The Fury and the Fantasy of the Left

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Speaker 2 Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I am Jack Fowler, the host.

Speaker 2 You're here to listen to the wisdom that will come from the namesake Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 2 And Victor's got a website, The Blade of Perseus. Its address is victorhanson.com.
More on that later, why you should be subscribing.

Speaker 2 We are recording on the 8th of February, and this particular episode will be up on Thursday, February 13th.

Speaker 2 Lot to talk about Israeli hostages, Donald Trump taking over the Kennedy Center, South Africa sanctions, sanctions against the ICC, energy issues, a piece, a great essay Victor has written for the new criterion, Maga Agonistes.

Speaker 2 And maybe we'll talk about some some Democrat Party

Speaker 2 just destruction, ongoing destruction.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I know, I'm crying.

Speaker 3 It's not Harry Truman, that's for sure.

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 2 although maybe

Speaker 2 some woman who thinks she's Harry Truman, right?

Speaker 2 It would be more likely. We'll get to all that when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show again. I have to say, this particular episode is up on the 13th, Thursday, the 13th.
Victor, two great things about today.

Speaker 2 Well, one about today, the 13th, is that I will be meeting in New York City with some nuns from the Sisters of Life, and I thrill to be with nuns of pious ladies and habits.

Speaker 2 So that's going to be kind of groovy. I do that for my where I work, where I have a normal job at Anphil or trying to help the sisters of life terrific order and then the next day

Speaker 2 uh mrs f and i will be celebrating our 30 congratulations yeah congratulations poor thing poor sharon so anyway

Speaker 2 talking about poor things and that that's not a should not be a comical lead in but uh today on the 8th the newspapers victor report on uh his headline condition of hostages freed by hamas a crime against humanity, says Israeli president.

Speaker 2 This is from Just the News, which is the mothership of this podcast, John Solomon's group.

Speaker 2 Palestinian terrorist group Hamas released three Israeli hostages on Saturday, and their condition sparked alarm among the Israeli government president.

Speaker 2 As Isaac Herzog said, the frail hostages represented, quote, a crime against humanity. Their names Ohad Ben-Ami, Eli Sharabi, and Ur Levi.
They were abducted, of course, on October 7th.

Speaker 2 So, Victor, I'm not surprised by that, and I won't be surprised when retribution comes at the time of, I guess, Israel's choosing, which I think could happen and probably should happen.

Speaker 2 Your thoughts, Victor,

Speaker 2 well,

Speaker 3 Hamas was headed for extinction had Israel been allowed to go into the last corridor near Sinai. And they would have, but of course, they value human life.
I mean

Speaker 2 it's

Speaker 3 kind of strange how Hamas rationalize it.

Speaker 3 When I was on campus and I had these impromptu talks and I mentioned that to one of the protesters and he kind of turned it around and said, well, Israel doesn't value Palestinian life.

Speaker 3 They charge, I mean,

Speaker 3 They think one Israeli is worth a thousand hostages. And I said, no, it's you who think that, not the Israelis.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 3 there was something that when we talked about that, I was worried about this deal, and I'm not an Israeli, so I understand that I'm happy to get the hostage home.

Speaker 3 But they were not allowed to destroy Hamas. Hamas is a cowardly organization.
When they went in on October 7th, they butchered innocent,

Speaker 3 largely unarmed people, raped them, mutilated them, burned them, every imaginable medieval crime. And then they snuck back and they hid in tunnels underneath mosques, schools,

Speaker 3 and hospitals, meaning they were willing to endanger civilians to protect themselves. And then

Speaker 3 they were almost eliminated. And then after Israel stopped this,

Speaker 3 They put some of them who were surviving, put their uniforms, and now they're releasing the hostages, but they're doing so under the auspices.

Speaker 3 Have you seen these guys and their fatigues and their green mask and all of this? And they act act like they're so tough.

Speaker 3 And these are the people who fought the Israelis and were completely decimated. But now, because they cannot fight the Israelis, they act like they're triumphant almost, and they're controlling.

Speaker 3 So get rid of the idea that Hamas won't come back.

Speaker 3 They're already in prominent positions. And

Speaker 3 forget the idea of Western liberals who say, well, the Gaza people don't really like them. Yes, they only had an election one time and they hijacked the government, but two things.

Speaker 3 When you saw the hostages released, did you see the anger that the actual Hamas terrorists were trying to keep away the Gazan mob who might kill the hostages and therefore they wouldn't get their other terrorist friends back?

Speaker 3 Not that they wouldn't mind, but they wanted to protect the Israelis so that they would get their thugs back.

Speaker 3 But my point is, it reminded me so much of the scenes from Palestinian videos and podcasts and television

Speaker 3 the day after October 7th, or indeed on October 7th, when they brought back corpses and Israeli hostages in trucks back through the hole in the fence, and the whole crowds came up and kicked them and spit on them.

Speaker 3 And when they have every time they release them, the crowds come by. So my point is...

Speaker 3 I don't believe in collective punishment, but I do believe that the Gazan people support the idea of October 7th, and the only reason they might object to it is they thought that Israel would not respond in the way

Speaker 2 that it did.

Speaker 3 And that's the only degree of remorse that they have, that tactically it wasn't smart.

Speaker 3 Probably that they didn't kill enough people. And what's really disturbing is we have all of these people who come over from the Middle East.

Speaker 3 and they protest on these campuses for much of 2024 and they don't differentiate as we as liberals say they do between Hamas and Palestinians. To them they're one and the same.

Speaker 3 And they even finally they were wearing even Hezbollah and

Speaker 3 Hamas insignia.

Speaker 3 And these are terrorists and I don't know why they're here, but Donald Trump has issued an executive order that if anybody breaks US law on a student visa and engages in pro-terrorist activity they'll be deported.

Speaker 3 And that was

Speaker 3 I don't know. I don't know why we take people from that engage or support terrorism from that part of the world and bring them over here.

Speaker 3 And then they become a powerful lobbying force, as we saw in the election. I just don't get it.
I don't get it at all.

Speaker 2 Victor, you know, this should have been maybe... I don't want to advocate for the death of anyone, but

Speaker 2 it sounds like this should have been a chapter in the end of everything, you know, that there just has to be some degree of annihilation here.

Speaker 3 Well, Hamas has to be annihilated,

Speaker 3 or they'll never, the Palestinian, they'll never happen, anything.

Speaker 3 And I do think, from what I understand from Israeli friends and what I've read, is the Israelis now, from interrogations and thousands of hours of video on home security cameras, they have a corpus of almost everybody who went in there, you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 That was not masked. And even the people that were masked, they have testimonies from other people who participated.
So I think

Speaker 3 they have got also a corpus of how many of the killers of the

Speaker 3 1,200 they have killed themselves. And it's a sizable number.
But they're going to hunt down every one of those people.

Speaker 3 And they know it. And I think

Speaker 3 we'll see what happens.

Speaker 3 I just don't see Hamas giving up every hostage. That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 Because if they give up every hostage, the Israelis will finish going down list by list to the people who were murderers and rapists and torturers.

Speaker 3 And they're cowardly people, so they're not going to want that. All of this stuff is braggadaccio.

Speaker 3 That's part of the weird thing about the Middle East. It's all of this Hamas, Hezbollah.

Speaker 3 You see all these videos: death to America, death to Israel, these big guys, six feet tall with beards and blindfolded, or they have masks masks on. I don't know what it is.
I mean,

Speaker 3 AK-47, da-da-da-da. And you're supposed to feel that these are the crack.

Speaker 3 And then you get these left-wing journalists that go over there from Europe, especially, but some from the United States, and they're so impressed.

Speaker 2 These are the crack troops of Hezbollah.

Speaker 3 They're not like Haman. They're the deadliest troops in the Middle East.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they don't fight very well when they're confronted in a fair fight, a fair meaning they know where the enemy is, the enemy knows where they is, and they go to it.

Speaker 3 But they do fight well against civilians.

Speaker 3 And then their supporters over here talk a great game and they climb up flagpoles and they tear down flags. They go to the L.A.
Veteran Cemetery. They deface it.
They deface the Lincoln Memorial.

Speaker 3 They deface the walls right outside the White House. They chase Jews into the Cooper Union, threaten them.
They go at Columbia and break into people's classes.

Speaker 3 They deface and break into the Stanford president's office.

Speaker 3 They tell Jews to go to one side of the room as they did at Stanford, the other people tear down posters, but, but, but when somebody says, that's all fine and good, you have a right to protest,

Speaker 3 but you have broken a university policy, and you know that if I was at the University of Gaza and I started waving an Israeli flag, I'd be dead.

Speaker 3 So we don't want to be too reciprocal given our asymmetrical sources of, you know, our types of government. But

Speaker 3 you'll get your wish now and you can go home. And then they get angry.

Speaker 2 And they, ah, yeah.

Speaker 3 It's like there was, I don't know if you saw it because you're in the East Coast, but there was a big story here about,

Speaker 3 I don't know if she was undocumented or not, but she broke into a park not too far in Bakersfield from here. I know the park because I speak there a lot.

Speaker 3 And she saw an American flag and because she's angry about the undocumented, she tore it down and she raised a Mexican flag.

Speaker 2 I saw that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the sheriff came in to arrest her, and then she resisted and pushed him and said, we're going to kill you. My father's going to kill you.

Speaker 3 I'm an Aztec.

Speaker 3 Her name was Aguilar, or Aguilaria, which somebody pointed out correctly, it's from the Latin Aquila, an eagle. It's not an Aztec name at all, it's a European name.

Speaker 3 But she was saying that she is an Aztec as if she's some kind of racialist and that she can differentiate her pedigree from metzito to Spanish to Aztec or whatever.

Speaker 3 I don't think she speaks Nahutul at all. I don't think she's ever been to Yucatan, but maybe she has.

Speaker 3 And the point I'm making is.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the only thing I got is: so

Speaker 3 you're mad about document the undocumented who are here illegally.

Speaker 3 and remember the first round is 90 percent criminals so she's always angry and she's so angry while on u.s soil whether she's an american citizen i don't know but she's tearing down the flag that all these people want to stay in that represents the soil they and they're waving the flag that under no circumstances she wants to go back to and you tell me and then the only way that you can square that circle is what she said she said this is america this was

Speaker 3 Mexico's land. This was Mexico's land.
Well, according to your own settler hierarchy, it was Native American land. And then the Spanish stole it from the Native Americans.

Speaker 3 And then the Mexicans stole it from the Spanish. And then we stole it from the Mexicans.
So we're fourth in line from the Native Americans.

Speaker 3 Anyway, it's the same.

Speaker 3 All of this, this,

Speaker 3 I don't know what the word is, this protest mentality or this anti-Western mentality, it's all predicated on reality.

Speaker 3 Right. And it's all predicated on the idea that I hate the West and what the West provides, but I don't want to leave it.
I want all of its material superiority.

Speaker 3 I want all of its freedoms, but I don't want to cultivate it. I don't want to invest in it.
I want to be parasitical upon it.

Speaker 3 And I don't, and if you dare send me back to where I'm praising the place,

Speaker 3 you're a racist or a sexist or xenophobe or whatever.

Speaker 3 But the only way people can get their attention, as Donald Trump has shown, when you have an asymmetry like Panama or Venezuela or Colombia or Mexico or Canada, then you more or less give them their wish.

Speaker 3 You say, okay,

Speaker 3 You want to send all the people here that are in jail and you want to dump out your prisons. you think that's cute because we have an enfeebled president.
Yeah, okay, you want a hostel.

Speaker 3 It's your choice, so we'll just put a tariff and we're not going to buy anything and you're not going to get a lot of stuff from us.

Speaker 2 And then it's, oh my God, that's a bully.

Speaker 3 Okay, you want to bring in the Chinese, you want to violate the spirit and the law of the Panama Canal Treaty. That's fine, but we're going to do the following.
Then they get angry.

Speaker 3 But it's all predicated on they want, if you're a Panamanian, you want to use the U.S. dollar.
You don't want your own currency.

Speaker 3 And you're glad, you're tickled to death that the Americans went down there in the way the French could not do.

Speaker 3 And the Mexicans, remember, when the Panama Canal was built, we took it over from the French that had failed. Lesseps had done the Suez, and he could not do Panama.
It was not like the Suez Canal.

Speaker 3 They had to have locks. The climate was killing thousands because of yellow fever.
dysentery, and it was a very unsettled political situation. Nobody wanted to do it.

Speaker 3 They thought about going through Mexico. They thought about going through Nicaragua.
And we did it.

Speaker 3 And that's the source of income. If we didn't do it, Panama wouldn't exist.
We broke it away from Colombia. It wouldn't exist.
And yet it wouldn't exist today. That's their income.

Speaker 3 And they use the dollar, and yet they look at that magnanimity by dealing with the Chinese and bringing in these Chinese imperialists

Speaker 3 to,

Speaker 3 I don't know what the purpose was, either to get rich or to humiliate us or both.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, how we let that happen is beyond me concerning.

Speaker 3 They picked Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 Well, when did the Chinese take those ports?

Speaker 3 I thought it was a while ago that they've been 2016, I think.

Speaker 2 Oh, was that? Okay. Yeah, 2015.

Speaker 3 They expanded it, too.

Speaker 3 They were in on the 2016-17 expansion.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 3 they were pretty ubiquitous.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 2 we talked, you talked, got your wisdom at length on our previous podcast about Panama. But right now, I want to take a moment for our sponsor, Quince.

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Speaker 2 Victor, I was going to talk about the Kennedy Center, but since we're kind of got in the immigration issue, I thought this would be a worthwhile follow-up.

Speaker 2 And here's a headline from the New York Post this week.

Speaker 2 East Hampton officials reassure residents that officers won't deport illegal migrants. So here's the first few paragraphs of this story.

Speaker 2 This hoity-toity place.

Speaker 2 East Hampton government officials are trying to quell wealthy residents' fears that local police could deport illegal migrants from the Tony town, many of whom work as maids, landscapers, and nannies to support the luxurious lifestyles of the well-off locals.

Speaker 2 Village and town leaders held a special community meeting Tuesday to assure citizens of Long Island's exclusive NABE, where the median property value is $2 million, that their hired help are not on their radar when it comes to deportation.

Speaker 2 Final little paragraph here.

Speaker 2 East Hampton Village Police Chief Jeffrey Erickson stressed that local law enforcement officers do not have authority to enforce federal law and won't go on to undocumented immigrants if given an ICE detainer.

Speaker 2 Victor, they want what they want.

Speaker 3 Well, we went through this when Rhonda Santis brilliantly exposed it.

Speaker 3 Remember, everybody, about the four years of the whole open borders and illegal alien, 12 million, that was all going merrily along until Ron DeSantis and Governor Abbott in Texas said, you know what?

Speaker 3 These people are all for illegal immigration in the abstract. What if they were in the concrete? Huh, let's bust people up to Martha's Vineyard.

Speaker 3 So they did, not a lot, and immediately they wanted to virtue signal. So they had puff jackets and their old designer hand clothes.
Remember little boxes?

Speaker 3 And they went to their civic center and they gave them this. And then they thought,

Speaker 3 that's it, isn't it? I mean, don't they see how magnanimous I am?

Speaker 3 I gave them my son's puff jacket and I had a pair of my husband's Gucci shoes and I had an old pair of designer French sunglasses I gave to them.

Speaker 2 Power Mars.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I, you know what, don't we have that

Speaker 3 Range Rover with 100,000 miles? Can't we give it to them?

Speaker 3 But they're still here.

Speaker 3 What are we going to do?

Speaker 3 Well, we'll send them to a military base or the inner city. Well, that's great.
So then they said, oh, we love you so much. We just would like you to go now.

Speaker 3 And they did. But this is a little different because now it's their servants,

Speaker 3 as we say in Latin, serwei,

Speaker 3 and they want them to be parachuted in.

Speaker 3 You know, if they could get drones, that would be the best solution that they could come up with.

Speaker 3 If you get a drone, they could ride a drone, come in in the morning, land, clean the toilets, fix the house up, and then the drone could take them back to, I don't know where, they don't care, maybe a hotel in Manhattan or something.

Speaker 3 And they can deal with gangs.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 they don't, they, they love, and I'm talking cynically because I have this bizarre experience that I live in an area where the per capita income is somewhere between 16 and 17,000 versus one where it's 130,000.

Speaker 3 And it's only four hours apart.

Speaker 3 And California is 45% to 50% Hispanic because of open borders, for the most part. The majority of that population is mostly from Mexico.
But this is ground zero here, where I am, because it's cheaper.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 there are no rules. California is the most legal and the most illegal state.
And what I mean by that is, to accommodate this

Speaker 3 problem of having 11 to 12 million people who came in over the last 20 years illegally and cannot obtain parity because most came without a high school diploma, without skills, without English, without legality, without money,

Speaker 3 then

Speaker 3 you had to have all of these social programs, but you also had to suspend the law.

Speaker 3 And when you have social programs and you suspend the law, somebody has to pay for that. So what California did is a lot of people say to me, well, why is it so hyper-regulated?

Speaker 3 Why do they measure the height of your mailbox in Atherton? Or why when I want to take out a eucalyptus branch in Mineral Park, I got to get a permit? Or

Speaker 3 why do we have all these? Well, because we have no regulations where I live.

Speaker 3 So, well, I do, but so within my two-mile radius, I would say there's 10 compounds. And traditionally, this means an old ranch-style farmhouse is owned or rented out by somebody.

Speaker 3 And then he does this. He gets a Winnebago, an old trailer, a garage.

Speaker 3 and four or five or a big barn and divides it up into places. And then he brings in entire families from Mexico.
And they bring in dogs, cats, a lot of animals, horses, cattle.

Speaker 3 And something that is zoned for a single family is now maybe have 50 people.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 all of these California rules that have to be maintained because we are a green, sensitive state, have to be suspended.

Speaker 3 And so what that means is all the people who follow laws have to be hyper-regulated to balance it out. So I have a huge bin, but I also now have to separate my garbage from glass, from this,

Speaker 3 from plastic, from,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 I also,

Speaker 3 on our land, we have an old pond, beautiful. It was one of the most beautiful places I thought in the world growing up.
My brother sold it. It's a long story, but I walk around it every night.

Speaker 3 It's adjacent to my little 42 acres, the remnant of our farm. You should see it, Jack.
I'll put some things on. It looks,

Speaker 3 it's just undescribable what it looks like. If you're an environmentalist and you believe in the pristine wildlife and natural habitat and fauna and flora, you would be shocked.

Speaker 3 And you would be shocked about the indifference people come in. They come in with, now, this week there's a big new

Speaker 3 washer. In the almond orchard, there's a big refrigerator.
There is a dryer. There is a car seat, but most of it just wet garbage, just junk.
And it's

Speaker 3 strewn all over the alleyways. It's into the bottom of the pond.
So when the water comes in from the irrigation district, you get bottles and stuff that float up.

Speaker 3 And you see animals picking through it. There's a whole bunch of coyotes this morning I saw going through it.
So my point is that there's no rules.

Speaker 3 So nobody I asked a person once, a person who came out to inspect my solar panels. I got solar panels.
It took a year, Jack, one year to get the permits.

Speaker 3 And then when I put them on a beautiful shed that was built in 1980 and met code, they didn't know it was on their map. So they said, you know what? That's not on our map.

Speaker 3 And I said, it's because it's an ag-exempt building and there was no law that you had to have a permit in 1980. You just had to meet code.

Speaker 3 And anytime they came out for another inspection, they looked at it. Oh, no, no, no, it has to pass.
So I had to go reapply.

Speaker 3 Well, I said, there's a mile away, there's five homes on a single dwelling zone place, and they're not homes.

Speaker 3 There's open Romex, there's porta-potties with no septic, there's horses out in the middle of the road sometimes. It's just a chaotic, and they're using this area.

Speaker 3 And he said, are you crazy?

Speaker 3 Why would I go over there? I said, what do you mean?

Speaker 3 Why would I go over there? There's M13, there's Sereños, there's Norteños.

Speaker 3 He said,

Speaker 3 what would I do? Put a red tag on one of the Winnebagos and

Speaker 3 in 30 days they're going to have it up to code.

Speaker 2 There is no code.

Speaker 3 So I said, then you go after me? He said, basically, that's what we do. We go after people who follow the law.
And we have millions of people who are on the other side of the law, not in a bad way.

Speaker 3 And he was not,

Speaker 3 he was defending them. I shouldn't present this as if he was criticizing them.
So what I'm saying is that

Speaker 3 these people

Speaker 3 in Atherton have they're hyper-regulated and they like this and they do not know where these people live.

Speaker 3 They go, they must by needs live under different circumstances in hotels in the Queens or the Bronx, and they will not follow the protocols that everybody else has to follow.

Speaker 3 So last night we went out to dinner and I would say I saw three open marts. And I'm talking not just, I'm on the corner selling root beer.
I'm talking about

Speaker 3 a de facto restaurant with long tables and a cook and everything. There's no health inspection, there's no sales tax, there's no income tax.

Speaker 3 And then another one where it was all lit up and they were selling clothes and everything,

Speaker 3 flowers. But my point is, in California, we have a huge black market.
And about two miles from me, there's about 5,000 people every Sunday.

Speaker 3 And that's where they do their shopping, from everything from furniture to appliances, no sales tax, nothing.

Speaker 3 But to make up for that, you've got to be hyper-regulated.

Speaker 3 And that's what people don't understand about illegal aliens, that when you bring somebody in to work in your home, and then you send them out, and then you say that Jose was the greatest guy in the world, he probably is.

Speaker 3 But you don't know how this system is making Jose live.

Speaker 3 So Jose will be living contrary to the zoning laws or the health laws or all these regulations that make life very burdensome for everybody else.

Speaker 3 And so in California, just expand that by a million or two incidents every day, and it's frightening. And so,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 and then people come in with guns. And I've seen protected species like barn owls.
I saw a great horned owl about five years ago shot. And the people just shoot, they come in, they fish,

Speaker 3 they throw trash everywhere, and nobody speaks English, and then you're a racist, or you're a xenophobe, or you're a settler, or whatever term of disparagement is used for noting it.

Speaker 3 But if Gavin Newsom wanted really to stop the $76 billion deficit and he wanted to apply the law equally, I think he'd have a revolution. It wouldn't be about deportation alone.

Speaker 3 It would be about saying, you know what, we've got the biggest black market of any state in the Union, and we're going to crack down on everybody who's not paying sales tax and not filing income tax.

Speaker 3 We're not going to have a cash society anymore. And if you're an electrician or you're a plumber, you're going to be paid on a payroll system.
No more barter, no more cash. And I think

Speaker 3 it would destroy thousands of lives. And that's how it is.

Speaker 3 All the people in Martha's vineyard just see one aspect, so then they become very liberal. And giving somebody a puff jacket does not make you a saint.
It really doesn't.

Speaker 3 You are employing somebody here who's illegally here.

Speaker 3 And that is not the end of it. That's the beginning of it.
And so that's what Tom Holman's trying to do.

Speaker 3 They're trying to say

Speaker 3 55 million people that were not born in the United States, 16% of the population, some citizens, some green card, but the majority here illegally, it's too much.

Speaker 3 And we've got to go back to a normal application of the law. So if somebody wants to put solar panels on their shed, we are going to regulate them.
Okay.

Speaker 3 But if somebody wants to rent out five Winnebagos, we're going to regulate them too.

Speaker 3 And it's not going to be that the people who were arrested for breaking the law, we're not going to say, oh, you're picking on migrants or you're a racist.

Speaker 3 No, no, we're going to treat people, it's racism the other way, the other way. You drove out 15 million people out of California, maybe 20 the last 40 years, because

Speaker 3 to subsidize this huge group coming in who needed to have parity, you taxed the hell out of the middle class, and the people who were wealthy were for all this because they were not subject to the consequences of their ideology.

Speaker 3 And these are the Martha Vineyard types of California, just the way it is.

Speaker 2 Well, fascinating, Victor, fascinating. Well, we're going to,

Speaker 2 since I was talking about New York, we're going to stick to New York a little bit, and then we'll,

Speaker 2 we have a bunch of Donald Trump actions to get your views on, and we'll get to all this when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Again, we're recording on the 8th of February, and this episode will be up on Thursday, the 13th.
Victor's website is theblade of Perseus.

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Speaker 2 Victor, here's

Speaker 2 a headline, New York Post. You know, politically here, Governor Hochul, who barely won an election, and she's up

Speaker 2 in 2026, and Lee Zeldin, who is now the,

Speaker 2 oh, he's the environmental, like EPA director. He was a congressman.

Speaker 2 There's some talk that he will run against her again.

Speaker 2 But there's also talk of a primary challenge from Richie Torres, who's a congressman from Moore. I know

Speaker 3 about it. The Bronx.

Speaker 2 But he's been a great friend of Israel and

Speaker 2 a critic of the way things are going to some degree with the Democrat Party, but especially in New York State, because Hokul is one of these green, mad, insane people who are spending a ton of your money, taxpayers' money, for these green programs.

Speaker 2 It costs, somebody's got to pay for it. How's it paid? Well, here's a headline:

Speaker 2 a piece from the New York Post.

Speaker 2 The utility giant, that's Con Edison, Con Ed,

Speaker 2 is asking the Public Service Commission to jack up average electric bills by 11.4% and send gas bills soaring 13.3%, a move that could mean a wallet busting $1,848 more per year than customers paid in 2020.

Speaker 2 Victor, that's a staggering amount, and maybe I can afford that, but I don't know how a lot of people could afford

Speaker 2 essentially $2,000 more than they were paying five years ago. On top of everything else, they're paying a ton more.

Speaker 2 Last thing on my own bill in Connecticut, you know, I paid $200 a month here last month, and there's

Speaker 2 $37 for public benefits, which

Speaker 2 has nothing to do with electricity for me, has to do with welfare programs. So this is a tax.
Everyone's being taxed insanely.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we're up to almost 40 cents a kilowatt.

Speaker 3 We have the same problem. Our bills are more expensive than yours.

Speaker 3 But you're similar in New York. I read that Con Edison has the same problem as PG ⁇ E.
One quarter of their

Speaker 3 users do not pay their bills. And it's against the law to cut their power off.
So if you,

Speaker 3 whether you're in need or not, if you choose not to, you'll have an administrative hearing or something, but you'll continue to get power and then you wait for the amnesty that's coming from the governor or something.

Speaker 3 And then you are are saying to everybody else, I'm not going to pay my power bill. I'm going to run my air conditioning.

Speaker 3 And all you people, when it's 106 in Fresno and who can't afford to run your air conditioning, I'm going to run mine because I'm not going to pay my bill. That's one thing.
And then

Speaker 3 wind and solar, Jack, is really inefficient. So they don't make any power at night.

Speaker 3 And so when you dismantle a coal plant or a nuclear plant or a natural gas and you say that you're bragging that you've got subsidized solar and wind, it works for the day, but at night there's no power.

Speaker 3 So then what do you do? You have to buy it from places that are red states that have coal or nuclear.

Speaker 3 So here in California, we're building this huge every time I go down Manning Avenue, there's another square mile of huge panels.

Speaker 3 But we have a I don't know what the figure is, but it's over 100% of our

Speaker 3 generation requirements are met now during the day because of these massive policies.

Speaker 3 And they're so massive that we used to give people incentives to put solar panels on their roof. And we had the

Speaker 3 first group, and then we said, you know what, it's too generous, even though you only got about half for generating it as you paid for using it.

Speaker 3 And then the second group I came in on like eight years ago, and it was about equal.

Speaker 3 And then we're saying, no, we're still broke. We built so many wind and solar, we really don't need everybody to have a solar panel, but we can't say that, so we won't really remunerate the money.

Speaker 3 And now they broke the solar panel industry in California because until you get affordable batteries, the amount of money that you would put for your panels and get back is gone from three or four years, seven, eight, ten years.

Speaker 3 And so now the only people who are putting solar panels are using their own batteries so that they can use it at night or something.

Speaker 3 And it's not that I think it takes takes about 10 years to pay back now. And there's no money being invested in the grid.

Speaker 3 So when you're making inefficient power for non-economic reasons, non-rational reasons, but you're doing it for an ideology of global warming, when the Chinese, it won't matter anyway, the Chinese are polluting the hell out of the planet, excuse me.

Speaker 3 But when you're doing that,

Speaker 3 and then you're you're making inefficient sources of power, you don't you still have to buy expensive power, and people know that. So California or New York, they know that.

Speaker 3 So if you're going to import power at night, it's going to be expensive because you have no choice.

Speaker 3 And then if one quarter of your customers are not paying that and you identify them as a protected species of indigenous victims,

Speaker 3 then Somebody's going to have to pay for it. And you're going to pay for it in one of two mechanisms.

Speaker 3 You're either not going to invest in the grid, and then in California, you often get wildfliers from faulty, sparky lines, or

Speaker 3 you're going to have to raise rates for the idiots that pay their bill on time.

Speaker 3 And that's what I think you talk to people.

Speaker 3 I heard that word maybe five times in the last 10 years. Why did you move out of California? I go to Florida, Nevada.
I say, oh, I lived in California, and I said, why did you move out?

Speaker 3 Because I'm not an idiot, Victor.

Speaker 3 And that means I don't like to pay the highest income taxes, the second or third highest sales, the highest gas taxes, and get the worst schools, the worst infrastructure, the highest crime.

Speaker 3 And somewhere between the alpha and the omega, to use that metaphor again, there's the reality.

Speaker 3 And the reality is we have large numbers of very poor people that we've imported or invited into the state, and we have two sets of rules to accommodate them.

Speaker 3 And one set means they are exempt from consequences of their plight, and the other group has to be non-exempt to pay for it, to subsidize it. And so that's just the way it is.
And if you, one,

Speaker 3 if you have a large community that's being paid daily in cash and doesn't obey sanitation in terms of disposing of garbage or refrigerators or doesn't want to spend $30 at the county dump, then they're not going to be prosecuted.

Speaker 3 They're just not going to happen. I've called maybe in my lifetime of 50 years 10 times the county

Speaker 3 or the state EPA when there's really big things like 600 feet worth of broken glass and barrels of oil.

Speaker 3 I'm talking about a whole vine row where they had oil and lubricants and paint, where somebody just took a big flatbed, got all of his neighbors apparently, all their crap, and then went down a vine row, hidden at night, and threw it off so it was a blanket.

Speaker 3 There must have been Jack, 500 fluorescent light tubes in that. There must have been 300 gallons of paint.
There must have been six 50 barrel lubricant old oil drums.

Speaker 3 There must have been, I don't know,

Speaker 3 a thousand pieces of two by fours with nails in them and sheetrock scrap. It was just like that.
And I called and called and I was told,

Speaker 3 number one, not only are we not going to take it out of here, and number two, you'll never find their names, they're not going to leave their trash there. And number three,

Speaker 3 how do we know you didn't do it?

Speaker 3 And so what do you mean? Well, this all has to be taken. The lubricants have contaminated the site.
All has to be taken to a toxic waste dump, which was about

Speaker 3 80 miles away.

Speaker 3 And you're going to have to do it.

Speaker 3 Or you're going to have to call an authorized licensed removal service. Or we're going to assume you did it.
Or you can just leave it there. The guy said off the record, you can leave it there.

Speaker 3 And I said, you can't even diss the row. What do you do? And that gets people really angry.
All that.

Speaker 3 So when you say white people, I don't think anybody understands why Hispanic communities on the border are against illegal immigration.

Speaker 3 Because once you have that incident in your life, or once your son is accosted by an M13 gang member at school, or once you are a parent in a Hispanic community and you worked really hard for a

Speaker 3 that you have a competitive high school with advanced placement and suddenly the classroom is swarmed with about 50 people who don't speak English and you've got to go back to English as a second language.

Speaker 3 You get angry about that. You really do.

Speaker 3 Or the rents go up or your grandmother has got to go to the heart clinic and it's a medical system and she always had an appointment and suddenly you show up and there's 50 people in line that have never been to a doctor.

Speaker 3 And then the people who are promoting all this are wealthy white people on the coast who say they feel really good. I have open borders and people in southern Mexico are getting all this great care.

Speaker 3 I just don't want to see them because I don't want to. And I have my own concierge doctor and I can.

Speaker 3 Dang. So it's really bad.
It is very bad. And

Speaker 2 I don't.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump is the only president in my lifetime that tried to stop it. The only one.

Speaker 3 The Bushes, neither Bush did.

Speaker 2 Nope.

Speaker 2 Going to need a chain reaction of revolutions here. Well, we're going to talk about Donald Trump, Victor, and we'll start off

Speaker 2 with his, I think,

Speaker 2 well, his actions

Speaker 2 on culture with the Kennedy Center. But first, I have to ask our

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Speaker 2 Victor, we'll get your take on this. Kennedy Center gets a house cleaning.
Trump to name himself new Kennedy Center Board Chair.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump said Friday he would end the terms of multiple members of the Kennedy Center Board and make himself a chair of a new board, putting himself at the helm of the Washington, D.C.

Speaker 2 Cultural Institution. I've decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the chairman who does not share our vision for a golden age in arts and culture.

Speaker 2 We will soon announce a new board with an amazing chairman, Donald J. Trump, the president, Sono Truth, Truth Social.

Speaker 2 Then he went on to talk about how the Kennedy Center last year was hosting drag shows.

Speaker 2 Anyway, Victor,

Speaker 2 it's not as important as other

Speaker 2 executive orders he's issued, but it is important.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's going to

Speaker 2 be the culture war. Yeah.

Speaker 3 The NEA,

Speaker 3 we had one of the potential NEA new directors on, and the NEH. Just Shubo, yeah.
Just Shubo, yeah, we've had him on. I hope, I don't think he's been nominated yet, has he? No.

Speaker 3 But he would be very good. And then we had the NEH coming up.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the Kennedy, it was very funny.

Speaker 3 The Bradley Foundation, of which I've been a member, I think, for 14 years, 13 years, we used to have our annual Bradley Prize ceremonies there at the Kennedy Center for a decade.

Speaker 3 It's a beautiful venue, and it was very close, you know, to where people were staying in hotels and accessible, but it got too expensive.

Speaker 3 And there were other problems. I didn't know if this was one of the problems or not, but we haven't had it there in, I think, at least seven or eight years.
It's too bad.

Speaker 3 And I think a lot of people feel that it's kind of like the National Cathedral, you know what I mean? These beautiful, iconic places.

Speaker 3 And we saw the National Cathedral Bishop in action shortly after inauguration when she lectured the Trump family about,

Speaker 3 I don't know what she was trying to talk about, I guess about illegal immigration, that they weren't kind enough or they weren't tolerant enough like she was.

Speaker 3 And I think she lived in a six-bedroom mansion. You know, it's sort of like Lloyd Austin lecturing the country on white rage and white supremacy and discrimination.

Speaker 3 And then, unlike Pete Hexeth, who doesn't have Lloyd's money, he lives in a, what is it, a

Speaker 3 big estate, a $7 million Washington estate.

Speaker 3 They're after Pete because the prior

Speaker 3 administration, as I understand it, he was living in housing for the Secretary,

Speaker 3 federal housing, Pentagon housing, and it needed to be painted and it was ordered to be painted. And they're painting it now when he's there.

Speaker 3 So then Pete is an elitist because, you see, he wants his house painted.

Speaker 2 His house.

Speaker 3 It's government property. Yeah,

Speaker 3 he's not putting a heated doghouse like the UC Santa Cruz president did.

Speaker 2 I wrote about that

Speaker 3 years ago.

Speaker 3 That was a sad thing. She killed herself, so I shouldn't make fun of her.

Speaker 3 But anyway, yeah, I mean,

Speaker 3 where do you even start about all this? There's nowhere to.

Speaker 2 Well, he's laid down a marker, and I think that's a good thing. Yeah, Kennedy, he's interested.

Speaker 3 That gets people very angry that he's interested in culture. And he notices

Speaker 3 that Melania was not put on Vogue's cover and they've got they've gone after her official portrait. Did you see that?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 3 She wore a tuxedo, they said.

Speaker 3 The subtext of that is this is the most beautiful, stunning, tasteful

Speaker 3 First Lady we've had since Jackie Kennedy. And if she were left-wing, she would be over every magazine and we'd be gushing about her taste and her beauty.

Speaker 3 But because

Speaker 3 she's married in the ninth ring of Dante's Inferno to Lord Satan, Miss Lucifer has to be

Speaker 3 deplatformed, shadow banned, erased, ridiculed.

Speaker 2 Non-person, and then

Speaker 3 I was looking at the people who write these stories. Megan Kelly mentioned it too.
They're always 20-something. You know what I mean? They're right out of the Ivy League

Speaker 3 and they're not very successful. They're not experts.
I'm not saying they're experts on fashion or beauty or anything.

Speaker 3 They're just angry people who feel that they're a soldier in the phalanx of the left and each must do their duty and their duty is to attack anybody that disagrees with them in personal terms.

Speaker 2 Snark is

Speaker 2 important for them to be snarky in public.

Speaker 3 That's a very snarky and public.

Speaker 3 Yeah, snarkily in public.

Speaker 2 Snarkily. All right, anyway, we have other important Donald Trump actions, I think, to get your views on Victor, including his sanctions of the International Criminal Court and South Africa.

Speaker 2 And if we have time to get your take on the piece you've written for the new criterion, and we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back, ladies and gentlemen, with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, recording on the 8th of February. This episode is up on Thursday, the 13th.
Victor,

Speaker 2 we've talked once or twice about South Africa and just what a hellhole it is. And Donald Trump, I love this.

Speaker 2 He issued this sanction order against them for targeting the white minority and he backs resettling Afrikaner refugees.

Speaker 2 The story is President Donald Trump has signed an executive order sanctioning the egregious actions of the Republic of South Africa.

Speaker 2 The South African government has passed legislation allowing it to seize white-owned farms without compensation.

Speaker 2 The executive order goes in shocking disregards of its citizens' rights. The Republic of South Africa recently enacted Expropriation Act 13, etc., etc.
Anyway, that's about...

Speaker 2 I'll just read one other thing here from the executive order.

Speaker 2 In addition, South Africa has taken aggressive positions toward the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, etc.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 Donald, I mean, of all the things he has to do, right, but to go there and see a terrible injustice, a country of great potential wealth just falling into some talk about Dante's Ninth Circle.

Speaker 2 I'm so cool with him doing this. Your thoughts, Victor?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, you're violating the cardinal rule of leftism that

Speaker 3 because of historic injustice, the victims are perpetually victims for the rest of their life.

Speaker 3 And the victimizers, even though they may be three to four generations away from apartheid in some cases, if young kids, they are parentally guilty.

Speaker 3 So there is no sympathy in the United States given for, say, an 18-year-old who grew up under black majority rule and he's been shot or killed, or his dad's farm is taken.

Speaker 3 And the weird thing about this,

Speaker 3 it's not like we don't know what's going to happen, because we have a laboratory example. It's called Rhodesia, Zimbabwe.

Speaker 3 And when Mugabe came in, all the left-wing liberals said he was wonderful. He said exactly what the people in South Africa did,

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 they were not going to play tit-for-tat, that the white minority would be left alone, given the same rights as the black majority.

Speaker 3 Rhodesia was the biggest, I think, wheat producer in Africa.

Speaker 3 It was a sophisticated cotton producer, British white minority. It was about 10, 12% of the population, but it was an enormously wealthy country.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he turned out to be a communist thug.

Speaker 3 every year and he was subsidized by the West and then they finally turned on he was a killer, he was a brute, he was a dictator, and he confiscated all of those farms, and they all turned into wasteland basically, and it became a net food import and impoverished.

Speaker 3 And same thing with South Africa. It had one of the most sophisticated grid systems in the world.

Speaker 3 It had some of the best infrastructure, port facilities. It had some of the most productive farms, Boer and English.
It's some of the most beautiful places in the world. And

Speaker 3 it's gone.

Speaker 3 It's got one of the highest crime rates in the world, highest rape, highest murder rates, the major cities. So they're coming.

Speaker 3 We know where it's going. It's going to go to...
And everybody knows it's going to happen. And a lot of the black majority know they will be poorer in 10 years than they are now.

Speaker 3 And everybody in the United States knows it, and no one will stop it. So

Speaker 3 this cadre of thieves, thieves, because they will confiscate the white farms, destroy them, and then they'll sell the land out and pocket the money to other black people only.

Speaker 3 And that's why even the Punjabi class or Asians that have been instrumental in South Africa's economic miracle, they're leaving in droves

Speaker 3 because it's a racist country now. It's completely racist.
The only difference

Speaker 3 is that the majority is the racist part, and then in the past it was the minority. The minority had apartheid.
Well, now the majority has apartheid, basically.

Speaker 3 And the difference also is that

Speaker 3 the minority that practice apartheid, although that was racist,

Speaker 3 there were two differences from the majority racism today. They were productive.
They made this thing bloom for everybody, in a sense,

Speaker 3 if you believe in trickle-down. But more importantly, they were self-critical.

Speaker 3 So there was a possibility to evolve because they were Western, and Western societies have self-built in free speech and criticism. And so they voluntarily, after,

Speaker 3 I shouldn't say voluntarily, they had a civil war, they gave up power and they had a constitutional process to get to depower them or to make them part of the democracy and they're a minority so they don't have power.

Speaker 3 And the majority is not democratic. It doesn't believe in free speech.
It does not believe in self-criticism. It will never change.

Speaker 3 It'll get more and more racist until there's no more land to confiscate and there's no more wealth to confiscate. And then South Africa will look like all the other countries in Africa.

Speaker 3 And until one of our two, I mean, I'm not being racist or stereotyping, but there are a few,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 Ghana's trying to do well. It's not necessarily race, it's culture.
And unless you adopt a free market society and a constitutional system of government and a separation

Speaker 3 between church and state and get into tribalism and an independent judiciary, you're not going to have prosperity and security. Just a historical fact.

Speaker 3 So we're watching this and I think Trump thinks that there's a lot of people there that are classical liberal farmers or whatever, and they're good citizens and he doesn't care what color they are.

Speaker 3 I'm sure if there's a Zulu farmer who has 100 acres and he's on the wrong tribe and they confiscate his, I'm sure they'll do that in some cases. He's welcome to the United States, too.

Speaker 3 I just don't believe, though, that Trump will be able to get away with saying that we're not going to discriminate on the basis of country of origins or race and let in a law-abiding South Afrikaner with all these skills, you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 It would be a very productive citizen.

Speaker 3 But apparently, he says he will.

Speaker 2 Well, problem here with tribalism, and you're right, like the intricate water system, as you mentioned,

Speaker 2 falling apart because the job has to go to the cousin. And so I guess it's one thing, Victor, if you had a tribal society, be tribalistic, but you can't have tribalism run a

Speaker 2 First World.

Speaker 3 We're not that far. We're not far that behind because

Speaker 3 We've had these fires and we've had we're not talking about the tragedy in Washington, D.C., but once we're over the trauma, I think we're going to learn that there were protocols and there were problems in a

Speaker 3 systematic failure of the FAA and the people who set the policy for Blackhawks.

Speaker 3 And some of the decisions that were made were not based on merit. And we know that's true of Los Angeles, in case of the water and power director, the mayor, the assistant mayor, etc.

Speaker 3 And once you substitute tribalism for merit, we know historically where you end up.

Speaker 3 And I always g relate that weird thing that happened to me when I was in a little Russian taxi on the way back, the way into Tripoli from the airport.

Speaker 3 And I'm not they were like sinkholes, the the you know, the holes in the cement and the asphalt.

Speaker 3 And I said to the driver, who spoke English, why you're you're the fifth larger ec largest exporter of oil. Why do you have not enough asphalt? He said, we're a tribalist country.

Speaker 3 We hire our first cousin and sometimes a first cousin. And

Speaker 3 it was,

Speaker 3 I just, it's depressing, but it's.

Speaker 3 Remember another thing that happens,

Speaker 3 the word colonialist is only, and

Speaker 3 there's only

Speaker 3 authenticity in one direction.

Speaker 3 So in other words, even though a lot of the Boers and English were there more than as long as, or in some cases, longer than tribes that migrated from other parts of Africa, they are still, because they're white, they're considered settlers.

Speaker 3 However, if you're a black

Speaker 3 South African and you were to immigrate to Western society, or you're not a settler.

Speaker 3 So, if you are somebody from the Middle East, for example,

Speaker 3 or from Turkey and you migrate to Germany, and I can show you what the German people were like

Speaker 3 in

Speaker 3 60 AD or 80 AD or 100 AD if I read Tacitus' Germania.

Speaker 3 Still, that's not considered that you're an interloper. No, no, no, no, no.
Even if

Speaker 3 you say to a Turkish immigrant in

Speaker 3 Germany, you're from an imperialist tradition, the Ottomans were probably the biggest imperialist, the cruelest of all imperialists of the modern era. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 You have a perfect right to go to Germany and they have no right to go to Turkey. That's the way it works.

Speaker 3 Just the way it is.

Speaker 2 I was stretching to find a piece of paper before, Victor, because what you said is happening here.

Speaker 2 You were talking about the FAA, but I had a headline about

Speaker 2 Brown University, Brown Medical School gives DEI more weight than clinical skills in promotion criteria for faculty.

Speaker 2 It's insane. Now, that's not tribalism hiring my uncle.

Speaker 3 And the people who wrote that,

Speaker 3 the Dartmouth medical faculty who,

Speaker 3 there were a lot of DEI people who helped write it, but ultimately there were probably a lot of white liberal people who endorsed that and then went to their

Speaker 3 faculty lounge and said, oh, I did this. I did this.

Speaker 3 I'm going to apply to be the, you know, the head of the medical school at Harvard because at Dartmouth, I had a mandatory DEI criteria that was more important than anything else.

Speaker 3 When they have a brain tumor, they will not get somebody from Dartmouth. That's for the ghetto.
That is for the borrower. That's for poor white people.

Speaker 3 All the people that make these DEI decisions will find concierge doctors that were based on merit. They may be Indian, they may be Chinese,

Speaker 3 but they will be based on merit.

Speaker 3 Non-merit is for other people.

Speaker 3 And the problem with these white professional, bicoastal, left-wing people who gave us DEI is that sometimes they can't escape the consequences of their own ideology.

Speaker 3 It's very, I don't want to stereotype the people in Pacific Palisades, but a number of them were very left-wing and voted for these people. And there's a number of people

Speaker 3 that fly and they vote for this, and they are going to be subject.

Speaker 3 We're in a very dangerous position right now as far as I

Speaker 3 get very tired. when I know Sean Duffy, I like him a lot, but he has to say that flying statistically is very safe.
It is. But that hides the fact that if you look at

Speaker 3 go-arounds, for example, for various causes, we had almost a record year, I think, in 2023. We've had near-misses.
The New York Times wrote extensively about it. They were very worried about it.

Speaker 3 So everybody knows the problems that have existed.

Speaker 3 We've had long investigative reports that

Speaker 3 the FAA was spending huge amounts of money on DEI, but was not updating its computers.

Speaker 3 I was on a flight to Fresno of all places by a, I won't name the airline, a pilot sat next to him, and he told me, well, he wasn't happy that he had to go to Fresno for a variety of reasons about the airport.

Speaker 3 But he said,

Speaker 3 and I said, well, at least it's American. He said, what do you mean, at least it's American?

Speaker 3 And I said, well, you know, we have the very sophisticated air traffic. No, we don't.
And I said, what do you mean we don't?

Speaker 3 He goes, Europe is much more advanced than we are as far as their avionics and computers and tracking and radar. He said,

Speaker 3 and I said, why is that? He said, well, we spend things on different things.

Speaker 3 Then he went into a tirade about, and he wasn't a United pilot, about United pilots had announced, he said the year before, and I looked it up, it was true, that 50%

Speaker 3 of all their trainees in pilot training by statute, their own statute, had to be minorities, minorities,

Speaker 3 regardless of their background. So they were turning away military pilots, everybody.
So that's just a fact.

Speaker 3 And that means maybe an 80% of it won't matter. They'll be trained fine, but

Speaker 3 you might be in a plane where a person wouldn't have been qualifying if he didn't fit a DEI category, and there might have been a military pilot that would have, and that might in that particular distance.

Speaker 2 Didn't United have a CEO who was

Speaker 2 the drag queen.

Speaker 3 Delta did, too. Didn't Delta.
Was it Delta that

Speaker 3 I think it was Delta that didn't they boycott the All-Star team or something in Georgia?

Speaker 2 Well, that was because of the

Speaker 2 elections. Actually, the All-Star game was moved from

Speaker 2 Atlanta

Speaker 2 because of the Georgia election law. It was moved to Colorado.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Now we find out that Stacey Abrams really did lose by 50,000 votes.
She was never elected governor, but her PA, her PAC or her get out the vote was completely corrupt

Speaker 3 and embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars and owes big fines.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it's

Speaker 2 nice work if you can get it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it is. But

Speaker 3 when you look at that, I don't want to get into it. I'm not an expert, but when you look at

Speaker 3 the disaster that took all those lives, all those young people was horrible at Reagan. You start to look at it and you think,

Speaker 3 who made the decision that military people would be flying anywhere near one of the busiest air corridors in the United States at night? If they wanted to have very

Speaker 3 challenging conditions for combat at night, maybe they could have gone somewhere else. And who made the decision they would be wearing night vision goggles with with limited peripheral vision?

Speaker 3 And who made the decision

Speaker 3 who made the decision that they were at 340 feet rather than 200? And who made the decision that they would be on a different frequency than the airliner, they couldn't communicate?

Speaker 3 And who made the decision that they weren't warned earlier

Speaker 3 where their trajectory might end up? And who made the decision there were not enough air traffic controllers in the tower at the time?

Speaker 3 Who made about a series of eight or nine administrative, staffing, and operational decisions that all had to be in sequence to work?

Speaker 3 And what I'm getting at is those sequences exist every single day, and there's near-misses,

Speaker 3 but they all have to line up perfectly. And the odds are, when they say air traffic control is safe, they're absolutely right.
It's safer than any other mode of transportation. But when

Speaker 3 those series of choices line up, it's not

Speaker 3 Victor's hit by one other car or there's a four-car pileup. It's 60, 70, 80, 100, 200 dead all at once in a traumatic event.

Speaker 3 And so to prevent any chance of those dominoes lining up all perfectly, which are necessary, given there used to be all of these safety, double safety, triple safety checks on that happening, and they're not there anymore.

Speaker 3 It's what I'm saying. They're not there because we are making decisions on operation, staffing, promotion, tenure, retention that are not based on pure merit.

Speaker 3 I'm not saying that everything is always based on pure merit. There's the old boy network.

Speaker 3 Oh, my boss's

Speaker 3 third cousin called me up. I'll hire him.
My son is a great fireman. I understand that.
But there is exams and there are experience on applications.

Speaker 3 And when you ignore all that, or you lessen, or you deprecate the importance, then what you're doing is you're setting up a domino effect, and it's going to happen.

Speaker 3 And so, when you get, and that's what they need to explain to all of us, that

Speaker 3 unless they want to be more candid and say, that's collective, Victor, of course.

Speaker 3 We're hiring people that don't have the highest test scores and they don't have the best grades and they don't have the best experience. And there's a

Speaker 3 until they master their craft, or maybe they can't, we don't know, there's going to be a heightened chance of an accident, but we're willing to have some collateral damages for the purposes of DEI.

Speaker 3 DEI is so important, it's to make an omelette, a few eggs have to be broken.

Speaker 2 Right, right.

Speaker 3 And so you might have to play a little bit of musical chairs and hope you get the chair when the music stops.

Speaker 2 That's what it is. Yeah.

Speaker 2 The day before on that American Airlines flight at Reagan,

Speaker 2 there was another near miss, and it was a flight from Hartford, which a flight I've taken there frequently, this same flight.

Speaker 3 Well, I mentioned on the air, and I had a pilot, I was in Los Angeles and

Speaker 3 Salt Lake in the same year, what they call a go-around. And they all say, some pilots say, well, that's very common.
But I saw the plane make a sharp turn.

Speaker 3 I mean, I saw a plane that we we made a sharp turn. And in the case of the other one, that was at LAX.

Speaker 3 It was almost zero visibility, but there must have been somebody who was not supposed to be on the tarmac because we touched down and took off again.

Speaker 2 Oh, my.

Speaker 3 And, well, not touched down. I mean, our wheels were down and we were almost,

Speaker 3 you were about an inch away from the tarmac, and then we went straight up.

Speaker 3 And then you look in the paper and you see there's been a lot of accidental hits.

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, like a baggage carrier hits a plane, or I think three weeks ago a plane hit another plane when they were going very slow.

Speaker 3 And it's just it's a very complex system that's overtaxed and has been neglected. It's not just DEI, it's everything.
Technology,

Speaker 3 protocol, and it's ossified,

Speaker 3 and we better do something about it.

Speaker 3 And that's a larger question. But until we do, there's going to be an element that risk that doesn't have to be there.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, let's end the show today by getting your

Speaker 2 tell us about this

Speaker 2 essay you wrote for the new criterion, MAGA agonistes.

Speaker 3 Well, agonistes is a fancy name from, we get agony from it, but it comes from the Greek word agon, which is a word for contest.

Speaker 3 or in a you know a sporting event, but the sense of a challenge. And agonistes is the adjective.
It just means under assault,

Speaker 3 being attacked. So Trump being attacked or Trump as an object of contestation.

Speaker 3 And what I meant was, is that as he gets this mega, and I wrote it before

Speaker 3 I wrote it before the election.

Speaker 3 I think I did, the earliest draft. And then

Speaker 3 it just came out, but it's been a long time.

Speaker 2 See you in the February issue of the criteria.

Speaker 3 It's been an editing.

Speaker 3 It was written. I I submitted it right after the election, as I remember, but I wrote it before.

Speaker 3 I thought he was going to win, but my point was there were certain things he had to be careful because

Speaker 3 he was going to be tried on them. And I listed three or four.

Speaker 3 One, for example, if you say you're going to lower taxes on Social Security or in them, recipients, if you say wages are going to be tax exempt, if you even bring up the question of maybe military personnel or first responders, then you have to add all of that up, and you might get over a decade, a trillion dollars of tax revenue that's lost.

Speaker 3 So then, if you say you're going to be for a balanced budget, where does that money come from?

Speaker 3 Now, there's an argument for it, as I said in the article.

Speaker 3 If you're Elon Musk and you say for everything that Trump said that he's going to exempt a certain category of people, two things must happen.

Speaker 3 I must cut 50 cents for every dollar of tax loss, and then we must deregulate deregulate and detax in a way that will grow the GDP so that the slice of revenue is bigger, kind of, you know, art laughers, laugher curve.

Speaker 3 So that was one challenge that I talked about. Another challenge was that the mega, and we saw this with Gaza, which hadn't come up when I wrote the article.
If you are a MAGA

Speaker 3 and you believe that we have had optional military engagements that are not in the U.S. interest, and we have spent blood and treasure in Iraq and Syria, Syria, but especially Iraq and Afghanistan,

Speaker 3 and they're not in the U.S. interest, or in a cost-to-benefit analysis, it doesn't work to go overseas and fight under the conditions of our enemies' preference.

Speaker 3 House to house in Basra, house-to-house in Fallujah, Helman province in Afghanistan. Then you have to avoid those.
And that's what MAGA said.

Speaker 3 Pete Hex was at the border. We're going to defend our borders, not Ukraine's.
Good.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 3 he's not coming in after just Obama. He's coming after, I think, the worst president in 100 years who has destroyed deterrence.
And what do I mean?

Speaker 3 I mean, from when Biden came in office, Blinken and Sullivan were utterly humiliated and anchored in that summit with the Chinese. They just stressed them down.

Speaker 3 I mean, they sent a Chinese spy balloon, and we're learning more about it, with impunity over the United States.

Speaker 3 I'm talking about the humiliation in Kabul, the 50, they say 8 billion, but when you look at all the vehicles, military and non-vilika, and all the infrastructure, the billion-dollar embassy, $300 million retrofitted base, even the gender studies program at the University of Kabul, when you look at all of that money, it's probably $50 billion.

Speaker 3 Humiliation.

Speaker 3 When you say I will react to a Russian invasion depending on whether it's a major invasion or not, or I offer to get Zelensky out of Ukraine, or I put a hold when I come in on offensive, whatever Biden did, I won't even get in.

Speaker 3 Daylight between us and Israel, which he announced.

Speaker 3 If you say, anytime you say there's going to be daylight between us and Israel, somebody's going to go in that daylight called Hezbollah, Hamas Iran. Okay.

Speaker 3 So now he has to restore deterrence.

Speaker 3 And indeed, he's been bombing the Houthis good in Yemen. And he's going to have to deal with Iran, maximum pressure.

Speaker 3 The member of the Iranian parliament said yesterday, Jack, that he himself wants to kill Donald Trump, and he will kill Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 He's a member of their parliament, and he said that everybody in the agreement,

Speaker 3 the government agreed with him.

Speaker 3 So to dispel that idea, you're going to have to use military force. In the first term, Donald Trump took out Baghdadi and bombed the crap out of ISIS.

Speaker 3 He He took out Solemani, and we got involved on the ground. But we didn't get in a big way.
So all I was saying is, for MAGA to be realist

Speaker 3 and to deter its enemies so it does not have to go to war, you're going to have to increase the defense budget, make sure you got more recruits, and you're going to have to use military force because somebody is going to be stupid enough to challenge you.

Speaker 3 And if you don't,

Speaker 3 then you're going to end up like Biden. And so, and yet that use of force will come under criticism.
So when he said something about Gaza, this has not worked.

Speaker 3 The United States must do, there were people in his base that, what are you talking about? I voted for you to get out of the Middle East, not to go into Gaza. That was another contradiction.

Speaker 3 And then I said a third contradiction, I'll just stop at three. There's a lot in there, is it?

Speaker 3 If you say you're going to drain the swamp, and this is before his appointee, so I didn't know exactly who he's going to appoint when I wrote it.

Speaker 3 But if you're going to say I'm going to drain the swamp, you can't have a swamp creature in there.

Speaker 3 So I'm not going to judge as first term appointments, but Rex Tillertson, Jim Mattis, John Bolton, Bill Barr, I go down the line, they were people of the establishment.

Speaker 3 And they were not MAGA people, but they knew

Speaker 3 the environment. They were fish that swam in that type of water.
So you're saying that type of water is going to be drained and the fish with it. Okay.

Speaker 3 So then you're going to have to get non-traditional people

Speaker 3 who are MAGA people and you're going to have a problem because when you nominate Pete Hexeth and Cash Patel and Pam Bondi

Speaker 3 and Tulsi Gobbert and RFK, they're going to go nuts. So you're going to have to stick by them no matter what.

Speaker 3 because they will try to destroy these people because they know what they're going to do when they get in. They are not going to act like a normal Republican appointee.

Speaker 3 I am sober and judicious, and there's pros and there's cons, and I'm open for dialogue in a bipartisan fashion.

Speaker 3 I know that we are a little bit excessive, and maybe you are, and we're going to split the difference. No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 You're going to have to go in there and say the top level of the FBI is warped, politicized, and it's got to go. So these people are going to have to come from a non-traditional background.

Speaker 3 you know, like cash. Not that he didn't qualify.
He was more than qualified, but he was a critic. And so what Donald Trump squared that circle is,

Speaker 3 and he did this after I wrote it, he didn't read it. It was in editorials.
He just said, you know what? I got to get a non-traditional person that's going to drive him crazy.

Speaker 3 I don't know if they're going to get it confirmed or not, but I want to get people who are victims of the agency in which they're going to run. Tulsi Gabbard, terrorist watch list.

Speaker 3 Now she's intelligence director of national intelligence.

Speaker 3 Cash Patel, the FBI snooped on him, now he won the FBI.

Speaker 3 Pete Hexeth wrote a book critical of the Pentagon that drove him crazy. Now he's going to direct the Pentagon.
RFK, they hated him HHS for years. Now he'll won HHS.

Speaker 3 Jay Bacharia, the people in Fauci tried to destroy him. Now he's going to be running NIE.
That was the attitude.

Speaker 3 So I was trying to say that if you're really going to stage a counter-revolution, you've got to deal with these contradictions:

Speaker 3 tax cut, but balance the budget. Or

Speaker 3 we're not getting involved,

Speaker 3 not getting involved in wars that are up, then you're going to have to use force to make sure that happen.

Speaker 3 And then, if you're going to drain the swamp, you're going to have to get very controversial people to do it. They're going to have to be by nature controversial.

Speaker 3 You do not want a non-controversial person because they're going to have to go in there with a mission.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the deadline gets run over. Yeah, no question.

Speaker 3 Exactly. Get compromised.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 3 that's what the article is about. It's in this issue of the new criterion.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a terrific

Speaker 2 essay, and it's a very good magazine, The New Criterion. You should go Google it, find it, and consider subscribing.

Speaker 2 And I forget if I mentioned subscribing to the Blade of Perseus, but you should do that, folks. It's $65

Speaker 3 for it. And

Speaker 3 we have a new thing. I write a 750-word article on Monday for users, Tuesday for users only, another one on Wednesdays for users.
But in place of the third one, we now do a 10-minute video.

Speaker 2 Sometimes in them, Victor wears a hat, and sometimes he does something.

Speaker 3 Sometimes I wear the hat, whether it's I turn off the heater in here and I get cold.

Speaker 2 It's a cool hat, Victor. See? Yeah, yeah.
Well, hey, listen.

Speaker 2 Anyway, that's what I'm saying. Well, we're going to end this as we typically do.
I'm going to thank those who take the time and effort on Apple.

Speaker 2 And you you can do this other places, at least Audible. Now I know about Audible and Victor's own website.

Speaker 2 People leave comments about all sorts of things, and we read them, we go look for them, we read them, appreciate. On Apple, you can also rate the show zero to five stars.

Speaker 2 And Victor's average over 7,000 people who've done that, thank you, is 4.9 plus.

Speaker 2 And some people leave comments there on Apple. And here's one.
It's titled Podcasts and the FBI. I'm new to podcasts, about to turn 82, so I figured I was old enough now to start.

Speaker 2 So happy to find Victor. Surprised you survived academia all these years.
So happy to see the lid come off the FBI.

Speaker 2 A typical criticism starts off by saying it's just the heads that's corrupted, not the quote, hard-working field agents, end quote.

Speaker 2 I'm sure there's still some good ones out there, but a fish may rot from the head, but it still rots.

Speaker 2 I've been critical since Ruby Ridge, when all the Muellers, et cetera, just promoted themselves out of the muck and went forward like nothing happened.

Speaker 2 Anyway, keep on keeping on, and this is signed B-L-A-A-T-L. So blah, Adel.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 I wrote something about that.

Speaker 3 Yeah. James Comey didn't come out of nowhere, and either did Andrew McCabe or

Speaker 3 Christopher Wray. They came from somewhere.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 hopefully they've gone somewhere forever.

Speaker 2 Victory,

Speaker 2 very great.

Speaker 3 The usual with the wisdom.

Speaker 2 I just want to quickly thanks those who

Speaker 2 subscribe to Civil Thoughts, which I do at the Center for Civil Society, where we try to strengthen civil society.

Speaker 2 Every Friday comes an email, free, not selling your name, none of that business. And what are you going to get? 14 recommended readings.
Really good pieces I've come across the previous week.

Speaker 2 So if you go to civilthoughts.com, sign up, you'll start getting it and you will enjoy it, I assure you. So thanks to those who do that.
Victor, you've been terrific. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Thanks to our sponsors. And folks, happy Valentine's Day.
That's tomorrow. And we wish you that and love and happiness.
We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Speaker 3 Thank you, everybody, for listening. Much appreciated.

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