War on Ag and Education in America

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the man lucky enough to be the host.

Victor Davis-Hanson, the star, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where probably within two weeks of this podcast airing, he will be teaching at that very fabled institution.

Victor is also a farmer and classicist and military historian, best-selling author.

Really, we've recommended, I haven't recommended this directly in a long time, but this book is eternal, The Dying Citizen. Folks should get it.

And you can find it and links to other books and many other things that Victor does at VictorHanson.com, his website. We'll talk about that a little more later.

We'll ask Victor to put on his farmer hat, if there is a farmer hat, or just get on the tractor, whatever, because we're going to talk about some agriculture, farm-related, geopolitical issues that include threats to deny food to American children at Christian schools if their schools don't bow to the woke ideology of the Biden administration.

I mean, it's sick stuff, but it's progressive stuff. And we'll do all that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. We're recording today is Sunday, August 7th.
And this show should be up on the World Wide Web on Thursday. Please listen to all Victor's.

I get to do two record twice a week with Victor. So does the great Sammy Wink.

And Victor is starting to interview people himself where he puts the other hosts of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show to Shaman. He did a terrific podcast last week with Stephen Kuay about COVID.

Very much worth listening to. So, Victor,

I know we've talked a couple of podcasts ago about these

growing fights against agriculture, Sri Lanka, in Europe. It's this green

climate change

effort to stop fertilizers. You know, it has to be natural.
This stuff is, it's going global, these fights.

It's now, there's a fight in Canada, but it's coming here if it's not here already in America. And I would like to direct our listeners' attention to

a piece on Power Line that John

Hindraker, I don't know, I never knew how to say it, if it's Hind or Hind, but John's one of the founders of Powerline. And his piece is from August 6th.
It's called The Coming War on Agriculture.

And it relates to another thing I'll raise momentarily, Victor, and then when I stop, I'll shut up and let you

have at it. And he writes,

boy, he's right.

He gets right to my heart on these things. I think many liberals are essentially sadists,

he's writing. They love to boss the rest of us around and make us miserable.
If you didn't know better, you might think they spend their days dreaming up ways to humiliate their fellow citizens.

Here's an idea. Let's screw up the grid to produce blackouts so that people turn on their lights and nothing happens.
They'll never stand for that. We'll make them stand for that and like it too.

Here's another idea. Let's tell people they can no longer eat hamburgers and bacon.
They have to eat crickets and vegetables. What? No one is crazy enough to go along with that.
Sure, they will.

All we have to do is tell them it's necessary to to save the planet. I'll stop here in a second, Victor.
John concludes, actually, I'm concluding, but he writes much more than I'm about to say.

Making food scarce and expensive so that much of the population is threatened with starvation has another benefit for liberals. They can respond by writing people checks representing food subsidies.

Thus, they turn millions of formerly self-sufficient Americans into government-reliant serfs. It's a win-win if you are a liberal.

So, Victor, this is, there is this war on agriculture under the guise of green. It's got serious, dramatic ramifications.

And if I may now, on the latter part about the Reliance, there's a great piece on National Review by Lathan Watts, and it's titled A New Low in the Radical Left's Culture War: The Weaponization of Food.

And in a nutshell, he's telling a story of a Christian school school in Florida called Grant Park Christian Academy that serves,

it's basically poor kids. So they've been reliant on the FDA and their, it's the national school lunch program.
Well, guess what? This is a Christian

institution. And now if they do not accept the whole nine yards of the transgender, bisexual, shared bathrooms, whatever crap hole is the official policy of the Biden administration.

These poor kids will not be getting their lunches. Too bad.

So food is that we have warfare on food. Food is being used as a weapon.
This is really distressing. Victor, what are your broad thoughts on these matters? Well,

start out, this formal war on agriculture that is the government directed. and elite directed takes place when there's a de facto war in agriculture.

Because remember one thing about agriculture, it's at the bottom of the food chain. It's where all the price hikes aggregate.

By that, I mean they are when they get up in the morning, a farmer has to pay for diesel fuel. And I'm looking out my window at orchards and I hear all night, every night, equipment.

That price to run that equipment has gone from about three dollars to seven dollars a gallon, seven dollars a gallon.

And when you look at these organophosphates, organochlorides, nitrogen, it's tripled. And when you look at labor, nobody's, California Jack is talking about minimum wage anymore.

We were killing each other over whether California would force people to pay $15 an hour. They're paying for piecework an average of $20, $25 an hour.
So there is no money.

And when you look at commodity prices, in some cases they're high, but I mean, take almond prices. They're $1.53 a pound.
They're lower than the cost of production.

And I'm not even talking about electricity that's up well over 28, 29 cents

or

a kilowatt hour. And so what I'm getting at, I guess, Jack, is that we are warring already on farmers, and we're asking them to pay more money and get not much more or less than their product.

And that is not sustainable.

But given what you referenced, I mean, in the Netherlands, they're having these protests and what happened in Sri Lanka, you see that there's an international group of theorists who believe that nitrogen in a chemical or synthetic form is somewhat different than nitrogen that comes out of manure.

And I can tell you that nitrogen per se, elemental nitrogen, is not. Now, there's another question of whether you want other additives in it or not.

And so someone who farmed most of his life as well as taught, I can tell you that I have used both. I put 10 tons of manure on a vineyard or an orchard and I've used nitrogen.

I've used calcium nitrate. I've used ammonium nitrate.
I'm used ammonium sulfate. I've used all of them.
I've used 15, 15, 15. I've used every combination of potassium, phosphate, and nitrogen known.

And if you don't have that, you're not going to be able to produce. The key is not that you won't have crops.
People forget that. It's not that, you know, corn won't sprout, but you will not have a

product in sufficient quality and quantity to justify the inputs that you're putting into it. In other words, you have fixed cost.
That fixed cost is the interest payment on your big combine.

That fixed cost is your diesel fuel.

That fixed cost is your liability insurance. That That fixed cost, I can go on.
I used to walk around the farm every day and my head would be like a calculator reeling.

I'd think, oh my God, today is this much we paid prorated insurance, this much we paid for diesel food, this much we paid for hydraulic fuel, this much we paid for labor, this much we paid for FICA, this is much much we paid for insurance.

And then I looked at the crop and said, where did the money come in? Well, it's all waiting to the end of the year if you have one crop. And so it's hard enough.

And now we're telling the farmer, people who don't know anything about farming, they may think they know something about, I don't know, biology, but they are telling them what they can and cannot do.

And if they do it, it's sort of like the military, Jack, when you go in and you tell people, this is what you're going to do, and this is what we think of you.

Because people think that farmers like, I guess they love synthetic fertilizers or they love pesticides. They don't.
They're the people who put it on. They're the people who live on the ground.

They're the people who drink the water they pump out on their farm homestead that comes from the aquifer where people are fertilizing.

But my point is that you keep doing this and it's sort of like reaching 40% of your recruitment level. You're going to get 40% of your food level.
And if I go into Whole Foods, it looks really neat.

I mean, wow. Or I go into Trader Joe's in California.

Everybody, you know, the checkers, the guys have, you know, long hair and they've got tattoos and the women have rings on their nose and it's really kind of a hip-neat place.

And you go over and you look at the hip-neat food and it's all there. But you know what's happened the last two years? It's it's sky high.

It's sky high and it's going to get a lot higher. And all of that stuff is predicated on somebody named Bud Smith in Nebraska.

or Tulare or Montana getting up in the morning at five and going out there and doing what he knows how to do best. And if you tell him he can't do that or you prevent him from doing that,

you're going to have something in food analogous to what you have in fuel right now. And we're getting close to that.

Victor, in California, is there a particular disdain for farmers as opposed to anyone else? Or is it really just, well, you could have a conspiracy theory like, well, I'm a progressive bureaucrat.

Well, they're all a bunch of billionaires. There's that, maybe that excuse.
But is there a special

disdain for farmers as opposed to anyone else the left disdains?

Well, there always has been because farmers are not organized and they don't have unions. They don't have a lot of lobbyists.

A guy with a 200 acres or even a thousand, he's not a part of, you know, there's a farm bureau, but the farm bureau is kind of like the chamber of commerce.

And what I'm getting at is they don't have organizational power. They're 1% of the population that actually live on a farm and produce 1%.

When the founders created the Constitution, they were 95%.

Up till the Depression, they were about 50%, 45%. They're 1%.
So there's not very many of them. There's about a million and a half or maybe 3 million at most.

They're not organized. They're not very numerous.

The popular press demonizes them. So they love Cesar Chavez, United Farm, or they hated the farmers.
They all thought they were Teamsters or they were big corporations or they were something.

So they always sympathize with the farm labor, never the farmer.

And when they do romanticize him, he's some five-acre guy with an organic patch that they meet every day that says, Howdy, and you all at a farmer's market. I'm not making fun of farmers' market.

I took my family and an old used-specific telephone van every night on a Friday night. I did that for 10 years to farmers markets on the coast of California.

So I love farmers markets, but I'm telling you that if you depend on your food from farmers market, you're not going to get the scale that you need.

When I go into a big and you know, Costco-like supermarket and I see all that stuff that people are lined up buying in bulk, bags of rice, bags of beans, whole boxes of fruit, that's keeping them going.

They're not taking five hours out of their Saturday morning and going and picking and choosing old variety, home delicious, ready-to-consume boutique fruit. It's a nice thing to do.
I did it.

It was a good source of income for a failing farm, but it's not enough quantity. So you're starting to tamper when you start talking about nitrogen, which is the essential ingredient.

in fertilizer that allows fruit and vegetables to size and to grow and to be thrive in otherwise depleted soils. You're starting to really get into something that's existential.

And what I'm worried about is that we have all of these people in these universities. And I'll be candid, most of the problems in our country start in universities.

In these non-scientific these this idea is not coming from the traditional agricultural department at you know Baylor or Purdue or UC Davis.

This is coming from sociology and social science and activist groups in universities, environmental studies, etc.

But when you start tampering with this and you're tampering with gas and oil and you're tampering with the military, You got to be very careful because you're starting to tamper with things that Americans never worried about because they were so efficient and so competent.

That is, when they went to the store, they didn't see empty shelves like the Soviet Union or South America. And when they had a military, they had some trust in it that it could protect them.

And when they went to the service station, they knew that there was some guy in West Texas that got up at four in the morning or was out in our oil rig in the Gulf and he was doing his job.

But when you start demonizing those people and you start telling them how they should be doing their job and what they can't do and you don't know anything about what what you're talking about, then

watch out.

Well, more demonized than farmers are ranchers, you know, and uh,

the cows are

evil, they're a cause of methane, their climate, you know, it's all cows' faults and pigs' fault, and their flatulence.

Um, that said, I just have to note that there was a piece the other day in the Daily Mail.

Part of the, to me, anyway, part of the progressive push on against meat has been this creation of this bogus meat, fake meat.

And, oh, you'll like it. It, you know, tastes like chicken.
So there's a headline:

fake meat fail, question mark.

Beyond meat, that's the name of the company, reels as sales slow and stock plummets, with an analyst saying it's burning through cash and may go bankrupt as partnerships with McDonald's and Taco Bell don't pan out.

I have to say, I'm a little discouraged that McDonald's and Taco Bell were even dealing with these people, but they may have felt the, you know, show so whatever the boardroom leftism crap to go along with this.

But anyway, Victor, in addition,

no comment.

You don't have to, we can move on. But the disdain for the farmer, I think, is even a little more intensified for the rancher.
Do you think that's true?

Yeah, I do, because he produces something that the left feels is a cause soleb, that is vegetarianism. He's producing something antithetical to vegetarianism.

And according to all of these survivalists, leftists that want us to eat insects or algae or something, it takes a lot more land to produce a pound of meat than it does a pound of vegetables or

carbohydrates, etc.

And so therefore they target it as, in their way, it's inefficient.

And throughout history, I mean, the sign of a successful society has always been the degree to which the middle class has access to meat. That's just the way it's always been.

And when you take that away, you've got problems.

And so that

you think if the left.

I'm sorry, but I mentioned that, you know, I mentioned in an earlier podcast, I was at a local food market when I was talking to somebody and he was walking along the meat section and he said he just wanted to look at the meat

and because he couldn't afford it. And that's that's new to this country.
And most of the people who get their meat get it at fast foods, you know, and that's in bulk. And that's what the left hates.

They hate this idea of a big feedlot and then a big beef processing plant.

where thousands of carcasses each day are translated into hamburger and steak and stuff and then very efficiently transported into wholesalers, and then they end up as frozen patties sent all over the United States, et cetera, et cetera.

But that's why you can go at any time of the day, 24-7, and you can go into a place and get a hamburger. And that was something the Americans just thought.
was their birthright. It's not.

It depends on a very fragile supply chain and a very complex society of animal husbandry. And they should be very careful when they start to dictate how these existential, this is not iPhones, Jack.

This is not Facebook.

You don't drink Google. You can't eat Twitter.

This is something serious that these people who inhabit social media and technology, when they start branching out to beef and food and the military, they should be very careful. Yeah.

Victor, you wrote a piece last week called Why We Lost Trust in the Expert Class. And to me,

it just takes, from what you were just saying, it just takes a handful of quote-unquote experts, God knows where the hell they got their expertise, but as bureaucrats, to take the fragile system and destroy it or harm it severely

because of their own need to project power or control or

whatever the hell

I think it is about control. But

anyway, anything you'd like to say about this particular piece you wrote, Why We Lost Trust in the Expert Class?

Well, the Expert Class is what destroys Sri Lanka.

They were the people, the international activists that convinced them to get rid of, as I said, organyl phosphate, pesticides, herbicides, and nitrogen. And the result was that.

Sri Lanka had double the

GDP or the per capita income, I should say, excuse me, of India. And now it doesn't, of course.
It's starving.

And it has no money. It had cash crops or export.
It has no money, foreign exchange. It has no fuel.
It's just a pre it's gone back to a pre-civilizational level. And that was all done by experts.

And when you look at what experts do, I mean, Anthony Fauci and the CDC and his National Institute of Allergies, Infectious Diseases, and these are the experts.

And they crafted this lockdown policy that probably did more damage to the United States economy and cultural psyche than anything in our history. They did that.
They were experts.

The experts were the ones that told us, 15 of them, Jack, Nobel Prize winners, they were the ones that told us that this

Biden spending plans, the Recovery Act, and even the Build Back Better, all those things would not be inflationary. We didn't, we stopped Build Back Better, but we have an incarnate.

They said it would not be an inflationary.

It would not. And then we got 9.1, not one.
The experts were the one who told us that Hunter Biden was likely Russian disinformation. These were CIA-affiliated people, retirement.

None of them have ever, Paul.

The experts were the ones that told us, 1,200 of them, that it was more important for young Antifa and BLM and activists to go out and break their own quarantine en masse, like they were in a hoplite phalanx.

That is, take off the mask, scream and yell, scream spittle all up in the air right at the height of the first spiking COVID pandemic. And don't worry about lockdowns, don't worry about quarantines.

And I think that post-George Floyd first couple of weeks was more injurious to the credibility of the quarantine than anything.

Once people understood that 1,200 healthcare professionals, experts would tell them that it was more injurious for a young protester not to be able to violate the quarantine than to abide by it.

And nobody believed in it. That was experts that did that.

And I could go on, but I think what's happened now, and it's not necessarily a good thing that people that have alphabetic combinations behind them, you know, a JD, PhD, BA, MA,

et cetera, et cetera, MBA,

doesn't mean anything anymore. It doesn't mean anything because not only is it easier to get into college, it's easier to get a degree.

And as we talked earlier in the earlier podcast, it's not merucratic any longer. But more importantly, there's something ideological now.

It's not just careerists that people say things they know to be false that are experts to get ahead, but it's ideological. And ideology is the enemy of expertise.

And so when you have all of these things have one thing in common. When you had the dream team, the expert JDs, they had one point of view,

and that was they were going to ignore any evidence that exonerated Donald Trump and fixate on any that didn't. And these health

experts were going to make their decisions based on whether it was conducive to the post-George Floyd climate. I'm not a big fan of hydroxychloroquine.

I know people who've taken it well before I took chloroquine when I went to Egypt as a young kid. It's so much more dangerous than hydroxychloroquine for malaria.

But basically, I've always been told that hydroxychloroquine, if you were careful, it does increase eye pressure, for example.

But if you had lupus, for example, that it was a very effective anti-inflammatory. I know people have been on it for 30 years.

I didn't know much about ivermedicin, but I remember being in the Middle East and southern Egypt, for example, Upper Egypt, that I'd see people with eye infections and I knew that ivermedicine was something that cured that and it was a very safe drug.

My point is that there's a lot of drugs, Jack, that have been used off-label for COVID. I mean, I don't know if Paxilvoid is very safe.
We don't know whether two boosters are safe.

We don't know whether some of these monoclonal antibody combinations are safe. So my point is that those were two drugs that we had a lot of experience where they were cheap.

And if they were used off-label in a responsible fashion, I'm not saying they were useful or not useful. All I'm saying is they didn't justify the outrage.

And there was the outrage because they were associated with Donald Trump. Right.
That was it. You could lose your license if you prescribed that in certain places.

Oh, I could, if I said, and I have long COVID, if I said, oh, I'm going to go to a long COVID center and I'm going to take Fredisone, which is a very dangerous drug.

I'm going to take it for a long time. It's a lot more dangerous than hydroxychloroquine.
I'm going to take that.

And then why I'm taking it, I'm going to take one of these new experimental monoclonal antibodies that, you know, they can really depress the immune system.

Oh, and why I'm at it, I think I'm going to take this designer drug and pay, you know, $5,000. for the dosages.
But if I said I'm going to, you know, I'm going to go and

take some hydroxychloroquine, then I'm a nut. I'm crazy.
I'm destroying my health because that's ideology. And that's not an argument that you should take hydroxychloroquine.

I'm just saying that based on its use as a drug, and we know about, I'm just talking about one thing. We know about it.

We have a long history of it. We have the World Health Organization declaring it as an essential drug, as it does ivermedicine.
Billions of dosages.

We don't have billions of dosages of these new manufactured antibodies and antivirals. And yet, you can go to a state paxlovoid center without a prescription.

They'll just say, if you have, if you test positive, you can go get it. And we have no idea of the long-term effects of that antiviral, what it does to the organs and things.

So, yeah, I'm.

It is, this is the conceit.

The experts who are unknowledgeable speak with absolute authority. And doctors who practice medicine, which is an art.
It's not, right? It's the medical arts.

And in many cases, have to, well, I know this patient and I'm going to try this. But they're the ones that would have lost their license if they prescribed that.

I've never been able to pronounce it, but the, you know, it's called the Trump.

Any drug associated with Donald Trump, even if you thought as a doctor was good for your patient, you couldn't give it to him. That's insane.

Anyway, it is.

Victor,

we're going to talk about another war, not on agriculture, but a war on

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Sunday the 7th. The show will be up on the, I think the 11th.
I may have gotten the dates wrong now.

Thursday, the 11th of August.

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That's victorhanson.com.

Do subscribe. By the way, Victor's got a, I want to talk about this war on math, but Victor, if we have a little time at the end of the show, maybe we can talk about the

one of those exclusive pieces. They're called Ultra, but it's one you wrote the other day on the

ridiculous roadshow of Gavin Newsome. And I'd like to maybe end the end the podcast talking about that.
But let's now talk about

woke math. Victor, we've talked before, you anyway, I say we talked, you know, you're doing the talking,

that's what it should be all about, about woke classics, right? You know,

how this

wokeism has infected the study. of the classics and the excusing now that you do need to even learn the languages as you learned many years ago.

You don't need to know, be able to read, speak Latin or Greek.

But math, math is, how, you know, two plus two is four. How could that possibly be

vocificated? Well, there's a piece. I was looking at the Washington Examiner by Jeremiah Popffits titled Woke Math.

How critical race theory found its way into

math curriculum.

There's a, I have to find this here, Victor. Yeah, here's a quote in a setup.

Critical race theory is something that can be and is being applied to all subjects.

Jonathan Butcher, an education fellow at the Conservative Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner, quote, you have this argument that math is meant to combat white supremacy as opposed to giving students the tools they need to succeed in school and in life, math is a tool of racial warfare instead of something that is supposed to prepare students to be successful in the job market as they go off to college.

And, Victor, it also interested me that this piece, again, it's the Washington Examiner, Jeremiah

Poff is the author of it, mentions and links to

a website called Equitable Math.

And And guess who that's funded by? It received substantial funding from, of course, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. You know, a little bit, besides

Bill Gates' expertise on all things, right? We know he's an expert on foreign policy and COVID and everything else under the sun, just because he happens to have a lot of money. I don't know.

I thought he was just a software engineer.

But I did think for a while he was in league with folks on education reform and

helping out with charter schools. You know, that just may be an impression I got from something.
I think he was actually involved in that documentary,

titled Waiting for Superman,

about

choice school programs in inner cities.

I guess, you know, if there's something being used to hack away at our civilizations foundations, I'm not surprised to see any more that

Gates' money is involved. So, Victor, that aside, or not aside, if you don't want it to be, yeah,

math is as

susceptible a subject matter as is anything else to being tortured and twisted by the woke forces. What, if any, are your thoughts on this?

Well,

I mean, it would be

banal just for me to say, well, they do it to everything, but they particularly,

they're like a besieging army and they've overrun the countryside, Jack.

And that is, they've taken literature, which is pretty easy to overtake because you just read something, then your theory is as good as somebody else's theory. There's no,

I mean.

Once you get rid of the idea that to be an English major, you need to know when Shakespeare was born, or to be a classics major, you need to know how many plays are exant of Sophocles.

Once you get rid of that, it's interpretation. So they've overrun the countryside, the woke army, but now they're at the citadel and they're conducting a siege.

And the castle is engineering and science and math, because that's based on indisputable facts. I mean, there's theories about how those facts should be used, but two plus two is going to be four.

And the problem with that is it's, I'll be, and I can tell you as someone who learned Latin and Greek very, I think, pretty easily and knows it pretty well, I was lousy in math.

I would be a lousy engineer. I just, I don't know what it was about physics.
They were very difficult for me.

And when I took as a high school student, my verbal scores were always much higher than my math scores. They were as a graduate in the GRE.

So it's a tough, I feel they're tough disciplines. Most people do.

So the woke people say to themselves, the architect, hmm, well, we've got gender theory and we've got postmodernism and post-structuralism and wokeness everywhere else.

But my God, those that stupid medical school, and we talked about that earlier, are letting people in based on

the math score in part on the MSAT, or you can't get into MIT or Berkeley. And they're not.
And the result of it is there's too many Asians and whites in those fields.

So we've got to change how we teach math or we've got to change what math is because then we can storm the last bastion.

I'll be the first to

say that as an advocate of classics, classical languages, humanities, the Western liberal tradition, I taught, those are long-term, very important things for society.

I think to create a humane and informed citizenry that knows something about its cultural roots. But for the here and now, when I get into my Honda and I turn the key on, I want it to work,

that is engineering. And when I go over an overpass and it doesn't collapse, that is an engineering.
And it's like our discussion on the military and food.

You start tampering with the stuff, the basics,

the foundation of a modern, sophisticated civilization, you're going to eventually, not eventually, very quickly be into

big, big trouble. And I already see it with science.
When we talked on an early broadcast about monkeypox and polio and the return of and the creation of these new challenges.

And we have thrown out the science of public health. We've thrown out the science of sanitation, public sanitation on a mass scale.
We've thrown out a lot of these ancient disciplines.

And now we're attacking math and engineering that are essential to our survival.

Public health,

the science of public health is the one thing we've needed in the last few years. And we've talked before about Scott Atlas and others, and it's the one thing that'll get you canceled

if you have raised it.

Victor, somebody under whose watch public health has gone to, you know, hell in a handbasket or poop on the streets is Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of that city where there's a lot of fecal matter underfoot, San Francisco, now the governor.

And you wrote a piece about him for

VictorHanson.com. This is one of the exclusive pieces, but you know, from time to time, we bring one from behind the paywall.
We'll give a little taste of it to folks.

It's titled The Ridiculous Roadshow of Gavin Newsom. and he is out and about.
Many people,

I think there was a poll at the, as we were recording.

I think the last few days has been a CPAC convention in Texas. I may have misread this, but there was some poll where

the belief is he will be

likely be the Democrat standard bearer in 2024.

Anyway, Victor, under his watch, so much has, so, so much has has gone wrong. Could you talk about his

piece you wrote in his ridiculous roadshow?

Well, I guess he thought when soon as I guess what happened is as soon as people heard that it was okay to say that Biden shouldn't run, and you have Maureen Dowd writing that now, and the laptop all of a sudden, the contents were being leaked and whispers.

And then so everybody thought, I'm going to get in on this.

And so you had this crazy Pitzer, Pitzer, whatever whatever he is in illinois he's not going to be a candidate but you had mayor pete suddenly sounding off on everything from abortion anything other than what he's supposed to be doing his awful conduct his incompetent conduct overseeing our transportation whether we define that as supply chains or airlines or gasoline but my point is this that he newsom got into it okay

He fits the bill. He's a young governor of the biggest state, youngish.

But I didn't understand. He started running these commercials and talking about freedom that, you know, you have no freedom because of abortion.

And I thought, wow, there is no freedom in California. It's the most unfree place in the entire country.
At California universities, the public universities are the most unfree in the state.

You can't say things as a faculty member. You can't say things in the general climate in Hollywood.
You can't say things or do things on a private school campus. I know that.
I work on a campus.

You can't say things. You can't, there is no freedom.
And then when you look at what we call larger freedom, the freedom to buy gasoline and move, you can't at $7 for diesel and $6.50 for gas.

You just can't go to places that you wanted to. If you want the freedom to walk in Gavin Newsom's home city in San Francisco, well, you can't drive there without

getting a clunker and then putting a sign on it that says it's on lock, nothing of value. If you save and you've got yourself a brand new Chevy and you drive in there, they're going to break into it.

Nothing's going to happen.

And there is no freedom to walk along Market Street. Somebody's going to accost you.
You're going to step on a needle or something.

I don't think there's any freedom to travel safely from my house to Los Angeles because when I hit Visalia to Delano, it's going to be Road Warrior on Gavin Newsom's freeway.

I have no freedom here because my avenue five miles down the road has been shut down for two years because of his stalled and crazy high-speed rail project.

They just went through and severed my main outlet to go west. I can't.
I've got to take a detour in my own avenue. So I can go on, but there's no freedom for a young kid.

to feel safe in the Los Angeles school district or the Fresno or the Stockton School District. It's just not going to happen.

There's no freedom there. And I don't think anybody who's young has the freedom to buy a home in California, not $1,000 a square foot on the coastal corridor.

If he thinks people are free in California, his California, it was 106 about two weeks ago. It was 104, I think two days ago.
And I went into Walmart to look for some swim stuff.

And

guess what? It was packed jack, but nobody was buying. They were all there for the free air conditioning.
They have no freedom to go home and turn on their air conditioners. They can't afford it.

So he lives in the most unfree state in the country. And then, if he's talking about, think about me as a successful candidate, I'm thinking, okay,

you and Jerry Brown institutionalize our summer forest fire.

We have one threatening Mariposa Grove, the largest stand of historic sequoia

gigantina

trees.

And

we've had the paradise fire. We had the Aspen Creek.
We have all these horrible fires because the state feels that theoretically you shouldn't harvest dead trees.

We had 30, 40 million of them and they're...

fodder for insects apparently and they go up every summer and then you say it's climate change can't do anything sorry and they pour pollutants in the air We just accept that. That's California.

That's Gavin Newsom. That's what he does.
He doesn't do anything. That's what he does about his sales tax.

If you took the combination of gasoline, income, and sales, and because of our assessed evaluation more than our rate, but our property, we have the highest taxes in the United States in California, 13.3.

on the top level for income. And then when you do that, you think, okay,

but we have the best schools? No, you don't. They're ranked in the bottom 10%.
Well, we have the best infrastructure. No, you're about 48th or 49th on most surveys of infrastructure.

Well, we have the safest place. No,

San Francisco has the highest per capita crime rate in the country. So we pay the most and we get the less.
And this is his state.

And he has had a role in that, whether as mayor, or lieutenant governor, or governor for a long, long time and people of like mind. So he is responsible for a lot of it.

And yet he tours the country making fun of

people going to Florida or Texas. At the end of the column, I said, you know, he's like a guy in a service station with a big name brand, like Arco or Shell.

And it's got a great reputation and it's got a big, all the advantage, but he just ruined his station. And it's filthy and it's dirty and it's high priced and the pumps don't work.

And when you go in there, people assault you.

And then across the road, an entrepreneur has created a new brand of service station and it's well lit up, it's spotless, there's all, it's cheap, the gas is a better quality. And guess what?

Everybody pulls over there and no one is going into his station. And he gets on the top of it with a megaphone and says, these people are horrible.
You've got to come to my station.

and that's what he's doing people are leaving california it's shrinking and they're going to florida i mean they've taken 30 billion dollars with them and a million people in the last three years don't answer this question but uh i i have to think uh that

this thought has crossed your mind it has yeah if i did not have

i'm the sixth generation to live in this little plot in this old house, I probably would have left. I have two children, grandchildren here.
Yeah. And I don't know anything else.
And I'm 68.

I'm going to be 69 next month. And I'm thinking, man, you should have got out 20 years ago.

And there's places because

I travel a lot, and there's some beautiful places in the United States that are wonderful.

I last year went to Tennessee. I had only been to universities.
I'd never been out in the country. So it's a beautiful state.
It's well run.

I drove a long way from Sea Island, Georgia, all the way down to Palm Beach in Florida. Everything worked.
I stopped at the huge rest stop. Boy, it was clean.

It wasn't like California where it was dangerous and dirty when you get off the freeway. So there's so many places that are better run.
Yet California is a natural paradise.

We took paradise and made it into hell, and they took hell and made it into paradise. You look back at your life and you think,

you saw this was happening. Why didn't you do more to stop it? Or why didn't you leave? Or why didn't you do something?

How did you get yourself in the situation where in your old age, you're at ground zero of utter failure that is quite dangerous, quite dangerous. Yeah.

Well, that's that is a

I've been at your house and you're, yeah, you're, you're, there's a, there's a little Mad Max

mood in in the in the hood.

Victor, okay, I just want to, we're going to have one more quick topic to discuss, but I want to take this opportunity to give a plug to an old friend of ours, Troy Senek, who used to host the classicist podcast with you when it was at Ricochet.

And I may have mentioned in an earlier podcast that Troy has a book coming out next month that's Man of Iron. It's a biography of Grover Cleveland.
But the reason I bring this up now is

Troy is one of the founders of a great

website and video production production company. It's called Kit and Key, and they do very important, worthwhile,

short videos. Anyway, they just put one out about California and the fires, and you mentioned, I'm just picking up on a point you made.
And

this links into the experts.

It takes four and a half years.

at a minimum for an application by the government itself, by the Forestry Service, to address an area of California, pick an area of X amount of acreage that they want to

make less

fire retardant, or more fire retardant, I should say, less of combustible. And it takes four and a half years to a minimum to get approval of that.
So the expert class is

sticking it to another part of the expert class. And what we've got combined with Gavin Newsom and company's total opposition to getting the dead wood out of those forests is just annual relentless

maelstroms.

You know, when you finally get down to it, they don't want people in the forest. So they don't care whether there's a forest fire.

So if you're up there in the foothills or living up there, and there are a lot of people in the Sierra Nevada, take one example. They don't care about forest fires.

If they lose their property, their attitude is shouldn't have been there in the first place. This is an unnatural place.

Now, it may be unnatural to put all these people in the California coastal hills in places like Malibu or Montecito or San Luis Obispo or Powell, all these beautiful places, but that's us.

All you poorer people who move up in your trailers in the California foothills and low Sierra, we don't want you up there.

So we're not going to to really worry too much about the infrastructure up there. And that's how they operate.
Every year, it's the weirdest thing in the world. They will lecture you to

you die about carbon emissions. And then they will do nothing to thin out a forest when you have 30 million trees, about half of them are still valuable.

that have died and should have been taken out and could be used, you know, for studs or ground up as plywood or something.

And the timber companies wanted to get access and they leave them there deliberately with the full knowledge that they are going to help feed a forest fire, which they see as natural.

And the result is every summer, and I'm way down here in the San Joaquin Valley, but every summer we start to get this big smoke cloud. Two years ago, we didn't see the sun for three weeks.
And

it's a gargantuan release of carbon emissions.

And because it's natural, they don't care.

And so, you know, and the thing about manures are, you know, we talked about that. It's related.
It's the same idea, Jack, when they want everybody to use manures, but they don't like animals.

So when they say, where does the manure come from? Well, the manure comes from big dairies.

and feedlots where you have lots of beef for protein consumption and you have lots of cows for milk and ice cream and stuff. But it doesn't come from Mr.
and Mrs. Smith on 40 acres or one horse.

One fairy.

No, that's where you get manure.

And believe me, as a person who purchased it, and I did every year for certain types of soil, you have sandy soils, you want manure because it also, in addition to offering nitrogen, it has a propensity to cut down on nematodes.

It distracts the nematode into the manure and they even get tangled up in it. So my point is, it's expensive.
It's much more expensive.

Anybody, whenever you saw a grape or tree farmer and in the winter, when you drove by and he had this foul-smelling manure piled up alongside that that delivered, there was two things.

You knew, A, it came from a dairy or a feedlot, and B, that guy had a lot of money

because it was so expensive. And whenever somebody just ordered, you know, especially guys who ordered ammonium sulfate, it was cheaper, cheap as you could be, just pure

and ammonium nitrate or calcium nitrate was very expensive. But the point is that it wasn't as expensive as manure.

Well, let's end on the manure note, except to,

because we have run out of time, but Victor, I do want to thank our listeners.

And

as I've said many times, no matter what...

platform you listen uh to the victor davis hansen show on we of course we are we're appreciative and thankful many folks by the way i do i try to listen to it off your own website if you if you uh particularly those who listen though on an apple podcast can leave a five up to five stars uh ranking and most

very few people don't most do the average is well over 4.9 percent thank you to those who do and many people leave comments uh you can do that on the apple podcast and we read them And here's one.

It's going to sound a little self-serving, but too bad.

It's titled, Worthy of Trust and Confidence. Victor, your analysis of current events is welcome and informative.

Jack does a great job of letting the conversation flow and turning the common sense spigot on. The week edition in the capable hands of Sammy piqued my interest to go back.

and relearn what I missed in college. This is from Big Mike 57.
And that's just, well, it's, it's, thank you, Big Mike, for me. I don't think I deserve that, but

many of the comments are, are, are really kindly in this regard, and we're appreciative of that.

Recommend again, folks who have not yet heard Victor's own hosting of one of the recent shows. with Dr.

Stephen Quay that they really, really should do that and get themselves an intimate lesson on COVID and what it means and where it came from, and just what this little disastrous thing is.

So, that's about it. Victor, thanks so much again for sharing your wisdom.
I hope the rest of the week is a good one for you as you continue to battle back against long COVID.

I hope it gets to be shorter long COVID than it's been. And thanks for all the wisdom.
And thanks, folks, for listening.

And we'll be back soon with yet another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson show. Thanks so much.
Thank you.

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