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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, the traditionalist.

We are recording on Monday, December 6th, 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

The star of the show is Victor Davis-Hanson, 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.

We've got a lot to talk about today.

We'll start off with Roman Catholicism, Victor, one of my favorite topics, and it has to do with the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

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

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We're back with the traditionalist.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen show.

We do the traditionalist, we do the classicist.

I get to host those two podcasts.

And the great Sammy Wink does the culturalist.

Victor, I want you to behave yourself as we talk about Holy Mother Church for me, but maybe I'll be a little angry about my faith.

Notre Dame Cathedral, as everyone knows, in Paris, had a horrific fire a few years ago.

As a Catholic, as a practicing Catholic, I must say, for whatever reason, it holds the hearts of a lot of people.

Of course, a lot of people looking forward to it being rehabbed and renovated.

Many people thought renovated as it was.

Well, the French, the Parisian archdiocese has some

renovator priest, and they want to turn

some of the initial reports have come out about some of the plans, and the plans at the end get to be decided by the state because the state of France owns Notre Dame.

But the archdiocese wants to turn it into what some are calling a woke Disneyland.

Got the place, side altars gone, confessionals gone, statues gone.

Let's project stuff about the environment on the walls of Notre Dame Cathedral.

I think it's a lunacy, but I think it's not maybe in its own way, not surprising that great edifices of the West are something that our woke and our elite need to destroy as part of destroying Western civilization.

What's your thoughts about this, Victor?

Well, it's so funny because

this current woke left are so much like the Robespierre Jacobins who did the same thing.

I mean, this global wokeness, I mean, they went in during the French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, and desecrated parts of Notre Dame, and they're doing it again.

And they change names and they change the days of the week and the months of the year and the founding date of France and they toppled statues and they erased names and they renamed things exactly like the left is today.

That should really warn us.

But, you know,

when you read that and you think, what is this generation really, to be honest, offered in comparison to Notre Dame?

I mean, it was built, what, in the 12th century?

They built it in less than 100 years, too.

It was pretty amazing as cathedrals go.

But,

and I think maybe Sammy Wink is here, the expert on France, but it was the tallest.

I know when they built the Eiffel Tower, people got very angry because it was now, the Eiffel Tower was now taller.

I mean, it wasn't as tall as a lot of those cathedrals in Germany, like Ulm or Strasbourg.

I think Strasbourg was the tallest building in the European.

Either that or we went to Ulm.

It was really large, tall, but maybe I'm wrong.

But anyway, so it's a monument to a prior generation of genius and industry.

And the idea that we would go in and alter it for what?

It's kind of like the pyramid outside the Louvre.

And this generation knows how to destroy and to rename, but they can't build anything.

Can't build a highway.

They can't build a mass transit system.

They can't go to the moon.

They can't do anything except bitch and moan and yell and hire more administrators to regulate and audit and check.

But people who built these cathedrals were something else.

It also, just very quickly, it reminds me, I was on the American Battlefields Monument Commission in 2007, 2008.

Of course, it was thrown off by Barack Obama, as we all were.

But something similar happened.

We oversaw all of these cemeteries where half of America's dead rest.

And

because of saving private Ryan, that particular graveyard at Normandy has more annual attendance.

It's very easy to get to than all of the other cemeteries put together.

It's pretty crazy.

And so we would be reading offers from the French or other European countries that they want to host, co-host, or maybe we'll have a pavilion outside the interest.

And every one of those things we looked at was peace tree, peace and reconciliation monument, a mural with ecumenical brotherhood, a global brotherhood.

It's the same idea that this generation thinks they're so cool and they're so, but they can't offer anything.

You know, maybe what would the Dutch and the French offer us?

I mean, you know, some of us said, well, are you going to talk about how your army collapsed in seven, you know,

four days or seven weeks, which is it?

But the idea that they were going to lecture us in this time and space in 2008, they had something that would be more attractive.

to the world than just a little cemetery.

Tom Conner, the Hillsdale scholar, wrote a brilliant book about the Monument Commission, the American Battlefields Monument Commission, and he really went through the history of it and it was quite stunning, really amazing after World War I when it was formed.

But I don't like any of this and I don't think anybody listening likes any of this, that these self-appointed connoisseurs are going to change or alter or add on or update these monumental icons of our civilization.

I guess we're not supposed to say dwarves, but this is a nation of dwarves.

This is a Western people.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, but we ourselves are diminished.

And everybody knows it.

Everybody says, you know, except for cell phones or something.

What did these people came out of the 60s?

What did they leave behind?

Nothing.

Nothing.

Participation trophies.

Yeah.

T-ball, everybody wins, pornography on the internet.

You know, Hollywood, I don't know, Friday the 13th, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

just putting Roman numels after, or remaking better Hollywood movies of a generation they trashed that was far brighter than they were, or rewriting novels of the 1920s or 30s or stealing them, or

trashing plastics departments, ending Greek, making fun of so-called old white male philologists that knew more in their little fingers than any of these young guys people do.

So I just feel that it's very difficult for this generation to be taken seriously.

Victor, I must tell you, I did date a girl way, way back who was in Friday the 13th, part two.

So

I don't want to get in trouble.

Also, I want to make a little commercial here so I don't forget it.

You were interviewed the other day on book TV, C-SPAN 2, an in-depth interview.

That happens usually once in an author's lifetime.

This is the second time this happened.

This is a two-hour interview.

So I want to encourage our listeners to go to the C-SPAN C-SPAN website, search under Victor's name, or whatever you need to do, but you'll find a truly excellent interview that took place December 5th.

That said, Victor, let's move on to one of our least favorite modern political figures, and that's Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York City, soon to be departing.

And he has just, as he's heading out the door, issued an epic order.

And let me read this from the Daily Mail.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is tightening COVID-19 restrictions for 184,000 private businesses and for children over the age of five.

And what he says is a quote-unquote preemptive strike over the fears the Omicron variant will spread rapidly in the city.

The mayor announced Monday morning that he will institute a vaccine mandate for private sector employees in the city and make children aged 5 to 11 show proof of vaccination to take part in indoor dining, fitness, or entertainment activities.

Victor, this is supposed to begin this implementation of this rule December 27th.

This comes out of the blue and a blow, so say New York City business owners, although I don't know that they could have expected anything from Bill de Blasio.

This is an epic government overreach.

I assume others will follow.

Your thoughts about this, Victor?

Did anybody take Warren?

I think it was his name, Warren Wilhelm Jr.

or something.

I mean, I think that's his name.

Warren Wilhelm.

It's about as German as you can get.

And then this guy takes his grandmother's name, De Blasio, and tries to, what, Mediterraneanize his name so he doesn't sound like somebody out of Stalag 17 or something.

Is that the idea?

He is the only major person in that primary of 2016

that was less impressive than Kamala Harris.

He's a complete buffoon.

So why is he doing this?

Does he have any science that this is going to restrict the spread?

Or is it because he wants people to call up and say, Mayor, mayor, I have a hotel.

Mayor, mayor, I have a five-star restaurant.

Can you please give me exemption?

Please, please, please?

Mayor, mayor, mayor.

And then when you look at the actual city, and I was there in October for a week, I couldn't recognize that.

I mean, a lot of you guys, Jack, you go there every day and you don't know.

Are you aware?

Because you see it gradually go, but

I only go if I have to go.

And that's rare because, yeah,

you know, as we were talking before,

it's like an open urinal half of it.

It is.

There's homeless people everywhere.

There's trash everywhere piled up.

The side streets between them boulevards are all torn up.

And you've got this weird thing with these bike lanes where if you want to take a car and they let you out, you have to look both ways carefully, especially at night, because these people on electric bicycles, which are mini-motorcycles, are going 20 miles an hour in the bike lane and they don't stop.

It's insane.

It reminds me, you know, when

I was 18 and I'd finished my first year at college and my professor, John Lynch, said, you know, if you really want to be a classicist and get four years, you got to take Greek in the summer.

Well, there were no programs.

I'd never been out of California, so I went to Yale University and I took something called the Intensive Greek course.

Ten weeks, I can't remember, 10 weeks at Yale.

But it was all graduate students in their mid and late 20s.

I was 18.

I'd never taken a foreign language before except Spanish.

So I really struggled.

But my point is, I, like an idiot, somebody said, you got to go to New York.

So I went up to New York and it was 1971.

I could never seen a more dreary, depressing, violent, dirty city.

And that's exactly what it's coming again.

So

he's going to go down in history as a person who reversed the broken windows, the Chief Bratton, the Rudy Giuliani, even the Bloomberg model.

He's going to destroy, he's destroyed that city.

You know, he made a desert and called it peace, I guess, quote Tacitus.

Victor, we have a few more subjects to talk about.

And let's go overseas and let's talk about China.

And the news being reported this week is that China is planning, red China, by the way, is seeking a base in the Atlantic.

The thought that America was the only navy in the world that could actually patrol the world seems not to be the case anymore.

China has spent years of development in and blackmailing of its Belt and Road initiative, has a lot of sites in Africa.

So I don't think it's any surprise that they would seek to have some port there for its Navy.

This is scaring people, maybe rightly.

What are your thoughts about this?

I think so, because I think the figures figures that I saw on the news accounts were that China's military budget for the first time went over, what, $250 billion?

And remember, ours is much larger, but they don't have diversity coordinators and diversity, equity, inclusion facilitators.

And so if ours is 700 billion,

they don't have a transgender surgeons.

They don't have the type of retirements we do.

They don't have the social inclusion czars, HR people, all of that overhead they don't have.

And so, you know, that thing going on the internet where they have that commercial jack where they show the recruiting film for the Chinese People's Liberation Army, and then they show ours about the woman and the other ones they have about the U.S.

military.

It's a welcome place for gays, transgendered, single men, da-da-da-da.

And Chinese are people blowing stuff up on the screen.

And so, you know, when they spend $250 billion, it's probably equivalent to what we're spending on actual military readiness in combat, really is.

And we always consoled ourselves and said, well, you know, they're a regional navy.

They're not a blue water navy.

So, yeah, they're going to build the Sproutly Islands.

Obama said, yeah, so what?

You know,

and they can, you know, they can stop aid to Taiwan, maybe, but they're never, ever going to go into the Mediterranean.

They're not going to go in the Atlantic.

They're not going to go in the Caribbean.

Of course, their strategy is

for the Americans to get out of the Japanese sea, then you want to have a base in Latin America to, you know, cruise around and show, wave them and show the flag so that they have to reapportion or recalibrate or relocate a lot of their fleet away from Asia.

And so they're going to keep doing that.

And we keep talking about Australia and all these countries, but their increases are not nearly as much in the aggregate as China's is.

China's spending a lot of money.

I mean, they have about 400 million people that are still living in revolutionary conditions, i.e.

under Mao.

I mean, they're rural people and they don't have the sort of things that people in the city have.

And there's a lot of tension.

So one wonders when

they have such a disequilibrium in...

wealth and they're spending so much money on infrastructure and they're so reckless in investment.

I don't know how they keep doing it.

But something's got to give if they're spending that much on the military.

Well, Victor, I thought we were going to talk about one more thing and we'll talk about two.

Something I just saw this, it just popped up.

We're recording again on December 6th and news has just broken that Devin Nunes is leaving Congress.

It's just been announced within the last half hour that he's going to resign from Congress later this month, December,

and he is going to be running Donald Trump's social media platform.

I'm kind of shocked by this.

I would have thought of Devin Nunes overseeing intelligence affairs in Congress and the next Congress, assuming Republicans take over, would be, you know, good for America, good for the world.

Anyway, I know you know him and are friendly with him.

I'm sorry to spring this on you, but any thoughts about this?

I'm looking at my phone and I see that I have two phone calls from him that I missed where I was on this.

So apparently he's calling various people.

Yeah, I've known him a long time and we're neighbors.

I really like him, but I'm not surprised.

I thought, and I think everybody thought, that the Republicans are going to take the House.

And if they do, based on the seniority system, he's pretty much likely going to be the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

So he would might, you could make the argument that he'd have the most powerful job, almost as powerful, I think more powerful than the speaker, because he could govern the whole traffic of the Congress.

So whatever the deal was, must have been pretty lucrative.

But what I'm getting at is, and I can speak as someone who's traveling, he lives in Tulare.

So that means he's got to drive 50 miles, 55 miles to the Fresno airport.

And then he's got to get on a connection.

This is what I've been bitching about.

You know, then you either got to go to Dallas or you've got to go to Denver.

And believe me, in this environment he misses connections he goes back there and he's not like most California congressman he comes back every weekend because he's got three small girls preteen girls beautiful girls beautiful wife nice home but he's not financially he's not a rich person is what I'm saying right and so I think it must have been, I've talked to him before about it, about other avenues, and it's always never been that he doesn't want to be in Congress, but he doesn't know how he's going to have a future for his family if he's going to be away from his three daughters five days a week for another 20 years.

And so I think that was the.

And also, I could see him interested in this, Victor, because he's been ill-served by social media himself.

He has, and he's kind of mastered it because he has a social media platform.

It's quite amazing, fundraising and whatnot.

And every year, the Democratic National Committee comes up with, can't we get rid of this thorn on our side?

And they get some person that no one knows.

And they,

some of them are carpetbaggers.

They come out and they flood them with $12, $13 million in cash.

And they run billboards.

But Devin Unez is a Russian agent.

Devin, they go out to his farm, his grandmother's farm, and they followed his wife around.

They went out to his parents' farm in Iowa.

And, you know, there's a lawsuit over that.

I want to get into it.

But

they really torment him.

And I think at some point, a person thinks,

well, I'm getting near 50 and I don't have any money and I've got three kids.

I'm only home and I only see my three children eight days a week.

Whereas in he probably could run this platform and I don't know.

I know there's, I will say I won't disclose you the information.

I know that there were other social media concerns that were interested in having him participate, and he turned them all.

It wasn't going to happen.

So this must have been an offer.

I'm just speaking hypothetically because

this must have just happened, Hanja.

Yeah, just, yeah, just while we were recording.

I know you've known him.

It'll make a lot of people mad, though, because they feel that he was one of the great fighters for conservatives.

I mean, he never gave an inch.

And what are we we going to do without him?

I don't know what will happen.

He has a district that's contiguous with David Valdez, who voted to impeach Donald Trump, both Republicans.

And there's a big controversy in that district.

But we are in reapportionment.

And we have a quote-unquote bipartisan reapportionment commission.

And it's not.

bipartisan, you know how that goes.

And it's left-wing dominated.

And I had been hearing things that they were going to redistrict him out of his present district where his house wouldn't be in his district.

And oh, that's legal to run in a district where you don't live, but it's terrible politics.

And the likely district that he was going to inherit was, it looked like a jigsaw puzzle to exclude as many Republicans as possible.

and to get people in areas of Fresno that are very, very left-wing rather than his rural foothill,

southern San Joaquin constituency.

So I know that they were actively trying to redistrict and put him out of business.

And I don't know, maybe he looked at the map and it's been finalized.

He said, I can't win that.

Well, Victor, one last thing about Congressman Nunes, and if we take your friendship out of the equation, but again, let's recognize that you're very involved in, of course, in military strategic considerations through Hoover Institution.

You have Strategica and you have the organization you run there that considers current global military problems and concerns and threats.

This was sort of Devin Nunes' bag through the Intelligence Committee.

I've got to believe you thought as the former chairman and then as the ranking Republican on that committee that he was pretty adept at intelligence matters for American security.

He was.

We had him speak at the Hoover Institution.

I think it was in 2014,

15.

And we had a very diverse group in the military history working group, and I won't mention names, but there were a lot of people who later became never Trumpers.

And he gave a very insightful, very careful, so he couldn't disclose anything, even though it was a closed meeting, appraisal of how during the reset years, i.e.

the reset years of you know, tell Vladimir that if you'll give me some space during my reelection, you know, that Obama hot Mike or Hillary's uranium-1 deal or Bill getting half a million dollars in Moscow, that period of appeasement, you know, where we didn't sell the Ukraine offensive weapons and Putin sort of ran wild in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

It's very ironic because these same people then called Debanunes a puppet, an asset.

They had billboards.

It looked like he was some kind of dishonest traitor.

But he was one of the first people to say that Russia cannot be trusted.

And I remember him telling members of the Hoover community that Russia interferes, not just in all elections,

it does through cyber attacks.

And you have to be very careful with these people.

And they're not very powerful in traditional economic terms, but given their nuclear deterrent and their viciousness, you've got to take them very, very seriously.

This is Devon Nunes whom later, I think John Brennan claimed Donald Trump was treasonous, and he clapper said that Donald Trump was a Russian asset.

That was part of the larger attack on Nunes as well.

And I won't mention some very prominent people on the right that asked him to resign.

They were seeking his resignation.

And they really, that I think another thing was, I don't think anybody understands just how vicious that Russian collusion hoax was.

And so when he reported it and he went over and gave that press conference at the White House, there were, you know, Adam Schiff and everybody said he'd acted out of protocol and all that.

But what I'm getting at is over the next three years, I mean, Adam Schiff found out his data.

They, remember that?

He disclosed that he had actually surveyed his phone and communication email data, the member of your own committee.

And as I said, there were all kinds of journalists all over here in the San Joaquin Valley.

The McClatchy Fresno B, I don't know what happened.

They used to endorse him, but they had a vendetta against him.

So I'm not kidding, Jack, every day, and they still do.

Nunes under a cloud of suspicion and Nunez recuses himself.

It was just attack, attack, attack, attack, attack.

And it got so if you said that you were a good friend of Devin Nunes, people would start arguing with you.

I was up in San Francisco and I walked by this store, I think it was 2016, said, you know, Nunez, Russian agent, give money, get rid of Nunez.com.

And they were raising money to get rid of him.

And then I spoke in Aptos, I think it was 2015,

excuse me, 2017.

And there were protesters everywhere.

It seemed like UC Santa Cruz's campus came out.

So they made life hell for them.

And then when that whole phony thing that he was going to recuse himself, Paul Ryan worked out where Adam Schiff had disclosed supposedly something and supposedly Nunes did.

He never did once.

And they were both going to go up to the House Ethics Committee and then they were going to vote 10-0

for Schiff.

And then the next day they go 10-0 for Nunes.

Remember how that worked out?

They excuse Schiff and then they...

All of a sudden, all the Democrats voted to hold a hearing on his ethics complaint.

So then he was taken off

the intelligence committee.

and that was a way of neutralize him and i i blame paul ryan for that he allowed that to happen as speaker of the house so i think he has a lot of wounds and he's still a young man but for me it's probably two things he's very interested in social media right and he's suing uh a lot of the social media the way they treated him and he's got three young daughters who need a father around yeah Well, if he brings the diligence he brought to his job in Congress, I assume it's going to be very successful.

Victor, we have one more topic to talk about, and that's another great California lawmaker.

Her name happens to be Kamala Harris, and we'll talk about her right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the traditionalist recording on Monday, December 6th, 2021.

Victor, Kamala Harris, here's the quick rundown.

28% approval rating.

The border, that's her bollywick, it's a crisis.

Her office is rife with dissent, any number of Politico, Washington Post, all the political junkie publications, one after another, running these stories.

Aides who are talking about the abusive environment in her office, that she's a bully.

Also, that this seems to be the M.O., not only of her office as vice president, but of when she was a United States Senator and when she was the DA in California, the Attorney general also she is unprepared staff reports are prepared on this or that issue she doesn't read them and then when she's caught short publicly ignorant of course it's the fault of the staffers she was a create created by willie brown who wanted a pyromaro and she was in her early 30s and he got her the job as city attorney of san francisco and then county attorney and then she ran for attorney general and then she ran when barbara boxer stepped down that opened up and then it was the woke movement she was a person of color and she seemed like when she was a city and county attorney remember jack she went after truant parents and marijuana and was trying to be a woke tough prosecutor so she had this image that among moderate democrats and republicans that maybe

that was kind of naive.

But anyway, when she got there, she's done nothing.

She's not very well prepared.

She's not very well educated.

She's got a, a, can I dare say this, chip on her shoulder.

She was a child of privilege.

Her father was a professor at Stanford.

I think he's still there.

He's in his 70s.

He's an economics professor.

And her mother was a cancer PhD researcher.

And out of that matrix, she said, I was that little girl, Joe Biden, that you were racist, you know, that kind of stuff, the victim.

And so she just ran with the whole woke thing.

And then, as we talked about earlier, when Joe Biden made that gaffe that he was going to have a woman of color, a black woman, after George Floyd protest,

then what do you do?

Is it Stacey Abrams or Maxine Waters?

I mean, we don't have Shirley Chisholms and people of that caliber that are running today.

We just don't.

And

Barbara Jordan, yeah, that would have been great.

But we don't have those types.

They're all, you know, very hard left women of color, as we've seen with these DAs and mayors.

So there wasn't a lot of people who were going to appeal to the Democratic Party.

So when he gave her name, it was by default.

And remember, we talked earlier, Jack, everybody was mad that Andrew Cuomo, that buffoon, was not

picked because they thought, oh, wow, he'll be president.

He's done so well.

You know, the Emmy winner.

And so that's how she got there.

And she is petulant and

she's very insecure.

And she screams and yells at her staff.

She always has.

She's leaked stuff about Joe Biden's cognitive disabilities, her staff does.

And they pay her back by saying she's never been to the border.

And then they pay her back by saying that you can make, hey, Kamala, can you go down there and handle that mess that I made?

Maybe you can talk to those 2 million people about getting a vaccination so everybody gets off my back.

That's the kind of stuff they give her.

Or go over to Europe and see how they treat you.

You know, so she did that.

And

it's been a disaster, but she's a mean person.

And so we have all of these staffers.

Wasn't there a guy today, Jack?

I just, I've been out.

My listeners might know my main water main ruptured in this ancient house.

It's over a hundred-year-old galvanized pipe under a huge tree root.

So I've been out of the news for two days.

I've been digging roots, sawing them, digging out.

Couldn't get a plumber.

Nobody would in right mind would look at that.

And trying to saw an old pump and put couplings in down in a trench.

And it's cold, it's wet.

and i haven't read but i did hear i had to go get parts it was on the news that there was wasn't there some staffer who did a little tweet of this a guy named david gins who looked like he was uh you know if he was blinking it was a picture he would have been

blinking he absolutely loves his job and when they said blink was it the idea that he was

that he was set up and he was going to blink sos is that yeah no that's what i'm i'm saying that yeah and then jen psaki defended her today at a White House press conference that she's a joy to work for.

You know, some people are into.

Probably just as bad as Hillary.

So

I don't know what to say.

She's

what we're shaping up is a larger landscape, Jack, and that is there's a three, there's a triangle here.

At one angle,

there's Joe Biden.

And we were told it was good old Joe from Scranton.

And, you know, Joe's a great guy, and he would then be a force multiplier of his agenda.

But he is so cognitively challenged.

And some days he doesn't even know what he's talking about.

And he's not a nice guy.

He was never a nice guy.

I remember Clarence, we've talked about this, the Bork hearings, the Clarence Thomas hearings, all of these racially insensitive stuff he said his entire life, the corn pot stuff, the whole, it's just ludicrous.

And then there was was a blowing in the girls' ears and what was it?

And eight or nine of them came forward before.

Then there's Tara Reed, it's never been resolved.

So he's kind of a creepy guy.

And then you go to his agenda and you look at border, no.

Afghanistan, no.

Economy, no.

Inflation, no.

COVID, remember everybody blaming Donald Trump?

Biden said, if you, he, all these people died, now there's more people died in his watch.

And he just thought, I'm going to walk into the presidency and COVID is over, and I got 17 million people vaccinated.

And I'm going to blame Trump for those 370,000 people that died under his watch.

Nobody's going to die at mine because I'm going to take Operation Warp Speed and claim it as my own.

And every commander-in-chief is responsible for every single death of COVID.

Okay.

And there was no Delta variant.

So he thought he was riding high.

He had high opinion.

And then the Delta variant hit, and Joe had no clue what to do.

And

he didn't do anything.

And so the second leg of that triangle is that he has no agenda at all.

And he's an unpopular, nasty guy that's cognitively in decline.

And then we come to the third problem, and that's Kamala.

What do you do?

i.e., if he can't finish his presidency, what do you do?

Do you take a person with 40% positives and put in somebody in the mid-20s?

And Nixon knew that.

I mean, Agnew was very unpopular and he was a crook.

And that was an argument that Nixon thought was, it almost worked for him, that I'm not going to step down because you guys are going to get Agnew.

But once Agnew got indicted, that blew up in Nixon's face.

And then you got Jerry Ford that everybody liked.

But as long as she's there, Jack,

there's going to be a lot of people in the Democratic Party,

I would rather be wrong with Biden

than with right with her.

I don't want anything to do with her because she's going to destroy the ticket.

There will be, I think she's one of those rare candidates.

Hillary was one of them.

I met so many women who were independents or Democrats, and they'd said they would go out and vote against Hillary.

Right.

And I think there are people like that on the left and center who cannot stand her.

They don't like her arrogance.

They don't like her put-downs.

They don't like her sense of entitlement.

They don't like the way she treats people.

They don't like the fact that she's way over her head.

And so I'm a little worried to tell, I think our listeners are a lot worried because

we all want, you know, I think we want a traditional candidate and a conservative agenda, but I don't want the country to pay like the price we're paying.

I don't know if we're going to get there till next November.

We're going to get a tsunami.

reaction against this craziness, but my God,

when you have somebody like her

that could be president, or you have Biden right now as president, and you look at the border and you look at the economy and inflation and critical race theory and crime, I've never seen crime like this.

I mean, we didn't even talk about that, Jack, but I mean, they killed the 81-year-old matriarch, African-American woman in Beverly Hills.

And then the person who killed her was out on bail.

And then he was found committing another crime.

They broke in the other night to Pacific Palisades and robbed from a private party.

Anyone knows of Pacific Palisades?

It's like one of the most elite areas of Los Angeles and Nordstroms.

And so I guess what these criminals are doing is they're saying, you know what, we're going to go after the rich.

And I don't know if they're Antifa influence or it's BLM, but where is BLM?

I'd like to hear BLM.

Can't BLM kind of contextualize?

Where is Nicole Hanna-Jones who told us at the height of the riots that destroying property is not violence?

Where is the mayor, Mr.

Fry of Minneapolis?

It said, just brick and mortar.

Why don't they come out and say, they gave us a standard that says there are no individuals.

There is a white collective and a black collective.

And every single white person is responsible for Jim Crow, whether you live in the North or West or whether you're alive in

1860 or 2021.

That's your responsibility.

But that's not true of us.

We are the Rainbow Coalition of Diverse People, but we have no responsibility for record murders in Washington or Baltimore or Chicago because we're individuals.

It's racist to say that Professor Kendi should address crime.

Why would you want Todd Nahisi Coates to talk about the spiraling crime rate or black on Asian crime or black on white crime or a Waukesha?

That's not his job.

No, it is his job because he self-appointed himself as the spokesman for a collective, not individuals, a collective.

He's the one that, and they are the ones who said, you know, we're going to capitalize black and this is a cohesive community and we have grievances against the majority, but no one is to be found when we have this skyrocketing crime rate, which Jack, I'll be honest with you, I've been looking not at you know crazy blogs, I've been looking at the data.

And the data suggests that it's overwhelmingly African-American youth who are involved in these crimes.

Maybe not all of the smash and grab, but inordinately, and by inordinately, I mean much more than the 13% of the population might suggest.

And if you say males, 6 or 7% of the population is committing over 50 or 60% of the crime.

Your correct point about, you know, we're going to have maybe a big backlash a year from now politically, but things could get a lot worse in the meanwhile.

And when it comes to crime, it can get a lot worse.

It has been a lot worse i was talking to the great sammy wink earlier when i was growing up in new york city in the 60s and 70s and 80s and it actually peaked in the early 90s i think 1991 92 there were like 2200 murders in new york city that year and in my little nice irish catholic enclave of a neighborhood a good place quote-unquote good place to grow up in my big family two of my sisters were raped both parents mugged apartments broken into car stolen, three brothers mugged.

And that was in a good place.

And that's what life was like.

And it can be like again.

And it's on a trajectory to be like that again.

So things can get a lot worse.

I had no money whatsoever as a graduate, as every graduate student.

I was flat broke and I was living in East Palo Alto.

which in 1975 was pretty bad.

And I can remember riding a bike down University Avenue and I got to 101 into regular Palo Alto.

And two young thugs pulled over, and they

grabbed my bike and throw it in their pickup.

And I did not, I was kind of like some kind of octopus.

You know, I just clung to it because that was the only way I had to get to school.

And they pulled and pulled and kicked, and I kicked them and hit back.

And we were literally pushing, and a police car came by, and they jumped in the car and let me have my bike.

And then I can remember walking down University Avenue in the 70s in University Avenue and having three thugs attack a mentally challenged person that my wife had been working with at the VA hospital.

And they were taunting him

and making fun of him and making fun of.

I had walked into a restaurant to get a reservation.

I came out and my wife had been waiting and she worked at the VA with this wonderful person.

And they were taunting and kicking him.

And I got into it with him.

And so that's what we're going to get back to.

A lot of these young people have all of these idealistic ideas about human nature, but without deterrence, we resort very quickly to Lord of the Flies.

And that's what we're watching right now.

And it's going to be,

we're going to see some things.

Unfortunately, I don't want to see them, but we're going to see some things that are going to be.

earth-shattering because this crime wave will not stop until deterrence is restored.

And that can be done by a lot of ways.

You can do a lot of things.

Joe Biden tomorrow, Jack, could say, you know what, I know that state laws are primarily the ones being violated, but a lot of the smash and grab merchandise is put on the internet.

It crosses state lines.

It's a federal racketeering matter.

And we're going to put you people in a federal prison for 20 years if we convict you.

Then he could say to Merrick Garland, existential danger of the United States are not Virginia moms and pops to school.

Pull those FBI agents out now.

And then he could could say, James O'Keefe and Operation Veritas are not existential dangers.

Pull out those SWAT-like tactics and free up these people.

And he could then say, you know what, Hunter Biden's laptop and how it got out and when he was drugged, where he left it, that's not an FBI matter.

I'm sorry.

Go free those agents up and start arresting these people for racketeering.

And he won't do it.

But somebody will do it because you have no choice.

If you allow the crime to continue, San Francisco is deserted and all these major cities downtowns will be deserted.

And, you know, what do you do when you read the Columbia PhD student was what, stabbed and killed New York City, and then an Italian tourist was stabbed by the same killer and the killer was out on bail?

What do you do when a temple guy, a little kid at Temple going to college, somebody wants to hijack him and kills him?

what do you do when there's a little boy walking in west palm beach florida and some guy out in bail goes over and kills him and what do you do when somebody gets in a car and kills six people and injured 62 and he's with a history of utter racism and the reaction of the media is to bury it on page 17 and say the suv is guilty yeah so the abyss between reality and rhetoric The reality is that we're going back, as you say, to a 1970s crime epidemic, as the rhetoric is that we're all searching the Pentagon for these white supremacists, proud boys, and we're in a spike of white supremacy violence.

And there's no data to suggest that at all.

These are noble lies, but they're lies nonetheless.

Victor, the one social policy that was devised that actually worked was fighting crime.

You know, we know how to fight it.

We know how to stop it.

Of course, that's been sullied as racist.

The broken windows theory of policing, it works.

It saved lives.

If you looked at the worst years in New York City and calculated how many lives people were not murdered,

it's the equivalent of a small town.

It's like 30,000 people would otherwise have been just in New York City alone.

They put them in jail and they, I guess they beat their head against their jail cell, but they didn't go out and kill an innocent person.

And they're not doing that now.

It's almost like the return of the 70s.

Somebody in the Biden administration administration said, you know what?

Those were happy days.

Let's see if we can get them back again.

Let's get all those crime, let everybody out.

We'll get up the crime.

Murder rate will go high just like it was in 71.

We'll bring back what?

Death Wish, Escape from New York, Dirty Harry, Falling Down.

Remember that movie in the 90s?

I think.

Oh, sure.

The Equalizer.

Yeah.

Bring all this stuff back.

Let's get inflation too while we're at it.

Jimmy Carter had an idea, 70.

Yeah, we're going to get inflation.

Then somebody said, well, racial strife.

That was a time when there was a lot more racial strife.

Let's get that back.

That was a good thing to do in the 70s.

Then somebody said, hmm, hostage taking Iran fell.

Let's get appeasing again.

That was a great time.

So Vietnam, helicopters from the embassy flying away.

Let's try to do that in Afghanistan.

So I don't know what it was, but this.

Biden administration seems to have some kind of weird nostalgia for, I don't know, 1975 or 1976 or 77 the carter administration but he's doing a good job of it to bring it back i think it'll be good for all of our wokesters our young little woker people that are you know 18 19 they've never seen it before and they're going to have to have their experience with inflation and high crime and humility abroad and lack of deterrence etc and see how they like it well they won't try taking the subway every day i'm being in the 1980s no i know you i know you're being all right well victor let's wrap this up.

Oh, I'm cackling.

Stop me, Juck.

You talk about it.

Oh, Kamala Harris, next thing.

I start cackling like this.

Yeah, I was going to mention before on her on her positive side, she does have the cackle, which makes you wonder: if you had to have a cackle contest between her and Hillary, who would, I think, I think Kamala would win.

Cackling banjos or dueling banjos.

Victor, we have great listeners, and many of them, as you know, leave reviews on iTunes.

Five stars remains the average and a number of people actually leave comments.

Here's one from Farmer3345.

And this is in response to, you did a podcast recently with Sammy Wink about life on the farm.

It was titled The Agrarian, and Farmer3345 writes, so thoroughly enjoyed the agrarian episode.

I'm the same age as Victor.

What is that?

97.

And having a farmer my whole life, I could so relate to everything you said about the trials and tribulations of being a farmer.

Our farm has had its ups and downs.

Lately, more downs and ups.

I would enjoy having a beer with you and talk shop about farming.

It made me feel like I am an anachronism by continuing my farming life.

I love it too much to quit.

Love all your other podcasts.

I never miss an episode and wish they lasted longer.

Thank you, Farmer3345.

Listeners, please consider visiting visiting Victorhanson.com.

That's where.

That was a nice letter, Jack.

Oh, it was.

Yeah.

All I can say is a fellow farmer.

I'll quote you from Isaiah: the summer is gone, the harvest is in, and we're not saved.

Okay.

Well, you'll want to hear that over a beer.

VictorHanson.com, ladies and gentlemen, visit it.

And a significant amount of original content that can only be read there is there.

$5 a month, $50 a year.

Treat yourself to it.

Send it as a gift to someone while you're there.

You'll also find links to many of the books Victor's written.

Yes, despite what Amazon's

monkey business, you can still buy The Dying Citizen, which has done tremendously well.

Consider some of Victor's military books for the military person in your life, make great Christmas gifts.

I would encourage our listeners, little old me, visit civilthoughts.com and sign up for the newsletter I write every week.

Civil Thoughts.

No, no, there's no cost.

There's just a dozen links of worthwhile things we think you would like to read.

That's about it, Victor.

Oh, I do want to say this.

I do believe the first episode of the Victor Davis Hanson podcast that we did way, way back when National Review was done after you spent six hours under your kitchen sink repairing.

I remember that.

I remember that.

That was unfortunately that was sewage

and water is a little bit wetter yes it's uh not as bad i've been doing this i'm 68 and i can remember being 15 and having my grandfather call me and say let's fix the pipe under then call under there and do it and what happened to my life and my brain at 68 can i have just one pleasant sunday and monday where i'm not my hands and knees i have enough money to you know call a plumber he uh he's busy Oh, there's new homes.

He's working on new homes.

Oh, he can't come out.

Oh, we'll do this.

So, you know, a person who has 10% of the plumber's knowledge is very dangerous because just enough to get by, but also to really screw things up.

So

I'm up in the second half.

Plumbing is not a hobby, right?

Yes, like electricity.

And I did a lot of my own plumbing when I tried to repair this.

150-year-old house.

But my gosh, I'm looking out the window upstairs and I'm looking at these two couplings where the old coupling blew off because the root bent the pipe.

And so I had two pipes that were at 45-degree angles.

So I had to dig them out and push them down somehow and then get two couplings on them.

And I got the water back to the house, but I wonder at what point it'll just have Mount Vesuvius again.

Well, not too many other public intellectuals can do that.

We were successful.

We were successful.

I got it done.

And I got the sewer pipe that day, Jack, done too.

Just some days of your life, when this happens, I just think, how many more days before I'm gone do I have to go under that damn house?

There's a pillar, you know, collapsed and the kitchen sinking or the hot water pipe broke under the house or the cesspool backed up under the house or the dogs got under the house and tore up all of the ducting.

And it just seems like, you know, if you think that way, way, it's pretty depressing.

And then I think, wow, I think I want to go get a new tract house in town somewhere.

Right.

Victor, remember, you can offer this up for the souls in purgatory.

So, of course, you have to be Catholic to believe that.

But, all right, well, thanks, Victor, for another great episode.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.