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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is the author of 28 books.

The most recent one is The Dying Citizen, and maybe we'll have an opportunity to talk a little bit about The Dying Citizen today.

But first, let's go to a few messages and we'll come right on back and talk about

California reparations and a little bit about Elon Musk and maybe get into some topics that are a little optimistic, as Sammy Wink is often asking Victor.

Maybe we can have a little optimism, so we'll do that today.

But let's have some messages first.

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Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody, Victor can be found at his website, VictorHanson.com, and you can join for a monthly fee of $5 a month or a subscription of $50 a year.

I highly recommend the later because you'll need a long time to read a lot into the

Victor, the VDH Ultra material, which is extensive and is not available unless you do have a paid subscription.

Victor, how are you doing today?

I know we have California reparations on the agenda today and California is,

how's the weather out there?

I'm kind of a little bit apprehensive because it's giving me echoes of 2000,

the winter of 2000, late 2021, in which we had this dynamic wet

late November, December.

And I remember up at Huntington Lake at 7,000 feet, it was five feet.

And then it literally did not snow until March.

And we lost that momentum.

And the same thing is happening, I'm afraid, right now we've had two huge storms, and we're about 130% of precipitation, both as determined by rainfall and snowfall.

But we're getting up to the 10-day mark.

And I'm looking at these long-range forecasts and that high-pressure areas

bouncing those storms that come from Australia or Japan and bouncing them up north again, up to Seattle.

And so we'll see.

And what else is new?

Oh, I have,

I was making great progress in strangling, crushing, beating long COVID.

I got COVID again.

So

that's the third time.

Third time.

And I had two Moderna shots.

I had Delta beat it in three days, as I said.

And then I had this long COVID started on May 1st.

And then I had taught, a doctor wrote me and he said, oh, by the way,

I was in the audience when you were speaking.

Just a reminder, there's a lot of people.

I was doing a lot of photo.

I think I spoke over 30 times.

So

you shake a lot of hands and photo ops.

And he just said

you don't have lifelong immunity, even though you may be having an autoimmune response to initial COVID.

It doesn't mean that that new Omicron variant, which appears periodically, won't get you.

So I guess that's what got me.

But unlike what the doctor said, they said each time you get COVID, it gets worse.

That was true with Delta and then Omicron was worse.

But this time it wasn't worse than the first time.

So I'm already bouncing back.

And

I've already tested negative after five days.

Yeah.

Oh, great.

Well, you have another thing going on in your state besides the weather, and that is a

new task force created by Gavin Newsom

on California reparations.

I know.

And, you know, I was watching, I think it was Tucker, might have been Sean Hannity, I don't know which one, but they were playing some of the protesters who were also

coming up to testify, I think, at First Baptist Church down in Los Angeles.

Anyway, one of the protesters said basically, and I'm sorry I couldn't find the exact quote from her, but she said, what they are offering isn't enough and it will never be enough.

And I thought that was an interesting statement because it kind of almost said it all I think but what were your thoughts on this California region well everybody deplores the institution of slavery that ended in 1865 right so

that was

we had 35 years of the

19th century then the 20th century was 130 so we're up to what we're up to 157 years so we're into

I don't know how you want to approximate that, we're into seven and eight generations from slavery.

Now, you can argue that in the southern part of the United States, there was a de ure Jim Crow discrimination that appeared after the collapse of Reconstruction in 1878.

And then there was de facto

discrimination, depending on the

the area you're living.

Out here in California, what I'm getting at, Sammy, is that we were not a slave state.

Not at all.

We never had slavery.

We had other isms and ologies, and we did not have Jim Crow.

In the sense that I can give you an example, in my local hometown,

I was very good friends with an Armenian family, and they were very, as most Armenian immigrants were, if I could stereotype, very hardworking.

frugal, very industrious, and very business savvy.

And he did very well.

He wanted to to buy a home, but it was from the 19th century, nobody had even thought that it was still zoned.

No Armenians, you know, no Armenians.

And then the Armenian community came here after being slaughtered, slaughtered,

almost completely in some areas of Turkey.

There was over a million people.

And I'm sure my Armenian friends are going to say, Victor, Victor, Victor, that was more than that.

But I can't give you precise figures above a million, but it was a million people.

And they were slaughtered by Turkey, and Turkey's never paid them reparations.

So, what I'm getting at is once we go down that road, no matter how atrocious the behavior of the majority of population to the minority,

there were editorials in the 1840s in major newspapers on the East Coast asking whether

Irish immigrants were human.

because they were small, malnourished, especially after the 1840s potato famine.

And many of them came over as indentured servants.

Japanese Americans in our lifetime, or my parents' lifetime, were in car and they did get a twenty thousand one-time sum, but that was for the confiscation of property.

We had the yellow peril and Leland Stanford, you know, the Union Pacific Railroad, he has numerous correspondence where he's very worried that the railroad is contributing to what he calls the

orientalization of California, that people are coming to work on it and staying.

And

man of his times, it was tribalist.

And so what I'm getting at is that once we go down that road, that in the present, we're going to write all of the past way back.

And I say way back because even Jim Crow has been de facto over by 19

from the 1960 civil rights movement, but surely by 1970.

So we're a half century beyond Jim Crow.

That's one consideration.

It's going to make everybody re-tribalize.

Everybody is going to say, you know what, if they do this, then how about this?

And how about that?

And how about this?

And so that's one thing.

And then,

and I know that the reparations movement has said, well, look at the Jews in Germany.

But those were direct descendants.

They weren't descendants.

There's nobody Jewish now, say third or fourth generation from the Holocaust, who's saying, my great-grandmother or my grandmother didn't get reparations for loss of income or confiscation of property.

Therefore, I'm going to get it without, you know, a substantial, this is a partial that was taken.

And so we don't do that

for third or fourth generation, much less seventh generation

Jewish people who have claims against Germany.

And so that's one thing.

The second thing is, as I said, California was a free state.

So when everybody says slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, they never talk about the 11 Confederate states and the four to five border states as

unique.

And it prompts a revisitation to the Constitution and the founding fathers, what we were all told are racist.

But they, from the very founding of this nation, if you read documents, foundational documents, slavery was the central issue.

And the majority of states,

I think you could make the argument, by 1820 did not want slavery.

And they did not want it at the founding.

Most of the founders, even the people who owned slaves, understood it was doomed.

It was evil.

And because of the predominance of Virginia in our founding, perhaps it wasn't resolved as quickly as it should have been.

Old Jefferson, who was a slave owner, understood that he was a contributor toward evil.

But my point that they were presented with an existential question.

How do we eliminate slavery when we've just got our freedom from the British?

Are we going to have a civil war, the 1861 Civil War?

Are we going to have it in 1787,

1780?

It would have destroyed the nation.

So they put that off.

And that was probably not wise, but it was the only alternative they thought at the time, given their vulnerability and the hostile powers in Europe that didn't want this country to succeed.

And then we had a series of compromises.

The 1820, the Missouri Compromise, all of those compromises just put off the inevitable that this country was going to go to war and 700,000 people died.

So

slavery is a horrible idea, but it's not unique to the United States.

The number of slaves that were confiscated or deprived of their liberty and shipped to the Middle East was as great or greater than the Western Hemisphere.

The British Empire, as we know, outlawed it in a way that indigenous tribes and the Arab world did not.

It was a participation of everybody, and it's as ancient as civilization, that evil.

The word slave comes from Slav, you know,

they were white slaves.

And when you go in Greece, the only Greece was based on slavery if you believe in Moses Finley that the leisure allowed to participate in self-governance was in part because there were I don't believe

you know I think it's Athenaeus has a quote of 400,000 slaves in Attica but let's say 20 to 40,000 slaves most of them in the mines but also in farms and my point is

That was an institution at the very beginning of civilization, and not just Western civilization.

It exists today in parts of the world.

We know that in the Middle East and parts of Africa, they're slaves.

So, this idea that somehow slavery was unique to the West or to the Caucasians or whites, and it was based, America was based on slavery, is not the full picture.

It's inexact.

And so, there's all the, and then we go to the present.

And when you mentioned this quote, it was very telling because once you start becoming a deity and you say,

okay,

we are going to rectify all the errors of the past in our infinite wisdom in the present since we have all this morality.

Where do you start and where do you begin?

And what is the next generation going to say?

Oh my God.

Can you believe people were killing 10,000 people a year in late-term abortion in a so-called sophisticated society?

Let's go back and see who did that.

And

I don't think you're able present within reasonable limits.

I don't think you can go back and write the past.

And then we get into the great society.

If you go back and look at the great society that was birthed by the civil rights movement, it was predicated on the idea of addressing in a repertory fashion the evils of slavery, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that that had hurt African American communities.

And that program over its last half century has probably funded about 50, 40 to 50 trillion dollars in entitlements that came to the underclass.

And before the idea of diversity, when we had almost every other group that was non-white claiming that they had claims against, claiming that they had

entitlements

that were commiserate with with their racial status.

It was mostly a binary of 12% African Americans, 88% so-called white people.

That was the binary, the tension, the para, whatever you want to use it.

So those great society programs were largely in their genesis aimed at that problem.

And they poured money in.

And great sociologists, historians, political scientists like Tom Sowell, an economist, have looked at that.

And he'd argued that

as far as the African-American family, as far as the crime rates, part of it was the general direction of the country, but it doesn't explain the greater propensity

of

things like illegitimacy or violent crime proportionally

that it was a product of white liberal repertory action.

Because everybody knows that when you just give somebody, you say, this is, we owe you this,

then you get that reaction that was so significant in your quote.

That's never going to be enough.

I'm sorry.

Slavery is so horrible that the very fact that you think you can buy us off, so we have permanent claim.

You know, and there were 15,000 murders last year.

Murders.

8,500 of them were African American victims.

Mostly the perpetrators were African Americans.

About 57%

of the people who are murdered in the United States today, this year,

are African American.

And that's about 12%.

So 12% of the population accounts for 58% of the people who are dying violently.

So

before we get into these cosmic issues, why don't we just address that?

Why don't we say, why are in the inner, is that because of the legacy of slavery or Jim Crow 100 and something years ago?

Or is it the Great Society programs?

Or is it the, maybe it's because of the racist inattention to the inner city?

Maybe we should say, okay,

let's have academies, private academies, where our best teachers go into the inner city and offer charter schools, and they teach kids Latin and geometry at a very early age and make them competitive so that affirmative action 12 years later is superfluous.

Or let's look at the popular culture, both white and black.

Let's look at the lyrics of Cardi B's songs.

about the demonization of women or the misogyny or the racism or the attacks on police and these rappers.

And what effect does that have?

So, what I'm getting at, Sammy, there's all these other things that take precedence that we could do to create de facto parody, but we're not getting any of it.

And it's all, as Shelby Steele,

a great colleague at the Hoover Institution of mine, has pointed out, it's predicated on the white guild.

So, and then we finally get to the last issue, and I'll shut up.

The state is $25

billion

short this year.

It's not the federal government.

It can't have a deficit.

It has to square the books at the end of the year.

Its fiscal year will be $25 billion short.

This is a state, everybody remember this, that has the highest income tax in the nation at 13.3%.

If you look at local add-ons to the state sales tax, it rates about fifth in the nation.

It has presently the highest gasoline taxes.

It has a low property tax rate percentage-wise, but because of the aggregate valuation of sky-high property in California, property taxes are in the top quarter in the country.

And yet, and yet,

with all that revenue, And all that $7 trillion in market capitalization of Silicon Valley, we have 21% of of the poor living in the state.

We have the highest number of homeless of anybody, both percentage-wise of any state and in absolute numbers.

We have the highest number of illegal aliens.

One of three people in the United States on public assistance is in this state.

We have the highest property crime rate in the United States per capita in San Francisco, and Los Angeles is close behind.

We have one of the most violent property crime rate spikes of any state nationwide,

I could go on.

But our schools are rated in the bottom 10% on the basis of test scores.

Our electricity kilowatt prices, I think, are the second highest after Hawaii.

Our fuel tax is not, as I said, is the highest, but the fuel formula that is required in summer months and the blends required make gasoline higher than any state other than Hawaii.

So with all these existential problems in California, in a time of massive debt with hyperinflation and heading into zero growth in recessionary times, I think we are, somebody comes up with the idea, Newsom, this commission, you're going to give, what, $250,000 to 5% of the state population for something that happened 160 years ago.

And it's not, this is key.

It's not going to be based on need.

So,

and now we're, I said that would be the last, but I have a final Phillip.

Yes, think about it.

LeBron James, Megan Markle, Oprah.

So, we don't talk about class in this country.

We only talk about race as the underprivileged and the oppressed and the victimized.

And the reason we do that is that we are a fluid country, and somebody who's poor

can become middle class, and somebody with middle class could be upper middle class, and on and on.

And the left hates that.

It's what Marx, you know, basically would call as religion, the opiate.

They think, oh, well, I'll be pretty, you know, I'll have a nicer car than the guy next door, and that's false consciousness.

Well, it's true consciousness.

And so the left understood in this country that you can't have a permanent victimized class of the poor because they become wealthier.

But race,

that's unchangeable in their minds.

And when it's not unchangeable, i.e.

we're a highly integrated, intermarried, and assimilated population where we'd have to have DNA badges

to tell who is black, who is white, who's Latino, who's Asian.

And by the way, dash-dash, hypothetical, I mean parenthetical here,

don't think they will not go back to the old Confederacy to adopt the one-drop 116th rule.

Remember, it was

Haile Berry in a divorce court proceeding said, I want to to invoke the 116th rule because I want custody of my child who's 116th black

in a dispute with her husband.

So that's where we're headed.

We don't have the money.

We don't have a history of slavery in this state.

We're a multiracial state.

We're 45% of the population is Latino.

We have more immigrants.

27%

of Californians were not born in this country.

So these people you quoted that were demanding reparations are saying to somebody from Guatemala, Mexico,

Cambodia, Korea, you owe us as a taxpayer into the general fund for something that happened to a country that you have no, you weren't even here.

And I guess the argument would be, well, they inherited a racist environment, but if they're not so-called white, then are they

oppressed too?

So the whole thing is just incoherent.

And why is Joe Biden doing this?

Joe Biden is doing this.

Oh, it's Gavin.

It's Gavin.

Well, I mean, Joe Biden is pushing it, and Gavin is

trying to piggyback on it.

And you know why they're doing it?

Because they feel that they are losing 51% of the population of all different, and they have to have these hot-button issues, and they have to satisfy an

increasingly progressive dash regressive base and that is and then they control the institutions and they feel that if we can call people racist they need an issue they're basically an aggregate juicy smallet the state of california as it is run by that bay area elite is is an incarnation of juicy smaller and they want to create a victim

on absurd grounds and then they want to use that victimhood to extract reparations psychological material material from the majority.

It's not, I mean,

it's not the so-called white majority, everybody.

It's about, it's under 40%.

So you're going to be basically telling the Latino community, you owe us for slavery because you're the tax, you're the middle class now, and you're going to pay for us.

And you're going to pay so

Fernando Gonzalez came, say, 20 years from Mexico, and he's working as an electrician, and the state is saying saying to him, you owe Oprah some money or you owe LeBron some money.

That's not viable.

It's not viable.

It's not viable.

I'm sorry.

And so I'll see.

So I'm not trying to excuse the evil of, of course I'm not, slavery or Jim Crow, but this is a prescription for the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda.

And just everybody should remember when you start to, as Martin Luther King warned us when he said content of our character, not color of our skin, when that becomes essential to you, your tribal affiliation, it's exactly like nuclear proliferation.

Once one tribe goes tribal and starts talking about their racial essence as essential, then the next and the next and the next, and you get into sort of for self-preservation, everybody will go tribal.

And we know where that leads.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about Elon Musk and his recent activities at Twitter.

We'll be right back.

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We're back and

welcome.

Victor,

Elon is, yeah, there's a couple of things that are going on.

The current thing is he's banning some journalists who have been tracking his private plane or tweeting about his tracked private plane.

And so he rightly, I think, is calling that doxing him.

But also

he's being criticized for his rapid firing of top management.

And I think his critics are trying to suggest he's erratic and ergo unstable, right?

And

they said they don't know why they were banned.

The journalists said that.

Even though he, yeah, but they keep saying they don't know why, even though Elon's out there saying, because you're doxing me.

But go ahead.

What are your thoughts?

Well, first of all, the journalists that were banned, for the most part, were the most

eager to ban other people for opinions.

They were banned, and I don't know if I agree with it or not, but they were banned because a website, Follow Elon or whatever its name is, tracks his private jet wherever he is.

And people know then when he's going to land in a particular city or place.

And he just had people that attacked a car in which his small son was in.

So what he's saying is, nobody on Twitter doxes anybody.

Once you start to publicize the private itineraries of people for the express purpose of harassing them, i.e., following Maxine Waters' advice, get in their faces, right?

Follow them to the gas station or Barack Obama's advice, get in their faces, argue with them.

But you add, you know, you show up at a person's home, i.e.,

the people who went after Kavanaugh, they found out where he was living, then he's not going to put up with that.

And then the issue arises is,

well, he said that he was getting rid of all censorship and all of these boards, but now he's doing this by dictat, dictate.

In other words, he decides that you can't dock somebody because it happened to him, but he should set up a disinterested board that would find, you know, would have these protocols.

And maybe that's there's some validity to it or not.

As far as but I can sympathize why he's doing it.

They want to destroy him.

They want to destroy Tesla.

They want to destroy SpaceX.

They want to

Starlink.

Anything that is associated with him, they want to destroy.

And they want to do it because he's sinned in two fundamental ways.

Cardinal sin.

Number one, he's an apostate.

He was a big guy that wanted climate change.

That was one of the motivations that drove him to Tesla.

He was the underdog who was taking on GM and Ford, which the left supposedly hates.

He was taking on NASA.

He was the heartthrob.

He gave the left a car that could go 300 miles without charge.

And they had thought, you know, we just want to get

to get an electric car so we can virtue signal and we don't have to get gas and the Chevy Volt.

It's just a mess.

Prius wasn't...

And then he gave them a product that they wanted, and that became sort of a badge of honor.

And all of a sudden, he's an apostate in the sense that he's really for free speech and they're not so they feel he betrayed them

and the second is

he doesn't care he does he's he may be this week the world's richest man

next week the second richest three weeks from now the tenth richest but he has the wherewithal that he doesn't care what they say about him in the sense they can't he's he's very hard to destroy how do you destroy a guy like that with those resources and that energy And so he's not,

he doesn't care what you say about him.

If you say to Elon Musk, you're never going to go to the White House correspondence dinner again.

You are never, ever going to be asked to be on the board of trustees of Stanford University.

You're never, ever going to get an endowed professorship.

You are never, ever going to get a Nobel Prize.

He doesn't care.

So all of the let we're going to review your book with a bad review.

He may be sensitive, but he obviously doesn't care, or he wouldn't be willing to lose, and I think he will lose billions acquiring Twitter.

And then third, there's another minor sin.

He went into Twitter, and he didn't just oppose them.

He made them look ridiculous.

He humiliated them.

Because what he showed the world was these people are not just enemies of the First Amendment.

posing as civil libertarian.

They're not just, you know, as Orwell reportedly said, I haven't found that quote, but if they paid better, they'd be fascist.

They're fascist.

They do not want free expression.

But he said they're lazy.

They have to have all these perks.

They're little wimpy people.

They're into psychodramas and melodramas, and they have this little bubble in San Francisco.

Oh, I have to go to work.

Why can't I stay home?

Oh, I had to stand in line at the latte bar.

Oh, I have to take, I need two hours for my yogas.

You know, oh, the vegan section wasn't what I want.

That's the image that he's exposing.

And it makes them look like what they are.

Spoiled people.

And he's not Mark Zuckerberg.

And he's not Bill Gates.

And he's not Jack Dorsey.

These people, I give them credit.

They created the technological revolution in Silicon Valley.

It helped the United States.

It took over the world.

Great, great, great.

But it's cyber.

It's the internet.

It's social media.

It's email.

It's Twitter.

It's not brick and mortar.

This guy, in a 19th-century fashion, built a rocket that works and sends a satellite, which those people need.

Tesla and

space are real things.

He built a car.

He had computer chips.

He needs that technology, but

he needs the Internet, but it's a real physical thing.

And we don't do that in America anymore.

We make our money out of Sam Bankman Freed by market manipulation or Ponzi schemes.

Or when you look at that Fortune 400 and you look at where that fortune is, there's still a few people in retail, assembly, manufacturing, oil, gas, real estate, but most of it is in law.

media, insurance, hedge funds, investment, and big tech.

So he's a throwback to something we haven't seen before.

And I think, you know, I don't want to

overuse this tragic hero paradigm, but I think he is a, he's not quite like Trump, but he's a tragic hero because he has a certain methodology that gets things done, but in the process, he doesn't follow the rules.

And people, when they're the beneficiary of his success, will find the laxity that they can start focusing on.

He doesn't follow the rules.

So for now, everybody feels he's a folk hero and he's taking on big tech.

But he just one day says, You know what?

You tell the world where I'm going to land with my child on it, and they try to hurt my child, I don't give a damn.

I'm just going to get you off, and I don't care who you are.

Well, we don't do that.

That's the gunslinger who pulls out his gun and he gets rid of the cattle barons and he rides off in the sunset because you can't do that.

And so what he's doing is he's revolutionizing Silicon Valley, but he's using a methodology that he himself knows cannot be orthodox.

What he's doing is he's going after the bad guys, but in the process, he's got to use a methodology that's not compatible with what the eventual solution will be.

And that is, we're eventually going to get to people who wake up and say, you know what?

These people are nothing unless they have the public cyber airspace.

They send their waves through the air.

That's what, and the electronic case, and they need the public.

To quote Elizabeth Warren, you didn't build that.

I don't quite believe that, but what I'm getting at is it's not just a newspaper.

It is the phone.

It is the electrical grid.

It is a public commodity.

And they have to follow the rules of free expression because they are a public utility.

And I think

we don't have a democracy without that.

And I think that's where we're headed.

But the person who's going to get us there is not the sober and judicious person who calls up Jack Dory.

Hey, Jack, just wondering, you're under oath and here in Congress.

Do you guys ever shadow ban?

Oh, no, we wouldn't do that.

Okay, I thought you didn't.

That's not going to get you where you want you to go.

You got to get a guy like him who says, I will lose 40 blank, blank ing

dollars if I have to, to destroy this monster.

I'll cut off every damn Hydra head there is, and I will do what's necessary.

But in that process of doing what's necessary, you beneficiaries are going to turn on me because I'm a little uncouth and crazy.

And more power to him.

I think we have not enough Achilles and Ajaxes and Ethan Edwards and the wild wild bunch left.

Yeah, yeah, and he certainly is showing himself to be something in that along that order.

Well, Victor, you know, we often talk on this show about all the things going wrong in America.

And I was hoping that maybe we could go over some of our troubles and maybe see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Everybody seems to light up.

Optimism.

We need some light at the end of the tunnel.

I know.

I feel so bad because I've been playing Eeyore for so long.

Everybody said, lighten up.

I can't take it anymore.

You've written about how America is going to hell.

Give me some hope.

Yeah, so let's go with some hope and we'll go to the

issues.

Let's just start with one first, and then we'll have to take a break and we'll come back with a few more.

But how about the debt in America?

How are we going to ever?

That's the elephant.

I've written about that a lot.

I have.

But not just a nick.

We owe $31 trillion this week.

That's 120 to 125% of GDP, and we're not in World War II.

And we're running an annual deficit.

And it's all,

it was George Bush, it's Barack Obama, it was Donald Trump, it's Joe Biden.

It's

$1.7 trillion annually.

And that's not sustainable because when the interest rate goes up,

you have to service that huge sum.

It's not Bill Clinton servicing, you know, $5 trillion

when the interest rate goes up.

It's $31 trillion.

You get up to, we get into hyperinflation where I think 7% will be, it may be higher next year.

I don't think the Fed has controlled it.

And you get up to interest rates that are 7% or 8%,

and you have 30%, you know, you're talking about in a budget of $4 trillion, 7% of $31 trillion.

I mean, we don't, most of a lot of that $31 trillion, not a lot, but a substantial amount is owed by the Chinese and everybody.

But still, no matter who's it owed to, you're talking about a couple of trillion dollars in theory in interest.

And the sad thing is every single year we get more revenue.

Sometimes it's $100 billion, sometimes it's $500 billion.

But the spending outpaces it.

So we know it's not sustainable.

And we know there's only three ways, four things to do.

You either bite the bullet,

and you stop spending and you reform the tax code.

And Simpson Bowles, I know Alan Simpson.

I like him.

He's a great guy.

I know he's controversial.

A lot of conservatives

have their

feuds with him, but I think he's a wonderful guy.

And the Simpson Bowles committee in 2010 had the answer.

They

cut taxes.

They simplified the tax code.

I think the three brackets.

They got rid of a lot of tax credits and deductions, which people on the conservative side didn't like.

They had a little gas tax increase.

And then they held entitlements to the rate of inflation, mostly, some cuts.

And you know what they said, Sammy?

By 2014,

2014,

it was $17 trillion.

They forecast that they could stop it there.

Think of that.

Right now,

and then they said if you continued with this,

we would reduce 60%.

By 2000, guess what year?

2023, next year.

And what would we be?

We would have a $10 trillion national debt, not $31 trillion, and we would eliminate it in about a decade.

And they reported back to Barack Obama.

Some Republicans didn't like it because of the gas tax, but mostly it was the left that wanted more entitlements.

And Barack Obama said, oh, I didn't think you'd really come up with a proposal.

And he just forgot about it.

They toured the country,

Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, bipartisan, private citizens, and public.

It was a wonderful commission.

Alan Simpson spent a great deal of his time and effort to tour the country.

And guess what?

That would have solved the problem.

And that's what we need to get back to.

Yeah.

What's next?

Absolutely.

Let's take a break and then come back and we'll look at a couple of more things: the border and our natural resources, and maybe a little bit on tribalism.

But we'll be right back.

Welcome back, Victor.

So, yeah, what's next is the border.

We have over 5 million new people in our country illegally since Joe Biden has been in office.

And I think everybody's aghast, and we're only seeing our left-wing news outlets now start talking about it.

I mean, I'm speechless when I see that.

Like, where were they for the last two years?

But

is there anything positive?

Go ahead.

No, there's no border.

It doesn't exist.

They destroyed it.

There were 5 million illegal crossings.

And I don't believe there's 20, there's more like 30 million illegal aliens.

We have the highest number and absolutes and percentages of people not born in the United States than we've ever had.

I said it's 27% of California, but it's 50 million people.

And they haven't been assimilated and integrated as they were under the melting pot, under solid bold tribalism.

It's, oh, we wouldn't want to infringe on on your

ethnic identity or essence.

And we had the solution.

So I said the Simpson Bowles would be a solution because your theme, what you asked, was, let's be positive.

Okay, I'm positive.

2019 and 20, we solved it.

There was essentially no more illegal crossing.

And what did Donald Trump, the hated Donald Trump, do?

He went back through 500 miles of rickety fence and he fixed it.

And he was just starting.

Everybody said, well, he didn't build a wall.

Wall Street Journal, Journal, Anco, everybody makes fun of him.

He didn't build a wall because they sued and sued and sued.

And his own Department of Defense and Homeland Security, low-level people tried to undermine him.

Remember, Anonymous?

We will stop this guy.

But he finally started to build it new.

And had he been re-elected, we would have had the entire border secure with a wall, and it would have mostly worked.

Then he said, if Mexico continues to contribute to this and subsidizes the export of human capital, this is what I'm going to do.

I'm going to revoke NAFTA and renegotiate it, and you're not going to get these trade concessions.

And second, we're going to tax $60 billion

in remittances because your people are coming up here illegally, and they are in many areas on federal help and subsidies, housing, education, food stamps, legal.

And they're using those those subsidies to free up cash to send back to your country because you won't pay for your own poor.

So I'm going to tax that $60 billion.

And you know what?

If you want refugee status, you apply for it in your home country.

And you know what?

There's no more catch and release.

And the problem was solved.

He was hated.

They lied and said, he created cages.

No, Barack Obama did.

Barack Obama did.

They weren't cages.

And compared to what we have now with people drowning in the Rio Grande and these poor communities overrun,

and we've had a lot more deaths on the border than we did under Donald Trump.

And so

there is no border.

So there's a solution.

Yeah, there's a solution.

We had it.

We have a solution for the debt.

We could do it tomorrow.

It wouldn't inconvenience us that much.

We have an easy solution for the border.

We don't have a solution for the debt, not because we don't know what's going to do, but because the left doesn't want to do it and to some extent the right and we don't have a solution on the border because the corporate right and the

i guess you'd call it tribal left feel that it's in their interest the the former with cheap labor the latter with

what they call demography is destiny remember what the left does demography is destiny meaning we're going to let everybody in this country and they're going to be dependent on us and they're going to vote against so-called white aristocratic golfers in the Republican Party.

But if you say that we're doing that, that becomes a great replacement theory and you're a racist.

But it's the same thing.

So we have these solutions.

I'm trying to be positive, but there are solutions, easy solutions.

What about the conservatorship of our natural resources?

What should we be doing with them?

I mean, America has been famous for having excessive.

Yeah, go ahead.

Well, I mean, precious metal.

Down by Brawley, there's all kinds of lithium.

I was just talking to a very successful captain of industry who was explaining that lithium is there to be mined for our new generation of batteries.

But there again, Sammy, we had a solution.

We were energy independent.

Maybe we exported and imported, but the net ledger was we were slated to get up to 15, 16, 17, 18 million barrels.

We had Admiral open.

We had Keystone.

We were pressuring to build build the Constitution gas line to New England.

We had the record new federal leases for oil and gas.

The price was affordable to the middle class.

Weeds flooded the world with cheap oil.

Who hated that?

We did not beg Venezuela as Biden did.

We did not beg Iran.

We did not beg Saudi Arabia.

We did not beg Russia.

We said, we don't need you.

And you know what?

We said, We don't need to be in the Middle East.

That's an optional idea to go to war.

It's not a necessity anymore.

It was just a win-win-win.

And as far as the environmentalists were, we said we can extract a horizontal drill and frack much cleaner and with much more sobriety than anybody in the world.

And it's a fungible commodity.

It would be better.

The more that can be produced under environmental guidelines in the United States, the better the world is off.

And guess what?

He came in, Anwar, checked no more Anwar, fewest gas and oil leases in any president in history, canceled Keystone, drained the strategic petroleum

reserve right before the midterms, spiked oil and gas.

People can't now can't even afford to.

I just got my propane bill.

It was $5 a gallon.

My God.

Under Trump, I think it was $1.25.

And this is...

Are you going to buy a steak?

Are you going to chuck steak?

Are you going to fill your tank up?

That's what he gave us.

But again, we had the solution.

It was all there.

Yeah.

Okay.

So this is the last one.

And I think I'm going to, I would, I would like to talk about higher education, but maybe we'll do that

in our next.

Yeah, where don't we do that?

Why don't you think of it?

How many is this?

For?

Give us.

Yeah, let's go.

I just want to go to the next one.

Do eight or ten and we'll do a half now.

Okay.

You want to go to tribalism or armed forces?

I wanted to go to armed forces

and see what you have to say about all of our armed forces being diverted into left politics and worried about race and trans status rather than the potential enemy out there and or the enemies.

Go ahead.

Well, I'm really worried about the armed forces.

I think

all of conservative America was the source of the armed services and the military, the Pentagon support.

And every budgetary battle or funding battle or cultural area, we supported the military.

But somewhere in this woke revolution, the left said, you know what?

I like the military now.

I hate the military, but I like them because they don't have this give and take about legislation.

They can just use the chain of command and by fiat have, you know,

subsidized transgendered surgeries, gay marriage, women in combat.

We can do anything we want.

All we have to do is get to

that four-star class in Washington and let them know that we're going to go after them or we're going to reward them, depending on their attitude.

They're going to be three-star, two-star, you're going to be promoted if, not if your artillery shells hit the target of your unit, not if your flyers hit the second cable on the carrier every time, but whether you have diversity, equity, inclusion.

And so the result of all this is, if you look at the Reagan Foundation popularity poll, it's the lowest it's ever been.

Only 45% of Americans have great confidence in the U.S.

Armed Forces.

Some of the branches until recently were 50%

below their annual targets of recruitment.

And we ask ourselves, and they say, well, that's because everybody's obese, that's because people are taking drugs, that's because wages are higher, maybe, maybe, maybe, but we think we know what it really is, that there was a particular demographic, to use their words, that inordinately and disproportionately joined the military in general and combat units in particular.

And those were conservative, traditionalist white males from south of the Mason-Dixon line and from rural areas like Bakersfield or Fresno or upstate New York or southern Michigan or northern LA, whether that group, and I say this again, people get very angry when they hear it, but since the Pentagon keeps a racial classification quota on every aspect of promotion and diversity and this and that, they do it except for

one rubric, and that's the number of people who were killed, killed in Afghanistan, Iraq.

And so they went after and called these people white supremacists and white privilege, and that particular rubric

died at double their 35%,

double their 35%

proportion of the population.

And that was suicidal.

So these families, three or four generations, said, not this pig anymore.

I'm not doing it anymore.

I'm not sending my son, whose father was killed in Iraq

or the First Gulf War, whose grandfather was wounded in Vietnam.

I'm not sending him into the military anymore.

Nope, nope, not going to do it.

Not so he sits in and be yelled at and told he has to read Professor Kendi and he's going to have to confess his privilege.

And there isn't much privilege in southern Michigan out in the rural areas, believe me.

There's not much privilege out in Fresno County in the rural areas or the Oklahoma diaspora that still hasn't quite, in some cases, achieved parity in the Sierra foothills.

And the idea that those people are going to join like they have in the past, they're not going to do it.

And they have to be very careful because they're starting to, the woke is starting to offend the Latino population.

And one branch of the service we know depends on Hispanics or the Marine Corps.

And you take a traditional Hispanic youth who is very important, Catholic faith, the nuclear family, fertility, and you put him in a unit when you tell him

that

there are certain issues that are antithetical to his values.

And the military is going to push those issues.

And they're not going to be battle efficacy.

He's not going to join.

So that's what's happened.

And how, again, can we.

But how do we change this?

Yeah.

We just have to tell the military,

we have to take control of the government by election.

There has to be a Republican administration and a majority in Congress, and they have to

start changing Pentagon Protocol.

And then they have to do some other things as well, because it's not just recruitment.

We are investing these huge sums.

You know, the B-21 bomber sounds great to me, but $750 million

when we're watching a war in action where these drones for a million dollars or a half a million are destroying whole apartment buildings, you know, for $750 million, I would think I would like 750 sophisticated drones and maybe a submarine that emerges from the deeps of the sea with a flat top on it and suddenly lets out or shoots from the underground under the ocean a thousand drones.

Who knows?

Each, you know,

undetectable.

But my point is that we can no longer have a revolving door.

So a three-star, two-star, four-star starts to see that $200,000, $150,000 in pension is not enough, and I'm going to gravitate to Raytheon, like Lloyd Dosten, or Northrop, or Lockheed, or General Dynamics, and make more money in 10 years than I made my entire life as a board member whose expertise and contacts in the Pentagon will be monetized by my new employer.

And therefore, we get these big ticket items in many cases that are unrealistic.

And then we need to really set the officer core straight.

We need to tell them, you are not political animals.

You are disinterested.

When you

entered the military and when you were promoted to officer rank, you understood the code of military justice.

You knew what Article 88 was.

It was inaugurated in 1953, and it was partly because of the Sturman drang of the MacArthur incident.

And you understood that Douglas MacArthur could not trash the Commander-in-Chief.

He couldn't trash them when he was serving, and he started to do it when he was retired.

And out of that came the idea that even if you're a retired officer, you cannot trash the vice president, the commander-in-chief, and the major elected officials.

And And so what happened?

All of a sudden, this woke movement,

it went through entire retired ranks.

So all of a sudden,

all of a sudden we were told, Donald Trump's cages are like Auschwitz.

This was an Air Force general.

Donald Trump is like Mussolini, an Army general.

Donald Trump is on D-Day.

He's almost like the Nazis on D-Day.

loosely quoting.

Donald Trump is a liar.

Donald Trump, here's a four-star admiral.

Donald Trump should be removed sooner than later.

We have elections for that.

You don't have to do it sooner than later.

And so it was almost insurrectionary, but was clearly in defiance of a statute.

If that statute means nothing, then junk the entire Uniform Code of Military Justice.

So what would I suggest in positive?

Get rid of the politicalization, weaponization, and indoctrination that has nothing to do with battlefield efficiency.

Make sure that revolving generals as they go out retirement there's a hiatus of five or ten years before they can serve on a dense defense contractor board.

Do not let any

military person have any more exemptions when they come out of the military.

There's a waiting period before they can be Secretary of Defense or a high post of the defensive.

You've got to go back and reinforce that.

No more exemptions.

And then

I think

in addition to that,

I think it's really important

that the

chairman of the Joint Chiefs has to understand that he is not in the chain of command.

We have taken that, we don't understand the history of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that grew out of World War II.

Mark Milley has no operational command in the chain of command.

And that is an entirely advisory war.

When Mark Milley had people in his room, officers, and say on nuclear protocol, all decisions of the theater commanders goes through him, that was insurrectionary.

Because the statute says that the president shall set policy in terms of national security crisis.

The Secretary of Defense, through the chain of command, will inform the theater commanders.

It doesn't say that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs absurps a role and interrupts that chain of command.

Much less does it say that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs can call his Chinese counterpart, the head of the People's Liberation Army, and say to him, essentially, I think that our commander is unstable because suddenly I have a PhD in neuropsychiatry.

And I've made this diagnosis on my, I'm being jest, but that's what he assumed.

And now I understand that

I have diagnosed him as non-compos mentes.

And therefore, if he ever gives an order to go into DEF CON 3 or 4,

I'm going to apprise you first.

Tell me what that is.

I think it's the big T word.

And there was no ramifications for that.

There was no ramifications when he did what every chairman of the Joint Chiefs have photo ops.

That's what they do.

That's what Owen Powell couldn't, he couldn't,

you know, God rest his soul, but he couldn't resist any photo op with the President.

And when Mark Milli started, oh, I apologize for having a photo op with the hated Donald Trump, he didn't say hated, but that's what the impression was.

So we have politicized the Joint Chiefs is what I'm trying to say.

And that has to be depoliticized and has to be defined.

And we have to tell the chairman of the Joint Chief, if you

interrupt the chain of command,

if you get into the political arena and start making statements, if you pander to Congress and say, talk about white privilege and try to snowball on the George Floyd momentum, you're going to be fired because that's not your, you're a military advisor.

You seek

the president and the vice president ask you,

this is what we contemplate.

Would you please tell me, drawing on your knowledge, whether this is doable, whether it's not doable, where in a cost benefit it's viable, whether it's stupid, and give me your opinion as a military expert, period.

And they didn't do that.

And so what I'm getting at, you see the larger picture.

These people are just out of control.

They're in the Pentagon, and they're like, oh,

I'm going to go work for this defense contractor.

And I'm going to call up my colonel that used to work for me.

And I'm going to say, you know what, we've got a really, really good anti-ballistic missile platform.

You've got to really push that.

Oh, by the way, I'm getting a couple hundred thousand dollars.

And oh, by the way, I think Donald Trump's an idiot.

Maybe tomorrow he'll be Joe Biden.

And I think he's Mussolinian Hitler.

Or I think he's okay.

And, oh, by the way, I think that

I'm testifying I,

you know, I don't like Chicano nationalism.

I think it's dangerous.

Or,

you know, I don't like poor white trial, whatever it is, and just start mouthing off.

And they're out of control.

And they're violating statutes, they're violating protocols, and

they've taken, and don't listen to me, Sammy, listen to the polls.

They took one of the most trusted institutions in the United States, and they have lost 50% of the support of the American people for the reasons that I outlined.

And they do not want a weaponized tool of the left in the military.

They don't want it.

They want it apolitical.

And they want it to be the most lethal and feared military in the world.

And unfortunately,

I didn't have time to get into it, but I'll finish with this.

This was all a loud, rambling preamble to Afghanistan because

the American people were saying to themselves, okay, we can put up with this nonsense of politicized generals and kindy and white privilege and all that crap and defense contractor boards, but we cannot put up with fleeing Afghanistan, getting 13 people blown up, blowing up a civilian car and claiming that it was a righteous strike, leaving a billion-dollar embassy behind, a $300 million refitted air base, who knows how many billion dollars in military hardware, and thousands of loyal Afghan

allies and contractors,

and destroying a hard-won deterrence.

Destroying it to the effect that just a few months later, Barack

Let me cut that.

Let me start again.

Destroying deterrence to the effect that just a few months later, Vladimir Putin said, you know what?

If I go into

Ukraine, these people are not going to do anything.

I've seen them in Afghanistan.

They're not going to do anything.

They flee.

They flee.

They leave stuff behind.

And they turned Afghanistan into an international weapons mark for terrorists.

You think they're going to help Ukraine?

Now, he was wrong about that.

But one of the reasons he went in, because he thought that we had lost deterrence.

And we have.

Deterrence is a psychological condition.

So when he felt that he could go in with impunity, there was no more deterrence.

And now it has to be reestablished.

And the reestablishment of deterrence is always more costly than

its gratuitous abandonment.

So there were so many things that went wrong, and nobody was held accountable.

In fact, the critics, if you look at my email when I wrote columns about these very issues, it was just.

I got a call from an officer who worked for the joint wanting to know

you know, why I was writing criticism.

I had people from the military.

Who are you?

You weren't in the military.

So that was even scarier that the pushback and self-righteous, how dare you?

We're in the Pentagon.

And this is the people's universe.

This is citizens control the Pentagon.

They need to understand that.

It's not a Washington-centric revolving door,

get promoted on the basis of political correctness or wokeness.

And I know that the majority of officers that are listening, they know it.

They know it.

And they can't say anything because to say anything will destroy their careers, but they know that that's true.

Well, you're right about that elections make a difference and we really need to get out there and change

the look of Washington through elections.

I mean, even just recently,

Wasi Safi, who worked with the U.S.

in Afghanistan, he was an Afghani, came across the border, and the Biden administration has him in jail.

It's just it's shameful.

It is.

Five million illegal entries, and we decide to jail the one person who has no criminal record but helped us in Afghanistan, whose brother was given citizenship because he just said, you know what, I'll never get out of Afghanistan alive unless I do what the other five million are doing.

And that's why.

And basically, he's, yeah, he's in jail.

So he's, the whole threat is they're going to send him back there and they'll kill him when they go back.

Yeah, they will.

This is endemic to the left.

The left has this crazy, stupid, nefarious practice that to validate itself or to have a veneer of legality, they always go after the so-called misdemeanor good citizen.

because they strut and they thrust their chest out and they say, wow,

we have a border.

He came in illegally.

We can't do that.

Because they can't handle the felony.

It's too existential for them.

It's just like the road that I live in.

Within a two-mile radius, there's no zoning laws.

There's no dog licensing.

There's no

Romex laws on electricity.

There's nothing.

Sue, everything is in violation.

And yet.

There's about four families that follow the law.

And believe me, if they need a permit, and they will ask for a permit, permit, that whole government apparatus will hound them to death because they say to themselves, ah, this guy will listen to me.

This guy will pay a fine.

This guy will show that I still have power, that I am somebody, that the law that I enforce is still there because it's not there for most people.

And that's what they do.

They punish the citizen.

They always punish the citizens.

Well, Victor,

they do.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our time here, and we have left tribalism and to look at higher education.

Oh, boy, that's something to look forward to.

This was supposed to be positive.

I hope it was.

I know.

There are solutions.

I tried to suggest some.

Don't lose hope, everybody.

We can stop it.

We can stop the madness instantaneously.

This country can make a radical correction.

It's not too late.

We can correct within months if we have the right people in there and we have public support.

Yeah.

And right now we're seeing some of that in the house as they begin trials on the Hunter Biden laptop and other things, right?

So where there is change being made.

So we're happy with that.

Well, thank you very much, Victor, for all your wisdom.

And we'll come back in our next episode and finish up what we were doing here today.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

And we're going to be upbeat again in my Eeyore fashion.

All right.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.