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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you for joining us.

This is the weekend edition where we usually look at things cultural and in more depth, but we didn't have time to do the news roundup this week, so we're going to do a news roundup on this edition.

So we'll be looking at Pelosi, DeSantis, Bill Barr, Kristen Cinema, but let's take a moment for some messages and come right back.

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I'd like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ellie 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.

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Victor, how are you doing today?

I'm doing very well, Sammy.

My little COVID update, I'm on week 15.

It's a nice little anniversary.

Yeah.

And I am, I don't want to say that because it sounds reckless, but I'm taking considerable amount of safe vitamins and time-tried and suggested supplements,

a couple of prescription meds, and I'm driving.

So the way I look at it, the glass is half full, to use a trite old phrase.

But it's mostly, I've decided that.

Long COVID is a disease of inflammation in the vessels and the brain because you get such bad pressure inside your head.

It feels like it's going to explode sometimes.

And then

no taste, no smell, a little problem with hearing, and brain fog.

And that's an overused term.

That means, in my case,

you go into a drawer to get a pin, and then you go into the room and you forgot, why am I here?

Or in the case of,

I think,

problems with oxygenation at the cellular level.

A year year ago, you know, I could hike up to 10,000 feet and have not one sore muscle after seven hours or ride a bike 25 miles.

And now

I'll swim 10 minutes or walk for half a mile.

I think, my gosh, my legs are on fire.

I must put out the fire somehow.

So it's a lack of oxygen.

So it's basically your immune system is gone haywire and it's overreacting to either the spike protein of vestigial virus that's inert.

But I think more likely it's because your immune system had preexisting hyperimmune tendencies.

And I remember now as I sit here over these weeks that I've had two or three viral illnesses, especially mononucleosis, that have caused post-viral fatigue.

Yeah.

Well, I know that you did an interview with Dr.

Stephen Quay

talking about the evidence for engineering of the coronavirus, which is absolutely fascinating.

We did it two days before he testified before Rand Paul's

Senate committee with two other immunologists and genetic researchers.

And the gist of their combined testimony was, without a doubt, the vival sequence is not the sort that can appear in nature spontaneously and that it was engineered at a vival lab in Wuhan, accidentally let out at some stage of its development.

And it has a tendency to mutate or to infect or even to scramble the immune system that would require, that doesn't appear in nature to the same degree in that particular type of virus.

So it was pretty compelling interview.

That'll be online for people to hear it.

I think you'll all like it.

We've had an interview with

Devin Nunes, and we just did one that will appear shortly with the

historian of Arab Islam strife, Ray Ibrahim, who wrote a new book.

The sequel to his sword and scimiter was Defenders of the West.

And he locates eight obscure people.

A few of them were not obscure, but most of you were, that kept back Islam.

And it's a very different take on that age-old question that

although politically incorrect, I think a lot of people will respect his linguistic facilities to look at sources in the original Greek and Arabic.

So that was interesting.

I'm hoping to have Scott Atlas, the historian Bruce Thornton has a new book coming out.

And I hope to have Andrew Roberts.

So we're going to have two or three people coming up on the interviews.

So that would be exciting.

Yeah, that's really exciting.

Well, let's turn to our agenda today.

I have a broad question first.

Just Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan.

We get all sorts of news on both sides, both criticism and admiration for her trip.

I have to say that while I have differences with her on almost everything, I kind of admired that she went despite the Chinese threats.

But what are your thoughts, Victor?

Yeah, there's some truth to that, Sammy, but she didn't coordinate.

So she created a situation in which she was haggling, arguing with the press secretary John Kirby or with the Pentagon hierarchy or Joe Biden.

And she managed to make Joe Biden and the Pentagon reflect the Chinese position against her position.

So however idealistic it was that we value and will protect Taiwan independence, which I happen to agree with, she situated herself and so that she found herself putting our own government, weak as they are and appeasing as they act, on the same side of China.

So what was weird and surreal was you heard China just blast her, but then you didn't get any support from biden or the pentagon and this all goes back to the 1972 deal of strategic ambiguity where nixon and kissinger in that vietnam period height of the cold war worried about the soviets wanted to triangulate with the chinese so

they said basically that treaty that There is only one China and we will not base troops in Taiwan, but we could say publicly that we would defend it.

And it's never been resolved what would happen.

And the Taiwanese, as the globalization took off 20 years ago, they became wealthy, they became westernized more so, and they're not ready to defend themselves.

Now they're scrambling to do so.

I think China is looking at a lot of things right now.

They're looking at the weakness of America and Afghanistan.

They're looking at the social justice detours from the Pentagon.

They're looking at Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and his ability to withstand global sanctions.

And they're thinking Taiwan's only going to get stronger and we'll never get an administration as weak as Biden.

And so they may see this as an occasion to do something they otherwise wouldn't.

We'll see.

The other thing is, when has Nancy Pelosi ever done anything abroad other than just to score political points for herself or to attack her enemies?

I mean, this is a woman who was all fire and brimstone after 9-11.

So in all of those briefings by the Pentagon, she wanted more enhanced interrogation.

And then she, of course, flipped and said they were torturers, the Pentagon and the CIA.

If you go back and read what she said during the surge, you would almost think she was rooting for the surge to fail after she became speaker in 2007.

She reached a Nadir when she went to Bashar Assad's

Damascus in 2007, right at the height of the surge, just less than a year after Assad had been at war with Israel, our ally in the region,

and at a time when there were tens of thousands of jihadists and insurrectionists crossing the border from Syria into Iraq.

And then she praised Assad and said that the road to peace leads through Damascus.

Ha ha.

And so, why was she over there?

She was over there to embarrass further her the president of the United States, i.e., her country at that time when it was in an existential war in Iraq.

So she doesn't have a good record of that.

Yes, I like the idea that she went over there and said to the Chinese,

we can do what we want.

We have to do what we want.

And I regret the fact that she could have just taken a week and got Biden and the Pentagon together and say, okay, Nancy, you're going to go here.

Here's the common front, the narrative.

But they didn't do that.

She freelanced.

And then that brings up finally the question of what do you do?

I mean, you can blame China for what?

Stealing patents, stealing copyrights, sending 330 to 380,000 students over here, 2% or 3% of them are spies, and planning professors that pass on technology expertise to China in universities, dump currency.

But that's what Chinese communists do.

I mean, if you're a Chinese communist, that's what you do.

You lie, you steal, and you oppose people who have capitalist-free societies.

So the question is, why do we allow them to do that?

Why are they buying farmland and we don't?

Why do they have all these students here and we don't?

Why are they so paranoid that we're in their backyard and yet they've been running the Panama Canal since 2017,

where 70% of the traffic is American?

Or they have gone into Monroe doctrine regions in South and Central America, and they basically are controlling the economies of

the southern hemisphere.

And they have decided that they and they alone will control the choke points of world commerce, whether it's a Panama Canal or big ports at the Piraeus or in the Mediterranean.

Thank God for the British, you know, that control Gibraltar, because that's what they're up to.

And so they do all sorts of stuff.

And then we're supposed to apologize for going to Taiwan.

But that's what I'm ambiguous about the whole thing.

I'm glad she went, but the way she did it and the motives for which she did it were bad.

And she could have done a lot better had she just,

you know,

softened her own ego.

If there was a missile that had gone into Taiwan, it would have hit Taipei.

It wouldn't have hit her Napa Valley estate, believe me.

So she always does that.

Why do you think she split ways with Joe Biden here?

I mean, she has been a blind supporter all the way up.

She always always

believe me, she would not have done this a year ago or a year and a half ago.

She waited till his, in some polls, he's down to 35%.

They want him out and they want people to remember that the Democratic Party has got all these forceful, dynamic people.

So she wants herself to step up.

She wants Pete Buttigig to step up.

But it's a sign that they have no confidence in Joe Biden.

As I said, I think 20 podcasts ago, he will not be on the ticket.

They will see to that.

Hunter's laptops' contents will be all over the news within, I don't know, 90 days.

Do you think Biden will make it for another two years?

I don't know.

I'll tell you one thing.

One thing about this virus that nobody knows, it's totally unpredictable.

And he has it.

And he's had a relapse.

And he looks awful.

And if he he has long COVID, they would never tell us.

But I can tell you that, speaking a little arrogantly, at 68, I am in better shape than he is at 79.

And the day that I got sick, I worked 12 hours out on the farm with a chainsaw and a crowbar.

My point is that I got

reduced to almost crawling across the floor by a month ago I was.

And we don't know the effect on him, but it could be a godsend for the Democrats.

They might just tell us under the 25th Amendment, Joe has got serious health.

You know, and then the thing is, you don't brag, you don't, you don't predict this virus.

You don't brag about it.

You don't say, oh, as soon as I got it, I had beat Delta in five days, but the first thing I thought was, uh-oh, you got to take 100 people to Israel.

You got to go on a speaking tour for a week.

This thing is weird.

So be careful.

And I wasn't careful.

But

one thing I don't do is, oh, I got over Delta.

Ho, ho, why didn't you get over?

You got to have empathy for anybody.

So what did he do the moment he got it?

Well, I had the two boosters.

Well, where did he get the two boosters and the two vacs?

That was an outgrowth of Operation Warp Speed, but he didn't say that.

Instead, he tried to contrast himself with Trump.

He said, well, Trump had to go to the hospital and he had to have all these medications when I just kind of moseyed on up to the private quarters of the White House and I was conducting my business the whole time without and that is so misleading.

I mean, the initial strain of COVID supposedly was much more virulent than the Omicron.

And he had vaccinations that mitigated some of the symptoms that Trump did not have.

And Trump was very, very ill, as many people were.

And he went right out on the campaign thing right after he had monoclonal antibodies, an antiviral, and all sorts of stuff.

And yet here he is bragging about how much he did.

As soon as I heard that, I thought, this SOB has never read Sophocles.

Nemesis is going to strike him down.

And sure enough, two days later, he gets a Pax Lavoid.

He had a remission from it.

And then he had a rebound and got the virus again.

Then I guess he went back on it, which is not.

According to Anthony Fauci, you're not supposed to do that, use it in two distinct rounds.

Of course, he did it, Fauci.

But we don't know how it worked.

We just hear that he's fine, he has no symptoms.

And then when you look at him on TV, he looks like an albino reptile.

He does.

He does.

And I don't mean that out of meanness because I have an enormous amount of sympathy.

One thing after I got us, I get these emails from these people or you know, a voicemail once in a while, and they'll say things like, oh, wow,

they all want to say the same thing.

And maybe I do, too.

I was a marathon runner.

I was a superb biker.

I was a weightlifter.

And now I can't do anything.

I got over the acute phase, too.

And so you don't want to brag about that.

And that's a typical corn pop Joe.

You know,

take Donald Trump behind the gym and beat him up.

I beat up.

I got my chain.

And I get so sick of that, Braggadaccio.

And he's a mean SOB.

He always was.

He always was.

He harassed women.

He got into the private space of little girls.

He plagiarized.

He lied about his bio.

He is genuinely the most corrupt president in the last 50 years.

Not since Lyndon Johnson have we had a president who's so corrupt.

And yet we're supposed to buy into this myth of good old Joe from Scranton.

And I feel bad for him now.

He's 79.

He's got the weight of the world on his shoulders and he's recovering from COVID.

But that is a time not to take a cheap shot at your predecessor and say, oh, I got over COVID quicker than he did.

I'm tougher.

Yeah.

It's just really bad form.

Yeah, it was.

So final verdict, yes.

As we said earlier, Sam, if you're going to take Vienna, as Napoleon said, then take Vienna.

Once she said she was going to go,

first high-ranking official since Newt did it, Genric, I said, okay, go.

But she didn't do that.

She said, if I go.

And the president said, oh, they leaked that they didn't want her to go.

And the Pentagon, they got a bunch of retired generals to come out.

And so then it was, okay, I'll go.

But the Chinese seem to be agreeing with my own government that I shouldn't.

And so we'll see how it all ends up.

Yeah, they seem to.

China seems to have Joe's back, huh?

You know, one thing, just as a end note,

this should be a wake-up call to us.

Yes, they have 1.4 billion people.

And yes, they cheat and they infringe and they appropriate.

But it wasn't just them that made them in this position in the last 50 years since Richard Nixon signed that 72 accord.

It was us.

They are delighted that we have destroyed a merocratic university system.

They are delighted that we have a therapeutic curriculum.

They are delighted that we pick people on the basis of their superficial appearance for key jobs.

They are delighted that our military has turned into a social justice system.

They are delighted that we have no anti-ballistic missile system.

They're delighted we don't have swarms and swarms, thousands, tens of thousands of missiles and drones tactically.

So

it's time for the United States that, you know, we think, we say to ourselves, oh, we're diverse.

We're diverse.

Diverse is our strength.

strength diversity is our strength well they should read foreign newspapers that look at us and they look at this spiking crime rate this hate crimes against particular people the collapse of the legal system the rioting all of the racial obsessions and fixations and they say diversity is their weakness they really do say that yeah and we've got to

wise up and say if we're going to have arguments over inequality and the fairness of capitalism in this country, let's do it on the basis of class, not superficial appearance.

As I always say, the proverbial

forklift driver in Dayton who makes 15 bucks an hour has a lot more grievance against the system than LeBron James or the Obamas.

Just because they are of a particular color of a group that happened to be discriminated institutionally does not mean in the present that they're victims.

And we've got to stop this color fixation and fixate if we're going to talk about inequality on class and if it's more people of color then fine let's let's work with them all of us but

inequality is no longer detectable or identifiable just by your race is what i'm trying to say yeah and we better keep that in mind Yeah, I think we should.

Can I then turn to the California fires, or at least the share of the California fire in McKinney?

It's called the McKinney Fire.

It's up near Klamath National Forest.

And

I thought what was interesting,

besides the fact that it's burned over 59,000 acres, is that MPR reported that extreme heat and erratic winds could make the fire worse.

And I thought that was interesting because if I looked on Fox News, their interest in the fire was that the causes of it are still unknown, but they didn't, they didn't put a

opinion out there about

basic climate change.

That's what I'm trying to say.

You're right.

Oh, everybody knows how Newsome, everybody knows how California got into this annual fire.

When I was growing up, we had fires, but they weren't like this, uncontrolled and regularly scheduled.

And so what, to sum up what's happening in California,

Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsome, to a lesser extent, Arnold Schwarzenegger, decided that they were going to A, ban timber companies, make it hard for them to survive, and there's only three or four of them left, and then B, buy into this crackpot, nihilist environmental idea that dead trees during a drought are

partially charred.

from a prior fire she'll just stay there and they will rot and they will make fodder for beetles and birds and worms and this is good rather than you know and you're not going to go in there and harvest them for wood and you're not going to go in there and clean up the forest that's artificial and you'll need you know earth scarring roads to get in there and people shouldn't be there so if you're in paradise or you're up on highway 168 and your house gets burned down that you were living in an unsustainable place as if woodside is not unsustainable or atherton isn't or hillsborough or knob hill isn't but nevertheless my point is they take these occasions when the fires break out because of their policies, and then they do what?

A, they do not fund

fire protection and fire prevention and forest management.

B, we have a decrepit electrical grid system.

So about a third of these fires are started by winds that whip up wires that are decayed or decrepit or falling apart.

Even though we have the highest in the continental United States, we have the highest electricity rates and we have the worst wired grid.

And then third, they use this as a reason to fund quote unquote climate change, not to stop the fire, not to prevent the fire, but to blame it on climate change.

And therefore,

we can shut down Diablo Canyon.

Or we, I don't know why it's clean, it doesn't make produce heat.

Or we can build high-speed rail.

Stonehenge, a little way from where I'm speaking right now for 10, 15, 20 billion.

Now, I think it's going to be up to 300 billion.

And that's how they operate.

And then four,

if you can't deal with the existential felony, you always delight yourself with the misdemeanor.

So where all this happens, Gavin Newsom says, We're going to be a place for abortions.

We're going to be an abortion mecca and we're going to subsidize abortion areas.

Oh, we're going to give 500 million to illegal aliens to make sure they can get over COVID.

Oh,

and he goes, we're going to give everybody 400 bucks to fill up at the gas tank after we shut down most of the oil and gas industry in California.

These people are really dangerous because

these fires did not have to happen.

If we had an up-to-date grid, if we had gone all winter long, every winter and spring and fall, and let timber companies, a lot of this wood is still good, whether for plywood or for Douglas Fir stud, there's it's out there, 20 million trees.

If we would let them harvest it, it would lower the cost of construction, it would employ thousands of Californians, and it would save the forest.

And what do we do?

We do just the opposite and performance, art, and virtue signal.

Is that so sad?

It is sad.

It's really sad.

I can smell the fire someday from yosemite it's not that far from mariposa grove and

historic one of the largest sequoia giganteas i think it is the largest in the world yeah and

they they they're very strange people that these ideologues they do not care about people the more they talk about humanity the more they do not like people Yeah, so speaking of

ideologues,

let's turn then to Ron DeSantos and his addressing a prosecutor suspending a prosecutor at Tampa Bay after these messages.

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Welcome back.

Victor DeSantis has just suspended the Tampa Bay prosecutor for, well, basically, he was choosing what laws to uphold and what defendants to charge and not charge

in a very discretionary manner that was more like

creating law, or at least, you know, he's the one that's going to make decisions on that law.

What's Ron DeSantis up to, and what are your thoughts on his recent

Ron DeSantis is doing what a lot lot of people want in some states?

The

prosecutors, state attorneys, I guess you call them state attorneys, can be suspended or removed by the governor, even if they've been elected or appointed.

So what DeSantis is trying to do is saying critical legal theory is nullification of existing law because you don't believe in the natural basis for law.

You don't think that the laws reflect a need to create, you know, a calm and safe society given the propensities of human nature.

And so when these people let criminals out or they decide they'll undermine the law by saying, I don't care what the law says on abortion, I'm going to enforce or selectively prosecute or not prosecute based on my own ideology, he says, okay, then

find another job.

And that's what everybody has been asking state officials to do in places like Illinois and Maryland and

especially California, and they don't do it.

So what he's trying to do is say, I'm going to do it.

I'm not going to talk about it.

Why is he doing it now?

Well, he believes in it, but he's also trying to show the Republican Party that they can have the mega agenda without Trump.

In other words, that he fights and he's as proactive and feisty and combative as Donald Trump was, that he's not just a Mitt Romney type of figure that's mouthing a few MAGA platitudes so and you know that one poll i don't know if it was an outlier or not that shows him ahead in new hampshire suggests to me that there's going to be a raucous primary and he's girding up for it and i don't know when donald trump's going to announce what it's going to be before the mid he'd be smart to wait to after the midterm

Yeah, that's going to be a very interesting primary, that's for sure.

If Donald Trump runs, we still are kind of in.

There's so many.

There'll be so many.

If one runs,

one is a serious candidate, then you'll see six or seven.

You'll see Mike Pence running, you'll see Pompeo running, you'll see Nikki Haley running, you'll see Tom Cotton running, you'll see them all running besides DeSantis.

And one of them, as I said earlier, will be a UN suicide torpedo.

He will just dog Trump and go after him and try to embarrass him in the debates, the way Chris Christie did with Marco Rubio.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I don't know,

it's very perplexing because one of the dynamics is in all the polls,

Donald Trump is even or barely beats Biden.

And Biden, I think even the left would, any Democrats who are listening to the left, I think you would agree that Biden was the only one that could have beat by hook or crook or whatever Donald Trump.

Any of those other candidates on the 2020 stage, whether it's Mayor Pete or Beto or Bernie, they would have scared the hell out of the voters.

And so he's not going to be on the ballot.

So that adds a twist to it because they're saying, okay, take the guy out because he's non-compos mentes, but we just took the guy out we decided four years ago was our only hope.

So let's go back to the people that weren't our only hope.

Camela Harris didn't get one delegate, not one in 2020.

Are we going to get Julian Costro again?

Are we going to get Mayor Pete Beto?

Who are we going to get?

They're not going to get anybody.

That just changes the entire complexion of a Trump candidacy.

Because if you run a poll between Donald Trump and Mayor Pete or Camela, he will probably pull ahead.

But more importantly, those people will not perform well on the campaign trail.

They never have.

Mayor Pete is just a glib, sanctimonious scold.

And she's, as I said earlier, she's got a vocabulary of 500 words.

So

that's something to consider.

So I think DeSantis is processing all of that, and he's trying to tell people that you can have Trump MAGA, but without the tweets, et cetera.

Yeah.

And so DeSantis is probably expecting Trump to run.

I think almost everybody is, but we haven't heard that he's actually going to yet.

So

can we then turn to Bill Barr?

I had a reader write in about this.

He said, Bill Barr has asked the Attorney General Merrick Garland for a special prosecutor into the Bidens.

And yet we don't hear much about that on the news.

And I looked around, there is a little bit, but he's right.

In general, nobody's putting, because Bill Barr was a very respected former attorney general.

And, you know, he didn't seem to take sides necessarily.

He did criticize Trump for the whole election position on the elections in November and that kind of thing.

So

it is kind of interesting that we don't really hear too much about

you or Jack that I defended him.

And I got a lot of email.

I said, how dare you?

Because he didn't buy into the voting machine fraud or whatever the particular nature of the fraud was in 2020.

But prior to that point,

he had been a bulldog about the Mueller investigation and the Russian hoax.

And everything he did was, and he had tried to get some prosecutions and we'll see whether Eric Kleinsmith is followed by others but the point that I'm making was he's among the mega base now he's considered toxic and yet he hasn't changed really he's still

a strong Catholic religious conservative Republican and

he got angry at Trump and the Trump got angry at him.

But if you look what he's actually done, he's not quite a Beltway Bush insider.

So he's going out and he's saying, you know,

Merrick Garland likes to give all these press conferences.

He's going to go, he loves double jeopardy.

He loves,

as you saw with the Breonna Taylor indictment, he's always going after people who have been exonerated at the state level and charging them with a different type of federal crime, but it's the same crime.

But he never looks at the elephant in the room that his president is mentioned by Tony

Bobolinsky and by Hunter's own admission as Mr.

10% of the big guy, or his opulent lifestyle, it all leads to one thing.

He was getting enormous amounts of money through the Biden Consortium.

And I don't think that he ever paid taxes on it.

I don't know that for sure, but I don't think his tax return would show that spike in income.

And I don't think Hunter did.

I don't think that Hunter paid gift tax when he refers to, I sent you some money.

So there's a lot of liability there, and Bill Barr is trying to draw attention to it.

And

we'll see.

Yeah, we'll see if anything comes of it.

Speaking of Breonna Taylor, what do you think about the second investigation of these cops?

Is that double jeopardy or am I wrong?

Well, I mean, it was something that was inaugurated for good purposes.

in the 1960s when local southern prosecutors were not prosecuting violent crimes against blacks.

So they came up with this idea after the 1965 Civil Rights Act that you could violate somebody's civil rights.

And that's a very vague idea, but they said you've violated their civil rights.

Therefore, we're going to charge you with a federal crime because we can't charge you with murder or et cetera, which is a local state matter because you've already been exonerated or acquitted of that charge.

But it really is double jeopardy.

It was for a good purpose, they said, and you can see how it was abused.

So, where it is now, every cop in America thinks, hmm,

there's a call for domestic abuse, or there's a warrant, there's a drug dealer in his girlfriend's apartment.

If I go in there

and there's a shootout

and I'm exonerated, that's not the end of it, that's the beginning.

Then I'm going to have a left-wing federal attorney go after me.

So I'm not going to go in there.

And they're not.

And with Breonna Taylor, the whole thing is just like George Floyd.

I mean, it's tragic that somebody loses their life, but, you know, when you see George Floyd murals with angel wings on him, he was in the process

of

passing a counterfeit check, which is a felony.

He resisted arrest.

If he hadn't passed the check, he would have never been arrested.

If he had not resisted arrest, he would have been very quietly in the car and on the way to be booked, and they might have been what had to go.

He had done this before the prior year.

And

if he had not,

you know, filled himself up with an illegal substance like fentanyl, he would be alive.

And that doesn't mean that I'm trying to excuse the officers, but I'm just saying that these things become

kind of melodramatic morality tales where

somebody who dies is all of a sudden a saint, and the people who are responsible for his death are evil when there's thousands, hundreds, all sorts of things that

weigh into the equation.

In her case, it's pretty clear that she knew that her apartment and her boyfriend were running drugs and guns.

I mean, they had guns.

And so when they came in to inspect and knocked on the door, it wasn't the police that shot first, as I recall, her boyfriend did.

And then, of course, if I was a policeman and I had a warrant and I was going into a place where I knew there was a dangerous thing and somebody shot, I would probably shoot on the assumption that they were going to shoot again and kill me.

And so it was tragic, but don't put yourself in that situation.

Sometimes you can't help it, but, you know, I can remember when I was.

I don't want to mention any names because they're still alive, some of them, but I was like 16 and I got into a car and there were four or five guys.

And I immediately, I didn't drink in high school, you know, with open container and all that, but all there were three people with an open container.

And one guy was smoking marijuana.

I said, hey, Victor, come on, we're going to cruise town.

I got in.

I said, I don't want to go.

No.

And they had a little lock the door.

Ha.

And they drove to a local restaurant.

They said, hey, I love that Pepsi-Cola clock.

And

I said, what do you mean?

It's just a neon clock.

Oh, we're going to take it, man.

Stay here.

So I stayed in the car

and

they ran in and stole it.

And the guy came out and I said, give it back to them and let me out.

And they said, no, we're going.

And they took off.

So I came home and I said to my parents, I was in this car.

And they said, it's your fault.

You didn't get out.

You didn't jump out the window.

I said, well, they wouldn't let me.

Well, you should have, you should have known who they were, but they blamed me.

And then they said, you're going in there right now.

And I said, What?

He goes, Get in the car.

And I had to go into this little fast food place and say to the owner, I was in a car when people came into your store and took off.

And the guy goes, I know who they were.

I know it wasn't you.

I knew exactly who they were.

I will get them.

They were, everybody knew each other in town.

But the point is,

there's a certain magic line that you cross when you get involved with people.

And you

can't predict what's going to happen after that line.

You cross that line.

And when you start having a drug-dealing armed boyfriend who's systematically breaking the law and injuring people, then, and he's using your residence, what do you think is going to happen?

And you're knowledgeable about the transactions and probably benefit from it financially.

It's too unpredictable.

Just like if I say tomorrow,

I'm going to start taking fentanyl and get high.

And you know what?

I said, I'll say, Sammy, I've got a bunch of stuff.

Somebody gave me a bunch of $100 bills.

They look pretty good for counterfeit.

I'm going to go in town and try to pass them.

And you say, I wouldn't do that.

I said, yeah, no problem.

And then I'm passing them.

And then somebody, the owner calls up.

And I push a policeman three or four times.

He says, get in the car.

And I don't do it.

What do you think the drugs, the felony, the assault on an officer are going to do?

They're going to get me shot is what they're going to do because I've crossed too many lines and my chances are waning.

I'm not excusing the behavior, but

of cops.

Yeah, no, of course not.

I can remember I had one instance with a cop.

I was 18 and I had contact lenses in those days.

They were those hard plastic that hurt your eyes.

And I drove over to see some friends in a dorm at a junior college.

I didn't drink anything.

And I noticed that I'd had these hard plastic things in my eyes.

for 24 hours and they were almost bleeding.

So I took them out, pulled over to the side of the road, took them out, and I reached for my glasses.

And I left them at this get-together.

And I had no way to see.

And it was like one in the morning.

So I put,

I, you know, how you can put your fingers at the corner of your eye to stretch them so that you can see.

And I got just enough, I put my head and I started down and I heard this siren.

And so I pulled over and

I put, I, you know, I just pulled and it was on a hill.

And this sheriff came up and he had a bullhorn, stay in your car.

Stay on your car.

And so I said, okay.

And then I had a stick shift.

I didn't have the emergency brake and I don't know what happened, but I, it wasn't a very, it slipped out of gear when I put the brake on.

It moved like six inches and tapped his.

bumper.

And he said, you have assaulted an R, a squad car.

You have assaulted a squad car.

Stay in there.

I'm calling back.

He said, all this.

So then he came up and said, okay,

punk, what are you on?

I want to know.

Is it dope?

Is it, I said, I'm not in anything.

He said, well,

I have a right to search your car.

I said, please search everything you can.

Take everything.

So he did.

And I said, I took my contact lenses out.

And he said, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard.

There should be a law against that.

I said, there isn't, unfortunately.

I agree with you.

And he said, well, you're blind.

Now you got a car.

And I said, Yeah.

So

then he said, Well, I'm going to write a ticket up.

I said, Well, what did I do wrong?

And he said, You were going too slow.

That's why I pulled you over.

I said, I was going too slow because at one in the morning, I couldn't see.

He said, Well, you're going to have to take a

breath test.

I did that.

You have to walk the line.

I did that.

I was near sighted,

you know, so I could see things right in front of me,

whatever.

Nearsighted.

And then he said, You're going to follow me all the way in to your home.

And I had to give him the address.

So then he put, I had to, he put his light on and his siren and everything.

And I had to follow like 20 feet behind him so I could see these big lights.

And he drove all the way in.

And then he said, I got you.

So all I said was, could I have your badge number?

He said, no, I'm not giving you my badge number.

And so I told my dad it was a big mistake because the guy was really trying to almost assault me.

You know what I mean?

He was telling me this and this he's going to do to me.

And then so I gave it, I remember I saw his name.

And so I gave it to my dad.

Of course, my dad went into the sheriff's office,

found the guy, asked him to come out and wanted to know if he wanted to fight.

I like your father's solution.

I love my mom.

My mom was like the, what's her name in the best years of our lives that puts up with Frederick March doing all those crazy things?

Myrna Loy, isn't it?

Myrna Loy.

She reminded me of Myrna.

She just said, so your son was innocent and an officer was trying to help him get home because he was blind and could have killed somebody.

And he was a little rough around the edges, but everything ended well.

So you want to go commit a felony and strike a police officer.

Of course.

Yeah.

So I was told at a very early age after that, do not ever, ever

get yourself into a situation.

I've been pulled over maybe eight or nine times.

Maybe out of three of those, I thought the officer was way out of bounds, but I didn't say a word.

You know, pulling you over for four miles over the speed limit or something like that, or, you know, a signal light that didn't work or something.

But I didn't care.

I was always very polite.

I still am.

But yeah, with that, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the United Auto Workers speaking of criminals.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

I just want to say something.

I didn't know

that you could give to a police charity and get a I gave to a police charier.

I'm supporting the police card.

Yeah.

So when Paul Pelosi in his hot brand new Porsche

is drunk and skips over and takes out a car, hits a car

and the driver's in it, I guess, and he destroys some, I guess, state private property.

He, and then somebody pulls him over, he pulls out a card and shows the police, right?

Yeah.

What is that for?

Get out of here.

I've never heard of that either.

I wish I knew.

I mean, that is the Mordita, isn't it?

That's like going across the border into Mexico and them pulling you over and you hand them, you know what I mean, to get out

some money.

And God, it's, it's

just

finance in our case.

It comes on this same

news cycle.

The guy is making these multi-million dollar investments on insider knowledge of his wife's legislation that will or will not aid a particular industry, computer chip or whatever it is that he then is buying and selling futures.

And then you see their assessed net worth is like $100 million.

And you see, and you don't make that kind of money in America unless you have some kind of

whole thing, is

there is a God.

There is a God.

It's so corrupt.

And I don't know.

I mean,

I'm a pretty conservative guy, but

if some guy named Joe Smith,

you know, got drunk as a skunk and he was in a hot car hot meaning high powered and he wrecked it and hit another person and then there was a time lag and then he pulled out of i gotta get out of jail free card i don't think that he would get off so easily at least before critical legal theory took hold yeah maybe now he would i guess anyway Maybe there'll be new types of cards that come out for that kind of

sincerely.

support i support the fire department can you not let my house burn down yeah exactly

um so to the united autoworkers and i just want to make a correction before we go forward i didn't mean the members of the united autoworkers their leadership was corrupt yeah

so the leadership has been indicted for misappropriation of funds to lavish vacations and golf equipment and things like that by the u.s government And so they're under investigation.

And also, they're creating a new constitution so members can elect directly the leadership, which is the good news, the second part.

But I haven't ever heard you, Victor, talk about unions before.

And so I thought this was an avenue by which you could say a little bit about your thoughts on that.

Well,

I belong to one.

When I was a professor at the CSU system,

26% 26%

of the 25,000 faculty were members of the union, but the union had a closed shop contract with the state, meaning you didn't have to be in the union to benefit from higher pay.

And so when I was there, they used to come to your office and say,

Professor Hansen, you're not a member of the union, but did you like that 3.5 raise?

Yes, we negotiate it for you.

And we have no money.

And I said, okay.

So she said, you're a free rider.

I said, okay.

And we don't have any money.

Would you go to our pizza party on this weekend and join or something?

And so I did.

And then after about three years,

Gray Davis then said, it didn't matter whether you wanted to join the union or not.

They were going to take your due money anyway as an employee.

So guess what happened?

I got out of the union.

They took my, I don't know what it it was, $1,000, $2,000 a year donation.

They

tripled their coffers.

There were no more informal pizza get-togethers.

There were all these lavish banquets for the union members.

And they didn't want any more union members.

Whereas before, 27%, their goal was to get 70%.

I think their goal was to get down to 10%.

because they wanted fewer people watching what they were doing because everybody had to be a member in the sense of a paying member.

And then the first thing they did was we had this little rare period of merit pay based on production.

So like for two or three years, every little faculty member put on their bulletin board, I'm Professor

Ben Jones.

And I, and they'll have underneath new article out in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, and they put it out there or here's my teaching evaluations, you know what I mean?

And they would, they would really, and then they would, that lasted for three years.

And then there were pay discrepancies.

The people who did the work got paid more, the people who didn't didn't.

And then the union just got angry about that.

And so they got rid of that.

And then they even had, I think it was something like equity

reconsideration or something, where the people who got the pay raises then were maxed out and couldn't get anymore.

So everybody else could catch up.

So, yeah,

unions were great

when there was

no eight-hour week or,

I mean, an eight-hour day or 40-hour week, or we like overtime, we like Social Security, we like disability.

We've had all of that.

And now

they're kind of superfluous because we're in a historic labor non-participation rate.

So 64% of the available population is not working, is only working.

So what, 36% of people are not working?

So, what does that mean?

If you want to work, you will be paid very highly.

And when you see truckers in Oakland, for example, that are kind of self-employed and there's all these gig rules that the unions are putting in and things.

I don't think the union is, I don't know what it is of the workforce, the non-government workforce is about 13 or 14 percent.

But when you say union today, it's synonymous with the SEIU

and government workers or culinary workers, but it's not what it coal miners as much.

There's not very many of the hard union members, you know, teamsters and things like that anymore.

Partly it's because, well, the aim is noble and that in capitalism, everybody will get what they can until they're stopped.

So I understand the adversity.

I just saw it firsthand, and it was just a way to ensure mediocrity

at the taxpayers' expense.

And then there's something else.

I don't know how to explain this, but

when you see a CEO and he's overcharging his corporation or something,

that's wrong.

But

when you see these guys in the union that are stealing money from a pension fund or living it up, it's worse in some ways because it comes out of the dues of working people, you know what I mean?

Directly.

Not that it is indirect on the other side.

And these people suffer the additional wage of hypocrisy because they're supposed to be men of the people

and yet they want to live like grandees.

Whereas the corporate grandee says, I'm a corporate grandee and I'm going to live like a corporate grandee.

That's why I'm a corporate grandee.

I want a huge bonus.

I want a beautiful home.

I want to be

live on a beautiful golf course.

Where the union guy sort of says, well, I want to, you know, I want to just attract house and I'm just one of you guys.

So that stereotype earns him that additional wage of hypocrisy.

Yeah, exactly.

Well,

I wanted, I know you and Jack talked a little bit about the Inflation Reduction Act, and we just recently saw that Kristen Cinema has, I know, has decided to sign on to it.

And it is a very interesting situation that we're in a period of inflation and then our economy is headed into a recession.

But what I found more interesting is that the the mainstream media and the left presses all act like this is a great time and it seems so delusional.

And then every once in a while you can read something that is not delusional.

And just recently there was an article on the Bank of England

and it said really just flat out, the Bank of England is raising interest rates.

by

a half a point

and they are expecting five quarters of downturn.

So the economy to turn down for five quarters starting this fall, and they're raising interest rates.

And I just feel like, you know,

it's England and they just have a very practical outlook on where the economy is going, as do our CEOs, which you and I discussed earlier as well.

So I wanted to leave.

They're very weird because

They gave us Jimmy Carter stagflation in 18 months.

So we have a 9.1 inflation rate, hyperinflation, but we have two quarters of negative growth, which were supposed to, what, bring down prices, and they may.

But they deny both of them.

They say that the inflation is transitory and two quarters of negative growth is not a recession.

So when they do something like this, that is print more money, create more regulations, raise taxes.

Well, they're exacerbating both.

So when you spend more money that you don't have, then you're going to increase, you're expanding the money supply, the inflation is going to increase.

And when you

add more regulations,

you're going to add more regulations and you're going to tax corporations, well, then they're going to cut back, but we're already in a recession.

So just as they have managed to create antithetical poles of inflation and recession at the same time, which are not supposed to coexist, at least not for very long,

they are doing things

that in different ways will make each of those worse.

And so, the question is, what should they be doing?

They should decide what is the greatest threat right now.

And the greatest threat, I think, is hyperinflation.

So, what they should be doing is very carefully raising interest rates steadily, but at the same time, they've got to increase supply.

And so, rather than give stuff to people, they should be increasing production.

And that means making fewer,

fewer rules and regulations that hamper creative production and not raising existing taxes on private enterprise.

And that way, maybe private enterprise would be encouraged to produce more, which would bring down prices at a time we have to raise interest rates.

But instead, they're doing the worse for both things.

They're attacking production, and yet they're fueling inflation and they think linguistically they can square that circle by saying we're not in a recession and we're in a transitory inflation it's exactly what we did in the 19 late 70s and early 80s until finally ronald reagens and paul voeekler said hmm

little growth recession hyperinflation, let's go for the inflation first.

So we're going to break the back.

We're going to get interest rates sky high.

We're going to break it.

And they they did.

And then just as they broke it, Reagan had deregulated the economy and cut taxes and the whole thing took off.

7% annualized growth and he got re-elected.

But they're not going to do that.

So it's going to be like Obama from 2009 on at just slow, steady stagflation, just slow, steady, no growth.

And that's what they do.

Again, Tocqueville had them perfect when he said that in America, the popular culture was that they would rather see everybody poorer and equal than everybody better off and a few wealthier.

And that sums up the whole left-wing mentality.

What is new to this equation, though, when you talk about politics and income and wealth is that

We're in a really, really Orwellian bizarre time when we have these people with phenomenal amounts of money from cryptocurrencies, from stocks, from tech, billions, billions, billions, multi-millions.

And yet, somehow they can be in Vogue magazine, or they can just gratuitously, if you're a multi-multi, multi-millionaire actor, just say out of the blue, I hate Donald Trump.

Or you can be Mark Zuckerberg and think, you know what, I'm worth $120 billion, but I'll give $419 million to warp the election so Trump will lose.

Then you can do all of these virtue signals and suddenly rebrand yourself as what, one of the people?

And that's weird.

When you look at their lifestyles, they're the most selfish SOBs in the world, the way they live and the way they hang out and the violations of the law and their, I can fly a jet and you can't.

And, you know, when Spain now is saying that no one can turn an air conditioner on over 80 degrees, and Germany is saying that we're going to have warm rooms for older people and we're going to burn wood.

We have to.

We have no energy.

Does anybody really think that all of the world's Dabbles crowd is going to get together and say, well, we're going to do our part.

We're just not going to fly private for a year?

They're not going to do that.

No.

And so, what I'm getting at is that this is new territory.

We've always had limousine liberals, the Kennedys, et cetera, et cetera, the Rockefeller, but we've never quite had this extreme level of wealth and the machinations and performance art to fool people into thinking these people are one with the poor or they're great people or they're working class people they dress just like you and me

they're not they're exploitive and they do a lot of damage with that money if you look at how george tours he's absolutely ruined the criminal justice system and he absolutely will not live in a neighborhood where people break into homes with impunity.

And yet he's considered considered a folk hero by the left.

Even though he broke the Bank of England, he's a convicted felon in France, but he was smart enough to know that being a loud leftist exempted him from all of that.

Where does that guy live now?

Because it doesn't sound like the English or the French want him around.

So he must be living in the United States.

I know, we don't either, but we have him, don't we?

He wrote an op-ed.

one of the most bizarre op-eds I've ever read in the Wall Street Journal, where he said a lot of studies show that the less you arrest the less you indict the less you jail the less crime you have and then he doesn't cite this story i mean where was that in a cartoon book or something he didn't cite his source he knows that's not true

well your statistics will certainly go down but that doesn't mean there isn't crime out there he's a nihilist his idea is to put a billion here, a billion there, and just cause chaos and just stand back and go, this is fun to watch.

It's like taking two dogs and throwing them into a corral and letting them fight.

That's what he likes to do.

He likes to incite things and he thinks there's a creative energy release for his sick agenda.

Yeah.

And on that note, Victor, we better close off the episode here today.

Thank you so much for your wisdom and all your

stories of tales of Victor as a criminal.

My life as a criminal didn't amount to, I know, I'm just kidding.

I had bad luck.

That sounds like a criminal.

I had bad luck.

That sounds, yeah, that's what they all say in prison, Victor.

I had bad luck.

I'm just kidding.

Until next time.

And I know that somebody reminded me, you said, you said you would be perfectly well at week 10.

And I said, it's worse than that.

I said I would be at week three, five, and eight.

But I promise in two weeks I will be post-long COVID.

How's that?

Yeah, we all are hoping for it for you.

Keep you in our head.

You can see that I've got brain disease.

It's making me neurotic on this subject.

All right.

Thanks a lot, Victor, and thanks to our listeners.

Okay.

And this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen.

We're signing off.