The Classicist: Bully Boy

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, The Classicist.

We are recording on Friday, August 13th, 2021.

Put aside your triscodectophobia.

This is going to be a typically wonderful show.

We're on the classicist, as opposed to the traditionalist, which I host, and as opposed to the culturalist, which the great Sammy Wink hosts.

On the classicist, we talk about things California, some of the things Victor has written for his own website and for American greatness.

By the way, I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic and the author of its new weekly email newsletter, Civil Thoughts.

But the star of the show is Victor Davis Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

If you've been listening to this podcast, thank you very much.

You'll have heard about VictorHanson.com, victor's personal website it's gotten jazzed up and new in the last few days so if you haven't gone to it go and you're going to find some new and interesting things but what we've talked about before and it's always there and will be there for the next few weeks is a link to his victor's forthcoming book the dying citizen how progressive elites tribalism and globalization are destroying the idea of America.

It's out the first week of October.

It's going to be a big deal.

Get it.

Order it now.

And when it comes, it'll come the first week of October.

And you'll be following all the hoopla it will generate at that time.

Today on the podcast, we're going to talk about two of Victor's recent essays for American greatness.

The California recall.

Seems like Governor Gavin Newsom has had a little bit of a meltdown or two and is finding new and interesting ways to try and fend off what may be his fate, not a good fate from his perspective.

And there's some academic pushback at USC

over some bald-faced anti-Semitism.

So let's get talking about Gavin Newsom.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show, The Classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, Victor.

You live there, you breathe there.

Well, I don't know, you try to breathe in California with the fires, but you breathe in the politics.

And Gavin Newsom seems to be the governor who's up for recall, which that recall election will take place about a month from now.

He's well aware that his situation is not that enviable.

Polls show him neck and neck.

One poll even shows him behind.

I actually saw some of the betting polls.

They seem to be in favor of him beating the recall effort.

But nevertheless, we've talked about this before, but of late, the last few days, videos come out with him having sort of a meltdown with the media.

And he's just,

I don't want to say he's losing it.

But man, he seems to be feeling the heat.

Victor, what are your thoughts about what's happening with this recall effort?

Yeah, it's sort of like the stereotype.

Daddy takes the keys away from Buffy's new car and she gets on the ground and goes into a fetal position and screams and yells, this is so unfair, the world, the way it works, his meltdown.

I mean, never have I seen a more privileged, pampered guy who had a obsequious toady press.

And then this is a McClatchy reporter after all asking these softball questions.

And of course, he can't quite explain them.

And he can't quite explain them because how can you explain the fact that you let 60 million trees die?

And then that was green napalm for the worst series of fires in the state's history.

Or you never finished these road projects and you perpetuated until he canceled some of it, the high-speed rail $20 billion boondoggle.

Or why do we have the highest sales taxes almost in the country?

Or the highest gas taxes or the highest income taxes?

And we're 40 rated in schools.

We have one third of the nation's welfare recipients.

20%, 22%, I think, live below the poverty line.

So the more money you give this administration, the less services you get.

And the $64,000 question, I think why he's angry is for two reasons, Jack.

One is Andrew Cuomo went down, his bookend left-wing governor on the East Coast of another big state, Blue State.

And nobody said that was going to happen.

They said, remember, he got the Emmy Award.

He got that, you know, in 2021.

I think it was in March or something.

So he was the left-wing Gaga guy.

And then they never thought would happen.

And it did.

And then they said for the last year, if you recall, you could never recall him.

You'll never get enough signatures.

If you got enough signatures, it wouldn't matter anyway, because he's so far ahead.

It's a one-party state.

And then that sorted to,

I don't know, erode.

And then when Larry Elder got in the race, people said, oh my God,

if you recall him, you don't even need a majority.

Larry Elder could win with 16 or 17% of the vote with 46 can.

Let's destroy Larry Elder as quick as possible.

Let's get Gavin Newsom in some, you know, gap clothes or something and make him go out there and look like he's a working man with little Levi's and his little, you know, $500 boots and pick up a piece of trash in front of the camera.

And I think it's going to, it's sort of like the,

reminded me these photos of him

reminded me of dukakis in the tank remember yeah gavin newsom dressed up to do a day's honest labor as an oxymoron so that's one of the reasons he's scared the other reasons is that under biden's six seven months we're having a systematic collapse of not just an airline being late but we're having a systematic collapse across the spectrum.

And this critical race theory, critical theory, critical legal theory, critical economic theory is starting to trickle down now.

It's not just faculty lounge stuff.

And so when you go in California and you fill up, you're just gonna spend $100, $4.50 to $5.20 a gallon.

And when you look out the window that I'm looking out, we get smoke now from almost any forest fire.

And we are in a drought and we did not build a single reservoir during Jerry Brown or Gavin Newsom's tenures, even though there was some budgeted for the Temperance Flat.

That would have been 3 million acre feet.

We could have had

billions of dollars allocated.

7 billion, I think it was.

We could have had 10 million acre feet of storage that would have captured the 2016-17 deluge at Temperance Flat, the sites reservoir in Los Banos Grande.

So he didn't do that.

And then he's a big open borders guy, and we have already 27% of the population was not born in the United States.

And what's happening is people are saying,

and I'm not saying Republicans, because we know how conservatives and Republicans feel about him, but people, people that are independents and Democrats are saying, well, I know he's one of us, but I can't afford gas.

I know he's one of us, but I looked at my paycheck and it's all going to taxes.

I know he's one of us, but when I bought my pickup for $60,000, gosh, I had to pay six or seven thousand dollars in sales tax and fees.

Oh, I know he's one of us, but my test scores at the school are horrible.

I know he's one of us, but the CSU campuses are, you know, they're letting in anybody.

They're getting rid of grades and test scores.

And how's my kid ever going to go to law school or business school if he can't get a competitive or she can't get a competitive education?

I know he's one of us, but...

Have you been to the Sierra?

It looks like Verdun lately.

And so they're starting to add up the daily cost of that guy, whether they go down to Venice Beach or walk in San Francisco with the needles, the feces,

when Barbara Boxer gets mugged in Oakland,

79 people shot and killed in Oakland, and you're still going to defund the police or this nut

Gascon, the local prosecuting attorney of L.A.

County or

Boudin in San Francisco.

So a lot of people feel whatever is happening, it's not working.

And this is beyond fights about Mr.

Kendi's critical race theory or AOC's Green New Deal.

And it's starting to filter down.

And I think he's worried because they're going to blame him.

And he's been bragging about our COVID superior response.

But what he hasn't told people, if you look at the deaths per million people of California, it's not that different than Texas or Florida.

If you look at the GDP declines or unemployment, it's not nearly as good.

And so by locking down the entire state of 40 million people, we only had minimal, minimal minimal differences with a lower death rate.

And so I think a lot of people are thinking, you know,

I didn't have a job for a year.

I had to stay home with my kids.

I had to go work at a cleaner's or I had to go sell stuff and I couldn't.

I did this because, you know, we were COVID and now we had as much COVID as anybody else.

And I lost my job or my kids lost a whole year of school or something like that.

So he's going to be blamed for this perfect storm of events that are starting to coalesce around him.

Yeah, well, he's got culpability, so why shouldn't he be?

Victor, this sort of jibes a little bit with one of the pieces you've written before American Greatness, your shorter weekly piece.

This is titled American Arm Aged and what started out as elite woke nonsense now warps everyone's daily life.

So you write, the rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives.

I think that's kind of what's happening in California with the recall.

For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families' safety and the American way of life.

Victor, you're right in one part.

I would like you to talk about a little bit because Mrs.

Fowler, I have to admit, had a thing about this idea of forgiving student loans.

But right here, about how Biden is considering extending exemptions for the repayments of $1.7 trillion in student loans, that amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back.

Of course, someone who didn't go to college and

is a mechanic, a welder, whatever it is, he's the one who's going to be paying the bill for the privileged kid that went to the elite school and took out $100,000 in loans and now it's going to be forgiven by Uncle Joe.

Anyway, Victor, would you like to talk about this piece?

Yes.

Well, I think this piece and maybe go beyond it, I think we all think that we dodged the bullet of the revolution, that reparations never really happened.

You didn't really have to pay people who, you know, five generations ago were either slave owners or slave themselves, the descendants.

We thought, you know, this is a capitalist country.

But I think the revolution is here

and we just don't have the right names for it.

We're beyond now.

What I call reparations, I'm talking about reparatory action.

And what I mean is disproportionate impact that justifies proportional representation that trumps merit, meaning if your SAT scores are not competitive or your GPA is, nevertheless, if you're a member of a particular group, you're going to get in at a rate of 12 or 17% in EA or Harvard based on your, you know, because you had a disparate impact experience.

That's out the window, Jack.

Now we're into repertory proportions.

And if you look at the Ivy League admissions, they do not reflect, in the most case, blacks, if I could use that word, at 12% or Hispanics Hispanics or 10%.

They represent our white males at 33%.

They look at white males at 12 to 15% and Blacks up to 20 or 18%

and Hispanics larger.

And the idea is that we're going to make up for past discrimination, not by reflecting the actual demography of the United States, but to weigh in heavily.

And this repertory action applies to what, TV commercials, new TV sitcoms, new characters in Hollywood, new corporate boardrooms.

So that revolutionary idea is here and it's now being institutionalized.

We always heard that socialists were not Democrats.

This recent poll that came out, I think yesterday, where 59%

of Democrats identified more as socialists and only 49% as capitalists.

It's here.

That is who Democrats are.

And when you look at the fundamentals of free market capitalism, the idea that the landlord owns his property, the tenant contractually agrees to pay rent for the use of it, that's out the window.

They haven't done that for a year.

We have the CDC and administration by Fiat saying, well, that's over with.

So Mr.

Landlord, and I'm not talking about rich people.

I'm talking about average people that rent out a room even.

You will keep up the property.

You will pay taxes on the property.

And you have title, so you're going to pay the insurance, but Mr.

Renter will not pay your rent because he's a victim, no matter what his economic.

I mean, when I'm, I'm literally, I'm talking literally, there's not going to be any authentication that this person who does not pay rent doesn't have the means to do it.

He can just say that he doesn't, and there's not going to be a court case.

You cannot sue him effectively.

That's out the window.

You've talked about student loan.

The idea that you have to pay back what you owe, I think that's over with now.

I mean, you mentioned that the kids who went to go to work at, you know,

the packing house at 18 and didn't run up these debts, they're going to pay for it.

The parents who squimped and saved so their child did not have to borrow, they're going to pay.

The student who had 40 hours a week to work so he didn't have to borrow at 5%,

they're going to pay.

And it's $1.7 trillion.

So we've really renounced the idea that you have to pay what you're obligated to.

And then we've destroyed the idea that for America to work under free market capitalism, you go get a job and then the market adjudicates what you receive over a certain level.

So

with Sammy, I did it on our Culturalist, I did a big rant about airlines.

And I just, maybe I got out of hand, but my point is when you look out the window jack on the tarmac today and you see one person trying to unload bags that used to take two or three,

one person behind the counter trying to adjust flights, standbys, and then go get the tickets and then take the wheelchairs in.

And then

you can't do all of that.

And when you know that there are millions of Americans sitting home who are getting compensation up to $21 an hour who won't work, or if they will work, they'll tell their employer, I only work for cash off the books.

My point is that whether it's free market labor wages or free market

debt debt to payback ideology or whether it's free market anything, renter versus landlord, they're blown up.

So we are in a revolution.

And when the president of the United States says to OPEC, we need you to pump more oil.

And then he keeps quiet by not saying, I told everybody that you're not going to get a new federal lease on any oil-rich land in America.

I told Americans you're going to shut down Anwar.

I told Americans you're going to shut down Keystone.

I told our neighboring Canadians, no oil from no million barrels almost a day from Alberta.

I told frackers in Texas, idle those rigs because the AOC's Green New Deal is on the horizon.

Oh, by the way, I didn't know that $5 a gallon gas in California is a bad thing in the midterm coming up.

If it is, I better go ask the Arabs.

Pumping two to three million barrels less than we were.

So the whole point of this fracking revolution was to give good pay to Americans for hard jobs.

It was to lower the cost of commuters.

It was to transition in power generation to clean-burning natural gas and lessen carbon emissions.

And it was to free us of Middle East dependency.

And somehow, Joe Biden, the good old guy from Scranton, managed to blow all that up.

Here, we're going to ask people, and I've been in the Middle East.

I've been to Kuwait, I've been to Saudi Arabia, I've been to Ghatar, I've been to Libya.

And when you go by and look at oil wells there, it does not, they do not have the same degree of environmental protections as ours do that I see in LA or Kern County.

My point being, what is so green, what is so virtuous about saying, oh, we don't want to.

drill in our nice little United States because we have all these rules.

But you know what?

We got to fuel all these cars, these Lexuses and these Mercedes.

But you guys over there that we don't like, that we know have a lot more spills and you burn off natural gas.

Oh, you just go ahead and pump for us because now we have redefined global warming as a little pocket of air above the United States only.

And what goes on in China or the Middle East has no effect on us.

So we can feel good that our little pocket of air is nice and clean and we don't dare get our hands dirty by pumping gas and oil.

It's just absolutely insane.

Victor, this piece ends with this.

really troubling last line.

We don't wake up from wokeness.

We will continue on our short trajectory to self-inflicted systemic paralysis followed by civilizational collapse.

Victor, let's talk about the other piece you wrote, the longer piece you wrote for American Greatness this week, and there was a collapse of aforementioned Andrew Cuomo.

This piece is titled The Great Leftist Bully Boy Hope.

The subtitle is the refined and moral left places itself on a pedestal above the fray, and as such, it has a natural attraction to those in its midst who do not.

Victor, a lot of this piece, of course, is about Andrew Cuomo, the buildup about him over the years, as you mentioned earlier, you know, getting

Emmy, all the accolades while people were dropping like flies in nursing homes and other places in New York during the pandemic.

At some point, you asked this question,

but why and how arose this fake Cuomo construct?

Victor,

two things about this piece: what was the the fake Cuomo construct?

And who are the other Cuomo-like players on the left?

Well,

the Cuomo Construct was the brash-talking ethnic Italian guy who, I guess, grew up in Queens.

Is that right?

He had the good Queens accent.

Yes.

He's not the bad Queens guy like Trump.

And he was going to go wow everybody.

He got the Emmy for his press conferences.

And he, even though Trump sent him a hospital ship, even though Trump sent him a temporary tent city at Jabbits, he didn't use them because he was the guy who could talk about mama and brother and tough guy.

So they thought, wow, this is what the left did.

They thought, we've got a tough talking guy like Cuomo, and he can out Trump.

Trump at his own game, but he's a good guy.

He's the good brass guy.

And we've seen them with, we've got James Comey now.

Our guy is an fbi guy we've got robert mueller he's a tough guy he went up to boston and broke the boston mafia and we've got michael avenetti and he's got suits and he's a race car driver and he's going to kill all chances of kavanaugh being ported so they latch on to these people and they deify them now we wouldn't want to do what they're doing we don't really approve all the time but these ethnic people and this and that so they fix on the great bully boy hope and that was what cuomo understood but integral to that construct was the idea there is no media in new york in particular in the united states in general it's a ministry of truth fusion so cuomo knew there were no there was no deterrence i'm not saying donald trump is a saint but donald trump knew from the moment he got up to the moment he went to bed that anything he did would be leaked to the new york times they would lie about him they would slander him so it did have a deterrent effect on him Whether that was good or bad, history will decide.

But Cuomo had no deterrent effect.

Neither does Biden.

Neither does Harris.

And that increases Eubris.

And Eubris always wins Nemesis.

So that's what happened to him.

So what I'm getting at, Jack, is that he, not once, not twice, not three times, not five times, not eight times, not 11 times, he violated not the space.

He violated the dignity of women around him.

And he did it because he's a narcissist and he knew that they would not go to the media because if they went to the media, they would get the Tara Reed treatment.

Oh, you're just mad or you're just upset or you'd like to own Trump or you're going to destroy our only anti-Trump megaphone.

And he knew that.

Literally, the more that there was no fall, no consequences to that creepy hand of his, the deeper it got on a woman's breast or rear end.

Because he thought, I'm Andrew Cuomo.

I'm kind of like Mao, who could touch any peasant girl he wanted.

Only in this case, these are professional colleagues.

And there was no consequences.

And so that's what happened to him.

And, but I think there is a God.

There is an idea of karma.

There is an idea of nemesis.

There is an idea of paybacks, a bitch.

What comes around goes around.

These are all colloquials from all different cultures that say there's a cosmic reality in the world that watches us.

And that behavior led to excess and arrogance, and now he's destroyed.

And people are looking at that and they're thinking, well, we've got to be very careful about this because if Andrew Cuomo went down, what did he do exactly that was all that different than Joe Biden during Joe Biden's 30 years?

Did Joe Biden ever sexually assault a woman?

Well, what Tara Reed said was actually more egregious than what was accused of Andrew Cuomo, because that was a classical sexual assault.

Did Joe Biden grab girls who were underage, breathe on them, touch their hair?

Yes, he did.

Was he forced to apologize to various women for trying to grab a feel or I don't know what a kid?

Yes.

And so they have to be very careful about what they're doing.

And we don't know what Cuomo, I mean, Cuomo is erratic.

If they take out Chris Cuomo, and I think they probably will eventually because he's such a dishonest journalist, and the two Cuomo brothers see that they went from the pinnacle of influence and money in America to the nadir of the abyss.

What would stop them from saying, I'm Samson with an arm around every pillar and I'm going to pull the whole thing down.

And why is Joe Biden surviving?

I don't.

Right.

So there's a lot of consequences here.

Victor, one of the other bully boys, though he doesn't seem to, not that we know of, have any.

sexual baggage like Cuomo does is Adam Schiff.

We've talked about him before, not for a long time, though.

We haven't heard much about him.

I haven't anyway, publicly.

He seems to be a little off the center of the radar screen where he had been for quite a long time.

But talk about how Adam Schiff is in this category of left-wing bully boy.

Well, Adam Schiff came up, we remember, as the ranking minority leader, Democrats were then in the minority on the Select House Intelligence Committee.

Okay.

And he deliberately, with media help, juxtaposed himself to Devin Nunes.

Remember, Adam Schiff was a sophisticated representative of this very, very wealthy tony high-end Los Angeles district.

And he was a former or want to be sort of like Ben Rhodes wanted to be a novelist.

Well, Adam Schiff winked and thought, I could have been a contender.

I mean, I could have been a script writer.

So he was always wanting to be around wealthy, high-end people and influence and money.

And okay, so

he went to Harvard Law School.

So immediately the media said, well, he's the minority leader and Nunes is the majority leader with the power and they will juxtapose that after the 2018 election.

But Nunes is the Claude.

He went to Cal Poly, which by the way is an excellent school.

But nevertheless, he's a Tulare dairy farmer.

And they did the Robert Mueller number on him.

Robert Mueller had the dream team, the Harvard guys, the All-Stars, the Hunter-Killer team.

Oh, poor Trump had John Dowd and Tycov and all these old losers.

And of course, the old losers were canny, smart guys.

that demolished the Dream Team, just as Devin Unaz outsmarted Adam Schiff.

So what did he do?

He did everything possible that was unethical.

He ordered surveillance of the data of communications, apparently, of Adam Schiff and others in government.

I don't know if he's ever been held accountable, but this is the Harvard civil law civil libertarian.

He had a wink and nod relationship during the first impeachment.

You remember when the anonymous came up and Lieutenant Colonel Vinman would not really talk about it because he might expose?

And then Adam Schiff sort of intervened and said, I've talked to him.

And you got the impression that Adam Schiff and the anonymous whistleblower, quote unquote, and Lieutenant Colonel Heroic, Patriotic, Sanctimonious, Self-righteous.

Mr.

Vinman had all been in cahoots.

And really, they were the architects

of the first impeachment.

And then,

when all of this Russian collusion stuff, remember, was over with, there were two reports: the majority report Devon Nunes issued, and the minority report.

The majority report said there was never any evidence.

The Mueller team will not find any evidence of collusion.

There is a lot of collusion, however, on the sense that Hillary Clinton took a discarded right-wing OPPOL project of Fusion GPS and enhanced it with the Christopher Steele dossier.

And then her legionnaires implanted that in the DOJ, the State Department, and the FBI, CIA, and they use it to leak about Donald Trump.

And they went after his operatives.

They tried to destroy him with the help of anonymous Russian sources.

Okay.

That's what Devin Nunes basically said.

And more even radically, he said.

And then there were people who, as part of this, en mask names.

They went after Michael Flynn.

They went after other people and leaked their names.

In other words, accidentally on purpose, James Clappers, you know, director of national intelligence or the NSA or James Comey, FBI, just accidentally, they bumped into people that were associated with Trump and those names were leaked to the public.

And of course, Samantha Power signed hundreds of those requests and went ask under oath.

I don't know who did it.

It wasn't me.

Somebody used my authority.

But you don't need to look out because, you know, I'm a very sophisticated civil libertarian that works for Barack Obama.

I don't know how it happened.

It's regrettable, but don't look at me.

And so Devin Nunes issued a report that was proven accurate and was trashed by the media as a Cal Poly product.

And Adam Schiff issued a minority report that was full of factual inaccuracies, completely bogus, conspiratorial, and the New York Times and the Politico and Washington gushed over.

And so that's what his role is.

And I think finally to finish this rant about Adam Schiff, the thing that got me the most was time after time after time,

Andrew McCabe, James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper.

They were regulars on MSNBC, NBC,

CNN, and they would kind of wink and nod.

I watched it a lot of times and they'd say, well, my sources, you mean, I still get intelligence.

I still get raw intelligence because of my clearance.

And I can tell you,

I don't want to breach any confidence.

You know, I'm a professional, but oh, wow, you wait to this bombshell or wait to the walls close in.

And they were doing that.

And they were insinuating that the Trump family was criminally minded and committed felonies and they were all going to go to jail or Michael Collins had a bombshell.

And it it was all bogus.

So then they go into Adam Schiff's committee and they testify under oath and they're asked by now the minority, did you or did you not?

And then it leaks out and I don't know who leaked it, but they all said, no, I don't have any evidence that this happened.

I don't have any evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump.

So what they were telling the public and what they were were responsible for it, therefore, to substantiate under oath and produce evidence, they never did.

And we can make the final conclusion that we're lying.

And so, why do I say lying?

That's a tough word.

But when Robert Mueller, who wasted two years almost and $40 million, and it was all predicated, that investigatory committee, on two things, the GPS package.

firewall with Perkins Cole, firewall with the DNC.

But ultimately, it leads back to Hillary candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.

When they then handled Christopher Steele, and he's testified under oath in a British court, he didn't have any notes.

He had no documentation, and he couldn't substantiate that.

And when Robert Mueller said, I don't know what GPS is, I have no idea what the Christopher Steele dossier is.

And James Comey said, don't ask me.

245 times.

I don't recall.

I don't know.

And Andrew McCabe came in and said, you know what?

I might have kind of lied, you think.

I know I said things that weren't true, but I was so busy on four occasions when I

contradicted myself.

I just, I just, I lost my memory.

And when you have that type of dissimulation, that's where we were with this whole sordid scheme.

Victor, a year ago, we heard a lot about these massive fires.

Of course, you experienced them and your own home was almost taken out by it.

We heard a lot relentlessly.

Haven't heard much about fires here back east, watching the news regularly, but except to find out that the biggest fire in California history is happening right now.

I'm curious why it's not getting the kind of attention that the fires last year got.

But will these enormous conflagrations happening right now, they will be harmful to Gavin Newsom?

Yeah, they will because they feed into a narrative that he cannot control human or natural disasters.

And he had prior warning because we've had them almost every summer and when we examine it dispassionately and we see that we had a drought four to five years ago when 60 million trees died and we used to have 28 timber companies were down to a handful because they were driven out of the state and then we had people in the California EPA write in places like the LA Times that you shouldn't cut these

dead trees down.

They were still good, remember that.

They were still good for purposes of lumber, the timber was,

but that they were a natural food source for beetles and birds.

And this was what happened before man came on.

So they knew that that was going to happen.

As far as people living there, many of them were on Forest Service cabins with long contracts.

And if they lost their home, well, that's too bad.

But you know what?

We don't really want people in the Sierra anyway.

It's a better place to let it just for animals, beetles and woodpeckers, and then people in the Sierra Club and maybe Stanford University, USC,

Silicon Valley backpackers can go up once a year, but it's not for humans.

That was the attitude.

And now people see this Dixie fire and it's up in a...

Yeah, where is it relative to you?

It's about 250 miles north, maybe 300 miles.

It's near Lassen and it's up in the upper northeastern quadrant of California, very densely, and these counties, remember, are all red counties.

They're very independent people, and there's not a lot of people there.

So there's not a lot of attention that the Los Angeles-San Francisco media access gives to it.

But winds come from the north here in California down this long state, so people are affected by it because the smoke comes all the way down from places.

And that feeds into the narrative that Gavin Newsom, while he's not directly responsible for the match that set off the fire, he had plenty of warning that you'd never in California let dead trees sit there and

be kindling for a fire during a drought.

And then the drought is another force multiplier.

People said to, you know, they think we had plenty of warning to build reservoirs.

We had plenty of warning to get rid of this idea.

You'd let all the water go out to the ocean for the delta smelt, et cetera, et cetera.

And we didn't do anything.

And then people say, we had all this crime.

We warned you that during COVID, do not use that as an excuse to try your theories in the abstract about the evils of prison incarceration.

Just let nice people back on the street.

And when they get back on the street, they do bad things like mug, you know, Barbara Boxer in Oakland near Jack London's where so he's not culpable in every case, but these long-term trends, you wanted climate change, repression of fossil fuels.

You went down to Kern County and you made it very hard for those people to frack.

You're trying to shut down the few remaining offshore wells off Santa Barbara, and yet your California 40 million population is more dependent on fossil fuels than they ever have been.

And you knew that.

And so I think he's going to be blamed for a lot of the crackpot, progressive, perfect storm policies that are coming to a head right now.

And the mood of the country, he's not going to get relief.

He's not going to get relief by saying Donald Trump did it.

He started that.

That was his campaign defense in the recall movement.

Donald Trump, these are Trump support.

That's just stale.

And he's not going to get relief in saying, look at Joe Biden's first six months.

That's why I'm part of the Biden team.

I'm a big advocate of what we, that beautiful thing we see down there in the border.

And I really, really like the idea of getting Saudi Arabia to pump gas for us.

And I think that $5 a gallon Stephen Chu policy of getting gas prices high to discourage you, that's a winner too.

And I really love this critical race theory.

It's about time we started judging people on the color of their skin.

Oh, and by the way, I think that this inflation is really good.

It kind of evens out the playing field.

And maybe if you don't have lumber to build houses, the fewer houses, the less pollution you have.

And my guys already have houses.

I don't think he can do that.

There's nothing there

for him.

And so he doesn't have an archangel to save him in the White House, and he doesn't have Satan any longer to blame in Donald Trump.

It's just him.

And he can't stand the heat.

So now, as I said, he's got his designer work clothes on and he's doing these selfies where he climbs under an

underpass to clean up homeless crap.

And everybody looks at that and they said, well, why don't you do that in your own home?

Is that near your own home?

Is that near Nancy Pelosi's home?

Is that what Dianne Feinstein puts up with?

Or is it just us?

And why are you doing that right now for the first time?

And why haven't you been doing that all the time so that's what i hear here and i think with a big bombshell story is a state that is about 45 latino i don't know if that word means anymore hispanic latino because so many people i know are intermarried with people other than

some pure race but nevertheless if that term has any resonance or signature, I would think about half of them will not vote for Devon.

Right.

Because they'll say, you know what?

I look at that border and I don't have any solidarity with people from Nigeria or Haiti or even way, way down in the Yucatan coming forward in a time of a pandemic without testing and without vaccinations.

And I have no empathy with that.

Or they say, I have to drive in my old clunker or my big car and it doesn't get good gas mileage and I don't like paying $4.70 a gallon.

And I don't want to pay 27 cents a kilowatt when it's 100 and I think it's going to be 107 today here.

So I have to go to Walmart and putter around to keep cool.

And so he lives in a different world up there in the Bay Area.

And I think a lot of people are saying, you know what?

If I want to be reductionist and collapse all of California pathologies into one simplistic exegesis, I would say the following.

There is a very toxic culture.

in the nexus between old money San Francisco aristocracy, $5 trillion of market capitalization in Silicon Valley and that, you know, 100-mile radius, and the elite academic culture of UC Berkeley and Stanford University.

And you put that all together, and that pretty much sums up this phenomenon of the left being the party of the wealthy and issuing edicts from Versailles, of which they'll never be subject to their own consequences of their ideology.

Well, Victor, as we close this program, this is the classicist.

We're going to read one or two comments that folks have kindly put up on iTunes we have a lot of reviews we have a lot of listeners a lot of them have gone to iTunes and left significant messages five stars is the average there are about 1300 to 1400 actual reviews and but for six seven or eight they're all five stars so thanks folks who do that of course thank you for listening and here just two comments that have come in this is partial can't read the whole thing by michael brill it was titled scholarly insight and Everyday Sensibility.

He praises the culturalist.

And then he says, for as prolific a scholar as VDH is, it is nice to know he would be equally or probably more appreciative of my ability to grow and prune trees or say, drive an old school bobcat than my graduate degrees from prestigious universities.

Even when I don't agree on a given issue, BDH challenges me to think deeper with the benefit of his accumulated academic and life experience.

I'm always happy when I see a new episode is downloaded.

Thanks for the great podcast.

That's Michael Brill.

Thank you, Michael.

And then from Corver 301,

American Role Model, he writes, this is really nice.

Professor Hansen, it's an honor and a privilege to get to listen to your podcast.

I'm 19 years old and began listening, reading to your books and essays as a freshman in high school.

Now, as a sophomore in college, I still eagerly check every day for a new BDH podcast to listen to.

As someone who is familiar with the Central Valley and California resident, resident, your anecdotes and stories resonate greatly with me.

Thank you for all you have given us thus far, and I look forward to listening to more of your wisdom.

Thanks, Corber 301, Michael Brill, and everyone else who's left such comments, and everyone who's listened today.

Thanks all for listening to this episode of the Classicist of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you, everybody, for listening again.

I very much appreciate it.