Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Sami Winc: So, Victor, lots on the agenda, but I understand you were at a political event last night with Steve Hilton. I don’t know if you had a few things to say about that first, and then—
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I was asked. He was in Fresno, and I was asked to introduce him and then have a Q&A with him.
Well, he’s the best-qualified Republican nominee in the last 20 years. He’s a polymath. He had his own tech company. He ran restaurants in London. He was the political adviser to the British prime minister, David Cameron. He had “The Next Revolution” for seven years as a Fox host, so he’s done it all, and he’s mastered California issues.
So, I asked him a series of questions on what do you do with high-speed rail? If you cancel it, what do you do with this Stonehenge infrastructure? What do you do with the Left stopping the California water project completion? What do you do with the decrepit … What do you do with California?
He had a lot of good answers. There were a lot of people there, but it’s going to be very difficult.
Xavier Becerra‘s attitude is two things. One, we, the Democrats, outnumber the Republicans in registration almost 3-to-1. And the Hispanic vote is 45% of the population. I don’t know how many actually are registered and vote according to that demographic. Maybe not as high turnout as other groups, but they are angry at [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and they tend to be very left-wing, most of them. And they’re turned off by [President] Donald Trump.
So, Becerra’s strategy is threefold. I’m going to stay in my basement, and I’m not going to campaign. I think there’s going to be a debate tonight, Friday night. I’m not going to campaign. Stay in my basement.
No. 2, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump is at 39%. He’s endorsed Hilton. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
And three, I don’t want to say a word about the multibillion-dollar fraud in California. I was attorney general at one time when there was a lot of fraud that was starting. I was the head of [the Department of Health and Human Services] when the federal government’s funds were being misused. My chief of staff and [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff have dipped into campaign funds in an improper way. I don’t want to talk about any of that.
So, I’m not going to discuss anything about my allegations of corruption or incompetence. I’m not going to debate Steve Hilton’s issues. I’m going to rely on the fact that, as [Los Angeles Mayor] Karen Bass just said, the election is over because he’s a Republican. All people are going to do, she said, is look at the name and, after “D,” check it off.
And that was a very cynical thing to say. She said that he’s already through. It’s not even close.
She may be right, but if he loses, and after Spencer Pratt loses, and the billionaire tax passes, there’s going to be a lot more people leaving the state.
And what’s happening in this state is the population is staying steady because the upper-middle class and the wealthy classes are leaving, but people are coming here because of our rich social welfare cost. And people who have come here, 27% of the California population was not born in the United States, and about 40% either were not born in the United States or their parents were not born in California.
And they have birth rates much higher than the indigenous population, and they have, on average, greater social welfare needs. And 50% of all California residents are on Medi-Cal, and 40% of all births are on Medi-Cal.
So, you can see what’s happening. The people who have the higher incomes are leaving because they’re taxed to death. The people who have the lower incomes, and who are recent immigrants or whose parents were, are demanding more social welfare services and think that the original population should pay for it.
And they’re going to run out of victimizers because they see themselves as victims of a system. I don’t know why a person would come from India or China or Latin America and come here and then have all these grievances against the existing California establishment, but they do.
And it’s just not going to work. It’s a medieval state with very wealthy people and very poor people. The middle class and the upper-middle class are leaving.
Winc: All right, so let’s go ahead and turn to the U.N. What did you think of all of that walkout on [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi Netanyahu and how he handled it?
Hanson: Well, it was very funny that the Iranian government just slaughtered 30,000 to 40,000 of their own people and continues to kill them. And not as many people walked out when the Iranians spoke as when Netanyahu spoke.
There were a lot of Europeans who walked out, and he addressed that with Britain and France. It was really amazing.
You know, he said, “You call us settler colonialism. Our language is unchanged. Our people are unchanged since the third millennium BC.”
And who are talking? The French, who were the great colonizers of the Middle East, along with the British. We inherited a British colony that had taken over and was not indigenous to the Middle East.
He had a good point.
He talked about [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani trying to arrest him. You know, he said, “Why doesn’t he arrest other people?” But he won’t ever touch people from China or Iran.
Well, it basically was a diatribe, and I don’t mean that in a negative sense, against hypocrisy.
And [Argentine President Javier] Milei and a lot of this, what was interesting, a lot of people from South America, a lot of presidents with this new conservative wave that Trump gets no credit for.
But as I said earlier, of the 32 nations in South and Central America and the Caribbean, there were only about seven or eight pro-American democracies, and now there are only, I think, five that are anti-American and socialist-communist. They’re all conservative.
The Paraguay president, who was newly inaugurated, lambasted the walkout. So did Milei. He gave a great talk. He said that the U.N. was parasitical.
Something just creepy, just to finish, looking at that delegation and reading about it. You have 170 nations. The majority now are not democratic. They come over to this rich, bustling city. They cannot be prosecuted for any crimes. They’re on budgets, and then they talk about democracy, and they vote usually to condemn the United States, the host, or Israel.
But they never vote in their own home country. So, they act like they’re defenders of democracy, and then they trot back and their dictator pats them on the head because they walked out during Israel’s or Donald Trump’s talk.
But I’m getting really tired of it. I think most Americans are. It’s okay just to vent, but we could just take it out of here, and it doesn’t really contribute that much to New York.
New York’s not going to sink or swim depending on whether the U.N. is there. I think it would be a lot better for it just to move to a neutral location. Why don’t you put it in, I don’t know, the Mariana Islands or Tahiti or something, a neutral place?
Winc: Or Iceland.
Hanson: Iceland.
No, they would never do that. What they want in New York is left-wing media exposure and then nice restaurants and big expense accounts.
And a lot of them are, I don’t know how to use proper language, pretty degenerate people, so they indulge in drugs, alcohol, sex, and it’s all legal. I mean, you can’t prosecute them.
They all get parking … That famous picture they have of all of their cars with hundreds of parking tickets on them. They’re just immune.
And they’re mostly from the Third World, so they hate the United States.
Winc: It’s all hush-hush.
Hanson: It’s just a circus.
Netanyahu was really good, and he addressed all the charges. I would have reminded him that genocide is impossible. They say he commits genocide against the Arab people, and the Arab people inside Israel are now 20% of the population. When Israel was formed, they were, I think, 12%.
You don’t have genocide. Hitler, if you say Hitler committed genocide, he did. What if you said Hitler committed genocide, but the Jewish population doubled in the Third Reich? You see what I mean? He wiped out Jews.
Tucker Carlson had a big rant about all this, and he went on Israeli TV and said that Israel was not a democracy because certain people don’t vote.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
And I wanted to say to him, “Who doesn’t vote?”
In Israel, every citizen, Arab, Christian, or otherwise, over 18 can vote.
Do people in the West Bank and Gaza vote? No, they’re not citizens.
Do they vote for the Palestinian Authority? Yes. That has semi-autonomy.
And do they vote in Gaza? They did one time. One time they voted for Hamas.
But, Tucker, there are about 30 million illegal aliens in the United States, and they’re here, some of them for a long time. Are you saying we’re not a democracy because they don’t vote? They’re not citizens.
We have a greater percentage of the population inside our borders that are not citizens, about 16%, 17%, or 15%, than does Israel.
But he counts the West Bank and Gaza as Israeli citizens who are denied the right to vote. That’s absurd.
And the more and more he talks, it’s really strange because it’s almost … I was listening to a rant, and it’s all conspiracy theories.
And it’s basically the more he says he doesn’t do anything, the more that’s an indication that he has said or done that.
That’s what’s strange.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
