Transcript of Victor Davis Hanson: Ketanji Brown Jackson ‘Is Way Out of Her Depth’ | Oct. 23, 2025

Katanji Brown, who I think, nothing to do with her race, but what she said and written, she is the weakest Supreme Court justice we've had in a generation. She's way out of her league. She was the one that in the confirmation could not define a member of male or female. And it's sad, but she's way out of her depth. And to say that blacks are disabled, it makes no sense. If you're just going to keep on saying that or assuming that It was very revealing because I think she basically summed up a lot of the left-wing black leadership's assumptions about Blacks.

Well, hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen, and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words at the Daily Signal. I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You are here to listen to Get Wisdom from Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and E. Lee Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. And he's a man with a website, The Blade of Perseus. Victorhanson. Com is the address you should be subscribing. And later in this episode, I will tell you why. We are recording on Saturday, October 18th, the day of the No King's Rallies. Madness is happening across the Fruited Plains, Victor, while you and I are talking. I'm sure that even the great Sammie Wink, when you record later in the week, you'll give some reflection on what actually took place. We are talking Saturday, the 18th, and this particular episode will be up on Thursday, October 23rd. What are we going to talk about today? Ketanji Brown, Supreme Court Justice, Saying Blacks are Disabled. I didn't say it, Victor. You didn't say it, she did. Some impressive takes on Donald Trump's economic efforts by the President of Walmart and by Fed Reserve boss.

Tax on Senator John Fetterman, the Democrat from Pennsylvania who sins because he does not hate Israel. There's a new strategia out. Strategica is the online journal Victor Overseas at Hoover. Taylor Swift wants to have children. Guess what? That makes her a racist in some quarters. And if we have time, there's some California homelessness, madness. I use the word too much, Victor, but when you turn to the left, it's just madness.

That's what it is. It's a sick state. It's a beautiful six state. It's a picturesque ill state. It's a scenic unhinged state. It's very sad to be a native and watch this. It's one of them in the biggest sadnesses of my life to see this state that even Pat, when I was a kid, Pat Brown was the governor. He sued the Sierra Club so they could build a California water project that saved the state, the Aqueduct. Then they had Reagan for eight years, and then you had George Dugmesian for eight years. And you had even Jerry Brown. He was governor for 16 years.

Yeah. The first term.

First term and second. He didn't do that much damage compared to what Newsom done. And even Arnold Schwarzenegger's second term was pretty bad. But they've undone all the work of Reagan and Dugmesian and Pete Wilson.

Yeah. Pete Wilson left with a big... Well, we forgot about what's his name in there a little But gray Davis, right?

He was a blip on the screen and we called.

Yeah. Well, anyway, so much to get your take on, Victor, and we'll do that. We'll start that when we come back from these important messages.

It's right is still right, even if you stand by yourself.

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 them in.

We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, happily now on the Daily Signal. Not that we were unhappy before, but this is a happy relationship. Victor, let me read the headline here. I forget where it got it from. Sorry. Oh, I know. It's from the Daily Mail. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argues for race-based redistricting. This was the Supreme Court had a hearing on the... Well, let me just read this. Liberal Supreme Court Justice, Khitanji Brown Jackson, on Wednesday, that would have been about a week ago from when this podcast is up, compared efforts to draw Congressional districts along racial lines, compared to the way disabled people were granted easier access to buildings after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. That's just quoting her. The idea of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is that we are responding to current day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don't have equal access to the voting system, right? Jackson said as questioned a lawyer representing Louisiana voters who argued that the court ordered creation of a second-majority Black district in the state violated the 14th Amendment by prioritizing racial composition in its boundaries.

They're disabled, the justice said, of minority voters in the state. Victor, are Blacks disabled? The Supreme Court Justice thinks so.

Yeah, I don't know what they mean, but I think a lot of people's problem with DEI and affirmative action is there's no time limit on it. I guess that's what Brown was trying to say, that once you state that blacks are permanently disabled as if it's a physical condition, then you're going to have permanent set asides. But that was never the point. Even most of the Supreme Court justices who voted for a affirmative action to be continued said they felt that it For 20 years, it would be no longer needed. When you look at undergraduates today, and most of the elite universities, they're proportionate, according to race. If you look at women, they graduate, I think it's about 54% of all BAs are women. And in law schools and medical schools now, there's a majority of women students, more than men. If you look at the Stanford website, I don't know how accurate it is, as I said, but it was 9% white males. So as I said before, if you look at per capita income levels in the United States, I think so-called Whites are number 8 or 9 of people who identify as Mr. Mondami, Indian-Americans are number 1, and then a group of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arab-American, they are higher.

So the whole idea of DEI It's frozen in an amber. It's stale. It doesn't adapt to change it. There's other problems with it, but it doesn't show that class and race are no longer identical, and that you've got all these people who are claiming that they're completely disabled or disadvantaged. I was looking down on my phone because the four biggest cities, I think, in the United States is New York, was Eric Adams was mayor, black. Los Angeles, Karen Bass, black. Democratic, Brandon Johnson, black. And then Philadelphia, Sheryl Parker, black. And I could go down to San Diego, Dallas, you name it. And the majority of the biggest cities in the country are black mayors. And so the The point is, did they have racially gerrymandered? No, they didn't. They didn't have racially gerrymandered districts. As I understand, it was just a citywide vote. Why do we have them in the house at this late date in the civil rights movement? It's to the disadvantage of Black Americans to have these racially created concentrations on the basis of race, because when you have two or three Black candidates running for Congress in these overwhelming overwhelmingly Black Democratic districts, you get an auction or competition to see who can be the most radical, the most authentic, the most Black.

Then when that happens and that person gets elected, that's the end of their political career. That's the end of it. Now, they may be speaker like Hycom Jeffries or Jim Clayborn and third ranking in the party after a number of years, but they're not going to be elected senator or national candidate. And the only way you can really be a anybody, black, white, a national candidate, you have to be a governor or a senator. Kamala Harris ran as a senator. So what they're doing is they're taking black politicians and they're putting them on record with a whole history of easily verifiable written and oral statements. And it's going to be very hard for them in a state race where blacks are only 10 or 15 or 20% of the population to have a so-called black radical or firebrand. That's why Barack Obama, the best thing that ever happened to him, he lost that Congressional rest. I think it was to Bobby Bush. He was not considered an authentic black radical like his opponent was in that Congressional race who was a former Black Panther. And that liberated Obama to go appeal, at least superficially as a moderate, and he was elected to a statewide race.

That explains why there's a larger percentage of Blacks in the House than the Senate, because they have these specially carved out districts, which basically make it very hard for them to run for the Senate. So I don't know why they're telling G. Brown, who I think, nothing to do with her race, but what she said and written, she is the weakest Supreme Court justice we've had in a generation. She's way out of her league. She was the one that in the confirmation could not define a member of or female. It's sad, but she's way out of her depth. To say that blacks are disabled, it makes no sense. If you're just going to keep on saying that or assuming that, it was very revealing because I think she basically summed up a lot of the left-wing black leadership's assumptions about blacks, that they are disabled. I don't think most people feel that's true. But in the reparations, I guess it's the California legislature and Gavin Newsom does, because he's just passed the second phase of reparations. We're anywhere from $20 to $50 billion short on the budget each year. We're going to have to make massive cuts.

And he's now basically saying to the state, I want to take 5% of the resident population, and I want to give them money for something that happened about eight to nine generations ago, somewhere else other than the California state, which was a state during the Civil War, but was a free state that fought the Confederacy and was opposed to slavery and did not ever allow it within its confines. I want to give money to African-Americans, but I don't know how to define them. I don't know if you're one-third or one-fourth or one-eighth or one-fifth or two-fifths or three-fifths, whether you qualify. I do not know how long you have to have lived in California. Did you hear about reparations and moved to Utah from Utah, and therefore you're a... We have no idea how to define a long-standing African-American We don't know who qualifies by this, Willy Brown, the former mayor, this Kamala Harris, who's half Indian. When you get into that racial realm of privilege and bias and prejudice, as the old south determined, you enter a labyrinth because ultimately you have to have rules. And once you make the rules, they're ridiculous. Even the third Reich did not know how to define Jewish people.

Was it one-quarter, one-fifth? And so they had all of these secret little genealogists that were working with the Nazi hierarchy because every once in a while, a top Nazi's rival for power or influence with the Hitler inner circle, the accusation would go, his grandmother was Jewish, his wife is half Jewish. And then they would go hire a genealogist and go to Gurin or somebody and try to get an exemption. But it was a ridiculous situation. Why would you have to have a yellow star to identify a Jew if according to your ideology, they were so inferior and different that you could spot them a mile away? You wouldn't have to have. The answer was they had to put a star because they looked just like us and they talked just like us in Western Europe. Many of them were fully assimilated where we're not observant Jews.

Died in World War One alongside us.

Yes, that's another story. The iron crosses at Auschwitz that were in a big box where people wore them thinking that they would be given an exemption because they had been heroic German soldiers in World War I. If you go down that route that Khadanji Brown, Khadanji Brown wants to go on, you have to have a whole system. If she thinks blacks are disabled, she better tell us exactly why they're disabled, who is disabled, how they were disabled, and define who qualifies and who doesn't. I had this I had a conversation with a person where I was employed for 21 years who was in admissions, and he was trying to tell me why they were changing the admission standards because I asked why people... Anyway, Anyway, to make a long story short, I was told that this was a particular program I was participating in was purely meritocratic, and this was a private gift. And the donor said, I'm not interested in racial/ethnic gender preferences. I just want this particular university to be preeminent. I'm giving money, and I want 50 people who apply to this university based on their GPA and their test scores. I want the best, and then I will I will give inducements.

I will give them free dorms. I will give them free tuitions. I will give them free internet. I will give them free exclusive parking. I will give them free entree to sporting events. When they apply and they get accepted at Stanford or USA or UCLA, they will come here instead. I thought it was a great idea. I volunteered. I was the first faculty member to participate, one of the first four, as I remember. Then all of a sudden, Jack, within, I don't know, three years, I get calls. Are you Professor Hansen? Yes. Are you in the honors program? Yes. My son has a perfect SAT and a perfect 4. 0, and he didn't get in. And I started getting after 3 years. So I go to the person who was running. I said, I would like to see the list of all the people applied with two things, nothing else. And I talked to the donor, and he was outraged. He already knew it. And I I said, I want to see the SAT score. And he said, no, we can't. I said, Yes, you can do that. I've just talked to the donor. So he brought it out.

And there were, I don't know, 700 or 800 people applied for the 50. And then I started seeing these names, the The people gave me, the parents gave me their names. So I started seeing their children. They were like, based on the qualification, they should have been eight or 15. And they were down at 200. I said, you are deliberately violating the charter. And he said, well, we're considering community contributions. And I said, so you don't want to use data? Why don't you? Well, because we have underserved communities. And I said, would you please tell me what the definition is? Hispanic, black, Southeast Asian. Tell me. Tell me what it is. What do you have? So if you say you're Native American, do you use a local gambling casino? You use their definition to admitted they have one. I think it's 116th, maybe one-eighth. And if you're Hispanic, what percentage do you have to be? And they wouldn't tell me. So I said, you just take people, you're going to have all these incentives based on race, and you have no definition. And of course, they did have it, but they didn't want to talk about it.

And the same thing where I work now. And that's what's the biggest ill-kept secret in the world is that these universities that have race-based graduations, race-based dorms, race-based admissions, race-based hiring, they just get vague about it. And then it's superficial by their eye. But they never quite tell you when the rubber hits the road and somebody complains and says they're a minority, what their standards are, because they don't want to tell you they're racially obsessed, just like the neo-confederates. It's funny, I wrote all these columns about neo-confederacy and nullification. That's been very popular now to the way that the left is nullifying federal law in the way that the old south did at Fort Sumter or the armories within the confines of the Confederate States. But they were worse. They have adopted the old Confederate One Drop Rule, 116th, because the Confederacy had this problem. When somebody was born and their great grandfather was black or something, had been a slave, and they looked white, then they had to get a genealogist and say, no, he's not going to get this or She's not. Because it was ridiculous. It always topples by its internal inconsistencies.

And the same thing, and the left is not only the one drop, well, not only the state's rights, but it's also got the economy, a very elite on the top of cone of the pyramid, and then an underclass underbeat, and the middle class flees wherever it is. The blue state model, California middle class hollowed out. So you don't want I'm going to go into the racial thing. Kedanji Brown, if she thinks blacks are disabled, then she should say, I think blacks are disabled, and I can define someone who is of African-American ancestry, and they require the following their great grandfather must be black or something. And I can say they're disabled because they are making this amount of money per capita, and this is the other average. Or I can say that they have been this, this, this in the year 2025. She can't do that. So now it's just empty, empty verbiage.

Blacks were disabled by the elites. We've talked before. Actually, we had Shelby Steele on once, a couple of years ago, when he and his son Eli made that great documentary, What Killed Michael Brown. But of course, they talked a lot about that particular case in incident. But then much of that documentary was about Shelby's life growing up and the destruction of a rough around the edges, but still vibrant Black community. This happened in Every major city in America, and many small towns in America, just black communities were just wiped out. And then they were stuck in these monstrous projects. And this was a purposeful thing done by the left. The Blacks were disabled. Where they were before the projects they had. They had the means to success, the means to economic path to success. And so if they wanted to talk about disability, it's inflict on them by-That was a big thing is I grew up in a community that was half Mexican-American, and we had very few African-Americans.

We didn't know a lot. There was eight or nine families, and I was close friends with most of them. But there was a natural diverse... Because everybody was middle class to lower middle class. There was almost no very wealthy people or wealthy. And there wasn't a lot of destitute people. There were some, but the point I'm making is it was natural diversity. And then I get up to UC Santa Cruz, and that's when I first in my first entire life met what I would call boutique liberals. And the way they talked about minorities were as if they were pets. You know what I mean? They knew what was good. If somebody didn't agree with them, they'd say, I don't know why he's thinking that. We had a tour, and there was a guy who was African-American who was telling us we couldn't go here and couldn't go here. He was out of line. And all these students who had long hair and are want to... He doesn't appreciate us, what we've done. We protest and we do everything, and he won't even let us go in the I said, So you think you own him, huh?

Because you think that you're left and you vote this way, or you're for welfare, or you're this. Maybe he thinks you're patronizing him and you're destroying his culture. Who knows?

Yeah, maybe he was right.

Maybe he was right.

Yeah. Hey, Victor, for our many new listeners and viewers, if you listen or view the Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, you care about where America has been, where we are now, and where we're headed. And that's exactly what Freedom Frequency is all about. It's a new online publication from the Hoover Institution, where Victor is a senior fellow, designed to cut through the noise and bring clarity to the issues that shape our country's future. Each week, Freedom Frequency delivers serious accessible analysis grounded in research and guided by the American values of liberty, democracy, free enterprise, and the rule of law. You'll hear from some of Hoover's most respected thinkers, people like Condoleezza Rice, General Jim Mattis, General H. R. Mcmaster, Economist John Cochrane, and of course, VDH, providing clear thinking and principled solutions for a complex world. As we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation. There's no better time to dig deeper into the ideas that built America and will determine its future. Subscribe now to Freedom Frequency on Substack. That's thefreedomfrequency. Org. Let me repeat that, thefreedomfrequency. Org, and join the conversation that's lighting the way forward. We thank the good people from the Hoover Institution for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, before we take a break, John Fetterman's in the news again. He's just a sinner by the Democratic Party standards. He will not malign Israel. He will not suck up to Hamas. And now there are a number of a Democratic congressman being talked about, who are talking about, anyway, challenging him in a Democratic primary, should he run for re-election. We were all over Fetterman a few years ago, Victor, but he is-Yeah, well, a problem we have with Federman is I don't think he was able, after a stroke, to resume a candidacy like he was.

He couldn't answer questions in the debate against Oz. But his only problem, if wants to get reelected, there's only one problem he has, and that's the Democratic primary, because they're going to use a lot of money, and he's only polling about 45 %. If he gets into the general election, then everything changes, and it's the Republicans' challenge because he's a very strange person. He's a very brilliant guy because what he's doing is if you actually look at his voting record, Jack, he's pretty much 90 % left. But what he says is so common sense and appeals to everybody because it's just smart. He's reasonable on Israel. He's reasonable on immigration, and that appeals. So his rating among Conservatives is pretty high, 55 And statewide, it's up to about 55 or 60. So his problem will be, can he get renominated by the Democratic Party that wants to punish him, not for the way he votes necessarily, but for what he says? And then with the Republicans, how are they going to handle? If he were nominated, they're going to say, Well, he's a folk hero and he's a moderate, and we're going to run somebody against him who is going to do what?

What if he loses and there's a hard campaign, we're going to suffer for it? Or will we be able to get somebody that's more conservative? Or will he flip completely over to our side and start voting with us. There's a lot of known unknowns there. But the biggest problem he has is what he says appeals more to Conservatives than it does to his own party. The way he votes is mostly with his own party. And that's also a party for Conservatives. They're going to have to say if he starts voting with them, is he going to flip? Or if his votes start to match his rhetoric, is he going to flip? Or do you want a really pure Can you get a pure conservative elected in Pennsylvania?

Yeah. One of his virtues, Victor, a la Trump in his way, is the authenticity of him. You don't think he's contriving anything. He's not sitting back in his office, drafting the right response. And he abhors the calling of his constituents, Nazis and fascists, because you are a Nazi, and I'm a Nazi, right? By a democratic standards.

You're right. Right after October seventh, I guess, he just basically, if I could condense, say, a couple of months worth of his remarks, it was something to the effect. What is it about October October seventh, you don't understand. There was peace. Take away October seventh, 1,200 dead, butchered, raped, maimed, decapitated, defiled by thousands of people who started a war and were joined by hundreds of citizens that were looted, raped, assaulted, took hostages. What medieval practice did they not engage in? Take that away and you would not have a Israel in now in Gaza. That's what he said. He was right. Take that away and there'd be no IDF in Gaza. More power to Gaza. Do what you want to do. If you want to take $10 billion and not build a Riviera hotel and a conference center and Imitate the Emirates or Qatar, and you want to spend it on a subterráne, Minoan-like labyrinth, go ahead. And you want to have a minotaur called Hamas down there, running everything. That's your vision of a minotour? Fine, go ahead. That's what Israel's attitude was. But we're not going to get in there. That's your business. They chose that.

And then we'll see Hamas is now. They can't have the phase 2 and phase 3 and phase 4 if Hamas is participating. It's a murderous, Isis, Nazi-like organization. It's got one purpose to kill Jews. They'll never reform.

And kill Gazans also.

Gazans. They will never change. They will never moderate. They will go into hiding. They will claim this, but they're never going to change.

Yeah, they have to be killed.

They have to be killed or exiled. They have to taken out of there, and the people who support them have to understand.

So, Victor, okay, here's a headline from the Daily Mail. Walmart boss says, Trump's tariff's gamble is paying off, and soon all Americans will feel the results. First few lines from the story. President Donald Trump's tariffs appear to be working for Walmart's chief executive has confirmed that the company is increasing its investments in USA made products and suppliers. The retail giant is not the only major American company paying more attention to American manufacturing. Now that Trump has placed tariffs on most countries outside the US with particularly high fees on imports from China and India, corporate America has been forced to search closer to home for alternatives. Boss John Furner, said Walmart's investment in products generated on US turf is part of the company's long-standing strategic priority, et cetera, et cetera. That's Good, I guess.

I think he's reflecting a new reality. And you got to give credit to Trump. He's the only one that envisioned what could happen because everybody said, if you have these tariffs, traditional classical economics say that you're going to do a lot of bad things. You're going to reward inefficient American firms. They're going to require subsidies. They're not going to innovate because they're not going to have... They're going to have plenty of competition with each other the way it should be. But what Trump and I think Walmart are saying is, Number one, this is not China 10 years ago or 15 years ago or 20 years ago when they gave enormous lucrative concessions to American and European or Western businesses, and their labor rates have gone way up. They're not so competitive as they were before. There's people outsourcing to Southeast Asia, to Indonesia, et cetera. And more importantly, they have enormous transportation cost and quality cost. So if you add it all up in the year 2025, if an American factory wants to make widgets, it's going to be a lot cheaper to get to a store than it is from China. Number two, they have a lot more rigorous product specifications and safety specifications of the stuff you're getting, whether it's sheetrock or penicillin from China.

Number three, you don't have to deal with a foreign government and opening this and that. Number five, you're not rewarding our enemy, which are using these foreign exchange huge sums to build carriers and drones and stuff to invade Taiwan and hurt us. So it's a win-win. And I think a lot of companies will start to say, You know what? Nobody automates better than we do. If we have a labor shortage or we have a problem with high wages, we're going to be the most automated in the world. I've seen it happen in agriculture. I was told that you could not automate agriculture. Certain things you cannot automate, hormones or raisins. The first thing I've noticed when the labor got very expensive, it's about $35 an hour. Some picking is maybe $18, but some tractor driving, it's very expensive. But the first thing I noticed, got an almond orchard. I haven't seen a sole in the orchard. It's computer A computer turns on the pump. It's automatic injection of nitrogen into the drip system. There is no pruning in the new... There's no major pruning. And if there is a machine comes by with a blade, and then the things fall on the ground, and then a shredder comes by and does it.

But that's rare. Most of the time, all I see is a harvester. It comes in with a machine, it has a computer, it knows exactly how long to shake each particular size of the tree or the stump. It It goes by, it puts them in a particular area in the middle of the row. Another one thing comes by and sweeps it in a nice little pile. It dries out in three or four days. The other one comes up, sucks it up, gets rid of the leaves, insects, crap, if I could use that word, and it goes into a bin and it's off to the plant. That's it. Raisins, they said, Oh, you can't do that. I see raisins now. They're all mechanically trelliced at a high special type of trellice The machine comes by, cuts the canes. The raisins shrink up on the vine over a month and a half. They have new earlier varieties of grapes that make them ripen in early August rather than late August. And then they shake them and then they go in. They have to be dried a little bit of dehydrated. But they said that was impossible. But what I'm getting at is you don't need to import a lot of cheap labor because the opposite happens.

People depend They don't innovate, they don't have to. But when you have high-priced, good, reliable labor, and then you use that labor. I'm not saying people who do manual are not good. I mean good in the sense of you know who they are. They're here. They're going to be here. They're part of the community. And then you give them machines and technology, and they get skilled. But if you just have a lot of people coming in from a foreign country, and they don't know the language, they don't have skills, then you don't want to innovate. You just hire people at an exploitive, lower wage. And so I know agriculture says we need cheap labor, but only 20 % of all illegal alien labor is used by agriculture. And the reason they can get away with that, if I can use that term, because they've been very brilliant and innovating with technology. And it's just amazing what agriculture has done to make farm work a specialty. I've always mentioned Fowler packing. It's a firm that I know the owners. I've gone and looked at it. Their view of farm labor was very different, or it was innovative, or it was at the front of their acuity.

They make They grow and package mandarin oranges called Cuties. That's seedless, really sweet little mandarin oranges. And they're the world's expert, but their view of a farm laborer is a farm labor technician. In other words, he's a person who's in the area. They have a cafeteria where he gets a high-quality meal at the plant. The plant isn't totally automated. Fifty people are doing the work of 500. There is medical facilities on their place when they go out to pick. There's clean toilets, there's everything. And then the people who pick are skilled to the degree they're still hand labor. But there's not much of it. And they're paid an exorbit amount. And they're able to compete because they have so much automation and they concentrate on a few stationary employees that are here and want to work for them. And that's a model that all of these agricultural firms are doing now. Harris Corporation, we knew the late John Harris. Same thing. And the opposite is when you have a lot of very poor people and they're coming in to work manual labor, then the emphasis is on, Pay them less and less and more hand labor.

Don't innovate. You don't have to. There's been things I disagree with it because when you have to innovate and labor scarce, then people that have capital and are larger concerns, agribusiness, marketing, vertically integrated, they're going to have the capital innovate the most. But nevertheless, it's inevitable. I think that's been very good in agriculture. I saw-I think everything in general.

You know, the Bronx is a very big place for agriculture. Last year, I saw some videos about... You talk about the automation of weeding. And these big, beautiful-looking vehicles, it's like a video game with these lasers that they're just coming out zapping. So finding the weeds, eliminating them, and frankly, I guess, eliminating what one would maybe call back-breaking labor, because otherwise, if you're not going to have this machines doing that.

It's amazing. I went and looked at it. When you see fruit, and I did that a lot in my life, hand-sorted it. I did that in high school, and then when we had our own packing place, we all worked out. But you should see this thing, this big line. It's about 50 feet wide, and just tons of fruit come across, and every fruit is different. So there might be a mandarin orange that has a bug has gnawed the skin off of, or there might be another one that a bird has defecated on, or might be another one's too small, or another one that's deformed-looking. But they have these lasers, these laser scanners, and they're redirected into the no-go box. I don't know how they do it. And it's amazing. So Trump is right. Where we want to go is to promote as many We, American, high paying, high skills, high tech, and constantly trying to automate and make our workers technicians. And not that there won't be a need for physical labor, and that should be ennobling, and we should honor that. But we don't need China to make stuff. We don't need them to make dust masks.

We don't need them to make pharmaceuticals because we know what they're going to do. Anything they can leverage is that somebody says, Well, Victor, they're not rare earth minerals. No. During the COVID crisis, when you couldn't get hand cleanser and mask, they were leveraging that. They were.

We were going to democratize them by all this, and look what's happened. Victor, another great, well, great is the right word, but positive economics-related story for Trump. Here's a headline. Again, this is from the Daily Mail. Federal Reserve Bank, Trump's migration curves boost wages technology. President Donald Trump's deportation policy is pressuring Texas employers to raise wages, recruit sidelined Americans, and invest in productivity boosting technology, according to the Federal Reserve bank, Dallas. Texas firms are taking measures to address Trump's impact by offering planned wage and benefit increases and more hiring of US-born workers, naturalized citizens, or legal permanent residence, end quote, said in October 17th, bank report by pro-migration economist, almost half of the surveyed companies said they hoped to extend overtime for their employees. A third said they planned to offer increased wages and benefits and to hire more Americans. And one quarter said they plan to invest in more technology. Sounds like a win-win-win.

I think this is why we have today a no King's protest. I think the left looked at all the things Donald Trump did, and they said, Hey, we used to be for that. We used to be trying to promote domestic labor. We were always talking about greedy capitalists that offsourced and outsourced, and we're not patriotic. Now he is. But he's more sophisticated even than we were. And jobs are going in the next year, i. E. The year before the midterms, there's going to be more jobs, they're going to be better paid, and we're going to get, I think it was the Washington Post said, Well, we don't believe there's going to be 15 trillion, but there might be 8 trillion, and that would be an all-time record in foreign investment. And we're going to get multibillion dollar new factories for everything from batteries to military goods. Jamie Dimons said that the bank, is it Chase that he runs? It's going to invest what? Or is it J. P. Morgan, Morgan Chase? Is it one trillion point something he's going to try to steer toward defense investment. He's very worried about our military readiness. And there's things on the horizon is what I'm saying.

If the Federal Reserve were lower interest rates, so we're not paying $3 billion a day in interest, but maybe two, that would save a third of a trillion dollars. With the foreign investment and the encouragement of domestic production and giving a level playing field, There's going to be a lot of opportunity for the United States, and I think the left knows it. I think they're afraid that the GDP and the inflation rate and the jobs rate sometime next March or April or June is going to be really robust. Not that it's not now, but they're going to have a lot of trouble running against it. I was on Pears Morgan not too long ago, and I was talking with about four or five people, most of them from the left, and it was very weird that they were not... They had no arguments except about inflation So this Congressional candidate in Texas just came, I can't afford anything. It's sky high. And I said, Excuse me? He's been here for nine months. The inflation rate is 2. 6. If you look at 9. 1, that was Joe Biden in 2022, '03. If you look at the cumulative price under Joe Biden for insurance or energy prices, or staple goods or meat, you will see they rose cumulative about 20 to 30 % over four years.

It's like $5,000 a family of four.

Yes. Car price, everything. And you expect... And they had no... She had no answer for it. Just yell and scream. And I think that's what they're worried about. He's going to have an economic argument. Last time he did, everybody, I think Jack, we had... I don't know if we had a podcast in early '20, didn't he? 2020 for national review?

Yes, it was.

Yeah. And I think we talked about everything was going swimmingly, like in January of 2020, it was pretty much he was going to get reelected. He had low unemployment. It was down to 2%, 2. 5. He had low inflation. Gosh, it was about... He left with 1. 9, but it was about 2%, and the interest rates were low. It was It was booming. And then COVID came along. I won't get into the conspiracy atmosphere, whether the Chinese knew that and they wanted to destroy the US economy or what. But I do know, as I said before, that for many days, if you were a resident of Wuhan, China, you were barred from flying into the interior of China, but you could take a flight to the United States or Europe, and hundreds of thousands of people did. So I'm worried about that, that I think things are going to go very well and there's going to be efforts to subvert or sabotage the US economy. I don't mean in a conspiratorial fashion, but either something that China might do or enemies, because otherwise, I think we're going to have a dynamic call me. I really do.

I don't regularly watch 60 Minutes. In fact, I never watch it, except last weekend, for whatever reason. It was a football. It came right on after the end of a football game. And They talked about Littleton, Massachusetts, which is a little old town, and it's totally infected by Chinese software, malware, whatever. It's water plant. It creates its own energy facility there. And not that any bad switch has been flipped, but the fact that it's even there in this Out of the way place. This is the troubling thing that some are saying.

I think everybody understands that now. Why are they buying up farmland adjacent or near a military base? Why not just buy it somewhere else? Why do they have to have 300,000 students here if they hate us so much and we're so awful? Why not just, I don't know, 30,000? If they have one or two %, they have three or four thousand espionage people. Why What is every weapons platform they create look almost exactly like ours? It's an emulative, parasitic government. It really detests the United States for what it represents, and especially the attraction the United States holds for people in China, like their own students or people in Taiwan or dissidents in China. They find us that we have something to appeal to them. Their biggest ace in the the hole is the American left. They feel the American left. When you have a Democratic administration, they're naive and they can be manipulated. If you want to send a balloon across the United States, go to it. If you want to beat your chest and get the Secretary of State to a national security advisor in Anchorage and just scream and yell at them and humiliate them, go to it.

If you want to buy up land next to a military base or send mysterious drones into these, go to it. There's not going to be anything, but not a different administration. That's what's scary about them.

Well, I want our listeners and viewers to know, Victor, a lot of new ones. You have a website, the Blade of Perseus. The address is victorhanson. Com. If you're a fan of Victor, and you got to be, that's why you're here, check it out regularly. You will find everything Victor writes, his Weekly Essay for American Greatness, Weekly Syndicated column, are there. The archives of these podcasts, links to Victor's other appearances, links to his many books. And twice a week, Victor writes an exclusive article for The Blade of Perseus, and once a week, he does an exclusive video. And you can watch them, you can read them. You just have to subscribe. It's 6: 50 a month or discounted, $65 for the full year. The web address, victorhanson. Com, and that's The Blade of Perseus. Victor, let's talk about other things Victor does online. You oversee, you are the, I'll call you Editor-in-Chief, the Big Cahuna of Strategica, which is an online journal for the Hoover Institution, and you issue number 101. It comes out every three, four, five weeks. And there is a new issue of Strategica out about battlefield medicine. Would you want to talk about that a little bit and why you found this was a worthwhile topic?

Well, one of the authors is a visitor at the Hoover Institution, and we had him on this podcast, and he talked about inroads in battlefield medicine. So we discussed maybe... I mean, we've had well over 100 issues now, 101, I think. So we've covered a lot of areas that are of contemporary interest that try to bring... What the magazine tries to do is bring historical exempla and experience to a contemporary issue. So we're talking about, has the world we were thinking of being wounded changed in the battlefield? It had changed in the battlefield, and it has in a lot of ways. I don't want to get into the individual essays, but just to take one example, when you have operators in air condition in Western-type headquarters and they're sending out drones, and the battlefield is becoming increasingly robotic, or the battlefield is becoming more defensive in the sense that people are able to protect themselves with AI or robotics, then warfare is not so much, although we do see it on the Ukraine war, just sending a mass of bodies against another mass of bodies. Because with low fertility rates, people are very, not that they weren't precious, but with one child families, there is a renewed emphasis to make sure people are better protected.

And then the time from which they are wounded and to the time in which they are treated is as short as possible. And a lot of these essays talk about this revolution in medicine and things, new technologies to stop bleeding, to do many operations, to train medics. So you get the impression almost, I know there's nuclear weapons and hypersonic weapons and AI, though, that people are now concentrating as much on defending the soldiers because there's fewer of them. And after that issue came out, there was a person from Ukraine sent me a picture of major highways that are getting near the battlefield in Ukraine, and they look very bizarre. They look like out here when we have bloom for oranges, there's a particular type of virus that's transmitted by insects. So they put this fine mesh over the whole row. But that's what they're doing in Ukraine, only it's two sides are mesh, and then a ceiling is mesh for miles. And then cars can drive through it because individual drones with AI and type of intelligence are targeting individuals. But now they can't get into the mesh or they'd have to blow hole. And people are able to travel back forth.

It's very scary because with facial recognition, you can send a drone to kill a particular general. I get a lot of things in the mail from people in particular militaries that say, You should be talking about this. But the idea that you're going to have a mother... I'm getting off topic that's not in this issue, but we're going to have a future issue soon on it. A mother fighter would have a pod that would drop it and it would open up and you'd have maybe an accompanying fleet of fighters about eight feet long, maybe. And there might be 15 or 20 in your fleet with no pilot, and that you are going to direct them from your mother pod as a fighter. And then you're going to have tiny ones You're going to send one into the air intake of another $80 million jet. Or that picture, that really eerie picture of the Hamas Kingpin Sinwa. Remember when he was sitting there and that drone went like this?

He threw Threw something at it.

And he threw something at it. And you get the impression that we're going to get small little dragonfly drones, and they're going to fly into people's homes. And I think that's happened in some of the takeouts of physicists and generals in Iran by Israel. And then medicine is becoming the same thing at the battlefield. They're being able to close that gap from somebody being wounded and dying dying on the battlefield. And the percentage rate, historically, from World War I to World War II to Vietnam and to the present, I think it's up to about 90 something % of those wounded are not going to die, that are wounded. I mean, I'm not saying that you're going to have an explosive shell land on you. That's not counted. But the people who are wounded and can be saved, 90 % will be saved. Anyway, it's interesting. Anyway, you can read about these various aspects of military medicine and the emphasis on as humans become, as the fertility rates get smaller and smaller than humans that are willing and there's more high tech opportunities in the economy and it's more automated, then you're going to see the battlefield reflect that.

You're going to have less and less unskilled shoulders, so to speak, that are infantry. They're going to charge a hero with a machine gun. They're either going to be better protected with new types of armor, or they're going to have robotics, or something, drones, or something with them, or to replace them, or when they're more and more going to be to the rear of the battlefield commanding, and then they're going to be safer. And the ones that are out there, there's going to be fewer of them and more medical opportunities to save them.

Well, anyone that wants to read this or any of the There are issues of Strategica, just go to the Hoover Institution website and type in Strategica. It'll take you there. There are 101 issues. Each issue is three, four writers, brilliant writers, and it's all very ever Green. You know what, Victor? I think we should talk about Taylor Swift, and we will still talk about what's happening in California. But it's really not so much about her, but it's about the way the leftist mind thinks. So this is a New a New York Post article from the other day, and it's titled White: Ultra Woke Writer Blast Taylor Swift as Racist. Canceled, that's the first line, a self-proclaimed white, highly academically educated, lesbian and bisexual writer, slam Taylor Swift as Racist, Dangerous, and Cis-Heteronormative for singing about wanting to have babies with her future husband, leaving the internet furious. In the online essay, Yes, Taylor Swift is a racist, not just the kind you think she is, the politicized relationship coach, Melissa Fabello, compares a song on the pop queen's new album, The Life of a Showgirl, to a pro-eugenics anthem and declares that all 12 songs are a magnum opus of white supremacy.

Is Taylor Swift a racist? Fabello asks? Yes.

No, she is for saying that because she's racially obsessed. It's funny about this whole fertility thing. Because of the demography through immigration, the idea was that the majority population of so-called Whites was shrinking and therefore, minority populations were increased. But when you actually look at the data today of minority populations, there's not great differences between ethnic or racial groups. It's all below 2%. So then the idea was, well, we want voters who are poor and in greater need of entitlements who are going to open the border. And that was something. Then the left came up with, as Kamala Harris said, I think it was yesterday, that she feels sorry for her stepdaughter, her husband's daughter, by an earlier marriage, who said that, I don't know what I should be doing. Should I get Mary didn't have children. This was what AOC said, remember? It's the left-wing professional idea of selfishness, to tell you the truth. I would have two children, but I'm just so dedicated to climate change, and they would be doomed because they'd grow up in a hot world. That's what Kamel Harris was saying, that her stepdaughter was worried about what the world would look like.

Subtext is, do I really want to have two messy little diaper kids running around in my house for five years when I could go out to a bar with my or go to Florence? Why would I want the price for a kid today from zero to 18 is about $450,000, $600,000? Think of all the times I could go to Tuscany or think of all the Redwood decks I could have or the Quartz Counters, instead of that thing. That's their attitude. Believe me. So they try to rationalize it, but the left adds a wrinkle to it. They keep thinking that if we can build this coalition, of trans and gay and feminists and blacks and Hispanics, then we'll run the country. And what is in our way? It's normative cisgender, I don't know what they call it, white people, and they shouldn't have any children. So anybody that does have children is a white racist because they are an obstacle to our greater racist project of getting rid of them. And that's how they look at it. The only problem they have, because basically these people are stupid, is that when you distill all those ideologies together, you get a fertility rate in Minnesota, Massachusetts, California of about 1.

4, 1. 5, and no matter what race or religion you are, and you get something in Utah, Florida, Texas, Alabama, Wyoming, Montana, about 1. 9. And so red state paradigms that talk about religion and family and normative sense, people go there and have children. And blue states that say the planet's too hot or it's racist or you're not, you're homophobic, they don't have children All of them. And then I'm not even talking about the A word, Jack. We're back up to what? Nearly a million abortions per year again. We are. We are. And if you believe in abortion and the left overwhelmingly believes in abortion, then you're aborting in their own calculus, a million potential constituents a year, and if they keep advocating for that.

Imagine how many teachers union members there would be without abortion. We've had 70 million abortions in America in the last 60 years.

What they hate the most, what the left hates the most from my experience, both with friends, family, and strangers and the popular culture, is basically someone who either doesn't go to college or goes to college for four years, nonprofessional, gets married, buys a house in their late 20s, if it's possible, early 30s, has two or three children, is either observantly religious or believes in a deity in transcendence, and is very happy at work and happy at family. They just think they're dupes, and they're part of the reactionary forces that's holding their liberation. They hate them.

A higher demographic version of Clingers in their mind.

Yeah. They're doing all the things that are making them less and less influential. They're having fewer children. They're having more abortions, and it's thinning their ranks. And the more they think they're going to bring in new constituencies, A, it's not sure that by the second generation, those constituencies will believe in their bizarre values. Number two, it's going to be harder and harder to bring in those constituencies illegally.

Yeah. Well, I don't know what gives them a happy life besides smoking dope and drinking a half bottle of wine every afternoon and then scrolling rolling through their Instagram for the rest of the night. Victor, let's end this with your... Before we say, ended, I did want to remind our new viewers and listeners that since we're on the Daily Signal here with a podcast, you're also on the Daily Signal four times a week with videos. So people should check that out, Victor. Again, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I'm not sure if you're Friday. Five, seven-minute video. So do check that out. So, Victor, here's a headline, How did California spend billions on homelessness only for it to get worse? This is from National Review. It has spent $24 billion Now, it's coming to cropper a little bit. Here's part of this national review story. The state has not offered any explanation since the figure was revealed in a state audit released earlier this year. Now, where did all the money go?

I can tell you where it went. Where? It went like this.

Okay.

I'm Victor Hansen, and I live in San Francisco or LA County. My friend, a person that I've given campaign donations to, a relative, an associate, is in the California legislature, or he's a lobbyist, or he's in the California executive branch. So I'm thinking I really love to help homeless people. So I'm going to make the fund for the safety of the homeless. Fsh. Nonprofit, of course. Yes, nonprofit Oh, yes. I'm going to be nonprofit, and I'm going to go to my representative and say, You know what? I'm a big campaign supporter of yours, and I will be even a greater campaign supporter of yours. But I need a $20 million grant, $30 million, because I will go into San Francisco and open a halfway house. And then they said, Yeah, it's great. So they get it. And then they hire their friend, their relative, their associates. They have to be taken care of. So they have nice salaries, nice cars, nice situations. And then they either do nothing or they encourage the behavior of what is homeless, but they don't address problem, and mostly they don't even try to address the problem. So if you look at where the billions of dollars went, it went to overhead, it went to salaries, it went to advertising, and it was all a hollow paper mache joke.

And that's what this happened. There was very few people who said, There's three of us, and we want a mini grant for $100,000, and we're going to go out and target four people who are homeless, and we're going to monitor them every day, and we're going to make sure they have good hygiene, and we're going to tender their health if we can, and then we're going to try to get them a home and decentralize it. So it was like the Somalian Really Hot Meals program in Minneapolis that stole a billion dollars, and the government should get out of it. They should let the private... They should say to somebody, We have a contract, and We have all of this empty land in the county, and anybody who wants to bid, if you can build a really clean 300 foot shelter that's immaculate, mass produce cubicle, here's what the contract is. And we're going to make a, I don't know, a temporary, semi-temporary place. We're going to have clean water. We're going to have a central bathroom shower. And each person is going to have this cubicle, and it's going to be clean and safe. And if a person breaks the law and does not get off the street and wants to fornicate, defecate, urinate, we're not going to let them.

They're going to have to go either to jail or they get an alternate sentencing to this new cubicle that's humane and clean, but it's not going to be in the center of downtown. And you're not going to be able to be an object where you can expose your genitalia or defecate in front of people or hit people or stab people or anything people if you break the laws. It's sad in San Francisco, they had an anti-spitting law in the 1860s. It said no man could walk along the sidewalk and spit out tobacco. And they had ratting groups that went out and killed rats. But San Francisco today is probably less hygienic than it was in 1870.

Gosh, yeah.

That's something that people don't realize.

It was like playing hopscotch.

Yeah, I always do that. Civilization regression is very Very common in history. When you look at certain periods, if you look at second century BC Greece and compare it to the fifth century, I don't think it was nearly as safe or as dynamic had gone backwards. If you look at sixth century AD in a Roman province, it was a disaster compared to first century AD. I think if I look at my community, I always say, civilizationally, if If I go down this road and I look at the houses and the people 60 years ago, are they more better kept? Or does it look better despite all the technology? Is it safer? If I leave my house at night, is it safer now or in 1960? If I go into town and I leave my wallet, I don't know, in my unlock car, would it be taken now or 60 years ago? I know there's technology and I'd be dead because of kidney stones and all these other health problems I've been in and operated. But on certain aspects, we are into civilisational regression. Just a fact.

Victor, you raise Well, we raise the nonprofit aspect of this madness out there. And I work for a company, the Amfil, that helps nonprofits. And there are so many good ones, whether they're policy or charity, like St. Vincent de Paul, and you are on the board of Bradley Foundation, which helps support nonprofits. But no one should be surprised that the Left has marched through all institutions, and it has marched through the nonprofit world, and it uses nonprofits, all this NGO stuff, all this AID money. They have used nonprofits as a means to bankroll their Absolutely. Well, Victor, we have come to the end of the show, almost the end of the show. So just a few things I need to say. First of all, again, Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, is victorhanson. Com. Hey, if you're on X, Victor's handle is at VD Hanson. If you're on Facebook, there's a wonderful Victor Davis Hanson fan club. Go find it. About 65,000 people there, wonderful folks. It's not affiliated formally, but they're good friends. For me, Jack Fowler, I have two things to ask. One is to subscribe to Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write.

Every Friday comes out from the Center for Civil Society, and it has 14 recommended readings, go to civilthoughts. Com. Sign up. I know you're going to like it. Totally free. And while I mentioned the Center for Civil Society in less than two weeks on November fifth and sixth, Well, maybe that's more than two weeks. I'm not sure about my schedule right now, but we're having a very important conference on America 250 in Philadelphia. So if you are in that region at all, New York, Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, et cetera, check it out. Go to centerforscivilsociety. Org, look for the event. I know you are going to like it. Pardon my Bronxies. Okay, two things to read from the many, the thousands of of comments we're getting through YouTube and various other venues, platforms. One, this one is funny because, Victor, you were talking with the great Sammie Wink in a recent podcast, and you talked about grandpa's finger. And so Mark Sutton, 5540, writes, That hamburger finger made me laugh. I'm the same age as you, and I have a memory of that World War I generation. As a child going fishing with my great uncle, he pulled from his tackle box his dried-out thumb, complete with yellowed thumbnail, which was cut off in his machine shop.

They were a tough bunch. So that's that. And then one from Lisa Malone, 3308, who writes, VDH is indeed our treasure of wisdom, simplicity, and kindness. Any show that has the common sense to showcase his enormous knowledge will be enriched. His simplicity in detailing history as well as current events is why I am such a loyal follower. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, everyone who takes the time to write comments that we do read, maybe even the nasty ones.

I like the idea of simplicity. If somebody had said, Victor's complexity. He's so complex. But I'd rather be simple than complex.

We will talk to Mrs. Hansen about your complexity.

I would rather be a hedgehog than a fox, I guess, as Arquilicus said.

Well, you've been terrific, Victor. Thanks so much for all the wisdom you shared. Thank you, folks, for watching and for listening. And we will be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words at the Daily Signal. Bye-bye.

Thank you very much. I appreciate you listening and viewing. And I think, what did Humphrey Bogart say at the end of Casa Blanco?

This is going to be the...

I think, Louis, this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship. Beautiful friendship. Amen. And that's the way I feel with the Daily Signal and all of you. Thank you very much. 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 at victorhanson. Com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.