← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
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- [00:03]
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- [01:51]
Jack Fowler
Hello ladies and gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host but the star. You're not here for the host. You're here for the star, the namesake, Victor Davis Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He's a best selling author. He is a military historian classicist. He has a website, the Blade of Perseus. His address is victorhansen.com I will tell you why later in the show. You should be subscribing. Victor has talked a lot, the last couple of episodes, of course, about the fires in California with the great Sammy Wink. But we still have much more to discuss about that catastrophe, ongoing catastrophe as we talk here on Saturday, January 11th. This particular episode will be up on the 14th. But we're going to begin today's episode talking about the verdict, Judge Merchant's verdict ruling against Donald Trump, some irony about Donald Trump and then full blown into the fires. And we're going to do all this when we come back from these important messages. We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, I'm going to read a little from today's New York Post again this is January 11th. And this is Jonathan Turley and his assessment of Judge Merchant's what the headline, one of the headlines is the Merchant Bragg hit job. And here's what Turley writes on Friday. That was yesterday in real time as we're talking. The sentencing of President elect Donald Trump saw one of the most impassioned defense arguments given at such a hearing in years from the judge himself. Acting Justice Juan Merchant admitted that the case was, quote, unquote, unique and remarkable, but insisted that, quote, once the courtroom doors were closed, the trial itself was no more special, unique and extraordinary than the other 32 cases in the courthouse. If so, says Turley, that is a damning indictment of the entire New York court system. Almost done here. Merchant allowed a dead misdemeanor to be resuscitated by allowing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to effectively prosecute declined federal offenses. Victor, this is a travesty. But I think it, like everything else that tries to hurt Donald Trump, it may help Donald Trump, but what are your thoughts?
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Victor Davis Hanson
Victoria Everything so far has made Donald Trump stronger. As I said before, he's a Nietzschean figure that the more you try to destroy him unfairly, the stronger he gets. Everyone who's looked at this case, even people like John Fetterman and people on the left, Mr. Epstein, who was a congressional Democratic Council, have said it's a joke. It was a federal offense. If it was an offense and the feds thought it was not, so then he bootstrapped that onto a state offense. There's nothing wrong with having a non disclosure form. And the whole case centered around the idea that he wanted to get Donald Trump and he was in competition with Letita James, attorney general, and Fannie Willis to Georgia prosecutor and Jack Smith, all of whom have disgraced themselves. And he thought that he could come up with this novel idea that even though the feds said that Donald Trump had not violated federal campaign laws, that the fact that he had had a non disclosure form with Stormy Daniels and had not reported it as a campaign expenditure, then he was going to call that a felony. And then each time that he did not report it on a form would be another felony. And then he could say there were 34, 33 felonies and make it psychodramatic. And that's what he did. And he was biased. And we don't know what the jury count was. We were never told exactly what each jury deliberation's verdict was. There were no instructions to that effect. He ruled almost 100% against every Trump motion his daughter is making. A fortune merchandising her father's name as an anti Trump. She merchant, as I said, she sells her skills as a campaign consultant. Made several million dollars during the campaign cycle. I guess Comey, Barrett and Roberts decided to join the left wing majority and let the sentencing continue. They were not worried that the whole thing was a joke and that the purpose of it was to say that Donald Trump is the first president to be a convicted felon and that's what they got. Or maybe they think, well, we'll save our ammunition and when the whole case comes up, not just the sentencing on appeal, then we will reverse it. But it's a joke. It's why people don't trust the judicial system. Anybody, any major corporation, any major controversial figure who's conservative. In New York, you're going to butt heads with Alvin Bragg or Letitia James or a federal prosecutor in the DOJ and you're going to be in trouble. And so you shouldn't do business there, you should get out. And that's what's going to happen. People are fleeing New York. So the problem with all these things is we're going to talk about in a minute with the LA fire. They seem sustainable until they're not. And so when you get this many people and that much capital leaving New York City and state, everything seems okay for a while, and then it doesn't. And the same thing with crime. You let In a million, 2 million, 3 million, 4 million illegals, and then when you let in five, the whole thing falls apart. These people have wrecked the country and they under the guise of DEI and woke. And I think people are going to hold them accountable. They have no choice. If they don't hold them accountable, there's no country left. You can't have a country where a rogue prosecutor invents new crimes just for the purpose. At the same time, he's going after Daniel Penny for saving people. And there was a case on the subway to show Alvin Bragg in action. Jack, I'll just finish with this. A homeless man was attacked by what, four people. He was Hispanic, they were Hispanic. He fought off them heroically. He stabbed and killed one. And Alvin Bragg, I guess it was in Queens. So it was the Queen's prosecutor, but they chose not to indict him, which was good. But why did they go after Daniel Penny? Because he didn't try to kill the person, just like that person didn't try to kill the person. But that person killed his assailant. And Daniel Penny even more nobly was trying to stop people from being a sale other than himself. And so this is what's going. They make a desert and they call it justice, and everybody's getting tired of it. I think there's a collective. I don't know what it is, but there's really an anger at this whole diversity, equity, inclusion thing. And there was a subtext here that we can't talk about in polite conversation. But Fanny Willis played the race card, as you know, with Nathan Wade and said it's all about going after a black woman. Letitia James played the race card and said the same thing and campaigned to get Donald Trump. And Alvin Bragg played the race card and they all thought that they would resonate with the white liberal community who helped them. But there was a racial angle that they thought that the meme that Donald Trump was a racist played into what they thought would give them national publicity and influence. The irony, of course, is African Americans voted for Donald Trump at a higher rate than any other Republican in memory.
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Jack Fowler
Well, it all gets back to what Shelby Steele has been writing about for years, that races really not about blacks in America, it's about whites in America.
- [10:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
It is about whites. It's about a guilty, wealthy, white professional class that lives of comfort and affluence and tries to square the circle of their guilt. And they do so by blaming racism and homophobia section on the white working class that has no privilege while they use their undeniable privilege for their own elitism. And they feel bad about it, but they justify it by saying they're racist. Not me. I can't be racist because I am calling everybody else a racist. And then they partner with the black elite and the Hispanic elite who they're indifferent. Their race doesn't matter. They both have the same aspirations, the same values, and they have become as despised by the white working class as the Hispanic and black elite. The joy reads of the world. The California majority leader of the House who was on television trying to explain why he called a special section of the legislature to go after Donald Trump, but not to discuss the catastrophe in Los Angeles. He has about as much relevance to a Hispanic contractor in Madera Merced as Gavin Newsom or Nancy Pelosi does a white truck driver in Des Moines. And so that's what Donald Trump proved. There's a class solidarity that trumps race. And that's a good development.
- [12:06]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Hey, Victor, I just want to take a moment now for our new sponsor, delete me. DeleteMe is a subscription service that removes your personal info from hundreds of data brokers Deleteme isn't just a one time service. DeleteMe is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the Internet. Deleteme sends you regular personalized privacy reports showing what info they found, where they found it and what they removed. To put it simply, Deleteme does all the hard work wiping your and your family's personal information from data broker websites. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Deleteme now at a special discount for our listeners today. Get 20% off your delete me plan by texting Victor. That's V I C T O R to 64000. Text Victor to 64000. That's Victor to 64000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. And we thank the good people at Deleteme for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. And Victor, I have to say, when I saw this copy come in, it reminded me of Please Release me, Let me go, that famous thing. I wanted to sing it. I'm not going to sing it. And then I thought, that's a great country song. And then I remembered it was sung by Engelbert Humperton.
- [13:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
Come old people, I need to get that. Not a day goes past where I am spraying weeds or I'm driving and I get this call and it says, oh, by the way, you wrote something. And I disagree with it and said, excuse me, who are you? I don't know. I got your number on the Internet and I'm really angry at you and don't hang up on me. And I said, you know, I don't do that to other people. I've never called a person I didn't know in my entire life and then railed about them. But I have at least two or three of those a day.
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Jack Fowler
That's crazy.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I know. So I'm going to sign up. The life of a California raisin farmer.
- [14:18]
Jack Fowler
Ex Fresno State professor, who's dodging embers, burning embers. Victor, you wanted to talk about Trump and irony.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Ironeia. It's a Greek word from Sophocles. Made it famous in his September plays. Irony. Irony. We all know what irony is. It's a message that it's a reality that exposes the opposite of what the rhetoric is. Or the rhetoric is used to convey a message that's far more important. Or there's elements of karma as well. One person does something, but it's ironic that the opposite is. I think everybody talks about Donald Trump, he shouldn't be talking about the Panama president is right wing. We're embarrassing them all of bipartisan establishment angry at Trump Greenland, he doesn't understand. They don't understand irony. And you saw it with the nominations. It was ironic that he just said to himself, anybody who is in these particular slots who suffered, I'm going to favor. So Cash Patel, the FBI went out. Now it's ironic he's going to run it. Tulsi Gabbard maybe I hope gets confirmed. They put her on a watch list. Jay Bacharya, they went after him, the nih. Pete Hegseth, he wrote a book. The Pentagon hated it. He'll run the Pentagon. You get the impression. So the same thing with these trolling things. The left has canonized the idea that you change names. As I said once I came to my office in Junipio Cerro Plaza at Stanford where I work was changed. The Woodrow Wilson School is everybody. The Bolt hall is changed, the Earl Warren center is changed. So Trump comes along and says, well, we're in the age of change. I think I'm going to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. And then you can't do that. That's imperialistic. And then you start to look at his irony and you think, well, there's 1700 miles of coastline that America has on the Gulf and there's 1700 miles on Mexico. And since we changed things, they've had 400 years of their share. They can keep going on everybody in Mexico keep using Gulf of Mexico, but we in the western world are going to start using Gulf of America. And that got them so angry. But then it was also ironic because Shein Bomb started producing maps, you know, Mexico's borders up near Montana or something. And then you want to say, well, why don't you get in a fight with Donald Trump and put your $63 billion in remittances in where your mouth is or your 12 million people who are going to come back pretty soon. So it was ironic. And then with Greenland, he brings up the whole Greenland thing and then Denmark gets angry and then he starts to leak his people starts to leak. Well wait a minute, New York is close to Greenland than is Copenhagen. Where is Greenland? I think last time I looked at the map, it's a North American territory, it's not European. And you little 4 million person country are colonizing you and EU. You're an imperial power and you're trying to control this native indigenous people with this vast expanse as if you're, I don't know, 16th century Britain and you're trying to control the whole continental sized country that's not even in your continent where the Americans are just trying to help and let them be autonomous and help them with aid and defend themselves and help the West. And the same thing colonialism, same thing with Panama. Oh, you object to Yankees coming in and trying to make you honor and agree, but then you invite in the most imperialistic colonial people in the world, the communist Chinese, and you do it on like us to make a lot of money. We don't want any money. We just want our ships not to be put in second place or to pay more than other ships or to make sure our military can get through. So, you know, that's what he does in Canada is ironic because 51 states and he just says, well, your Trudeau, he weighed in at the election and he said that Harris should have won as the first black woman. It'd been wonderful if I lost. And you have an open border, you don't defend it, but it's kind of ironic because you're under the US nuclear umbrella and you rely on American defense and you rely on a border in which we don't send our illegal aliens into your country, we don't send drugs into your country and you're kind of hypocritical. Maybe we should just. You stay Canada, we'll stay America. You get your own military. Well, you have your own economy. And of course that's not what they want. So they're. Every time he starts these discussions, they call it trolling. But the more deeply you uncover the layers of arguments, that's ironic. And the people who are blasting him then become hypocritical. And that's. And same thing he did with the Republicans. Oh, I don't know if I can vote for him. Pete Hex. I don't know if I'm vote for. Well, you voted for Pete Buttigieg and you voted for Majorcas. That didn't bother you as a Republican senator, did it? So he's, he knows what he's doing. You have to go up to a point and then you have to stop though you don't want you because Trudeau is out and the left will be out and a pro American government will be in Canada and we will do it a lot of favors by buying their oil and building Keystone. I hope so. You don't want to alienate Canadians, the presumptive.
- [20:31]
Jack Fowler
The government there seems like a real cool cat.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, he does, Mr. Apple Eater.
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Jack Fowler
Yeah, that'd be A great North American tag team. Hey, Victor, by the way, I was thinking about irony in movies and whatever reason I thought of Clint Eastwood and hang him High, which of course, you know, they tried to kill him and then they all end up getting.
- [20:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
They all tried to hang him and he hanged them.
- [21:01]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, I love that movie.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Terrific.
- [21:04]
Jack Fowler
Ed Begley, Bruce Dern, others.
- [21:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Inger Stevens was in that. She was a nice Swede. Oh, yes, of course. Yeah. She killed herself. Did she? Yeah, she did. I liked Inger Stevens. Of course, I'm not going to brag, but Ann Margaret and Inger Stevens were both sweet.
- [21:28]
Jack Fowler
Oh well, I've seen Ann Margaret in what's that Carnal Knowledge. A little more of her thank a 12 year old boy was supposed to see at the time. Anyway, my friend, we are going to get into more of your views about the insanity of the fires and what caused them and the leadership in California. We will do that when we come back from these important messages. We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson show, which is a podcast that comes to you all from justthenews.com that's John Solomon's website. That's the mothership. But now this is also being recorded, video recorded. And you can find the Victor Davis Hansen show on Rumble. You can actually see the beleaguered faces of your interlocutor here. Victor. Here's a headline. There's a lot in this and this folks have heard and talked so much about fires, but some news came out yesterday. Again, we're recording on the 11th of January. Leaked memo Leaked memo reveals LA Mayor Karen Bass demanded her fire department cut an extra 49 million just one week before the wildfires broke out. This is from the Daily Mail. Quick read here the first, first three lines. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass demanded her fire department make an extra $49 million of budget cuts last week. A leaked memo revealed the cut is already on top of the $17.6 million of cuts in her latest budget. The extra cuts requested just days before the fires broke out and devastated swaths of Los Angeles. Los Angeles would have shut down 16 fire stations and crippled the department's ability to respond to emergencies.
- [23:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
Sources said she hired in her budget, her $50 billion budget, 451 new positions. And you go and look at them as I did. They're all, not all, but almost all of them are dei. So remember, everybody, DEI is a sin of commission and omission. It impedes productivity. It's a commissariat that double guesses you and tries to audit you when you're doing nothing wrong. But then it eats away resources and it destroys meritocracy. If I could just indulge everybody, I would like to go down a check roll of this confederacy of dunces that destroyed Los Angeles. So you start with the mayor and you pointed out she thought she was warned. Remember that the Santa Ana winds were high, the chaparral was dry, they'd had fires before stay here in the command post. And she decided to go to Africa to showcase. I don't think she went there, Jack, to consult with the president of Ghana about fire protection strategies. I guess it was dei. It's sort of like if I was the mayor of Los Angeles at this point, I'd go to Sweden to see my roots. She thought it was, it would resonate. And then she really didn't come back quickly and she was confronted at the airport and she got an honest reporter because he wasn't an American. So he said Americans are corrupt. So she said, he said, you know, why did you leave and are you ashamed? She just looked there stone faced, comes back and then gets in there and she tells the reporter to shut up and she doesn't have a clue. So as these fires are going on, the city is releasing false alarm after false alarm about mass evacuations. So everybody is, the whole city now is paranoid, as they should be. They start to evacuate. No, you don't have to. No. And so they have no trust in the government. And then people start things. He did and this is one of them. And then in 2018 when they had a similar fire and remember there's 200,000 homeless people. Greater Los Angeles, Jack, is 18 million people this fall. So there are people all over here on hillsides at night in the winter who are lighting fire. They caught one, as Mel Gibson mentioned and other people have mentioned and they usually let them out but there's a high likelihood that some people to keep warm are lighting fires. And this took off. But in 2018 somebody mentioned that said don't dare drive, blame the homeless. This from the ex Castroite who used to have her hegiras as she went to Havana to meet the good man himself, the mass murdering Fidel, head of the Black Caucus in Congress. So then you look at her appointments, so she looks at the water and power utilities are, and she says, well, we've had a little problem with our appointments. The prior guy is now in federal prison for bribery. So we had another person who then quit. So I'm going to get the first Latina. So they got Ms. Kionis and they said, you know, to get a quality person like that, we've got to double the salary to $750,000. We got to pay this brilliant person who we know what PG and e is like. PG&E is bankrupt. She was at PG&E, so they paid her $2,000 a day to come over here. And the city burns and she says, we have a 3 million gallon tank. It's down. That's what happened. Well, you don't really care how many gallons are in the tanks. You should know how many gallons it takes to put out a fire. Maybe you should have had 10 million, 20 million, 30 million. Oh, you did. You had 117 million gallon reservoir at the top of the city. And it's, it's fire season. It's still the late fall, early winter, it's dry, there's Santa Ana winds. And so surely you, head of the brilliant person from PG&E who's getting $2,000 a day to shake up the system because your predecessors in federal prison is empty, under repair. So what, what would it matter if you had 3 million gallons or not when you needed 100 million? And there's 1 million reservoir sitting there that could have saved these people's dreams and livelihoods. And it's empty. Okay, so then we go to the vice mayor. She's in Ghana. So we have Mr. Brian Williams, her DEI, appointed Deputy Mayor for safety. So she's in Ghana. So everybody goes, well, Brian Williams is here. Oh no, he's not. He's under suspicion. He's under suspicion. He phoned in a bomb threat to the city council. So poor Mr. Deputy Mayor for safety is not on the job. So then we go to the fire chief. Well, we know from Ms. Crowley has talked. She keeps saying, I've had all these jobs. I've had all these jobs. Well, they were mostly in paramedic jobs. And when she does talk the last two years about her tenure, it's always that I brought in 70% DEI. And now she's under the gun because she cannot speak about herself the last two years in terms of anything other than I'm the first LBGTQ woman fire chief. She didn't complain that we knew. She never went to the press and said she was going to cut 45 million. She did cut 17 and now they're starting to blame her. So then she blames the mayor and then she says, I love this. Well, our job starts with the hydra, when the water comes out. So we were all there and it's true, we were there to put out the fire, but there was no water. That's not my concern. It is your concern. You should have had all of your fire marshals every single day going through the whole city, checking those. And then when that didn't come out or the first hour, you should have had a backup plan. Plan. And you should have been on the phone every single day with Ms. Quinones saying, is that reservoir full? Is that reservoir full? I got my people out there. The moment a spark starts, we're in danger. Ms. Quinones, get that reservoir full. I'm going to go public with it. No, but she did have a assistant DEI fire chief, a very husky person, but she was quoted. She had a nice little cute gay woman who had a little cute video. And she said, Christine Larson. Yes, Christine Larson. Well, you know, people say, can you carry a man? Look at the. Ms. Andreje. The hating of Ms. Anthropi. Anthropia. I don't know what we would call it. Ms. Andrea. Ms. Andrea. And she says, if I have to carry a man out of a house, he's in the wrong place. If I go to a. I guess you'd say, okay, Ms. Larson. So if you go to a swimming pool and a toddler is at the bottom of the pool and he can't write, and you're not able to jump in and hold your breath and go down and swim with him on his back, then he's in the wrong place, isn't he? Is that your attitude? Anytime you can't do a task, you blame the victim. That person should be fired. Crowley should be fired. Quinones should be fired. Mr. Williams, if he's not fired, he's on leave. The deputy mayor, he should be fired. Karen Bass, of course, should resign. And then we go up the ladder. Where was Kamala Harris? She's got a tenure. So Kamala Harris, during the election. Jack. Remember when she said Ron DeSantis is not doing enough for the flood victims in Florida? I'm a natural disaster person. So she flies into Florida, she gets in front of the camera, she's ready to do all this, and then she gets, poor Joe, he still got his little bitter streak. Well, you know, I get along with Ron DeSantis. He's doing a good job. So she shuts up, and then Ron DeSantis puts his boot on her mouth and says something like, don't try to glom onto my work. So I thought she had a record and she's an LA resident, so I thought she would be in the Cameras, I'm Kamala Harrison. As you know, I support full utilities and power. I'm a fracker now and I believe in energy development as I announced in my hundred year transformation metamorphosis. And she's not there. So then we go to Joe Biden, the President. Joe's there? Yeah, he's there, but he's there to put off thousands of acres off limits to the public so you can't have power to Angelus. And they ask him about Joe. Hey, let me. Let me tell you, my grandkids house was saved. My son, my. His kid, I guess his dog. My kid's house was saved today. I'm a great grandson. How do you think that. And then later he goes to another press conference. He goes fire away, fire away. Questions about people who've been torched. And is it true that he suggests that he was at Nixon's funeral? Funeral Rather than Carter, Somebody called me up. I have to check that. Somebody said that he had said that, that he thought he was at Nixon. Anyway, I'm going to. Don't quote me on that. So then we had Nick. So then we come to the piece de resistance with our mayor, excuse me, our governor. So Mr. Mel Gibson the other day said, what should the governor have done? Mel said, use less hair grease. So he flies in, and he always flies in with his Abercrombie and Fitch vest. Kind of like I don't have one on, but kind of a nice vid. He's got his hair slicked back, kind of like that David Muir guy that had his coat pinned up. He looks the same. He's got it slicked back. And unfortunately a woman runs up to him and gets through security and he said, I don't know, I'm just calling the President. But of course he's not calling the president. And she starts to yell at him. And what does he say about the hydrants? Well, it's a local matter. It's a local matter. Do you mean, Gavin, that there's natural springs in Los Angeles of water? So Los Angeles gets, I think, 15% of its water from wells. They get it from the Owens Valley state problem, the Colorado river state problem, and the aqueduct and penstocks that are pumped over the Grapevine state problem. So we look at you, Gavin, and you know, in 2014, we voted we 7 point field, 7.5 billion for a 1.3 million acre new reservoir above Millerton Lake, not far from where I'm speaking on the San Joaquin River. It's a tertiary reservoir. There's Not a lot of problems. It's not in the High Sierra, it's right in the foothills. 1.3 is what we were supposed to do. Well, it's been 11 years and I don't know where the 7.5 billion, I bet it was for other tasks, but we didn't build it. So then we go to the sites reservoir on the Sacramento, another low so that we could have more storage. 1.5 million. We didn't build it, but we have the Los Granos Grandes Victor, they're going to build the other one. At least it'll double the capacity of San luis. Well, it's 1.7 million. They didn't build any of them. So they said we don't need 5 million acre feet of storage to put in your stupid aqueduct and pump it over to la. So you have a lot of water. And then it got a little worse, Jack, because they're letting out 90%. Then when you don't build reservoirs and you have wet plentiful years, you say I don't have anywhere to put it. So of course it's preplanned. So they let 90% of the water out, don't pump it into the aqueduct, into the estuaries to save the delta smelt the three inch, what they call the canary in the mine, which is endangered because they want to bootstrap on climate change and farming and Los Angeles taking water because it's not as fresh water and oxygenated. So we're going to take all the water, cancel the contract, let it out to the ocean, save the canary in the mine. And then they don't tell you there's evasive striped bass that are devouring these things like chocolate candy. And there are five municipal districts around the bay. Now these are left wing, enlightened utopian people who put sewage treated but sewage into the delta and bay. So there's a final piece to this. He didn't build the reservoirs, he let the water out and then he started a grandstand. He came up with this crazy idea that he was going to be the indigenous persons president and the environmentalist green radical president. So he was going to go up the Klamath river and blow up Four Downs. And he was going to then say we don't need 80,000 homes with clean energy, we don't need flood control, we don't need irrigation, we don't need recreation. The people have homes on the lake. Screw them, they're probably wealthy white insects anyway that prey on society. Screw them, we don't care. We're Going to blow them up. And then he caused an environmental disaster of mud flows that killed flora, fauna, everything. But he did say that I restore to Native American people their native habitat. How does he even know that? Is anybody alive in 1860? I don't think so. And so that's his record. Then you look to the fire problem. Paradise fire, aspen fire, campfire, same old thing. They come in, he walks around, gets his Abercrombie and Fitch little thing, he gets his hair back, he walks around. Sometimes he carries a little shovel. Shovel some ashes. Sometimes he has a little pokes around. Usually, you know, he's got some officials from the federal government he wants to bail him out. And then he's running a $70 billion deficit, state deficit, given all the stuff he spent on 500 million for illegal alien health care, all that stuff. Di. And they ask him every single time, don't you think you could bring back the timber companies? Don't you think that the logging mills, to glean the forest, can't you let individuals go up and get their firewood from the fallen trees in the Sierra or the Cascades? Don't you think you can clean the chaparral on the foothills? Don't you think you can let the farmers and ranchers graze a little bit more to get the brush down? No, no, no, no. I just got off the phone with the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the wildlife conservants, they said no. So that's what he did. And he created a tinderbox. He created a tinder box. Then he didn't allow enough water to hide it. And then he changed ancient protocols of all these awful people. You know what the subtext of all this is? Is these evil white person people, these evil white males like William Mulholland, you remember him from Chinatown fame, The guy who dreamed up a way to have 18 million people in Los Angeles by brilliantly and ruthlessly bringing in Owens Valley Colorado River Aqueduct, and created Los Angeles and created the most efficient futuristic water distribution system in the world. But he was an old white guy. And so therefore we cannot have anybody ever like him again. Or the architects at the California Water Project in the Central Valley who figured out in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s how to transfer two thirds of the state's water to where only one third is found, but 2/3 of the population are found. And the greatest distribution of water in the world and the highest lift of any pipeline in the world over the grapevine. Those evil white people did that. And then we go to the Most sophisticated highway system by 1960 in the world. The California freeway system. 101 99, all these things. We added i5 and the 70 and it was all the work of these awful white men. Then we have these great universities. No we didn't. Victor. You think Caltech and USC and UCLA and Stanford and 1950s and 60s that really got going became world class universities. They were not great universities. You're mistaken. You're suffering from false conscience just because you went to Stanford, the UC system, you think they were good, they were racist, they were sexist, they were transphobic, they were homophobic, they were mediocre. But when we came, we took your legacy and we stripped off these racist names. Bolt Hall, Earl Warren. We got them all done. And we created these great universities and they're turning out people like the Karen Basses and you know, the Ms. Kionis, these brilliant people that are running the infrastructure that they inherited but they did not add to. Not one iota do they add to it. But they're correcting the endemic embedded sexism and racism tech within it. And that's where we are. How's that?
- [42:24]
Jack Fowler
Well, there's still more.
- [42:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
There's still more.
- [42:28]
Jack Fowler
Look, I want to ask you a little more. That was terrific, by the way. And I'd like to raise. You don't have to comment on this. This is the east coast. Prejudice or ignorance of water for most of America, this is water.
- [42:48]
Victor Davis Hanson
You have too much of it.
- [42:49]
Jack Fowler
It comes out. And the real problems that California has been facing for years has just been met by indifference by this, by let's call it the media, which is very east east coasty now. I just want to say that and you. And I think you know.
- [43:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I grew up a little different, Jack. I grew up in the 50s and 60s with a grandfather that I had to irrigate with. Every summer as we walked by, he'd hears the vocabulary. He used 6 inch casing, 8 inch casing, 12 inch casing, 14 inching. Turbo submersible pump. Thousand gallons of minute, 1800 gallons of minutes. 600 gallons. Cement pine Flat dam water. Consolidated irrigation district. Flow 24 hours, one acre foot. That's all I heard. Water, water, water.
- [43:41]
Jack Fowler
Here nothing water. Mineral rights.
- [43:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes. We lived in. We live in a desert. California is a desert. It's the top third of it is Oregon and it's wet. The bottom two thirds is a desert. And somebody in the Sierra figured out how to take that water from the Sierra and the top third and make it paradise. And then we handed it over to the presence, the most arrogant of all the generations, the most affluent, the most lucky in their inheritance. In about 30 years, they destroyed it. And they had the arrogance to say that they were more morally and intellectually superior to the people who are dead when they couldn't do anything. They can't even maintain it. They don't know how to maintain it.
- [44:29]
Jack Fowler
Well, and the. It also feeds much of the world, which is, you know, double down on the craziness. Victor, I wanted to get a little more from you about Karen Bass.
- [44:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
I just.
- [44:39]
Jack Fowler
I do want to let our listeners know about your website, the blade of Perseus. Victorhansen.com I want to recommend you visit it regularly and you will find so much there. The links to Victor's weekly essays for American greatness, his weekly syndicated columns. Victor writes two exclusive pieces every week for the Blade of Perseus. Links to these podcasts and to their archives and to Victor's books. And I'm assuming soon we'll have links to the rumble videos of these podcasts. And Victor does videos, also exclusive for his website. Now he's doing videos for the Daily Signal five times a week. I don't know when you sleep. Victor.
- [45:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
I got it. I got a letter about that. Dear Victor, are you aware of the word overexposure? Be careful. Familiarity breeds content.
- [45:35]
Jack Fowler
Well, everyone's entitled to their opinion. You should subscribe. It's $5 a month, discounted. $50 for the full year. The Blade of Perseus. Victorhansen.com But I also should say on X, Victor also likes, once a week he writes his big post on X. And it's usually. Not usually, always terrific, terrific stuff. So, Victor, one thing I wanted to. As we close out this segment on Karen Bass you brought up, this is a Castro lover that Benceremos, or however the hell you say it, Brigade.
- [46:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
We shall overcome. We shall conquer.
- [46:14]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. And she was not just. She was an organizer, a great activist, state representative, and she was the speaker of the assembly, the most Democrat state in the nation. She was the leader of the House and then she got to Congress and she was the chairman of. Of the Congressional Black Caucus. She's the mayor now. I know Los Angeles, second largest population, third largest population city in America. Victor, I think as we look at this whole calamity, she is the Democrat Party.
- [46:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Oh, yeah, of course she is. She was crushed when Castro, remember she said, el Comandante, el Jefe muerte. She was so angry when he died. The loss to humanity that this mass killer Castro destroyed drove out the most, a million of its most talented citizens of which were a beneficiary and a huge racist.
- [47:12]
Jack Fowler
Of course, the Cuban Communists are mega racists.
- [47:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, the Cuban Communist Party was run by the people in Cuba. Remember, Cuba was a little different than the other Caribbean islands. There was an. There was a native Cuban indigenous population which they basically exterminated. But it was very, very small. And there were very. When the Spanish came around 1500, there was, there wasn't a lot of indigenous people. So the Cubans, until African slaves were brought in in the later 16th century to do the sugar plantation work, there weren't a lot of blacks there. And that elite prided themselves, as you see from Mr. Mayorkas or Mr. Gascon in Los Angeles, that elite prided themselves that they were basically European. And it was very racist. So the Communist Party in Cuba and the elite were racist. They didn't intermarry, intermingle people. One of the great racists of all time was Che Guevara. He used the N word all the time. So absolutely they were killers and they were racist. And she idolized them. And when I saw that deer in the headlights. Silence, mute, silence. When that reporter dressed her down and she said, I don't think she's going to survive. Because one thing about the Hollywood left wing, wealthy Hollywood actors, financiers, all the people in Los Angeles for the big money. And I had just driven through Pacific Palisades in December to speak. It was a shortcut over to i5. And it's one of the most beautiful, affluent. What's the word? Tasteful, quiet. Multi. Multi. It's makes. It's like Brentwood. The people there run the state or they run and for you to burn them out and then to be callous and then they're going to sit there and see their beautiful homes ruined and they're going to. The mayor tried to cut the fire and we had fire. She did cut the fire department. The fire department could have saved my home and my neighborhood and our school and our golf club and they cut it. And the power and water czar who's overpaid did not allow us to have water, which then still could have saved us. And the fire chief was incompetent, didn't care there wasn't water because she said it wasn't really her responsibility until it came out of the hydrant and then the governor and it's going to, at least for a while. And then they're going to. You got to follow it through, Jack. So then let's say we're talking six months ago. So then they're going to have to come in and get bulldozers and clean those lots up that's all toxic. A plastic PVC pipe, the Romex wire, etc. The insulation, some of the wallboard. So they're going to have to put it in trucks and they're going to have to truck it out to a landfill. They're going to have to get a permit permit and that's going to take them about a year. And then they're going to give an architectural and they're going to be in competition with 10,000 people to get their plans. And so they're all going to rush the planning department which takes another year and then they're going to start building and they're going to have too few contractors and building inspectors. So there are going to be backlog and they're going to get a belly full of the California coastal. If you're in Malibu, it's going to be under the California Coastal Commission and those are all appointments and they're all left wing and they're mostly failed politicians and friends of failed politicians, very well paid as all California commissions and they have absolute power. None of them are going to be elected and they're going to be over regulated and over lectured and over sermonized to death as they try to reconstruct these homes. These homes took a half century piece by piece to build, but they represent the collective frustrations of thousands of people had to deal with these agencies and now they're all going to have to do it at once and it's going to be a disaster. And you think that Gavin Newsom, if he was a good mayor, would say, listen, I've got a plan. I got to go to Washington and I've got to get $300 billion to bulk up the stupid socialist fair plan which I have a policy with which is completely insolvent. It will be. It only has 750 million in reserves. This thing is 200 billion. And I'm going to get the money to pay these claims out. I'm going to waive some of the building code restrictions I'm going to bring. I'm going to give them money to hire another thousand building inspectors, another thousand code inspectors. I'm going to get a special landfill just to handle the debris taken out. That's what you think they do. They won't do that.
- [52:45]
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor, when we come back from these final messages, I think we should follow up a little bit on that because you raise questions of Culpability broader than the knuckleheads who are the paid administrators and sympathy. Should we have sympathy? And then I have one final, I think, major question for you about are all calamities equal in the eyes of ideologues? And we'll get to all that when we come back from these final messages. We are back with the. Well, yeah. What's the name of the show? The Victor Davis Hansen Show. I'm sorry. Up late last night. I saw Tyrus last night. I was in New Haven. Oh, you did? Oh, he's great.
- [53:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. Did you talk to him?
- [53:40]
Jack Fowler
No, no, I was, you know, just a member of the audience.
- [53:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
Was it a good audience? It was a lot of people there was packed, yeah.
- [53:47]
Jack Fowler
Good.
- [53:48]
Victor Davis Hanson
I'm very happy to see his career thrive because you know, what I like about his career is not just he's on gut bill, he's funny. But he goes on regular news shows and he does sophisticated political analysis. And it's good. It's really good. He's incisive, he's smart, he's well spoken, and he brings a whole wealth. He's got natural intelligence. But he's also been done a lot of different things. And so he's. Yeah, he's.
- [54:22]
Jack Fowler
I tell people, they say, who should we get as our speaker for this dinner? That I'm like. And then in the Northeast, I said, get Tyrus. He will put Butz in the seats. And he is so damn smart. I love the guy.
- [54:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
I do, too. I like him. Long may Tyrus run.
- [54:42]
Jack Fowler
I'm making excuse for being tired. So let me close out that issue of sympathy, culpability. Of course, watching these horrific scenes, Victor, you can't help but feel bad. Feel, oh, my gosh, this is devastation. This is terrible. I feel for the folks who live there. I don't care what their party affiliation is. But then you think, well, you. This is. You voted for these clowns that left us happy.
- [55:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
They had a good. They had a good. They just had a chance. They had Caruso. I'm not a big fan of his. He's kind of a Republican. Then he goes Democrat, depending where he thinks. 51%. He's a big philanthropist. He. He endowed, I think, the law school at Pepperdine. Very well known in Los Angeles. His daughter lost a house. But had they elected him, I don't think this would have happened. I really don't. I think that reservoir would not have been empty. I think he would have been on the phone the moment he heard a spark. I think he would have said, he would have, wouldn't have had any reluctance to say if we've got all these people camped out all over the hills, you see anybody lighting a Christmas tree with a propane torch or decked out in the mountains, and these are reports that have happened, you not only arrest them, you let, you tell the media, you were going to tell people, stay on the lookout for anybody who's lighting. And it was just the opposite. How dare you even suggest the point. Homeless did this. Yeah, he would have been, he would have been different. I should have. Jack, you reminded me. I should have included, I think his name is Mr. Ruiz. I think I should have included in this confederacy of dunces in our state. And I want to remind everybody if you think I'm being unfair and it's everybody's fault, it's not. California is the only, only state that has the following. There is not one state office holder, not the governor, not the lieutenant governor, not the Attorney general, not the controller, who is a Republican. There is, there is only nine, nine of 52 congressional seats who are Republican. That's about 17%. There is a super majority of Democrats in the House, what we call in the state Senate, and of course there's Gavin Newsom. We have the most left wing state judiciary of any in the country. And we have the most left wing federal appellate court anywhere in the world. And the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. To the extent legacy medieval matters are left wing. The daily news aggregators, McClatchy newspapers, it's almost extinct now, but it was always left wing. The aggregators, Apple News, Google News, Facebook, despite Mark Zuckerberg's 11th hour conversion, they're all left wing. The universities are all left wing. They're all on the coast. So this is a left wing problem. And we had the speaker of the assembly have a little press conference. He must have been an idiot. He has called Jack a special session of the legislature. Now, some of you are going to say, well, Victor, he called it so they can get emergency financial relief, they can get emergency water and fire. No, he didn't call the special session to do what? To fund strategies to stop Donald Trump, his president. He thinks he's in 1832 South Carolina and he's a Confederate state and he's trying to stop the federal government from intervening. That's what he thinks he's doing. Or he thinks he's Alvin Bragg, that he can take a state law and trump a federal law or a federal attorney. And that's what he's trying to do. He's trying to stop Donald Trump. And think of the logic, Jack. So you're in California. You have 200 billion plus of damages. You've got 250,000 people without a house. You're running a 70, 70, I don't care what it is, it once was $77 billion deficit. You have the highest taxes, income among the highest sales, highest gas taxes. And you need what, you need federal help immediately. And you have a senile, demented friend who's going to go out of office in 10 days. And then you have Donald Trump. And Donald Trump can help and he will help. But what do you do with your only source of salvation? You call a special session of the legislature, you and Gavin Newsom, to try to thwart him. So the message is to Donald Trump, Mr. Trump, due to our malpractice and our left wing monopoly of all the political levers and gears in this state, we have ruined it, probably intentionally. Our combination in a unique fashion of woke and green has spelled disaster. So we need to be bailed out. So we want you to give us billions of dollars in federal assistance. But before you do, we're going to try to stop you from interfering in our state business. And we're going to try, we're going to try to block everything you do, immigration, logging, oil development, water allotments. But we're not going to block you. If you want, if you're, I don't know, if you're going to give us 200, $300 billion, we'll take it, we'll take it. But we don't really want you to give it to us, but we'll take it. That's their attitude. It's a bad attitude to have. It's insane attitude to have. Even the, the reporters who are all left wing couldn't believe it when they questioned him. And it was one of the worst. It was worse than Karen Bass's performance. He said, I'm here, I'm here. Why are you calling a special session to strategize thwarting Donald Trump when there's this natural disaster of historic proportions and you're going to need federal help, shouldn't you? We're going to discuss water and the fire. That's why. That's what he did. It was just embarrassing. He couldn't finish his sentence.
- [61:35]
Jack Fowler
What's a counterpoint to this, Victor? To me, the outrage Democrats and leftists are capable of outrage and prolonged outrage.
- [61:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's what we saw.
- [61:47]
Jack Fowler
Still see with January 6th, I'm sure there are still poor souls getting sentenced and held in terrible prison conditions. But this is a passion for them that, that elicits tremendous outrage from the left. But the withdrawal from Afghanistan does not. Implicit by Joe Biden. Orchestrated by Joe Biden. And this monstrous series of fires over.
- [62:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
The years, they don't mind destroying the state.
- [62:18]
Jack Fowler
No outrage from the left, but they don't actual catastrophe.
- [62:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
Just think of what happened to Dawn. I mean, everybody said there's no connection back. There's not connection. But just think the very. Again, I want to quote that line from Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, Caesar, he doth stride above us like colossus. And we like little nothings, seek our quiet grave. But the point I'm making is that just the idea there's going to be a different United States has shocked Canada. And that liberal coalition in Canada said, you know what, you idiot, Trudeau, you have attacked Trump, you've celebrated Kamala Harris. He's coming in and we don't want you anymore. Get the hell out. Excuse my language. And then in Syria, this is a good time to attack Assad, because he's not going to be propped up by Joe Biden's State Department or anybody. And they're going to be active. So let's go get him. And then Iran, you know, Iran is terrified and there's people protesting Iran. So just the idea that he's coming and he's going to bring normalcy back has got a lot of people frightened and for good reason. And he's going to have to move, as I said, very quickly while they're licking their wounds. But this California thing is, if they had any sense, which they don't, they would say, donald Trump, you're a builder, and one thing you like to do is build, and you build quickly and well. So would you come in here and give us a la builder czar, a federal official, would you appoint to oversee the entire disbursement of federal funds? Because we don't trust these people. We believe if you give us $300 million. Excuse me, billion. If you give us 300, they will hire DEI people and they will hire radical green people and they will squander it just like they did all of the other monies from the state. Please don't do that. Give us a. I don't know how long the movie stars when you lost. You know, I had a house that was almost burned three years ago, and I watched the map every day, and it two days, it looked like it was completely burned. The map of burning area had gone over the house, and I didn't realize that the fire had gone all made a 360 around it because the firemen had put mount. And then on this farm we had a small house that was the repository of all of the family history. My father's war medals, he won the best medal. It's like this second medal, the Congressional medal and all of his World War II mementos. We had a 300 year Hansen Swedish Bible. They were all stored where my father had an apartment, a nice little farmhouse. And my brother sold it. And the next door house, part of our own, was rented to a gangbanger's family. And the gang banger got angry and used to throw rocks at the house. And I have a nephew who was living in the house and he walked out. Nobody knows how it started, but the gang banger had in the past thrown rocks at the house. And the gang banger's family lived about 100 yards away on the same property. But now the boundary line separated and it went up, it just burned up. It just spontaneously combusted and it burned everything. I mean everything. And that idea that everything that you grew up with pictures of your parents, all your family, they're just gone. And they were gone in a moment. And I was just thinking about that the other day and the anxiety I had about this house I built in the Sierras. Those poor people, they ran out. They don't even have clothes, they don't have. They probably don't even have some of their wallet. They don't have their medicine, they don't have anything. And they're homeless. There's 200,000 of them. 250. It's terrible. And how they. How you could not get angry when it was. It was really every aspect from the water to the strategies about preventive strategies to what to do after the. The fire started, to the homeless problem. Everything, insurance, it was all preventable. And how you could not get angry. You'd have to get angry at that. You'd have to get angry at that. You'd have to get angry at that.
- [67:02]
Jack Fowler
The elites are still saving their anger in part.
- [67:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
Even one of the Kardashians saw a homeless person lighting. Did you see that? With a torch. He was lighting things. And she yelled and screamed. And then there was a citizen's arrest of him. I bet he's out by now. I bet they released him the moment the police came. But I don't know where it all.
- [67:25]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, I'm sure there will be more things to shock us that come out in the forthcoming weeks. We've come to about the end of this particular podcast. I don't want to be so glib following up the seriousness, but I have to say we've talked before about Gavin Newsom, that he reminds me some cartoon character and it just came to me while you were talking. This is. I love the cartoon Zippy the Pinhead and he has a character in there, a Griffey. And it's.
- [67:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
It is.
- [67:56]
Jack Fowler
It is Gavin Newsome. So I folks, check, check that. Check that out. What else? Oh, we have people who rate this show and I have a comment here from Apple. Over 7,000 folks have taken the time to 0 to 5 stars and practically everyone gives Victor 5 the 4.9 plus is the rating. So we thank the folks that do that. And here's I have to read this comment Victor, last week I listened to a commentary about you being too hard on Detroit, especially downtown. I've delivered wheat flour to Milano Bakery in the downtown region of Detroit. Talking to the owner in East Europe, sounding gentleman, we talked a bit. He told me that compared to 20 plus years ago, the area around the Malone Bakery 25 years ago was a dangerous area even during the day. But now it's been cleaned up and it's safer. Today he can leave keys in the ignition of his trucks and they're safe, but crime is still a problem. But leaving the bakery I ran into rough looking neighborhood and unsavory people hanging out. So in my observation, Detroit is not super safe. So anyway, thank you for taking the time to write that, but the guy's headline was Detroit and you and Jack got beat up. So I I only raised this not to be selfish. But now that we're on video and some comments that people said because of my natural good looks and the Samsonite bags I carry under my eyes when I've gotten beaten up recently and I don't think I've been punched in, I don't know, 50 years or something to that effect. But regardless, anyway, thanks for that.
- [69:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
Also.
- [69:51]
Jack Fowler
About Me I write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter at the center center for Civil Society where we are trying to strengthen civil society and it comes out every Friday. Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up. What you'll get are 14 recommended readings of great articles I've come across in the previous week. So Victor, you've been terrific. Appreciate all the wisdom you shared and folks, thanks for listening and watching. We will be back again very soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye bye.
- [70:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you very much everyone.