A Country's Destiny Is Self-Created

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star and namesake.

Victor Davis-Hansen 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, he's a farmer.

He's a classicist.

He's a military historian, essayist, nationally syndicated columnist, best-selling author.

He's also a travel agent.

We'll ask him about his recent trip to Israel.

We're recording on Saturday, June 4th.

Victor just returned to the United States two days ago.

We're going to be talking to him through his jet lag.

After the messages, we'll hear about the trip, and then we're going to talk about a number of issues starting off.

I think we'll start off talking about the Texas shooting.

So,

Victor, hang on there a second.

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

So again, we're recording on Saturday, June 4th.

I'm pretty sure this podcast will be up on the World Wide Web on Tuesday, which I think is the 7th.

I don't have my calendar in front of me.

Victor, you have had quite a month.

You mentioned on previous podcasts, last few, you had gotten COVID, you recovered, but then you had a very long trip to the East Coast.

You had to go back home to California, and then you had to go to Israel for a, I don't know, 10-day, twice-delayed trip with a significant group of people, about 100 people.

You're back.

You're enduring the jet lag.

You're enduring the aftermath of still of the COVID that you went through.

But, you know, I'd like you, if you don't mind briefly telling us how the trip went.

And then I want to ask you a question based on one of the columns you wrote, ultra pieces you wrote for victorhanson.com.

So, you know, quickly, Victor, is there anything you'd like to say about how your Israel trip went?

It went very well.

We had about 100 people.

And as you said, it had been canceled two times, once for COVID, and in 2021 for COVID and the war.

So it was either now or never.

And our Israeli partners were very patient, but it was either now or never.

And unfortunately, on May 2nd, I got a bad case of COVID.

I thought it was over.

And then the acute phase passed.

And then now I don't know what happened, but it's sort of neurological.

So I only say that because I kind of have a brain fog and neuropathy and weird symptoms and no energy.

So I was, I'm kind of apologetic to the group because

some days I didn't really know what I was saying or doing.

I was so wiped out and still am.

But it went very smooth.

I mean, we had a few people we thought might have had COVID, but everybody eventually tested negative.

They got back in okay.

We went all over Israel.

especially the Sea of Galilee area seemed the most popular.

We had Ken Calvert, a very distinguished distinguished lecturer from Hillsdale College, speak on, I think, four lectures on the history of Israel from ancient Judaic times to the contemporary landscape.

I gave a lecture on the Six-Day War, the Omkipper War, the contradictions in U.S.

foreign policy toward Israel.

We had the former national security advisor of Israel give a question and answer that with me, Iran and West Bank, and almost every issue imaginable.

We had a military historian, Mr.

Shabbat, Professor Shabbat, who was then a member of the IDF.

He talked about the Israeli defense forces.

Carolyn Glick, well-known political columnist, talked about,

I just kind of want to keep using that word, talk about, but she gave a very impassioned excursus on

how people

use the Palestinians.

It's almost a proxy to express their general dislike or anti-Semitism or dislike of Israel or anti-Semitism.

It was a very moving lecture.

And then we had Ido Netanyahu, the brother of the prime minister, and he gave a really unique talk about the history, the recent history of Israel and why it has so many adversaries and what his challenges are.

And then we had

an appearance of Mr.

Netanyahu Bibi himself, which gave a very strong pro-American talk and reminded everybody why the United States is such a critical ally of Israel and vice versa and how they were.

Vice versa, amen.

Yeah, mutually beneficial.

And so everything went very well.

Well, that's true.

If I sound hesitant, I don't think I did as good a job as I should have.

I went to Jerusalem one day for the Tikva Foundation's conservative summit, and there was about well over a thousand young conservative Israelis there.

That was a big

difference.

One of the things that I noticed, I wrote it in the Ultra, Jack, is that

if you look at that city like Tel Aviv

or Haifa and you compare it with something like San Francisco, which is also a beautiful city.

Was.

Was.

Can I read it?

Can I read a section?

Absolutely.

This is why, because I was going to ask you about this.

You're right.

And this is ultraviolethansen.com, ultra, the exclusive article.

So I'll stick it in here now, folks.

You really should subscribe, but we'll give you a taste.

Victor wrote, I contrast Tel Aviv with San Francisco.

The former city pressure washes its sidewalks in the early morning.

But unlike the latter, the anchor of a six trillion dollar market, capitalized Silicon Valley, excrement does not fly up from the pavement.

Needles do not roll in the gutters.

There are no shouters on the corners, eager to confront and bully.

Everyone in Israel, in contrast, seems frenzied and working.

There are labor shortages, but because there are too many things to do rather than too many who won't do them.

And that's just part of what you wrote, Victor.

So, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing on the commemoration of the Israeli liberation of East Jerusalem.

There were pre-teens, Jack.

12, 13 out at 10.30 at night, waving Israeli flags on this patriotic day, walking everywhere throughout Jerusalem.

You couldn't do that in Fresno.

You couldn't go out at nine o'clock at night and walk to the downtown.

Your life would be in danger.

And there's no homeless people.

And everybody's working.

And I mean that literally.

If you see Russian Jews cleaning the streets, you see immigrants.

painting, working on scaffolds.

It's a frenzied attitude that characterizes the entire workforce.

And I don't know,

it was disturbing in this sense to see that the United States, so much wealthier with so many more natural resources, is almost in a suicidal self-destructive path.

And Israel with very few resources, natural resources, but in this neighborhood where a momentary flirtation with wokeness would be equivalent to a suicide pact, is confident.

And not so, I mean, there's a left in Israel that's on hinge, like the left in the United States, but there's a sense that they feel they're better than the alternative their system is.

And they don't have to be perfect to be good.

And I think that exudes a sense of confidence everywhere.

Well, Victor, I've never been there.

You've been there several times, and I do want to go there, but

if you went back 70 years, is there any, maybe South Korea is a comparable country?

that has gone from infrastructure, et cetera, nothingness to this truly thriving democracy.

It's almost incomparable.

Yeah, I just would finish is that the hatred that people have toward Israel, it's partly anti-Semitism.

A lot of it in the region is envy.

And there's over a million Arab residents, some Christian Arabs, but the majority Islamic.

And people were very confused because there was a recent poll that a high percentage of them felt no affinity with Israelis, but a great deal of affinity, affinity, which is a natural instinct, with Arabs elsewhere on the West Bank, which is kind of dangerous for it because they have a political party and the Bennett government relies on this Muslim party, and that has affected their foreign policy stance.

But my point is this, that when you look at the West Bank and then you look at Israel and you look at Arab, predominantly Arab towns inside Israel vis-a-vis their counterparts on the West Bank,

There's just a huge disconnect as far as prosperity, as far as infrastructure, as far as affluence.

It's just stunning.

And it doesn't fit the narratives here in the United States of an oppressed people.

And nobody, nobody

wants to leave Israel, who

I want to be very careful how I say this, but nobody that's Arabic living in Israel, whether they have been there for centuries or decades or just a year or two, want to go and immigrate to the West Bank.

In contrast, lots of people in the West Bank are desperate to find their way inside Israel.

And that's something that I think people should digest very carefully and ask themselves, why is that?

Well, Victor, while you were away, there was this,

as you know, as I think everyone in the world knows, this terrible school shooting in

Texas that left many school children dead, dead, a few teachers also killed.

I have two questions.

One is, whatever thoughts you may have about the aftermath, the politics of it in the aftermath, even I know you just flew back and I don't know if you saw anything of or

saw a transcript of Joe Biden's remarks, national address about the shooting.

So if you have anything you'd want to say about that.

And then the second thing I'm curious about is your take on

some pieces that have been written about the policing of the event and how that may be a reflection on the masculinity deficiency in our society.

In fact, Miranda Devine, who we all know is a great writer and columnist at the New York Post, my old colleague at National Review, Madeline Kearns, has written something

comparable to this, but it was

an unmanly

response to the slaughter of children.

And I don't know that it was just anecdotal.

But anyway, Victor, your thoughts about the policing and if I could be wrong about my take on masculinity, but the politics of it also.

It's hard to know, Jack, because almost all the things that were told to the crowd

in deadly fear that their children were at the mercy of this gunman were not true.

And there was no information that would justify such an exposition to the people.

By that, I mean he wasn't barricaded in some type of mini fort, spraying everybody with impunity.

He wasn't wearing body armor.

He wasn't just there for a few minutes.

He was there for over an hour.

And contrast that behavior with a 9-11 firemen that went up the World Trade Center up to their deaths and didn't hesitate.

So there's something that happened.

I mean, this is not the first time where people have been critical of local law enforcement, but this is a, we're becoming more risk averse.

Or maybe somebody would defer and say, well, Victor, we're in the COVID lockdown.

We've had the riots of 2020.

We're woke.

This is an aberrant period in American history, and it's not indicative of any long-term pathologies.

I don't know if that's true or not, but there's something different.

Peggy Noonan wrote something in the Wall Street Journal about it, that the idea that law enforcement, heavily armored, many of them wearing protective armor with enormous amount of firepower, would sit around or walk around.

They would arrest a parent, I mean, excuse me, handcuff a parent that wanted apparently to go in.

There were people who wanted to volunteer and go in.

I think any parent would.

But if law enforcement is not willing to take some risk to save little children that are being systematically murdered as each minute ticks by, then we've got a real problem.

And then when you mentioned Joe Biden, Jack, but when he uses that occasion, talks about banning nine millimeter handguns and talks about this is that we're going to have to have these draconian laws.

If we really want to stop this shooting, we need data and we need to say, is the United States per capita the mass shooting capital of the world?

It's a lot of data that says it's not.

What constitutes a mass shooting?

If somebody goes into Chicago at night, pulls out an automatic weapon and tries to shoot somebody in a park and ends up killing four people, is that a mass shooting?

Is the, we're not hearing a lot of, there was the Tulsa shooting where a patient went in and shot his doctor and shot four people in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And we heard of another escaped convict that went into a cabin and killed a family of five, but we almost heard no information about any of those.

So I'd like to know what constitutes a mass shooting and why the media is so selective in

giving coverage and why we don't have an honest discussion of the law enforcement response to it.

And then

if you want to talk about guns, we could start with a bipartisan agreement right away.

And that would just mean any convicted felon, let's say within the last five years, who has a weapon should not be allowed to have a weapon.

And I think that wouldn't stop the latest shooting, but it would stop a lot of the mass shootings in the inner cities.

And it would stop some of the people who were involved in so-called mass shootings the last two months.

Why don't we just say, if you've been convicted of a felony in the last five years, it is going to be a mandatory prison sentence if you possess a firearm and you can't buy one.

And I think that would cut down a lot of violence.

And I have a suspicion that the left would oppose that.

They would say,

this would what?

It would be unfair to marginalize people or something.

But that's where you could start.

And you could have a compromise.

You could say the left could say, okay,

anybody who has a felony on their record within the last five years shall not be able to purchase or possess a firearm.

Now, conservatives, let's say that since you have to be 21 in

many states to drink, you cannot order or purchase a semi-automatic weapon until you're 21.

that's fine with me if you're going to get something and a compromise for that concession and that's something to build on but i don't think that's ever going to happen so i i don't believe that the left is sincere about gun control because when you know there's six or seven hundred people killed in chicago and it has strict gun laws but people are picked up all the time

that are felons in possession of a weapon and there's no consequences

And so, part of the problem that we're talking about, Jack, is that on the one hand, we have this move to say that prior incarceration was racist and unfair, and current non-incarceration has led to a crime spike.

So, how do you square that circle?

Either one or the other is true.

And you either put people who are felons in jail when they commit another crime, or you don't.

If you don't, there's going to be a lot of innocent people hurt.

That's just a fact.

I was listening to a podcast today, and

someone talked about the fact that Stop and Frisk, which has been attacked and now abandoned, attacked by the left, that was a policy to find guns, you know, illegal guns on the way to create mayhem.

And the left vigorously opposed it.

Most of the people who did didn't live in the neighborhoods in which people who were felons were walking around with concealed weapons illegally and were using them on the innocent as predators and so they felt that in the abstract this was terrible to stop and frisk somebody but they felt it was terrible from safe enclaves where they live they never had any problem in their own neighborhoods with that right so they were going to adjudicate what other people were going to live under and that's just

That sums up contemporary progressivism itself.

Amen.

Well, Victor, we're going to talk about arrests of

people,

one person, Peter Navarro.

And we're going to do that right after this important message.

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

We're recording on Saturday, June 4th.

And this show will be aired on Tuesday, June 7th.

So Victor, Peter navarro one of donald trump's top aides was arrested by the fbi in shackles taken away why because he he refused a congressional subpoena to appear before the january 6th committee and testify seems uh overkill or over arrest the way this was done to me anyway victor any thoughts about the arrest of navarro and anything else regarding the ongoing January 6th?

Well, I mean, first of all, they went after they, being the Democratic-controlled Congress who issued these contempt citations and Merrick Garland's Department of Justice that oversees the former James Comey and Christopher Wray, currently the director's FBI.

And

so does anybody really think that Mr.

Navarro is a threat to anybody?

And why wouldn't you just call him up and say, Mr.

Navarro,

we find you in contempt and we have to, we're going to come and detain you?

Why would you go out and sort of do a perp arrest at an airport as he's on a plane or boarding a plane or getting all?

Why would you do that?

It's reminiscent of Roger Stone's SWAT team arrest.

or James O'Keefe,

you know, with the diary arrest, or the

January 6th contrast with the May 2020.

And what it's really telling us is that we're seeing a Sovietization of this country.

And by that, I mean ideology is now adjudicating the way that supposedly non-partisan bureaucracies work.

The FBI, let's face it, and the DOJ are partisan entities.

Just think for a minute.

I was thinking as you asked me that question, Jack, of the asymmetries.

So remember Eric Holder with the Fast and Furious scandal?

and they voted to hold him, they being the Congress.

I think there was, I don't know,

a dozen or more Democrats joining the Republican majority.

It was overwhelmingly to hold him in contempt for failing, you know, to produce subpoenaed documents, which he would not.

Does anybody believe

that the FBI was going to go into to sort of shadow Eric Holder and arrest him at an airport?

You know, it's the same thing with, when you remember when Andrew McCabe on three to four occasions lied to a federal investigator, he just simply lied.

Did anybody really believe that they were going to arrest him or have a SWAT team come into Mr.

McCabe's residence?

That's what they got Roger Stone on, lying.

Or did they think he was going to go to prison?

Remember George Papadopoulos supposedly lied to a federal investigat official?

They put him, what, 14 days in prison?

So what I'm getting at is it's really scary because that's a hallmark of a totalitarian society when the implementation of justice is asymmetrical based on ideology.

And it sends a message, doesn't it?

That

if you're James Clapper or John Brennan, you can lie to Congress under oath.

But if you're anybody else who lies to Congress, you're going to go to jail.

Or if you lie to a federal official and you're not Andrew McCabe,

it's just very scary.

And what the message is that Peter Navarro's contrast with Eric Holder is

buy woke insurance, mouth woke platitudes, say nice things, don't be obdurant or defiant, because if you do, this Soviet will go after you, the Soviet state.

And it's starting to get really creepy.

It's not just, you know, the unequal application of justice, but this idea that ideology now has seeped into every federal organization and is adjudicating how the administration of justice or protocols or enforcement of regulation is applied.

It's everywhere.

It's everywhere.

Does anybody believe that the Oscars or the Tonys or the Emmys or the MacArthur Award or any of these are based on real achievement, talent?

No, they're based on ideology or diversity, equity, inclusion, or green matters.

And that's what's really weird.

And

the ultimate wage of that is when a society is no longer merucratic and does not adjudicate things by disinterested criteria, you got a Soviet system.

What is the Soviet system?

It's no baby formula on the shelves.

Wild West robberies of trains in LA.

Tombstone in Chicago on a Saturday night.

Pete Buttigig talking about every single ideological issue except why there's cargo ships all the way out to the horizon to the port of Los Angeles, are $7

a gallon for diesel fuel here in California.

The system starts to break down.

And that's what's really scary.

Also, Victor, laid on top of that is we've discussed before that disagreement means from the perspective of the left, criminalization, which again, we've discussed before when hopefully we, the conservatives and sane people, take over, that we truly understand, and politically, we truly understand the nature and venom of this enemy and abandon the Marcus of Queensbury rule because they sure as hell want to see us behind bars.

I don't know about me.

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

When we discussed that in an earlier broadcast, the Old and New Testament reaction to the midterms, when I think the Republicans,

I'm pretty sure they're going to win the House by a large majority, maybe a historic majority, and the Senate, I think they'll be gained.

And then the question is, how do you stop this out-of-control, lunatic, unhinged left that has no public support, but is controlling all of our institutions?

And there is a school that says, you just move on, Victor and Jack, you just move on.

You get an agenda, you have a contract with America, and then there's the other Old Testament school that said, no, until they understand

how

their actions have influenced and hurt people, they're never going to change.

And so, what that would mean is when the Republicans in January of 2023 took control of the House of Representatives, you would see investigations of Hunter's laptop.

You would bring in the entire Biden family and put them under oath.

If you would bring in Merrick Garland and you would ask him what in the world he was doing by having FBI agents incognito at school board meetings.

You would ask him why it is asymmetrical.

And if he didn't comply, you would go have him arrested in an airport, something like that.

And with that, or you would just say, you know what?

Joe Biden took an oath to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.

He did not do it.

He allowed 2 million plus people to cross the southern border in clear violation of the laws that he swore to uphold.

And he and Mr.

Mayorkas, the Secretary of the Interior, shall be impeached.

And is that what we want?

That each time a president loses the majority in his first term of the House during the midterm elections, then he will be ritually impeached?

Because that's what the Democrats have established is a precedent.

And will they stop?

Maybe they'll stop only when it happens to them.

And we can go on and on, but you can see when they abuse power like this, where it's all going to end.

Victor, I'm going to try and take a little mercy on you, given what you've been through.

I think I'm sounding like I've got, what COVID brain fog.

No, no, there's no brain fog at all.

There's the usual good sense and brilliance, but I wanted to say you brought up the cabinet.

You wrote this piece cabinetcy of Dunce's, which was published while you were away.

It really went around the good old interwebs.

Would you want to talk about that?

And then we'll talk about one more subject, I think, about the economy.

Tell us about that cabinetcy of Dunce's essay you wrote for American Greatness.

Yeah.

Well, put it this way, does anybody believe,

if we just take it step by step, does anybody really believe that the present Biden cabinet, the secretaries of these particular cabinetcies, does anybody believe that they were appointed because their resumes match the job description?

Does anybody believe that the mayor of South Bend, Pete Buttigig, had unusual expertise in transportation matters?

Does anybody believe believe that?

Does anybody believe Alexandro Mayorkas really understood how to secure the southern border and therefore he was made a Secretary of the Interior?

Does anybody believe that?

And we could go on and on.

You remember this Secretary of the Interior, Deborah Holland?

She was the one that, when she was testifying, why we haven't had any action on new federal leasing of energy

exploitation, she just sort of the deer on the headlights.

And then you see these aides frantically sending her notes what to say.

Why shouldn't they do it?

They do it to the cabinet officer.

One thing, and we mentioned this before about Ukraine, Lloyd Austin.

We all know that this administration sees this as a proxy war, a way of hurting Russia.

Okay, fine.

Everybody's sympathetic with Ukraine.

I am.

But let's not say it because

they've got an unhinged leadership and they've got 6,000

deliverable nukes.

Why would Lloyd Austin say the purpose of this war, I guess he means to the last Ukrainian, is to hurt Russia as a superpower so it should never do something like this again?

That's a dangerous thing to say.

And I could go on and on about this bunch.

And I'm not even getting into Merrick Garland and, you know, investigating the threats from parents or

this crazy, I don't know what we would call her, the Ministry of Truth person.

Remember her?

And she's the TikTok.

She had that crazy.

She's gone, though, now.

She's gone.

Janowitz or whatever his name, Janowitz.

Jankowitz, I think her name was Nina.

And Nina's gone, but the Disinformation Ministry, I think, is going to be reconstituted.

So they're all ideological appointments.

I understand that every president likes to get people that share his conservative or progressive views,

whatever the case may be, but this this group is incompetent.

And the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Grenholm, that woman is just, when they ask about what are you going to do to help the American people, remember, she just said, that's hilarious.

I have no power to do that.

If you have no power as Secretary of Energy, why did you recommend that they cancel the Keystone or put Anwar

off limits or restrict federal leasing to the degree you can as Energy Secretary?

Why did you do that if you don't have any, if you think it's ridiculous, that you can do a positive thing is ridiculous, but a negative thing isn't ridiculous?

And so these people are hacks or political ideologues, and they're very dangerous.

And I think historians, just to take a step back, Jack, are going to look at this period, say, from the outbreak of COVID, I don't know, we'll call it March of 2020.

to the end of the

midterms in November, the final few months of the first two years, as a unique period in American history where this country went certifiably insane, where people just simply did not obey the law, where people said and did things that were extraordinary, where we saw things that were unimaginable, whether empty shelves or whole industries like the building trades industry or the airline industry that just ceased to function

or the cargo, the port issues.

It's just a systematic breakdown or things like

Chris Rock being attacked or Dave Schipper, all of this stuff.

And it was normalized.

And I don't know whether it was the ultimate wage of long-standing deleterious trends that were there.

prior to this period or the lockdown, the mask wearing, the isolation, the virus, it killed a a million people.

I'm speaking to someone that I didn't really know what long COVID was, but this large percentage of people who don't get over are a large percentage of people who just who are well but won't work, whatever the cause is with this reduced labor participation.

I think they're going to say the country is went nuts.

And I say that with the assumption that the country is going to recover and a future generation of historians will be bewildered at this abnormal interregnum, not that this will be the new norm, because if it is a new norm, norm, the country won't exist.

It cannot continue as it is.

What we're witnessing every day, whether it's prices, inflation, crime, racial relations, the absence of a border, the deliberate destruction of energy independence, this is not a sustainable enterprise.

Yeah, Victor, I think you used the right word there, deliberate, which you said applied to energy, but I think it applies

across the board, including historians will look back and say these people consciously, almost maybe consciously,

sunk the economy.

And that's what we're going to talk about in the last segment of the show.

And we'll do that right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

I'd like to encourage our listeners, Hopefully, there are plentiful new ones, to visit victorhanson.com.

That's Victor's official website.

Everything he writes is there.

And some of it you can't read unless you're a subscriber.

And there's a lot of such content.

It's not a little drib here or a drab there.

Victor writes a lot of exclusive content.

It's called ultra.

Subscription to victorhanson.com is $5

a month, $50 for the the year.

So I encourage you to subscribe.

You will not regret it.

By the way, while you're there, look at some of the books Victor has written.

Victor, I'm going to be a chauvinist here, but I think there are a lot of Father's Days approaching.

I think there are a lot of dads out there who are military buffs who would love to get a Father's Day present of the Second World Wars and any other book Victor has written.

But if you got a a dad or an uncle or a husband or kid who's a father and you're looking for something for them and their military buffs, you cannot go wrong with the Second World Wars.

So

as for me, I'm Jack Fowler.

I write The Civil Thoughts, a weekly email newsletter that's published by the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

You can subscribe.

It's free.

No strings attached.

Just 12, 13, 14 recommended readings and a bad joke at the end of it.

That's civilthoughts.com.

You can sign up there and check out centerforceivilsociety.com.

So, Victor, as we get into this final topic about the economy, three or four things.

One is that

within the last few days, Elon Musk, who whatever he says now is major news, but he made some significant announcement about cutting back a hiring at Tesla, his automotive/slash battery company.

That has gained some headlines.

Jamie Diamond, the big Wall Street financier, investor, said something in the last day or two, also, great fears about where the American economy is heading.

And counterpoint to that, from his,

I think it maybe was from his basement in Delaware, where he spent probably more time than he has in the White House since he became president, Joe Biden.

Here's a headline from

yesterday.

Biden claims, quote, more Americans feel financially comfortable, end quote, since he took office.

I mean, can you imagine somebody more aloof?

So, Victor, I say that because then also,

I raised those three things.

And then maybe you want to discuss that if you wish, but in context to a piece you've written for Victorhansen.com.

It's a two-part series.

It's again, it's one of the exclusive pieces, the ultra pieces, but it's called Neutroning America, part two.

And I think that gets back to what you were just saying before we had the break.

I mean, essentially, this is an attack, a kind of a cultural and economic neutron attack on this country by the left.

So we're in bad times, we're heading for worse times, just how worse it gets.

We're dreading.

Victor, your thoughts.

I think we all now finally figure out what's going on.

You've got a 79-year-old president that's

mentes.

He's not in control of his mind.

And he's surrounded, and that's how he got elected.

Remember, he would never have been nominated had the left not come to him and said, look, you're losing, but we will bring out the marginalized people vote and we will get you nominated and then we will participate in the general election.

But the price of that getting you across the finish line is you've got to give us your administration.

And I'm talking about the squad type of people.

I'm talking about the Obamas.

I'm talking about Elizabeth Warren.

I'm talking about Bernie Sanders.

I'm talking about the big donors in Silicon Valley.

I'm talking about the media.

Okay,

so that's what they did.

And Joe Biden was told, This is what you're going to do.

And he did it.

And as all ideological agendas end up, it was a total failure.

And now people are criticizing Joe Biden for something.

Part of his mind says, but I didn't do it.

They did it.

And part of his mind says, if you're going to criticize me,

I'm going to defend myself.

But he doesn't know what to defend because he doesn't even know the particulars.

He didn't even understand

that,

I mean, the people who were around him are toxic and mean spirited.

But I don't think if you said to Joe Biden, you printed money, you did quantitative easing, you kept interest rates unrealistically low, you were coming out of a quarantine, you had a vaccinated population that you inherited, you had a natural rebound in hiring, all you had to do was sit back and watch the recovery, and you ruined it by printing all of this money, increasing consumer demand while restricting consumer supply.

And you got classical

inflation.

He doesn't understand that.

And so he says these lunatic things.

You know, I don't know what's going on.

I didn't do this.

Everybody's doing well.

And, you know, and this is a transition to energy.

And he doesn't understand what he's saying.

But when you have the people that you enumerated, let's include Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, who have all and Larry Summers way before all of them had told us exactly what was going to happen.

And they continued to do it, then the logical question arose about his advisors and the people who are running the country right now.

Are they mean-spirited and they wanted to seek damages?

Are they blind ideologues that don't care about anybody outside the Noman King Torah?

Are they just simple incompetence?

Maybe it's a mixture of all of them.

But that's where we are now with energy.

That's where we are with crime.

That's where we are with immigration.

That's where we are with this inflation.

And somebody who came out of graduate school in 1980 in the waning years of the Carter disaster and watched the job market for PhDs is non-existent and then began to farm during the Reagan correction of high interest rates and it started under Carter.

I can tell you that this thing is lining up with something I've seen before in my 20s.

And that means I think we're going to have a stagflation where you have negative, we've already had negative economic growth in the first quarter.

I think we'll see it in the second or third quarters.

Two quarters in a row is a recession.

And I don't think the inflation is going to stop because you've poured so much funny money into the economy.

And I know you're eating it up right now with sky-high energy prices, sky-high food prices, sky-high power and

electricity, sky-high housing, sky-high everything.

But there's still a lot of money out there that was created.

And there's still a lot of non-productive labor

force, a non-productive labor force.

So I think you're going to see some things that are really frightening in either the end of this year or the beginning of next year.

My advice as an amateur economist would be do not buy a house right now,

even though the interest rates are going to get higher and higher.

Save your money.

I know that that would contribute to a recession, so I'm not responsible, I guess,

for advocating recession.

I don't want to see a recession, but I would hoard my money and then you'll see prices finally stabilize, but not after a lot of people have had their lives ruined.

When you have these radical transitions from no inflation to hyperinflation and from artificially low interest rates

to

ascending interest rates at a geometric rate,

There's catastrophe and opportunity.

Those who are savvy understand that these radical changes give them opportunities.

And those like me and most of the people are listening who are not sophisticated economic observers get hurt.

And that's what's going to happen.

This economy is going to change very quickly within a year.

And it was all self-created, Jack.

That's the thing.

Absolutely.

It was self-created.

Right.

Didn't have to happen.

Still, the brakes could be put on disaster, but there's no way they will turn on the energy spigots.

And that goes to, you know, you mentioned a couple of factors.

And

the mean-spiritedness, I think, is part and parcel of the president of the United States.

We saw it with the withdrawal of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, an almost so what attitude from Biden, which was the same attitude he had when America was pulling out of Vietnam 40, 50 years before.

One of the myths that we need to correct all of us, both you and hijack and everybody listening to tell your friends is the myth of nice guy Joe Biden from Scranton is preposterous.

This guy, whether it was during the Clarence Thomas hearings

or when he was

running for president and lying about his 1988, his resume, and was yelling and screaming at reporters

or during the 2020 primaries when he called people fat or the corn pop stories or junkie or you ain't black or the terror reed accusations or the hunter biden and the biden conglomerate syndicate i should say he's not a nice person the fact that he's 79 and has cognitive problems earns him some empathy, but it does not excuse a life of corruption and mean-spiritedness, incompetence.

You know, it was, I don't want to keep repeating things, but those two famous quotes from Barack Obama that, you know, don't underestimate Joe's ability to F it up.

And Robert Gates is, he's been wrong on every major foreign policy decision, I think he said in the last 30 years.

So he's not a nice guy, and he's doing a lot of damage right now.

And he's blaming everybody but himself.

And that's perfect to form.

That's the way he always has operated.

The fact that he's being manipulated in his dottage is no excuse not to hold him responsible for a Senate career that was despicable and the current despicable presidency.

I wrote a column about six weeks ago.

I said, brace yourself.

You're going to see things you had never seen before.

And he's going to be out.

of hand as he starts to talk.

They don't know what to do with him right now.

I mean, this is the guy who went to the U.S.

Naval Academy and flat out lied and said that he had an appointment, but because he would be competing with Roger Straubach, he had to go to Delaware, i.e., I guess he had a great football career there.

Is that what he was implying?

Or he turned around and said that somebody, a white supremacist, he included that incident in Dallas of the three Asian American women that were shot, as if that was.

a white person had done that.

He just makes things up.

His staff tweeted out there were no vaccinations.

You know, we have a picture of him getting jabbed on day.

I think it was December 17th, 2020.

So

these people are melting down and the staffs are leaving and we're watching this thing.

And unfortunately, we're all invested in it.

And it's changing our lives, our very lives.

Our kids have been damaged from not being able to go back to school.

People's businesses are being ruined by the price of fuel here in California.

Carpenters, electricians, plumbers can't get.

I have a guy who's doing a simple job.

He's a wonderful construction person, self-employed, and he's fixing up an old carriage house.

And Jack, he couldn't get a four-inch ABS elbow.

It didn't exist.

A plastic pipe.

I mean, he couldn't find it.

And this is a major hub of a million and a half people.

You know, it wasn't at Lowe's.

It wasn't at the local hardware store.

It wasn't at Home Depot.

This is unheard of.

This wasn't some weird esoteric part.

It's one of the centerpieces of any sewage system that anybody needs.

And it's that way.

Why should we get baby food?

Why should we get plumbing parts?

And he doesn't care.

He knew about the problem.

He didn't care.

He didn't care at all about it.

He doesn't.

That's another thing.

He does not care.

We keep saying that.

He doesn't care.

And the people around him don't care.

They don't drive diesel semis.

They don't do it.

Joe Biden said he did, that he was a former semi-guard, but he was lying again.

They don't care.

They don't care about the inner city.

They don't walk around the streets of Baltimore or St.

Louis.

They don't care about the violence.

They don't go to the border either.

Yeah, they don't care about a woman alone in a home at night in a bad neighborhood who might have a block in her nightstand.

They don't have that problem.

They have security.

They don't care about somebody living on the border in a Mexican-American community that's trying trying to get advanced placement courses in their local schools.

They're trying to make sure their children teach perfect English.

They want to have state, local, federal agencies that can accommodate them if they have dialysis or healthcare problems or the ER.

They don't care when they flood millions of people illegally, unvaccinated, untested, into these communities.

They don't care.

Well, Victor, we care.

So, and Americans will care in November, I'm sure.

So, we'll still have two years of bocce blue from Delaware, but we'll

say our prayers.

So, Victor, we've almost run out of time here, but as we do at the end of our programs, we'd like to thank our listeners for listening and those who Google Play, Stitcher, whatever platform you're listening to this on.

Thank you.

By the way, where you are, the Victor Davis Hansen Show is broadcast from justthenews.com.

That's John Solomon's website.

We get plenty of reviews from folks who listen on Apple Podcast.

And here's one that came in the other day, Victor, while you were away.

It's titled Honesty.

I sought VDH for history, his application of historical events to current times to better understand where we are headed.

It is now on the top of my podcast shuffle due to his honesty, his desire to address events and topics with thoroughness and wanting to explain it as the professor he is.

As a country, we're lucky to have him.

A plus Victor, and this is signed by Honesty Uniad.

And we thank him and other people who have left comments.

We do read them all.

I must say I'm a little negligent, Victor.

I'm trying to read more of the comments that people leave on VictorHanson.com on the articles.

Also, folks, there's a very friendly Facebook website.

If you're on Facebook, you should join this group.

It's called the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club.

They also track wherever you go, wherever you're podcasting or making appearances on television or radio programs.

You're going to find links to all that there from the good folks at that site.

If you're on Facebook, Victor has his own page and there's VDH's Morning Cup on Twitter.

It's at vdhanson.com.

So I think that's about it, Victor.

We've got to take a break here and then we're going to record yet another podcast.

And I appreciate your finding the strength through the jet lag to do that.

So, on that note, thanks very much for all the wisdom you shared today.

And thanks, folks, for listening.

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

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

It's deeply, deeply, deeply appreciated.