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Hello, ladies and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, the star, the namesake Victor Davis-Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Lots to talk about today.

We're going to start off with Victor's thoughts on some comments by Joe Biden about a movie that he showed at the White House this past week on Emmett Till, the young black teenager who was lynched, murdered in the night, I think, 1955.

But Joe Biden, of course, has...

taken this tragedy and this movie and exploited it into his usual

lunacy to make America more divisive.

Anyway, we'll get Victor's thoughts on that, plus the train derailment, troubles with

flying again, abortion and the Department of Defense, plenty more.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We again, we are recording on the 18th of February, and this particular episode will be up on Tuesday, February 21st.

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So, Victor, I know you have some thoughts you want to share about Joe Biden.

Again, he

had a viewing at the White House earlier this week on a documentary on Emmett Till, and he said some thoughts the day before about the new governor of Maryland.

Joe can't help but stir America's racial divisiveness.

Victor, what are your thoughts?

You know, I don't understand Joe Biden because he

calls

the so-called white middle class chomps and drags, and then he brags that he's a mid from that.

And then

he unleashes a whole patois

of fake acts,

you know, put you all in chains, that kind of stuff.

And then he has a whole repertoire of racism.

Remember he said Barack Obama was the first clean, articulate presidential black African-American candidate.

And he called the journalist junkie, and he called him, you ain't black.

And he said to a very distinguished group of professionals, they're going to put you all back in chains.

And the donut comment.

And he used the term for one of his senior assistants down in Louisiana.

He called him boy.

Still uses the word negro, et cetera, et cetera.

So he's watching this

new film about Emmett Till, this horrific murder that took place, as you said, I think 55, I guess, in Mississippi.

Young African-American teenager was brutally murdered

by

this

aggrieved husband who had nothing to be aggrieved about.

His wife accused the teenager of flirting with her, whatever.

He beat him to a pulp.

killed him, buried him.

The body surfaced.

They found out.

They shipped the body.

It was an open casket funeral.

It set the country on fire, as it should have.

And then people got even angrier when a white jury acquitted him.

And then he confessed later on, knowing he couldn't be put under double jeopardy.

And he got some money for an interview saying that he did it accidentally, but that was obviously not true.

So

he sees this thing and he says, you know, lynched for simply being black, but I don't think that Emmett Till, first of all, was lynched, was he, Jack?

I think he was beaten up.

But

I'm not going to quote the exact exact circumstance.

And then he said he was lynched for simply being black, nothing more.

Okay, no problem with that.

That's true.

With white crowds, white families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies and mailing them as postcards.

I'm not sure that that is applicable to this particular case.

I'm trying to split hairs, but in a very tense, racially divided America to say that all these white people were taking pictures.

I think that's about an earlier age in the, from 1870 to 1920s, when 3,500 African Americans aggregate were lynched.

It was terrible.

But then this is what, but I'm not, I'm not interested in splitting hairs about that.

He says, hard to believe that that was done.

And then he said, and some people still want to do that.

And who are those people?

Who are the people who want to do it?

I want to know who he means by that.

What are the statistics?

Show me the data.

I guess the only two places you could look for data that would support such a wild accusation would be hate crime statistics and interracial statistics of violent crime.

But when you look at those two categories of hate crimes, so-called whites are underrepresented.

African Americans are double their numbers in the demographics.

If you look at interracial crime, which is, it's rare compared compared to most crimes, it's about

all murders and violent, so-called violent crimes.

I think it's six to eight percent.

But of that six percent,

depending on the particular crime, African Americans are five times more likely to be the perpetrator against whites

than the victims.

So when I look for

you know, it's like Mark Milley and the white rage, I just want to know where they get that information.

Where does he know that?

And the answer is he doesn't know it and he's going back to his tropes and his demagoguery remember put you all in chains he warned people who voted for of all people moderate uh mitt romney but the weird thing about it was

he said this on a thursday

And on, and this is kind of important, on a Wednesday, he went to Maryland and he said, you know, this new African-American, very accomplished new governor, who's, I think his name's Wesmore, He said, you know, and he always has this fake accent, kind of the Hillary Clinton patois dialect or the Obama fake inner city dialect.

And so Biden, you know, he's introducing, he says, you got a hell of a new governor in Westmore.

I tell ya.

He's the real deal.

And the boy looked like he could still play.

He's got some guns on the boy?

And I'm thinking, wait a minute, that's a racial slight.

How can you say that on Wednesday and then accuse white people of wanting to lynch people on Thursday with no evidence?

And more importantly, is that a gaff?

Because I remember in August of

2021, he went down to New Orleans.

You remember and he said something to the effect, I'm here with my advisor and boy, and boy, and a boy who knows Louisiana and a boy.

He said that before.

I can't imagine.

Victor, you would call a dog.

Come here, boy.

Or you would maybe call a little child.

What a nice little boy.

You're a good boy.

And it gets even worse, though, because you remember when

they, I think the New York Times printed a story that they begged Joe Biden to stop praising Robert Byrd and James O.

Eastland, the two segregationist senators that when he came up in the 70s were still in there and ran it.

And he not only refused to do that, but he said something once, you know,

I used used to caucus with James O.

Eastland.

And then he said something very important.

He never called me boy.

He always called me son.

And I'm thinking, okay.

So you're telling me that this white segregationist was a great guy because he didn't call you boy,

but you called two very accomplished African Americans in your own presidential tenure as boy.

Right.

And this is on top of the corn pop racist fables.

It's on top of the donut remark shop.

It's on top of you ain't black.

It's on top of junkie.

It's the satchel Negro.

So he's got a whole history of the makes the most infamous black Barack Obama was the first black candidate, remember, that's articulate.

So he's got a whole corpus of that.

And then he projects, and the left never says a word.

So he can call, he can just

blanketly stereotype an entire demographic of

being racist, but his own words convict himself.

And I, and no one says a word.

And it reminds me so much of what Harry Reid said.

You remember him?

He said something to the effect that Obama was the first person that didn't have a Negro dialect unless he really wanted to have one.

And then we had,

I want to be careful here, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I remember she said that she was confused why uh there was all the up people were upset over you know roe versus wade and abortion she said frankly

you know i thought that when roe was you know decided that there was a concern about you know had too many people and we had particularly growth in populations and then this was the key word i remember it as if I read it yesterday.

In populations, we don't want to have too many of.

In other words, that was what, that was the eugenicist argument.

And that was given in the New Yorker, and they kind of hushed it up.

So what I'm trying to say is that a lot of these very, very left-wing people who are always alleging racism and other people themselves are very uncomfortable with the so-called other.

And it really is some kind of psychological mechanism where you square that circle about your own uncertainty about race by then making these blanket accusations.

And, you know,

it gets back to Joe Biden accusing people of whip, you know, and Majorca's whipping poor Haitian refugees coming across,

not refugees, they were just illegally crossing the Rio Grande.

But it does filter down and it is.

It does filter down into concrete policies.

And you can really see that in East Palestine.

And

I know that this will ring true to our audience.

If there was a derailing of cars,

say near the PCH in Malibu, and if those cars were not leaking, but they had inert acetylbutane or vinyl chloride in them.

PVC is basically what it is, that makes PVC pipes.

And they decided that they didn't want to pump them out or they were worried about, and they vented that

and you had a huge toxic plume sitting over brentwood

uh pacific palisades and malibu or or or prompton watts and south central la either one right you would have an outrage you would have biden down there you would have fema they're not even down there in all ways so what i'm getting at is if you're very very very privileged and white biden will

address that and do, you know, you're the chosen people.

If you're a so-called minority, he will go that too.

But if you're a poor, white, poor white,

he has nothing but contempt.

You can see it.

The reason he doesn't go to East Palestine, if you want to know why he doesn't go, just see what he said the other day when he accused people of still wanting to see people lynch and celebrate it.

That's his contempt.

Victor, the majority.

He's really being despicable.

He really is.

I cannot get this image.

They said that Reagan had a

Teflon veneer, but when you think of Joe Biden, my God,

this family is demonstrably the most corrupt presidential family we've ever encountered.

And he has said the craziest racist things.

They got mad at Trump for saying Haiti is an SHIT hole member.

And that was proof of his racism, supposedly.

But compared to Biden, and there's zilch, nothing.

Well, it spreads to others, too.

Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot somehow, and I think this is a terrible game to play, but what the hell?

What if

some Republican had said something akin to what Biden said about this movie on Emmett Till, exploited Emmett Till?

Absolutely.

And through, he'd be awesome.

But if James Carville was plotting, he'd say, oh,

yeah,

the most recent murder

a la Emmett Till, was

Tyree Nichols in Memphis, killed by five black men.

They would play that game immediately.

There's no question.

Of course they do.

And then the other thing is racial demagoguery is not coming from the lower middle white class.

It's coming in refined tones from the upper, white, middle class, upper, upper, upper class, whether it's Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Harry Reid or Joe Biden.

It's coming from that class, A, and it's coming from the privileged African-American class.

I can remember back in the 2012 election, Chris Rock said that, oh, it's 4th of July.

Remember that?

It's happy white people's day.

And then I remember

later they asked Jamie Foxx about,

is it

Dongo Unchained, that Quentin Tarantino movie, what it was like.

They were after, remember for using the N-word in that movie, and they were after Tarantino,

because

it's filled with that slur all through that movie in the dramatic context of the times.

And he said something I'll never forget.

He said, I kill all the white people in the movie.

How great is that?

Nobody said a word.

And I remember Jay-Z, they all love Jay-Z, came to the White House, and he had that weird badge, the 5% nation badge on.

And that 5% referred to this radical subset of the nation of Islam that hates white people and wants to kill them and get rid of them and they're wicked.

And he had it on.

And I thought to myself, my God, how can he get away with that?

And then I remember the CNN, Ellie Mostel, that CNN talking head, he said right during the COVID, well, when COVID's over, I just don't think I can take white people anymore.

I just can't, I just don't want to be around them.

Or that psychiatrist at Yale University who said she dreams of, she was a visiting psychiatrist, I should point out.

And she said she dreams of shooting white people, killing them.

And, you know, it goes on and on and on.

And, and I don't, you know,

it doesn't matter to me if they want to talk.

It's a free country.

But what gets me so angry is that Joe Biden then projects what his social class says onto the white working class or wealthy privileged blacks like Sonny Hoston on The View, who say that Republicans go to Trump like roaches do to RAID.

And Whoopi Goldberg says, hey, the Holocaust was just a fight between some white people.

When they say outrageous stuff like that,

and Biden and his class say outrage, it does filter down.

And how does it reify and manifest?

It's manifest like nobody gives a damn about this white community community of 98% white, very impoverished, middle class, lower middle class, right on the Pennsylvania border, i.e., it's right next to the Pennsylvania precincts that ensured that Barack Obama in 2008 would lose to Hillary Clinton and then incited him off on these people cling to their guns, their Bibles, their religion, the Klinger speech.

And

so

they just, I bet FEMA's not even there.

You would have thought on day one, they would have said, oh, my God, these things are explosive.

We're going to vent them.

Let's bring in tents.

Let's bring in cots.

Let's bring in semis full of food.

Let's bring in mobile kitchen and get set it up 20 miles,

you know, up window.

Yeah, Victor, I got to say, you're right, generally, because this happened weeks ago.

I think it was just yesterday when we're recording.

that we're doing it now.

The APA Commissioner Regan, I think is his name,

showed showed up there.

And Pete Butijik's whole purpose was

whenever they have a problem like this,

it's always Donald Trump did it.

So the balloons,

it was Donald Trump.

We were told that this happened first with Donald Trump.

He didn't even know about it.

And now we're told that in 2018, he relaxed the regulations for rail cars.

He did, but it had nothing to do with toxic chemicals.

It had something to do with, as I recall, oil being

transferred.

They didn't call that toxic, so they didn't require some type of electric braking system on a car.

I don't think you should have done it, but it was completely irrelevant to what happened.

But in their mind, they can't deal with a problem, so it's Donald Trump.

And Pete Buttijik knows, why doesn't he go there?

Because he has contempt for those people.

And more importantly, he knows that if he were to go there, it would not be an MSNBC puff piece interview.

He understands that.

They would address him in a town hall, and he wouldn't like it.

And

it wouldn't be homophobic.

It would be, who in the hell do you think you are as Department of Transportation Secretary to just write us off as nobodies?

Well, and on top of that, Victor, and there's a lot to put on top of Budigé here, because we can go down the laundry list of the other kind of transportation, and we will later on the show, we'll talk about some of the air calamities or near calamities.

And where is Budigé actually, you know, half the time he's on vacation or on family leave, or I don't know, you know, chest feeding his son or whatever the hell he does.

But

his absence is

very noticeable in the face of

critical events related to transportation.

Of course, remember the ship's out in the ocean.

What the hell is he doing?

He's on family leave.

And then, though, when he finally did speak out about this

train derailment this week,

it was this weird and really obnoxious.

Well, you know, there's a thousand train derailments in America.

And I was like, oh, are you bragging about that?

Yeah,

there's three a day.

Well, yeah, there's three toxic plumes sitting over a community of 5,000 people killing fish and burning their lungs every day.

I don't think so, Pete.

But

he's absolutely predictable.

When you talk about Pete Buttigig and he should resign or be impeached or fired, it's hard to know who is the most incompetent cabinet member.

Is it that crazy Jennifer Grisham that started laughing when somebody asked her about why don't they pump more oil and gas?

Is it Mayorkis who keeps,

you know, he's sort of like this idiot that said that this demonstration was mostly peaceful.

I think it was on MSNBC as the flames shot up in the sky.

And the same thing is true.

He always seems to have a backdrop of the border with hundreds of people crossing it as he claims it's secure.

So there's so many mediocrities, blinkens.

So I don't know where you would start.

Yeah.

Can I just

indulge me here, our listeners, that Marco Rubio yesterday wrote to Biden urging him to fire or to immediately demand the resignation of Budijesh.

Of course, Biden responded somehow or other.

I don't know, he never has press conferences, but his comment was he has absolute confidence in Budigé.

And in his letter, though,

Rubio does a nice quick little recounting of Budig's history here.

Unfortunately,

he calls it a two-year-long pattern.

During the historic maritime surface transportation disruptions in 2021, Secretary Boutigej, completely absent.

Amidst an impending possible rail strike late last year, Secretary Boutigej left the country to vacation in Portuguese wine country.

Near misses in commercial aviation, as well as recent system failures, including the one that shut down air travel in Florida in January, indicate that serious and persistent problems across the Department of Transportation are not being sufficiently remedied, etc., etc.

The ramifications of Pete Booty Judge's incompetence, not only these poor 5,000 people living in the midst of this

hellhole in Ohio, they're just

billions.

The cost has to be hundreds of billions of dollars and affect all Americans very deeply.

I can remember most egregiously flying over the port of Los Angeles in 2021, and it struck me, three things struck me.

One, I counted the ships that were out docked.

I shouldn't say docked, anchored in the harbor all the way out to the horizon.

There was 19 of them.

I could count.

I read that there was actually 70 of them.

And then I noticed as we circled around over the

port, there were these containers like they had, somebody had just thrown them everywhere.

You know what I mean by that?

There were containers.

They weren't stacked up in a row.

They were at every angle in all of the storage lots, meaning they were all full.

And then the weirdest thing, third was there were trailers and empty trailers.

container trailers that were parked in residential streets.

In other words, these truckers went in there and they waited and waited and waited and waited and waited and waited.

And finally, they couldn't wait any longer.

So they just dumped their cargo anywhere they could find it.

And then

they dumped the trailer somewhere and took off home.

I guess they were going to come back back or something, but it was a complete mess.

And then they had those pictures of Wild West looting.

Remember that?

All of these Amazon packages on the ground on the trains that were entering and leaving the port where people had just

looted them.

And all of it was almost every aspect of transportation was in complete chaos.

I was thinking about this the other day, two weeks ago.

I went down to Los Angeles and I thought, you know, Pete Buttigieg is Secretary of Transportation.

The Federal Aviation Administration is in big trouble.

The guy doesn't know what he's doing.

And we have all these problems.

I'm going to go to LAX four hours early.

So

I got to LAX, I opened the door, and boom,

every power, not just

a screen here,

everything went out.

There was no power for about an hour.

And then when it came on, all these flights were canceled.

Up until,

and luckily, I was three hours and a half after that.

But my point is, everybody understands now that when you want to take a train or you get in a car and you look at construction or

you get on a plane,

it's in chaos.

And this guy hasn't done anything.

He's absolutely done nothing.

He had no qualifications whatsoever.

The only qualification he had is the only qualification he had when he ran.

He was trying to argue that he was the first openly gay candidate for president.

And that should, by definition of identity politics, make you want to vote for him.

But when you looked at his record as mayor of a small town like South Bend, Indiana, they used to call him, what, pothole Pete, because he couldn't fix the streets.

And

I think everybody's got to take a deep breath and think there's two problems with this whole identity politics

woke revolution.

One is commission and one is omission.

One is deliberately destroying merit and hiring people or admitting them.

or giving them preference on the basis of their superficial appearance rather than any meritocratic criterion.

In other words, tribalism of the most ranked sort, pre-civilizational tribalism that always dooms civilizations.

First cousin Middle Easternism.

The second is omission, that when you're doing all of this stuff, you don't have time for anything else.

If you're in the Pentagon and you're just talking about how

How can I get promoted for promoting transgender subsidized surgeries or what percentage of women are gays or blacks or Latinos or Native Americans did I get promoted under my generalship?

If you're thinking of that, then you're not thinking about what's going on in Afghanistan.

Or you'll tell the American people as Mark Milley did in June that he had full confidence in the Afghan forces to be sustainable.

Or we have full confidence that the Russians will take Kiev in 72 hours.

So they're not confident because they're a commissariat and they're using ideology

and identity politics in lieu of merit, but they're putting so much emphasis.

It's like Stanford University having 16,000 students, but 15,000 administrators and administrative staffers.

When you're putting that much investment, then you're not, you don't have time.

Or these kids in school, was it not one school

in a Baltimore school district, not one student in one school

of any of them they couldn't find one person that was up to to standards as far as math competency was concerned same thing with

yeah and Illinois it was the same there wasn't one person in a school district inner city district and yet you want to ask yourself how many courses do they have in diversity equity and inclusion and identity policy all of that stuff and these we are turning out a very very very ignorant and arrogant young group of people.

They're not getting a rigorous education because of all of these superfluous isms and ologies.

And they're told to be very arrogant about that.

They're morally superior to past and current generations.

And,

you know, the Chinese aren't doing this.

I'm sorry.

And

other countries are not doing this.

And I was looking at the graduate program at Stanford.

58% in electrical engineering and PhD program at Stanford are foreign students.

48%.

Excuse me.

Victor, this is a good point just to mention to our listeners

on the

plane front, airplanes,

your most recent column is destroying meritocracy is deadly and it has to do with what about the actual ramifications of

a tribal base.

Yeah, and

I didn't go go into it in detail, although I did a lot of research for that column.

You know, it was that San Francisco,

there were all different types of planes.

777 that took off, it was going to San Francisco from Maui and it almost crashed.

And I know that there was inclement weather and the pilots were very skilled, but something went wrong.

It was either the air traffic controller gave them a false sense of security to take off or the plane wasn't service right.

But planes don't do that in rough weather.

And then we had that where you are,

Kennedy Delta Airlines, that basically they almost crashed, it almost crashed into an American airline.

That had to be 75 feet.

That was probably an air traffic control.

We had the FedEx in Austin.

That just, I think they missed by 100 feet.

Then we had

an LAX.

Remember, they were towing out the jet.

They just hit a bus.

towing this big super,

I think it was an Airbus 321, and they hit a bus.

And then we had, of course, everybody knows about Southeast, Southwest Airlines, completely shut down for almost a day and a half and canceled for another three days a lot of their 60% of their flights.

And then we had the bad weather at Christmas where the whole grid, I guess that was a computer glitch for two or three hours in the morning that shut down the whole air system.

We hadn't seen that since 9-11.

And so my question is, when you look at what the FAA has been saying, and the Department of Transportation has been saying,

and United Airlines has been saying about their pilot training, it's all diversity, equity, inclusion.

They're never talking about, United Airlines does not have a communique.

Maybe they do, but they're not advertising it.

But we have increased rigorous.

10 more hours for pilot training.

30 more hours.

They're always saying that 50% of all of our trainees will be diverse.

Or the FFA said that we're going to use particular language or we're going to, but they never talk about increased competency, more rigorous training, et cetera.

It's always about lowering standards or becoming more diverse.

And

it does filter down to the real world.

Yeah, let me tell you an example, Victor, of something I heard that's not related to travel here, but coaching.

A friend of mine, whose name I'm not going to give, but he became coach of a high school team and had, of course, you have to take some training.

And what do you think the training was about?

Like, it's if

you're a white guy, and if there's a black kid and they need to be corrected about something, you know, think twice before you do it.

It's very specific about that, you know, about injecting clear race.

racial differences in training for coaches.

Well, I know it.

What kind of training is happening in America that doesn't have some

I mentioned that before.

It filters down to the street so that there are,

and it happens on all races.

And so in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, if the word got out, you could beat to death an Emmett Till

and you would be acquitted, then you're going to have more of that because every thug, deranged person in the world, not that they're very numerous, but they are out there, will do it.

And if you have, you send the opposite message that you're going to decriminalize or defund the police, then you're going to get something like, and you, and you send the same message

in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, it was black people are inferior.

But if you send the message, white people are evil, or you're Jay-Z with the 5% badge, or you joke like

Fox,

how great is that?

Killing white people, that's going to, or, you know, raid and women and spraying women that vote for all that crap.

It's going to filter down.

So you're going to get somebody on the PCH that, as I said last time, hits a doctor, walks over, stabs him to death, and says white privilege.

Or you're going to get a bus in Florida where a little tiny girl is beaten to a pulp by two black teenagers and nobody does anything.

Or you're going to get that latest one.

that horrible one where that little boy in Virginia, he would look like he was almost malnourished, had this big black woman trying to choke him to death right on the bus.

And you're going to get more of that because you have to have deterrence.

Deterrence makes the world go round.

Everybody has to understand that if you do commit a crime or you do something that's violent, there will be consequences and that prevents you from doing it.

But once you start this verbal campaign, that's racist and you say this stuff,

then people will react to it.

And then it's going to cause a and so when you have

a white racist South that condones that by acquitting a violent murder of a black teenager, then you're going to encourage a backlash.

And they had that backlash with the black militant group that took over the civil rights movement because of people, you know, they thought

we're going to be able to capitalize on civil rights for a different agenda than Martin Luther King's.

Well, the same thing will happen if there's going to be a reaction to that.

And you can already see it happening.

There's a growing anger.

And I hope it doesn't manifest itself in the same way.

But I think everybody should take a deep breath and say, I'm not going to talk about race.

I'm not going to disparage any group collectively.

We're all individuals.

Right.

Well, how can you do that when the President of the United States does it every day?

Exactly.

You know, Victor, you and I talk a lot about race on this program because it's being injected by ideologues into every aspect of our life and our life in its totality.

I'm 60, I'm pushing 63, and I've said this before in this podcast.

I grew up in the Bronx and in really bad times, crime-wise, and the racial tension was off the charts.

But, and then as I look back, let's say 10 years or so ago in my own home and in my own extended family, you know, the racial divisions in America were healing.

There's no question they were here.

Intermarriage was evidence of this.

And I was the publisher of National Review, and the publisher of National Review's house, every night, they were black kids, gay kids, whatever the heck.

It's not patting my back.

It's just, it's a reality.

And Obama and Biden's injection of race into

a division, into our, what was a healing nation,

is a truly evil thing.

That's the thing.

You can see it without, you can take an iconic figure like Oprah Winfrey.

She was,

prior to Obama, she

appealed to everybody, and she was the most popular woman in America.

She was a multi-billionaire.

And why was she?

Because she diminished race.

She tried to appeal to women who were watching TV during the day on the basis of common interests that

transcended racial differences.

Once she started going into the woke movement during the Obama era, she ended up as a caricature,

a multi-billion dollar woman complaining that some Swiss attendant didn't bring down a $38,000 crocodile bag quick enough for her.

And that was a microaggression.

That's where we went off.

It was, as soon as Obama ran for office and he started to say things like,

I read his memoir when he said,

I just decided not to date white women anymore.

Or

when he threw his mother, grandmother under the bus and said, you know, every time she heard a black man come,

she got

you know, unusually.

I thought, well, maybe she just looked at crime statistics of that particular city she was in and made the necessary adjustments.

Not to be commended, but maybe that was what she did rather than being a racist.

But he attacked his own grandmother.

Then there was the Trayvon Martin, the son that I never had that would have looked like me.

Then there was the Gates thing, where he said the police, everybody knows the police do this as they did to skip Gates.

It was just non-ending, non-ending, non-ending.

And that's that kind of ripped ripped off the scab.

Instead of healing, we went where we are now.

And

it's Joe Biden is

it's just reprehensible that someone like that

with the most questionable

record on racial harmony should ever, ever.

pontificate about people being racist with no evidence.

I can remember when that guy during the 70s, he carved out this persona that he was going to be the point man in the Democratic Party against busing.

He was going to be the point man.

Remember about criminals and life sentences for drug dealers.

And I think he used the word jungle in one point.

And he was,

that was his persona.

And what he did to Clarence Thomas was thinly disguised racial condensation.

It really was.

And for him now to be president and to lecture, lecture, lecture is really despicable.

I don't mind if, if, I don't mind at all, if Mark really wants to get up before Congress under oath and says, you know what, we have a big problem with white rage and white privilege.

And here are the statistics.

We did a survey and we asked the ranks, do you feel comfortable with, and it came out that one group, white people, showed an inordinate racial prejudice toward other.

I would have no problem.

He didn't do that.

All he did was piggyback on the post-George Floyd hysteria, the BLM movement, and he wanted to virtue signal.

And then he basically said

that the military had a problem, and he was going to get to the bottom of white rage and read Professor Kendi's book.

And he and Austin were going to make sure that the ranks were free of white racists without any evidence that there was a problem with white racism.

And as I keep saying, the only problem they have, since they live in the world of proportionality, was they had one demographic that died at twice their numbers in combat.

Well, Victor, we have glad you talked about the military because we have

some

really head-scratching and troubling actions by the Secretary of Defense, and we're going to get to that right after these important messages.

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So, Victor,

our

Secretary of Defense.

Gosh, I can't, what's his name?

It just escaped me.

Bloyd Austin.

Bloyd Austin, yeah.

Who is a Catholic, by the way?

Roman Catholic.

It does matter because, once again, instead of, you know, what's the purpose of the

Department of Defense, besides sending tons of weaponry over to Ukraine,

it's to defend America.

But the focus is, of course, on abortion.

So your federal law, Hyde Amendment, precludes the federal use of taxpayer funds to pay for abortion.

But damn it, this Biden administration, what are they going to do?

The Department of Defense, okay, we can't,

if you're a servicewoman, you get pregnant, well,

we can't pay for it, but you know what?

We're going to give you off.

We're going to give you the time off to go fly to one of these states that offer them for free.

Some of these like Disneyland, sorry, Disney abortion mecca of California and Connecticut's trying to become one.

So you're going to get the time off, a taxpayer expense, and we're going to fly you there too.

Travel expense.

Yes, the travel expenses.

This is our Department of Defense.

I don't quite understand that how they get around the Hyde Amendment by paying people to travel federal dollars to get an abortion, but they do.

And this is all superimposed

on a number of stories in the media right now.

And one of them is that

we are

dangerously short of artillery shells, javelin missiles, rockets, spare parts for our arsenal, given Ukraine.

And that's either due to poor procurement management or naivete or cuts or what, transfers of money in the Pentagon budget from buying artillery shells to stuff like this.

And the other is

we still, you know, we've talked to death about the balloon, but we're shooting down

a hobby balloon at $500,000 to $480,000 a crack with a Sidewinder missile.

And basically the military is telling us, Lloyd Austin's military, we do not

have

an airplane that can operate over 50,000 feet.

to go, I guess,

shoot a cannon, you know, a 20 millimeter or something into this balloon very cheaply.

It was very funny.

Somebody sent me an email, one of the readers, it was from Russia today.

I don't even, you know, I've never watched it.

I've never been on it.

But the point was they were boasting the Russians were, and I mentioned this to Sammy.

I saw, I mentioned something to Sammy, and then it was like one of those weird moments where what you mentioned later comes true because two days later, I looked at the email and here it is that the Russians were bragging that their MiG-32 can function at that altitude.

We can't.

Our SR-71 could at one point.

But my point is this, that we have fundamental problems with the U.S.

military.

And they run the gamut

of 25 to 35% short on recruitment, lowering of standards to get the necessary bodies in the Air Force and in the Army and in the Navy.

They run the gamut of depleting our strategic stocks, arsenals of very important weapons.

They run the gamut of apparently having a porous air defense shield over the continental United States where balloons can come through undetected.

We'll never know the truth because they haven't been honest about whether it was undetected or not, but they feigned that it was.

And then the inability to shoot down a sub-tech,

low-tech balloon without using a high-tech, sophisticated, very expensive weapon.

And so, given all those things, and we could go on about the inability to defend Taiwan,

I don't know why they're doing this.

Why are they doing this?

Why are they spending all this money on subsidizing transgender surgeries or this woke

training that doesn't have anything to do with battlefield efficacy?

It's so redolent of the Soviet army, as I keep saying, or the

Wehrmacht, where ideology trumped competency and trumped calculations of how to defeat the enemy on the battlefield.

And

we were always the consensual, open, free society that was on bound by ideological constraints.

And so we were empirical.

We promoted people on merit.

We reacted to the world on the battlefield through empiricism.

We were not deductive, but here we are in the year 2023.

It's almost we want to regress to a pre-modern mentality.

Also, Victor, and I didn't mention this before the show, but I don't know if you saw the news that the renaming binge in the Department of Defense

continues on.

Let's eradicate.

the names of any member of the Confederate Army off of any institution or building, etc.

So the

Navy,

you may have even been in this place.

I know you taught at the Naval Academy

a while ago, but there's a place there called Maury Hall.

Yes.

I know.

And it's

named after Matthew Fontaine Maury.

He's considered the father of naval oceanography.

He joined the Confederacy.

Regardless, the building had been named after him probably for over 100 years.

And this week,

it's been replaced.

It's being named after Jimmy Carter, a former president.

Jimmy Carter was a submariner himself.

Actually, he did something, I believe, pretty brave on a submarine once.

It looked like it was going to have a nuclear leak or a uranium leak.

But that continues on.

I'm sure

sooner than later, there will not be a single member of the Confederacy

who's who

they, the men they fought against sought, who probably should have hated them more than anyone else, sought reconciliation and healing with them on behalf of the nation for the sake of the nation.

But

we will continue down this road.

Yeah, I do.

I mean, it requires just a modicum, just a little tiny bit of historical knowledge that in the traumatic years after the Civil War,

there was this idea that these wounds would never heal because to defeat the

the South, we didn't just defeat it on the battlefield, as William Tecumseh Sherman said,

and he said very controversially, and they relieved him of command for other reasons.

But when he was in charge of the Western theater, he gave an interview to the Cincinnati, I think it was the Observer.

He said that you're going to have to kill 300,000 of these people.

He called them cavaliers.

What he meant was the plantation class.

And that's about what we did, the Union.

But there were 700,000 killed for very, not just on the battlefield, but disease, et cetera.

So after that trauma, there was this

national effort to reach out.

And part of it was

the realization that in this awful slaves

holding society, about 6 to 8%, depending on how you define that group, held slaves.

But the majority of people fought that didn't have slaves.

They fought maybe

for slavery.

They did fight for slavery, but they didn't really fight for slavery in the sense that to them they were fighting for other reasons.

It might have been hatred of the North.

It might have been the protection of the heartland of Georgia against Sherman, whatever it was.

And they might have been racist.

They might have not.

We don't know.

But

the point I'm making is, not that I disagree or agree with any of this, but to go back historically and look what people were trying to do in the late 1870s and 80s.

They were trying to heal the country.

And they were trying to say there was such a thing as an honorable Confederate that was not involved in slavery, even though a lot of the generals held slaves.

It may have been naive, it may have been doomed, but the intent was, we don't want to ever do this again in the United States.

And you can see what Hollywood did.

You can see it so easily.

All during the 1950s, this was still true.

So if you look at

most of the Hollywood heroes and Westerns, what did they have in common?

They were Confederates.

So, Shane, what does he say right before he blows away

Wilson the gunslinger?

Jack Polanza.

You know good Yankee.

You know good Yankee liar.

And what is,

who is John Wayne?

Comes up through the door of John Ford's wonderful scene, that shot where he comes right in.

Where is he coming from?

He's coming from Texas, Texas Rangers.

He fought, it's kind of suggested he was fighting for Quantrell, one of those awful Confederate bands.

But the point was that the heroic people and who were making these films, right-wing people?

No.

Many of them were Jewish immigrants, immigrants from war-torn Europe or

getting out right out of, yeah.

John Ford, Irish from Maine.

Yeah, probably, he probably knew Chamberlain or Eli Kazan.

Eli Kazan, part of the Greek diaspora out of Asia Minor.

So they were coming here and they realized very quickly the country was still torn apart.

And in almost every single Western, these people are, and there's so many Westerns where it's obvious that they're trying to say, hey, Northerner, hey, Southerner, to get along.

And

so my point is that when you start destroying in a blanket fashion, every single person who's associated with the Confederacy, you're assuming that

there's no historical downside from that, and that the people who did it were abject racists.

I'm trying to suggest to you that they weren't.

They may have been naive, but they weren't racist.

Their intentions were good in many cases.

And many people, I don't know what the majority, nobody does, of the Confederacy were not white racists.

They fought for a bad cause, evil cause, but they didn't see it that way.

Some of them didn't.

And that's just like saying that the horrible, probably the worst military force that was ever created was the SS and the Wehrmacht.

And I can say that most people thought that were racist, fought for the SS, but not everybody fought for the SS, is what I'm saying.

They were drafted, and you were an 18-year-old in Germany, and your family had been there for centuries.

What were you going to do?

But you were fighting for an evil regime, and that's tragedy because you didn't see it that way.

You were trying to keep alive, survive.

But this new woke has no nuance.

You can really see it with the first Ken Burns movie, Civil War, when

he tried to cultivate Shelby Foote, who was a die-hard Southerner and who is on record of saying, you know what, if I had been alive in 1860 as a young man, I probably would have fought for the Confederacy, for my native Tennessee.

He said that, lived in Memphis.

And they had Southerners with Mary Chestnut's diary.

It was kind of a reconciliation, the music, and it was a tragedy.

It was not melodrama.

It was perceived as tragedy.

It was very critical of the racist South and very, very

interested in emphasizing the role of slavery and black troops in the North.

But that movie could never be, I've said that twice now, that movie could never be made today.

And if you look at his later movies, it's just very different.

Yeah, and nor would Ken Burns make it that way himself.

No, he would not.

Right, right.

And he couldn't make that movie today, and he knows it too.

Yeah.

We have just a little time left, and maybe enough to talk about one other subject quickly.

There's a particular piece that was reported last week on Fox News.

It was a piece, it was an op-ed about the Biden administration coming from before the family farm.

And as a as a farmer, I'm sure that rings pretty

close to you.

So we'll get your thoughts on that in a few minutes, right after this final important message.

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

Before we get to this op-ed piece, Victor, I'd just like to remind our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com.

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Victor, so

if I could locate this piece on my computer without ginning up any noise, yeah, there's a touch.

Kent Hoffman has written this piece for Fox News.

Why Joe Biden is coming for my family's 70-year-old farm.

So on top of what all the

risk, as you know, we've talked about on the show for many times about the risk that comes to every farmer.

Now we have in America this push that if it seems like there's a drop of water somewhere, regulations by our more liberal administrations, i.e., Obama tried to do this, now Biden is, are trying to invoke these water regulations that are going to give control of land, much of it farmland, to the federal government.

It's a real threat to people who are risking

all their resources,

working 18 hours a day.

It's

producing the food that we eat.

This is insane.

Victor, what are your thoughts about this?

Well, you know,

when I wrote The Dying Citizen, Chapter 4 was called The Unelected.

And I pointed out this law that is now back in the news again, the Inland Waterways Act, and how an EPA bureaucrat reinterpreted that, not as a navigable water, but any standing water in a farm.

So there were cases here where I live in Central California on the west side, where after rains, any low spot will collect water.

And so the EPA, whether state or federal version, will come out and test that water and see if it is polluted.

Well, of course, it is.

It has runoff and fertilizer and everything.

Nobody's going to drink it and it filters back into the water.

But that was not what the law was intended for.

And so it's again the idea of an enterprising EPA with the power of the federal government knows that they can go out and any particular farmer they don't like or feels that

they should target, they can go out and misinterpret the law and test his water or her water on her farm and then declare her in violation of an Inland Waterways Act.

And that's exactly what the EPA has done with all of its legislation.

It just takes what the law ostensibly says and then expands it on the proviso that if you file a complaint or you cite a farmer, they're not going to have enough money to contest it.

They don't have the resources that you do, and you can bully them into fines or some type of rectification according to your whims.

And it's, it's, I don't think anybody has any idea what farmers put up with.

And I've mentioned,

as you know, and the dying citizen I mentioned, and I think Sammy and I talked, we don't,

when I was a raisin farmer, we didn't own our raisins.

So we would have Thompson seedless grapes.

I think we owned them.

We had titled the land.

We planted them ourselves, or my great-grandfather or grandfather or mother planted them, but depending on the vineyard.

But when we cut the grapes, Jack, we dried them.

And guess what?

They were became raisins.

We stacked it.

We shook them and we got them in bins and we were going to take them either to Sunmate or a private packer.

And we didn't own them.

The federal government owned them.

Our raisins.

I can't, still can't conceive that.

So if I have 100 tons and I say, I'm I'm going to sell this to bakers, the federal government said, you don't have this year, the federal government has determined that the reserve tonnage is 30%

and only 70% is free tonnage.

That 30% belongs to us and we will negotiate what we pay for it, but we're going to take it off the domestic market.

It is illegal for you in your barnyard to take one forklift bin.

out of that stack.

Don't try it.

And you have, you can take a pound or two for personal consumption, but you do not own those raisins.

So you take them in, and then

say I take 100 tons in, I get paid for 60, 70 tons, depending on what the free tonnage is.

And then the government decides, well, to prop up the price, I'm going to give the other 30% away in foreign aid.

Sometimes we got 20 bucks a ton, $20 a ton for free tonnage, or they gave it to cattle feed.

And sometimes they threw it away or it rotted, but you don't own it.

And another thing that people don't understand is you can be a packer

with

2 million crates of peaches coming out of your bin, and you'll have certain inspectors, but you can be a small farmer with maybe 1,000 a day, and you'll still be inspected, but the inspection rate per box will be so much greater.

The federal government does not like small farmers.

They claim they have a special division of small farming and organic farming, but what they mean by that is an acre or two or kind of a hipster type operation.

They do not like the middle operator and they go after him all the time, all the time.

And yes,

the other side of the mouth was all for years, the family farm, the family farm.

Like it's

a lot of it was good, but I used to, when I was farming full-time, and I still walk around the farm in this reduced fashion tonight, I just would say to myself, today I'm going to see 10 people from some government agency that are not going to ask me to come onto my place.

And so, what I meant, there would be the consolidated ditch tender.

The water would go through our place on a communal ditch.

So, anytime he wanted, he could just come on and inspect the underground pipeline.

And then I'd say, there's a mosquito abatement person.

He could come on and see if I had a low spot with some water so he could spray an insecticide.

I didn't have to ask my permission or anything.

And then I would see an assessor, or then I would see the power company,

or then I would see the gas company,

or then I would see an official from the Raisin Administrative Committee, something like that.

Almost every day, there would be somebody I don't know who didn't ask permission.

And I thought to myself, Do people just walk into your house without knocking?

But that's the idea it is with farming.

And as I said earlier, we had a big wall on our packing house when we started, my brothers and I, in 1980, we started packing our own fruit.

There were two regulations.

When I quit farming actively, I still puttered around in 92 or 9.

That whole wall was covered.

It was covered with regulations.

I mean, it was just amazing.

Every single one from the state of California, federal government, it was just amazing.

I thought, who has the money, the money to keep up with this?

And then you, and again, it's you always regulate and you target the compliant for psychological satisfaction that you, the bureaucrat, are productive.

And then after you've fixated on the misdemeanor, if there is one, you justify the fact you were completely inept, inert, unable to do anything about the felony.

So why this was all going on

600 yards away, there were people with porta-potties that were draining them on their land.

There were horses that were corralled in a horse farm that weren't getting enough food.

There were violations of building codes, zoning, and they couldn't.

And you would point that out.

And their attitude is, are you crazy?

And so that's why I think Americans are so angry right now, the middle class.

They say, you know what?

You guys always regulate us.

You always monitor us.

You're always,

and yet that gives you

some type of psychological satisfaction that you're impotent.

And by that, I mean Joe Biden has 87,000 IRS people.

And it's already come out that they're going to go after tips now.

So some young woman who's got two kids, who's making $16 an hour in California, and I know that's a lot, but it's close to the minimum wage.

She's going to have to report every single, you know, a guy said, that was a great male.

Here's five bucks.

She's got to report that.

And then you think of the Biden family, the Biden family.

And you look at Joe's three big homes.

It's 10% tip.

Exactly.

And you look at

Hunter's money and you say to yourself,

Why doesn't the federal government just go back and look at all of their reported income for those years and see if the reported income in any conceivable fashion would have supported the lifestyles that they live.

And when they talk about on the laptop that are the phone records, that Punter needs $100,000 from Joe, Joe, did they pay gift tax on that?

Because that's over the limit, you know, the $15,000 to $17,000 you're allowed to give a child.

So that's all I'm saying is why don't you go after that?

They did with Trump.

They went after every single thing.

And the House Ways and Means Committee got us tax records.

Why don't they do that with all these people?

But why go after tips?

And that's what I don't understand.

The whole justification for the administrative state is to find people who are honest and will listen to you and comply, and you can harass for those reasons.

And then the people at the very, very top who have so much money can get around all of the statutes with their legal gymnastics.

And then all the people on the bottom end, the poor, just ignore it.

They just ignore it.

You know, if you get a ticket, it used to be a joke that the Highway Patrol would say, we're going to have to issue strong tickets to stop this madness.

And it is mad on the California Freeway.

So then you, you know, I was late for an appointment.

I went down a hill.

I got a ticket.

It was like $450.

And then all of a sudden I noticed that I was driving normally compared to most people.

They get tickets, and then every once in a while, Jerry Brown would announce, okay, $100 million in tickets haven't been collected.

We're going to give you exemption if you fit this impoverished income level.

So

that's why people in the middle class get so angry because they feel that they lack the romance of the poor that the wealthy extends to them, and they lack the resources of the wealthy.

And so they have nothing going for them.

Well, it's tough to look in a mirror and see a sucker looking back at you.

You know, and don't you feel like we're the sucker class almost?

I think they are.

I think that's why somewhere between 300 and 500,000 Californians have left and they're welcome to leave.

I mean, Gavin Newsom is delighted that they're leaving, but they took $17 billion with them.

We've got a $25 billion shortfall.

$25 billion.

shortfall, but $17 billion in income seems to have vanished.

And if they keep it up in California, and I think they are going to keep it up, this is going to, it is a medieval state now, but it's going to be a state of the poor and a small enclave of very, very wealthy people on the coast.

And that's about it.

There's not going to be a middle class of any size.

Well, Victor, that's

we've got to end it on that because we are somewhat over and we've got a little business to attend to here.

So but we thank our listeners

and couple couple of notes to

mention.

One, you know, thanks to the folks who listen on,

well, no matter what platform you listen on, thank you.

But especially if you're on Apple Podcasts for iTunes and you leave a rating, zero to five stars.

Again, practically everyone has five stars.

We thank you very much.

Means

you are enjoying or learning from the wisdom Victor shares

at least four times.

Although I know you did a couple extra podcasts this week, some interviews.

I did one with Bruce Thornton, the author, about his new book on civilian military tensions called Cage Fight.

And then I did one with Edo Netanyahu, the playwright, journalist, author, and brother of Bibi Netanyahu, who I've known for a while.

So I think you both would, I think everybody would enjoy both interviews.

Yeah.

So

to those who leave also comments, thank you.

There's one that was very, I'm just going to mention Maybell Ann.

She wrote something very nice about me.

I'm not going to read it on the air, but I don't know who you are, Maybellan, but there's a big kiss to you.

You're very kind.

Someone who Blue Eyed 1972 left this very short

comment titled New Listener.

I am new to your podcast and I am hooked.

My new favorite phrase, thanks

to VDH is now, quote, sanctimonious, self-righteous, and competent.

I don't know who you were describing that, Victor.

It could be any number, it could be Pete Buttigieg, it could be Joe Biden, could be any number of people.

So, those are folks that leave the comments on Apple Podcasts.

We read them all.

Thank you.

And we also read the comments

that folks who

visit victorhanson.com leave.

I don't know that you have to be a subscriber to leave a comment, but here's one, and it applies to the

meritocracy piece that you wrote about the airlines.

That's your most recent syndicated column.

And it's a little bit here, but I think it's worth reading.

Mary Lou Arkfeld wrote this the other day.

She writes, Thank you so much for your teachings, podcasts, articles, Victor.

My 50-year-old son recently had heart surgery in Plano, Texas.

At age 12, he received a mechanical aortic heart valve due to congenital defect and is pacer-dependent.

He has exercised regularly, maintained a healthy weight, looks incredibly healthy.

In January, he underwent

aneurysm repair, three valves replaced, and a new PACER.

None of this was a self-induced problem.

Your thoughts on who will care for us in 20 years is a very real problem for some.

Thank God his team was spectacularly intelligent and caring.

We cannot lower the standards for medical schools and expect excellent health care to continue.

Right on the amen, Mary Lou Archfeld, real-life

recounting of why meritocracy matters and why its

disappearance will also matter terribly.

So thank you, Mary Lou, and everyone else who leaves comments.

Victor, thank you for the wonderful thoughts you shared today.

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

Thank you.

Thank you you all for listening once again.