Makers and Breakers: California, Churchill, and Biden's Buddies

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to hear Victor Davis-Hanson, the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's got a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

This is the second of a number of special episodes that we are doing with the help of our listeners.

We do not want there to be any

holes in the program here while Victor's away.

He's talked about this Normandy trip he'll be on.

So we're doing some of these episodes with your questions.

And thank you, everyone who's submitted questions.

And we're going to get to four of them them on today's episode and the first one is going to be about

somebody a

mother in California asking Victor for advice about teens in California and we'll get to that right after these important

messages

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, I have a question

from Jennifer.

Jennifer writes, Hi, Victor.

I'm a SoCal mom, Southern California, of two teens, one leaving for college in the South this summer since no one we know can get into California universities any longer.

My question is, what would you be doing differently today if your kids were teens growing up in California?

Do you think you would move your family away?

I hardly know anyone who is here because they really want to be here anymore.

Or would you stay?

and try to change things in the schools, in the municipalities, etc.

That's from Jennifer.

Victor, your thoughts.

Well, I stayed, and I would like to say I stayed because I thought through podcast and writing and public speaking, I could do a small part in saving California from itself.

But that would be disingenuous because I

had the benefit or the burden of living in the same house.

It's now been 150 years that my family's lived in this house.

And there's a little segment left of the original that at one time there was 135 acres here, and then we had another nearby farm of 45.

But

I still have 40 of the, and that's the last 40 acres that's still in the family.

So I felt that I had an obligation to at least do what other generations had done for me.

And that is each generation, and I'm the fifth,

were able to improve the property and hand it to the next person.

And so I thought to myself,

it's so radically changed, and that is, it's so different than it was when I was growing up.

I mean, there's M13 Norteños and Serenio gang members within a half mile of where I live.

There has been shootings, there's been vandalism, there's trash throwing.

So I wouldn't want to put the burden on my two surviving children to

say, you have to take care of this.

All I can do is I tried to take the ancient house and as I mentioned to you Jack and maybe to the audience I completely redid it in the last two years.

So it looks like it was when it was built and it's completely redone with electric plumbing, sewage, water, roofing,

everything, insulation.

It looks like it's a brand new house.

It was very costly too.

And then the same was true of the barn and the other.

I've had all the buildings we built and I'm going to pass it on to my two children, and I won't be here, and we'll see what they do.

We being the mystic cords of memory, and we'll see.

But had I not had that responsibility, I don't know what I would have done.

Because

if everybody leaves, then you turn it over.

And we've had this question come up before.

I don't think the left owns California.

I don't think they have a right to take over Stanford University.

I get irate when I hear these students say that Columbia is theirs because they pay tuition.

That's not true.

Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, you may be private, but guess what?

330 million people subsidize you by not taxing your enormous endowment income.

They give you hundreds of millions of dollars in grants.

They have subsidized your student loans to the tune of nearly $2 trillion.

And the alumni gave the money to the supporters.

So you little snotty-nosed students that happen to be occupying a university for four years and you pay that you're paying, you don't have to go there.

So it's like saying, you know, I went and got a steak and therefore the steakhouse owes me.

No, you had a transitional arrangement.

You paid them money and then they worked hard and gave you a nice steak dinner.

You went to the university and they had an obligation.

Who's getting ripped off by that, this?

Are there students there

that are not getting their final examinations and their graduation because a small minority have terrorized the administration,

who are mostly invertebrates by nature?

So I don't know what I would do is the long answer, Jack.

I would like to think I would stay if I didn't have this farm.

But you know what?

I'll say this.

I know literally hundreds, 500 people in my area and people that I've met professionally and where I work who have left.

They've gone to Texas, Tennessee, Arizona,

Florida, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Nevada.

And you know what?

I don't think there's less than, there's less than 1% that are unhappy.

They all say the same thing.

I miss the beaches.

I miss the weather in California, but I am so happy to get out of that crazy place.

I can go buy shotgun shells from my shotgun.

I don't have to go through the rigor-maro.

If somebody breaks into my house and I have to defend myself, I won't go to prison.

I can walk down the street and not have to step in excrement.

I don't have to read that we're going to increase the tax rate from 13.3 to 14.

There's no high-speed rail.

There's not 22% of the population living in poverty.

There's not half

the country's homeless people.

There's not one out of three of the country's welfare recipients.

There's not

40% of the people who go into a hospital have found diabetes.

We're not the home of half, nearly half of the nation's illegal aliens.

So they all say that, and they're all happy.

And they don't pay income tax.

And guess what?

Their kilowatt.

Power bill is cheap and their gasoline is cheaper.

So whatever we're doing in California, it's almost suicidal.

It's like,

you know, for the dying citizen, I quoted people from Silicon Valley who were immigrants.

And there's a couple,

I suggest you all go look at those quotes.

Some of them say, we're so happy that people are leaving.

California is a multi-ethnic, multiracial state.

And if we have to get rid of all the so-called white supremacist conservatives and they want to leave, this is wonderful because they make room for us.

It's very racist, the triumphalism.

So, another thing we don't talk about in California,

they despise, they, the majority of the irredeemables, the clingers, the chomps, the dregs, all of the disparagement that Clinton and Obama and Biden have used.

So, it's not a hospitable state anymore for anybody who's conservative and traditional.

That said, I'll finish with one qualifier: that there are three Californians,

Californians.

There's the left-wing

coastal corridor from La Jolla to San Francisco, 50 miles inland.

That is about, I don't know, 20 to 25 million, maybe 25 million people.

That is left-wing and unhinged.

And then there is the upper third of the state, the third above San Francisco, maybe above Napa, Santa Rosa.

It's very sparsely populated, but it is rock-solid conservative.

And if you look at the spine of California, the foothills in the Sierra Nevada, it's conservative.

If you go to the great interior valleys, lately the Sacramento Valley is becoming liberal because of Bay Area refugees, but

essentially from Stockton southward to Bakersfield, it's very conservative, still is.

And if you go look at the inland empire east of Los Angeles to the Arizona border, and you add all of that up and you get about 15,

oh, 15 million people who are more conservative than red states.

They just are scattered and they don't have political power because they're dealing with the most liberal people in the world that live on this very expensive, very utopian coastal strip.

Funded by, that's where all the universities, where USC, UCLA, Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego, UC Irvine.

That's where they all are.

And that's where what few corporations are still here.

That's where Silicon Valley is.

That's where the beautiful people live in Montecito and Malibu and Carmel,

Big Sur,

Half Moon Bay.

Santa Cruz, Monterey.

Yes, that's where the good people, they think, live.

Well, I know two beautiful people who live in Selma.

But Victor, one last thing related to Jennifer's question is, is it, do you think because you are, if I may say, of the land, I mean, I'm from the Bronx.

We're not, you know, this is less of a sense of

property and land and dirt.

And

that has some sort of a higher meaning.

I think it might have a higher meaning, but does it?

Is that something that keeps you more because come from a farm that's your life uh lots of your neighbors who own farms have have left died or sold but have left but is that

is that a strong pull that yeah i think it is

i i left as an undergraduate and then i went and lived in greece my junior year in a program and then I came right into graduate school both on the coast, UC Santa Cruz and Stanford.

And then I went and stayed at the american school of classical studies for a year and then if you add up all the time that i've lived in greece since then it's probably almost another year

off and on but

my point is that i always came back here and i think there's something about getting up in the morning and and being out in the country and watching people grow and being engaged in it yourself, which I was for a number of years.

And even, you know, I still walk through the orchard and still check on things.

And

then you're kind of a captive of the

memory.

So when I get up in the morning, I walk around and I'll see a standpipe and I'll think, there's where I was when I was six years old.

And there was Rhys Davis, my grandfather.

And there was my uncle-in-law, Vernon Nielsen, and there was my dad, William Hansen.

And they were discussing the amount of irrigation water we were going to get that year right there.

Or I'll be in the backyard under a persimmon tree.

And I said, I can remember when I was nine years old, my grandfather said, his grandfather planted that right here.

And I can be upstairs on the balcony and be looking at the farm.

And I can remember, you know, my twin brother and I, it snowed in 1961.

And there was six inches of snow when we climbed up there.

on the balcony and we were told not to do it and we got snowballs and we pelted our parents when we were nine years old and laughed at them.

And they laughed back at us.

But I was free-range as a kid.

And by that, I mean, we had a little house, 900 square feet, that my dad moved on.

It was an old house.

And where I'm living now was my grandparents.

And that's where I grew up in this little tiny house.

And finally, he got enough money where he built another little house next to it, but he never connected them.

So we had to, we slept in a room, and then we had to walk outside to go to the living room and the kitchen, believe it or not.

but the point that i'm making is we were free-ranged and by that i mean on once we did our little chores he would put a sign up on the the refrigerator by order of corporal william a staff sergeant william f hansen 393 bombing group tenyon the following

and he would have

PBC, private first class, Victor Davis Hansen, Alfred Davis Hansen, Nels Frank Hansen.

Nels was a corporal because he was older.

And he'd say, Victor will be doing yard duty.

It will entail pruning.

It will entail going and getting firewood for the week for the outdoor barbecue.

It will be doing, and they had all of our little tasks, scrubbing the tile, the grout in the bathroom, all of the stuff.

And then

at 12,

guess what?

We were free.

And he would say, okay.

And we would walk.

We had about a mile in each direction, half a mile, and we could go anywhere.

And it was beautiful, these orchards.

And my grandfather was kind of a weird farmer.

He didn't just level the land when the big D8s and D9s came in.

You could do that.

So we had hilly land, and he would terrace it.

So there were these little two-acre orchards and vineyards and a big pond.

And he lined all of the alleyways with walnut trees.

And so it was shady.

It was like something out of the wind in the willows or, you know, Winnie the Pooh.

And

it was just magical.

And we would go out and catch polywogs and we'd look at red-tailed hawks.

And we'd scamper through here and we talked.

And then we had an extended family.

There was Emmanuel George, who was Portuguese and part Mexican.

He was a gruff, hired man for 30 years.

He was like our best friend.

And then there was Joe Carey.

He was a Native American Cherokee Indian.

And he taught me how to do a lot of stuff.

He also taught me there were whoop, you know, whoop snakes that the snake grabbed his tail in his mouth.

And I don't know if that he meant to be serious, but he told us all these folk stories.

So we grew up and when we were running around, we would bump into him.

So then right around five o'clock, we'd check back in.

And, you know, we were really young and we were on too.

I don't know.

what was so wrong with carrying a, I had a 1893 pump 22, I guess you called it a carnival gun today,

tiny 22 with a pump.

I think it held 12 shots.

And I would be going out and meet my grandfather at seven or eight.

And I said, I'll go get the woodpecker for you.

I'll go get you two cottontails for dinner.

And if I see a jackrabbit, I'll shoot.

And stuff like that.

You know, predators that were just, you know, eating young binds or something.

So we were taught how to be armed.

We were completely independent.

And that

it was ingrained with you.

And so I've always had, I don't know, it's been a dual legacy because I've always been a little bit too contrarian.

I know that when I was an undergraduate, I carved out an antithetical position to the hippie left-wing UC Santa Cruz brand new campus.

And I remember some great classics professors say, Victor, why don't you, you know, you don't have to be at odds with all these long-haired hippies, dope smokers, basically.

They're not bad people.

But I didn't hang out with them.

And then at Stanford, I looked back and there were some wonderful philologists, Europeans, Austrians, Germans, British, that really taught me, as no one else could, Greek and Latin and literature and manuscript traditions.

And yet they were stuffy Europeans.

Victor, are you going to the opera in San Francisco?

No, I'm not going to go there.

I'm going to go home and prune vines.

And so that was unnecessary to accentuate that rural independence.

But it's,

I don't think I could leave.

That's who I am.

And

I'll see about my, I have a wonderful son, and he was very independent.

I raised him that way, where he was free-range, and he

he just came down the other day to work on a boat, and he took the motor apart.

And he's very mechanical.

And he lives in town.

I'll see what he does when I'm gone and whether he'd want to live here.

What if that

iconoclastic Victor?

You never wore bell bell bottoms, did you?

No.

No.

I picture you in some 70s.

I think in high school I had gene, you know, they had, remember they had blue jeans that had bell bottoms for a while?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I might have worn those with boots, but they used to make boot.

No, I never,

I had more hair than I did now.

And I think

I went into kind of an, I don't know what the word is when I left graduate school.

I got got my PhD at 25.

I came home to take my grandmother, take care of her in this old rickety house.

My mother said, you know, it's falling apart.

Would you take care of your grandmother and try to fix it up?

We don't have money, but make sure, you know, pump out the cesspool, stuff like that.

So I did that.

And then my wife came.

We had three kids here.

And

I, for the first five years farming, I would say I grew my hair long and a long beard, but it wasn't left wing.

It was more,

I don't know, Duck Dynasties type stuff.

Yeah, I didn't go to Fresno for one year, believe it or not.

That's the major city.

Yeah.

I didn't want to go there.

And I think my parents were really worried about me.

And I can see why.

You know, I'd been in school non-stop for eight years.

I had a PhD.

I had my thesis published.

It was coming out.

And

I tried to tell them I'm not going to get a job.

I'm a white male.

And they were not hiring.

And I think I got a part-time job back east that I didn't take.

take.

But it all works out if you just keep at it.

You know, I got a, I was lucky five years later to be hired at Cal State Fresno to start teaching Latin, and everything went well.

And at the end of 21 years, we had five or six professors.

Unfortunately, you've now reduced to doing podcasts with Jack Fowler.

But anyway, my friend, we've got a few other questions.

And one's from Dave, and it has to do with Winston Churchill.

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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Folks, just a reminder, especially you who are new listeners, and there are plenty of you, visit theblade of Perseus, victorhanson.com.

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So again, VictorHanson.com.

Check it out.

Victor, simple question from Dave.

How would today's world be different

if Churchill had not become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1940?

It's a good question.

Chamberlain died, remember?

He was very ill.

I don't know if it was stomach or pancreatic cancer or it was a blood disorder, but Churchill, we remember was

made prime minister the day that the Germans invaded France on May 10th of 1940.

Up until that point,

it was Halifax, the aristocratic conservative.

He was

considered more sober and judicious than Churchill, less erratic.

very blinkered guy.

And he was, in fact, he was offered

in the conservative circles, people would actually favor him over Winston because Winston was considered given Gallipoli and all of the wild swings between conservative and labor or liberal both.

That was this, I mean, it was just a luck that he was made prime minister because Halifax didn't step forward and he was completely unfit to be prime minister.

He had a, he was in this period.

He wanted to negotiate with the Germans and he wanted to negotiate with Mussolini.

If Churchill had not been made prime minister, probably Halifax or someone like him would have.

So what would have happened?

Hitler had it planned from September.

As soon as he went into Poland, he had planned for a spring invasion of the Low Countries.

He was going to take

Denmark, he took Norway, but the Low Countries of Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland, he had planned to take.

He was very fearful of France because they never could do it in World War I.

But as a National Socialist, he said that they had become decadent.

They wouldn't fight.

His general staff, people like von Rundstedt,

were warning him.

The French Chartank is better than the Mark II and III.

The DeWante, I think it's called, I forgot the name of it, French fighter is as good, if not better, than the 109.

French artillery from World War I is still very good.

And we've got to be careful.

The indomitable French army of 3 million men can be called up within six weeks.

They've got a million active soldiers.

The British have a third of a million that are coming from Britain.

Let's not do it.

Hitler overruled them, and they went in, as you know.

They didn't go through the Maginot line.

They did later have an assault with the southern flank, but they went through the Ardennes.

Sickle cut went around the French fortified position.

Belgium had told them not to fortify the border, so they went through Belgium and right into France.

The whole government collapsed in three weeks.

So that was going to happen no matter what.

But at that key moment, Hitler said to the British

and through the Swedes probably and the Swiss, if you cut a deal with us, we will have a continental empire

from

occupied France and we'll have a puppet government and all these countries all the way to the Soviet border.

And it doesn't have to be necessarily part of the German Reich.

We have allies such as the Hungarians and the Romanians that will be autonomous and the Finns and we will create a puppet German.

But we're going to annex as the September plan of 19 World War I, we're going to annex the major ports like Cherbourg, Brest, Calais, because we need submarine pens.

But

we'll let you survive, and you can have the Anglosphere, and we will be partners.

And

I think Halifax might have been interested in doing that.

You couldn't trust Hitler at all.

He wouldn't have honored that.

And

had he done that,

I'm not sure that he would have invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd of 1941.

Because if you go back and look at some of the things he said during table talk and the memoirs of some of the people around him, the generals,

he invaded the Soviet Union not because he thought, as the propaganda went, that they were going to preempt and attack him.

He thought that he could not take England.

He had tried to take Great Britain, the United Kingdom by the Blitz.

It had not worked.

Fighter production during the Blitz of Supermarine Spitfires was higher than, believe it or not, 109s, BF-109s.

He could not break the British.

They had superior intelligence.

They had superior radar.

And the Spitfire with limited range, et cetera, was a superior in the right hands to the BF-109.

Very comparable, but if you look at the record, they shot more down than they lost.

And so

my point is,

if you had had another

prime minister,

they wouldn't have resisted probably, and they would have cut a deal, and Hitler probably would have broken it.

But I'm not sure he would have gone into the Soviet Union.

He would have had a nightmarish alliance of the Soviet Union and Hitler controlling most of the world.

and Japan and Asia.

And then Britain, completely antithetical to their values, allowed a maritime kingdom along with the New World.

But eventually they would have had a rendezvous with the Nazi Party and Stalinism.

But these

the general sense was that I don't know if it's accurate, but at the time Hitler said that he invaded the Soviet Union because he could not take Britain and he was isolating Britain then.

He would have all of the oil and all of the food and all of the resources of the Soviet Union and no one would dare cross him.

And then he would turn to Britain and isolate it.

Imagine thinking that, though, I can't take England, but I can take Russia.

Yeah, it's crazy.

But he was a continental power, and he was very upset because, as you know,

the German fleet was not, it was only about a tenth the size.

of the British fleet.

He lost 10 destroyers in the Norway campaign.

The pocket battleship Graf Graf Spree had been sunk by cruisers, no less,

off the coast of, it was

scuttled, but off the coast of Argentina.

Excuse me, I think it was Paraguay, Uruguay area.

And

he just said that, you know, and he turned to Dernitz and he said, well, we have the submarine campaign.

And he found out that...

They went to war with about 20 submarines, U-boats.

It was a myth that they had these, you know, they eventually built about 1,400 of them, but at the beginning, he lost confidence in the Navy.

And he thought that Germany could take the Soviet Union because they were fellow land powers, but he could never break

the British Navy.

It's sort of like Napoleon.

Napoleon went into Russia because he couldn't take Britain.

And he thought about taking Britain.

And

what the famous First Lord of the Admiralty said,

when asked,

he told the British government, my sires,

I

cannot guarantee that Napoleon won't invade, but I can guarantee you he will not invade by sea.

And that was the attitude of the British Navy.

We don't know how he'll get here, but I can guarantee you he will not come by water.

And he wouldn't have been able to do it.

And so he turned to Russia.

And that was the biggest mistake he made.

Because for all the post-war, for all the theories and books, and there's a whole industry that

he was preempting because there was a Soviet, a preemptive plan of invasion.

There's no real evidence of that.

And that's really kind of really frightening, that the Soviet Union's plan all along had been to unleash Hitler and tell him not to worry.

about your eastern flank, just destroy those bourgeoisie, democratic, capitalist countries.

And that meant Western Europe and Britain and eventually United States.

And they were hoping that they would fight it out and weaken themselves.

And then maybe the Soviet Union would turn on Britain, but not for years and not only after they had destroyed their capitalist Western rivals.

He thought the Soviets saw Hitler as a useful tool.

Right.

Well, Victor, we have time for one more question, and it will be about our favorite person.

No, not Anthony Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden.

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

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

Victor, here's a question from Rick.

My question for VDH is, why does everyone refer to the dire circumstances as Biden's order problem, spending problem, Middle East problem, etc.

You get the idea.

None of these issues are a Biden problem exclamation point.

He has no idea who or where he is.

All of these problems have been created by leftist Democrats or those leftists that control the Democratic Party.

And unless you call them to account and name them, they will continue to run our nation from the shadows.

The left has tainted the image of conservatives as MAGA Republicans.

How do we pin a commensurate label on the Democrats?

They have won the war of words, and they have planted the idea that it's the Republicans that are unreasonable and unwilling to compromise.

That being the case, low-information voters will be convinced that they are a party to support.

Victor, I hope Rick is wrong about

some political campaign projections here, but he's got a very interesting interesting point.

It's Biden's problem, not Democrats' problem.

What do you think about that?

Well, he's absolutely right.

Does anybody really think that Joe Biden reads over federal judicial appointments?

Or does he say to, you think he ever gets home?

It's four days a week.

He's at his beach house.

You think he says to Joe, kind of worried about Pete Budget.

He's not on top of the job.

I'm really worried about these stories about Boeing's assembly problems, United's management.

He doesn't do that.

He doesn't know what's going on.

So he's right.

So then he asked us to say, well, who's controlling it?

And I don't think there is a left-wing base.

I think that left-wing base has absorbed the entire Democratic Party.

So what I mean by that, when we used to talk about the base, the left-wing base, we meant the squad.

the BLM people,

the Antifa, the radical Greens, the radical abortionists, and people, luminaries that represented those diverse interests, the Bernie Sanders, Bernie Boy, Bros, or whatever they called them.

And then there was the Elizabeth Warren.

And then we used to think that

the majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, at that time and Chuck Schumer were the old party.

But there was nothing in their voting record that suggested they ever really voted against that base.

Chuck Schumer went out in front of the Supreme Court.

You remember Jack, and I think it was March of 2020 and he shook his fist.

He said, Gorshich,

Kavanaugh, you're going to reap the whirlwind.

You're not going to know what's going to hit you.

And Nancy Pelosi just said all kinds of crazy things.

That

old supposed

establishment of the Democratic Party is entirely Jacobin, socialist, progressive left.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, is about as left-wing as you can go.

His uncle was Lionel Jeffries.

Remember him, the ICE man?

He was the guy who was the Afrocentrist who would attack scholars and say there were ICE people that were superior genetically, blacks, and then,

excuse me, the ICE people were inferior whites, and then there was the superb Sun people.

That's his uncle.

That's his uncle.

He was a radical in college, Hikem Jeffries.

So my point I'm getting at is that who is running this White House?

It is Michelle and Barack, who live in Colorama, the first real ex-president that state put, I know they have the four states that we kid around about, but they are in Washington more probably than Martha's Vineyard or Hawaii or Chicago mansions.

So they're there.

And there is Elizabeth Warren and there is the Black Caucus and the Latino caucus and all of the ethnic pressure groups and the green, and then there's the billionaire class that are running it.

Who are those?

These are the Mark Zuckerbergs, these are the George Soroses,

these are the Bill Gates that get things Tom Steyer.

This is the party of the ultra-wealthy.

And so, when 2020 came around, they looked at people in this group, and there was

Julian Castro,

remember Spartacus, Corey Booker, there was Pete Buttigig,

there was Bernie Sanders, there was Elizabeth Warren,

and

the power brokers and the left said, these people cannot win.

They cannot win.

But we need to reconstruct good old Joe Biden who lost in

He lost the Iowa caucuses.

He lost New Hampshire.

He was headed nowhere going into South Carolina and Nevada primaries.

And they said, resurrect him.

We're going to rebrand him as old Joe Biden from Scranton.

He is a working class.

Now, I know his family is corrupt, Frank and Jim Biden.

I know he's got creepy skeletons in the closet, the Hunter Biden, Ashley Biden.

We know all that.

It doesn't matter.

We don't want him to be engaged.

We know he's got cognitive problems, that he's a little bit senile.

He's had brain operation.

We like that because we can control him better.

All we need to do is put this prop up and say that Donald Trump is a radical, chaotic, crude

buster up.

And Joe Biden is sober and he's calm and he's going to unite us.

And he's an old lion of the Senate.

And he's a working-class guy.

Good old Joe.

He's the first guy in his family to go to college.

Remember that lie?

He drove a semi-truck.

He's had a tragic life.

A drunk driver killed his family.

All these lies that they promulgated.

So they constructed him and they run the country.

And when people say, well, they kind of kidnapped Joe or they took over or hijacked.

No, they didn't.

They like where he is.

They like where he is.

They like him on hinge.

They like him non compos mentes.

That means that they can control him even better.

And that's who's running the the country.

So the letter is absolutely right.

Joe Biden is not running this country.

No way, no how.

All he can do is for when he has to give a State of the Union or a debate or one of his Phantom of the Opera's semi-maga, semi-fascist, ultra-maga speeches, they can put him to bed for four days, give him Adderall or whatever stimulant, previgin or whatever they give him, and then they say to him, all you have to do is shout and yell for one hour, two hours, and just look angry and

that will reassure people that you're energetic.

We don't really care what you say.

You can say your regular crazy things.

Just be animated.

And that's what they're doing.

And that's who's running the country, the Obamas and Isabel Warren and Bernie and the squad and the ethnic and racial caucuses and the transgender, gay.

But that's the Democratic Party.

There is no,

I mean, maybe there's Federman,

but after a stroke, he's completely a different person.

And he's walking around as if, I don't know, he's an anachronistic Democrat.

I don't know if it's because of his medical condition or he finally got fed up with these people or he's a sly fox that wants to get re-elected by appealing to the independent and conservative Democrats in Pennsylvania.

I don't know, but he's about the only one.

He's got a lot more appeal than Bob Casey has.

Yes, absolutely.

Who would have said that a year ago?

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, Victor, you've been terrific.

And if I may, a lot of people write me, they're very fond of your recollections of growing up.

And

it's just wonderful today talking about what life was like, especially your dad's refrigerator.

orders that's kind of cool kind of cool um

thanks for for all that uh victor i want to remind folks again check out victorhanson.com and do subscribe uh what else if you've yet to purchase victor's new book

best-selling book the end of everything

go to your local bookstore

order online amazon wherever you feel comfortable doing such and and I get it.

And as for me, Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter that comes out every Friday, and it has 14 recommended readings, excellent articles I've come across the previous week that I think intelligent people like you would like to know about and maybe even read.

I provide an excerpt of the piece and a link to it.

So go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

I'm confident you will enjoy it.

And thanks for those who have done so and who write me appreciatively.

So, Victor, again, you've been terrific.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you very much, everybody, for listening.