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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are recording on February 21st, 2022, George Washington's birthday.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I am the host.

I am the author of Civil Thoughts.

You'll find that at civilthoughts.com.

More importantly is the namesake and star Victor Davis Hansen, the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

And Victor is also the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

On Twitter, he's at VD Hanson.

Hey, he's got a website, victorhanson.com.

We'll talk about that in a little bit.

And well, we'll talk about it much sooner than later because one of the pieces we're going to be talking about, one of Victor's original pieces of writing that he does for VictorHanson.com is called Five Realities.

We Dare Not Speak, but we're going to speak about one of them right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So, again, at victorhanson.com, I want to tell you that among the latest, numerous exclusive pieces there, by the way, folks, you gotta subscribe.

You really should.

It's $5

a month, $50 for the year.

That's just a copious amount of original material that can only be read at that website.

If you're listening to this podcast and you're not subscribing, I just don't, it's a mystery to me.

But I'm digressing.

Anyway, Victor, hello, my friend.

One of your pieces, one of these exclusive pieces, we'll take a little bit.

We'll discuss it.

We'll pull it out from behind the paywall.

We'll discuss one of the aspects of it.

It's called Five Realities, We Dare Not Speak.

And let's just talk about, I'll tell you the five realities there.

We have no border, Biden, Harris, Pelosi, hate crimes.

If my fingers would work, Victor, on turning the page, I would be able to tell our listeners, oh, the pushback is here.

Indeed, it is.

It's here and it's coming on even hot and heavy in November.

But the one we should be talking about today is called male to female sports heroes.

And here's how this section of this piece begins.

When we look at the phenomenon of transgendered athletes, quote-unquote, women, formally identifying as men, such as University of Pennsylvania medal-winning swimmer Leah Thomas, we know immediately this is not fair, but we dare not say that.

Victor, I have to admit, I like that this guy's last name, and he is still a guy.

I think we know that the reports from the fellow, the women swimmers at the U Penn team complain that, you know, he takes his swimming suit off.

Guess what?

He still has his manhood there.

If anyone else did...

walked into a women's locker room like that, they'd be arrested.

But, you know, he's lauded by the media.

Well, anyway, Victor, I take a perverse verse, thrill that his last name, Thomas, is actually a guy's name.

That said, Victor, would you expand on your thoughts about this male-to-female sports craze lunacy, idiocy?

Well, I think the basic facts are not in dispute, Jack, that he went through puberty

and early manhood.

and he has the muscular skeleton frame, muscle skeleton frame of a man.

And And so he has the size of a man.

He has the body mass of a man.

So he has all the advantages of a man.

And then he's announced that he suffers from gender dysphoria, which in the old days we had various manifestations of.

Some of it was transvestism from the Latin words for changing the clothing.

So people were still primarily of one gender, but they liked to dress in the clothes of the other on occasion.

We had a word called transsexualism, which meant this very, very, very tiny percentage of the population was probably chromosomally or genetically mismatched.

So they were maybe thought they were one gender in the wrong body.

And we know that that's scientifically, there's, and then

we renamed all this transgenderism and said it's a national epidemic.

And we had mechanisms to, we had surgeries in the past.

It was all, but nobody in the past said that it was not biological.

It was socially constructed.

I noticed they don't do it with race.

Elizabeth Warren tried to.

Ward Churchill tried to.

Rachard Dolzel tried to.

Sean King tried to.

And they all met opposition.

But for some reason, this is a protected species of left-wing.

hysteria.

So we now, Mr.

Thomas, Mrs.

Thomas, Leah Thomas, whatever the correct pronoun is, has announced he's he's a woman and he's been under hormonal therapy, but not for a long time.

He has not made, as you pointed out, the radical and often disfigurative or dangerous transition to removing his male organs.

And he's basically a man in terms of sports, and he's destroying all of these long-held and spectacular female swimming records.

And he will destroy them all, as any

fairly successful, but not top male athlete would do.

And that's what he's doing.

And it's funny because in the past, when people try to do that, remember the, I think their name was Press Sisters in the Soviet Union, that one was a Tamara press.

They tried to do this.

And, you know, the Americans went crazy and said, you've got to take a spit test to find out what their hormone level.

We didn't have DNA like we do now, but there had always been the temptation that this could happen.

And I don't quite understand the politics on the left.

I know there's this word they use intersectionality, and that's supposed to be enhancements.

If you're black and you're gay and you're female, each is an enhancement or a force multiplier of the other in the hierarchy of victimhood.

But I don't quite understand how when they collide.

And so here we have feminism in a positive sense.

It was trying to bring needed stature and recognition to female sports and get equity through Title IX.

And then we have a male kind of breaking down the door and entering this domain and hijacking it and taking away a lot of its luster.

And more importantly, setting an example to other semi-successful male athletes that if you don't, you're never going to reach the pinnacle of excellence.

then jump over to the other genders and maybe for a while.

We don't know what the future of his gender will be.

And And it raises a lot of questions, though, and that is, why don't we have females who are transgendering to men enter men's sports?

Because according to the doctrine of socially constructed gender, they would be just as successful as Mr.

Thomas is, the former Mr.

Thomas is.

But we never see that, Jack.

We don't see some female swimmer who now says she's a man and she joins the male swim team and breaks records.

Now, why is that?

According to their doctrine, that should happen

because sex and biology, sex

is not biologically directed.

It's constructed socially.

You just don't see that.

And that's what

I think is a travesty.

And we can't speak about it.

I'll get a lot of hate mail just for saying this.

It's a very strange thing in the pyramid of intersectionality.

It's at the pinnacle.

I think it trumps race and feminism or any other

aspect or variety of victimhood.

Why feminists, professional feminists, if I may,

don't combat this more aggressively is kind of shocking because they are the ones, well, society in general is bearing the cost of this.

By the way, Victor, he was the 432nd in his whatever races he competed in, the 432nd best college male swimmer in America.

So

it's very dangerous.

He's basically

by example, and there will be others who follow him, and there are already, especially in track and

sprints and hurdles and things.

He's saying to a lot of mediocre male athletes, not mediocre, more than mediocre, but not the top.

If you want to take some hormones and transition, not that a lot would, but there will be some, then you can get a lot of notoriety and you can be probably a very lucrative career if you're willing to do it.

And many will be willing to do it.

And we're going to destroy women's sports.

I mean, we have categories.

We could have a transgender Olympic, just like a special Olympics.

We could do that.

We could do that.

And there would be no objection whatsoever.

But they've really hijacked the cultural.

levers of power and influence on the left.

And it's also destructive because we know from statistics that there's not as large a natural group as the people who are transgendering.

In other words,

because of this new movement, a lot of young people who are confused anyway in their teens about things such as sex and hormones and all that, as they come into puberty, they are transitioning.

And some of them,

either through the advocacy of the schools or their parents or whatever, they're taking a whole menu of of very dangerous drugs, hormonal drugs, and drugs that accentuate the opposite sexes characteristic.

And to those that have removed breast

or they have changed their genitalia, it's not necessarily an easy thing to do.

And it has is fraught with medical complications.

And because so many of the people are confused in this process, and yet they're taking drugs and going under procedures that are irreversible in some cases.

It's kind of a, I don't know why the medical community is on board enthusiastically when they should show a little bit of skepticism and have sort of a checklist that before a doctor prescribes very powerful drugs to someone 13 or 14 or 12, they have to meet a certain criteria from parent.

parental permission to long periods of counseling.

But it's, it's, it's bizarre what's happening.

It's part of this woke hysteria that's erupted the last five years.

Usually happens, as you know, without parental involvement or in opposition to parental involvement.

So, well, Victor, yeah, I find it very troubling and not to be too much of a wise ass, but I think you could see some has-been NBA player just saying,

I'm declaring myself a woman.

I want to play in the WNBA and just, you know, running around side.

Yeah, and we didn't even, we didn't even mention the homosexual community because it is at odds with them as well.

Because a lot in the homosexual community have made an argument, I think successful argument, that there is a small percentage of the population that is biologically wired.

And I'm not going to say it's aberrant.

I'm just trying to say that I see it in animal kingdom all the time growing up on a farm.

But there are people who are biologically wired.

I don't think it's all culturally constructed, that they have an attraction to the same sex.

And I mean, we disagree, but there's some tensions there is what I'm trying to say.

So that if you're a male and you're more effeminate than masculine and you're homosexual,

it doesn't mean that you want to become a woman.

It means that you are a...

category of male that enjoys male relations, but you're still male.

And the homosexual community, gay and homosexual or male homosexual and female homosexual, have been very clear that they feel that they're strong advocates of women or men, that they identify and they take pride in that identification.

The transgendered movement sort of says, well, if you're attracted to somebody of your same biological sex, then you transition over and make a change to do so in many cases.

So there's not only tensions with feminism, but there's tensions.

That's why people like, I think Andrew Sullivan have been in trouble with a transgendered movement.

Right.

Well, Victor, let's move on to a cleaner subject, politicians making bundles at the hands of Red China.

So I've ordered, I've not gotten it yet, Peter Schweitzer's new book, Red Handed, How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win.

I like Peter.

He came on one of the national cruises I ran.

He was just a terrific guy.

He was a really smart guy, too.

And this is like his third or fourth best-selling book.

And he really gets the details.

Some of his previous books were ahead of time telling about big, you know, the 10%

big guy, Joe Biden, and all the family antics into making money off of name and position.

So all that said, Victor, not having seen the book, but I saw an article that Breitbart published over the weekend.

It highlighted 20 former and current Republicans, elected officials, I should say, Republicans, who are part of his investigation, who are part of this making money operation off of Red China.

They include Mitch McConnell, former Speaker John Boehner, Haley Barber, Jeb Bush, Herry Bransted.

We mentioned this issue in one of our most recent podcasts, Victor, that the Soviet Union never had the luxury of former congressmen lobbying for them.

And I shouldn't necessarily compare things here.

I do find this more troubling for the Republican brand than say something, you know, like Liz Cheney, we got to get rid of Liz Cheney.

I find this kind of involvement with the country that wants to stomp on America just

horrible.

Anyway, Victor, those are my thoughts.

You may have the book.

You may have looked at it already, but what are your thoughts on this stain on the grand old party and its kowtowing to Red China?

Well, I think it's atrocious.

I've always admired Peter Schweitzer.

He was a colleague at the Hoover Institution.

I don't know why he left.

I know why, but I don't approve approve on our end why he left.

He's had two enormous advantages when he writes these.

Remember, he was basically the guy who taught the nation about uranium one,

but he's very soft-spoken.

He's not hysterical.

He's matter-of-fact.

And two, as you point out, he's...

he goes after Republicans, which makes him very unpopular in the Republican establishment.

And he has in this case as well.

And I have to be very careful because I've had this experience Jack where I have associates I'm not just saying at Hoover or any but everywhere in of the people that I deal with that

I start to learn they have sizable financial interest in Chinese commerce or investment and

Some of them, a very few brave ones, that has taught them that they're dealing with what it is to use that trite it is what it is they're dealing with totalitarians that want to destroy the United States and they are some of the best advocates but it's insidious it is insidious and as I said earlier when you look at the Wuhan

virus to use that Trumpian term they were absolute masters at mimicking the left's woke propaganda and suggesting any indication that you wanted to connect that where the evidence led to the level four biology lab, the origins of COVID, was met with, you are racist.

And so it's weird.

And you mentioned the Soviet Union-Russia, but they are pikers compared to this propaganda machine.

And our financial class

knows that.

And so they know that if they get in bed with the Chinese, the left will leave them alone because of the nostalgia of Mao and his little red book in the 60s and all that stuff.

They always go easy on communist governments.

And the right would not be doing what they're doing vis-a-vis their political attitude toward China if it was 1970 and it was a backward third world country.

It's 1.4 billion people plugged into hypercapitalism.

And they're generating a lot of money and they need to catch up by stealing copyrights and patents and dumping,

manipulating their money, dumping product in the world market below the cost of production, asymmetrical trade.

All of that is being aided and abetted by American left-wing and right-wing people.

And you know what's funny is that we can almost take anybody, Jack.

Look at that last presidential election.

We had Michael Bloomberg.

He had said, and it came out when he declared his candidacy, that it was not a dictatorship, that G had to respond to consensual government interests.

He had a constituency as if he was, you know, a European parliamentarian, I guess.

And then we had Bloomberg.

We found out at the same time that he had over $10 billion in investments trying to jumpstart startup companies, I should say, many of them that were affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.

And then we had Steve Kerr,

that coach in the NBA, that was giving, being a mouthpiece and said, you know, don't criticize the Chinese.

We have mass shootings.

He couldn't produce any data because the numbers compared to the Uyghurs are minuscule of people who were shot every year in mass shootings at school.

Then we had LeBron, who over the lifetime of his Nike contract will be about a billion dollars.

He can say everything in the world negatively about the U.S.

police and U.S.

culture.

He won't utter a peep.

This brave man won't utter a peep about China.

Then we had this Turkish-American athlete who has been very good about being honest, and he's going to be on the outs.

And he wasn't like Colin Kaepernick at the end of his career.

He was still very good.

I think he was already released.

Yeah,

he's gone.

And I could go on, but I mean,

every

politician, athlete, retired general, all of them have these ties with China, and it affects our ability as a country in a very confident fashion to say these people,

they want to destroy Taiwan.

They want to exploit Australia.

They're behind North Korea, bullying South Korea.

They've even convinced the Philippines that they were stupid to alienate us because China is their real existential enemy.

Or why was where I work, why did Stanford University hire a visiting professor, I think it was a neuroscience, who wasn't just a member of the Chinese government.

She had ties to the Chinese military.

Or why do these universities keep getting fined for taking money from Chinese communist-related entities and not reporting it to the Department of Education, which is required by law?

Or why of the 360,000 students,

when

there's somebody who has remotely, even remote ties to Taiwan, that these Chinese students start protesting and then everybody's afraid to say, listen, you're just orchestrating for your Chinese government masters.

And we know that the 380,000 students who come here are not a broad section of the Chinese population.

These are the elite of the elite.

That means in China that your parents are either working for a consortium that has ties or approval from from the government, or directly they're provincial officials or high federal officials for the Chinese communist government.

And they're everywhere.

And what I just said will get me in trouble when I open my email because you're not supposed to ever suggest that a Chinese student might have ties to the government, which govern or adjudicate his own behavior in the United States.

And if just 1%

of them were active sources of electronic data, computer research, whatever that was valuable both economically and militarily to the Chinese government.

That's a lot.

That's, what, 300?

Well, Victor, my son at UConn, my youngest son, his roommate was from China.

3,000, I should say.

Yeah, 3,000 people.

Dad's a mayor of a big city with a million people.

I mean, there's a lot of high-influence Chinese students here in America.

And, you know, I wish they were learning freedom.

I don't think that's the case.

I know it's sad because there's a Russian under every bed, but Russia's got 140 million people.

They have 140 million less than the Soviet Union.

They've lost 25% of their territory.

They're a one-trick oil pony.

They have no other income.

And

China is ascendant.

And what we have done is pushed Russia into the lap of China.

And Russia has two things and only two things going for it.

They've got a lot of oil and they've got 7,000 rusty nukes.

And yet we're not using them to balance China.

And if Putin...

tried every single, if he reified every single diabolical plot he had against the United States, he wouldn't have a fraction of the potential to hurt us.

Not that he wouldn't want to, but that the Chinese actually are hurting us.

And yet the left just can't reboot and look at China.

And I think that's partly because of that historical romance.

We heard it during the Obama administration with China because of its communist revolution or its idea that China is a non-white country and therefore it's a victim of white supremacy, rage, and privilege.

I don't know what it is, but we better wake up that it's an existential threat to the West in general and the United States in particular.

Well, Victor, not everything's bad news or disappointing news.

Progressivism got a beat down.

And of all places, San Francisco.

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Again, we're recording on February 21st, 2022.

This is George Washington's birthday.

Happy birthday, George.

San Francisco.

Voters, Victor recalled three Board of Education members who seem to be happier renaming schools than keeping them open during the pandemic.

So that was a big issue in this recall election.

Also a big issue was the fact that they seemed to be obsessed with stiffing Asian American kids who were getting into some of these advanced schools at numbers far beyond their proportion or slice of the population.

And actually, you know, we've seen similar stuff to Asian Heritage students in New York City.

It's always masquerading as equity.

In New York City, there are some of these prestigious public high schools that had very significant Asian populations, Asian Americans.

And of course, you know, Bill de Blasio had to immediately put an end to that.

Again, we need equity.

So, Victor, but again, back to San Francisco.

We had an election.

Separately, we're going to talk about...

internal polling that the Democrats have come across and its impact.

But let me just ask you right now, just about San Francisco's citizens, Victor, they're probably a pretty woke lot, all in all, but this was a stunning blow they delivered to these very, very woke politicians, some who, after the fact, of course, said this was all an act of white supremacy.

Victor, what happened in San Francisco with this recall election?

Was it a localized event or a sign that far and wide the political tectonic plates are shifting under the Birkenstock feet of the political and media elite?

Well, I'm a Californian, so therefore I have to be careful because the state is insane.

So when it shows a little bit of sanity, I don't know whether it's returning to normal.

I don't think it is, but I'm happy about this election.

But it reminds me when we had a recent ballot proposition and people were asked, do you want to reject?

Prop 209 that had said it was illegal for the state to use race to give them privileges for admissions and hiring.

Everybody thought that that would be a landslide.

And it was not.

In other words, a state in which whites are a minority nevertheless voted not to give privileges on the basis of gender or race.

But more importantly, and everybody knew, of course, that because we're in a lawless state, that administrators at UC or the state CSU system would ignore it as they do.

They don't care about breaking the law.

They follow a higher moral calling.

But nonetheless, people were, as we are now, Jack, with that recall election, they were just ecstatic on the moderate conservative side.

And then we had the Newsom recall and everybody here in California said, look at that.

ballot proposition that failed and it failed overwhelmingly and that shows you there's a nucleus of people who will recall Gavin Newsome.

And I was thinking at the time, no, they're Democrats, so this is an interneescent squabble and they will rally around their guy.

And they did.

And so I don't know what to make of it, but I think it can be explained by the sort of the currents that you were talking about.

The Asian Americans, the Asian American community did not want high schools like Lowell to be run by lotteries when it was famous for placing some of the best students at Caltech or MIT or Stanford in the sciences, especially coming out of that high school that was meritocratic.

And that the school board, they didn't like changing names.

They didn't like changing murals.

And this was juxtaposed to the idea that the population, the school population is shrinking.

Partly, it's people are having fewer, fewer children, partly the gay community, partly a lot of things are happening in that city, but they don't have an expanding student population.

And the school bathrooms are bad, the infrastructure is bad, the classrooms are bad.

And yet this school board was using these national buzzwords like, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion, and get rid of this name and plaster over that mural, et cetera.

And so people just got angry.

It was liberals getting mad at hard leftists.

And does that mean that the liberals who got mad will say, I don't like hard leftists.

Biden

is hard left now.

Therefore, I'm going to continue on this new train of thinking.

And I don't think so, but I could be mistaken.

But it's still an indicator, if I could have it both ways, Jack, with the Virginia elections, it does show you that within the ranks of the left, there's disunity and some people either don't vote or vote in the wrong way because we know from Virginia the few, not a few, but a lot of either independents that vote left-wing or Democrats that vote left-wing either stayed home or voted for Youngton and his slate of candidates.

So it's something to think about.

But what was happening in San Francisco is not sustainable.

And that's what I think is a real lesson of these discussions: is that if you just take California, you can't have a state of 40 million people with three or four large racial groups and then tribalize it.

And then each one pitted against the other for the spoils of government largesche.

You can't have 40 million people in this huge state and have freeways like five or 99 or 101 that are cake or ossified when you had the money easily to make them six lanes and you spent it on this Stonehenge six, seven miles away from my house.

It hasn't laid one foot of track, $15 billion after it started, which could have built 10 reservoirs.

And we're in a drought now and we don't have any water.

And two years ago, we had a lot of water and we could have had three, 10 or

more of these two to three million acre-feet reservoirs.

So everything has gone haywire in the state.

And people are starting to say it doesn't work.

I can't afford to fill up $5 a gallon plus.

I cannot afford.

to go to Costco and not have products on the shelf.

I can't afford to look at what's going on at the Port of LA.

I can't afford the crime of, you know, jewelry stores in Carmel by the sea being broken into and looted.

So the system is not working and it's starting to affect the hourly life of the citizenry, whether that means a person is walking in the street in San Francisco and his feet are covered with human feces

or a businessman is walking to work in downtown L.A.

and some homeless person assaults them or you're riding a bike along the bike path.

near Santa Monica, you're going toward Venice Beach and somebody knocks you over.

It doesn't work anymore.

It doesn't work anymore.

Or the drivers know that in the roads.

Nobody in California follows the traffic laws.

They're speeding because the police, and I do talk to a lot of police, they feel that there's no deterrence left.

If they pull somebody over, they have a bad and worse choice.

If they write them a ticket or they take them in for breaking the law, they're going to be under suspicion and they're going to be assaulted, attacked.

you know, and if they reply in any way at all that's considered less than conciliatory, they're going to be on a body cam incident.

And yet they know that if they be too lax, give too much latitude, it's going to lose them deterrence.

They don't know what to do.

So it's a mess.

This is one little bright sign, but I don't know.

I'm not confident.

Okay.

Well, Victor, not everything should be necessarily political, but here's a topic that let's look at if there are political aspects to it.

Of course, there are economic aspects to it.

And this topic has to do with the state of Black Americans and the Biden economy.

Clearly, Black Americans in South Carolina saved Joe Biden's political prospects.

And that, as you've cataloged, discussed over many previous podcasts,

regardless of all the lunacy and things that if you and I said them would be considered racist in Biden's career, but his political hopes were resuscitated there.

Now, there is a, I thought, a very important, worthwhile discussing editorial from the New York Post over the weekend about the, you know, essentially that blacks are getting the short end of the economic stick, which certainly was not the case under when Donald Trump was president, but it seems to be very much the case under Joe Biden.

So let me just read this quickly, Victor.

It's titled Bidenomics and Blue State Policies Hurt Black Workers.

And very quickly, here's how it begins.

More terrible news for New York City.

black unemployment remains stubbornly high at 15.2 percent per the latest data worse one in five black new yorkers is either out of work involuntarily part-time or has given up the job search entirely the trend is bad too unemployment inched downward over the latter half of 2021 for whites asians and hispanics in the city but kept ticking up for blacks and the bad news is national february's job report shows that U.S.

Black unemployment at 6.9%

is significantly higher than the overall 4% rate.

Some areas are as bad as New York.

In late 2021, Black unemployment in Washington, D.C.

stood at 15.4%

versus 8.1%

overall.

In Illinois, it was 13.3% versus 7.4%.

In California, 12% versus 7.2 percent.

Victor, your thoughts on

black Americans and the Biden economy?

Well, I kind of blame the elite black leadership, and by that I would mean in the House of Representatives, people in the government like Kamala Harris, the vice president, so gifted,

Clyburn, exactly, Oprah, LeBron, all of them, because they have never taken a realistic attitude empirically about who helps them and who hurts them in a sense that we want to do the best for the most of the African-American community.

This guy, Trump, comes along.

He has an initiative.

You can agree with it or disagree.

I disagree with some of it, but he looked at inordinately tough sentencing for drug users.

or drug dealers, I should say.

And the result was a lot of people who did not have violent records, some of them did, a lot of conservatives argued that they're inseparable because when you start dealing drugs by necessity, you're going to carry a gun.

But nonetheless, he allowed a lot of people to get back into the life.

I don't know what they did with that.

The statistics are not out.

And then we had record, I want to accentuate that again, record low African-American unemployment.

I think it was down to about 5.5 during the Trump.

And the Black leadership despised him.

They despised him.

They despised him.

Then we flip the page and we have Joe Biden, and they saved him in South Carolina, even though his economic policies were basically those of a wealthy white bi-coastal elite.

And by that, it was climate change, climate change, climate change, climate change,

and more regulation, and more regulation and more regulation, and

stop pipelines, and get the price of gasoline high so less people can drive, so you have less carbon emissions, et cetera.

That was not good for Black America.

And then Trump was crude and bombastic, and the leadership bought into that.

But compared to Biden, Biden, and I'll be very carefully, I don't know if there's a difference between the adjective racist or racialist.

The racist means he hates people

on the basis of their differing racial characteristics from his own.

And he stereotypes that or extrapolates to everybody and doesn't look at individuals.

And racialist means he's obsessed with racial difference.

And I think Biden is a mixture of the two because I'm just thinking of the corpus of Biden's racial animas.

When he was running, you remember he said to a disjockey, you ain't black.

Another one, he called him a junkie.

He was president and he referred to one of his subordinates as boy.

They use the word that the African-American community has discarded decades ago, Negro.

He said, Satchel Page, the great Negro.

And then this is all juxtaposed to put you all back in change when he kind of, and then the corn pop stories.

And we're going back earlier to his career, bragging that George Wallace referenced him, or he was good friends of James O.

Eastland,

the segregationist, or Robert Byrd, the Ku Klux Klan former member.

So he doesn't have a good record.

And yet the black elite embraced him and then promoted him, even though his agenda was basically that of the very wealthy people who bought and sold him on the coast.

And then what the inevitable happened.

So that's the politics of it, Jack.

There's another story that I have to be very careful so that the listeners don't misunderstand what I'm saying.

But we don't have FBI crime statistics, I think, since exhaustives since 2019.

But there is a perception when we look at ad hoc statistics on particular crimes, such as 12 cities in America we know have the highest murder rate in their histories, or the rate of assault.

You know, the left always says, well, crime itself hasn't gone up that much, but they're factoring in things like white collar, tax cheating,

or

fraud, or investment securities violations.

I'm talking about violent crime.

It's gone way up.

And there's a perception that in the past, statistically, there's a perception that the past statistic, i.e.

African-American males from 12 onward that represent less, less than 6% of the population, account for 50% or more of violent crime, that that's disproportionate may have increased.

Part of it is Silicon Valley's YouTube culture.

So you wake up in the morning and there are violent smash and grabs, or carjacking, or attacks on Asian Americans.

And whether this is representative or not, the public perceives that this is primarily a disproportionately African-American group of males that are doing that.

So what I'm getting at is five things we're not supposed to talk about.

Here's something that we're really not supposed to talk about: that this crime wave is in part, not wholly, but in part due to African-American males disproportionately assaulting people or committing felonies.

And that pervades the general sense in the Asian American community, the Hispanic community.

And I'm speaking to somebody who lives primarily in a Hispanic community.

So, what I hear from people anecdotally, it supports the evidence of two or three years ago.

But more importantly, it gives me a sense that a lot of people,

they see such crime in the popular culture that they're less than eager to hire young African-Americans, 16, 17, 18, 19 in entry-level jobs.

And I think when Trump was president, he was deterrent and he supported the police and that helped the inner city.

And there was less crime.

And he made a point that he bragged incessantly, not just from egocentric reasons, although they were there, but that he had lowered the African-American unemployment to record levels.

And he got no credit for it.

In fact, the elite hated him.

The more he did for the African-American community, the more they hated him.

The more, you know, Jory Reed called him all sorts of names.

So there's a big disconnect.

And you know, you can even see it, Jack, when Al Sharpton starts to say that, and what he in coded terms, that he can't buy toothpaste because it's locked up.

And where are the police?

And what he was really saying is, I'm a spokesman for the African-American communities.

And why are you guys committing crimes disproportionately?

That has the result that I can't buy my toothpaste like I used to.

Shame on you.

And he was chastising.

Yeah, right on the spot.

Right.

Go ahead.

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

Well, he was chastised by, I think, Hannah Nicole Joan, who had earlier said that crimes against property were not crimes.

So that's the subtext behind it.

I asked someone, I won't.

I don't want to reveal too many details because they may be listening, but I ask, why with this labor economy, why don't people go up to West Fresno and get a lot of African-American unemployed youth and get them into all of these trades that they can't get labor?

I mean, if you want to get a plumber, good luck, an electrician, good luck, anybody.

And the answer I got, and the person I was talking to is not white under traditional terms of those racial categorization.

He said, I'm afraid.

I'm afraid of violence.

I don't know where that person would commit a crime because they're, you know, I'm not quoting him verbatim, but what he was saying is they're overrepresented, they, the African community, male community, and I am stereotyping them.

And that may be wrong, but I'm not going to die on the altar of diversity, equity, inclusion just to make a point when I don't have to yet.

But that's what I'm worried about.

And so I think that's the subtext of this whole thing about Black unemployment.

Because what you asked, Jack, is you basically said to me, why is Black unemployment in certain areas 15%?

Why is it high when we're at record job shortages?

Why is there Black African non-participation in the labor force at a high level when everybody needs those workers?

And you have to be careful because there's millions of African Americans that are working very diligently.

But the unemployment rate, which they complain about, rightly so, shouldn't be that way in this economy.

There's no way in the world it should be that way.

And I think it's that way for three reasons.

This leadership is more interested in power and influence and money for themselves and it's not too worried about it, or they'd be marching into the White House and yelling at Joe Biden.

And Joe Biden has some mysterious,

I don't know what it is, but he has some mysterious, weird relationship with race.

He cannot talk about race except to

deprecate people on the base of their wreck, whether in the doughnut shop or Barack Barack Obama, the first clean, articulate black, whatever it is.

And then third, there's a surge in crime.

And I think a lot of the surge is due to a greater surge than the national demographic in the African-American.

And all that in perfect storm fashion explains the inexplicable about too high black unemployment rate in a period of labor dearth.

Well, Victor, we have one more topic to get to on today's episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and that's about internal political polling that has the Washington Democratic leadership in an emerging panic.

And we'll get to that right after this message.

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

So, Victor, you've seen these reports from last week.

Again, it's February 21st when we are recording.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee conducted a poll focusing on the 60 most, what they call the 60 most competitive House districts for the upcoming congressional elections.

1,000 people responded.

And they asked questions, posed questions from a very pointed Republican view, I guess, just trying to see how much grip Republican messaging maybe has had.

Of course, they're looking at what just happened in the Virginia House races.

So there's clearly some connection between Republican political messages in the face of Democrat wokeness.

So I hate to bore our listeners just quickly.

Let me throw a few numbers out here.

57% of voters in these districts agreed with these statements.

Democrats in Congress have taken things too far in their pandemic response.

64% of our voters agreed with this statement.

Democrats in Congress support defunding the police and taking more cops off of the street.

62% agreed with this.

Democrats in Congress have created a border crisis that allows illegal immigrants to enter the country without repercussions and grants them taxpayer-funded benefits once here.

just a few more.

61% agreed with this.

Democrats in Congress are spending money out of control and Democrats are teaching kids as young as five critical race theory, which teaches that America is a racist country and that white people are racist.

I got one more, 59% agreed with the statement.

Democrats are too focused on pursuing an agenda that divides us and judging those who don't see things their way.

Victor, there's a lot more data.

in this polling and much of it I think shows that people who consider themselves swing voters, self-defined, their numbers are higher than the numbers I just read typically in these results.

So, Victor, it does look like there is an emerging storm facing Democrats.

I don't know how, with the leadership they have and with the time left and with the paucity of potential issues coming up with the state of the economy, how these numbers can get better for them, if not worse, and that it may lead to what one might call a bloodbath in november for the democrats so those are interesting more than interesting to me poll numbers you may think they uh don't speak as much to republican favor as i think they would what are your thoughts on these numbers i i do and what i like about our audience and the letters and comments is that they want rational they don't want emotional they don't want me to say oh my god we're going to cream them They want to have rational analysis.

That's how they look at the world.

I think we're really lucky in the quality and numbers of our listeners.

So, you're absolutely right when you infer that it looks very bad for the Democrats.

But, why is that rationally so?

Let's break it down.

So, usually, a president has eight or nine key policy initiatives, and they vary in popularity, but at least some of them are popular.

That CNN poll that said, what has Joe Biden done?

And the last alternative is nothing positive.

56% said that.

So, Joe Biden, depending on which polls the Real Clear Politics Aggregate uses,

is about 39 to 41%.

And that's pretty much approval.

That's pretty much what all of these are.

Some of them are a little lower, some are a little higher.

So my first point is

they are not getting help on any of these issues.

It's not like he shut if Joe Biden had just finished the wall, Jack, or he had just said, we're going to keep Bagram Air Force Base with 3,500, And then he did what he did with a pipeline and critical.

It wouldn't be this bad.

But every single one has been an ideologically driven, radical, nihilistic disaster.

And it's hurting him.

Number two, Barack Obama did a lot of things that were very unpopular, like Obamacare.

He ran that through with not one Republican vote, the apology tour, all of that race polarization.

But he was able to recover because he had certain tools.

He was a master teleprompter reader.

He mastered the cadence.

If he was a bunch of Pacific Kites, wealthy white San Franciscans, he sounded like he went to prep school in Hawaii.

You put him with an African-American audience, you would think that he grew up in Alabama.

He was a chime like Bill Clinton.

Biden has none of those skills.

None.

Barack Obama was the first African-American president.

He had a legacy brand that he used.

And so while he was unpopular, he got down to 43 or 44.

He was never going to get down in the 30s, and he ended up in the low 50s.

So what I'm getting at, Joe Biden does not have a personal signature or a personal asset that can bring those

either.

the popularity of his unpopular initiatives up or can counterbalance them before

before

the poll.

So then we go to the third criterion.

Can he change?

Can a bunch of James Carver's or Doug Schoen's, you know, break into the White House and say, sit him down and get the squad and Elizabeth Warren and the Obamas

and Bernie out, close the door and say, Joe, and shake him.

Come back to, wake up, Joe.

You're in a slumber.

You're going to do what Obama did the first term.

You're going to lose a thousand local and state offices.

You're going to lose the Senate.

You're going to lose the House.

And if you keep it up, you may lose 10 seats in the House.

Those people

and the Senate, excuse me, they will impeach you.

And they may be able to be the first time in history that they can convict you.

So you've got to stop because you're destroying all of us.

Now stop it.

Well, he's not cognizantly able to process that.

He's mentally challenged.

Let's face it.

And even if he were not, he has sold his soul in a Faustian bargain to get elected to the hard left of his party.

So just to reiterate, the policies are all unpopular and they're not going to help him.

He is unpopular and incapable of saying, well, you don't like what I'm doing, but you like me in Obama fashion, or even Bill Clinton fact.

And three, he's not capable of changing the policies because the left will not change.

Their mentality, Jack, is,

all right, we're going over the cliff, but let's go over Thelma and Louise and be glorious as the glorious generation that was the most hard left, most hard left appointments, hard left everything.

And boy, what a two years of a glorious revolution that was.

That's their attitude.

And they're not going to let the realists, I don't think they're, I don't see any evidence of it.

And so I think what they're looking for now is Joe Biden comes back from, you know, Munich or Ukraine or wherever they place the next summit, Kiev, I don't know, Geneva, and he comes back and said, I gave you peace for our time.

That's about all they have.

And so it doesn't look good for them, but there are reasons.

And I don't want to be, I mean, Obama was wiped out in the second largest first term, midterm loss in history in 2010, and he got re-elected.

And Newsom was very unpopular.

And for a brief moment, he was polling below 50%.

And he won overwhelmingly on the recall.

So, what happens in November is: do we have a war?

Does inflation keep up with this?

And remember, we're dealing with the left, Jack.

So they control the bureaucracy and they control the media in Silicon Valley.

So we know what's going to happen on November 20th.

We're going to learn after the election was over that Mark Zuckerberg and Lisa Jobs and the Google trio and all those people put in a billion dollars to warp particular House races, Senate races, you name it, just like they did in the general election of 2020.

We know that's going to happen.

We know that Silicon Valley is going to, and the media and Washington, all they're going to talk about all summer long is Trump's tax returns, Trump's archives, Trump's family, da da da da da da da da.

And then we're going to hear that Joe Biden is basically the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln.

And any little economic news, if unemployment

of African Americans is 15% in particular areas and it goes down to 14.1, that's going to be D-Day news.

So that's what we're up against.

And all we have is the people.

If the people get angry enough in Howard Beale fashion, I'm not going to take it anymore.

or tank man in Tineman Square and say, you know what, I don't care what that stupid Mark Zuckerberg says.

I don't read the New York Times.

I could care less what the Washington Post says.

I haven't watched CNN or Crazy Joy Read in years.

I don't listen to what LeBron James or Steve Kerr lectures me.

I could care less Hillary Clinton's late.

I'm sick of these people.

I'm not talking about Republicans alone.

I'm talking about independents and once what we used to call normal liberals.

Yeah, you're going to have a, and I don't know the answer to that yet.

I have a suspicion that I'm optimistic that it's going to be a collective for moderate Democrats and swing voters.

I think it'll be something like this.

If the present trends continue, Jack, it will be at a dinner party or on the tennis court or in the computer coding carol in Sunnyvale.

It is, well, I did my part and I voted Democratic.

in the gossip or the thing.

And then secretly they went in and said to themselves, I am sick of this stuff and I'm voted against it.

Right.

Well, your lips to God's ears, Victor.

That's about, well, not totally all the time we have because for all I know, you may elaborate on something coming up.

But, you know, a lot of our listeners are on Google Play and Stitcher and other means of catching this show.

Those who are on iTunes, we asked them if they would consider leaving a five-star rating.

If you believe it deserves five-star rating, I do, just because of Victor's wisdom, please consider doing that.

That's on itunes.

And if you want to leave a comment, know that we read the comments and we take them to heart.

And as you know, if you listen to the show this at this point, you know, we always choose to read one.

Here's one from Lefty.

And Lefty titles this, Your Writing.

He writes, well, I know Lefty could be a woman, but I think it's a guy.

Wanted to thank you for all your books.

Love the podcasts and the historical insight you share with the listeners.

You are a very cheeky and wonderful writer of history.

Love how you end chapters with witty repartee, like in Ripples of Battle, the end of the chapter on Shiloh, when you discuss the participants would radically change, quote, the course of American history, but only after they themselves were first changed by Shiloh.

end quote.

That's great writing and a fantastic ending to that chapter.

Thank you.

I think Lefty left for four exclamation points at that.

By the way, Victor, for those readers who are interested, the ripples of history, ripples of battle, I should say.

You wrote that in 2004.

I am looking at it right now.

I'm sorry, it's on Amazon.

That's where I'm looking.

Ripples of Battle, How Wars of the Past still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think.

And heck, if you order it today on Amazon, you can get it tomorrow.

So anyway, thanks, Lefty.

Victor, I was with some friends in New Jersey this weekend, Ken and Lisa and their brother, Lisa's brothers and their family.

They're all huge fans of yours.

So much of my Sunday was filled with people regaling or wanting to know more about Victor, wanting to know about Sammy Wink also.

But, you know, I didn't tell any secrets.

So Victor, thanks for that as for all you do.

As for me, hey, folks, if you're interested in the weekly email newsletter I write, it's free I know strings attached.

It's got a dozen worthwhile suggestions of intelligent articles to read.

It's called Civil Thoughts, and you can find that at civilthoughts.com.

Sign up if you don't mind.

I'm also involved.

I run the center for civil society.com, and we're very much dedicated to strengthening civil society.

So that's my pitch.

Victor, God bless you.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared today.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Thanks all.

Thank you, Jack.

Ripples of Battle, I think I told Sammy, was the book I most enjoyed writing.

Oh.

Yeah, I really did.

Everything clicked.

It didn't sell as well as other books I wrote, but it was my favorite book to write.

And thank everybody for buying it.

And thank everybody to remember that I did write books.

I just, as a final epilogue today,

I was at an area not too long ago and a person I felt had been very undistinguished sort of said to me, Why don't you write books?

And I said,

I wrote a quarter of a million word history of World War II four years ago.

I wrote a dying citizen.

I'm working on a history of ancient cities that have been destroyed.

So, this idea that if you go on Fox News or you comment like we are, suddenly you never wrote any books.

It's kind of strange.

But that's the person was on the left, so I made the necessary adjustment.

Okay, thank you, everybody.

God bless.