Utopian Dreams and Middle Class Nightmares

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

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

That's Victor Davis-Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor's official home on the internet, which y'all should be visiting quite regularly and subscribing to, is the Blade of Perseus.

And you will find that at victorhanson.com.

Victor, today we have a couple of topics, but they're all kind of in the zone of America is struggling with money, with youth dying, with taxes.

So we will, this will be a little, little morose.

Maybe

it'll

turn on, activate your Eeyore

aspect, Victor.

But we'll get to these topics right after

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

So, yeah, Victor,

I came across preparing for the episode a number of,

I think, worthwhile, important stories that reflect where America is at, where its head is at, where America's head is going.

And I think it might be worthwhile lumping them into one, or not lumping them, but putting them into one show.

So, here's the first

story.

This is from the Daily Mail, and it's headline.

I'm just going to read the headline, the few sentences here.

More Americans are struggling to make ends meet now than in the aftermath of the pandemic.

A new survey shows nearly 40% of U.S.

households can't pay expenses.

And here's the first few pieces: sentences.

Roughly two in five Americans are still struggling to make ends meet.

New federal data has shown more than the amount seen in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The

revelation comes from the Census Bureau's latest household survey released Wednesday, which shows some 38.5% of adults or 89.1 million people experienced difficulty paying their bills between April 26th and May 8th.

The number is up from a year ago when 34.4% of Americans reported they were undergoing budget crunches and comes as a near 50% increase from the 26.7%

recorded in 2021.

Victor, America is struggling to buy milk, eggs, pay mortgages, pay rent, and I think it's only going to get worse.

What are your thoughts, my friend?

Well,

I would like to say I told you so, but

since

a majority of the country apparently voted for Joe Biden and he pretty much announced his

program and the F the Federal Reserve was pretty much on board.

And what was the program?

That as we were coming off COVID and as all of us were stuck in our houses, apartments, etc.

And as the government was printing under Trump and then under Biden

$4 trillion, $5 trillion of easy, funny money, and everybody, you know, everybody had a relative or somebody was getting COVID money that didn't need it.

And we heard of businesses and then we heard of all the

irregularities, if not fraud, involved in that.

The point being that people were not spending money because there were very little places to go.

It was hard to find a car.

Cruises were shut down, vacations flying.

Nobody wanted to fly.

And there was money piling up.

And at that point, it would have been wise to

gently, gently raise interest rates from,

say, a 30-year mortgage, 2.6 to 3,

and see if you could hold it there, 3.5.

But we didn't do that.

So Joe Biden came in and said, you know,

that

everybody needs to spend more money.

So he ran up two consecutive years of $2 trillion deficits just at a time when the public was emerging with a limited amount of cash, but cash nevertheless, when interest rates on everything were low, but there was, and this is the catcher, there was a supply chain crisis because factories here and abroad had been shut down.

So you had all these easy dollars chasing very, very few commodities.

And so, as I used to harken on this, I used to try to draw people's attention to,

you know, $70 for plywood, $138 for 150 feet of Romex copper wire.

It was insane.

Cars that used cars that were selling for double their worth.

And so what happened was that as people began to run out of the easy money during the quarantine, and as inflation went up one month to 9%,

and now we consider an annualized rate of six a success, but that remember is on two years of inflation.

So they went up 8%,

then 7%.

So you're about a third higher higher on everything.

And then Joe Biden raised taxes.

So,

you know, I'm just speaking as

a person who's, you know, comfortable, but not wealthy.

And all of a sudden,

I'm at 39.5 income tax level.

And then the state of California has gone up to 13.3.

And then you have your payroll tax, and they've kept upping the limit in which they can tax you, the income that's vulnerable to such taxation.

You have Obamacare,

and you can easily, easily, easily get up to 50% of your income.

I do, and I don't have any deductions.

And

50% of your income when prices have gone up 30% over the Biden tenure.

And we're kept waiting and waiting and waiting for the,

I don't know what you would call it, the reckoning.

And the reckoning is here now.

People can't afford anything anymore.

And you see everybody said, well, why are houses still high?

Well, the only reason that the housing market hasn't completely collapsed is that these sellers are A,

set that their house appreciated so much under this inflation

and their house is worth $600,000 no matter what.

And then, number two, they're thinking, wow, if I sell the house I bought for $200,000, tripled in value, I'm going to have capital gains that have gone up.

But But more importantly, I have to live somewhere.

So I'm going to pay a huge capital gain.

Then I got to go buy a house and I can't get it at 2.7% interest.

I'm going to have to pay 7%.

I'll just stay here for a while.

So the housing market is solidified, ossified, calcified.

Everything is that way.

And

you could see it coming when Joe Biden was talking about shutting down this coal plant and shutting down this gas field and canceling this pipeline and adding this regulation and powering this EPA

and subsidizing this green industry and batteries for tank, all of this stuff.

It was all had one thing in common.

It was expensive.

Government, bigger government, bigger government, higher taxes, more inflation.

And that's what we have.

And finally, people

can't afford it.

Right.

You know, gasoline, I won't even get into gasoline, but boy, if you're paying when Joe Biden came in, he said it was $5, one of his many lies.

Oh, I came in on $5 gallon.

No, it's about $250

and it got up to $420.

But here in California, I can remember it was about $280,

$290,

and now it's $5.30, $5.40.

So $2 extra a gallon, you know, and you're filling up a 20-gallon tank is $40.

extra and you do it once a week

you know it's

160.

Yeah.

160 a month.

It's, you know, 2,000 bucks a year.

And that means 2,000 bucks you're not spending on other stuff.

And that's starting to be felt is what I'm trying to get at.

And we're starting to slow down finally.

I think this has to be the most, I told, you mentioned I told you so.

And if there is, I cannot think of another I.

greater I told you so y kind of moment.

And recent last week in New York City,

and this, I think Fox covered it, so it may have gotten more broader attention.

The

number of illegals who have been bused into New York now,

it's about 70,000 people so far.

And the city geniuses are putting, we're planning to put

these folks in city schools, in their gyms, in the gymnasiums, setting up cots and such.

So the parents, the same parents who voted for this chucklehead and who are suffering, can you imagine trying to buy eggs and pay rent in New York City compared to other places who their backs are being broken economically now

are having their schools.

threatened by these, who knows who these illegals are, what kind of creeps they may be or not.

So they're growing outrage and and right they're right to be outraged but they're also right to look in the mirror and say you know i voted for this guy i voted for alvin bragg i voted for these geniuses so anyway well i mean it

it's

that's what we do i mean illinois is going to give them i i guess they're talking about uh organ transplants and eye special eye care that Americans can't get.

Here in California, we gave 500 million, I think, for health care to illegal aliens.

That was just last month.

Or New York gave 500.

We already had done 500.

The point I'm making is that

I think that's 5 million.

Isn't it 5 million a day in New York it's costing for illegals?

But the point is, it's just so typical of the left.

It's, okay,

we're going to have 6 million people enter.

And we're not going to, we have two things that we have to remember about our talking points.

We're not going to talk about how much it's going to cost.

We don't care whether they come in with diabetes.

We don't care if they don't speak English.

We don't care if they don't have a high school diploma.

We don't care if they have a criminal back.

We don't care.

And B, if you object, you're a racist, a xenophobe.

So that's what, those are the rules.

And so then they all come in.

And all of a sudden, these state and local budgets, they think, wow.

You know, I won't mention the hospital, I won't mention it, but I had to go to the emergency room about a month ago, pretty ill.

And I can tell you that the number of people who spoke English was very small and it was very crowded.

There were excellent care.

The people did their best to give me excellent care.

And I got over whatever I had.

But my point is that

we're making it very difficult on ourselves because we are taking people from the poorest areas in the world that their government has a responsibility to help.

i.e.

Mexico, which will not help.

And they're streaming up here with the sanction and encouragement of Mexico City.

And they want to go from third world health care.

And we're a kind and compassionate nation that says

the moment you set foot in the United States, if you don't have absolute instant parity with an American native born citizen, you're a racist.

So we try to do this.

And then we have a whole multi-billion dollar

industry in academia and the race industry and the left who send out

paper after paper after paper about how awful we are.

So they and what that is.

We've done an analysis of California, and it turns out that Hispanic communities have less income than white communities.

Well, yeah, 27% of the state wasn't born in the United States.

We have 10 million illegal aliens that came the last 20 years.

What do you expect?

You expect us to just take a jumbo jet to Oaxaca and fly people up, and all of a sudden they've got a

$100,000 car and a $600,000 suburban home.

And if we don't give them that, we're failing.

But that's how our mentality is.

And we're just humans.

You know, summos homines, non-dei.

We're not gods.

And that utopian demand is really frustrating.

And it's really going to get expensive.

And that's besides, you know,

you don't know who they are.

I was walking with my wife not too long ago, and I turned the corner in our orchard.

and here was a man sitting

on a tailgate in a pickup with an AR-15 at his lap and

didn't speak a word of English.

On your property.

Well, on our shared alleyway.

Yeah.

And so it's my property.

And

I, in my broken Spanish and his broken English, I inferred that he was getting a bounty from a neighbor.

to shoot squirrels.

And I think that turned out to be true.

But I had no idea,

you know what he was doing yeah then right yesterday i think i mentioned to sammy i was walking out in the almond orchard and turned a corner and here's a refrigerator a freezer with the lid open right in the middle of the row just thrown in there and then i was walking this morning along this

historic pond that had been my family for years that my brother sold it to another person, but I walk around it just to make sure that everything's okay.

And here's a whole nother washing machine.

And all the parts are strewn over and there's all this literature in Spanish.

And so

that is the reification of illegal immigration.

If you bring up, if you come up from Oaxaca and you come illegally and you reside illegally and you're going to live here in perpetuity illegally, then you're going to do what?

You're going to be...

poor.

And if the government's going to give you a lot of stuff, you're still going to say, you know, you need a phone and

you need housing and legal and education and health care and food subsidies.

And you're still not going to be parity, achieve parity with, you know, an Armenian American, an Arab American, and a Japanese American, a white American.

So then we're culpable because that's racism if you didn't achieve parity.

So you're going to have to skim because you're going to have to, what, send back $60 billion a year?

And if you take the number of illegal aliens and you divide it by the week of remittances, it's about two to three hundred dollars a week per person.

And so to free up that money to help your familia in

Mexico, you're going to have to have subsidies from the taxpayer.

And that subsidy is not just free stuff from the government.

That subsidy is also,

well, I'm not going to go buy.

uh a dumpster.

I'm surely not going to pay for trash pickup in this rural house I rent from this other guy, this shack or this Winnebago I'm living in.

So when I get stuff i i got to throw away i'm just going to drive out somewhere and throw it in the side of the road or in a vineyard and then stupid idiot people like victor are going to go have to pick it up and deal with it and that's what he has to do because he's got more than i do and he owes it to me because i'm a protected illegal alien that's the attitude and

it's it's cost and that that's beside the security and as i said with sammy the other day it's the it's the most orwellian bizarre situation.

You know, I do this military history group where we fly out with about 100 people and we talk about Europe.

You know, we go to Europe or Israel or wherever.

And it's very carefully planned.

And then, you know, we fly back in.

And in that 20-year history, when I used to do this, I would at least see Jack once every three years.

And it was always the same.

Somebody flew into SFO, upper middle class, and they lost their passport, or they left it in the seat of the plane, you know.

Or in one or two cases, I remember somebody was a foreign national and thought they could just get in and jumped on a plane somehow.

I don't know how, because they check passports when you, and you know what happens?

They take them in a little, they take them into a little room.

And I think they're detained and they're either sent back to their country of origin if they don't have a passport or if they can prove they do have a passport.

It's a lengthy process to get documentation to let them into the country but you contrast that with just walking across the border with no identification no legality no permission during a pandemic when we're throwing people out of the military who didn't get vaccinated it's bizarre it is bizarre this attitude we have that we romanticize the illegal immigrant we think that you know that he has more rights than the u.s citizen does it's just it's the strangest thing in the world And the people understand, they don't understand human nature.

When you do that, the person does not have more respect for you.

The person says, wow, this is a weird country.

These idiots just

kowtow to me and expect that I have demands or grievances upon them when I came into their country illegally.

And they do.

So

if you're at ground zero and you don't live in Woodside, California, or you don't live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or you don't live in Palm Beach, then it's a very different.

If you have to confront illegal immigration, it's a very, very different phenomenon.

And like I said, when you see somebody come in with broken English, with a teardrop tattoo under the corner of his eye, and you're walking alone at night, and he's got a whole car full of garbage in plastic bags, and he's just about ready to dump them on your property.

What do you do?

Please don't do that.

That is against the law.

Yeah.

You know,

you don't know who he is.

You don't know if he's a felon in Mexico.

You don't know anything.

Or you're driving in town and all of a sudden you see a guy run the stop sign in front of you and doesn't know how to drive.

Or you're with your daughter, as happened to me, and get hit.

by somebody who's an illegal alien.

And the first thing he does is, as his Honda Civic rolls over, he sprints off and takes off.

What do you do?

Or if somebody, you come out one more and you hear a terrible crash and noise and you go out and you look outside and there's a car upended in your vineyard and it's upside down.

It's taken out $5,000 worth of damage.

And the police come and you say,

what are you going to do?

Well, he's out there somewhere, but if we arrest him, they're not going to do anything.

So we'll just let him go.

And you say, officer, could I make a suggestion?

This person destroyed this property of mine and he abandoned his vehicle.

Can I tow it?

And then I can call a salvage company to sell it to them and part

recompense.

No, if you do that, that's a felony.

You're guilty arrested.

You do not touch that car.

We have to

impound it.

We have to give him 30 days' notice to pick it up.

And I said, well, could you please ask him to

pay me?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You're a citizen.

That's your problem.

He's not a citizen.

He gets an exemption.

I said,

are you going to charge him?

Because look, there's two big Colt 45 cans right on the floor.

And the whole thing stinks of alcohol.

Well, we didn't see him drink.

How do we know he drank?

He's not here.

Oh, he's innocent then.

Well, we didn't know.

We didn't see him run into your property.

We didn't know if he did.

So the guy that comes to pick up the car may not be the perpetrator.

I guess it was a ghost then.

It was a, you know, artificial intelligence did it.

That's the whole attitude of the country now.

It's always

things like that got me so angry.

I would, I wrote the dying citizen about how it's disadvantageous to be a citizen.

Well, Victor, the citizens are angry, at least about taxes.

You talked about taxes you're paying.

And here's

a story based on a new Gallup survey.

Americans' opinions of federal income taxes are the worst Gallup has seen in about two decades.

Six in 10 Americans say the amount of federal income tax they pay is too high, a level last seen in 2001.

46% believe the income tax they pay is fair, essentially tying 1999's 45% as the lowest.

in Gallup's trend.

A new high of 51%

say their income taxes are not fair.

More Americans say federal income tax is the worst or least fair tax, edging out local property taxes.

There's much more in this article.

Victor,

I don't know what much more there is to say, but there's I'm curious if you think this is a

trend.

Clearly is a trend here of growing anger about taxes and how it might manifest politically.

Well, I think it's really going to play into the hands of the Republican because they're the only party, the only group of people that want to lower taxes and starve the beast.

But

I kind of erred when I suggested that the problem was just inflation and people can't afford anything, much less taxes.

But it's also

what that money does when it gets into the hands of government on both ends, the top and the bottom.

So I mentioned people coming in from this country and getting what, a free hotel room in New York or free phone at the border that we don't as citizens and ejecting veterans out of a hotel to make room for a foreign national who broke the law, that gets people angry symbolically.

Somebody's going to listen, oh, yeah, okay, but that's just a minister.

Okay, let's go to the Pentagon budget.

So

we left, the Pentagon says $7 to $10 billion.

Disinterested observers say 20 to 50, and Donald Trump said the other day 80 billion.

I think he was using the training and all the things that went into the use of the weapons.

But we gave all of those weapons to the Taliban.

And they're turning up, as I said, with Sami in places like Pakistan.

And they will turn up in Ukraine as well if they haven't already, especially the automatic weapons.

But my point is,

did anybody resign about that?

Did Mark Milley, who is so eloquent about white supremacy, did he have a press conference?

And he wants to say, I want to apologize to the American taxpayer.

A lot of people are under the gun.

You're not doing very well.

And you pay your hard-earned money.

And we just abandoned $50 billion.

I'm sorry.

No.

And just today, we learned what?

A Pentagon accounting error says that we gave $3 billion

more in equipment to Ukraine

than was allotted by Congress.

And okay,

so that that was bad enough.

The next day.

That's a big error.

Yeah.

$3 billion?

Yes.

That would pay for one week of high-speed rail

legal fees in California.

So anyway,

then we hear that Joe Biden has met with some Ukrainians and he wants to increase the money to Ukraine to $278 million special appropriation for their spring offensive.

So I'm thinking, well, wait a minute.

We just gave them $3 billion that we didn't say that we were going to give them.

Isn't $3 billion enough?

And you said that you wouldn't want to give them F-16s because it would inflame the situation.

The Russians said that was a red line.

And now you're giving them F-16s.

Plus, you gave them $3 billion extra.

Now you want to give them $26.

Who pays for that?

Well, that's what gets people mad.

They see the government just waste the money.

Waste, waste, waste the money.

Or they see that

and state taxes.

They see that all during Zoom, teachers were not in the classroom.

And sometimes they weren't even Zooming.

They didn't go to work.

And all of a sudden, they're threatening after two years of that, they're threatening to go on strike if they don't get more money.

And yet, when you say to the teachers, Could you please, if we give you a raise, could you please have some accountability so that a test score goes up 1% for every 1% in your no, how dare you do that?

You're a racist.

How dare you say that?

So

it's like squeezing,

squeezing

a piece of fruit, and there's no more juice left.

It's just all skin and the pit.

And the Americans are saying, you know what, I get 50% of my income.

And now we're going to get 88,000 new IRS agents.

And you know, if you really want to raise money, you can talk about, as Joe Biden does, millionaires and billionaires billionaires who don't pay their fair share.

And he says they pay, I think he said they only pay 6% of their income.

That was a flat out lie.

Most of them pay more.

But the point is there's not enough of them to squeeze.

So if you really want to get the money, you got to go after the lower middle class and the middle class.

You've got to go after the electrical contractor.

You got to go out of the way after the waitress.

You've got to go after the truck driver.

And you've got to get all their cash income off the books.

You've got to come out here to Fresno County and you better drive around and see all the people who are selling everything from shovels to bicycles on street corners and say to them, where did you get that?

Are you reporting that sale as income?

Hmm.

Are you paying sales tax?

That's what you have to do if you're going to really get more revenue.

And people are going to be in a shock.

shock for that.

I think what I'm trying to say inarticulately is that we're building up.

It's like a wave and it hasn't crested yet, but it's starting to have factors that are increasing the wave.

And these are non-traditional conservative constituencies.

For some,

it's their daughters in sports, and all of a sudden there's a guy that's, you know, a male competing against.

For some, it's their daughters in the locker room, and a guy with testicles and penis is staring at them and says he's a girl.

For some,

it's being hit by an illegal alien while he leaves the scene of the accident.

For some,

it's trying to rent a bike when a bunch of guys

try to say that they're intimidate you when you're pregnant, and then the media make sure you're going to be let off,

suspended from work.

All of these centrifugal forces are starting to build.

I saw it happen one time in my life.

And that was after the exuberance and the nettiness and the craziness of the 60s, which was that that was an equivalent of the woke revolution.

And people think, well, it wasn't that bad.

Yeah, it was.

I was at UC Santa Cruz in 1971.

I was a high school.

I graduated in 71.

I saw the night, late 60s.

And there were terrorist bombings.

There was just complete chaos, drug use, everything.

And finally, people said, We're either going to have a country or we're not going to have the patty hurt, all that stuff.

Yeah, we forget about the bombings.

Victor, I was, I was

over New York City, like two blocks away from it.

One every three days.

One every three days, I think, in 1971.

Yeah.

And so

we decided, and what happened?

Richard Nixon won in the largest landslide in history.

And then the Watergate thing came.

And then they went and said, you know what?

We've got to go back to Jimmy Carter.

We've got to go back.

I'll never lie to you.

And we had the stagflation and the hyperinflation.

And we've got to get over our inordinate distrust of communism, fear of communism, and all of that stuff, and all of the race mongering and all that.

And then people said, you know what?

I've had it.

And we got Ronald Reagan in 12 years.

So I think what's going to happen, I really do believe this, whether it's Trump or DeSantis, there's going to be a collective shrug, like I'm not going to be had again.

And I'm speaking especially to you guys who voted for Biden.

because you didn't like Trump's tweets or you were angry about, you know, horse face Stormy Daniels or you said to yourself,

you know, I liked his agenda, but why does he always get in the, you know, the access Hollywood and grab their P-U-S-S-Y and all this stuff.

I just can't take it anymore.

Good old Joe Biden, at least he's going to be drab.

And no, he wasn't.

And so just remember that

we voted in this disaster and we can vote it out.

But you've got to come to your senses and realize that these people are hardcore leftists and they don't like you.

You know, I just finished

what I'm mystified is by these people that you and I used to know and associate and work with, Jack.

And I would call them the never Trump, they're not conservatives anymore, but they're never Trumpers.

And I look at them on the pages of the Atlantic or the Bulwark or the Dispatch.

And most of them voted for Joe Biden or they sat out.

And you would think after this disaster that's pushed the

American civilization to the brink, that they would have any remorse.

But you know what?

I read that bulwark today.

It's all defense of Joe Biden.

And I guess that's either they've gone hard left or the sources of their income, the Pierre Omedio dare or whatever his name is, all of that money means that they have no free will anymore.

They have to reflect their sources of their left-wing funding.

Well, but they're the BS behind them, Victor, right?

I didn't change.

The party changed, but that's a lie.

It's such a lie.

There's some of them there who were just once upon a time, really strong pro-lifers, and Dobbs comes out.

Oh, this is the worst thing in the world, et cetera.

You know, they have

there's

a lot of disingenuousness with them.

Absolutely.

Every issue.

That's one of the reasons I left National Review.

Every issue I was lectured on the pages of National Review on about 10 issues.

A, the environmentalists are crazy and they're ruining the economy.

B, we have to be energy self-sufficient.

C, we need a strong defense and deterrent foreign policy.

D,

that radical abortion now even includes abortion to the day of birth.

This is murder.

you know, and on.

And we have to have racially blind policies that we have content of.

That's what I read.

And then this

Trump comes along

and as uncouth as they find him, he has a four years where it's all those policies are enacted, all of them.

And they have no complaint, maybe fiscal responsibility.

I'll give them that, that he's physically irresponsible.

We ran up a debt, but there was COVID.

But still, he had deficits before COVID.

Okay.

But then we get...

the antithesis of everything they hated with Joe Biden.

And

they're quiet.

All they can talk about is that they're not.

All Prime Trumble.

Yeah.

And I think

the only sword that cuts that Gordian knot is they're back where they always wanted to be.

They were never comfortable.

They were always elites.

They always were part of the left-wing bicostal aristocracy.

They felt more comfortable socially, culturally with the left, the media, the New York Times, New York Review of Books,

the Washington DuPont Circle, Georgetown set,

getting on CBS, Face the Nation.

That's where they wanted to be, and that's where they are.

And what got them there was hating Donald Trump and being a useful idiot for the left and a subsidized useful idiot.

This gold in them, Nar Hills.

So, Victor, we've got

a couple of other America struggling topics to get to.

and one of them is about how

they're not small odds that someone you may be working with will be high on marijuana.

And we'll get to that and some other topics right after these important messages.

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

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So, Victor, my friend, here's a headline from the Daily Mail.

A record one in 25 American workers are high on marijuana at work, data suggests.

Can you guess which industries have the biggest stoners?

Accommodations and food service industry workers use marijuana most often and the rate of transportation workers using

cannabis rose 167 percent from 2018 to 2082.

You know, Victor,

I've never, I must say, I have many sins.

I've never had marijuana ever.

Once or

let's say two or three times a month, I'm in New York City, and you just, you're walking through a cloud of it everywhere.

You know, you just, it's a, it's a pervasive smell now.

I have, I have, have a feeling that the numbers of those who are higher are higher than what this article alleges, but it's, I think it's kind of disturbing,

Victor.

Maybe it's the modern age version of the afternoon of workers having had the three martini lunch.

Anyway, do you have any thoughts on this?

Well, I.

I've watched people for the last 50 years that I've known some in my family that use it.

And on the one hand, it's a cannaboid and it's an anti-inflammatory antioxidant.

I got interested in the phenomenon because I know people

that use it.

And Willie Nelson's a good example, right?

He's almost 90.

He says he smokes it every day.

And because I've been interested in this phenomenon of chronic inflammation and overactive immune system.

And from this long COVID, I've been battling.

So I take things like quercetin or physetin

to

tamp down the immune system.

And they all,

everybody says, well, try CBD.

Well, I kind of have an allergy to weeds or hemp.

So I don't take the CBD that's marijuana with the THC extracted.

So you can buy it over the counter.

But I never was able to take it.

But

I've noticed two things about people that do take it.

It does seem to have some anti-inflammatory effect on them.

So they seem to complain less about joint pain or muscle as they get older.

But B,

and this is what I think you're getting at.

Everybody that I've known who's been a chronic user of it seems to have lost a lot of, what's the word, ambition, drive.

It's sedative.

And it tends to, you know, go back to that 60s.

Oh, hey, man, hey, man, like, we'll do it tomorrow, man.

Be cool.

Hey, we got to go out and work on the roof today.

Yeah, man.

Like, yeah, we'll get it to it tomorrow, man.

Hey, man, have a tote, that kind of stuff.

And I think it does, it has deleterious effects on the central nervous system over time.

It's a depression.

It's not a stimulant.

It's a depressive.

It's kind of like alcohol, but I think in some ways

it can make a person more schizophrenic.

So my worry is that

these statistics are started coming out about once we legalize it or de facto legalize it.

We've got millions of people driving.

And every time I drive 200

miles to work, usually once a week, I'm going to leave next Wednesday.

And when I'm on these roads across California, every once in a while, it's really scary.

Somebody will be coming.

Have you ever had this happen?

And their

left tire is

over the white line.

And as they get closer and closer, they don't move back.

And it's one of two things.

One is I see them texting, or I'm on the highway.

Yes, texting.

Or I'll be on the freeway on 101 and somebody's in the lane next to him.

And he just starts to scoot over.

And you think, I'm not going to honk.

He'll move back, but he doesn't.

And he almost hits your mirror.

Or they're high.

They're high.

I don't see them drinking.

So I assume that there's a lot of people on the road that are smoking marijuana and are high.

And that's that's impaired their ability to drive.

And I've talked to some police officers and they tell me it's an underreported phenomenon that when they pull over people for apparently they think is drunk driving, increasingly they smell stuff, but it's not alcohol.

You know, it's marijuana.

And I don't know how we did this.

We just suddenly one year, we just do these weird things in America.

We just said, you know, oh, everybody's transgender.

Didn't know that, but now they are.

Whoop, marijuana, yeah.

Yeah,

we have all those concerns about it.

They're all gone.

It's perfectly okay to smoke it and do whatever you want.

It just instantaneously flips.

Why are we still cracking down on cigarette smoking?

Oh, well, in California, you can, that's the worst thing in the world.

To smoke a cigarette.

I've never smoked.

I'm not a smoker, and I don't use marijuana.

But

the attitude of a Californian to a whiff of cigarette smoke versus a whiff of marijuana is very different.

Marijuana is tolerable,

cigarettes is not.

It's got a class thing, I think, too.

That cigarette smoking puts you into the lower classes where marijuana, you're exempt from that class prejudice.

Yeah, no, I agree with that.

Definitely.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's, we've got one other

of the alarming,

depressing, distressing topics here.

But Victor, here's the headline.

It's from the Wall Street Journal.

Young Americans are dying at alarming rates, reversing years of progress.

Car accidents, homicides, suicides, drug overdoses have pushed up death rates for children and teens.

in the U.S.

Victor,

I was going to read a big chunk of this article.

I don't think I should or really need to, but this is

really, amongst the many things troubling in America, the fact that we are

going in reverse on longevity, which we are,

you know, the whole life, but that young Americans are

dying at these increasing rates.

And I have a feeling that much of it has to do with

drug overdose.

This is the, this, a lot of this has to do with the uh consequences of the lockdown yes anyway victor troubling your thoughts there's only one statistic when we look back at covid that matters and because all of the other data can be easily massaged who had covet who tested positive was it an antigen pcr test da da da da it's just the excess death rate that's it each year we know how many people the population generally was and what was the death rate and we can make a ratio And except for Sweden, it has a, it was the one,

it was the one country that stayed open that everybody demonized.

And now we find out that its excess death rate is much lower

than its competitors or its friends or the EU or the NATO nations that adopted these strict lockdown.

And us as well, our excess death rate went up.

And so why was that?

Because we're starting to learn the country went crazy.

When people were cut off from social interaction, when they were cooped up, they tended to be more likely to drink, to use drugs, to have suicidal thoughts, to be abusive to family, to spouses.

And I think it explains, to be frank, the precursors were there, but the whole George Floyd mania where the country went crazy, and then the whole Trump craziness in 2020 and the 120, a lot of that was a catalyst was this awful lockdown.

So that explains some of the short term.

But the long term, if you're killing 80 to 90,000 people a year from fentanyl and opiates coming in from Mexico, and these tend to be very young people who may be at a party and they say, hey, you got an Atavan, you got a Valium, got a hydrocodone or whatever.

I need a coding.

And

the fentanyl scares people off.

So what the cartels are doing is they're giving fentanyl and they're producing it in tablets that look like codeine or

Atavan or Ambien or whatever.

And that allows them to get a market and they're killing people, a lot of people.

This is aside from the fentanyl addicts.

Well, when you kill somebody with...

at 35 or 25 or 15, that's very different than 85 as far as the actuarial tables go.

So that is a big cause of it.

And then I think also

the social disruption of

just the whole political climate, the woke revolution, it's got a lot of people suicidal, unsteady, more prone to drink.

The economy is really bad.

And I think people are coming to the conclusion that American civilization is slipping away from us, that our generation destroyed things, and that their children are not going to be going to K through 12 where they can be confident, the teachers are skilled in instruction.

They'll be able to compute, read, write at a very advanced level.

They're going to go to a competitive university where it's fun and yet they're going to learn a lot.

And they can say and express.

what they want.

Their military is top-notch protecting them.

The government is

apolitical.

Its institutions, the DMV, the Pentagon, the CIA, all of these institutions are disinterested and professional.

All that's gone.

It's been wiped away by this whole woke revolution.

And that's caused an enormous psychological distress and turmoil along with the drugs.

And I think that's a lot to do with it.

The other thing about it is if you

look at

white males, not white females or not marginalized people, so to speak, they have had the most precipitous decline in longevity.

And a lot of that is from the opiate Midwestern crisis.

And you really saw the attitude toward that community when we had the East Palestine derailment, where you had this toxic cloud that should have punched every left-wing environmental green button, but it didn't.

It didn't.

People just, Biden didn't go down there.

Pete Buttigig waited and waited.

It was like, you know what?

I am not going to go down to the Ohio-Pennsylvania border to a bunch of MAGA overweight white people who are getting a sniff of some plastic because they support, you know, gas and oil.

So they deserve what they got.

And it was just a contempt for them.

And that was kind of, for me, that was kind of a revelation how they look at the opiate crisis.

Because think about it, 100,000.

I mean, the black community said when the crack cocaine epidemic hit the inner city,

they said there was indifference, but you know, there was.

But the fentanyl crisis has really hit a particular lower white, lower middle class, rural, small community.

tends to be more in the Midwest.

Not that homeless people in L.A.

don't take it all the time, but what I'm saying is that particular demographic had no sympathy.

And so 100,000 dead

does not phase the open borders green advocate.

It's just like, okay,

so what?

100,000?

Don't take fentanyl.

It's their problem.

Obador said it's your own fault.

So we don't care.

It's not as important as getting a hotel room for a guy that gets off a bus illegally in New York.

We got to give a guy, you know, that crosses into Texas, we got to give him a free cell phone.

The fact that that open border kills 100,000 people, they're all East Palestinians anyway from Ohio.

Who cares?

That's the attitude.

It really is.

I've noticed that my whole life.

I've noticed that when I navigated between

rural Fresno County, which was sort of the locus classicus of two constituencies growing up, one was the Oklahoma diasporas, you know, 100 miles from

Bakersfield and Buck Owens and, you know, all those,

yeah, that type of country Western Oklahoma-based music.

And then Fresno County was basically destination one for the Oklahoma diaspora.

And then illegal immigration.

I learned very quickly when I went over to the coast at UC Santa Cruz and Stanford University, and I met a different type of

clientele, is that the word?

That while they had great sympathy for illegal aliens, they just despised Okies.

They hated them.

I don't know what it was about lower white people with a tinge of a southern accent or church of God, Assembly of God, Church of Christ, religious affiliations, or the country Western, or the cigarette in their mouth, you name it.

They just despise them.

That was the worst thing in the world in their way.

Okies, oakes, okies.

I was at UC Santa Cruz in 1971.

I was 18 and I asked some friends to come up.

And they kind of drank some beer and the student lounge.

And I remember all my people in the dorm came up and said, who are those awful people that came up?

We don't want them ever here again.

These people are horrible.

And so I think there's a prejudice against the white working class.

And you can really see it with affirmative action and quotas and hiring because the

white elite, as long as affirmative action was demographically.

adjusted to on a percentage basis proportionally represented they felt they could game the system, wealthy white people.

What I meant by that, Jack, is if at Stanford University let in 67% white people,

according to their numbers and the population, and

10% Latinos or 10% blacks, and then they kind of pressed down and discriminated against the Asian, and there was no problem with affirmative action because the white person said, either my kid is a superstar and I put him in sat camp, he's got an 800 sat score,

and

I know the dean, or I work in Silicon Valley.

I can get him into Stanford, whatever.

They didn't care that there was discrimination because they could game the system.

It went after the lower white working class.

You know, a guy who was a straight A student

from,

I don't know, Tulare, California, applied to Stanford from a rural high school.

He wasn't going to get in.

He didn't know anybody.

That spot was too precious to be given to somebody else under affirmative action protocols.

But now,

with

repertory admissions, and you see it now with 22% of the incoming class of 2026 at Stanford is white.

22, well, of course, the white working class can't get in.

But you take the number of students that are admitted every year at Stanford and you take 22% of them and you shave off 55% of that 22% for women, and you only have 45%,

you're down to 300 or 400 white males.

And that's not enough to accommodate all the children of administrators, of faculty, of Silicon Valley grandees.

And you get rid of the SAT score so there's no documentation, and you won't release the scores of the people who applied and were accepted and chose to take the now optional SAT.

That's taboo, but you will

inform people and brag that you rejected of the people who chose to take the exam and got a rare perfect score, you rejected 60 to 70 percent.

Well, that's affecting, that's affecting the upper white elite, the upper, upper white.

And that's why I think the left really blew it, because they are, they're turning on their own constituencies now.

They didn't care about the white working class.

They were happy to keep them out of Harvard, Yale, Princeton.

They don't want them there.

But now, and they're not going to be there now.

They're not ever going to be there.

If you're a white working male from bakersfield and you're brilliant and you got a 4.5

and you took the sat and got a perfect score they're not going to let you in anywhere at a ivy league or stanford type place maybe caltech but

now it also is the upper upper left wing family and that that's that's what's going to be interesting

they're affected they're they're getting angry too you can talk to them i've talked to them

they It's nice to see some people hoist it on their own petards, right?

Well, I mean,

they have a point, don't they?

They think,

never going to happen to me, but now it happened to me and it's unfair.

And it is unfair.

But,

you know,

it's so funny because

Stanford, just to take example I know the best, has kind of announced that it was racist to suggest that the new incoming class

was not based on merit, right?

Because they want, it wasn't based on, it said it was based on merit.

And then their official narrative is, ha ha, 22% white people,

you know,

9% white males.

It's a merit system.

You didn't get in.

Finally, it caught up to you that all the people of marginalized people and gays and women, they're better than you are.

So then you say, okay,

then just show us the data of the SATs that people, because many of them got in and chose to take it.

Just tell us what the score is, or better yet, just get rid of affirmative action.

We don't need it anymore.

You've said it was merit-based.

And under a merit-based system such as your own, only 9% of the student body will be white male.

So why do you need affirmative action?

And what do you get when you say that?

Silence.

Silence.

General Will, the most

manipulative, non-transparent,

and unprofessional mind is the upper, upper, upper white liberal academic mind.

They will say and do anything to warp data, to obfuscate, and not to be candid.

And because they're such ideologues, and it's all based as I keep hammering on the premise that they're never subject to the consequences of their pernicious ideology.

And they think they have a free ride to tell everybody else how to live in Visalia or Modesto or Prater

or Auburn.

You live this way.

This is what we tell you to do.

But

if these rules that we you live by happen to affect us, we have the money, the influence, the power to be exempt.

And we must be exempt because we're smarter and better than you are.

And that's after being, you know, I'm 69 and I.

I've seen that my entire life.

I encountered it very early and it's only gotten worse over the last half century.

They mock India for having a caste system, but they sure as well live by it themselves.

Hey, Victor,

we're going to take a little break here for one last important message and then maybe have a little Memorial Day thought.

So we'll be right back.

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

I forgot to remind our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com.

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uh Apple Podcasts.

And we thank everyone who listens, no matter what platform you listen on.

And we thank those who, particularly, particularly on itunes or Apple rate the podcast zero to five stars.

Practically everyone does the five stars.

And there have been an awful lot of comments of late.

Many of them have been very praiseworthy of a recent podcast Victor did with the great Sammy Wink on the conquistadors.

But here's, I'm being a little self-centered here.

So here's one

comment.

All Mr.

Hansen's podcasts and writing.

That's the title of it.

It says, Thank you, Mr.

Hansen, for your unfailingly excellent analysis, which you pepper with your audition, quintessentially American gaze, and beautiful humility.

How this native Chicagoan loves to hear about the life and work of a California farmer.

And please forgive my silliness, but as a lover of 1930s and 1940s American cinema, I smiled broadly the other day

when, regarding Mother's Day, you and Mr.

Fowler discussed Mildred Pierce and I remember Mama and Joan Crawford and Irene Dunn.

What fun.

I'm probably about to embarrass myself, but that discussion

might give me license to be a bit frivolous.

Mr.

Fowler's voice has always reminded me of that of Van Johnson.

Please know that's a compliment.

Mr.

Fowler's voice is warm and welcoming and fills me with nostalgia.

Thank you both for indulging my silliness and for delivering your peerless podcast, Laura from Chicago.

Thank you, Laura.

So this is a lead into Memorial Day, believe it or not, Victor, because I liked, I love Van Johnson, not like Van Johnson would love me.

He's not nearly the act.

He was not nearly the actor that Van Heflin was.

Oh, well, of course, Van Heflin stars in your favorite movie, Shane,

but Van Johnson stars in one of the great war movies, Battleground.

That was a good movie.

Yeah, it was just terrific.

And again, I'm being self-centered here.

Titus Titus Techera, who has this great movie podcast, and he writes a lot for

Law and Liberty and

Claremont Review, and he's written for National Review.

He saw me tweet about Battleground, which was Van Johnson, George Murphy, Ricardo Montelbon, just about, it's about the Battle of the Bulge.

And he asked me to be his guest on a podcast

to discuss it, which I did.

And that'll be out this week.

But anyway, Victor, as we brought this up in the past few years,

as we approach Memorial Day weekend, I really like to tip my cap to Turner classic movies.

Hard to believe that Ted Turner, of all people and something he owns, actually does something that I think is profoundly important for American culture.

You know, it could have been easy as you name it for TCM to say, we're not doing with given the wokeness and all this crap infecting our society to end this tradition, which it has done for 20 plus years.

So, every Memorial Day weekend, it's just filled with terrific

movies about war and people making the ultra sacrifice.

And I don't know about you, Victor, but I think I find Memorial Day the most sacrosanct of our holidays.

And for a media entity to recognize it and give it its due as best it can, I think that's a great thing.

So, uh, some of the movies coming up this weekend are uh A Walk in the Sun and that's a great movie Joe.

Yeah, oh, Walk in the Sun, yes, that was a Theater Dreiser, wasn't it?

Uh, American Tragedy, I think.

Is that with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Cliff?

No, no, no, no, no.

A Walk in the Sun is with Dana Andrews.

Oh, yes.

And it's about

they land at a beach and there's an invasion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was a great movie.

So was a long, long, longest, long, that was a good movie, too.

Longest Day was a great movie.

Oh, yeah.

That's.

I even liked Robert Mitchell.

Of course, I want to don't want to beat the drum, but Best Years of Our Lives is a great movie.

I even liked

Great Escape was good.

Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson.

That was a great movie.

Yeah.

I think that's James Garna's best performance in any movie because

he's a little too much in whatever else he's been in.

But that

was a great movie.

You know what else was a modern movie I thought was...

Was that

Black Hawk Down?

That was a great movie.

I thought it was.

That was really sad.

The Million Dollar, was it called the Mogadishu Mayo at the end where they're trotting?

Yeah, I think it's brilliantly done battle scenery there.

Yeah, I couldn't tell you who was in it, but I remember watching it in movie theater.

I think, holy shit.

Ted Seym, the guy that just died.

Is it Ted Sizemore?

He was the guy in.

Yeah,

he was in it.

He just died from, I think, a drug problem.

I think Ridley Scott did it, didn't he?

I'm not sure.

Don't remember.

But there was that, Eric Banna was in it.

I remember.

Ted Seymour, Tom Sizemore.

I'm sorry.

Tom Sizemore, right.

Sam Shepard was kind of the clueless

general.

Oh, yeah.

Remember, he was, I liked him a lot.

He was a great actor.

Yeah.

Your favorite war movie, we've discussed it before.

I know you've talked at length about you like Das Boot.

Am I right on that?

Yeah, Jürgen Prochtow was a genius.

That was a brilliant movie.

That was Wolfgang Peterson, wasn't it?

Was it?

I think it was.

I'm not sure.

But that was a great movie.

And I have the German tape that's a little bit longer, the translation, you know, the subtitles.

That was a, I always, I liked Breaker Morant too.

That was a good movie.

Oh, yeah.

And one of the great movies was

it was really good with Zulu, you know, the Rourke Striff.

We talked about that.

Yeah, we did.

Like a few months ago.

That was Michael Caine's first

roll.

And that was very...

Sergeant Broadhead, that was very close to the actual, I wrote about that in Carnage and Culture, the defense of Rourke's Drift.

That was very close to the actual

what happened.

And they should have been.

That movie was close.

Yes, it was very historically accurate.

Then they had a

few days after 1500 Brits were slaughtered.

At Islawando, where they didn't have the keys to the ammunition boxes and they didn't open them.

They wouldn't open them and they were slaughtered and mutilated.

And then

they did a prequel to that.

You remember Zulu Dawn?

Zulu Dawn?

I've never seen it.

Yeah, it's not that bad a movie, and it's about the white, about Islawanda slaughter.

And when they fled from Islawanda, there was this little outpost at Rourke's Drift.

It was kind of a little

station, you know.

stage station and they had right they had food it was a missionary it was

a missionary church it was a depot for the british army and there was only about i think there was i don't know 25 people and then people flocked to it that survived not many people survived and they built a little compound and they put mealy bags of, you know, horse, they had gunny sacks of forage, and they made a little rampart and they prepared.

And they had Martini-Henry rifles, you know,.45 caliber single shot, but

they were very worthy of it.

I loved in that Jack Hawkins, who's the minister, and as

he's leaving, uh, with his daughter turning back and yelling, you're all going to die.

He was a terrific actor.

I think John Ford said he was the best actor.

He was very,

yeah.

He was uh

gosh, he was good in Bridge Over the River quite bridge over the river quiet, right?

Yeah, Bill Holden.

Bill Holden's one of my favorite actors, too.

I've never seen anybody do as good a job as he did in Wild Bunch.

The Wild Bunch at the end with the machine gun.

Oh my gosh, yeah.

You know, he was Ronald Reagan's best man.

I know he was.

Yeah, he had that great line in Wild Bunch when he said, you know,

if this we can't hang together in this outfit, we might as well give up.

Because all we have is, and it was really a good little lecture about camaraderie and even though they were thugs and criminals and anti-heroes, but it was

typical Sam another Sam Peckinpaw, Fresno native.

Yeah.

Nephew of Denver.

I guess he was, let me think now.

I guess he was the

either the brother or or the yeah brother of denver peckinpaul who was a friend of my mother they were on the superior court bench together oh i know we've talked about peck and paw uh did you ever talk to him or no

i met i i met denver peck and paul oh he was he was a judge in fresno

he used to carry he was a judge that had a you know he carried while he was a judge.

It was very rare in those days.

And he had a little, they were from Course Gold.

So that first movie, Ride the High country yeah

that with um um oh my gosh uh

oh

that was with joel mcrae joel mcrae yeah yeah i just saw him in foreign correspondent yeah yeah he was he was just wonderful in that he's one of my favorite actors too but he that was sort of autobiographical because all they had kind of a property in that area.

The geography doesn't quite, because Corsica is not the high country.

It's about, I guess, 3,000 feet or something or if that

uh but it was about he grew up in a cattle ranch and so it was that idea of the california sierra nevada foothills and a lot of the people in those a lot of the people in those peck and paul movies that are sort of crazy like the guy in the wild bunch uh bo what's his name oh edmund o'brien yeah well yeah he and bo hopkins you know who has

at the beginning where he's he's he holds out and shoots everybody and keeps them away, that he's kind of a white trash.

Oh, sure, right.

Edmund O'Brien's,

I guess it was his grandson in the movie.

Yeah.

And anyway, that type of southern accent,

kind of poor white profile is what Peck and Paul grew up with.

Although he was kind of an aristocrat.

He was from an old, old Fresno family.

And

that movie was, I think, Ride the High Country and the Wild Bunch were two of the best 10 Westerns that were ever made.

They were really good.

But that made him famous,

Ride the High Country.

And

it was

another talent that used too many drugs, I guess, because he could have done a lot.

He could have made even better movies.

I couldn't have made better, but he could have made more best movies, is what I'm trying to say.

Well,

if you have the chance to see The Wild Bunch,

you really have to take take it well victor i just i'll cat i'll just

uh close out these tcm thoughts by saying that this uh

uh marathon lasts from i think friday evening through through uh monday uh actually late early very early tuesday morning so tip of the tip of the cap and god bless all those who uh made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of the liberties that we

still try try to enjoy despite the woke SOBs who try to.

That's a very good point.

Just remember, everybody, on this, as Memorial Day comes up, there was a lot of people

who died on the first day of Shiloh and were killed on Okinawa and Ibojima and blown up at Bella Wood for our freedom.

And we forget who they were.

And we've got to make sure that they died for something.

They died for this idea about the United States.

And

we're a link in the chain.

And if we don't endure, then they died for nothing.

So we have to, we owe it to them to continue on.

And your namesake, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, he got killed at 2023 and he had his whole life ahead of him.

He's a star football player, first

straight A student.

And that's all I heard growing up.

But, you know, you have to do, you have to live your life in a way that he would have lived his, and he died for people like you to have a chance.

So that's,

I think everybody feels that way.

We just kind of, we kind of get lost once in a while.

We lose our way and then we get back on it.

But this whole popular culture and indulgence and me, me, me

and all of these fads that we talked about today, they're just ephemeral.

They're just passing.

They're nothing.

They're just empty, emptiness.

What endures is the bedrock?

values of the country and what we were founded upon.

Just think away all this crazy stuff.

It'll pass.

Yeah.

Well, Hansen in 2024.

Victor, my friend, God bless you.

God bless everyone who served us and protected us.

And

thanks, folks, for listening.

Appreciate it, appreciate all the wisdom Victor shared today.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.