No Majority, No Honesty: What the Left Lacks

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And we'd like to thank Vibrance Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host.
You're here to listen to Victor Davis Hanson, who is the wise man. He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, bestselling author, philologist, military historian, classicist, so many things.
He's got a website, The Blade of Perseus. You'll find it at victorhanson.com.
You should be subscribing. I'll tell you why later in today's episode.

We are recording again on Monday the 21st. This particular episode will be up on Thursday, the 24th of April.
Victor, some of the topics we have yet to get to have to do with California and the disaster of post-fire Los Angeles, the Olympics that are

supposed to take place in a couple of years. Our friend John Fund has written a very interesting

piece on the California Coastal Commission. We have Senator Van Hollen from Maryland, who is just,

I went to confession, I can't say bad things for the time being. He's just too much.
Some other Democrats now seem to be going, they're going to get, I think they're actually in El Salvador now, kissing up to these horror show hoodlums. We have some polls about how Donald Trump is doing with Americans on particular issues.
And I think even if we have time, seafood, there's an executive order on seafood that I think is worth getting your two cents on. So we'll get to all these things, Victor, when we come back from these initial important messages.
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Glad to see you again after our last recording. We're still alive.

That's a wonderful thing. Victor, let's start off with the polls, because I think that's most interesting.
Not the most interesting. It's pretty darn interesting.
And I think it's in line with some of the things we've seen in the previous few weeks where Americans stand on the things that Donald Trump is doing. And this is, I'm reading from the, this is a Harvard-Harris poll shows, overwhelming support for Trump policies.
74% support deporting illegals, 70% for closing the border, 69% for Doge. Doge, which is all these protests in the streets over Doge.
65% support banning trans men in girls' sports. 57% for ending foreign aid.
57% for reciprocal tariffs. That got me a little.
I thought that would be higher. And 53% for drilling in Alaska, drill, baby, drill.
These things are resonating with Americans, Victor. Your thoughts? Well, I mean, in his popularity, Harvard Harris had him 52-48, and some polls have him 50-50.
I think real clear politics, because they've got some of those insane left-wing polls, which I say insane because some of those were all four or five in the 2024 election and as much in the 2020 election. it's it's counterintuitive because 24 7 nbc abc cbs mns nbc cnn new york times npr pbs la times what is trump is sinking he's terrible he's horrible and you look today i've been very critical the wall street journal but i mean almost every what i do is i look at the news articles and they're all critical and then i look at at the group that writes them and I click on the names and I look at them and I see that most of them are from the other persuasion, the liberal progressive persuasion.
So you would get this impression from the media that he's in dire straits. Everything's falling apart.
But there's two things going on. The public is reacting to things that they voted for and they want and number two we're not getting a balanced judgment i mean this same media told us that we were not in a recession with joe biden even though he had two consecutive quarters of negative growth they made it now they're saying a recession is inevitable.
But in early April and then the March, inflation rate shows that inflation is not going up. Oil's going down.
Job creation was more in March than anybody had expected by about almost 100,000 jobs. And it looks like they're going to get a budget bill through.
They're making some progress on Doge, and it's kind of good that it's not in the headlines every day now because they're just quietly cutting, cutting, cutting, things that needed to be cutting. And I don't know what you'd say about the border.
I think the worst thing that Biden did or any other president in my lifetime did was welcome 12 million people in here and deliberately broke federal immigration law by not enforcing it. And that's over with.
And we were told day after day by Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, you have to have comprehensive immigration reform. You don't.
You just needed somebody to enforce the existing legislation. And it stopped.
Ninety-eight percent. It was just the most radical change in our lifetime to see a border that had 10,000 people a day have almost nobody.
And with Houthis houthis they were saying this is unfair donald trump just hit us again and we hadn't done anything this time this time i mean for four years they said the red sea is ours and they killed people they sunk ships they they tried to they took the entire world's commerce and rerouted around the Suez, almost as if we were 15th century and galleons going around the Cape of Good Hope. And now all of a sudden, why are you doing this to us? We're not going to do anything anymore.
And all of a sudden, Iran is, well, we would like to talk. And all of a sudden, Hezbollah, I don't know.
And where is Assad? He's disappeared. And, you know, I can see Putin.
Trump goes back and forth. If he thinks Zelensky doesn't want to, he says, start talking.
If Putin doesn't, he says, we have other things to do to you, Vladimir, like a secondary boycott of oil. So the world is not falling apart here abroad, as the media says.
And the people know that. And so that's why they're voicing a sense of confidence.
And that's why the Democratic Party is in this turmoil. They don't know how to handle it.
And the older leadership, Chuck Sch schumer is there anybody else besides him in that leadership i guess elizabeth warren but she's with the the jacobins but they don't have any vision they don't it's like you mentioned gavin newsom they don't come out with an alternative agenda we think that we should let in 2 000 illegal aides a day, rather than none. Or we think we've been too hard on the Houthis.
Or, you know, Mexico should be perfectly allowed to have 170 billion surplus and 63 billion remittances. But they don't, because to expel out an agenda is something they know that people will not like.

It's that old 70-30, 80-20, they're behind on the issues. The agenda will have to be vilify Trump and hope it sticks, right? I mean, is there another practical agenda? No, I'm just watching this, and I see that the more impotent they are and the less actual power they wield and the less the public likes them.
If you look at the polls of the Democratic Party, 29, 27, one poll, I think it was 23% approval. They react to that by being crazier and more strident and upping the, you know, not just fascists, but the other day, Jasmine Crockett said that Trump was like the worst than the M13 gang member, you know? Right.
And so they are lowering the bar on what's permissible. And we're going to see something like we saw with these two assassinated.
I don't want to predict it. I hope it never happens.
But if they keep this language up and you start to see polls that say 50 percent of self-identified leftists think it's OK to shoot and you see them romanticizing a assassin like Mangione and you see them go fund a alleged murder like Carmelo Anthony and basically saying that he was a victim. And you see this M-13 wife beater who was pulled over for trafficking and let go and was found.
Yes, everybody. He was found by a immigration judge to have M- ties even his wife did not deny it she didn't deny that she was beaten by him either so that is the people who they are supporting and they all have one thing in common they all have committed violent acts and they're romanticized and the reminds me when i was in college i remember high school i think it was rolling stones jan wiener said that manson was innocent and they romanticized him for a while the left really did so my point is that the that they are creating a a climate of fear and legitimizing violence and something's going to happen.
And I think they want that to happen, this hardcore wing. When you keep saying all of these things, all of these things, it's cumulative.
And it's not good. And we'll see where it leads to.
But we've talked about these four iconic figures that they seem to have attached and made into deities. And that was Mangione, the assassin.
And then there was Carmela Anthony, who's still, we don't know. I mean, he's still under indictment.
He hasn't been tried, but he has confessed to putting a knife in somebody's heart.

He said he did.

And he's now, for some people on the left, a hero who's a victim of racial prejudice.

I don't see how that works, but that's what they're trying to peddle.

And then we have Mr. Mahmoud Khalil, who the more you hear about him, the more you see that he was unapologetic in advocating the October 7th violence, killing, murder as a guest on our soil.
And then we see Mr. Garcia, and I don't think anybody who looks at all of the case, what the left does is they say, well, he wasn't convicted of domestic abuse.
He just had charges filed by his wife. And then for some reason, she withdrew them.
I wonder why she withdrew them. And then, well, he wasn't convicted of trafficking while he was pulled over and everybody there was from the same address and he had an expired license.
And while he wasn't, nobody has a testimony that was M13. Well, he's got in gangs.
He was picked up at a Home Depot with him. He had informant.
He had judges who saw. But here's the point, Jack.
It doesn't matter. The left is saying to us, each of the 12 million people had a right to enter the United States illegally.
They broke the law. We allowed them to break the law.
Then they broke the law a second time by residing here. Now, you, you, you will break the law, we think, if you take the people who broke the law and return them to lawfulness by putting them back where they belong in their own country.
That is illegal. But it wasn't illegal to allow illegal people to come in illegally.
That's what they're telling us. So we could have just reduced the entire Garcia argument to simply, did he come here illegally? Yes.
Is he residing illegally? Yes. Did he go through a deportation? Yes.
Did the judges order that he was not here lawfully? Yes. Why worry? Is he a U.S.
citizen? A Maryland? No. He is a foreign national illegally residing here.
And why doesn't he? I mean, if you take the left's view, it is we have the sovereign right to go down to El Salvador and then what? Kidnap an El Salvadorian citizen and bring him back up here? Is that what they want to do? Why do they think, if he's deported, why do they think they have a right to bring a citizen from another country and forcibly put him up here? Because the president of El Salvador said he's not going to send him up here. He doesn't belong up here.
He's a citizen of El Salvador.

He always was.

And if he really thought that citizenship was so important and he got married, why didn't he apply for citizenship?

Why didn't he do that?

Why didn't he apply for a green card?

Was it because he thought he wouldn't get a green card?

Because if he did try to get a green card and people examined his record, they might see something there from a prior judicial ruling that would not give him a green card. Victor, if I went to France, got drunk, which didn't happen, by the way, committed some crime, I would think I'd be so lucky if I could get out of there and never have to come back again, right? That would be a good ending to a bad situation.
You know what? That's a good point. And we all expect that.
One of the most distinguished classicists that I knew, I won't mention his name, he's now deceased, but he wrote a magnum opus. It was one of the most important books on philologies on inscription.
I knew him well, and my wife knew him well when we were living in Greece. He had an important manuscript to mail to the state, to European publishers.
He went down to the Athens post office at five before it closed, five minutes, 10 minutes. And they were closed.
But they weren't closed. They were all having coffee.
Even they locked the doors, even though. And he knocked on the doors and said, I need to get in.
And they said, closed. Clista.
And he got angry. And he didn't think he was doing anything wrong.
And he kicked the door and juggled it. and the door broke.
The glass door shattered. And they arrested him and they took him to jail and they were going to deport him.
And he had to file. And he, anyway, for the next months he had to get a lawyer and say it was an accident and he was a scholar, but they did not fool around.
It wasn't as if he was driving down a road in rural Athens and he had six illegal Americans in his car and he was pulled over and he had no license that was valid. And everybody said they lived at his apartment.
No. So, yeah, this is absurd.
And I think that's why most people, I think 57 percent, you said, are favored deportations because they don't understand how it can be legal to swarm the border and break the law when they knew they were breaking the law. And then all of a sudden, just because Biden didn't enforce the law to say you're breaking the law, if now you enforce it,.
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Victor, because people just love the sound of my voice, I just have to read this from you talking before about left-wing violence. And I saw this piece yesterday by Beckett Adams on National Review.
And this is the media obtuseness. Actually, it's about the media's distortions.
Do we even really care what the media has to say anymore? But here quickly, CNN must broadcast from another planet. Network correspondent Donnie O'Sullivan suggested recently with a straight face that political violence in the United States is almost entirely a right-wing phenomenon, and that there simply is, quote, no equivalent on the left, end quote.
This isn't just untrue. It's dangerous.
And I agree, Victor, you were talking before about dangerous things, and when 50% of people on the left support, and then you have this Glenn, what's her name there, Simone Sanders on MSNBC the other day, oh, they're going to start deporting black Americans. This is a stew of lies and distortion that's only going to end very badly anyway your your thoughts

well i mean i had my house swatted with sheriff showed up from a false call apparently attended to suggest there was tension then they might have to you know intervene i don't know what the purpose of that crank call was other than to be malade.

And I get the, I know. the purpose of that crank call was other than to be malade.

And I get, you know, I would just put an angry reader last week where the person wrote, beware, and then beware, and it was kind of a threat. And you're getting a lot of those.
I get a lot of those now, and people are hostile. I was on the campus and somebody came up to me about tariffs and was not wanting to engage in a polite conversation.
So it's just this idea that if they ramp up the heat, then something is going to happen and that something will be good for them. They don't know what it is.
They just know the more that you torch a Tesla dealership, the more you scratch a Tesla's car, the more you run a guy off the road with a Tesla, the more you say Donald Trump is a fascist, a Nazi, the more that you say that he wants to deport black people. Something will happen and that something will be in their favor or you say that he's an m13 member and this is the i mean think about it for a minute they raided his home and they took away 13 000 documents and they found 102.007 percent of and they even had to put labels they brought with them the fbi did and then then they tried to take him off the ballot.
They impeached him twice. They tried him as a private citizen.
They had four prosecutors, state, local, and federal, to go after him. And all of that failed.
And now he's president. And they've gone into, I mean, people on the right made fun of Biden all the time time and they said you know he doesn't know where he is they probably amplified that because the left said he's fit as a fiddle joe scarborough said i've never seen him i knew joe biden i've never seen him more cognizant so but they didn't do this stuff threatening and threatening threatening and I don't know where it's going to end but it's getting really scary i'm not scared because i'm 71 but the climate that they're creating is is unacceptable and i guess it's designed to tell the independent voter or the romney republican we're're divided and we're crazy.
And you can stop all this by stopping this MAGA stuff and stop the Doge and stop the terror. Stop all this.
And then we'll be, you know, we'll just call him a Nazi. Then when he was out of office, we'll say he was a good guy, and we'll call the next Republican a Nazi.
But I don't think they understand that they're not the majority of the country. Yeah.
Also, we're— Polls you just read show that they're not the majority, even the media. The media doesn't understand that they have just destroyed their brand.
And every time I look at something that MSNBC or CNN, I think Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, Alpha Bink, Steele dossier, FBI performance with Twitter. You don't believe any of it.
It's all. Yeah.
I think we've also given up on the fetal position, Victor, which was a reality. It was for a lot of people.
It still is. I mean, Donald Trump had a tweet on Easter, you know, about holiest day of Christendom.
And he said, you know, Joe Biden is a moron. That wasn't Christian-like.
And a lot of people on the right said that wasn't. Yeah, I mean, but you don't see people in the right threatening people uh and it's it's going to get really scary it really is it really is and then that to the degree that there is something that is clearly like the would-be fire bomber of the shapiro house was angry about Palestine, apparently, right? Yeah.
And now we don't hear that he's left or he's any of that. He'll probably be a white nationalist or something.
It's just like the person who went after Pelosi when he had an Antifa flag at his house. You know, Lee Oswald was a right-wing guy, even though he's an avowed communist with connections.
They always do that. And that's everybody.
When I say they, what I'm talking about is the history of communism and this idea of socialism and radical redistribution. It's all predicated on the idea that we are more and more.
And to create this heaven on earth, we have to be able, we're entitled to have methodologies that justify,

that are justified by our noble and superior ends.

And those means, any means necessary, that's not important.

The end result is important.

We'll get you there.

Just put up with us.

That's their idea.

You survived, Kulak.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're going to uh let's see what should

we talk about next i think we should talk about katie hobbs the governor of arizona she's never

really come in for any victorization and let's do that's a that's a that's a real swing state

yeah yeah well let's do that when we come back from these important messages.

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Victor Katie Hobbs, a border Democrat, and she's an ideologue, and she vetoed a bill that protects American citizens from illegal aliens. And of all states, Arizona, I don't know, you know, along with New Mexico and, has been tortured by illegal aliens.
And she is just a dang ideologue.

So, look, the Republicans control veto proof.

Not veto proof.

They have a majority, supermajority, two-thirds in each house.

So maybe they'll override her veto. But we have a bad egg in an important state your thoughts about her yeah it's you know it's it's very difficult you have mark kelly as the senator and you have katie hobbs as the governor and i it's very problematic about arizona because at the grassroots level it's a ready state.
Maybe it's not quite purple yet. And even though they've had massive numbers of illegal immigrants come in to that state the last 20 years, but the Republican Party has not been able to win at the Senate level consistently or the governor's level.
And the result is that the left feels that it's headed in Nevada or California direction, that just with a little bit of push, and that's what she's counting on, that she has a majority that will side with her if she's able to make the argument that Donald Trump wants to go into your home and find somebody who's been here 10 years, married to American citizen, working, never been arrested, and didn't get a green card and wants to yank him out and deport him. He may want to do that, but that's not who's being deported right now.
And she wants to make that argument to enlist support or to make it so crazy or to, I guess the word is what we talked about, or turn up the heat. So that's what they're doing.
Same thing with Gavin Newsom. The problem with all these states is, again, they don't ever tell us what the solution is.
Why don't they just say, we let in 12 million people. That was the point.
We wanted a new constituency. Under mail-in balloting, we feel that in the swing states, we had about 2 million people we registered in Social Security.
That's what we wanted don't care about the integrity of social security we just wanted to have constituents that said i have money from the government and we'll find ways to register and have you vote but and that was worth it and we don't care if there's a few criminals like 500 000 why don't they say that? But they don't even talk about it.

What would Governor Hobbs want to do with the 12 million people that were not here in 2021? What does she want to do? Is that normal? Are these all refugees in 1870 from Europe that are coming here and want to be integrated in and are lined up at Ellis Island to come in legally? No. So they don't tell us what the alternative is.
They just scream and yell, and we're going to do this. It's like Gavin Newsom.
You know, I don't think biological men should be in film, but I'm not going to do anything about it. The Coastal Commission is slow there's holy i'm not going to do anything about it and why he's talking about that we're having one and now probably two major oil refineries in the bay area shut down we've lost most of them anyway they're going the way of the california timber we import timber and oil we have a lot of each and then that's going to shut down and i just filled up friday and we're told oil prices are down and they are near 60s between 60 and 70 a bear you know what gas i filled up at 4.99 a gallon at a rural service station in california where 21 percent of the people below live before below the poverty line and one quarter of everybody is not making their power bill.
PG&E, they're just can't do it or they don't want to do it. So what I'm getting at is the whole state is in free fall, and he's mouthing off about the Coastal Commission, of which he's fine with, and he made the appointments, some of them.

And the same thing about transgender, of which he'll do nothing.

So there's nothing there. They don't ever do anything that would improve the lives of people except spend.

I mean, build back better inflation.

Okay, inflation reduction out.

You're going to build back better 170 windmills off New new jersey you really think that's going to bring help everybody no so i i don't know what they want it's just i've never seen anything like it they don't have it's not like when i was growing up it was you know hubert humphrey he was kind of naive but you know i'm gonna have the humphrey Hawkins full employment act that will government will hire people if it gets below three percent or whatever or it's just stuff JFK or even Bill Clinton you know but this stuff is new this is really weird there's no constructive policy there's no alternative policy it's just you know it, it's just either hatred or it's Gavin Newsom.

Yeah.

You know, it's just weird.

We talked a lot, or you did on our last podcast, about the desire to just torture people for the sake of torturing government bureaucrats.

And the California Coastal Commission here, there's John Funder, our friend, who wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal the other day talking about how Elon Musk and Gavin Newsom are in league to criticize the commission. Well, what did the commission do? Last October, it denied Musk the ability to launch some of his SpaceX satellites from the U.S.
Air Force.

I think Vandenberg Air Force. Edwards, I think.
And then there are other things. The Coastal Commission is trying to cripple these ranchers that live in the area.
I don't know what it is that it's not trying to make people's lives miserable. Well, who do they represent? they represent the people who either inherited a beautiful home or lives near the coast all the way from san diego to basically the russian river and or has the money to buy an area and does not does does not want anybody to build near them or anything.
That they, that's who they represent. They don't want any commerce.
They don't want anything except that constituency. And it's kind of, I got mine.
If you tell, if you say to them, and I have done this, I've talked to some of them. So you want open borders and you want half of all illegal immigrants in California.
And they are coming from basically three places, Chiapas and Michoacan and Oaxaca. And these are the poorest of the poor people in Mexico.
And they are coming here without English and without skills and without a diploma. And you want them here.

Now, we know from Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth that you feel that they should be just picking your crops all the time.

But they're not going to just do that.

They're going to get injured.

They're going to age.

They're going to need skill sets.

Now, how are you going to give them an affordable house?

How are you going to give them affordable power? How can they fill up at the gas tank? And they don't care. So they're doing the weird thing.
They're bringing in very poor people, and yet they're not making California affordable. They're doing just the opposite.
They're making it a rich person. So it's a medieval society, and they don't care.
You talk to them. They do not care.
Every time a left-wing politician talks about illegal immigration, I just count myself. I go to myself, one, two, three.
At about count 11, they say, well, who's going to pick our crops? Who's going to? 20% of people who identify is here illegally are engaged in agriculture. 20%.
They could at least say who's going to do our roofing or who's going to do our meat packing, dressing out a beef or something. But they have this idea, the liberal that, well, these people, that's what they're going to do.
They're just going to do that stuff. And we're going to and they should, you know, they should do that.
They don't have an idea. These people are going to – if we're going to take them, when we better educate them and make them legal and integrate them into the middle class.
And therefore, we must have viable housing and affordable fuel. And they don't care about that.
They never did. They don't now.
They're elitist and i that's why getting back to universities a lot of them most of them came out of this universe this new university system where they went to classes and there was no attempt to be even-handed on climate change on diversity on anything it was all left-wing drummed into you and they've they've been affected by it you know and they're very radical and they pulled away from them at the center and they're they're running certain states minnesota massachusetts new york california and they're running them into the ground and the only thing that's going to everything that is not sustainable will not be sustained. And there's fewer.
They're not having children as red states are. People are leaving in the millions from these states.
They have unfunded pension. They have budget.
And it's very tragic because all these states were the powerhouses of the American economy because they had a prior generation that was really good. And they had a lot of natural resources and they had traditions behind them.
And they are ruining them. And it's amazing what they're doing.
Well, state I live in, Connecticut was the powerhouse for the arsenal for democracy. It made the tools that made the tools.
I know it. And now it's a basket case economically.
Yeah. Beautiful state.
Look at California. Henry Kaiser built most of the Liberty ships in Alameda.
And the Seventh Fleet, until it went to Pearl Harbor in January of 1940, it was right in San Diego. And most of the aircraft industry was in San Diego.
Charles Lindbergh had his Spirit of St. Louis built in San Diego.
So what did they do? I don't know what they did, but other than everything they have the on Midas touch, everything they touch turns to dross. And all these issues um it's funny when you read those polls every time you read a poll about the border or USAID I just would like them to say well this is why people disagree with us and they're wrong and we'll win them back over once we explain what?

Once we explain to these ignorant people why 12 million were really good,

once we explain to them that you have to have a gender studies program at the University of Kabul,

when we explain it to them, they'll all be for it.

It's either that or these people are stupid

and we're not going to tell them what's going on because they're too stupid to appreciate it.

So we're just going to hide them and treat them like children. It's either one or two of them.
They either actually believe that people like this stuff or they know that they hate it and they try to disguise it and push it through. It doesn't matter which one it is because the results are the same.
But we're watching something that's uh donald trump is you know he's he he's flooding the zone but he's gonna have to he's gonna uh he's gonna have to articulate these things on easter you don't have time to say that joe biden is a moron if you an easter should be, we are trying to make life better. If you want to have a Christian message, the message of Christianity is to protect everybody and to make conditions in which they feel confident and they're happy.
And we are doing that on the border. We are doing that on the economy.
That is the message because they are. And they keep talking about 70.
They need to say, you know what? This country wants to cut a deal with us. Not a perfect deal, but this country.
And don't deal with the EU at once, Germany or France or UK, any particular country. They need to get three to four big countries to cut deals.
Once they do that, it's like putting your finger in a dam and then your fist and then the whole thing will flood. And they'll all want to cut deals.
But they have a timeline and they don't quite, I don't know if they understand that the Europeans and some of these foreign entities that are running up these huge surpluses or have prohibitive tariffs that are asymmetrical they're counting on the american left to build up such opposition to talk down the stock market to make so much pressure that that he'll cave and he's got to say i'm not going to cave i'm not going to andy kessler had something about that in the wall street journal today caving the motive that you've got it you've got to get this see it through and cut deals if you can they don't have to be perfect do not make the being perfect the enemy of the good just do it do it do it do it well victor we have a lot of we have a lot of new listeners and viewers, and I want them to know about our friends at BestHotGrill.com. They make hot, fast, solar infrared grills with rising prices everywhere.
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We thank the good people from Solaire for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, if we can stay in California a little bit before we head to the final segment of today's episode.
By the way, we're recording on Monday the 21st. This is up on Thursday the 24th.
And we're going to end the show talking about Senator Van Holland. But right now, let's just focus a little more on California.
We have an article about the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics coming up fast. And, you know, L.A.'s a basket case.
Frankly, I should have done a little more research before this episode to see, by the way, what's happening with all the, you know, the burn oh what five uh building permits what here's what's happening in the palisades la looks at that area and they see these 1910 to 1940 built homes some of them on a quarter acre or third acre lot beautiful spanish style adobe and they see one or two people in there, either

inherited or very wealthy people, and they say to themselves, that's not fair.

Why do they get to have that?

Those are, they don't see, oh, this is a part of historic California.

These people work very hard for that.

It's a beautiful neighborhood.

And now it's gone.

And so these people are now applying for permits, And they're trying to rebuild what they had. And the planning commission has two modes of thought about it.
Number one, well, since that house was built, we've changed all these rules. So you have to have this amount of solar, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this.
And some of them, they don't even know. I mean, they haven't built a home and they never built a home.
They inherited it. But okay.
And then the other is, well, you know, you could have three homes on that lot or something like that. And so they don't like the idea of a Pacific Palisades in general.
So there are no hurry to approve it. But the other part of it is they have such strict – I know a couple of builders really well.
You know what they do, Jack? They get a guy with a tripod and a camera, and they film how the house is built, every one of them. You know, I put it on autopilot so that when they get done, know if the person want uh has a complaint he will say look at that nail it wasn't completely put in or he missed two nails here and then they will find him and and that's the type of regulatory uh and when they say we're going to streamline it they can't streamline it and then they have another third problem a lot of the people who are in the planning commission, regulatory commission, they're sort of like the woman who ran the Los Angeles Water and Power.
She made $700,000 a year. She was a DEI hire.
She had no interest that a lot of the hydrants were not functional, that the reservoir was empty. There were no consequences.
and when you have a lot of DI hiring it's not I'm not going to get into race

or ethnicity. It doesn't matter.
It's just an exemption that is extended. It's like when people used to complain about rich kids or alumni that were legacy alumni and they got their grandkid into Harvard or Yale or Princeton, how unfair that was.

But what they were really saying is that kid thinks that he got in even though he didn't have to play by the rules and make the standards. So then he gets exemption.
And once he gets exemption, he has an attitude that he always should get exemption. and why you would take that pernicious model of nepotism

and then transplant it to race, gender, etc. And expect anything different than the consequences.
So when you hire somebody on a basis of their merit, then you can't say to them, well, you have to be fired because on a meritocratic basis, you didn't fill that reservoir. You didn't ensure that all those hydrants were working.
You didn't have a plan to ensure that the people of Pacific Palisades had sufficient water. They didn't get power afterwards.
You can't do that because the person was saying, well, I was hired for particular reasons because of historic racism or discrimination or lack of diversity. So that's what I'm being judged on.
And that's not what you're complaining. I mean, that's not my main job.
And they have a sense of entitlement, and they don't understand that. And so that's part of what's happening in L.A.
The other part is more real and concrete and mundane. And that is, he started out in 2024, Jack, with a $76 billion deficit.
Now, how can he do that? Gavin, I want you to answer this question if I were to talk to you. You once had a $76 billion deficit.
You have the highest income tax rate in the nation at 13.3. At about 60,000, 70,000, you hit people with a 10% rate.
You have about the eighth highest state local sales taxes. You do now have the highest gasoline taxes.
Your property tax was limited to 1% under the Jarvis tax initiative, Prop 13. But with these add-ons that local communities do and special waivers and this and that, you're getting about a point and a half.
But that's not the point. The average house is so high in its appraisal that the income tax rates for new homes are just about like they are in any other place in addition to all these other taxes.
So with all that money coming in, how in the world can you be running a deficit? And when you start looking at the budget, you start to see, well, we have our $15 billion boondoggle called high-speed rail. We got to pour billions of dollars in.
I thought that indigenous people should have their rivers they had 200 years ago. So I wanted to blow up four dams on the climate.
That cost $250 million. I thought we should have $500 million more in health care for illegal aliens.
I wanted to extend Medi-Cal to everybody. So of all the residents, citizen or not, in California, 50% of all the births we pay for, and 40% of all the residents, citizen, legal, who cares, illegal, 40% are on Medicare.
So when they do all of that, there's no money. There is no money.
And what that means when there's no money, there's no margin of error. So you get a fire like Los Angeles, there is no reserve fund to go address it.
There's no mechanism that can cut through the regulation. There's no Pete Wilson or Ronald Reagan or Donald Duckmation said, look, that earthquake, we're going to build that overpass.
Here's the incentives. Get it done.
There's nobody like that and so we're it is kind of sinking into a

third world state it really is it's not going to happen the olympics are going to be a joke and pacific palisades is not going to be rebuilt for years if ever like it was just not going to happen and it's it's high-speed rail is never going to go from bakersfield to sacramento with a lateral over to oakland it's not going to happen they don't have the expertise to do it they don't have the money they don't have the skilled people to do it that's beyond if they if you said to these people in california we want you to build a california aqueduct like your great-grandparents did, our grandparents did in the 1963, 60, they couldn't do it. They don't have the ability to do it, not quickly, not efficiently.
Right. It's kind of like, you know, to take a historical parallel, it's kind of like the Mycenaean Lion Gate at Mycenae, you know, 20 tons or something, these monumental.
And then you had the end of that culture. And during the Dark Ages, say, I don't know, 700 or 800 B.C., that's the beginning of the city-state.
Maybe even earlier, 1,000 people would walk around and say, wow, what is that thing? Who built that? Oh, I know who they were. Those were gods.
That was Hercules did that. Or maybe it was, I don't know, Odysseus or somebody or Zeus came down.
But somebody I can't explain because I couldn't do it. And that's what we're kind of getting at when I drive and I look at San Luis Reservoir.
I look at the aqueduct. I think there must have been some kind of semi-deity here.
Who were these people who did this? Wow. I was driving the 99.
We were driving the 99 for 220 miles. And, you know, it was like, it was built when there was about 14 or million people and now there's 41.
But there's sections of it where there's just it collapses from three to two lanes and i was thinking wow they had two lanes each direction when you only had 14 million people and we have 41 we still have two lanes but we we depend on on their uh we depend on their expertise and we still have the aqueduct we We can't really maintain it. And we haven't built a reservoir for water storage since 1983 outside of downtown LA system.
But who were these people? I always say to myself that when I go look at Folsom Dam or Millerton I go, God, who were these people? Maybe we should start having mythologies. We'll be oral bards and we'll make oh i'm gonna tell you of the great millerton god oh and he fought with the great god who built the pin stocks over the grapes who were they they came down from mount olympus now they had superpowers the history channel has these you know shows on ancient aliens.
Maybe there's some sync here with explaining things. Anyway, Victor, we've got one more quick section to hold today, and we're going to get your thoughts, further thoughts, on Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland, the man who is visiting El Salvador.

And there are more in his wake.

And we'll get your thoughts on this idiocy when we come back from these final important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show Doing my paperwork here, Victor Let's see, Van Hollen This is his moment in the sun Today's Monday the 21st I think he was on many of the Sunday shows yesterday You know, the media main shows He, as everyone knows He went to El Salvador to visit the illegal immigrant who he dubs the Maryland man very interesting Scott Jennings on on CNN who's terrific I think he's very good yes it's like if you're explaining how you and this is the politics of this if you're explaining how you, and this is the politics of this,

if you're explaining how you came to be sipping margaritas with an MS-13 gangbanger

who has lived illegally in the United States for 14 years before he's finally deported,

you're losing, okay? You're losing. You're losing optically.
You're losing politically.

So your thoughts other than, I just want to add, Victor, a note here that

I misplaced my piece of paper. Oh, here we go.
More Democrat lawmakers are visiting El Salvador on Abrego Garcia's behalf. They are representatives Yasemin Ansari of Arizona, Maxine Dexter of Oregon, Maxwell Frost, Florida, and Robert Garcia of California.
This is a priority for the Democratic Party. I mean, more go.
Why don't you all go visit? It's only going to help the Republicans. But your thoughts, Victor? What was the alternative? The alternative was let's make another kickboxing video where we punch the air and say, you know, or we're going to We've got eight senators that use the word s-h-i-t or maybe we can have spartacus another guy can say hey that worked i'm going to do 29 hours no this is all performance art and i asked you a question jack did you know who this guy was the senator von hall i never heard of him did you no i just know they had to have two in the state but this is his moment in the sun so he it worked for him right all of a sudden he's on the talk shows and his way of thinking margaritas margaritas m13 m13 i don't care i'm on tv and i hate donald trump And that's all he cares about.
And they say to him, Senator, the reason that you know are now, you're not famous, you're infamous. The reason that people are aware of your name and who you are is because of something you did that was stupid and wrong and amoral.
I don't care. They know me, don't me? No, there's no such thing as bad press.
There's only press. That's how he thinks.
And I am making a statement. I almost think, almost, Jack, that they should just take the guy and ask Bukale, the president, would you just deport him to the United States for one day and just fly him in and then say, oh, you were illegal.
You got to go back out now. And because that's what's going to happen to him.
He can't he can't not given his record, get a green card. Nobody would give him a green card that was saying everybody just uses this word gang.
And I got to be very careful. but one quarter from where I'm speaking, about three years ago, there was a shootout, not a shootout, but a near shootout between a person in the Norteños gang, Sireños, and a person that he thought wrongly was in the Sireños.
The person, unfortunately, or fortunately, wasn't in the gang that he thought, but he went over there with a revolver and tried to shoot right near me. And a member of my family was in between the two, the shooting.
And the cops came out and you get a text that this person was arrested. He went to jail that night and then then he was back out.
They let him out that night. And I saw the person who was in the gang member, because he was renting a house an eighth of a mile from me.
And I came home once from Fresno, and that person in the same car was trying to break into my barn. And I ran out there.
And he had kicked my dog who was screaming. And he was chasing.
I got a bar. I didn't know where he was.
But he broke down. He almost broke the whole door.
But he broke into it. And he was a known Norteños gang member.
And he actually went over to the neighbor and thought that guy was an opposite gang member who wasn't. And tried to go into his house armed.
So what I'm getting at is this is not funny when people say, ah, he's just a gang member. No, no, you don't understand that Norteños, Sereños, Trin, M13, these gangs reflect particular conditions in Venezuela, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, southern Mexico especially.
And you have no idea what those conditions are. And so when you see those people, and you can tell what they are, whether tattoos and things, you have to be very careful how you look at them, what you say to them.
And I think I related that. I was in the parking lot about right after the election and four people jumped out of a car and they had gang insignia and they yelled at me.
And it was just that they watched Newsmax and they wanted to say that they agreed with me on the election. But I don't want to give any more information.
I liked them them but it was clear that there was some gang affiliations there but my point is you've got to be very very careful when you have that many people here so it's not just we have people all over the world that are waiting from india from europe from from indonesia all over different races different everything. And they want to come.
And given that demand to come here, what is so hard about making it legal only and just telling somebody, we have a little rule here. If you came here illegally, you have to go home.
And if we haven't got to you yet, we just ask four things. Don't wear gang insignia and hang out with M13 members at Home Depot.
Don't have tattoos that can be arguably gang insignia. Don't have your girlfriend go to the authorities on two occasions, say you beat the crap out of her.
Do not drive with an expired license and do not drive a car that people with legitimate conjectures and law enforcement think that you're trafficking. That's all we ask.
Just don't do that. Because we have a guy with a Ph.D.
in computer engineering from India that wants to come. But we don't need you.
And that's the argument that Americans are making. They don't want that.
They just don't want it. And the left thinks that that's going to be a winning.
It's not going to be a winning argument. The main problem, the existential problem, is people cannot figure out if he is here illegally and if he came illegally and he was not he didn't go to a hearing and clear it up or he didn't get it.
Why is what right does he have to be here since he's in violation of the law? And since there's 12 million of them from the Biden era and another 15 million, how in the world are you going to have 27 million hearings?

You can't.

Did anybody have 27 million hearings to let them in?

No.

They just said, we don't give a blank about American law,

and Joe Biden is going to let us in,

and we're just going to swarm the border.

And now all of a sudden they're saying,

oh, it's like this Mr. Garcia says,

you know, I came in blank you, screw you. I'm coming into your country.
I'm going to do whatever the blank I want. Now it's hello, I am Mr.
Garcia. And I don't think I was given the full array of jurisprudence.
And I expect to be the recipients of legal counsel and all of the powers of the American constitutional system. And I insist on that.
That's what he's acting as if he is. And it doesn't make any sense.
I don't think the American people are going to go for it. Everybody says it was in Powerline not too long ago by a place that we have a lot of admiration for, Jack.
John Henderaker, excuse me. He said he thought in passing that they were going to lose the midterms.
And he didn't mean that necessarily as a snide remark on Trump. He just said historically you lose the midterms.
I think the only time in recent memory where a party has actually picked up two seats was after 9-11 in the 2002 midterms at George Bush before the Iraq invasion picked up a couple of seats. But I'm not sure that's going to happen.
I think you're going to I think that there if they cut a trade deal or they get a lasting ceasefire in Ukraine or they get a lot of investment and they avoid a recession, I think that the alternative is so abhorrent that they could just stay even or even pick up some seats. I really do.
We've never seen anything like this. And now they want to go down.
More people want to go down so they can get on the Sunday talk shows and see this guy. I don't think these are the Emma Lazarus poem subjects of the tired and poor, but they're certainly being made to be heroes by.
It's like, it's almost as like I'm going to champion this person but i'm not going to live anywhere near him because deep down in my evil soul i have a deep suspicion that the guy that i'm insisting is not a gang member was a gang member and he might still be a gang member and if he's not he knows gang members and i don't want him in my neighborhood but you that's okay you're ill You're illiberal. You're small-minded.
You're right-wing. But you're going to live next to a gang member.
Yeah. I have an available daughter.
Please marry him, you know? Yeah. So, hey, Victor, we're cutting it a little shorter today because of certain scheduling restrictions.
So we're going to conclude, as we normally do, though, with thanking folks for leaving comments on so many platforms, Rumble, Apple, Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, YouTube. I mean, a YouTube video now, one of Victor's podcasts, will have 700, 800 comments.
Thanks, folks, for doing that. We try to plow through them and read them.
I'm going to read one. This is from a YouTube comment.
Boy Wonder 4169, who wrote, Victor, great work. Please keep it up.
You're keeping free speech alive and real for Californians, thankfully. You've always had a great way with comparing history to present times and making history meaningful for us in real time.
So many more of the same are to be found. And thanks, folks, for that.
I also want to thank folks who have subscribed to Civil Thoughts. That's the free weekly email newsletter.
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So, Victor, as ever, terrific.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Thank you, Jack.

Thank you, as usual.

I'm just along for the ride, my friend.

And we hope next week you'll be even better than all those apples and medication you're on.

This antibiotic is the key.

After seven weeks, it'll work. I have to think – I have a couple of trips, so maybe it'll – the change of climate.
Thank you, everybody, for watching and listening as – and I hope we can – you mentioned all the comments and it's I would say that

the correspondence that I'm getting

is by a magnitude of five.

And I feel bad because I can't answer it anymore.

So I feel really bad.

I used to try to answer emails and packages and stuff.

I can't.

There's just, it's a ton of it.

Well, if you become Catholic, you could buy Locate, you could be two victors. You can do that.
Oh my God. All right.
Thanks, Victor. Thanks, everyone.
We'll see you next time. Thank you.
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