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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Victor Davis-Hanson is the star of this show, and he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has an official website.

It's known, well, it's called, its name is the Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

You should be subscribing, and I'll tell you about that a little later.

And by the way, the happy home on the internet of this podcast is John Solomon's justthenews.com.

Victor,

a lot of California stuff on the agenda for today's, this this particular episode.

But we're going to begin with some

news that has just broken about Joe Biden

speaking in West Hartford, Connecticut today, and just more

freaking crazy talk from a man who

should...

From a man who has his finger on the button.

Finger on the button, and he should be taking a nap in the basement and not being the leader of the free world.

But we get your thoughts about this craziness and then, Victor, craziness in California, the political powers of B trying just to turn the state totally, officially, into a union stronghold.

The streets of San Francisco, we'll talk about that, all that after

these important messages.

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

So, Victor, you and I had talked on our last podcast about

some of the crazy, more recent utterances of Joe Biden.

But today, as we're recording, news came up from the Daily Mail, and

it's just

typical Joe.

He's in West Hartford giving a speech today, this afternoon, headline, God save the queen, man.

Babbling Biden jokes about being 110 and says, don't make me a dogface lying pony soldier during bizarre gun control speech.

And then he struggles with the stage exit, as usual, where do I go?

Which way do I go?

He just,

I don't know, Victor, a little bit of me.

I'm ashamed of laughing at a man who's clearly the onset of dementia.

This is not.

the beginning of dementia.

This is the full-fledged.

And it's going to get a lot worse.

It's It's going to get a lot worse because I've had relatives that have had it and I've watched it firsthand.

And

it increases not, as I say, not arithmetically.

It gets double the day before, quadruple the day before.

It just, it's sad.

I lived with my grandmother, you know, and I took care of her for a whole summer, just me.

And she was at that point.

In 1980, she was born.

She was 90 and she was not cognizant.

So she would say to me, I'm going outside to wait for the stage.

Well, there was a stage here when the house was built.

And I'd run after her.

And then she'd say, well, who are you?

You know, are you the stage driver?

And where are the horses?

And she was a very sweet, I have nothing but wonderful memories of it.

It was very tragic.

And we all have a rendezvous, I suppose, maybe with this, but he should not be the president of the United States.

And the people who knew this and used him, including his wife, to stop Donald Trump and stop whatever they thought they were stopping, endangered this country.

The left went crazy when Donald Trump said he had a bigger nuclear button than Kim Jong-un.

Remember that?

But that was a deliberate, calibrated...

warning to him not to keep threatening the West Coast.

And he stopped threatening.

This is scary.

It really is.

And this is well aside from the fact that he is now under allegation of receiving himself $5 million

from people connected to the Ukrainian government in some fashion, while he is governing our policy and the degree to which we're sending massive shipments to Ukraine.

So there's so many issues here.

And he's so,

you know, the last podcast, I mean,

everybody listening out there, whether you're a truck driver or you're a carpenter, a plumber, a doctor, a lawyer, whatever your job is, if you were in your job today and you saw somebody and you gave her a hug, and as you pulled your hands away, you touched the sides of her breast like Joe Biden did, what would happen to you?

What would happen to you if you're a teacher and you have to go into your

section meeting and you said, I'm a lion dogface pony soldier.

I'm 110.

God saved the queen.

What would people do?

They would, you know what I mean?

They would just, and then if when the meeting was over and you didn't know where to go.

So you wouldn't allow that because

it wouldn't be professional.

It wouldn't be helpful.

It'd be dangerous.

So is the president of the United States then just a ceremonial position that doesn't matter?

But he should be removed.

He should be removed immediately.

And they should invoke the 25th Amendment.

And I don't understand why they don't.

I understand they have nobody else because the party has gone so far left that even a Bill Clinton-type centrist, Bill Clinton's not a centrist anymore.

There's nobody left.

They've destroyed a whole generation of Democrats.

But, and then

as projectionists, they say, well, the Republican Party is unrecognizable.

That's only unrecognizable because you know that you're unrecognizable and you project that onto people.

But my God, it's scary.

And the weird thing is, we've got some weird rendezvous ahead because

he has a tendency.

He has certain things that come out.

When people have Alzheimer's, the

cognitive shields or

you know, I don't want the cognitive shield that shields you from doing things or the protection or the veneer of respectability, it's all gone.

And you get pure Joe Biden.

And we've saw that with these racial outbursts he's done.

And we see it with the sexuality, the breathing on girls' hair, whispering, the weird jokes when he gives a speech.

Oh, look at that young girl.

You're cute.

How old are you?

And then there's just bizarre things like this.

And it's going to get worse.

And

I've always said that he was not going to finish out his term, and I don't think he will.

But how he will end his presidency will depend on, again, his utility to the Democratic Party.

Yeah, I don't think even Nostradamus would have predicted this, Victor.

This is a really bad, bad scene for our country.

Well, let's talk about

what do you think the Chinese, so you're in China right now in Qi, and you're thinking, you have your advisors around, and they're saying,

well, you know, it's very hard to go across the South China Sea to get in Taiwan.

And nobody's ever quite had an amphibious, and they've got a lot of wherewithal.

And then the next person says, yeah, but they've emptied all their arsenals under.

They've sent a million artillery shells to Ukraine.

They don't have any.

And the next guy goes, they don't have any javelin missiles.

It's going to take them five years.

They don't have any more shore-to-shore missiles or ship-to-shore.

They're gone.

So,

and then when are you ever going to get a president like this?

Think about it.

What's he going to do?

He doesn't know where he is.

If there's a next election, you're going to get Trump or DeSantis and it's game over.

They're going to get tough.

There's not going to be any more balloon tests.

There's not going to be any dressing down their diplomats in Anchorage.

There's not going to be any more pride flags and humiliating withdrawals from Afghanistan type scenarios.

We can't keep

buzzing their planes and trying to ram their ships because they'll sink one of them.

So when are we ever going to get an opportunity like this again?

So there's always risk.

United States is a big power, but it's run by a complete non-compostment

failed mind, and we better move now.

And I think that's a serious discussion that's going on right now.

Victor, by the way, you mentioned Pride Flag.

I didn't tell you about this in advance, but just came to me.

You know,

at that White House ceremony that we, which we talked about on a previous podcast, the

Pride celebration, the Pride flag was hung illegally, let's put it that way, relative to the American flag.

The American flag being disrespected at the White House is like the American flag, that's the thing we pledge allegiance to, right?

I pledge allegiance to the flag.

I have to correct you.

Okay.

That's the flag we kneel down on one knee when it's flying during the national anthem.

That's true.

That's what we turn our backs on.

That explains the pride flag.

If we didn't do that with our flag and allow that, those timid corporate bosses in the NFL,

then we wouldn't have a pride flag having equal status.

But that's one problem.

The other problem is that once you demonize the majority as culpable for all the sins of the past or anything you don't like in the present or all your career goals that have been thwarted and you want to,

you know, remanufacture them or recalibrate them as somebody did this to you, then

0.0001 has equal say over 99%.

And that's what the pride flag is.

And so

it's,

and then they, they just took the word pride, like nobody else has pride, only transgender or gay people.

Well, I thought it was one of the seven deadly sins.

And I'm waiting for lust month, if we can have that.

Or gluttony month.

Either one, I'll pick.

You'll think it's going to happen.

You're going to have some, you know, continental don't tread on me snake flag, you know,

people will put that flag up.

And that's perfectly, that's much more patriotic than this thing.

But you're going to see all, once the Democrats did this and they set these precedents, it reminds me of a great passage in the third book of Thucydides when he says, the problem with the Corsairan revolution is that once you destroy institutions and protocols that were there to protect everybody and you have power and you destroy them, when you come out of power, you're going to try to flee to those institutions and you've destroyed them.

They're not going to be there.

So mark my words.

The Democrats are going to rue the day that they allowed these weird flags to be the same as the American flag.

They're going to rue the day they got rid of the idea you don't

you they destroyed the idea that you don't impeach a president twice or as a private citizen or a 22-month hoax special counsel investigation.

or filibut.

That's all going to come back to haunt them.

And they're really going to, really, really, really going to regret the idea that an ex-president is sacrosanct or the leader of the opposition is sacrosanct.

Barack Obama will be very careful because there's a lot of questions when he left office that you get an SOB Republican in there and he's going to say, you know what, they don't learn.

The only thing they will learn is to indict one of their beloved icons for an infraction.

And we'll see.

And the Bidens are going to be in big trouble

when they don't have Mary Garland and the DOJ.

And it's not going to be punitive or reciprocal.

It's just going to be the law.

And they broke the law and they know it.

Right.

And so you never want to destroy institutions that serve everybody for your own short-term political gain because it will come back to haunt you.

Whether you're a dogface pony soldier or not.

I still, I look, you know, I try to find that quote.

I can't find it.

I don't think it exists.

It's a composite.

It's a mashup.

I have a feeling.

Is it from Ford Apache or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or what John Ford movies?

I think there's a searchers thing in here.

I don't know why, but

we'll get to the bottom of it.

Also, maybe, you know, when John Wayne in

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

visits the old chief,

a

pony that walks and

we go hunt buffalo, kill,

get drunk.

I have a feeling there may be some.

But there was when he said it like in early 2020, and there was a whole mini industry.

Remember that?

Of people, they call that in German Quellenforschung,

the search for the source.

You know what I mean?

What was the original source of that?

And nobody could find it.

Yeah.

Well, I think it's about, that's probably about three, three or four sources,

one for every word in the phrase.

All All right.

You know what?

I just thought one last thing.

You know, go ahead.

I think I remember there was, he said it twice is what I'm saying.

And

I think you're right.

It came from,

I know it came from John Ford, but it wasn't just

lying dog face pony soldier.

That was added in.

You might be right.

It was that guy in.

She Warrior, Pony Soldier, right?

Yeah.

And he added the Biden trimmings to it.

Well, sooner or later, he's going to tell us that he himself

fought and

bored Apache along with Henry Ford and

not Henry Ford, Henry Fonda and John Wayne.

All right, Victor, there's also lunacy in California, always is, but this is pretty serious.

And we'll get to your thoughts on it right after these important messages.

Back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

I mentioned at the beginning of the show, especially for our new listeners, VictorHanson.com.

That's the Blade of Perseus, Victor's official website.

You should visit regularly, daily, even, because frequently, I'd say two or three times a week, you will find an original piece that Victor has written exclusively for that website.

You'll also find archives for these podcasts, Victor's appearances on other podcasts, radio shows, his books,

his writings at American Greatness, a syndicated column.

But it's the exclusive quote-unquote ultra pieces that are, that

there's a lot of them.

They're terrific, and you need to subscribe in order to read them.

So do subscribe.

Five bucks gets you in the door.

It's discounted $50

of the year.

That's at victorhandson.com.

If you're on Facebook, by the way, check out VDH's Morning Cup and also maybe pay a visit to our friends at the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club.

Very good people.

If you're on Twitter, Victor's handle is at VD Hanson.

So Victor, my dear friend, I love Will Swame.

Will, and I know you know Will, he runs the California Policy Center.

Yeah, I met him.

Yeah, he's such a good dude.

And California Policy Center is boy, oh boy,

they punch above their weight, but

it's a tough road to hoe.

It's kind of always struck me as strange that California did not have as much of a conservative pushback and think tank as you find in other states.

But there's Will.

He's slogging away doing it.

He's the president.

And he's written a piece for National Review that it's titled A Very California Coup.

And indulge, please, to our listeners, just indulge this.

Here's how it begins.

For decades,

California's government unions have bankrolled the campaigns of politicians who, once in office, return the favor, rubber stamping

union demands, no matter how extraordinary the results in education, fire safety, health care, infrastructure, housing, cost of living, taxes, and crime have been catastrophic.

Now,

state lawmakers are prepared to hand even more power to government union leaders.

State Senator Tom Umberg's Senate Constitutional Amendment No.

7 would create a constitutional right to, quote, economic well-being, end quote, for government workers and would prohibit California state and local officials from taking any action, quote, that interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively.

I'll be finished this in a second.

Lawyers representing public employees could argue, for example, that that a decision to close a school, end a failed program for the homeless, or build a road with non-union labor would interfere with their union's constitutional protections.

Former state senator John Moorlock says democracy is gone if this passes.

Victor may be gone already, but this is really, really freaking troubling.

Your thoughts, my friend.

That's Maoist cultural revolution.

We're back in Maoist China, the the 1960s.

It's just surreal.

And

the

Democratic Party, once again, realizes if it doesn't have all these institutions and it doesn't have the unions, and I don't mean the unions, the regular unions, the United Artiller Workers, maybe, but most of the old unions that we knew, the coal miners, the pipe fitters, the long, they don't exist anymore.

in the sense of powerful big money but they do have the government unions and they're you know the SEIU and those unions, and they're huge, and they're the biggest teachers' unions, and they're the biggest source of income for Democrats, and they don't dare cross them.

So, they give them whatever they want.

And, like every good idea that starts out to protect teachers or from imperious bosses, they take it to the next step and they destroy it.

The left does.

They have them on minus touch.

Everything they touch turns a dross.

And they've destroyed the whole idea of unions.

And they've destroyed with it California.

You know, I was driving today from Palo Alto to Selma, and I was just doing one of my Homeric Odysseys, just looking for my Cyclops and the Sirens and the Lystragonians and Circe and Calypso, and they're all there.

You know, you're driving down, and all of a sudden, without warning, there's one lane as you're going over Pacheco Pass.

Construction, nice nice time, commute time at eight in the morning.

And then you get on I-5, and there's just four lanes on changed.

And 60 years ago, twice the population.

Can't we spend $1 billion and make a six-lane highway when we're spending 50, 80 billion on a whole Stonehenge high-speed rail?

No.

So you get on that

quote-unquote freeway, and it was the main, the weirdest thing I ever saw.

There was a whole line of trucks in the right lane, but they don't go at the same speeds, right?

So, Joe, entrepreneurial trucker, wants to go 70 when his radar says there's no cop, and the truck ahead of him is going, he just pulls over, right?

And they all pull over to the left lane.

So, there was a caravan of left and right trucks, and that line of cars was backed up a half mile, going 40 miles an hour as they tried to accelerate.

And I thought, wow, this is just dysfunctional.

And then I stopped at a

place to go to the restroom.

And there's some crazy people, you know what I mean, on road stops in California.

You got to be very careful.

They're really nutty people.

I don't know if they're on drugs.

I don't know,

but

it's a tower of babble.

You got to be careful.

Well, the whole point I'm making is that

the stuff that happens in California, whether it's the union stuff or the laws that legalize basically shoplifting,

they're not just in isolation and they're not just episodic.

They're starting to

coalesce.

And you're starting to see the breakdown of basic society.

That means driving.

I

filled up with gasoline, Joe Biden's gasoline today, $5

jack and 78 cents, 578.

And that was if you buy regular.

I think the highest octane was 99% was 640.

And I went by in Palo Alto, I went by,

and a friend had told me it was almost $7.

So I went into a shopping center to get something to eat, and it was $6.90, $690 a gallon in Palo Alto at this place.

And so you're starting to see things that just don't work anymore, whether it's crime or San Francisco.

They destroyed the city in four years.

It's very,

and then you see a guy like Gavin Newsom go on to Sean Hannity and just flat out lie that he's a big tax, he never raises taxes.

He was the one that institutionalized a 13.3

income tax that was raised.

It was supposed to be temporary.

And then he raised taxes as the mayor.

How did he perform on that, Victor?

I didn't, I didn't, I mean, I know about it and I, and I heard that Hannity, you know, it was friendly with him, or maybe not friends, but whatever.

He was civil, he was nice, but

you know,

everybody says, if I was interviewing him, I could have done a better job.

I don't know if that's true, but I would have really hammered him on all the things he said in the past because he basically is a very sly, glib politician.

He's not very bright, but he's sly and he's glib.

So his whole shtick right now is that he's as hard left as he can be, but he wants to put a very thin veneer that he is a Clinton 1990s conservative new Democrat.

So he says, you know, Donald Trump, I have no complaints about Donald Trump.

Donald Trump worked well with me.

He trashed Trump all the time.

And then he'll say something.

I'm not a tax raiser.

I'm physically responsible.

I stopped the

14%

or something proposed tax.

Well, that's really big of you.

You've got 13.3%.

You've got one of the highest sales taxes.

And then, you know, he said property taxes are much higher in Florida.

Well,

yeah, because they don't have an income tax, but they still are not as high that would be, that would make up for our income tax.

And just because you have a lower rate in California, believe me, if you have a $2 million assessment for your little cottage in Sunnyvale, it doesn't matter if it's 1% or 3%, you're going to pay a hell of a lot of property tax.

And so

he just can't, he's talking about the border.

He wouldn't be candid.

He doesn't seem to understand that you have a massive challenge when you have a state with 27% of the people were not born in the United States.

You should have a Marshall Plan of civic education, assimilation, integration, Americanism.

No, none of that.

And L.A.

is a wasteland, the downtown.

All the work of the 90s,

restoring the L.A.

downtown with these beautiful new buildings has been wasted.

The renaissance of San San Francisco is

hold off on San Francisco because we're going to talk about that.

I will say one thing, though, just in finishing, I have noticed that

when I went down 101 not too long ago,

that

all the shopping centers on 280 or 101

in San Jose area, you know,

when you go drive by them, and I stopped a couple times to use a restroom or to get gas,

They're packed.

I mean, they're just packed.

And I know what that's from.

It has to be that people in San Francisco are not going to, they don't have anywhere to shop.

Right.

Because they closed that big shopping center not too far from San Francisco because of theft.

And if you can't buy anything in San Francisco, where do you buy?

You know, where do you go to Costco or where do you go to a discount big chain store?

You got to go to San Jose,

which is over an hour away, yes?

45 minutes.

It can be an hour.

Absolutely.

It can be an hour, over an hour.

But it just shows you that very liberal people who created this don't want to live with the consequences.

They'll go to San Jose.

They used to make fun of San Jose.

Oh, San Jose, I'd never live in San Jose.

I live in Knob Hill.

I live in Pacific Heights.

I live in Presidio Heights.

I would never live in San Jose.

Well, now you're going to San Jose because it at least has some semblance of working and your utopia was destroyed by your own ideology.

Well,

we've got a very interesting

story to tell about San Francisco a little

later, but in this episode.

But before we get to that, Victor,

well, I guess we could stay in the area and once

this crap that we're going to talk about now is coming out of Silicon Valley.

I'm not going to read anything, but an Amazon delivery man goes to a house.

He hears, he's got,

you know, he's got iPods in his ear, but he hears

from the ring bell

say something.

He thinks it's insulting him, the delivery man.

He reports to Amazon that when he tried to make this delivery to this house, he was called a name.

It doesn't say in the story a name, but you can just assume.

Amazon,

the resident is hooked into Alexis, Alexi, whatever.

I don't have iPhones or any of that.

And they shut off the resident's service based on the accusation of a racial complaint made by the delivery man.

Well, it just so happens that A, nobody was home.

B,

the

bell, you know, technology on the doorbell

is programmed to ask automatically, may I be of help?

Something like that.

What do you want?

Something like that.

So it was nothing.

No, you're an N-word or anything like that.

The resident himself was a black guy, you know?

So he, so

this is not so much about this incident, Victor, but it's about our increasing living and hooked up through technology.

But that Amazon would feel privileged to turn off your power in your home based on an accusation with no evidence is, I don't know, I would think it's a sign of the future, except the future is here right now.

That you will be punished.

You can be punished and you will be punished if you cross some threshold that our tech gods in Silicon Valley don't like.

Who knows what's next?

What if

your doorbell thinks it's something like, vote for Trump, you know?

Anyway,

I'm making a little light of it, but I think it's really troubling, Victor.

Your thoughts?

Well,

it's kind of

a futuristic, isn't it, blending of intrusiveness, Orwellianism, high-tech, political correctness that

they can do this and there's not going to be any consequences, right?

And

it's contrary to the whole constitutional idea that you are innocent to proven guilty, except in the corporate world, where

I guess there's people in the corporate world, Jack, that are so terrified of their own shadow that they just work on the principles of innuendo, right?

So

if...

if they think somebody had said something wrong, then they put into gear all the powers that they have.

And because they're amoral people, there's no limit to the means to accomplish something.

That's what

I think one of the things

we forget is that we went through this in the 1880s and 90s.

And I'm not trying to

demonize the so-called Robert Barons.

Those guys did a lot of great things for this country, the Carnegies and the Rockefellers.

and the Henry, all those guys.

They were men of action.

But

when Standard Oil had 90% of the oil market, it was vertically integrated.

You had to break it up.

And

we haven't applied that to these people, Amazon or Google.

Google's got 90% of the searches.

So

they have unlimited wealth and unlimited power, and they exercise it in any way they can.

They're very successful at it because a Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or any of these guys will pose as men of the left.

And they are

humanitarians, the Bill Gates' of the world, and they worry about us.

And under that veneer, they're just old-fashioned monopolists.

And they get away with anything.

And they have the technological

wherewithal and the money to sort of, you know,

run roughshod over individual rights, the bill of rights, rights, anything they want.

And there's not going to be any consequences because they have so much money.

They play that weird two-step.

When a Republican is in power, Amazon and these companies say,

we're the kind of guys you'd like.

We're the entrepreneurs.

We're the free marketeers.

We don't need to be regulated.

When the left is in there, they say, don't regulate us.

We give you all the money.

It's all your money.

And they have each of these big, you know, Amazon has Facebook, Twitter, they all have somebody in DC who does outreach to, you know, the right.

And, you know, people are, people,

people sell their

beliefs for pennies on the dollar.

So

I mean, it's getting to the point where if you're inside your house, they can control you.

We've talked about this before.

If you had this feeling, I know people are that you're visiting a town like 300 miles away from you and you buy gas there, or you do some transaction, and then the next day you get an ad from a business in that town, or you buy on Amazon a neti pot, and then the next day you get sinus

vitamins or something that pop up on your screen.

It's just incredible.

I'm sorry, am I a lunatic?

Do I believe the devices are listening?

My wife and daughter, this is about two years ago, were having a conversation about Boston cream pie, right?

And my, but my daughter said something like Boston cream cake, and Sharon, my wife's known as Boston cream pie, and let's find the recipe.

So she goes on her phone and starts to type in, you know, Boston, she was trying, you're going to type a Boston cream pie, B-O-S.

By the time she was, she didn't even have the tea,

and it automatically filled Boston cream cake,

which is no such thing as Boston cream cake, but the freaking phone was listening.

There's no question.

I'm no, no.

Cheryl Atkinson.

Remember, they thought she was crazy because her computer,

was it the CIA or the FBI was listening to her on her computer?

Yeah, I mean,

absolutely.

Who doesn't believe their air fryer?

What explains this phenomenon?

It's really weird.

And I know that I've quoted him to death, but the poet Hesiod had a good point when he talked about moral regress and material progress.

And my point is this, that these people, because they are more sophisticated and they have iPhones and iPads and Apple watches, and they say the people in 1930 could never do this, not understanding that each generation stands on the shoulders of the prior one.

They don't know anything about history, so they think that they were born from the head of Zeus's brilliant Einsteinian people.

But nevertheless, they equate the fact that we're a technologically adept society

with

superior morality that's evolved to a higher level.

So this transgendered stuff or, you know,

not putting out forest fires

or not cleaning up the forest or banning natural gas stoves.

All of that is

justified by the fact that that

is a sign to them that they have a new morality that has advanced so much.

And they feel that it has advanced so much because our technology is advanced.

So they think that we're much more sophisticated than our iPhones and we can do all these things with our iPads and we, the pings and all this.

And therefore, because we can do that, and people in 1940, 1960, 1990 couldn't, we're much better morally.

Because how could we not be better if we did if we

have better things?

And they don't understand there's a whole canon of philosophy and historical warning exemplar that suggests the wealthier you get and the more leisured you are and the more you build something like nero's golden house that was you know pretty sophisticated the more likely you are to marry your horse if you're caligula and that's what or a galbus you know and they don't understand that at all and so in some ways if we had petronius a novelist here he looked at this or pocaccio and they looked at what's going on with Mulvaney or at the L.A.

Dodgers.

They would be perfectly, they would think it's perfectly logical that this society is so wealthy and leisure, this is exactly the symptomology you'd expect.

Because human nature being what it is, you give people too much time in the day, or they get too lazy, or they get, the more that they get, the more they want, and the more they feel victimized that they don't have what somebody else does.

Yeah, we're in insatiable society.

A great general, Matthew Ridgway, he was the savior of Korea.

They once asked him why he was for the draft.

And,

you know, I thought he would give, I was reading that, I thought he would adduce all, it was an interview, I think, and he asked him,

it gives you more manpower and da-da-da-da, and da-da-da-da-da, and we have a ready supply of manpower.

We get all the youth together from different classes.

All these are good reasons, you know, kind of the World War II movie where there's the Catholic guy, there's a Hispanic guy, all that stuff.

Anyway, my point is this, though, he said something was very in it.

He said it takes

time out of the day and

it gives some young people a serious existential thing to do.

And that's very important at this time, meaning

that

he wasn't quite saying that war, but the idea that they had to have a cause or they had to do something is very important for people in a leisured and affluent society.

That way, you could see that with 9-11, that all of a sudden that whole, people forget that woke had a precursor in the 1990s.

Right on the verge of 9-11, Jesse Jackson was really, remember that pushing reparations?

That was the first we heard of it.

And they were really, I mean, I think the David Horowitz Center put out a

kind of

blast pamphlet against reparations.

That was the moment right before 9-11.

And that had been, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go.

That was the whole 90s cultural revolution.

And then suddenly, bam, that's not existential.

Taking down the World Trade Center is, and we forgot all about it.

And we...

we turned to what was really important for a while.

And that'll happen again if things get bad here.

If Biden continues to be president with the economy and the border and crime and this rampant shoplift,

and homelessness, it's going to get like that again.

Well,

we have a drag queen singing the national anthem tonight at the New York Mets game here in New York City, Victor, which is not equivalent to

crime and

the destruction of the family, but just yet another sign of the

degradation of our society.

So, hey, Victor,

we're going to

talk.

Well, I'm going to pose a thing or two for you about the streets of San Francisco and Dirty Harry.

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

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So civilthoughts.com.

You know, I was thinking when you mentioned the transgendered singer.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

There actually is a legacy in Latin that they're called the castrati.

And I think in modern Italian, weren't they the castrato?

The Catholic Church used to use them in the Middle East.

Yes.

And there was the idea that if you castrated

a young boy, yeah, before they reached puberty, they were forever fixated or solidified at that 13-year, at the maximum power of the voice before it changed.

And then they were in high demand when they were castrated.

So the castrati, even in Roman times, were considered very very good singers.

I wonder if this person was a castratus in the sense that he'd lost his genitals and he would transition to.

I don't know.

Every time I see transgendered, I don't know if there's subsets as there used to be.

There were subsets called transvestas, transvestism, and those were just heterosexuals.

I said, change clothes.

Yeah.

Or there was transsexuals who actually had the physical.

I have a feeling that most transgendered are not castrating themselves, right?

Victor, to read

The American Mind, which is

the website of the Claremont Institute,

has a piece up either today or yesterday that gives graphic details of what this means to be a castrati, to turn yourself, you try, take off your, you know, lose your member and then try to turn it into a receptacle.

And

it's gruesome.

And

it's a lifetime

of hell.

And if you bitch about it publicly, you get hell then from the transgender community.

Also, it's a really, really troubling

process.

It's very funny because they outlawed it in Europe in the 1850s or 60s.

you know, because I know in Italy or places, maybe not so much in Germany,

places that had a lot of emphasis on opera, for example, if you had a castratus in your family, or an Italian, a castrato,

and you

emasculated him, you know, at a very early age, neutered him, then he was a very powerfully, a powerful resource as far as singing.

And where it was choirs or they had great careers and they could hold notes.

much longer.

And there were families that did it.

And then it was considered barbaric by, I think, the 1870s, The sheer shot of castrating, the sheer idea of castrating anybody was so abhorrent.

They just banned them.

And I don't think we've ever had opera singers like that again.

That's what

that happened.

But the idea you would return to that, you know what I'm saying?

You'd go back to castration when it was considered one of the cruelest of all operations.

It's kind of strange.

Well, the exquisiteness of

a young boy's voice.

So when the king got

coronated or whatever the hell happened last, or

a PAA zoo, when that note is, there's such beauty in it, but to try and turn that into a permanence by maiming somebody is

do you remember

that stones can't always get what you want and the big it begins with a Vienna boys choir.

Oh, yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, let's speak, let's speak some more about culture, Victor.

Two things in this wrap-up

segment of today's episode.

One comes from, and they're both about San Francisco.

And there's a good friend of this podcast.

This podcast originated a couple of years ago out of National Review.

And this is, I think it's third iteration, but used to be sponsored on occasion by

Shraga Kawiar, a great friend and his family.

He's just a huge fan of Victor.

And he contacted me a a couple of weeks ago, and I had meant to bring it up at the time, and I didn't.

But it was about,

he's a big movie fan, Godfather, but he's a big fan of the Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood movies.

And he had some specific questions, but I think a little too specific.

But Victor, you know, it's so much about,

and you think about other movies from the time, like,

of course, Bullet, but San Francisco is

a great set,

a great scene

for any number of movies.

And

at the time these movies were being filmed, it was also a crazy-ass city with

serial killers and Jim Jones and

racist groups and hippies and all this weirdness and madness.

Anyway, Victor, we have another thing.

I want to get your thoughts on basically then.

Victor, do you have any thoughts about Dirty Harry in those movies?

And then we have a typical and sad and ugly story from Eli Steele, who's a great filmmaker, and he's the son of Shelby Steele.

And they were in San Francisco to make a documentary.

And like anyone else that's in San Francisco with a car, they met up with some serious criminality.

But we'll get to that in a sec.

Victor, any

thoughts about the Dirty Harry series or other movies of San Francisco from what was your youth?

Well,

the San Francisco of the late 60s and early 70s, when a lot of those Dirty Harry sets were used, has the same relation with the San Francisco of the 1950s,

where you say Vertigo was filmed, than San Francisco, than it does.

with the current San Francisco.

And what I mean by that is the 1950s San Francisco, if you look at movies and sets, people, and I can remember being a little boy and my parents, even if we went up to a San Francisco Giants again, they made us wear little ties, clip-on ties.

Everybody was well-dressed in the early, late 50s and early 60s.

And it was just a beautiful city.

And then

in the 70s, it got, as you say, raunchy.

It was not just a Masonic Street or Hey Dashbury or Smoking Dope.

But it was a, I don't mean, I don't want to say a benign,

but it wasn't coarse.

And I mean, it was violent.

You had the zodiac and it was out of control and you saw where it was going, but it hadn't reached full fruition.

And then the big tech money came in and sort of straightened it out.

But this is not, we haven't seen, this is maybe like the Barbary Coast of what you read about in 1840s, San Francisco, right on the, say, 1849, the 50s during the gold rush, where they had vigilantes.

They had to have vigilantes and it was just wide open.

You can read William Decumpsey Sherman's

memoirs and he was a banker in San Francisco

when he left West West Point before he became, when we entered the service, but in the early 1850s

he talks about the crime and the need for vigilantes.

It's kind of like that now.

It's so far from

the vertigo sets, what you see today in San Francisco.

And it's, and we thought the 1970s were, had really declined, but the 1970s now looked like the golden age compared to what we have now.

And I don't know.

San Francisco is not a very big city.

You got to remember it's about the size of Indianapolis.

It doesn't have a lot of, it has natural beauty,

but it's very densely populated.

So all of these pathologies, it's like in LA, you have more homeless, but it's spread out.

And so it's force multiplied.

so it's very fragile place

and when

and you get you get just a few stupid policies and you can wreck that city it's really always on the edge it always was and you you have to have some sane people even in the heyday of the 70s

80s you had the san francisco chronicle and you had charles mccabe or herb kane and they were writing stuff that was laughed but it was sensible you know what i mean sensible

and And

that doesn't exist anymore.

And yeah.

And so

I don't think anybody feels safe in San Francisco.

I don't think any business is moving to San Francisco.

I don't think any startup says this is the place I want to be.

I noticed when I first got to Hoover, say 2003 and then four and 5, there were people moving from Silicon Valley because it was so dynamic, they felt the nightlife, they wanted to live in the city.

They didn't want to live in Menlo Menlo Park or Palo Alto or Mountain View.

They moved up there, and that's not true now.

Everybody's leaving there.

And then you talk to people, but they don't go to conventions there.

If the convention is held there, they don't go, but conventions themselves don't want to go there.

So, when Gavin Newsom just said that was all exaggerated, he was just when that interview, getting back to that interview, that's not true.

He was mayor, he helped destroy the city, and it's destroyed now.

And many people say, No, it's not.

I walked.

Nobody did anything to me.

Just keep walking six o'clock at night for five nights in a row.

Just park your car

and see what happens.

Eli

Steele was a student of mine at Pepperdine and the master's program when I was a visiting professor there.

He's a wonderful guy.

He's very talented.

He did the Ferguson movie.

Remember that Amazon tried to censor Shelby in Eli's movie?

What killed Michael Brown?

Yes.

And

I was a big fan of Shelby Steele when he did that PBS, Binsonhurst.

And

he had a great career.

He's still very active, but he had a mega career.

And then when he started to do documentaries about Vinson Hearst and show the evils of tribalism on both sides, Italian and everything, and he started to get into complexities.

then the left just said, you can't do that.

And the content of our character and all of of those essays that he wrote, they just,

they couldn't get into that.

And

he was a,

he was a professor at San Jose State, and he's not like a lot of people that are in so-called race studies.

He was an English lit scholar, taught English.

And

for, you know, I'd say for,

he's moved now.

He's out of state.

Right.

But I would say for 15 years, he and Tom Sowell were my two closest friends at the Hoover Institution, maybe my only friend.

But I was very close to both of them and still am.

He's a lovely man.

And Eli is a great guy.

And I've done,

I do believe their documentaries really required viewing.

Can I just read this, Victor, what Eli posted on Twitter?

You hear how bad San Francisco is?

I was filming a shot of my father, Shelby Steele, and in the 10 minutes we were gone, our SUV was broken into and nearly $15,000 of cameras stolen called 911 and they hung up twice well victory it turns out that over what was stolen was approaching fifty thousand dollars in equipment and then Eli posts an ongoing series of you know police hang up go to the police station everyone Everyone that was in the police station at that time, and they look from the pictures, looked like there were a dozen people were there because their cars were broken into or stolen.

You talked to the car rental agency.

Yeah, San Francisco, yeah, it hurts.

We're getting 30, 30 cars a day.

I mean, it's it's uh uh madness.

He has had to start a GoFundMe or he had a friend start a go fund me to you know help diminish the cost of, but he was there to make a make a uh an important documentary, and I think it would be an important one for conservatives.

They'll they'll release uh what it's about in due time.

Um,

anyway, that's it's, I would search for if you're interested, Eli Steele,

go on Twitter and look and see the story that he lays out tweet by tweet of what

it means

to drive in a good neighborhood, quote unquote, good neighborhood.

Yeah, and I think he actually tweeted me a personal tweet today.

And I think he said that they could see people drive by in a Mercedes with a gun, threatening, or his friend did, threatening people.

In other words, don't call them.

And so they were scouting out and nobody's going to do anything.

Nobody's going to do anything at all.

They had an exchange.

I didn't know if you heard that between

London Breed, the black female mayor and the socialist city council member who was white and they went at it.

And she played the race card and said, this is just what I basically wanted to,

she's getting pressure from the business community as because she's mayor.

And they said, either clean up the mess or we're out.

When we're out, there's no city because there's not many left.

So she's trying to, in a half-hearted way,

at least stop the rampant crime downtown, which is impossible with an underfunded police.

And then she's trying to clean up the homeless, which is impossible.

Gavin Newsom spent billions of dollars and made it worse.

And anyway,

the socialist is on.

You can get a clip and listen to it.

He's saying,

she says, don't tell me

you're just a typical white elitist.

And he's saying, you're just a typical lackey of the business community, meaning homelessness, we've got to have, don't dare touch the homeless.

And she's saying, we have to, but she's using the race card as if she's a victim of his racism.

So when you get to that impasse where they're both culpable and they're both, the socialist is calling her a capitalist lackey and she's calling the socialist a racist and the problem is not being solved.

And that's what the antitheses are in San Francisco.

They're never going to solve it.

And we all know what the, we all

know what the answer is.

It's to bring back sanitariums and mental hospitals and closely go through all of these people for, and then they're going to have to go to a mental hospital.

It would be, in the long run, cheaper.

Number two, to the people who are somewhat functional and have no family, then it would be to get large areas with small little 200-foot cubicles that have a sink and a bed and are clean and have rows of them with a communal big shower, bath

doctor, dentist, a little mini city, and they can go in in there and then have security and keep them out of the city.

If they break the law, they, you know, you say, well, they don't, this is a free country.

They should, not if they break the law, it's not.

You can arrest them and they can be sentenced to that place.

And then, third, they have to have a public relations campaign about families.

And they have to inculcate the idea that we've now played around with 60 years of alternatives to the nuclear three-generation family.

But ultimately, every family that I grew up with, everyone that I knew had an Uncle Joe or

Grandma Mary that had a touch of Alzheimer's or mental illness, and the family took care of them.

Right.

And

if they couldn't and they were violent, they had to go to a sanitarium.

But I can remember my grandfather saying that his father had

got mental illness and they had to commit him to the mental hospital in Stockton.

They were very sad about it.

And then I had an aunt that was horribly physically crippled.

I mean, she couldn't, she was just terribly ravaged by the polio epidemic of 1917.

And they took care of her in that living room.

The family did.

She never

didn't spend one day in a rest home until she, and that's what people did.

And

that's a partial solution too.

All of these people have relatives.

And maybe the relatives could visit them in a sanitarium or into a secure location or what, but you've got to get them off the street.

And you have to say, Victor, they don't have the right to not take

location, right?

Well, you have to tell them that

you're not the victim.

The victim is the little 12-year-old niece walking down the street and

gets feces on her shoe.

The victim is the...

mom who has her children in the park that steps on a syringe.

The victim is the guy from Provo, Utah that saves his money up to go to San Francisco and some homeless person smacks him in the head.

The victim is the nine-year-old girls walking with her dad down Market Street and somebody defecates in front of her or masturbate.

That's what they are not victims.

They're doing, I've seen it firsthand, and they're doing things that

are oppressive and victimizing.

They're not victims.

And that's just the way it is.

And until we change our attitude about that, you cannot let a small number of people destroy civilization and then deify them as a victim.

And it used to be, we had a whole vocabulary.

I'm not asking that we go back to that vocabulary of disparagement, but there was a purpose in it, you know.

And I can tell you that my grandfather told me in the Selma train station during the 30s, there were hobos and bums, and he would go in there, and there were relatives that he had that lost their jobs that were going up and down the rails and he would get a

postcard and say you know i'm your cousin jerry and i

go down up and down the southern pacific and i'll be in your town and he would go in with his

old pickup and try to find them and then bring them out to the farm and he had bunks in the barn and they had a my grandmother cooked a big kettle of soup and they could stay as long as they want as long as they got up at five with him and helped him irrigate and pick peaches or plum.

Well, there was, I was, while you were talking, I was looking, I thought I saw it in today's New York Post, but there was

a,

I think it was a Korean family with a pregnant mother

was shot in the head and she died.

And her eight, she was eight months pregnant, the baby died.

The husband was shot.

I don't know why I'm thinking it was Iowa, but

a crazy homeless guy who did it.

And he, of course, had a record in a previous state.

And yeah, there are people that need to be in institutions,

not only for their own health and safety, but for our health and safety too.

Yeah, just everybody should ask themselves

if

Mr.

Penny had done nothing to, is it Mr.

Neely, his name was, in New York?

The Michael Jackson impersonator.

Yes, yes.

If they had done nothing to him,

yes.

If that person had stabbed or killed or strangled one of these innocent people of which he was threatening, would he have been in prison or indicted, sentenced in prison as long as Mr.

Penny will be?

I don't think so.

He had been out on parole so many times, 45 times, three violent assaults.

And

that's the problem that

we

were so, I don't know where it came, we came with a 60s bankrupt idea that was institutionalized in the 21st century that we're going to romanticize, glorify the perpetual perpetrator of crimes because of his race or his poverty or his homelessness or his transgender or whatever his ism is.

But it's a tyranny.

It's a war against the majority.

It really is.

And it's destroying their quality of life.

They can't go places.

It's a crime to have a family drive up from Tulare and want to go to

Golden Gate Park and can't do it with their friends and safely.

Or it's terrible for a guy.

There's a lot of guys in our area that don't have a lot of Uber money.

So on weekends,

they take their private car and they go up to San Francisco and they sleep in it and they

try to do Uber for two days, 200 miles away with it.

They used to.

I don't know if they can do it anymore.

And I would talk to them when they get their windshield broken and then destroy it.

They'd lose everything and nobody cares.

It's really cynicism by our elite that gave us this whole paradigm.

It's also ideological, Victor.

I've mentioned this before, but

if you say that a homeless person needs help, that means you've established a norm, right?

And you're going to establish a norm for this.

Well, maybe

that means establishing norms is permissible.

And the whole project of the left is to destroy norms.

So how could they establish a norm that would help and save the homeless person and not get caught up in the hypocrisy?

You can find

all of this in Michelle Foucault's Madness and Civilization, or I think he had a book called Discipline and Punish,

or The Order of Things, or The History of Sexuality, any of those books.

And the whole central thesis is there's no norms, it's all relative, and it's all based on wealthy, powerful people constructing fake laws or fake norms to oppress other people.

And that's, there's no natural law.

There's no semblance between a penalty for theft and what theft does to a society.

or murder or assault or sexual norms, any of that.

So,

you know, this idea that heterosexual is culpable, well, you have no civilization unless people have children and you can't raise children with one parent.

You just can't do it.

It's very hard.

Some people can manage, but it's very difficult.

So over,

it's not Victor's idea.

It's 7,000 years of civilization or 2,500 years of cognizant civilization that were self-reflective and wrote about it.

And you can read it in Greek and Roman literature that a man and a woman and a marriage union and children are the ideal body politic for civilization.

But if you say that, and if enough people do that,

if enough people do that, then if a person's gay and doesn't want to get married or

people don't want to have children, that's fine.

But that can't be the norm because then your society will not be demographically viable.

So what we've done is we've forgotten that you have to have a majority that follows the rules, that doesn't shoplift, that stands for the flag.

And that majority has got to be pretty large.

And then, if they do that, then you can tolerate in 1950 or the 40s, these dissidents.

But if you start to romanticize and glorify the exception and you destroy the rule, then you have no, there's no stability.

And that's what's happened.

There's no chorus.

Yeats,

Yates, funny

famous poem, The Sinner Won't Hold.

It doesn't hold.

There's not enough of us in the center.

And so the aberrant become dominant because nobody is enforcing norms.

Nobody lives up to them.

Nobody's telling a child that's in high school, if you

graduate, you get a good job, you should buy a house, you should get married, you should have two or three kids.

You don't mean that you have to.

That same teacher can say, if you're gay, you don't want to, that's fine too.

But you've got to at least give the equal message that there is such a thing as a desirable norm, and that is what keeps civilization going.

If you can have a brilliant gay painter or gay writer, that's all predicated on the guy that has three kids, he and his wife bought a home, they play by the rules, they don't break the laws, and they have eight or nine grandchildren.

The society reproduces itself with certain customs and protocols.

If you don't have that, you have nothing.

You can't have people on the periphery, then riders and

eccentrics and bohemians.

You can't do it.

So that's what we have to get back to, that that guy that everybody insults, sort of like I was sitting at Casa de Fruta, and there was just average people came by, and I was talking to them.

Guy with a truck, guy who's an engineer, just they're the people that keep everything going.

Or when I'm out here in Selma and I fill up at what I call the arena, the gas station that's 10 cents cheaper.

And I see all these Mexican-American people, and I talk to them.

And

what are you doing?

Oh, I'm on my way to Mendota.

Why are you going on the way to Mendota?

Oh, I'm going to give up propane delivery.

Oh, what are you doing?

I have a night shift at the neurotic.

I just got off from the hospital.

That's the kind of people that

make it go.

It's not, it's not sad, but it's not the best.

Made it go during COVID also.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

It wasn't.

Anyway, we've glorified the aberrant and destroyed the norm.

We're Michelle Foucault's society.

He was the heartthrob, you know, of his 90s.

Wasn't a dumb person, but he had a very toxic ideology that norms were just artifices

to

exercise and to gain and hold power.

Anyway.

Well, one last thing, Victor, mentioned before again, Eli and Shelby and the last documentary they made was

what, not who, what killed Michael Brown.

I strongly recommend it.

It's not only a look at what happened in Ferguson, but Shelby gives a much

in-depth look at the destruction, willful destruction by

liberal experts.

to destroy black communities in St.

Louis and other

cities, thriving, maybe not too rich, but still thriving.

What would you do if you were Tom Sowell or Shelby Steele and you have devoted your entire life, not to Black studies, but to literature or economics?

But once you mastered

those disciplines, you also applied it to race relations.

And you knew in your heart from your research and the way you grew up that there were certain norms that were essential essential for every society.

And you were going to, you saw progress that was reaching parity in the black community before the great society.

It was slow, but it was, it was,

and then you saw largely a group of white liberals who had utopian ideas about what was good for black people.

And they were going to force that down the nation's throat.

but they were never going to live with black people.

They were never going to put their kids with black people.

And then this is what I'm getting at.

And then they were going to demonize Shelby Steele or Clarence Thomas or Tom Soule

or Tim Scott as sellouts.

You know, there's something very evil, very, very evil of Barack Obama, who went to prep school, who was half Black, who had grew up with a banking grandmother, who went to Occidental and goofed around, went to Columbia, goofed around, went to Harvard, goofed around, got a professorship at Chicago, goofed around,

and had it made telling Tim Scott, who grew up in the rural South at the closing days of Jim Crow, that he's not authentically aware of what black people suffer.

And this is from a man that, I guess,

did his podcast at Colorama, Martha's Vineyard, Hawaiian Mansion.

So that's what.

That's kind of why all of us should be really protective of

what a Clarence Thomas went through or Thomas Soul.

It must be one of the worst things in the world to know that you're smarter than these very wealthy white people

who are calling you inauthentic because you know what will help black people the most and you care more about black people than the black elite, the Al Sharpens, the Don Lamont, all those people

have to live with that, that you're better than these people and yet these people criticize you that have never

had any experience.

And it must make a person very angry, but they're not angry people, but it would make me very angry.

Yeah.

Well, you're not allowed to escape the white liberal plantation.

So many people have said, Victor, Victor, Victor, when you want to look at the source of all of our maladies,

whether it's the climate change, intolerance, or letting forests burn for our own good,

supposedly ecological reasons or the diversity equity inclusion or

the ESG corporate stuff there's it's not hard to find it the pathway leads back to a wealthy white usually academia or media enclave and they're usually right

left-wing affluent media law, academia, utopian, but very selfish and always ensured that their bromides will never impact them or influence them.

That's the whole story of America in the last 40 years.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

we're going to wrap this up.

I'd like to thank our listeners for joining us yet again and listening, no matter what platform they use.

Those who use

Apple or iTunes can rate the show from zero to five stars.

We have a 4.9 plus average.

And that means practically everyone's given it five stars.

So thanks very much.

Those five stars are for Victor.

If they could give 10 stars to Victor, you'd give 10.

I know you would.

One comment we'd like to read that somebody left that wrote, we read them all, but here's one from Apple, and it's from Pamela.

7644.

Your podcast loved your show today.

This is from a few weeks ago.

It bothers me that General Eisenhower seems so intent on punishing Patton, more so than letting his genius win the war.

That is the impression I get anyway.

Sammy is great.

Love your shows together.

Pamela, 7644.

She is right.

She is right because Sammy is great.

So are you, Victor?

Don't give Sammy too many big ideas.

Hey, Victor, you take care.

Thanks very much, folks.

Thanks so much for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone, for listening.