The Persecution of Trump and Diane Feinstein's Power of Attorney

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Victor Davis-Hanson, VDH, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Moshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You know, because of some circumstances, Victor and I are recording our show a little earlier in the week, but it happens to be on Thursday,

August 3rd.

And it's important to put this down as a marker.

because this is the day where Donald Trump was yet again arraigned in a federal court.

And we have some information about that.

More information will come out in the next few days, but we're going to get Victor's immediate thoughts on what has transpired today in Washington, D.C.

We'll get to that.

We'll get to Victor's thoughts right after these important messages.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bull and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bull and branch sheets are made with the finest, 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, Bowl and Branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my Bowl and Branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So, join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bullandbranch.com slash victor.

That's Bullen Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply.

And we'd like to thank Bowl and Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.

Well, I have found the Secret serum.

And it's Vibriance Super C Serum.

The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers.

Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients, including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and aged spots with Vibrance.

I just began using Super C serum last week and I love it.

My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh.

And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.

Give it a try, and you'll love it too.

And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.

Go to vibrance.com/slash Victor to save up to 37% off and free shipping.

That's Vibrance.

V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E.

Vibrance.com slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

A little later in the podcast, Victor, I will tell our fine and wonderful listeners about your official website, The Blade of Perseus,

which is at victorhanson.com.

And also, today's episode is sponsored by Field of Greens.

And I'll tell you a little more about that later.

Victor, Donald Trump woke up this morning again, Thursday, August 3rd, Bedminster, New Jersey, took a plane, went to Washington, went to the federal courthouse with his attorneys,

was arraigned,

charged with crimes, processed,

and before a federal judge, said not guilty to four counts.

Victor, a remarkable day

for American jurisprudence.

What are your thoughts, my friend?

I spent the day at work and then I drove the 200 miles across California listening to all the different radio stations.

And it was very funny how the left is so giddy.

They think they have 100 indictments.

But more importantly, Jack, they're like poker chips, they think.

One talking head was saying, we're going to get 600 indictments

without any explanation of what kind of indictments, whether they're valid, just the sheer number.

And then they're talking about no bail, maybe.

They were hoping that Trump might not get bail.

He would go immediately to jail.

But they're completely oblivious about why people would be angry about this.

And I wrote a column today for American Greatness where I went through each item that Donald Trump was charged with, election denialism.

I mentioned all the left-wing examples of that.

Destroying evidence, his supposedly attempt to erase videos and

Hillary Clinton's

destroying with a hammer hard drives under subpoena, erasing, what you say, bleach it?

You mean like with bleach?

No, Hillary, we know you use bleach bit to erase all of your emails.

And then there's a line.

I don't know his aides.

I can't remember.

It's if they were Jim Comey,

Clapper, Brennan, McCabe.

And then there's, of course,

the phone call and the impeachment versus

Biden's outright threatening the council and his family and getting Victor Slocum fired.

So I went to them and the left, the elite, doesn't even, they're not even aware of this, that most people see there's two Americas and two sets of laws that apply.

And if you're left-wing and an elite, you get an exemption.

You do whatever you want, basically.

And if you're not, you're in big trouble.

And then the use of these juries, they were giddy, Jack, about

in New York,

they can say all they want about Alvin Bragg, but when Donald Trump has to face a jury of his peers in New York or Washington, then all bets are off for him, meaning it's either going to be a

highly highly left-wing or highly black jury, and therefore

this orange man that is supposedly hated by everybody will be convicted whether the evidence leads to that conclusion or not.

So it's pretty bad.

We've never gone after, we've never had an ex-president president since Teddy Roosevelt

when he ran against Taft.

We've never had a president

emasculate his leading opponent and tie him up.

We've never had a president tie his leading opponent up with indictments when he is facing far greater legal jeopardy because Joe Biden really did, I think, engage in bribery and by extension, treason as outlined in the Constitution.

And we're going to find that out.

The only sad thing about all this is you get the sense that when they have to go back, Jack, to 1870 laws designed to go after the Ku Klux Klan, or Alvin Bragg has to contort a non-disclosure agreement with Stormy Daniels into some kind of felonious campaign finance violation, i.e., Hillary Clinton was fined $113,000 for the Mueller fraud stuff, but she never went to jail.

But when you have to get that desperate, remember how they went after Michael Flynn on the Logan Act?

When the left is using every type of warfare they can, and it just shows you that they don't have a serious writ or a serious crime.

They can just use a regular statute.

And they know that.

And did you see the face of Jack Smith when he announced his indictment?

Did you think that he was sweating and looking terrified?

It was, you know what I mean?

I thought it was amazing.

It was really, his whole face gave away the insecurity and uncertainty that he had about his own indictment.

Right.

Victor, it's not only,

you know, legitimate crimes,

it's also broader.

No,

we are at a point, well past the point where

we want to persuade

those people who are on the other side or sometimes on the other side or

with whom we disagree.

And even if we can't persuade them once upon a time, we still could have a drink with them at the end of the day and now it's to criminalize the people, whether it's Donald Trump or if you're a pro-lifer

outside a clinic and you do something,

you know, you probably know a little bit, they're going to knock your door and it's six in the morning.

They know what they're doing.

There was an article today, maybe by David Brooks.

Did you see it in the New York Times?

What if we're wrong?

And he basically says, we rig the system so that these phony degrees from Harvard or Yale or Stanford, and we make them requisites for journalism, media, politics.

If you've been to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, whatever, Chicago, then we let you into the little club, even though we don't necessarily equate that.

those letters with any knowledge.

And in my own day, we used to have guys with cigars from the lower classes that were reporters.

And, you know, this is David Brooks, one of the great elitists of all time who said Obama's pants turned him on because they have have a perfect crease.

I don't know if any of us have worn crease pants in a long time, but the point I'm making is they know it.

That's why he wrote, just like Peggy Noonan after the Trump victory, remember it's about the people with no protection versus the people with all the protection.

And they, they, every once in a while, they see the middle class angry and they get kind of scared.

And they kind of say, well, you know,

globalization and these phony universities and we and our little enclaves, we created all this anger and then we make fun of these people.

We're the ones that fly jets and we're the ones that,

you know, have nice cars and we are, and then we tell the guy in a pickup, you're a polluter, or we make you pay him more for electricity so you don't turn on your gas grill or whatever, electric gill.

They know it.

And every once in a while they get scared.

And they're kind of scared now because they went too far and they

they're hoping deep down inside it's going to be a January 6th thing, the protests.

And by that, I mean they know that was nothing and that they ginned that up into an insurrection.

As

Mr.

Rosenberg said from the New York Times, remember he said there was a hell of a lot of FBI informants all over.

But

I think now they're afraid that there might be a backlash and that Donald Trump might be elected and that if he were elected,

he would go after to the degree he could with the statute of limitations, he would go after the Clinton and Biden corrupt machines.

And they're really afraid of that because they don't really believe in democracy.

They believe in democracy when they control the government.

But

we know that they're willing to pack the court or they're willing to let in new states or get rid of the filibuster or trash the Electoral College or cheat on the voting

if it's in their interests.

But you do that to them and then

they go paranoid.

We talk about the Constitution and they're fixated on process.

That's all they do.

That's all they do.

They just do process.

We never do.

We always say,

we're going to get out and vote.

We're going to get the majority.

And you think, well,

They sued to change the voting law.

Oh, I didn't know that.

We're going to win the Electoral College if that's what it takes.

Well, they have the blue wall, but the blue wall fell.

Well, they're going to get rid of the Electoral College.

Well, we got the court.

We got the guys.

Well, they're going to change the rules and pack it.

Or they're going to go after the justice personally and call them corrupt.

Are they going to mass outside their homes and intimidate them?

Or a Stanford

law professor, a Harvard law professor is going to say, just ignore the affirmative action ruling or the rule behind.

That's how they just make it up if it doesn't go against them.

Then they say, you know, democracy dies in darkness.

This is a,

I don't know, it's,

this is probably the most intellectually, morally, culturally bankrupt

generation in our history because the 60s people, I grew up, I was younger, but I watched those people.

They were superbly educated from the

people from the 50s.

Now, they did trash their education.

They took,

you know, wire cutters and cut the chain of continuation so that other people didn't get the chance they did because they trashed the universities.

But they did believe in free speech.

I mean, some of them didn't.

They would shout people down and that all got started.

But these people, their grandkids don't.

They're anal retentive, spaghetti-armed, Antifa,

nerdy, mean-spirited people who sit behind consoles and cancel you, shadow ban you, deplatform you, cowardly,

entitled, and they make fun of all the people who keep them safe and prosperous.

Yeah.

Victor, they also lie to the heavens.

I saw some

piece today on the Daily Mail about the Harvard professor who I think she was, she studied honesty and essentially honesty.

And

her

studies

had dishonesty in it.

That's the assumption.

And she's suing Harvard.

And this has to do a little bit with that,

the former, now ousted president of Stanford, the lying in academic reports.

But I've read some other piece in the Financial Times today.

Somebody sent it along.

This is a massive issue.

It's not

random, occasional fibers in these scientific studies, it's rampant.

There are thousands and thousands.

There are a couple of groups out there now that just debunk these studies by these left-wing PhDs who just, they fill them with lies.

It's they all lie.

They all lie.

All anything that has to do with race, class, gender

is usually a lie.

And

almost every day in the news, that some person has to retract a paper or

his evidence.

If you go to Power Line, it's just a new story

about the crime and, as I said earlier,

in Minneapolis and in Minnesota in general.

It's just a complete lie that blacks are inordinately punished for the same crimes that white.

In fact, the data shows that whites are inordinately punished for the same violent crimes.

Not because the criminal justice system hates whites or hates anybody.

It's just that they're afraid that if they punish blacks according to the law, there'll be a riot.

And if they do the same for white, there won't.

And so,

you know,

a lot of these things, these whole mythologies, Michael for

Michael Brown and Ferguson, I mean, we forget that this was a man that walked into a market and intimidated a person of color, I think he was an East Indian.

and then just looked at him in the face and stole things.

And then he pranced out high on dope.

And then he walked down the middle of the road.

And then a single officer had to confront this large man who had a companion.

And he charged the officer and he tried to get his gun and kill him.

And so the officer defended him.

And he never put his hands up and said, hands up, don't shoot.

And that mythology made its way into the CNN anchor room when they all walked out hands up.

And then we had the Ferguson riots.

And, you know,

I've been very critical of what the

film

showed, Officer Chalvin and

the George Floyd matter, but let's not forget the circumstances.

This was a felon who had put a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach in a house invasion, who'd been pulled over the year before for being high on fentanyl, who was high on fentanyl and fentanyl-related drugs, and who was in the process of passing counterfeit money, and who not once, not twice, not three times, but repeatedly resisted arrests from the officers who were much smaller than he was.

And yes, so it was terrible and we punished the officer, but he has angel wings now on murals in Afghanistan.

Why do we do this?

And that caused this whole idea that this myth that Blacks are being killed inordinately by white policemen, it doesn't happen.

The Washington Post showed it didn't happen.

Out of 11 million arrests, it was like 11 a year of black unarmed suspects were shot.

And there was more or almost the same of white suspects.

And then they said, well, see, 13% of the population has almost as many killed that were unarmed.

We're talking about 11 and 11.

And then you say, yeah, but they make up 60, 70% of the arrest.

The people who come in contact with police, they're killed at a much less rate than whites are.

And you can't, it doesn't matter what you say, it doesn't matter any data, because it's not about data, it's not about the truth, it's not about anything.

This whole woke crime, chaos, anarchy is about a left-wing dogma of equality of result on the back end, massive redistribution of resources, dividing in a Marxist binary, victim versus victimizer, and then finding the necessary narratives to justify it.

Systematically racist, insidiously racist, reparation, all that stuff.

And it's going to continue, the destruction of meritocracy until people say, you know what, it's not going to go on,

not going to do it anymore.

And we'll see if that happens.

But look at with this on Midas Tusk.

touch that the left have, they have destroyed Portland, they have destroyed Los Angeles, they have completely destroyed san francisco they have destroyed seattle they've destroyed minneapolis they've destroyed parts of new york

they've destroyed parts of washington

and we saw what they did with the the covert lockdowns we see what they're doing here in california they destroy everything they come in contact it's like Venezuela was a prosperous country.

They destroyed it.

Cuba was a prosperous country.

They destroyed it.

They destroyed Colombia.

They've destroyed everything they touch.

And that's what's scary about it.

Nobody says anything.

Everybody's scared.

Yeah, interesting.

And they glorify the city.

They

discredit and disdain the rural.

And yet

their policies, the one place they want everyone to live in some kind of Coolio concept is right, some Brooklyn shared apartment

on the same street where they're going to sell muffins and Tai Chi and chi chi

destroying these places and you can't have gas in them and you know

you're going to get stabbed if you go out to get a quart of milk.

It's effed up.

600,000 have left California in two and a half years.

600,000.

Housing market would be crashed if they let people build houses.

But when you let in millions of illegal aliens and we have one-third of the nation's welfare recipients that come for the largesse

and you don't build homes, it's still very expensive to buy a home.

And because we'd have people living in the streets, it'll probably take another three or four million people to live before housing returns to normal, maybe 10 million.

But don't kid yourself, it can happen.

There can be a lot more people leave the state, especially if they up the taxes like they're talking.

We have 13.3 income.

Most counties have between 10 and 12%.

We have very high assessed evaluations of property taxes.

We have the highest gas taxes.

We have the highest electricity taxes.

We have the highest electricity.

We have the highest gas prices, except for Hawaii.

And we have the highest basket of taxes and prices.

And this was all created from a state that Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson,

George Duke Majin had created.

It was heaven.

It worked.

It was ahead of everybody.

And infrastructure, schooling, public education, you name it.

It's all been destroyed by these dogmas.

And then the funny thing is they destroy it and then they don't want it.

They don't want to live in downtown.

They don't want to live in California anymore.

They want to go destroy something else.

It's so weird.

Like

I would give Stanford University, I was there today, about five years.

Because with these repertory admissions and you're only having 20% white, and I don't care about the person's color, I'm just just saying that if you're taking 67% of the population and you're restricting their admissions to 20%,

and a lot of those people qualify under the old rubrics that Stanford itself said that were necessary, if you want to come to Stanford, then you better have a 4.5 GPA and it better be from a ranked high school.

And we'd like our students to have 750 or 780 on our SATs.

Okay,

if that was what you said you had to have, and that's what built your name, and then you destroyed that, well, what are you going to get?

Well, you're going to get very quickly what people are already talking about.

And that's the big conversation on campus that nobody wants to talk about.

That already the classes are inflating the grades, they're dumbing down their curriculum, they're scared to give the actual grade that people get.

There's more crime on campus.

And I think in five years, it's going to be,

you know, I mean, mean, Hillsdale is going to be Stanford.

And Stanford's going to be, I don't want to make fun of a CSU because I'm very proud of the CSU system, but it's going to be something like CSU Stanislaw because it has no standards.

And everybody knows it.

Everybody knows it.

They just don't talk about it.

Everybody knows it.

I talked to a professor today.

That's all he talked about.

I've talked to a professor.

They all know it.

They all know where it's headed and they can't stop it.

It's like a locomotive that's stuck on high.

It's going 80 miles an hour.

There's a bend up in the tracks and everybody knows what's going to happen and they can't stop it.

And eventually the alumni are not going to give the money to that.

It's going to take some brave soul.

to be the president of that university and say, I don't care what you say about me.

We're going to restore meritocracy.

We're going to get back to Martin Luther King Jr.'s idea that race is incidental.

We're going to try to have a diverse campus in thought and politics.

And

maybe they can save it, but I don't see anybody with that type of courage.

Right.

Even if you had that courage, Victor, that's layered on top of

a fact of

incoming students that maybe have an are innately intelligent, but

no longer have the knowledge you'd expect someone at the age of 18 or intelligent to have.

They don't know anything.

I've talked to students.

You can't carry a conversation on a university campus.

There's no reference.

If I were to say Ionic Order, Parthenon, Acropolis, Battle of Shiloh,

Grover, Cleveland,

you know, if I said Joe Domanic, they don't know any of it.

They do not know any of it.

I don't know what they know other than

diversity, equity, inclusion stuff.

And

they try hard to talk about.

They're very arrogant, but they don't know anything.

And so all these people in the world that are competing with the United States, they're pretty happy because they feel we're fifth century AD Rome.

We're a big, fat, entitled, lazy country that can be plundered.

And,

you know, it's like, I can't believe it.

I keep going back to the bio lab.

12 miles from my house where I used to work in the summer for about three weeks when I went from packing house to packing house trying trying to get a job.

And they find all this stuff, right?

And they've got measles and they've got HIV and they've got COVID.

And yes, they probably were trying to get some of Gavin Newsom's hundreds of millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars of free stuff by qualifying for COVID protection and payback, paycheck protect, all those giveaway programs that were so disastrous.

And they were making test kits and the test kits were fraud and they got recalled and they were worthless.

But the fact of the matter is, in the era of the Wuhan lab, right in the center of rural California, they've got dangerous vira

and dead genetic rats run by a Chinese company.

And they've known it since March.

And everybody's like, we're all Lotus.

Oh, wow.

Right over there in real good old Reedley.

That's kind of weird.

200 dead rats on the floor, 800 of them they had to euthanize, all genetically engineered?

Hmm, that's funny.

Like, hey, I got to get back.

I've got to get back on Twitter.

I got to do some video games today.

That's their attitude.

You know, rats never got loose anywhere, Victor.

So

they were always saying that, you know.

This couldn't hurt you.

This couldn't,

they've already been saying that.

Or the local authorities are just saying, our job is the, it was just the building.

That's not the viruses.

That's somebody else's job.

And so,

why would we ever let any Chinese national

come to the United States that wasn't a citizen?

Right.

Give him a green card to open a company to handle

viruses with genetically enhanced rats after what we know from Wuhan.

Is there somebody with any brains in immigration?

It's a suicidal nation that does.

It is.

The whole principle is

what Milton Friedman, quoting, I guess, Samuel Johnson and David Hume, they all said there's a lot of rot left in a nation.

Their attitude right now is,

well, we were very lucky.

We had these great grandparents and grandparents that went through the Depression, these suckers, they think they're suckers, that went out and died in Normandy and were blown up in B-17s and won the war.

Then these crazy Cold War guys that defeated the Soviet Union, and then they recovered from the oil shocks, and they gave us all this wealth.

And

hey, it's party time.

That's their attitude.

Let's enjoy it.

Let's smash and grab.

Let's carjack.

Let's not, let's defund the police.

Let's legalize dangerous drugs.

Let's have partial birth abortion.

Let's show transgendered sex shows to kids.

Let's just have a jolly old satiric on time.

That's kind of where we are.

And if you say, wait a minute,

where are the voices of history and civilization?

Do you know what you're doing?

You pulled the plug on the bathtub and we're all going down with you.

You racist.

You're a homophobe.

And we all, oh, please don't say that about it.

We're Eloy too.

So we got to.

We do anything, but don't say that about me.

Yeah,

we've got to stop that.

We've got to just say.

This country is not yours.

I'm sorry.

But just because you're occupying Seattle or Portland doesn't mean that you get to tell everybody what to do.

I'm sorry.

It's not going to happen anymore.

And we'll see what happens in this next election.

These indictments are so volatile.

It just, everybody thinks they know something.

They know nothing, nothing.

We don't know.

We have no idea whether it's 600 indictments, it's $200 million in legal fees.

We don't know what's going to happen with Joe Biden.

We don't know what people are going to do when they look at this railroading of justice.

And it's wide open.

Now DeSantis is going to have a debate with Newsom.

We don't have any idea what's going to happen.

This whole thing is in flux.

And all we know is that Joe Biden is bragging about Bidenomics and all of his

psychophants are on TV saying it's a great economy when 35% say that the economy is working well for them.

Right.

Yeah.

5,000, 6,000, 10,000 more bucks a year than it was

two or three years ago.

And that's a year, right?

So like it's not one time.

When did 25% tipping?

I go to places I ate out in Palo Alto and

I eat out when I've had on the road and they used to be 15%.

And I hit the bill and it says check check 15, but that's you're not supposed to do it 20,

25, even 30.

I always check 20 now, but I see there's 20.

When do people get 25% tip?

A quarter of the cost of the meal goes to the server?

It's crazy.

You're asked to do that if you buy a bag of

time.

I know.

You go to Starbucks and you have to go serve yourself and you got to, you got it.

You're supposed to pay a tip.

It's

all right.

We have to give a tip to our, to our, uh, our listeners, and uh, we'll come back with some other topics.

But, you know, we have a sponsor today, Victor, and I'd like to take a moment to tell our listeners about Field of Greens.

And I know that summer travels can make it hard to get the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables, unless, Victor, you're going down,

you know, 99 or 101 and pull over at a fruit stand there.

Well, that's why I excuse me, take Field of Greens.

It's a whole organic fruit and vegetable.

It's not a watered-down supplement.

It's backed by a better health promise.

Each ingredient in Field of Greens has been scientifically chosen to support vital organs like heart, lungs, and kidney health.

Others support my immune system, blood pressure, metabolism, and healthy weight loss.

Let me get you started, folks, with 15%.

percent off.

So how do you get that?

You visit fieldofgreens.com and use the promo code Victor,

V-I-C-T-O-R.

That's promo code Victor at fieldofgreens.com.

Try it, folks.

I do.

Thank you, Field of Greens, for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, I'd like us to get your thoughts on

Diane Feinstein, but do you have any other thoughts final back on the Trump indictment?

Anything else you'd want to say about Jack Smith?

And if yes, please do.

If not i'll just mention that sure go ahead

i i've mentioned before but this this one statement that says

that he unlawfully discounted a legitimate vote

on law that's not there's no law that says you can or cannot discount a vote that's insane and so then it was The next idea was he didn't believe that the election, he just said that.

What did it matter if he believed it or not?

The fact is, did he stop the election?

If he was president, did he stop the election?

Did he order everything?

Well, he got special,

he got electors.

No, he said, if things go bad and our theory holds up in court, or we can, then we'll have an alternate set.

I didn't agree with that.

I thought that was silly, but he didn't go hijack it and put his people in there.

It wasn't like he

got, I mean, it wasn't like he was the Hollywood actors in 2016.

exactly they got on tv and said please electors don't vote for the popular vote in your state right they should all be arrested they should all be arrested they were trying to overthrow the government it wasn't like barbara boxer and benny thompson and all of the 32 house members who rejected tried and tried to get everybody to reject the ohio results so that john kerry would be president on the bogus claim that the machines were fraudulent.

So it's just,

it gets exasperating these people.

They just, they have no collective memory.

It's just on to the next, you know, we've gone from 2016, destroying the Trump administration for 22 months, 40 million with

Robert Mueller.

Then it's suddenly, okay.

Yep, no pee-pee tag.

Yep, Dashinko was a creep.

Yep, Christopher Steele was a pathological liar.

So what?

We're on to impeachment.

And then, oh, oh, yeah, I mean, yeah, he, I guess Joe did the same thing.

But now we're on to Russian disinformation and it's 2020.

And that laptop has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.

And that's what they do to poor Joe Biden.

That's what the Trump people do.

They get a laptop and they get the Russians and that.

And then, oh, sorry, it's authentic.

Yeah, we lied, but 51 intelligence.

Yeah, we died.

Yeah, Anthony Blinken was behind it all.

Mike Morale.

no consequences.

We warped in a whole election.

Now we're on to 2024.

And this time we're not going to wait to the final days.

We're going to start with the 600 indictments.

That's, do you know any mafia person, Jack, that's ever faced 600 indictments?

No, and I don't know any mafia person either.

No.

I mean, I mean, I've never heard of, I don't mean no person.

I mean, has anybody in the audience heard, know,

read, ever, about a violent murderer who was faced with 600 counts?

We thought there was a lot, Victor, right?

When Elliot Abrams was charged, then he had like 40 charges against him.

That's to inundate you so you beg for mercy on one.

But

same

thing with Patrick Fitzgerald and Scooter Libby.

Right.

That was a complete railroad.

But never, they're bragging now that when James and Fannie Willis and Bragg get together with

Smith, they're going to get 600 of them.

And

it's just mind-boggling how they can get away with this in the United States.

It's just,

there's a lot of subtexts here that people don't talk about because they're afraid.

I mean, there is an African-American left-wing.

uh hatred of trump so you have a black prosecutor bragg you have a black prosecutor james you have a black prosecutor, Willis, and you're going to have majority black juries in New York, Washington, and Atlanta.

And I'm just telling you the truth.

And there's a hatred there of the left, not of all black people.

A lot of black people like Trump.

He's got a higher

popularity rating with blacks, but the hardcore left is taking the lead on this.

And

there are racial motivations here.

It's clear.

And nobody's talking about that.

And I'll probably get

sanctioned from Hoover or Stanford or something for saying it.

But

it is three out of these four, all of the state

prosecutors are products of the Sorrel system.

Right.

And they have.

They have in the past accused Donald Trump of various things politically or promised they were going to get them.

And they rely on juries that feel that Donald Trump is a racist or something.

So that's why I feel that he will be indicted, no matter what the evidence is, and he will be convicted, and they will do the same process to find a judge that will sentence him to a long time in prison.

And people tell me, well, no appellate court judge, Victor, in his right mind, is going to go back and think you can dig up something in the Grant administration.

Well, it doesn't matter.

That'll be in 2026 when

we're all into the Newsome presidency or something.

That's irrelevant.

Donald Trump will go to jail and he will be in jail, I think, during the election.

And that is just unimaginable, but that is likely to happen.

Yeah.

Wow.

Banana Republic.

Victor,

we need to get your thoughts on Diane Feinstein and Feinstein and this new

repackaging of her life.

And let's get to that right after these important messages.

You might be wondering, when is the right time to add collagen to my diet?

How about today?

Calagen production starts to dwindle in your 20s.

By the time you've hit your 50s, decreased collagen contributes to wrinkles, sagging skin, and joint discomfort.

Native path Calagen can help.

It's packed with only type 1 and 3 collagen fibers, the ones your body needs most for healthy joints, skin, bones, hair, nails, and gut.

Plus, it's third-party tested for purity with no fillers, no additives, and no artificial junk.

Two scoops a day of Native Path delivers 18 grams of protein.

Mix it into your coffee, tea, or any drink.

It's completely flavorless and easy to use.

Right now, get a special deal at a fraction of the retail price, plus free shipping.

Available at getnativepath.com slash Victor.

With over 4 million jars sold, thousands of five-star reviews, and a 365-day money-back guarantee, this is your moment to take control of aging before symptoms get worse.

Go to getnativepath.com slash victor now.

Supplies are limited and demand is surging.

And we'd like to thank NativePath for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So you just got back from summer vacation.

Maybe you might have even had to book two rooms because of your snoring.

Some vacation, huh?

Snoring can be an underlying cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even memory loss.

Here is my advice.

If you want every night to be a true vacation, you need to get yourself Zipa.

That's happy Z spelled backwards.

Zipa is a doctor-designed mouthpiece that not only moves your jaw forward, but is also the only device with a patented tongue seat belt to keep your airways open and the snoring away.

The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.

Zipa was proven in a 600-patient clinical trial and sold over half a million units.

From now until the end of October, show your family you actually care by purchasing a limited edition Pink Zipa.

Not only will you save $10,

but Zipa is on a mission to raise $50,000 for breast cancer research and they will donate another $10,000 to the Susan G.

Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Go to ZYPPAH.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511511.

Put your snoring on a permanent vacation and help a worthy cause with the snoring device we trust by visiting zyppah.com and use the code pink or text Victor to 511511.

Remember, Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.

Text fees may apply and we'd like to thank Zipa for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Before we get to Victor's thoughts on the 90-year-old California Senator, it wouldn't be bad, regardless if she was 90 and with it, but she ain't.

We'll get to that in a second.

A few things.

One, Victor has a website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

If you go there, well, if you don't go there, I know what's wrong with you.

But if you go there and you try to read some of the articles there, well, if they're Victor's American Greatness articles or his syndicated columns, you will be able to read them.

But if you try to read the ultra articles, you won't unless you're a subscriber.

Victor writes two or three ultra articles a week.

It's exclusive, exclusive to the website.

You can't read them anywhere else.

If you are a fan of Victor's writings, please subscribe.

It's $5 to get you in the door, $50 discounted for the full year.

That's theblade to PerseusVictorHanson.com.

I have to mention, Victor, that we've mentioned this before, the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club, which is on Facebook.

It's one wonderful group, folks.

And someone posted today, because you say so much about,

you can say it in Latin, but not this pig.

And someone has designed a t-shirt there with a pig wearing sunglasses, really cool.

And underneath it, not this pig, hashtag VDH.

That's a Matthew John did this.

He writes the perfect summer tea to go with your subscription to the blade of Perseus.

Anyway, it's kind of cool what your fans do, Victor.

What's the Latin for that again?

Not this pig?

Non-hip pork is.

It's kind of a fragmented line from Petronius's satiricon when he's

it's it's actually it became a kind of idea that I'm not that stupid.

I'm not going to put up with this, but it was about a pig that wasn't fully cooked.

And they said, this pig is not cooked.

And so

it's a very weird thing.

Yeah.

But anyway, I like that t-shirt.

It was really.

Yeah,

it's funny.

Thank you, Matthew, John Fisher, sharing that.

Thanks to the folks over at...

at the Victor Davis Hanson fan club.

It's not official

for Victor, but they're good people.

So anyway, back to California.

Here's the headline, Victor, from the Daily Mail today.

Ailing senator Dianne Feinstein, 90, gives her daughter, her daughter, power of her attorney after a string of cognitive concerns and during a bitter dispute over her late husband's estate.

That dispute is not an unimportant news story, but Victor,

If you gave something,

your health came to such a point that you gave the great Mrs.

Hansen your power of attorney.

I doubt that you would be able to

serve on the boards or any other number of things, right?

You know, it means I don't have the cognitive powers essentially to make decisions.

Someone has to make them for me.

But this is a senator of the United States.

And her daughter, I think her daughter is essentially de facto now, the senator from California.

It's fascinating that

it shows you the low regard we have for politics.

If you were a bank president or a loan officer or an accountant or a hybrid patrolman and you were in the mental state of Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi or Diane Feinstein, you'd lose your job.

Yeah, or the guy from Pennsylvania.

Let's not forget him either.

He's a senator.

I can't remember his name now.

Yeah,

Federman.

Federman, yeah.

Fedderman.

So,

but as long as you're in politics, anything's okay.

You don't have to show up for work.

If I don't show up at my job and drive 400 miles and stay there for a while,

I'm not supposed to be there.

But what if I just said, I'm kind of old, I'm just going to stay here in Selma?

It's just amazing how we give these people passes.

And she had encephalitis from the shingles, and she got facial paralysis.

And Mitch McConnell McConnell just lost complete train of thought for what, a minute?

And he had some obviously, I don't know what it was,

a stroke.

Yeah, I think that was not the first time that happened.

No, and I guess he fell down right on his face and he'd had a concussion or brain swelling.

And then we had Pelosi was just, she doesn't know what she says sometimes.

And, you know, I'm not talking about age.

You look at Charles Grassley compared to Mitch McConnell.

Charles Grassley is vibrant.

You know what I mean?

He's what, 96 or something?

Yeah.

Who's the Harvard professor?

He just retired at 93 or 94.

Harvey Mansfield.

Harvey.

Oh, yeah, Harvey Mansfield.

Right.

Yeah.

Ah, I know Harvey very well, and I really admire him.

And he's, he's,

he, you know, he's,

I don't know what to say.

Every time I see him.

A vibrant non-agenarian.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Every time I see him, I, I have to ask him because I can't believe it.

I I always say, Harvey, now you're 80 or you're 84.

No, no, I'm 90, Victor.

No, I'm next time.

I'm 92.

He looks like he's,

he was, he's just amazing.

So it's not, it's not age.

I'm not saying that it's age.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's the physical age that all that matters, you know.

Right.

So Grassley, I think, is, I don't know what he is, but he's about the same age as Diane Feinstein.

And he looks and acts like he's 70.

So my point is that we got to,

I think that all of the politicians should take a Montreal

assessment, cognitive assessment test that Trump did every year.

When you get over 60, you take it.

If you can't pass it, boom, you're out.

Because we do that with pilots.

We do that with police people.

We make sure that

You know,

I go over, I have to drive, you know, so I have to take, I get claucoma type of test I have because of this long COVID high pressure.

And at some point, that it would affect my peripheral vision.

I couldn't drive.

I wouldn't get a license next time.

So my point is, everybody should follow the same rules, but not politicians.

It's like, wow,

these are like homeless people.

We don't really, we don't want to interfere.

They can be any way they want.

All they're doing is making our laws.

Big deal.

So Diane Feinstein, whisper in her ear,

tell her you say I, Diane, remember that?

And then, Mitch, hey, Mitch, somebody wave your hands in front of his face.

Mitch, Mitch, Mitch, come down to earth.

Or Federman,

you know, you look like you're on the beach and you haven't said one coherent thought today.

And Joe Biden,

hey, Joe, you turn this way and know the war is in Ukraine.

It's not in Iraq.

Right.

And so.

Taking invisible people's hands.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But what's so strange about all of this, if you

it's

the description of reality is a more dangerous thing

than the reality itself.

So when you say these things and the left goes after you,

the right doesn't go after you.

They don't say, don't dare speak about Mitch McConnell.

They're empirical.

Yeah, I agree with you.

But if you say something about the left, then it's

there, it's all, I mean, these are the very same people that got, what was her name, Professor Yee or something from Yale to come and testify before Congress and then to say that Donald Trump should be put in a straitjacket, restrained and removed and be removed under the, then we had Rosenstein and McCabe that were conspiring to get him out on the 25th Amendment.

And we had people writing op-eds saying he's crazy.

Oh, he slipped on a, remember he had a little slow gait in the rain?

I think that was at the academy, academy, one of the academies.

And then he said, My button's bigger than yours,

Kim Jong-un.

And they said, Oh my God, he's insane.

And then we had Rosa Brooks and everybody.

We're talking about insurrection.

And getting back to the earlier impeachment, what Donald Trump did, she wrote, she was a very prominent Pentagon lawyer in the Obama administration.

11 days after

Trump was inaugurated, 11 in Foreign Affairs, a flagship left-wing diplomatic magazine.

She said, we've got to get rid of Trump.

We can try impeachment.

She had nothing to impeach him on, but it would take a long time.

We'd never convict him.

We could get him out in the 25th Amendment.

He had no sign of being, but it didn't matter.

Then she said, but there's a quicker way, a coup, a military coup.

Maybe you could just, the officers would refuse to follow orders.

And I thought, wow, that when I read that thing and I beat it to death in columns, I thought, that's a call to arms.

You know what I mean?

That is a call for violent revolution.

And nobody said a word.

Nope, nope, nope.

And since then, we had two colonels that came out and they wrote an op-ed saying that he should be removed.

We had Mr.

Admiral McRaven said, well, sooner the better, even though we have regularly scheduled elections, he wanted Trump out.

So it,

and then we're indicting a president because we think he didn't mean it when he said the election was rigged.

If he did mean it, what would that mean?

I mean, why would they put that in?

So you say,

okay, well, he didn't mean it.

So what?

What's the difference?

If he did mean it or he did mean it, he didn't mean it, he did mean it.

He either did it or he didn't.

You know,

the policeman was shot by a robber.

The robber says, I wanted to kill him.

I didn't want to kill him.

So what?

The evidence will tell us, right?

Right.

The evidence will tell us.

And

you can see where this was all going from the very beginning.

When they, the tip-off was when they, when Rosenberg got ambushed on the Operation Veritas, and he said he spotted a lot of FBI informants.

And then Mr.

Ray Epps, that they'd left, used to despise when he was on the person of interest FBI list for saying on four occasions, we got to go into the Capitol or

texting his nephew, I'm the architect of this.

And then they decided that he flipped and he was going to be an iconic folk hero.

So they discount.

And then they put the 25,000 officers

into the Capitol, put the bobbed wire so everybody would think that these buffoons with the deer horns and stuff were really insurrectionaries.

They never found one firearm inside the Capitol.

Yeah, there was one inside, but, you know,

it killed a woman.

Yeah, it killed Ashley Babbitt.

And then, you know, and so that was all orchestrated.

It was all orchestrated.

And they've never given up.

There's central casting somewhere.

No sooner has Adam Schiff been censored and everybody's despised him on both sides of the aisle.

He's a pathological liar.

And then he sprouts,

he's like spontaneous generation.

Then this guy named Dan Goldman sprouts up, right?

And he's a bigger, bigger liar than Schiff was.

He comes out with a straight face, looks at America and says, they were talking about the weather.

Joe Biden's talking about the weather.

And I thought, this is right out of the godfather, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Did you see Devin Archer's

Tucker's interview?

I did.

I did.

What did you say?

I thought it was bizarre because he was kind of smiling and he was kind of saying, you know, I'm a crook too.

And Tucker would ask him this question.

He'd kind of laugh and say, yeah, that's kind of how it goes, Tucker.

You know, you don't, you just get,

it was all about Joe.

And Tucker says, well, you call, he would get on the phone and he said, yeah.

And Tucker says, well, did you expect him to go through the details?

No, you don't do that, Tucker.

You really don't.

You just get him to say a few things so they know he's in the the room.

He's present.

And then

he kind of admitted to his own

illegal activities, but he was pretty mellow and it was kind of like Hunter.

You can see the guy was basically a party animal with Hunter.

And he was of Hunter's,

he didn't have a problem with the laws, what I'm saying about

reporting things.

And he's on, I mean, he...

He's accused of swindling what?

A Native American tribal group.

He's got all sorts of accusations, but he basically substantiated what everybody knew that Joe Biden from time to time

for performance art would say,

Joe Biden is on the phone.

So that, hey, everybody's seen that.

We can produce him anytime we want.

You may be taping this, but he's going to talk about the weather.

And the thing is like the Godfather 2, when the brother shows up, right?

You know, it's a point to presence sometime.

Yeah.

I mean, that Goldman would come out and say, now, listen, and that gold, in that godfather scene, when the brother comes up and the would-be guy who's an Italian guy from Sicily is going to turn evidence, he looks at his brother and it's the understood mafia stare that you don't break the code of silence.

It doesn't mean anything.

He didn't say anything, did he?

Did that brother say, please don't testify against the Coriolis?

No, he didn't.

All he was doing was just winking winking at his brother.

That's what Goldman was basically saying.

And he thinks we're stupid.

And there's no quid pro quo in history where some guy gets up and says, I'm Joe Biden.

My son has taken $10 million in burismo.

And according to our contract, I'm going to make 16 phone calls to get

soaked and fired.

Is that it?

That's what, he's not going to find that.

Come on.

It was just, and so for that guy to say that is just ridiculous.

It's just pathetic.

And we're supposed to, okay, Representative Goldman, I guess you're right.

And then they all played the other call.

I thought that was so grotesque about that no sooner we brought back Bo alive.

Well, he was so upset about Bo.

He was so upset about, remember that?

Yeah, yeah.

People on television said it.

And so did all these representatives.

I thought, you know, you should be ashamed of yourself because you brought up, as you pointed out in an article, Jack, you brought up the truck driver who was not at fault.

And if there was any fault, it was Joe Biden's first wife who probably had a rolling stop.

The truck driver heroically tried to stop.

He hit her.

She was killed along with a daughter.

And what did you do, Joe Biden, for what, 15 years?

You told everybody that he was drunk.

He drank his lunch so you could get empathy.

It was pathetic.

And then we had your son who died tragically of a brain tumor.

And you told us he again and again and again, he died in Iraq.

He did not die in Iraq.

He did not die in Iraq.

Then you said he got cancer from a burn pit.

Maybe he did.

Maybe he didn't.

It's not proved.

But now they're using the death to suggest that Joe doted on Hunter because of Bo's death.

And

that's really, you shouldn't do that.

It's like in case of emergency, break glass, right?

And there's an axe, except the axe is Beau Biden

or the, you know, the first wife.

They're incorrigible with that.

Yeah, they are.

They are.

They are.

And it's not a good thing to do that for a person.

And

it's just,

it's, you know, Guy Benson wrote something about that.

And he had a good point where he went through all of the references to Bo and in this context of trying to excuse.

So you are breaking the law

and

you're culpable and you're willing to bring up the memory of your own prematurely dead child to help you get out of your own self-created mess.

And you do that with surrogates that are told to mention that, because that's what it is.

Right.

I thought it was a lot.

Do you remember how the left mocked Nixon

with his last speech at the White House and he was talking about his mother, and, you know, it was

whatever, but he wasn't using his mom as he was just wandering down

melodrama way, but they mocked him mercilessly for

being so maudlin.

How dare, you know, you talk about

his youth and the difficult times, etc.

Because of all everybody, one of the most common emails emails I get is, can we live together?

You probably do.

Is it impossible to deal with these crazy people?

And I've been really thinking about it.

So I went back about and read Frederick Jackson's Turner essay on the American frontier and the idea of free land is venting social tensions.

And I went back.

and went online.

I was had an hour in the evening and I read parts of Democracy in America by Tocqueville, Alexis D.

Tocqueville.

And unfortunately, and then I read some things Jefferson wrote, and it's pretty weird or strange how these brilliant social scientists, historians,

political observers said what made America work was this Western expansionism, this free land.

So when you had all of these social tensions and you had the elite going after Andrew Jackson or those, all those tensions, the way people dealt with it, they went west and they got land and they got, they built oil and gas and coal and farming.

They were the muscular classes and they were just too busy creating and doing things to worry about what somebody at Harvard said.

The great

novelist,

you know, Lou Wallace,

who wrote Ben-Hur, he was shunned by all Robert Lowell, all the Harvard professors, but he didn't care.

He would been a general in the Civil War and he got, it was the most popular book, and he was out west.

I think he was at Wabash.

But my point is, nobody worried because you could always go away from them.

But now you can't go away from them.

And all of the things that kept conservatives and traditionals busy, they're after.

They're after your.

They're after your leaf blower.

They're after your cooktop.

They're after your hot water heater.

They're after your pump on your private land.

They deprecate all the things.

They have granite in their homes.

They don't like you mining it.

They have stainless steel appliances.

They don't like you smelting it.

They have beautiful wood floors.

They don't like you cutting a tree down to give them the wood floors.

They're impossible people.

And so I'm worried because

these former political observers were suggesting that only the frontier or only westward expansion or only the outlets of creativity and building a country from nothing allowed these tensions to be lessened.

But now we're postmodern and we're not expanding, and the economy is stagnant, and we're

undoing, we're de-civilizing.

So it's different.

And I don't know how these two groups are going to get along.

I really don't.

Joe Biden talks about how great Biden economics is.

If you go back and look at GDP and unemployment state by state,

it's all the red states are doing well and propping up the economy.

it's states like texas and florida and tennessee it's not california it's not new york it's not minnesota it's not illinois they're big economies but they're not doing well and what's making us do well are the stuff that biden didn't screw up

and it's i don't know how we're going to get along because uh

It's very hard.

These indictments were a big mistake on the part of the left.

All they had to do was just say, you know what?

You guys should grow up because you know, ask yourself, if Trump was not running,

wouldn't you, Mr.

Bragg, go after him like this if he was back in New York as a private citizen or in Florida?

No.

Would you, Mr.

Smith, go after him in the way you're not going after Biden?

No, you wouldn't.

Ms.

Willis in Georgia, would you really go after this three-year-old phone call if he was not running?

No.

Ms.

James, do you really go after him for

getting a loan by saying his Trump towers was worth more than you think it was?

No.

So just stop it.

And they can't do it.

They can't do it.

It's a tick.

They cannot do it.

They hate him so much and the people he represents.

Right.

The idea of America that they want to restore.

David Brooks wrote a really, as I mentioned earlier, a very dishonest article today.

He's quoting somebody and saying, he always does this.

He says, are we culpable?

Were we wrong?

Or were we the bad guys?

Meaning we went after the middle classes and we went after the red state and interior.

But then he quotes a guy and says,

well, these the Trump supporters are all people who looked fondly back at 1963.

And do we want to go back to 1963?

No, we don't want to go back to, they're not looking back to find,

they'll take 1985.

They'll be happy with 1995.

They'll be happy with 2005.

Don't put that point that they want to go back to Mobile, Alabama in 1963 in the South.

These people in Michigan did not live in the South.

These people in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania did not live in the South.

They don't want to go back to 63.

They want to go back to before the madness.

They were perfectly fine.

They were fine with George W.

Bush.

They were foreign by George H.W.

Bush.

They were fine with Bill Clinton.

It started with Barack Obama.

He was the one that started the racial animosity and the hardcore green and America is not exceptional and you didn't build that and all that stuff.

But

they're happy to live in 2007.

They're happy to live in 1998.

They have no problem.

It's not, so don't tell us they're trying to go back to 1963 in the South.

They're not.

That's That's not the mega agenda.

It's just don't allow these people from the last 10 years to take something like San Francisco and destroy it.

Yeah.

And that's.

Well, Victor, same, if we, I understand, not going back to what 1963 stands for in racial terms, right?

But if we went back to 1963, we might still have some intact neighborhoods and

cities that weren't turned into hellhole of public housing.

If we went back to 1963.

It would be before the great society that

destroyed the black family.

Well, I mean,

you go,

I have this little habit now that I watch 256 on direct TV

of the Turner classic movies, and

I want to look at our big cities, you know, and I see them in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s.

And I don't mean Hollywood stage saw it.

I mean just shots of the city.

And it's amazing.

Like DOA, like that 19, you know, the guy, Edmund O'Brien

is being poisoned.

He's in San Francisco.

And it's like, wow, this is a freaking beautiful city, right?

Yeah, I saw the, I saw, I think it's 1976, I saw Invasion of the Body Snatcher.

Remember with

Donald Saw?

Yeah, right, right.

It was in

San Francisco.

No, the remake.

The remake, right, right.

But it was in San Francisco.

It looked normal.

It looked normal.

I couldn't believe it in the 70s.

Yeah, Bullet was.

So they've done a lot.

Got to hand it to them.

They destroyed a city in about four years, five years.

Yeah.

And

they really did.

And they defunded the police.

They decriminalized the criminal code.

They had this woke idea of intolerance.

They

destroyed Lowell High School.

They destroyed all merit.

And

they didn't work on the infrastructure.

It was all about green this and green that.

And they destroyed it.

And now they have to live it.

Now they have to live.

Detroit was standing there for everyone to see what can happen to great cities.

Yeah,

they're very adolescent.

They're like adolescents that, you know, destroy their room or break a window, or they're 13-year-olds and they throw something and they say, Hey, dad, can you fix the window?

Hey, dad, uh, you know, I smashed the wall socket.

Can you get the electricity running?

But and their version of it, hey, we screwed San Francisco, so we're going to go to Austin,

where there's adults in the room that won't listen to us, so we can act like children, and then they'll take care of everything for us.

And to us,

yeah, we'll screw Austin up and we'll go somewhere else all right victor well we've

yeah we've come to the end of this just such upbeat uh episode but let me uh let me uh do i got i got yeah we've got to get upbeat because i i know i have decivilization and

i have a bunch of depressing stuff on their website and i think it's well you you better when you record with sammy you're going to have to have come up with something positive to start the show i think i'm going to go watch i'll go watch barbary barbara is it what's called Barbie, I'll go watch Barbie.

Oh my gosh,

I'd pay to see you watching that.

Okay.

So we have on

Apple a podcast, the platform,

whatever platform you listen to, folks,

this podcast, the Victor Davis Hanson show, we are deeply appreciative.

Could be Google, could be Apple.

Stitcher, not for much longer.

You can actually listen to the podcast on Victor's website, victorhanson.com.

But folks on iTunes and Apple can rate the show.

Most give it five stars.

It's practically 4.9

average from thousands of ratings.

So we thank those folks that take the time to rate it, and some actually leave comments.

And here's an interesting comment, Victor, from

a quite interesting conversation you had with Sammy in a recent podcast.

And this is titled Removing Dams in Favor of Natural Hydrograph.

And it says, Thanks for your insights.

There isn't a problem with Native Americans longing for a return of salmon.

The main problem is that ecologists are not focused on restoring the upper reaches of creeks and streams where spawning needs to get established.

To recapture salmon cycles of 100 years ago, first understand there are small watersheds that no longer have proper shade, vegetation, natural flow, or wildlife populations that naturally fertilize watersheds, creating a habitat suitable for spawning Pacific salmon.

Unlike Atlantic salmon, Pacific salmon die in the process of producing offspring.

Released female eggs and male milt result in future salmon.

These emerging offspring, they're called fries, need specific nutrients, temperatures, gravel stream beds, shade, vegetation, and logs to dodge predators.

Unfortunately, we Pacific Northwest Natives have listened to activists who are well-funded and think that, and they're usually white activist leaders, they are going to accomplish things by closing dams.

We can't get back to the 100-year-ago

hydrophobic rivers and native watersheds by removing dams.

And this is signed by Thankful and Glad.

I think it's pretty interesting.

It is.

I wrote a series of articles maybe 10 years ago on water, and I pointed out that the dams

regularize the flow of the Sacramento and, for example, the San Joaquin Rivers.

They were in a boom and bust cycle.

The melt, the

melt on a year like this would flood Tulare Lake, it would flood the delta, and then it would be gone.

And then,

if it was a below wet year, then the rivers would be too low for salmon.

But you put 30 or 40 million acre feet behind dams, and you can let them out at a reasonable rate and keep the rivers running.

Then you

it was it created an artificial regularity and

that's just a fact.

And when they put little, you know, they put things for fish to go around the dams.

But this idea that every single year, for example, this came up with salmon on the San Joaquin River.

And so they said, well, there were salmon.

Well, if you go back and look very carefully, they were not very common because down here in the southern part of the Central Valley, there were droughts and there was not enough snow every year to guarantee a robust river.

But the dams, because they were storing millions of acre feet and they were letting it out at a steady rate, transform those rivers most years,

even with their demands by agriculture and hydroelectric, into pretty steady flows.

And so to blow them up, you're going to have flooding again, and then you're going to have drought.

That was perverse.

Yeah, all they have to do.

So they just have to go online.

They can read the Central Valley Project, the California Water Project, read the argument for hydroelectric, read the argument for recreation, read the argument for flood control, read the argument for irrigation.

They're all there.

And then look at the San Joaquin Valley from Bakersfield to Sacramento, and everything they predicted is right here.

And it's paradise in terms of productivity and

population.

At least it was until we neglected.

And so

blow it up and you'll go back to valley fever along 5 million acres of scrub in the west side.

It's true.

And there won't be very much farming farming on these.

Right.

Good luck, good luck getting celery, folks, and tomatoes.

No,

no, Victor, that was, you know, we've got some pretty smart

listeners, and that was great.

Again, thankful and glad for that

great comment.

Victor,

just as we end, just like to recommend to our listeners to visit civilthoughts.com.

That's where you can sign up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter that comes out every Friday.

I write it, I share 14

links and excerpts from what I believe are important articles that I've come across in the previous week.

And I share them, and I think they would be of interest to you.

There's no transaction going on here, it's totally free.

We're not collecting your names and selling them on the World Wide Webs.

So that's civilthoughts.com, which is published by the Center for Civil Society at Amphil, where we try to strengthen civil society.

And that's where I work, and

I am very happy and proud to work there.

So, Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared on this really

sadly historic day for the United States of America.

Thanks to all our listeners for listening, and we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.