Bad Bunny Super Bowl Spectacle Was a ‘Crutch for the Lack of Talent,’ Says Victor Davis Hanson

When you put Jay-Z in charge of the halftime show, then there has been a script, whether it was Rihanna or Beyonds or any of the... We know what it is now. You just turn on the TV and you say to yourself, there's going to be an elaborate set with shooting lights and all kinds of crazy stuff. And that is a crutch for the lack of talent. And then they're going to have a whole group of... They did this last year... A whole group of dancers. And they're going to twerk. Is that the word? Twerking? and they're going to simulate sexual intercourse. And the sets and the explosive and he'll come out of a hat or they'll throw him to the crotch. All that is a sideshow, a veneer for the lack of talent. This year, you saw all of that. Well, hello, ladies and hello, gentlemen, and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. And this time you see my face, but you're much happier to see once again the face of Victor. He's making now is stepping his toe back into the podcast water. He's already recorded one episode. It was terrific. It ran the other day. We are talking on Tuesday the 12th, late at night here on the East Coast. And this episode will be up on Thursday the 12th. I have a few questions for Victor. We're going to try to keep it short, keep it in the game, not tax. How are you doing? Just quickly. six weeks ago tonight I got operated and I think I'm getting frustrated because I'm not feeling the way I should I think and I think the original operation was a great success the surgeon was brilliant he went in he got the lymph nodes he did everything and I was awake after four hours and the emergency and I thought everything was going great and then I'm 72 so one of my arteries and two of my veins I don't know what happened I guess they're old but they started bleeding pretty heavily and thank God Mark Berry is a great surgeon because he went right back in didn't hesitate and they put me out and reopened the lung and started all over again and he found them and you know I lost I don't know two or three liters and five transfusions and that's my problem right now it's the it's not the the surgery I mean it hurts and I feel like there's something missing down there I wonder where it went it's kind of like a little black hole you lose half of your lung you didn't you didn't bring it home and put it in no I think they biopsy I didn't know what it was. Yeah. And anyway, I'm dealing with, I always had a good heart. I don't mean that narcissistically as, you know, spiritually, but physically. And then to have AFib and kind of like an IED, you go places, you never know when it's going to go off. And then the medicine for it is kind of bad. It wouldn't be bad, but I have mast cell, mastocytosis, so it kind of releases mast cells. so I just feel like I'm too wobbly I can't drive yet I'd like to get back full time to work but and all this is um you know subsidiary to I gotta I have to face tomorrow I'm going to talk to the oncologist about I mean this is the as one person said oh don't worry about this this is the sideshow one of the doctors said the real problem is making sure the cancer doesn't come back because I have a couple of, what's the word for it? Liabilities. This type of very rare, this type of muconous adenoma carcinoma is like 1 out of 10, but out of the 10, the mutation is like 1 out of 200. So it's very rare, and it can't be treated. It's not treatable with immunotherapy or chemo. I mean, you can throw it at it, heavy doses, but it will only give you 5% edge in survivability. You had to get it the way you got it was by surgery. Yes, you've got to get it all because it has a tendency to come back. And when it comes back, I mean, it's pretty bad. So I hope they got it all. And I think that's the bad news. But the good news is that it didn't get into the lymph nodes and the margins were good. And they took the whole lobe out. So I'm just waiting now on the blood biopsy. They have a new test where they can take the genetic imprint, the mutation of the tumor, and then check your entire, you know, your blood to see if any DNA is in there. And if it's not, you have, you know, you have to, it can come later, but you have a good prognosis. So I'm hoping that's true. I don't think I'm, even if I wanted to, and I don't think I'm physically able to take this doublet chemo right now for a 5% advantage. But I don't want to talk about that. I have to talk to the oncologist. They've been very good. I spend my mornings, I'm trying to be a proactive patient. So I've been reading maybe five to six long articles a day for 30 days. I'm happy for you there. mutations, margins, all these different aspects to make an informed decision. But I really want to get back. And then it's so weird because so many people have been so nice. I mean, I never expected so many people to be so nice. I mean, they're nice. I knew they were nice. I didn't know there were so many of them. So I'm getting letters, emails every single day from the nicest people. it's really the last thing I'll say it's really weird to appreciate because we get with all of this distractions of Mondami and Bad Bunny and all the I stuff and you get depressed and then you get these letters from people from the kind of a lost generation we don't even think about and they write in the most beautiful cursive handwriting it's just amazing I mean, I'll get people that will write a whole page in just beautiful calligraphy. And they all mention God. They talk about prayer. They talk about their lives. They talk about all the tragedies. I read every one of them. And I think people forget that there's a lot of people out there in America that are not represented in the leftist narratives and the media. And they're what make the people, and I think a lot of them listen to this show. I don't mean a lot of them in absolute numbers, but as a profile, we tap into that profile because we share a lot of their values, all of them probably. But they're the people who make America work. It's really amazing. I have to kiss up to you, but you're also one of the most relatable people out there, Victor. So people feel they can relate to you because they do relate to you. Well, I like my audience. I really do. I worship my audience. Every time I go somewhere and somebody comes up to me, they just fit a profile. They're polite, kind. I mean, it's just amazing. yeah i get it i get it by reflection or refraction i went to this hillsdale event and that was i don't say i was mobbed by people but one after another uh who are fans of yours so uh i'm happy to take your your the applause for you and pass it on well victor i have a few questions to ask you uh today and the first is going to be about a minute minnesota minneapolis and we're going to get into the super bowl and maybe another in california and we'll do all that when we come back from these initial important messages. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own words, produced and carried by our friends at the Daily Signal, Rob Bluey and company. Rob's runs a great operation there. Great man. Victor, my first question, I've taken to writing these down with all the guests that we have, the pinch hitting for you. I don't know how you did it. You had so many guests. They were all great. Wouldn't want to pinch hit for Victor Davis Hanson. Victor, we see the images and videos from Minneapolis of barricades at these intersections. They seem like low-rent Midwestern versions of Seattle's Chaz and Chop. They're troubling, nevertheless. There are street intersection barricades populated by misfits and balaclavas holding their anti-ice signs, playing flutes, chanting moronic chants, demanding evidence from people driving by to prove that they are not ICE officers. And even when the proof is shown by these poor people who are just heading out to the store to get milk or whatever, the protesters engage in assault and destruction of property. Water bottles are the new projectiles. Victor, doesn't it strike you as odd that these cranks, I think they're worse than cranks, but that they want evidence of identity when they also hold a near religious belief that America should be invaded by non-citizens and that it's a moral outrage to demand IDs in order to vote? Well, if we were going to go through all the contradictions of the protesting class, we'd be here all night. But there's certain things that they haven't remarked about. If you look at the ICE officers, and I try to look at them, there is a disproportionate number of Hispanics. There's a lot of black officers. There's a lot of white militants. What I'm getting at is that there's a class element. When you see these very affluent people in their puff jackets and their whiny voice and the things and the epithets they say, it's just so vulgar and they throw stuff out. And the worst, I don't know if you saw that, but they brought hundreds if not thousands of these. This is a family show, so I don't, excuse me. I would use the Greek word olisbos, but I'll use the English, classical Greek. Sappho has it in one of her poems on olisbos. But they use these dildos. Did you see them? And they throw them at people and they stick them on cars. I mean, that's a really deranged mind. There's just a level of crudity about this upper middle class, left wing culture, Malou. And then here's these people out there. And you look at them, and they're basically saying to these protesters, we didn't let in 10, 12 million people. You did. You didn't say a word. And you didn't say a word when these 600,000 criminals started killing and raping and stealing, and you've got 1,700 of them in your jails. All you have to do is just turn them over to us. Just turn them over to us. And then we have Tim Walts and Keith Ellison and Jacob Fry, and they're all elected officials who are egging these people on. And we have people coming from out of state. We know that. They're getting funded by all these left-wing foundations. So I guess I'll just conclude very quickly with Tim Walts said the other day that the crime rate was down at historic lows in Minnesota. And that's not from him turning people over in the jails. That's from them, despite the opposition, picking up criminals on their list. But he wouldn't give any credit to ICE. None. But he knows that it's a very thing. He doesn't quite want them to leave because he wants them to get rid of these criminals. But he can't say that. And instead, it's so bad. They damn them and they misrepresent them, they slander them, they smear them. They dox them. Yeah, dox them and then they want them to clean up the mess that they can't. And you're basically looking at a class warfare of working class people cleaning up the mess that elites made and then having the elites damn them for cleaning up that mess. and the other thing about it is I think I wrote one of the first ones the neoconfederates now everybody's talking about it but there is so much irony here that these liberal people have followed the John C. Calhoun the Jefferson Davis and then the modern incarnations of them Orbo Faubus, George Wallace. These are all people, remember, and our audience knows them, that in the 1960s tried to resist the federal government on the grounds of states' rights, just like their Confederate great-great-great-great-grandparents. Well, that's what they're doing. So if you look at the Confederate profile, it's down to the T. They are racial essentialist. they talk about race all the time one person even called one of the ice person the N word did you see that yeah they really into race and they talk about white people white people white people white people all the time They're into states' rights, just like a good confederate. They don't have a middle class. The middle class is leaving these states in droves, so they've got the subsidized Somali community, all these different, what they call the communities, and they're all on government multibillion-dollar handouts, which are skimmed off by elected officials and bureaucrats. And then you've got the elite, but there's not really a viable middle class, just like the Confederacy. And in addition to that, so they have states' rights, they have racial obsessions, they have no middle class. And then when you examine them, they appropriate federal property just like the Confederates did. They go in and try to get into the ICE property. They try to blockade things. They try to obstruct federal law. They don't even know about the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. So just to finish, Jack, what is the answer? I think everybody out there is torn in two. Half of us say, you know what? There's people in Minnesota that have nothing to do with this, and they deserve protection and they want their federal statutes enforced. You can't just pull out because they'll occupy federal property and they will have won and they'll say the federal government has no jurisdiction within their confines. And it's the duty of every federal officer and elected official to ensure that the federal law is enforced to its fullest throughout the land. and then you say yeah but they want to put they want to put conservatives and lose lose situation they want to make so much chaos that they say look they can't stop of us but then if you come and try to stop them then they're going to say that you're an authoritarian gestapo nazi and then there's the rest of us and i think a lot of us listening say okay we'll take care of that and a force, but we have midterms coming out. And we can go into Texas. We can go into West Virginia. We can go into Wyoming. These people are wonderful. They turn over the criminals. The crime drops. These Antifa types don't dare stick their head into West Virginia if they know what's good for them. They won't go into Texas. We don't have demonstrations. We get all of the guys out, and everybody turns their attention back to the real issue. 10 million illegal aliens led in by Joe Biden, rounding them up, 600,000, 700,000 criminals, crime rate goes down. And don't go into those places. Just say, you know, Tim Walsh, you're right. We're going to enforce federal law in a little while, but you're so wonderful, you do it. If you don't want to do it, you know, and what will happen is, tragically, and I'm not suggesting this is a good thing, there will be people who die in the blue states a lot more, by truck drivers, by rapists, by killers, and the red states will be much safer, and they already are becoming safer, except for some blue enclaves inside them. And I know people are going to say, well, no, no, you can't back down. I'm not saying you're going to back down. I'm just saying before the midterm, don't play into their hands. That's what they want. Just say, you know what? Turn over, just make it again and again. We're here to get the people in the jail. Please give us the people in the jail. So California's let out 4,000 people, Jack, last year, 4,000 criminals. They let out and they would not give them to ICE. And they've got about almost, over 25% of all of the, it's getting up to about 28% of all incarcerated criminals in California, state, local. or illegal aliens. Yeah. And we always talk about, oh, we can't lock people up. It's too expensive. Imagine if you just turned over a third, a quarter to a third of your prison population to ICE and they deported them and you had all that room. Then you could go back to three strikes and bring back sanity to the state. So it's a mess is what I'm trying to say. Before we take a break, you know, on the, you didn't say it, I do, but let these big cities and these blue states marinate in the conditions they have. That's a good word, Jack. Okay, well, you can use it. The longer term problem is, we've talked about this before, you know, who's left to elect sanity once everyone's gone? Everyone who is there. There's a lot of middle New York City, you know, a liberal city, but still there was enough people there to have the, I don't know, the fortitude, the intelligence to elect Rudy Giuliani and Bloomberg for a 20 year period. But I don't see that sense of sensible base in any of these places. I'm worried about that because when I when I was told I had this problem with cancer I don't know why I was driving in town so I went to the local cemetery see where my mother, my father, my grandparents my sister is buried there died very young and then my daughter and as I was walking I started walking I looked at the you know the gravestones are flat and I saw all these names Jack and I hadn't really digested and you know I'm 72 but these were people who died in the last 50 years but my point is I grew up with them they were teachers they were people business people they were policemen the whole community is there and I have pretty good memory and I could associate every name with a face, and they all had something that came to me, and that was they were all upright. They were the kind of middle America, small town, World War II vet, you know what I mean, what you're talking about. But they're there now, and I don't know if that tradition has been handed to their children or not because when you go into the same town, it's a very different place. and I'm not trying to belittle my own town but when I go to the supermarket or Walmart the whole parking lot is covered with trash people don't take their shopping carts put them back they're all littered everywhere when I go on the side of the road it's full of trash when I drive down I see so many crazy things when I pick up I don't read the Fresno Bee but sometimes I pick it up on the internet just to see the headlines. And it's all about gangs and killing and illegal. So I think that's the problem that we have not, we broke that great chain of American civilization. This link in the 60s, 70s, 80s, I think Obama had a lot to do with it as well. It was broken. And we haven't replaced those people. I was up in the upstairs. I'm trying to go around and try to just contemplate things because, you know, when you get kind of this sentence, you kind of look at things. And I was looking at Victor Hanson I was named after. There's a nice picture of him. 22, not bothering anybody. 21, he was. 20, he was just, you know, University Pacific football player, joins the Marine Corps, trains on Guadalcanal, goes to the 6th Marine Division, gets killed on the last day of Sugar Lowfield. And there's a picture of him, shirt off, big guy. And I thought, wow, all you people went all over the world to die for us. And then I read what this Representative Chu said. Did you see this guy Wu or something from Washington? He's an elected congressperson, and he gave a 2024 interview. And he said, oh, we're close. We're the majority now, Asians. And he doesn't speak for any of these people, so I'm not trying to suggest anybody agrees with him, but this was an elected representative of Congress. He said, we're just about to take over this country and get rid of all the white people. I thought to myself, is that what all these people died for? They did that so that they could have Mondami or they could have Bad Bunny? Is that what they really thought? Is that what they didn't? That wasn't their vision is what I'm saying. and so there's something wrong right now and i think a lot of it is the destruction of civic memory nobody remembers and i know that they always say this the left and i agree with it that if you come to the united states and you follow if not they don't say follow those but if you are a naturalized citizen you're just as much american as somebody been here three four five i I agree. Yes. However, asterisk footnote, that means that you love this country and you will talk more positively than negatively about it. And you would adhere to its rules and regulations and you have some reverence for its past, even though that doesn't include you. what happened in 1941 or 45 or 18 or civil. You need to be, but if you're not, you just come here, then yeah, you're not the same. Because you haven't been inculcated or you have no desire to learn about the country of which you came to. And that wasn't true of most immigrants. They really wanted to be Americans in the fullest sense of the word. And most of them do today that you talk to. but there's something else when I hear this Mondami guy say we're America and I'm thinking well then why are you having all these flags here and America is just one of the many Americans and why did you say F ice and why did you tell Americans they had four months to learn Spanish so they could listen to you and now I'm kind of gyrating into our next topic probably I mean Bad Bunny. Well we're going to get to Bad Bunny I think we'll, yeah, let's do that. But let's do that when we come back from these important messages. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. I'm Jack Fowler. I'm very happy to be with my friend again. And Victor had a wonderful episode the other day with the great Sammy Wink. So, you know, every week we'll have one or two of Victor until his strength returns. and then we'll be back in the full-time saddle. For your sick guy, Victor, you know, you're doing these shows. You're doing the Victor Davis Hanson in a few words. You're writing still, so, you know, you're doing pretty productive. Yeah, it's kind of weird. I'll get people. I'm not sleeping, though, but I get people come and they'll say, well, I saw you, and therefore, can you do this, this, this? I said, no, I have just enough energy to do this. But there's a nice little pathway. It's not the biggest freeway, but there's a little pathway like this. And if I get some good results on the next test, if I shouldn't do chemo, if it doesn't come back, if I can get over this, then I can get back. And I have, you know, the percentages are more positive than negative. Big negative, but more positive. So that's my goal. Keep the prayers up, folks. All right, here's my second question. Find the path. Yeah, or blaze it. I did not watch, you know, you're going to feel sorry for me. I lost my glasses. I did not watch the Super Bowl halftime show or hardly any of the game itself. I have to defend myself. I used to be an NFL statistician way, way back 50 years ago for the Elias Sports Bureau. But I really could care less about football because of what football has become. and how it seems to have, not seems, because it has become a tool for ideology. So I saw the lyrics of Bad Bunny's tunes. They were toned down to the halftime show person. But unvarnished, the lyrics to the, you know, unedited songs, they're tributes to sexual abandon and sodomy, and there's no orifice that does not have a role for Bad Bunny's music. So this is how the NFL believes America should be entertained and how Latin culture should get its hour in the spotlight. Victor, what do you make of this? You're a son of a man who once played for the great Amos Alonzo Stagg. I don't know. I guess this Goodell, the commissioner, thinks he's going to make it a global project and that there's 150 million people tuned in. and that more than the 60 million Americans which is off they used to have a lot more than that Everything this is a Neronian Roman circus It really is And we have been accustomed I mean I don't care what a person's politics, so when I see folk singers that used to come there, I saw Country Western, I had no problem with any of them. They were great. And left wing, right wing i enjoyed it but when they started when you put jay-z in charge of the halftime show then there has been a script whether it was rihanna or beyonds or any of the right and we know what it is now you just turn on the tv and you say to yourself there's going to be an elaborate set with shooting lights and all kinds of crazy stuff and that is a crutch for the lack of talent and then there's going to be a singer male or female, and they're going to be almost on, you can't understand what they're saying. And they are going to take a song that made them a billionaire that is full of pornography and it's just horrible, but they're going to tone it down. And they're going to do the following. They're going to gyrate and grab their genitals from time to time, almost as if in a masturbatory excuse me, fetish. And then they're going to have a whole group of, they did this last year, a whole group of dancers. And they're going to twerk. Is that the word, twerking? And they're going to simulate sexual intercourse. And the sets and the explosive, and he'll come out of a hat or they'll throw him to the crowd. All that is a sideshow, a veneer for the lack of talent. and this year you saw all of that so you had this bad bunny and he could not refrain from touching his genitals every minute every second he was not singing he was mumbling or talking in the united states 14 of the population speak spanish or understand it 86 the people who are proficient in English is 90%. So here he's got this Jay-Z, Goodell, Bunny idea that we're going to appeal to 14% of the population and ignore the 86% who don't understand Spanish, even though that the people who understand Spanish overwhelmingly are part of the 90% who know English. and we're going to bring this guy out and he's famous because he says things that are unspeakable he can out Jeffrey Epstein Jeffrey Epstein's imagination so he gave this I guess the talk was Saffira that was his signature song and they put the lyrics in Spanish but you're right they excised them because they would have taken him off the air but if you go look at and I can understand some of the Spanish but they didn't do this, Jack. They did not translate for the viewers the lyrics. So what was the point of putting them in Spanish when he was speaking in Spanish? There was no point of it. And I'll tell you what the point was. That those songs, even when they were toned down, were filthy. The one that you're referring to, the Sephira, you're right. I'm going to use the Latinate clinical descriptions. It celebrated not just fallachio, but exploitive fallachio. Exploitive sodomy. Exploitive analingus. It was filthy. It was horrific. The whole song is he sings and he made his money on that song. So he took that song and he had the horror in it and the dementia in it. But he took those three acts out or he would have been kicked off television. and the best thing that ever happened to him was it was in Spanish because that was one of the reasons I think that he wanted to do it in Spanish because I don't know how good his English is but he could be a little bit racier with the caveat that he was not going to have a translator and he was not going to have a big billboard aboard at the stadium or on your TV set that translated. And so when I was looking at that, I thought, wow, what is your feminist left that praise this in the intersectional community? Remember, it's gays, women, blacks, Chicanos, leftists, they're all intersectional. So on the one hand, yes, he's DEI. Yes, he's against the so-called white exploitive hierarchy. But then he doesn't just use these terms of sexual punishment and exploitation on what the left calls objectifying women, right? They're just nothing. And he uses the word H-O-E-S, hoes. So after saying he's going to do these horrible things to these women, then he calls them not, well, they're my partners. He just objectifies them as prostitutes. And he uses that rap ghetto word hoes. And there's no criticism. I had a colleague at the Hoover Institution who said, this is beautiful. I thought, have you lost your mind? And so it was just jarring to have this guy in front of the ideas that, well, it's a festive cultural occasion. So everybody get Gramps and Dad and Mom and the kids around the TV set and then see this wonderful guy, DEI, and he's going to grab his testicles and gyrate while people below him simulate sexual intercourse. And then he's going to speak in a language that's only known to 14 out of every 100 people. and then it's going to be filthy and he's going to tone it down but his tone down version is filthier than most songs and you're going to promote the NFL and then you're going to have some added attractions to amplify that so you're going to have this Ricky Martin the Latinos and he's going to sing about all the bad white people have done to Puerto Rico through the example of Hawaii. What have you done to Hawaii? In Spanish, all in Spanish. But you look at the text, and he's saying you came in, you took over our beaches. This is not Hawaii. You took over, you took everything, meaning in a racist fashion, white people have no claim to Hawaii. And I'm thinking, are you aware of what you're singing? So you're mad about people coming in legally, migrating to a part of their own country and overwhelming the indigenous population. Well, what do you think 12 million people did that you support? They crashed the border. They were illegal. They broke laws, and they just barged into a country that wasn't their own uninvited. That dwarfs anything than Hawaii. And then we had the Washington Post, which thankfully they canned a lot of them. They have no more sports page, but one of the last things that a sports writer wrote was that this was Colin Kaepernick's rebel. He was the most relevant person there. I'm thinking, you too have lost your mind. This is a person who was raised, adopted by a middle-class white family, raised him, and his mother was white, His father left him and he was black. He had a wonderful, loving family. He was given every opportunity in the world. All I had never known of Colin Kaepernick, Jack, before his dubious transformation into a political activist, that he had been fined by the NFL, I think, for using the N-word. And I was really shocked at that. I thought, wow, why would he call somebody that? and then after George Floyd he fading his skills were fading and he became the face of take the knee and sit don't stand for the national anthem and he made a fortune he sued everybody they wouldn't hire him he got a settlement and he's at the game and we're supposed to believe the Washington Post that he's the most relevant he's relevant Washington Post for two things that I could see in 2016 and 17 he tanked the viewership 25 percent viewership and i think it was five to ten percent of actual stadium attendance he cost the nfl billions of dollars and then he gave us the idea or he promoted of two national anthems which we saw at the super bowl so we have a black national anthem. And if I say we have a white national anthem, people would say, well, that's racist, Victor. The national anthem is for everybody. Yes, it is. I will hope that's true. But if you say that you have to have a black national anthem, then de facto, by admission, you're saying that the old national anthem is not yours, or it's insufficient. So then whose is it? Well, maybe it's these people I don't like. That's their national anthem. So he did so much damage, and yet here he's glorified. And you put Ricky Martin with the denouement, and then you add it all up to, I have to admit, it was one of the most tedious games I've ever watched. I felt so sorry for the Patriots quarterback. I just watched every play. There would be the primary receiver covered by four people. The secondary and tertiary receivers were wide open. And he threw right into the crowd every single time. And I guess he was, he's skillful, but I felt bad because it's very hard to be 23 years old or is that how old he is and be in that pressure cooker. But it was a disaster. The game was not very good. And then the halftime was atrocious. And then the weirdest thing was when I saw Meghan McCain and Piers Morgan and people at the Hoover Institution praising this thing. Petronius the Satiricon couldn't do justice to it. It was so gross. And then there was the subtext. They had told him, obviously, we're going to do it in Spanish and we're not going to translate it. So you can be foul-mouthed, but don't put in analingus and sodomy. And don't do that or we'll get kicked off TV, even in Spanish. But we're going to have all these sets and don't insult the audience and say F ice or you have to learn Spanish. But you can code it, code it. So that's what he did. He had all these little coded messages that U.S. was bad and the Latin American experience was better, da, da, da, da, da. which begs the question why would you have somebody like that yeah well for the middle finger it shows to the I don't think any of the football players knew who he was I think hardly any of them knew who he was hey Victor I have to let our listeners and viewers know something if you've studied enough history you start to see a pattern nations don't lose their way overnight they adrift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved. For wartime, we've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations. And policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical truth. Every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. 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Whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank if you believe as we do that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious call 844 844 or visit protectwithvictor.com. That's 844-790-9191, 844-790-9191, or visit protectwithvictor.com. History rewards those who take the long view. And we thank the good people from Allegiance Gold for sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Victor, maybe I should just ask you one last final question. I was going to say one last thing about bad boning. Go ahead. Well, when I was registering at the Stanford Hospital, I thought it was very magnanimous. they have a little placard and you point to your language like a code. Yeah. And that will tell you that you're going to get a translator. There was 20 of them. I canceled, called them. When I call my pharmacy, the first thing I hear is in Spanish. I can push a button and get everything. My point is that this is a very kind, magnanimous country. And whatever language you are, we bent over backward. at the cost annually of billions of dollars. If you want to look at our ballots in California, it's like the Tower of Babel. There's like eight different languages. So my point is this. Voting, hospitals, civic duties, legal things, education. We get all these different languages. And then this guy comes from Puerto Rico, and he says to the American people who offer all of its minority residents who are not proficient in English, 10% of the population, 30, 40 million people. America says we don't want to disenfranchise you or hurt you or don't give you a full experience. So not only do you have your language, cable TVs in your own language, but for official business and for matters of your health and security, we're going to give you complete translation. And given all that, this guy will not even offer a translation to 90% of America that can't understand a word he says. And then he wants to put this in the idea that he's cutting edge, and he's going to go grab his genitals and do all this pornographic stuff and be in Spanish. No, you know what would be really cutting edge? that would make him very unpopular and heroic, if he said halfway through, I want to just say something in English. I know all of you are around your football screens. I love this country. You treat people whose language is not English far better than any other country treats non-speakers of that official language. If you go to Mexico, if you go to Puerto Rico, which is a commonwealth of the United States. If you go to any country, you do not get the attention if you're Chinese or if you're Filipino or if you're African dialect or if you're Japanese that this country gives. I just wanted to point that out. That would be a wonderful, and everybody would get angry at him. But he acted like he was heroic. He was obsequious. He was just doing what we expected he'd do. Well, sure. And let's end on this, Victor, with your comment on this, because we've reached kind of the limits of how much, how long you should be speaking. that he would be, you blame him correctly, but that the NFL, big organization, I'm sure run by, you know, elites, graduates of Ivy League schools, would also portray him as a representative of the Latino community. and especially, you know, Puerto Rico recently passed a law to ban abortion, as much of the rest of America is expanding. Yeah, that was very... But here he is. Yeah, he's the pinup boy for Latinos. If I was a Latino, I'd be livid. I would add two things to that. He has a song about Puerto Rican independence. A lot of Americans would say promises, promises. But if you look at the latest poll or plebiscite, 90% don't want to be independent. It's broke already. And if it was independent, it would probably end up like Cuba, a failed communist state. But the point is 90% don't agree with him. And yet he puts himself up as a spokesman. And that's just shocking that he thinks he's a Puerto Rican rebel. And so he doesn't represent anybody. And the other thing about it is if I was Hispanic and I had my, say I'm a 72-year-old Mexican-American. I know many people, some of my best friends, most of my friends in Selma are Mexican-American. But if I had my family there and he was speaking Spanish to me, and even though it was toned down, it was pretty clear that it was all about sex and penetration and thrusting, all these things. Why would it? It was very condescending. I would think, you mean you're going to get in front of the TV and you won't say things in English to most of Americans, but just because I'm Mexican-American and I understand and speak Spanish, that gives you the right to get up there in that stage and grab yourself and have all of this simulated, and I'm supposed to like it? I don't think it would go over well with a predominantly Catholic population. I really don't. Well, hopefully any population. I think this is all, he set out a tone to be completely filthy in Spanish, and people listened to him and they thought it was neat, and then the Western world gave him Grammys, and they adored him because he hated ice, and he became, out of nowhere, a billionaire famous person. But I don't think it's – something about it is really indicative of the crisis and civilization in the West. It really is. Ideology has marched through every institution, schools, et cetera, and the NFL. Well, Victor, we normally do three segments. We're just going to do two tonight. I'm grateful you could do any. It's great to see you and talk with you. with you. I do want to let our listeners and viewers know that they should visit your website, The Blade of Perseus. That's VictorHanson.com. Do subscribe. And here's Victor. He's alive, you can see. And he has a series, a recent series, I think it was eight to ten articles on how he defined... I had no idea that I would lose half my blood volume. and you may have one of the just one more chapter to one of the interns came in one of the intern residents came in when i was in the hospital and i you know when you take out the lower right lobe is big it's the biggest one oh and you only you only have two on your right side not three so it's half your capacity and so i wasn't thinking that it hurts and i was trying to get air and i said to him there's something wrong with me i can't Every time I try to expand, it hurts, and I don't feel like I'm getting the air. And he said, Mr. Hanson, we took out half your – do you understand that? I said, well, what is there now? And he said, nothing. Yeah. Fill it up with M&Ms. Hey, so – Anyway. I also didn't mention you're the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. I apologize, Hoover. Go to VictorHanson.com, The Blade of Perseus. Do subscribe. subscribe. It's $65 a year. I think. I've forgotten. It's been so long since I've heard. Or you can pay monthly if you want. And for me, Jack Frowler... Six weeks tonight. Well, six weeks from now, you're going to... But you are better than you were six weeks ago. Six weeks ago, I looked at my phone. I had 300 steps. I got out of the hospital. I couldn't do 300. I did 6,000 today. Well, that's pretty darn good. It's not that good, but I'm really, I'm not where I want to be. I'm really, I feel when your body, when you never ever in your entire life thought about your heart, you just jumped up and did stuff and your body feels like it betrayed you and you're kind of an invalid, you feel really vulnerable. It's like, wow, what if I'm walking in the orchard and there's somebody stealing something? What would you do? Or what if I'm out here in the middle of nowhere walking and you get AFib? And you start to lose that confidence and you can't do that. George Patton said, never take counsel of your fears. And I'm trying not to. But I'm really angry at myself that I haven't gotten better. All right. Okay. You want to beat yourself up. I said to Scott Atlas, he's been very good, of course. The world-famous radiologist. So I said to him, Scott, you know, I was in Libya and I had a ruptured appendix for two days before I got back to Tripoli. And there was no antibiotics. And I had gangrene. And there was no painkillers. He didn't allow any painkillers. And all they had was ether. So they knocked me out. I woke up three times. They took 10 inches out of my colon. They took out the appendix. and I flew home in four days. You know what he said? And you were how old? I said, it was 20 years ago. He said, exactly. You were 52 and 52 ain't 72. And he was so right about that. This was my fourth operation this year. I had one in June to rebuild my sinuses. I had this bronchoscopy where they knock you out for an hour and go down your throat and clip stuff. then I had the cancer removal and then 30 minutes later I had the arterial aneurysm operation so I don't want to go to hospitals anymore Jack I don't want you to either I just want you to walk happily around almond trees I am with all my friendly bees okay last thing to say is go to civiltoughts.com sign up that's what I do it's a free newsletter, you're going to love it. Victor, you've been terrific. Thank you so much. I don't think I've been terrific. I've done my best, that's all I can say. But I want to come back, and we're going to try to do this on a semi-regular basis. I'll find out. Everything is unknown, but I'm going to do my best, that's all I can do. I really enjoy what people have written and our audience. I had no idea that we had... I just didn't think we had that many listeners. Well, and your nickname, I've hyphenated it. It's NT, which stands for National Treasure. If I had a nickel for everybody who wrote me about you being a national treasure, I'd be a very rich man. But I am a rich man because I get to do this with you. Okay. My final sign-off is... Everybody's got to get... We have to get, don't be like me, Eeyore. You have to be confident. Give me confidence because I have a feeling, something about this illness, that the people who love this country and know how to fix it are not going to give up. They're going to win, and they're going to not do it violently. They're going to do it by argumentation, logic, and the truth, and they're not going to be intimidated. And they are very, very capable people. they have been stigmatized, stereotyped ridiculed but they are very capable people and I meet them every single day I'm not talking about a particular race or anybody I'm talking about people of all different races that love this country and they love its history and they're not going to give it up to these lunatics and I would that's not going to happen they think it's going to happen but it's not you are dead right I shouldn't be dead you are right I'm going to get in trouble for keeping you now 55 minutes God bless everyone, thanks for watching we'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hanson and his own words bye bye you