← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: Will the Trump Economy Come to Fruition Before the 'Midterm Exam'?
01:19:29
On Tuesday's episode of "Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words," Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler examine the MAGA base's current frustration and how President Donald Trump only has one year left to show results before the 2026 midterms.
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- [00:00]
Narrator/Announcer
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- [01:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
We had this Marjorie Taylor Greene back and forth with Trump over the Epstein files where she was attacking Trump, tracking him, attacking him. And then she tried to clarify herself and said, I'm not suggesting you are in them, but you got to release them because the Clintons are in them and Hillary's in them on the flights. And then Trump got exasperated and then she went on the View and said she was pretty much the same as the View or sort of. And so he really went DEFCON 1 on her full megatonnage. I think he's going to discover if a tariff is on a product that Americans don't make or cannot make but want, then you're going to have to address the larger picture and not to tariff things that will raise prices up for Americans who will buy that again and again and again. I think we've always learned there's about two things, if I could use a vernacular, you don't mess with Americans. One is coffee and one is gasoline. What I'm getting at is these things are adding up and they bother the base and Trump just dismisses them. But he should dress them because he's got just a year and we're in a race, as I said earlier, for the Trump economy. There's so many things he's invested in fuel, foreign investment here of companies, deregulation, tax cuts, hoarding 2 million people that were mostly on social assistance, closing the border so you won't have that overhead. And it's all going to come to fruition. Just a question of whether it does in time for the midterm exam. Foreign.
- [02:39]
Jack Fowler
Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words. We are recording on Saturday, November 15th. Is it right. Is it the 15th? Yes. And this episode will be up on Tuesday, November 18th. I'm Jack Fowler, the host. Victor Davis Hansen is the. He's the reason you're here. You want to get his words. Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Bussky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. And for the last few weeks he can be declared a senior contributor to the Daily Signal, which is the happy home for the Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And then there's also the four times a week video Victor Davis Hansen in a few words.
- [03:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
And you can go to our website. We have an angry reader up. The professor said I was at the end of my road, so I watched Das Boot last night on tape. Oh, yeah. When the, you know, when he emerges. Not yet. Not yet, comrade.
- [03:43]
Jack Fowler
Victor is far from Washington.
- [03:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
Not yet. I'm not at the bottom of the ocean yet.
- [03:49]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, well, Victor, there's a lot to get your wisdom on, I think. I'm not going to mention all the issues. I'll just mention the one we'll start because we never. We end up never be being able to get to all them. But I think the one that is of most interest, we'll just call it MAGA Unrest and we'll start off this episode with that when we come back from these important messages.
- [04:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Right. Is still right, even if you stand by yourself.
- [04:18]
Jack Fowler
Mr. Chief justice, may I place the card? 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 foreign. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. I do want to mention that Victor has a website, the Blade of Perseus. The web address is victorhansen.com. check it out. Do subscribe when the reason you'll subscribe is because you'll be able to read Victor's. What do you call them? Exclusive, exclusive articles twice a week.
- [05:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
Ultra.
- [05:21]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, twice. He does two ultra pieces a week for the Blade of Perseus.
- [05:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
And one, somebody wrote me a note about a month ago making fun of that word ultra, and I didn't catch it. He said, you ultras are ultra thin. And I didn't know what that meant. And then I was at the drugstore In Palo Alto, Menlo park, trying to get a prescription filled. And I walked by and there was prophylactics and one said, ultra thin.
- [05:49]
Jack Fowler
Hey, while you were there, no mentioning names. You did, you did meet a fan of the show. He wrote me.
- [05:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
I not only met him, I was in line to get that prescription. And he was very sweet guy, very friendly. I really liked him. Very nice guy.
- [06:03]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, he's written it in me a.
- [06:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
Number, as was a man that came up at the restaurant right after that, as another person was as well. People there are. Let me put it this way, without being incriminating. There's a radius, a section, a geographical locus in Menlo park, one of the most left wing places in the world where there are conservative people. I don't know why they go to particular places there, but every time I go to one of those restaurants, I see people who are very kind and conservative.
- [06:38]
Jack Fowler
Well, we'll get onto the topic in a second. But Mountain View is the town next to Palo Alto. Correct. And Mountain View has a.
- [06:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
It does. It has a speaking conservative group. Yeah, I've spoken to them. Wonderful people. But you never know. Like on Wednesday, I was walking to my office and a woman shouted at me. And I thought, oh, here we go. And then I stopped and I thought, should I turn around? And she goes, hey, hey, hey. So I turned around and she looked. She had the accoutrements of someone on the left. The way she looked. I don't mean that deprecatory at all. Just the K outfit. And I went over there and she was the sweetest person in the world. She said she listened to our podcast, Jack, Sammy. She really liked what we were doing. It was wonderful. My point is, you can't stereotype like Victor did with a K word. You can't just do it because people come in all shapes, shapes, sizes. You never know what you're. It just, it's. I think I told you that anecdote. About five months ago. I was in the parking lot of a nearby store and a guy came up to me and I mean, he looked like Apache or something. He had long hair, he was tatted all over. He looked like he was a gang banger. And then I looked behind him and a whole car of people just like him. I thought, okay, serenos or naranios? Serenos. M13 Trenta, what is it? And he came up and goes, hey. And I said, I didn't. I thought I may hit his car in the parking lot. He goes, man, I love Newsmax. I love what you guys are doing, you gotta try El Jefe Trump is my favorite. You gotta keep doing it. Don't back down. Don't let those little blank blank get you down. Yeah, so you would never know.
- [08:34]
Jack Fowler
You're right. Don't judge the book by the COVID So Victor, let's begin with this MAGA unrest. I've written a little something here. I'm going to call it the bucket list of Trump issues causing MAGA eyebrows to rise. I've seen a number of posts.
- [08:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
Are you going to go on a lightning round? Just mention one and I'll give you a quick bounce.
- [08:58]
Jack Fowler
Well, let me this, I'm just going to lump them all together. Okay, so here they are. This is a, you know, quoting from an actual, I'll call it a tweet. Prices are still high. We'll talk later about Trump's reaction to that. His praise of H1B visas while denigrating the talent pool of the talent of the US worker pool. 50 year mortgage, 15 year car loan ideas, the 600,000 Chinese students, the bizarre claim that if he doesn't do this it will hurt historically backed colleges. So if you take all these things which have happened and come up percolated in the last few days, there are, and Trump's saying in response to being pressed by Laura Ingraham when she interviewed him, I know MAGA better essentially than anyone else, but still there seems to be a lot of what, what is, what is our hero doing?
- [09:52]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, this is a very good point because he's gone in the polls from about 40, he's still higher. Let's be clear, he's higher at this point in his administration than Obama or Geor Bush, George W. Bush, but he's gone from about 45, 46 in Rasmus into 42. A Real Clear Politics, excuse me, to about 42. And I don't think that is coming from the left because the left is in a civil war. The shutdown, they're in mess. So it's coming from either independence or even the base. And to point out what you were saying, we had this Marjorie Taylor Greene back and forth with Trump over the Epstein files where she was attacking Trump, tracking him, attacking him, and then she tried to clarify herself and said, I'm not suggesting you are in them, but you got to release them because the Clintons are in them and Hillary's in them on the flights. And so. And then Trump got exasperated and then she went on the View and said she was pretty much the same as the View or sort of and so he really went DEFCON1 on her full megatonnage. Wacky. He didn't call her kooky like he did Tucker. He called her wacky. And he said he was looking for a candidate to primary her either in her House seat or if she should run for one of those seats and Senate seats. So that was one thing. And then Laura, to her credit, I mean, she just stayed firm and said, why would you want to have 600,000 students? We have too many anyway. We have all these people who are broke and want to go to college and there's not enough room and it's too expensive. And we know that. Stanford Review. I had a wonderful dinner the other night with kids. I shouldn't say kids. They're better informed than I am. On the national. The Stanford Review paper, the conservative paper, and they had run a series about espionage. It was almost Pulitzer Prize of the old Pulitzer Prize standard, showing that the Communist Party inserts people among the students who. Who go after people to develop relationships with and then to use them as conduits for technology transfers and things like that. And then. And so that hurt him, the 600,000, because most people want 300 Chinese students, not 600,000. I'd be happy with zero students coming from. Just like we did in the Cold War with Russia. So that was another thing that happened. Laura. And then Marjorie Taylor Greene. And then we've had some people angry at the tariffs. So that was a. I think that won't happen. The 600,000 students. I think he was trying to use that as a leveraging tool, which he. And he knows that they need the students because without that technology transfer, they're going to fall further and further behind. They're emulative. That's all they can do is emulate Western Europe and the United States. Why give them the opportunity to do that?
- [13:05]
Jack Fowler
Well, one of his defenses also, Victor, was if we don't let all these students in these colleges, X amount of colleges are going to collapse.
- [13:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Laura had a good repartee. Remember Jack let him collapse.
- [13:16]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [13:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think Hillsdale College is beset. Almost every month, a small liberal arts college calls them up and says, we're broke. Some of these beautiful colleges with eight or nine hundred students, we don't even know the names, but they have a beautiful campus. But they probably have several hundred million dollars in retrograde outfitting to upgrade them, and they're losing money and they want to know if Hillsdale will take them over. That's a damning indictment, that Hillsdale's protocol and way that it manages itself is a model and these other liberal campuses can't do it. I think Hillsdale's always faced that dilemma. Do you want to market the Hillsdale brand in the sense of make hundreds of Hillsdales or will you dilute your product? And that came up about a proposed California campus. But my point is that hurts him on the visas and the students and then these so called skilled visas. A lot of people who you talk in Silicon Valley say you know what, it's designed to get classic PhDs in computer engineering. But when you look at the majority of them, they're bas in coding and they're taking jobs away from somebody with a computer science degree from San Jose State, a BA or something. So I don't know the answer because I'm not qualified. But what I'm getting at is these things are adding up and they bother the base and Trump just dismisses them. But he should, I think he should address them because he's got just a year and we're in a race, as I said earlier, for the Trump economy. There's so many things he's invested in fuel, foreign investment here of companies, deregulation, tax cuts, deporting 2 million people that were mostly on social assistance, closing the border so you won't have that overhead. And it's all going to come to fruition. Just a question of whether it in time for the midterm exam.
- [15:26]
Jack Fowler
The marketplace, the supermarket victor, is still a tough place to conquer. Despite inflation reduced and despite some prices, eggs and other things, we hear the down my wife the other day who cooks some Italian food even though she's Irish, Rigotte. She buys Rigotte. She says, I'm looking at this thing. It cost me seven bucks a few years ago, cost me four bucks. These little anecdotes and it's hard to.
- [15:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
I just got my insurance bill for cars. It's outrageous. You know what I mean? It's like the price of a used car. So he needs to say the following. I left in 2020 with a 1.7 inflation rate. Joe Biden borrowed $7 trillion. Economists like Larry Summers said, don't do this. Do not borrow money and put it into people who are coming out of the lockdown with pent up consumer demand when the supply chains are still endangered and there's not enough goods and services to supply the demand that has not expressed itself for two years but now will be flush with entitlement cash. And he did it anyway. And in 2022 we had 9.1% inflation, but he needs to say Joe Biden had 5.1 inflation on average every year. Every year of his four years. I came in on January 20th, I've only been in there a little over 10 months. And the inflation rate is about where it was when I came in, about 2.8 or something, 2.9, getting close to 3. And so we are addressing it, but it's going to take me another two or three, four months to come down. And then he's on the tariffs. He's doing what he always should have. He's doing art of the deal. He had very high punitive tariffs on this program. We said we didn't understand the logic of tariffing Britain or Israel or Australia who had, they had deficits and we had surpluses with them. But I think as we saw with Switzerland when they sent over their grandees to lower the tariffs from I don't know, 30 or 40 down to 15. Now he's going to the point where the official policy of the United States will be reciprocal tariffs. And if you think that is not sufficient, you can make up the difference by investing in the United States with companies to lower your tariff costs and to give us an economic stimulus. So I think you're going to see a lot more reciprocal tariffs rather than punitive tariffs and that's going to help too. So. But you're right, that does temporarily drive up prices. Although the Wall Street Journal just, I don't know, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal said they couldn't think that it's resulted so far. Then it with more than 1% in increase can be attributable to the tariffs so far. But when they come down, it'll be good.
- [18:40]
Jack Fowler
Well, a little more on that laundry list of issues in a second. But first for our viewers and our listeners, ever since COVID millions of Americans have started buying preparedness supplies, especially emergency food. And that's a good thing. But there's a big mistake most people make with their emergency food supply. They don't have any way to cook it in a real emergency when the power is out or the grid is down. And that's why our friends at My Patriot Supply created their Black Friday survival special. It comes with a 4 week food supply plus $150 worth of free gifts including everything you need to prepare your emergency meals like a cook stove, fuel, fire starters, plus a water purifier, a bug out bag and more. It's the complete survival kit your family needs to ride out natural disasters, civil unrest or anything worse. And it also makes A great Christmas present, but it's only available through Black Friday. So head to prepare with VDH to check out everything that's included. With all the uncertainty in the world right now, we simply can't afford to be unprepared. So go to preparewithvdh.com and get prepared today. That's preparewithvdh.com and we thank the good people at my Patriot Supply for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. I think if I was in a survival episode, I wouldn't mind being there with you, Victor, alongside you and picking persimmons off your trees.
- [20:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
And yes, that we have persimmons and pomegranates and walnuts and pecans and all sorts of things we could forage and gather. Right.
- [20:31]
Jack Fowler
Dryers and hunters.
- [20:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, and hunters. We can eat coyotes. I see them every night.
- [20:37]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, well, hey, one more, maybe not one, maybe more than one more thing. Regarding this list of issues I mentioned. If I could only find my darn paperwork now. Well, let me just read, let me just read one thing that the Wall street mentioned. The Wall Street Journal before here. Oh my gosh, Victor, I'm sorry.
- [21:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
Affordability. Affordability. Affordability. Affordability.
- [21:04]
Jack Fowler
Well, that's a, it's a rollback. So here's what he mentioned Trump, Donald Trump did today of when we're recording on Saturday the 15th. So on Friday the 14th, he moved to lower tariffs on beef, coffee and dozens of agricultural and food goods marking a significant rollback of his so called reciprocal levies as he looks for ways to address Americans concerns about the cost of living. So there's more to read there.
- [21:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
I suggest people go, yeah, everybody should really get the larger picture. What's going on? We're running a $1.1 trillion trade deficit and we're doing it in part. Not all, not all, but in part because we have these countries that are mercantile, they export and then they raise barriers against us. And they do that. In addition to do that, they deliberately subsidize their product with government funds to lower the cost, to undercut us. The classic example is the rare earths. We used to be dominant in that China copied our machines that refine it, copied the way we mine it and then started dumping it below the cost of production. Destroyed our industry. That went on a bit then. Now they have a monopoly. He's trying to address that. And the problem is that certain countries supply stuff like that. Our elite want a Rolex. Nobody. I don't. Never have one. I don't know why anybody. I have something that cost about 100 bucks, an apple watch or something. But maybe they want to buy a Rolex, but they can't buy it because we put this huge tear off on it, double the price. But if they make something that Americans want and we don't have it and we don't really grow, I don't know if anywhere in the United States we grow very sizable amounts of coffee. So putting a tariff on coffee is to punish coffee producing countries that have tariffs on other imports from the United States. In other words, say our trucks, they don't import a Ram truck without making it impossible to buy. So we retaliate by tariffing. But I think he's going to discover if a tariff is on a product that Americans don't make or cannot make but want, then you're going to have to address the larger picture and not to tear off things that will raise prices up for Americans who will buy that again and again and again. I think we've always learned there's about two things, if I could use a vernacular you don't mess with with Americans. One is coffee and one is gasoline, if you can get those two things. Or maybe steak is a third. Or meat, red meat, if you can get red meat, coffee and gasoline down and he's got gas now, it's going down, down, down. So he needs to get coffee and red meat.
- [24:08]
Jack Fowler
And I would think a more vociferous claim, taking credit taking for the gasoline price reduction.
- [24:19]
Victor Davis Hanson
He needs to take more credit and he needs to say, I started pumping natural gas. Joe Biden started to reduce it. He drained the petroleum reserve, strategic Petroleum reserve. He spent a trillion dollars on boondoggles to subsidize wind and solar. And then at the end of his administration, he was terrified that he was going to destroy the US energy and he started pumping in the way I had taught him to do that. Now I inherited a can do fracking, horizontal drilling, natural gas production. And I've just in one year increased the amount of oil we produce per day by a million barrels, up to 14 million barrels. And I will. He's already starting to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And he should say, I'm going to fill the whole thing maximum, and I'm going to get up to 20 million barrels. And he can do it with new leases and ANWR and all of this stuff. And that's going to lower the price to $2. And he needs to take credit for that. Just like he doesn't take credit enough for the economic cost of what he did on the Border. What I'm getting at is he's done all of these things and foreign and abroad, but he needs now to connect them. These spokes of the wheel. And the hub is the economy. The midterm will be determined on the economy. So each thing he does, he needs to emphasize, what do I mean? I shut down 2 million, I deported 2 million people and I shut down 4 million people coming a year. That means more houses are going to be open, more apartments are going to be open for American citizens. That means when you go to your dialysis clinic, it's not going to be as swarm. That means that we are not going to break local budgets, emergency rooms, all the stuff that adds up to our cost. And this is the very beginning. I'm going to keep pushing this. He needs to say that. He needs to say, when I went into Washington and even Chicago, the burglary rate, the assault, the rape rate. And these have economics, these have economic consequences. When people feel safe, they go out and purchase things, they increase gdp, they lower the cost of crime. And that's my point. When I go overseas and I job on, I know I sound obnoxious sometimes, that when I tell Canada, you better get up to 2%, that means that our allies will share the burden of Western defense and that that puts less pressure on us to build and take over, build weaponry and take over from them. He needs to say that. And he needs to say that.
- [27:19]
Jack Fowler
America is in the world's interest and everything.
- [27:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
He'S doing has an economic aspect to really does. And so I hope he can do that because eventually the only thing I'm not at all pessimistic about the economy are prices or inflation. I just don't know if they're going to kick in these programs enough by November of next year to get inflation down to 0.3 or something in the third quarter. One of the things he's battling is the Democrats are nihilists. So Kevin Hasard and others have suggested that the fourth quarter GDP that, that the Federal bank in Atlanta had projected at 4% GDP. That's astounding. They think it's going to go down by a point and a half to two and a half just because of the six weeks, $15 billion a day minimum, government spending much more in the economy shut down, that cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the whole total economy. And when you put in the shutdown and then you're going to see that the interest rates are. Jerome Powell is not going to lower them down because he is a popular icon among the left and he's a beleaguered target of Trump and they think they've made him into a folk hero. So he's going to try to keep interest rates high and they are going to go on the offensive. There's a bunch of little people in a room at the DNC and they have their talking points. Today it's affordability. They came up with affordability and then a month ago is Epstein letters, Epstein letters and shut down, shut down. They get the key buzzword and they're going to, we're going to see recession, recession. We're going to be wall star, Wall street collapse, collapse, collapse. So if he can battle the fake news, if he can get the interest rates down, if he can avoid another shutdown in January or later in the year, he'll be fine.
- [29:24]
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor, there's one, one other aspect of that list I mentioned and that's the H1B visas. I'd like to get your thoughts a little more on that. You also mentioned rent and some interesting numbers have come out about rental homes and I think how that may be affecting the ability of people to buy homes. And we'll get to all that when we come back from these important messages.
- [29:50]
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- [30:22]
Jack Fowler
We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. We're recording on Saturday, November 15th in this episode is up on Tuesday, November 18th. So Victor, I didn't, you know, I wasn't very jingoistic of Trump. This is Donald Trump in his interview with Laura Ingraham where he talked about we need, it's funny he raised the H1B visa or he talked about it, I don't know if it's actually happened. $100,000. But then we need these people because we need the talent and we don't have enough talent here in a nation of 330 million people. And, and I don't know, maybe he's right. Maybe two generations of terrible education, a generation of able bodied men not rising to the occasion to want to be employed and you know, is he right? Is there insufficient supply of skilled workers in America.
- [31:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
He's right in the sense that if you look at the I'm just going to take the California experience, that's the most extreme. But it's a barometer of what's happening nationwide. If you go back, anybody, and go online and look at the curriculum as offered in the catalog of Cal State Fresno, Cal State Los Angeles, Cal State San Francisco in 1965, 1970, and you compare it today, you can see that a third of the curriculum across the board is non merocratic. It's not academic. It's therapeutic dei, radical green. It is a deductive, unimportant aspect of traditional education and that hurts us. So he's right that we're not turning out enough engineers, we're not turning out enough computer people, we're not turning out enough doctors, we're turning out too many sociology, environmental studies, psych majors and they're poorly educated. So I bet if you see the average psych major and you ask them to comment on Freud's interpretation of dreams, he couldn't do it. They don't even know their own field because of the pollution of DEI and ideology of radical environmentalism, radical pacifist, all of these radical critical legal theory, critical racial theory. So he's right about that. But what he has to be very careful is his base is America first. So when you say that you're going to allow Silicon Valley, with 9 to 11 trillion dollars in market capitalization, wealthiest nexus in the history of civilization, to bypass Americans and bring in people largely from China and India and Asia, with exceptional degrees and skills not found here, then you're kind of violating America first. So you have to understand that your average person said, well, I thought you didn't want to outsource or offshore. And now you're kind of insuring people from different countries and we have all these Americans out of work. And then of course, if you look at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, what's the meme? What's the theme? Jack it is today's graduates are out of work. And I was talking, I had a wonderful conversation with eight of the Stanford Review people. These kids are from all over the world, but they speak perfect English. The ones that are not American born, they're brilliant. They're far better educated, far better informed and brighter than I was at that age. And when I talk to them, I asked them specifically and they say there's more and more students than they ever have seen at Stanford that are conservative. There's no doubt about it. They're a little worried about Nick Fuentes because he has an underground level of support that they think is astonishing. That hasn't really hit the mainstream media. But when you talk to them and you say, what is the greatest. This was my question, what are you most worried about? It's just overwhelmed. Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. And when they graduate, people who were on the fast track in economics and mba, Vas Fiscal Policy International, it's all AI at the entry level. So they think, you know, if I'm going to be hired by Goldman Sachs to do assessments of the copper industry, an AI code can do it. So Trump needs to say that. He needs to say we've got to reform education and make sure that the people. We don't have these superfluous majors. He can't do it himself, but he can jawbone it. And then he's going to have to say, we're going to. Within two or three years, we won't need these people because we are going to have a Marshall Plan to train our own people. And then. I don't understand. I understand he's interested in the African American vote. So he says historic black colleges. But I looked at the data, Jack. There's almost no foreign students there. There's no Chinese students.
- [35:44]
Jack Fowler
I think there are 30 Chinese students in historically black colleges.
- [35:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, that's not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen. This is the most racially inclusive society in the world. And when I go abroad, I am appalled. When I talk to people in Asia, especially in the Arab world, sometimes in Europe, the contempt they have for African Americans to take one group. I am, compared to the United States, we're a racial paradise. And I would suggest anybody who feels otherwise, go spend six weeks and live in Egypt or wear your Black Lives Matter button in the west bank, or go announce to someone from Yugoslavia, Syria or China, if you're African American, you want to marry their daughter and say what they say because they have caste systems, they have an endemic racism that no one wants to talk about, about. And so they're not going. Chinese students will not be allowed by their government to go to black college. I just guarantee you it's terrible that I have to say that I disagree with it, but they will not do it. I can tell you I've talked to Chinese students. I've talked to them at Pepperdine, where my half my classes were Chinese students. I've talked to them when I gave graduation addresses, and they all tell me the same thing. They have particularly targeted schools that they on a particular list. And they go to those particular schools because they are in safe neighborhoods and the demographic is what they feel makes it a competitive school and safe for them. And that does not include black colleges. It does not include certain colleges in the wrong side of town. I was talking to some Asian students that told me that there was a not Asian, Chinese. They said they were rethinking going to usc. There had been some violence there, even though they loved that campus. So that's Trump's. That's not going to save colleges by pouring Chinese students because they're only going to go to the approved colleges. And those colleges are fine right now. They have more students. They want Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Vanderbilt or Rice or Baylor or Pepperdine. They have more students than they can handle. So you don't have to say that the places that are needing students, the Chinese students will not go to. I'm just telling you that they will not go there.
- [38:33]
Jack Fowler
Back to what you mentioned earlier when Laura said let them close. And talking about AI, AI is not going to change your, fix your plumbing. Plumbers fix plumbing. And we know the average age of people in the, in the trades is very high. And you can't go back a generation and say these parents who would die that you would dare imply their child should go to a trade school rather than be, get some worthless college degree as a sociology major and then come out and be broke.
- [39:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
And that, that' that's changing. My daughter has a home up in the Auburn area of the Sierra Nevada mountains and that's become a refuge from affluent left wing people. They don't want to talk about it, but they feel that crime, the public schools in the Bay Area, not the Peninsula, but the Bay Area or in Los Angeles, they fled to the Sierras. They used to make fun of people who did that and said that they were white trash or they were, you know. But now these homes are very. And I can tell you when I go and visit the people who really run that place, it's kind of like in Palo Alto, are master contractors, master plumbers, master electricians, master roofers, because you have all this money and it's chasing the trades to get this spectacular beautiful kitchen or to redo the bathroom. And these people can demand almost anything, $50 to $100 an hour. And they're not just plumbers in the eyes of these very wealthy people in California, they're master craftsmen. And so I don't understand why a younger person would get a psych degree and then get $200,000 in debt and then go join Antifa or Black Lives Matter or just protest against ICE because you're angry. Or vote for Mondame or this nut up in Seattle when you could just master two or three of these crafts in trade school for a year or two, or go get an apprentice with a contractor. And then by the time you're 35, you might have your own business with three, or you'd be very. But you'd also have the prestige you think you want by going to the university. Mondami's constituency was upper middle class families who had children who said that you will be like we were in the 1960s and 70s, upwardly mobile in the 1980s if you get a degree from Swarthmore or from Brown. And they did and they went to New York and they want like the metrosexual lifestyle. And guess what? You can't afford an apartment if you're a mid level editor, lawyer, financial analyst. So then you get angry and say, I want to tear down the whole system and vote for Mondami and pay these people back that did this to me. I should have prestige, I should have a title. My education should be on my sleeve and I can't even get a job. And I see this nut over here and that guy over there and he's got a, he's, you know, he's got a fleet of Ubers or he's got this or he's got that. He, he runs 6, 6, 7 11s or he's a. Yeah. And they, a lot of it's envy. Anger.
- [41:54]
Jack Fowler
Envy. Yeah.
- [41:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
So trades are very important. Yeah, I was very blessed because I farmed full time for 5 years and I saw farmers and I had been in academia and I like, you know, as a graduate student, undergraduate for eight, nine years, and then I took a full time five and then I kept farming for another 10 where I taught. So I had these two antithetical worlds. And I can tell you that the people that I saw farming and working on tractors and calibrating fertilizer, fertilizer machines are, you know, if I talk to somebody who was telling me exactly how deep the submersible pump, pump had to be and how many gallons per minute it would produce and how many acres in a drip pressurized system that would irrigate, I didn't see that kind of talent in academia. I really didn't. I'm not just trashing academia. And that's just representative of all of these. These are very important fields for us and we should really try to encourage people to go there where there's shortages of labor and expertise and not import people in if we can help it. But yeah.
- [43:08]
Jack Fowler
Keeping small, private, expensive colleges open is not a hill to die on.
- [43:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, I don't think it is. I don't care if there are historically white colleges, black colleges, it doesn't matter. They have to live in the real world. It's just the way it is.
- [43:26]
Jack Fowler
Here's a real world thing, Victor, and I might be a hypocrite given what I just said about the market, but this has to and we're going to talk more in the next episode about some boomer generation warfare attacks on boomers. We're not going to focus on it here on this episode, but one of the issues is the affordability of homes. And affordability of homes requires a supply of homes. And we've read articles before, I don't think we've ever discussed it before about these venture capital firms that are going around and buying up homes that paying cash on the market. So here's a study. I saw this on X the other day. Someone put this up. Estimated this is a graph. It's estimated share of single family rental market held by investors with over over 1000 homes in selected areas. And this is as of a few years ago. So in Seattle, for example, 9% of homes are held by these investors with these massive amounts. And it's as big as in Atlanta, 25% of these homes, Jacksonville, 21% Charlotte, North Carolina, 18, et cetera. So Phoenix, 14%. You can't buy a home if they're being snatched up by venture capitalists who are turning them into rental properties. I don't know what can be done about it, if anything, but it's, it's troubling.
- [44:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
We're going to have the habit on this show of always quoting the appropriate line from our favorite movies. So I'm going to go back to Heat when Jon Voight, and by the way, I talked talked to John Voight the other day. He's in something about him I really like. He is so explicit and intellectually honest and, and doesn't care if he's controversial. But he's in that great line and he said it's a free country, bro. So we can't, I'm not sure how what we can. I know people who build homes, a good friend who's a developer and I know another person, I know a friend that buys them up what you're talking about. But they're very different in their outlook. The one person thinks they're building homes for families and he feels good about what he's doing. He's fighting the bureaucracy to create a home that's well built. But there's so many regulations about the materials, like is the sheetrock green or the wood here? And as I said last time, he has to film what he does because somebody might sue him the way you forgot nails in that truss or something. But my point is this, is that there's something about home ownership. It was traditionally 62 to 63% of the population had a home. But the age of first home buying is way up. It's up into the 40s. And the argument that our grandparents and great grandparents made why they promoted home ownership, they'd always say homeownership isn't for everybody. I can tell you that when the pump goes out, or my septic tank gets full, or a gutter falls off the house, or I have to go into the house because there's a leaky hot water pipe, it isn't for anybody. It'd be much nicer, call the landlord. But what I'm getting at is everybody knows if you own a home, then you invest in it. Some people invest because of pride of ownership. Some keep up with the Joneses. Some of them say, if I don't invest in this and keep it up, I'm going to lose my equity. Whatever it is that becomes an expression of that person that gives them pride, it gives them financial security. The building won't be torn down, the landlord won't, on a whim, evict you. And it's better psychologically if you're in your home and you spill coffee on the rug, you go over there and clean it up. If you're in the home and your dog scratches the paint, you fix it. Not like, well, maybe when I go, he'll get my cleaning deposit or something and let it go. So it's very important to have homeownership. Not everybody can do it, and people can't do it at various stages of their lives. But there has to be a mechanism to encourage it through lower interest rates, incentives for developers to build entry level homes, and incentives for the states to offer fast track zoning, building permits, and nothing like California, California's law, they'll never do it. It's lost. Because we've got 10 million people living from La Jolla to Berkeley, and homes that they either inherited or they had money and bought. And they've so increased in price they probably averaged $2 million a home and their Attitude is, I got mine, Jack. I got mine, Jack. I got all I need. So you know what? I'm going to live in Utopia from now. I'm going to vote and get my representative to make sure that those crazy, stupid people down in Mad Madera or up there in the Atwater, that they use shingles that have been recycled. And I want to make sure that that glass is threefold tempered glass and is energy conservation. Not that my house is, but my house is tasteful and I own it or I inherited it. And so you've got to just forget those people and keep pushing to deregulate and allow these people, these, these very talented developers and our workforces to build these homes. And then as far as the investor, you have certain roles that I'm not sure that I approve of in Europe. I can tell you that. I used to talk to a donut person in Athens. He had the Greek version of donuts. And he would tell me that he was very happy. And I said, you know, you were closed today. And I. And I couldn't get it done. I had to walk all the way down to Syntagma Square. And he'd say, well, because we have rules that you can only have a certain number of donut shops in a certain area. You know what I mean? And that's true of pharmacies and everything. I don't want to do that, but we don't have to go to that extent. We could say that if developers own more than X amount of houses, they're going to have to pay a huge fee in taxes or something like that. Local entities could do that. They could say. Or they don't have to be punitive. They can be incentivized. They can say to developers, you will get this, this, this, this, this tax break if you have X percentage of your sales go to homeowners who will live there. And we know the neighborhood's going to be different. Anybody who's owned a home and rented. If you want to be honest and go into your confessional booth, Jack, and confess your sins, but I know you treated your rental property that you lived in when your dog stained the rug, you kind of, I don't know, said, I hope it doesn't smell too bad when I move out, but when it's in your own home, you went nuts and probably put that dog in jail or something. But anyway, you got to incentivize home ownership and you got to get that 62%, maybe up to 70% and that age of home buying from 40 down to 30. You do that and you won't see as many lost souls voting for Mondo on.
- [51:03]
Jack Fowler
Okay, I went to confession on Monday, but I did not have any dog related sins to confess.
- [51:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
Did you confess that you treated your rental differently than you do your house.
- [51:13]
Jack Fowler
Up to well, I was a landlord when Sharon and I were first married.
- [51:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
And, and it was landlord.
- [51:19]
Jack Fowler
No, no. But there's the, there's the grape juice spilled on the rug, you know, or I was called over things, things were broken. Well, you broke it. Read the contract. But I would fix them anyway. I was a good landlord. I think so anyway. Victor, we talked about California and bad things will never get fixed, but maybe one thing will get fixed and that has to do with CDL licenses and we'll get your thoughts on that and a few other topics when we come back from these final important messages.
- [51:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [52:07]
Jack Fowler
We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words on November 15, Saturday, it's a sunny day here in Milford, Connecticut. I I hope it's not snowing where.
- [52:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
You are, but no, we're suffering from global warming and perennial drought. Gavin Newsom just said that he couldn't address the fire. It was Midwinter Jack when it hit the Palisades and we're just in a drought situation. And now we find out that we had three huge rainstorms in October and we're in the second day of what will probably be eight to nine days of rainy weather. And every time you happen to do that, they say, well, we don't use the word global warming, we use the word climate change. So that means you mean that you have an unusually wet October and November? VICTOR yes, we do. That's because of climate change. How about if it was dry? That would be because it's climate change. Well, what if we had hail? That would be climate chaos. Get your terms straight. And it's all due to us. And we have these stupid idiots that buy jet skis, snowmobiles, Winnebagos. And now we have these people that will do AI and they're just taxing the planet. And I live in Atherton and I have a very tasteful home and it's naturally 70 degrees, so I don't use air conditioning. And my pool, I Don't heat. I have solar panels on it. So that's how they think. And there is. I can't. I've lived 72 years in the same place and I've seen droughts in the 1960s. I've seen unusually wet years the last four or five years. So I don't, I don't get it. I have a home in the Sierras and I've, I can take show you a picture four years ago where it looks like an Eskimo igloo. You had to tunnel in to get into it. And there were people who unauthorized were on my roof skiing off the roof to the side I saw the ski.
- [54:22]
Jack Fowler
Tracks, the giant slalom.
- [54:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes.
- [54:27]
Jack Fowler
Victor, though you have to be grateful that all the billions of dollars that the California taxpayers approved bonds to allocate for more increased water retention that all this rain is going to be kept in these new, relatively new reservoirs.
- [54:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
Oh no, no. It's going out to the Pacific Oce. Poor little three inch smelt Delta smelt hasn't had enough air yet. So this oxygenated water in our rivers and because we haven't built a major dam other than the LA Municipal Water District, we don't have anywhere to put them. We didn't build Temperance Flat, we didn't build the Seis Reservoir, we didn't build Los Banos Grande. We could have had another to I think 6 million acre feet and all this water would be stored for the drought that must come. Gavin Newsom is very strange, Governor. I've never seen any elected official anywhere in my life who has more contempt for the average citizen. He will talk about high speed rail. He'll talk about global warming. He'll talk nonstop about Trump. He'll talk about how cruel people in ice are. But he won't say one word on how the middle class Californian is supposed to pay that PG&E bill when a quarter of them cannot. He won't talk about how they're supposed to pay 5:50 a gallon for gas when somebody across the state lines is paying three bucks. He won't talk about how they are supposed to afford a $900,000 two bedroom house. He won't talk about how they're supposed to drive east to west when half the roads are under construction and there are maniac driver truck drivers that look like it's Road Warrior, you know. Yeah. And he won't talk about any of the things that people care about.
- [56:20]
Jack Fowler
Well, he's too busy maybe. Victor, thinking about what's the next hand gesture. He's supposed to make. I did see he gave some, some video of him talking down in Brazil. He was there last week, I think and, and he really did. He looked like he was doing some kung fu training.
- [56:40]
Victor Davis Hanson
I know, I think he's, I don't know, something's wrong with him. He's, he, he comes up with a little meme, like one week, okay you guys, I'm going to be the Trump on the left so I'm going to hire you. So you do social media eight times a day with capital letters, exclamation points. And then somebody says, okay, what else? Well, this week I'm going to use an F bomb, I'm going to use dirty language. Next week I'm going to threaten people. I'm going to hit Texas people in the mouth. I'm going to smack Trump in the mouth. That's how he thinks. There's no authenticity, there's no consistency. He's been, I've seen a lot of left wing politicians here in my lifetime. Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Willie Brown. He is by far the most incompetent but also the most nefarious. He really is. He has some, it's either a blinder or he has utter contempt for the middle class working California. He really does. And how he gets elected I don't know but maybe. A lot of people I talk to every time you talk like this, I said end mail ballots. End mail ballots. End mail ballots. I've got six of them on my kitchen desk. I know a guy who's voted it for just do it and have an ID and we'll see if it makes a difference.
- [58:07]
Jack Fowler
Well his, the people that work from like a stop clock twice a day is right. Did something right. Here's a headline. California to cancel 17,000 CDLs issued to illegal immigrants. California officials are finally admitting they've issued commercial driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. On Wednesday, state officials announced they will revoke 17,000 CDLs that were granted to immigrants who they now acknowledge remained in the US after the expiration of their legal status. Imagine that, just that sheer number of.
- [58:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
Trucks, 17,000, I think all of them are right outside my window right now because no, I mean high speed rail is six miles away and they've decided to make an en rail ramp on it and they need gravel and dirt and unfortunately my little road that's not little anymore is the main conduit to it. So night and day, every 90 seconds a huge truck driver drives and I watch them because I walk around all the time and I just study them. And I would say one out of four are the old breed. And by that I mean they're going 55 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour on a rural road. They never swerve, they don't go over, they're not texting. And I'd say the other 60% are madmen. They're going about 65 to 70 miles an hour. You look as they come and go, and that back trailer looks like a rattlesnake going back and forth. And when they come by, if they're not shaded, increasingly trucks shade their window so you can't see in, but you can see somebody with a little thing propped up here reading a text. And they don't know what they're doing, they're incompetent. And the way they drive, you can see it. And then I can. I have seen a truck going 65 miles, 70 miles an hour, pass a car on my road in front of my mailbox. And so these. And remember, these are non domicile licenses. That means if you're an illegal alien in Nevada and you don't even live here, you can come here and take the test and apply for it. And we've issued non domicile California license. So somebody listening in Indiana, I know you're getting frustrated with me talking about this, but we can get to you. You can have a California driver license. Maniac driving all over Indiana or Iowa and you didn't give him that license. And it might even have no name on it. So it doesn't even have his name. It was just issued. So we export the toxicity that we create and it's dangerous. And when there's another force multi, there's two force multipliers. And that's why almost every day, if you scan the California newspapers, there is a truck that jackknifes or kills somebody or involved in an accident or there's a road rage, something. Today there was a road rage where a man got out, father of nine, to check a car and they had an argument and he was stabbed. You'd be crazy in California when somebody cuts you off to flip them the bird or yell out the window because you don't know who they are. But my point is that you have two force multipliers. One is the infrastructure. They are driving on a 1970 system where there were 16 million Californians. There's 41 million now. And for all practical purposes, outside a few big city areas in San Francisco now, the freeways have not Changed. You can go for 40 miles on the 99, the main lateral north and south and there will only be two lanes in each direction. You can go 100 miles on I5, two lanes and there will be two truckers. So the bad infrastructure, crazy drivers and 27% of the population was not born in the United States. So when you go by on the freeway, just say to yourself, one out of every three cars. The person was not born in this country and may not be familiar with American automobiles, rules, driving, know the street signs. When you put all of that together and it's. I used to like listen to the music talked on hands free when I drove my four hours over to Palo Alto. Now it's sort of like I feel like a P51 fighter pilot, you know what I mean?
- [62:48]
Jack Fowler
White knuckle in it too.
- [62:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I think, oh wow. I feel like my dad's story. There's a Frank coming at me on the left. Oh, 12 o' clock high. There's a Jack. Oh my gosh. When you see these big trucks, it's just scary. It really is. I don't know why people haven't addressed it. It just, it's. And you can see the roads, the roads are just taking that right lane and center. It used to be just the right lane was destroyed, but the center lane is destroyed.
- [63:17]
Jack Fowler
I feel bad bringing this up because my, my late father in law who was a great man who was a marine and he was an independent truck driver and so was everyone else who was on the road was like him. And those days are over.
- [63:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't think you should feel bad because I feel that the trucking industry, the truckers are angrier than we are because they have to deal with them. I've had two or three emails from people who say, have you ever seen these people? You just see them, Victor, when they're driving. You should see them when they hit their destination. They try to back up to Walmart. And he said it's a circus. They can't even back their truck up or they'll say do you see where they park? They used to park off the road. Now they park on rounds ramps at night. So you're trying to go on and off and on ramp or. And there'll be a big truck, guys sleeping. And so they know better than anybody those guys used to. I mean you still see some of them and they're some of the best drivers in the world.
- [64:17]
Jack Fowler
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [64:18]
Victor Davis Hanson
Not, not, not anymore in California.
- [64:22]
Jack Fowler
Well, one last topic, Victor. Let's talk here's the headline Gaza Foundation Famine. Gaza famine. Headlines vanished.
- [64:31]
Victor Davis Hanson
How did that happen? I know how it happened. Greta Thunberg got over there finally with the food, didn't she?
- [64:38]
Jack Fowler
This is from Fox News. For months, headlines warned of an impending famine in Gaza. Images of starving children, shattered infrastructure and humanitarian collapse filled the news. On August 22, 2025, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification IPC declared that while full data was lack lacking, expert inference indicated famine was underway. Governments pledged aid. Humanitarian agencies sounded alarms. Yet today, the word famine has nearly vanished from the headlines. What happened?
- [65:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
I will bet you that the caloric intake of people has not changed from today six months ago. What's changed is Hamas was almost destroyed and cut a deal and then they told their Pravda outlier. We're now in a wait and see fake peace. And part of the protocols of the fake peace are we're not going to say we're starving to death and we're not going to be suicide bombing the Israeli food convoys, the UN Food convoys, the American food. We're not going to do that for a while. That's all it is. And it's the same thing about the SNAP thing. I was, I've been trying to go to a different two or three different food markets, but when I heard SNAP that people are going to starve, remember.
- [66:06]
Jack Fowler
That it would take the typical SNAP user six months to starve.
- [66:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I said to myself, the snap, I'm not making fun of people. I'm very compassionate. Obesity can be much more deadly than being underweight. But I said to my snap, I just was listening to a news account and it said people were going to be starving. That's what I heard, the word starving. It was either Elizabeth Warren or the AOC or they're going to be starving. Well, I went into this particular store and I said to myself, I'm going to count the first 15 people and nine of them were morbidly obese. Nine. Nine. And I know somebody is going to say, well, Victor, that's because they have no money and they only get these EBT cards and that only allows them to get processed food. No, processed food is more expensive, I priced it than buying bulk fruits and vegetables and bags of rice and beans and stuff. But I guess we're all, if you want to know why people are so cynical, is that they're just tired of being lied to, lied to, lied to all the time. And one of the things is that, I mean, one out of three people who go to a hospital in California are found to be pre diabetic. That comes from diet. Partly genes, but a lot of it's diet. I'm talking about secondary diabetes, acquired diabetes, not somebody who has a genetic problem or was born innately with it. But I'm talking about people that was predicated on diabetes diet. And we all have to watch our weight. But my gosh, to tell us that people are going to starve to death. If you were to curtail the snap when the people receiving them are, you know, £300.
- [67:57]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, I think the average weight difference between someone on and off snap. I read some study recently was 60 to 70 pounds. I mean that's, that's, that's the size of two.
- [68:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
You know, I watch what is boss. But I was there and there was two people there and a small child. The father must have been 57 and 250 and he had five individual beers. Not a case. And he went ahead of the line and paid cash. So I had to wait for him to be separately checked out. The mother must have weighed 27 70. She could hardly walk. She was probably about 30 years old and the child was obese. And they must have had $400 worth of groceries. When I said to myself, it will be the fourth or the fifth EBT card, it was the third. In their defense, it was the third. And then I looked at it, I thought how many Cokes Pepsi's will there be? There was only 48 of them. And then I thought to myself, how about frozen pies? Frozen foods? Sure enough. And there was literally, literally no fresh vegetables. And I looked at the vegetables. You can get packs, pre packs of salad for like four bucks. You can get squash for nothing. You know what I mean? It's not like you're buying, buying grapes in the winter or something at $3 a pound. So I don't know what this is part of the left. It just inundates us with this oppression victim. You should be ashamed of yourself. That whole thing, I think, yeah, that's what.
- [69:49]
Jack Fowler
How dare you think I should not be allowed to eat potato chips? You know, well, you're spending my money. Why don't you spend it on healthy.
- [69:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
Stuff instead of then when you superimpose the reality on who's talking to us like this? Ilyan Omar. She was one of the people telling she's worth what did you see that 15 million, 16 million dollars. Now when she married into this hyper entrepreneurial campaign consultant that she used to give contracts to and the Pelosi plan. And then we hear it from Elizabeth Warren who wrote a book on how to flip houses. We're talking about home ownership. Flip houses and make a big prophet actually wrote a book on it. That was probably before she wrote her book on indigenous American recipes. But what I'm saying is that the people who Chuck Schumer are then Nancy Pelosi, remember she was lecturing us. Wasn't lecturing. She was bragging about her $30,000 refrigerator sub zero and then the ice cream that was $13 during the middle of COVID And she's a champion of expressing how the right exploits people starve them.
- [71:03]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, yeah.
- [71:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
I mean it's a bunch of wealthy people using poor people to romanticize and to fault the middle class who pays the taxes.
- [71:15]
Jack Fowler
Well Victor, you've shared a lot of wisdom today. I appreciate it. As we we typically do at the end of these shows there's two things. One I, I gotta toot my own horn and that's I write Civil Thoughts. That's a free weekly email newsletter that comes from the center for Civil Society. I'm a senior fellow there. It's for it includes 14 recommended readings, gives you a link, gives you an excerpt. I, I think they're interesting articles that I come across and I share them. This that's the only purpose we're not charging. It's free and we're not selling your name. So how do you get it? You go to civilthoughts.com sign up and easy peasy. The one I wrote this that came out yesterday Victor had something to do with the lack of Christian names. And I looked at my church's baptismal names and there was nothing. It's like who's Zoe? Who's Saint Zoe? There's no Saint Zoe. So anyway, read Tom Soul on that.
- [72:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
He wrote A great article 40 years ago on African American young women naming these new names that he was trying to find and he was trying to argue that that was going to haunt people when they were older because most people wanted non controversial names or easy to pronounce first. We're talking about first name.
- [72:36]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Well so the pronunciation is one thing and now it's also the coolness of spelling. Like Michael. Michael has to be. I'm different. I'm going to spell my child's name Michael M Y K O L. You.
- [72:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Know that kind of R John J O N even though it's not short for Jonathan. Yeah.
- [72:52]
Jack Fowler
Well anyway that's simple thoughts do thanks folks. Who I get a lot of emails from folks who are enjoying it so and I want to remind about Victor blade of Perseus VictorHansen.com on X. Victor's handles Dhanson, of course. Go to the Daily Signal, please.
- [73:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
And.
- [73:11]
Jack Fowler
And subscribe.
- [73:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Everybody go to the Daily Signal. And C. We're still working. We're still in competition with the Bizarro Victor. But.
- [73:23]
Jack Fowler
Bizarro Victor is. Bizarro Victor is mean and he has. No, no.
- [73:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
Maybe I've been hot. I don't want to be cruel, but Tucker gave one of the weirdest. I. I like TikTok. He gave one. Did you read what he said? That he was attacked by some demon when he was asleep?
- [73:40]
Jack Fowler
I did. He was being interviewed by Megan Kelly. Was Megyn Kelly. Yeah.
- [73:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
Said he had scratches on him.
- [73:47]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. On the side. And he showed his wife and he went outside. Yeah, it was. Look, I believe in demons and possessions, but I don't.
- [73:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
Do they have claws?
- [73:58]
Jack Fowler
Well, teeth or claws.
- [74:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
They.
- [74:01]
Jack Fowler
It can be physical. Padre Pio, who we talked about a few episodes ago, he's the. The Italian monk who appeared in the. In the sky over body in that region in Italy and was telling the fighter pilots your. Your father's friends in the. In the European theater, not here. And no bombs fell on his monastery.
- [74:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
But he was a demon.
- [74:22]
Jack Fowler
No, no, he struggled.
- [74:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
He.
- [74:23]
Jack Fowler
He actually had the stigmata, which were.
- [74:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I know it's picture.
- [74:28]
Jack Fowler
And he. He did battle at night with. With demons. Yeah. So could demons. I shouldn't talk.
- [74:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
Maybe I'll be attacked by one. But my.
- [74:38]
Jack Fowler
Well, you've. You've been attacked by mother Nature. And yes, I had a. More than enough.
- [74:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
I've had about 30 little demons. They've had teeth called kidney stone.
- [74:50]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Well, anyway, also at the end of the show. Here we are. I want to read three comments that people have sent in. And here's one from Tracy Schneider, 1633. I believe they're off of YouTube. I've been listening to VDH for at least 15 years now. I'm in my 50s. I grew up on a family farm as well. I love his stories about his family. Hearing about them and about their experiences in war and on the farm make it more real for me because of the way he tells it today made me very emotional listening. Thank you, Victor, because you were talking about your father. Father. And. And he was. The nightmares he was having reliving the. The terrible events when he was saving the world for democracy. Then we have K. Duvey, who writes. I live in rural Wisconsin. Someone dumped a speedboat in a ditch a quarter mile from my land filled with tires. Unbelievable.
- [75:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
So I've never had a boat. I've never had a boat dump. I've had a semi truck. I've had spray rigs, but never. We have an industrial sized refrigerator. It's still in this neighbor's orchard. Nobody can get it out. That's really disturbing. Entire boat.
- [76:07]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. And one last one Here is from TZ is me. Born 1950, dropped out of school 1966. Parents signed me into the army six days after my 17th birthday. Three years later I have my GED and I'm a Vietnam vet. Shortly after returning home to the Bronx, I have been selected to become an Apprentice in Local 580 iron workers. Three years later became a member of the fire department of New York. One year later, married, bought a house in the Bronx, became a father. All by 25. And the world has changed. So that's cool. Indeed it has.
- [76:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
Somebody who knew what he was doing.
- [76:46]
Jack Fowler
Doing. Yeah, yeah. That was the way as we used to say.
- [76:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
I remember getting married at 23 and somebody in my high school said, a young woman I saw in town said, we never thought you were going to get married.
- [77:02]
Jack Fowler
You're an old man.
- [77:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
You're an old man.
- [77:07]
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor, you are still. You're hanging in there.
- [77:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
We trying to hang in there as much as we hang in there.
- [77:16]
Jack Fowler
Thanks Victor for all the wisdom you shared. Thanks folks for listening. Thanks for watching. We'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Bye bye.
- [77:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you everybody for listening. 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.
- [77:45]
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Victor Davis Hanson
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- [78:14]
Jack Fowler
See mintmobile. Com.