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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

VDH is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He has a website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

You'll find it at victorhanson.com.

I heartily recommend you visit it regularly, and I will discuss that.

a little later in the podcast.

I, by the way, am Jack Fowler, the Victor, I don't think I'll call myself the host anymore.

I think I'll be the second banana or maybe the third banana,

bruised banana.

We have a couple of headlines today.

Again, Victor, we're recording on Friday the 15th.

I think it's important we mention that date because, you know, yesterday some big news happened, and that's one of the headlines of this morning's paper.

Hunter Biden gets indicted on federal firearm charges.

Victor, when we come back from these important messages, we'll get your take on that and plenty more.

Folks, we'll be right back.

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Back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So Victor, that's the headline.

Hunter Biden is finally indicted.

Watching Fox yesterday afternoon, which I rarely do because I try to work, but our old friend Andy McCarthy was on, and he said this before, but okay,

he didn't say whoop-de-doo, but there was sort of an essence of this.

He's indicted.

The things he should have been charged for, he could have been charged years ago, and the clock has run out on other things.

And frankly, what we are really concerned about is not so much Hunter Biden and his gun charges, but the tax questions which get into the big guy, 10% Dad Joe.

Victor, your thoughts?

Well, I think we're all cynical because that's really the only area of exposure that didn't involve his father, although it did involve his family because his brother's widow, as I understand, during a spat, tossed the gun.

And I think somebody, didn't somebody in the family blame Hispanics that they did it or something?

I can't remember.

There There was some

corollary there, but it was part of a pattern that

he leaves things.

He leaves crackpipes and rental cars.

He leaves laptops at repair shops.

He's responsible for in some way to leave,

I don't know, irregular, and I shouldn't say irregularly, unlawfully regulated, unlawfully

certified, unlawfully obtained, handguns in a dumpster near school.

Maybe somebody in his family, if not Hunter himself, leaving cocaine in the West Wing cubicle.

So he leaves everything, and that's why he terrifies

the Biden family.

And we've talked about that a lot, that they have a strange relationship, that they got to keep him very close because he's not only,

what's the word, drug-adled forgetfulness, or deliberately trying to egg on his dad, or to send signals to the family, I'm capable of anything, anywhere, or I'm not going to sit in prison as the bagman for the family.

But

this thing is, it's maybe it was because the judge said this should be the one that was expedited first.

And he's not going to get 25 years or whatever the media says.

They'll give him a year or something of probation.

But it does show that this Weiss is reacting to pressure, and we'll see whether he's reacting to pressure to

get out of the jam that

he created by acquiescence with Mary Garland, or he really wants to go full hog and restore his reputation that's in tatters now.

So we'll see.

But there is a lot of statute limitations, statutes that have been exhausted.

He had a huge tax exposure, so not all of that is still prosecutable.

He never registered as a foreign agent.

Remember Paul Manafort?

They went right after that guy.

I mean, the moment

they fixated on him, they looked at that, and wow, he was gone.

And he was in prison for that.

And so they don't have anything

that will involve the Bidens.

And the other thing that's very interesting is that all these Democrats

who are all just

emphatic that there's no evidence,

They don't have any, I don't know, they don't have any sense of what the rest of the country, 60% of the country thinks there's something there.

And they think there's something there because

Victor Shulkin said he took a bribe, and the head of Burisma says he has

17 recordings, two of which were on Joe Biden.

We have the IRS whistleblowers.

We have the laptop incriminating evidence itself.

Devin Archer did not exonerate Joe Biden.

He proved that he was there and basically used to conduct business.

There was Tony Bobolinski.

And we don't know what the fate of these 4,000-plus emails will be.

So it's all out there.

It's just a question of

how desperate is Joe Biden?

And will he employ executive privilege?

I'm not going to turn over my bank statements.

No Bidens are going to

turn over any transactions or dummy companies or shell corporations that hid this money.

I'm not going to release its executive privilege, the 4,000 emails, or I'm going to get Hillary to come in and bleach them.

Who knows?

It's going to be very difficult is what I'm trying to say, Jack, is that

they really are on the back of Kevin McCarthy.

You've got to do this, you've got to impeach him.

But

he's going very methodically because he knows that at each area of incrimination, there are firewalls the Bidens have put up around it.

And so it's going to take the Ukrainians.

Do you really think that

Viktor Shokin or the barisma head is going to be able to say, yeah, I'll come over and testify?

Sure.

I'll bring my recordings over, and then somebody in the Ukrainian government will probably say, you do that, and you're going to get a bullet in your head because that is our source of supply in this existential war.

And you're not going to have any role in impeaching foreign aid.

You

window yeah absolutely and then then you think

well we're going to

uh

we're going to go uh use the whistleblowers and you're thinking hmm the whistleblower's reputation has had a radically have you noticed that jack it has a radically changed stature from lieutenant colonel call me lieutenant colonel binman and eric saramella remember then that vinman didn't even didn't uh he wasn't supposedly the whistleblower.

Caramella or Saramella or whatever his name is, didn't even hear the call.

But they were canonized as these brave people who came forward, not the IRS whistleblowers.

Whistleblower is a dirty word now, suddenly.

And so I don't, they're going to demonize those guys in a way that the left was outraged if you ever suggested even to mention the whistleblower's name.

So that's going to be difficult.

And as I said, we know that Joe Biden uses the administrative state to protect his family, and they will do that with any subpoenaed material.

There's also, I don't know what we would call it, Jack, what we would call it, DEF CON one, the Harris, the Harris factor,

looming behind all of the indictments.

The left is saying, hey, you right-wing nuts,

you are Americans and you are patriotic.

Do you really want President Harris in the next year and a half and have her go into the election as an incumbent?

Now, you may think that's good for your political opportunities in the future, but she could be elected.

And so be careful of getting rid of old Joel from Scram.

Now, you'll get, we'll have to go to DEF CON 1 because we'll have her.

And then I suppose there's the Defense in Depth defense.

You know, it's kind of like a World War I trench.

They have a series of trenches that they just fall back.

Joe Biden never.

He never discussed anything.

Okay, that trench was overrun.

Joe Biden never, he discussed things, but he never actually participated in business.

That trench was overrun.

So now they've retreated to the third one.

Yes, he knew about it.

Yes, he conducted business, but it was kind of an illusory effect.

He was just there, and maybe Hunter was doing it, but he wasn't aware of it.

And so that one is sort of cracking.

And the next one is, show me the money.

Joe's already said that.

So they keep retreating.

And then finally, I suppose maybe the real DEPCO one is Hunter.

If it really gets bad, really, really gets bad.

And

Hunter is, I don't know, he's hanging again.

He's trying to shake down people for money to access to Joe.

He's still involved with his paternity suit where he lives it up with $16,000 a month.

His lawyers may call Joe back again.

Somebody around Joe is going to say, look, this guy is blackmailing us.

He's out of control.

You put him on Air Force One.

You put him in the White House.

It doesn't work.

He's a crackhead.

And he leaves things everywhere.

And look at what happened in the White House.

He's a

and he tried to bring you in in a court case, Joe.

He was willing to subpoena the President of the United States, perhaps cause a constitutional constitutional crisis, to testify on his behalf.

He could have put you in perjury territory if you were asked on the stand, did you ever participate in a

Hunter transaction?

That would be a lose-lose for you, Joe.

You'd either have to say, no, I didn't, and they would produce evidence that you did,

or you say, yes, I did, and they say, well, you're lying now or then, because you've told us you never did.

And your son puts you in that.

So it's time to cut him loose.

Victor, you're the historian, right?

I mean, history is rife with kings knocking off the troublesome prince, right?

Yeah, you just, I think Joe's, that is the DEF CON won, not Harris.

Just, it's finally, if it gets bad, it's Hunter did it.

I don't know.

I'll just call Joe Biden from scratch.

Everybody's got a wayward son.

I love the guy.

No joke.

I love him.

But I didn't know what he was doing.

I had no idea what he was was doing.

He was using my name.

He was signing my name.

He was, he was just, and he got rich.

And maybe he put some money in my account to fix

a broken garage pad or put some shingles on it.

I don't know.

I was so busy running the country.

It was Hunter did it.

Hunter did it.

And that might be the last

ring of defense.

So he's going to, he has all sorts of efforts to get out of this.

That would be, you know, Mario Puzzo could write that,

write the story of what's going to happen.

Something, I mean, I wrote an article this week, and I think I mentioned it with Sammy.

What game is Hunter playing?

I.e., is blackmailing his own family, supposedly.

But I was reading that transcript.

You know, they have some of them on that weird site, Marco Polo.

Marco Polo, yeah.

Yeah, and I mean, it's really weird when he's really angry.

At least I'm not going to take half.

I don't have to, you know,

not going to take half the income as Pop's doing to me.

And

I have to pay all the bills.

And he's really angry that the big guy and the 10%

is

greedy.

I'm going to go to prison.

I'm going to actually have to go to prison while you guys sit back.

I'm the bag man.

I'm the dirty.

I'm old Hunter, the guy that everybody makes fun of.

I'm the guy on the picture of the cigarette.

I'm the guy with a hooker.

I'm the rogue.

I'm the buffoon.

I'm the bad son that survived.

Bo was the perfect one.

I get all, and I have to go actually fetch the money so that you guys can be wealthy.

And now I'm going to have to go to prison while you guys get off?

I don't think so.

The whole Biden family is dysfunctional.

That's the thing that people should remember.

Well, all of them are.

Whether it's the

Is it Ashley, the daughter,

or the niece?

I don't know.

The girl who took showers with Joe Biden, the girl who left her intimate diary in a rental home, and then the FBI had to retrieve it from Operation Veritas, which didn't have it.

They thought they did.

To Jim Biden, who puts a shingle out on every office the moment Joe sneezes, he's open for business again.

To Hunter, to Hunter's

first wife, to Hunter's.

I mean, I feel bad for the widow.

Yeah, but

the good son dies,

and then in mourning, you do what?

You have a sexual relationship with your brother-in-law who's married and who has a family.

Is that a way of mourning?

With a crackhead, drug addict, miscreant?

And so the whole family is just.

Every circle in Dante's hell, I think, would be

populated by one Biden for one reason or another.

Anybody goes to hell, you'll see Biden's at every level.

Two things you raised, though, Victor.

One on these five fallback positions to DEF CON, one, but the one about the,

oh, dad, oh, yeah, well, he was just checking in.

So once again,

Joe Biden himself hasn't said this, but Biden's reach for empathy

is seen in that.

I'm going to use my son's, oh, he was recovering alcohol, you know, drug addict, et cetera.

So I'm going to now use his problem as a political defense.

He does it everywhere.

Yeah, he does it with, as you've written.

He did it with the tragic death of his first wife, that he was the victim because the drunk driver had recklessly destroyed his wife and daughter.

That was not true.

He did it with his other son, Bo, when he said he came home in a coffin from Iraq.

He did not.

He did not die in Iraq.

He lied about that.

And now he tries to, I don't know, bank shot off empathy from

Hunter's problems.

So he's capable of anything.

And anytime there's a question of mourning or solemninity,

whether it's the parents of those who were killed in Afghanistan, he's looking at his watch.

or he's meeting with them and he tries to outdo their loss by talking,

making a story about his son, or he's talking to the people of Maui, and he invents a raging fire in his home that almost killed his cat and took his Corvair.

He's just hopeless.

And it's not that he's senile.

The senile, the senility just means that his protective veneer, his social awareness that you don't be Joe Biden all the time, you don't tell corn pop stories all the time, is gone now.

It's gone with his cognitive facilities.

So you're seeing 100% 24-7

Joe Biden as he is.

Maybe 10 years ago, you saw 90% of him.

But he has no defense.

He has no defenses now.

He's just him in the raw.

Two more lies this week, by the way, Victor.

He's a professor of political theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

He taught a class there.

Who knew?

I never knew he was a political theorist.

Right.

But that was a lie.

He also, he always has a racist statement about every six weeks.

Did you see that he was talking about

people

that were in need and that didn't have high school diplomas?

And he said blacks and teachings and people without high school diplomas as if every black person doesn't have a high school diploma.

Elected Tom Sowell.

Yeah.

Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, Barack Obama.

They all are in need of Joe Biden's pity because they never went to high graduated.

The other lie, by the way, was the September 11th.

Yep, he lied about that.

Did you see John Kirby's Fix the Lie effort?

I didn't.

I saw there was a headline about it, but I didn't click on it.

Yeah, it was the lie to fix the lie that was the lie to fix the lie was a lie.

He said, well, he was there a week later.

No, he wasn't.

It was 19, 20 days later.

And

that guy

said to Jean Karen, Jean-Carrine, Jean-Pierre, you know, look,

the boss is a pathological liar, and you're not lying enough for him.

And I've got to take over.

I'm a consummate liar.

I earned my spurs with Hillary and Benghazi.

So I know how to lie, and I'm taking over this lying operation.

That's the attitude they have.

And they won't answer.

I mean,

that Kirby guy, you can ask him any question that's incriminating.

He just won't answer it.

And they have this, they brought out another guy from the State Department who's just, every time they ask him a question, he won't answer it.

And he says, that's beneath me.

We're not going to get into that.

How dare you?

And so this is, you know, democracy dies in darkness, people.

And

this thing is

this, you know, we're all Americans.

And

this is very funny because when

I talked to Sammy about David Ignatius, the one thing we didn't talk about was

he, when he wrote that op-ed, it was

the singular achievement.

Yes, the singular achievement was he saved us from Trump.

I'm thinking, oh, he saved us from 3.7 unemployment, 2% GDP, 1.8 interest rates, 2.0 inflation rate.

Is that what he saved us from?

That was so bad.

Wow, here in California, paying $3 a gallon for gas was terrible.

And buying Romex wire at 250 feet for, I don't know, $40 was a lot worse than paying $178.

So what did he save us from?

Oh,

David Ignatius, he saved us from Donald Trump colluding with the Russians.

That way, he urinated.

No, he didn't.

That was a complete lie.

Oh, he saved us.

from working with the Russians who 3D printed a laptop and then Trump conspired to fake a laptop to make Hunter look bad.

No, no, that was a fake too.

Oh, he saved us, Joe did, from the ping-pings and the alpha bank.

No, that was a lie too.

Oh, he saved us from Donald Trump canceled all aid so that on the spurious idea that Joe Biden was crooked.

No, he gave them aid eventually, and the aid was offensive, not just defensive as Biden and Obama had approved and wouldn't approve offensive aid.

And by the way, he had a sixth sense because he was right on that Victor Shokin

had been fired for investigating corruption among the Biden family.

So that's what David Ignatius thinks is the signature achievement of Joe Biden.

He saved us from all of that.

And then he gave us

relief.

He said he's a wonderful guy.

He's a great president.

We got 30-year mortgages up over 7%.

That was hard to do.

And

inflation's about 20%

from when he aggregate since when he entered office in January of 2020.

If you look at staples, gas, food, especially things like meat, dairy, vegetables, that was good.

He accomplished that.

That was a wonderful withdrawal from Afghanistan where we left 50 billion.

We got 13 people killed and we abandoned our allies and contractors.

That was was pretty impressive, Joe.

He gave us a

big city crime wave.

He stopped energy development.

So he drained the strategic petroleum reserve on the eve of midterm election.

And he begged Venezuela for oil.

Can you please

pump more oil, Iran?

Can you Saudis pump more oil?

It's filthy, dirty.

It ruins the planet.

We have more than you do, but we're not going to get our hands dirty with it.

So would you give us yours?

That's what he did.

And

these people are just so frustrating.

They have these little perches at the Washington Post or New York Times, and they're so sober and judicious.

And then they just say stuff that's just complete lies.

And we're supposed to believe it because we're hicks.

Yeah.

It's a difference between, and we've talked about this before, the woman back with Nixon.

How did Nixon win?

I didn't know anyone.

Yeah.

Voting for for Nixon?

I think that was.

Yeah, which very well may have been true.

But these are just outright lies in the face of

monumental facts, including Bidenomics.

And it is.

We should talk about that, but we have to take a little break.

We'll merge into that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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Victor, today's headlines, and this picking up the baton from the conversation before the break.

USA Today, of all papers, I don't think I've picked up this paper in years, but it was at the hotel.

So, economy weighing Americans down.

Subhead, more say they trust Trump than Biden to lift burden.

Victor, the poll, this is a Suffolk, a USA Today Suffolk University poll.

More Americans say they trust Trump than Biden to improve the economy by 47% to 36% margin.

And that spread is 46.26 in Trump's favor among independent voters.

And here's just a little clip from this article.

Nearly 70% of Americans said the economy is getting worse, according to the poll, while only 22% said the economy is improving.

84% of Americans said their cost of living is rising,

and nearly half of Americans, 49%, blame food and grocery prices as the main driver.

It's getting harder to survive out there with the little bit of money that we do make, says Casey Laffey, a waitress at a diner in Philly who lives with her husband

and a daughter, Laffey, who voted for Biden in 2020, said her family's food budget has skyrocketed from $800 to $1,500 a month.

Eggs are ridiculous, she said, also singling out prices for fruit, vegetables, and milk.

Yet, Victor, as we discussed before we started this podcast, the president is so proud going around the country telling everyone in a full voice, in mumbling and in whispering, that Bidenomics is working.

It's working.

There's a rule in American politics that

if you have an economic program, you do not, under any circumstances, suffix to it onomics.

You don't say Reaganomics.

That was not a term of endearment in 1981 and 1983 when Reagan had interest rates very high, up to 12, 15%.

Paul Volcker was trying to break inflation, which he did do.

But during that period, that was not

a term of endearment.

And Bush onomics, Clinton, nobody used Obamaomics, nobody uses that.

So whoever advised him to say bidenomics?

And

just the term is stupid.

But then what is he?

What he does is

he looks at these 30-day periods.

And so if you look at when he came into office to where we are now, the inflation on everything is up about 16%.

And on certain items that they're the most important,

and that is things like rent and health care and food, especially staples.

You know, as I said earlier, meat and foods and dairy and gasoline and diesel.

You look at all that,

it's 20% higher.

And then he looks at a month and says, well,

it went up 2%

this particular month over last year.

Well, yeah, but look at what you've done since you've been in office.

He said, well, it's only 2%.

No, it's not that only 2%.

And so if you want to say that inflation's gone down 5%, and now when we look at the aggregate rate, since you stepped into the Oval office, it's only 4%, 2% each year, okay, but it's not.

And so Bidenomics, and then what's he bragging on?

The price of gas?

Is he bragging on interest rates?

I don't understand what he thinks is good.

Maybe he's happy about he's cooked up another $2 trillion deficit.

So I don't get it.

I don't know what they're saying, but I think it's

they get in a room and they say, let's survey what we're going to run on, the border.

And some left-wing person in the meetings say, hey, man, we got seven, eight million people.

We got them in.

There's nothing they can do about it.

They're never going to send them back.

Before we're done with this, we're going to get 10 million.

Then some guy, an older guy, said, you idiot, that polls about 30%.

Then the next guy says, hey, man, you know, we've defunded the police just like we promised.

It was great.

Look at all the, have you seen San Francisco, Portland, you stupid fool?

We can't run on that.

Another guy says, hey, man, we shut down Anwar.

We got rid of Keystone.

We hectored those frackers.

We told them who's in ball.

We had Jennifer Granholm do that.

Are you an idiot?

People drive, 90% drive, and they can't afford it.

Why would we run on that?

And that's the conversations they have.

And the lunatics are winning.

So he goes out and brags about all the stuff that everybody doesn't like.

And then he wonders why he's so low in the polls.

The big thing is that

what's really fascinating about this political cycle that we're in, it's so different from when I entered the entered voting age, or you did, Jack, because it was just a stereotype that the Bushes, George Sr.,

W.,

Romney, Bob Dole, John McCain.

They all had multiple houses.

They were in the golf course, and the Democrats always made fun of them for being out of touch.

John McCain can't remember how many houses.

Mitt Romney has an elevator.

W

was just a frat boy.

That's what they said.

And they don't say that anymore because they're the rich party.

They're the party of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Mike Bloomberg.

That's who they are.

They're the wealthy, wealthy, wealthy people in the upper by coast elite professions and the subsidized poor.

And the Republicans are now the national working party.

And that's why people like David Fumm and Bill Kristol, Charles Sykes hate them because they cannot stand that working class.

They wanted to be in that elite Republican cockpit and lose every national election and say that we won and we lost very nobly and we represented our principles of tax cuts and deregulation and privatizing Social Security.

These were principled positions, intervention in the Middle East for democracy.

We did this and we lost, but it doesn't affect us any.

We're still going to make the same amount of money, same titles, same job.

And that's over with now.

They've just switched places.

The Republican Party is a populist nationalist party and it has appeal to the white working class, but it also has appeal to an increasing number of minorities.

What the left doesn't get is if you're a Mexican-American immigrant and you're 50 and your kids are U.S.

citizens,

or you are the child of an immigrant, you're part of the middle class now.

And suddenly an open border means not that Jose, your nephew, is coming across.

It means you may not have AP in your school.

When you put thousands of people in the school district that can't read or write English, you're going to go back to where you were 50 years ago with bilingual education.

Or as I said earlier, your child may go to school and a Norteños or Sereños M13 person across the border is going to beat him up because he doesn't speak Spanish if he's Hispanic.

So

they don't get it.

They think that everybody is going to be obedient, compliant to their open borders, left-wing policy.

And a lot of people are not.

They're solely middle class, and they look at the price of fuel and food and safety and the border, and they don't like it.

And it's just, there's so much opportunity for the Republicans, and yet I don't know.

I can't figure out, Jack, what the...

what the solution is.

Megan Kelly, I was on there yesterday.

She had a long interview with Donald Trump.

And I commented with her afterwards.

I will say one thing, boy, if you listen to Donald Trump for 45 minutes and listen to Joe Biden, he could not do that.

You know what I mean?

He just couldn't.

Like how he

got

during the debate.

That was the strange thing about Biden.

But go ahead.

I don't think he could do that again.

No.

I mean, she was pretty tough on Trump.

Yeah.

And he fended off pretty well.

Some things he said was

exaggeration when he said that he opened up,

basically he gave everybody the right to open up their society and ignore the lockdowns and Ron DeSantis closed down Florida.

That wasn't accurate.

Maybe for a week or two, but it was DeSantis one of the first to realize.

Because he had Jay Bacharia and Scott Attilas and people advising him, and he made some good decisions.

But

Trump Trump has something, I don't know what it is.

He has a fixation on DeSantis.

Have you noticed that?

He just,

I mean, there's people, if you look at the stage of the people up there, it was, DeSantis wasn't attacking Trump, not like Haley was.

Man, she was going after him.

He's too old.

It's new, not like Christie, not like Mike Pence.

But he fixates on that.

I guess it's just classical politics that DeSantis is the

of the non-informed candidates he's got

fortified by a perception of disloyalty.

Disloyalty, absolutely.

He mentioned that.

That was really good.

And Megan did a really great job.

She said, you know, you keep saying

the sanctimonious.

Why?

And he pointed out, and he was roughly accurate, not about the loyalty, disloyalty, but he did describe what was happening, that the Department of Agriculture guy was ahead of DeSantis, and then he came in and gave DeSantis the endorsement, and then DeSantis narrowly won the nomination, and then narrowly won the general.

And in Trump's way of thinking, then

DeSantis owes him his political career forever.

I don't know.

It's forever.

That would be like me saying, I think, I don't know, in the last

45 years, I've probably written

thousands of recommendations for former students.

I've written hundreds of

recommendations for graduate students of mine.

I've written dozens of recommendations for former colleagues of mine, and I'd say 10 or 20 percent have attacked me.

And do I care?

No, I don't care.

I really don't.

Victor, if you endorse me for city clerk.

I am.

Everybody's got a joke.

Get out and get up.

You remember what

early in the,

you know, I got out of bed every morning from 1960 to 61.

My dad was really funny.

He'd come in and he'd say, get up and get out and vote for Dick Nixon.

And that was Dwight Eisenhower was saying that to everybody.

Because they had said,

why should we vote for Dick Nixon?

He said, if you give me an hour or a day, I can think of something.

Wasn't that brutal?

What?

It was.

And then he kind of felt bad.

So he said, get up and get out and vote for Dick.

So we were sleeping all the time.

And my dad would try to get us up for school at six.

So he'd come up and scream.

He was a Democrat, so he was a big JFK guy, but he thought it was really funny.

Get up, get out, and vote for Dick Nixon.

So get up, get out, and vote for Jack Fowler.

Everybody listening to this.

City Clerk Milford, Connecticut.

And listen, Victor,

if I win, I'll let you come to the front of the line if you need a dog license.

So

that's one of the things we discussed.

Do you want some mail-in ballot curing harvesting advice?

We can

call it.

I'm already starting.

Hey,

we're going to talk about some Senate things after another break.

But before we get to the break, and Victor, I have to see if you can actually contain yourself here for a few minutes because you gave a little laundry list of some of those, Bill Crystal and Charlie Sykes, but a name you didn't mention is David French.

Oh my Steve College.

Yes.

National Review Days.

Yeah, so he wrote something the other day, the Times, and you sent to me, but I'll let you erase it, but counterpointing it to

his

deep desire to get...

Oh, my gosh, this is terrible.

I can't.

Your friend, the former congressman, don't get Lyme disease, folks.

Camera.

Devin Nunes?

Devin Nunes.

Yes, yes.

The crucifixion of Devin Nunes must be resigned, etc.

Yes, that was a big thing.

He thought the idea that Devin Nunes was suggesting that

the dossier was fake, that the dossier was seated by Clintonites like Bruce Orr or his wife.

or people in the media, or the idea that Christopher Steele was getting money from the FBI or Christopher Steele was working for Hillary along with Dashinko,

and the idea that the FBI had gone rogue and had framed Carter Page.

Wow, Devin Nunes is making all this up.

He's got to resign immediately.

And then, after it was all proven true, did he write that?

Oh, wait, he wrote that really great op-ed.

You remember, Jack?

I confess I was completely wrong about Devin Nunes.

I want to apologize.

No, he didn't.

I'm sorry.

I got mistaken.

He never wrote that.

It was published on September 32nd.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I had a, you know, he was one of the people who

I was really naive when I went there.

I talked to, I really liked Rich Lowry, and Rich would always say, We're not, don't, don't, don't attack other writers at National View.

There's no need to, and we get attacked by enough people.

And then I was just thinking over the years, every single one of those people.

All right.

This was, don't get, don't go down this rabbit hole.

I'm not going to name names, but that was, that was, that was the.

But French wrote something the other day that talked to you in the New York Times.

Yeah, David French wrote, you know, where is the evidence, McCarthy,

to prompt not an impeachment, but an impeachment inquiry.

And it's sort of channeled his earlier one about where is the evidence, Devon.

Well, David,

I guess Tony Bobolinski was completely lying when he said that his emails were verbatim captured on the laptop at a point when the 51 authorities said it was likely Russian disinformation and Joe Biden said it was made up.

That was completely a lie?

Or when Tony Bobelinski said that he had been in a room with Joe Biden, who was saying he had no contact, or Devin Archer said that there was no,

what, leverage to the company?

They had nothing.

Neither he nor Hunter had any access other than Joe Biden, who was in, who appeared on phone calls, one of which Hunter says he's next to me.

And I guess

we're just going to ignore Victor Shokin, who

for years the Biden family and the media lied about and said that he was a rogue corrupt prosecutor.

And then we learned, David, that the State Department had memos suggesting that he was doing a lot of

good to stop corruption until he was fired, fired by Joe Biden.

And why was he fired?

Was it because all of a sudden Joe said, you know, the State Department says he's doing a really good job, and I don't think so.

Rather than consulting with the State Department for mattered principal, I'll just fire him.

Or did it have something to do with his own son and indirectly himself?

And then we had the IRS whistleblowers that were kind of tabled, but they said there was a lot of discrepancies on income

gained and income reported in the case of Hunter Biden, who remember said that he was giving half of his income to his father as well as paying his bills.

I didn't say that.

He did.

He said it on a laptop in an email.

And then we have, of course, had

400,000 emails.

We just like to look at them before he bleach bits them, like Hillary did when they were subpoena.

And so

there's a lot of evidence and more than is necessary for an inquiry.

I would remind all of our listeners, there was no inquiry in the second impeachment.

Nancy Pelosi didn't say, well,

we don't really know much about January 6th.

Some people say it was a riot gone bad.

Some people say, well, we're going to find out and have an inquiry.

No, they just impeached him.

And when he entered office, 61 House members voted to impeach him before he'd even been in there one day.

They were ready to impeach him, and they tried to.

So that article is just on hinge, but it's written for the New York Times.

Remember what the New York Times does?

They say we want both sides.

And he plays the,

he's a little different.

He and

former National Review colleague, they're supposed to play the Juan Williams role, right, at Fox News.

And that means they're supposed to be the conservative voices.

But Juan Williams is really left-wing.

I mean, he really goes on there and he believes it.

And he gets in big fights at Fox.

They don't.

Nothing they have written has ever bothered any of the maybe one or two issues.

Yeah, I'd say

Russ Stout.

Well, they wouldn't be there.

They wouldn't be there.

So that was completely ridiculous.

And

Kevin McCarthy did the right thing.

And the problem that the left is having is that they set precedents about impeachment that they do not want to apply to themselves.

Some of us warned them, do not impeach a president in his first term when he loses the House.

There is enough founding father concerned in the Federalist Papers and sorted letters.

You shouldn't do that.

They did that to Trump.

If you're going to impeach somebody, then have a full-fledged special counsel.

They did not do that with Donald Trump and either impeachment.

Either impeachment.

Do not impeach somebody twice.

They did that.

It's never been done.

Do not impeach and then try somebody as a private citizen.

They did that.

And so that's not a model.

And that can

boomerang right back onto Joe Biden.

And we'll see if it does.

And we'll see if he does.

If

David French then says, well,

I object to this, but the Democrats started it.

I doubt that.

That's the big thing about the Democratic fear.

They're just paranoid now.

They're saying, oh, my God.

Did you see?

I mean, David Ignatius, all these people, they say retaliatory,

we can't have a retaliatory Trump administration, a revenge administration.

And what they're really translated that means, hmm.

What if Donald Trump, oh, I don't know, put 10 or 11 FBI agents on the ex

payroll and gave Elon Musk 3 million bucks a year and said, you know, Elon, just suppress the story.

It's too anti-Trump.

And then get Mark Zuckerberg over there at Facebook to help you out.

Or maybe he said, hmm,

I may have to tell Elon Musk, hey, I want you to hire all my guys when they retire, because this is going to be a new evolving door.

And I want them all to be hired at your company, because that's going to be very important to me as my administration progresses.

He could do that,

or he could

what else could he do?

Well, he could say, you know what?

Looks like Roberts is getting a little wobbly.

Let's just pack the court.

Let's just see how that goes.

We'll just say we'd like to get 15 judges.

Or, you know, now we have the

Senate if they went in 2004 and Barack Obama was right.

It is a racist Jim Crow relic.

So let's get rid of that filibuster.

We're not going to let, what, 45

Democrats stop us in the Senate.

We're going to have the House and the White House.

So we're going to get rid of the filibuster.

And, you know, we need two more states.

We need some more senators.

Let's start talking about cutting California in two and letting the Northern California right wing have their own state.

And we could do, there's all sorts of stuff they could do that would emulate the Democratic precedent.

And that's what they're afraid of.

They're thinking, you know what?

Those guys are too stupid, too naive, or too afraid to ever even consider the kind of stuff that we did.

Right.

Yeah.

Or maybe Trump can say, well, you know what?

We better go look at those key states.

And

we better get Elon Musk to give us 500 million bucks so we can go in there and replace or augment, absorb the work of the registrar.

That would be very interesting, shouldn't it?

Or, you know what?

January 6th was a really, really bad thing, the Democrats taught us.

And so we're going to go back, and I don't think that all the states, the statutes of limitations, are over with.

And I don't know, Minnesota,

Washington, Oregon.

So we're going to go back there and we are going to look at those people in 2020 for racketeering, insurrection, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And we'll retry them.

And we might have to put bobbed wire around one of the fences in Washington again.

And we'll look at all those expropriated public spaces that they took over illegally.

And so there's a lot of stuff.

And maybe we'll have some crazy when I'm inaugurated again.

Maybe we'll have a big MAGA riot in Washington and nobody will get arrested.

Or better yet, maybe we'll have a conservative celebrity said, you know, sometimes I dream of, I don't know, blowing up the Congress.

Like Madonna said she dreamed of blowing up the White House.

The point I'm making, Jack, is they went completely rogue

for the whole Trump period.

And they did things that were shameful.

And they did things they would never want to be applied to them.

Nobody's saying they're going to be applied to them, should Trump or whoever the Republican nominee is, but they're afraid because they know themselves.

They look in the mirror and they say, you know what?

If I were the Republicans and I got power of the Congress and the White House, I would really screw us.

Absolutely.

Because we tried to do it to them and they should do it to us according to our own logic.

And that terrifies me.

The hard ideological left sort of counts on the candy ass

temperate response or non-response.

And

when they see a hard response, yeah, the pips squeak.

Hey, Victor, you talked about impeachment, and one of those senators who voted for the impeachment of Donald Trump was Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney's

retiring.

And we're going to get your thoughts on Mitt Romney, Joe Manchin, John Fetterman.

Maybe even Mitch McConnell.

We're going to have

a Senate, a final segment of this podcast looking at the upper house, but starting with the senator from Utah.

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

Back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We have another sponsor, though, Victor.

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So

Victor, yeah, Mitt Romney,

76, I think he is.

He looks pretty good for 76.

He looks very good.

He looks very vigorous.

He looks very good.

He hasn't missed a step.

But he's heading out the exit.

Clean living.

Clean living.

Yeah, no, no, no Coca-Cola.

He's

heading out the exit.

And as he announced that he was not running again, he had barbs for Trump, barbs for Biden.

So your thoughts on Mitt

his retirement.

I don't understand Mitt Romney.

I don't understand.

I have no, I'm completely mystified by that guy.

In 2012,

he was running on self-deportation.

In other words, he was saying in that primary, we're going to build a wall,

but we're going to make everybody go back.

Everybody.

That was the extremist position.

You know, there was 20 million people here, and they can self-deport, he said.

So he was fire and brimstone.

And a lot of us, you know, a lot of people support support him.

He was a better choice than Obama, no doubt about it.

But did he want to do the things necessary to win?

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

They were running at, when they got done with him, they had done to him what they had done to John McCain, what they had done to Bob Dole.

He had an elevator in his house.

He had, was it two or three Cadillacs or Lincolns.

He put a dog on the top of his roof.

He hazed somebody in high school.

He didn't talk to his garbage collector as he should have.

And his wife was an equestrian.

They just destroyed that guy.

They did.

When they got done with him, they caricatured him into an out-of-touch

bonds dealer from Massachusetts, et cetera, et cetera.

They destroyed him.

And yet everybody supported him.

They tried to get him elected.

He didn't get elected because seven to eight million working-class class voters had a sixth sense that if he was going to be president, he would do what they did not want him to do.

In other words, he would try to talk about capital gains and privatizing Social Security

and getting more involved in the Middle East, and they didn't want to do it.

And so

he lost, and then he was in that debate.

Remember Candy Crawley?

She just basically said, time out.

I'm no longer the moderator.

I'm the Obama fact-checker.

And you're wrong, Mitt, about terrorism, and you're wrong.

And I know.

And then he's, you know, okay.

I mean, he didn't say okay, but he just folded.

He should have grabbed the mic like Reagan and said, I'm paying for this or I'm in this thing.

But he didn't.

And so it was always marketing.

Had he done that?

Don't you know?

All he had to do is he should have just grabbed the microphone and said, there's two people debating, and you prove, Candy, we don't need you anymore when you intervene as a partisan and you can't even intervene as a knowledgeable partisan you're not only biased but you're stupid because you just said that

this benghazi thing that barack obama didn't say that uh it was a terrorist attack when it was

and obama you know, didn't.

And remember what the Clinton-Obama nexus said about Benghazi.

Well,

was

a spontaneous riot of a bunch of terrorists that were stirred up by a

right-wing Coptic video on the internet that was playing around, you know, with Christian fundamentalists.

And we just have these guys in the United States and they're just provocateurs.

And this guy, you know, he was on probation.

We're going to go after him.

And he made a

and it maligned Islam and these guys, terrorists, saw and they just like a spark, it set them off and they just got a GPS mortar and they just said, you know what, I can figure this thing out in two seconds.

And it was just spontaneous.

How do you guard against that?

And

what did Mitt Romney should have said?

No, it was a long-planned, carefully scripted terrorist attack.

It Wasn't a mob mad at a video.

But he didn't.

He let Candy Crawley

contextualize and support Barack Obama so that eight to 10 million people watched that campaign in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania,

Ohio, North Carolina.

And they said to themselves, We're kind of suspicious that he doesn't really care about the working class, but he doesn't really want to fight.

So, why should I go out in a limb and fight for him when he won't fight for himself?

And

that's what he did.

And then he was senator.

In his defense, Donald Trump played

kind of a cruel joke.

I mean, Trump, as soon as Romney was hectored in 2016, you remember, Jack, everybody said, Mitt, you're the nominal head of the Republican Party.

You were our standard bearer.

You're not saying anything about Donald Trump.

So then he just went on a jihad and he said, Trump stake, Trump this, Trump Foundation.

Remember that?

He just

destroyed Donald Trump.

Said he was a crook.

I don't mean he succeeded in destroying him.

He sought to destroy him.

And then Donald Trump is a pretty crafty guy in a Machiavellian way, albeit.

So when it was time to be Secretary of State, remember what Trump did?

Oh my God, embarrassing.

Yeah.

I have a little crumb on a piece of string, Matt, and you're a rat.

So I'm going to throw that little crumb out, and you're going to come and grab it.

And then right when your jaws are going to get out, I'm going to yank it.

Yeah.

Oh,

Mitt Romney is Secretary of State?

Yes, he has financial experience.

He's got political experience.

He would be a great guy.

He's going to come up and I'm going to interview him.

And he just humiliated him.

And then Romney went back to what he does.

He started to attack Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

And then he was running for Sinder in Utah, and there was a possibility that he was a rhino and the Utah conservative base wouldn't come out.

So Mitt said, hey, Donald,

can you endorse me?

And Donald thought, hmm, I need an extra vote.

Don't want to lose that seat.

Not possible to lose it, but maybe Romney could lose it.

And he endorsed him.

As soon as he endorsed him, Romney started attacking him.

So now my point is it's for someone who talks about integrity and principles and consistency, he's not.

And you can see that when he was the governor of Massachusetts on state-run health care and how he massaged that in the 2012 campaign.

Nevertheless,

he is our senator from Utah.

He's got a year and a half.

Do you know any senators right now, Jack, who are saying, I'm not going to run a year and a half before their tenures are out?

I don't.

Have you heard any purple senator or has anybody said to retire?

Oh, I'm not going to run.

Why is he doing this a year and a half?

He's not going to be, he's going to be senator till late January of 2025.

Couldn't be,

wait, maybe we should look at the polls, Jack.

Maybe there's an obscure guy running for senator that nobody thought had a chance and is polling 60%.

Maybe so.

And maybe Mitt thinks, well, you know what?

All of that attack on the Republican standard-bearer and president

was a six-term, a six-year single-term project.

And I can't go back to my voters after what I've done and win their hearts and minds.

And somebody is going to defeat me because he's got a 60%

polling right now.

And I don't want to get drawn into all this.

So I'm just going to check out a year and a half.

I'll just enjoy the job.

It'll be apolitical, and I won't be attacked, attacked, attacked by people in Utah.

They will be relieved, relieved, put my arm around him at a rally in Salt Lake or Provo.

Mitch, you're a great

Mitt, you're a great senator, and we're so glad that you're retiring.

That's what I'm saying.

You remember, Victor,

it was in Utah where Mike Lee out of nowhere.

Yes,

he didn't endorse him, did he?

No, but even the Mike Lee, when he first became a senator, he defeated the incumbent Republican Robert Bennett in a primary that was like out of nowhere.

And if I was a not strongly conservative Republican in Utah, I would always be worried that.

And you remember that Mike Lee, wasn't he running against Evan McMullen,

the so-called presidential candidate in 2020?

Right.

Yeah.

And so

he's 16, maybe, huh?

And so he's running against this guy.

And

this guy is, you know, a hardcore leftist.

He may say he's a centrist, but

does the other Republican senator endorse Mike Lee?

No, he won't.

Remember that?

He would not endorse Mike Lee.

Right.

So he had no future.

And

I'm just saying this, not because I

don't like Mitt Romney.

I respect his character.

I think he did as best he could given the situation he was in.

But

all of these people are creatures of of politics.

Just remember that.

And a lot of their anger and hatred of Donald Trump is that Donald Trump blew up their political viability.

We were talking about David French, ditto.

Bill Crystal, ditto.

David Fum, ditto.

Some of our former colleagues whose names shall not be mentioned, ditto.

Mitt Romney, ditto.

That was one thing that he did do.

He took the pundocracy, he took the Republican establishment, and he completely bypassed it unapologetically.

And to be frank, crudely, and he just wrote those people off and said they're losers.

And they've never forgiven him.

Never forgiven him.

So as Mitch's, Mitt, I should say, is heading for the exits.

He talks about the age, his own age, 76.

I don't want to be, if I run again and win, I'll be 82, et cetera, et cetera.

Tax Biden and Trump for their age.

But that gets us into maybe Victor's age and these kind of psycho-dramas, geriatric dramas in the Senate.

We have a couple.

Well, we have Mitch McConnell.

You want to talk about him?

And you had mentioned before.

We started recording John Fetterman in Pennsylvania doing

something goofy.

We still have out in California, Dianne Feinstein.

So, Victor, we have this other ball of

worrisomeness about certain senators.

What are your thoughts?

Well,

I mean, it's not, I want to be careful here because I had a grandfather that was 86 and was sharp as a tack and then one day had a heart attack at 86.

And he was running a 135 acre farm.

You know, he was completely cognizant.

So it's not necessarily age.

It's more likely to have problems.

But I was listening to Charles Grassley the other day.

He's 89.

He was pretty sharp, I tell you the period.

Yeah.

And he's a lot sharper.

I was listening to Nancy Pelosi.

She's incoherent.

She's 83, I think.

And then Mitch McConnell, he has these,

what is it, brain freezes where he just loses contact with the real world.

Right.

Or I don't know what that is.

It's like temporary catatonic state.

Yeah, it's some kind of epileptic or catatonic state.

And then there's Joe Biden, I've said.

And then there's Fetterman, and he's, I guess, fifty-five or fifty-four.

So the and

Feinstein's ninety, and she is not able to do it.

And so I guess what we're saying is you get older, it's more likely, but not necessary.

But once you are disconnected from reality, like Fetterman is, or Diane Feinstein is, or Mitch McConnell is, or Joe Biden is,

and you have one of the most important jobs in the United States to represent us at the highest level of congressional authority in the Senate or the presidency, then you, I think you have a duty to step aside.

And then that opens up

a political can of worms because if you're in a safe seat

like Dianne Feinstein, there's no problem.

If you're in a kind of an odd seat, I think the Democratic governor of Kentucky would want Mitch McConnell to step aside and appoint somebody who wasn't a Republican in this place.

So I understand there's political ramifications, but

man, when you look at Dianne Feinstein at 90, she is not able to fulfill that job.

And if you looked at Biden the last week, I had said on this podcast so many times that

he was failing at a geometric rate.

And it's true, each week that we see him, he's not just a little bit incrementally, he's much worse and much, much worse the next week.

And he's getting to the point.

I saw, I looked at clips of his denials, you know, about barisma except in 2019.

He looks like a different person in 2019.

He has some semblance.

And, you know, it's very, I got, I think I told you, I had my knuckles wrapped by a Fox host for saying that Donald Trump, that Joe Biden in 2020 was beginning to to look reptilian, which he was.

That was just an accurate description of him.

But

when you see him and he gets off the stage yesterday and

he goes in three directions, he doesn't know where to go.

He's completely baffled.

And then he has this,

I think it's from AFib or maybe it's, I think he's on a pacemaker.

When people have congestive heart failure and their voices change and they kind of, I guess they're saliva or whatever.

You know what I mean by that?

He does not know how to pronounce words anymore.

Well, he crushes the words.

Four words become

two words.

There's no syntax.

Racing through this

telemetal.

And I've never seen in my entire

television news watching of 50 years, I've never seen an aide cut off a president in mid-sentence

the way they did.

They just said that.

You just, that's it.

Or I've never seen a president repeatedly, serially, chronically saying, they won't let me do this.

They're going to get mad.

Yeah.

Or to show the names of people that he's going to call on in advance that have been prepped to ask particular questions, I guess, prepped by

the press secretaries.

We'll call on you from the New York Times, but you got to ask this question.

So then they get Joe aside.

Joe, this is the question.

It's number two.

We have a big two here.

Here's a picture of the person.

Here's the name.

This is the question.

It's all in capital letters.

16 font.

This is what you're supposed to say.

0.1, 0.2, 0.3.

And that's how he's supposed to do a press conference.

And yet he can't do that.

And so who do you blame for that?

I blame

Jill Biden.

Jill, Jill Biden.

I do.

She was the one that could have put a stop to it.

But we've got to remember, the reason that they're scared is not just because of Kamala Harris, but they look back at the 2016 field, and there was a reason why they chose somebody then who was non-campos Mentes, and that was they looked down the list of characters and they said,

Elizabeth Warren's crazy.

She's dangerous.

Bernie Sanders is a socialist.

Pete Buttic is a sanctimonious snob.

He wouldn't win anything.

Corey Berker is a Spartacus nut.

Who else was it?

There was nobody.

So they said, well, there's nobody.

And Joe didn't win Iowa in New Hampshire, but he's an old Democrat.

Maybe we can put him in the basement or put him in a car where you honk and stuff.

And

we'll recreate him as old Joe Biden from Scranton.

And that's what they did.

And so my point is when he can no longer fill that construct role, that he's not even able to sit at at a desk and feign that he's president, you're back to square one.

And those candidates were not very impressive.

So then now they're thinking,

who's a new candidate that wasn't on that stage?

And I guess it's people like Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Winimer or Gavin Newsom.

But

if you look at those people's records and the actual status of those states of which they're in, they're not too impressive, especially Gavin Newsom.

Which I should say today, Jack,

he's running for president and he knows that he screwed up a wonderful state.

Somebody's going to say, well, Victor, that's not fair.

There were cosmic forces.

Yes, I know, but he was mayor of San Francisco for eight years.

He was lieutenant governor for eight years.

He was governor for four.

He, more than no other person, he was in control of the Bay Area.

and the state, if you put that aggregate years of experience.

So when people are upset about there's no border there's gavin on the border

with his little you know didn't he didn't he do something recently yes just recently

like yes in san francisco he was he's uh

he has pledged pledged

two hundred and fifty million dollars to stop

smashing grab all of a sudden why would it be so important right now i don't understand it oh there must be a possibility that he will be governor, and he no longer believes in defunding the police and making smash and grab and carjacking misdemeanors.

So he's going to spend $250 million.

That's about half, Jack, that he's going to spend to blow up four dams on the Klamath River, which give us clean hydro, recreation, flood control, irrigation during droughts,

et cetera, et cetera.

That's going to cost $500 million.

The $258 million he's going to use to stop smash and grab in California.

That's about half of the $500 million that he gave illegal aliens during COVID.

So it's not a lot of money and will have no effect.

They spent $10 billion in San Francisco, they have for homeless.

It doesn't do any good at all.

But he's going through the motions that he's a Bill Clinton Democrat.

That's what he wants to do.

Except Bill Clinton called out, I know it's not fair to say that it's fair to soldier, but he's

reparations.

It's early.

It's early.

It's early.

I would expect that would be the next thing he's going to do because we just had a poll in California, and it was over 60% do not want reparations.

And so that's what draws his attention.

He wouldn't be down on the border unless 60% of Californians want it closed.

He wouldn't be talking about homelessness,

except 60%

want it stopped.

And he knows that 60%, when we're $45 billion, likely could be in the hole for our annual deficit.

And 2.5% of the California population are claiming that six generations ago, their ancestors, they just know that, were slaves.

And they just know that the people in the state, 27% of whom were not born in the United States today,

owe them as former slave owners reparatory money.

And he knows that's absurd.

And

you add into the equation, if you look at the people who are pirating ships, that's a new thing in Oakland now.

We have pirates.

I don't know if you saw that.

What?

Yes, pirates.

They're like Somalis.

Only they're us.

They're Americans.

At the port?

Yes, they're getting their little boats and they go around the assembled boats and they see one they like and they strip it or they get in it and hotwire it, and take it off and loot it.

Damn.

Yeah, it's pirates.

And

we have

the people of Oakland are basically telling the African-American DA that she's let criminals out that are killing and destroying people.

And

if you look at the

profile of the smash and grab or the people who swarm storms or the carjacking, they're demographically unrepresentative, meaning that the 2.5% of the black community, when you look at the actual people who are doing the violent crimes that Damon Newsom is talking about, it's about 50%

African-American young males.

So I suppose, what am I getting at?

The 60% who said that they do not want reparations have seen this now for two years, and they're very liberal people, and they're probably saying, I'll make you a deal, leadership in San Francisco, wanting reparations.

If you can help us get

the African-American population that represents 2.5% of the state to commit no more than 2.5% of the smash and grab and carjackings, then we'll vote for reparations.

How's that?

Maybe that's the attitude.

I do think it's fair to say the 60%, that does not mean 40%

support.

There's a lot of head scratchers in that non-opposition number from the poll I saw.

Hey, Victor,

I have to tell the listeners we're at the end here.

Yes,

but I do have to remind our good listeners, and particularly the new ones that you have, the website, The Blade of Perseus.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

Please visit it.

Visit it regularly.

You will find archives to Victor's podcasts and his various appearances on other podcasts or radio shows, links to his pieces from American Greatness and a syndicated column, and then the ultra pieces that he writes exclusively.

for the Blade of Perseus.

Right now, he's in part seven of a series called The Strange and Dangerous People of the American Outback.

And these are

the men who worked on the farm, Hilario, Bert, Rodrigo, and other cast of characters that have come through Victor's farming life over the decades.

It's a really, really interesting and fun series.

But you can't read it unless you're a subscriber.

It's five bucks to get in the door, $50 for the year.

And the full year is a...

there's a ton of ultra content.

So please do subscribe.

As for me, Jack Fowler, I write the,

what do I write?

Civil Thoughts for Hampfil,

where we are determined to strengthen civil society.

It's a free weekly email newsletter that has about 14 recommended readings.

Here's an article I came across the previous week.

Here's a link.

Here's an excerpt.

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Go to civilthoughts.com and do

sign up.

And thank you for those who have done so.

So, Victor,

many of our listeners can, well, they can rate this, the podcast podcast if they choose to do so on iTunes or Apple.

And those that

do go there or listen there, many

give it a full five-star rating.

The average is over 4.9%.

We thank those who take the time to rate the show.

We thank those who leave comments.

We do read them.

I read them.

Victor does, and the comments also left on his website.

But here's one

comment I'd like to share, and it's from Darwin Horne.

It's titled Central Valley, a farm culture.

Your discussion of the loss of our farming culture was poignant.

The same happened in southern Illinois.

In the early 1980s, I was a grad student in St.

Louis and had a side job working with an ethnobotanist.

We surveyed the abandoned farmhouses in the agricultural region in the Illinois River Valley, looking for heirloom plants that were left behind.

The residents seemed to have disappeared suddenly.

Many of the houses still contained furniture as well as clothing left in closets.

Some houses even had dishes still setting on kitchen tables, some with half-eaten meals.

It seemed apocalyptic and reminded me somewhat of Pompeii.

I too mourn the passing of this life way and believe we are culturally poorer for the loss.

Thank you for personalizing it so eloquently, Darwin mourned.

Thank you, Darwin, for that and all others who have left comments.

Victor, thanks for the great wisdom you shared today.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone, for listening.