Fallout from Our Two Systems of Justice

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, the star, and namesake is Victor Davis Hanson, and he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Two websites to tell you about.

One is VictorHanson.com.

Its name is the Blade of Perseus, but that's the web address.

You need to go there

regularly someday, Victor.

I will learn how to pronounce that word.

Someday.

But you need to go there regularly.

And I'll tell you more why later.

And also, justthenews.com.

That is John Solomon's website.

And this podcast finds its happy home there.

Lots, lots, lots to talk about today.

I believe this program is going to be uh up and out on the on the webs, world wide webs on Tuesday, April 4th.

And that is the day when former President Donald Trump is scheduled to be indicted in New York.

And we will get Victor's thoughts on that and plenty more right after these important messages.

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Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So, Victor, I'm going to read a little something here.

The Trump indictment, we have multiple counts, reportedly near three dozen.

We have head fakes from the Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg,

who said that the grand jury was in recess for a week while he was really, what was really happening was he was prepping charges on business fraud against the former president.

The New York City surrender of Donald Trump has been coordinated between Bragg's office and Trump's counsel.

The surrender is scheduled for Tuesday the 4th.

Donald Trump may end up at the notorious Rikers Island in New York City, a hellhole.

I think

April 4th may be a day that will go down in jurisprudential infamy.

Victor,

let's leave aside the

talk of this has hurt or helped Donald Trump as a 2024 candidate.

I think that's, for the moment, a superfluous topic.

What does this massive carpet bombing, criminal indictment by Alvin Bragg and Hatton DA against Donald Trump mean about the state of America?

Well, I don't recognize the country anymore because there's two systems of justice.

If you take documents out and you're a vice president and you don't have any legal authority to declassify them, and then you spread them through unsecured locations, that's tolerable.

If you do it while you're president, and you have the ability to declassify them almost by fiat, then you're under and you're going to be the subject of a a special counsel investigation.

So what I'm saying, Jack, is this.

What did Donald Trump not do?

I'll tell you what he did not do.

He didn't destroy 30,000 emails that were under a federal subpoena, as Hillary Clinton did.

He didn't take devices that were on a federal subpoena and destroy their hard drives and wipe them clean and then joke about it.

He didn't marry

his sister so he could become a U.S.

citizen in a fake bigamy case and to warp or evade U.S.

immigration law like Ilion Olmar did.

He didn't take all of his devices that were in his possession and were under federal subpoena and wipe them clean as the lawyers in the Mueller investigation did.

He didn't lie under oath in front of the Senate, flat out lied like James Clapper, and then when he was called on it, he said, I gave the least untruthful answer.

He didn't flat out lie like John Brennan did on two occasions when he was asked about whether he had spied illegally on Senate staff computers or whether he

could

confirm there was no collateral damage on drone assassinations.

He didn't do that.

He didn't

doctor a document for a FISA court, forge it, alter it, and then get a slap on the wrist like Kevin Klein Smith.

He didn't do that.

He didn't, in the 2016 election, hire a foreign national to work for him and pay that foreign national, which is illegal to do on a campaign through three paywalls, as Hillary Clinton did.

He didn't testify before Congress and on 245 occasions say that he could not remember or he didn't know anything about it as James Comey did.

He didn't go under congressional testimony as Robert Mueller did.

And the central question, if they asked Donald Trump,

what do you know about this disclosure?

And he says, I didn't know anything about it.

I wasn't concerned with it.

Nothing, like Robert Mueller did with the dossier and fusion GPS.

He didn't do that.

And he didn't do what John Kerry did

when Trump was president, that is, go to Paris and talk to the Iranians about ways to subvert getting the Trump policy on Iran, violation of the so-called Logan Act.

He didn't do that either.

So my point, I can go on forever, but what I don't understand is

what the Democrats are doing now is they know,

they know, they know, they know they cannot appeal to 51% of the population on almost every issue that they are pushing.

An open border,

radical cutbacks in fossil fuel energy, natural gas,

gas, oil,

the Afghanistan policy, the unlimited blank check to Ukraine, the embrace of critical race theory,

radical identity politics.

the big city DAs that are letting people out for crime.

Donald Trump didn't go hit somebody over with on the head with an axe and get it reduced to a misdemeanor.

He didn't do any of that.

So they know they can't appeal to people on the issues.

So they go to process,

process, process, process.

Sometimes that's existential.

Depending on whether they're in power or not in the Senate, they are either for or against the filibuster.

If they win the Electoral College, they call it the Blue Wall and they love it.

If the Blue Wall crumbles, then it's a racist relic from the ancient white man constitution.

If

they

need more senators, then they want Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.

to be states.

If they want, they get angry that some states have a voter ID in the way you need one to cash a check, then they want a national voter ID law that circumvents the Constitution's assignment of primary responsibility to the states for that.

If they have the Warren Court, they don't want to tamper with nine justices.

If they don't, and you have a conservative majority, then that is a racist court and they want to outdo FDR's 1937 court packing, and court packing then becomes good.

And so that's what they do.

And what they've hit on something, Jack, I think our listeners should realize.

This country is run financially and politically, unfortunately,

between your city, Jack, New York, and Washington, D.C.

And that a seller corridor.

That's where all the power of governance and finance is.

It's also the most liberal place in the United States.

And it has the most, I would call, politicized, weaponized federal and state and local attorneys.

And it has the most quote-unquote marginalized populations that are on juries.

So, what they do is, the DAs do, they go after prominent people on the right.

And they do it in Chicago too, as we saw with Conrad Black.

And they do the Conrad Black formula.

They just get all sorts of writs for their indictments.

They just throw this

sink at people.

And then they make the defendant get each one dismissed.

Meanwhile, they're cherry-picking a favorite friend, judge, that that they know socially or they know politically or they're in cahoots with.

And then they make sure they get it.

We saw that with the Scooter Libby debacle.

Or Elliot Abrams.

Elliot Abrams, you name it.

And then they get the marginalized people, jury, and then they appeal

that the person is a racist or he's conservative or he's, and they convict them.

And that's how they've, that's called welfare.

And that's what they do.

And that's what they're going to do for Trump.

I have no doubt they're going to convict him.

I think they're going to throw writ after writ after writ.

He's going to be tied up in court.

And then they're going to put him before a Bronx or, I don't know,

maybe a Manhattan.

Movie Manhattan.

Yeah, you know, what, above 121st Street or something.

And they're going to put them in there and they're going to wink and nod that this guy is a white supremacist and he hates you.

And they're going to get him convicted.

Right.

And then,

because we're not, we'll get into the politics of it, but as you said, the delay of a second, but then we're in interesting historical territory.

Because what this will do is, this is going to send a message to the Republicans.

They always play by the Marcus of Queensbury rules, and it's never tit for tat.

We're Nobler, we're Mitt Romney, we're John McCain, we're Jerry Ford,

we're Bob Dole.

We don't do that.

And over the years, that has been suicidal.

So, what they're going to do is, and we saw that when Kevin McCarthy finally wised up and he said, you know what?

If Nancy Pelosi says that my nominees for committee members as the House Minority Leader are taboo, then they're taboo.

And he kicked Adam Schiff off.

And if they're going to either mock a president by tearing up the State of the Union on TV, maybe they should do it.

If they're going to say that we need to get the filibuster out when they're in the majority maybe when the republicans are doing it they should do that and so they're going to have to go tit for tat and what that means is it's a destruction if they have to do that it's really

destruction of jurisprudence and politics as we know it because you see what's going on is the democrats have this this

brilliant strategy is it goes like this we are screwing up the united states we are deliberately warping and sabotaging 233 years of jurisprudence and constitutional protocol.

And we can do this because you don't.

And there's enough of you law-abiding citizens to keep the country going.

You're the guys that frack.

You're the guys that mine.

You're the guys that farm.

You're the guys that build.

We regulate, torment, and go after you, but we count on you doing that.

And you will obey the law so you can allow us to warp it.

and if the republicans ever retaliate then the country's going to go to hell and they know that so we are defenseless because we love the country and want it to secede and they have a free reign to abuse it because if we if that's not true and we retaliate

can you imagine what what would happen with joe biden he any anytime They would go through that Hunter laptop.

They would go through every subpoena document and anything remotely that took place, one gift, one meeting in Mississippi, Alabama, Wyoming, Utah, any conservative state, a local, I don't know,

Salt Lake City DA or a state attorney general in Alabama or you name it.

Right.

They would just, North Dakota, they would, they would indict Joe Biden.

Right.

And go after him, just like they do in a third world country, just like they do in Brazil or Argentina or anywhere else.

And now they're crowing and they're thinking this is so great because they finally got Donald Trump.

And you know, there has been communication between Mr.

Bragg,

the federal attorneys in the District of New York,

Democratic Party, probably the White House, because he wouldn't dare do this if he wasn't given the green light.

And we know what the strategy is.

The strategy is to fatally weaken Donald Trump, at the same time, winning him enormous popularity.

He's already running ads against DeSantis almost every night on Fox News.

Trump is.

He's raised $4 million.

Everybody's pissed off, and they should be.

Excuse the language about the treatment of Donald Trump.

I think the Democratic rationale, and this is not unique, everybody's, it's obvious, was to make sure that Donald Trump, A, is nominated and B, is so tied up the moment he is indicted at this indictment, if this was the weakest indictment of all three of them, the Mar-Lago special prosecutor is much more accomplished than this buffoon.

And he's much more political even.

And he will find a way, I think, to indict Donald Trump, although he'll look really ridiculous now.

He's going to look ridiculous either way.

If he doesn't indict Trump,

people are going to say, You met Bragg upstage you, this buffoon, and you're a special prosecutor.

So, but if he does indict him, they're going to say, Well, how about Mike Pence and how about Biden?

And then we have the Georgia ridiculous grand jury with that ninkum poop, ignoramous woman that went all through the media bragging about how biased she was.

And they, I think, will indict him.

And the rationale, the agenda, the strategy will be

for all of 2023,

all of 2024 up to the convention, he will be in the news every single day with a negative story.

He will be fighting for his life and he will be the candidate.

And then he will lose to

non-compost Joe Biden by three or four points.

That's what they want.

That's the strategy.

By the way, Victor, there are two other cases, too.

There's the Eugene Carroll's rape allegation.

That is supposed to take place

later in this month.

And then the New York Attorney General's tax fraud suit against Trump.

So there's a condalign here.

I can't believe it.

There's a story out today about the University of Delaware

Biden think tank that got $6.7 million

into that

kiddie, and they had $12 million from OIST.

From China?

Yes.

Yes, 6.7 from China.

And then Joe Biden has never reported any income

on that fund, although his entire family made a bundle.

And there's all these emails warning the family that you have to at least have some kind of symposium.

You can't just use it all for self.

So basically, a

money laundering deal where University of Delaware came to Biden and said, raise us a bunch of money.

And if you do, we'll give you some for this phony Biden center, which has never, I have, there's no record that it's ever done anything.

And using non-profit status to do it.

If you had a federal prosecutor who could subpoena

every Biden member's tax records and you could subpoena all the bank records of this money flowing in that was probably not

forget about the cash payment, all the money, and you collated them, you would find that that Biden family has enormous tax exposure.

Why this guy's been going around the country as president, lecturing us on every wealthy should pay their fair share, and they won't do it.

They will not do it.

And so,

you know,

it just, it's just overwhelming.

I was watching the,

you know, I wrote a column about left-wing violent sheep.

about how they love to think about killing, beating, burning, decapitating Trump, beating him up.

Corey Booker said that.

Robert De Niro said that.

Joe Biden.

Jane Fonda said on the news that she thought murder was kind of the appropriate penalty for pro-lifers.

We had that crazy professor at Wayne State said he wanted to kill people.

We had the transgender manifesto that suppressed and blamed the victims, the Christian nine-year-olds that were killed, all of that.

And then we had somebody go go into the Texas legislature.

But when I filed the column, I didn't realize what was going on in Tennessee.

That came out the next day.

So the left basically says, we're going to use violence to get our way, and we're not going to be prosecuted.

None of the kids at Stanford Law School

were ever kicked out or disciplined.

Video is still not released, right?

The school's still suppressing the video?

Oh, yes, yes.

And everybody on the right is is very naive

i have no problem with dean martinez i read that long long

long letter she wrote on the one hand on the other hand we're going to do this but we have to be careful not to do this yes but maybe so so kind of sort of okay

Never once in there did she have a reasoned legal argument by saying that this is

she did, if you decipher that document, she said you did filter out a

there is a campus policy that forbids disruption of invited speakers b

they

disrupted the speech c

we the dean uh enabled that and then little footnotes to each of those but We don't know really who instigated it.

And B, maybe they thought the dean was right.

All these excuses that would never hold up in a court of law.

So Victor goes down the road and gets drunk and runs off somebody off the road and kills them.

And he's guilty of drunk, fatal drunk driving.

And he says,

but

I wasn't aware of the law.

Or

I had an official that I saw commercial and he said that, you know, be careful about DUI, but he never said it was an offense.

It's just crazy, all the little exceptions, maybes,

excuses that she used for the fundamental truth that they broke the law

as it's described by Stanford.

And so did the administrator.

She did too, Ms.

Steinbach.

She should have been fired and the video should have been released and they should have identified those students and they should have been expelled.

And then you would never have another demonstration.

I know those, I know the Stanford, I went there, I'm on campus there, I understand the Stanford mentality, and everybody should know what it is.

These kids,

both the marginalized kids that are there and the so-called wealthy elite kids that are there, they are the most

sanctimonious, elite, career-driven, self-infatuated people in the world.

Don't believe that they're nihilist revolutionaries.

They're not.

Every one of those people you see with pink hair and a ring in their nose in those videos, they're going to be a federal judge or a corporate lawyer in 10 years.

These are absolutely, these are the, you know, these are the people who worked for Obama in their 40s.

And if you expel them from Stanford Law School, or they, or they are deemed unqualified by the bar to take the test, they're going to have a meltdown.

And you could really see that with the FBI lawyer that forged a document who should be in prison.

And the whole left-wing legal community came out in support of client he's a great guy he didn't mean it he was a little zealous let's give him a one felony count and then we'll just kind of give him a 30 day this and now we'll let him go come back and be a lawyer which he is today

so

that's the thing that really got me about this loss case and and i don't know the summation of all this is when you have two sets of jurisprudence two sets of laws and there's so ace what do you do?

Because as I said at the beginning of this rant, if one side

expects

one side to be the parent and they're going to be the whiny teenager,

then the parent has no choice.

When your kid keeps yelling at you and saying this and that, yeah, I'm not going to do this.

I'm going to run away.

I'm going to spend this.

I'm going to have the credit card.

And you say, well, I'll do the same thing.

And then maybe you won't eat.

You know, if a parent says to a 15-year-old, you took my credit card and

you went down and splurged for $1,000.

I don't have that money.

So you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to splurge more and then they're going to cancel it and you're not going to eat.

But parents don't do that.

Right.

And so Republicans are kind of the parent.

The conservatives are.

These guys are afraid of tough love.

Yeah.

And I don't know.

Tough love for America.

How do you, how far do you go with tough love before you blow up everything?

Right, Devicta, because if some, as you were saying before, if some prosecutor in Wyoming filed Erico charges against the Biden Corley own family, I think

we would think, well, that's just something improper about that.

Remember when Tom DeLay was

harassed, this, you know, those

predecessors to what's happening, this, this hell-bent Texas DA

trying to ruin his career, we were aghast at that, rightly so.

I think the only hope, just to be on record, the only hope for this country

is

that every traditionalist, conservative Democrat, moderate Democrat, independent, any Republican says,

I have a problem with this or that issue, but this country is in danger.

And we have to get rid of these people out of the House.

and out of the Senate and out of the presidency.

And then if you were to do that, then you're going to have to put enormous pressure.

And they would have to say to the president, you're going to finish that blank, blank wall.

And then you're going to deport all the people, the 7 million people who came in illegally.

They're going to be deported.

Mr.

Oberdar is not going to give you any more lectures about how wonderful 40 million people came in the United States illegally, basically, and how they should vote a particular way.

He will be quiet when you send 7 million people back to him.

And then you're going to put the cartels on a terrorist list.

And then you're going to tax remittances at 10%

and make $6 billion off the 60 billion that flows out.

And then you're going to have to have the Supreme Court, you have to hope, if they declare affirmative action on, you're going to have to really go after people that break the law because you know what they're going to do, Jack.

They're going to try to circumvent that as they do now in California, where it's against the law.

But my point is on crime, on gas, and every, they're going to have to go the full max.

And then, because you know what will be if they were to do that?

You could could turn this country around very quickly.

And what would happen is people who were so vehement

would see that life got better.

In California, gas would get cheaper, electricity would be affordable, and things would start to work again.

And people would say, well, I don't like those guys, but I'm not going to vote against them because the world is returning to normality.

But this stuff is unsustainable on every level.

Banks going under or no border or crime.

It's just unsustainable.

Victor, back on the jurisprudence and Trump, we have

the former speaker, Nancy Pelosi,

twisting the meeting, like going to court is an opportunity to prove your innocence.

She tweeted about that.

And it's kind of,

well, I don't,

the left has no problem standing things on their head, right?

I mean, Martin Luther King about content of character in the garbage can.

Imagine how

liberals might analyze, say,

To Kill a Mockingbird,

Equal Justice Before the Law, a great movie, but a kind of a liberal cultural point, which I think they would reject now, given what's just happened to Trump.

right?

Yeah, you would like to say that Nancy Pelosi at 81 is non-complos mentis like Biden.

She's not.

She's always been stupid.

So when she says he has to prove his innocence, she's a speech.

She was the speaker of the House.

She's the most prominent Democrat in the House, maybe in the country.

And so if she doesn't understand that you are innocent until they prove you guilty rather than Biden, then she doesn't know anything about the country.

This is a woman who said,

why are you sending people to cities that are here illegally when we need them up here to pick our fruit?

Right?

This is a woman who gave us lecture after lecture after lecture about Trump's terrible policies, and we had to have a complete shakedown and snuck into her hairdresser and got caught on camera.

You know, this is the person who is a very

dangerous person.

And she's, and every time she opens her mouth, she says something like this.

It's really scary.

And when you look at Hillary Clinton and you look at Nancy Pelosi and you look at Joe Biden,

and it's, it's, it's, it's.

geriatric nightmare.

Well, it's reflected in these polls.

When you look at this Wall Street Journal poll and when they ask these key questions,

is America a singular, exceptional country?

Do you feel any patriotism?

Do you feel that children is or child raising is important?

Do you have a

religiosity?

It was just night and day with the people who identified as Republican versus Democrat.

And you can see that these people are the representations.

Sammy keeps saying on our podcast

that,

yes, the leaders reflect the people.

So when I've said to her off the air,

wow, these people are really bad, she'll say, well, who voted for them?

They are not stupid.

They voted for them for certain reasons.

And what would those reasons be?

I guess that the primary reason is that they're either A, very wealthy, so that these injurious policies will not affect them negatively, or B,

they want something for free.

And so we got this scene this week, Jack, when they, I don't know if you saw it at San Francisco, the filming of that reparations hearing.

Did you see those people come in there and lose their temper and scream and dance?

And they said basically

five million is not enough.

California wants to change the grid to basically all solar with batteries.

And we have the highest electricity in the country and we have the highest poverty rate.

But they don't care about the poor.

They want to keep going.

But they said it would be $41

billion to finish this solar wacky project.

And we're going to be about $40 billion when this...

deficit is finally seen this year that we have to come up with.

And how could you even contemplate 300 billion dollars they're still going through this charade if they were to do that i'm almost hoping they do in san francisco because the the tax would be so enormous and people would flee that city they'd have to they couldn't they couldn't survive it financially and that would really send a message and i don't know it's it's this is someone yeah someone wrote it was here's the game plan to ruin california we're in you know it's it's well into the third act.

I have to apologize to my audience.

I don't want to be so dreary because Sammy and I had a new little,

at the beginning of every podcast, she asked me to have good news, but I'm writing a chapter right now on May 29th,

10 in the morning, Black Tuesday, 1453, when the walls of Constantinople were breached.

And what I'm getting at is that great city of a million people that was the bastion of Christendom in the east

was the

custodian of romanity for 1100 years when they went through those walls there was only 50 000 people left in that city there were vast

swaths of weeds and gravel and some little villages that once was packed with a million people 50 000 they had all left Either they couldn't get security or they were afraid of disease or they were afraid of the Ottomans, but they they left, or they thought that the government was corrupt.

And that's

when I, when you read these primary sources from contemporaries that try to explain it, it's very eerie.

It's so close to what you're seeing in Portland and Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington.

All those great cities that generation and generation sacrificed to build, they are being destroyed at

light speed, speed of light.

We have Detroit as the great example.

You know, it was the, it was the runner-up for the 1968 Olympics, which I think was probably chosen and say

after World War II in 1946, it had the highest GDP of any city in the United States.

It was like 6%.

The auto industry was supplying the world.

They had the best architects.

They had everything.

They had the best opera,

everything.

And I got in trouble in a review because I said

in an essay or actually a book, I said,

if you looked at Hiroshima in 1945

and you looked at Detroit in 1945

and then you looked at each city

in 2010,

you would think that Detroit got nuked and that Hiroshima was Detroit.

They switched.

Today, Detroit looks like Hiroshima did in 1945, and Hiroshima looks like Detroit did in 1945.

And the only difference is,

we did it to ourselves.

So whatever the programs or the policies that destroyed Detroit, they were more injurious than a nuclear bomb because we bombed Hiroshima and it recovered, but Detroit never recovered from this government bomb.

It never did.

It's much more insidious and dangerous what they did in Detroit and what they're doing everywhere.

And I've never seen that level of hatred on the left.

If you look at, I used to,

you know, I'll give you one example.

About eight or nine years ago, somebody sent me a clip from Joe Scarborough,

and somebody on there attacked me.

And I won't say who it was.

He's a creepy guy.

And Joe will.

Go ahead, say it

yeah i i've already and then joe scarborough says something like wow that's kind of weird to go after him like that and i turned i mean in other words he was

left-wing you know his very his i think he's influenced by his romantic liaisons of the moment and that affects his politics but he's but he's now so hard left And I watched him just screaming and yelling the other day.

And then

I was just, I thought, I want to just spend a morning while I'm writing.

So while I was typing, I turned on the news and I flipped it and I saw that view.

That is just full of hatred.

All they talk about, and they have these names, you know, whoopee, joy.

They're not joyful, whoopie people.

Man, it was all about white.

White, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white.

I've never seen anything in a country.

so different now that we just take one group.

And when when you say white, it's always in a negative context.

And it's always a collective as if everybody, as if I have anything in common or you do with Nancy Pelosi, right?

And it doesn't make any sense, but it's just full of hatred.

Well, look at Victor, look at the late night, right?

Once upon a time, which Johnny Carson and

knockoffs on other networks, but

something anyone and everyone could watch and not feel attacked by or threatened by.

And they were certainly not

the Johnny Carson show wasn't a political show, but every one of those shows now is.

It's a show of the left and they just spew hatred at people like you and me.

No, they hate it.

I think everybody should realize it's listening.

I came to the conclusion that the left

hates you.

They hate you.

And I can feel it when I go places and people want to argue or I look at my email.

I get,

even I can feel it in my former circle of friends.

I'd say that

in the last,

since 2015 or 2016, I would say, or maybe when I wrote that book, The Case for Trump,

and actually, the original title was Why Trump Won.

The publisher changed it.

But my point is: this:

I would say the number of people that I used to be very close friends with, I mean, really close, like my inner circle of 20 best friends,

15 are gone

and family and friends.

And yes, and I can say in every single case,

they initiated it.

In other words, they wrote me something to the effect of, don't call me again.

This, for you to win back our friendship, you should do this.

Yeah.

They've declared an anathema against me.

Yes, I can't believe you did this.

You're a big disappointment to me.

Or they've reviewed my books, people who were my former editors.

It's amazing.

But I haven't done that to anybody on the left that I know.

And I still that

hates, let's say they hate Trump, they hate Republicans, they flip down.

I still haven't cut them all.

Well,

if I may,

yeah, if I may, you mentioned Joe Scarborough before, and you know that

our listeners don't care about my life, but Joe's a very good friend of mine and has been for a long time.

Just dating back through National Review things.

And

yeah, I agree.

Joe's gone quite a different man today than he was 10 years ago.

But my mindset is, I think, a conservative mindset.

I don't abandon my friends, you know, but the left abandons their friends.

Politics becomes everything with them.

Everything.

It absorbs them.

And I feel really bad.

I mean,

if I were to say,

who are the closest people in your family and who are the closest people in your circle of friends, I would say I could name 15 names.

And I can tell you that in different methods or manners,

each one of them has

communicated to me they want nothing to do with me.

Yeah.

Well, I bet a lot of people listening to this right now, Victor, are shaking their heads and saying amen, because they've gone through the same experiences.

And it's

shameful what America has become in this way.

And you're right.

I went to a funeral

transition.

I went to a funeral

of a dear first cousin,

very close to him.

I really admire him, Mark Henry.

He's a wonderful person.

And I would say that I saw people, relatives and friends that I hadn't seen in a while.

And then I saw people I didn't know.

And the people I did know were very friendly.

They either watched Fox or something they wanted to talk about.

But the other people just, it was very cold.

It was weird.

They didn't want, they just kept away.

Like, what are you doing here?

And Mark was very conservative.

He was a wonderful person.

Not because he was just conservative, he just was.

But

my point is this: at a solemn occasion,

when it's a funeral, you're trying to jointly honor somebody's life and lament their passing.

Why would people

come into a church, Catholic church, and why

would they have that venom and not release it and give you a dirty look or turn away when you say hello?

I don't understand that.

This is the fundamental at the core of, say, BLM.

And, well, let's just pick on BLM.

The concept of forgiveness.

This is why I can't stand what Christian churches or Catholic churches have these BLM placards out in front of it because

Christianity is about forgiveness.

There's no salvation without forgiveness.

But BLM is totally and hates forgiveness.

Forgiveness is impossible under its under its own.

Although I think you give BLM too much credit.

I don't even think they think.

I think it's just a total shakedown mafiosa organization.

Remember how BLM started?

The Troika were three angry black women who were lesbians.

And at start, you start, I wrote an article for the new criterion.

People should look at it.

I researched it very carefully.

They started out before the Ferguson phenomenon as objectifying, talking about being objectified by black men and the black super masculine credo.

It wasn't necessarily just race.

It was anti-male.

And then when Ferguson happened, Michael Ford, they transmogrified to an umbrella organization.

But it was always financial

from the very beginning, there were financial irregularities.

So when I heard that these corporations like the Silicon Valley Bank that went bankrupt was taking depositors' money and giving them $76 million,

and that three of them absconded with all these big, beautiful homes and money, I wasn't surprised.

That was the purpose of it.

It was kind of like a

warped version of GoFundMe.

You know what I mean?

Right, right.

That's really annoying.

We're paying 0% interest, but we're giving our profits to these radicals.

This is sickening.

Hey, Verica,

we've got to talk about another topic or two.

So

I think one of them.

We all take a break, too, right?

Well, that's why, yeah, we're going to talk about hard work, some stuff you've written,

and we'll get to that right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

There is a website.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

It's known as the Blade of Perseus, and that is Victor's official home on the World Wide Webs.

You should visit it because you'll find the links to everything.

Victor does, writes, his appearances.

You'll also find the links to his ultra articles.

Those are significant.

And we're going to talk about a new series that you've started, Victor.

But you can only read them if you subscribe.

Subscription is five bucks to get in the door.

You can pay five bucks a month as you go along, but discounted for $50 a year.

If you are a fan of Victor's wisdom, it comes orally and it comes through the keyboard.

And you need to subscribe to VictorHanson.com to see, to get all the wisdom Victor

dispels over a year.

Is dispel the right word?

Dispenses, I think that's the right word.

So

anyway, there's that.

Please check it out.

Victor,

one of the series that you've written now is about hard work.

And I'd like to proceed

with

a little something, get your comment on it, and then we can talk about the ongoing series.

I was at the, this past weekend, or excuse me, this past couple of days, I was down in Washington.

There was a National Review Institute at a summit, and I, you know, I'm still contributing editors to National Review.

So I went, and there was an interesting conversation

between Rich Lowry, the editor, and Alan Guelzo, who's the, you know, the great historian.

I know you know, Professor Guelzo.

He's at the James Madison Center at Princeton.

And he

won the prize.

Yeah, I just reviewed his Robert E.

Lee book for the Claremont Review.

It was a very good book.

Oh, terrific.

Okay.

That's a great publication, by the way.

Folks should, everyone should subscribe to that.

Anyway, they were just talking about

what are America's strengths, its inherent strength.

And of course, they got to talking about World War II

and how

once

war comes upon us, now America must get into this mode of becoming the arsenal of democracy.

And the initial time it took for building destroyers and aircraft carriers, et cetera, I may have misheard, but let's just say it's a year.

And within a few years, two years or so, they are down to 90 days, maybe even less to construct these liberty ships.

And one of the points was that it was the...

It wasn't the

designers of the ship, et cetera, who made this important

collapsing of the process, which was important to winning the war.

You know, it's the speed of America producing all this stuff.

It was the men and women, well, I'll say mostly men, you did have Rosie the Riveter, but the men and women who were working who understood what they were doing, found the shortcuts, who influenced the processes and said, this is what America really is, this kind of democracy of the hardworking individual.

And I thought, well, that's, you know, that's Guels' point.

That is a really interesting point.

This is really the heart of America.

So

now,

switching a little, you started this series about

the greatness of people who work hard and how they define America.

So Victor, there's a big jump ball here.

Anything back, talk about the series you've written.

If you want to go back and as one of the great World War II historians comment on that,

please do what you wish.

Well, I mean,

Henry Kaiser, just as an experiment, wanted to see if he could, you know, 7,500-ton Liberty ship,

if they could build it in 24 hours, and they did.

But usually they could do it in three days, finally.

And then they went into the freedom ships, were even bigger.

So it was,

but you got to remember that generation.

It was very different than this generation.

That generation came out of the depression.

I can remember my father saying to me, he said, wow, dad, when they.

I was in high school.

And I said, so they

put you in a dorm with a bunch of people and then you had to eat all these food.

He said, what do you mean?

I lived in a shack next to the barn.

We had a two-bedroom house and my sister had one bedroom and my parents had the other.

And it was 900 square feet and we thought we were in heaven, but I wanted my own room so that I built a little shack under the barn.

I had an outhouse and cold water.

And that's how I grew up.

So

when I went into the Army, they had clean sheets and they had good food and they had clean uniforms and we had, it was wonderful.

And I said, yeah, but all that training you had to do.

And he was in the Marine Corps, then they transferred him to the B-29s.

And he said, that was nothing compared to what my father, we had to get up at 4.30 in the morning and milk the cows and then we broke horses during the day.

when he was when i got home from school then we butchered pigs to eat he said this was and that that was that whole generation.

It was,

they were capable of anything because they had nothing, and uh,

they were highly

unified and they were patriotic.

And you know, every once in a while, you get a revision.

When I wrote the World, uh, Second World Wars, I read thousands of pages on World War II, and I had my entire life, but there's a lot of revisionism: the United States is this, was that

it's not true.

That generation was the greatest generation, and it was partly partly this idea of

duty and unity, but also hard work.

I wrote this first thing on hard work.

It was a series.

And then I looked at, I won't mention the author, but there was a weird,

I'd already written the first one, and then I thought, I'll just write one.

But then there was this article where I write called How Hard Work Destroys Character by an author who I admire.

He writes good stuff.

And it was all about the crap jobs he had and how that wasted his precious time.

And he was never the, you know what I mean?

Oh, gosh.

And I thought, I used to, you know, when I was doing that, I would think I had a professor.

I won't mention his name either.

He was a wonderful professor.

But one day he had us over to his home

and he had bought a beautiful chest of drawers at an antique, you know, dealer.

And we were all there.

And he said, well, what do you look at that?

And it was all scratched up.

It had been a mahogany, but

I don't even think you would have had to sand it.

I think you could have found a varnish in Ongano with it and it would look fine.

But he said, can you imagine how many hours that would take to do that?

I said, oh, about three hours.

He goes, yes, but I would not be doing what I have to do, what I want to do.

And I would never get those hours back.

And I thought, wow, I never thought about that.

I did think of monotony because I can remember when I was six or seven.

And When you plant a vineyard, I wrote about this when I was in my 20s, but I didn't write when I was six or seven.

My grandfather, when I'm looking out the window right now at an almond orchard I have, the vineyard I pulled out was planted in 1959 and I was six and my grandfather was

69.

And he planted it by hand with

another two workers.

And then you put stakes up and those vines just take off in May.

So you about every

two weeks, you have to get twine and tie them up to the stake or they'll break off.

And that becomes the trunk.

And he, we would go through there and I would look at that row, 100 vines, and I would get on my knees and I would tie the thing and tie the thing.

And it would take me a minute.

And I'd think, wow.

And I'd say to my grandfather, well, when do we quit?

When do we quit?

He goes, when we get done with five rows each.

And I said, but we've been here all this time and I'm only halfway with my first row.

And then he just begun and then we would pick up walnuts he had about he came out of the depression so this ranch this farm you know it's mostly sold off i just have 40 acres left but it was at one time this part was 138 acres and he had every uh alleyway lined with walnut trees so they'd have walnuts for the year right right they could live on them and sell them and And, but we had to pick them.

So we had this ancient guy come out and he would shake the walnuts and then he he would send us to pick up the walnuts on the ground.

And it was all fall and winter and our hands were black.

And if you took gloves, you really couldn't find them in the leaves.

So

we'd say, we were like seven, eight, nine, 10.

Go, grandpa, our hands are black.

He said, well, we'd go to school and the teacher goes, what did you do to your hands?

Are you using ink?

Can't you get a ballpoint pin?

And I'd say, no, we were picking walnuts.

She goes, well, wear gloves.

I said, my grandfather doesn't like us to wear gloves.

And the point is, when you're doing that, I would be under a tree and I'd look down the row and there'd be 15 of them.

And I had a little satanic mind and I'd say things to him like, I wouldn't say anything loud, but I said, let me think.

I was about seven and I'd say, grandpa, what time is it?

What time is it?

And before he'd cut me off, he would tell me.

And then I, you know, I had basic math and like an hour per tree.

And then I'd think, oh my gosh, how many hours in a day?

We have 15 more trees.

and there's no way out.

So you get this,

what I'm trying to say is it does about five things for us.

It develops patience.

It develops that the world is not at your beck and call,

that there's certain natural things that have to be done to eat and somebody's going to have to do them.

It gives you enormous empathy.

I remember my mother who grew up here and she was an appellate court judge.

She always went to farmers market in her 60s to peddle fruit with us.

Appellate court judge, second woman in California, because she, it wasn't because she was trying to show off.

She just felt comfortable.

And she always told me when you go somewhere, and those days you remember you, you had to, it was 10 to 15%.

She goes, you always have to tip.

And so bad things, she used to, I said, mom, a lot of these guys are union, but that always sunk into me.

So whenever I go, I always tip 20%.

And the other day, I was at a hotel,

not the other day, about a month ago, and I only had about $4.

And I looked at the thing and I, and I left like $4.

And I think bad things are going to happen to me the whole day.

And you know what?

They did.

They did.

At the airport,

I momentarily lost my license and I had to, it was somewhere in my jacket.

And I thought, oh my God.

And I thought to myself, but God, I tipped the limo driver 20%.

And the guy that got my suitcase at the hotel, I gave him 20%.

But I did that not to virtue signal, because I know what it's like to do physical labor.

And I know the mentality of people who do it.

It's very important that people do it.

And they need to be honored and rewarded, or their whole country won't work.

It was like during the lockdown,

it was weird.

My wife and I were here in the house.

And as soon as they declared the lockdown, it was almost divine nemesis.

The refrigerator went out.

The hot, the dishwater, dishwasher went out, the washer and dryer went out,

and you couldn't go anywhere.

You know, Home Depot was out.

It had taken people a year to get some of that stuff.

So we went on lawing, and we had to pay out through the nose, and you could find it.

But then

the weird thing was right during the quarantine, these guys would come out and they deliver, you know, and they had on these weird things now.

Instead of having clamp trucks, they're the clamp truck.

You know what I mean?

They have these big belts around them.

And then one guy gets on one side and they have an engineer where they lift the whole thing up.

And they would just come right in and they would put it there and this and that.

And I'd say, how many do you have deliveries?

They say, we have 15.

I said, oh, we didn't know anything about COVID then.

It was the first six months.

They said, I don't know if we're going to get it or not.

We can't.

They said, all right, if we don't wear a mask because we're breathing really hard.

And I thought, wow, these guys are keeping the country going for the Zoom class.

So then when you'd give them a tip, 20, you know, if they came in

20 bucks, right?

Yeah, I always give them $20 or $30, depending on how many they were.

And they would get amazed, amazed.

They just didn't.

I ordered a snowblower the other day

because the one I shot a bearing and I need one.

And it came in the mail, and the guy came out that weighed 300 pounds.

And he had to jimmy it off the truck and it was difficult.

I helped him and I gave him $25.

And he said, wow, you don't have to do that.

I said, well, he says, and the thing is that we don't do that enough, I think.

And I don't think these people are making $30, $40, $50 an hour.

So it's very important

to work and understand what it's like when

i don't know i used to think to myself there's no way out of this i'm farming i'm making seven dollars an hour i got three kids of support i'm driving an oliver 1962 tractor

seven hours a day disking disking disking go down the road turn around go back go down the road turn down dust everything monotony mechanical problems i can't get out of this i'm stuck for the rest of my life.

That kind of despair,

you have to understand that people have that and they have to be rewarded or talked to or treated decently.

And you'll never get that empathy unless you do that type of work.

I think it's good to do it.

One of the worst things that happened to me when I had this long COVID is that

For nine months, every time I, you know, I used to chainsaw, I still do, but for about nine months until I got over it, I couldn't do any of it.

And it was like crippling that you couldn't go out and a big branch, I'd try to go out there, and then I would try to chainsaw and get so dizzy.

And I thought, wow,

if a person can't physically take care of themselves, what's the point?

And so it's very important, I think, to continue to have some hand in physical work.

Right.

And I don't mean just exercising or weightlifting or jogging.

It has to be something that

is actually

sweat.

Many of my friends would not know how to turn on a lawnmower.

Never mind, mow the lawn, never mind, use a chainsaw, never mind, you know, build a wall or fix a roof, or et cetera.

So you're right, Vic.

By the way, this series, the two parts, I don't know if you have more in store, but it's titled Hard, Brutal, and Dirty.

I have one is a world to itself.

I have a third one.

Yeah.

A third one is, as I said, I wrote the first two, I think, before this writer did for American Greatness has said it was a waste of time.

And then I thought, I'll reply to that.

So the third one is that's coming out Tuesday is hard work is ennobling and

why it is ennobling.

It's not a waste of time.

I'm not suggesting that you

have to pump out cisfolds, but I've done a lot of that, by the way.

Yeah.

By the way, Victor, the tipping thing, you know, as a young boy, I was a delivery boy on a truck that would go around the Bronx and Yonkers selling vegetables, probably maybe it was even

grapes grown on the Hanson farm, but

and some and some items that fell off the back of trucks, as we used to say.

I mean, there'd be

bananas next to the hot fake furs.

We'd also take

gambling gambling bets too.

Anyway, this is kind of a Damon Runyon type of setup.

But all that said, you know, I got tips for making deliveries, et cetera.

And, you know,

it is a wonderful thing to get a quarter back in 1970.

and appreciation and kindness.

It inspires,

it shows the person there's goodness in the world.

And some of these actual quarter tips I got from

over 50 years ago still matter to me

deeply.

And I encourage people, I've always tipped extremely well.

Not, again, as you said, virtue signaling, but I just think it's the right thing.

You know, that's the one thing I thought

one of the reasons I voted for Trump.

I talked to a guy from New York, I think I've told you that, and I asked him if if he knew Trump, and he said no, but he saw Trump from his tower where he worked, and he had on occasion seen Trump pull out of his limo and with his suit go and talk to people when no one was looking, right,

on his construction sites.

And he said it was generally known that all the construction workers liked him.

And then I talked to a guy, I had to go to Florida and speak, and a guy who knew him very well was telling me in detail that all of of Trump's fallow you know foibles but one thing that he admired was that all the groundskeepers and every he had an affinity with them and that

for all of his elitism and all that you do get the impression that some of the transformation of the Republican party from the Mitt Romney party to a workers nationalist middle class party was due to Trump's ease.

And I know everybody's going to say, Victor, the guy lived in Trump Tower.

I know all that, but I'm just saying that there was some realization on his part that he wouldn't have been where he was unless he had people in the blue-collar class that he treated fairly or at least

he felt comfortable with.

And that's important for everybody to have that empathy.

Right.

You know, it's, and you have to have kind of a good humor about it.

I remember when it seemed like my parents,

they had this old farmhouse, but my mom worked in Fresno.

And every once in a while, every month, they'd have a big party.

I thought it was ridiculous, but they invite people and they'd love to cook steaks and feed them.

It was kind of like a frontier party.

It was just full of food and drinks.

And they had a lot of lawyers would come and farmers.

And almost every time

the cesspool, right, would start to back up.

And we had all these irrigation pipes, cesspoles that my father had made himself.

In those days, you could pump it in a big long pipe out to the vineyard and let it dry.

Crap.

Right now.

From the septic, it's illegal now.

And then you would take the tractor and disc it in.

And we were, and you had all of these old pumps, so you had to prime them and they get in your face and everything.

But this funny thing was, there was an obnoxious judge.

I won't mention his name, he's dead, but he always had a big stogie, right?

Yeah.

And there was a neurotic

woman there, too.

Neurotic or erotic?

Neurotic.

I'm sorry.

Not because she was a woman, but we'd always, so when they left, we had, as soon as they left, fortunately after the party, the whole thing stuffed up.

So we dug two feet of dirt down.

We took these old wooden, it was wood, we should have been steel, but we took the lead off

and then we saw saw all the stuff floating.

And something was in the intake pipe, had clogged it up.

And

so my dad said, Well, there's your problem.

There's seven stogies floating on the top of the crap, and there were about 10 minstrel pads.

Oh, my gosh.

And he said, Victor, you're going to go, first of all, that'll clog up the pump.

So

I went down.

oh gosh yeah and i had a kind of like a pole net and screw you know netted that out and then we primed an old rig stratten pump and pumped it through all these leaky plat uh iron pipes out to the vineyard about 100 yards away and then we got down to the crap and my dad goes now this is called archaeology boys

This cesspole should have a sandy bottom, but it's been stuck up.

It's the septic tank.

So before we get the septic tank, we got to take buckets and dig the crap out and then take a ropes and take it up in your wagon.

And there were tons of stogies.

So my dad goes, well, that was the party three months ago, and that was the party nine months ago.

And I said, Dad, we were in high school a lot.

Mike said, Dad, that's so gross, man.

Why are you doing this to us?

He goes, Where does it go, Victor?

You think these stogies just dissipate and float away

when you tell somebody not to flush a pad?

And do you think everybody listens to you?

Right.

Your father was right.

That sounds very archaeological.

Yeah, and he never got angry either.

He never got angry, just laughed about it.

And he was covered with crap, too.

Oh, my gosh.

And then I thought to myself, when I took over, I did that with my, you know, I had three kids, no money.

And so, when the septic tank in this house,

and then finally, I said,

Why not just call the septic tank person?

Can't you afford it?

It's very expensive now because of all the rules in California, but right.

So, we had these little tanks, and I know this is getting gross to the listeners.

So, when I decided either to abandon this old farmhouse or rebuild it from the ground up, which we did last year, basically wiring, plumbing, insulation,

water, everything, roofing.

I wanted to get, and what I did was instead of just getting a normal septic paint, I got a 2,000-gallon concrete vault.

And then I got 100 feet of leech line.

And the guy goes, but there's only two of you.

This is an industrial.

I said, I don't care.

I want to get the biggest one you've ever had.

I want to get the best leech system.

I want to get a sump pump to pump it out under pressure.

I never want to deal with the rest of my life.

And that's all from that

from 50 years of dealing with that crap.

Well, and by doing this, Victor, you are

giving money to other people who can use it for other purposes.

So,

yes, yes.

Anyway, I don't know how we went from Trump to crap.

It wasn't delivered.

Well,

hey,

we were going to talk about, we're about out of time, folks.

We had some other topics potentially to discuss, but I think, Victor, you've been terrific on these that we have discussed.

As As we do at the end of the,

as we near the end of the show, I'd like to thank our listeners for listening.

Those who listen on iTunes and Apple

podcasts can leave a zero to five star rating, mostly five star.

Thank you very much.

Some leave comments.

We read the comments.

I have a couple here I want to read.

One is not about me, but somebody wrote a comment about me.

It was very nice.

You know who you are.

Thank you very much.

Here are a few.

quick Bubba from Atlanta rights.

It's titled, He's Great.

And it's very simple, Victories.

Fire-spitting classicist.

Sounds like a bumper sticker.

Another one from Anomad2011 titled Excellent.

I love hearing about Rome and the Roman wars, but could Victor recommend books to read on the subject?

We should absolutely.

Go ahead.

If you have a quick one, go ahead, but it might not be a bad topic topic for

when you're away uh walk to talk about some history yeah

i i will do that on the next broadcast with sammy go through the we're remember we started with the persian wars then we did the peloponnesian wars then we did the punic wars then we did the roman civil wars and we're going to talk next time about uh the barbarian so-called that's against the rules to say barbarian but because that's too judgmental but

but i think it's okay because in that case they had blue eyes and blonde hair hair.

Okay.

But so we're going to talk about the Huns and the Vandals and the Oscars.

They don't rate on the intersectionality.

No, they don't.

They're like Vikings or white supremacists, I suppose.

One last one.

This is from World Gone Nuts titled Adoption.

Question Mark, question mark.

I've been listening, watching, and reading Victor for the last two years.

He has enriched my life in so many ways.

Thank you so much.

I would adopt you as my my father if I could.

You are a calming voice in a turbulent world.

Exclamation point.

You know, I just get the sense reading that that that was not meant as a joke, but as a deep level of

wishful sincerity.

So

from World Gone Nuts.

Victor,

I don't think you need to

have any more.

You had three children.

You don't need to have any more.

I hope I was a good father.

I hope I was a good father.

I think every father looks back and thinks that extra task you did for your professional life, you shouldn't have done and spent more time with your kids.

But then on the other hand, you think, well, maybe I made income that helped them.

I don't know.

You try to rationalize as you get near the end of your life.

Every parent does.

I do.

Yeah.

I do.

I don't think any parent ever thinks I spent too much time with my kids.

I also think when you get old, that no parent thinks, oh my God, I had too many kids.

I think every parent thinks, I wish I had had more kids or I wish I had spent more time with my kids.

You know, it's interesting because I have five and my kids are not kids.

They're all adults.

And as I, you know, think back

over the years and when we first were married and we were living in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Sharon and I and two other kids were, they were very little then.

And I think of those memories, but then for some reason, psychologically, the other three children who are not yet born, but they seem to be in the equation somehow or other.

So like a totality

to the family.

I know.

Maybe I need to see a psychiatrist, but I like that feeling.

I think also, because I lost my youngest at 27.

She's a lovely, she was a lovely.

Yeah,

that especially when you have a child you've lost.

And I think in some ways I spent more time with her than my other two, at least.

And I didn't mean to do that.

It's just that she was kind of like a writer and she was interested in politics.

And so she would call me.

But she was kind of a free spirit, very independent.

But

when you lose a child, you feel especially that you didn't spend enough time with them.

Because you can rectify any lapses in their adulthood, at least maybe.

And I think I've done that with, I talk to my two children all the time.

I'm very close with both of them.

But

you brought your daughter, you brought Susan on.

I was an observer, you know, I watched, I see things.

I took her with her.

I took her everywhere with me on my trips, my company that does the trips.

I took her on four of those.

Well, she clearly.

had an affection for you and you it was just it was the noticeable so would I know you're not beating yourself up or anything no I'm not I'm just I'm just thinking I'm just trying to remind the audience that I think they feel the same way, that everybody,

and I just, I'm trying, I'm in that mood because of that poll.

There was such a high number of people who said that having children was not a major

concern of theirs.

And when you, when a society has a 1.6 fertility rate, that's a symptom of widespread malaise, I think, selfishness.

Greatest joy I have is my children.

and

how they love each other and interact now.

And whatever the burdens were of changing diapers are far surpassed.

Well, anyway, Victor,

we have to move on.

We have to actually conclude.

So thank you.

You were really terrific today, as you always are.

Thanks to our listeners for being with us, to our new listeners, especially.

Keep coming back.

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Thanks, Victor.

Thanks, everyone.

We'll be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone.