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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

We are recording on Thursday, February 3rd.

The year is 2022.

I'm Jack Fowler.

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

He is the author of the bestseller, The Dying Citizen.

And you can find a ton of original content by Victor Davis Hansen at his website, Victor Hansen, S-O-N, VictorHanson.com.

A little more about that later.

Victor, we're going to begin the show by going to the other side of the Atlantic and see what the hell is going on with Boris Johnson.

And we'll do that right after this message.

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

So, Victor Boris Johnson sealed the deal finally on Brexit.

And a lot of people thought, you know, this guy was an international conservative leader.

Immediately shifted, though, to turn his, I don't call it administration, but whatever the hell they call it.

It was going to be total, go totally green.

It was going to be an environmentalist's happy place.

And then in the midst of the very severe lockdowns that Johnson and his government imposed during COVID, it's been revealed that at his residence at 10 Downing Street, where the prime minister hangs his hat, seemed like it was party central.

One of these, we've seen these examples here, Gavin Newsom, right?

Masks for thee, but not for me.

Boris Johnson's prime ministership.

is hanging in the balance.

Victor, any thoughts about what's transpired over there culturally?

And if he goes, do you have any thoughts what that might mean for, I don't know, anything in the world, peace, security, relations with the United States?

Yeah, I think we all have had kind of a misinformation about Boris Johnson.

Remember when Trump was president and

the latter days of his presidency, Johnson kind of made gestures that he was sort of a populist in the same Brexit.

And we associated him with Brexit, which was successful.

It's kind of off-the-wall guy.

I I mean, his hair wasn't quite Trumpian, but he looked just disheveled.

He's, as a classicist, I admired his power of recall to recite the opening lines of the Odyssey and the Iliad pretty well.

So, you know, he was kind of a different kind of guy.

But when he came into power, he's gravitated much more to the left.

than he stayed on the right.

And he sort of embraced this whole Karen idea of lockdowns and masks.

And

he's like our London brand mayor of San Francisco or Gavin Newsome or the, I guess it's Miss Gretchen in Michigan or all of the Nancy Pelosi, all the people who break the rules that they insist on for others.

But the problem with him is he lives in a class-bound society that's much more sensitive to aristocratic indulgence and exemption.

So we just say people are a hypocrite, but we don't get up in the morning and say, you know, we just expect it of Gavin Newsom.

He's a spoiled brat.

He has his own rules.

He'll lie and say he took his mask off for only a little while.

And with his divine powers, he told all the viruses to stay put and not come for about a second or two.

So we understand that.

But in England, I think, Britain, United Kingdom, I think it's a little different.

I think they feel that.

This is an entitled Oxbridge person and all of that persona that he was one of the people or he was a popular that's starting to wear thin and the traditional Tory

political class feels he's an embarrassment so I don't know where his constituency is though it's not on the left

and it's not with you know the old Tory class that's sober and judicious at least ostensibly in public it's it was kind of this Brexit populace that had analogous movements in France and the United States but he hasn't been true to those principles.

So I don't see there's anybody there to support him.

I would have said he combed his hair with a weed whacker.

So,

okay, let's.

I can't comment because I feel that they used to call me in high school cactus head because I had thick blonde hair that I never combed.

And I would give my,

I don't know what I would give to have any hair left, but it disappeared in 2014 in the space of 12 months.

It just vanished.

So

I'm envious of weed whacker hair style.

Okay.

Thanks.

Thanks, Cactus Head.

So, Victor McClan,

they called me CAC, K-A-C.

Hey, Victor, you look like Cactus.

Hey, CAC, comb that hair.

Oh, my gosh.

Victor, let's come back here.

This side of the pond and a couple of political things about Joe Biden.

One is that some new polling data, I'm sure you've seen this

Suffolk USA Today poll.

This has to do with Biden standing for re-election.

This was a poll of Florida voters.

And of course, Florida has the third most electoral college votes.

So approval, disapproval of Biden in Florida, 39% approved, but 53% disapproved.

So he is well underwater in a crucial state.

Now, Hillary Clinton, as we've talked about on a previous podcast or two, she's percolated up again at the whatever tender

age of 70, whatever the heck she is.

And as a potential candidate in 2024, according to this poll, Hillary Clinton would beat Joe Biden in a primary.

She's 46 to 43.

But the poll also shows that in Florida, Biden trails DeSantis 44 to 52 and trails Donald Trump 44, 47.

So that's one item about Biden.

You can talk about it or not.

But I'd like to add, though, this news that came out today.

And again, we're recording on Thursday, February 3rd, that Axios, the political website in DC, reported on these memos that have come out the day prior to the Taliban taking over Kabul.

The memos are within the Biden administration and they show totally unprepared, hadn't the faintest clue that the Taliban were about to turn that nation into a Taliban state, despite what Joe Biden was saying.

prior to that at the time and immediately afterwards and also what some of the generals said immediately afterwards So, Victor, I think that's the more pressing thing, but any, if you have any thoughts about the polls or any thoughts about these revelations on Afghanistan.

You know, when you look at the polls and you just take out one or two polls that Ipsus poll or Reuters,

he's down on the aggregate.

He would be in the aggregate about 37%

because they only have him down four or five points, where the others range from 12 to 20,

the 10 or 12 others they use to bundle his so-called approval ratings.

So it's a lot worse than he thinks it is, and there's no bottom to it.

If there were to be a bottom, then he would reverse policies.

But when Jen Saki says the other day, she starts to make fun of people on her podcast that think there's a crime wave.

Remember that?

There's people who think that everything's falling apart.

There's crime.

And, you know, she was met almost immediately, even from left-wing cable.

There is a crime wave, i.e., our zip codes are no exemption from a carjacker or a smash and grabber.

So now now I think Biden is trying to go to New York and say that he's concerned about all the killings of police.

He's not.

What I'm getting at is they're so ideologically rigid and Joe Biden is in this ideological prison that from his Faustian bargain with the left, they don't have any, I don't see how they can reverse course.

And they're going to keep doing it and doing it and doing it.

And so I think they're going to bottom out at about 35%,

which is their hardcore base.

They're losing Mexican Americans of all

different economic classes.

They're losing African-American males.

They're not winning over the soccer mom's independence like they did in 2020.

That rubric is angry, as you saw at the school board elections in Virginia.

They're angry about the lockdowns.

They're angry about crime.

So I think...

We'll see, Jack, but I think we have to reimagine this not just as

even a 2010 correction.

this is something different.

As you saw, the January ratings came out, remember on the cable news programs?

Did you see that stunning figure?

That

is it, 46%

of the Democratic people who watch TV watch Fox News.

It was incredible.

And it was.

Some of the ratings that things like the Five or Greg Gutfield or Tucker are getting are just astronomical.

And CNN doesn't even, it doesn't really exist anymore.

It's lost about 80 to 90% of its all.

So something like one night, maybe 500,000 people were Don Lemon like 300,000.

I mean, it's just a joke.

It's Tucker is up on an average night, 2.3 to 2.4 million.

On a really big night, 4 million.

So it's something's happening.

And it's sort of a,

you know, the American people are really strange people in a way.

They fight and bicker, and then suddenly something happens.

They woke up on December 8th and said, Well, we're not an isolationist anymore.

That's over with.

And they were watching Reagan.

You know, Reagan is, you know, he's mean, he's unkind.

Here's Jimmy Carter.

He's folk.

And then suddenly they looked at stagflation and the Rainian hostage thing.

And they said, I'm done.

And they voted.

I mean, Reagan, up until about four months of the election, was pretty close.

And then he, you know, he just ran away with the election.

So they look at things and then they look at evidence.

And I think when the American people, I'm talking about everybody, and when they look at crime, whether you define it as inner-city crime that threatens young children who are being killed, or you are worried about people being murdered in Beverly Hills, and when they look at Afghanistan, whether you want to stay there or not, the manner in which you got out, the humiliation, the loss of equipment, everything,

the way the Taliban is treating people left behind that we unbanded, they looked at the border.

It's not just a forest border.

There is no border.

There is no border now.

And when they look at COVID on Monday, Fauci says something.

On Tuesday, he corrects it, promises a new thing.

On Wednesday, he'll say something, but on Thursday, he corrects all of them and is out.

They've had it.

And I think you could see a real shift.

I'm talking about, you know, 40 or 50 seats in the House and maybe take back the Senate plus three or four.

And

I think the Democrats look at this scenario and they don't see how they're going to get out of it.

Because to get out of it, we know how Obama got out of it.

He had that, you know, second largest loss of House seats since 1938 in 2010.

But he was young.

He was the first black president.

He was charismatic.

And he just talked about peace and love and harmony.

And there was no more, I'm going to run through, I'm going to run down your damn throats, Obamacare.

It was just kind of, I'm the commander in chief, and Mitt Romney is a wealthy white guy and, you know, wrote off 47%.

And then the last couple of years, I'll let Hillary and Trump dominate the news.

They hate each other and I'll play golf and be a senior statesman.

He left office with 53% approval rating.

But my point is that that's not Joe Biden.

To see Joe Biden is not to like him.

He does two things that turn people off.

He goes, if I'm Joe Biden right now,

why are you dying, Jack?

I'm just, I got to get out of here.

You know, come on, this thing's dragging.

Or, yeah, yeah, Jack.

I don't want to.

He just carps on anything.

Yeah, he dumps it.

And then the other

I could do, I could do things like this.

Hey, Jack, the point is we're doing a podcast, Jack.

And so he does this weird, creepy stuff.

And that's all besides the blowing in the hair.

And

it's just weird.

And people don't like.

somebody representing him that way.

And he's not going to correct.

He can't.

So now he's, when you mentioned the house and Pelosi, he's going back to their, they're thinking, well, how do we get here?

Well, we didn't campaign.

We put the guy, the SOB, in a basement, and we wouldn't let anybody at him.

So we'll just put him in this thing.

We won't let anybody, there won't be any crowd.

There won't be anybody.

The cameras won't show people's faces.

They won't, you know, sit down when he says.

Yeah, you'll have to excuse me.

I don't think I think we talked about that before we went on.

So let me just say to the listeners, yeah, this is about some news news that came out today, because we talked on previous podcasts, the State of the Union is going to be March 1st.

Now, Nancy Pelosi has said to Kevin McCarthy, get this.

When the president gives a state of the union, only 25 people from each party can be in the House chamber live for the president's State of the Union speech, which is such a freaking comedy.

So that's its own thing.

And today, somebody made a suggestion.

Governor Governor Junkins is giving the rebuttal.

And I believe he may actually be giving the rebuttal in the chamber in Richmond, but someone suggested that the Republicans instead go and sit, attend the Yunkins' rebuttal, since they're not going to be able to get in the Capitol building anyway.

So, but anyway, that's the background to that story.

Yeah, and I think what they are terrified is simply there might be some, I don't know, senior senator and Joe Biden can say anything at any time, right?

and they might he might just roll his eyes and say what the f and that would be on camera and they don't want any reaction to his not his insanity because as i said earlier he's failing it at a geometric not just an arithmetical rate and so they're going to do everything they can to put him on ice so to speak and that means i mean you read the other day that when he's in a room you nobody can drink water because they'd have to take off their mask for a second and they don't want joe to be exposed but joe has told everybody that he's yeah that joe has got two vaccinations and get a booster you got to get a booster if everybody just this is a human man-made this is a plague of the unvaxx and that's all he says if he if it was true then why would he worry because he knows it's not true that he could get covet and while most people get a mild dose of covet if they've had two shots or two shots in a booster people who are elderly have died and he's elderly and he's weak and he's enfeebled so

he doesn't believe his own propaganda The whole thing is a disaster.

And it gets back to that one key point that is the key that unlocks all of this confusion.

And that is a group of people in the primaries in 2020,

they were all ready to throw him under the bus.

I mean, you had articles about in the New York Times about Hunter.

You had Corey Booker and Kamala Harris insinuating that he was either a racist or non-compos mentes.

And then we each had their moment.

Pete Buttigig, what a sanctimonious, self-centered scold.

And then we had Beto, what a nut.

That guy, Corey Booker, who Spartacus, who is this guy?

Camela Harris, not one delicate.

Julian Castro, one trilled R too many.

Fake.

So they were all the, and it was Elizabeth Warren, you know, the house flipper who was just always angry and screaming and I'm going to do this.

So there was nobody.

And then Jim Clyburn came up with the idea, you know what?

And then Mike Bloomberg, the billion dollar loser.

And so the farming expert, too.

You drop a seed in the ground and it's easy.

I wish I did that with farming.

If it was true, I'd be wealthy.

But then there was Joe Biden and the African-American vote created him.

and saved him in the South Carolina primary.

And then he went on to Nevada and et cetera.

Okay.

They all conspired.

They said, this is the guy who's going to give us the veneer for the AOC squad hard left Bernie Sanders agenda.

And at that critical moment, we got a person that they knew was not up physically or mentally to the rigors of the job, and they didn't care.

They just wanted to carry him across the finish line and then outsource it, as we've seen, to these crazy nuts who are giving this these weird appointments and weird policies.

But it was all predicated on one assumption.

While he would stumble and while he would flail, he would be able to continue.

And if he couldn't continue, we had Kamala Harris.

And they never in their right mind thought he's going to flail

like you won't believe to the point that he's embarrassing us.

And two,

Kamala Harris is as unpopular as he has.

And there was a reason why she, just like there was a reason why he didn't campaign and couldn't win people over as president, there was a reason why she got zero delegates and will not win people over as vice president.

So that's her dilemma.

And they're never going to get away from that fundamental con they played on the American people.

Right.

You mentioned crime before, too, Victor.

And we've talked about crime many times, but, and I mentioned this personally about growing up in New York City and the Bronx in the 1960s and 70s and 80s and in a quote unquote good neighborhood.

And how many, oh gosh, within a block of me, how many guys murdered and in my own family, two sisters raped, both parents, mug, three brothers, mugged, car stole, an apartment, broken into.

And this was, again, a good, good neighborhood.

The DA lived two blocks away.

And crime has the potential to get much, much worse.

And that to me is such a driving factor in this anger in America.

You talk about, I don't know how with the DAs we have, with the abuse of the police departments, I don't see how this U-turns anytime soon.

People have no idea how bad it can get.

I mean,

I don't think they understand human nature.

Crime is analogous to war.

Whether Vladimir Putin goes into Western Ukraine has nothing to do with whether you smile at him or not.

It has one thing alone.

He is going to make a cost-to-benefit analysis that absorbing Ukraine and giving him prestige at home and terrifying his neighbors to give him concessions is worth the possibility of an armed conflict in the streets of Kiev with sophisticated anti-tank and airplane weaponry and irregulars in the mountains versus and

financial sanctions and that.

And that's what he's going to do because there is all that matters is whether he's going to be deterred or not.

And the same thing about a criminal.

You can tell a criminal, I'm going to get away to the police and we're going to have social workers.

And we just had a case, you know, where a person went in and shot high school people.

We had two people at a college shot and killed two law enforcement.

But crime is predicated on the criminal making a cost of benefit.

It may not be sophisticated.

It may not be lengthy.

It may not be thought out.

A to z, but they make it.

And the idea is, should I smash and grab?

Should I carjack?

Should I shoot that person?

And that will be predicated on the chances I'll have to pay a price for it.

And the price will be worse than the opportunity or the profit in the crime.

And they have concluded, they being our collective criminal class and people who are now attracted to criminality, like the people looting the Union Pacific Railroad in Los Angeles, that there is no punishment.

There is no deterrence.

And this will continue.

And the problem with deterrence, whether it's in crime or war, it's very easy to lose and it takes years to reestablish itself and to remind people.

And how would we stop this crime wave?

We'd have to go back to how we stopped it in the 1970s and 80s and 90s.

We'd have to go back to the broken windows.

We would have to tell people if you smash and grab, you're going to spend five years in prison if that's the appropriate penalty.

We'd have to clean up the homelessness.

We'd have to say there's a law on the border.

It's called U.S.

immigration law and you broke it.

So you're going to be deported right now.

And if we catch you coming in again, you're going to be in prison.

You're going to pay a terrible fine.

And you know what, Mexico, if you don't listen to us and you continue to encourage that, we're going to tax all your $60 billion in remittances at 10%,

6 billion.

And we really will pay for the wall that way.

So that's the type of tough attitude that would have been unnecessary had we just coasted and kept the policies we had in place.

But when you say we're going to defund the police, or you have 40 or 50 district attorneys funded by George Soros, who says that crime is a construct of the wealthy capitalists and they don't prosecute crimes, or when you have criminologists in the university telling us we have to let everybody out of jail, then you get what you get.

It's going to be very tricky and dirty and messy and awful to restore safety.

It's going to get so you're right.

It's going to get, I can see it.

I can drive right down in rural California California on a couple of selected avenues.

And I say to my wife, let's count the felonies, just looking at things.

You know what I mean?

Just look at the felony.

And they can be anywhere from a horse in the summer at 110 degrees without any shade in some ramshackle place, or it can be Romex wire hanging out, or it can be a guy with 30 dogs running in the middle of the street or a goat, or it can be a guy going by us the other night, as I mentioned.

You know, I was driving just to Home Depot and two guys were racing on either side of me.

One pulled over, the cop did.

But everywhere there is a sense that deterrence is lost.

And we all know it.

Jinsaki laughed at it and said,

but as I said earlier, somebody slapped her down because Biden is on his way to New York to tell the mayor that he's good old Joe Biden with his, what, chain?

He's going to get his

corn pop chain out of storage and go around and swing it again.

Or maybe he can beat up Donald Trump.

Remember, he's going to take him behind the gym and beat him up

or there's a third alternative he can go into that lunch counter of that guy insulted his little sister remember he's going to take his head and slam it down on the counter maybe that joe biden or he can jam his rosary beats down somebody's throat so all right victor we've got uh next let's we've got two other topics to discuss and not all that much time left but one is a column that came out today at American Greatness, where you publish twice a week.

This is Russian Appeasement Was a Left-Wing Monopoly.

That's the title.

And it starts with this simple sentence.

One way of understanding the 2009 to 2014 Obama administration policy of quote-unquote reset with Vladimir Putin's Russia is to recall two iconic incidents.

Victor, what were those iconic incidents?

Well, the first was going to Geneva in 2009.

I think it was the mid-summer.

They only been in office a few months, pushing that.

They went out and got a jacuzzi.

They had mistranslated it.

It said was the Russian word for reset, which doesn't seem like it would be a hard thing to get the right word, but it was this idea that we are morally superior.

And George W.

Bush is very unpopular.

He punished Vladimir Putin too severely when he went into Georgia.

So we're not like that.

We are live and let live.

We are peacenicks.

And so we're going to make a special relationship with Vladimir Putin.

And his eyes got big as if somebody handed him a plate of chocolate chip cookies.

You know what I mean?

Oh my God.

Or he looked at Hillary and thought, she's a big fat turkey on a spit, and I'm going to carve something to eat.

That's how he looked at it.

And so,

well, I mean, we cut oil production, the price soared.

Putin smiled.

We cut defense spending.

Putin smiled.

We praised NATO people, even though they didn't meet their obligations and military preparedness dipped.

Putin smiled.

We stayed in that crazy missile agreement that was asymmetric.

Putin smiled.

We refused to sell the Ukrainians offensive weapons.

Putin smiled.

That famous March 2012 election year, hot mic to Medevid, when...

Barack Obama said, I need some space.

It's my last election.

Tell Vladimir I'll be very flexible after I'm elected, especially on matters of missile defense in Europe.

So,

and it was a win-win, wasn't it?

Putin said, Yes, I'll be, I'm not going to go into Ukraine and Crimea until you're elected, and I'll do it in 2014.

And Obama said, and I was elected.

And they both said, and you don't have missile defense in Europe anymore.

So it was a win.

That's the kind of stuff that ruined it.

And during simultaneously with this,

not just the reset, but simultaneously with this, there was also individual members of these iconic democratic families.

I'll give you just a quick why Hillary was overseeing the transfer.

She denies it, and they have all this contorted exegesis, but basically, her word, yes or no, could have stopped 20% of sales of uranium to Russia or not.

But while she was adjudicating that in a way favorable to Putin, Bill Clinton got $500,000

for one speaking engagement.

I don't figure out how much a second that was, but it's pretty lucrative.

And then the Bidens we just talked about, they went over there and Hunter came back with $3.5 million from the mayor's widow.

And that was at a time when Joe Biden, remember, was vice president.

And guess what?

He was against selling offensive weapons to Ukraine, and they didn't do it.

And so they were profiteering.

There was this reset appeasement.

We invited the Soviet Union into the Middle East for the first time in 40 years.

John Kerry did that.

And the point was that he invaded.

Then we had Donald Trump.

He did just the opposite.

Everything I just said, he did the opposite.

Pumped oil, got NATO to pay, up defense, got out of the missile deal, killed 200 mercenaries supposedly in Syria, et cetera.

And there was no invasion.

And then they were right back at it with

Biden.

Remember that?

You know, Vladimir, I know you're hacking, but I have this little list here of 16 institutions that I would like you guys not to hack.

So, when you try to destroy us through hacking, please lay off these agencies.

Thank you.

Oh, Afghanistan,

that didn't hurt our deterrence with China or Russia or being humiliated by the Chinese in anchorage.

That didn't hurt,

and etc., etc., etc.

So, like some criminal, he made the cost

benefit calculus that he could sit on the edge of Ukraine and and sit there and sit there.

And it was like putting a frog in a hot boiling pan of water and watch NATO jump.

And now Germany has been revealed as really on more favorable Putin than us.

Turkey, the seditto.

Biden doesn't know what he's going to do.

Nobody wants to go over there in the backyard of Europe and bail them out.

then superimpose that everything that I just said, the media and the activists on the left will transmogrify into Russian collusion, Ukrainian impeachment count.

He hesitated for a minute to give them aid because he wrongly suggested the Biden family was corrupt, etc.

And it was all a projection.

The people who collude with Russia and Putin, and the other iconic moment, of course, was the steel dossier.

paid for by Hillary Clinton through three firewalls using Russian sources.

I I think I mentioned once that there was a report that some of the Russians themselves were freaked out.

They're like, well, wait a minute.

We hear that she's making stuff up about us

that

suggests that we're colluding with Trump.

I mean, she's kind of helping us out, but we're being defamed, but there's reasons for us being defamed, but this isn't one of them.

For once in the world, you know, we're telling the truth for once.

It's kind of funny.

And so that's what it was all about.

They have a monopoly on appeasement and Russian collusion.

They colluded to create the dossier.

They colluded on oil prices.

They colluded the Clinton and Biden families colluded to get enriched.

I could go on forever.

Yeah, the grift is at the bottom of so much of this.

And Victor, there's another grift that's going on, and America has gone on, and it involves Black Lives Matter.

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on February 3rd, 2022.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I humbly like to ask our listeners who would be interested in a weekly newsletter, email, has a dozen suggestions of worthwhile articles to read.

Subscribe to it.

I write it.

It's called Civil Thoughts, and you'll find it at civilthoughts.com.

And that's run by the Center for Civil Society, which I run for American Philanthropic.

And we're trying to strengthen civil society.

And if that interests you, check it out too.

Thank you.

Also, consider visiting Victor's website.

You'll find the pieces we just discussed that he writes for American Greatness are there, but there are many pieces, original, totally original.

Can't read them anywhere else.

They're the ultra.

They're on the cone of silence.

Ultra.

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If you haven't bought The Dying Citizen yet, I don't know what's the matter with you, but go there.

You'll find the link.

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find it.

There's a very friendly group also called the Victor Davis Hansen Club.

Check it out.

It is a vast archive of all that Victor does and has done.

So, Victor, we'll conclude today's podcast talking about the BLM.

And I was a little shocked to see this.

California, of all places, is going after Black Lives Matter for the 60 million bucks it has raised, but has not filed any reports on it.

There's such financial chicanery and hanky-panky that's gone on with this organization.

By the way, not only from the boodle that came in the door in the last two years, but even prior to that, there's something about, you've mentioned before one of the ex-leaders has all these mansions, but somebody else took some of this donated money and bought a mansion for somebody else in Toronto.

It is a grift.

It's a big Marxist grift.

Well, California doesn't do anything on principle.

So why are they doing this now when they didn't, they have had two years to do it, six years to do it.

Remember, BLM originated out during Trayvon Martin.

It was built on the lie that Trayvon Martin was gratuitously murdered by a white person, like Hispanic, when when he had a fist fight with another minority, a Hispanic, who was being beaten up and to save himself, shot Trayvon Martin.

That was the lie they started with.

Then they compounded the lie with hands up, don't shoot, which even Eric Holder's Justice Department found was a lie.

And so the second big Ferguson was a lie, and they fanned the flames of that.

And then they were still more rebund.

And then George Floyd came along and that triggered it.

And they were there with their hands out and they got over $100 million,

$40 million, of which, I guess, is unaccountable.

And Miss Quellars has four mansions.

She's been telling us that capitalism in general is toxic, and white capitalism in particular.

And then, what does she do when she gets her hands on the money?

Now she's disappeared from the leadership.

She goes to the whitest area I know in California, Toponga Canyon, and buys a house.

And then, after telling us to defund the police, she puts a $35,000 security fence around it.

So she's not a serious person.

But the reason that California is now acting is that is embarrassing in the press, but there's been a series of polls, both in left and mainstream, Harvard Harris, and they don't poll well, Jack.

They have about, I don't know, 60% people don't like them.

And they used to be popular.

And there's a reason why people don't like them.

They were behind defund the police, and we know how that worked out.

They were behind the 120 days of looting and rioting and arson.

And there's too many of them that have been on television.

So they told us that Kyle Rittenhouse was a racist and they demonstrated outside.

And so you're shooting three people in self-defense who are white like you and so racist.

And then when we had a real racist, Mr.

Brooks, who wrote about in advice about how to attack white people and he wrote that on social media and then he got in a car and killed six of them and injured 62 more

they had a BLM activist in Milwaukee that raced right to there with

other protesters.

They didn't show one bit of remorse for the death and destruction other than to brag that this was the start of the revolution.

They told us when we had the Georgia killing where those three white people improperly accused a black jogger of being a thief and they shot him, that this is impossible.

There was only one black juror.

This was another racist American.

And they convicted them of conspiracy to commit murder with life sentences.

And that was the state charges.

Their federal government's in on it now.

So everything they say has been a lie.

And then there's been that iconic Jussie Smollett case.

I mean, when that guy got on the stand and they put him under cross-examination, it was absurd.

He basically did stick to the story that he was walking at two in the morning in Arctic temperatures, and people who were walking with bleach and MAGA hats hats and looking out for empire stars happened to bump into him at two in the morning.

And like Ajax, he fought them off with a hand in the cell phone and the other hand with a sandwich.

But he had the news still.

I mean, it was so absurd.

And they said that his conviction was proof of racism.

So they've lost all public support.

And that's why California now feels that it's legitimate to find out where the money and, more importantly, tax him.

California is always looking for for money.

And I can't think of anything they've done that anybody believes is positive.

And their main focus, remember, Jack, was one narrative, one narrative that African American suspects are being killed inordinately by racist cops nationwide.

And everybody has shown that given the 11 million people who are arrested per year and the number of African Americans as a percentage of that aggregate total who are shot of those African Americans arrested while unarmed is not disproportionate to their population.

What is a lie and what is disproportionate and BLM knows it is that as Heather McDonald pointed out, Jack,

an African-American suspect is 400 times more likely to shoot a policeman of any color than a policeman is likely to shoot an unarmed African suspect.

And so that entire narrative that came out of the George Floyd, which was an aberration, and we were told it was stimulating, we never got any data to support that.

And so 40% of the people who kill cops are African Americans.

They make up 12% of the population.

And yet they claim there's this war against the defenseless by these predator cops.

And you can see what the wages of that are.

When you look at all these cops, we're on a monthly record now per month.

If this continues, it'll be an all-time record of dead cops.

So, one can't say enough ill of BLM.

And it was a Marxist organization.

The only thing that I'm perplexed about is one thing, and I'll finish.

And that is when you look back at BLM literature and Ms.

Quellars and her two associates, remember what started?

This was right before Trayvon, right?

Right there.

They were a

feminist, lesbian, homosexual rights group.

And you can can go in and look at the literature in places like Time magazine and left-wing blogs.

And it was being hailed as a group of primarily gay women.

Two of the three were gay.

And their main objective was to apprise the Black community, in particular in America in general, that Black women were systematically discriminated against, including by Black men.

So it was that homosexual rights organization.

And somehow these sensational cases allowed them to jump their track and to metamorphosize into this, we're the custodians of black males whom we used to be very suspicious of, but now we're their custodians.

And we're going to demand justice because they're being slaughtered by police, although we're not going to produce any data that would support that allegation.

We do support the 120 days of writing and we do support what happened in Waukesha, basically,

et cetera.

And we're not going to have any accounting.

And by the way, there's nobody in charge now.

So BLM, they're looking to see who gets the 60 million.

And the obvious conclusion that we draw is that the three people looted it.

They didn't get it all, but they took maybe 20 or 30 million dollars and they left town or somebody did.

I don't want to make accusations without exact proof, but the leadership took a lot of money and then there was some left and it's leaderless now.

And think of all these corporations that gave all this.

Exactly.

And think of all the diversity, equity, and inclusion officers.

And think of we capitalized the B for black and think of all the things they were able to ram through.

And now we find out that the whole organization was corrupt.

It was designed to enrich its Marxist creators and it did a lot of damage to people.

Yep.

Another, as I said at the beginning, another big, big grift that has had terrible consequences for America.

But Victor, let's end on an upbeat note, though.

I want to recount one of the very nice reviews left on iTunes.

Thanks to everyone who listens to this podcast and who subscribe on various platforms, Stitcher, Google Play, et cetera.

But iTunes, you can leave five-star ratings and practically everyone does.

Thank you for that.

And some people leave comments and we read the comments.

And here's one from Malkaruth.

And it's titled, A Great Mind, A Humble Spirit.

VDH is the kind of guy you would enjoy meeting and talking with at the local bar.

He certainly sounds like that guy.

No pretension, just a rare combination of common sense and uncommon knowledge.

That's Malkaruth.

We thank you for that.

And for all who leave reviews and for all.

who listen and for all who subscribe to victorhanson.com and even those who subscribe to Civil Thoughts, thanks a lot.

Victor, thanks for sharing your wisdom as ever.

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

Thanks for listening.

Thank you for hosting, Jack, and thank everybody for listening.

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