The Classicist: Lawlessness and Noble Lies

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Well, hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the classicist we are recording on Sunday, October 17th of the year of our Lord, 2021.

I am the host.

There's a host, and there's a star of the show.

The host, Jack Fowler, I am the director of the Center for Civil Society at AmericanPhilanthropic.com and also the author of its weekly newsletter.

Civil thoughts, more on that later.

But the star is Victor Davis Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and New York Times best-selling author for the dying citizen.

We've got a lot to talk about today.

We're going to start off talking about the book, some of the monkey business that goes on in the publishing industry, but how it has rightly landed on the bestseller list.

And we'll do that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

The classicist, this is one of the three weekly podcasts that occur under the Hansen Show umbrella, the traditionalist and the culturalist with the great Sammy Wink are also coming to you weekly.

So Victor, hello, my friend.

It was good to see you a couple of weeks back in New York, where you were doing extensive promotion for The Dying Citizen, now out, number seven on the New York Times bestseller list.

Victor, let me make a lament on your behalf, or just my own lament.

This book, when it was actually published, I'm sure there was significant pre-sales through amazon so it should have come as no surprise that this book was going to have high sales geez october 7th if you went on amazon to buy it let's say somebody saw you on fox that night or newsmax or you know on laura ingrahm's show and the impulse was then and there wow i'm going to get this book right now someone goes to amazon what do they see out of stock right now today as we're talking it's on order that kind of deal but despite these kind of weirdnesses that I think happen to conservative authors, the book has still done so far tremendously well.

As I said, number seven on the Times list.

Today, it's number 24 on Amazon.

I think it's been as high as number three, maybe, or number six.

Yeah, the only thing that was strange is, and I've written, I think, 24 books.

And I think maybe 20 since Amazon had its ratings and all that.

And I've dealt probably with all the major publishers in New York, Doubleday, Simon Schuster, Basic Books, Bloomsbury, Alfred Knopf, Random House.

But I've never had this experience, even with a Trump book that had a very provocative title.

And what happened was

after I did what conservatives want to do, and that is be invited on Mark Levin or Glenn Beck or do Fox and Friends, I was doing about 10 of these a day in New York for that week.

And it started out immediately at number three.

And then mysteriously, and the publisher had taken a risk.

They had published thousands of copies.

So they had assured me that they were anticipating

supply chain interruptions and da, da, da, da, da.

But within 30 hours, it just froze.

And it said, either out of stock or soon in stock.

And it just stayed that way.

I mean, the ratings didn't change.

They went from three the first day to maybe, I think it was seven or 12, and then it just stayed there for a week.

And it just said, you know, out of stock or soon to be stocked.

It doesn't mean that they weren't shipping some, but that was a discouraging message.

And then you find out when you inquire that A book is not charged as sold until it's shipped.

Now, that's obvious because if people could just get all their friends, you know, to order books, pay for it, and then 24 hours later, cancel the order.

So it has to be shipped.

So during this period, even though it was saying

out of stock on Amazon, it was being bought, but it was not being shipped, at least not shipped fully, and we don't know why.

But the result of that was it looked like the book was dropping.

So there was this kind of Orwellian situation.

If you went on Jesse Waters or Tucker Carlson or you did 10 really high-rated podcasts or radio shows, whatever, it would be getting worse because obviously they weren't shipping books while other books in the list that are comparatively rated are being shipped.

And, you know, you look at the top 20 Amazon books and how could a book, only one book be out of stock and be out of stock basically at the end of the second day, it was published.

And this went on for 10, 12 days and now it's erratic.

So one day it'll be

ships in three days, six days, eight days, and soon to be in stock.

It goes back and forth.

But I can assure the people listening to it that there are books and it's either they're dribbling them out from a logarithm or they're somebody's playing tricks on it or they don't like a conservative book.

But the New York Times has a different formula apparently where they look at more, they wait, you know, book sales, Barnes ⁇ Noble and Amazon.

And so why Amazon was saying

it's out of stock and you can't ship it and won't be counted as a sale, the other venues were counting them.

So it was still this week number six on books, hardcover and audio.

And I think number seven on hardcover.

Well, Victor, I'd like to let our listeners know that,

again, we're recording on Sunday the 17th.

Today, or in the next few days, is a...

what I'm told was an exceptional discussion interview of you with Megan Kelly.

It'll be part of Book TV, C-SPAN's Book TV.

So encourage folks to check out Book TV's website and find that video.

So congratulations, Victor.

Well deserved.

Let's talk about some of the exclusive writings you do for VictorHanson.com and your American Greatness pieces.

And we'll try to get a California piece in there.

But encourage our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com, subscribe.

It's very affordable, very reasonable.

There is a, despite Victor being on the road like a madman, he still produces a ton of exceptional, original content that can only be read there.

Two of the pieces that I'd like to talk about today, Victor, are written for your Eeyore's corner.

Still brings a chuckle every time I think of that.

Eeyore's cabinet, excuse me.

So one of them is, I'll mention both and then we'll take them on one at a time.

One is called the New Nullificationers or When Laws Mean Nothing.

And this is how it begins.

This published, I think, October 5th.

We now have about 500 to 600 jurisdictions that are sanction quote unquote sanctuary cities counties and entire states where progressive neo-confederates have declared that federal law is now null and void in their safe spaces victor there clearly are ramifications to this sanctuary mindset it's not a cute oh look at the lefties who run this little city they're having their their say there are actual consequences that i believe probably get at the heart of the themes of the dying citizen also.

So why did you write this piece, Victor?

And what is the issue or the trouble, the ramifications with the sanctuary movement?

Well, you know, I think people, when they're looking at this chaos, whether it's at the border or in Afghanistan or inflation or critical race theory or no material, no.

goods on the shelves, they want an exegesis.

And we'll get into that later.

But one of the things that gets them very angry is that the law is, A, not enforced, as we see on the border, federal immigration law.

Joe Biden took an oath to faithfully execute the laws.

He has not done that.

And then, number two, they're not equally applied.

And so when they look at the sanctuary cities, it hits both their buttons.

So first of all, they say, well, wait a minute.

Somebody broke the law.

by crossing into the United States, A.

Then they broke it again by residing continually in the United States, B.

And then C,

they probably had false ID, okay.

But D,

we know that a high propensity, not the majority, but a high propensity of illegal aliens commit crime.

But in 550 jurisdictions, and these can be counties or cities or whole states,

they will not notify immigration authorities when somebody who's here illegally has committed a crime and is being held.

In other words, after they fulfill their sentence and they're to be released, let's say somebody comes in, as has happened five times in my life, is drunk and runs off the road and tears out a lot of trees or vines, causing anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 worth of damage.

And then he's apprehended, intoxicated.

So he's taken to Fresno County Jail.

He's found to be here illegally.

He gets, you know, three days in jail.

He pays his fine, and then they're supposed by law to call ICE.

ICE picks him up, puts him on a bus back to Mexico or Central America, wherever he's from.

That's not happening.

It hasn't been happening for eight years.

Okay, let's just forget, Jack, the idea that these are very liberal people who used to go, and rightly so, enraged about nullification.

That is, George Wallace standing in this doorstep in 1961 at the University of Alabama and saying, you know, racism today, tomorrow, forever, I mean, segregation, and was trying to defy federal law, a federal judicial order.

So that's what nullification is, states' rights.

But these people are states' rights nullification people.

But so they're angry at that.

People are angry.

Why don't they follow the law?

And then they're mad because it's not applied equally, this illegality.

So they know that if you're in Virginia or Utah and you say, in my city, my county, I'm not going to follow the full extent of federal gun registration.

So if I want to get, I don't know, a clock, nine, I'll just go in and buy it, and the guy will hand it to me unless it contravenes state law.

You can't do that.

People on the left would go nuts.

That would be a felony.

That would be enforced.

So would the Federal Endangered Species Act.

Or

if you and I said, you know what?

Given the mess at the border, I am not going to have a passport.

They don't have it.

They're not citizens and they're not vaccinated.

And they walk right across, right in the front of federal officials and nothing happens.

So next time I fly to Europe, I'm coming right into SFO and I'm going to say to the passport control, F you, I don't have a passport, but I am an American citizen and I don't have a vaccination and I haven't been tested.

So what?

And see what happens to you.

You'll be probably put in jail for saying that.

So what people are very furious is that there is no law in many cases.

And to the degree that people are being prosecuted because they break the no law or the law, either one, it's asymmetrical.

You and I know that if we go into the local Walgreens and get a garbage bag and start putting stuff in the garbage bag and walk out, we will be in jail.

We know that if you're a young African-American male in San Francisco and you ride a bike into a Walgreens and you throw stuff into the plastic bag and ride out, nobody will do anything to you.

We've seen it.

We've seen it not just once, but hundreds of times on YouTube and other venues.

So they don't like the idea.

They don't like that people for 120 days looted, rioted, committed arson, destroyed $2 billion worth of property.

28 people died.

And then when we had the January 6th deplorable riot, as it was, People are still in solitary confinement and they're going to face stiff sentences from what looks like to be mostly misdemeanor, illegal entry, or damaging federal property.

More power to them.

They committed a crime and they're found guilty of it than my God, full extent of the law.

But that's asymmetrical.

And that's not, you can't do that in a republic.

That's one of the things I talked about in the dying citizen.

And if the IRS has called me before in the past, I overpay my taxes, and usually just because I feel I'm a target, and they ask questions.

You had this type of speaking and I try to explain, no, no, I report my speaking to a bureau like consortium.

I don't report individual talks.

They do, and they take a commission, et cetera.

So what you're trying to do, Mr.

IRS, is make me declare $5,000 for a lecture for a week or a university and then do it again when the consortium reports it.

I'm not going to pay taxes twice.

I'm sorry.

Okay,

that's what I do.

But if I were to lie and say, I have no idea what you're talking about, I have no idea.

Or I'll be James Clapper and I'll say, you know, I gave you, Mr.

IRS, the least untruthful answer.

Or if I'm, you know, I could have been, I could have played James Comey.

245 times, the IRS could have said, Mr.

Hansen, you're coming into the Fresno office.

We're going to put you under oath.

I said, okay.

And they're going to ask me, what did you mean?

I can't remember.

I don't recall.

That's what James Comey are.

or if they said well here is the basis for our investigation here is a document that was in your possession and here's another document i.e i'm robert mueller talking being asked about the steel dossier and the fusion gps project the two twins of his investigation and i said i know nothing about that i don't know anything about it i don't know anything about it what would happen to us so what i'm getting at is that a lot of the furor that people are are seeing is that they see on television, on the internet, on social media, in their own experience, vast swaths of the population that do not obey the law.

And then they are prosecuted.

And I think the theory is

one or two things or both.

And one is law enforcement and prosecuting attorneys and the so-called administrative states say, Mr.

Smith over there, who's an idiot, and he gets gets up every morning at six and he gets in his putt-putt car and he goes to the office and he works like a dog.

He goes home at five.

He puts his feet on the couch.

He's never been arrested.

He's never not paid a bill.

He does everything.

That guy will pay

and he will nod.

And if I come after him, he will nod.

Now, the other guy who's got a rap sheet and he's a marginalized person, I don't want to get near him.

because I'll either be called some type of isology or ism if I go after him.

And more important, it's going to be just a labyrinth of trying to arrest him or find him.

So I'm going to be asymmetrical in what I do.

And then the second aspect of it is I have nothing but contempt for the person who makes me feel important by following all my administrative edicts or legal edicts.

And I have a romanticized adulation for the person who says to me, screw you.

And that's where we are now.

And you can see it on street crime.

You can see it on homelessness.

you can see it on any way.

You can literally defecate on the street in San Francisco, shoot drugs, fornicate, and urinate, and you will not be arrested.

And you can go look across the street when some portal store owner has put a new pane of glass and some inspector said, oh, that's not the quality of unbreakable high-tensile glass that's required if it's only a foot from the ground.

Take it out.

And that's what's getting people furious.

You just just mentioned James Comey.

You called him essentially a lion on Twitter and a lamb before a congressional committee, which is a wonderful way of looking at him.

So, Victor, let's move on to this other piece before Eeyore's cabinet.

This was written within the last week, and it's titled Chronicles of a Deep State: Remembering the CDC.

This is about a transformation of a federal agency, and not just any federal agency, one that has, of course, now has a dramatic amount of power.

It started off in the late 40s under the U.S.

Public Health Service as

an entity investigating or dealing with malaria, and it's become something very

much else in 2021, and I think quite dangerous even.

Victor, would you talk about this transformation, this case study of a sort of one federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control?

Well, one way of looking at the abject failures of the CDC during this crisis, I'm not just exaggerating or pontificating.

What I'm saying is that for critical weeks, the CDC, A, had a monopoly over COVID-19 testing and their test kits were completely bogus.

And they did not let private enterprise compete with them.

And then they finally did and we caught up.

Or the CDC did not know whether a travel ban was useful or not.

Or they deferred to the crackpot WHO, which was controlled basically by Communist China, or they outsourced their authority or at least their PR to Anthony Fauci, the head of the Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases.

And the result of it was he gave us conflicting information about, oh, you wouldn't wear a mask.

That's not going to do anything.

You better wear one mask.

In theory, you should wear two.

And we've talked about this, 60, 70, 80% immunity.

And oh, no, I would never fund gain of function that's not gain of function research and Wuhan there's no evidence that the Wuhan lab leaked that virus so that's what we got from the CDC but what we don't know is why we got that and I think a lot of what I was trying to argue here is if you go back and look at the CDC said 10 years ago they basically said something to the effect

We are more than the Center for Disease Control, i.e., we're not going to deal with a Zika virus or H1N1

or Ebola, but we're going to deal with diseases as we cause them.

And what were those?

Obesity, diet, effects of climate change, mental health, racism, sexism, isms.

These were all considered health issues that they now reclassified as a disease.

I have no problem with that if they're serious maladies, but it's a zero-sum came, Jack.

So when you have your pie and it says this virus, this virus, this virus, and half your pie is

manpower, capital, labor, budget devoted to new viruses that could wipe us out.

They're not doing that.

Why?

Because they're doing all this other stuff.

Why?

Because they want to virtue signal to the culture at large, but particularly the left in the Congress that approves their budgets or in the administration.

And we had the exact same thing in NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

We had Mr.

Bolton, the Obama appointee.

And what it was he asked on his confirmation, what is your mission for NASA?

Let's make sure that we can do what we did with the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, get to the moon and only we're going to get to Mars or we're going to have a brand new concept of space station or we're going to mine asterisks.

No, no, no.

And if you want to know why we have a competition between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, which I think is great, and Richard Branson, I think that's great.

But they are taking up the slack that the government used to do, but can't do.

And one of the reasons they can't do it, not the primary reason perhaps, but go back to read what he said.

He said he had three points, three items, three agendas.

One was to let people know.

about what NASA is doing in underserved communities.

And then number two was to reach out to the Muslim world.

Three was to remind the Muslim world that they had a traditional record of accomplishment in scientific inquiry and get them involved.

Not one of them had dealt any way, shape, or form with NASA.

So you have all of these bureaucrats.

And I tried to end on a larger note.

I'm not saying it's the primary cause, but maybe we're in a mess because General Milley, who was supposed to advise

Joe Biden didn't want or didn't have accurate information about Afghanistan.

So he just mouthed what Biden wanted to see.

And he didn't have accurate because he either didn't want it or didn't know because he was what?

He was scrambling one foot ahead of the posse and nodding about white supremacy and white rage and reading Professor Kendi at night to the degree that he did.

He claimed he did.

So these bureaucrats become commissars.

whether it's the CDC deviating from their mission to get into social problems that have nothing to do with infectious diseases diseases or NASA that have nothing to do with space exploration or the Joint Chiefs that have nothing to do with battlefield efficacy, then all of that suffers.

I have a certain requirement at the Hoover Institution.

I'm supposed to do original research.

I'm supposed to do public commentary.

I'm supposed to run programs for Hoover.

I'm supposed to talk to supporters of the Hoover Institute.

We do these podcasts.

What if I just said, you know what?

I'm re-imagining my thing.

I'm going to be an evangelical preacher.

And I'm I'm going to do that at night.

And I'm just going to preach.

But maybe my gospel will be climate change.

I just want to get so active in climate change.

I'm going to preach people all around the world.

What would I do with these other aspects of my life that I'm being paid to do and I'm responsible to do?

And that's what these guys are doing.

They don't have any sense of loyalty to the office, their duty.

They don't have any sense of professional conduct.

All they do is they go before Congress and whatever some nut like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or

former Senator Harris yelled at them or what Barack Obama wanted or the deep state wanted, they said, you know what?

I'm highly compensated.

I'm going to have a good pension.

I am not going to stand up for the principle of what my agency or cabinetcy is supposed to do.

It's really funny because It's very similar to the Soviet system.

You look at the Red Army between June 22nd, 1941 and 19,

I don't know, I would say around July of 1943, at least up to Kursk, you could say that the commissars were responsible for getting about 5 million people killed.

I.e.,

they were telling the generals, if you make a strategic withdrawal or you

bring back and resupply or recalibrate, you're going to be shot.

And they didn't do that.

And they had some of the largest encirclements at Kiev and outside Moscow in 1941 in history.

And once basically Zhukov said, I'm going to fight on principles of military strategy and tactics.

And I'm not going to listen to a commissar.

And then Stalin basically let him do it.

Same thing with Vostas and the other generals, Koniev.

But we're not doing that.

We're supposedly.

antithetical to the commissaire system, and yet we're being run by commissars.

Yeah.

Let's talk about a California commissar.

So on the classicist, we try to, when there are worthwhile California issues, and there always are.

So Victor, there's a piece, and I sent this to you the other day.

And of course, you're intimate with this whole issue.

It's in the Sacramento B

titled Self-Serving Garbage.

That's in quotes, Wildfire Experts Escalate Fight Over Saving California Forests.

And here's how the story begins.

It says, as the Caldor fire roared into the Lake Tahoe basin more than a month ago, Brian Newman took some comfort in the surroundings.

An Operation Section Chief with CAL FIRE.

Newman knew that thousands of acres of trees and brush had been deliberately removed from around the basin in recent years.

He and other firefighters said the work helped level the playing field, turning imminent disaster into one of the most dramatic success stories of the 2021 wildfire season.

Obviously, quote, this is a quote from Newman, obviously, the fuel reduction and the thinning played a part, a large part, said Newman, who patrolled that night in a Cal Fire pickup.

Anyway, now, Victor, again, you've experienced this.

I think the thinning is a thing that saved one of your homes last year.

Now, there's this professor from UC Davis, Chad Hansen, quote unquote, influential environmentalist.

He looked at the Caldor fire and drew a different conclusion.

Again, this is in the Sacramento B article.

Forest thinning didn't work.

In fact, it probably made things worse by removing shade and exposing more of the woods to the ravages of climate change.

A thinner forest meant less of a natural windbreak that could have slowed the fire's progress.

And he says you can't fight the wind with a chainsaw.

Now, Hansen, not you, but Chad Hansen, and others have had it with this kind of leftist malarkey, to quote Joe Biden, and are pushing back against these impractical, may I say, morons.

Victor, what are your thoughts about this?

Well, my first thought was that Hansen, Chad Hansen, spells his name H-A-N-S-O-N.

Correct.

So he's Swedish.

So my Danish in-laws are people that, not in-laws, but people in my family who were Danish were right, that a Swede is a Dane with his brains blown out.

So,

and I say that as somebody of Swedish ancestry, but look, he's been a ubiquitous figure and he's a attention getter.

So he always writes op-eds he's everywhere and the state loved him jerry brown loved him and newsom loves him and why do they love him because we had a serious drought that prompted a beetle infestation and certain trees were very susceptible to it pines especially but also to a lesser extent cedars and firs so basically from the sierra nevada mountains south to bakersfield all the way up to tahoe and above we lost 60 million trees, died.

I mean, some of the pine trees could be used for plywood and they were of minimal value, but some of them were very valuable timber.

But we destroyed.

We used to have 20 timber companies in California, but because of the spotted owl and all that 80s controversy, we didn't have the capacity.

And so we didn't order these things to be thinned out because we weren't spending money on that, Jack.

We had to spend $500 million for illegal immigrants.

We had to spend all of this money on so-called climate change.

We had to stop building reservoirs.

So what happened was this.

These things sat there from 2007.

They had been there before this later drought, but they really accentuated in 2015, 16, 17.

And people were saying, please let us harvest these things around our home.

They wouldn't even let you do that if you were on federal property.

And this guy and others like Mr.

Hansen were saying, oh, no.

First of all, you can't do anything.

This was not caused by a beetle infestation directly.

This was not caused by a drought.

This was caused by climate change.

Just get with it because the fact that you drive your car or you have

a gas-powered chainsaw, that's what did it.

It was not that we have periodic droughts for as long as records have been known in California.

It was, first, we're impotent.

And number two, but you know what?

This is a natural process.

So these 60 million trees, they're going to slowly crumble.

Now, watch out.

Don't get crushed by one.

Or if it's next to your house, well, you shouldn't have been there anyway.

Who's told you to build a cabin on anywhere but flat ground?

And so we were told they would create mulch and mulch would enrich the ecosystem and beetles and bugs and worms would then eat in this trees and the bird population would increase, the squirrel population.

That's what we were told.

And then sure as hell, and I have a place up at 7,200 feet on private property.

And I can tell you that seven trees died right around my home.

And the first, because it was private, I was able to take them out almost immediately.

And that probably saved my house and it saved a lot of other people who could do that.

But I watched dozens of cabins.

go up in flames, watch in the sense.

I followed it every day in the news.

I watched the radar maps.

I saw the foot-by-foot descriptions on these very accurate heat sensoring maps.

We went up there and looked at them right after the fire.

They lost everything.

And it was because these trees were not harvested.

And you would hike up in the Sierra.

You go up to Kaiser Pass.

You would go to Twin Lakes.

You would go in Sequoia.

Wherever you went, you saw these things everywhere, dead trees.

You could fly above it when you're flying out of California, a whole swath.

And people said, in the old days, The Indians, the Native Americans,

the fire would clean a little bit of it out now and then or people would, the timber companies would go in there and harvest it and then there would be greater space between the trees and they would clean the brush out that was unnatural so this thing happened and we had the creek fire last year we had the paradise fire the year before but we're not getting normal fires we're getting three four five hundred thousand acres of fire and here in the san joaquin valley in the sacramento valley you just get this huge plume of smoke for july and august so much so that the airlines sometimes say that they can't land.

It's like winter fog.

It's more carbon emissions than all the cars you could imagine in California for that day, the smoke.

And these people then all of a sudden turn on a dime and say, well, it's kind of a natural phenomenon.

And if it's not natural, it's due to climate change.

But the fact of the matter is, our grandparents used to have bases all around California, and they had these old tankers, even C-130s when they came.

And they used to be, when I was a kid, DC-3s or whatever, you know, the DC-3 military model.

And they would fill them up with retardant and they would just bomb, bomb, bomb.

And then they'd send swarms of firemen and they put that fire out immediately and rapid response.

Not that we still don't do that, but we only do it when it's a catastrophe.

We have no preventive maintenance at all.

We don't clean up the forest.

We don't thin it out.

We don't let loggers build on natural roads all there.

We don't want to, if we see a red-tailed hawk and a dead tree in the mountains, we say, uh-oh, or we see a particular bat or owl, you can't cut that dead tree.

And it's very strange because it's very dangerous because these things fall over on houses.

You could be on a trail and you'll see you can't walk a trail.

There's like seven or eight of them that have fallen over and their limbs are scattered.

And this is what the environmentalists want.

Their idea of forest management is basically this: Mr.

Hansen and others.

They want whole swaths of the Sierra Nevada declared out of bounds.

No

forest cabin leases, no roads, no tourists, no grubby middle-class guys with, you know, Jeeps or Winnebagos,

no jet skis on the lake, none of that.

And it's all off.

And then they, they, will have a permit to go in anytime they want.

to do quote unquote scientific studies about the forest.

And then if it burns, it's no problem.

It's a natural phenomenon.

And then they will allow particular groups, Friends of the Earth, Wildlife Conservatory, Sierra Club, John Muir, but to go in there and hike and do what they want because they are approved people.

But the old idea in California, we're going to build a nice road.

We're going to build a beautiful reservoir.

It's going to be surrounded by beautiful scenic alpine-like conditions.

It looks like Switzerland when we have water.

And then the people, Hoi Paloi, they're going to be able to have recreation.

They're going to be able to enjoy and hike and they're not going to pollute because they love it up there.

And then the water will be stored.

and it will create hydroelectric clean power as it comes down to the valley.

And then it will allow agriculture to farm in the late summer, whereas before it would just go out to the ocean.

And, you know, when you think it'll stop flooding.

Even where I am living until the the 1950s, the town of Reedley used to wash out its bridges until they built Pine Flat Reservoir.

So it was a win, win, win, win.

Flood control, power generation, agricultural irrigation, recreation.

And that all four of those were anathemas to the environmentalists.

So they have not built a reservoir since 1983, major one in California.

And they get guys that are on.

The government payroll with tenure.

They don't have to worry.

They're not like a guy in prayer california gets up at four in the morning and he gets in his car and he drives up to seven eight thousand feet and then he carries a 60 pound chainsaw and he straps it to his back and he goes up at a tree and cuts off the limbs and then he works all day long on that and then he comes back and makes a fraction what chad hansen only to be denigrated as not essential to the economy of California.

And so it's really disturbing to see what these tenured academic experts do.

And then when you saw the quotes of people criticizing him, and these are people who are PhDs, forest experts, and they're coming out of the woodwork now.

They've either retired or they've been marginalized.

And they said, we've had a hundred years of experience on how to stop a fire that destroys things.

And you do it by preventive maintenance.

You have small fires sometimes to get a thickly grown area, thin it out by a manageable small fire, or you get people in to build a road and then spread out and log, but you don't do what you're doing.

Just let an overgrown brush thing go.

And it's just something that is unimaginable, Jack, growing up here and seeing the air clear as the engines got more efficient and release less carbon monoxide, et cetera, particulate matter, and then all of a sudden to see all of that gone that lasts three years.

These terrible forest fires and the smoke.

Well, Victor, with the environmentalists controlling essentially our policy, I mean, to me, it seems clear that what they hate are people, actual people, or people of the wrong class.

Victor, we have time for one more thing to talk about.

So, as we do here on the classicists, we'll refer to one of your American Greatness pieces, folks.

You can find a link to this on victorhanson.com, but do want to encourage you to visit American Greatness's website.

Victor has two pieces a week there.

This piece is called Our Woke National Icons, and the subhead is Millie Fauci and Biden are soulless men who reveal the bankruptcy of our ruling class.

It's a long essay.

Victor, of course, you can talk whatever you wish to about this, but if you don't mind, Towards the end, you have a section in this essay called Why.

You say, in a strange way, Biden's cognitive dysfunction and age-related befuddlement serve as prophylactics.

The understood contextualization of his serial fantasies and lies goes something like, quote, well, you might lie too, or get confused if you were 78, given a president's schedule and past serious brain operations.

Or perhaps a cruder form of apologetics is intended.

Damned right, he lies constantly.

Of course, he seems adult.

So, what exactly are you going to do about it?

Replace him with Kamala Harris.

And you ask a question here, Victor.

You're right.

How do these people continue to exercise such power and influence?

And you cite four kinds of categories explaining why.

And they are: number one, is the DC defense culture, number two is careerism, number three is China, and the fourth is the shadow of Trump.

So, Victor, on this essay, again, it's our woke national icons.

Maybe if you get into that, why

these people continue to exercise power and influence.

Well, I mean, if you think about it, we think China is an existential enemy.

And the three people who have been in the news most prominently,

I think, are Hunter Biden, General Milley, and Anthony Fauci.

They have one thing in common.

They seem to be very familiar with China and very complimentary of it.

And what I mean by that is Hunter Biden still owns a 10% stake, apparently, in a Chinese communist government-affiliated financial organization that has enriched the Biden family.

He doesn't seem to be embarrassed about it.

General Milley seems so familiar with the commander of the People's Liberation Army that not only will he call him, He will call him and warn him, he's promised, if the United States would ever take any preemptory aggressive action toward him.

And Anthony Fauci is so familiar that when gain of function research was deemed too dangerous for obvious reasons post facto we know now he routed through peter dasek and the echo health alliance another quote-unquote non-profit that seems to be doing pretty well for its directors six hundred thousand dollars to go into the level four biology lab at wuhan where they were doing what gain of function.

And if you look at the redacted communications, you can see that Anthony Fauci was very worried about this.

So all three of, I won't even get into Bill Gates, who assured us that China was doing a wonderful job.

So China seems to have its tentacles everywhere in the West among our administrative class and corporate elite.

Second is,

what do they also have in common?

Joe Biden got elected and the Biden family got elected by don't look at our taxes, don't look at Hunter, what he did, don't look at Hunter's laptop, don't look at the fact he's cognitively impaired, but he hates Trump.

General Milley became prominent because after he did a routine photo op, the retired top brass lied and said Donald Trump ordered tear gas to be used and clear out Lafayette Square for no reason and federalize law enforcement.

Nazi, Mussolini, da da da.

We know what followed.

And then Milley, being a political animal, said, I apologize.

Is that enough?

for the left to like me?

May oh I'll better leak that I might resign.

You know, as we said earlier, promises, promises.

So we read, General Milley rumored considering resignation in his exasperation with Trump.

And of course, Anthony Fauci has been leaking and playing the CNN, MSNBC game.

So China, Trump, and then, of course, political correctness.

Joe Biden told us that he was good old Joe Biden from Scranton when he was running as the normal sane person in the Democratic field.

And I say normal sane because if you listen to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Pete Bettigig

or the rest of them, they sounded insane.

So that's what everybody thought they were getting, the never Trump, good old Joe Biden was granted.

But that was a complete ruse and he was woke.

And apparently General Milley is woke when he says he's worried about white rage in the ranks.

And apparently Anthony Fauci is woke as well, if you collate some of the things he said.

So wokeness, familiarity with China, virtue signalings, performance art, never Trumper,

and then

another element, and that is lifetime tenure.

By that, I mean, has General Milley ever, he's been where he, he's been in the military, okay, but that's his lifetime job.

And what has Joe Biden done?

Has Joe Biden ever held a job?

No, he hasn't.

Hunter Biden tried to go in the military and he got kicked out for drug use.

He tried to get a law degree, but other than being the conciliary for the Biden family syndicate, he's done nothing.

Has Anthony Fauci ever been outside of government?

No.

No.

No.

So we get these people and they just stay in government and they make the necessary adjustments for left or right coming into power.

They'll say or do anything.

They seem to be impressed with or familiar with or profit from China.

When a guy like Trump comes in, they try to vie with each other to prove to the left they hate Trump more than the left does.

And they don't have a life outside government and they're pynching.

And so we look around and we say, wow, James Comey, the only time he's ever gone out, he revolved into a corporate law thing trading on his DOJ FBI experience, I guess, or Bob Mueller, but they don't follow the rules.

Andrew McCabe, I don't remember.

Did you leak, Mr.

McCabe?

We want to remind you, Your Honor, I don't remember.

I don't think I did leak.

Okay.

You just lied to a federal investigator.

Well, I couldn't remember.

Don't take my pension.

Well, he's got his pension back.

James Comey, Director Comey, were there people in the FBI who took the dossier and ceded it to others in the DOJ?

Did they cooperate with the media to make sure that this dossier that you paid for, i.e.

you had a contractor named Christopher Steele that you actually fired for breaking the rules of his contractual agreement with you.

But were people in the FBI responsible for talking to BuzzFeed or others?

You know, were they?

Mother Jones, perhaps?

I can't remember.

I don't know.

Bob Mueller, you ran an investigation for 22 months.

You had your dream team.

You spent $40 million.

You had Fusion GPS, was a big catalyst of their work, the Steele Dossie.

I don't know anything about this.

i don't know anything about it i don't know anything if you'd be dossier i don't know what that is james clapper we have evidence that the nsa has been spying on uh america oh i don't think it would ever do that that's preposterous then caught least on truthful answer john brennan we have this evidence that you're killing people on the afghan border with these obama drone spies we have never killed anybody not one act of collid collusion we have evidence that you've been spying that your CIA has been tapping or monitoring the Senate staffer computers.

Senators' staffers have had their computers entered by your CIA.

Well, you wouldn't do that.

All of these people lied, Jack, and they lied under oath, and nothing happened to them.

And so I have a whole section in The Dying Citizen on these people, and they're dangerous.

I wouldn't get into Lois Lerner or Loretta Lynch about the tarmac meeting with Clinton.

They lie, lie, lie.

And, you know, Trump exaggerates, yes.

And Trump says crazy stuff about, I had a bigger crowd size than anybody, or I won more electoral college margin than any.

Okay, that's salesmanship, braggadacho.

It's regrettable.

But he's not going in there systematically and trying to lie under oath and mislead Congress.

Because if he, not that he wouldn't try it, but if he does it, he's under 24-7 surveillance.

They'll go after everything he says or does.

But with the left and people the left finds useful, there's no deterrence because they're all, all of what I said became noble lies.

So now if you look at 60 Minutes, George Stephanopoulos, it's all, well, these people, Christopher Steele's a hero because think about it.

He cast such dispersions on Trump, 22 months, $40 million, that that helped lose Trump the election.

They helped him get impeached.

That was a valuable thing that Christopher Steele did to us.

And, you know, that's how it works.

Andrew McCabe was very valuable.

He really leaked things from this investigation that got out there in time.

And, you know, Lisa Page and Peter Strupp, they may have been fired, they may have violated protocols, they may have leaked, but they were on the front lines trying to get this smelly group of people at Walmart out of the picture.

And that's how it works.

Well, Victor, my old from a long time ago, colleague at National Review, Joe Sobrin, late Joe Sobrin, always said that beneath every double standard, there's a single standard, and the single standard is their exclusivity to do as they want.

I don't believe the Comeys and others of the world think they're hypocrites.

We may think they're hypocrites.

I think they think there's a standard for them, and there's a standard for you and me.

And that's clearly what seems to be the case in practice.

That said, Victor, a few notes as we end this edition of The Classicist.

I'd like to recommend again that our listeners visit VictorHanson.com.

It's called VDH's Blade of Perseus.

When you're there, you'll find links for various things.

Maybe, you know, that's where you can find how to follow Victor on Parlor.

You can get a link to subscribe to Victor's Week in Review.

Those curious about the subscription plan for the exclusive content of which there is a treasure trove every month.

I mean, Victor does produce a tremendous amount of copy.

I don't know how you do it, Victor.

There's a monthly plan.

It's only five bucks.

Stick your toe in the water.

Try it out.

It's 50 bucks for a year.

Well worth it, because there is voluminous, exceptional content found exclusively at Victorhanson.com.

As for Little Old Me, please visit civilthoughts.com and maybe subscribe to the American Philanthropics New Weekly email newsletter.

I would greatly appreciate it.

And also, maybe check out the Center for Civil Society because what we're trying to do is strengthen civil society.

Victor, this week, we do read our folks who are leave five-star reviews or any star review at Apple, and we appreciate that, but like to read one review left at Amazon for The Dying Citizen.

And this is by a gentleman named Jonathan Baldy, and it's titled A Warning Call.

we would all do well to heed.

And this is what he wrote about the dying citizen.

I may be one of the few regular listeners of VDH's weekly podcast here in the UK, but I've always been impressed by his ability to quickly and effectively analyze current affairs.

The Dying Citizen is no exception to this, though it is a long book.

I both read the Kindle edition and listened to the Audible audio book.

It is full of biting analysis of the dishonesty and corruption in America, which has knock-on effects on the UK's prospects.

Read this book with an open mind, and you'll be surprised at how dishonestly the news media has been treating issues of great importance to the west's future prosperity and safety.

It may make you angry, but it will be an anger at how much we have been misled by those concentrating corrupt political power in their hands and making us hate each other, doing real harm to vulnerable people.

The dying citizen is a great reminder of where we have come from and what we can lose if we don't hold on to our precious liberties.

So that's a five-star Amazon review from a Jonathan Baldy.

Thank you for that.

Victor, we will be back soon with another edition of The Classicist.

In the meanwhile, there's the traditionalist and the culturalist with the great Sammy Wink.

So we encourage our listeners to check out all the podcasts.

That being said, thanks much.

I hope you all have a great week or whatever you're going to have.

And thanks for listening to the Victor Davis Hanson show, The Classicist.

We'll be back soon.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, Jack.

I much appreciated it.