Left-Wing Campaigns and the Race Against Biden

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host, our star and namesake.

Victor Davis-Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and also the Wayner Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus. You'll find it at victorhanson.com.
I'll tell you a little more about that later in

this show. Victor, with lots of political things to talk about today.
We are recording, so we keep everything in perspective, folks. You know, when we're getting Victor's wisdom, there's so many

events are fast and furious, but we're talking on Sunday, the 29th of October. This particular podcast should be up on November 2nd, which, Victor, that's All Souls Day.

I don't know if you know about All Souls Day. I know of it, but I don't know it

in a sense of intimacy with it. Okay.

It has to do with purgatory and

the souls who didn't make the cut for sainthood. But that's a, we'll get, we'll get to that.
Well, I thought that I've always thought that it was my patron. That was my third chance to get in.

Third time's a charm. Because

I'm a sinner and I didn't know if I'm going to make it or not. I'm worried about it.
Well,

you've suffered a lot on this planet, this mortal coil, Victor. So I hope you get through purgatory.
But anyway,

America is going through

purgatory, the purgatorial presidency of Joe Biden. And Joe Biden has an opponent now in the Democratic primary.
So we can talk about, get your thoughts on him, Victor.

I think we need to talk a little more. It's been a while since we talked about Robert F.
Kennedy and his consequences in the race.

Do you think Republicans would want him to run versus not running? I think it's worth exploring that.

Also, Victor, we should talk about the shutdown of pharmacies across America and why that's happening. We'll get to all that and more, though, right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show. And Victor, I have to apologize to our listeners if there's a little sound in the background.

Well, there's some activity at the Fowler Household this Sunday evening. But Victor, let's start with getting your thoughts about, let's start with RFK.

Two things.

First of all, he is a candidate, and it's kind of reckless.

The Biden administration is, or Joe Biden, I was the administration of the White House, they're refusing to give him secret service protection, which I think is standard for somebody who enters a race and particularly someone who has polling with the numbers he has and

the public attention

that he would receive. Jeez, his father was

assassinated

in a fucking. And his

uncle and father were killed. And it's horrible.
Yeah. They wouldn't do that.

I think everybody has to remember that everything that the Biden administration does is predicated on politics, not it's leftist. I understand that, but we were talking the last pod about

branding the strategic petroleum reserve.

We didn't really get into begging Russia, Iran, Venezuela to pump more oil, this dirty, gooey stuff that they hate, but they don't hate it around election time.

And

why I mentioned that, Jack, is if

these crazy polls are true, and I don't think they are, but if they were to be true and that RFK hurts Trump more than Biden on a Trump Biden standoff, then they will probably do all they can and restore Secret Service or for the first time offer protection for him because he'll be seen as an asset.

And that's how they think. But

why you wouldn't when you're

You're spending billions of dollars in federal entitlements by letting 8 million people come in, and you can't even spend a few million dollars to provide safety for a viable Democratic candidate.

He's more viable than half the Republican candidates as far as the polls go.

And why you wouldn't provide protection given his family history, I don't know.

Well, Victor,

do you think he

would not hurt?

I'm assuming Donald Trump is going to be the candidate, but regardless, no, it's not regardless. I think it matters.
Donald Trump's the candidate for argument's sake.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
would take more votes or less votes from Donald Trump than he would from Joe Biden.

I think he will take more votes from Joe Biden. And if the polls show that he slightly takes more from Trump, it's only because

the media

has been

demonizing him as how dare he run against Joe Biden, and that resonates with Republicans. And then

when they see a superficial

Kennedy, what they see is a guy who was skeptical of the vaccinations, the lockdowns, big government,

and they feel that their agreement on those narrow range of issues apply to his whole ideology.

But when you start looking at his redistribution redistributionist socialist past, his idea on energy, he's a green New Dealer. You know what I mean?

So

I think once

if he is going to be a viable candidate and people start to

really explore his agenda and who he is and who he was and who he would be. Right.

They're not going to see him as sort of a Kendrid renegade is what I'm saying. They're going to see him as the hard leftist and that support will fail.
Sort of like Ramaswamy.

Everybody thought that he was this outsider that was speaking truth to power and he was idiosyncratic. And that was all true.
But the more that he talked,

he said some things about Israel and things. He gets himself in trouble, is what I'm saying.
And they learn that he didn't vote this and that. That's just a natural political process.
So

people who

he hasn't been vetted. Kennedy hasn't been vetted in the way that Roswame hasn't been vetted.

And we know that when he's vetted and all of his views come out and what he thinks and who his constituents are that I think conservatives will not vote for him over the Republican.

If it's Trump, they will not vote for Kennedy over Trump or any other of the Republican

that might win the nomination, Haley or Dissent. They won't do it.
At least not in numbers that will be, that will matter. matter.

And I think

Biden just feels that if anybody runs, whether it's Cornell West or maybe a Green candidate or Kennedy, they're going to hurt him. And I think eventually that's going to be right.
They are.

And that's why they don't want to give him security. I mean, I'm serious about that.
Maybe.

Yeah.

Maybe it won't hurt Biden. Maybe it'll hurt Dean Phillips.
So, Victor, the

congressman, Democrat congressman from Minnesota

has announced, I think he's going to be in the

New Hampshire primary, where Joe Biden is not going to be in the New Hampshire primary. But

Phillips is running for a reason. I guess he wants to be president,

but also

finger in the wind and sees that Joe Biden in November, it's not finger in the wind, that's the wrong analogy, but Joe Biden, the way he is,

the wreck that he has made of this country and the world is

a losing proposition for the Democratic Party a year from now. And that's

where his head is at. Victor, any thoughts about this

54-year-old Democrat congressman? Well,

I don't know how long he will be viable, but he has money. He's not

hyper-wealthy, but he has enough money to sustain himself as a credible

candidacy where he'll have some outreach. But we saw with Michael Bloomberg that money doesn't really mean much.
He spent a billion dollars and went down in the poll.

And

he's a Jewish guy. So

at this opportune time, there's a lot of people who are strong supporters of Israel and see that these people around Biden are not.

And maybe he will peel off some of the Jewish support in key states from Joe Biden. That would be a fear.
But the problem is that

when you have an incumbent president or you have any

presidential race and you have a member of the House of Representatives, whether it was member Pete McCluskey, he ran against Nixon. Oh, yeah, sure.
And there was Phil Crane. Remember him? Yes.

And they all run, and they're all purist,

and they're fresh faces, and they're reformers, and they don't go anywhere because you don't have a level of exposure in the House,

media

fundraising that allows you usually to wage a national campaign. You either have to be a governor of a big state, or a well-known governor, or a very wealthy, successful business person, a Ross Perot,

or

somebody like that, or Donald Trump, or a governor of a big state, or a senator. And when you're not that,

you have, it's very hard for a House member to become president. It's not going to happen.
But

he could do damage to Biden in these states. We learned that with Ralph Nader.

He did a lot of damage to Al Gore

in places like Florida. And it could matter.
And Cornell West, I mean, if Michigan is

Michigan Michigan or Georgia's is, you know, they're 30, 40,000, 50,000 votes, Cornell West could tip away from Biden. And they know that.

So they're probably offering him all sorts of enticements to crop out.

Victor, one of those famous iconoclasts or whatever the word you use was John. Do you remember? I think you might have even known him, John Schmitz.

Yeah, I knew it. Did you know him at all? No, I just, he came in the news, and I want to be very careful because I didn't prepare this, but I'm pretty sure that his daughter was the

Mary Leturno. Yeah.
Yeah. And she had that affair with about a 15-year-old and married him.

She married him. Yeah.

She was in the news and it was just the media pounced on that because here was this conservative family and she was doing something very unconservative, supposedly. But I remember he

was

reviled here in California as a representative by the left because he was a member. I think he was a member of the John Birch Society.
He was.

He had some third party that ran against Nixon, also, I think in 1968. He did.
Yeah, he did.

Anyway, just curious.

Hey, Victor, there's another

congressman to talk about, and that's the Democrat Jamal Bowman. And we'll get to him and his

fire alarm insurrection right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show. So Victor, New York Congressman Jamal Bowman from the 16th District, who's actually that district is a few blocks from where I grew up in the Bronx.

Even though it's part of the Bronx, but mostly all Westchester County, Hoity-Toydy Westchester County has this man representing them. And Bowman, I think our listeners know,

he

tried to disrupt Congress by pulling an emergency, a fire alarm, feigned that it was, oh, he thought it was an emergency exit. And go to the videotape, Victor.
It's pretty damning. And yet still

got a lot of attention. That's my thoughts.
That Hycomb Jeffries that said that it was,

no, it was just an inadvertent mistake and they were hounding him. It's just, it's what everybody said it was.
He walks in and he thinks, I'm going to remove these placards

so that I guess people don't think that

it could be, what, ostensibly inadvertent, that there was no warning there. So if he does get caught, that he could say

there was no warning. And then he walks out and it was kind of he has his back almost, doesn't he? And he kind of just taps it as if he's walking nonchalantly off.

And he thinks that cameras won't pick him up actually doing it. But what I'm getting at, it's a lot different than the actual photographs that were released.

I don't know why it took him so long to release it.

But what he told us was it was a frontal thing where he walks out toward the doors. He's confused.

He's been there before, but maybe this is the first time that you can't exit in the way you usually can. He's in a hurry.
He thinks it's some kind of disability door where you push a button.

So he just pushes this thing and says, fire alarm.

And then he's surprised. And then he walks.
That's not what the picture showed. So he was deliberately trying to disrupt a session of Congress.
And when you superimpose

it onto people

that supposedly did this in January 6th, then you've got a problem. And when you say

the January 6th

committee went after Trump for supposedly egging on an insurrectionary activity or capital disruption, when you see here, this guy is actually trying to disrupt a session of Congress by committing a class.

It should have been a Class C felony.

And then when you juxtapose it to that, to Rashid Talib out there in front of the Capitol, white people are occupying illegally the rotunda and she's screaming and yelling threats basically that she's not going to support Joe Biden and that the hospital was blown up by the Israelis, which is a blatant lie.

Then you wonder what are the rules. And the rules are, what if you're a person of the left,

your people can

occupy the rotunda, you can shut it down, you can disrupt a congressional session by committing a felonious act. I think he pled it down to a misdemeanor.

You can say insightful thing.

And it's just this,

the legal system has degenerated into this asymmetrical, one-sided

enforcement of the law. Right.

It almost doesn't matter that he was caught on videotape doing all this.

It wasn't. If that had been Marjorie Taylor Greene and she had done that, they would have censored her.
in two seconds. Or they would have, there have been Republicans that would censor her.

And he's, you know, he's, he was very vocal about his criticism of Israel, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, that's another thing. This is a very touchy issue, but I mentioned it with Sammy just in passing that,

you know, that the African-American community is very varied. And there's, you know, Representative Donalds and intellectuals like Glenn Lowry or Shelby Steele and everybody,

they are the best of thinkers in America, and they understand what's going on in Hamas, but they are not the establishment of the left wing, which is reflected in voting when African Americans vote anywhere from 80 to 90 to 95 percent leftist.

And when you see manifestations of that in the black caucus'

majority not wanting to support Israel in its moment of, you know, not

endorse a statement of concern or outrage over Hamas or material support. And then you look at the BLM poster,

and then you see high-profile members of that community where it's Kenya West saying just outright anti-Semitic.

And even a guy like Dave Chappelle, did you see that clip where he's doing a skit where he talks about Jews as aliens, and then he says they're space Jews coming back to Earth to take land that they had abandoned years ago as if

there was no continuity in the Middle East of Jewish people. So

it's kind of frightening and I think it's more that people in the DEI community once again think that they have been given indemnity and they can say or

do anything they want as far as prejudicial behavior or speech and because they have been self-declared perpetual victims and oppressed. And this is 2023 and that's not true anymore.

And you can really see it, Jack, when

that magic triad has disappeared. Remember, it was all before

diversity, equity, inclusion, its predecessor, the original triad, was what? Race, class, gender. Remember that? Race, class, gender, race, class, gender.

And the class disappeared. Nobody mentions it.

I was really curious about that because I thought, well, this has all been superseded that now we defined oppression by race rather than class because we, unlike gender, apparently, we say it's immutable.

You are what you are.

You can't construct your race.

Elizabeth Warren tried, it doesn't work. Okay.

And then that means you're perpetually victimized. It can be Oprah, you can be LeBron, you can be the Obamas, you can be Eric Colder, but you are a victim.
Okay, we get that.

But when you get people very wealthy, it's a little uneasy. So when Michelle Obama goes over, you remember over to Germany and how much was she getting? It was $12,000 a minute, I think.
Staggering.

Yeah, staggering if you can get it. And she was going to speak on diversity.
Oh, not on equity. Remember that? It was diversity, inclusion.
She dropped out.

part of the triad, the Holy Trinity, equity. And so they don't want to talk about equity and they've dropped class.
It's not race, class, gender.

It's race and gender or it's diversity and inclusion, but it's not equity. And that's because

there's a lot of people in all different walks of life, different races that are doing very well, and race is no longer a barometer of oppression. It is an

economic or elsewhere. or otherwise, but it is an indemnity policy that if a person self-declares that their primary

signature is race, that's incidental. It's not incidental.
It's essential to whom they are,

then they feel that they have a blank check to say outrageous stuff. Whether that's a glider that symbolizes somebody machine gunning down children in Israel, that's okay.

Or Dave Chappelle talks about space Jews or, you know, all of this stuff. And I think it's not good for that DEI agenda because people are saying, you know what?

This anti-Semitism is not the old white, you know, the Rothschilds control everything, the Jews,

all that stuff. Father Coughlin, Lindbergh, that's over.
This is a left-wing

DEI project. It's sophisticated faculty, it's intellectuals, it's people on the left, and it includes an inordinate and disproportionate number of so-called marginalized people who do not like Jews.

They don't. And you saw that.
Did you see that really awful clip about the Jewish woman on a bicycle? And she's got her child, infant, she's riding. I think it was in Queens.

And she's trying to ride in the bike. path and a guy's park at a diagonal and she can't get around.
She says, please, sir, can my daughter and I go

through the bike? He says, go around. She said, the traffic's very dangerous.
He said, who are you? You're Jewish, aren't you? I knew it. You're a Jew.
And he starts ranting and babing.

And then we had the

Hispanic guy that broke into a Los Angeles Jewish home. Did you see that? And terrorized the father and four children.
And it's...

I had written about this way back when I was writing articles in conjunction with the book Mexifornia, that the La Raza Charter was very anti-Semitic originally.

But there is something, when you tell a particular group that you are a permanent victim and no one dare says that

you yourself are racist, theme houses, separate graduation, that's a very dangerous thing to do because they feel they can say anything

that is racist or biased or anti-Semitic and there will be no repercussions.

Victor, do you think there's some

amount of resentment here? I mean, I'm speaking very broad generalities, right? Jewish America, philanthropic, political, back, you know, decades,

very supportive of minorities,

lower

middle class,

et cetera.

Unfair to say bleeding heart, but, you know, there's some aspect of

general support and pro-Democratic Party, et cetera. And I always thought growing up in New York, there was, you know,

again, to paint very broadly that, you know, Jews are very supportive of

blacks and trying to get them out of their

situation,

ghetto, New York.

Maybe,

again,

very broad. terms.
No, but that's absolutely true.

Remember the women's marches where Linda Sasseur and black BLM activists drove out Jewish women that were part of that left-wing coalition? Yeah. Absolutely.

And we know that in the black community, there was one force multiplier, and that's Islam.

And so many black intellectuals, you know, Kendi or Barack Obama, they have adopted or were named Islamic names. And we have the black Muslims.
And there's this idea that there's a special

resonance as fellow victims between

Islam and black America to a greater degree than other groups would claim that affiliation or affinity. So there's a lot of things working.
There's the old stereotype of the pawnbroker.

Remember the Rod Steiger movie where a Jewish person has got some business in the inner city.

You saw it with Al Sharpton. Al Sharpton, right? Remember Freddy, what was the name of that? Freddie's Something Market? Freddie's Market.
Freddy's Market, yeah. Yeah.

where they killed a Jewish person. They set a fire a business.
Remember Al Sharpton said, put on your yarmocks and come over here. I'm ready for you.

We had Jesse Jackson saying, I guess I'm in Jaime Town now.

And we had, as I said,

Barack Obama said some things about Israel, apparently, that the L.A. Times did not want that tape to be released.
And I can't think that he's ever said a positive thing about Israel. So, yeah,

there's that impression that a lot of and we I don't even want to get into Louis Farrakhan, and he has a large following. When he said it was Judaism was a gutter religion, then we have the Reverend

Wright, remember, from Chicago? And he said that he was

Barack Obama's personal savior

and personal pastor. I shouldn't say savior, pastor, preacher, married them.

I think in 2008 when Obama ran for office, Jack, I'm trying to tax my memory, but I think he gave an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times when he said he didn't miss

a single Reverend Wright service.

Yet we know that Reverend Wright wrote things

that were wacky, that the Israelis had particular anti-black, anti-Arab weapons. I think he said he was asked if, do you still see

Barack Obama, your former pupil? And he said, damn Jews, don't let me at him. So, yeah,

there's a lot of problems

with

a lot of people in the black community as far as their open disdain and collectivization and demonization of Jews. And everybody knows it, but it's a taboo subject.

And no sooner will we leave this subject that I'll get my angry reader for the week about it.

I just have one coming out.

I can't even translate. It's just full of the S word and the H word and

every possible thing.

But

it's a problem. Yeah.

Well, another problem, Victor, is

what's happening. across America with pharmacies.
I've mentioned this at the beginning of

the podcast as a subject. And

we have massive store closings. And let's get your thoughts on ramifications of this and why it's happening right after these important messages.

Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show. So,

Victor, there's a headline out this week that CBS in Washington is moving to shut 900 stores because there was some article with just, I think, about 50

shoplifters descended into a store,

cleaned it out. I think we've seen this any number of times now.
And then Rite Aid, another major pharmacy, is also shutting 1,500

stores.

Now, there are some reasons beyond shoplifting. I know some of these places have been hit by opioid

lawsuit settlements, but still

the lawlessness that's reigning in our inner cities is having ramifications. And what are we going to hear a few years from now when

in

the Bronx or poor areas, there's no drugstore to go to to get the drugs that grandma needs or you need. And whose fault is that going to be? So anyway, Victor, I understand

it is when you have these virtual pharmacies where they have pictures of the items that you would like to buy. I don't even think they do that in third world countries.

And when I go to a pharmacy in rural communities here in California,

that are not subject to big city shoplifting, I still can't buy things I want. I have to, if I want to buy any allergy medicine, any razor, any electric toothbrush, anything over $5,

it's going to be locked up. And you have to hunt the person down.

And because of chronic shoplifting, which is enabled and empowered by some kind of woke idea that you can't prosecute these crimes if they're less than $900 here in California in aggregate.

And then the only reaction is the stores are basically told you can't move, you You have to serve underserved communities. And they say, no, I'm not going to lose money.

There's too much thievery and shopping, shoplifting, and we're leaving. And then they get blamed.
Oh, you're not doing this. You're not doing that.

But it won't change until these district attorneys are voted out of office. The mayors are voted out of office.
And again, it's this idea that

the more you

act utopian or the more you brag about your

magnanimity,

the less moral you become.

The moral thing to do is to enforce the law and give stiff penalties for thievery for the purpose of allowing stores with security and with profit in mind to go into inner cities and offer the services needed.

It's not very liberal. It's not very nice.

It's not very moral to let somebody come in there with a garbage bag and clean out a shelf and therefore shut down a pharmacy when somebody who's very poor on public assistance needs glaucoma drops that night.

And that's what's happening. And,

you know, it's again,

we know what's wrong, Jock, but we feel the medicines worse than the disease. So we just are paralyzed.
We know what we could stop homelessness.

We could stop pharmacies leaving the big cities or not locking up their goods behind cages or back in the store. We know how to do it.

It's just that we feel that the ability to do it, to solve it, to give the remedy would be so acrimonious that it's not worth the hassle. So we just say, I'm moving.
I'm just taking it out.

I don't want to deal with these people. I'm just done.
I'm out.

And the same thing with the homelessness. I don't want to go down to San Francisco.
I do not want to walk over feces and needles and see people injecting, defecating, urinating, fornicating. I'm done.

But I do know how to stop it, but the medicine's worse than the disease. We could have mental hospitals spring up.

We could have people in humane areas outside the city where each person had a small, tiny little dwelling. We've done things like that, but we'd have to forcibly remove people.

for the simple reason they were breaking the statute. They were breaking the law.
It's against the law to defecate. defecate.
It's against the law to shoot up drugs in public.

It's against the law to urinate in public. It's against the law to occupy a public space overnight.
We know all that. But they don't believe that they can do anything about it.

Well, Victor, we have a few more topics to

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Hey, Victor,

I did want to ask you about any response to your

new issue of the new criterion is out, and you have one of the major pieces in there. We've talked about it in the past, but this is

Oliver Anthony's Richmen North of Richmond. The title of this piece is Popular Song is Populist Revolt.
In a way,

it feels like it may be 100 years ago when this happened, given, of course, what's happened in the last few weeks in Israel. But

yeah, we've got this is a great essay.

Any response to it or anything you'd like to say about it?

Well, it's had a lot of response.

It was sort of a defense of

Anthony from both the left and the right.

Some people in the right

called it incoherent, stupid, just ranting.

And

I think they wanted him to

be a William F. Buckley and write a coherent, systematic critique of leftism and then put it to music.
That's not going to happen. Wow.

So, and then people, of course, on the left said that he was body shaming, he was racist. But I dealt with all those.

I mean, he's writing out of the Appalachia Nexus, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, etc.

And when he's talking about people on public assistance that are abusing, he's talking about white people, 99% of them. So it wasn't racist.
And when he's talking about North men,

men north of Richmond, it's because

he's there and that's the highway to Washington, D.C.

And we're in an area where people are trying to control our lives. It's basically a rant about

globalism

and the diminishing purchasing power of the working class and the hopelessness of it.

And just when you think he's going to be,

I don't know, another Merle Haggard, Okifa Muscogee, or Jason ID, you know, don't try that. It's not quite that song.
It's more of a tragic song, you know, I wish it wasn't true, but it is.

And it's kind of shrug your shoulders, we're screwed. And then when he has been interviewed, he's been offered a lot of money.

That was a number one song, I think, on the first time on so many charts at once. Right.

And

he didn't want anything.

He said, I don't want a corporate jet. I don't want

music,

computer-fed music,

logarithm, algorithm, I should say, music. I don't want it.
So he lives in a traitor. I mean,

he doesn't have anything. And yet he has talent.
When you actually break down the song, it has

a variety of tones. He raises his voice.
He lowers his voice. There's variety.
He has some weird allusions, you know, to he uses rhyme. He uses repetition.

He uses homonyms, minors, minor. It's very much more complex than people think.

And I don't quite understand the left because they say it's kind of outrageous.

And as I mentioned, the number two song

at the time was written by a rapper. And I don't even, well, I can't repeat it on the air.
We mentioned it before.

It's full of the most intimate, disgusting treatment of women, of violence. It's calling for violence to be perpetuated.
It's bragging about kind of violent

sick sex. And it's the number two song.
And no one who is criticizing all of our anthony is saying, well, wait a minute, there's not one,

there's one, anything perverted about this song. There's nothing that a child couldn't listen to.
Why in the world

would we be angry when we tolerate this other song right below it on the charts?

So I went through all of the manifestations and then kind of gave some data about the economics and the static or ossified, calcified status of middle-class wages over the last, he says the dollar is no good.

And in fact, 25 years ago, just 25 years ago, Jack, in 1998,

the dollar had twice the purchasing power. that we have.
So our dollar, in terms of what you can buy, is a 50 cent piece compared to what it was just 25 years ago. So everything he said was true.

And I felt that somebody needed to say something positive about him. So I did.
And I have, you know, I've never met him. I don't know him.

Probably never meet him.

I have people. I really, you know, I'm a good friend of Clint Black's, but that's my

end of my knowledge of country music from the inside.

And I really like Clint. I think he's a wonderful person, very talented.
So I,

and I haven't talked to him about all around. I don't think anybody knows him.
He came out of nowhere. But I've been listening to two or three of his repertoire.
He's pretty talented.

And I like the way he modulates his voice and the speed and tone of the music, the lyrics. It's got a lot of, actually, I mentioned classical tropes for

the line-ending alliteration of both rhyme and homonyms and repetition of the same word.

It's a little bit more intricate than

people are imagining.

And I do think he has a good voice as well.

Well, Victor, we have another Biden House-related,

not Congress, but like StillMissile

scam that's breaking

as we're recording this weekend,

late October, the last weekend in October. And we'll get your thoughts on that.
And maybe if we have time, one other topic right after these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show. So Victor, I know,

excuse me, I can overcomplicate things, but essentially here's what happened. Joe Biden bought a house in 1974 for $185,000.

And then 20 years later, he sold it to a donor,

a top official at MBNA. I don't know if folks remember, MBNA was a big credit card company based in Delaware.
Joe Biden was senator, and he sold it for $1.2 million. That's 1996.

So that's a pretty damn big return on investment. That house, now, what are we talking now?

25,

close to 30 years later, that house that sold in 96 for $1.2 million is valued today at only $1.6 million, which meant that when biden sold it back in in 96

he got a lot lot more money

a tremendous amount more money than the house was really worth in other words this is a way to collect money from a major donor directly now wait a minute jack sorry you are not suggesting

that A, he might have tampered with a donor in connection with a, I don't know, a senatorial race,

campaign financing, or

you are better not be suggesting that he is playing around with the value of his assets, because if you are,

he has a rendezvous with Letita James and Alvin Bragg.

Sure as there is, because he's in Trump territory, supposedly. Wait, wait, wait.
I saw that. Can I add one other thing? Yes.
That MBNA employed Under Biden also to

put some icing on the cake. You know what this is about? And I say this in the context of the $200.

I'd love the $200,000 check because his brother gets $600,000, got to give it to the Biden boys. He writes something to Joe.
It's income. It will not be reported, no doubt.

And so he writes loan repayment, and there's no record of any formal loan given. And all of these that are merging are like little tiny, taking a little ballpin hammer and hitting a big, huge egg.

And little fisher there, little fish are there, and then all of a sudden without warning, it just implodes. And that's what's happening.
And that's why they're going to make a huge effort

to, I think, leak about him to get him out of the race, that he's not cognitively viable. He's not,

I don't know, ethically viable. He's surely not, given his record, politically viable.
and they're going to get rid of him.

But he is the most corrupt president since Warren Harding, no doubt about it.

Everybody knows it, and they won't talk about it unless it's going to be useful to get rid of him if you're on the left. But the thing that's really bothers me is kind of idiosyncratic.

You remember when he came in and he raised taxes and he said, I'm getting tired of people not paying their fair share. And we've got the wealthy, the rich, they just don't pay taxes.

And we're going to stop that. I'm thinking, okay,

you went around and demagogued the people who supposedly don't pay taxes. And yet here in California,

1%, Jack, 1% of the household pays half of the income tax, half. And they are leaving at an astronomical rate, which might explain why our $25 billion deficit will probably be up to $40 pretty soon.

But nonetheless, while he was demagoguing and accusing people, that's what he was doing in perfect leftist fashion, a projection. Remember how the leftist mind works?

If I commit some crime, ethical lapse, then I'm going to project that on other people as a way of disguising my own culpability. And that's what he's done.
He's demagogued the tax.

The big thing, he's kind of like Al Capone. His vulnerability is in tax avoidance because all of those millions of dollars, I don't think, will show up on his tax returns and somebody

if jim biden just wrote him a check for 200 000 i hope he paid what is it 40 on gift tax and if it wasn't

if it was an income redistribution i hope joe biden paid

probably in his bracket he probably should have paid 80 000 of that to the government federal i don't know what whether Delaware has a state income tax or not.

And if he didn't say it was income and it wasn't a gift and neither one of them paid taxes, but it was a loan, then let's see the conditions of a loan because of an amount that large, you'd have to have some record of it.

You can't just say, here,

here, you know, take this. Or maybe, you know, it's not his son or daughter that is going to be inherited in probate.
You can subtract that from the inheritance tax exposure.

So there's no leg to stand on.

And yet

it's

it's going to be cumulative aggregate. And finally, the people on the left say, you know what?

I'd defend this guy if he was up 55, 45 in the polls, or if he was young and dynamic, or he had a great record on Afghanistan and with China and on Ukraine and staunch ally.

And he was deterrent as far as Israel. But there's no there in crime, inflation.
They think he's got a bad record. He's He's cognitively challenging and embarrassing, and he's corrupt.

So why would I go out and defend him anymore when he's behind in the polls of Donald Trump?

So what I will do, and even DeSantis runs, even, and he's supposed to be so far behind Trump, and so is Haley, but both of them run either even or ahead of

Biden, although not to the degree that Trump does. And

what's the positive side of the ledger on him? I don't understand if you're a Democrat. Yeah.
Is it

Dev? Is it that

what is it? Is that Gavin Newsom is a ⁇ we know him in California as a buffoon, but they don't know that. He's young.
He's dynamic.

He has that little profile with sunglasses and his vest, and he looks like a candidate. He would be better in their eyes for the progressive message than

Joe Biden. So I don't think he's going to run.
I've said that before. I'd say it's a 50-50 chance that he will finish his term.
I think he's one

Air Force one step fall away or podium fall unfortunately, tragically from being severely injured and incapacitated. Or these blank stares that he has will continue.

Or his outrageous thing about, you know, the Islamic Jihad couldn't shoot straight. If they just had a shot straight, i.e.

hit the Jews and killed them in Tel Aviv, then we wouldn't have had a problem with the fake news story. But he says things that are just

impossible.

Victor, I think

the recent numbers, actually, I think I'm looking at Real Clear Politics today on Sunday, the

29th.

The approval, presidential job approval is approved 40.7 and disapproved 55.6. It's pretty damn significant.
And direction of the country is much faster,

more spread. Right direction, 24.2, wrong direction, 66.
Those are pretty damning numbers for the incumbent. So

well, Victor, one more topic, and this is,

I hope it's reflective a little of some of the interests or concerns our listeners might have.

It's been bugging me for ages, and this has to do with self-driving cars. And there's been some stuff in the news lately.
There's a company called Cruise

um that had self-driving cars a robo taxi and it was ready to

to be unveiled in california there were some tests and someone got hurt maybe even killed and so this cruise robo taxi stuff was pulled but i

whether there's technological problems or not with for me

Like with

electronic money to replace actual cash, I'm concerned about these self-driving cars

because they probably force you off the road, but it kind of gets into

the government knowing everything about you, where you are, where you're going, where you've been, where we won't let you go.

And

I just find it's probably maybe more Jetsons, the old cartoon,

than reality. But I don't know, Victor, maybe I'm a conspiracy theorist, but is there anything

right in what I'm worried about?

What's the attraction of

the driverless car?

I never understood it.

I mean, when you're in the car, you don't want to drive at all, and you trust some inanimate object to guide you more safely than yourself, or that we're going, it's an experiment, or it's the first step on a trajectory where

we're just going to deliver stuff with no drivers.

And we know that it doesn't work very well because we see these incapacitated cars everywhere. But

what's the upside on it, given the dangers of it? I don't understand that at all,

what it is. And they haven't made the case for it.
So then what's the impetus? And I guess it is that

You can control it. I mean, it's that way anyway.
Now, it's getting kind of scary.

I keep mentioning my Echo Diesel that's still in the shop.

I bought it in 2021, beautiful truck,

rated at 12,000 pounds. I think I told everybody.

Son

is towing just 7,000 pounds. The turbo went out, almost killed him, backed down the hill.

Called up the ram. I went to the dealer.
I'll mention him later if they don't fix it because they haven't, but I won't mention him now. And of course,

one month to get in, Jack, and then one month to fix the turbo.

And then no sooner than

the turbo was fixed now and the warranty was good that it starts leaking. And when you take a turbo on an echo diesel, you have to take the cab off, Jack, three or four hour job.

And then there's so many things to put back in the right order and place, it's very difficult. So no sooner than we do it, it starts leaking coolant from the turbo.

And so brand new turbo. And then of course it's three weeks to get in and now it's sitting in there right now.
So no truck. You pay $60,000.

It's only two years old. And now I'm going up to, I'm going to get up to four months that I haven't had it.

And you try to talk to the dealer, you try to talk to Ram,

you get nothing. And so what I'm getting at is

it's a beautiful truck, but it has very sophisticated electronics. And you mentioned this thing about monitoring.

I get emails periodically, I guess it's Mopar or someone, and they can tell me what the air pressure is, what the oil level is, what I have been, how many miles I have on it, and when all my, and it's good.

But what I'm getting at, this thing is almost like an autonomous brain, right? It's communicating, communicating all the time. And when I broke down, when we broke down, I was following my son.

It sent a signal to someone that the turbo was out.

And so what I'm getting at is these cars are so sophisticated. Why would you go to the next level and let them drive themselves as if they're artificially intelligent?

They are now almost with these sophisticated screens and computer and technology.

They're almost fixing themselves and they're almost people, but they're not people. So don't let them drive as if they were people.
And I don't see, are we,

that's one of the pressing issues, the fact that we have to drive a car is so much more pressing and existential than homelessness or being able to buy aspirin at a pharmacy.

Or being able to walk in Washington, New York without being clubbed in the head, or driving your car in San Francisco without having a carjack

or Israel. All of these existential problems, and we're worried about

cars that drive themselves without anybody in them.

What do you think the thing is about it? What's the big attraction?

Why are you the faintest clue other than

control?

So I say that I want to go to the store.

I get a Tesla and I say, go down to Kingsburg, California, and I ordered all my groceries and you'll pull up along the curve and then a robot will give you the groceries and you'll drive home.

Is that the idea? Yeah. I don't know what it is.
I don't either.

Well, anyway, Victor, I

appreciate you letting me share

my fears. Hey,

as we wrap up today, I do want to, I forgot to mention earlier, I think I did anyway, The Blade of Perseus. That's Victor's website at victorhanson.com.
And please do go there and please do subscribe.

You can actually sign up also for Victor's weekly email. Keeps you abreast of everything he's doing and writing.

On

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Do pre-order it. And you should sign up,

subscribe actually, uh to this web to his victor's website because then you can read the ultra articles that victor writes two or three times a week there's a great one uh out now about uh our elite ammo amoralists if you're taking on leon panetta

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Free Eekly. I wish I could speak English, Victor.
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Victor, very short comment to end the show. And this is from

Alaska Wes,

who titles it very simply, Renaissance Man.

Victor is the true Renaissance man, farmer, historian, linguist. He covers all the basis.
I really enjoy his podcast, really down to earth. Thank you, Alaska.
Wes, we do read all the comments.

Those come on,

that one came from Apple/slash iTunes, where you can also rate the show zero to five stars. We also read the comments that are on Victor's website.

So, Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared today.

And thanks, folks, for listening. And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
Thanks, everybody, for listening. Much appreciated.