The Political Spirit or Spirited Politics

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Hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is Victor Davis-Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor's official home on the World Wide Web is victorhanson.com.

We'll talk more about that later.

Plenty to talk about today.

Certainly, there are things to talk about related to Kevin McCarthy.

And one of the ways we can get into that is

Donald Trump's intervention into the speakership race.

And let's talk about that and other Trumpian things right after these important messages.

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

I don't think I said my name.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I am the host.

Victor.

Again, so much is going on

with this speaker fight, the 12th vote.

You had some great analysis.

Last night, which, by the way, would have been Thursday, January 5th.

You were on Tucker Carlson's show, and you had just a great view of why this fight that had happened that has happened rolled out by then over 10 ballots had taken place, I think.

Why it mattered, but why settling this matters also.

Now, in the midst of all that, Victor,

Donald Trump tried to lobby the

anti-McCarthy Republican votes and urged them, pressed them to vote for him.

And

not a single one flipped at that point.

So,

does reflect in any way on Donald Trump's political power?

And if you can work into this also a little bit, Victor,

at the same time,

actually a few days earlier, Donald Trump did some,

analyze the 2022 election results, and he blamed pro-life voters for essentially sitting at home and thereby costing.

uh the republicans the red wave so we have we have trump's an interjection into the speaker fight and Trump's analysis of the pro-lifers cost the election.

Would you like to talk about those matters, my friend?

Yeah, well, first of all, on Trump, that was a strategic error because he's got this base and it has these concerns that he championed and voiced.

And although he, in a previous incarnation, had been pro-choice, I suppose.

Once he became the titular head of the dispossessed middle class, the deplorables, and he resonated on the border.

He resonated with China and trade.

He resonated on energy.

He

resonated on foreign policy.

It was just assumed that he would adopt the social cargo as well, and he did.

So he was skeptical of woke, critical of woke,

blunt about the origins of COVID without worrying about political correctness.

And he was

pro-life.

So when he's trying to explain what happened in the midterms, the subtext is that he backed candidates like Blake Masters or Herschel Walker or Mehmet Oz that weren't

competitive.

I don't know if that's true or not.

And then some House people that were not competitive.

And therefore, he's worried that everybody's blaming him rather than Mitch McConnell for not.

winning the Senate and not getting, you know, a 30 or 40 or 50 seat edge in the House.

And one of the ways he's trying to rationalize that is to go back and say, well, the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade.

And then some of these, by implication, these crazy state legislatures rushed in to bar abortions from people who were raped or incest.

And then that caused a backlash.

But he's got to be very careful because he came late to this,

what do you want to call it, this MAGA agenda.

That wasn't something that at the age of 40 or the age of 50 or the age of 60, he was synonymous with.

And so that's grafted on and inherited an absorbed constituency.

So he can't prune it away.

And he would have been much better either not to talk about it or to say we all made mistakes in the midterm.

And I did.

Republican establishment did.

We probably didn't handle the issues as well as we could have.

But just to single out abortion is something that he can't do because he's got a 30 to 35 percent base.

It's loyal, but it requires something from him of that loyalty.

And so

he's,

you know,

he's upset because he looks at DeSantis and DeSantis had a wonderful inauguration speech.

and kind of detailed all the things he did, all the things he would do, all the things that has made Florida the destination spot of out-state migration.

And he's getting a lot of popular press.

And then the left is going after him.

And

he doesn't get the attention from the anti-Trump left that he used to because they fixated on the mortal enemy now, DeSantis, to some degree.

And then he's got these self-induced mistakes he's done since election or even prior to election.

So at some point, you just wait for someone in his inner circle to get some discipline.

And it worked in 2016 to be all over the map.

It was needed.

But now people want consistency because he's got an opponent on like 2016 that is contemporaneously

governing in a very successful way, in a very disciplined manner.

And DeSantis' message is, I'm I'm every bit as anti-woke as Trump, but I'm much more effective because I don't waste ammunition by shooting at targets that are not important.

So

that's what he's got to do.

And this was an unenforced error, another one.

As to the other part of your question, was Trump weakened by the fact that he was lobbying this

MAGA cadre that was holding out against Kevin McCarthy?

Maybe, maybe not, but I don't think those people, because I think he had 12 or 13 defections.

He's down now to five or six.

So when we say that these 20 or 21 that were holding out against McCarthy were a block, that's not quite true.

I think there were some that wanted to emphasize in a national fora or an arena that the Republicans are no different than the Democrats in spending.

And of course, you could say, well, wait a minute, look at the Republican Congress in 2017.

The rank and file supported pre-COVID Trump's big deficits.

So

it's a little bit disingenuous that suddenly when Biden's there, they're worried about debt.

My point is this,

that there are four or five of them that

doesn't have anything to do.

with Donald Trump.

It doesn't have anything to do with MAGA.

It does not have anything to do with the agenda.

They just want stuff and they don't believe the seniority system's in the Constitution.

And some of the stuff they want may or may not be good, but they've gotten all of the stuff.

Whether it's one person can call a vote to

question the speaker's tenure or get rid of him.

or

what type of investigations there are or freedom caucus people in particular.

They got all of that, but they just don't like him.

And they're never going to vote for him.

And the question is, now you've used all of the incentives to get the people who had substantial issues.

And Trump may or may not have been helpful to McCarthy, but the die-hard people, they don't like him.

And I don't know what you could give them because I think...

Well, but Victor, didn't they essentially imply, give us something and negotiate?

You don't negotiate.

Well, I guess you can negotiate if your intention is just to keep negotiating forever, but it implies that

something can be resolved.

No, it can't.

Matt Goetz said that.

He said,

this is what we want from McCarthy,

and this is what he's given us.

And Laura Ingram said to him, well, I wouldn't have given, even I wouldn't have

given away all that.

And now that he's given you all that,

you're going to vote for him?

And he said, no.

So why would you give him anything if he's not going to negotiate?

He's not.

He just he's just going to vote against

McCarthy.

So then the only alternative is if you've exhausted the incentives and it still doesn't work, then there's the disincentives.

And what will you, will you tell him, if you don't vote, you're not going to be on a committee?

And then will he, I don't know, but

he doesn't have a lot of options once today 13 have been peeled off and they're down to the hardcore.

So

I think they look kind of ridiculous because it's personal or they want just stuff for themselves.

And I think somebody mentioned that their fundraising, and I don't know why I'm on these lists.

I don't give money to political parties, but I get these appeals now for money from some of these people.

And I think they feel that they've raised their stature and they're going to have PACs and they're going to be powerful, etc.

well, they may, but revenge may come, and it may not be a dish served all that cold.

You know, it might be pretty warm, but I could see several of these Republicans being primaried in two years, and maybe rightly so, just because of the dishonesty of saying, Yeah, let's we can we can negotiate this.

I mean, that's really not,

they have no real intention of negotiating.

I don't know

Lorraine

Burbert, the Colorado Congresswoman.

Right.

She won by, what, 600 votes.

Right.

And she almost lost.

And Kevin McCarthy dished out a lot of money to her.

And she said afterward she was contrite and she was not going to revert to her former persona.

of controversy for controversy's sake.

And here she is right back after winning that close race

on national TV.

With, you know, I was listening to some of the things she wanted, but it was incoherent because.

Well, it doesn't always attract the best and brightest.

You know,

I don't want to boil this down to a city council in Milford, Connecticut, 25 years ago, but I got to tell you, I was the majority leader at the time.

And

you wonder sometimes, like, why did this person run?

You got weirdos, you got cranks and oddballs.

And when you have 450,

excuse me, 435 or 535 add in the senators, you're going to get some

strange birds.

If you just look at the whole situation, you're looking at these

Republicans in the House.

They're only one-third of the government.

They're only one-third of the government.

And then you've got, on the one hand,

Twitter, the old Twitter and Facebook and social media and professional sports, and Hollywood, and the institutions in K through 12, and academia, and the media in general, and Wall Street, all against them.

And then, when you look at the political sphere, you've got the Senate against them.

And when you look at Murkowski and Mitch McConnell and the rest of them,

it doesn't resonate that they're conservative, your guys in the Senate that much.

I mean, there are not very many Rand Pauls, et cetera, Josh Hawley's and those guys.

And then you look at the presidency and it's this doddering guy who's just a totem who's being run by Michelle and Barack, Elizabeth Warren, the squad, and the left, left, left, left, left-wing donor class.

And so they don't, if they, you think they would just wake up and say we're surrounded by a sea of Jacobins.

And these people are not Democrats.

These are hardcore revolutionaries.

They cancel pipelines and cut off our energy.

They, right in the middle of winter, they don't want to give you natural gas.

They have a border where 5 million people came across.

They have engineered this whole woke racist movement, which is racist.

And they've destroyed our credibility abroad with Afghanistan.

Right.

We've got to, that's the enemy, and we don't have any margin of error.

And we have a model because Nancy Pelosi was able to run this country into the ground with a five-seat majority.

Like I said to Sammy, when they wanted to peel off they being some Democratic representatives and cut

to Ukraine, bam.

Nope.

She lined them up in the streets of Paris and guillotined them.

And when they vote for Hakeem Jeffries, it's every single person.

So that's who they're against.

What I'm getting at in this ramble is that's who they're against.

Victor, it's not a ramble.

And you made this.

They have no margin of error.

Absolutely.

On TV, and they start.

Matt Getz starts giving these blowhard lectures about, I'm going to do this.

You want to say to him, you're one of 435 people in general.

You only have a five-person

majority in particular.

You're nothing.

You have no power.

You don't understand what you're up against.

Your little squabble and you know, with Kevin McCraw, it doesn't matter.

He's conservative enough.

He's not there to be an ideologue.

The speaker has one job, and that's to be kind of a coordinator, a manipulator, an engineer of what bill goes when.

And he has to be on the conservative side, of course.

You don't want an ideologue like Paul Ryan, who's, you know what I mean, free market, you know, this libertarian.

You want a practical nuts and

bolts conservative that understands the conservative movement,

but is writing, you know, tracks about conservative philosophy.

And I don't know what they want because on every single issue that's destroying the country on energy and the border

and crime, you name it, Kevin McCarthy's pretty good.

I don't know what he said 14 years years ago that they keep quoting, but right now he's good enough.

And I agree.

Budget.

He's weak on the budget.

I understand that.

He was weak on the border, but he doesn't have a margin of error himself.

He will not be weak on that.

He will be tough because he's going to have to be.

And

Victor, let me interrupt.

You made this case.

on Tucker Carlson's show last night.

Again, that would have been January 5th.

I believe it may have been influential in how things have moved along today on January 6th.

And one of the things

I'm repeating what you just said and you said last night, they are Jacobins on the left.

And there's this predilection.

I thought it was just amongst our, you know, never Trump friends, some who used to be our colleagues, who had this thrill.

for the circular firing squad.

But you know what?

So do some of the hard right, hard, hard right ideologues.

They seem to thrill to it too, when the real enemy is this massive force, as you said again last night, you have everything working against you.

Everything.

All we have is this House Republican caucus, and they want to fixate on these

strange little squabbles and not see the size and the scope of the enemy facing not only them, but us, the rest of America.

Anyway, the argument you made was really powerful.

And I believe.

Well, you know, Jack, when you looked at a lot of the pundits that were on television and in the print commentary or online, I think everybody's gravitating to the point where they were willing to give 24 to 36 hours to 48 hours maybe to bring up these issues.

And then

the paleos and the base, they said, this is great.

This is a good internet.

And yeah,

sure.

But now we got to the critical mass that you can sense that They're looking at what their enemies are saying and what the left is saying and what the world is saying, and it's not positive.

So they were thinking, oh, well, we believe this is democracy in action.

This is what Republicans do.

They exchange ideas.

They have Stern and Drang.

It's all great.

Yes, for about a day or two, but not 12 or 12 votes, 13 votes.

So now they're starting to see they look ridiculous.

And a lot, you're going to see each day, each hour, pressure from pundits, television hosts.

I mean, Tucker was pretty reasonable, I thought, when he said it was becoming, it was good to have a little humiliation, to a little come down to earth for Kevin McCarthy, and now it's starting to get counterproductive.

And then Laura kind of said the same thing.

And I think if you look, I think Molly Hemingway and others have started to gravitate toward

this was very salutary, but maybe it's time to just move on and you're not going to replace Kevin McCarthy.

Right.

So I think that's where we are now.

Yeah.

Well, by the time folks listen to this on the 10th, this may have all been settled matter.

But again, Victor, I thought your

public contribution to this through your appearance on Fox may have been very helpful.

And

it was, as analysis goes, it was.

pretty darn good.

So we have a couple of other things to talk about.

Again, today we're recording on January 6th.

You may hear in the background, with me speaking, a dog snoring.

I know I heard before some dogs about in California may have been barking a little in the background and at the wonderful homes.

I wrote an essay about them.

Well, that's a map.

Don't be mad at them.

They're lovely.

We should talk about that essay.

And we should also talk about

another essay from the Wall Street Journal about January 6th.

And let's get to those things and maybe we'll have time to talk about Joe Biden and his new

policy towards the border crisis.

Let's do that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'd like to remind our listeners, and particularly our new listeners, that VictorHanson.com is Victor's official website.

I strongly encourage folks to visit there regularly.

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And Victor writes a ton, a ton of copy.

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So check it out.

Check it out regularly.

We were talking before one of the pieces, the ultra pieces, is we aging creatures of habits, part one, where Victor is

talking about some beloved or maybe not so beloved dogs.

We'll get to that a little bit.

Victor,

what else I said?

Oh, yeah, the great essay in the Wall Street Journal today.

Philip Hamburger, who is a professor at Columbia Law School.

He writes occasionally for the journal and in some other conservative journals.

I don't know that he's necessarily a conservative.

Victor, I know you know him.

He was a Bradley Prize winner, and I think rightly so, won that about, I think, about four or five years ago.

Anyway, his piece is titled, it's in today's Wall Street Journal, January 6th, How the Supreme Court Set the Stage for the January 6th Riot.

And in a nutshell, it was Supreme Court decisions over the,

from 20, 25 years ago that empowered the growth of the bureaucracy at the expense of the legislature.

And this has led to a great cultural and electoral frustration.

It

I'm just reading here a little pullout from the article.

Expanding agencies' regulatory power turned presidential politics into an all-or-nothing game.

And that is one of the psychological, cultural, psychological reasons that something like the January 6th riot happened.

Victor, I think it's a very interesting and important article,

maybe even persuasive.

You've written about these themes themes before, also.

Would you talk about this?

Well, I wrote it in the Dying Citizen.

I have a one-sixth of the book is called The Unelected.

And these are people who have mastered the federal bureaucratic corpus of laws and regulations so successfully that incoming and outgoing elected officials have no power.

Who do I mean by that?

Well, let's take it, let's go through that rogue's gallery: James Comey, Andrew McKay, James Clapper, John Brennan,

Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Lois Werner, all of these people were not even getting into the HHS or EPA or the Pentagon, a guy like Mark Milley, another one.

And so what do they have in common?

They violate the law.

So for Mark Milley, the law says that the chairman of the Joint Chief is an advisory.

advisor he doesn't have any operational command and yet when he brags that he called in the theater commanders and said, nothing, no order about the use of strategic nuclear weapons comes,

is going to go out unless it comes from me, that was kind of a

he absurded his power.

Or when you're John Brennan and you say on two occasions that the CIA has never spied on senatorial AIDS computers or there's no collateral damage in assassination drone attempts on the Pakistani-Afghan border, if you're James Clapper and you say that you told the least untruth about spying by the NSA or Lois Lerner, you take the fifth or James Comey on 245 times under oath you can't remember or Andrew McCabe, you lie four times to federal investigators under oath.

Or if you're Robert Mueller, you deny that you have any knowledge of fusing GPS or the steel dossi that prompted your own investigation.

You see where we're in Christopher Wray, you just stonewall Senator Grassley, where you jump on a Gulf Stream to your vacation home and say you have an appointment.

And Anthony Fauci, 175 times in depositions, claimed he didn't know.

He says something on mask and vaccination, immunity, natural immunity on Monday and then on Tuesday.

So my point is that these are, they have a law onto their own.

And you can't reason with them.

And they're so big and they're so cumbersome.

And you can see it with the reaction to January 6th.

If Mr.

Hamburger, Professor Hamburger is right that it was a cry of the heart demonstration

against that, I'm not sure quite I would frame it that way, but nonetheless, look at the reaction.

That bureaucracy

just, you know, it just got into gear.

So

all of a sudden, the media

bureaucratic Washington nexus said that

all these people were killed.

There were nobody killed except they all died naturally, tragically so, including Officer Signick.

But

one person didn't, and that was a 14-year-old military veteran who committed a serious misdemeanor by going through a window, and she was shot for that, posing no threat.

And then the bureaucracy said, Well, her shooter is African-American.

He's got a record of recklessness.

We're not going to tell you who he is.

Nope, no ID.

And we're going to trash Ashley Babbitt.

And then we're not going to release any information, communications about worries that law enforcement expressed to Nancy Pelosi when she deliberately did not beef up security and the National Guard was not called out and the Pentagon was apparently asked.

Not going to do that.

And who's

that whole machination?

And then we have the FBI.

We still don't know

how they won't tell us how many undercover agents or informants were there were mingling with the crowd so that's just one isolated example and you know I'm looking out the window and we have a all of our climate geniuses have told us we were in a perennial permanent drought and it's we're in a deluge every day and we don't have the reservoir capacity because all of these geniuses told us that reservoirs were passe

and the water and then they make individual choices that

about water storage and releases that transcend political decision-making.

So, this water is rushing out in the rivers out into the ocean, and yet if you go by some of our reservoirs, they're not full.

And the aqueduct is not being completely fed from this deluge, or you'd have San Luis

over the top right now, and other reservoirs like it.

So, those are decisions that are made by climate scientists working for the state government or the federal government or the EPA scientists who tell us that

in the book I mentioned the Inland Waterways Act, where the EPA just arbitrarily on its own decided that your ditch or your little pond that forms after rain is an inland waterway, and they can come on your property and then test it and find you if they find the water quality impaired.

That was a

skunk cabbage on your land, you're screwed.

Yeah, it was just in the paper again.

They're still doing it.

And

this is what they do.

So they're huge.

And I'm not even getting into the billions of dollars.

Stanford University has a voting project.

That's a euphemism for encouraging a particular type of leftist turnout.

It got a huge multi-million dollar grant from the government.

Who made that decision?

Somebody deep, deep, deep, deep within the federal bureaucracy.

And that's what they do.

They're completely unaccountable because they're too large.

And most importantly, they live in Washington.

So their spouses work for MSNBC, NBC, PBS, NPR, legislative aid to Congressman X and Senator Y.

And they go to the parties, they know each other, and they have tiers and calibrations, A-list, B-list, C-list, D-list, E-list.

And it's incestuous.

And I don't know how you break it up other than you have a

balanced budget amendment, so you can't fund all of these things.

And then you move these bureaus out of Washington.

So AG goes to Texas,

maybe Fresnoville, who knows?

FBI goes out to Kansas City, HHS goes to Montana, and just break it up so that a person there doesn't marry

Bureaucrat A doesn't marry Bureaucrat B, or bureaucrat C doesn't marry legislative A D or Representative E does not marry to person right.

And, you know, it's a revolving door, too.

And that's another aspect of it.

When, you know, I like Bill Barr, but boy, some of the disclosures that Lee Smith mentioned in his tablet article about the laptop.

when he knew that that laptop was authentic and he knew that the suppression of it by the DOJ's FBI

had a role in the election.

And then when he dismissed any worry about the integrity of the election,

when he also knew what the FBI may or may not have been doing with Twitter, it's kind of depressing.

And then of course,

he worked as chief counsel for Verizon, and then he goes back into the government, and he's the best of them.

And then when we have all of these people coming out at the highest levels of the Pentagon to Northrop, to General Dynamics, to Lockheed.

General Austin, Defense Secretary, comes right out of Raytheon.

And then we learn that we have all of these high-priced weapon systems, but we're short artillery shell, or

we're short javelin projectiles.

And it doesn't make any sense that we've got this

unelected group of people that

gravitate and become very wealthy.

I mean, James Comey was chief counsel for Lockheed, and then he goes right back from the DOJ into the FBI, and who knows where he is, if he hadn't been smeared, stained on his own volition, he would probably be back, if he isn't already, at some big post.

They're all in these corporate boards, and then they back and forth, back and forth, Silicon Valley board.

It just, it's mind-numbing.

And enriching, quite enriching, right?

Can you imagine what the chief counsel of Lockheed makes a year?

Well,

it's all based on one principle.

Everybody should realize that when you deal with a federal or state or local bureaucracy, it's based on the idea that they are judge, jury, and executioner.

By that, I mean they can judge what a statute really means against the wishes of the people who drafted it, and then they can

they can legislate that, I should say, on their own, and then they can fine you,

and they can adjudicate whether that fine is legitimate or not.

They can come out to your property and, you know, whether it's, I don't know what,

from a building code infraction to a water inland waterway, and then they can execute.

And that means they can distinguish what the fine is.

And then to cap it all off, they say to you, sue us.

So, and one other thing, Victor, not only

stretching an existing law, but also refusing to implement an existing law.

You know,

the whole Confederate attitude that

what do you call safe cities or whatever you call this?

Yeah, you can do it by omission or commission.

And then they say, we have all the resources.

They basically say, I make $160,000 a year, but I have a multi-billion dollar legal establishment on my side.

You can go hire your lawyer at $1,000 an hour, $500 an hour, sue us,

and take three years of your life.

We had this famous case here where Mr.

Horn decided he was not going to give the federal government bureaucracy, the Raisin Administrative

Committee, more than half his raisins.

And so he just said, nope, I'm not turning them in.

They belong to me.

I'm keeping there.

And he was in court for years.

And then he won, but it didn't really matter because he was exhausted.

And he lost all this money.

But imagine a guy saying, no,

I grew these raisins.

They're mine.

You can't just come out to my place or come out and

send me a letter in the mail.

It says the reserve tonnage this year is 58% of the crop.

Therefore, everybody's going to bring in the 100%.

We're going to take 58% and we're going to put it in a stack over here.

And we're either going to throw it away or give it away or sell it for nothing in Europe.

And you're not going to get anything for it.

And somebody says, okay,

I won't take your 58% in.

I'll just leave it here and I'll stem it and wash it and peddle it at farmers market and sell it to local.

No, you won't.

That will depress the domestic price.

So that's what they do.

And they're very powerful.

And it's increasingly clear, and this is very important that people realize that there's a woke element to it.

Because what the left has done, they've said to promote woke affirmative action, parity, symmetry,

proportional representation, whatever term they use, the federal government and the state government can hire.

And you get basically lifetime civil service tenure.

And we're going to engineer social equality through federal government and therefore state government hiring.

And therefore, the taxes will go up.

And we're for

big government, more jobs, more regulation.

And through that mechanism,

people will vote for us.

And

Republicans were very naive because they kept saying, We're going to, you know, you guys are going to have to the Latino community or to the Black community, you know, that's killing you.

You guys are getting all this regulation and stifling house construction, home construction, and

you're getting into the middle class now.

And

the subtext was, yeah, but

my son works for the unemployment bureau and my daughter works for the DMB and I work for the Corps of Engineers, so what's so bad about that?

And so I guess what I'm saying is when a Republican says or a conservative says, I want to cut government

and cut taxes, starve the beast, then

30% of the country that the left says is a monolithic, marginalized constituency says, no, that's our avenue to get back into the upper middle class.

And the left is promising us that.

And so it becomes a political act, the growth of government and the type of jobs.

And it's, you know, you can see it in all sorts of strange ways.

And

the government employee then gets kind of a repertory or compensatory advantage.

So

if

I'm not, I don't know, if I want to put solar panels on my shed

and it's been here, I don't know,

150 years, 40 years, and I don't have a map of it, then somebody comes out and tells me we're putting a hold on your solar panel installation.

And this person is a young Mexican-American kid, very brilliant guy.

I really liked him.

But he's telling me that, you know, I have the power to stop all of this

insulation, which, by the way, had been paid for, and they decided I needed a map at the last moment.

And then, when you say to him,

well, go down the road, and there's 40 people living illegally in a single parcel.

There's no dog licensing, no dog vaccination.

There's wild dogs in the road.

There are porter potties in places of a septic system.

There's Romex

connecting six or seven trailers That's illegal.

You could have a field day.

Right.

He won't do it.

Are you saying to put insulation in your house,

solar panels, they were requiring a map of

a building.

And I had to go back and find the map.

And all I could come up with was to show that in 1980, which was 50 years ago, I just happened to have a copy of an addition to the original 1870 shed.

And we're talking about somebody with something with a value of very small.

Right.

And they were ag exempt.

And I said to him, these are one building.

This was not a unique building that is brand new.

It was an addition to an ancient building.

There is no map of it, but I do have now the map of the modern addition.

And he was saying,

okay, you put the

solar panels on the modern edition, modern mean 50 years ago, 50-year-old shed, and it meets code, but it's connected to a building that was built, I don't know when.

And I said, I do.

It's 150 years old.

It's completely up to code.

And they said, it doesn't matter.

It's part of a continuous, they have a common wall, is what I'm saying.

So he stopped it for almost a year.

And that's how, that's what you deal with.

And that person had life or death over me.

And believe me, when I talked to these people that were inspecting, your tone, your attitude, if you're not subservient and they're not imperious, then something's not going to happen.

They've got to let you know that the rules of the games have changed and they have a lot of power and you don't.

Right.

They don't really care.

Right.

Because it is subjective.

And you're right.

They can say no as well as they can say yes.

So you're right.

Everything about it.

The whole government, they come out in a beautiful government car.

They don't pay the insurance.

They don't pay the fuel.

It's brand new.

They come out.

They have all of this power to tell you that they want this and this and this.

And if you object and say that what they're doing is crazy or illegal.

And of course, I appealed and I appealed and I appealed and I appealed.

And finally, I called the state, state Department of Energy, and I did all this.

And then I got a ruling that I could do it.

And then it was,

and basically, it said that the building that I'm putting the thing in, if I have a map, and then a person post facto said, Oh, by the way, that was ag exempt, that building.

So we didn't need a map.

Oh, my God.

So that goes on.

And

then that's the act of commission.

But you were talking about an act of omission.

So if I'm riding a bicycle down the road, as I was

15 miles, and five dogs jump out and bite me and knock me down,

and

I'm bleeding pretty badly from my shin and knee, and I've got five dogs, and I don't know which one bit me because they're all similarly looking.

And I go to the owners and they lock the door

and they won't come out.

And the dog bites me again when when I'm standing outside their door and I yell to them, do these dogs have raby shots?

And they say, no entiande,

no entiene, you know, we don't understand Spanish, no entiande English.

That's English.

And then I call,

I call the Sheriff's Department.

We don't do that.

I call the SBCA.

I call the,

you know, the Humane Society.

I work with, and they tell us that we work with a private.

This just kept going on and on.

And meanwhile, I call a doctor.

Hey, you're standing there bleeding on this property and knowing it.

Yeah, yeah.

And the bleed, the blood, of course, attracts another dog.

And so when finally, when I called one of the sheriffs, I said this, and he said, well, which one bit you?

I'll go over there.

He was a nice guy.

And he called me back and said, Mr.

Hansen, there's five or six dogs.

How would we even tie them up?

And I said, you got to tie them all up.

And then I got a call and they say, well, you're going to have to pay fifty dollars a day to put them in the pound

i said i do is there a statute and he said yes it's against the law for an eye and losses dog to go out in the middle of the road and bite someone that is an infraction i said are you going to arrest them no

and then they said when i said well who puts them away so we can see if they have rabies Well, we partner with, and they gave me some private aid.

And I called them and they said, no, we don't.

We're not going to do it.

And so I called the doctor and he said, you, you know, you got 20,

you've got to get those things locked up for 21 days.

And you've got about 90 days to do it because your symptom, you know, your virus will be dormant longer than right.

So he said, by the way, you've had a couple of immune episodes.

So I don't want to give you raby shots if I can help it.

You know, 4 million dog bites, I guess, a year.

the state.

So there's very few chances, unless the bogs came from Mexico because there's greater incidence of rabies by far.

Not a lot, very small percentage, but you should be aware of that.

Okay,

these people are obviously from Mexico because they don't speak English.

And that took me 60 days, and it was only resolved by calling a congressperson up and saying, this is what, could I quote to you what I'm going to write about this screwed up?

County, your district, the state, et cetera.

And then all of a sudden, they came out with a huge cage, kind of like a dome, and they put the dogs in and they sealed it and they dropped off dog food.

So which means they had the ability to do that when you first spoke to them and they just didn't.

Yeah, I had 20 days.

Every day for 70 days, I'd call somebody.

And then finally

I called my GP and he said,

are you sure this is when they bit you?

And I said, yes.

And he said, well, you got about two weeks and then we'll get the shots.

we and the longer you wait

the more risk you take if these dogs are rabid and he said

why would the dogs just come out and bite you and i said because i think they're just chasing things i don't think they were rabid they didn't seem crazy they weren't

i mean but they he said when you went to the door did they bite you i said yes they bit me again even though i was talking through the screen to the owner as much as I could in broken Spanish.

And

I think they spoke English.

They claim they didn't.

But the point is, I would go by there every day because I wanted to see if they were letting the dogs out, you know, because they had to be in there for 21 days to see if they got rabies.

And I thought, you know what?

I bet you five bucks they'll let a couple of them out because they don't want to be culpable if they do have rabies.

Just let them out.

So I would go by there, and then we get in a big argument.

I did that three or four times.

Oh, my gosh.

And it's happened, you know.

It just, what I'm getting at is that the individual starts,

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the bureaucratic class will always go after the law-abiding misdemeanor and they'll never address

the law-breaking felony.

Right, right.

So they'll go after me and say that I committed a misdemeanor by having a licensed company put panels on top of a shed which are installed, but they will not allow a permit to be, I mean, the completion of the permit.

They get the permit to install them, but you needed to be inspected so that the power company could hook it up.

They wouldn't do that because they said it was an infraction.

But that was a minor little infraction because they admitted that the panels were on a building that was perfectly encoded.

They just wanted a history of it because it was attached with a

breezeway, Jack, not the same wall, right?

Breezeway.

But over the breezeway, there was a roof, and that started the next old shit, which was older, and I didn't have a map for just the semi-old one.

And so, when I pointed all of these felonies all up and down the road, I went through the whole litany of cockfights and dog fights and chop shops and prostitution and gang shootings.

And I told him, This is here, this is here, this is here.

He just looked at me and said, Are you crazy?

And this message for me was, I'm a bureaucrat.

Why would I go over there

and be insulted, shot at, harmed,

get my book out and put red tags over the 50 buildings or cars when nobody was going to pay and we're not going to do anything to them.

It's kind of like this criminal justice system where you see these people going in.

and, you know, stealing, breaking.

Palo Alto, we talked about that.

I mean, downtown Palo Alto in the Apple store, they went in and they just looted $35,000 worth of computers.

Nobody did anything.

I mean, there was no police coming and there was no, the shoppers didn't do anything.

But if you're in Palo Alto or Atherton and

you're on one of those nice...

scenic little roads where you there's no sidewalk and you put a mailbox too low or too high, they're going to hit you.

I have friends in Atherton that, you know, when they wanted to cut a limb off an historic oak, if they didn't get a permit, they were in big trouble.

Yeah.

And yet, so they fixate on the law-abiding misdemeanor that may be committed, and they give a complete exemption and amnesty for the felony that they have no ability to even fathom, much less to enforce that law.

You see that right there.

Look at the border.

Well, let's talk about the border, Victor.

Let's talk about Joe Biden and the border.

And

keep your thoughts.

We have to take a little break here.

Keep the thoughts going, but then let's add to them what Joe Biden's up to.

And let's do that right after

this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show, so we're talking about the law-abiding citizen being the one that has the law come down on them or the bureaucracy come down on them.

Victor, you were just about to talk about the border.

And then also what happened this week, Joe Biden finally, who has never...

Hard to believe any American who's been in public office, national public office 50 years, has not been to the border.

The president has not.

He's going to go to the border.

And he issued some new

pronunciamentos on the border, something about letting 30,000 people in a month.

I think, what the frick, frick, that's like 400,000 people a year allowed to come into this country and just like disappear into the thin air,

which seems to be, will be something Joe Biden will do in violation of existing law.

Anyway, Victor, continue your thoughts and then

please expound on Biden's blatherings.

He's not going to do anything.

He went down there to show that he was there

and that there's a problem.

And that please, please, if you want to come into the country, fill out a form and we'll let you in.

That was basically the message.

It wasn't, we're going to have a strict immigration that's going to be diverse, merucratic, limited,

and completely legal.

That wasn't what he said.

He gave some little tweaks and everything.

But the fundamental problem is they want that.

So when we get angry and we say there's 5 million illegal entries, whether that's the same person or not, I don't know, but in some cases, but 5 million incidents or entries across the border illegally, we get outraged and we start thinking of things like: are there cartel members?

Are there

drug runners?

Are there fentanyl people?

Are people dying on the border?

Are they breaking into people's homes on the border?

Are they going to need immediate parity as defined by legal educational food, shelter,

health subsidies, maybe $10,000, $20,000

a year per person.

And are they really going to be eager to work when the labor non-participation rate is at a historic low?

And a lot of studies have shown that the federal, state, local subsidies for non-participation are more incentivized than working.

That's the country they're coming into.

And so

that's, but that doesn't register with them.

They don't care about that.

What their mindset says, huh, the United States is getting an individual who walked across the border illegally, and we on the left, and we alone on the left, gave them amnesty and didn't prosecute them.

Then they came in and they resided illegally, and we gave them amnesty de facto.

And then...

They signed up for federal help and state help, and we told them that we were the people who allowed that to happen and the money to come to them against the wishes of racist old white dinosaurs on the conservative side that don't like them and hate them.

And that's what they tell them.

And then to cap it all off, if they come across at 17 or 18 and they've lived in Oaxaca State, to take one example, and they've been a victim, and I think they have, of systemic Mexican racism, i.e., by the ruling classes in the cities, but in particular Mexico City, doesn't matter.

That's going to be transmogrified into

you came illegally into our country, you resided illegally, you probably had a legal identification, but now you're 18, you're going to apply to college, you're going to be eligible for affirmative action.

And by the way, we're going to give you a waiver on in-state tuition.

So

you might not have to to pay,

as you're not a U.S.

citizen and you're not a legal resident of California,

you may have to, you should have to pay what somebody who is legal and a citizen or a legal resident or a greenholder in Nevada must pay to go to Cal State, but you don't.

So we charge American citizens three times the tuition that we do California residents.

and illegal aliens.

So it's better to be an illegal aliens in in California than a U.S.

citizen right across the border in Nevada if you want to go to a California state university.

So that's what they look at.

And they see that system and they think, you know what?

What does it all mean?

It means votes, votes, votes, votes, votes.

We're going to change California.

We're going to, we did.

It's blue.

No more Pete Wilson, no more George McMasian, no more Ronald Reagan, no more Arnold.

Schwarzenegger and we flip New Mexico and we flip Colorado and we flip Nevada and we are going to flip Arizona.

And that's how they think.

I don't know if it's right or not.

And we're going to call all of this demography is destiny.

And if you dare say what we're doing, then you are a racist because you believe in the great replacement theory of, oh, you're paranoid, all of you sterile white old people.

You're all being replaced by brown people.

This is what they're going to allege about you, rather than you're just interested in the law.

The only thing that's screwing up their whole project is that along the border, there's a lot of people who are Mexican-American whose lives are being uprooted and destroyed in small communities, especially in Texas and the Rio Grande Valley.

And then more importantly, and like in my community and communities like this, when you have people trucked in, flown in, bused in from the border, and they're not,

Jack, less than 50% are from Mexico.

This new group is from Central America and South America and Haiti and other places.

And a lot of people in the Mexican-American community are not fond of having their schools,

you know,

with a lot of students that need special attention and a lot of social services that are overcrowded now for the people who are citizens that rely on them.

So

there is a little murmur of dissent, and the left is kind of paranoid because that may or may not be manifested in a 40%

uh republican latino vote well victor um we you talked kind of depressingly about how you've been treated by some dogs and i i can't help but think look you love you know i love dogs and i know you love dogs and mrs

fowler and mrs hansen love dogs too but uh when you tell that story i'm thinking gosh do you go out you should go out riding a bike in your mad max world with a with a gun uh just to uh keep from being attacked by pit bulls.

But

I did.

You know what I did when I rode?

I stopped riding.

I would ride 20 miles and I'd get a big Windex kind of squirter and I would fill it with pure ammonia, you know,

ammonia.

Ammonia.

Right.

And then I would squirt.

It had zero effect.

And then I would go online and get like dog sound buzzers, you know, that high-tensity sound that they would, and I remember a pit bull running after me, and I bent down with my hand as I was riding as fast as I could, and I put it right near his face and I buzzed it.

And he just laughed.

Like,

that's a so, yeah, I got a final little anecdote.

There was a dog named that I was riding that I did this for about 10 years, and it ran across the street from this house.

And

it was a weenie dog, a dachshund.

And I ran over it with thin tire road bike, and I went, I completely flipped, and it

seriously injured, if not killed, the dog.

But

I

dislocated my knee, I was bleeding, and I walked over there.

And

the owner came out and said, What did you do to Snookie?

You did this to Snookie.

I would think her name was Snookie, the dog.

Yeah.

How did you, you hurt my dog?

And I said, Your dog is out in the middle of the street chasing people.

Right.

And

so

I went home.

The bike was, you know, couldn't ride it.

So I walked two miles with this bike bleeding.

I got all cleaned up.

And then I got back in my pickup.

I went right back there.

And the dog was,

the dog's brothers and sisters, like five of these dogs were out in the middle of the road.

And I went at full speed and I could have, you know, just smashed all of them and I slammed slammed on the brakes.

And then I honked the horn and she came out and I said, See,

this is what you're doing.

And I could have smashed all of them.

Oh,

Snookie is dying.

She didn't stop.

Snookie is dying.

You know, I flattened you on your bike and you just exposed that my dogs could have caused a car wreck, but I don't care.

So that's.

Well, I've visited you several times.

And when I said Mad Max Max before.

I'm sorry, there is a certain element to the area of wildness.

But to layer onto this, the image of

five

dachshunds in the middle of the street is kind of just, it's kind of what I say.

But Victor,

you do have.

You and Mrs.

Hansen have several dogs.

And this, let's get into close the show with by drawing our listeners' attention to a piece you've written exclusively.

This is one of the ultra pieces you've written for VictorHanson.com.

It's titled We Aging Creatures of Habit, which begins with you describing yourself as sort of inferring as you approach

70 years that you're getting decrepit or

breaking down a little bit.

But much of this is

you're talking about some of your Queensland heaters or Australian cattle dogs or mix of them that

are also,

some some of them are getting old or getting many of them but but many of them are creatures of of habit and

well we're all creatures but these dogs really are habit intensive right absolutely and i know that some of our listeners have queensland healers or what we call australian cattle dogs which were a 19th century invention in australia 1830s the 50s

people who had sheep and cattle out in the outback, various European

herding dogs, whether they were types of collies or Australian shepherds or whatever, shepherds, they crossed them with dingos and they came up with the Australian cattle dog.

And they're beautiful dogs.

They're dappled, what the Greeks call poikolos.

They have little spots on them.

They have, everybody knows those forked ears that rise up.

They have an alligator mouth, kind of, I mean, they have big shoulders.

They're not too big.

They're like a small lab, but they're just enormously energetic and nervous.

And they have that dingo.

So when they're lying, they'll always go into a place where there's a,

you know, it's 360 degrees except for their head.

So they'll dig in a hole and only their head points out.

Everything else is protected.

Or they'll go into a corner to sleep.

And

we get them as rescue dogs.

And I should say that most of I,

almost all of the work and maintenance is done by by my wife.

I don't do anything.

And yet that little nothing that I do, I complain about because they're neurotic.

And they've been in this pack so long.

There's four of them now.

There were five.

One of them was a lab.

But they notice things.

So I don't close the driveway gate at night.

Or there's three igloos and one of them has a hot pad

and the other has a hot pad, but one's hot pad either isn't on or doesn't there and so the dog that doesn't have the hot pad claims that the dog that does is in his igloo so then they

or

or you leave a light on right that's bothering them right

and they remind you and so they have a language so and you just think oh they're just barking But you go out there and they have these legitimate grievances like, I'm the lord of the manor and I don't like that light.

And by the way, it's it's not safe for me to sleep my hour or two at night with that gate open, so close it.

And oh, by the way,

you know, I'm sport, but Spotty got a better igloo than I did, and I'd want him out so I can take it over.

And that's how they do it.

And

it's kind of neat when I've had them for, you know, Queensland's for, oh, over 40 years.

Right.

I have their names, all the ones that died and cement out in dog cage

when I poured this lab.

But

man,

getting up at six and take five, six, seven in the morning, taking them all out, feeding them,

walking them.

Yeah, and how many dogs do you think you've had in the course of your life?

You know, even as a kid in your family, oh, going from 50, 60?

No, more than that.

Yeah.

The thing about Queenslands is that they're very hardy, but when they get to be between 10 and 12 or 13, they start to go deaf and blind.

They were bred for endurance.

So when we had one spotty that rescue dog and had a completely broken compound fracture that somebody had set wrong, so the

back leg were parallel, the bones and the thigh.

They were never set.

And we couldn't go back.

And so when she was like four or five, we climbed Kaiser Peak 10,500 feet.

And she just zoomed up.

Her lung, you know what I mean, right.

We've taken them up there before.

They're enormously,

when they're young, they have enormous endurance.

That's what they were bred for.

And they have a problem, and that is they're intensely loyal to one person.

Not, not, not you.

Well, sometimes one of them is,

but they will bite, they will defend, and then they have another bad intensity.

They are bred, they can't help it to nip.

That's

how they herd.

And you can train them, you can do everything.

And they do a mock nip.

So when you open any gate in a pier, or they're let out of a gate, at least some of them will go down to your foot or ankle and kind of brush against it.

It's kind of an act of friendliness.

But what

they would want to do is bite you.

And every once in a while, if I'm blowing weeds and they get angry about the sound, and then I open a gate to another yard, one of them will come up and bite me.

And over the years, I've been bitten 10 or 15 times in the ankle by them.

And another bad thing they have.

That's never mind the neighborhood dogs that bite you.

It's just your own dogs.

I know there's people in the audience who are saying, Victor, you idiot.

I have

Australian cattle dogs and they're perfectly minded.

I know they are.

Our problem was we would go, every time we'd hear about the Queensland and the pound, my wife would go get it and then bring it back.

And it had been maltreated for these reasons I'm talking about.

The other problem they have is they're kind of unpredictable.

So when you, they have enormously,

they're very bright dogs and they know memory.

So you can have somebody come into your compound.

We have an acre and a half in a yard.

And if they know that person and that person has been wiring or worked painting and they interact with them and that person gives them a little treat of dog biscuit.

For the next, for the rest of their lives, that person can walk in with impunity.

They remember them.

When I had, before I had the studio and Fox cameraman, could come from LA or San Francisco, just one time to acquaint them, and bam, they were, they had an exemption.

But, but you have one person that kicked them or

yelled at them, they will remember that forever.

So, I had one person, camera person,

and

he was talking to me on the other side of the gate.

We have one dog that's really unpredictable, Queensland.

And I said, Don't come in.

Oh, no, I've been here five times.

I said, I know, but you yell at sport and he doesn't like you.

So, why don't you just stay there?

No, no, no.

So, he came in and he just sat there because I was there and he looked at him and I could see it.

And I said, Would you please quietly go?

Because he's, oh, he's not going to bite me.

I've been here five minutes.

I just watched him.

And he was listening, believe it or not, he was listening to the tone of his voice, his mannerisms.

And he was deciding whether this person that was mean to him or didn't like him, he was going to bite or not.

And he was looking at me to see whether I was going to be mad at him.

And I see sporty, sporty.

And man, the guy said, okay, but this is and bam, he just went after him and bit him.

And if my wife wasn't here in the old days when I had no money and I was farming full-time, that would have been the end of him

because I couldn't take that risk, you know, getting sued or something.

Right.

Even though I always had shots, I always had license, but

you know, I didn't know what to do.

So I had to get first aid to him and everything and tell him, show him the shots and all that.

Well, he should have listened.

Should have listened.

It's a know-it-offs.

Well, this is

a lot of strangers understand that about them, though, because, you know, I've had in the past big German shepherds and stuff, but when they come by and they're on the other side of the gate to hand me a package or solicit money for a church, and they look in there and they see these four dogs, especially the ones that are classical Queensland with the perfect face and coat, because a lot of them, two of them are Mongol.

They just don't want to get near them.

They'll just think, I don't like those dogs because they've had interactions with them.

And

it's, you know, they pick out people in the family.

My daughter,

one of the dogs was loyal to my son more than to her.

And

she had to be very careful because

you can enlist that dog as your

private guardian, you know, as a family member.

Like, oh, you can insult your sister or you can, if I'm the father, I can discipline my son.

And that little dog will sound you know like caribou in hell hades will be your little three-headed dog that will enforce the rules so my point of all this and i'll stop is that i was getting tired of it so i wrote an essay about when you get old you don't want to go on the roof anymore you don't want to go under the house anymore every right you twist your ankle you don't even know it next morning you come up and you're lame and part of it is getting up and feeding these neurotic dogs especially this and that and then walking them this and that, and then barking them this and that, and getting them in the cage this and that.

Yeah, I know, you know, you can farm out the plumbing work and the siding and the painting, but taking care of the dogs, that's going to be tough.

You're going to be stuck with them.

They're stuck with you.

That loves Queensland and comes out and says, Mr.

Hansen, I will train these dogs to be obedient.

Well, we'll find the patron saint of

dogs.

Actually, St.

Rocco.

St.

Canis.

no there's not a saint canis by the way today is if we may end this on a religious note this is the 12th day of christmas this is the feast of the epiphany and it's also uh about two days or yesterday after the burial of of uh pope emeritus uh

Benedicto, as he was known as Joseph Ratzinger, who was really one of the great intellects of our time.

He wrote some brilliant treatises, but he was on the wrong side of the woke movement and that was starting to gain momentum.

Right.

Well, the Catholic Church wokery

has been

nefarious there

for decades and decades.

We talked a few weeks ago about the FBI and problems today, and these things have been percolating for decades

in our colleges.

Same thing in the Catholic Church.

He was a throwback to the old idea of a very learned, scholarly, polyglot

philosopher, you name it, was very interested in how the church was formed.

Yeah, I think he will would be someday in Catholicism.

There are certain saints who are considered doctors of the church.

Thomas Aquinas, they're so profound as theologians.

And

Joseph Ratzinger

will most likely be one such so that he may

rest in peace.

So, Victor, we thank our listeners for listening and some who rate us,

they can do that on

Apple Podcasts slash iTunes.

Again, thanks for those who do that, zero to five stars.

And most everyone leaves five stars.

And some who leave comments, we read them.

And here is one from Rick Leo, 7545.

And it's titled Known and Unknown.

I look forward to the VDH podcast like I did Christmas when I was young.

VDH is a national treasure as far as I'm concerned.

I listen intently to every word and also enjoy the co-hosts' interjections.

I only wish there was a podcast every day.

I often go back and listen to older podcasts to hear the predictions.

Five stars for Victor, Jack, and Sammy.

And thank you for all the information, Rick in Tucson.

Thank you, Rick.

Thanks, everybody else, who leaves comments

about this show.

And I know Victor and Sammy and I read comments that are left on Victor's website too.

Appreciate some of the thoughts you give us there.

So

that's about it on this January 6th that we're recording.

This episode will be out on the 10th.

Oh, I forgot to add, Jack Fowler, Civil Thoughts.

I write civil thoughts, free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

You can sign up.

No charge.

That's what free means.

No strings attached.

A dozen or so recommended readings.

You'll like it.

Go ahead.

Do it.

CivilThoughts.com.

Thank you.

All right, Victor, my friend.

Thanks for everything.

I think you got to go feed your dog, and I got to go wake mine up and feed him.

He's

stopping from snoring.

God bless.

Thanks, everybody.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.