Post-Modern Rhetoric, Pre-Modern Culture

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the host.

Victor Davis-Hanson is the star and the namesake, and he's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Waynamarshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where he is right now.

Victor has just finished a two-week teaching stint there.

We thought we were going to not be able to record any podcast until Victor got back a week from now, but found a little narrow window here on this.

I have a little tiny microphone in my luggage.

Well,

oh, that's nice.

Always carry one.

Victor.

is going to be taking some questions from me, the man lucky, to ask him questions on my own behalf and on behalf of many listeners.

We'll talk about some college lunacy that's going on and a couple of pieces Victor's written about old bad lies.

And then, maybe if we have some time, we'll talk to farmer Hansen about some stuff he's written for his website, victorhanson.com, on growing raisins.

Not fun.

Tasty, but not fun.

And we'll get to the college stuff right after these important messages.

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

Victor, I know when you do these Hillsdale stints, two weeks, three weeks, they are, it is wall-to-wall teaching, grading, lecturing, activity.

So

I'm assuming the last two weeks for you were a lot of work.

I started when I was 50 and I'm 69, so 19 years of it.

I have a lot of good friends here.

It takes me a week to get adjust to the climate when I get older, and then it's hard, you know.

Standing on your feet and lecturing for three hours was a breeze when I was 51 or two or five, but

69, I don't know, I can feel it, but I think it's the long COVID.

I think, I think when that is over, I'll feel 50 again.

It's called Jack, it's called long COVID euphoria when you break through.

Oh, well, um, I'm waiting for it.

I was going to say,

I hope you

experience it, maybe even during this recording.

I hope so.

It can happen any moment, I'm told.

Well, Victor, let's talk about some college stuff.

I'll throw three things out there.

I think two are very much worth talking about on their own.

Let me, the little one is just maybe just to make a note that that terrible case in

at Oberlin College,

where the school, its administrators, rallied students to antagonize a local bakery, charged them with racism.

As many listeners know, a few years ago, the family who owned the Gibsons, they sued the college.

They won.

They won a dramatic amount of money.

Several of the family members died while waiting.

Yeah, that was terrible.

That was terrible.

Truly terrible.

But finally, the

school has agreed, isn't that nice of them, to pay $36 million

plus interest.

They appealed and appealed.

The Ohio Supreme Court flipped them the bird.

So

that is a, I would hope,

a great blow for those of us who think you can fight back,

you can win.

I don't know that that kind of experience makes the

troublemakers, college administrator troublemakers

take a breath.

Maybe we shouldn't do this.

Look what happened to Oberlin.

Anyway, that happened.

So if you have any thoughts on that, Victor, if not,

well, I read the statement from the college and what was manifest, there was no apology.

They never said, we're sorry for falsely accusing you.

of racism.

We're sorry of using university resources and personnel to organize protests and boycotts boycotts of your bakery and store.

We're sorry that we caused you such economic damage and we libeled you.

And we're sorry that we kept appealing so we wouldn't have to pay you anything, even though the original court found us culpable and we had to go, we took it all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court.

And the patriarch died of old age and then his son died of I think cancer.

And so it was a lot of, you know, it's a lot of stress to be called a racist and to have a lot of very affluent and highly politicized students to shun you or boycott you or call you names.

And of course, in our society, there's never,

there's never, I'm sorry, especially on this topic, just Juicy Smollett has never apologized.

Mr.

Phillips has never apologized to the COVID kids.

The Duke faculty never apologized to the Duke lacrosse team, and we're now having another case there at the Duke Volleyball.

Right.

It's always just throw these epithets around: racist, racist, racist, and everything's okay.

There's never a need to apologize because

we're marginalized people or we're virtue signaling.

But after a while, the currency of the language is inflated and it has no value.

So

it doesn't really mean much anymore.

Victoria charge.

Yeah, it does have its consequences, maybe not in the most important ways.

Let's,

well, in this next case, you just mentioned it, the Duke

BYU.

And if I could just try to encapsulate it, and I'm sure most of our listeners have followed this to some degree, but a volleyball game between BYU, Brigham

Young University, and Duke.

One of the Duke players alleged that someone in the crowd was yelling anti-black racist things, comments.

It just so happens that this woman, I think her name is Rachel Richardson, has an aunt who is a kind of well-known racist of her own, black lady in Texas, who's running for office, who's using this case and exploiting this case, and maybe actually even creating this case.

for some weird political gain.

But

any investigate, the investigation by BYU and anyone into what happened is that nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

No one said anything.

No one yelled anything racist.

But then

the South Carolina University, the Gamecocks, the girls basketball team has now decided to forego their home and home.

They were supposed to be playing BYU twice this upcoming women's basketball season.

Why?

Because of the scandal at BYU, except there was no scandal.

I just want to recommend anyone, Will Kane, who's at Fox.

I love Will.

I've known Will a long time.

He's a great guy.

He's done some great, great analysis and reporting on it.

But Victor,

this is lunacy.

Nothing happened, but something happened.

And

the coach of South Carolina is, even though there's no evidence of anything, is going to go ahead and make like the Empress fully clothed.

And your thoughts about this?

Well, it's the logic of the Say Them Witch Trial.

So you call somebody a witch, you call somebody a witch, other people know that that person is not a witch.

But if they stand up and say, wait a minute, that person, that young girl, is no way in the world is she a witch.

How dare you do that?

Then what happens, Jack?

Then she's a witch.

So if you stand up and say, we have a tape of the entire game, we have no record that anybody in this dance, in particular the so-called

racist who yelled out epithets from the spectators' benches.

We have no evidence that he did it either.

In fact, the university has apologized to him.

But nevertheless,

we don't want to be the first one to say that, because if we're the first one to say that, that might suggest that we're weak on

our woke credentials of denouncing racism.

And so we just leave it up in the air and let it die like we did with Jesse Smollett and Duke La Crosse and et cetera, et cetera.

We don't have one person in any of these universities to say, wait a minute, it is a greater crime to accuse somebody of racism

than

almost anything.

And so you've called this person a racist.

There's no evidence that that was correct.

And now you're compounding that crime by boycotting or suggesting that the mere allegation of racism is synonymous with the actual use of that invective.

That's shameful.

They should boycott

any school that boycotts NYU.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hey, can we?

I want to,

there's still a few more college

things to talk about, but just struck me while we're in referring to South Carolina.

I'm sure you saw this, Victor, but if folks don't watch Fox News or read, you know, quote-unquote conservative media, they stick to their local paper, if they watch the network news, they're not going to have heard this most likely.

In South Carolina, there's a black state rep Democrat named Crystal Matthews, and she's the Democrat nominee for the U.S.

Senate.

She's challenging Tim Scott and the Republican incumbent.

And she was caught on camera by Project Veritas

saying

about her white constituents.

Again, she's a state rep right now.

You got to treat them like, I'll say, sheet,

something that sounds like that.

I don't want to curse

on our podcast.

Imagine if a Republican had said that, Victor.

Any thoughts about this?

Well, I guess you're asking me, Jack, if she's right that when you treat so-called white people like she,

then

they have

a natural apologetic manner.

Oh, I'm not a racist.

So she's empirical.

But what she's saying is that essentially she looks at the world in terms of white and black.

And we're not allowed to say that she's a racist because she claims that she's marginalized or she's suffered this and that.

But it's now 2022.

And when you look at a lot of statistics across the board, it's not necessarily white people who are the wealthiest or the most privileged.

If you look at their comparisons in income, family income or personal income compared to, say, Arab Americans or Asian Americans, et etc.

But she's not going to beat Tim Scott.

Tim Scott's ecumenical.

Everybody likes him.

He's a good senator.

She has no chance for that.

And

she thinks that

this is okay.

It's not different, Jack, it's not that much different than what Joy Reed says on the air.

It's not much, you know, different than that Ellie Mostel.

I mean, he was what is, he was a MSNBC

consultant lawyer, and he said that after the COVID lockdown, he said, you know, I just don't have any desire when I come back out to see white people.

I don't want to talk to them.

I just would rather not be around them.

That's just what people say.

It's no different what the UC Berkeley House, theme house for students says, when please don't blame a white person in.

This is mounting, and what I'm going to get at, these are elite pronouncements from political and media figures, and then it filters down, and then it is accelerated by the Soros Dio, the Soros attorneys.

And they are emulated by small town attorney, public attorneys, public prosecutors, whatever you call it, local district attorneys.

And the result is that somebody

sees a jogger.

in Memphis or somebody sees a mother with two children or somebody drives around recording something about white people and they think it's okay.

And why wouldn't they think it's okay if a Senate candidate says the same thing that you treat white people like blank

and a Harvard educated graduate says that he doesn't want to see these people anymore doesn't want to be around them and we've we've institutionalized racism and if you have a separate graduation you don't want these people there and then at the whole

The whole excuse for this blatant racism is the construct that, well,

the history of slavery and Jim Crow make it impossible for people of color that have been marginalized to be racist.

Then you get, it goes from the absurd, like Juicy Smollett and the volleyball folks and the lacrosse ruse

to the deadly, the deadly, and that's killing somebody in Memphis.

And yet, nobody says anything.

And so she's culpable for whipping up hatred.

How's that?

And

if that gets out and

what happens.

And

it's time for everybody just to say, you know what?

Just human.

And our superficial appearance is incidental to who we are.

It's not essential.

But that's what I think a lot of elites feel that if it's not essential to my identity, then I have to compete in the sphere of ideas or business or something.

And, you know, I'm not, I'm not LeBron.

I'm not open.

I don't have that talent.

So I'm going to use the crutch of you're a

So that's what she's doing.

You know, it's kind of a related anecdote.

And by the way, I want to talk about with you, hear from you about two other things.

I'm sorry if we're talking a lot about

race today, although not really.

I mean, it is so

being

race-related stories are being so promulgated and contrived

by the leftist elites that

they merit a response.

They merit Victor's

take on it.

But there was a vandalized gay rainbow crosswalk in Atlanta.

I don't know if you saw this story the other day.

So what were the headlines originally were white supremacist was accused?

Must have been a white supremacist who vandalized the gay pride

crosswalk with SWAT stickers.

And yeah,

the white supremacist

happened to be a black black guy.

They found out who did it.

It was a guy, Jonah Jade Sampson, 30-year-old black guy, you know, who's a criminal,

but he did it.

But of course, it was, had to, had to have been white supremacism that

engaged in this.

Anyway, Victor, on to two other things.

Just to note, remember that

I think he's from the University of Tennessee.

Remember Wilford Riley, that African-American scholar?

He wrote a really good book called Hate Crime Hulk.

And it was about how the left

peddles these fake hate crimes.

Yeah, nooses left on.

Yes, they're commonplace.

And there was one, I got to be very careful.

There was an allegation of one at Stanford where I was.

But people understand that that

sign triggers the entire wealthy white educated class to outperform each other.

So when Jesse Smollett fakes a hate crime, then we have a race to the bottom with Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, everybody's saying, this is horrible.

No, this is more horrible.

And they get to virtue signal their superior morality.

And there's never consequences to it, never.

And it also shows that the number of would-be victims and oppressed are too large for the pool of oppressors and victimizers.

So when you have that asymmetry, you have to,

want,

if you want

compensations from the government or from society at large, what do you do when you can't be oppressed and you can't be victimized?

It's 2022 and you're, you know,

you're 60 years after the civil rights movement, you have to create these monsters.

And then if you create the monsters, you say there's monsters everywhere.

And I need blank, blank, blank.

I need 10 diversity, equity, and inclusion czars.

And I need the staff.

And I need

this many books published by Simon and Schuster on black themes.

And I need this many characters and TV commercials.

And that's how it works.

And it will continue to work until somebody says,

non-hick pork is not this pig.

I'm going to evaluate people on them.

on people, on their individual characteristics and soul, and not, I'm not going to look at

their skin color.

And what I just said is considered worse than racism because if people adopted that

ideology, the whole thing would collapse.

It's built on straw.

It just needs a few people to say, nope, not me.

And you're already starting to see it when Dave Chappelle took on the, you know, the transgender group and they were going to cancel him and they were going to do this to him.

And then Netflix just said, nope, he's making us too much money.

Right.

And Joe Rogan.

Yeah.

Joe Rogan, they're thinking, nope, he makes us too much money.

money.

And the universities and Hollywood are sort of the places where you can't do that.

But maybe

what's going to happen this year or the next year is that Hollywood's going to learn that none of their movies that are woke make any money.

They lose.

Maybe the New York Trade publishers are going to understand that all these books are pouring out about woke this and woke that lose money.

Maybe Wall Street's going to learn that ESG and all of these ideological reasons to buy stock other than profit and loss are going to lose money.

And suddenly we're going to wake up and say, ah,

say the witch trials are over.

Joe McCarthy is a drunk bragger.

Right.

Happens.

We went through a collective hysteria.

Now it's over.

Yeah.

Well, and we're still in it.

And one of those

incidents of this idiocy happened the other day.

And

I'm pretty sure you haven't yet addressed Queen Elizabeth's death.

And I'm not asking, I'm going to save that for Sammy, the great Sammy Wink, if she wants to, when she records podcasts with you, wants to discuss that.

But

in response to the Queen's death, though, there have been a number of

high-level,

often college, but elite

accusations and

denouncements of the queen, the colonizer, etc.

One of the crudest ones that came out immediately was this professor at Carnegie Mellon, modern language professor, Uju Anya, who said she hoped when she heard the queen had died, she hoped her death had been one of excruciating pain.

And Victor, I wasn't really doing any research into her, but I plugged her name in Google and something came up about her as a racist.

And it was

a petition on change.com, one of these, you know, petition websites, where she now she's from Nigeria, and I'm I'm going to say my observation is uh, people from Nigeria who are recent, you know, come to the United States or Western Africa or even the Caribbean, they don't want to be known as uh, you know, uh, African Americans, they they don't want to be associated with uh thought of the same as uh blacks in America who are the great-great-grandchildren of slaves.

They see themselves as distinct.

They actually

have a derogatory term they use for

the progeny of

slaves.

It's called a cata.

I think I'm saying it wrong.

I think it means stray cat that left home and wandered away and never came back.

Yeah, but it also is, it's, you know, trash.

Trinish.

It's derogatory.

It's put down.

So she has used this term,

tweeted it, used it.

Of course, some kids have gone after her now on some petition.

So it's, I don't know, maybe it's a little little league

Jacobins being eaten by their own kind.

But the hostility of her

attack and that of others on the death of the queen by these, I mean, they really are elites.

I mean,

they're acting like they are themselves oppressed, but they are the 1% of the 1% of America.

I just find it really.

And Jeff, you'd say people, you know, saying no, no more of this.

It was interesting, Jeff Bezos attacked her immediately.

I don't know, you know, read too much into this.

As a general rule, when people come here, if they come here to work and they're impoverished from Oaxaca, for example, in my community, then they're very happy to be here.

And they see that things work, at least they used to work, compared to what's going on in southern Mexico.

But if they're elites,

like Ilian Amar or this professor from Nigeria, and they come, then they scan the horizon and they see that the institutions in which they want to participate, because they're elites, whether that's academia or media or government, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is left-wing.

And then they immediately set foot in the United States and they have a whole array of charges.

And then that begs the question,

well, if it's so bad, why did you come here?

I mean, and then she blames in her rant, she blamed the queen for, you know, all the deaths from Nigeria.

But I mean, if you just take one event,

you remember they had the Feed the World and all of that stuff

in 19, I think that was 67 to 70 or something about Biafra.

Biafra, yeah.

Yeah, that was.

George Harrison led an effort on that.

Yeah, he did.

It was a great concert.

And two million people died.

And it was kind of a proxy war.

I get that.

But it was a weird proxy war, as I remember, because the Soviet Union was kind of on the side of Britain for Biafra.

And Nigeria was kind of, we were neutral because we had no dog in the fight.

But there were other France, I think, was for Nigeria.

But the point I'm making is

that was a black-on-black civil war.

The British had nothing to do with it.

And so she's saying that the Queen caused her all this trouble.

But when you look at all of the ex-colonial world, let's say,

in Africa

and other places,

whether it was, it wasn't because they were necessarily humanitarian, although many of the imperialists were, but they wanted order and they wanted people to get along and to

rise above strife so they could be useful for the empire.

But the point I'm making is that when that imperial project collapsed after 200 years, what followed wasn't better.

It was bloodbath and

retribution and vendetta.

And for her to come to the United States and say, well, I left all this murder behind because of the queen, the queen was apolitical.

All she did was travel the world and try to be a good emissary of British manners and traditions and stability.

The thing that is going to be interesting is

we, you know, Lady Di was glamorous, and then we had Fergie, and then we had her son, Andrew, and we have all of these, her sister, Margaret.

So I won't even get into Meghan Markle and crazy Prince Harry, but the point I'm making is they have a large extended family.

And

all of them were on, even Prince Charles with his wacky idea about

you know, green this and green that.

Yeah, he's a class

in Islam and all this stuff.

So my point is that, you know, he's not not defender of the faith.

He's a defender of the faith, as if Britain has no particular religious tradition that it was founded upon.

But my point is that none of them, all of them are found wanting.

None of them could last five years under the public eye.

And yet this woman for 70 years

lived in a bubble and every aspect of her life was the stuff of the paparazzi and they couldn't and she she acted acted with sobriety and grace and humor, and nobody could do that.

And you're going to find out nobody could do that.

And her job was simply to,

you know, to represent British values of the values that she grew up with in the mid-20th century.

And she did a good job, early 20th century and mid-20th century, did a good job.

And they'll never find anybody that could withstand that pressure.

And my God, how you would get up every day

in your life and have to put on these particular clothes and go out and meet these particular dignitaries and shake 100 hands and smile with all these crazy people you have to meet with one directive.

I represent the British government.

British traditions and the British people.

And today, I'm not going to embarrass them.

I'm going to enhance their image.

That was something that we don't see in this narcissistic, selfish culture.

Well, Victor, um,

you're you're up in Michigan, in cold, cold Michigan, and I'm so happy for you that you haven't been home, hot, hot, boiling hot, thermostat-locked California.

Get your quick thoughts on the uh Gavin Newsom's electricity ramblings right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

A couple of quick plugs: VictorHanson.com, that's Victor's official website.

And if you're not subscribing, something's wrong, you know, that you get a lot, a lot of original content there.

I don't know that we're going to have time on this episode to talk about, I had two pieces.

Maybe we'll

talk about one on another podcast.

But for example,

raisins.

You did this two-part series on

growing raisins.

Just terrific, but it's part of the exclusive content of the website.

It's five bucks a month, $50 for the year.

So I really want to encourage our listeners to stick their toe in the water and subscribe.

For me, Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

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And one plug, Victor.

I do this.

I've been blessed to be your

compadre here, host Sammy Wink, the great Sammy Wink, the same, but one of the great hosts of Victor Davis-Hansen podcast in the past has been Troy Senek, our great friend.

And Troy's got a book coming out

this week, and it's called A Man of Iron, The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.

It's a great book.

I want to recommend to our listeners

to buy it.

So go find it on

Amazon.

So, Victor,

yeah, thermostats.

I'm so glad I'm

retrograde when it comes to these things.

I don't have an Alexa.

I don't think my refrigerator can listen to my conversations in my house at least.

The refrigerator is too old.

But

that thermostats could be locked by some third party, that the governor of the state

who has suppressed energy creation in the state

and has lauded it is now demanding of its residents that they

roast and

don't use air conditioning at certain times, mandates that everyone and his uncle has to have an electric car.

But of course, how the hell are you going to?

you're going to charge an electric car with electricity made from fossil fuel anyway.

It's just a typical madness in California.

But

what thoughts do you have, if any, if you want to share about this kind of energy thesis?

I think even the Teslas, when you turn them ready, they had a little warning on their

dash saying, don't charge me.

That was really big brother.

Seriously?

Yeah.

Really?

Oh, my God.

But

this is long and coming.

And so you got to remember about California.

There's this coastal strip from

La Jolla to Berkeley.

It's about 30 miles wide.

And it kind of expands around Los Angeles.

And that's where 30 of the 40 million people live.

And at the dawn of globalization, seven, eight trillion dollars of market capitalization arose.

And this is where Caltech and Stanford and USC and UCLA and UC Berkeley and etc., that's where the universities are.

And they decided that they had reached utopia.

And so they were going, starting about 30 years ago, they were not going to build any more dams.

So in 1983 is the last dam.

Who needs the California water project?

How unnatural is that?

And they said, we don't want Rancho Seco nuclear plant in Sacramento.

We don't want the one down on the Southern California coast.

So they got rid of those two.

Take eight, nine percent of the nuclear production of the state, take another eight, that was 20,

And don't build any more hydroelectric.

And don't stop whatever leases you have and

the minimum fracking down by Bakersfield.

And then don't tap this enormous Monterey shale, oil, and natural gas.

And then say you're green.

It's hot.

Everybody has solar panels on your house and it's more power to them.

And they generate a lot of electricity, but only during the day and only mostly during the spring and summer.

Then they say, well, we're going to outlaw cars.

But what are they doing?

I mean,

everybody has this wrong about California.

They think that they're just stupid and therefore they're in a quandary.

That's true, but they're also malicious and they're conniving.

And what I mean by that is to feed this 41 million person state, You've got to import electricity from other places, other states, and fuels, natural gas and oil.

And that means places like Alaska and Utah and Arizona.

And they don't follow your rules.

So it's sort of like, well, we believe that

carbon emissions are killing people.

So you guys have to

burn carbon.

And so you generate electricity and then you give us your refinery, you know, fumes and all that.

You keep that, but then you send gas and you send electricity to us.

And that's what we do.

We don't produce anything.

Same thing with timber, same thing with mining.

So we have one of the richest natural resources

in every aspect of that idea, and we don't exploit them anymore.

And then every once in a while, like every once in a while, like every summer.

these tinderbox forests that haven't been maintained, they haven't been thinned, they haven't been

cleaned of dead trees and brush, they go up like tinder boxes.

And then they sort of say, well, that's climate change or

those poor white trash shouldn't be living in the foothills.

And this is nature's way of readjusting.

And then these fires put more carbon in the California atmosphere than months of driving.

And so that's how they operate.

And it's all based on the idea that Gavin Newsom and the people around him and that class lives where they do.

It's the weirdest thing in the world, this state, because when it's 110 in Fresno, it's 85 maybe in Palo Alto, or maybe it's 65 or 75 in San Francisco.

And so when it's, you know, let's get it up to 28 kilowatts, let's get it up to 30 kilowatts, let's make it impossible to turn on your air conditioner.

That doesn't affect people on the coast.

That affects poor people who can't afford $1,000 a square foot on the coast.

So one way, and I think the only way and the best way of looking at this dysfunctional state is it's a bunch of very wealthy, privileged people who got richer than crisis on globalization because they had particular wares, whether it was insurance or law, university, or academia or tech, and they've got so much money and they live in this

paradisical place with this year-round 70 degrees, that they make like life hell for the other 10 million that live in very tough places that can get very hot or very cold in the mountains or in the valleys.

And they don't care.

And then they dress it all up as being woke.

But

if you were to look at it through their woke lenses, you would say this is a bunch of very wealthy

people in the legislature and in the universities and in the media and in politics that are crafting policies that make Mexican-American people of the lower middle class in places from, I don't know, Turlock down to Early Mart to Strathmore to Stratford to Bakersfield.

It makes them almost impossible to live because they can't afford to turn on the air conditioner, which is 110, or they can't afford to fill up their $6 a gallon pickup.

It's a very selfish culture,

this bike coastal, both on the east and west coast.

It's really strange.

It's one of the weirdest things that I've ever encountered.

They're atheists or agnostic.

So they have this, they're like the Jacobins with their Lord radio, this idea of humanism, secular humanism or radio or reason or logic.

And then it's a cult and then they're devoted and they have, and no apostate is allowed anything, any power or any influence or any dissenting view.

It's kind of a political sadomasochism.

There is a thrill at inflicting pain.

Yeah,

they love the idea of inflicting pain.

That's why they love COVID.

They love the idea that everybody was locked down and they got their news only through their screens.

And the Hell Out class brought them all of their food and appliances and dropped them at their door.

And they were on Zoom and made a ton of money.

And the government can control where you're going, what you were doing,

except if you're Nancy Pelosi at her hairdresser, Gavin Newsom, you know, at a baseball game or at the French laundry or London Breed, et cetera, et cetera.

So they destroyed the state as a functional state.

What I mean that is

our listeners know you cannot drive a car into San Francisco and park it on the side of the street without expecting it to be broken in and nobody will be held accountable.

Our people know, our people, our Americans know if you walk into San Francisco,

You got to be watch your feet while you step in.

You're going to see thousands of homeless defecating, urinating, fornicating, injecting.

If you fly into SFO and you look at the Bay from the most green city in the United States, you're going to see a lot of brown effluent.

A lot of brown effluent.

That's partly a mixture of these archaic Bay Area treatment plants that have such high cost through update.

and they don't get nitrogen out of their effluent and the storm drains where they wash all of these little cities, big cities and little, and they have to wash all the crap off into the storm gutters.

And so

it's very strange.

It's like pre-modern, except in certain little enclaves with security guards, and that's who runs the place.

And I don't know how they get away with it as long as they've done, because they tend to be quasi-racist.

They can't tend to be, and I don't mean that just loosely, because it's largely a white and wealthy Asian class that don't really care the effects on mostly people, because the white middle class is leaving the state and it's being replaced by a Mexican-American middle class that is baffled that their former democratic allies and patrons care so little about their religion, their customs, their traditions, and their livelihood.

Yeah, again, not only care, don't care, but hey, Victor, I do want to

hear your thoughts about that terrific two-part series you wrote for VictorHanson.com on raisins.

But just want to make note.

Portland is, let's say, Portland's a first cousin or maybe even a younger brother of San Francisco.

When you think about the kind of lunacy that's going on in major cities on the West Coast, here's a headline today.

I'm reading for, you know, of National Review.

Sorry, Victor, three Portland hotels headed for for foreclosure

amid rampant rioting and homelessness.

This is by Diana Klobovit

from yesterday.

Three hotels in Portland set for foreclosing after missing mortgage payments, according to documents by the Willamette Week, etc., etc.

They owe $270 million.

I mean, I'm not going to read anymore other than say we can all deduce why.

Nobody's going there anymore.

There's madness in the streets.

And

what's a sign that no one's going there anymore?

The hotels are empty and now going under.

This is, is Portland going to be is

the Detroit, the next Detroit in America?

Maybe San Francisco is going to be the next Detroit.

Anyway, if you have any thoughts about that,

it's a beautiful city.

I used to go there and speak a lot.

They have great bookstores.

They have a university, a couple of colleges and universities.

And it's like San Francisco.

It was a place that in the 1970s and 1980s, everybody wanted to go to the 1990s.

And Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, you know, these were all the hip places.

They were supposed to be tolerant and they were naturally beautiful.

And they had people who were running them that were old-time Democrats that grew up in the 20s and 30s and 40s.

And they're gone now.

And we've got the woke people that are incompetent, ideologically driven, biased, and they're running these cities.

And they've taken their inheritance from prior ancestors, trashed the ancestors as illiberal, racist, sexist, homophobes, torn down their statues, renamed buildings.

And what have they given us?

They've given us pre-modern Dickensian London.

That's what they've given us.

And if you go there, and I've been to all those cities, the downtown is uninhabitable, and you can't walk.

at night in the downtown.

And the wealthy people live in secluded enclaves and they don't go downtown if they can help it.

And they have no idea what, after spending billions of dollars, they have no idea what to do with the homeless and they have no idea what to do with these career criminals that are just looting and killing and hijacking.

And they can't talk about it.

For the homeless, they will not talk about it.

And everybody knows you have to have mental hospitals and you have to have areas where they can be treated.

I don't want to use the word camps, but they have to have compounds where people can be,

you know, the individual shelters or group shelters where they can be watched and treated medically, and they should not be allowed to go out on the street and defecate and harass

and urinate and

have sex and shoot up drugs and ruin the entire, I mean, it's medieval.

So when you start asking ourselves, well, why do we have monkeypox and why are we getting polio, the return of polio, and why is all this happening?

Maybe it's because there was some law of nature that said you know 2500 years ago the greeks and the romans discovered that you've got to take your effluent and make it downstream and you can't allow people on the streets to do the things they're doing now so it's really a a return to feudal feudal times or medieval times yeah and i don't know at what point There is a point, there always is, that when a thing can't go on,

it won't go on.

Herbstein, I think, said that.

But

I don't know how close we are because everybody's been navigating around it so they have the money.

So if you look at house prices in Tiburon or Pacific Heights, I think Mark Zuckerberg just sold his latest home for 26 million.

There's such an imbalance and inequality of wealth because of globalization.

There's so many people that figure that I will live in these beautiful cities.

I've got a lot of money.

I have walls around my house.

My kids will go to a neighborhood prep school.

And I can,

I want to live here, but I will, under no circumstances, go out to the downtown or to the poor areas by myself

because I will be attacked.

Right.

And I don't know what happens when you can't jog at 4:30 in the morning.

And if you get

raped and killed, then the Twitter mob or the Facebook monsters say that it was your fault for going, you know, for

being alone in the middle.

We make excuses, but, you know, nobody wants to talk about it.

There's certain things we can't talk about, Jack.

And let's be honest.

We have a problem after George Floyd with young African-American men between the ages of about 17 and 50 that comprise about six to seven percent of the population, and they're committing about 55 percent of all violent crime.

And it's largely occurring in the cities.

And people know that and they make the necessary adjustments and they don't talk about it.

And anytime you see

a video, and now they're almost hourly of

a group of African-American people jump out and they had one, I think a woman in Chicago.

Chicago, right?

Just kicked her and beat her.

The jogger, they had two people in Memphis that were talking about hunting down whites.

They kidnapped a mother with two children.

They beat up, they kick an Asian woman almost to death, hit people in the knockout game.

Everybody knows it.

Nobody will talk about it.

Anybody who talks about it is a racist.

And so they go along their way and just say, and it's never going to change until people talk about it.

And

I don't know what to do about it.

You can't.

I remember that Todd Nahese quotes the African-American.

I guess he's a comic book writer now, but when he in his heyday as a critic, he would talk about the talk that I have a talk

with every young African-American that the police will stereotype.

Well, that may be true, and we saw that racism can occur, as it did with George Floyd, I suppose.

But my point is that if your son is part of a collective that's committing

crime at about nine times their demographic, then people are going to be on the watch for them.

And I'm not saying that.

That's what Jesse Jackson most infamously said.

Right.

So I don't know how you deal with it because it butts up against all of these liberal pieties and you can't get anywhere.

So then what do you do?

We just kind of lie and people make the necessary adjustments.

So African Americans, middle-class African Americans know this, and they want police and they don't have police.

So they're leaving Chicago.

They're just leaving.

And you're starting to see the strangest thing in the world that there is a second African-American diaspora, but it's in the reverse direction of the 1920s and 30s and 40s.

It's back to small towns and largely red states where there's communities and the law is enforced.

And they don't feel anymore that.

conservative red states are racist at all.

Maybe their elites do, but they don't.

They feel safer in Tennessee or small town town Alabama than they do in liberal

Chicago or Baltimore and Detroit.

You're in the Bronx and I got to go get a

quart of milk and I may be taking my life into my hands.

Well, I mean,

you got to get out of Dodge.

You just have to.

Yeah, and it's happening everywhere.

And the whole society, I don't know.

I have an article I was writing today for American Greatness.

What caused all this?

There were these precursors to it, but then I think the lockdown,

it's COVID, the lockdown, the quarantine, the rise of the Twitter instantaneous mob and the Facebook social media phenomena.

All of it was like a perfect storm.

And this country is almost unrecognizable now in terms of crime, in terms of energy, in terms of cost, in terms of the political class.

And, you know, I get so tired of a John Kerry Kerry stepping off of a jet plane lecturing or Bill Gates

in his compound in Seattle lecturing or, you know, Jeff Bezos lecturing or Mark Zuckerberg lecturing or Michael Bloomberg lecturing, because they're not wealthy.

They're hyper-wealthy.

Right.

And they're completely shielded.

from many of the ideologies like George Soros that they advance that destroy the middle class and make life hell.

And they don't care.

In In fact, it's beyond that they don't care.

They make fun of the middle class and they project their own racism or

elitism on the middle class.

Because after all, if they're so ecumenical and tolerant,

why would they build these compounds?

Look at the Obamas.

Why do they need a Calorama mansion and then a secluded estate in Martha's Vineyard, plus their Chicago little digs, big digs?

And then they have this Hawaii thing.

And they all have one thing in common.

They want to keep away from people.

They don't want people getting near them.

They want to have a safe world.

And then they emerge from those enclaves and start lecturing America how it's racist and what it has to do, what it has to do, what it has to do to make the Obamas not hate them or not feel race.

And oh, please.

And so we're supposed to do this.

A guy who's under, you know, in in a shop all day, Black, Mexican-American, white, I don't know what, doesn't matter.

And all day he's going to work and he's going to make $100.

And then he gets out of that

greasy and he goes home and the Obamas are saying, well, this is what you're going to think.

And you've got

to win my approval.

And that's just, everybody's sick of it.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

let's totally change the tenor of this conversation and talk talk about

raisins.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on Saturday, September 10th.

Victor, you write a lot of exclusive material for victorhanson.com.

And one of the latest pieces you've written is a two-part, a series on what it's like to grow raisins.

I mean, I just,

I can't imagine a worse job.

I probably can, but let's just say it's a pretty damn tough job to be in 1967,

you know,

having to harvest.

raisins just the the the the the physical wear and tear that you and others your family and many others in the area went through to grow these things

for us to eat, sweet little treats for us

to eat.

Victor, it's a great series.

I recommend our listeners read it.

Of course, you have to subscribe to do that.

But just tell us, you know, quickly, because we don't have much time left here,

how dirty the business was of growing grapes.

Well, it's changed radically.

So now they're trellised, you know, and they're they're mechanically cut and they dry on the vine.

But half the crop is done the old way that I described.

And this is only part 205.

But essentially, it's you wait till about August 25th.

It's about 105

and you've got drying weather.

It takes about two weeks.

You go through with a tractor, you slant the row between the two vines, you go

pick the pick the you crawl down basically with a pan and you go under that vine and it's it's filthy dirty it's dusty there's black widows there's yellow jackets some of the bunches are mildew you cut the grapes they drop in the pan then you pull yourself out of the vine turn around and you dump a pan on a piece of paper you spread it it's about 23 pounds and you go down and you when i did it i got six cents a tray and then you go down the next and the next and next and you have to pick all the grapes you can't melt them and pull them because they shatter and you have to put not too many grapes so they'll never dry and not too fuel or they turn into carma caramel caramel

and you have to pick between 19 and 23 bricks if you don't if they're too sour they turn into what we call weedies and they blow away because there's no sugar in them if you wait too long to get the perfect sugar then a rain like there's a tropical storm now in mexico and i i lost two entire crops by having the the grapes on the

on the ground right about now.

If it was, right?

Yeah, I gambled.

And then I gambled.

I should say I lost three crops.

I lost two to we,

we, my family, we lost two to rain.

And another one

we picked early because we didn't want it and they didn't have the sugar and half the crop evaporated and it didn't make a good raisin, a red rather than a purple raisin.

And then I did have one big crop,

as my neighbor once once said to me, an older fellow who's very smart, but he said it, you know,

I went out, we got it out and we rolled, then you roll them into balls and stick them onto the vine into biscuits.

And if you do that, you can, they'll survive a rain because they later came out with resins and plastics and stuff in the trays to make them waterproof.

But we saved the entire crop and then the price.

you know, went up 40% because so many people lost there.

So there's this element, who got the raisins in that year?

And it was like, who got their raisins in during the 76 disaster, the 77, the 80, the 82?

And anybody who did made a lot of money or not, and now, you know, it's the crayon raisin market and Greek raisins and the raisin businesses,

it's not, you can't survive.

So most people have pulled out their vineyards and they are.

They're planting almonds, which are also bad now.

And if they're staying in the business, they have to spend about $10,000 to fifteen thousand dollars to redo plant a different type of variety than the thompson seedless uh plant them much more densely the rows are closer they trellis so the whole thing looks like a you know a carpet above your head it's completely shady for weed control and then

a machine or you have people go through and cut the canes and then they dry on the vine for months maybe in october then you shake them into a bin and go to a dehydrator and finish the job.

But it's, there's still people who do the natural way, about, you know, half.

At one time, there were three or four hundred thousand acres.

It was the crop from Bakersfield to

Modesto.

And Sun, I was, you know, my grandfather was one of the original members of Sunmade Raisin Cooperative.

And I picked a lot of grapes.

My grandfather and parents, you know, they said

I was born in 53.

I remember picking in 59 and 60 and 61, and then most of my childhood until I was 18.

And the idea was

if we're going to have this farm and we're going to have to hire workers, and it was funny.

The original people came during the Dust Bowl.

So the workers that I remember when I was in, were from Oklahoma, very poor.

And then they started to become upwardly mobile.

And then there were people from the Philippines.

And then they started, and then there were people from Mexico.

And each, in fact, I can remember Japanese Americans doing it.

But anyway, we were supposed to go out there and pick the perfect row and show the workers that the people who owned the property, their children would do a good job and not leave berries on the vine.

They wouldn't scatter the berries on the ground.

They wouldn't throw trash in the row.

They wouldn't defecate.

And

they would go back to the end of the row to a portable bathroom.

They wouldn't throw Coke cans everywhere.

They would lay a perfect 23, and that's what we had to do.

And it was pretty tough, you know, when you're a young kid out there with a lot of, and then when I got older and I was on the other end of it, I was the person inspecting it.

So I was, I would,

oh, take a year, 1984.

I would get up at five in the morning.

I'd get the crew started, and then I would drive 30 miles up to Fresno and teach a class.

I'd come back.

I'd monitor, talk to the crew boss, walk the roads.

My other two brothers were doing something even more risky, table grapes in our other farm.

And then I would go back, take a shower, go back, and then I would come back.

And I would do that three times a day for that three or four week period from the time we picked to they dried to the timing they cured in the biscuit roll to the time you put the biscuit roll into a bin and you got the entire then you had to shake them jack so you had this primitive shaker and you had to throw every one of those bins in a bin dumper and it was just like a dust storm.

Everything came out.

I mean, twigs came out, bird crap came out,

live lizards came out, black widows came out, leaves, dirt, puncture volume.

And then you had to make sure that it shook

all the debris that fell through the little slots and

the raisins bounced down.

Then you picked out rotten raisins, scorched raisins, green raisins, and then you put it into what we used to do, sweat boxes.

They weighed about 70 pounds,

huge, big, thick oak boxes, pine, I should say.

Then you stack them up and you tarp them and you let them there for a couple of months to cure so they'd even out.

And that was, that was a lot.

You had a derrick.

We had a big derrick before we got went to bins.

But again, that was something that was supposed to build character.

Yeah.

Well, tell me, just one, we got one minute left.

So you got only one minute you can answer this question.

Why are table grapes even more risky than raisins the raisins sound like a

50 part process because you don't put

it the farmer who and i've done table grapes so

you get a raisin grape is the size of your thumbnail or something little tiny gold but if you want to get that grape big and and sweet right there's new varieties now but you got to girdle the vine that means make a little cut around the either the stump or each cane after you prune.

You have to

spray it with gibrelic acid, which enlarges the berry.

Then, for the whole summer that you're growing this, you've got to water not every two weeks or two and a half weeks, you've got to water every week.

You've got to thin leaves so the sun can see, hit the grapes and make them color.

There's birds, you've got to get the birds away from them.

They'll peck, especially if they're they're red grapes or black grapes.

And there's so many hand jobs, and it's so.

And the point is, you have to make a box of grapes that looks exactly like someone in New York City will want a perfect bunch.

It has to taste sweet, right?

And you can't have any rot.

Then you have to bring it all out and you have to clip it.

And so it's kind of like surgery.

And the point is that,

whereas you have maybe today

three or four thousand dollars an acre before you see in a raisin or five thousand six thousand you may have twenty thousand in a table grape wow and then you have to make sure that it doesn't rain because they because you're going to pick right now into september october even some november they'll put plastic over the the rows but if you get a rain and those big fat sweet berries uh if you get a quarter inch they'll split and once they split the juice comes down the gnats get in it and you've lost your

wow i i just a final thing in

19

year my mom died, 1989, we had red ruby seedless.

I wrote about this in Fields Without Dreams, and it rained.

And we tried to put Botran and Captan, all these were fungicides in those days.

And we tried to put plastic over the rose because we knew it was going to rain, but it rained and it rained and it rained.

And they were beautiful grapes.

And the next by morning, we just walked out there.

And

my brother said to me, Smell them.

It's like a distillery.

And you looked up, and there were millions of these little gnats.

And these big, beautiful three-pound bunches were hanging, and they were just dripping juice down on the ground.

And we had to take them to the

crusher to make, I don't know what they made, grape juice or cheap wine out of them.

Yeah.

Wow.

Well, Victor,

thanks.

It's, I mean, fascinating.

And I know many of our listeners

really enjoy hearing about your life growing up and life on the farm and the rigor of it.

So

before we close, I do want to thank our listeners for listening.

And no matter what platform they do that on, we appreciate it.

Those that listen on iTunes and Apple podcasts have the opportunity to rate the show five stars, one to five stars, and the 99%

rate of five stars.

And we thank you for doing that.

And some leave comments also.

And here's a comment.

Now, one of the

podcasts in the recent week or two that you and I had pre-recorded

because you were going to be away at Hillsdale,

we asked, I asked of you, excuse me, one of the listeners asked that I asked a question of you about your musical

tastes.

And that got so, it was so popular.

I got so much commentary about that.

So, this one is titled VDH's Music.

I've listened to the Victor Davis-Hansen podcast for years since Rush passed away.

It's been a major source of news commentary for me.

After listening to the user question podcast, I realized his taste in music is exactly what I would have thought it would be.

Country to Broadway musicals, tributes to his beloved family.

It was a great episode and prompted me to review it for the first time i guess it means went back and listened again thanks i thank you uh for what you do even through your covet struggles both jack and sammy have been amazing but just don't stop the rants uh and we don't intend to and this is signed by uh tabella so thanks to bella for that yeah it was uh was really really uh interesting to listen to victor's uh far-ranging tastes and music so um victor thanks so much um for uh sharing your wisdom today.

Again, to our listeners, thanks for listening.

And please be assured, we will be back soon with yet another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.