
Plane Crash, Executive Orders, and Kash
In this episode, Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Sami Winc discuss Trump's early presidency, executive orders, the D.C. plane-helicopter collision, DEI policies, meritocracy, immigration challenges, the fentanyl crisis, Kash Patel's confirmation hearing, and the left's response to political apostates.
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Safeguard your wealth, protect your future while there's still time. Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson show.
This is our Friday news roundup and we'll be looking at the news of the week and Trump has been very active in his first two weeks as president of the United States and so we'll talk a little bit about some of his executive orders, those successful ones and some that have been challenged a little bit. And we'll look at there was just a crash yesterday of a helicopter into a civilian plane.
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Protect what you've earned before the fraud economy collapses completely. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Victor's the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com.
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Well we'd like to... Well, Victor, there was a terrible crash yesterday between a helicopter, a military helicopter and a civilian airplane.
And I was wondering, since that's the most current news, your thoughts on that? I know we don't know everything about it yet. Yeah, it's only been 24 hours.
but in all of these situations, there's fundamental causation and proximate causation, or we can say culpability. So you start with the fundamental culpability in one of the most busiest air corridors in the United States with some of the most important people in the government that's essential to the operation of the government.
It doesn't seem logical that you would have a retraining Black Hawk mission at night anywhere near that corridor. So I know the military will say, well, we have to have these very realistic training sessions.
But there's places you can fly all over the ocean in rough weather, but you do not take that training mandate and put it next to a civilian corridor. So there was an operational lapse there at the highest levels.
Whoever ordered that training mission with people who were either training or retraining to get anywhere near that corridor is culpable, I think. And that's going to be found out.
Now, as far as the actual immediate culpability, Donald Trump gave a press conference today. Pete Hexeth, who was the defense secretary, spoke.
And so did Sean Duffy, who oversees, he's the new transportation secretary, who oversees the National Transportation Safety Board and the FAA. So the point is this.
They all said, mentioned DEI in passing. Now, that would have been all right if they're referring to Trump's 2000, and they did, Trump's case.
In 2017, he came in and said that 3,000 aircraft controllers had been denied an opportunity because of DEI, sexual orientation, gender, race, and they were completely eliminated. This was at a time that increased after the George Floyd death, so that you had United, just to take one example, United Airlines was saying 50% of their pilots will not be meritocratic.
Now, they don't like the word meritocratic, but anytime you put commissar-like restrictions on a search, and you tell people coming out of the military, let's say you've got a guy who flew C-17s in the military, and then he had an air traffic controller post in Kabul, and then he's now 35, and he applies the FAA. Well, that's the kind of person you want.
But if you say you're not going to even look at him, and they did that. So Trump revisited that issue, but he did it in the context, so it was very risky, because if it turns out that this is not a DEI issue, then he looks like he's demagoguing it, maybe, and he will incur the charges of racism.
However, Trump's not stupid, so he has had 24 hours to look at the examination, and he's had people in transportation in the Pentagon say,
he's obviously said, I want to know who the hires were at the air traffic control level, at the pilot level, at the military level. And he must have some indication to make such a bold statement.
And we'll find out. So we don't want to prejudge it.
The other thing is when I said
ultimate culpability
versus proximate
when you had one plane that was redirected to go past the airport and make a hook and come back, and then you look at the itinerary of the Blackhawk, and it was supposed to make a hook, and it theoretically would have been parallel hooks,
but instead it crossed and never made that right turn. It went right into the plane.
So they were either, if you were to envision whose fault it was, it doesn't seem like it's the pilot's fault. He was on course.
It's either the Blackhawk helicopter did not receive the communication that said watch out for this you know make sure you're at or he saw another plane and he mistook that plane for the the one that crashed or he i don't know what it was he was not trained but there's culpability there and there might have been culpability with the air traffic. We don't know.
But they were too close. Even if he did everything right, they still shouldn't have been that close.
And speaking of someone, I've mentioned it, as you know, on these podcasts that I had a really, and I had a lot of pilots write me, well, that's no big deal, but these go-arounds, when you're going down and you actually, one case we touched and we took off again and went around. And then at LAX, they've had baggage carriers almost hit a plane, and they've had planes go off the tarmac, I think, in Texas.
So we've had a lot of these near misses. And usually people say, we've got too many planes in a crowded airspace, and we don't have enough qualified air traffic controllers.
And we'll see if this... The other thing is, I was embedded twice in Iraq, and the first was very brief, three or four days in 2006 during the surge.
And that constituted being in a Blackhawk both in daytime and at night. And then the second time, I think I took one trip at night in it.
And they are very powerful, fast-moving, jet engine propelled. And there's not a lot of reaction time.
I can remember the talking to one of the pilots and he said, we've got to be very careful because the Iraqis were putting cell phone towers up without lights on and not telling anybody as they were starting to rebuild the country. And he said that they'd almost hit a couple of them, but he was telling me you have almost no reaction.
And my farm is right in the pathway of Lemoore Naval Air Station on the way to Fresno Air Terminal. So almost every day or night when I'm outside, I see these Blackhawks, usually in pairs, they're going back and forth.
And it's amazing how fast they go and low they go but usually uh as i think that elevation of 400 feet uh was a little we'll find out but that seems irregular near an airport you think a black hawk would be closer like 150 feet closer to the ground but when you get up you're getting more into that layered airspace. So, and Trump was saying they were on the same elevation.
He was right about all of these things, that it's not going to happen again. It's human air.
But we'll see. He must have evidence, or I don't think he would have brought up the DEI.
Then Elon Musk tweeted something where he reversed the letters and said, instead of DEI, D-I-E, that it was caused by that. And that's not necessarily – I mean, all that means is that there were criteria other than strict merit, and that usually means proportional representation.
So under D-I, lawyers or particular pressure groups look at a particular organization and they say, this is the demographics of the United States. This is how many Latinos, how many Asians, how many blacks, how many whites, 52% women, 2% gays.
I want that exactly to fit. Now, there is exceptions.
If the DEI advocates see that they're overrepresented, such as the post office where African Americans are about 20% higher than their demographic, they don't say anything. Then it becomes repertory.
They say, well, this is overrepresented, but there has been so much systematic discrimination before, it's time to get even. That's the operating principle.
And that's one of the reasons DI is so unpopular. And Trump has a lot of, I guess you would call it covert or stealthy support among liberal, liberal white males who would never be caught dead saying they agreed with Donald Trump.
But in their own lives, in government, academia, they've been passed over. And they feel that they came from a generation post-civil rights and that they grew up not knowing anything about Jim Crow.
Say if they were born in 1960, now their careers are over at 65. And they came of age during the Lyndon Johnson executive orders about affirmative action.
So the only thing they've known, and I fit that category, the only thing I've known is affirmative action. When I came of age in admissions to UC Santa Cruz, and I can remember that it was, believe it or not, it was one of the hardest universities to get into when it was first opened.
It was really glitzy and hippie, and it was harder to get into than Stanford. And my point I'm making is that I won't mention names, but I had a 3.95, had pretty good SAT scores.
And there was two students at my high school that had very poor grades and KESS scores. And when I got, I was on the waiting list and I waited all summer long.
I was admitted two days before school started. And both of those students, they were at UC Santa Cruz.
So I thought to myself, well, what was the point of studying every night? And they was a where I guess you'd call them in modern parlance DI. And then when I got to Stanford University the first year, the chairman called us all in and he said, I want you to sign this.
You're not going to get a job. And we said, well, we're going to be here four years.
He said, you're not going to get a job here at Stanford and everyone we're going to hire are only women and minorities. And you white males, there were three of us, you're not going to get a job.
But we do not want to be sued. Wow.
So that's all I've known my entire life everywhere. And for people who say, well, it's just a bunch of angry old white people.
It's a generation that did not practice racism and a generation that came of age in the civil rights movement. And if you look at where the emphases should have been, it should have been at the kindergarten.
So we have African Americans with just, they're in schools that are completely inadequate and their test scores and math are not improving. So if we had taken that same amount of money instead of rewarding elites, economically speaking, and tried to address fundamentals at the very early age, we wouldn't have needed this.
And then, of course, the other thing is a lot of African-Americans that I know secretly, not maybe some of them not so secretly, want it to end. because if you look at people, and I'm not associating these people because I haven't talked to them, but as I said earlier, if you look at where I work and you came from Mars and you listen to one of our new fellows, say in economics versus Tom Sowell or somebody in political science or literature, and then you listen to Shelby
Steele, or when you talk about statecraft, one of our experts, supposedly, these are all white males. And then you listen to Condoleezza Rice, or then you listen to Kyron Skinner on diplomacy.
Well, those four African-Americans I named were superior in every category on talent, merit. But there would be a stranger that came in and said, well, they were a beneficiary.
Maybe they were at some point. But the point I'm making is once you get rid of DEI and you go to a merit, everybody will acknowledge that they were superior to the competition and that's why they were hired and excelled.
Yeah, they would have excelled anyway. Yeah, I mean, Tom Sowell is brilliant and Shelby's brilliant, et cetera, et cetera.
So, it'll be good, I think, because everybody will not say, well, that was a DEI hire. It'll just be over with.
And I don't think that there is systemic racism that will deny African Americans an equality of opportunity rather than a result. Yeah.
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We're getting back to the old genres. Maybe we're having military movies, maybe westerns again.
Yes. No offense, Sammy, but no more urban psychodramas about women confessing to each other who was mean to them.
Like the holiday, having relationships and bad relationships. I think the American people don't want to hear about a melodrama about a relationship anymore.
They don't want to know about angst, about sexual ambiguity. I'm not making fun of these issues.
They're real. But they've heard so many of them.
Yes. And they don't want to see another title where it's sort of white fragility, white men can't jump, white silliness.
And they have that now as a title. Well, can I guess on your action movies a little bit here? Because I think America's tired of the same old car chains that they put into every single action movie, and they go on for like 15 minutes.
Who wants that, right? Well, that was started with Steve McQueen with Bullet in San Francisco. Before you make fun of it, I urge you to go watch that again.
That is one of the most amazing car chases I've ever seen.
And if you don't believe that, look at the James Bond 2000,
maybe it was 16 or 17, Spectre movie,
and look at that car chase with Daniel Craig
where he drives this sports car up and down Spanish. It's amazing.
So some of them. Daniel Craig, however, wasn't doing it while Steve McQueen probably was.
Well, you're both good actors. Yeah.
All right, Victor, let's turn to Donald Trump's second week in office and got lots of executive orders he's put through. He's obviously executing and his nominations or his secretaries are obviously executing the immigration executive orders.
We've got Kristi Noem out there on raids. So any commentary on the immigration executive orders and what they're doing would be fine.
But there's a second one. He tried to put a freeze on federal loans and grants, and he had to resend that freeze.
And what I want to know there is, um, what did he achieve by throwing this out, uh, out there that he was going to, um, stop to stop or put a freeze on those loans for a second? And is it proof that D.C. is going to get in the way of what Trump wants to do? There's millions of students that have been admitted and they have to have their student federally guaranteed loans or they've been accepted.
And when he said that, they won't be able to go to college. So people – I think it was sort of like the old – you know, an old British man of war who sends a cannonball across the bow of a friendship just to warn them that they have the ability to sink them.
So he does this student loan executive order and then it stops and we'll say, well, we'll think about it. But it tells everybody the days that you're going to go to a bank and get a loan and the taxpayers are going to honor it and take away moral hazard and 25% of you are not going to pay interest on it, is over.
And the universities who keep issuing these, arranging these student loans, especially the ones that have multi-billion dollar endowments that are tax-free, and they will not use those endowments as security for those loans. They want us, the taxpayer.
And then when you add into the equation that half the 18-year-old, 26-year-old cohort is working, and then they're going to be stuck on their taxes to pay for this $1.7 trillion loan. So he knows it has to happen.
It's kind of like TikTok. He knows that you can't have the Chinese running TikTok because of their surveillance and data code, everything.
But he knows that that's the most popular venue for these new voters who voted for him. And so what he do, he said, we're going to, and then we'll just wait a minute.
So he's trying to acculturate people to these radical changes. And I don't know, he's got, he, one of the reasons he won the election were young people.
And that was a combination of having these disparate Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan, these weird podcasters, even RFK. And so he has IOUs.
And I think the Republicans in the Senate, when they look at RFK, they said, you know, I disagree with them and da, da, da, da. But you got to honor your commitments because when he said Bobby's on my side, everybody just about had a heart attack during the campaign.
And he did. He wasn't – Bobby didn't go around saying vote for Trump.
Ha ha. He was sincere.
And he took a big hit. I mean, Carolyn Kennedy came out.
I thought that was one of the most atrocious things I've ever seen. She was the late JFKs.
I grew up with little pictures of Carolyn. She was a little younger than I was, a year or two or something.
And she was always crawling under the president's desk with John John, who tragically died. But for her to make a video and say that he likes predator birds because he himself is a predator.
And then not to produce data. I was just thinking, you know, all of us when we get into the public eye, what would your family say? I know that if I was there, I have people in my family that are not particularly fond of me.
But I would hate, I don't think they would do that. I mean, it was, I think, I asked myself, well, Caroline, if he hadn't said he was for Trump, would you do this? Did you do it in the past? I don't think she did.
And I know that we're all worried about the measles vaccination. And I am.
My mother in 1950 had a child before I was born, and she had German measles. And they didn't know how to stop measles.
I had the measles too. We called them German measles then.
There was to differentiate something called three-day measles. But, you know, I don't think we use ethnic terms anymore to blame the Germans.
But we all had them. And then my mother had a daughter, Georgianne Hansen, and she had a heart valve problem.
And she was born blind. And she died a little after a year.
So when I grew up, it was you've got to get a measles when that came out. But the actual number of people who die of's talk is about 500 a year prior to that.
And so what what damage he's done, if he has done damage by discouraging vaccinations, and I'll put a footnote there and say he has told people get the measles vaccine and whooping cough. Obesity kills 100 times more people and diabetes do.
So his main emphasis at HHS will be diabetes and food and blood sugar and not vaccination. I think he's told just keep away from that because the real, if you really want to save people's lives, RFK, go where the morbidity is.
And it's with obesity and diabetes and cardiac problems. And, you know, obesity and food are also carcinogens.
They help cause cancer. Yeah.
And I think RFK is going down the right road on the healthiness issues. He always has those videos where he takes his shirt off and he's my age and bop, wow.
And he does push-ups too. They were showing that the other day.
Carolyn said that he can't be trusted around women, I guess. She's really blasted him.
I thought to myself, given that his advocacy for health, he is far more qualified to be HHS, at least he's interested in those issues than you were. You never struck me as an authority on Australia.
And I don't think, given the cynicism of all appointments, and both parties do it, for major ambassadorships, you're talking anywhere from $3 to $20 million, depending on where the ambassadorship. I don't think she gave that kind of money.
I don't think she has. Well, her husband's very wealthy, but I think the Kennedy fortune has been dispersed too many errors.
So my point is she got that position on her name as a Democratic icon. So for her to say that he is unqualified, I would say it back to her.
Well, Can you tell me the distance from Perth to Melbourne? Can you give me any appraisal of the Australian Defense Forces, what kind of planes they fly? Can you tell me their positions on New Guinea? And can you tell me what their status right now is with China? No, she can't. So she shouldn't talk.
No, not at all. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit more about immigration if you have any reflections on Donald Trump's first two weeks.
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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show. You can find Victor at his X account and his handle is at VD Hanson and then on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup.
So come join him there if you are a social media person. Well, Victor, so lots of people being arrested and taken back, and we have Colombia and Mexico who tried to resist the repatriations.
I was wondering your thoughts on that. Well, the Colombian president folded like a tent.
He's crazy, by the way. He said, you know, he would have a whiskey with Trump, but he had indigestion and Trump was a white slaver.
But Trump just, he handled that very well. When they were, everybody remember the context.
They weren't not just saying go to the United States. They were opening their mental hospitals and jails.
And they thought that was cute because they thought Biden was, you know, Biden and he wouldn't do anything. So Trump sent them back and they blocked the flight.
And so Trump said 25% and then he said, oh yeah, sure. And he, you know, he got this little braggadocio and machismo and then Trump just quietly said, oh, by the way, it goes up to 50 percent at the end of the week.
And then everybody said they need Colombian coffee. And then people said, no, they don't.
They have coffee from Brazil. They have coffee from South Africa.
They have it from all over the world. And then.
Wasn't that AOC? She was. Yeah.
She doesn't. No offense, AOC, but I don't know how you ever graduated from college.
No offense. But and then he said he started in on and Trump just one thing that Colombians want to do is come to the United States.
And that's the most you talk to foreign diplomats. That's their and I don't know why, but that's their dream to get billeted away from where they're.
Would you like to live in Columbia or would you like to be treated like royalty in Washington? So he put a hold on 1,500 people from the elite of Columbia and the government that they can't come here. And, you know, it's sad because, I mean, you're talking about a great power and a minor power.
And so their attitude is, well, we're going to do that back to you. But I think Trump's attitude is, okay, oh, pobre pobrecito, we don't get to go to Colombia.
That's his attitude. The same thing happened with Mexico under Biden.
Remember, Obedor, he said, it's a beautiful thing.
We have 40 million that came in illegally to the United States.
Beautiful.
And then he'd say, I urge all my expatriates who have become citizens to vote Republican.
And then when Biden went down there, he had to help Biden.
Oh, let me help you.
You cannot do the stairs.
And then he said something about they were almost the same age.
So they had a field day. They would just wave the caravan.
Ha, ha, ha. We're replaying the Mexican War.
And we're rebuilding the lost nation of Aztlan. All this stuff came out of Mexico.
So then we get a flight. And they say, no, you can't send them back.
And then the cartel shot an American citizen in the leg. And there was another shooting where they shot it on US soil.
So, Trump just called her up. And the point is, what is Mexico's levers over us versus what are levers over Mexico? Everybody has to understand it's an asymmetrical.
Remember everybody when Ross Perot, maybe some of you were too young, but when he was running for president in 92 and 96, Bill Clinton was talking about the North American Free Trade Association, NAFTA, where there'd be no tariffs. And Ross Perot, well, he does.
I just don't want him to do that because if he does, I'll tell you what's going to happen.
In two seconds, you're going to hear a big sucking sound, a big sucking sound.
That sucking sound is going to be American.
It's going to be away.
And everybody laughed at him.
And you know what?
When the treaty was enacted, immediately Mexico got a $2 billion surplus.
You know what it is now? 168 billion. Billion.
So when we put a tariff on a Chinese product, they send the raw product to Mexico, whether it's car parts, truck parts, computers, and they assemble it in Mexico. And then they send it here tax-free.
And they do that to their advantage of 167. So, Ms.
Scheinbaum, you can talk all you want about refusing this and that and Yankees and imperialists, but what Trump will do, I'm warning you, he will put a tariff on you, and he will take that 167, $68 billion surplus, and he will get it back down to zero. And that will almost destroy your economy.
Or, or I shouldn't say or, I should say in addition to, you get $63 billion in remittances. And those remittances are largely, from the data we have, Mexican nationals who are living in the United States and who are dependent on the largesse of the American taxpayer.
They get health subsidies, food stamp, what we used to call food stamp, EBT, transfer, electric banking, transfer cards, educate, everything. And that frees them up to send an average of three or four hundred a month.
And that's where you get the 63 billion. All he has to do is say, you know what? I don't care who you are.
You can be an American citizen. You can be a Mexican national.
But if you send money from the United States electronically or any means that we know of, we're going to slap a 20% tax. That would be $12 billion.
He could do the same thing for Central America and Latin America and South America, another $12 billion. That's $25 billion.
He can do that very easily. Then he can also say to Ms.
Scheinbaum, on average, the last decade, 75,000 Americans have died of fentanyl. And Mr.
Obedore was incorrect when he said, well, it's your fault. You have the demand.
Partly. But fentanyl is so lethal, they lace it with other illicit drugs or they lace it with prescription drugs like Valium, for example, or methamphetamines, you know, Adderall drugs.
So they trick the person into taking it and that gives them a high.
But, you know, they don't, they're not pharmaceuticals.
They don't want to kill their addiction clients, but they do to the tune of 75,000 a year.
Over 10 years, that's 750,000.
So what is Mexico?
An enemy? A friend? A frenemy? Neutral? All of them? If you say, well, how many people died in World War I? 117,000. How many Americans died in World War II? Somewhere between 150 maybe and, excuse me, 450, 470.
How many died in the Korean War? 36,000 to 38,000. How many died in Vietnam? 56,000 to 57,000.
How many died in all the other wars that we fought? Probably 10,000. It's less than 750.
Mexican cartels have killed more Americans than all of the wars that we fought in the 20th century and the 21st century. And so we have a lot of anger at Mexico.
So the cartels should be very careful. And when you add the cartel income, some people suggest it's 20 billion and the 63 billion and the 150, 67 billion, you're getting up to way over $200 billion that Americans are sending to Mexico.
And yet they repay that magnanimity, not with gratitude, but anger. And so they keep sending people here.
They are too, like Colombia and Venezuela, emptying their jails, their people have problems, criminals. They can't stop the cartels.
So Donald Trump is saying, I don't want 75,000 people to be killed. I do not want two to three to four million people coming here without a background or a health audit.
I don't want that anymore. And you won't listen to me.
And now you're insulting me by turning back flights. You keep it up and we're going to put a tax like you won't believe on remittances and we're going to put tariffs to stop that trade imbalance and we're going to close this border tight.
And I think they're stupid to test him.
I really do because I think he'll do it.
Yeah, I think so too. It's like Reagan and I was – 1981, I can remember talking to people and Reagan, they kept saying, oh, the air traffic controllers are going to shut down.
They're in this PATCO.
Remember PATCO?
It was the union.
And everybody said he wouldn't dare do that.
And he said, well, and then one day he did it.
And he fired them all.
And they said, oh, everything.
And he took, you know, he got a hardcore group of military air traffic control and they survived. And they had this guy, I forgot his name, with a beard.
He'd go on TV and say, this is going to, they'll cave. And they'd ask Reagan.
He acted just like he did with the hostages when he was campaigning in 1980. What are you going to do, Mr.
Reagan, about the hostages in Toronto? There will be no hostages in Toronto. And then they'd say, what are you going to do? Why did you do this? He said, well, we had a law that you can't strike if you're a federal employee.
And they violated it. So I had no choice.
I didn't want to do it, but they're gone. They're dead.
They're gone. And then all of a sudden, there was rumors that Gorbachev and all these people said, oh, my God, this guy's crazy.
We've never seen an American president. And so I wouldn't trust him if I were these people.
I mean, I don't mean that in the bad sense. I think Trump is absolutely serious.
And we could go on to a peripheral topic if you want to introduce it, I hadn't discussed it. And that is an executive order to deport people who lose, who have violated the conditions of their student visa with an added qualifier that he put on his executive order, anti-Semitic activity and pro-Hamas activity.
Well, let's do that, Victor. But first, I'm going to welcome one of our sponsors, or welcome back one of our sponsors.
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Openphone.com slash Victor. And if you have existing numbers with another service Open Phone will port them over at no extra charge so thank you Open Phone Can I say something before we start? Yeah, what would you like to say? I feel like Odysseus that survived the Sirens, the Calypso, Circe the Lystragonians today because I left at 5 a.m.
from Powhatta this morning in my regular weekly drive. So I go down 101 at 520 and the trucks are in the middle lane and I get behind a truck of the three lanes.
And this is one of the rare areas on 101 that will quickly go to two lanes because it's an ossified. And they were going 74 miles an hour.
I just parked. I got in the wagon train and followed.
The trucks were going. Yes, 74 miles an hour in the middle lane.
So then I went to Gilroy and I went through an alternate route, as I usually do. It's parallel to 152.
It has not changed, by the way, 152 between Pacheco Pass and Gilroy.
So it is ossified, calcified static.
It's the same thing I used to drive when I was 18 years old, 45 years ago, when the population was less than 20 million.
So it was a caravan of people from Hollister, from Los Banos, and it was packed. And the lights come right at you.
But it was just two lanes. And there was a break in the traffic because of these slow trucks.
And the whole thing is double line. And it's very dangerous.
There's no corridor. Anybody can just, and that happens all the time.
So I go around a quarter, and a guy is passing.
And he almost killed me, and I went off the side of the road. Luckily, there was a place to go off.
So Odysseus thing, I survived the Cyclops. I got back on my little raft, and I started to go down I-5.
I got to Pacheco Pass. I made it over.
And then I hit from the west side town of San Joaquin all the way to Carruthers, which is about 50 miles. I hit zero visibility fog.
And what did I find? That I had to cross three major highways, one a diagonal.
There were no stop. And it was like you had to roll down the window and then just go for it because you couldn't see anything.
But here's my point. I passed three cars coming at me in the opposite lane and two ahead of me with no lights, No lights.
So I was thinking about all of this in my odyssean to get home today safely. And I said, Gavin Newsom is spending $25 million to sue Donald Trump.
He gave $500 million for illegal alien health care. He can do anything but build the roads.
So why isn't 101 three lanes the whole way? Why isn't 152 four lanes? And then you have 27% of the drivers on the roads who are not born in the United States. So these people that I walked, I saw next to them were, I would not identify their country of origin, but they were immigrants because they were going very slow.
And all of a sudden they peered out, but no lights on. So I thought to myself, why doesn't he have a Marshall Plan? If we're going to have 27% immigrants, why don't we inculcate them? Why don't we have things in the school? This is how you write a check.
Make sure if you're selling things on a corner, you fill out sales tax. You pay income tax.
If you're going to, you always have your lights on when you drive because they're going to kill somebody. And so it was very scary to see these cars come.
Three white lines was all you could see. And then all of a sudden a car comes at you and it's gray.
You can't even see it until you look at the window right next to you. And then you're going ahead and you're going 30 miles an hour.
And then all of a sudden you get in there in a fog bank and you pull up and a person's going 10 miles an hour freaked out with no rear headlights, no red lights. And that's what California is.
It's a complete disaster. So when he gets his slick hair and he does that little head fake when he goes back and forth and you say, and Donald Trump is right about that.
You want to say to them, you blew up dams, four of them. You didn't build three dams that would have given us six million acre feet.
You're not filling the aqueduct.
I went by San Luis Reservoir when he lied and said to Trump, it's full.
All the reservoir.
No, it's not full.
It's less than 70 percent full. It looked to me like it was 60 percent full.
And then you see that the freeways are in horrible condition.
You get on 101 to the get off to the Gilway exit. It's like going through bumper cars.
It's just the road is so torn up. And then you have, we are a state of immigrants, but we don't tell immigrants what is the protocol because that would be intrusive or unfair.
Why don't we say you're here, we want you here, but we have these protocols, the state, we have one of the largest black market economies of any and of all the states. It's the biggest.
It's demonstrably true. So why don't we say we're short revenue? We're running 70.
So everybody who has a corner stand or a canteen, you've got to pay sales tax, charge sales tax, and you've got to pay income tax. No cash.
We have a huge cash. And if you're driving a car, we've got to inculcate in your schools certain protocols that when you come to a four-way stop, the person on the right has the right of way.
You just don't take your hand and wave around like, oh, I'm picking you or me. That happens every time I go to, hey, I'll just pick you.
No, no, no, no, no.
I'm to your right.
I have the right of way.
Or you're to my right.
You go.
But they always wave you.
These drivers do.
And so, you know, and we have about 50% of the accidents in L.A. County and Fresno where
the person leaves the scene of the accident.
So we have enormous existential challenges in California. And what does he do? He demagogues about, oh, the reservoirs are full.
Oh, it had nothing to do with DEI down in Los Angeles. Oh, it's a local issue.
He is one of the most inept governors I've ever seen. How do you take a 13.3 income tax rate and run up a $77 billion deficit when your sales tax, depending on the county, is probably the fifth or sixth highest? Your gas tax is the highest in the continental United States.
How do you do that? I don't understand. Do you want an answer to that? I mean, they're completely inept.
And as you said, they don't have clear programs for the future, for highways, for water. And then the cities and municipalities don't have clear programs to keep trash off of the street and maintain good sewage.
And that's the problem.
I think when he was talking to Donald Trump, what he was really saying to Donald Trump when Donald Trump came to L.A. and he met him at the airport, I looked at his attitude.
I mean, he had just said that the legislature called a special session not to address Los Angeles, but to galvanize rejection of Donald Trump. But he didn't want that.
He wanted the federal money for L.A., but he wanted to trash Trump. So what he was really saying to Trump, if you listen to him, was the subtext.
Donald, I am a child of privilege. I was groomed and mentored by the Getty Oil Fortune family.
My father was an appellate court judge. My mother knew who he was.
And I have always lived in the Bay Area. And you don't understand, Donald, that this is a medieval society.
Thanks to me and Jerry Brown, we drove all the middle class out with high gas, high electricity, terrible infrastructure, terrible.
They left.
So we have a huge group of poor people who are dependent on lavish entitlements.
30 to 40 percent of the state budget goes to Medi-Cal.
Half of all births in California are Medi-Cal births. Okay.
And then I have an insurance policy, and that's called 9-0-1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2, and as long as I lavish all these entitlements, I don't care if we have dams. I do not care about infrastructure.
I do not care that our schools are 45th in the nation in test scores. I do not care that some of the truckers magazines rate us 99, excuse me, the 99, the worst highway in the United States are the most dangerous because I have an automatic constituency that I lavish money to and entitlements.
And then I get all my campaign financed by the richest people on the planet. And that's who I am.
And so I can demagogue you all day long. And I can lie to the people and I can say the reservoirs are full or it's just a local issue of the hydrant.
And he's gotten away with it as mayor, as lieutenant governor, and as governor. So for Anna's city councilman, he's there for 30 years.
He's done this.
And he's destroyed the state. But there's no accountability.
And he knows it. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break.
And I know you said you had a digression that you were going to go into, and maybe it was just part of our agenda today. But we have left talking about Kash Patel's confirmation and then the left's antics this week.
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show. So, Victor, lots that went on with confirmations this week, but I think
Kash Patel is probably one of the more interesting ones. And I was wondering your thoughts.
Yeah, in this odyssey, before I got home in Ithaca, I got waylaid with all these things
that happened today. So I'm still a little freaked out.
But one of the benefits was I
added an hour to my trip. So that gave me time to listen to the Cash Patel nomination hearings.
And it was, they kept, of course, it was all January 6th, January 6th, January 6th. It wasn't, you expose Adam Schiff as a complete pathological liar.
And your memo, the Nunes memo that you helped draft just demolished the minority report from Adam Schiff. It was the main thing is they wanted to drive a wedge between him and Trump.
Donald Trump pardoned this despicable person and he went out and tried to shoot or he came out of his car armed and he was shot and killed. So they kept hammering on that.
Do you support this? Do you support that?
And he just kept saying, I do not support any pardon for people who have shot law enforcement,
shot at them or use violence.
And then he said, and I especially don't support Joe Biden's pardon of Leonard Peltier,
who killed, executed two FBI agents.
And Durbin says, well, that was a long time ago and he's 80. So I thought, well, he pardoned a person who killed two FBI agents.
They have family. He executed them.
And you're saying that he's suffered enough because he's 80 years old? And how do you know he's not going to do something? I mean, 80-year-old people are capable. I'm 71 and I'm still hail and Donald Trump is 78.
And is that saying, are you going to say that, well, I don't blame Donald Trump because he's 78 years old? No, we don't do that. So the whole thing was like that.
And it was, he was very good. The funny thing about all these nominees that some of the rhinos in the party deprecated, Pete Hexeth, Pam Bondi, Cash Patel, man, when they go before those people, Sean Duffy, they have all of the answers.
They're really impressive people. And they go head to head.
And it's kind of they have a wink and a nod. And it's kind of I think their logic, I'm just suggesting this.
I don't have any confirmation. But their attitude, they go going very confident.
So their attitude is basically, I have 53 senator votes and you have none to stop me. You can't stop me.
Now, you think you're going to get Murkowski and Collins and maybe Mitch, I can still get confirmed. So I'm not going to kiss up to you in any way possible.
In fact, the only thing I worry about is not getting 50 senators.
And the only way I would not get 50 senators is to sell out Donald Trump. And I'm not going to do that.
I'm not stupid and I don't want to anyway. And that gives them a lot of confidence.
And then you get these people frustrated like Elizabeth Warren. Cheeks come off as completely unhinged.
And then they don't understand the media, the left.
They're polling right now 37%. And cheeks come off as completely unhinged.
And then they don't understand the media, the left.
They're polling right now 37% in the, I guess it was the latest Emerson poll, 37% said they approve of the Democratic Party.
Do they understand how they drive that down? When somebody like Elizabeth Warren just cuts off RFK, won't let him answer a question, screams and yells and says, and then it was, can you promise that you won't, because he has all these law firms, that your former legalist won't sue the pharmaceutical countries? And then you look and then within a nanosecond, the right-wing blogosphere has all the recipients of pharmaceutical money and the highest is Bernie Sanders and then her. And so you have all these hypocrites that are defending big pharma against RFK.
And that doesn't work. It doesn't – they don't understand that just because the network – just because ABC anchor is biased or David Muir or any of these people or you've got joe and scarborough it it doesn't matter anymore they can get the right can get the message out part of that's due to elon musk when he opened it up but uh they were just an app and then you mentioned schumer and schumer's so funny so all those governors i think there were six of them, and they've called him.
Can I just insert, that interview he had was bizarre. He's weird.
Yes, he said, I think Sammy is referring to, now everybody get this, a poll just came out that the Democratic Party has the lowest ranking in a generation, 37. It's usually 50-50, 37%.
And in response, he says people are aroused. I've never seen so many people aroused.
And, you know, we were really aroused. And, you know, we're gout, but we're also aroused.
So then immediately, I was thinking, I remember he said for elections, he said erections. So I wonder if anybody's making that.
So I was watching last night and I was by myself in my apartment and I got online within a now second. All over the Internet is erections, erections, erections, aroused, aroused.
And then where his fury came is, I think, the governor of Illinois and the governor of Kansas.
She's a Democrat.
They called him up and they said, you're not fighting these nominations enough.
Instead of just saying, are you insane? We're looking like idiots. We lose our temper and we lose every one of them.
And so he was trying to, he's completely bewildered. He's a deer in the headlights.
His legacy is going to go down on one thing. He got out in front of the Supreme Court in 2020.
I think it was March. I'm doing this by memory.
And he got in front of a mob of angry abortion protesters, pro-abortion. And he said, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, you sowed the wind.
You're going to reap the whirlwind. And then, quote, you don't know what's going to hit you.
That was a direct threat. Within months, people were swarming their homes.
That's a felony to try to influence a Supreme Court justice by intimidating at his home. They went to the homes of Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch, but especially Kavanaugh.
No one spoke out in their front. Joe Biden liked that.
Then the Democrats leaked that Roe versus Wade before the midterms. And all of that was a green light from Chuck Schumer.
If anybody had done that, if they had gone out in front of Elena Kagan's home or Ketanji Brown and tried to swarm it and then had an assassin show up who wanted to kill a Supreme Court but called his sister, I think, and she talked him out of it. And they would have attributed that to any U.S.
senator who had advocated violence. You can't have the Senate minority leader at the time advocate violence by threatening the security of the Supreme Court justices while they're in session behind those doors.
He was right at the doors. When he says, you don't know what's going to hit you and you're going to reap the whirlwind, well, that's interpreted by certain people as a green light.
When I was younger, he was a House member. I think I remember when i was in my 20s watching him i think he was a representative from new york on the on the watergate committee or he was he he seemed semi-normal but he has completely lost his mind as all the democrats are because they cannot believe you know nobody they need an intervention that what they always say.
Maybe they can get Bandy Lee, that psychiatrist from Yale. Remember her? She went to testify that Donald Trump was crazy and needed straight jacket.
And then Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenthal tried to trial and they were discussing putting a wire. Well, Bandy, I think they dismissed you from Yale for unprofessional conduct because the American Psychiatric Association does not let you telediagnosed people without any exam and declare them crazy, especially public figures.
They did it. They call it the Goldwater rule.
They said Barry Goldwater was crazy. I like Barry Goldwater, but they all said he was crazy.
And then they said, we can't do this any longer. So anyway, she was out of a job.
She was a heartthrob of the left. Maybe Bandy can come back.
Bandy, come back and examine not just Emeritus President Joe Biden, which you didn't seem to bother you at all, but examine Chuck Schumer and tell me that he's sane and then go and talk to Elizabeth Warren. And then if you're on your way out the Capitol, pay a visit to AOC.
Well, you're bringing me to an article that I read this week. I like Byron York.
I've always liked Byron York. He's the ultimate professional.
I've met him a few times. He was a colleague of mine at National Review.
He's always sober and judicious. I don't mean that sarcastically.
I mean that sincerely. He's very ever, if ever, wrong.
He's very careful about what he says. He's got enormous credibility.
And he was writing for the Jewish World Review, and in his article, he's analyzing the left,
and he puts it most succinctly here.
He goes, the left must moderate its instinct to fight every single thing President Trump
does, and I don't think they can do it.
I didn't get the idea in his article that he thought so either.
They're losing everyone.
They start with this premise.
It's very sexist.
So they see Pam Bondi, who's 59 or 60, and she looks like she's 40.
She does.
She's a very attractive woman.
She's very smart.
And they see, and they're sexist.
They are sexist.
And they think, well, she's just a blonde bimbo.
And so it're just going to tear her apart. And she tears him apart.
And then they see Pete Hex and they think, well, this guy is weird. He's got the Jerusalem cross, you know, and he's been married three times.
And we're just going to slice him up because I'm Senator Sanders and I'm Senator Schumer. I'm Senator Warren.
I'm Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. And then he just destroys them.
And then they bring in RFK. And they're even making fun of his voice now online.
And so they think Bobby's great. And he just destroyed them.
And now I was watching today Kash Patel. He's from an immigrant family.
He's kind of weird. We've monitored him before.
FBI went after him. And we'll just destroy him because he didn't go to Harvard or Yale.
And he just, he was like carving a Christmas turkey. I've met him before.
He's really sharp. Cash is very smart.
He's unafraid.
And I can tell you exactly from, we haven't discussed this personally, but from what he said and venues, he's going to do exactly what you think he's going to do. He's going to go into the FBI, and he's going to go down to the first, second, and third tier,
and he's going to find people who were appalled by Robert Mueller, but especially James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Wray, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, all those people that ran the eighth floor, I think they call it, of the Hoover Building. He's going to get them all together and say, you were ostracized, weren't you? And they all say, yes, we were treated terribly.
And he says, who else was? And get them all around. I want experts who want to go back to old-fashioned investigation, counterterrorism, national security.
And they don't understand that everybody, they don't understand why nobody's listening to them. They don't understand.
They keep saying it's Trump or it's Kat.
No, it's your message.
Just get a poll and go look at the polls.
Just go, anyone, get your bias polls.
Border, do you want it open or closed?
Everybody, closed.
How many sexes are?
Two.
You know what I mean?
That's what the American people want.
And I know you can warp it a little bit by changing the question, but was Kabul and Afghanistan?
No, we don't like that, American people.
We don't like the Soros DAs.
We don't like the New Green Deal.
We want fracking.
It's all there for you. You need Bill Clinton, but not the shell of Bill Clinton today, who's, you know, he's been grifting for so many years and Epstein's playing, but I'm talking about him in his prime.
As I say to everybody, go back and look at the 96 Democratic Convention. It could have been written by Ronald Reagan.
And he just took Dick Morris and he just, whether you like it, cynicism or not, he just said, what is the poll on immigration?
What is the poll on law enforcement? What is the poll on crime? And he just went right down what the people wanted. And he got reelected.
And they had eight years of governance. And he never won 51% of the vote because of Ross Perot.
I don't know if that was a reason. But Republicans, how could you, every time George H.W.
Bush or Bob Dole in those debates try to debate him, well, I'm just kind of, I kind of agree with you. I kind of think that everybody should be, have school uniform.
We need 100,000 police officers. We need to be oral efficient.
We need to use our resources. And then they would go about the border.
Yeah, I'm for legal immigration, but I'm not for illegal immigration. I want to protect our union workers.
That's what he did. He just ran circles around them.
And then it was like, okay, been there, done that. Now it's Hillary's turn to ruin the party.
And so she got her moment. Everybody said, with Bill, you get two.
You get Bill, but even the smarter. No, you get the more obnoxious, less smart, less capable partner.
And then that's what she did. And then you had Hillaryism and Obama.
None of them had Bill Clinton's cynicism. And, you know.
Come on, let's face it. It was savvy.
He was pretty savvy. He was savvy.
He was good looking. He was young.
He had enormous appetites in the wrong place. But he was slick and he balanced the budget.
I'll never forget that. For three years, we had a surplus.
That was a lot of Newt Genrich was doing. Newt gets a lot of credit for that.
But he did a lot of good things. And then at the end of his second term he got left.
And then it led to Hillary running for Senate and then Obama. She ran against Obama in 2008.
And the whole party went hard left. Although, for her credit, when she ran against Barack Obama, I shouldn't say for her credit, she started bowling, and then she started putting whiskey in her beer, remember, and had boilermakers.
And then they asked her, well, you know, Barack Obama made a slip, and he said he was, remember he slipped and said, and my Muslim faith, do you think he's a Muslim? Well, he says he's not. She played the Islam card.
She was really dirty, too. So, but Bill Clinton, they're never going to go back to that.
If they did, they'd probably, they'd be very hard to beat.
And he didn't have,
he didn't have, he started to,
but he didn't have, he had Hollywood money,
but there wasn't that huge,
if you look at the George H.W. Bush campaign chest,
it was about the same.
That big disparity between Democratic megabucks
didn't really start to the millennium.
So that was pretty amazing for him to run in a three-person race two times and get elected.
But it was because of Dick Morris and that message.
Yeah.
Well, if I could take us back to confirmations just for one second, because it hasn't happened
yet.
But I was wondering, it seems like the left is worse against one-time leftists
like RFK and Tulsi Gabbard.
And I was wondering if you had any ideas.
Oh, those are apostates.
Yeah, apostates are the worst thing.
But in their defense, who is the most despised person on the left right now?
Liz Cheney. I guess she's on the left right now, Liz Cheney.
I guess she's on the left. Where is she? Adam Kissinger and maybe Bill Kristol.
And why is that? Because they're apostates. See, the problem with apostates, and I don't think Tulsi Gabbard or RFK were always eccentric.
They weren't party people. But in the case of somebody like Liz Cheney, when you run and you are successful and you raise money on this conservative agenda, and then with a matter of weeks, you flip and you don't just say, I'm still a very hardcore conservative, but Donald Trump, I can't vote for him, but I'm for the message.
Because he did a lot of – and you don't do that, but you start embracing these other messages and you campaign for Kamala Harris. Then everybody says, well, what an idiot I was.
I believe you. And same thing with Bill Kristol.
I remember I wrote checks to you and now I feel stupid because you were never sincere. So, an apostate, and the question is, are they apostates or not? I said yes in a way, but they were always quirky.
I don't know what you'd call them, but they were quirky. They were kind of civil libertarians, Tulsi.
The other thing is, as I said before, I've met Tulsi Gabbard. I've been on the same venue with her.
I spent a whole day with her. And she's a very genuine, sincere person.
She's kind of an earth mother. You know what I mean? She's very empathetic to people.
I just watched her for four hours sign books with me. And people would come up and they would want to tell stories.
And she was, that's so fast.
And she meant it and she would turn to me later and say, that woman had a great story.
And then it got late, late in the evening and it was going on and on.
And she looked at me and she said, this is what we signed up for.
We're both, we're going to give them their money's worth.
She was an ultimate professional. And I only say that, everybody, because I've been doing this, I think my first public lecture was a graduate student when I was 23.
So I've been doing this for 48 years. And I have met most of the people in the conservative side.
And I can tell you that there is a lot of people who say, I don't have time to sign that book. What are you doing? I'm at the airport.
Don't bug me. Or, no, I don't.
I don't. I don't have time.
Or you'll be with them at a book signing and they'll say, I'm getting out of here. I'm not going to do this.
And so she was different like that. There's a few people that are different, but she's very empathetic.
I've never met RFK, but just the amount of vitriol and effort, you know.
When they got done with him, he was the bear story.
And I felt bad.
He had to get in front of all the leaks, so he had to go out and confess to the dead bear story.
And then his second wife committed suicide, and then they brought that up, everything. And he was always, and then the sexting, the texting and all that.
They said he was committing adultery when he don't think he ever touched the woman. You know what I mean? So it was, I don't know.
I really liked his campaign partner, the one who ran for vice president under his third party. I forgot her name.
She was a Silicon Valley. She was very wealthy.
Did you hear what she said? Wasn't she Filipino or Asian? I think she's Asian, yeah. But she's very smart and she's very wealthy, very successful.
And she said something that I really admired her for. She said, I think yesterday, I'm speaking on Thursday, she said, I want to warn all you people that are going after Bobby.
If you're going to go after him and do it in a dirty fashion, I will spend every ounce of my energy and money to go after you and primary you and donate. So don't do it.
Not that that will have a deterrent effect because, you know,
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are just creatures of big pharma and left-wing money. They have all they need.
But I thought that was really loyal of her to say that. Loyalty, everybody makes fun of Trump's loyalty, but loyalty is a very rare virtue.
Very rare virtue. Yeah, and he has a whole lineup of people that are being confirmed that are both loyal and authentic.
And I think that that provides a huge contrast with the left. Every time they do a press conference, they praise him.
And I'm just thinking, what is, everybody says, what is the difference now between 2017? And I went back last night when I was watching the coverage of the crash. And I went back and looked at all the stories about Donald.
They opposed almost all of his people, but almost half the people he appointed were not MAGA people. And within about a month or two, they were leaking.
They were leaking all the time. Rex Tillerson was leaking all the time.
All of them, of those non-MAGA appointments. And they, remember Anonymous, that little, I think it was his name, Chad something.
I don't know. He was in the Homeland Security.
And he was leaking. And he wrote an op-ed and said, we're going to stop Trump every avenue.
And it was just out of hand. He had nobody that was supporting him.
And you had guys like Venman, you know. And he wasn't, he just listened to a call.
It was a normal call and he calls the, you know, he calls Sarah Merrill, the whistleblower, and they cook up the whole thing with Adam Schiff. It was just one thing after another.
And so then he's in the wilderness years for four years and he says, you know, if I'm ever going to come back, it's loyalty. You've got to get people, good people.
They have to be good and they have to be loyal and they have to be on the same page. And they all are now.
So they're force multipliers. So they get in a cabinet meeting and there's nobody who's going to say, I'm not going to do that.
Or you can't do that. It's all, and that's going to be the difference.
Yeah, it sure is. The unity of it all.
So, Victor, one last thing, and this is a little bit lighter, even though she tried to make it heavier. There's an influencer, Selena Gomez, that neither of us knows, so she's not influencing us.
What is an influencer? But she let it all pour out as far as her tears and hysteria that they're starting to take all of the rapists and robbers and thieves and back to other countries. She's also mad because so ICE has evidence that there's a rapist or a murderer in the Aurora Hotel, right? Or apartment.
They go in there and they don't know who's who, right? And so they're all there and then they start asking for their status, their ID. And then they find out somebody is also illegal, but there's not an arrest warrant.
So in her view, in the left, they kept asking Donald Trump that at the press conference and Holman, Tom Holman. So in the left-wing mind, it's not a crime to barge through the country, break immigration law, break it again and reside here, and break it a third time probably with fake ideas.
So their idea is, well, if you go in and there's 20 people in a room and 15 of them are rapists or murderers and you're trying to find out and you find three that are here illegally and have broken the law and they haven't they've broken their summons and so you deport them well that's wrong no it's not it's wrong if the if the ice officer says i'm going to waive immigration law for you and and make you exempt and pardon you but not other people that was one thing and thing. And then the other thing, she said, my people.
This I am crying for my people. It's not your people.
Your people are Americans. Do you understand that? You're an American citizen.
I don't, I was in Florence once, right? And I think I said this, didn't I? There's a table and there was an African-American guy and he was sitting there and there was a Swedish couple at this long table.
and they, I don't speak Swedish, but I grew up hearing it so I can recognize it.
And they were a blonde, blue-eyed Swedish couple. And they were talking to the waiter, Italian.
It was during, I had just been operated on, so I know the date, from a ruptured appendix in Libya. So it was 2007.
I was in Florence. Florence, yes.
And so they were the guy who was at the table was an African-American and he had a uniform on, U.S. uniform.
And they were the the the guy who was at the table was an African-American and he had a uniform on U.S. uniform and they were making fun of him and they were speaking English.
The Italian saying, oh, well, yeah. So I got up over there and I walked over there.
I never done that before or since. And I said, before you make fun of my fellow American, you should ask what you did in World War II, my Swedish friends.
And I would say to Talion, as I remember, you were a Mussolini person. And this man over here, to the extent he could contribute, his probably family is military.
And I have more in common, a lot more with him as a fellow American than I do with you, even though I'm Swedish.
I said that to the Swedish people.
And they said, how bizarre, how bizarre you come over to our table. And I said, well, I just I've been listening to the crap you're saying for the last 30 minutes.
And I couldn't muffle my ears enough. and for you to sit here and make fun of a U.S.
soldier when you were neutral and sent iron ore over to Hitler
and you said that you'd waive the transportation charge because you loved Hitler so much. And you Italians were Mussolini.
You went into East Somalia and you butchered people. I was going nuts.
But the point is, if you're an American, your allegiance is with Americans. No matter what they look like, it's not my people.
My people. So when she said my people, all she does is confirm a stereotype that she's a tribalist.
And she shouldn't do that. And so I think even Dr.
Phil made fun of her. But here's the last thing, and I'll shut up.
I said earlier there's been 750,000 people killed by fentanyl, if you look at the average for the last 10 years. Did she cry about those people? Why wasn't she crying about those people? Who did that? A lot of the did that came from Mexico, and a lot of it were cartel people.
So why didn't she say, I don't like this, but my people, my fellow Americans were dying in droves from an open border. But she doesn't care.
Well, think of all the sex trafficking that came across. 300,000 children missing.
Children, women. She doesn't care about that.
And the good thing about the right now is what I like, and I didn't see that when I was younger, they have the youth now. And the young people are really energetic.
And if you think about it this way, if you're a young person going through high school and you're going to college and you start taking those DEI courses or you major in a college and they don't even have that major, green studies or ethnics, you're not going to learn anything. But if you're conservative, you're not going to do that.
And if you're conservative in college, they're going to press you all the time in class. They're going to pick on you.
They're going to do everything. And all that does is make you stronger.
And so all of these young – I've met so many of these people who are conservative young people. They're so bright and they're galvanized and they're so much better prepared than their leftist counterparts.
So when she does that, then they comment and they simply destroyed her. And I think she withdrew that video because it was so – I'll just say one last thing.
Because I mentioned Ms. Levitt.
Is she our press secretary?
If I thought – I want to be very careful.
If I thought I was a Hollywood person, I want to go to central casting to find a press secretary that would make the left's head explode, I would say, hmm, I want to get a woman who's really, really bright and has a photographic memory and is beautiful and is not cynical, but very sincere and looks like she came off a Kansas farm and loves Donald Trump and the MAGA and is ultimately loyal. And that's who she is.
And she is making their heads explode. Didn't they get really angry on The View? Oh, my gosh.
The View. What's her name? Griffith? Is that her name? Alicia? What was her name? I don't know that one.
I just know Sonny Halston. Oh, yeah.
Sonny Halston and Whoopi Goldberg got mad and said, she's there because of our sacrifice. No, you didn't sacrifice anything.
You've been a multi-multi-millionaire since you were 30, Whoopi. And Sonny Halston, I don't want to get into personal invective, but your husband now is a multi-millionaire and he's under criminal indictment.
So don't give anybody lectures about you paved the way for Miss Levitt. People who paved the way did it in the 1950s.
I can say that I can. My mother graduated from Stanford Law School in 1946 near the top of her class.
And she got one offer as a legal secretary. and she came home to Salmon, a local attorney, let her work part-time while she raised.
She had four children. One died.
But those women suffered, not Whoopi Goldberg. And then the second thing is they said that she's a beneficiary of DI.
She's a 10. A 10? I thought, oh.
So now we get down to it. You've got your claws and your Burmese cat snarl and you're angry at her because she's beautiful.
And you call her a 10 as if she's a bimbo. That sounds like a sexist that you can't be beautiful and brilliant at the same time.
And she almost, I don't think she meant to. Well, she did.
I guess she was talking about Corinne Jean-Pierre who had the binders, you know, and Corinne was copying Kaylee, but she relied on them a lot more than Kaylee did. Kaylee was a good press secretary, but so funny, they ask her, are you going to be bringing binders? My binders are in my head, in my brain.
And she doesn't.
So she's been very good and they hate her. And she's only 27.
I'm thinking when I was 27, I had already failed. I had got a PhD at 25 and then I couldn't get a job and I was farming and I was losing money.
So I was on a massive Ferguson to 65 hour after hour thinking, how did you manage this?
You've got two kids and you're making $6,500 a year and you had a PhD in classical languages.
How did you screw up so much? And then I look at her at 27 and I couldn't do that, which she does. You know what I mean? Go in front of all these hostile people that hate your guts, and then try to not get – I mean, they're all trying to do one thing.
They hate her, and they're trying to oppose her, but they want one thing. The one thing they want to do, that's what the left does.
They want her to agree with them in a criticism of Donald Trump. That's what they did with RFK.
That's what they did with Cash today when I was listening to him. Would you just, I know you support law enforcement, Cash.
You must be shocked about the pardon. And he explained it.
Does that mean you're criticizing Donald Trump's pardon? He said, no. Well, why wouldn't it mean you're criticizing Donald Trump? That's what they want.
And they're trying to do that to her. And she's a big fish that doesn't take the bait.
They're bottom feeders too.
Well, we're at the end of our show, Victor, and thank you very much.
I'm kind of hyper today because of my trip.
I just got home after a four-hour drive.
Well, it's been a wonderful show today.
So we'd like to thank our audience for joining us.
Thank you for listening, everybody.
We wouldn't be here if you weren't listening, so we appreciate it. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off.
Thank you for listening, everybody. We wouldn't be here if you weren't listening, so we appreciate it.
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off. Thank you, everyone.
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