From Military Recruitment to Environmental Protection

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are recording on Sunday, July 3rd.

And this program will be up on, I believe, Thursday, July 7th.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I am the host.

Victor Davis Hansen is the namesake of the show and a star.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is a best-selling author, farmer, classicist, essayist at American Greatness,

also the new criterion.

You're writing Victor a couple pieces there a year.

Now syndicated columnist.

Everything Victor writes can be found at victorhanson.com, including stuff that is exclusive to that website.

And we'll talk about a little later how you can read that exclusive content.

On this episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show, we got a couple of topics.

And the first one we will discuss, or I'll pose a question, and Victor will give his wise opinion, has to do with the sorry state of military recruitment in America.

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

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

So, my friend, you've read the news.

We've talked an awful lot about things military on this podcast.

And a lot, I think, Victor, of the wisdom you've shared, your concerns about the military, are, or I should say, about the military leadership, probably an explanation for this next topic.

So, last week, news came out about the recruitment, the military's recruitment, and the numbers are pitiful, pitiful.

It's just so under the targets.

You know, here's the military leadership.

Last month, by the way, it's July now, so Pride Month is over, but

we talked about it in other podcasts, Pride Month began with the Marine Corps of all places putting a helmet with bullets on the helmet, and each one matching a color of the Pride flag.

So I guess, is it any surprise that vilified middle-class Americans don't want to join this institution that they probably once, or their parents once, maybe even adored?

Victor, what are your thoughts?

Well, I mean, you hit it on the nail on the head.

And as I said on an earlier podcast, I get three or four emails a month.

And when I speak, I have four or five people come up and they all say the same thing.

Professor Hansen, my husband is a military veteran, or I was a military veteran.

I have three children and one of them wants to join the Marine Corps and I don't want him to and they don't.

And then they go off and their complaints are always the same.

We feel that we're going to be targeted.

My son is not a white supremacist.

He's afraid,

why would he have to be vaccinated when he's had COVID twice?

Why would he have to be vaccinated or she when people are crossing the border with no test or vaccination?

My uncle was wounded in Iraq, that kind of stuff.

And so what basically to dumb it down,

as I say earlier, 72 to 75% of all the people who were killed in Afghanistan or Iraq, and I think we could go extrapolate that.

It's pretty much the same, if not more so, in the first Gulf War, were white males, mostly from the middle classes.

Okay.

So what did our Secretary of Defense and our chairman of the Joint Chiefs do during the hysteria that followed George Floyd's death?

They went before Congress and they said they were going to go after white supremacists and white rage and

they were going to read Professor Kendi's book, which is an utter attack on white males collectively.

and that you have to be racist to stop racist against them.

And

then we had the pronoun commercial.

We had the pregnant air suit commercial, flyer commercial.

We had all of this.

So we have all of this emphasis on the woke agenda coming out of the Pentagon.

And why do we do that?

Because the left has reversed

its natural suspicion and dislike.

of the military, of the CIA, of the FBI.

It came to the conclusion that these have chain of commands, anti-democratic, they have to be, mechanisms.

And if you can get to the top and you can get the top through threats or enticements, and by that I mean either threaten somebody's promotion unless they seem to be on the right page.

or entice somebody that you have no problem should they be an admiral or general when they gravitate out going to work work for a big defense contractor, which used to be the obsession with the left to stop that, then you can influence these institutions.

And sometimes it's just, you know, James Clapper working or

John Brennan, they go to MSNBC or CNN.

But the point I'm making is that they can institute social change without the mess of a Congress.

There's no back and forth.

There's no dissidence.

It's chain of command.

We are going to have a pride flag.

We are going to do a pronoun, and it's going to filter through millions.

And so the left loves them now.

And

the problem is that they don't represent 40, 50, I don't think they represent 75% of the people who are in the military.

And so they have to do one of two things, Jack.

They either have to make a truly Napoleonic revolutionary force,

where ideology is imbued, and I mean ideology other than Americanism, patriotism in the traditional sense of it, but they have to make a revolutioning nation in arms, that we are gay, we are transgendered, we are radical feminist, we're marginalized people, and we are your military, and we're going to fight your wars all over the globe if we have to with that type of fervor, kind of like the Napoleonic column.

that charged at Waterloo.

Okay, but if it can't do that, then it's not going to have anybody to fight.

And so far, they can't do that.

So then they're turning around

to the

middle-class white male, probably below average income person who was the bread and butter of their combat units and who died, as I said, twice

the numbers of their proportional representation in the population in a military that

just hammers proportional representation, proportional representation.

You're going to be promoted because your race or your ethnic background or your gender does not reflect the general population in this particular kernel slot or this particular major slot therefore we're going to consider that except

you're overrepresented in death so we're not going to we don't really that doesn't bother us you really believe that if

women or minorities were dying in twice their numbers in the general population, people wouldn't be angered.

And I said this on a podcast and I got attacked by a person that said that that was beneath me.

And I said very calmly that I didn't bring it up.

The military brought it up.

The military brought up proportional representation and disparate impact, not me.

I have no problem.

If every four-star general was black and he earned that unmerited, I think that's great.

If the military is 75% Asian, more power to, I don't care as long as it's merucratic.

But they're the ones that tinker around with quotas and proportion and on the orders of the left-wing people in Congress and in the administration.

Okay, if you're doing that, you should go down the line and you can say the most important thing is life.

And we're losing twice the number of people.

as of a particular group in the general population.

Now, why is that?

But of course, they're not doing that.

And you're not doing that.

You know why, Jack?

Because these families that generation after generation, they send their kids to the Marine Corps or the Army or the Air Force or the Navy,

they don't hearken like that.

When they get a message that their child was tragically killed in Kandahar or was blown up and hit, they don't say, oh, my God, this was unfair.

There's 70.

percent white in this country then 35 percent of them are male and i just found out that 70 of the people dying are white male this is unfair it's it's racist they don't say that right they don't say that so my point is they're not trying to cause trouble but they are targeted by this military for indoctrination and they don't like it and they don't bitch they don't moan they don't yell they don't organize they don't make commercials for them they just say you know what

non-hick porkas, not this pig.

I'm not going to enlist at the same rates they used to.

And I think I'm worried about it because I don't think you're going to get a lot of transgendered recruits.

And I don't think the lesbian and gay community is going to step up.

And I don't think that necessarily the inner city is going to step up.

These numbers are really drastic.

Also, you should tell.

Yeah, let me read.

They're frightening.

There's a piece by Chuck DeVore in the Federalists from last week, and it's

the Army has only reached 40% of its recruitment recruitment goal.

So here's two paragraphs.

As a result of its massive recruiting shortfalls, the U.S.

Army has lowered its standards, dropping requirements for recruits to have a high school diploma or GED to enlist while relaxing tattoo restrictions to allow tattoos on hands and neck without a waiver.

These two decisions will result in a less capable force with troublesome discipline issues.

The Army is even offering.

What's that a euphemism for gangbangers?

Yeah, well, those those are the yeah we're we're searching for white supremacists but please come work with us the army is even offering enlistment contracts as short as two years barely enough time to learn the basics of modern warfare and then finally here victor the dod is even reviewing more than 250 disqualifications for service such as asthma and ADHD, with only 23% of Americans aged 17 to 24 qualified to serve in uniform without a waiver, and just 9% of those eligible to serve even interested,

something has to give.

And with some experts suggesting that a draft might be needed again, et cetera, et cetera.

So, yeah, what hell, you know, Chuck Schumer talked about reaping a whirlwind.

Well, America's reaping a whirlwind because of the political correctness and wokeness of our military leadership.

And it has to do with the most basic need of our country to defend itself.

Think of the logic, Jack.

Here's the logic of the left-wing mind: It is, I'm going to take your military that has the most fearsome reputation in the world, and I'm going to turn it into a revolutionary tool for woke agendas.

And so I'm going to, whether it is climate change, it is going to imbue all procurement.

We're going to get an electric Humvee.

We're going to get a battery operated tank or whatever.

We're going to research that rather than lethality.

And I am going to have all of these race, class, gender, LBG, Q,

whatever issues.

And

in the process, that's not going to be enough.

I'm going to be negative, not just positive.

I'm not just going to push these positive recommendations.

I'm going to go after white males and say that they're the cause of a lot of problems.

And I'm going to call in the Defense Secretary and Mark Milley, the chairman, and they're going to humiliate themselves in their obsequious, toadish compliance with my crackpot conspiratorial theories.

Okay, I'm going to do all that.

And as a result of that, we don't have enough soldiers.

So I'm not going to go out and tell more gay people or more marginalized people or more women to run.

They're not going to join.

So we might have to have a draft, but I don't want a draft.

I fought, you know, I'm seven years old.

I fought in the 60s in the draft, resist.

So what do they want?

No military.

Okay.

But But they all have these, they want to help Ukraine.

They want to do all of these,

you know,

noble thing.

Are you going to have the bi-coastal elite join the military?

Are their kids going to do it?

No.

So the fact of the matter is, the elephant in the room is

who joins the military in disproportionate numbers in combat units?

It is the guy who lives in Reno, Nevada, and his dad was a Vietnam veteran.

The girl whose parents both met in the Air Force, and she lives in a small town in Colorado, the guy in upstate New York, the guy in Bakersfield.

That's who does it disproportionately.

And you went, you, Mr.

Military Leadership, you went out and deliberately targeted those people.

You humiliated them and you discouraged them and you gave them no incentives.

And they finally said, you know what?

I'm done.

And they need a radical reboot.

They need commercials that appeal to this demographic.

Right.

And when you add, there's other elements to it, too.

And when that demographic tends to be a little bit more conservative, and they look at Michael Hayden loudly on social media saying that Donald Trump is emulating the tactics of Auschwitz because he's using the Obama-era detention centers.

Or they see retired General McCaffrey saying that Donald Trump is Mussolini.

Or they see retired General McChrystal,

who has to tell us how much he hates his picture of Robert E.

Lee, so he threw it and sent it to the dump suddenly.

I don't know how that happened.

Or we see General Petraeus,

who suddenly said, after, I don't know, three decades at Fort Bragg that he realized it was racist or he didn't.

Who's this Bragg guy?

Yeah, who's this guy?

Hey, I just found out.

Summer of 2020, I just noticed that there's a statue of Robert, a picture of Robert E.

Lee at West Point.

Or you have General Mattis who mentioned about D-Day and the Nazis in a context.

I could go on and on and on and on.

But when your recruit looks at all of this, potential recruit, they come away with two lessons that the echelon, whether it's active Mark Milley or General Allen, who's what, head of the Brookings Institution, who's very loud in the campaign and what he's facing, a possible indictment for influence peddling.

So they look at all this and they say to themselves, I draw two conclusions.

One,

the people who are going to make decisions involving my 18-year-old don't like my politics and suggests that I might be associated with the people they target as Nazis or criminals or whatever.

And two, they not only don't like my politics, these people are very, very wealthy.

They're not living out, you know, in Tulare, California.

or Pixley or Livingston.

They're very wealthy and they made a lot of money in their poor.

And that is a lethal message for the lower middle classes.

I don't know.

I'm speaking, Jack, as somebody who taught a year at the Naval Academy.

It's not your father's military.

Yeah,

I taught at the Naval Academy.

I was a visiting professor of military history for two weeks, I guess it was, at UC Berkeley.

You teach at the Naval War College ever?

I used to lecture there.

Oh, I used to speak all the time at the Army War College.

I was a visiting speaker there.

I wrote a lot about military history.

Some of my best friends are generals.

I did two

embeds in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, where I went over there during combat, during the surge.

So I like the military.

I liked officers.

And I'm at Hoover, where there's a fine array of officers that I get along with.

We have a wonderful program for lieutenant colonels.

We have four stars.

So this doesn't make me happy to say all that, but there is something terribly wrong.

And I don't know who's going to fix it.

A politicized military.

Can you imagine that the earliest it could possibly be fixed is about three years from now?

I pray.

I mean,

this isn't going, there's going to be no 180 by the Biden administration.

Put it this way: Mark Milley is iconic and representative of this problem.

I mean, just take a deep breath for a second.

What has he shown us?

He's shown us that he was one of the generals who went on television in the summer of 2021 under Biden's directive and said that things were stable in Afghanistan.

And then when they weren't and the whole thing collapsed, not that he has operational authority, although he sometimes thinks he does.

but he labeled it a logistical success.

And then when we killed a bunch of innocent people, he said it was a justified what, kill or justified bombing in Kabul when we hit the wrong,

it was justified or with a clean or some type of euphemism for we got the wrong intelligence and we blew up a bunch of innocent people.

And then, in addition to that, he was the guy who went before Congress and gave us an excursus on Professor Kendi and white rage.

And all he showed in that testimony is he's completely ignorant about this issue.

And yet,

he's so ignorant that he feels that he's in an advisory role to make sure that other people follow his advice and they read this propaganda and they look at ways of weeding out these supposedly epidemic of white supremacists.

But as soon as I heard that, I went to the Federal Register of Hate Crimes and I went to the Federal Register of FBI Statistics, or it comes out of DOJ on interracial crimes.

And guess what I discovered, Jack?

That white males are underrepresented in hate crime.

In other words, they don't commit 67% of the hate crime.

Two marginalized groups who remain unnamed are overrepresented.

And when I went into rare interracial crimes, which are only about 7% of violent crimes, are between the races, so-called white people, and I think we're mostly talking about white males, are underrepresented.

In other words, they are about four times more likely to be the victim than the perpetrator.

So when I looked at that data, I thought to myself, well, you're attacking a group that A, dies twice their numbers in the population in your combat units.

B, since you are fixated by race, they do not commit hate crimes at anywhere near the level of their numbers in the population.

And when it's a rarer matter of assaulting or injuring or killing or raping somebody of an opposite race, they are vastly underrepresented.

And yet you're targeting them for one reason, because you feel the political atmosphere in Washington is conducive to that narrative.

And you're doing that because when you retire, you want to make sure you're not fired, but you're going to retire and you're going to be comfortable in the left-wing corporate environment.

And that's, I think that's true.

Everything I just said is absolutely true.

And you think that nobody catches on to that.

So Mark's end game.

Right.

Yeah, I think I thought, well, you were wrong about Afghanistan.

You did enormous damage when

you started quoting Kendi and White Rage.

And you're probably indirectly in that sense responsible for a vast drop off in recruitment.

You are an advisor.

Statute says very clearly that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs does not have operational control and yet you you

on your hunch that donald trump who your left-wing associates have criticized for being a neo-isolationist and does not want to go in let's say to syria and adjudicate a syrian turkish war but nevertheless you've said he's trigger happy You've made that announcement and then you leaked that to a journalist to make sure that that would appear in print in which you were were so convinced that he was dangerous and trigger happy that you contacted your Chinese communist counterpart and you tipped him off.

And you said, if my president gives a particular order, which I feel is dangerous, I'm going to tip you off about that order.

And then

you violated the constraints on your command that says it's advisory only when you told theater commanders, should they get a presidential order through the Department of Defense, i.e.

the Secretary of Defense, about the use or control of nuclear weapons, that you're going to report to me.

I mean, that's insurrectionary.

He has no jurisdiction over a theater commander's communication with the Secretary of Defense.

He's an advisory.

And

I can top this off by memory, I hope.

And then after the assault on the White House grounds, which sent the Secret Service after the Trump family to put them in a bunker and ended up in the partial burning of the St.

John's Episcopal Church, and for a time threatened to flow into the White House grounds, which is probably organized or directed by social media, Antifa and BLM,

Donald Trump went across and had a, what you called, a photo op

and thought about using federal troops to restore order because the mayor of Washington wasn't going to do it.

She wouldn't send anybody to help the Secret Service that night.

And what did you do, Mark Milley?

You apologized and you said you should not be seen with the President of the United States in a political context.

I'm thinking, would you please list every single chairman of the Joint Chiefs going back to the 50s who did not pose in a photo op with the President of the United States?

Okay.

And would you please give me the names of

those

presidents who called in federal troops because they felt that local police forces were overwhelmed?

How about Colin Powell during the Rodney King riots, Mr.

Milley, General Milley, when he let George Bush know, I've got 5,000 Marines.

They're ready when you are.

That's what he wrote.

George W.

Bush Sr., George H.W.

Bush.

And guess what?

They sent them in to the Rodney King focus point in south central Los Angeles.

And yet we're supposed to believe that any commander who considers using federal troops to restore order for a riot that bordered on the White House grounds and then wanted to reassure the country the next day that he was outraged about that and the tort is a political hack.

That's our chairman of the Joint Chief.

Any one of those should have been grounds for dismissal.

They weren't.

Well, as we know, Victor, only one person got punished for the debacle in Afghanistan.

Hey, we have to move on.

We're a little shorter on time today, but we've got two other topics to talk about.

One of them is going to be the Supreme Court decision about climate.

I hate to call it climate change.

Let's just say Supreme Court decision telling the EPA it doesn't have the authority to make the cap and trade decisions that it's made on quote-unquote climate.

Big Big blow to the Biden administration.

And then we're going to talk about, you know, Joe, maybe Joe going after Governor DeSantis of Florida, which I have a feeling Governor DeSantis is saying thank you so much, Joe.

So we'll get to those topics right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on Sunday, July 3rd.

This podcast is airing on July 7th.

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So, Victor, maybe we should start off with Biden v.

DeSantis.

So, here's a headline from PM, a website from Saturday, July 2nd.

Biden vows to stop DeSantis's anti-grooming bill.

This was the legislation that Florida passed saying, you know, you can't be teaching second graders about fellatio or it was just and other things that people would have gotten their teeth knocked down their throat 20 years ago if a teacher tried to do that.

So here's very quickly, the Biden White House has issued a statement saying that they must stop Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' parental rights and education bill, claiming the bill encourages bullying and yet another effort to curtail states' rights.

The White House claims there will be federal intervention in opposition to the quote-unquote anti-grooming law.

Moves for federal mediation include monitoring by the Department of Education and calls for people to file formal complaints about the law's restrictions with the Department's Office for Civil Rights goes on.

Victor, I can't imagine, you know, Governor DeSantis, who, as we know, most Americans feel, is considering running for the presidency.

Regardless, he's got a big enough job.

running the state of Florida.

He's up for reelection this year.

I cannot imagine a gift like this that he would get that Joe Biden wants to take me on

this.

Have at it, Joe.

Victor, what are your thoughts about that?

And then we're going to get to the Hunter Biden laptop, the thing which the gift politically, which just keeps on giving.

We'll get to that after your thoughts on this.

Quickly,

they had at it with Trump, and they feel after this Cassidy Hutchinson that they've inflicted mortal damage on Trump.

They haven't.

But in one poll, DeSantis now polls higher than Trump as a possible 2024 Republican nominee.

So now they're shifting gears and their attitude is, is: well, we have neutered Trump for a while.

And although we hate him more than we do anybody else, we may have misfired and we put too much of our effort on against Donald Trump.

And while we lowered his popularity through this invective, we have enhanced DeSantis.

And while he doesn't have the fire in the belly, carnality of Trump, he's got this record.

And we may be shooting ourselves in the foot

by shifting attention toward DeSantis as conservative as Trump, as feisty as Trump, and maybe less volatile in the sense of social media, tweeting, all that stuff.

So now they're saying, let's go after DeSantis.

But they look at Florida and they look at unemployment, they look at GDP, they look at, you know, after trashing him on COVID, if you look at the deaths per thousand and compare it to New York or New Jersey or Massachusetts, so it's hard to see anything in his record.

So now they're going after this effort.

But if you tell the American people that you're having this radical school curriculum that is encouraging preteens to explore sexuality through stories about transgenderism or gayness or all of these things, they're saying, wait a minute, our kids don't rate very well in math and science worldwide.

The schools are getting more and more mediocre.

There's not one second.

It's not that they're homophobic or transphobic.

They just think, my kids are not getting an education.

And I think it's because the teachers either are unqualified and don't have the expertise to teach them or they have agendas, but we're spending too much time on effort on material that is not going to help.

them succeed in life or the country.

And so they're angry.

And

he, DeSantis, feels that, and he knows that's the majority.

And he's a politician and he has deep felt beliefs, I believe, that sync with theirs.

And the result is this is an issue that the Democrats feel, A, they want to get rid of DeSantis and weaken him because he seems as big a threat now as Trump in the next presidential election.

And B, they feel their base will come out and say, wow, you know, but they're not going to talk about what I just talked about, Jack.

They're going to talk about freedom of speech and, you know, we have to be all we can be, that kind of therapeutic.

And then, of course, Gavin Newsom, he's running ads on Fox News against DeSantis.

That's kind of weird because if you compare the two states, it's like an F and an A.

But nevertheless, he's public enemy number one now.

And I think every Republican, Jack, should take a deep breath, especially I'm talking to you, never Trumpers, or you conservative independents, because you thought that the hysteria over Donald Trump was unique to Donald Trump.

And you don't remember the Cindy Sheehan years when George Bush, in the words of John Glynn, was a Nazi or Al Gore was a digital brown shirt or all of that invective where they said that it was horrible.

They made fun of the Bush children or Dick Cheney was a prince of Halbert and Darkness.

Remember that narrative?

And he shot somebody deliberately and they went after him.

And then Trump came along and that tension shifted and you thought, well, he's sui generous.

So it was just Trump.

No, no, it's not just Trump.

It's the left.

If we get a few more polls that show DeSantis running ahead of Trump, the left will pivot and start calling DeSantis, and they already do, a Nazi, an evil person that hates personal freedom, homophobic, sexist, racist, all of that.

And I think everybody should realize that.

I say that as somebody that during those years, I didn't think that George W.

Bush was a racist.

I didn't think he was a sexist.

I didn't think Dick Cheney was.

I didn't protect them, but I defended them against those charges.

And for them to, and their followers now to suggest that the people who attacked them in such unsavory terms were somehow

understandably angry at Donald Trump and that that was a unique phenomenon.

That was almost amnesia of their own past.

That's what I don't, I get back to Liz Cheney.

I don't understand that all the horrible things that they say about Trump, they said about her own dad and the same people, the same people.

And they will say it about her if she comes out and is still conservative and supports Dobbs ruling or something.

Right.

And so, you know, it's just the way it is.

It's the way the left operates.

Well, I think whatever they're up to, it's here politically.

I'm pretty confident it's to the benefit, political benefit of Governor DeSantis.

So Victor, let's shift a little here and talk about Joe Biden, but more so, well, him and his son, Haunter, and the infamous laptop that is the gift that keeps on giving.

Of course, it's whatever it gives, the things that are uncovered from it, we rarely find reported by the major media.

Of course, they they weren't reporting that Justice Kavanaugh was an assassination target, so why should they talk about Hunter's laptop?

But in the Federalists, last week, Margot Cleveland wrote a piece called Joe Biden's Voicemail to Hunter means it's time to appoint a special counsel.

And I don't think it's all that complicated, but I'm not going to.

get into every jot until we'll hear of this.

But what was uncovered was a voicemail from December 2018.

Again, this is recovered from the backup of this was Hunter's phone that was backed up on this, on the infamous laptop.

Hey, pal, it's dad.

It's 8.15 on Wednesday night.

If you get a chance, just give me a call.

Nothing urgent.

I just wanted to talk to you.

I thought the article released online, it's going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good.

I think you're clear.

And anyway, if you get a chance, give me a call.

I love you, et cetera.

So this article in the Times was about, of course,

a Chinese company and its relations with American companies.

Of course, it was a company that Hunter Biden was trying to deal with.

So it's the nexus.

Connect the dots.

Joe Biden never had anything to do with Hunter, malarkey.

So anyway, Victor,

like many other things that have come out about Joe dealings with women, amongst many other things, this seems to be off and will always be off the major media radar, but it's not unimportant.

Your thoughts about this, please.

Well, I mean, in that brief message, probably was about a 30-second message, what did we learn?

That Joe Biden was outright lying when he said he had no interest in or knowledge of Hunter Biden's business activities, even though Hunter used to ride on Air Force II with him as vice president.

How does Joe Biden know when exactly something's going to be published?

And how does he know that he's in the clear?

Is he just a person like Victor Hansen just said, hmm, it's my guess that you're in the clear?

Or does he talk to people using his former contacts or current contacts?

And so why is he not worried about why a Chinese operative would try to contact Hunter Biden and extremists?

Why is he not worried about what the call was over rather than to reassure his son that he's evaded scrutiny if he was the former vice president of the United States.

If I had a son and he had a lot of Chinese contacts and I was involved with that Chinese contacts and there were people on the trail of that and there was a story and I found out that it was going to come out in the New York Times and I made some calls.

I'm just extrapolating now, Jack, that whether people in the DOJ or whatever were going to pursue this FBI, and then I wanted to call him, I would say, listen, son, what the are you doing to the degree that i'm culpable i apologize but we're getting too close for comfort whatever we're doing is not only politically stupid but it's amoral and we got to stop this but you get the impression that he is amoral right doesn't care he just doesn't want to get caught and so I don't know.

I guess the only thing that could be said, he supported his son, but I mean, when the son is a crackhead

and a home wrecker and a crook, then it doesn't do any good to say that you're loyal to your son if you're not going to reprimand him and try to change his behavior.

Well, the Corleons implied that the laws were for suckers in America.

That's what, I mean, that you got to hit the nail on the head.

So, all of our listeners are listening and they're thinking when they hear stories like this, they think, wow, I got a letter from the IRS that said I didn't report my gift to my daughter or wow

i sold a home and they disagree with my capital gains of formulation

wow

that kind of stuff you know what i mean wow i have a nephew that had a dui and i did this or i have another nephew who lost his registered gun or wow my son rented a car and let the crack pipe in it and now the cops are that's That's the kind of stuff they deal with every day.

And they look at this and they think, we're not an aristocracy.

We're not a monarchy.

We're not a third world autocracy.

We're a constitutional republic.

Everybody's equal.

And why is this family serially, again and again and again, exempt?

Since when did the FBI become a private retrieval service for Joe Biden's daughter's Lura diary or the Hunter laptop or the Secret Service became a retrieval service for his lost semi-automatic pistol.

But that's what they think.

And so the good old Joel Biden from Scranton shtick doesn't work anymore.

It's very profoundly depressing because what it really shows us, if you take a deep breath, is the left is always, when there's conservatives in there, they're always running expose stories on things like this.

And when they get in, they just think, you know what?

We don't really care about corruption.

We don't really care about influence peddling.

We don't care about law breaking.

We just want to know if they're on our team and they're perpetuating and furthering the agenda.

Then we'll take care of the rest.

That's it.

These people deserve no respect, the media.

None, none.

When I get a call from particular outlets, would you want to comment?

I usually don't even...

answer the phone if I know who it is, but if they do identify themselves, New Yorker, Washington Post, New York, I don't talk to them.

Why would you want to talk to any of those people?

Because you know what they're up up to.

Well, story's already written.

And you're just kind of the anecdote to say they spoke to you.

Yeah.

They just want a comment so they can cut and paste and make you look stupid or your

views look stupid.

They're not media.

They're not journalists to everybody.

They are not journalists.

They're probed a voice of Prabhda functionary.

Well, Victor, we got time for one more quick discussion, and that will be about the Supreme Court's.

Another important decision was the Supreme Court's ruling that handed their head to the EPA and the American bureaucrats who exercise rights reserved for Congress.

And we'll talk about that and close out the show right after these important messages.

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CTMobile.com slash ISP for details and exclusions.

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

So, Victor, you know, the attention, of course, media attention really went to the Dobbs decision

that overturned Roe v.

Wade.

And a second place, if there was a second place, was the Supreme Court decision on gun rights.

Then there was a major case about prayer.

The coach who was exercising his First Amendment right to pray in the middle of the field before a high school football game.

That got a lot of attention.

I don't think a lot was given, some was given to this case, though, in a 6-3 decision.

This this was written by Chief Justice Roberts, the court limited, here's from, I'm looking, reading now from CNN article, limited the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to set standards on climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions for existing power plants.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court said that only Congress, not the EPA, has the power to create a broad system of cap and trade regulations to limit emissions from existing power plants in a bid to transition away from coal to renewable energy sources.

The decision is a major setback for the Biden administration's agenda to combat climate change, specifically the goal to zero out carbon emissions from power plants by 2035 and cut in half the country's emissions by 2010.

So, yeah, Victor, I think this may be a decision, all that, not all that warmly received in Congress.

I mean, Congress has so delegated its authority to write the laws of the United States to the regulators of the United States, who then, of course, become quote-unquote experts and then get all draconian pretty damn quickly to the devastation of, in many ways, to the country.

So there was quite a setback.

I think quite important there for the good guys.

And the good guys are people who believe in all of the above energy, reasonableness.

It is.

And I wrote, you know, in the dying citizen, I wrote a whole chapter on this called The Unelected and people who serve as judge, jury, executioner, or legislative, executive, and judicial, and they are lifelong bureaucrats and they revolve in and out.

I think the current head of the EPA is Gina McCarthy, isn't she?

And she was the Obama EPA.

Yeah.

She got in trouble.

Remember, they didn't want to confirm.

Pennsylvania lady.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And she started out, I think, as Mike.

I don't know if she worked on Boston Harbor, but she worked for Dukakis.

But anyway, I remember that I think they just tabled her, and the person before her was that crazy woman, Lisa Jackson, who had that imaginary person she emailed with.

And we're talking about imaginary creatures, remember?

And she used a pseudonym in her email, and they fired her.

And she went, of course, where they all go back into Silicon Valley.

And then Gina McCarthy was nominated.

And I don't know what happened, but they tried to stall that as much as they could.

And then she was confirmed, and now she's back again.

And she represents this strain that the court struck down that the EPA can take a law and then they can expand it into something that was never intended.

And I gave an example in the book of the Inland Waterways Act: that the EPA had the right to go in on water that was for navigation purposes and test it.

And they soon went into ponds and private lakes and even drainage from runoff.

And they were testing that.

So they were finding any excuse they could to go after a farmer.

So my point is that all of this, Jack, is this EPA is

staffed by people who have never been in private enterprise or they've never had to meet a payroll.

or they've never farmed or they've never cut down a tree for people to have wood for their home.

And they're adversarial.

They never come to somebody and say, look, this is the statute.

We have to interpret it very literally.

And you might be in violation.

Let's work together to make sure you're not.

They never do that.

They expand and expand because they don't like those people.

And the other thing about it is there's a whole network.

We've talked about high-ranking military officers that evolve back into

the corporate world, but these people are not sincere.

They're not socialist.

They're not leftist.

They may say they are,

but

when Lisa Jackson left the EPA, she went, as I said, right to Apple and I think the Clinton Foundation.

And when Gina McCarthy went out, she went out to Wall Street.

And guess what?

She was an advisor on what?

On green issues.

So it's a game for these people.

They go in, they try to do damage, and then they get rewarded by the corporate world.

And they,

their tenure and their policies are geared toward their retirement.

And they want to get a name, and they do not want to do something that's unorthodox or would not be conducive to their post-retirement income.

And even the most radical, and she's the most radical EPA person we've ever had, both in the Obama administration, I think she was in it now.

But this is just typical that an agency gets a life of its own.

It gets huge and it's got all these employees.

And then for the more employees, you got the assistant director, the associate director, da-da-da-da-da-da.

They all make these huge, we're talking about Anthony Fauci's Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, the NIA, all of them, CD.

And they get bigger and bigger and bigger.

Then the people at the top run it like they're medieval lords.

They abuse the law.

And then some poor guy.

or a woman that runs a store, a sandwich shop, you name it, sues and it takes, it breaks them and puts them through bankruptcy almost to get justice.

And usually they don't get justice, but this particular court at this particular time gave them justice.

And so.

Remember, Victor, if they get justice, it may be around too, like the cake baker, right?

Yeah.

He won.

And then the same agency came after him again.

You know, I would just finish by saying, I wrote an article saying how much ruin is left in the United States.

That's a quote from Adam Smith when he was saying,

basically, he said, don't expect these societies that are taken over by people with wrong ideas to collapse them because societies have a lot of ruin, meaning a lot of capability that has to be destroyed or resiliency.

But what we're watching in the United States is a whole class of people.

They don't create, they don't build, they don't create things that people need,

and

they monitor, they audit,

they watch, they regulate, they discourage, they sue.

And they draw a particular type of person who's eloquent, rhetorical from college, but not smart, or is a wordsmith, but not creative.

The people they hate are the Teslas.

And Jeff Bezos, you've mentioned him.

He's finding out maybe his new girlfriend is not as left-wing as his former wife.

I don't know what's happened to him, but he's starting to realize that, you know, nobody likes Amazon, quote unquote.

Everybody uses Amazon.

But the idea that I can sit here out in the middle of nowhere on my farm, and I just ordered the other day two sensors for a garage.

I ordered a circuit breaker.

I can get it delivered.

I have some acknowledgement of the service that Jeff Bezos, you know, provides.

I understand it comes at the expense of local commerce, et cetera.

But nonetheless,

I grant him that.

I grant Steve Jobs that.

I even grant Bill Gates that, that they were creative and built something of value.

These people

create nothing,

nothing of value.

And they don't like people that create things of value.

And I feel bad for Elon Musk because I hope he's idealistic and he understands what he's getting into.

But the moment he said that he would vote for DeSantis or the moment he took on Twitter or the moment he said he might not vote Democratic, you know, that every factory the guy owns is going to be inspected.

He's going to be sued.

Every labor union, every race, class, gender, LBGTQ issue, they're going to go after him and tie him in court any way they can.

He's public enemy number one now.

Well,

Victor, this is the perfect, perfect segue into the closing of the show.

Yes.

Because we're thanking, as we always do, our listeners for listening and for on Apple podcasts for leaving ratings.

Most people leave five stars.

Average is 4.9 plus plus.

And some people leave comments.

We read them.

We appreciate those that do.

Some ask questions.

This is a great comment, just based on what you were saying.

This is from Owen 2.

It's titled Dr.

Hansen and My Model 3.

I never miss a VDH podcast and wish the general public would hear your brilliance.

Do have one small complaint.

Wish you would not bash Tesla owners so much.

I am widowed, retired veterinarian, living on my farm between Austin and Houston.

I drive a 2018 Tesla Model 3.

Love that car.

80,000.

You know, he's a good, that's a very good point.

Well, but, you know, I don't think you bash the car.

You bash the Tesla owners.

Yeah, the car.

I admire Elon Musk for making Teslas.

I worry about where we're going to get the electricity to fuel them.

And I am going to buy a Tesla.

That's my promise.

Yeah, I mean, the electricity comes from what?

Magical place that doesn't involve other forms of

energy or production.

That's good.

I don't, when I had made fun of Teslas, like let them eat Teslas,

it was a symbol of privilege, but because they are so expensive.

Well, remember, Victor, the two weeks or so ago, there was, I think it was a Michigan congresswoman who was talking about driving.

Oh, and I had my Tesla.

And I didn't have any problem.

I'm not paying $6

a gallon of gas.

I mean, who the frick can afford that?

I think our point that people don't, that it's been used by the left

as a way to say, I don't worry about your gas or diesel prices.

That's your problem because I have a Tesla.

When they don't realize it, most people can't afford a Tesla.

Let them eat cake.

Technology and the entrepreneurship and the quality of the car, from everything I've known, heard, I admire them greatly.

I take that

seriously.

Okay.

Well, anyway, I think

we remain, or you won't speak for you, but I'll say kind of, we remain all of the above people, you know.

when it comes to energy and

cars and vehicles and forms of commerce, etc.

So anyway, Victor, it's been wonderful talking with you today.

I deeply appreciate the ability or the opportunity to be doing this with you.

I know there are many people who listen.

I get a lot of emails now from folks.

I'm becoming your conduit for

access to Victor.

A lot of people will give their eye teeth to be in this position to talk with you twice a week.

So, anyway, I want to state I appreciate that.

Appreciate everyone who.

Well,

you're French,

it's great.

It's great.

It's a great deal.

And all the listeners as well.

Yeah, they're wonderful.

Sammy Wink is wonderful.

So I want to encourage everyone to check out her two most recent discussions with you.

So, on that note, though, it's still as we're talking, Victor Iron are talking, it's not yet the 4th of July.

It will have been by the time you're all listening to this, but I still want to say I wish everybody happy Independence Day.

God bless America.

And thanks for listening to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Happy 4th of July.