The Unnaturals: Fauci, Lightfoot, and Newsom

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the man who's lucky to be the host of this show, but you're here to listen to the star and namesake.

That's Victor Davis-Hansen, who 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.

Justthenews.com.

That's the home for this podcast.

There's a lot going on, as there always is to talk about.

And some news that came out Daily Mail, a big article about Red China promising to increase its military spending, which was already pretty damn huge to begin with, by another 7%.

And we're going to get Victor's thoughts about what that might mean for America's own national security right after this important message.

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

So Victor, the Communist Party is going going to drastically increase its military spending.

I believe the line they used was about war preparedness,

certainly related to Taiwan.

This is in the face of an America, as we were talking about on our most recent podcast, of American military that can't get enough soldiers to stay in the armed forces, cannot get enough soldiers to join the armed forces, and has, of course, left billions and billions of dollars worth of actual armaments in Afghanistan and is giving billions and billions away to Ukraine.

So Victor, it's a buildup

at a time where it seems America is weakening militarily.

Are we weakening militarily?

And Victor, what do you think about this buildup?

Well, you know, when you say weaken, that's both an absolute or a relative concept.

We might not be weakening absolutely in the sense, well, excuse me, in the sense that we're not in the sense of a quality of our arms, but in the

quantity of arms we surely are.

I mean, the number of planes, the number of ships.

the number of artillery platforms is far less than it used to be.

And people argue, well, they're much more effective.

Maybe, maybe not.

And I don't know if we're going to make that up with artificial intelligence and drones or not.

But what's interesting is that Chinese have been, they've completed 200 new silos.

And I don't just mean 200 missiles.

I mean 200 advanced, sophisticated missiles that are probably superior to ours, and they're going to have multiple warheads.

So we have about 6,500 nuclear weapons.

And I think in any one time,

there's 1,500 of them that can be deployed immediately.

And under the Obama administration, remember, well, that'll just blow up the world.

And people said, no, Barack, our enemies don't look at that the way you do.

They say, if

we have a first strike and we hit a thousand of their targets, will they have enough to wipe us out?

And if they will have enough to wipe us out, we won't try it.

And then our allies

I think I told you that story on the air once when

I was speaking and a person from an allied country came up to me a general

and he said you know i've been listening to you deplore the obama cutbacks obama wanted to go down to remember 500 only

deliverable weapon you this was at nato headquarters right uh no but i had a similar contact a little bit talk this was on in carmel california oh okay go ahead i'm sorry this person came up to me and he said

he had a piece of paper and he had names of countries japan australia south korea Philippines, Taiwan,

Europe.

And he goes, I want to know how many of

these are.

And then he had 6,000.

He goes, how many are ours?

I go, what do you mean?

I want to know how many are ours.

And I said, what do you mean?

He said, just how many do you need to protect yourself?

I said, I don't know.

1,000, 1,500, 2,000.

How many do you need to ensure Europe will not be attacked by the Russians?

I don't know, 500 to help their own deterrent in France and England.

Okay, how many for Japan?

I don't know, maybe 200 or 300.

How many for the Middle East?

I said, I don't know.

And what his point went, he wanted to know how many we had to protect South Korea from North Korea.

And what he was saying is that there is such a sick game called nuclear arithmetic.

And

the more allies you have, the more they feel that some of that nuclear deterrent should be used for their deterrence or their

protection because they have the ability to make nuclear weapons and they don't do it based on the United States guarantees.

And so China knows that.

So China is thinking, we have a bigger military in the United States.

We build up our Navy and our Air Force, but they're way ahead of us in nuclear weapons.

So at some magical point, I'm talking about 2005, 2010, we have stolen enough technology from them, either through our students over there or our espionage ring, that we can now skip many decades of trial and error, challenge and response, and outfit a nuclear deterrent that would be comparable or superior to the United States.

And that's when they started doing it, just recently.

And now they're going to have one that's,

you know, and everybody's going to say, Victor, there was such a thing called the missile gap.

Did you ever watch Dr.

Strange

Come on.

And I said, well, I mean, that's just the way it is.

And when they get to be superior to us, they're going to move on Taiwan and say, you know what?

You don't have a nuclear superiority.

We're not as scared of you.

We have 1.4 billion people.

And you people are a risk-averse, post-modern, sophisticated society.

We're not necessarily that way.

Or so they think they will think.

I'm not sure it'll be accurate, but that's what these nuclear weapons are all about.

They're updating their military.

They have done it conventionally, and now they're starting to do it strategically.

And I'm told that they have parity or superiority in things like space-based weapons.

And that's what those balloons were about.

Remember, they had a dual purpose.

One was to spy on American nuclear silos.

And by that, I mean they would probably want to know how far they were, how deep, you know, everything about them.

What would be the reaction if you got near them,

whether anti-ballistic missile sites nearby, the silo?

And

that was one.

And then one was to test our response.

What would American president do if we went right to the continental United States?

Would he shoot it down on day one?

Would NORAD find it?

Was a balloon so primitive that it would be in a paradoxical way more stealthy, more sophisticated than a spy satellite or a U-2, I mean, a U-3,

what do you call it, sophisticated spy plane.

And I think they accomplished both of their missions because their emphasis now is on strategic superiority.

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and maybe we should stay in china a little bit uh via anthony fauci i have um a great piece in the epoch times uh which wonderful weekly newspaper they carry your column as you know i know you subscribe and this is a piece by uh david bell um and it's titled Dr.

Fauci Comes Clean on Vaccines and Respiratory Viruses.

You know what?

We haven't heard much about this.

By the way, this is not a reason to put Anthony Fauci up on a pedestal.

Here's how Bell's article begins, quote, attempting to control mucosal respiratory viruses

with systemically administered non-replicating vaccines has thus far been largely unsuccessful.

End quote.

You know who wrote that?

Dr.

Anthony Fauci.

He wrote it in a journal called Cell Host and Micro.

It reported, recently published one of the most more important papers of the COVID era.

And I'll leave with this final quote, Victor, and then we'll get your thoughts on what Anthony Fauci is

doing here, what this particular admission means.

Quote, rethinking next generation vaccines for

coronaviruses, influenza viruses, and other respiratory viruses.

This has elicited surprisingly little fanfare considering its authorship and content.

So writes David Bell.

You know, Fauci is coming clean

to some degree, a victor.

After he's left his job, after

an economy has been

kicked in the groin, groin after millions of school children have lost years of education and learning.

What do you make of that?

Jack, I don't think it was just that he came clean.

He refuted everything he's ever said that was of major importance.

He's basically now telling us that

his old dogma that if you got the messenger RNA vaccinations, you would not be infectious, nor could you be infected.

And that natural immunity was, in comparison, very

i don't know porous it wouldn't work as well and now he's saying just the opposite so that that's disturbing and then he's talking about respiratory viruses and the flu uh and that there's certain public health measures to take and it sounds like he's much more flexible on social distancing masks quarantines and

really big on natural immunity and you don't get natural immunity unless you get the virus So my question is, I could go in detail about it, but the main importance for our audience is, why is he changing now?

And is it because he's worried about his legacy?

Is he worried about the Republican Congress is going to disclose or subpoena or public all of his emails with Francis Collins, Peter Dostick, all of the alarm that he had in the first days of the COVID pandemic that somehow people like us, our listeners, our audience, would think that Anthony Falchief, given on the evidence, may have helped fund it through Echo Health

gain of function research, which was outlawed in the United States, but not so in China, the Wuhan Lab, and therefore was the

birther of this virus.

Is that why he's worried?

Is it, or you know what?

It's also, Jack,

was this whole I mean, the idea that he became a cult figure.

I know it was narcissism and he had pictures of himself everywhere he made an enormous amount of money and he's speaking for enormous fees and consultantships and all of that I understand

and I understand

that he did not like Donald Trump.

So it was part of his role once he was the advisor to Trump to undercut him

on

MSNBC, CNBC,

NPR,

and that's where he was after he was ostracized or he ostracized himself from Fox.

And was the, was, if you look at the results rather than just the causation, and one of the results was it destroyed the, as you know, it destroyed the Trump administration going in in 2019

in December, but especially even as late as January and February.

You know, Biden brags about his unemployment, it's 3.5.

Trump's was 3.4.

I mean, it's 3.4.

Trump's was 3.5 without the inflation or high interest rates.

As we went into

the pandemic, he had the first time we'd had a middle-class increase in wages.

Interest rates right now on a 30-year mortgage are 7%.

They were 2.9% under Trump before COVID.

2.9.

And even when Biden took office, they were 2.9.

The inflation rate was 1.8.

That was a booming economy with low inflation, low interest, steady growth, low employment.

And you know what?

The number of people, Jack, that are working in 2020 and January, that was not

before COVID, the last month, that was not achieved by Biden until two months ago.

He barely got the number of people back.

So he brags about all of this low unemployment.

All he's done is finally, after all of the money and spent, we finally got back to the number of people working before the pandemic hit.

And more importantly, the labor, I think the most key statistic is the labor non-participation rate.

And it's gone up under,

if I could go at the other way, the labor participation rate has gone down.

It's down almost to below 62%.

And so what I'm getting at was Fauci's craziness that defied prior and post-medical exegesis and what he said himself.

why in this period, in this period alone, was he such an outspoken critic of almost all the things that Donald Trump said?

Right.

And I think it was because

he, and why was he so famous on the left?

Why did the left, they'd known him from the AIDS epidemic, they'd been very critical of him during the AIDS epidemic.

Very critical.

He was not a, when we went into COVID, he was not a national hero.

Why did he become one?

Because he became synonymous with quote unquote, I am the science, and Donald Trump isn't, and I represent rationality, and he doesn't.

And I think he was instrumental in

forming political opposition to Trump on the basis of COVID.

And now it's over with, and people look at him and said, for the cheap price of getting rid of president,

I don't know if that's cheap, but for the price of getting rid of president, you ruin your reputation.

And you bankrupt now.

And now he says, no, no, I'm a scientist.

I'm going to go back and write peer-reviewed papers and go back to my original one.

Trump's gone.

It's not an issue anymore.

Victor,

the last thing I'll say about this particular piece by Bell, again, it's in the Epoch Times.

And he makes the point over and over again that this wasn't just,

Fauci wasn't admitting he got it wrong.

I don't think he'd even use language approaching that, but that this was really an admission of deception.

That what went on was not, I got it wrong.

It was intentional.

It was truly deception and the consequences of

that people will

one of Bill's points is people will believe they're being deceived by the leading, you know, I am science, the health guru of the United States, and how that, the ramifications that's going to have for the future yet to play out, but how we feel about healthcare in America now, because these guys lie to us.

They blew it.

They lied to us.

I don't think

you can argue that the so-called million, I don't know if that reflects people who've died of COVID rather than with COVID, but the figure is around 1.1 million.

You can argue whose fault that was.

And I have a feeling that

our Fauci had some pretty bad advice that contributed to that.

And, you know, the idea of the rest homes and all, I won't get into that, but I think it's pretty clear two things.

One, that everybody talks about the number of cases of spousal abuse, familial abuse, suicides, chronic depression,

alcoholism, drug overdoses, economic ruination.

missed medical operations, procedures, tests.

You add all of that

up,

and you can argue that more people probably died.

I think if you look at the actual number of people who died from any causes, total dead per month, you can argue that

it was greater.

And so my point is

that

the reaction to the virus probably did more damage.

And that's not talking about the economy.

which ruined an economy that we were went from two plus growth down to minus seven some months.

And we wiped out the work of years and lifetimes of millions of people.

And we shut down the schools.

And I don't think those kids are ever going to get over that missing two years.

And we looked at, we created a whole Zoom culture of elites.

It's still played.

But more importantly, Jack, I think psychologically, it did a lot of damage.

I think putting people away from other people with no human contact, not just did it, it sort of softened up and made their immune systems flabby.

So when they went back out, they got colds and flu, all that.

But just the lack of human content or the idea you go into store and you see everybody mask

and the suspicion or you get all your information from television, not from talking to people or being refuted or rebutted or in conversation.

That one-sided stream of...

information that comes from the mainstream media via your computer, your iPhone,

or your television.

I think it explains the mass hysteria, the

BLM phenomena, the Antifa phenomena, the 120 days of rioting,

the craziness.

It really was an accelerant of woke.

Without it, I don't think you would have had woke.

It would have died out by now, like Me Too did.

What was the difference between woke and Me Too?

Me Too kind of died out with Tara Reed.

With a mask, either you have a mask on or you don't have a mask on.

So it's very easy.

I think you're going to get to a point very quickly where stores and banks are going to not allow people to come in with a mask because it's such a they don't know whether a criminal.

I keep going to that anecdote.

I think I told it three or four times where I was talking to the bank teller in a local town and she said she's terrified of people with masks.

And she said, you know,

I've had one time in my life when somebody came in with a handkerchief and evolved the bank until COVID.

So what's, I don't know which, who were, who were what.

Yeah, I get a point.

I actually, a friend, he's dead now, Ron, Ron from Milford.

He was kind of an

odd ball, but he thought it was funny.

Went into the local bank and he had a, you know, a winter mask pulled down over his head.

And,

you know, Ron couldn't

Ron couldn't run

a block and get away, but he was just being a practical joker.

He was arrested, rightly so.

You know, the law's against that, but you're right.

It took the abnormal and the unreal and it mainstreamed it.

And we just shrugged.

One day I was, you know, I was in the bank and everybody had a mask on.

I thought, my God,

am I sane?

Is this insane?

Or I went and,

you know, I talked to my daughter and I heard all the kids.

And I said, what's going on?

They're all home.

They're all home.

They shut down all the school.

And I said, well, what are you doing?

I'm trying to conduct Zooms.

You know, and then people got it.

They also got to look at what their kids have been teaching.

So there was all sorts of these secondary ramifications that we hadn't even thought of.

And it's marred.

And I hope to God we never go back to this again.

Yeah.

Speaking of abnormal and unreal,

Lori Lightfoot lost her re-election effort for Chicago, a mayor.

Any thoughts about that, Victor?

Is Is he surprised by that?

No,

because she hit that magical woke

data point where life, because of woke, becomes so untenable that even people who supported her and supported her policy understood that it was suicidal.

Too many people were getting killed.

The magic mod, they were doing, I mean, she destroyed the city like the way Bill de Blasio did.

And so they turned on her and then she played the race card.

She said it was because being black and a woman.

And I thought to myself, are you blank, blank serious being black and gay in America?

How do you think the cabinet member,

why do you think Camilla Harris is vice president?

Was it because of her stellar senatorial record?

Was it her brilliant legal career?

Was it her wonderful record as Attorney General of California?

Was it her mellifilous diction and grammar?

Is that why she's Vice President of the United States?

Or was it she's an old loyalist Democrat, served 30 years and can bring in?

No.

It was A, by Joe Biden's own admission, she was female and she was black.

So for her to sit there and tell America that I was defeated in an overwhelmingly minority city because I was what, black and gay, gay woman?

So African Americans and Hispanic Americans, which comprise the majority of Chicago residents, which I think are only 30 something percent white, they voted because what?

White people brainwashed them?

And then she's, when she talked about racism, I remember that.

You remember that statement she said that I'm no longer going to talk to white reporters?

Right.

Yeah.

She was the biggest racist of all time.

And then she was kind of in kind of like Bill de Blasio, who

the Marxist who who had to go to the, you know, be chauffeured to the gym and had all sorts of questionable financial expenditures and stuff, and lived the life of royalty.

She was always, I have to have my hair done because I'm the public image of Chicago.

You can't, but I must.

So it's very strange when leftists talk about radical enforced egalitarianism and that

they are the voices of the folks, and they do that only to secure and advance advance their own privileges.

Well, the vanguard of the proletariat needs

to highlight.

She was the anecdote to Rom Emmanuel, we were told, that he would be the last white male mayor in Chicago.

And he was the anecdote, we were told, to the corrupt Chicago machine, that he wasn't part of it.

He wasn't an alderman and all that stuff.

He was an outsider.

And, you know, he was.

And he didn't do anything but make things worse.

And then to correct him, we were not going to get part of the machine, and we were not going to get a

white male from the outside.

We were going to get a Chicago black

gay woman.

And she would come in with a fresh

perspective.

I remember reading that she was articulate, kind of a Harry Reid, condescending fashion, as Joe Biden and Harry Reid said about Barack Obama, and that this was going to usher.

And no sooner did she get in than pad, pad, pad,

call people racist and destroy deterrence.

And the city was back to, as I said, a pre-modern existence.

By the way, Victor, I don't want to make the case for big city machines as a way of life.

I was a publisher of National Review.

We don't, you know, we have conservative principles, but you got to admit, Chicago

was

a great city.

I mean, just actually in its way, a beautiful city.

The city that worked.

Remember that?

New York didn't work.

Chicago did.

They could get the snow off the street.

Yeah.

That was what I was told when I was growing up.

Yeah, it was supposed to be the epitome of Midwestern values.

And it was Carl Sandberg's cities of what, Big Shoulders or something?

Big Shoulders, yeah.

Yeah, it was, it was the can-do Richard Richard Daly city.

Yeah,

had its virtues.

It's, you know what, it's one of the saddest things about this whole race thing, because Mayor Washington was a disaster in Chicago, is had

African-American conservatives been elected, and there were a lot of them that had a lot of great ideas.

And the whole African-American traditional conservatives intelligentsia that had wonderful ideas how to, you know, let the free market adjudicate and temper its excesses, but rely on it and have confidence in it and be inclusive and not try to race spade or hire people on the basis of, if they had of just, then these cities that had these large minority populations would have, they didn't have to suffer all those.

And I don't know if it'll be reversed or not, but

I don't, I wonder if the constituents that voted these policies in will ever get to the point where they won't look at a person's skin.

They'll just say, I'm going to vote for the person, no matter what their color is,

who advocates certain things that we know work.

But it's very tribal right now.

It really is.

Well, Victor, you mentioned a famous old Democrat name, Daly, and another one is Kennedy.

And we're going to talk about Kennedy, and we're going to talk about some interesting poll on California right after these important messages.

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So, Victor, the Kennedy I was mentioning, wanted to mention is Robert Kennedy Jr.,

who, you know, pre-COVID, I think had some renown,

well, some typical Kennedy scandal stuff,

but

big into environmental matters, clean the Hudson River, clean the Hudson River.

Okay, there's nothing wrong with that.

We don't want a dirty Hudson River in New York.

But once COVID happened, he became quite the warrior against

Fauci, against the aforementioned Fauci, against Biden, against

the glorification of the vaccine.

I stumbled across him on some

local TV show, and I just thought it was fascinating.

It seemed that he had a real depth of knowledge in discussing the intricacies of

the vaccines and what they were trying to, you know, obviously fight off.

Anyway, Robert Kennedy Jr.,

very popular political name, was up in New Hampshire this past week at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics.

That's the school, part of the St.

Anselm's University in Manchester.

And he said he's thinking of running for president.

And his wife has given him a green light.

And, you know, I think it would be interesting, Victor, if he runs and torments Joe Biden.

It'd be kind of hard not for this press not to give Robert Kennedy Jr.

Jr.

some airtime if he does run.

What do you think?

Well, he's not going to get much

political traction from the voters for a variety of reasons, but you're right.

The more candidates you can get, he's got a famous name.

He was, until recently, if you said Robert Kennedy Jr., you associated him with the topics and themes you mentioned.

He was a radical environmental lawyer.

I know as a farmer out here, he went after Roundup in the Monsano.

He got, I don't know what what it was, but it was, he made millions of dollars, Jack.

He was one of this in that firm that I don't know what it was, $300 million.

And that was just one of the settlements against Roundup.

The irony, of course, is when I started farming, and I may get cancer tomorrow, but we were told that Roundup was a safe alternative.

It was more glyphosate, it was salt more than a toxic organochloride, organophosphate killer like Parquat.

And so you could use

Roundup.

And I confess I used it yesterday.

So

anyway, he made a lot of money.

He was very well.

And then he got on energy.

Remember that?

I never understood his energy.

I could understand that he was for the people, but he was against hydroelectric and nuclear.

He tried to get dams canceled.

He tried to get nuclear plants shut down, which both are the best and most efficient producers of clean energy.

And the environmental record of dams is not that anyway.

And then all of a sudden, during the COVID, maybe a year or two before, he started sounding idiosyncratic.

I don't know if you remember.

I think he had a child that had allergies or autism.

And he thought that vaccinations had something to do with it, hyperimmune.

So he got into this theory, and it wasn't completely a theory that vaccinations create hyperimmune responses.

For somebody who was sick for a month when I was 19 from four vaccinations for tropical diseases before I went to Egypt, and then I got a long story, but every time I went to the emergency room, they'd give me a tetanus shot because I was farming.

I'd get cut, dirty cuts.

They never kept records in those days.

And then finally, I think I had my fourth

10-year booster within three years.

And I got sick as a dog for about three months, fevers and everything.

And finally, a doctor who was from England, by the way, said, you know, we don't do, we only give one

vaccination in Europe, and that's it.

And you Americans keep pushing the envelope.

You better be careful.

Do not ever get another tetanus vaccination.

And I think I had four boosters in, I don't know, five years.

So anyway, he made that.

I was kind of curious when he started talking like this.

And then when COVID came out, Tucker, remember Tucker Carlson had him on?

A lot.

And why did Tucker?

Because he doubted the efficacy of the mRNA vaccinations and felt that the immune response, given his other advocacies before COVID,

would be more dangerous than the protection it provided, if any.

And everybody thought he was crazy in February, March, April, May, June of 2020.

And then by August, September, when the breakthrough started with the Delta variant, and then by January, February of 2021, when Biden kept claiming that the virus is over, 4th of July, it would be dead because of the vaccination.

And then we had, and then all of a sudden, no, you have to get a booster.

And then it was another booster.

And then it was the third booster.

And he was...

he was getting more vocal and said, do not do this.

You're just creating spike protein that's more, that's not really giving you up-to-date protection over the latest variant, but it is filling your body with spiked protein, as I remember he said.

So I listened to him and I thought it was very interesting.

So, and he was one of those Dennis Kucinich kind of people, you know what I mean?

That

at least in their populist rhetoric, they kind of, they kind of use that

in a way that's not the elite.

He's an elite bicosta liberal, but he does have empathy for the people he he actually says he represents.

There's some consistency there, even if his nostrums are wrong.

So he's a little bit different than Elizabeth Warren or those others.

And he's not afraid to deviate from left-wing orthodoxy, even though sometimes crazy.

But otherwise, he's not going to be politically viable just because, you know, he's had.

I think he's been married three times and he's had his third wife committed suicide in anguish about him leaving her.

And

being a Catholic, he had problems with forced annulments and all this stuff.

Yeah,

he really treated that wife.

The third one.

The second one.

Yeah, quite

nasty.

I think there was a long article in the New Yorker or Atlantic that detail that.

It did.

It did.

So I don't think he'll be politically viable is what I'm saying.

And then more importantly, the Kennedy name.

Let's be honest.

The Kennedy name was created by by one man, J.F.K.

And he created it because he understood

that you could be young and charismatic and a Democrat and be for tax cuts and growth and moderation and deterrence.

And so he was a kind of a Dwight Eisenhower, but younger.

Wasn't that much difference between his policies and Ike's.

Right.

And then that was it.

He got killed and he was martyred and he was deified.

Okay.

Yeah.

And then everything else has been a play on him.

Bobby Kennedy got killed, but he was playing on JFK.

Ted Kennedy was a complete slave to his appetites and he played on JFK.

And to a lesser extent, Bobby.

And then the children that went into politics, same, ditto, ditto, ditto.

So the name keeps diminishing.

It's a law of diminishing returns until you get, unless some Kennedy comes and becomes

a successful JFK centrist, but that's not going to happen.

Yeah.

Still,

I think he'll get some, if he does do it, some

media attention.

So

but his constituency is for those people who are outsiders and are left wing, the constituency is reporters.

And

they write puff pieces.

I don't think they're going to write anything because the holy grail to the left is Anthony Fauci and lockdowns and masks and the mRNA vaccines are great.

And

if you question that, you're killing people.

That's the way they feel.

Well, I just want to be clear.

I do not want

Robert Kennedy Jr.

to be president of the United States.

So, hey, Victor,

there is a Quinnipiac University, which is actually not too far from me, but famous nationally on occasion for the Quinnipiac poll.

It's done a big survey of the views of California voters, not necessarily residents, it's

voters.

So, this poll came out

the other day on a whole range of questions.

And let me just throw out some.

I think

you've looked at it, but let me give you our listeners just a couple of numbers here on Gavin Newsom's approval.

44% approve, 43% don't.

Over 70% of voters do not want Gavin Newsom to run for president.

Just a little aside, Joe Biden's rankings among state voters is approval is 58, 47, which I think is not a good number, especially since this has to be disproportionately Democratic respondents to the poll.

Kamala Harris has a 42% approval rating, but 48% disapproval in her home state doesn't say much well for her

future.

As for the state economy, 34% say it's good, but

almost 60% say it's either not so good or poor.

On this question of prisoners can vote,

32% say yes, which I find disheartening, but still a vast majority, 64% say no.

Interesting question.

If you could afford to move out of California, was, if it was economically viable, would you?

43% said yes.

A majority said no.

I mean, it is a beautiful state, after all.

I mean, who wouldn't want to live there?

If you could.

But that's eye-opening.

I mean, geez, one out of every four people in the state, excuse me, four out of every 10, if they could leave, would leave.

So there are the numbers here that, you know, Victor, the issues that people think are most important seem to be immigration and homelessness.

And on homeless, you wonder, is this, do they care about homelessness?

$10 billion, $10 billion.

Yeah.

Are they sick or not?

Yeah.

Is that why they prioritize it?

Or are there some lefties in there thinking we don't do enough?

It's not really all that.

What's happening, I think, is

that

the got to remember that California, if you look at it demographically, is about 35% so-called white, about 44% Latino, and then about 20% Asian and others that check mixed race.

So, what I'm getting at is you've got a large Latino population that either is in one of two professions, either the California state or federal bureaucracies, I mean, Department of Human Resources, da-da-da, DMV.

You go to these services in California, the management level is mostly Latino, Hispanic or Latino.

And then second,

they're private entrepreneurs, landscapers, contractors, electrician.

And both of those constituencies are in the upper middle class.

And they're starting to learn that you have a California income tax rate, a California sales tax rate.

California gas tax rate that's the highest in the country and you have schools that are in the top excuse me the bottom 10 percent infrastructure is rated about dead last in a lot of these surveys of bridges and roads.

You've got a third of the world of the nation's

poverty recipients.

You've got the largest number of illegal aliens in the country, the largest number of homeless.

And they look at it.

And Gavin Newsom is the epitome of that.

And so far, he has survived politically because whenever anybody criticizes him and he feels that he has to react, he writes a check.

And all I mean by that, Jack, is he writes a check for $500 million for health care for illegal aliens during COVID, or he writes a check for $600 million to give rebates for his high gas prices.

But when you have the highest kilowatt outside of Hawaii and the highest gasoline prices because of the blend in taxes, and you have the highest prices on average per square foot of any state, people can't live.

I don't care what your party affiliation.

So that poll does not show the 25% of the state that's solidly conservative.

That poll shows a lot of upscale Hispanics that do not like Gavin Newsom.

Well, does that translate into they won't vote for him?

Not yet, because it's versus what or whom.

But

another problem he has is he's a child of privilege and insider.

So he did not really do anything on his own.

His family, his dad was a judge.

By marriage, he's related to Nancy Pelosi.

He comes from that old boy

network of wealthy people.

Gordon Getty and the Getty oil fortune was at his beck and call for help and got him in businesses.

And

he's, you know, he's had a drinking problem.

He's not necessarily been the representative of sober.

He gets angry.

He has that gravelly voice.

He yells at people.

And then most peculiarly,

he's either a hypocrite or he's absent while on duty.

And by that, I mean he'll go to the French laundry and wear no mask after he said that it's a criminal offense almost if you're not masked.

And then in reaction to the criticism, he'll show up down at an event in a sporting event without a mask.

Do it again.

Or he won't say anything when Nancy Pelosi gets caught at the hairdresser or London Reed the Mayor gets caught at the French laundry.

So people feel he's a hypocrite.

And second, when we had these horrendous biblical fires two years ago where everything,

for me,

it's personal because I have a small house in the Sierras and the fire came within about 800 yards.

And he wasn't, you know where he was, Jack?

He was in Montana with his in-laws.

He was out of state.

And this is a guy who told us that he wouldn't pay,

he wouldn't pay for anybody to go to these red states because of

their attitudes about abortion and transgenderism.

And he went to one because his in-laws have a Tony Diggs that he stayed at right during the fires.

Okay, so now I'm looking out the window, Jack, and there's a terrible hail storm.

We have had probably will end up the wettest year in recorded California history.

He has told us that we were in an existential drought.

And even when we had the first wave of wet weather, which if it had stopped raining entirely, by February 20th, we would have had enough water for the whole year.

The drought was over then.

And he still said it was a drought.

And yet,

in a very wet year that he said was a drought, 90% of all of the melted snow at that point and all of the rain runoff was going out to the ocean because of our environmentalist pipe dream that they were going to have riparian waterways that were analogous to 19th century rivers, or they were going to save the Delta smelt three-inch little bait fish in the delta, or they were going to replant $30,000 or $40,000 at a shot salmon so they could go up to the Sierra.

All of these crazy ideas were destroying California agriculture, and they were draining the reservoirs.

And then

everybody was warning him that the drought is over.

Stop it.

Just declare it over.

No more.

Let the water be saved.

Give the farmers their contractual water.

Just drop all about monitoring your groundwater.

Just wait and watch this year.

It's never been anything like it.

So now, the last four days, it is raining a torrent.

There has been an accumulated, accumulated jack about 50 feet, just 60 miles from me up in the Sierra.

I went up

in January

and dug, dug, dug.

And there were six feet of snow in the deck and six feet in the courtyard.

And then I hired two young men to take 10 feet off the roof.

And then they took more out.

And then my daughter and her family came up a week later and started from scratch and did the same thing again.

And then it happened again.

And I got a note from the snow removal that there is now, they can't get in.

The road is completely blocked.

There is 12 feet of snow on the driveway.

I don't know if I have a house yet.

I hear that a lot of houses are being collapsed.

When you have a cumulative 50 feet, you can imagine.

And even though my house is pretty well built, it's had 50 feet fall.

And I've taken all but the last 15, but 15 feet is pretty heavy, especially with a high water content.

So all this long exegesis is on what?

It's excursus.

Where is Gavin Newsome?

Where is he?

I ask that, Jack, because they can't open Highway 168.

I've never seen anything happen like this in my life.

It's still closed for almost a week because you know why?

They don't have enough Caltrans snowblowers.

and they break down.

And the governor is where?

He's out campaigning on the East Coast about abortion and everything because he thinks he's going to be running for president.

So that's why people don't like him.

That doesn't mean that they will vote for a Republican-conservative alternative.

They just don't like him.

And that means that he's not going to be the nominee no matter what.

People get to know him and see him and his yelling and

what he calls his, I guess, casual clothes where he gets Bergenstocks or,

you know, these designers

felt vest and all that.

It's so artificial and contrived because that's who he is.

And he never is here during a fire or a flood or any problem.

And yet when they were looting the trains down in the LA port, the port was inert.

And guess what?

And then he came and dressed down five days later and picked up trash on camera.

Didn't do any, he didn't enact any policies that would deter criminals from wild dress, wild west type robbery.

When he finally came back from Montana, he got in the same outfit, the jeans and the work boots and the vest.

And then he went up and he helped clean up around the ash, you know, and had a photo op.

And people don't like that.

And that's, he doesn't care.

If he cared about the middle-class Californians, he would make sure their gas was competitive or their electricity rates.

He says we're outlawed natural gas, he did all new homes.

And you're not, you can't buy, Jack, a blower.

Amazon will not send you a gas blower to California if you buy it.

You cannot buy it.

And you can only buy the existing stock in stores.

You have to bring it up.

What if you went to Nevada and bought one and brought it to the store?

I don't mean that as a great alternative, but

if you can find somebody that can fix it and has parts, I don't think you can bring the parts in.

But my point is that, you know, I have an electric blower.

It lasts for about eight minutes

at full blast.

And so I have all my old

gas that I try to fix and keep going.

And then he said, we're all going to be, I mean, we're the biggest Tesla market in the United States.

I think Tesla sells 40% of their cars in California.

It's the largest selling, the Y model Tesla is the largest selling car in California.

It beats forward Chevy, anything.

And yet he tells us, hey,

we don't have enough electricity.

Don't charge your, don't, during last summer, he's worried about it because he hadn't, they don't, they don't, they shut down.

two nuclear power plants.

He was going to shut down Diablo Canyon, then he backed off.

But But that's the kind of what he does.

It's all,

it's just a representation of what a very wealthy person who lives within 30 miles of the coast from

La Jolla to Berkeley thinks.

Whatever they think, that's what he does.

Victor, one question about him and one about the weather.

If he disappeared today for whatever reason,

who is the

in waiting to be the next

political leader of California?

And I'm not talking talking about Kamala Harris

or Adam Schiff, who all have their eyes, he has his eyes set on as you know.

I don't think there is anybody of any stature.

I mean, there's all this, if you go look at the main people who are running the California legislature,

the Assembly or the House, a vast majority of them are under investigation for various conflicts of interest or corruption or sexual harassment.

All of them, the leadership is because it's a one-party state.

So there's no worry about audit or

examining their record or holding them to account.

When they have super majorities in both houses of the California legislature, there's not one single statewide Republican office holder.

Out of the 52

House seats,

There's we had a big win.

There's 11, 11 Republicans.

And there's not going to be any more Pete Wilsons and

even an Arnold Schwarzenegger would be too conservative today.

And part of the problem is, you know, 10 million people have left, somewhere between 400 and 500,000 left last year.

So this guy is campaigning and he tries to take down DeSantis.

He's convinced DeSantis is going to get the nomination.

And that that's going to be

an election of the governors.

And he has an existential problem that people

in droves of 400,000, 300,000 go to Florida.

And by the same number, they leave his state.

And his state, to be fair to Florida, I've been to both a lot.

California, Florida is a beautiful state, but it's not as beautiful as California.

California is the most beautiful state in the world.

I remember, Victor, the first time I went out there, I could not believe the beauty.

I thought, oh my gosh, this is so, so special.

It really is.

It's like nothing in the world.

I can be at 7,000 feet at Huntington Lake and an alpine lake and gaze at this beautiful cold water lake.

And the temperature is 75 degrees in July.

And there's these lush forests.

And I'm looking at Kaiser Peak.

And I can get in my car.

And I can drive through, say, if I do it in May, Irish foothills.

It looks like Ireland in the spring and even in the summer at places.

And then I can stop at my farm and see this verdant patchwork of farm.

And then I can go in two hours and I can be on the beach at Cayucas, California, an old fishing village and beautiful beaches.

And you can do, and that's not, these are not the places people go to.

They go to even, I guess, more beautiful Tahoe or they go to Montecito or Carmel.

So it's got everything.

So we took paradise that we inherited.

from nature and from a wonderful generation that created everything from the California Water Project to our wonderful clover leaf

interstate and state systems of freeways, and we destroyed it.

And Texas and Texas, and maybe Tennessee and Florida took, I don't know, I don't want to say hell, but they made whatever they took into paradise.

And so this is his legacy.

And he's the caboose.

He is the caboose on the long train of

Jerry Brown, term one,

Gray Davis, Jerry Brown term two,

and he's the ultimate manifestation of what they can do.

Go down to San Francisco and just walk or walk.

You know, my wife and I, I had to go speak in Los Angeles not too long ago.

And anybody who's gone to downtown Los Angeles?

Boy,

it looks like it's been nuked.

There's nobody there.

I mean, you look at night and

the high-rises, there's no lights in them.

And

I thought, wow, I got to go down there.

I got to beat the traffic.

I got to get there before 2 o'clock.

It's downtown.

I got there because 4.05 was packed, but I got downtown at 3.30 on a weekday, and there's no traffic problem at all.

I thought, where are the people?

I couldn't believe it.

Well, they're zooming or they're afraid to come downtown.

Homelessness, crime.

That's his California.

Go down.

I used to be a visiting professor at Pepperdime.

I'm going to do it again in the fall, but I used to love

when I would drive my 220 miles to my farm.

First thing I do, get my bike out of the trunk, go down to, you know, somewhere around halfway between Pepperdine and Venice Beach, get on the bike path and ride all the way to Torrance, 30 miles to Torrance and back sometime.

And you know what?

You can't do that now.

There's Venice Beach is just, I mean, there's the homelessness, the crime.

It's just amazing.

He did that.

All of those people did that.

The mayors, the state legislatures, and he's got to run on that.

Yeah.

Proof of the pudding, people, Lonel Reagan said that people vote with their feet.

And

so he did that, and his party did that, and his ideology did that.

And whenever there's a real problem that requires hands-on expertise and high morale in the bureaucracy, he's not to be found.

He's out of state.

And his wife is making a pretty good salary as a CEO of a quote-unquote non-profit that is selling their left-wing literature to what?

The California school system.

Talk about that as a conflict of interest.

All these people, remember the left, when you have the media in your pocket and

the ideology of the reporter and the politician is identical and they feel that they don't believe in

keeping somebody honest, that they have a shared utopian agenda, then they do whatever they want.

They have no fear.

He has no fear at all.

He doesn't fear the media.

He doesn't fear the electorate.

He doesn't fear anything.

If Larry Elder runs against him for a recall and the Los Angeles Times opinion columnist said he's the voice, he's the face of white privilege, or somebody shows up with a monkey

costume when he's speaking.

They don't care.

They could care less.

That would be a career-ending fact for anybody to write that about an African-American, successful, accomplished person, that he's a voice, a face of white supremacy.

No consequences.

And

that's important for people to understand.

That created Gavin Newsom.

Old boy, networking, old boy, take care of our own San Francisco, wealthy, aristocratic.

That's what they did.

And then plug into the California Democratic machine and wait your turn and give in your billet, and then

just assume that you can do whatever you want because the California media is so left-wing.

Well, one last thing on the weather, I'm dispirited after what you're talking about.

I am very much scared right now.

But on the weather front, is there any,

with all this

torrential rain and snow?

And I know you just said

90% of this.

Well, there's so much now that it doesn't matter.

They let out 10 million acre feet.

That's about three of those big.

You've driven on by Pacheco Pass and you sit on that big reservoir, or there's a big one right near where I live at Millerton Lake, and that's a half a million acre feet.

It's huge.

And just think of that 20 times.

Well, but my question was going to be, though,

are the aquafires, the underground water, has that been replenished at all?

I don't know how it's starting to because

the rivers are rushing out, but the dams were built for a purpose.

And that was not just irrigation and not just hydroelectric and not just recreation.

They were built for flood prevention.

And so.

In a really rare historical year like this,

they're going to fill up and there's going to be so much water.

And there is right now

that the irrigation districts are being told, we'll give you all the water we want.

We've got to get this, whatever water's in the lakes, we've got to drain it so the snow melt won't flood over.

So what's happening is on my little farm, this pond

that my great-great-grandmother was, I mentioned was the reason that she came here,

it's full.

It's an artesian, it's being filled by the irrigation district.

I'm looking out right now at the almond orchard.

There's water standing in the rows.

We had a guy out pumping it out so it didn't kill the tree.

It's so much water.

And it's crazy.

So despite everything that they've done, the environmentalists, and it's not just to save the salmon or the delta smell or the river banks, none of that.

It's also to destroy agribusiness and agriculture.

They do not want people farming.

And at least farming as they conceive it, but they can't stop nature.

Nature has said to you, screw you, the drought is over.

It's not climate change.

It's not climate change.

You're not in a permanent drought.

We're going to snow and we're going to rain till you're sick of it.

And it's going to be very dangerous for you people because we're going to put you back into flood.

This is more dangerous right now than a drought, much more dangerous because

people have never seen.

this level of snow.

And, you know, I spent 20 years of my life saving money to buy a little lot in the Sierras and build a house.

And I was worried about the drought and the trees that it right, it almost got burned down, right?

Yeah, we had three years of drought.

And I think I had to remove nine trees that died right next to my house because I thought they were any moment they were going to fall over.

One, the neighbor cut down a tree and it fell on my roof.

I had to get that fixed.

And I thought, wow.

And now I've never seen, I mean, I've had

16 winners up there, and I've been on that house myself digging, and I have never been more frightened of that house that it may be right as we speak right now, collapse.

I have no idea.

All I know is that I said to my wife, I think I was kind of paranoid that I, that we went up there and we got all the snow out so many times, and then I had my son do it, and I had my daughter's family do it, and I hired a person, and she kind of dryly said, would you like 55 feet on that?

Because Because that's what would have been if you didn't.

That's some staggering concept.

55 feet of snow.

Anybody's out there and you have a home or you know anybody in Huntington Lake, please tell me if I have a house.

I would very much appreciate it.

Yeah.

Well, we'll say a prayer to St.

Joseph, who's the patron saint of snow and see if he can.

He's not patron saint of snow removal.

He's just, you just want your, your house to sustain whatever burdens on it right now.

Isn't it funny?

Only in California two years ago, would you be watching the fire hourly report to see

how far you were?

And my shingles got so hot that I had to tear them all.

I just put on a brand new roof.

It was very, because of the, and now I'm wondering if it's too wet and it's too much snow for the roof.

Yeah.

Well, anyway, only in California, but we're not well led.

We have a beautiful natural, but a very dangerous state because it's prone to earthquakes and fires and floods.

And we fooled ourselves by our ancestors' ingenuity and benevolence that we were at the end of history and we're not.

You got to watch the fires and watch the floods and create good reservoirs and good fire departments and good roads and good access.

And we haven't done that.

We lived on the fumes of other people's work.

Well, Victor, we're about out of time, so we thank our listeners who, especially if you're new, thanks very much.

Do consider, as I mentioned before, victorhanson.com, visit the Blade of Perseus and subscribe.

As for me, Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society at Amphil, where

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And practically everyone gives this show five stars as a tribute to the regular brilliance that Victor

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Some people leave comments.

We read them all.

And here's one.

And I cannot say who it's from because there's so many, it's like somebody was slapping the keyboard, or it looks like one of those

Welsh lakes or, you know,

it's just the word with 37 letters in it.

But it's titled, Dr.

Hansen is a National Treasure.

Why isn't he president?

Dr.

Hansen is a brilliant author and political analyst.

His work in the field of classics is exemplary or exemplary.

I've read his wonderful book, A War Like No Other, three times.

I own many of his other texts, and they were all great reads.

Thank you, Dr.

Hansen, for keeping real academics alive.

Thank you.

to whoever you are for writing that.

Victor, thank you for all the wisdom you shared today.

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

Thanks so much.

Thank you,

everybody, for listening.

As for why I'm not president, there's a simple reason I'm totally unqualified.

And I wish people would also, when they're unqualified, admit it, like Mark.

Thank you very much, everybody.