The Bad Left Politics: Canadian Re-education and California Devastation

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, our star, our namesake.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marjabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where Victor is actually right now sitting and talking to me.

And he'll be there for a whole week doing his Victor thing

at that great institution.

A lot to talk about policy-wise, things California, Jordan Peterson having to get some social media training dictated by the Canadian Psychiatric Association.

It's just crazy.

Some other,

maybe we'll get into some censorship stuff.

And

before we get into,

let's start off with Jordan Peterson.

We're going to hear an important message, but we're also going to hear about

Victor's travels.

So we'll get to all that right after these important messages.

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Back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I know our producers don't like to do this, Victor, but I have to give dates.

But this particular podcast is supposed to be up and out there on the internet on the 5th, which would be your 70th birthday, correct?

Dak,

you're right.

I am going to be 70.

I'm sorry, I gave the year.

But I'm suffering from long COVID euphoria, so I feel 50.

Okay.

Is that minimized, though, by long-distance travel?

Yes, it is.

I had to travel here,

But I'm feeling much better.

And

we can talk about the U.S.

airline industry if you wish.

I've made a lot of public comments about it.

But

I didn't think I'd make 70 at one point in my life when I had a ruptured appendix in Libya.

And

I did.

Yeah.

You've talked to us about that dramatic surgery.

And

of course, the last, the most recent podcast you did with Sammy, you gave an accounting of your immediate family members and they're,

well, many have died young.

But you never figured that out about why they all died, whether it was because of pesticides or just growing up.

But it was very strange that my sister-in-law died at 50.

Her sister died at, as I said, 52.

My daughter died at 26.

My aunt died at 49.

My other aunt died at 60.

My mother died early.

And they all grew up on a farm.

Yeah.

Well, we're happy.

We're happy and blessed for what God gives us, but that you're here, Victor, for 70 years and hopefully many more.

And let our listeners in on a little something.

You say that after you've seen Joe Biden, you say, you hope I have many more years.

Do we really want to go there?

True enough.

enough.

Although Henry Kissinger is 100 and he's still there.

I just saw it.

I'm interrupting you, but I just saw Mick Jagger at 80 and they had him juxtaposed to Joe Biden.

And the caption said,

see what sex, drugs, and alcohol can do for you.

Do you know Biden,

the headlines of today's paper, he's like 40% of his presidency has been on vacation.

Yeah, it is 40%.

He has not been in the office.

Thank God.

Yeah, right.

Well, that's,

by the way, Victor, then early here in real time, but as on internet time, very happy birthday.

And we had, we had, you had one of your

listener fans actually write a song about the sage of Selma as a birthday gift.

I don't know if you got a chance to.

I lived listening to it.

He wrote a birthday song and it was very nice.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, here's the headline.

We'll get to your air travel later in this episode.

It's about Jordan Peterson.

Jordan Peterson says he will move to broadcast mandated social media training.

And this is from the Daily Wire.

Let me just read the

first two sentences.

Mandated social training?

Yeah.

Well, Dr.

Jordan Peterson said that he will move to broadcast publicly the social media training he was ordered to undergo by a psychologist governing body that targeted Peterson for criticizing transgender ideology, climate alarmism, and the Canadian government.

Peterson told Fox News, Jesse Waters last week that he hoped to film or audio record all sessions of the court-upheld social media training.

Last week, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that the College of Psychologists of Ontario could mandate Peterson to go through a so-called, quote, specified continuing education or remedial program, end quote.

And, Victor, we think we got it, have it bad here.

Maybe we do.

I think we do, but dang.

North.

Well, we had an American Revolution, Jack, and Canada didn't so canada canada never had a bill of rights and so they always lecture us on their european progressivism but the fact is

for all our rallyness america is a lot freer country than canada jordan peterson

i mean they hate his guts for what because he doesn't play what they want to so they're now going to make him go through mandatory

training

you know the asymmetry is what's really interesting.

They always have people go through training or counseling, but

they never do for other people.

And it's always asymmetric.

What do I mean by that?

I mean, if

someone gets on

a media platform and says white supremacy or white privilege without any data and collectivizes an entire group, that's fine.

But if you...

you say it of other groups and suddenly it's stereotyping, blah, blah, blah.

But they hate hate him because he's well-known and he's making money and he's prominent and

they're like little lily liliputions trying to rope gullibar to the ground i guess i i i've done you know a podcast with him i like him but uh

he's very outspoken and uh they're going to continue to do this the rest of his life

just a fact of life they yeah the victor i have a feeling if

if this, you were in Canada, you'd be going through the same thing.

One of the things he was charging.

They drove Mark Stein out.

I mean, they went after Mark Stein.

Yeah.

The only difference is there that we call it the takeover of the administrative or the dark state.

Right.

But they don't, it's, it's not controversial there.

The state is the media.

The state is everything.

Right.

So there's no

conspiratorial aspect to it.

Well, if you were a Canadian, Victor, and you're writing a book on civilization, you've written a book essentially on collapse of civilizations.

I think that's a broad brush.

That's one of the reasons he has to undergo training because on some podcasts, he talked about radical gender theory being a sign of civilizational

collapse.

I mean, that was the mortal sin.

He said that mandatory

gender counseling, which is happening in the United States.

And I know that my granddaughter, I won't mention the situation she was in, but one of the reasons

her family has moved is that in the public schools, young girls, and she's 13, were advised about

transitioning as an option.

So, what we did is we took something that scientifically was documented.

And as I said, it goes, you know, Havelock Ellis in the 19th century wrote about early 20th century.

It's a very rare phenomenon.

It's 0.002 of 1%.

And then if you look at a graph jack, it goes up to 2%, 5%.

And then you get into the realm of the ridiculous or the surreal, where people at Brown University are suggesting 30 to 40% might want to transition.

So it's a mass hula hoop pet rock phenomenon.

And nobody has the guts to say that.

And it does a lot of destructive damage.

We took 50 years of trying to get parity for women.

And then we let these biological males destroy all their records.

Or we have, the left has always told us they wanted to protect the quote unquote, the children.

Then we let biological males go into blocker rooms for young girls.

Or we unleash sexual predators in the prisons.

And it's all under the veneer of progressivism and you don't dare say anything.

So that's why they're going after Jordan Peterson.

He said something.

But you know what he did, though, that was really interesting.

When he said it was a sign of civilizational decline,

I don't know if you've read Petronius's satiricon, but that is one theme in there, cross-dressing, sexual ambiguity, male

being a feminine effet.

Right.

And

there's a scene in that novel, and it was written about 60 AD during the reign of the Emperor Nero, probably as a caricature of the imperial decadence.

But they meet a soldier in the street and they start making fun of him.

You know, a big soldier is kind of a policeman.

And so most of

the story is the wandering of three people who are sexually ambiguous.

They have all this ambiguity, but they also, one of them, Gaeton, is not sure whether he's male or female.

And when Fellini made a version of the novel, it wasn't a very good one, I think, he actually accentuated that with the hermaphrodite, One of the figures, uh, that was central.

But that, if you go back to classical signs of decadence in a society, what is it?

There's a you just check, check off about five things:

infertility or lack of child,

you know, fertility.

Right.

So the families go from five to four to three to two to one.

That's one.

No investment in the future.

No investment in the future and more time for the

satisfaction of the adult appetites rather than investing in child rearing.

That's one.

And two is it's always listed, whether we like it or not, it's sexual ambiguity.

And

I don't know quite why that is, but it's mostly the male blending in with the female.

If you look at literature like Ovid, there's an attraction of women, of men in the gladiatorial

arena.

They all say, you know, I'd like to get filthy, dirty with this gladiator.

But that itself is a reflection that the men of their own class are experimenting with different types of sexuality, and that's a sign of decadence.

And the third, of course, is

nonsensical spending of money.

So,

particular foods or particular dress,

or gold-plating quail eggs, stuff like that to eat.

And that's another one.

And then the fourth is gratuitous violence

in the arena.

Pliny has a great letter about just the slaughter of elephants and lions in the Colosseum for no reason.

And we pulsed him.

Cicero even said that about 100 years earlier.

That was that just

hacking them to pieces?

Yeah.

At the end of the show, they would hack the animals, the elephants' tusk off or the head trunk off.

It was disgusting.

Kind of like our video game.

And then pornography.

People say, well, the Romans didn't really have pornography.

Well, because they didn't have the visual, you know, they did.

And what their version of it was they would get slaves and have them demonstrate these pornographic acts on a stage at private parties instead of showing, you know, blue movies.

So, and that those were all chronicled by,

you know, Suetonius, the 12 Caesars, Petronius of Satyricon, Tacitus's Annals,

Plutarch's Lives.

And so, what Jordan Peterson is doing when he's talking about civilizational decline, he mentions transgenderism and the pronouns and all this.

He's just channeling a long tradition of criticism.

And the funny thing is, we think that we're so modern and sophisticated.

And here, the Canadian government's going to go make him be re-education camp.

And nobody did that in moment time.

Right.

They were free.

Obviously, they didn't because we read what they wrote about it.

That's

That's Lenin's gift to modernity, the re-education.

And

I have no figures, Victor.

You go get re-educated in Soviet Russia, Communist China.

You may come out, but then you may still be killed also.

Or

the end of 1984.

He was re-educated, but he's still going to be off.

Well, the left, isn't it funny that they adopted all of the things from the Maoist Revolution?

Because look at loyalty oaths.

That was in 1952, 53, 54.

The University of California required a loyalty oath.

Have you or not been a communist?

And there were communists in the State Department, so there was some rationale to it, especially after the Rosenbergs, et cetera.

But a great classicist, M.I.

Finley, I think...

It's very obscure, but he left Cornell University, went to Cambridge, partly because he didn't want to take a loyalty oath.

But now, if you're in a university, you have to, when you apply to college, express

how are you committed to diversity, equity, inclusion?

What have you done?

And then a professor has to periodically for review write

to describe their commitment to it.

And worse yet, every job applicant has to do that.

And are Al.

So they're McCarthyites and they're adopting all the things that their grandparents used to say they were against.

But it kind of makes

sense that the left, you know,

if it paid better, they'd always be fascist.

And now it pays better.

So they are fascist overtly.

Well, Victor,

we have some other topics to talk about.

I think we should make a little mention of...

of some positive news on the energy.

Energy positive news.

Well, we have, well, that's, I'm going to steal a page from Sammy about nuclear power, but we're going to back into some depressing news about California.

Positive will segue to negative.

We'll get to that, Victor, right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor, I think it's maybe just worth noting, but I was having breakfast the other morning, flipping the channels.

Sometimes I put that squawk box on, CNBC.

It doesn't seem to be very political.

So it's

a safe haven.

I don't have a clue what they're talking about with

quantitative easing and all that jazz.

But that morning,

the CEO, chairman, president of the Southern Company, the big Southern power company, was on and talking about that it had

got approval and was moving ahead for the opening of two new nuclear power plants, the first time

in 30 years that America America

has

opened new plants.

It's busily shutting existing ones.

So I think that's a positive thing to note.

Maybe it's

three steps backwards and one step forward, but it's still a little good news on energy.

But meanwhile, you can comment on that, but I want to get into Gavin Newsome, what he's doing in California-related energy.

Go ahead if you want to say anything.

Well, Herb Stein said, what can't go on won't go on.

Yeah.

That old

Nixon official, Ben Stein's father, and what he meant in this context was

if you're in California and you're dismantling the nuclear plants, and they were going to do Diablo Canyon, and they said, wait a minute, that's a million customers.

So they gave it three or four more years.

But they've dismantled every other nuclear plant.

And then you've got all of this natural gas and oil, the fourth largest deposits in the United States, and you're not going to build new natural gas plants.

So then you're going to make these huge solar farms, which destroy the landscape.

They really do.

I drive to work three hours, and you should see what they've done to the west side of California.

They're huge.

I don't mean an acre or two, hundreds of acres.

Hideous.

And they're producing more power now along with the rooftop than they need during the day, but they can't store it.

And nobody else needs it.

So then at night they don't have any and they import the coal-fired, nuclear-fired energy from other states like Nevada, Utah, Arizona.

Now they import natural gas from Alaska or oil from Saudi Arabia.

And the idea is that we don't want any of these dirty fuels, but we want to use them.

We want to use this.

It's kind of like Joe Biden.

I will not

be energy in,

I will not be energy sufficient, but I want the dirty Saudis and the dirty Venezuelans and the dirty Iranians and the dirty Russians to give us the dirty oil so we can win the midterm.

Yeah.

And that's that's what's so we don't have any energy at night.

We have to import it.

We have too much during the day.

So if they're going to try to build a nuclear plant, it would be welcome.

We mentioned, I don't want to mention it too much again, but there's four dams on the Klamath River.

And

they provide clean hydro for 80,000 households.

They offer flood control, which is good in the winter, and

storage in the summer for irrigation and water and recreation.

There's homes built on, and we're going to destroy all four of them.

They're taking $500 million to blow them up, and they're taking it out of a water construction bond, at least in part.

And that's what Gavin Newsom is doing.

So the rationale for that, and I know, again, you mentioned, we've talked about it before, but the rationale

in part part for some of these things, I guess, is salmon runs, but it's returning things to nature, right?

Like that's.

Yeah, it's returning.

Think of the logic.

We're going to turn California back the way it was when these awful ancestors of ours came here in the 1850s and 60s.

And we want to go primitive.

We want to be pre-civilizational when we had salmon runs to the Sierra and all these mythological utopian images of the state.

But we have 41 million people.

And unfortunately for them, they don't all live in Silicon Valley.

So what they've done is these people who are very, very wealthy, who have enclaves, their kids are protected, they're protected.

They've mandated, you know, we're going to get rid of natural gas stove cap.

You can't buy a diesel pickup pretty soon.

You can't have a diesel semi within 10 years.

You can't do this.

You can't do that.

But then they had an open border.

So we have over 10 million people who came illegally and they're second and third generation now.

And they're very, they're trying to become middle class.

And they're paying $5.50 a gallon for gas and $6 a gallon for diesel fuel.

And as I said earlier,

you go into Selma to a Walmart, which I do at 108 degrees.

And who's in there?

Are they buying things?

No, they're in there for the free air conditioning, sitting there, sitting there in the afternoon, letting their kids play.

And then when you go to fill up in my hometown, it's very, it's a long process because nobody flips out a credit card and puts it in, just drives off.

Because if you have a 25-gallon tank and it's $5,

$125, if you have a 30-gallon diesel tank,

And I have a diesel pickup I just filled up not too long ago, it was $180 to fill up.

Wow.

And so what happens is people in the line, they go in and pay, here's 20, here's 30, tell me, and they parcel it out because they don't have enough money.

So then the whole line backs up because everybody's got to go in and they just can't use the machine.

I'd say eight out of 10 people pay cash because the cash is four cents cheaper a gallon.

And they don't have the money on their credit card to do that.

Yet this was dreamed up by somebody like Tom Steyer, right?

The guy with the big Tahoe mansion that Joe Biden was vacationing at, who made his fortune.

Remember, he made his fortune in an Indonesian coal plant?

Right.

And then he's doing penance at our expense.

No offense, Jack, but it's a Catholic concept.

He's doing penance and exemptions and indulgences at our expense.

Okay, Victor.

Count that in.

It's okay.

Well,

but you know, interesting, you just mentioned solar farms.

And so we could

blow these dams up for nature.

Meanwhile, over here with nature, we'll pervert it with these ghastly solar farms, which material costs more than

magnetic.

And these wind farms that these

cuisine arts in the sky, chopping up bald eagles and other birds, and bats.

So why is that not natural?

There has to be some central overriding principle to all this.

Yeah, it's hatred of people.

Yeah.

I mean, if the solar wind, where these people in their great vast chart of intersectionality, they know, I don't know, we've talked about that, but I guess solar and wind trump

race or gender, but

they can do anything.

They can, or it trumps

Green energy trumps environmentalism because they slaughter, you know, red-tailed hawks or golden eagles in the wind machine.

Whales,

whales, yeah, the sonar.

Yes.

It disrupts their natural navigation system.

And so that disrupts it.

And then when you look at all of what they, they always are against teachers' unions, charter schools,

homeschooling.

And yet, when you look around Stanford University, all of their kids are at,

you know, Sacred Heart, Castilea, the Harker School, the Menlo School, which is fine.

But then why do they dictate for everybody else what type of school they go to?

They all want high kilowatt age, 30 cents a kilowatt.

And where do they live?

They live right along the coastal corridor where the temperature, I have an office in the Hoover, I've never, tower, I've never turned on, as I've said, the air conditioning.

or the heating, and yet the policies that emanate out of that zip code ripple out to places like Bakersfield or Madeira or Reedley, where people have to, they can't live under those policies.

It's too expensive to turn the heater on or the air conditioner in extremes of heat.

So a lot of this is,

a lot of this ideology that transcends or nullifies reality is based on the ability of these people to be shielded from the consequences of their own ideology.

And that's really at the heart of this whole political debate we're having left-right.

That we have a little group of left-wing Jacobins who, under globalization, got very, very wealthy.

And they had this utopian

idea, but it was really based on the fact that it was never going to affect them.

And every time it affects them, you get some

forced admission, like a John Kerry saying, I have to have my Gulf Stream because I have to get to

summits on green energy quicker or or more.

He says that.

And, or you, you get someone like Al Gore saying, I need, you know,

10,000 square feet or I need a 7,000 amp panel because I'm so much, I'm so valuable for the movements.

Just what Lennon and every man on the left say.

Yeah.

Well, Lori Lightfoot getting her hair cut.

You know, I forgot about Lori Lightfoot getting her hair cut, which violates all the masks of the face because she said, people expect me to be presentable.

and gavin newsom had to eat at the french laundry without a mask because his lobbyists were there for health care and the same thing with london breed had to do it nancy pelosi had to sneak around

even diane feinstein needed a chinese spy for 20 years didn't she

Yeah,

we won't talk about Fang Fang this time.

I've had, but we've probably had the Fang Fang.

She came to my office and I

audience.

I'm not going to repeat the story, but I am.

Okay, the funny thing about it was she came in, and I can't emulate that.

It sounds condescending, but she had a very thick Chinese accent

as if she, but she actually, I think, went to, she said the Cal State hate.

And when I said, you know, it's not going to work, Miss Fang Fang.

And

there's somebody here, and she's, she breaks into Valley Girl Cal State.

Hey, man, like, don't, don't do that sh with me, man.

Like, I know what you're doing, okay?

So I was thinking of Eric Swalwell after I had met her, and I thought, wow, only an idiot with, I mean, a genuine certified idiot would fall for this get up.

Tight pants, boots to her knees,

sunglasses, the whole thing.

And I thought.

Who would fall?

Eric Swalwell qualifies.

Yeah, he wanted the happy ending.

Well, Victor, let's let's continue down the dark road and California.

So, I mentioned earlier about, well, I'm going to speak on California, Jack, on September 6th.

Oh,

at Hillsdale?

Okay, well, maybe this you can work this into your talk.

I'm trying not to be too negative because my daughter listened to one of her first podcasts and she said, Oh my God, you sound like Eeyore again.

You're doom and gloom.

Come like, up.

I'm trying to help you, Dad, and

you're just not.

Don't be so good.

It's like

Ecclesiastes to every season.

And this makes

Eeyore, you know?

So, but here's another Eeyore.

I'm supposed to Neville Chamberlain and say there's no danger to the East in Germany.

Stanley Baldwin.

Who would ever think we need Spitfire?

That's a waste of money.

Yeah.

Eric Hitler has told me that he wouldn't attack.

Look, this piece of paper, he signed it.

All right.

There is a fellow Eeyore at Hoover.

I don't know that he came into it being an Eeyore.

I traipsed over this on the Hoover website the other day, California on Your Mind.

I did not know there was such a section, but it's

kind of this effort seems to be spearheaded by your fellow fellow,

Leo Hanian.

And you can talk about him in a sec.

But here's the title of this.

big piece he's just written and you'll find it listeners on the hoover website california on your mind I once thought California would fix itself.

I was wrong.

And here's how he began this piece.

For the last five years, my Hoover colleague Bill Whalen and I have written about the economics of California, its state policies, and its state politics.

Before I began writing California on your mind, I knew that some California economic policies were poorly designed and creating significant waste and dysfunction.

But it wasn't until after I began studying these issues in detail that I found out just how badly California is politically managed.

The problems are so numerous, so glaring, and so costly that I thought California politicians would self-correct.

I was wrong.

Victor, this piece is really, well, you know these details.

I'm not sure.

He's very good.

He's one of our best Hoover scholars.

And so when he, and he's very data-orientated.

So when he concludes there's no hope for California, at least politically, he should be listened to.

But politics is an ancient word.

You know, it comes from the word polis, the city-state.

And by definition,

it reflects two different points of view coming into conflict.

But we don't have that.

So, and I don't mean that just as an exaggeration, flip-off, but look at California.

It has super majorities in the House,

the Assembly, and a supermajority or veto-proof.

That's a veto-proof synonym in the state senate.

It has no statewide elected officer that is Republican.

There's not anybody, Secretary of State, Attorney General, Lieutenant Governor, no, no, no.

We've had now 12 straight years,

Jerry Brown into Gavin Newsom, and

we're going to have 16 of them.

I don't think that Arnold Schwarzenegger qualifies as a Republican.

You add him in, and you'll have 24 straight years as governor.

I think we've up to 12

of 52 congressional seats are Republican, 12.

So there is no politics is what I'm trying to say.

It's a one-party state.

And that's what he sees.

And the question is, why is it a one-party state when it elected successively Ronald Reagan, George Duke Masian, Pete Wilson?

And the answer is

demographics, that what happened to California was, A,

people paid the highest highest taxes in sense of gas taxes income taxes fourth highest sales taxes their assessments were very high so even the one percent made they were paying among the highest property taxes they were willing to do that for the beauty of the state and the history of what it was a can-do place and then they looked at the school test scores 45th in the country

infrastructure 49th highest property crime rate in the United States in San Francisco and they said for all that money we get very little it's not worth looking at the beach at Montecito.

We don't really,

I can climb another mountain.

It doesn't have to be, you know,

half dome.

And so there's other beaches besides Santa Cruz Beach.

So they just said, you know, I'm not going to do this anymore.

And 10 million of them left in the last 30 years.

Then, second, there was $9 trillion of market capitalization between San Jose and San Francisco.

So you have Oracle, Facebook, Twitter,

Google, et cetera.

And so there was never that type of wealth in history.

And those people are very political.

And all of those, what that did is it changed radically the nexus of politics.

So we went from Los Angeles that had conservative politicians.

And we mentioned that in one of the podcasts, the people who we on the national level, Jack, not the local level, came from that Silicon Valley Money Bay Area.

Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom,

Barbara Boxer,

Camilla Harris.

They all came out of that nexus and they were all backed by Silicon Valley people.

Silicon Valley also became the dumping ground.

It's like Lockheed and General Dynamics for the Pentagon.

It's the landing pad for all of those left-wing apparatcheks.

It's where the FBI,

James Baker, we've talked about, gets $250,000 as FBI general counsel.

Then he hires, they're hiring Twitter at $3 million to censor or suppress information.

And he ends up as what?

General counsel of the old Twitter at $8 million.

So that money and the activism in Sam Bankman-Freed,

again, the only reason I know him well, I hear the paparazzi helicopters, he lives about a mile from my apartment.

Although I should say he did.

Now he's behind bars.

We're trying to tamper with witnesses from the Stanford campus.

I got to be careful because I've been accused of Stanford bashing.

But his parents were both Stanford professors.

And while they protested vehemently their innocence, one was a bundler of dark money in Silicon Valley as a law professor.

The other, of course, is now under

some accusation, formal or not, about transferring properties and stuff from his ill-gotten gains of his son.

And so what I'm getting at is that Silicon Valley is very powerful, and that kind of money goes to the left.

And then when you got rid of eight to 10 million middle-class people, then you replace them by having an open border.

So you had some of the poorest people in the world coming from Oaxaca, Chiapas,

the lower part of Yucatan.

Unlike earlier immigration where people were coming from northern Mexico, Many people were indigenous.

They needed enormous entitlement help.

And so we have right now 54 percent of all births in california are medic medi-cal medical

and anybody goes into a uh as i had just done about three months ago if you go into an emergency room

there are no i mean everybody there's primary language is spanish and so that was a radical change that required enormous help by the federal government at the time where we lost any confidence as a host so we were unable to acculturate intermarry, inter assimilate this new population.

So one, two, three,

the voters who voted for Reagan and Dick Major and Wilson, they're gone.

They're gone.

They left.

And the new voters came to replace them and they're not yet conservative.

They may, the Mexican-American and Latino population, they may become conservative.

We always say they will.

but it's been a little slower development than everybody had hoped.

And then you have the Silicon Valley corridor of where the money is.

And we have all these universities, you know, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, nine UC campuses, 23 state campuses.

You add it all together, and I think he's right.

I don't see how you're going to change the state until it

becomes dysfunctional.

And I think we're getting close to that.

San Francisco is a pre-civilizational place.

The streets of medieval London, I would imagine, they clean the defecation up every every morning more than they do in San Francisco.

I just want to encourage our listeners.

You just wrote a four-part series on the death of San Francisco.

I just went to San Francisco.

I've never seen anything like it.

All these beautiful new buildings that were built in the boom era, say from 2005 to 2020, they're 30% empty.

And if I said, I went to San Francisco, nobody would believe this.

You said, oh, I'm going to go to San Francisco and I'm going to go to a meeting in a building and they're going to have a pressure washer right in front of us.

They have to walk around

that's washing off human excretement from the sidewalk.

You wouldn't believe it.

But that's exactly what was happening.

And the question is, think about it.

This very sophisticated society is finding every business about their waste

effluval.

And it has to be perfect this and perfect that.

their city waste treatment.

And

they're just pressure washing this stuff every day into the storm drain, the rainwater drain.

And you can see it when you fly over it.

There's a flume coming out.

And it's a pre-civilizational society.

So when you go by, people yell at you, scream at you.

And you can see people, I shouldn't say you can see, you can not help but see people urinate, defecate, inject, fornicate, anything.

Right.

And the drugs are weird.

They're not like marijuana or hashis.

They're drugs that turn people into walking zombies.

Zombies.

Or I shouldn't say walking all the time, people laying down with a crackpipe, Hunter Biden style, you know.

But it's victory.

It's

scary.

It's, it's, I've never seen a society commit collective suicide so quickly.

I mean, quickly.

It was 2018.

It was a beautiful city.

Oh, dang.

I remember you going there twice, three times a year for National

related things.

Peter McGowan, a great man, our friend who used to own the Giants, visit with him.

And

it was nice to go.

There was a lot of people.

I can remember going to a National.

I used to speak for National View Institute.

I would stay at the Hyatt, I guess it was.

And I would walk a mile over there.

I guess it was to the City Hall or whatever that lecture hall was.

And I came back.

at night at 11 o'clock by myself.

It was perfectly, it was lighted.

People were partying on the street.

It was very safe.

It wasn't my kind of town, but it was very safe.

It was operating.

And now

it's been completely destroyed on every aspect of the world.

Lowell High School, they ruined their meritocracy.

I guess they're going to try to bring it back.

They topple statues in Golden Gate Park.

They'll have Cervantes.

They whitewash WPA murals because they don't have, I mean, these communist murals that we paid for, they're pretty well done.

They're not diverse enough, so they washed them off.

So every aspect of pre-civilizational decline is evident from a two or three hours.

My favorite, as I keep saying, is the different types of

notes on the cars are really fascinating.

Some, you know, they're all, they have the windows down in Union Square, and some of them say, nothing here, or please don't break in, nothing of value.

Doors unlocked.

And they have these placards, you know, on the dashboard saying,

we surrender the criminal element.

And then there's these stories, I don't know if they're urban rumors or not, where

the

would-be thieves meet them as they get out of their cars and said, Look, instead of just, you can lock up the car, but just pay me $200 or $300 and I won't break in.

So,

you know, a sensible,

relatively sensible transaction, I guess.

You could sum up to why San Francisco is a city that got all their wishes came true.

Yeah.

Right.

Every wish they wanted came true.

And

this is, this is the end game for a sanctuary city.

By the way, Victor, we got to.

It looks like a neutron bomb is what it looked like.

Well, I hate to sit here and look at Sanford across the nation.

Look at that.

And many people think that's something happening somewhere else.

But if you live in or near another major city in America, it's probably coming.

could come to you.

So Michael Goodwin, who's a Pulitzer Prize-winning.

I've had dinner with him.

He's a very good guy.

Oh, he is.

He's a good one, man.

Yeah.

He's got a piece in today's New York Post.

I don't have it in front of me.

This is

Sunday the 3rd.

You should look it up, folks.

And he talks about New York City is

going to replicate San Francisco.

New York.

He says New York City is right behind.

Yeah, yeah.

And we had the wherewithal to come out of the doldrums, you know, 30, 40 years ago, or with Giuliani Bloomberg, it doesn't have those resources

now.

And it's the weirdest thing, Victor.

If you want to live there, as rent is like, you know, one-bedroom apartments, four or five thousand dollars.

But

the city's clearly beginning to circle a drainage.

I was going to ask you about that.

So New York City,

the rents and prices haven't gone down.

It's like San Francisco.

And I asked somebody that, and he says, because people retain their property, but they don't live there.

And so the market is not as fluid.

Well, that could be true.

I mean,

here where I live in Milford, not to bore our listeners too much, but it's in the solar system, commutable.

And now that you have bandwidth,

many folks

can tolerate not having to take a two-hour commute into the city.

I talked to a person in San Francisco that had a place.

I said, why don't you just sell it?

And it kind of got teary-eyed and said that we hope for a day when the madness will stop and they'll return.

It's kind of sad.

I think that could be a mindset for New York.

Yeah.

But

they have cash that they can buy something that's relatively reasonable within the solar system.

I'd say it's at least two years behind San Francisco.

In other words, the sidewalks are still crowded.

There's still some.

It's clearly in decline.

First time I ever went there was 1971.

I was 18.

I went to Yale's intensive Greek program.

That was one of the dumbest things I did because I picked Greek and Latin.

And I ended up with all graduate school students in their 20s and 30s.

And I was 18.

I'd never been out of Fresno County.

Anyway, I flew there and I took the train to Times Square in 1971.

What a hellhole that was.

Wow.

Yeah.

It was crazy.

People coming up to you and...

soliciting and everything, but it's going to be that way again.

Yeah.

Talking about human human nature.

I mean,

the same cast of characters are always there.

It's just that there's something called deterrence.

So they don't come out of the woodwork because they feel in a cost-benefit analysis, it's not worth staying, you know, six months in jail or a year or two for hitting somebody over the head with a bar.

But they're capable and they want to do it all the time.

But it's just the thin veneer of civilization keeps them suppressed.

And then when you have these very wealthy or pampered activists who say, oh, human nature is malleable, they listen to our lectures on diversity, equity, inclusion, and they become very wonderful people.

So we have to take the civilization veneer off.

Sort of like Rousseau, every man was born into change and just take the chains off.

And then we have human nature in the raw and it's so wonderful.

And then all of a sudden they start beating up and killing people and

they don't know what to do.

Yeah, well, people who gave us it is a sanctuary.

It is a sanctuary city.

It's the voters voted for these sanctuary city.

Every sanctuary city is

every sanctuary city that a Texas or Arizona governor or mayor has sent

what they wanted, right?

Illegal alien.

Right.

Thank you for sending them.

We love Pedro and we love Juan and Maria.

And you know what?

We don't have enough

landscape jobs and nanny jobs for them.

So they're going to be that we just want them so much.

But because we're a sanctuary city, but they're going to have to leave tomorrow morning on a really nice bus.

That's what they do.

And Martha's Vineyard did that.

They got them out of Dodge there because that was the weirdest thing in the world.

They all bought little sleeping bags and they bought food and they had like used, as I said, North Face jackets and all these nice designer clothes.

And they bought them to the little illegal Anglian Center and they said, See ya, wouldn't want to be.

Yeah.

Get out of the dodge in 24 hours.

Well, Victor, we have we're doing a little truncated

episodes or editions this week, given that you were up at Hillsdale and you have some duties to perform there.

So they've taken the time, but we're going to come back.

Maybe we'll take one last, get your views on one last thing about maybe bidenomics bidenomics and the news about Americans, how they're increasingly living paycheck to paycheck.

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

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

Before we get to that last topic, I'd like to encourage our listeners to visit the Blade of Perseus.

That's Victor's official website.

You'll find its web address, is victorhanson.com.

Go there.

You'll find the archives to these podcasts, to Victor's other appearances, their links, galore, his American Greatness pieces, and his syndicated columns.

You'll find those links.

But then you'll find ultra articles, and you will click on them, and you will not be able to access them.

And,

well, why?

Because you need to subscribe.

$5 gets you in the door.

It's $50

for the year.

Victor writes

about three times a week, ultra pieces.

So if you're a fan of Victor's writing, and I have to believe you are, then you really should subscribe

on an annual basis.

There's an awful lot of exclusive material that Victor.

I have a series that's on the website about the hard men of the American Outback.

The Strange and Dangerous People?

Yeah, Strange and Dangerous People.

I'm a little worried how people are going to react to it because when I grew up, we were free-ranged, and we had Manuel George and Joe Carey, a Cherokee Indian guy, and a guy that was half Portuguese and half

Mexican-American.

And they were like our surrogate parents, the hired men.

So when I was five and six, as I've written about.

But when they retired, I got a little older.

It was very hard.

My grandfather got very elderly, and we hired a cast of characters.

I'll start out with Bert.

Bert.

Yeah, well.

The first thing thing he said to me was pornographic.

The last thing he said to me was pornographic before we fired him.

And he was the strongest.

And the scary thing about him was

the first thing I saw him do was take an eight-foot iron beam, or I should say pike, to pull out a

walnut tree root to pry it out.

And he bent it.

He was so strong.

Oh, my sketch.

And then I talk about Larry, hilario.

And the first thing he, not the first thing, the week, he was the next hired man.

He said, By the way, before I say, you know, I want to tell you right now, I killed a guy in Brownsville, Texas, just shot in.

So be careful with me.

Oh, my gosh.

How old are you at the time?

He's telling us to what, a 13-year-old kid?

Yeah.

And then the next people were, I use pseudonyms with the Rameras.

They lived right next to us.

And

they began robbing every house on the farm, including my, and they took my grandmother's, she was a

champion speaker for Women Christian Temperance Union.

They stole her diamond ring.

So that was the next group.

He got killed.

And then

I talk about these, the hard men, and it was very, the type of people you meet in farm work or farm labor.

And

so it was a very good education, but I had been kind of pampered.

We all have because we had these benevolent hired men that sort of were parents.

And when we would ride our bikes or run around the ranch, they would encounter us and they

help us work or teach you how to drive a tractor.

Then when they left, we got caught people.

My grandfather got very ill.

They lived with you too, Victor?

Were they living on the ranch?

They lived on the ranch, yeah, right next to us.

In fact, I would, the third family that were criminal, I'd come home from school and they would be in the house.

And that was really scary.

You'd come home and there were six or five or six of them in the house.

And then I finally talk about the clan.

And these are people when I was an adult.

I was 24.

My grandmother was 93.

And my parents were working.

And this family came in and asked to take care of my grandmother.

And they were like the suitors in the 22nd book, 24th book of the Odyssey.

They took over the house.

I mean it.

I mean, they moved a drug dealer in.

They lived upstairs.

There was no bathroom.

So I came in from college.

And a guy was urinating off the balcony.

They carved their initials and

they ran up.

They had the gas key.

They were taking all the gas and food.

And

my parents were at work.

And so one day I just lost.

I was there for a supposed summer to help clean up everything.

The house was falling apart that I live in.

And I lost my temper and I fired all six of them.

And then I sat down really happy.

Then it dawned on me: you have a 93-year-old incontinent Alzheimer's grandmother now that it's your sole responsibility

to cook and to watch her and to clean and to fix this house.

So I never quite got back into academia for five years.

But my point was it was really kind of scary.

And then when you, how do you fire someone who's taken

and

the older one, I called him mad dog because he would get really angry and start yelling at you.

He said to me, you know, In Mexico, when your person leaves the house, it's up for grabs.

If you just leave and go to the United States, people take it so your grandfather died and they ask us to take care of your grandmother and your parents are gone so i think it's our house dang

do you think that's

i mean not to give the devil his due but do you think that is a kind of a cultural mindset yeah it is it is well partly because of the cartel all right but that is a cart there are no property rights in mexico and rural mexico from what I can tell from people here.

I have at least 10 people I know very well.

They get in their pickup.

They go back to their old home and somebody's living in it.

And they can't get them out without hiring somebody.

Yeah.

And

the only way I could get them out was to act crazier than they were.

Right.

And

they.

But that's this is not just some Mexican thing, too, elsewhere in America.

This rise in squatters and then the seeming ability to get them out.

No, there's squatters everywhere.

Santa Cruz, they can't get them out.

But this was pre-squatting

era.

But they were kind of pioneers in squatting.

And

they had it, you know, they would call my mom up and say,

we need food, so we have to have an account at the local to feed your grandma, your mother, and then we have to have gas to get to work.

And I came in one day and there were six cars lined up as if it was a filling station.

And so I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

And then I lost it.

No,

I'd love to see.

No, I really would love to see it, but it'd be interesting to see Victor

having lost it.

I just had dinner with a guy last night and said he liked our podcast because he felt that he had been a loser for a while.

And he thought that I had been a loser for a while too.

And

I had been redeemed.

But I felt like a loser.

I had a PhD from Stanford and I couldn't get a job.

So I was farming with, with, you know,

$6 an hour for piecework.

And I did that for five years.

And

it was pretty wild country.

And when they wouldn't leave,

you had to forcibly get them out.

Yeah.

And somebody's going to say, well, you could have called the sheriff.

No, you can't call the sheriff.

They don't do anything.

So anyway.

Well,

that's part of the ultra series that you write for VictorHanson.com.

So it's a long and waiting, long commercial.

It's just a question of what you want to do.

You know, that's an existential question.

So if somebody comes to your property and throws a box of used diapers, a car seat,

a hot water heater,

a dead puppy, all in a big pile, and you call the sheriff, they're not going to do anything.

Even if you find a phone bill, usually they're pretty careful.

But what do you do with that?

You have two choices.

Just ignore it, pick it up, and put it in the bin.

I usually do that.

Or you find the address and then you put it all in and you take it over and dump it on their lawn.

And that gets interesting.

I've done that once or twice

because

I learned there's a whole subterranean California culture of local people going around to off-the-books homes of people who are here illegally collecting their trash.

And they don't go to the county dump.

Right.

They go

to Victor's Farm.

They go to places out in the country and they dump it.

And then once it dumps, it's kind of organic.

You have a choice.

You can either be self-righteous and say, I'm not going to pick this up.

This is not right.

I'm not going to enable these people.

But if it starts to grow like Mount Trashmore, we call them,

if they start growing, then the word gets out and it becomes force multiplying.

So everybody comes out.

Oh, they don't care.

We'll just do it.

So it's like mowing the lawn.

You have to do it all the time.

Right.

No, trash attracts trash.

Yeah, I was not too long ago.

I was walking out there and I turned the corner, and there was a semi-truck park in the orchard, along with a refrigerator.

Oh, really?

Outside.

Oh, God, oh my.

I complain about the refrigerator.

It's pretty heavy, too.

Yeah.

I need to haul it somewhere.

All right, Victor, we've got time quickly now.

We want to take a break.

Yeah, well, we've had

we've been hearing this week, this past week, Joe Biden's out there when he's not on vacation.

He's bragging about the success of Bidenomics.

Some

jobs report came out a few days ago.

Okay, America is adding jobs, not losing them.

Often these numbers are radically revised down two or three months afterwards.

Anyway, Victor, oh, it's Glory Times in America, right?

Yeah,

if he's going to campaign on the wonders of Biden almost, he should just say this.

Look, when I came in the office, the inflation rate was 1.9%.

It was just too low.

So I did what I could.

And you got to give me credit, I got it up to 9%

for six months.

I'm not doing too well now.

It's going back to five or six.

But if you average it over the

two and a half years on staples, I at least got

staple foods, gas,

natural gas, heating.

I got it up 16%.

That was pretty good.

I didn't have a lot of time, but I did do that.

And then I managed to take 2.9

mortgages on 30-year mortgages.

I didn't quite triple them.

I did double them, and they're up at seven.

So give me credit at that.

And I spent, I borrowed $6 trillion and printed it.

That was pretty good too.

I did that in two and a half years.

Trump, it took him four,

but I matched him in two and a half.

And I'm trying my best.

That's what he should say if he's going to campaign on Bidenomics.

Well, here's the people who are hearing this.

And

those people hearing this are Americans.

And here's a poll that came out the other day.

Lending Club conducted a survey of

roughly 3,500 Americans.

It says two-thirds,

almost two-thirds, 61%

living paycheck to paycheck.

those earning uh less than um where those earning less were predictably hit hardest by the rising costs interest rates and inflation over the last year a staggering 78 percent of those earning less than fifty thousand per year as well as sixty five percent of those earning between fifty and a hundred thousand a year admit to living paycheck to paycheck both up

in comparison to 2022.

And one last thing here, Victor.

70% of Americans are stressed by their finances.

45% of Americans were found to have, only 45%, I should say, were found to have emergency savings, with 26% of those admitting that they have less than $5,000

saved for emergencies.

So I guess everything, not everything, it can depend where you live, but if you're earning, you and your wife are working together and you're earning $100,000 a year, which is far over the average of most Americans, and you are still living paycheck to paycheck.

It doesn't sound like something to brag about the economic conditions in America brought to you by Joe Biden.

There's a lot of people living on the edge here, Victor.

And I imagine

in various stages of anxiety about their economic fate.

I think there are.

I talked to a variety of people the last two or three weeks in all walks of life.

I bought a new

automobile and I talked to a sales manager, a salesman.

I talked to the checker at the food market.

I talked to the woman at the bank.

And they all say that under Donald Trump, these are all people who would be a traditionally democratic profile.

They wish that that economy or he was back because they can't afford the things that have come to us under Joe Biden.

And

I mentioned before when you buy a ribeye steak at at the market I go to, it's like a petting zoo.

People look at you.

And so I bought one the other day.

It was $24.

It was about

less than a pound.

And a guy came up to me and he said, wow, do you think you're better than everybody?

How did you buy that?

And then I looked at his two cases of Coke and I said,

Well, those cases of Coke are on sale, I think, for $17.

So you've spent $34

on 48 Cokes.

What were they at two years?

Oh, yeah, they were expensive.

And I said, I couldn't afford that much sugar.

But the point is, everything is up.

Everything is up.

And

nobody's buying steaks.

I guess they won't cut out buying ice cream and Coke, but they have cut back on quality meats and vegetables and fruits because they don't have any money.

And

I get frustrated, but I wanted to buy

an automobile and I went into the finance, and it should have been out, but I waited two hours because some poor woman, I mean, they had to come up with creative finance.

He had four kids and they were trying to get themselves into a station wagon.

And the salesman was really good guy, so was the finance officer.

I didn't mind waiting.

They just said, we do what it takes to get them into a car.

Yeah.

And the used car market is just, I had a a 2006 Tundra that I paid $32,000.

And somebody came up to me in the parking lot and said, I'll pay you $18,000 for that.

And so the used car, in a weird way, a car that's about one or two years old, it's used, if it just has a $4,000 discount from a new one,

it'll sell.

People just don't have that money anymore.

They don't have it, even though they're, or they had it and they spent it under this inflationary

drunken spending by Joe Biden.

He's done so much damage.

That's why I really get angry at him when he goes out there and he mumbles and he slurs and he talks about Biden omics.

Then he goes to one of his three homes.

And we've talked about how he got his three homes on a senator's and vice president's salary.

He doesn't really care about people, whether it's

watched when people have died and the parents are grieving, or he tries to upstage mothers

killed in Afghanistan Afghanistan by lying about his son

dying in Iraq,

or that Bidenomics really is a great thing after it's destroyed a lot of families.

That's something that I don't think we've ever come to terms to, that this guy is not a nice person.

He wasn't a nice person before he got in.

He was a blowhard, pathological liar, a plagiarist.

And now with this senality, that in a very

Orwellian sense, that's a veneer that exempts him from criticism criticism because people say, oh, he's just senile.

He's just old Joe.

He's a nice guy.

He's not.

The veneer of his self-control has been rubbed off, and you're seeing him in the raw now, and it's not very pretty.

Right.

I still, we made fun of him because of the all the

criminality as the Corleons, but I, but I, I do think there is a deeper essence of the Corleons.

He's a very self-control.

He thinks he can get right into the physical space.

So when he has these young girls, he gets right next to them.

That one on the tarmac, I keep mentioning that he nibbled on her neck or tried to, and he blows in their hair as if they would like, they enjoy that.

He's such an egocentric narcissist.

And then he talks about these people have lost everything in Hawaii.

And he talks about losing his cat and his Corvair from a minor kitchen fire.

So he's a reprehensible person.

And unfortunately, he's our reprehensible person.

Yeah.

So anyway, I'm going to keep clubbing him.

But we've got all of you out there, if you're listening, I'm trying to describe Joe Biden in the raw because his policies and his leaderships are not to be recommended.

And that will be, we're going to have a podcast.

We're going to say, what do you do about it?

Because a lot of people have asked us.

And unfortunately, the Republicans have their own problems, not as existential or great as the Democrats, I think, but they still have a lot of problems by uniting behind a candidate and then winning.

And if they don't win, we're in big trouble.

So all you people out there that say, I'm not going to vote for this candidate if he doesn't get the nomination or not,

you will, because this choice that's coming up is going to be a stark one.

Four more years or five of this guy.

Well, Victor, we're going to wrap it up.

I do want to thank our listeners.

I want to also thank some of you who write me because you subscribe to Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter that I write for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic now, Amphil.

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And again, victorhanson.com.

Go there.

Victor, you just mentioned

some of the lies of Joe Biden or the

crassness to the gold star families.

And that'll be one of the,

let me read a comical comment first and then get a comical comment.

that we find from kindly left at iTunes or Apple, which you can leave comments there.

We read them and you can rate the show zero to five stars.

And Victor has a 4.9 plus average there.

So thanks, folks, who do that.

But this one is titled Victor Davis Handsome.

Quote, if Victor ever wanted a pseudonym for collecting bribes from Ukraine, there you go.

All the best.

It's signed Carlos Danger.

And this is Alan of Los Angeles.

Actually, there is a Victor David Handsome on

Twitter, and

he's a big fan.

He tweets a lot about you.

Sometimes I engage with him a little bit.

But anyway, thank you, Alan Los Angeles, for that pithy little thought uh oh also there was one called from uh buck the iguana who left this comment it's titled la mer and that's uh charles chenon was the french singer yes charles chenon la mer yeah we talked about that we want to put that song on i think it's gonna you're gonna have to pay royalty fees i will have to pay royalties just because the tinker told you

tinker taylor soldier spy when they're all getting their retribution or they're just desserts that that's the background song.

Yeah, well, I'm sure

they paid the channel to stay.

Yes, plenty of over that.

Okay, here's a comment, though, from left on

your website, Victor.

It's from Linda.

And

Linda writes, I too am a bereaved parent, and it is despicable as Biden actually takes advantage and changes circumstances of his experience of loss.

There are no words, this man is soulless.

Thank you.

That's a very good point.

For the election.

He is soulless.

Yeah, yeah.

He not just tries to hijack these commemorations and then outdo

his own tragedy, but he makes it up.

They're fantasies.

Well, Biden didn't die in Iraq.

He died tragically of a brain tumor in the United States.

Then he said that he's changed the story so many times.

He died of a burn pit.

We don't know that.

We don't know that.

And

he always alters the story about everything.

And he's never, and the funny thing is, he's coming off a media that had a whole section on Donald Trump's lies, the Washington Post.

I think they said there was a lot of people.

Democracy dies in darkness, right?

Yeah, a lie every 14 minutes of his presidency, they told us.

They completely dropped that because

Donald Trump was exaggerating.

He didn't make up, he didn't say that he lost a member of his family or he didn't do stuff like that.

Yeah, there's actually, we shouldn't get into this, but there's this Washington Post correspondent, Phil Bump, who was on the podcast.

Did you see that?

And he's like, they will not.

Joe Biden could say he was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald.

They asked Phil Bump.

They will not reply.

Point blank.

Did you read the laptop?

Did it not say that Hunter Biden, did he not say that he gave, he had to give half his income to Joe?

Did he?

Well, I don't know.

Maybe.

Oh, I didn't know.

Or sort of.

Yeah.

No, they will not admit it because it's not, for them it's a religious experience right just like russian collusion and laptop disinformation and the first impeachment they're all religious experience they require faith of a devoted

yeah

and they're not they're never they're never going to be apostates anyway well okay linda also said that she remembers you in her daily prayers so that's wonderful thank you linda thanks everyone i appreciate that very much yeah everyone who comments and listens, thanks.

Spread the word,

share the show.

Go to victorhanson.com.

Thanks, Victor.

Happy birthday, Victor.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

We'll be back soon.

I'm turning 60, so I don't know what it's like.

Well, if you were Joe Biden, you'd be 30.

You could just say.

Well, okay.

Thanks, everyone.

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