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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, and we are recording on Sunday, the 20th.

And I mentioned that because it's a few days before an expected Republican debate when we're recording.

And we'll save the commentary on that from Victor for his forthcoming discussion with the great

Sammy Wink.

So just a little temporal context.

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

His website, The blade of perseus has an address victorhandson.com i'll tell you more about that in a little bit i did mention the debates victor because there's a pre-debate story and that's donald trump is not going to participate in it and instead he is going to do a long interview with tucker carlson and victor i'm sure our listeners would like to get your thoughts on that A number of people have written me asking for your thoughts on another Republican candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, who's also come out with his Ten Commandments.

So we'll get your perspective on that, Victor, and a few other things, including Joe Biden, who's just a cold-hearted SOB.

Your thoughts, Victor?

Wait, good old Joe Biden from Scranton?

That's right.

Come on.

I'm sorry, Joe.

I'm sorry.

I almost called you Joe there, Victor.

Sorry.

Yeah, he is.

You ain't Jack,

you junkie.

Put you all back in,

Put you all back in chain.

Everybody knew that Joe Biden was a caricature.

He was never a nice guy.

He espouted, whether it was James O.

Eastland or Strong Thurman, he cozy up to segregationist.

When he ran for president, he was kicked.

He had to remove himself for lying about his own transcript, for plagiarizing Neil Kinnick's speech.

When he ran again, he said that Barack Obama, his rival, was the first black, clean, articulate, whatever that meant, I don't know.

I thought, surely Chisholm was pretty clean and articulate myself.

And then his third race,

he started off, you know, hey, fat, hey, you lying, ponyface, dogface, pony soldier.

Hey, junkie, hey, you ain't black, just on and on and on.

He got a total exemption.

And then it's not just that he lies,

but he lies about things that are very,

taboo to lie about.

There's a gold star mother.

And rather than listen to her plight, he lies about his own son.

He always has to up, whatever the conversation is, he always has to be the

one who suffered the most.

Victor, there's

a degree of callousness

in politics that with him that seems to rival that character.

Is it Francis Urquhart from

the British,

what's the game of, not Game of Thrones, I forget the name of the political series,

that Kevin Spacey, the American version

here, but just utter callousness.

Well, Victor, we're going to talk about all those things, and we'll start off, though, with the debate.

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

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Back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So Victor,

a Republican debate is coming up this forthcoming week.

Again, we're recording on Sunday the 20th.

Donald Trump will not be participating.

Donald Trump has

done a flanking action, political flanking action.

He will not only not participate, he will be interviewed by Tucker Carlson in one of Tucker's Twitter.

interviews that then many of them have received like tens of millions of views.

So,

I don't know,

seems a strategically wise thing.

But your thoughts, Victor?

I see the logic that it's strategically wise.

He's a front runner, so he can't expand that large lead conceivably much

further if he gets on stage.

But Donald Trump is Donald Trump.

He's a larger-than-life figure.

So we're to expect that he's not going to debate his peers.

I understand some of them are non-existent candidates,

Asa Hutchinson, people like that, and that it's a leveling effect to be on the same stage with him.

But nevertheless, he's the head of the Republican Party, de facto.

And everybody who goes on that stage is pledged to report, to support the winning candidate.

So what he's doing is he's saying,

I'm the front runner.

And as soon as I get the nomination, I want everybody on this stage and everybody to rally behind me.

In fact, his supporters have already called on people to drop out and rally around.

But he's also saying that in

the contingency, if I don't get it, I'm not going to necessarily endorse the winner because I don't want to debate and make that pledge.

So I don't, I think given his position, that's not necessarily so wise.

And more importantly, we haven't seen Donald Trump one-on-one with hostile people.

And that's what he was good at.

In other words, he has the rallies and he has the

usually softball interviews.

But he's good at repartee.

So that's how he became famous.

He went on that first debate and destroyed all the

low energy jab, little market, Marco, lying, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul.

He did all of that.

But now

he's not going to go on there and do what people want him to see.

How he reacts I haven't seen this in years.

They want to see how he's up to it, his old form.

So I think that would be very good if he would go on stage, mix it up, show people that even though he's ahead, he doesn't have to do this, but he's going to A, support the nominee, and he wants everybody to support the nominee, and B,

even at

76, he can outdebate much younger people.

I think it's a mistake.

And then the third aspect of it is if he doesn't want to go on there and he wants to play by traditional political arithmetic that frontrunners don't do anything that would be

unnecessary,

then

why try to destroy his own party's evening by deliberately scheduling an interview with Tucker Carlson?

And he knows that Tucker's at war and with Fox and Fox is at war with Tucker, so that this is sort of a get even.

And so forget Fox for a minute, but he's trying to diminish the audience of his party, not just the audience of his rivals.

That's what I'm getting at.

And it looks petulant.

Will it hurt him?

I don't think it'll hurt him politically, but long term,

I don't think that the leader of the Republican Party and the would-be president just skips out on a debate.

And

I don't see how that creates this image of a

sure winner or a man that knows how to run things, or a man that can take on all commerce, or a man that wants to unite his party, defeat this Biden disaster.

It doesn't channel into that.

I'm sure that everybody's gone through all the traditional arguments why you don't do that in his position.

But there's a lot of people out there that want to see Donald Trump.

They want to see him on stage.

They haven't seen him in a long time.

And they want to see him in venues other than talking to Tucker Carlson or talking to

you know a friendly reporter or a Sean Hannity.

They just want to see him as

a politician and mix it up.

Yeah.

Well, you're right.

That's part of his

political appeal.

And Victor, you had written many, well, I would say many times, but back in 2016, when I have argued in the past, you were probably the most astute political observer.

This great classicist and military historian out politically assessed the political assessment class.

You have made the point of the cunning, you call it, you know, he has an animal instinct, and that seems to appeal to a lot of people.

And it's

right, it's not on display in a.

I always thought he was going to win.

I wrote that he was going to win the debates in 2016.

I knew he was going to win the nomination.

And I wrote that he would likely be president because because he had that animal cunning and that instinct for the jugler vein.

And he destroys people if you give him enough room.

The only time he didn't do that,

and I had written about that, the only time he didn't do that was the first debate with Joe Biden, where he took the advice of Christie and Giuliani and others to rattle an enfeeble Joe Biden.

But he didn't.

have enough time to do that an hour and a half.

He should have, they canceled the third debate.

He should have demanded the third

debates time be added on the first two.

And so if he had another hour, two and a half hours, if he was calm like he was in the second debate and methodically rattled off facts after two hours, then he could have rattled Joe Biden.

But instead, he came off as

using,

exhibiting his negative qualities and hiding his positive qualities.

And that was a disaster.

Other than that one debate, he's done wonderfully in debates.

He never turned down any offer.

If he was on the beach,

believe me, in Florida, and there was this Maui disaster, and he was president, and somebody walked up

unannounced or through the press

fence, climbed the fence, or went through the string or the tape or whatever you're supposed to keep out of and said, hey, Mr.

President, when are you going to visit Maui?

And he would have said, I'm on my way right now.

I'll go right now.

Or he said, come over here.

Let me talk to you.

I'll explain.

That's what he would do.

And then he wouldn't care if he made a gaff or anything.

And that was what was attractive about him.

He talked to anybody anytime.

He drove his handlers crazy.

So that's his strength, to be with the people.

And I think he should do it.

And I think

if he loses four or five points in his lead, it won't hurt him.

But I think long-term it'll hurt him if he continues not to show up because they're just going to attack him and attack him and attack him and attack him.

In his defense,

Mike Pence hasn't hasn't said that he would debate, as I understand it, and endorse the winner.

That's kind of strange for the vice president, former vice president, not to make a commitment that he would endorse the Republican nominee.

I don't think anybody in a party, if you're an independent, third candidate, who cares, but anybody in a party who won't endorse a person who's the titular head should be ashamed of themselves and leave the party.

That's what got me so angry about these never Trump people.

Not just the Bill Crystal, the David from

forget those guys.

They're now where they always wanted to be.

I'm talking about people like Mitt Romney.

You know what I mean?

I mean,

if you're a Republican and you're in the party and it's 51% better than the alternative, then you vote for your party.

Otherwise, just be an independent.

Well,

Victor,

we're going to get your thoughts a little more elaborated on you.

You raised the Maui

incident, and I think that ties in with what you also mentioned about the gold star on mom.

And let's put that aside for the time being, because

we could use a little more concentration.

But maybe sticking with the debates or tenuously here, one debater

is Vivek Ramaswamy.

And a number of people I know have written me and have asked if I could ask about you directly about your thoughts on him.

But

as this podcast approached, so did some headlines about

Brahmaswamy.

Two things to note, Victor, and then please give your take on him.

One was how he has risen in the polls.

Now, this is

some polls have him neck and neck in second place with

Ron DeSantis at 10, 14 points, quite distant from Trump in first place.

And I know polls are polls.

It's a long way to go.

But that's interesting how he seems to be catching on.

And I'll say, I did see him at a

conservative event earlier in this year.

There's no questioning.

The guy is very engaging with the crowd and people,

he's very appealing.

He talks pretty damn quickly, but he still has an appeal.

The other thing about him, he came out with his

Ten Commandments.

And this very quick, Victor, they are, God is real.

There are two genders.

Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.

Reverse racism is racism.

An open border is no border.

Parents determine the education of their children.

The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.

Capitalism lifts people up from poverty.

There are three branches of the U.S.

government, not four.

And the final, the U.S.

Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.

You know, pretty succinct Ten Commandments, like the original Ten Commandments.

And I don't know how anyone could not find these appealing, anyone who's not some leftist.

So there you have it, Victor.

What are your thoughts on Vivek Ramaswamy?

Ah, well, he's very effective.

I mean, he's not just worth $600 million at 30-something that he made on his own, started with nothing, so to speak.

But he's very, what he's trying to do is channel traditional American values, nuclear family, but put them in the context of what

is ruining America.

So when he says, you know,

no border, what we have now, an open border is no border, or there's two gender, he's talking about contemporary issues.

And he's trying to make a

collage of about 10 things that if you were to follow his advice, then you you would be doing two things.

You would be consistent to what made American great, culturally, socially, politically, economically,

but you would also be addressing particular crisis that's destroying America.

And so that was pretty clever what he's doing.

His brand is he's very

well-spoken and almost glib.

And

he likes to mix it up with people who disagree with him, and he doesn't get angry.

He's not like Joe Biden, or he

get off the grass

or he doesn't do the, get off the grass, would you hear what I'm going to say?

That creepy stuff,

none of that.

And,

you know, Donald Trump gets angry at people, but for all the guys said he was so mean, he actually didn't hold grudges and he didn't try to,

you know, he made fun of it.

He twittered bad things, but he

also had kind of a live and let live attitude when he was engaging in conversation.

Ram Swami has that.

And

the only question is: we've had these candidates before, Jack.

We've had,

do you remember the Ben Carson effect?

That we just, just,

I don't know what moment we lost our romance with Ben Carson.

It might have been when they asked him about NATO and things.

He didn't really understand the importance of NATO, its historical function, or why we were committed to it, our foreign policy.

But

anyway,

we had Mike Huckleby.

Remember the authentic Mike Huckleby of 2008?

We were kind of tired of

Romney and McCain, and he came along as kind of a nice guy that was more conservative than either, but happy warrior.

And Howard Dean, yeah, but they always hit something, and that is when they're not known, or they're not known from politics, or they're not, there's a reason.

And Ramashwami was known as a brilliant entrepreneur, hedge fund, operator, biotech guy, but outside of that small circle, he wasn't.

Whereas Donald Trump has been a fixture for a half century.

But it's very hard for somebody with no political experience

to be given the nomination of one of the two parties.

Donald Trump pulled it off because he was the anti-Republican and anti-Democrat, but yet he wasn't a third party candidate.

And Ramashwami is trying to do that, but

there's Trump in the room and there's dissenters there.

So I think what he's trying to do now is show people that he has a sunnier disposition.

He's better spoken.

He's upbeat.

He's much younger.

He's much more energetic than Trump and others.

And

I'm sure that

If he behaves himself in the sense, he doesn't melt down or there's not some scandal.

i mean and be sure jack if he gets up another five points the left-wing uh

machine will find out something he said or did 30 years ago and will and try to destroy our illusions about him but he he's a perfect vice presidential candidate so we'll maybe we'll see that or a cabinet member or something like that i don't think he's going to make the presidency though

There's already a non-politician in the race.

There's already a younger person called DeSantis.

And there's another outsider with limited political experience that's waiting in the wings called Yunken.

So

he's not the only eccentric or

different candidate.

And just because you're appealing, you may be very appealing.

I think he's very appealing in his ways.

I don't know.

It's up to everybody.

Subjectiveness.

Can you see him as president?

No, I can't.

I I mean, I'd like to see somebody from India as president.

That would be a good idea because there's a large, successful community, so I have no problem with that.

But it's just that I want to know

what he's been like over time and space.

I want to see him in a long, long campaign.

I want to know exactly what he's going to do.

He has kind of a contract for America.

It sounds very good.

He really drives the left crazy because he's very dark skinned, and they're obsessed with skin color and superficial appearances.

And yet he has two things the left hates.

He's more pro-American than they are, far more, and he's much smarter and articulate than they are.

So he's not just,

you know,

I don't know.

Ben Carson is a very brilliant surgeon, but he said things or he didn't think things out or he didn't have enough experience to be the outsider that Robin Swami is.

And

so I think

he does a lot of good.

I'd like to see him

really debate with DeSantis and Trump.

And I think it would be something to watch.

But

the only final thing is I am very suspicious.

And this is nothing against

Vivek.

Vybek, is that his name?

Is that how I want to pronounce it right?

Well, I say you say Vivek, I say Vivek, but Vivek, maybe the combination of the.

No, I usually mispronounce things, but that's all right.

It's part of your allure.

I would say that

a lot of people are very distrustful of people coming out of the tech world or the financial world, especially if we conflate it with Silicon Valley.

I just, I don't know, there's something about, I guess it's my proximity to that place, but I heard

a very multi-billionaire Silicon Valley person speak the other night.

He's a very brilliant guy, very successful, very kind, very nice.

But when they were talking about San Francisco, they asked him why people were leaving and would it hurt the tech, he seemed oblivious to the destruction of the city.

if you knew what I mean.

He didn't want to talk about homelessness.

He didn't want to talk about smash and grab.

He He didn't want to talk about medieval filth on the street.

He didn't want to talk about any of that.

And so

they don't, I don't know what it is about the tech people.

I think they have a sense that because they made so much money so young and so quickly, that that is proof or that is a testament that they're morally superior and they're smarter than everybody.

Everyone I've dealt with, and I lived near, I worked near Silicon Valley, every one of them has a certain air about them that you're you're supposed to be

completely impressed by them.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

There, I think, part of what, and I've talked about this, I just wrote an article for Roger Kimball at New Criterion on

Oliver Anthony's Richmond, North of Richmond.

Yeah, it's what, yeah, it's what he's talking about when he says he's an old soul in a new world.

He Yes, certainly.

I don't know.

He's very interesting.

I don't want to get off topic, but he's a very interesting.

Well, go because this is intriguing.

Go ahead.

Yeah, he's a very interesting guy.

I mean,

he comes out of nowhere.

He writes this, it's really a beautiful song, as I said with Sammy.

He modulates his voice.

He has a weird rhyme.

He has

they're not homonyms, homographics, where he has two words

that

sound the same,

but they're not the same word.

So he says,

rich men and rich mund, Virginia, are miners that dig and miners on Jeffrey Epstein's Island.

And then he hits you out of the blue with obesity subsidized by the government and Jeffrey Epstein, but you are not expecting it.

And he modulates his voice.

He shouts.

He's quiet.

He's introspective.

He's ecumenical, but he's also angry.

And then he had a little biojack he put on the internet.

It was fascinating.

I saw that.

Yeah.

$750 trailer.

He lives by himself.

He said he's a failure, that he's not a nice person, that he's not a good musician, that he doesn't have a good voice.

He does have a good voice.

I can't adjudicate his musicality, but

I was very intrigued by him because he...

Why did 25 million people download?

And why did the left go after him?

I was reading what the left was writing about him.

It was just incredible that he deserves mockery, that he's a right-wing nut.

All of this white this and white that.

Why were they so angry at him?

And the reason I'm making this is there's he hit number one on all the charts, right?

Yeah, globally, globally, globally.

We have never seen it before.

Never.

Never, never, never.

So he hit all of those

markers

and the left went crazy.

But you know what the second song is on the billboard charts?

The second one.

It's not right.

It's not, he has a lot of them on there, but it's not one of his.

It's by a rapper.

I know that people are going to say, Victor, where the hell have you been?

Everybody knows this.

But I don't.

Don't tell me.

Have you ever heard of a rapper called

Gunner?

Like he's a gunman or something?

I plead the fifth.

No.

Well, he has has a new song, and it's called F,

the F-word with you mean,

up you mean.

And

it's number two, Jack.

And all these people on the left, these elites, are saying this man is,

this Oliver Anthony's a baleful influence on America.

He's dangerous.

He's whipping up resentment.

This is a guy who has $750 trailer and he has nothing.

And he had a head injury that put him out of work.

Kind of sympathetic because I got a concussion a few days ago from a falling brick.

I was working on a wall, and so I know what that's like.

So, you know, when he said, I'm not a good musician, I'm not a very, he said, I'm not a very good person.

He said, he spent five years struggling with his health.

And then, just when you think, well, he's just trying to be Arnold Schwarzenegger with planned career enhancement steps.

He's got it all planned.

No,

he said, I don't want six tour.

I think he said, I don't want six tour buses.

I don't want a jet.

I don't want, was was it tractor trailer?

I don't want even to play in a stadium.

I just wrote the music.

I was suffering from mental health.

I want to get back to bluegrass.

I didn't want any editing.

I don't want any bulls.

What do you say?

I'm just an idiot with a guitar.

Well, by the way, Victor, what if he did want those things?

What would be wrong with that?

Nothing's wrong, hypothetically.

But they would say, well, he's just out for the money, but he's not.

He's not trying to whip up people for his career.

He wants, as he says, to be a voice of the middle class.

And by the way, the working middle class, the East Palestine, Ohio people.

And the left hates him because he's the wrong color, the wrong region, the wrong zip code, the wrong gender, the wrong religion.

In that song, he mentions the Lord twice, and he wishes that this would all go away almost as a prayer light.

And,

you know, he's the kind of person that John McCain called a crazy or a hobbit or a brazen bird right yes a crazy bird and biden called them uh dregs and he called them chomps and obama started it with clingers and hillary trumped him with deplorables and irredeemables and

you know

it was really funny because they really got angry when he said

he said you know if you're five foot three is that what and 300 pounds and the tax our taxes shouldn't pay for your fudge.

Uh, fudge rounds.

Everybody said, Wow, this is just fat-shaming.

Well, who fat-shamed?

And who said that we shouldn't?

Don't we remember your mayor, Jack, uh, Mike Bloomberg?

Didn't he go after super size?

He wanted to outlaw it because, in his infinite wisdom, poor people were buying this sugary corn syrup stuff.

Michelle Obama was

school lunch.

Why do we subscribe?

And then, so I thought the left would like that, yeah.

But if you live in Malibu, and by the way, if you live in Malibu and Manhattan, you don't see that.

If you live in Central Valley of California and or you go to rural Michigan, southern rural Michigan, like I do every summer, and you see people who were morbidly obese with Mountain Dew

cases with five or six EB2 cards trying to figure out who gave what to you or where'd you get this one or this one's expired.

So

he's lived that.

And then

what i didn't get was if the left is going to attack the person's song because it has a baleful influence you remember when uh what was his name lamar kendrick to pimp a butterfly that rapper that obama brought in he that that that song that obama loved had the n-word in it yeah and he also said we hate popo i wrote an article about that's why i remember it we hate popo so that was okay

and

you know i

when I was writing this article, I wrote down some of the lyrics from the number two song on the billboards, Jack, the one that nobody's talking about, and it's just about as popular as Oliver Anthony's song that they're all angry about because they say it sends a mean message.

Here's what I wrote down.

And I can't say this on the air.

Well, you can beep yourself.

Okay.

Here's one line.

Fing this bitch like a perv.

Smack her from the back, grab her perm.

Ice the burr, oh,

the Sing S-H-I-T-T-I-N-G on all your turds.

Can't take the D-I-C-K your turn, or suck with no hands, you can learn.

Watch me grow it like a worm, get down to the gritty, then

F-U-C-K up the city.

All of my bitches is pretty.

They're showing their titties.

It's It's up to the ceiling.

And it goes on and on like that.

It's the most foul, grotesque, insane, stupid thing I've ever heard in my life.

And I haven't heard one person say this is absolute misogyny.

It's filth.

And at a time when our cities are overrun with violence and smash and grab and looting and shoplifting, this guy says that get down to the gritty when you F up the city.

And what did Mr.

Anthony say?

He said, everybody, he wishes, he wishes, Lord, it would all go away.

And then he says in his bio, I just want to make people happy.

I'm not a Republican or a Democrat.

And they hate him.

And yet they excuse this stuff.

Or they, somebody's buying it outside the rapper community.

Nobody says a word.

And then they say, well, he's out for money.

He lives in a $750 trailer.

You know what else is in that song?

That stupid F you,

you men, you know.

Yeah, number two.

Yes, number two.

He says he brags about his, I didn't even know what it is, a Bentley Spur?

What's a Bentley Spur?

I've never seen a Bentley.

I've never seen a spur.

And then I found out, I went on the internet.

A Bentley Spur is a top-of-the-line Bentley.

It's about $300,000.

So here you have this guy who became fabulously wealthy off this filth, this racism, this anti-police, this call for violence, this misogyny, this hatred, this pornography.

And he's bragging about his $300,000 car.

And we're going after some guy from Appalachia that has nothing who's trying, wrestling with mental health issues.

And he's trying to write a song that encapsulates the lost red state or middle state, Midwest that were the great losers

of globalization.

He didn't know his place, Victor, right?

You know what else I think they hated about?

I was thinking of that.

I think when he said Richmond,

rich men north of Richmond, you know, the freeway, 85, whatever it is from Richmond.

95, 95.

Yeah, right up.

I lived there, in Fredericksburg, yeah.

Yeah, you know, those are the people, right, Jack, that north of Richmond is where the people in the Beltway are.

And they're the richmen, and they're the ones that think they know everything.

And as he quotes that line, they think you don't know.

They think they know everything, and they try to control.

But you remember after

Trump was elected for just a brief flashing moment, Peggy Noonan thought she was going to cash in or jump in on the mega bandwide.

And she wrote articles like how global elites forsake their country and they didn't nourish people.

That's before she flipped back to her Beltwell.

That was kind of like, uh-oh.

Maybe we wealthy Beltway creatures

didn't know what was going on.

And then there was, remember that one that David Brooks just wrote?

He wrote something like, are the elite anti-Trumpers the bad guys?

He didn't mean it, but he wanted to throw that out there.

Like, I'm sensitive to the fact that people like me are despised for the way we think, act, and look down at other people.

So, what I'm getting at is one of the reasons they hate this guy is he's trying to tell the world, these people,

with all this money and all this influence and all this networking and all the the cash they made out of globalization, offshoring, outsourcing, all the political control they want to

censor your speech.

They want to have two laws, one for you, one for them.

Nobody likes them.

They run the world and nobody likes them and nobody should like them.

That's what he's saying.

And they screw over the United States.

Man, you can see what's happening to the United States.

All these best and brightest gave us Portland.

They gave us San Francisco.

They gave us the open border.

They gave us begging Saudi Arabia for oil.

They gave us

the Ukraine war.

They gave us, you know, I don't mean that they caused the Ukraine war, but when Joe Biden said he didn't care if there was a minor invasion, that green lighted

Ukraine, especially after the greatest humiliation in 50 years since Vietnam, which was the Afghanistan skedaddle.

So they screw up everything.

And this guy is saying, nobody likes it.

We're sick of it.

And that everybody's responding to that.

And I think a person like Peggy Noonan or David Brooks will, hmm.

But all the people we know are the right people.

They went to the right schools.

They have the right letters after their name.

They dress the right way.

They talk the right way.

They live in the right zip codes.

They know.

It's like that old line, right?

The person, how did Nixon win?

I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon.

Pauling Kahl, the critic, said that.

Yeah.

And then you remember that.

So when he said that thing, and I wrote that down, Lord knows they all just want to have total control, want to know what you think, want to know what you do, and they don't think you know, but I know that you do.

Yeah.

I wish I could just wake up and it not be true, but it is.

Oh, it is.

He has a lot of rhythm and modulation and musicality in that song because there's a lot of protest songs and a lot of populist song that come come out of Nashville every day, not that he did, but every day, and they die in obscurity.

His didn't.

And it wasn't just the message, it was the way he's, he has a good voice.

And it was the way he changed the variety of the song, the emphases, the sound, the tone.

By the way, Victor, you don't even have to have a great voice.

Bob Dylan didn't have a great voice, but he somehow or other was really appealing, right?

So I'm not comparing him here, but

this song, The Guy Connects.

He does.

And

for the left to go out, you know, Rolling Stone went after.

Jack,

our former employer went after National Review.

I mean, just, I don't want to, don't make me cry here.

It was just, I like the guy that I won't mention his name, the name that shall not be spoken.

I like him.

I've liked what he writes.

He was from Oklahoma.

He's not an elite, but he went into the whole, he went full National Review and said, why doesn't he get a job?

Or there's plenty of jobs out there.

Well,

maybe he got hit in the head and he got a skull fracture for six months.

Or maybe he didn't graduate.

He left high school at 17.

Or maybe if you lived in that environment, as we know from JD bands, it's not an easy environment to get out of, but he did get out of it.

He did get out of it.

He did get out of it.

He learned how to play the guitar, the resonator guitar.

And he did a lot of good things.

And now he's somehow done something that no other person has ever done without any prior hit song his song was number one on every chart and you know what it's really weird i did an experiment jack i i i went to charts you know and

enters uh the internet and they try to suppress that as much as they can they will say uh the hot top not that they they have the actual ratings because they have that would they can't quite lie that much but they say

this month's greatest hits or what's what's cooking and they have all these other songs, but they never mention his song, which is being downloaded more than any other song.

And

I don't know, I don't know what's going to happen to him.

I don't know how long he he's written a couple of, I read, you know, I don't have a dollar.

I read, I listened, I listened to about seven songs when I was writing this essay for the new criterion.

And, And,

you know, I just thought, wow,

we don't say a word about some thug who is a convicted felon,

uses a word called gunna

about killing people at a time when black youth are being massacred by gangs in the inner city.

and who brags about the ostentatious wealth that he's accrued from these vile songs by buying a Bentley.

And we don't say anything to the graphic language about forcing a woman to perform oral intercourse or pushing her head down or all these bizarre or anal, this scatological stuff.

We don't say a word.

And then we have a guy who mentions the Lord and he wishes he wakes up and it wasn't true and gives a little biography.

He didn't go on TV.

He wrote it online.

And

may have been, I don't know, transparent, it may have been simplistic, but it was honest.

And we don't like that guy.

And I think the reason is, is that

he's somebody who says, you know what?

I know you guys made out in globalization.

I know you in the media, the universities, politics, the corporations, tech, you all had skills that you could translate to a 7 billion person market.

And I know everybody in Appalachia and everybody in northern Ohio and rural Arkansas,

they were offshored or outsourced because there's a lot of muscles out there outside the United States that can assemble and manufacture and pump and drill and mine and grow.

Okay, we get that.

But that does not make you smarter and it does not make you more moral and it doesn't give you the authority to look down and try to control people's lives, tell them how to, what this, they can do here.

And there's three genders there and gotta like Ramaswamy was talking about and so this this guy is public enemy number one among our elite and he's hero number one among the majority of Americans well if you if you the thing about number two Victor is it's not condemnable because

this you could I guess you could condemn the song itself and I guess you could but the fact that it's number two means it's resonating in a certain community and if you condemn the song it's resonating among

the community right it's not just resonating among the african-american inner city it's resonating among white elites as well who kind of think they're slumming by listening to lyrics talking about killing people and screwing effing the the city up

How can anybody who lives in the Bay Area, who walks through San Francisco and sees the latest thing this week with

two fellows and a Lexus, a Lexus,

going slowly down the street, stopping at each potentially

expensive car and breaking the windows and grabbing the stuff within 20 seconds and stealing, or when people are in the street walking up and hitting people or defecating or injecting or urinicating or assaulting or fornicating, et cetera.

How can anybody who sees that want to go out and buy a record when the singer says, I'm going to

go out and F the city?

And it doesn't make any sense.

Why would you want to do that?

Or when he talks about women in this

right on the heels of the Me Too,

right?

I mean,

we destroyed

Al Franken for putting his hand on a sleeping, you know, just putting his hand on some woman breast

as a joke.

We destroyed his senatorial career.

We destroyed a lot of people.

We destroyed Garrison Keeler

for being a little bit too chummy.

We surely didn't destroy

Joe Biden,

Tara Reed, or no, I guess we have to change that.

The nibbler.

Remember, he was not nibbling, turkey gobbler.

He was turkey gobbling that poor girl's little child's neck on a tarmac.

I guess it was in Finland.

But right on the heel of all that, then we have a number two song where the person is talking about crude sexual acts and violence against women and calling them names.

I don't understand that.

I don't understand.

If any other singer did that, they would be persona non grata.

And yet we do that.

And again, then we could correlate it with what we're doing to Mr.

Anthony.

At least the elites are.

And I wish him well.

I really do.

And I'll see if it'd be a great, it's a big temptation when you're the, at this little window of opportunity, you are the most listened to voice in the world.

And there are people offering him, what, $8 million immediately, all of these contracts.

He's from an impoverished family, could help everybody.

And instead, he says, I don't want to semi-trucks.

I don't want the tour buses.

That's not going to make him popular.

among his peers in the country business nor the people who run it.

And so he did that.

So I really admire him.

Well, hope we hear more from him, Victor.

And as you're talking, I'm thinking, gosh, I wish he would, Victor, have a conversation with him on a special

bad for him because

a couple of Fox people have mentioned that they've been trying to get him.

They've just asked and asked.

I think Tucker's been after him.

Joe Rogan's been, everybody's after him.

I think he knows that

comparing tiny things to big things, you know, when I write and I get a book that sells well or I write something and then you talk about that book or you're on two or three podcasts a day or three or four talks a week, and you're not writing and

you're not in the situation

that created this stuff that you're being asked about.

You're also talking about yourself constantly, which has got to be

unappealing at some level.

When I go over every week to Palo Alto, I just assume that aside from the four hours one way and the four hours the other way,

that 48 hours or 72, whatever it is, is a total loss as far as creativity and production.

You cannot write.

I don't know how anybody writes because

You get there and you see friends, you like people there, people come in your office, they talk.

Some people gossip.

You go here, you go there, you speak to this group.

And then the next thing you know, you think, wow, I left Tuesday morning.

It's Thursday night.

I haven't written a thing.

I haven't read anything.

I haven't done anything.

I've just talked, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

So maybe he has an instinctual

sense that if he were to do this, it would be non-ending.

And then it's almost a paradox because when you do that, you have doomed yourself that nobody will want to hear you or talk to you very soon because you're not going to do anything.

You'll be a flash in the pan because what makes people want to talk to you is the fact that you're very productive and that you have songs or books or ideas.

But if you just talk about it and try to hawk it, then you're not going to produce any more.

And that's the problem.

And so you have to keep away, you have to find a way to keep that away.

For me, it was living out in the middle of nowhere.

And in fact, places where

people think, if I

would rather die and go to hell than where you live.

And so that was my insulation.

But I like the idea that he understands that.

And he's so young that he at a very early age.

Well, Victor, this is a little bit, this is not what he's doing is not comical, but kind of reminds me of that Gary Cooper movie, Mr.

Deeds Goes to Town.

That was a movie, great movie.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, so what?

I have a lot of money or the potential of it.

Anyway, Victor, we're going to move on.

That was a great,

but if you need to go down a side alley, Victor, you should go because your instincts are.

Well,

I just got in this mood and

I just went nuts for, I don't know what it was, six hours and wrote 3,200 words.

And so I was, I don't know where it came from, but it's, I had it in my mind, so I want to get it all off my mind.

Well, we're going to talk a little bit, Victor, the time we have left.

We have time for two topics, both related to Bidens, one the

Joe, and the other Hunter.

And we'll get to

those topics right after these important messages.

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So Victor, mentioned before, Biden, the cold-hearted, the callous.

So the repeated no comment comments about

the disaster in Hawaii, which to me, I counterpointed a little bit.

I'm sure you have and others have with, what the hell?

When George W.

Bush

didn't go to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or how

he did go, well, he did, but he didn't go immediately, right?

Well, he was on his way to Washington.

He looked out the window and they took a picture of him.

But as soon as he got to Washington, because

he had to get back to do something, he went down there, he put on waiters, he went around, and then we had, it didn't matter.

The left said they wanted to destroy his administrative second term.

Almost immediately, he was at Kenya West said he hates black people.

And that's what they just unleashed.

And then he just ended up just pouring money.

And they had that crazy mayor, Noggin.

Is that Nagan?

That guy?

The

Chocolate City mayor

who went to jail.

Yeah, he was a crook.

They had a terrible governor, and they had a terrible everything.

And yet, Biden has these optics that he's sitting on a beach

in front of his 6,000 square foot home.

I guess it was almost $3 million he purchased.

Somehow he had the wherewithal just a year after he left the presidency, vice presidency, 2017.

He's sitting there, and you juxtapose that picture with that moonscape on a beach in Maui, and somebody just wants to ask,

What's he going to do?

And he just says, no comment.

And why couldn't he just bring the world's attention?

Why couldn't he?

You know what he should do?

He should get in a C-17

and fly over there and sit in a cockpit with the Air Force pilots and land and then make a huge tent city with hot food and water and medical supplies and get everybody housed while they fly in all sorts of stuff to start rebuilding

or walk through the ashes and tell America, these people are vulnerable, and we're not going to have them forced to sell out to big hotels or developers.

These are their homes, and I guarantee you, we're going to help them rebuild.

What's so hard about that?

Right.

Well, we'll be more apt to find them spending money in Ukraine to rebuild than within the United States.

No, absolutely.

Well, Victor, the other callousness was this,

and you mentioned it also.

This is, I'm looking at the Daily Mail and the Gold Star mom.

mom.

I'm scrolling here.

Sorry, Paula Self, whose son was one of the 13 who were killed by the terrorist, or 14, I forget, sorry.

Army Staff Sergeant Ryan Christian Knauss.

And

his mom went to the White House.

There was some

gathering of Gold Star.

parents, which I find a little shocking that Biden even had that.

Here's what the story says.

says: During a meeting in the Oval Office, Biden told her, I can understand if you're angry.

I stood face to face with him, eyeball to eyeball, she continued,

saying, I began to weep.

Then she told the president, it should never have happened this way.

He stood there stoically self-recounted, as opposed to getting an apology or a hug.

Nothing out of his mouth except, Would you like to get a photo with me?

That was it.

So, Victor, i mean i

i'm just no i'm not i am shocked i'm shocked he's so effing callous if it's if you look up callous in the dictionary i'm sure joe biden's face is there i'm sorry go ahead well i mean he also took that occasion with some others to lie again about

the sad death of his son and said that he died and i i know he shipped home in a coffin from that was a complete lie how can you lie to somebody in mourning how can you do any of that he's

we get back to this existential problem jack is that

we feel that because he's senile he's cognitively challenged that something has happened to joe biden no nothing has happened to joe biden the only thing that has happened to joe biden is that the protective veneer that a

sane person has, a cognitively engaged person has, that filters out his essence is eroded because of his mental incapacity.

So you're seeing not just an occasional Joe Biden who espoused, you know, corn pop racist stories or bragged about,

you know, talked about the jungle of the 70s and all that stuff, or flipped all over on Iraq or harassed and really tried to demean Clarence Thomas.

But you're seeing that constantly because there was no filter now.

Right.

And what you see is what he always was.

He was a mean SOB.

Right.

And he was a total fraud.

He was a mediocrity that was kind of a good-looking, glad-handling.

It's good old Joe, nice guy.

And then he created, he was

not at the top of his law school.

He did not get the scholarship.

He did not write that speech himself.

He was a plagiarist and a liar.

And he was a mean person in the Senate.

And he probably did sexually penetrate Tara Reed.

And he had a bad habit of grabbing and trying to get cheap feels.

Even who was the, is it Scott Brown was the senator from Massachusetts, Jack?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So he was going to punch him out if he

didn't give an interview and told him to stop it.

Yeah.

I think he threatened him.

Yeah.

Scott Brown's wife is, well, it doesn't matter what she looks like, but she's an attractive lady.

And yeah, Biden was a little too handsy with her.

I think he was at the swearing in.

When I was a professor in Fresno, there was a very prominent, wealthy guy.

And he had dinners, and he helped the university.

But he was notorious for Bidenism.

In other words, his technique was not to grab some girl openly.

But to say, come on and sit down at my table.

And then he had these hands that were like octopus tentacles.

They would reach under the, and you could see his shoulders dip on both sides.

And he would grab a woman's thigh and then work his way up to her crotch while they were at dinner.

They were just shocked.

You could see, and nobody said a word.

And then finally, I had

a cousin who was sort of like my sister because her mother died.

It was my aunt.

And I went to somewhere and

he said, with my mother and father, he said, she's going to to be sitting right next to me.

And my mom said, no, she's not.

And I said to him,

I said, you know, in the old days, for what you do, they take off a hand.

So if you try that, they're going to take your hand off.

How's that?

And he, and I had worked for him for a summer.

So, but the point I'm making is that

certain people who do that get passes and everybody knows it and they don't say anything.

And that's what Joe Biden has been known for.

And he even had to apologize.

Remember on the stump in 2020 when that young woman, I think she was in Nevada, came out and said.

Nevada, right.

Yeah, he had to apologize.

And so, I mean, if you look at the character defects of that guy, there is

lying, plagiarism, sexual assault, sexual harassment, racism,

financial irregularities, or whatever it is.

And when you look at the people that he inculcated around him, whether it's, I mean, he turned the FBI into a personal Biden retrieval service.

So if one of his wayward daughters loses a diary that says she showered too long with her dad at an age when she shouldn't have been, then they go get it and get James O'Keefe.

He may have it.

When does the FBI serve as a retrieval service for a diary that somebody abandons in an apartment?

Or if you have a laptop where you've got hookers and drugs, then you get the FBI and you suppress that, you get a hold of it, you put it

on ice during the election, nobody gets to look at it, you no comment, you get your old buddies in the FBI, CIA, that were intelligence investigatory authorities, and then they swear a big lie that it has all the

hallmarks of Russian disinformation.

And then you tell America there's a bunch of little gremlins in the

Moscow, as I said to Sammy, and they are, what, 3D printing a laptop?

And they're putting all these pictures together.

And then they flew it over to Florida and they just stuck it into a...

Nobody believed that.

And yet, that's what he does.

And he lies about it.

And

that's what the FBI did.

And then the FBI, where's Hunter's gun that he illegally registered?

I can tell you, Jack, if you go and buy a handgun and you lie under oath about that handgun, and that handgun shows up in a dumpster next to a primary school, they're going to come after you

big time.

Right.

And the FBI is not going to go retrieve it for you or the Secret Service and then say,

well, it was just his wife threw it out.

She got in spout with him.

No, it's not going to happen like that.

And so that's another thing that

Oliver Anthony's song really hits on, that there's two codes of justice.

And I hate to say this about this country, but it has descended into

this

elite code of justice, whether it's Hillary Clinton breaking up subpoena devices or erasing with bleach bit, subpoenaed emails, or it's Hunter Biden, or it's Joe Biden, or it's Jim Biden, or it's Jill.

It just, it's going to reach a point where it's it's not going to be sustainable.

People are getting very, very angry.

Right.

Well, Victor, one last thing on this

gold star.

And I'm just agreeing with what you said earlier.

I think if Joe Biden, when he first ran in 1988, let's say he had won president, he was elected then, and there was some similar event, I believe he would have been the same callous SOB

however many years ago, that is 35 plus years ago.

So you're right, the veneer being stripped away, but

everybody is.

It's really funny, but all of us in our experiences have seen elements of Joe Biden's, but we haven't really seen them all conglomerated.

I was mentioning about somebody that had tentacles,

roaming hands under the table, would grab women, or when they would hug them,

he would pat them.

But I also knew another official when I was a professor, and for emphasis, he would whisper.

You know what I mean?

So he'd say,

Professor Hansen, come to see me.

I go in there and he'd be angry about something I wrote or said or did something.

So,

I understand that you wrote an op-ed.

We're not going to allow that to happen in my school.

You understand?

And I'm thinking, I mean, every

trait that I've seen in a person that was distasteful had been conglomerated or aggregated in this guy.

And there's just, it's something about him.

I don't know what it is.

Yeah.

And he's president of the United States.

Did you see that?

I'll just finish this topic.

Did you see when he had this

press conference?

I think it was Wednesday, August 15th, and he said,

every single objective that my administration has

enacted has been successful.

Tell me just one.

Tell me just one that we failed to enact.

And you think, yeah,

they were all failures.

So maybe you enacted them, but they all turned out as failures.

The border is a failure.

The crime is a failure.

Your energy policy is a failure.

Your inflation policy is a failure.

Interest policy is a failure.

Your Afghanistan is a failure.

Everything you've touched turned to dross.

But the way he said it, he was just yelling.

You know, that scene where you see him when he's just yelling?

Yeah.

He just tenses up.

It's like the, remember the guy, you know, the campaigning, the guy challenged him about

guns and, you know, you want to go fight.

That kind of, he, he cannot, he cannot.

Yeah, remember he said he bragged on two occasions.

I'd like to take,

if I had seen Donald Trump when I was in high school, I would have taken him behind the

gym and beaten him up.

Yeah.

Or I took him.

Cornpop would have helped him.

Yeah, remember I told that guy to cut off six feet of chain.

So I got fixed feet of chain to go make it to confront.

You know what?

Corn pop backed off.

And then the other one, when he went into the lunch counter, that guy had insulted my that guy had insulted my sister.

I took in, I just walked into that, the lunch counter, I took him by the head, and I just slammed his head down right on the counter.

That's what he talks about.

It's all this braggadaccio.

Yeah.

Little Joe Biden.

Yeah.

It's just, you know.

Well,

we have, we have one more topic to discuss, Victor.

And I hope we, you know, not, well,

we'll, uh, we'll just keep going until you're finished elaborating on it.

And that's the appointment of David Weiss as a

special prosecutor and the charges by many that this is an illegal appointment.

And we'll get your thoughts on this final topic of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show right after this final important message.

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

So, Victor, Victor, I'll just quickly read this headline.

Alan Dershowitz,

the Hunter Biden special counsel appointment is blatantly illegal.

Victor,

the law, the rules,

and it's U.S.

Code 30150, et cetera, et cetera, says the Attorney General must appoint somebody in a special, the special counsel shall be selected from outside the United States government.

And

who was appointed was the most inside the United States government and the guy who had effed up all things going on already with this

alleged investigation into Hunter Biden, which is, as things appear, Victor, is less of an investigation and a more a run out the clock

to protect the son of the president.

So, Victor, was he appointed illegally?

What are your thoughts?

Well, I mean, I got in trouble.

I wrote that he was.

And then a lawyer in New York, whom I respect a great deal, and I've known her for 30 years, she wrote me kind of a, hey, heads up that, dear Victor, while you're right that you quoted the statute, that only has regulatory advisorial authority within the Justice Department.

It's a bureaucrat.

It does not have the force of law.

Therefore, I would like you to amend your column.

So I went back and looked at the statute as I had before I wrote it.

And then I went back and looked at what legal eagles on the media, like Jonathan Turley or Alan Dershowitz had said.

And they said that internal

regulations or statutes within the Department of Justice, internal, have the force of law because they are part of a congressional

appropriation or bill that set up this type of procedures that had to be approved by Congress.

So I don't know what is what, but whether it's a regulatory

statute that he flagrantly broke or whether it's a

prosecutable offense, I don't know.

But why would you do it?

That's a good question.

Why would the Attorney General of the United States announce, contrary to all of his previous protestations, that he was going to have a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden as a reaction against Prosecutor Weiss's

clear bias that had A, seen him try to run out the Statue of Limitations over a five-year investigatory period.

B, had seen him ignore all of the recommendations of agents that were investigating, whether they were IRS or investigatory FBI people.

And see

that when he presented this ludicrous plea deal that not only pretty much

exempted him from past, but future crimes that they had not discovered, a judge got so outraged that she did what no one else has ever done.

They interfered with the prosecutorial defense attorney, and I don't mean ever done, but it's very rare and said, you know what?

This is beyond the pale.

You can't do that.

This is just whitewashing this guy's crimes.

I'm not going to accept it.

Go back and try it again if he wants to plead guilty.

And by the way,

Hunter's attorneys are now claiming, this is really fabulous.

They're claiming that because the prosecutor agreed in writing, subsequent, of course, to the approval of the justice, but the fact that they merely agreed at a preliminary step, therefore it has the force of law, and they're suing that they want the prosecutor's deal

preserved in another court.

So what am I getting at is,

why would you pick that guy when there was all this baggage and you were immediately going to be criticized?

And there's only one answer, that in comparison to the type of damage that an honest special prosecutor or special counsel

could do do and the things that he could uncover compared to that, which would destroy a presidency, almost any conflict of interest, almost any embarrassment under any cynical, egregious violation of a statute of law would be worth it in comparison.

And that's how they think.

So they got together and they overall, they say, Joe, if we get this guy in here, he's going to get these, he's going to get your tax return.

He's going to go through that whole, that entire laptop and he's going to see every single reference.

He's going to get a guy to go over to Ukraine.

It won't be Ruli Giuliani this time.

He's going to get, they're going to get,

you know, forensic accountants to go over and interview people in Ukraine.

And they're going to find out where this guy is talking about when he said it'll take 10 years to find these sham companies that I hid the payments.

And we're going to go look at all, they're going to go subpoena all your fake names, every one of them, all three of them.

And they're going to find in the archive stuff.

So whatever we do, whatever it takes, we've got to stop this.

And Joseph, well, what do we do?

Well, you've got to put the guy that's been on our team, make him the special.

Oh,

can't do that.

Well, do you want to go to jail?

Okay, I'll do it.

That's pretty much what happened, in my opinion.

Well, Victor,

we're going to have to wrap this up.

We've gone a bit, but I've got a little long.

I thought I would raise this as a reader comment, as a playoff to get your thoughts thoughts on something.

But I think now, given your discussion of Oliver Anthony,

this is a great way to

end the show.

Maybe it's not great.

We'll see.

So, but by the way, we thank everybody for listening,

no matter what platform you do that on.

And oh, I have to, I do want to say Civil Thoughts.

I got to make a plug for myself here.

Civil Thoughts is the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, now Amphil, where we are dedicated to strengthening civil society.

I encourage you to sign up.

It's totally free.

We're not renting the names.

There's nothing transactional that goes on here.

And when you do get Civil Thoughts, you get a dozen plus recommended readings from me, Jack Fowler, things I've come across in the previous week, really good articles.

Here's a link.

Here's an excerpt from a variety of sources and publications.

So I think

you will enjoy that.

So thanks for that.

So back on the comments, Victor, there's a bit of a long comment here put up on iTunes

slash Apple.

And it's titled, Sounds Like My Hometown.

And

here goes.

Your list of points that show a civilization in total decline and about to collapse sounds like my hometown, Jackson, Mississippi.

Here's a recounting of recent news stories about Jackson.

Highest murder rate in the country.

Jackson successfully defended its title as America's murder capital in 2022, even after homicides declined 13%.

WLBT reported yesterday, Jackson ended 2022 with 133 homicides, a 13% drop from the year before when 153 people lost their lives to violence.

In other words, the rate of killings in Jackson is more than three times greater than in Chicago.

Markedly reduced police protection due to numerous unfilled positions, many unsolved murders, catch-and-release judges with numerous crimes continuing by those released Soros-funded district attorney, one of the lowest per capita number of police personnel ratios in the country, armed robberies downtown and all other sectors, racing on the interstates, abandoned and burned out buildings all over town, traffic signal lights not working in dangerous places, huge potholes in virtually all city streets, undrinkable water, if any water at all, and system under federal management, streets that ooze sewerage, numerous educational expense paid trips for mayor, housing prices plummeting, i.e.

if you can find a buyer, dumping of untreated waste into the Pearl River, no garbage pickup available, one of the poorest cities in the USA, horribly rated public schools, zoo in disrepair and about to close, abandoned motels, hotels, office buildings inhabited by homeless people, and rats, incompetent, if not dishonest, mayor, and lethargic and incompetent administration.

The mayor council is at loggerheads and suing each other.

The previous president, that's Donald Trump, flew into Jackson, and the mayor refused to meet with the president, rejecting the opportunity to address any of the above-listed problems of the city with the nation's leader.

Is there anything that the Jackson government does well?

Can you name one thing?

Other than these minor issues, Jackson is a relatively nice place to live.

We'll conclude here.

We moved from Jackson in 1979, then returned there in 2005 for 10 years and saw a dramatic decline taking place.

The problem exists all across America.

This is from stakes are high.

And Victor, this is played off of your podcast you did with Sammy talking about the civilizational

collapse.

You know, it's funny about Jackson, Mississippi.

It's like Memphis, Tennessee, or Houston.

And what they do is when people categorize the collapse of northern blue cities of Portland, Seattle, L.A., San Francisco, or the blue crime rate in Minneapolis, or the disaster that's Chicago or Baltimore or Detroit, the left always says, well, actually,

when you look at the South, it's much more violent per capita.

But what they don't tell you is,

Jack, they're talking about southern cities like Houston or Memphis or Jackson.

and they're all run by whom?

By Democrats.

Yeah, it's a capital city.

Who's running it?

And they're all surrounded by pretty much peaceful rural small towns and larger municipalities that are run by Republicans that are fine.

So, yeah, the point is not red or blue, but anywhere you have a large city and it has a Democratic city council

and it has a mayor who's left wing and there is a large minority population.

They are going to be enacting policies, the Democrats are, that is going to contextualize violence.

And you're going to have no deterrence.

And people are going to be suffering.

And they're going to move.

And then you go into the San Francisco doom move.

People move.

There's less taxes.

It's too dangerous to shop.

Corporations and stores move.

Then the city says we're running out of money to fund the police.

And then we have to raise taxes.

Then more people say i can if i got to pay more taxes i got to get something in return good schools infrastructures no that's worse than i'm then they raised that's how it happened

and

those are one of the i've been one of the scariest cities that i've ever been in is years ago i spoke at the university of memphis and i came in on a friday as i recall but

I

spoke for a group that didn't have a lot of money and I didn't get very much money, but they got a ticket that was cheaper if I flew out on Sunday.

So I gave the talk on Friday.

I think I came in actually Thursday night.

I spoke for very little.

One of those days, my bad years when I was teaching, I teach three days a week, four classes, five classes, and I would get out

to Fat Fresno Air Terminal, take the red eye to some connection, San Francisco and LA, then fly across country, wake up, speak, and then try to get back that day or stay the weekend.

Anyway, they had me fly out Sunday to save money, and I walked around all day Saturday around Memphis.

I wanted to go see where Shelby Foote lived.

I wanted to see the Martin Luther King Museum, and I was in some bad neighborhoods.

And I saw, yeah, I mean, it was a really scary city.

Memphis, yeah, really scary.

Yeah, there are a lot of cities.

We talk about Detroit like it's unique, but there are a lot of first cousins and second cousins.

Stopton, California, Fresno, California, is very dangerous.

Well, Victor, I know that was a long comment, but I do think

what you wrote has struck.

You wrote that for the American Greatness column, I think, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, but it's struck a nerve and it's continued to strike a nerve, just like Oliver Anthony has

struck a nerve.

So, hey, Victor, we've run out the clock.

Your wisdom, as usual, was magnificent.

Thank you very much for sharing all your thoughts to our listeners.

Thank you for listening.

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

Bye-bye.