the local paper.

Well, so what happens now?

Because I, I just can't get over the fact that Biden's pushing for amnesty for those 19 to 20 million people.

Yeah, that's a huge number who are in this country. You don't hear boo about it in the press? Nothing.

I mean, ten years ago, remember when Bush tried to actually create a plan where he worked for the for amnesty with the other side? And it was it was the lead story on Fox News every day. Now you've got Biden pushing this and he says it wants it to happen within eight years.

No one's talking about it. So do you think it's likely to happen or does it all come down to Joe Manchin? Like, what's going to happen with that? Oh, I think the numbers are so large that they're going to do something like, say, we're going to give an amnesty for 11 million and then they're going to wink and nod and say that's only half. We only gave it for half as a first step. And once they do that, that's going to, of course, entice more people and more people and more people across the border.

And the people who are doing this are people of the upper upper middle class or where I live and I work. It's the Mark Zuckerberg and the Google people who have the ability to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own ideology. And so they don't care. They feel pretty good about and they think that I'm always going to have a wall around my estate as I dam walls on the border. I'm always going to have private schools for my own children as I champion the teachers union and damned charter schools for the lower middle classes.

So you can see how it works, at least the short term thinking of the people who enable this to happen long term, it will finally catch up to them, as it does with every disastrous decision. I think also, just briefly, I think we have to be cognizant or candid about the role of race. Race has changed in this country. We used to believe that class was the determinant of victimization and oppression. We we looked at the poor, didn't have a good break, whether it was self-inflicted pathologies or bad luck or exploitation by employers or whatever culture, we accepted that we wanted to help the poor of all different races.

There's more people who are poor, that are nonminority than all minorities put together, I think is about twenty seven million versus twenty two million or something. So that was it. That was sort of the Marxist idea and it didn't really work in the United States and say that we're going to have a class struggle because we're all fluid, we're upwardly mobile. Yesterday's poor person is tomorrow's wealthy person. Tomorrow's wealthy person was yesterday. Except except but something happened with that formula where we created this new thing called diversity.

And that was in the Obama administration, really, that it came into the fore before it was a black white binary and everybody else was working around it. But because of the legacy of slavery and the poverty of the African-American. That levels of poverty in the African-American community, we were working on that specifically, suddenly, all of a sudden we dropped all class considerations. I remember two thousand, nine, ten, all of a sudden six in this area, Punjabis, third generation optometrist who were Asian, anybody.

Anybody who was non-white was now a new group called Diversity, and all of a sudden at Stanford where I work, if somebody came from India and he was a grandee with a lot of money and he was a doctor or a professor and you had him in your department, you were considered diverse. And what that did was it just divorced all ideas of oppression and victimization from class considerations and it up in a practical sense, the exploited poor from, you know, 15 percent of the population that were non-white, poor 10 percent, all of a sudden, 30 percent of all classes.

And what that did is you could be very, very wealthy. And we saw that in that interview with Oprah, Oprah, the victims. You know, she said that a thirty eight thousand dollar purses, crocodile purse was not instantly presented out of its case to her. Therefore, they were racist and she suffered from it. Michelle Obama said she was a victim when somebody to target asked her to take a package down from a shelf. The royal these royals that we saw are victims.

Everybody can be a victim based on the idea that they're not they have some claim to be non-white in some ways. Even they can be wealthy, they can be privileged. They can have far more privilege than somebody in southern Ohio or Appalachian or Bakersfield, California. That's a new idea that I think we haven't discussed as a society. Why don't we make these things income based rather than racially based?

It's funny you should bring this up, because I was saying when I was teasing you, I said I don't I don't know if I have it in me to ask Victor about Meghan Markle and the Royals just because I see you on such a high pedestal.

But I'm glad you brought it up, because I do have strong feelings about it. And they're right along the lines that you just mentioned. We're supposed to look at the millionaires talking to this billionaire on set in this television setting that's watched by tens of millions around the globe and feel sorry for this prince and his wife, the duchess, because they're really worried that their son might not get the title to which they feel he is entitled. You know, I didn't I saw clips of it and I didn't understand that incoherence, it was, I don't think parents and children I mean, there's a lot of grandchildren of Queen Elizabeth.

They're not all titled doesn't mean just because you're a grandchild, you're automatically titled the act doesn't happen, doesn't happen. The only reason we know about either Mark, Miss Markle, Meghan Markle or Prince Andrew is because of the queen. And they were he was born lucky, I suppose, with all this privilege. And yet. Listening to him, he feels like he's suffered because his wife has suffered, who even before she met him, she was well off.

And the actress, she had a little company. She was doing fine. There was no sign that she'd been oppressed. And then, you know, what did she think the royal family of Britain is like? I mean, the Windsor family goes way back and has Germanic roots and has proper English roots. You if you are I married into that family, believe me, they would be joking behind our backs that we are American yokels, whatever race we were, and that we wouldn't be necessarily malicious.

It's just part of that the baggage that one accepts when they want to become a royal by marriage ran. And then you have these two neighbors, 90 million dollar estate or Oprah lives, 50 million dollar estate, Montecito, where the royal couple lives. And they're aghast at all this oppression that they've suffered. And I thought, wow, we're in a pandemic, people are dying. We've got all these national crisis and we have to listen to these psychodramas.

And then there was no evidence. It was all she said. She said or an unnamed person said this, and we won't name this person, I guess, until next episode.

Oh, but they want their privacy. Yeah. You just wrote a piece about this called The Progressive Imaginarium, which nailed it. Can you explain what that term means? Well, I think we have this sort of funhouse where all these imaginary characters live and the press allows them to live there, whether it was these two supposedly all white hoodlums that confronted Jesse Smollett in Chicago at two thirty in the morning yelling Magga slogans. And they didn't like entires if they even knew what Empire was and then they threw out bleach.

Of course, the freezing point of bleach, I think it was eight below that. It would have it would have frozen in midair, but nevertheless, it scattered as if they were going to bleach him and make him white. And then somehow he fought them off while he was holding a sandwich in one hand on the cell phone and the other. And they managed to put a noose on them. But diminutive, juicy beat these people. And people accepted this and they accept it.

They accepted Elizabeth Warren.

And if you go back to a catalog at Harvard Law School, she was their first Native American. She's in this fantasy house. These two people are in this fantasy house. Joe Biden, we have we just talked about this idea that he's vigorously engaged President good old Joe Biden from Scranton, this middle class centrist president that's on top of things. It's a complete mythology and these are media fed mythologies. And, you know, I was a big critic.

I took a lot of heat from the right of the capital, assault and mob.

But if you look at that capital, January six assault, what you see is it was there was no leader. It was a bunch of buffoonish, angry, just.

You know, enraged people who committed a felony and should face the consequences, but all of a sudden we had this fantasy that it was an armed insurrection preplanned and that they were trying to take ties in with them to kidnap government officials and they were armed. There was never one person who was arrested that ever had in their possession, much less used a firearm. The ties came from the Capitol Police that some idiot stole. And the tragic death of Officer Cicconetti couldn't can be attributed to a lot of hypotheticals.

We don't know that. But one of them is not the New York Times narrative that a enraged Trump supporter approached him with a fire extinguisher and bashed his head in and killed him. That's not true. And so that's an iconic date. And why that's important is that that justified the largest militarization of Washington since the Civil War. Thirty thousand people at one point yet we didn't hear a peep, Megan, from the two hundred and eighty retired generals and admirals and national security officials who said that if Donald Trump called in the troops after the burning of partial burning, the St.

John Episcopal Church, and that I think it was June six riot and demonstration that got close to the White House ground, that would be an insurrection.

That would be a coup. We're going to have more with Victor Davis Hanson in one second, we're going to talk about the upcoming George Floyd trial and the pressure on the jurors there and how the media is likely to cover this one. But before we get to that, I want to bring you a feature we call Sound up here at the Megan Kelly Show.

This is where we bring you some sound, some like a sound bite that we feel you must hear. And for me, this one was a no brainer. Everyone seems to be weighing in on Oprah Winfrey's bombshell interview of Harry and Megan because we really were dying to hear from her. Hillary Clinton, who's got some strong opinions. Listen to this.

Their cruelty in going after Megan was just outrageous. And the fact she did not get more support, that the that the the reaction was, you know, let's just paper it over and pretend that it didn't happen or it will go away. Just keep your head down. Well, you know, this young woman was not about to keep her head down. You know, this is 20, 21. And she wanted to live her life. She wanted to, you know, be fully engaged.

And she had every right to hope for that.

OK, so could you please spare us the lectures on cruelty to young women in twenty twenty one? Miss, let's create a war room to attack Bill Clinton's accusers when he was running for office with the help of George Stephanopoulos, by the way.

Right. She didn't care. She shouldn't care whether it's true. She's want to tear him down. That's it. That's Hillary Clinton, folks.

Feminist icon who now is speaking out about the cruelty against poor Meghan Markle. Can you like who does she think?

And by the way, cruelty from a woman who allegedly issued the stand down order in Benghazi, Libya. Right. Who let our troops hang out to dry while they were under attack at the consulate. I'm just saying maybe she shouldn't be lecturing people on how to behave well. Right. Not to mention all of her alleged illegal acts when she was hiding her server, having a server and then deleting the hard drive and all the stuff she did.

She should just not be moralizing to anyone about anything like the nerve of her to go out there and play this like Hillary is going to stand up for Meghan.

You're not helping, you know, helping Meghan Markle's cause not even a little.

And by the way, let's not forget about her associations with Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.

And don't forget, Ronan Farrow reported that it was her publicist who tried to kill the story at first about Harvey Weinstein outing him as a as a sexual predator now that the guy denied that. But she also reportedly had a conversation with Lena Dunham about the same thing. And so you tell me whether Hillary Clinton is a protector of women or she does want to weigh in on the side of the princess because she's got to be fashionable. She should spend more time working on her hair and less time working on fake statements about female empowerment.

And that is what we call sound up. Back to Victor in one minute. Good news, everyone, entrepreneurial optimism has increased. In fact, a recent survey shows the highest ever intent for people to start their own businesses in spring. Twenty, twenty one. That is good news. Have you ever wanted to do that? Started start a business or a side gig or sort of like pursue your life's dream? Sometimes I think about starting a restaurant, like a bar.

I don't know, someplace you can go and hang out with a good vibe, get the VIP treatment, and then I think about hiring people to staff out the restaurant. I think I was going to be a hassle. And I go back to the news. Well, listen, if I had Zipora at my side, I might think about it some more. Maybe I will, because Zipora will make hiring super fast and easy. And right now my listeners can try it for free.

When you post a job on Zappacosta, it's going to get sent out to over one hundred top job sites with just one click, then zip recruiters matching technology will scan thousands of resumes and profiles to send you the most qualified people for your job. If you're really interested in the candidate, you can even invite them to apply for your job with one click zip recruiter will send them an email from you, get the personal touch and that makes you stand out from the competition.

It's so effective that four to five employers who post on ZIP recruiter will get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now you can try zip recruiter for free at zip recruiter Dotcom Mark. That's Zip recruiter dotcom EMK zip recruiter. The smartest way to hire.

Coming up with the George Floyd trial, because that's that's a taboo subject, but I think one can have a balanced view that that had Officer Schavan not put his knee on the neck of George Floyd for eight minutes, it would have been a different outcome without also denying the fact that had George Floyd not been in the process of committing a felony of counterfeiting and had he not had apparently near toxic levels or toxic levels of drugs, there would have been a different outcome.

But that balanced view is not going to be on, is not going to be what the trial is about. It's going to be about utter fear of a huge multimillion dollar damage, death, riot mayhem, if that verdict is anything other than second degree murder. And I was just thinking about this because it we're going to cover that trial and we're going to need to be fearless about it because the facts are the facts. And if the facts turn out to be in any way helpful to the officer, people are going to lose their minds at media who report that.

So it's going to require some intestinal fortitude to follow the evidence wherever it goes in that courtroom. We're going to do that. But that case in particular is just so controversial. And yet, as you know, Victor, you know, you point out that already I read one of your pieces where you were saying some of these polls, you're kind of showing that perhaps we're at the end of this WOAK pandemic, perhaps we're getting near the end, one that that shows people are seeing that sort of so-called armed insurrection really wasn't exactly that and that the media is at a very different standard for that than they have toward the type of violence we've seen.

And the second one was about people's attitudes toward black black lives matter and police.

It's been radical. And as you know, the Harvard Harris poll is not conservative. It's not a Rasmussen poll. And they found that 73 percent of the public now considers Antifa a terrorist organization. And by about 12 point margin, they feel that it was given too much leniency. And whereas BLM had about 55 percent of public support, it's down, I think, in the high 30s now. And the police have just just risen. That's no longer people feel you should defund the police or that they're culpable, that they're the aggrieved party.

And that changed that radical change in view as a result of 90 days, as you said, of unchecked looting and arson that followed sometimes peaceful demonstrations, but not all that. They didn't all end peacefully and people thought there had to be consequences and there was none in. Then, as you say and as I've written, it was asymmetrical, the way that we react to the capital assault. And the other problem with the George Floyd is that May twenty fifth is now an iconic day among our cultural elites.

I know that after May twenty fifth, my life, everybody, life, everybody's life at Stanford University changed. Everybody in academics, life changed. All of a sudden we were presented with a narrative that we had no control over. That said, George Freud's death revealed that we are racist, inherently evil society going back to 16, 19, and there's nothing you can do other than make the product or efforts. And that means changing standards, going to workshops, being educated, confessing that your privileges, honor and all of that, and for that day to be suspect of anything less than that.

If that jury finds out that Officer Schavan was derelict and committed involuntary manslaughter, inadvertently putting his knee too long, or maybe even if they acquit him much less or should say much less, if they acquit him, that whole date then is question. And that narrative that we now have institutionalized for a year is is over with. And I don't think people can afford on the left to let that happen. It's like, how can that jury. How are they going to be able to offer an unvarnished assessment of the case, they're going to be terrified.

Everyone in the country knows that if that jury, who, unlike the rest of us, gets to sit steps away from the witnesses and evaluate their credibility and look at the evidence firsthand and touch things and feel things and deliberate amongst themselves, if they don't come to the right conclusion, if they find anything other than murder in this case and the and the odds on murder are pretty long, according to legal experts.

I mean, really, they're pretty long. They know as well as you and I do that there are going to be riots unlike we've ever seen.

And just think of what happened when the Ferguson D.A. didn't. Right when they didn't bring the charges there. This is going to make that look like nothing. No, it is, and I think everybody knows that, and I think that we saw that 30 years ago with the O.J. trial, that that jury was terrified and that that had a role we know later and acquitting O.J. because people were just they didn't want to face the consequences. And I think their attitude is really cynical.

It's sort of they I mean, the larger society as well.

If he was derelict, it's his own fault, Officer Charles. And if he has to be a sacrificial lamb for the greater good, then so be it. And that's that's what's really disturbing. There's a I use that word asymmetrical, maybe too much. But when you look at what happened, George Floyd had a degree of culpability because he was in it was engaged in a crime apparently from all or witnesses and passing a 20 dollar counterfeit bill. And he he didn't actively hit the officer, but he passively resisted arrest.

And that's a felony. So. The officer after his death, the officer's name was released right away. I mean, I was matter of a few hours, but the capital officer who shot this bad, but I think her name was who illegally entered and should not have been inside the Capitol, was trying to break through, probably to commit damage, which nevertheless, she, too, was unarmed, but she was shot and killed. To this day, we have no idea who that officer was.

And so I guess it's little things like that when the public and I'm trying to reflect now why are these polls are showing this this radical change in views? And I think a lot of it is the public just feels that. The administrative state or the bureaucracy, our elected officials are the media does not look at things empirically, they have ideological agendas are they're scared. That's also a motive. They feel that if they were empirical and they're thinking if there's going to be damage or there's going to be fallout from my decision, it's going to go on you and not me.

And so I see that an academic life a lot where you see college presidents any time there's something like the Smith case where an African-American young woman claimed that she was harassed by being black at a lunch counter or I should say buying lunch. And she blamed all of these poor working class people, the janitor, the security guard, some of the kids, you know, who actually hadn't done anything. She was not supposed to be in that area and they were just worried for the other people who were going to come in.

And yet, if you read what the academic said, it was all this virtue signalling that we're shocked we're not going to let this happen. And the subtext was we're going to destroy people's lives because they really don't matter. They're just poor working class white people and they're not annointed academics like we are.

Yeah, it was back to lived experience. Her lived experience made her perceive something in a way that wasn't factual. And so the destruction of those lives must be tolerated because of the respective colors of their skins. Yeah, and then every once in a while, you read in the paper where there's an outstanding liberal academic and for the situation, he falls through the cracks or she does, and then they are victimized and suddenly they are outraged. We saw that Mr.

McNeil at The New York Times, or very wise when that starts happening, then people, they think, wow, I'm one of you. Why is this happening to me? I don't I get exemption. I hate Donald Trump just as much as you do. And yet they don't, because once once these forces are unleashed, there's no logic about where they're where they're going to fall or lead to.

But why did you write that? And I quote, Peak weakness is nearing.

And the end of your sentence was because if it continued in its present incarnation than the United States, as we know, it would cease to exist. So that's a good news. Bad news sentence.

Yeah, well, I don't think. Yeah, so.

There were situations in the ancient world during the, say, the Peloponnesian War on an island called Corsaro famous incident where this started, where they started all of this hysteria, they factions started fighting and it was total chaos. And the historians facilities chronicled it and said when human nature being what it is, this is going to happen. It's not a sustainable situation. The reign of terror was not a sustainable situation. When the Jacobins hijacked the French Revolution and 17 19, the Salem witch trials were not sustainable.

You couldn't just go say she's a witch, he's a witch. And while there were communists in the State Department, you couldn't have a guy like Joe McCarthy say, I am holding a list of two hundred names and crimes of these communists who because it was an act, you couldn't allow that to happen in the sense that the system then wouldn't work. So if this if we really do believe that we're systematically racist and we always were, and whether it was 11 trillion dollars in reparatory Great Society programs or seven hundred thousand dead during the Civil War, that we've done nothing to remedy that and that we're inherently evil, then there's no reason for us to continue.

History comes in and says, oh, by the way, if you don't think you're better than the alternative, then you're not going to last. And you can't have these universities on the one hand, say, you students or one point seven dollars trillion in debt and we're going to charge you full tuition for a third rate Zoome experience while our professor just sit home in quarantine. But but we're going to make higher millions of dollars of diversity and equity and inclusion coordinators and administrators and Provo's.

And you're all going to have from one hour to three hours and mandatory diversity training and re-educate that. And we're going to create a climate of fear throughout the country where if you make one wrong state, you and I are on this right now, you know, making better than I do. And I know in academia that if I say one thing wrong or you do, you could end up spending thousands of dollars in legal fees just to preserve your livelihood.

And it's happened it happened to me at Stanford University. It was written about with Scott Atlus, the advisors who's a colleague of mine, and Neil Ferguson, the historian. All of a sudden during this period, people that were very radical in the Stanford faculty thought, hmm, it's about time to go after that right wing Hoover Institution in this context. Yeah, and they were not we're not right wing. The majority of Hoover fellows voted Democratic in the last two elections are three elections, but nonetheless, they couldn't tolerate the idea.

There were some conservative on campus and so they made these wild charges. That's Dr. Atlas was responsible for four hundred thousand deaths that because I had questioned the ability to check the authenticity of one hundred and mail in ballots, one hundred million, even though I had said that it wasn't wise to press that objection to the elections beyond the initial suits that failed. Nonetheless, I'm responsible for five dead in the capital that.

So I just want to say I listened. As I pointed out earlier, I listened to you. I listened to you throughout the election. And when Hoover when Stanford turned on you, these these key professors at Stanford try to turn on you to say somehow you caused what happened on January 6th.

I thought it was outrageous, too, because I heard you raising questions about mail in ballots just and you said something like Trump lost the election when that was allowed prior to the election when when that was allowed in a sweeping method in places like Pennsylvania because you had questions about the integrity of those about that's nowhere near the same as saying the crack in the Sydney, you know, like, no, they they were trying to attack you.

Like you were saying, Trump is still the legitimate president and he's he's not going to leave office.

No, I know it. I got in an argument with Lou Dobbs on and on Fox News one afternoon, whom I like. I like him very much. I respect him a great deal. But I didn't believe that there was a problem with the voting machines along the Sydney power lines. And I said, so I think it was November 9th on Laura Ingraham Show. I said, if the if you can't establish, you can't win in court, not because it's wrong or right, but if you don't get a hearing in court, you're never going to overturn this election.

You might as well work on the Georgia Senate races. So that was ironic. But the thing about it was these professors, at least one of them I don't want to mention, all four lumped them together, but that professor had started an antifascist, you know what that means. And it's short for a.. Network on campus. The earlier a few years earlier, he told Stanford students he celebrated the fact that they were shut down a bridge endangered lives cause car crashes at peak hour in the San Mateo Bridge, 70 of whom were arrested.

And he had posted on his website. This all took about five seconds to find this out. All he had to do was go to his website and he was recommending one of the most anti-Semitic tracks you could see if America knew all about the terrible Jews and terrible Israelis.

So that and there was no all. I guess what I'm trying to say is that this would have continued and continued. I wrote a letter to The Daily. It didn't stop them. Neil and Scott objected until finally we just said, you know what? This is not a matter of they get to lie and we get to lie. That's what they were saying. Some people said, well, everybody has liars. Let's just call it quits. We said we have not lied.

We haven't said anything wrong. Don't conflate us with these people. And we respect. We're not the ones trying to censor them, even though they're not telling the truth, but we didn't really get help until we helped ourselves. And really, I think it's a good lesson for all of us that when you get targeted by the mob, you're not going to have a lot of people come to your defense. The only defense is yourself, and the left is on the left.

And these matters are bullies. And they will not stop until they feel on a cost benefit analysis. They have more to lose and to gain. And then once we kind of showed carefully an old series of letters and media appearances that we had done nothing wrong. We were just scholars that they objected to on ideological grounds and that if you really wanted to examine culpability for insurrectionary activity, you should look at our accusers. As soon as that happened, it dropped.

It was dropped.

Oh, wow. So just to back up, because I know you're short on time, but how will it fall apart? How will Wokingham leave us? I wasn't around for the McCarthy era and I yeah, I don't know how the Salem witch trials, you know, wound up dying out.

The first thing that happens is it cannibalizes the sacrosanct. So when McCarthy went after the US Army and George Marshall, hero of World War Two, and then that forced Dwight Eisenhower to say, you know what, you may be in my party and that's my base, but I got to speak out. And that happened. And once the Republicans said, you know what, he's not going to get exemption from us. So in this case, if they continue to go after Democrats and leftists in academia and they will because each victory makes them gorged and more conceded, that will begin to slow it down.

And then the other thing is the sheer amount of capital and labor and time that's invested in them.

I can tell you that in our particular minor, little isolated case, I don't think that the people who run a multi-billion operation like Stanford University want that type of publicity and they want that type of time exhausted and they want all of those legal questions adjudicated by their staff when there was nothing there. And I think it's a drag on the economy and our own collective time that if everybody is if everybody is a racist, then nobody is a racist. That's what I'm getting to.

And that we get a saturation point where, you know, if everybody's the same, which then there's no longer anything called which if everybody is an aristocratic Catholic oppressor and seventeen ninety three France and nobody is. And that's what's happening right now. Everybody is systematically racist that they they say that openly. You're all racist. You all it's all up to you people to confess well. That's not viable because there's still 70 percent of the population, whatever ideological bent they are, is not is not going to say I am awful and culpable and you can do whatever you want, tell me what I have to do.

And there will be some who feel that they can dodged the bullet and make a deal, but most won't when it gets to that extreme. And we're getting close to that extreme.

So I think we're already seeing in polls that people are starting to push back and see the underneath that I'm sorry, what killed, I think, what killed the Metoo movement.

Which I thought had a lot of justifiable causes in the beginning, but what what really did it end was when they went after Brett Kavanaugh and you could make the argument that what you did at 17 years old, when there were no corroborating witnesses and what evidence did exist, kind of exonerated him. But nevertheless, they persisted and then they started going after luminaries on the left. I mean, Tara Reid going after Joe Biden. And she had far more, I thought, credible charges than did misformed against Kavanagh's.

But then you look at Cuomo and the left mind, it was fine that he may have been indirectly responsible or indeed directly responsible for fifteen thousand deaths in long term facilities in New York. But what was not tolerable was that he touched or been acted inappropriately toward women. And so at that point everybody said, well, if there is a me too Credle and a culture, then let's follow it. Let's apply it to Joe Biden, let's apply it to Andrew Cuomo.

Let's apply it to other people and not just Brett Kavanaugh. And it sort of petered out. I mean, some of it was institutionalized, a good part, but it doesn't have the same force that it did two years ago.

Well, I certainly hope that. I mean, the one good thing about this nonsense infiltrating our schools is that I do believe, whereas you might not stand up for yourself, parents will stand up for their children. Parents don't want their kids showing up at the third grade to be told they're white supremacists. And I think we're starting to see some real pushback on that more and more, which gives me some hope. All right. Last two questions.

The first is, what is the thing that's most concerning you right now about our country?

I think it's actually the debt we're getting. Twenty nine trillion dollars in debt and we just passed two trillion dollars. We printed and we had a trillion dollars that we haven't even used. And the ideology behind it that we can just print money and we can have zero interest rates and we can transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from middle class and lower middle class people who get no interest on their meager savings and use that zero interest to keep borrowing, borrowing money and not paying interest on it.

Because that's not sustainable either. Some point we're going to have a stagflation, inflation, recession. And so the when I look at history, everybody always says to classicists, why did the classical city state fail or why did Rome do so well? And suddenly it collapsed in the fifth century? Well, it's never suddenly it's the destruction of the currency and it's increased debt and that the ideology, that debt, that debt creates, that everybody's entitled to some free money.

That's what I'm most worried about. All right.

I'm squeezing in one question before my last one, which is speaking of the classics, because this is your department and this is truly what you're your expert in. For somebody like me who doesn't really understand it, like I don't I'm not. I have a confession for you. Last night I Googled classics like what does it mean?

You know, ancient Greece, OK, ancient Rome. And then. And then what? After that, I would like to learn more as somebody who is a just a Syracuse University graduate and then went on to law school where they didn't talk about this at all. What would be a good place for me to start to learn more about the classics? Well, I would to be frank, I would not read anything after two thousand because it's ideological, what we're talking about today, infected classics.

So there's a good book, a classic book by Edith Hamilton called The Greek Way was classic. In the nineteen forties, there's a Kitto, the Greeks. I co-authored a book called Who Killed Homer, What were Classics and What Happened to It? There's a good book called Greek Ways by Bruce Thought. And all of these start the theme of all of these books is that there are certain works of literature, art, architecture that everybody recognizes by their innate beauty and power and wisdom.

And it has nothing to do with being white or male or anything. And over time that that's the test of it. So the Doric order or the Parthenon or a Greek based painting or the Iliad or the Odyssey or Facilities History or Aristotle's politics, they are so focused on the great issues of life, the human experience, what happens to us when we die? Why do good people do bad things? Why do you forgive somebody or does that only empower them?

All of these things every day that we want to know about these these pieces of literature, these poems and forensic speeches or histories deal with in a way that most literature today doesn't. And then the same thing with art they capture what the I see is not what you think it seems, but then it goes it if it exaggerates beauty, it does so in a way that's realistic. It's classical and that's the term are why is our Supreme Court or buildings in Washington or Paris, why do they all go back eventually to this classical mode of columns or architraves or pediments?

Why not just make square boxes like the BO House movement? And so classics means that throw anything you want in the human experience out there. But there are certain archetypes of. Of literature, and it's not just in Greece and Rome, it's in Florentine, Italy in the in the 15th and 16th century. It can be American novels in the nineteen thirties, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, that we're not they're not here today. So there are these pockets of brilliance that explode and they become immortalise.

And so that was what classics are. And then very quickly you study it in a variety of ways. The keystone is learned Latin and Greek. Most people don't want to do that. If you do Latin, Greek, then you can read it in the original. You can see what they said about it in there. But you can study ancient history. You can study through archaeology, numismatics, ancient coinage, ancient architecture, ancient base paintings. You can go in.

I spent a year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens as an archaeologist. So that's exciting to you dig and you find things and it's quite spectacular to see a grave come to life all of a sudden. And so it's a multidisciplinary experience. And I wish it was there because I thought I created a classics department, Cal State, Fresno, for twenty one years for minority kids. I think 90 percent of my kids were from Southeast Asia or Mexico.

And I found that if they learn Latin and some learn Greek and they learn vocabulary and etymology and how to speak like the mosses or Cicero, no notes, just using hand gestures and memories, I could really ensure them a quality education that was better than what you could get at Stanford. And all of them. Race became incidental to who they were, was no longer central. They were so meritocratic and they were so skilled and adept. And these are people who came from Mexico without even speaking English in some cases.

But I just wish we would get back to that democratic system. And then I think because I'm not a I don't believe that people's natural aptitude has anything to do with race or anything at all. And so. I'm not worried about immigration from a racial point of view, I'm worried of what cultural legal point of view if we had if we said we're going to take one hundred thousand people from Mexico legally and we're going to select people on who we're going to have the best chance of succeeding quickly based on their education level in Mexico, it would be I think they would be just as successful as anybody else.

My worry is because we're undermining the sanctity of the law mostly.

Yeah. And then and then you're told you can't talk about it. So first of all, that was inspirational. I love listening to you talk about I love your own enthusiasm for it, which is contagious and makes makes me want to go I'm going to go get those books today.

Abby, would you please go get me those books today there. So that's exciting because I you made the case very persuasively. Here's my last question, which is I asked to some guests about you in particular need to answer this. What do you love about America?

You know, I like the American can do. I don't give a damn attitude. And that was with us from the very beginning, as we know from the founders. And we were right on the border some time of chaos. But I like the idea that I see a guy that's built his own Winnebago out of wood on the freeway are like an idea. When I go up to the lake and there's a boat ramp and everybody's in line for hours to unload their boat and some weird guy on the other side found a natural dirt slope, he says, come over here.

Look what I've done. They don't do that in Europe, you know? And so there's this spontaneous, innovative, highly individual streak that's inherent in America. And that's why once we get going, we're always we screw things up. But once we get going, like in World War Two, at the end of World War Two, we had a larger GDP coming out of the Depression than all the other major belligerents in the world. The US Navy was larger than every single Navy in the world by nineteen forty five, and yet it wasn't.

We had the 19th largest army behind Portugal when World War two started and when it ended we had twelve point five million for whatever people say about vaccinations. This country was the one that gave us for vaccinations and we are going to be eventually the largest country with the most vaccination once we gear up to it. And once we just let get the government out and say, you know what, Walgreen's, you do this, CBS, you do that the the purposes as many arms get job as possible as quickly.

And once you unleash this American individualism and imagination, it's quite scary, but in a positive way. So that's what I like best about the United States. And what I like worst is when people try to artificially repress it or stigmatize it or demonize it. But there's a natural exuberance about this country that's ecumenical, too. And Americans are the most charitable people in the world. When somebody goes on a funny thing or somebody has a natural, there's nowhere else in the world where anybody just starts giving and spending like Americans do.

I've lived all over the world and traveled all and I I've never seen anybody quite like in America as far as their generosity and their lack of pretense, or you go up in Europe and you'll just see American come up. You say, where are you from? Oh yeah, I was there. Hey, yeah. Yeah. You want to go have coffee or other people don't do that to the same degree that we do. It's it's something that we need to really, really appreciate because it is exceptional.

The one and only Victor Davis Hanson, now people know why I love you. I'm really glad you were here. Thank you. Please come back to please come by, Will.

I will. So up next on Wednesday, don't forget to subscribe, you got to listen to this interview, JoCo Willink is here. This is not just a Navy SEAL. This is the Navy SEAL. This is the Navy SEAL commander that all the SEALs want to work under. And this guy not only served our country honorably with repeated tours of duty in the Middle East and Iraq, but I mean, he knew some of the best and greatest Navy SEALs that have ever served our nation.

And he's got leadership advice. He's got thoughts about where we are in our country. He's got thoughts on how you get yourself out of bed every day and deal with some of the craziness that's weighing on all of us so much. Right. Like how do you pull that out of your head? How do you deal with bullies in this school culture? How do you even think about your bullies? I found him really useful with some practical tips on how I could do better in my life.

And he's on another level. He's not like anybody we've had on before. He just comes at everything from a different level. And he's the one who got me thinking about how we need more military people in office. Right. We need somebody like JoCo to run for office. Unfortunately, he's probably too evolved to do it. But I know you're going to love the interview, so don't forget. Go ahead and subscribe. Now, download the show.

Give me a five star rating if you feel inclined. And I'd love to get a review from you. I do read them all and I always appreciate hearing your feedback. Talk to you then. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No bias, no agenda and no fear. The Megan Kelly Show is a devil may care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.