The People's Republic of Palo Alto

Shopify helps you sell at every stage of your business.

Like that, let's put it online and see what happens stage.

And the site is live.

That we opened a store and need a fast checkout stage.

Thanks.

You're all set.

That count it up and ship it around the globe stage.

This one's going to Thailand.

And that, wait, did we just hit a million orders stage?

Whatever your stage, businesses that grow grow with Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 a month trial at shopify.com slash listen.

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, Victor Davis-Hansen, 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.

I am in

kind of gray and cold Milford, Connecticut.

Victor is on the East Coast too today.

It's rare that we're in the same time zone when

we talk.

Victor, maybe you're lucky you're not back out in California where,

what do they call it now, the Pineapple Express?

I don't know.

I'm trying to find out if I have something.

I'm trying to find out, Jack, if I have a house.

Last time somebody took a picture of it, I couldn't see it.

It's under 20 feet of snow.

Staggering.

So staggering.

I'm just trying to remember if scissor trusses are very strong.

That's what it has on it.

Yeah.

So anyway, today I had to go to the East Coast to speak, and I'm doing complicated mathematical formulas of the weight of Sierra snow per square foot versus what I remember the

roof was gauged at.

Anyway, everybody.

Well,

you're hope St.

Joseph

will be protecting you.

Okay, of the snow.

Well, St.

Joseph, the patron saint of homes.

So, you know, we'll

give him the duty here to take care of your property.

Joseph, okay.

Yeah, Jose.

So anyway,

all that said, Victor, there's so much to talk about.

We're going to start with your home turf.

By the way, if I had to title the show, I think I'd call it the People's Republic of Palo Alto because there's so much happening in Stanford, this Silicon Valley Bank.

Then we've got Fauci versus Robert Redfield to talk about.

So

we'll start off with Things Stanford and we'll get to that right after these important messages.

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

What a performance by Team California.

The power is ours.

Our public schools are a place where all kids feel like they belong.

My children, my family, my community.

All students.

All students.

All students belong in a great public school.

Let's get ready for back to school at nea.org/slash back to school.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor, two things.

I hate to lump them together because they're different, but they are Stanford-related.

So, the first is kind of a topic we've touched on, more than touched on before.

Stanford Review, that's the conservative alternative paper

on campus, has a piece out

looking at the

racial component of the new class.

And white students are 20% of the Stanford incoming class,

down from 40%

in

2016.

So there is some version of affirmative action.

Of course, no one, none of these institutions claim they're engaged in affirmative action, but there clearly is.

So it's going on at Stanford.

The other Stanford thing is news that happened from late last week.

I think it was Thursday or Friday,

that

Stanford Law Equity Dean by the name of Tyrion Steinbach, along with Stanford Law students, suppressed a talk from Fifth Circuit federal judge Kyle Duncan, Duncan, invited there on behalf of the Federal Society to talk about COVID and guns and some other topics.

But in

a typical thing we see now on college campuses, shouted down, forbidden to talk.

The dean talked and gave a five-minute, six-minute rant about DEI and how dangerous

this judge's policies were, how threatened everyone was.

I'm for free speech, except not for this guy.

Just the latest in one of these episodes, Victor.

You know, Stanford, didn't Stanford, wasn't there some effort recently?

I think we've talked about some free speech

statement came out of Stanford, but damn, it looks like it's the citadel for suppressing speech.

So Victor, two Stanford stories.

Go at it whatever way you prefer.

Okay, so the first one, I've written about that, and the Stanford announced that this incoming class of 2026

will be 22% white, even though the white, quote-unquote, white population of the United States, and I say the United States because it brags that it's a national university and not a local university.

So it's 22% versus about 67 versus 80%.

So it's almost a quarter.

They are deliberately,

they're either saying that the white applicant pool is mediocre now, or they're deliberately discriminating against it because they, not not me, not Jack, not you listening, but they follow something called proportional representation.

Remember that, that if it's not proportionally represented, it being the demographic in question, then there has to be disparited impact.

In other words, it doesn't matter if there's bias or cause, the impact is not fair.

It's disparate.

And therefore, you have to make corrections.

So according to their own theories, somebody did something wrong.

You don't have have to prove it, but the 67% didn't get the 67% representation.

Who did?

Well, that doesn't apply.

We understand that now because of the way the left has taken over our institutions and doesn't believe in the principles that it jams down our throat.

So what you have to do, Jack, if you have 12% African-American and you have a large percentage of mixed race, and you have a large percentage of Latinos, and I say mixed race because a lot of people who are Latino or black are not, you know, 100%.

So the mixed race is very important.

And if the Asian community is suing,

and they are,

because although they make up 10% or so of the national population, based on this university's own criteria, which they have told us are essential until the woke movement, they have been discriminating.

against Asians by not considering test scores and

GPAs the way that they apply them to other groups.

So Asians,

they're afraid of Asians.

Let me put it that way.

So if you're going to represent all of these different groups, mixed race, Latinos, blacks, and you're going to have more Asians in their population.

And by the way,

if you followed Stanford's old standards, there'd be about 40% Asians.

And remember, when we say Asians, we're not talking anymore about people from the,

what we used to call the so-called racist term Orient.

And I've said before, it's not a racist term.

It's just a Latin word for the rising of the sun versus the

occidens, the setting of the sun, people who lived where the sun rose.

But anyway, it's no longer confined to Japanese or Chinese or even Southeast Asians.

It includes the entire subcontinent of India and that huge expatriate community in the United States.

But anyway,

so that's what they're doing.

And it gets a little bit more interesting than that because out of that 22%,

you have to get, you know, half, I think it's 52% are women of the class on average.

If that applied to the white 22%.

So now you have 11% white males.

But most of the athletes, not all of them, but most of the athletes in all of these aggregate sports, soccer,

lacrosse, all of them, they tend to be white males.

I mean, African Americans dominate maybe in football and in basketball, but in baseball.

And not necessarily Americans, though.

No,

yes, not necessarily Americans.

So then you're getting into the legacies as well.

These are people who have a long

relationship with Stanford, not just the donors.

These are people who are professors.

These are people who are deans.

These are people who used to be the former provost,

and they have children that they want extra consideration given.

Then you have the donors.

And the word on the Paldo Street is if your child is at Castellaya or Sacred Heart.

or Menlo School or Harker School, and they have the requisite criteria that used to get you in, i.e., 4.0, and a very good SAT score, you're not going to get in unless you donate somewhere between 10 and 12 million dollars.

That's a fact.

They won't deny that, but that is pretty clear.

So when you put donors and legacies and athletes and you're down to 22% and then you get rid of over half, you're down to say 10%.

There is no room whatsoever for your proverbial white male super kid with no connections or money.

What I mean is, if you're listening and you're a young white male somewhere in southern Illinois or,

I don't know, in the

badlands of Montana or Wyoming, and you have a perfect SAT

and you have a 4.5 with AP, and you're an Eagle Scout, and you've done it, you're not going to get into Stanford.

Now, that's probably a gift because it's way overpriced, and you're not going to learn anything when you get here because the curriculum has been hijacked and watered down.

But that's what it is.

It's a race, and I think they know it.

And we're going to, and that's why they've gotten rid of the SAT

because they're trying to, they're at a scene of the murder, Jack, and they're trying to get rid of the murder weapon.

And the murder weapon is the SAT, because when the Supreme Court hands down that you cannot use criteria and then exclude people on the basis of race, you've got to get rid of the evidence.

So now they're saying you don't have to take the SAT

and

we're going to look at GPA, but there's other intangibles,

work experience, life experience, diversity, all of these other things that we can subjectively analyze.

And we'll see how it goes.

But what Stanford is doing, of course, is

they are making a big gamble, Jack, and they're making two big gambles.

Gamble one is they're saying to their constituencies in the Bay Area, you may have a startup worth a billion dollars.

You may

have a kid that's a whiz kid.

You

may

have known us, but there's not enough room for all of you because there isn't.

So we're going to have to let you go.

You can't do it.

Sorry.

That's the one

gamble they're making.

And then if they're letting in a lot of students under these racial rubrics, it's not my standards that they have tossed out.

It's not yours.

It's not the listeners.

It's their own.

And so if we're talking 2010, Stanford was telling the world, we reject 60 to 70 percent of

perfect SAT scores because we are the hardest university in the country or the world to get into because we demand academic excellence.

Now, even then, they didn't, but that's what they applied to so-called white people.

So now you're going to throw that out.

And that's not the end of it.

As I said earlier, that's the beginning of it.

Because then when you bring students in that haven't met your own criteria of what a first-class research global university should be, then what do you do, Jack?

You either can do two things.

You can water down the content or you can change the grade or you can do both, actually.

And they're doing both.

If you look at the syllabus and the reading list and the grading patterns, and if you don't want to do that,

if you don't want to do that, that means you're some old fuddy-duddy white guy.

And you say, you know what, there's standards and I'm not going to change.

And if I'm teaching humanities of the Western world, we're going to read Homer and then we're going to read Virgil and then we're going to read Boethius and then we're going to read Dante and then Shakespeare on our first and we're going to,

okay, but that was geared for a different student body that had different incoming criteria.

And this one doesn't.

So when you start applying your quote unquote standards, you're going to give grades disproportionately to people who might not have got in before.

Therefore, you're a racist.

So what I'm basically saying, Stanford is now pledged to make admissions synonymous with graduation.

They'll do whatever they can to make sure that people graduate so there's not a pattern of quote unquote systemic racism.

And this is going to already have enormous effects.

It's very expensive to get in, and most of the students that are getting in that wouldn't have got in are getting in on fellowships and scholarships.

And so

we all are via the federal government to some extent, and the tax exemptions that Stanford enjoys is a quote-unquote nonprofit, which we subsidize.

We're subsidizing a racist policy where we're looking at people's color of their skin rather than the excellence of their applications.

As far as the other one, at the law school,

we had a federal judge speak and

the Stanford law students started to hector him.

And they had some pretty obscene signs, as you know, Jack.

And they were really awful.

And they were trying to

intimidate him.

And as speaking as someone who's been through this, I was at the University of Oregon once speaking on immigration when a lot of the Chicano Studies students came in, jammed all the front seats and took posters and waved them with signs about me.

And I couldn't see the audience.

They screamed and yelled.

And I looked over at a dean that I had just walked in with, and he left.

He wasn't there.

In my case, I skipped out of the dinner.

I said, I don't want to be anywhere near anybody at the University of Oregon.

But anyway, this is not new.

What is new, the disruption is not new, is that the dean of equity, diversity, equity, inclusion,

she hijacked a lecture.

Right.

So she got in, interrupted the judge, and then started saying, you don't understand what you do enrages these people, i.e.

all of this disruption, all of this

obscenity on the signs.

I mean, they were obscene of these Stanford students.

You kind of deserved it.

Right.

And that's what she was trying to do.

And she should be fired immediately, but of course she'll be promoted for it by Stanford.

And, you know, this is not, we've got to remember Stanford University produced Mr.

and Mrs.

Bankman Freed.

And so Mr.

Freed, the father of Sam, was a tax lawyer working closely with Elizabeth Warren and Mrs.

Bankman Freed, I think her name's Freed, his is Bankman.

She was a dark money bundler for Silicon Valley, $65 million,

Close the Gap, I think it was called, or Mine the Gap.

My point is that they're under investigation for owning property worth $16 million.

It may have been transferred.

May, I'm not making any,

I don't have, I haven't heard the court testimony or what if there's going to be indictment, but they were listed as guarantors of certain property.

And I don't think you make that kind of money at Stanford.

Apparently, they didn't have the money because there were other people put up, I don't know how you put up $25 million, which should have been the 10% of $250 million bomb for Sam Bank and Fried.

But then, of course, he's connected.

But my point is, both of those professors, one who teaches tax law, and I guess the other one teaches realist theory, meaning the ends can justify as the means necessary to get them,

are themselves

in some way deeply involved with their son's

ill-doing.

And the son right now, as we speak, is living with the parents on campus under house arrest, or I shouldn't say house arrest on Bond.

But then, you know, not too long ago, they had this professor, I think her name was Michelle Dauber.

Dauber?

And she started posting about, remember the Johnny Depp

trial?

Yeah, the trial.

And he had that very

effective, I thought she was brilliant, that Camille Vasquez, that Hispanic lawyer.

Yeah, right.

She was people thought he was dating her, but whatever.

Yeah,

she was very attractive, very

well-spoken.

And this, this Stanford law professor started tweeting, oh, she's just a pick-me girl.

And then she started attacking Johnny Depp on publicly.

And

she said that she hoped that somebody would murder him.

And then she said, I hope his corpse is devoured by rats.

This was the Stanford law Professor.

And if you think that's weird, remember the other one at the House Judiciary Committee when they were rushing through the second impeachment.

They didn't have any special counsel.

Donald Trump would be tried as a private citizen, but they wanted to get it out after January 6th.

And they called in, of course.

If you want a left-wing person to bend the law and with a veneer of prestige, you go to Stanford Law School.

And that Pamela Carlin, I'll never forget it.

She was talking about Trump's 13-year-old son.

And she said, you know,

the Constitution says that there's no titles of nobility.

So if president, you know, Trump can call his son Baron, but he can't make him a Baron.

It was just crazy.

And when you talk about the Federal Society, because the Federal Society sponsored this,

last year, or 2021, as right before graduation, they circulated this invitation.

It was kind of fake, but it was meant to be kind of like Babylon B, but it was very realistic.

It said the Stanford Federalist Society, you know, wants to invite you to a violent insurrection.

It's known as a coup, and

it's going to conflict in every aspect of law.

And here's where to assemble.

Sponsored by the Federal Society.

And people believed it.

And so

that

law school has something deeply, deeply, deeply wrong with it is what I'm getting at.

And this is not the beginning and it's not the end.

I have a little connection because

with it, because my mother graduated there from law school in 1946.

Right.

She had gone to the University of Pacific and graduated.

Then she went to Stanford and got a second BA and went to the law school.

And then I think she was the second woman to be a pellet court judge in California.

And the first, you know, juvenile, female juvenile judge in Fresno County and Superior Court.

But my point is, she was on the board of overseers of the law school.

And when I was a graduate student, there, I used to go over and see her at meetings there, and they were very proud.

The overseers, they built a new law school.

I think Jerry Ford even came out and

dedicated it in 75, maybe, 76.

But it was a normal place.

It was a normal left-wing place is what i'm saying right this is not this is not it

and all of these people who have graduated from stamford law school except in the last four or five years have to be utterly shocked by this you should not give them any money at all right none none none none none none it's a force for it's not a force for good right and these students should be these students should be really you know to tell the truth they should be ashamed of themselves i looked at the tape right

they were yelling and screaming at this federal judge.

And then they were having these placards.

Finally, the judge had to tell one woman, you have it upside down,

your obscenity.

And then

the diversity person who was kind of either contextualizing them or defending them or egging them on,

at that point,

she says they can leave.

And then they were kind of like lemmings.

It was all performance art.

About half of them got up and left.

And these are the people who are going to populate democratic administrations from now on for the next 50 years and uh they kind of mirror an incident from last year at yale law school but they do where a

woman who i don't know she was a judge but she she was a

uh

the lawyer in a particularly important um federal case and she was shouted down by you know the future the future judges and supreme court members of america where they are suppressing any speech intolerant of any divergent view yeah I remember that I remember that wasn't that that very controversial logging is her name Gherkin yeah I think so yeah yeah and she said they were all going to be punished and it was unacceptable they always say it's unacceptable right this is not an institution you know it's unacceptable but they don't I don't think they did anything to them the only thing that can be done

externally, and I don't know how you feel about this,

it was stated in the Yale case, and some people said, These kids, if you are a graduate of Yale Law School, no judge, they should not be hired as

clerks.

And as you know, they do it with this.

Do you think they'll do it with this too?

Well, the same, yeah, that's been some of the reaction.

Um, also, if I may, Victor, just quickly, you know, I'm looking at an account of what happened at Stanford that Ed Whalen had

written.

And it says five law school administrators were present while this while this happened and then Steinbach, the dean, got up and her speech was written.

So this was quite premeditated.

It wasn't that she

witnessed something and her passions took over and she got up and hijacked the event.

She orchestrated it.

I know that you could say, I mean, the ninth court is in san francisco for the western states federal court and it's the most liberal there is but trump did put a few republican judges on there so if you said if the judges said we don't want to have anybody

uh involved from that law school clerking for us because there were members of the administration there and they either allowed it or they contextualized it i said or they agreed with it and that was contrary to democracy they're always talking about democracy but if you have a federal judge and you shout him down, then you're attacking democracy according to their own logic.

But more importantly, you can see where this leads, Jack, because

the academic legal community is creating a situation in which if you disagree with them, if you're a judge, then you are hurting people and you're endangering their lives.

They just establish that by fit.

You know, if a Republican judge said, you know what, if you're for abortion, you're killing babies.

And therefore, it's okay for my supporters to shout down anybody.

But it doesn't go two ways.

But my point is, you can see what a short distance it is from this to Chuck Schumer, who at that time, I think, was the minority Senate leader in 2000.

19, we went right in before the Supreme Court doors with a mob behind him and said, you know, Gorshich

Kavanaugh, you sowed the wind and you're going to reap the whirlwind, and you're not going to know what hits you.

That was a direct physical threat.

And I couldn't, I remember that when he was pontificating about Tucker the other day, I thought, shame on you.

And then, more importantly, within a year, there were people protesting out at the Supreme Court justices' homes with the one caveat, if they were conservative.

So the left has this monopoly on this violent disruption.

And they say, we can go break break up speak lectures at law schools.

We can intimidate federal judges when they come to our law school.

We can have our senators go out in front of the Supreme Court and scream and yell and threaten two judges by name.

We can send our mobs to restaurant to drive out, you know.

Kavanaugh.

We can go to their homes.

And you know what?

If an assassin, assassination person, an assassin shows up,

egged on, no doubt, by all this, and you know, that things happen.

And as far as there's a felony,

and it is a felony

to

assemble at, and I know that because my mom had made some pretty controversial rulings sometimes, and there were people upset about it and called her and things like that.

They didn't come out to our farm, but my point is

that

there is a law, federal law, statute says you cannot go to a judge's house for the purpose of intimidating.

And when they asked Merrick Garland about that, remember what he said?

He said, well, there were already

there were law enforcement.

We had

people there at their home, meaning think about the logic of that.

Yes, they broke the law in the past.

when there weren't

law enforcement protecting the justice zone.

And yes, they're breaking the law in the present

while there is protection.

There were still mobbing there.

But therefore, because they're not going to be effective

in

storming the judges' home, I didn't think it was necessary to charge him with anything.

It's basically what he's saying.

He also kind of made it the duty of the U.S.

Marshal Service.

Andy McCarthy had written about this.

Well, the Marshals were there.

It's like their responsibility.

No, it's not.

It's your responsibility to have federal to prosecute.

They don't prosecute.

The marshals don't prosecute.

But Merrick Garland, too busy to go.

It's like a bank license.

It's like a bank robber who has gone in and robbed a bank once and got away with it.

And then he's gone in another time and he's walking around the bank and he's going to rob it.

But now he sees there's a policeman guarding it.

And we can't arrest him because the bank is no longer endangered because now it has guards.

But the person who in the past robbed the bank and wants to rob it in the present, we're not going to indict.

That's his logic, right?

That if you've committed a crime in the past and you want to

commit a crime in the present, and that's why you're there according to the statute, but you can't pull it off and endanger the justices' lives or get on their lawn now or get in their sidewalk and scream because there's federal marshal, we didn't indict.

It's almost as ridiculous as Merrick Garland telling us that he only goes after pro-life people because

I guess they're stupid enough to protest at abortion centers during the daytime.

But the real deal are the pro-lifers who bomb and attack and graffiti and destroy at night.

And apparently, Merrick Garland is saying to us that law enforcement go to bed at sundown.

They just don't want to work at night.

And I just thought, you idiot, you're telling me that most crimes of any sort in the United States take place between 9 to 5 and law enforcement can't enforce it?

Does he

understand anything about the

classical connection between nocturnal

and thievery?

I mean, come on.

That's when crime does take place.

So anyway, it's really sad.

You know, Stanford, I have a lot of people in my family went there, and I can tell you it's shameful.

And it always suffered from an arrogance.

And people who went there never, in California, never let you forget about it.

But an arrogance and wealth.

And as I said before, nothing was more striking to me right after George Floyd to come on campus and see two guys in flip-flops get out of a BMW convertible with BLM stickers on the bumper.

But that's who, that's what is the contradiction about Stanford.

It's a rite of passage for wealthy people.

It always was, that they indulge in, you know, innocent, stupid, little liberal hard-left stuff, and then they get into the corporate and legal and media, big money, or their parents take care of them.

Well, Victor.

It's not now.

It's not now, Jack.

It's a hardcore Marxist training ground.

Yeah.

Well, a lot of those wealthy people who

love Stanford and brandished the brand

probably have a significant amount of their money at Silicon Valley Bank, which seems to be collapsing.

And we will get your thoughts on that

and some of the reaction to that by Fang Fang's friend, Eric Swalhuel, and others, other topics.

And we'll get to that, Victor, right after this important message.

we're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show again this particular podcast is up on just the news.com and other platforms I want to encourage our listeners especially if you're a new listener to visit Victorhanson.com that's Victor's official website and you will discover there are certain articles and everything Victor writes is put up there and all his appearances There are links to these podcasts, of course, and other podcasts, other Victor's on other radio programs.

But you will not be able to read certain pieces by Victor because they are exclusive.

They're called ultra articles, and you need to subscribe in order to read them.

It's five bucks to get in the door, 50 discounted to $50 a year.

There's an awful lot of original material there.

So, if you love what Victor writes,

you really should be subscribing.

So, that's victorhanson.com and subscribe to Ultra.

By the way, Victor has a piece, an Ultra piece up now.

They're not all about politics and policy, but some of the more wonderful pieces, I think, are about Victor's own life on the farm and growing up.

And there's a great piece that you've just put up, Victor, called Neighborly Theft.

And it's about

Howard,

an adjacent farm owner to your farm and a man who borrowed a lot and maybe even stole some things all seemed to have a hankering to

pick the pears off your off your trees.

But it's a beautiful piece.

It's beautiful.

And you can't read it unless you subscribe.

So that's VictorHanson.com.

Victor,

yeah, the Silicon Valley Bank,

which is home to a lot of Palo Alto area venture capital.

They don't call it Silicon Valley Bank for nothing,

had its trading suspended because

there was a run on the bank, essentially a run on the bank.

Gary,

Greg Becker, excuse me, he is the CEO of the bank.

And I'm getting these, you know, this is an article.

I'm not going to read it, but it's the link from Daily Mail, which I check out several times a day.

He, in 2015, I believe, successfully lobbied Congress to get reduced standards of scrutiny on the bank

because it was so, you know,

it is so low risk.

Don't apply those standards to us that you apply to other banks after the 2008 banking fiasco and collapse.

And he succeeded.

And this bank, I think, is the 14th biggest in the nation,

soon to be.

I don't even know if it's going to be a bank anymore, trying to sell it.

So, Victor, we have

yeah i'm in the bank and it's and it's a lot of that leftist money is in there i i don't want to be there to be just money jack i think three to i think there was only three to five percent that had less than 250 250 000 that were covered i mean think of that that the depositors 97

had over 250 000 in the bank so that's the subtext of all this that these are the right people

and they have a lot of money in there and they're facing a lot of losses.

And they put Joe Biden in the White House, and they want to know where the protection is beyond the $250,000.

And

it'll come, but I'm just

as an initial observation.

It's not to do with banks, but I can remember in 1983, I wrote about in Fields Out Dream, Sun Made Raisin Cooperative collapsed.

I don't know if people know that.

It collapsed with 27 million.

That was a lot in those days, shortfall.

It collapsed because the cooperative was not

accurately returning to the Raisin members what they thought they earned.

In other words, it was being poorly run and the market itself was collapsing.

But

to keep the members in the cooperative and not have them go out to more competitive and better run small independent Packers, they paid them money that they did not earn, the co-op didn't earn.

They were borrowing.

And then when it collapsed, they had about $27 million collapse.

But every single small farmer also had something called capital retain, which means they deducted a sizable percentage of your

crop and they put it in a rotating fund.

So you put it in for seven years before you got any of it.

And that was to

capitalize expansion.

And so they just took that, Jack, to write off the 27 million.

And not only took that, they said to the independent growers, well, you got too much anyway.

And so we're just taking your own money that was in here to pay for what you got.

And think of the logic.

We ran this thing into the ground and you would have all have left if you had known what a terrible job I, the guy's name was Frank Light, had been doing.

But we couldn't tell you that because then you would leave and destroy my co-op, your co-op, my co-op.

So, what we did was we kept paying you out what you would have got if you'd sold your raisins out elsewhere, even though we didn't have the money.

So, we borrowed it.

And now they're calling in the loan, and we don't have any money.

So, we're taking your money and the capital retain.

And my family was $87,000.

We never got it.

We all sued.

I think we got $9,000.

And they owed us, still owe us $79,000.

They'll never pay.

And my point is, things like that happen in America all the time.

Right.

All the time, these collapses, and the people get nothing.

And this is right in the heart of Silicon Valley.

This was the go-to bank for startups.

And

that's number one to keep in mind.

And number two, I think you're going to see more of this because Joe Biden printed $5 trillion.

And

the debt is now $33 trillion.

And in his new proposals, even though we have a trillion dollars more in revenue because of his tax hikes and because the economy is recovering from the lockdown, even though that, it's going to be wiped out by more and more spending.

So the left keeps thinking, according to modern monetary theory, you can keep spending, spending, borrowing, borrowing.

And what's happening is

A lot of these banks

gave loans out.

And we all know, I i have a son who was a very astute buyer he went out and bought a beautiful home at 2.9 interest right that's a 30-year interest right

and

uh the bank is only getting 2.9 but the inflation right now is seven percent right the question is there's millions of people with those cheap interests there's also millions of municipal municipalities

municipal concerns that have 1.8 bonds I think I own some bonds, I don't know, $20,000 at 1.5 I took out.

So they have a lot of bonds out there that they are committed to holding, I guess, at very low interest rates.

And so

when people want to go into that deposit and put money in there, they expect, what do you get now?

5%?

I think 5 or 6%?

No, you get 4% on a 30%, I mean, a two-year bond or something, I mean, a two-year deposit.

But my point is that to get people to put money in the bank, they have to pay a interest rate that is going to cost them a lot of money because their income is not very much because they're getting the interest income from cheap mortgages that they issue.

And depending on the bank,

It's going to be very difficult.

There's not going to be a lot of banks that different from this one, I think.

And this one made an error because they announced, apparently, that they were going to hold on to all of these low interest bonds that they had issued.

And they weren't going to just take a one-time hit and buy them out, right?

And then reissue them at a higher interest rate.

And some people got scared.

And then I guess a bank has, what, five or six percent of the money on hand that they owe.

And then they just started swarming it.

You actually was right out of it's a wonderful life.

It's a wonderful life, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

The money's in this house and that house, right?

Yeah.

And that's where it is.

Right.

And everybody thinks they're postmodern and they're sophisticated.

And we live in 2023 and we just don't do that.

We don't go act like, you know, those people in Wonderful Life where there's no Sidney Green, you know, what's his name?

Lionel Barrymore Jr.

Right.

Mr.

Potter.

Right.

Mr.

Potter and Potter Real.

That doesn't happen anymore.

And we're sophisticated.

No, it's human nature.

It's fixed across time and space.

And people are subject to the same panic.

And

Mr.

Squalwell looks at his Bay Area district, and this is another thing that I think all of our listeners have to realize.

This is more important

than if another normal bank in Fresno had gone oner.

I'll tell you why.

That this state economy

gets income tax revenue from 1% of the households.

1%

pay

about 52% of all of California income tax, number one, and they are leaving in droves.

Number two,

we have imported over

5 to 10 million illegal aliens.

And if you look at the Medi-Cal budget alone, It is massive, massive.

In my little area, the Madera Community Hospital Hospital just declared bankruptcy.

And why is that?

Because the remunerations come from the state and the federal government too late and in

too little value to cover the enormous health expenses that are required to give 21st.

21st century health care to people who walk across the border from Oaxaca State.

It's very hard to do.

It's a very noble thing to do.

It's necessary.

It's humanitarian, but somebody's got to pay for it.

So, what I'm getting is California's economy is very fragile.

The high-earned upper-middle class that pays half the income tax is leaving.

The other middle class is leaving.

They've got billions of dollars off the books and a black market economy, Jack.

I can get in my car, as I said earlier, and go down to an intersection two miles away.

I can buy clothes.

I can buy food.

I can buy milkshakes.

I can buy rakes.

I can buy bikes from any of these places, and I will have one thing in common.

I will pay no sales tax.

I can go to a big swap meet two miles on a Sunday morning, and the same thing, I will pay no sales tax.

So they have enormous underground economy that they can't tax.

And they can't tax because if they do,

the San Francisco Chronicle or the LA Times will say state focusing on

marginalized people community, communities of poor asked to burden the tax, you know, shoulder the burden.

And then, in addition to this,

we're sending back $60 billion

to Mexico in remittances.

Half of all illegal aliens live in California.

I don't know if that ratio stands up, but in theory, it could be $30 billion of leaving the state and going back to Mexico and Central America per year.

And that is possible because the state is providing medical services and legal services and food services and shelter entitlements to subsidize a person to send $300 or $400 a month back to Mexico.

So what I'm getting at is when you destroy the middle class and the upper middle class and you either drive them out or you have an underground economy and you bring in millions of poor people who don't pay income tax and don't pay sales tax in some cases,

then you've got to rely on Silicon Valley, $9 trillion in market capitalization.

In other words, it's a big suction from the entire globe.

It brings in that $9 trillion worth of value from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, China.

But

if you tamper with that,

and we are tampering with it, it's laying off millions of employees.

We know that Twitter was just terribly run before Elon Musk.

It's probably worth $2 billion

at most, not what Elon Musk paid for.

And Facebook, they're laying off thousands of employees, thousands.

And if you get a bank there that served as the bank to go for startups and it's now broke, and you've destroyed the confidence of the depositors in that type of bank, and you're...

you're still having people send billions out of the United States from California, and the federal government itself is

running billion, excuse me, trillion to trillion two debts, 1.5 trillion, I think, annual deficit, and we own 33 trillion.

I don't see

somebody tell me where the solution comes from.

I don't know.

Who's a sober and judicious politician who says this can't go on or what can't go on won't go on?

Quote Herb Stein.

So I don't know what's going to happen, but

it's kind of a 1929 warning of what could come.

And so the Fed's going to have to come in and guarantee, Swalwell thinks, all of the money that's lost.

And if it doesn't come in, then people will not have confidence in the banking system of that sort.

So they'll take their money out and they'll put it in Citibank, Bank of America, something that has a better reputation.

But again, victory, the Biden economy, one last thing.

The Biden economy that Joe Biden just bragged about, he just gave a speech and he said

he's done more to address climate change than any president in history.

And he did that by lowering your heating and cooling bills in your home, even though your natural gas has gone up 27%, your electricity has gone up 12%.

But he lies.

But when you have a president like that and you have an economy like this,

where are you going to put your money?

Because you're now raising it.

I think the March is going to, the March inflation rate, we're going to find out next week.

It went from 9.1 to

in February down to 6.4.

I think it's going to go back up to 8.5.

I don't think we're near out of this.

So we're going to have stagflation where we're going to soon have massive layoffs, a slowing of GDP, lowering this high inflation.

And where do you put your money?

Well, you have three choices you can put it in the stock market the dow took a big hit because of this and it's not performing anybody look at your 401k it's not very encouraging or you can go into real estate and

those people who know how to do it will make money no doubt but uh it's falling nationwide.

And I suppose if you already have money, it's a good time to buy and then sell later.

But it was an overheated, inflationary, expansionary market, way overpriced.

And now the interest rates on 30-year homes are down to, or up to seven, seven

point one,

and nobody's buying homes.

They can't afford it.

So the price is crashing.

And maybe you can put it in a bank, huh?

And get your 4% on a Passbook account if you keep it in there for six months while you're losing 3% to inflation.

That's seven.

It's not very good.

And a lot of people know that.

And they're doing risky, risky things.

Or, Victor, you could put this back to the point you made earlier and

bouncing off of Swalwell, who's been tweeting, you know,

all the assets should be covered over, but and people commenting on his...

his tweets of like, well, why the hell should I pay for it?

Why the hell should

other Americans pay for the people in this bank?

You know, you could invest in a small business as opposed to just land or put money in a bank or even.

The reason that you should pay, Jack, is the same reason,

the same reason during the COVID lockdown.

If you had a small shoe store or florist shop where one person came in every 10 minutes that you knew, you were deemed a health hazard and you had to shut down.

If you were Walmart or Target and you sold shoes or flowers and there was 500 people masked in your store.

That was okay.

That was safe.

And that's how the federal government's bureaucracy worked.

That's absolutely

my asset in a small business

can go poof, but

somebody with $2 million in Silicon Valley Bank has to be a business.

Two, that would be nothing.

Two.

Small potatoes.

10, 15 million.

And so there's been talking about a lot of money, but Swalwell is very worried for a couple of reasons.

These are his donors.

These are the people who give money to him.

And they have called him up and said, listen, Eric, you idiot, I don't give a damn about Fang Fang.

All I want you to do is start making some calls and making sure that Biden, whom I gave to,

guarantees my $4 million that I lost, or I'm never going to give another penny to you people.

And he's getting a lot of those calls.

Yeah.

Is he the congressman, by the way, for the uh for Palo Alto?

No, he's up near uh the Livermore corridor on 580.

Um, okay,

and

he's it's he's the bedroom community on some of the more the more distant uh the more distant BART stations, right?

So he's about 45 miles.

It's a very affluent, he's he's from a a very,

very, very affluent area of,

you know,

I don't have the map.

I don't know exactly.

I don't know that there's a non-affluent area around there, Victor.

But it's that area in

when you go over the Altamount Pass and you go to Livermore, then you go.

There's Pleasanton right there, and then you can go up on 680 to Dublin.

I think the next one is San Ramon, Danville, Walnut Creek.

There's that famous Blackhawk exclusive area.

That's one of the wealthiest areas in the Bay Area.

A lot of Silicon Valley people live there.

Well, Victor, that's all discouraging.

And this, your commentary here and on previous podcasts, like we are

looking over the brink of some sort of civilizational abyss.

And this is the economic aspect of it.

Well, we have time for one more topic, and that's our old friend, Anthony Fauci, and we'll get to that, Victor, right after this, right after this final message.

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

I need to make a little plug for myself, Jack Fowler.

I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter.

published by the Center for Civil Society at Anvil, where we are, we try diligently to strengthen civil society.

It's totally free.

We don't sell your name.

And what do you get when you subscribe?

I try to come up with 12 to 14 interesting articles I've come across that week.

Here's a link.

Here's an excerpt.

I think you'll like it.

You're intelligent.

It's not transactional.

It's civil thoughts.

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

I think you'll like it.

So, Victor, a couple of things happened on the Hill this week.

And we don't, maybe on the next podcast, we could talk like Elise Stefanik going, you know, grappling with FBI director Chris Ray.

But

we had

the congressional hearings with Matt Taibbi

about

Twitter files.

But we also had Robert Redfield, who's the former head of the CDC.

who was up on Capitol Hill.

And he said, let me just get this

in front of me.

He said,

well, let me just, I'll just paraphrase.

Look, he went up and he said, essentially, I was shut out of meetings.

I did not agree with this

monopolist position that

Fauci and others had formulated at the

not at the very, very origin of

the COVID pandemic, but

the early first thing.

And

we could not say that this came from the Wuhan lab.

I disagreed with that.

I was deliberately kept out of meetings because I would express the sentiment that maybe it did come out of the Wuhan lab.

He said this at the congressional hearing, and Fauci was on Fox.

I've got to give him credit for going on Fox, but he was with Neil Cavuto, and he said, absolutely a lie.

That wasn't true.

He did not keep Redfield.

But I think it's pretty, amongst the many other things that have coming out slow, So, bing, bing, one after another, incriminating Anthony Fauci

for knowing, knowing

what the cause was and ruining careers and preventing the rest of America from finding out

that this was a

not only that came from Wuhan, but it came with money funded, the taxpayer money that Anthony Fauci spent

in violation of rules prohibiting such.

So, Victor, we've gone over this terrain before, but this is the most recent.

Yeah, I think his biggest problem is

that

if a Joe Mansion or a cinema, somebody wanted to censor him, if they could get a majority in Senate, because he outright lied to, when you remember when he was questioned by Rand Paul, he said that,

I think it was the NIH.

He said it did not, it never had funded

gain of function research and move on.

That's a lie.

And he said that while under oath.

And I think a lot of people are going to go after him.

But what he's really angry about is that,

you know,

Dr.

Robert Redfield, I mean, my God, he's the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

And he gets up there.

He wasn't, I mean, unlike Fauci, he was not combative.

He was philosophical.

And this is the guy they've turned on, Jack.

Collins, Francis Collins, and Fauci,

everybody has turned on him because he

always said there was a possibility that it came from the lab.

And what he did, and I watched the testimony, and matter of fact,

it wasn't very emotional.

They just kind of said, yep.

They said, well,

when Anthony Fauci was communicating with Francis Collins, was there a worry, a perceptible worry

that

information would come out that they had a role in

sending via Echo Health money for gain of function research.

Yep, yeah, that's true.

Later, when

Dr.

Fauci quoted a scientific paper that suggested that that was, that there was no lab leak, that that came in part

because, or should say in totality from an animal, did he have anything to do with that paper?

Yep.

Did he help commission the paper?

Yep.

Did he participate or edit or look at it?

Yep.

So in other words, Dr.

Fauci was quoting as

the definitive analysis of the origins of the Wuhan lab leak to prove that it wasn't the Wuhan lab leak.

It was a natural transmission, but he didn't tell us that he himself had commissioned that study in the same fashion that we learn that Peter Dasick had helped get a group of scientists to go to Lancet and run a quote-unquote unquote investigation.

They went over to China.

They were completely stonewalled, which didn't bother him a bit.

They came back and said

it was not a lap leak.

And now we know pretty much,

according to the Department of Energy and the FBI, it was a lap leak.

So this raises the question,

were people like Collins and Fauci and Dasik terrified because they were subsidizing, in the case of Dasik, actually participating in gain of function

research that was illegal in the United States?

And they deliberately circumvented U.S.

law stealthily and funded this type of research in a very insecure French-built Wuhan 4 lab that very quickly came under the control of the People's Liberation Army.

And that virus was engineered in part with U.S.

expertise and subsidies.

And therefore, did the million people who died in the United States, in some way, can that be traced back to the laxity and poor judgment of Anthony Fauci?

That's what this is all about.

And it looks increasingly as if that would be true.

And I think that's why Fauci does not not look very well.

I mean, he's over 80, he's going to retire, but he's not the confident, cocky person that

used to interview him in his study with his little bubbleheads,

replicate meditations of himself, and the posters on the wall, and the paintings of him.

You remember all that?

Yeah, it's one of the more narcissistic rooms in America.

Yeah, he's trying to find a sympathetic voice, Neil Cavuto, kind of a never-Trumper, kind of a.

I've been on his show.

He's a very fair guy, but he thinks, Fauci thinks that this will be a sympathetic

I don't think Cabuto will be sympathetic but he's on there he's going to all of the networks hinting hinting that Redfield is wrong and that's unfair if you want to read

A Plague Upon Our House by Scott Atlas he pretty much laid it out that Fauci was wrong and the other part of the story is and other people have picked it up there's actually two parts Jack the first is

that not only did he commission a study and participate in the shadows upon its completion, and not only did he, then he referenced that as self-exculpatory to himself in a very unethical fashion.

He not only did that, but there's been charges that if you, I don't know how many it is, $50, $60 billion, if you had a research lab in the United States and you wanted to be funded via Anthony Fauci, then you were were going to have to adopt the Wuhan pangolin dash bat story or you wouldn't be funded.

In other words, he was using the money of the American taxpayer to further his own personal ambition.

And that's very deadly.

The other thing was even more, Stephen Quay, whom we had on,

I had interviewed, and I think I'm going to interview him again this month.

He said in a series of interviews that not only was this gain of function, but that it was gain of function about an engineered virus that must have been interrupted before completion and had a lethality rate in retroste of about 1% of the infected.

However, there was some indication of the genome sequence and what we had learned before there was a complete news blackout and what the expertise the Chinese had acquired might seem

would give them the possibility to go further that they were working on viruses that could kill 10% of those infected, which he said at that point, you're looking at Armageddon.

If 10% of an infection can kill, and even 30%, and that would be in bioweapon territory.

So there's some life and death questions in all of this.

And all Anthony Fauci has to do

is

get off

the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases with his incestuous relationship with the National Institute of Health and the CDC, the new directors, and Francis Collins, who's retired.

And once he's retired, Jack, guess what?

He will not be the arbiter of these federal grants.

And every independent researcher will speak his mind, especially if they have a feeling that there's going to be a change in administrations in two years.

And so I think I don't want to see any,

you know, I'm not unhappy that he did so much damage because a million people died.

And in some ways, he was culpable, not just from his bad advice and misleading statements about the lockdown and masks, especially about the ironclad

immunity of the mRNA vaccinations, but

He did, if this is true, and I think it is, that he participated in a type of research that was too dangerous to perform and then was undertaken by our worst enemies in communist China.

Right.

And then he's culpable.

And when he's no longer, he's kind of like, I guess the image everybody should keep in mind is he's riding a tiger right now.

And the tiger is a furious truth.

And as long as he's on the saddle, he can suppress that truth.

because he has financial leverage over the people who have the expertise and capability to

tell us what the truth is, but won't because they feel that that tiger, you know, is controlled by him.

But once he gets off, that tiger is going to maul him.

And it's going, the truth is, and it's going to be a bad, bad situation.

Yeah, Victor, others, I, by the way,

it's not.

It's bad to fund the research, but as you've discussed in the past, the research itself as a thing that you would engage in gain of function is so Frankensteinian or Stinnian,

it's immoral.

Well, they ask a lot of the, yeah, they ask a lot of the, they asked Mr.

Redfield and they've asked Mr.

Quay a simple question.

Do you know of any major breakthrough in virology that has come?

from gain in function research and they couldn't cite any.

And then Fauci was on all the airwaves.

You got that flu vaccination?

That was gain in function.

Well,

is that scientifically proved?

Are we supposed to believe you once again?

Right.

But it doesn't seem to me that it's very smart to let all of these labs all over the world that don't have

the protections that we used to have.

And I don't know if we do anymore because we're destroying our own meritocracy, but to allow people to tamper with them.

All it takes is some

Iranian agent, you know, to go into somewhere and kidnap somebody and

I don't know, Thailand or

former Soviet Republic, bring them back to Iran, put a gun to their head and say, we're going to kill your family.

I want you to make this virus and then I want you to make a vaccination for this virus

and then unleash it.

And that's what we're headed to, thanks to people like this.

So

the science.

Yeah, so arrogant.

I am the science.

All the people's lives that he destroyed, I mean, he destroyed a lot of other scientists' lives.

He ridiculed them.

He made fun of Jay Bacharia and the Great Barrington Declaration.

They went after them.

He was involved in the Twitter suppression of any story he felt was hostile to the narrative.

He was wrong on everything.

He should have been fired.

Donald Trump should have fired him a long time ago.

That's my only criticisms, really, of Donald Trump, has been appointments.

He appointed people, and I understand that he was not a politician.

And I understand the bipartisan Washington swamp tried to drown him when he came in.

I understand how all about the Mueller investigation, all the terrible things they did to him.

But it was not just appointing people like Amarosa and Scaramouche and all those people.

It was not firing right away

the first day, James Comey.

It was not firing earlier Andrew McCabe.

It was not firing Christopher Wray.

It was not firing Mark Milley.

It was not firing Anthony Fauci and Burks and Collins.

He should have fired them all.

For a guy whose popular TV show ended with you're fired, it's kind of

hot as president.

He did not do that himself.

Well, Victor,

shared a lot today.

As usual, brilliance.

I appreciate it immensely.

Listeners,

almost to a person, thrilled to you, to what you say.

According to the reviews we get, again, on Apple and iTunes, you can rate the show zero to five stars.

And nearly everyone gives Victor five stars.

We thank those who do that.

And some people leave comments.

We read them all, take them to heart, especially the ones that say shut up, Fowler.

But here's one that I'd like to share.

From

Mrs.

Cochise, veteran of the U.S.

Army, Co-Chiece on the warpath, who I think we read a comment from her early on, a couple of years ago on this podcast, but she it's titled A Long Maine Winter with Victor Davis Hansen.

This is, well, this looks like it's maybe Mr.

Cochise.

Victor, my wife and I, now in our late 60s, live in one of the farthest northeast townships in the state of Maine.

So no surprise, the winter can be rather harsh, unpredictable, and long.

Unfortunately, this winter has been a real doozy.

Next to that, wisely chosen, neatly stacked extra cord of split firewood.

You and Jack and Sammy have helped make this winter a little milder.

Many nights sitting in

front of the wood stove, yellow labs at our feet, and a bowl of my wife's many excellent soups and chowders.

Listening to this podcast has made this old couple's evenings quite special.

And we thought you all should know that from your number one fans from the great state of Maine.

May God forever bless you all.

The coaches.

Very nice.

Yeah, that's very sweet.

Very sweet.

And there's a lot more of you than you think.

Yeah.

We remember that.

I was on the plane and a couple of people came in up to me and wanted to talk about the podcast.

And that's what they said.

They said, but they said it in a different way.

They said, there's a lot more of us, us, than you think.

And we're going to have a reckoning.

And I think if we can get the balloting straightened out in 2024,

this woke thing is on the decline.

It really is.

People are sick of it.

And

it's a bit of destruction.

Did anyone tell you to be?

Go ahead, Victor.

No, you go ahead.

Well, I was just going to ask you,

did anyone ask you to be nicer to Sammy?

I think

it has come up before.

I was in the Dallas airport, I must confess, and a woman a little bit older than I am came up and said, I like your podcast, but have you noticed something about poor Sammy?

And I said, Oh, no, here it comes.

She says, She always has to say,

can I be allowed to say something?

I said, That's a ruse.

Come on.

She said, No, no, you just crush Sammy when she asks questions.

And she's trying to help you.

Just don't.

I said, she's free to ask anything she wants.

I don't even know what she's going to want.

I don't prepare.

She just does it.

So

she has a blank check.

Sammy does.

But I don't know how this got started.

I'm somehow crushing poor little Sammy.

Sammy's the Sammy's great.

You and Sammy do great, great podcasts.

So, hey, Victor, thanks so much.

Thanks to all who listened.

And

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.