Ceasefire, Resignation, and Political “Cults"

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Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. This is a Friday news roundup and there's lots of news this week, of course.

Speaker 2 We'll probably talk a little bit about the fires, but more importantly, Jack Smith issued his report one day after he

Speaker 2 one day after he resigned from his position.

Speaker 2 And also we have a Hamas deal in the making with Israel. So stay with us and we'll be back for those

Speaker 2 news stories.

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Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

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Speaker 2 Well, Victor, there seems to have been a fine, I mean, they seem to be getting closer to a deal, Hamas and Israel, that there will be some release of 34 hostages in the initial phase of the deal.

Speaker 2 They don't know whether whether the hostages are dead or alive, I have to say.

Speaker 2 There will be a pause in the fighting and a release of Palestinian prisoners, and it sounds like hundreds for a few prisoners from Israel.

Speaker 2 And then the final thing is they're demanding aid to the Gaza Strip. And that was according to a CNN article.
And I know that there's other

Speaker 2 things out there, but what are your thoughts on this deal?

Speaker 3 There's all these different

Speaker 3 catalysts catalysts at work, and they're mutually exclusive.

Speaker 3 So before we can figure out whether it's a good or bad deal, and we should say captives, hostages, there's a lot of Americans among them, which is why Trump is interested.

Speaker 3 Not that he's not interested in Israeli prisoners, but especially Americans. So what are these factors? Number one, Trump is not in office.
I'm speaking on Tuesday, the 14th.

Speaker 3 So if this was 2017, they would be invoking they being his political opponents, would invoke the Logan Act. How dare you? This is what they got in Michael Flynn.
So

Speaker 3 the degree to which the special envoy, is his name Weisskopf or something,

Speaker 3 to the degree, and he's a businessman, he's got kind of a

Speaker 3 he was in financial trouble, and the Qatari government at one point in the distant past helped him get out of it. But he's a blunt-speaking, non-diplomatic person.

Speaker 3 And he supposedly has gone over there and said to Netanyahu, when Trump comes in, I don't want any Americans' help. Okay.
That's number one.

Speaker 3 So it's in a transitional period.

Speaker 3 Two, we don't know the degree to which all the 13 cabinet-level appointees are jumping the proverbial gun. So why this is going on, what's Michael Waltz doing, the National Security Advisor?

Speaker 3 What's Pete Heckset?

Speaker 3 He's not even confirmed. Waltz doesn't have to be, but he's not in office yet.
And then there's Marco Rubio.

Speaker 3 So the people who will make these decisions in the Middle East are, of course, Trump, but a troika of

Speaker 3 Rubio, Waltz, and Hexeth, and I think he will be appointed. DOD, State Department, National Security Advisor, and National Security Council.
They're not in power, but this, they're all pretty much...

Speaker 3 not the neo-isolationist base, the Steve Bannon. They're more Jacksonian, no better friend, no worse enemy, kill Soleimani, bomb Baghdadi, bomb that kind of stuff, of the First Administrative.

Speaker 3 So there's that.

Speaker 3 Second,

Speaker 3 does anybody believe that if Israel pulls back and withdraws from Gaza, which is one of the

Speaker 3 demands of Hamas,

Speaker 3 that Hamas will, what, dissipate? Well, we didn't mean it on October 7th. No, there are, the only reason they're talking is three reasons.
Number one, they're afraid of Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 When I say they are afraid, that means they are afraid that their Iranian patron is saying, look, I want you to get rid of those American hostages, give them back, or they're going to bomb us, or somebody will.

Speaker 3 Or two, they're Turkish, they're new Turkish sponsors because Turkey's kind of filling the void now.

Speaker 3 And Turkey's a NATO ally, and they're calling up Trump, oh, you know, we're a NATO ally, da-da-da-da-da. That's number two.

Speaker 3 And then number three,

Speaker 3 they feel that the Israelis are going to wipe them out, or not wipe them out, but I don't mean the whole, but can defeat them. So then you look at the deal, they want humanitarian aid.

Speaker 3 They're in no position as losers to demand anything. They want Israel not just to have a ceasefire, but basically to declare the war over and get out of Gaza.

Speaker 3 Mr. Hamas, whoever you are now, because most of your leaders are dead, I want to tell you that they did not go into your country.

Speaker 3 They don't have any desire to go in. You went in their country and you murdered 1,200-plus people in a medieval fashion, and that's why you're in the position that you are.

Speaker 3 And all the people you boasted about for a year, the Iranians, the Houthis, Assad, Hezbollah, they've all been attrited. They're all diminished.
So now you're in the 11th hour, and you want to...

Speaker 3 Basically, the subtext of this is:

Speaker 3 help us, help us.

Speaker 3 They're going to destroy Hamas. We're almost gone.
Can anybody help us? Oh, Donald Trump. Now, how can we flip Donald Trump? Well, Donald Trump wants to be Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Speaker 3 So Reagan said there will be no hostages. Mr.
Reagan, Mr. Reagan, Jimmy Carter has not been able to bring the hostage on.
You're going to take office any day.

Speaker 3 What's your plans?

Speaker 3 Well, there are not going to be any hostages. And that was a very dramatic thing to say, and it did force Iran.
Now we're

Speaker 3 45 years later, we've got the same problem with Iran, and Trump wants to be a Reagan. Well, who wouldn't? So Reagan is, Trump is saying you better, but unlike Reagan, he's more explicit.

Speaker 3 I'm going to bomb, do whatever you have to give up these hostages. But here's the problem.
Does Donald Trump

Speaker 3 He wants to be the person to

Speaker 3 get the hostages? He wants the the person to end the war.

Speaker 3 But when he sends an envoy who has not a legal authority yet in the transition and reportedly, I don't know if it's true or not, pressured on the Sabbath,

Speaker 3 Netanyahu, to do what?

Speaker 3 Get out,

Speaker 3 don't go into the last 25% of Gaza, end the war, allow humanitarian and release hundreds, if not thousands, of terrorists, some of which were probably involved in October 7th.

Speaker 3 Is that going to reflect well on the Trump administration? And when you look at the advisors who will have Middle East portfolios on like this special envoy,

Speaker 3 you're talking about Mike Huckleby, Ambassador to Israel, Pete Hekseth,

Speaker 3 Marco Rubio,

Speaker 3 Michael Waltz, they all have one thing in common, they're very strong Israel supporters. This deal is not not going over.
The rumors of this deal is not going over well among the Israelis.

Speaker 3 Their attitude is we want the hostages there.

Speaker 3 But if you're Donald Trump and you're our savior and we think you are our savior, only you can get the hostages back without us having to release all these terrorists and not to finish the job.

Speaker 3 Because Mr. Trump,

Speaker 3 85, 75% of Gaza, we went in, there are no terrorists. They're all in this last little enclave.
And that's who's negotiating. And they're terrified.

Speaker 3 If we can go into that enclave and eliminate them, there will be no need.

Speaker 3 And you can just tell them, you're going to surrender and get out of Gaza, A, and you're going to release the hostages, American and Israeli. And if you don't,

Speaker 3 this is what's going to happen to you. This is what's going to happen to the Houthis.
This is what's going to happen to Hezbollah. And this is what's going to happen to Iran, starting with Iran.

Speaker 3 And I guarantee you, he might be successful.

Speaker 3 But to put a special envoy with no legal authority during the transition to fly over to Israel, who's a businessman and has had some prior business relationships with

Speaker 3 Gutter, which is not really pro-Israeli, it's anti-Israeli, and then to have him strong-arm Netanyahu

Speaker 3 to stop the war in Medias-Reyes, Rebus, it's not good.

Speaker 3 Not good. No, not at all.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, the other story that came out this week that was

Speaker 2 probably one of the more interesting is that Jack Smith did resign, but the day after he resigned, he also released his report where he claimed, and if you ask me in a very cowardly fashion, that Trump would have been convicted of conspiracy to defraud the United States if he had not won the election.

Speaker 2 What does that mean in a report at this point?

Speaker 3 That means I wasted millions of dollars and I was appointed special prosecutor after Joe Biden demanded that I be appointed after denying that he had any influence on Merrick Garland.

Speaker 3 And I had no legal authority because the special counsel statute had expired. So this was just, I wasn't a special counsel.
I was just an appendage of Merrick Garland in Joe Biden's

Speaker 3 Department of Justice. And I was appointed on the same day that Michael Coangelo, Mr.
Coangelo, third-ranking person in the department in which I work for, resigned.

Speaker 3 And he had come from Letita James' HIT team, and he would now go back to Alvin Bragg's hit team. And the day that I was appointed,

Speaker 3 Mr. Nathan Wade from Fannie Willis's operation was also meeting with the White House counsel.
So this was a political hit from the very beginning. He's angry that he was incompetent.
Number one,

Speaker 3 there was no proof that Donald Trump had done anything different than Joe Biden. He had taken documents that were labeled classified.
Maybe some

Speaker 3 that were more classified than Joe Biden. But the special counsel, his counterpart, Mr.

Speaker 3 Hurr, found out that Joe Biden had put them in more places than Donald Trump, for a longer period of time, in less secure areas, and had had disclosed classified documents to somebody who had no clearance, such as his own ghostwriter, who then broke the law and destroyed subpoena,

Speaker 3 subpoenaed evidence in the fashion of Hillary Clinton. And all of that, he said the same thing.
He could have been indicted,

Speaker 3 but he would be too sympathetic because he was an older man with a feeble memory. And of course, the left got angry.
They said, if you're going to indict him, indict him.

Speaker 3 But if you're not going to indict him, don't tell us why. That's disparaging him.
That's as if he was guilty, but that's not for you to make. You indict him.
Or if you don't indict him, he's innocent.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 Using their own logic, then he's innocent.

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Speaker 2 Well, Victor, there's been a lot going on in LA, of course, with the fires. And some new things that have shown up this week in the news are the excessive amount of looting.

Speaker 2 In fact, we saw a sign on one owner's house that said owner home and have gun, beware.

Speaker 2 Elon Musk has provided the internet for areas that were hit by the fire particularly hard. And a real estate investor, Keith Wasserman, asked for private firefighters.

Speaker 2 So the news came out to defend his home, and he got a lot of pushback on social media with that. So I was wondering your thoughts on any or all of the.

Speaker 3 Well, let's go in the order that you enumerated them. Number one,

Speaker 3 there's looters. Somebody wrote me,

Speaker 3 I had been on a Fox, and I mentioned that, and they said, Well, why would there be looters? Because it's all burned out. Well, no, it's not burned out.

Speaker 3 You're talking about, and I don't want to give anybody any ideas, so bear with me, but you're talking about one of the wealthiest zip codes in the United States.

Speaker 3 So one would imagine that in every single one of those majestic houses, there were safes. And in the safe, there was everything from bonds to weapons to

Speaker 3 jewelry to gold bars, everything.

Speaker 3 And maybe not even in the safe, just in well-kept places like this bookcase or something. And they will be impernipatist.
They will not be burned up.

Speaker 3 You know, they're not flammable.

Speaker 3 And so many of them won't be, especially in a safe. So there's a huge amount of money that's tempting these looters that are even dressed up as fire protection people.

Speaker 3 And worse yet is they're in Los Angeles, so they understand this was the era of George Gascon, and they haven't got the message yet that he was recalled.

Speaker 3 So they think that it's open season. They can just go steal and take things and wander around.
There's not going to be any consequences. So it's very important.

Speaker 3 I don't know why Gavin Newsom doesn't have the National Guard there right now, just patrolling every street. He needs to do that immediately.
And then there's people who live there.

Speaker 3 Every, I don't know, 50th house, house, there seems to be, for some reason, they're standing. But they have no electricity, and they have no water and they have no sewage.

Speaker 3 So there's people living in there, and that has to be addressed. The second thing is about Elon Musk.
I don't understand why the left, I understand why the left hates him.

Speaker 3 But just as he did in the Carolinas during the flood, he has this brilliant idea that cyber trucks with this huge

Speaker 3 7,000 pounds of batteries, if you don't use the batteries for transportation and you position them strategically on a grid, then they can offer Starlink and power the Starlink.

Speaker 3 So he's taking all of these cyber trucks, apparently hundreds of them, and he's putting them in key places, and then he's opening up Starlink free.

Speaker 3 So all the first responders, all of the people who are trying to find out who's alive, can communicate on the internet. That's amazing.

Speaker 3 And he is doing more than almost any, a lot more than the mayor is doing, a lot more than the

Speaker 3 deputy mayor for safety who's basically under house arrest for phoning in a bomb threat or the allegations of such but it's a larger question about Elon Musk is they've been going after him they say he's a billionaire he's too close

Speaker 3 well

Speaker 3 you never said that about George Soros who destroyed the basically destroyed the prosecution

Speaker 3 system in our major cities. You never said that about billionaire Reed Hoffman that funded the whole bogus Eugene Carroll suit.

Speaker 3 You never said that about Mark Zuckerberg, put on $419 million to absorb the work of the registrars,

Speaker 3 2020 election. You only do it about Elon because

Speaker 3 he flipped. Part of it is I love my Tesla, but I hate the man who made it now.

Speaker 3 So every time I drive around my beloved Tesla, and Tesla, I know, is better than all the other EVs, but every time I get in it, it's an advertisement for, oh no, for a pro-Trump person.

Speaker 3 So they have that frustration. And then there's fear.
They're thinking,

Speaker 3 wow,

Speaker 3 nobody can break into the top three, GM, Christ, or Four. He did.
He's the first person. The DeLorean never did.

Speaker 3 Studebaker, American Meritors, he did.

Speaker 3 And then they're thinking, well, he bought X. He paid $30 billion too much.
It wasn't worth over $10 billion. He paid $40 billion, $50.

Speaker 3 Yes, and he revolutionized the whole idea of social media and he created a stampede. And now you have Mark Zuckerberg who's following in the footsteps of Elon and the Google people.

Speaker 2 But you also have Mark Zuckerberg who said that he couldn't possibly have gone against the government. And apparently Elon did.
That's the other frustration.

Speaker 3 Difference. I don't know who would have won their cage fight.
Elon's much older and Mark Zuckerberg's kind of buff, but Elon's a much more courageous person. And then you have the rocket.

Speaker 3 If you had said Elon is going to save NASA from itself and he's going to launch a dozen, two dozen satellites every month, nobody would have believed you. My point is this.

Speaker 3 So now they're thinking Elon is going to

Speaker 3 cut with Ramaswamy and this Doge thing. That's silly.
He can't cut a trillion.

Speaker 3 He can. He did it with NASA.
NASA. He did it with Tesla.
And he did it with

Speaker 3 X. So he can do it.
So they hate him, and they're afraid of him. And so anytime he comes into the news, they trash him.
And now he's interfering, they think, interfering over in Europe.

Speaker 3 He's telling the Europeans that they...

Speaker 3 What is he telling the Europeans? The latest is he's... retweeting list of Labour Party members who have been not alleged, but convicted of pedophilia.

Speaker 3 And that is in response to the you shouldn't meddle. I want to remind the British Labour Party, you sent over and put it on the internet 100 foreign nationals.

Speaker 3 And if they didn't register as foreign agents, and none of them did, they were breaking U.S. election law, federal law.
That's a felony. And they did it in 2004 when they went to Ohio.

Speaker 3 And they always get away with it. And then as leftist Europeans, they say, oh, the United States, you interfere in our elections.

Speaker 3 And we interfere in the Ukrainian elections and we interfered especially in the Israeli elections. So

Speaker 3 he's doing a wonderful job and he's hated because they're envious and fearful of him.

Speaker 3 So that was eluding and then the Musk

Speaker 3 question. And your third one was...

Speaker 3 Oh, about the guy who got...

Speaker 2 Oh, sorry.

Speaker 3 Oh, about the guy who got his

Speaker 2 house or tried to get private firefighters.

Speaker 3 The reason I'm asking.

Speaker 2 But there's actually two more.

Speaker 3 There's also Rick Caruso whose Palisades Village was saved. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So there's a question there. This goes back to Marcus Licinius Crassus, the first triumvir, and he made his fortune.
He was considered.

Speaker 3 There's a book, I think, by F. E.
Adcock, Marcus Crassus'

Speaker 3 Millionaire. And it's about a biography of Crassus, how he ended up, remember, decapitated.

Speaker 3 And I think they poured that scene in Game of Thrones where they pour gold into Danny's brother. Yeah, it's right.
Yes.

Speaker 3 That comes from Marcus Licinius Crassus' Life of Plutarch, where they poured molten gold. It's kind of, well, you're a billionaire and you're greedy.
Here's some gold to go out with.

Speaker 3 Then they decapitated his head and used it in Euripides,

Speaker 3 Euripides' Bacchae, when the head of Pentheus is carried in. So they performed it.
So my point is, he was notorious in Rome and he would pull up with a private fire brigade. He said, fire?

Speaker 3 So how much is your four-story Roman villa worth? Da-da-da-da. Well, here's what I can do to save it.
And there was always the allegation that he was lighting fire.

Speaker 3 I don't know if that was true or not. So there's this long

Speaker 3 history of anger at private fire services because they favor the wealthy. But this is a little different for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 3 Number one, if you're against it, you have to assume that the private firefighter would not

Speaker 3 would have been otherwise employed by the Los Angeles Fire Department or in some kind of volunteer brigade. There's been some heroic brigades, but that's not, there's a lot of manpower in Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 So I don't believe, and these people don't really have proven skills. They're not necessarily trained to the same degree as firemen, as the union reminds us every second.
So my point is,

Speaker 3 in greater LA of 20 million people, do you really believe that 4,000 or 5,000 who are being employed by private people would have the means?

Speaker 3 Therefore,

Speaker 3 they're taking resources from the fire department? I don't think so. Number two.

Speaker 3 When they go into a row of houses in Malibu or up in Brentwood now or Bel Air now or parts of

Speaker 3 and they go in what do they do

Speaker 3 they

Speaker 3 clear the brush

Speaker 3 they turn off the gas and they usually spray the whole house with fire retardant or they spray it with water soak it and they're not all hired by the way by the private owner a lot of them are hired by the insurance companies So up, and I've mentioned this before, my house was almost burned to a crisp in Huntington, during Huntington Lake in Central California Sierras

Speaker 3 during the Aspen Fire. And it just survived by heroic

Speaker 3 action of the firefighters. But here's the point.

Speaker 3 There were 400 cabins that were over 100 years old built on Forest Service land. And when this huge fire, and by the way, it was due to the same type of lack of forest management.
They didn't glean.

Speaker 3 Everybody up there said, please glean the forest. Let the loggers come in after the drought and take these trees.
They wouldn't do it.

Speaker 3 So when they started to go up, the insurance companies came to their clients and said, let us send somebody. So sometimes they sent these aluminum blankets because their homes were not big.

Speaker 3 And they put reflective heat-resistant blankets. And when you drove after the fire, there were some there that survived.
So it's not just wealthy owners,

Speaker 3 it's people who have insurance policies with particular companies. And then, number three,

Speaker 3 if you've got nine houses in a row and two are saved,

Speaker 3 you're putting fires out. You're not turning the fires to another one.
You're reducing the fire. So it has some utility.
Any house you can save is dampening the fire.

Speaker 3 So they are, maybe it's hit and miss, and they're not on a united front like the fire department with a strategy. But even the freelancing helps.

Speaker 3 And then, number four,

Speaker 3 what's going to happen when the fires are out? They have to recover economically.

Speaker 3 So I know

Speaker 3 our listeners will say, well, Victor, this Caruso guy, he's going to make a fortune because he saved this billion dollars. Yes, he is.

Speaker 3 But on the other hand, the people who in the next year or two or three

Speaker 3 who have crews to clean up and they're going to be pouring cement, they're going to be raising the walls of houses, they're going to want to eat, they're going going to want to buy stuff.

Speaker 3 And they don't have any facilities. So the more people that are saved, and the quicker you can get the community back.
If you can get wealthy people to come back there, maybe they'll clean up.

Speaker 3 The only thing that bothers me is this. It's not the private,

Speaker 3 it's this tragedy that if you go through that area, it is so wealthy and so majestic, the homes. But there are homes

Speaker 3 of rich 80-year pedigrees that look beautiful. They're the Spanish-style Southern California.

Speaker 3 You go by them, they're white stucco, they have the red tile roof, kind of adobe look with white, and then they have tropical plants. They're beautiful, but

Speaker 3 they're not mansions, if you know what I mean. So they would then they're second generation or third.
So typically a person's parents died, they're working in LA, they inherited a a 2,200 square home.

Speaker 3 And let's say they inherited it in 1980 when they were in their 30s. And it was worth $300,400.
Well, now it's worth $5 or $6 million.

Speaker 3 But they don't have the income. And they're Prop 13, so they can only maintain it because they inherited it directly from their parents, and they didn't change the title with a sibling or something.

Speaker 3 So my point is they're out. So they have this lot that's worth a lot of money, but they do not have the wherewithal to rebuild.
The insurance will not cover the

Speaker 3 insurance will cover the price maybe of a 2,200 square foot in theory, but not during a rush when everybody's trying to get help and labor and supplies. It's going to be $600,000, $700 a square foot.

Speaker 3 Easy.

Speaker 3 And so my point is there's going to be a lot of people come into that area.

Speaker 3 Speculators and investors are going to say, you know what, there's your house. You inherit it from your parents.

Speaker 3 I know it was worth $4 million, but their insurance is not going to pay because the lot's probably worth $2 million.

Speaker 3 It's not going to pay for the repair and it's a mess and do you really want to live in a tent for three years? I will give you a million dollars for the lot or something.

Speaker 3 And that's going to change the nature of that community. It's going to make it even more exclusive.
Unless the state comes in, this is even scarier. I was on Laura Ingham last night

Speaker 3 and comes in with its utopian idea that we're going to make a 15-minute city that this is a chance to experiment on these lab rats. We're going to make high-rises all over Pacific Palace.

Speaker 3 I have no country,

Speaker 3 no western home,

Speaker 3 no

Speaker 3 quarter acre lot, no pool. You're all going to live like little rats in a apartment condo,

Speaker 3 and then we're going to have a little green space and then you're going to get there with your new LA light rail. Why we sit in, I don't know, five acre estates in Beverly Hills or Brentwood

Speaker 3 and dictate to how you live. I don't think that's going to happen, but that's what they want to happen.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they won't let that happen.

Speaker 3 Well, they being

Speaker 3 that line,

Speaker 3 it's in

Speaker 3 a wild bunch when they're tricked and they get these worthless washers and

Speaker 3 they scream. I think it's Warren Outside,

Speaker 3 and Edmund O'Brien said, They,

Speaker 3 who is they?

Speaker 3 They, so when you say they, they,

Speaker 3 who are they? It's the wealthy. The wealthy will not let that happen.
They will call, hey, Gavin, I gave you a million bucks in your campaign. Hey,

Speaker 3 city council, I funded you, and they will not let that happen. The only mystery is, are they finally going to make the connection that they cannot always avoid the consequences of their ideology?

Speaker 3 They're subject to it on rare occasions. This was a rare occasion.
I know that their kids are in prep school and they hate teachers' unions.

Speaker 3 Excuse me, they love teachers' unions and they hate charter schools and their kids are in private school.

Speaker 3 I know that they like green power, 40 cent kilowatt, because they don't care about people in Fresno that are 105 with no money and can't afford air conditioning. I know that they love the idea.

Speaker 3 They love the idea of $6 gas.

Speaker 3 Save the planet because they don't care. They love the idea of 13% taxes because they would rather have

Speaker 3 they make so much money, they don't care about 13% tax. It's the people from 100 to 500 that get killed, not the people who make 10, 20 million a year or so.

Speaker 3 But this time, they lost their home,

Speaker 3 and they will probably be angry, and we'll see how long it lasts.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we'll see how long it lasts. They had interviewed a young girl on one of the Fox evening shows, and she said,

Speaker 2 Karen Bass is making a mockery of the Democratic Party.

Speaker 2 And so I don't think she understood that it was the Democratic Party that gave birth to Karen Bass, but she thought maybe somehow this party was different from what Karen Bass was doing.

Speaker 3 So you vote for Karen Bass, and that came up in whatever you think of Caruso. He is a proven guy that knows how to make money.
He would work for the government for a while.

Speaker 3 He's done everything, right?

Speaker 3 I don't think he's conservative, but he's competent.

Speaker 3 That says a lot in Los Angeles. Or you've got a woman who was in Congress that was head of the black caucus who, what, 12 times went down to see El Jefe, and when he died, she said

Speaker 3 she tweeted that El Comande El Jefe, Castro Marta, you know,

Speaker 3 in mourning for this mass murdering Castro. And she promises she's not going to go, because she had a reputation as an itinerant junketeer when she was in Congress.

Speaker 3 Well, I'll stay in Los Angeles. And of course, she gets re-elected.
And what's the first thing she, she got re-elected, just got re-elected. And what's the first thing she does? She junkets to where?

Speaker 3 To find her roots in Ghana. It's not necessarily a strategic city or state or country, anything in Ghana, the nation of Ghana, compared to the fire protection of Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 And then she gets back and she's cornered and she can't say anything. And she cuts the fire budget.
She appoints all these di people

Speaker 2 yeah enough said

Speaker 2 well let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about women in the news this week we've got lots of them and amy chews on deck so stay with us and we'll be back

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Speaker 2 Welcome back. So Victor, lots of women this week and I wanted to talk a little bit about Amy Chu.
She was famous as praising the role of a tiger mom.

Speaker 3 Yep. She wrote

Speaker 3 a Yale law professor.

Speaker 3 And she came to prominence because she wrote, I think she wrote it in two months

Speaker 3 about

Speaker 3 what the Asian mode of parenting can do. And

Speaker 3 when she had a disobedient teenager, like every teenager. And so she, instead of accommodating or appeasing the teenagers' demands, she doubled down.
You're going to play a piano or a violin.

Speaker 3 You're going to get straight. And they were all very successful.
And that became a bestseller. She got a lot of criticism, but she was still okay as far as the left was.

Speaker 3 After all, she's probably a Democrat. But she also had a reputation of reaching out to people that were very bright that she came in contact at Yale Law School, both left and right.

Speaker 3 She made no discrimination. I don't know.
I think she's center left. But nevertheless,

Speaker 3 she met J.D. Vance.
And anybody who was bright, she thought, that didn't have network connection, she helped. So she was Miss Networker.
She could get somebody, she knew all the Supreme Court judges.

Speaker 3 She had a reputation for being competent, competent, reliable. If Amy Chu represented a Yale law graduate, they were good, or she wouldn't really.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 she had a pipeline to federal appellate court and Supreme Court. So that made her very powerful.
Then she wrote this book. People were kind of easy.
But then

Speaker 3 they turned on her because during the Kavanaugh hearings, she quite courageously refused to sign a letter,

Speaker 3 as most of the obsequious law professors at Yale did, condemning

Speaker 3 Brett Kavanaugh and supporting these absurd Susan Blassey Ford charges. She didn't.

Speaker 3 And so they started to re-examine her, as the left always do.

Speaker 3 And she had a party, believe it or not, Sammy, she had a party where these 20-year-old, 28, excuse me, law students, 21, 22, they were all above the drinking age, but they had alcohol at her house.

Speaker 3 This is from the puritanical left now. And then her husband, who had no record of ever doing anything wrong, he wanted to, or

Speaker 3 he

Speaker 3 seemed, or he sort of like wanted to touch, kiss an undergrad, but no evidence. So they went after him.

Speaker 3 And of course, Yale thought, oh boy, I can't get her to punish her for supporting this horrible Trump appointment. But I'll go after her husband.
And they put him on suspension for two years.

Speaker 3 He did nothing wrong. She wrote a book on tribalism during this period that I read.
It was actually very good. And it was a warning to minorities, Asians included,

Speaker 3 and Hispanics and blacks that they had been encouraged by white

Speaker 3 coastal elites to emphasize their tribal identifications. But the white coastal elites were not the majority of white people,

Speaker 3 and they were the white people that had the privilege. But if everybody made their race or gender or sexual orientation essential rather than incidental to who they were,

Speaker 3 the great mass that's about 65% of the population is white.

Speaker 3 And if you say, white privilege, white privilege, white privilege, white rage, white rage, white rage, white supremacy, white supremacy, you keep doing that as they did,

Speaker 3 well, these white puppeteers in the West, they love it because they think, oh, you're talking about all those people in East Palestine or Fresno. But you're going to create a backlash.

Speaker 3 And then this white group is going to say, yeah. Okay.

Speaker 3 You got your tribe, I got mine.

Speaker 3 And so she predicted that would be very dangerous and called for people not to do that. And they continued to do it, and she was proven right.

Speaker 3 And I mentioned that when I go early, I won't mention the places I go to, but if I get up at 5.30 and run into a supermarket in rural Central Valley,

Speaker 3 for some reason in which there are heavily minority populations, and I see a rare white person,

Speaker 3 it's like,

Speaker 3 hi,

Speaker 3 how are you? Everything okay, mister? And they don't know me. How is it? And the subtext is, you're white.
I'm white.

Speaker 3 I never thought about that before, but since they got a tribe and they got a tribe and they got a tribe, we need a tribe. And it's like nuclear proliferation.

Speaker 3 They got a bomb, we got a bomb, we got to get one too.

Speaker 3 So she ⁇ the only sad thing about this whole thing, when they went after her and they tried to take her courses away, they tried to get her for crazy things like delinquency to minors and that didn't work.

Speaker 3 They tried to do everything, get after her husband. She got ill and she developed sepsis under the intense pressure.
She's very resistant, and she almost died. So you didn't hear from her for a while.

Speaker 3 She's very bright.

Speaker 3 I admire her courage. I wish her the best.

Speaker 3 And now she's back in the news because she's going to the inauguration as a guest of J.D. Vance.
J.D. Vance, a man who owes her a great deal.
He met his wife, I think, in her class

Speaker 3 at Yale Law School. And I've met him once and talked to him once on the phone.
I can tell you he is a man that

Speaker 3 has a good memory.

Speaker 3 And he has a lot of

Speaker 3 peace.

Speaker 3 everything they said about J.D. Vance was not just untrue, it was a lie.

Speaker 3 I talked to him a long time once and on the phone as well, and he was very knowledgeable, he was very nice, kind. As soon as they nominate him, I thought,

Speaker 3 doesn't make traditional sense.

Speaker 3 They're going to win Ohio anyway, Czech. Trump is a white male.
He is too, Czech. The MAGA people are under assault.
He's a MA person,

Speaker 3 and then cancel that out because I'd heard him before and I'd seen him. I thought, A, unmatched intelligence, B,

Speaker 3 knows the underbelly of America like few people do, three,

Speaker 3 soared in law school and was successful, and D,

Speaker 3 when they go after him on TV and they will, this is what, I think I said that in the podcast, he is going to tie them in knots.

Speaker 3 He's a brilliant debater, and he said the other other day they were trying to bait him about

Speaker 3 the transition and Joe Biden had done all these wonderful things and the economy is great.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he said basically

Speaker 3 he left us with a dumpster

Speaker 3 fire. And this is in regard to Joe Biden had just given this atrocious speech.
We need to talk about that speech. He gave it to

Speaker 3 his

Speaker 3 State Department. Did you hear this speech?

Speaker 3 No, I didn't.

Speaker 3 Go ahead and talk about it. He says, and I'm the first president that the next guy that follows me can say, there's no war in Afghanistan.

Speaker 3 Yeah, dummy, you lost the war, and you got 13 brave people killed, and you left $50 billion.

Speaker 3 It would be like Roosevelt saying,

Speaker 3 well, we lost D-Day, so I pulled out. And now

Speaker 3 anybody follows me, there's no World War II.

Speaker 3 Joe, the only worse thing than a bad occupation is to lose a war. You lost it.
And then he said this,

Speaker 3 and Iran is weakened.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 because Israel didn't listen to you and retaliated, and they wouldn't even have a nuclear deterrent if you let them do what they wanted to do. And they said, and Hamas and Hezbollah are on the run.

Speaker 3 Yes, because they ignored you after you demonized Netanyahu. He went in and did things that you said.
Don't retaliate. Be measured.
Don't do that. And he didn't listen to you.

Speaker 3 And he saved Israel because he didn't listen to you. And Assad, Assyria is gone.
Well, it's not gone because of you. It's gone because they're afraid of Donald Trump coming in.

Speaker 3 And they gave the green light to these rebels and said, you know what? Iran is weak. Hezbollah is destroyed.
The Israelis are there. Trump's coming in.
Now we can take him out.

Speaker 3 And that's what the rebels did. Every single.
And he said, we've got a China.

Speaker 3 No, they're not. They're buying more farmland around military bases.
They sent the balloon trajectory. The worst was Ukraine.
My God, he said, thanks to me, Ukraine was not...

Speaker 3 No, thanks to you, they invaded Ukraine because you pulled out of Afghanistan in such a humiliating fashion that five months later, Vladimir Putin thought, you know,

Speaker 3 we went under Bush when he was weakened 2008 because of the war.

Speaker 3 We went under this guy when he was vice president, when he was with loudmouth Obama, and Biden didn't do anything, and now after Afghanistan, he won't do anything. And he didn't.

Speaker 3 You know what he was at? He said, You remember, are you going to react if Vladimir Putin comes in? Depends on whether it's a minor incursion or not.

Speaker 3 And then when the incursion was major, and he panicked Biden and said, get Zelensky out, Alfred Marietta out. You remember that?

Speaker 3 So what I'm getting at is every single thing

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 he did made the world more unsafe. And then he looked around and he said, the coming of Trump,

Speaker 3 what Israel's done in the Middle East,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 all of that has made

Speaker 3 some things better. But I had nothing to do with him.
It was despite me, not because of me. And yet he took that reality and he lied.
And he always lies with his,

Speaker 3 I don't know what you call it, schizophrenic. It's like this.

Speaker 3 And first it's the slur anger mode, slur anger, SA mode. And he goes like this.

Speaker 3 And I went in, yeah, well,

Speaker 3 he's weak.

Speaker 3 And then he goes into the whisper mode.

Speaker 3 And guess what, everybody?

Speaker 3 I did that. I weakened your.

Speaker 3 It's just impossible to listen to him. He's so off-putting.
He's so obnoxious. And to sit up there in front of the American people and lie about, he said about the hostages, he's close to a deal.

Speaker 3 He hasn't had a deal since they went in on October 7th and took them. He wasn't even worried about them.
He didn't even know who they were.

Speaker 3 He never really called the parents of the 13 people who were killed because of a skedaddle in Afghanistan.

Speaker 3 You know, open border, wrecked economy. And here he's telling everybody he's made the world safer.
It's much more dangerous.

Speaker 3 As much as I do not approve of what Obama did when Trump came into office in 2017, the world was a safer place than it is now. He's going to have to restore deterrence.

Speaker 3 And I don't know what MAGA people are going to say. I am a MAGA person.
I know what I'm going to say. But I'm going to say to Donald Trump, be a Jacksonian.
You're Andrew Jackson.

Speaker 3 And do not get in an optional war, a forever war, an endless war on the ground in the Middle East.

Speaker 3 Yes, do not get into Ukraine, but you have to protect our interests, and that might be sometimes a Soleimani or Baghdad-y type of operation. I don't think he should start keep.

Speaker 3 He's made his point about Greenland and Panama and Canada. Made great

Speaker 3 tactical decisions, trolling. We talked about that.
It's funny, it's ironic. He puts the onus on Canada, onus on Denmark, onus on Panama.
But I wouldn't keep pushing about

Speaker 3 not ruling out force.

Speaker 3 Because Donald Trump is not going to send troops into Panama. And you can't really make them guess or be afraid that you might, because they know you're not.

Speaker 3 But otherwise,

Speaker 3 suggesting that Denmark is a colonial power

Speaker 3 and reminding them that they're farther from Greenland than we are, and it's North American territory that Donald Trump, the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist, is trying to protect the territorial integrity of Greenland, are telling Panama that they're subject to a colonial imperialist China and have betrayed their friends that were magnanimous,

Speaker 3 are telling Mexico, you had 400 years of Gulf of Mexico, now it's our 400 years since we have the same amount of coastline, is effective.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, thank you for that. Let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about women

Speaker 2 in the news this week. So stay with us and we'll be right back.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen show. You can find Victor at his Twitter or exhandle at VD Hansen or you can find him at Facebook on Hansen's Morning Cup.

Speaker 2 So come join him there if those are your social media outlets.

Speaker 2 So Victor in the news as well are Lindy Lee and Pamela Hempfil. I hope I said her last name right.
Lindy Lee is a ex-Democrat who said the Democratic Party was like a cult.

Speaker 2 And Pamela Hempphel is an ex-MAGA, if I can put it that way, who claimed that the MAGA,

Speaker 2 the MAGA people were like a cult as well. And so I thought it was striking that we're seeing all this accusations of cult on both left and right.

Speaker 2 Hempfeel is one of the accused January 6ers who had, who says she's going to refuse a pardon after she pleaded guilty, but she would not take a pardon from Trump because the Democratic, the Democratic, the MAGA agenda was very cult-like and they turned her mind.

Speaker 2 And I was wondering your thoughts on either of these people.

Speaker 3 Well, they're adults, and all the information each of them won was there. Lindy Lee, I mean,

Speaker 3 she's upset because she bundled millions of dollars

Speaker 3 and then she found out that Camilla Harris was paying people, and of course, if anybody else had done that, there would have probably been some type of investigation,

Speaker 3 like Al Sharpton and Oprah Winfrey, to basically endorse her. She bought them

Speaker 3 and some rappers. And then, in addition to that, she was junketing with a lot of private flights for kind of low-level staff.

Speaker 3 She ended up blowing through in 100 days her own campaign and her PACs, $1.5 billion in three months, and then she ended up in debt, owning $20,000. So

Speaker 3 she lost. So my question

Speaker 3 to her is

Speaker 3 had she won, would you have done this?

Speaker 3 In other words, you're now telling us that the Democratic Party is so extreme and you feel so betrayed because you in heartfelt sincerity, went to these donors and you found out that Kamala Harris was an operator and blew through their money and had nothing but contempt for them and lost.

Speaker 3 But let me just reverse it. Had she won, let's see, she beat Trump by three points.

Speaker 3 People would say, hey, Lindy, they kind of spent a lot of money, but it must have been worth something because he won.

Speaker 3 So, and then when we go to the second MAGA person, you're trying to tell me that between

Speaker 3 November 2nd of

Speaker 3 2000, I don't know why, excuse me, it wasn't the 2nd, but it was the 5th or 6th of 2020 and January 6th of 2021, you did not know that there were both legitimate and illegitimate questions about balloting.

Speaker 3 All you had to do was turn on the news. If you were a conspiracy theorist and a cult member, then you would listen to crazy

Speaker 3 Lynn Wood,

Speaker 3 and you would have believed that the Dominion Dominion computers were communicating with China or Venezuela. Nobody believed that.

Speaker 3 Or you could have said there were legitimate questions about the election because they changed the voting laws in most of the swing states so that 70% of the traditional Election Day electorate did not vote on Election Day.

Speaker 3 They voted under the guise of COVID through mail and early balloting, and the rejection rate fell enormously by a magnitude.

Speaker 3 Double the ballots, one-tenth of the authenticity. So there were legitimate questions.

Speaker 3 So you, I don't know how that filtered down to you, but you thought that Donald Trump, you were tired on Election Day and you looked at the returns and you went to bed and Donald Trump was ahead, and then all of a sudden the mail and ballots came in in Arizona, in Georgia, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, and he lost, and you got angry.

Speaker 3 So you chose on your own volition to go to the Capitol. And you were arrested for going into the Capitol, as I remember.
I wouldn't have arrested you.

Speaker 3 I would have cited you as a misdemeanor of unlawfully entering a federal building. But nobody put a gun to your head.
You know that it was against the law to go into a federal building.

Speaker 3 Now you can say legitimately, well, it was Sheida Talib and the squad and all those people had protest about Hamas and they took over the whole Rotanda and that was unlawful and they never arrested one.

Speaker 3 And you have a point.

Speaker 3 But don't tell me after all this time

Speaker 3 that you felt that you didn't have enough information. Or what are you trying to tell me? You were brainwashed by Donald Trump?

Speaker 3 And let me ask you in a different way.

Speaker 3 Had you gone to the Capitol and had you had a legitimate discussion, and had that discussion put emphases on what was going on as it did after January 6th, and maybe it had an effect? I don't know.

Speaker 3 And they would have said to people that there were irregularities. Would you have been mad now?

Speaker 3 Is it mad that you were arrested? Was it mad that you showed up? Nobody forced you to do that.

Speaker 3 I thought this section was on powerful, independent-minded women.

Speaker 2 Well, I, yeah, no, actually. It was just on women.
But they, you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Might as well put in

Speaker 3 Karen Bass.

Speaker 2 All these women,

Speaker 2 what they're complaining is that it was cult-like, but I think they were the ones that were cult-like. They were seeking out a cult experience.
So they were.

Speaker 3 I'm living in Little Old Selma when I heard what

Speaker 3 Camilla Harris was doing with these big high rollers, and they were spending all of this money.

Speaker 3 You could tell they were buying endorsements. You could tell that the people that were running her

Speaker 3 campaign were totally inept. And it was just a free fall with free money.

Speaker 3 And I don't have any empathy for the guys that wrote the checks anyway.

Speaker 3 They were writing the checks, I don't think, because they believed in the genius of Camilla Harris and what she was going to do another four years of what Biden did.

Speaker 3 They were doing it because they wanted influence. And that's fine, too.

Speaker 3 That's what Donald Trump said when I think in the 2016

Speaker 3 debates when Rand Paul said, you're what's wrong with America. You're the nexus of money and influence.
He said, basically, I'm paraphrasing him. He said, you're absolutely right.

Speaker 3 And you came up to my office, wrote me a check for $10,000, and I got a lot of influence with you. So that was pretty.

Speaker 2 Well, let's turn then to student loans. And Joe Biden has announced cancellation of another $4.2 billion in student loans.
Now, I wouldn't bring this up, except there is,

Speaker 2 I've been investigating a case in California community colleges where they're talking about these fake students.

Speaker 2 And in some of the publications, they say their estimate is that as many as 25% of fake students. And that means, and for all of you guys who are wondering, what does it mean? A fake student?

Speaker 2 It means that somebody is putting in names of people going that as though they were going to community college and then going in and asking for financial aid and then

Speaker 2 getting financial aid from a whole bunch of different names that that they do this with and they have a case where they caught three women in 2023

Speaker 2 but so he's forgiving these loans and there's a huge rate of

Speaker 2 fraud that of people getting these loans and then last thing I have a reader that wrote and said that the loans

Speaker 2 Where he he was reading about the loans.

Speaker 2 He said, the next time you hear about how the taxpayer should excuse student loans keep the following in mind student loan usage percentage based on the provided search results of a 2019 lending tree survey found that

Speaker 2 20% of students used student loans for travel, 26% used them for close, and it's worth noting that only 10% said that they use their student loans

Speaker 2 to pay their tuition. This suggests that significant portion of students, around 46%,

Speaker 2 combined traveling and clothes, those two percentages, are using their school loans for non-essential or discretionary purposes.

Speaker 2 Now put all those things together and it's not just insulting to people who didn't go to school that these student loans are being forgiven, but for all taxpayers that so much fraud is going on and then the students that do get the loans that aren't completely fraudulent are using them for other purposes.

Speaker 2 And I was wondering, you know.

Speaker 3 The general rule, whenever you take a collective group and you romanticize them, or you idealize them, or you suggest that they are noble and should be exempt from market forces or from reality,

Speaker 3 you're going to have problems. So

Speaker 3 if you say the homeless, to take one example, are kind of victims of society, and they're there not of their own volition or their own

Speaker 3 laxities or crime, whatever it is, addictions, mental illness, but you're just not going to talk about them. So they're all over the L.A.
Hills, everywhere.

Speaker 3 When I've gone down to L.A., I see them everywhere. I see them on sidewalks.
I drive down Malibu Canyon Road on the way to Pepper, and I see them on the side of the road.

Speaker 3 And it's cold, and they're not going to light fires, and you're not going to go out and arrest them.

Speaker 3 But if they are protected species, in which

Speaker 3 you are paying paying almost double for their care than you are for the fire department, then you're going to have a problem.

Speaker 3 If you romanticize students

Speaker 3 and you say that they're all hardworking and then we just want to give them a hand to get their education when many of them are middle class and they are taking loans out with the expectation that they don't need it for actual school, but that it's an income enhancer and they don't have

Speaker 3 any intention of paying it back. I think 25% of them are in arrears, then you have a problem.
It's like Karen Bass.

Speaker 3 If you say that powerful black women should not be subject to criticism, and that's what people are making the argument, that white racists like Victor suggested that she shouldn't have gone to Ghana and she should have answered reporters' questions, and she shouldn't have cut the

Speaker 3 fire budget by $17.5 million,

Speaker 3 and she shouldn't have appointed this

Speaker 3 fellow deputy mayor who's now under charges of phoning in a bomb threat, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 3 But if I am told that I can't say that, because she's a powerful black woman, then she's going to take advantage of that powerful black woman exemption as our homeless people think.

Speaker 3 You know what, we can do like a guy rides us a bike with a blowtorch, a propane torch,

Speaker 3 and he's riding openly in the middle of fire conditions, and he's lighting Christmas trees in LA.

Speaker 3 And his attitude is: they don't do anything to the homeless people. Well, I'm a homeless person.
You can do whatever you want.

Speaker 3 You can defecate, you can inject, you can fornicate, you can urinate, and there's no consequence. Well, that's what we've created this

Speaker 3 noble myth of the student. And the fact is that it's one of the

Speaker 3 contributors to prolonged adolescence. So we have these students that are taking three, six units.
They're taking a federal loan and guaranteed loan. They're not graduating in four years.

Speaker 3 50% graduate in six years.

Speaker 3 So they're eating up their 20s with kind of want to take a class in gender studies, kind of want to take a class in

Speaker 3 sociology of the self, kind of want to take a

Speaker 3 class in Marvel comic books, and I'll get my three, six units, and my student loan. And probably if I do it long enough, I'm not going to have to pay it back.

Speaker 3 I'll just pay the interest on it, and they're going to forgive it when you get a demagogue like Joe Biden in. So it's not a good programming, and

Speaker 3 it delays marriage, it delays child rearing, and it delays homeownership. So these guys should get on the pathway of life at 20 or 21 and decide what they want to do.

Speaker 3 And most people, I'd say 55%, don't belong in college of a population.

Speaker 3 They need to get a trade and help the country move and build and electrify and plumb and do all these things and truck, but not to kind of sort of kind of maybe might be a student.

Speaker 3 And that's costing us a lot of money. It's $1.7 trillion.

Speaker 3 And then Joe Biden, being lawless, says

Speaker 3 in a campaign stop, he said, well, I forgave so many billion dollars and the Supreme Court said I couldn't do it. It was illegal because I did it without legislation.
But I got around it.

Speaker 3 I got around it.

Speaker 3 So he was openly flaunting the court's

Speaker 3 authority. They need to get out of it.

Speaker 3 Just think, where I work, I think the Stanford endowment is over 30 billion. So let's say tomorrow Donald Trump has a first executive, there shall be no federal guaranteed loans.

Speaker 3 So Stanford tells its students, We can give you a tuition waiver, but to pay the $200,000 a year in tuition, room, and board, inflation,

Speaker 3 eating at the cost. I mean, Stanford's raised its prices higher than the rate of inflation because they had a guaranteed loan package in some cases.

Speaker 3 Some people are very wealthy, and even a place like where I used to teach, Cal State Fresno, probably had more student loans than Stanford because Stanford kids are pretty wealthy.

Speaker 3 But my point is to take this example.

Speaker 3 So what if there was no student loans? And the Stanford package said that out of the $200,000, we'll give you you a grant for $50,000 guaranteed loan by your endowment. So suddenly

Speaker 3 these kids say, well, Stanford,

Speaker 3 they're not going to make me pay it back. I'll just, no, they will make you pay it back.
So you go to Stanford and you want to take your DEI course, your environmental,

Speaker 3 they're going to sit you down and say, look, you came here, we want you out of here in four years, and what are you going to major in? Because we need a major that's competitive and remunerative.

Speaker 3 We don't want, you don't come to Stanford and borrow our money and then go out and take six years and then don't pay it back for 20. We're not going to do that.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 And we're going to give you courses that are competitive because we're lean and mean. We don't have 16,000 staffers, which they do have.

Speaker 3 And we don't have a DEI guy making $300,000 and $200,000 for his assistant. We are lean and mean.

Speaker 3 And that would be great, wouldn't it? Yes. Moral hazard, moral hazard.
Where's the the moral hazard?

Speaker 2 Well, the last thing on our agenda today, Victor, is the American Airlines failed to prioritize their employees by allowing the retirement managers of their pensions to invest in ESG, environmental, social, and governance.

Speaker 2 And the court ruling was that they failed their employees. So the court upheld that.
That was

Speaker 3 they took their money and made them invest in it?

Speaker 2 Yeah, they took their money and their pension system.

Speaker 3 ESG is going the alphabetic suicide trajectory of DEI. DEI, ESG, same thing.

Speaker 3 It is an

Speaker 3 unworkable, mandated program mindset that's implemented by elites that doesn't work. So in the case of DEI, it's anti-merocratic and it uses criteria that are superficial race, sex, gender,

Speaker 3 rather than merit. And this ESG basically says that we're in the marketplace and the stock market's been doing good,

Speaker 3 and you don't have to be very smart to make money now with this huge increase.

Speaker 3 I'm talking about 20-year.

Speaker 3 And we're going to invest in companies that are environmentally sound and socially responsible.

Speaker 3 And then those companies think, hmm, we have kind of a shaky operation here. We're not very profitable, but we're going to broadcast and virtue signal and performance art that we care.

Speaker 3 And we hire people of color. And

Speaker 3 we use solar and wind power only.

Speaker 3 And that masks the actual productivity of the company. And then

Speaker 3 the investor, the ESG people say to the investor, we want to virtue signal and feel good because everybody thinks we're greedy. And remember,

Speaker 3 Occupy Wall Street and all that. We don't want that image.
We want to be part of the community.

Speaker 3 We want to be supporters of the community of color, the LGBTQ

Speaker 3 community, the environmental community.

Speaker 3 And so we're going to take maybe 1 or 2%

Speaker 3 off our productivity invest in companies that are not quite competitive, even though we have a...

Speaker 3 commitment to our stockholders and investors and people that we will get you the highest return. And they got away with it.
And now all of a sudden in times of

Speaker 3 semi-recession, people are saying, you didn't give me what I wanted. You're not as competitive because you're investing in non-productive enterprises, so you can feel good at my expense.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 2 the governance part of that is essentially you had to be PC. The companies had to be PC on top of it, which was just politically biased.

Speaker 3 It's okay if they're making money. Who cares if your ESG investment, let's say in Red Rock or something,

Speaker 3 returns 7% on your money and you feel, wow, I get 7%

Speaker 3 and they don't use any gasoline in their delivery trucks. They're all electrified.
Oh, wow. But when they're getting 2%

Speaker 3 and that's your hard-end money and the inflation rate is 9% like it was in 2021, then you say, oh my God, I lost 7% of my money, just so these guys that are billionaires can go around and brag that they're for the environment.

Speaker 3 It's not a sustainable proposition.

Speaker 2 No, it sure isn't. Well, Victor, that's it for today.
I'd like to thank you for all of your wisdom. It's been wonderful today.
And I would like to thank our listeners. Thank you for joining us.

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

Speaker 2 This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.