Federal Chaos and the Absurd Left Agenda

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here for the star and the namesake, and that's Victor Davis-Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne, and Ma Shabuski, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor, I have to give away that the day we're actually recording and the day this podcast should be up and about, we are talking on the 6th, Friday the 6th, on the cusp of a week of Republican insanity on Capitol Hill.

And this particular edition should be

out on the World Wide Web on the 10th, which is the day after Columbus Day.

I mentioned that, that's the...

Are you trying to be Italian chauvinistic?

Well, half Italian chauvinistic, Victor, just half.

But you know, America is named after an Italian.

We have to remember that always.

No, Amerigovesby.

No, I shouldn't.

I mean, I know that, but we also have Columbia's enshrined.

Sure.

Oh, yeah, sure.

Yeah.

I'm just glad Vespucci's name was Americo and not.

I'm sure the left would say that we're two old white guys and nostalgic dreaming of the way it once was when European explorators of indigenous people were

canonized as if

they didn't didn't sacrifice over 20,000 people in one four-day period.

Right.

And remember the first,

the oldest corpse found in America was that guy

who was of European ancestry.

And that, gosh, I forgot what they call him, the Kindale Man or something like that.

But

we're not allowed to talk about these things anymore.

What we are going to talk about, Victor, I will ask you questions and get your wisdom, are the updated thoughts on this

speakership debacle in the house maybe a little thoughts on the attempts to rid America of Columbus Day you were on Tucker the other day with phenomenal numbers that and other topics Victor and we'll get to that right after these important messages

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

So, Victor,

I know you've been on

TV talking about these matters the night of the takedown of Kevin McCarthy.

I know you were on Laura Ingram's show offering your

wisdom and criticisms.

I'm not sure if you've recorded with Sammy yet and

you probably have and discussed this at length, but it maybe deserves a little more of your attention.

And I'd like to draw our listeners' attention to a piece in the Wall Street Journal today by Kim Strassel.

And I'll just read the very end of this, Victor, and then your broader thoughts about Gates or whoever you want to talk about.

But here's what Kim wrote at the end.

And she was very critical of Gates,

Matt Gates, the Florida congressman who led the coup against McCarthy and the eight other, seven other Republicans who joined him.

But she writes, concluding her terrific op-ed, the sad truth is that Washington has always been a town divided between those who put in the work and those who preened.

The pity is that more of those conservatives who really are toiling day in and day out to notch real policy victories, senators, House Freedom Caucus members, activists, aren't more willing to highlight the distinction.

They are only undermining their own cause.

So, Victor, you know, she makes a point here.

Are the

good conservatives on Capitol Hill somehow

and have they enabled Gates and others?

Victor, your thoughts in January.

I was listening to Matt Gates, and he was entirely incoherent.

He was trying to defend the fact that he went right to his website or his chain emails to raise money after deposing the speaker.

And as I said, with Sammy, when you have half of one-third of government, and you only have that half by an eight-margin

of a majority margin, and

your message to your caucus that you want to remove the speaker because he has at some times talked to the democratic opposition,

and you are using the democratic opposition to interfere with the Republican caucus in a very cynical way to get rid of the speaker, and you have no backup plan.

I don't understand what it is other than just narcissistic chaos because

we're not talking about things that are really critical now.

The border crime, the impeachment inquiry, any of that.

We're talking about a psychodrama, whether it's Steve Scalise or Trump putting his toe in the water or

Nancy Pelosi losing her office.

All of this was because of Matt Gates and these other people.

And most of them, they're not even conservative.

I mean, Nancy Mace,

she was voting against, I guess, McCarthy because he was too conservative, that he wasn't sensitive enough on abortion issues.

And Ken Buck, whom I've met a couple of times, and he was always self-styled as Mr.

Conservative,

he's angling apparently from the news accounts for a CNN

analyst position.

And then you could go Matt Gates himself, maybe

for a governor or senator from Florida.

So you get the impression that a lot of these eight had alternate agendas.

You get the impression that Matt Gates hates Kevin McCarthy because he has not shielded him from an ethics complaint.

And you get the impression that they're not interested in using the little power that they have effectively.

And so I thought, you thought, The listeners might have thought that they were going to consolidate the seven or eight person margin, solidify, work very hard.

Kevin, whatever people say about Kevin McCarthy, he raises a lot of money and he has an uncanny ability to go out and find viable candidates.

And he was one reason why they took back the House, albeit by a smaller margin than they should have.

So when you get rid of him,

you've got to have somebody.

I like Jim Jordan.

I've met him.

I think he's great.

But we'll see if he has Kevin's ability to raise money across the spectrum and to appeal to a larger group of candidates.

And I hope he does.

And I don't even know if he's going to get it.

So it was from A to Z.

It was a blank, blank disaster, in my opinion.

And Matt Gates, I don't think that if you're under ethics complaints, whether they're

politically motivated or not, but if there is some evidence that there is suspicion about some of the things he did and they're going to examine it, then you don't become the moral megaphone of your party and start lecturing people about their conservative fee days, conservative fee days.

It's not very conservative to be promiscuous with a lot of women, allegedly.

You know what I'm saying?

And then maybe even some that he may have not known how old they were.

So then you have somebody like that under suspicion, and he's lecturing the nation, the Republican caucus

on one theme.

And that theme is that Kevin McCarthy is not true to conservative traditional beliefs.

It's really hard to swallow.

Yeah, well, we spend a lot of time mocking the president of the United States for his creepiness with girls

of any women and girls,

young girls behind them sniffing their hair and all this crap.

I don't know why we should not be critical of

Gates' antics.

Victor, I did agree with you about Nancy Mace.

She seems,

first of all, South Carolina

has always seemed to be a wiggy state for Republicans.

I mean, it is a Republican state, but there's a lot of,

I don't know, just a lot of oddballs.

The Lindsey Graham, for the longest time, right, was the Republican you could count on for sticking it to the conservatives.

He went through some change later on.

You had Sanford, the former governor and the guy that, what was he?

In Argentina, whatever that scandal when he was.

But Mace also has,

she defeated an incumbent Democrat and kind of was

seen as a rising star early on.

But she has been all over the map and I think quite unreliable.

She was very good on some aspects.

of the impeachment inquiry, but maybe

she too apparently has higher aspirations because

I guess she's trying to solidify her reputation as a conservative for a statewide office run in a conservative state.

And she may have been afraid she looked more rhino-like

in her advocacy to ease up on the abortion issue.

I don't know what it is, but

she's really, that was a strategic disaster for her.

And I don't know if she understands that.

She's very attractive, young.

I think she's in her mid-40s.

She's charismatic.

She's very bright.

She has a lot going for her.

For her, she's charismatic.

But this was

just a strategic blunder for her.

And I bet she's getting a lot of pushback.

And in her quest for higher office, she may have endangered her present office.

And people, this is one of these issues where everybody says it won't matter for a year from now.

But if anything goes wrong,

in 2024 and that's a big bust like 2022 was, disappointment in the Senate, people are going to look back at certain things.

And one of the things they're going to look back at was this needless cul-de-sac detour and melodrama around Kevin McCarthy and the architects of that, Ken Buck, Matt Gates,

Nancy Mace are going to be culpable.

Yeah, I do think for many of them, it boils down to their own side hustles, and we're all at the expense.

What was the line from Thomas, man from all seasons, you know, but for Wales, is that what they really, is Ken Buck going to sell out for some CNN gig?

Does anyone even watch CNN anymore?

Yeah, I know.

And even if they're all right that I'm being persecuted because I'm an idealist, Matt Gates or Nancy Mace,

I have to appeal to you, the voters, for what they're doing to me.

It doesn't really, I mean, anybody can say that, but the fact of the matter doesn't change.

The Republicans have a very small majority.

They have no margin of error.

That small majority is the only thing between us, the people, and a full-fledged socialist agenda because the left controls the White House and they control the Senate.

And they barely, barely missed out on controlling the House.

If they had controlled the House,

we would be in big trouble.

And what do we do with that little eight-person, seven-person lead, depending on who is healthy and who's present?

We squander it and we start to cannibalize ourselves.

And now there's all this acrimony.

And now we think that, oh, there's going to be a magic person who can appeal to all of the paleos, all of the MAGA, the remnant neocons,

the

doctrinaire, chamber of commerce people, and the rhinos.

They can get them all together and they can do a much better job than Kevin McCarthy can.

And the fact is that

that argument is logically incoherent and dysfunctional.

I mean,

he got them all together, whether you like him or not.

And he raised money and he got a majority, and he's stopped a lot of the stuff that Biden otherwise would have done.

And yet you're saying that he is not a purist, but the eight of you can't even decide what that means.

You have no alternate backup plan.

And now you're telling me you're going to find...

I like Jim Jordan, as I said earlier, but do you think that he can appeal to a wider spectrum than kevin mccarthy in the republican party i don't i tend to like his politics but this is what they're doing and so i mean incoherent is a very good adjective because they don't know what they're doing all they're doing is printing for the cameras

considering outside gigs fundraising off this disaster and then eyeing higher office

and

how how long have you known mccarthy i know he's not a neighbor neighbor but neighboring district but he's So he's in a city.

Well, I bumped into him.

I mean, if you're in this area,

and I'm in a weird district, I'm right in the middle of

four districts, basically.

And they all come from Bakersfield to Fresno, and they intersect where I am.

So there's Kevin McCarthy's Bakersfield up to near Fresno.

There's David Valdeo's district.

There was the old Devon Nunes district.

And then there's a liberal Democrat whom I know and I like, Jim Costa and Fresno.

And all four of them I rotate.

So in the last 30 years, I've been in all four, three or four of those districts.

So I bumped into him a lot.

And when you fly out of Fresno, you see everybody there.

And so you can see him there.

You talk to him.

I saw him at an event, had a nice 10-minute conversation this summer with him.

I've introduced him before to local.

When you speak, sometimes they say, would you introduce somebody?

And I go introduce them.

And we had a question and answer session, I think, last year.

I don't know.

I mean, he's whatever

the thing that they're tagging him with is he's a blow-dry

Washington swamp creature.

Maybe, maybe not, but he is part of the Oklahoma diaspora that moved into Bakersfield in the 1930s that came with nothing for the poor.

So his pedigree is working class, tough poverty,

two, three generations, and then

becoming a very big success.

And

so

I don't know.

He's part of a group of California

congresspeople.

Matt Gonzalez is wonderful.

Devin Nunes was wonderful.

And they're all kind of beleaguered because they're 11 to 12, depending on the particular election, out of 52 to 53 congressional seats.

So

they get get a lot of attention because they're the only Republicans really in the state.

The Democrats have all the statewide offices.

They have supermajorities in the legislature and they have the governorship.

And as I said, they have all but 12 of the 53 congressional districts.

So when you're a Republican with national office, you get a lot of attention.

Yeah.

He came to visit NR once, a National Review, and I was a publisher.

And, you know, i think you remember i used to get in the office at six in the morning and and that i don't know it was eight o'clock meeting but he showed up at seven

and so it was just the two of us and i found him i honest to god i'm not i don't recall what we talked about probably you know family and dogs and whatever the hell he was just genuinely nice guy i i i really uh enjoyed he's down there he's yes he's from bakersfield and he's the kind of person i grew up with in in this area So

it doesn't quite fit this.

I mean, Matt Gates is from a political family that's probably

a lot wealthier than and from a different socioeconomic paradigm than was Kevin McCarthy.

So this idea that he's a man of the people is a little bit

disingenuous.

And

why are we even talking about this when we should?

See, my problem is that

we have to talk about this, but we're not talking about what Joe Biden and the left is doing to to the country.

We'll get that.

And this is everybody on the conservative side.

They're all arguing back and forth over this.

If this is a preview of

what's coming up next summer, they're going to lose.

Because if

you can see what's unfolding, Donald Trump is going ballistic now.

I don't blame him because of this fraudulent lawsuit.

i.e.

lawsuit dash civil lawsuit dash government inspired lawsuit with a Democratic judge.

There's going to be no jury, and they're going to convict him, I think.

And they'll probably put a gag order or put him under a house arrest.

Who knows what they're doing?

Or they'll break him.

And this is the beginning.

And then we have the three other ones.

And this is going to go on all fall and all summer.

And there's going to be half the Republicans who are going to say, I'm with him more than ever.

And there's going to be half the Republicans, I think, who are going to say, I like what he did.

I'm for him, but they have tied us into a ball, and we have to get somebody that has a MAGA agenda but is free to act and campaign.

And that'll be an enormous fight.

Some of you are already saying, Victor,

Donald Trump has 55%

of all the primary poll votes.

That's why I said 50-50, because I assume that at some point all of these candidates are going to aggregate into a we like Trump, but Trump's not viable, and it will be 55, 45, 47, 53, something like that.

I'm not saying it will coalesce around one candidate necessarily very quickly, but at some point a lot of people will say that Donald Trump is the best candidate.

Yes, he had a great four years, yes,

but we have not outsmarted the left yet to see how he will be viable.

And just to say that you can be president while you're in jail or you can be president with a felony conviction does not solve the problem.

The problem is you have to have a president that can fly all over the world at any time, do anything that presidents do.

And that will be made very difficult when these vindictive people go after you all fall, all summer, and next fall.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, you mentioned the need to talk about important issues.

And one of them, of course,

is

immigration.

It's invasion.

And we have

our president.

Maybe somebody gave him an order,

but he's taking some action on what used to be the border.

And we'll get your thoughts on that, Victor, right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So Victor, again, my favorite newspaper is the New York Post.

Blockhead Wakes Up.

What a great headline.

Today's paper,

Friday, October 6th, Blockhead Wakes Up.

Quotes, two quotes from a quote from Biden from 2020, quote, there will not be another foot of wall constructed by my administration, end quote.

And the news breaking over the last couple of days.

Well, guess what?

We're now building a wall.

Your thoughts on this, Victor?

Like everything that Alejandro Mayorka says,

the whole this new little 20-mile something

wall is shrouded in his lies and Biden's lies.

So

They are getting flack.

We have Eric Adams down in Central America, Mexico, begging them not to send any any more people.

We have full-fledged

demonstrations, anger in Chicago.

We have people along the border in congressional districts, representatives that are furious.

And they're starting to affect Biden and his ability, he thinks, to be renominated.

So out of that pushback from his own party, they figured out that some of the worst crossings, the most traffic,

they could get out of this by saying, well, yes, we don't believe in walls and we don't think they're going to work, but

we are a very legal administration.

And this funding was appropriated by Congress under Trump and we have no choice.

So right now,

We decided that we have to follow the law.

And the question then begs the question, okay, well, the law was under Trump, why didn't you do it earlier?

Or since when did you become legal when you tried to cancel billions of dollars of student loans on the eve of the midterm, even though your own speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said that would be illegal to do so.

So my point is that this administration of all administrations in U.S.

history is probably the most prone to act illegally.

And yet, because they have to build a little section of the wall to fend off their own party's revolt, they are now claiming they're doing it only because they're so obedient to the letter of the law.

It's just a joke.

I mean, you put Karine Jean-Pierre out there, and she just lies, lies, lies, lies, and says that they're very legal and all this.

And we don't want to get into hypotheticals.

It's just, she's got to be the, I mean, there's a lot of people that would contend for that honor, but she's got to be the worst press secretary that I've ever seen.

Ron Ziegler looks like Socrates confederate.

He does.

And she just sits out there and lies and lies and lies.

And then when she can't come up with an answer, at least Jin Saki would say, I'll circle back.

And then, of course, never circle back.

She just says it's a hypothetical.

I'm not discussing hypothetical.

Everything to her is a hypothetical.

She's way over her head.

And

it's

the only good thing if you're opposed to what Biden is trying to do, it shows you that she's a pretty poor defender of these crazy policies.

You know, Victor, the excuse being

the letter of the law, we had to follow the law, so we have to build this damn thing.

Here's another piece in today's

New York Post.

26 federal laws were swept aside for the new section of the border wall to be built in Texas's Rio Grande Valley.

The laws waived by the Biden administration include legislation to protect wildlife and public health, include the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Solid Waste Disposal Act, Bromlett, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So much for that.

The point is that.

And what did they say?

They said that the law said that Homeland Security had money for a border wall to be built by 2023.

I think that's what they said.

And now

the end of 2023 is approaching.

So they have to spend what's left of this money.

Does anybody believe right now if there was not a border crisis this acute,

but there were a few thousand coming across and the media was not covering it and their own legislatures and activists were not concerned, that this

administration would have said, oh my gosh, there's still money in the budget.

And that authorization said it had to be spent by 2023, so we're going to build a wall.

They would never do that.

So they insult our intelligence when they talk about following the law.

They're saying Merrick Garland always follows the law.

That,

you know, these are people who, when they get a midterm coming up, they break the law and try to cancel

half a trillion dollars of student loans.

They try to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower the price of this awful, gooey, smelly, terrible fuel that they won't pump, but they will beg others like the Saudis and the Iranians and Venezuelans to pump.

So they have no credibility whatsoever.

Hey, Victor,

I want to ask you a question about where you're going to be tomorrow.

And not tomorrow as we're talking, but tomorrow, the day after this podcast

airs.

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So, Victor, two things personal.

You're going to be in Washington for

this coming week

for an award related to encounter books and maybe a good opportunity to let our listeners know a little about

encounter books.

And then I'm curious about your thoughts.

Also, sticking on Victor personal, you were on

Tucker Carlson's, one of his Twitter interviews earlier this current week, and it is the numbers of viewers are approaching 40 million people who've seen that.

So, Victor, tell us a little bit about these things personal.

Well, Encounter Books, remember, is sort of the conservative place

in New York publishing, or indeed publishing in the United States, that does not exercise censorship.

There are books that are there by people who are probably Democrats, but they do try to emphasize certain ideas, that is, Western civilization, traditionalism, conservatism.

And at this particular moment,

it was started by Peter Collier, who was a brilliant guy.

We knew him, Jack.

He was my editor on Mexicornia.

He called me up when I was doing the Second World Wars and asked if he could just edit it.

And he spent hours.

And one of the reasons that I think the book sold over thousand copies was his editorship informally

uh and then peter uh handed the baton over to roger kimball who's done a wonderful job and we at the bradley foundation

and i've overseen that budget for a number of years and and

have consulted with roger kimball but that word is inaccurate because roger does all of the work with a wonderful staff and they've written i mean land of hope was probably is a best-selling alternative to the Howard Zinn propaganda in our schools.

Land of Hope is a history of the United States.

It's very fair-minded.

It's not propaganda.

It's not right-wing, anything.

It's just empirical.

And that's Heather McDonald, we publish

on her

continuing research on police.

So if you're a conservative author right now

and you're at a big house, Alfred Knopp, Random House, Basic,

Simon ⁇ Schuster, you're going to be under pressure because of this woke agenda.

And we offer people a home.

And so it does a wonderful job.

And they're having this dinner, and they decided to give me an award, I suppose, because I've been

nominally overseeing the book.

And I published a couple of books.

They did the Mexifornia.

That was Peter Call here who did that, called me up one day and said, I saw you read an article.

Why don't you make it into a book?

I said, well, it's kind of controversial.

And he said, let's use this name Mexifornia that you used in your article.

It was a prison term that the Chicano activist in prison used

as pride.

And so he did that.

And then to give you another example,

I had co-authored a book with John Heath, Who Killed Homer.

It was very controversial in the tiny field of classics.

And the University of California Press had signed a contract with me to publish four of my academic books, Warfare and Agriculture and Classical Greeks,

Western Way of War,

The Other Greeks, and Who Killed Homer.

And they had done the first three paperbacks.

And then suddenly when Who Killed Homer came out, they called us up and said, we're going to reneg on the contract.

We're not going to do this.

And

we said, why?

And they said, you're too controversial.

And you replied to people in the field who have contacted us.

Basically, it was,

one of you is at Cal State Fresno, one of you is at Santa Clara, and the people who are really angry are the big Whigs at, you know,

universities.

And we don't, we're afraid that they're angry at us.

And then they had already done the copy editing, the line editing, and you wouldn't believe in, I've never seen this before or since, that the editor at UC Press

was supposed to be checking dates, facts, spelling, but in the margin, she was writing comments to the other

This is stupid.

These people are dying.

Just stuff like that.

I could not believe it about her own authors.

So

it got around that they were doing this, and all of a sudden, Peter Collier called out of the blue.

He said, I'll publish it.

Don't worry, don't worry.

I'm going to do the paperback.

And it did, and it sold.

It was very successful.

So that's the kind of stuff that

Encounter does.

It looks around and sees

where there's problems or vendettas or censorship against particular authors.

It always did that.

But now

it's just booming and

Roger Kimball is just overwhelmed with submissions and the sales are much different than they were.

It was a successful operation, but not a national bestseller as it has now.

And that's because

people

are not having an opportunity for a voice.

And it supplies that so well speaking of booming yeah well

yeah it's like i i don't think you're shocked by the numbers but still it's wow i think it's uh i think tucker usually gets between five million and 70 million in some cases uh so i was surprised I did it.

I'm speaking right now on a Friday morning.

So this is for

all day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

It's been four days, and I think it was about 39 million, which surprised me.

It was about an 18, 19, 20-minute, I don't know, 25-minute interview.

It was about, he just asked me, what do you think lies behind these crazy things that are going on?

And I tried to explain that we're in a cultural,

social, economic, political revolution.

that encompasses every aspect of our lives, whether we're going to change the foundational date of America, topple statues, change names, reinvent sexuality to include three genders, destroy female sports records, you name it.

The revolution is all around us.

And so it was a good conversation.

And

it's going to be very interesting because that was the first interview that Tucker did that was remote.

Remember that he left Fox

and

he had to take some time off.

And then he has a studio on the East Coast in a remote area and one in Florida during the winter in a kind of a remote area.

So it's hard for people, say, from the West Coast to fly all day with two or three connections to get there.

But now he has a top flight studio and he has the ability for you to do

a remote interview.

So this was the first one he did.

And we weren't quite sure how it would go because we hadn't done it before.

But he...

was in.

If I worked for Fox or Newsmax or any of them, I'd be shaking right now, right?

Like, damn.

Look at the eyeballs,

the number of eyeballs.

I don't understand them in a way.

If I was Fox,

this is what I would do.

I would call Tucker up and I'd say, I don't know.

I do not want to talk about the past.

I do not want to talk about anything that we did or you may have done.

I just want to talk about the present.

And I want to offer you your show with

no holes bar.

Just go out there and speak.

And if it offends Paul Ryan or James Murdoch, that's fine.

But

to get that lead-in, see, people say, well, he didn't make that much money because these sponsors were boycotting him.

That wasn't the point.

He was the anchor.

So people

tuned in to Tucker, and then they stayed on.

And when they didn't have that hook, they've lost a million viewers in some cases that they haven't gotten back.

And I don't understand why they don't do that.

I don't understand why Newsmax doesn't come over to him and say, here, you can have half ownership

as a corporation.

Just take it half, and they would be wealthier for it.

What we're all fighting for here in media, where I used to be in the media, and actually this is media, are eyeballs or time, or in case a podcast really headphones.

But you're vying for people's time and that he can

attract that volume of people for that amount of time

is staggering compared to what other media sources have for their audiences.

But anyway, especially with X, I mean, Elon Musk is very lucky to have got him on there because he's really helping X.

And

he's a center of attack because

when I went on, there were people who said, well, you shouldn't go on Fox again, or

this isn't compatible with your job at the Hoover, or

these views are all bogus.

They're not 40, 50 million.

They're just one or two and these are bots.

So he gets incoming from all sides.

And there's an effort,

I think a bipartisan effort to pressure him not to say things.

Doesn't mean you have to agree.

I'm not sure that the Ukrainians, as he said, blew up that pipeline or, you know, the bridge, excuse me, or the dam or whatever it was in Ukraine.

But I don't know.

And on some areas, he's been the first person to speak honestly and correctly.

Sometimes

I have a darker view of Vladimir Putin.

I shouldn't say that he has a dark view of Vladimir Putin, but he feels that in this particular case,

the Ukrainian

position vis-a-vis Russia, given its long history, is unrealistic and that government is totally corrupt in a way that makes it not much different than Putin's.

I'm not sure if I'd go that far, but otherwise,

a lot of us agree with a lot of things he says and and really resent the effort to try to censor him.

I do.

And I know that if I'm on the campus where I work, there will be people come up to me once in a while and say, I can't believe you go on his show.

And I said, if you had a chance to go on his show, you would go on a show.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

So, you know,

it's strange, but the left, if we talk about them collectively, said years ago that it was Bill Buckley's firing line that was one of their greatest platforms for discussing or promoting their issues.

Of course,

you take the platform available for you to discuss things,

to say,

Tucker has the cooties and I'm not going on.

That's insane.

And people take that position.

Well, Victor,

I want to get back a little bit.

One last digit.

If you don't mind about the ramifications of the potential ramifications of Republican game playing on Capitol Hill, and then talk a little about maybe

Christopher Columbus and maybe one quick other topic.

But let's get to those things right after these important messages.

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I should have mentioned at the outset that Victor has

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Victor,

one other quick thing.

I meant to caboose this onto the previous conversation, but John

Hindraker, I don't know how to say John's name.

Yeah, I have always had trouble pronouncing his name.

Well, he does, he's at Powerline, and he does this.

He and Scott Johnson and Steve Hayward and others do a terrific job.

It's a great website.

I know it's the first website you look at.

It still is, yeah.

Interesting piece, quickly, you know, he just really links to something something Steve Moore

put out from the

Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which in turn referenced the new Gallup poll.

Was that Gallup poll fine?

Record number of voters prefer Republicans on the economy.

And

this is for since records have been, or Gallup has polled since I believe 190 or thereabouts.

But John ends his short piece with, normally one would think that with an edge like this on the economy, the GOP would be in great shape going into next year's election.

But this is, after all, the Republican Party we're talking about.

The eight sellouts who joined the Democrats in evicting Speaker McCarthy are among those who are keeping the Democrats alive.

And, Victor, that's the fear with these kind of numbers, with people

breaking economically over inflation.

What we think inflation hasn't gone away, it just says maybe it's not going up as quickly as it had been going up.

But the cumulative effect on a family income is is staggering and yeah

everything

else everything is falling apart every there's no

there's no logical support for this agenda and i say that

jack because the agenda is devouring its own we've had i think sammy and i talked about that we've had six incidents this year

of hardcore leftists that defunded the police and deprecated the police

and

were in favor of BLM and TIFA in some cases.

And they all were killed or attacked.

The baker in Oakland, very left-wing baker, they tried to rob her.

She ran after the car.

They dragged her through and killed her.

We had the tragic thing in,

was it Brooklyn at Crown Heights?

Guyana's girlfriend, he was

stabbed through the heart by an 18-year-old.

We had the poor woman in, I think it was Baltimore, the CEO that was attacked and killed, or maybe she was,

I don't know, I guess she was in Baltimore.

Then we had the activist that was killed in Philadelphia.

And then we had the city councilwoman in Minneapolis, who was carjacked in front of her children, small children.

And then we had Mr.

Representative Quaylar from Texas, the Democrat, who had voted against,

he had voted for, excuse me, defunding the police, and he was carjacked.

And all of these people were

supporters or advocates of this agenda of basically dismantling the police and dismantling the criminal justice system.

And they all didn't quite understand that they live in big cities,

unlike a lot of red state people.

And that's where crime is

the most

acute and to be frank in all six of these cases unless I'm mistaken they were young African-American teens or in their 20s who had prior records either of mental instability or crime

and that meant that the left was on incapable of drawing conclusions that from a one two three four five six all left-wing people all in big cities all run by Democratic politicians, all out of the blue, either killed or maimed or terrified, all by

all non-African Americans attacked by African-American teens.

Therefore, there's a problem.

If this

are the elite,

what do you think is happening in the inner city?

In other words, the inner city where poor people can't get out, they are being attacked by these same people,

only they're Mexican-American or black.

But now there's attention to it because this Frankenstinian monster, that is this crime wave they created,

has transcended the inner city.

And there's nowhere to be safe.

There's a place to be safe if you're a red state in Wyoming or Utah or Tennessee, but if you want to enjoy the cultural malu of a young hipster, single, unmarried, or you're in a suburb or you're a politician, you're going to be in a city that you help create a staggering crime wave.

And you're not going to be exempt because of your class, and you're not going to be able to honestly talk about what's happening.

Because according to your own definition,

if you say that dismantling the police, dismantling bail, dismantling crimes that used to be

categorized as felonies, letting people out the same day, not enforcing shoplifting or smash and grab, whatever, contributed to this crime wave.

And that after George Floyd, you have a

class of young African-American men in large cities that are inordinately committing crime at 5 to 10 to 15 times their 2.5%, 3.5%

percentage of the demographic.

You can't say that if you're a left-wing person.

And so

they are paralyzed by this.

They're paralyzed by the border.

They cannot digest the fact that they let in 8 million people.

And that 8 million people at a very late date, albeit, did not stay along the border.

Finally, the right wised up and started sending them to the sanctuary cities so that they could taste the consequences of their own ideology.

And now

they don't know what to do.

They can't, this is not fair.

We can't send them out like Martha's Vineyard did.

There's too many of them.

And they are our brothers in ideology, and we want to welcome them, but I don't want them in my backyard.

These are illegal aliens.

I don't have any background check on them.

How do I know there's not an M13 person camped out inside my luxury home?

I don't know.

So that is another indication.

Same thing with fuel.

Yes, shut down Anwar, shut down Keystone, shut down Continental Pipeline.

Absolutely.

Jawbone those frackers, the lenders.

Don't lend money to frackers in in horizontal.

Give incentives for EVs.

No more federal leases.

Get rid of offshore.

Yes, yes.

Oh, wait a minute.

Gasoline in California is $6.50 a gallon.

Diesel is almost $7 in some places.

This is a blue state.

What are we going to do?

Ah, let's drain the strategic petroleum reserve right before the midterms.

Oh, let's ask Venezuela to pump more oil.

So

it's getting incoherent.

And on the economy,

Bidenomics was a word that people used in derision.

They always add onomics to a project.

They said regonomics, Bushonomics,

Obamanomics.

And so Biden was called a failure Bidenomics because he came in and inherited basically 30-year mortgages at 1.8 to 2.2.

And now they're 7%.

And the interest rate.

And the inflation rate was about 2%, and it peaked at about 10%.

And if you look at aggregate back to January 2021 on gas, on food, on staples, it's gone up 25 to 30%.

And when you look at the debt, $6 to $7 trillion that we printed or we're going to print by the end of his term.

And so it was a disaster.

So then somebody in that White House thought up, well, we're going to really turn the tables on them.

We're going to say bidenomics is something to be proud of.

So what did they do?

They just went out and advertised their failure.

And now, as you said, 60% plus have no confidence.

And 77%

are angry at the border.

And about the same number are angry about crime.

And so there's a common theme here that the progressives got what they wanted.

They had the House.

They had the Senate.

They had the White House.

They pushed the whole thing right through.

They have the courts except for the Supreme Court and they got what they wanted.

And then all of a sudden, they didn't care that it affected all of us, but they did care that it endangered their hold on power.

That most people who vote have a car, and most people who vote don't want to be attacked by somebody in the city randomly without warning.

And somebody who votes might want to buy a house.

And given the inflationary cycle they unleashed that increased houses by 10, 20, 30%, you can't afford that when you're paying 7%.

And most people don't want to have a worthless currency and $33 trillion in debt when you can't service it at 2%.

So if you're

servicing that loan at 6%,

the loan basically went from 33 trillion to 100 trillion in terms of servicing it because it's three times more expensive given the interest rates.

And we're headed for, I think, an implosion very quickly.

And they didn't think that it would ever come back to haunt them.

And now they see that A, they're going to lose power,

political power, and B,

they have to live too.

And

they're afraid of the big city.

They're afraid to walk out.

Congressmen

do not like to drive to work by themselves anymore.

They know that when they open the door of their home in a very plush little neighborhood, or maybe they go to an apartment garage if they have a convenient apartment near the Capitol, or they want to walk to the Capitol from their Tony Diggs, they're in danger.

They're absolutely in danger.

And people in New York who love the hipster lifestyle and they love public transportation that's so much better than this gas hog polluting individual car.

They know they're in danger now.

And they know they created it.

And

it's not just exaggeration.

They can say all they want about, well, the crime wave went down.

Well, the crime wave may have gone down

in any six-month period because it's astronomically high.

And if it increased at the same geometric rate it was increasing, you would be locked in your home.

You couldn't even get out.

It would be so dangerous.

But I can feel it out here.

And as I said,

every day it's a new thing.

Today, last night I walked through my almond orchard and there was the usual trash piles that people had thrown.

And I was there last night at 7 o'clock.

I got up this morning at 4.30 in the dark with a flashlight.

I walked out and there was a new car seat.

I shouldn't say car seat.

Two seats taken out of a car, thrown right in the orchard.

So somebody came in between, I don't know, eight last night and four in this morning and just dumped their trash out.

And they do it all the time.

And if I were to stereotype, I would be called a bigot or racist because there's always trash that accompanies the big trash.

Throw out a refrigerator, appliance.

I've picked up so many refrigerators or dryers or washers and then the garbage.

And they're very careful not to put the address, but not the attendant.

So what was in there?

A Spanish language newspaper and some notices in Spanish about advertisements and stuff.

So for me, it's a good enough indication that this is part of the illegal alien problem where people are being bussed, and they are, up to central California from the border.

This is Gavin Newsom's contribution to the open border mess.

And believe me, where Gavin Newsom lives, and I've driven by Nancy Pelosi's Napa secluded estate with a big wall dash fence around it, they don't encounter this.

Although her husband did encounter part of the ramifications of their ideology.

But generally, they think they can avoid this.

And only fools that still live in rural Fresno County, as one person told me not to want, what do you expect?

Why are you living out there?

It's your fault.

Well, no, we've been here for 150 years.

Why is it my fault?

Right.

You know, right.

There's a virtue

in not running away.

Some people have to.

to do that for the protection of children, etc.

But, you know.

We talked about that on Tucker.

I said, Tucker, it's a monastery of the mine.

I have that inclination myself.

And so, yes, I don't watch the Oscars anymore.

No, I won't turn on the NBA.

Yes, I don't go to first-run movies.

I haven't been to a theater in five years.

I understand that.

I don't watch any network news.

I do not watch any network

programming.

I get that.

But that's not solving the problem.

And if I were to pull up everything and move to rural Tennessee, it'd be a lot safer.

But it won't solve the problem.

They don't need me in rural Tennessee.

They don't need you,

you in California that are

against this madness.

They need you to stay here, all of us,

to fight.

Because the alternative is you say,

okay,

our grandparents built the Bay Bridge.

It's theirs now.

Our grandparents created great-grandparents, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, into two of the greatest universities in the world.

It's theirs now because because they occupy it.

Our grandparents built these beautiful national parks and these

infrastructure dams.

It's theirs.

They occupy it.

No, it's not.

They're just squatters.

They're just renters.

And they usually defy the founding mission statements of these institutions.

So why not try to take them back?

Victor, if I can add just one last quick thing

based on the murder in New York City of

what is his name now?

Yeah, Ryan Carson, the activist.

So also today's New York Post, Nicole Jelinis, who works at Manhattan Institute,

pointed out two things.

One, just the sheer volume, explosion of these

stranger murders.

You don't know who the hell it is.

Someone's yelling at you, I'm going to kill you.

And they do kill you.

In New York City, it's quadrupled in in the last few years but the other thing she points out is this guy was murdered by someone saying i'm going to kill you

but when

on the train remember the penny guy yes daniel penny when someone said on the train i'm going to kill you and he took action then you get arrested right for stopping

jack is if mr penny had been walking by the bus stop in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, at about the same time.

And as he was walking by and he saw a young couple dressed in wedding attire,

formally dressed, sitting on a bench, and he saw a young teen

that was knocking down scooters, screaming and yelling, I'm going to kill you.

And he looked at the defenseless people on his right and the armed perpetrator who would-be perpetrator, what he would have done was intervene and take the knife away, throw him down on the ground, hold him, tell the other people to call the police.

I'm not sure that they would have appreciated that citizen's intervention,

but he would have saved his life.

And when he did that on the subway, he's facing prison or jail.

And

that's where we are.

Believe me, if the deceased

had been able to overpower

the stabber, and in that altercation, the stabber had the knife fell on him and he had died.

I think that he would

trouble.

He would be in big trouble.

It might be a riot.

You know what I mean?

I'm just telling you the truth.

I'm telling you the truth.

And that is after George Floyd, there was a complete redefinition of crime.

The law enforcement and the decision to prosecute or convict or incarcerate now is not based on the law.

We have gone into a complete regression.

So this is about 1930s in the South, just as when African Americans were picked on, demonized,

and treated asymmetrically.

And the big cities that are run by blue governments,

the perpetrator, the race of the perpetrator, and the race of the target matter a great deal in the application of the law.

It's just a fact.

Right.

Just a fact,

especially with these prosecutors.

And we know that's a fact because they basically say that that's a fact.

And everything has been seen in racial essentialism.

So when you look at illegal aliens being bussed in Chicago and you look at black activism that are protesting, it's completely, it's not about the laws being broken and people are being overwhelmed only.

It's in racial essentialism.

These people coming into our black community, these illegals.

And that is the logical dividend once you go down that road of tribalism.

And we're not done yet.

When the left created this tribal mentality, and I really want to say it started in earnest with Obama.

He was the one that took

content of your character and turned it into color of your skin, with the Trayvon Martin editorializing, with Michelle Obama, with her editorializing during the campaign, with his grandmother, the racist, who jumped when she saw an African-American teen with the Beer Summit.

We could go on and on.

But that started it and it unleashed these furies that are in all of us, these terrible things that must be repressed.

That is

the human

inclination to identify by superficial appearance.

And he fueled it.

And now it's completely into a prairie fire.

And I don't know how you extinguish it, but

you can see it in the military.

You can see it in the administrative state, you can see it in the universities.

When I was a student at Stanford from 1975 to 79, 80, and if somebody told me,

Victor, in 45 years at this very institution, there will be racially segregated dorms, there will be racially segregated graduations, and there will be

racially segregated options to pick your roommate and safe space.

I wouldn't have believed it.

I would not have believed it, even in those tumultuous times of the mid-70s and the aftermath of the 60s.

And yet that's what we're doing.

Nobody says a word.

Nobody says a word.

It's not sustainable in a multiracial society.

You're starting to see it.

And human nature is based on one thing, deterrence.

People do things depending on a cost of benefit

unless they're saints.

In other words, they get up and go to work every single day because they need the money.

And if they don't do it, they won't be paid.

If your employer said, I will pay you whether you show up at work or not, nobody would show up.

Given the nature of men, there'd be some of us that would show up, but most wouldn't.

And if you tell a young person in the inner city

that A,

If you commit a crime, you're probably not going to be arrested because there's not enough policemen.

And B, if you are arrested, you're going going to be released almost immediately.

Or if it's a serious crime and you are going to be charged, there's very little chance you're going to be convicted.

And if it's a very, very, very serious crime and you're convicted, there's a very slight chance you're going to prison.

Then they're going to be empowered.

And if you superimpose all of that, what I just said, with people on the view, and the president, and political activists, and celebrities, and television, and all of they say and General Milley and all of these people say nonstop white privilege white privilege white privilege white supremacy white supremacy white supremacy white rage white rage white rage and Professor Kendi and all of that BLM stuff

and you collectivize and demonize a group then you're going to have a criminal type not a lot but one or two percent of the population is going to think that they can A commit crimes and they can just randomly attack somebody of a different race and there'll be no consequences.

Especially when the popular culture will say, one of the worst crimes there is is interracial crime

and

interracial crime.

And as long as it's typical, that is, it's a white person attacking somebody who's non-white.

But we know that the two groups that are the most targeted are Jews and Asians.

And we know that people who are targeting Jews and Asians are not disproportionately white.

And so so we don't hear about that.

And so

this is what's so strange about everything is this Orwellian

Orwellian force permeates every aspect of our lives.

You can't say that, or we know the truth.

You cannot have an Eastern European society where everybody empirically knows something's going on.

but they can't say it.

And that creates the cynicism that we see everywhere in America today.

We need a leader who just says,

once you dismantle the criminal justice system and once you went down the racial essentialism line,

we have created a very dangerous situation.

The most

numerous victims are people without resources and African Americans and others in the inner city.

But we are also creating a situation where criminals are going all through the city and smashing and grab and looting and carjacking and attacking random people based on their race.

I think it's based on their race.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

we have to conclude today because I know you have some time constraints.

So

we'll leave discussion of Christopher Columbus to

another day or

another year.

We thank our listeners for listening.

Of course, you're listening.

And we read the comments that you leave at the Apple slash iTunes

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where you can rate the show zero to five stars.

And as usual, practically everyone leaves a five-star rating.

Appreciation of the wisdom Victor shares.

Some leave comments, and here are two quick ones.

One is from James Rogers.

It calls it Satisfying Listening.

Never disappointed with the brilliant interviews.

Victor, Jack, and Sammy had yours to my brain.

Thank you, James.

And then E, period V, period D, D I E.

Looks like Eddie with the V stuck in the middle of it.

But quick, the best thoughts in podcasts writes, Victor Davis Hansen is simply a national treasure.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, EVDI, James Rogers.

I would thank folks who sign up

for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at Amphil.

Dozen plus recommended readings.

I think you'll like it.

So do check that out: civilthoughts.com.

Sign up.

Victor's website is theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Go there.

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Subscribe.

Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared today.

And thanks, folks, for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you very much for listening, everyone.

Dad?

How do you make a happy egg?

Well, it starts with a happy hen.

Happy egg.

Happy crack.

Happy flip.

Happy poach.

Happy whip.

Happy hen.

Happy egg.

Happy sizzle.

Happy brunch.

Happy hen.

Happy egg.

And you can make eggs a bazillion ways, but that orange oak is how you know it's happy.

Happy

egg.