Street People, Masks, and Crackpipes
Listen to Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler talk over the streets of San Francisco, Stacey Abram's call racism, the politics of masks, crack pipes and Kamala's first trip to Europe.
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Hello, ladies.
Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
We are recording February 10th.
I'm Jack Fowler.
I am the host, the star, the namesake.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
And he is the author of numerous best-selling books, important, every one of them, whether they're best-selling or not.
Most recent one is the dying citizen well you can find that at victorhanson.com we'll talk about that in a little bit first thing we're going to talk about victor though is the streets of 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.
Hey, Victor, do you remember the good old days when the streets of San Francisco was a production of Quinn Martin, right?
Remember the show?
I do.
Now the streets of San Francisco.
Yeah, it was a pretty good show.
Jack, I just happened to watch Vertigo.
Remember that movie?
Oh, sure.
And James Stewart and Kim Novak, they were walking down the streets of San Francisco.
Did you see people the way they were dressed, the stores, everybody was smiling?
I mean, it was actually filmed in San Francisco, so it wasn't a set.
And the city looked just stunning.
And that's what I remember.
Even in the hippie days, it wasn't like it is now.
So it's very sad.
Great cities.
Yeah.
And people dressed up.
I remember my mom took us and my dad said, We're going to take you to the new San Francisco Giants Candlestick Park.
And we've got a special discount from your dad at work.
And so the five of us go up to candlestick.
Can you imagine this?
My dad wore a tie.
My mom had a pleat skirt.
And we, all three of us, we were, I don't know what we were, eight, or we had to wear ties and sport coats.
Yeah.
to a game and then we took them off when we got there yeah what about all you see yeah you see pictures of old you know old baseball every every guy had a hat on and a white shirt and a tie uh it's quite yeah quite different that was six 60s gave us the beginning of this but
yeah
yeah my first game was 1965 but that was in the bronx that's another story yeah it's another
yeah so victor my friend yes there's a story in today's uh daily mail about
some street junkie, some guy who's, you know,
he's made a career of being a street junkie, but he explained that he is essentially being paid to be a sidewalk citizen between what he gets.
He's got a free phone.
He's got Amazon Prime on his phone.
He's got Netflix on his phone.
He's got paid 262.
620.
Yeah, I heard.
Yeah.
Plus all the free, whatever the free meal cards are.
This is nuts.
It's being invited.
This is being invited by progressivism to destroy our cities.
Your thoughts, Victor?
The first thought is when we listen to this, there's some guy right now in his 13th hour down the freeway on a truck, and he's working like crazy as someone is listening to, there's a nurse in her 12th hour shift.
And there's a guy right now pumping out a septic tank just as the sun goes down.
And even Victor, privileged as he is, you know, yesterday morning, I get up at five in the morning.
We're tearing off the roof.
Chimney started to totter.
I go under the house.
I check the wiring.
I go into the attic because they dropped the old shingles in.
I get in the car.
I drive all the way over, you know, four hours to Stanford.
I do the work.
I come back.
I just walked in.
That's what every single person does.
It's not no big deal.
And so when we hear this, the guy, you know, he didn't have to delineate what he was, the privileges, right?
So, what would be the purpose but to mock us, us being the working class?
Yeah, the suckers.
So, that's one thing.
And the second is, remember what progressivism, Jack, is based on.
It's based on a therapeutic notion of human nature, that the more that you indulge someone's appetites, the more they feel magnanimity and they feel the radiant love for you.
And then they reciprocate in kind.
So, in the liberal mind, we're not being fair to him because what he meant to say before he was so rudely cut off by the media was, I don't have to work, I get free stuff, I get entertainment free, I get food and lodging, that covers my habit, and you know, and because of that, I feel so gracious to society that I pick up trash around me.
I never defecate or urinate on the sidewalk, and I just feel so privileged to be in such a beneficent society.
That's what people believe, benevolent society.
And it doesn't work that way, unfortunately.
We're sinful creatures, human nature being what it is.
So it's whatever you pay, or you know, that was the old Milton Freeman.
If you subsidize something, you get more of it.
And
that's what we're doing.
You tax it, you get less of it.
So we should tax people, maybe homeless.
I don't know.
Well, they have the money.
But San Francisco, you know, it's
when I first started working in Palo Alto, I was a student there, but Silicon Valley was the place to be, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Sunnyville.
And then
around 206, 2006, they all, the new yuppies, the guys, you know, that wore the ankle shoes and the skin tight,
what do they call them?
We used to call them high water pants and high water sleeves.
Yeah,
you know, that look, that look, shiny suits, kind of Mr.
Hipster techie multi-millionaire legs.
Yeah.
They all went to the city.
The city.
That was where it was at and that was you know rents were four thousand dollars for a studio that's what you hear now and now
people are leaving because the fact is
the fact that you voted for barack obama or hillary clinton or joe biden and you've got a blm sticker on your beamer it does not mean that these people will not break in one of the homeless people i was driving home today listening to him and he said how do you get your money and he said break-ins on locked cars break them in so there's no exemptions when you go to the Lord of the Flies society.
And that's where we're going.
Nobody gets out alive because they're progressive or they made a deal with the consequences of their own ideology.
It doesn't happen that way.
Eventually they come for you too.
Yeah, they might even come in your house.
So, Victor, the next story and what the hell is going on in the great golden state.
I'm sorry, I'm going to call them bums.
Some are bums.
Some are mentally challenged.
How dare you?
Well, you know, assuming.
I mean, many need to be in institutions.
Of course, we don't have institutions anymore.
But now progressives and the lefties are suggesting that they be cured of homelessness problem is that they be lodged in private homes.
And it struck me, I know it's not a, it's an ensequitor,
but we're a nation founded in opposition to the quartering of red coats.
But now it's okay.
to put a junkie in the spare bedrooms.
So Breitbart has a story on this posted yesterday again today's uh february 10th the headline bay area homeowners and landlords asked to take in homeless people as uh homelessness continues to spiral out of control victor this is a crazy idea what do you think well you know from what i read today and listened to the news, I think these nonprofits have a of 8,000 8,500 people on the streets of San Francisco.
That's that's larger than most towns here in the San Joaquin Valley.
They've had 60 takers.
So 60 people are willing to welcome the homeless in.
And I was at Stanford University campus, and I just couldn't resist suggesting to some very affluent professorial types that this was a chance to marry ideology with pragmatism.
In other words, just as you don't believe in walls or, you know, punitive immigration, but you don't want to have people cross the border into your garage.
So, maybe they could redeem themselves by saying, you know, this gives me a chance to step forward.
And I didn't have any takers.
I didn't think that was funny.
So it's kind of a pre-modern existence.
So if you're on the street, Jack, you have no running water, just like we didn't have in 1850.
You have no sewage, just like we didn't have before the so-called crapper.
And we don't have power, so there's no electric blankets or anything.
And then right juxtaposed them, we're into the postmodern society where you don't just have a beautiful Victorian, but it's kind of, you know, it's got postmodern art on the wall and it's got just the right milieu of teak floors.
And I've been in some of these houses, you know, and they're juxtaposed.
There's no middle in between.
And so when pre-modern meets postmodern, postmodern loses because they're not equipped for this challenge.
And all of the money and all of the government and all of the security, that insulation gets frayed.
So these guys are kind of like a hot wire and it's not like Romex.
It's a very thin layer of cloth that separates them from the wealthy and they're sparking everywhere.
And so it would only take a left-wing mind to dream up this.
And they're going to get nobody to do it.
Maybe some people will give money for some other person.
I shouldn't say nobody.
There'll be some people.
There'll be probably some very religious people who believe in the spirit of man and they will volunteer maybe 50 as i said 60 or 70.
i'm afraid they'll come to an unhappy conclusion because from what i've seen when i've been up there the people are not non-violent and a lot of them have i think 70 of them are either drug addled or they have severe psychological problems that manifest itself
Yeah, the closing of facilities and institutions has really, it's just devastated
individuals and American cities.
It's terrible.
And I remember that I was speaking for National Review, Jack, at one of their municipal retreats, and it was about nine o'clock, and the hotel was not more than, I don't know, eighth of a mile.
It was about 9.30 at night.
I walked.
I was with you.
Yeah.
And I saw a guy across the street defecating.
Right.
Gosh.
As you stepped over a needle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
Maybe liberals are one-step needle or one too many feces, human feces in their hiking boot.
I don't know where their breaking point is, but it's got to be somewhere.
And that somewhere may
be manifest in November.
I think there's going to be a lot of people who are going to say, I can't stand those Republicans, those greedy bastards, and they're heartless.
And they're going to go look around and go in there, either mail in their ballot or vote against them.
and then deny it to the day they die.
You know, Victor, we have to now move east.
We're going to move east, and we're going to talk about Stacey Abrams.
Now, I know she's been in the news a lot lately, but not since when last you and I talked.
So, just a little refresher, you know, for our listeners, Stacey Abrams is the Georgia Democrat leftist, and she posted pictures, I think, on Instagram.
She was with at an elementary school visiting.
I don't know why she gets to visit an elementary school, it's like some head of state coming, and she's just happens to be a woman, but she's special.
Anyway, dozens of kids were with her.
They were masked.
Stacey Abrams, no mask,
no mask.
She was attacked on social media for hypocrisy.
And of course, her first response was the charge that her critics were, of course, racist.
So Victor, we've talked many times about the race card.
I think it may still have power among the elite, but I think flyover America, working
class America, my daughter-in-law is Hispanic America.
My grandchildren are Black America, even though I'm white.
I think the charge of racism is not only empty.
I don't think it's not only powerless, but it's proving maybe politically counterproductive to those who toss it around.
So, Victor, what do you think about what Stacey Abrams did?
And do you think my bargain basement analysis has any merit?
Yeah, I do.
They all get caught eventually.
And remember, when they get caught, Jack, that is a rare moment.
We should multiply it by a factor of a thousand.
So when Stacey Abrams gets caught, that means she's doing it all the time.
Like Gavin Newsom's French laundry is a regular thing for him to go out to dinner, not wear it.
They all have, you know, they all have creative explanations and exegesis for somebody.
I think it was it.
I think it was Gavin Newsom said he just took it off for a minute.
So he plain God, he took his mask down.
And at the playoffs, he was josting around.
He He shouldn't have to wear a mask.
He's Gavin Newsom.
And he ordered the universe to halt all the vira in the air and said, virus, stop.
I'm taking off my mask for a photo.
That's what he wants you to believe.
And for Stacey Abrams, it's always the race and gender card.
I mean, it's really strange about this woman.
As I remember, all she'd ever done was she was an assistant city attorney and state legislator.
And then she wrote kind of risque sex novels, romance novels that were kind of graphic.
And when she ran for governor, they found out that she had a lot of credit card debt, wasn't that right?
And she explained it with this very complicated, contorted, but never a person should always pay their credit card bills.
And then she lost by 50,000 votes, as I recall, Jack.
And this is very important for all of us to remember this because she paraded around the country for two years as people introduced her at left-wing events as the real governor of Georgia.
And she said she was robbed and it was white racist fraud and it was voter suppression.
And she said that her successor was illegitimate and she gave every excuse except people didn't want her to be governor.
And the same thing with the mask.
And
so you really get the window into this.
We're getting it constantly.
Now it's not a window.
It's like a panorama into the mind of the left-wing person.
It's at its core, an arrogant, narcissistic, sanctimonious, egotistic view of the world where I am so much brighter, more articulate, and I have a view, a panoptica, and I can see everything in society, and I know how you people should behave and act.
But for me to take on your burdens and to suffer and to worry about you, I have to have exemptions, whether it's flying into Davos with my jet, or whether it's not wearing a mask or whether it is, you know, dancing at a nightclub.
Yeah, dancing at a nightclub or AOC hugging people face to face or in the case of Stacey Abrams claiming that her opponent is illegitimate as she is a crusader against Donald Trump for questioning elections and how he's undermining democracy.
You know, I was just thinking the other day when I was seeing her, you know, until Trump questioned the 2020 election, the left had kind of a monopoly.
It was Al Gore who said the vote count in Florida, which every post facto audit, even the New York Times found was accurate.
He lost the state.
He questioned it.
And then it was Bush was selected, not elected.
And then 2004, getting off the tangent.
Do you remember when we had Barbara Boxer and they introduced legislation, or excuse me, they introduced a motion she did in Congress to overturn the election and said that the Ohio vote had been improper.
They got 31 Democrats to say, we want to decertify the electors.
And then 2016, remember those fourth-rate movie stars that did the commercials when Trump went on?
Oh, they were painful.
Don't follow them.
Please, electors, appeal to your
higher level.
So they always questions elections like Stacey Abram.
Who also wrote the novel?
The novel.
Well, besides the novel, she also
not only supported, but maybe had a role in drafting the Georgia's election laws.
She did.
She has a pack.
Remember a PAC?
So every time I go into Selma and I get in line at Walmart or Save Mart or whatever it is, I'm just amazed at how many people still write checks, very poor people, and they whip out that ID like two seconds.
And my point is that we have IDs for everything but voting, I guess.
Well, Victor, there's a lot of news about masks.
There always is, but big political news about it.
And we're going to talk about that post-hake
maximus nuntius.
You want to translate that for our listeners?
Well, post-hake means after these things.
And
go ahead.
I'm going to translate it word.
Go ahead.
I'm going to translate it word to word.
All right.
So go ahead.
Post-haik, H-A-A-C, I think you're saying.
Maximus.
Greatest.
Nuntius.
That's a messenger or a.
Yeah.
After this important message.
Yeah, it's a messenger or something.
So after these things, we have an important message.
There you go.
I should say, please, all you Latin scholars out there, I slip the greatest message because maior is the comparative of the adjective
great.
and so it's maor maximus.
It's an irregular comparative and superlative in Latin.
That's the last time I'm going to use Google Translator.
Magnus,
magna, magnus, magnum, and then maor, greater.
We get major from it, maior.
Yes, and then maximus, as in maximus gladiator.
Okay.
Hey, listeners, we're going to talk about masks right after this important message.
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It's overwhelming.
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hey, we're back with the Victor.
I'm sorry I said you have an ecclesiastical pronunciation of Latins,
given you learned it in the church.
I learned it in the Latin.
Well, I actually learned it in a little Catholic boy's high school, but with the Bronx accent, I guess it comes out a little interestingly.
So, Victor, let's talk about masks.
The news of the last couple of days is that a number of blue state governors, and that includes some, at least one Republican governor of Massachusetts, they've conspired, gotten together, and we must drop the use of masks as mandatory.
Anthony Fauci said something the other day.
You know, he's always saying, you know, back and forth.
I can't keep track, but something along the lines.
Spinning, spinning, spinning.
Yeah, diminishing the need
for masks.
So a couple of things, Victor.
One is that, you know, these governors, even though the implication out there today is, oh, the mask mandates are going to be over with, no, I think this is going to take a while for them because this thrill they have of telling people a jump and expecting the response to be how high, to let go of that, that power that they've exalted over the last couple of years, I think it's going to come a great difficulty.
And
the other thing, I think you've heard it, we've heard it, that some of these blue state internal polls, they just must be awful, awful.
And that's the motivation, likely motivation behind this change.
So, you know, Victor, also there's, I think, the fact that there's no science behind these, what have been these treacherous regulatory mandates.
So do you have any thoughts on this policy retreat on masks?
And
anything you want to say about these mask requirements in general?
Can I preface it just with the idea?
I think like like a dog's tail is cut off and then the dog feels, that's very cruel.
He feels like he has a long tail or a person loses a limb and they still feel when you for about 10% or 20% of this is some now kind of totem or fixation.
And when they take off the mask, they feel like they still have it on.
And so they've lost a limb and they're never going to, I don't think they're ever.
going to not wear a mask.
I'm not saying it's a lot,
but I was on the Stanford campus today.
These are supposedly our quote, best and brightest, or at least that's what they self-identify as.
I saw four people riding a bike with mask on, with no helmet.
It's very dangerous to ride in the campus without a helmet.
I saw one person smoking in between his mask with no helmet.
So if you're riding a bike with no helmet, but you're wearing a mask, there's no explanation for it.
You know, the greater danger, cost of benefit and all that stuff.
So they are never going to give up these masks.
They're sort of wedded to them.
And, but there's two things, Jack, that have radically changed the democratic attitude toward social distancing, masks, lockdowns, quarantines.
The first is Omicron, and that is they had a trifecta, a Bible, three central pillars.
of their COVID ideology.
Number one was vaccinations.
Remember, they don't want to remember, but remember it was ironclad protection, 96%.
It's not for them.
It's for you.
You get a vaccination.
You're too Moderna, you're tuned Pfizer.
And if Joe Blow down there wants to hurt himself or not, he can't hurt you.
That's what it was sold as.
Okay.
Omicron said, you know what?
There is no absolute immunity if you've got two vaccs, if you've got a booster.
You can be infected and you can be infectious.
The second pillar of their policy was: if you lock down, if you wear a mask, you will not be infected.
Well, this Omicron is 20 times more infectious than the original or Delta.
So you can, there's people who have stories that I just talked to a colleague of mine in Hoover, and he was in his house.
And maybe somebody came to the door or somebody visited.
He and his wife have a bad case of COVID.
And the third was natural immunity is something that weirdos like Jay Bacheria or Scott Atlas dreamed up.
It doesn't exist.
And that was crazy, of course.
And now we learned that people who have two vaccinations and a booster have no more resistance against Omicron than a person who had the Delta.
In other words, naturally acquired immunity is, we know now, is as good as artificially acquired.
So when that thing blew up, and it did with Omicron, because you can't stop it, and yet it's not as severe, Jack.
So the other part of the narrative was, you're going to die.
And if you said, well, it's 99.7, I won't.
No, you're going to die.
Well, because
we've lost a million people, but with Omicron, it's both more transmissible, but less lethal.
And it blew up that whole narrative.
So then the Democrats can no longer say following the science for the lockdown because it doesn't work with Omicron.
And then, as you say, they looked at the polls
and they thought, oh, my God, we're losing the soccer mom and the suburbanite
and, you know, in the Highlander that she's driving around her kids and they're regressing.
They're not going to school.
Oh, my God.
The Mexican-American businessman who's got his tire shop, that's his whole income.
He's angry.
And his wife, who works as a secretary, can't go to work because they got kids on Zoom and the Zoom doesn't work.
They're angry.
And so they did a lot of internal polling and they said, let's get a new narrative that Omicron's over.
And then when when I liked the new narrative, how it was expressed, remember that guy,
is it Hakeem Jeffries, the new wonder congressional Democrat who's going to take over from Nancy Pelosi as speaker, one once upon a time?
Right.
Well, he was on there.
I think he was, remember, he was praising Biden for ending the epidemic.
He said, pandemic.
He said, you know, because of Joe Biden's hands-on successful, we're seeing the end of Omicron.
Translated that meant this,
this son of a bitch virus, excuse the language, is so easily transmissible that it's going to spread everywhere, and then there is herd immunity.
And lo and behold, between people not getting a severe case and vaccination or herd immunity, the caseload is dropping.
The deaths are dropping.
And this guy's standing up now and saying, see, and I will bet you in the State of the Union, Joe Biden will go back to that boast, I'm not going to end the lockdowns, I'm going to end the virus.
Remember that boast?
And he's going to tell everybody that so many million of people got three shots or two shots under his, whereas he's not going to tell you that more people, a lot more people have died under his tenure than Trump.
He's going to tell you that he ended Omicron.
And he did sort of in the sense that, you know, It's like a burglar comes into your house and takes everything because the door is wide open, you have no security.
And on the way out, he trips and falls or something.
And you say, well, I got rid of the burglar.
So he's going to do that because they don't have anything else.
And they're prepping for that.
And they have all these internal pollsters that say, what's the narrative on the border?
And then we have this inflation 7.5.
Inflation is,
did you hear him today, Victor?
Yeah.
He was quote, what's the, oh, gosh, I can't remember the guy from NBC
who he was having an interview with them.
He says, you know, you said this was transitory back in July.
What do you mean by transitory?
and biden gave one of his typical like come on man you try and break my chops or something like that like it is transitory like it's yeah i was driving home
about an hour ago i was out on the middle of the you know by san joaquin out in the west side of california driving no other person on the road and i'm just listening to different news channels i'm just thinking that he reminds me of an alchemist biden remember how they make they thought they could make gold out of dross yeah he thinks he can make success out of failure so you know, the inflation comes and then Saki says, ah, you people that want your Peloton or it's just a wealthy thing or you get, he trots out some Harvard economy.
It's transitory and it's successful.
Oh, then that didn't quite work.
And then it's, well, it's giving a lot of people higher wages.
Don't mention real wages, but higher wages.
And the same thing with COVID.
You just kind of have no therapeutic program.
He had none at all.
He didn't, you know, remember the test.
Did you get your test kit in the mail?
I didn't get mine we were all going to get a test i didn't know i signed i didn't get it and you know i drove by the other day in salma there was a big line to get tested and well it didn't i mean he has no therapeutics he didn't do much he just piggybacked on the vaccine program that one idea that he had and he took all credit for it from trump did never mention operation warp speed and he was going to run across the finish line and omicron came along so he hasn't done anything but he keeps declaring that these failures are successes.
Even the border, it's sort of, you know, if he lets everybody across, if you apprehend one out of a hundred, maybe that is more apprehensions when there was nobody at all coming across with those sections of the wall.
Right.
You know, so he said, well, we have apprehensions.
Well, it's like, you know, a whole flood of people coming.
You say, I'll take that one out of a hundred.
And that's more because before we could get nobody out of the wall, across the wall.
So he's an alchemist.
Yeah.
Or Pee Wee Herman who fell off his bike and said, I meant to do that.
So,
Victor, hey, we've got one more thing to talk about on today's episode, and that is crack pipes, but we'll do that right after this important message.
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Hey, we're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
I'm Jack Fowler.
I am the author of Civil Thoughts, a weekly email newsletter.
Check it out.
Get it.
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12 recommended readings every week.
Let's go to civilthoughts.com.
If you want real great stuff, you go to victorhanson.com.
Is that a plug to put an ad for your thing on the website?
Well, I'll be happy to do it, Jack.
I'll give you a very favorable rate.
We don't have no ads, but I'll make an exception for you.
Oh, that's awfully nice, Victor, considering what you're paying me.
So,
go to VictorHanson.com.
No, no, no, that's fine.
It's fine.
Listen, I know a lot of people like some of the animal and childhood stories Victor writes from time to time.
And he's got a few really good ones that are up this.
Childhood stories?
Childhood stories.
These are sophisticated analyses of,
I'm just kidding, of course.
They are childhood stories.
Oh,
the latest one, Victor
taking on possums.
Mr.
Possum.
Mr.
Possum.
Yeah.
But those and other great analyses on current events.
Many of them are behind what they're called ultra.
It's exclusive content.
Try it out.
It is
$5 a month.
Yeah, there you go.
And $50 a year if you do it.
I hardly, hardly recommend.
So, Victor, back on crackpipes, though, it wasn't in my version of the Bible, but I think in some versions it says, Blessed are the crackpipe distributors.
They should be called the
sons of God.
Victor, I'm not sure how truly true the report is.
I think this was true that the HHS was going to include
these materials in this crazy ass.
Yeah, it's been all over the media.
But, you know, Victor reminds me a little bit of Huxley's Brave New World, where they took care of.
I don't think he had proles in the Brave New World.
I'm not sure what the unmentionables were in that novel, but they were drugged.
This was one, but let's keep them drugged.
And Victor, I'm just curious of Joe Biden.
This is his administration.
Remember, Joe Biden was saying
they want to keep you all in chains.
Well,
this attempt to keep, I think it's directed at black communities.
I think a lot of blacks think this is directed at them, but to keep them on drugs, on crack by the distribution of these kinds of devices.
I mean, it's really, I think, it's repulsive.
I do think they think they're being benevolent as they pave the road to hell.
Victor, what are your thoughts about this?
I don't understand the whole philosophy, Jack, of incentives.
So you're incentivizing the use of crack cocaine with this pipe.
And And if you don't give them a crack pipe, they're going to what, make an inferior brand that won't get them high as quickly or addicted as easily.
I mean, there's no incentives.
Why don't we have a program from the government that says adopt a crack pipe head?
And for each person who tutors or spends times with a person or counsel them and we'll have them tested, you know, your analysis every two weeks, just adopt a person on the street, go talk to them.
For each person that you go six months where they're not on crack, you get, you will pay you the money.
Have some type of incentive to get the people off rather than to incentivize and subsidize for them to be on, which explains your skepticism, cynicism, nihilism that the federal government, i.e.
the left, feels that this is a useful constituency as a perennial argument for subsidies.
Crackpipes.
Where have I heard that, Jack?
Oh, you know what?
I was thinking that that leads us to Hunter, and we have two items in the news, Ukraine and crackpipe.
So if I were Joe Biden, I would make Hunter Biden the crackpipe czar, and I would send him over to Ukraine to consult because he's been to Ukraine more than almost anybody.
And our current czar that was announced today is her first, on her first visit ever to Europe, Kamala Harris is going to be our point person for negotiations with our NATO allies for a common front, given her familiarity with Europe, her
support of Western civilization, her understanding of the NATO alliance.
They're going to be so relieved.
But I think Hunter, actually, I'm being not quite facetious.
He might know more about Ukraine than she does.
He certainly knows more about crackpipes.
So he could do a do thing.
He could be, you know, gain back his reputation by flying over there and getting the barisma team and saying, you know what, we're going to, here's what Ukraine is like.
It's a very necessary country.
It's been very kind to my family.
And here's what crack.
I left one in a car once.
It's really bad.
You lose them all the time.
I lost mine.
It's like my computer.
But if the government will give you one when you lose one, it really helps out.
He could, he could talk to us.
Maybe, maybe he can give 10% of his salary to the big guy.
So, Victor, you know, we're a little crushed, you and I, today, because of our schedules.
And we have a little concluding business, as we always do on the Victor Davis-Hanson show.
We appreciate, of course, our listeners.
People listen on many forums, Stitcher, Google Play, the folks at iTunes, many have the opportunity to rate the show.
Most people still leave five stars.
It's one of the highest rated shows on,
maybe in fact, be the highest rated show on iTunes.
So we thank those who, of course, who listen wherever they listen.
Thank those who leave those star ratings.
Some people actually write reviews.
We read them all.
And I'm going to read one because,
you know, it's not often that Victor, you heard him a little earlier in the podcast schooling me on Latin, but here's a message left by Father John Hollowell.
And I apologize in advance, father, because the fact that you're a listener to the Victor Davis Hansome show will probably get you in trouble with the Vatican.
It's titled Big Fan.
But Galileo, awesome show.
Victor is a voice of reason in a rational desert.
Just one comment.
Galileo, and Victor made a little dig at the Vatican and Galileo a couple of podcasts ago.
Galileo was actually a friend of Pope Urban VII.
Yes, he was.
That's true.
He was.
He was.
Although the Pope eventually censured Galileo.
Let me read what Faja says here.
You're going to have to go to confession for refusing to treat his theories as a hypothesis.
Cardinal Newman said that it is revealing that Galileo is the only name that ever comes to mind when people claim the church despises science.
Finally, finally, most of the early figures in the scientific revolution were priests, monks, and Catholic laymen and laywomen, including the priests who discovered the Big Bang theory.
That's Father John Hollowell.
Father, we thank you for your, I don't know if Victor thanks you.
I'll say I thank you for your leaving that comment.
So, well, can I interject?
You're listening to a person that
I had a bad bike accident.
I had a bad sinus thing.
So three years ago, I I went in for the whole sinus rebuild.
They took out turbinates, they took out polyps, they redid my septum, and they took a drill and drilled out my sinus passages.
And before I went in, I said, and I was being facetious, there certainly has to be a patron saint of Moses.
And he said, there's Saint Nazo, is it Nazo?
I made that up.
But I had this game with Jack that every time I need something, you know, I'm driving or I'm flying.
There's always, I ask him for the patrons and he has them off the tip of his fingers.
But, you know, I really appreciate because I read Sammy sends me some too, all of them, in fact.
And I really appreciate because we have an alternate feedback jack that people write about what I, not just the podcast, but written word.
And they go to the victorhanson.com.
Right.
There's a lot of comments.
And we have those angry readers.
And I have a point total where
if you use all capitals for a three or four more year exclamation points, And then we have the profanity score where you get the F word, the S word, and then the personal invective, you moron, you creep.
And then the personal threat.
And you can get a 10.
I've had given it about three times.
Right.
And so we try to hold them up.
They're very scary.
Every once in a while, a really wonderful reader will say, he'll call me or write me or something and leave a message.
It goes, I'm not being exact.
I don't want to give anybody away, but it's, Mr.
Hansen, this is Special Agent Smith, and my territory is Southwest Texas.
And I consult with a federal attorney, and you have received in that angry reader a serious death threat.
And you listed the name of the person who did it.
And I took liberties of doing some investigation, and I've notified him.
And I've
said no so uncertain term.
And I'm not making fun of that.
That's happened.
And then the guy writes another one to me and says, I'm going to get you or I'm going to cut your throat and all that.
It's funny.
Yeah.
Well, there are a lot of people that would love to have your, have your back that just would.
So I've been with you.
I know.
I was in Nashville today and yesterday, talked to some people just totally enthralled by you.
I've been with you in hotels and lobbies and people like circling around like it's Pluto and Neptune.
And then they're afraid to come up.
But you mean a lot to so many people.
And we appreciate, of course, again, folks that leave these comments and thoughts.
It's really wonderful.
I think we're all in it together, Jack.
I think all of our listeners, our readers, you, me, we feel that the country is slipping away.
And we're trying, and each according to our station, whether it's to listen or to write or to whatever you can do, we're just trying to think, man, we've got to stick together because these people mean us harm.
And it's and it's not just they're incompetent, they're incompetent, but they're not incompetent about being greedy and accumulating power for themselves.
So,
we appreciate it.
That solidarity.
All right.
Well, Victor, thanks for that.
Thanks for everything from this, your comments earlier on the show.
And thanks, folks, for listening.
We'll be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
Bye-bye.
Thank you again.