Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor is an author, scholar, columnist,

essayist, and a political and cultural critic. He is also the Martin and Ili Anderson senior

fellow and military history and classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and

Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. This episode is our

weekend episode and we're going to have a look at American politics. It seems that lots

of the stories recently are exposing new aspects of our democratic government and they're

taking me back to a passage in Madison's Federalist 10 where he argues that the system of checks

and balances would set one man's ambition against the next and this would be helpful to the

exposing corruption in the system and I think he may be right or maybe he may be too right

but we will look into lots of political stories today after these messages.

Welcome back. I would like to remind people that you can follow Victor at VictorHansen.com.

The name of the website is the blade of Perseus and you can get a subscription for $5 a month

or $450 a year. So come join us at the website. You can also just get a free subscription

and get on our mailing list and we mail out Victor's recent podcasts and articles and

such on that list. So please come join us whoever you are. Victor, how are you doing today?

I'm doing pretty well. We're in a 10 day call but respite from the California flooding

and remember we're still in a drought because it's very precious to the new sun conglomerate

to have a drought so they can you know destroy California agriculture and put everybody

on water rationing so they let out I think it's up to 13 million acre feet now. We had

the weddest December 15th, January 15th on record and yet the reservoirs, as I said last

time we're still less than 60%. So that's very depressing but it's part of a you know it's

a pattern of California. It's been a subject of Fox News shows a lot I didn't want to

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