Victor Davis Hanson
speaker
2,022 appearances
16 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 23 Mar
Victor Davis Hanson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.
Appearances
They were Jacobin.
Yeah, three quarters of the electorate lived on the coast. They all were very much for it. And then they said, you know what? We're going to connect what you should do. You were going to have a big high-speed rail line leaving Oakland, San Francisco area, go down the near the 101, tap in on, you get over Pacheco Pass, go down. And they said, not in my backyard. I voted in the abstract.
And then they thought, well, we need a laboratory rat. And so they called all the local governments here and we were all broke and we have very low per capita income. And they said, would you want a big boondoggle public works? And we said, yes. Well, then... They gave a route from Bakersfield pretty much along the Santa Fe Rail route. And everybody said, well, wait a minute.
For years, we've said that we only have one track on the Santa Fe route. That's the Amtrak, not Southern Pacific. And for just a minuscule amount of money compared to what you're envisioning, it's going to be $300 billion. And they've already spent about $20 billion. But we could make a parallel track right along the Santa with very little right-of-way expense.
Instead of having these trains sit there and wait for the oncoming train on a side track, we'll have them parallel so they would go at the same time. We'll beef up the tracks. We can go up to about 90 miles an hour. And then we'll expand the rail. We've always envisioned going over the grapevine and going to L.A. and not having to go by bus. the missing link. And it was all talked about.
And they said, no, we're going to do space age high speed rail was Jerry Brown's idea. And so we voted for it. And then we started seeing signs come up, Jack, that said, we have this percentage of minorities. We have this percentage of disabled. We have this percentage of trans workers, all the publicists. And then our road here was, where I live on was shut down for four years.
So when I wanted to go every week to work, I had to find all of these securitist detours. It's reopened and they build... That was all for one overpass. And I looked down, there's no track there. It's just the same thing. I know a lot of... These were all left-wing environmentalists. And if you go down and follow the route...
about 20 miles from where I'm speaking into Kings County, there was this historical floodplain from Tulare Lake. And the result of that were these 400- and 500-year majestic oaks, some of the biggest oaks in California. And every farmer that had one on his property, you were not allowed to cut them down. So you had these cotton fields with these beautiful... And they just went in and just, bam!
pulled up every one that was in the way, and then you had all these farmers. They had 100 acres on this side, and then they had 300 acres. They said, no, no, there's only going to be, we have to drive eight or nine miles around to get to the other side of your farm. And it just got, they went through downtown Fresno and ruined small businesses.
So what I'm getting at, they had a multi-billion dollar overhead in eminent domain suits before they ever did anything. And they build all, so now we've got all these bridges everywhere. There's one over Fresno and Bakersfield, all, and they're total incompetence.
Every time that I say something like this on a podcast or on an air, when this podcast is over, after it's aired, I'm going to get some little official letter from a person who's on the California High Speed Rail Commission. And most of them are left-wing former functionaries and they're going to are developers who have a financial interest in it. And a lot of people do.
And they're, you know, that subcontractors and they're going to say, Victor, you're just ignorant. You don't know what's going on. This thing is going great. And then you look at what the I'll just finish this, Jack, by saying what's scary is not the 20 billion or so that's going to get you from Bakersfield to Merced at about 20 miles faster than if you took the Santa Fe.
Because they've already scaled down the speed. is two things are very scary. Given California rates 45th in the nation in test scores, and given that the public schools are completely failed, and given the level of education among the population, and given that we have an enormous challenge of integration assimilation because 27% of the people in the state were not born in the United States,
The idea that you're going to have this public unionized workforce run this place, this system is very scary. And two, they've already come through with the amount of ticketing that would be necessary for you to go from Bakersfield, 110 miles or 20 miles an hour to Merced. By the way, people listening to this, is your idea of a vacation to go from Merced to Bakersfield?
I'm not making fun of the two cities, but they don't come to mind. When I think of California tourist play, I think San Luis Obispo, Carmel, Santa Barbara. I don't think of Bakersfield or Merced, but that's where they're going, this lab rat experiment. And it's already been envisioned it's going to lose millions of dollars to operate. It's not the building it.
If you built the system for free and you had to operate it, it would lose money.
That's what people are talking about with the eventual Los Angeles all the way to Sacramento with laterals into the Bay Area. That's what they're talking about. But they'll never do it. everybody says, you know, I don't think they have the skill to do it. That's what's really frightening about this state.
When I see the roads, if you look at the people that we all hate from our past, that we're told to hate them, that generation, and you look at the San Luis Dam, or you look at the California Aqueduct, or you look at Folsom or or Orville Dam.
You look at any of the things these guys built, or the PG substation, main power plant up, or you look at Hetch Hetchy, built in, I think, 1910 or 12, or Huntington Lake, the Big Creek project. They were so far ahead of their time. They were so brilliant. And we're just pygmies compared to those people. We don't have the expertise to do it.
I'm not saying that people coming out of Caltech or engineering programs at UCLA or Stanford are not good. I'm just saying that generally we do not have the skilled labor and we don't have the skilled engineering numbers to create these things anymore. If you disagree, then you ask why we couldn't have built high-speed rail or ask yourself what's going to happen in Los Angeles.
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