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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star and namesake.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Amar Shabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He finds his happy home on the internet at the Blade of Perseus, and you should check that out.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

I'll talk to you more about that later in the show.

I have to give a tip of the hat, by the way.

I should do this every few episodes, Victor.

Our home, our official home, the podcast's official home on the internet is John Solomon's justthenews.com.

You should check that out every once in a while, actually every day.

Victor, as usual, many things to talk about.

And I think we should first go after, oops, I mean, talk about Chuck Schumer, the majority leader of the Senate, who's attacking the Supreme Court, the nine-nothing decision, Supreme Court.

It's MAGA land.

Even those, Sotamaira and others are members of MAGA.

I didn't know that.

But once again, the leading Democrat in the Senate is bringing his vitriol to the high court.

And we will get your thoughts, Victor, on that and plenty of other topics right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So Victor, our old friend Chuck Schumer from New York, I'm ashamed to say.

Here's a headline from Foxnews.com.

Schumer rips MAGA, MAGA.

Supreme Court, after 9-0 vote on EPA water rules, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer slammed the Supreme Court's ruling Thursday that limited the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate bodies of water, calling it a MAGA.

court, even though the decision was 9-0.

And this was now it says on Thursday, but that's that's probably a week prior to this broadcast being podcast being broadcast.

The High Court issued an opinion that narrowed the EPA's broad definition of waters of the United States.

The court said the federal government must define WOTUS,

Waters of the United States, as a water source.

with a continuous surface connection to major bodies of water.

Victor, there are two stories here.

One is Chuck Schumer attacking court.

By the way, you've spent a lot of your life, and we've talked about this in the past, worried about or conflicted by or angry at government, state and federal, and how it plays

politics with and crucifies farmers over water.

You may have some thoughts about the actual decision made, but Victor, your thoughts about Schumer

and your thoughts about maybe water.

Well, you know, I wrote in the Dying Citizen a chapter called The Unelected, and I mentioned this expansion of the statute concerning waterways by the Environmental Protection Agency.

And remember what we're talking about.

The Congress passes a law that says there has to be water quality on navigable bodies of water

as they

butt, a butt or go through your property.

And that means if you're putting calcium nitrate on an orchard and it rains and that nitrate goes into a river and the river is found to have too high a nitrogen content, then you're culpable.

Okay.

That was the intent and the extent of the legislation.

So anytime you create

an unaccountable government agency, by that I mean they have the powers to legislate, i.e.

they can expand or contract through their interpretation of that legislative decision.

They have judicial powers.

They can come out and

adjudicate whether you owe money or not.

And they have executive.

They can determine to enforce a law or not enforce it.

So you have no checks and balances on them.

And what this arose out of, a lot of farmers have low spots.

So on heavy rains and there would be a little temporary pond,

those little chipper EPA, state and federal, would come out to your place if they didn't like you or they wanted to exercise their authority and they say, oh, that's a navigable, that's a waterway.

And you say, no, it's not.

It dries up.

It's just a low spot.

No, we're going to test it.

Well, of course they're going to have it's a runoff, but it's going to dry up.

It doesn't, it's not a major water.

No, it doesn't matter.

because we reinterpret the statute.

This is what the legislator really should have done.

And now I'm an executive, so I'm enforcing my reinterpreted status.

And now I'm a judge because I deem you guilty.

So you own a fine.

And you say, but this isn't fair.

And they say, sue us.

We're lifelong bureaucrats, but we have the power of the federal government.

We have all the attorneys.

You want to go out and spend $200,000?

You say, no, I don't care.

Okay, then, Mr.

Farmer, here's what you're going to do.

Now listen carefully.

And that's how it was working.

And finally,

Chuck Schumer, who like Michael Bloomberg, who said that agriculture was a joke, all you have to do is drop a seed and then bang, it sprouts up.

He doesn't know the first thing about a navigable waterway or a waterway or a farmer's drainage pond.

It didn't matter though.

And it was 9-0.

He's just bashing the court.

I don't know what happened to that guy.

He was a doctrinaire liberal.

And then when the woke people took over his party and he was scared of AOC might run against, I don't know what it was, but he went.

completely nuts.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated, remember he said they have seven ways by sunday or something the cia to go after you and it was almost like he was rah rah rah rah rah cia go after donald trump huh what an idiot does he have any idea what the cia can do to you this was you know

uh

sort of a prophecy that came true given what the fbi and the cia did do

and then he most i think the low spot in his entire career in which he'll never live down he went out in front of a anti-life pro-abortion mob and got right up to the Supreme Court doors

and yelled through the doors, Gorchic, Kavanaugh, as if they could hear him.

You will reap the whirlwind.

You will reap the whirlwind, i.e., you sowed the biblical wind and now you're going to reap the whirlwind.

And then the punchline, you won't know what hit

Well, I mean, if you were in a disinterested, fair society and you have a major political figure threatening the physical safety of Supreme Court justices over a pending case, i.e.

questions about abortion, then you would say

that could be an actionable offense, that that was you know, interfering in the judicial process or threatening a judge or tampering.

But of course, he's Schumer, so he got away with it.

And then, of course, about 11 months later,

people started, according to the left's new tactic, showing up at the homes of Clarence Thomas or

Alito,

even John Roberts,

et cetera.

And they were screaming and yelling.

And then lo and behold, we had a transgender would-be assassin show up.

And luckily, he lost heart and he texted his sister who talked him out of shooting i guess it was gorshich or kavanaugh one of the two and then of course that continued with gorshich uh kavanaugh would go into a restaurant and they would mob him so this was all what he called for i mean this is exactly what he said when he said you know you don't know what hit you you're going to reap the whirlwind and so people i think just followed out his prompt.

And

it had to be a, can you imagine a Rand Paul

getting a bunch of pro-life demonstrators and going out to the Supreme Court and saying, Justice Soto Maire,

Justice Soto Maire, you do not know what will hit you.

And then when a bunch of crazy, crazed protesters showed up at our house and screamed and yelled, and there was some right-wing guy that showed up with an intent to kill her, what would the left say about all that?

They would have gone out and tried to expel Rand Paul from the Senate.

It's just part of this great asymmetry that we just take for granted that the left gets away with it.

But he's a despicable person.

He really is.

And he's never paid any kind of price for what he said.

And he's a big advocate of

using, weaponizing the federal government.

One thing we've learned about...

Jim Jordan's weaponizing, I don't think we needed to learn it, but it was confirmed is the left

has no real ideology.

Yes, I know they have an equality of result redistributionist idea, but essentially it's about power.

So 1976, 77, Frank Church wants to go after the CIA and the FBI for post-Watergate investigations of spying on America.

Yes, that's great.

He's a hero.

Today, how dare you do that?

FBI, it's an iconic American institution, i.e., what's the subtext?

Subtext is, we couldn't weaponize it in 75 and 6, 77.

We thought it might be against us, but now we control it, so it's good.

So we don't care about civil liberties.

And just follow that line of thinking and everything makes sense.

IRS,

IRS is good.

You know, it gives a pass to Hunter.

Lois Lerner went after the right people.

It's a good thing.

They gave the whistleblower, you know, whistleblowers?

Eric Saramella or whatever his name is, Michael Vim, all wonderful people.

Now, these guys, oh, they are

right-wing, white conspiracists, anti-Biden people.

So, whatever particular civil liberties issue there is, there's no civil liberties issue.

It's just to the degree of which it has utility for the left, and they will make the necessary adjustments.

So, all of a sudden, they found out that once they captured the Pentagon, all these guys with four stars and a chest full of metals that go right back to Raytheon or,

you know, general dynamics.

This is wonderful because these guys, you know, they created more diversity.

And CIA, no problem.

If the CIA, John Brennan lies under oath, unleashes, they were going after Trump.

That was FBI?

Oh, wow.

This is wonderful what they did.

That steel dossier was authentic.

So they're they're all for weaponizing all of these traditional conservative agencies.

And the final thing to say about it is: these agencies are in big trouble,

and many of them are very valuable.

But when you lose your constituency, which is traditional America that supports you, and you insult them, as we saw with the Pentagon hearings, when they basically said America, as it is represented in the armed forces, was racist racist and white

raging

and you don't get people to join.

And now when you look at the polls of FBI approval, I mean they're up there with used car salesmen, no offense to used car salesmen, because they've lost the support of the American people.

And that's reflected in

just as recruitment doesn't go up for the Army, there's people who don't want, they're afraid of the FBI.

They're terrified of the FBI.

They feel the FBI is a personal stosy retrieval service for the Biden family.

Lose a gun, call the FBI up, Hunter.

Ashley Biden, lose a diary, get the FBI to go get James O'Keefe out and see what he knows.

Rouse him out in the middle of the night in his underwear and humiliate him.

Lost a laptop, go after that laptop person, suppress it, claim it's that's what they do.

Rejection.

I think they're scared stiff.

I really do.

I mean, go back and look at those text exchanges from Stroke and Page.

They're so arrogant.

They wouldn't write like that today.

They understand that people do not like them.

And the next, if Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump is re-elected, if Trump is, I shouldn't say Trump's re-elected, if he's elected

or Ron DeSantis elected, I think either one of them will go after those agencies.

I mean, really go after them, like the FBI.

And the FBI should be taking that seventh floor of that Uber building should be transferred lockstock and barrel to Utah or Wyoming and get it out of Washington.

And then they should go and find all the whistleblowers and say, Lou, you, you, you, you, you're going to be in this, you're going to be running the agency right now and just weed it out of anybody who was political.

And then

they should do the same thing with the Pentagon.

They should do the same thing with the CIA.

They should do the same thing with the DOJ.

They should do the same thing with the IRS.

I think they will.

Victor, it's kind of, you know, I think the worm is turning.

We talked about this a little bit on our previous podcast, but that

maybe hopefully majority of Americans are moved on from seeing the left or

leftists or people like Chuck Schumer, say,

as

bleeding heart liberal, right?

which is a phrase that kind of implies, well,

you know,

you want good outcomes.

That's what you're all about.

You're a liberal.

You want good outcomes.

Maybe we could still have a cup of coffee with you.

But it's moved on.

And I think it's mostly because of these companies, Bud Light, et cetera.

Oh,

you hate me.

That's what this is really about.

It's not only you have a different view of governing.

It's that part of your view of governing is you hate me.

And it's finally sinking in with many Americans that these SOBs hate them.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, I used to play a parlor game because I'm at the Hoover Institution and we have what we call retreats where Hoover fellows speak about the mission statement of the institution

and that is limited government, free markets, personal freedom as it pertains to war, revolution, and peace.

And over the last eight years,

because we're based in California and in the Bay Area, we have seen, in general, 500,000 Californians in the last 18 months have left the state.

And among our donor base, a lot have left.

And I'm interested in why they're leaving other than the obvious, right?

That they don't want to pay

the federal rate of 39%.

Or in addition to that, California is up to 13.2.

And, but it's not just that, Jack.

I ask them all the time, why are you leaving?

And they'll say that.

They hate me.

And I said, What do you mean by that?

Well, Victor,

when I buy a car, I pay basically 10 to 11 percent with state and local taxes.

And I may be,

we have Prop 13 that limits it to 1%, but they have ways of getting around that.

They go up to 1.5%.

But more importantly, my house anywhere else would be valued at 800,000.

And here in California, in the Bay Bay Area, it's 33 million and I'm paying an exorbitant tax.

And when I fill up at my,

I pay the highest gas taxes in the United States.

And then when I have my federal taxes at 37, 38, and my 13% on a lot of my income,

and I can't write the state and local taxes off anymore, I'm paying a huge amount of money.

So then I would say this, well, then you're angry because you're paying a huge amount of money but you get little intern well yes we get very little in turn victor we if you go down the 101 down by gilroy or santa barbara you take your life in your hand if you go down i-5 it's the trucks are in the left lane now we have all the space for three lanes we don't do it you go down the 99 it's a death trap you go into lax it's out of dante's inferno

If you go look at a high-speed rail, it's a debacle.

If you go on the streets of San Francisco, it looks like a medieval city.

If you go down El Camino Real and one of the richest places where there's $9 trillion of market capitalization, it's lined, lined with buses and Winnebagos of people living there who work there, who can't afford.

The whole society is falling apart.

If you look at the public schools, they're nightmares.

So I said, okay, you pay too much and you get very little in exchange.

Yes, yes.

So that's why you're leaving.

No, no.

It's a little bit more than that, Victor.

I said, okay, what if they hate me?

They hate me.

One percent of California pays 50% of the income taxes.

And what do they do in the legislature and the popular culture?

They make fun of the people who do well and pay half of their income tax, which is over half of the state income that's revenue.

And we're not all Jay-Z and Beyonce or LeBron or the Malibu party set that they give a pass to.

They hate wealthy people.

They want to have a mansion tax.

They want a wealth tax.

It's never enough.

We're facing $35, $32, $35, $40 billion likely in state deficits that cannot be rolled over.

And what are they thinking?

After having a 13.3 income tax top rate, Florida has none and it has a $2 billion surplus.

They're thinking, how do we raise that to 14%?

Because we hate those people and they owe us.

You think that's an exaggeration?

Then you think about what they're saying.

I thought, you know, we talked a little bit about Sammy, the $800 billion reparations commission.

What I thought was most striking about it was that when somebody asked them, how are they going to pay for it?

They said, we've already paid for it.

I guess they, I don't know what that means, but they wanted a free house, two or three million dollars a person.

They didn't care how a bankrupt state could pay for it.

But what was interesting, Jack, is they said, well, we're willing to take it on the installment plan.

The installment plan.

You're going to pay me.

And if that reparations passed in California, you would see a million people leave in one year.

One year, you'd see people leave.

They'd say, I'm not going to work all year long and pay this excessive rate and see this state with crime and filth in the cities

and

just terrible infrastructure and then turn over

$800 billion to 5% of the population who hates me.

And that's what they would think.

Because anybody

who wants 800 billion and then says to the state, I don't care where you get it.

And you owe it to me.

I see people just, as you you say, leaving and even leaving, abandoning their houses.

If you stayed, the burden is probably less to just

abandon your house than to pay the.

I think that's really

come down the pike.

You know, it's really important

to go through history and see why areas become depopulated.

Everybody thinks it's plague

or it's

war.

It's not.

It's usually taxation and social policy.

Plutarch, the famous biographer he wrote and was active roughly around 100 a.d

and in some of his lives it's very on it's very eerie because he will describe the countryside of greece under roman imperial administration and he will say it's desolate and small towns have weeds growing in their in their agora And what he's trying to tell you is that under

Roman imperial rule, the city-state, the small farmer, the small independent community, the consensual government were all gone.

And there were concessions to either large estates, Latifundia they called it,

or vast tracts that went on farm.

Why?

Because of Roman

taxation that destroyed these small independent communities.

And the only people who could afford it were corporate people who had inside contacts with the Roman legates and professional tax collectors and the Roman administrators.

But vast areas that had been quite populated were desolate.

You go to

the Deem of Marathon.

Everybody knows about the Battle.

I shouldn't say everybody, but we should know about the Battle of Marathon.

In classical times, around 500 to 400 BC, that was a thriving community with four separate city-states.

The largest farm we have any evidence for

in classical Greece is about 130 acres.

And go into Roman times, about the time Plutarch wrote, one man, Herodes Atticus, he owned the entire area, probably 30 or 40,000 acres.

And so, how did he get all that land?

Because people were bankrupt.

They couldn't pay the taxes anymore.

They were hated by the government.

They disappeared.

They moved into the cities.

They just dissolved.

So it's not unimaginable to think that

you can, as somebody who's been downtown LA this spring and downtown San Francisco, and you see 30, 40% of these downtown, beautiful buildings unoccupied,

and you try to say, was it the riots?

Was it the fear of COVID?

Was it the Zoom?

Was it the crime?

Was it the taxes?

It's all of them.

And they've completely depopulated large areas of our downtown.

I'm surprised, you know, we need Saint Jerome to write an account about how there's grass growing in the form of Rome.

That's what it or Procopius.

When Belisarus gets back to Rome to retake it in the sixth century, what does he see?

This million person city is empty and it's, you know, falling apart.

And that's what's happening in our cities.

A lot of, and they're all in places where there's very, very, very high taxation.

And the reason that people are leaving, besides crime and terrible schools

is they are hated by these municipal and state governments.

And they tax these people to death.

And they never say, I want to thank the 1%

who paid half the taxes.

It's always, how did you get that money to pay our taxes?

You must be a crook.

And that doesn't

go well.

And you know what the final insult to injury is?

The legislature is always coming up and its bureaucracies with ways to tax Californians who leave, who leave.

They want to have a severance tax so that they can go after you when you're in Florida or Nevada or Texas or somewhere else.

Well, Victor, some people

think that maybe California is salvageable.

And we'll talk about that in a little bit.

There's a piece by Walter Russell Mead in Tablet magazine.

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So Victor,

you had mentioned to me before the podcast

that there was a very interesting piece you had read by Walter Russell Mead.

So I went scrambling through the Wall Street Journal from the last week.

I couldn't find it, but then I googled and there it is on Tablet magazine, which by the way, Tablet mag is an online

journal.

I usually give it a link in every week, every edition of the Civil Thoughts that I write, my free weekly email newsletter.

It's a terrific publication.

Anyway, he has we're speaking about California.

We have been, we will, and we will continue with another story after this.

But he's got a piece called Build Back Red California.

And I'll just read

one

little paragraph here.

Oh my gosh, this is such a long piece.

He says here, the door is open for California Republicans if they dare to walk through it.

For anxious millennials, aspirational Zoomers, and above all, for millions of immigrants, home ownership remains the key to the American dream.

Tight land use and zoning regulations, plus ever-increasing regulatory requirements for new home construction have turned California, once a haven for first-generation homeowners, into the most expensive housing market in the country.

As of April 2023, the state's median home price stood at $765,900.

Mama Mia.

If housing costs are factored in, California has the highest poverty rate in the nation.

Victor, this is a big piece.

Lots of data, lots of analysis.

I think it's a little far-fetched what I glanced and gleaned, but hey, he's no dummy.

Walter Russell Mead writes a lot for the, he's a professor, right?

I think on the

column in the Wall Street Journal every week.

So Victor,

you know, tell us why this piece interests you.

Well, I should say that he was a member for many years at my military history program at the Hooper Institution.

I've met him.

I've had dinner.

I've been on a cruise with him.

Very learned person, wrote a great book on American post-war foreign policy.

So he's a very skilled analyst of

domestic and foreign affairs.

And what he's trying to argue is that,

well, the subtext is that this bi-coastal elite

created this regulatory...

environment for their own selfish interest, i.e., if you've got a beautiful little cottage on a quarter acre, a nice nice house in Carmel, you don't want anybody around you, except if they're going to clean up or cook for you.

You don't want in San Francisco, you don't want a new development of a bunch of poor people.

Or if you live in Woodside, you don't want anybody from Redwood City near you.

But the point is these zoning laws, not in my backyard type of things, have made it almost impossible to buy a home, which is one of the conservative stimuli in a society.

You put a guy who you know, writes graffiti over everything, and suddenly if somebody writes graffiti over something he owns, or a guy who throws a rock through a window, and suddenly he has to fix that window, he has a very different idea.

So home ownership traditionally, it runs about 62 to 63%.

California is much lower because we have 27% of the population.

It wasn't born in the United States.

And we have

And he's got a, Walter Russell Mead has a good insight to the left-wing mind about how these people who lecture us with all of these liberal pieties and platitudes never are subject to the consequences of their own ideology.

So it's a depressing picture at first

that we live in this medieval state in which we have these wealthy coastal elites, none more so where there's $9 trillion of market

capitalization between Stanford or between San Jose and San Francisco, and you add

about 10 to 12 million illegal aliens who moved into the state without English skills, capital legality over the last 50 years,

and you've got the ingredients, you know, and then you add the Reagan, Dec Major, Pete Wilson, Schwarzenegger voter left the state, perhaps five to eight million.

And so you've got a bifurcated society that's left of very wealthy people along the strip living in $2 million on average homes from La Jolla to Berkeley, and then everybody else who's not middle class, they're lower, lower middle class, highest poverty rate, 22% of the population in the United States, one-third of all welfare recipients, half the homeless,

the Medicaid budget just soaring out of control,

only six or seven percent left to fix infrastructure.

So that was what he starts with.

And then he says, But wait a minute,

this has happened before.

During the Great Depression,

when

the drought and the depression wiped out millions of farmers from northern Texas, Oklahoma in particular, and Arkansas, they headed westward, the Jodes of

John Steinbeck

fame.

And

a lot of of novels

from 1932 to 1940 talked about the Okie diaspora, so to speak.

Anyway,

what he's saying is

that group that came to California was caricatured because they brought in the Church of God, they brought in the Assembly of God, they brought in Fundamentalist Church of Christ, they had tent revivals, they had southern accents,

they

had weird habits.

They

were fundamentalist Christians that were,

they were not like

we being the native California, we Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, et cetera, Catholic.

So, and they were very poor.

And more importantly, they were imbued with

the

New Deal mentality.

And remember that we don't associate Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas with being blue states.

But during the Depression until really the Nixon years, they were.

I mean,

think about it.

William Fulbright, you know, he's a good example of that area.

A lot of the Texas senators were very, very, Yarlborough was very left-wing.

And that was all a legacy of very poor white people that looked toward the Roosevelt administration for help.

And they came in droves to California.

So he said, all of a sudden, they started electing in the late 30s and 40s and early 50s

left-wing governments.

And the state didn't react well.

It was not as bad as it is now.

15 to 17 million people, not 42 million.

But his point is that as these people began to intermarry, assimilate, enter the upward mobility trajectory, they had became stakeholders and they became more conservative.

And they became kind of the new majority of the state, their children, their offspring, their mentality, and they became conservative.

And they elected people like a conservative Democrat Yorty in Los Angeles.

Or in San Francisco, you had Christopher, who was actually a Republican.

And they brought in the Reagan Revolution of 62.

And they brought in Pete Wilson.

And now

they're either fully assimilated, their grandkids are left-wing, or they left.

But,

but

Walter Russell Mead says 45% of the state are first and second generation people from south of the border, the majority from Mexico, some third generation.

And, and like the Oklahoma diaspora, they are starting to be the head of the DMV,

the police chief, the local hardware store owner, the tire shop entrepreneur.

They have homes.

They're not having 12 kids.

They're having two kids.

Their kids are going to college and they have to live in California and they have to pay $5 a gallon for gas.

They have to pay this income tax rate.

They have to pay this over.

valued assessments on their property taxes.

They have to deal with crime.

They've got to go to San Francisco sometimes and or LA and see what's happened.

They don't like smash and grab, et cetera, et cetera.

So what he is saying is that they very so slowly are starting to do what the proverbial quote-unquote oaky population, they're becoming conservative.

But unlike the quote-unquote oaky population, they're bigger.

They're much bigger.

They have a much greater percentage of the population.

They're not a million or two.

They're 10, 15 million in theory.

As I said, they're the largest ethnic group in California.

And I don't even know if they're still an ethnic group because they're so assimilated, at least by the third generation.

But his point is that

they are becoming conservative because they are the establishment now.

They are the authorities now.

And if they don't become conservative, then they understand that everything they work for is gone.

So yes, the legislature may want to do do their transgendered stuff and they want to do their reparation stuff and they want to shut down

natural gas plants and they do not believe in harvesting timber and letting the forest burn.

Okay,

but they don't have the constituency they used to have.

And they were ready for an earthquake as these

emerging upper middle class, middle class Latino voters, Hispanic voters, Mexican-Americans, they're going to start voting in their self-interest like the Oklahoma people did.

And we're going to have a new era of red if, if, and then of course he had to put this in, if the Republicans drop the golf course stuff and they're not Mitt Romney types and they're populist and they welcome these people to run the party for them.

And so you don't have just a bunch of guys golfing in Orange County in a little enclave, but you turn over your party to Rodrigo Hernandez, who runs 1,000

people working for his landscaping corporation or something like that.

And so we'll see.

We'll see.

I think there's one thing he misses in his analyses, a very important thing, and that was the Oklahoma diaspora was essentially from 1930 to 1940.

And we had people that I grew up with on this farm that were from Oklahoma.

And

I know people in my family that, you know, that had friends and family members and in-laws.

I did.

They're from Oklahoma.

So it's a very

immediate knowledge of it.

But the difference was that stopped by about 1940.

There wasn't a fresh infusion all during the 50s and 60s of poor people.

And so there was not a lot of,

there weren't people in Oklahoma who had come with nothing, and then they were electricians, and then they were electric contractors, and then they were electrician businesses, and suddenly they had more people coming that were poor, and they were felt that they had obligations to them and ethnic

ties that bound them.

They were just segregated.

They were cut off.

They were just, that was it.

It was a one-time deal.

didn't continue in the sixth because Oklahoma recovered and California began to get expensive.

And so, so, and that's what's different.

If you shut the border and you build the wall and you enforce immigration, yes, he's absolutely right.

You keep the border open and you send a million illegal aliens into California every year,

and you're not going to have a conservative Latino majority because for each Latino person 55 years old who's fluent in English, he's been a citizen for two generations, you're going to have a new person come in and say, Where's my

where's my EBT card?

Where's my scholarship for my kid?

Where's all this?

I need this, I have nothing.

And so that's going to be hard to break.

But yes, he's right.

If you will cut the border supply off and you have a finite pool like you did with the Oklahomans, they will become conservative.

And maybe you have a conservative.

The same thing's true with the Asians.

They are coming, but

that stream is starting to taper off a little bit.

and a lot of the asians were conservative uh when i grew up they were largely taiwanese and japanese and then we brought in literally hundreds if not millions of people from southeast asia who were very philippines indonesia vietnam laos cambodia

very poor very, very poor.

And they kept coming.

And they had a very different political ideology than

the establishment Asian population.

They were very left-wing.

And so that's the key is if the immigration is continuous or whether it's periodic.

If it's periodic, then people will grow conservative in these ethnic groups.

If they're not, they won't.

His argument is it's not a minority anymore.

It's a majority minority.

It's just about ready to be 51% of the state.

And so whatever, I think his argument is whatever the Latino consensus is, is going to be the state, whether you like it or not.

That 51% will have the state's numbers in a democracy.

And whether they will be influenced by Silicon Valley money or coastal culture, and they're going to go down the reparations, transgender, radical, abortion on demand, or they're going to be socially and culturally conservative depends on

how many people come across the border every year, I think.

Yeah.

Well, which makes the 2024 elections all the more important.

Well, there are probably 100 important reasons.

Hey, Victor,

we're going to move away from California, and

it's graduation time.

Actually, many schools have already had their graduations, but you have some thoughts on graduations, and we are going to hear them right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, and Victor has a website.

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So one of those pieces, Victor, one of these ongoing series that you're writing for the website is called

Our Ossified Americans.

And in part one, that's the only part up,

you're writing about institutions that have outlived their age, and you start off with tribal graduations.

Victor, what is a tribal graduation?

I don't know what it is.

I watched one of them on local television, but

apparently this is 60s relic that oppressed people

and minorities will identify by tribal affiliations, i.e.

superficial parents or language.

And the result would be that

at universities, community colleges, high school, there's going to be, and there is,

They say there's going to be a general graduation, but that's fragmented now.

So sometimes you only have these.

there's going to be the transgendered graduation that the latino chicano graduation the black graduation the asian graduation etc the mixed race graduation i suppose and this is going to amplify the reality on campus where you have the

they don't call them segregated houses but they call them theme houses so i i have an apartment on the stanford campus and i walk to work

across these theme houses and they're basically restricted by race.

That means if you're Joe White guy and you'd like to go into a black theme house,

you can't.

You can't.

But if you have a European theme house, of course, nobody, you would be bounced off the campus.

Now, all of that made sense maybe when these groups were impoverished and they did not have parity either numerically or economically with the majority population, i.e.

90% a white

200-year tradition, 10% black, 2% or 3% Asian and Hispanic in the 40s and 50s.

However, today,

when the white population is 67%

and you have about 17 ethnic groups, whether Punjabis or Arab Americans or Korean Americans or Thai, who have a higher per capita income than whites,

it's getting increasingly hard to suggest that anybody's oppressed.

Jay-Z and Beyonce just bought the most expensive real estate property house this year, 210 million in L.A.

So my point is, when you have these graduations, are you really talking, say, at Cal State Fresno, when 47% of the population is Latino and 75% of the degrees are going to Latino, and you have a Latino graduation that only Latinos go to,

well, that's the majority of the students, right?

So

are you going to extend the logic to the minority of the students?

Because there's only about 15 to 20 percent white so-called white students at Cal State Fresno, I think, 25.

So do they get to have a European?

Is that what they want to?

What would happen?

Does anybody, do you want to go down the Rwanda, Iraq, Yugoslavia?

Because that's where it ends.

As I said before, it's like nuclear proliferation.

If your neighbor goes nuclear, then you go nuclear.

Well, if everybody's identifying first and foremost by their tribe to the extent that they have separate graduations, theme houses, safe space, and you're outnumbered, and they say that anybody's outnumbered has a right to have an ethnic, then you know what's coming down the turnpike.

It'll be some type of somebody will some very soon will say, let's have a European-American graduation.

And what are they going to say?

That's white supremacy when you're a minority of the population in California.

So that's one thing.

And the second thing is, how do you qualify?

So in an interracial society, about 40% of Latinos marry outside their group.

And I can tell you from somebody you caught 21 years at Cal State Fresno, I had just

every other student was part Latino.

Everybody I knew was married to Latino.

I have a brother who is married to a Latino.

I have another brother who has Latino children.

Everybody knows that.

Extended families families where Latinos are in them.

It's just, it's a commonplace.

So how do you adjudicate?

It's kind of like the tribal problem with Indian gaming, where some guy pulls,

appears out of nowhere.

There's 50 members of a tribe that's worth a billion dollars in gambling value.

And he all of a sudden he says, I'm a member of that tribe.

They said, no, you're not.

Your name's Peter Smith.

He said, yes, but I'm 116th.

And I can prove it.

And then they said, well, okay.

And then they sue.

And we've had these fights everywhere in California among tribal.

Who gets it?

So who goes to the Latino graduation?

Does the guy who has a grandparent that's Argentine?

Let's say you come from

Argentina and come to California, and your name is Roberto Sandoval.

And let's say you speak fluent Spanish.

from Argentina and you're now a U.S.

resident or a U.S.

citizen, but you have blue eyes and blonde hair because your mother's family was from Italy and Germany.

And you are only a half or an a fourth of so-called native Argentine, which is Spanish.

So you come to Cal State Fresno, you don't look like you're Hispanic, but you're perfectly fluent in Spanish.

And you want to go to...

And your name,

let me excuse myself.

I shouldn't say you're going to take your patronymic, but your matronymic.

Let's say your name is Klaus Schwab, okay, just to take a familiar name, because your mother from Argentina was German, but yet you speak, you're one-fourth Hispanic and you speak fluent, and you come in there and you say, I'm a Latino.

I'm going to be the Latino graduation.

You say, well, wait a minute, your name's Klaus Schwab.

I'm one half, one quarter, and I speak fluent.

Well, that guy over there, he's been a third generation

Mr.

Robert Sandoval, but he's only one half, but his name's Robert Sandoval and he looks darker than you, but he doesn't speak Spanish.

I do.

That happens.

So what is the criteria to go to the Latino graduation?

Is it facility in Spanish?

If it is, half the people wouldn't be able to go there.

I know they have it in Spanish, but now they have it in English and Spanish.

And you look at the audiences, and when they speak in Spanish, half of the people can't understand a word.

And then is it your Hispanic name?

Does that make you more Hispanic?

That you, if you're one quarter Hispanic, but it's all on your father's side, and you keep a Spanish-sounding name and you trill your R's and you add accents, does that mean you're

authentic?

Is it your superficial appearance?

I go into my local community, Jack.

90% of the people are Latino.

And I swear to God, if I

went in there and I took the first five Latino people who cut my hair, I see at the mailbox, and I said to a stranger from France, that woman's name

is

Marguerite Aga Nostelli, and that person

is

Haji Khan, and that person is

Myro Stephanopoulos.

In other words, that person is Italian, that person is Arab, and that person is Greek.

They wouldn't know the difference.

They would not know the difference.

So my point is that if you are creating an ethnic chauvinistic race only, and they always say, well,

it's not race only.

Anybody can, no, it's race only.

Come on.

And your theme is that you have grievances against the majority, but there is no majority anymore.

And you're all well-established as middle-class people.

And

what is the qualification?

Is it the language?

Is it the superficial appearance?

Is it the name?

Come on, let's have some definitions.

If you want to go down the apartheid route, then give us the apartheid models that have been used in the past.

And you've got, as I said with Sammy, you've got National Socialism that can help you out.

You've got the pre-Confederate antebellum South.

You've got Jim Crow.

You've got South Africa.

They can all come in to help you with the one drop, the 116th, you name it.

And that's what's so silly about it, these graduations.

And

I don't understand it.

I mean, what do you, how long do you keep saying that your primary persona is your ethnic appearance?

I don't get it in a racially integrated United States.

And

how do you apply for being Hispanic anymore?

And we really saw that.

I keep bringing it up, Jack, but we saw that with the Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman.

If the poor guy, George Zimmerman, had just said,

look,

you think I'm a Nazi-sounding name, Zimmerman, German?

I get it, but I'm not.

My mom's from Peru.

She's a first immigrant.

I'm a first-generation Peruvian.

My dad married a Peruvian.

Her name is Mesa.

And you know what?

I have a lot of pride in my Peruvian roots.

So I'm not just faking it like third and fourth generation.

My name is Jorge.

It's not George.

It's Jorge Mesa.

Jorge Mesa.

So Jorge Mesa got in a fight with Traybon Martin.

And the whole end of story would be a lot different.

The intersectionality

rules collapse at that point.

Exactly.

And the New York Times would have trouble pushing white Hispanic.

And so, my point is: it's so ridiculous to keep going down this route.

And at this graduation, we have all these different graduations, and the country is so disunited and fragmented.

We're waiting for one brave college president who says to himself, you know what?

I'm 55.

I've had a great career i was a professor i've been a provost i've been a dean i've got a comfortable 401k right screw it i'm going to stand for principal and they i know they will fire me but i'll make a statement so he will say on this campus at this time we're going to have one graduation it's going to be ecumenical and each person can contribute in their own unique way, but we're not going to separate people by race.

And the same thing about dorms.

You're not going to be able to violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964

and five by selecting in advance the race of your roommate.

Sorry.

And two, you're not going to

be in a racially segregated dorm.

And that would be wonderful.

He'd be famous.

She'd be famous.

Yeah.

And we, you know, it's like Diogenes, you're looking around Athens for one honest man.

You can't find them.

There's no SIHiawakawas.

They're going to jump up on a bullhorn, yank it out, and say, You're not going to shout down people with a megaphone who would disagree with you and become famous, right?

Yeah.

Well, Eplurbusanum is hanging on by a thread there, Victor.

We have time for quick time, just quick for one

from

many from one.

Yeah, well,

it seemed to be, seemed to have worked for over 200 years.

I have hope, though.

But all that, my opinion aside, again, not a lot of time left.

And we're going to go back to the Supreme Court and talk about one quickly, one last topic, and that's going to be asset forfeiture.

And we'll get to that.

Victor's thoughts on that right after this final important message.

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

So, Victor, that same MAGA Supreme Court that was vilified by Chuck Schumer, that we began this podcast talking about, issued another ruling striking down a Minnesota county's asset forfeiture law.

And in a nutshell, some lady had not paid her full property taxes.

The state or the county foreclosed on the property,

sold sold it, sold it for a lot more than the tax debt was,

kept

the bounty, kept the balance.

And this was an issue that was, you know, the court decided essentially, no, you can't keep the balance.

This isn't, you know, this isn't the point of paying on debt.

So good.

I personally am glad that some

refinement of asset forfeiture has been brought brought to bear by the Supreme Court.

But in general, Victor, I have found that,

left or right, conservative or liberal, and conservative, I mean by some conservative members of Congress, because this issue came up years ago in the war on drugs.

Like, yes, let's, you know,

the guy who's selling drugs, he was doing it from his car.

We're going to take the car.

Oh, by the way, there was a hundred thousand dollars in it.

The money must have come from, we're going to keep it all.

And municipalities and counties keep them and they look forward to that money.

You know, this is good.

We need the dough.

But in many cases, Victor, we know these stories that people's

car, house, have been taken wrong, improperly.

They didn't commit any crime.

They can't get their money back.

It's a nightmare, I think.

So that's just me.

I'm babbling, but I have a problem with asset forfeiture.

I don't know.

Do you have any thoughts?

Yeah, I have a big problem with the show.

I have a problem with two things.

One is the use of imminent domain for quote unquote economic renewal, where the state or the local municipality goes into a very successful area and confiscates property or forces a sale at their price range

because they want to have a big corporation or a hotel come in.

That's bad.

And the thing about the assets is we're going to see a lot more of this because if you look at the obligations and the unfunded liabilities of states and cities, especially their pension plans in blue states and blue cities, they're broke.

They are out and they're like paramecium or amoebas.

They're self-perpetuating organisms and they're going to need retail, they're going to need revenue and they don't have the revenue because they've,

to mix my metaphors, they've killed the golden goose.

The golden goose is gone and they've taxed them so much they left.

And so there's not enough people with the type of income that they demand to redistribute.

So, a city like Chicago or San Francisco or Los Angeles or Baltimore or Indianapolis or Milwaukee, they're broke.

And where are they going to get the money?

Well, one of the things they do is they turn to assets.

So, if people are late on a tax bill, or

they haven't paid a fine, Of course, that will be asymmetrical, the enforcement of that, or they're involved in illegal activity.

And it won't be uniform, Jack.

It won't be, this is the policy of the city of Los Angeles.

If you don't pay your property tax, regardless of who you are, this is what we will do.

If you are in garage in a felony, if you are charged and convicted of a felony of drug transportation, selling, et cetera, importation, we will confiscate this.

They won't do that.

It'll be all ad hoc.

Well,

who is this guy?

Is he important?

Maybe we'll leave him alone.

Is he related to a politician?

Who knows?

Oh, what color is this person?

What gender is this?

What sexual orientation is this person?

It'll all be weaponized, as we've seen.

And that's scary because they will start looking for people with assets and then sort of in

Berea fashion, show me the target and I'll get you the crime.

Show me the fat cat who's got some assets to help, you know, my broke city police department that

can't afford patrol cars.

Oh, that guy over there,

he's got a chauffeur service and they're selling marijuana out of the back seats of some of their cars.

Let's go after him and go after him and enforce him with drug running.

And we can get six of those town cars or SUVs, paint them black, put our signal, and there's our police force.

So that's what we're going to see more and more of.

Yeah, it's bad.

It seems to me it's a violation violation of all sorts of search and seizure and the basic idea of property ownership.

But everybody thinks, well, Victor, you're paranoid.

No, I'm not.

We're $33 trillion in debt.

And these states or cities in the blue states in particular, which I live in, have massive, massive debits.

and obligations and yearly deficits and they don't have the tax base anymore because people are fleeing them and they're poorly run and they're weaponized and they're crooked and they need revenue or they're going to massively default.

And when you look at what they rely on, you look at San Francisco, Los Angeles, you look at Chicago, you look at Milwaukee, as I said, you look at some of these cities, Philadelphia, they depend on a lot of very high-end corporations being headquartered there and owning office building.

But when you look at the vacancy rate of an office building in these blue cities, it's about 35%, Jack.

Right.

And the price per the debt, the indebtedness per square foot of these office buildings, that entails the amount of money they borrowed to build the building versus what they paid off with rent.

It's climbing.

It's like from $150, it's up to $250 a square foot.

for these massive hundreds of thousands of square feet buildings.

And there's no way in the world they're going to be able to pay those debts and they're going to default.

And what is a city, what are these cities going to do?

They're going to be looking for some assets to survive.

And somebody's going to say, well, Victor,

they can cut their diversity, equity, and inclusion program, their community health center.

No, they won't cut those.

Those will be the last thing they cut.

In Connecticut, there was a, and I'm sure eventually it'll come to pass.

This is some maybe 10 years ago, someone introduced the novel idea of the hoarder's tax, which was to just tax your savings.

Of course, savings of money you've already has already made it through the few dollars that have made it through the taxing system in your bank account or wherever.

But, oh, you're hoarding it, and we have a right to take part of what you are hoarding.

That's the mentality.

You know, it's like Max Spialistock and the producers.

I want that money.

You know, that's what it comes down to.

I mean, that's what it's going to be.

Whatever way we can do it to get it.

Our whole system is built on a simple premise.

Our whole modern American system the last 20 years is we always punish the middle class non-offender model citizen for the sins of the offender that we won't punish.

So you have shoplifters that go in and just walk out with hands full of stuff and you can't punish them, then we will ensure that

these stores lock up everything so the middle class law-abiding citizen comes comes in there for some clariton and a big shaver and he's got to wait an hour.

Or

whole earth's going to say, you know what?

We're going to leave because there's too much shoplifting and the city won't enforce it.

And then we punish all the people who counted every day of going in there and getting an apple and some grapes.

He is the one that is punished.

Same thing with guns.

You've got people in Chicago killing.

10, 20 people on weekends with handguns.

We're going to make sure there's hard for the guy out there in rural Dakota that needs to buy a handgun to shoot rattlesnakes.

We're going to make it, we always punish the law-abiding citizen and make his life more inconvenient because we're afraid to deal with the real problem.

Same thing with homelessness and everything.

And

we're going to say, you know what, the homelessness

problem, that's a sacrosanct.

They are victims.

They do not attack people.

They do not make life on

healthy.

They do not smell.

They do not use drugs.

They don't happen this.

You, the citizen, if you want to walk down Market Street or by Union Squares, it's your job to step over the human feces,

over the syringe, turn your head when somebody's defecating, urinating, injecting, fornicating.

Don't let your children see that.

That's your problem.

So we will make life hell for the law-abiding citizens so that we can allow the lawbreaker to be exempt because we don't have the moral authority or the imagination or the courage to deal with this existential problem.

If you had the courage, Richter, you'd have to say with all these issues, you'd have to say, that's abnormal, which means you'd have to say, this is normal.

And they don't have the.

Or you'd have to say, I'm sorry, homelessness is not.

is not, that's a euphemism.

If you took every one of those people that was homeless, quote unquote, and you took a huge parking lot, say 10 acres outside of San Francisco, and there are such places, and you built a hundred thousand dollar little cubicles and they've done that that are about 300 square feet and they have running water and heat and they're clean.

And you put 150 of them in a nice little village and marked them off, and they had a communal medical center, and you took all those people and you put them there, it still wouldn't matter.

They would leave because it's mental illness, it's mostly drug use, it's crime, and you don't want to talk about that.

So, you put them all together under the noble rubric.

They're just homeless.

No, it's not the problem they don't have a home.

That's one of the problems.

The problem is they're using illegal drugs with impunity.

The problem is they're stealing with impunity.

The problem is they're mentally ill and they're either not giving treatment or medicine.

It gets me angry because, you know, when we had this Neely thing in the subway, Jordan Neely,

and we were told that the system failed him.

I read that.

No, he failed us.

The system didn't fail.

He was arrested 42 times.

There were many occasions where he was offered count.

Every one.

He was hardly ever incarcerated for very long.

Yet he broke a person's jaw.

He hit a woman in an eye socket and smashed it.

He was lewd.

He had three violent felonies.

Every time he was offered counseling, he was offered a halfway health.

He either left or he didn't take advantage of it.

Well,

he was ill.

I'm sorry, but society reached out for him and gave him an exemption 42 times, or he wouldn't have been where he was threatening people.

So we've got to get over this idea that

every homeless person is a victim.

They're not.

They're victimizers in many cases.

They hit people.

They damage people's aspirations.

They destroy property.

And until you have the courage to deal with that problem,

and you know what?

I guess what's coming, there's the way I look at it as a metaphor, there's a big steam engine called truth coming.

I don't mean authoritarianism or right-wing, you know,

vengeance.

I'm just talking about truth.

It's a locomotive called truth, and you're looking down the track, and it's coming at about 70 miles an hour, right at us.

And one of the truths is this homelessness.

The other is that, and Heather McDonald's new book I was looking at

on the end of the meritocracy, we're going to have her on a podcast, I think, next week, is that

for all the problems with race,

there's something we don't talk about, and that is a subset of the population, about

5%

of the population, which is the numbers of African-American males between the ages of 12 and 40, are committing about 55% of the murders and about 50% of violent assaults.

Just that small group.

And we're not doing it.

It's not that we're not addressing that.

We don't even want to talk about it.

To talk about it, what I just said is a fireable offense.

But that truth is coming too.

People are going to start talking about it, especially as they find that they can't walk places in the inner city.

They can't go anywhere.

Yeah, domestic tranquility matters.

Yeah, yeah, and that is a truth.

The other truth is we're going to see it this summer because here in California and many of these blue states, they have shut down nuclear plants.

They have shut down natural gas plants and they have spent billions on daytime solar mega farms that give you 110% of the energy you need during daylight hours and 30% what you need at night, nothing.

And when you start seeing these blackouts and brownouts in a massive scale, then I think people are going to be considered,

are going to be confronted with truth, truth coming down right at you.

Here's truth.

And same thing about the airline industry.

The airline industry is in shambles.

Everybody, it's overcrowded.

It's poorly run.

We're hiring people to be pilots and air traffic controllers, not on the basis of merit, but on the basis of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And we've had six, seven near misses.

And we're looking at truth coming down that this present system,

given all the technology and all the safety mechanisms that have been extraordinary the last 10 years, we're going to start seeing some catastrophic accidents unless we change very quickly.

I have a feeling, Victor, if we go on another hour, there'd be about 20 more truths.

We're all going to be flattened by it.

It's scary.

I'm very afraid of truth because truth is something.

Remember what the Greek word for truth is?

It's alethea.

And it comes from a Greek word lanthano, to forget.

And alpha, as you know, a moral.

Alpha is called alpha privative.

It cancels out what follows.

A

latheia, not forgettable.

Lanthano means to forget or miss.

So what is truth?

Something you can't put out of your mind.

It just exists.

It's not forgettable.

And

it just exists regardless of what we say it is.

And it's just an absolute platonic absolute.

And these truths are pretty hard.

They're called human nature.

And if you don't punish somebody who shoots or defecates on a city street, then you get more of it.

Well, they say the truth will set you free, but I guess not

right after it hits you.

It'll take a generation or two.

That's in John.

That's in the gospel of John.

And the word that they use there is aletheo.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, that's

time to tell the truth here.

It's all the time we have.

We'll thank our listeners, no matter what platform they listen on.

If you're a new visitor, a new listener, particularly thanks for coming.

I hope you stick around.

And, of course, thanks to those folks who come.

now four times a week and sometimes five times a week to listen to Victor.

Looking forward if you're actually going to do a one-on-one with Heather McDonnell.

That That will be

terrific.

For myself, quickly, I just want to encourage our listeners to visit civilthoughts.com and sign up for the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, where we are determined to strengthen civil society.

Civil Thoughts,

it's free.

We're not putting your name on a seller.

We're not selling your name.

There's nothing transactional about it.

And it gives 12 to 14 recommended readings, like the piece we just discussed on Russell Walter Mead.

That's the kind of thing I would put in there.

Hey, Russell Walter Mead has this great piece and tablet mag.

Here's the link.

Here's an excerpt.

So

lots of people here who have listened to this podcast have signed up and they enjoy it.

CivilThoughts.com.

And Victor, to our listeners who rate the show, which they can do on iTunes or or Apple, zero to five stars.

Many do.

We have an average of over 4.9.

A few people that don't give us five stars.

It's a free country.

You don't have to, but most people love it.

And we thank them for taking the time to rate the program and also those who leave comments, which you can do at iTunes and Apple.

Here's one.

It's from NSSS.

I don't know the name of NZ.

And it's titled The Most Important Voice for All Americans Who Love Our Great Country.

That's the title.

And here's what NZ writes.

Hello, Jack, Professor Hansen.

Words cannot describe how important your podcast is to Americans of all ages.

You may not think you're having a huge impact or reaching the youth, but you are.

As prolific writer, essayist, and thought leader, your work has led the way in important circles, think tanks, and the donor classes.

But now your words, this meaning the podcast, is doing the same for youth, the common man, uninformed or politically lost, who absorb content differently while in motion, multitasking, etc., for better or worse.

Please don't ever think

you're not having an impact.

You are.

For my family, friends, neighbors, thank you for your tireless work.

God bless to you and yours.

NSSS.

Thank you for that kind compliment.

Victor, thanks for all the wisdom.

you shared today, as you do on every episode.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Much appreciated.

See you next time.