GOP Election Wins Begin and The Return of Trump Tweets

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we are recording on Tuesday, May 10th, 2022.

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

And he hangs his editorial hat at victorhanson.com.

You should visit that site regularly.

I think I added an extra syllable in there and subscribe.

Also, before we get into our first topic, which is going to be J.D.

Vance's victory in the Ohio Senate primary last week.

I just want to tell our listeners, thank you for your patience.

Thanks for being with us.

By virtue of circumstances, illnesses, technical difficulties, travel.

Right now, I'm in Greenville, South Carolina,

in a hotel room, which may be a little echoey, but we've had some difficulties getting these podcasts corralled and together, but we're here doing it, thankfully.

So we hope to be back to our regular schedule.

And again, a lot to talk about today.

The first topic will be the J.D.

Vance victory and what Victor thinks about that.

And we will discuss that right after these important messages.

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

So Victor was the big, I think the first really big political primary of the year in Ohio for the Senate.

Senator Rob Portman is retiring.

The Republican primary fight was quite a battle.

Josh Mandel, who had been the candidate, the Republican Party's candidate about 10 years ago for the Senate, was

in the fight, a former state chairman, a chairwoman, others.

At the very end, polls were saying this is tight as can be.

I forget his name, the guy's family, they own the Cleveland former Indians.

He may pull through.

But J.D.

Vance got Donald Trump's endorsement and he prevailed.

Of course, he's well known.

He wrote Hillbilly Elegy, made into a very popular film.

You know J.D.

a little bit, maybe even more than a little bit.

Victor, what are your thoughts about anything related to that?

primary win by J.D.?

Well, you know, it's very strange because J.D.

is a very good candidate, but he was running roughly, what,

second to third for most of the winter and early spring.

And everybody said that Josh Mandel had the, had it locked up.

And then suddenly the Trump endorsement put him over the top.

And that was supposed to not happen.

And we found out that most of the people Trump endorsed won in this particular round.

And we have about seven or eight more of these primaries coming up.

But what was strange is, and we have joked about it, I think, Jack, on this show, that Trump endorses people who are already ahead in the polls.

But this wasn't true of JD.

This was actually a case of a very major Senate race where somebody was behind.

And then the endorsement, I mean, I think he was...

I don't know what the percentage was, but he was, was he behind Matt Dolan, too?

I can't remember.

I don't think he was ever behind Dolan, but he was.

Behind Mondel.

Yeah, and he was at 10 points in that area for quite a long time.

And it put him over the top.

The other thing that was remarkable about this, when Hillbilly Elegy came out, and he was really, JD was really riding a wave of

sort of the left said, you know,

he's an acceptable Hillbilly to us.

He's an Appalachian that got professional, got professional bike coastal credentials because he's a Goldman Sachs, I think he was Goldman Sachs, and he had, it was Harvard Law School he went to, or was it Harvard?

I think it was Harvard or Yale, but either one.

He was invited on to MSNBC, let's say.

Yeah, and that's when I met him.

And then what made him a darling of the left, to be frank about it, was

when Trump

sealed the nomination in March 2016, I think you could use that date,

then people wanted someone to debunk the American populist movement.

So they went to JD and they said, look, I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but you've got a lot of credibility because you're both educated and you're an Appalachian hillbilly, and therefore you could look at yourself in an abstract, disinterested view.

You know, you'll be very valuable as a negator of this pseudo-populist, orange-skinned, multi-billionaire Manhattan guy masquerading raid as a populist.

And he did.

He wrote some very critical things of Trump.

And then, as Trump governed, he, I think he had a genuine recalibration.

He said, wow, this is stuff that's been very good for the working classes.

And he became gradually more and more pro-Trump.

And his brand of, I don't know what you would call it, what would you call it, Jack?

Libertarian populism.

So the pencil.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Something you like.

Right.

Yeah.

It had certain

appeals to people like Peter Till and other people backed him who were quite wealthy and he raised a lot of money.

But what I'm getting at in a very laborious fashion is he still had sort of the goodwill of the left.

And then they went from 180 degrees on him and they went from calling him a hypocrite or sell out to hating him and they despised him and they started going back to these slurs about poor white trash.

And it was just amazing that

this guy who I think he'd been in the Marine Corps, he went to Yale Law School, as you said, I think,

graduated from Ohio State.

All of a sudden, they despised him and they hate him.

I had met him in 2016.

We had a good talk and I disagreed with him then about Trump, but his Wall Street Journal was rational and, you know, we disagreed.

And then I met him again and we got, you know we were more in tune but I just couldn't fathom the people that had brought him at this venue that I first met him who were very anti-Trump they ended up hating him and when I mentioned that I'd like to see him again this is before he kind of came out pro-Trump they got very angry at me So I don't quite understand it.

I really don't.

I mean, I understand the left and how they're that way, but it was almost as if they always wanted to make fun of somebody from from the poor white working class but because of his yale law degree and his wall street connections and his wonderfully written memoir that was very critical of elements of appalachian culture they felt he was okay and then once he was no longer useful they thought then he wasn't okay and all their stereotypical clingers deplorables irredeemable prejudice came to the fore Victor, where you stand on Trump and where you stand on abortion rights are the two major determinants of logic and friendship and everything else that happens in America significantly for the red, for the left and somewhat for the right, too.

J.D.

Vance was friendly.

I have a lot of people that are never Trumpers and I disagree with them, but I have no problem with them.

Let's face it, I work at an institution.

until it became more left-wing is the bastion of George Bush, George H.W.

Bush centrism, right?

And I have no problem.

i have friends that are very strong bush supporters and hated trump i don't care they're friendly nice people i disagree with them on politics but i don't get that you know that this hatred hatred hatred hatred well but yeah one form of hatred is silicon valley's hatred for donald trump which led to him being banned from certain social media platforms most famously twitter uh elon musk and again we're recording on may 10th but within the last day or two has attacked twitter's decision from

2020 to uh prevent then president trump and cat and who was running for re-election prevent him from

being on that platform so um any any thoughts about now donald trump of course has his own social media operation now but uh i i kind of find uh musk's statements in these regards sincere.

His castigation also and some other tweets by him of how obviously leftist the prevailing

leadership of Twitter is, et cetera.

Any thoughts about him and in particular his comments on Trump?

He's a Clinton Democrat.

He always was.

He always will be.

He's an old-fashioned

liberal Democrat, which is nothing wrong with that.

That's who he is.

And the problem is that he doesn't have to go left, he feels, as the way Hillary did or Bill did, because there's nothing in it for him.

So he's right where he always was.

And he's, you know, he had that little graph he showed that the Democratic Party went hard to the left and left him as a so-called moderate or moderate conservative, just because that's what Bill Clinton, if you and I were discussing his 1992 platform, the left would hate his guts.

And that's where Musk says he is.

So what does that mean for Republicans or Democrats or excuse me, conservatives?

It just means if you think he's going to come on there and be a avatar of very conservative thought, you're sorely mistaken.

He's just going to go on there and say, you're welcome to express your views left and right.

And when it comes time to the 2022,

he'll probably tweet that he endorses the Democratic candidate.

So don't get your hopes up, but that's a marked improvement because these people who run Silicon Valley,

whether it's the widow of Steve Jobs or whether it's the people at Google or whether it was Jack Dorsey or whether it was Mark Zuckerberg, they are not liberal.

They are a hardcore leftist, mostly because of their extraordinary wealth that shields them from any consequences of their pernicious ideology.

But that's who he is.

He's very bright, though.

What I kind of admire about him, he takes whole fields that everybody says in a cost to benefit analysis, do not go into Tesla, do not go into moon launches, and then he does it very well.

And at some point, everybody wants to know, well, he hasn't had a business that produces a profit, right?

Tesla has not produced a huge profit.

Starting to be a little bit of profitable, but not.

anywhere near its $1 trillion market capitalization would suggest.

His moonshots are not that all that profitable.

So that was true of Jeff Bezos.

Remember for all during the last two decades or whatever, they said, we don't understand why he's worth so much.

He's never made a profit.

He was just building these regional centers everywhere.

And he was expanding from books to kitchen utensils to garden to clothes.

And everybody said, why doesn't he just stop and try to make a profit?

Well, what he was doing was 40 market share, and then they unleashed it.

And maybe I think that's kind of the way Musk looks at things.

Right.

Well, Victor, you're a man with personal experience with COVID.

And there are some reports that, of course, there is another strain around now, but predictions

of

another

significant potential COVID strike coming towards America later in the year.

And let's talk about that

after we hear these important messages.

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

Before we talk about things COVID, Victor, just want to remind our listeners that VictorHanson.com is the place where anything you write can be found, pieces you write for American Greatness and other outlets.

You do write any number of things, a lot, in fact, quite a lot, of original content that can only be read at victorhanson.com.

And that, to read it, and if you're a Victor fan, you need to subscribe.

It's a copious amount of material.

It's $5 a month, $50 for the year.

So I'd like to heartily recommend our listeners do that.

And you'll find links to books there also on Recommend.

It's a little bit out from Father's Day, but hey, if Dad, you know, there's a dad or a husband or whatever in your life that likes military history in particular, I really recommend Victor's The Second World Wars.

You can find a link to that book at victorhanson.com.

Big, big, thick book, and it would make an exceptional gift.

So, Victor,

you, as you mentioned on the last podcast, your own dealings with, yet again, with COVID, but we have White House reports coming out in the last two days that predictions that there will be 100 million COVID cases in America for this fall and winter approaching.

Geez, Victor, do you have any thoughts on that, including thoughts of how we could really screw this up again?

i mean there the modelers have no credibility whatsoever remember that was the four million

five million or several million people who are going to die of covet right in the first year so they have no they they can't predict anything just think of what the predictions were when this thing started you know no mask one mask two masks social distancing no social distance don't go on a cruise don't go on a date do do both

As soon as we get herd immunity, but it's not going to be 90, it's going to be 80, no, 70.

How How about 60?

Just recently, if I'll shoot, we're over the pandemic.

Oh,

boy, there's an Omicron variant.

I didn't count on it.

I better switch my daily

prognosis and then never tell anybody I was wrong yesterday.

That's how this thing is happening, because they don't know anything and they act like they do know this.

I don't mean they know nothing, but they don't know anything in the sense of the total body of knowledge that would be required to master this epidemic, this pandemic.

And so there's a lot of ways to look at that, Jack.

The best way is that this joins this 100 million are going to be suffering from COVID.

It joins the Roll versus Wade, the Putin price hike, the January 6th latest bombshell, the Donald Trump dies in darkness narrative.

It's anything other than the border and critical waste theory and inflation and fuel and crime and Afghanistan.

So, but I don't get this particular one because

this is not an issue that will help them.

If they want to go into another lockdown and cause what, another mini crisis and say, oh, we have to go into lockdown right before the midterms.

We've got to do the right is ready for them this time on mailing ballots.

If they say, oh, we have to have 150 million mailing ballots, well, they'll know about that and they're ready for it.

They're already gearing up.

If it's so that you can create a crisis and then get sympathy for Biden.

He's the guy who told us that the president should not be in office.

Any president, I think I'm quoting him.

I don't know, verbatim almost by memory.

Any president who's in office when 200 something thousand die should not be president.

He said that in August of 2020.

He ended up with almost 400,000 dead.

There's a million now.

So more died on his watch, even though he had vaccinations than under Trump.

So why would you want to bring that up and say, 100 million, you guys?

And they say, well, then you're responsible for it.

So I don't see the politics of it.

I see that the idea you want to have a crisis.

People are done with

COVID.

And because about 90% of America has one shot of the possible four shots in most cases, and because they've had

You know, 90% of them, if they haven't had that, they've had a case of COVID or two.

they have some t cell memory they have some antibodies and that means if you're like me and you had two shots and you didn't get the booster but you had covet in september october of 2021 then you got hit with a bad case of covet omicron you're just in bed for five or six days with a fever you can hear my voice it's still screwed up it's been day eight I'm dizzy, got a few post-flu.

To me, it's like a bad flu or maybe a moderate flu.

And I'm going to go on and I expect to get it again, but I'm not going to stay home and not speak.

And when I give a lecture,

right before I got ill, I think I gave eight lectures.

And the modus operandi is you give the lecture, people come up to you and say, can I sign my book?

Shake my hand, give me a hug, photo op.

And I'm not going to say, oh, oh, don't get near me.

I'm sorry.

I don't know your status.

Are you vaccinated?

Are you triple, quadrupled?

Or whatever.

I'm not going to live my life that way.

And I don't think anybody else is either.

So I agree with you.

I don't see that that's going to happen.

You're going to get COVID.

99.9 of us are going to survive.

And I know you don't think that on day two, when you got 101 temperature and you're shivering, but you're going to survive and you're just wiped out.

And I'm not going to stay home and say, oh, I've got long COVID.

I'm really wiped out.

What am I going to do?

Everybody's going to go out and work.

Absolutely.

And that's what you have to do.

It's just get over it.

When you test negative, take your test at home.

And the moment you test negative, 24 hours later, when you do not have a fever or symptoms and you've had maybe vaccinations or a prior case, get back into the game.

And, you know, this idea that we're all going to be post-COVID victims is, it's a terrible thing.

I've had mononucleosis really bad in my 30s, and I was wiped out for months, if not years.

And I'm not, you know, it's an immune problem, but we've all had it with COVID, And we're going to make the necessary adjustments to move on.

And it's not

going to be a political issue.

It's going to work.

I haven't had it yet, but I think I'm not trying to extrapolate.

But you know what?

I'm convinced I'm going to get it sooner or later.

And I'm convinced I'm probably going to get it again after that.

And we just have to factor this into life because we've also lived through the utter destruction of our society.

No, not, I can't say utter because utter means almost complete, complete, but the deranged attack on our society and lockdowns.

We're not going to endure that anymore.

I look at it, I was thinking, I was sitting in bed all week with a high fever, and that's pretty high for me at 97, my normal temperature.

But I thought I've had malaria in Egypt by myself.

And I've had a torn ureter in Greece for six weeks in the hospital with a staghorn calculus.

I've had a ruptured appendix in Libya and almost died.

I've had a mastocytosis problem.

It was put me in the emergency room a couple of times.

So that's what everybody listening has had, just stuff like that.

People live lives of quiet desperation.

They have major operations.

They lose one.

I'm sitting in a room right now, Jack, at a house.

I just think, oh my God, I can remember the day my aunt died, the night before she died here.

I can remember the name.

the night before my grandparents died.

I can remember the night before my mom died.

I can remember the night before my dad died.

I can remember my daughter coming here a week before she died.

That's life.

It's tragic, but you go on.

And all of us know that.

And

this idea that you're going to get, what is it?

This idea we're going to get boosted every 60 days.

Booster, booster, booster, booster, booster, booster, booster.

Yeah, well, you get the booster.

And I mean, I got it.

And I was sick for a week.

because of it.

Yeah, and

I got Moderna too.

And

it wasn't quite as bad as COVID, but it was close.

And I was sick for four days with it.

And I didn't want to get the booster when I had high antibodies from Delta.

And then somebody said,

I talked to a doctor, said, hey, by the way, Delta doesn't give you protection from Omicron.

And

so all I can tell you is a lot of Americans have had either the original or Delta or an early Omicron or one or two or three or four shots.

And they have some immunity now.

Not enough not to test positive, not enough not to have symptoms maybe, but enough, maybe not even in some cases to get out of the hospital, but not, they do have enough not normally to die.

And that's what's striking.

When I look at these statistics every day in California, I see a lot of cases.

I'm starting to see an uptick in hospitalization, but I do not see an epidemic of death, not like the first two rounds.

Well, Victor, let's talk about a cranky old man that can't stand the things you just said, most likely, if he heard them, if he could comprehend them.

Wait, is this your Catholic idol?

Yeah, Joe Biden or the Pope, which one?

I was thinking of either Joe Biden, the Pope, or Anthony Fauci.

We'll get to Fauci on our next podcast.

But no, let's talk about Joe Biden, who came out, I think it was yesterday, attacking.

conservative Republicans or those that ascribe to the quote-unquote MAGA agenda.

And he called them, in the collective, he called it the most extreme political organization that's existed in American history.

He did not.

He said he was the unity president.

He was going to bring us together, Jack.

He didn't mean that.

Come on.

Must have mumbled a caveat at this time.

I guess we're worse than the KKK, the American Communist Party, the American Nazi Party,

the Weatherman Underground, the SDS, BLM, Antifa.

Is that what he meant?

I guess so.

He could have.

He could have.

So people who are pissed at him, pissed is a technical term, over

shocking, just inflation alone,

now have another, you know, the president once again dumping on their heads.

You know, if Trump doesn't run, Jack, and somebody like DeSantis runs, he'll run that tape.

to submit his mega fides and say, this is what they think of you.

And that'll be a deplorable, Hillary irredeemable moment.

You know, just to have that sound clip in the 2024 election.

Not that Biden will be running, but that's what they think of people.

They never get over.

I mean, they never learn.

And I'm thinking, these people are what?

They're extreme.

They're dangerous.

And what is the Biden family?

And what have you done right now?

We're in a vicarious surrogate war almost with Russia, and it's over Ukraine.

And what is the one thing that you have in common, Joe?

Your whole family is compromised with corruption in Ukraine.

And you did not prepare Ukraine to be invaded by Russia.

You inherited a policy that gave them offensive weapons and you did not.

continue that supply chain at sufficient volume to deter Russia.

And you said things and you did things, whether it was begging him to give us oil, i.e.

Putin, or not to pact certain entities that gave the impression you were weak.

And after Afghanistan, that impression was confirmed.

And don't tell us who's dangerous and who's not dangerous.

You're dangerous.

Your whole family is dangerous.

Hey, Victor, I'm going to throw a curveball at you.

Normally, we discuss everything.

You have COVID, Jack, because you're acting a little strange.

I'm in my hotel room and I have all my clothes on.

So

I think I'm doing fine.

Just give me a few minutes.

Hey, Victor, I saw this on the Hoover website, a piece by Pion Lomborg in the Wall Street Journal.

He's a visiting fellow here at.

Oh, is that why?

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, this is interesting.

This

is foreign policy and also to Farmer Hanson.

Ukraine crisis reveals the folly of organic farming.

Did you read that piece?

I did.

I know

I did a little bit.

I thought it was very good.

And I'm speaking as somebody who farmed 180 acres and had 30 acres that made more money organically than 150.

So you're going to say, well, then you don't agree with it.

Yes, I do agree with it on this context.

It's all about volume and labor.

And so what I'm saying is, Jack, I farm peaches, plums, nectarines, raisins on 150 acres and did it traditionally.

And that doesn't mean you're pouring pesticides, but that means you use ammonium sulfate, ammonium nitrate, calcium nitrate, and you don't use manure.

That use in those days, you use Roundup rather than hired people to dig.

And you sent your stuff to a packer.

With organic farming, it was volume.

You can't produce very much and sell it.

So we would have no pesticides, no fertilizers, beautiful tomatoes.

We had one acre plots, Asian pears, Santa Rosa plums, old-fashioned varieties that would be very fragile, Alberta peaches.

And then we would take them on ourselves.

One thing I'm proud of that my son, when he was 16 and my daughter, when they were 16, were driving 3,000 pounds of fruit over Pacheco Pass to the coast to places like Monterey or Santa Cruz and peddling fruit.

And it was very, it was a wonderful time, but, and it was organic, but the fruit, because we were producing both fruits, it wasn't, it didn't look better.

It didn't taste, maybe the varieties tasted better because You had to, you know, you had such a small quantity of them, like your backyard tree.

But for the idea that we're going to all go back to organic farming means you need labor, labor, labor, labor, labor, Jack.

Because if you don't use chemical nitrogen fertilizer and you don't use petrochemicals, then you're talking about cultivating because farming is three things.

It is water, fertilizer, and weed control.

That's it.

And you can't get around that.

And we can get rid of labor with drip irrigation, computerized drip irrigation.

And on some crops, you can get rid of labor by mechanical harvesting.

Not a lot, but not soft fruits or grapes and stuff.

But even raisins are being mechanized.

But when you get down to weed control, you either spray it or you dig it out.

or you get a mechanical harvester and you burn fossil fuels, unless you can plug in your tractor.

So what I'm getting at is that it's very labor intensive.

The whole point in the 1950s for organophosphates and organochloride

and

nitrogen-based fertilizer was labor, labor, labor, cut down on the labor.

Don't haul in a bunch of trucks with the manure and then go get a tractor and shank it in and shank it in.

And then the resulting weeds go out, all of that.

And there was a lot of abuses of it.

And, you know, I can remember putting on something called Surfland.

And gosh, I had another contact agent that was an immediate weed killer with that pre-emergent and the roller pump blew up and I turned around and it got all over my face.

In those days, we didn't wear protective clothing and my hand turned from my fingernails to my elbow bright orange.

It stayed bright orange for about seven months and I started to taste like salmon in my mouth.

some kind of weird fish smell and taste and i had that taste in my mouth for a week i'm not any advocate of pesticides.

Anybody who's put them on doesn't like them.

But organic farming can produce very healthy food.

I think it probably is safer than having these pesticides on them.

But when you're talking about the amount of labor input into that and the cost and the production,

and you have 8 billion people, it's not going to work.

It's not going to work.

Yeah, here's,

if I may, Victor, as you're just pointing out there, I mean, there are truly massive consequences to this lumbarg's writing that uh you know i guess i'll just call them the davosi types are kind of mandating that developing nations use organic methods so here's what he wrote this nowhere is this tragedy more obvious in sri lanka where the imposition of organics has been calamitous president rajapaska ran for election in 2019 promising a transition to organic food production.

This policy produced nothing but misery.

The issuing of fertilizer caused rice production to drop by 20% in the first six months after the switch to organic farming was implemented.

Last winter, farmers predicted that tea yields could fall by as much as 40%, food prices rose, the cost of vegetables quintoupled, etc., etc.

So, yeah, this is a pipe, it's not a pipe dream, it's a reality.

I can remember driving in Greece with my parents 40,

44 years ago

and stopping to get strawberries and being told that that field had either used wet manure,

cow and pig manure that had not been aged, or there was an accusation that they mixed night's soil in it, i.e.

human fertilizer.

In those days in Greece, it was pretty wild, but they had the most beautiful strawberries.

And you have to be very careful when you buy fruit that touches the ground.

I learned that from farming.

So if it's a carrot in the ground or it's a melon that touches the ground and you have any of that.

Anyway, I ate them and I got E.

coli poisoning for three weeks.

And at one point I was at the Abankoles Mos Hospital and they said you might have to go on dialysis.

And so my point is that when you talk about organic, you're talking about insects that can be dangerous.

You're talking about types of wet manures you have to be very careful with.

You're talking about all sorts of things that were the bane of agriculture for 2,500 years.

I don't mind going away from chemicals.

As long as people realize why chemicals came in, it wasn't because of a silent spring conspiracy.

It was that a lot of people didn't have very much money and they said to the farmer, you do this, it'll kill this and kill.

And then they overdid it and then they wiped out predators and all that.

But even when I was farming full-time years ago, there was integrated pest management where you had selective, there was something called defend and dibrome and seven.

And some of the old guys would do that.

That was, we always call that liquid death or dust death.

A guy would go through a field and everything would fall off the grapevine.

I mean, everything.

The ladybug, a spider, it was horrific.

Or they would talk to you in their spray rig or their dusting sulfur machine and you could see the stuff drip out of their tank or the dust fall and you'd see insects on the ground just fall over.

Nobody wanted to do that.

So there was clear abuses is what I'm trying to get at, Jack.

But you go in the other direction and you're back to Hesiod's works in days at 2,700 years before Christ.

You should read about it, all of the challenges the former gets up with.

What's that called again, Victor?

Works in days.

You know, another thing, Jack, is this brings up, I'm glad you brought it up, because it brings up a larger point right now, and that is that part of the problem we're having right now with supply chain

and truckers who can't make it and people who can't get their bathroom remodeled and going into Home Depot or Lowe's and seeing the shelves is that this professional class, these people that we hear every night on television or Joe Biden or the Republic, either party,

they have completely forgotten in their exuberance about bicostal globalism and the good life, and

Bitcoins, and all of these Zooms, and all of this stuff, that who it is that lets them allow, allows them to live one more day.

It's farmers who get out there every damn day.

I mean, I got up usually at five in the morning, and I hear these people, their trucks are going, their almond fertilizing rigs are going, they're out there working.

And then I see people going to work that are painters and plumbers and electricians and framers and sheetrockers and general contractors and mechanics these people are what make this country better because they don't have counterparts in other countries quite like them

i've been all over the world when i look at truckers in different countries and i look at the way they build homes or they i look at the way they farm compared to americans we are very very lucky i had a guy came out yesterday because i have solar panels and there was a problem with all the problems i'm having with electricity and conduits.

And he just looked at it.

It was like an engineer's report at Stanford.

This is what happened.

This is what's wrong.

This is how to fix it.

Don't worry.

And you know what I mean?

It's just amazing.

And yet we deprecate them and we think they're losers because they don't make a particular salary.

And now they're in control of the country.

you know, because we're so short labor and everybody says that when I go to Palo Alto or I go have

lunch in Atherton or I go out to Mountain View or I go to Los Altos.

When I hear it, I'm always by myself, but I listen to other conversations.

It's, do you know an electrician?

Hey, guess what?

I got a really good roofer for you.

Hey, man, you won't believe I found a guy who can wire my house.

And it's like this class is helpless.

And they're all in search.

They have all this money and all these dollars are searching around for one honest, competent.

tradesman.

They're so rare and valuable.

And so I'm really glad that finally we're starting to appreciate those people and they're making a little bit more money.

And I don't know if it's more than the rate of inflation, but they're very skilled people.

Well, Victor, we just have a few minutes left and we'll pick up one more topic right after these important messages.

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

We were recording on Tuesday, May 10th.

I'm hoping this is up on Wednesday, the 11th.

By the way, I, who just is speaking, is Jack Fowler.

I am the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

I'm down in South Carolina for our annual meeting, and myself and my nearly 100 colleagues are determined to strengthen civil society.

And if that floats your boat, and I hope it does, check out what we do at centerforcivilsociety.com.

And I also write a weekly email newsletter.

It's free.

It has a dozen recommendations for worthwhile things that have been written the prior week.

It's called Civil Thoughts.

And you can sign up for that at civil thoughts.com.

Victor, last subject.

Sad news came yesterday that Midge Dector, great friend, personal friend and friend of conservatives, great social critic and author, passed away yesterday at the age of 94.

I was fortunate to see my old friend late last year at the Commentary Annual Dinner.

She was there.

She's the wife of Norman Podhoritz, the mother of John Podoritz, who's the editor of Commentary.

Ruthie Bloom is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post.

Just a lovely lady, Victor.

I know you knew Midge.

Do you have any thoughts?

It's one of these people that you really like on the first time you met them.

And I met her 20 years ago with her husband, Norman Portoritz.

I knew John Portoritz.

I know him.

I like all of them.

They're very bright people.

But with her, she had a little twinkle in her eye, a little mischievousness that I liked about her.

She gave a talk once at a college that I was having to teach at, and it was on the radical gay movement.

And it was talking about the hyper-promiscuity and hookup and certain elemental factors of gay lifestyles across time and space throughout history, very learned about, you know, not having children as often, et cetera, et cetera, all these things.

And a lot of people got very angry.

And the question and answer, she never lost her temper, but she never backed down.

And she said, there's elements here that are going to lead to things that, and I remember Gorvidal just, that was a period in which he was just really angry about her.

And,

you know, the spouse of Norman Poteretz, she was always in the fulcrum of these New York-Manhattan fights with former liberals, former conservatives, etc.

But she brought a sense of elegance and style to everything she did.

So I admired that.

And I remember she had edited Tom Soule, I think, when she was an editor.

I think she was an editor at Harper's, too.

And she was a wonderful editor.

We had talked about Tom's writing a lot when I talked to her because I was a good friend of Tom and Amiganfred.

There was everything about her.

I liked that she was tough and she was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who believed in egalitarianism and equal opportunity.

And sure enough, in the 70s and 80s, she thought this is not equal opportunity.

This is a quality of result forced down people's throats by an elite.

And she sort of, in some ways, was ahead of the MAGA movement in a weird way.

She saw trends in the American society that would be manifested with MAGA.

Even though she was a neoconservative, she was a neoconservative that did not hate the Trump movement.

That was what was unique about both her and her husband.

They had reservations because they

lived and seen Donald Trump in Manhattan.

They didn't approve probably of his business practices, but they were very empathetic to the people.

that he was trying to give a voice to.

And that was unique among people of their class and people of their association and intellectual cadre.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, like all people we know, friends, I hope we all are blessed to meet again in a happier and better place.

So that's about all the time we have, except at the end of this podcast, as we do the end of all podcasts, I'd like to thank our listeners for listening, for sharing.

the podcast with their friends, informing others.

And we do read the reviews that are sent to us via iTunes.

Thank you to whatever platform you listen on.

Thank you.

Those at iTunes, and especially those who leave ratings, especially five-star ratings, thank you.

Here's one typical comment.

It's from Beetle763.

And it says simply, my favorite podcast is what it's titled.

Victor is the only podcast that I look forward to.

His knowledge of history leaves.

me in awe every time i'm fifth generation living on our family farm i can totally relate.

Thanks, Beetle763, for that and for all who share their thoughts with us.

That is all the time we have today.

Thanks for listening.

Thank you, Victor, for sharing thoughts and wisdom.

And folks, we'll be back in a couple of days with yet another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

Much appreciated.