Civilization in Reverse: Water and Plague

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we are recording on Sunday, the 24th of July.

This particular episode should be up on the World Wide Web on Thursday, the 28th.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the star of the show.

That's why it's called the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

And he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in History at the Hoo Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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

Twice a week, he writes essays for American greatness.

You should check him out there.

Writes a lot of original content for victorhanson.com, his website, and we'll talk about that a little later.

Some of that original content, though, will be the subject matter for today's program.

And one of those topics is water.

And we're going to get to that right after these important messages.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bull and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bull and branch sheets are made with the finest, 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, Bowl and Branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my bowl and branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So, join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowlandbranch.com slash Victor.

That's Bolin Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com

slash Victor.

to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply and we'd like to thank Bolin Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.

Well, I have found the secret serum and it's vibrant Super C Serum.

The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers.

Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients, including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and age spots with Vibrance.

I just began using Super C Serum last week, and I love it.

My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh.

And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.

Give it a try, and you'll love it too.

And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.

Go to vibrance.com slash Victor to save up to 37%

off and free shipping.

That's Vibrance.

V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E.

Vibrance.com slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, my friend, hope you're doing well.

Speaking of wells, wells is where water, wells are where water comes from.

As we've talked about before on this podcast, the issues facing California citizens, not only California citizens now, the wet people out west.

Now, here, here in the East, you turn on your faucet.

water comes out.

Nobody thinks of water as a commodity.

Nobody thinks of it as an issue.

They should spend a little time

west of the Continental Divide and learn how precious water is, how political it is, and how it is a tool being used by progressives to punish people.

So, Victor, you've written a.

Sarcastic.

Oh, yes, I was sarcastic.

It's a sarcastic article.

Yes, it's a sarcastic article.

But I do want to recommend before I mention that, that at the California Policy Center, which I mentioned before in the past, past, Ed Ring, who has done like a 16-part series on California and water, you should check that out.

So, Rictor, you've written, yeah, a sarcastic piece, but let me just read two very quickly here.

You've about, I don't know, six to maybe ten aspects of this water, water, and not a drop anywhere.

Here's number three, in times of drought, Rivers must, this is from the leftist mindset, rivers must run to the sea to preserve 19th century riparian landscapes and aquatic life and to replenish oxygen in the fragile waters of the bay and surrounding delta to save small fish.

By the way, they're not native, those fish.

The treated nitrogen-rich effluents of dozens of Bay Area liberal communities into the fragile bay have little to do with its declining oxygenation.

That's number three.

Number four, sarcastic.

Agriculture is doomed in the West, and quite privately, it should be, given its reliance on unnatural water transfers, especially on California's west side.

Victor, you're undergoing a serious drought, even when you weren't having a drought.

A short period there was an opportunity to

help

address this issue.

Nobody did nothing, as we say in the Bronx.

victor tell us about why you wrote this piece

well you know we have this drought and i i try to measure it both by data

of annual rainfall and snowpack it's in its second year but it's part of a five year we were interrupted by a very wet year which is tragic because we had three years ago just enormous amounts of snow and rain, but we were not ready or we were not willing to capture that water bounty and reservoirs and underground storage.

So we lost it.

But it's very strange.

I just like to preface, it's sort of like if a meteor is coming to the United States and it's headed here and you don't want to send an atomic rocket to blow it up because you think that's short term, but you want to discuss the galaxy in general.

And that's sort of what people do.

Well, it's climate change.

It's climate change.

So even though the United States and Europe contribute, I don't know, about 2%

of carbon fuels to the world, we've got to worry about that.

And it's inevitable.

So we're not going to do the short-term things that would alleviate the drought.

And that's the attitude.

And so it's used to promote this climate change.

And what that means is that we haven't built a reservoir since the new Malonas Dam for water storage in the mountains.

And that was when we had about 21 million people.

We have 41 million now.

So 20 million extra mouths or cars or showers, whatever you want to term it, are drawing their straws in this finite storage capacity.

And that was by design.

It was by design.

It was considered unnatural.

And then we compounded the fact that we started this riparian idea that, well, I've read about John Muir and he hiked down the San Joaquin River, or I've read about early explorers in.

in the Sacramento.

They were beautiful places.

They looked out on the bank and there was salmon jumping up on their way to the Sierra.

We can still do that.

The reservoirs might be better served rather than their original intent of hydroelectric power or flood control or recreation or agriculture, agricultural irrigation story.

Why not let that

just use it to modulate the river at full capacity so you could store it?

And guess what?

Our two main rivers in California would have better year-round water capacity out to the Delta than they ever did in the 19th century.

So at $50,000 a salmon, we can do that.

And we might have to cut off 95% of the deliveries to agriculture, and we might have to modulate our power generation, but that's worried.

And then, you know, as far as forest fires go, Jack, they're kind of a natural thing.

And so when we had the drought and the Beatles took over and we lost 30 million trees, And remember, this, especially in the case of Douglas fir, these species of trees were very valuable, but we've drove out the timber industry.

So we'll just let them kind of, you know, break apart.

Maybe they'll fall down on a couple of things, but who cares?

They're going to be a natural mulch for bugs and birds.

So we'll leave them there.

And if they have a little fire now and then, that's what nature did before we got here.

And if it threatens people who live up in the mountains and cabin, they have no business in such fragile landscapes.

Now, we on the coast, where there's no aquifer and we get about 15 inches of rain, we have to have long distance water transference.

But those people up in the Sierra, those hillbilly people, they are in a natural place.

And so we didn't thin out the forest.

We ignored all the classical rules of forestry that took so long to develop.

And then we're going to adjudicate where people live and where they should not live and where they should farm.

But it's going to be based on one sacred principle: The La Jolla Berkeley coastal strip next to the ocean that can't support naturally 20 million people, it will have water transference from Hetch Hetchy, from Hoover Dam,

and from the California Aqueduct.

And that's non-negotiable.

If which shorts agriculture, we have no business farming.

We can import our food from, you know, India or South America or Mexico.

And, you you know, the next thing is everybody, then they go around and they say, wow, there's too many freelancers.

There's all these guys that would have their own wells.

And they've got these 19th century retreats into

mineral right law.

And it says that the minerals under your property belong to you.

So while, yes, they spend 50, 60, 80,000 and up drilling a well and putting a pressure system in, that water's got to be metered because it's our water.

And we don't want some guy with a, you know, out in the country outside Modesto with a quarter acre

lawn.

So we're going to go after him.

And that's, that's coming up.

Excuse me, Victor, that metering, has that ever happened anywhere as far as you know?

Yeah, I think it has happened in some places around the world, and especially Europe.

And when you get these wet years,

as we remember, we've had years that were so wet, and I think December of last year was a record almost.

And most of that snow melted by, we didn't really capture it all, but the snow melt.

But when you have those wet years, they never nullify the climate change thesis.

So remember, global warming as a term no longer exists.

There's two terms, climate change and climate chaos.

And what that means is it's too dry, it's climate change.

If it's too wet, it's climate change.

If it's too, too many tornadoes, too many earthquakes.

Remember the guy who said earthquake?

I think he was in the Congress.

I don't think it was Hank Johnson.

It was somebody else who said that earthquakes were climate change.

But whatever the.

Johnson said that the island flipped over.

That was said that everybody went to the edge of Guam.

He was worried that it would flip on top of them.

And that was famous because of the startled look that the military officer asked to answer.

He looked like he'd seen,

I don't know what he thought he was.

Yeah,

okay.

Eyelids flip over when they go, people go to one edge.

Right.

So anyway, that's the attitude of California.

And the result is that if you drive out on the west side along I-5, you see almonds coming.

Okay, the price has plummeted to 150.

And by the way, listeners, the idea that almonds are stealing water from other crops, it's about three acre feet per year to grow almonds, about what canning tomatoes or grapes or cotton is.

The reason that we focus on almonds is that these Westside farmers who traditionally had row cropped and when water supplies were cut off, they let their fields fallow.

What happened was they planted almonds that for a period from 2005 to 2017 or something.

They were phenomenally profitable when we had, you know, three, four, 500,000, not the current 1.3 million acres.

And the price was up to 4, 450 a pound.

Some of these guys got, you know, that's wonderful soil out there.

They got, I don't know, 12,000 bucks an acre gross and maybe three or four.

They were netting 8,000 bucks and they were making a lot of money.

And everybody said, wow, these corporate people are making a lot of money on all this water.

And they didn't say it because about tomatoes or cotton because they weren't making a lot of money.

So they started to transition to permanent crops.

And then when they started to cut the water, the farmers said, wait a minute, I can't just tear down these almonds and plant tomatoes or cotton or dry farm wheat.

I have an investment of 20,000 an acre and permanent infrastructure, the trees.

And so then they started thinking that they could find another aquifer.

But of course, there was one, and it wasn't just the exhausted one at 500 feet, it's about 1,200 feet.

And the aquifer where I'm speaking today, you know, it's dropped precipitously from 50 feet, but it's still about,

you know, 90 to 110 feet here.

So my point is that when you go down 1500 feet, you need a 200 horsepower electric turbine pump and you need casing going down, you know, perforated casing.

It's about a million and a half dollars a well, and then you're only going to get 200 gallons a minute as you gobble up electricity.

But that would keep these orchards alive.

And the left looked at that and they said, wow.

greedy farmers now they're farming money-losing almonds tear them all out

and divert the water from the san luis river reservoir um waste station so to speak of the on the aqueduct and let it go to where it belongs and that is san jose and oakland and san francisco and san luis obispo and santa barbara and then pump it over to los angeles and that's where we're headed i think we're headed to a point where in my lifetime, I grew up where there was no west side farming.

That started with the San Luis Project, I think in 1962, BF Cisk and JFK, et cetera, and Jerry Brown's dad, Edmund Brown, did a great job.

But I think that land will go out of,

it already is starting to go out of production.

And it's not just You're going to drive, you know, down Manning Avenue or 180 across the West Side in Shields or whatever and see fallow land.

That's not what happens out there.

It's windy and it's hot.

You're going to see Sahara-like conditions.

When I was growing up, the west side was a place where there were wild coyotes and valley fever blew across in the fall, and it was a desolate place.

And I think we're going to get back there.

Crazy, just absolutely crazy.

It is.

It's reverse civilization reverse.

Again, it's

to me fascinated from afar.

This is the the prime example of how progressives hate people.

They'd rather them not have the means to drink, not have the means to produce food to feed the world, feed America and the world.

It is really

almost

satanic, it seems.

It is.

It is.

And of course, it's asymmetrical.

I like that word, but the left, because they don't ever say, let's cut off the California aqueduct.

It's unnatural to suck all of that water out of the clamouth or the Feather River and bring it all the way down

to, you know, Palo Alto or Silicon Valley.

It just doesn't make sense.

We're living in an unsustainable, fragile landscape.

Our aquifer only supplies 15% of our needs.

And Hetch Hetchy, my gosh, we destroyed something that John Muir said was more beautiful than the Yosemite Valley to give us water.

So we're going to do our part.

i think they are doing their part i think they're trying to what depopulate san francisco with all the empty stores and everything so maybe they're all going to move out of san francisco yeah some big piece about that it's about 24 percent of uh

what did i see 24 of stores are just shut now in in san francisco and we've talked about

before i think the last time i was in the city walking around the city maybe was with you five or six years ago gosh almighty what what's what's happened to this beautiful city?

It's um

hey, but Victor, they well, they got rid of they got rid of their DA.

Um, and if I can shift a little south, but I'm springing this on you.

I just, I just read right before the, we started recording that

Gascon, the recall effort in Los Angeles, where they need uh, like almost you know, about 566,000 signatures,

uh, 716,000 signatures were submitted.

It's funny, isn't it?

A guy's sheriff and he lets criminals out or he doesn't arrest them.

Or if they're arrested, he doesn't indict them.

Or if he indicts them, he doesn't really prosecute them.

If he convicts them, they're out.

But they get so angry, they recall him.

So he skedaddles down to LA and reinvents himself, repeats the exact horror, and then they wise up finally and recall him.

And meanwhile, his buddy, Mr.

Boudin, takes over.

And learning that they didn't want Gascon, he then emulates exactly the same, the same policies, thinking that he's, I guess, different.

And then they recall him.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, San Francisco, the problem is not in the stars.

It's within you.

You vote for these people and they destroy civilization.

There's nothing in history that suggests civilization is linear.

There's nothing that suggests that that beautiful city that you see maybe when you watch Vertigo and you see people properly dressed and streets are clean and everybody's happy and there's a rule of law in those scenes and movies of San Francisco.

There's no reason to believe that that's going to always not only stay the same, but get better, get better.

Victor,

the runner-up for the 1968 Olympics,

which were held in Mexico City, the runner-up was Detroit.

And can you imagine that?

So 1960, Detroit is in, you know, Detroit was in 1945, Detroit had the fastest population growth, best GDP, and was considered an artistic and musical powerhouse.

And today, I've said this before, that if you were in 1945

and you looked at Hiroshima, and you looked at Detroit, and then you came back in your spaceship and looked at 20,

I don't know, 15 at Detroit and at Hiroshima, you would say, hmm,

there were two atomic bombs dropped.

One was in 1945 in Hiroshima, and

one was in

2015 on Detroit.

It looks like Hiroshima did

then,

and Hiroshima looks like Detroit did then.

That's sad.

It's all self-created.

So it shows you, Jack, that

people

can create something more disastrous than an atomic bomb.

Right.

Policy is just as lethal.

Yeah.

Hey, Victor, the piece about water was an ultra piece for your website.

And I'll get the little plug-in right now to our listeners who are not yet subscribed to VictorHanson.com, do so.

because that piece and the next piece we're going to use as a topic for discussion, they're the kind of things that are there every week.

There's a lot of exclusive content there.

It's $5 a month.

Well, $5 initiation.

You know, go in, pay the five bucks,

feel the essence and then the glory of the great website.

And you're going to like what you see.

And the subscription is $50 a year.

It's well worth it.

So

that's the plug.

Now, the other ultra piece that is we're going to use as a topic here has to do with Victor's COVID afterthought.

And we are going to discuss that right after these important messages.

So you just got back from summer vacation.

Maybe you might have even had to book two rooms because of your snoring.

Some vacation, huh?

Snoring can be an underlying cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even memory loss.

Here is my advice.

If you want every night to be a true vacation, you need to get yourself Zipa.

That's happy Z, spelled backwards.

Zipa is a doctor-designed mouthpiece that not only moves your jaw forward, but is also the only device with a patented tongue seat belt to keep your airways open and the snoring away.

The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.

Zipa was proven proven in a 600-patient clinical trial and sold over half a million units.

From now until the end of October, show your family you actually care by purchasing a limited edition pink Zipa.

Not only will you save $10,

but Zipa is on a mission to raise $50,000 for breast cancer research and they will donate another $10,000 to the Susan G.

Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Go to zyppah.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.

Put your snoring on a permanent vacation and help a worthy cause with the snoring device we trust by visiting ZYPPAH.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.

Remember, Zipa Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.

Text fees may apply and we'd like to thank Zipa for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor,

you're on week, as we're recording today, it's probably week 10 of your prolonged struggle with your

COVID.

Today is a Sunday.

It's exactly 90 days on a Sunday

that I woke up on a Sunday morning.

I worked very hard.

I chainsawed.

I was helping fix this house problem.

And about

eight in the evening, I started again,

tickle in my throat, body aches.

And I woke up with a raging fever.

Six days.

COVID, got up, said, okay, I beat Delta.

I've been vaccinated, just like Dr.

Fauci said.

I've got antibodies, so it will go away like Delta did, and I'm going to go back to work.

As soon as I test negative, I tested negative after five or six days.

I got on a plane three days later.

I went all, I saw you in Delaware, I went to the Brown, I went all over the East Coast.

I came home, wiped out, thinking, hmm, things are supposed to get better, not worse, but it's in your head.

Come on, just shake it off.

I got to go to Israel.

I I had a couple of days.

I said, you know, I'll rest and it'll be over with.

I flew to Israel, long flight, 105 people for 16 days pre, you know, tour and all that stuff.

Came back.

Hmm, I can't sleep.

I have neuropathy.

I feel like I have the flu.

I have brain fog.

I can't hear.

I can't taste.

I can't smell.

This is weird.

But it's only a month.

It's not long COVID.

So I'll go and do some, did some more traveling, speaking.

And then I hit a wall about six weeks.

And I said, you know what?

This is some kind of Chinese engineered virus.

It can't, it's destroying my immune shutoff.

So it became an autoimmune.

I've had

a little bit of something like it before, but with another infection and just

muscle aches, neuropathy, hearing.

just weird things.

And the thing that what's really bad about it, it does something to your brain, makes you anxious, like I'm talking now, obsessive, compulsive about it, because it doesn't end.

And then more importantly,

you try to say to yourself, I tell you, I feel a little bit better today.

So I'm going to go lift some weights.

I'm going to go exercise.

I'm going to go write for 10 hours.

And then my brain, if anything says that it's not working, you're going to say, don't panic.

It's just your brain doing that.

And then you go do it i drove friday

almost five and a half hours about 300 miles plus and i thought i'm see i'm well i did it i didn't get lost and then what happens is the next day you crash i mean you go back to square one and then you say okay i'm in square one but i'm going to try it again and you never you never just say I'm just going to lay there because if you lay there, you look at your arms and legs and you start losing muscle mass at about 5% a day.

And you look just awful and you feel awful.

So my attitude is I'm going to try within reasonable limits to keep responsibilities and commitments and try to ignore it, but I have no confidence anymore that it's going to go away because it's something that has an ability.

As I read the literature, the spike protein or remnants or remains of it that are not large enough or not active enough to indicate a positive COVID test.

I haven't tested positive since May 5th or 6th.

I've been negative ever since.

No fever, no cough, nothing.

It's completely different.

And that, I guess, these remains for some people's inferior immune system like mine, it just activates it and it makes it.

You know, it's very strange.

I hope if people are listening, this might be of some value to their experiences or people they know have it or they have it is that

you can eat, Jack, more than you usually do, and you'll lose weight.

I think it's because your immune system or you don't sleep, insomnia, you only sleep a few hours, if any, some nights, but you wake up and you think, I'm going to have a huge steak, salad, rice,

maybe some, and then you feel gorged.

And then you wake up the next morning after russ, you know, and you, and you've lost two pounds.

Wow.

It's the strangest thing.

At one point, I think I lost almost 30 pounds,

and I had lost some before that.

So I think now I'm trying to actually, for the first time since I was in wrestling in high school, I'm trying to gain weight.

I do want to, obviously, to hear you talk about this piece you've written, but if it's not too personal, it's two in the, because you just,

you've got insomnia.

So it's two in the morning and you're wide awake wishing you weren't.

But what do you do in the middle of the night?

Do you just try to hope you can catch the brass ring and get to sleep?

You do.

You start to, you know, you do all the things that people tell you.

They call it, you know, the culture of sleep.

You have to make sure it's dark.

You try not to use an electric device,

iPhone or computer two or three hours before.

You try not to have water, so you have to get and go to the bathroom right before.

you start

with the natural if you can't sleep you take i take theanine uh and magnesium threonate and

serine or something like that and then if that doesn't work you take these little natural mixtures of tryptophan and 5-hdp and melatonin and that usually doesn't work and then you say i have the last resort

i'll go to the big artillery.

Maybe it's an Atavan or a Valium just to make you, and that doesn't work.

And then I try not to take the sleeping pills, ambient or anything.

Sometimes I try to do, during the day, I'll put a mask over my head and listen to some kind of

hokey little, I shouldn't say that.

Because they're good.

And sometimes I'll get an hour of sleep.

I plan to do that right after.

I didn't sleep last night, so I'm planning to do that right after this.

I've been very fortunate though, you know,

because here I am on this farm, but I work at Stanford.

So I have a wonderful ophthalmologist, Dr.

Judith Nebbitt.

And she has really, I have a problem with high eye pressure, which has been exacerbated for some reason.

And she knows a lot.

And so she's given me a lot of advice.

And then I also teach at Hillsdale.

And there's just a wonderful doctor who's a supporter of Hillsdale, Dr.

Samuel Pappas.

And he's very scientific.

He reads and he's proactive and

he talks to me or emails and gives advice.

He's not saying take this drug.

He does the gamut of integrative to traditional medicine.

And so

before I was kind of a quack, to tell you the truth, Jack, I just took stuff.

I took.

amino acids, I took quercetin, I took luteolin, I took pine bark, I took vitamin D, selenium, maybe 10 or 15, probiotic, all of these things to get back at the cellular level.

And then he mildly and kindly suggested that this avenue might be more effective than that avenue.

So I relied on his advice.

And I get a lot of people, believe it or not, I get people who write me and they've had long COVID.

And they send me scientific, one thing I don't do is I don't read the,

not because I disagree with them i don't read the social media stuff about it chat list because i i don't have time but i read the scientific peer-reviewed papers right and uh they're very interesting there seems to be a big and i wrote about this in one of the covet pieces that is the are there viral remnants that are insiding the immune system are there certain people who have hypersensitive immune system.

It seems like a lot of people that get long COVID, long COVID are not your obese, diabetic, older person that has compromised immune system, but hyperactive.

That is, they have hyper allergies or in my case, mastocytosis or

some people that are triathletes, young, weightlifters, and they overreact to it because of

either a very young, strong

immune system, or in my case, kind of an older person that's always been too sensitive.

Not that I'm a sensitive person, but my immune system is very sensitive.

Apparently, so that was interesting.

Or

is it

just

this stuff hides?

It's not particles and it's not your immune system.

This stuff is still around, maybe not enough, and it's in your gut or your brain.

And it's just telling your immune system, aha, can't get me.

Try to get me.

And then the only hopeful thing is that I think in a matter, either

I hit the official long COVID today, 90 days, so I guess I have long COVID.

But

the point is that at some point,

I used that metaphor before, it's like a locomotive, your immune system, it jumps the tracks and it's going at full speed with its wheels, but it's spinning in the sand.

And something can push that back on the tracks, and then you get a homeostasis, and the immune system will calm down.

And what that is, people are arguing about and they're trying to investigate.

For some, it's take antivirals or monoclonal antibodies and just wipe out everything that's left of that infernal virus.

And then once that's happened, the immune system says, there's nothing for me to hunt down anymore.

I'll go back and be a nice immune system.

Or it's

feed the mitochondria at the cellular level.

So if that immune system is robbing you of the essential proteins and nutrients that allow you to function, and the the result is horrific muscle pains.

It's like lactic acid in your muscles.

If you swim or you lift something or you walk too much, you get burning muscles.

Then maybe find nutrients or supplements that would feed that

mitochondria so that it doesn't get depleted.

And it says to the immune system, you can steal everything you want, but I'm still functioning, so there's no need to do it anymore.

And then it gets back.

So there's all these strategies, meditation, electrical stimulation.

They all have some scientific inquiry.

And I think I kind of bug Dr.

Pappas or Dr.

Nevitt or people like that who I ask them questions that are pretty esoteric.

They're very learned and they're very helpful.

And so I'm trying to learn about it, not just because of me, but I want to find out about the phenomenon and what it says about.

how it was, I think it was engineered.

I think Stephen Quay in that Wall Street Journal,

op-ed pretty much definitively did it he i've heard him give a lecture on it and i'm going to try to have him on our podcast uh next week yeah i think by the time this podcast airs that podcast will have yeah i think it'll be i think he his logic is definitive it really is and uh it shows you that this virus is capable of immune disruptions and mutability and infectiousness and morbidity for particular types of people in a way that just doesn't happen in nature like that.

So, Victor, I thought I saw Fauci

say

maybe where he was so adamant, of course, to protect himself, I think, legally from what he did funding Chinese gain of function research.

But

maybe he left a little room open that, yeah, maybe this could have been

engineered as opposed to being a natural virus.

I think he did.

I saw that interview that he did with Brett Baer.

They got very heated.

He really pushed back at Brett Baer, and Brett Baer had really, I was surprised, impressed him.

The problem Fauci has is that of those redacted emails at the very outbreak, there was a worry among the virology community that A,

the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, along with Mr.

Dr.

Collins at the CDC and the NAI.

They all were very much wanting to continue with gain of function research, maybe for noble purposes to create better vaccines.

But when that was outlawed, they began to fund Peter Dasick's Echo Health

and other

indirect routes that would be things like mice that needed human-engineered lungs to experiment on.

And that technology or that know-how was probably beyond the range of the Chinese.

And that expertise was somehow given to them.

And so we were funneling to Bat Lady or whatever you want to call her to continue a type of research that was A, indirectly controlled by the Chinese military at this level four in a lab that had a history of sloppy safety procedures, and three, a mechanism to avoid U.S.

law.

And then when that was exposed, Lancet, the medical journal, under Peter Dasick's suggestion, ran an investigation in which he picked the people.

They went to China.

They didn't get full cooperation.

Then they announced it a

natural phenomenon, even though the number of miles between the potential bat and the lab were just fantastic.

It wouldn't have been easy.

And then there was no animal that had ever had this virus until a human had had it.

And there were animals within the lab that they were experimenting on and we even know a couple of people who apparently were infected and went out accidentally and the question is what were they doing

so why were they taking such risks with such a poor safety record in china and were they trying to really Was the Chinese military a humanitarian effort and said, you know, we had SARS-1 and we had this Middle Eastern version of a coronavirus.

And we were just trying to help humanity.

And we were the only country that really thought that gain of function was legitimate.

Or were they working on some kind of bioweapon?

By the way, Victor, you can't say that America, the American medical community, Fauci and others, did not know of the sloppy ways of being able to do that.

No, they knew.

No, no, no.

They knew.

That's demonstrable.

And what they are saying is that this was not gain of function.

And I don't think that's viable.

That was that exchange with Rand Paul.

And I think Rand Paul this week is going to have hearings.

Dr.

Fauci knows.

You can see it in his face.

You can see it in his answers.

And I would just like to say that, you know, it's pretty clear, I think,

that

I don't want to be definitive.

I'm not a scientist, but it was one reads.

whether it's popular literature like Nicholas Wade or some of these reports by dissident investigators by Dr.

Kui.

When you read it, you get the impression that there is slowly coalescing a scientific consensus in here in Europe and Japan that this was a gainofunction virus whose purposes we don't know,

but we should have known given the dangerous environment in which it was being conducted.

And I think the majority, I can say two things about the consensus.

The majority consensus suggests that it was accidentally released due to sloppy procedures.

It wasn't deliberately released.

But there is also another minority consensus that feels that perhaps we're going to learn that this was not for vaccination purposes, but maybe a bioweapon project, that at some point in its early development, it escaped by accident.

And that might be one of the reasons the Chinese have reacted with such draconian ways, because they know the potential for social disruption far more than we do.

But the accident doesn't preclude a possible intentional release at some other point if this thing is being developed, was being developed for nefarious reasons.

The thing there is, and the traditional counter-argument to that is: well, they wouldn't have intentionally released it because they didn't have a vaccine, so it would be in their backyard first.

And the answer that some people have suggested is,

oh, yes, but

they were developing

a bioweapon and they had mechanisms further down the road that would either control the nature of its infectiousness or they would have a vaccine, but during this process,

it was aborted because it jumped.

And I don't know the answer to that.

I'm not a scientist.

I'm not dispensing medical.

But I would say that, and I think this is the most important thing, and I mentioned it a little bit in that article, that if we all just take a deep breath and think of all the people that we know who have died from this,

or all the people who have been locked in their homes and gone crazy, or the people who have had long COVID, or the people who have recovered and they don't have long COVID, but they have tingling fingers, or

they don't taste right.

All of the disruptions, and you start to think about it, what the Chinese did,

if you just enumerate them, it destroyed a presidency.

Whether you like Trump or not doesn't matter, a foreign pathogen destroyed that presidency.

If it had not happened, I think even Democrats would have agreed that he would have been re-elected.

It blew up, and as I said that in the article, it blew up in a booming economy.

We had a great economy.

You know, and we want to know what happened after George Floyd, the 120 days of riot or the January, I think it created a national hysteria that people walking around with masks, kids with no social, no outlets to go to school, no social interaction, people dependent, paranoid.

It created a level of anxiety and apprehension that it was like gasoline and the George Floyd or the election set it off.

It's ruined.

I can speak as a grandfather of a special needs child who was deprived of critical schooling.

It has destroyed the lives of a lot of kids.

And I don't know to what degree they're going to be able to make up for that two-year hiatus.

And we've had substance abuse.

Scott Atlas has been very, I mean, he's been vindicated, but he's not just, you know, bragging on his vindication.

He's been really at work and showing that in terms of suicide rates and spousal abuse and all of these missed doctors' appointments and surgeries and cancer and heart, it's been devastating.

Almost the toll will probably be more than the actual plague.

Which he was trying to

bring to bear in the White House and he was opposed by Anthony Fauci on this.

And Dr.

Burks.

I read it.

I've known Scott Atlas for, I don't know, 15 years.

And what happened to him was the greatest miscarriage of justice and character defamation that I've ever witnessed.

When he said repeatedly,

repeatedly, if you have a shotgun approach and you shut down all the schools and you put everything person in an indeterminate quarantine, you're going to do two things.

Number one, and most importantly, you're going to rob the nation of

the resources to concentrate and focus on rest homes and older people.

And this first wave, that's who's dying.

They need to be masked.

They need to be quarantined.

They make sure that workers around them are tested.

That's what he said.

And then he said, if you do this,

we're going to have an enormous toll on adults that are going to that are going to get cancer and heart attacks and alcoholism

and then the children are going to, and he said that.

And then he said another thing, that he supported vaccinations.

He supported boosters.

But he did say that this is a mutable, strange virus, and you cannot count on vaccine.

That was when Joe Biden came in and he said, we're going to to all get vaccinated and it's going to be the end of it.

And he was yelling and screaming about the need for therapeutics.

From the very beginning, we ignored that.

Doctors who had therapies,

and they may have been controversial, but they were some success.

And they were all ridiculed.

And he was, so he was, he was right.

And what did we do to him?

We destroyed his career.

assassinated his character.

And I know someone who wrote some op-eds in support of him, I I got really severely criticized.

And it was just a, it was just a national madness, the Stanford medical school, the Stanford faculty, they went after him as if he was some,

and yet he was trying to help them.

That was what was strange about it.

He was trying to help them.

But, you know, besides all that, Jack, there were other things.

I mean, we went from, what, 26 million?

early or mail-in balloting.

We've never, that was, I think the, I don't know what it was, it was 30% or something.

We went up to 102 mail-in ballots that were early bow or early that were not cast on election day.

And the error rate plummeted mysteriously from the state's average of about 5% to 0.3 to 0.6%.

And so what I'm getting at is it altered the way that whether you, whatever you think about the election, the change in voting laws in March and April and May that had drop boxes and

third party voting and all of this stuff

and not checking a name versus the registered name or an incomplete name or all of that under the guise of COVID really changed the way that Americans voted.

We have never had 62 to 64%

of ballots not cast on election day.

That second debate, whatever you think about it, it didn't matter.

50 to 60 million people had already voted.

So that was something that we don't talk about we don't talk about the millions of people who are disabled right now and so we talk about the labor force well why can't we get labor well we subsidize labor participation non-participation yes we did and yes we're coming into a period where we had enormous demand and funny money so there weren't enough workers to create the supplies for yes and there's a lot of people who there still are i know a lot of them that don't go out jack they're convinced that they're going to get COVID.

And whereas before they thought they were going to die and they didn't want to get it, now they're afraid they're going to get long COVID because it's now in the news and they don't want to get it.

They'll say, well, I know that

I can beat it in four days.

But according to this, Anthony Fauci himself, people

who get long COVID are not predicated on whether they were in the hospital or not.

Anybody can get it.

So there's what I'm, and then there's the long COVID people.

And I just said, since I've been out here i've had maybe people working here three or four people who have either had covid or they months later they're still dragging and they unfortunately have to use their hands and muscles and they're tired and uh and so

it's funny i was talking to one of them a couple months ago and i said i couldn't do what you're doing if i had i had just gotten this first month and he said

well i'm just tired, but I don't know.

I couldn't think.

I couldn't, how do you, you know, he was having problems with the electricity paradigms.

And I was thinking, and he said to me, well, how do you, how do you do your job?

Because your brain is fried.

And I think, so that's something that's underestimated.

And then

we don't even know what the side effects of these vaccinations are.

You know, we've had young men with myocarditis.

We've had women, especially in some of the RNA vaccines that have had cysts that are mistaken for tumors and mammograms have been,

you know, they can report false positive ovarian cysts, menstrual disruptions, have all sorts of problems with these vaccinations.

We've crippled them.

We're talking about crippling the military.

We're kicking people out.

of the military that haven't been vaccinated, but they may have had COVID one, two, three times with antibodies.

Right.

And we're not sure that the boosters offer any superior protection did it did it did it for uncle joe uh that's a good point jack because we have fauci and biden who are and they're almost shameless in the sense that they keep yelling you got to get vaccinated you got to get double boosted you got to lose use paxaboid well they did all that and they got infected Fauci took Paxaboid and then he relapsed.

We don't know how he feels.

We don't know how Biden feels, but it's kind of disturbing when they're telling us almost in childlike terms that he cleaned up his plate as if that's an advance.

I mean, if somebody said, Hey, Victor, how are you doing with your long COVID?

And I said, I've cleaned my plate.

Oh, my gosh.

I think you're wearing a bib in mommy's feet.

Yeah.

And

it really, so it really destroyed.

And then we're not even talking about the mothers out there with allergic children that are desperately driving 100 miles to find formula or women that can't get tampons, or electricians that can't get wire.

And

guess what?

It gave us COVID, the Chinese gift gave us Joe Biden, which I think is arguably the worst president since James Buchanan.

Yeah, maybe before.

He's the worst ever.

Yeah.

And that was all from this, take away that COVID.

And, or just do this, Jack, just say COVID would have been like H1N1 flu, or it would have been like SARS-1.

This was different.

I think everybody should realize that.

I'm not somebody that says, well, there was a Spanish flu.

Yes.

And it was more virulent, but we're not over this thing yet.

And I think in the fall, we're going to get more and more iterations of it.

And I don't know how they're going to make a vaccine that is safe.

in time.

And I think we're going to live with the idea that

we all have a rendezvous with COVID.

We do.

And we have a rendezvous with, if we get over it in a week or two, we're going to have some after effects.

And there's going to be 10% of us that either have allergies or that we stress our immune system through athletics or young, robust people, or we're type A personalities.

I've heard that.

or they have upregulated immune system, autoimmune diseases, and they are going to get a bad case of long COVID.

Right.

We're going to have a significant part of the population with diminished capacity.

And you yourself, you could get COVID again, too, right, Victor?

Or a new strain of

whatever's out there.

I don't want to say wrap this up because an important part of this COVID piece you wrote is about the Chinese.

Let me just read this very quickly.

You wrote, the Chinese are responsible for millions of deaths worldwide.

In essence, they have waged war on humankind and unleashed a weapon thousands of times more deadly than a nuclear bomb.

I said said nuclear.

I'll get to that later.

But to what degree and why are they exempt from the consequences?

Do they own politicians, fund university research in the West, contribute to medical journals, threaten media and the universities that promulgate skepticism of the crackpot pangolin or bat theory?

So Victor, you know, not only related to COVID, but kind of in general, China, which

we talked before about you know well why would they have invent some people say why would they have invented this uh virus if they didn't have the uh antidote antidote already well you know they they they slaughtered tens of millions of their own citizens or they starved them to death.

And this is the legacy of this, of China, of communist China, has been one of very limited criticism over the decades relative to even, you know,

the poor thing for the, you know, the Soviets was they had Stalin, right?

A bad guy.

Of course, none of them got any criticism relative to what, you know, Nazi Germany did, but China

seems to have gotten a free pass from criticism for decades.

So I don't really think it's any surprise.

Well, it's a good point because let's just look at two

aggressive acts, whether intentional or not.

And I know that's kind of a contradiction with the word aggressive and intentional, but we have Ukraine and Russia went in there and the world is rightly shocked and it's doing all

it can, right?

But

China's Wuhan level four lab did so much more damage than Russia will ever do to the world.

And yet there's silence.

In fact, if you criticize them, you're a racist.

I can say that I wrote an early article based on secondary sources.

It wasn't my idea.

I'm not a researcher, but I suggested there was a good chance that this thing was engineered.

And I got attacked in, I think it was Slate.

I got attacked by the Stanford alumni.

People wrote to the Stanford Alumni Association.

I got attacked by faculty.

Some radio person picked it up and used my, I never used the word doctor.

I have a PhD, but he said doctor.

And then all of a sudden, I got attacked for suggesting that I was an MD, which I never did.

So, my point was, we created a climate when you could not discuss this rationally.

And that begs the question: why was that?

Why did we create that climate?

And why is it different than Russia?

Why can we so easily condemn Russia's invasion and the death and destruction when it pales in comparison to what the Chinese have unleashed?

And if anybody says, well, you're paranoid, Victor, just remember one thing.

For about 10 to 12 days, if you were in Wuhan,

you could not leave Wuhan and go to another Chinese city.

That was against the rules.

But you could fly into LAX, you could fly into SFO, you could fly into Milan, you could fly into London, you could fly into JFK.

Now, why was that?

Why didn't they say if it's too dangerous to leave Wuhan for Shanghai, Shanghai, Shanghai, or Beijing, we're not going to send you around the world?

So they were culpable.

And why did the World Health Organization lie?

And why did Bill Gates say they were doing a good job?

And why did Anthony Fauci say we shouldn't be criticizing them?

And the answer to that is clear, that we have so much investment in China, and they are so heavily invested in joint projects.

and funding medical research and academic journals and they're present on university campuses.

They're ubiquitous.

And so that's the reason.

And it's really scary.

I think it's quite frightening because

if you speak up, they're going to try to destroy you.

And

then to see Dr.

I'll just finish with this, Jackie, because this is almost incomprehensible if you think about it.

So the face of COVID,

prevention, prophylaxis, treatment, everything in the United States has been Anthony Fauci.

Anthony Fauci.

So he was the gospel.

He was on Fox News for half a year.

He was the apolitical, nonpartisan, senior man who was so well, we thought,

and that's not true, but that was the impression that he fostered during the AIDS epidemic.

Okay.

if you just i i don't think you anybody that's listening and i can't comprehend it because it's so startling it's it's beyond the ability of the human mind to grasp.

But just let me try.

It suggests

that for nearly

we're going to come up on two years,

or actually, we're already over two years.

And for that period, the person who has been advising us and disseminating information and covering the airwaves is a person

who authorized a grant and help

to a lab investigating and researching and developing a gain of function virus that was responsible for this catastrophe when it was illegal to do that research in the United States and knowingly so.

Think about that.

If that is true, and I'm not saying it is true, but if that hypothesis is valid, then essentially you have a person who is culpable in some part for the dissemination of this virus, who is in the same time telling people that it didn't come from a lab.

Now he kind of backs off, but he's not, that doesn't wipe away what he's been doing.

And he's been giving signals and exegesis and analysis that protects himself.

And so when Brett Baer, who's a good journalist, mentioned that in this recent

Fox News interview, and he talked about the virologist that wrote him and the redacted, Jack, the redacted emails of Francis Collin.

Why they would be redacted, I don't know.

But this is what Fauci essentially said.

Brett, I know you better than that.

I know you.

Now come on.

And so he was ad hominem, and he wasn't addressing the problem.

And all he had to do was say something like the following.

I

think

that we must know all we can about viruses, and that type of research was wrongly outlawed in this country.

I have other affiliates that we fund that are active outside the confines of the United States.

I had a grant that I knew may have been used to promote research, which I think was vital for the survival of the human race in general, the United States in particular, and I allowed that grant to be used

for

research in China.

And I don't know what happened there.

I don't know whether this was a natural outbreak or it came from the Wuhan lab, but I'm very disturbed that ground zero of this epidemic just happens to be very close to a level four

PLA-controlled

virology lab.

And I want to investigate that for all of it.

He didn't do that.

He never did that.

And so all he did was he doubled down.

Wear one mask.

Oh, he said, wear no mask.

We're not going to walk around with masks.

Wear one mask.

Might as well wear two.

Oh, herd immunity: 50, 60, 70, 89.

Oh, vaccinations are the way out of this.

You people who are not getting back, you're endangering everybody.

And everything he said was without any doubt.

It was, it was, it came on from Mount Olympus as if he was, you know, Zeus.

Right.

And there was

totally discredited.

He sees himself like in a stained glass window, St.

Anthony.

You know, he is

why he took the rhetoric with Brett Baer.

He's above and beyond reproach.

How dare you?

Crazy.

We're almost out of time.

We've got one little other thing we've got to get to, and we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

We're recording on Sunday, the 24th.

I want to make a little plug.

You know, Victor had a podcast once upon a time on Ricochet.

It was called The Classicist.

Do you remember who your host was, Victor?

Troy Sinek.

He was a wonderful host.

Yeah.

He had

very learned, very exact, analytical.

He's a wonderful host, and he's a wonderful writer yeah he's a great writer he's a great guy he actually lived in milford where i am but coincidentally so at one point your two podcasts you have a different podcast your hosts were sharing an office uh troy shared my office he was writing a book and it's out next month it's called a man of iron the turbulent life and improbable presidency of grover cleveland i got a review copy i'm in the midst of reading it's terrific book so i just wanted to give a little plug to yeah it's very timely jack because i mean up till now, Wilber Cleveland, I think, was the only two-term president that skipped a term.

I mean, he was.

And so we're looking at Donald Trump, who has directly referenced Cleveland and said, well, why can't I run again?

Cleveland did.

Yeah.

So we'll, and I think Troy's book will be very relevant, whatever your feelings are on Donald Trump.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

So anyway, that comes out in the mid mid-September.

Go find it on Amazon.

Victor, I'm throwing a curveball at you.

I didn't tell you ahead of time I was going to ask you, but just let's say two minutes.

AOC

arrested, arrested, no handcuffs.

What the freak?

What kind of crackpot political theater?

And brazen, you know, she's faking the handcuffs.

She's still walking in hand, one hand behind the back.

She's waving with the other one.

Magical.

Maybe the handcuffs had long, you know, changes.

She's always the, she always the

upper middle class, privileged

victim.

She's always seeking a greater degree of victimhood, even though she's been quite callous and rude and attacking other people.

She has, and she doesn't really mind what she says about other people.

She cannot handle any criticism.

So this was a perfect occasion for her to go out and feel like she's in Selma, Alabama, circa 1963 or something.

And so nobody arrested her.

I mean, no one handcuffed her.

Those arrests for civil disobedience are just simply, follow me over here, stand there.

We're going to fill out this form, give me 50 bucks or something, and you can bail.

I don't even know if they charge, and you can go.

And what did she have to do?

She and her friends had to put their hands as if we wouldn't see the handcuffs.

And we could say that, oh my gosh, they handcuffed.

AOC.

It's terrible, this police brutality.

And then we learned that in the middle of her perp walk i guess that's what she thought she was doing she fist pumped so i guess her invisible handcuffs fell off she raised her hand fist pumped and then they fell back on and they were behind her and she of course said she was doing this because she this is the safest way to to react when police are around you.

It sends a signal that you're not going to prompt an inordinate response.

But if

you're not going to incite a police brutal action, then the least thing you would think of, I think, was to take out your right hand and fist pump to a crowd,

because that might be alarming to a police person.

So the whole thing was a myth.

One thing about AOC is when she does something, she's a pathological dissembler.

She never tells the truth about what she's actually doing.

She always dissembles.

When she gets caught with some anti-Semitic thing or some crazy thing she always blames somebody or says you want to date me or she never addresses the charge or the accusation and refutes it

you know i heard that when those uh hand imaginary handcuffs fell off that um corn pop was there and he picked them up and handed them to the police so yeah and he's uh when joe gives a uh

a speech, he always turns and remember he turns to his

right and he shakes this imaginary hand.

And then somebody whispers, no, no, the other, it's nobody's there.

And then he shakes the air and then he goes away.

So maybe they know something that they see something out there in reality that we don't.

By the way, also on, you know, the

fantasy game here,

he, now, Biden said the other day at this speech about climate change that he had, where he grew up in Delaware was the most essentially cancer prone place in America.

And he said he had cancer.

Now, he may have had cancer, like a lot of people have cancer, but they have a little, you know, skin cancer that's taken off.

But the implication is, yeah,

I don't have the text in front of me.

No, I think you're right.

I was when I heard that, I looked at the text very carefully to see what the tense was.

And it was,

it was in the past tense.

I had cancer.

So does he say I have cancer?

Or did he beat cancer in the past?

And that, because I'm under the impression that occasionally, like many people with fair skin who were that age, he has skin cancers removed.

So I don't think he said, I have cancer.

But even that would be bogus because his implication was

it's because of the you know the chemical industries that are operating here in Delaware that that got people you know cancer

They got cancer because of that.

And not, I'm not making like anyone who's had skin cancer and people die from melanoma.

He really, to me, he was, he was, he was saying he got the kind of cancer when you hear someone's, oh my gosh, I got the big C.

Well, you know, maybe he's confused.

Maybe he has it.

He's not supposed to talk about it, but I doubt he's maybe.

There's two ways of looking at Jack.

It's either he let out something that he should not have, and that might explain some of his morbidity, which I think is that exegesis is not likely, or more or less he's back to driving semi-trucks and competing with Roger Stauback at the United States.

Right, right.

And nobody

he cleaned his plate, though.

So I don't want him, I don't want to deprecate him because he is at an age where he's frail.

I kind of worried about him when he had two vaccinations and two boosters because there is a minority view in the medical community that the more boosters that you have,

you can alter the immune system so that it might not be as reactive to infections as it otherwise would be in this particular manifestations of different viruses.

So I don't know, but I was kind of worried about him when he was taking, he had four vaccinations and then he took Paxavoid.

And I don't know what else happened.

He's not like Donald Trump, pretty much that a bear of a guy.

And then he just said, ah, you know, I had Pepsid and I had monoclona.

I had the antivirals and I had that and I feel strong.

Then he went out, I don't know, six, 72 hours after he got out and dressed people.

And I mean,

when I saw that, I thought, man,

I was thinking of that the other day.

I thought, well,

I'm not overweight like Donald Trump.

I ride a bicycle.

I exercise.

So I had COVID on a Sunday and I'm going to do what he did.

I'm just going to jump on a plane.

I thought, oh my God, I'm 10 years younger and that guy is 10 times stronger in better health than I am.

I think it's the cheese, the McDonald's cheeseburgers.

That's probably the, could be the cure.

I think so.

It's confidence too, I think.

I think a lot of people who feel no doubt, and that's very important for a leader, that they don't have self-doubt or, you know, they're not second guessers or third guessers.

They're just,

I think, I don't, I don't think we know much about the immune system and the brain and the gut and all the connections, but

right.

It's

well,

if you're talking about my gut, this is a lot, a lot to learn.

All right, we're out of time.

So, at this part of the program, we do not that out of time, we got a minute or two left.

We thank our listeners, Google, Play, Stitcher, wherever you listen,

itunes, geriatric,

Apple podcasts.

On that, you can leave a rating of one to five stars.

Victor deserves 10, 20, five is the max.

But go and rate the program and leave comments.

If you wish, we read them.

We read the comments

on Apple Podcasts, also on Victor's website.

People leave comments, we read them.

And here's one, and it's titled Connected to Reality.

Victor is a surprising character.

He's a professor at first look, but then you listen to him to find how incredibly connected to reality he is.

That's what makes you need to keep listening, hearing stories of his father, grandfather, mother, an assortment of figures in his life, and the memory of them, always reminding him to be thoughtful of what is going on in the world.

I watch and listen to many lectures and podcasts given by professors and academics, and nearly all of them have this incessant need to talk about high-falutin, pie-in-the-sky theories of how human nature should work.

You won't get that here.

What you'll get is a man that has an in-depth look at how humans live now, how they've lived in the past, and how the past influences us today.

Jack is pretty awesome too.

P.S.

from a formal naval nuclear operator.

Please, dear God, stop saying nuclear.

This is from Steel Net.

I apologize for my Norm Crosby

impersonations and

manglification of the English language.

I'm going to find what I can, what my excuse is.

I had a,

try this one.

I could say I had a catastrophic bike accident in 2014 that knocked out my four teeth, split.

my lip completely severed so that my left half of my lip was not connected to my right half, lower and upper, splattered like a tomato.

And I had to stitch them together, and I have a dead space

there in scar tissue.

And I have a lisp now, too.

I never did.

But the problem with that

explanation is that I mispronounce words before that, and I was never careful in my dictionary.

I'm trying to be very careful because I feel, you know, kind of bad when I said something about, I'll just end the the program today jack i said something about tesla i didn't mean it

oh i heard something about you and tesla i didn't mean it in a deprecatory way i admire people and to prove my fee days i went out and ordered one i i did yeah it's not going to come until april but i did so i'm not going to be a hypocrite i'm going to apologize to you tesla owners because they're great cars and and when you pay 650 a gallon as i did in palo alto the other other day,

you want some relief.

I don't know what the payback as far as the cost of the automobile versus the gas save in terms of years is.

I had the rough idea, but that's one apology.

Another thing is, I said I was bordering on the edge of quackery, but I didn't mean doctor's advice to me was quackery.

I meant that I was a quack,

even though I'm not a doctor, because I had been, I meant just the opposite, that I had been,

you know, reading scientific,

And then I would say, oh, take quercetin, take lutein.

These are all more or less without side effects.

If you don't take them in the maximum doses, I never take them in the maximum doses.

I was taking 10 or 12 of them.

And then it was only through talking to doctors like Dr.

Pappas and Dr.

Nevitt and others who gave me medical advice.

And they didn't.

they didn't you know i'm not they didn't prescribe things but they gave me very serious and very valuable and they're very learned people.

And I really, really appreciate it.

I don't want to mention their names to embarrass them, but just to remind people that there are doctors out there in whatever their particular field of specialization, they take an interest in their patients and they try to do all they can within the limits of professional medicine to suggest things.

Or what the government will let them do

when they ban

applicable medications.

And I know that when we

show anger at Dr.

Fauci, there's

that came up just to finish very quickly when the Rand Paul hearings, when he asked that, was it Dr.

Jay or Jen or something, when he asked him how many patients have you seen?

And he had seen none, and yet he was lecturing on first-line therapies at the ER room.

So my point is this, is that, yes, we need researchers, and they're going to ultimately get us out of this, I suppose.

But right now and in the future, we have some brilliant clinical doctors and they treat people and they notice things.

They notice that this person with a normal pulse or normal blood pressure is not normal or a pulmonologist.

They understand what's going on with this virus.

And boy, they're just invaluable and they don't feel they have the answers, but they give you parameters.

And what I'm saying is, if you talk to the Fauci establishment, they'll say, go to a long COVID center.

And those are good.

I have no doubt they're good.

But

there's also other people who will say,

this is a drug or this is a vitamin.

I'm not suggesting you take it, but there is some scientific material that I can give you that shows you whether it's non-prescription or that either you or your physician should investigate or you should not do this.

And

they're doing a wonderful job and there's starting to be some uh incidents

inside incidents of people with long covet that within a year they start to feel better and part of it is some of these therapeutics so i doctor we never would have we never would have thought there'd be a political line when it comes to medications but but but that's what we've endured my friend you have you're you suffer from uh it's not a sin but you're you're your scrupulosity there's nothing you said that denigrated doctors, but I think.

No, I really admire the two that I've talked to more than two.

I've had doctors call me and say, you know,

you should check out this scientific study.

I'm not telling you to take this supplement or this therapy or something, but you want to be aware of it and follow it in the scientific literature and see if it develops into a double-blind study.

And then you discuss this with your practitioner and see if this is something that could help you.

And so, the point I'm making is they're constantly trying to help people because they understand

that when you get up in the morning and you haven't slept and you ache all over, like you got the flu,

and you got neuropathy, and you can't taste or smell, and you're dizzy, and it and you know it's going to be the next day, and the next day, and the next day for a while, you've got to be very careful about your psyche.

And they understand that.

So, they they try to give you optimistic uh advice and i really appreciate that and i think everybody out there listening who's had covet or is suffering from the aftermath or long covet appreciates that too what what these doctors are sort of like the counterpart of you know majors and colonels that we're out there in afghanistan warning about and they're not the generals um

those are the fauci and the collins you know and the burks

right

well victor this is about when the Gary Owen will start playing

as we say goodbye.

And thanks to everyone for listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.