Fake Gaza Famine, Real Ukraine Meatgrinder, and California Purgatory

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

Victor Davis Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is a best-selling author.

You will find links to his books, including his current bestseller, The End of Everything, at his website, The Plate of Perseus.

The address is victorhanson.com.

I'll tell you why later in this episode, why you should be subscribing.

Today, when we're recording, is Friday, the 28th of June, but this particular episode will be out on America's 248th birthday, the 4th of July, Independence Day.

I think it's still a holiday in America, Victor.

I don't think Joe Biden and company have outlawed it yet.

But happy birthday, America.

We'll get to talking towards the end of this episode about some

Hansonian celebrations of the great day.

Before that, though, we'll get Victor's thoughts on, oh, California becoming a purgatory,

the war in Ukraine as a meat grinder, and the Gaza famine that never was.

We'll start with that right after these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show again.

Happy birthday, America.

It's also my mother's birthday.

She's born on the 4th of July.

So happy birthday, mom.

She's 91.

So Victor,

well, you know, the Washington Free Beacon is a great website.

They do exceptional reporting all the time.

And there's a piece by Adam Credo, the Gaza famine that never

was.

And here's how it begins.

New evidence indicates that contrary to claims by top U.S.

officials and international media, the Gaza Strip is not on the precipice of a widespread famine that Western experts claimed would endanger millions of innocent Palestinians.

Victor, I can't believe you believed for a moment that there was any truth to that.

Nobody thought.

They had pictures of all these people in Gaza, and

it would be like saying there's famine at the border.

When you look at people coming across the border, it's more likely they suffer from obesity than they do famine.

And the same thing as Gaza.

People were well-fed, and there was millions and millions of dollars.

The only problem they had is Hamas was stealing things so they could open up black market.

sales corridors and make money and buy more weapons and kill more Jews.

That was the whole point.

But there was never a famine.

And also, nobody ever believes their casualty figures.

That's all.

They just make it up.

Not that there wasn't a lot of death, but

it's so strange about this whole

disequilibrium because everybody said, well, there's 100,000 Jews that can't live in their home and they're displaced.

along the northern border with Beirut because of Hezbollah.

Nobody talks about them.

There was a million Jews that were ethnically cleansed from the Middle East over the last 50 years.

Nobody talks about them.

There's no UN camp down by Gaza in Israel.

It says this is the UN camp from all the displaced Jews from Cairo and Amman and Damascus and Beirut and Baghdad.

Why isn't there?

Are you trying to tell me that little tiny Israel has more resources to absorb refugees than does the oil-rich Middle East of 500 million people?

So there was always something weird about this, that the whole Gaza-Palestinian is a construct of the Western mind, and

it's developed and enhanced in the Shahs to play on that particular Western idea of guilt.

And anybody understands that goes to Israel that the 2 million citizens of Israel who are Arabs and most of them are Muslims and most of them are Muslims of the 2 million, not all, but most of them, they have no desire

to go live under the Palestinian Authority or Gaza or to move to Beirut.

And not all of them have been in there three or four generations.

Some of them came in, especially Christians who were ethnically driven out or religiously driven out of the West Bank.

You know, I really, in 2006,

Jack, I

went on a tour with an IDF officer of the West Bank.

And I don't know if I got the date exactly right, but they were building the wall.

And I think I've mentioned this to you.

And we got up to the northern parts of the wall, the trajectory, and they were clearing the ground for it, the fence wall, whatever you want to call it.

And there was a protest.

And

the IDF colonel looked at me and he said, You know what that's about?

And I said, Well, I guess you guys are taking their land.

Is that it?

And he said, No, we're giving them, we're giving to get land banked for East Jerusalem,

we are giving land of 1967 Israel, at least we're proposing to do that,

in roughly equal acreage to Arafat.

So I said, what do you mean?

He said, well, this particular town that we're passing through that is now in Israel under the new accords, the wall would make a little detour around it and it would be at last reunited with its Palestinian brethren.

So I said, but it doesn't look like they're celebrating.

He said, no, they're angry.

I said, at whom?

He said, at us.

I said, why?

He said, because they want to be in Israel.

That's why.

Because they get pensions and they get jobs and things work.

And they don't want to be under a corrupt Arafat government.

That summed up the whole thing to me.

And so I didn't, you know, it's all.

It's like all these Middle Eastern students come over here and then trash the United States and say it's Satan and kill the Jews and go back to Poland, go back to Germany, the signs, deface our statues, throw paint on the Lincoln Memorial, burglarize the office of the Stanford president, all of that stuff.

And so you get the impression from all their activity, they hate the United States.

But the one thing that they would go, they would squeal and scream and yell if you said, you know what, we're going to take you up on it.

You're going to, your visa is expired and you're going to go back to your beloved Jordan or Egypt or West Bank or Gaza.

And then you know what?

You're not going to have to suffer from us, suffer us.

So you get to stay there.

And we're not taking any more, you know,

green card holders.

You know, when Trump, one of the worst criticisms of him, remember when he designated six countries that he wasn't going to allow visas from?

And they weren't all Arab countries.

You know, I think there were North Korea and Cuba, was it Venezuela too, or Iran and the West Bank?

Everybody said, this is so racist, anti-Islamophobia.

But I thought they would rejoice that they get to stay and they wouldn't have to come here.

And I think he'll do it again.

If he was smart, and he is smart, he would just say, you know what, we're going to take a breather.

Given the distaste that people from Gaza and the West Bank harbored toward America, we don't don't want to inflict any more pain and suffering on them and psychological torment by having them here when they obviously hate us.

So just for their benefit, we're going to not accept any more visas

from these following countries.

Just name about nine countries where people hate our gods.

Victor, this

Food as politics,

non-starving, there's no famine.

Both you you and I are of a certain age, and you eat all your food.

There are children starving in China, and indeed there were, and very real

people starving in Biafra,

terrible, terrible things.

But

famines are

hopefully a thing of the past, but the use of the left will always use something to try to guilt us.

And even here domestically, right?

The

food banks are empty.

But we're a nation of obese people.

I'm like, where's

food deserts?

There must be manna in the deserts.

I don't know.

There's just so much.

So

the left's use of starvation and famine, I think, like a lot of

things they use are

getting quite worn out in the eyes of the public.

Yeah, it is.

And it's always at odds with data.

It's never data-driven.

So when I wrote Mexifornia, I had a lot of people that wrote, you know, it was just,

it was a call for

kindness, assimilation, integration, legal, measured, diverse,

meritocratic immigration.

It wasn't anti-immigrate at all.

And

people wrote me and said, you are

You hate people who are starving and they're here because they're starving and they're here because they're coming because they're starving.

And I said, okay,

well, let's look at the data.

And this was in a public forum.

And I had come, you know, kind of prepared for it.

And

I was surprised at what I found, Jack.

It was just, you know, it was...

I don't know, it was mostly people from the Caribbean, from the Pacific Islands, Samoa, and Latin America,

Mexico.

They suffer the greatest rates of obesity.

And you can argue, well, they didn't have quality food and they had to drink imported sugary dry, all that stuff.

But

that was just, no, no, you're wrong, Mr.

Hanson.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

People in Mexico are starving.

I said, no, people who are coming from Mexico have problems.

One out of every three people in California that's admitted to a hospital is found to have pre-diabetes without knowing it.

And

so,

you know,

there you go.

It's not

driven.

It's not empirical about

Gaza.

When every time they show, I mean, the sad thing is, Jack, there are people starving with this Islamic revolution or attacks on Christians in places like the Sudan, for example.

Oh, true.

And they blockaded entire Darfur.

These people are starving.

And I don't see anybody

in the mainstream media, an anchor woman, Rachel Maddow.

Let's help the people of the Sudan who are being mercifully oppressed and deliberately starved by radical Islamic groups.

They just don't do it.

I don't see anybody at Harvard or Yale doing that at all.

Nobody, and the same thing is applicable to partition and refugees and occupations.

I haven't seen one Stanford Middle East student say, you know what, Turkey invaded Cyprus 1973.

They've still got 45,000 occupation troops there.

They expropriated the land and drove out 200,000

Cypriots.

Nobody knows how many.

They killed and butchered 20,000 maybe.

And it's occupied.

It's an occupied island.

Why don't you?

It's not recognized by any country other than Turkey Cyprus, but Turkey.

Can't you empathize with that?

No, we don't care about the principle of refugees.

We don't care about occupations.

We don't care about partition.

We only want a particular cause that makes

affluent Westerns guilty, Westerners guilty, and it seems to be Palestine.

And why?

Because it involves the Jews and we're anti-Semites.

Victor,

you've got a few pieces you've written for your weekly essay for American Greatness in your syndicated columns, and I think they're worthy of further elaboration from you.

And one of them is about the meat grinder of the Ukraine.

And we will get to your thoughts and explanations of that essay when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Just let me, Victor, quickly remind our listeners to visit your website, theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

When you go there, You're going to find links to these essays Victor writes for American Greatness, syndicated columns, his appearances.

Victor's often on other podcasts.

You'll find the links to them there, the archives of these podcasts, links to his books, and links to his ultra articles, which are written exclusively two or three a week by Victor for The Blade of Perseus.

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By the way, what else do I want to say, Victor?

Oh, yeah, the end of everything.

You'll find the links to that there.

And Victor's forthcoming book, folks.

The old book, but still forthcoming.

The Case for Trump, which was a bestseller from 2019?

2020.

Yes.

Yes, the paperback.

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I would call it essentially a new book.

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You'll find links to that at the website, also Amazon or Basic Books.

Victor,

the meat grinder of the Ukraine.

I mean, are there...

Are there a million dead people because of this?

Joe Biden brought about it.

There were a million casualties.

Yeah.

Well, why is it a meet grinder?

Tell us about this essay you've written for American Greatness.

I got a lot of criticism from the never-trumped right and from the left.

The principle was simply this: I don't like Putin.

He started the war.

I'm glad he didn't take Kiev.

I wish they had defeated him.

But the fact of the matter is, Ukraine

has

only about 30 million people there of the original 41 or 42 million.

The Soviet Union's got 144, so it's got 12 times the population.

It's got 1 30th of the territory and resources, and it's got 1 tenth of the GDP.

Now, that could be made up

if you were going to

say it's in NATO and we're going to use the...

Europe would contribute as much money as the United States and they would have kind of like a 1936 1936 international brigade of French Foreign Legion type people or international, you know, you round up, oh, we, you know, you tell the Americans, we want to fight for Ukraine and you raise, say, 700,000 international troops, but that's not happening.

And the Europeans are not giving as they promised.

And the spring offensive, whoever dreamed that up a year ago, was insane.

The idea that you were going to take an outnumbered country and give it a few Western tanks and then, like a ram, beat its head against a wall of that 600-mile long fortified Russian line.

That was what they wanted to do.

And they lost 10,000 casualties of that offensive at least.

So my point is that it's the number of dead, wounded, and missing is about where we were with the battle, the nine-month Battle of Verdun in 1916, in which nothing really transpired.

The French had a heroic defense,

and they stopped the German assault and we're right back where they started.

Now we're getting close to the Battle of the Somme, which is over a million.

In August of last year, the New York Times said there were 500 dead, wounded, and missing.

If you calibrate the monthly attrition rate at that rate, and it might be higher now, we're getting

close to eight, 900,000.

And we're scheduled next year or the end of this year to get up to a million casualties.

No one's talking about that.

They're talking about Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, but not Ukrainians.

The West wants to stop and punish Putin to the last Ukrainian.

So what would the article say?

The article said

there has to be some way to stop destroying an entire generation of Russians and Ukrainians that does not reward Putin.

And it was basically, I went back and looked at the rumored deal that Putin, after being humiliated in February, early March of 2022

and Zelensky prior to that had been under discussion.

Not my idea, theirs.

And the general parameters were that Putin was willing to recognize an autonomous Ukraine, but he was not willing to give up the Crimea.

and the Donbass, which he had stolen in 2014, and which no other presidency until Biden reversed course had said that they had the wherewithal and the desire to take back by force.

He was willing to say, if you institutionalize this, I will give this,

I will, that's it, and you can't be in NATO.

And there was squabbling about that.

And then the war broke out, and he thought he was going to take the whole thing.

He was stopped.

And now we have this carnage.

And so

nobody's making any progress except the Russians are getting more weapons and more manpower and they're going to grind just like they did the German army of 1944.

Everybody said in 41, 42, 43, they're dead, just like they did of the Finns.

The heroic Finns were wonderful in the November, December 1939.

And then

they killed or wounded 500,000 Russians, and then they wore them down.

And they did have a...

And Mannerheim was smart enough not to go to the full end of it, and he had a deal.

He lost some territory, but he saved an independent Finland.

So in this article, I said, from the Russian point of view, they could say, we stopped Ukraine from being in NATO, and now the world recognizes Crimea and Donbass as part of Russia, which they always were, we feel.

Ukraine could say, yes, we're not part

of NATO, but we really are European.

We're more like Austria or Switzerland.

And now we have this huge cachet of weapons.

And we've got a better, bigger military than we've ever had.

And we are ready to deal a very tough blow if he comes in again.

And we could keep giving them arms.

We could have a demilitarized zone around the Donbass and the Crimea and the Russian border.

And the Ukrainians can say we were like the heroic Finns in 1939.

We didn't completely defeat Russia, but we saved our country.

And

we dished out an enormous loss to the Russians.

And

that was what I outlined.

And that way, we wouldn't have this incoherence that all of these Westerners want Ukraine to keep fighting, keep fighting,

and using it as a proxy to punish Putin.

And they have an irrational hatred of, I can see Putin, but they hate Russians.

Russians are always the villain in every Hollywood movie.

They have

these Rasputin-like people with glasses on and body tattoos.

And it's kind of like the equalizer.

Remember that

movie?

Sure.

And

they're always the bad people.

They're the bad people in Taken.

They're bad people

in different movies.

Okay.

So

why not just

try to get a settlement like that.

Nobody wins, nobody loses, and stop the proxy war.

That is, stop using Ukraine as a way to hurt Russia.

Because in the Cold War, we never did that.

The rule was we have proxy wars in Korea, we have proxy wars in Vietnam.

Sometimes stealthily the Russian pilots attacked us, but nobody attacked the homeland of the United States.

and nobody attacked the homeland of Russia.

Okay.

Now we are using a proxy to attack the homeland of Russia.

It's justified, absolutely, morally, strategically, it's sound, but it's still attacking the homeland of Russia with an American proxy.

And that's why Putin is sending these submarines and ships near Cuba, between Florida and Cuba.

And what he's saying is that we once did what you're doing.

We used a proxy, Cuba.

But we didn't fight in Cuba, your side against our side, your right-wingers and our left-wingers.

We tried to arm it with nuclear weapons to point at you, your homeland.

And you know what you did?

You almost went to a nuclear war to stop us.

You blockaded the island.

And I want to remind you of that.

So that's why I am going to get near Cuba.

And maybe he thinks he's going to give them missiles.

I don't know, because Biden's weak.

But the point I'm making is it's a very dangerous violation of the old problem.

And then there's the question of, do we really want to have China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and this new anti-American?

Why not try to break it up and turn each other, turn China against Russia and Russia against China?

And why don't we

tell the Ukrainians, we're going to treat you just like we do the Israelis.

If we tell the Israelis to be proportionate, you be proportionate.

If we tell the Israelis that they must have a ceasefire, then you must have a ceasefire.

If we tell the Israelis they have to keep have they have to schedule election, they have to have a bipartisan government, then Mr.

zielinski you you bring in political parties you reschedule elections you you

uh suspend your cessation of habeas corpus if we say israel you have to be used munitions that don't cause collateral damage then you mr zelensky when you retaliate against russians in the donbass encryption make sure that no no civilians but we don't do that we don't

and so that and i got a lot of really angry you know you're rewarding Putin, you're a stooge, you're a mega fool, all that.

Yeah.

I guess what I should say to them, well, how many million do you want to kill?

You want to kill another million?

Because that's going to happen.

And it's not going to, you're going to, you're going to arm, arm, arm.

And I listened, I had a conference as the head of the military history program a year ago and this year as well.

Right.

And we were, we brought in a lot of Ukrainian.

I can't discuss the internal people who were there or the actual positions that were taken, but there was a lot of discussion that the ongoing spring offensive was not going to work because it was the wrong strategy.

The weaker powers should not have a counteroffensive against entrenched lines, but they were running out of manpower.

The average age of Ukrainian soldiers is 42 years old,

and they don't draft 18 to 21-year-olds.

I guess they need them, or they flee the country.

So I haven't seen a nation in arms.

I mean, when Gaza happened and they did that to Israel, the IDF called up the reserves and people all over the world

flocked to Israel and they had the ability to get almost 800,000 soldiers.

And if they have to fight Hezbollah,

and I think they do, they're going to call up the reserves.

And I don't think there will be anybody.

that will, and that's going to be a bloody, nasty, mean war.

Why doesn't Ukraine say that?

Why don't they say we're a nation in arms and we need every Ukrainian exile all over the United States, all over Europe, every expatriate, come to Ukraine.

But it's different.

They're not doing that.

I think it's because they feel

they'd be killed and the Israelis have a chance of not being killed.

I don't know what it is.

But it's trying to get coherence.

That was the plan.

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Victor, 1 million casualties.

Do you think of the

military

types that you associate with through Hoover and other places,

do they not blanch at just the numbers?

And what if it was a year from now, a year and a half, and we're still in this Bragmart and it's 2 million?

Does the body count matter to them?

And

related to that, is there anyone, not naming names, that you

associate with in these circles who has changed a position

on the war because of the toll it's taken, because of the meat grinder?

I've met people from Ukraine who have.

But

it's the Republican establishment, it's the never Bill Crystal, never Trumpers, it's the mainstream

left,

and the hardcore left and the MAGA people are suspicious for different, very different reasons.

The hardcore left, the AOCs just hate everything America America does.

So they think that,

you know,

and they buy into Russian collusion, Russian disinformation.

That's another subtext we didn't get into.

That one of the reasons there's this animus on the left and the never Trump right is

they hate Putin because they still believe in the Russian collusion and Russian disinformation.

theories and they can't stand Russians, even though, remember it was Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that gave us Russian reset, that started the whole appeasement of Putin.

But

I don't, I think the majority of Americans are very

worried about the destruction of Europeans.

And it's very weird.

You know, when you look at wars, you can see force multipliers of the divisions.

They have religious or ideological reasons or this, but Ukrainians always wanted to be independent of Russia, but many Russians near that area speak Ukrainian, Ukrainians speak Russia, they're both the Russian Orthodox Church.

They're both parts of the Russian, belong to the Russian Orthodox Church.

I think if you showed me a Russian and Ukraine, I couldn't tell the difference visually.

If I heard them speak Ukrainian, both speak Ukrainian or both speak Russian.

I don't think anybody could really know who is what, is what I'm trying to say.

There's millions of Russians who live in what is Ukraine, and a lot of Ukrainians live in Russia.

Solzhenitsyn was people think he's Russian, but he was, but he was also part Ukrainian.

Then there's the other element, and that is the glorification of the Ukrainians and

Zelensky and a complete rewriting of World War II.

So a lot of the people who want to go to Moscow and see Ukraine crush Russia don't trust Israel.

But

as someone who's read quite a lot on the Russian front and written a book on World War II, I can tell you that there were four places

in occupied Russia that the Germans found very conducive to the Holocaust.

Very conducive.

I'm going to get people very angry, but three of them were the Baltic countries.

If you look at the number of Germans that were needed to ethnically cleanse every Jew Jew in the Baltic, almost every country.

It was very little.

And when they got into Ukraine, they found out that Ukrainians were,

not only did they want to join the Germans, they had some reason to, given the famine and the

Holdor, the

Holdomor, the

deliberate famine by

Stalin to kill 10 to 20 million Ukrainians.

But they were very anti-Semitic.

And at Babayar, the people who were shooting, a lot of them were Ukrainians and Ukrainians hated Jews and that's just a fact and of World War

II

that's that fact has fed this fact that you know Putin always says they're fascists they're Nazis or Nazis what he's trying to say is that they greeted the Nazis when the Nazis came in they did it because they had not had any first-hand experience with Hitler and they had a lot with Stalin.

By the end of the war, they didn't like Hitler any more than they did Stalin.

But the point again I'm making making is that

it's just one of these weird issues that people go crazy about.

And it's all these peace-loving people and all these people who say Trump is a warmonger and all this.

They want to pour money.

They want to pour weaponry.

They want to pour

everything

to keep this war going.

And they really, I don't know whether they think it's exhausting Russia.

It is.

Or it's isolating Russia.

It's not.

Or they think that Ukraine is going to win.

They can't.

They don't know anything about history.

They should look at the invasion of Russia by Charles XII of Sweden, or the actual mechanics of the Napoleonic invasion, or what happened under Operation Barbarossa with Germany, or how the Finns actually did at the end of the Winter War when it ended in 1940,

or

how Russia divided up Poland with Germany in 1939.

And

there is a definite pattern.

You fight Russia

anywhere near its borders, and it is incompetent, it gets surprised,

it has a disregard for losses,

its equipment is crappy, and then guess what?

The Mother Russia comes into play and they start building better weapons.

They start losing more.

The more people they lose, the more they recruit.

And unpopular killer, murderous governments become popular

and they win.

They grind down Napoleon.

They grind down the Swedes.

They grind down the Germans.

They grind down the Finns.

They grind down the Poles.

That's what they do.

And I don't think they're going to grind down the Ukrainian.

I think all these people who said, you know, Russia was going to walk over Ukraine were completely wrong, and I said that at the time.

I thought

it wouldn't be a cakewalk, but I thought it would be a long, typical Russian war.

It's been so much death and destruction there.

And I put the blame completely at the feet of Putin.

But there's something wrong about Westerners interfering.

And we go back to that revolution of

2014 where they got rid of the Russian Yashinko and got rid of him.

He was coming a thug and he was probably pro-Moscow, but that was a Western European American idealistic fantasy that they were going to create a Ukrainian EU outpost, NATO, right on the border of Putin.

Right.

Well, Victor, I have one more

Ukraine-related

question,

and we'll get to that and maybe a little talk about California when we return from these important messages.

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

Victor, we're recording on

Friday the 28th, the day after the debate,

Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

And in the debate, Donald Trump said quite confidently, I think two times, maybe even three,

that he was going to

end the war.

He said even before he took office again,

he would, he would, he said it with,

I mean, look, his usual bravado.

Yeah, he has to be very careful because that's what the left went after, Michael Flynn, remember?

The so-called Logan Act.

It's never been used before, but he won't be president until January 20th if he's elected 2025.

So he says even before he's president, he's going to solve that.

Well, officially, he can't do that because if he starts to do what John Kerry did when John Kerry tried to undermine the official government in the United States, which at that time was Donald Trump, and Kerry did do that.

with the Iran deal.

He was meeting with all these Iranian officials stealthily in Paris and elsewhere.

But officially,

Trump has no legal or historical right to intercede in diplomacy, which will be the domain of the lambed up Biden administration.

He can't do that.

So when he says, I can do it before,

he can draw up a plan, but he's not supposed to talk with the Russians.

Right.

Well, I wonder if it would be like a replay of

Reagan assuming office and the moment he takes over the dynamics in Iran are of course.

And they accused, of course, they accused Reagan falsely that he had backed channels open to the Iranians so that they wouldn't release the hostages until he was president.

Therefore, that's why Carter.

That was kind of a conspiracy theory of the early 80s.

But

I don't know what he means by that.

That's kind of simplified down.

He said, I would have solved, I'll solve the Israeli problem.

I'll solve the Gaza.

I think what he means is

I told Putin that I would attack him if he he didn't, if he went in, and Putin said, no, you won't.

He said, I might, that kind of stuff.

But we'll see.

Well, Victor,

you've written a column on California, and folks can find it on your website, The Blade of Perseus.

And it's

the paradise of California, how it's become a purgatory.

As a New Yorker, I've said this before.

First time I went out there,

I could not believe how beautiful this

place was and

still is in many ways.

And there have been

on the political front, there have been some things that

observers, not residents, see as signs of hope.

Oh, crappy DA who's recalled, et cetera.

and

lousy mayor being prosecuted maybe in Oakland, things like this.

Maybe it's a fitness start that there's going to be a turnaround.

But I kind of,

I don't know.

I think it's wishful thinking on my part.

Anyway, Victor, you've written this piece.

Give us a little rundown of it, if you don't mind.

Well, it was kind of an attack on Gavin Newsom, and he deserves it.

Jack, just a little over two years ago, we had a $99 billion surplus given all of the federal COVID money that the outgoing administration and Biden, incoming Biden had sent the largest state in the union, California.

And

we were just full of cash.

And then Gavin Newsom, who was running for re-election and had eyes to run for president because he thought Biden might not, started

giving hundreds of millions of dollars to include illegal aliens into the Medi-Cal program, outright grants, billions of dollars to solve

the rat hole of high-speed rail.

And we now have a $47 billion and climbing deficit.

And

he's very stuck because we have the highest income taxes at 13.3.

And if it goes any higher, the exodus will increase from $250,000 to $500,000.

We have the highest gas tax, so the highest gasoline prices in the continental United States are going to go up with a 50 cent increase.

We have the highest kilowattage rates, except for Hawaii.

So, in every barometer, it's the most expensive places.

And when you look what you get, the schools are rated in the bottom 10%.

The infrastructure is rated in the bottom 10%.

27% of the people in California who reside there were not citizens.

We had a bond, Jack, we approved, I think, eight years ago, to build $7 billion to build the dam on

the Temperance Flat site, the Los Banos Grandes site,

the Seitz Reservoir.

That would have given us 5 million acre feet so we could capture this runoff.

And what did he do with some of the money?

He went up to the Klamath River and he blew up four scenic dams.

They provided 80,000 people with hydroelectric clean energy.

They had flood control.

They stored water for agriculture.

They were recreation.

They destroyed people's homes.

It was horrible.

They created an ecological disaster with a big mud flow of the debris and the Flotsam and Jetsum from the destruction.

Everything he touches turns to draws, Gavin Newsom.

And he has this stick where he slicks his hair back and he wears this designer casual clothes and then he just has the mannerisms down.

He He says nothing, and he doesn't tell the truth.

And he's got a really high, for the first time, disapproval rating now.

And so

we're trying to do things, but

the legislature and Newsom would not allow

a ballot measure to be put on the November ballot that allowed people to stop

tax increases.

And then the Supreme Court voted unanimously at the state Supreme Court, not to let the people voice their opinion so i don't see how it's going to change at all

it's a minority majority state and it's not an ecumenical state it's a hobby

bellum omnium contra omnes a well of every a war of everybody against everybody so the the small six percent black population wants reparations they want like a you know, almost a half a trillion dollars.

And California was a free state.

It never had slavery.

And as I said, most people who lived there are only one generation or indeed 27% were not born there.

And then you have the Hispanic population is renaming it.

They just went into historic Fresno and renamed another street, causing a lot of

unease for business owners and residents have to change all their addresses to see.

We have so many Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Boulevards in California, but there's not anybody who's standing out for people as a people.

And so it's, and then we have the anti-Semitism.

I mean,

my gosh, what happened at UCLA?

It was all, it was open season on Jews.

They go to a synagogue and they try to beat up Jews at a synagogue.

Or they, they, you should saw what they did.

I have a soft spot for the architecture of Stanford.

It's beautiful sandstone architecture, as you've seen when you've been there, Jack, but it's very porous.

And so when you spray paint on it, it seeps into the stone.

And you can't sand it, you can't blast it, you can't wash it.

You got to take a little pick and pick out each paint particle.

And those spoiled, rotten kids went in there and they wrote these obscene kill the peak,

and they defaced that entire colonnade.

And that's what's in California now.

It just,

you know, banning natural gas are,

and you look at the mayor of Oakland, who's now on an FBI investigation, then you look at the DA, she's under recall, then you look at London Breed.

She had a debate with people who were trying to unseat her, and her question was, ah,

can any of you name three well-known transgender dancers, you know, drag queens?

Oh, no, I can't.

Can you name how big your deficit is right now or how many homeless people you know?

No.

So

it's just a beautiful place.

And what keeps people in California is that people, my final comment is: it's the largest red state in the United States.

And by that, I mean by population, maybe not as big as Texas, Florida, but if you take California to the north of, let's say,

I don't know, Sacramento,

and you take

somewhere around Highway 152, Los Banos, down to Bakersfield, and you take the whole length of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and you take the Inland Empire eastward of LA County, you get about 12 to 15 million people of the 41 million people, and they are very, very conservative, really conservative.

And so,

And they are the people who are leaving.

But a lot of left-wing people are too.

My daughter, I might have mentioned, she left Santa Cruz, very blue, and went up to Newcastle between Sacramento and Auburn and got a rural area.

And it's very, very, it's just, it's very conservative.

But you know who the most people are coming with all the money, Jack?

Bay Area people, very liberal people from the Bay Area with kids.

And they're moving to an area that's connected to Sacramento and it's only two hours from San Francisco.

And guess what?

It doesn't have homeless, it doesn't have left-wing politicians, it doesn't have smash and grab.

But let's hope that their ideology and policies don't recreate what they left.

Well, they have lawns where they can put their signs on to they're fleeing from themselves.

This kind of thing is right.

Crazy.

Hey, Victor, you know what?

It wasn't always that bad, right?

Once upon a time, and the Hansen family, I have to imagine this is the 4th of July, so I hope you don't mind me asking about life on the farm and

what happened?

Did anything happen?

Was the 4th of July, Independence Day, a big day for you?

It was very strange because

we had this farm and I live in my grandparents' house, which then was an old, rickety, semi-Victorian two-story farmhouse, but it was big.

I think it was then about 2,500 square feet.

And then that was big in those days.

And then when I remodeled it and put the annex, it was probably about 3,500, 4,000.

But we only had 800 square feet, the five of us.

And then my dad just built on a little house next to it, 300 square feet with bedrooms, maybe 400.

Very small.

So we weren't in a position to entertain Bona Hollis, but my mom loved to, and my dad and mom were really a partnership.

They were great cooks.

So Christmas, Thanksgiving, we had it.

And we had all different ways of, I know, in between the two houses, my dad built a patio and we had these big kettles, you know, of fire.

I don't mean sophisticated fire pits.

I mean my dad went to the scrapyard or that the Davis scrapyard of all the 19th century pots where women used to, you know, wash clothes.

And they were huge three-legged kind of witch kettles.

And we had them.

We had to go get wood down the pond and I would get the wood and we built these huge fires and then we intersplace people

and we had Easter acunts and then on 4th of July when it was hot, that kept away the mosquitoes and the June bugs and et cetera.

But it was always,

it was,

there was, it was very hyper-patriotic is what I'm saying.

And they were my Swedish grandfather was very conservative and a Republican and my Welsh-Irish

mother's father was very conservative, but Democrat, but they got along.

They never argued.

And it was all sort of,

there was Frank Hanson, my grandfather, and he had been gassed in World War I and the Musar gone.

And he, you know,

he had a very strong kind of Swedish accent.

And there was my dad, the B-29 guy, and then my

aunt's husband, Vernon Nilsson, and he had been in the Aleutians.

And then every once in a while, cousin Dick Davis or Bob Hansen would come over.

And one guy was with the Third Army.

The other guy

was a logistics guy who got aid to the Soviet Union in a very dangerous capacity going through Iran on truck.

So they all had this idea that the country was this wonderful place.

It was can-do.

And then

we got fireworks.

And at about, you know, when the mosquitoes calmed down a little bit,

we had

in those days, we had all this land, you know, for 120 acres, we just had this blob trace out in front of the house.

And we each got an allowance for working on the ranch.

We would go to Red Devil Fireworks, Green Dragon, whatever the stand was, and then we had all let them off.

We got to do that.

I think I was five years old when I was letting them off.

And then everybody watched them.

And every once in a while

uh one of us kind of broke the rules where people from mexico would come out and peddle stuff that were firecrackers from mexico and they were not fireworks they were firecrackers you know what i mean yeah they were they were kind of explosive and we would buy them on you know they would come over and sell them and then my parents would know then about every 10th fire uh firework we'd put one in and go boom and everybody would start laughing it was

It was a great time.

It was a time when there would,

we had no key to our house.

Yeah.

It was never locked.

And my grandparents didn't really ever lock their house.

There'd be no point to it.

They were very porous houses and the neighbor, everybody knew each other.

We were all free-ranged.

You just got up at six or seven years old and ran around the ranch and checked in at noon, kind of like an animal.

You were wild.

You were told, you know, if you take your BB gun or you're 22, don't shoot an owl or a hawk.

I don't care about the blackbirds or crows.

Go ahead and do that.

But

it was a beautiful state and everything worked.

Everybody was...

It was funny about the race issue.

I went to a school, as I said before, I was about 90% Mexican-American until I was in the seventh grade.

It was about 50%.

And then I went to a high school, but I don't remember any racial tension whatsoever.

And it wasn't because there was a subordinate class,

a Marxist binary, because there was intermarriage and dating was very common between Mexican and non-Mexican.

And many of my best friends, you know, are intermarried to this day in their 70s and 80s that I went to high school with.

And there wasn't any racial wars at all.

And

it was very paternalistic.

The teachers were always saying when these kids came from Mexico, and that was when the first big migration started in the 50s and 60s.

It was, you have to compete, you're going to be an American, you're going to have to know the Star-Spangled Banner, you're going to have to compete with kids from Fresno.

We're going to teach you to know with no accent.

You can't speak Spanish on the fair on the school grounds because otherwise you won't speak the king's English and you won't be successful.

That was the message.

And the La Raza movement destroyed all of that.

And I have to ask myself,

who was the more successful generation?

When I look at people my age that I grew up with that were Mexican-American, I would say that 0.00 of the Mexican-American community that is now 70 years old took drugs or were law-breaking.

They were some of the hardest working, law-abiding people in the world.

And they can't say that necessarily about their grandchildren.

And I I think a lot of it was,

we are the proudest of Americas.

We are the exemplary minority.

We're going to assimilate.

We don't use the word Chicano.

We don't use all that stuff.

And that's all over with now.

It's blown up.

And you ask yourself, is the state better off for it?

And

I remember my father ran a vocational community college, and there was a guy named Cruz.

He was a Mexican veteran.

So my dad said, when we go up in the morning, I would drop a car off.

They worked on cars.

He said, go talk to Cruz.

And he meticulously taught me how to fold the American flag, how to run it up the pole, how to run it down the pole, the protocol, how to fold it, what to do if it touched the ground, all of that.

It was like an encyclopedia.

It was just so different.

Yeah.

Well,

all of those, the left did that.

The left has a lot to answer for.

California, it wasn't Pete Wilson.

He saved the state.

It wasn't Ronald Reagan.

He saved the state.

It wasn't Pat Brown, the old Democrat.

He saved the state.

It wasn't

George Decmajion.

It wasn't even Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He was weak and he vacillated, but he didn't do the damage.

The damage started with Jerry Brown Jr.

and then accelerated with Gray Davis, and it went to full fruition with Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco bunch of Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris,

Gavin Newsom.

Well,

let's hope that the 4th of July and celebrating it is not something that these

current crop of politicians will find reason to outlaw someday in your

beautiful.

It goes back to the idea that

You don't just on 4th of July go out and shoot an AR-15

up in the air, which happens in my neighborhood now

and you think about what 1776 was and how different it was from the French Revolution or anything that came before it instead of just making fun of these old white men just ask yourself where in the heck did George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, where do they all come from?

And how were they all there?

How were they all there at the same time?

Alexander Hamilton,

and how did they create the system?

And how lucky we are that we're their successors rather than making fun of them.

Well, Zadam says it was made for virtuous people and that's how it works only with the virtuous people.

So kind of stay the course, Americans.

Well, Victor, we're kind of at the end here because we're a little crushed for time

today.

And you've been terrific as usual.

I want to thank our listeners,

including those who go to Apple and iTunes to rate the show zero to five stars.

And Victor, you have 4.9 plus plus plus rating of several thousand folks who have done that.

We thank them very much.

And those who leave comments, thank you.

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Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks for everything.

God bless America, folks.

Happy birthday, America.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone.

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