Trials, Budgets and Presidential Candidates

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Hello, America and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our Friday news roundup, so we're going to go over lots of news that we have going on today, especially the Trump trial and the aversion of a shutdown by Kevin McCarthy.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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So Victor Trump is on trial, a civil fraud trial in New York, and he is charged with overvaluing property.

But I thought what was also interesting is he has a lot of people who are piling on him now that he's in trial.

And John Kelly recently

let out that Trump called vets, according to him, losers and suckers.

So we see a lot of people piling on here with that particular tale.

And I was wondering if you have any thoughts either on the trial or what do you call people that pile on like that?

Opportunists.

Opportunists.

I'll start with the second one first very quickly.

So

there was an Atlantic Monthly

article with Mark Milley showcase.

Remember Mark Milley is leaving the chairman of the Joint Chiefs position, and he's going into the private sector.

We'll see what he does.

I have a suspicion he'll do what they all do, and that is go work for a defense contractor, but I want to withhold judgment.

And I think he's going to write a memoir.

And then there was John Kelly, who was a former Homeland Security

Secretary under Trump.

and also for about a year or so chief of staff who supposedly brought order to

Trump's White House.

And remember, Trump was criticized severely by the left for being over-militarizing his administration by bringing in H.R.

McMaster as three-star general, retired as National Security Advisor, James Mattis,

four-star retired as Secretary of Defense, and John Kelly, four-star retired as

chief of staff.

And

so Millie's going to come out with a book.

Kelly's weighed in about Millie's comments that Trump was a dictator.

Ms.

Hutchinson, who was an aide, high aide to Trump, has got a new book memoir, Tell Off.

And there's others.

And now, what are they all saying?

They're all echoing that Donald Trump in his private conversations was gross, cruel, mean.

Probably true, too.

I don't know, but there's no corroboration.

He could be mean.

He's mean sometimes in his public.

You know, he makes fun of Rosie O'Donnell and Megan Kelly,

etc.

But they said that the suckers comment about those who died in combat, or he

deprecated a veteran's appearance who was severely born.

These are horrible things, they're atrocious things.

But these are private conversations.

And so three issues come up, Sammy.

Three that I can think of.

Number one:

were these comments

public or private, and

did they involve policy or not that got these people's attention?

I.e.,

did Donald Trump do to the American people what we are experiencing the last two and a half years?

Are they angry because prices have gone up on key staples in fuel 25% in the last two years?

Are they angry that there's 8 million illegal entries, none of whom have been audited, and

we're going to pay a price for that for generations to come?

Are they angry about that?

I mentioned.

Are they angry about

canceling student loans by Fiat or draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and begging illiberal regimes to pump oil on the eve of the midterm?

Are they commenting on the withdrawal from Afghanistan?

My point is, are they saying, this is, we work for Donald Trump and and he did these terrible things to the American people, and now there's Joe Biden, and we're not doing these.

No, they're not doing that at all.

They're just saying, we're just not going to talk about how the Trump administration affected the American people.

We're going to talk about things he said to us that were horrific.

Okay.

Every single person listening in moments of craziness has said horrific things to people they trusted.

I can guarantee you have.

Okay.

And so now we're supposed to judge this administration not on what it did, but what a private, a president said in his private conversations.

It would be as if saying, all we're going to talk about is JFK

having sex with an 18-year-old underage person and having her fallate one of his, or trying to, one of his staffers or LBJ pulling out his phallus in front of a cabinet meeting, or Bill Clinton, no comment needed.

So these are things that are bad, but we need to have bookended what he did.

And they don't do any of that.

They don't do any of that.

They don't say...

Second thing, if they are worried about democracy being threatened, and they say they are, that's what they all say,

then let's talk about it.

Did Donald Trump weaponize the FBI and the DOJ and the CIA?

Did they go after people and try to destroy their lives as we saw with the Russian collusion hoax?

Do these people, are they upset that 51 intelligence, quote-unquote, authorities lied to the American people to warp an election and a debate that was coming up?

Are they angry that their FBI director that they feel

was, I guess, pretty good?

Andrew McCabe lied four times to a federal investigator.

James Comey pled amnesia 245 times.

James Clapper, James Tremann, da-da-da-da-da.

They all lied under oath.

And they're talking about Trump warping the institutions?

Is that what they're talking about?

Do they, any of them, when they look at this Letita James lawsuit and the judge that's involved, do they ever say to themselves, if Donald Trump, imagine,

had said on January 7, 2021, he's not going to run for president, you think anything would be going on right now?

Or put it another way, do you think right now if Joe Biden had a smashing success and was robust and was ahead 60 to 40 in every single poll that they would even care to prosecute Donald Trump?

No.

No.

These people are completely oblivious.

Then there's a couple of other issues.

Why do we know who John Kelly is?

And why do we know who Miss Hutchinson is?

And why do we know who Mark Milley is?

And why do we know who any of these people?

Why did we know who John Bolton was again?

He had a recess appointment.

It's really the only major appointment he'd had in years in government.

It was because they were appointed by Donald Trump.

Would they have been appointed by another?

I doubt it.

And so, I mean, reportedly, James Mattis, the defense secretary, suggested that Mark Milley not be

not be chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Okay.

So

there you have it.

And finally, when we talk about the two military officers and they talk about Trump being a danger to the Republic, you know what's a danger to the Republic?

Some of them.

We have never had a chairman of the Joint Chiefs who broke into the chain of command against the law and said, listen, you do not report to the Secretary of Defense.

You report to me on these important matters of

international tensions.

We've never had a chairman of the Joint Chiefs who did the following.

called up his PLA counterpart and warned him that his own commander-in-chief was unstable And should there be an existential tension, that he, Mark Milley, would take it upon himself as a psychiatrist to diagnose his president as unstable and then warn the PLA person to act accordingly, i.e., I don't know.

Be assured that Mark Milley would not follow a direct order from the President of the United States.

Have we ever had anybody doing that?

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

Have we ever had, did John Kelly and Mark Milley say in their interviews?

Well, Donald Trump was very crude and vulgar in his private conversation, said things that were just intolerable.

But

there is such a thing called the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 88, that applies to retired officers like me now.

And retired officers are not allowed to disparage, I think that's the exact word that's used, the commander-in-chief.

So we're not going to call him, we should not,

we being the community should have not called him Hitler-like or Mussolini or a liar or should have been removed sooner or later.

Did they say that?

No.

None of them did.

And finally,

finally, they are worried in these arguments, as is the left,

that Donald Trump

might

do to them if he returns to office what they, if they were Donald Trump, would do to them.

Everybody see what I'm saying?

That's why they're scared.

Because they operate that way and they figure and take for granted that Trump will too.

And that's why they're terrified.

And

I don't see any of them in any self-examination of what the military has descended to.

Are they angry that Rosa Brooks, a Pentagon lawyer,

What if Donald Trump, let me just ask everybody, what did Donald Trump do so badly that 11 days

into his administration, Rosa Brooks

in foreign policy wrote an article saying he should be removed three ways.

25th Amendment?

Nah, too long.

Impeachment?

Nah, too long.

Military coup?

Wow.

Now that's something we should consider.

Did they say that?

Did they ever say that?

What did Donald Trump do in the first few

months of his administration that 58 Democrats would have decided almost out of the starting box that he should be impeached.

Can they tell us?

Can he tell us?

Yeah, but can I ask you something in that?

What is it about Donald Trump and why did it change the Democrats to this, we're going to get him out at all cost and we're going to do these extraordinary things.

He was completely

separate.

There were two things.

He was completely

separate and exempt from the traditional levers of influence and pressure.

In other words,

traditionally a Mitt Romney, if the Council on Foreign Relations expressed distrust, or the New York

Review books, or the Washington Post op-ed,

or any of these magazines or venues that said

you're

you're treading in dangerous waters, people would be worried about that.

He didn't care.

He does not not give a damn.

He doesn't even know who they are, most of them.

So they felt that they had no control over him.

Then they looked at

his

agenda, and it was unorthodox.

Nobody wanted to close the border.

Nobody did.

Not George Bush, not Bill Clinton, not Barack Obama.

The Republican Party was Chamber of Commerce Cheap Labor, and the Democratic Party was new constituents.

And they all agreed on that.

Simpson-Missouli under Reagan satisfied everybody by going through the motions and opening the border.

So nobody wanted to get tough with China.

Not the Biden family for sure.

Not all of our captains of industry.

Nobody thought there was anything wrong with that.

That was crazy to say that.

Nobody, Republicans even in Freemasonry, they didn't say things like,

we're going to make beautiful oil and we're going to pump natural gas and we're going to do all this.

So he was completely immune from influence by by the establishment, and he had an unorthodox mega agenda that did not please either the Democrats or the Republicans.

There was a third ingredient.

Donald Trump was crude and crass.

He was a gunslinger.

He said things you don't say.

When Megan Kelly made a good point that he had been unkind to women, he said only Rosie O'Donnell.

That was funny.

When, you know, when

Rand Paul said that he had mixed politics and money, he said, I did, and you were a really good person who gave me money, and I did stuff for you.

Nobody ever talks like that.

Nobody ever looks like that with that orange hair and that fake tan and all of these scandals and big-time wrestling background and Stormy Daniels and that Queen's accent.

Nobody, this is not how you have a president.

And I'm not suggesting that these are not legitimate concerns or sources of worry.

I'm just saying that look at what he did,

General Milley, General Kelly.

Look at what he did, Ms.

Hutchinson,

and see if what he did hurt or helped millions of people.

And ask yourself if Joe Biden hurt or helped millions of people before you adjudicate him as a danger to democracy, and not Joe Biden, who had the FBI pay Twitter to suppress news, whose Secretary of State called up

a former head of the CIA to round up 51

quote-unquote intelligence authorities to lie to the American people to warp an upcoming debate.

Ask yourself, they won't do that.

Instead, we're supposed to ask who Mr.

Colonel Nagel was, a youngling.

They wrote a letter and published it, I think, in Defense 1 and said, General Milley, you've got to use the 82nd Airborne to remove Donald Trump.

They wrote that in August 2020.

He won't, if he loses the election, he won't move.

You've got to get ready to get him out.

As soon as the election's over,

hey, Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel, there is something called Inauguration Day.

You understand that?

That happens about two and a half months after an election.

That is a legitimate presidency after an election.

You can't take the 82nd airborne and remove a sitting president because you don't like him.

You understand that?

But it doesn't matter.

So

I don't take these people seriously.

I do take them seriously that Donald Trump is crude, that he said terrible things in private, but I don't see how that translated to policy that threatened the Republic as they insinuate.

Yeah, that's true.

As far as the trial, very quickly.

Kuimalo, who got hurt?

Kuimalo, who got hurt?

The banks, they made a lot of money.

They charged Donald Trump interest.

I've met some New York bankers in my lifetime.

They're not stupid people.

They're some of the sharpest people in the world.

They all know about Donald Trump's way of doing business.

They know that he exaggerates.

They know he doesn't tell the truth.

They know he's rambunctious.

They know he's unstable.

And they know that he

can do things.

So they took a calculated risk.

They looked at his income and they looked at his assets and they probably said, whatever Donald Trump's assets are, like most people, subtract exaggeration, in his case more.

But they found that there was sufficient assets and income and they loaned him money and he paid it back.

All parties were happy.

So why are we prosecuting him?

Because some judge who knows nothing about real estate in general and less about New York real estate or East Coast real estate thinks that Mar-a-Lago is not worth

$30 million when it's probably worth a half a billion now or more.

Or he thinks that Donald Trump doesn't know how to

calculate square footage and exaggerated the square footage of his house.

Ask any New York wealthy person in Martha's venue has a house in Nantucket.

How many square feet did you have in your vacation home?

And if it's 3,000, they'll say it's 3,500.

And they'll probably say that on a form too, if they're going to sell it.

This is a nothing.

But

again, it wouldn't happen if he wasn't running for president.

Yeah.

Well, I was thinking, though, while you were saying that, do you think that now the Democrats have a model for their future

assault on the Republicans, that they're just going to replay this Donald Trump thing all over and over again, no matter who the candidate is?

I don't think so because they've set a precedent.

What are the precedents they've set?

You lose your majority your first term, you get impeached.

Joe Biden lost his majority, he may get impeached.

And they're going to scream to high heaven and nobody's going to listen because they did it to Donald Trump.

And there was a hell of a lot more evidence about Biden corruption than one phone call.

And they screamed and yelled and yelled that when they were in the majority, as they are now, the last thing they wanted was to remove the Senate filibuster.

When they were in the minority, it was important.

When they were in the majority, it was a Jim Crow relic.

So when the Republicans are in the majority, they might end up, they say, you know what, you guys were right.

We're going to get rid of it.

And you're not going to have a way to stop us.

And I could go down on voting laws and ID and packing the court and threatening to get rid of the Electoral College and letting in new states

and draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and by Fiat,

all these things they did.

Yeah.

Russian collusion, Russian, and it's going to boomerang back on it.

Yeah, so they're going to get payback is what you think.

So if a DeSantis were our candidate, then maybe it would be a little bit different than what they did to Trump?

DeSantis.

I would be, if I were them, I would be more scared of DeSantis than I would Trump because I think he's going to get get even rather than get mad.

And he's not going to scream and yell.

I'm just basing this on what he's did at Florida.

If you look at New College or critical race theory in the schools

or Disney, he didn't go give big, you know, he didn't get angry and do it.

He just did it.

And he did it with his, I don't know, a stiletto.

And I think if he were to be president, you would see a radical dis, I don't know, what do you call it, decentralization of the FBI and a decentralization of the CIA and a complete re-haul of the health agencies and the DOJ.

And

he wouldn't make a big deal of it.

Just do it.

I think you'd have a wall on the southern border in six weeks.

I think he would start just saying, you know what, people broke the law.

They came in under the Biden.

amnesty, which was not an amnesty, it was illegal.

We're not angry at anybody.

We don't have any vendettas about illegal immigrants, but they broke the law when they crossed the border.

They broke the law when they resided, and they're going to have to go home.

And then we would see systematically

deportation.

Yeah.

And

same thing all down the line.

I don't think that you'd see

a Mark Milley appointed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, Victor, we have some messages coming up, but we'll be back to talk a little bit about Kevin McCarthy and the budget that's been stalled for 45 days, I believe.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

You can find Victor at his website, victorhanson.com.

The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus.

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Before we go into Kevin McCarthy and his budget, I guess it's a crisis, so I'm going to call it a budget crisis.

You did an interview recently with Tucker on Twitter.

I don't quite understand how that works, Victor.

He has a channel on Twitter, and then people can go there and find the interview with you.

Is that right?

Yes, that is exactly how it works.

He has, I guess you call it a Twitter feed, but it's a series of interviews.

I think he's up to 26 now, and they range from 30 minutes to an hour.

And he tries to bring people

in to be interviewed.

And usually you had to go to his main or Florida studios.

But now he has the ability, as he did with Fox, to do Zoom interviews.

Yeah.

Or

live you feeds.

And that's what I did yesterday.

Oh, okay.

And we did it for about 30 minutes.

And he brings a topic.

There's no talking points.

You don't know what he's going to talk about.

I had no idea what he was going to talk about.

But it was

the lawfare and the politicalization of the institutions of America and the administrative state to destroy Donald Trump and

what did that entail.

And I said we were basically in the middle of a revolution.

I use the word Jacobin not to act smart or say it's a funny word.

It's just a revolutionary word that...

that characterizes the French Revolution.

And all it means is it's not a political revolution alone.

It's an economic, financial, cultural, social, military revolution.

It's all aspects of our life, from the foundational date 1776 to 1619, to

three genders instead of two, to tearing down statues, to renaming buildings, to having fedtermen walk in the Senate as a slab, and that's the new decorum.

It's a holistic 360-24-7 revolution.

Well, speaking of our Congress, we're trying to get a budget through, and Kevin McCarthy has asked or has passed a 45-day extension on it.

But I think the interesting thing is that Matt Gates is trying to replace him as the Speaker of the House.

And I don't that's both interesting and I'm sorry some of your viewers, I mean your listeners sometimes say I laugh at the wrong time, but him being the Speaker of the House just makes me smile.

Well

let's just go down the list.

One,

the Republicans control one half of one third of the government.

Two,

that control is based, depending on open seats or on healthy representatives, anywhere from six to eight seats.

Number three,

that thin, razor, thin majority in one half of one-third of the government is very volatile.

There are paleocons, mega people,

moderates, neocons,

and rhinos.

And somebody has to herd all of those people in to exercise their thin majority.

And so Kevin McCarthy, whom I've known, he's a representative just one district over from where I'm speaking right now.

His whole plan was to be the impediment, the speed bump, and the only speed bump

to Joe Biden's agenda.

I shouldn't say Joe Biden's agenda, to the Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren squad agenda.

And so far he's been doing pretty well.

So Matt Gates

comes along and says, you haven't done what we should,

you haven't embraced the whole MAGA agenda.

You're not shutting down the government.

And McCarthy's saying, I don't really have the votes to do it.

And for me to shut down the government would be catastrophic anyway if I did have the votes to do it, because I would be distracting attention away from the Biden inquiries and our efforts to close the border and to modulate the aid to Ukraine.

So I will try to pressure

But I only have a very small majority of one-half or one-third of the government.

Number four.

And so Matt Gates accuses McCarthy of enlisting Democratic House members to vote not to shut down the government along with the Republican majority,

and therefore he's sold out.

Number five.

How does Matt Gaetz

What is his agenda?

So if he gets rid of Kevin McCarthy, because all the Democrats will vote against him, and then he thinks he has seven or eight Republicans that will too,

then who's going to be Speaker?

Matt Gaetz?

Or somebody that Matt Gaetz wants?

And how are they going to be doing it?

He's going to then attack all the Republican majority and then turn around and get rid of Kevin McCarthy.

And he's going to say, now.

I want to be Speaker or my hand-picked person wants to be Speaker, but I don't have the votes, so I'm going to do what?

Oh, I'm going to go to the Democrats and say, can you please vote for me in the way that I blasted you for voting not to shut down with McCarthy?

Six,

is Matt Gates,

who is currently under an ethics violation, accusation, is he in a position at his age, experience, and record to

exercise effective and sober leadership in the House and unite them.

That's what we're talking about, isn't it?

Uniting?

Because

the Republicans haven't won an election.

As I keep saying to everybody, seven out of the eight popular votes, the last ones, not 51% since George H.W.

Bush.

They blew them midterm.

It's not like they have a great record of electoral success to coast on.

They have no margin of error.

This country has moved to the left, whether we like it or not.

And finally, is it seven or eight?

I think it's seven.

Something around there.

Yes.

Finally,

when you look at all of this thing,

what was the Republican record under George W.

Bush for eight years and Donald Trump for four on

physical sobriety when they had the control of the House and the Senate and both did?

Did they have a Simpson-Mazzoli effort to balance the budget?

Was Matt Gates screaming and yelling during the Trump administration, we've got to get a balanced budget?

I didn't hear him.

In fact,

as a conservative, this really disturbs me, but if you go back

to 1980

and you look at the last 43 years of governance,

and the budgets submitted from the executive branch by Ronald Reagan for eight years, George H.W.

Bush for four years, Bill Clinton for eight years, Barack Obama for eight years, and Donald Trump for four years, and Joe Biden for three.

During which period did we have the smallest deficits?

Got an idea, Sammy?

The smallest deficits.

Yes.

Did you give me the Clinton years?

Yes, I did.

The Clinton years.

Yes, over that eight years, I think we increased

the debt by about 3%.

We had, I think, three balanced budgets.

Now, everybody's going to point out, well, that was because of Newt Ginrich, that he was willing to get massive cuts and freezes

in just giving up a couple of points to raise taxes.

Yes.

But the point was they did it.

And so when Matt Gates looks at all of these problems that he's so focused on about reckless spending, he's right about that.

Why doesn't he just take a deep breath and say we in the Republican Party,

not

Kevin McCarthy alone, but all of us, all of us, have spent money that we didn't have and therefore set a precedent for these wasteful spending Democrats to say,

well, if the Party of Physical Responsibility borrows trillions, then we'll borrow trillions more.

And that's what happened.

Yeah.

Well, since we're on the topic of the Congress, I don't know if there's much to say about Jamal Bowman and his pulling the fire alarm alarm down, but did you have any thoughts on that?

It's been pretty bandied about.

Well,

each time he says something, he gets in deeper trouble.

So he goes out and he knows that these doors are not the doors that you take to go to a Senate or House or any congressional vote.

There's a tunnel that expedites that.

So he goes out here and he tries to pull.

the alarm and he does and it makes the building emptied and that's either a high-class misdemeanor, or if you were to be a biased prosecutor, you could milk a felony out of it.

And he gets caught.

So everybody listening should say, did Mr.

Bowman ever come forward?

Had he not been caught?

I.e.,

had he just run up really quickly, tapped that snuck out?

with an invisible cloak.

Would you think he'd be telling anybody he did that?

No.

No, he would be bragging privately in the gym that he shut down the government.

That's what he would be doing.

So he knows that.

So then he came up with a second thing, and it was,

I

thought that the fire alarm as principal of a high school was actually a little blue button that you pushed to open the doors and the sign right in front of me that said no access

alarm didn't mean anything and then the second and third signs on the door that said emergency only alarm will go off didn't mean anything

so

that's that.

And then he gave an explanation, and then he couldn't quite persuade anybody, so he did the Nazi card.

He said, and if they wouldn't, if they wouldn't do this, if they wouldn't stop, you know, going after me, then we would know they were Nazis.

We could go with the Nazis and the Nazis and the Nazis.

And, you know, the reducto ad Hitlerim doesn't work because

there is a Nazi party and nobody in the Congress is a member of the Nazi party and it's a smear and a

slander so then he he puts his finger in the wind and says oh my god 24 hours later some people in my party are saying don't call people Nazis well what will I do well I'll go back to my little Volodex of lies and look up the one about the Hitler lie.

So he pulls it out and says, I didn't do that.

It was my staff.

I resent what the staff did.

I'm sorry.

They shouldn't have have done that.

He never does anything.

It's always somebody else.

And so then he had to retract that.

And then he sicked the squad on people.

And we got AOC saying the word vestibule that he was just trapped in there and he didn't know what to do.

And the vestibule was the walls are closing in on him.

So he had to burst out.

That was pathetic.

I think she wanted to show us a polysyllabic word that we didn't know or something.

And then finally, he's now muttering,

he's got his surrogates playing the race card.

Did we think that was not going to come?

That he's a victim of racial injustice.

So there you have it.

There you have it.

And they won't do anything to him.

They might get a censor vote up on the floor, but it won't pass, probably.

He should be in jail for that.

Yeah.

Well, somebody that they might do something to is Sam Bankman Freed.

And his trial starts next week.

And it seems that many of his partners in crime may be testifying against him.

That's the problem, huh?

Well,

there's a couple of things about that story.

We're always told the left makes people pay their fair share, and they don't like the rich.

The fact is that the New Democratic Party is the rich.

So what did Sam Bankman-Freed and his...

very hard left parents do when the proverbial something hit the fan.

They immediately tried to drain as much money as they could out of this Alameda extension that was supposed to be separate and they went into private accounts.

That wasn't their money.

Just like you have a 401k, some guy of the hedge fund decide just to go in and take your money, not your investment money,

take it and take it out of your account for purposes that were not disclosed.

And what were the purposes?

To buy a big, beautiful penthouse in the Bahamas, to buy Persian rugs and lamps and art, to, as we talk, get a million-dollar salary for yourself.

That's what he did.

And now he has all these young people in this polyamorphous, polyamorous, I should say, relationship.

And they're saying that he did it, not me.

He did it, not me.

He did it, not me.

So it's kind of a circle of scoundrels.

They all did it, but they got first to the prosecutor because they didn't have the attention and the glamour that Sam Bankman-Fried did.

And his parents are now under probably investigations for being party to this.

They wanted their Lucre and of course their hard leftists.

So we were into the Barack Obama Oprah Winfrey syndrome, a very, very John Kerry syndrome, a very, very wealthy leftist lecturing people about equity.

Excuse me, Michelle didn't say equity for her $741,000 hour in Berlin.

She said she was speaking on inclusion and diversity and forgot by accident equity.

I guess she thought $741,000 or $12,000 a minute is not equity.

Before you get angry at me, listeners, I mean that she probably thought she was underpaid.

So she didn't want to embarrass her people.

her host by saying, I didn't get equity.

You only paid me $12,000 a minute.

So

they're all yelling and screaming and fingering each other.

And he's going to be the musical chairs.

The music went off.

He has no chair.

And he's a big fish.

And he was living at the Stanford campus, not too far from my apartment.

And he was trying to tamper with witnesses.

So they revoked his,

I guess you'd call it his bail, parole, whatever it was, and he's back in prison.

I don't know if the people who put up that bond, remember it was some fabulous amount that was a phony number.

They only put it up about 500,000 if they lost their money or not because he did go back in the can.

So

I just don't understand something that

there must be so much money out there that you would give money to a slob like that because what?

He grew up at Stanford or

Miss Ellison's parents were MIT or his parents were Stanford?

Is that why you do it?

Why do you give it to Elizabeth Holmes and her fake blood testing machine?

Because she's blonde or she looks like Steve Jobs in a black getup.

Why do some of the smartest investors in the world turn over billions to these little kids?

I don't understand it.

Because of their zip code?

Stanford University affiliations?

Is that it?

I can tell you as somebody who's had, I think, five members of my family go to Stanford.

I'm a graduate there.

I've got a PhD.

I work there.

I would not trust anybody from Stanford with a $5 bill.

No offense, Stanford.

If I saw anybody in the world where I would not want to lose my wallet, it would be on the Stanford campus.

Believe me.

I would rather lose my

wallet, I think, in the Selma Home Depot.

And Jose Lopez would be much more likely to drive out here and give me my wallet than the left on the Stanford Law School or business school or any of those places.

Well,

Luctra does a lot to people.

All right, Victor, let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about Newsom and California.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back.

Don't forget that you can find Victor on X, which is the former Twitter at VD Hansen.

And you can find him on his Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

And there's also an unaffiliated Facebook page that unaffiliated with us that is called Victor Davis Hansen's Fan Club.

And they have lots of good stuff on that page.

So if you're a Facebook person, then you might want to try one of those places.

Well, Victor, Newsom,

there's a couple of things.

California in general, and you wrote an article about it called California the Great Destroyer, and so we want to hear more about that.

But if we could talk about Newsom first and his appointment of LaFonza Butler, who is not registered to vote in California, but apparently she's going to be our senator, interim senator.

But also, the other things Newsom has been doing that seem to be indicating he looks like he's going to get himself positioned so that he could be a presidential candidate, I think.

But what are your thoughts?

Well,

like Joe Biden, he announced in a very racist fashion who would not be eligible to even be considered.

And given that the black population of California hovers between four and five percent and the female black population is two to three percent

Gavin Newsom

said in advance that I'm not interested in 96 percent of you in other words my senate pick will not even look like 96 percent you're just intolerable taboo

If you're Asian, if you're Hispanic, if you're white, if you're male, I don't want to consider you.

You understand?

You may be Einstein, you may be Abraham Lincoln, you may be Daniel Webster, you may be Henry Clay, but I'm not going to look at you.

I'm only going to look at a black woman.

That's the first thing he did.

Then he looked at this race, and he's got Adam Schiff, a shifty, you know, collusion,

hoax.

in the polls slightly ahead.

And he's got a black woman, Barbara Lee, and he's got

Representative Porter.

And they're all calling him all the time and saying, give me me, me, me, me, me, me, me.

I want to be the incumbent.

I want to be the incumbent because it's for this replacement.

Diane Feinstein died.

I think even though she was very ill, it was very sudden.

And so they all want to go into the special election, or I should say, the regular election in November as the incumbent.

So he tried to square that circle and he came up with what he thought was a brilliant solution.

I, Gavin Newsom, will be running in the primary in in 2024.

In the Democratic primary, the black vote is very important, not in California, but I don't care because I've won California.

But I need something

to go

into a place like South Carolina primary and run pretty well with Camilla Harris.

whom I'll probably be a candidate against.

And so I'm going to tell everybody that I picked the first, can't be the first black woman, Camilla beat me to it, but it can be the first gay black woman.

And

I will tell everybody

that

I did this as an interim choice so I wouldn't get involved and be prejudicial to the three candidates running, but wink, nod, I also picked her on the idea that she's ahead of the SCIU for a while, now Emily's list, I know her, and she's going to run for re-election, and she may win, even though she doesn't seem to have a constituency in California because she doesn't even live here.

So that's what he did.

And he's been doing all of these things lately.

He goes down to the border, as I said.

He talks about homeless people.

He talks about building a mental health facility.

He talks about streamlining infrastructure.

Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

That's what he does because he's running for president.

Why is he running for president?

Because to use a leftist phrase, the walls are closing in on Joe Biden.

I don't know if you saw that, Sammy, but he was giving a speech the other day where he just simply stopped.

Yes, I did see that.

He just stopped.

And he just quit.

I'm speaking right now to you all and I'm going to tell you about a

Bye.

See you later, guys.

I don't have anything to say.

I lost my train of thought.

That's what he did.

And then you look at Hunter on trial right now, and we've already talked about this, listeners.

There is a sick relationship between Hunter and his father.

Hunter's lawyers threatened to call Joe Biden as a witness unless he got preferential treatment, which would have happened except for that courageous judge who squashed it.

Hunter Biden did not have to do that art thing, paint by numbers, and shake down people for influence to his father.

He did it.

Hunter Biden didn't have to fight

a

child

patrimony suit.

It was only embarrassed Joe Biden.

Why did he?

He was living in Malibu at what, $16,000 a month?

And he's fighting over a few thousand dollars a month with this woman, this stripper that he had a child with.

Why does he do all that stuff?

Because he's sending Joe a message that I'm completely out of control and you better keep me close.

And so all of these things are happening right now with Joe Biden.

Cognitive disability,

Hunter, no agenda that polls 50% on any issue, you name it.

And

so Newsom's showing up at the border and allowing a nuclear plant to stay open.

Yes, absolutely.

Diablo Canyon will stay open, even though he wanted to close it.

And he's talking, he's calling up agribusiness people.

He's doing everything he thinks is going to position him slightly to the right.

This is a guy who during COVID, gave $500 million to illegal aliens and gave us a lecture that COVID was a way of getting

a more progressive capitalism under the lockdown.

And then aid at the French laundry with lobbyists with no masks.

Yeah.

And currently, he's vetoed three different bills.

One requiring justices to consider child's gender identity in child custody disputes.

He vetoed that.

He vetoed a bill that would allow unemployment to strikers.

And he vetoed a bill giving OSHA protection to domestic

vote a bill, as I said, to streamline regulatory encumbrances.

He also

vetoed a bill that would have the legislature or the executive branch appoint sheriffs and get rid of elections for sheriffs.

So he's trying in the 11th hour to position himself, as I said.

And he's a very...

Republicans be very worried about this guy because he's very slick.

He thinks he's very good looking.

He's glib.

He's rhetorical.

And after, as I said before, after 15 minutes, he runs out of canned memorized lines and his little psychodrama, losing his temper, shouting, doing all these little antics.

But you got to get to the first 15 minutes is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, exactly.

He's like like a big puffed up plastic doll, and he's got a little hole in it.

And he looks all puffed up and formidable.

But as he speaks, the air goes out.

And in 15 minutes, he's totally deflated.

But for the first two, you have to get through the first 15 minutes.

Well, Victor, you have to continue with our California saga here.

You've written at the end of your recent article called California the Great Destroyer that so like modern vandals and Goths, contemporary Californians are for, are far better

destroying the work of others than creating anything of their own.

And I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about what you wrote in this article.

We inherited from a bipartisan gubernatorial tradition.

a wonderful state.

It was wonderful to grow up in California.

Everything worked.

The clover leaf, it was invented here, the modern airport here.

The freeway system here.

I can remember when I was 16 driving from Salma to Fresno on a three-lane 99 freeway and there was, you might see one car parallel to you.

You just zoomed out.

Today that thing is jam-packed 24-7.

Why?

Because we have 40 million people.

and not 15 or 16 million and the highway hasn't changed.

It hasn't changed.

It's still the same, no more lanes.

And so

California doesn't create things.

And I gave some examples.

It can't.

It inherits things.

It inherited the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge.

It inherited beautiful forest, natural inheritance.

It inherited wonderful airports, freeways.

educational system, JC, CSU, UC, you name it.

And this generation destroyed it.

And they're very good at destroying.

If you want to pass a measure that says $7 billion for dams and water restoration, and at least $3 billion, almost $3 billion will be used for dams, you don't spend that.

What do you spend the money on?

You take the water appropriation and you use it to blow up dams.

So on the Klamath River, they're blowing up four dams, as I said before.

And they, you know, they have recreation, they have water storage, they

are valuable during a drought, and they create 80,000 households worth of hydroelectric clean power, and you blow it up.

And you don't just do it like we do everything else over 10 years with regulations and lawsuits and fight.

You just do it.

If you don't like forest policy, you don't like farmers grazing their cattle on the foothills and getting rid of grasses, you don't like weekend woodcutters going up and cutting their firewood, you don't like timber companies selectively harvesting and thinning out the forest, you just do it.

Say, no, don't do it.

And then you burn up 60 million trees.

And we did that the last four summers, except for this one.

And you have a plume of, what, carbon imprint all over the state.

You just do it.

If you

You want to destroy San Francisco, you just unloose the homeless people.

You want to destroy statues, go to Golden Gate and tear one down.

There's no controversy.

But you want to build something?

You want to build something?

We approved in 2008, and I wrote this article, and I said it was a $33 billion project bond, but somebody wrote a little note saying, well, it was only $8.9,

no, $9.8

or something billion of the $33 billion.

But the point is it was sold as a $33 billion

bond and this was the first installment that we passed and then we just gave more.

And what's happened since 2008?

Well we're in year 15 and we haven't had one foot of track laid.

We can't build high-speed rail.

Our grandparents in the Great Depression built the eastern span of the Oakland Bay Bridge in three years.

Three years.

We took 11 and it went from $250

million projected cost to $6 billion plus.

We're going to redo LAX.

It used to be a premier, it's one of the worst airports.

I say that without prejudice.

I'm not trying to denigrate it, but you go down to LAX, it's like going into the sixth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno.

And we're into $30 billion, not going to be done until 2028, that remake of the airport.

I could go on, but the point I'm trying to make is we can't do projects.

We can't create.

We sue each other.

We say they're unfair.

They're not green.

They're racist.

You name it.

But destroy something, destroy the timber industry, destroy forest management, destroy

dams.

We're damn good at it.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Well, Victor, this is the end of the podcast today,

our Friday news roundup.

I'd like to thank

all you listeners out there for listening to the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Thank you everybody for listening.

And I'm having my elevate water as I speak.

Still,

our dear friends still send us.

And it gives you a little pep.

It's

hydrogen-infused water.

Yeah, it's supposed to have antioxidant properties.

I've been slowly getting over long COVID.

I think it's had a positive effect, and I really appreciate people sending it to me.

Yeah, I've been drinking it too and it really gives a lot of energy.

And I really want to thank Tucker for having that interview.

That was a nice thing to do.

That was the first, as I said,

distance interview that he's had.

And I think he's projected to transform that interview series.

that can go, as I said, from 30 minutes to an hour plus into some type of television on the internet.

I don't know, but it's going to have guests and appearances and tapes.

So I think it'll work.

Yeah, it should be excellent.

And to get Elevate Water, you can just go to drinklevate.com.

So that's their website.

So again, thanks to everybody.

This is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Link, and we're signing off.