Corruption on Top, Strife for the Rest

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I am the host, the star, and the namesake Victor Davis Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Amar Shabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Plenty to talk about.

There's always, as long as Joe Biden's president, as long as Donald Trump's being indicted, as long as America is on the brink of civilizational collapse, Victor, there's always something to talk about.

And today, we should begin this episode by picking up a conversation that I understand you and Sammy talked about in another recording.

And that's this

tablet magazine interview of

David Garrow,

Obama biographer, a young Obama biographer, and it's turned up some really interesting news nuggets.

And also, I think the fact that some discrepancies in Obama's life have been

come to be of total non-interest to the major media.

We cannot expose the great and holy one.

So, Victor, we'll get to that.

I just want to mention also today our

episode or edition is sponsored by our good friends at AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens, and I'll get to that in a little bit.

And first, we will get to your thoughts on the Garrow tablet magazine interview.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

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Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor,

I'm happy to learn that you and the great Sammy Wink touched on this tablet magazine interview.

You know,

not to plug up front the Civil Thoughts newsletter I do every week, but I don't know how I came across Tablet Magazine, online journal.

It's Jewish

in its interests, except it's more than that.

It cares about deeper and broader things, but it's really a great publication, always something really interesting in there.

So I often put it in simple thoughts and then see that this interview

with David Garrow, the biographer, he wrote the FBI of Martin Luther King Jr., Bearing the Cross, but he also wrote in 2017 a biography of Barack Obama called Rising Star, and it didn't seem to get that much attention.

But one thing that's come out of it, Victor, is that what he found out at the time when he was writing the book about young Obama clashes with Obama's history of himself in his book,

What the Hell Was Dreams of My Father.

So

I found this article

and interview really interesting.

And I think

you can talk about whatever more on this you'd like to talk about, Victor, but there's one thing that gets me, or I'd like to hear your thoughts on, I think our listeners would, is about current Obama, right?

There's a man, the only American president ever, other than Woodrow Wilson, to live in Washington after

he left the White House.

And, you know, Wilson had to.

He couldn't go anywhere.

He was dying.

He was a stroke victim.

But Obama is clearly there, clearly has set up his

third term

operation through Joe Biden, and it seems of great disinterest to the media, as do many other

aspects of Barack Obama's life.

Let's not report the truth because

do we want to untie the fable?

Anyway, Victor, great piece, I thought.

I want to recommend Tablet Magazine in general to

our

listeners.

Your thoughts, my friend.

Yeah, it's a very good magazine.

I think I misspoke when we referenced it with Sammy.

I said Neil Kazadori has an editor.

He's the editor of Mosaic, another great magazine.

And it's kind of strange that both are Jewish-focused magazines, and they came out about the same time, and they're very well edited and run.

But

Tablet, I think, is edited by New House.

And her husband, I think, was the interlocutor, David Samuels, in this particular interview.

And he's written, you know,

he's a man of the left.

He's written for Atlantic and New Yorker on things like rap music.

I think he was the one, remember that

damning interview of Ben Rhodes, where he got Ben Rhodes to say that these, they fed all of these false narratives about the Iran deal.

And he said these young people know nothing.

And he really derided the.

the left young reporting, how easy they were to be befuddle.

Anyway, it's a long interview with David Garrow.

And what's interesting about it is,

I don't know how to frame it, but it's almost like I told you so.

And by that, I mean he finished the book.

The book was written over eight or nine years, and it came out in 2017.

But there had been preliminary previews of it.

And when people heard of some of the things that were in it,

such as Barack Obama,

his memoir, Dreams from My Father, was a complete fantasy.

It was a work of fiction.

They didn't like it, and they didn't like him earlier because he had reported on the underside of the personal life of Martin Luther King, not as essential, but incidentally.

And so the left had kind of disowned him.

And so now, six years after the book is out, he gets an

interview with David Samuels, who's kind of like a Matt Taibbi, not quite there yet, but a man of the left.

It's increasingly apparently bothered by woke.

But my point is this, is that he's kind of saying,

well,

I know the left ignored this book, but

in the last six years since it's been out, look at who Obama is and what he's done and see if I didn't predict that given the story of his life that I chronicled.

And he didn't really write about the administration of Obama, but now he's saying things that that make, he's saying this is the logical culmination of the values and who Obama was.

And for example, he says at one point that the Obama administration was a failure.

And it was a failure because they did not do anything in Syria after saying there would be a red line if the Assad dynasty was producing weapons of mass destruction.

It was a failure because

in light of where Ukraine is now,

the first aggression took place during the Obama administration, both in the Donbass and then in Crimea.

And you can make the argument that that was a direct result of Obama's general weakness abroad, but also his reluctance or failure or absolutely rejection of sending javelins or other any offensive weapons to Ukraine.

And more importantly, that hot Mike and Soul, where he suggested that if Vladimir

didn't cause him

problems during the election cycle and Vladimir didn't, then he would be flexible on missile defense, meaning he'll dismantle it.

And he did.

And then once the missile defense was dismantled, and once Obama was elected, then Putin went in.

And so, in that larger context, he was saying that administration, and he talks about the Iran deal, was a failure, failure.

He also said in the biography that he quoted Obama, that he was late, that Obama said he was lazy.

And he said, in a couple of contexts, he said,

when it was kind of revealing because he had found quotes where Obama had said that his dream would to be in his basement in sweats and just phone in the presidency, meaning, I don't want to go, I don't want to travel, I don't want to see people I don't want to like, and no more kissing babies and shaking hands.

But what if I just ran the country by phoning in?

And he said, it's very ironic because that's what he's doing right now.

He's phoning into all of his employees that have populated the Biden administration.

That was pretty interesting.

He also was asked in the interview about

what would Obama be like as a

Supreme Court justice.

He just said he's too lazy.

You know, he's just, he wouldn't do the work.

And then he referenced his Harvard Review tenure where he didn't do anything at the Harvard Review.

Yeah.

John Yu has told these famous stories about teaching with him, quote unquote, with at University of Chicago.

He was a

total no-show.

Yeah, yeah.

He got a big grant, a whole year off without teaching to write about contract law.

And what did he do?

He wrote, he got Bill Ayers to help him help, quote unquote, I'm not a conspiracist, so I'll use the word help, write his memoirs, which were not memoirs.

They were just fantasies glorifying Obama.

Garrow had gone through that memoir piece by piece, word by word, and every time there was a person referenced, he

found that person.

And what he said in this latest interview, six years later, was he was stunned that all these left-wing people took that memoir at face value, and they never investigated most of these people.

And most of them were just fantasy creatures, or if they did exist,

they don't have any memory of what Obama said that they said or did.

And of course, he says they did that because they were wedded to the Obama myth, that he was this dynamic young black guy that was going to unite the country.

So he basically says that the whole eight years now we learn were a failure.

And that was pretty amazing.

What I guess I'm getting at is that Gerald one time, I think, was a socialist, and Samuels was a man of left.

And now you have these two leftists basically telling the American people, you guys were right.

This guy was a total fake person.

He invented this whole black identity after growing up in a prep school in Hawaii, raised by white grandparents and a white mother, whose black father from Africa had walked out before he was even born.

And he was, you know, his name was Barry Sortero at the second name.

But before that,

he even had his mother's name and he created this Barack Obama when he got down to Occidental and he found that there was currency and using an African name instead of Barry.

I mean, he was, that's his birth certificate name, but he never went by it.

And then he used his Indonesian stepfather's name for an exotic flair, just like he got in big trouble about the birther controversy.

And that's touched on in the interview.

He was born in Hawaii.

I believe that.

But he brought it on himself because in a promotional jacket for Dreams from My Father, the editor of the bio says, I've seen the jacket, and it says that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

And he let that stand because he thought that made him more what?

Authentic.

Authentic, genuinely exotic with that name.

Yeah.

So basically, the interview reiterates what we already knew that a guy that grew up as an upper middle class grandchild of a bank president who's very hardworking, his grandmother, and a PhD, his mother, and who was not raised among African Americans at all, decided at some point in his career to change his name.

And then, as he said in the memoir, and that probably was true, that he sought out blacks on campus and he dumped his white girlfriends and he married Michelle.

Yeah.

And the discrepancy, Victor, was the Obama story is he was inspired by some

black play,

a play that was mainly about black characters.

But the girlfriend's recounting was, no, they went to some

exhibit in Chicago that had to do with the Holocaust, no, had to do with Eichmann, the trial of Eichmann.

Yeah, it was, and there was this nutty anti-Semite, I think his name was Coakley or something, and Obama was defending it to her.

And she had a family that had helped Jews and

I think her grandparents or her father maybe in Holland during the war.

So she wasn't going to put up with Obama's radical sheik.

So she basically told the biographer Garrow that all of that's a lie, what he said.

And she was a professor and she had.

She wasn't somebody just to be discounted.

And she wasn't a Spern woman.

He asked her to marry him and she turned him him down.

So it wasn't out of spite.

She just didn't want this guy, this preppy little wimpy guy, suddenly becoming, you know, rat brown or Farrakhan type person with his conspiracies about Jews and everything.

And so she got rid of him.

And of course, that was kind of like when he was on.

the campaign trail in 2000, if you remember eight, he gave a talk about the Palestinians down in Los Angeles.

The LA Times had the transcript and it was apparently very critical of Israel and pro-Arafat.

Remember how they squashed that and they wouldn't release it?

I don't think it's ever been released.

And just like he had a picture smiling with Farrakhan before the election.

And remember, that picture of 2006 was suppressed.

They didn't, that picture surfaced after he was president.

So the whole press conspiracy was

this is the same press,

Victor, that looks at George Santos

and has to find and should,

this is what they should be doing, all the minutiae of all the hypocrisies, et cetera.

That same press that has this insatiable curiosity about a Republican, a lower-level Republican congressman, has zero curiosity about the then President of the United States.

In the case of Donald Trump, they're going to have 600 indictments.

Apparently, they're bragging about.

And everybody knows that if he were not running for president, they wouldn't have one, given some of them go back years.

And yet, here's a guy.

Another thing that's interesting in that interview with Garrow is he talks about the Russian collusion hoax, and he knows it's a hoax.

And he says that people sometimes don't appreciate it.

It didn't start.

in 2017.

It started in 2015 and 16.

And guess who was president?

And guess who was briefed about it by John Brennan, who was one of the perpetrators of it?

Barack Obama.

And who was his people in the DOJ?

Loretta Lynch.

And what was she doing?

Meeting with Clinton on the tarmac so that they could craft a strategy not to charge Hilly with destroying subpoena materials and on and on and on.

There was one other thing.

Oh, about Garrow himself.

I'm just curious.

Have you ever,

not that you've met every historian in the world, Victor, have you ever crossed paths with him no i never have that i know of um i don't think we traveled in the same circles right he he came to some other fame i mean despite writing books that that won the pulitzer prize about um martin luther king but he did

he did try to try to write he wrote a a piece in the i think before the 2020 election, my recollection, about Martin Luther King and some

documents

come across.

Yeah, we talked about that.

I mean,

that's what did him in.

That's what destroyed his ability.

That book that he wrote about Obama should have been a bestseller.

I mean, it was massive.

It was massive.

And whether the public thought it was anticipated whether it was going to be critical or not, it wouldn't have mattered.

It still would have sold.

But his

His sin was that he took some FBI notes that he discovered, and they were not informants' notes.

And he made a distinction that when the FBI talked to informants, they had a modality or a protocol, but when they did it themselves and they were direct participants in the wiretap or the investigation, they had a different,

it was discernible the difference.

And he was basically saying that

not only was Martin Luther King a serial womanizer, but he had been abusive to women, and that had changed his opinion.

At that point,

everybody attacked him.

But it wasn't just the FBI, Ralph Abernathy, as I said earlier, where Sammy had said the same thing.

And Ralph Abernathy had gone so far as saying the night before he was tragically killed, he had been with two different women at the same time.

And there was all this other personal data that he apparently thought was

critical to his biography, or at least to the story of Martin Luther King, which made him a more complex, tragic figure.

That he had been guilty of plagiarism.

He was a womanizer.

He was drinking very heavily.

And yet he was treated terribly by the FBI and the Kennedy administration, which was tapping his phone.

And so

I guess what I'm getting at, he was persona non grata.

That was it.

With you, and Jesse Jackson went after him.

in the Shaw, everybody in the black community went after him.

And here he is.

Nobody cares that he wrote a full surprise winning biography of King or that he did.

Nobody has surpassed his work on Obama.

And he mentioned in the interview, he might be curious about writing about

Clarence Thomas.

Well, you get the impression that he's like a Matt Taibbi or Bill Maher, that he's coming to the conclusion that

the left devours its own and is intolerant of anything other than the party line that has to be maintained regardless of the cracks in its edifice.

Well, Victor, we're going to talk a little about

maybe Hunter Biden and his daddy.

But before we do that, I'd like to welcome

once more our sponsor for this episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show, and that's AMAC.

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And I'd like to thank AMAC for sponsoring the Victor Victor Davis Hanson show.

And I'm going to play off AMAC here because it's kind of age-related, right?

You can be a member at 50.

You can be a member of AARP, by the way, at any age, but you're quote-full full member at the age of 50.

And how old do you think Hunter Biden is, Victor?

50?

He's actually 53.

So, you know, he could qualify for being a member of AMAC, and he's not a kid anymore.

but you know, it's strange that he and his

daddy share a joint bank account.

I was watching Fox today and Darrell Issa, the congressman from Southern California.

You may have had some dealings with him in the past.

I saw him not long ago.

Yeah.

Yeah, he was on and he's like, this is this is weird.

you know why would these two people have a joint bank account of some kind i i you know i share i still pay for my kids My kids are all between the ages of 23 and 35.

And I think four of the five of them, I'm still paying for their phone.

You know, just things that have carried on for 20, 25 years.

But the concept of an adult sharing a joint bank account with another adult child is just a

Hunter was putting money in there under his own name.

And then Joe was, it could be one of two things or both, that when Hunter had money, he was putting it in there and then Joe could write checks on an account without showing income.

Or

given Hunter's

profligate

spending habits, his dad had to cover and Hunter could just tap into his account.

And why would Joe have money?

Because of Hunter.

So Hunter and Hunter's way of thinking, I put the money into the account and so I can draw it out, but it's better for both of us tax purposes just to have it shared.

And it's highly irregular, but everything about them is highly irregular.

And,

you know, when you look at all of this

stuff

and you look at the left and they are taking They have 100 indictments and they promise they're going to have 600, none of which would exist if Trump had not run for office.

They're all from ancient history mostly, a year all the way back to 10 years, but they all dug them up because of Trump, the candidate.

But you look at all of that intense scrutiny and the machinations in which they will go, evoking an 1870 law, claiming stormy civil suit as a violation of campaign

finance rules, etc.

And then you compare it and collate it with

Hunter Biden.

And you have these people that really insult our intelligence, like Goldman saying, I have looked at the confidential transcripts, which you haven't seen yet.

And I can assure you, there are talks about the weather.

And it's just, it's an insult to the intelligence.

I don't mean that just rhetorically.

It is.

We're supposed to say, yes, Representative Goldman.

So Hunter's with a bunch of business associates, and they're talking about the money that a hunter will receive for the services that he will render.

And out of the blue, on 20 occasions, Joe pops up.

And we've, you know, we've got all of these CNN and MSNB, but he was talking about for his son that passed away.

And he was talking about a hunter, and they're close.

They have a bond you don't under, can't appreciate, but they just happened to call during the negotiations.

And we know what it was about.

Hunter says, listen, my dad, if you guys pay me the money and Victor Shokin is poking too deep, I can get the SOB fired.

And my dad can do it.

Oh, by the way, my dad called up.

I'll put him on speaker.

Hey, everybody.

How's it going, Hunter?

How's it?

Hey, what's the weather?

I just wanted to pop in.

I'll see you.

That's what he did.

And we're supposed to believe that has nothing to do with reinforcing the value of Hunter Biden.

And we know that's not true because when Joe left the presidency, his value dropped in half.

They cut his salary by half.

Not completely because they knew he could

be recombobulated as a presidential candidate.

But

it's pathetic.

And I don't know if we're ever going to get justice.

I don't think, I'm not sure we are because.

The Republicans have to figure out because impeachment no longer is about crimes and high crimes and misdemeanors, treason and bribery.

It is in

Hunter, I mean, in Joe's case, but it's been so politicized, it's a political act.

And so, when, at what point, if any, is it in the Republican interest to impeach Joe Biden and get the attention away from what he actually did?

Or

and what, in a normal case, you would appoint an independent counsel, but given the record of Jack Smith, given the record of Robert Mueller, getting the

record of Patrick Fitzgerald and Scooter Limby, giving Lawrence Walsh and

whatever that was, a Rangate, there's not a very good record that these people, Ken Starr is an exception, but there's no record that these people are independent.

And you might just give cover for a left-wing prosecutor to be appointed by Merrick Garland to, quote unquote, investigate, kind of like the special counsel that's supposed to be

investigating uh joe biden how can it be that joe biden took papers 15 years ago trump only two and trump's already indicted and we haven't heard anything about biden's a prosecutor why doesn't he hold a prop press conference and says i know there's interest in government papers.

There's indictments.

I just want to update you.

This is where we are with President Biden.

We have three different locations, three different troves of classified documents, three different areas which which were not secure.

We were only notified of this after the Mar-Lago raid when their lawyers came forward

and informed us, and we're still investigating.

They can't even do that.

They can't even leak.

They leaked about everything but Joe Biden.

Yeah.

Part of our, I don't know, Victor, I could be wrong here, but part of our maybe

problem with seeking justice is here.

Here we are talking about Hunter, and he just begs to be talked about.

But the problem,

I give you credit, though.

You said he was 53.

Yes.

When you look at those pictures of him cavorting with women, I assume, on protected sex, with all of these experienced prostitutes, and he's taking crack cocaine,

and he's binging alcohol.

And I can't believe he's still alive.

It's amazing because he looks, remember that picture when he has filed down teeth?

Right.

And then his teeth are capped now and he looks, he looks normal.

So the Biden family, and look at Joe.

I mean, for all, I mean,

for all the things Joe has done, it's pretty amazing that these guys are still around.

Yeah.

Physically, if not.

Yeah, no, I mean,

plastic surgery takes care of the surface issues, and Joe's got plenty of that.

But yeah,

hair implants, plastic surgery,

whitening teeth.

Gosh, that joker smile of his.

I'll never forget that debate that he had with

Paul Ryan or

Sarah Palin in 2009 and Paul Ryan in 2012, where he just didn't answer any question.

He just smiled like a joker, interrupted, and just smiled and said nothing.

And he was tan

and he looked like he was a corpse in the sense his face was completely rigid and formaldehyded.

But he

he always gets by.

Joe always gets by.

He gets by with lying.

He gets by with corruption.

He always does.

He's really, just as Barack Obama did by mastering this persona that I'm a Chicago organizer, a part of the exploited, victimized black community.

So Joe got by.

I'm just old Joe Biden from Scranton.

I'm just an old Catholic conservative boy that grew up poor, and I represent the American working class.

I'm the Amtrak guy that the SLI, I couldn't even drive no private plane for Joe.

I just had to drive, take the train.

That was all of that has elements of truth, but it's so fabricated.

Yeah.

Well,

let us pray we see justice always happens, whether it's in this life or the next,

definitely in the next for all of us, but it'd be nice to see a little justice for Joe and more so Joe Joe than Hunter in this.

So Victor,

we should talk about some new polling that's come out about Glenn Yunken.

And let's get your thoughts on

that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Before we get on to Governor Juncken, I would like to remind our listeners and inform our new listeners, and there are a lot of new listeners, Victor.

The show keeps growing and growing,

that there is an official website for Victor.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

I encourage you to visit it regularly.

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You'll find clips there.

The archives of this podcast and the ultra articles.

Ultra are the exclusive pieces, Victor writes, for The Blade of Perseus.

Maybe if we have some time towards the end of this episode, Victor, we might be able to talk about one of them, the current series you're writing.

This one's on

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So,

Victor, yeah, there's a piece out

from the Daily Mail.

Is it time for Glenn Young to get in the race?

New Virginia poll shows governor would beat Biden in a head-to-head by seven points.

DeSantis is tied with Biden in this poll.

Biden is ahead of Trump.

Victor, I know many, several of our recent podcasts, you've been very emphatic on

who the hell knows what's going to happen in the next few months?

I mean, there's so much at play here.

But,

you know, what do you think of the chatter for Youngkin?

To me, he's been out of the headlines a bit.

Yeah,

I think that

his mention

is

representative of two things.

One,

the Republicans are now starting to smell blood with Joe Biden because he's polling below Trump,

even or below DeSantis, and now below Yunkin.

And so there's going to be a lot of interest in any Republican candidate, and he's going to get lower in the polls.

That's simultaneous with not 50, not 80, but 100 indictments of Trump.

All of them, in my opinion, are not justified.

They're only there because he's running for president.

They're evoking ancient laws from the 19th century, anything they can.

They promised to get up to 600 indictments with these four prosecutors.

A lot of it is highly weaponized.

They want to have left-wing juries in New York, left-wing juries maybe in Miami, left-wing juries in Washington, politicized prosecutors, cherry-picked judges, and evidence nullification, and put Donald Trump in jail.

And right now, he spent $45 million.

But the point is that even if they are all,

their indictments are successful, many of them, and he's convicted.

And even if they're overturned on appeal, they feel it was worth it not only to dismirch the Trump name, but to make him spend millions and millions of dollars.

And he's not talking about the economy or crime or the border or foreign policy.

How could he?

All he can talk about is

day to day another indictment, and that's the purpose.

So in that larger environment, people are looking for an alternative on the right.

And then there's this other wrinkle.

The

anti-Trump, but still the conservative base, before Trump had these problems, was split between Trump and DeSantis.

DeSantis, I think, and I don't know this, but I think some of his advisors said,

don't emphasize at the

beginning your wonderful record in Florida, emphasize to the MAGA base that you're as conservative or more conservative than Trump, so you don't get rhino eyes.

And so in some ways, the Disney matter, the transgender matter, the critical race theory matter, they were all good issues.

And he was admirably taking on woke, but he found himself running almost to the right of Donald Trump on issues like guns, abortion, corporations like Disney, and to his credit.

But I'm just talking about craven politics, just

politics in the raw, just, you know,

not even nice politics.

And what I'm saying is that

he found himself

who had been the one-time mainstream Republican alternative to Trump and got a lot of criticism from the Trump people that he was a Jeb Bush-like character, which he wasn't.

So he reacted to that.

And the result was that apparently scared off some of the big Republican donors, none of which are, for all practical purposes, are not supporting Trump.

Trump is actually a populist candidate with $5 to $100.

Everybody opens their email and there's 50 messages: Dear Victor, dear Bill, dear Sam,

I will be in prison unless you send me $20 by midnight tonight, that kind of stuff.

And so DeSantis,

that was a source of his financial support.

And he was trying to fight the reputation that he was a Jeb Bush, which he isn't.

So

now that he was a cultural warrior, that same group of rhinos that were going with him, even though he was conservative, now are looking for two things.

Somebody they feel comfortable with that is conservative, and he's a Wall Street guy, and that's Glenn Young.

I don't know to to what degree that's an accurate or fair characterization of Glenn Young, because he's an evangelical

guy.

He didn't have to

go after the people on the school boards, he chose to.

And he's very popular, he's very soft-spoken, he's very charismatic,

and he may be the most charismatic of the non-Trump candidates.

But

I do believe it's too young.

And in DeSantis' favor, I would say that once he pivoted in the last week away from the cultural awoke issues within Florida, and he began to talk about what he would do with the border, what he would do with the economy, what he would do with crime, what he would do with education, what he would do with foreign policy.

And then he went out and he started.

giving these interviews to people who were potentially hostile, Megan Kelly, Tucker Carlson, et cetera.

He did very well.

He did very well.

So I think whatever the campaign strategy was, it's been altered.

And I think that's good.

So now I think we're in a new campaign.

It's still early.

And the new campaign is characterized by new developments.

And there's three or four of them.

Number one, Joe Biden will probably not run for reelection.

He's failing at a geometric rate.

I've been saying that, but now it's transparent.

And his family is utterly corrupt.

And that corruption is starting to creep nearer and nearer to him with evidence of that.

And then second, Donald Trump is not fighting a nutty prosecutor like Bragg or

a civil suit over a potential sexual harassment allegation years ago or even a non-disclosure form about.

He's dealing with a hard-nosed, kind of disreputable federal prosecutor who wants him in jail and is willing to charge him with anything he can,

even if he has to, as I said, go back to the Ku Klux Kahn statutes of the 19th century.

That is new

to hemorrhage him.

I thought, and everybody had thought that they were going to dangle indictments over his head to give empathy to Trump.

and wait until they really lower the boom so he would get the nomination and then they would bleed him as a general candidate.

That may still be true, but I think in their eagerness, they really started to

preempt that.

And they want him, they want to destroy him right now.

And I don't know if they've thought that out,

but they may get away with it.

And that's new.

Well, in that new climate, then people are looking at different candidates.

And what will happen is,

will young,

if Juncken says he's not going to run, but he may run if DeSantis or,

I don't know, Nikki Haley or whoever don't do well.

I think Mike Pence is taking himself out of the race.

He's a nice man.

He's honest.

But when this all came down against Trump, all he had to say was Donald Trump and I had many disagreements, especially about January 6th.

But

while I disagreed with Donald Trump, our disagreements did not entail criminal activity on his part.

And these

politically motivated indictments are beyond the pale.

And he couldn't do that, Jack.

He joined the chorus saying that Donald Trump was culpable.

And once you do that, then you're saying you're basically, you can say yes, but maybe this, qualify that.

But pretty much Pence put him in.

put himself on the side of the 600 indictments to come.

And that is, that's exclusionary.

He's done.

He's toast.

Not that he was viable, but he's toast.

No one else has done that except that crazy Issa Hutchinson.

He's, well, he was toast beginning.

They're out, done.

Even Chris Christie has been tiptoeing around it because the only proper announcement or editorializing or opining on that from another candidate is I'm opposed to Donald Trump.

I'm running against him.

And I think that I will be a more effective candidate than he will in bringing justice to you, the American people, and restoring one standard of justice, equality under the law.

He has been the victim of a witch hunt, but I can't stop it right now until I'm president.

And when I'm president, I will stop it for you, the people, and to bring justice to Donald Trump.

And when I find it, if there's any indictments that come out of this circus, I will pardon Donald Trump.

But I'm in a better position to do that than is Donald Trump.

And then that's the only thing.

And to the degree a candidate can say that, they're going to be viable.

And so I think we're in chapter two now.

It's a whole new race.

And I can't believe I read in American Greatness where I write.

I see other places that the race is over.

It's time to rally around Trump.

He's the only candidate.

And then at the same time, you look at these polls.

Today there was one that says 46% of Republicans think that he's going to be so tied up in legal entrapment and

technicalities and indictments.

And, you know, just

he's going to be Gulliver and the little putians are going to have tarp and wire and rope all over him.

And he's going to be shackled that they don't want him to run.

So how can that be

the race is over?

It's not.

It's wide open.

What do you think about the Newsome

DeSantis looming debate?

That,

I mean, I think it's going to happen.

And

that's when

Sean Hannity offered it to both, and they seem to have both accepted.

You can't,

the standard assessment of Gavin Newsom is wrong.

If people say he destroyed your state, yes, he did.

He's a hypocrite.

He takes mask off while he orders to you.

He got into the reparations.

He did.

He took a huge surplus that the government had given us for COVID, COVID, essentially, and he ran up a $35 billion debt.

He's blowing up dams.

We've spent $15 billion,

much of it when he was governor and even mayor in San Francisco, and there's more homeless than ever.

The schools are a wreck.

The economy is slipping.

People, 600,000 people have left in the last two and a half years.

By any fair measure, he is an utter failure.

There's Wild West train robbing on trains at the Port of L.A.

And all he can, the lack of a forest serious policy means that our forest goes up and smoke.

And he puts on a kind of a work vest and gets on gloves and he shows up at a forest fire and rakes it for an hour.

Or he goes down to L.A.

and he picks up two Amazon packages on the ground.

That's what he does.

However, he's young.

He's said to be good looking.

And three,

he can finish finish a sentence.

And that's something that Joe Biden is not.

And he's smug and he lies.

So when you go in there, obviously DeSantis has a record.

No tax versus 13.3 tax, higher rated schools versus a mess.

No homeless problem anywhere near California, no crime problem, higher GDP, kept the economy open with no more excessive deaths per year than California.

You go down the line, it's just much, much better, superior.

People are coming to Florida in the hundreds of thousands.

People are voting with their feet to leave California.

And when they get into a debate, Ron DeSantis is twice as bright as Gavin Newsome.

He will have all the facts at his disposal.

Gavin Newsom won't.

He will be, but, but

Gavin Newsom can be very formal.

He yells, he screams, he gesticulates, he looks emotional, he looks good on camera.

So you can't underestimate is what I'm saying.

Right.

Well, you know what?

That debate's going to be about two things.

He's going to say, I'm for freedom.

The way there's no freedom here in California because of all these regulations, but I'm for freedom.

You're going to take a woman and

she's going to die on the operating table because of you when she needs an abortion.

And then there's all these poor people that are transgendered and gay, and you're driving them out of the state.

And then you go into the libraries and you censor books.

And then, can he get in?

Yes, I censor books that have genitalia in the Sex Act.

If he can get that in, but that's how he's going to debate.

If I was Gavin Newsom and I based my debate performance on what I've seen of him, I would say, well, governor,

you're the most repressive state in the world.

People are leaving your state in droves.

Maybe not the people that you care about, but people of color and gay people and people that are transgender that you go after.

And now you're going after America's sweetheart, Disney.

And what are you doing?

You're trying to censor Disney.

You're trying to ruin that company.

And we don't do that in California.

We're live and let live.

We let people.

That's what he's going to say.

It's all lies, yes, but he will say it better than I just did.

Far you're right.

And find a way to

accuse DeSantis of being a racist because you have to have a debate with a Republican.

Yeah, no, and you know what that's going to say?

He said, and John DeSantis is a racist.

He really believes people.

Think of this.

Just think of this.

Ron DeSantis said he put into formal policy that blacks were lucky to be slaves so they could

get development skills.

Don't listen to me.

His own congresspeople who are people of color and even Tim Scott, a main rival, Tim Scott, a Republican.

They agree with me, Ron, not you.

And that's how we

watch him debate.

That's how he does it.

And he's an effective debater for someone of limited intellectual capacity.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we have time.

I wish we had more time, but there's a couple of things I had put out here.

But I guess the one I'll pick, we'll save the Ultra

series.

uh for another time but there's a headline uh out from the hill uh some new polling polling about more Americans say they can never retire.

And let's get your thoughts about that broader issue of

Americans of a certain age and facing the golden years and how golden they will be or not.

We'll get your thoughts right after this final important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So yeah, Victor the Hill

has

a piece out today, titled again, More Americans Say They Can Never

Retire.

And let's see, in a July poll conducted jointly by Axios and Ipsos, I'm not sure what Ipsos is, 29% of workers under 55 answered a retirement query with, I don't think I will ever retire.

Asked why not, three quarters of the never retire group said they could not afford to stop working.

A smaller share said they didn't want to.

I feel a little odd posing this question to you, Victor, after all these

years of many, many episodes, especially ones where you talk about your family and his grandpa,

it could be in his dotage, but what's he doing?

He's out on a tractor and he's maintaining the crops in the field.

I don't know, sometimes you think retirement's a luxury.

I think we all know all kinds of people who have been fortunate enough to retire early then again you think of guys who are iron workers and these there are many jobs that just beat your body up and how can you be what do you do when you're 67 at that point and why are people at work well i'm 69 and a month from now on september 5th i'll be 70 and I am working more than I did 10 years ago.

I mean, I have a full-time job at the Hoover.

I can't afford to retire.

I write three ultras and two columns.

That's 5,000 words a week.

I'm just, as I'm speaking right now, right before we went on, I'm doing the proofs page editing for a book I just finished of 110,000 words.

I'm going to teach a class

one day a week at Pepperdine.

I'm going to Hillsdale, part of my annual visit there.

I can't retire.

And why can't I retire?

Well, part of it's my own fault that,

you know, I didn't, I didn't make very much money when I was a professor.

But

a raisin farmer, I lost money.

And then I did a lot of things that were on economical, like put a lot of money into

a farm that was losing money.

And I put a lot of money into restoring a house that was 150 years old and eight buildings, but probably

more romantic than economically wise or physically swise.

But all that said,

the reason that they say that is since Joe Biden came into office,

prices on key things like gasoline

and bread or eggs or milk, they've gone up by 30% totally.

He just talks about 6% this year.

It's better than 8% last year.

But aggregate, gas has gone up here about $2 a gallon.

I just filled up yesterday and drove across.

It was $5.58.

And when I remember filling up at 350 in California, so people, first of all, if you wanted to go buy a pickup when Trump left office, you could pay $50,000.

That same pickup, I can tell you, I can swear, I've seen it, it's $65,000.

So it's much more expensive.

If you took out a loan, my son has a mortgage out at $1.

I think $1.9.

And I helped my daughter buy a house just about two months ago.

And the guy called me up and says, Mr.

Hansen, you're so lucky.

I think we're going to be able to swing it for 6.8.

So 7%

versus 1.8, it's about, for most loans, it's about $1,000 more a month.

And when you look at electricity costs and gasoline and natural gas because of this energy policy, and you can, who's going to pay for all these 7 million people coming?

And it's going to be higher taxes, more social programs, more entitlements.

And how can you in California, how can you make anything when it's 13.3%

income tax?

And that hit, and even the 10% hits you pretty low at about 65,000.

And then we've got Obamacare tax, we've got payroll tax, we've got a federal income tax rate of 39%.

So it's very hard to save money.

And people say to themselves,

I'm in a dilemma, Jack.

This is what the average listener says that's my age or younger.

On the one hand, I surely don't want to die in the saddle.

I work my whole damn life.

I'd like to go spend a week in Florence one time in my life.

I'd like to go up to the lake.

Who knows?

I'd like to watch.

I have dreams of buying a Winnebago and touring the country.

They think of that.

So they say,

I don't want to die in the saddle and then work all that time and I'm almost 70.

On the other hand, they say, but I know so many people who retired at 65, thinking the economy was stable and everything.

And now I've noticed they've sold this vacation home or they've sold this car or they're out of money.

And they didn't think that it would be this quick.

They thought they planned and they retired too early.

And so it's a hard call, but.

I had a mother who was a justice who died from a brain tumor while she was working.

And I had a grandfather, you mentioned my grandfather, he was irrigating on a Friday morning at 86.

And then he got up the next morning, couldn't get out of bed.

He took him to the hospital.

He had congestive heartfear.

He died that night.

So he literally was working to the day he died.

I think that's what I'm going to do.

I had this long COVID, I think I'm starting to turn the corner and getting better.

So

I enjoy what I do.

But

when I was 50, I started opening a 401k a little late.

I thought,

maybe when I'm 62, I can go to Greece every summer and lay on the beach or just rent a little house in the Peloponnese.

But that is not going to happen.

And so also, another thing that happens is all of us that have had children realize that

when we came out of college

and housing was not as expensive.

There wasn't student loans.

So it's much harder for young people to get it.

And the old idea of the depression era generated, well, we don't want to help you because if we did, we'd coddle you and you'd be not able to be.

And that kind of, you know, my parents, if we were sitting on Saturday afternoon in the house after, you know, five days of high school, five days of football or baseball practice, and then working on the farm when we got home and we wanted to sit and and watch you know a football game saturday afternoon my dad would say what is this an old man's club

is this the retirement center you all got comfortable chairs i guess there's no walnuts to be picked up this fall is there i guess you're grand you're happy that your 78 year old your 80 year old grandfather is out there picking oranges that what you want to do sit around grow fat lazy so you just

We just, you couldn't do that.

You were hiding from my dad.

We worked all the time.

And that was the idea that you just work work that's but that's why asking you this question i i have a feeling the where you how you grew up like the concept of retirement was just no i mean i i did hear about it my father retired to drive my mother around as a judge because she was being asked as the first woman you know superior second woman in the state and he drove her around and he that was a full-time job but and he also he retired as an administrator and then he went down and farmed so he called his retirement helping us farm what do i mean by that he welded every day he fixed tractors all day long yeah but that that's what he called retirement and

you know it's uh it reminds me of my grandfather swedish grandfather's funeral have you ever been to a swedish funeral I have not, Dr.

No.

Oh, my God.

You go there and you get all these relics.

I've been to about five of them, my great uncles, my grandfathers.

It goes something like this if i would to take pieces of each one of them and put them into a narrative you go there and there's a lutheran minister just says very quickly and then they look around and nobody says a word and nobody nobody cries

and then if sometimes the minister will say does anybody have anything to say

And if they do that, it's a big mistake because nobody wants to say a word.

But if they do, they go, yeah, he worked hard.

And then another person kind of

perks up, yeah, he worked really hard.

Then the third person goes, yeah, he didn't miss a day of work.

Then the fourth person goes, oh, yeah, yeah, he worked so very hard.

And then it's over.

And then the family says, oh, you want to go have coffee at the house?

We have some alphabet butter cookies.

And we got some rye crisp and we'll all go over to the house.

And you go over to the house,

you know, and you you sit there, and everybody looks at the wall and they say, Yeah, Frank died.

He worked hard.

Yeah, Frank was really good with the horses.

He really worked hard.

Just about work.

No one ever says he was a nice guy.

Well, that's the quality of your existence, whether you were lazy or you were industrious.

And that was your character.

I'm kind of character.

So it drove my mom kind of crazy because she was from, you know, a family that was part Irish and Welsh.

And she thought, wow, these guys.

I've actually cried at a funeral.

Yes, yes.

And she was very emotional and they were really stern.

And, you know, you could be with my grandfather, Suish, and he'd say, Yeah, Victor, you get on the horse.

And then you get on the horse and he'd ride a horse next to you.

And you'd ask a, I was a chatterbox.

I'd ask questions, yeah,

yeah, yeah.

And you'd see him, let's go kill the pig.

Well, what are we going to do, Grant?

We're going to shoot him in the head.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And then he pulls out a gun and blows the pig forehead off and yeah we we pull him out of the yard and we hang him up and then we we butcher him yeah yeah and then you do that for eight hours with him and he doesn't say a word

is his was crying was uh i don't want to harp on this just to round this out and then we'll read a viewer comment a listener comment but was um

Was crying a taboo in Swedish culture?

Oh, absolutely.

I've never seen my father cry once, not one time in his entire life.

I saw my mom maybe once or twice.

Yes.

No, no, no, no.

You don't have no emotion.

And

I really was influenced.

I always talk about my maternal grandfather that had the house that I'm living in, but I had a lot of respect

for my grandfather.

I remember when he got cancer, he was 80 years old.

He had this huge tumor in his gum, and it was from phosphine gas poisoning.

He was disabled.

He had no lungs.

They basically were eaten out for the 50 years of his life

from World War I.

World War I?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was in Belgian hospital for a year, but he was too sick to come back to Kingsworth, California.

And

my dad goes, you've got a big lump there.

Yeah, I got a big lump.

And he goes, I think we need to get it cut out, dad.

No, no, we got a big lump.

We just let it go.

And he says, no, no, you got to do it.

It's going to metastasize.

Yeah, probably spread, probably spread.

And he said, I like it here.

No.

And then my dad goes, oh, you know what's going to happen, dad?

It's going to stink.

That thing is going to rot in your mouth.

And people will not want to be even near you.

Oh, yeah, okay.

We get it cut out.

And then they cut it out.

I can remember I was like 15 years old and my mom goes, let's go see.

your grandfather,

your dad's dad.

I said, why?

He cut off his finger.

I said, he did did what?

I was in high school, a freshman.

He said, yeah, he was at a grinder and, you know, he's 80 years old.

He didn't see

the sharpening a knife and it flipped and his hand went into the grinder.

So we go to the hospital.

He's sitting there and he's got a big smile.

And I said, grandpa, what happened?

He goes, yeah, I got four fingers now.

Four fingers.

Yeah, no more five.

Starts laughing.

Four fingers.

I had a twin brother who was farming.

And, you know, sometimes I feel like he's not particularly fond of me, but I give him credit, man.

He cut off the end of his finger.

Yeah, he was fixing an air compressor and the belt went on automatically and it took off.

And he turned around and go, I just lost the tip of my finger.

And so

that was a whole different code, I think.

So, yeah.

Retirement, that's a long.

excursus on not uh we're all going to drop in the saddle the people I know the only time time people i know that are my age of my generation that have retired have and i mean this without any macabre they've got cancer or they've died i really do not know a person my age

69 who retired i don't and i professors we had a soft life at least the latter part of my life was soft without farming but still they're not retiring.

They're still going in there and teaching.

And that's hard when you're 69 to stand up there for two hours and lecture off the top of your head.

And I, you know, I

was,

you know, I left a meeting the other day and they said, where are you going?

I said, I got to drive 200 miles back to home right away before traffic.

And everybody didn't think that was anything.

They're all working.

They were older.

Some of them were older than I was.

So I think our generation.

is not going to have the American dream that was promised in the early 60s where everybody was going to retire at 55 and then use a very generous pension

to fish and hunt and take your grandkids on vacation.

And you were all going to raise your kid and the 18, they were just going to skip off to college, pay that, there would be no tuition, et cetera.

And you'd be on, you know, be free.

No, no, it's your children are going to be more expensive after they turn 18 because they're going to have student loans and they're going to need mortgages and they're not all going to work for Goldman Sachs.

Yeah, I know one guy, Victor.

I can't, I'll just say I know a guy and I

deal with him on stuff.

He's in his 40s and he's got student loan debt of over 200 grand.

And frankly, there's just no way out.

There is unless you win the lottery, unless you find and marry some millionaire's daughter.

or maybe billionaire's daughter.

I mean, I don't know how people get.

I think people should

wake up to this, especially on the conservative side.

I wrote about it in The Dying Citizen.

If you go back there and look at that book, I said, when you look at the age of marriage, 23 to 29, the first age of a child, 29 to 33, the first age you buy a home, 35 to 39.

The number of people buying homes is dropping down.

And the fertility rate as late as 2000 was almost two, 1.9 to 2.

It's about 1.6, 1.5 and dropping.

And a lot of that is the

part of it is this younger generation has material needs that they think are essential.

I mean, $300

tennis shoes or $200 sunglasses that our generation would have never even considered.

But that being said, housing, fuel, transportation, and real dollars, education are far more expensive than they've ever been.

And that's because this

economy has been socialized every year.

We've got got less and less of a free market system, more and more of regulators, more and more of unproductive people working for government whose main job is to stifle people who are productive.

And I talk to a lot of people in my community.

There's a lot of Mexican-American, very hardworking people, and I can tell you, I haven't met one that has one job.

I'm kidding.

I'm not kidding.

Not one person that I have met in my town

has one job.

And I will also say without any detail that about 50% of them depend on cash wages on the weekends or going to a swap meet or something.

We have probably the largest black market economy in the world in California.

And everybody thinks, how can that be?

You're the most regulated economy in the world.

We're also the least regulated because people can't afford the regulation, so they just ignore it.

And so this, I think, these got fundamental problems.

And that was one thing that Trump really did.

He redefined the Republican Party from George H.W.

Bush running on greater capital gains tax cuts, which I agree with,

to we have to figure out how people have a living wage.

And I think that's important.

You're right.

You think about the $5,000 annual, which I think is low that the Biden Bidenomics has foisted on the typical American family.

And to get $5,000 of disposable income

Yeah, after you probably need to have a job

that pays $100,000 a year

and a year with 13 months in it, you know, because it's extra money.

So it's,

how does, I just don't know how people

have been good to me.

That's why they're working two jobs and that's why it's cash.

Cash is

this came up.

This came up when I was, again, I was writing the book.

So I took about a 10-mile drive all around these small towns and i noticed something how many cars do you think i found average in front of each house in rural california no seven

seven and that was when i drive by i and they're mostly mexican-american or people from india are poor whites but you see

i guess you know kids that can't go out and get a house and then the parents and then the grandparents that don't have enough money who are living there, and then an uncle, or an aunt, or cousin who's renting a room or just staying there.

And it's incredible.

It looks like parking lots out here with these small old farmhouses.

So, that's something that we don't talk about: the real destruction of the middle class.

That's why

the chapter I spent the most on the dying centers was peasants.

And I said, We have created a new peasantry, and we have.

And Joe Biden has made it so much worse with more debt, higher interest rates, and of course, inflation.

And I get, he made a desert and he called it Bidenomics.

Well, Victor,

we've got to wrap this up with three things.

One is you mentioned funerals before.

And today, we're actually recording on Friday, August 4th.

And earlier today,

the cantor at my parish, my Catholic parish, or my former Catholic parish, it's closed.

And occasionally, their church has opened up for a funeral for one of, you know, dead, now dead parishioners.

And I sang the funeral mass.

And today was for David Meese, who was 93, but he was a big Victor Davis-Hanson fan.

So God rest his soul.

I just wanted to mention that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And yeah, he's, oh, gosh, he loved you.

And then

I know people heard your birthday.

I know there are people who jotted that down September 5th.

And I am sure they're either going to people who send stuff to Hoover or drive by your house.

I have not been home for my birthday in 20 years.

I always go to

Hillsdale.

I have not had a birthday party or anything in 20 years.

I'm not saying acting that.

I mean, I just don't think about it anymore.

In fact, people remind me, hey, did you know it was your birthday?

My daughter and my wife and my son always are very good about it, but it's always like, wow, I forgot it was, I had a birthday.

Are you going to be in Hillsdale the same?

Absolutely.

I'm going to go there on the 30th of August

and give lectures and, you know, guest teach and interviews.

This year, I'm not teaching the whole intensive courses that I have for the last 19 years.

I'll call John Miller up.

Maybe they'll find Carvelle for you or something.

Yeah, I usually see John when I'm out there.

I love being at Hillsdale.

It's like going back into the 1950s.

Every time I get there, I always think I'm away from home too much.

But when I get there, gosh, I get there and there's Tom Conner, the historian, Mark Kalkoff, the historian, and my partner, Al Phillip.

I always see what Larry Arn's done within the year that I've been gone.

It's usually dramatic, a new building.

you know, more.

I'm going to see him and Wilfred Riley and a few others a week from today.

You know, someone in Connecticut on the Massachusetts state line in the town of Suffield left Hillsdale, this home that was a replica of Monticello.

Yeah,

I think they're calling it the Blake.

Is it the Blake Center?

But anyway,

yeah, they're having an event there, and I'm going.

Wilford Riley's a really good writer.

Oh, he's one of them.

I love him.

He's a nice guy.

Yes, Dan Mahoney, the great scholar, and George Nash, the great glorious man on the planet.

I gave a lecture about the 100th anniversary of Hoover, and I looked and read George's biography of Herbert Hoover.

It was wonderful.

And the Hoover Institution.

He's a wonderful, there's all these people that are very brilliant that we don't really acknowledge.

They're just out there.

Yeah.

Well, George lives in the area.

I have to tell you, folks, look him up.

George Nash, he is the Hoover.

historian,

not the Hoover Institution, but the president.

But he's also the historian of the Hoover Institution.

Oh, of the institution itself?

Yeah, absolutely.

If you want to find information about the Hoover Institution, you go to things that he's written about the Hoover Institution, in addition to his biographies.

Yeah, you can look at U2 or C-SPAN, he has speeches.

He's just something very lovable about him.

So, all right, anyway,

Victor,

we have people that leave comments about this show on Apple and iTunes.

They rate the show.

Again, most people, 99% give it it five stars.

You can give it zero to five.

Occasionally, there's less than a five.

That's usually some Fowler-related snide comment.

Maybe appropriate on Snide.

And today we have a comment,

five stars, and

a comment from Politico Pete.

And it's titled Great Show.

And it says, thanks for the amazing show.

Covers the issue.

The mainstream media would rather avoid great balance of different issues.

And Victor is such an engaging, thoughtful, and interesting commentator.

He communicates in such a calm manner and clearly has respect for the intelligence and insights of his listeners.

Thank you, Politico Pete, for that.

Victor, you were your usual terrific self today.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

And thanks, folks, for listening.

Visit VictorHanson.com, sign up for Civil Thoughts, and we will see you.

No, we won't see you.

We'll be back.

We will be back.

You can listen to us again on on another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for your patronage.

It's much, much appreciated.

Thank you.

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