Election Rhetoric Storm and California Slippin' Away

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

You are here to listen to the wisdom of Victor Davis Hansen, the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is so many things, best-selling author, syndicated columnist, farmer, military historian, classicist, and man with a website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

I'll tell you more about that towards the end of this episode.

We are recording on Friday, the 29th of March.

It's good.

Friday,

and we have any number of things to discuss in this episode.

I just want to say, Victor, we're going to be recording two episodes today.

And this particular episode will be out on April 2nd.

And on the second episode,

we're going to talk a lot, a lot, a lot about Donald Trump and that one.

But in this one, we're going to start off getting Victor's thoughts about Joe Biden, about an...

insane award given to the Associated Press for a photograph

they took on October 7th,

The fallout, Victor's thoughts on the fallout of the sacking of Ronna McDaniel from MSNBC.

We have a bunch of California stories also to get Victor's thoughts on.

We'll get to all of this, starting with Joe Lieberman's death right after these important messages.

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we are back with the victor davis hansen show so victor joe liberman who was the senator from connecticut where i live i know joe knew joe liberman a little bit I served on a board with him at the Gatestone Institute, bumped into him a few times in the city.

As you may recall, he had a relationship with William F.

Buckley on National Review.

Bill Buckley was central to his election to the Senate in 1988, but he fell.

He had an accident.

He moved out of Connecticut.

He moved to Riverdale in the Bronx.

And he fell the other day and he died from complications of that fall.

He was 82.

The vice presidential candidate on the ticket with Al Gore in

2000,

a man of

some

appreciation on the right,

but

a very eclectic man.

Victor, what are your thoughts about the late Joe Lieberman?

I had a lot of admiration, just like you did.

He ran with Al Gore, as you remember, in 2004.

And then they kind of turned on him as he became

a little bit more moderate.

He was always a moderate, but I mean, he veered away from the direction the Democratic Party was going.

And then in your state, I think he ran as an independent to capture his ⁇ to get reelected to for his Senate seat.

He did.

And that made him really angry.

And I think he was pretty prescient.

He saw where this anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-Jewish,

I don't know what do you say, base of the Democratic Party was going.

And he was adamantly against it.

And so I don't know where he was politically.

He was probably what we would call a JFK Democrat when they don't exist anymore.

So he was kind of out in the wilderness.

I don't know

what somebody like Joe Lubernan, he was an independent when he died the other day, what he would do with a party that incorporates things that we've never even imagined before?

Just this week, Jack,

we had a Berkeley city council meeting that was designed to commemorate the Holocaust.

There was actually a Holocaust survivor there when these thugs broke in, or protesters.

And I was watching the video of it.

What they were saying was pretty crazy, you Zionist pig.

It was horrible.

And then when you collate that with this University of Missouri Journalism Journalism Award for the best photos of the year,

and they gave

one of the top awards to the photo of the young woman who was a Germany Israeli who was apparently killed

at the concert, had her head bashed in.

They took the body, as everybody saw from that video, and she was partially stripped.

And they put her as a trophy, the corpse, in the back of that pickup.

And then they drove around honking, had people spit on her.

And I think there were four, three or four people in the pickup.

That photo got the top award.

So these are things that Joe Lieberman would never have imagined and didn't imagine and distance himself from.

So his passing is a reminder of what the Democratic Party used to be like, but it bears no resemblance today.

He wrote a piece

last week in the Wall Street Journal going after Chuck Schumer or

Chuck Schumer's Schumer's

involvement in Israeli politics and his attack on Netanyahu.

So he was

who

that

really was.

Well, it wasn't so much that, by the way, Victor.

Now I think about it,

he was elected in 1988.

He unseated Lowell Weicker, who was just a reprehensible Republican.

And

he lost the primary after

in

2006,

the Senate primary, because of his stand on

Iraq, the Iraq war.

And so he lost to Ned Lamont, who is now the governor of Connecticut, but he then won the general election as an independent.

And two years later, he endorsed John McCain.

I think he may have even spoken at the Republican convention.

No, he didn't.

He did.

He did.

I remember that.

But what would he have made of this Shauna Luke's poor woman who was killed and defiled

and

had her head bashed in and she was being shown off as a trophy and people were celebrating her partially nude corpse?

And

the photograph of that and the photographer win this award from an American university, which apparently I hadn't heard of it, but it's a renowned Picture of the Year award.

at least one of the Pictures of the Year awards.

So it's just mind-boggling

where we are.

And when you look at those protests where they broke into the

innately obscene Biden, Clinton, Obama raising all this cash in New York, really reminder who the moneyed interests are in this country and who they're for.

But the point I'm making is this is getting really out of hand.

And when you go into try to disrupt something that doesn't have anything to do with Gaza and Berkeley, it's about the Holocaust.

And the same thing is going on at Stanford University.

There's an article in the Atlantic by a Stanford student just how dangerous it is.

I mean, it's dangerous.

It's just like the 1930s.

And

nobody in the Democratic Party, the only time it ever came up as far as anti-Semitism, remember Corinne Jean-Pierre said, well, we're looking into that.

And then she just went off on Islamophobia, which is not supported by any FBI statistic.

It's not nearly the problem, if it is a problem statistically compared to anti-Semitism violence.

So I don't, you know, it's, he was,

he would have been, it was impossible for someone like Joe Lieberman to be a part of the Democratic Party.

And if you are an old Jewish liberal, I don't mean old by age, but if you've been a Jewish liberal, Jewish American liberal for a long time, you have a choice.

You can do what Joe Lieberman did and leave the party, or you can do what Chuck Schumer did and double down and try to prove to everybody that you don't have any particular empathy with Israel, at least as Israel as you think it's governed by the Netanyahu government.

Something's happened to him anyway, though.

Something's happened to Chuck Schumer.

I don't remember him

as crazy, but in 2020, he went out in front of the Supreme Court doors and said, you know, I keep mentioning that.

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, you

sowed the wind you're going to reap the world when you won't know what hit you.

And then this speech about Israel, he's

something is wrong with that guy.

He's just out on a limb.

He's just.

A story just came out about him today, Victor.

He was, someone uncovered a speech he gave in 2009.

This has to do with immigration.

I remember that speech.

I remember that speech.

It was Byron Brimstone about the need for closed borders.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I remember that.

I remember Hillary Clinton's, I said before, I remember her 1992

Bill and Hillary's speeches.

I remember Nancy Pelosi's speech at the

also at the conventions.

And I remember that because in 1992, I was on the Stanford campus at the Center for Behavioral Studies, and I remember that.

And

I was starting to think about writing about immigration, and I thought,

It's not really controversial or it's not of any interest because the Democrats and the Republicans are on the same page.

Or maybe the Democrats were for a stronger border because of their union constituencies and there were people in the Republican Party that were laissez-faire.

Right.

Let the market adjudicate.

I had one of the most famous economists in the world.

I won't mention his name because I don't want to characterize something he might disagree with after he's passed away.

But one of the first debates I had with him was a donor had us debate at a restaurant.

And I was saying that this is going to be a disaster if you have an open border because we're not assimilating, integrating that many people.

They're coming without skills.

They're not having audit background checks.

And once you come illegally and you reside illegally, you get ID.

And he just dismissed it.

He said, ah, we're going to let the market adjudicate.

I'll never forget it.

He said, when wages...

on the southern side of the border and the northern side of the border are the same,

we won't have a problem.

And they'll get there if we just let enough people in.

And I said, well, why don't we do that all over the world?

We can do it all over the world.

We can get rid of all borders.

But I said, when this

adjudication or this changing or this transmogrification of wages takes place,

how many million people do you think it will take?

10, 20, 30, 40?

Why not all Mexico?

And he couldn't say anything.

He lived in a very nice place, so when I reminded him that, he got very angry when I said that.

I also did a debate on one of the first NRO cruises.

You remember when he was a wonderful person, Bartlett, the Wall Street Journal editor?

No.

What was his name?

Yeah, I think

it wasn't an N.R.

Cruz.

What Cruz was it?

He was one of the speakers.

And it was when he was dying, I think, of prostate cancer.

Yes.

Really?

Robert Bartlett?

Is that his name?

Robert Bartlett, but it would have been a different.

The venue is unimportant.

You debated him.

Yeah, very politely about illegal immigration.

I had just written Mexifornia, and he didn't like it at all, and said that it was exclusionary and that the United States needed the labor.

99.9% of the people who came across the border illegally would be wonderful Americans.

And I said, how do you know that if you don't audit?

And why did we ever ask for anybody to have a vaccination in the old days?

Or why did people who come legally,

as I said to him, why do people have to fill out forms that are applying legally if people are coming illegally and you have no problem with it?

Why not just get rid of the whole process?

I think he warmed to that idea.

Afterwards, he was very polite and he came up and, you know, no hard feelings, but we were just on a panel back and forth.

Yeah.

That Venezuelan guy we talked about last week.

Kibera, is that him that killed Lake and Riley?

No, no, the

TikTok.

The influencer.

The influencer.

Yeah, he was.

I saw some other pieces about him talking about immigration.

He's just waving cash around like, you're idiots.

I'm here and I am getting money from this or that scam or this government program.

And you clowns are working.

You're sweating for nothing and I'm sitting on my ass and collecting cash.

So that's the reality of

the used to be border.

I think ICE put a hold on him, though.

They're looking for him.

Yeah.

They can't find him, but they only did that because he added insult to injury.

And

it's the same thing with Oberdor.

I talked about that a little bit with Sammy, that 60 Minutes interview, where he basically said,

20 billion's cost.

You You got to recognize more friendly Venezuelan, Cuban communist government.

Yeah, you've got to get amnesty to Mexican citizens or else.

And I think they asked him, or what?

And they thought, well, he wouldn't say, but he did.

He said, or it's going to continue, which de facto was an admission that he has the ability to stop it.

Right.

Because when he says it'll continue, it means If he doesn't get what he wants, he'll allow it to continue with a qualifier that if he does get what he wants, it won't continue.

So he has the ability, whether he gets 20 million billion or not from us, to stop it.

And he won't stop it because he finds it an interesting.

I have a theory, though.

I have a feeling that once he made those demands, just as

Biden in 2022,

on the eve of the midterms, drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and started canceling student debt, he's going to do that again.

In fact, he's already started with the cancellation of student debt, but he will start draining the reserve, and he will cancel debt, and he'll make some deal with Obado to stop illegal immigration around June, give him money or something.

And then he'll tell everybody that, well, this month, look, it's down.

It's down.

It's way down 500%.

I couldn't believe Corinne Jean-Pierre the other day was just shameless when she was talking about that the crime rate has gone down,

way down under Joe Biden.

It's much better now.

This was in response to the killing of the police officer.

It's down in the sense that it spiked to all-time highs nearly, and now it can't get any higher without civilizational collapse.

So obviously something that goes astronomically high will level out.

But even property, car theft, all of that.

except for murder and violent assault has gone way up.

And it's at a level that's not sustainable.

But you can see the contours of what's going to happen in this election.

They're going to blame all of their failures on Donald Trump.

Afghanistan, it was his idea, not ours, to get out quickly by crime.

Well, he did it.

He did it.

And then they're going to say, energy,

we lower the price of energy.

you know, temporarily.

So anything, their attitudes is after screwing things up for

three and a half years, any little slight return to normality is going to be considered normality or an improvement, not upon the disaster that they...

Yeah, the new normal.

Yes, that's the new baseline.

The new baseline is their historical high.

And then if they deviate downward a little bit, then unlike Donald Trump,

they've made all the bad things go away.

I don't think anybody's going to believe that.

Yeah.

Well, there's an interesting thing

the Trump campaign or Trump pack's coming out with.

We'll get to that in a minute.

But first, Victor, you know,

this particular episode is

now in the month of April, April 2nd.

We're out on.

And April means what?

Taxes.

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So, Victor, picking up on

where we left off,

I want to just read a quick headline here from this is from the Daily Mail.

The Trump PAC has revealed a new app, and I think it's going to be a powerful political tool.

Just here's the headline, Victor.

Any thoughts you have?

How much more are your groceries under Joe?

Try Trump Super PACs Biden Mart, Biden-Mart.com to see how your shopping bill has changed in four years.

I checked out the article.

I mean, it's this is right.

It's bread and butter.

What's on everyone's table?

You just go there and under Trump, I paid

17 things and it costs 23 bucks.

And under Biden, it costs me 37 bucks.

I think that, I think that on average,

the average increase will obviously change depending on what you buy, but it's like 65, 70%.

Everybody knows that.

Everybody goes shopping, buys anything.

Like, you buy even a freaking cup of coffee.

How's this thing?

It's five bucks already.

Everything.

I just, I hear it every time I go to the supermarket twice a week.

That's all people talk about, how expensive it is.

And I start, I look at poor people and I start seeing, I know a lot of them have electric banking transfer cars, but when you look at some of the

checkout totals, you know, I used to think $150 was outrageous.

I see $400, people, $400

for a real big shopping cart, you know,

here in California, at least.

Or

gasoline, you know, with these trucks with 25, 30 gallon tanks, and it's over $5.

You see these poor people with $150

to fill up.

And then when you get in line with these cut rate, you know, mass volume stations, every once in a while, you see one.

Out here, they're a.m., p.m., you know.

When you see them,

nobody has a credit card.

They go in and pay cash because they're not, they don't have the money to fill up.

Yeah.

Well, it's also cheaper, too.

Well,

cash versus credit, but still,

I haven't filled up a tank out there, but I assume it could approach 100 bucks, right?

Or more.

you uh you fill up your truck does it tap does it top a hundred bucks oh

i have i have a 32 gallon tank well it approaches 200 bucks so i just filled up in palo alto unfortunately usually i can go you know

if i can get 20 miles a gallon on a 5.8 hemi um ram v8 i'm doing pretty well but when i go sometimes if i forget to fill up here which is about 20 cents to 30 cents a gallon cheaper than on the coast, but six bucks with

I had 30 gallons, so it was $180.

Dang.

Yeah.

All right.

That's the gift of Joe Biden printing $6 trillion and psychologically at least telling people that.

The era of the internal combustion engine was over, the federal leasing was going to be cut back, no more Keystone ideas, Anwars off the table, which is really interesting because as I said last time, he's actually, he doesn't want to tell anybody.

But one of the things that he's most sensitive about is food and gas.

So actually, when you look at the cubic feet of natural gas or oil that it's being produced,

we're at Trump levels, at his zenith.

And we're even getting higher, which tells you that when they made fun of Trump, when he said, I can get up to 50, I don't know what the number is, 15, 16 million barrels a day or whatever it was, they laughed at him.

But you can see that that's after you put Anwar off limits.

You're not taking any North American oil from Canada, or you've cut back on offshore.

We could do a lot more for at least for 10 years.

But it's really funny about Biden because

That's what's so strange about this non-transparent, disingenuous administration.

They damn oil.

They damn oil.

They They told us when he was running that the Saudis were a pariah nation.

He was not going to deal with them.

And then as soon as that midterm came up, he courted the Saudis.

He courted the Venezuelans.

He courted even the Iranians with the Iranian deal.

And it was pump,

courted Putin.

Well, not quite right at the election, but he had in 2021.

You guys pump oil.

You pump oil.

You got to get the price down.

I'll drain the reserve.

We got to get it down.

And so it was so cynical.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, speaking of cynical, the hiring and firing of Ronna McDaniel, and we'll get your thoughts on this right after these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, we discussed last week

the

initial outrage, outrage by Chuck Todd and others concerning the hiring of Ronna McDaniel, the former head of the RNC,

by MSNBC.

But between when we spoke and today, she she got canned, defenestrated, however you want to put it, the network executives caving

to the outrage machine of their

editorial staff.

But I didn't understand this.

The reason they said was because she was the head of the RNC.

Well, she'd, yes, she'd be.

I mean, so was Michael Steele.

Michael Steele is the head of the R, and George stephanopoulos is over at abc and he was at clinton flak and at msn they have al sharpton at snbc

he was the most anti-semitic racist political you can imagine they have joy reed remember that thing where i she just said for years that somebody hacked her email and therefore she was not homophobic but she went after that governor christie who was running for senate in florida remember is Is his name Christie?

I forgot his name.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, I forget.

Christ.

Christ.

Christ.

I'm sorry.

I added a Y to it.

Governor Christ, Charlie Christ.

And he,

boy, she wrote some horrible things.

And that reappeared.

And then she said that the FBI was looking out because she was hacked.

It's a complete fabrication.

She lied and she right on the air with a straight face and she's never apologized.

She's there.

Sharpgun's there.

And,

you know, they've got John Brennan.

John Brennan has admitted that he's lied twice under oath.

He was one of the people along with Mike Morrell and Anthony Blinken and James Clapper that cooked up the whole 51 quote-unquote intelligence authorities to lie to the American people on the eve of the second debate that Hunter's laptop was not Hunter's laptop, that all those naked selfies and Mr.

10%

and the big guy all came out of the brain of some Russian guy in the Kremlin.

That's what they told us, basically.

So they have no standards at all.

I don't, you know, and that I made a tweet.

I don't know why she'd want to do that.

Is it the exposure?

Is it she wants the $300,000 for being a paid analyst?

Is it because she wants to follow the trajectory of Nicole Wallace, Joe Scarborough, Michael Steele, where you go, you're really kind of supposedly a brand name signature conservative.

You go over to MSNBC or CNN, and then you quietly drift, drift, drift.

And presto, at some point, you're where the bulwark is.

You know what I mean?

A Charles Sykes or

William Crystal, and that's where in media there's a lot more financial rewards.

Is that her trajectory?

I don't know.

But she's got, if Fox can be defamed because people on the air,

and there were three or four people who did, said that the Dominion computers could not be trusted and they were communicating, that was a false allegation with foreign interest,

then

it seems to me that she's got a good case for defamation when they called her a serial liar and she made up this and this and this.

And she really damaged her character.

So we'll see what happens.

But it it just shows you that these people are paranoid.

They can have no

dissent.

They can't have any unorthodox person on there.

And as we go into this election cycle, they are getting really weird.

They are terrified that Donald Trump is going to win, that Fannie Willis,

Alvin Bragg, Letita James, Eugene Carroll, Jack Smith,

getting him off the ballot, all that's not working to the way that they thought it would.

And they're left with the issues, and they do not want to talk about the issues.

So it's going to be big, big money, big, big money.

Donald Trump wants to have back alley abortions.

Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government.

And Donald Trump is a Putin stooge.

And that's about it.

It's all you're going to see.

Yeah.

I think they can also stomach their own culpability to a degree if you go back to 2015

and and donald trump ruled the msnbc airwaves he just did to the exclusion of anyone else you know where's

rubio no way to be found on msnb it's funny you said that man i think they they his opponents calibrated it was a billion dollars in free publicity if they had to pay for that type of exposure by the minute the worst was i i used to watch once in a while joe scarborough when he wasn't completely unhinged And I could not believe it in 2015, 2016.

He was an

unapologetic Trump partisan.

He had Trump on there every day in 2016.

And he was, remember he would throw up these softball questions, and then they would kind of have a

crosstalk about how they knew each other socially and all that.

It was just embarrassing.

And I don't know whether he thought that he wanted to promote Trump so Trump would be a weaker candidate versus Hillary Hillary, or his transformation was not complete into a leftist then at that point.

He really was for Trump, or I don't know what it was, but it was really weird.

And he got a lot of static for that, too,

from Republican candidates for being so biased.

Well, you know,

Joe's my friend.

Once you're my friend, you're always my friend.

And

I'll let you have the floor on all those

things.

So I think you're pretty damn dead on

your observations there, Victor.

Hey,

we're going to talk a lot more about Donald Trump on our on our next episode, but right now, Victor, I have one word and it's barbecue.

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Victor,

you're out in California right now, and there's a lot of stuff going on out there that I think we need to get your thoughts on.

One is,

well, we've talked a lot about him in the past, but

SBF Sam Bankman Freed got sentenced.

Any

my former semi-neighbor.

Yeah, any thoughts on that before we pick up some other things?

Yeah.

Yeah, but Sam Bankman Freed,

I was disappointed that he only got 25 years.

Bernie Madoff got over 100,

and his scam outdid Bernie Madoff's in terms of total losses.

It was really weird about his parents, too.

I mean, they petitioned the court with letters and he was this effective altruism and all this stuff that they,

nobody talked about the thousands of people who lost everything when this thing collapsed.

And he did it knowingly.

He was a pathological pathological personality.

He really hurt a lot of people.

He was like Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos,

and

only much, much, much, much worse.

And I guess he thought that because the Democratic Party takes care of their own, that he was going to use other people's money and out contribute George Soros, and then he would have been the darling of the Democratic Party and he'd have a lifetime exemption from any criminal exposure.

It almost worked.

But

yeah, I thought he got off lightly, even though he's going to be 50-something when he gets out, but they won't keep him in the whole 25 years.

Well, Victor, close to Palo Alto is Oakland.

And here's a headline.

I'm just curious,

when is Oakland going to become Detroit?

This is from the Daily Mail.

Outrageous Oakland officials go after 102-year-old wheelchair-bound man after he was unable to remove graffiti painted all over his home as a dem run city threatens to fine him thousands.

Are you kidding me?

No.

Yeah.

This is Oakland.

That works on so many different ways.

Remember the Bloomberg?

I wrote an article once called the Bloomberg Effect, when he was talking about the need for supers to ban supersized drinks when he couldn't get the snow out.

And the left has this, and the administrative mind in general has this idea that if you cannot deal with the existential, then there's really nothing that we need you for.

So you inflate or you focus or you exaggerate the inconsequential.

So translated to Oakland, that means they have no idea how to deal with all of these

chains and fast food and Starbucks leaving that city because people are being carjacked, murdered, attacked, looting, and the district attorney and the chief of police and the mayor either cannot or will not deal with it.

So everybody knows that, and they are losing high-end

donors.

If you look at Oakland, go up on the hill above it, Piedmont and all those people, they have their own security patrols, and even them are not going to stick around because that...

that crime is incrementally going up the hill.

And to the people who live in Sira, so to speak, if I use an old Star Trek term.

But

yeah.

And so what do they do?

They go after a 102-year-old man because he didn't raise the graffiti and they're going to charge him $1,100 and another $1,000.

And then they're going to make him pay for the, and then they're going to virtue signal, see, we're dealing with graffiti, even though there's, as a lot of the news accounts pointed out, there's public facilities, telephone juncture boxes, electricity that are covered with it, that they're responsible for.

And they won't, they can't, they won't clean them up.

It's just typical.

It's just like San Francisco.

They've got home.

The last time I was there was not too many months ago.

You can walk by a store and to the degree there's some people still in the down

the downstairs or the bottom floors, 30 or 40 percent of them are empty.

There's urine and there's feces.

And when I went to a hotel restaurant, they right in front of me, they were using a pressure washer to clean the sidewalk.

And I balked out because I could see things flick out into the gutter.

But my point is, they're now preventing these storefronts from putting window boxes or planters or anything to keep the homeless people from camping out in their entrances.

And I guess the excuse they're using is that the disabled will have more difficulty.

I don't know.

If I was a disabled person and I had a choice between

going through an entrance where somebody was alive and animate, sleeping there, urinating there, fornicating there, injecting there, defecating there, and could hurt me, I would rather have nobody there and navigate around a planner box.

It's not going to jump out, get in my face and attack me.

And so, again,

what's the purpose of it?

The purpose is to tell people, I'm London Breed, I'm the mayor,

we're dealing with infractions of the code, we're trying to make sure that we don't have impediments on the street, we're down to the nitty-gritty now because we can't deal with the homeless problem.

We know what we have to do.

We have the money to do it.

We're not going to do it because we would rather have it fester than be called illiberal.

And we're just not going to do it.

And that's just get used to it.

And,

you know, they don't really give you the figures about how many people as a result of all this are leaving California.

They say 285,000

in 18 months.

But you start looking at some of them.

It could be as high as 250,000, 300,000 a year.

are leaving.

And these are not people who are part of the 50%

who pay pay no income taxes to California.

This is the 1%

that pays 50%.

This is the 5% that pay 80% of the taxes.

These are the people that have homes that pay high property tax because of the assessments.

And when you start losing those,

when you, at a time you have a $76 billion

deficit after you got all that federal funding during the COVID years from the Trump administration, and you had,

you had a

hundred

billion dollar surplus, and you go through it.

It's just phenomenal.

And a lot of the story is, the subtext is that people don't want to talk about it.

There's two things that are going on in California besides the crime rate,

besides the high-speed rail fiasco, besides the infrastructure fiasco, besides California.

One of them is this flight of capital and taxpayers, but the other is we have the largest black market of any state in the Union.

I can go today, Jack.

You just name the item, and I can go buy it at a corner.

If I want to go get any type of food, I can get it five.

five

miles from my home right now without paying any tax on anything, restaurant, nothing.

And I know that the owners are not paying anything.

They're just pulling up in the side of the

street

in a mobile canteen.

If I want a shovel, I can go to the annual swap meet, excuse me, weekly,

no sales tax, no income tax they pay.

If I need a plumber, if I need an electrician, a roofer,

a

window installer, you name it.

I might not be able to call up a licensed contractor and get him out here.

But if I do call him up and I said, I have an emergency, they will give me an employee and says, well, we'll get a guy on the weekend or people, and they'll come out and they'll say, yep, I'll do it for $50, $60, $70 an hour in cash, in cash, in cash.

They all want in cash.

You know, when you go into the bank and you,

I had a person, I won't mention his name or occupation.

He wouldn't work unless I paid him in cash.

So I went in the bank apologetic to get a small amount of cash.

And they said,

well, this is nothing, Victor.

Don't feel bad.

You should see the amounts that we have to give out to some of our employers.

So

it's all a black market and no one talks about it.

They won't go after it.

Partly because a lot of them are recent immigrants.

27% of the state of California was not, of residents were not born in the United States.

And so they do not want to get a reputation.

They're going after that type of community.

But they are driving, they have no qualms.

They don't worry at all, Jack, that they're driving out

the taxpayer.

They don't seem to be worried at all.

And I don't know.

Can I get back, if you don't mind, just quickly to Oakland?

I'm just curious, Sim, from total East Coast perspective, always considered Oakland,

I don't know, stepchild of San Francisco in a way.

I'm not denigrating it, but it's just a perception.

And

what was Oakland?

40 years ago, Victor,

would you go to Oakland?

Was it a place of a nice downtown, restaurants, et cetera?

Or was it always kind of a gritty town?

It depends when you say you're talking 40 years ago.

Well,

just give us your perception of what Oakland is.

Well, I would say, well, that would be, say, in the mid-80s.

No, it was bad.

It was like it is now.

And

I can remember going on the freeway and having to pull over to get gas.

And it was really bad.

I got lost and was driving through a neighborhood of near downtown Oakland.

And it was bad.

And when I was a college student

in the 70s, I went to a restaurant there.

It was bad.

As I remember, there's a Fox station there, and there's not one in San Francisco studio.

And a long time ago, I went there, and it's bad.

However,

the weird thing was, in the 80s, I think it was 1999,

Jerry Brown

chose Oakland to return to politics.

And he schmoozed with all of the big businesses and the labor unions and the black community, the Latino community, you name it.

And for about 10 years,

they had, and it had started to be fair before him, but they had urban renewal,

Lake Merritt, they had a yachting, I mean, a crew program.

There were, you know, Mills College was there.

They had all sorts of things going on.

Piedmont, the prices prices just skyrocketed to be in the, it's one of the most beautiful, the hills above Oakland that go all the way to the Berkeley Hills are some of the most beautiful places in the world.

And so it was in a renaissance.

And that's how Jerry Brown leveraged that.

back into politics, that he said to everybody, I took a city that was in dire, I deliberately did it.

I didn't go right into San Francisco.

I didn't go into Los Angeles, San Diego.

I wanted to go to Oakland.

And he stayed downtown.

He did the whole thing he did in the 70s as governor.

And

I give him credit.

It was in a,

I don't want to say quite a renaissance, but Alameda County, Oakland, the Oakland airport got prominent as a cheaper or more convenient place to fly out of in certain ways.

I remember I was asked to speak on that corridor between, I think it was 580 and

the highway 13, Piedmont.

It was really beautiful.

It was very safe.

I walked around and

it was on the way to being recovered.

And now it's gone in reverse.

And the same thing is true of Berkeley next door.

And I, what I may say, reversed, in 1971,

my parents had an old friend that died in his 80s, and his widow called up and asked if we could help her move to an apartment.

So we drove up.

I drove up an old 65 Chevy pickup my grandfather had,

and I met my parents coming up, and we loaded everything on.

I drove over to the rest home or the assisted living.

We moved.

We put it in storage and I parked my pickup.

I went with my parents.

I parked at the storage section.

I went to the nearby assisted living to meet.

They picked me up.

I went over to help them unload her personal belongings.

I came back and the pickup was stolen.

And

that was over.

It was broad daylight.

And

I think it was nine hours later, they found it abandoned down in Hayward somewhere.

And it was trash with all sorts of paraphernalia in it, and it was torn up.

And I drove it home.

It was, for some reason, it was leaking oil.

And I remember my dad bought me two gallons, two gallons of

oil, and I stopped all the way for the next 210 miles putting oil in it.

I don't know what they did, but they did something to it.

Tried to yank out the engine or pull something out.

But

it had a renaissance.

And all they'd have to do is enforce the law,

arrest people.

If they're guilty, convict them.

If they're convicted, incarcerate them.

If they're incarcerating, don't let them out.

And don't worry about whether you're inordinately incarcerating this group or that group.

If they're guilty, just have blind justice and apply it.

And it wouldn't take very long for people to return to normal.

But it is, we have these enclaves that in the post-George Floyd Defund the police,

they haven't got back to normal yet.

They still, everybody thinks, well,

BLM collapsed.

The Troika, female Troika that founded it, were crooked, they got their nice homes, they took the money, and it's over with.

The corporations are not stupid enough to subsidize that graft.

And, you know, George Floyd, we've learned more about the whole circumstances around it, and it's a little bit more complex, and everybody's sad.

And we found out that the Defund the Police was disastrous, and now we're coming back to normal.

Professor Kendi is not the high-day item, hot item he was.

Not Oakland.

No, not Washington, D.C.

either.

The residue of all of that craziness is still there, that 2020, 120 days of protest riots.

Yeah, I don't, and I don't know how they get saved other than by strong local leadership, but that's

bet.

I went there in July and I

pulled over to use the restroom and to get gas.

And the sign said, it wasn't more than two blocks from the freeway, we are not responsible

for your vehicle.

And I walked in and asked if I can use the restroom.

She said, no.

I said, I thought it was a law you have one.

She goes, I'm sorry, we do not let people use the restroom.

People lock themselves in there and they do things and then we can't use it after they do things.

So I said, okay.

But I said, why do you have a sign?

And she said,

well, because we're not responsible if somebody carjacks your car as you're filling up.

And I guess that meant that they were doing it.

So it wasn't safe.

And

San Francisco is not safe.

And increasingly, places that were safe in the Bay Area are not safe.

And they won't be safe again to the people who voted these politicians in, suffer the consequences of their own ideology

and say to themselves, look in the mirror and said, I voted for a critical legal theory, relativist paradigm, and it's made my life miserable.

And I regret what I did, and I'm not going to vote for it anymore.

We'll see if that happened.

Yeah.

Well, along the same lines of

voting for things and not getting it, water,

we've got some thoughts for you to share about what is happening right now in the golden state, which has been soaked, soaked, soaked with water, and yet it seems like...

It was raining yesterday.

Yeah.

But we'll get to that, Victor.

Final thing we'll talk about.

Maybe not.

Maybe we'll add a little thing also on the caboose.

We'll do that right after this final important message.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So Victor, oh and water, okay, the reservoirs are

full, right?

The reservoirs that should have been built are not full because they don't exist, even though the money was bonded for it.

And yet the farmers in the Central Valley, which feeds the world,

are going to be denied water, not totally denied, but certainly harmed.

Tell us what's going on there, Victor.

Well,

the Central Valley is, you know, it's 5 million acres, and I live on the eastern side.

So we have what we call local irrigation districts.

And that means the rivers that come out of the immediate Sierra Nevada, the Kern River, the Cahuilla River, the Kings River, the San Joaquin River, they have all been dammed years ago.

And those reservoirs supply people within a 30-mile radius.

And so we're lucky we get Kings River water and Consolidated Irrigation District.

And that means also when you're using surface water, it recharges the water table, which has dropped about

40 feet

because of recent drought.

But remember, the more that Gavin Newsom says we're in a permanent drought, the more we remember that that we're cyclical.

The problem is that not we're, it's not climate change.

The problem is we have 41 million people, and the water infrastructure and the transfer structure is designed for about 18 million people.

And add to that an ideology that says you're in a permanent drought, and no matter what happens, you're not going to get more water or snowmelt because it doesn't exist.

So then when it exists, like last year

record,

I think we, you know, my gable on my mountain place collapsed under 25 feet of snow.

And

March was wetter than almost any month in history.

So this year they said the same thing.

Wow, look at January and look at December.

And we just waited.

And sure enough, end of January, most of February, rain, rain, snow, snow.

And then it was March.

And people said, well, it was just an average year with droughts.

No, it's been snowing and raining and we're up to about 120% of normal in most places.

So what does that mean?

That means that for those acreages that are not near the Sierra, which is about 70%

of the San Joaquin Valley, roughly from Highway 41

eastward all the way to I-5 or the 99 eastward maybe,

the water table goes 200, 400, 800, 1,000 feet even deeper and they depend on a very different type of transfer the majority of that is out of folsom or lake shasta or oroville and that's through the california water aqueduct well those are full now jack so that all that water should be transferring south through the delta It goes into the delta, then it would be pumped into the aqueduct, right?

It's not.

The rivers that are Sacramento American River tributaries are going into the delta, but they're not at the same volume being pumped.

Why?

Because they don't want agriculture on the western side of the San Joaquin Valley.

It's the richest soil in the world.

It's the most productive in the world.

It's a place where you get three tons of almonds per acre.

or three bales of cotton an acre.

It's just amazing when you have water, but it has no groundwater, so it's entirely dependent on these Northern California 300 mile transfers along through the aqueduct.

And they do not want to do it.

They believe that

there's too much corporate agriculture, there's too much unnecessary farming,

that we don't need pistachios, we don't need almonds, we don't need raisins, we don't need canned tomatoes, we don't need cotton, we don't need any of that.

That's what we don't, We go to whole earth and we don't buy those sometimes.

And

we don't need meat.

We don't need alfalfa fields, any of that, fodder.

And so what do they believe in?

They want a riparian paradise.

They want the rivers to flow from the northern mountain ranges and the Sierra at 100% of capacity.

And that means they want to give first choice of the reservoir storage to the rivers.

So it goes out to the Pacific.

And they want, especially when these northern tributary rivers that have been under legal contract to different water districts to the south were on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, they don't want to honor those contracts.

So

the San Luis Reservoir doesn't really, it's full.

It has over 3 million acre feet.

I just drove by.

It's almost full.

But that's not going to go to what it was intended for when it was built in 62.

It's going to go to the greater Silicon Valley, to San Jose, or the aqueduct.

As it goes south, it'll go over to

the Central Coast, San Luis Obispo, or they'll have to Santa Barbara before it gets to

L.A.

But it will be for municipal consumption.

So they're cutting off all of the farming, even though they've got a record water year.

And somebody can say, well, Victor, they have 41 million people.

They have to.

Yes.

They could still do it, though, if they didn't let it go out to the delta, where it comes into the delta.

It just needs to be transferred into the aqueduct at 100%.

But they have certain,

you know, the delta smell,

it's a canary in the mine, you know, the water quality,

the American River, we can restore it.

We can have salmon going up the San Joaquin River like we were once read about in 1870, that kind of stuff.

It's very ironic, Jack, because a lot of these permanent streams flows in these rivers are dependent on the reservoirs that they think are artificial, but ensure year-round water releases.

Because in the old days, you know, when the snow melted, it just flooded everything where we live.

Reedly to Fresno was underwater, and then that was it.

There was nothing in the late summer, so no fish could make it up anyway.

So they're using the dams for for a purpose that was not intended.

It's not recreation.

It's not the four purposes they built these 50 or 60 major dams.

It was for recreation, for irrigation, water storage.

It was for flood

protection, and it was for hydroelectric generation.

And now we're...

We just blew up four of them.

They said, these are Native American lands.

If we blow up the four dams on the Kalimath River, it'll flow back to its 19th century reputed velocity.

We'll get salmon bugs.

Indigenous people will go back to their indigenous fishing way.

This is what we're going to do.

So we blew them up.

And guess what?

We had

mudslides.

The rivers were fouled.

We had mass die-offs of fish.

We had game animals, deer and stuff that were trapped in this sinkholes.

It was a disaster.

And we don't build dams.

We blow them up in California

this generation.

We don't build railroads like we used to.

We waste 20 billion on high-speed rail, Stonehenge.

That's what we do.

This generation is really culpable.

It took a state, I'm going on a rant, but it took a state

that

had a moderate tax.

And this was, I'm not being partisan, this was under Jerry, I mean, Pat Brown, Jerry's dad, Ronald Reagan, Goodwin Nye, all of these people.

They were Republican and Democrat.

They had the premier educational system in the world, tripart.

Over 100 community college.

They had 23 state colleges, state universities.

They had, you know, nine UC campuses.

They were building a UC campus every four or five years.

LAX was a model of, so was SFO of what an airport should be in the early 60s.

Clover leaves were invented here.

We had nuclear plants,

Diablo Canyon,

up in Sacramento.

We had one.

We had down one on the coast on the way to San Diego.

We had everything.

We had a surplus of gas and oil.

And

we had a professional work, non-union state workforce.

We had strict laws, Reagan, Deltmajan, Pete Wilson.

It was a wonderful state.

And this generation destroyed it.

They destroyed it.

It's in debt.

It's got the highest taxes in the country.

It's got the fourth or fifth highest sales taxes, highest income taxes.

It's got the highest gasoline taxes.

It's got one-third of all the welfare recipients in the nation.

It's got about 45%

of the homeless people.

21% of the state lives under the poverty line.

It's got the largest exodus of population of any state.

I could go on.

I think its infrastructure is rated something like 46.

The 99 next to me, the north-south main lateral, the center of the state is, I think it's rated the most dangerous per

100,000 miles driven, highest fatality rate of any major highway in the United States.

The schools are ranked, they used to be like on the top 10, they're ranked about 45, 46 on the basis of their test scores.

Everything is going down.

And when you look at the things that were going up,

that used to be our pride, we have USC, we have Stanford, we have Berkeley.

Those universities are in disarray.

We saw that with the anti-Semitic epidemic.

They've gone into racial spoil system.

They have repertory admissions, despite the Supreme Court.

They're in a mess.

I can't see any, I don't see any bright spots in California, except it's so naturally beautiful.

It takes, there's a lot of rot in a nation.

You know, it takes a while to get down to pre-civilizational levels, given how wealthy

the state is naturally and the bountiful inheritance that our parents gave us.

Victor, you know what you didn't say in all this rant?

What?

You didn't say what the

what the F, what the F is wrong with this place, which is a lead-in, Victor.

Should you make comment on the use use of.

Well, I had a minister from Ohio write me.

I read all the letters from our readers, and he said he was getting tired

of,

I guess, my limited vocabulary.

And he said that I fairly regularly use the F word.

And we know what that is.

I think I said

I was angry about something.

And one time, and I don't know, we're doing four,

we're doing four a week, or we're doing 16 a month.

So we're doing what, three or four hundred a year.

And I don't think I've said, I think on one time I slipped and said that and I backtracked immediately and said I shouldn't say that.

But the idea that I use the F word.

Sorry.

Yeah, I mean, I got really angry.

So

I'm going to write an angry letter on the website about it.

But I really didn't like this minister and his self-righteous aspect.

It shows your limited vocabulary.

It shows you have no respect for your readers.

It shows you that just a, you know, just one in harangue.

And

I don't mind harangues if I'm wrong and I am wrong at times.

And I try to acknowledge that.

But the idea that I say F, the whole word, all the time.

are fairly regular is a complete fabrication.

And so.

Maybe the F word that bothers him is fouler.

That could be

too.

I haven't heard

why you say frickin', is that it?

Frick, yeah, F and I said it, you know, but

that's a euphemism for the F word.

It's not the F word.

It's a substitute.

But

we don't even use it on the angry readers.

I tell all the editors.

when they get me the letters that were not to print what the people write to it.

You should see the stuff they write yeah it's uh

i mean it's full of obscenities and we usually you know put an f and then three dots two dots yeah or like sergeant snorkel from beetle bailey you have to use all the characters like stars and amphibians and etc i'm trying to

i'm writing ultras for the website today right

And I'm going through one of the kind of what were the 10 strangest encounters I've had during the collapse of civilization out here.

Meaning

I went a half a century with maybe one a year at most of a, you know, a guy comes in and strips a truck or a guy comes in with an AR-15 shoots everything up or a person

who comes in with a chainsaw and cuts off all the brass valves, all the drip system.

But not now.

So I was going through them and

I was was riding.

I was very careful not to be graphic.

But the night before last, I was walking by myself at dusk and there was this car.

This is a metaphor for California.

And the windows were up, but there was nobody in it.

But the hatchback

was up.

And so, my God, I thought, wow.

this car has been stripped or the occupants are thieves and they're out in the orchard trying to strip the

copper wire out of the submersible pump, you know, and they're coming back to their

mode of transport.

So as I walked by,

there were people

in it.

In the hatchback, in the back?

In the back, laying down, and they were engaged in a sexual act.

But I didn't know that when I saw them.

Yeah.

Wow.

Because

one of the persons had their legs around the other person's neck.

That person was on the back, and the other person was facing them and both of them were one the person on the

lying flat was looking at me but i wasn't

i could just see that person's legs around the person whose back was torn piece

and that

interrupt us yeah yeah yeah but i didn't know what they were doing so i thought for a second that they were

there and this person was was doing CPR, like pushing, you know, and the person was propped up maybe, and they were, because they were frantically moving.

So I walked over and said,

can I help you?

And they turned around and they were not clothed.

And so I said in Spanish, this is private property.

Yeah.

And of course.

Yeah.

Well, it was private.

But my point is, I'm not trying to be gross, but

I was writing this as an incident, as one of my 10 weirdest incidents.

Day in the life of Victor Davis Hansen.

Yeah.

The entire semi, a whole semi with two big trailers, 80,000 pounds parked in my orchard being stripped, was one of, I think that made number eight.

So anyway, I was described, but I was very careful not to use the words that describe the act, is what I'm saying.

Right.

I always do that.

I try to use euphemisms.

But the weird thing about it is, and this is the reason I'm relating it,

is the attitude when you find something like this on your property.

It's the attitude when you see somebody with an AR-15 shooting in your direction.

You see, you hear a bullet whiz by 20 yards away, or when you go in there and you see a guy unloading 50-gallon black trash bags of garbage on your property.

It's never,

oh,

I'm sorry.

It's anger.

So when I walked by and I said, could I help you?

Thinking it was CPR, I thought maybe it's mixed martial arts.

I didn't know which it was.

I thought, wow, they're fighting.

They're fighting.

And this person's flipped the person down or she's pushing down on her heart because she's dying.

And then

that was dispelled the moment.

They turned around and I saw they were on clothes, but

one got up, one turned around.

But the point I'm making is, what would be the reaction?

Embarrassment?

Yeah, so I just

walked.

I said, okay, it's private property.

And I said, I'm not going to get near these people.

So I just kept walking.

And they, I looked around at about 30 yards and they clothed themselves and got in a car.

And they made a U-turn.

They didn't have to make it.

They could have gone out the alleyway that way, but they made a U-turn and they gunned it

right by me as i was like and then rolled down the window and swore at me

and i thought wow this is so weird you just broke the law you came onto my piece of property and i didn't yell at you i let you continue whatever you were doing i'm still not quite type sure of what type of sexual activity it was or who what gender you were.

But anyway, I let it go on and you repay that magnanimity as weakness to be exploited because you drive by and you try to go really close to me really fast.

But even then you roll down the window and start swearing at me.

And that sums up California today.

It really does.

That's crazy, Victor.

I don't think they're going to name the child Victor, by the way, nine months or now.

Well, I think they were of the same gender.

Maybe put it that way.

So they're not going to have, not that they couldn't have a child in today's gender society.

Right.

Nevertheless, okay, that is a turkey baster in the car.

Okay, my friend.

Hey, I want to recommend to our listeners, of course, VictorHanson.com.

That's the Blade of Perseus.

That's his website.

Victor just said he's writing ultra pieces.

Well, those are the pieces he writes exclusively for the Blade of Perseus.

You should subscribe.

It costs $5 a month or $50 discounted for the full year.

Two or three times every week, Victor writes ultra pieces, and that you'll also find on the website links to his american greatness weekly essay syndicated column other writings archives of this podcast links to his books including his forthcoming book the end of everything

and again it's uh you can also by the way you can also sign up for the weekly email that goes out from the Blade of Perseus.

So please do that.

And as for me, Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts,

the free weekly email newsletter.

It comes out every Friday.

It's got 14 recommended readings.

Here's an excerpt.

Here's a link.

These are things, articles I've come across in the previous week, and I think you will like them.

I do that for the Center for Civil Society at Anvil, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

So go to civilthoughts.com

and do sign up.

We read all the comments.

People leave comments on Victor's website, and you can leave comments if you listen to this podcast through iTunes and Apple.

And you can rate the show zero to five stars.

And practically everyone gives Victor five stars.

And here is one comment, and it's very short and sweet.

An American treasure.

Victor is an outstanding human, wise beyond comprehension and years.

He's one of

a few American treasures.

speaking truth.

We are blessed to have him among us at this time of national devolvement.

And this is signed by Ron

JL.

And we thank him.

Victor, we mentioned earlier, Victor,

about Ronald McDaniel, a very long tweet or X that he did.

Well, if you're on Twitter or X, his handle is at VD Hansen.

So do check that out.

And if you're on Facebook, the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club, not officially related.

tied in here, but good people.

Join that.

VDH's Morning Cup.

You'll find that on Facebook.

And by the way, one last thing.

This podcast is housed at John Solomon's JustTheNews.com.

So check that out too.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Let me thank you for all the wisdom you shared.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

If you're a new listener, I hope you enjoyed it.

Again, Victor said, four times a week.

That's a lot.

That's a lot of Victor.

But for many people, it's not enough.

Right, Victor?

Even more.

Yes.

All right.

Thanks so much.

We will be back

with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank you, everyone, for listening.