The Fury and the Fantasy of the Left

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Victor Davis Hanson Show – "The Fury and the Fantasy of the Left"

Released on February 13, 2025, "The Victor Davis Hanson Show" features Victor Davis Hanson, a distinguished historian and senior fellow, co-hosted by Jack Fowler. In this episode titled "The Fury and the Fantasy of the Left," Victor and Jack engage in a robust discussion covering a range of current political and social issues, emphasizing the perceived overreach and ideological battles waged by left-leaning factions.

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1. Introduction and Overview

The episode begins with Jack Fowler outlining the key topics for discussion, including the recent release of Israeli hostages by Hamas, Donald Trump's initiative to take over the Kennedy Center, sanctions against South Africa and the International Criminal Court (ICC), energy policies, and internal struggles within the Democratic Party.

Notable Quote:

Jack Fowler [01:49]: "Lot to talk about. Israeli hostages, Donald Trump taking over the Kennedy Center, South Africa sanctions, sanctions against the ICC, energy issues."

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2. The Israeli Hostages Situation

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the release of three Israeli hostages by Hamas. Israeli President Isaac Herzog condemned the act as a "crime against humanity" (John Solomon's group, [07:03]). Victor and his guest delve into the ramifications of Hamas's strategies, highlighting their willingness to endanger civilians and their tactical maneuvers to protect themselves.

Notable Quotes:

Unnamed Guest [08:05]: "Hamas was headed for extinction... they butchered innocent, largely unarmed people, raped them, mutilated them, burned them, every imaginable medieval crime."

Victor Davis Hanson [07:03]: "I won't be surprised when retribution comes at the time of, I guess, Israel's choosing, which I think could happen and probably should happen."

They further discuss the broader implications of Hamas's actions on Palestinian public sentiment and the challenges faced by Western liberals in distinguishing between Hamas militants and the general Palestinian populace.

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3. Illegal Immigration and Its Impact in California

The conversation shifts to the complexities of illegal immigration in California, with a focus on how it strains local regulations, social programs, and infrastructure. Victor criticizes the state's approach, arguing that accommodating millions of undocumented immigrants creates a dual system where law-abiding citizens bear the brunt of regulatory burdens.

Notable Quotes:

Unnamed Guest [17:07]: "There's a huge black market... What California did is a lot of people say to me, why is it so hyper-regulated?"

Unnamed Guest [35:45]: "Donald Trump is the only president in my lifetime that tried to stop it. The only one."

Victor highlights specific issues such as zoning law violations, environmental degradation, and the inefficiency of social services overwhelmed by unauthorized populations. He emphasizes the economic and social costs imposed on the state, advocating for stricter immigration controls and enforcement.

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4. Donald Trump's Executive Order on the Kennedy Center

Victor and Jack discuss President Donald Trump's recent executive order declaring himself the new chair of the Kennedy Center's board. This move is portrayed as a symbolic challenge against left-leaning cultural institutions, specifically targeting events like drag shows hosted at the center.

Notable Quotes:

Jack Fowler [52:07]: "Donald Trump said Friday he would end the terms of multiple members of the Kennedy center board and make himself a chair of a new board."

Unnamed Guest [56:03]: "Donald, he's interested. That gets people very angry that he's interested in culture."

The discussion underscores Trump's broader cultural and political agenda to reshape American cultural institutions away from what he perceives as progressive and anti-traditional influences.

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5. DEI Policies and Their Impact on Safety and Operations

A critical examination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies follows, with Victor and his guest arguing that these initiatives undermine meritocracy and operational safety, particularly in sectors like aviation. They contend that prioritizing DEI over qualifications leads to increased risks and inefficiencies.

Notable Quotes:

Unnamed Guest [75:32]: "When you ignore all that or you lessen or you depreciate the importance, then what you're doing is you're setting up a domino effect."

Unnamed Guest [80:04]: "We're not going to have a cash society anymore. And if you're an electrician or you're a plumber, you're going to be paid on a payroll system."

Victor illustrates these points with examples of near-miss aviation incidents and the potential dangers of disregarding expertise in favor of ideological compliance.

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6. Victor's Essay on MAGA and Trump's Challenges

Towards the end of the episode, Victor discusses his essay for the New Criterion magazine titled "Maga Agonistes." In this piece, he outlines the inherent contradictions within the MAGA movement and the challenges Trump faces in fulfilling his agenda without overstepping practical and economic boundaries.

Notable Quote:

Victor Davis Hanson [81:51]: "If you say you're going to lower taxes on Social Security... you might get over a decade, a trillion dollars of tax revenue that's lost."

He analyzes Trump's strategies, such as increasing defense budgets and restoring deterrence against international threats, while highlighting the logistical and ideological obstacles that could impede these initiatives.

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7. Conclusion and Final Remarks

In wrapping up, Jack Fowler acknowledges the depth of the discussions and thanks listeners for their support. He highlights Victor's contributions and encourages audiences to engage with his writings and subscribe to his platforms for more insightful content.

Notable Quote:

Jack Fowler [91:15]: "Sometimes I write a 10-minute video. Sometimes I wear a cool hat. It's a cool hat picture."

The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to rate and subscribe to the podcast, emphasizing the importance of supporting independent voices in media.

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Overall Insights:

• Critique of Left-Wing Ideologies: The episode consistently critiques left-leaning policies and ideologies, particularly focusing on their impact on social structures, economic policies, and cultural institutions.

• Advocacy for Strong Leadership: Through discussions on Trump's actions and policies, the hosts advocate for strong, decisive leadership to counteract what they perceive as unchecked progressive overreach.

• Emphasis on Meritocracy and Security: A recurring theme is the importance of maintaining merit-based systems to ensure safety, efficiency, and economic stability, opposing policies that prioritize ideological compliance over qualifications.

• Concern Over Social and Economic Costs: The hosts express significant concern over the social and economic costs of illegal immigration, DEI policies, and cultural shifts, arguing that these factors contribute to systemic inefficiencies and societal strain.

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This detailed summary encapsulates the key discussions and viewpoints presented in "The Fury and the Fantasy of the Left" episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show, providing a comprehensive overview for those who have not listened to the podcast.

Transcript

[Victor Davis Hanson]

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[Jack Fowler]

Hello ladies. Hello gentlemen. Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I am Jack Fowler, the host. You're here to listen to the wisdom that will come from the namesake, Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. And Victor's got a website, the Blade of Perseus. Its address is victorhansen.com More on that later. Why you should be subscribing we are recording on the 8th of February and this particular episode will be up on Thursday, February 13th. Lot to Talk about. Israeli hostages, Donald Trump taking over the Kennedy Center, South Africa sanctions, sanctions against the icc, energy issues. A piece, a great essay Victor has written for the new Criterion Maga Agonistes. And maybe we'll talk about some Democrat party just destruction. Ongoing destruction. Yeah, I know I'm crying.

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, it's not Harry Truman, that's for sure.

[Jack Fowler]

No. Although maybe some some woman who thinks she's Harry Truman. Right? More likely. We'll get to all that when we come back from these important messages.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

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[Jack Fowler]

We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show again. I have to say this particular episode is up on the 13th. Thursday the 13th. Victor, two great things about today. Well, one about today the 13th is that I will be meeting in New York City with some nuns from the Sisters of Life. And I thrilled to be with nuns of pious ladies and habits. So that's going to be kind of groovy. I do that for my. Where I work, where I have a normal job. At Anvil, we're trying to help the Sisters of Life. Terrific order. And then the next day, Mrs. F and I will be celebrating our 39th.

[Unnamed Guest]

Congratulations. Congratulations.

[Jack Fowler]

Poor thing. Poor Sharon.

[Unnamed Guest]

So anyway.

[Jack Fowler]

Talking about poor things, and that's not a. Should not be a comical lead in. But Today on the 8th, the newspapers Victor report on his headline, condition of hostages freed by Hamas a crime against humanity, says Israeli President. This is from just the news, which is the mothership of this podcast. John Solomon's group, Palestinian terrorist group Hamas released three Israeli hostages on Saturday, and their conditions sparked alarm among the Israeli government. President Isaac Herzog said the frail hostages represented, quote, a crime against humanity. Their names, Ohad Ben Ami, eli Sharabi, and or Levy. They were abducted, of course, on October 7th. It's a. Victor. I'm not surprised by that. And I won't be surprised when retribution comes at the time of, I guess, Israel's choosing, which I think could happen and probably should happen. Your thoughts, Victor?

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, Hamas was headed for extinction had Israel been allowed to go into the last corridor near Sinai. And they would have. But of course, they value human life. I mean, it's. It's kind of strange how the Hamas rationalized it. When I was on campus and I had these impromptu talks and I mentioned that to one of the protesters, and he kind of turned it around and said, well, Israel doesn't value Palestinian life. They charge. I mean, they think one Israeli is worth a thousand hostages. And I said, no, it's you who think that, not the Israelis. But there was something that, when we talked about that I was worried about this deal, and I'm not an Israeli, so I understand that. I'm happy to get the hostage home. But they were not allowed to destroy Hamas. Hamas is a cowardly organization. When they went in on October 7, they butchered innocent, largely unarmed people, raped them, mutilated them, burned them, every imaginable medieval crime. And then they snuck back and they hid in tunnels underneath mosques, schools and hospitals, meaning they were willing to endanger civilians to protect themselves. And then they. They were almost eliminated. And then after Israel stopped this, they put some of them who were surviving, put their uniforms, and now they're releasing the hostages, but they're doing so under the auspices. Have you seen these guys and their fatigues and their Green mask and all of this. And they act like they're so tough. And these are the people who fought the Israelis and were completely decimated. But now, because they cannot fight the Israelis, they act like they're triumphant almost, and they're controlling. So get rid of the idea that Hamas won't come back. They're already in prominent positions. And forget the idea of Western liberals who say, well, the Gaza people don't really like them. Yes, they only had an election one time and they hijacked the government. But two things. When you saw the hostages released, did you see the anger that the actual Hamas terrorists were trying to keep away the Gazan mob who might kill the hostages? And therefore they wouldn't get their other terrorist friends back? Not that they wouldn't mind, but they wanted to protect the Israelis so that they would get their thugs back. But my point is, it reminded me so much of the scenes from Palestinian videos and podcasts and television the day after October 7, or indeed on October 7, when they brought back corpses and Israeli hostages in trucks back through the hole in the fence and the whole crowds came up and kicked them and spit on them. And when they have, every time they release them, the crowds come by. So my point is, I don't believe in collective punishment, but I do believe that the Gazan people support the idea of October 7th. And the only reason they might object to it is they thought that Israel would not respond in the way it would that it did. And that's the only degree of remorse that they have, that tactically it wasn't smart, probably that they didn't kill enough people. And what's really disturbing is we have all of these people who come over from the Middle east and they protest on these campuses for much of 2024, and they don't differentiate, as liberals say they do, between Hamas and Palestinians. To them, they're one and the same. And finally, they were wearing even Hezbollah and Hamas insignia. And these are terrorists. And I don't know why they're here, but Donald Trump has issued an executive order that if anybody breaks US Law on a student visa and engages in pro terrorist activity, they'll be dep. Supported. And that was. I don't know. I don't know why we take people from that engage or support terrorism from that part of the world and bring them over here, and then they become a powerful lobbying force, as we saw in the election. I just don't get it. I. I don't get it at all.

[Jack Fowler]

Victor, you know, this should have been, maybe I Don't want to advocate for the death of anyone, but it sounds like this should have been a chapter in the end of everything, you know, that there just has to be some degree of annihilation here because if there's.

[Unnamed Guest]

Not, well, Hamas has to be annihilated or the Palestinian. They'll never happen anything. And I do think, from what I understand from Israeli friends and what I've read is the Israelis now from interrogations and thousands of hours of video on home security cameras, they have a corpus of almost everybody who went in there, you know what I mean? That was not masked. And even the people that were masked, they have testimonies from other people who participated. So I think they have got also a corpus of how many of the killers of the 1200 they have killed themselves. And it's a sizable number. But they're going to hunt down every one of those people and they know it. And I think we'll see what happens. I just don't see Hamas giving up every hostage. That's what I'm saying. Because if they give up every hostage, the Israelis will finish going down list by list to the people who were murderers and rapists and torturers. And they're cowardly people, so they're not going to want the. All of this stuff is braggadocio. That's part of the weird thing about the Middle East. It's all of this Hamas, Hezbollah. You see all these videos, Death to America, Death to Israel. These big guys, six feet tall with beards and blindfolded or they have mask on. I don't know what it is. When AK47, da, da, da, da. And you're supposed to feel that these are the crack. And then you get these left wing journalists that go over there from Europe especially, but some from the United States, and they're so impressed. These are the crack troops of Hezbollah. They're not like Hamas. They're the deadliest troops in the Middle East. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they don't fight very well when they're confronted in a fair fight, a fair meaning. They know where the enemy is, the enemy knows where they is and they go to it. And then. But they do fight well against civilians. And then their supporters over here talk a great game and they climb up flag poles and they tear down flags. They go to the LA Veteran Cemetery. They deface it. They deface the Lincoln Memorial. They deface the walls right outside the White House. They chase Jews into the Cooper Union, threaten them. They go at Columbia and break into people's classes. They deface and break into the Stanford president's office. They tell Jews to go to one side of the room, as they did at Stanford. The other people tear down posters. But, but, but when somebody says, that's all fine and good, you, you have a right to protest. And, but you have broken a university policy. And you know that if I was at the University of Gaza and I started waving an Israeli flag, I'd be dead. So we don't want to be too reciprocal given our asymmetrical sources of, you know, types of government, but you'll get your wish now and you can go home. And then they get angry and. Ah, yeah, it's like there was. I don't know if you saw it because you're in the east coast, but there was a big story here about. I don't know if she was undocumented or not, but she broke into a park not too far in Bakersfield from here. I know the park because I speak there a lot. And she saw an American flag, and because she's angry about the undocumented, she tore it down and she raised a Mexican flag. I saw that. Yeah. The sheriff came in to arrest her and then she resisted and pushed him and said, we're going to kill you. My father's going to kill you. I'm an Aztec. Her name was Aguilar or Aguilaria, which somebody pointed out correctly. It's from the Latin aquila, an eagle. It's not an Aztec name at all. It's a European name. But she was saying that she is an Aztec, as if she's some kind of racialist, and that she can differentiate her pedigree from mestizo to Spanish to Aztec or whatever. I don't think she speaks Nahutul at all. I don't think she's ever been to Yucatan, but maybe she has. And the point I'm making is.

[Jack Fowler]

Foreign type.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah. The only thing I got is, so you're mad about the undocumented who are here illegally. And remember, the first round is 90% criminals. So she's always angry. And she's so angry while on US soil, whether she's an American citizen, I don't know. But she's tearing down the flag that all these people want to stay in that represents the soil and they're waving the flag that under no circumstances she wants to go back to. And you tell me. And then the only way that you can square that circle is what she said. She said, this is America. This was Mexico's land. This was Mexico's Land. Well, according to your own settler hierarchy, it was Native American land. And then the Spanish stole it from the Native Americans, and then the Mexicans stole it from the Spanish, and then we stole it from the Mexican. So we're fourth in line from the Native Americans. Anyway, it's the same, all of us. This, I don't know what the word is, this protest mentality or this anti Western mentality. It's all predicated on reality and it's all predicated on the idea that I hate the west and what the west provides. But I don't want to leave it. I want all of its material superiority, I want all of its freedoms, but I don't want to cultivate it. I don't want to invest in it, want to be parasitical upon it. And if you dare, send me back to where I'm praising the place, you're a racist or sexist or xenophobe or whatever. But the only way people can get their attention, as Donald Trump has shown, when you have an asymmetry like Panama or Venezuela or Colombia or Mexico or Canada, then you more or less give them their wish. You say, okay, you want to send all the people here that are in jail and you want to dump out your prisons, you think that's cute because we have an enfeebled president. Okay, you want a hostile, it's your choice. So we'll just put a tariff and we're not going to buy anything and you're not going to get a lot of stuff from us. And then it's, oh, my God, that's a bully. Okay, you want to bring in the Chinese, you want to violate the spirit and the law of the Panama Canal Treaty, that's fine, but we're going to do the fall. And then they get angry. But it's all predicated on they want. If you're a Panamanian, you want to use the US Dollar, you don't want your own currency, and you're glad you're tickled to death that the Americans went down there in the way the French could not do. And the Mexicans. Remember when the Panama Canal was built, we took it over from the French that had failed. Lesseps had done the Suez and he could not do Panama. It was not like the Suez Canal. They had to have locks. The climate was killing thousands because of yellow fever, dysentery. And it was a very unsettled political situation. Nobody wanted to do it. They thought about going through Mexico, they thought about going through Nicaragua, and we did it. And that's the source of income. If we didn't do it, Panama wouldn't exist. We broke it away from Colombia. It wouldn't exist and yet it wouldn't exist today. That's their income and they use the dollar and yet they look at that magnanimity by with the Chinese and bringing in these Chinese imperialists to I, I don't know what the purpose was either to get rich or to and humiliate us or both.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah. But well, how we let that happen is beyond me.

[Unnamed Guest]

Joe Biden well, when did the Chinese take those ports?

[Jack Fowler]

I thought it was a while ago.

[Unnamed Guest]

That they've been 2016, I think.

[Jack Fowler]

Oh, I said okay.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, they expanded it too. They were, they were in on the 201617 expansion. Well, yeah, they, they were pretty ubiquitous.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah, well we, we, we talked. You talked. We got your wisdom at length about on our previous podcast about Panama. But right now I want to take a moment for our sponsor, Quince. Quince has all the must haves like Mongolian cashmere crew neck sweaters from $50, iconic 100% leather jackets and versatile flow knit activewear. The best part, all Quince Items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. By partnering directly with top factories, Quince cuts out the cost of the middleman and passes on the savings to you and me. That's us. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices along with premium fabrics and finishes. I love that I'm a Quince customer. Indulge in affordable luxury. Go to quince.comVictor for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Quince Q U I N C E dot com Victor to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comVictor and we thank the good people at Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor I was going to talk about the Kennedy center, but since we're kind of got in the immigration issue, I thought this would be a worthwhile follow up. And here's the headline from the New York Post this week. East Hampton officials reassure residents that officers won't deport illegal migrants. So here's the first few paragraph of this story. East and this hoity toity place. East East Hampton government officials are trying to quell wealthy residents fears that local police could deport illegal migrants from the tony town, many of whom work as maids, landscapers and nannies to support the luxurious lifestyles of the well off locals. Village and town leaders held a special community meeting Tuesday to assure citizens of long Island's exclusive name, where the median property value is $2 million, that their hired help are not on their radar when it comes to deportation. Final little paragraph here. East Hampton Village Police Chief Jeffrey Erickson stressed that local law enforcement officers do not have authority to enforce federal law and won't go on to undocumented immigrants if given an ICE detainer. Victor. They want what they want.

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, we went through this when Ron DeSantis brilliantly exposed it. Remember everybody about the four years of the WHO open borders, an illegal alien, 12 million. That was all going merrily along until Ron DeSantis and Governor Abbott in Texas said, you know what? These people are all for illegal immigration in the abstract. What if they were in the concrete, huh? Let's bus people up to Martha's Vineyard. So they did. Not a lot. And immediately they wanted a virtue signal. So they had puff jackets and their old designer hand clothes, remember little boxes, and they went to their civic center and gave them this. And then they thought, that's it, isn't it? I mean, don't they see how magnanimous I am? I gave them my son's puff jacket, and I had a pair of my husband's Gucci shoes, and I had an old pair of designer French sunglasses I gave to them.

[Jack Fowler]

Power bars.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah. And you know what? Don't we have that range rover with 100,000 miles? Can't we give it to them? But. But they're still here. What are we going to do? Well, we'll send them to a military base or the inner city. Well, that's great. So then they said, oh, we love you so much. We just would like you to go now. And they did. But this is a little different because now it's their servants, as we say in Latin, serui. And they want them to be parachuted in. You know, if they could get drones, that would be the best solution that they could come up with. If you get a drone, they could ride a drone, come in in the morning, land, clean the toilets, fix the house up, and then the drone could take them back to, I don't know where they don't care. Maybe a hotel in Manhattan or something. And they can deal with gangs, but they do. They. And I'm talking cynically because I have this bizarre experience that I live in an area where the per capita income is somewhere between 16 and 17,000 versus one where it's 130,000 and it's only four hours apart, and California is 45% to 50% Hispanic because of open borders for the most part, the majority of that population is mostly from Mexico. But this is ground zero here, where I am, because cheaper and there are no rules. California is the most legal and the most illegal state. And what I mean by that is to accommodate this problem of having 11 to 12 million people who came in over the last 20 years illegally and cannot obtain parody because most came without a high school diploma, without skills, without English, without legality, without money, then you had to have all of these social programs, but you also had to suspend the law. And when you have social programs and you suspend the law, somebody has to pay for that. So what California did is a lot of people say to me, why is it so hyper regulated? Why do they measure the height of your mailbox in Atherton? Or why when I want to take out a eucalyptus branch in Menlo Park, I got to get a permit? Or why do we have all these? Well, because we have no regulations where I live, so. Well, I do. So within my 2 mile radius, I would say there's 10 compounds. And traditionally this means an old ranch style farmhouse is owned or rented out by somebody. And then he does this, he gets a Winnebago, an old trailer, a garage and four or five or a big barn and divides it up into places. And then he brings entire families from Mexico and they bring in dogs, cats, a lot of animals, horses, cattle. And something that is zoned for a single family is now maybe have 50 people. And all these California rules that have to be maintained because we are a green sensitive state have to be suspended. And so what that means is all the people who follow laws have to be hyper regulated to balance it out. So I have a huge bin, but I also now have to separate my garbage from glass, from this, from plastic. And I also. On our land, we have an old pond. Beautiful. It was one of the most beautiful places I thought in the world growing up. My brother sold it. It's a long story, but I walk around it every night. It's adjacent to my little 42 acres, the remnant of our farm. You should see it, Jack. I'll put some things on. It looks, it's just undescribable what it looks like. If you're an environmentalist and you believe in the pristine wildlife and natural habitat and fauna and flora, you would be shocked and you would be shocked about the indifference. People come in, they come in with. Now, this week, there's a big new washer in the almond orchard. There's a big refrigerator, there is a dryer, there is a car seat but most of it just wet garbage, just junk. And it's strong, strewn all over the alleyways. It's into the bottom of the pond. So when the water comes in from the irrigation district, you get bottles and stuff that float up and you see animals picking through it. There's a whole bunch of coyotes this morning I saw going through it. So my point is that there's no rules. So nobody. I asked a person once, a person who came out to inspect my solar panels, I got solar panels. It took a year, Jack, one year to get the permits. And then when I put them on a beautiful shed that was built in 1980 and met code, they didn't know it was on their map. So they said, you know what? That's not on our map. And I said it's because it's an ag exempt building. And there was no law that you had to have a permit in 1980. You just had to meet code. And anytime they came out for another inspection, they looked at it. Oh no, no, no. It has to pass. So I had to go reapply. Well, I said there's a mile away. There's five homes on a single dwelling zone place. And they're not homes. There's open romex, there's porta potties with no septic. There's horses out in the middle of the road sometime it's just a chaotic and they're using this area. And he said, are you crazy? Why would I go over there? I said what do you mean why would I go over there? There's M13, there's Serenos, there's nortegnos. He said what would I do? Put a red tag on one of Winnebagos? And they're going to obey. In 30 days they're going to have it up to code. There is no code. So I said, then you go after me. He said, basically that's what we do. We go after people who follow the law and we have millions of people who are on the other side of the law. Not in a bad way. And he was not, he was defending them. I shouldn't present this as if he was criticizing them. So what I'm saying is that these people in Atherton have. They're hyper regulated and they like this and they do not know where these people live. They must by needs live under different circumstances in hotels in the Queens or the Bronx and they will not follow the protocols that everybody else has to follow. So last night we went out to dinner and I would say I saw three open marts And I'm talking not just I'm on the corner selling root beer, I'm talking about a de facto restaurant with long tables and cook and everything. There's no health inspection, there's no sales tax, there's no income tax. And then another one where it was all lit up and they were selling clothes and everything, flowers. But my point is, in California, we have a huge black market. And about two miles from me, there's about 5,000 people every Sunday. And that's where they do their shopping. From everything from furniture to appliances. No sales tax, nothing. But to make up for that, you've got to be hyper regulated. And that's what people don't understand about illegal aliens. That when you bring somebody in to work in your home and then you send them out, and then you say that Jose was the greatest guy in the world, he probably is. But you don't know how this system is making Jose live. So Jose will be living contrary to the zoning laws or the health laws or all these regulations that make life very burdensome for everybody else. And so in California, just expand that by a million or two incidents every day. And it's frightening. And so, you know, and then people come in with guns. And I've seen protected species like barn owls. I saw a great horned owl about five years ago shot. And the people just shoot. They come in, they fish, they show, they throw trash everywhere and nobody speaks English. And then you're a racist or you're a xenophobe or you're a settler or whatever term of disparagement is used for noting it. But if Gavin Newsom wanted really to stop the $76 billion deficit and he wanted to apply the law equally, I think he'd have a revolution. It wouldn't be about deportation alone. It would be about saying, you know what? We've got the biggest black market of any state in the union, and we're going to crack down on everybody who's not paying sales tax and not filing income tax. We're not going to have a cash society anymore. And if you're an electrician or you're a plumber, you're going to be paid on a payroll system. No more barter, no more cash. And I think it would be, it would, it would just, it would destroy thousands of lives. And that's how it is. And, and all the people in, in Martha's Vineyard just see one aspect. So then they become very liberal. And giving somebody a puff jacket does not make you a saint. It really doesn't. You are employing somebody here who's illegally here. And that is not the end of it. That's the beginning of it. And so that's what Tom Holman's trying to do. They're trying to say 55 million people that were not born in The United States, 16% of the population, some citizens, some green card, but the majority here illegally, it's too much. And we've got to go back to a normal application of the law. So if somebody wants to put solar panels on their shed, we are going to regulate them. Okay. But if somebody wants to rent out five Winnebagos, we're going to regulate them too. And it's not going to be that the people who were arrested for breaking the law, we're not going to say, oh, you're picking on migrants or you're a racist. No, no, we're going to treat people, it's racism. The other way. The other way. You drove out 15 million people out of California, maybe 20 the last 40 years, because to subsidize this huge group coming in who needed to have parity, you tax the hell out of the middle class. And the people who were wealthy were for all this because they were not subject to the consequences of their ideology. And these are the Martha Vineyard types of California, just the way it is.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, fascinating, Victor, fascinating. Well, we're going to, since I was talking about New York, we're going to stick to New York a little bit and then we'll, we have a bunch of Donald Trump actions to get your views on. And we'll get to all this when we come back from these important messages.

[Unnamed Sponsor]

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[Jack Fowler]

We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show again. We're recording on the 8th of February and this episode will be up on Thursday the 13th. Victor's website is the Blade of Perseus. VictorHansen.com is the address. If you're a fan of Victor's writing, you should subscribe. It's $65 a year which is discounted from the monthly rate which is 650amonth. You want to do monthly, do monthly, but it's cheaper to take an annual subscription. Why would you do that? Because Victor writes a ton of stuff every week and collectively annually for The Blade of Perseus. Two exclusive articles, one exclusive a video. Plus, there are links to Victor's many other appearances, the archives of these podcasts, his writings for American greatness, and weekly syndicated columns.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So go there.

[Jack Fowler]

Subscribe. You're a fan of Victor.

[Unnamed Guest]

You are.

[Jack Fowler]

You love his writing. Get it all. The Blade of Perseus. Victor, Here's a. There's a headline New York Post. You know, politically here, Governor Hochul, who barely won an election and she's up in 2026, and Lee Zeldin, who is now the, oh, he's the environmental, like EPA director. He was a congressman. There's some talk that he will run against her again, but there's also talk of a primary challenge from Richie Torres, who's a congressman from Ohio, the Bronx. But he's been a great friend of Israel and a critic of the way things are going to some degree with the Democrat Party, but especially in New York State, because Hochul is one of these green, mad, insane people who are spending a ton of your money, taxpayers money, for these green programs. It costs. Somebody's got to pay for it. How's it paid? Well, here's a headline. Well, here's a piece from the New York Post. The utility giant, that's Con Edison, Con Ed is asking the Public Service Commission to jack up average electric bills by 11.4% and send gas bills soaring 13.3%.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Move.

[Jack Fowler]

That could mean a wallet busting. $1,848 more per year than customers paid in 2020. Victor, that's a staggering amount. And maybe I can afford that, but I don't know how a lot of people can afford essentially $2,000 more than they were paying five years ago. On top of everything else, they're paying a ton more. Last thing, on my own bill in Connecticut, you know, I pay 200amonth here last month, and there's $37 for public benefits, which is. Has nothing to do with electricity for me, has to do with welfare programs. So this is a tax. Everyone's being taxed. Insanely. Yeah.

[Unnamed Guest]

We're up to almost 40 cents a kilowatt. We have the same problem. Our bills are more expensive than yours. But you're similar in New York. I read that Con Edison has the same problem as PG&E. One quarter of their users do not pay their bills, and it's against the law to cut their power off. So if you, whether you're in need or not, if you choose not to, you'll have an administrative hearing or something. But you'll continue to get power and then you wait for the amnesty that's coming from the governor or something and then you are saying to everybody else, I'm not going to pay my power bill, I'm going to run my air conditioning. And all you people, when it's 106 in Fresno and who can't afford to run your air conditioning, I'm going to run mine because I'm not going to pay my bill. That's one thing. And then wind and solar, Jack is really inefficient. So they don't make any power at night. And so when you dismantle a coal plant or a nuclear plant or a natural gas and you say that you're bragging that you've got subsidized solar and wind, it works for the day, but at night there's no power. So then what do you do? You have to buy it from places that are red states that have coal or nuclear. So here in California we're building this huge. Every time I go down Manning Avenue there's another square mile of huge panels. But we have, I don't know what the figure is, but it's over 100% of our generation requirements are met now during the day because of these massive policies. And they're so massive that we used to give people incentives to put solar panels on their roof. And we had the first, first group and then we said, you know what, it's too generous. Even though you only got about half for generating it as you paid for using it. And then the second group I came in on like eight years ago and it was about equal. And then we're saying now we're still broke. We built so many wind and solar, we really don't need everybody to have a solar panel. But we can't say that, so we won't really renumerate them. And now they broke the solar panel industry in California because until you get affordable batteries, the amount of money that you would put for your panels and get back is gone from three or four years, seven, eight, 10 years. And so now the only people who are putting solar panels, panels or using their own batteries so they can use it at night or something. And it's not that I think it takes about 10 years to pay back now and there's no money being invested in the grid. So when you're making inefficient power for non economic reasons, non rational reasons, but you're doing it for an ideology of global warming. When the Chinese, it won't matter anyway. The Chinese are polluting the hell out of the planet. Excuse me, but when you're doing that and then you're making inefficient sources of power, you still have to buy expensive power. And people know that. So California or New York, they know that. So if you're going to import power at night, it's going to be expensive because you have no choice. And then if one quarter of your customers are not paying that and you identify them as a protected species of indigenous victims, then somebody's going to have to pay for it. And you're going to pay for it in one of two mechanisms. You're either not going to invest in the grid, and then in California, you often get wildfires from faulty sparky lines, or you're going to have to raise rates for the idiots that pay their bill on time. And that's what I think. You talk to people. I heard that word maybe five times in the last 10 years. Why did you move out of California? I go to Florida, Nevada, I say, I lived in California. And I said, why did you move out? Because I'm not an idiot, Victor. And that means I don't like to pay the highest income taxes, the second or third highest sales, the highest gas taxes, and get the worst schools, the worst infrastructure, the highest crime. And somewhere between the alpha and the omega, to use that metaphor again, there's the reality. And the reality is we have large numbers of very poor people that we've imported or invited into the state. And we have two sets of rules to accommodate them. And one set means they are exempt from consequences of their plight, and the other group has to be non exempt to pay for it, to subsidize it. And so that's just the way it is. And if you, one, if you have a large community that's being paid daily in cash and doesn't obey sanitation in terms of disposing of garbage or refrigerators, or doesn't want to spend $30 at the county dump, then they're not going to be prosecuted. They're just not going to happen. I've called maybe in my lifetime of 50 years, 10 times the county or the state EPA, when there's really big things like 600ft worth of broken glass and barrels of oil. I'm talking about a whole vine roll where they had oil and lubricants and paint, where somebody just took a big flatbed, got all of his neighbors, apparently all their crap, and then went down a vine roll hidden at night and threw it off. So it was a blanket there must have been jack 500 fluorescent light tubes in that. There must have been 300 gallons of paint. There must have been six 50 barrel lubricant, old oil drums. There must have been, I don't know, a thousand pieces of two by fours with nails in them and sheetrock scrap. It was just like that. And I called and called and I was told, number one, not only are we not going to take it out of here, and number two, you'll never find their names. They're not going to leave their trash there. And number three, how do we know you didn't do it? And so what do you mean? Well, this all has to be taken. The lubricants have contaminated the site. All has to be taken to a toxic waste dump which was about 80 miles away. And you're going to have to do it or you're going to have to call an authorized licensed removal service or we're going to assume you did it. Or you can just leave it there. The guy said off the record, you can leave it there. And I said you can't even diss the row. What do you do that gets people really angry? All that. So when you say white people, I don't think anybody understands why Hispanic communities on the border are against illegal immigration. Because once you have that incident in your life or once your son is accosted by an M13 gang member at school or once you are a parent in a Hispanic community and you worked really hard for a. That you have a competitive high school with advanced placement and suddenly the classroom is swarmed with about 50 people who don't speak English and you've got to go back to English as a second language. You get angry about that. You really do. Or that rents go up or your grandmother has got to go to the heart clinic and it's a medical system and she always had an appointment. Suddenly you show up and there's 50 people in line that have never been to a doctor. Yeah. And then the people who are promoting all this are wealthy white people on the coast who say, I feel really good. I have open borders and people in southern Mexico are getting all this great care. I just don't want to see them because I don't want to. And I have my own concierge doctor and I can. Dang. So it's really bad. It is very bad. And I don't. It's. Donald Trump is the only president in my lifetime that tried to stop it. The only one. The Bushes. Neither. Bush did. Nope.

[Jack Fowler]

Going to need a chain reaction of revolutions here. Well, we're going to talk about Donald Trump Victor and we'll start off with his, I think the, well, his actions with Call on culture with the Kennedy Center. But first I have to ask ourselves, our dear listeners, if they've ever wondered how much of their personal data is out there on the Internet for anyone to see. And it's more than you think. Your name, contact info, Social Security number, home address, even information about your family members, all are being compiled by data brokers and sold online. I recently found a solution and this is a service called Delete Me. Delete Me 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, Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping your and your families personal information from data broker websites. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me now at a special discount. For listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen show today, get 20% off your delete me plan by texting Victor to 64000. Text Victor to 64000. That's Victor to 64000 message and data rates may apply C terms for details. And we thank the good people from Delete Me for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, we'll get your take on this. Kennedy center gets a house cleaning Trump to name himself new Kennedy Center Board Chair Donald Trump said Friday he would end the terms of multiple members of the Kennedy center board and make himself a chair of a new board, putting himself at the helm of the Washington D.C. cultural institution. I've decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the board of trustees, including the chairman who does not share our vision for a golden age in arts and culture. We will soon announce a new board with an amazing chairman, Donald J. Trump, the president said on Truth Truth Social. Then he went on to talk about how the Kennedy center last year was, was hosting drag shows. Anyway, Victor, I, I'm, you know, it's not as important as other executive orders he's, he's issued, but it is important.

[Unnamed Guest]

Oh, it's going to the left. Yeah, the nea. We had one of the potential NEA new directors on and the nea.

[Jack Fowler]

Shubo.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, yeah, we've had him on. He, I hope I don't think he's been nominated yet, has he? No, but he would be very good. And then we had the NEH coming up and the Kennedy. It was very funny. The Bradley foundation, of which I've been a member, I think, for 14 years, 13 years. We used to have our annual Bradley Prize ceremonies there at the Kennedy center for a decade. It's a beautiful venue, and it was very close to where people were staying in hotels and accessible, but it got too expensive and there were other problems. I didn't know if this was one of the problems or not, but we haven't had it there. And I think at least seven or eight years. It's too bad. And I think a lot of people feel that it's kind of like the National Cathedral, you know what I mean? These beautiful, iconic places. And we saw the National Cathedral Bishop in action shortly after inauguration when she lectured the Trump family about. I don't know what she was trying to, I guess, about illegal immigration, that they weren't kind enough or they weren't tolerant enough like she was. And I think she lived in a six bedroom mansion. You know, it's kind of like Lloyd Austin lecturing the country on white rage and white supremacy and discrimination. And then, unlike Pete Hexseth, who doesn't have Lloyd's money, he lives in a. What is it, a big estate, a $7 million Washington estate.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Guest]

They're after Pete because the prior administration, as I understand it, he was living in housing for the Secretary, or Federal housing, Pentagon housing. And it needed to be painted, and it was ordered to be painted, and they're painting it now when he's there. So then Pete is an elitist, because, you see, he wants his house painted. His house. It's government property. Yeah. He's not. He's not putting a heated doghouse like the UC Santa Cruz president did. I wrote about that. Yeah. Years ago. That was a sad thing. She killed herself, so I shouldn't make fun of her.

[Jack Fowler]

Well.

[Unnamed Guest]

But anyway. Yeah. I mean, where do you even start about all this? There's nowhere to.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, he's laid down a marker, and I think that's.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, Kennedy, he's interested. That gets people very angry that he's interested in culture. And he notices that Malenia was not put on Vogue's cover and they've gone after her official portrait. Did you see that?

[Jack Fowler]

Yes.

[Unnamed Guest]

She wore a tuxedo, they said. And the subtext of that is, this is the most beautiful, stunning, tasteful first lady we've had since Jackie Kennedy. And if she were left wing, she would be over every magazine and we'd be gushing about her taste and her beauty. But because she worked, she's married in the ninth ring of Dante's Inferno to Lord Satan. Ms. Lucifer has to be right. Deplatform shadow band.

[Jack Fowler]

Erase Ridiculed non person. And then, and then.

[Unnamed Guest]

And the people that write these stories of. I was looking at the people who write these stories. Megyn Kelly mentioned it too. They're always 20 something, you know what I mean? They're right out of the Ivy League or they're. And they're not very successful. They're not experts. I'm not saying they're experts on fashion or beauty or anything. They're just angry people who feel that they're a soldier in the phalanx of the left. And each must do their duty. And their duty is to attack anybody that disagrees with them.

[Jack Fowler]

In personal terms, snark is, it's important for them to be snarky in public. That's a very.

[Unnamed Guest]

Snarky in public. Yeah, snarkly in public.

[Jack Fowler]

Snarkily. All right. Anyway, we have other important Donald Trump actions, I think, to get your views on Victor, including his sanctions of the International Criminal Court and South Africa. And if we have time to get your, your take on your, the piece you've written for the New Criterion, and we'll do that when we come back from these important mess.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

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[Jack Fowler]

We are back, ladies and gentlemen, with the Victor Davis Hansen show recording on the 8th of February. This episode is up on Thursday the 13th. Victor, we talked once or twice about South Africa and just what a hellhole it is. And Donald Trump, I love this. He issued this sanction order against them for targeting the white minority and he backs resettling Africana refugees. The story is President Donald Trump signed an executive order sanctioning the egregious actions of the Republic of South Africa. The South African government has passed legislation allowing it to seize white owned farms without compensation. The executive order goes in shocking disregards of its citizens rights. The Republic of South Africa recently enacted Expropriation Act 13, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, that's about. I'll Just read one other thing here from the executive order. Order. In addition, South Africa has taken aggressive positions toward the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International court of justice, etc. So Donald, I mean of all the things he has to do, right, but to go there and see a terrible injustice, a country of great potential wealth just falling into some talk about Dante's ninth circle. I'm so cool with him doing this. Your thoughts, Victor?

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, I mean you're violating the cardinal rule of leftism that because of historic injustice the victims are perpetually victims for the rest of their life. And the victimizers, even though they may be three to four generations away from apartheid in some cases if young kids, they are perennially guilty. So there is no sympathy in the United States given for say an 18 year old who grew up under black majority rule and he's been shot or killed or his dad's farm is taken. And the, the weird thing about this, we have a, it's not like we don't know what's going to happen because we have a laboratory example, it's called Rhodesia, Zimbabwe. And when Mugabe came in, all the left wing liberals said he was wonderful. He said exactly what the people in South Africa did that they didn't, they were not going to play tit for tat, that the white minority would be left alone, given the same rights as the black majority. They were. Rhodesia was the biggest, I think wheat producer in Africa. It was sophisticated cotton producer, British white minority. It was about 10, 12% of the population but it was an enormously wealthy country. And he turned out to be a communist thug every year and he was subsidized by the West. And then they finally turned on. He was a killer, he was a brute, he was a dictator. And he confiscated all of those farms and they all turned into wasteland basically and it became a net food import impoverished. And same thing with South Africa. It had one of the most sophisticated grid systems in the world. It had some of the best infrastructure, port facilities, it had some of the most productive farms, boar and English. It's some of the most beautiful places in the world. And it's, it's gone. It's all, it's got one of the highest crime rates in the world, highest rate, highest murder rates, the major cities. So they're coming, we know where it's going, it's going to go to and everybody knows it's going to happen. And a lot of the black majority know they will be poorer in 10 years. Than they are now and everybody in the United States knows it and no one will stop it. So they're going this cadre of thieves, thieves because they will confiscate the white farms, destroy them, and then they'll sell the land out and pocket the money to other black people only. And that's why even the Punjabi class or Asians that have been instrumental in South Africa's economic miracle, they're leaving in droves because it's a racist country. Now it's completely racist. The only difference is that the majority is the racist part. And then in the past it was the minority, the minority had apartheid. Well now the majority has apartheid basically. And the difference also is that the minority that practice apartheid, although that was racist, the one, there were two differences from the majority racism today. They were productive. They made this thing bloom for everybody in a sense, if you believe in trickle down. But more importantly, they were self critical. So there was a possibility to evolve because they were western. And western societies have self critical built in free speech and criticism. And so they voluntarily, after I shouldn't say voluntary, they had a civil war, they gave up power and they had a constitutional process to get to depower them or to make them part of the democracy. And they're a minority, so they don't have power. And the majority is not democratic. It doesn't believe in free speech, it does not believe in self criticism. It will never change. It'll get more and more racist until there's no more land to confiscate and there's no more wealth to confiscate and then South Africa will look like all the other countries in Africa. And until one over two. I mean I'm not being racist or stereotyping, but there are a few, you know, Ghana's trying to do. Well, it's not necessarily race, it's culture. And unless you adopt a free market society and a constitutional system of government and a separation between church and state and get her into tribalism, an independent judiciary, you're not going to have prosperity and security. Just a historical fact. So we're watching this and I think Trump thinks that there's a lot of people there that are classical liberal farmers or whatever and they're good citizens and he doesn't care what color they are. I'm sure if there's a Zulu farmer who has 100 acres and he's on the wrong tribe and they confiscate his, I'm sure they'll do that in some cases. He's welcome to the United States too. I just don't believe, though, that Trump will be able to get away with saying that we're not going to discriminate on the basis of country of origins or race and let in a law abiding South Africaner with all these skills, you know what I mean? It would be a very productive citizen. But apparently he says he will.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, problem here with tribalism, and you're right, like the intricate water system, as you mentioned, it falling apart because the job has to go to the cousin. And so I guess it's one thing, Victor, if you had a tribal society be tribalistic, but you can't have tribal tribalism. Run, run A We're doing it here, first world.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, we're not that far. We're not far that behind because we've had these fires and we've had, we're not talking about the tragedy in Washington, D.C. but once we're over the trauma, I think we're going to learn that there were protocols and there were problems in a systematic failure of the FAA and the people who set the policy for Black Hawks. And some of the decisions that were made were not based on merit. And we know that's true of Los Angeles in case of the Water and Power director, the mayor, the assistant mayor, et cetera. And once you substitute tribalism for merit, we know historically where you end up. And I always relate that weird thing that happened to me when I was in a little Russian taxi on the way back the way to Tripoli from the airport. And I'm not, they were like sinkholes, the, you know, the holes in the cement and the asphalt. And I said to the driver who spoke English, why, you're the fifth larger, largest exporter of oil, why do you have not enough asphalt? He said, we're a tribalist country. We hire our first cousin and sometimes the first cousin. And it's depressing, but it's. Remember another thing that happens, the word colonialist is only, there's only authenticity in one direction. So in other words, even though a lot of the Boers and English were there more than as long as, or in some cases longer than tribes that migrated from other parts of Africa, they are still, because they're white, they're considered settlers. However, if you're a black South African and you were to immigrate to Western society, you're not a settler. So if you are somebody from the Middle east, for example, or from Turkey and you migrate to Germany and I can show you what the German people were like in 60 AD or 80 AD or 100 AD if I read Tacitus Germania still, that's not considered that you're an interloper. No, no, no, no, no. Even if you're. If you say to a Turkish immigrant in Germany, you're from an imperialist tradition. The Ottomans were probably the biggest imperialist, the cruelest of all imperialists of the modern era. Doesn't matter. You have a perfect right to go to Germany and they have no right to go to Turkey. That's the way it works. Just the way it is.

[Jack Fowler]

I was stretching to find a piece of paper before Victor, because what you said, it's happening here. You were talking about the faa, but I had a headline about Brown University. Brown Medical School gives DEI more weight than Clinical Skills in promotion. Criteria for faculty. It's insane. Now, that's not tribalism. Hiring my uncle.

[Unnamed Guest]

And the people who wrote that, the Dartmouth medical faculty who. There were a lot of DEI people who helped write it, but ultimately there were probably a lot of white liberal people who endorsed that and then went to their faculty lounge and said, oh, I did this, I did this. I'm going to apply to be the head of the medical school at Harvard. Because at Dartmouth I had a mandatory DEI criteria that was more important than anything else. When they have a brain tumor, they will not get somebody from Dartmouth. That's for the ghetto. That is for the bar. That's for poor white people. All the people make these di decisions will find concierge doctors that were based on merit. They may be Indian, they may be Chinese, but they will be based on merit. Non, merit is for other people. And the problem with these white professional, bicoastal, left wing people who gave us DEI is that sometimes they can't escape the consequences of their own ideologies. I don't want to stereotype the people in Pacific Palisades, but a number of them were very left wing and voted for these people. And there's a number of people that fly and they vote for this and they are going to be subject. We're in a very dangerous position right now as far as. I get very tired when I know Sean Duffy, I like him a lot. But he has to say that flying statistically is very safe. It is. But that hides the fact that if you look at go arounds, for example, for various causes. We had almost a record year, I think in 2023. We've had near misses. New York Times wrote extensively about it. They were very worried about it. So everybody knows the problems that have existed. We've had long investigative Reports that the FAA was spending huge amounts of money on DEI but was not updating its computers. I was on a flight to Fresno, of all places, by a. I won't name the airline. A pilot sat next, and he told me, well, he wasn't happy that he had to go to Fresno for a variety of reasons about the airport. But he said. And I said, well, at least it's American. He said, what do you mean, at least it's American? And I said, well, you know, we have the very sophisticated air traffic. No, we don't. And I said, what do you mean we don't? He goes, europe is much more advanced than we are as far as our avionics and computers and tracking and radar. He said, we're. And I said, why is that? He said, well, we spend things on different things. Then he went into a tirade about. And he wasn't a United pilot, about United pilots had announced, he said, the year before. And I looked it up, it was true that 50% of all their trainees in pilot training, by statute, their own statute, had to be minorities, regardless of their background. So they were turning away military pilots, everybody. So that's just a fact. And that means maybe an 80% of that won't matter. They'll be trained. Fine. But you might be in a plane where a person wouldn't have been qualifying if he didn't fit a DEI category, and there might have been a military pilot that would have. And that might. In that particular distance.

[Jack Fowler]

Didn't United have a CEO who was.

[Unnamed Guest]

I think so. Delta did, too, didn't Delta? Was it Delta that. I think it was Delta that didn't they boycott the All Star team or something? They all in Georgia.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, that was because of the. Yeah, the election, actually. The All Star game was moved from. From Atlanta because of the Georgia election law. They were. Was moved to Colorado.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah. Now we find out that Stacy Abrams really did lose by 50,000 votes. She was never elected governor, but her PA, her pack, or her get out. The vote was completely corrupt.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Guest]

And embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it owes big fines. And it's nice work if you can get it. Yeah, it is. But when you look at that, I don't want to get into it, I'm not an expert, but when you look at the disaster that took all those lives, all those young people, was horrible at Reagan. You start to look at it and you think, who made the decision that military people would be flying anywhere near one of the busiest air corridors in the United States at Night. If they wanted to have very challenging conditions for combat at night, maybe they could have gone somewhere else. And who made the decision they would be wearing night vision goggles with limited peripheral vision? And who made the decision, who made the decision that they were at 340ft rather than 200? And who made the decision that they would be on a different frequency than the airliner? They couldn't communicate. And who made the decision that they weren't warned earlier where their trajectory might end up? And who made the decision there were not enough air traffic controllers in the tower at the time who made about a series of eight or nine administrative, staffing and operational decisions that all had to be in sequence to work. And what I'm getting at is those sequences exist every single day and there's near misses, but they all have to line up perfectly. And the odds are when they say air traffic control is safe, they're absolutely right. It's safer than any other mode of transportation. But when those series of choices line up, it's not Victor's hit by one other car, or there's a four car pile up, it's 60, 70, 80, 100, 200 dead all at once in a traumatic event. And so to prevent any chance of those dominoes lining up all perfectly, which are necessary given there used to be all of these safety, double safety, triple safety checks on that happening. And they're not there anymore, is what I'm saying. They're not there because we are making decisions on operation, staffing, promotion, tenure, retention, that are not based on pure merit. I'm not saying that everything is always based on pure amount. There's the old boy network. My boss's third cousin called me up. I'll hire him. My son is a great fireman. I understand that. But there is exams and there are experience on applications. And when you ignore all that or you lessen or you deprecate the importance, then what you're doing is you're setting up a domino effect and it's going to happen. And so when you get. And that's what they need to explain to all of us, unless they want to be more candid and say, that's Victor, of course we're hiring people that don't have the highest test scores and they don't have the best grades and they don't have the best experience. And until they master their craft, or maybe they can't, we don't know, there's going to be a heightened chance of an accident. But we're willing to have some collateral Damages for the purposes of DEI di is so important that to make a omelet, a few eggs have to be broken.

[Jack Fowler]

Right, right.

[Unnamed Guest]

And so you might have to play a little bit of musical chairs and hope you get the chair when the music stops. That's what it is.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah. The day before on that American Airlines flight at Reagan, another, there was another near miss and it was a flight from Hartford, which, a flight I've been, I've taken there frequently, this same flight.

[Unnamed Guest]

So I mentioned on the air and I had a pilot, I was on a. In Los Angeles and Salt Lake in the same year, what they call a go around. And they all say, some pilots say, well, that's very common. But I saw the plane make a shark. I mean, I saw a plane that we made a sharp. And in the case of the other one that was at lax, it was almost zero visibility, but there must have been somebody who was not supposed to be on the tarmac because we touched down and took off again.

[Jack Fowler]

Oh my.

[Unnamed Guest]

And, well, not touched down. I mean, our wheels were down and we were all. You could. You were about an inch away from the tarmac. And then we went straight up. And then you look in the paper and you see there's been a lot of accidental hits. It, I mean, you know, like a baggage carrier hits a plane or I think three weeks ago a plane hit another plane when they were going very slow. And it's just, it's a very complex system that's over taxed and has been neglected. It's not just dei, it's everything, technology, protocol, and it's ossified and we better do something about it. And that's a larger question. But until we do, there's going to be an element at risk. It doesn't have to be there.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, Victor, let's end the show today by getting your. Tell us about this essay you wrote for the new Criterion Maga, Agonistes.

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, Agonistes is a fancy name. We get agony from it, but it comes from the Greek word agon, which is a word for contest or a sporting event, but the sense of a challenge. And agonistes is the adjective. It just means under assault or being attacked. So Trump being attacked or Trump as an object of contestation. And what I meant was, is that as he gets this maga. And I wrote it before. I wrote it before the election. I think I did the earliest draft and then it just came out. But it's the February issue of the Criteria. It's been an editing. It was written. I submitted it right after the election, as I remember. But I wrote it before I thought he was going to win. But my point was there were certain things he had to be careful because he was going to be tried on them. And I listed three or four of them. One, for example, if you say you're going to lower taxes on Social Security or in them recipients, if you say wages are going to be tax exempt, if you even bring up the question of maybe military personnel or first responders, then you have to add all of that up and you might get over a decade, a trillion dollars of tax revenue that's lost. So then if you say you're going to be for a balanced budget, where does that money come from? Now, there's an argument for it, as I said in the article, if you're Elon Musk and you say for everything that Trump said that he's going to exempt a certain category of people, two things must happen. I must cut 50 cents for every dollar of tax loss. And then we must deregulate and detax in a way that will grow the GDP so that the slice of revenue is bigger. Kind of, you know, art laughers, laugher curve. So that was one challenge that I talked about. Another challenge was that the mega and we saw this with Gaza, which hadn't come up when I wrote the article. If you are a MAGA ITE and you believe that we have had optional military engagements that are not in the US Interest and we have spent blood and treasure in Iraq and Syria, but especially Iraq and Afghanistan, and they're not in the US Interest or in a cost of benefit analysis. It doesn't work to go overseas and fight under the conditions of our enemy's preference. House to house in Basra, house to house in Fallujah, Helmand province in Afghanistan, then you have to avoid those. And that's what MAGA said. Pete Heck says it was at the border. We're going to defend our borders, not Ukraine's. Good. Okay, but he's not coming in after just Obama. He's coming after, I think, the worst president in 100 years who has destroyed deterrence. And what do I mean? I mean from when Biden came in office, Blinken and Sullivan were utterly humiliated in Anchorage in that summit with the Chinese. They just dressed them down. I mean, they sent a Chinese spy balloon and we're learning more about it with impunity over the United States. I'm talking about the humiliation In Kabul, the 50, they say 8 billion, but when you look at all the vehicles, military and non Vehicle and all the infrastructure, the billion dollar embassy, $300 million retrofitted base, even the gender studies program at the University of Kabul. When you look at all of that money, it's probably $50 billion humiliation when you say I will react to a Russian invasion, depending on whether it's a major invasion or not, or I offer to get Zelensky out of Ukraine, or I put a hold when I come in on offensive. Whatever Biden did, I won't even get in daylight between us and Israel, which he announced. If you say, anytime you say there's going to be daylight between and us in Israel, somebody's going to go in that daylight called Hezbollah, Hamas around. Okay? So now he has to restore deterrence. And indeed he's been bombing the Houthis good. In Yemen, and he's going to have to deal with Iran. Maximum pressure. The Iranian member of Iranian parliament said yesterday, Jack, that he himself wants to kill Donald Trump and he will kill Donald Trump. He's a member of their parliament. And he said that everybody in the agreement, the government agreed with him. So to dispel that idea, you're going to have to use military force in the first term. Donald Trump took out Baghdadi and bombed the crap out of isis. He took out Soleimani. And we got involved on the ground, but we didn't get in the big way. So all I was saying this for MAGA to be realist and to deter its enemies so it does not have to go to war. You're going to have to increase the defense budget, make sure you got more recruits, and you're going to have to use military force because somebody is going to be stupid enough to challenge you. And if you don't, then you're going to end up like Biden. And yet that use of force will come under criticism. So when he said something about Gaza, this has not worked. The United States must do. There were people in his base that. What are you talking about? I voted for you get out of the Middle east, not to go into Gaza. That was another contradiction. And then I said a third contradiction. I'll just stop at 3. There's a lot in there. Is it? If you say you're going to drain the swamp, and this is before his appointees, so I didn't know exactly who he's going to appoint when I wrote it. But if you're going to say I'm going to drain the swamp, you can't have a swamp creature in there. So I'm not going to judge his first term appointments But Rex Tillertson, Jim Mattis, John Bolton, Bill Barr and go down the line, they were people of the establishment and they were not MAGA people, but they were, they knew their the environment. They were fish that swam in that type of water. So you're saying that type of water is going to be drained and the fish with it. Okay, so then you're going to have to get non traditional people whose who are MAGA people and you're going to have a problem because when you nominate Pete Hexseth and Kash Patel and Pam Bondi and Tulsi Garbert and rfk, they're going to go nuts. So you're going to have to stick by them no matter what because they will try to destroy these people because they know what they're going to do when they get in. They are not going to act like a normal Republican appointee. I am sober and judicious and there's pros and there's cons and I'm open for dialogue and a bipartisan partisan faction. I know that we are a little bit excessive and maybe you are and we're going to split the difference. No, no, no, no, no. You're going to have to go in there and say the top level of the FBI is warp politicized. It's got to go. So these people are going to have to come from a non traditional background. You know, like Cash. Not that he didn't qualify, he was more than qualified, but he was a critic. And so what? Donald Trump squared that circle is. And he did this after I wrote it. He didn't read it. It was in editorials. He just said, you know what? I got to get a non traditional person. That's going to drive him crazy. I don't know if they're going to get it confirmed or not, but I'm going to get people who are victims of the agency in which they're going to run Tulsi Gabbard terrorist watch list. Now she's intelligence Director of National Intelligence Cash Patel. The FBI snooped on. Now he won the FBI. Pete Hexeth wrote a book critical of the Pentagon that drove him crazy. Now he's going to direct the Pentagon rfk. They hated him HHS for years. Now he'll want hhs. Jay Bacharia, the people in Fauci tried to destroy him. Now he's going to be running N.I. that was the attitude. So I was trying to say that if you're really going to stage a counter revolution, you've got to deal with These contradictions. Tax cut but balance the budget or we're not getting involved. Not getting involved in wars that are up. Then you're going to have to use force to make sure that happened. And then if you're going to drain the swamp, you're going to have to get very controversial people to do it. They're going to have to be by nature. You do not want a non controversial person because they're going to have to go in there with a mission. Right. And he's done very long.

[Jack Fowler]

Gets run over. Yeah, no question.

[Unnamed Guest]

Exactly. Get compromised. So that was it. That's what the article's about. It's in this issue of the New Criterion.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah, it's a terrific essay. And there's a very good magazine, the New Criterion. You should go Google it, find it and consider subscribing. And I forget if I mentioned subscribing to the Blade of Perseus, but you should do that. Folks. It's $65.

[Unnamed Guest]

We have a new. We have a new thing. We. I write a 750 word article on Monday for user, Tuesday for users only. Another one on Wednesdays for users. But in place of the third one, we now do a 10 minute video.

[Jack Fowler]

Sometimes in them Victor wears a hat and sometimes he does.

[Unnamed Guest]

Sometimes I wear the hat. Whether it's I turn off the heater and hear and I get cold.

[Jack Fowler]

It's a cool hat picture.

[Unnamed Guest]

See?

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, hey listen. Anyway, well, we're gonna, we'll end this.

[Jack Fowler]

As we typically do. I'm gonna thank those who take the time and effort on Apple and, and you can do this other place a lot, at least Audible. Now I know about Audible and Victor's own website. People leave comments about all sorts of things and we read them. We go look for them, we read them. Appreciate on Apple. You can also rate the show zero to five stars. And Victor's average over 7,000 people who've done that. Thank you. Is 4.9 plus. And some people leave comments there on Apple. Here's one. It's titled podcasts and the FBI. I'm new to podcasts, about to turn 82, so I figured I was old enough now to start. So happy to find Victor. Surprised you survived academia all these years. So happy to see the lid come off the FBI. A typical criticism starts off by saying it's just the heads that that's corrupted, not the quote, hard working field agents, end quote. I'm sure there's still some good ones out there, but a fish may rot from the head but it still rots. I've been critical since Ruby Ridge when all the Muellers, etc. Just promoted themselves out of the muck and went forward like nothing happened. Anyway, keep on keeping on. And this is signed Blaatl. So blah Adol. I don't know, but I wrote something about it.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, James Comey didn't come out of nowhere and either did Andrew McCabe or Christopher Ray. They came from somewhere.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah, well hopefully they've gone somewhere forever. Victor, very great with the wisdom. I just want to quickly thanks those who who subscribe to Civil Thoughts, which I do at the center for Civil Society where we try to strengthen civil society. Every Friday comes an email free. Not selling your name, none of that business. And what are you going to get? 14 recommended readings. Really good pieces I've come across the previous week. So if you go to simplethoughts.com sign up, you'll start getting it and you will enjoy it, I assure you. So thanks for those who do that Victor. You've been terrific. Thank you. Thanks to our sponsors and folks. Happy Valentine's Day. That's tomorrow and we wish you that and love and happiness. We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

[Unnamed Guest]

Thank you everybody for listening. Much appreciated.

[Unnamed Sponsor]

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