Topics Tickling the Mind

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Hi there.

Thank you for joining us at the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Neale Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is an author, scholar, columnist, essayist, political and cultural critic, and perhaps our favorite unwitting provocateur of the left.

This is the Saturday weekend edition, and we're going to look at some topics in current culture, the Latino population turning red, the vanishing of farm life, and some of Victor's research and thoughts, though he is not a medical doctor, but nonetheless, he's done a lot of research on long COVID.

So we're going to have a look at that.

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Welcome back, Victor.

Usually, I ask, how are you doing?

This is going to be a weekend edition.

I'm doing well.

I had the flu and I got over it.

And a a few questions on health.

I'm on the

downward slope on this long COVID.

And

why,

wait, Sammy, we had a disagreement before you suggested I was a pundit.

And then you backtracked and said I was a commentator.

Now you're saying I'm a provocateur.

You are.

I did say unwitting.

So if you don't want to be one.

That's exactly why I called it unwitting.

So I know that you're not trying to be a provocateur.

You are merely presenting things as they are.

Remember what Harry Truman said.

I just give them the truth and they call it hell.

When they said, oh, you give them hell, Harry.

He said, I give them the truth.

They call it hell.

Yep.

Yeah, that's.

about what the truth is most of the time.

Let's turn to our subjects here.

We have a interesting phenomenon going on, which perhaps I heard you talking with Jack earlier about scaring the left, and I think that they are afraid of what the Republicans might do, which is what you were talking about, but they're also afraid of this Latino population turning right.

And we see new faces in the Republican Party and in Congress, such as Myra Flores and Yesley Vega.

And I was wondering your analysis on just how far will this go?

Well,

there had been this Republican mantra for the last half century that immigration largely from Mexico and as often illegal as legal

should not be opposed because

it would be in the Republican Party's interest because the Republican Party was the party of the Christian coalition, family values.

It promoted large families, religion, traditionalism, anti-abortion,

suspicion over, you know, radical, gay, radical, feminist, all this stuff, cultural issues.

And that never really happened.

So,

I mean, there were aberrations.

I think George W.

Bush maybe got, I don't know what it was, 40% of the Latino vote in 2004.

Jeb Bush in Miami-Dade County, I think he got well up to, I don't know what it was, 70, 65%.

But usually it didn't happen.

And it didn't happen because the Democrats

claimed they were lunch bucket unionization middle class people.

And two, they were the party of federal entitlement.

So when you came across the border, it were Democrats that were responsible for giving you food stamps and

oh, EBT cards and

legal, educational, health, housing subsidies.

And the Republicans were on in the contrast, the Mitt Romney, aristocratic, wealthy, white golfing crowd.

They didn't care.

So that was the paradigm.

So when Carl Rove and others said, you know, let's not mention open borders because eventually it's going to benefit, he was wrong.

And I wrote Mexifornia in 2002 and three and suggested that if it continued, the state would be a minority, majority state and it would go very hard left.

I think I was right about that because

at least until now, we're not going to see another Pete Wilson, George Ducmesian, Ronald Reagan

governor, unless things change.

But I think they're changing.

So if they're going to change, Sammy, then the original things have to either be invalid now or they have flipped.

I think they have.

So let's take the Democratic Party.

Yes, it still panders, as we see, to open borders, but

it is no longer a middle-class, lunch bucket, unionized, traditional ethnic party.

It's the party of what,

transgender experimental surgeries without parents' consent, drag queen shows at schools and community events,

abortion to the last day of birth,

radical BLM Antifa type activity.

I'm going to go on and on.

So

it has alienated the Latino community, not because

that they've changed their emphasis on family values, which wasn't their main drawing card, but the Democratic Party

doesn't embrace that anymore.

It's antithetical.

And you can see certain,

I guess you'd call them iconic moments.

For example, after Roll B.

Wade, where people dressed up in handmade costumes and crashed

Catholic Church

mass in Los Angeles,

it was primarily Hispanics, and they just got,

didn't want to put up with it and the nonsense.

So that's one thing.

And then on the other side of the ledger, let's be honest, that

the Republican Party is not run by Bill Crystal.

It's not run by David Fromm.

It's not run by George Will on the pundit side.

It's not run by Mitt Romney.

It's not run by the Bushes.

It's not run by any of that particular class.

In other words, it's not so easily caricatured as a golf golfing.

I'm not taking anything away from golf.

It's a wonderful sport.

I've never golfed, but maybe before I die, I'll try it.

But my point is that it's not so easily

pigeonholed as wealthy white corporate elites, which, by the way, wealthy white corporate elites are mostly left-wing now, but it is a new workers, nationalists, upper-middle, middle, middle, lower-middle class.

And so it makes it easier for Latinos who are actually very upwardly mobile.

And where we live, there's we being my family

for generations, that if you want something done,

if you want your

roof put on, if you want your house painted, if you want a quality electrician, if you want somebody putting in ducting, then you're going to

one out of two times have a Mexican-American contractor and

largely Mexican-American laborer.

And the contractor, if he talks to you, will be complaining about California.

He'll be complaining about how expensive it is to fill up his diesel truck.

how many regulations he has to have for his employees, how much taxes he has to pay, how awful the schools are for his kid, how unsafe it is when he parks his truck at his business at night, et cetera, et cetera.

And the Democratic Party just ignored all that.

It's a party of Silicon Valley.

I'm just speaking about the state, but it's true nationwide.

So what I'm getting at is

Donald Trump, for all of the criticism people lodge against him, he rebirthed the Republican Party in a very different way.

And that different way got historic participation by Latinos.

And he did it at the very time the Democratic Party went into an insane trajectory.

And it was antithetical.

It really was anti-family values.

And those two were force multipliers of each other.

Now, that doesn't mean you can wipe out a half a century of Democratic investment.

And remember, the Latino elite is heavily invested in the Democratic Party.

And so it's the elites are all left-wing.

You mentioned some Mexican-American

candidates and congresspeople.

That's new and it's going to continue.

But right now,

the plum jobs in California are often held by Latinos in government.

But

that's not the entire community.

So I think you're going to have half

45%

to 50% within that range of Mexican-American voters, as well as Cuban voters, Venezuelan voters who are going to vote Republican.

And that's going to be

very important because

the Democratic Party has gone out of its way to insult, insult, ridicule, defame the working-class white voter.

And just think of all the euphemisms they've come from Obama to to Biden, working backward, chomps, dregs,

remember John McCain, crazies,

clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, all of that go into the Peter Strzok text vocabulary, you know, toothless, smelly, and they're not ever going to come back.

Hillary Clinton going into West Virginia, you know, I'm going to break the coal industry.

Things like that.

They're never, ever.

The white working class is not going to go back.

to the Democratic Party.

And like the Latino class,

it sees the Republican Republican Party as a populist party.

So, how funny that a queen-speaking orange-man

billionaire was able to destroy the monopoly of people in his class.

But he did.

And I don't think it's now rest on Donald Trump.

It's embraced by every Republican.

That's what I find so amusing when you read, say,

every once in a while I just look at the bulwark, and it's so funny to read these people

that are former Republicans, and now they're angry, and they think they have the moral high ground.

And when you read what they're saying, they're making fun of the Republican.

Oh, the Republican, Lynn Cheney, you know, Liz Cheney, oh, they've gone crazy.

You can't, no, they haven't gone crazy.

What's happened is they don't want to vote for people like you anymore.

because they feel that you were careeristic, you were beltway functionaries, you were grifters,

you made a great living on being for everything

but what they were interested in.

You know,

they understood that capital gains reduction was good for the economy, that

intervention now and then was necessary overseas, et cetera, et cetera.

But you didn't care about their issues like outsourcing and offshoring and crime and all of this.

And so

it's very funny that

they are the elitist and they're irrelevant and they hate the people who made them irrelevant, irrelevant, who were the people.

And what's even funnier is that we were told that conservatives were going to create racial divisions, where in fact, this new

populist Republican Party has diminished racial differences, and it's welcomed people of the same class.

So you're going to see a lot of African-American males.

I mean a lot in relative terms of 20%

and 45, as I said, to 55% of Latinos join and voting for Republican Republican candidates.

And remember, the Republican candidates, this is what's even stranger.

There are some very good candidates that come from the traditional Republican profile.

That is, they were very successful in business and they promised to bring that know-how to governance.

But there's a lot that aren't.

They're small business people.

They're blacks.

They're military veterans.

They're women broadcasters.

anchor women like Carrie Lake or like J.D.

Vance.

And they bring a lot lot of middle-class familiarity, Herschel Walker.

And so, I mean, they're very successful, but they come from such different non-corporate backgrounds.

I know that J.D.

Vance works for an investment firm and Blake Masters worked for Peter Till and all that, but there's so many more.

And so I think they're going to do very well.

And I think the Democratic Party feels that

For all the talk about the Republican Party went crazy and that they're where's the Republican Party that I used to know and respect.

I.e., you never knew it, you never respected it.

But

it's you, not them, who's changed in a negative way.

They've changed to be more inclusive.

You've become more exclusive, and that's where you're going to lose.

Yeah, do you think that they're afraid of this?

I'm just looking at a New York Times poll, and they say that

the

56%

will vote in in December for Democrats, sorry, in November for Democrats, and 32% for Republicans.

But in the same poll, they say that they're even split on which party they agree with more at Democrat 43, Republican 41.

So I don't know if that's a very important part of the world.

Was that a national poll?

That was a national poll.

Yeah, it was.

Yeah, well, I think if you look at now updated party affiliations, it's not like it was.

It's 37 are 35 Democrat and 31 or 32 Republican and Independents are the largest.

And so they are the party that is bleeding the most.

And there's been all these flips from Republican, I mean, Democrat to Republican in states like Florida and Texas.

And so, I mean,

you can just see it when you listen to these candidates on television.

They don't, A, ever suggest they want to change Joe Biden's policies, and they don't give you any concrete suggestions how they would change it if they did want to change it.

And B, they don't talk about it.

They don't defend it.

They don't promise to be better.

All they do is talk about abortion or Donald Trump.

So it's more.

They have a triad in this campaign.

It was one,

January 6th, January 6th, January 6th, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Mar-Lago raid, Mar-Lago raid, or Joe Biden is giving you free student loan amnesty you don't have to pay back your loans he's going to legalize your dope marijuana is good it's don't worry about gas he's pumping out the strategic petroleum reserve you know what the covet lockdowns are still in effect in terms of your covet check it was just buying off the electorate and to the degree they talked about elections it was always abortion abortion abortion abortion abortion

he's going to they talked it to death and so that women the constituents constituency that that message was aimed for, got sick of it.

And that's, you can see it with independent women.

They got sick of it.

In other words, okay, abortion, you're right.

It should be a private.

But under the rejection of Dobbs, now each state can make that decision.

And if you're a woman who wants an abortion in a red state that has outlawed it up until, you know,

outlawed it completely or not the last 15 weeks, then you can get in your car and drive across the state line in most cases.

Gavin Newsome will even fly you in the military.

It will fly you anywhere you want to go.

And so it doesn't seem like it's a pressing

existential issue the way it's framed.

But if you keep talking about it and keep talking about it and keep talking about it and keep talking about it, then you try, you finally draw people's attention to it.

And it is killing a

young person in a womb.

And people don't want to talk about that.

But you force them to talk about that.

And they will resent you for making you talk about that.

And the same thing applies to Republicans when you keep saying,

oh, sanctity of life, sanctity of life, yes, yes.

But you know what?

You're going to have that baby even if your father raped you or a stranger beat you over the head and raped you.

And then people are going to say, hmm, so I'm going to carry this.

you know what i mean of somebody who ruined my life and raped me and tried to destroy me

and that's I mean, in a Christian world, that child is not blameworthy of that.

But in the real world, you keep, you don't talk about that.

And so, as I said with Jack, to the degree that each side avoided that,

it wasn't an issue that hurt them, but the Democrats are not, can't let it alone.

No, they sure can't.

And they seem to be sort of

in denial, I guess, if I had to identify their psychological condition of what's going to happen in November, or at least the presses seem that way.

They seem to be, I guess, wanting to talk up their sides,

you know, to get people out to vote.

They want to assure them that they're going to win in November.

And I don't know.

You're even starting to convince me that they won't win.

They're not.

No, no, it's not that they're not going to win.

It's going to be that they're going to lose, as Trump said, bigly, bigly.

Because

you can just see it in the commentariat and what people are writing.

And what they're saying is Jim Crow, voter suppression, voter fraud,

racism, Trump candidates, proud boys.

That's what they're talking about.

Because they know that it's coming.

If they had any integrity, they would say,

we have a message that people don't want to vote for therefore we're either going to accept that and gracefully leave the political arena because they hate us for what we did or they're going to try to say you know what you may be right so let's open up anwar and finish keystone let's finish the let's finish the wall

and then we'll talk about it But for now, we'll just finish the wall, stop the madness, and let's get federal prosecutors in here to try try to get some kind of interstate or cross-state prosecutions of some of these criminals because the local DAs won't do it.

They're not going to do that,

and so people want them to do it.

They're just going to go abortion, abortion, abortion.

And people are going to

vote.

And then, when they're going to vote them out of office, and I don't think there's a I don't think there's a ceiling on this

because once people shrug and decide,

each race becomes kind of a reflection of that group shrug, that consensus.

So except in, you know, maybe AOC seat, places like that, Hawaii, but every single seat is vulnerable.

And so

anything can happen because the same phenomenon is rippling through the entire country.

So somebody in Tennessee or somebody in North Dakota or somebody in Michigan or somebody in downtown LA, who no matter what it is, doesn't like paying for gas.

They don't like inflation.

They do not like crime.

They do not like the open border.

They, meaning almost everybody.

And they want people to talk about it.

And when these people don't talk about it, they lump them as responsible for it.

And so they don't care about the party affiliation anymore to a certain degree.

And you're going to see things, I think, for that given that

times and the money that Democrats have and the media blitz they use, they're still going to lose and they're going to lose big time, believe me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, I was listening to you and Jack this week and

you said something to the effect of they're going to blame it all on Joe Biden ultimately.

Yeah, they will.

They will.

Who else can they blum it on?

Themselves?

Yeah,

I know.

What are they going to say when

Kelly loses Arizona?

He voted for Biden 95% of the time.

What are they going to to say when Fetterman loses in Pennsylvania?

He voted as a lieutenant governor for everything that Biden is for.

What are they going to say?

And he's very vulnerable with his hunter and his dementia.

You know,

they didn't have it.

It was so funny.

I don't understand Mitch McConnell.

He's a very sensible person in some ways.

He did a lot of good service by out

maneuvering the left to get judicial appointments that were conservative

approved.

But my point is, when he sort of pulled money out from Arizona and he said these candidates are less than impressive, he was just caught up with this left-wing hoax that there was a sudden blue wave, which never exists, as I've said on all these broadcasts, never existed.

Just a media construction to discourage turnout and funding.

But these candidates were good.

They were good.

All of them were good.

And we're glad the guy Laxalt is good.

And Masters is good.

And Fetterman's opponent.

Oz, he's good.

KD Vance is good.

This idea that they were bad is just, I think it reflects

Mitch's fears that they're going to get elected, that they're going to be elected.

There's going to be four or five people that are not Orthodox Republicans, as he's assumed, for support for majority leader.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think that he's afraid of a squad situation.

You know, the left has the squad and it always destabilizes.

And I think he might be afraid, I'm going to have these loose wires come in here.

I mean, that would be my guess.

Yeah, but

it's a lot more dangerous because they represent entire states.

The squad are congressional districts.

And they are all without exception, Presley and Elian Omar and

AOC and Talib.

The four of them are all from gerrymandered

special minority-majority districts, okay?

But these people are from entire states, so they have much larger constituencies and much, and they have to have degrees of a skill set that these people don't have and experience to get elected statewide.

AOC could never be elected statewide.

Taib could never be, Elon Omar would never be elected statewide, even in Minnesota.

Wresley could never be elected statewide.

Blake Masters has a good shot.

Even Herschel Walker has a good shot.

J.D.

Vance is going to win.

Oz, I think, is going to win.

Laxalt's going to win.

So they come in there and they are serious people.

They have so many more political skills than the squad, and they have such larger constituencies, and they're going to join a senate many members were mad that mitch didn't get in early on and support these people and so

uh we'll see what happens but

yeah they're going to be they're going to be very visible in a republican dominated senate when you're going to see them on tv and they're

that cross-examination you saw with rand paul and Dr.

Fauci is going to be magnified and replicated again and again, but with people just as skilled, if not more skilled than

Rand Paul.

Yeah.

All right.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break for a few messages and then come back and we'll talk about

COVID.

Long, oh, sorry.

We'll come right back and talk about

the vanishing farm life.

So let's go ahead and have our break.

All right, welcome back, Victor.

I know you did two books on farming, Fields Without Dreams and the Land Was Everything,

and they were well received.

I think even Jane Smiley, um, did she write the introduction to Fields Without Dreams?

Yeah, I think I went through that tortured relationship once, but yes, she did.

Yeah, and then she called me and wanted her name removed, I think, five years later, because I supported the Iraq war.

Yeah,

so and then they're both on the declining

American farming existence, right?

That no longer small farms anymore.

But I was wondering if you could discuss with us current problems

in agriculture.

Well,

there was a duality in American agriculture, and that duality was

agriculture, agribusiness, and agrarianism.

Agrarianism denoted the cultural aspect of farming, that is, putting a family on a piece of ground they owned over generations and the values that are inculcated by the act of farming and their contribution

with other type of family farms to the community at large.

Okay, that was America, 94% at our founding.

And after, you know, with mechanization and vertical integration, et cetera, we got down to about 2%.

But that 2% was viable.

And there were people who were part of the farming community that had jobs in town.

But

in the 21st century, that process accelerated with globalization because the markets became huge.

It's six, seven billion people.

Suddenly, if you were in Fresno,

you were a corporation, you were vertically integrated to the degree you had orchards and vineyards in Chile to get the winter market, or you had a farm in Australia,

and that required a degree of sophistication.

So you were vertically integrated.

By that, I just mean the market,

the produce that left your farm that you controlled was in your trucks that went to your processing plant or packing house that went

the finished product that your broker sold that went to the store.

Okay.

And the average farmer didn't have the expertise, much less the capital, to capitalize.

So they were sort of like the deplorables, the irredeemables.

They lost out.

And we wiped out a large segment of that farming class that had survived

the diminishment in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s.

So in this area that I'm talking about, when I fly over and I look down at the tessera, the squares, the sections of farming, I go over my house because it's it's on the route out to

Los Angeles sometimes.

And

it's amazing that these 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, they all have the little houses on them, but they're not farming.

I mean, the land is in production, but it's either rented out or owned by corporate.

And the corporations are not, you know,

mustachio banditos,

snidely whiplashes from my childhood cartoons.

They're

they're good people.

They're just family farms that had the size or the know-how or the audacity or the capital.

They got big.

There are some out-of-state corporations, but my point is that there's no longer a viability.

And so you're not getting a contribution.

So you go to a local town in this area or anywhere,

it's not run by farmers on the school board, the hospital board, the Little League Commission.

That infrastructure is very different.

You don't have these farmers that have that experience with nature and practicality and politics.

How many times have you heard a senator?

I mean,

I think on one of the broadcasts, you mentioned Grassley, right?

Yes.

I said he was 89.

He's one of my favorite senators.

He's a farmer.

He was a farmer.

So

I bet he can still get on a tractor and drive it at 89.

So my point is this, is that that was something that was lost, not in the agricultural sense, because if you look at the actual production per acre,

like on the farm that I live on that I rent out to a corporation, a family corporation, if you look at the amount of water used, less.

Pesticides used, less.

Fertilizers used, less.

Production tripled from my, that's what corporations have done.

And if you want to say, well, it's a conspiracy, they use toxic, they use less toxic chemicals than we did as family farmers.

so i'm not arguing about we're gonna starve

but

there were there was something about that culture growing up and having multi-generational families living in the same place i mean we lived on the same farm with my aunt with crippled aunt with my grandparents my parents we were free-range and everybody was

And so we went to school.

We started after Labor Day because everybody said, oh, I got to go pick grapes.

Or you'd come out to your farm and

the guy would talk to your dad about, you guys use an Oliver or do you use a Massey?

It was, it was kind of a community.

And then you'd go into the school board and there'd be a farmer on there, you know, and it was

there was something other than just the production of food was going on on these farms.

So I, you know, I was remembering the other day, some of our listeners like

classic Westerns or maybe war movies.

One of my favorite was 12 o'clock high

with Gregory Preck.

And it's kind of an enactment of the Schweinfurt Raid and the disastrous

United States

entrance into World War II from that terrible period from 1942, late 42 to mid-44 when, my God, I don't know who thought it up.

I do know who thought it up, but why they continued with daylight on escorted bombing and B-17s into Europe, but they were wiped out, 40,000 killed.

And Greg Gupeck is in this.

But the point I'm making is Dean Jagger, who's a pretty good actor, he's in a little shop and

he sees this jug that they all used to put bets in and stuff or money in.

And he remembers that's been pawned, but it was from that fighter, that bomber squadron.

And then the whole movie is a flashback.

And he started, so I was driving the other day.

Actually, it was yesterday.

And I just thought, I'm going to drive through all of this patchwork of farms and try to remember.

And so, I saw all the homes where, when I was a little kid, I visited, or when I was actively farming, I knew everybody there, right?

Yeah, and I thought, what happened?

So, when I was driving down a road, and the big fallout was that

started with the 80s, 90s, but boy, by the time you got around 2000 and we went into full globalization

and whole whole industries collapsed

both because of foreign competition and because internally

the prices were low for the commodity for a plum or a peach or a nectarin because the money was made in the packing and distribution and selling of it so when people were vertically integrated they were willing to farm farm

to get the product at a loss and for tax benefits, buying land depreciation, depreciation, but they could make a ton of money.

But the farmers who were competing with that, because there is a market, were killed because that's all they had was the market price for their commodities.

They had no way of making up that loss through a vertically horizontal, I mean,

a vertically integrated operation.

Okay.

So I was driving by and I just saw him.

He just came out.

I just, I said, oh my God, there's that house.

I went to high school with him.

He was trying to farm.

He went to farmers he he put a rope around his neck he shot himself he took grapes so he could make sure he killed himself and then i was driving around i said there there that guy i used to go to farmers market he had a booth next to me he had 20 acres he was trying to save money and fix his arbor for his farmer he fell off and shattered his back and went paralyzed And then I was driving further and I said, wow, I remember that guy.

He did my brush shredding.

He did it.

What happened to him?

I thought, wow,

he just got on a three-wheeler and was making turns and went right into the path of a truck outside of his vineyard and killed himself

accidentally.

And then I said,

well, wow, what happened to that person?

And I said, wow, he was a wonderful person.

I went to high school.

He was one of the,

he just drank himself to death.

I remember he came over

when I wrote Fields Without Dreams, and I signed a a book.

He was like 110 pounds.

He was drinking all day long.

He's a wonderful, wonderful person.

And then I was driving by, I said, where's that guy?

I thought, wow, he's the most brilliant mechanic I ever met in my life.

He could fix anything.

And he was farming.

And then the price came and the price went for table grapes down to this level and plums to this level and this.

And he didn't have the capital to tear out everything and go into almonds for a while.

He didn't, and he just moved away.

He's gone.

And then I looked at my own family and I thought,

who was there?

They're all gone.

And what's replaced it?

It's mostly people living in the homes of very poor people that are here illegally because, you know, this is...

The corporations or the people renting the land or owning it don't want the homes, but they have people that work on the farm or they want to rent it out.

And they have like, instead of a farm family of five that it's in high school and on the board, there's like 30 people living there, 20 people.

None of them speak English and it's all

in many ways, it's contrary to zoning.

Whereas I went by a farm about three miles, I thought, I'm going to go by that farm because it was the most meticulous lawn.

And his wife, I remember, was out there all the time with her.

Everything was dead.

It was completely dead.

And there was about

seven cars outside that hadn't been painted in years.

It was horrible that the whole destruction of that beautiful farmhouse.

So it was kind of like Dean Jagger going back and thinking, wow,

that whole group of people are wiped out.

And we don't think about that.

What do you think it's symptomatic of, though, all of this

panop,

you know, sort of mosaic or painting of decline or death?

I'm not sure which one, but what is it?

I think part of it was that

a lot of things.

One of them is that as this country grew to 330 million and food got even cheaper

and it was

transported at great distances and you had the,

I mean, when I go into a huge super food market, it's just there was nothing like that in my childhood.

I mean, they've got everything, right?

And it's just amazing.

It almost looks like, it's funny.

It's almost like, and the best ones, they're almost like fake farmers' markets.

They have wood flowers, you know what I mean, and barrels and stuff like this, even though it's a big, you know, a super safe way or whatever, or Kroygers or something.

But

what caused it was that ability to

satisfy consumer demand for fruit.

You can go in and any supermarket, you can buy red or green grapes in in february you can buy peaches in april you can you know what i mean there's no such you can buy oranges in july there's no i mean with cold storage and worldwide markets and peak corporations growing stuff all over the world

it's it's a very different experience and to satisfy or to create that demand required as i said

levels of intricacy and size that were antithetical to a small little farm.

I was thinking of my grandfather.

If you told my grandfather, Mr.

Davis, now you've got your 120 acres and you've got your little system of your vines here and your peaches there and your plums there and your grandkids and your kids are all living there, but that's not going to satisfy new consumer demand.

So what we want you to do is,

first of all, to make this economical, you've got to go from 120 to 700 acres.

Now, we want some semi-trucks here.

And that barn, it's not going to be, you know, old Jim and old

Jed, the old donkey and horse that are remnants of your, that are living there.

You're going to take that thing and rip it out and build a big packing house.

And then you've got to get somebody in your family to get into brokerage.

And he's going to say, well, I don't have that kind of money.

I never made that much money.

I didn't really want to make that much money.

I was just trying to create a family ethos.

So he would say, well, I had three daughters and I mortgaged the family and I sent them up to Stanford University and they got educated and they were all good citizens and no one in my family has ever been arrested, not even for

drunk, nobody drinks in my family and I try to, we don't even smoke cigarette.

That's what he would say.

We've been good and I was on the school board.

I was president of the Selma School Board and I was the Mason and my wife

head of the Walnut Improvement Club, and they read books.

That's what he would tell you.

And I kept my daughter, she can't walk, and I didn't put her on the dole.

I kept her in our house, and we took care of her.

And

my daughter went to work because we were the daycare because we picked our grandkids up and they stayed with us during the day after school.

That's what he would say.

So, are you telling me that

there is a decline of civic responsibility?

Yes.

There was no homelessness.

As I said, we had a relative

that fought in the Philippines and got dinghy fever and he was not all there.

And he rented a room and everybody in the family went and checked on him and brought him food.

And he rode his bicycle out here from town and everybody took care of him.

And

my aunt was got a terrible case of polio and she went up to the shrine and they just destroyed her body with 17 operations trying to break bones in those days in the 20s.

And when they got done with her, she could not go to, she graduated from San Jose State.

I don't know how she did it.

She was going to go to Stanford, but she couldn't do it.

And she had learned how to be to work a loom and stuff and made sweaters and stuff.

But they took care of her.

Today, that wouldn't happen.

And when they got old,

we took care of them.

You know what I'm saying?

And when my father died, we took care of him.

And when my mother died, she had a brain tumor, we took care of her on the farm.

Both of them were taken care of in the farm.

That doesn't happen anymore.

And so, yeah, there's just a difference.

And

there's no sense that there's no sign, there's no, you don't go into a supermarket and say, I better get my grapes because they won't be here because the season's over, right?

Because they don't, person know that if you're living in Washington, D.C., and you you see a green grape in August and you see one

in April, you have no idea that they're different.

You have no one that one came from California and one came from Chile,

right?

You have no idea, and you'd have no idea that the guy, the one that came from Chile, is owned by the guy who owns the grape in California.

So, and so it's different.

I'm not trying to be moralistic and say it's bad.

I'm just saying we made it so efficient, and food is so cheap, and it's so scientifically orientated.

There's no art of farming now.

I mean, it's just

a laboratory science, and that's wonderful because we've used less resources to produce more food.

But in the process, that whole

way of life that had its roots all the way back to the foundation of the country and all of the baggage that people hate that was part of it was lost.

So I can remember coming home

and I said, you know, I was in a car.

I was a freshman in high school and one of the guys ran into the foster freeze and stole something.

And I'm worried.

And my mom said, oh, my God,

what do you mean?

Were you in the car?

I said, yes.

He goes, what did you, we don't do those things in our family.

So I want you to go in there and you go, you're not going to tell a person who did it, but you go back in there.

And so, I went back in there and I said to the owner, I think somebody, I saw somebody, and he was, he said, oh, it's cheap.

It doesn't matter.

I said, well, I'll try to.

And I went back to the person and I said, would you please return that?

That's the kind of stuff they did.

You know what I mean?

And I can remember once there was a Mexican-American family.

He was my best friend.

And his parents went to Mexico.

And he was living with his grandmother.

He was like 88.

And we came home once.

And my grandmother said to me, Well, Benny, where's your dad?

He goes, Well, my dad's in Mexico.

Well, what have you eaten?

No.

Well, you're going to sit down here and eat.

And then my grandmother made a big thing for him and said, Now we're going to take you home.

But he had a bicycle.

So we put it in the old international truck.

And then there.

And then Benny did that all the time.

He came out.

And that was what the whole world was like.

And I can remember going doing that to other families when I'd walk home.

There was no crime,

okay?

So, you're not trying to be moral, but you are describing a situation that's very like Rome with the Latifundia and

the kind of civic exactly, exactly.

It's latifundia, latifundi was much more efficient as far as total food production, but it ruined the agrarian class of Italy, and it's one of the reasons that the Republic did not persist

to transform.

So, what I'm saying is,

I don't know to the degree that I tried to write this, most of my life I've wrestled with this question, but I do not know the degree to which that you can go in and get beautiful grapes and fresh fruit and whole bags of rice for very little money.

And even until Joe Biden was president, pretty inexpensive cuts of meat.

And the fact that

I have to have security cameras and a wall

around my house.

And when I walk around this farm that I was born into,

I don't know why I walked around it this morning.

I saw a V8 engine this morning, a whole engine just sitting there.

Wow.

People throw, how do you throw away his trash?

I walked down the alleyway and it made me look like it.

I would say it looked like Mumbai, but it looked like San Francisco.

It was just trash, trash, trash, trash.

Nobody would have allowed that.

And I have all these keys.

when we would go for three or four days my dad would say okay to my mom hey pauline where's the key

where's where's the key oh well just lock the front door don't worry there was no key or they'd put it on a tree and it was like here's a big key ring that anybody can see

there was no there was no

There was no security concerns whatsoever.

No.

Or, you know, they would call call up: hey, there's Ivor Johansson, the constable, the big old Swede.

He's going to come out and arrest the guy that pulled over.

And when nobody ran off the side of the road drunk and tore out your whole vineyard.

And when they did, I remember a guy did.

He was a Mexican-American guy, really nice guy.

He got drunk and he tore out about 15 vines.

And that guy came over to my grandfather every single Saturday and gave him a $5 bill to pay for the damage.

That's happened to me in my lifetime six times, and nobody's ever done that.

The people ran away.

They just left the car there.

So, my point is that this destruction of civic life and law and cohesiveness and the outsourcing of familial responsibility to the state to take care of the unwantables or the problematic people in our society all came at the expense of efficiency.

So, the more, the wealthier we got, the more choices we got, the more 500 channels,

we had material progress with moral regress.

Just what Hesiod, the poet, said.

And I don't know how to stop that.

And when I was driving here, I just thought,

you know, I could go on and on.

I could go, that guy, he got lymphoma.

He couldn't face it.

He blew his brains out.

That guy,

he was paralyzed the last year of life, just fell down and just,

gone.

This guy just killed himself.

This guy got in this horrible, preventable wreck.

And it was just more.

And I thought, wow, there's that farm.

It doesn't exist.

That farmhouse is gone.

This is gone.

Then, when you saw the little bit of glimpses in the 80s and 90s that flicker, because I had,

you know, the three children, I would, I would pick up my daughter.

And so I went out to this,

where all these farm families, where she used to stay overnight.

and the houses are wrecked.

They're wrecked, but the vineyard looks really good.

Not the vineyard, the almond orchard looks beautiful because it's either rented out or owned by a corporation.

So it's very strange that the

agricultural productivity has never been better, but the homes that used to represent the people who work there have never been worse.

Yeah.

And that decline in civic responsibility, I think you treat some of this subject in your current new book, which the paper back has just come out, The Dying Citizen.

I did.

I did.

And I,

I mean, when I, you see homelessness, every one of those persons is related to somebody, right?

Yeah.

And that somebody understands that that person is a great inconvenience, right?

So that they, I'm not, you know, I know a lot of people don't have the wherewithal to take care of somebody, but maybe 10% or 20% of the homeless could return back to their families and people could try to work with them.

Or maybe

a civic

somebody should say, we don't want cheap labor in the United States because it brings in Chinese-produced cartel-sold fentanyl.

And fentanyl is destroying this country.

It's destroying this country.

We're not going to allow it in.

We don't care what that does to the labor market.

We're not going to let it in.

But we have to have have some culturally based values that contradict maybe just absolute free market logic sometimes.

Not like the extent of France.

I understand that.

Although, you know, when I go to Germany or France or the countryside of Greece, there is a stability there.

They're not nearly as productive as we are as far as food.

Their prices are much higher.

But there are stable rural communities there.

It's eroding, but not like here.

And there are areas in the United States and the Midwest where that still exists.

I get on a bicycle at Hillsdale and I can ride around and see these declining small towns, but they still exist.

And there's still things that I remember.

I always feel when I go to Hillsdale for my annual teaching, I'm going back into the 19th century in some ways.

because there's still farmers markets.

You go out in the country, nobody's going to kill you.

Nobody's going to mug you.

Nobody's going to break into your house.

When I rode my bike, I left my house that I was allowed to stay in open without blocking it.

I never lost one thing in 20 years, not one.

I left a backpack full of books

and a computer in many classrooms over 20 years.

I never got it lost once.

And that was not true of my career at CSU Fresno.

And it's not true.

It would not be at Stanford either.

And so what I'm getting at is that agrarian rural ethos was very valuable to creating our constitution and our customs and traditions.

And it was worth subsidizing, I think.

And all these people who tried to resist it, the resisting of the vertical integration and corporatization of agriculture, nobody knew what they were doing.

They were just destroyed.

And they killed themselves or they were killed.

And I remember them.

And it's like nobody remembers.

So I was on this sort of Dean Jagger riding my bicycle over this weed-infested tarmac with this flashback of all the guys that were in these B-17s.

And they didn't realize that it was impossible to fly all the way into Germany without a P-51 or P-47 or go all the way in there.

during daylight in formation with a precision bomb, right?

Rather than night area bombing so that was kind of what these guys were up against they didn't understand that it was hopeless that you were going to get prices for your fresh produce at eight percent increases commiserate with your inflated costs it wasn't going to happen

that the and

don't get me wrong as a critic One of the things I like in my old age is going talking to farmers that I know and viewing the surviving family corporation.

I just went over to one,

Fowler Packing.

I mean, you talk about homegrown, absolute genius, ingenuity, humane treatment of people, a satisfied, well-compensated workforce.

It's amazing what that family has done.

So I admire that.

And they're big, they're huge.

And so, but I'm, and they have the same values of that family, but

that phenomenon, not everything is like that particular family.

And so it's too bad, but it's something that it's going to be more and more questioned, I think, as we get into our Roman, the version of the Roman third or fourth century AD.

Yeah.

And it seems to me that, you know, since...

There isn't the natural instinct of a small farmer who has a civic interest for people now, it's incumbent upon the schools to have a strong civic education.

It would seem

to be a problem.

Yeah, and they don't have it.

It's worse.

So when I left the farm and I went to this rural school that was 90% Mexican-American,

they would have fired everybody there today because they said things like, well, who wants to raise the American flag?

Because every morning, one person gets to carry the flag around the classroom as we sing God bless America and do the flag salute.

And then we would have our civic, you know, sixth grade.

I want to tell everybody that this was the greatest system in the world.

Now, what are the checks and balance?

Victor, you play Supreme Court.

Hilario, you play Congress.

And Veronica, you play president.

Okay, Victor, how are you going to check him?

And he's going to check you.

And so it was checks and balances.

And then we went to Mrs.

Redden and she said, said, I want to make sure that every single person in this room speaks the king's English.

And that includes you, Victor, and you, William, and all you people who didn't grow up in Mexico.

You don't speak it any better.

And so we had, I had to have speech therapy classes because I couldn't say the letter R.

I said, wah.

And she

beat that into me and taught me how to say red rather than red.

And then all of a sudden, she, when we had a group of eight, she said, We have a stick-shift Chevy.

And we don't, everybody would go, we have a stick-shift Chevy.

No, you don't have a Chevy.

You have a Chevy.

How are you going to be successful?

How are you going to compete with these kids in prep school?

How are you going to, and that's how we were, it was wonderful.

And all of those people were successful.

And it was all about civic education.

And it came, it reverberated what they got at home.

And

it was.

Today, it's not like that at all.

Civic education, I doubt the teachers even know much about the civic education in elementary school.

Even the labor, and I know that the left would say it was paternalistic,

but I remember Gregory Lopez came from Texas every year and he would,

you know,

I'm speaking from the area in which he lived for three weeks.

Oh, it's nicer now.

I'm in a barn right now.

And

the reason it has water and electricity was because it was made for Gregory's family.

And they had cots and wash and a bath and anything.

The point I'm making is that I remember when they would leave,

they would drive two cars.

My grandfather would fill them up with gasoline, and then they'd have big, big

sacks of used clothing.

Everybody gave them used clothing, and they worked very hard.

And they,

it was, yes, they were poor and we were not as poor, but there wasn't that big divide between labor and capital.

It was really you live next to them, you talk to them.

I know that I would play with their kids and we would work together.

And there was no,

you know,

it was just trust.

It was weird.

It was, and then I remember once I was at, I was in the barn playing and I said, my grandfather

said, I'm supposed to shoot that woodpecker that's bothering up there in the rafters.

My grandfather, you know, he always tells me to do stuff.

And Gregory, we said, don't ever speak that way in my presence again against Mr.

Davis.

And I said, why?

And he said, because he would never say that about me.

I know that because people have told me that.

And if he's not going to, if he's going to.

treat me

that way, you're going to treat him that way.

Nobody would ever, can you imagine that today?

There'd There'd be so many Marxist critiques of labor exploitation that would just drive your head, it would explode.

Yes, that's true.

And it's, it's,

and

it's, I know that it's very hard to have a complex lifestyle today.

It's very expensive, and the middle class is being destroyed by this Biden administration, but a lot of the complexity is considered necessity and a birthright.

And we don't realize that

we lived in this country without five televisions or four televisions or without cable subscription or without Xboxes or video games or

earbuds or whatever they're called.

And you know what I mean?

You can do it.

But we did lose something.

We got more technologically sophisticated.

We got less happier.

And we got.

more diverse, exciting lifestyles, more choices, so to speak.

I mean,

if I want to watch an old gunsmoke rerun, there's 500 channels on direct TV.

Just blows your mind.

But I'd still rather just have three channels and watch gunsmoke.

But if you look at the younger generation, there's so much to distract them that if you started talking to them about civic responsibility, they would just turn to their cell phone and go on with their game.

They don't want to have anything.

They don't vote.

They don't want to hear about it.

You know, Jesse Waters started what?

As Bill O'Reilly's

How Stupid is America correspondent on the street.

But even if you think he was deliberately trying to find stupid people, you couldn't find stupid people stupider than the people that he found.

It was just like,

what's the capital of America?

And they'd say Rome

or Fresno or something.

Or they'd say,

how often does a president have to face election?

10 years,

two weeks?

It was that kind of absurdity.

And it happens all the day.

There's all these industries that mediate little mini industries that show you how stupid people are because they don't have any civic education.

And to the degree they do have civic education, it's critical.

It's all about how it's racial.

One thing we're not talking about in this country is, and this is a final statement I'll have about my

break.

So, okay.

Very quickly, is that when you go down that diversity, equity, inclusion,

it's not just emphasis on that.

It's capital, labor, time taken away from other things in our zero-sum existence.

So whether it's...

all these diversities are

these mandates or whatever it is at the schools, we don't have time anymore to inculcate a common curriculum, a common civic educational path

because we're just fragmented into all these therapeutic, unnecessary, unproductive, nihilistic discipline.

And boy,

as I said, they're starting to hit airline pilots, nuclear plant operators, you name it.

And when you start destroying merit and distracting people with all of these workshops, especially the military.

It's not, it's going to be, we're going to pay a heavy price for it.

Yeah, it's mediocritizing.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come right back to talk a little bit about long COVID.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

I would just like to remind people that Victor's website is victorhanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 for an annual subscription.

We have a new

app out for your cell phones.

I believe the Google Play Store is for

Samsung and other,

not the Apple iPhones.

We haven't quite got the Apple Store

short up yet.

But if you do have a Samsung or a, what are those other phones, Victor?

I'm trying to think.

It's Samsung or

I don't know.

You're asking if I just made an argument about being technologically illiterate.

Okay.

Well, anyway, so we have, we do have the app.

We're very proud of that.

So please come to try it out if you can.

And also that

to remind people that on social media, Victor can be found at Hansen's Morning Cup on Facebook and V D Hansen on Twitter.

So please join us there.

And finally, also John Solomon's

are

we work with John Solomon and the Just the News crew.

And you can find Victor's podcast there.

That's our podcasting site.

So on his website as well, but that's who we work with.

And so Victor,

I know that you're not

a medical doctor, nor would you give advice to anybody.

We would advise them to work with their own actual medical doctors.

But I know that you've done a lot of research since you have had long COVID.

And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the fruits of your research for yourself.

I've been really moved because I must have had 30 or 40 people call me or write me about it.

They've heard that I'd had it.

And so they've called.

I've had five or six doctors that have called.

And again, I'm not dispensing, I'll just medical advice, but it seems to be a consensus.

Let me just do it in progression of what is it.

And it seems to be that there is a percentage of the people who get COVID of all types, Omicron, Delta, or the original strain, that the symptoms, although they alter somewhat, they continue.

after you test negative.

So what we're saying is that people who don't have perceptible

active viral part, you know, vira in your system, at least enough to cause clinical symptoms, still have symptoms.

And so that then gets to the next stage, Sammy.

Why is that?

And that's a two-pronged answer.

One,

there's three or four theories of why your immune system or the virus is active or not active, but you have the symptoms.

And one of them is

that you have an immune problem

that insufficiently vanquish the virus you you put it down enough but you don't you have intrinsic comorbidities in your immune system so that it's at a subclinical level of not testing positive but at a level enough to do damage to you two

it whatever that level is it's not the virus that's doing the damage it's either the virus remnants that are pretty much inert, they're circulating, but they're inert, or they're the spike protein and they either one is exciting your immune system in certain predisposed people.

So it's an autoimmune disease, or you were weakened through this ordeal with acute COVID and that reactivated latent viruses like CBV or EBV, and you're suffering some of the immune responses to those viruses.

So those are the choices.

And then the symptomology is vast, but I won't go into all of it.

But what are people saying?

I have long COVID.

What's making me weird?

And

symptomology-wise, there seems to be one cohesive explanation, and that's inflammation, that you are

secreting psychotones or leucotrines or something.

And again, this is not, I'm just trying to collate as an outsider what the medical community has come up with.

And that immune expression

manifests itself in five or six major areas.

One is neuroinflammation.

So you have brain fog.

What does brain fog mean?

It means you go into a room and it happens to me all the time now.

I got to go into the living room and get you know, a pen and you get in there and you forgot what it was.

Or your word search, you never have done that quite before or you're writing something for a column and you have to read it out loud now because it sounds kind of crazy for you that's brain fog or you've lost your taste like i've lost my taste and smell i'm getting some of it back but that's probably from inflammation i always didn't i didn't have great hearing but i kind of lost hearing

That's from neuroinflammation.

I've had a lot of problems with my eyes that, I mean, I've had had high, high, high, high, high eye pressure.

I think that's cause I never had that high before.

Or you still, even though you have good oxygen, it's weird.

You have good oxygen readings, but it's hard to breathe.

Maybe it's your muscles are inflamed.

But the big thing that I got, I think a lot of people get is vertigo and also your muscles ache.

So,

you know,

I could go up to 10,000 foot, 500-foot Kaiser Peak in three and a half hours with no problem whatsoever, just a year ago.

And now, if I, you know, do an exercise bike for 20 minutes, it feels like I had lactic acid burning in your muscles.

And obviously, that's oxidation problems.

So, that inflammation can apparently create microclots in your capillary, so you don't get enough oxygen to the muscles, or you get neuropathy, pins and needles.

I think one of our sender Kane

from Maryland complained that he had pins and needles that had long COVID.

I get all these symptoms, not just from reading, but people write me.

And so then the question is: what do you do about it?

Is it permanent or what?

And

I should point out here, Sammy, it doesn't seem to be predicated on whether you had a bad time with the acute phase or not.

You know what I mean?

Whether you were not.

People that were in the hospital and people who had had it for a day can get long COVID.

And it doesn't seem to be people necessarily that are elderly or with compromised immune system.

From my experience of what I read and what I observe, it's almost that people have hyperimmune.

In other words, this was the little,

they had a lot of gasoline in their system and this torched it.

In other words, if you had asthma or allergies or an autoimmune problem, I had an autoimmune problem, I won't get into it, but it seemed seemed to trigger that, make it worse.

And a lot of athletes, marathon runners, people who were really in great shape were prone to it.

I know people have written me and said,

I ran a marathon a week before I got ill.

I can't walk across

the room.

And so

they don't know quite.

Those are the symptoms and those are the possible causes, but one thing they don't have is a universal description of what triggered it and therefore how to stop it systematically.

So what the status is now is almost everybody knows it's inflammation.

So you kind of want to repress the immune system, but you don't know what's causing the immune system to go crazy.

So, and that's like true of a lot of, so you're just treating the symptoms.

So if you say, I'm going to go to a long COVID center of any type, private or public or whatever, they're going to have you go to a pulmologist.

I didn't do this, but you can go to a pulmologist, you can go to a neurologist, cardiologist.

Every person will treat

their own discipline's individual symptoms as manifested by you, and then they'll coordinate, make sure they don't overlap with drugs.

You see what I'm saying?

But nobody says, ah,

this is caused by a depletion of cortisol.

Therefore, I'm going to find out what is

depressing the cortisol rather than it's it's not the effect, it's the cause.

Or these people are all really have a vascular disease.

So I'm going to give warfarin and that's going to thin their blood.

They're going to feel great, but they don't know what caused it in the first place.

You see what I mean?

So they're treating it, and therefore are you going to be on warfarin the rest of your life?

Or they'll say to you,

I can give you low-dose naltraxin that will gradually

tone down your immune system and you won't have to take steroids, but I don't know what caused it to go crazy is what I'm trying to say, other than it's typical post-viral phenomenon.

And in my case, I've had amoebic dysentery as a young person

in the Arab world.

I had vivax malaria.

I've had a ruptured appendix.

I've had a lot of tropical illnesses.

I've had a lot of vaccinations.

I think I increased over a two-year period.

I had over 20 vaccinations to go to, you know, yellow fever, typhus, typhoid, plague, smallpox, to go to places you shouldn't go to.

And I always had a bad reaction.

So I know I had an immune problem.

I had mono when I was 34, and it took me years to get over the, so,

and it's so long COVID was, but it's, it's mysterious is what I'm concluding with.

I had Delta.

I got over it in three days a year ago.

And I had sky-high antibodies according to a test right before I got COVID.

I still got the Omicron version.

So there's so many

complexities and mysteries that it almost makes you feel sometimes when you get a little low that only an engineered virus could create such havoc.

And finally, I don't think it's appreciated.

I'm not whining that the medical profession is ignoring it.

They're not.

But when you start to read some statistics, I'm kind of doubtful, but I give them some credence because I want to be fair-minded that one out of every five people who gets COVID has lingering symptoms and one out of every six or seven has severe long COVID,

then you're talking about four to eight million people, right, in the United States.

When you talk about a labor shortage,

there's a lot of people who are either afraid of getting this long COVID

or they have it.

or they're afraid of COVID and they're not participating in the labor force.

And so it's a multi-billion, if not trillion dollar hit on the world economy.

And I think it's really important to find out what it does.

I think the bright thing I would leave people with from my own experience is it's very, very important to be optimistic and not to,

I know, I mean, and I'm not saying I'll just finish with what you should do, in my experience, what you should not do.

I'll start with what you should not do.

I got it.

I got over it.

Acute five days.

I was really wiped out.

I went on a seven day speaking tour and moment i tested negative and the whole time i got pins and needles neuropathy fatigue it got worse and then i led 105 people to israel for 16 days and then i came back and spoke in nevada when you added that up for the first

i don't know 35 days after I got acute COVID and tested negative, I was gone 30 days working 16, 17.

That's the worst thing you can do is

jet lag time airplane travel.

Don't do that.

I should have just stayed home.

The second thing, I think

if you just think you're going to go into radical rest and just lay there, even though we don't have enough energy to move, I mean, there were days when I thought, hmm.

When am I going to go into the kitchen and get some tea?

Let me get a strategy.

Wow.

I went and got tea.

I actually walked.

That was in the dark days of August.

But you always, I always tried to exercise no matter what.

I walked every single day, a mile in the morning, a mile at night.

And some days I was like on almost all fours.

I was so wiped out.

And that helps.

And you always, I worked every single day writing.

I did not take a day off, but the first part was stupid, but I think later it helped me.

And then what you should do is,

is as i say exercise in my case i took supplements i experimented i always did had a simple rule that i would try one at a time i would read extensively about the side effects and i would not take the recommended dose i would take small but i took a lot of them i still do and then i would talk to a really great doctor who was an integrative doctor and he would advise me.

I also did acupuncture once a week.

So sum it all up.

I think there's also, it's impossible to tell to what degree acupuncture or low-dose naltrack or any of these supplements

have a radical effect in healing given, I think there's also a time span.

In other words, I think you get really ill, almost deadly ill for the first three months of it.

And then you feel like you have the flu for the next three months.

And then at six months, you start to taper off and you have the lingering neuro fatigue and neurologia.

And then I hope by a year.

And so I'm in the, I think beginning the third,

the third quarter, because I'd say I'm up to 70%

of energy.

And

I'd say the neuropathy and myology has gone from my hips down to my knees, down to my calves and feet, where it is.

I got 50% of my 50, depending on the day, 50 to 70%.

I'm a little, I had the flu, so it's, it kind of set me back, but I feel that I'm progressing really well.

And I hope my goal is to be cured sometime between Thanksgiving at nine months and Christmas.

But I'm not sure that's a path.

I've had people call me up and say,

it's amazing.

He said, you know, I was sick as a dog and I woke up two days and my immune system shut off.

One guy,

was very interesting.

I go to, and we were talking the other day.

He's an acupressurist

kind of

body mechanics guy, just to help you deal with neuropathy

and muscle ache.

And he was telling me that the immune system has to be shocked back.

It's like a railroad, you know, a locomotive that went off and spinning because it's not on the rails.

And once it's on the rails, it won't have to spin.

And how do you get it back?

COVID shocked it off and made it not turn off.

So how do you make it turn off so it goes back to a regular reaction?

And there's all kinds of crazy theories.

My God, there's people who do this ganglion nerve in the neck, there's people who get their blood washed, there's people that do stem cells, there's people who take ice-cold baths, there's people that do all of these

saunas.

And I'm not deprecating any of them, and let me be clear, but my general rule I think might be of some interest to some people that have it:

don't try

any

unapproved medical course of treatment if there are serious possibilities of side effects.

If this was a terminal disease or an endless disease, then I could see doing it.

But I think that it is a disease that is

last, if you're very, very lucky, three to six months.

If you're normal, six months to a year.

If you're unlucky, a year to two years.

So you would,

you know what I mean?

Scary, yeah.

Well, it wasn't.

It's scary enough.

Yeah.

When I had it after two months, I said, my God, I could have this for four months.

When I had it for four months, I said to myself, if this ends at six months, I'm blessed and went to heaven.

And it's six months and it still hasn't gone away.

But I feel that I've made enough.

enough progress that

it's been really good.

And I shouldn't say that.

It's been really awful.

It's worse than having a ruptured appendix.

I've had three kidneys.

I was thinking the other day: would I rather have my kidneys?

I've had 20-plus kidney stone, three-kidney stone operation.

Yes, I would rather have those than this.

I had a ruptured appendix and almost died and had perientinitis for six weeks after the operation.

Would I rather have that or this?

I would rather have that.

I've had a catastrophic bike accident, 175 stitches in my face, a destroyed knee, four teeth knocked out, broken nose, lips destroyed, with can't feel them to this day in the middle of my mouth.

Would I rather have that or I'd rather have that?

That's how insidious.

I don't know.

The choice sounds tough to make, though.

Anyway, but

we're laughing about it.

I don't want to laugh at people that have it, but I.

Only reason we're talking about it, I don't want to talk about myself, but I want to make, if I can contribute in any small way to somebody who's listening and who's had this, I would like to offer a ray of hope that the doctors are getting better and better and better at it.

So every morning, just I just do this, take long COVID and do a Google search with Google News search.

And you will see that every day, the number of trials are going on.

There's hundreds of trials by off-label drugs supplement.

They're trying everything.

And I think it's kind of like the way to look at it.

The guy that discovered it's going to to be famous and a Nobel Prize winner.

And everybody in immunology is working on it.

And I think they're going to find an answer that's safe.

And

I think that's what we have to look forward to.

Yeah.

And don't be depressed.

Don't let the, I think there is something with the neuroinflammation.

Oh, one thing is really bad about it is you have insomnia.

And I started,

I thought if I got two hours sleep in June and July, I was lucky All night long, just buzzing like you put your hand into an electrical socket.

And then, by,

I don't know, August,

um,

four hours, and then September, five.

I went to Hillsdale, I didn't think I could teach four hours a day, and that was just that familiar surroundings, that quiet there, the people I like so much there.

I did acupuncture and I got away from all of the other stuff here, and I think I got better.

I had a really great companion, Al Philip, that we rode bikes with, and even though it was pathetic riding them, but

once you get up to six hours or five or six hours, I think things radically improve on your side.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're at our time

and actually way beyond it.

So we better call it quits today.

Thanks so much for all of your wisdom on the Hispanic vote and on COVID and on

agriculture.

Yes, absolutely.

Thank you so much.

And I'm sure your listeners thank you too.

I hope so.

This was a little off kind of out of the way, off the normal path type of podcast, but it was on issues that I think are interested people.

They affect us all.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right.

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

Thank you, everybody.