The Faustian Bargain

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host.

Our star and namesake is Victor Davis Hansen.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, best-selling author, his current bestseller is the end of everything.

His forthcoming, I swear, bestseller will be the old bestseller, The Case for Trump, the new edition, out in early August.

Victor has a website, an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHanson.com is the web address.

I'll tell you more towards the end of the show why you should be subscribing.

We are recording on the

6th of July, Saturday, July 6th.

This particular episode will be up on July 9th.

So we're talking, we're going to get Victor's views about the big thing that happened late yesterday, Friday the 5th.

That was George Stephanopoulos's ABC News late night interview with Joe Biden.

How did Joe perform?

Did he save himself?

And then we have some reaction from the Biden family itself.

We'll get Victor's views on those things and plenty more.

The British elections will get all this rocking and rolling right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor,

20-minute or thereabouts interview.

Frankly, I don't know how anything could have salvaged Biden's campaign.

I think it could have only kept things flat or made it worse.

You watched the interview.

Are things worse for Joe Biden the day after?

Should he never have done this?

Well, he doesn't have a choice, Jack.

This is worse than Watergate.

I think we should just call it Biden Gate.

Because with Watergate, the reputation of the dashing Woodward and Berdenstein, the investigative, fearless reporter, that truce, that was all hatched, that mythology.

And now it's formally ended.

I mean, for most of us that are listening, we knew it was over.

30 years ago, 40 years ago, but missed thy heart.

But now it's dead because the media was central to this conspiracy, this Faustian bargain that was made in 2020.

Everybody, I've talked about it before, everybody knows what it is.

Good old Joe Biden from Scranton,

Jill Biden get their wish, narcissists both.

They get to be president, they get the power, the prestige.

All they got to do by these puppeteers

directives is

fulfill the ceremonial aspects which they love so well.

And then the third-term Obamaites give the agenda, and they're not responsible for the agenda.

Joe is, the moderate who's going to unite us, that mythology.

How many never Trumpers, Jack, did we hear?

Was it Liz Cheney?

Was it

people at the bulwark?

Was it Bill Crystal who told us that Biden was going to bring back normality and unite the American people?

He'd never united anybody before he was non compos mentes.

But anyway, that was the bargain.

I've called it the Faustian bargain.

And now it's over with because the conspiracy could not be maintained.

He was so bad and so decrepit that

he was forced into an early debate, an historic debate before either party had nominated their presidential candidate.

Okay.

And he thought he was going to be cute with his little Clinice would, come on, man,

I'll take him on to Trump and then slanting it by establishing the rules.

Trump couldn't speak, cut off the mics, hardcore left-wing moderators like Jake Tapper and Dan Abash had a whole history of hatred expressed toward Donald Trump.

Okay.

And Trump surprised everybody, cunning that he is.

He's a cunning guy.

And he said, you know what?

He's deteriorated.

And this is forced on him.

And I'm going to do it.

And everybody advised him not to.

And he didn't care what the rules.

He wanted to get Biden out in front of the nation because he knew what was going on, and he knew that the people in the Democratic Party knew things that the rest of us didn't because the media had kept it quiet.

Okay,

so now

there's a couple of things to think about, Joe Biden.

First of all, this Faustian bargain is over with.

Everybody knows what it's about,

and it's over with because, number one, the agenda, once you gave the Obamaite Susan Rice and

Anita Dunn and her husband and Ron Klein and

the Clintonite Obamaite left, Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken,

Samantha Power, you name them all.

You give them the power, they enacted an agenda.

And

it destroyed their popularity, such as it was.

Open borders, crime, hyperinflation, destruction of deterrence, humiliation of Rod at Kabul, Ukrainian-Israeli wars, the green fanaticism.

Nobody wants it.

So that was number one that destroyed this Faustian bargain.

Number two was

Joe

couldn't fulfill.

I mean, he can get elected because of January 6th and the changeover from balloting from 30% showing up on Election Day in most states to, excuse me, 70% down to 30% as male and

early balloting dominated.

That was not good for Trump.

But my point is this.

Joe Biden was never a nice guy.

He ran on dividing people.

You should go back and look at that, everybody.

Go listen to that tape in 1988 when he's confronted about

stealing Neil Kinnock's campaign speeches.

Yeah, that's, I don't care.

I'm smarter than anybody in this room.

And I was the top of my class.

It was all lies.

And they let him go then, but then he quit.

He even ran kind of jack in 1984, kind of sort of, maybe.

His name was mentioned with Mondale.

And then he ran again in 2008.

And that was the famous

Barack Obama's the first black, clean, articulate.

presidential candidate.

And he blew up very quickly.

So he can never, he never had any success as a candidate other than being the good old Joe from Scranton that got elected in Delaware

every election.

The second thing about him was he's utterly corrupt.

And the only time that he had been out of government where he could operate freely and without worry

was that period from the end of the Obama vice presidency, that would would be 2017 to the end of Donald Trump's term.

And we know that that's when a lot of the money came in.

Those deals, though, were created and sealed when he was vice president for a lot bars.

So he was crooked.

Any of us in this listening audience, if you get income

and it's distributed, and they write on the bottom of the check, loan repayment, and you get audited, and that's that's a sizable amount of money to be audited.

They're going to ask you for the loan document.

You just can't do that.

You just can't get a bunch of money from somebody and not report it as income and have the person write loan repayment.

They want to say, well, where was the loan?

But not with the Bidens.

So then he goes around the nation saying, pay your fair share while his son is up for tax fraud.

And he's a tax cheat, no doubt.

So he wasn't, he's corrupt.

He wasn't a nice guy.

Of all the people in the Senate, I'm not trying to defend Donald Trump's randiness, but Joe Biden was a little different.

Wasn't just Tara Reid and walking in front of the Secret Service allegedly naked.

He had some

sick fixation for violating the private space of women.

And everybody knew it and they covered it up.

And he finally it came out and he had to apologize in the 2020 said,

old Joe from a different generation that didn't really understand.

That was crazy.

But

while he was president, he turkey gobbled that little girl's neck in Finland.

He would call out, go, you're cute.

He would hug people.

That picture of the, was it Kavanaugh?

Whose daughter was that nominee that he did?

She just kind of

the earth open up and swallow me, please.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then you have to superimpose that onto the hunter laptop depravity, the, the,

I guess, Frank Biden,

nude selfies that ended up in a gay porn.

Nude swimming in the pool.

Swimming in the pool.

The daughter's diary, Ashley, saying that she took showers too long, inappropriate with her father.

So there's all these things are coming together.

And I'm not saying that they come out explicitly, but they form the character of Joe Biden.

They form the character.

That's why he goes on that Stephanopoulos says, and just outright lies, because he is a crook and he's a pervert

and

he's a mean,

mean person.

When he was campaigning and anybody who

questioned him, he called them fat.

He called him a lying dogface pony soldier.

He called him a junkie.

He said, You ain't black.

That's the way he is.

That is who he is.

And now the blinders are off.

So when he gave that Phantom of the Offer speech, it was natural for him, semi-fascist, ultra-mega.

They asked him during the debate, what do you feel about the half the country that voted for Trump?

Well, if they voted for Trump, I don't have money, I want anything with him.

He's a mean old guy, and now the veneer

is off.

The media ruse is over.

The Faustian bargain has collapsed that they tried to pull.

And this is worse, as I said, Biden gate is worse than Watergate because the media did not try to expose this.

They tried to conceal it.

They tried to conceal it.

And now they're spinning and spinning and spinning.

The ones that tried to conceal it are either doing one of two things.

They've defected and they're saying, well, I didn't, I wasn't given when I said all that,

when I was Joe Scarborough and I said all that,

I'll just take a little hiatus for a while and recalibrate.

Or they're digging deeper because they're invested in the lie.

Well, I just talked to Joe.

He seems fine.

But George Stephanopoulos then, who has been one of the great perpetrators of the lie, because he's not really, never really was a journalist.

He was always a political operative.

So he had that interview and the questions were fair enough.

He had no career if he didn't ask them because he was under suspicion as a toady

who had participated in this conspiracy, which he had.

So he asked him, are you, you know, are you being seen by doctors?

Have you had a cognitive analysis?

And he just, and then he didn't have no follow-up.

It was like, well, I asked the questions in front of the nation.

No, you didn't.

It was taped.

We don't know what degree it was edited.

You didn't have any follow-up

when he said that he gets tested every day.

Well, why didn't you ask him specifically, could you give me the name of one doctor

or one test that I could look at?

And you do that.

He'd never asked questions like that in the follow-up.

And

so.

And Victor, we've seen him come prepared to clobber.

when Peter Schweitzer was on.

Yeah, it was always gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

Not Joe Biden, because he was a perpetrator in the lie that Joe was old Joe

from Scranton that was an independent thinker and was going to unite the country and was a moderate and

was slurred as kind of creepy, which wasn't true.

And he was slurred as senile, which wasn't true.

And he was slurred as corrupt, which he wasn't true.

They were all true.

And so now they have it.

And now he's bleeding.

He's hemorrhaging.

And they can't staunch the bleeding.

And so

if you think about it and you game it,

Jack, all, all the alternatives are bad.

So if you just go through them very quickly, Joe says, screw this.

I'm going to stay on the ticket.

I'm going to be, do you hear Doris Kearns?

What's her name?

Good one the other day?

I could not believe it.

She said, well, FDR, she was very very cagey she was on the radio with neil cavuto and she was very cagey and not predicting what he was going to do i'm a historian yeah you're a historian who've also plagiarized you didn't tell us that right but she did yeah kicked off pbs for a while for that her husband was a hack for johnson yeah so anyway she gets on and says she's not going to predict but then she says well you know fdr they said he was He was decrepit or he was very ill, but he showed him.

He said, you know, I can, it was very funny how he handled the complaints against his age when he ran for his fourth term.

He's, you know, he talked about his dog.

You can attack me, but I get mad when you attack my dog.

That was really funny.

Yeah, Doris.

And you know what?

He died 11 weeks after he took the oath of office.

11 weeks.

And unlike Joe Biden, he didn't, he was forced to do a very important thing.

He got rid of Henry Wallace, his

Kamala Harris of the age.

That was his vice president.

And he had not done that, and he didn't want to do it.

That was Eleanor's favorite.

He was forced to by the big city, New York guys, Chicago, big city machines.

He was forced by the southern segregationists that hated commies.

He was forced by the Tody media.

And they came to him and they said, FDR,

We don't know what your health's going to be in like 1945 and we're in a war.

So you've got to get Henry Wallace.

He's pro-Soviet.

Get him off and bring in this guy, Harry Truman.

We won't give him any power.

Nobody knows who he is, but he's kind of conservative and he's a southerner and he's from a neo-Confederate and he'll, he'll give us a lock on the southern.

And that's what they did.

And then Truman surprised everybody and was a pretty good president.

But the point I'm making is had they kept Henry Wallace, he would have been making the decisions about the Okinawa campaign of April 1st that in the middle of it.

I mean, on on the 6th, Roosevelt died, but that thing went on for two months.

And Henry Wallace would have been present.

He would have been making the decision about whether to drop the bomb.

I don't know who he'd drop it on, Henry Wallace.

He would be at the Potsdam July Conference on the Future of the Post-War World.

He would be making the decisions on Uncle Joe Stalin and what our attitude toward the Soviets was going to be after they gobbled up Eastern Europe against all of the agreements at Potsdam and Yalta.

So

that's one scenario that he

just sticks in like Roosevelt does, and he gets rid of the vice president.

I don't think he can do that because this is a different age.

You can't get rid of a black woman.

This is like nemesis, his hubis.

I'm going to get a black woman.

I'm going to get a black woman after George Floyd died because I'm going to demagogue this and I'm going to be more woke than anybody.

Then he looked around and thought, okay,

is it Stacey Abrams, Maxine Waters, one of the squad?

Who is it?

It's the only one is Camilla, but

she's incompetent.

And there must have been something in the back of his mind, or maybe the evil Jill mind, because Jill can't stand Camilla Harris because she called Joe a racist in the primary debates.

But it was very funny because

it was kind of an Agnew appointment.

Remember Nixon?

He knew that Agnew

was kind of an undistinguished governor of Maryland.

In those days, to be governor of Maryland was sort of in the, it was, you were going to be corrupt or you were going to have to be anti-corrupt.

I don't know how corrupt Agnew was, but anyway.

He was corrupt enough that he.

Yeah.

And when they turned him loose and nattering nabobs of negatism and all that stuff, that you know that great, you know, that great New York columnist that wrote all agnes

pat buchanan uh pat buchanan the other guy too he was really oh the guy oh yeah the new york times writer yeah he was a great he was i really liked him

well anyway yeah anyway

so

that was his kind of uh insurance policy so he can run he can't get rid of her kick her off himself and he will lose and he will lose big i think and he will be blamed.

He will be the last of the old white male pseudo-moderates of the Democratic Party.

He will destroy the last

vestiges of the old Clinton, 100,000

cops, school uniforms, night basketball, I'm a moderate, that kind of stuff.

And it will be a purely Jacobin post-Obama party because of, and they're never going to forgive him if he doesn't, if he goes all the way.

Or

he can,

you know, he can win.

And I don't see that happening at all.

I don't see that man can happen.

Of course, they have this problem.

They're basically angry that he's going to lose.

They're not angry he's destroying the country.

In other words, the Democrats and all these donors are saying, oh, my God, we're going to lose.

All my initiatives aren't going to be passed.

I won't have an inside nod on how the country works.

But they don't say, oh, my God.

They're not like the 1944 people who said, hey, FDR, we're in a mess.

This guy could lose us the war.

He could empower Joe Stalin.

You know, they don't care about that.

They don't have any problem with Joe being president senile.

They just want, they're afraid that his senality will either lose him the election or he'll do a Roosevelt and drop dead and give them Kamala.

So if you go through all of those, if you step down,

and I think he may have to step down given his

geometric rate of decline,

you're in unchartered waters.

Everybody writes a column every day about what's going to happen.

They don't know how to do it because I don't know how they can, I don't think Ohio is going to let him on the ballot.

It's too late.

It'll be too late.

If they have the convention, are they going to move it up?

And the delegates are going to be released.

If they release the delegates and

the money that that comes with them,

I don't know how Camilla Harris would fare, but I'm almost sure that the Democratic hierarchy will not nominate her.

And that would be, you know,

they wheel out James Clyburn, who's just, you know, I kind of admire the guy because he's honest.

He doesn't mince words.

It's black 24-7,

alpha to omega.

Everything they ask him is about black chauvinism.

And he comes, they wheel him out now about every hour on left-wing TV.

And he says,

and he thinks that's a racist thing to do.

It actually isn't.

Does anybody believe right now that if

Kamala Harris was a dynamic Barack Obama or Hycombe Jeffries, that they would get rid of him?

No.

It's not race.

It's her incompetence, not her race, Clyburn.

You should remember that.

So I don't know what they're going to do.

And they're going to have a convention in Chicago.

They're going to have, if they get, if he drops out, it's going to be chaos inside and it's going to be violent bedlam outside is Antifa, BLM.

The Hamas people smell weakness and chaos inside and they're going to go crazy.

They know in a big left-wing city, they're exempt from any prosecution.

They looked at 2020, 14,000 arrest.

Everybody was let go.

They're not at the Capitol.

They're not, you know, deplorables or redeemables.

So they just assume that the crazy Mayor Johnson in Chicago and the crazy DA will let them do whatever they want.

And they're right.

So it's every, you walk through those scenarios and it's lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose.

They only have one and only one slight chance.

And that's if Alvin Bragg's conviction, if you get the judge, Mershon, if he sentences Donald Trump to, you know, 10 10 years in prison.

There'll be a lot of pressure on him to give him a prison sentence, even though it'd be outrageous.

But I don't see anything else.

Everything they've done to Trump has increased his popularity.

And Trump, I'll finish this rant by saying Trump has been very cunning.

He understood that gag order helped him, the judge.

He didn't talk that much about,

he didn't violate the gag order.

He understood that the debate rules, even though they were in, he just understood if I can get him there,

it's in my favor to have the mic cut off because I will look sober and judicious, and I can't interrupt him because I can't control myself.

I'd like to interrupt him because he's going to lie about me and insult me.

And that's what he's being trained to do, to call me an alley cat, morals of an alley cat, which he did, call him a convicted felon, and he would have got, but he couldn't because they cut the mic.

And then he understood that the moderators would either have to do one of two things.

They would have to be their natural biased, and that would make him look good, or

they would have to play fair.

And so

it was very smart what Trump did.

And he's a much better candidate.

He's just kind of, he's much more disciplined.

I hope he can stay disciplined because this is his election to lose now.

He can do something historic.

He can do a Reagan 1984 or a Nixon 72.

It's all lining up for him.

All he has to do is don't tweet.

This person's a horrible, evil guy.

I hate this.

Don't do any of that.

Just keep cool.

Don't take the bait with these commercials.

They're going to run against him.

And he could win

the Senate and the House.

And he could pick some justices too.

I don't know what the one thing that's going to come up we haven't talked about, Jack, is Justice Sotomayer doesn't look like she's in good health.

And they remember Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, and they're still bitter about that.

And

I don't think Justice Sotomir will make it another five years during the Trump administration if he should be elected.

So I think there'll be a lot of pressure on her

from now until January 20th, regardless of the election, to drop out.

And it's going to be very tricky if she does,

because the Biden

Obama nexus has been so critical of cinema and

mansion.

And without them, they don't have the votes, even with Camilla Harris, I think, to

get a replacement approved.

So we'll see.

It's going to be a mess.

And this mess, remember, is when once you

once you start to weave these

deceptions, you just have to keep doing it.

And once you, it's all based on that fundamental original lie of 2020, that he was in good shape and that he would serve as an empty vessel with a moderate veneer for a Jacobin agenda.

And that was all deception.

And they're paying a huge price for it now.

And it's not going to end.

Trump should just be quiet.

This thing is just like a Greek tragedy.

It's just let him let it go through the whole 1500 lines and watch these people.

Every day they lie, they lie, they turn on each other.

They just watch it, Mr.

Trump.

Come on, Mr.

Trump, President Trump, watch this thing unfold.

Do not stop them digging.

They're digging their own grave.

Let them dig deeper.

Well, and not only, Victor, the headlines we're seeing now about the political leadership of the Democratic Party

trying to plot this out, as you also mentioned, the certain riots that are going to be happening in our streets during the

Democratic Convention.

And I would expect not only in Chicago, but elsewhere.

And who knows what we'll see as we get closer to the.

I think we know what we saw.

We saw a little bit of it in your hometown, New York, on 4th of July.

Weren't they burning the American flag and screaming all these horrible epithets about the country under no circumstances they want to leave?

Got all these Middle Eastern guests, Visa card holders, green card holders, and what do they do on the holy day, the holy secular day, I should say, of America, the founding,

signing of the Declaration of Independence.

They get out in the street and scream and yell about how awful the country is.

They under no circumstances will leave and go back to their promised homeland.

And that's

a foretaste of what we're going to see at their convention.

Who wants to be a tourist coming to New York City the day after the elections?

You know, and Trump wins.

Oh, the city's going to be a hellhole.

But hey, Victor, I have something else to bring up related to

your decrepit comment.

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Victor, you mentioned decrepit before, and

you just talked about the 2020 spin, but this

line broadly, oh, the last six months, the last few weeks, we've noticed a decline.

I mean, come come on, this guy campaigned from a basement four years ago.

So this there's nothing new about

his decreptitude.

It's just gotten far worse, but it certainly was evident and noticeable when he was running then and covered up then.

The cover-up of Biden's mental

collapse has been going on for several years.

But on that point also, Victor,

do you think there's a certain culpability of

the American electorate?

Yes, absolutely.

Jack, I'm speaking to someone in California.

Nobody put their gun to the head and said they had to vote in people like Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Willie Brown, Camilla Harris.

They did it.

They got what they, and now they're saying, oh, my God.

You go to the waiting room and there's all these illegal.

It doesn't work.

Oh, my God.

High-speed rail has spent almost 20 billion and it hasn't laid a foot of track in 15 years.

Oh my God, the 99 freeway is a death trap.

Oh my God, I-5 is a death trap.

Oh my God, have you been to the Oakland airport or downtown Oakland?

It's Escape from Los Angeles 1980s movie or escape from New York.

It's just open smash and grab and theft.

Oh my God.

They don't even have a Cal Fire has just let these fires burn.

I'm looking out the window right now at a smoky fire near Pine Flat.

They have no for, they don't let, there's only two forest companies left.

They drove all the others out.

They gleaned and cleaned the forest.

Oh my God, they won't even touch the Monterey Shale formation that would give us,

you know, cheap natural gas.

They're going to ban natural gas.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

We got 20% of the.

Our poverty rate is 21%.

Oh, one out of every three welfare holders.

That's what they did.

It's a bunch of very wealthy people, and they're immune from the consequences of their policies.

And we're the lab rats, the middle class.

And the lab rats have left.

And then you have the subsidized poor, and that's California.

And

I don't know.

In the last

72 hours, I witnessed the following.

I was driving on

my street,

Mountain View.

You don't need to tell it at a mate I won't tell the street major crosswalk I was going through a green light with a car parallel it was two two lanes in each direction and some guy went about 90 miles an hour ran the red light on his side to our right I was about three feet I was in the slow right lane the guy in the left light was a little ahead he went right almost hit that guy's bumper he was two feet ahead of me went through

and

apparently the car the other two lanes he almost hit him so he hit the brakes jack and he went head over heels and destroyed his i and i pulled over and you know a lot of people rushed over there that were closer to him and then i thought wow and then i went to get

uh

i went to

get some groceries and I'm standing in line and this woman,

I mean, she literally took out five EBT cards.

Five.

Oh, no, we're sorry.

This one is max.

Oh,

okay.

Here's another one, WIC car.

Here's another one.

And they have all these little bundles, you know, all the food, and then comes the

teeth white whitener and the pet food and all the rest of stuff.

The vitals, yeah,

you pay for cash, and then the lottery tickets.

Then you go out and a community that has 13%,

I mean,

per capita income,

13 to 14%.

And I could not believe it.

I counted

nine club crew cab trucks, Dodge,

GM, Chevy, and Ford.

Those are $80,000,

maybe.

And then I counted three BMWs at this place.

And so something in the state, I don't know what it is.

And then, of course,

it's been July 4th.

So, here we are in the 6th, and we still have illegal fireworks going on every night, every single night.

And in the broad category of California fireworks out in the country, it's called shooting automatic weapons at night.

So, I've already lost two panels that have been shot.

I only live a mile and a half, but apparently they don't know that a.22 long rifle will go about a mile and a half.

And they're not shooting long rifles.

They're shooting center fire, you know, 243 caliber, 222 caliber.

But all the dogs have burrowed under the house every night.

It's just,

this is an insane state.

And then I look at the news and we see that in Oakland, they went crazy.

They went into a.76 station.

I don't know if you saw that yesterday.

They had the owner on look and they just looted, they not only looted it, the smash and grab cloud, but they destroyed it.

They destroyed the shelving.

They destroyed everything the guy had built.

And

40 minutes, no police.

You think Gavin Newson's going to go over there and see him?

No.

Yeah.

No.

So this state is,

and that's along another ramp because who voted these people in?

And now that they're upset because even the upper, upper middle class can't be shielded from their votes, the consequences of their vote.

They won't let

the Supreme Court that the left has appointed and the legislature, they won't let

things like

you have to have a larger requirement to pass new taxes.

I guess we have 13.3 income tax.

They want to go up to 16.

And they won't put a crime bill on the, because they know it'll pass,

that revokes this $950 is scot-free.

I mean,

is it a proposed referendum?

Yeah,

but they won't even let people try to spread the referendum because they know it'll pass.

My community, I bet it would get 80% support in this community where I live because people are sick of it.

So I don't know what,

you know, the other thing I've noticed is,

and I said this before, almost because of this state is so highly regulated and so expensive, there is a huge black market.

I mean, it is huge.

In a 10-mile radius,

you can buy flowers, you can buy milkshakes, you can buy drinks from Mexico, you can buy shovels, you can buy mattresses, you can go to one of the biggest swap meets in the world, three miles away every Sunday.

I mean, gosh, you can buy, you can get every food you want in a roadside canteen.

And it's all

you ever see a sheriff's car there.

Oh, yeah, I do.

You do?

And they're buying food,

but no sales tax.

Right.

And no, I don't think any income tax.

And then

I would say once every 10 days, somebody comes in my yard and wants to sell me something, just random.

And this can be, I guess, hot stuff like, I don't know, farm equipment or whatever.

And then in addition to that,

and

this is what

really gets me is that

I guess I spent,

I won't tell you how much I spent, but I'm still paying for it.

But every single person that I hired came to me and said, I'm not going to work unless I get cash.

And I said, well, do I get cash?

Because I pay about 55% of my income with a 13.3 rate and 37 federal plus Obamacare plus FICA payroll tax plus property tax plus gas sales.

Do I?

Well, that's your problem.

I'm just not going to work.

I'm not going to work.

Sorry.

Every one of them.

Yeah.

And then sometimes I'd say no and no, and then, you know, you'd have to do stuff.

And I would

go into the bank and I would say, this is money.

I want to know.

I'm not a drug dealer.

I'm taking out $3,000 today.

This is to pay somebody.

And then I would make them file a receipt.

And I couldn't write it off because I'm honest.

I mean, I live in a farm and I didn't write off anything because, you know, even the barn I use as a studio.

So I'm not going to, you know, when a small barn was falling down, I don't use it anymore as an ag thing.

So I was really honest.

And I said to every single person, here is a receipt.

I am not writing this off, but you should report this as income because I have already taken it.

And none of them

So you get double your wages.

So, my point is: California's got so many problems.

We've got a multi-billion dollar black market,

and I don't think they're ever going to.

If they stop, if they clamp down on that, they'd have a revolution.

They really would.

And I don't blame some of the people that are desperate, but

you see things.

And then this morning, I went in to

drop off.

My wife was a

meticulous recycler bottles plastic etc

so i have all i take all these bags to the local recycler and i just give it to them right

and so there was this poor hispanic person who didn't he looked like it was it was 109 yesterday jack 109

and it was about 2 30 and i was filling up with gas and he came in to the gas station as usual and they always do they take apart the all the trash cans right

And try to find one or two bottles.

So I just happened, this was yesterday.

And

I gave him some, I had a bag yesterday, and I had bottles today.

It was too heavy, so I took it to the recycler.

But yesterday, I gave him a big bag.

I just said, wow, he's here.

I won't have to go to the recycler.

Here's, you know, all plastic bottles, probably worth 30 bucks.

So we got all happy, but he had three of them on his back.

And then he was walking down the side of the road at 108 degrees.

And everybody was passing him.

And so I started thinking, I said, that guy,

he's probably, he's illegal.

He doesn't speak a word of English.

I don't think his, I think he was from way deep in Mexico.

His shoes were all torn up.

And I thought, wow, he's doing something good for a change.

He's trying to recycle because he didn't just take stuff out that wasn't his at the service station.

He was picking up, you know, cans and bottles along the side of the road.

So I thought, so I was driving into town and I saw him walking maybe a quarter mile.

So I pulled over and I gave him $10.

And he was so scared that I was going to turn him in.

I don't know.

But that's what you see every single day in California.

It's just chaos, chaos, chaos.

And that's why people are leaving.

And you're right, this all started this talk because we voted for them.

I didn't, and our listeners didn't, but they have family members as I did and friends who did vote for all this.

Yeah.

Folks, believe your lion eyes, right?

Hey, Victor, we have a little more to talk about the Biden family related to

the Stephanophilus interview and the debate from last week.

And we'll get your thoughts on

on the Corleons of Delaware right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show again.

We are recording on Saturday, July 6th.

And I do want to encourage our listeners, particularly our,

did I miss a syllable there?

Particularly our new ones, to visit Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

Go to VictorHanson.com.

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So that's the Blade of Perseus,

VictorHanson.com.

Victor,

today

there's an article from

the Daily Mail

headline.

If I could scroll my phone here.

Oh, by the way, Bill Sapphire was the.

I really liked his column.

I mean, I know that he was a political operative, but that guy was a very, he wrote a lot of columns on grammar, syntax, style, as well.

Yeah.

Astute.

President Joe Biden's family.

damaging their family's damaging response to Donald Trump debate fiasco as they seek to, quote, settle old scores, end quote, and seize control.

So, this gang of hoodlums, including Hunter, who's, as we know,

isn't even the smartest man.

Smartest man he's ever met.

Yeah.

So,

whatever folks think about browbeating

this family out, and you know, God knows, Victor, between the time we're talking and the time this podcast is up, who knows?

You know what's going to happen

at some point.

He can't.

One of the reasons he will not step down is that he knows that Hunter, himself,

Jim, and Frank Biden all need

pardons.

He knows that because they have felonious culpability.

And yet they haven't been charged.

He knows if he were to step down, Robert Hearst's case could be reopened.

It's just hanging there.

It's just, he didn't say,

you know, it's over with.

He just said he's culpable and he's guilty of taking, I had somebody write and say, you're mistaken.

He didn't do this when he was president.

Excuse me.

He had classified documents in his private home while he was president.

That is a felony.

And he had them from his senate and his vice presidential and his hiatus as a private citizen.

The only reason that the DOJ learned about it, because he appointed a special prosecutor to go after Donald Trump for the same thing.

And then somebody said to him, hey, Joe, Do you think that you might be as guilty as Trump?

Can you check that for?

Oh my God, I realize I just found a bunch of classified documents.

And then the media, and then the media said, oh, unlike Trump, he volunteered.

No, he didn't.

He was forced to do that.

And he had him in more and more and less secure places than Trump did.

And he violated, he did another thing that's a likely felony.

He let his speechwriter with no security clearance have access to this.

And then it was on tape, and then there was a subpoena, and the speech writer went full Hillary Clinton and destroyed subpoena.

And Robert Hur did not prosecute him,

the speech writer.

He did not prosecute Biden, but that doesn't mean it can't be prosecuted.

It just sits there.

And Biden knows that.

And so

people don't talk about that, but the only way he's going to get pardons is to continue and either win or lose.

If he wins, he will pardon, it doesn't matter.

He'll be president.

He's got immunity under the new Supreme Court, and he will pardon his family at some point.

If he loses, he has November, December, and January.

As a lame duck, does anybody care?

They won't care at all that he'll pardon everybody.

However, if he steps down, do you think Camilla Harris is going to pull a Jerry Ford and pardon Nixon?

No, she's not going to do that.

And you think that Donald Trump will come in?

I don't think he'll be vengeful, but I have a feeling he'll just appoint a special prosecutor and say, you know what, I want you to look at all of the Biden family.

But I think that's one thing we haven't talked about.

I really believe that a lot of pressure is on him to pardon Hunter, to pardon the family.

And if he steps down, that's one reason

he will not voluntarily step down.

Yeah.

Because even if...

I think it's terrible to prosecute someone into bankruptcy,

but

that is the the

you know after after other than being convicted becoming you know prevailing but being becoming bankrupt so so an ongoing prosecution or investigation into the biden family

will will bankrupt these these jokers could bankrupt these jokers the world works on the

i i i mean i'm not a secularist like the greeks but they saw a divine justice what they called it the justice of zeus aeschylus did did.

And Hesiod

gave us the sequence.

And it is overweening arrogance, what they called Eubris,

evokes the goddess Nimesis to pay them back for that, to level out the universe so you don't have people.

And then destruction, Ate, follows, the house of Oedipus, etc.

And

I think the Indians call it karma.

Popular culture says things like come around, what goes around comes around or paybacks a bitch.

But they all identify something.

And in Christian exegesis, there is this sense that if you commit certain,

there is a reckoning, a reckoning.

You can forgive your, you can ask for forgiveness, but most of the people who do these things don't.

And so I really do believe that there is so much culpability there, that there's some type of cosmic forces that are showing that at the right time, and Nemesis always waits until the most opportune time.

And I think that Biden got away with lying.

He got away with this Faustian bargain.

His handlers thought they were cute.

Every night, Corinne Jean-Pierre thought she was so cute, dreaming up, cheap, fake.

They didn't understand they were going over the cliff and by intent.

And now

it's a disaster.

It's a tragedy.

Only these are not sympathetic characters, as often is the case in tragedy.

So I don't know how they're going to get out of it.

I really don't.

And I just hope Donald Trump realizes that

he doesn't have to intervene.

He can be statesmanlike.

He can talk about his agenda.

And I think

he will.

And let them

turn on each other because they're going to turn on each other.

Victor, at the debate,

I should say in the Stephanopoulos interview,

Biden lied, saying one of the reasons he performed poorly

was that Trump was shouting at him.

And it didn't happen.

I mean,

you could believe that Trump would have done that hypothetical, you know, but he didn't.

He lied about everything.

He lied and said that he had been traveling.

He hadn't been traveling for 12 days.

12 days.

He was prepped for 12 days.

He slept for 12 days.

And,

you know, I guess all his legacy is,

I guess his legacy is you don't need a president because we haven't had one.

You just get a puppet or a straw man.

I think Conrad...

Black had the most ingenious description, a waxen effigy or something.

And you just put them up there.

And then kind of like that old Star Trek episode, remember the guy just drugged in front of the TV screen and then the handlers

work with their agenda.

Again, it's ironic that Joe Biden could not do any, no one would hire him for any job other than to possess and make the decisions when to use the nuclear codes.

That's a commentary on us.

I'd hire him to be a lifeguard.

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Victor, Jack, I have to make a correction.

I have people who listen to this, and I want to make sure I'm accurate.

I said it was 108, and I apologize.

It's 110.

And I am looking right now at the 5 o'clock forest cast, and it's going to be 116 at 5 today.

Tomorrow, 117, 114, 112, 113, 115, 111

for the next few days.

And that is, that's what I mentioned, that poor guy.

He was dressed all in black with three black plastic bags, one of which I gave him, and I felt I was culpable.

So when I pulled over, I gave him some money, and I tried to give him some water, but a person can die in that heat, you know.

Yeah.

Well, maybe he saw you on Fox and I must have rained.

I don't think so.

I haven't been on, you know, I had the long, I had this long COVID and I was up in the mountains.

Everybody's up in the mountains.

Right.

It's 7,000 feet to get, but plants die.

What I've been, I have to go.

I'm going to be gone as we mentioned.

I'm going to be speaking on the Hillsdale Cruise.

Right.

And And I hope this,

I don't think the jet trip, but I hope the 14 days away will snap me out of it and I'll be back to my normal state.

But my point is that everybody is just

squirming around to because the heat, you should see, I have some beautiful Japanese maples and they just get scorched.

And you've got to

cars.

I was at the market the other day and a woman had a black Chevy Tahoe, and I was following her out.

She

opened the door and put her hand on the hood and went, ouch.

Yeah, gosh.

I remember I was down in,

I was on the border in Arizona once.

I forget the city I was in, but it was like 120 degrees.

I think it took me about 20 minutes to drive while I had rags on the

steering wheel.

We cannot comprehend such.

It is not heat.

It's not humid.

So I suppose that's,

and of course, when it's

and what's weird about it, we're going to beat Bakersfield.

Bakerfield is 100 miles south and it's usually much, much hotter, but it's only going to be

a mild 113 today there, not 116.

Oh, bomby.

Well, Victor, I'm going to ask you to

do a little short reflection, and then we have to take a final break.

And then I want to ask you about Trump versus Kamala Harris, if that ever plays out.

But the first short reflection is, did you hear the big news, Victor, the great economic news from the Biden administration, that the price of gasoline in July 2024 was

one penny less a gallon than

that?

They didn't tell you that

they have drained, I think it's now 50% of the strategic petroleum reserve.

And they haven't been, they can't refill it.

They have this weird idea about petroleum that it's stinky and oily and gooey and toxic if you pump it out of the ground on American soil.

But it's sweet-smelling and precious and non-toxic if you do one of two things.

You pump it out of the strategic petroleum reserve used for national emergencies.

And after all, Jack, it's not like there could be a world global emergency given everything is quiet in Iran and Gaza and Ukraine and Russia and Taiwan and China.

So there's no real need to have a strategic petroleum reserve.

And that's why they're growing in.

Or you can beg the Saudis, the Iranians, the Russians, the Venezuelans to pump this ugly goo on their soil.

So

that's what the Biden administration is doing.

The same thing about the unemployment.

It went up to over 4%.

And then they bragged there were over 200,000 jobs.

And then you'd look at the Bureau of

Labor Statistics and it looks like about half of them were

part-time jobs.

And I have a feeling they weren't held by American citizens for the most part.

And so I think if you, excuse me, more than half, I'm not sure that we raised for population growth or whatever, we really got a lot more full-time jobs.

But it doesn't matter.

The bureaucratic deep state administrative state, when Trump is in, that'll be his biggest, if he's going to be elected again, that'll be his biggest challenge, that all those statistical bureaus and

cabinet sees, deep state administrative

institutions and agencies will all issue data and edicts that are going.

and

it'll be another anonymous.

We're here to stop this man from the inside.

Let us pray.

Victor, we're going to get your thoughts about Trump v.

Kamala, if that's possible.

And we'll do that right after these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So Victor, in the wake of everything we've already been talking about, of course, a couple of headlines are related to well.

Maybe Kamala will be the candidate, and Kamala is already looking for her vice presidential running mate, et cetera.

What if

she ends up being on the ballot going toe-to-toe with Donald Trump in November?

Better for Trump, worse for Trump.

What do you think?

Well, I think it was Breitbart,

or it was some conservative outlet quoted a poll that she

polls

worse than Biden does against Biden is now down six points.

Got to remember that at this point, I looked at it, at this point in 2020, on June 6th, Trump, according to these left-wing polls, was down 10, 10,

10.

And he didn't lose by 10.

He's up six in these polls.

So you can imagine what that will be like if it were to stay the same on election day.

So

the choices are starting to

really be limited.

And they're going to either work on the mail-in ballots or they're going to work on the law fair or they're going to have to have the

mother of all October surprises.

It's got to be better than their 2016 steel dossier surprise.

It's got to be better than the 2016

Access Hollywood tape that they sprung before the debate.

It's got to be better than the 51 intelligence authorities who say that Hunter's laptop has got the likelihood of being wrestled.

It has to be better than that.

And so I don't know what it will be.

We'll have to have Trump doing something with the, you know, who knows, but other than an October or September surprise or putting him in jail.

I don't know what they're they're going to do, but she's not going to beat Donald Trump.

She scares people.

Yeah.

And she's, she's, it's not just everybody says she makes a word salad or her syntax is circular.

It's very important to have a school bus because school buses are very important.

And I love school buses because I like them, that kind of stuff.

But

she's arrogant.

and she's

she's off-putting

and she has no clue of what she's.

She hasn't done one thing in the last three and a half years.

She didn't, she was the border.

Remember, she was the space czar.

She was the border czar.

The border czar, yeah.

And all of her DEI supporters said, well, they just put her in

thankless job.

Well, she could have really made something out of the space program.

She could have gone and met with Elon Musk and all of the private people and NASA and had press conferences about going.

She didn't do anything.

She could have gone down on the border and tried to stop that.

She didn't.

So

I don't know.

I just don't, I think, again, there are so many downsides to every decision.

He stays in, but he gets rid of her.

He stays in, but he doesn't get rid of her.

He gets out, and then she takes over.

He gets out, there's an open convention.

They don't, all of them are bad, every one of them.

And they're just arguing right now in back rooms, which is the worst.

And the biggest problem, they're going to have this thing in Chicago, like we talked.

And they've got, what, 100,000 illegal aliens that have taken over a lot of the services that were usually accustomed to be used by inner city poor black people.

And

well, maybe the locals will

riot also.

You know, why not?

There's a headline.

It's New York City, but I think the local communities

are furious with how money is going to the illegals that are occupying their buildings now and they're getting bupkis.

So I could see some people being pissed off about that and they add those ingredients to the stew anyway.

Well, you have three people.

You've got Mayor Johnson, who is pretty much an avowed socialist

and thinks he needs to pay reparations when the city and the pension system are absolutely broke and about 50,000 people are leaving and the state of Illinois is in the wreck.

And then you've got Governor Fritzer, and he's opening more migrant shelters.

And he thinks that that's going to clean up Chicago.

And that's only going to make the black community and the Hispanic community even angrier.

And they're going to say, well, we're U.S.

citizens, and you're opening hotels for people who broke the law and preferences.

And then you've got the worst of all, and that's that.

I think her, that Cook County, I think her name was Kim Fox.

Remember from the Jesse Smollett thing?

And she's, she's let, she doesn't even prosecute crime.

So between those three, how are they going to keep order in Chicago?

They're not.

No.

No.

Maybe if they just play Kamala Harris on loudspeaker, everyone will be confused into some stupor.

You see that videotape going around

about her.

She's got some crappy, what can be unburdened of what have been some lunatic line, which I must confess I don't understand that she repeats over and over at every freaking appearance she's at.

She's just, I don't know.

She's a hitcher.

Yeah, there's no, there's no way out.

It's,

it's bad, bad, bad.

It's much worse than

the Republican situation with Richard Nixon because Richard Nixon was an ultimate, consummate poker player, and he understood that when, you know, Senator Baker and Goldwater and all of them came down, it was over with.

And he was going to be impeached.

So he stepped out and he thought,

you know, and he got rid of, and he waited till Spiro Agnew was indicted and resigned.

And then everybody liked good old Jerry Ford.

The Democrats loved him because they thought they could beat him.

And

bad things happened once he left because that's started into the big stagflation.

But more importantly, we pulled out of Vietnam and let it.

It was the same thing as Joe Biden, the helicopters on, only it was the helicopters on the embassy, and it was terrible.

and this is worse this is much worse but at least nixon understood that if he had continued the 1976 wipeout would have been even worse because jerry brown uh jerry ford was a nice guy and he and he came kind of close to carter he did and he he stopped a lot of the the complete tsunami in the Senate and the House.

And they don't have a Jerry Ford

as a vice president type of person.

She's no Jerry Ford.

Oh my gosh.

He fell down the stairs.

Biden falls up the stairs.

So, hey, Victor,

we've come to the conclusion of this display of your usual brilliance and appreciate all

the thoughts and wisdom you offered up today.

We thank our listeners for doing just that listening.

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And here's one.

It's titled National Treasure.

Listen to every podcast God has gifted you with, especially in the time we're living in, in my estimation, a trio of trios in the context of attributes.

Humility, extraordinary depth of discernment to analyze a subject, and probably as important as any of the three, the desire to continually learn more and more and share it with those who have the same interests.

And that's from Honeywelder.

And that's directed at you, Victor.

It's certainly not directed at me.

Thank you, Honeywelder.

Thanks, everybody else who

have left comments.

Victor, you've been terrific, folks.

Thanks for listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.