Targeting the Middle Class and Our Political Circus

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I am Jack Fowler, VDH.

Victor Davis-Hanson is the star and the namesake.

He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow.

at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

His formal home on the internet is The Blade of Perseus.

You'll find that at victorhanson.com.

This podcast's happy home is John Solomon's Just the News.

So visit that too when you get a chance, just thenews.com.

Victor, this morning I saw a headline at Hot Air.

Remember that promise of no new audits below $400,000?

Yes, I do.

The IRS doesn't.

And we're going to get your take on this, Victor, right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor, when Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act came about, it had $80 billion for more IRS agents.

And the promise was,

we're just going after the big fish here.

And, you know, a little small fried guppies, nobody cares.

$400,000 and above, that's what we're targeting.

And like everything else, Victor, the target is always becomes everybody, whether it's tax increases, et cetera.

Here's from the hot air piece.

The specific promise was that the new IRS auditors wouldn't go after anybody with incomes below 400,000.

Few people make more than 400,000.

So the numbers sounded good enough.

Not my problem, said the little guys.

What do I care?

Yeah, well, it was never true.

And the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has said the quiet part out loud.

The IRS isn't going to limit its increased audits to taxpayers with incomes over $400,000 or limit them at all.

It will simply expand audits for everybody.

Victor, I'm sure you're shocked.

I'm not because the people that they would like to go after that make a million and more have tax lawyers, a lot of them, and they have professional accountants.

And if they have a professional accountant, usually the professional accountant is pretty honest.

And so they're not going to,

unless you're Hunter Biden, not report income.

So

what I'm getting at is when you go, I'm not talking about the super people

in the Biden, Trump, that income bracket.

I think Joe Biden reported an income the very year he left of $11 million.

I don't know how he did that when his prior income tax was about $500,000.

That being said, when you get up to that level, you can really get some money from them because a lot of their tax write-offs are of dubious

validity.

But from a million up to say 10 or 20 million, those people usually get accountants.

They're pretty smart.

A lot of them don't take risk or, and it's hard to get the money out.

They'll contest it and they know as much.

Many of their accountants and lawyers are former IRS people.

So where do you get the money?

Well, the middle class, and that's the largest group.

And so when you say up to 400,000, as soon as I heard that, I knew it was a lie because they're going to go after the people I see in Fresno County every day.

And these are people that are independent contractors.

They're plumbers.

They're electricians.

They're roofers.

They're

cement layers.

They own

individual businesses and they're not making it very well.

But a lot of them, I'm not going to give any names, they have to.

They have to get paid in part in cash.

They sometimes don't report all of their income.

They take questionable, and they don't have access to superb accountants and lawyers.

And the IRS looks at that wage group and says, that's where the money is.

And so when he added 88,000 more tax examiners, I thought, wow.

Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, but they're going to start going after those people.

And the other thing is

we have a huge black market.

And as I said before on this broadcast, name me an item, Jack, and I can go get it for cash.

A shovel, I can go down to a Sunday swap meet two miles from my house.

It'll be brand new and there will be no sales tax.

Chocolate milkshake, I can get a Mexican version of it a mile from me, no sales tax.

Any type of food, no sales tax, but sometimes they're not taxed anyway.

How about clothes?

You can buy any types of of clothes you want.

Bicycles?

About four miles down, there's a little intersection that has a bike mark.

And so that's all on tax.

There's no sales tax.

The people who are selling it are getting cash.

They don't report it as income.

And that's who they're going to have to go after if that's the point.

And this is so ironic because the left is the engine, not all the left, there's a lot in the right, but they're driving these huge deficits, these huge entitlement programs, and you have to pay for it.

And they thought they were going to go after who?

Elon Musk?

I don't think so.

If you're going to go pay for all of these things, you're going to have to go after the middle class.

That's the greatest number of taxpayers, and they don't have access to

clever tax lawyers and accountants.

And a lot of them take deductions that are of questionable merit.

or they don't report income.

And that's what you have to do.

And I, you know, there's a lot of us that make a pretty good salary, but it's all in,

I don't think

I haven't had anybody pay me in cash in 30 years.

And so you have, you report every dime.

And

if you're not actively farming, which I'm not, then you can't depreciate things.

And unless you're using them as an office, you got to be very careful if you're working at home, like I usually do, because you do have an office at work.

So I end up paying 57% of my income for state and federal and almost have no write-offs.

So I'm a little ambiguous about this.

I don't like the IRS doing this.

But on the other hand,

I see all of these people who are not reporting income and are being paid in cash and then they vote.

left-wing, I'm thinking, well, you better be careful because you guys are part of this huge spending machine and there's

getting money out of the corporate elite is like pulling teeth, but not out of the lower middle class or the middle class.

They're going to go after waitresses.

That's another thing they'll go after because you're starting to see these tips.

The 15% now is considered an insult, Jack.

So you get the bill and it says 15, 20, 25, 30.

30%.

So you, you know, you go to a restaurant and the service is late and the prices are really high.

They're double what they were in COVID.

And maybe you see the waitress once or twice.

Many of them are excellent waitresses, but you have occasional people.

And then you're supposed to give 25% to that type of service.

And that's a lot of money.

You can turn a meal of $100 into $125 like that.

And that person will probably not report it, or at least a lot of them won't.

And that's a lot of money now, 25% or 20% of these inflates.

So they're going to go after that too.

That's the whole point.

They get more money to spend more money, not to pay down the deficit, not to balance the budget, to get more money, to pay more money.

It's going to be very interesting because this middle class is going to be scrutinized to give money to

hotel accommodations in New York City for Eric Adams visitors from south of the border, maybe.

They see soon.

That's going to be very, very expensive when you bring in 8 million people that have no skills, no diplomas, no English facilities, no higher education, no capital, no legality, but do have an enormous need for health care, education, legal services, housing, food subsidies.

And the more that you give them that, the more that they're going to think they're entitled to it and that they have grievances against you, the host.

Did you see the pushback?

Did you see

the pushback against Eric Adams by the White House?

Yeah.

It's New York City's fault.

They did not have a strategic plan to deal with this.

Yeah, the attitude was really strange.

It was Mayorkis and Biden saying,

Well, what's wrong with you, Mayor?

Didn't you know we were going to break the law?

We were going to let everybody in without any visa, any control, any permission.

And once we let them in, we were going to let them reside illegally in the United States because they're future constituents.

And so, why didn't you get on the bus?

You were pretty good at the beginning.

You went out and met the buses.

You shook their hands.

You gave them a bottle of water.

You trashed Trump de Rigueur.

That was good.

And you said that you were a welcoming city and you're not racist.

And you're, and then people took you up in your work.

And then what did you do, Eric?

You went full Martha's Vineyard.

You just said, we love these people.

We love you so much.

We're going to give you, as I said, our North Face handoff clothes, hand-me-downs.

We're going to cook a casserole for you.

And we've got the nicest, most beautiful bus you've ever seen that's going to pick you up at six tomorrow morning.

And that's what the Martha's Vineyard solution was.

And that's what he wants.

And they're saying, we're not, what's wrong with you?

You're on the team.

And then he said,

long term, the White House said, well, we're going to try to stop this busing from the border states to places like Chicago and New York and Martha's Vineyard.

So basically what they're saying is the new U.S.

border is the border of Texas.

And everything south is Mexican sovereignty because we're going to open that border.

It's going to stay open.

But everybody who gets across it is going to live in those border states.

And they can't come north because that's the border.

There's a new border now.

No illegal alien gets to go north of Texas.

They're not going to be allowed to be bussed to Northern California, Washington, Chicago, Minneapolis, all the nice blue cities that have sanctuary city jurisdictions.

So there you have it.

The Daily Mail

website has AOC and another New York City congressman, Espilant, at a rally.

Well, the rally is against them.

They were at this hotel, the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, right near Grand Central Station, where

it's now filled with top to bottom with these illegal aliens.

And they went there to hold some press conference about, isn't this grand?

Something like that.

But there was a crowd waiting for them, like, go to hell, AOC.

I mean,

you know,

these people here are affecting our jobs, our schools, et cetera.

So

New York City is, like many places, may start coming apart at the seams politically

because of this.

What do you mean is going to happen?

I don't know.

They should come out here, and I can tell you what's going to happen.

If you let in millions of people, and we have been doing that, and you do not require of them

any type of background checks, authenticity, audit, adjudication, as you do your own citizens, especially in time of COVID, then what do you expect a person to do if they leave some of the poorest places on the planet, from Honduras, from Guatemala, from Chiapas, from Michoca, from Oaxaca,

and they come from,

you know, pre-civilizational societies where they don't have running water that's clean, they don't have septic systems, they don't have roads, they don't, and they're, you know, dropped off in a postmodern society that has no confidence in its own values anymore, then you have a recipe for disaster.

So every once in a while, you know, I mentioned that I had Laura Logan do a piece and I drove her around my neighborhood, and she said she thought it was scarier than Cairo where she was attacked.

And

I can, you know, I can see an old farmhouse not too far.

I don't want to reveal the location because I have to live here, but there must be eight shacks on it where people are living.

There must be three trailers.

There's every type of animal you can imagine.

A horse, a pig, a sheep, a goat, a chicken, a goose, everything.

There's dogs that are on license.

There must be 50 people living on that little compound.

And then if we move down the...

the street, there's something that was called the

Casa de Putas, or

on Google Maps, where there was an orchard, and all of a sudden people showed up at my house, and they were looking for

Don de está las putas, cerca de tú.

Are they near you?

Where are the prostitutes?

It's on the map.

Look.

And there was an orchard, and they were running things there.

I won't want to get it.

Wait, wait, wait.

Seriously?

There's a Google map of

the Abu Box.

They didn't have it right because it was hidden.

So they had a Google Map title of a business,

and Enchanted Gardens was another one.

And

it was hidden.

So when people got in the area, I was the closest place that wasn't hidden.

So these people would show up wanting to know where these places of ill repute were drugs and guns and everything.

And they weren't necessarily safe or harmless-looking people, to tell you the truth, given the location and the nature of their tattoos and the language they spoke and things they had in their car when I would look into their car or when somebody comes to my house and he asks me if he can go look for a piece of stolen property and I look in his belt and he's got a gun.

And so that is the illegal.

That was when Donald Trump said, and that got every bicosta elite so angry, he said, and Mexico's sending us and they're not always sending their best.

He didn't say they were sending their worst he didn't he said they're not always sending their best and he can he can drive through the san joaquin valley most of them are hardworking people they want to better themselves it's going to be a rough transition because they have enormous requirements they have been taught of things in mexico that we must deteach them that you can't just

when you have an extra sofa or refrigerator or an air conditioner or car seat, you must go to the dump.

You just don't put it in the back of your pickup and look around and then toss it in Victor's Vineyard or Orchard.

It's not nice to do that.

But these are the problems that are every day.

And when you hit somebody in California, in rural California, and you're quote unquote undocumented, it's not a nice thing to do to leave the scene of the accident.

The person may bleed to death.

One of my closest friends in high school was killed by an illegal alien that hit him and then left.

and he could have survived.

He bled to death for very, he was knocked into the middle of a vineyard.

Nobody knew he was there in his car.

And so I've seen that happen.

And I said before to Sammy, we've had four,

five wrecks in my last 30 years of people

who were drunk, went off the road, destroyed a lot of property.

whether hitting an irrigation standpipe or knocking out vines or trees, and they left the car and they fled the scene of the accident.

And the highway patrol or the local sheriff did nothing, nothing.

You couldn't even take the car and impound it until they showed up and sell it.

They wouldn't let you do that.

And when you asked the insurance company, they'd say, we don't cover that.

Oh, no, we don't cover that.

Or they'd say, would you please give us a report of the driver?

Well, there was no driver.

He left.

Oh, there's no evidence then.

And that's what people put up with.

Or when you go to the, I would ask everybody where I work who thinks illegal immigration is such a wonderful thing

to have a near-death episode and have to go to the local emergency room.

Try it and see how many people speak English and how many people are in there and how long it works.

Just try it.

Victor, you've been dealing with this.

much longer than much of the rest of America, but just given the sheer volume of people that have come across and then the fact that these sanctuary cities

don't want them and will send them anywhere, I think

this is coming to a

neighborhood near all of us.

There will be a Connecticut version of this.

I think that's the Biden plan.

It's to let in more people, but not to let them in to their constituency cities.

because the left loves to be utopian as long as they're never subject to the consequences of their crazy ideology yeah but once it hits them then they get upset they get on you know they don't mind illegal aliens if they you know drive from salinas

and they park a winnebago somebody has a winnebago on el camino royale and they rent out beds in the l in the winnebago and then they take the bus out to Woodside or to Atherton, and they clean, and they cook, and they do the yard, and they watch maybe an elder parent, and then

they go back at five, and they sleep in the bus because they can't afford anything, and then the bus takes them back, or on weekends, they're back to Salinas.

But they're out of Palo Alto, is what I'm trying to say.

I see that all the time.

And those people who employ that labor are not worried about it because they're not living

with the impact.

Their kids are all in prep schools.

And believe me, illegal aliens do not go to prep school.

Their kids are not in the public school system.

Their neighborhoods have augmented security patrols that help if the police have been slightly defunded.

So they're not worried about crime.

They don't associate with people

socially or something.

When they go to a food market,

I've been there in Los Altos, et cetera.

It's not like the one that I go here.

I mean, you don't stand in line why somebody goes through five EBT cards and speaks a dialect, an indigenous dialect of Nahu

that nobody in the market understands.

That doesn't happen.

You know what I mean?

It's not like.

It's not like a cow gets loose and ends up

next to your mailbox mooing one morning when you're checking the mail.

I have to assume that's probably happened to you anyway.

I mean it can happen to anybody.

It's not necessarily connected with it, Julie Golland.

Just that when people come up here and prices are so high and they're used to

butchering their own cows and killing them.

Yeah.

Sure.

And when I drive now

down to the stop sign, I have to be careful about a menagerie that's in the street.

And,

you know, speaking to somebody, as I've said, so many times that used to ride a bike until he was attacked by dogs and the owners would not come out of the house and nobody would deal with him from law enforcement until I called a local congressman up and said I was going to write a column.

And then suddenly they were willing to lock the dogs up, but they wanted me to pay for it.

And the dogs bit me three times.

And the owners had no concern at all.

Oh, that's your problem.

And the other time I was riding a bike, Snookie, I think I mentioned that, their dog

was just out in the middle of the road.

And I rode by and it went out in the middle of the road and it jumped up and bit me.

And I went over the handlebars.

And in that process, Snookie died.

He got crushed by the front wheel.

He was a dachshund.

And the family came out.

And were they worried that their dog had almost killed somebody and had bitten them with no vaccination?

No, they started heaping abuse on me and swearing at me, and I had hurt Snookie.

Yeah, what I was told.

So, that's what these are all the things that happen when you do something that is stupid.

And that means you open an entire border and you welcome in people from a very different culture that has enormous existential problems of poverty, corruption, legality, education, language, and you just bring them in wholesale.

At the same time, you apply a different standard, especially during COVID, to your own citizens.

And you tell your own citizens, you will be social distancing.

You will have a mask on.

You will get back.

These people won't

because they're noble.

They're better than you are.

And that's the attitude.

And that's why Donald Trump got elected in 2016.

One of the many reasons he said he wasn't going to do that.

And

once you start doing that, and then if you have a host that has no confidence and these kids get into the school system and there's nobody there, as I was a student, who says you are now an American, you may not think you are, but you came here.

And if you're applying to be an American, this is the flag, you're going to salute it.

This is the song, God bless America, you're going to sing it.

This is the language you're going to speak.

And we're going to give you a brutal bar.

We're going to give you every dream come true.

You wanted to come to our country, we will make you more American than Abraham Lincoln.

But you may not like it.

So if you don't want to do this, go back.

Well, that was the attitude for 150 years, and it worked.

So when you see a Mexican-American citizen over the age of 40 or 50 or maybe 60, in my experience, are the most patriotic, hardworking, law-abiding people in the world.

Anybody who came through that system.

And that's the people that I really admire.

That's the people I hang out with.

And they are some of the greatest critics of this new system

of no borders.

And that's why

I think that they're going to be heard at the polls.

And I think the Democratic Party is starting to look at these constituencies and they're going to say, you know, it's not that we want,

you know, it's not that we want 55% of the Hispanic vote or 60%.

We need 80%

because we told the white working class, we hate your guts.

And that's why we call you deplorables and irredeemables and clingers and chumps and crazies and hobbits and dregs.

We have a vocabulary for you, and we do not like you.

We don't like East Palestine.

We don't even like the lower middle classes in Maui.

We don't like you.

We like to romanticize the poor, and we like the money and the taste and the culture of the rich.

But we need these constituencies.

And if the Hispanic vote goes 45% or if the black vote goes 25%,

20% for a non-Democrat, they're done.

Even the vote harvesting, vote curing, all of that stuff won't work.

So

that's why I think they're really worried about Joe Biden.

He didn't care.

And he's got a bunch of revolutionary Jacobins around him who are giving advice.

It's absolutely insane as far as the viability of the Democratic Party.

A lot of people have been warning that.

Is it Rory Texera?

He's a really smart guy, and Joel Kotkin's a smart guy.

And

they've been warning.

I mean,

they're not men of the right.

They're warning the Democratic Party: what you're doing is alienating your base.

And they keep doing it.

Does anybody really believe that AOC and the squad have any idea what it's like on the border between Texas and Mexico or in the southern San Joaquin Valley?

They have no idea.

But the people living there do, and they're not going to vote Democratic forever, but they think they are.

Maybe the walls are closing in and they just don't see them.

Yeah, I mean, if I go to Stanford University each week and I see somebody,

and maybe once or twice a year, somebody brings up illegal immigration and they kind of give a

frown and they look at you and say, well, did you write that book, Nexifornia?

I usually just assume that they're in a cocoon that allows them to pontificate like that.

And if they were down here, they would be outright fascist, unlike myself.

Because given the lifestyles they lead, and I've watched them, they're pretty much apartheidist.

They hang out with the same birds of a feather flock together, the prep school crowd, the Stanford Ivy Ivy League crowd, the high professional, the Silicon Valley crowd, but they do not invite somebody over from Watsonville or Kilroy or Redwood City to dinner.

They just don't do it.

And yet they will yell and scream and lecture you that you can't talk about illegal immigration with the I word.

They're undocumented.

And that makes them feel so good.

that they didn't use the word illegal alien, that they,

you know,

they feel, Wow.

I haven't seen an undocumented person in a long time who wasn't cleaning, but I don't feel bad about it because I don't use the word illegal.

That's how they think.

Great to be morally superior.

Hey, Victor, we've you mentioned AOC.

I mentioned AOC,

and there's another story about her, and then a story about a Democrat state senator.

We'll talk about anything that's relevant.

We're going to get to AOC and

the porn actress wannabe Virginia state senator right after these important messages.

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

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Hanson Show.

So, Victor, back to AOC and then this other, oh my God, I can't believe it.

AOC,

who is being heckled today

in New York City, that's always a good thing, has a husband,

has one, maybe does, doesn't?

On some of the forms that one must file with the House Ethics Office when it comes to trips.

Who's sponsoring this trip?

Who came along?

Who got the freebie?

The spouse gets a freebie, right?

Well, she puts down that she has a a spouse, except she's not married.

So that's a little thing, you know.

And

more of, I think, and we care about what you think, Victor, but AOC being the great

foe of the normalcy of the status quo, and yet she is milking all the advantages that one gets in the position that she is in.

So we have that, Victor, and then this porn

side-hustling Virginia Democrat candidate, Susanna Gibson.

She and her husband,

and she's a mother of two.

She's running for a state senate seat.

And of course, the Virginia legislature is pretty tight there.

But yeah, she's on some,

I mean,

it's chatterbait.

It's a platform that you stream sexual acts.

So she and her husband do the do the nasty and people pay.

And then they critique them.

That's the news count said.

Yeah, yes.

Well, it's, But she's.

And then she's angry that somebody violated her privacy by bringing it up during the campaign.

I guess.

Consider that violation.

I suppose if you're buck naked with your husband and you strip down and you get into

graphic sex and you're talking to the screen, I suppose that's what's going on and you want people to watch you.

Yeah.

And then you are angry that people brought that up and then they shamed you or they gave you attention.

The whole point of what you did was attention.

So

who would vote for someone like that?

And the answer is, I don't know.

Maybe they voted for some reasons that we think would be disqualifying, but they think would be encouraging.

I don't know.

But she was very angry.

That's what's so strange about this postmodern society.

It's not enough that these people do these things and that there are, you know, people are live and let live, but they ask you to approve it.

And they get angry if you criticize it.

So if you're going to have a trans something

in a library with children and they're going to simulate sex acts, but you can't criticize it.

And

it has to be mainstream.

And then all of these people say this is not right.

It's like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

We just got one arrested, right?

that was publicly masturbating in Los Angeles.

I didn't know.

Yes, she, he was masturbating.

One of the people, I think, that was participating in Los Angeles

group pregame ceremony.

And people said that that type of activity tends to be that way.

And then it tended to be that way.

And people are angry.

How dare you mention it?

How dare you connect it?

How dare this, how dare you even say that as a candidate, I'm a nurse practitioner, I think she is.

I'm a nurse practitioner.

I am a professional.

And you're bringing up something tawdry about me and trying to shame me and you would have thought that you know she was thinking that did i expose my ankle on the sidewalk and they're now looking at my ankle is that what i did no you took all your clothes off and you committed i guess sex with your husband and you showed us every intimate aspect of your anatomy and what you could do with it and then you elicited comments and you made people pay for it and you're not surprised that people are repulsed by that and then that's not an issue about your character as you run for office.

Sorry,

half the country still thinks it is.

And that's your problem.

Now you have to make the argument to them.

Maybe you can say, look at my video.

I'm hot.

Maybe you would like to vote for a hot person.

Maybe that's why you did it.

Maybe that's why it's up there.

Whatever your argument's, ridiculous argument's going to be, make it.

But don't whine and say this was so unfair and this is mean.

That's what's really.

Yeah.

You know, don't insult people's sense of morality and then get angry that their sense of morality is insulted.

And so AOC,

what is it with the squad?

You remember

Ilan Omar?

She had the political consultant that she was hiring and giving him hundreds of thousands of dollars and they were kind of living together.

And it was kind of like.

She wasn't married to her brother anymore.

No, she's not married to her brother anymore.

Come on.

Sorry.

That was her husband.

How'd you know she was

anyway?

That's okay because she was a woman of color and she was a left-wing Democrat.

Had it been some

Oklahoma young woman who, you know, married her brother, they would have made fun and said that this was an Ozark, okey, you know what I mean, incestuous,

typical of the poor white trash.

That's what they would have said.

But if you're from Somalia, it's exotic.

You know, we don't understand those customs.

We don't understand the cruelty of the immigration system.

So we're going to give her a pass.

And there's no such thing as bigamy, too.

I think she married someone else when she was married to her brother.

But be that as it may, that must be a ruse that AOC learned from Ilan Omar because she married her political consultant.

You remember that?

And then it made it legal.

And she married him because people were saying this is really dishonest to be paying somebody you're dating and living with, apparently, and then

she

yielded to pressure and married him.

But I guess AOC has told us that she was married and therefore

that he was entitled to all the perks as the spouse of a congresswoman.

And now we learn that they were just living together and he's entitled to none of them.

Well, it's common law, maybe.

So these people are moralists.

They believe that they're morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, so that they have certain exemptions that are necessary.

This is kind of like Al Gore saying, I've got to have a 7,000-foot, 10,000-foot house to contemplate the evils of fossil fuel generated electricity.

Or John Kerry basically said it for years.

I need a Gulf Stream with a huge fossil fuel footprint so I can fly everywhere and fight global change more quickly and effectively.

So these people are saying

I need to have a con where I have the wherewithal to fight for the poor and the oppressed and ensure social justice.

And maybe that means I have to fudge a little bit who I marry or live with, but I need the funds so I can't help people.

And that's the attitude.

Yeah, well, it's a bit of a con, but also a sense of entitlement.

These perks, I'm going to, I think.

I think Elon

I think she paid that guy that she eventually married that was her quote-unquote boyfriend consultant.

I think it was over $600,000 for

campaign advice and help.

And she was dating him.

It just went into their common coffers.

Nice work.

Nobody said a word.

Nobody said a word.

Again, if she'd been a right-wing southern working-class white candidate, they would have gone after her.

Like, you wouldn't believe.

Yeah, like a guy.

I can't.

It doesn't even have to be white.

She'd been Dinesh D'Souza.

Remember Dinesh, he had some of his friends give some

token

campaign support, but it was over.

Right.

They put him in prison.

Put him in prison and then put him on a very prolonged post

parole system.

I think

maybe even thousands of hours of quote-unquote community service just to

break it.

Almost the same time, remember the Obama administration, Andrew Sullivan was a foreign resident on a green card and he was caught in possession of marijuana, which they had used to deport people and the Obama administration gave him basically a pass.

And it's really scary when we go to a full third world in favoritism.

Like Elon Musk is now being under scrutiny because he's not willing to hire, is that right, illegal aliens?

Or he's not conducive to that.

They're going after him for that.

And he used to be a saint, which brings back the question.

I have a lot of people who I know somewhat that are pretty successful.

And sometimes it's frustrating when they give to both candidates, you know, you know what I mean?

But to the conservatives, but they give a lot to Democrats.

Right.

Cover my.

Exactly.

You say to them, why the local assemblymen or the local senator, state senator, why do you give them all this money?

And they'll just look at you.

Where the blank have you come from?

And what they're saying is that these people will use the law to punish you.

And they'll selectively enforce the administrative state statute against you.

And so this is an insurance policy.

One of them actually said to me, do you buy insurance for your car?

Do you buy insurance for your house?

This is my insurance for business, that they don't come after me.

And I think that's really true, never been more true than the Biden administration.

And I think they're not shy about it.

I think they like the idea that it's very well known that they will go after you if you're of a different political persuasion.

And if you're a

left-wing person, then you get the sort of Hunter Biden treatment.

And that is something that people think about.

It's like, do I want to be in the losing team or the winning team?

And it's a powerful inducement.

And

it is.

I think a parallel

comparison of

the actual way the mafia runs, the Corleons run versus the Biden, how they run, the shakedowns, the expectation that the kick it back upstairs to the big guy.

It's all very, it's very,

I know.

If I was a big corporate person and they wanted stuff from me,

I don't know what I'd do.

I think I would not have a corporate jet.

I think I'd have a Cessna with one engine that had 90 horsepower.

And I'd say, you know what, you want to use my jet to go around the speed?

Go here.

Here it is.

Use it.

Or you want, oh, you want my Lincoln town car to go visit your campaign site?

Say, hey, I've got a 544, 50-year-old Bobo stick shift.

You can go drive it if you want.

That's what I would do because they do that.

And

well, Victor, before, you know, we have one, I think, very important topic to get your thoughts on.

That's about Biden and Iran.

But I had mentioned on our previous podcast, we didn't get around to it, about

Joe Manchin.

And since we're talking about Democrats, and he,

gosh, there's a couple of things going on.

Some, I forget who headline I just read, somebody begging him.

Oh, Clinton, Clinton, Bill Clinton begging Joe Manchin not to run as an independent, but Manchin himself, this has been going on a little bit, but a little more pronounced lately.

I may leave the Democratic Party, whether he leaves and becomes an independent or becomes republican but i guess the question here is victor um

should we care do we really care no we do he's an artifact

joe mansion's an artifact of a 50 50 senate and that happens once in a while when you have a

a rhino on the Republican side or the version that version on the Democratic side.

He had power for a moment because he could give a majority, and he did to the Biden agenda.

And then he looks at his state and it's 70% of West Virginia went for Trump.

And he's going to lose the next Senate election.

He knows that.

And so now we're supposed to believe that he's evolved to a higher plane and now he's a no labels,

third way

statesman rather than a ranked politician.

You know,

that's what he's, I think he's trying to tell us.

But no, you're a Democratic politician who forgot who your constituencies were, and they have moved on from the Democratic working class party because there is no such thing anymore.

The Democratic Party, as we heard from Joe when he told your constituents, that they could learn to go code and not mine coal.

And you may heard from your presidential candidate that she was going to come there and put you out of business, you miners.

And that's kind of what Oliver Anthony said in Richmond, Northrop.

Don't worry about the miners and Jeffrey Epstein, worry about the miners from that part of the country.

At a time when fossil fuels are very short and China is building two coal plants per month,

this is a valuable commodity.

And when you go in there and you make fun of these people and you call them all these derogatory names and you say that they're expendable, go get go learn computer coding how hey joe why don't you go tell hunter to go learn computer coding because he has no skills and once you're inert and you will be very soon how is he going to make a living your name is not going to be an attraction it's going to be

a liability And what is Hunter going to do?

I suggest that he learn to code.

Or maybe he can learn to dig coal because that's a much more honest living.

And it's much more important to the economy.

But they did that, and Joe Matchin was part of that party.

And he kind of grumbled every once in a while.

Then he went to Washington and voted straight Democratic ticket.

And then he'd realized for maybe a month or two or maybe a year or two that he was going to carve out a blue dog, independent, high-minded Democrat.

But he did at critical times join their majority.

And then he loved it when they attacked him.

The left would say, oh, Joe Matchin's a sellout.

And he would campaign on that in West Virginia.

But they finally caught on to him.

And he was going to lose.

He's going to lose the next election.

So now he's, you know, he's well-spoken.

He's kind of, he looks like a politician.

He's

experienced.

So now he can transmography in from the,

you know,

I don't know what Hamlet type of Democrat.

He can be a national figure that does the same thing on a national stage.

And it's not going anywhere.

Well, Victor, we're going to get your views on the

payment of billions of dollars to Iran by the Biden administration.

And we'll get to that right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show, and Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

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Victor, I'm looking at an editorial from

my former place of employment national review.

One quick paragraph here.

On September 11th, the State Department told Congress that it had plans to move forward with the arrangement that U.S.

officials previewed last month by issuing waivers that allowed the Iranians to receive some $6 billion in frozen funds.

held by South Korean banks.

Under the plan, the U.S.

and Iran are set to carry out a prisoner swap trading Iranian nationals convicted of or credibly charged with illegally exporting controlled technology to Iran for American citizens wrongfully imprisoned there.

Great big fat stinking payday for people trying to build nuclear bombs to annihilate Israel and probably us if they get the chance.

Victor, your thoughts?

Well, you got to remember that Barack Obama did that.

You remember in 2020, I think it was?

Remember the pallet that came in at night with all those Euros and all the cash in?

And it was 400 million.

So there was, I think, four hostages.

So the price used to be $100 million a head.

And Vice President Biden oversaw that.

And now as president, it's gone to, what, $900 million?

We're getting

seven?

Is it seven?

I think it's six, but

we're paying seven billion, right?

Is it six billion or seven billion?

Six billion.

Maybe it's seven people for six billion.

I think we're down.

So the price went up by a factor of nine.

And so

that should tell you something that they used to take hostages and then sell them back to us for 100 million.

And now they're selling them.

It's not quite our money.

put these sanctions that our allies

followed and then we are able I guess, to influence the South Koreans to give back money that was sanctioned to Iran if Iran releases these hostages and pays nine times more than the last time they did it.

So I would assume three years in the difference.

So that if we went from $100 million ahead to $900 million,

that another three years, the price will be $2 billion, and they will get more, believe me.

And we saw it with Britney Greiner and the Russians and they're just going to keep doing it.

And I don't know how you stop it.

Maybe you have to

just,

you know, the next time an Iranian diplomat comes to the UN, just say, you know what, why don't you just stick around here for five years or something like that?

They don't understand.

It's all predicated on.

We're going to do to you what you'd never do to us.

And we're going to be compliant because the American people like that.

Trump did it.

And they like, it's always a popular thing to bring back.

Jesse Jackson was a past master of it, to bring back hostages,

bring back hostages, pay the ransom, give a big speech.

That,

is it, remember Bergdahl, Bold Bergdahl that we brought back from the Taliban?

We paid him off, the deserter?

Yes.

And then we were told again and again by Susan Rice.

Susan Rice was sort of the

Camilla Harris.

Every time they had a bad job, remember?

Just like they send Kamala, they make her, I don't know, border czar.

Well, they're always making Susan Rice the czar of some hopeless cause.

They'll get her out, lie about in Benghazi five times in a day, tell us that weapons of mass destruction were taken out by the Assads.

And she was trying to tell us that he had served nobly and was captured on the field of battle, remember that?

The deserter who just took off and then ended up in the Taliban, and then they got some terrorists, but they weren't terrorists because weren't they in Dubai or something?

They were good terrorists that were being watched by their handlers.

And then we found out they ended up back in the Taliban on the battlefront.

Also we could get back this deserter who had a press conference.

I remember just now recalling that his father even spoke a little Pashtun, didn't he?

to show that they were a liberal,

authentic,

cosmopolitan family whose son was really sick sick of the U.S.

military, and he thought he was criminal, and he walked off the battlefield to find the enemy.

And if you dare said the D-word that he was a deserter, then you were somehow cruel and heartless.

And then

we traded our guys that were terrorists for him.

And so we all do that.

And it's a bad idea because

always some right-wing guy, you know, he gets disgusted in Congress and he says, this just encourages more terrorist taking.

They say, where did that guy come?

What cave did that guy come out of?

And he's always right, right?

Human nature being what it is.

Yeah.

He knows.

And we're not supposed to say that human nature triumphs and trumps everything, but it does.

And all these sophisticated people who think, well, it's

that the Iranians will not be using this for weapons accusation or to fund Hamas or Hezbollah or the Assads.

It's going to be strictly for

humanitarian use because they've assured us of that.

Remember all that stuff they tell us?

It's just all lies.

And

the hostage deal is not even done.

And then we get the supreme leader say, what the F?

You think we're going to listen to you?

We use the money for whatever we want.

It's ours.

We took the hostages.

We ransomed.

took them.

You paid the bribe.

The bribe money's ours now.

We'll do whatever the F we want.

Hey, they lie to us.

We lie, but we started to show up at the IRS.

You know, that somebody like Anthony Blinken or,

you know, one of those guys called up and said, hey, why did you guys say that?

You're not supposed to say that till the deal is done.

Don't say that, that you can use this money for anything.

That was part of the deal.

You're supposed to lie and say that you're using it for humanitarian purposes, that it's not going to go to Hezbollah or to another,

you know, Adam.

Smither.

Yeah, you're not supposed to do that.

It's not supposed to go to another plane to hit Israel.

You're not supposed to say that.

And they always get embarrassed when these guys have nothing but contempt.

They never learned that an Iran, a Russia, a Venezuela, a Cuba, you name it.

Hamas, you know who they like the best is American president?

They like some right-wing nut.

They really do.

because they feel a little bit of fear of them and they think they're crazy and they're capable of anything and their way of thinking, they have respect for them.

Reagan understood that.

And when they see somebody who

appeases them, it's the Hitlerian response to Neville Chamberlain.

That guy gave Hitler everything he wanted,

but he didn't give him one thing he wanted, an instant war.

And so Hitler was really angry and he said to his inner circle, if I see that guy again, I'm going to jump up and down and smash his stupid suit and his umbrella.

He hated Chamberlain.

And that's the way it works with abusemen.

The Iranians hate our left.

I know everybody's going to say, well, they gave him everything.

That's why they hate them.

They're so easy.

They have no respect for them.

And they do have some respect for someone who's capable.

You know, they may say they hate Donald Trump, but they secretly admire him or they're afraid of him, what he did to Solemani.

And they wouldn't do this with him.

Just like the Russians would have not gone into

Kiev, tried to take Kiev.

There's a reason.

I mean, everybody says, well, that's so reductionist.

They went in 2008 when Bush was kind of weak after Iraq and everything.

And then they went in 2014 because of the Obama appeasement.

Then they went in 2021 because of the

Biden appeasement, but they didn't go during the four years.

That's just so silly.

It's so simplistic.

But it's true, right?

And that's how they think, Putin, especially.

Well,

they've got themselves a field day with the current president.

By the way, Victor, I did not let you know we were going to discuss this at the end, and I don't know how much discussing this is worth, but this is just too tempting.

And it's a topic we raise on every practically every podcast, and that's the lies of

Joe Biden.

But I just saw this.

Biden claims to group.

By the way, we are recording on Friday, so Rosh Hashanah is

going to start at sundown today, the day we're recording.

Anyway, Biden claims to group of rabbis that he was, quote, raised in synagogues in my state, end quote.

President,

I thought he was Puerto Rican.

Well, it's the same thing.

In this article, it's like, wait a minute, man, he just said you were raised by Puerto Ricans.

And if you remember, he also made a claim way back that he

every Sunday was going to a black Baptist.

He did.

He went to a black college.

I thought he was at black colleges too.

Didn't he?

Was he going to attend a black college?

He's so, he's effing zealig.

Walter Mitty on crack.

No, he's versatile.

He's versatile.

Sorry, I should admire him.

Anyway, that's the latest line that Joe Biden.

Oh, my God.

I wonder if he did that when he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania teaching political theory.

Or was it when he was a long-haul semi-truck driver that he was Jewish or Puerto Rican or Irish?

Or maybe it was in between slamming the guy's head on the lunch counter, or maybe it was corner.

He was getting arrested in South Africa.

Oh, he didn't get arrested in South Africa.

That's right.

But was it when he was up for a football scholarship to beat out Roger Stahlbeck at the Naval Academy?

I'm getting

maybe it was when he was the top, he was he graduated in the top third of his class in law school.

That could be it.

So let's pick one.

Well, Victor, hey,

thanks.

Sorry, ending.

No, I'm not sorry for ending on that.

I'm glad we just added to the to the laundry list of Biden lies that we've discussed on the show.

Well, you know what's going to happen?

Maybe the Washington Post will have to get that column or what was that?

The lies of Donald Trump.

Didn't they say they have 21,000?

Remember the Washington Post used to list daily, they said lies of Donald Trump, and you'd look at them and they were all contested.

They would say, Donald Trump gave a

lecture in Michigan, and official reports suggest there was 38,000.

Trump is now claiming there were 42,000, 45.

This is another lie.

Remember those lies of Donald Trump?

Donald Trump said he was worth $11 billion.

Sources suggest that he's worth $8.5 billion.

And these were the lies of Donald Trump.

And then here you got a guy that makes up completely.

It's not an exaggeration.

It's just out of whole cloth and there's no column.

The lies of Donald Biden.

They're not even journalists anymore.

They're just extensions of the Biden, the left-wing campaign machine.

Flying monkeys of

the the wicked witch of Pennsylvania.

Every once in a while you get people call you, you know, from those agents, you know, and they always call a

person on the conservative side for a quote, right?

New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago.

Every once in a while they want quotes.

And the kind of quotes they want, of course, are, even conservatives caller Joe Blow will, you know what I mean, to criticize a conservative.

And they always want to trap you.

But, you know,

I get five or six every year, not as many because I say no every time.

But now I don't even,

I'm not polite, is what I'm trying to say.

If they call and say, hey, I'm doing a story, and I know you've written about something this in the past, and I know this must disturb you.

Would you want to give us a quote about,

oh, I don't know, that Ron DeSantis is going a little overboard with Disney or Donald Trump

and Jared Kushner or something.

And

you just say, you guys aren't journalists.

You're not journalists.

So, and I couldn't trust that you would ever repeat what I actually said or quote it.

You would either fragment it or put three little dots or ellipses, or

you're not trustworthy people.

I can't have anything to do with you.

I'm sorry.

I don't want to hear from you ever again.

I always try to tell them.

The story's already written.

It's already written, and they know what they're doing.

It's,

yeah, it's

well,

You have to learn the hard work.

There was a woman, I think it was 20 years ago.

She said, I'm, it was from a big East Coast piper.

And she said, I'm going to write

a long essay on you about how you came from a farm and a raisin farm.

And you're at the Naval Academy.

People are quoting you.

I said, no, I don't think so.

She goes, no, I want to come out.

I want to be fair.

So

I picked her up at the airport and there was the ring in the nose and, you know, the whole left wing the whole get up and i was very circumspect and you read that piece it was just if you read that you would think i was completely an idiot a nut

i didn't even know this thing existed but you tell me

i will name the

she's a very well-known writer and so all those people who say another guy from the la times said can i follow you around for three days i'm really interested in the nexus between being at stanford and being on a farm.

I said, no, this has happened.

It's all.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I'm a populist.

So he came down and you know what happened.

Same thing.

You can't do it.

This is just a word of warning to everybody.

You cannot do that.

And they appeal to your vanity and took me, you know, stupid, naive person.

I thought, wow, they're going to be empirical.

They're not.

They're there for one purpose.

And that is to defame a conservative or to manipulate what he says or to make him look like an idiot.

Do not ever give an interview to any of those people, period.

They're not journalists.

This is not 1975 or 1965.

They're not journalists.

They're extensions of a political campaign.

If you doubt that, go back and look at John Podesta's emails.

And you'll see people like Glenn Thrush writing to John Podesta about how to write a column and if they approved and then even saying, I guess I'm a hack, meaning I'm asking a political campaign to prep or massage a story that I'm going to write as a, quote, disinterested newspaper person.

And that's just the way it is.

And you cannot deal with those people at all.

And

you can't.

I used to go once in a while on CNN or Bill Maher when he can't do that.

You just can't do that.

It's all going to be a setup.

And everybody says, well, you should speak to the opposition.

You should be on different venues.

You're preaching to the choir.

Yeah, that's true in theory, but these people are not Democrats.

They're Jacobins.

And

it's going to boomerang on you every time you do that.

There's a time to talk and there's a time to fight.

And

if somebody comes up to you and you're at a reception, you're giving a speech and somebody says, you should go talk to that guy.

And you say, why should I go talk to the guy?

Well, he's one of the lead reviewers for fill-in-the-blanks, right?

Some liberal New York Times, Book Review, New York.

Well, why would you want to do that?

He's going to do what he's going to do.

And why would you be obsequious?

Just assume that in this time, in this place, in this polarized climate, the left is not disinterested journalists.

They're not.

They're operatives of the Democratic New left-wing party, and they're out to destroy people.

And you can't deal with them.

You just can't do it.

I was at receptions earlier this week in New York City for two non-liberal publications.

One is National Review, the other was City Journal, and you're still on the masthead of City Journal.

So three people,

Victor,

hi, I'm Jack Fowler, said,

Are you that Jack Fowler?

Are you the victor?

Do you do the Victor?

I was like, You should be headed when he's saying that.

That's, yeah, that's, oh, God, I love Victor.

He's, and then this then this outpouring of affection for you.

I'm glad to hear that because I don't hear that.

Oh, I, oh, my gosh.

I mean,

I have some really nice birthday cards came from people.

A lot of them.

They were very sweet.

Do you?

The aforementioned Facebook group.

On your birthday,

the Victor Davis-Hanson Fan Club was just rife with

well-wishing for you on your birthday.

Now, there's lots.

There's lots.

I appreciate it.

I really do.

I think everybody feels that we're in the same boat.

Each person, according to their station, has got a paddle.

And

we're sinking.

And we're trying to paddle and get to shore.

And

the sea and the storm is the left.

And we're in the same boat.

And we're all saying to each other, can you do the TV?

Can you write?

Can you give money to a candidate?

Can you go out and

drive people to the polls?

Can you write a lot op-ed to your local paper?

Whatever you can do, do, because we're all sinking.

And these people have the elements at their command.

They have all the, you know,

they can swamp us with a storm.

They can bring up sea monsters to get us.

But there is the shore.

And we're trying to get back to the gray.

I don't know.

It's kind of a Tolkien-esque.

We're trying to get to the other side.

And that's traditional America.

Not back in in 1950, but the way it should be now.

The C analogy is a perfect segue into this, which is a comment left on

Apple's

rating section.

And thanks, folks, who go to iTunes or Apple's Apple to rate the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

And you can give it zero to five stars.

And as you would know, you've heard me before,

practically everyone gives five stars.

The

4.9 is above 4.9% is the average ranking here.

So folks are liking what you're doing, Victor, and some folks leave comments.

And here's one.

It's titled Just Another, Just Wonderful VDH Podcast, Another Wonderful Weekend episode covering a vast variety of topics from World War II.

to Clinton's old press secretary to agriculture.

Each topic thoroughly engaging as the next.

And Sammy does a great job steering the massive fleet of topics.

Looking forward to the classics next and more stories from the farm, along with Victor's insight into the events of our times.

Always something to learn.

I sure wish I could get a good Santa Rosa plum these days.

Thank you, Victor.

You are

a national treasure.

Well, that's from outdoor paintings.

I wish I could get a good Santa Rosa plum, but they're very rare.

Well, so somebody's going to make money someday on bringing back the

heirloom or

the old fruits and vegetables actually had some flavor in them.

Hey, Victor, you've been terrific.

As always, thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Thank you, folks, for listening.

I want to thank those who visit and have signed up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write and gives a dozen plus recommended readings, articles I've come across the previous week.

It comes out every Friday.

Remember, it's free.

CivilThoughts.com.

Thanks to those who do that.

Victor, you've been great.

Thanks to AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens, for sponsoring our show today.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Much appreciated.