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

Speaker 1 Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen, this is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 Sunday, February 23rd, and this particular episode will be up on Thursday, the 27th. Who is Victor Davis-Hansen?

Speaker 1 He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where I think he's going to be in a couple of days.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes, I'm going to go to a military history conference.

Speaker 1 And on the

Speaker 1 4th, wait,

Speaker 1 5th, sixth, fourth, I'm going to give a talk on Hollywood

Speaker 1 World War II movies.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 Yes,

Speaker 1 you talk about.

Speaker 1 My three favorite, I'm going to say, are George Patton

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 Das Boot.

Speaker 1 And then one that nobody likes, but I do like it, and that's The Bridge Too Far.

Speaker 1 That is a very good movie. I went to Battleground and they were expendable.
But that's, you know, everyone's each their own. Well,

Speaker 1 what else? Okay, well, Victor,

Speaker 1 you're here. We have so many topics to get your wisdom on.
I think we'll start off with Democrat madness.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You happen to live there. So

Speaker 1 we will get to all this when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 1 We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I don't think I mentioned all my own babbling, Victor, that you have a website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com, later in this episode.

Speaker 1 Towards the end, I will tell you, especially you new listeners, why you should be

Speaker 1 checking that out and subscribing. So, Victor, I had hoped we could have gotten to this last show.
We didn't, but

Speaker 1 let me try to combine three things. First of all, Mark Penn, the Democrat pollster,

Speaker 1 was on Laura Ingram's program the other day, which would have been Friday,

Speaker 1 I think, the 21st.

Speaker 1 New poll has Dems Falling Off a Cliff.

Speaker 1 And this was, I forget where I'm reading this from, but the ratings for the party, which were in the high forties, are going to be like 35%. Oh, this is hidden talking to Laura.

Speaker 1 And I think the basic question is, who's doing a better job as president, Biden or Trump? Trump is winning that with 57%.

Speaker 1 I think you're seeing a retrospective assessment of Biden and the direction the Democratic Party was going, and really a lot more negative than it was on Election Day.

Speaker 1 And he goes off on to say, going off a clip. So that's one thing, Victor.
The second thing is a typical,

Speaker 1 well, it is typical.

Speaker 1 This lunacy in public. The Worcester, Massachusetts city council became a national laughing stock because the city has declared itself a trans

Speaker 1 sanctuary city. And then the third kind of lunacy of these things just seem to play into the hands of Republicans now.

Speaker 1 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 but a video of her dancing

Speaker 1 at a drag show

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 if

Speaker 1 it's about the majority of people,

Speaker 1 If you go back, Jack, and you look,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 and so you get the impression that this has been widely known through antiquity. I mentioned before

Speaker 1 a famous the Athis 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 Sibylla.

Speaker 1 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 illi, the feminine pronoun.

Speaker 1 He had his right pronouns, Jack.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But my point is, if you read Petronius, the Satyricon, this is all through antiquity. And there's little isolated cases in Diodorus with people who have disparate sex organs, the whole thing.

Speaker 1 But it's not the majority. And so what

Speaker 1 the Democratic Party has done in search of a new civil rights-cause celeb, they have taken the transgendered issue, which was was always a very minute portion of the population, and they've magnified it.

Speaker 1 The second thing they have done is they have blurred the idea of mainstream

Speaker 1 normality versus tolerance. Nobody on the right is saying that they want to go out and hound transgendered people.
All they're saying is that if you are biologically one sex, that is, you have a

Speaker 1 muscular skeletal

Speaker 1 particular,

Speaker 1 and we're usually talking, Jack, about males, then,

Speaker 1 and I think that's very important, everybody. We're talking about males who say they become women who compete in female sports.

Speaker 1 We're not talking about females who say they have become males competing against males

Speaker 1 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 large part do not win male athletics.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What we're talking about is young girls who are

Speaker 1 dressing after gym or after sports

Speaker 1 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 filmed that out.

Speaker 1 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 Vinnell was gay.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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-parent, not that it's impossible, but it's a normative situation.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So when you have trans people come in and storm in, or you have

Speaker 1 Bud Light ads, and it just is not appealing to the mainstream. And

Speaker 1 it's especially bleeding and hemorrhaging the democratic party support among black males and hispanics yeah and they can't stop it they can't stop it so

Speaker 1 the only um democrat crit self-critique and you see this in some people

Speaker 1 like james carville even

Speaker 1 they'll kvetch about some things

Speaker 1 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 thing

Speaker 1 it's it's the message. You could have Cicero articulate the message, and people do not want the message.
They don't want Mark Penn, remember,

Speaker 1 along with Doug Schoen, was the architect, I think, of the 1996 Democratic Convention statement, which I've mentioned before, which reads pretty much like a MAGA statement.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's why they won in 92 and 96 with a little help from Ross Perot.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.
You remember that?

Speaker 1 Yes, it was Joe Biden who

Speaker 1 leads the money. Unprompted.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Joe Biden, everybody's nemesis. I mean, what a...
He has done more damage to the country and to his party than any living Democrat. He really has.

Speaker 1 He really almost destroyed this country for four years, and he's destroyed the Democratic Party.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 makes Carter look like Churchill.

Speaker 1 Victor, it's really a little too personal, but Worcester, where this insanity happened, was,

Speaker 1 as you know, where Holy Cross

Speaker 1 Anthony Bauci

Speaker 1 intended is located.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 and Mrs. Fowler and I spent our our wedding night there, but not in a way that you would

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 my fingerprints are likely over $40 million going to Wuhan when I claimed it was only $600,000.

Speaker 1 And, you know, his name up not too far from where the city council drag drag weirdness happened was Holy Cross. And there's Anthony Fauci's name up on a building.

Speaker 1 And I wonder when that will ever come down. But before, let's talk about another college.
And I want to take a moment for our sponsor, Hillsdale College, which we just mentioned.

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More than 40 free online courses. Go right now to hillsdale.edu/slash VDH to enroll.
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Speaker 1 Personally, I'm enjoying a Hillsdale course, The Second World War, taught by that guy over there. I'm looking at right now, Victor Davis Hansen, and Hillsdale's president, Larry P.
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Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 By the way, Victor, I'm drinking some water out of this cup, but it's part of the college. Yeah, you can't see it.

Speaker 1 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's a very fine journalist.
I like John a lot.

Speaker 1 He's a crazy person. I see him when I go to Hillsdale every year.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 He is really one of the best people

Speaker 1 on the right, just a super guy.

Speaker 1 Let's see, Victor. Well, there's so much

Speaker 1 that Donald Trump has rolled out in the last few days, so we're going to take on some executive orders and mission statements, etc.

Speaker 1 So let's start with, we'll do one, then we have to take a little break. But

Speaker 1 one has to do with, I get my papers in order here,

Speaker 1 the post office.

Speaker 1 Everybody always

Speaker 1 look at the U.S. Postal Service and

Speaker 1 it requires, what, hundreds of millions of dollars of a subsidy every year. And they always.

Speaker 1 If by hundreds of millions, you mean billions, yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I'm ambiguous because they want to eliminate Saturday. I mean, I grew up with this idea that

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I have one here, but of course, it looks like

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I said, that's my mailbox.

Speaker 1 So, and I've had people try to tamper with it and everything, but it's untamperable. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I just want to very much. 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 that.

Speaker 1 People have always suggested they eliminate Saturday service, FedEx.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 overnight UPS and it came four days late and I saw that it went all the way to Kentucky and back again.

Speaker 1 And I live 190 miles away from my office, but maybe that's the way they do it. But I'm not so sure.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 I've had pretty good luck with the post office recently. Yeah.
Well,

Speaker 1 everybody loves their local post office. Well, not necessarily everybody.
I do. I'm there a lot, like the ladies that work there.

Speaker 1 A couple of things, Richter. One is I don't 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.

Speaker 1 There's no, I think, no question about it. It probably would have been a privatized thing.
The other thing tees me off about it are stamps, the commemorative stamps. I was a stamp collector, and

Speaker 1 it is an expression of

Speaker 1 our culture or of the governing culture. And so many of our commemorative stamps have been about Pete Seeger and all these left-wing.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 who, by the way, who's today's the 27th

Speaker 1 when this is being broadcast. It's the anniversary of his death.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's it's a very it's a reflection of the wokeness of government. But

Speaker 1 anyway, valuable. Well, I mean, it's it's uh

Speaker 1 it got hurt um

Speaker 1 because what I think it's 75% of all communications are through electronics now, Facebook, social media, email.

Speaker 1 And then it

Speaker 1 it uh

Speaker 1 uh I mean

Speaker 1 thirty years ago my thing it would be about this big, and now it's two or three letters. So I and

Speaker 1 It's a unionized postal service. It's kind of a

Speaker 1 an

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 1 one of those situations in which

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 minorities, it's a way of handling

Speaker 1 hiring minorities

Speaker 1 in percentages greater than their demographics, and no one says much of it.

Speaker 1 It's a very coveted position to work for the post office. It's guaranteed almost lifetime employment, and it pays very well.

Speaker 1 And it's not - I mean, it can be dangerous if you're a mail carrier, I suppose, with dogs and stuff.

Speaker 1 And it's an iconic idea. So, my only point of all this rambling is that every conservative, even George W.
Bush,

Speaker 1 I think Trump mentioned it the first time, they all look at the post office and they say, why is the government delivering mail?

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 and we have email. And every time they try to do it,

Speaker 1 they're on the wrong side of public opinion. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I think it's probably the thing most intimate that people have.

Speaker 1 Either you're getting mail, you're seeing the mailman, you know the mailman.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 1 We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the recording on Sunday, the 23rd of February. So, Victor,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 First two lines of this, Donald Trump signed an executive order that stops taxpayer money from going to undocumented migrants.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 just the other day, after

Speaker 1 he,

Speaker 1 what did he do with Caleb Vitello, the acting director of ICE, was reassigned on Friday. Donald Trump unhappy with the amount of arrests being made by ICE.

Speaker 1 Your thoughts on the executive order and his action with the head of ICE?

Speaker 1 Well, the latter first, he's got a little bit of a problem because

Speaker 1 they've been so spectacular at discouraging illegal immigration through

Speaker 1 they've stopped catch and release, they've stopped refugee status, applied after you get here, you have to apply for it in Mexico.

Speaker 1 I've been told they're restarting the wall, they've beat there's great morale,

Speaker 1 and 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And we've got the first iteration to deal with. We still have, we've only deported, I think it's 80,000.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And it's very hard when you have 600 sanctuary city jurisdictions and you have on cooperative local authorities in blue states, and it's very expensive.

Speaker 1 And they haven't got enough authorization from Congress. And so Donald Trump is very impatient

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And what they need to do is start the deportations en masse of violent criminals, and they're going to have to find some way.

Speaker 1 I think Pam Bondi has been working on it to coerce these blue state renegade officials to follow state law.

Speaker 1 As far as the cutting off, that's mostly a, and 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

Speaker 1 there are a lot of people under federal reimbursements for Medi-Cal or Medicaid, I should say. We call it Medi-Cal in California.

Speaker 1 Medicaid, and more importantly, we have a big abuse of the Social Security

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 we've got to stop this. In California, we passed 187.
There's a big myth, Jack, that Pete Wilson, who was that he was

Speaker 1 he and he suffered terrible

Speaker 1 popularity problems because he backed 187 that passed by over 60 percent of the California population. And that led

Speaker 1 to a Democratic renaissance under Jerry Brown. That's not true, actually.
There was,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's not legally apt.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 I mentioned that

Speaker 1 very controversial period in 187. I was a professor at Cal State Fresno, and we had just demonstration after demonstration.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And don't burn the American flag if you want to stay here. It's incoherent.
And we saw that again when they shut down 101. The protesters were doing just that.

Speaker 1 That's not a good thing for the Democratic Party, everybody. If you're here illegally, do not protest against

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 that you love Mexico so much that you don't want to go back

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 you hate the United States so much, you have to stay here. And that's incoherent.
Incoherent.

Speaker 1 Now, another action Donald Trump has taken was the unleashing of the America First Investment Policy. And this

Speaker 1 has a broad agenda to it. But one of the aspects of it is,

Speaker 1 I don't know, an international middle finger of sorts to China. I just want to read one section of it.
If folks will

Speaker 1 indulge me, because

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Here's what is in this policy, which anyone can find on the whitehouse.gov website.

Speaker 1 The United States will use all necessary legal instruments, including the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, CFIUS,

Speaker 1 to restrict PRC, that's Red China, PRC-affiliated persons from investing in United States technology, critical infrastructure, health care, agriculture, energy, raw materials, or other strategic sectors.

Speaker 1 My administration will protect United States farmland and real estate near-sensitive facilities.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Victor, that's just one part of this. This is really an important document Donald Trump has put out.

Speaker 1 I think the problem we have with China and the Europeans is everybody knows it, but we don't really say it, is that

Speaker 1 they have been taking advantages of us

Speaker 1 for ossified or anachronistic reasons. In other words, the Europeans still think it's 1946 and we're the only superpower.

Speaker 1 They've been devastated, and so they get the Marshall Plan or they get asymmetrical tariff.

Speaker 1 China still thinks it's 1980 in the post-Mao era or in the middle 80s, and they're trying to liberalize their economy. So we're going to let them, with this George H.W.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They love this market here. They can dump stuff.
And so

Speaker 1 no terrorist for you, no terrorist 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.

Speaker 1 You dotted our landscape on campus with Confucius Institutes, which were PRC. conduits.
You have about one or two percent of your students are are active espionage people.

Speaker 1 That's probably two or three thousand, if not more. You're buying heave farmland, often real estate next to military bases.
We saw what happened with the spy balloon. We don't do that to you.

Speaker 1 So don't do it to us. And then they, and to a lesser extent the Europeans, then say, look at Trump.
He's a disruptor.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And what Donald Trump believes, and we haven't seen,

Speaker 1 we'll see what happens. We'll keep an open mind.
But he believes

Speaker 1 that if you take the United States back to zero and it has zero tariff to any country that has zero tariff, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I'm getting really tired of people that are lodging these complaints against the United States. They say things like, you're interfering.

Speaker 1 Germany, for example, when Elon Musk interviewed Donald Trump on his own ex inside the United States, Jack,

Speaker 1 they said that that was an interference.

Speaker 1 It was in their own affairs, and that Elon Musk was interfering because he commented on German politics and he praised the ADF and that

Speaker 1 J.D. Vance met with the AFD.

Speaker 1 Are you kidding me?

Speaker 1 Christopher Steele almost destroyed our electoral process with a lie, and he was a British subject.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 All Europe does and all people abroad do is interfere with our elections. They always do.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 I don't know why the left, the Democratic Party, they used to be for protecting American jobs, and all of a sudden

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 When a German Chancellor gets up, as Schultz did right after

Speaker 1 February 24th of 2022, and says, This is we're going to be, this is, this won't stand what Russia's done. We're going to be sending everything over to Ukraine or after October 7th.
This is terrible.

Speaker 1 And then they don't do anything or they do very little.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you've 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%?

Speaker 1 What would happen to you people if that happened?

Speaker 1 And then they say things like, well, you've got a big base at Ramingstein, and you've got these 80,000 troops, and we help pay for them, and maybe they should go home. Promises, promises.

Speaker 1 If you don't like them, send them home. America is happy to send them home.
But

Speaker 1 I was reading a pretty good sophisticated account when Europe says it's going to send troops to be peacekeepers. You hear that, Mr.

Speaker 1 Stormer said that.

Speaker 1 They don't even have the logistical lift capacity to supply them.

Speaker 1 They couldn't do that. They depend on refueling from America.
Their planes need to be refueled in wartime conditions by Americans. They need the C-17, C-130 lip capacity, etc.

Speaker 1 And that's talking about a debased form.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Victor, talking about the president's, 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

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 the fullness of thought that have gone into them. And clearly, this is not something whipped up on day one.
This is

Speaker 1 a broad frontal attack or restoration. And one last thing

Speaker 1 that just came out the other day is the energy dominance

Speaker 1 fact sheet put out by Donald Trump. And, 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.

Speaker 1 And he's really intending on coming through on these broad range of promises.

Speaker 1 Anyway, yeah, I mean, they've been working on the executive orders for a long, long time. So they were all written

Speaker 1 before he was even elected. They were ready to go on day one.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 exactly, promises made, promises kept. And

Speaker 1 remember what happened with energy? He

Speaker 1 vastly increased by 2 or 3 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 Anware off.

Speaker 1 He started lecturing fracking. He made an EV mandate.
And then the 2020

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then suddenly, he started draining the petroleum reserve to get re-elected. And he went from about 90% all the way down to 50%.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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 buff.
Now, Trump comes in and says,

Speaker 1 that wasn't what I really wanted. That's where I was before I lost that election.

Speaker 1 And now I'm going to go back to what I had originally planned, and that's 20 million, 22 million. He's going to go full blast.
The only problem he's going to have is he's going to have to produce,

Speaker 1 he's going to have to convince these oil companies who have very sophisticated measuring

Speaker 1 capabilities of what their reserves are to go out and start producing a lot of oil

Speaker 1 and a lot more work with the price dropping and make the same amount of profits where they drain their long-term

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 gavin newsom is theoretically sitting on the monterey shale formation along the coast range that has apparently a lot of natural gas but we don't use it and and we could easily do that instead we're outlawing national gas in 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 in the shale yeah He's become a - I can't figure him out.

Speaker 1 It's kind of like mea copo, mea copo, mea maxima copo. Now I want to get elected, so I'll say anything that is contrary to what I actually did when I was governor.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 he only

Speaker 1 signed those laws that allowed

Speaker 1 criminals to

Speaker 1 the Alvin Braggs of the world to

Speaker 1 run rampant and

Speaker 1 cops to be reliable.

Speaker 1 The Me Too left turned on him, and now he's angry. And Chris Como, every once in a while, I listen to what he says, and

Speaker 1 they fired him, of course. And he says some things that are pretty out there, but

Speaker 1 he doesn't sound like old Chris Como in CNN anymore.

Speaker 1 He does not, most certainly. Hey, one last thing, thinking 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.

Speaker 1 A former Obama economist says one of Biden's biggest legislative victories turned out to be a dud.

Speaker 1 Jason Fuhrman, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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, Fuhrman told Politico.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so that's a remnant. Remember shovel-ready jobs right after Obama came in, and then

Speaker 1 there was

Speaker 1 Cylindra, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 cash for bunkers and shovel-ready jobs. And all the post-mortems on all those programs showed they were failures.
And the government, you can't have the government do certain things.

Speaker 1 It's envisioned for a particular role that private enterprise can't do, and that's things like national defense and collect taxes.

Speaker 1 And I know some people are listening and said, well, actually, Victor, we could get private companies to, like the Romans did.

Speaker 1 The Romans had a very effective, they just had the tax collectors get bonuses, and they were very effective and hated.

Speaker 1 And hated, yes.

Speaker 1 That's why Matthew, the apostle, was

Speaker 1 found a side gig in being an apostle because he was hated as a tax collector.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 other things that make the Democrat Party look unpretty, out of it, out of touch, which we were discussing at the

Speaker 1 outset of the show.

Speaker 1 Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs 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

Speaker 1 what do you call it,

Speaker 1 when you occupy somebody's house, like a squatting.

Speaker 1 They voted for her. What do they think? Yeah, yeah.
So-called conservatives.

Speaker 1 That's one thing we could learn from Europe because we know now that the United States could get all the ballots tallied within 48 hours if we just said this.

Speaker 1 You all have to show up on Election Day like you used to, or maybe 70 or 80 percent. You have a paper ballot.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You have to have an ID.

Speaker 1 And it would work very easily. And we know the Democrats will always oppose it.
And yet

Speaker 1 when you poll the population, the citizenry, whether they're white or black or Hispanic, they all poll that they want IDs.

Speaker 1 The Democratic Party, you see everybody, you know that better than I do. It has a message now that no one wants.

Speaker 1 This is not the Democratic Party of minimum wage, disability insurance, Social Security, 40-hour work, overtime. That's all done and settled.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 do what you don't want. And nobody wants

Speaker 1 this system of election.

Speaker 1 This is more the party party of Robespierre than it is of Dan Rostenkowski. Yeah, it's the party of Robespierre.
It's the Jacobin party. There's no doubt about it.
And I say that not lightly.

Speaker 1 What did Robespierre want? Oh, he wanted a year zero. Oh, we had one called 1619.

Speaker 1 What did he want to do? He wanted to go after the church. They killed 6,000 priests and nuns.

Speaker 1 Oh, we went after anti-abortion people and said they were Christian, white Christian nationalists in the military. Almost every Jacobin

Speaker 1 agenda item is what the Democratic Party would, the modern version of it, they embrace. They were Jacobin.

Speaker 1 Well, they're especially Jacobin out in the Golden State, Victor, as you know.

Speaker 1 And we're going to talk about a couple of California-related topics when we come back from these final important messages.

Speaker 1 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show

Speaker 1 on

Speaker 1 recording on

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 good man, founder of the conservative movement. Victor's got a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Speaker 1 VictorHanson.com is the address. Go there, and you'll find links to everything Victor writes, his appearances on various other programs,

Speaker 1 American Greatness Essays, Syndicate Column,

Speaker 1 archives of these podcasts, links to his books, and

Speaker 1 three ultra things a week. Two of them are articles.
Victor writes exclusively for The Blade of Perseus, and one exclusive ten-minute video that every Friday or thereabouts.

Speaker 1 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 ultra pieces.
$65 a year, which is discounted from $6.50 a month.

Speaker 1 Do the math there, folks. You'll figure that out.
So go to the Blade of Perseus and do subscribe. Victor,

Speaker 1 wow,

Speaker 1 three really interesting things. Let's take it on the two federal things, and then we haven't talked about

Speaker 1 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 the

Speaker 1 Cal the Rail. And it's in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
And

Speaker 1 Sean Duffy, the Transportation Secretary, is going to be investigating it, Doge's. And it looks like I'm reading here now from the Daily Caller.

Speaker 1 He's spearheading he Duffy is spearheading a probe into the

Speaker 1 California High Speed Rail Authority to determine whether roughly $4 billion in taxpayer taxpayer money should remain committed to a proposed project to build high-speed rail in the Central Valley, etc.

Speaker 1 Of course, the Central Valley was kind of the afterthought of that, too, wasn't it? Was the big sell was San Francisco, L.A. and

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You were going to have a big high-speed rail line leaving Oakland, San Francisco area, go down

Speaker 1 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 the laboratory rat.

Speaker 1 And so they called all the local governments here, and we're 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's the Amtrak, not Southern Pacific. And for just a minuscule amount of money compared to what you're envisioning,

Speaker 1 it's going to be $300 billion.

Speaker 1 And they've already spent about $20 billion. But we could make a parallel track right along the San

Speaker 1 with very little right-of-way expense. Instead of having these trains sit there and wait for the oncoming train on a sidetrack, we'll have them parallel so they would go at the same time.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then we started started seeing signs come up, Jack, that said,

Speaker 1 we have this percentage of minorities, we have this percentage of disabled, we have this percentage of trans workers, all the public.

Speaker 1 And then our road here,

Speaker 1 where I live on, was shut down for four years. So when I wanted to go every week to work, I had to find all of these securitist detours.
It's reopened, and they build. That was all for one overpass.

Speaker 1 And I looked down, there's no 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

Speaker 1 about 20 miles from where I'm speaking into Kings County, there was this historical floodplain from Tulare Lake.

Speaker 1 And the result of that were these four 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.

Speaker 1 So you had these cotton fields with these beautiful, and they just went in and just bam

Speaker 1 pulled up every one that was in the way. And then you had all these farmers.
They had 100 acres on this side. And then they had 300 acres.
And they said, no, no, there's only going to be,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So what I'm getting at, they had a multi-billion dollar overhead in imminent domain suits before they ever did anything. And they built all, so now we've got all these bridges everywhere.

Speaker 1 There's one over Fresno and Bakersfield all, and

Speaker 1 they're total incompetence. Every time that I say something like this on a podcast or on an air,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And most of them are left-wing former functionaries, and they're going to are developers who have a financial interest in it.

Speaker 1 A lot of people do. And they're, you know, that subcontractors come, and they're going to say, Victor, you're just ignorant.
You don't know what's going on. This thing is going great.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 Bakersfield to Merced at about 20 miles faster than if you took the Santa Fe,

Speaker 1 because they've already scaled down the speed,

Speaker 1 is two things are very scary.

Speaker 1 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 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 By the way, people listening to this, is your idea of a a vacation to go from Merced to Bakersfield? I'm not making fun of the two cities, but they don't come to mind.

Speaker 1 When I think of California tourist play, I think San Luis Obispo, Carmel,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's not the building it. If you built the system for free and you had to operate it, it would lose money.

Speaker 1 The price tag for the whole Enchilada originally

Speaker 1 $15 billion. Yeah.
$15 billion.

Speaker 1 It's already spent there.

Speaker 1 You just said $300 billion.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 When I see the roads, roads, if you look at the people that we all hate from our past, that were told to hate them that generation, and you look at the San Luis

Speaker 1 Dam, or you look at the California Aqueduct, or you look at Folsom or

Speaker 1 Orville Dam, you look at any of the things these guys built, or the PG substation, its main power plant.

Speaker 1 up, or you look at Hetch Hetchy, built in 1910 or 12, or Huntington Lake, the Big Creek project.

Speaker 1 They have so much, 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.

Speaker 1 We might have, I'm not saying that people coming out of Caltech or engineering programs at

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And high-speed, if you, if you disagree, then you ask why we couldn't have built high-speed rail.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, you can't, you have to have a public spirit for a thing, right? And if your spirit is to

Speaker 1 adopt DEI laws and affirmative action, et cetera, that's the priority.

Speaker 1 Does anybody think that Karen Bass is going to go into Pacific Palisides like right now, like Donald Trump did when he built the Manhattan Central Park skating rink?

Speaker 1 Does anybody believe that she's going to go in there and say, look,

Speaker 1 I got a contract to get out all of the crap.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's not going to happen. It's not going to happen.
Well, what is she doing, Victor? Well, you know what? She just fired the police chief.

Speaker 1 She fired the fire chief, who was famous for bragging that as a gay woman, she was going to get

Speaker 1 40%, or I don't know what her percentage was, of DEI employees. And they're fighting back and forth.

Speaker 1 Her writ, Karen Bass says, well, she didn't tell me,

Speaker 1 she should have told me there was a fire danger before I junked it to Ghana.

Speaker 1 Well, Karen, all you have to do is open your eyes and be in Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 I was teaching at Pepperdine, and I would walk outdoor and I'd see a 45-mile-an-hour wind at night, and I'd drive through Malibu Canyon Road and look at the dry, and I thought, man,

Speaker 1 and then I 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

Speaker 1 we don't have it. That's another thing that we don't talk about.
We don't have the public school schooling to create a workforce that isn't anywhere near where we were 50 years ago.

Speaker 1 And we don't have the public spiritedness. 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.

Speaker 1 I could not believe the freeway system. I know Floridians are being swamped by us, millions of people

Speaker 1 pouring into Florida, but you look at that infrastructure compared here,

Speaker 1 and you can't believe the public-spiritedness.

Speaker 1 I got a car to go to the airport. I got a car to go to the event I was speaking at.

Speaker 1 I ate out three or four times. It was largely a Cuban-American workforce, not all, but the people were so competent and polite.

Speaker 1 And everybody I met at the events were upbeat, confident compared to this place.

Speaker 1 They built high-speed rail

Speaker 1 in Florida. They could probably do it.
Well, they did it.

Speaker 1 Texas could probably do it. Yeah.
But not this place. Yeah.
Not this place.

Speaker 1 You've talked about

Speaker 1 people graduating even from Stanford

Speaker 1 whose

Speaker 1 employers aren't suspect about their. Why 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,

Speaker 1 well, until this year, and given that they're racialist, in other words, they made sure there was only going to be 9% to 10% white males out of, you know,

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 That averaged about 200 people out of 2,000 or so, 1,500 or 1,600 that were going to be admitted.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I just said on this and other places,

Speaker 1 I don't think an employer in Silicon Valley wants a Stanford graduate.

Speaker 1 And I got this guy, I got so many people talk 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.

Speaker 1 We've been knowing this for years now.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They don't say what, we don't have a class on what percentage of

Speaker 1 this community is underserved by laptop computer. They don't have that.
Or what percentage of computer engineers are of this color or this gender? They don't do that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 we've been referencing with Mark Duth. Duthot? I mean,

Speaker 1 Ross Duthot.

Speaker 1 Ross Douthett. Yeah, Douthett.
And

Speaker 1 when Andreessen said

Speaker 1 my

Speaker 1 lieutenant came to me, my CEO came to me and said, not just that they're extremists, they want to destroy us. He's talking about his own employees they were hiring.

Speaker 1 They used to want to get ahead, and now they want to destroy the company. And so

Speaker 1 ideology and incompetence are a bad mixture.

Speaker 1 I get so worked up because I see this thing every week, this high-speed rail monstrosity.

Speaker 1 And it's almost like a golden calf, you know, and we are pagans that worship it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It goes so fast that they can't make a lot of turns.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the point I'm making is they had the most sophisticated publicity team, hit team, that any criticism was always countermat. And I got sick of it, all these people.
How dare you say that?

Speaker 1 How dare you do that? And when you look at the composition of the board, there were a lot of developers on it, too, at least one or two or three of them at different times.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Graffiti, I see. Well,

Speaker 1 I mentioned five years ago, Laura Lorgan 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

Speaker 1 I really liked her, too. She was really very inquisitive, and I know people got very angry.
I don't know why.

Speaker 1 I think she may be controversial, but she said, my gosh, Victor, it's just a receptacle for homeless people and graffiti around the bridges.

Speaker 1 So ugly.

Speaker 1 They airbrush it out now and they try to pressure wash it off. But

Speaker 1 it's too bad.

Speaker 1 We wasted so much money. Well, we've got to keep up on the waste of money here because one last topic related to California.
You mentioned before Karen Bass and the fire.

Speaker 1 So Gavin Newsom, hat in hand to Congress, writing to the

Speaker 1 House Appropriations Committee leaders. One is on the Republican leader is Tom Cole.
He's the chairman of the committee.

Speaker 1 The Democrat ranking member is my congresswoman, Rosa DeLauro, famous for her purple hair.

Speaker 1 He's asking Congress for $40 billion

Speaker 1 to help L.A. 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?

Speaker 1 We need $40 billion of federal money, and the reason we need it

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Or I gave $500 million for illegal alien

Speaker 1 special health fund during COVID, or I gave another $30 million for immigrant rights legal legal suits. So all of that stuff.
And then he hates Trump, and then he's asking for $40 billion.

Speaker 1 I think Trump will just say, why don't you go sell off high-speed rail to somebody?

Speaker 1 And then he never says this.

Speaker 1 They cut, they just demonize Elon. Why wouldn't he just say this? I'm Elon Musk, governor.
I don't have enough funds to create

Speaker 1 sewage, water, infrastructure to allow this stuff to get rebooted. However,

Speaker 1 I need 40 billion, but I will help you find it. Now, Elon, how many, how much can you find me 40 billion in USAID?

Speaker 1 Can we go into the Cecy 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 does he just talk like that?

Speaker 1 But instead, it's gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. And I hate you.
Gimme, I hate you. Gimme.
It's like a petulant teenager, you know, to her parent or something.

Speaker 1 Maybe we should get the rare earth materials from California.

Speaker 1 Two things drive California, you know, when you think about it. It's

Speaker 1 left-wing,

Speaker 1 coastal, boutique politics, and by that is DEI and

Speaker 1 radical environmentalism, and then then illegal immigration.

Speaker 1 And the Democratic Party feels that they flipped California from the Reagan, Duke Mason, Pete Wilson, Schwarzschneger era by allowing us each year to have half of all of the illegal aliens that came.

Speaker 1 The only thing that's ironic about this, Jack, is that we have 45 to 50 percent of the population declares themselves Hispanic.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 I don't have anything left. It's California, 10,000, 12, 13, I think it hits you at $60,000.
It's 10%.

Speaker 1 Then they look at the sales tax. Then they say things to me like this.

Speaker 1 Well, why doesn't other people pay taxes?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I can barely make it. Housing is so expensive.
Insurance is expensive. Gas is expensive.
I do not want to bring in, fly in 700 people a night from Oaxaca and the Fresno airport.

Speaker 1 I just can't afford it.

Speaker 1 That's a switch. It's not the majority yet, but it's getting there.
Well,

Speaker 1 let us pray.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We're reminding our listeners to visit your website, theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Speaker 1 And as for me, I write,

Speaker 1 amongst the many things I do, I write Civil 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.

Speaker 1 It comes out every Friday, 14 recommended readings, links, and excerpts of great articles. And you go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.
Again, free, not selling your name, any of that stuff.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Well, folks, leave.

Speaker 1 I have to read one

Speaker 1 comment that someone left on Apple, and people go to Apple to rate the show, and everyone's given Victor five stars, zero to five stars. And this is

Speaker 1 no, no, this is not from Apple. This is actually from your website, Victor.
A comment from Bridget

Speaker 1 on the Blade of Perseus.

Speaker 1 She writes: Going into the election year, I sought to better educate myself and took VDH's American Citizenship in its Decline course with Hillsdale and sincerely benefited from the material.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 She's very nice. Well, she's right.
She's got you pegged.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 that trip was

Speaker 1 26 hours of traveling. That's a grind.
No question. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I hope you weren't in row 37 in the middle seat. No, but I'll just finish with something that really bothers me besides a lot of the other stuff

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Or if you have to use a resume 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 your overhead bin capacity

Speaker 1 is not correlated with your seat. When people board late or and they walk down the aisle, they just put their stuff

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 the number of wheelchairs to disembark.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's the proximity to the heavenly choir. Oh, I have one more complaint since I'm being Krabby Appleton from the old cartoon days.
Oh, you're Tom Terrific. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm not Tom Terrific, but I am Krabby Appleton, and that is

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 some of the people who are dressed, it looks like a sloborama. I mean,

Speaker 1 there's people with

Speaker 1 no, I mean, they don't have their sweatpants up so their posteriors are showing or they come in with some kind of weird socks as if they're shoes.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There's no standards.

Speaker 1 No, everybody breaks the rules. It's just, it's chaotic.
And you can see

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 Atlanta airport, I think, yesterday. Oh, really?

Speaker 1 Yeah, on my favorite airline, Spirit Airline.

Speaker 1 I took a Spirit Airlines once. I mean, that is.
What?

Speaker 1 Same thing. I think I took it with you.
I think we were in California. Yeah, I was like,

Speaker 1 yeah, it's not my cup of tea. It's, what is it, $29 for a ticket?

Speaker 1 Yeah, well,

Speaker 1 I don't want to sound like a snob, but boy, flying is not,

Speaker 1 it was not enjoyable. And the airports are not enjoyable.
And the stress of making a connection is not enjoyable.

Speaker 1 I hate that.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 I had an 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 taxiing.

Speaker 1 And then 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.

Speaker 1 It says, sorry, you're now at the D terminal. And then you go to the D terminal.
You have to reverse your, it's just,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But I think it's, maybe it's too cheap. I don't know.
The fares are too inexpensive. Yeah, well,

Speaker 1 I don't blame you, Victor. You've made this change in your life.

Speaker 1 For 50 years, I've been doing this, and I keep telling people I'm not going to do it anymore. And then my institutions keep saying, Would you speak here? Would you speak here? Would you speak here?

Speaker 1 And I found out, I just looked at my calendar. I'm going six times to the East Coast and

Speaker 1 Midwest. Yeah.
I've had a lot of people. Victor, come speak.

Speaker 1 No. Please.
No. Please.

Speaker 1 I confess I like being in my farm. Yeah.
Well,

Speaker 1 I like doing Zooms. I see a lot of people.
I don't mind leisurely drying over to the coast to work. I have a nice place to stay at Stanford.

Speaker 1 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 anymore.

Speaker 1 Well, Victor, you put yourself out there for...

Speaker 1 quarter of a century doing that. Half a century.
You've done your duty. Done your duty.
I'm 71. Well, I mean, just of the flying

Speaker 1 around the world.

Speaker 1 All right, my friend, you've been terrific. Thanks, everybody who

Speaker 1 comments and

Speaker 1 who listened today. And be assured that we will be back with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.
Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody.