← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: Did Trump Just Lure Democrats Into a Trap With Epstein Files Switch?
01:26:24
In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc discuss whether President Donald Trump just didn’t want the distraction of the Epstein files, was protecting Republican donors, or was luring Democrats into a trap.
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- [00:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
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Sammy Wink
See mintmobile.com hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own Words. This is our Friday News roundup. So we'll look at the latest news of today. This week, the Saudi prince showed up to have a meeting and we have more information out about the assassin or attempted the attempted assassin of Donald Trump and that Thomas Matthews cooks and then also crooks and then also the Epstein files. So stay with us and we'll be right back with those stories.
- [01:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
Right is still right, even if you stand by yourself. Mr. Chief justice, may I please the court? This is Hans von Spakowski, host of the Case in Point podcast which looks at the hottest cases affecting politics, culture and everyone's daily lives. But we talk about them without confusing legal jargon and we have interesting guests like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. And we end with reviews of classic Hollywood movies relevant to the topic. Case in Point, the podcast available everywhere you won't want to miss.
- [02:05]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can find Victor at his website, victorhansen.com the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus and it has all of his podcasts and writings and books as well links to buying the books. So please come join us at the Blade of Perseus. You can subscribe for ultra material at $65 a month or six. Sorry, $65 a year or 650amonth. And we'd love to have everybody. So Victor, we have the Saudi Prince in Washington, D.C. we know that the material reason he was there Is to buy F35 military planes and for access to AI technology. And Donald Trump was going to secure is still trying to secure a trillion dollars in investment in the United States. The presses, however, and I'm sure everybody not noticed this thought that the Jamal Khashoggi murder was more interesting. And I was wondering your thoughts on his visit to the United States.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Well, mbs, as he's called, he's the de facto the royal son who's running the government. We know that he was involved in the order to kill Khashoggi. And Trump basically said when he was asked, this is a good man. And that guy was writing some really negative things. So that wasn't the right thing to say, obviously, because in a democracy or constitutional cover like ours, you don't kill somebody for saying bad thing. I guess you do in Saudi Arabia. But then he kind of stepped in, MBS did, and said it's not going to happen again. So the long and the short of it is what do we want from them? We want them to join the Abrahams Accord. They will if there's a two state, if there's some kind of state in Gaza, which I don't think the Israelis are going to allow with Hamas involved. They feel it's politically impossible because they're not a constitutional government for them to get ahead of the other Arab countries because they'll get terrorism or Iran will fund some Shia population demographic inside Saudi Arabia. So they're very wary. Excuse me. I think the key is that he's giving away a lot of he's giving them access to F35s. Israelis will be against that. We don't know what type of F35. When we gave them Abrams tanks, we always would say that a U.S. abrams can blow apart an export Abrams. So I will imagine that a US F35 can beat an export you. But they're getting a good deal and they're getting a de facto, a de facto promise to protect them. And Trump said, well, we're doing it anyway. You know, when they sent missiles that Iran sent a missile at Saudi Arabia, we try to knock them down. So it's a lot, it's a very good relationship to have. It's much better than calling them a pariah state like Biden did, and then going over there and begging them before the midterms, as he did in 2022, to pump oil. However, he's going to get a lot of flak on his base. I think Thomas Massie, his proverbial thorn in his side, has got up and said, why are you dealing with this illiberal regime? We want to hear about the Epstein files or we want to know this or that. And Trump is trying to talk about the trillion dollars that Saudi Arabia is going to invest and then he announced, I think he announced today that he has 20 trillion and Biden only had, I think, 70 billion in his four years of foreign investment. If you cut that in half, and there actually is $10 trillion of foreign investment, the economists have a particular ratio of what that represents in jobs for each billion dollars, but it's, it's millions of new jobs. So getting back to what Trump is trying to do, he's in a race for the midterms, so he's trying to get as much foreign investment. He does not want another war. He wants Saudi Arabia to pump oil to keep the price down, even though it hurts our producers, but benefits our. So Saudi Arabia basically said, okay, we'll pump oil, we won't cause any problem, and we'll try to work with Israel. But we want two things. You got to protect us, and you have to sell us F35s. And that's where it is.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah. And Trump is his same sort of pugnaciousness with the, with the press and.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Get out of here. You're bad.
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Sammy Wink
You shouldn't. ABC reporters should not be considered a good reporter, maybe should be fired. I think he, he said, because she asked the question about Khashoggi. So he was.
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Victor Davis Hanson
They always. I mean, he has a, he has a point. When you go back and look at the particular reporters, that same reporter who was asking this really sharp questioning, she asked Biden questions like, what do you think your best legacy is? What are you most proud of? So they all have this veneer of journalistic professionalism. And then when you hear Trump be uncouth and crude and call them names and say, you shouldn't be here, and you. Oh, that's so terrible. But then when you actually look at. What's terrible is that they're not symmetrical. They were, you know, they canonize Obama, Biden, and then Trump. They act like they're real journalists for a change. Yeah.
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Sammy Wink
So don't counter Trump is the good advice.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Anyway, he has reasons. I just did a weird interview with German tv, and every single question was, as a person who supports the Constitution, what do you think of Donald Trump's efforts to subvert it? And I think, what are you talking about? Who wants to get rid of the Electoral College? Who wants to let in, you know, let in two states, Puerto Rico, and then make Washington, D.C. a state without going through the constitutional process? So that's what I'm getting at, is that he. Yes, he's crude, and yes, he's mercurial, but the people in the media are so biased that he has ample grounds to attack them. That's what he's doing.
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Sammy Wink
Yes, of course. So the other big news this week was Thomas Matthew Crooks. They were saying he was potentially right wing in the beginning and that he had very little social media presence. And it turns out that not only did he have a lot of social media presence and also using it to publicize threats and extremist ideology, but he frequented left sites, one of which was a furry site, and identified himself as a they them pronoun. And I was wondering about these new revelations about this wannabe assassin.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Well, he, he was a Trump supporter. Then he flipped and became, you know, he was an anti Semite. Just. He's very similar to Robinson and the other ones. And there's something going on here when he, this furry furrier and all this stuff that Crooks was into and then Robinson and his gay or trans boyfriend. And we go back, it's a taboo subject we're not supposed to talk about. But I have a feeling that if you would collate all the recent mass shootings and assassination attempts and actual assassinations, and then you ask and ascertain if these people are into these bizarre sexual identities, trans furries, you would see far more people represented than their actual demographic in the population. But we can't talk about that because there's something unstable about it. And they, when you create a climate of hatred, then these people who are unstable and this category of unstable people or sexually unstable, then they express themselves by violence. And we don't know the whole story. Under the former FBI director. They just basically got up there. Their, their spokespeople just said, there's nothing here. We went through hundreds of emails. There's something there. He had. You just don't walk in with exemption. He must have had some prior knowledge and surveillance or something that, and I think there's. That he may have communicated what he was going to do. The same thing with the shooter of Charlie Kirk. There's something there that more people knew about it in advance than were told. And I think that Kash Patel, if there's something to be found, we'll get to it.
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Sammy Wink
Yes. And I think also speaking of mentally unstable, the second guy, I forget his name, Ruth, who tried to assassinate Donald Trump, he was a little bit crazy as well. You know, his lifestyle off to the.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I mean, the left always gave us. Was it Cornel west said that words matter. So if you keep saying fascist, fascist, fascist, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, then a Luigi Mangione or a Ruth or Crooks or Robinson, whatever, they're going to come out of the woodwork and they're going to think that they're going to be canonized and they're going to be famous for taking out somebody like Hitler.
- [12:50]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So Victor, let's welcome Allegiance Gold as a sponsor. If you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their ways way overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations. And policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical Every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. The wise never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction. That's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are locating are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history. Physical gold, not a speculation, but as insulation. Reputation matters. Which is why we're partnering with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability and an A plus rating with a better Business Bureau. For years they've guided Americans through transparent education and long standing relationship built on trust. And right now they're extending a special liberty offer for our listeners to help you get started with real gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank. If you believe that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious. Call 844-790-9191. That's 844-790-9191 or visit Protect with Victor. That's 844-7909191. Again, the number is 844-790-9191 or visit protectwithvictor.com History rewards those who take the long view. So we'd like to thank Allegiant Gold for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Well, Victor, let's turn to what we talked about last week and you judic, judiciously off into talking about the economy. And that's the Epstein files. And I thought that was a judicious move last week because we should be talking about the economy. But the Epstein files are everywhere in the news this week. So I was wondering and it's everything from a Democratic Stacy Plaskett who was texting Epstein in real time during congressional meetings to Marjorie Taylor Greene who says Epstein files have ripped maga, ap, and even Larry Summers now has stepped down from public life. And so we got everything on all sides of the political spectrum. What's your thoughts?
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Victor Davis Hanson
Well, the Pleskett was not even a congresswoman. She was a representative from the Virgin Island. And the reason that she was getting instructions how to, I think it was Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, how to bring him out and embarrass Trump was that he had his one of his sexual mansions in the Virgin Islands. So he has a prior relationship with her in the political. He was probably a donor or supporter of her. So he was intimate with this Pleskit. So she gets up there and basically he's texting her in real time because he hates Trump. So what's the point of all this? The point of all is they had these Epstein files for four years and they didn't release them, given what they did to Trump. And they coordinated with five suits, 91 indictments, they would have leaked anything out. Okay, so they didn't want to release that. So the question is why, if they're the Democrats and we know the answer, that there's going to be people like Larry Summers or Bill Clinton coming up or this representative that were on very close terms with Jeffrey Epstein. So then it comes to Trump and everybody says, well, we're going to let it out. Pam Dalmy says, I have the whole fo. And they didn't. Now why didn't they? And everybody on the left said, well, it's because of Donald Trump. That was the stupidest thing in the world because they would have released it because they hate Trump. That's the one thing that guides, that's their North Star. They hate Trump. But they didn't. And so there was nothing really in there. Yes, there were things like Trump didn't fall for it, or Ms. Giffrey was there for a little while, but there was no, you know what I mean, no pedophilia. So now Trump has it and he thinks it's a distraction from his economic news. Okay, so there's pressure and they're saying we're getting killed by the Democrats. Release them. Trump says no. So then the question is why did he say no? I have a feeling that he said no because there were some prominent Republican donors on that list and he didn't want to embarrass them. And legally, it's kind of strange. These are sealed court documents and you're leaking all these names and you don't know to what degree Larry Summers career has been ruined. And apparently it's because he asked Jeffrey Epstein, how do I get vertical with this young woman? He didn't really have incriminating evidence yet that he had gone to the island and had relations with underage girls. But he's done for. And that's a good example. What will happen to anybody that comes up in that? So then the question finally is, to what degree is Tom playing four dimensional, five dimensional chess? Did he know all the time that he was not incriminated? Yes, he knew that they would make something, a mountain out of a molehill, but he probably did not go to the island. He did not do these things that other people did or they would have leaked it. So now he has all this stuff and he's saying, I don't want to leak it, I don't want to leak it. Now, is that because primarily he's, as I said, protecting a donor or is he luring them into a Trump ambush? So then they said, no, no longer. He stonewalls. Marjorie Taylor Greene even agrees with us. And then bam, he's going to let it out. And the first couple of things we learn is a big Democratic former Secretary of the Treasury's, former President of Harvard, his boom, his whole life has exploded. And then this Pleskate woman, this representative from the Virgin Isle, I mean, that is pretty incriminate. Can you imagine a Republican congressman and he's interrogating a witness and he knows Jeffrey Epstein so well that Jeffrey Epstein is giving him real time instructions. And she says at one point, slow down a minute, I'm coming up yet. I'm coming up next with a question I need to get. What does this mean? What does this term mean? So she was like a puppet and she's a Democrat and there's going to be more of it. So I don't know to what degree there will be Republican donor collateral damage, but I think the Democrats stepped in it. That's what happens when you are driven ideologically. Their ideology is Trump Derangement Syndrome. Anything he does, we're going to. So he knew that. So at some point he thought, okay, they're distracting from my economic good news and my investment from overseas. And they think they've got something on me and they think I won't release them because there's donors. But you know what, they started it, so I'll just blow it all up. And if I have donors that get hurt, I'll say, they did it, they forced it, and they're going to have more exposure. Basically, Jeffrey Epstein was a person on the left and he wanted to be a player. He had two purposes in life. He was a high school teacher. He knew nothing about economics. He wasn't a financial advisor. He was a blackmailer. And he was slick. And with Giselle Maxwell, they had a team. She was the daughter of a former media magnate. She understood public relations. So their plan, he wanted to be an intellectual. He wanted to know all the celebrities. So he started out by getting these young girls and then making a web, and he was a spider. And then a celebrity or a big CEO would get entrapped. And he would say to him, oh, I don't know, it's going to get out. You had sex. I didn't know it. That girl that happened to be visiting just for a few hours, did you know she was 15 that you had relations with? And then he probably let it be known. It was on tape. So then he said, I tell you what I'll do. I will manage your financial portfolio. And he probably got just an average seven or eight. And they didn't lose money, but he got money that way. He got a fee for that. So he was managing over a billion dollars. That's how he ended up worth about a half a billion dollars. And then he got to say, I know the Israelis, I know the un I know the president of Harvard. And then that would be a resume. And then that would get another resume. And finally he was meeting the presidents of the United States. And we don't know to what extent these young girls were part of it, but I hope to God, excuse the expression, that they do not. They do not pardon his partner, Maxwell Giselle. From what we can tell from some of the affidavits, she was knee deep in the sexual exploitation.
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Sammy Wink
She went out and recruited, that's what I've read anyway, that she went out around, found girls that could be easily manipulated.
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Victor Davis Hanson
According to this memoir, she was aging, she felt, and to remain on a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Her task was to bring women for two purposes. For his sexual gratification and for this shakedown that they were being enriched by. And then they had a relationship. But she was in sexually involved in lesbian relationships sometimes with these young girls. And these young girls were very. It's. It's. Megyn Kelly got in big trouble because she said that the girls were teenagers and therefore were not completely victims. And that was not her point, was it was not pedophilia, which she would define as sexual relations with children that had not reached puberty. That's an ancient distinction in the ancient world. A pedophilia was having sexual relations with somebody beneath the age or younger than puberty. After that, until adulthood, it was called pederasty. They used the word instead of philia, which means love or can mean sex, erastes. Pederastia is actual sexual congress. So I don't know if she made that distinction, but the law does not make the distinction in modern times. Each state sets the age of consent. It can be, I think it's 14 in one or two states, 15, 18, usually it's 18. Anything below that, we call it pedophilia. But actually in classical terms it's pederasty. But you don't just because a girl is at the age of 16 or 17 sexually aware she's had sexual partners. She's manipulative, she uses her youth, doesn't nullify the idea she can be a victim. What does anybody know at 17? I didn't know anything at 17 or 18. So they're easily manipulated and it's the responsibility of adults not to take advantage of them, as Jeffrey Epstein, much less humiliate them and make them basically be prostitutes.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, I think a young kid, I think the universities sort of prey on that to the extent that they are ideological rather than inductive that they can influence young people all the way up into their early twenties.
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Victor Davis Hanson
What's really scary is because there is a non sexual aspect of manipulating young people and that's K through 12 and in college, their first or second year ideologically trying to tell them all sorts of crazy things about trans and gay and abortion, all of that stuff. They should just lay out the issues involved and say I'm going to teach you the inductive method. Evidence A, fact B, situation C. You look at the evidence and then you come up with your own conclusions. I'm not going to start deductively and saying abortion is wonderful, trans is okay, and then plug in evidence that confirms that. But they don't do that.
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Sammy Wink
And it certainly takes a particular kind of parent to help their child to see things rationally and to sort of avoid the pitfalls of young adulthood where you are.
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Victor Davis Hanson
And how can you do that when 50, 45% of families are divorced and about 30%, 30, 35 are single parent where the parent is working. And the idea that you're going to have your grandfather, grandmother, aunt, uncle in a 19th century extended family so they can babysit counsel doesn't happen. I think there's that. That's part of this whole problem with young men. You know, they grew up in single family households or if they did have a father there, the father was working so hard in the middle class and there was no grandfather, no uncle there. So no one teaches people. The school used to do that, actually. I mean, when I had. We had a class when I was a senior called Senior Problems. Senior Problems. And it taught us how to shake a person's hand firmly, but not squeeze it to the point of pain. To look in the eye but not glare. To be able to write a check with your signature, but not your signature so plainly that it could be counterfeit, fitted. You had to. We were taught how to make a distinctive signature that would be our own imprint. We were men. Senior Problems. We, of course, we had The World War II vintage venereal disease movies that scared us all to death. And they even had. I mean, they were. This was in 1968, 71. So it was only 25 years out. So we actually had the World War II thing and they were us. You know, it was pretty. After you saw those, you never wanted to date anybody. And so. But they don't have any of that. They don't have any. And then we were told what a mortgage is, what compound. Compound interest is what a credit card was courtesy when driving. When you say, excuse me, I'm sorry if you come in late, if you came in late to class, I'm sorry, Mrs. Thompson, I'm late, it's my fault. It was just a whole different world. But. And I think there's a big emphasis now to bring that back. I think that's what a college like Hillsdale College does. It's holistic. And they even have the idea that not only are you going to be polite, and people insist on that, but most of them come that way to college from their parents, their traditional families, but they reinforce that. They also believe if you live in a country with a second amendment, whether you want to shoot a gun, you should be acquainted with it. So they have one of the most impressive gun ranges and you see young girls out there shooting, and it's not that they want to shoot things, but they know what a gun is. So if they're in a situation, somebody has a gun, or they're in a school, and suddenly person is trying to protect them with a gun, they can pick it up and know how to use it, or they know what somebody's going to do to them with a gun, its familiarity with firearms.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, it's an Olympic level fire shooting range at Hillsdale.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I've been out there a lot, and it's one of the Most sophisticated I visited. I've only. I've never shot there. But it's very sophisticated. And the good thing about it is it's in it. It inculcates young people about gun, not to fear them and how to use them. And there's other things about being at that. That campus and the environment that it, it's. It really does emphasize respect for property, for other people's, considerations for feelings. I don't mean therapeutic, but hygiene, manners, etiquette, it's all. There are senior problems that would. The final. I can still remember it. You get a Christmas gift from a third cousin. How many days should it take for you to write an etiquette letter thanking you? What should it say? And you had to write a letter. I think it was something like within a week or baby shower. I've given so many gifts to so many extended family. Never got thank you back.
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Sammy Wink
No, I don't remember any of that training when I was in school.
- [32:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. And then there was something about, do you just use binder paper in a white envelope or do you invest a little money at the Selma Stationary wonderful store and try to write it on nice stationary stationery that was actually called Selma Stationery Store Wonderful. People ran it.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, well, we'll see. Maybe we'll return a little bit to those pre 60s values.
- [32:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
I hope so.
- [32:28]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, before we move on to Kash Patel and some new information that came out about the COVID and origins of COVID or at least the debate around it. I just want to say this might just be comic relief, but Jasmine Crockett was accusing Lee Zeldin of getting funds from Epstein and it was the wrong Epstein.
- [32:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
It doesn't faze her. She's wrong about everything. She's made so many wild accusations and her attitude is, well, if it's not true, it could be. It could be he's Jewish. So then he has a Jewish. That's how she thinks. I mean, I feel like I live in a different planet when I see a reporter kissing her, literally getting down on the ground and kissing her feet. Or I hear people who were supposedly educated saying she's one of the bright stars. She's a complete lunatic and she's a racist and she is a preppy, upper middle class, privileged woman who went to prep school and she gets up there in Congress and she modulates her accent much more than Hillary or Obama. She can sound like she's an inner. She's lived the entire time in the inner city. She's authentic. She's much Better at it than Kamala Harris was.
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Sammy Wink
Oh, yes.
- [33:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
Faking her accent.
- [33:51]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. Come on. I couldn't do that. Well, let's turn to Kash Patel. And he was on the Glenn Beck show and he said that he had found evidence that FBI agents were paid to lie about the origin of COVID because they did not want it to be in that lab. That is outrageous. But that's the new information.
- [34:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. I think what he's saying is that there was evidence from very early on that it could not have come from a pangolin or a bat. I wrote an article about that reading and I really got attacked. I think it was by Slate magazine, but it was pretty clear. Tom Cotton really wrote a New York Times op ed about it very early. And then we had Dr. Stephen Quay. He's been on this show at least two or three times. And he was one of the first to show that the genetic sequence of that virus, there was key choices about the cleavage site and all that. That to get all of those right indicated two things. Each decision about how to manufacture or how that virus originated always erred on the side of being more infectious. And then two, the odds were in the millions to get all of them just right to make it the most infectious possible, you had to maybe eight or nine in a million ch only have happened in a lab. And he, he was one of the first. And then of course, Jay Bacharia, Scott Atlas, they said the same thing. And that administration was what it was scared. I don't know. I mean, the Trump people, there were people within the Trump administration that said it came. He called it the China virus and Biden came in and that was. Was a felony almost literally to say publicly that that came from China. I guess they were afraid that it would disrupt their detente with China or foreign investment with China or something. But Andrew Roberts in this issue of the New Criterion, everyone, the great British historian has got a wonderful essay. It's a text of a speech he gave about the dangers of China. And he makes what we've said the other day, it's. I think we have 285,000 Chinese students. The idea that the Trump administration would increase that to 600 is lunatic. I know that's a bargaining chip which he. Maybe you can get a closer relationship or maybe we can get fewer Chinese exports, but that is a road to perdition. Because if just look, they're billing. I think they almost have now they will have within two years three 80,000 ton aircraft carriers and they look exactly like our hundred thousand. A little smaller, and then they're going to get another 10 years. They'll be equivalent. Their planes are almost as good as ours. And why we would allow that conduit of technology, they have literally saved trillions of dollars in research and development. It would have taken them organically 50 years to catch up to us. Instead, they just leapfrogged over and had that whole body of technology sent electronically home and they jump started, whether it's creating viruses or creating aircraft errors. And one conduit, not the only one, but one major one, was students, especially graduate students, and they arrest them almost every week. And that's beside the fact that almost every student who returns home to China has to have a minder who interrogates them and says, what did you learn? Did you do this? What was in your course? Did you meet anybody? Who do you think would be sympathetic to us? And it's just, I don't know. I would urge very strongly the Trump administration for, not that I have any influence, but that would be a mistake to let 600,000. It's a mistake to have a million students here, foreign students, because we have almost the same amount of two hundred and something thousand from the Middle east. And we see how that worked.
- [38:12]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the mismanagement of rebuilding the Pacific Palisades. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Welcome back to Victor Davis Hanson in His own Words and our new partnership with the Daily Signal. You can find Victor on his X account and his handle is Dhanson. And on Facebook, Ansons Morning Cup. So please come join us.
- [38:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
I would say that I have had a lot of people, both in the public come up to me, but also on email, on phone, and they'll say, victor, we can't find you. And that's because we switch platforms for a variety of reasons. I don't want to get into from just the news to the Daily Signal. And part of that transition entailed getting all new. I guess we would call it keys but mechanisms to promote and find it. And more importantly, we could not use our prior name, the Victor Davis Hansen show, nor could we use the Victor Davis Hansen Podcast because we had started out on National Review. So the Daily Signal chose Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. But if you go on the Internet or you go to just the news, our prior 800 plus episodes are listed there with ads and everything called the Victor Davis Hansen Show. But it stops. It's inert, fossilized ossified, on October 2nd of 2020, all the new ones. And from now on, everyone will be Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And you can find it on our website. You can find it at VD Hansen on X. You can find it at all the outlets of the Daily Signal. So we're getting the word out, but it means that for now we're getting a lot of people who say, well, you were number six or number eight in the ratings and now you're not. And I don't know, I was listening to your thing and it's out of date. Victoria, you're back in October. Well, no, you're listening to the wrong show. It's the bizarro Victor Davis, as I've said before, this weird guy named Victor Davis Hansen, I don't know anymore.
- [40:34]
Sammy Wink
The doppelganger.
- [40:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, he's a doppelganger. And he has expropriated my identity. It's identity theft, and I'm going to strangle him someday.
- [40:43]
Sammy Wink
All right. With that, let's turn to the Pacific Palisades. Rebuilding the Pacific Palisades, our federal government. I think it was Doug Byrne, I think it was the secretary of the Internet. Interior came out and said that they've streamlined everything and opened it up as best they could. But since it's a state and building and rebuilding permits are state and local, both Karen Bass and Governor Newsom are slowing the. They've done nothing to streamline and make it easier to build.
- [41:15]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's even worse than that. They have suppressed news that state officials knew that when the arsonists tried to burn everything down and they had put out that fire, that fire then went latent under the ground or in brush. It was almost as if it was burning charcoal, so to speak. Bad metaphor, but there's something like that. And then the wind blew it back out and it caused a fire. They did not want to let people know that the state officials and local officials had seen the arsonist, apprehended him, and knew that he had tried to start a fire and yet did not go back to that place and monitor day by day by day, hour and try to extinguish every trace of it. And that when Gavin Newsom says, well, on arson causes were not culpable, that's only a quarter true. You're culpable because you knew that there was a danger of that fire reemerging. That's happened a lot. It happened up with the Aspen Fire. They put the fire out and then it came back out. And so the Other problem is, why don't they just spend a portion of the budget? And I'm sure the Trump administration, within guidelines, would have given them federal help to come in with a massive effort and clean all of those plots up. And the answer is, just as they caused the fire by preventing homeowners from cleaning the flammable brush on the hillsides and caused the fire by not ensuring that that reservoir of a million gallons, which would have stopped it was full, it was empty and the hydrants weren't working and the hiring practices were bizarre. So they didn't have the top field and there was no people in charge because the mayor was in Ghana on a junket and the vice may or the deputy mayor was under house arrest because he was charged with a felony of foaming in a bomb, fled and he was convicted. I could go on, but they thought that this is a chance to reimagine Los Angeles. In other words, under DEI and the new neo socialists of the left, they thought, well, Pacific Palisades, they have these, I don't know, three to 4,000 square homes, these beautiful Romanesque and Spanish style homes. They have come from the 20s and 30s. It's too Asian and too white, it's too affluent. Why do they get to have a hillside that faces the Pacific Ocean and is kind of a Malibu up on the mountain? That's not fair, that's not diversity, that's not equity, that's not inclusion. So we'll just kind of say, I can't hear you, you have a permit. Oh, see me next week. I want to help you. And then make it almost impossible to rebuild so that the people do one of two things. They sell or they say, I'm going to Texas or Tennessee. And that's happening. And these lots are not being rebuilt because the owners don't want to be the only person there. You know, I'm there. And there's no neighbors. It's a charred moonscape. Who would want to live in that situation? So they are waging psychological warfare under the pretense that we have to do it right this time. And they want basically low income, high density housing right in the middle of this picturesque, beautiful neighborhood. And that's what it's all about.
- [45:04]
Sammy Wink
That must be another reason that the people are not rebuilding single homes is they're afraid that they'll have a plopped down right next to them, a low income housing area.
- [45:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
I'll give you an example of what they do. I had a very good friend I won't mention any more because he could be identified, but he was a part investor, owner of a surgery center. And it was so successful and so beautiful and clean and competent. Everybody had their one day surgeries there, maybe one night. And it was obviously, they should expand to fill the need in the greater Fresno area. But the Obama administration said, no, no, no, no. We have identified other areas where they're underserved. So for each room that you put here, you've got to go way over there and build for equity. And so basically they said, what? But that area is a very dangerous area. We will not have people that want to drive in that particular neighborhood. And the people in that neighborhood who need surgical care are here all the time. But why would we go into an area where it'll be hard to insure, it'll be hard to protect the security and safety, doesn't matter if you want to. And they could not expand without doing that. And that's what the Obama administration did all the time with developers.
- [46:31]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. And that's affecting everybody.
- [46:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
So that's what they're doing. They're doing that right now. And so it's Karen Bass, I don't know how she's still mayor after what she did, you know, go to Ghana for no reason. Right. During fire season. And then Gavin Newsom saying, it's global warming, it's climate change. It had nothing to do with the fact that we didn't allow people to clear out flammable brush. It had nothing to do with, with the reservoirs being empty. It had nothing to do with fire hydrants not working. It had nothing to do with incompetent fire and water executives who were hired on the basis of dei. It had nothing to do with that. It was climate change. And the drought, Gavin, 20, 24, 5 was a normal year. As far as precipitation this year, you just said that we're in a permanent drought. Climate change. If you look at the water precipitation level in October and so far November in California, we are headed for one of the wettest years in 30 or 40 years. And that happens. It's happened all. We're not in a permanent necessary drought. And that's just an excuse for people who give us a left wing agenda. Oh, you can't glean the forest. You don't want Joe Blow going up to the forest with his chainsaw to get his winter supply of firewood and clean the forest. You don't want a truck going in there and trying to damage the fragile landscape by picking out and taking out, you know, dead trees that are kindling for forest. Fires that would be too intrusive. It's better to let the trees, even when they had massive fires or before they're dying, just let them fall on the ground. They rot and they provide mulch for bugs and beetles and then birds eat the beetles and it's just a nice ecosystem. And when it fights, every once in a while it burns down. Yeah, like the Aspen fire or the paradise. You know, people are going to get their hair mussed up. Collateral damage. But these people shouldn't be in the mountains. The mountains are reserved for the Sierra Club executives that oversee it and the NGOs who know what they're doing. You don't want Joe Blow going up there and living in the foothills of the mountains. So maybe, you know, insurance rates should go up and discourage them from going up there. A fire once in a while, send a message. That's their attitude. And then we can blame it all on global warming. Oh, Cal. Fire wasn't there. Oh, not enough money in the budget. Oh, no. Preventive fire strategies. Nobody cleaned the forest as they did for 50 years. Global warming did it. Not us. Global warming.
- [49:32]
Sammy Wink
Yes. Our administrators and elected officials seem to think they're in jobs that are entitlements and that they don't have a job to do.
- [49:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's ideology. Anytime you have ideology, whether it's commissars in the Soviet Union or DEI or radical green ideology, it's always an excuse that prevents us from finding the real cause of the problem.
- [49:54]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. Well, Victor, I wanted to turn before we go to our last ad to Tucker Carlson and his argument debate discussion against Israel, and it seems to be very pro antisemitic, has heated up this week with accusations against Mark Levin, who is one of our top conservative commentators. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that. I know that he called the big. The most important thing he did was to call Mark Levin evil, which is something strange. And then we also learned that, and I guess we'd have to consult Jack on this, that Tucker was attacked by a demon in his bed.
- [50:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
He said that. Said that to Megyn Kelly. I mean, he did sleep with four dogs, he said. So maybe it was the dog was possessed. I guess that's what he's saying. I don't know. As I said, he was very gracious to me. And I was on the Fox News often Monday nights right after his monologue. So it was. And I never heard any of the anti Semitic or conspiracy stuff from the time seven or eight years I can remember when he came to Hoover none of that. He reflected the views of his wonderful father. His father was a really great person. He was very patriotic. He was anti communist. He ran, I think, Voice of America. He was very pro Israel. And then I think it's in Power Line, people quote him that in 2012, when somebody came up to him after a lecture, I think it was, and suggested that the 911 attack was a conspiracy, he just said, you should be ashamed of yourself. You don't do that. And he walked away. That was the Tucker that I knew, and that's the Tucker that I hope reemerges, and I think maybe can. But when he gets in a fight with Mark Levin, he's saying, well, Mark Levin was against Trump. Well, so was Tucker. Tucker said at one point, I don't like Donald Trump. The second thing is he said things recently that the old Tucker would have never said. For example, the great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when Tucker said, even when you call somebody a Nazi or Hitler, it so demonizes the situation that even a Christian. Christianity is no defense about the wanting to kill somebody. So if you call somebody, I. E. Like me, Hitler or fascist, that will bring out the worst. It's a good argument. But the problem was the simile was terrible. Tucker, Adolf Hitler was a Nazi. If you ask if you were there in 1942, 43, when right before Bonhoeffer was arrested, and you said to Adolf Hitler, are you a Nazi? Yes, I am a Nazi. I'm proud of being a Nazi. That's what he said. He is a Nazi, and he was punished for it. But, you know, you say, well, Bonhoeffer called Hitler a Nazi, and then he may have been wanted him dead. Because whenever you say a Nazi person's a Nazi, then you want them dead. But in this case, it's not a person, it's a Nazi, and he wants to kill people. He's responsible for World War II, mostly 65 to 70 million dead, 6 million Jews incinerated. And if you can stop that, that is a moral act. And that's what Bonhoeffer said. That was a bad situation. And then he. He's doubling down now. And I think that's a mistake. I think that I'm not going to tell anybody how to live their lives. But you look at the conservative movement, we've taken a lot of hits. As far as the media, when you lost, I knew Rush pretty well. When you lost Rush Limbaugh and his ability to extemporize, and he was a genius, and he's gone, and no one's been able to replace him. People are starting to realize that. Charlie Kirk, I knew that when he was alive. I said that right before he died, that there was nobody who was able to convince young people that the left were the establishment. Not the right, the left. They ran the Pentagon, they ran the irs, they ran the White House, they ran the corporations. They ran. And the natural exuberance of youth to question authority, he encouraged, he said, be rebellious. That was a very unique take on that on the campuses. In other words, it said in the old days when you were conservative and you were traditionalists, you were an old fuddy duddy and people made fun of you, that you never had your youthful flirtation with change and don't listen to that. You are the revolutionaries. You are the rebels. You are reacting against an ossified, reactionary left. He's never been replaced. He won't be replaced. Tucker, prior to all of this, he had developed an audience from Bill O'Reilly, had a huge audience. People thought that when Bill O'Reilly left, the whole network would collapse. One reason, within about a year, he had recaptured Bill O'Reilly's. That was an amazing achievement because Bill O'Reilly was a very adept newscaster. I know people thought, you know, because of the reasons that he departed. But. But he was a very bright guy. I used to watch him. Was it Inside Edition? He was really good. And Tucker was able to recapture that audience in some ways. He augmented it as the audience naturally grew larger. And some nights three or four million people were listening to him. And he was very skilled. That's why all of this is so. To lose all these people through death or assassination or whatever happened to when he said he was possessed, something has possessed him. And I know that he was treated unfairly. The way he was let go by Fox on a Friday night. Why would you do that on Friday night? Why wouldn't you have discuss. Maybe they had. I'm speaking of ignorance. Maybe they had prior discussions. But the Tucker that I knew and the Tucker that most people knew wouldn't. He would be on the other side of the issue with Tito. Excuse Tito Fuentes. Nick Fuentes. I'm a San Francisco Giants ancient fan. So what I'm getting at is he would have interviewed Nick Fuentes the way he did Ted Cruz, and he would have interdued Ted Cruz the way he did Nick Fuentes. And why he didn't do that, I am not going to speculate. But what's happening on both sides of the issue, if you read the American Conservative and Chronicles and people behind Tucker and the Groipers. Nick Fuentes has added almost a million viewers to his various venues. He's getting that he got a shot in the arm like you would not believe. And then you read James Kershik wrote or John Potorowicz in Commentary. Everybody's doubling down. So there is no, there's no way, there's no. And I'm not saying they're morally equal. I tend to fall on the Tucker has. He's not the Tucker that you cannot institutionalize antisemitism conspiracy theory. And it's incumbent upon all conservatives to call that out. But the point is, point that I'm making is everybody, it's tearing everything apart. And I don't know, I don't see a solution. It's like the left, the left is going to decapitate all of its senior leadership. Schumer, Pelosi, even Hikem Jeffries. His DEI sterling credentials are not going to help him. They're going to get every socialist they can in office and they're going to run all the big cities. They're going to be a lot of blue state socialist governors. It's going to be like the 1930s and it's going to blow up the Democratic Party because the Americans are innately not socialist and the economy is going to, I think, boom in 2026. I really do, given the foreign investment, the deregulation, the taxes, the increased natural gas and oil production, everything looks good. And that will hurt the neo socialist.
- [59:13]
Sammy Wink
And so, you know, since you've just arrived there, let's take a break and then come back because I wanted to talk about the Democratic Party in New York State. So stay with us and we'll be right back after these messages. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson In His Own Words show. And you can find Victor on YouTube and on Rumble. And now our audio is available on Spotify as well as the video. So you can do the video on Spotify too. But I know that we have a lot of adamant audio listeners and so go to Spotify. It's also streamed to iHeart as well. So there's some venues there to find the audio. So in New York, the Democrats are tussling with each other after the Mondawi election. And what but the issue is is that Mom Domini needs raised taxes and the governor, Kathy Hochul, does not want to raise taxes or at least he.
- [60:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
Has no ability to raise state income tax. It's already over. I think it's higher than California in the top bracket, 13.4 we're 13.3. It's exorbitant. It's outrageous. He wants to go higher, but he doesn't have any ability to do that.
- [60:30]
Sammy Wink
And the reason he wants to go higher is because he's offering free childcare. And he's got this idea of these grocery stores that will state run. And so they're talking about how Hochul, who has been adamant against raising taxes again in New York, is getting a lot of pressure that if she doesn't line up with the Mondami strain of the Democratic Party, that that's, they're going to have to take her down. And I was wondering your thoughts.
- [60:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
She knows, she like Andrew Cuomo, each of them in the past has said, if you don't like our left wing, crazy socialist state leave. Cuomo said that I think about abortion. She did the same thing. And then people left. There's been over probably 2 million New Yorkers have left in the last four or five years and they've taken capital with them. And so she knows what. Because she's in a position of responsibility, unlike Mandami, who's never run anything. She knows what he's, what he will do. So she is saying to him, we're not going to raise. We're already the highest or second to the highest income tax rate in the country. The problem is in New York state and city, they want to go full communist when it already is not working because it's socialist. So when he says I want to have free bus people, they're saying we don't have any revenue as it is. We're broke, the buses are dirty on time. We can't get people to pay because people. Half the bus riders don't pay. If you want to reduce subway prices, it doesn't work already because half the people join, go over the turnstile if you want to give rent control. The reason we don't have more development and building, we have over a million rent control. And there are people like you who are not hurting, that are in rent control from affluent multimillionaire families as well as the poor. So what the problem is, the only solution would be to do what Bloomberg tried to do and Giuliani, and that would be to deregulate the most regulated place in the world, to lower taxes and give incentives and to call in the business community and say, how can we get investment and build more units? And what incentives do you want to do that? And then bring in the transportation people and say, how can we get cleaner, safer mass transit? What do we have do we have to. How do we get somebody like decarlos Brown off the subway because he didn't even pay. We don't want people like that even though he wasn't in New York. So I, it's just so bizarre that the problem with New York is that socialist and then they want to have the solution is communism. It's not going to work.
- [63:38]
Sammy Wink
Do you think Kathy Hochul has seen her last days as governor?
- [63:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well she, I don't know what I'm not familiar enough with New York but she's got a lot of really people who've talked. Lee Zeldin did very well against her. He came pretty close in New York. The problem in New York and the problem in Manhattan that why you don't have a Governor Pataki or another Giuliani, even a conservative Democrat in the old days like Patrick Moynihan. And the answer is that it's same same answer to California. People walked away. Millions in California have walked away. Every Reagan, Pete Wilson, George Dukmajian voter is gone. Not everyone, that's an exaggeration but 10 million in the last 40 years and the same thing in New York and they've been replaced by people. 65% of the people who voted for Mondami or 65% of all immigrants voted for Mondawi. So you have a lot of people who are not born in California. There's 27% of the population was not born here, here and most of those, not all, but most of them came poor and were dependent on SNAP and etc. That was by design. That was by design, yeah.
- [65:05]
Sammy Wink
Well since you mentioned California, the last thing I wanted to talk before we go to comments is Politico. That is a left leaning publication for anybody who knows has written has an article that says Gavin Newsom is the sure front runner for 2028 for the Democrats. And I'm going to explain the reasons to you and then you can reflect on them. They said he is one well positioned, he looks younger than 58. He's broken into social media with his new podcasts and his social media team and he has a charisma of Clinton. And all these Trump challenges, the ICE agents and the fire, the dealing with the fire have really actually made him stronger rather than effective made him stronger.
- [65:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
With his base, his strategy. Remember what it was he thought that he would be the front runner. And what had lost Kamala Harris the election was that she had a record that was so far left that every time she was on the stump she either had to not Talk to the media or bump in once in a while to an honest journalist who said, well, you were out on, there's 10,000 illegals coming in a day. You where the borders are. You're on record. See that video? You said no deportations. You wanted to confiscate guns. We don't believe you ever owned a clock. You said you were going to ban fracking. So then Gavin says, look, I can win, but the way to win is what Mark Pennsylvania and Halpern and Carville said, you gotta be in the middle. And I'm so far, I will be nominated. So he brought on Charlie Kirk and he brought on Steve Bannon. Remember that? And he said, I'm a centrist and I'm a technocrat, okay? And then suddenly said, hey, Gavin, that's not the right strategy. You have to get nominated for first before you pivot it to the center. And you're not going to be nominated because these are not like it was in the Clinton days. This is not like it was even in 2020 with Biden. These people are communist and neo social. They will never vote for you. So what you have to do, you've got to go start using the F bomb. You've got to be profane. You've got to attack Trump every day. You've got to go and endorse all the left wing candidates. You've got to be so far left there's nobody to your left. Then you get the nomination. And then you can lie and do stuff because you're slicker than Camila Harris about your record. That's his strategy. But the problem is all they have to do is say Gavin Newsome wants to do to the United States what he did to California. And every. And then just run, just. I could do the commercial today. Gavin Newsom wants to do to the United States what he did to California. Here's what's in store for you who vote for him. Half of all the homeless. Largest number of people in poverty. 1 out of 3 welfare recipients. Highest kilowatts in the country. With one quarter of his population doesn't even pay their power bill. Bill. Highest gasoline taxes, highest gasoline prices. Highest insurance costs. Highest or second highest state income taxes. 60 to 70 billion dollar shortfalls every year, deficits. And just keep doing that. And look at California, the largest exodus of any state. Largest exodus in numbers of any state. And then just show visuals, the paradise fire, the Aspen fire, the Pacific Palisades fire. Then show the rail yard out by LA Harbor. Then show downtown San Francisco, the Homeless and then show about six pictures tragically of immigrant truck drivers jackknifing. There was one the other day, just it happens every day. And say this is what he wants to do to the United States and you'll win.
- [69:43]
Sammy Wink
Yes. And the strange thing about the political article is they seem to be suggesting that he was well positioned because of that record.
- [69:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
You just Marco Rubio and J.D. vance. If, and I don't know if DeSantis go back to that debate. Gavin did all of his little gymnastics, his little arm tweak and his shoulder move and all of that. He had his hair slicked back. He looked great. DeSantis looked plodding for the first 10 minutes. He had all of the talking points. Gavin, what do you think about fire control? Well, here in California we represent the people. Gavin, what do you think about your high tech? And here in California we believe in diversity and equity. It was just canned answer that had nothing to do with the questions. And after about 10 minutes, DeSantis just like Da da, da, da, we have half your population and we have no income tax and we spend about a quarter about the money that you do. And he just compared Florida to and people. Gavin, why is everybody from California going to Florida? Nobody from Florida is going to California. Just stuff like that. And he wore him down. And then all of a sudden people started, said he's a fool. Newsom. I really have strong feelings, I think, and I'm a lifelong fifth generation Californian. I have never seen anybody do more damage to this state than he has. There's not one person alive given his resume. His resume has no resume outside of government in California. On the City Council of San Francisco, as the mayor of San Francisco, as a lieutenant governor of California. You're talking about 32 years that he was instrumental in Bay Area. And remember, this is not 1960, where Los Angeles ran the state, the Bay area and the $11 trillion of market capitalization in Silicon Valley that runs the state. And he's right there with Nancy Pelosi, the late Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Jerry Brown, Nancy Pelosi. They did it. They created California as we know it today. I should say destroyed it. And they're all wealthy.
- [72:04]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. And they don't suffer the consequences of what they've done. So Victor, let's go ahead and turn to comments. And you recently had a article on the reality caught up with climate change. And so these are some responses to that. What I chose them, I thought they were interesting because these readers have proposed things that are other ways of getting energy. But anyways, the first one has a very short quip for Bill Gates and then he talks about something that would be, that illustrates an alternative. He goes, if Gates wants to. And this is from Tionico, if Gates wants power to run his AI playhouses, okay, let him build the sources. And then he goes on to say, the small totally contained nuclear power plants that run our Navy are proven safe and reliable, cost conserving. And the Navy doesn't spend years of studies, testings permitting, et cetera, they just take out the blueprints and make another one just like the other ones. So that's the Navy people do it because it's government. Yeah, go ahead.
- [73:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes. And you're going to see a lot of left wing billionaires flip, either directly involved in AI AI or investor. I think Sam Altman, the so called guru of AI said we needed 100 gigawatts. A gigawatt is a thousand megawatts. Megawatts, not watts. A thousand megawatts. So basically a good sized power generator does about a thousand megawatts. So he's saying you need a hundred of those plants every year, year just to do the AI. And so if you're a left wing investor or you want to get rich among the Silicon Valley elites, you say to yourself, who's going to allow that to happen? Wind and solar? You'd have to pave over the whole state of California with solar panels and turbines. You still wouldn't be able to do it. So that people abdicated. The second group that abdicated were the people who said, none of these people believe in what they're saying. John Kerry, Al Gore, they fly private. The Pelosi's, they have these huge mansions, they have natural gas heating. The people in la, they are talking about making the middle class use less electricity and natural, if at all. They can't have, but it's not them. So it's an illegal, complete top down argument. And so that was a radical change. The other change was fossil fuels were geostrategic. And for the left, the left wants to, they hate Putin. If you hate Putin, then the way to hurt Putin is to pump oil and gas and lower the world price and he'll go broke. If you want to help Ukraine, it's tough. Do two things, lower the price so Putin cannot buy weapons and fund his war machine and start shipping liquid natural gas to Europe so it doesn't have to buy Russian gas. And that's another argument why you want natural gas and more oil. Not to mention the lower Prices for the middle class. But they were exhibited, disclosed, outed as elites because this whole green thing. And then finally it's like this year in California, it's wet. So we only have about 140 years of accurate record company the planet's 4 billion years old man has been here 300,000 years. We've had plenty of evidence of natural cycles of cold and hot well before the industrial revolution. So we don't really know. And yet they're taking. There's a fourth reason why the whole thing blew up very quickly. China sends us turbines and solar panels below the cost of their production. They have destroyed the American solar and turbine manufacturing industry and the European and they supply now about 80% of the world's turbines and solar panels. Now why do they do that? They're not making all that much money on it because they destroyed the market, the competition by undercutting them, by selling stuff either at cost or below a cost. Because they want us to have renewables. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. They're building two to three coal and nuclear plants aggregate per month while they're telling the rest of the western world, you guys gotta get wind and solar here. We got them, they're cheap, take them. And therefore our products will be more expensive and we'll have to import more Chinese goods and they'll be able to have more foreign exchange and they'll build more weapons. But they're not, they're responsible they in India for the vast majority of carbon emissions.
- [77:22]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, we know that. Yes. So another solution was from Dan Stormquist and he was talking about liquid fluoride thorium reactors and he says that these liquid fluoride thorium reactors are also much safer to operate than our typical water cooled reactors. Thorium is also fairly abundant and does not have the same shelf life of uranium. Promoting this technology greatly reduces the chances of nuclear weapon.
- [77:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think we're going to see a lot of new. We're going to see a lot of ways to use natural gas, nuclear, oil, hydroelectric in much more efficient fashion. And we're going to see it won't die out, solar and wind, but the amount of land and area they require. They're antithetical to every green dog dogma. They kill wildlife, they take away precious farmland. They have. You can't recycle them, they're from China. It's just it. If it's almost, it's contrary to everything the left tells us except, and that's an ideological, you know, commissar decision. Wind and solar are the only Rec they're the party line and therefore forget about the environmentalism, the recycling, anything, anything. And that's how they think.
- [78:47]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. And then finally, Thomas o' Brien reminds us it took Trump to really break open the climate hoax. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get someone of his caliber every presidential election? Yes, it would be. Well, we'll try.
- [79:02]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, they, we'll try here on the, I was listening to Trump yesterday and today and everything he says is great. And then it, he, it's like people whisper in his ear, don't mention Biden. You mention him so much. And then he says, and I've had all this for and Joe Biden or and then people say, he goes, I don't get much sleep, but I sleep. I don't need it compared to Joe Biden. And he's, that's part of the package, everybody, that if you, you want things done quickly and efficiently and it's done constitutionally. So I'm not suggesting it's autocratic, but you're going to get somebody to cut through the red tape. And bureaucracy has a particular type of personality that cuts through everything, whether you want it to be cut through or not, in areas other than government.
- [79:56]
Sammy Wink
And you know, if I had to say, I see Gavin Newsom as trying to mimic Donald Trump, even more so than Rubio or Vance.
- [80:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, no, he tries to, he uses capital letters, exclamation points. He doesn't intentionally debate Trump, but he's not very good at it. Or his young social techie media techies are not very good at it.
- [80:16]
Sammy Wink
Yes. But he also tries to get every camera he possibly can and be out there for an interview at any moment. And at least that's what I've been noticing recently with Gavin Newsom.
- [80:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
Put it this way, if you took a young person who was from a notable family and you plopped him down in the wealthiest environment in the nation out of as San Francisco, but they did not have the resource. They're upper, upper middle class, highly educated, but they did not have the type of resources of the people they associated with, I. E. The Gettys. And then you let that person, he was out in the real world and he had a womanizing problem, he had a drinking problem, okay. And then that wealth that knew him banked him on every single deal. And then he, he married twice. That's okay. But he was caught fooling around with his best friend's wife. But anyway, forget those minor or major foibles. And then he married somebody who's very wealthy and you say most of your life you were not out in the dog eat dog world. You were not a self made person. You were subsidized because people felt you were young, good looking, human hip, from a good, nice family and they wanted to help you and invest in you for a quid pro quo. You would have him. He is the archetypical Nepo baby he really is. And I say that without any personal venom toward him, but just the result of it he has done. If he just came down to the San Joaquin Valley and spent, say in August, just spent 10 days and you gave him a car and said, I want you to drive between, I don't know, to Larry and Delano just every day on the 99, see what it was like. Or you said to him, here's how much money you can spend on air conditioning. It's 108. Maybe you can go to Walmart and get free air conditioning, sit there all day like hundreds of people do, just see what he created or the type of homeless situations where if he had instead of having this $9 million home, have him have a nine nice once, nice little brownstone in San Francisco with a whole street of homeless people at your doorstep and see what that would be like. But he doesn't do that. Or have him have to commute every day down, I don't know, 101 or I5 and see three trucks in the left, middle and right lane going 75 miles an hour. And none of them who are driving speak English or read English. And he has to deal with that. But he doesn't.
- [83:06]
Sammy Wink
No, no, he'll never know those things. All right, Victor, this is the end of our show. We'd like to thank our audience for joining us and thank you for.
- [83:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you everybody for listening and watching the Victor Davis Hansen In His Own.
- [83:18]
Sammy Wink
Words show and our Friday edition, which is a news roundup. Thank you. And this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.
- [83:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.