The Left from China to California

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler.
I'm just the host, the star, the namesake. That's Victor Davis Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Waynamar Shabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find everything Victor writes at victorhanson.com. You should subscribe too.
I'll tell you a little more about that later. As for me, check out civil thoughts.com.

Subscribe to the newsletter I write. All right, enough of that.

Let's get to what we're going to talk about today. Two things at the forefront of this program will be related to China.

We're going to talk about the Shanghai lockdowns, and we're going to talk about Taiwan. Does it need to be aggressively rearmed? And we'll get to those topics right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. We're recording on Monday, Easter Monday, April 18th.
This show will be up on the World Wide Webs on, I believe, April 21st.

So Victor, these are some issues that have been hanging around a little bit. Wish we could have gotten to them sooner.

The dynamics of what's happening in Shanghai and China may have changed, may change between today when we're recording and when we're up and people are listening to it.

Regardless of the change, there has been just a total oppression of human beings.

You know, the problem with China is the Chinese Communist Party and its brutal tactics, which it employs on its own people.

And one of the things they've done with a hint of COVID coming is to lock down Shanghai. And people are in desperate situations.
They need food to eat, right?

If you're locked in your apartment, et cetera. So I don't think this is any surprise, but I'd like to hear your thoughts about, if you have any general thoughts about this lockdown.

And then also, okay, we know about it, but I don't think we're hearing, there's certainly to me, no intense coverage of this in the American media.

I imagine it's one of the world's biggest cities, totally, everyone's shut down, locked up, and it gets really perfunctory news attention, at least by what I see.

And I think there's a reason for that. But anyway, Victor, your thoughts on what's happening in China itself in Shanghai? You make a good point.
I'd go even further.

I don't think in the history of post-industrial life, there has ever been an attempt to completely control every member of a huge multi-multi-million person city to the point where they're locked in their

apartments if they call and say they have a fever or they might if they're stupid enough to do that. I think none of them are doing that now.

Then they're taken to these huge centers, former pavilions for trade or international exhibits, and they're put in little cubby holes. And

they're given no hot water to take a shower. They're given pretty bad food and the lights are on 24-7.

And they're put in there not for five days, but apparently from First Town accounts, two or more weeks, three weeks some cases.

And they're doing this with a level of coercion that's just unimaginable in the West. And they're doing it.

I don't know why they're doing it because Europe's not doing it. We're not doing it.
Japan's not doing it.

I guess they had this reputation that they had stopped Omicron, and yet there were epidemiologists like John Yiannidis or Jay Bacharia or

general health policy experts like Scott Atlas, who warned us that if you take a population and you lock it away during these variant mutations, not only are you going to destroy the population in the sense of psychological damage, substance abuse damage, and missed important screenings for especially the young population that's not subject to serious COVID naturally.

So the downside we know now is worse than the upside. So they took this population

and it doesn't make any sense other than this variant of Omicron is not going to kill 99.9% of the population, especially if they've been vaccinated or they've had prior cases of COVID.

So why isn't it being covered? Partly it's the distraction of the Ukraine war and the democratic implosion at home.

And partly it's because China has always been given exemptions from normal scrutiny and censor and audit by the American media and the American corporate world and the American political class. Why?

Is it because they're less pernicious than the Russians? No, they're more pernicious because they have greater wherewithal.

But it's because so many Americans are making so much money from the chief financial officer who says we can gouge these Chinese foreign students to the joint venture cheap labor assembly plant in China to LeBron James.

Victor, I wonder if one of the reasons for acting so outlandishly is to show that they can indeed do this, as opposed to

showing the people of China, showing the people of the world that they can suppress an entire millions of people.

That's an excellent point.

I think we in the West feel that there are certain sidelines, parameters that we as a sophisticated post-industrial postmodern society don't dare go beyond, as if human nature has changed.

But when you meet somebody like Chinese communists or Putin,

they don't think that way. In fact, they think in a very scary manner that's even worse.

They think we are going to shock the Western world that history hasn't ended and it will never end and human nature is, and we're going to kill people and we're going to use a level of violence and we don't care what you say.

So Putin, he had planes that were capable of carrying nuclear weapons buzzing the skies of Ukraine.

And so is it impossible that he would send, you know, a one kiloton tactical nuclear weapon in a keyboard? No. He might do it just for the hell of it and say, what are you going to do about it?

Or Or is it impossible they could shut down all Beijing and Shanghai? Yeah, they could do it. And they could say, so what? We don't care what you say.

This is a government, remember, that knew COVID was a respiratory dangerous illness and highly infectious. And it started in Wuhan.
And privately, they knew it came from that lab.

And they shut down all commerce to and from Wuhan within China.

And they deliberately allowed flights to go uninterrupted to land in Europe and to land in the United States for about two weeks before travel bans were issued.

And then they called those travel bans racists. But in the meantime, they sent over a million people, many of whom,

all of whom were not vaccinated or tested. So that's the level of callousness that that government is capable of.

Victor, let's keep talking about the Chinese Communist government and Taiwan. I was caught on Fox about a week ago.
General Jack Keene was on and saying

what America needs to do is to aggressively arm Taiwan now, not wait, just start pushing military weapons, et cetera.

Therefore, I don't know if it was to brace China against actually mimicking Russia and invading Ukraine, to keep China from invading Taiwan, or this, I don't know, to me, a sense that this is going to happen sooner or later, and they might as well have as much armaments as possible to push back and maybe to replicate in a way what Ukraine has done with Russia.

So, Victor, you are a military historian. One of the things you do at the Hoover Institution is you run this military strategy group, publishes Strategica.

What thoughts do you have about what America should be doing with Taiwan right now? Well, I don't think we should be talking about it. I understand that.

General Keene is trying to be an advocate and he needs the public for, but I think most people should be very quiet about it because it's better to be quiet and carry a big stick than loud and then not follow through.

So you get the downside if you say that we're going to arm Taiwan and then you don't. And the Chinese will give you the downside, but you're not going to get any upside.

The better way to do it is just be very quiet. They were looking at the matter and then flood it with arms.

But I think what he's saying is that if you think about it, Ukraine, Jack, has become our Spanish Civil War, so to speak. I know that Ukraine is a separate nation, but it is Russian-affiliated.

And what's happened is it's become the laboratory or laboratory, if I use a fancy British term earlier, laboratory of weapons of the future. Just like from 1936 to 1939, we discovered a lot of things.

That Stutka dive bombers were pretty effective.

There was such a thing called blitzkrieg, that tanks supported by aircraft could do a lot of damage, that Germany was very sophisticated and starting to rearm.

And the nationalists, who probably didn't have broad initial support, won because their patrons sent more weapons in that were better than the communist Russia under Joseph Stalin did to the anarchists and the communists and the social popular front, so-called Republicans.

But there was a laboratory to see what worked and what didn't. And out of that conundrum came the blitzkrieg of 1939 into Poland.
The same thing's happening in Ukraine. We're learning a lot.

And we're learning that these sophisticated anti-tank weapons and these anti-aircraft latest generation of weapons can really help neutralize a very powerful traditional artillery tank force if it's in difficult terrain or within cities or suburbs.

When we get out out into the open spaces as the war is transmogrifying into eastern Ukraine, we'll see what happens. They might need sophisticated tanks.

The other thing we're starting to see is that logistics, logistics, logistics, that was a tenet going back to classical Greece and Rome. That's what made the army of Alexander the Great so effective.

They had caches of food every every 20 miles in advance. They could march 20 miles a day and they had a meal waiting when they got there.

You know, Don Lingles wrote something called the logistics of Alexander the Great years ago. And that's important because when you see all those long convoys that were sabotaged,

I said ambushed, excuse me, and taken out by individual teams of roving javelin or RPG shooters. And those trucks, they were not anyway carefully maintained.

In other words, their tires had not been, they had been sitting there.

You know, anybody knows that when you have an old truck or a tractor and you don't use it, the tire becomes stale and it will crack and they hadn't been maintained and then all of a sudden they lost the entire war in the major cities essentially because of poor logistics and maintenance so out of that spanish civil war experience in ukraine you're starting to see general strategic and tactical lessons vis-a-vis taiwan will the taiwanese fight like the ukrainians if they do fight like the ukrainian and they arm the population and they become a nation in arms then they're going to be very difficult to take out without nuclear weapons.

And if every block in Taipei has a javelin team and an SAM team, and they've got buried tanks and they've got artillery platforms, and they've got harpoon missiles and bunkers all along the coast that can take out a transport with thousands of amphibious troops 40 miles out in the South China Sea, and the world gets outraged, as they are with Ukraine, and they level stiff sanctions.

Do you think Beijing's really going to want to do that? And they're going to look at Putin and they're going to see how he handles that.

Do they want to lose eight generals the way that the Russian army has? So

I think it's going to give communist China a pause is what I'm saying.

And we're starting to see the contours how a postmodern war is going to be fought, even with a nuclear bully attacking a nearby breakaway or supposedly irredentist ideology that says that everybody who speaks Russian or Chinese belongs back to the mother country.

I don't think that's, I don't think that's a given anymore.

Yeah, Victor, I didn't catch the entirety of your recent discussion with Sammy about the Ukraine war and the Moscow, however you pronounce the Russian ship that was sunk.

But that is one of the new contours. Navies are really at great risk.
And we've sort of talked about this before, but the sinking of that ship, I think. That was the pride of the Russian fleet.

We were told that its offensive punch was greater than any comparably sized cruiser. It was a cruiser, if you use the archaic World War II terms, about 12,000 tons.
But it was easily sunk.

I guess some drones came in around it and buzzed around it and confused its anti-aircraft defense system.

And then two harpoon-like missiles, we claim they weren't harpooned, maybe they were indigenously built.

They came in and kind of like a javelin, they went up and went right on top of it and blew it up.

And that was, if you look at those aerial photographs all during the war, it was the big ship and every berth it was twice as large, or it was always referenced as the ship of the future.

It was a ship the U.S. Navy had been warning us about that they had to really increase production.

of our own frigates and what our cruisers because of what this new Russian ship represented, the acme of supposedly cramming offensive weapons, cruise missiles, torpedoes, et cetera, ship-to-shore batteries into one ship.

It was supposed to have sophisticated anti-aircraft defense mechanisms, and yet it was easily taken out. I don't know whether that has sent a shudder up the spine of the U.S.

Navy, or it's encouraged them and reassured them that their ship wouldn't have been taken out like that because it was much better equipped to combat incoming missiles, or what the effect has on the Chinese in the sense of, on the one hand, well, our harpoon-like missiles will take out all the American ships that try to provide support for Taiwan, or Taiwan will take out all our ships of a cross-channel landing.

Well, Victor, let's move from China back here to the United States, and we'll talk about Project Veritas and some accusations it's made against the Biden Department of Justice.

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

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show recording on Monday, July 18th. And this particular podcast is being aired on April 21st.

So, Victor, I'm going to read quickly here a headline or story from published the other day on Fox News.

It's titled Project Veritas Founder Says Department of Justice secretly forced Apple, Google, to provide data. And here are the first two paragraphs of this article by Joseph Wolfson.

The Department of Justice forced both Apple and Google to provide data belonging to Project Veritas and its associates as part of its probe into the whereabouts of Ashley Biden's missing diary.

Founder James O'Keefe said, James is the founder of Project Veritas.

O'Keefe announced that both tech giants came forward, revealing they were hit with, quote, nine secret subpoenas, end quote, to monitor, quote, professional and private accounts, end quote, into the group's security detail.

After it was previously revealed that Microsoft also received such orders from the feds, O'Keeffe stressed that the data being collected by the Department of Justice includes everything.

from texts and emails to private photos as well as quote information of our sources end quote Victor, same

Department of Justice that is hunting down, you know, nasty parents at school board meetings, et cetera. This is quite troubling to me anyway.

What are your thoughts about what Merrick Garland and company are doing? It's scary, Jack.

I mean, if you think of the FBI as a private retrieval service also for the Biden family to add on to this, whether it's his daughter's diary they went after James O'Keefe, or whether it's Joe Biden's laptop they put on ice before the election.

This is besides all of the antics of James Baker and Andrew McCabe lying to federal investigators and

Kevin Klein Smith forging a document, FBI lawyer, and no need to get into the page struck stuff.

But you get the impression that the hierarchy, at least, I don't want to disparage the agents in the field, but these hierarchy, this hierarchy came from somewhere.

And so there must be a broader culture of corruption that they're politicized. And they feel they will be promoted into positions of ultimate influence depending on their political calibrations.

And the Justice Department, whether we're talking about Bruce Orr during the Russian hoax who was channeling his wife's fraudulent information into the proper channels, or we're talking about Loretta Lynch and the tarmac tarmac scene with Bill Clinton, the accidental meeting of two private jets where they discussed what?

Hillary's emails, they said they did, and they discussed their grandchildren, but no one believed that. So, I'm really worried that this goes back, you know, I always say it goes back to Obama.

He was the one that cooked up, as I said, the racial diversity polarization. But he also cooked up this idea that the federal government can go monitor people.

So, when Eric Colder went after the AP reporters, remember that?

And James Rosen, and then they unleashed Lois Lerner to go after nonprofits that they thought were conservative to deny them nonprofit status before the 2012 reelection effort. No one said a word.

And no one said a word of all these things. They just detailed.
But the fact is

that the FBI,

The DOJ, and I'm not talking about the change of guard when you have a Republican or a Democratic president.

It gets worse, of course, with a Democratic liberal president, but the entrenched hierarchy is out of control.

And

to a lesser extent, it's true in the Pentagon. This is exactly what the founders were scared of, a permanent judge, jury, executioner, legislative, judicial, executive bureau.
in charge of our lives.

It's very scary.

And boy,

there's two sides of this coin, Jack. It's what they did to James O'Keefe,

what they did when they went after Carter Page,

what they did when they went after the Trump campaign, what they did when they went after the parents and the school boards trying to monitor them, what they did on January 6th with all those informants.

Don't ask me, ask liberal reporter Matthew Rosenberg, who told us for a year that this was an insurrection and then privately off the cuff got caught bragging that it wasn't. It was a joke.

It was a buffoon riot, but there were more FBI people there than he'd seen. He saw them everywhere.
So, what I'm getting at is that this agency is out of control and it's dangerous.

And I don't know how to break it up other than we've got to take the FBI headquarters and move it out of Washington. maybe Kansas City, somewhere in this center.
I prefer it maybe in Utah or Nevada.

Just get it out of Washington. So you don't have these incestuous power relationships where Andrew McCabe is married to someone running for office in

Virginia who's channeling

Terry McCall of Clinton money for her campaign at the same time her husband is investigating the Clinton emails, why the media says it's all perfectly okay,

or good old Bob Mueller that everybody knows in Washington, or James Comey, who evolves from DOJ to Lockheed.

Just sick and break it up. And I hate to say that about the FBI, but final comment, Jack, it's not just heirs of commission.
Think of all the omission, the omission.

So how many people has the FBI interrogated? Did they not know who this Frank James was? They had no idea who he was. They had no idea who Mr.
Brooks was.

They had no idea who the Sarnovs brothers were. They were warned by Russian intelligence of all people.
They had no idea who the San Bernardino terrorists are.

So what I'm getting at is they had no idea of the major at, was it Fort Riley that shot Ala Akbar, shot 13 people in the Pentagon said it was workplace violence.

I'm getting at is that when you concentrate on these peripheral issues that are woke and designed to ingratiate yourself to congressional committees or permanent bureaucrats or left-wing administrators, you're omitting certain things they feel could be called racist or Islamophobic.

And the result of it is the FBI is not doing their job. They're not.
To the degree they are doing their job, they're committing crimes.

When you have FBI informants egging on some buffoons in Michigan to kidnap the governor, why do you have more FBI informants or agents involved in that process than the actual kidnap kingpins, according to two who have been acquitted and then hung juries on two of the testimonies that have come out.

Or why on January 6th, do you really have the whole crowd infiltrated by FBI agents? I don't understand what's going on.

I think most Americans are more afraid of the FBI now than they ever have been in their entire life. Yeah.
More than under J. Edgar Hoover.

I thought that we learned something about listening in to when Bobby Kennedy and everybody as Attorney General and J.

Edgar Hoover were listening in to the intimate conversations of Martin Luther King. We weren't going to do that.
That's what the Frank Church Committee was all about in 76, 77.

We're not going to do this anymore. And yet we have a liberal establishment who feels that, you know, any means necessary are approved because of our exalted superior morality in.

Well, Victor, you just mentioned people not doing their jobs.

And we're going to look at California, where there is a bill pending, just been introduced in the legislature that will sort of work in that direction. Let's pay people not to work.

So we will talk about that and one other lunacy in your beloved home state right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. I'd like to recommend folks to subscribe to victorhanson.com.
I mean, go there, play around in it, to go everywhere.

There's a lot of interesting and free articles and clips of the podcasts Victor's done, appearances he's made, but there is a significant amount of exclusive material. It's called Ultra.

You can only read it if you subscribe, and it's well worth the subscription. Five bucks a month, $50 a year.
That's at victorhanson.com.

So Victor, our mothership for this podcast is John Solomon's Just the News. And here's the beginning of a piece it published the the other day.

California could move to shorten the work weeks for employees of large companies. I think that's an important word large.

Under a new proposal by state lawmakers, Assembly Bill 2932, introduced by Assembly Members Evan Lowe and Christina Garcia, would make a 32-hour workweek the standard for companies with more than 500 employees.

Any work done over 32 hours would trigger overtime of at least 1.5 times the regular rate of pay, according to the bill.

Additionally, any work above 12 hours in a day must be compensated at twice the regular pay rate.

The bill also states that an employee's pay at 32 hours should remain the same as it was at 40 hours, directing an employee to maintain an employee's regular rate of pay despite the reduced hourly work week requirement.

Victor, that's for companies with 500 or more employees.

I have a feeling that doesn't affect a lot of people out of small business owners that will have to be working 80 hours a week to make a living. I'd just like to get your thoughts on that.

Plus, this other, there's another bill, not a bill, there's actually a law out in California that's called the Private Attorneys General Act.

And this is from a piece in National Review published on April 18th. And it talks about this bill.
It's called PAGA.

And it says, through PAGA, California has deputized aggrieved employees and their attorneys to sue small businesses on behalf of the state for even the most minuscule violation of California labor law.

A typo on a pay stub, unstructured breaks, or miscalculated overtime could result in a million-dollar infraction for your local diner, muffler shop, or salon.

And the possibilities for private attorneys are endless. California's sprawling 1,100-page labor code is too vast and bloated for state attorneys to enforce on their own.

As a consequence, the state outsources to, some might say, incentivizes private attorneys to sue on behalf of the state of California.

Victor, this is the mindset that is encapsulated in the PAGA bill, which, by the way, is up before the Supreme Court. It's an important case pending before the United States Supreme Court.

Between that bill and this legislation, I mentioned there is a very unhealthy, un-American dynamic going on in this state. Your thoughts?

I mean, France tried it, Jack, and it hasn't worked out very well. The idea that if you work 32 hours, you're less stressed and you're going to be more productive than you, it's not true.

I mean, I think last week at somewhere around Wednesday, I could have said, I did my 40 hours or my 32 hours and I'm done. I'm not going to work anymore.
I wouldn't have gotten anything done.

And so we all know that, but it's part of this larger trend, as you point out in California, that we always take a bad situation and we make it worse. We double down.

And the logic is that we've screwed up the state, but it's not because we screwed up the state, it's because we haven't screwed it up enough. So let's just do a little bit more of this.

So right now, we have a terrible labor shortage in California, where the incentives through the COVID relief packages, whether it was the American Rescue Plan or

printing money in California, we're not performing as well as Texas or Florida with our misguided COVID lockdown practices. But part of it is we have state incentives not to work.

So if you want, and I can tell you somebody that in the last 60 days have dealt with insulators, septic electricians, painters, roofers, they all tell me the same thing.

There's nobody willing to work. They cannot get workers.

So in that climate, think about the mentality that we're going to make it harder for a small business to perform, either by unleashing subsidized jackals to go out and sue them or to

make it, you know, everybody's not going to work as long as they were going to work. It's just insane.
And who does this hurt? It hurts the poor because the poor need affordable housing.

It's not going to get built. The poor have small businesses that grassroots startup business.

They can't start up because of this and who's making the laws if you look at the background of the california legislature they're usually that's dominated by wealthy tech money going into the coffers of particular candidates they come out of tech they come out of teachers they come out as lawyers they come out of the political apparatus bureaucracy but they do not come out of small business people

or farmers or anybody that's had to

deal on their own with meeting a payroll or hiring people or trying to make a business and that's why people are leaving we've had for the first time a net loss of population in california so essentially to sum it up we took paradise and made it hell and hell was natural texas and they made it into paradise and people are leaving for places like that i think everybody i talk to they all say the same thing

if i could

leave, if I didn't have children here or grandchildren, I would leave in second.

And there's nobody that wants to stay here because they feel they have a target on their back. We imported two things.

Imported great poverty from Mexico, and we brought in a lot of people illegally and without the tools to rapidly transition into the middle class. And we're still doing that.

And then we imported a lot of very wealthy people who flocked here to this $6 trillion

market capitalized Silicon Valley global markets. And from all over the world, they came here.

And that was a lethal combination because we had a lot of people who got fantastically wealthy and then used the rest of the population as their lab rot mice to experiment upon their utopian ideas that would never affect them.

And then we had a lot of poor people who did not have the linguistic, educational, or cultural skills yet.

in a climate where the elite discourage assimilation or integration to take up the slack of the middle class that was leaving. It wasn't just the white middle class.

It was middle class third generation Mexican Americans. A lot of African-American populations dipped because they thought, you know, there's nothing here for me.

I'm not a wealthy guy that can afford $1,000 a square foot on the coast. I can't afford to put solar panels on my house.
I can't afford to pay the highest gasoline or electric prices. So I'm leaving.

And then there were poor people who said, well, I'm subsidized and the welfare money is pretty good, but the crime is bad, the schools are bad, the roads are bad. So, and who dreamed all this?

So, we want to find a name to associate with all of this, because we do know that people said

that we came out pretty well when the country was not doing well in the 70s. The Carter, we did okay.

And that was because we had Ronald Reagan, you know, from 66 all the way to 74. Then we had Pete Wilson or George Mason, excuse me.
Then we had Pete Wilson and even Schwarzenegger.

So we mostly had Republican government. And as soon as that stopped and supermajorities took over, that was because of tech and as I said, immigration and flight.

Then we got what we have now. And so they just completely undid what bipartisan Democrats and Republicans had did.
They stopped. fixing the aqueduct.
They stopped building reservoirs.

They stopped widening and improving roads. They stopped traditional classical education in the public schools.
They stopped race-neutral plans in their major university. They politicized Caltech.

They politicized Stanford. They politicized Berkeley.
They changed the name of Bold Hall. They started, all of that craziness came out of the Obama, started in the Clinton years, but then

Obama, then the Jerry Brown eight years were a, we recalled a Democratic governor Gray Davis. That wasn't that long ago, 20 years ago, but started with Jerry Brown 2.0 and then Gavin Newsom and then

and it would change it all reflected a change demography and now the $64,000 question is how bad does life have to get how dangerous you are going to feel from a criminal from a bad driver from somebody you know will break in your house or hit and run you on the street and you know they will not be indicted or how bad does it have to get before you leave?

Either before you leave or before popular outrage of people is such that they demand that their own liberal politicians they voted for get out? I don't know.

History's got an ambiguous record on that, whether people can get angry enough and change it before chaos. Victor, got two minutes to talk about a thing that won't leave.

And those are these black birds that are haunting. I'm looking out the window at them right now.
So you've written

at victorhanson.com. It's one of your ultra articles.

Sometimes you write about what's it like to have a farm or property from your childhood to present, and you reminisce and you antagonize about the history of these birds that have haunted you.

You portray yourself a little bit as the old man on get off my

lawn.

But we only have two minutes, but could you tell our listeners about what prompted you to write about these nasty little things that never go away?

Well, I've kind of been reduced because I used to help farm 180 acres and they were terrible blackbirds.

They'd come onto red grapes, peck them, the juice would come down, cause bunch rout, increase botrytis, or they'd plump a beautiful plum or peach when they had a red color.

And we did all sorts of things that I described. We put balloons with fake sparrow hawk kites below them.
We had sound machines. We had glittering metal.
And, you know, it didn't work.

We had fake owls. So when my world's shrunk and now I have a backyard and I see these things, you know, they'd like to, they look for water.

So when they're nesting, they go in with their beaks and take the feces out of the nest. For some reason, it's hardwired.
They'll go to a puddle or a swimming pool and drop the feces in.

And they come back around in this part of the year, around late March. They get acculturated again to where they grew up and they have their nest everywhere.

So I've got about 100 of them, and they're right in my backyard. We have a pool.
They drop their feces in the pool. You put a cover, it's covered.
You don't know which is where.

Pull the plastic cover off, wash it off, or just clean the pool. And they defecate, they squawk.
And then when they start to have,

you know, they fall out of the nest. There's little squawker birds everywhere that are dead on the lawn.
It's a mess, and you don't know how to get them. So I've tried every classical solution.

I had a lot of good ideas from the readers and because I didn't use that word grackles you guys use it in the East Coast, but everybody said, oh, that's what they are.

And, you know, some people said, you got to get an owl, Victor, that makes noise. Your owl doesn't make noise.
These are emails that get open.

You have rubber snake. Yeah, I have seven rubber snakes.
You have glittering disc. Yeah, I have a whole wall of glittering disc.

Do you have noise? Well, no, but if I have booming, then the dogs go crazy or the neighbors go crazy. Do I have a gun? Well, I have a one's.22 caliber pellet gun.

I can't use a.22 or shotgun because it's all around furniture and stuff. So I try to, you know, picking off a blackbird with a pellet gun is an endless task.
Right.

And so I'm just living with them now

and

getting angry and frustrated, A, that I'm so petty because they do leave in June. They move on and just, you know, they have a different, they'll do something else with somebody else.

But every time I've gone to a place in this valley, a restaurant that's had a fountain or a swimming pool, I always look and it's just covered with Blackbird feces.

Folks, I really do want to encourage you to read these pieces. It's a two-part series.
It's at victorhanson.com.

Again, it is one of the exclusive articles, but I think many people find Victor's writings about his farm life and his youth quite enjoyable. So, Victor, that's almost all the time we have.

I just would like to read one comment someone left on iTunes. So, you can go to iTunes if you listen through Apple and please consider rating this podcast.
It gets up to five stars.

If you want to leave a comment, go ahead.

If you want to leave a question, I've mentioned before, Victor will be going away in May, and we're going to be pre-recording some podcasts that answer your questions. So, we're not going to

have a break. We're not going to have a two-week period without podcasts, but we want to populate these podcasts with your questions.

And the iTunes venue is a good place to leave them as questions, as comments. Anyway, that said, here's one from Jake MD58, just as thank you.
That's the title.

What will we do if we ever lose a voice like VDH?

He keeps me from the depths of despair and inspires hope while he shares his historical perspective and brings lessons of history to bear on our current brokenness.

Can never fully express the gratitude so many of us feel toward you.

He should consider becoming a Lutheran preacher.

Heaven knows we need one. Jake MD 58.

Reverend Hansen, that's a very kind thought.

Your religious aspects.

Again, I will repeat.

Victor gave some

talked about the Gospel of St. John in a recent podcast with Sammy Wink.
So go back. Maybe we'll see if he has the qualifications to be a preacher.
So, hey, thanks, Jake MD58.

Thanks, everybody who listens. Again, subscribe, victorhanson.com.
For me, civilthoughts.com, get the newsletter we've published. I hope you'll enjoy it.
We appreciate everyone listening.

And I think that's it, Victor. We'll be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
Thanks a lot. And thank you, everybody, for listening again.
Very much appreciate it.