History of Income Tax Amendment 16 and News of the Week

Fellow Americans, a shocking revelation from the Department of Government Efficiency demands

your attention. Doge investigators have already uncovered an astounding $115 billion in government fraud, with analysts suggesting hundreds of billions more will soon be exposed.
This goes far beyond simple waste or mismanagement. We're witnessing the unraveling of systematic corruption that appears to have artificially inflated our economy for years.
Reports indicate the previous administration channeled approximately $1.5 trillion through non-governmental organizations, creating a facade of economic stability that was built on quicksand. Now, as this house of cards begins to collapse, financial experts are warning of an imminent short but deep recession that could devastate unprepared investors.
Consider the sobering question, what will happen to your retirement savings when this fraudulent economic structure finally crumbles throughout civilization, across empires and economic systems. Physical gold has consistently preserved wealth when currencies and paper investments failed.
Shouldn't a portion of your retirement be held in an asset with a 5,000-year track record, one that can't be manufactured by government decree or manipulated through accounting fraud? American Alternative Assets is offering a complimentary wealth protection guide explaining how to shield your financial future from the coming downturn. You'll discover why current conditions may present the optimal moment to secure your wealth through precious metals.
Don't delay until the fraud economy completely unravels. Call 833-2-USA-GOLD or visit VictorLovesGold.com now to request your free wealth protection guide.

That's 833-287-2465 or VictorLovesGold.com.

Safeguard your wealth, protect your future while there's still time. Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
This is our Saturday edition where we look at something a little bit different in the middle section. And this week, Victor is going to be talking about the 16th Amendment and income tax is added to government powers in the United States.

But first, let's listen to a few messages and we'll talk about a few news stories after that.

Stay with us.

Vacation season is nearly upon us.

This year, I'm treating myself to the luxe upgrades I deserve with Quince's high quality travel essentials at fair prices, like lightweight shirts and shorts from $30, pants for any occasion, and comfortable lounge suits with premium luggage options and durable duffel bags to carry it all. The best part? All Quince items are priced 50 to 80 percent less than similar brands.
By partnering directly with top factories, Quince cuts out the cost of the middleman and passes the savings on to us. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical, and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes.
I love that. Quince is my favorite store for affordable luxury at home or on vacation.
Everything from Quince is not just affordable, but the path to easy, comfortable living, even when traveling. With spring vacation season here, I look to Quince for classy, comfortable, and cute.
I just recently added a

light blue linen vest and a short crop sweater to my Quince collection, and I'm excited to wear them as I go off, especially on my travels this spring. For your next trip, treat yourself to the luxe upgrades you deserve from Quince.
Go to quince.com slash victor for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's quince.com slash victor to get free shipping and 365 day returns.
quince.com slash Victor. And we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
We'll be back to our show in just a moment, but first an important message for anyone concerned about their financial future. Have you seen the headlines? The Department of Government Efficiency has uncovered a staggering $115 billion in government fraud, with investigators suggesting this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Financial analysts are now confirming what many suspected. The previous administration's economic success was largely artificial, propped up by funneling trillions through NGOs and creating an economic mirage.
As this corruption is exposed, experts predict we're heading toward a short but deep recession

when this false economic support evaporates.

What does this mean for your retirement savings?

Throughout our history, when governments manipulate economies and currencies collapse,

physical gold has been mankind's most reliable store of value.

Shouldn't you consider protecting part of your retirement with an asset that governments can't create with keystrokes or devalue through corruption? American Alternative Assets is offering a free wealth protection guide to help safeguard your financial future from the coming economic correction. Call 8332-USA-GOLD or visit victorlovesgold.com today for your free guide and learn why now may be the perfect time to add precious metals to your portfolio.
That's 833-287-2465 or victorlovesgold.com. Protect what you've earned before the fraud economy collapses completely.
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
He has a website, victorhanson.com. Please come join us there.
The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus. It's got loads of stuff on it from his writings in journals and his podcasts.
And you can come explore his books. And you can join us if you would like to subscribe to the VDH Ultra material, and you get two articles a month plus a independent video cast for our Ultra subscribers.
It is $6.50 a month or $65 a year. So, Victor, I wanted to start off this a lot of questions because they've been sort of piling up in my agenda on health care and just give you a mosaic.

And then you can tell me your thoughts on what's going on with health care under the Trump administration. Trump has passed or signed an executive order that is trying to press for, I don't know how successful they'll be, transparency and pricing with health care providers.
Elon Musk has started into finding all the fraud, which everybody knows exists in our public health care providers. And so he's hot on the trail of that.
There's been a measles outbreak in Texas. And then finally, polls coming out that increasing numbers of Americans are becoming a little bit worried about what's going to happen to Medicare and Medicaid.
And I wondered your thoughts on the health care situation in general. Well, it's a lot to talk about.
There's a general rule that everybody knows in the health care industry, Medicare, Medicaid, and the local equivalents, say here in California, Medi-Cal, there is so many people on it now that we've never had a higher percentage of the population on it because we're aging and we're impoverished. And we brought in 30 million people who were impoverished the last 30 years from south of the border.
Okay. everybody knows that millions of people are dependent as their only source of income and their only source of healthcare.
Everybody knows there's massive fraud and abuse. So when Elon Musk looks at that, he has two warning signs.
Number one, if you mention the word, I'm going to have to cut Medicare or Medi-Cal, under any circumstances, you're going to get a blowback that has not happened on any other. USAID, EPA, no problem.
Defense to budget, go to it, Elon. But those people do not want to even hear it.
Once Dan Raskowski, the Republican majority leader, mentioned cutting Social Security, but also Medicare, he was swarmed by his car. They went after him.
On the other hand, that's where a lot of the abuse is. So it's kind of a lose-lose situation.
If you want to really cut, you're going to have to go in there because there is a lot of fraud. But the fact that you're cutting anything, the left is going to destroy you.
As far as the measles epidemic, the problem with measles was always, I had measles. We used to call it the German measles, the three-day measles, the red measles, but we all had it when we were growing up.
In most cases, it was not dangerous. I think that people, please look this up, but I'm pretty sure it was about 500 deaths per year, about 50,000 cases.
The problem with it, with measles, of course, is if a woman is pregnant and has measles, it is one of the few infections that will damage the fetus. And I had a sister, Georgia Ann Hansen, who died, I think, at two years old.
And my mother had German, what they called German measles, and she was born blind with heart defects. So it's a very, it's a, and it's a, it's a treatable situation.
So we have been vaccinated and that's, and this is interesting because RFK has been skeptic of vaccination, but here's the, here's the intricacies. I want to be very careful what I say.
It's such an emotional issue. The left is saying he wants to cut measles as a requirement, but there are people right now who don't have measles vaccinations.
In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of parents who do not trust any vaccinations, and their children are not allowed in most states in the public school

system. So they're being homeschooled, right? We haven't, I don't think we've had a death in the last five years from measles, a death.
We probably have four or 500 cases per year, if that. I think that's too high.
But now we're starting to see an outbreak. So if we were a rational, informed society, we would say something along the following.
Because if a parent chooses not to have their child inoculated against childhood diseases, which whooping cough, measles, mumps, then they can't go to the public schools. That's a rational thing to do.
But why then would you let in 12 million people the last four years from one of the poorest areas in the world that is rampant with childhood diseases and say that you're a racist or a xenophobe to even mention the fact that these people coming in unaudited might have diseases. And Texas, where the outbreak is, might be indicative of that.
I can tell you that in rural southwest Fresno County, we've had one years ago, we had cases of leprosy, Hansen's disease. I think there was two cases one year, but nobody was allowed to

talk about it. So my point is, yes, you should be inoculated.
And yes, RFK will probably widen the window of exemptions if you do not want to be inoculated, you don't want your children. they're not going to be at risk.
But here's the catch with all vaccinations. You say vaccinations are dangerous, so I'm not going to be vaccinated.
But the fact is most people will be vaccinated. I think just like 95%.
So those people, in your view, are taking a risk. But by taking a risk, they're suppressing the ability of the virus or the infectious agent to transmit, and you're a beneficiary of that.
So if everybody did what you did, we would go back to the 40,000 and 50,000 cases a year, and I don't know how many deaths, 400 or 500 deaths per year in the United States, 330 million, maybe more now with the population increase. So that's what we're talking about.
But surely, if you're going to have an open border and you're going to let in three to four million people a year and you make it taboo to even discuss the fact that they're unaudited and they're coming in without health checks and they're coming from areas where these diseases are not rare. And then you're telling people who are citizens in an area where there are no outbreaks that they can't put their children in the state schools because they're unvaccinated, then you've got a disconnect.
And so I would think that you should, under our new immigration policy, there should be a health check at the border. And nobody should be let in who's legal, and anybody who's coming legally should have a vaccination history and a checkup, as was true in the past.
well let me take a moment to welcome back a sponsor of ours, Factor. Factor has chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy.
They're dietician approved and ready to heat and eat in two minutes, so you can feel right and feel great no matter what life throws at you. Factor arrives fresh and fully prepared, perfect for an active, busy lifestyle.

Eat smart with Factor.

Get started at factormeals.com slash Factor Podcast and use the code Factor Podcast to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. That's factorpodcasts at factormeals.com slash factorpodcasts to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box.
Thank you, Factor, for coming back to sponsor the Victor Davis Hanson Show. So, Victor, you were speaking of immigration, and we have Trump with an interesting proposal to allow for golden cards, and that this would be people who can pay $5 million, I think he said, and then they would get a golden card to enter and work in the United States.
Or companies could pay that for somebody. I was wondering your thoughts on this.
Well, we do have that program already. It's kind of difficult.
And according to Mr. Luknick and the Commerce Secretary, there may be as many as 200,000 people queuing up that we have not been able to accommodate.
It's not such an easy thing because the people who had

that means of $5 million, some of them may have got their money through illegal or illicit means,

so they have to have a very careful background check. But the simple thing is, as he said,

if you do the math and you're paying $5 million and you've got $200,000 lined up, right,

Thank you. math, and you're paying $5 million, and you've got $200,000 lined up, right? $200,000 million, and you've got $5 million, you've got a trillion dollars you could get, and you could apply that right to the debt.
So it's enticing. And then the criticism of it, well, we're an egalitarian society.
Yes. But we are bringing in 12 million people the last four years who have made enormous claims on the state in health care, on education, on housing, on nutrition, on food, everything.
and some people have argued that it could be as high as $30,000 or $40,000 per year per illegal immigrant. And that's aside from the law enforcement problem.
So what Donald Trump is saying, we're going to stop that, and it will be expensive in the short term to deport people. But once we get the border control, we'll have legal-only immigration.
And people will go back to a system where they will apply for immigration for a green card, which allows them to work. And then once they're here, if they have not broken the law and they're self-sustaining, then they can apply it for citizenship.
At the same time, he wants to expand the special entry. We have all sorts of independent agents in the United States, and they make a pretty lucrative living by having a rich foreigner say, Mr.
Smith, you're a citizenship broker. I want you to fast track my citizenship applications.
So he's trying to expand that, and he uses the word gold card. Green card is for everybody.
Gold card is the person. And as he explained it, these people then would have a lot of money.
I mean, it's not that they have 5 million. If you're going to spend 5 million, you have a lot more.
So you would come in and you would buy things and hire people and pay taxes, and it would be good for us. But most importantly, we would get around the special dispensation for techies and skilled people that's causing so much trouble.
Because we're letting in people under certain visas to work, and we're told that they're PhDs and they're special, and they're not always. And so they're taking jobs away from coders.
But this time we're telling the employer, the Apples, the Googles, the Facebooks, so you need a thousand highly skilled engineers from Taiwan, from South Korea, from India, anywhere. You're going to pay the $5 million to bring them in.
And I don't know, there's wrinkles. And he didn't spell it.
Would the $5 million be a one-time fee so then they could renew it under a regular green card process? Or would they have to keep paying? A lot of things that are up in the air. But here's what I want to make the point.
Donald Trump really does believe that he can balance the budget if he does four things that no one's ever thought of before. Number one, massive cuts.
I'm not talking about here and there, but a trillion dollars. We're spending a trillion.7 that we don't have this year.
And that's down from Joe Biden's record. He had the record of the most debt piled up in four years, more even than the COVID Trump problem.
So that's number one. He thinks he can get a trillion dollars.
Then they believe that for all the braggadocio, about the 25% tariffs, they were willing to negotiate reciprocity. Canada, you have 5% on average, we will have 5%.
Germany, you have five or six, we will have that. And they feel that that is saleable.
People will agree with that. Because it's just, Germany says, I don't want to have any.
You can bring all the Dodge Ram trucks you want. Nobody wants them in Germany, but we won't have any tariff.
And then we'll say, okay, we won't have no tariff at all on Audis or something. But he thinks he's going to get money from tariffs.
I don't know how much he will be. I will say that as we get to the income tax, the income tax is connected to tariffs because the only source really of revenue were fines and tariffs.
And the income tax was introduced to eliminate or reduce tariffs, which were about 40% to give a break on pricing for the lower middle classes. But nevertheless, he thinks he's going to get money on tariffs.
He's going to cut a billion. And then he's going to have this program, the gold card.
And he thinks he's going to get a trillion dollars, maybe once or twice in spurts. Or maybe every year there's going to be, I don't know, there might be 10,000 a year.
And then he's also going to go maximum development of natural resources, but especially oil and gas.

We are almost self-sufficient. By that, I mean not that we don't import, but we export about the amount in dollars that we import for oil and natural gas.
Somebody's going to say, well, why do we import any natural gas or oil when we have it? It's because of the quality and the refinery and the transportation costs. Sometimes it's cheaper to sell natural gas and then import it or to sell oil, etc.
But we're getting to the point of self-sufficiency. So the point then is that Donald Trump wants to build pipelines.
He wants to open ANWR, and he wants to get an additional, I don't know what that would be, 23, 24 million barrels, three or four million barrels.

And I don't know if that would crash the world price to put that on the market. And I don't know whether people in the oil companies or the independent oil producers would want to do that because basically they'd have to invest more money to produce more product at a cheaper price.
And it's a finite commodity. So you're an oil company, you have a big oil field in Anwar, they open it up, you think, yeah, wait a minute, price of oil is 60, 70 bucks a barrel, $50.
The more I produce, the less I'm going to have in the long run and the lower the price I'm going to get. So it's going to be tricky.
I think one thing, people don't think this about Trump, but the more oil you can take off the world market. So you put maximum pressure on the two or three million barrels from Iran, and Russia has been restricted to China and India and Turkey, basically.
So then you keep the price high, then we make money. That's my point.
So cut a trillion dollars, maybe get half a trillion in tariffs, maybe quarter a trillion, 250 billion in oil or natural gas sell, and then maybe 200 million in the gold card. And you've got the ingredients for a balanced budget.
That would be a Herculean. I'll make a statement that I'd never make predictions, but I will make a prediction.
If Donald Trump in the next two years balances the U.S. budget, which we have not seen since the Newt Genrich and Bill Clinton compromise of 98, 99, 2000.
And remember, they did that by raising taxes. Genrich allowed some taxes to be raised, Clinton allowed cuts to be made.
But that's never happened since. If he balances the budget in one of the next two budget years, and the war in Ukraine is over with, and he stops it, he will be reelected.
I mean, excuse me, he will have his house reelected, and he maintain that majority and he will be an iconic president if he does those two things. And the left knows that.
So the left is going to do all it can. In fact, I have colleagues of the institution in which I work, which will remain nameless, who are doing all they can to suggest that the war not be ended.

In other words, that it's going to be a giveaway to Putin and you can't do it.

And we know people in the Congress that are trying to stop this budget. They tried and they do not want any cuts.

They do not want any more oil production.

They will oppose the gold card and they do not want any tariffs.

But if he's able to overcome that, as I said, it'll be something that's historic. Well, they're trying to stop him in all sorts of ways, but fortunately, they don't have the greatest minds on their side.
I just saw AOC out ranting and raving about Elon Musk. It was entirely unconvincing.
She's just crazy, right?

Yeah. I mean, it doesn't help when they have a congresswoman, Marcy Kapoor, whatever her name is, in Ohio, and she's saying that Elon Musk has only been a citizen for 23 years.
Therefore, he doesn't have allegiance to the United States. And Who is he loyal to, Canada or the United States?

And this comes from the left. They can't go through a congressional session where they don't have a resolution faulting Republicans for harassing poor immigrants and being xenophobic and nativists.
And now they're scraping the bottom of the barrel.

They've called him a Nazi.

They've called Elon Musk Hitler.

They've called him a crook.

And now they're calling him a disloyal, naturalized citizen.

Naturalized citizen.

And this is something that I thought only the far, far right did.

Blood and soil.

There are blood and soil Democrats now.

You're not really a U.S. citizen unless you were, is that right, a congresswoman, unless you were born in the United States? You're a nativist now.
You don't trust him? It's just mind boggling. Everything they've said has no logic.
He wasn't confirmed. Well, either was the national security file.
You're saying that Jake Sullivan was illegitimate because he was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate? Well, he's making money.
Well, he's the richest. He came in worth $450 billion.
Where is he making money? They ask him to bail out our astronauts that NASA can't save. And so I don't know where he's making money.
He's losing money, actually. By doing what he's doing, you have Tesla dealerships that are being vandalized.
You have people who have Teslas that are having their cars vandalized. You've had left-wing, huge boycott of Teslas.
You've got the German government after him where there's a gigantic Tesla factory in Germany. He's taken a huge hit.
The stock has fallen by 10 or 15%. I don't get he's lost money by doing what he's doing.
Just like he lost money with X. I don't know where he's going to keep making money because he probably lost 30 or 40 billion dollars by opening up all of social media by taking Twitter, which was a toxic player in the social media world, and opening it up with influence on other people to do the same.
And he's losing money on, I think he's losing probably tens of billions of dollars in the stock price on Tesla. And I guess SpaceX is a private company, but I don't get the impression that he is buying estates.
He lives in very simple, he dresses very simple, he lives very simply, he doesn't splurge. He does things that the left should be on their knees praising him.
He's provided Starlink service for the people who were burned out in Los Angeles free. He has provided it for the Ukrainians so that they have a chance to defend themselves from Russia.
He has not provided it for Russia. He has not charged

them. He was a big icon among the left until about a year ago.
Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about the 16th Amendment. Stay with us, and we'll be right back.
In today's fast-moving world, your team needs to stay connected to your customers without missed messages, communications, silos, or slow phone systems. A flexible and efficient business phone system isn't just nice to have, it's essential to succeed.
Enter OpenPhone. OpenPhone is the number one business phone system that streamlines

and scales your customer communications. It works through an app on your phone or computer,

so no more carrying two phones or using a landline. With OpenPhone, your team can share one number and collaborate on customer calls and texts like a shared inbox.
That way, any teammate can pick up right where the last person left off, keeping response times faster than ever. Plus, with AI-powered call transcripts and summaries, you'll be able to automate follow-ups, ensuring you'll never miss a customer interaction again.
So, whether you're a one-person operation drowning in calls and texts, or have a large team that needs better collaboration tools, OpenPhone is a no-brainer. See why over 50,000 businesses trust OpenPhone to manage their businesses' calls and texts.
OpenPhone is offering our listeners 20% off your first six months at openphone.com slash Victor. That's O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E dot com slash Victor.
And if you have existing numbers with another service, Open Phone will port them over at no extra charge. Open Phone, no missed calls, no missed customers.
If you've been with us at all over the last six months or so, you are probably familiar with one of our favorite new brews, Wired2Fish Coffee. As you may know, their coffee is delicious and smooth, but more importantly, the company has amazing commitment to give back.
Wired2Fish Coffee gives back 25% of profits, 25% to conservation, clean water, and things like missions and evangelical outreach. From river cleanups and initiatives for fish habitat to programs that give people in slums clean water and spread the word about Jesus.
Wired2Fish Coffee is in it to make the world a better place. They also have just launched a medium roast decaf, and for avid coffee lovers, their much-loved brew is now available in two-pound and five-pound bags.
Join us and enjoy your coffee while making a difference in the world

and join a community of like-minded coffee lovers. Subscribe and save today and enjoy discounted coffee and free freight or just give this great brand a try with discount code Just News or Just The News.
For 10% off your first order, head over to Wired, number two, Fish, Coffee Today, and make this year a year you align your coffee with your values. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
You can catch Victor at his social media on X. He is at VD Hanson and on Facebook, it's Hanson's Morning Cup.

So, Victor, the 16th Amendment is allowing the United States to have an income tax, something that the country resisted all the way for 100 years. It had been tariffs as the means to earn or excise tax for the federal government to earn money to pay for it.
And so now they were instituting an income tax. And I'm kind of curious why 100 years later, and I know that we can see some resemblance to Donald Trump turning to tariffs and trying to fix our terrible income tax problem.
But what are your thoughts on 16? Well, they had a brief income tax for the Civil War just as a one-time stopgap. But the problem was that in the Constitution, I think it's Section 1, Article 2, it says that the federal government cannot have an excise, a blanket tax without apportionment, without apportionment.
And that had been, I don't think the founders knew what they were doing on that particular. I don't know if they intended it, but what it was ruled in a famous, I think it was 1895, the Pollock case, it was ruled that it was literal.
In other words, if you're the federal government and you want to tax the population, you can't just issue a tax on everybody as individuals. You have to apportion it by the states.
So that would mean, according to the court interpretation, which stood until 1913, it would say the following. We need $100 million.
I'm just taking an arbitrary figure. Okay.
The 50 states, each one will contribute to that based on the percentage of the population. So California, whatever the state was, would be adjudicated, prorated.
And then you would, the state then would contribute as a state. So say California is one-sixth of the population, they would pay one-sixth of the tax bite.
And so, that's how it was. And everybody understood that that was a block.
There were people who tried to get an income tax. They really wanted it throughout history.
But because it's in the Constitution that all states have to be apportioned by the all income taxes have to be apportioned, that was pretty much the rule. And they didn't know how to get around it.
And Supreme Court cases had, by a very close margin, five to four, had upheld that. So the only way you can overrule the Constitution or a Supreme Court decision is get a constitutional amendment.
So to get a constitutional amendment, you need three quarters of all of the states and you need two thirds of the House and the Senate. It's almost impossible to do unless there's something with broad support, 18-year-old vote, women's suffrage.
And there was. And why was there? Because this was the height of the progressive movement under Woodrow Wilson was elected in 2012.
He always wanted the income tax. And the reason they got it through was, as you pointed out, the chief source of revenue was tariffs.
And the tariffs were not like 3% or 5%. They were sometimes 30% and 40% of goods, and they protected domestic industry.
But the left, the progressive and to the extent that they were populist movements, said these tariffs, and correctly so, are taxes. So they're increasing the price for goods on American citizens, number one.
And number two, to echo an old nullification argument by South Carolina before the Civil War, people said they are protecting the Yankees, where I think there was about four or five states that were responsible for almost all the tariff revenue, New York, Massachusetts, where all of the industry was at that time, and around the Great Lakes area. So the argument was Wilson, the progressive movement elected Wilson.

He said, we're going to now, we have the mandate, and we've got people who want to have cheaper prices by lowering tariffs and making up the difference with an income tax.

And the income tax will affect not everybody.

It was 1%.

Just 1%. And then he needed allies.
There wasn't enough Democrats. So they went over to the recently emeritus president, Teddy Roosevelt, and they said to him, essentially, if you have an income tax, it will be consistent with your progressive advocacy of helping people have lower prices, and it will only be 1%.
Okay, and actually had a gradation where it went up to 2%, 3% based on income. But it will also give you the revenue to rearm, because Roosevelt was a big, you know, the great white fleet, and he wanted to warm.
And they could see already that this is the year before World War I broke out. And they could see what was going to happen.
And they knew we were disarmed. So he said, we need to have a military industrial complex, and we need bases in the South.
So this was a great period when they started to acquire land in the South for military bases to get Southern votes and to get the progressive Republicans. So it was very easy to pass.
It wasn't that low. It was sold on the idea that it would give this huge amount of revenue and create a military for the first time that was permanent.
and it would be very cheap, 1% to 2%. 1% for most people.
40% of the people would pay 1%. Okay.
So they passed it, and that made it legal. And then that same year, they had the Revenue Act that they put the specifics into it.
Now that the Polak decision had been reversed, it was okay to have an income tax without apportionment. So then they went in and said, they decided that, okay.
And then they went back when we were on the eve of getting into the war in 1916 and said, ah, we need to go up to 2%. So you could see where this was going.
This is all very relevant, everybody, to what we're discussing now, because Donald Trump is not stupid. They think he is.
He's not. He's cunning.
He's sly. He's really smart.
And he understood that before there was an income tax, this country, mutatis mutandis, the necessary changes being made, was able to have enough revenue with tariffs. So he's got that on his brain, that there has to be other sources of revenue other than these high income taxes.
I don't know if there is, but he has said in moments of candor that he wishes the income tax was either vastly reduced or non-existent, but we'll see. But that's how the government, once you pass the 1913 and 1916 Revenue Acts, you could see where we are a century and 110 years later, it was going to be inevitable.
There has never been one tax or one government program that ever got smaller. They always get bigger.
And that was the nature of it. And it changed everybody's life.
And so every once in a while, when I was in high school, I'd meet a conservative teacher and they'd say, well, Victor, you think you know everything? You know, the income tax is illegal. And I said, no, it's not.
I was like 16 and I think his name was Mr. Dudley.
He was a really good guy and he'd come and here is the constitution, article one, section two, all taxes must be a portion. I said, yeah, but they passed the revenue.
The revenue act was illegal., they passed the Constitutional Amendment. The Constitutional Amendment was illegal.
They argued all for the original intent, et cetera. So that's where we are.
And remember what we're doing, everybody. We're trying to find iconic moments, key moments in the 20th century.
We're going to go from the very earliest that I talked about, the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War that was more than just Russia being humiliated. The humiliation helped spark just a little bit more than a decade, the Bolshevik Revolution, because the Tsars had been, the Tsardom had been totally discredited by that catastrophic loss of their Baltic and Pacific fleets to the Japanese of all people.
And by the same token, the Japanese throughout the government, because they negotiated from a position of strength as the victors in that war, they negotiated hard. They didn't get very much territory.
They didn't get the Sakhalinites.

So they were discredited. And that was the beginning of the authoritarian, militaristic Japanese warlords that would result in World War II.
And then we went to the Panama Canal. We have all this recent discussion about the Panama Canal.
But yes, that was an American, brilliant engineering feet, Mr. Lesseps and the French company that had been brilliantly successful in the Suez could not do it.
No one could do it in Panama. It required two or three things as we talked about.
You had to conquer yellow fever and malaria. The United States did.
And you had to create new technology of steam shovels, trucks, special railroad cars of a magnitude nobody had ever seen before to get rid of the earth. And we did that.
And we had protections. And Donald Trump was right about that, that we would have exclusive rights that no other country had.
And so this China deal, I think, was a violation both of the letter and the spirit of that treaty, both the original treaty and the one that Jimmy Carter signed away in 1979. And so now we have done the income tax, which I think changed the whole nature of the United States.
Without the income tax, you don't have a federal octopus, you don't have a military industrial complex, and you don't have people working from January to May to pay their taxes. And you don't have social tensions when 40 to 45% of the American people did not pay any federal income

tax. Next time, we're going to talk about the guns of August and what caused Europe to commit collective suicide in 1914 and the outbreak of World War I, and why did we get into it? All right.
Let's go ahead and take a break and come back to talk a little bit about things in the news. The funny or facetious and then some sad events occurred this week.
So stay with us and we'll be right back. Are you a yo-yo dieter? You diet, lose weight, but gain it all back plus a few extra pounds.
Then later you lose it and regain it again and again. It's dangerous.
Studies show that can increase your risk of heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and other health problems. Breaking free of your yo-yo diet pattern is a main reason doctors created Lean.
Lean is a supplement, not an injection, and you don't need a prescription. The science behind lean is impressive.
It's studied natural ingredients target weight loss in three powerful ways. Lean helps maintain healthy blood sugar, it helps control appetite and cravings, and it helps burn fat by converting fat into energy.
Listen, if you're tired of losing weight and gaining it back, if you want to lose meaningful weight at a healthy pace, Lean was created for you. Let me get you started with 20% off when you enter victor20 at takelean.com.
That's code victor20 at TakeLean.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates.
Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So, Victor, could I just ask you one thing? Because you were talking about Donald Trump, and you said he's very smart, and he's got a business cunning. And so, but recently, he's adopted the facade of the sort of mellow, contented old man.
I love that. And he's sort of put Elon out there as that target to take all of the hard shots for him.
Do you think he admires Elon in a way of somebody who he kind of sees himself in Elon when he was that age? He does. You can't finish any description of Elon Musk.
I'm exaggerating, but not necessarily that much when he tells that anecdote. And then the rocket started to descend, and then this mechanical erector set arm grabbed it.
Can you believe that? They grabbed a missile in mid-flight. Elon did that.
And by the way, Elon, no one else can do it. Only you can do it.
And so, yes, he has genuine admiration. That's why the hatred of Elon is so bizarre, because everybody understands that without Tesla, you wouldn't have an EV industry.
It's a viable, working, reliable car, and the big three can't even emulate it. And then without Elon, you wouldn't have a space program.
NASA has gone off the rails. I don't know what happened to it.
Without Elon, we would still be censoring social media and the FBI would be working with Twitter and Facebook to try to weaponize an election. So I don't know what the anger is about him.
Without Elon, we wouldn't even be talking about cutting waste. All he's doing is basically Donald Trump said Joe Biden went crazy.
I was crazy, but he went crazier with the debt. I had the excuse of COVID.
He didn't. And then he said, Elon, you took over Twitter and they said that you had all this feather betting and didn't you get rid of 90 percent? And Elon said, I not only got rid of 80 or 90 percent, it works just as well.
Well, could you come over here? Yes, I want to come over here and do the same thing to the U.S. government.

That's where we are.

So, yes, he has a great admiration.

And yes, he's 78 years old.

I can tell you I'm 71 and my level of energy from 71 to 60 or 68 is very different.

But it makes him more reflective.

So, yes, it enhances his message.

He still tweets with capital letters. He still calls people bird brain and idiots and despicable and crazy and stupid, but less so.
And he looks tired because he is. He probably gets four hours sleep, 78-year-old.
And it makes him, oddly, it makes him more effective. And he's flooding the zone.
That's what he's doing. He's saying, you know what? He got all that cabinet.
You saw that picture the other day. And he's saying to Sean Duffy, I want you to go in there and save the FAA.
Everybody says, we're having all these crashes. We're not having any more per day than we did under Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Trump's first term, but they're more publicized.
But more importantly, he's only been in there five weeks. The FAA is Joe Biden's and it was DEI, just like United Pilot Training was DEI'd, meaning people were being hired on the basis of their superficial appearance and fired if you didn't fit the particular favored profile.

So then he's saying to Pete Hexeth, recruitment, we're down 50. They keep lying.
Every time they're short 40 or 50, they just said we didn't need that many. We do need that many.
And then all of a sudden, Pete Hegseth, 350 people a day, 10,000 a month. It's record he's been able to do.
So everybody said he's crazy. He's tattooed.
He's out there with the... He looks like a soldier.
He's fought and he's trying to radically change everything. We've talked about that.
My gosh, I don't think I've heard one retired general, have you, who have said that Donald Trump was a pathological liar, that he should be removed sooner than later, that he was Mussolini-like, that he's an architect of Auschwitz-like cages, or that he is on the wrong side of the D-Day beaches and Nazi-like.

Why don't they say it? Because they know that he is going to enforce the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and I think he's going to open up procurement. And the same thing with Marco Rubio.
As I said last time, he is Patton, and Trump is the chaotic armored thrust, and he confuses the enemy like Patton did. And then the infantry comes behind the sober and judicious people and they iron out.
So Panama's in a frenzy. Oh, he's going to invade us.
He's going to do this. Marco Rubio goes down and says, look, we want to be friends.
Donald Trump gets a little wild sometimes,

but you signed a deal with the Chinese

and you knew what they're doing.

You knew that even if it was technically legal

to put a Chinese-controlled company

at the beginning and the end of the canal,

are you insane?

And to turn this over to these people?

Okay.

And that's what he does.

Ditto Greenland, ditto Canada. I will say one thing.
Donald Trump's got to be very careful about Canada because, yes, they have an inordinate asymmetrical tariff, and they run up a $50 billion, and they know exactly what they do. And they spend about 1.4 on their defense.
They don't meet the NATO requirement. This is one of the most impressive militaries per capita in the history of the West during World War II.
The Canadians, they had a huge fleet. They had wonderful soldiers.
They sacrificed. The Dieppe raid, it was all, it was the British planned that and the Canadians got bled white on that.
They're very courageous for them not to be armed. So what is but here's my point.
This was Trudeau, Trudeau, Trudeau. if he keeps the pressure on canada and it's already worked i'm not criticizing that he's got a billion dollars invested by the canadians to close the border all they have to do is up

their defense a little bit, and they can do that. And the second thing they do is just say, we want reciprocal tariffs.
That's all. If we charge you for milk and butter, you charge us for milk and butter, timber, timber, oil, that, you know what I mean? But here's the problem when he, if we, and I understand the art of the deal, you have to be crazy and talk, but what we're doing is we're taking this Nen Kumpuk Trudeau, who had rock bottom liberal labor, et cetera, ratings of the left-wing parties, and we're making him into a victim and the protector of Canadian sovereignty.
Every time we say, well, you're Governor Trudeau, 51 state. Meanwhile, we have these wonderful conservatives, the Stephen Harper wing, and the others, there's four or five of them, and they are put into an impossible situation because they have to, as politicians, defend Canadian sovereignty.
And they have to defend them from whom? Kindred spirits, Donald Trump. And so the conservatives want to do to Canada what Trump's doing.

That is lower taxes, lower deregulation, have a good military. But when he attacks Canada generically, then Trudeau said, look at them.
They're Trumpers. They're just like Trump.
And the result is it's wacky now. The conservative popularity is going down.
And if it continues, they might not win what would have been a landslide election. And so I think we have to find a message and thread that needle.
We have to say, we're angry at Trudeau and what he's done to Canada. We need a conservative.
And once we have a conservative government, every issue can be worked out. Now, that's interference in Canadian elections, but that's what they do to us.

Everybody does that to us.

So I just think somebody in the administration, not Trump, but maybe J.D. Vance or someone

should say, boy, if we had a conservative, stable, normal government, not this crazy

man Trudeau, we would have everything negotiated on a symmetrical

basis. And then I think the conservatives would win.
Well, Victor, let's turn to some good reading and good listening. And I'm being completely facetious for our listeners.
We have, in terms of listening, I guess Gavin Newsom is starting his own podcast and he's calling it, This is Gavin Newsom. And I was wondering your thoughts on such a narcissistic thing.
This is not Gavin Newsom. You should have just had nobody show up because that's what he is, an empty suit.
I don't know. I mean, I've talked about this a little bit.
He wants to talk with MAGA people. I'm a MAGA person.

Everybody listens to MAGA persons. If all of our audience who's listening right now could go on and show, they would say this, Gavin, you have 13.3, the highest income taxes in the United States.
And you're, I think, number nine in sales tax, average per county, depending on the county, 10 to 12%. You have the highest gas

taxes. Gavin, we rate 45th in schools test scores.
We have the highest per capita crime rate in San

Francisco and Oakland of any major city. We have one third of all the welfare recipients.
21% of

the people live below the poverty line. You're bleeding out 300,000 of the most productive

of the welfare recipients. 21% of the people live below the poverty line.
You're bleeding out 300,000 of the most productive citizens are leaving. Gavin, the reason they're doing that is you have the highest tax, and I didn't mention the gas tax, that's the highest.
You have the highest property values, the highest housing values, the highest gas tax, the most regulations, the highest income tax. And we wanted something in return.
And what we got are crime-ridden cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, full of homeless people. And we have schools, the LA public school system is dysfunctional.
And we have a teacher's unions that run these schools and they don't work. We have infrastructure that is among the worst.
I think the American trucking industry has got the California freeway system down either last or close to the last. And I know that per miles driven, the 99 freeway is the most dangerous freeway.
It's not even a freeway really in some places. So you have the 101 that's decrepit, the 99 that's decrepit, and then he's spending $15, $16 billion to continue Jerry Brown's mad idea of a high-speed rail, which is beyond the ability of the present competency of California.
California's elite, whether you're talking about the government lawyers or the government politicians or the government engineers, they're not competent. They can't do this.
And if they, so they had, 2009 we voted for this high-speed rail. We would talk about 30 or 40, 50 billion.
They have spent over 15 billion. They have not raised, laid one foot of track.
And now, are we going to get the 500 miles from LA through Tehachapi to Bakersfield to Fresno, up to Chowowchilla over to Pacheco and get to the Bay Area. No, we're doing phase one minus.
That is Bakersfield to Merced. I'm a chauvinist of the San Joaquin Valley.
So everybody, I love Bakersfield. I love Merced.
But it's not the time, the place you want to go take a high-speed rail. If you get from that 178 miles, if you get there in three hours driving, you're not going to feel cheated that you got there in an hour because you didn't get there in an hour.
And by the way, it's not going to go 250 miles an hour. They've already downgraded it.
They've already showed you what the ticket price would be.

They can't run it.

Look at BART. because you didn't get there in an hour.
And by the way, it's not going to go 250 miles an hour. They've already downgraded it.

They've already showed you what the ticket price would be.

They can't run it.

Look at BART.

It's a complete mess.

It's just a spoil system for unions and DEI and all of that stuff.

And it's so tragic because Jerry Brown's father, Edmund Brown,

was very gifted. He sued the Sierra Club to create the California Water Project, and they approved the California Water Project in 1960.
Five years later, they had the first phase of the aqueduct, and that's 400 miles long. They had it all the way from the delta down to San Luis, about 80 miles.
They had the O'Neill 4 Bay, and they were pumping it over the highest pin stocks in the world into Los Angeles. And then Phase 2, where they had a lateral into San Bernardino, and then Phase 3, these labs, they were all done within 10 years.
That was a brilliant group of people, the engineers, the politicians, the lawyers, the workers. They created the most sophisticated aqueduct system in less than 10 years and much of it in five years.
This is now 15 years, 15 years, and we haven't laid one foot. And when I go down my avenue, most of I see workers are they're spraying graffiti.
They're sandblasting graffiti over the bridges. Remember what he did, everybody.
They took all of the overpasses that were most highly seen. And they started those first.
And then they had big billboards. Your taxpayer dollars at work.
High speed rail high-speed rail sophisticated overpass and then you drove down the 99 or 40 when you saw them oh my gosh but they didn't do anything in between in between they were hung up for years and lawsuits with farmers and preservationists and it was a mess so that's gavin and he's not going to talk about any of that stuff, and I wish he would. And why is he doing it now? He's doing it now because his little antenna have pricked up and he thinks, hmm, let me see.
They're opposing Trump, but they're gone nutty. All they do is scream and yell, and they call Elon Musk untrustworthy, and Hitler, and Mussolini, and they have all these horrible names.
They scream and yell at Congress, and yet they're dying on the altar of transgenderism in Maine. The border is closed, and they think that everybody wanted it wide open, and another three million.
These people are crazy in my party. There's going to be a little seam in the next election for a liberal who sounds a little traditional.
I'll have a little bit of, I'll get a little teaspoon of Al Gore and Bill Clinton circa 1992, 96. So I will have a podcast.
And the thing I'll do about it is I want to talk to MAGA people. I'm inclusive.
I believe in inclusivity, D-E-I. It's not diversity, equity, it's inclusivity.
So I want all you MAGA people to call in, we'll kind of joust them when it's all over, and I lie to you about how great everything is. We all part friends.
I say, you know, Gavin's a miracle worker. He's a can-do guy.
He's not an ideal. That's what he's doing.
It's not going to work. I have a feeling it's going to be quickly dubbed, this is not Gavin Newsom's show.
Well, he's going to do exactly what he did with Donald Trump. So he went to the White House, and he begged, begged, begged.
And he said, and then Trump came out and didn't want to meet him because who wants to meet him? It's all, who wants to meet him with his Abercrombie and Fitch vest, his slick back hair. And then he looks for the latest camera or wherever the cameras are.
Then he gets a shovel or he puts on gloves and picks up trash. It's all fake photo op guy.
That's who he is. So he comes out and he forces himself onto the tarmac to meet Trump.
And basically said, we need $40 billion. And I'm so wasteful.
I started the year with $77 billion deficit because I opened the borders and we have Medi-Cal. And we need the $40 billion.
But you're such such a wonderful person and I've always liked you. We've always got along and flattering Trump.
So Trump goes back and he said, I got the 40. And then he goes to the legislature.
I need 50 million because we're going to sue that SOB. And that's what he's doing.
And that's what he always does. So this whole thing is part, this is the podcast version of Kissing Up to Trump.
It has nothing to do with his ideology or his politics. He is a captive, even if he wanted to be independent, he's a captive of an insane assembly and state senate.
And they're all run by coastal elites from San Diego to Santa Rosa. And their main, they have two main agendas.
Green, green, green, green, destroy nuclear energy, natural gas, and illegal immigration, illegal immigration, and identity politics. That's it.
I like that Trump gave him, or it seems to be giving, he's going to give him money, but he's not going to let Newsom and his cronies have control of it.

I might as well burn it up if it wasn't.

Meanwhile, Lee Zeldin's got the EPA, and I think they've already helped greenlight the removal of toxic stuff out of there.

They should just let Trump come in with a czar and just say, we will have everybody with permits, greenlighted. They can have all their plans and all the toxic stuff and all the infrastructure, the sewer, the water, all the power.
We'll all be done in a year, and we want you starting with your independent contractors within a year. Well, I promised good reading as well.
Apparently, Jake Tapper, a CNN interviewer, has written or is writing a book called Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and This Disastrous Choice to Run Again, and His Dis his disastrous choice to run again. And this is the same Jake Tapper that, as a lot of shows have been showing this week, castigated Laura Trump for having suggested, I think in 2020, that Biden was in decline.
And so I was wondering your thoughts. Yeah, it was very disingenuous because Laura Trump said he's not able to finish a sentence and stutter.
Oh, he had a childhood stutter and you're making fun of disability. You can't diagnose people.
You're not a doctor. I didn't stop you, Jake, when you guys all said that Donald Trump was subject to 25th Amendment removal and you said he was demented and you got Bandy Lee up at Congress to lie that he needed a straitjacket intervention.
And you did it so much that Trump finally said, I can't take this anymore. I'm going to take the Montreal cognitive assessment, which he did.
And he told us that he could tell the difference between a camel and a dromedare. And that was what I looked at the test versions and stuff like that, two humps, one hump.
Anyway, the point I'm making is Jake Tapper, and you mentioned Laura Trump. So if you go and look and say Joe Biden plus stutter, and you tick a date, 1980, 1990, you don't find anything.
You do it 2020, 21, 22. Then all of a sudden the left said that he wasn't demented, that he was a sympathetic, vulnerable person that had mastered his stutter.
So you're supposed to believe that. That was not a true thing.

Jake Tapper and people like him demonized anybody.

I wrote a comment.

I don't know if you remember in the 2020 primary,

he was on the stage and he lost every debate. There was, I think, Amy Kobachar, Pete Buttigieg,

one of the castro twins

spartacus uh elizabeth warren and bernie sanders and they were raving and stuff and he was just and then every once in a while sean handy and fox or somebody would show that thing and he said if you want to help joe biden go to And then he said, and you know, the 1776 and all that stuff. And it was obvious that he...
And then they were quoting Barack Obama. Remember he said off the record, Joe, you don't have to do this.
You don't have to... Meaning you don't have to take the country down the drain and embarrass yourself.
So that was known. And Spartacus was on the stage in one debate.
And Joe, they asked him a question. I can remember, I don't know which particular debate.
And he said something like, I sure did. Yes, yeah.
And Cory Booker, I didn't understand any of that. It was just like Trump.
He said almost the same thing Trump did in the debate years later. So everybody knew that.
And I kind of got angry when I saw that title of that book, because he, the co-author and all the left were part of the greatest media conspiracy in the history of the United States to do something that was very dangerous, to take someone who was obviously cognitively challenged and not up to the job, physically or mentally, and reinvent him as old Joe Biden from Scranton, and then in the primary tell Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Spartacus, Bernie Sanders, you can't get elected in the general election. You're crazy.
You're hard leftist. The only guy that we can fake the American people out is Joe Biden.
He's our veneer. So you're going to drop out.
And Pete, you'll get a cabinet post, even though you have no experience in transportation. And Elizabeth, you and Bernie get your hard left agenda.
And Brock, you and Michelle get all your appointments. And Joe will just come.
He'll just, I hope he can make it. But Joe, it's COVID and you stay in the basement.
You don't go anywhere. And if you want to go anywhere, you're kind of like a drive-in movie.
You sit there in your car and they sit there and they honk. Remember that? And you're not going to do anything.
And you turn it over to the money. We'll out-raise him three and a half million.
We'll change all the voting laws and we'll have 70% of the people not showing up on election day where the error rate of particular ballots will drop from a normal 5% to 6% to 0.3, 0.4. And Molly Ball summed it all up in time.
Left-wing reporter now working for the Wall Street Journal. And she just said, she called it a cabal and a conspiracy, how he got picked and how they won.
Okay. And then when he came in, he's worked two to three days a week.
And remember Barack Obama had said, he was on record saying, they said, Brock, is there any chance you could ever think of a third term? We miss you so much. You were so brilliant.
Yes, I was. Of course I was brilliant.
I'm always brilliant. Well, what would your dream be? Well, yeah, I just stay in the basement and work out.
I just every once in a while, I'd phone up my orders and I didn't have to do anything. And that's exactly what happened.
He tipped us off. And so that's who ran the company and they created this cabal.
The only irony or nemesis, the Greek said from hubris, overweening arrogance, comes ate or disaster and then nemesis divine retribution chaos and then so they were arrogant then they got the chaos and then they got the retribution and the retribution was donald trump and they couldn't pull it off he almost pulled it off they lied to us and lied to us and they I take it very personal, as I said, because I wrote columns about it as early as 2000. I said he was unhinged.
And I got so many angry letters. I got attacked in print.
I won't mention the network and I won't mention the anchor. But I went on a major television show and I said that he was reptilian because he looked all pale and he only had that grimace from the repeated Botox treatment.
You know how we kind of grimace when he would say semi-fascist and ultimate? Didn't he look lizard-like? Well, I didn't say lizard-like. I thought it would be scientific.
And somebody said, what do you make of that, this person? And I said, you know, it's very disturbing. He's reptilian almost.
And my God, I never went on that show again. They never asked me to go.
I was kind of ostracized. But now we learn from Jake Tapper.
All you nuts out there that we demonize. Hey, Laura Trump, that we cut you off and ridiculed, you were all right.
But guess what? We were right, too. We just kind of sort of maybe a little bit said that he might have been perfect, but we kind of didn't mean it.
And now we're going to redeem ourselves by writing a book and how bad it was. You think Edith Wilson was covering up the stroke-ridden, bedridden Woodrow Wilson?

This was worse.

We're supposed to buy this book now and believe all that. No, Jake Tapper, you've lost all credibility.
I suggest no one buy this book. It's just going to be, it's not about Joe Biden's dementia.
It's about Jake Tapper and the mainstream media trying to wiggle their way out of the biggest conspiracy in our history between Democratic insiders and media insiders. And they're probably the same people.
And they lied to us and lied to us and changed rules and regulations and protocols to allow this, as I said, wax and effigy to be president. I've never heard it better said.
So thank you, Victor, for making sure our listeners do not buy the book and that I was being entirely facetious about everything. I don't think any of them were going to buy it.
No, I can guarantee you our audience was not going to buy it unless they wanted to have a comic relief. No, I don't see Jake Tapper having an audience that want to buy that book.
But let's turn to the last topic, which is the border and issues and insights has a table, a study done of crossings at the border for all the way from Trump's first administration through today in January. And it shows that January crossings at this time for Trump is at 60k or 60,000.
And that last year with Joe Biden, it was at 180,000. So Trump has cut that by one-third, one-third of what Joe Biden.
But it also showed that Donald Trump's, in his first term, all of his Januaries were below even his 60,000 this year. So there was a consistency among his Republican, in his Republican administration.
And so what the insight or insights and issues wanted to say was that all the claims of the left, that the Republicans were standing in the way of Joe Biden stopping this. Comprehensive immigration reform.
Yeah. We're here now shown to be a lie.
That was always a lie.

Yeah.

What they called comprehensive immigration was to try to fool two or three senators into thinking that they were going to have a solution when it was basically amnesty. And people are not stupid.
When Ronald Reagan signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, which really took the Border Patrol off the border and gave I-9 forms to the employers. There was massive fraud.
I know that when I was farming in those years, it was a joke. Somebody, you had to keep records of I-9 forms and somebody would give it to you and then you'd have no idea who they were.
You had no idea, and no one ever checked. And the old system, they called it La Migra, and they were everywhere, and they stopped.
But my point is that that was a complete failure, Simpson-Mazzoli Act. So the border was open.
Obama opened it at first to get running. Remember, he said it's only legal, and then he got elected and then he kind of opened it.
And then when he was up for re-election 2012, we kind of remember it's only legal, but then he just opened it wide. Trump came in with a, he started, everybody criticized him because he didn't build the new wall, but the old wall, he did 500 miles of it.
It wasn't a wall. It was under George W.
Bush. It was just a rickety fence.
So he worked. And what did they do? He tried to get the military.
The Secretary of Defense opposed him. I mean, you had Jim Mattis at Secretary of Defense and John Kelly.
They were not on the MAGA agenda. They weren't.
Rex Tillerson was not on the MAGA agenda.

He had a team that did not believe that you should stop all illegal immigration. He tried.
Then they cherry-picked judges. Then they said that he was putting them in cages.
Remember that? Even though he tried to... I was on an NPR broadcast, and I tried to very carefully say the cages were made by Barack Obama.
He inherited them, and they're not cages. They're facilities that if you didn't have that security, you would have no security, given that 90% of the people do not show up for their deportation or their immigration status hearings.
And then after I got off, the host that was interviewing me started trashing me, which you never do in journalism. You don't interview anybody.
If you want to interview a buddy and you don't agree with him, you ask him tough questions. You don't have them go off and then start attacking them when they can't.
And that's what happened. My point is that with all of that, if you look at the last year, he's finally stopped it.
He had no more catch and release. You had to apply for refugee status while you were in a different country.
He beefed up the Border Patrol and they were starting to build the new wall, 20, 30 miles. They just started.
And then the election happened. And then Joe Biden, for the first year, if you look at that first year, he was just saying, well, I'm not for illegal.
And what I mean is the fumes of the Trump administration had deterred people. Don't go north.
But they didn't. And then Joe Biden, somebody said, well, you know,

wait a minute. In 2020 in the primary, he said, come north.
Remember that? Hey, everybody,

come north. We're not going to do anything.
Maybe we'll try it. And they started trying.

And then by the second, third, it was off the charts. And then Donald Trump comes in and they say, wow, he didn't do anything in the first 30 days.
Yes, he did. But it's just beginning because

he's getting the message out that you will be deported. The other really important thing to

I'm sorry. the first 30 days.
Yes, he did. But it's just beginning because he's getting the message out that you will be deported.
The other really important thing to remember is, here's the argument. Donald Trump said he was just going to get 500,000 criminals.
Well, they're hard to find. But here's the point.
You go in, you hear there's two cartel members in an apartment building. and so you go in and one guy's got his nephew there and one guy's got his girlfriend, his buddy, but there's no felony record on them.
So you get the two people and then you just, what do you do? I'm not allowed to ask your immigration status because we're giving de facto amnesty for anybody who entered illegally.

Oh, don't tell me whether you did or not.

No, they're not going to do that.

They're going to say the law says you cannot enter the United States. By the way, you're next to these criminals.
Can I see your, I don't have any, I entered illegally. Well, you're going to be deported.
Oh my God, they deported people who weren't criminals. They were criminals.
They broke the law. What is it you don't understand? There is either a law or there's not a law.
If they're not criminals, then anybody can come across the border. And by the way- They're harboring criminals, though.
That's a felony, by the way. And I think some of our governors got that message when they were bragging.
Was it the New Jersey governor bragging he was going to put somebody illegally above his garage? And then somebody said, well, we're going to charge you with a felony. If you don't believe that, everybody, if you don't believe that it's against the law to come in the United States without documentation or permission, then just leave your passport at home when you fly in from Holland or Britain or France.
Just leave it back in your hotel or tuck it into your suitcase and say you don't have one and see how far you, a U.S. citizen, get by trying to enter the United States without a passport.
I've seen it in my 50 years at least five times. And these are people who somehow got on a plane, either without a passport, but more likely somewhere in their overhead luggage.
They dropped it or in the seat and they come in there and you can see what happens. They have no passport.
The person at the window and all five cases that I saw, they call security and they take the person into a room. I don't know what

they do, but I have a feeling they make sure they're legal or they're U.S. citizens and they go on a computer and find out and maybe they find them or they let them come in with a Xerox version.
But you cannot do that. And if a citizen can't do it, why would you allow a foreign national to do Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show, but a tragedy happened this week.

Gene Hackman was found dead at 95 in his house, and so, too, his wife, who was about 60, 67 or so years old.

She was 30 years younger.

So it is a mystery what happened to them.

At this point, we don't know how long the bodies were there.

I think that's when he really he was uh wonderful in bonnie and clyde but he came very famous with um the uh drug uh drug movie two of them the french connection and french connection too he was popeye Doyle and he was every man. He was always, I think people have, and the obituaries have called him believable.
He did a, I think it was with Al Pacino called Scarecrow. It was a really good movie.
and he was kind of a protector of, there were two inmates and he was kind of the rugged big guy that made sure that Pacino wasn't molested

or taken advantage of, and he was really good in that. He had a very sinister role in Unforgiven as the local sheriff that was a bully, and he was kind of a psychopath.
He was building his retirement house, and Clint Eastwood comes in with Morgan Freeman, and they killed Morgan Freeman. They whipped him, and then he was a psychopath.
He had that great scene, kind of morbid scene, morbid, when he comes in and he thinks, everybody shoot him. And the character, once he gets alcohol, he reverts back to his natural proclivities as an accomplished killer.
He's incompetent unless he drinks. But once he's, he doesn't care.
So he's, he basically, nobody wants to shoot him. If they all shoot him, they're free, but somebody's going to die.
And then they shoot him. I mean, they being Clint Eastwood shoots him and he's on the ground.
And after he's killed everybody, he sees him twitch and he walks over and he says, this isn't fair. I was Billy Nowles.
And he goes, whoever said anything about fair? And he finishes him off. And that was kind of, you remember Richard Harris had come in as, I think, Bob, what was it? Something Bob.
He was a killer, and he was coming in. The prostitutes had hired somebody to get even with a person who had disfigured one of the prostitutes.
And then Gene Hackman kind of baited him as if they were friends, and then he just beat that crap out of him and almost killed him. So he was a bully, but he played it in a brilliant fashion.
Everything he did was great. And then about, I think Unforgiven was his last movie about 20 years ago in his early 70s.
He just said, I can't do it anymore. And I think his point was, I'm forgetting lines now or something.
I don't want to be remembered. So then he had a big estate in New Mexico.
And he had a younger wife, as you said, 30 years. So it's kind of odd because when I read this this morning, and I'm speaking on a Thursday morning, they said there was no foul play.
So he was obviously in very poor health from the pictures, at least of the last year. So either he fell or maybe she fell, and that seems hard in the early 60s, but maybe she was injured and he didn't know what was, he was by himself or he didn't, or he fell and then she was trying to revive him.

Who knows? She was injured and he didn't know what was he was by himself or he didn't or he fell and then she was trying to revive him.

Who knows? But it's hard. I guess to anybody who reads a story, they can't make sense of it.

And we will be by the time you're listening to this, you will have the answers because they said there were blunt trauma.

Well, nobody can commit suicide by blunt trauma to your head. I think the implication is they might have hit falling.
But they were in separate bedrooms, weren't they? One was in the bathroom and one was in the kitchen. Yeah.
You can see that he fell and then maybe trying to pick him up, she might have fallen. And that's the scenario where he fell in the bathroom.
She tried to pick him up and hit her head and then was dizzy and went to lay down and then got a hematoma or something. But it's very tragic.
It's very odd. So, well, and the dog was dead.
Maybe he starved. The dog wasn't fed or something.
They said that there were pills somewhere. So some sort of sedative of some sort.
That's what it sounded like. But if you just ask the average person and say, you're 94 and your wife is 63 and you have a dog and you're all three going to be found dead in a week.
And with blunt trauma, it's going to be, I think it has to be someone had an accident if it wasn't foul play and it's apparently wasn't. And then the other person tried to react to it and got incapacitated.
And then they weren't able to call somebody or feed themselves and they got i don't know and then the dog was not fed or neglected but it's really sad but it shouldn't overshadow what was a great career yeah he was from a very uh working class family i think his father left him when he was 13 just got up one day and drove out out, waved to him, see ya. So he was a self-made person.
Yes, I remember him in The Firm. That was that Tom Cruise movie.
He played a good part in there. He did.
He was a very sympathetic character. He was kind of a crooked lawyer that at the end realized how flawed and terrible a person he'd been and tried to do some good and knew he was going to be killed, but he allowed Tom Cruise's wife to be alive, to escape.
Yeah, that was, everything about him was, he was a great, he played a role that Soboski in A Bridge Too Far, the Polish paratrooper, that they had a Polish airborne that according to the Market Garden, I'm doing this by memory, so the Market Garden plan was a flawed plan from A to Z. Terrible.
Montgomery's disaster. He didn't get the harbor secured at Antwerp, but he did get on this crazy idea of leapfrogging into the Rhine across five bridges.

But nevertheless, the last one at Arnheim, they were supposed to get there in 48 hours, but it was five days. And so finally, the idea was to give the first British airborne reinforcements from a Polish division, but it was so foggy and they landed them on the wrong side of a tributary.
And it was just a screw up because it came late because of the fog. They landed under difficult positions.
They had to go across the river to help. They couldn't do it.
They almost got away. And he played that Polish general.
People flawed him And the reviews of that movie. I remember they said that his accent wasn't good, but he looked Polish.
He acted Polish. I thought it was a good role.
I thought he did a wonderful job. But I noticed later that for some reason, critics who didn't like that movie, I liked the movie.
In fact, I think I'm going to, as I speak, I'll be in Hillsdale next week talking about World War II films. I'm going to talk about that film along with Patton and my favorite World War II movie, Das Boot, The Boat.
Yeah, it seems like Gene Hackman was just in hundreds of supporting actor. He worked harder than he was known in Hollywood as the hardest working.
He was in his 50s because he started late. He started in his 40s to get known.
He didn't have a 20, 30 year. He was unknown.
And he was doing five or six films a year. He worked himself just to death almost.
Well, Victor, thank you for all of that this weekend. And I hope everybody has enjoyed it.
And thanks to our listeners for listening to us. Thank you, everybody.
I appreciate listening. And call into Gavin's show and get on there and tangle with Gavin Newsom.
He wants your voice to be heard. That's what he said.
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off. Thank you, everybody.
If you've been with us at all over the last six months or so, you are probably familiar with one of our favorite new brews, Wired2Fish Coffee. As you may know, their coffee is delicious and smooth, but more importantly, the company has amazing commitment to give back.
Wired2Fish Coffee gives back 25% of profits, 25% to conservation, clean water, and things like missions and evangelical outreach. From river cleanups and initiatives for fish habitat, to programs that give people in slums clean water and spread the word about Jesus.
Wired2Fish Coffee is in it to make the world a better place. They also have just launched a medium roast decaf.
And for avid coffee lovers, their much-loved brew is now available in two-pound and five-pound bags. Join us and enjoy your coffee while making a

difference in the world and join a community of like-minded coffee lovers. Subscribe and save today and enjoy discounted coffee and free freight or just give this great brand a try with discount code JUSTNEWS or JUSTTHENews.

For 10% off your first order,

head over to Wired2FishCoffee today and make this year a year you align your coffee with your values.