The Fatherless, Drag Queens, and Vaccines

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, and we are recording on Sunday, June 19th, 2022.

It's Father's Day.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the star of this show, and 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 writer, and practically everything he writes can be found at victorhanson.com, a thing to which you should be subscribing, but we're going to talk about that later.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the host.

I author a weekly email newsletter, Civil Thoughts.

I'll tell you a little bit.

about that later.

We've got plenty to talk about on today's episode.

We'll talk about Father's Day, lots of stuff that's California related, COVID for kids, that and more right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, I guess I should have told everyone we were really recording on the holiday of Juneteenth, but I'm going to opt instead.

If I had to pick one, I'm going to say we're talking about Father's Day because it is Father's Day.

And happy Father's Day to you and all others who are listening.

So, Victor, I sent you a link.

There's an interesting piece by Bob Hogue in Red State, and it's titled Father's Day Crisis: as the U.S.

Leads the World in Fatherlessness.

And as of today, there are 18.5 million children who are fatherless in the United States.

We've read before of the devastation, talk before I should say, about the devastation, particularly in some of the minority communities, particularly in the Black communities where I think it's maybe three quarters of children born today are not born into a marriage.

Doesn't mean they're fatherless, just means that their father, you know, is not around.

Victor, before we talk about other matters, this is a troubling trend.

It's been going on for years.

I think it's deep, wide ramifications for our country and our culture.

Do you have any thoughts about this?

Well, it's a symptom that we have too few fathers.

That is, our fertility rate is going down in general.

And the fathers that we do have, we have too many that aren't doing a very good job.

So why is that, Jack?

And I think there's a variety of contributing factors, but one of them was the self-esteem 60s movement, do your own thing, find yourself.

And that came at the expense of lending your time and effort to ensure that your child is a productive and sane and wonderful member of the community.

And so you put your interest first and the child second.

Second was that the federal government absurd the role of both parents when it went into especially marginalized, if that's the right word, poor communities and said, we're going to give you X amount of dollars for this number of children, et cetera, et cetera.

And that really excused the father from saying, you know what, I sire this son and I have a financial or fiduciary duty.

But when the state comes in and says, no, you don't, there's no problem.

And then third is a more generic, the death of shame.

We're in a private guilt where we just feel a little bit guilty for a transitory moment.

But nobody says, wow, that guy has a child, but he doesn't give one dime to him,

or he doesn't help him, or he doesn't spend time with him.

And that's socially acceptable, as all these other things are.

Well, Victor, one of the things that's becoming more socially acceptable, I think, really just in elite circles, is this plethora of drag in America.

I mean, it's just everywhere you where you turn on the TV,

you're on social media, and what are you seeing?

Drag queens

in

elementary schools doing readings or performances or drag queens in high schools doing performances.

When did it become a necessity for our education system to bring a particular spotlight on this?

I'm sorry, if you're a drag queen listening, sorry, not really.

Weird, really weird lifestyle.

I don't understand it either.

I mean, why did we destroy the very descriptive word transvestism?

It was a good Latin word.

It just means vestis is the person trans,

a person who used to enjoy wearing the clothes of the opposite sex or dressing up as if they were a member.

of the opposite sex without any proclivity of, you know, radical surgery or hormone treatment they just enjoyed and that was a very rare rare rare small percentage of the population but it was known throughout antiquity and all the way up to the present i mean if you read petronius's satiricon

or elements of catullus's uh attus or you read what suetonius says about the 12 caesars it seems like that in their view they seem to be suggesting that an affluent leisured society has too much time and too much ability to gratify the appetite.

So a small, small, small percentage of them, they go into various areas.

And the symptomology of that is one of them is transvestism.

So we've had that all of our lives.

I mean, it was...

I can remember in a rural high school, there was a young guy who was in high school and he really, what we would call push the envelope.

So he would try to wear clothes that were obviously feminine almost.

I mean, he had culottes, but they were kind of like a dress, but he claimed they were bell bottoms.

And he dressed, I mean, he looked like a woman.

Okay, so, but you know what, Jack, everybody left him alone.

He died very young, but he became from, I think, during the AIDS epidemic, but he was a very, very talented artist and fashion designer.

But

everybody liked him.

But this idea of taking a biologically or psychologically or neurologically, whatever element, adverb we use, and turning it into this major, major, major element of the American experience, so major that it will be a fundamental learning block of our schools, it's just absurd.

And it's absurd because it suggests that we're doing everything so well that we have this time and energy and resources to commit to encouraging transvestism.

But when we look at test scores,

check, bad.

When we look at discipline, violence, bad.

When we look at our graduate programs and the humanities, bad.

When we look at the level of performance in our bureaucracies and our institutions that would reflect an educated, competent workforce, bad.

And so this is going on when our airline industry is dysfunctional, when our ports are dysfunctional, when our border is dysfunctional, when our economy is dysfunctional, when our energy

sector is dysfunctional.

But yet these people act as if this is far more important than negative GDP growth or

stagflation or hyperinflation or $7

a gallon diesel fuel.

And they are going to be sorely shocked when their assumption that

your power goes on all the time when you have, there's a little energy generator in their basement.

So when they flip on that switch, light goes on.

Or when they go to the gas pump, there's a straw down there and it has a big, big natural pile of refined gas.

Or

when they go to their bed and breakfast or they go to their, you know,

whole earth type of restaurant, there's some little garden in the back that just produces food.

They have no idea about the razor's edge or the margin of safety, how thin it is

to invest so much time and resources in something that historically has always been a symptom of a society that is too affluent and too leisured and headed in a direction that cannot end well.

By the way, Victor, about the razor's edge,

I met with some folks yesterday, Saturday.

By the way, again, we're recording on Sunday.

This particular program should be aired on Tuesday the 21st.

So, but I'm talking about June 18th.

I was with some friends.

Anyway, one of these individuals, younger guy, was talking about the supply chain.

He works for a major company and they're involved with things such as baby food and not infamil, but some other product.

And the nightmare he talks about

with, you mentioned our problems with our ports, with the shipping,

the condition of the ports, how they are run, the logistics to get things in and out, the insane costs that have gone up 1,000% to get things shipped in.

Then, on the administrative side in America, how the administrative state just crushes companies who want to make baby formula, etc.

Good luck if you have, you know, two years to get just the permits approved, never mind creating things within the factories themselves.

You just can't expand these places.

If you want to add a new line, guess what?

It's going to take two years.

We really are on a razor's edge, as you've written about.

And that's that I recommend to our listeners to find this series that you've published at your website, victorhanson.com.

It's really, really troubling.

When I get up every morning, I ask myself, to what degree am I a productive person or an anti-productive person?

That is,

does the land that I live on produce anything for society?

Do what I write, is it red, or is it of any value for society?

Or do I just sort of get a pinch and milk it and then hang around and pursue, you know, what I think Nancy Pelosi said, we can all about if we have Obamacare membership, we can be artists or we can do our own thing.

But my point is that every young person has to make a decision.

Are you going to be a regulator, an auditor, a scold?

Are you going to be a producer?

Are you going to go after people who produce our oil, our coal, our lumber or food?

Are you going to regulate them and tie them down?

Are you going to be a Lilliputian?

Are you going to be Gulliver?

Which is it?

And everybody has to make that decision.

And what problem is that we're turning out millions of college graduates in debt?

And they feel that because they have this little cattle brand BA behind their name, that they're smarter than the fracker, or they're smarter than the welder, or they're smarter than the asphalt paver, and they're not.

And they want to go and tell that person, oh, you're environmentally unsound.

This is what you're going to have to do.

You work 15 minutes over this and we're going to find you.

This kind of stuff.

And regulation and audit is very important for a robust muscular society.

But when it becomes more dominant than production, then the society starts to fall apart.

And that's where we are now.

Last year I was stuck in Chicago and there was no labor and the plane was late and the plane would never get to Fresno five hours late, but then it would stop in Denver because it had no fuel.

It was just a comedy of a third world country.

But when it pulled in, they said, we don't have any baggage carriers.

And there were all these baggage carriers.

And I was looking out the window at them.

And there was a guy with a clipboard and he was doing that.

And then all of a sudden I saw this one guy.

And he went out there and he just started unloading all the bags frantically by himself for 25 minutes.

And then the others came to help him.

I said, that's the kind of guy that America used to be.

And the four guys over there are what it is now.

Or when we look at these school shootings and law enforcement officers who are frozen and mobile inert versus a Border Patrol agent that goes up, then that's what everybody has to decide.

Are you going to be a generation of renewal and renaissance?

Are you going to be part of the decline?

And the decline can be defined by not being productive.

Well, Victor, for little kids to watch drag queens next year in school, they may need to have their COVID shots.

And we're going to talk about the latest CDC regulations that are quite troubling in a lot of ways.

And we'll talk about that right after.

These important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor, here's a headline out today, Sunday, June 19th, from the Daily Mail.

Experts question CDC's approval of COVID vaccines for under fives because Pfizer's study used just three children to prove it works.

They didn't put works in quotes, but and Moderna admits it is only 37%

effective.

We should just assume we don't have efficacy data.

That's in quotes.

Victor, this seems just wrong on so many levels.

So a disrespected federal agency in declining esteem, I don't know if it ever had esteem, the CDC has this regulation.

It's based now on, it seems on very, very shoddy, almost non-existent data.

Your thoughts, Victor?

Well, I mean, like you, Jack, I got vaccinated and the theory was that when you're in your 60s, you're more vulnerable.

And we were told that it would completely, absolutely, certainly stop infection, which was not true.

But the idea was maybe even if the spike protein is dangerous, you're in the twilight of your years.

So

you take a chance.

But to do this on...

to have an on i mean it's they say it's tested but it doesn't have the same scrutiny and duration of audit that our prior vaccinations have had and we've had problems with vaccinations with polio and others, shingles vaccinations.

But to test this on, to tell these five and six-year-olds that they're going to be vaccinated when we don't know the long-term effects, I think is really reckless.

I have a daughter and her family, and

my son-in-law did everything by the book.

He got his two vaccinations and he got his booster, and he got COVID, I think the same day I did.

He's over it now, or I'm still struggling two months later.

But he was really ill for tired for almost three or four weeks.

My daughter got the vaccinations.

She had some pretty scary reactions to the vaccinations, but she got over those.

And then she got COVID.

And they have three children.

Two, because they're in the school system, had to be vaccinated.

One got COVID.

And the other, my other grandson, he's five.

He was not vaccinated.

He got COVID.

It was minor, minor.

And so what I'm getting at is a typical family is there are some considerations and worries about the vaccinations in people of any age that although it may mitigate the effects, but Omicron was supposed to be a very mild disease.

And yet people who have had two shots and a booster or two boosters, there's a lot of them that have a pretty tough case.

I had two Moderna shots and I had Delta.

And when Omicron came around, I was on my back for six days with a high fever and I'm still wiped out.

But my point is that the vaccinations, maybe it's because of the hype or they became political, but Anthony Fauci

basically and Joe Biden, this was the new team, but we're going to end the virus.

We're not going to.

end the economy, all that crap.

And they so oversold that when this thing was more, it was not like,

you know, measles or mumps mumps where vaccinations can tend to be of long duration defenses.

But in fact, they sold this as something that it wasn't.

And what it wasn't is a ironclad protection.

And what it wasn't was fully tested for years.

So it's kind of coronavirus, I think, will turn out to be like a severe flu, but for a minority of the population, maybe with immune problems, maybe I would fit into that.

You're going to have some problems if you get it and

post-viral stuff.

But otherwise, this idea that we're going to tell everybody that we know exactly what the vaccinations are and we know exactly who should get them.

We know exactly the nature of this disease.

That's just, I'm not saying they say that, but that's what they assume.

And every single time anybody speaks up against them, they silence them.

They ridicule, whether it's a Jay Bacharia or Scott Atlas or any of the people in the Great Barrington group, they try to silence them.

Anthony Fauci Jack is going to turn into a very tragic figure because when he gets grilled by Rand Paul and Rand Paul starts to ask him questions about why do you have redacted communications about the number of people in the CDC or the National Institute of Allergies, Infectious Diseases, or the National Institute of Health.

why don't you tell us who is getting what on royalties for research that pharmaceutical companies

subcontracted and to the degree that that might affect their decision about the use of those pharmaceuticals?

And we get nothing,

nothing.

And so he's sitting on a tiger, and the tiger is the enormous power and strength of the federal health bureaucracy.

But once he gets off that, it's going to devour him because he's going to be the subject in the next Congress of, I think, a lot of hearings and depositions and freedom of information releases.

And it's, I'm not suggesting that he's did anything illegal, but I think he did a lot of things that are unethical.

And I think the things that he did that were unethical had enormous ramifications, negative ramifications for millions of people.

Well, he's also,

he's the little, you know, the little guy from Brooklyn, who somehow, though, has cast himself as above the law.

As many of that's what the elites are.

They're above the law.

I don't consider them hypocrites myself.

We've discussed this in the past.

I just think they genuinely believe it doesn't apply to them, whatever that is.

And he really is the pin of it.

You know what sums it up for me is one day

last year, I think it was,

there was a CNN interview and they showed him in front of his computer.

I don't know if you remember that.

And there were pictures of himself all over his office.

And on that day, people had referenced whether landlords were going to be able at last to collect rent from their tenants, which they had not been able to, even though they had been paying for maintenance.

and taxes and all their expenses.

Nobody gave them a reprieve.

And it was contingent upon a formal recommendation from the NIH and CDC.

And I thought, where in the world, how in the world, why in the world did somebody like that guy determine whether somebody in Bakersfield could collect rent from somebody who was a year overdue?

I thought, this is crazy.

So we outsource so much of our freedom.

to these unelected judge, jury, executioner bureaucrats.

And he was the epitome as the highest.

I think he's the highest paid federal bureaucrat in the national workforce.

So I have no animus to him.

I have no personal grudge against him.

I remember him making a lot of mistakes during the AIDS crisis.

He always had one particular trait, Jack.

He always went from one extreme to the other.

I think during AIDS, he said it might be infectious through kissing or something.

And then he went way off into the other that, oh, don't worry about it.

And then in this saying, he said, don't worry about, you can go on a cruise, don't worry about the coronavirus.

And then, wow.

So he's always an alarmist, and he's an alarmist based on putting his finger in the wind and thinking where what is the 51% political consensus that ensures that he is Anthony Fauci with his hand on multi-billion dollar grants from thousands of researchers, PhDs, and MDs that when he walks into a convention hall, they come up and treat him like he's at Versailles.

That's how he operates.

Right.

Victor, there was an important special election for Congress this past week.

Mayor Flores, a woman born in Mexico, immigrated legally to the United States at the age of six, won a special election for the United States Congress in a border seat, Texas border seat of a community that's 85% Hispanic.

It's possible, you know, the reelection.

for that she will have to run again in november so this is a short-term election redistricting has put her into uh

she'll have a tough opponent.

Nevertheless, I think this was an incredible political event.

What are your thoughts about it?

Well, when you hear Ms.

Flores speak and you see Myra Forest speak and you see

her family and all of this stuff and you compare her with AOC, who is the heartthrob of the left, there's no comparison.

This woman lives in the real world.

She has real problems.

She's not

an angry 20th-something bicoastal elite bragging about her degrees.

She lives in the real world.

And so this terrifies the left for a variety of reasons, Jack.

Number one is

they have so alienated the white working class that despises the bicosta elite that runs the Democratic Party that they over-rely, they have to rely on monolithic minority support.

And that's defined by about 94% of the black vote, 75% of the Hispanic vote, maybe 70% of the Asian vote in national elections.

And so when one of their biggest constituencies and the one that is growing the most rapidly and demographically is the youngest betrays them, that's what that their word, not mine, but has no more fealty toward them, they're angry.

And it only makes it worse because when you look at these people on TV or in print, their attitude is thinly disguised, but it's, well, how dare you do that?

Look at all that I've done for you.

And you almost get like they're saying, you know, I opened the border so you could get your sister, Herlinda, to come up to Atherton and help with my housework.

Or I'm on the Upper West Side and I got Hernando.

I support an open border.

And Hernando's brother, Ramon, came over here and

now he's painting my house.

That's their attitude.

And they sense it because they sense what everybody else is getting angry that these people are not subject, as I keep saying, to the consequences of their own ideology.

So the Hispanic community almost woke up like a sleeping dragon and says, wait a minute, they don't care that I'm paying $6 a gallon.

They have money.

I don't.

They live.

I don't have a 2,500 gallon propane tank like the Obamas do who lecture us on equality.

I can't live in Hawaii on the beach and have a big lawsuit about whether I'm environmentally sound for my third mansion.

I just can't afford to turn on the air conditioning when I don't have reliable and affordable electricity.

I don't want to have people, half of whom aren't even from Mexico, coming into my community with crime problems, with crowding out social services, with negative impact on the schools, why these people put their children in private schools.

So they have seen, they pulled back the curtain and they've seen this little bi-coastal elite, nasal sounding, droning elite, and they think, you know what, what was I doing?

And once these movements take hold, they grow geometrically.

And I think it's almost like the emperor has no clothes.

So Ms.

Flores says, hey, you guys,

These left-wing liberals, they're naked.

They don't care about inflation.

They don't care about the border.

They don't care about gas prices.

They don't care about bringing us together.

All they want to do is open the border and buy our vote, and we're not going to do it anymore.

And that's a profound thought.

The time has come for a profound thought, and it's here.

It's a revolutionary act.

I think you're going to see 50 or 55% of the national Hispanic vote say,

I'm going to vote.

It wasn't cool to even say you're Republican.

In my town, if you said you were conservative or Republican and you were Mexican-American, that was taboo.

And now it's kind of being, especially among young, it's okay.

And an okay is becoming yes.

And I think you're going to see an absolute terror among the Democratic left progressives.

And they're going to react in exactly the wrong way because they're going to show what their real attitude is about Mexican-Americans and Latinos and Hispanic.

They're going to start saying, how dare you?

Or they're going to call in a bunch of their elite university obsequious leaders and they're going to say, hey, you guys, we got you this California Assembly seat.

You're the assistant minority leader to the California Senate.

You're in the Texas legislature.

You've got to go corral those people.

Bring them back.

And that's the attitude of the left.

They're condescending and they do not want to associate with people that are unlike themselves.

And they create this enormous psychological facade of virtue signaling to make up or square the circle that they don't feel comfortable.

Not that they don't feel comfortable with brown or black people.

They don't feel comfortable with working class white people.

Right.

So when they talk about white supremacy, they're talking about middle class, lower middle class white people.

Well, what's more hated than a black conservative?

I think conservative Hispanics are about to find out.

Yeah, they are going to find out.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we've got a lot of California things to take up, and one of them has to do with water.

And we'll talk about that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor writes for American Greatness regularly, pretty frequently for the new criterion.

But you can find whatever he writes, including things that are exclusive, at his website, victorhanson.com.

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Victor, Ed Ring,

who is a California expert.

And I think Ed was actually the founder, or at one time he was the president of the California Policy Center.

Now, for that institution, CalPolicyCenter.org, I want to recommend our listeners visit that, particularly if you're out in California.

He's in the midst of a 15-part series on California's water crisis.

It's pretty complex.

Actually, Victor, I was just reading a piece yesterday, his fifth part.

It was about the war amongst farmers in California on water.

If you're north of the Delta versus south of the Delta, on the east side versus the west side.

So there's, yeah, it's a very complex political and social issue.

But

in National Review this weekend, Ed wrote a piece.

It's titled Water Crisis, What Water Crisis?

California continues to reject desalination.

And this is as much about water, Victor, as it is about the nastiness of the California bureaucracy.

So desalination is an option among many options.

It's been very important to Israel and some other countries.

You got the ocean, you got the plants.

It's, you know, you've got water.

It's costly infrastructural investment, but it's an option.

So here's what Ed writes, and I will shut up after I read this, Victor, and ask you to comment.

He writes, on May 12th, The California Coastal Commission Board of Directors voted 11 to nothing to deny the application from Poseidon Water to build a desalination plant in Huntington Beach since 1998.

Get that, 1998.

That's 24 years now.

Poseidon has spent over $100 million on design and permit work for this plant.

At least half of that money was spent on seemingly endless studies and redesigns as the Coastal Commission and other agencies continued to change the requirements.

The denial of Poseidon's application makes it very unlikely another construction contractor will ever attempt to build a large-scale desalination plant on the California coast.

This is a historic mistake.

Victor, your thoughts about it as an option and about the ways and means of California's political bureaucracy.

I think Ring is writing a series of excellent articles on water from all these different viewpoints and one is desalinization.

And if you read the article, he's trying to make the point that in terms of the energy to produce to turn seawater, it doesn't seem competitive with A, treating what we call gray water.

That would be water that, you know, use your sink or in a sewage plant that's been treated and then you can do various things with it.

Or it never went into the sewage system.

It was used, you know, like at a car wash or something or something like that.

Or reservoirs and dams.

Reservoirs and dams are the cheapest, especially when they're gravity fed.

And then retreating semi-used water, reusing water that we would normally send out to the ocean treated.

And then you have desalinization.

But his point is that for large communities that are right on the ocean, that because of the transportation cost of pumping that water, let's say from Shasta Dam or Orville Dam into the aqueduct and then sending it 500 miles and pumping it over the grapevine and then going into Southern California or going from Lake Mead or the Owens Valley.

It's not quite competitive, but it's getting near competitive just for municipal water use.

I just got back from Israel and I think they're putting two more plants on, and they have 20% more water than they can use.

And they're giving it away to people in the West Bank.

I think they're, and they're going to be a water exporter.

And it's mostly coming from treating gray water, but desalinization plants.

And they're getting more and more efficient.

And so what ring was trying to say is a normal sane state would be doing all of these things they would be finishing the california water project or the central valley project we would build these low elevation reservoirs that are gravity fed and getting us three to four or five million more acre feet more than that then we would have water treatment plants that reuse some of the gray water for agricultural purposes and special canals that they can use on plants that are safe.

And then for large coastal areas, they would have a desalinization plant and they don't want to do any of it.

They don't want to do any of it.

And so we got 40 million people and you have a reservoir system designed for 16 million.

And

so anything that can't go on, as we always heard, doesn't go on.

And so at some point, I think we're going to get there around August in California, there's not going to be enough water.

And that means when you fly over California and you see these swimming pools and green lawn, they're not going to be there.

I know that Palm Springs is kind of innovative.

They're using recyclable water, but you have to have water to recycle water.

It's not going to be there.

And the aquifers are dry.

We drove across the valley on my, you know, over to the coast

where I work and that area.

And you should see the west side, Jack.

There is a drilling rig almost every other mile.

And what it means is that these farms that are from the Sierra to the coast ranges, when you get out two-thirds of the way of the coast ranges, that water table drops from, say, 70 or 80 feet to four or five, 600 and up to 1,500.

And farms on the lush borderline, there's no water because it's dropped.

It's dropped eight, nine, ten feet.

And so they're trying to go deeper and deeper, but you're only so deep you can go before the water is not a very good quality.

It's too expensive to pump up.

It has to be mixed for agriculture with surface water.

So something has to be done, but nature will step in.

And my metaphor for California is when I go to work each week and I go down 280, every once in a while I'll go a little bit further for either on the way to San Francisco, but you see the Crystal Springs Reservoir.

It's beautiful.

It's, I think, eight or nine miles, and it's fed by the California aqueduct.

Okay, none of that water comes from runoff.

There is no water.

Remember, Jack, that from La Jolla to Berkeley is the least sustainable place in the world to put 20 million people.

It has an annual rainfall of about 18 inches, but it has no sandy aquifer.

It's mountainous.

There is no water.

When you read the diaries of the Spanish explorers, they said you couldn't live here because there was no water.

After San Francisco burned down in 1906, they said there was no water.

We have to get it from somewhere.

And so they get it from Hetch Hetchy or they get it from the aqueduct, but there is no water there.

And this is very ironic.

Everybody should remember that the most environmentally loud, intolerant, and accusatory people live in the least naturally sustainable place.

in the world, a place where we should not have 20 million people.

They should all move up to Northern California where we get 50 inches of rainfall, but they don't want to live there.

They want to live in Carmel.

They want to live in San Francisco.

They want to live in Santa Barbara.

They want to live in La Jolla.

And yet they do not want to create the water transportation systems necessary.

And a little community, a beautiful community, two hours.

and a half from my home, Cambria, they don't have water.

So you can't even build a house anymore there.

And so this is a real problem.

And all we want to do is talk about climate change.

If you have $7

a gallon for diesel fuel, that some trucker is going to say, you know what?

I'm not going to drive my Amazon Prime anymore because it's too expensive.

So I'll park it.

And then when he parks it, that engine is out of the grid, so to speak, or the matrix.

And suddenly it starts raining again because we solve climate.

That is insane.

And yet that's the ultimate trajectory of this.

weird idea that we're going to have 41 million people.

We're going to let a lot of water on a wet year out to the ocean.

We're not going to build reservoirs.

We're not going to build desalinization plants, but we are entitled to live along the coast.

And, you know, they're so critical of farmers.

They're always saying, oh, farmers will use too much water.

Well, at least farmers use that water and increasingly more efficiently every year to produce one more days of food.

What do these people produce?

Do you really think that if the average person says you can have meat and potatoes and vegetables and juice and fresh fruits,

or you can have Facebook and Twitter and Google, what's it going to be?

In existential times, they're going to pick the food.

So who is essential?

The people who produce food, not the people who produce social media.

When I walk around in an airport or I walk in public and I see everybody glued to that iPhone.

I don't think that is

going to keep them alive.

When I see them at a restaurant eating and drinking, that will keep them alive.

We have really warped priorities.

And it's just another, I'm kind of going a rant, but it's another

indication of the utter hypocrisy.

of this bicosto league.

These people who lecture, lecture, you can't build a desalinization plant.

You can't build a dam.

You can't do it.

But I get to live in Woodside and I get to live in San Luis Obispo and I get to live in Montezito and I get to live in Berkeley and there's no water.

And I am living here because my great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather's generation and my grandfather's generation, racist, sexist, homophobic as they were, were, I guess, imaginary.

imaginative enough to create a water transfer system that allows me, but I got mine.

I inherited my house.

I don't want anybody else to have it.

And I want to make sure I still have my nice warm shower every morning and my little garden and etc, etc.

And that's not a sustainable ideology.

Victor, I want to recommend to our listeners that they go to American Greatness or to your website.

You have a piece called The Selfish Californian, which talks about a lot of these things, the self-absorbed elitists, selfish, moneyed, left-wing political class.

I love this line.

You're right.

Apparently, these well-educated and self-declared Socrateses believed that Californians could drink Facebook, eat Google, drive Twitter, and live on Snapchat.

Yeah, there's something really

bollocks up here,

culturally and psychologically.

Victor, we got one more thing to talk about, California.

It's not a fun thing.

It's a bad thing.

It's the death of two Los Angeles police officers.

And we will talk about that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, the grim news was that two Los Angeles cops were slain, Joseph.

Santana and Michael Paredes.

They were gunned down by a career criminal, Justin Flores, who blew his own brains out after this gunfight.

Why was he in a position to kill two cops?

And he was stabbing someone.

I believe the cops were responding to an incident where this criminal was stabbing someone.

It was because he was out on the streets, courtesy of a lenient plea deal.

by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, overseen by George Soros's pinup, George Gascon, the DA of LA, also the former DA of San Francisco, where he was also the police chief.

Victor, this is,

I don't know, is this just another story that's going to go into forgotten?

This Gascon seems a little,

I don't know, is he beyond the reach of people?

Is this

double murder?

Because it is a murder.

Do you think this is going to have any

ramifications?

It is.

I think that Gascon, who was run out of San Francisco as Boudin was just recently run out, will be run out of Los Angeles.

And this isn't particularly important because these people are old-style Bolsheviks who have substituted race for class.

In other words, their whole ideology of critical race theory or critical legal theory or critical penal theory is that this entrenched capitalist white class has oppressed marginalized people.

And even though they're very privileged, you know, Mr.

Boudin has a little bit of of marginalized person fee days because he translated for Hugo Chavez, right?

And Mr.

Gascon, even though he's from, I think, a pretty affluent Cuban refugee family, he's Gascon.

And so they play that.

idea that they're on the cutting edge of marginalized people.

But the problem is they're fossilized dinosaurs and they don't understand California that the middle class, especially in government, is Hispanic, it is Asian, it is black, and the people who are overrepresented, who are attacking them, are from marginalized communities.

Not always.

So what I'm getting at is you have two Mexican-American officers and they're killed by a Mexican-American person.

So it's not a question of race.

It's a question of do you want the enemies of civilization?

or do you want civilization to win and forget race.

But they always try to leverage it it first by class and then by race and what's happening is look at the asian community in san francisco that overwhelmingly voted against bhudin they were basically saying we're sick and tired of unfettered anti-asian hate crimes and it's not a bunch of white yokels from utah that drive into san francisco on weekends it's mostly african-american males who are doing this and so when it's interracial racial race becomes meaningless.

And yet these are fossilized racial mongers.

And that's a subtext.

So the Mexican-American community of Los Angeles, of which I think it's about 55 to 60%, if you use the word Latino to include, you know, Central Americans, it's even higher.

They are the policemen.

They are the bureaucracy.

And they are being preyed on by criminals.

And this guy doesn't care.

And he keeps trying to bring in, you know, leftist romise or leftist rhetoric.

And it doesn't affect them anymore.

It has no meaning for them.

All they know is this man, Mr.

Gascon, let out a career felon.

And that career felon shot it out and killed two policemen that were Mexican-American.

Not that that matters necessarily the whole community, but what they're saying is Mr.

Gascon is going to destroy Los Angeles as we are recreating it, and we don't want him anymore.

Same thing with Mr.

Boudin.

And I think this is a big lesson to the Democratic Party because Barack Obama, they're going to get two lessons out of this.

One, Barack Obama said, and remember Michelle, this is a damn right mean country.

She was at it again, by the way, this week.

Their whole subtext was diversity, and we're going to divide the country by race, and then there's oppressors and oppress, and victimizers, and victimize.

And that doesn't work anymore because

there are communities with incomes higher than so-called white people.

And we're in an intermarried, integrated society.

But more importantly, the people who are lecturing us and dividing us in terms of Marxist ideology are the oppressors.

I don't believe in Marxist ideology.

But if you were to believe,

You don't want to hear a lecture from Michelle Obama from one of her three mansions anymore about this country being unfair.

It's a joke.

We don't want to hear about Mr.

Gascon.

He doesn't live the way that these these police officers live.

He has no idea what he puts them through.

So another subtext of this whole conundrum is the left is the party of the privileged.

It is the party of the wealthy.

It is the party of I don't give a damn about other people.

And it's not.

all just all a bunch of white liberals.

It's a bunch of liberal blacks, liberal Latinos, liberal fake minorities, liberal Elizabeth Warrens, yes.

But they have one thing in common.

They don't care about the middle classes.

And they want to leverage you and scare you and divide you by race.

And it's getting pathetic.

I think, Jack, that they are going to face the biggest backlash of my lifetime in November.

And I know that everybody, I look up at Real Clear Politics and every other article by the left is Democrats are going to win the midterms or it's not that bad or racism is still the issue.

It's not.

And even some of the Republican professional class, well, we're almost equal in the House, so we might get up 10 or 20 seats, or we really blew it.

It's like 2010 in the Senate.

We've got all these crazy candidates like J.D.

Vance.

I don't think so.

I think it's going to be a referendum where everybody is going to say, these people, if they're kept in power, are going to destroy this country.

They've almost destroyed it.

And then they're going to come to their senses and they're going to say, this country does not have a birthright of perpetual existence.

It's on the razor's edge.

And if you don't give 330 restless, angry people affordable power, affordable energy, affordable fuel, affordable houses, a secure border, safety in the streets, you're going to create chaos and you're almost there.

And so it's now or never.

And I think a lot of people are getting to that point, regardless of what their politics are.

Right.

Even a liberal Democrat or many have to understand and do understand that this is self-inflicted.

If it was the case because of other circumstances, well, that's one thing, but that this is clearly self-inflicted by the man who falls off of bicycles is evident.

Victor, that's about all the time we have other than to do what we do at the end of the show, and that's to thank our listeners.

And if you listen on Apple Podcasts, thank God if you listen on Stitcher, Google Play, et cetera, thank you very much.

Thank you for listening.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

I just want to give you a little praise here, Victor.

Yeah, that's okay.

That's all right.

On Apple Podcasts, of course, we read the reviews here.

It's a couple of them.

There were a number of reviews used here, like fix the audio.

And we've been through that already.

Victor's figured it out.

It's terrific.

But I must say, it's just a study stream of of praiseworthy comments.

Here's one from Pamela, 7644, says, I could listen to you any day, anytime.

I love history.

I come from a family of farmers in America since the 1600s.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge, Diane.

Hail Hansen from Uyanatsny,

Y-N-O-T-T-O-N-Y-S.

I don't know you know how to pronounce that.

Hail Hansen, V-D-H is the absolute best.

I urge you you to respond to the Garage Logic podcast, which I also listen to.

Believe me there, listeners would benefit greatly from an appearance by you.

Thanks.

I don't know what that means, but hey, hey, write me and maybe we'll figure that out.

One more.

VDH is a resource.

This is from Thack SF.

Thanks for another great show as a retired Special Forces officer.

And further work in the intelligence community.

I appreciate your voice of clarity and reason in a world gone mad.

Thank you, Thack SF, everyone else who's written, everyone who listens.

We deeply appreciate it.

Victor, thank you for another great episode of Sharing Wisdom, and we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, everybody, again.