Victor Davis Hanson

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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 over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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The Victor Davis Hanson Show · Overexposed: The Truth and Troubles of Left Politics · 25 Feb 2025 podcast

They came out on the railroad and then they looked around here and they found an artesian pond and you could buy land within, I think it was two miles of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which we're still two miles from. And The government gave it to the railroad for development. I have the certificate.

They bought it for $4 an acre, and they were given 20 years to improve it, and then the railroad would come back and examine. That was what caused the great riots about eight miles from me, the massacre that was written about in the octopus. When did that happen? That happened, the Muscle Slew Tragedy, it's called. That happened at the early, I think it was either 1888 or 89.

And it's about six, eight to miles, there's a monument. And the railroad came in and basically told people who had bought land that that they didn't improve it. And they said, we did improve it, and they did, but we couldn't improve it as much as you would like because you kept raising railroad cargo fees because it was a monopoly and there was no way to get their grain or fruit.

and so the railroad tried to take it and they had a shootout and they became folk heroes it was in that period that um 18 earlier that we were the i think one of the first families here and they bought the land and then she had three sons my great-grandfathers my great uncles Oren, Skyler, and Cyrus. What names? He was named after Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the threshing machine.

Anyway, he stayed here, and then he had his father. His son was my grandfather, who was born here in 1890. Rhys Davis. They were all Welsh men. And he had a little, they were very poor. They dried apricots. And this family had moved in from New Mexico in about 1905 or 1906. My grandfather was about 15 or 16. And he met this young girl who had a family of 11 children. They were dirt poor.

and they waited till they were 21 and they got married and then the next thing he knew he told me his mother died of breast cancer and his father kind of went crazy when that happened so at 21 they had no money and he had a brother and a sister. Anyway, he bought 120 acres. He had a mortgage his entire life. And then he married my grandmother, and their whole family moved in with him.

Yeah, they had a barn here. It's made out of eucalyptus poles. Anyway, then my grandmother was very different. Her family had come from the south. They lived in New Mexico, but they were from Alabama. And my grandfather was a very strong and

union person and anyway my grandmother had kind of still when I knew her a slight southern accent and there was always a little tension there and all my parents of course were very strong democrat but they were very strong unionist And my grandmother wasn't, you know, she didn't refight the Civil War, but her family were cowboys. And her brother, when they moved here, he was 12 years old.

Over a thousand miles.

I knew him very well. He was born in 1900. He came much later. He was selling off their bankrupt little cattle ranch. And he came and they didn't have money to use the... She came on the train and then... They went broke when they got here. They bought a house. They all went broke. The weird thing about it is that family was all very successful.

The guy that I told you who moved here became very, very successful. He was deaf, too. And he figured out the most brilliant for a person who was completely broke. He got a concession from the local sewer plant that put gray water, not sewage, onto alfalfa. He rented the alfalfa from a person. She said, it's not level. It won't irrigate. What do I do? And he said, if you, she had 400 acres.

He said, if you level the 400, you can have 200 acres. So he did it himself, and then he got the gray water. He said, I will charge you a nominal fee to put the gray water on my 200 level acres, and I'll grow alfalfa. In those days, you could do that. The alfalfa grew very quickly, and then he went every... A few months to Montana, and we had this big cattle truck.

And he brought the cattle back, put them there, and he deliberately picked that place because it was two miles from the feedlot, so he would get a cattle drive for two miles. So he explained it when he was about – he died at 98. He explained it to me. that there was no way to lose money.

People were paying him to fertilize his own alfalfa, and then he got cheap cattle, and he fattened them up very quickly, and then he didn't have any transport costs. He was very right-wing, very right-wing, and he was 5'4", and he wore cowboy boots. And then he introduced me to my great-uncle.

Yeah. Well, he came with his—I'll stop now—with his brother, who was Uncle Bill. Yeah. And— He came from Magdalena, New Mexico, and he literally came. He was 5'5", 5'6", big cowboy boots and a hat, and he had a Smith Wesson on his holster with a little sheriff's star when I knew him. And he was visiting. He was in his 60s or 70s. And he said, well, you know, I like your dad.

When he married my niece... You know what your dad told me? He got out of that darn B-29. He came home. He said, you're the littlest man with the biggest gun I've ever met. So he wore a gun everywhere. So anyway, that was a pioneer family. Yeah.

And, you know, he did it with a—he didn't do it with a D9 or a Massey. He did it with a 9-in tractor, or he had somebody do it. I don't know if he did it himself, but they had— You know, the 9N didn't even have overhead valves. I had a 9N. Sure, you still do up in the back there somewhere. The Jubilee tractor was a beautiful invention. When I was a little kid, I used to disc with it.

Well, everybody, we know you're all hearing about this huge controversy. And it started when Trump sent General Kellogg over his special Ukrainian envoy, Marco Rubio, Waltz, his national security. And he said some things. And basically, Trump I want to be very careful and characterize it.

He looked at this and he said, this thing has been going on, it'll be on the 22nd, and we're speaking today on the 23rd. Excuse me, tomorrow is the third anniversary on the 24th. And he said... He keeps saying millions and millions, but it's probably the aggregate Russian and Ukrainian dead, wounded, missing, captured, probably a million and a half. This is the worst disaster since Stalingrad.

One-fourth, more than one-fourth. Twelve million people have left Ukraine. And there's no end in sight. So he looks at this and he says, Trump is saying, well, when this whole thing started, and it didn't start on my watch... The Europeans said they were going to pour all this stuff in, and they didn't do what they said they did.

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