Promises Made, Promises Kept: Executive Orders and Energy Dominance Unveiled

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the man lucky enough to be the host and to ask Victor the kind of questions I think you would want him to answer.
We are recording on Sunday, February 23rd, and this particular episode will be up on Thursday, the 27th.

Who is Victor Davis Hanson?

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and

Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where I think he's going

to be in a couple of days.

Yes.

Not a couple.

Yes, I'm going to go to a military history conference.

And on the 4, wait, fifth, sixth, fourth, I'm going to give a talk on Hollywood World War II movies. Oh.
Yes, I am. Well, do talk about.
My three favorite, I'm going to say, are George Patton. Patton, right.
And Das Boot. And then one that nobody likes, but I do like it, and that's The Bridge Too Far.
That is a very good movie. It is.
I would have picked Battleground, and they were expendable. But that's, you know, everyone's each their own.
Well, okay, well, Victor, you're here. We have so many topics to get your wisdom on.
I think we'll start off with Democrat madness. Then there's a bunch of really important Trump executive orders and actions that are so heartening.
And maybe if we have time at the end, there's so much craziness going on in California. You happen to live there.
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Protect what you've earned before the fraud economy collapses completely. We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
I don't think I mentioned all my own babbling, Victor, that you have a website, The Blade of Perseus, victHanson.com, later in this episode. Towards the end, I will tell you, especially you new listeners, why you should be checking that out and subscribing.

So, Victor, I had hoped we had gotten to this in the last show. We didn't, but let me try to combine three things.
First of all, Mark Penn, the Democrat pollster, was on Laura Ingraham's program the other day, which would have been Friday, I think the 21st. New poll has Dems falling off a cliff.
And this was, I forget where I'm reading this from, but the ratings for the party, which were in the high 40s, are going to be like 35%. Oh, this is him talking to Laura.
And I think the basic question is, who's doing a better job as president, Biden or Trump? Trump is winning that with 57%. I think you're seeing a retrospective assessment of Biden and the direction the Democrat Party was going, and really a lot more negative than it was on election day.
And he goes on to say, going off a clip. So that's one thing, Victor.
The second thing is a typical, well, it is typical, this lunacy in public. The Worcester, Massachusetts City Council became a national laughingstock because the city has declared itself a trans-sanctuary city.
And then the third kind of lunacy of these things just seem to play into the hands of Republicans now. And Donald Trump is the governor of Maine, who Donald Trump got into a little fight with, so to say, at the White House, and what comes out by a video of her dancing at a drag show in Maine.
This is a party, Victor, that still doesn't get it, or it is embracing what it truly is, a party of insanity. Your thoughts to all of this? Yeah, there's two issues here, I think.
One is, it's about the majority of people. If you go back, Jack, and you look, if everybody would go back and take dates like 1970, arbitrarily 1980, and the word transsexual, I don't think the word transgender was used at that time, but there is a term that was used, gender dysphoria.
And that would mean that people felt that they're in the wrong body, so to speak. And then you look at scientific studies that were conducted and demographic studies.
It's about 0.001% of the population. And then you look at current news stories that say that 20% of the Ivy League campuses say they are gender dysphoric or 10% of.
And so you get the impression that this has been widely known through antiquity. I mentioned before a famous The Athos poem by Catullus that was written somewhere around 045 BC in Rome, where he talks about a person who gets caught up in an ecstatic Eastern cult of Sibylle.
They go into these ecstatic rites, and then he castrates himself, and he becomes, and halfway through the poem, they start to use the Latin illa for illy, the feminine pronoun. He had his right pronouns, Jack.
And then he sits at the beach at the end when the trans wears off, and he sees that he's become Eastern and effeminate and he laments this. But my point is, if you read Petronius' Satyricon, this is all through antiquity.

And there's little isolated cases in Diodorus with people who have disparate sex organs, a whole thing. But it's not the majority.
And so what the Democratic Party has done in search of a new civil rights cause celeb, they have taken the transgendered issue, which was always a very minute portion of the population, and they've magnified it. The second thing they have done is they have blurred the idea of mainstream normality versus tolerance.
Nobody on the right is saying that they want to go out and hound transgender people. All they're saying is that if you are biologically one sex, that is, you have a muscular skeletal particular, and we're usually talking, Jack, about males, then, and I think that's very important, everybody, we're talking about males who say they become women who compete in female sports.
We're not talking about females who say they have become males, competing against males with advantages. They

don't have an advantage. They have a disadvantage.
And that should tell you something right there, that women who transition to males, for a large part, do not win male athletics. The second thing is I don't think there's a lot of objections from the male community that when males come into their restrooms and they are biologically female, people do not care.
What we're talking about is young girls who are dressing after gym or after sports events with people who have male genitalia. And the left used to be that we have to protect our children.
We have to be careful about sexualizing and they have completely thrown that out. The other larger question is what Trump is trying to say is we want tolerance.
And I say that because he has a gay secretary of treasury. Rick Grenell was gay.
He's one of the most, he's had more people who were gay in top echelon positions than almost anybody. But what he's trying to say is in any society, the idea of a man and a woman and a nuclear family and fertility of 2.1, 2.5 children is essential, not about ideology, not about politics, but just statistically to that society.
And what I mean by that is all of our sociological studies, if you believe anything from social science, show that a two-parent family, and I'm talking about people who are single parents, not that it's impossible, but it's a normative situation.

But what the Democratic Party is doing is they are taking things that have minute constituencies and they are magnifying them to try to leverage the Republicans as illiberal and it's not working. So when you have trans people come in and storm in or you have Bud Light ads and it's not appealing to the mainstream.
And it's especially bleeding and hemorrhaging the Democratic Party support among black males and Hispanics. And they can't stop it.
So Victor, the only Democrat self-critique, and you see this in some people, like James Carville even, they'll kvetch about some things, but it's really about the messaging. That's, we got the messaging wrong.
But I don't know how you message this kind of It's No, it's not the messaging. It's the message.

You could have Cicero articulate the message, and people do not want the message.

They don't want it.

Mark Penn, remember, along with Doug Schoen, was the architect, I think, of the 1996 Democratic Convention statement, which I mentioned before, which reads pretty much like

a MAGA statement. Not that the Democrats ever followed through on all of them.
And Clinton took

in the second term, he took the country to the left. But for a while, the idea of a closed border,

legal only immigration, strong support for defense, for the police, physical sobriety,

that was a Democratic winning message. And that's why they won in 92 and 96 with a little help

Thank you. for defense, for the police, physical sobriety.
That was a democratic winning message. And that's why they won in 92 and 96 with a little help from Ross Perot.
And that's why they won the popular vote in 2000. That's why they won the popular vote in 2008.
And then after that, they went and Obama, as soon as he got elected, he took the party to the left. And even Obama ran in 2008 that he was opposed to gay marriage.
Remember that? Yes, it was Joe Biden who... It was Joe Biden who leaked it.
Unprompted. Yeah.
Joe Biden, everybody's nemesis. I mean, he has done more damage to the country and to his party than any living Democrat.

He really has. He really almost destroyed this country for four years, and he's destroyed the Democratic Party.
Well, I don't know if it was you saying it, or I heard somebody else that Jimmy Carter must be smiling somewhere that he's not in the last place. He makes Carter look like Churchill.
Victor, it's really a little too personal, but Worcester, where this insanity happened, is, as you know, where Holy Cross, a great institution that Anthony Fauci is located. So, and Mrs.
Fowler and I spent our wedding night there, but not in a way that you would, uh, you would, uh, Anthony Fauci isn't, he's now, you know, he started, he didn't need a pardon. He didn't need a pardon.
Well, I'll take it if you ram it down my throat. And now it's, thank God I got that pardon because, uh, my fingerprints are likely over $40 million going to Wuhan when I claimed it was only $600,000.
And, you know, his name up not too far from where the city council drag weirdness happened was his Holy Cross. And there's Anthony Fauci's name up on a building.
And I wonder when that will ever come down. But before, let's talk about another college.
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We thank the good people from Hillsdale, the lucky people that will see Victor in a couple of days for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. By the way, Victor, I'm drinking some water out of this cup, but it's part of the college.
You can't see it. It's the College Fix, which is run by the Student Free Press Association, whose leader is John Miller, the great Hillsdale professor.
John Miller is a very fine journalist. I like John a lot.
He's a good man. I see him when I go to Hillsdale every year.
He is really one of the best people on the right, just a super guy. Let's see, Victor.
Well, there's so much that Donald Trump has rolled out in the last few days. So we're going to take on some executive orders and mission statements, et cetera.

So let's start with, we'll do one, then we have to take a little break.

But one has to do with, I get my papers in order here, the post office. everybody always

they always

look at the US Postal Service

and

it requires a

what they always look at the U.S. Postal Service, and it requires, what, hundreds of millions of dollars of a subsidy every year, and they always...
If by hundreds of millions, you mean billions, yes. Yeah.
Yeah. And I'm ambiguous because they want to eliminate Saturday.
I mean, I grew up with this idea that at 2 o'clock I would say to my parents, can I go out and check the mail? Can I check the mail? Please, please, please. We have a rural mailbox.
And I have one here, but of course it looks like a safe. It's an armored mailbox with keys.
And I do that because I've had it robbed so many times or shot up.

But then I went online, Jack, this is off topic, but I looked at a company.

I won't mention the name.

I don't want to endorse particular companies unless, you know, they're not sponsors. But their ad was a guy with an M16 shooting at the mailbox and the bullets bounced off.

And I said, that's my mailbox.

So, and I've had people try to tamper with it and everything, but it's untamperable. Yeah.
Well, I just want to verify. So, I like my Saturday.
I get really excited on Saturdays. I say, I'm going to walk out to the mailbox and see what's there.
But they're going to eliminate. People have always suggested they eliminate Saturday service, FedEx.
I will mention UPS. I had a very important package of medicine that came to my office and a book that I had to review.
And one of my assistants tried to mail it overnight UPS, and it came four days late. And I saw that it went all the way to Kentucky and back again.
And I live 190 miles away from my office, but maybe that's the way they do it. But I'm not so sure.
I guess what I'm saying is the post office is much cheaper than the alternative. And I used to be a lot less efficient, but I've had pretty good luck with the post office recently.
Yeah. Well, everybody loves their local post.
Well, not necessarily everybody. I do.
I'm there a lot, like the ladies that work there. A couple of things, Victor.
One is, let's say there was no post office and such a thing was needed. What would be created today in 2025 is not the postal system we have.
I think no question about it. It probably would be a privatized thing.
The other thing teased me off about it are stamps, the commemorative stamps. I was a stamp collector.
And it is an expression of our culture or of the governing culture. And so many of our commemorative stamps have been about Pete Seeger and all these left-wing...
You know, it's very difficult to find a commemorative stamp that has anyone who would be considered a conservative. You know, say, like Bill Buckley, who, by the way, who's...
Today's the 27th when this is being broadcast. It's the anniversary of his death.
It's a very it's a reflection of the wokeness of government. But anyway, I both.
Well, I mean, it got hurt because, what, I think it's 75% of all communications are through electronics now, Facebook, social media, email.

And then it, I mean, 30 years ago, my thing, it would be about this big and now it's two or three letters.

And so it's a unionized postal service it's kind of a and it's it's one of those situations when which uh it's kind of like the nfl or nba we all talk about diversity diversity diversity but when you look at the actual makeup of the post office minorities it's a way of handling uh hiring minorities in uh in percentages greater than their demographics and no one says much of it it's it's a very coveted position to work for the post office it's guaranteed almost lifetime employment and it pays very well and it's not i mean it can be dangerous if you're a mail carrier i suppose but dogs and stuff and it's it's an iconic idea so my only point of all this rambling is that every conservative even george w bush um i think trump mentioned it the first time they all look at the post office they say, why is the government delivering mail? Do we have a federal power company? Do we have a federal gasoline company? And let's get rid of it because it's inefficient. It costs too much money.
And we have FedEx and UPS and we have email. And every time they try to do it, they're on the wrong side of public opinion.
Yeah, well, I think it's probably the thing most intimate that people have. You're getting mail, you're seeing the mailman, you know the mailman, so if we're allowed to say mailman anymore.
Hey, Victor, there's a number of other really more important, I think, Trump actions that deserve your attention. And let's get into illegal immigration, if I'm allowed to say that, your views on Trump's executive order and his action against the head of ICE.
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So, Victor, Donald Trump, here's a headline from the Daily Mail. Trump signs most explosive executive order yet as he pulls all federal funding to illegal immigrants.
And first two lines of this, Donald Trump signed an executive order that stops taxpayer money from going to undocumented migrants. The White House stated that Trump is committed to safeguarding federal public benefits for American citizens who are truly in need, including individuals with disabilities and veterans.
Trump is demanding corrective action to stop all taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens. And, Victor, if you don't mind, roll into that.
That Donald Trump, just the other day after he—what did he do? Caleb Vitello, the acting director of ICE, was reassigned on Friday. Donald Trump unhappy with the amount of arrests being made by ICE.
Your thoughts on the executive order and his action with the head of ICE? Well, the latter first, he's got a little bit of a problem because he's been they've been so spectacular at discouraging illegal immigration through. They've stopped catch and release they've stopped refugee status applied after you get here you have to apply for it in mexico um they i i've been told they're they're restarting the wall they beat there's great morale and they're not they've stopped these apps i haven't gone to the fresno air terminal lately at night, but I've been told that it's vastly reduced.
My point is there's not a lot of people coming in the border now. I think it's less than 40.
So the impetus or the direction of enforcement is now interior. In other words, we can live with probably 30 or 40,000 illegal aliens.
We're going to curtail them to zero probably, but there are 12 million under Biden and there was 20 million here before. And we've got the first iteration to deal with.
We've only deported, I think it's 80,000. We've got 500,000 people that may have had criminal records and we've got another million and a half who've already been given their deportation orders.
They were not refugees. They've gone through the system, and they've fled.
So we've got about 2 million people we have to deport, and it's very hard when you have 600 sanctuary city jurisdictions, and you have uncooperative local authorities in blue states, and it's very expensive. And they haven't got enough authorization from Congress.
And so Donald Trump is very impatient because they've got half the problem solved. But that problem of letting them in, it was easier to solve than asking them to leave.
And what they need to do is start the deportations in mass of violent criminals, and they're going to have to find some way, I think Pam Bondi has been working on it, to coerce these blue state renegade officials to follow state law. As far as the cutting off, that's mostly, Donald Trump can only do that on the federal level, and most welfare or electric bank transfer, most of it, not all, but is state and local.
But there are a lot of people under federal reimbursements for Medi-Cal or Medicaid, I should say.

We call it Medi-Cal in California.

Medicaid and more importantly, we have a big abuse of the Social Security disability program. It's a multi-billion dollar expansive program.
And a lot of people who come here know that and they get on disability on the federal level. So what he's saying is, we've got to stop this.

In California, we passed 187. There's a big myth, Jack, that Pete Wilson, that he suffered terrible popularity problems because he backed 187 that passed by over 60 percent of the california population and that led uh to a democratic renaissance under jerry brown that's not true actually there was uh after we passed 187 pete wilson still enjoyed favorable always did favorable popularity ratings the courts will say if you're here, then you're an American, basically, and you get everything, and that's not legally apt.
And so I mentioned that very controversial period. At 187, I was a professor at Cal State Fresno, and we had just demonstration after demonstration.
It was really, and they were burning the American flag, and some of my own students were doing it. And I ventured out there and said, do not wave the Mexican flag if you don't want to go back there, and don't burn the American flag if you want to stay here.
It's incoherent. And we saw that again with those, when they shut down 101, the protesters were doing just that.
That's not a good thing for the Democratic Party, everybody.

If you're here illegally, do not protest against immigration, your immigration status by burning the American flag. and do not wave the Mexican flag, because that suggests to an outsider, whether that is a fair

impression or not, that you love Mexico so much that you don't want to go back and you hate the United States so much you have to stay here and that's incoherent incoherent now another action Donald Trump has taken was the unleashing of the America First Investment Policy. And this is pretty, has a broad agenda to it.
But one of the aspects of it is, I don't know, an international middle finger of sorts to China. I just want to read one section of it, if folks will indulge me, because it incorporates a lot of the anxieties and anger that many Americans had over the lack of fairness between how China operates in the U.S.
and how, of course, you can't operate in China. Here's what is in this policy, which anyone can find on the whitehouse.gov website.
The United States will use all necessary legal instruments, including the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, CFIUS, to restrict PRC, that's Red China, PRC-affiliated persons from investing in United States technology, critical infrastructure, healthcare, agriculture, energy, raw materials, or other strategic sectors. My administration will protect United States farmland and real estate near sensitive facilities.
It will also seek, including in consultation with Congress, to strengthen CFIUS authority over greenfield investments, to restrict foreign adversary access to United States talent and operations in sensitive technologies, especially artificial intelligence, and to expand the remit of emerging and foundational technologies addressable by CFIUS. Victor, that's just one part of this.
This is really an important document Donald Trump has put out. I think the problem we have with China and the Europeans is, everybody knows it, but we don't really say it, is that they have been taking advantages of us for ossified or anachronistic reasons.
In other words, the Europeans still think it's 1946 and we're the only superpower. They've been devastated.
And so they get the Marshall Plan or they get asymmetrical tariff. China still thinks it's 1980 and the post-Mao era or the middle 80s, and they're trying to liberalize their economy.
So we're going to let them with this George H.W. idea that we kind of let them cheat and then they'll become democratic as they get wealthy.
That's both over with. so what seems a shock is not a shock all that trump is trying to say

on a series of these issues are, I will go down to zero tariffs with you, Germany, with you, France, with you, China, if you do. They don't want to.
They love this market here. They can dump stuff.
So no tariffs for you, no tariffs for us. You go 5%, we're not going to go 2% on you anymore.
And China, you have 350,000 students before COVID, probably still 300. You dotted our landscape on campus with Confucius Institutes, which were PRC conduits.
You have about 1% or 2% of your students are active espionage people that's probably two or three thousand or if not more you're buying key farmland often uh real estate next to military bases we saw what happened with the the spy balloon we don't do that to you so don't do it to us and they then they, and to a lesser extent the Europeans, then say, look at Trump, he's a disruptor. Or they write an article in Foreign Affairs or the New Republic, and they say, this is horrible, this is what he's doing.
No, he's bringing us back to the middle, normal. And what Donald Trump believes, and we haven't seen, we'll see what happens, we'll keep an open mind, but he believes that if you take the United States back to zero, and it has zero tariffs to any country that has zero tariffs, it has 5, 10, 15 percent with any country that does, then we will be getting a lot of money from either tariffs or from increased profits from trade, exports.
And we'll see what happens. But we are going to treat people the way that they treat us.
And I think that's not asking so much. I'm getting really tired of people that are lodging these complaints against the United States.
They say things like, you're interfering. Germany, for example, when Elon Musk interviewed Donald Trump on his own ex inside the United States, Jack, they said that that was an interference.
It was in their own affairs and that elon musk was interfering because

he commented on german politics and he praves the adf and that um jd vance met with the afd are you kidding me christopher steel almost destroyed our electoral process with a lie and he was a British subject.

During the last election, the laborites broadcast that they were raising money to pay people to come over here in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and campaign in our elections. All Europe does and all people abroad do is interfere with our elections.
They always do. And so all Trump

is saying on all of these issues is we're going to treat you like you treat us, not better, not worse. But they think it's going to be worse because it is worse in their case because they've been getting away with murder.
And I don't know why the left, the Democratic Party, they used to be for protecting the American jobs. And all of a sudden, they're the worst offenders.
They're hand in glove with our trade opponents or military opponents. But they will not insist on parody.
Parody, parody, parody. When a German chancellor gets gets up as Schultz did right after February 24th of 2022 and said, this is, we're going to be, this is, this is won't stand what Russia's done.
We're going to be sending everything over to Ukraine or after October 7th. This is terrible.
And then they don't do anything or they do very little. We don't believe you guys anymore.
We don't believe that what was so hard about spending 2% of your GDP on defense, you all promised in 2014 you were going to do it. And you still got 10 or 11, 9, 10, 11 countries that won't do it.
And you want to be in NATO. And then you get mad when Donald Trump bullies you? What if the United States did not

meet its 2%? What would happen to you people if that happened? And then they say things like, well, you've got a big base at Rammstein, and you've got these 80,000 troops, and we help pay for them, and maybe they should go home. Promises, promises.
If you don't like them, send them home. America is happy to send them home

but I was reading a pretty good sophisticated account when Europe says it's going to send troops to be peacekeepers. You hear that Mr.
Stormer said that? They don't even have the logistical lift capacity to supply them. They couldn't do that.
They depend on refueling from america their planes need to be refueled in wartime conditions by america and they need the c17 c130 lip capacity etc and that's talking about a debased form we're not in the great shape that we were militarily but still at this low level we're heads and shoulders above the whole European continent. Victor, talking about the range of the president's executive orders and actions, I do encourage listeners who are interested in these things to visit the White House website.
And we're now 30-something days out from the beginning of this presidency. And it is really heartening, Victor, the scope and breadth of these orders.
And when you read them, the fullness of thought that have gone into them. And clearly, this is not something whipped up on day one.
This is a broad frontal attack or restoration. And one one last thing that just came out the other day is is the energy dominance of fact sheet put out by Donald Trump.
And, you know, drill, baby, drill. But we want American energy dominance.
Well, this spells it out. And it's like, wow, I voted for this guy.
And he's really intending on coming through on these broad range of promises. Any thoughts? Yeah.
I mean, they've been working on the executive orders for a long, long time. So, they were all written before he was even elected.
They were ready to go on day one. And exactly promises made, promises kept.
And remember what happened with energy? He vastly increased by two or three million barrels. Biden came in and he canceled Keystone.
He canceled new liquid natural gas terminals. He did it at the end of his term.
He put Anwar off. He started lecturing fracking.
He made an EV mandate. And then the 2022 midterms came up and prices hit the ceiling during the inflationary period.
Here in California, it was in the San Joaquin Valley, I paid $5.50 a gallon. And then suddenly, he started draining the petroleum reserve to get reelected.
And he went from about 90% all the way down to 50%. And then they came to Joe Biden and said, you are not going to get elected.
So here's what you're going to do. You're going to tell everybody that you're a new green dealer and you're going to talk up EVs, but you're going to drill.
So they went back and they started to drill like Trump and they got it back to Trump and even a little above. Now Trump comes in and says, that wasn't what I really wanted.
That's where I was before I lost that election. And now I'm going to go back to what I had originally planned.
And that 20 million 22 he's going to go full blast the only problem he's going to have is he's going to have to produce the he's going to have to convince these oil companies who have very sophisticated measuring uh capabilities of what their reserves are to go out and start producing a lot of oil and a lot more work with the price dropping and make the same amount of profits where they drain their long-term reserves. So how is he going to get around that? He's going to have to give them some kind of tax concession or he's going to have to open new fields and find vast new reserves.
Gavin Newsom is theoretically sitting on the Monterey Shale formation along the Coast Range. It has apparently a lot of natural gas, but we don't use it.
And we could easily do that. Instead, we're outlawing national gas in new homes, you know.
Yeah. So.
New York has the same issue. Mario, excuse me, Andrew Cuomo, when he was governor, banned fracking.
There's a huge, huge gas reserves there on the shale. Yeah, he's become a, I can't figure him out.
It's kind of like mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Now I want to get elected, so I'll say anything that is contrary to what I actually did when I was governor to be mayor.
He signed those laws that allowed criminals to—the Alvin Braggs of the world to run rampant and cops to be liable. The Me Too left turned on him, and now he's angry.
And Chris Cuomo, every once in a while, I listen to what he says. And they fired him, of course.
And he says some things that are pretty out there. But he doesn't sound like old Chris Cuomo and CNN anymore.
He does not. Most certainly.
Hey, one last thing, because we're talking about some economic stuff, I just want to raise quickly a headline. Again, I think this came from the Daily Mail.
A former Obama economist says one of Biden's biggest legislative victories turned out to be a dud. Jason Furman, the former top economist for the Obama administration, told Politico he believes former President Joe Biden's attempts to bolster U.S.
infrastructure were largely unsuccessful.

He told Politico he believes former President Joe Biden's attempts to bolster U.S. infrastructure were largely unsuccessful.
He told Politico Biden's programs had basically been a failure. He also suggested in the interview that high costs often marred the Biden-Harris administration's infrastructure projects.
projects. All of this, quote, all of this drove up costs so much that the money that got spent

was basically swallowed up by the higher costs. And then a lot of the money hasn't even been spent, Furman told Politico.
So that's a remnant. Remember shovel ready jobs right after Obama came in and then there was the...
Then there was Solyndra, Solyndra, cash for clunkers. All of these government programs were failures.
And then Obama, because he was so far left, he thought that he was going to use this prop. This is very important to everybody.
The idea that we had this waxen effigy, Joe Biden, who they used and manipulated as sort of a cardboard, mixing my metaphors, cut out the last four years. That started in 2009 when they made him vice president.
They said, you know Joe from Scranton. Good old Joe.
He's a tough old hombre. He's going to watch every penny of cash for our bunkers and shovel-ready jobs.
And all the postmortems on all those programs showed they were failures.

And the government, you can't have the government do certain things.

It's envisioned for a particular role that private enterprise can't do,

and that's things like national defense and collect taxes.

And I know some people are listening and said,

well, actually, Victor, we could get private companies too, like the Romans did. The Romans had a very effective, they just had the tax collectors get bonuses and they went, they were very effective and hated.
And hated, yes. That's why Matthew, the apostle, found a side gig in being an apostle.
He was hated as a tax collector. Hey, Victor, I forgot to mention one thing earlier.
We're going to take a break shortly, and then we're going to talk about a bunch of California-related issues. But other things that make the Democrat Party look unpretty, out of it, out of touch, which we were discussing at the outset of the show.

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, she vetoed an election integrity bill that was passed by the Republican-run legislature.

And I was looking into her a little bit.

Last year, she also vetoed legislation on, what do you call you call it when you when you when you occupy somebody's house like a squatting um uh so uh they voted for her what do they think yeah yeah so-called conservatives that's one thing we could learn from europe because we know now that united states could get all the ballots tallied within 48 hours. If we just said this, you all have to show up on election day like you used to, or maybe 70 or 80%.
You'd have a paper ballot. And if you want to request an absentee ballot, it has to be because you're ill or something or you're out of town.
But there's not going to be any more early balloting or blanket mail-in balloting. You have to have an ID.
And it would work very easily. And we know the Democrats will always oppose it.
And yet, when you poll the population, the citizenry, whether they're white or black or Hispanic, they all poll that they want IDs. The Democratic Party, you see everybody, you know that better than I do.
It has a message now that no one wants. This is not the Democratic Party of minimum wage, disability insurance, social security, 40-hour work, overtime.
That's all done and settled this is a different socialist redistributionist monstrosity and no one wants it so they have to use the courts they have to use the deep state to to do what you don't want and nobody wants this system of election, you know. This is more the party of Robespierre than it is of Dan Rostenkowski.
Yeah, it's the party of Robespierre. It's a Jacobin party.
There's no doubt about it. And I say that not lightly.
What did Robespierre want? Oh, he wanted a year zero. Oh, we had one called 1619.
What did he want to do? He wanted to go after the church. They killed 6,000 priests and nuns.
Oh, we went after anti-abortion people and said they were white Christian nationalists in the military. Almost every Jacobin agenda item is what the Democratic Party would, the modern version of it, they embrace.
They were Jacobin. Well, they're especially Jacobin out in the Golden State, Victor, as you know.
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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson show on recording on Sunday, the 23rd of February. This episode's out on February 27th.
Again, I mentioned before, my old boss, Bill Buckley, died on this day in 2008. Rest in peace, good man, founder of the conservative movement.
Victor's got a website, The Blade of Perseus. VictorHanson.com is the address.
Go there and you'll find links to everything Victor writes, his appearances on various other programs, American Greatness Essay, Syndicate Column, archives of these podcasts, links to his books, and three ultra things a week. Two of them are articles Victor writes exclusively for The Blade of Perseus and one exclusive 10-minute video that every Friday or thereabouts.
So if you're a fan of Victor's writings, you are depriving yourself if you're not a subscriber. That's how you get to read the ultimate pieces.
$65 a year, which is discounted from $6.50 a month. Do the math there, folks.
You'll figure that out. So go to the Blade of Perseus and do subscribe.
Victor, wow, three really interesting things. Let's take it on the federal Two federal things And then we haven't talked about Los Angeles and the fires And the aftermath of that in a while But we'll start off with one of your favorite topics, Victor And that's that monstrosity of Cal the real And it's in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.

And Sean Duffy, the Transportation Secretary, is going to be investigating at Doge's. And it looks like I'm reading here now from the Daily Caller.
He's spearheading, he, Duffy, is spearheading a probe into the California High-Speed Rail Authority to determine whether roughly $4 billion in taxpayer money should remain committed to a proposed project to build high-speed rail in the Central Valley, et cetera. Of course, the Central Valley was kind of the afterthought of that too, wasn't it? The big cell was San Francisco and LA in three minutes.
Three quarters of the electorate lived on the coast. They all were very much for it.
And then they said, you know what? We're going to connect what you should do. You were going to have a big high-speed rail line leaving Oakland, San Francisco area.
Go down near the 101. Tap in on you.
Get over Pacheco Pass. Go down.
And they said, not in my backyard. I voted in the abstract.
And then they thought, well, we need a laboratory rat.

And so they called all the local governments here, and we were all broke, and we have very low per capita income.

And they said, would you want a big boondoggle public works?

And we said, yes.

Well, then they gave a route from Bakersfield pretty much along the Santa Fe Rail route, and everybody said, well, wait a minute.

For years, we've said that we only have one track on the Santa Fe route. That's the Amtrak, not Southern Pacific.
And for just a minuscule amount of money compared to what you're envisioning, it's going to be $300 billion. And they've already spent about $20 billion.
But we could make a parallel track right along the Santa Fe with very little right-of-way expense. Instead of having these trains sit there and wait for the oncoming train on a side track, we'll have them parallel so they would go at the same time.
We'll beef up the tracks. We can go up to about 90 miles an hour and then we'll expand the rail.
We've always envisioned going over the grapevine and going to LA and not having to go by bus and from the missing link. And it was all talked about.
And they said, no, we're going to do space age high speed rail. It was Jerry Brown's idea.
and so we voted for it and then we started seeing signs come up jack that said uh we have this percentage of minorities we have this percentage of disabled we have this percentage of trans workers all the publicists and then our road here where i on, was shut down for four years.

So when I wanted to go every week to work, I had to find all of these Securitas detours. It's reopened, and they build.
That was all for one overpass. And I looked down, there's no track there.
It's just the same thing. I know a lot of these were all left-wing environmentalists.
And if you go down and follow the route, about 20 miles from where I'm speaking into Kings County, there was this historical floodplain from Tulare Lake. And the result of that were these 400- and 500-year majestic oaks, some of the biggest oaks in California.
And every farmer who had one on his property had that you were not allowed to cut them down so you had these cotton fields with these beautiful and they just went in and just bam pulled up every one that was in the way and then you had all these farmers they had a hundred acres on this side and they had 300 acres they said no no there's going to be, we have to drive eight or nine miles around to get to the other side of your farm. And it just got, they went through downtown Fresno and ruined small businesses.
So what I'm getting at, they had a multi-billion dollar overhead in eminent domain suits before they ever did anything. And they build all.

So now we've got all these bridges everywhere.

There's one over Fresno and Bakersfield, all.

And they're total incompetence.

Every time that I say something like this on a podcast or on an air,

when this podcast is over after it's aired,

I'm going to get some little official letter from a person who's on the California High Speed Rail Commission. And most of them are left-wing former functionaries and they're going to are developers who have a financial interest in it.
A lot of people do. And they're, you know, that subcontractors and they're going to say, Victor, you're just ignorant.
You don't know what's going on. This thing is going great.
And then you look at what the... I'll just finish this, Jack, by saying what's scary is not the $20 billion or so that's going to get you from Bakersfield to Merced at about 20 miles faster than if you took the Santa Fe.
Because they've already scaled down the speed is two things are very scary

given california rates 45th in the nation in test scores and given that the public schools are

completely failed and given the level of education among the population and given that we have an

enormous challenge of integration assimilation because 27 of the people in the state were not

Thank you. education among the population, and given that we have an enormous challenge of integration assimilation because 27% of the people in the state were not born in the United States, the idea that you're going to have this work public unionized workforce run this place, this system is very scary.
And two, they've already come through with the amount of ticketing that would be necessary for you to go from Bakersfield 110 miles or 20 miles an hour to Merced. By the way, people listening to this, is your idea of a vacation to go from Merced to Bakersfield? I'm not making fun of the two cities, but they don't come to mind.
When I think of California tourist places, I think San Luis Obispo, Carmel, Santa Barbara. I don't think of Bakersfield or Merced, but that's where they're going, this lab rat experiment.
And it's already been envisioned. It's going to lose millions of dollars to operate.
It's not the building it. If you built the system for free and you had to operate it, it would lose money.

The price tag for the whole

enchilada originally

was like $15 billion.

$15 billion?

You just said $300 billion?

That's what people are talking about

with the eventual

Los Angeles all the way

to Sacramento with laterals into the Bay Area. That's what they're talking about.
But they'll never do it. Everybody says, you know, it's, I don't think they have the skill to do it.
That's what's really frightening about this state. When I see the roads, if you look at the people that we all hate from our past, that we're told to hate them, that generation, and you look at luis uh dam or you look at the california aqueduct or you look at fulsome or or orville dam you look at any of the things these guys built or the pg substation uh main power plant uh up or you look at hitchhetchy built in 1910 or 12 or hunting or Huntington Lake, the Big Creek Project.
They were so far ahead of their time. They were so brilliant.
And we're just pygmies compared to those people. We don't have the expertise to do it.
I'm not saying that people coming out of Caltech or engineering programs at UCLA or Stanford are not good. I'm just saying

that generally we do not have the skilled labor and we don't have the skilled engineering numbers

to create these things anymore. And if you disagree, then you ask why we couldn't have

built high-speed rail. Or ask yourself what's going to happen in Los Angeles when you look at all of those burned out homes and you tell me how they're going to rebuild that.
Yeah. Well, you have to have a public spirit for a thing, right? And if your spirit is to adopt DEI laws and affirmative action, et cetera, that's the priority.
Does anybody think that Karen Bass is going to go into pacific palisades like right now like donald trump did when he built the manhattan central parks uh skating rink does anybody believe that she's going to go in there and say look i got a contract to get out all of the crap i want the bidding will open today. It'll be done next week.

And it has an incentive clause.

This is the date we want it. 30 days.

Anybody who can do it in 25

gets an extra multi-million.

That's not going to happen.

It's not going to happen. What is she

doing, Victor? Well, you know what? She just

fired the police

chief. She fired the

fire chief who was famous for bragging that as a gay woman she was going to get uh 30 uh 40 percent or i don't know what their percentage was of dei employees and they're fighting back and forth her her writ karen bass says well she didn't tell me she should have told me there was a fire danger before I junketed to Ghana. Well, Karen, all you have to do is open your eyes and be in Los Angeles.
I was teaching at Pepperdine and I'd look, I would walk outdoor and I'd see a 45 mile an hour wind at night. And I drive through Malibu Canyon Road and look at the dry.
And I thought, man, if, and then would see at night, if I drove home, these campfires everywhere from homeless people. And I thought, they are one homeless campfire away from Armageddon.
Any idiot could have said that, but we don't have it. That's another thing that we don't talk about.
We don't have the public schooling to create a workforce that is anywhere near where we were 50 years ago. And we don't have the public spirit in us.
And we are leeches, parasites that are living on the infrastructure that they gave us. And we don't, we just can't.
I just got back from Florida. I could not believe the freeway system.
I know Floridians are being swamped by us, millions of people pouring into Florida. But you look at that infrastructure compared here, and you can't believe the public spiritness.
I got a car to go to the airport. I got a car to go to the event I was speaking at.
I ate out three or four times. It was largely a Cuban-American workforce, not all.
But the people were so competent and polite. And everybody I met at the events were upbeat, confident compared to this place.
They built high-speed rail in Florida. They could probably do it.
Well, they did it. Texas could probably do it, but not this place.
Yeah. Not this place.
You've talked about, Victor, people graduating even from Stanford whose employers aren't suspect about their...

I said that at a public event.

I said there's so much DEI, and given the new Stanford admissions policy

from 2020 to 2000, well, until this year,

and given that they're racialists, in other words,

they made sure there was only going to be 9% to 10% white males out of, you know, I don't know, that averaged about 200 people out of 2,000 or so, 1,500 or 1,600 that were going to be admitted. And given that the faculty who are almost 100% left-wing will tell you privately, I've either got to give everybody an A or water down the class or introduce a new gut.
I just said on this and other places, I don't think an employer in Silicon Valley wants a Stanford graduate. And I got this guy, I got so many people talking to me, but one very prominent person in Silicon Valley, I won't mention his name, said, Victor, you're way behind.

You're way behind.

We've been knowing this for years now.

We would like Georgia Tech or Texas A&M or places like that where they do teach engineering, computer science.

There are no DEI elements in the curriculum.

They don't say what we don't have a class on what percentage of this community is underserved by laptop computer. They don't have that.
Or what percentage of computer engineers are this color or this gender. They don't do that.
And then more importantly, we get the best, we get the worst of both worlds when we hire these guys because we get the act of the sin of omission. They're not qualified, but they think they are.
So they often clog our HR. I thought that was kind of an exaggeration until Mark Andreessen gave that famous interview that we've been referencing with Mark Duthot.
I mean, Ross Duthot. Ross Douthat.
Yeah, Douthat. And when Andreessen said, my lieutenant came to me, my CEO came to me and said, it's not just that they're extremists, they want to destroy us.
He's talking about his own employees they were hiring. They used to want to get ahead and now they want to destroy the company.
And so ideology and incompetence are a bad mixture. I get so worked up because I see this thing every week, this high-speed rail monstrosity, and it's almost like a golden calf, you know, and we are pagans that worship it.
I call it Stonehenge for a variety of reasons. It looks like Stonehenge because you have all of these bridges and now they're very sensitive.
Bridges, well, there's no tracks. So what they did, everybody, is there's all of these major thoroughfares that they had to go across on high-speed rail.
They'd go so fast that they

can't make a lot of turns. So they had this route, and their idea was to build them all in very public places first along the 99, so everybody would see they were making progress, and they had big billboards.
And then in between them, they hadn't even got the land yet, and they were in court, and they hadn't cleared the area.

And the point I'm making is they had the most sophisticated publicity team, hit team, that any criticism was always countermacked. And I got sick of it, all these people.
How dare you say that? How dare you do that? And when you look at the composition of the board, there was a lot of developers on it, too, at least one or two or three of them at different times. So I just think the whole thing was a mess.
I wish they would have. And now the question, though, Jack, is what do you do with it? Graffiti.
Well, I mentioned five years ago, Laura Logan came out to do a Fox Nation on gangs, and then she was here. She said, let's go do high-speed rail.
So we went over there, and she said, I really liked her too. She was really very inquisitive, and I know people got very angry.
I don't know why. I think she may be controversial, but she said, my gosh, Victor, it's just a receptacle for homeless people and graffiti that were around the bridges.
So ugly. So they, they airbrush it out now and they try to pressure, wash it off.
But yeah, well, it's too bad. We wasted so much money.

Well, we got to keep up on the waste of money here because one last topic related to California mentioned before Karen Bass and the flyers. So Gavin Newsom, hat in hand to Congress, writing to the House Appropriations Committee leaders.
One is on the Republican leaders, Tom Cole. He's the chairman of the committee.
The Democrat ranking member is my congresswoman, Rosa DeLauro, famous for her purple hair. He's asking Congress for $40 billion to help LA recover from the fires.
Any thoughts on that? Well, they always ask. They don't say where it's come from.
Why doesn't you say this? We need $40 billion of federal money, and the reason we need it is I was running a $75 billion deficit, even though I raised taxes to 13.3, the highest in the nation, because I was doing things like putting $50 million in a legal fund to sue you, Donald Trump, who I want to give us $40 billion. Or I gave $500 million for illegal alien special health fund during COVID.
Or I gave another $30 million for immigrant rights legal suits. So all of that stuff.
And then he hates Trump. And then he's asking for $40 billion.
I think Trump will just say, why don't you go sell off high-speed rail to somebody? And then he never says this. They just demonized Elon.
Why wouldn't he just say this?

I'm Elon Musk governor.

I don't have enough funds to create

sewage, water,

infrastructure to allow

this stuff to get rebooted.

However,

I need

$40 billion, but I will help you find

it. Now, Elon,

how much, can you find me $40 billion in USAID? Can we go into the Sacy Abrams stash and give me $500 million? Can I go into the Pentagon? I hear you're getting rid of $68 billion in DEI. Can I have $8 billion there? Why doesn't he just talk like that? But instead it's gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme.
And I hate you. Gimme, I hate you.
Gimme. It's like a petulant teenager to her parent or something.
Maybe we should get the rare earth materials from California. It's two things drive California when you think about it.
It's left-wing coastal boutique politics, and by that is DEI and radical environmentalism and then illegal immigration. And the Democratic Party feels that they flipped California from the Reagan, Dukmasian, Pete Wilson, Schwarzenegger era by allowing us each year to have half of all of the illegal aliens that came.
The only thing that's ironic about this, Jack, is that we have 45 to 50 percent of the population declares themselves Hispanic. But after 30 or 40 years, many Hispanics, I think the majority are middle class now, and they're looking at their payroll checks and they're thinking, my God, I don't have anything left.

It's California, 10, 12, 13.

I think it hits you at $60,000.

It's 10%.

Then they look at the sales tax.

Then they say things to me like this. Well, why doesn't other people pay taxes? I said, like who? Well, look at all these guys on the corner.
They're selling stuff. They don't pay taxes.
I said, yeah, I know they don't. We have the largest black market economy in the country.
So what I'm getting at is that constituency that the Democratic Party created has matured, and now they are on the other end. They're not necessarily the recipients of the most generous welfare state.
They are the payers. They have to pay for it.
And they are saying, no more. I do not want to pay for this.
I can barely make it. Housing is so expensive.
Insurance is expensive. Gas is expensive.
I do not want to fly in 700 people a night from Oaxaca into Fresno Airport. I just can't afford it.
That's a switch. It's not the majority yet, but it's getting there.
Well, let us pray. Victor, you've been terrific as ever.
I think we've come across almost the finish line here today. I want to thank you for all the wisdom you shared on all these vital topics.
We're reminding our listeners to visit your website, TheBladeOfPerseus, VictorHanson.com. And as for me, I write amongst the many things I do, I write Sybil Thoughts, which is a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society, where we are trying to strengthen civil society, and you can get it.
It comes out every Friday, 14 recommended readings, links and excerpts of great articles, and you go to civiltoughts.com, sign up.

Again, free, not selling your name, any of that stuff.

Well, thank you.

Well, folks leave, I have to read one comment that someone left on Apple.

And people go to Apple to rate the show.

And everyone's giving Victor five stars, zero to five stars.

And this is, no, no, this is not from Apple this is actually from your website Victor a comment from Bridget on the Blade of Perseus she writes going into the election year I sought to better educate myself and took VDH's American citizenship and its decline course with Hills, and sincerely benefited from the material. Since then, I've continued to educate myself with the help of VDH's podcast.
I thoroughly enjoy them. Mr.
Hansen is so likable and witty, witty, it's entertaining to learn from him. I look forward to each new article and post.
Thank you so very much for sharing your wisdom at a time when so many can benefit from your knowledge. And that's Bridget.
That's very nice. Well, she's right.
She's got you pegged. My eyes are half closed because I got home yesterday and I figured that from my farm to get to the airport, to get to a connection, to get to the East Coast and back in five days, it was that trip was it was 26 hours of traveling.
That's a grind. No question.
Yeah. So I hope you weren't in row 37 in the middle seat, middle seat.
No, but I'll just finish with something that really bothers me besides a lot of the other stuff is when people come up and they want you to switch seats.

You know what I mean? So if you want to use the restroom or you want to view, you want the window. If you want to view, put your head over.
Or if you have to use a restroom or you want to get up, you have the aisle. And then somebody comes up to you and says, you know, I have a grandparent over there.
And could you just give up your seat? And I was watching somebody do that to another person, and then I read a lot of stories that people are getting really tired of that. Oh, yeah, yeah.
If I was going to go on a ramp, I would say that your group number means nothing now. You see people just head away.
That's number one. Number two, your overhead bin capacity is not correlated with your seat.
When people bird late and they walk down the aisle, they just put their stuff over any, the first one they find, whether it's in business class or the first rows, that's bad. Number three, and I did this from Palm Beach.
I'm not making fun of people from Palm Beach, but the number of wheelchairs that are used to board the plane is not in direct correlation with a number of wheelchairs to disembark. So, again, there must be a spa-like condition, health waters or something on that plane because people board first, get their overhead space, and then they sprint off when they land.
It's the proximity to the heavenly choirs. Oh, I have one more complaint since I'm being Krabby Appleton from the old cartoon days.
Oh, yeah, Tom Terrific. Yeah, I love that.
I'm not Tom Terrific, but I am Krabby Appleton. And that is air travel has really turned into the Greyhound bus, and that's a slur to the Greyhound bus days.
What I mean by that is when you go on some of the people who are dressed, it looks like a slob-a-rama. I mean, there's people with no—I mean, they don't have their sweatpants up, So theiriors are showing or they they come in with some kind of weird socks as if their shoes they don't they're just and then they bring all of these smelly foods on you know what i mean they bring whole things it's it's a very on it's not very it's not like it used to be there's no standards uh no everybody breaks the rules.
It's chaotic. And you can see why we've had these crashes and near misses the last four or five years.
Free for all. Free for all.
I just saw there was a big free for all at the Atlanta airport, I think, yesterday. Oh, really? Yeah, on my favorite airline, Spirit Airline.

I took a Spirit Airlines once.

I mean, that is...

Once.

Same thing.

I think I took it with you.

I think we were in California.

Yeah.

And I was like, yeah, it's not my cup of tea.

It's, what is it, $29 for a ticket?

Yeah, well...

I don't want to sound like a snob, but, boy, flying is not, it was not enjoyable, and the airports are not enjoyable, and the stress of making a connection, I'm not sure. It's anxiety.
I hate that. You know, I got on the plane just to finish in Palm Beach, and I got my little app from the airline, and it said, I had an hour hour connection and it said, you're going to be 30 minutes late.
I couldn't know why we were boarding on time, right? But I guess it was air traffic. And then you get on the thing and you connect with their internet.
And then it says, wait a minute, you're only going to be 12 minutes late. And then you look at it, you shouldn't look at it at all.
And then it says, you're going to be 20 minutes early. And then it says, you're going to be 10 minutes late.
And then you get there and you're on time. And then you sit there, right? The taxing and you get in there and then you think, wait a minute, the A terminal is next to the B terminal.
I can make it. And then all of a sudden, you're halfway and you happen to look at the thing.
It says, sorry, you're now at the D terminal. And then you go to the D, you have to reverse your, it's just, they treat people like cattle too.
There's, I don't know. I know they do a job, they move millions of people per day without injury and that's, and it's very accessible, but I think it's, maybe it's too cheap.
I don't know. The fairs are too inexpensive.
Yeah. Well, I don't blame you, Victor.
You've made this change in your life. 50 years I've been doing this and I keep telling people I'm not going to do it anymore.
And then my institution keeps saying, would you speak here? Would you speak here? Would you speak here? And I found out, I just looked at my calendar. I'm going six times to the East Coast and all Midwest.
Yeah. I've had a lot of people.
Can Victor come speak? I can't. No.
Please. Please.
Never. I confess I like being in my farm.
Yeah. Well, I like doing Zooms.
I see a lot of people. I don't mind leisurely driving over to the coast to work.
I have a nice place to stay at Stanford. Yeah.
I love that. But I just do not want to get on a plane and fly to New York, Washington, Palm Beach, you name it.
I can't take it either. Well, Victor, you put yourself out there for a quarter of a century doing that.
Half a century you've done your uh duty done i'm 71

well i mean just of the flying you know around the world so all right my friend you've been terrific thanks everybody who um who comments and and who listened today and be assured that we will be back with another episode of the victor davis hanson show bye-bye, 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.
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