National Concerns: The Pandemic and Energy Crisis

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Hello and welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the Saturday edition where we look at things a little less political and a little more historical usually, but nothing is perfect.

And so today what we have on our agenda is the COVID pandemic and a look in depth at the COVID pandemic and also our energy crisis and some of the maybe some look at the historical parallels to our current energy crisis.

I want to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He can be found at victorhanson.com.

His website is called The Blade of Perseus

and we welcome everybody.

It's a great deal, subscription, $5 a month or $50

a year.

And it gets you access to the VDH Ultra content, which is about 2,400 words a week and really great articles on the website from Victor.

Well, Victor, we'll get to our agenda today, but first let's listen to some messages.

We're back and we've got very serious issues, obviously, in our culture today, both the COVID pandemic and our energy crisis.

And we wanted to take them a little more in depth.

So we'll start with the COVID pandemic, if that is okay with you, Victor, and look at everything about it.

So I do have a series of questions, but I'm willing to talk about it.

in any fashion that you would like.

I would like to remind people just of some statistics before victor addresses this issue the cdc stats of average daily on all three of these things are average daily cases 99 000

average daily deaths 248 and average daily hospitalizations at 4 393 and that was as of yesterday so those are their average dailies yesterday the June 22nd, we had in the United States 774 deaths, so a little bit higher than it's been in the recent month, and then over 2,000 worldwide deaths.

So regardless of that it's a little bit higher than it has been in the last few months, it's definitely seems a lot less than, for example, January 2022 seems to have been the real height of contagion for the COVID virus.

The United States, according to the CDC, is 83% vaccinated as well.

So, those are some statistics maybe we can work with, Victor.

But I was hoping we could start and talk about the origins and China's role in this, what we know about it anyway, in this crisis, and then work from there.

And so, what are your thoughts about its origins now that we've been in it for two years and we can reflect back?

I think we should start with two given laws about any discussion of COVID.

First of all, we have this kind of custodianship that if you're not a PhD in neuroscience or biology, you cannot talk about it.

Or if you're not an MD, I'm not dispensing medical advice.

I'm just talking as a historian, number one.

And number two, start with the general rule that almost every authoritative statement that we've been told since the origins of this virus has been proven wrong.

And that's not necessarily a reflection on the expertise of our officials, although it can be at times, but that this virus is unlike any that we've ever seen before.

It mutates, it's more infectious, it has more variants, it's just different.

And that should give us some idea about the origins.

The origins are very interesting because

We started out being told that it came in the United States in March and it it may have been in February or January in Wuhan.

Now we know that there were cases last fall, the fall before, that is in 2019.

We know that they were outside of Wuhan.

So there were people transmitting this virus much earlier than the Chinese government allowed, which raises the larger question.

If China has nothing to hide about this virus, then they would have welcomed in international experts into the lab, toured the lab, and said, we need your help.

This came in a market, or this escaped, or whatever they wanted to say, but they did not do that.

They allowed some people to get near it or go in, but it was under close supervision and they did not release material.

So that tells us that they are not transparent.

If they were transparent, they would have shut down Wuhan

first

and

stopped all travel outside of China.

They didn't do that.

They shut down Wuhan internally, but you could get on a plane from Wuhan and go outside the country, or you could go to another country on a connecting flight.

Now, that tells you something.

In other words, they were willing to allow this virus to spread, willingly or not, in a way that they were very concerned about internal spread.

And they have a different view of the virus than most of the Western world.

If you look at Shanghai recently, they shut down the entire city.

Nobody had ever contemplated that, even under our most stringent lockdown protocol.

So they feel that this virus has to be eliminated.

And

that should tell you something.

In a way, they are more alarmed about this virus than we are.

And so

why is this?

Why, and I'll give you another example.

Why did the Echo Health Alliance under Mr.

Dasik, and in accordance with Lancet, the most prestigious of all European British medical journals, why did they run an investigation of the Wuhan lab, go over there

and seek the authorization of the Chinese for a very limited censored inquiry, and then come back?

and say that it was not engineered at the lab.

And then since then, almost every member of that task force has either had to renounce their investigation or has remained quiet.

And now that is a discredited effort.

So put all this together.

And I think it's pretty clear that the virus did not occur from a pangolin or a bat.

So the virus probably came out of this lab.

And it was a gain of function effort.

And we know that because that activity was going on because we were funding a small part of it, not a big part.

I've read things where they've said things along the following: well, this virus targets older people and saves the young, and it mutates more, and it's more infectious.

And therefore, they were experimenting with a type of weapon that would

target older people,

maybe of their own population.

I don't believe any of that.

So, what I'm suggesting to you is very likely, given the literature, that this virus escaped from a very poorly secured lab and it was a product of gain of function research, whether to combat a biological weapon or just to investigate about the nature of viruses or to create one.

I think that's pretty clear now.

And that is a tragedy because that has taken almost two years to make that statement or longer.

We could have known that in March of 2020 and then we could have operated on a different premise.

And so bottom line, line, the origins of COVID-19, the virus that causes that, were kept from the world public and the scientific community for almost two years.

Yeah, and it has killed over a million people in the United States.

It's killed over a million people.

Well, Victor, what have we learned about the disease itself?

And I know that this is personal to you because you've obviously had COVID twice, and this last one has been a pretty hard hit.

But based on your observations of the press, obviously, and you're not an expert at all in it, but what have you learned about the disease itself?

I've learned not to believe any official

authoritative statement.

So

I got two Moderna shots.

And when I got them, I was told that it had a 94% efficacy rate against the then-current strain.

And it probably did.

But no one really said

this strain is going to mutate and we have no idea what we'll do in other word pfizer and moderna gave these authoritative statements and they said they were minor side effects so we start there and i had minor side effects i do have an immune problem that i've had with mastocytosis that it causes inflammation and other problems but

I've had that under control for years.

So the second shot, I was very, very ill.

I had a high temperature for three days.

I have a member of my family who took the Pfizer who got some very bizarre side effects.

I know people have had.

Second thing I want to say is that

this idea that we were told early that these were sort of analogous to the flu shots, this new RNA technology was greenlighted.

Maybe it was, I have no problem it was greenlighted because that first variant was killing people and it did stop that.

It did.

So it did a wonderful thing.

But they could have told the public that this is untested.

We want you to get it, but we cannot be assured it will not have side effects.

And for younger men, we have some mitocarditis and health issues.

And for other people,

there were associated for women, for example, and we don't know if it was the packing, the lipid packing or what, but especially the Pfizer, we're told that there can be benign cysts that confuse mammogram results or ovarian cyst.

For some children that have some special needs, there can be something like an epileptic fit, temporary.

We don't know how long the effects.

So that's the first thing to remember.

The second thing to remember about the vaccinations, they were politicized.

I know that Donald Trump used that and bragged that he was going to have Operation Warp speed before the election.

But it's pretty clear in retrospect that members of the board of Pfizer or who are connected with Pfizer were communicating with people who were associated with the Biden campaign.

And the early prediction that there would be an October announcement was withheld.

And then only after the election, suddenly, within a few days, Pfizer said it had an effective vaccination.

So that tells us right away that there was a politicalization of this rollout.

I don't know to what degree it affected our health, but the timing was very strange.

The third thing is we were told that people who had got it,

the virus, that natural immunity would not be as efficient as the vaccine.

Again, this was part of a larger effort to push the vaccines to get herd immunity.

And that itself was controversial because just as Dr.

Fauci had assured us initially to take a cruise, don't wear a mask and then wear a mask and then maybe two masks would be better than one.

So herd immunity that was going to be achieved started to fluctuate in an effort to get people vaccinated.

If we can just get 60%,

60%.

We can just get 70%, 70%.

If we can just get 90%.

And so that law, the public started to lose confidence in Dr.

Fauci and others.

Then we were told that natural immunity was not as effective.

Then we were told that it was equally effective.

Then we were told that it was more effective.

And then we got Delta.

I got Delta.

I was very ill for three days and I tested negative within four days and I was able to continue work.

I was tired for maybe a week.

I thought nothing of it.

I took an antibody test.

I didn't order it.

The doctor did.

without my knowledge.

He was trying to test everything, very good doctor, cardiologist, and he just came back and said, wow, you're near 2,500 antibodies.

You pretty much are protected.

And so when the rush came to get a third booster a few months later, I thought, wow, I had such a bad reaction to Moderna.

I don't want to get a booster when I've got so many antibodies.

And I talked to some doctors and they said, you know, we now know that natural immunity is as good or better than vaccination.

What we didn't know was that the Omicron first variant, second variant, we're now into the third, had been written off as not as lethal or toxic as the Delta or the initial variant.

And while that may be true, it was far more mutable and far more

debilitizing, maybe.

Yes, and effectious.

And natural immunity from a Delta or original strain was not going to protect you from Omicron, nor were two Pfizer shots, nor were two Moderna shots, nor were one booster, nor were two boosters.

I have a lot of friends, associates who've had two boosters who got very ill with Omicron.

I mean very ill.

I don't mean in the hospital like the original variant.

I mean one to seven days with a fever, a bad flu, let me put it that way.

And then at least a week or two of being wiped out.

That's another thing we weren't told.

And then we were told originally that people who didn't quite get over it, they needed to get over it.

In other words, well, I got, you heard this, and this is before I got Delta, or after I got Delta.

I would hear people say to other people, and I knew a few people, well, I got over Delta.

I would never say that to anybody, but it would be as if I said to somebody who didn't feel well after five months, well, I got over Delta.

Why can't you?

Or you look like you got over it, you look fine.

But they weren't fine.

They had either viral remnants in their system, according to one theory, that continually activated their immune systems, but not at a level to show a positive test.

Maybe they were weakened remnants themselves would not cause, or they reactivated a prior herpes virus or Epstein-Barr virus that was stimulating the immune system, or the initial infection had done something to the immune system in such a way as other viruses didn't do, but it would create a post-viral fatigue caused by a

continued sustained and unnecessary autoimmune response.

And so suddenly we began to hear about a year ago, or even earlier, people who said, I got over COVID, but I am wiped out.

I got over COVID, but I still can't taste or smell.

I got over COVID, but I have neuropathy.

I got over COVID, but I've got rapid heartbeat.

I've got over COVID, but I've got stomach issues.

I've got over, and you name it.

And they were all elements depending on one's own prior health, prior comorbidities.

They were all, it seems to be indications of an overactive immune system.

And we didn't pay attention to it.

Now

we know that we're into the third or fourth strain of Omicron, that Omicron is far more infectious, that no level of vaccination or prior non-Omicron immunity can protect you from it.

Getting a prior Omicron

or

a fourth or third booster can perhaps stop you from being ventilated or going in the hospital or some value there, but it's not going to

prevent you from getting it.

And everybody is getting Omicron.

And we have no idea if you get this Omicron, and I got it on May 2nd, to what degree you're going to have immunity

30 days, 90 days,

I've been meeting everything from 90 days to a year.

And we hear that there are vaccinations in the pipeline to deal with the Omicron variants.

But put it this way, Omicron changed the calculus of the whole COVID challenge.

And by that, I meant it was not initially as lethal as Delta or the original alpha strain.

And two, it completely blasted through the

one-shot, two-shot, three-shot, four-shot vaccination barrier.

And so that made a dilemma because

people were starting to talk of Omicron as almost a booster shot.

In other words, they said, well, it's not going to get you that, not going to put you in the hospitals.

The hospitals aren't going to be overrun.

You get Omicron, you're sick for four or five days, and then you've got immunity as much as you would for a shot.

So we dropped the lockdown, which I think was wise.

We dropped the mass, which I think probably wise.

Everybody gets Omicron because it's 30 times more infectious.

They all get a level of antibodies.

And for for about six months to a year, they're done with it.

And that, I think, is where we are with one caveat.

I'm not sure from the literature that I've been reading that Omicron is more or less likely to cause what they call long COVID, that is extended symptoms beyond two months or six weeks, whatever standard you use.

But because it's so more infectious, there are more people.

having problems.

And I was just looking today at the numbers.

Some people say conservative one out of 10, when people say one out of three that get COVID are going to have some symptoms and problems after

six to eight weeks.

Well, that's a huge number.

That's in the many millions.

And so when we're looking at a poor labor participation rate, we talk about loafers who are getting checks from the government and they're not going back to work or the 25-year-old in the basement using his COVID check, you know, to buy a video game rather than to go out and work with his his dad as a carpenter or something.

But there must be also a large number of people who have had Omicron because it's more infectious or maybe still suffering from Delta or the original, and they just can't go back to work.

In my case, I know right now that if I was a landscaper carpenter or plumber, I wouldn't be able to do it.

But I've been very fortunate that I'm sitting here talking to a microphone.

and I can do it.

And when I was reading about this and then collating my own symptomology, it does seem that it has something to do with the immune system

on high all the time.

So it makes it very hard to sleep, and yet you need sleep.

It feels like you're buzzing or you have pins and needles or your immune system.

You want to say to your immune system, I'm going to meditate.

Just stop it.

There's no danger from the virus anymore.

You're just killing me.

Just stop it.

And that drains or it impairs a mitochondria or the energy producing ability at the cellular level.

And there doesn't seem to me to be any way right now to stop it.

You can take, and I

take vitamin D, you can take zinc, you can take things to help the microchondine, you can take carnitine, you can take creatine, you can take to stop the swelling or the mast cell hyper inflammation, you can take quercetin, you can take luteol, you can take viscetin, you can take cingular to tamp down, you can take steroid.

I haven't done that.

The people I know have done it.

You can get another shot as if that's going to kill off the virus.

You can take paxivoid as if that would work.

You can take low dose LDN.

It's an anti-opia that's taken not at 50 milligrams, but at one milligram to start.

It's a very low dose.

So there's all of these things that anecdotally suggest that they're trying to approach this sustained infection at a variety of levels, either to kill off, you can take antivirals, anti-herpiviruses, anti-Epstein-Barr virus,

anti-anny virus, with the idea that there are just a few still going around there.

You test negative, but they're just enough to keep that immune system unnecessarily working.

And so, what I'm getting at is everybody has a theory, and they do a study on an amino acid, on a vitamin, on an antiviral, on an anti-opiate.

And in that anecdotal manner, they're finding some efficacy.

But they haven't had the resources yet, you know, to have a thousand people in a double-blind study.

Yeah.

So if somebody has long COVID, we don't have really any answer to it.

We don't.

It's tragedy.

And right now, I think there's a hospital, Boston Hospital, in association maybe with Boston University or Harvard is running a big study on niogen, true niogen, which is a form of niacin supplementation.

The idea that it would create nitric oxide and it would help at the cellular level.

There's some people who are doing mitro Q,

creatine, anything.

There are people approaching the problem from you're not creating enough of the vital vitamins or amino acids or the stuff that the cell needs to give you energy because it's being drained off to run this stupid immune system that's hunting for nothing, but it's killing you.

So, or I shouldn't, that's metaphoric, it's making you sick.

So therefore, we're going to supply it faster than it can be used.

And then you won't have the symptoms.

And finally, when you have plenty of it, the old immune system finally

gets slapped around and it quits.

Yeah.

Maybe in three months, six months, nine months.

But we're not going to let it do damage to you in the meantime because we're going to shove coal into the engine faster than this thing can burn it off.

that's one theory so there's a lot of studies going on but we don't have an answer but in the meantime in the meantime it it seems like a person who has comorbidities would probably i mean if i had comorbidities i would bank on the side of a booster myself but i don't i yeah i think had i not had delta I probably would have taken a booster, but

I don't know because there's going to be somebody listening out there that says, Victor, I took two boosters and I'm sick as a dog.

It's so anecdotal.

We don't want to, we're not doctors, we're not scientists.

We don't want to either advise people to take things or try to give diagnoses or prognoses.

So I'm not going to do that.

And I'm not going to have somebody say Victor Hansen was giving false information on his podcast.

So I don't have an answer.

I'm just saying, I'm just trying to be an observant historian

and look at the literature.

And I've been reading a lot of the literature.

I try to read an hour a day.

And

it does seem that if you do get the vaccinations and the boosters, you have a less likely chance to end up on a ventilator.

But what we have to be very careful is something along the following, that somebody 70 years old, let's say with an obesity problem and diabetes, gets two shots and two boosters and still on a ventilator.

And then somebody who's 40 in pretty good shape with no vaccinations then says, I got over COVID in five days and I didn't get vaccinated and he's on a ventilator.

So

your own state of health.

In my case, I think the good news for me was that I was exercising about an hour a day with a stationary or a regular bicycle and swimming and walking.

And I had lost some weight prior to that.

So I was in, for person 68, pretty good shape.

If you look at my blood test and cholesterol and heart, the bad thing for me was, as I said, I've had a problem for a long time with an overactive immune system.

Yeah.

And the other thing was, I think this is very important, and this is just anecdotally, that a lot, one thing we haven't discussed is viral load.

And so I think

I'm not going to endorse or condone masks, but if you're obviously around people that have it, a mask, an N95 mask, I don't know about the others.

I think the others are not going to do much, but that's just my own opinion.

An N95 mask properly worn is going to help you.

Or some type of air circulation blue light system is going to help you.

But the key is vival load.

So I know that I went for a whole year out on the farm

and I didn't go very much.

I did everything on Zoom.

And if I went on an airline, it was empty.

If I went to speak, it was, you go into

a place and you do it by Zoom.

And

the last year, I should say from January until I got ill, I'd say I was at 15 to 20 open occasions where I was speaking to 200, 300, 500 people.

Usually the event organizers as part of your contract will have you sign books.

do a photo op, do a VIP reception, do a regular reception, go to dinner, give your talk, and maybe do a podcast or be available afterwards.

So it could start as early as three o'clock and end at 11.

And in that period, you could be hugged or shake hands with 300 to 400 people.

Yeah.

Survival load.

And you're flying somewhere and you're missing a connection and you have a 17 or 18 hour day to get there.

And I had a lot of those.

And that's how I got ill.

I came right from one of those events.

And 36, 48 hours later, I had COVID.

So I think that's very important for people.

That's not my opinion.

That is pretty much scientific consensus that each person's immune system is able to fight off a particular million number of

virus, you know what I mean?

But at some point it gets overwhelmed.

It can't kill them fast enough.

And if you keep, these are what's very grave about people in the ER or in the COVID wing, doctors, nurses that are just being saturated with infectious viral particles.

And the mask will help some, the protective equipment will help some, the vaccination will help some.

But at some point, if they're up there 14 hours a day and they're stressed, seeing people die, their system is going to have, it'll be porous.

Yeah, exactly.

And then they get overwhelmed.

And once you get overwhelmed, and that's, I think, what happened to me.

Because over the last two years, there were periods where I could feel that something was going on.

You know, if I was teaching a class, I was teaching at places or I was giving a seminar.

I was sitting on a plane next to somebody who, you know, some people are weird.

They just keep coughing.

They open their mouths and say, don't worry.

I don't think I have COVID.

I'm going to get tested when I get home.

They say things like that to you.

And, but you feel like you're fighting it, but you fight it off.

Yeah.

And if you're not sleeping, and I can tell you that once you get this stuff, the long COVID for me, if I had one night of seven hours or six hours, I think I'd get over it in two or three days.

But just being, it feels like you're in a bath of alka-celts or buzzing,

you're anxious.

And I'm not an anxious guy.

I'm pretty mellow.

So this was new to me at 68.

All of a sudden, wow, I can't relax.

I got neuropathy.

I'm buzzing.

I can't, and you can't sleep.

And the more melatonin or natural supplements you take, the worse you feel because you still don't sleep.

I haven't taken sleeping pills.

I've tried some other short-term stuff and it doesn't work.

So what I'm getting at is be careful about the viral load.

And that doesn't mean go into a lockdown or anything.

It just means take normal precautions around people because

you, the American, we know enough about some of these prophylactics and some of the medicines after you get it.

We have ways that you can keep out of, keep off a ventilator.

And that wasn't true with the original six months of this epidemic.

But we don't have ways to ensure that you're, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and then come right back to discuss more and even about social media, I think, what we've learned about social media in this pandemic.

And I know that your central point is that the human body has hundreds of millions of forms and everybody's unique.

And there are some small trends that we can identify that may help people, but everybody really has their own course to take with COVID so far.

We don't have quite the understanding of it as we have perhaps of the common flu and that kind of thing.

But let's listen to these messages first and then we'll come right back and hear more from you on the COVID virus.

We're back.

And Victor, I know I don't know if you had something more to add to what you were looking at.

It It does seem to me that you gave a really wise caution to everybody that they are unique and they need to work with their doctors and that we're looking at some of the broader trends perhaps that we can identify and your anecdotal experience with COVID, which is

underline.

I would just emphasize that I'm not going to tell people exactly what I tried and I'm not going to advocate.

others to try things.

And because I don't think that's wise on the air to do that but i will say that long covet is for in my opinion of having it is more serious than we think it is and it's had an effect on the workforce of the united states it has not been properly appreciated and then i'd just like to how does this all end the pandemic that's what's really curious the idea initially that you're going to do the Shanghai method that is you're going to go after every single living person

and if they have covet you're going to put them in a cell basically i don't mean a jail cell but almost in in shanghai and then they can't spread it and then you've cleaned it out of the community i don't think that's going to happen it's too infectious it's probably going to be something like the 1918 1919 so-called spanish flu that is it's going to infect everybody and then it's going to mutate and by probably being become more infectious as it is and yet less lethal.

And so everybody is going to get some form of, there's going to be a few who have robust immune system.

They're just super people.

And we may have like a flu vaccination, I hope.

And maybe that's a good way to look at the COVID vaccinations now.

They're like flu vaccinations.

Every year we get, you know, people get flu vaccinations and they're told this year it was 20, 40, 50,

60% effective.

When you get up to 50% effective, everybody's just congratulating.

Wow, you got a flu shot and it was 50% effective because they never know which of the strains is going to be dominant.

And so maybe that's what's going to happen with COVID-19, that there's so many mutable strains that we're all going to, those who believe in vaccinations are going to get vaccinated, I don't know.

in the fall or what and then you have a 50 chance of not getting that year's strain but remember a couple of other things we were told that the summer would, remember we were all suffering the northern hemisphere and people said, look at Africa, look at South America.

And it was the idea that with places that were sunny and people were out, we didn't know whether they had greater exposure to vitamin D, natural vitamin D.

energy or we didn't know whether the temperature killed the virus on you know on a table or in the air or an aerosol form it probably did but all of these once confident and reassuring aspects of COVID have been demolished.

Here we are in the summer and people in California, we're almost back to the infectious rate, at least we were a month ago of any of the other strains.

And so whether or this new form seems to be quite happy to be heat hot.

And I think that's important to learn that

something's weird.

I just want to remind everybody, something is is weird about this virus its ability to mutate its ability to stand temperature changes its ability to quickly evade vaccinations its ability to do all sorts of stuff and i wish that the scientific community i hope brave scientists are looking at its viral sequencing and trying to explain why this thing is what it is.

And then maybe if they understand it and they get all of the information that somehow they can create a vaccination that can stop it or a drug that can stop it or a drug that can, with a person that has long COVID, that can stop the immune system.

And that's my hope.

And now we're spending a lot of resources.

So.

You know what bothers me is when I'm reading news and I'm watching China and they're locking down their cities recently.

And I'm thinking, what do they know about this virus since they have hidden their own role in it?

And we, you know, it might help our scientists to know the origins of this virus in order to understand its progress.

And yet we can't do that because China's hidden everything and they are locking down their own cities.

And I think, wait, there's something might be really wrong with this virus that the Chinese know and we don't.

And I don't know how you feel about that.

No, that's exactly what concerns our listeners.

And I have some of you write or you make comments, and you've made some very wise observations.

And we've had some a lot of really good, I guess we would call them medical writers.

Nicholas Wade wrote a long, really insightful essay on COVID.

And their point is this,

since we don't have the information fully, about the virus, as you point out, we have to ask ourselves as lawyers fundamental legal questions, not legal, but analytical or logical questions.

If it was just an accident and it might have been embarrassing, or if it was just a bat,

why wouldn't China release the information?

Were they afraid that they were doing gain of function and they stumbled on some avenue of research that had potential strategic uses and they didn't want to share it?

Or were they afraid that they would find some type of research that they shouldn't shouldn't have been engaged in and that would be incriminatory?

We don't know.

But the fact that

the people who were engaged in the research, we have some of their names and they're not around.

They're either locked up or they're dead or I don't know where they are, but they're not available.

And the fact that the Chinese government has forbid information to be released and the fact that people were locked down at Wuhan very early, but they were not locked down flying into Milan or San Francisco.

All of these things are just circumstantial, but they're so numerous that they build a circumstantial case that China has something to hide.

And that something to hide is of value to 8 billion people on the planet.

And they won't.

be released and they're not being because of their financial clout

they're not being held to account i don't know to what degree if they came forward and just released everything, it would help us make a better vaccination or better treatment, better medicines.

But why wouldn't they want to do that?

That's what I don't understand.

Yeah, exactly.

The United States has been very open about things, on many things, maybe not in its past, but it has been trying to.

So is Europe.

And you can go online and you can read all sorts of research projects that are open.

Everybody but China.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The known unknowns, as they say okay victor the last question on the pandemic i have is how has it changed or has it changed our perception of social media and i know that your website you have your own materials published to social media or posted to social media and so we do use it everybody uses it but it seems to me that with this pandemic their

use of algorithms to weed out information that they don't like people to hear has been really exposed but i don't know what your feelings on the whole social media my view of human nature is that whenever there are opportunities new opportunities there's going to be bad actors that will try to take advantage of them for personal gain gain being defined by power influence money it's just natural to the human condition so when these

when there was a national pandemic and people were terrified and they still are of it.

I mean that literally, Sam.

I see people who on a plane, I was on a plane two weeks ago and there was a person sitting next to me with a plastic guard

and an N95 mask and gloves.

And she said to me,

I hope this doesn't bother you, but I'm not going to get COVID because one out of three people get long COVID and I can't afford to.

And I had no problem with that, but it shows you the level.

She had little plastic, you know, disposable gloves on.

And she didn't care that I was looking at her.

And I didn't mean to be rude.

I was just curious, but curious in a way that was none of my business, obviously.

But

what I'm getting at is that it's changed people.

So when you didn't have social interaction and people were not

out there, especially children, it's very important for child development to see a person's face and associate a smile, a grin, a grimace, a bad look with a type of social situation.

So a child learns that when he puts his muddy hands on the wallpaper, the mother looks at him,

you know what I mean, with a frown.

And they associate that.

But when you have none of that association, and people are wearing masks, and I mentioned this before in a podcast, when I went to the bank and a young bank teller told me that she was terrified because she reads in the paper about all these bank robberies or smashing grabs.

And they come in with masks.

And she said, look, everybody has a mask on.

How do I know that there's the criminal?

And we know criminals take advantage of that.

And then when you're not out trying to be reassured by people, and I think the whole George Floyd hysteria that followed was force multiplied by COVID, the lockdown.

And then when you have these lockdowns, people take advantage of it.

And so social media did just that.

Yeah, they do.

They become judged, during an executioner.

Suddenly they decide if somebody says hydroxychloroquine.

I haven't taken hydroxychloroquine.

I have never advocated that people do.

I have friends that have taken it for other reasons, lupus.

or autoimmune diseases, and I get mixed information.

For some, it acts like a prophylactic.

For others, it lessens the effects.

And for others, it does nothing.

It is a regularly safe drug.

I've taken it.

My precursor of it, when I was in my 20s, when I went to Egypt, chloroquine for malaria.

Yeah.

It didn't work.

I got malaria.

But the social media, though, distorted things.

Yeah, if I were to say take it, then I would probably be banned.

And so there's been a demonization.

A lot of it had to do with Donald Trump, that if he

ivermedicine or chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine that was associated with him or his supporters.

And even though there were studies that that said in some cases they had some utility very early on, people demonized that.

And then that censorship extended to, you know, communication.

And because this communication, we haven't really solved this question.

And that is when we use the phone and call up somebody, if I call you, Sammy, and on my cell, I were to say, hey, I've got long COVID.

I think I'll try hydroxychloroquine.

You said, well, okay, that's okay to do that.

Or if, but if you write a letter that's okay if you write a letter to the editor but somehow these people who were controlling this method of communication written social media decided they were not a public utility and that they could censor expression even though there were no alternatives to them and even though if the government said hey

your internet signal is going through our space, our public space.

And if you're going to use our public space, you're going to be be subject to the rules of the Constitution.

And they didn't do that.

And so we...

Well, maybe now that Elon Musk is buying or might buy Twitter, I know he's back and forth on it, so he may not too, but

that might convince the Democrats that they might want to assure the Trump.

And Devin Nunes is true social, the Trump.

the Trump platform.

There's going to be a lot of competing platforms.

And that's how the American, that's the American way.

But that's another problem at this.

I think the rioting of 120 days had something to do with the lockdown.

Taking this wonderful economy of December.

Boy, if you go back and look at GDP, unemployment, border crossings, foreign policy, just go back and read the headlines from November, October, 2019.

and then look at it in July 2020.

I mean, that lockdown that was supposed to be three weeks, flatten the curve, that led to an array of social, economic, cultural, military, political disasters.

And we took a beautiful economy and ruined it.

We took a beautifully controlled border finally and ruined it.

We took a stable foreign policy and ruined it.

We took an energy-independent nation and ruined it.

And

so I'm not...

trying to excuse Joe Biden and the people around him, but I think that force multiplier was the virus and the reaction to it it made people go a little crazy yeah it made everybody something that they're not and yeah i don't think we've ever quite gotten over it and yeah and maybe we can turn then naturally here to that energy crisis that you just referenced that may have been augmented by the COVID crisis as well.

I don't know.

But I wanted to look at it and see your thoughts because now we're seeing here in California six and seven dollar a gallon gas.

And I know historically when we see the main energy or the main foodstuffs going up at that extreme rate, for example, the French Revolution, we usually look at the cost of wheat and bread went up and exorbitant for them, inflation.

And that usually we say that fired some of the belly of the French Revolution, as did the rationing and the dearth of goods in the Russian Revolution in 1917.

And even in smaller incidents in the United States, well, not smaller, it's just as big, but different types of incidents that are not necessarily revolutionary, but they do change society extremely, like the Great Depression in the United States.

Is our energy crisis right now, or it seems it is going to bring something possibly?

But I was wondering your thoughts on that gas and the energy crisis that we're suffering from right now.

Well, we were, just take a date, let's say November of 2020.

We were self-sufficient in energy.

Our consumption of natural gas and

oil

and the value of it, we were selling some abroad, we were importing some, but we were pretty much energy independent.

And but more importantly, I think that people forget this, we were energy independent for a couple of reasons.

Number one is we had cut down slightly the consumption because of the COVID lockdown, and that was ending.

And B,

we were so confident about our energy independence that we were really working fast on, say, the Keystone XL

or encouraging frackers to take more risk, even though the price had been low because of the decreased demand.

But we were in a position maybe within a year or two to get up to 16 million barrel.

And so we took that, and it was almost the perfect storm.

Put it this way.

If I, Victor, was in charge of U.S.

energy policy in January 21st of 2021, and I wanted to destroy the energy sector in the United States in the sense of making us energy dependent and to really shock the middle class and defeat

vicious inflations, I would have done the following.

I would have immediately canceled the Keystone Excel pipeline that gave us a million barrels from Canada.

I would have immediately put Anwar, the Arctic refuge, off limits immediately.

and that would have anywhere from 300 to 500,000 barrels capable.

I would have immediately canceled all expansion of offshore drilling.

I would have immediately canceled all new leasing on federal lands.

I would have immediately, immediately gone to lenders and said, I just think, you know, you're not green.

And the government's going to be behind these equity.

and green initiatives that force corporations to be more civic-minded.

So I don't want you to be aggressive or even helpful in lending capital to frackers

and horizontal adrenaline.

And then I would have said to the public, under my watch, we're going to end fossil fuel.

Are you talking about all those things Joe Biden did immediately after reaching office?

Okay, thank you.

Basically, I couldn't have done a better job than he did.

Causing energy crisis.

But my purpose was to get gasoline up in California at $680 a gallon.

And he says the Putin price hike.

I remember, and I double-checked on February 23rd, the price of gas in California was about $460 a gallon, and now it's $6.

So about 55% of the price had already occurred when the Ukraine war started.

So we're now rendered, we're a very strange place in American history.

We're basically saying

we don't like filthy, dirty, hot gasoline and diesel fuel.

We have a lot of it.

And so look where we are now.

We have deliberately curtailed a resource which if you combine coal, natural gas and oil, you can argue we had the world's largest reserves.

If you believe that we live on village earth global community planet, all of us on earth, then oil is fungible.

So how Venezuela takes out a barrel, how Russia, how Saudi Arabia, it affects the world community.

If you believe the United States has the most strict environmental laws, and I do, then why would you think that you would not take a barrel out for use, but you would go to Venezuela or Iran or Russia or Saudi Arabia and encourage them to do it?

And that's what we're doing.

And then if you look at the geopolitical aspects of that strategy, why would you criticize the Saudi royal family vehemently as Biden has and then beg them?

Why before the Ukraine war would you beg Vladimir Putin to pump more oil?

And we did.

And that, I think, had a role in the Ukraine war because in his way of thinking, they're not going to deter me if I go and try to do a thunder road takeover of Kiev.

Or why would you

approve the Putin-Germany Nordstrom pipeline, but you would oppose our allied East-Med Cyprus.

So it doesn't make sense, Cyprus and Israel and Greece effort to bring in natural gases to Europe.

So it doesn't really make sense what we're doing, but

it has these geopolitical dangers about it, which were all precluded when we were energy independent.

In other words,

we don't have to go into the Middle East and worry about oil.

That's Europe.

If Europe's dependent on it and they don't want to pump or frack and they have a lot of fracking natural gas, then they can go into Europe.

If China needs for their own oil needs, 30% of their oil has got to come from the Middle East, that's their problem.

But we don't need to go in there anymore.

And that's where we were.

And I don't understand why you would voluntarily give it up and yet you would want gas to get up to six, seven, and eight dollars.

And that's collating what.

Energy Secretary Grisham has said or Pete Budeshik said or Joe Biden has said when they use the word transition.

We're transitioning.

No one in this administration has said the following.

We may get to a green future, but we're not there yet.

And damn it, right now, I'm worried about the middle class.

And this country cannot afford to pay $6.50 for gasoline.

So what we're going to do in the short term, we're going to open every damn resource we have, but we're going to transition.

But this transition is not going to break the back of the American middle class.

They won't do that.

No.

They will not do that.

They want to put every club cab, Chevy pickup, every Winnebago,

every big suburban or Tahoe.

They want to put that in cash for clunker categories, that disastrous program under Obama, where we sell them all for nothing.

And that's what they want to do.

And we're all going to cram into

a Tesla.

Maybe we'll get a government loan for $70,000.

And that is only an intermediary step where we get a BART, something like BART, which is on Safe to Ride, or the New York subway.

We just extend it in a citywide fashion.

So Victor wants to go to Stanford for his weekly meetings.

So he takes a bus for waits for a bus in Selma for 30 minutes.

He gets up to Fresno.

He takes a train.

He gets on the train.

He gets into Oakland.

He gets into Oakland.

He takes the BART.

Then he takes the transit back to, and he has a nice nine-hour journey with all of these different people he doesn't know.

Yeah, and this is in a pandemic, remember?

Yeah, yeah, Victor, let's go ahead and take a moment for some messages and come right back with that thought, especially on the electric vehicles and the future with this kind of policy, the future of us here in the United States.

So we'll be right back after these messages.

We're back.

And, Victor, I know you were right on a thought about

the way that the left hopes we might live, but how very, speaking of inconvenience, how very inconvenient it would make anybody who has a middle-class lifestyle, these people that are voting for these, the policies of the left, seem to think that everybody lives like they do, and most of them have enough money to get around these problems.

You were just on, you know, they want us to live live in these middle and lower middle classes to have lives that are almost not even livable without the energy that we need to help our middle classes.

Everybody should remember there's a general rule with the left.

When they advocate a policy, it's the policy that is driven by two considerations.

It's directed at some people they don't like, which is the American people, the middle classes.

And B, it's intended to apply to the people they don't like, but not to themselves.

And if you remember that, it explains everything.

Gun control, but you know, I have a security person at my Presidio house.

Or I live in Piedmont, but I have a security patrol that's armed, but you can't be armed.

Teachers unions are great.

Charter schools are bad, but my kids don't want to get near either one of them.

So they're going to be at Sacred Heart or Castellan.

I'm speaking in reference to the bay area water transfers are terrible they're unnatural we don't need any more dams or but we need hetch hetchy because san francisco and the bay area is in a very unnatural place shouldn't be there it's there's no rainfall or no snow melt to sustain that population and you know we need to have decriminalization and defunding the police and stop this punitive incarceration.

But, you know, I'm in a neighborhood where we're pretty safe.

That's how they think.

And they're very dangerous people.

They have this idea as it relates to energy.

I'm John Kerry.

I need a private jet to make sure that you are in a train.

I'm Barack Obama and I have a 2,000 gallon plus propane tank.

So I got mine and I'm going to have a really nice energy third mansion, but you're not.

You're going to have solar panels and if it's windy or something, you know, we're going to ban natural gas from new homes.

And we're doing that in the Bay Area.

New homes cannot have natural gas heating or cooking in some city ordinances.

So it's really strange what they want because what they want for us is what I lived in Europe almost three years.

And I can tell you, when you live in an apartment building, as most Europeans do,

And then when you want to go places, you either have this little cramped car that nobody can fit into.

If you get in a wreck, you're dead.

Or you take the bus.

And when I was a student, I took the bus everywhere and I lived in an apartment.

I was completely dependent on the government.

So I would get up in the morning, I'd read the newspaper, and I'd say, hmm, the 51 bus is going to be delayed today.

And I get on it, and there was no room.

It was filthy, dirty.

And then that was in Athens.

And then if I wanted to get a car, I would go out to a rental group.

I would put my name in to rent a car.

That's what they want.

And they feel it's a better use of energy and it curtails the type of freedom and liberty that they don't want people to have.

I believe that.

I believe that this is all deliberate.

But I also think that their voters are this upper middle class that when all those policies come down, it tightens their lives up a bit, but doesn't disrupt them.

No, and that their voting

people in.

It keeps people off the freeways.

It keeps the riffroff out of the gas station.

It keeps the roads safer because there's fewer people on them.

Yeah.

And I think that middle class soccer mom is one that Donald Trump, as far as voters went, had trouble with.

And I think those are the type who don't see, you know, the greater half of the population are not living in those conditions and are even worse off in a way that nobody would ever want to live.

And they vote these left-wingers in

for moral security.

When I drive from Fresno County into Santa Clara County or San Mateo County where I work.

I have an apartment.

I have a transition psychologically that occurs right about two-thirds of the way in.

And it works like this.

I don't see farm fields anymore.

Okay.

And I don't see big factories.

And of course, there's no oil wells.

And sometimes, you know, in the vicinity of Kalinga, there's oil wells not too far from my commute route, a little bit south.

But when I start to get into the San Jose megalopolis, I start to ask myself, does anybody here know

when they go to the whole earth or they go out where the food comes from?

Have they seen it?

Is there a prune orchard?

Is there a vineyard?

Is there a lettuce field nearby?

No.

Does anybody who's driving and filling up and they've got high birds, when I park at the Stanford parking lot, it's not yet all Teslas, believe me.

Does anybody ever see an oil well?

Do they ever go up to Richmond and see that refinery and all those tankers coming in from places like Saudi Arabia or Alaska?

Or do they ever go out to Bakersfield, Elk Hill?

Do they ever do that?

No.

They go to downtown Los Altos or Palo Alto and they look at granite counters or they look at refrigerators.

Do they ever know where a granite mine is?

or where it is.

So my point is this, is that all of that stuff comes in.

When I come in on the commute, I always look at trucks and it's amazing.

There are propane trucks, there are gasoline trucks, there are food trucks, there are lumber trucks, there are trucks with pipe, there are trucks with steel.

It's all coming in on the 101 or the 80 and our 17 or whatever the feeder is into Silicon Valley, Bay Area, Megalopolis.

But no one knows where the people are that make it.

And they don't even know how it makes their life.

They can't point to that truck and say, I need that truck.

And they don't think about what the lives are like of these people, especially when they start in on their policy of being green or defunding police.

And those lives of those people are just diminished in the way that it's unlikely.

They're very medieval.

They never live that way.

Or their education availability of the people.

They're very medieval.

They live up in a big keep on the mountain and they don't know all the peasants out with their size and shovels out in the fields and that's how they look and they don't care and and that they don't care that the policies that they elect to have are destroying the lives of those people they do care at one point now i'm speaking right now from stanford university campus right next to it and there was a fire and it altered the main electrical supply to the university.

And this is is the third day that they cannot fix it.

And they have a limited number of supply for strategic buildings such as archives, hospitals, et cetera.

But there's not enough power for normal operation.

This is third day.

They're talking about not till Monday, five or six days.

That's just one main feed got cut.

And we're talking about temperatures at the end of the week in the San Joaquin Valley of 105 to 107.

And we are told that we're going to have brownouts this year because Governor Newsom and Jerry Brown didn't believe in increasing the power supply.

They thought of diversifying the power supply by taking natural gas or nuclear power off the grid and replacing it with solar that would work during the day.

But 41 million people have not had sufficient increases in power.

What I'm saying is there's not a redundancy.

This didn't happen in the 1960s.

I was a student at Stanford.

I can tell you that from 1975 to 1980, I don't think there was one day where somebody wrote me an

email along the following, 16 catalytic converters were stolen on campus, beware.

Or an identified person stole a bicycle and confronted a young woman and knocked her off the bike, like I get.

there's not going to be full power for today, tomorrow, the next day.

And so what I'm getting getting at is that this neglect psychological and real of the muscular classes whether they're police people whether security people whether they're farmers whether they're miners whether they're frackers whether they're assembly construction people is starting to affect these people in the keep

they're not going to be able

to

be immune from the consequences of their own ideology.

And you can really see it.

One of the things you see in Europe, I know everybody knows what I'm talking about, whether for financial reasons or material shortages or labor shortage, you see half-built homes everywhere.

The bottom floor, they park the car, the top floor.

Maybe it's because of financing, maybe because it was stupid tax policy, maybe because everything has to be imported and expensive.

But there are a lot of reasons.

I'm not saying there's one, but people build homes over generations.

the middle class.

And you're starting to see when I drive around the Stanford area now, I start to see people who are remodeling and building.

And it looks like Europe.

I mean, my God, they have tarps because they can't get a roofer.

Or it's not just a month project or two months or three months or five months.

It's like two years.

And so we are doing things to the fabric of life that are starting to affect the very wealthy and the blessed.

And they're not going to be able to get a car when they want, or they're not going to be able to build a house as quickly as they want.

They think it'll be better to make the middle class suffer, and then there'll be less competition and they'll have, as I said, emptier roads.

But that way of thinking that I'm okay and other people are not okay is not sustainable.

You've got to be, I'm okay, and I want other people to be even better than me.

But they don't have that attitude.

And now...

classical hubris is starting to create nemesis.

And I think that they are going to be subject to the consequences of their own ideology.

So we're predicting, but we're predicting change and this energy crisis, along with the pandemic and other things, right, will bring about change, at least in our elections, if not in other things, perhaps.

What do you think, Victor?

I think the election in the November is people are angry.

I just talked to a person yesterday who was a farmer, wonderful farmer, a brilliant farmer, and

he now rents out his fourth or fifth generation farm and he moved to the coast and he was telling me that people are angry and he didn't mean it in a mean way he was just saying they're angry about the food the supply shortages they don't like an america where they go in and

their wife can't get tampons.

They don't like it when they go in and their daughter or their sister or their wife cannot find baby formula.

They don't like it when they have to stand in line, or should say park in line for $7 a gasoline almost.

They don't like it and they're angry.

They don't like it when they see smash and grab.

They don't like to go online and just see somebody walk into Walmart and steal something and walk out.

So what are they doing according to this guy?

They're seething, he said.

They're seething.

They don't like this censorship where they're cynical.

So they look at the paper and they say, this person committed a smash and grab robbery in Carmel.

This person did a carjacking.

This person assaulted people on the BART.

And there's no description of the person.

This person committed a hate crime.

There's not even no description.

But then they hear somebody in the popular culture say, we've got to be careful for domestic terrorists,

or we have to watch out for white hate groups.

When they know that's not the particular group that's doing this,

that and they get angry that they will not say the truth that African-American males are committing crimes not commiserate with their representation in the population and hate crimes and interracial crimes and all sorts of crimes have spiked since the George Floyd.

And they want the data and they want to know why and they want honest descriptions.

So did your friend, this ordinary guy, have a prediction of what people are doing or did he see something that with this seething?

I mean, they're seething.

We know all these policies.

He was worried about it.

He was worried about it

because he thought it was going to have a direct effect in the midterms.

But he didn't know whether the people that he was going to vote for.

Now, I'm kind of implying what he said,

and I'm kind of collating what other people don't know whether the people who were voted in as the corrective are going to make the changes, or they're so compromised

that they won't.

And then, when they look at the alternative, like Donald Trump, they feel that there's problems there.

And so, they want somebody that has Trump's attitude.

He wants to really drain the swamp and shut down the border and make it legal only immigration and stop crime and be energy independent and be deterrent abroad.

No better friend, no worse enemy, foreign policy.

But they don't know that the Republican Party will do that.

And when they see gun control, I mean, they're reasonable people.

And they say, you know what?

I have no problem if an 18-year-old has to wait till he's 21, just like he can't go in at a bar, so he can't buy an AR-15.

But if you think that's going to stop this craziness in Chicago of 800 people killing each other as it's Dodge City every night, you're nuts.

And if you're going to do that, then maybe we should say any felon who has committed a felony should not be able to buy a gun.

for five or 10 years.

And if a felon is in possession of a handgun, then they're gonna go to prison.

They know that if you say that, you're gonna be called a racist because you're gonna say you're inordinately locking up a particular group, not

you're trying to create a deterrent so that particular group does not do what it's doing to endanger its own children.

And that's what they're frustrated about, that they don't see a solution that would work.

They know what the solution is, but the medicine is considered by the elites worse than the disease.

Yeah.

So far, but maybe things will change.

Maybe in the midterms, maybe in the midterms.

I'm a little worried they're putting so much faith in the midterms, the midterms, the midterms, November, November.

And I've been guilty of that myself.

But I'll just say to our listeners in finishing,

20 seats is not going to do it.

30 is not going to do it.

40 is not.

You're going to need 60 or 70 seats pick up.

You're going to need almost 300 house members.

You've got to send a message that is just so unambiguous.

You've got to almost take the Senate.

If you don't do that,

I don't see any hope of stopping this madness.

It has to be so huge, so unambiguous, so definitive that the left says, oh my God, we have destroyed the party.

We have destroyed all of our power.

Yeah.

You've got a situation where an Adam Schiff is in such a minority in the House and so disreputable that they don't even want him on MSNBC.

And he has no clout whatsoever.

He's not the head of any committee.

And people in his party point their finger at him or AOC and say, you people did this to us.

You so alienated the American people that we've lost all power for two years and maybe four and maybe for a generation.

And anything short of that won't work.

All right.

Victor, we've gone way over time.

This has been really really fascinating and thank you very much for all of your words of wisdom on our energy crisis and on the pandemic the historical view of it it's been absolutely interesting since you do so much reading on the current events and you've followed that pandemic so closely it's been a real eye-opener so thank you very much thank you and thank everybody for listening even when i went on and on today

no it was absolutely fascinating So, yeah.

Thanks, everybody.

And this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.