Out-of-Touch Policy and Dangerous Talk

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Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

We are recording on Saturday, July 16th.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Victor Davis-Hanson, the namesake and star, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Later on, we'll talk a little bit about his spectacular website, VictorHanson.com.

In all the two plus, three years, however long we've been doing these podcasts, Victor, I never thought we'd ever at all talk about this or never mind start a podcast talking about this, but that this is Sri Lanka.

But hey, it's not unimportant, and we're going to talk about it and some related issues right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So, Victor,

Sri Lanka has emerged as a

maybe as a poster child for the insanity of several things, green economy and reckless spending.

Let me read something here from Steve Hankey, who wrote a piece a few days ago from when we're recording for National Review.

And Hanke is a well-known economics professor.

He's at Johns Hopkins.

I know he taught at the California system, Victor.

I don't know if you know him or came across him ever, but Sri Lanka has collapsed right now.

Riots, inflation is 112%.

The nation is totally unraveling.

It had been a basket case for years.

There had been this decades of civil war, and that civil war stopped.

And then Sri Lanka actually emerged economically as kind of a

wonder kingdom, and it was growing significantly, growing in middle class.

Had two brothers, though.

One is the president, one's the prime minister.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing the name right, but Raja Pasca.

So the Raja Pasca brothers

have done the country dirty.

Here's what Hanke wrote:

The Rajapaska's government spent freely, running large deficits and piling up government debt.

The central bank of Sri Lanka became a great facilitator.

Indeed, in 2020, the bank's governor said the fears around debt sustainability appear to be unfounded as rupee-denominated bonds were within the sovereign power money could be printed to repay them as indicated by ideas like and this is not unimportant modern monetary theory so there you have it for the first this is hanky still for the first time a governor of a central bank publicly and explicitly embraced modern monetary theory with that the rupee sank like a stone sri lanka hemorrhaged foreign exchange reserves the central bank attempted to to stem the flow with ever tighter exchange controls, but to no avail.

Victor, one or two other things.

The nation has spent through all its holdings.

It has a massive debt.

And a lot of this has been driven by this crazy-ass idea, which is not limited to Sri Lanka.

It's global.

The country would become 100% organic, right?

100% organic means for most of the farmers in the world and in Sri Lanka, you're out of business.

So we have this modern monetary theory madness.

We have this overlaid with this green madness.

And what it has done is has destroyed a growing and vibrant country.

And if we can do it to Sri Lanka, I guess it could happen anywhere, maybe even the country we're home to.

So, Victor, I'd like to have your thoughts on that.

And then after that, we're going to get into some of these European associated issues with the Dutch, who are also the Dutch farmers being tormented by these green SOBs.

Your thoughts, Victor?

Yeah, well, well, a couple of things is, remember how the left would get very angry because they said that big pharma, when they, and they still do apparently, when they have a new drug out, it's too expensive or too controversial or too subject to legal action to have a double-blind study in the United States.

So they go to places in South America or Africa and they try this drug out because the left says humans are expendable there.

But what's happening is the left does the same thing, only they do it with climate change and renewable energy and quote-unquote non-manufacture farming or whatever, non-industrial farming or back-to-the-land farming, organic farm, whatever term they use.

And so, this is what they do with Sri Lanka.

They get a bunch of their elites and they go to Western universities, or they have Western NGOs go over there, and they peddle this stuff that we know doesn't doesn't work.

And we tried modern monetary theory here with Biden, and that's why we have a 9.1 inflation rate.

That was what we did.

We were told it wasn't going to happen.

We had all the economists that signed the letter,

destroyed their reputations for political expediency.

And we know that sustainable agriculture is a niche,

a niche, and it cannot feed the number of people that are required to be fed under those.

And what is organic?

It just means, I mean, nitrogen is organic, but what it means is that you shall put no fertilizer in the soil that has been processed or fortified.

So you can't use ammonium sulfate, you can't use ammonium nitrate, you can't use calcium nitrate, you can't use any of that, you can't use tin, tin, tin, all of these very successful ways of increasing crop production.

And feeding the world, and feeding the one, even though that we know that the plant is indifferent to the type of nitrogen that it absorbs, whether it comes out of manure.

So it can only use manure.

And the problem with manure is when you use manure,

you know, it has weeds in it, it has all sorts of materials in it, it smells, and you've got to be somewhat careful if you're using crops that touch the ground or in the ground, potatoes, carrots, or strawberries, anything that might absorb, you know, bacteria that has some problems.

Weed control, same thing, no roundup, no pre-emergent herbicide, no anything.

Okay, so then you're back to cultivation, but the cultivation means labor, so it has to be very labor-intensive.

One of the worst things in the world, and I've done it a lot of my life, is to have a hoe and look down a row of 100 vines and say, I've got to go hoe those young vines.

or

you know get in a an old tractor in a vineyard wagon and dig out Johnson grass all day long.

But you can't, that's what you do when you do organic.

And then there can be no pesticides, none.

So you're going to have to have, you know, chaim and power or, you know, turmeric or

something that's hot or salsa type of natural peppers and things.

And then you can have some types of natural bacteria for worm.

But the point I'm making is that ultimately you're causing, you're in a situation where you need a lot more labor and it's a lot more expensive and you need a lot more attention and you're going to have less production.

And as someone who farmed for a number of years, we had about 25 acres of organic fruits and we would take those to the markets in Palo Alto, Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, etc.

It was pretty lucrative for a while.

You have to make sure you don't use any nitrogens, any pesticides, any herbicides.

The fruit doesn't look as good.

It doesn't get as big, but it kind of tastes better if you know how to stress it a little bit.

And there are a lot of people, you go to the market and everybody wants to know why that organic grape, organic peach costs more, even though it doesn't look as good, it doesn't look as bright.

The varieties are different.

You can't have an engineered variety of grain or something like that.

So you're going to have less production.

So it's for wealthy people.

And I'm not making that in a deprecatory manner at all.

It means wealthy people who have the capital and the income and want to spend a little bit more for the guarantee that there is no organophosphates or organochlorite residues on their fruit can have it.

But to feed an entire nation of poor people in terms of capital and labor and scale, you have to have traditional agriculture.

You can't do it.

And yet they've lapped this up from the West and the result is that people are starving.

I think the radical left would rather have people starve and have organic agriculture than have everybody fed and alive but having to be dependent on nitrogen or organophosphates.

I would say one other thing is that

it's not all bad in the sense that when the organic movement, and it kind of was, you know, the silent spring horrible phenomenon, but Rachel Carson, but

it did affect

traditional agriculture and people should learn and remember that.

And by that I mean when I was farming in 1980s and when I grew up in the 1960s and 70s people poured on

the

you know they used something called dimethoate and I put it on and something called dibrom I put on dibrom and I couldn't breathe for a week I put on a Agent Orange type of surfland pre-emergent got on my arm and I had a yellow arm for a week oh maybe six weeks I put on paraqua and got a leak in a pump, and I could taste it in my mouth and coming into my skin.

And so

that was a bad way of farming.

And with the organic movement, people said, well, we don't have to go full organic.

What we can do is we can force these companies to find less toxic materials.

We can use less of them.

We can pay more attention.

And so in that process, say something like Omite, which was a very popular, it's out of use now, but they used to tell you to spray three times.

And the wind would get in it.

It would smell, it had an awful sweet smell to it.

And the point I'm making is we got down to where we just spot sprayed because of that knowledge that we accrued.

So it was an integrated pest management.

Use a little bit of organophosphates, a little bit of nitrogen, some manure.

but there wasn't this rigid orthodoxy stylish.

You don't do that one bit.

And that's the problem.

Nothing wrong with using organic techniques and integrating them.

But that's the problem with the left.

It's all or nothing.

I don't need to get into modern monetary theory.

We already know it's bankrupt.

It's as bankrupt as critical race theory as critical legal theory.

Critical legal theory gave us George Gascon and Chesa Boudin.

And critical race theory gave us the BLM shysters.

Modern monetary theory gave us the people in the Biden administration who crafted this 9.1 inflationary policy.

So, when you're an investor and it's your money, it's not somebody else's money, it's not the public money, and you hear that a guy said he's going to print money, then you're going to get out.

You're just not going to get anywhere near that.

You're going to get your money out of there.

And that's the danger.

That's what Biden is problem right now.

The people look into the United States and they said it's a modern monetary theorist.

And suddenly the Federal Reserve said, no, no, no, no, we're going to raise interest rates.

Well, they're going to have to raise interest rates

two points above the rate of inflation to stop it.

And that would be right now 11%.

We're nowhere close to that.

And so we're going to have inflation as long as the interest rates are not above the rate of inflation.

Victor, back on food and nitrogen and the like, moving to Europe.

I've seen these videos.

You may have also.

So may our listeners of Dutch farmers who are in revolt against their government, government, which is also pressing this anti-nitrogen campaign bureaucracy, pushing this stuff.

But it's also an anti-animal, and it's also this, so this alignment of vegan politics with green and get rid of your animals, essentially at some point, get rid of all of them or a lot of them, because animals create methane and they're taxing the planet.

So all these things are kind of, you know, that food is now a central weapon

in our global culture wars.

I don't think it's any surprise.

Back in, you know, with the Dutch, many of their family farms, they're losing their farms.

This mindset has spread to other places.

In Belgium, reading a piece that

the politicians in Flanders are trying to reduce the livestock of pigs by 30% in eight years.

Belgium has one of the largest

per acre collections of various livestock, pigs, sheep, cow.

And New Zealand, big place, sheep and cattle.

They're planning to tax them.

Who's getting taxed?

The farmers are getting taxed.

So, Victor, one last thing.

I'll stop babbling.

The new issue of commentary is out, and Noah Rothman has a

it's just a terrific cover essay.

It's called You Are What You Don't Eat.

And it is a look, a comprehensive look at food and culture wars, which in some cases are like, how dare you culturally appropriate you white people that own a tacos truck.

You have no right to have that.

Two,

these broader global and national theories that say growing food for a world population of seven or eight billion is a bad thing.

I don't know what people do, die in the meanwhile.

So, Victor, we have food politics kind of running amok.

The vegans, the vegans, have a lot to do.

Yeah.

Let me just start with cultural appropriation, that buzzword.

There is no such thing as cultural appropriation in the sense that if you borrow something from a particular culture and you enjoy it and you use it, and you think that it is natural to your own culture, that's wrong.

It's only one-sided.

It means when the majority culture eats tacos, they have culturally appropriated a marginalized people's food, like, you know, Taco Bell.

But it doesn't work the other way.

And by that, I mean, I once went to a basketball game, and it was the Kingsburgh Vikings.

And this was a town that my great-grandfather and my Swedish side had helped found.

And it's very proud of its Scandinavian heritage.

Okay.

And

it's in a county that's very diverse and predominantly Mexican-American.

It's one of the few communities because they had this influx of Swedes that came en masse from Lund and then to Chicago and then to Kingsburg.

And they founded it about 1880.

My great-grandmother, she planned out the cemetery fence and stuff like that, wrought iron fence, which is still there.

Anyway, my point is this, is that I went to this game and I was from Salma, that is a much more predominantly Mexican-American community.

And I sat on the Kingsburgh side to watch my son.

And a Mexican-American woman with dyed blonde hair and a green t-shirt that said Vikings said to me,

well, what are you doing here?

And I said, I'm watching the game.

Are you from Salma or Kingsburg?

And I said,

I'm from Salma.

And she said, you have no right to be here.

I said, I have no right to be here.

She said, we're Vikings.

And she had dyed blonde hair.

I said, you're culturally appropriating my culture.

And she said, what do you mean?

I said, is your natural hair color blonde?

And she said, no, I dyed it.

I said, well, you're trying to emulate the Swedish culture by having your hair dyed blonde.

And I was kidding, but she took it seriously.

And then I said, and then Vikings, do you have any cultural affinity?

Would you get mad if I had said the Selma Aztecs?

She said, yes, I would.

That's our culture.

I said, well, then why are you taking my culture?

She said, you don't have a culture.

I said, yes, I do have have a culture.

And so what I'm getting at is when you see somebody who's got blonde hair that has dreadlocks, they're culturally appropriating a culture supposedly.

When you see somebody who is dying their hair blonde or straightening their hair, they're not culturally appropriate.

When you see somebody who's Asian singing an opera, Italian opera, they are not culturally appropriate.

And when you see some American who's, you know, writing a haiku poem, he's a culturally appropriate.

That's how it works.

And so when they talk about cultural appropriations, all they're talking about is a political strategy to embarrass or shame somebody.

As far as the actual agriculture is, people have to remember one thing about farming.

It's one of the few things that you can't live another day without.

You can live another day even without gasoline for a while.

You can live another day without your cell phone.

You can live another day without your lawyer.

You can live another day without your insurance agent.

You can live another day with even without your rooker.

You cannot live another day without your food.

And ultimately, all that stuff you see in the store, whether it's processed or packaged or organic or fresh, it comes from a farm.

And the problem with farming is you farm all day.

and you work all day and you do not know what you're going to get in return and it's going to come at the end of the year for many people who are monocrop.

And there are going to be a lot of other people on your back.

That is the person who trucks it, the person who processes it, the distributor, the broker, the supermarket.

And of all of the dollars that a product sells for, say,

for every $1, the farmer gets about 3 or 4%.

That's it.

And there's only about 1% of them in the United States left.

A little bit higher.

There used to be about 90% in the 18th century.

And before the Industrial Revolution, there was about 85%,

and then by the time of the Great Depression, it was only 30%.

But the point is that everybody had first-hand intimacy and recognized that fact that they knew farmers or they were a farmer.

But now nobody knows a farmer.

Nobody knows anything about agriculture.

They just think that they go to Whole Foods and all of that stuff comes out of the head of Zeus.

And so they have all of these utopian bromides, just like they do with energy.

And so if you start tampering with agriculture the way you are tampering with energy, you're not going to get $7

a gallon of

diesel or gas in California.

You're going to get an empty shelf and you're going to get people who don't have enough to eat.

And we're already doing it in California by diverting water out to the sea.

And if you drive along I-5,

you can see thousands of acres of almonds that have been destroyed.

Now, almonds are not just eating out of your hand, they're milk and they're butter and they're oil, and they're used in all parts of the diet, and they are going to be disappearing in large numbers of acres because of water restrictions.

It's not just global warming, that's part of it, and change of climate.

But the great contribution to that fact is state policy made by urban people are not building reservoirs.

So, when we have these wet years every three or four years, we're not storing water.

And there are so many restrictions on agricultural use, from dust control to labor laws, that a lot of people are not doing it anymore.

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

And so we better be very careful because if you bidenize the agricultural industry in the United States like they're trying to do in the Netherlands, you're going to have a big problem.

You have to have food.

I went to a very tony, I'm here on campus, and I went to a very tony restaurant the other day, Safeway, and restaurant.

And

somebody in the restaurant said they didn't have that on the menu because they couldn't get that commodity.

And then I went to this Tony Safeway,

and there were shelves that were empty.

I hadn't seen that in that particular one.

There were shelves that were empty.

I don't know if that's supply chain or pricing or what.

And there was...

New America.

Yeah, so I think that

we're going to have to have a different change of mindset that we better be very, very careful, you on the left, that you hate trackers, you hate horizontal drillers, you hate pipeline

construction, you hate farmers, you all think that it's not what you want, but they don't, you know, you live in your high-rise and you drive, get on your bus or mass transit or drive your Prius or your Tesla.

That's all well and good, but somebody behind the shadows, somebody grimy, somebody you don't like, somebody who's deplorable, they go out there and they know how to produce food for you, they know how to truck it in for you, they know how to put fuel in your tank for you, they know how to make power for you, you don't know any of that.

And the idea that you're going to set policy for all of those people, and they're going to set policy jack on the premise that these people are bad people and they want to pollute and they're greedy, they don't make any money on you.

Mid-sized and family farmers are not rich.

They work like crazy.

They don't make a lot of money.

If the left really, really, really wants to help the economy and help poor people and help sustainable, then just go after the people in insurance, stocks.

You're too big to fail.

Yeah, just go after the corporate people.

Go after Disney.

Go after all these people.

Go after Steve Jobs' widow.

Go after Bill Gates.

Go after Elon Musk.

Go after all of them.

They make enormous amounts of money.

Go after George Soros.

But don't go after people that don't have any money and lecture them because if they decide that it's not viable, you're not going to eat.

And it's not going to be just you.

it's going to be poor people yeah I can see it I try to when I look prepare for columns or these podcasts I go to different stores and I was in a store in my impoverished community and I was looking at people and maybe it's good Jack but three years ago everybody in this marginalized community had 24 packs of Coca-Cola and I don't mean diet coke and they had frozen poplar and frozen pizzas and frozen raviola and frozen popco.

I can say the word tacos.

And they had all of that.

And now when I look at it, they are buying what I used to see 20 years ago, 30-pound bags of beans, 20-pound bags of rice, 20-pound bags of flour.

They're buying it in bulk and it's from scratch.

And they're just basic commodities.

And that tells me that when the price of fruit over the last two years has gone up 40%.

Well, it's also a hedge against you thought that it's not going to be there in two months

exactly they do not have confidence that it's going to be there in two months and i used to always say when the subsidies check came you could see it because the fast food stores were parked out into the street everybody got their ebt card renewed so they went and now I don't see that as much.

And so I think what's happening is the funny money that Joe Biden printed under modern monetary theory is starting to run out at these high prices, is gobbling it up very quickly.

And second, people are scared because all of the familiar reference in their life, fuel, food,

safety, they're not there anymore.

And that's what's scared.

Joe Biden has done the impossible.

He has turned one of the most prosperous.

wealthy, affluent, safe countries in the world into sort of an escape from LA scenario, escape from New York.

It's just people are terrified of going into a big city.

They're terrified to drive and, you know, they don't know how much gas is going to be.

They don't know if they can afford to drive to LA and back.

They're terrified whether they're going to get, they order something on Amazon.

They don't think it's going to be there.

It'll be delayed.

If they go get on a plane, it's double what it was four years ago and they think they're going to go to a connection city and be stranded there or there's not going to be fuel to take off, or the bags won't.

That's what they're worried about.

He broke down the whole system because you know what he did?

He unleashed the greatest array of incompetence with no private enterprise experience whatsoever in his cabinet.

We've never had a transportation secretary as smug and stupid as Pete Buttigig.

We've never had an energy

secretary as clueless and arrogant as Jennifer Granholm.

We've never ever had an

Attorney General like Merrick Garland.

We've never had a clueless person like Janet yelling at Treasury.

I could go on, but these people are uniquely unqualified and they're arrogant and they're ideological and they're ruining the country.

It's filtered down after almost a year and three quarters that the stuff of life is short, in short supply.

Water, food, food, you name it.

Energy and getting it to you.

It's

true.

I don't know.

It sounds like a prescription for genocide at some point i don't know

i'm worried about it i think to myself i have 40 acres and i have an old house but we have a garden but i think wow maybe i should start doing what my grandparents did and bring back the old root cellar and the big thick cement vault that was cool in the summer with all their canned jellies and vegetables

and bring back the rabbit cage, bring back the chicken cage, bring back the milk cow,

all the things I remember.

Well, Victor,

Marie Antoinette allegedly said, Let them eat cake.

And she is the subject of a comparative piece you've done relating, I think, to some of the people.

You just mentioned some of the geniuses in the

staff, the Biden administration.

And let's talk about this piece you've written for American Greatness.

It's titled Our New Antoinettes, and we'll do that right after these important messages.

we're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on Saturday the 16th.

My friends and listeners, and I hope you're all the same, I want to strongly encourage you to visit VictorHanson.com.

It's Victor's official informal website, and links to all the articles he's written for American Greatness or other places, podcast appearances, other appearances, You'll find links there.

Victor also writes a sizable amount every week of content that's readable and accessible only at that website.

It's called Ultra.

To read them, you need to subscribe.

Five dollars will get you in the door.

Test drive, victorhanson.com.

You're going to like all these pieces.

And a full year subscription is $50.

So give it a shot.

As for me, Jack Fowler, hey, why don't you visit civilthoughts.com?

That's where you can sign up for the weekly email newsletter I write.

And it's free, just suggests 12, 13, 14 worthwhile pieces that have come out recently that maybe would interest

you or others.

So I do that for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, and we are determined to protect civil society.

And if you're interested in that, centerforcivilsociety.com.

So Victor, I mentioned the piece you've written for

American Greatness last week.

Folks can find it at American Greatness.

They can also find it at your website.

It's titled Our New Antoinettes, and you describe them as the modern left-wing elite.

One of the people you take off on is Mark Zuckerberg.

So, I'd be interested in your sharing your thoughts about this essay you've written.

It's pretty extensive.

You talk about Boudigej and others here.

Why is Mark Zuckerberg Zuckerberg one of our new Antoinettes?

Well, you remember Marie Antoinette, and you're right.

She probably didn't say let them make cake.

That was something Rousseau wrote about an elite who said that.

And people,

I don't know whether he meant to imply that, but that was before she even got to Versailles.

But she did have this little fake farm.

You can go there and see where it was.

And there she dressed up as a peasant.

and she milked cows and it was a way of getting away from the intrigue and the stress of court life and so she thought she was kind of she wanted to see what a peasant like would be like without the manure and the dirt and the disease and everything so she dressed up like that and i was just saying that mark zuckerberg you know he's worth 60 billion and he loves to walk around with faded jeans and t-shirts and flip-flops and he sends out little videos of himself on little surfboards on 4th of july and he's just one of us and then he's not one of us though he poured 420 million

into the last election to absorb the work of the registrars in key precincts to affect the election outcome because he thought that stupid people who vote needed his brain and his superior intelligence to warp the count.

And that's what he did.

He masquerades as if he's this person, this kind of 20-something, 30-something, just a normal guy.

But he's a J.P.

Morgan, he's a John D.

Rockefeller, multi-multi-billionaire who uses money in a way that he doesn't care whether it contravenes voting laws or he just does what he wants.

They all end up in Hawaii, Jack.

They all build up big estates like he does.

The Obamas have their new Oahu estate.

And, you know, Bill Gates is the same thing.

He's buying up farmland.

He's always giving us lectures.

He told us how well the Chinese had done with COVID.

He's a big investor in China.

George Soros is a felon in France, but they're all wealthy.

They all try to tell us how to live.

And basically the message is restrict your type of consumerism and somehow or conform to a particular type of protocol that we have dreamed up for you.

And if you complain, then you are racist, homophobe, natist, protectionist, sexist, and stuff.

But we have a...

an agenda when that is you know climate change gun control bourgeois demand transient And that's what all that matters, because we have already surpassed the existential requirements of living.

We have enough money that we no longer have to worry about shelter or food or transportation or fuel.

So we, as platonic guardians, can worry about transgenderism for you.

And then when we figure it out, we're going to tell you what to do.

And yes, it's going to restrict your lifestyle.

If you go to a bathroom, there may be somebody of the opposite sex, what you consider the opposite in there.

Or if your daughter wants to get a scholarship in swimming, there may be a man with the genitalia who's swimming against her.

Or maybe if you live out in the country and you go, honey, we're going to restrict the size of your magazine.

Or maybe

we're going to tell your local clinic that if somebody is

nine months pregnant and they're getting an abortion, that the child can be killed in the womb or right after them.

We can do that for you.

And that's what they do.

And you can really see it in some of the people who I say they.

It's the Silicon Valley elite.

It's LeBron James elite.

They've all got things in common.

You know, there's Barbara Boxer, our senator.

She's a Chinese lobbyist.

She's now down in Rancho Mirage.

There's Jerry Brown,

small as beautiful.

He's on his 2,400 acre estate in Grass Valley, living sustainably, I suppose, in isolation.

There's Gavin Newsom, who says, you know, you can't go to homophobic Montana, but I'm going to take my publicly paid security detail to kick back at my father-in-law's Tony Big Montana Ranch.

There's Nancy Pelosi, wear a mask, you know, you've got to do this, you've got to do that.

Oh, by the way, I'm quarantined.

You can get $13 pint ice cream in my $23,000 sub-zero refrigerator.

I want to tell everybody that I have that.

And by the way, I can sneak around San Francisco without a mask and break quarantine to get my hair done.

Oh, and I'm so worried about, you know, brownouts in California.

I'm on the Tuscany beaches in Italy with the elite of Italy, the celebrity elite.

And it goes on and on and on.

All of these people do this.

They live a particular lifestyle like Marie Antoinette.

They play act as if they're peasants or they have empathy or they're one with the middle class, but they adopt let them eat cake policies.

You know what?

Let's get a Tesla, as the Senator Sabino, Sabino, without a name, in Michigan said.

I drove.

I had no problem.

Go get a Tesla.

And, you know, Teslas are not just 40,000.

You add state taxes and markups and everything, and they're more like 50 or 60.

And so

they're completely out of touch.

And they're like Marie Antoinette.

Put it this way, Jack.

How is Hunter Biden living right now?

How is he affording a $20,000-a-month rented mansion in Malibu?

And why is the Secret Service paying $30,000

to watch over him?

He's a great painter.

I guess that's his income.

Why doesn't he come to Fresno?

He can get a place for $4,000 a month, a really beautiful condo.

He can just stay in Fresno and then the Secret Service can watch him

or put him on a work farm to work, sweat, and get all that stuff out of his system.

And I haven't even got into.

Gavin Newsome.

I just mentioned his Montana sojourn, but remember the French laundry and

Magic Johnson and he were powling around, wear a mask, but Magic and I are not doing.

Or the Boma said, oh, you know, climate change is going to

inundate the seashore, but not my Martha's Vineyard new $14 million state.

And we've got to transition off all fossil fuels that give heat.

Don't tell me they're not clean burning, but my tanks at Martha Vineyard, you know, there's 2,500 gallons of them.

And I think most Americans where I live, they maybe burn 600 gallons a year in propane.

And so the Obama family are propane pigs.

They lap it up and yet they lecture people.

So that's what I think everybody's getting tired.

It's really hurt the Democratic Party because

they've got to the point now where that elite says, you know what?

We made our money in entertainment, Netflix,

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Bercher Hathaway, we made it in Goldman Sachs.

So we didn't get our hands dirty with

oil and gas and farming and construction and trucking and manufacturing.

So that we're somehow the elite billionaire class.

And we have even a greater right to talk down to you.

They are the most selfish, self-indulgent people in the world.

Anytime anybody has that type of money and i don't mind them giving it to left causes but when they go out publicly and they enact policies that hurt the middle class and they talk down to them it's it's really marie antoinette yeah

and what she was supposed to be i mentioned very carefully that she didn't say that and

and uh she was a better person than the people who guillotined her for sure

well

I'll disagree with you.

It bothers me when these

mega billionaires give to leftist causes because they're funding many of these

green BS and vegan ascendancy and all this other lunacy, but enough.

They're going to have a rendezvous when everybody gets their Tesla or their Tesla light cars to charge them is going to be more expensive than fossil fuel.

It's not now.

And they're going to need about a couple of hundred.

nuclear power plants.

I think the Japanese government said that for them to convert, they would need about a $35 trillion investment to accommodate that.

And they do not want to build nuclear power.

Gavin Newsom wanted to shut down Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo, and he would have done it had not brownouts.

And so, like I said in another podcast, I had an energy consultant from PGE call me and have a guy come out to my mundane little farm and wanted to know why I wasn't putting on more solar panels.

And when I explained the cost and everything, and he did as well,

the nuts and bolts of it were, Jack, that they are desperate to find megawattage because they're worried that August there's going to be brownouts or next year.

And they have shut down so many fossil fuel electrical generation plants that now they're going out and to people who have solar panels and they want them to buy more, not to nullify what they use, but to be energy producers.

Right.

So as I said to them, I'm almost zero now.

Well, you could be a producer.

Well, I don't want to be a producer.

I just want to produce enough what, well, why don't you be a producer?

And I said, well, it doesn't work in a cost-benefit analysis.

Well, but you'd get some money.

I said, not as much as it would cost me.

But they're desperate in California.

So they always do these things on food and energy, and then it bites them.

And then they...

you know i don't know what the the counterpart we mentioned food but just as they're begging the saudis for more oil, I think they're going to go over to Russia and say, please, Vladimir, will you send us some wheat?

We don't have any hamburger buns at McDonald's.

We need it really quickly.

Right.

We'll see.

They'll be told that they can't use the meat anyway.

It'll have to be, it'll have to be manufactured in some factory.

This is

kind of a soil and green trajectory we're on here, Victor.

We don't have all that much time left, but I hope we can get in two topics and one of them victor i mentioned earlier you write this ultra articles for your website victorhanson.com and right now you you're either you've just concluded your i think you've concluded a three-part series on the uh covet plague which is still tormenting you

it's got a long you know it's a lot of boxcars and a caboose on the uh on the driving train uh but you talk about lessons learned would you like to share your your to you, what are the lessons that have been learned so far?

Well,

I think,

and I'm prejudiced because I'm a colleague of Scott Atlas,

but I think when history is written, they will say just the opposite of what Scott Atlas was described as.

Scott Atlas never said masks didn't work.

Scott Atlas said N95 masks for particular people who are vulnerable is a wise decision.

He never said quarantines didn't work.

He said to

husband your resources and focus them on those that statistically will die from COVID, i.e.

over 60 more likely.

During the first variants, remember he wasn't here during Omicron and I said wasn't in charge of policy.

He said it's very unlikely that children are going to be seriously ill.

Do not keep them out of school because they're going to suffer much more damage than even the few that will be infected.

That turned out to be true.

He also said that mass quarantines had deleterious effects on social harmony, social calm, missed doctors' appointments.

We would see increases in cancer, spousal abuse, drug use, suicide, all that turned out to be true.

And so I think in the future, we're probably not going to have another lockdown, no matter what Omicron does.

Second thing, I don't think we're through with, we've gone Omicron 1, 2, 3, 4.

I don't think we're through yet with this virus.

I think it was biologically altered.

And I know that people will say, well, the flu changes, but we haven't had a virus that so quickly

evades vaccination and so quickly almost every modality of therapy, taxavoid is going to stop it.

No, it's not.

It didn't work.

And vaccines are going to make it less toxic.

Maybe, maybe not, but it's not going to be a wall.

What we've learned is that about 90% of the people are going to get this virus.

They're going to get sick for a week and they're going to have two or three weeks of fatigue.

They may have a few lingering and maybe permanent, but there's going to be about 10% of us that are going to get it.

And I had Delta and got right over it.

So I don't know what category I fall in, but they're going to have a problem because their immune system, whether it had prior comorbidity, in my case, it did.

But the point I'm making is it's going to react in an unpredictable way for,

I'm going to be three months coming up with this stuff.

And they're going to,

it's going to impact the labor force because I know so many people that I see

that have had this and they never quite got over it or they didn't get over it at all and they're not working.

And that's going to have an impact.

I think we're going to understand that somebody is watching this, this whole

process, and they're going to conclude.

I'm not saying the Chinese thought this way, but I just want to throw it out there.

They're going to say, a manufactured virus let out, destroyed an American presidency at its zenith, destroyed an entire economy, sent an entire 330 people into collective hysteria.

And by 2020 or somewhere, they were rioting for 120 days.

They've had a woke plague that has done more damage than the virus has to their institutions, and they're completely crazy.

That is a a powerful thing that no nuclear weapon could do.

And so I think people like the Iranians and the North Koreans and the Chinese, they will continue to experiment.

And we talked about nerve gas and bioweapons.

We didn't really understand what that meant.

That meant that a lab like Wuhan or somebody who comes from Wuhan, who's hired in Iran, can take a coronavirus or any other virus and alter it.

whether to be more mutable or more infectious or more lethal or spike, whatever, and and kill a lot of people and injure and disable a lot of people.

And they're going to do it.

And we're going to have to be prepared.

And then another lesson is

if you said that Russia,

Russia

in December of 2019 had a plan to have a, or it would, whether inadvertently or had a plan, would release a virus and it would kill over a million Americans and it would destroy the economy and it would destroy a presidency and it would make the country go.

You would be so angry.

You would say that's an act of war.

And yet that's exactly what China did.

They lied about it.

And they've never come clean.

And well, and even worse, Victor is funded with our tax dollars, thanks to Anthony Fauci.

And this is what's so ironic.

We're all sitting here, and this is what I wrote about.

Everybody take a deep breath, because sometimes you and I, all of our listeners, we don't really understand the enormity of them.

Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, along with Francis Collin and people in the CDC and the NIH,

they knowingly routed over $600,000 to Bat Lady in the Wuhan lab through their friend Peter Dasick and Echo Health.

And then they hid,

they hid that funding so much so that their redacted emails show a level of panic when the outbreak occurred.

And that's not an exaggeration, that's not a political statement, that's a fact.

And then Peter Dasick helped stack a Lancet investigation to make sure that the team that went over to China would come back with a pangolin bat alternative explanation because he knew what would follow if that did not happen, i.e., that members in the United States

health industry, the federal health government,

had some role in creating a virus that just devastated and almost destroyed this country.

And to see Fauci there every night on television in some aspect,

you've got to get two vaccinations, you've got to get two boosters, you've got to get Paxovoid, you've got to get a second dose, all of that.

And without any hint that he knew that that type of research was going on and that was outlawed in the United States, and he enabled it, even if it was for his so-called noble purposes of finding a vaccination, is outrageous.

Final thing I pointed out in that piece, that series is every single thing, Jack, if you think about it, that we were told about this virus was wrong.

Every single thing.

We were told that you can go on a cruise ship.

You couldn't.

You were told told it would never get here.

That was false.

You didn't need a travel ban.

We had one.

We should have had one earlier.

We were told that masks would reduce it.

We learned basically it's only one N95 mask that does partially.

We were told that states that went into massive lockdowns would have far fewer deaths per thousand than states that didn't.

I think if you look at Connecticut, or New York, or New Jersey, California, you compare them with Texas or Florida.

They're not much different.

In some cases, they're worse.

We were told that Marderna would stop the virus, 96%, Pfizer-Moderna, and that would be it.

Joe Biden told us that.

In fact, he lied and said that he created the vaccine and there was no vaccine available until he was president, even though he was inoculated when Trump was president.

And that didn't turn true.

It broke through in summer of 2021.

We were told that as it mutates, it would get milder and milder and milder.

But it seems to me that this latest Omicron from the people that I have talked to, I just was walking down the street the other day, yesterday, here in the Stanford campus, and I met somebody that I knew, and he had COVID, and he was very, very fatigued on day nine.

Everything that they have told us is not true, and everything they will tell us is not true.

And there's millions of people who have been discriminated in the federal government, the military, that have had COVID once.

I've had it now.

I expected to get, if I get over this longer, I expect to get it again.

And they have had it.

And they are not, they're going to have to quit the military or quit the federal workforce or they're going to be stigmatized.

And yet we know that their natural immunity is as good or better than the vaccination.

So we need a complete revamping of this.

We need a a national martial plan about this whole thing.

We need a president who's dynamic and says this is never going to happen in the United States again.

We're going to have a a bio

weaponry, plague, epidemiological force that's going to be preemptive.

And we're going to tell every country in the world that if you experiment with viruses and one of them gets out and comes over to the United States, you're going to pay an enormous price.

So we warn you, you better stop.

because if it happens again, you're going to pay a terrible price.

And if it happens again, they should take out that Wuhan lab, just take it out and tell the Chinese what they're doing.

And the fact that they're back again doing stuff there is very scary.

They should not be allowed to do anything.

That thing should be closed down completely.

And Dr.

Fauci should be fired immediately because he knowingly helped engage in research that was deemed unlawful in the United States.

I'm really worried because I think what's going to happen, the Iranians are going to hire some

renegade virologists from either Europe or the United States, but probably from China, Russia, or India.

And they're going to pay them a lot of money and they're going to craft some crude version of a coronavirus and they're going to let it out.

There have been reports that the Chinese were working on genetically genotypes of viruses, i.e.

viruses that attack particular people by race.

And that's the next harrowing thought.

And Joe Biden was completely ill-equipped to handle this.

Dr.

Fauci and and Dr.

Burks hijacked the Trump health force.

Trump should have, could have fired him very early.

I don't blame him.

He didn't really know what was going on because it was a new phenomenon.

But in many ways, Dr.

Burks was worse than Dr.

Fauci because she made a lot of these decisions that were duplicitous.

She was the one that was planning, crafting.

conjuring how to take the flatten the curve 10 days, two weeks into a permanent lockdown.

And she succeeded.

And I'm really worried about it because

I'm prejudiced because I'm sitting here with a, you know, a migraine and muscle aches and no energy after 12 weeks from this nasty little bastard virus.

But I'm worried about people.

I think that this thing is not quite what it's advertised, that it has the ability to disable seven or eight or 9%, 10% of the workforce for months.

And I think it's going to come again and again and again and again.

And it's going to be not cyber warfare.

It's not, I'm not even worried about a nuclear exchange.

I'm worried about this type of stuff.

And

especially when you're in this situation, we haven't talked about that this time, but just to finish that we were in this situation with Russia.

And it used to be a taboo during the Cold War that you didn't talk openly about the use of nuclear weapons.

And the Cuban Missile Crisis and Korean War, there was talk and that everybody stepped back.

But this idea that Putin and his cadre are talking openly about using a nuclear weapon, or that people in New York are talking about what happens if a nuclear weapon should arrive on United States shores, or they're talking about particular cities in Britain or the United States that would be hit, or we are talking about arming the Ukraines to sink the Black Sea fleet or to go into Russia and to take out depots on Russian Russian soil or to

brag how many generals have been assassinated due to U.S.

intelligence.

That is crazy.

I don't care what the moral questions are.

Nothing is impossible.

And you keep talking about this escalation and you keep talking about nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons, and you lower the threshold of the unimaginable and the unthinkable.

So I would say, you know, in the connection with what we've just experienced with COVID, which was like a neutron bomb, basically, it killed a million people

and it disabled a lot of others.

I think we should just say, you know what?

I don't care how awful and horrible and they are, the Russians, and I'm very much pro-Ukrainian to expel them from their shores and let's give them necessarily weapons to do that.

But the idea that this is some moral crusade of our time to destroy Russia and remove Vladimir Putin, as Joe Biden said, and it'll go on forever And we're going to spend billions of dollars.

At some point,

you're really risking some type of confrontation with an unsteady leader that has nuclear weapons.

And it's dangerous.

And all these people who think it's so moral to pound their chest and say, I'm going to be tougher than the next guy.

And I want to go and take out that refinery.

And I want to go kill all those Russians that are assembling on the border.

And I want to sink that big cruiser.

And I'm going to, ha, I've got another 10 guys we're going to assassinate.

I know exactly where they are.

Ha ha.

That's stupid.

Yeah.

And preventable if

we didn't have an idiotic pullout on Afghanistan, which just exposed our weaknesses, which unleash,

which is coming up on an anniversary.

Yeah, I mean,

the left hates simple explanations, Jack.

So you just go like this.

2008, George Bush was

experiencing about a 26% approval rating.

The Iraq war and Afghanistan war were not going well,

and we were suffering crippling oil prices.

He invaded Ossatia and Georgia.

2014, the price of oil was high.

Obama was rendered a weak leader.

He had already promised to be that he would dismantle on that hot mic take missile defense by appeasing Putin if Putin behaved during his reelection campaign, which Putin did.

And then he invaded eastern Ukraine and and Crimea.

Fast forward, we had a strange hiatus, didn't we, between 2017 and 2021?

And the left would hate that reductionist explanation that Trump was unpredictable.

Nobody knew whether he was sane or crazy, they thought he was capable of any, and they didn't want to screw around.

The Russians didn't.

And then they got Joe Biden in there, and you mentioned the primary reason.

He humiliated the United States with the worst military catastrophe in 50 years.

I think it it was worse than the Vietnam poll, to be honest.

Destroyed deterrence is incompetent, can't finish a sentence.

And Vladimir Putin said, this is a 2008, 2014 moment.

I'm not going to miss it.

And he went in, especially, you know, with the reaction and things Biden said.

And then he did the worst thing to sum up, Jack.

in terms of classical deterrence, you should be quiet and carry a big stick, as Teddy Roosevelt said.

You don't get loud and carry a twig.

and he got loud and personally insulted putin he's a tough guy he's a murderer he did all and then he appeased him yeah and so did obama and that's catastrophe spoke loud trump trump did just the opposite he did the exact right formula he said i like vladimir putin i can talk to vladimir putin i can deal with the russians i have nothing against putin i sat down with him on oh by the way i killed 200 of his mercenaries that attacked us i upped sanctions i flooded the world with oil and crashed the Russian price.

I got out of that asymmetrical missile deal with him.

I sold the Ukrainians, javelin, missiles, etc.

And so that's how you deal with Putin.

Well, Victor, that was

pretty tough stuff.

And if we had more time, I'd go on a Fauci Holy Cross rant, but I'll save that for another time.

I have nothing against Fauci as a person.

When I do, I do.

I see him.

Yeah.

He's 80 years old.

He's shrunken up.

He knows what he did.

His research and the way he funded research in China has led to a catastrophe that ruined thousands of lives.

And he can't admit it.

And he keeps thinking there's a magic bullet.

Just one more vaccination, one more booster.

one more pax of it.

He has no idea that he's Dr.

Frankenstein and the monster he created is out of control.

And there's nothing Dr.

Frankenstein can do.

So when I'm sitting here, you know, and I've got numbness in my legs, I've got tingling all over my thighs, and I got brain fog, I can't sleep, I've got about 20% interest.

It's ridiculous after three months.

I think to myself, you help engineer this stuff that had the weird ability to turn on the immune system and not turn it off?

And because it did.

And it's an autoimmune disease for millions of people worldwide.

He did this.

And then the acute phase is still killing people.

I know that everybody says it's just a minor thing.

It is perhaps compared to its initial manifestation, but there's 200 people dying a day in California from it.

And there's infections are up.

It's everywhere.

And maybe it'll get milder and maybe that's good.

We'll get herd immunity finally.

But I don't trust anything about this virus.

I don't think we've ever seen anything like it because I think it was humanly engineered.

Right, right.

And it will do things that will shock us.

Well, here's a guy who,

you know, my graduating class just had its 40th anniversary.

So there was a, this is from Holy Cross.

So there was a lot of fundraising efforts.

I don't give to Holy Cross, I never have.

But much of it was around the glorification of Fauci, who was a graduate and who

the science center at Holy Cross has just been named for him.

So they had some big honking ceremony, and Holy Cross wraps itself with this guy who has done everything you just described.

And on top of that, is a pro-abortion Catholic.

And how a Catholic institution can name it.

Maybe some day in the world, since...

The left has established all these precedents, maybe some right-wing group will rush the campus and knock down a statue and a wall cheer.

That's what the left has done.

They destroyed all of our institutions, customs, and traditions on the expectation that it would never boomerang against them.

Right.

I'm still waiting for Kevin McCarthy in the first State of the Union address in 2023 to frown and look really angry on TV.

And then when Biden hands him that State of the Union mess, he just tears it up.

Tear it up.

Yeah.

We've got one more subject to talk about, and we'll get to that right after these important messages.

Well, Victor,

we have lots of listeners.

The numbers continue to increase.

We welcome our new listeners.

We thank all who are loyal and come.

Now it's five times a week, two with Fowler, two with the great Sammy Wink, and now you've created another weekly podcast where you're interviewing people.

The first one was with Devin Nunes.

So encourage our listeners to find that.

Thanks.

Whatever platform you listen on, Google Play, iTunes, it still exists.

Stitcher, Apple Podcast.

Thank you.

Those who listen on Apple Podcasts have the opportunity to rate this show one to five stars.

Always said, Victor deserves 10, but the most you can give is five.

So please consider.

rating it and you can leave comments there.

We read the comments.

We appreciate those who who have constructive criticism or praise.

Here's one.

And there's a question here, but Victor will help.

We'll save the answer to the question if you want for another podcast.

This is from Jared Nordblom, and it's titled Always Brilliant.

I'm so glad I found this podcast many months ago.

Very passionate about politics and the broader cultural issues.

So it's nice to listen to Victor to balance the conservative talk hosts who are more expressive in their consternation, I'll say.

And the way he ties our present condition to history is brilliant.

I do have a question because I am a reader of history, with so much history now being written with a left-wing bent.

How do we find history books that are more fair in their reporting or analysis of history?

Is there a particular decade and earlier, I think, bookies, meaning that's reliable.

A lot of public domain history books are free, but are they too antiquated?

Thanks and keep up the great work, Jared Nordblum.

I think that would be an interesting topic for another.

I think we should, yeah, we should do.

Just very quickly, Land of Hope by Wilford McClay.

It's a wonderful balanced history of the United States.

And we have a team that Roger Kimball is assembling an encounter that's going to have a Land of Hope type Western Civ textbook that is coming out soon.

And when I was a graduate student, I always made fun of Will Durant because he was an amateur and we were an academic and we felt that his things on Greece were simplistic.

But about 10 years ago, I read it over, and most of those volumes were pretty accurate and they're well read and they're balanced.

It was written by a 1950s, 1960s liberal, but it was not woke.

Yeah, what was the what was the do you remember the name of that series?

It was like a 10-book, 10-book big monster books, each one of them, right?

Yeah, it was uh, Will and his wife, um,

uh, Durant, and it was uh, I'm trying to think of it real quick.

It was

maybe you can look it up, but it was

the age of reason,

yeah,

the story of civilization, or story of philosophy, or I think it was story of civilization.

Yeah, which is 11 volumes or something.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Yes, Victor, there were 11.

How the hell did you know that?

Well, you know, everything I read it, and even Arnold Toinbury's cyclical theories of civilization,

which are very Hellenic ideas of, you know, birth and adolescence and maturity and decay.

That's still good.

It's well written.

And even H.

G.

Wells wrote a history of civilization.

It's kind of a Fabian Marxist view, but it's still interesting.

All of these things are empirical and they're written in

engaging prose.

They're not like this junk, this junk that we're reading today that's just woke nonsense.

This is terrible because, you know, I have Lyme disease and my memory is in the crapper for names, names, but who's our friend passed away 100, the great historian of the Middle East?

Bernard Lewis.

Bernard Lewis, yeah.

I have brain fog right now myself.

So we're the blind leading the blind.

But yeah, Bernard Lewis, he wrote a great number of books on Islam, but, you know, and also on the Ottoman.

Right.

He's so, so there, Jared, those are some thoughts from the great master, and maybe we'll elaborate that.

You know, I just would, I would just put in, I'm trying to remember very quickly, Jacques

Barzon.

He wrote a brilliant book in his 90s, Dawn to Decadence.

It was, it's just, it's about a half millennium of Western civilization.

And it's wonderful to read that.

It was a bestseller and

one of the most impressive books I think I've ever read.

Still in the saddle when he was in his 90s.

It's amazing.

Well, Victor, thanks, my friend.

I hope the next time we talk, your health has improved.

It's a very

me too.

The slope of the trajectory doesn't seem

up and up.

It's slowly upward, but I have bad, bad stuff that happens.

Yeah,

we'll find the patron saint for you and pray.

So, all right.

Well, thanks, Victor.

Thanks, all our listeners.

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

Bye-bye.

Bye.