The California Model

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to our listeners.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com, and subscribe to a free subscription and get on our newsletter list, or have a paid subscription and get ultra content as well, which is well worth the $5 a month or $50

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Victor is the scholar, columnist, and essayist for everybody who is new and very adept at political commentary.

And we will get to some of that about California after this break.

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Welcome back, Victor.

I hope you're doing well today and ready for discussion mostly of California.

If we run out of California dreaming, then we'll turn to other subjects.

But I wanted to pursue since California is largely seen as the

left's model for what they would like the country to become.

It would be worth some time.

And there's been a lot of articles out about things going on in California.

So we'll focus on that and maybe move on to other things.

But how are you doing?

I'm feeling well.

I'm going through my morning email.

Dear Professor Hansen, dear Victor, dear Mr.

Hansen, I suggest that you might try hyperbaric oxygen, maybe steroids,

radical doses of antihistamine.

and then 50 other different modulating drugs, which I appreciate all these suggestions.

But I'm upbeat and I'm

going to Hillsdale College to finish my last year of teaching there after, gosh, I went there in 2004.

So it's 18 years.

I haven't been home for Labor Day in 18 years.

So

and I'm going to be 69 on September 5th.

So I want to spend my 70th birthday, God willing.

for the first time in 20 years in the Sierras.

How's that?

Oh, that sounds like a good idea.

Next year, yes.

All right.

You know, before we get into California, I just came across this morning an article on the president of the American Historical Association.

I know you're a history.

Yeah, we talked.

Oh, did you?

So he didn't really say much.

He just said the new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own time as well as

change over time.

Okay, what else?

Because that's the cardinal tenet of historical wokeism, that you use the postmodern customs and mores of 2022 to project back into the past

and use them as melodramatic condemnation of others.

Works, it means if William DeCompthe Sherman, you know,

frees 20,000 slaves and takes a bunch of Midwesterners from Michigan and Indiana and Minnesota who've never seen an African-American person person in their entire life.

And we know that from the diaries that were written.

And he takes them down into the bowls

of

Georgia and frees them and burns down the plantations of their oppressors, especially Hal Copps, governor of Georgia.

And then he goes up to the Carolinas and does the same thing.

Guess what?

He used the N-word once or two times.

And so what is he?

He's a racist and he's a horrible person.

And that's how we do it.

So we who are not perfect demand perfection of people who were in a pre-industrial society that died in very

much

shorter lives than we did.

And they endured horrific medical procedures.

They were ill.

They didn't have any modern appurtenances.

And yet they're supposed to be as sophisticated morally as we.

And of course, we in the present

who abort maybe a million babies a a year, maybe eight or nine thousand as they go through the birth canal,

and we have about a million people defecating, urinating, fornicating, injecting drugs on our streets, and we have everyday videos of people who walk up and give people concussions or kill them, and they're out on bail, and they will be out on bail that day.

We are a moral people

with no clue what people 50 to 100 years are going to think about us when they look at a woke and they

send it to the trash heap of history where it belongs.

Yeah,

okay, so let's turn to the left model of the future at California.

And I have three things to

state just to give an overview of what we're looking at.

That

the last nuclear plant was scheduled to close completely by 2025.

Banning new gas cars was supposed to be complete by 2035.

And the absence of or

carbon neutral California was scheduled for 2045.

And a colleague of yours, Bill Whalen, said this about that in an article he wrote: That's a lot of California dreaming and potentially something of a nightmare.

And I just start there with commentary and we'll see where it goes.

Okay, so a bunch of elites that have all of this money, and that's where California is run.

It's run in Silicon Valley, Stanford, Berkeley, Nexus, San Francisco, all the way to San Jose.

And there's, as I said, six to seven trillion dollars of market capitalization.

They've come up with the idea that they're going to ban

internal combustion engines, right?

And so what are they going to replace it with?

They haven't told us.

And what is that going to be?

who knows is it going to be hydrogen if it's going to be electric and it's going to be teslas and things like that then we have to ask ourselves well where are they going to get the

where are they going to get the energy because right now the california grid to be very succinct

is only 20% renewable.

We import 20 to 30 percent of our power from hydroelectric up north in Washington, or we do it from coal plants in places like Arizona or oil plants in coal in Utah.

And we decommissioned two huge nuclear plants that gave us, you know, almost 30% total with diabolical.

We were going to get rid of diabolical.

We didn't.

So my point is this.

We can barely get through right now 41 million people our grid and we're paying it through the nose to buy electricity.

which is cheaper than the 27 to 30 cents kilowatt hour that we charge ourselves.

So So now we're going to, just in a few years, say we're going to be 100%

on the grid and we're going to charge every car.

And how many cars are there?

What, 18, 19 million, million cars in California?

So what are we going to go do with all of those?

Are we going to,

I don't know, $19 billion?

Are they worth over $1,000?

I mean, we're going to get rid of trillions of dollars in cars and just junk them.

Like

it's going to be California's cash for clunkers.

Is that what we're going to do?

We're going to slowly replace them with what?

I ordered a Tesla.

I think I told the audience that.

And it's very interesting.

In California, it's over 10% tax and license.

So when you see your little $63,000, it's not $63,000.

And then there's various add-ons.

So you're talking $70,000 for a car that's, you know, sort of as comfortable or not as comfortable as a Honda CR-V.

And so nobody's going to do that.

And I don't know how they're going to prepare a feudal society that has no middle class.

It's gone.

And so are they going to tell the 42% of the population who still identify as Latino?

Are they going to say to them,

I tell you what, you guys, you've got to get those electric trucks.

There's a big steal.

They're about $85,000.

And

they'll go about 200 miles with a big load on them, maybe 150 miles.

So you think you're going to go drive down to San Diego?

I don't think you're going to be doing that, but you shouldn't be doing it anyway.

Are they going to say, is Gavin Newsom going to say this?

And Nancy, why don't they just say this?

Mark Zuckerberg says we have to transition to renewable fuels in so many years, and we're happy they're finally reacting and saving the planet.

And I, Mark Zuckerberg, will not fly another private jet, nor will Leonard DiCaprio.

And I, Barbara Streison, and I, Oprah, and I, LeBron, swear that I shall not live in a home that has larger than 5,000 square feet, nor shall I have any other homes other than the one I live in, because they're very expensive to heat and it requires natural gas and non-renewable generated electricity to cool it.

I'm not going to contribute to the planet's decline.

Are they going to do that?

As Nancy Pelosi says, I have twin refrigerators.

I don't know how many cubic feet, 25 plus 25, 50 cubic feet, 25,000 bucks for that take too much energy.

I don't need all that ice cream.

Gavin Newsome, you know, it's really expensive to go out.

I wanted to get into a vegan insect diet to save energy.

So I'm not going to the French laundry, much less.

asking you to do something that I wouldn't do at all, like wear a mask.

So the elite didn't say anything as exemplars of this new, because you know why they didn't?

Because we know what it's going to be like.

It's going to be the energy green version of the mask and quarantine mandate.

Just think of that.

Think of your elected representatives in California.

Think of them on national security issues.

Just look, think of them.

We can go through them very quickly.

Barbara Boxer, she was a big green person.

Where does she live?

Rancho Mirage, an artificial creation of

Colorado River Water.

And she's what?

A registered Chinese agent?

Diane Feinstein, champion of what?

Senate

intelligence committee had a Chinese spy as her chauffeur for 20 years.

Her late husband added to his hundreds of millions of dollars with Chinese investments.

Is she going to be a green fighter from her big mansion in San Francisco or her former huge Tahoe second or third or fourth home?

Maybe it's the Pelosis with their Palazzo in Napa.

Or maybe did you think that Paul Pelosi's brand new Porsche he wrecked while drunk was a gas guzzler?

Or was it a green electric Porsche?

And did he really need, you know, a $130,000 car?

Does he really need that as a man of the people?

And Gavin Newsome, if he can have, why can't we just say this to Gavin Newsome?

You have these multiple homes

that people help you buy.

And can you just pay the taxes so they don't put on the internet that you're late again on your your property tax?

Just do that.

And so

that's who they are.

And they have no moral credibility to enact these radical changes, which require leadership, but not these people.

Yeah.

They're grifters.

It sounds like they are creating a model future for the left of a bunch of peasantry who are going to live lives in hovels and not be able to do too much in order to pay for the elite's excesses.

When I go to Palo Alto, I have a little apartment on the Stanford campus.

I either walk or ride a bike before COVID.

I would go into Menlo Park or Atherton,

any of these beautiful communities.

And believe me, they're kind of like the Elven Forest and the Lord of the Rings.

They're beautiful.

They have these majestic oaks and people.

And then I walk by these sidewalkless, beautiful winding roads.

And it's beautiful, but every car is a Tesla and stuff and then you see something that

in comes a smoky 2005

ford truck with a trailer and out come a bunch of mexican-american guys and they do the lawn or they're coming in an old car and they're doing so you get the impression that the class that is being served has created these utopian bromohides for everybody else but without worry how the people who are serving them are going to react.

How are they going to react?

Do they ever go down to places like Mendota or San Joaquin or Tranquility or Fowler or Sanger or Selma and say to these people,

this is what you're going to do, and I'm going to live a life with you for two weeks and show you and train you and prep you and tutor you on how to do it.

So let me get in your pickup and we'll go out to work one day with you and we'll see how we can make your life greener and more affordable.

They don't do that.

They don't care.

You know why they don't care?

Because they,

virtue, signal, and performance are their theoretical progressivism and that allows them to live like reactionary.

Yeah.

Victor, let's take a moment to have a break and then come back because there are some signs that things might be changing and we'll have a look at those.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

Victor, the signs of change, I think, are, and some of these are good and bad.

I'm not suggesting they're all good signs in the sense of, well, we have big companies are just exiting the state.

So we know quite a few years ago, Tesla decided to do that.

But just recently, Amazon has stopped building its distribution centers in California.

And the second sign I see of change is Gavin Newsom came out against a proposition 30, which is a clean car and clean air act that would

increase taxes by 1.75%.

And it's for a zero emission vehicles subsidy and infrastructure.

And half of that were incentives reserved for low income.

And he came out against it.

So, I mean,

perhaps there are signs of change even among the left here.

What do you think?

No, I'm sorry.

I've been to San Francisco lately and it still looks like medieval Paris

and there's homeless everywhere and cars still have signs in that

steal what you want.

The car is unlocked.

Please don't break the window.

And I read the

California papers online every day and there's smash and grab, carjackings,

killing people in downtown LA.

Crime is out of control.

The roads are all under construction.

High-speed rail is ossified.

It's not doing anything.

It's just frozen.

I can just ride down my, I just drive down the other day, I drove down my avenue and I'm still blocked off for two years.

No, no, no.

It's structural.

It's structural.

The problem is that the can-do middle class has fled, four or five million of them in the the last 30 years, 700,000, 800,000 of them to Texas alone.

And the Mexican-American community is evolving from many of them who came here illegally with no English, no skills.

They are now evolving, but they're not at the point where they're the majority of middle-class replacements.

So we don't have a fully developed.

potent middle class.

We have an underclass and we have this coastal elite and the coastal elite hasn't changed a bit.

If you went over to any California and you asked them a series of questions, would you like to shut down the entire west side, get rid of 5 million acres of farming that allows us to have, you know, clean, edible, and affordable food?

They say, yeah, absolutely.

We got to save the Chinook salmon and we got to save the,

you know, that the little smelt, the delta smelt.

And if you tell them, well, we're not sure what causes the delta smelt's disappearance, it could be sewage, it could be the striped bass predator.

They don't care.

It's a religion.

So I don't think anything has changed.

I think it has to get a little worse first.

It's getting there very quickly.

Yeah.

You know, what I noticed among my super left friends, and I'm talking people that take up woke agenda and try to force it into their companies and such.

When they are retiring, they are retiring to Vermont, New Mexico,

wherever, wherever Portland, getting out of this state, it is the strangest thing I've ever, you know, for me, but anyway.

Well, I mean, it's 13%,

it's 13% the top rate.

And I think you get 60,000 and you're up above 10.

So when you have this, and Biden just increased the income tax.

So if you're making 240,000 and your wife and you make 120, and

you're paying, you know, over 50% right off the top.

That's not counting payroll tax or Obamacare penalty tax, all that.

And then you say to yourself, well, I'm the highest tax person in the United States, but look what I get in return for that.

I get

the highest property crime per capita in the world,

I should say in the United States, in San Francisco, the worst rated infrastructure, at least down right above Mississippi, and many ratings, the bottom 10 public schools in the United States,

the highest electricity prices per kilowatt in the continental United States, the highest gasoline prices.

So when Gavin Newsom goes around and says, you know, we're the freest, we're not free, we're serfs.

And when he says they have these new posters now, these billboards that says, oh, look what happened in, you know, Texas with the schools and

school shootings that wouldn't happen here.

It could have, it happens every day in different manifestations here.

What do you think san bernardino is about terast

and the point is in california

it's not free because you have no disposable income and what that means is that every single californian 27 of them were not born here so they don't have a long acculturation in custom and tradition and high respect for the irs but i can tell you when i get in my pickup and i drive around and what do i see i see swap meets i see corner food stores ad hoc with chairs and cardboard tables.

I see clothes on a rack outside a house.

I see a tire.

I go to the lumber yard just two miles away and guess what?

I can buy fruit there.

I get accosted on the way back to my car.

You want to buy strawberries, peaches, plums?

Here they are.

And so what I'm getting at, and when you have a restrictive economy like that, people make the necessary adjustments.

And we have a huge black market on taxed economy and it's illegal.

And when you say to someone, hmm, would you come out and climb under my house and spend an awful four hours as a professional plumber

to fix this?

They say, nah, I'm not going to do that.

But I'll tell you what, if you pay me $70, $80, $90 an hour, I'll come out on Sunday, but it has to be in cash.

It has to be in cash.

That's what California is now.

It's a third world black market economy for the lower classes.

And for the wealthy, it's, you know,

it's tax avoidances and paying income as capital gains tax at a reduced rate.

And the middle class that's vestigial, that's calcified,

it's screwed.

And it gets nothing in return for the huge amount of money it pays for its utilities, its fuels, its food, its shelter.

and

its taxes.

I wish I didn't be, and everybody would say, well, if you say, if that's true, Victor, then you're a hypocrite.

You should leave.

Yeah, I should, but I'm burdened and chained by memories.

I mean, I'm looking out the window right now and I see a ghost of my great, my grandfather here and his stories about his grandmother there and my mother there and this farm.

And I think, let me just fix it up and give it to the next generation.

They can figure out what to do with this tiny speck of what's left of a farm.

But yeah, I'm not a beat.

It would be dishonest to our listeners to say that it's encouraging.

It's got to get worse.

I don't want it to get worse, but

it's not unlivable.

By unlivable, I mean

30 years ago, I could drive to the Stanford campus when I was a visiting professor in two hours and 45 minutes.

Now,

if I do everything perfectly, I get down and I calculate the traffic patterns on the 99, on 152, on high five, on 101, on one everything

on 85, on 280, and I do it just perfectly, I can do it in three hours and 30 minutes.

But

if I am in a meeting or I am giving a lecture or somewhere and I get into a adverse traffic pattern anywhere, not just in El Palo Alto, I'm talking 100 miles, 80 miles away on 152.

I can tell you, or I'm going to bump into a construction or a slowdown site.

I was trying to come home the other day and I thought, wow, I'm going to leave and two hours early.

I got a Fox thing to do at home.

I'm going to barrel down who is no way in the world it would be five and a half hours.

And bam, just when I said that, all the traffic was backed up for a construction zone that somebody had hit.

And so that's what, that's California.

There's no margin of error.

There's no margin.

There's no reserve electricity that's going to stop a brownout.

There's no 10,000 reserve firefighters that are going to rush in like hoplites at a battle and save the big forest fire.

There is no

Caltrans that is going to get your roads up to date.

No.

No, and the government has 87,000 new tax IRS tax agents that are going to start coming down on that middle class harder.

Maybe they'll even go after your flea market people.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

No, they won't do that.

No, anybody who makes over 100,000 and less than a million should have a big X on his back, crosshair, because he's in the crosshairs.

And if you do not get a salary,

you are going to be audited no matter what.

If you pay 55%, I pay 55 plus percent of all my income.

And I bet I will be targeted.

I take no deductions and I bet I get targeted.

I get everybody will be targeted because they have to.

Where are they going to get the money for all this stuff?

Yeah.

Gavin Newsom gave $500 million to illegal aliens so they could adjust

to COVID.

He gives this money here.

It gets there.

Remember when they went up from 12 to 13.3?

He said, this is going to be temporary.

Jerry Brown said, we'll revoke it in a year or two.

They're talking about a 15 or 16% income tax.

Yeah.

They're probably going to put quotas on these IRS agents.

Well, you get paid such and such this year.

You better bring back to the IRS that much.

Yeah, they had a little amendment.

Remember the Republicans, their little pipe dream amendment?

Well, just make it that they won't not go under after anybody that makes less than $400,000.

No,

we're not going to do that.

Well,

speaking of the economy, a new bill is making its way through California legislature, Bill 257, and it's to regulate fast food for labor violations.

And they're going to try to make the fast food corporate chain as responsible as the local guy for any violation against labor.

And this is expected to raise the price of fast food.

And so, for the lower classes, who are largely those who eat the fast food, it doesn't look good.

I used to

when I had children that were small, and I was teaching and I had to and my wife was working and I had to rush home from school to the farm and pick them all up and I and on particular nights when I didn't teach at night I had to be responsible I confess to my audience I went to fast food I haven't had a fast food hamburger in 30 years but as my children remind me you gave us fast food

so anyway the point I'm making is I avoided certain days when I knew that EBT EBV, EBT, electric bank transfer, EBT cards were renewed because this is what happened.

You would go down Floral Avenue in Selma

and the line would be out in the street.

And people, when they had the money, they would, that's what, that was the cheapest way.

If you consider time and energy and the quality of food, it was clean.

It was nutritious.

It wasn't necessarily long-term in your interest to eat fatty foods, trans fats, et cetera.

But you you weren't going to die tomorrow.

You were going to live one more day.

So it was packed.

And so the idea you'd go after those people, unless you're trying to help the consumers of that food, I don't know what the purpose is.

But

the thing about all of this is that if you think, what's the common theme?

The common theme is that some guy that lives up in Pacific Heights or Fairfax or, I don't know,

Woodside has these dreams that, oh man, supersized drinks are awful for you.

They're just cornstarch, sugar, corn sugar.

That's horrible.

Yes.

And then, oh, man, you know, everybody doesn't need natural gas heaters.

We're going to outlaw that in Berkeley.

You're going to have to have electric.

Yes, that makes sense.

And, you know, they have these, who needs this, you know, 7.0 liter engine and these big gas guns?

Yes, that makes sense.

But it all makes sense from your world, your world that is what it's in a little cocoon so all of these people like gavin newsom and nancy pelosi

they have all this money they earn from non-muscular labor where did paul pelosi make his money he made it with real real estate wheeling and dealing on paper because his wife had and stocks as we knew the other day when she tipped him off and he went out and bought futures

and on regulated or unregulated industries.

And we know that.

And that's how they make it.

And so they wonder why, wow, we live such sanitary, anal retentive, perfectly green lives.

Why doesn't everybody else?

So we're going to pass laws to force them.

But they don't understand that that nice, beautiful granite counter was some sweaty guy up on Granite Mountain that carved it, that mined it.

And those wonderful, I don't know, teak fours you got.

Some guy trucked them in from the Port of LA in a stinky diesel truck and he barely made any money at $7 a gallon.

So I could go on, but you get the part.

The problem is that the elite have no firsthand or do not want any first-hand affinities or experience or empathy with the muscular classes.

No, and they seem to miss it because it's incrementally and insidiously adding to the struggle of those lower income classes.

And so they just think it's not really there.

You know what I mean?

Like you can't.

They have an attitude that when globalization set in, that they had particular skills.

And they had particular skills because they were morally superior and intellectually superior to people, other people.

And they were in on it.

They understood what was going on.

They went to Stanford.

They went to Berkeley.

They went to Harvard.

They went to Yale.

They were in.

They knew what was going on in the world and they made a ton of money.

And they just can't understand how these stupid, deplorables, and dregs and chumps and irredeemables and clingers were just clueless.

And that's how they look at the world.

And they pass laws on all of these people.

You know,

you should have a

Chinook salmon that can come from the Pacific and then swim down that little San Joaquin River and then take his little fins and flap his way up to the Sierra.

Because I read in 1870, that's what they did.

Yes, and there were 3 million Californians, and in a drought, the San Joaquin River dried completely up.

And so there weren't regular salmon runs.

So you want to take a dam and a reservoir and use it for purposes other than it was intended, irrigation, recreation, hydroelectric, flood control.

It's at your use to regulate a year-round release so you can have your salmon and then you can go to your

you know, your presidio party and say, I was really on the cutting edge.

My daughter is really on the cutting edge of restoring salmon to this San Joaquin River.

Okay, yeah.

And at whose cost?

Some poor guy who owns 200 acres, he's on his tractor all day, and he has no water.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's take another break and then come right back on that green initiative and look at some of the results of wildfires we've seen in the courts.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back, Victor.

The courts just issued their judgment on a PGE-caused fire that burned down Paradise, which was a city up north, and it was called the Camp Fire.

And

PGE was found guilty of all the people that were killed in that fire, 84.

So, 84 counts of manslaughter.

I'm just curious what you think that will mean for a company to be accused of manslaughter.

And then also just speaking of green initiatives,

California is a tinderbox, as we all know.

And then if you have any words on the Stonehenge Railway, high-speed railway, that would be interesting too.

Well, who did all this?

PG ⁇ E didn't do it.

PG ⁇ E, 40 years ago, was forced to do certain things as a utility, and they did.

And so they shut down their southern california nuclear power plant they shut down their sacramento power plant they didn't build any more natural gas power plants and they were told that you know that you're going to get 20 of your power grid from people's roofs so they're all going to put solar panels and they're going to be subsidized to do it but you're going to have the overhead cost to hook them up into the grid and then you're going to compute what they do and it's not going to pay out for you because they're not going to pay any power bills But you've got the overhead.

So we got that.

We have millions of Californians like myself that are

generating solar energy that almost covers what they consume and giving PG ⁇ E little, if any money.

But PG ⁇ E is responsible to service our electrical hookups, meters, et cetera.

Okay.

And then in addition to that,

They told PG ⁇ E all of the forms of energy production that is cheap and profitable, you can't can't use.

Sorry.

And then they said,

California is 41 million people, and we need a new grid, but we're not going to give you the mechanisms to make the new grid.

You're not going to have the profit margin that you need as a utility to invest in, just like the freeways, just like the schools.

Okay.

And then they said,

Ancient forest management is

antiquated.

So the old idea that your grandparents, and we used to watch them at Shaver Lake, Huntington Lake, Pine Flat Lake, Bass Lake, you name it, Florence Lake, Edison Lake, you know what they did.

They would go through and they would look at,

they would just take a bulldozer and make a logging road.

And then they would go through and we would, the Forest Service asked them to clean up some brush and you know, dead stuff.

And if they see a dead tree and they could use it, maybe a Douglas fir, then they would take it down.

Or they would take down a live tree if it was crowded.

They paint in different colors.

They had codes and they would take them out.

And then if a tree was a pine and it was dead, they could say, well, we'll grind it up for plywood or maybe make cheap pine for, I don't know, door frames or windows, something like that.

But they did.

They were everywhere.

We had a huge timber industry.

And we said, we don't do that.

No, no, no, no.

That's what people down in Mississippi and Georgia do.

We don't do that.

So when our trees die, we let them crumble crumble and mold and rot, and then they fall on things, and then they enrich the biosphere of the forest floor.

We have a rich ecosystem of bugs and woodpeckers and squirrels.

Okay, but you also have a tinderbox when you have 60 million of these dead trees.

And someone who hiked all through the Sierras every summer until this year, all you saw were dead trees everywhere.

everywhere.

And so when we had this fire up at Chaverin Huntington or we had the paradise, what did anybody expect?

And

they had no preventive maintenance to stop that.

And then they didn't send, they didn't have enough people to stop it.

And then when you said to them, you were releasing trillions of tons of carbon emissions into the air, much more than the cars, much more from the cars for years, they didn't listen to you because they were green wizards.

And they said, you know what?

We have a good forest management.

We're not exploitive like you old timber company lackeys.

And so that's what we have.

So then PGE found out that, wow, their antiquated grid when it's in a drought and it goes through the foothills and it goes through forests like Southern California Edison's.

It's dangerous.

And if they get a wind and we get winds in October, they can be very dangerous here

in late September and it flaps around and that old high

voltage line snaps onto a drought-stricken

hillside where you forbid people to graze.

Grazing's bad, remember, even though it gets rid of the dry brush and the fodder for wildflower.

And then it fires.

And then when it goes out of control, you blame PG ⁇ E and you sue it for manslaughter.

God, what a sad tale.

Yeah, and then when people live in the foothills and they get burned out, guess what?

They can't go back there because the insurance companies won't will know.

They understand what's going on.

They're not going to insure those homes again.

i can you can go up to huntington lake and see that horrific fire two years ago and you drive around uh the dam and these poor people had these little cabins that had been in their general families for generations and they were very well kept up they were honor you know they were an honored possession and they were integrated within the forest they were not the huge you know aspen colorado homes they weren't they were just seasonal cabins and they went up like kindling.

And they had these 100-year forest service leases, 99.

It started, you know, 1912 or something when Henry Huntington started to develop Huntington Lake.

And they, you know, they came due about during the Obama administration.

Of course, the Obama administration got rid of 7,000, 8,000 cabins on forest land because he just couldn't stand those people living on forest land, those stupid peasants.

They don't have the taste of a Martha Vineyard estate owner or

Hawaiian ocean front owner like he does with his $100 million from Netflix, but he got rid of them and he wanted to get rid of those.

So they decreased the leases, you know, to yearly or bi-yearly, and then they went up in smoke just from this fire.

You have no way you could save them.

And guess what?

I don't think more than half of them will be replaced.

The Forest Service will make it so difficult.

And

they were very, you know, they were hard.

A lot of them were not insured.

They were old.

They're not going to be there.

And you're going to have a vital mountain community that used to go up in the summer out of the heat.

They had, you know, get-togethers.

They frequented the old mountain store.

They were a really great mountain community.

They're going to be decimated.

And that's what they want.

A denuded force of people.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's so sad.

So that they can go hiking in their very expensive.

Yes, they can get their

range rover that they bought.

They bought that range Range Rover at $140,000 with their all-weather tires.

Then they get those weird jackets.

What are the little pockets, those air pockets all over them?

I see them on the Stanford campus.

I don't know.

I'll trust you on that.

I know.

There's some kind of really weird jacket, I'm told, costs $400 or $500.

And then they get these German-made designer boots.

hiking boots and they get all the accoutrements and they go up and they have a wonderful time once a year.

And then they get out of the forest and they say, we don't want anybody else living here.

Yeah, they definitely don't want the hoi polloy there.

Victor, we are right at time here, but I had one last thought.

It's a quote I was reading, and this article was,

I think, left-wing because they were worried about this.

But I think in California, they shouldn't worry.

And here it is: quote, politically, college graduates have become the base of the Democrats, while workers without degrees have shifted to Republicans, unquote.

Here in California, I don't think I see that.

I find that, you know, it's kind of ironic that they were so worried about that because here we definitely have our workers tend to be Democratic so far.

Maybe it's changing.

What do you think?

I think there's a little bit of the younger generations.

I see it on Stanford a little bit.

But I will say that there's a force multiplying effect.

So if I have to deal with somebody at the Stanford Daily, left-wing, or the Stanford Review, conservative, or if somebody comes in my office and they are a Stanford conservative, incognito, and I have to deal or I teach a class or I give a lecture with regular Stanford students, I can tell you that the conservative person is far more classically educated.

They don't have a moment.

to take these race, class, gender, diversity, equity, inclusion therapeutic classes.

So they actually read history.

They know great literature,

as a rule.

So that's encouraging that one of them has more effect, I think, than five on the left because they're so much better educated.

The other thing is that

look at what Joe Biden did.

He just with the stroke of a pen canceled,

I don't think it's 300 billion, I think it's going to be more like $500 billion in student loans.

You know, if it's up to 500 billion,

he canceled 33%

or more than 33 percent of the 1.4 trillion dollar that's owed and he basically did it because polls had showed that college voters in college and recent graduates were disappointed with joe biden they thought he wasn't radical enough and they weren't going to vote So he did it right before the midterm.

Nancy Pelosi told him it was illegal.

He couldn't do it in June.

So why didn't he argue with her then?

Or why didn't he do it before she did it why did he do it right now 80 days before the election because he wanted to firm up his base and

where is the left they always tell us that donald trump was extra-legal that he tried to undermine the the constitution think about it did he ever do that

for that matter did he ever do any of those things did he put eric Colder in leg irons for refusing a subpoena?

Did his FBI, you know, go after Joe Biden?

Did he have meetings with the FBI every morning and say, use the Logan Act, go after these people?

Did he go into

the Obama home and get all those files that he hadn't quite been up to snuff with with the archives?

Is there a Lois Lerner in the Trump administration that went after, used the IRS?

Did those people who leaked, you know, and then think of all the people that Biden has done.

You think the people who leaked the Dobbs verdict, and they leaked it before it came out, you think they're going to be treated like James O'Keefe, who they're going after because he had in his knowledge, I don't know if it's his possession, Ashley Biden's diary.

So

it's very scary right now, this use of these institutions in extra-legal fashion.

And the idea you can break the law and just get rid of debt.

And you say, I think it's going to boomerang because there's more people,

as many people, who didn't go to college.

And he's saying to to them

and he's saying to people in college think of this too so it's a it's a double whammy saying to the 50 who didn't go to college

hey hey

you missed out man hey man you missed out so you're going to pay taxes to pay for these people who took sociology and psych and gender study Six years is on the average to graduate.

Half of the people who enrolled graduated.

So anyway, he's going to tell them, you pay for it.

Then he's going to tell the people who did take out loans, oh, you paid paid your loans off each month, sucker.

And then he's going to tell the people who didn't take loans and said, you know, I'm going to borrow from my parents or my grandparents or take two jobs.

He should have waited for Joe Biden.

He would have forgiven that debt.

I don't think it's going to work, but you can see what it's extra legal.

And he is doing so many things.

And, you know, I'm just waiting for Liz Cheney to say, I have in my hand proof that Donald Trump was planning to pack the court to 15 justices, that when they got control of the Senate, they wanted to get rid of the filibuster, that he wants to sabotage the electoral college, that he wants a national voting law to supersede the constitutional rights of states to set their own ballot protocols.

I want to know that.

I want to show that he's a revolutionary.

She's not going to do it because he wasn't.

Yeah.

Victor, thank you so much for everything today.

It's hard to get a perspective on this California and you and I, I know, can't believe that the left would see it as a model for their future America, but

we'll see where California goes.

Maybe that working class will start to support Republicans in California and California politicians will start to rise up that are against these policies that are absolutely destroying it.

That's my only hope.

I hope so.

I think we're,

i just get back to my i'll just finish with this thought my father dropped me off at the uc santa cruz dorm in 1971 it was morrison house on cal college and he walked down and he saw things in five minutes that just you know the old b29 guy and he said to me when this bunch takes over watch out

because they're not they are the most look at the way that they've treated the the walls in this hallway look at the floor with the vomit on look at the people are going to have to clean up after them look at those drugs that everybody's smoking they are the most narcissistic self-interested spoiled brats masquerading as revolutionary he said i fought revolutionaries these are not revolutionaries they're pseudo they're going to take over this country and ruin that's basically what he told me yeah and then he said and you're not going to be a part of it And your dad is a prophet.

He was, man, I tell you.

And my mother was very upset when he got back.

And she said, don't say that to Victor.

He's trying to get to a new world.

Who don't know?

Those kids are very idealistic, perhaps.

No, they're selfish little bastards.

They don't even, they don't take baths.

I went in the shower, Pauline, and they were walking around naked.

And, you know, I went in to urinate and there's girls in there.

And I don't know what they're doing, but they haven't earned the right to have all that freedom.

They don't work.

They don't do anything.

And he was spent a day there.

And then I came home on Christmas and he said, how's it going?

I said, well, everything he said turned about turned out to be pretty underestimations of what they're doing yeah they run it if i read my uh banana slug

alumni news they are the producers they are the screenwriters they are the foundation heads they are the corporate lawyers they are the wall street investors they are the sports owners they are the

everything the college administrators the professors that that generation Yeah.

All right, Victor, well, we'll end on those selfish little bastards and thank our listeners and then our readers at The Blade of Perseus.

Thanks, everybody.

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

Thank you, everyone.