Toxicity: Bureaucrats and Policy

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Victor Davis-Hanson is the star and the namesake.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

and the Wayne and Marshall Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

The Blade of Perseus Perseus is the name of his official website, and you can find that at victorhanson.com.

You should go there.

You should subscribe.

We're going to talk about some of the one of the article series that Victor's done for that website that's exclusive to the website, but we'll get to that a little later.

First off, on today's program, we're going to find out if Victor is one of those suckers who worked hard to have a good credit score.

And

we're going to look into the Biden administration's love affair.

I guess it's a love affair down memory lane with the 2008 financial meltdown.

And we'll get to that, Victor.

Your thoughts right after these important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So

Victor, we have now another sign about how merit, doing things by merit, achievement, how it seems to be a sin, and that there's also nothing progressives will not promote to cripple America.

In a nutshell, people with high credit ratings will have to pay 1% more on their mortgages under a scheme concocted by Joe Biden's federal housing financial agency.

So let me just read this very short clip from a news report last week.

The objective of the

changes is, quote, to maintain support for purchase borrowers limited by income or wealth, the federal housing finance agency director Sandra Thompson said in a statement this week, there's been concern regarding racial disparities in credit scores.

The average white American has a rating of 727.

in the year 2021 versus 667 for Hispanics and 627 for those who are black, according to the FinMasters Finance blog.

borrowers with a credit rating of 680 or higher can expect to pay another $40 a month if they have taken out a $400,000 mortgage, according to the Daily Mail.

Under this scheme, the proportionally biggest increases will be for homeowners who made large down payments.

So, Victor,

yeah, you have a better credit score.

You're going to pay more mortgage to satisfy some

social progressive scheme.

And we should note that we are, it is 2023 and it's the 15th anniversary of 2008.

So maybe the Biden administration wants to celebrate with another mortgage crisis.

Victor, maybe former Senator Barney Frank or Representative Barney Frank could weigh in because he was a big advocate, remember, that

Fannie May and Freddie Mac should

extend loans to people who didn't qualify.

This is a little different because I think what they're saying is:

well, we know what destroyed us in 2008.

It was giving huge loans to people who were unqualified.

We like the idea of giving people who were unqualified loans,

but we can't do that given what happened.

So we'll work it on the other end.

We will just lower the interest rates for the people who are unqualified with low credit scores.

And the cost will be made up by the people who play by the rules and have good credit scores.

And because

we're socialists, we don't believe that

people work hard and pay their bills and play by the rules so they can have good credit scores.

We just think it's because of racism.

Nor do we believe that the whole banking system rests on the ability of a lender to make reasoned choices and to lend money to people who will more likely pay it back than not.

We think that's the left just thinks that's racist.

So here we are again.

We're going to do this and we're going to lower interest.

But because remember that it was 2.9 on a 30-year mortgage when Donald Trump left office.

And I can tell you it's about 7% right now on a 30-year loan for

given Joe Biden's efforts.

It's not going to be, I don't think it's going to have much effect.

I really don't, because poor people are not going, if they say, we'll give it to you five or six, it's still pretty high.

But the point is not whether it'll have an effect, it's what it relates

about the government's attitude toward you, the listener, and then it's more or less contempt.

So you should be proud that you always pay your bills, that you don't go over in your credit card and cancel it out and leave somebody hanging or you pay your mortgage on time.

But the government now under this regime feels that

I guess that's too Protestant or too Catholic or too Christian or too Western or too establishment or too white.

I don't know what the ism or ology is, but it's a pathology.

And it has, it's part of a larger manifestation of radical, what they call equity or equality result.

So here in California, it wasn't just the legislature, Jack.

It was PG ⁇ E in Southern California, Edison, the San Diego Power Company that went to the legislature and said, hey, we got a great idea.

Let's add a surcharge on everybody's power bill flat rate based on their income.

So all these fat cats, they're going to pay more because they can.

So whether you lose, you use power wisely or unwisely, you waste it or you save it, doesn't matter.

It's what you make.

You're going to be penalized.

Remember, we have the most regressive

tax rate of any country in Europe.

We think that they're socialists and we're free market.

No, we pay, if you make over a couple hundred thousand, you pay more of your actual income than Europeans do.

And just remember that the federal tax rate now is 39 plus

and for higher income middle-class people.

And then if you live in California, it's 13.3 on top of that.

And you can't write that off over 10,000 on your, if you have a house with property property taxes, it'll gobble up that $10,000

exemption very quickly.

So we're in pretty much 13 and three

and 39.

You're getting up to 53.

And then you've got your payroll taxes, your Obamacare taxes.

You can easily get up to 55% of your income.

And when you have 1% of the taxpayers in these cities like New York, states like New York and California that are paying

50% of the income tax

revenue for the state.

You can see why people are leaving and why they don't want them to leave, and they're paranoid about it.

But it's again, a socialist effort.

It's kind of the financial version to college admissions.

So it's not just that you don't have to take the SAT or the ACT to go to Stanford University.

It's,

we're going to brag that we reject, according to an article in San Jose Mercury, we reject 60 to 70 percent of those who get a perfect score.

That's just too well.

That's just too good.

They tried too hard, they're too well educated, and they just worked everything.

So we do not want those people, 70 percent of them out.

As far as the people who chose the optional test and got in, well, we're not going to tell you what they got.

That's private.

But we will disclose that

we rejected 60 to 70 percent of the 0.01 that get a perfect score.

So this is what socialism is.

It's a hatred of achievement, accomplishment, talent.

It's just the opposite of modern market capitalism and conservatism that says

this is liberty.

You're all free to go out there.

We have a certain benchmark that you can't, you know, a certain

bottom line that you can't commit crimes, that you have to, in some ways, return your success to the community through philanthropy, or we'll give you a tax deduction, but we're not going to confiscate your money because we know that when we do that, we destroy your initiative.

We destroy your initiative, there's less for everybody.

But that's not what they believe.

And so

I think I wrote an article, Jack, last week, called We're Socialists that We Don't Do We Even Know We're Socialists?

Because if you look at that

idea, you look at college admissions, you look at the power bill,

and you look at the appointments that Biden is making.

He tried to make a State Department appointment the other day.

Basically,

the ambassador-at-large to Africa that had flunked the State Department exam.

But

that's what you have to do in a Jacobin society.

You have to war on merit and destroy.

any test or classification system that makes one excel and one leave.

It's like, you know, it's t-ball.

Everybody, we don't keep score.

We all get the same number.

You know, you, you swing 25 times, you swing one.

It doesn't matter just until you hit the ball.

You know, Victor,

a few years ago here in Connecticut, it was probably about eight years ago, someone proposed

in the legislature, a hoarder's tax, which was, what's the hoarding?

Who's the hoarder?

You know, is it someone who's keeping junk in their house?

No, it was to go after people's bank account, people's savings accounts, which is money that's already made it through

the tax system and what's left.

And here are the people who have to do it.

They have it, but the wealth tax.

They want a wealth tax.

There's a wealth tax in L.A.

if you sell homes over, I think it's 10 million.

They tax you a special surcharge.

If your home is,

everybody said, what do you care, Victor, 10 million?

You go down the California coast and you look at an 1,100, 1,200 square foot home that's 60 years old.

it can be over a million and a half dollars right now believe it or not even with 500 000 people living california in the last 18 minutes i've been looking at homes for my daughter and it's just staggering how much they are and especially now with seven percent interest so the idea you're going to tax these so-called super homes because you're going to pay back pay people

You're going to pay them back for being what?

You know, you're angry at them.

It's payback because they were successful.

It's just, it's staggering what we're doing in the socialist regime.

They're kind of like in the woodwork, like insects or termites.

And as soon as they get a president like Joe Biden,

they burrow out.

You know, you can see them, you're right.

But when you get a conservative like a Trump or a Reagan or Bush,

they go back in the woodwork and they just, you know, they.

they

eat and eat and they do their stuff and they're already, they're gorgeous and then, wow, those little holes you see in your doorframe, that's what they are.

They come right back out.

Yeah.

And

that's, I'm not using this to knock Trump, but I will say the thing that bothered me most about his administration was early on

was that,

well, I'm not going to curse.

I'll say crap.

You know, it's month three.

And wow, it's still Obama's

commissioner of the IRS who's running the IRS.

And what's her name?

Susan Yates, who was some.

Sally Yates is a DOJ.

Yeah.

She was the DOJ.

Now, when Biden came in, everybody was cleaned out on day one.

Everybody.

Your Democrats always do that.

Yeah.

And

that's why

I remember what they do, the left.

They call people racist, sexist, transphobes, greedy.

That's all.

They don't really believe that.

That's just all

a strategy.

So then you say, oh, okay,

maybe

I won't appoint this guy.

He's too conservative.

Oh, maybe I'll give Janet Napolitano or something, the National Humanities Medal or something.

Maybe I'll appoint a David Souter for the Supreme Court.

Maybe I'll,

you know, maybe I'll, I'm Mitt Romney, I'll walk and

protest in a big march with BLM.

It never works.

I'm sorry.

It doesn't work.

It does not work.

They look at that outreach as weakness to be exploited.

Yeah.

And yet

the right does it all the time.

They really do.

And David Brooks had an article.

I don't read him, but it was in the New York Times.

They just saw it about that Joe Biden was the moral candidate this time around.

I thought, wow.

What does that do for you, David?

Moral with his grandson, moral with these young girls that he made feel uncomfortable, moral with his family shakedown consortium,

moral with terror reed,

moral with calling half the country fascist.

Just define that for me.

Yeah, the daughter he showered with, yeah, the uh the Boku lies over the he was arrested in South.

Well, you've gone through the litany of lies, but uh,

well, David, uh,

it's David being David,

Victor.

speaking of liars, little liars, little sought-off front liars.

You sound like long dissenters.

And he said, I'm going to throw that little elf across the Potomac.

Well, I think you could throw Anthony Valgi

across the Potomac, and many people would want to.

And I think we should.

We should talk about.

Tony, who never goes away, a barnacle on our culture and our psyche and

on our cemeteries in America.

We'll get your thoughts about some of the latest Tony stuff right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So Victor, I would like to recommend first before I go on to our listeners, particularly new listeners, there is a website, The Blade of Perseus,

that is Victor's official website.

You'll find it at VictorHanson.com when you go there.

Links to various articles Victor just mentioned, the syndicated column that he wrote, We're all social, Are We All Socialists Now?

You'll find that there.

Link to it, pieces he's written for American Greatness, appearances on podcasts, radio shows, archives of these podcasts, links to the books he's written.

But then there's also links to Ultra articles.

And Victor writes two or three a week.

And Ultra is

an exclusive series to his website.

And you have to subscribe in order to be able to read them.

So do that.

$5 gets you in the door, $50 for the year.

And there's just a ton of original material that Victor writes for The Blade of Perseus.

So please consider that.

Now, actually, the current series

of Ultra articles that Victor's been writing, this is a three-part series.

It's called Civilizational Killers, and we should talk about that, Victor.

But first, first, let's talk about

your favorite person,

person, Anthony Fauci, who I have to, again, make amends.

I went to Regis High School in New York City, so did Anthony Fauci.

I went, I graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

So did Anthony Fauci.

I don't know.

I feel like I should be whipping myself.

He,

so lately, he's, you know,

Tony, what's going on?

What was your culpability?

Well, he wasn't following orders.

Sounds a little third Reichy.

He wasn't giving them either.

No, no.

James Freeman wrote an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day.

James is a great writer.

And it was titled, I think it was titled

Anthony Fauci in the New York Times, because Fauci had given an interview to the Times.

So let me just read this quickly, Victor, and then let's get your thoughts about this man and his sense of what's culpability or culpable for or not.

So he says to David Wallace Wells, that's who interviewed him at the Times, nothing was done perfectly, but what I can say is that, at least to my perception, the emphasis strictly on the science and public health, that is what public health should do.

I'm not an economist.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization.

The Surgeon General is not an economist.

So

we looked at it from a purely public health standpoint.

It was for other people to make broader assessments, people whose positions include, but aren't exclusively about public health.

Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something.

There's more to read here, Victor I won't, about him defending himself against claims that Fauci shut down the economy, Fauci ordered schools closed.

But the comment that I just read,

I wonder what Scott Atlas would have to say about that line of BS.

So Fauci.

He's defending himself again.

Go ahead, Victor.

I had dinner Monday night with Scott, and I discussed some of these things with him.

And of course,

he's sort of in a state of

wonderment as I am that

the four or five things that he tried to implement as the advisor to

Donald Trump over the objection of doctors Fauci and Burks were simply A,

not to put all of your trust into the mRNA vaccinations.

They were helpful.

Older people should get them.

But the idea that they would offer permanent protection against being infected or infecting someone else was not true.

And they came at the expense sometimes in our obsessions with them.

of therapeutics.

And there were a lot of off-label uses of drugs, whether that was Pepsid or ivermedicine, that may have had some utility that people didn't know about because the government suppressed it or demonized people who said things like, hey, maybe quercetin or singular or pepsid has some utility.

And then, you know, that he said that mask wearing would not stop the epidemic.

Stopping the schools, shutting down the economy would, in the long run, kill more people than than the virus because

it would spike spousal abuse, child abuse in confined quarters, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, suicides, lost

productivity, recessionary times, and school that can never be made up.

So

put all that together, and I think he's right.

All he hasn't received is a apology from people at Stanford University that thought he wasn't worthy to have a medical license.

As far as Fauci himself, he's got a new narrative.

It's kind of diabolical.

Remember what he's doing right after

the explosive news that COVID was here,

there were those

emails that were

sued for, and they came to light with heavy redactions.

where he and Francis Collins were in a state of panic.

Remember those, Jack?

And they were kind of communicating about it, just can't be, can it?

Gain of function.

And we got to be careful, don't we?

About people getting the wrong narrative that it came out of the Wuhan lab.

And then maybe the expertise or the equipment or the guidance or some of the money we,

in fear that it was illegal here, routed to Chinese scientists at the Wuhan lab via Peter Dasick's Echo Health.

That fact

governs everything that Fauci said before or since, that he was involved basically in promoting gain of function

research that resulted in this virus.

So to stop that narrative, Jack, he had for about three years a other narrative that all viruses come from natural sources.

They jump from pangolins, they jump from bats and they get into the human population.

But we got a problem because we'd have no single animal, not one that had this virus before a human did.

We can't find any.

So, what do we do?

Now, the Department of Energy, the FBI, other intelligence agencies are saying it had a gain of function, or at least an engineered origins in the lab.

So, he's got a new narrative now.

Have you seen it?

It's something like this:

Chinese scientist A walks around outside.

Maybe he goes with scientist B to look for bats.

Who knows?

They get infected or they have exposure

and they bring back the virus.

And the virus, either they're looking at microscopically or it's on them and then it is absorbed through osmosis by the lab, then it escapes from the lab.

So yes, you're critics of me, yes, there was a lab, but it wasn't because of gain of function.

And yes, it came from a natural source, an animal.

It's just that the guy who had the animal virus on him went to the lab and then it came off him there somehow.

So we're both right.

That's where he is now.

It's absurd.

It's totally absurd.

He looks terrible.

When you see him on TV, he's lost that cockiness and combativeness because he knows what's happening.

that with the Republican takeover of the Congress and maybe the Senate and the presidency, all of those records records are going to come open and all of his protectors as a politicized animal will be gone.

And there'll be a free inquiry.

And a guy like Rand Paul will just have a select committee if he's a chairman and they will look at it.

And he's afraid they will find

that

China was engineering viruses and they did it with the express consent of people under the radar here in the United States.

They were even funded or the machinery, both literal and metaphorical, came from us in some sense.

And we escaped and millions of people have died.

Over 1 million Americans have died.

That's so consequential you can't even grasp it.

Think about it.

That the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the head of the Center for Disease Control were involved in some tangential way or peripheral way with giving the wherewithal so that the Chinese could do

dangerous research well beyond their capability to ensure it would be safe.

And out of that

engineered virus came the SARS virus that escaped.

And therefore, are they culpable for the subsequent disasters and loss of life?

That's what they're worried about.

Because nobody can even imagine it.

Because if it is,

you know, I don't know if it's libelous or what, but if that theory was true, and there's a lot of people saying it is,

then you've got the guardian of us from viruses being the person who didn't guard us, but promoted the virus.

Right.

Maybe unwillingly.

But then, you know, when we had that interview with Stephen Kway, the...

immunologist, biologist,

I asked him point blank,

can you think of any positive development that's come from gain of function research and a cost of benefit analysis?

He said no.

And other people have been asked that question.

They say no.

Yet that was what Fauci said all the time.

Well, of course we're gaining money.

We're finding more vaccine.

What could not,

I'm not posing this.

rhetorical question correctly, but the only thing that could come from this, whether it's COVID-19 or any other thing that we're experimenting on, is a holocaust of some kind.

Yeah, it would be like I have small grandkids, you know, that are three and seven.

I would just put a bunch of loaded guns out there, play with them.

Well, that's what doing, that's what giving viruses or the technology to experiment and enhance them is with people in China with an unsecure or insecure lab that was created by the French and run by the People's Liberation Army with people who have to ask us for assistance because they don't know what the blank they're doing.

What would you expect to happen?

Of course it happened.

By the way, Victor, his inability to accept blame or to lie was kind of mirrored last week by Randy Weingarten,

the despicable head of the teachers union who's,

we didn't, we wanted the schools open.

Of course we was terrible the schools were closed.

We did what we could to keep them open.

I mean, God, what a

She called people names.

She libeled them.

She ridiculed anybody who suggested the teacher should get back in the classroom before the damage that they had wrought by their absence was irrevocable.

She demonized them.

It's all on tape.

She knows that.

Even that reporter for CNN, the host, he tore her to pieces on the air.

He knew that.

And so the problem with wine garden is the same problem with Fauci.

Fauci controls, what, $50 billion in research funds.

I don't know how that many thousand labs that results in.

But if you're at Georgia

State or Cal State or UC Riverside, anywhere.

And you've got a lab and you hire eight or nine people and you're trying to find out whether

what causes

reflux or whether your uterine cancer is connected with this or that.

You need his funding.

And he knows that.

And so then he asked his buddies, what do you think?

I know we have peer review and all that, but he asked his buddies and he pays back his enemies and he rewards his friends.

And everybody was terrified of him, just like they're terrified of Weingarten and the union.

She controls hundreds of millions of dollars.

She's the one that has her hands on the the purse string.

She's the one that tells candidates whether they get teacher union money or not.

And they're bullies.

And then they come before Congress and they act like, you know, sheep.

Oh, I was just trying to help everybody.

No, you weren't.

Yeah.

Without you, you know, oh, I wouldn't consider that.

And the things that not gain of function when you take a virus apart and you probe around and you change its

RNA or DNA or whatever, you change it.

No, that's not, it's not a gain of function,

just screwing around with

its essence.

The broader concerns that we've talked about in the past, and of course, this was the purp, the goal of Scott Atlas to see

what are going to be the broader societal effects.

If we do A, how will it impact in other areas?

Back to Randy Weinggarten, closing the schools.

Some article came out in the Daily Mail the other day.

30%

of high school teenagers in the last, since I think 2021, have contemplated suicide.

Just massive depression numbers.

The wreckage from this lady fighting to keep these schools closed, abetted by the sought-off head of the, whatever the hell he was, Fauci.

It was just the human toll

is

crushing.

We took millions of kids and we said,

oh, your senior year was your great year for being quarterback.

No, it's not going to happen.

Oh, you were a world-class swimmer.

You were a world-class band person.

You were the greatest person on the debate team.

It's canceled.

Forget it.

It's over.

Or you had a difficult home and you needed to get to school every day.

Oh, sorry.

Stay there with that dad of yours that drinks too much.

That's what we did.

And we just disrupted people's lives.

And we said to the mom who was a waitress, and then she was doing Uber driving and her kids were in school.

She dropped them off for her at eight in the morning or seven in the morning.

She went, you know, and did a seven to five shift.

You got an Uber.

She did.

No, you can't do that anymore.

You stay home with your kids now.

They're going to be there for two years.

We wrecked people's lives and nobody was held accountable.

And I don't think they're ever going to.

There's a Hoover study that it's going to be very hard for the whole generation to ever make up that two-year

absolutely that two-year hiatus in their education because

those are building blocks.

And if you miss those critical years, you never quite catch up.

The left never pays for anything, Victor.

And like we look back at Eastern Europe, as one did any freaking commie who, you know, tormented people for two generations,

Did anyone pay for that?

I mean, they just seem to get away with it.

No, they didn't pay.

And

all these bureaucrats are, they get up in the morning and they think they have

are salaried people.

I'm eight to five.

I can't be fired.

I'll just go and say stuff and there's no consequences.

And then they're wrong and people's lives are destroyed.

And it's, oh, well, if you don't dare say that about me or I'll sue you.

So the classus, Locus Classicus was Rand Paul's

exchange with Anthony Fausti.

Anthony Fausti's attitude was,

how dare you do that?

I'm the head of the National Institute of Allergies.

In fact, I'm neutral.

And Ron Paul said, I'm a doctor, too.

And it was like,

you know,

thought of Rand Paul in a new light yeah he really was he thought he was some kind of earl or duke in the english court or something and that you didn't you know and you know i i i go back to that

because i watched it happen in real time

uh

it was in

it was at the end of the first year you know and it was

I think it was in October.

You should have read what those guys wrote at Stanford.

You know, it said stuff like as

Stanford experts or Stanford faculty with expertise.

And they went after Scott Atlas and they signed this,

you know, they made fun of him, that former Stanford medical school colleague.

And, you know, his opinions and statements, I can remember it by heart.

You know, they were undermining public health authorities and they were

preponderance of the data he'd ignored.

And then he went on, they went and on and they signed their name.

I can remember it.

The guy, I think his name was Pisel or something.

They just all wanted to pile on.

And then you should see, remember their names, their titles, Jack.

You know, professor of pediatrics, infectious diseases, and microbiology, and immunology, and former vice provost, and dean.

Professor of Medicine, and Senior Associate Dean for Global Health, and Director, Center for innovation and global health, and senior fellow institutions, all that.

And then it was MD, PhD, MHS.

Don't bore me, man.

Don't bore me.

Basically, you saw a guy that worked for Trump.

You didn't like him.

You didn't know anything about the COVID.

All of your medical expertise was not prepared for you to accept that the Chinese had reversed or engineered a gain in function virus, deliberately hid its origins.

It was here.

We had no idea how to deal with it.

People were on the left happy in some ways that the Trump administration didn't know what to do with it.

And then you were terrified and you used all your expertise to say, stay home, lock the doors, don't go out for two years or forever.

And

the Zoom culture, the mail-in ballot, 30% shows up on election, all of that helped a particular ideology.

And then you're going to give us all these initials, all these titles to say basically that someone should be censored, a colleague of yours, because he had the temerity to say,

we're doing a lot of things.

It's going to hurt people.

Please think about what you're doing.

And then he said something even worse.

I can remember when he said it.

He said, eventually we're going to get to a point of her, remember that evil word, Jack?

Herb immunity,

something that was the basis of all immunology up until COVID.

And then you were not supposed, the word disappeared from the vocabulary, from the lexicon.

And then Atlas said at some magical point, a combination of the mRNA vaccinations and the traditional vaccinations coupled with the natural immunity that will last for a while from actual infection will create a greater number of the people who can ward off infectiousness or make it mitigate it.

And at that point, the virus will not be able to hop, hop, hop.

It will hop over to a person and get thrown out because they have either natural or acquired immunity.

And that's where we are today.

It doesn't mean we're not going to have variants.

It's not, we'll have the problems, second wave, third wave.

I don't know, but it's exactly what he said would happen.

And that's what John Yannidi said would happen and Jay Bacharia

and all of them, Martin Ludendorff, they all said that.

And the medical profession under the leadership of Collins and Fauci.

I don't know what Redfield, his point of view was.

He's all over the map now, but I think he has a better argument that he was against

the lockdowns.

Yeah, well, wasn't too loud about it at the time.

Victor, one last thing before we move on to your Civilizational Killers series is just about Fauci's culpability and the hubris is the, you know, the I am science.

And I'd just like to say, if I heard you, you could say,

I am classics.

Now,

you could,

because it would be true.

I am classics.

But if you did say it,

I think I'd say to you, are you, are you insane?

What do you mean?

Why would you talk like, who talks like that?

Anthony Fauci.

You should say that if I said that.

A, I'm not classics.

And no, but I'm going to say that is.

You have the legitimacy, I would say, argue.

I'm just using that as an example, but that he would say, I am science.

Like, who the F thinks like that?

This guy does.

So anyway, Victor, let's

stop my ranting and take a look at the aforementioned ultra articles that you write for The Blade of Perseus, and you have a three-part series up up right now.

It may extend, I'm not sure, but civilizational killers.

The first part is perversion of the law.

And Victor, would you mind talking about this piece for a little bit?

Well, I was trying to think, you know, what historically destroys civilization.

And

one of the, so there's a tripartite series of essays that deal with finance and the law and equality.

But if you have a system of jurisprudence and it's based on statues of lady justice with blindfolded,

decay

the old Greek idea of justice, and it's supposed to apply the law, and that you've had a history at some periods in your

past where, say, African Americans in 1860 or 1920 were not given equality under the law, at least local law, then you should be very careful that you live up A to your ideals and B, that you don't lapse into your occasional wayward path and ignore that.

But look at it right now.

I mean,

ask yourself if you

on January 6th were walking around, you saw a big protest, you went to it, and all of a sudden a a bunch of people were going into the capitol and the guys were waving you in you walked in you thought well i don't like the look of this it's and you walked out

you didn't do anything but your picture was on it you're you're that's the end of you you're going to be charged thousand people were charged but if you go on june you know you go in late June, early July, and you try to burn down the St.

John's Episcopal Church right across from the White House, and then you run across that street street and you try to fight with policemen and injure them and try to get to the ground so you can go after Trump and his wife, they're going to do nothing to you.

Nothing.

If you've got a bunch of stuff in your vice president of the United States and you leave office in January of 2017 and you know you took classified documents, you threw some in your Hunter Biden car garage, you put some in your phony Chinese shakedown office, you took some to your home.

And you knew it in 2016.

And you knew it in

17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.

And you know that as vice president, yours is no ambiguity.

You had no right to declassify those.

They're going to do nothing to you.

If you're Donald Trump, you take them out and you have the right to declassify them.

And maybe you did or did not, I don't know.

But you know that at some point you could have.

And you put them in Mar-Lago in a closet and you lock it, and it's a compound that's sealed from the public with guards,

and you're in an argument back and forth with what counts as a

document that was a personal one, and you have this ongoing dialogue.

You're going to go to jail, I think.

That's what they're going to do to you.

They're going to try to put index that Mr.

Smith, is that his name?

He's going to try to indict Donald Trump.

And if you think Alvin Bragg goes after

people

in New York who

give money to an employee that shakes them down and says, you know, that they either had an argument with or sex with whatever, and they have some kind of non-disclosure form or whatever.

And he goes after all of those people.

He doesn't even go after a guy who takes an axe and hits somebody in the head with it who's out in a day or two.

Are you think think Letita James in New York goes through all the corporate records of all the multi-billion corporations and say, ah,

Jamie Diamond's corporation, he listed as an asset a corporate headquarters that is not worth what we think it is.

We're going to indict him.

Or do you think all these phone calls people are going to call that these politicians make, they're going to say, ah, we got Chuck Schumer.

He had a phone call and he said, we need this to happen.

They're not going to do that.

So everybody understands that they've destroyed the equal application of the law.

And it's not just in Trump's case, it's in all of these other cases.

And it's scary.

Right.

It's really scary.

Do you think that

you think that transgender parents go and they say, we think if you're a parent of a transgender person and you say, I think we should have transgender

studies,

you think the FBI FBI is in the audience listening to them?

I don't think so.

No.

So, and you think that if Donald Trump's,

if you think that Ivanka Trump had a diary that said that she took a shower with Donald Trump and she lost it, the FBI would be looking for it?

You think if Don Jr.

was high on crack and lost a bunch of computers and he lost one right before the election, and Trump called up the FBI and said, you got to find it.

And they said, Mr.

President, we got it.

And he said, look, just suppress information with Twitter and keep that locked down.

And my guy, Anthony Blinken or whoever Mike Bump, who with the equivalent, he'll handle it.

He'll get a bunch of people to say, don't worry that it's Russian disinformation.

And you have, is that going to happen?

No.

So something went wrong.

This application.

of the law is asymmetrical.

It depends on your ideology.

Right.

But it ties your hand.

Well, are they tied if you're a conservative who

believes in the equal application, justice is blind?

Because if it's not applied equally,

I mean, if a law isn't applied equally, is it really a law anymore?

And then, well, what do you do to defend yourself?

I mean, you don't

advocate that you take the law into your own hands, right?

Well, everybody's, that's why everybody feels ultimately they need to be armed.

That's why they do not want to come in contact with the federal government.

I had a talk with some accountants that I work with, and I try to pay 5% more than I have to on income tax.

I try not to take any deductions.

I don't anything, because I'm paranoid that they spot people who are conservative.

And so my effective rate is pretty high.

And I just think, well, you know, there's a computer looking at it.

And if you're paying more than you should, you'll probably be given an exemption.

But yeah, I think that

it's scary.

And

it's going to destroy the country.

The other thing I wrote about was debt.

And when you have 130% of GDP in peacetime and you owe 30, could get in the air of 30 trillion, 33.

and you're running a $2 trillion deficit and you say we want to

you want to reduce it.

Oh,

you're going to let fitnil in.

That's what you want to do.

You want to let fitanil in.

Then what do you do?

That's so absurd.

How do you even

approach the conversation?

We're going broke.

Well, then you say, well, wait a minute, Victor.

How did the Romans deal with it?

Because they're bread and circuses.

How did Cuba deal with it?

How did Venezuela do it?

How did Argentina?

How did Greece deal?

And you think, hmm, yeah, I remember how they did it.

There's two or three ways to do it.

Number one, you just take the

currency and you print money.

And that's kind of good because the people who have money, it's worthless.

And the people who don't get money, it may be worthless, but they get something.

It's like 1923 in Germany, and they say to the Weimar Republic, you guys owe the equivalent modern-day dollars of a trillion dollars to the French and British for war reparations, the damage you did.

And they said, Okay, we'll pay them back in Reichmark,

but we'll print them.

And that's one way to get on out and destroy your currency.

The other way is to, what, appropriate capital from somebody.

Just say, you know what, and we can do it with a, we'll have an, we don't say this is the appropriation capital measure, it's the mansion tax, or it's the power bill tax,

or it's the higher interest tax for wealthy people.

Or

do you remember this idea that was floated for a while?

It comes back every once in a while that your private 401k could be translatable into years of credit with Social Security so that the government could come in and take your 401k and then give you

earth 100,000 or something a year of credit.

They've talked about that before.

So you can confiscate money, you can print money, or you can renounce debt.

We owe $33 trillion.

Who do we owe it to?

Well, in the left-wing mind, we owe about, I don't know, seven or $8 billion to the Chinese, and we owe some to the other lenders.

Maybe it's, I don't know, 40% foreign, but

we want to pay that back.

But we owe it to Jim Smith, who's got a huge

car dealership, and he makes $4 million a year, and he's got $5 million in CD.

Does he really need that, Jack?

Because he got it in a way that was not fair.

He didn't build that.

You didn't build that.

You use the road.

You use the electric grid.

You use the insurance, federal insurance programs.

So you didn't build it.

So we're going to take it.

And we're going to, how are we going to take it?

We're just going to say, you know what, you bought a bunch of federal, but anybody

who

got a net worth of over $10 million, we're just not going to honor your T-bill.

And we got close to that under Obama.

You remember when Chrysler, the or the order of the

contractors and bondholders, when it went bankrupt, that Obama played fast and loose with a legally prescribed order of who gets paid in succession.

If anybody doesn't believe this,

I I was a contractor for the Chicago Tribune with a syndicated column.

They went broke in a speculative deal for about two years.

I didn't get paid.

And I got a little note from the editor of the time:

if you'll keep writing

your column, there'll be a place for you when we can pay you back.

They never paid me back.

They just didn't pay me.

I think I wrote for months on end for nothing.

And then when I was very young, I was a member of

Sun-Made.

My family was Raisin Cooperative.

They took 7%

of your money of each raisin crop you delivered, and they put it into what they called capital retain.

And they always had seven years.

And then after seven years, you got one year back.

And guess what?

In 1983, he said, you were overpaid.

I was overpaid.

What do you mean I was overpaid?

Well, we paid you too much money for your raisins this year.

But I said, but you paid us less than the private people did.

Yeah, I know, but we had some problems and we just kind of borrowed some money to it wouldn't look too bad.

So if the private group was paying $1,200 a ton,

we had to pay you $1,100 a ton to make it look like you should stay with us.

But we really didn't make $1,100 a ton because we're pretty inefficient.

So we should have paid you $900 a ton.

So what are you telling me?

Well, that money's gone and we can't fire ourselves.

So we're going to go into the capital retain and take it.

What do you mean?

Well, it doesn't exist, but we're going to renounce that debt.

What do you mean?

Well, you're a member of the owner.

I said, I am.

Yes, you're a cooperative member.

I know, but you have seven years of my money.

It's $80,000.

We don't have any money.

We need it.

Yes, but as an owner, and you've made a decision to renounce that.

So I said, what?

I'm not going to pay back myself?

They said, yes.

As members of the cooperative, on the board, and the directors, we've decided that all of the members that we owe $27 million screw you.

Well, then we're going to quit.

Yes, you can quit.

You can quit.

And that would be kind of good, because if you quit, then we don't have to ever worry about paying you.

You get out.

We bring in new members and they start overpaying us into the retain.

And we promise, promise, promise, sure to God, that we will never do this again.

So I'm pretty acquainted with the confiscation of your money, whether private or quasi-public.

Did anyone ever pay for that?

No.

Oh, I sued.

I was with a group of people who sued them.

So we were owed $80,000.

We had to pay $1,500.

Each person did to pay the lawyers.

And we got 11 cents on the dollar.

And guess what?

Sun Made Raising Cooperative, it was $27 million in the hole, and they got a check for $27 million in the sense that they just said, we don't owe that anymore.

And one

fourth to one-third of the people quit, and they thought, this is kind of good.

They quit.

We owed them all this money.

Now we don't.

And

we've got a new membership that is coming in.

And guess what?

They're coming into a co-op that doesn't owe any money.

And they'll just contribute to the capital retain.

And

I could see what was going on.

It was like in my late 20s.

So I said to myself, what is going on with this cooperative that my grandfather was a founding member?

And it was a Bible jack.

You never spoke an evil word about Sunmaid.

It controlled 50% of the industry.

It was a cooperative.

It was an egalitarian institution.

It was trying to get a fair shake by staying together.

So the Sunmade Maiden was in every store.

And then these bad guys on the outside, they didn't pay the overhead in advertising and market production.

And then they were vultures.

And these raisin companies, they just sold and undercut.

So if sun-made raisins were $3 a pound, they charged $2.50 and they made more money and they paid the farmer more.

I thought, well, why is this?

Because I had been raised on Sunmade indoctrination.

So I would go over to Sunmade when I delivered my raisins.

I sit in the truck, they load them off,

big long truck.

They take, you know, 18 tons, 16 tons, whatever it was.

And I would look at everybody.

I said, my God,

I've never seen such slow workers.

And there's a supervisor there and there's a supervisor there.

And then I would go over to discuss going to a private raisin factor.

I won't mention any names, but there was this guy who had a really good raisin packer.

He was Armenian-American.

And so I went over there.

He had a really big company, not as big as Sunmade, but I wanted, he was paying $100 more a time.

So I went over there.

Guess what, Jack?

I went into the office.

I said, could I say, see Mr.

So-and-so?

And they said, I don't know where he is.

Who are you?

I said, I was only a punk kid, 26, 27.

They said, oh.

just go out there and look at him.

So I go out there, Jack, and here's this guy who's kind of dirty and he's got raisin stems in his hair and he's on a forklift and he's zooming around moving these 500 pound bins i said you know where mr and he has a cigar in his mouth i'm the guy you're looking for and i'd say uh well you pay i'm busy right now but just hang on there and then they you know he'd he'd stack them up and go in and then he'd go in he'd put his arm around me and said, why don't you come with us?

I'll give you $100 more.

And you're not, it's unmade socialism.

I'm not socialism.

I try to get the best I can.

I up front, this is what I'm going to pay.

No more, no less.

You know, you get your money right away.

There's no seven years retain, it doesn't take three years.

We're all going to be happy, nice guys.

And then he said to something I'll never, you know, the co-op is only as strong as the weakest link.

And there's a lot of weak links over there.

Mr.

Hansen,

over there at Sunmade.

So I came home.

That's right.

My mom, you know, mom, I think I'm going to quit Sun.

What?

My God, you can't quit Sunmade.

I thought that I had said that I was converting to Islam or something.

You know, you can't commit Sun.

You can't leave Sunmade.

Your grandfather helped.

You don't know what it was like before Sunmaid came.

And I said, well, why are we even doing any of this?

The Raisin Administrative Committee owns our raisins.

So we can't even, once we can't take our raisins and sell them at farmers market or anything, they own them and Sunmaid then takes them and they give us 50% on free tonnage and the government then says half the crop can't be sold.

So we get 25%

of our money that's owed us in September, October, November, and the interest rate is 16% on our loan.

We're going to go broke.

Victor, don't leave Sunmade.

I said, we left.

And then I felt terrible because because she was so loyal to the idea of a bunch of small agrarian farmers banding together during the Depression.

Well, it made sense then.

It did.

It was a noble idea.

And I can remember we would drive down and my grandfather would look at, we would drive down.

He goes, we're going to take a ride today.

And we'd ride around in this pickup 1947 International, where you pushed the...

the ignition, you know, you turn the ignition on, then you'd have to push a pedal to start it.

And we would go around, he said, Look at those bins, Victor.

They're not sun-made bins.

Now, Mr.

Smith, Mr.

Jones, he was a member, but you know what?

He's undercutting the cooperative.

He's getting more money and he's getting it all up in front.

But that company's not spending the money to develop the market.

They don't run ads.

They don't do this.

And I said, He's getting money, grandpa.

Or not.

I know, I know, but

you save your money.

You save it, you're frugal, you don't spend it, and then you don't demand it.

I said, okay,

what a lost world.

I heard once that all that, the infamous for years, the California raisin commercials with the characters, whatever, that at the end of the day, that raisin sales really did not increase despite the massive promotion.

There is half the acreage of Thompson Seedless as there was 20 years ago, and the price is about where it was when I farmed full-time 30 years ago.

So you figure.

And in other words, when I farmed,

it was

about $900 a ton and they paid $12.

And then some years it got down to $400, $500.

Two years we didn't even pick them, Jack.

We just cut all the canes off and didn't even make a crop because we didn't want to pull out the vines.

And then now the price is about 12 or 14 and the price, it's you lose money and the cran raisins just killed it.

They had all those skins when they made cranberry sauce and stuff.

Yeah.

So we got the bright idea of taking the

cranberry after they squeezed it and making it into kind of a Wheaties flake.

And it, you know, it stole about 30% of the raisin market.

And

people don't eat very many raisins.

And now, the people who grow it, it's you have to have a corporate setup where you have to tear out your vineyard, then have a high-tensile,

you know, arbor, trellis system,

densely planted vines, new varieties that get ripen, you know,

thalma peat, they call it, or et cetera, et cetera, and you get five tons an acre.

Whereas if you have the old rows like my used to have, you'd be lucky if you get two and a half to two.

It's in science now.

There's not very many raisin growers left.

I think I've said to us, you know, it's kind of funny.

When the whole thing collapsed, I wrote about it in Fields Without Dreams.

And this guy came to the RAC, the Raisin Administrative Committee, to explain why we were getting nothing and you could not

own your raisins.

And they declared free tonnage was 3%.

So we went to all these raisin packers and you'd see all these raisins stacked up in boxes, set aside the government-owned 70%.

We got $60 a ton for 70% of our crop.

That didn't even cover the harvest.

And then the 30% was only domestic.

This guy was explaining all of this to us.

He was a federal bureaucrat.

It was during the Reagan administration.

I think I wrote about it.

And I said,

well, you're basically telling us that

we're going to go broke at $400 a ton when it costs $700 or $800.

He said, some of you will.

And I said, well, what do you mean, some of us?

And he said, let me explain, idiot, how the free market works.

I said, okay, explain.

Well, you're going to get less.

So some guys are going to learn how to make raisins at half the price.

He said, no, they're not.

They can't do it.

Oh, yes, they will.

And then the guys that are inefficient will go broke.

I said, yes.

And then their farms will be taken over by people who are more efficient.

Okay, but it's being manipulated by you, the government, because it's not a free market.

Oh, that doesn't matter.

And I said, well, what happens then?

He said, then the raisin price will go down and consumers will buy raisins.

I said, no, they won't.

It's fixed.

The co-op owns 55% of the market.

And he says, I said, we're getting killed by overseas subsidized EU raisins from Greece and Turkey.

Well, that's good.

How can that be good?

Well,

they'll make you be more competitive.

But I said, they're not even competitive because the government gives them 300 a ton and that won't be sustainable, will it?

I said, after I'm dead, I won't.

But

they don't pay anything for NATO or their defense.

They just get free subsidies from us.

And I said, let me get this straight.

As I walked out, I said, so low prices are good because it makes us more efficient.

And the consumers get cheaper stuff.

and the people who cheat overseas can't sustain it.

That's what you're saying.

Then, how come

the guys that I knew that went broke are, you know,

the most efficient racing growers I've ever seen and the best people in the world?

And the guys that some of them that didn't go broke inherited money or they were part of a big corporate or they had depreciation.

Oh, I don't know.

I remember what he said, it's no use talking to you.

So, that was my big introduction into the world of

corporate crony capitalism and federal

interference.

And, you know, they finally fire,

they sued a guy who said, you know what, these are my raisins.

And I don't care about some depression era or raisin administrative rule that says you own them.

You do not own them.

I own the land.

I own the vines.

With my labor and my capital, I dried these raisins.

They're mine.

And I can do whatever I I want.

And they tried to destroy that guy.

It took him about 20 years.

I won't mention his name.

And he won, Jack.

He won.

They don't own your raisins.

They say they do, and they still claim they do, but they don't.

I thought farming was what Michael Bloomberg just said: stick a finger in the ground, drop a seed, and put a little water, and you're rich.

Hey, Victor,

we have just a little time left, and we're going to get to one final small thing right after this final important message.

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

I'd like to remind our listeners

to visit civilthoughts.com.

That's a website.

that is published or produced by the Center for Civil Society at Amphil, which used to be American Philanthropic.

That's where I I work.

And I write a free weekly email newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

There's no risk.

We don't sell your name.

What is it?

I find about a dozen, not really 14,

articles that I've come across in the previous week,

not necessarily political, cultural, usually religious, that I think would be of interest to people.

And

here's the link.

Here's an excerpt.

I think you'll like it.

I know a lot of listeners to this podcast have signed up and they seem to enjoy civil thoughts.

So do that.

CivilThoughts.com, sign up free.

I appreciate it.

Victor,

let's just

wrap this up.

I probably should have raised this on a previous podcast where

we talked a little about

Tucker Carlson, what was going on at Fox.

But as you're being very autobiographical, let's end this on an autobiographical way.

And just, would you let us,

would you give us an understanding about your relationship with Fox?

Because people see you, have seen you week in and week out, two or three times a night on one of the prime time

cable channels.

And I think people probably come to the conclusion that you are affiliated with Fox.

And that's not the case, but would you just clarify your relationship with Fox News?

Well,

affiliated would be you're a hired Fox analyst, paid analyst.

There's a lot of them.

And I'm not in a position to be one.

And I made that clear, I think.

And that is because of two reasons.

Number one,

I work at a university where if you're getting paid to be a CNN or MSNBC consultant, that's one thing.

But if you were to be a Fox consultant, that would be another.

And I won't be too, I've got to be very careful what I say, but put it this way: when I want to be at work and to, I'm called to come on, if I am at a particular university's particular studio, I've had problems with such things as if you want to use a studio, you're going to write out in advance what you're going to say, which is not possible either to me or to Fox.

So I kind of have a relation that if I am willing to go on Fox or they will wish to have me, and they do rate people, they rate guests, they rate host, everybody is under constant evaluation.

Okay, it's, I don't want to get into it, but they evaluate everybody.

And if you're doing okay and they would like you to be back,

it was very hard for me to drive all the way to Fresno to a studio, which wasn't equipped with an extra studio.

So

I have a barn that was built in 1870, and I had a daughter who was going to come back here.

So I remodeled it and made inside the barn a two-bedroom, really nice kitchen bath,

all by code.

And

I use that.

They have an automatic setup that a contractor put in.

So all I have to do is just,

they call my assistants.

They said, and usually it's very little warning, whatever the

maybe a day or two at the most.

Sometimes it's 10 minutes.

And if I happen to be around,

and then they say, this is what we're going to do.

And we don't really know what it's going to be.

They said, these are some of the areas we'd like you to talk about.

You have some ideas or something.

You can tell us, okay, if you don't, And then I go out there and I turn this light on and that light on and this light on.

And I sit in a chair and I put this piece in my ear, this priest microphone.

Then I put

my cell phone on a particular little amplifier.

So I dial in the station.

Usually I try to do it 15 to 20 minutes.

The contractor, I won't give his last name.

His name, first name is Dewai.

He's very good.

He lives back east.

Every once in a while, he flies out and checks all the equipment.

and he sends me a message a text message that you're good to go then i call in i'm there and then i just look at a blank screen i never have any

i don't know when they say charts or look at this i can't see anything nothing and if i did put it on television it's a seven i don't know six or seven delay and echo right yeah and what they do is they aggregate cell phones on the live view so

I happen to be out in the middle of nowhere, but there's a lot of cell phone towers and they can get a signal that has a very small delay.

And so then I go on.

I think

you have to, where I work, you have to list all the things you do so they know what you're doing.

You know, radio articles, books.

So my assistant does all of that.

And she called me last week and I said I was on Fox 156 times.

out of 360 days.

But that was just basically, you know, washing the car.

I used to be a very intensive gardener to my little rendezvous with Mr.

B.

But I would just stop everything and I go out there, wash my hand, mush my face, put on a coat that I have hanging in the closet and do it and then just jump right back.

So that was my, that's my relationship.

But when I would go to New York much more frequently than I do now, Washington, I would see, I would go in person.

I tried to make a point of, you know, seeing Martha McCallan or Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingram or Sean Hannity so that when I was in New York, they were very accommodating.

I'd go on maybe five or six times a year.

And then

the nice thing about it was that

I have never once been told what to say, not one time.

And I have disagreed with hosts in a polite fashion on things like,

um, I'll give you one example.

I was on Fox business with Lou Dobbs, whom I really liked, and he had Sidney Powell on,

and she was getting into the whole kraken.

You remember, released the Kraken?

You remember that, Jack?

I'm still waiting for it to be released.

I was waiting for it, too.

And I just said, with all due respect, I don't think there's much there there that had to do with suing particular states' legislative decisions,

making lax, in our opinion, the voting laws, turning a 30%

mail-in ballot to 40, 50, even 70 in some states,

the rate of rejection of ballots going down as the ballots went up that were not cast, stuff like that.

So nobody, he never called me and said, listen, Victor, We had her on there for Dominion and you disagreed.

Or on Ukraine, there was a host.

I said, you know, we all,

all discussions about the blank check we're giving them, which I think is a mistake, and all the dangers about the nuclear entanglements, which I think we're not appreciating,

and the

dwindling of our strategic munitions, you know, that we don't have enough of,

all of that is important,

but Putin did cross the border, and he is culpable.

So that, stuff like that.

So my point is, I've never, nobody ever called me up and said, don't ever do that on my show again.

Never.

So that was good.

I should just say that I've done it for about five years, but I had done it, you know, irregularly, maybe 10 years earlier.

And I used to, you know, who was really, I don't know if she remembers that, who's really nice?

It was Megan Kelly.

When she was at Fox, every once in a while, she'd call me up.

And I did her show once in a while.

And I did a few of the other shows.

and then there was a particular show with bill o'reilly do you remember that and george will when they yelled at each other yes were you on that episode no but i thought it was i i had nothing against bill o'reilly right i thought it was kind of out of hand didn't you he started yelling at his guest yeah yeah and george will was basically saying that bill o'reilly's ragged reagan biography that implied he may or may not have been senile during his rather than after his tenure remember that yes And then Bill O'Reilly got angry.

And then George Will,

who, you know, we disagree on a lot of stuff, obviously, but I thought he handled himself kind of professionally.

And Bill O'Reilly didn't.

So I wrote a column about that.

And I was critical.

And

I got some phone calls from Fox people who are not, I can say this because they're no longer employed or they're not living.

And they were very critical of me.

And

they didn't know how infrequent I was on their or their

related radio shows.

Right.

So, and then one of my colleagues and your colleagues at National View was a regular guest.

And I was told I had to change that column

or else that person wouldn't be on anymore.

And I would never be on, not just infrequently, but if I ever were to be lucky enough to be on regularly, I would never be on again.

I've never told anybody this, so I'm being very careful.

I know.

I've never heard this before.

I don't think I have it.

Guess what?

This person called from high up in the organization and said,

I want you to change that.

And I said, with all due respect, you don't understand a syndicated column.

You produce it just like you produce a pair of shoes.

And then every day,

newspapers or outlets, they see a potpourri of shoes on their menu and they pick and choose depending on the title or the quality of the author.

In my case, in those days, there was about 45 newspapers that would pick it up.

They pay very little, $20 or $30, you get.

So I said, I wrote this two days ago and these, these, these picked it up and they bought it.

So I can no more go back and say, hey, remember that thing you bought for $25 and you printed yesterday?

I want it back.

I don't own it anymore.

Right.

And they said, we don't care.

We want you to change it to this person,

or he's out.

So that person

called me and I said, look, I don't own it.

I don't care.

I'm not going to change.

I can't change the thing.

I wouldn't change it if I could.

And there it is.

You change it.

And then that person called back and basically said, you're never going to be on this

network again.

Never.

And I said, and I liked the person.

I knew him vaguely.

I liked him a lot.

And I said, I like you a lot.

And he said, it doesn't matter.

You embarrassed our

marquee host.

You wrote a few.

He did a pretty good job of it himself.

Yeah.

And then he said,

you quoted from a biography that was not authorized.

And I said, Doesn't matter.

Do you understand what a biography is?

If somebody writes something critical of Victor Hansen and it's footnoted and he's not an authorized biography, that has no or more or less currency than if somebody I hire who's an authorized biographer.

In fact, the authorized biographer and some methods of calibration is less reliable because he's been working in cahoots with his topic.

So I quoted somebody who was an unauthorized biographer, and I quoted it.

It was a quote.

It happened.

And so he said, I don't care.

So I, at that point, that was the end of Fox.

I never was asked to be on.

I was zero, zilch, gone.

And then

things happened with people leaving and even passing away and other things and conundrums and everything.

I won't get into it.

And then one day I owe her a lot.

It was Laura England was the first person.

Her producer called and said, why haven't you been on Fox?

And I said, I don't want to get into it.

Well, we think we can bring you on Fox, but we don't, you know, we just come on once.

We can't guarantee it.

We don't want to get into how the guests are outvaluated.

But if you don't feel comfortable or you don't do well, you'll, you know, it'll be a finite experience.

So it just open-ended.

Come went in.

And then I did it.

And then other hosts started to call and the same thing.

They were very polite.

And

I kept doing it.

So it's been about five or six years now.

Probably, I don't know.

I don't know.

Well, I don't, I, yeah,

I wouldn't count.

Yeah, 800 a period.

If you do 156 a year

times five years, that's pretty, pretty significant.

Yeah.

And I don't, I, I, I, at least I can say I'm not that noble because if you're not a Fox analyst and people call you and say, we'd like to have you tomorrow on Fox and Friends at three in the morning Pacific time, right?

Right.

And I'm working on a book till at 9, 10, 11 at night.

I'm not going to get up at 2.30 in the morning and get a bunch of dogs screaming and yelling and going out and

starting a studio.

So I don't have to do that.

And some weeks, you know,

I go overseas a lot to work.

So I can say I'm going to be gone for two weeks.

And it's very casual.

And so then I also,

I don't know, you know, I'm not into the intricacies of Fox.

So when Tucker left, I don't have the relationship where I can call a particular grandee or very high person.

I just hear stuff, but it's secondhand or third.

So I'm not a player in the Fox

news, not at all.

And one thing I try to do when I started to go on, I made it clear to the people who called me.

I would promise that I would do two things, two things.

three things, actually.

I would not attack the network

or the host.

And what does that mean?

That means when you get on Fox, you wouldn't believe, Jack, that you get other CNN or news, you get other people that want you to come on, and they can subtly put you in a position where you're going to attack the people.

You know what I mean?

Right.

So, even though I'm not an employee of Fox, I felt

honored to be on the

so, but the two big things were that I promised

I would never have an agent

call them up or nor would I ask to come on.

So in other words, I would live my life.

I write two or three columns a week, books.

They would then find out if I was suitable that week.

And

they would call me.

And I have never once in my life called the producer and said, I want to go on.

And the second thing I said, I'd do, I said, I will not call you and ask to put other people on because I get a lot of calls because they don't understand my relation.

They think I'm a paid analyst and I have influence.

I don't.

So I get people who call, I won't mention names, but they'll say, hey, Victor, I got a great best-selling book.

I need the private number of this booker.

I can't do that.

So I said, just do what I did.

They'll call you.

So you don't, and they get a lot of calls.

Oh, and the final thing is I don't get angry.

So

by that, I mean not, I always say to myself, if you're on there with somebody who attacks you, Geraldo, I've been on there, has attacked me, for example.

I don't get angry.

I try not to.

And then by getting angry, I also mean that they don't know what the news cycle is.

So they can call you up and say, hey, Victor, it's on a Monday.

Would you come on this show on Wednesday?

So you set your whole schedule, right?

You don't go to lunch with somebody or you're driving to work and you have to leave two hours earlier because you're going to be driving home or something.

And then you go out there, you know, and you sit there and you're just about ready to go.

And somebody says,

we have to cut to Joe Biden's news conference.

Right.

Or it's important.

And then you say, okay, but we'll get you in.

But they don't know.

They can't tell how long Joe's going to talk about himself.

So at the end, you sat there.

As long as it takes the ice cream cone to melt.

Yeah, you sat there for 50 minutes, right?

Right.

Well, what you don't do is call him up and say, listen, I'm Mr.

Important.

Right.

How dare you made me?

And then you cancel.

You don't do that.

I just don't think you do.

It's not polite.

And that's part of the

hazard or

part of the package.

So that's happened to me a lot, but I never get angry about it because I usually bring stuff to read.

Well, I don't think you get angry about anything, Victor.

I know we've, we've had some contentious conversations over the last 20 years, but I can say with all honesty, I've never, ever heard you be angry.

And I can't imagine you go angry.

I tried it.

I'm afraid.

I'm afraid of that.

I do have to.

Maybe do a B or

I keep it.

I've had a couple of things, but it doesn't do any good when you see somebody who's yelling at you or saying how much they dislike you

or

why you should be fired.

And I've had all of that happen.

I just say, you know what?

If that's the way it is, basically F you in a polite voice.

I can't help you.

I'm out.

Buys.

And I'm done.

And then if the person calls up a week later and says, I lost my temper, I always say, it's no problem.

I have no grudge, but I don't go back.

So that's a bad habit that once that happens, you're kind of, you know, I've had close friends that'll call me up and say,

how dare you vote for Trump?

You should be ashamed of yourself.

I said, well, I'm sorry you feel that way.

Oh, man, you just, that is just, that just tells me who you are.

I said, okay.

And then

three years later, hey, I got this book coming out.

I'll give you a choice.

Can you either review it or blurb it?

Which is it?

And I said, you know, I just don't think I'm going to be able to help you.

So that's what people do.

It doesn't do any good to get mad is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, don't ever put me on

your blank list.

No, I'm very.

Anyway,

that's my relation with Fox.

It's kind of

what it is.

It's ad hoc on a daily basis.

I think it comes to that.

I like going on.

I think it's good to try to connect with the public.

And I think the public understands if you go on there and you don't yell, right?

You don't kind of scream and you don't try to interrupt to get more time for yourself.

You don't interrupt the host.

You don't interrupt the other guest

and you try to explain.

I mean, you can't drone.

You got to kind of click.

And sometimes you don't know what they're going to ask or you don't even know the topic.

But if you just try to

empathize with one point of view, I am now a watcher and I am watching myself on there.

And would you be repulsed or would you be angry or would you think it was okay?

That's what I always try to think.

How would people like to be treated if they were watching you?

And so you try to, that's what I do.

I try to always think of an issue in terms of how it affects people who are on a tractor or driving a truck or hammering nails, that issue.

And if you have that view of theirs and you feel you can connect with them, even though, and sometimes people come up and say that to you, but sometimes they don't.

Like if you're at Reagan Airport, a guy walks by and he flips your

hat off, knocks your hat off, and he says, F you,

asshole.

And he's dressed like Antifa person, all black and stuff.

Don't worry.

God will take care of him.

Hey, Victor, we've gone up.

There we go.

Let me just thank our listeners.

And of course, hey, if you go on, if you listen through Apple iTunes, you can rate the show zero to five stars.

And practically everyone leaves five stars.

And thank you to those who do rate the show, take the time and effort to do that, and those who actually

write comments that we do read.

And here's one of them.

And it's titled, Thank You, Victor.

Thank you, Victor, for keen insight and your courageous declaration of the truth.

I'm so glad you are recovering from your frightening encounter with the Wasp B.

As a relatively new listener, I would thoroughly enjoy a segment devoted to the history of the climate change agenda.

Just as when you interviewed Dr.

Kui about COVID-19, a similar type of segment

is very much needed.

Yeah, we're going to, we have Jan Lomberg at Hoover.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, really?

And I think we're going to hire a very, very well-known climatologist expert on global warming.

I won't mention his name because that's not final, but I think I'll try it out.

Yeah,

he's great.

I saw him a couple of weeks ago at the National Review Institute Summit.

Yeah, he's very, really.

I think he's got a new book out, too.

But we should look into that.

Well, that's from NCN

NC, excuse me,

NC Neo Doc.

I think that's probably North Carolina.

Thank you, NC Neo Doc.

Thank you, Victor, for

everything you shared today.

And thanks, folks, for listening.

We will be back

soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Have a good day.

Thanks for listening, everybody.