Trump Resurrects the Department of War, ‘Phillies Karen’, and the Murder of Irina Zarutska

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin N.

Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marsha Busky Distinguished

Hello Fellow in history.

Someday I'll learn to speak, Victor, at Hillsdale College.

And he also has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

The web address there is victorhanson.com.

He also does a daily video for the daily signal.

We are recording on Monday, September 8th, and this particular episode will be out on the following day, Tuesday, September 9th.

We've got plenty to get Victor's wisdom on, and I think, Victor, a good place to lead off might be the Department of War.

And then we have a number of individuals: Malcolm Gladwell, Tim Kaine, the Phillies Caron, Connor McGregor wanting to run for President of Ireland.

So it'll be an individual heavy agenda today.

But we'll get to all these things when we come back from these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the man lucky to be the host, friend of Victor.

I've been a friend for 20-something years and get to ask him the questions I think you would

like to ask.

Yeah, yeah, which is

the anniversary, of course,

later this week.

Victor,

Donald Trump has renamed

the

Defense Department the Department of War, and Pete Hagseth is now the Secretary of War.

As a military historian, as an American, what are your thoughts on this?

Well, I mean, that's what it's for, is to

conduct war

if that definition is broadened to maintain deterrence by being so strong that nobody would want to commit war against you.

It was the Department of War until after World War II, and then Truman decided

on complaints from the various branches of the military, they said the Navy doesn't know what the Army is doing.

The Marines don't even within the Navy know what they're doing.

There's an Army Air Force.

We need to make it an independent Air Force.

Why don't we consolidate all of these things into military operations?

And then they decided they needed a new name.

And so,

because of nuclear weapons, they felt war would be very provocative.

And they did not want to say we're going to go to war because at that early nascient stage of nuclear acquisition, they weren't sure that you could distinguish nuclear weapons from conventional warfare.

What I'm getting at is, if you go back in the 1940s, there were a lot of people, and that's why we did one of the reasons, and it wasn't just costs where we disarmed after World War II, to the extent that when we went into Korea, we didn't have anything.

On land, for example, we had to get tanks out of storage, and our airplanes were, the F-80 was way inferior to the MiG-15.

But the reason that was is that we felt that with nuclear weapons, there would be no more war.

But we didn't really appreciate that if both sides have nuclear weapons, or if you can't use nuclear weapons because they're too destructive, or your own constituencies would not allow it, then you're going to use conventional weapons.

So

in that climate, they learned that

you want to not say war because they felt any war would inevitably escalate to nuclear exchanges.

And that's why they got rid of the term.

And then

this was the great age of the social sciences, psychology, sociology, community studies, and it thought that language, words matter, it would be too provocative or it would reflect a prior

Neanderthalism on our part rather than that war is innate to the human species.

So right now it's just a question that I see it as, how much is it going to cost to rename everything?

We knew that just renaming two or three of these southern generals' bases was $40 or $50 million.

So

then we get into this discussion:

how do you enact that change by executive order?

And

if that's how it happens, will the next president just go back?

And I can guarantee you, if it's the next Democratic president, they will go back and rename it.

If you want to do it, it has to be institutionalized by legislation, it seems to me.

I think my problem, Jack, with all of this is

eye on the prize, that they're heading into the midterms in about

14 months.

It's going to be predicated on the economy.

What are going to be the interest rates?

What's the Supreme Court going to do with the tariffs, etc.?

And it's going to be predicated on bragging, justifiably so on the border, and ICE, and making sure that ICE gets its message out so it's not demonized in the way it's happening, and crime,

and these social issues, transgenderism, men's sports.

So you want to keep your eye on the prize.

But when you get into these other things,

such as,

just to give you an example, bringing in 600,000 Chinese students, which is very unpopular with your base, or

saying

placing tariffs on countries like Australia or Israel or the UK that are strong allies and run deficits with us,

with us.

That hurts the argument for tariffs.

And

so, what I'm getting at is that I don't think they need the distraction because Hexeth is doing a great job within the Department of Defense right now.

He's getting rid of these crazy DEI programs.

He's re-examining how we're going to procure weapons.

He's got recruitment back up to normal levels when people said that would be impossible, 45,000 or 50,000 people.

So I don't know why you need the distraction, that's all.

Yeah.

Well,

maybe there are other distractions, or maybe there's actual news, Victor.

I look at the Daily Mail several times every day, and the last few weeks, disturbing headlines about a third of the nation is already in recession or

the cost of housing, housing market looks like it's going to collapse here or there.

So I'm not asking you to necessarily comment on the economy.

We weren't planning on that today.

Maybe we should on the next episode.

But yeah,

the economy is stupid.

And

that's what matters to the midterms.

Right.

If you use all the barometers

that Powell used in 2021 when Biden inaugurated what would be $7 trillion

in

borrowing, and you heard economists like Larry Summers say, if you do this, you're going to get the the worst inflation in 40 years.

Essentially, he said that, hyperinflation.

And you were coming out of a COVID lockdown with pent-up consumer demand and disrupted supply chains and not enough goods and too much free money floating.

You knew you were going to get 9%.

And what did he do?

He didn't do anything.

He didn't raise rates like he did.

And then he tried to lower them three months before the 2024 election.

And when you look at the whole record, the whole record of Lisa Cook as an example, who's on the Federal Reserve Board, she's a hardcore leftist.

She's called Trump a Nazi.

She's violated federal law by claiming primary residence in two different states to get favorable tax and mortgage.

So

that's going to hurt him unless he

and I don't blame Trump for jawboning the Federal Reserve.

He gets trashed by the Wall Street Journal, but as long as interest rates are this high, where you have to pay six, seven, or over on a home mortgage, that whole

because the economy is in a period of rebooting.

We're getting rid of a million and a half illegal aliens and some of them were working and that's necessary.

And the long-term effects that you're getting rid of a lot of people who were on social services.

I just went to a local hospital whose name will not be

mentioned and I just looked at the heroic staff there dealing with new immigrants.

And it was flooded with new immigrants.

And they were over-taxed, overworked.

They were doing a great job.

They were trying their best.

But that's happening all over the United States in particular areas.

And that savings will not be felt for a while.

So what I'm getting at is that we're in a period of rebooting and the Biden spend money, print money, let in everybody, there was a logic to it of just mass this, mass that, that artificially hyped some of the statistics, even though it wasn't a very good economic record.

In terms of real income to people, the first Trump administration was far better.

But to rein all that craziness in is going to take months.

And that's the rub right now.

We need lower interest rates.

We need to get more attention to what the good things that Trump's done on the border, the fentanyl, trying to address that, trying to address address crime, but

I'm not sure he should even go into Chicago, the Chicago Barack Obama, Mayor Johnson, Rahm Emmanuel.

It's a democratic stronghold.

To me, it's kind of like going into Fallujah.

I don't mean to demonize the people of Chicago, but as a simile, it's an area where Trump's strengths will not be immediately appreciated.

Washington will be because he has a federal statute to save the capital.

What I would like to see him do, just to get on another topic very briefly, I would like him to look at Washington as a model city and put all of his resources and then hold it up and say, see,

this is what you can all do.

I'm here to help you.

I want to help you.

I care about inner-city people.

But I don't really want to go into your cities unless the people express a desire, whether that's expressed in a referendum or city councils or mayor, I don't know.

And I think he would be, be, then they would be shamed as Washington calms down and becomes normalized and they get out of hand.

But as soon as he goes in there, people are going to forget crime.

They're going to be all of these white professionals, yuppies, metrosexuals, are all going to protest.

There won't be very many inner-city people because they're afraid to protest because they're mostly for it, for the intervention.

And it's going to be the media hysteria, and it's going to get back to the left-wing strategy, which is I'm going to lay on the ground, put my hands over my ears, scream and yell, kick in a fetal position, and scream, scream, scream, and hope that everybody is like that and wants it all to go away.

I'm going to create so much chaos and hysteria that the voter will just say, make it all go away.

Uncle, yeah.

Well, I wonder what the indications are from the as you just pointed out, the people that say Chicago, because if there was a true unrest among the populace, even though it's a generally Democratic populace, I mean, they're the ones living in a city that this I think this past weekend there were seven murders and you know, fifteen shootings.

The previous weekend, weren't there?

So only like 54 shootings, and many of them were murdered.

And why are they electing the mayor they're elect they've elected, you know?

Yes.

How can you force a horse to go to water?

How can you force people of the inner city not to elect these black officials who are elites in league with these white professional yuppie metrosexuals?

And they have all of these utopian bromides, you know,

Green New Deal and diversity, equity, inclusion, but they don't deliver to make life better for people in the inner city, and yet the inner city people buy into

white people are racist, these people care about us, you know, and how can you go in there as Trump intends to do unless you have a grassroots movement of people who are affected by this crime and say, Mr.

President, we are the majority, and then they go out and protest.

So if you have a protest as we saw in Washington recently and we see in Chicago at places where you have white affluent people predominantly from secure neighborhoods with even security, private security in the most posh areas of Chicago.

And they're out demonstrating,

and there's no counter-demonstration that's grassroots, then who's the constituency for Trump to be able politically to do this other than he's going to take heat and media, as we know, and then the long-term effects might be, you know, two, three months?

And whereas if he just sticks to Washington, he has statutory authority, there's no question, it's already worked, He can show it up, hold it up as a model to Baltimore, Detroit, et cetera.

The irony is if you go back in 2015, 16, 17, and you see the murders in Chicago or Detroit,

and look who was calling for Joe Biden or even earlier Barack Obama.

It was the left, the left-wing white professional class said, why don't we bring in federal troops?

A lot of them said that.

But it was not Trump.

Right.

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Victor, before we get on to some of the individuals who will be, you know, topics on this program, which again, we're recording on

Monday, September 8th.

Since we're talking about cities,

how about let's get your thoughts here on the murder of Irina Zarutska, who was 23.

And we've all seen, thanks to X,

the footage of her being slain by de Carlos Brown, 35.

This happened in Charlotte on their light rail system.

Two things, Victor.

One, the news, this happened October 23rd, I believe.

And the broader public news of this did not happen until just a few days ago.

And then the mayor of Charlotte, I don't have the name in front of me, was praising,

yeah,

praising those who did not draw attention to the video.

But there's so much in this particular terrible, horrible, savage incident.

Victor, any thoughts on that?

Every modern pathology in our society was evidenced in this.

And I'm so sick of the word tragedy.

Tragedy means there's no culpability that just the forces of nature or divine forces conspire conspire to have a bad thing happen.

This was not a tragedy.

This was an act of pure unadulterated evil of a social predator who had been let out for serious crimes 14 times.

And when he committed this act, he was out on bail from a previous violent crime.

And that That video was the most spooky, creepy, evil thing I think I've ever seen.

When when you see him.

And then this poor young girl, immigrant, sits there and she believes she's safe in the United States and she's looking at her phone.

And this guy right behind her,

and by the way, she didn't stereotype anybody.

She didn't say, I'm not sitting to black males because statistically they have a higher crime incidence in this age group than other people.

She was just, she sat right in front of him.

She looked at her phone.

And then as soon as she did, his criminal instincts were alerted, and then he closely looks carefully at her.

He looks who she is, he whips out a knife, and then he goes and preys on her.

And then he quietly walks out, dripping with blood, no one stops him, and he goes out, and then two things happen in this sick society of ours.

One, the mayor immediately says too late, because the police are a lot savvier than she is.

That we're not going to release a video because

it will

inflame people and turn public opinion against the homeless,

and

it will not be fair, you know, to this victim.

And then, of course, social media rallies to his

support and opens a GoFundMe.

And people start to fund in Luigi Mangioni style a killer,

a killer, and then GoFundMe belatedly stops and says, oh, we can't continue this.

Why did they ever let it start in the first place?

And so I was thinking of Daniel Penny.

So think of this, that here is an ex-military person sitting minding his own business, and he sees somebody like Carlos Brown harassing people and threatening them.

So then he intervenes

and stops him and in the process mistakenly the guy dies and he is a criminal and charged with

I don't know manslaughter and has to go or second degree murder and we have Alvin Bragg Grans and then there's silence about this.

No main media not the New York Times not the CBS NBC NPR nobody and to the degree that it's finally filtering in the news it's Republicans pounce Republicans pounce.

The right pounces and uses this, but they don't even give you the details.

And the details is

that

this was a career African-American male criminal, and she was a young, blonde, white, and we have the Sweeney, I would call it the Sweeney effect.

That because she was white and blonde and pretty, and because he was an African-American male, all of the pathologies of this repertory society start to go into autopilot.

Well,

he was homeless.

He is a victim of social circumstances.

He has not been treated fairly.

We have to shield his feelings.

We have to...

No, we don't.

This is going to go on until people say, you know what?

I'm going to be honest with you.

I don't care anymore.

And we're not going to allow this to happen.

So when Donald Trump says he's going into Washington or he's going to go into Chicago and everybody gets mad and all the white professionals in Washington start to demonstrate, there's these subtexts.

One, oh man, I can go out to dinner again in Washington.

This is kind of great, but I can't say it.

Two,

the vast majority of crimes are committed by African American males between about 414 to 40 in that city.

They're not proportionate to the demographic.

And nationwide, about 6% of the population, it's smaller than that actually, of African American males 15 to 40 commit about half of the violent crimes, murder and violent assault.

Now you can argue, as we've said before in this program, you can argue that it's not their fault.

It's It's endemic racism, it's the history of slavery, Jim Crow, it's social programs, or you can argue from the right, what do you expect when you pour money into a community without $20 trillion in the last 60 years in the great society, without having mandates about work and

no criticism of a dysfunctional one, you know, where African American males

are not staying married or participating in fatherhood to the same degree as other groups.

You can do any of that.

But those are the facts, and they are exactly

entirely exempt.

You cannot discuss them.

In fact, what I just said, I guarantee you I'll get a hundred emails calling me all sorts of names just because I related facts.

And it's not going to change.

We saw the young interim who was walking in Washington, D.C.,

very late at night, and he got caught in a crossfire between two African-American males, and they shot him and killed him.

And we were told, well, it was an accident.

Then we saw so-called the vernacular big balls.

What happened to him?

He beaten to a pulp.

I think the perpetrators are out.

We saw what happened in Cincinnati, and immediately victimhood came in, and the mayor equivocated, and we said this was,

it's just not going to stop unless people say, I'm not a tribalist.

I don't identify by my superficial appearance.

I'll condemn anybody of any race or gender or sexual orientation, but I'm not going to be a tribalist.

I'm not going to be a pre-civilizational person who identifies mostly with my group.

This is especially important

because we historically now have 17, 16-something percent of the population that's foreign-born.

It's getting up to about 50 to 55 million people.

And when you look at what Washeed Talib just said in this pro-Hamas demonstration about how horrible the country is that her parents have immigrated to from Palestine, which I don't think is utopia,

and then you look at Delia Ramirez, the Guatemalan American who goes down to Mexico, and then Spanish says her first loyalty is to

Guatemala.

Then you see Ilin Omar in the past and current say that this country is trashy and the dictatorship in Somalia wasn't as bad bad as Trump.

You've got a problem that you have people from these, I'll be frank, from God-forsaken places, Guatemala, Somalia, the West Bank, who immigrate here because they know quietly that it is consensual government, freedom, better prosperity, security.

But the moment they get here, they put their antenna up and they realize that the moment they set foot in the United States, they qualify as DEI, exempt.

We don't have to worry about what we say.

We don't have to assimilate fully or integrate.

We can trash our host all we want because we are protected categories from this evil white majority that created this country on principles of what she called settler colonialism.

And I don't know how you break that until

everybody says enough is enough.

Yeah, well, I don't either.

It sounds like violence is going to be needed

even on a global scale.

But we'll talk a little more about the crime, Victor, and then some of these figures who are in the news, like the Phillies, Karen, Lady, Tim Kaine, and others when we come back from these important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor,

folks, Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus go to victorhanson.com and subscribe at $65 a year or you just want to stick your toe in the water for a month or two at $650 a month and Victor writes two pieces exclusively every week for the blade of Perseus does an exclusive video every week also so it's a significant amount of content over the year there's plenty of free stuff there also links galore to various appearances by Victor and his writings for American greatness syndicated column so blade of perseus victorhanson.com yeah Victor maybe we'll just round out the criminal

stuff by here's Stephen Miller put up some statement on X,

making this partisan.

The Democrat Party at every level, judges, politicians, academics, non-profits, is organized around the defense and protection of the criminal and monstrous and the depraved.

The more vile the threat, the more vociferously the Democrat Party works to protect and enable it.

Pretty much sums it up, I guess.

Anything you might want to say about that?

Well, I mean, everybody demonizes Stephen Miller, but the question is, is he empirical or not?

So let's take a few examples.

How about Luigi Mangione, the murderer, the contract, basically killer, who made a self-contract to murder the, I think, Brian Thompson, the

United Health executive lionweight.

They're going to make an opera out in San Francisco.

He's a heartthrob.

That Taylor Lorenz ex-Washington Post columnist was giddy over his looks and charisma.

And we saw what they did with the Sernoff brother who was on the cover of Rolling Stone.

He was a mass murderer, killer.

And then we look at Obrego Garcia.

He is a purveyor of child porn, allegedly.

He is an alleged gang member.

He is a known wife beater, and he is a known human trafficker.

And he had several deportation orders out.

And we had a U.S.

senator fly all the way down to Salvador to be photographed drinking with him with a cocktail.

So I could go on, but this pantheon of people, and we just talked about to Carlos Brown, the murderer, that immediately a

GoFundMe page and a mayor starts to equivocate and contextualize what he did.

And that's what they're doing.

And

so I don't know.

Anybody who votes for this, if you want an open border and you want 10 million people coming in, like Olbrego Garcia,

then go ahead and vote for it in the midterms, because that's what we're going to get.

And if you want more Chicago's and Detroit crime with less intervention, and nothing like what was going on in Washington, then vote for it.

And if you want this mandatory new Green Deal, no more fracking, no more horizontal drilling, no more natural gas stoves, go ahead and vote for it.

And we'll see what happens in the midterms.

Well, Victor,

he's got a point.

Yeah, we're allegedly a country of e pluribusunum, but some of our leading politicians

including one man who came close to being vice president, Tim Kaine, don't seem to understand the basic concepts and principles of America.

So

I have to believe most of our listeners and viewers have seen Kaine's statement before the

Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.

It was not an offhand comment either, Victor, where he essentially said that

the rights of citizens come from government.

and come from law.

They do not come, as our Declaration says.

These self-evident truths are endowed.

We're endowed with them by our Creator.

He equates that with Iranian theocracy.

And it's really, to me, shocking that

I think he did us a service.

I have a little bit of empathy.

He had long COVID.

I've had long COVID twice.

So I think it creates brain fog and delusions.

I hope I don't sound delusionary when I had the first six-month and four-month bout, but he said he's been an advocate for long COVID COVID, and he said that it's affected his judgment,

but I don't think it affects his ignorance.

And

I guess the left just can't accept the fact that

until their generation, this therapeutic generation of the 60s onward, most people in the West believed they were born into

a natural desire for freedom, a natural desire for safety and prosperity, and that each individual had

inalienable rights.

And where did that come from?

It was imprinted on their brains by God at birth.

And that was the traditional Western exegesis, and that's why our country works.

It wasn't because Rousseau or Montesquieu said it, and they might have articulated it, and they might not have wanted to say God for a variety of reasons, but basically, people believed that.

And

that

it was divinely in doubt.

But to have a senator directly contradict the message of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it's hard to see how ignorant he could be.

What's even weirder is

does he really believe that that's going to help him with his constituency?

Is there that many metrosexuals and yuppies and

Karens in his district that that resonates with?

Or just people don't don't care?

They don't want to defend their own traditions and culture.

Until you do, you know,

I mean, the left, did you see anybody on the left that criticized that?

No.

And nowadays, I would think the only one who may step forward and criticize any of the lunacy is possibly Fetterman on occasion.

He's the only, I mean, when a Republican says something, I mean, just take J.D.

Vance said he was glad that we destroyed these smugglers in this ship.

And then Rand Paul immediately criticized him and said, you know, they needed a trial and this was a target of the, whatever you, whoever you, whichever side you are, there was at least discussion of it.

You couldn't do that on the left.

And

I don't think anybody said that the people in the boat who were traffickers were American citizens and the fact that Obama did a predator takeout of Mr.

Al-Wawi, no saint, and killed his teenage son, both of whom were U.S.

citizens.

No one seemed to object on the left.

They don't object if it's.

They have enormous party control.

It really is.

Solidarity or mind speak.

You know what I mean?

Once somebody in the DNC cooks up the narrative, then it just repeated verbatim.

If you say that Donald Trump is guilty of Russian collusion, then walls are closing in, walls are closing in, walls are closing in.

And that just comes to every radio and TV station, every politician.

Yeah.

Well,

let's look at another kind of crazy headline.

I don't know if it's crazy, Victor, but this

Philly's Karen story.

And so we're, again, we're recording on, it's

1 o'clock, 2 o'clock Eastern Time on Monday when we're talking.

No news yet of who is this lady, but I can't recall, outside of some really massive

war event or disaster, a news story so quickly engrossing the nation over what?

Over someone grabbing a bowl of.

Oh, there was Jack.

I have to interrupt you.

Remember,

was he a Polish entrepreneur that grabbed the

similar in a way, although.

But this was worse because he didn't get in an argument.

I watched that thing four times

and he didn't take it out of her hand.

He was just quicker and slyer that it, yes, it bounced closer to her, but it took a weird bounce where it bounced into his hand or rolled into his hand.

And then he just triumphantly walked over, and the first thing he did is hand it to her son.

And then, but I have to ask you, Jack, when you use the word Karen, because I have talked about demographics recently about the tragic,

I shouldn't say tragic, I just oppose that term, the evil work of de Carlos Brown cutting the throat of this innocent young woman.

But

Karen, what does that mean?

Does that mean a left-wing, neurotic, mostly white, middle-aged, professional woman in a big city who feels that she's smarter, more moral than the MAGA or the average people, and therefore she takes it upon herself to exercise influence and rights

that

shouldn't accrue to her.

If she has a lawn, there will be a sign in it, and if she sees you with a Make America Great Again hat, she will confront you.

So she's the one that one out of every 20 people who, one of the reasons I don't want to fly anymore is going to the airport, but one out of every 20 people you see at a distance and they start looking at you and they walk closer.

And then they're about 45 to 70,

and they're white, and usually they're sort of hip fashionably dressed.

And then they say, You,

you're doing, and they always say the same thing: you're doing a lot of damage.

A lot of damage.

You don't know who you are.

You don't know what you're doing.

You're just a fool.

And then they storm off.

I mean, if you say anything, like, please, you know,

I was pleasantly sitting down until you barged in.

Yes, yes, yes.

And that happens about 5% of the people I've met.

So yeah,

I think I told you I have a disabled granddaughter, and she was walking in Santa Cruz with my daughter.

And

she has Smith-McGinnis, a genetic defect, where she's missing two

genes.

She can't have any stimulus, light, noise, or anything on her face.

And

during the COVID, she was wearing a mask outside,

outside near an open space.

And they were walking.

And

Karen came out of her house and started yelling at my daughter to put this mask on this disabled child.

I mean, she was in the house and looked out the window in the bright atmosphere next to a park, and there was no houses around.

And she jumped out in her house and tried to intervene.

And

yeah, there is that group of people, isn't it?

Where did they come from?

I don't know.

I think that we

somewhere in the last 40 years we said people who have bachelors or masters or MBAs or JDs or PhDs or live in particular zip codes or have particular influences or titles after their name,

they deserve greater influence on society than the rest of us, especially if they're utopian and they feel that they're m more moral on questions of race and gender and all the green, all these signature.

They really took hold during the Obama administration because they were affluent.

And I think globalization really enriched these bi-coastal corridors where they prefer to live, from La Jolla to Berkeley and from Maine all the way down to Charlotte.

And

they feel that they've created heaven on earth.

Yeah.

They all have black belts in HR also.

Chris Caldwell did a terrific essay a few years back for Claremont Review of Books on this,

how the

primacy of HR and

the warriors of HR have really harmed America.

But this incident, Victor, we could wrap this up and then on her.

I thought it was just truly interesting for a number of reasons.

One was,

I mean, it's a home run ball.

How many people have their cameras out recording just like everything that happens in public?

There were different angles.

Actually, remember the lady said, you took the ball out of my hands.

Well, somebody had a video of what actually happened.

What was weird?

It was like the Roman arena, wasn't it like the Roman Arena?

Thumbs up, thumbs down, because everybody started booing her.

Right.

Yeah.

And then up in the bleachers above her, there was two white guys and a young black guy, and they were really great.

They were yelling and screaming at her.

Boo-hoo.

And then she finally, her husband got up first, or her partner, and stormed out.

And then she followed.

And then she tried to explain.

She went over to somebody and tried.

I like the way she did this school mom thing where she was just

like that, you know, lecturing the father.

And his attitude was, okay, take it.

I have enough things to worry about with my son and my wife at this thing without you bugging me.

If you want your little ball, it's so typical because, you know, Karens...

are so affluent and they deride material acquisitions and consumer culture and yet she was so fixated on getting getting a little baseball and saying that she had it and she couldn't stand the and she was so territorial that's another thing this woman that i mentioned in the house she felt that the whole area outside her yard and house were her territory and this woman felt that I guess she had some bizarre notion when you go to a

sports event, especially a baseball game, that you have territory.

And if anything lands in your territory, you have proprietary rights to it.

And nobody can enter your sacred space.

There's no written law, but I worked at Yankee Stadium.

I was a vendor there, and there's sorry, if it's in someone's hand, that's theirs.

Otherwise, a scrum.

I

went to the San Francisco Giants game, and I would say it was Luce Libre.

If you

I can remember being as a kid there, and I went during college a couple of times, too.

And a ball was in my coming

zeroing in on my general vicinity, and about seven guys came in in front of me, and they had mitts and everything, and they stood up.

I didn't care.

That was part of the fun of it.

Well, Victor, I want to take a moment for our sponsor, Hillsdale College.

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And we thank the good people from Hillsdale for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, before we head into the break.

I was just going to say very quickly, I was scheduled to give a lecture this Saturday at Hillsdale on military, the cultural, historical, economic effects of the Vietnam War.

And I had a health incident, so I can't fly.

But,

God willing, I'm going to deliver that lecture Saturday afternoon on Zoom, which will be available.

And I look forward to that.

And I was supposed to be in Hillsdale as we speak, Jack, but something came up, and I wasn't expecting it, so I have to get attended to.

And so I'll be doing that Saturday and then the

I think it's about 2 o'clock Eastern time, but I'm not sure.

Hillsdale is a wonderful place.

I always urge people to donate to it.

I've got a wonderful president, Larry Arne.

They've got a great faculty.

I've had an association with it,

I guess, since 2004.

So it's been 21, 22 years.

I've gone every year, COVID notwithstanding.

And

it deserves everybody's support, especially it's a model now, an antithesis to the pathologies of higher education elsewhere.

Yeah.

Need 20 more of them.

I saw Larry Arne last week.

I was at the NatCon conference in Washington, and he gave a great talk, but it's hard to beat.

Of all the talk, the speeches I saw, I didn't see them all.

Tom Holming spoke, and

Victor, he is so, he is a rock star.

He is so powerful.

He's so apologetic in his desire to enforce the law.

Everybody calls him a radical, but he's a traditionalist.

He's just saying you made a law.

It's a federal law.

And

why is it moral to break it under Biden and amoral to enforce it under Trump?

And

I really admire him, the stuff that he takes from people.

He's really

a virtuous person.

I think, like Trump, the attacks probably make him stronger, you know, somehow or other.

I think he's my age, isn't he?

In the 70s or late 60s.

He's getting up there.

He looks like

a bull.

He does.

He's just big, and he's a force of nature.

By the way, I didn't plan this to talk about, but something you said earlier, and maybe we should talk about this, and then we'll end up the show talking about the farmland handovers or desire for handover in California.

But the ice

going after factories, and there were a Hyundai plant, I think in South Carolina, there were over 300 illegals there.

But to me, it seemed like, if I misread the article, they were

all Korean or mostly Korean.

And this is what I don't don't get.

Why are we allowing it's great?

Oh, Hyundai wants to build a plant

in South Carolina.

Great.

Well, then why aren't the jobs there for South Carolinians?

I don't know.

Why is the Wall Street Journal today condemning that and claiming that that's a good way to turn off foreign investment?

And these were min um I think they were trying to suggest that they were model employees or they were

teachers or they were came over to on visas.

And I don't know the details.

I think the Wall Street Journal says it was a clerical error.

That's what they imply at least, that they were over here to train people on temporary visas not to and then they use those visas to work.

But my question is this.

This is a sophisticated ally of the United States and we all welcome their investment in the United States.

But is it very hard?

If you want to bring people over, Japan does it, Germany does it, all these foreign investors do it.

You bring over your group and you get a temporary work visa so these people can train Americans what to do.

But apparently, there must have been people who complained to ICE and said, they're bringing over,

you know, assembly line workers, and they're taking our jobs.

And this is not right.

And I don't think the South Korean government objected to that analysis, only they, their only point was, please don't incarcerate them or hold them.

Just give us, I think we did.

I think we gave them free transit back to South Korea.

And then, of course,

again, that's an old horse that I've beaten to death.

But the Wall Street Journal I was reading today, it's almost, what's the word, exuberant?

And

almost, even now, the op-ed writers are trashing Trump.

And

the articles are all negative.

And

I don't quite understand what they are objecting to.

I really don't.

I can see that the tariffs bother them because they're free market economists.

I understand that.

They have an argument that I can understand.

But don't they understand as well that all of their prognoses in the last nine months have been wrong?

They said that we were going to have a stock market crash.

He crashed it on March 1st.

We were going to have a recession, hyperinflation.

And all they're doing is it's now,

again, look at the news articles and look at, just touch the link on the name and it will pop up.

Former Politico, former Washington Post, former New York Times reporter.

Do they really believe?

Why don't they get somebody from the interior to go

to the Wall Street Journal?

Can't they get somebody from Alabama, Texas, Kansas, Wyoming, something that might better reflect their views?

But why do they always hire somebody within the Beltway or the New York corridor that has a long history of left-wing news coverage in these left-wing venues, and then expect conservative people to continue to subscribe to it?

It doesn't make any sense.

Aaron Powell, well, and as for the editorial page, which you mentioned,

I'm not equating them with Bill Crystal, but we'll say Bill Crystal does not have a monopoly on Ubris, and I think Ubris is a great motive.

Don't they understand?

You know,

I had mentioned before, in the wee hours,

people were flying into the Fresno airport on 737,

and there were hundreds of people that were coming in under nocturnal auspices, illegally, well, legally, and they had an app, but no passport, coming into the Fresno airport, and then they were dispersed all around the surrounding Fresno County communities.

And that's not the end of it.

That's the beginning.

So if you have an urgent emergency and you want to go to an ER in the area that I am in, you're going to confront the idea that hundreds of people have arrived in the county, thousands, who have never seen a doctor.

And we're a moral, humane society, and we have trained

staffers, nurses, doctors, but they're not equipped for these influxes.

They're equipped for a sporadic use of an ER, not a routine use, which people who have never had medical care would expect.

And so it's costly, and that is a zero-sum game.

So when I talk to a Mexican-American friend of mine, he says I see at the food market or the post office, and he says his mother can't get into dialysis because of blank-blank.

And yet the people who inaugurated these policies and support them are completely exempt from the ramifications.

Gavin Newsom would never go to the ER that I went to.

Never.

Nor would the Biden family.

They all have concierge or special care or federal

elite or state elite coverage, but they don't understand that the consequences of their policies affect poor people, middle-class people, rural people.

And it's just, and that's we're really getting to the center of this self-hatred in

Western thought and society.

It's these self-appointed guardians that have all of these utopian ideas for everybody: open borders, new Green Deal,

transgendered men, and yet

their zip codes, their titles, their education, their government affiliations, their influence protect them when these experiments go wrong.

So we're the lab rats, and they are

the clinician

with the white coats that are injecting us with all of these

so-called utopian cure-all injections.

whether it's, you know,

they will eat meat, we will eat crickets, you know.

Yeah, and we, and then if we say anything, then we're clingers or deplorables, irredeemables, or in the parlance of Joe Biden dregs, or garbage, or chumps.

By the way, just mention Biden very quickly, Jack.

Did you see the article?

I think it was in Axios,

about Jim Biden?

I did not.

Yes.

Well, Jim Biden had sworn under testimony that Mr.

Ho,

who was the Chinese entrepreneur that he and Hunter were

dealing with, wanted to come to the United States.

He had paid Hunter a million dollars to be his personal representative, and he was worried whether there was an occult warrant for his arrest or detention.

And that he

asked the Biden family to use their this is in 2017, before Biden was president, when in his wilderness years

between

when he was really active, by the way.

The Biden family went into full gear after Joe was vice president, but before he was president, and used the idea that he would be president to get their greatest amount of lucre.

But in this period, which isn't really, I shouldn't say wilderness, but fertile years,

it was very funny because he testified, he was brought into Congress and he testified that

Jim Biden is they said, did you use any

private investigator, anybody with contacts with the Secret Service or any government agency to tip off Mr.

Ho, that you had inside knowledge of whether he was going to be detained?

i.e., help him not come to the United States and evade the consequences when he might be culpable.

And he said, no.

It was just

the fact that somebody investigated, I had no idea.

Now they found information where he hired an ex-Secret Service

personnel to do exactly that, to use his former government ties to find out whether or not Mr.

Ho was going to be detained and to communicate that information to the Bidens, who then would communicate it to Mr.

Ho, who then came to the United States, but ironically, the information was wrong, and they were going to indict him or detain him and they did.

But that's all

what I'm getting at is that's all just academic what I just said because as we know after swearing that he would not pardon any of his family but particularly

Hunter Biden he right when Hunter was convicted convicted of fraudulent arms acquisition, the revolver that he lied about

and IRS problems which he was guilty of, he pardoned him.

And he pardoned Jim, he pardoned his sister, he pardoned all of them.

Said he wouldn't, and he did sign them.

He didn't do the auto pin.

So if you think, well, Victor, that's unfair, doesn't matter.

Well, the ones that were important to him, he used his signature.

The ones that were not, and again,

I want to go further here.

We now have also a story, I think it's from Axios again, but I may be mistaken, where once he he pardoned personally his family to cover that up or to dilute it,

his aides then frantically started getting names of almost anybody they thought could be pardoned and ran them through the autopin.

This is an alleged allegation.

So then there would be so many pardons, a record number, that people would say,

well, Joe Biden is just a generous, forgiving president.

It wasn't his family.

It was everybody.

And

that that makes sense, actually.

I've been wishing this for a long time, that there's some intrepid journalist who will take one case, one pardon, and I've mentioned that scumbag judge from Scranton who

was fopping kids off to some prison-like foster care system and getting

kickbacks for it.

And he was convicted, he was in jail.

Total piece of dirt.

Why he would get a pardon is beyond me.

Never mind some of the murderers, but just trace that.

How did that get to the Autopen?

Who was involved?

And by the way, Victor, what you just mentioned,

and there were thousands of pardons, right?

There was.

How many case managers were there?

I think they just put out the word.

And they said

eight or nine of the people who ran the country just said, call up the DOJ, call up the Sorrels people, call up all the Tides Foundation, call up everybody and just get the names of cause celebs.

And we're going to par they they pardoned under house or Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist who was convicted of shooting or participating in the shooting two FBI agents who were who were wounded, yes, and two of them had coup de grace in the head, bullet wounds.

They under one of the testimonies at the trial that two people begged for their life and they were executed, and he bragged about it allegedly, according to an informant.

There was no doubt about his guilt, and he's now free.

He has to stay at home, I guess, with an ankle bracelet, but he killed two 20-something-year-old FBI agents, and he was pardoned.

It kind of gets back to Stephen Miller's thought.

This may have been a matter of convenience for the Bidens, but it is also

almost a sacrament now

for the left to

let there be no jurisprudence.

It reminded me once of when I was at Walmart in my rural community,

and

what people used to do who were impoverished, they would put kittens or puppies in a box and kind of put them in the parking lot somewhere.

And it was on the freeway, so it's a very impoverished community where I live.

And every once in a while, people get off the freeway and they don't know that, but they see a Walmart.

You know, they want to get supplies or something.

So there was this box next to my car of three or four puppies.

And this Karen parked next to me, Karen-like couple, obviously with it.

It was from a Los Angeles dealership.

I looked very carefully at the license plate, and they got out.

And I got out, and they said, we should adopt that puppy.

Look at those puppies.

It's very hot.

I said, I know, this is terrible.

But it happens here.

I've seen it a number of times.

I said, in fact, my daughter, my late daughter, used to come home.

Susanna would always come home with a cat.

And she said, you're an empath.

You're an empath.

All you do is adopt stray cats.

And now we've got to deal with them.

We had tons of them.

And she was very good with it.

So I just said, I don't know what to do.

Well, call it Pete's SP it.

Call it that.

And finally, she started.

I said, why don't you adopt it?

Just take it and put it in your beautiful car and drive back to Los Angeles and the problem is solved.

Take one puppy.

But don't give me lectures about what I have to do.

And I think that's

the same thing with the left mentality.

All in the abstract, they're going to tell you that how dare you put poor Leonard Peltier in jail for the rest of his life, or how dare you not

understand De Carlos Brown's troubled 14 felony history when

he inadvertently slit the throat of an innocent young girl.

But then why don't you live next to him when he's let out?

Why don't you just adopt him as a cause?

And they never do.

All of this is predicated on the idea of safety

that's in turn predicated on your status or your money or your zip code.

And that's a real existential problem in this country.

I think it had a lot to do with globalization, the sheer inequality and

volume of money when we had maybe 100 billionaires and suddenly we had billionaires worth $50 billion, $100 billion.

And when suddenly we had professional classes that were getting $150,000, suddenly they were getting $300,000, $500,000, $900,000, which is fine in a capitalist society.

I have no complaint.

But that created an idea that they had deserved it.

And they were more moral and smarter.

And that's why they were so highly compensated, and that's why they had beautiful homes, and that's why they wouldn't live in a place like Bakersfield.

And that created it.

Really, the last quarter century, that's what spurned the Karen movement, I think.

Well, we have one more story, Victor, that will make your head explode.

Maybe even your head, Victor, but it's maddening.

Well,

remember, it's a Swede who is nothing more than a Dane with his brains blown out.

I don't think I heard that one before.

But anyway, we're going to get to that when we come back from these final important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor, thanks for hanging in here, despite what you've gone through, but the curveballs the gods of health have thrown at you.

I'll get in quickly.

Jack Fowler writes Civil Thoughts, a free free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society.

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CivilThoughts.com.

Victor, here's the headline from the Daily Mail.

Democratic state plans to take farmland from white owners and redistribute to help rebuild soul and wealth.

And here's the first few paragraphs.

I know you all know the first first word California California legislature legislators are set to hear plans to take farmland held by white owners and redistribute it to minorities in and aim to quote help rebuild stolen wealth end quote Democrat governor Gavin Newsom's agricultural equity advisors are reportedly set to finalize the plans that would redistribute farmland to non-white Californians and Native American tribes through land transfers and financial assistance programs The report will come as part of a two-year plan being put forward by the California Agricultural Land Equity Task Force to Newsom and the California legislature by the end of the year.

I had a few questions.

You said indigenous people and non-white people.

Did I say that?

What is it?

Is it because

anybody who's not white is eligible?

Because I just asked, because in my home here, as I look out the window,

I'm looking at a parcel that is part of 14,000 acres

from a Basque immigrant.

I'm turning around and looking northward, and I see

hundreds of acres.

by someone from the Punjab.

I'm looking south, and I notice I got a parcel map not long ago with the names of the parcels, you know, people.

And I would say so-called white owners are in a distinct minority.

So

anybody that owns land that's not white is okay.

So if you have a white

organic farmer outside of Sebastopol that's farming 10 acres, then his land is going to be taken away because some seventh generation Native American optometrist believes that that's his,

but

someone with, I don't know, 5,000 acres who's from India is not going to be touched.

Or are you a Native American if you're a Focahontist with one thousand?

So

ultimately, when you have questions of this kind, you always have to go back to the old Confederacy because they had a 1/16th drop rule that made you black.

And

I think that's the same thing that affirmative action uses to tell the truth.

So they're they're going to have DNA tests and then

somebody doesn't have land because they were hardworking and they couldn't get a loan and they were victims of racism or they just didn't want to or they had other problems or what.

And somebody else who worked 20 hours a day and got his five acres up to a thousand acres, he's going to be punished for that.

It's not going to work because people who own property, especially farmers who live on their property, they're not going going to allow that to happen.

First thing my grandfather said to me when I was five years old that I remember is we walked around, I would follow him.

He was irrigating with the concrete valves and he had little metal, we call them twisters, you know.

They were about three feet long and you put them into the valve and you turn the crank and it lets the handle and it

it lets the water go down each row from the pipeline underneath the ground.

And he said, Victor, we were walking down the alleyway and facing the neighbor, and I walked into the he said, don't, don't, don't, do not go into

Mr.

Siota's property, do not go into Mr.

Hazelhofer's property, do not go into Mr.

Kinseyan's property, do not go into Mr.

Cowano's property, do not go into Mr.

Israelian's property.

Notice the diversity that was natural, not forced.

And do not go into Mr.

Arndt's property.

I do not want you to go into anybody's property unless you ask for permission.

It's their territory.

They built it, and you just don't go across a property line.

I'm saying, I'm sorry.

And

when I walk today, I don't walk.

You know, when I go around my property, I get scared to even go onto somebody else's property, even to

go look at something.

I never do.

And I think farmers are all that way.

And I just can't imagine you would have a revolution if this task force tried to do that.

Especially in Napa Valley, because I know a lot of these very upscale wine growers, and they're not what you think.

Some of them are Hollywood producers and just investing, but a lot of them are hardcore farmers who worked, sweated, sacrificed to get what they had, are building family dynasties.

And the idea you would go in and take it.

But I have a better idea.

Gavin Newsom, with the help of Getty money, has something called Plump Jack.

That's his companies.

And they have Napa Valley's, I think, hospitality things like wine stores.

I think there's even a hotel I stayed at.

It kind of was like really upscale that I spoke at.

And he has a $9 million home.

And I bet you in Marin, and I bet you it's built on Indigenous territory, as is Stanford University, where I work.

So why don't we do this?

Why don't we say all the members of the legislature that are considering these recommendations tell us exactly how many square feet they own, where it is, so we can do property searches on all of them.

And we'll just say that because we want to set an example, that the legislature and the governor, lieutenant governor, will be the first to allow Indigenous people to have some other property.

And I don't think that's going to happen.

And it's just like Stanford University, every once in a while they change a name.

We have to change Hunepio Serra Plaza.

He whip indigenous people.

And I said to a very prominent left, well, why don't you change Hunupio Serra Boulevard that goes right through the campus?

Oh, we couldn't do that.

Oh, you just want to do a dead-end plaza for Virtue Signaling, but not the major thoroughfare?

And why don't we go back and rename the university

with an Indigenous name?

Because according to your own code of ethics, not mine, yours, because I take consideration of the time and the circumstance in which people say things.

But Leland Stanford wrote about

the desirability of getting rid of Asian workers as soon as they finish the railroad.

Come over here, exploit them, use them, bam, you don't want them here.

And

given that record, why don't you retract that name and get an indigenous name to the original settlers before the settler settler

colonialists came.

So, what I'm getting at, everybody, is it's just a virtue-signaling game.

They would have an armed revolution if they tried to confiscate land like that.

Remember the Bundy family when they were renting federal land and the Obama administration came in and tried to cancel their

ancestral rental agreements?

Remember that?

That was almost violent.

Yeah.

Well,

let's see what our great agricultural secretary, and I think she is, Brooke Rollins.

She's wonderful.

Yeah.

Yeah, she's wonderful.

We'll get her on the show some day.

We're going to get her on the show.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our time here, and I just wanted to read two comments of the

every week now, thousands of comments on your website, Rumble, YouTube, and various other platforms, Apple.

Thank the folks that do leave the comments.

And I know I go through them and try to read them.

I stop crying at the ones that are critical of me but uh they're they're plentiful anyway

jack so don't i know victor you're my maron by the way there were so many really thoughtful ones and interesting ones because we've talked about the the truck driving

not only that terrible incident but the the the broader issues with trucking in america today it's really there's really quite a lot of thoughtful uh folks have written about it and it's one of those things victor that that this is what torments americans on a daily basis

People who drive, they're on the roads.

Yeah, you've talked about it many times.

Just since I talked to it, I drove back

and to be on a

two-lane freeway, freeway, quote-unquote, and to see both lanes

with truck drivers

going 70 miles an hour, or the right lane going 65, and the limit is 55, and the left trucker going 70, and you're ahead of him, going 72 and a 70 mile and he gets right up to your bumper and you look and you say

if a dog comes across if somebody I'm dead because he can't stop that or you're going down the Pacheco Pass on a hairpin turn at a 30%

grade and you're in the left lane going in a 65 mile an hour zone you're going 63 because it's very dangerous there's a wall on your left and on your right you see this maniac in a truck and he's going faster and passing you in the right lane and as he starts to pass you you see as he breaks to make the hairpin turn going downhill 30% grade his semi starts to go like this like a snake's tail or something dog's tail and before you know it he's six inches in your lane and then you drive by and you want to

honk and he's got against the law a completely shaded window you know there's all sorts of gradations that you can have shade in California, you know, for the driver's window, and you can't, it's pure black, you can't see who it is.

Sometimes you can, but a lot of the times you can't unless you see them coming opposite.

And

it's a nightmare, and I predict there's going to be catastrophe after catastrophe.

It's getting worse.

And as we said during that story, it was very tragic that three million people wrote a letter in defense of that truck driver,

however you calibrate defense, whether to let him go or to mitigate him or not charge him.

And a number of them were from the Punjabi community, which really shocked me.

Because I know a lot of Punjabi Americans are wonderful people, and I can't believe that they would rally to the cause of an illegal alien who killed three people and showed no emotion whatsoever, according to its own cab cam.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're going to close out the show today.

Can you hear me?

I think something went a little hinky.

Yeah, I can hear you.

Yes.

Okay.

Well, I just want to read one quick and buzzing

phone.

It's supposed to be on silent and it buzzed.

That's all.

It's all right.

Forgive it.

One quick comment from Norman Emmanuel 4975.

I just turned 60.

I've lost all my family.

I listen to you and it calms me so.

I hear your voice of reason and it reminds me of home and confident voices reassured during turbulent times.

Thank you.

Thank you,

Norma Emmanuel.

Thank you, everyone else who's taking away.

Thank you, Norma.

I really appreciate that.

That's a very unique letter.

I've had a couple of health issues, and I've been staring at the ceiling.

You know, it's weird, just as a final thought.

Have you noticed this, Jack?

And when you get into your 70s,

it's kind of bad.

Your memories kind of short, they jump back to periods in your youth

when your parents were alive, all your siblings, all your

nuclear extended family, and you kind of skip over the things that you thought at the time were very important that led to your workaholic ways, you know, traveling.

I did this, I wrote this book, I did it.

It all becomes meaningless, not meaningless, but you don't remember it with the same degree of detail and affection.

And you get this nostalgia for when you were 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 18,

and you had all these uncles and grandparents, and everybody was together.

It's really shocking.

I hope it's not a sign of, what,

you giving up the rat race, because I think you have to fight, fight, fight, as Donald Trump reminded us to the very end.

But it is weird that the memory plays tricks on you.

I find myself, especially these last couple of months when I've been fighting a couple of things, that

you really look back at those periods in a way that

you really miss is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, I had the great benefit of

from college on

probably about seven years living with my grandmother, her sister, my great aunt, her husband, and it was one of these Italian homes where everybody came all the time.

And it was a beautiful, beautiful thing to have extended family and loving extended family.

So,

I feel for folks who don't have didn't have that experience.

I am too.

I think it was wonderful.

Yeah.

So, well, Victor, we got to ride this out now.

So, thanks very much.

You were terrific.

I hope you continue to improve.

Not your mental health, because you couldn't improve on that, but your health.

And, folks, thanks for watching.

Thanks for listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching.