← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
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- [00:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [01:52]
Jack Fowler
Hello gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I'm Jack Fowler. We are here with the great Victor Davis Hansen who is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. We are recording on Saturday, January 4th. This particular episode should be up on January Tuesday, January 7th. Victor is. Victor has a website, the blade of Perseus. VictorHansen.com is the address. I'll tell you why later in this episode that I believe you should be subscribing. Victor, a lot to talk about. Lots happened in the last few days actually something happened yet a few days pass. Jimmy Carter passed away, which we get to be able to talk about. But I think we should start off with the big news from yesterday. Speaker Johnson was reelected and it was a close call. And we'll get your take on that Victor when we come back from these important messages.
- [03:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [04:31]
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- [06:09]
Jack Fowler
We're back with Victor Davis Hanson Show. By the way, folks, Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you, Victor and Mrs.
- [06:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you. Happy New Year to Everybody listening.
- [06:19]
Jack Fowler
I hope it will be a happy new year. It would have been a very unhappy new year.
- [06:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
Very. I'm smiling all the time now, Jack.
- [06:25]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, we like that.
- [06:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
I do.
- [06:29]
Jack Fowler
So, Victor, it was a close call yesterday when the house assembled on January 3, constitutionally. And the first order of business was to elect the Speaker. As we recall from two years ago, it was a days long battle to get Kevin McCarthy elected because of any number of recalcitrant Republicans who refused to do so. Mike Johnson, the incumbent speaker, faced the same fate there were. It was very close call. He lost. He had. He didn't lose yet. I mean, the vote was still open, but he had not achieved the goal of 218. And then he talked to two Republicans. They were. Who were they? Ralph Norman of South Carolina.
- [07:18]
Victor Davis Hanson
He's from South Carolina. Yeah, right.
- [07:20]
Jack Fowler
And Keith Self from Pennsylvania. Of course. Thomas Massie from Kentucky held firm, but Johnson won anyway, Victor, there was some drama there. And your thoughts about the drama about these Republicans?
- [07:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I mean, when you look at the vote, the first vote was 216 to 215. My point being that every single Democrat stood together and they had a lot of disparate opinions. And Hikem Jeffries is not necessarily an experienced majority minority leader. But my point is this, that they understand power and whatever problems they have, they feel that they are dwarfed by their opposition to Republicans. Republicans were given a mandate. They have the Supreme Court, they have the presidency, they have the Senate and they have a close margin in the House. You would think that they would collectively say to themselves, we were very lucky, they outspent us. We lost some terrible races in California where mail in ballots destroyed us because of the way that California handles balloting. We lost three of our best congresspeople in California. But now we're going to stick together because these people represent a French revolutionary Jacobin party and yet they don't. So then the three people who are dissidents, you want to say to them, okay, so what percentage do you not agree with Mike Johnson? 70, 80, 60. And what percentage do you agree with the Democratic positions? 10, 20. So you're going to destroy the House majority because you're not getting your complete way. And when you have RINO congresspeople, and there are a few, they could say the same thing. So Massie is in the news and he's a maverick and he promises he'd never vote for Johnson. And I understand that a lot of this resistance did some good the first two rounds when they threatened not to vote for him. The first two rounds of discussion, not votes. When they pared down their reconciliation bill, that was good. And he's now properly chastised. But I just don't get this idea that you get in front of all these cameras and you say it's my way or the highway to. And you hand over the House to the Democrats. Doesn't make any sense to me. All of us have been in our own lives.
- [09:58]
Jack Fowler
If he had been a Democrat, how do you think Nancy Pelosi would have treated him?
- [10:02]
Victor Davis Hanson
I know how she would have done it. She would have put his office in the basement somewhere and then she would have stripped him of all committee assignments and then she would have called the DNC up and said, I want $10 million spent to primary him or her. That's what she would have done. And, and therefore even AOC was afraid of her. Do the Republicans really believe that the squad, those crazy people in the squad, or that crazy woman from Texas, Crockett, are on the same page with all of these other. Jim Costa, our representative here in Fresno? They think they're on the same page. They're not, but they stick together and they vote identically because they have one thing in common. They don't like Republicans in power and they love to be in power. And therefore Republicans just keep doing this. You think they would have learned and it's a bad foretaste at what may come because they have an enormous amount of legislation that can save the country. They can close the border. They can build a wall. They can tax remittances on them if they want to. They can go in and try to cut a trillion or $2 and start to go to a balanced budget. They can recalibrate the way we spend defense monies, restored it. They can do all of this, but they can't do it if every time they're going to have a close vote and every vote will be close. They've got Thomas Massie or another person pops up and says, well, he gets all this. I've been a loyal soldier. And he gets all this publicity and everybody's begging him and giving him concessions. So I'm going to do the same thing. And so it's a bad precedent and we'll. And we'll see what happens.
- [11:48]
Jack Fowler
As Victor, I didn't tell you, ask you about this ahead of time. As Kevin McCarthy been. Have you heard from him about him?
- [11:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
I hear all sorts of things. He's now he's making a lot of money. He's, you know, as they all do, lobbyist, advising Speaking. Yeah, he never made much money. He was an honest politician. He didn't make money. He grew up from a poor family in Bakersfield. So he's out trying to recoup income and stuff that he feels he lost out on with public service. But there's been rumors Steve Hilton is rumored to run for governor here in California. The Fox former anchor and some people have said Kevin McCarthy might want to do that. I think he could have had the Secretary of Agriculture if he wanted it, but I don't think he want. I think right now he wants to secure his financial future, I suppose.
- [12:51]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Wow. Well, Victor, we have other items to get your wisdom on. We have a lot. You have a lot to say, I would assume, on Jimmy Carter. The former president passed, passed away. I have a bunch of questions about him. So, Victor, let's just have at it. What? What?
- [13:15]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I mean, there was the. He came out of nowhere, as we remember, 1970, 75 and 76. And his reason to be was that he was not going to lie to us and Watergate, Jerry Ford, and we're going to get a Southern. The old rule was if you were going to be a Democrat and you were going to be elected, people were so suspicious of the Great Society and all of that. So they would only vote for a Democrat who had a Southern accent. So they ran LBJ in 64. And then they broke that rule with Hubert Humphrey. He came close, but then they said, you know, and then we broke it again with McGovern. So they said after McGovern, we're only going to get Southerners. So they had Jimmy Carter, 76 and 80. Then they broke it again with Walter Mondale in 84. Then they came back with two Southerners for the next eight years. Obama was an exception. So he was a fake conservative from opinion. He was a farmer, he was evangelical. But what they didn't quite bargain for was, I mean, the people who elected him was he was very sanctimonious and self righteous and so he had that smile, but he was ruthless and he had some visceral. I don't know if it was biblical or what. It was a distaste of the Old Testament or Israel, but he had some almost pathological dislike of Israel. So when people would criticize him, he would say things that only he could get away with. Well, these are Jewish donors or these were the, these are the Jewish lobby. And rather than to address the question that there was a political, cultural, social difference between the only constitutional system in the Middle East, Israel and its People around that wanted to destroy it. But he's most infamous for is he started that tradition that the ex president would start interfering. So LBJ went to his ranch. We never heard much. Doris Kearns Goodwin went out and interviewed him, but he was done. And Richard Nixon, you'll say, well, he was done, Victor, because he was disgraced. Well, no, he actually did write some great books. People called him up for his foreign policy, but he did not interfere. He did not interfere. When Reagan went out in 88, people said, well, he was senile, but he was not. Didn't have Alzheimer's for a couple. He did not interfere. George H.W. bush did not second guess Bill Clinton. George W. Even Bill Clinton just wanted to go make money, remember, he didn't try to upstage him. George W. Bush very nobly went back to his ranch. Jimmy Carter started this idea on the left that because he felt he was robbed and he was the morally superior person to Ronald Reagan. He hated Reagan. And he could not believe that he had been landslided twice, I mean, excuse me, once, and that Reagan had landslided his running mate, Walter Mondale, in 84. He was very bitter. It was sort of like John Kerry's remark about George W. Bush in 2004. I can't believe I'm losing to this stupid guy, you know. So he was very condescending. And then he started to freelance. So if there was a problem in the Caribbean and Haiti, he was there. If you wanted to go to Cuba and praise Castro, he was there. If you wanted to screw up negotiations over nuclear proliferation in Korea, North Korea, he went there. But mostly he reentered the Middle East. And as he kept doing it, he, whoever the particular, he had a particular dislike for Menachem Beginning and Netanyahu. So he kept inserting himself. And in all of these things there was a theme, two themes. One, the incumbent president in power was a realist, a Machiavellian and not an idealist. So that I have to come back and remind America to come home under my post president. And he did that with Clinton too. In fact, I think Clinton's people hated him more than George W. Bush's people did. And then the second thing was he always inserted himself on the side or he gave editorialization on the side of dictators, Third World people. And I think the worst thing he did was he went into the whole Rhodesia problem and he lionized Mugabe and said that he didn't want power, he was above politics. He was a cutthroat from the beginning, terrorist. And so you had this white minority in the center of Africa and they had created this booming economy. It was greatest agricultural per capita country in Africa. People flocked to it for jobs, but it wasn't viable given that it was a minority government based on race. So the British said, we're going to do this and pulled out. And then Ian Smith created this republic. So there was going to have to be a transition. But there were people in the black community, the bishop, what's his name, they were going to at least profess that they were going to work with a white minority and gradually, gradually, gradually become a majority. I don't know if that would have worked. It surely didn't work work in South Africa. It's a mess. But they turned that under Carter's pressure. They turned that country, I think Wilson and Britain too. They abruptly turned that country over to thugs. And Mugabe was one of the worst dictators in the modern period. He killed his opponents, he harassed people, he was a crook. And he bankrupt the country, announced a food importer, and that's impossible. He gave an open season. They went out and shot farmers, drove them out, and they got what they wanted. A hundred percent black run country, which is fine, but it's a third world impoverished country. And so my point is, if they were smart and Carter was smart, they could have attempted. I don't think they would have been successful, but they could have attempted to find a way to maintain their prosperity and giving some exemption to people in the economy that were producing. They could have gone to these big farmers that were exporting tobacco or cotton and said, look, we need what you're doing and your expertise, but we want you to set up a training academy for blacks that have not had a chance. Something like that. I don't think it would have worked given the tragic nature of the whole stuff, but it would have been an attempt. He didn't do that. He tried to grandstand. He got his evangelical sanctimonious self in there, blah, blah, blah. So he has a mixed legacy.
- [20:44]
Jack Fowler
The former Andrew Young was also very.
- [20:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Andrew Young. Andrew Young, he hated Israel. He was stealthily contacting the Palestinian terrorists. Remember, an Arafat in those days was not the later Arafat of the Clinton period. That said, I'm no longer a terrorist, I'm a statesman. He was an unrepentant killer terrorist. And he had his fingerprints on the killing of U.S. diplomats. And he was a terrible person. And Carter preferred him than he did an elected Israeli prime minister. So I'm not a big fan of Jimmy Carter and I haven't even touched on what he did. He got snookered with the Shah and he communicated. His White House communicated with Komne who was in France and was very scared after his surrogates and his cassettes had spread all over Iran and they had thrown out the Shah. They were in the process. He didn't know how he was going to get from France to Iran because the French and the Americans could have stopped that. And he communicated with the Carter White House and sold him a bill of goods that he didn't really have any dislike of America and that he thought that he would continue in the same foreign policy role as the Shah. And he had nothing wrong. Nothing wrong. And they believed it. And so they facilitated that idea. And then they were even stupider because they thought that Bonnie Sauter or Ghost Body or one of these socialists was going to have an EU type of Iran. And so then they prompted a second wave of flight. The first wave, remember, was as the Shah tottered, most of the Jewish community was wise enough to see what was coming and they got out. And that first generation that came to America were very conservative, very pro American, but the other part of the opposition, not talking about the religious opposition, but the secular upscale middle class, were socialists and they thought they got rid of the Shah and they were going to get a secular socialism. And then of course, they were stupid and Carter encouraged them and they got wiped out. Goats body was killed. They almost killed Bonnie Sodder. And that second wave that came to America were not conservative, they were socialists. So when you meet an Iranian expatriate, it's very strange. I've met a lot of them. When I meet Iranians that are older and they're in business, farmers, developers, they tend to be very conservative, very pro American, American. And then I meet a second class of Iranian Americans, second generation or first, who came later and their hopes were dashed that the removal of Shah would not result in a European style socialist government. And they blame the United States. So they blame the United States. Yes, yeah, yes. Those types of people. But they're mostly, I've met maybe 30 of them in academia and media. Media, government, they're not in private enterprise. And so there's two types of these expatriates and they're very different. If you meet a first generation, I'm talking about the people who left between 77 and 80 before Khomeini came in and before the socialists thought they could take over. They just knew that the Shah was going to fall and they wanted to get out and get their money out and their business expertise and people out. They tend to be very thankful to the United States for letting them come in. And they're very, they're wonderful people. If you deal with a second. Their position right now, and I have interviewed with them, I've talked to them, their position is, well, I'm here and the reason I'm here is because your government is a fascist government that conspired with mosaddegh in the 50s to destroy our democracy. And you still owe us and we don't like you. And even though there's a theocracy in Iran, you're too hard on it. So therefore the Iran deal, they're for lifting the sanctions, etc. And they know deep down in their hearts that the only way that government's going to change if the people have that green revolution and get out on the street, if we start to press them. I'm not saying that we should do any military at all. I think we should restore the sanctions, the oil squeeze, and then I think that theocracy would be in trouble. So I'm not a big fan of Jimmy Carter. I know that he, he didn't make a lot of money. The Carter Center. I didn't listen to anything they said. It was, he got harder. It was very funny. He was a person that lamented getting kicked out and not winning reelection, but he was also liberated. The more that he was away from the White House, the less compromises he had to make. So he brought his evangelical religious zealotry into left wing politics. And so he was always the sanctimonious, pure of heart, talking down to lesser moral people. And that got very tiring.
- [26:15]
Jack Fowler
Country's elections. He was the, the Pope of all that. Yeah. I'm curious, Victor, you're. I do have another Carter question or two for you. But as for the Shah coming to America, was that a mistake? I mean, obviously it was mistaken in one sense that all that was a consequence of that. But from the get go, should it have been obvious to not let him come here or was there a case?
- [26:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't think it mattered. I do not think it mattered. He had been a friend of the United States. He was an autocrat, but he wasn't a theocrat. He didn't kill as many people as Khomeini did. And he tried to modernize the country. He gave women rights that they'd never had before. Most of the, the most virulent opposition to him came from mullahs and theocrats who were getting subsidies from him. And he stupidly cut them off, many of them, because they were writing things that were too critical of him and they resented the role of women. They were sort of like the Taliban and they were romanticized here in the United States. You know, Michel Foucault, the postmodernist literary critic, he was the big rage in the 1980s on American campuses. He went over there to Iran and came back praising Khomeini, even though that Foucault, who died of aids, was a promiscuous and proudly promiscuous homosexual. And had he been in Iran and they had known that and he was a Red, they would have killed him for that. But he was bragging. It was a very sick time. But we were a great power and we had a person who wasn't perfect, but he was better than the alternative. And he was keeping the Persian Gulf open. And during the Saudi Arabian oil boycott of 73 and 74, he was selling oil to the west. And he wasn't attacking our ally Israel or sending terrorists. So what caused the. The modern problem in the Middle east was not Israel that that had been there, that that was a manageable problem with its Palestinian radicals. What really broke the whole thing wide open was the appeasement of Iran and its use of oil to subsidize these new terrorist groups like Hamas and the Houthis and Hezbollah and their new partnership with Assad and their takeover of Lebanon. And that was all theocratic Iran's doing and us appeasing them. So that wouldn't have happened under the Shah. And I think under the Shah there would have been some type of. There wouldn't have been what we see now in the Middle east is what I'm trying to say.
- [29:16]
Jack Fowler
It's really interesting to see photos of Iran, daily life in Iran from say, 1975. You would think you might be in America. Just the cultural way of dress, etc. And what a free fall that nation is.
- [29:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
I went to school in 1971 at 17 to UC Santa Cruz, and there were a lot of. Even there. There were Iranian American students, and there were thousands of them. And they were the children of the upper middle and professional classes in Iran. And they were kind of strange because they were all taking. In the 70s, everybody wanted to take psych and environmental studies and English. They were not. They were taking engineering, math, science, even in a place like Santa Cruz and the state colleges. And, you know, that was all over with. And so.
- [30:13]
Jack Fowler
Well, there's a little more to get on your thoughts on Iran, Jimmy Carter. And that has to do with the, the effort to. Failed effort, the colossally failed effort to save the hostages. Just have a curious question or two about that, and I'll ask that when we come back from these important messages. We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show recording on Saturday, January 1st 4th, and this episode will be up on Tuesday the 7th. I think that's the 7th, right? Victor's got a website, the Blade of Perseus. Its address is victorhansen.com you should subscribe. Five bucks a month, $50 discounted for the full year. Why would you do that? Well, you want to read everything Victor's written. His weekly essays for American greatness, his weekly syndicated column, links to various other appearances. Victoria makes the archives of these podcasts, links to his books and his ultra articles, which he writes I think now two a week. And now new weekly video, 10 minute video. Victor talking about an important issue. I think this week it's on higher education reform. So check that out. The Blade of Perseus, Victor, while I'm at it. But there's also on X, and that's at VD Hansen, these podcasts, I know many people are listening, some are starting to watch. And they can be found on Rumble. And it's too long of an address. Victor, I'm going to hold this up. I don't know if anyone can see this, but this is, this is the Rumble address for the video editions of these.
- [32:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
Jack, don't we have sophisticated electronics and.
- [32:10]
Jack Fowler
Victor, I think we communicate by carrier pigeons sometimes, so. Or oatmeal boxes with strings. Okay. Victor, my friend. Yeah. About, about the, the hostages. I'm curious. Have you, first of all, have you ever spoken to any hostage?
- [32:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, I have not. I have not spoken to any hostages. And I would have liked to, but that whole thing was handled so poorly. I mean, once the students took it over, the United States had the ability to force that. All they had to say is, you are not from this moment. We were in an oil embargo, though, remember? But all we had, the second embargo, 79 and 80, and oil prices were tight. But we could have said, you're not going to ship any oil out anywhere. And we could have put a travel ban on, just blockaded the country until they let them go. Or we could have taken out all of their military assets and we could have said. And remember what Reagan did? He was running. And every time they asked him, what would you do about the hostages, he didn't interfere. He didn't say he More or less said, there will be no hostages. When I'm present, there will be no hostages. And that sent a message. So remember that last minute scurry on the part of the Iranians to get the hostages out before Reagan came in because they were terrified what he was going to do, which showed you that if Carter had the same stance. And then the hostage rescue was a disaster. That horrible scene where the mullahs are taking their canes and poking the charred bodies of Americans that were abandoned when the helicopters crashed. Here's a country, continental sized country, almost with 50, 60 million people at the time. And we're sending this little puny rescue force to go into downtown Tehran. We should have had 100 helicopters blanking the skies of Tehran, 100 gunships. There have been, you know, Warthogs flying at tree level all over the city while we were trying to get them out. That was so pathetic. It wasn't just the. It was so poorly planned and it was typical Carter. I got to get reelected, but I'm so morally pure. I'm not going to do something that might be too egregious or too offensive. So let's have a rescue, but let's have a little tiny rescue. So we just get in. Nobody really thinks that we're doing anything too mean. It's going to be purely humanitarian. But we'll just. And that's the way he was. And you know, everything. I guess he was a day late and a dollar short on everything he did. So he started printing money, printing money, printing money. And we had this horrible inflation. And then he finally got smart, but too late. He brought in crazy Paul Volcker. And I can remember I had never bought a new car in 1980. And I went to get a new car, I think it was a Mazda. And I couldn't afford it. The interest rate was 19.5%. And then Paul Volcker then gave us this high interest, which destroyed the economy to get down inflation, which was destroying the economy. And they created this new word called stagflation. And it carried over to Reagan. I can remember a friend of mine had a big sign in his raisin vineyard. It said Reagan vineyard. And you go back and you look at the polls of Ronald Reagan, even after the assassination attempt. I'm talking 82 and early 83. He was not going to win reelection. And that's why they nominated Mondale. They thought he was young and vibrant. And Carter didn't look that bad because Reagan was in this recession. And he was in this recession because he wisely kept Volcker, and Volcker broke the back of inflation by high interest and curbing the money supply. But it really put us into a terrible recession. And then the miracle happened right around early 84. The economy in the last nine months of 84 grew by an annual rate of 7% GDP growth, and it was just a boom. With the Reagan tax cuts finally kicked in, the productivity increased, revenues poured in, and the rest is history. But Carter, if he had a.
- [37:04]
Jack Fowler
Were you operating the farm?
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Victor Davis Hanson
What?
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Jack Fowler
Carter, were you operating the farm?
- [37:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I was. And I can tell you what the difference was. So we had the boom of inflation. Farmers like inflation in some sense because it increases the power of your lending ability. Your land goes up and your commodity prices go up, though not as much as your expenses. But the point is that they hate interest rates. So when I started farming, I got my PhD in June of 1980. And of course I came home. My grandfather had died. So I came home and took care of my grandmother for the summer and started farming. I thought it would be six weeks, but there were no jobs and ended up five years. But the thing was, is the price of raisins in 82 was 1420 a ton. And then the interest rate, it was still. The inflationary boom was starting to slow down. People were planning vineyards. We planted a vineyard and an Orchard in 1980. It was all boom, inflation. And then I remember going to the Federal Land bank and there was an old crusty guy there, and I just got so angry. I wanted to borrow 150,000 to plant. And he said, well, you got the collateral to do it, but you're an asshole, because if you borrow this money, you know it's still high interest rates. Are you going to be paying me back at 12%? And you think this boom is going to go on? You think you're going to get $1400, it's going to go down to 800. I said, it hasn't been 800 since the earliest. It's going to go down to 600 then. How's that, Sonny? So I'll give you the money, but you'll come in here and you'll be broke. And I came back and I thought this guy, and he was absolutely right, and he was trying to tell a stupid idiot like myself, don't get caught up in the. So anyway, the next we had all. We borrowed the money, we planted a beautiful orchard vineyard, and then the existing 130 acres we had, the price went in one year from 1420 under Paul Volcker to $400 so Reagan came in, and it was free market then. No tariffs, anything. The EU started dumping subsidized raisins into the United States that you couldn't compete with. And the interest rates were sky high. The price of land, Jack, went from 16,000 an acre to 3,500. And our net worth just zoomed. One of my siblings left. I think it exacerbated my father's drinking. I've talked about one of my close friends who put a noose around his neck, put. Went into his garage with the carbon monoxide on, took an overdose of pills and shot himself. All four at once. So it was a terrible time. Everybody went broke. Nobody. They used to call Thompson. They would have ads. Thompson, Thompson, Thompson. Those were Thompson Vineyards for raisins. And it was. They were called instead of Thompson Seedless, Thompson Worthless. You can get a Thompson worthless vineyard. Sunbathe went broke. So our family had $88,000 in capital retains in the revolving fund, and they hid that liability and they borrowed money to pay the farmers more than they were getting so they wouldn't leave. And then when the con was exposed and they had no money and they had been borrowing it, they said, well, it's your fault. You got the money. And we said, well, we got less money than the private would have paid us. And they said, yeah, but we didn't have it anyway. We were just trying to match what the private could pay because we were inefficient. So you just stole money from yourself. It's your fault. So bam. And, you know, they never recovered. Half of us quit the co Op. My grandfather was a charter member of Sunday, and so he would have rolled over in his grave, but we quit and everything. And I can remember. I'll give you one last anecdote. We were trying to put stakes on this new vineyard we planted. And I went in and I went into the local hardware to get vineyard staples, those big, heavy staples that you staple on wire. And they were $300 for, I don't know what it was, a ton or something, half a ton or so. I went into this old shed in the place, and I went through all this junk, and here were these barrels, like whiskey barrels, and they were full of old staples that in the Depression, when they took out a vineyard, they took the staples out and they re hammered them, and then they put them in, and they were like 60 years old. So I brought them out. And then I wanted to buy steaks, and there was no. I couldn't afford the $1.60. So we bought just plain steaks. And I found about six old barrels of creosite, and we poured it in this big witch's blue and we dipped the steaks in so they wouldn't rot. And everybody did stuff like that. And that year, I went back the other day, I got my Social Security report and I made in 80. Started in 82, actually, I made 6100, 7200, 5800 all. And then in 1985, I got a job for $21,000 as a lecture. But that was more money than I had made the last three years farming. And we went into big debt, too, huge debt, and I don't think we would have ever paid it off. But my mother died tragically of a brain tumor, and she had not told anybody. But when she was perfectly healthy, she had said to me one day, we should all be insured because if anybody dies, the whole thing is going to blow up. But she had taken out, you know, they were offered a state pension as a judge, but nobody. She. I remember when she told me, I said, you're perfectly healthy. You're only in your early late 50s. What are you doing this for? And then 10 years later, she had a brain tumor. And my father and I took the insurance. We went straight to the Federal Land bank and paid off all the debt.
- [43:16]
Jack Fowler
Wow.
- [43:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
So that was Jimmy Carter's recession. And the cure for the recession. The medicine was almost as bad. And at that point, I wrote a book about it called Feels Without Dreams. And I'll just end with one anecdote. I was kind of angry at Reagan because I didn't know much about economics. For this reason, when this whole thing blew up, there was something called the Federal Raisin Administrative Committee. It's a federal relic of the Depression. They own your raisins. As I've said before, from the moment you have a grape on the vine, you cannot take. If you're going to make raisins, you don't own that grape. So if you dry it on paper, you put it in a bin, you take all the risk expenses. You cannot take that and sell it. You have to take it to an authorized raisin packer and then he decides what percentage the Raisin Administrative Committee says this is how much you can sell in the United States. The rest you have to give to us. And we will sell it as reserve tonnage as we see fit, usually for cattle feed or aid abroad. So it was a horrible thing. So I went to this meeting of this guy and a Reagan official came out and I was like 26 and somebody said well you went to college, you speak for us. And I said well, I don't know much about it. So I said how can this be good? $420 a ton. Why don't you just get rid of the reserve tonnage and have a free market. If we're going to go broke, at least price will go up, up. This is controlled poverty. You're limiting the supply. And why don't you cut off all these people dumping raisins? We're paying all their NATO bills in Europe and Greece and Turkey and Spain and they're dumping all this product before the cost and we pay for all of. And they hate us anyway. I live in that country. They hate us. So these Europeans hate you. You're paying for their dispense. And then this new EU is subsidizing dump product. Are you stupid? You know what he said? Well, you don't understand fiacs. Boy, this is the best thing that's ever happened to you. We call this winnowing the grain, trimming the fat off the meat. I said, well, what do you mean by that? Well, yeah, I understand you lost $1,000 a ton. That's $2,000 an acre. If you're 80 acre, I understand 160,000. But you know, the strong will survive. Strongest of the fittest said, that might be true at $1,000 a ton, $400, but at 420, it's not even worth doing it. It's just, well, that's the point. You're going to go out of broke. Maybe you young guy will go broke first and then when you more people go broke. It's called creative destruction. Do you ever read your economic. I said yeah, I know all about creative destruction. Then you go out of business. The strong survive, the people get cheaper raisins, everybody's happy. And the guys that survive will find new technology. I said the price will not go the, the middleman will just make up the difference. It won't go down that much. It didn't go down that much. And you're going to have, if you did this gradually, but cutting the price by 75% in one year, you're going to have suicide, you're going to have alcohol, you're going to destroy all, all these people. How many are there? There's 5,000, is that right? Who gives a blank about 5,000 people? At that point I thought you know what? It's, it's going to happen. And it did happen. And it happened not just to raisins but peaches and plums and grapes. And I can remember selling 23 pounds of beautiful table grapes for $4 a crate.
- [46:58]
Jack Fowler
Oh my.
- [46:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
Wow. And the, and the box was $2. And the, the packing and picking were 250. And you, you sell it because if you don't, then you lose everything. But if you, if you harvest it, you think, well, at least I got some money back rather than just throw it away.
- [47:16]
Jack Fowler
Victor, someday we'll get your A piece from you on the virtues of the Department of Agriculture, if there is.
- [47:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
I hated the Department of Agriculture. I thought they should have got rid of all subsidies and just turned it over the free market. But they don't. The thing about the Department of Agriculture and subsidies, I say that it always went to the people who didn't need the money. Cotton allotments, water. It was always really big corporate farming. It wasn't small people. And I wrote a book. The land was everything. And I predicted that there would be no small farming. And I think it was 1998. And I look around now I'm in this room and I look out the window. There is no, no farming. Small farming. Not one, not one small farm. It's all planted to machine mechanized almonds. And everybody here that was farming is gone. And it's run by a couple of people that own anywhere from 10 to 15,000 acres, which is fine. It's very productive. And you know what the irony is? I'm looking out my window and I look at the farm that I. We had altogether 185 acres. My siblings all sold out and left. I'm the only one here. The 42 acres that I have looks better than it ever did. It's immaculate. I mean, people drop trash everywhere around us, but not on this place. And it's all computerized. It's all scientific. It gets about 3,000 pounds of almonds. But it's all corporate. And there's nobody. It's not serving any other purpose than maximizing production. I'd say that because all these people grew up on farms around here. So you knew every family. They were Little League, hospital League, pta, Masons, Eastern Star, everybody. You know, there was a shame culture. Nobody got in trouble. It was a wonderful community. And now it's a medieval community of a few wealthy people and a bunch of poor peasants. Very few in the middle class.
- [49:20]
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor, it's depressing. You have to. And it is more depressing, more depressing to come here and let's, let's shift to New Orleans and the Terrorist attack there earlier this week. 15 dead, although I saw 14 dead. I'm not sure how many. But nevertheless, does that matter? And a couple of dozen people in terrible condition. And I know you talked at great length with Sammy, the great Sammy Wink about your thoughts on what happened. I do want to raise something, though, from journalist Azra Nomani. Now, Azra, I've known Azra 25 years more. She was a writer, reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and she had some fame of late in Northern Virginia. She was one of those parents who were leading the fight against the high schools which were denying children of Asians, which, you know, for me, growing up particularly thought Asians Chinese or Japanese. But no, these are the children of, you know, Indian who were being denied scholarships essentially because there were too many of them getting. Doing well in school. So, anyway, Asra was one of those leaders that developed into that, you know, the parent movement in Northern Virginia. But she's Muslim, and she wrote this article for Fox News. It's titled is Islamists Familiar? Quote, unquote, Triple D Strategy Follows the Bourbon Street Terror Attack. And let me just read first two paragraphs here and then, Victor, your comments, please. First, a radicalized Muslim kills in the name of Islam. Then groups like CARE C A I R to our listeners deploy a strategy I call Triple D. Deny the crime had anything to do with Islam, deflecting with excuses and then demonizing anyone who calls out the terrorism as islamophobe. Indeed, within 36 hours, CAIR issued a statement denying the problem of Islamic extremism by claiming it's been rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Muslim world. It then deflected from the killer's religious radicalization by describing him as a, quote, man with a history of drunk driving and spousal abuse. I'm glad OSRA did this. The Triple D. Victor, your thoughts on this?
- [51:52]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. That's like saying, well, the people who hit the tower, the Twin towers, some of them had some mental problems. Some of them have brushes with the law. They were. Yeah, that was the real cause. Does anybody believe that if you close down all the radical mosque in the United States and Europe, there would not be a reduction in terrorism? Of course there would be, and everybody knows that. And so the $64,000 question is why? And I mean that in the following. This is what gets Americans and the people listening so angry. So you've got this 500 million person Middle east, not that that's all the Muslims in the world. There's another 500, half a billion outside of the Middle East, India, Indonesia, etc. So you have all these people, Pakistanis included, and they're very proud, as everybody should be, of their religion, their culture. But there has been a massive exodus out of the Middle east to Europe and the United States. And that massive exodus is because people feel there's no economic opportunity, there's no freedom of expression, there's no security of their person, and there's no protection of any constitutional notion of due process, habeas corpus, okay? So they leave and they go to places where there is. And they, as all immigrants do, they bring their culture. And as the United States and Europe, as the United States used to know, they would basically have a brutal bargain. We transmitted the message through assimilation, civic education, integration, even intermarriage, that the reason that you came here is you have rejected the totality of your prior existence. Doesn't mean you don't like people from your. You still have. My grandfather would always brag about Sweden and his father, but they did not want to go back there, and they understood what a beautiful place this was. I can remember as a boy, my Swedish grandfather saying, there's nothing like this place in the world. I've never seen soil like this. I've never, never seen a country like this. He was gassed In World War I, fighting in the Argonne Ardennes. So my point is the Argonneus. Argonne. So my point is this. When they come over here, you would expect just a little bit in the mosque, but they don't. They try to tell you, basically, the message is that the United States is decadent and that people are being corrupted by its culture, especially in Europe. And you have to find moral and spiritual purity by rejecting the popular culture and the system of which you are involved in, parasitically involved in. And for certain people who feel that they can't perform, they're not happy. They don't. This is a. This type of indoctrination reaches pathological support. And that's why we have a Major Hasan, that's us, second generation, who says Allah Akbar as he shoots 13 of his fellow soldiers. And then we have the San Bernardino, two Pakistanis who kill even more, and they are radical Muslims. And then we have the Sarna brothers from Russia, Chechnya. And there is a other component, and that is they look at the popular culture around them, and they have particular appetites for it. So this man has been divorced twice. He likes to have alcohol. So he has taken. He, on his own initiative, has broken the chief tenets of Islam. He's promiscuous, he's got divorces, he drinks. He has all of these personal problems that are in violation, as are the Sarno brothers, dope, smokers, everything. And then they start to hate the system that satisfies their appetites. And they say this system is pornographic and women and gays and in and in. And they made me do this. And then they get reinforcement to be pure again. And they voice things that are very disturbing. Every one of them goes on social media or to friends, starts to give these warnings. And of course the society and this Obama era, but even pre Obama Marxist binary victim, victimizer, oppressor, oppressed, says in this arbitrary line across America, the Islamic, Arab, Pakistani immigrant from the Middle east is a person of color. He's here, he's being oppressed by white people, particularly Jews, who are now in the oppressor category. And we don't apply the same level of scrutiny or deterrence toward these people because they are a protected minority analogous to Hispanics or blacks. And how does that work out? Oh, Russia, I know Russia told us about the sarnas, but we're not going to go in and be intrusive. I know that Major Hassan said Allah Akbar before he murdered his compatriots, but we're going to call that workplace work violence. I know that Mr. Whatever his name was, Farkas I guess his name was, and his wife in San Bernardino or his girlfriend. I know what they did, I know they were broadcast. But we're not going to associate Muslims with this Islam at all. Now, if you believe all that, then you would believe there is a symmetry amount all other types of zealotry. But anytime someone who is not a Muslim, especially, especially a white male, they will label him a Christian zealot and they will try to find anything they can to suggest that Christianity drove him to do that. And even though you're starting to see Christian academies targeted, especially we've had a couple of cases of trans people, but doesn't matter, they are the problem. And then it all encapsulates with Joe Biden, who on four occasions said that. And he, you know, the thing about Biden is everybody knows that the only time he had moments, glimpses, parentheses of clarity was when he was angry at maga, Trump white male conservatives. This is a guy who probably of all modern presidents, any president, not one of them had ever expressed so, so much overt racism as Joe Biden. Think of that. Hey boy. I have that boy. I have a boy down here working for a corn pop. Hey, you ain't black. Hey, junkie. Eastland was a good. They never called me boy. Yeah, he's the first articulate black that I ever had a. You know, Delaware's a slave state, all that crap. So he then gets on three occasions, four occasions, and says the biggest hair, the white male supremacist, white male, right wing white man. And so he perpetuates that. So then somebody like this Jabbar, they look around our Sarnab or Hasan and they say, you know what? These people are guilty. And they will do anything they can to contextualize my behavior. And the reason they do that is because they are guilty. They know it. They have done all these things. They're colonialists, settlers. They put Israel over here. They demonize people like us. We don't get to, you know, have the same opportunity. And they're afraid to clamp down on us. They're scared, they're weak. And so if we had a president, I think we're going to have a president who's going to say, we're going to treat everybody the same. And if you're institutionalizing hate speech and we're going to start to surveil you, I think Kash Patel will start to do that. I really do. I think he'll go back and he'll just empirically say, this is a column of all of the terrorist activity. We want to know what the ideology, race profile was. And if he finds that the majority of them are Islamic orientated, he's not going to worry about it. He's going to say, this is what we're going to look for. If it is white supremacy and the data says it's not, he would do that too. Look at those people. There are a few crazy. What? But you know what's so weird? What I just said can be encapsulated by the cybertruck explosion out in front of Trump Tower, this Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. So now we have most of the facts. This man from the Middle east spouted off this anti American, anti radical Islamic stuff. He went and murdered 15 people, injured more than a couple dozen, I guess. And then simultaneously, but not separated and completely without apparent communication, a military veteran wants to draw attention, apparently in his kind of deranged mind, to drones or something, security threats, the United States. He's had a traumatic brain injury while in service. He's been disabled, his girlfriend's broke up, he's angry. So he rents a cybertruck. And if he had wanted to blow up things, the guy was an expert in Munitions. So he just instead takes a bunch of gas and a bunch of fireworks, puts it in the back, and he thinks, how will I get. How will I get a big message? Oh, I'll drive out in front of Trump Tower and everybody, you know, he's a new president, and I'll blow my truck up, but after I shoot myself in the head. And sure, he could have hurt people, but the point was he wanted to blow himself up and give us one of his deranged messages. So now they are conflating these two and saying, well, you see, you have this pro maga Trump person that wants to hurt. No, he was just suicidal in a very reckless, suicidal fashion. He could have injured a lot of people, but he didn't. And somehow that's morally equivalent to this. And what I'm getting at is they always try to find any methodology possible to contextualize Islamically inspired violence, even though what we've seen in New Orleans, we just saw two weeks earlier in Germany, and we've seen it in a lot of places. It doesn't mean that's the only type of terrorist inspired violence. But.
- [62:44]
Jack Fowler
This is about veterans. It's not about Islam. This is.
- [62:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, it's about our. Yeah, they always want to go. Remember the Homeland Security director? She said the greatest threat to Americans are returning veterans. The other thing is, and this is what I meant by the $64,000 question, what I don't understand is why somebody comes from Syria or Jordan or Egypt or Iraq or Yemen or the west bank or Gaza, and they come over here and then they start to dislike this country to a great degree. And I'm not talking just about terrorism. I'm talking about people. Two days after that, they were marching in your city, New York City, pro Hamas demonstrations. And I saw a campus for four months where every time I walked from my apartment to my office, somebody got in my face, yelling from the river to the sea. Or some eliminationist rhetoric and anger, anger, anger at the university, and they went in and trashed the president's office. So not all of them were from the Middle East. But my point is this. And you know, if you don't like the system or you know what it's like before you got there, why do you come over here? Why don't you just go to an Islamic university? And Cairo, there are some with very long records, very prestigious stay at Jordan, get your engineering degree from the University of Beirut. But why come over to the United States in the hundreds of thousands? Why create all of Dearborn and then Try to hold the whole state electorally colleged hostage. Unless the government supports this terrorist organization called Hamas, it doesn't make it. And that's what it is. Reduction. That's the way to be. It is. I don't understand that. I can see saying, I came over here, you know what? This country sucks. You know, I was raised a traditional Muslim. I believe in the tenets of Islam. Everybody's promiscuous, they're using drugs. Women are exposing themselves on the Internet. These Internet influencers are. Are decadent. The country has no morals, it's not safe. I'm just going to leave. I don't agree with that, but that's. I can see from his point of view why he would want to go back and feel perfectly happy in the west bank or maybe in Syria. And if he says, well, it's a dictatorship and it was. No, it wasn't imposed on the United States. Nobody put Hasad in. Nobody put these people in. In fact, we lost 8,000, 9,000Americans trying to get rid of the Taliban and get rid of Hussein and offer you a alternative, which I think was naive. It's none of our business what you want to do. If you want to have a hundred Assad, that's your business. Khomeini is your business. Any of them, it's your business. But don't leave your business and then come over here and bring it with us, is what I'm saying. And I don't. I don't get that. It's a larger question, Jack. You know, my famous memory is that not too long ago we had a soccer match in LA Coliseum. And this. The. The fans were all rooting for Mexico. Why they were the United States. And you'd think, well, if you like Mexico so much, I go back to that famous scene. I had one of my smartest students I ever had. He was brilliant. He was an illegal alien. And he was out on prop. When we had that Prop 187 that said that we're going to deny state support for people who are here illegally. And he was waving this flag of Mexico and they were burning the American flag at csu. And I walked up to him and I said, what are you doing? And I said, you've got a big glutton examination. And I'm giving you five hours of Greek instruction every week, independent study on my own time to prepare you for a PhD program. And I said, you're waving the flag of the country you don't want to go back to, and you're burning the one that under all circumstances, you want to stay. Well, it doesn't make any sense. Are you insane? He looked at me and he said, well, I want to feel wanted. And I said, well, if I went illegally to Mexico, do you think that they wouldn't do anything if they caught me? He said, well, you're supposed to be different. I said, no, we're just human. If you break the law, you're here illegally. Why should we subsidize? And the point I'm making is I thought, why would you ever wave a flag of a country you left in anger at or disgust at, or stifled dreams at, and then burn the flag of the country that offered. Offered you refuge, that hosted you? And that's what everybody gets mad about, the illegal immigration issue. That when it's not just the remittances, it's not just the welfare, it's not just the crime, it's not just the mockery of our federal laws. It's not the arrogance that I can come over to your country right through your border. Ha ha. I can get a fake id. You owe me a free roam of free food. It's the idea that there's no gratitude, None. You come over here illegally, and then you start making demands on your host. And what are the. I'm just getting angry because, Jack, in the last 48 hours, I went to a local store and a woman ahead of me pulled out four EBT cards. Four. I had to wait there. Four of them. She didn't speak English. She had coke, you know, the same thing. And she had four of them. And they went through them to see which ones were valid. So they were either purchased or something. And then I came home. I did my morning walk. I had just be another. I saw another trash dump. So somebody had just come out to this ancestral artesian pond that, as I said earlier, my great great grandmother had discovered in 1870, had been under our care for now. My brother sold it when they went kind of under. And there is a washer, there is a dryer, there is a refrigerator, and there is a car seat. And they're all shattered and dirty with sorted garbage all over these pristine willows. And then. And it's just turned into Mount Trashmore. And I think, why would you do that? What is the logic? What's the ideology of somebody who does that? You come to this country and everything is in Spanish, the trash, except everything has been sifted. So there's no address. Last time I found the address, I took it over and dumped them on their Lawn almost got killed. But my point is, why would you come to a country and then you rent a place and you have all this trash, and you don't want to spend 30 or $40, whatever it is, to go to the dump? So your attitude is you'll just go out here in the middle of the night to a beautiful pristine orchard. Scenic spot. Beautiful. And then you'll unload all your trash, and then you'll go home. And then what is the next stage of thought? That stupid idiot who owns it, he has more than I do. And he cares about the landscape and the ecology of his property. So he will go out and meticulously pick up each little piece, and then he will have the wherewithal to dispose of it. And he owes me that. And I'm going to keep doing that so that once he cleans it up, I'll go do it again. And if you don't clean it up and my neighbor who owns it now won't clean it up, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And they still. We've had this. This huge freezer in the orchard, my neighbor's orchard, right next to the property line now, for six months. I don't know how you get it out. It's really big.
- [71:07]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [71:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
And.
- [71:09]
Jack Fowler
Wow.
- [71:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
So that's what gets. I don't understand that mentality of. There's nothing. There is nothing noble about illegal immigration. Nothing on every aspect of it. It's not fair to legal immigrants. It's not fair to the taxpayer to subsidize somebody who breaks the law and free up cash at the tune of 63 billion to be sent back to Mexico. A government which deliberately sends its poor here as a safety valve and then expects them to work hard and. Or get federal subsidies to send money back to them. It doesn't. I could go on and on, but it's not. It's not a moral enterprise. And I think that's the thing that Holman and Trump really have to Kristi Noem and all of them have to emphasize. Illegal immigration is not just the poor, noble people who came for a better life. It's 180,000 to 100,000 fentanyl deaths deliberately dead because of disguised drugs to look like, you know, Valium or Ativan or amphetamines that are fentanyl. And it's a deliberate war on the United States. It really is. And until you get that idea, you'll never be able to have illegal immigration. Unless they make the argument that when somebody goes into a store and they have five different cards that should have been in their name, apparently. And you use that, then you're hurting other people on public assistance, right?
- [72:44]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Well, it proves the cliche, right, Victor? No. No favors go unpunished. Maybe they. And hopefully they will. There will be some punishing happening. Now we have to come back for one quick final topic, and that's still about New Orleans and woke. The attack in New Orleans woke corporations. And we'll do that when we return from these final important messages. We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. Victor, around the Bend here, coming to the home stretch. And I want to read from a piece by Ed Morrissey on HOT air. It's titled, you're in woke hands with Allstate. Remember when insurance companies tried very, very hard to be boring? Recall the days when we all wanted to hear from insurers was your claim will be paid right now. Instead, these days, insurance companies act more like comedy clubs and financial underwriters. We have Jay Kangnia with star athletes, Australian Gecko Flow and the gang, whatever the hell it is they do. And don't even get me started on Doug and Limu's bizarre psychotherapy sessions. And yet all of that still pales in comparison to the very weird decision by Allstate during yesterday's Sugar Bowl. Fresh off two terror attacks, Allstate CEO and chair Tom Wilson chose to advertise their services by scolding Americans for being addicted to, quote, divisiveness and negativity. Tom Wilson, the CEO of Allstate, by the way, Victor, is also the chairman of the United States Chamber of Commerce. Your thoughts?
- [74:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
The Chamber of Commerce hates the mega movement, but so isn't Allstate owned also by Disney? You can correct me if you're wrong. Wrong it might be or it's a. There's some relationship. Yeah, you can look at it as I'm speaking, but maybe it's not. I misspoke. But my point is he wants to make a public statement on the eve of a major sporting event. Why didn't he just say this? We're all in tough times now. We've had inflation and there's understandable anger at spectacular rises in prices for staple goods. And I, as one of the member, as your Allstate, the face of Allstate, understand that insurance premiums have gone sky high and cars house you. The consumer are you're getting your premiums doubled, you're getting your policies canceled. But we're here to try to work around this problem. Some of the problem is because of false claims. Some of the problem is too much regulation. We understand that. But some of the problem is that we have not been able to offer you a competitive product at an affordable price. And I'm here to tell you that I feel all of the problems that you're having with insurance and Allstate is going to be at the forefront of. Of ensuring affordable insurance for you. Why didn't he just say that? And if he had done that, he would have been a folk hero. Instead, he thought, what's the easiest thing to do in America if you're a grandee or c. Oh, I know what it is. It's to lecture Americans how illiberal and subtly suggest that they're racist and Right. And Trump and Maga. So I'm going to get up here and say it's too divisive. And apparently he thinks what caused the New Orleans divisiveness, if he wanted to be honest, which would have been very unwise, he would say, we don't at Allstate, we don't involve ourselves in politics. But, you know, from occasion, from time to time, it's starting to get a little disturbed. So we're here as an insurance company to protect you. And one of the things we all have to be is vigilant for extremism, especially coming from the Middle East. If you wanted to be honest, that would have been an insane thing to do, but at least it would have been more honest when he was doing this wishy washy stuff.
- [77:19]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, Victor, it's kind of obvious, you know, the. Reminds me, I may have a quick comment of Noel Coward who had this famous song after World War II, don't let's be beastly to the Germans in the face.
- [77:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
I remember that.
- [77:36]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Oh, please, let us not talk about the obvious reasons here. Well, Victor, that's about all the time we have. For this episode. I do want to thank listeners who checked out and actually subscribe to what I do. One of the things I do, I.
- [77:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
Didn'T know, I didn't want to misspeak about who owns all. I was trying to see because I knew that it was when I was growing up, you always bought it at Sears. You know what I mean?
- [78:04]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, yeah. Well, they. That's a big fund that owns a significant amount of Disney and owns a significant amount.
- [78:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
Maybe, maybe there, there's some connection there. But yeah, it's the ethos that really bothers me. And then it's not just that insurance went up. I have this place up in the mountains. There was a Fire. But now. And it didn't get burned, of course. I had it for 16 years and a policy with an insurance company. The premium was 2,500. It was. Anyway, to make a long story short, the premium doubled. The amount of coverage shrunk by 30% and the deductible went from 1,000 to 50, 15,000. Then I looked at my car insurance. It's almost doubled. I've had one claim in 20 years. A deer hit my car last year and destroyed the bumper. It was probably about $5,000. It was the vinyl part of the car, but it took out a couple of sensors. That's all. I've. I never have filed one claim on the place in question. And now there's not much of a forest around it given. And it's. There's a fire hydrant across the street from the house and a fire station 300 yards away. And yet they dropped the insurance and the insurance that would. The only company that would insure it had this crazy thing. And that's happening to everybody. Everybody. We talk about electricity going up, gas going up. That was why Kamala Harris got beaten in the election. James Carville was right about that. The economy's stupid and. But if you're an insurance executive and your industry has mysteriously become unrecognizable because of its pricing and it's squeezing Americans and you get on national TV and you start to lecture Americans about their illiberal tendencies and why they have to man up, they're going to get angry at you. It wasn't so much what he said, literally, it was the pose and the attitude that I'm a big insurer and you people who pay my premiums that I have almost doubled are too small minded, unlike me. And that's not going to be a sustainable way. They should fire him. They really should. I wish people would fire people. It's like that FBI agent Alethea Duncan comes out. She says, I can tell you one thing it's not. How do you know that, Ms. Duncan? She said it was a matter of an IED. We've gone through that with Sammy. But another thing. I don't know where all this comes from, but there is a common denominator that the DEI madness has infected everything in various degrees. And behind every madness you can start to see this doctrine. And he's infected with it. The FBI agent was infected with it almost every single thing. To some degree, there's a dei. And I think on our next broadcast we'll talk about Joe Biden's Presidential Medals of freedom and citizen. But keep that in mind that DEI is a Marxist equality of result binary oppressor oppressed and. And it's infected just like it did in the Soviet Union. Every single thing from science to economics to architecture, everything is a matter of dei. Everything in America. When you discuss any topic, farming, architecture, transportation, power generation, insurance, ultimately it will be phrased and couched and contextualized in the realm of dei. Who was the oppressor of this matter? Who was the oppressed? The reduction.
- [82:01]
Jack Fowler
Good luck getting brain surgery 10 years from now when the products of DEI medical schooling.
- [82:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
A very close friend of mine said if I were you, I would not ever go to a doctor that graduated from this medical school in the following years and when the DEI took over.
- [82:22]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, well, all right. Well my friend and I just want to follow up on closing that. I want to thank folks who subscribe to Civil Thoughts, which I write every week. Go to civilthoughts.com and you'll get the newsletter every Friday. I want to thank the folks who take the time to rate the show on Apple and some leave comments and they leave comments also on Victor's website. Here's one. I don't have a name on this one but it's titled A dairy farmer and a raisin farmer have more knowledge than those. And here's what this kind soul writes. Victor, after listening to you and Nunez. A dairy farmer and a raisin farmer in California. You guys have more knowledge about business and political world than any of those bicoastal universities cattle branded that are running our country into the ground. None of these politicians could run a successful business without the grift. Another note. Yesterday I picked up some very nice looking naval oranges in northern Illinois. I looked at the labels sticker and see it's Booth Ranch. 7500 acres of oranges just east of Selma.
- [83:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
I know Lauren Booth. I'm going to give her plague A plug for Lauren Booth. That's her orange ranch. There's not a nicer better person. She's the daughter of Otis Booth, LA Times, Berkshire Hathaway. Very prosperous but very public minded, very philanthropic and just a wonderful person. And that's her ranch. I'm glad to see that her product is becoming it is known nationwide.
- [83:54]
Jack Fowler
Well, this ends with by saying but looking at these oranges and realized all the challenges this family has to stay in business in our beautiful productive state of California only to be under constant attack by Newsom and the clueless progressives in your state.
- [84:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
Every time I think of Newsom it gets worse and there's I always think he can't do anything worse but you know he does and he manages to do that. He came out against the repeal of $950 exemption for looting. You know Prop 37 I think it was everything he says touches. It's got the on Midas touch.
- [84:33]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, well I hope he's that kind.
- [84:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
He just bought a nine million dollar home. He's got a tough. I don't think he can put on his Abercrombie and Fitch working vest and prance around and get around that nine. Maybe he can mow his lawn or something. None of the people see him weed. All right, okay. Thank you everybody for listening.
- [84:56]
Jack Fowler
We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye Bye.
- [85:03]
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