Trouble: Mexico, Davos, and California

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is an author, scholar, military historian, and a political commentator.

He is also a farmer.

I guess he wouldn't consider himself currently a farmer.

He does own land, but he was a farmer and he writes some really

insightful.

commentary on his website which you can join it's called the blade of perseus and you can join the website for five dollars a month or a $50 a year subscription, or you can come on for free and get onto our mailing list.

And there's lots of free stuff on the website as well.

So please come join us.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Today, or for this weekend's episode, we are going to be looking at Mexico and

Victor has a recent article actually out on Mexico.

We want to talk a little bit in depth about that, but let's have a few messages before we do that.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back, Victor.

How are you doing today?

I'm doing pretty well.

I've been pretty busy.

I'm working on my book, The End of Everything, and we're doing

a lot of interviews.

And

here on the farm, it's very wet.

It keeps raining and raining.

The more that they say today will be a clear day, the less and less likely that will be true.

I keep thinking all of the reservoirs will be overflowing.

I look at my statistics that are mailed to me by a water advocacy group, and I see that the major

reservoirs are only half full.

They're not even at 75% where they cap them and wait for the snow runoff.

And I just, you know, part of my route back and forth from Tresno County to Stanford-Palo Alto area is the San Luis Reservoir.

And it's just pathetic to see that it's only, but we can get into that later, it's only 55%

full when we have water 10, 12 million acre feet rushing out to the ocean.

And these people are so wedded to the idea of a drought and the compensatory actions and power that that gives them that they just can't give it up.

And so they're almost intent or hell-bent on creating a drought in the midst of a flood.

I've never seen anything like it.

You know, the U.S.

Drought Monitor, which is a site that takes information from some government and some non-government organizations, said that California at this point has extreme doubt, drought has been eliminated.

So

there's some things out there that are talking about maybe we should be worried about saving the water rather than.

I can tell the difference.

I have a 400-foot gravel pack well

and the water table

15 years ago was 50 feet.

I had a 120-foot old open bottom well.

It was 100 years old.

And the water table dropped.

from 50 down to 80 down to 90 down to 100 and it's now about 120 when it got down to 110 and the the well was 120, and I started pumping gravel or too much sand, I drilled a different type, you know, the now standard plastic casing.

But I went wide.

I went six, excuse me, I went eight inches,

almost like a small ag well.

So I could get a lot of volume.

And that was,

I set the bowls, I think, at the submersible pump, I mean, at about 150 feet.

And I had 122 of water.

And there were times when the neighbors and the renters and everybody pulled, turned on those huge 60, 70 horsepower, 1,700 gallons, 2,000 gallons a minute pumps.

Then they went from May until October non-stop.

It just drew down the water table at periods during the day.

And I get poor water pressure.

And now, you know, of course, they're not irrigating in this wet weather, but my gosh, you turn on the faucet and

you can see the difference.

The water just gushes out because the water table is obviously going up.

And as it goes up, it seeps into more of those perforated holes in the plastic casing.

And so it's, there's a lot of little in the grass that the lawns are green.

It's very strange to see that this is kind of a natural cycle.

About every third or fourth year, you get an unusually heavy winter.

And then you get a normal year and you get two years of drought.

that was why the California Water Project was created and why I don't know why it's been ignored and never never quite finished.

But anyway, we can go on to another topic.

Yeah, so let's talk about Mexico for a little bit.

You wrote an article recently about the kind of the pros and cons, if I could put it that way.

But you concluded it with this, and very interestingly, one sure sign of historic national decline is the collective inability of a government and its people to defend their own borders and national sovereignty.

And I was wondering if you could go ahead and elaborate on Mexico

in light of that.

Well, Joe Biden went down to Mexico 10 days ago.

And as we said on an earlier podcast, President Obadar said some amazing things.

He was bragging that 40,000 Mexican nationals were now in the U.S.

without any worry at the auspices under which they entered, i.e.

illegal.

And then he went further and said, you were the first president that hasn't built a foot of wall.

I thought that would be something of shame, but Biden was basking.

And then he went into his usual,

you know, diversity, equity, inclusion stick to pander to his Mexican host, who, by the way, he was helping them prop Biden up by the arm, you know, because he felt that Biden was so frail.

So the image that Obador conveyed was, my God, I'm happy to have this sucker as president.

We've only, we're never going to get anybody like him.

So let's just open the gates and flood that country.

And in the Mexican president's mind, there's two operating premises.

One is to get as many Mexican nationals into the United States.

And why would that be?

Let us count the plus, plus, plus, plus ways for Mexico.

Number one, they send $60 million.

excuse me, $60 billion in remittances back to Mexico.

That's the largest source of foreign exchange, much greater than the oil industry.

It even beats the cartel's drug industry, which is about $45 billion, and it's smuggling

human trafficking, which is about 10 or 15 billion.

But you add them all up, and you can see that

the Mexican economy's two or three sources of greatest sources of national income, foreign exchange, I should say, come from the United States, either by selling us drugs or smuggling people back and forth, but most importantly, by people here,

Mexican nationals, who are sending money to Mexico, which

raises the question: how can such poor people do that?

And the answer is that our generous federal and state and local entitlements that give

subsidies in terms of health, housing, food, education, legal care, et cetera, free up about

two to four hundred dollars a month per person.

And that money then goes to Mexico.

In other words, we, the taxpayer, subsidize.

Why we don't put a 10% tax on it?

Trump kept saying, I'm going to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it.

Everybody said that was absurd.

Well, it was absurd that he didn't do it, but he could have done it.

All he had to do was slap a 10% tax on remittances.

Just said, any dollar that's sent to Mexico from the United States will have a 10% remittance to the wall is finished, or illegal immigration ceases.

He didn't do that.

And the second thing, of course, is

Mexico

has an enormous impoverished population.

Why that is, given that the natural bounty of Mexico in terms of precious minerals, climate, agricultural, natural gas, and oil, I don't know, but I could get into it with some theories, but I won't.

But the point is that by exporting human capital, they export poverty out of their country into this country.

The third thing it does, it works sort of like Frederick Jackson Turner's, remember that American thesis of the frontier, the safety belt theory, that the inequality in Boston and New York.

and the Philadelphia and the major cities of the East did not burst into European-style 1848 revolutionary

activism or insurrection because there was all this land and they just took their anger with them and they headed west.

Horace Greeley's go west, young man.

Well, the same thing is true.

Rather than march on Mexico City for the exploitation that is

institutionalized, they march into the United States.

So it relieves them of that.

It relieves them of social welfare cost.

It gives them a big cash calorie.

And so there's a fourth reason, too, I think.

You remember that soccer match about 15 years ago down in Los Angeles, Sammy, when the American played, the American national soccer team played the Mexican national and the entire stadium and LA Col seemed booed the Americans.

Yes.

And that was very strange.

And it reminded me of one of my best students that I had at Cal State Fresno, of a number of brilliant Mexican-American students that I had.

I was during the 187 controversy, that ballot proposition that was going to make ineligible people who were not U.S.

citizens or who had been here illegally, make them ineligible for California entitlements, which passed overwhelmingly.

It was declared on constitutional course by liberal federal courts in California.

But I had a student and he was waving this Mexican flag during this protest, and they had burned an American flag.

And I said to him, Why are you, I walked by and I said, why are you burning the flag of the country under no circumstances you want to leave?

And you're waving the flag under no circumstances you wish to go back.

And he had this puzzled look.

And that's an immigrant phenomenon sometimes.

But I should say that my Swedish grandfather would always get angry when he heard Swedes praise the old country.

And he would always tell the stories of his father and how awful it was to be in Sweden compared to the paradise of California.

But nonetheless, what happens is that when you have 40 million expatriates, the longer they're away from Mexico, this is kind of an irony or paradox, the more nostalgic Mexican life culture becomes, as long as they don't have to go back and live under the Mexican government.

So that becomes a very powerful constituency.

And you saw that with the Mexican-American congresswoman from Florida that went to Davos and was just yelling and screaming with these leftists.

She's a Republican, and she was screaming about amnesty.

And so

Mexico Obador was happy to say, I have because he sees these people as a potent lobbying force for the Democratic Party, because he sees the Democratic Party and he have similar interests.

He wants to export human capital for financial gain.

They want to import constituencies, and they meet.

halfway.

Mexico says, ah, the more that Mexicans come to the United States and they begin voting, the more they vote for left-wing

public officials, the more left-wing public officials want more power.

So the more they open the border, and that helps us.

And so, hand in glove,

cheek by jowl, that's what they're doing.

And I don't think it's going to stop.

And when you add other factors into the equation, such as the Democratic Party,

some ways the Catholic Church that has a falloff in non-immigrant

worshiping constituencies and employers, somewhat in agriculture that accounts for 20%.

But things like landscaping, hospitality, restaurants, hotels that want cheap labor, then you've got the whole calculus that explains

this disaster.

Five to six million illegal entries.

I don't know how many entries are represented by one person staying,

but 250,000 people crossed in one month.

It's of a magnitude that we have never experienced before.

It's just mind-boggling.

And we have laws to prevent it because none of these people are refugees.

That is,

they're not proving or even trying to prove that they are suffering from racial discrimination or ideological persecution.

It's all economic refugees, which are not covered under the federal immigration law.

Sure.

And you can imagine if you were down there, they would just say, yeah, we're here because we know we can get money from the U.S.

government.

They've told us that.

Who is the U.S.

government?

It's just the people listening to this that pay the taxes.

And, you know,

when Donald Trump said Mexico was not sending us our best people, people were outraged.

We just had a shooting down the freeway in Goshen where 10, excuse me, six people were murdered in a household by, I think, a cartel gang-dash gang-related shooting.

And it's pretty clear that if you hike up into certain areas of the Cascades or the Sierra Nevada Range, you will bump into Mexican cartel, marijuana plantations, or meth labs or fentanyl distributed

distribution, distribute

places, processing.

And no one can do anything about it.

People are scared.

It was interesting to see in the newspapers that they tried to pass that off as gang

violence, but you and I know gang violence.

That's drive-by shooting.

They miss everybody or a little kid actually gets a stray bullet or something.

This was, they went into that house and they chased a girl down and put several rounds in her head and in the babies as well.

So it was absolutely brutal in a way that was, that doesn't sound like the normal gang violence.

The thing to remember about the cartels is they don't care.

So, and they feel that they operate wherever they want.

So they're in the United States, and I think they're in my hometown.

And everybody knows they're in this area of the San Joaquin Valley, and everybody's terrified of them.

And you don't cross them because they don't mind shooting an American citizen, because they feel there's no repercussions.

Not until the United States government shuts the border completely off and only allows legal, meritocratic, measured, and diverse immigration will this problem be solved.

And we're not going to do that for the reasons I pronounce.

One thing Albrador didn't tell Joe Biden was:

I allow half of these 250,000 people a month

come from other countries.

They can come from the Arab world, Asia, they can come from Afghanistan, they can come from Russia, they can come from anywhere.

But they now make up of that 250, about 120,000.

But his attitude is: just come through Central America or fly into Mexico City and just keep going north.

However, if you leave Venezuela or Nicaragua or Guatemala or Honduras and you come through Mexico and you stay here and you commit crimes or you apply for social services and welfare or you won't leave, then we're going to kick you out.

And they deport them all the time.

And they're even talking about building a wall sometimes so they can modulate the entrance.

So what I'm getting is that one of the reasons that Obador has contempt in general for the United States and in particular for Joe Biden, because he has no respect and he has no fear of the United States.

And he thinks in his mind, he thinks, if I was the United States, I would act like a great power.

But these people care so little for their national sovereignty and their national identity that they can't and won't say no to me.

And I have nothing but contempt for them.

And I'm going to rub their snout in it.

And that's what he did with Biden.

Oh, come over here, President Biden.

Let me help you up the stairs.

And it was one of the, I mean, that and kneeling

before the national basketball team was pretty humiliating, but we've got a long way to go.

We're only halfway in this presidency.

You know, now that you're talking about Ogrador,

I went and read a few things about him for this.

And, you know, his campaign slogan was hugs, not bullets, and that he created a National Guard in the hopes of

effacing or getting rid of the army so that he could, quote, declare that Mexico is a pacifist country and does not

military.

He's a communist and

he

thought he could cut a deal with the cartels.

And

he did

for a year or two.

He cut a deal with the cartels.

The only person, whether you like him or not, the only person he respected and feared was Donald Trump.

Yeah.

Because Donald Trump said Mexico is not exporting always the best people.

And everybody said he was a racist, but there was truth to that.

But more importantly, he said, I'm going to build a wall.

And then all of his deep state administrators turned on him.

You know, I know that Ann Coulter and other people blasted Trump because

he only refashioned about 500 miles of rickety fence.

That was very valuable because they're not coming across there where he built that fence, the huge wall.

But he only did, he only had a chance to do about 25.

But it was people in the Pentagon, Homeland Security, Interior, and his own administration that were, as Anonymous pointed out, they're trying to subvert every order that he issued, every cherry-pick-picked liberal judge

filed in an injunction with.

I don't know how he got any of it done, but the point was that they did fear him.

And when he left office, illegal immigration had actually almost been a non-issue.

He finally achieved what he had promised after four long years.

And

historically,

you mentioned the last line of this column I wrote that appeared today on Thursday.

And when you look at Rome and you ask, why did Rome and the West fall

in somewhere around 476, but pretty much from 420 to 470?

It was being overrun by Osgoths, Visigoths, Huns, Vandals, earlier the Vandals.

And why did the Eastern Empire survive from 476 to 1453 for a millennium, a thousand years?

And I think the answer is borders, borders, borders.

They could not defend the Rhine and the Danube.

Why couldn't the West?

Because they had a multinational, multiracial, multi-ethnic population that had Balkanized.

This is one of the reasons.

There's 270 supposedly

causes of the fall of Rome.

But one of them was that people in the legions and border communities no longer spoke Latin.

They no longer had their primary fides or loyalty to the government at Rome, and they allowed people to go into Rome.

They married, they had children, which was contrary to the legionnaires' laws, and people flooded across the border.

Not so in Byzantium.

and Constantinople, the Eastern Empire.

So partly it was natural defenses.

They had the Golden Horn, they had the Bosphorus, they had the formidable walls of Constantinople, which were, I think, along with Punic Carthage, as the most impressive fortifications of the ancient world.

And they had a punitive, preemptive method of border defense, as you see later, 100 years after the fall of Rome, excuse me, about 70 years afterwards with Belisarius's career of patrolling the borders and protecting Byzantine territory from Persian and then Vandal

incursions.

So borders were very important.

And you have to ask yourself, they're a reflection of a national mentality.

When the border becomes no longer defensible,

then what happens in the people, they no longer see themselves as exceptional.

They're sort of like Barack Obama's summation that we're no more exceptional than what Greece, then Greeks think they're exceptional.

We're just one of many.

And that's already happened in Europe.

Europe doesn't have borders.

They have no borders within each country, but they allow people to come, at least until this year or two, in the COVID epidemic, at will.

Remember what Germany's motto was: yes, we can, we can do this, we can do this.

And she allowed, what, over a million and a half Middle Easterners to come into Germany.

And just this week,

there's rioting and

policing, and the same things happened with Norway and Sweden.

And

it's a Western disease.

It's a Western lack of confidence brought on by affluence and leisure and utopianism that they have the power to create utopia and that they can change human nature.

So somebody comes from a different country and a completely antithetical cultural experience.

and a different religious experience, political experience, and these arrogant Westerners think they are so impressed with what I have created here that they are risking their lives to illegally enter my country.

And therefore,

therefore, Ergo,

they're going to adopt and assimilate and be a perfect Western citizen.

And they never think that this person thinks, I like all this money.

I like all these subsidies from these stupid people, but look at them.

They're decadent.

They don't have children.

They have homeless people everywhere.

They have all of this crazy world culture.

I have nothing but contempt for it and I want to milk it.

And that's the attitude of a lot of people who come in, especially if you come in illegally.

If you come in illegally to the United States and the first decision you make in your life is to ignore the laws of your host,

and the second decision is to reside continually and mock the laws of your host.

And the third major decision you make is to either ignore a summons to go to an immigration hearing that you were issued upon illegal entry or to find identification that's false and violate identification laws, then you're not going to be a good citizen.

I'm sorry, you're not, because you've got acculturated to the idea that the laws of your host mean nothing to you.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break for some messages and then come back and maybe talk a little bit more about Oberdor.

I had a few more things and then turn to the Davos climate talks.

We'll be right back.

We're back.

I would like to remind everyone that there is in Victor's area at Clovis Community College, they will be having a Daniel D.

Martino, who is a Venezuelan trained as an economist and is now getting a PhD in economics at Columbia University.

He'll be talking on socialism as he experienced it in Venezuela.

And you can

text your

attendance to 559-9,

sorry, 559-492-7282.

That's 559.

Is this a commercial, Sammy?

7282.

Kind of.

It's going to be a really good talk, and it's very unusual for a community college to

get a person like this.

And I know that the Young Americans for Freedom are sponsoring it.

And so it's going to be really, really well done.

It's at six o'clock on February 6th.

So please text your attendance.

That'd be great.

Victory, we were talking a little bit about Obador, and you had a cynical view of him.

And I want to back that cynicism up by a few examples that I thought were kind of interesting.

So not only does he start his presidency with hugs and not bullets, but then when he's faced with a standoff in Nuevo Laredo, he has sent in

deployed army units, at least two of them, 600

soldiers each, and also the National Guard.

So

whatever his campaign was, he doesn't seem to be doing it.

That's one thing.

The second thing is...

He didn't do it.

He just didn't understand.

the degree to which the cartels run Mexico.

I don't think he runs Mexico.

I think all of the major decisions, decision makers, are either afraid of the cartels or they're in the K of the cartels.

So he found out that he either had to change direction or go to work for the cartel.

So I mean, he can talk all he wants about this utopian pacifism and stuff.

The truth was that the cartels have taken over Mexico.

Yeah.

I'll even go further.

I think there's large, there are cities in California where they've taken over.

I don't know if those in the vicinity of where I live are taken over, but I can tell you that,

oh, I want to be very careful, but when I go into town and shop, I would say once a day I can spot somebody who is in a gang or cartel related.

And I can say that about once a month or once every two months, I encounter someone in the

rural part of my farm or on the side of the road or by the mailbox who is

a gang member or a cortel-related person.

And so

when you hear that just right down the 99 freeway, six people were executed with impunity and the police apparently have no leads whatsoever.

And believe me, they're not going to get anybody to come in and swear out an affidavit that they saw something because that's a death warrant.

Then that tells you that under this

local president of ours, he has basically ceded large areas of American sovereignty to Mexico, however, you define that sovereignty, the way Obador does it, 40 million people live here.

And he said 40 million in the sense that they're not going to be assimilated or integrated into the American body politic.

And so I think I'm optimistic because a large percentage of the Mexican American population has to live on the front lines and they're fully American and loyal Americans and they don't like it.

It would be sort of like me if I was,

oh, I don't know,

if I live on the coast of California and just tankers came in with Swedish refugees, right?

And they were poor and they brought, they came in illegally, and they expected me to show solidarity with them because I had similar ethnic.

I wouldn't.

I wouldn't.

No, of course not.

So, Obador, as well, has made promises at the Paris Climate Accords about green, you know, a green future, and yet he has prioritized fossil fuels and has dismantled climate-related policies since he's gotten into office.

So, I don't think he was one of the favorites at the

recent Davos climate accords,

especially since Mexico is, I think, the second in the world for greenhouse gas emissions as well.

So, I was wondering,

you know, I would like to just show, you know, the cynicism about what he says and what he does are very different.

And then also get your thoughts on those climate accords.

I mean, the Davos Climate Conference.

Well, as a general rule,

I think it's, you can say that 40,

I'd say, excuse me, about 60%

of the planet do not believe in John Kerry Al Gore's vision of climate change.

Or if they do, they do so in a cynical fashion.

I'm talking about the 1.4 billion people in India, the 1.4 to 1.5 billion people in China, the billion people in Latin America, etc.

It's over half, well, over half the population of the 7 billion people.

And if you count the, and what do I mean by that?

Places like Vietnam or Indonesia or Bolivia or China or India or Mexico or Central America, is that

they're not going to cut back on natural gas or oil exploration if they have that resource.

And they're going to continue to use it because they're impoverished, because their systems are,

they don't work.

We all praise China, but about 40% of the people have never seen a Western doctor.

And many of them don't even have indoor plumbing.

And they live well below our poverty level, but they live below their poverty level.

So my point is.

Why do they

virtue signal or performance art their support of the Davos crowd.

And it's because they want reparations.

I use that in the broadest terms.

In other words, they say, well, we're where you guys were in 1920 and we're catching up.

And as a developing society, we have to depend on the most inexpensive fuels we can.

And because you people went through the Industrial Revolution and you have these lifestyles and you contributed so much now, it's our turn and you have to,

if you want us to have solar panels, you buy them.

So they feel it's sort of a shakedown transference of money.

Trump sort of said, Screw you, every country's got its own fate, do your own thing.

You do your worst, we'll do our best.

May the best man.

That was his laissez-faire attitude.

Biden is behind massive cash transfers

to the so-called former third world.

And the funny thing about that argument is it doesn't really hold true because

if you say that the United States used an inordinate amount of carbon, say from 1920 to until recently, which were per capita very low in comparison with the world, then the United States can say, well, then don't use our chemotherapy.

Don't use our automobiles.

Turn off your television sets.

Don't use your computers because all of that was a product of Western science and development.

So you people in the third world want all of the

dividends of a sophisticated post-industrial society, but that you know, and then you want to blame it for using more resources.

But they don't just use it for themselves.

And when I go to a third world country, and I've been to a lot of them, I'm always amazed at how many computers and how many they jumpstart.

You know what I mean by that?

They don't go through

the slow progression of technological development.

that was characteristic of the West.

By that means

dial phone slowly, and then you go this.

They just immediately go to cell phones and then the next and the next and the next.

And they leapfrog in a way that we didn't do it because we had to create these things and invent them.

But once we invent them, they want the finished product and that helps.

It's instantaneously shipped to a non-Western country.

You know, the Davos

Conference doesn't have anything going for it when it says the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the United States is the

sort of star to look the North star to look to.

And the reason for that, they say, is because there's government protection and subsidies to support green energy.

And I was thinking, wow, that seems completely turned around because their

Inflation Reduction Act is right at the same time as their energy reduction actions, right?

Which is not going to reduce inflation in the least bit.

People have to realize the whole green movement is an elite enterprise.

It's for people who have already solved the challenge of their immediate housing and food

and

educational needs, and they have discretionary income.

And then they virtue signal to themselves.

that they're morally superior by saying, look at that guy in the middle class with that big ram pickup or that Winnebago or those jet skis.

We're not going to let him do that.

He's using too much of a carbon.

But us, if we've got to go to Aspen or we fly in our friend's corporate jet, that's fine.

And John Kerry said that when he was asked, you remember, I think it was in 2018, why do you fly private when you lecture people about their carbon footprint?

And he said, well, because I have to get to climate change

conferences more quickly.

And that's what the whole thing about Davos was: the pictures that came out this week from Davos were of two sorts.

The news stories, I should say, they were of two sorts.

Hundreds of these corporate gasoline-burning private jets and

high-end, in the sense of high-charging prostitutes.

And these, and yet you would think that the exploitation of women and spewing carbon for one or two people on a citation 10 or Gulfstream would not be what they would consider

salutary global behavior.

And to see,

what I couldn't figure out about Davos,

I contributed an article to the Great Reset,

Michael Walsh's edited volume.

I wrote the introduction, and I learned about Klaus Schwab.

He wrote The Great Reset and COVID, and it was sort of a never let a crisis go to waste.

During COVID, in this panic, we can assume power that's transnational.

Remember what Davos is trying to do?

They're trying to override the sovereign legislatures, parliaments, Dumas, whatever you want to call it, of individual countries.

And they can do it.

They've already done it in the sense of tax reductions.

They've told Ireland, you're not going to undercut EU tax policies.

And they have the...

the regulatory and punitive power to make sure a nation that tries to have an individualistic or unorthodox economic program can be punished.

And they can do that on a transnational basis.

They can decide it in Davos, so to speak.

But to see there all at once, you know, that was by, what was that guy's name, Konstantin Kiston?

Kissen.

Kisten, Kisten.

Kissen, yeah.

That's why he went viral, because right at, it was almost as if that release of that video was time to coincide with.

Davos.

While these grim people who were living it up were lecturing Hoi Poloi about their sins, He was pointing out how ridiculous it was.

And the only way to solve climate change and global warming is to unleash talent in a merocratic landscape in Western societies of the sort, like Elon Musk, who's given us everything from Starlink to Teslas and solar panels and Tesla batteries and everything, and let them compete in the marketplace of ideas to get a more efficient form of energy that has less carbon imprint.

That's what we're, that will be

the problem, that will solve the problem, but it won't be people like Klaus Schwab.

And these people are completely

dense and they don't care at all

about

the perceptions that people have of them or that they're paradoxes or ironies or hypocrisies.

So you see a John Kerry.

And he's like sort of lumbering around and you think to it yourself, he's going to say something ridiculous.

He's going to be a hypocrite.

And sure enough, he says it's sort of like extraterrestrials were trying to come in and address these.

Basically, he was saying that the Cretan, the Davos people are the superior aliens, right?

And they're looking at this planet Earth and these deplorables and chumps and dregs and clingers.

And wow, they're not of the same race, even.

Then you think, Al Gore, is he?

I heard Al Gore was going to be there.

I said, he wouldn't, would he, have a vain, bulging, bloated outburst of anger, accusatory, and he did.

It was right on script.

Can you imagine what it would have been like to be in that hotel room with that poor woman?

It was in Portland or Oregon when he went crazy and

she

said he acted like a sex craze poodle.

Was that the term he used?

Yeah, she called him a sex poodle.

Yeah, he wanted a so-called massage.

I think she was a married woman with kids,

legitimate masseuse.

She went in there and he exposed himself, she said.

And of course, he was Al Gore, so that was just dropped because people like Al Gore and Joe Biden, they just do not, and Bill Clinton do not exploit women.

They never do.

They can't.

They're incapable of it.

They're feminists.

And that's how that swap.

But these people, and then the Klaus Schwab.

And I don't think the sins of the father should fall on the children, much less the grandchildren.

But when you see him with this heavily accented German

that is sort of grating to a Western audience that's grown up with everything from Hogan's heroes to the Great Escape

and stereotypes, you'd think that he'd be very careful.

But then his father, you know, was involved in an airplane engine manufacturing firm.

in, I think it was Ravensburg, but it was in a major industrial city, maybe in the Ruhr in Germany.

And he was cited as a model company by the Führer, by Hitler.

So you have this family who got very wealthy supplying the Third Reich with the wherewithal to do everything from kill Jews to destroy Europe and start a war that costs 70 million people.

And the son of this family is now lecturing everybody on their sins and why they should listen to him, who is advocating an authoritarian solution that is transnational, that overrides local government control control and individualism.

And you put it all together, and it is creepy.

Yeah.

Well, you know, John Kerry says something even more stupid than the

aliens that he was talking about.

He said, the only way to stop climate change was for governments to spend big.

That sounds like some Keynesian disease, if you ask me.

Yeah, you know what?

I really, you mentioned these guys.

And

what I don't like about them is their not just their haughtiness but

you remember that uh

john kerry i think it was in i don't know what it was was it two when he was running for president was right after remember he had that luxury lot

and uh i don't know when

what the luxury yacht yacht yeah it was a seven eight ten million dollar sailboat right

and it he had a massachusetts uh property tax they have property tax like they do on airplanes but his was on a yacht and um

he moved it this is a guy who likes you know populist politics and the poor man and inequality he marries this heinz widow it's a multi-billionaire he gets a little toy which is a yacht that he sails i think he sold it later but anyway he transferred was it to rhode island maybe i don't know where he put it.

Yeah,

that sounds right.

He did it very quickly to avoid the property tax.

And then you look at Al Gore,

and he had a failed cable company, and it was of no market value.

But Al Jazeera thought that it would be something, it was an entree because of the Gore name to get into, say, a direct TV package.

And

he bought, I think they paid $50 million for nothing.

And it made, or maybe it was more, it made Al Gore fabulously rich.

And what was

the irony of that, Al Jazeera was funded by gutter, which is funded by what?

Petro dollars, carbon emissions.

And if that wasn't enough, Al Gore was reportedly

hastening that sale so he could beat the increased Obama capital gains tax.

And so here you have somebody who always rails about the inequality and the need for higher taxes and the evils of carbon emissions.

And he becomes a multi-millionaire in part because

a carbon emission spewing country pays him a bloated price

under circumstances by which he tries to beat a tax, just like Kerry.

It was almost exactly the same.

So why should we listen to these people?

They're hypocrites.

They're very wealthy, spoiled people.

They grew up in aristocratic households.

They have a sense of entitlement.

They think that they

think that they deserve special compensation.

And what did Al Gore and

John Kerry have in common?

They both ran and failed at their presidential candidacies.

And in a weird way, Al Gore, remember, said that

Bush was selected, not elected, and he kept calling the Bush administration brown church.

And he never got over the fact that the Florida vote was actually accurate, as the New York Times post-election inquiry proved.

And that he did lose the electoral college, even though he won the popular vote.

And John Kerry never got.

Remember, he said that famous phrase on the campaign: I can't believe I'm losing to this guy, meaning the moron George W.

Bush.

And then, of course, when he lost, with a wink and a nod,

he didn't really say much when Barbara Boxer and was it 31 House Democrats led by

none other than Benny Thompson, the head of the January 6th Committee, denied the election results from Ohio and refused to vote in favor of certifying that electoral count, which, had they been successful, would have put the

whole decision because Ohio was a determinative state, would have put it in the House of Representatives.

Talk about election denying is I think I could make another thing I just thought of, Sammy.

Yeah, go ahead.

The Democrats have denied every election on the presidential level in the 21st century that they lost.

They denied the legitimacy of the 2000 election.

A large chunk denied the legitimacy of the 2004 election.

And in 2016,

they denied the legitimacy of Donald Trump's victory.

And I say they, that included Joe Biden, that included Hillary Clinton, that included Hikeen Jeffries.

He was the greatest,

the current Speaker of the House.

He was the greatest election denialist.

I think it was, I read 70 times he said that Trump was illegitimate and had stolen the election.

But Jimmy Carter weighed in in 2004 and again in 2016.

The benevolent, grand, old, nice, cuddly Jimmy Carter.

He was an election denialist of the first caliber.

And that's another rule that basically in the current left, if they accuse somebody of something,

Russian collusion, then just say, well, they're colluding with the Chinese, obviously.

Whether it's Hunter Biden or Joe Biden's,

you know, quote-unquote think tank at the University of Pennsylvania that rakes in 50 billion from foreign sources, including basically the Chinese were paying Joe Biden's salary, but they were channeling it through a front of the University University of Pennsylvania that got a cut.

Or if they say,

Donald Trump is colluding and he's just misinformation, then you know that that's what they're doing, that they're saying that Hunter's laptop is Russian disinformation, or there's a Russian collusion hoax,

or Putin's given a list, or Donald Trump didn't say anything when Putin has a list of people he assassinates in Afghanistan, or these millions of Russian bots have warped the election by automatic

advertising.

All this stuff that they accused Donald Trump is just a cover for what they were doing.

Yeah.

And just to Stacey Abrams is a good example of election denialism.

Well, and just to finish off the

problem of those well-heeled dreamers at Davos, none of them will suffer the consequences of the policies that they're advocating either.

But let's go to some messages come back.

Thank you.

Oh, John Kerry rode a bike.

He did like Pete Buttigig, you know, he's ferried in an SUV and he gets out, waves the cameras, and gets on his bike for a mile.

It's all performance art with those people.

Yeah, it is.

Well, let's go to some messages and then come back and talk about California.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

So to California, Victor, I just wanted to look at a few things.

With all that precipitation, we had quite some snowfall on Mount Baldi.

And unfortunately,

actor Julian Sands has been missing going on seven days now since January 13th.

And

I'm particularly affected by this because I did like the movie A Room with the View.

I thought that was an excellent production of the Merchant in Ivory

theme.

And so, so a sad thing, he's got caught up in all this precipitation, I have a feeling, but maybe he'll make it out.

They said that he's an expert mountaineer, so maybe something, he's something happened, but he's, you know.

Yeah, you know, it's

what people forget about Los Angeles area, we think Southern California.

And it's not part of the Sierra Nevadas, but my God,

when you go down to Los Angeles and you look at, I think it's called Mount San Antonio, but it's what we call Mount Baldy.

It's higher than Kaiser Peak in the Central Sierra.

It's over, I don't know, 10,500, 600 feet.

It's tall and it's covered with snow in this warm climate.

It's very strange.

It's sort of like Mount Kilimanjaro, not quite as tall as that, but it's...

So people who are accustomed to, you know, cutoffs and t-shirts in that warm climate in the spring, or even they don't quite realize that when you go up there, you're in the high Sierra, the San Gabriel version of it.

And it's a lot of snow up there.

And so it's very dangerous.

And I'm still trying to wait to get into, I have a little place up at 7,200 feet at Huntington Lake.

And

I just looked at the cumulative snow.

that it's fallen at the nearby China Peak

and it's over 30 feet, over 30 feet.

And

I don't know what these roofs will do of the homes there because they call it Sierra cement.

It's got a weird texture of heavy water content and then it freezes, melts, freezes ice and it weighs more than say Rocky Mountain.

People have alleged snow and that weight.

These roofs are not engineered for more than a couple hundred feet pounds per foot.

So

it's scary.

And then what do you do with the snow?

And I kind of made an unscientific analysis over the last 16 years I've had this house.

Should you have a composition roof?

Should you have a metal roof?

And then some years when it's moderate snow, I think I should have had

a

metal roof because it just slides off and you don't have to worry.

And then

I start thinking, yeah, but one of my neighbors, because of the unequal pressures

on the roof, because they don't come in individual shingles, but whole sheets, sometimes the nails pop out.

And even with washers, the water goes through the nail hole.

Or when you look at them, unless it's the highest quality metal roof,

maybe you've seen it, Sammy, the paint chips off or sheds.

Or sometimes you'll be sitting there in the winter and you'll hear this crash.

And all of a sudden you look out and your neighbor's house has a ton of ice.

It just slams down.

And if anybody was there,

it would kill them.

And sometimes the shards break windows.

That happens a lot up there.

So then you think,

well, at least they don't have the weight on the roof.

And then you say, well, snow is snow is snow.

On a moderate year, that's a very good idea.

But what if it's a heavy year?

So where would you rather have the 30 feet or the 15 feet after melting?

Would you rather have it threatening the integrity of your joist, the roof, the weight, or would you rather have it shed off a metal roof and then pile up near the house?

And unfortunately, those homes are very rarely built on exactly level ground.

If that snow keeps piling down on the high side of a house, then in essence you create, what, an iceberg.

And it freezes solid and it starts to move and it can weigh hundreds of tons, some of these mountainous things.

And I saw a neighbor not too long ago.

It went right through the living room.

It just took it.

It looked like it was a glacier in fast motion, you know, speeded up motion.

So there is no solution.

Then there's limitations to composition roofs because they tend to leak a little bit more and they don't shed the snow.

And then you have to have a stronger roof, et cetera.

And you get.

these ice bridges or these huge bridges that pull shingles off.

So there is no adequate, except, you know, I was going to say that they're outlying wooden shingles, but I had a neighbor that had an old heavy shake roof.

And it seemed to me that every year it both shed snow, but it didn't just do it abruptly or leak in the way that metal roofs did sometimes.

And then I saw a home at the lower lake of Shaver, or maybe it was a business.

I don't know if you ever seen it, they had rubber shingles.

Maybe some of the listeners have seen that.

But every time I go by that place, it looks like composition.

But I stopped once and I went and looked at it, and it has rubber, big, thick rubber shakes.

And every time I go by there,

there's not a lot of snow on that roof.

I don't know how

it operates, but it seems to me that it's a pretty good idea.

I've never heard of it, though, being sold.

Well, also, Biden has been in California recently at Santa Cruz with Gavin Newsom to survey damage and flooding.

And I'm not sure.

That's one of those political showcases, I guess.

As has Jakeen Jeffries, who came to tour around with Nancy Pelosi and California high-class Democratic donors or meet California high-class Democratic voters.

I was wondering if you had anything to say about either of those.

Well,

they're coming to California, and what are they talking about when they see this?

uh deluge and i've seen about five of them in my life

they can't they can't just say this is a tragedy.

What can we do?

How about federal dollars?

They have to say climate change, climate change, as if that absolves them of all compensatory or preemptive activity.

The fact is, California has a propensity for drought and flood.

And that's why our grandparents built

the California Water Project, and our great-grandparents and grandparents built the Central Valley Project.

They knew that.

They knew that.

They knew in a year like this, what you wanted to do was complete the tributary canals and aqueducts off the California Aqueduct.

And when that stuff starts to pour into the rivers, you drain it off and you put it into reservoirs.

And

the sites reservoir, 3 million acre feet, Temperance Flat, 700,000 acre feet, Los Vanos Grandes, 2 million, never built.

Even though I think it was in 2012,

Proposition 1, we approved $8 billion

on a California proposition, of which only $2.5 billion were for reservoirs.

Nothing.

They never built them.

They were just tied up in core.

They had no intention of building them.

They're still tied up in core.

But had we done that or added another 20 or 30 feet to the dam, Lake Shasta,

all this water would be stored and we could channel it in a way that wouldn't flood the delta or it wouldn't flood these local rivers and yet they won't do it.

And so then when they it was almost like they create the conditions

that will ensure flooding and will ensure you can't weather the next drought because all of the 12 or 14 million acre feet has gone out to the ocean.

And then they'll come back in June and they'll say, hey, nope, nope, nope, wettest year in 10, 20 years.

But you know what?

We're still in a drought.

we're still suffering from climate change we still have water rationing we still have to have these measures and you have to have this permit and this thing and pay this and that and we still have this problem and that's what they want so they're going to let the water go out and they're not going to build any more reservoirs and the system that we are that's hanging by a thread was built over 50 years ago And it was built at a time we had less than 20 million people.

And so when you put 40 million people, 41 million people in the state whose infrastructure is archaic and ossified, what do you expect?

I really watched this because I try to take different routes on the 185 miles from the farm to Stanford.

And you get a cross-section of California.

You know, I leave through Fresno County.

I go through the Westlands, the West Side.

Sometimes I go Fireball Road.

Sometimes I go

Manning Avenue all the way to I-5.

Sometimes I go up to 152

once in a while.

And I'll take the long route and go down Mount Whitney Avenue.

But my point is this, that you can see what the infrastructure is looking.

If you go on the 99, the 152, you get a glimpse.

And

I just want to say one thing.

I went to UC Santa Cruz in 1971

when I had just turned 18 and I drove in an old car that broke down all the time, but I drove on 152.

And when I got to Casa de Fruda and I went on a

basically just a two-lane road, one lane in either direction from

150 to Gilroy, it was crowded.

Now, that was 50, 52 years ago.

I drove it the other day coming on the lease traffic

going eastward as the entire commute started at five in the morning, or actually 4:45, from

the San Joaquin Valley up through Pacheco Pass, the Monterey Peninsula,

through Hollister, the inland Salina, and they were all going into Silicon Valley.

And that road had not changed in 52 years.

And I swear to God, there was about a foot between each car.

And that thing will go on from 4:30 in the morning to 9.

And you say to yourself, Mr.

Newsom, what would be so hard to save lives, just widen that road, or have a freeway go over the top of it through the foothills and connect with 101?

What would be so hard?

Then I got on I-5 and I said to myself, let me just examine this dispassionately.

And it was just like Road Warrior, Mad Max.

It's only two lanes in each direction, but our forefathers bought a lot of land, so you could easily put three or four lanes in each direction.

But to do that would only only enhance the car driving public and the internal combustion engine.

So we deliberately say, if we don't build freeways, they won't come, but they still come and they're death traps.

It's almost as bad now as the 99.

And you know what's so funny about it?

The left lane.

The truckers are just, I don't, maybe they're, they have to, you know, maybe I don't blame them that that's how they make their livelihood.

They have schedules to meet, but they just decide I'm going to get in the left lane.

And there's only two lanes.

And as long as there's no police static on my radio, I'm just going to go full blast.

And they drive about 70 miles an hour in the left lane.

And everybody wants to drive 80.

And it's just Road Warrior that may the best man win.

And you see, it's dangerous.

And I-5 used to be one of the safest places in the United States to drive.

Now, along with the 99, it's the most dangerous.

I don't know.

I don't want to sound like St.

Jerome writing in the fourth century about the decay of Rome or Augustine in Hippio Regis, you know, Regius starving to death as he looked out at the vandal occupation of North Africa and destruction of the city of God.

But my God, there's something to say with being alive right now and watching an entire civilization in California on wind before your very eyes at an accelerated geometric pace.

And I mean on wind, whether it's infrastructure, freeways, airports, schools, crime, water, electricity, power, fuel, taxes, et cetera,

illegal immigration,

it's just in free fall.

And then to have this clown, Gavin Newsom, who's a product of this Bay Area nexus that gave us Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Diane Weinstein,

and Nancy Pelosi to see this guy who was a child of privilege get on his,

I don't know what you'd call it, Sammy.

What upscale

clothing

outlet does he use?

But he always has sort of the right sleeveless vest.

It looks like it's stylish work clothes when he goes out to make these photo ops.

Ralph Laurent, maybe, or something.

Maybe.

Yeah, it's something like that, but it's more like an outdoor alpine.

And he always is perfectly groomed.

his hair is perfect kind of like he reminds me of a version of trudeau an american version of trudeau yeah kind of a dandy and then he's got this this pedigree and then he always winds he gave an inaugural address

and i read the text of it and it was all about all the poor things that happened to gavin newsom he grew up in divorce he was neglected He didn't really get the attention he wanted.

And, you know,

you look at at Ron DeSantis, who was a child of the real working class, what did he talk about?

Remember his

state of the state address?

It was how great everything's ours in Florida.

This is what I did.

This is what we're going to do.

It's not me, me, me, me, me.

Something therapeutic California.

Oh, poor me.

Yeah.

Didn't he say

all his citizens pulled together after that

hurricane or something and they rebuilt the bridge?

But he gave it to them.

He didn't like say, my government rebuilt this bridge.

What I like about Gavin Newsom is he is a buffoon.

And so he reminds me of Chris Walwell.

He really does.

They're very similar.

And

he has 350,000 people leaving the state.

And remember, in California, 1% pay half the income tax.

And we're $25 to $40 billion

short this year.

And he doesn't know why.

You take away that 1% of the population, that 1% household that's paying half the income tax, and you insult them, and you raise the taxes, and you call them, and they're going to leave.

And they're leaving to Texas, Tennessee, and they're enriching Florida, and they're taking capital with them.

They're not just Elon Musk.

Everybody is leaving.

And now we're talking about reparations in California, right?

And if that should happen, or if it got close to discussion, you would see a stampede out of state.

You're not going to tell 18 million Latinos that you guys have had it very easy and you're going to pay reparations to 4% of the population for something, slavery that has been over for six decades.

It's just not going to work.

And the census in 1860 of African Americans was 4,000 African Americans.

1%

of the population of California in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, which took 700,000 lives

to end slavery.

And 1% of the population of California were living in

a free state that never experienced slavery and was radically pro-union and had no major battles or confrontations of the Civil War within its state boundaries.

And then you're going to pay six generations later the descendants of

that supposed exploitation, and you're going to sell that to Asians who have been, what, manipulated by the likes of Leland Stanford and the Big Four during the railroad construction, put in camps during the

occupation camps during the Second World War, or have been victimized by reverse quotas for systematically being rejected at elite colleges that they've earned admissions to based on the college's own criterion?

Or you're going to tell the Latino community that had the Chuco riots and a history of discrimination?

Are you going to tell the diaspora of Oklahoma, the people I grew up with that were dirt poor?

And

when I went to a local school, it was the Mexican-American people who felt sorry for the poor Oklahoma.

third and second generations who were poor.

And you're going to tell them, and then you're going to what?

You're going to have no class distinctions.

You're going to reward Oprah and Megan Markle and LeBron for all the things they've suffered, which they haven't, but their great, great, great, great grandparents did, we think.

And

it doesn't make any sense.

And you're going to do this when you owe $45 billion likely in deficits?

Who are you going to tax?

What are you going to cut to pay for it?

And then when you think, is this going to solve, what's it for?

And I guess, is the subtext to solve the African-American

disasmetries?

And if it is, wouldn't it be better to address what's causing them?

You know, 65%

of African-American families have one parent.

I think it's 72% of all births occur out of wedlock.

And 55% of the perpetrators of violent crime are African-American, and yet African-American young males make up about 3% of the population.

Don't you want to address those problems

and help the African-American community?

What good would giving each person $150,000, $200,000, $800,000 do?

We spent $22 trillion in the great society.

We just gave $5 billion to the so-called Pigford 1 and 2 agriculture.

Remember that?

That we said there was systematic racism against black farmers in the South.

So the government paid out under Obama $5 billion in reparations.

You could argue that affirmative action is repertory.

I mean, it's compensatory.

I don't understand the whole logic of it.

I'm going to write an article tonight about it.

I get so confused by it.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our time here.

So I would like to thank you for the wisdom and clarity of your political commentary today.

Certainly helps me to understand a lot more about Mexico and the issues in California and even Davos.

And I'm sure you're listeners as well.

And we would like to thank the listeners for

your

patronage, I guess.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody, and thanks for listening.

This is Victor Davis-Hanson and Sammy Week, and they're signing off.