Victor Davis Hanson (51:51)
Taking the place of informing. He. He said the Teamsters were hiring illegal aliens and he called them wetbacks. And he sent people down to the border with clubs and they worked with the border patrol and ratted people out. When people, all these ICE people should say to themselves, hmm, we're on the front lines trying to stop ice. Just like Cesar Chavez, pause. Tried to help ice. So in other words, left wing crowds are now trying to stop ice. But the locus classicus was the same thing with Cesar Chavez, but he was organizing with mobs down at the border where they were trying to go after illegal aliens and then help ICE and the precursors of ice. And I grew up here on a farm at the very center of this Delano. Where he started is about 45 miles from here and in the park in town. I remember going and listening to him. In fact, when I was a senior, there was a big strike at Table Grate. And all of the guys wanted to watch it because we had all worked on packing houses. And everybody said that Cesar Chavez threw nail at the ufw, threw nails all over the driveways. They cut down little trees with chainsaws. They sabotaged trains that had refrigerated cargo on them going eastward. And it was mostly Chavez's brother who was in charge of the shock troops. So a bunch of guys, I think there were two Mexican American guys and two of us. Let's go watch a big strike in Delano. So we drove down and there were maybe a thousand people protesting. And there were people, people picking early table grapes and they were trying to get the people to come out. And I was kind of naive and I said, well, he's non violent. There's not going to be anything happening. And everybody said, oh yeah. So a prearranged signal. They just went into the fields, the Chavistas, and pulled everybody out. It was one of the most violent things that I'd ever seen. And the weird thing was we were there watching it, sitting on the car. The Tulare county sheriffs came over and wanted to arrest us. And they said, you guys are from Berkeley. And we all had like short hair and San Joaquin Valley accident. No, we not. We're just watching. Oh, you're an outside agitator. The problem with Chavez was he was never an angelic. He gets credit because I grew up in those days and I worked in summers. I either worked on my grandfather's farm or I worked for local packing houses. And I picked peaches and grapes. And it was pretty rugged. I mean there weren't beautiful bathrooms and water break, all that. So he got all that in mostly by fear. And then the big company, they weren't even big companies, they were family owned companies. And he started with the table grape because the others were so dispersed. In other words, peaches, plums, nectarines. Were 40, mostly small growers. They became greater, bigger, but in those days. And the raisins farmers, we were raisins and plums. But they were all members of the community and their kids all worked in the fields and you might have, you know, like 20 workers for one week a year picking grapes on your place. So it wasn't anything he could organize. And the people were local. So the kids got out of school. We all got out of school early. So my grandfather and my uncle who were farming at the place would say, okay, you're going to get row one through, you four boys are going to get well one through for. And I want you to pick 200 trays a day so that the workers see you. And I don't want any horsing around. And when you roll, I want you to roll 2000 or 2500 trays when it was time to roll so everybody could see you. Because that was, you know, you didn't want a bunch of snotty white kids with Filipino workers or people from Oklahoma or Mexican American. So he didn't target that he targeted. And most people when they go in the stores don't rush to the sun made raisin counter and they don't rush to get some nectarines. They love those big beautiful green and red grapes. So he knew that the problem he had was these were not vast Tenneco type farmers. They were the best farmers. They were the most savvy farmers and they were hard knuckle farmers and they were from immigrant families. So you had Dirigo from Sicily, the Dirigos, you had the Gemma family from Italy, I think. And then you had the Zanonovic family from Croatia, the Pandel family from the Balkans, I think Croatia, Zulum, all of these people, they were hardcore people that had nothing and they built up this stuff. So when you saw them on TV or you talked to them, these were guys that were tanned, leathery faces, cigar in their mouth, worked their whole life. They were not the type of, you know, like a suit, you know, a guy with an MBA or something. Hey, Mr. Chavez. Will. No, no. These guys were tough as nails and they had done all the work themselves when they were young and they had built these kind of. They were large acreages, but compared today, I mean, they might have been a thousand acres, but not like these. 20, 30, 50,000, 100,000. But. So it was very hard to. Took him about five or six years and you had to get. He. He thought he had to get viol. He did was. He wasn't a very good speaker, but he had very expressive faces. I remember listening to him. Well, the growers. The growers, you know, the growers. This is more than just grapes. These people don't want people to live. They don't want them to drink water. They're killing us with pesticides. And that was very effective. And these guys were kind of like, well, you know, hey, I'm $2 now. I got $2 a bucket. And well, I did it. I so bad about it, that kind. So they won that optics war. And then they got Robert Kennedy and he came out and he blessed the program and all the people boycotted grapes and they did a secondary boycott, which was illegal. In other words, if Safeway had non union grapes, then you. Nobody would go to Safeway. They bought, they wouldn't boycott. You couldn't go to Safeway and not buy grapes. You couldn't go to Safeway at all. So even at the local Safeway where I was growing, they had pickets all the time. Don't go into Safeway. And it's very funny. I was in this period in 71, I was 17. I went to University of California Santa Cruz, the most radical campus probably in the nation, had just opened three years ago. And I had grapes, but they weren't table grapes. They were the same species, Thompson seedless. But we dried them into grapes. They were the little yellow ones. They're not the big fat green that you girdle and use. Jabella and you artificially make. Make big. Same plant, same vine, but you cultivate it differently. So I had them in my room and everybody would come in and eat them. And then one day some, a very. I won't mention her name. She was very famous. Her parents owned a huge cosmetic company. And another guy whose father was a pretty well known producer came in and they said, these are great grapes. We boycott grapes. I said, these are. I picked them myself. You're non union. I Said they're not even table grapes. Well, they look like grapes. I said, we dry them into raisins. Well, they should. No, no, these are great. So they put all these stickers on my door. My dorm boycott. And then I walked out and everybody said, you hate Chavez, you're. And all these. So that's how he won. He had all of these wealthy white kids that felt so guilty they wouldn't eat grapes. Most of them didn't eat the grapes anyway. But in the cafeteria, if you had grapes, they'd have big signs, Union pick. You know, all of this. And it was very effective. The problem with him was that beneath that angelic face, he was ruthless. So he drove almost all the people that he worked with out of the movement. His closest confidant was Dolores Huerta. And even on camera he would scream at her. They were supposed to be. And they became intimate. Nobody knew that. But now we're going to celebrate. Every town in the Valley has Cesar Chavez Boulevard. He's a folk hero. But no, there's almost nobody who is Mexican American. Second, third, works in agriculture. I mean in the sense of picking thing, that's mostly immigrant labor, first generation. But the point is, everybody reverse, reverse him. And I don't know what's this going to do? Because they've all yesterday and today canceled their Cesar Chavez. And why did they cancel it? Because these revelations are coming out and it coincides with two things. The MeToo movement and the Epstein files. And the accusation is that according, and it's not some white maga nut on a talk radio who's screaming and yelling that they can easily caricature, It's Dolores Huerta. 95 year old Dolores Huerta, who knows everything about the union and whom Cesar Chavez treated very shabbily and drove out of the movement. Especially with his little flirtation, big flirtation with Synanon, that weird cult where the. They played the game, where they got everybody in and they just said F you. And that really turned off the Catholic Mexican American hierarchy in the union. And he was very vindictive. So he turned over the apparat of the whole UFW to Synanon. And by 1975, 80, he was zero. Everybody, it just imploded. But the weird thing is the accusations are, I shouldn't say weird. Tragic is that Dolores Huerta, the most radical Mexican American political figure in California, is now saying that she was taken to a vineyard and raped. Raped by Cesar Chavez and in other situations was forced to have intercourse with him. And she mothered two children that Were his. Shel was so bothered by it. I think she had eight of her own. That and I think, excuse me. Chavez's wife had eight children. Doris Huerta might have had 10 or 15. She was very fertile and she had them raised by somebody else. As I read the accusations today. And they did a DNA test. They are his children. But that's not the worst. That he raped his most trusted advisor, then kept quiet that he was having other affairs with women. He also, there's an allegation that he had groomed young girls as very, very young. I won't get into the ages, but they were considerably younger than 15, 14. And he had sexual intercourse with them. So he was a rapist and a pedophile. Well, you don't know how this is going to do. I mean, nobody wants to cover it, but the New York Times is going to run and you know what they're going to to do.
