EV Meltdown and the Left's Epic Insanity

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler.

We are recording on Friday, the 5th of April.

And this particular episode will be up on Thursday, April 11th.

You are here to hear Victor Davis-Hanson, the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Numashabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is many things, a syndicated columnist, essayist, military historian, a classicist, farmer,

rancher.

Now, some people say rancher, but I don't think so.

Best-selling author.

Got a book coming out in May 7th, The End of Everything.

Sure to be a bestseller.

I'll tell you where you can find more information about that.

That's his website.

More about that later in the episode.

We're going to begin today

by looking at this real meltdown in electric vehicles and some shocking things that have happened

with corporations and just the whole sense that America is saying,

thumbing its nose at this concept.

Not that there's anything wrong, Victor, with owning an electric car.

I know you do.

So you have a little perspective on that.

You know what?

My wife, A, is a big fan of Elon Musk.

And B, she said, when we redo this garage from which I'm talking right now into an annex,

we put a 220 charger on the wall, exterior wall.

And she said, I have a 40-mile each way

and I don't want to drive anywhere else.

So what happens is she comes home, she plugs it into the wall, three hours later, it says 300 miles.

We don't go with a whole maximum, supposedly 330.

And she takes off.

And she's been doing that for two years.

And she has never had one problem, not one mechanical problem.

The car takes off like a Corvette.

It's very safe, and

she doesn't take it anywhere.

I don't take it to Palo Alto because I don't know what I would do if I had a flat.

I don't know what I'd do with a, if I had a flat.

It doesn't have a spare.

It hasn't, it has no spare.

You can get spares, but I don't have one.

And,

you know,

what the range says on the meter on your dash is not what you get.

In other words, if it says you have 200 miles, you're not going to get 200.

You might get 180, depending on how you drive.

So my point is that the Tesla, at least in her experience, is a very good car.

But the idea you would mandate that

and isn't Bill Barr suing California's mandate?

He might, but let me just say one thing to do.

You've got important thoughts to share on this, and we're going to hear all of them right after this important message.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, Bowl and Branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my bowl and branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights.

And they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowlandbranch.com slash Victor.

That's Bolin Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com

slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply.

And we'd like to thank Bowling Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Shopify helps you sell at every stage of your business.

Like that, let's put it online and see what happens, stage.

And the site is live.

That we opened a store and need a fast checkout stage.

Thanks.

You're all set.

That count it up and ship it around the globe stage.

This one's going to Thailand.

And that, wait, did we just hit a million orders stage?

Whatever your stage, businesses that grow grow with Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 a month trial at shopify.com slash listen.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, I'm going to get in so much trouble from listeners who hate when I interrupt you.

And I'm sorry.

No, that's okay.

Yeah.

No, so I, you know, the Clampetts would not load up their truck and drive to Beverly Hills in an electric vehicle because they'll be held to pay along the way.

I, I, Mrs.

Hansen going 30 30 miles each way.

Yeah, that seems sensible.

Yeah, I don't understand it too.

You know,

I spend part of the week in Palo Alto in Menlo Park, and I've noticed that when you talk to people about, they don't want to buy.

Tesla was way down on sales.

They've got so much bad publicity.

Remember Jennifer

Graham?

What was

the governor?

Remember,

she bragged that she was going to take this cross-country EV trip.

Was it two years ago?

And then we found out that they were blocking the chargers for other people.

Her staff went ahead and they parked so they could at least get a free one so she could just arrive, get charged and get on her way.

So

it's too uncertain.

The American people get in their cars partly to be independent.

They're not strapped in a seat on an airplane.

They're not on

They're not subject to BART.

They're not subject to Amtrak.

They want to be independent, free, and control of their own destiny.

And they don't get that reassurance in an electric vehicle because of the charging.

And maybe if they had an electric car right now that had a 600-mile range, then they would have no problem.

Or if you pulled into a

charger and there was like a gas station, you just...

five minutes later you were out they'd have no problem but the idea that they might end up somewhere uh where they'd have to wait for three hours, or it would be, you know, 10 degrees and too cold.

They go up in the mountains to ski, and their car wouldn't be too cold to run it.

It's just a lot of problems.

I guess

I think everybody should realize that the internal combustion engine was a work of genius for the little amount of fuel it uses.

And now they're so clean burning that the only way you can say that they're bad is that they've redefined pollution not as emissions as much as heat, because they have

very little carbon monoxide and smut and particulate matter anymore.

It's the heat that they have gone after.

But

it's just irrational.

And part of it is everybody's angry on the left at Elon Musk.

Partly, there's been a lot of stories about people being stranded.

Remember Chicago, then that cold wave, all those pictures.

And then there's the Chinese that everybody are scared of.

They're importing, they're going to supposedly dump all these cheap cars in the United States.

And then these mandates didn't work.

I go by the every once in a while just to see what's going on.

I'll drive around the local new cars.

And

I know some salesmen, they don't like them at all.

People don't like them.

Yeah, that was the headline from Epic Times.

Jeffrey Tucker had a piece.

The Hertz meltdown reveals the scale of the EV debacle.

So Hertz,

the chairman.

I mean,

I thought, I'll be smart.

I'll get an echo diesel pickup, 30 miles the gallon.

I will get a gas car, and I'll get an electric.

I'll have three sources of power.

And the diesel, that's a long sign that people are sick of hearing, but

I lemon lawed it back and got a fair price and a buyback.

And then I bought a gas truck, and I haven't had one problem.

So there's something to be said.

I mean, diesel I drove all my life with tractors and bigger trucks,

but there's something to be said for a gasoline pickup versus a diesel or an echo diesel, at least a small diesel engine that's turbo max,

what it lacked in cubic engines, it tried to make up with a turbo.

That's not a good, I think, design to do that.

But

the idea that these poor truckers, I have a lot of reason, I mean, I get angry at truckers all the time when they cut me off on I-5 and they're in the left lane going 80 miles an hour or something, a two-lane each way, freeway.

But I have a great

admiration for those guys, especially the independent guys.

How they can sit there for hours on that seat and take all of those loads

and make money

when

they sleep on the side of the road.

They don't get a good diet sometimes.

They don't get a chance to exercise.

And then you would put this burden on them about electric trucks where they'd have to every 300 miles stop and get charged.

It's just, it's obscene what they're doing to the trucking industry.

So

the reality, Victor, you may have seen these videos, a guy testifying before Congress, like,

you know, some company that said, well, yeah, we want to do electric trucks.

We want to play with the team.

And the amount of power it would take just to

the current technology to give even a small, relatively small fleet of trucks is like the amount of power.

You know what they should do, Jack?

They really should.

The trucking industry, the car industry, they'd say, you know what, if global warming is this dangerous, we put a proposition to you.

You make a

10-year mandate for Gulf Streams, Challenger jets, you name it.

For 10 years, you have to have electric jets, and then we will follow suit.

We promise.

And we'll let all of those Silicon Valley grandees at the San Jose airport.

You go by, it looks like,

you know, it looks like a parking lot of private jets.

Just make them all electric.

That's a great idea.

And make it a mandate.

They have to do it in 10 years, like their mandate.

And they would say, yeah, that's fine, but they'll never do it.

They love their private jets.

I see them at certain airports.

It's just amazing about all these left-wing people.

They'd rather not go anywhere if they had to fly commercial, right?

Oh, no, they wouldn't go.

I don't mind when they fly private.

I just don't like it when they fly private and then tell the poor trucker you're going to have an electric car or electric truck or owls.

And I don't like it when I go down to L.A.

and I drive through certain neighborhoods in Brentwood or Beverly Hills, and I see these five, six, ten, twenty thousand Malibu 2 estates with left-wing people in them.

I'm thinking, what is the heating and cooling bill for two or three people in a 10,000 square foot home?

And these people are the ones that are directing us about how to live our lives.

Anybody who's for global warming should just

be the opposite of Al Gore, who has a huge home and flies private.

Just say, you know what?

I'm not going to live.

I swear to God, I'm not going to live in a house with over 3,000 square feet.

I'm not going to have any SUV pick me up at the airport.

I'll only ride an electric car and own an electric car, and my jet will be electric in 10 years, and then I have no problem with it.

Right.

And I'll eat crickets.

I won't eat meat anymore either.

So,

hey, Victor, let's stay on energy.

But first, I just want to take a minute to welcome back our great sponsor, Hillsdale College.

Dear listeners, do you know that Victor, this this Victor Davis-Hansen, is one of the professors in three of the over 40 free online courses at Hillsdale College?

That is correct.

The first course, American Citizenship and Its Decline, is based on Victor's book, The Dying Citizen.

Another course, the second one, is The Second World Wars, which is based on Victor's best-selling book by the same name.

By the way, Victor, any listener out there, Father's Day coming up, get that book for today.

The third course, Athens and Sparta, is partly based on Victor's book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

The courses are seven to nine episodes long, and they're self-paced.

So you can take them whenever and wherever.

Go right now to hillsdale.edu slash V D H to start.

Excuse me.

It's free and it's easy to get started.

That's hillsdale.edu slash V D H to start.

Hillsdale.edu slash VDH.

We thank Hillsdale College for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Have a funny feeling, Victor, someday there's going to be a course titled The End of Everything that Hillsdale will be.

I don't know.

We'll see, but everybody should

take a look at Hillsdale because it's the antithesis of the elite university.

It's imploding.

It's thriving, and it's thriving because it's got wonderful faculty, it's got a wonderful curriculum, it's got a wonderful president, and it's doing everything right.

It's a cherished institution.

I wish there were a thousand hills, Dale.

Yeah.

Well,

keeping the pledge to stick with power, I'm looking at an ex-post.

I criticize for still calling it Twitter, but an ex-post by Mike Lee, the Utah senator.

He

does want to replenish America's backup supply of petroleum as a fuel source.

He wants to eliminate, and this is Lee writing still, sure wish he'd have told us that when he decided to raid the strategic petroleum reserve just to make the deficit look slightly less obscene.

And he has a chart here

that shows

it's just, it seems like there's just 17 days, very small amount of

reserve left, and that Biden allegedly said something the past week that he was not going

to refill it.

I assume Victor he'll refill it as the election gets closer and then unleash it so prices of gasoline go down.

But

playing politics with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a really troubling matter.

I mean, especially after they drained it.

I mean, they got it about 90% full.

They were making fun of Trump.

If you remember during COVID when the price got very low per barrel of oil, I think it was down to 30 because there was no demand, and Trump just snapped it up and he filled that thing up at cheap.

And they said, well, he's just trying to help the petroleum industry.

Well, he was, but he was also helping us.

So Biden came in.

And remember, these are people who said that it was ugly.

gooey, stinky.

They were going to outlaw it.

They were going to stop.

They did stop the Keystone pipeline.

They put Anwar off limits.

They were,

I guess, the Centennial pipeline they were after, they stopped new leases.

And then people got angry and got gas.

Here in California, gas got up to $6.

And now, what did they do right before the midterms of 2000?

They emptied it.

They took 50% of it and

unleashed it.

What else did they do?

Remember the campaign Biden said, well, we're going to be talking to the Saudis, not that pariah, pariah state.

And then all of a sudden, on the eve of the Mitrims, the Saudis were wonderful.

So were the Venezuelans.

So they were telling all of our arch enemies, including the Iranians.

And that's one of the reasons, everybody, why when you ask, it's just inexplicable.

They've attacked our installation and soldiers and killed and wounded Americans at 130 different occasions.

And we will not strike back.

Why?

Because they do not want any tension in the Middle East.

That's one of the reasons that they're pressuring Israel because the price of gas is going up.

And as I said, the price of oil is $90 a barrel.

And they have forecast to go up to $110 when we get into summer driving.

They're so desperate, Jack, and they're so lack of principled that they have told the Ukrainians not to target Russian oil installations.

Imagine that.

They're giving everybody a lecture about you're selling out Ukraine.

You don't want to give them enough weapons.

You should be ashamed.

Oh, by the way Ukrainians don't do anything about a refinery don't send a drone over there anything we need the Russians to well I thought they were going to embargo oil we were told it was that sanction had destroyed no they want as much oil right now as they can before November they want want the price.

I think I looked yesterday.

The average price of gasoline in California this week is $5.30.

It's gone up about 60 cents in in the last three weeks, and it's headed up to $6 again and higher.

And they think, you know what?

There's not one barometer of economic activity, not even food, that gets people angrier at the administration in power, and that's the price of gas.

And I can see it.

I live in a community where the average per capita income is $16,000.

When I drive in to a discount gas place two miles from my house, we call it the arena, Jack.

You wouldn't believe it.

Any time of the day, there's a line of cars.

And this is rural.

It's not even in the city limits.

And when you get in that line, it can take you 20 minutes because people don't have enough money to use a credit card or they don't have one.

So they go in and they will park their car, go in and give them 50 bucks.

And then they see how little 50 and they hit their head and they say, I need to get more gas.

They go back in and give them a few more dollars.

They don't have the money to pay that type of price.

And Biden knows that.

And

again,

forget all of the moralistic sermonizing about global warming and it's a dirty fuel.

If you go online and any of the American Petroleum Institute, any of these indices that show you

oil pumped, natural gas pumped in the United States, you will see that we were at or above the peak Trump years.

They're saying one thing, but as the election looms are doing another.

And when they got angry and they were trying to cut off, I think they did, a lot of natural gas exports to Europe, remember?

Oh, then they kind of disguised it in global warming terms.

The real subtext is they don't want to export.

Maybe it's good.

But they want to do everything and their capacity to lower oil prices, gasoline prices, and natural gas before the election.

If you, anybody out there is so misguided to vote for Joe Biden, and if he should win, mark my words, as soon as the election is over, he's going to go full green agenda and he's going to start having more mandates about EV.

He's going to cut back on federal, but not now.

Not now.

It's just absolutely analogous to the student loan program.

Right before the 2022 election, he did everything illegally.

The Supreme Court had said later and before, you can't do that.

And now he's trying to do it again this week.

He's trying to forgive more student loans, even though the court has blocked him.

It's really amazing what this left will do that's extra legal.

or hypocritical to retain power.

It's just amazing, you know.

And

expect, if we were going to forecast what's going on in the next few months, I would suggest three or four things.

Number one, they're going to use a big amnesty.

Everybody mark my words on student loans.

Number two,

They are going to beg the Saudis.

They are going to de facto loosen up on the sanctions on Russia.

They are going to start drilling and encouraging record U.S.

production to get the price of gas before the election.

Number three, they are going to put all sorts of pressure on the Federal Reserve to get that home mortgage rate down from 7% right before the election.

They really will.

And number four,

number four,

They are going, when Obador said that he wanted $20 billion, remember that, to close the border?

I will guarantee you that Biden have already called him up and said, yes, we'll think about

normalizing with Cuba or Venezuela as you demanded.

Maybe we can give you some money, but we don't want to publicize it.

And they will try to stop the traffic just before the election, but not after.

And I was thinking out the other day, and I looked at Obador, did you see that?

He's already starting for the first time since Trump was in office to turn people away from the border.

This is all election-driven.

Well, Victor,

we've got some other things to

raise.

One of them, a little distant now from

energy and electric vehicles and gasoline, are the precious sugar cubes and hothouse flowers that have to eat at Princeton University.

And we'll get your thoughts on this pathetic story and others topics right after these important messages.

If you're running a business, you know that every time you miss a call, you're leaving money on the table.

When every customer conversation matters, you need a phone system that keeps up and helps you stay connected 24-7.

And that's why you need OpenPhone.

OpenPhone is the number one business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications.

It works through an an app on your phone or computer, so no more carrying two phones or using a landline.

With OpenPhone, your team can share one number and collaborate on customer calls and texts like a shared inbox.

That way any teammate can pick up right where the last person left off, keeping response times faster than ever.

Plus say goodbye to voicemail.

Their AI agent can be set up in minutes to handle calls after hours, answer questions, and capture leads so you never miss miss a customer.

So whether you're a one-person operation drowning in calls and texts, or having a large team that needs better collaboration tools, OpenPhone is a no-brainer.

See why over 60,000 businesses trust OpenPhone.

OpenPhone is offering our listeners 20% off your first six months at openphone.com slash Victor.

That's O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E openphone.com slash Victor.

And if you have existing numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them over at no extra charge.

Open phone.

No missed calls.

No missed customers.

Do you ever just want to turn off the news and ignore politics?

That's understandable.

It's overwhelming.

But here's the thing.

We're citizens of a republic.

The decisions made by our government affect our everyday lives.

In order to be a good citizen, you have to read and understand the United States Constitution.

And that's why I'm so excited that Hillsdale College is offering a brand new free online course called The Federalist.

This course explains how the United States Constitution established a government strong enough to secure the rights of citizens and safe enough to wield that power.

And today, it's our responsibility to pay attention, to be vigilant, they may say, in order to preserve and protect Republican self-government.

Hillsdale's online course, The Federalist, includes 10 lectures, each about 30 minutes long.

You can take the course at your own pace.

There's no cost to sign up.

I'm like many a college alumnus who's benefited from the Federalist course, it's filled those big gaps with exceptional and unbiased analysis that was all too often missing from our higher education experience.

Go right now to hillsdale.edu/slash vdh to enroll.

There's no cost and it's easy to get started.

That's hillsdale.edu/slash VDH to enroll for free.

Hillsdale.edu slash VDH.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen

show.

Yes, so Victor, this

story involves Robbie George, who runs the Madison Center at Princeton and is a highly regarded professor there,

amazingly respected on the right.

He's a colleague with you on the the Bradley Foundation board,

one of the real academic stars of Princeton, but he has the sin of being a conservative.

And these

many, if not all, the Ivy League schools have these eating clubs.

I must say they didn't have them at Holy Cross.

And they don't have them

where I taught at Fresno State either.

Yeah, it was a cafeteria.

Yeah.

But they have these clubs.

And a student invited his his professor, George, to dine with him there.

And I think he was even George, who is Robbie.

George is a graduate of Princeton, was a member of the club also.

And all of a sudden,

a hell broke loose because,

well, we can't be in the same room eating with this terrible man.

He is a very, well, you know him well.

You can say what you want about him, but this is just another sign of

the

candyassery of the elites in our elite institutions that they cannot be in the same dining hall as Robbie George having salad.

It's nuts.

Victor, your thoughts.

Again, there's all these layers to the current epidemic of insanity.

So the people who complain, think about this generation that we are raising of younger people.

They have been so entitled.

They are so sheltered that if they, in their opinion, see Robbie George at a dining club, then they get triggered, they get hurt, they can't stand to even think.

I mean,

do they have any idea?

You know, I'm reading, because I'm leading a tour of D-Day on May 23rd for the 80th anniversary.

So I've been rereading Carl de Este's book on, great book on Normandy.

I'm reading Anthony Bieber's D-Day, Stephen Ambrose.

Do they have any idea that these kids that were 17 and 18 years old on the first wave at Omaha Beach were just, it was a death sentence.

They got, they waded out, they were dumped out in the water too early and their head was blown off.

Or after they took the beaches, for the next 70 days, they were trapped in the Bokage and they were killed.

It was just horrible.

But that's what prior generations did.

And this entitled, smug generation feels like it can't

it can't endure to see a conservative professor.

And then the other irony is that of all the conservative professors, myself included, Robbie George is probably the most amicable and easygoing of all of them.

He has no rough edges.

He reached out to Cornell West, the hardcore leftist, and did an entire polite joint speaking debate conversations with him for years.

He's always done that.

He's never

he doesn't swear.

he doesn't say bad things, he doesn't lose his temper.

His whole purpose is to spread an alternative view of politics to the degree that it's even appropriate to do that in a university setting that is ecumenical.

If everybody wants to talk about liberal causes, Robbie's point is, well, maybe you would like to find a different view.

If you do, come and see me, but I'm not going to press my views on you.

If you want to have me come to your dining club, even though it's left-wing, I'll be happy to.

But I didn't invite myself.

I didn't insist I come.

I'm not suing you.

So

it's just the same old thing.

And, you know, there's been, I just read a study of the,

it was in the Instapund.

Glenn Reynolds

posted it.

Steve Hayward's done a lot too with the ideological bent of faculty.

And when you get in by discipline and major campuses, when you get into the elite, it's about 85 or 90%

Democrat to Republican.

When you get into the fields, the most conservative, according to the one I just read, was engineering and then physics.

And then you go down, but when you, I didn't realize communication is really the most left-wing I always thought English was.

But it's about 95, 96% Democratic professors.

And when you you look at gifting at Stanford, it's about 94%.

I mentioned earlier that in the Stanford faculty complex of the people who voted in the last mentor, it was like 550 voted

in the primaries, for Biden in the Democratic primary.

There were 14 that voted for Trump, 14.

And so it's...

It's so weighted, and yet they can't be happy with that.

They can't say, well, we control all of academia.

We use ideological litmus tests to hire, to promote, to tenure, to retain.

We make people fill out McCarthy-era DEI oaths.

We require that.

We do all of this stuff and we run things, but we don't want a conservative walking anywhere near a dining club.

And that's how they do.

Think if they had real power, what they would do.

You know what I mean by real power?

Yes.

We wouldn't be talking right now.

We'd be be lined up with a Byron squad.

Yeah.

By the way, since I mentioned Bradley, can I just,

I know coming up, I think all the Bradley Prize

winners have been announced now.

Jay Bhattachari,

Sam Gregg, and I just saw the other day announced that Bill Allen, William Allen,

the great professor of our founding,

who's somewhat ill, but

he is a happy warrior.

He's former chairman of the Civil Rights Commission.

He's very, very good.

I've heard him speak.

He's very well-read, well-spoken, and very calm.

Yeah.

As is Professor Greg.

He's a great guy.

And

I know Jay, of all of them, I know Jay

the most.

He's a colleague at the Hoover Institution.

And he's about as soft-spoken as you can get.

And all of those guys,

I get back to that again about Stanford.

On that campus, as I speak,

you had the four most,

not the most, but of the most esteemed public health experts as far as policies go toward epidemics or as far as the science of immunology.

in Jay Bacharia, Scott Atlas, John Ioannides, and Michael Levette, the Nobel Prize winner.

And what was the attitude of that campus?

It was shunning them, ostracism.

I would like

all of them to get prized, Bradley prized.

I would like to get all of them to get

honored for what they did because they warned us.

They warned us again and again.

If you shut down this country and you shut down students from schools and you shut down the medical industry, you're going to have a lot of excess death from missed cancer screenings, missed surgeries, spousal abuse, familial abuse, suicides, drug use.

But most importantly, when you shut people from human contact and they're relying on electronic machines to interact, when you turn them loose, you better be careful.

And what we saw with the George Floyd riots, I think, had a lot to do with the consequences of COVID lockdown.

And

now, I'm a little upset because now

Burke's is starting to emerge as even worse worse than Fauci

behind the scenes crafting policy.

And why Donald Trump didn't fire both of them, I don't know.

I know

it would have been a big blow-up, but that would have saved us a lot of trouble.

But what I'm getting at is

that each day the evidence gets more and more.

The House is investigating Peter Dosick and Echo Health.

It gets more and more

really disturbing that at the core of this whole reaction to COVID, it seems that high officials in the federal government, the Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, you name it, many of these people knew that there was gain of function research going on,

A, that it had been outlawed in the United States, B, and they had worked around that law by using grants, sometimes not being candid about where the money was going to go, And they were funding

gain of function research in China.

And when that was known and the epidemic spread, they did all of their best to demonize anybody who said that the disease was a gain of function, man-made engineered virus in Wuhan, and they destroyed people's careers.

And if you think about it and you think about it logically, and Rand Paul, I mean, he's controversial, but

when he went through the entire step by step and you got back to Dr.

Fauci, you start to see something that's almost unthinkable.

It's unimaginable that people in the United States lent their prestige and their money and were not transparent about it.

And they had some involvement in the creation of an artificial virus that escaped and killed 50 million people and a million Americans.

And that's where we are.

And they did their best to hide their tracks by attacking other people, by trying to destroy the career of Bacharia or Atlas or Yanidis.

And

it's really going to be the most, it's been the most disturbing thing in science

in a long time.

And they just used science any way they could.

And then we had all of these aftershoots of

you have to wear a mask unless you're Nancy Pelosi at the hairdresser.

You have to wear a mask unless you're Gavin Newsom at the French laundry restaurant.

By the way, I'll just finish this rant, Jack, with in California, and I'll emanate, I'll emulate Joe Biden, you have to wear,

you have to wear a mask, but you also have to get $20 an hour in a fast food restaurant

unless you're Gavin Newsom.

And he pays his food workers at his Jack Plum franchise $16 an hour.

Oh, I didn't hear that.

Yeah.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Not only did he give an old sidekick, the Panera Bread franchise, an exemption, but he has an exemption, which

is

the essence of progressivism.

Progressivism is a

pick of the very wealthy bicosta elite, and it's predicated on one central thesis.

We just talked about it with private jets and global warming.

The architects are never subject to the consequences of their own ideology, and they consider all of us semi-fascist, ultra-mega, deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, dregs, clingers, as laboratory rats to be experimented on.

But when the experiments go bad, they don't suffer.

Well, Victor, I want to get your thoughts on, well, I just want to mention something

about

the Stanford area.

But before I do that, I've got to say a word, and it's barbecue.

And just hearing that word makes one's mouth water.

And you may already have a low-temperature, slow-cooking smoker, egg, or pellet barbecue.

But in the middle of your busy week, dear listener of the Victor Davis Hanson Show, who has that kind of time?

You need a hot, fast, solar, infrared gas grill.

It heats up to a thousand degrees.

In just three minutes, even on cold winter nights, that heat locks in juices and flavor and grills food faster.

In just a few minutes, your family will be sitting at the table enjoying delicious, better than restaurant quality grilled food.

Juicy steaks, moist chicken, tender

fish.

I don't know what fishin' is.

That's a new, it's a new kind of food.

Tender fish and healthy grilled veggies.

Soler is a multi-generational veteran-owned business.

Their portables, carts, and built-ins are all made in the USA from commercial-grade stainless steel.

So they are built to last.

Get your free guide how to choose the right infrared grill at best hotgrill.com.

That's best hotgrill.com.

Solair infrared gas grills for fast, delicious grilled food every day.

Best hotgrill.com.

Once more time, one more time.

I got to learn how to speak someday.

Best hotgrill.com.

And we thank the good people at Solair Infrared Gas Grill for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show.

And by the way, get you a Solair and cook at home and you want them to pay food at a restaurant which charges

has to pay its employees $20 an hour.

Can you imagine how much it's going to cost to eat out in America?

How much more it's going to cost to eat out in America?

Hey, Victor,

Jay Bhattachari did his studies initially,

some of the initial studies of what the hell was happening in

the Menlo Park/slash

Hoover Palo Alto area.

And

it comes to mind today because I just came across

a new documentary.

It hasn't been totally released yet, but it's by Shelby Steele and, of course, Eli Steele, his son.

And it's called Killing America.

And it's a study of the

anti-Semitism and anti-meritocracy efforts at hand in these local school systems.

It's really quite discouraging.

And as much as some of this is motivated by this

liberal idiocy post-October 7th, a lot of this crap hole was afoot beforehand.

So I want to recommend to folks to be on the lookout for this, Killing America.

And they just do terrific work, Shelby.

Yeah,

Eli was a student of mine when I was a visitor at Pepperdine's graduate program in public policy.

Good friend of my late daughter and Shelby, who's been a colleague of mine for over 20 years.

They're both brilliant, wonderful people.

And everybody should

take enormous flack from people.

Remember their last

on Michael Ford.

Who killed Michael Brown?

Yeah, Michael Brown.

What killed Michael Brown?

Yeah, excuse me.

Michael Brown, what killed him.

Amazon deplatformed it for a while.

And

the whole, just as a sidelight on the anti-Semitism,

we're seeing things.

I had, I think

I didn't do one with,

how do I put that?

I didn't do a podcast with Sammy this week because I had two, one with Benedict Beckel that some of you may have already heard, but he's a brilliant scholar that created this whole analysis of why we hate ourselves in the West.

And he used a term by Roger Scruton, oikophobia, or this self-contempt.

And I think it's fascinating, but a lot of it has to do with Israel as well.

And then I had a graduate student at Stanford, Kevin Fagalis, on.

I think you'll like that interview.

And he went chapter and verse what's happened to Jewish students at Stanford and what people said and did to him and other people following,

not following

the response to October 11th.

I'm talking about following October 7th.

Everybody should make that crucial distinction.

You don't get it from the mainstream media, but the hatred of Jews intensified after October 7th.

It intensified even further after the retribution or the attempt to get rid of Hamas in Gaza, but it didn't take that for people to come out of the woodwork.

They were delighted that 1,200 Jews were killed on October 7th.

I mean it.

And everybody should remember that.

It's going to be fascinating what the politics, Jack, are, because we keep hearing there's 250,000 voters of Arab American persuasion that will vote in a bloc against Joe Biden.

Personally, I don't think they will, given the Trump alternative.

But they say they will, and they say they will to such an extent that they are being used used by the pro-Hamas forces to leverage the Biden administration successfully, as we've learned with Biden's pressure on Netanyahu.

But nobody talks about the much greater population of 8 million Jews, maybe 4 or 5 million are voters.

And they tend to break 70% Democratic historically.

And some of them are in very key states.

They're not all in California and New York where it doesn't matter.

And it would be very interesting to to see what happens if they break as blacks or Latinos are said to be.

I know Sammy's been on the radio, I mean, the interview with me, and she's very skeptical.

She thinks that this idea of a massive Latino defection or a massive black defection or a massive Jewish defection, it's not going to happen, that they're just too wedded to the status quo, no matter who is at the top of the ticket.

I'm a little bit more open to the idea, but it's going to be interesting

if you're a Jewish American and you identify with your Jewish heritage and you see what this administration is doing right now

by trying to overthrow an elected government, and that's what they're doing in Israel, and trying to predicate the delivery of weapons with the demand to not

finish off Hamas.

I think Elizabeth Warren, didn't she today say she wanted to predicate the resupply of F-16 parks, F-15 parks, predicated on whether Israel obeys Biden and stops the ceasefire.

I've never seen such a naked,

you know, just effort to interfere with the politics.

I know people are going to say, well, Victor, we give them so much money.

We give everybody money.

But we've never seen...

It started under Obama

with the...

Yes.

Obama hated Israel.

He really did.

He loved Iran.

Valerie Jarrett grew up there.

She loved Iran.

This administration had Robert Mallee in there for too long.

They loved Iran.

They still love Iran.

They think Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran and Assad, they all form a block of resistance.

They all are authentic revolutionaries.

persecuted Shia.

They're Persians who don't get their due.

And that the real enemies in the world are sell-out Arabs in the Gulf, are Jordan, or Egypt, or the Jewish state of Israel.

That's what they believe.

Play them off against each other.

And then when our former allies shriek loud enough, we'll come in.

We'll say, we can't hear you, Israel.

What did you say?

A little louder.

That's how they view themselves.

Victor, we've got another topic to discuss as we round out the show.

But before we head to a commercial break, and we will head there, I do want to

let our listeners know, VictorHanson.com.

You should go there and sign up.

Subscribe so you can read Victor's exclusive ultra pieces.

But you should look for in the in the archives of these podcasts, Victor did at least two, maybe three podcasts with Stephen Kway

about the aforementioned, talking about

gain of function and the almost diabolical machinations by our

administrative state related to COVID.

And they are fascinating and troubling discussions and interviews that Victor has held.

So go find them.

And I'm hoping, Victor, there'll be another refresher with you and Professor

Way.

So that said, we're going to talk about the new issue of Strategica, which Victor oversees at the Hoover Institution.

And we will do that right after this final important message.

Cooler temperatures are rolling in, and as always, Quince is where I turn for false staples that actually last.

From cashmere to denim to boots, the quality holds up and the price still blows me away.

Quince has the kind of false staples you'll wear non-stop, like super soft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just $60.

Their denim is durable and fits right, and and their real leather jackets bring that clean classic edge without the elevated price tag.

What makes Quints different?

They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen.

So you get top-tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands.

When the weather cools down, my Quint sweaters are a go-to.

My cashmere short sleeve that works under any jacket, formal or casual, or my thick, long-sleeve, go-everywhere, do-everything sweater that pairs with any pant or jogger.

Quince products are my favorites, which is why I went to Quince to buy my recent, very beautiful purse that leaves the house every time I do.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com/slash Victor for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.

That's qui nce.com slash victor for free shipping and 365 day returns.

Quince.com slash victor and we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I've got 20 minutes to run club meets and it's time for a quick pre-workout snack.

Go go squeeze Active Fruit Blend to the rescue.

Made with Select B vitamins to help release energy.

It's an easy squeezable pouch made to move with me.

The taste, so good.

And made with real fruit.

Even better, whether I'm hitting the trail or meeting my friends on the court, this is my go-to on the Go Snack.

Quick, easy, ready when I am.

When it's go time, I go with GoGo Squeeze Active.

Snack yours on your next door run.

Search for GoGo Squeeze on Amazon.

We are back with the

Hanson Show Victor.

Runs Strategica at

the online journal at Hoover.

Go find it.

This is issue 91, and it's on drones.

And if I just may read, Victor, the beginning of Seth Cropsy's central piece, he's one of the authors of

three

who are participating in this particular issue.

And it says, the Ukraine war has been dubbed the first drone war and the first Starlink war, considering the publicly apparent role of advanced technologies in the conflict.

However, the issue is what the Ukraine war might teach us about the future of military power.

More specifically, is the Ukraine war a watershed moment after which unmanned distributed technologies will dominate the battlefield?

Or is it a remarkably public display of a broader set of evolutions in the character of warfare?

Victor, I think this is really cool and interesting.

Would you talk as you want about issue 91 of Strategica on drones?

Yeah, I thought

I picked the topics.

David Berkey, my assistant, manages the mechanics of getting everything laid out, which is more difficult.

But I wanted to see what the

attitude toward drones, given what's going on in Ukraine, where they've done, I think they've sunk 40% of the Black Sea fleet, and they have even, you you know, kind of marine drones that look like jet skis almost.

And whether this is really the radical change in warfare that everybody's talking about.

That is, can a power that's outnumbered without the GDP or population or area or military budget or hardware, can it actually ever stand up?

And the answer that in this essay

by Mark Moyer, which and Seth Cropsey, John Yu talks about the legal aspects of it more than the technology.

They come to almost the identical, if I could generalize widely, that yes, they're very valuable and yes, they pose alternative ways of hurting the enemy that are going to be very hard to defend against, but they're still a tool.

And they don't change the nature of war that's solid, unchanging,

immutable, because it's human nature.

You have to defeat the enemy, you have to humiliate them, you have to dictate policies.

And in the case of naval warfare, yes, drones can destroy 40% of the fleet.

Does that mean you don't need a navy?

No.

Because

how are you going to get

grain into Ukraine?

you have to have ships to escort you.

Can drones fly along and knock down other drones?

Maybe, but are they going to be able to take men to one place to another?

So what they're saying is that the old

standbys and soldiers on the ground, people in planes, ships with sailors, they're not going to change.

They can be enhanced, they can become more vulnerable, they can become more lethal, depending how well they adopt to the drone technology.

and revolution, but they don't rewrite the rules of war.

So it's pretty interesting.

They also point out that this is part of a larger development, Jack, that it may be valuable to us that we are putting $14 to $15 billion in these 11 to 12 aircraft carriers, and they require 5,000 people to have mobile platforms.

And if you had 100 cheap drones at, say, $100,000 each, and they were flying at 2 in the morning at 6 inches above the water, would they be able to be stopped before they hit the head, the

shore, the water line, excuse me, of a big $14 billion $5,000?

Maybe not.

So what they're trying to say is

maybe these aircraft carriers or maybe these other platforms should have anti-drones or have more drones themselves.

But you still need, though,

the traditional

idea of ships and men and artillery, etc.

So it's a tool that enhances, but it doesn't change what war has been like for centuries.

Well, again, listeners, that's Strategica.

You'll find that at the Hoover Institution website.

Victor, we're about out of time here.

We come to the end of this podcast where we do our end-of-the-podcast business.

So I've already talked about VictorHanson.com and folks do go there to find

links to all Victor's articles.

And again,

the ultra articles you will need to subscribe in order to read them.

Victor writes two or three a week.

I calculated as

essentially two books worth of original content.

And five bucks gets you in the door, $50 for the full year at the blade of Perseus VictorHanson.com.

Victor, also, I wanted to mention, we talked about this on another podcast.

Victor writes a lot on X, and he's got a recent piece up, Why Are They Destroying Us?

It's just terrific analyses of the current political scene.

So if you're on Twitter slash X, go and follow Victor at VD Hansen is his handle.

And on Facebook,

Great people at the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club, not officially tied with the VDH, but good people who

have all sorts of links to all sorts of things Victor's done over the last 20, 30 years.

You'll find it.

Find it there.

Also on Facebook, the VDH's Morning Cup.

Sign up for that.

On

iTunes and Apple, people leave messages, comments.

They rate this show zero to five stars.

Practically everyone gives Victor five stars.

And here's a message.

We read them all.

This one's titled California Central Valley.

Quote, I live in Modesto and work in Fireball.

I hope I said that right.

And I'm surprised at the difference in the labor force.

The further you get away from Highway 99, skill set is much lower.

You quickly find that the state is subsidizing the labor force.

With welfare, Section 8, housing, so on.

Something I don't hear much discussion on is how the state is fleecing companies through taxes, environmental and labor laws to pay for this.

There are really hurting companies with the California meal break laws giving employees three years to file lawsuits against employers.

It goes on and.

No, he's absolutely right.

And I may culpa, mea culpa, because there is a war.

on businesses and they're not going to fight it anymore.

They're leaving in droves.

The local foster free is just 20 miles, just shut down because of the $20 wages.

And if you go, as I keep haranguing to a food market whose name won't be mentioned in the middle of the day and you see how many people are able-bodied and none of them are paying with their own money, they're all using EBT cards.

We are subsidizing non-labor participation.

The other thing is, and I mentioned this before, one of the on

appreciated, underappreciated pathologies, unfortunately, in California is the huge black market, huge black market.

The other is non-tax compliances.

People are being paid in cash and they are selling things in cash and they're not paying income tax and sales taxes and they're not being audited either.

And I think it's a wonderful thing to be diverse.

I really do.

I'm not being cynical, but when you have 27% of the population, that was not born in the United States who are currently residing in California of the 41 million.

So when you get up to 12 or 13 million people and they have no immediate experience until they came here with the United States, then you have a massive challenge to teach them about how insurance works in the United States.

You don't leave a scene of the accident,

a large, how traffic is different from their home country, the traffic laws, what's the culture about the voluntary tax reporting system, a lot of things, and inculcate them so they don't see their tribal affiliations as their primary persona, but it should be incidental.

And we are not doing that.

And so we are multiracial, but we're not a single culture state anymore.

And we have so many people who are operating by principles of the country in which they were born.

And they need to be assimilated and integrated and helped understand the American project.

And if it's not going to happen, then then you're going to see non-reported income grow, grow, grow, and shrinkage in taxes, which means you're going to go tax businesses and the affluent more and more and more.

And I mentioned to Sammy, when you have

4 million households, Jack do not pay their power bill in California.

And to make up for that, they've had to change the solar compensation for solar power on people's roofs.

And

they're going to introduce an income penalty based on your income.

You're going to have to pay more for power.

So when you have socialism like this and you have so many non-compliant people, we have a $76 billion

deficit.

All we'd have to do is say, we're going to war on cash transactions, and we're going to warn everybody.

If you sell products on the side of the street or on a Saturday swap meet, you're going to have to pay income tax on your sales and you're going to have to charge sales tax.

And if you don't do it, we're going to go after you.

And if you are driving a car and you hit somebody and you take off, we're going to impound that car and you're not going to get it back ever.

We're going to sell it and we're going to give what we can give to the injured party.

And

that's aside from enforcing the immigration laws.

But

California, everybody talks about all these pathologies.

The infrastructure is shot.

The school system is ranked near the bottom.

The taxes are highest in the nation.

The number of

welfare recipients per capita is the highest.

The homeless is the highest.

But one thing they don't talk about is that this was an experiment to open the borders.

Cavin Newsome approved $500 million to pay the health care bills without any thought of how

you govern a state where over one out of every four persons was not born in the United States, their native language was not English, they're not being acculturated, and

how do you manage that

in an atmosphere where what I just said can get you fired as racist or xenophobic or tribally chauvinistic, et cetera?

They don't even want to talk about it.

All they say is diversity is our strength, but then they don't say, well, if diversity is our strength, why do we

lead in this category, unfortunately, in this category, in this category, in this category?

And it has something to do with we're not teaching people who come to California from different countries that you are now an American.

You made a decision to leave your own country.

We don't want to advise you, but if you did, you have to do it legally.

If you didn't do it legally, you got to go back.

And if you're here legally and you want to be a citizen, we're here to help you, but you're going to have to learn the nuts and bolts of civic education, Constitution, Declaration of Independence.

you're going to have to speak English.

And we highly discourage people who come to this country from seeking public assistance.

It took a generation to destroy paradise here, Victor.

Well, it did.

Texas, I know Texans are going to get angry at me, but Texas was not given a natural beauty like California was.

There's nothing like

Yosemite or California coastline in Texas.

And they took, I don't want to say maybe purgatory, and they made it into paradise and compared.

And we took paradise and made it into the inferno.

And that's hard to do.

I told our former governor that once.

He got angry and called me about a column.

He said, what do you mean?

You would never, Texas is horrible.

I said, they took hell and made heaven, and we took heaven and made hell.

He started yelling at me.

He was so angry on the phone.

It was true.

If it was Jerry Brown, I assume he went back into a yoga studio to come back.

I had no animus toward Jerry Brown.

We talked a lot about Greek and his Jesuit education.

So it wasn't personal animus.

I like him as a person, but his policies I thought were disastrous.

Unlike his father, Pat Brown Sr.

was a good governor.

Yeah,

who beat Nixon.

So you're going to be, I'll be quick here.

I think you mentioned before, you're going to be away for a while.

And I want our listeners to know that we are going to pre-record some episodes of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

And if you'd like your question asked, and I'm very happy to do it, send me an email, jackrslc at gmail.com.

That's jackrslc at gmail.com.

Send me your question, and we're, I think we're going to pre-record about six, seven, eight episodes.

Yeah, I hope so.

And I'm going to answer any question.

If it's like the email I get, if it's a question of comparative Greek and Latin grammar, I'll try to answer it.

If it's a question of

don't you should wear makeup on Fox because your head looks like a reflective ball, I'll answer that too.

And this gets me angry that this false allegation I use frequently F word, and I've already written an angry letter about that, it'll appear.

So I'm going to answer anything, Jack.

Very good.

All right.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

We will be back soon with another episode episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone.