Trump Goes to California and Hegseth's Confirmation

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Speaker 3 Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host.
You are here to listen to Victor, who's the man with the wisdom.

Speaker 3 He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayner Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Speaker 3 Its address is victorhanson.com. Later in the show, I will tell you why I believe you should be subscribing.

Speaker 3 Victor, I feel the last time you and I spoke was a week ago, and I feel like a year has happened in these last seven days.

Speaker 3 So much dramatic

Speaker 3 Donald Trumpism

Speaker 3 has gone around the world. You and the great Sammy Wink have discussed much of this, but there's still so much to get your take on, Victor.

Speaker 3 Actually, I think we should begin the show today by talking about a vote in the Senate for Pete Hagseth's confirmation and how, of all people, Mitch McConnell voted against that. We have that.

Speaker 3 We have Donald Trump in California,

Speaker 3 the Musk salute.

Speaker 3 the removal of security details for Fauci, Pompeo, Bolton, and some more talk about pardons. And we'll get to all of this, Victor, when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 3 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. We are recording, by the way, on Saturday the 25th, and this particular episode will be up on Tuesday the 28th.

Speaker 3 Folks, we know a lot happens in three days. A lot happens in one day in America now.
But

Speaker 3 we always catch up with Victor's take on

Speaker 3 what has transpired. So Victor, let's commence today with Mitch McConnell, now just a plain old senator from Kentucky, no longer a member of the leadership.
But damn, he seems like a man filled with

Speaker 3 spite. He voted against

Speaker 3 Pete Hegseth's confirmation to the Senate. Pete was confirmed when the vice president cast a tie-breaking vote.

Speaker 3 Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, two other Republicans who voted against him. Victor, you have some important thoughts to share on this.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 There were three Republicans, Murkowski from Alaska, Collins from Maine, and Mitch McConnell from Kentucky. They all voted against Pete Hegseth, and they're all sort of in a different category.

Speaker 2 Take Lisa Murkowski first. She would not be representing, there's a Republican, as you know, senator in Alaska.
She's the other quote-unquote Republican. She's not really a Republican.

Speaker 2 She's only there because she engineered through her allies this rank voting that is unlike almost any other place. And

Speaker 2 it's designed to elect people with more minority support by playing off other candidates, which sometimes in collusion they run to the benefit of the person who is going to be advantageously favored by this ranked voting.

Speaker 2 Number two is

Speaker 2 she's got to make the argument

Speaker 2 that she has a consistent record, a prescient, principled record about rejecting nominees for high cabinet posts. So let's just go back in the time machine four years ago.
She voted for Pete Buttigig,

Speaker 2 and she had heard him the entire primary debates of 2020, what all of the things he said, all of the things he said

Speaker 2 going into speculation that he would be the transportation secretary about racist clover leaves and all of this DI, and she voted for him. She also voted as, and by the way, Susan Collins did too.

Speaker 2 Deb Highland was the Interior Secretary. All we heard from Biden was that she was the first Native American woman, first woman,

Speaker 2 But we didn't hear about what she had been promoting her whole life and what she tried to do to reify that advocacy once she was

Speaker 2 the Interior Secretary. So, what was it? She wanted to cancel all pipelines.
She wanted to ban all fracking on federal lands. She wanted to ban all new federal leases for oil production.

Speaker 2 She got a lot of that through.

Speaker 2 And that was

Speaker 2 to the detriment of the people of Alaska and and to everybody, because this was at a time once she was in that prices spiked.

Speaker 2 Here in California, I remember distinctly filling up for $5.80 a gallon, but $21.22.

Speaker 2 And that was only broke when Joe Biden decided to dump 2 million barrels a day on the domestic market by pumping out of the strategic reserve. And by the way, everybody,

Speaker 2 Joe Biden took a reserve that was 80%,

Speaker 2 I don't know what it was, 650 barrels, 650 million barrels, and he took it down by 40%

Speaker 2 at a time when

Speaker 2 we, meaning the American people, had been benefited because Trump had filled it up with cheap oil.

Speaker 2 So then Joe Biden took it down, and now Trump's going to have to spend multi-billion dollars to fill it back up. He did that to win the midterms and say that gas had gone down.

Speaker 2 So you tell me the logic, Deb Holland. Why is it okay to re-pump oil out of the ground, but it's not to pump it out the first time?

Speaker 2 Then we go to Collins. And so she voted for Buttigig.
She voted for Holland.

Speaker 2 And then if we go to the Secretary of Defense, she's saying Pete Hegseth, who was a decorated veteran who saw service at Guantanamo and Iraq and Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 She says she voted for Lloyd Austin, as did the other two. Lloyd Austin went AWOL for about seven days.
He didn't even tell anybody where he was.

Speaker 2 If you're a private and you have an emergency, let's say appendix or prostate problem, and you just stay home and go to your doctor and take care of it, you're going to be court-martialed.

Speaker 2 You really are.

Speaker 2 And so I understand he was ill, but he has to set an example. He was the person in charge as DOD secretary of the worst

Speaker 2 military humiliation in American history at Kabul. Never have we left so quickly and such chaos, not even in 1975 from the Saigon Embassy roof.
We left $50 to $60 billion.

Speaker 2 We turned over billions of dollars of infrastructure to terrorists, the Taliban. We left a billion-dollar embassy, a remodeled $300 million priceless Bagram air base.
We did all of that.

Speaker 2 He was the general that was there, and he did not tell Joe Biden, don't do it.

Speaker 2 He went along with it. He can say what he wants afterwards, but he didn't make a principled effort to stop that.
So, and

Speaker 2 Collins and Murkowski voted as well for Austin.

Speaker 2 So I don't understand how they're saying that Pete Hekseth is unqualified as a conservative, but Lloyd Austin was a great Secretary of Defense, or that their judgment about him was

Speaker 2 confirmed when he served, or Pete Buttigig

Speaker 2 was a great transportation,

Speaker 2 or they were shocked that he thought he was, but he wasn't, or Deb Holland. I could go on with other cabinets.

Speaker 2 Then we come to Mitch McConnell. He's a little different.
He voted.

Speaker 2 I don't remember, but I don't think that he voted to confirm Deb Holland, but I may be mistaken. So why did he vote? And you could take it two ways, Jack.
You could say once Collins and

Speaker 2 Murkowski

Speaker 2 were informally known to be opposed to

Speaker 2 Pete Heckseth, he, I don't know what would be, he circulated among the senators and wanted to know if Tillis

Speaker 2 was going to vote against it. When Tillis said no, he was at the last moment he was going to vote for

Speaker 2 Hexeth, then I think Mitch might have thought, huh,

Speaker 2 I can make a principled vote in opposition to Trump, but I won't be blamed because I know it'll be tied in J.D. Vance.
That's the charitable.

Speaker 2 The uncharitable is that he wanted to stop Pete Heckseth and embarrass Donald Trump for past slights, insults, going back almost a decade.

Speaker 2 And that goes back to the, remember when Trump blamed Mitch for the collapse of the effort to repeal Obamacare, that Mitch had assured Trump that they had the votes, and then they basically carried McCain in.

Speaker 2 And McCain, just who had campaigned for re-election on repealing Obamacare, it turned out that he hated Trump more than he disliked Obamacare

Speaker 2 and voted to extend it. So it was very disappointing to see that happen.
But Pete was confirmed, and the question is, what will he do? I think he'll do three things very quickly.

Speaker 2 He will look at recruitment and he will stop the farce that when the military is short 30, 40, 50,000 soldiers, then the next year they say, well, you know what?

Speaker 2 We were looking at our military needs and we really didn't need 30 or 40. And guess what?

Speaker 2 We met our recruitment. But when you look at the actual numbers, they're shrinking.

Speaker 2 And I think he will stop the DEI that turns off white males who, as I keep saying, have a record of dying at twice their numbers in demographic. But if you go

Speaker 2 ad after ad after ad, not about people jumping out of helicopter, of all different races, of all women, men, and women, and you say, all you can be, if you get rid of that and just stress I'm the first woman, I'm the first gay, I'm the first trans, and all about this is a pregnant flight suit, then you're going to turn off people because they feel they will not be promoted or retained or evaluated in a merocratic fashion.

Speaker 2 And then I think he's going to look at the procurement. And I think he's going to learn lessons from Ukraine and

Speaker 2 the Middle East that while it's valuable to have $5 million tanks and $14 billion carriers and $150 million F-22s in a conventional fight against a superpower like China,

Speaker 2 you you could get a much bigger bang for the buck, and that would be by buying not five, six, ten million dollar drones, but thousands of cheap things and put them on drone platforms at sea and very lightly manned and just swarm the zone.

Speaker 2 And I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to tell Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed,

Speaker 2 Northrop, look,

Speaker 2 you're very valuable,

Speaker 2 but we're going to have to stop this where our generals revolve out of the Pentagon and then they go to work for you.

Speaker 2 And then they call up their former subordinates and advise them that their particular high-ticket item is better than their competitors.

Speaker 2 So we're going to still deal with you, but we're going to put some kind of sunset law that when you leave the military, you cannot be a defense contractor or lobbyist.

Speaker 2 And he was asked that directly, and he didn't answer it because he just cut

Speaker 2 he cut off Elizabeth Warren. I think she had a point, but he cut her off brilliantly And he said, I'm not a general.
So, are you going to go out and rotate? And he said, I'm not a general.

Speaker 2 But I don't think he will when he leaves anyway. We'll see.

Speaker 2 And I think he's going to favor these startup companies, Andoran and these Andoril and all these other ones that we see in Southern California that are saying we can do far more hypersonic, laser, drones, AI, all of this stuff.

Speaker 2 Just give us a chance. So I'm very happy that he got confirmed.

Speaker 2 One final footnote.

Speaker 2 There was not one single Democrat that voted for Hexeth, and there will not be one single Democrat that votes for Patel, and there will not be one single Democrat that votes for Pam Bondi, I think, maybe one or two.

Speaker 2 When you go back and look at the voting records for the Biden nominees,

Speaker 2 They were all like Marco Rubio. I mean, pretty much some Republicans voted overwhelmingly with the exception of Deb Holland.

Speaker 2 That was a little close, but it was still, there were still a lot of Republicans that voted for her. So it should remind us, as we see in the House wars, that the

Speaker 2 Democrats have an ironclad

Speaker 2 rule, and that is whatever your ideology is, if you can be a Marxist in the squad, you can be a so-called vestigial blue-dog Democrat. You can be anything.

Speaker 2 But if you don't vote the way their leadership tells you to vote and you don't have ironclad solidarity, then they're going to punish you.

Speaker 2 They're going to punish you by not appropriating federal funds to your district or your state. They're going to punish you by raising the prospect of primarying you with a candidate.

Speaker 2 They're going to cut the

Speaker 2 vote blue fund for you and drain off your campaign resource. They're going to do anything.
And they have put the fear of God into all of these people, and they vote lock, stock, and barrel.

Speaker 2 I'm not suggesting the Republicans use those terms, but until they get that type of discipline, they're going to need a much bigger margin than they have now.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, hopefully, the Democrats won't have any nominees for

Speaker 3 several decades.

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Speaker 3 Yeah. Hey, two things.
One about Pete. You know, I know Pete a little.
I think it would be fair to call him a friend. I am very fond of him.
I had him on a national review cruise once.

Speaker 3 I don't know if you were on that one or not, Victor, but we had a thing three mornings at 7:30, and it was called the Burke to Buckley Program. It was very special.

Speaker 2 I was on it. I was on it.

Speaker 2 I think he was living, was he living in Florida then?

Speaker 3 No, I think he came.

Speaker 3 I forget where he came from. He brought his dad with him, who's a great guy.

Speaker 2 I love the guy.

Speaker 3 But Pete was there every one of these sessions. He's really a scholarly guy.
So I think that's important to note.

Speaker 3 And that leads me to hope he would, amongst the things that he would be taking on, is a reform of the curriculum of our military academies.

Speaker 3 I think he would be surprisingly positioned to do that because he does care deeply about

Speaker 3 these matters. So

Speaker 2 he's great.

Speaker 2 I was at one time, I mean I was the Simon visiting professor at Pepperdine. I was a visiting professor

Speaker 2 in the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine. I was a Nimitz professor visiting at UC Berkeley.
I taught a year as a Schifrin professor at U.S. Naval Academy.
And

Speaker 2 I'm the

Speaker 2 Butzki

Speaker 2 professor at Hillsdale. I know that these are center-right, but I have never,

Speaker 2 never, and I've spoken at maybe over 200 universities in the last 45 years. I have never been in a more left-wing environment than the U.S.
Naval Academy of 2002 and 3

Speaker 2 really was.

Speaker 2 If it wasn't for two or three really great friends I met,

Speaker 2 I just encountered

Speaker 2 a hatred there of the Bush administration, George W. Bush.
And me in particular, I was really shocked about it. And I didn't, you know, I tried to be collegial, but I just couldn't believe some of the

Speaker 2 faculty presentations. And some of them by military.
I'm not saying that was all true. There was

Speaker 2 maybe eight or ten really good people, but there's a problem when you have

Speaker 2 set up like the Naval Academy that emulates a private university, and then they rotate people in from the military that have PhDs that want to teach there, and then you hire 60% or 70% of the faculty out of the civilian pool.

Speaker 2 So, what you do is you get this tenured civilian group of leftists, because all professors are leftists, and then you get military people that want to stay there as professors and be tenured by civilian leftists.

Speaker 2 So, then that modulates what they say and act like, because the civilians do not want a hardcore conservative military person teaching. And

Speaker 2 the irony was that most of the students were very conservative. So they had this kind of coded,

Speaker 2 I don't know, anger resistance at the faculty. I don't know if it's changed in 22 years, but I was just shocked when I went there.
I was shocked. And I probably,

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 the professorship gave

Speaker 2 some

Speaker 2 funds so you could invite people in that particular chair. Not a lot of money, but you wanted to get...
So I really, the last two people had not invited very many people. So I took it very seriously.

Speaker 2 And I called up a lot of people

Speaker 2 to speak and do it for the government in the sense of don't get the regular honorarium. And at that time, I tried to be ecumenical.
So I had Max Boot. He had a master's degree.

Speaker 2 You know, he wrote about

Speaker 2 whatever one thinks about the new Max Boot. At that particular time, he was an up-and-coming historian.
He'd written a book on irregular warfare.

Speaker 2 Most of his scholars, I don't like the new Reagan book, but there are many books he wrote that are very good. And he came, and he was the editor of the Wall Street Journal page.
You remember that?

Speaker 2 At a very young age. And any case, I had all these people say, he can't come.
He doesn't have a Ph.D..

Speaker 2 He's too conservative. And then I had Don Kagan.
Don Kagan said, you know what?

Speaker 2 I'll come for almost nothing. He came down.
Oh, Donald Kagan is here.

Speaker 2 Well, he had just written this great book, The Causes of War, you know, so I thought that they would welcome that this, I had revived this lecture program that had been inert under the prior, and they didn't, the faculty.

Speaker 2 So it was very hard to bring the people. I had people.

Speaker 2 I just left there, and then I think I told you there was a very wonderful person there who

Speaker 2 had been a graduate. He was in the reserves.
He went to Iraq. He was an Arab linguist.
He was offshore training people how to interrogate and he came onshore, I think, into one of the hotspots.

Speaker 2 I don't want to give any information that might reveal his identity. And he was tragically killed.

Speaker 2 Kind of a fluke incident going. And

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 this professor came up and basically said, you're responsible for killing him because you supported the Iraq war. And I said, I'd like to give some money.

Speaker 2 I don't want your we don't want your money to the

Speaker 2 so I left very angry about it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then I remember the late Don Rumsfeld called me and said, I hear you're at the Naval Academy. We've got a big problem there, and I'm going to reform it.

Speaker 2 I said, I don't think you're going to reform it. You're not going to reform it.
It's just not going to happen.

Speaker 2 You're going to have to go back to the Air Force, West Point.

Speaker 2 And I said, you've got to understand that for an academic

Speaker 2 coming into history or English and the idea that you live near Washington, D.C., but not in Washington, in beautiful Annapolis, and you have the prestige of saying you're a professor at the United States Military Academy, and third, you know that it doesn't work like West Point or the Air Force Academy.

Speaker 2 In other words, you can get tenure and a lifetime appointment, and the majority of faculty will be like-minded leftists like you.

Speaker 2 And the people who will gravitate to the military will be sort of independent thinkers in the military and brave

Speaker 2 specul, you

Speaker 2 intellectuals, not your

Speaker 2 blood and guts patent type,

Speaker 2 that's not going to change. And he said, I can change it.
I said, no, you can't. You cannot change that.
And I remember he called me up later and he said, I looked into this.

Speaker 2 This can't go on. Someday after we're all gone, he said, it can't go on.
And I don't know if they've made changes or not.

Speaker 2 Not yet.

Speaker 3 Well, I hope Pete Pete looks into it.

Speaker 2 I think he'll look into that. I really do.

Speaker 3 One other thing about Murkowski, it's not funny, but she and her dad, remember her dad? Yes, I do.

Speaker 3 He was a senator, and then he was governor, and he lost

Speaker 3 a primary to

Speaker 3 Sarah Palin in 2006. And then Lisa Murkowski lost her primary to

Speaker 3 what was it, Miller, I forget his version,

Speaker 3 in 2010. And then she orchestrated a write-in campaign, mostly through the Eskimo tribes.
However, I'm sorry, Native American. I'm not sure how you say it anymore.
But

Speaker 3 then

Speaker 3 she won again in 2016, 2022.

Speaker 3 And as you mentioned, she had the,

Speaker 3 what do you call it, the second place, third place?

Speaker 2 Ranked voting.

Speaker 3 The ranked voting, yeah.

Speaker 2 A lot of the ranked voting, believe it or not, came out of the Hoover Institution. We had scholars who really pushed that.

Speaker 2 I never understood why that was.

Speaker 3 I think that she is clearly a woman with tremendous resentment of conservative Republicans for what they did to her family. Remember, her dad had the land, the Bridge to Nowhere?

Speaker 3 Her dad had the land on the other side of the Bridge to Nowhere.

Speaker 2 She was, I don't know, it was the same thing with Mitt Romney when he ran twice. He made his Hajj to Trump Tower.
You remember that?

Speaker 2 In 2008 and 2012 to get Donald Trump as a private citizen's endorsement. And then he waged this really

Speaker 2 bitter campaign against Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 Even though he wasn't a contestant in 2016, people went to Romney and said, you're the senior Republican of the party, given you were our nominee in the last election.

Speaker 2 You have to use all your intellectual talent and courage and independence to blast this man. And so he went on a

Speaker 2 remember that campaign in 2016 where he he said, Trump university, Trump steaks, Trump whiskey, it's all fake. Everything he taught, he just went crazy.
And Donald Trump paid him back.

Speaker 2 I think it was a mistake, but Donald Trump to pay him back said,

Speaker 2 I don't carry grudges. That's largely true.

Speaker 2 He's transactional. So then he said, Secretary of State, I hear Romney wants it.
Remember, and Romney went all the way up there. And he actually went through the...

Speaker 2 He was never going to appoint Mick Romney, but Romney made it clear to the world that he, A, really wanted something from the man that he had insulted and tried to destroy, and number two,

Speaker 2 didn't catch on what was going on. And once that happened, then he ran for Senate in Utah, and Trump, again, it's transactional.
He thought, you know what? I need that vote. So he endorsed Romney.

Speaker 2 And then Romney. turned out to be the leading never Trumper in the Republican almost always voted against Trump.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 3 that scene that went making him

Speaker 3 wait at, I think they were eating dinner together. I almost picture Trump having food in front of him and Romney not, but at the Secretary of State begathon.
It was kind of cruel.

Speaker 3 Anyway, hey, Victor, let's move on and talk, get your thoughts on, because we have a lot to get to on California and pardons and other things, but maybe quickly, this controversy about Elon Musk and the Nazi salute, which is one of the few things that leftists seem to be grasping onto and trying to make into a major scandal.

Speaker 3 I note that Benjamin Netanyahu came out with strong praise

Speaker 3 for Elon Musk. Do you have any thoughts about this weirdo controversy?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 Elon obviously wants something, he was excited at a crowd, so he went like this, to like touch, and he goes like this, and they said he paused too long here.

Speaker 2 But that died very quickly because everybody started showing

Speaker 2 these things from Elizabeth Warren, from Barack Obama, from Hillary Clinton, even AOC, Jack.

Speaker 3 AOC? Yeah.

Speaker 2 So then he tweeted something, because they kept at him, and he tweeted something about pronouns, you know.

Speaker 2 and he used all of the worst Nazis, sort of like, oh, you think I'm boring, like Goring, or should I say him or he, him,

Speaker 2 and he did this word game. And then they went back to the anti-deflammation lead and Jewish organizations and said, you were wrong to support him and say it wasn't a salute.

Speaker 2 Now he's making fun of the Holocaust. He wasn't.

Speaker 2 He was making fun of the Holocaust in the way, if that's true, the way the left then trivializes trivializes Hitler and say, you're Hitler, you're Hitler, you're Nazi.

Speaker 2 Or General Hayden said, oh, Donald Trump is setting up Auschwitz cages.

Speaker 2 So then they went after him.

Speaker 2 I think the subtext is

Speaker 2 they see him as an asset, the left does, and they have that asset.

Speaker 2 And then they look at... And the left's wing mind, remember everybody, that what they do is exempt.

Speaker 2 They often project things that they do that are unlawful or unethical onto the left because they feel that they're exempt. So it's perfectly okay for Mark Zuckerberg to infuse $419 million

Speaker 2 into the 2020 to absorb the work of the registrars, or for George Searles to put in $60 billion. But you better not be Elon Musk, $60 million.

Speaker 2 You cannot be Elon Musk and spend $300 million in the swing states. So they detest him for that.
So now what they're doing is they're trying.

Speaker 2 I went through the Daily Beast, all of the left-wing sites, the Drudge Report, which, by the way, is one of the hardest left ones there is now.

Speaker 2 People can speculate why, but I think it's personal pick at the Trump family.

Speaker 2 But nevertheless, when you go through them, then now they're playing up that Sam Altman, the guy with the AI, you know, he and Musk are arguing, and there's a story that Susie Weil says Elon's trying to get an office in the Oval Office, and then they're, you know,

Speaker 2 Steve Bannon says he hates him. So, what they're trying to do is tear Elon from Trump and say he's a liability, you know, and he's an ego.

Speaker 2 And that's a lot about going after Elon. And then the Europeans are going after him because he endorsed the

Speaker 2 alternative for Germany party, etc. And

Speaker 2 you're left with just the reality. He's a very talented, wealthy, controversial guy.
And they're very angry because they feel that they have a monopoly.

Speaker 2 And they're going to go after the same way very soon.

Speaker 2 They're going to go out that they did Peter Till, but they'll go after Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Google people, cook at Apple, if they don't toe the line. Right.

Speaker 2 I don't know where they get their power. It's social and cultural that these titans they finally said to themselves, you know, I don't mind paying taxes and I don't mind, you know,

Speaker 2 ESG, DI, whatever.

Speaker 2 But when they go into the market and they tell us that these seven companies are going to have AI and nobody else, or you can't do this and we're going to regulate you, or they don't support us when the Europeans are taxing that crap out of us, now that's too much.

Speaker 2 And then when we have to hire these people out of these elite universities that they train, as Andreessen, I think Sammy and I talked about that,

Speaker 2 that his CEO or his partner said to him,

Speaker 2 not his partner, but one of his chief advisors said, I've come to the conclusion that people we hire from these places, they want to destroy us. And they do.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 we'll see, but they're going to go after everybody should just assume that they're going to go after Elon and they're going to try to tell everybody that he hates Trump and Trump hates him and the other tech lords are in the fight and it's a mess.

Speaker 2 I don't think it's quite true though.

Speaker 2 Well, speaking of messes. He's the richest man in the world.

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 3 He can always escape to Mars. Maybe literally he'd be able to.
Victor, speaking of messes,

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 3 fires in California and the

Speaker 3 devastation there. Donald Trump visited yesterday.
We are recording on the 25th, Saturday the 25th. But Trump went to California after he went to North Carolina.
And he had

Speaker 3 a meeting with Gavin Newsom and a meeting and/slash confrontation with Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 And we'll get your take, Victor, on the relevance of these things when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 3 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I just want to state before we get into Fires and Newsome, Bass, Trump, that Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

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Victor, there's so much to ask you about.

Speaker 3 So Trump goes to California, and the man who had a special session, who created a special session of the California legislature to stick it to Trump, meets him at the airport, Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 3 Let's take any thoughts you have on that before we move to his meeting with Karen Bass. Any commentary on that, Victor?

Speaker 2 Well, Trump has all the cards because the Olympics is coming, and Trump rightfully took credit for it when he was president and he engineered that.

Speaker 2 And they know that Los Angeles has got to do this, but he also knows that there's a lot of agendas.

Speaker 2 And once this beautiful, this most beautiful, the crown jewel really of Los Angeles area, the Malibu Palisides area, when you combine the hillsides, the sun, the ocean.

Speaker 2 Just, you know, I teach at Pepperdine sometimes, and just beautiful, just stunning.

Speaker 2 And they know it's going to be rebuilt, but they have these engineering ideas. Why did these people inherit a quarter-acre lot and a Spanish-style villa? This isn't fair.

Speaker 2 Maybe now they don't have money to build it or they didn't have insurance, so the city should come in and re-engineer low-income housing, affordable, and you know what I'm talking about, European,

Speaker 2 you know, outside in the suburbs. Every time you go to Milan or Naples or, you know,

Speaker 2 Marseille, you see these big high-rises, kind of like where you guys live outside on Long Island.

Speaker 2 And then you supposedly tie them in with light rail, and they have green spaces, and this is what they want to do. And Trump, of course, doesn't.

Speaker 2 So he comes in there and he says, we're going to put some, you know, he turns to Rick Winnell, either you or

Speaker 2 someone you trust, Rick, and Rick is a L.A. resident, is going to run this.
And there's going to be, and then you have Darrell Isis explain there's going to be strings on this. And then Trump,

Speaker 2 kind of like a maestro, he's orchestrating all these people, and they all have this different agendas. And then this leftist Brad Sherman goes in and says, I don't agree with you this.

Speaker 2 I don't agree with you that. It's like me saying, Jack, I'd like you to be co-host, but I don't agree with you on abortion.
I don't agree with you on foreign policy.

Speaker 2 and but,

Speaker 2 and that's what he did with no power. And I'm thinking, are you insane?

Speaker 2 Why are you doing this? And then, so finally, Trump was very diplomatic, and then he turned and he said, you know,

Speaker 2 if you think about it, we have a storm coming in. The fire is out in Palestine.
There are looters going in there. It's restricted.

Speaker 2 A lot of people off the record know that they have safes or they have gold or they have precious jewels, and

Speaker 2 it's their property and they can't go in. So Trump just says to, he turns to Karen Bass in front of the world and says, why are they waiting? And she goes, well, they'll be, well, in a week.

Speaker 2 Why wait a week?

Speaker 2 What harm can they do? They can go in there, and the fire was of such intensity, and there's not a lot of, you know, half walls or upstairs. It's just powder.

Speaker 2 So they can go in there and hire their own people and get in and clean it up.

Speaker 2 Let all of these brilliant people who made all this money or their movement, they have their own idiosyncratic ways of cleaning this up. Just unleash them and they will rebuild.

Speaker 2 And, you know, and then she thought, oh,

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 Maybe a year. Okay, sort of, kind of.
And then there's Gavin Newsom. He wasn't invited, but he met him at the airport.

Speaker 2 So out here in California, everybody, Gavin has been blanketing the state and saying

Speaker 2 that's a lie about Trump.

Speaker 2 All the reservoirs everywhere are full. And what he's saying is

Speaker 2 at this time of the year, we don't fool them, we don't fill them all the way because we anticipate a big melt. So I, when I let the water out all year long out of the Sacramento tributaries,

Speaker 2 and to a lesser extent when the San Joaquin dumps into the delta and they meet,

Speaker 2 it doesn't matter in the winter because I need the reservoir. But when, you know, when the melt's gone, I still do it in the summer, but let's not talk about that.

Speaker 2 But he's lying because we are in a drought right now and we're not probably not going to get an anticipated snowpack.

Speaker 2 And when you look at these reservoirs, there's most of them, not the far north ones, but the big ones, Folsom, 60%,

Speaker 2 San Luis, 70%. They're not full.
They could be full right now if you let these tributaries that the snow was melting that occurred in

Speaker 2 November, December. If you could let them not go out to the ocean, you could fill them.
And then, if you get a big snow melt, you could let some out. Or you could just

Speaker 2 cram it down the aqueduct or the Mendota Canal. But he's lying about that.
These reservoirs are not full. And you know why you know that?

Speaker 2 The California Aqueduct, the state project, the state water project that's joined with the Mendota Bypass,

Speaker 2 Kern-Medona Canal. That's a Central Valley project.
But they have kind of merged. And the point that Trump was making, as a federal partner, I will insist that the

Speaker 2 water that comes out of the reservoir system and the river system, the Sacramento American Kalama, all of that, will be pumped into the aqueduct.

Speaker 2 But right now, these people that are farming millions of two or three million acres along this aqueduct goes 100 miles.

Speaker 2 Longer than 100 miles. Those farmers are getting 10%

Speaker 2 of their contracted water.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 who's taking it? Well, over the years, they've given some to San Jose, they've given to Santa Barbara, they've given it to San Luis Obispo, they pump it over.

Speaker 2 But the point is, they could get most of it if he wouldn't let it out to the ocean. If he'd fill the aqueduct, there would still be plenty for LA, but he won't do do that.

Speaker 2 So what he does is, he says, basically, he says,

Speaker 2 well,

Speaker 2 he lies in so many different ways. He says, well, the reservoirs are full because they're traditionally at 70%

Speaker 2 in a traditional year in preparation for the huge snowmount. There's not going to be a huge snowmount, probably.
There's no reason to keep them that down.

Speaker 2 The water that would fill them up in case we have a drought and we are in a drought is not there because you're letting it out. The farmers are not going to get their water that's contracted.

Speaker 2 And they want that because out in the west side that the water table runs from 500 to 1500 feet. And if they don't have that water, they have to shut down.

Speaker 2 If they shut down then you get the scrub and the tumbleweeds of my youth. I'd go out to the west side.

Speaker 2 My grandfather would always say, if you guys go out there, be careful of valley fever because it's just a dust bowl. That's that fungal

Speaker 2 infection that's deadly if you don't have immunity to it. Didn't grow up out here.
And And then there's just tumbleweeds, coyotes, etc.

Speaker 2 The soil was rich, but there was no water. Well, they want that to go back.
They don't want it farm.

Speaker 2 When you fly over it, it looks like a green garden.

Speaker 2 All the way down to the Harris Ranch, all the way up to Los Banos and above, all the way up to Stockton, Cracy, and up there. So then my point is,

Speaker 2 then it goes to Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 And then he says, well, they're all full. If you actually look at the Pyramid Lake, they're about 90%.
There's no reason why they're not full.

Speaker 2 They're not full because he's not putting enough water in the system. Would that have made a difference? Probably not because you had a

Speaker 2 Confederacy of Dunces that were operating the water. And what do I mean by that? There was enough water to fill the 117 million gallon reservoir at the top of Palisides.

Speaker 2 It was completely empty because of a tear.

Speaker 2 a five-foot tear in the plastic cover. And that was to prevent evaporation and contamination.

Speaker 2 But it would have, you could have, she should have just said, you know what, fill that thing because we're in fire season right now, and you work on the cover, and when the cover is done, put it over there, but just keep filling that thing up.

Speaker 2 She didn't do that. She didn't look at the fire hydrants that have been inoperative or stolen or didn't have the pressure.

Speaker 2 Then she said something like, Kuyon said something like the head of water and power, oh my god, we went through

Speaker 2 three million gallons of reserved water to augment the system.

Speaker 2 And why were they augmenting the system,

Speaker 2 Ms. Keonez? Because accordingly, to Gavin Newsom's, all the reservoirs were full.
So if they were full, you were pressurizing the system and palisades from different sources.

Speaker 2 Why did you need 3 million reserve gallons?

Speaker 2 Because you don't have enough water to keep the system pressurized at its fullest, because you have limitations on how much water you can take out of those reservoirs because you're not sure the governor is going to release enough water into the aqueduct and pump it over the grapevine into them or you won't have enough from the Owens Valley or Colorado sources.

Speaker 2 So if she just filled that thing, there would have been, they would have had a fighting chance to stop a lot of the damage. The whole thing, and so Trump got into that mess.

Speaker 2 And, you know, he had all of these people from, you know, he had, and they were, many of them were people from the legislature that hated him.

Speaker 2 I mean, the Speaker of the Assembly called a special session, and then the press conference, to show what they were going to do, started attacking Trump.

Speaker 2 And when Gavin Newsom says, I have nothing, I need Trump's help, I'm trying to be a part. No, you're not.
You just authorized $20 to $30, $40 million

Speaker 2 when you have a multi-billion dollar deficit, and you lotted that money for the sole purpose of blocking Trump. his executive orders, and then you turn around and say you want to partner with him?

Speaker 2 And everything he's wrong about you've never diverted water from the California Water Project. That was what you ran on.

Speaker 3 That's what you did.

Speaker 2 You took money from the California bond to build three mega reservoirs and you blew up four small ones. You blew them up.
And you used money from the bond to build reservoirs to destroy them.

Speaker 2 I know you're going to say, well, Victor, that was only 2% of the total water in the Oklahoma.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 But it was iconic that you take money that voters wanted to build reservoirs for insurance that would have given you five to six million million acre feet, million, and you took that money to blow up four historic dams on the Klimic River.

Speaker 2 So I don't know how he survived that mess.

Speaker 2 He'd been on a 19-hour day. But when he turned to Karen Bass and says, why not a week? Week's a long time.
He was soft-spoken.

Speaker 2 And Melania is with him all the time now, Jack. She's a partner again.
Boy,

Speaker 2 she just sits there

Speaker 2 smiling at him and sort of like

Speaker 2 saying, go on, Don, go do it.

Speaker 3 There's some weird way,

Speaker 3 a force multiplier.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she is.

Speaker 2 She's so superbly dressed and so beautiful. And she just sits there.

Speaker 2 And then I just saw her face.

Speaker 2 I was looking at the face of all the Trump people when you had that Bou Day or whatever her name is at the National Cathedral when she was going on that harangue against the Trump family.

Speaker 2 There's all these lip readers who say that J.D. turned, everybody turned around and said, can you believe that? And I looked at Tiffany was the angriest, Tiffany Trump.

Speaker 3 What a blank show that was. Hey, Victor,

Speaker 2 she left her six, as Sammy and I mentioned, she left her six-bedroom, five-bathroom home.

Speaker 2 worth $2 million in one of the toniest neighborhoods of Washington to talk about that Donald Trump is not sensitive to poor people.

Speaker 2 He's sensitive to poor people, but they're not your poor people who are legally here.

Speaker 2 They're people who are black in the inner city, and they're people who are Hispanic in the Rio Grande Valley or the San Joaquin Valley that are impacted and don't live in $2 million estates like you do and protected from the consequences of your own cheap ideology.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Anyone who sees that and sees, if they take the time to see what is happening with the Anglicans over in England, we'll say, there's no,

Speaker 3 I don't follow it all that closely, but I'm not surprised this religion will be extinct in a few years.

Speaker 2 I don't think they believe that Jesus took a whip and chased out the moneylenders.

Speaker 2 I think she says to the people that Jesus said to the moneylenders and the Pharisee-type people, I think we need to network on this. You get your people, I'll get mine.

Speaker 2 We'll have a discussion and we'll brainstorm and we'll have concessions in the spirit of my Sermon on the Mount. And then you get something and I get something, but we just tone it down.

Speaker 2 We don't resort to whips and things. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I wonder how they would rewrite the Sermon on the Mount. Hey, Victor, before we move on, because there's some other California things, I just want to take a moment for our sponsor, Quince.

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Speaker 3 I made something, said something about accents. By the way, Victor,

Speaker 3 I want to get your thoughts on Trump's quid pro quo for aid to California. But I noticed you watched old movies, and

Speaker 3 people don't say Los Angeles, they say Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 It seemed to me like that was a traditional way to

Speaker 3 pronounce the city's name.

Speaker 3 Anyway, I just bring that up because i thought i heard you say it similarly uh recently okay

Speaker 2 when i mispronounce words people sometimes think that i've i've got an agenda that i'm influenced by my vast knowledge of foreign languages no and it's not true it's usually just

Speaker 3 no it's part of your norm crosby uh stand-up routine i think so

Speaker 3 all right victor donald trump said the price for helping california is for the state to adopt voter id ID laws, which, by the way, is a is a very popular position with the population, not necessarily the

Speaker 3 assembly, the legislature of California.

Speaker 2 They'll never do it. They will never do it because

Speaker 2 they don't want to disenfranchise

Speaker 2 millions of people who are here illegally and are voting and have been long residents. They just don't want to do it.
They'll never do do it. They will never do that.

Speaker 2 They will only do it if things get very worse.

Speaker 2 And there is a charismatic Republican leader, and he can galvanize all of the anger about the $15, $50 billion boondoggle Fresno, I mean, Merced to Bakersfield high-speed rail, or what they're doing with water, or these fires are now endemic, and they're going to keep going.

Speaker 2 That's the sad thing about it. There's still millions of acres of uncleared brush chaparral around Los Angeles.
We haven't had a big storm. They may have a little rain today.
We don't know. But

Speaker 2 the winds will kick up still.

Speaker 2 The Santanas are not quite over. They're still,

Speaker 2 especially if it's hot during the day. It's very cold.
When you get these cold nights and you get these

Speaker 2 warm days, you get in Los Angeles, these winds go up in the canyons from the ocean. It's just terrible.
And

Speaker 2 they haven't changed.

Speaker 2 And what does somebody mean by that? I would say, do you still have 100 vehicles that are not running because of air pollution updates? I bet you do. Has anybody filled up that reservoir and

Speaker 2 Pacific Palisade just to show people? Are all the hydrants working now? I don't think so.

Speaker 2 Do you have a new fire chief and a new assistant fire chief? I don't think so. Is the deputy mayor fired because he allegedly phoned in a bomb threat? I don't think so.

Speaker 2 So if the conditions haven't changed and the people who caused the problem haven't changed, and there's not a radical, are there right now thousands of fire people

Speaker 2 combing the hills around Los Angeles to cut down the brush and to strangle, kill, murder, bomb, cut down the poor little milk vetch plant

Speaker 2 that they love so much so that they won't clear the hillside? I don't think so.

Speaker 2 And that's it's it's

Speaker 2 it's a one-party state. I'm not saying that one party states can't work.
Texas works. But this party,

Speaker 2 it doesn't work. You've got a bunch of socialists that are very wealthy and materialistic and they feel that they have enough money and zip codes and influence.

Speaker 2 When you go through if you just take a I take if you want to know what's wrong with California, just go start in La Jolla, one of the most beautiful places in the world, San Diego, La Jolla, drive up

Speaker 2 and go up to Newport, one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Speaker 2 Keep going along the coast to Ventura, Oxnard, and then go to Montecito, San Barbara, one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Speaker 2 And then just take a little hike up in those beautiful places like San Luis Obispo. Then keep going

Speaker 2 up to Monterey and Santa Cruz and then on the way to the Bay Area,

Speaker 2 and you'll see that you'll see more money there than anywhere in the world. Some of the most beautiful homes, and 90% of those people vote hard left.

Speaker 2 They really do. And then you

Speaker 2 jog over to the Inland Empire or San Bernardino, or you go up from, say, Bakersfield, go up the 99.

Speaker 2 you know, pull over into a counter, I don't know, in Delano, and then come by and go into West Selma, where I live. And then,

Speaker 2 you know, you can make a little detour into Madeira, and you go up to the 99 all the way to some,

Speaker 2 and you'll see some of the poorest people in the world living.

Speaker 2 And these communities are heavily reliant on entitlements, and those communities make so much money, and they have such beautiful homes that they're willing to pay it.

Speaker 2 And the people in between that don't have that kind of capital and can't afford the tax and don't take government services to the same degree, they've left.

Speaker 3 They've left.

Speaker 2 And that's California. And I don't know how you change it, except the people along the coast, the 30 million of the 40 million residents have to make a change of mindset.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I just

Speaker 2 don't see it.

Speaker 2 I say that because I've been 22 years at the Hoover Institution, driving back and forth every week, and I see these kids generation after generation, some of the wealthiest people in the world, and especially from California, and they're hard left when they're there.

Speaker 2 My favorite was parking

Speaker 2 on campus during George Floyd.

Speaker 2 That

Speaker 2 I think it was May of 2020, and

Speaker 2 the thing was shut down, but there was a young kid in flip-flops, and he pulled in with a BMW convertible in May, or June. It was during the summer.

Speaker 2 And he had flip-flops, and he had a BLM sticker on his $120,000 BMW convertible. I thought, there it is.
That's it. Yep.

Speaker 3 Well, I'd like to mention one other thing, Victor, get your thoughts on it, and then we're going to

Speaker 3 head to the

Speaker 3 last chapter of the show, and we're going to talk about pardons. But pardons is part of this.
It has to do with Karen Bass. We brought this up before, that in her previous life

Speaker 3 as a hardcore communist maybe she's a softcore communist now but she went to Cuba regularly she was an organizer for this uh Venceramos Brigade that was big in California well we shall conquer yeah they taught a variety of of uh future looming terrorists and those terrorists with names like Tim Blunk Susan Rosenberg Linda Sue Evans these are the people who engaged in a number of terrorist activities in the U.S., including bombing the U.S.

Speaker 3 Capitol in 1983. So here we have an actual attack

Speaker 3 on the Capitol by people. Connect the dots to this Karen Bass.

Speaker 3 And then also thinking of pardons. All these people, well, not pardons, they had their

Speaker 3 long convictions, because they were engaged in a variety of terrorist activities, bombing other federal facilities, armed robbery of the Brinks truck in New York.

Speaker 3 But they were arrested, convicted, some of them 50-year jail terms. Guess who

Speaker 3 ended their sentences? Was Bill Clinton in one of his last acts as president? He led all these SOBs out of jail. So we have pardons, we have

Speaker 3 true attacks on the capital of the United States, and somehow or other,

Speaker 3 Karen Bass's fingerprints.

Speaker 3 That's a good point because I was looking at the pardons.

Speaker 2 Joe Biden,

Speaker 2 if you count clemencies, reductions, and pardons,

Speaker 2 has pardoned about 8,000.

Speaker 2 And when you do the 2,000 of Barack Obama, you get 10,000.

Speaker 2 So of the last four presidencies, George W. Bush only did 200.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 now Trump has got about 1,600, but 1,500 of them were just this one pardon. He did about 200 in his first two.

Speaker 2 So, what I'm getting at is of the last four presidents, the two conservative presidents that had 12 years of governance pardoned or offered clemency to 20%

Speaker 2 of what the eight years, the same period, eight years of Obama and four years of Biden. In other words, they did almost five times as many pardons and clemencies.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 people are so upset about the JC.

Speaker 2 And the thing about the J6 very quickly is all I would say to Liz Cheney, Adam Kissinger, Adam Schiff and by the way, Jack, just as a little sidelight, you see on the Internet all of these

Speaker 2 outraged expressions by Adam Schiff,

Speaker 2 Andrew Wiseman, the brains behind the Mueller investigation, the Machiavellian operator, and people like Chuck Schumer in 2021, when it came up that Donald Trump, in his last two weeks, could give a preemptive pardon for the people that week that had just been arrested and pardoned himself.

Speaker 2 There was no idea, there was no ever clear evidence that he was going to do that. In fact, he tweeted that he wouldn't.
But of course, like Trump, he said, I could if I wanted to, but I won't.

Speaker 2 But they went nuts. And those are being played now.

Speaker 2 And they say, anybody who accepts a preemptive pardon de facto is guilty because they would turn it down if they didn't and now they're all this is wonderful you have to have preemptive pardons and the thing about January 6th is one

Speaker 2 they they stonewalled by they'll never tell us the true FBI role to cash Patel as FBI director. They said we were not, we don't know, we can't tell.
And then they said 23 informants.

Speaker 2 Again, Matthew Rosenberg said, I was there, they were everywhere. He said, liberal, little surprise, New York Times.

Speaker 2 They would not release all of the videos for three years. I don't think we've still seen them.
There is missing encrypted files and evidence in the January 6th Committee that they

Speaker 2 mysteriously disappeared shortly before the Republicans came into power after taking the House in 2022. Somebody destroyed evidence.

Speaker 2 If there's nothing to hide, then Liz Cheney should never, she should have just said, Cassie Hutchinson, you go testify any way you want.

Speaker 2 But I don't, there's no need of me to have a stealthy phone call and make sure I walk through your testimony when your lawyer is not present.

Speaker 2 And, you know, if I'm Nancy Pelosi, the evidence is out there.

Speaker 2 Kevin McCarthy, we've never, why would I turn down your nominations? You know, three or four more Republicans, we've never done that in the history of the House. Sure, it's your right.

Speaker 2 Just as my right. When I was in the minority, you didn't turn down my nominations.

Speaker 2 And then she didn't do that. She said, basically, I just want Liz and I want Adam because they voted to impeach Trump and they are going to be defunct and out of the House.

Speaker 2 So I know that they're not going to vote in the way you would like. And then, of course, in addition to all that, they didn't have to lie.

Speaker 2 If there was nothing wrong with the narrative, then just say that Brian Sicknick had a stroke.

Speaker 2 And then why fabricate that four people that were in law enforcement who later killed themselves for various reasons, they died, we're going to have a ceremony in the rotunda, all five were killed.

Speaker 2 There was only one person killed.

Speaker 2 And if you really, really believe the narrative, then there was no reason not to just get the evidence out that Officer Byrd shot an unarmed woman, lethally shot her for the misdemeanor of going through a window.

Speaker 2 A little diminutive veteran. Ashley Babbitt was not an existential death to anybody.
She broke the law.

Speaker 2 But in the United States, when a law enforcement officer in any way is suggested that kills or did anything, I mean, Officer Chauvin didn't take a gun and shoot George Floyd, who was unarmed. He

Speaker 2 tried to restrain him because he was resisting arrest. He was on fentanyl.
He just passed counterfeit currency. He was on drugs, fentanyl, and he had COVID.
He had heart problems, etc.

Speaker 2 But we had his picture in a nanosecond and his name and his address. So there was no reason to hide Bird or to tell us that he didn't, he had a wonderful record when he had a checkered record.

Speaker 2 He left a loaded firearm in a bathroom in the Capitol.

Speaker 3 So the point I'm making is a car in his neighborhood also.

Speaker 2 Yes, he did. And then what else did he do? He tried to make sure that he got money

Speaker 2 from the victims' fund of

Speaker 2 January 6th law enforcement officers, as if he was a victim.

Speaker 2 So the point I'm making is all of those narratives were suppressed, and if you really have nothing to hide, then you don't need a video to surface suddenly right now that Nancy Pelosi is in the car.

Speaker 2 And you say, oh my God, I should have had more Capitol Police.

Speaker 2 Why did they do all that? And that's the problem.

Speaker 2 And then you don't, then you go, you're not, you don't get your fact checkers and say, well, you can't talk about May, June, July, August, September, October 2020, when 14,000 people were arrested, because there were more arrested.

Speaker 2 Yes, there was more arrested. And you know why? There were more arrested? Because you guys killed 35 people,

Speaker 2 not none, 35, and you blew up $2 billion of damage, and you blew up a precinct, police precinct, federal property, and a courthouse. And then you went in and tried to torch the St.

Speaker 2 John's Episcopal Church. You tried to storm.

Speaker 2 And that's why 14. And you know what? The percentage of people arrested who were let go with nothing far exceeds the number of the 1,500 or so that were arrested on January 6th.

Speaker 2 The conviction rate, the jailing rate is many times higher. Yet you go to those fact checkers and they just lie through their teeth.
So there's no connection with these two things.

Speaker 2 And, you know, this person was given 10 years for arson during the 2020.

Speaker 3 No one quite had that.

Speaker 3 That is so frustrating.

Speaker 2 It really is.

Speaker 3 Well, Victor, we have one or two more topics to bring up, and we'll get into some of your one of your favorite people, Anthony Fauci, and we'll do all that when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 3 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Again, we're recording on Saturday the 25th, and this particular episode is up on to check my notes, Tuesday the 28th.

Speaker 3 Victor, one last thing on pardons, if you don't mind, I I want to bring it a little close here to where I live in Connecticut. I live in Milford, Connecticut, which is about 10 miles from Bridgeport.

Speaker 3 So this is one of the more notorious

Speaker 3 pardones of Joe Biden. And let me just read this report from many of our local papers here about the Connecticut drug.

Speaker 3 Kingpin, convicted in the deaths of an eight-year-old boy and his mother, was granted clemency by Biden. It's pissing off, excuse my French, even fellow Democrats.

Speaker 3 Adrian Peeler, 48, of Bridgeport, served 25 years in state prison on conspiracy charges in the death of Karen Clark and her eight-year-old son, B.J. Brown, in January 1999.

Speaker 3 The two had been slated to testify a month later against Peeler's brother, fellow gang,

Speaker 3 drug gang leader Russell Peeler, who was on trial for killing Clark's boyfriend. Little B.J.
was in the car. He saw what happened.
He saw this drive-by shooting. He was going to testify.
And

Speaker 3 Adrian made sure the little boy was murdered, and mom was murdered, and he was convicted and went away. I have to say this

Speaker 3 locally:

Speaker 3 what's one of the impacts of this crime, irrespective of what Biden did, was, okay, wow, if I'm in a drug-ridden community, and if I see a crime happen, and if I'm going to testify, there's a good chance I may end up in a grave.

Speaker 3 This is really a chilling, impactful thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And for Biden to pardon him, it's just staggering.

Speaker 2 And to do it at the end.

Speaker 2 Just everybody who's listening, ask yourself: if Joe Biden had won the election, do you think he would have done this?

Speaker 2 You're going to say, well, he had nothing to lose, Victor. He wasn't going to go up for electron.
No, he wouldn't have done it because he would have had zero public support going into a second term.

Speaker 2 And that would have been a midterm campaign issue that would have ruined his down-ticket support in the the Congress.

Speaker 2 He only did it in the last days or hours even of his administration because he knew it had no public support and he was an embittered old man and he hated Donald Trump, but more importantly, he began to hate more his own party who deposed him.

Speaker 2 And he had no

Speaker 2 circumspection. He didn't say to himself, you know, I was going nowhere in 2020.
I had bouts of dementia. I had embarrassed myself on the debate stage.

Speaker 2 And then those guys saved me, Jim Clyburn and the Black Caucus and the Obama people. And they allowed me to be president when I was not fit, and they controlled the agenda, but they got rid of me.

Speaker 2 So they created me and they got rid of me. But I had a four years, which I didn't deserve.
He can't think like that. And neither can his wife.
So he's a mean-spirited person.

Speaker 2 And all the dementia did was take away the veneer of control, took away his blinders, and we saw the old Joe Biden from Scranton who he really was.

Speaker 2 If you go back and look at his career, he was a mean, excuse the language, SOB. He always was.
He had racist tendencies, he was a plagiarist, he was a pathological prevaricator.

Speaker 2 No need to get into the lies that he

Speaker 2 defamed the person who was in the auto accident that killed his wife, who was not culpable at all. He did every despicable thing.
I'd go back to Tara Reed, all of that stuff. And then,

Speaker 2 you know, every time I see Donald Trump hug somebody, I just say, if that was Joe Biden, that girl would be in big trouble right now because he would say something or blow on her. And no one s

Speaker 2 says a word. So

Speaker 2 anyway, I would just like to talk about that very quickly as we end, Jack.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 3 I have to read one thing, though, before you do, Victor.

Speaker 3 Go ahead.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because

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Speaker 2 I'm going to be sure to see it. It sounds very.
I'm going to go see it.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Before you go see it, Victor, and before you start taking a 2x4 to the head of Anthony Fauci, although he's so small, maybe all you need is a toothpick.
I do want to say that...

Speaker 3 Peeler, who we talked about before on the part, and like there has to be some parallel to Biden's uh madness and nastiness.

Speaker 3 It seems like there had to be some kind of like an earmark thing, like, oh, well, he's gonna do this. How did Peeler get on a list? And how did all these other SOBs get on this?

Speaker 2 Well you know that Biden didn't know he from what Speaker Johnson said when he went to meet with him, he said, Why did you shut down these liquid natural gas projects for export in Louisiana?

Speaker 2 And that was critical because we promised, you promised the the Europeans you would supply them with a reliable, affordable source of energy. And Biden said,

Speaker 3 I didn't do that.

Speaker 2 Who said I did that? I don't know anybody.

Speaker 2 I don't really hear that.

Speaker 2 And so you get the impression from Johnson that this was a normal occurrence when these people do they think, what would be a really spectacular left-wing performance art act.

Speaker 2 So when I leave office and I go apply to Google or I go to apply to the Source Foundation, I can say, I was the architect that shut down the LNG

Speaker 2 facilities for Biden. That's how they think.
So they're thinking, we're going to go out in the left-wing sphere and what do we do? Well, let's get,

Speaker 2 I'm a lawyer. I want to go to this law firm.
Ooh, I want to go to this state government post in California. I want to be ahead of Apple's

Speaker 2 interior DI program. So I'll just, let's go through all these names,

Speaker 2 which people have been oppressed, are discriminated, or fit our DEI categories, and we don't really care what they did, and we can take credit for it.

Speaker 2 So believe me, Jack, we don't know who did it, but it's that army of leftists that came into the Biden administration via the Obamas and via the recommendations and promotions of Elizabeth Warren, the squad, and Bernie Sanders type.

Speaker 2 Those people

Speaker 2 are preparing these lists and will never know their names, but they will not be shy in identifying themselves at the particular opportune moment when they think it helps their career, and it will help their career in these leftist institutions.

Speaker 2 If you think that retiring generals revolve into the major defense contractors, and many of them do, the left-wing counterpart of that, they revolve into Silicon Valley, at least until recently, where they get, you know, James A.

Speaker 2 Baker, the FBI lawyer, who went from about a quarter million dollars salary at the FBI to $7 million

Speaker 2 a year as Jack Dorsey's chief counsel at Twitter, where all the other 15 other retired FBI people were working.

Speaker 2 Take a breath, and now we're just finishing with

Speaker 2 Tony, Tony, your former fellow alumnus.

Speaker 3 Is that right?

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 2 I don't understand.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump stopped

Speaker 2 federal monies used to protect three people, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo,

Speaker 2 and Anthony Fauci.

Speaker 2 Now, I have read, and people correct me, that Anthony Fauci's security detail was paid out of National Institute of Health funds and authorized by Joe Biden, and it would sunset or finish when Joe Joe Biden went out of office.

Speaker 2 So I think in that case, he simply did not

Speaker 2 renew this NIH program. It wasn't that he went out in the middle of it that had an unlimited tenure and said, get rid of it.
But then the next question is,

Speaker 2 you're talking about a person who had

Speaker 2 Secret Service, supposedly the best security detail, almost had his head blown off.

Speaker 2 So I think Trump is saying to them,

Speaker 2 if they want to kill you, it's not going to help you because it didn't help me, and I have the biggest legion of security in the world.

Speaker 3 Number two,

Speaker 2 how long does this last?

Speaker 2 He asked that. They said,

Speaker 2 Mr. President Trump, are you feeling any responsibility for anything?

Speaker 2 He's injured.

Speaker 3 No, how long does it last? For life?

Speaker 2 And you know, we all

Speaker 2 comparing

Speaker 2 great things to small,

Speaker 2 I have an angry reader column, and that I just kind of, every month or two, we go through the emails, and they are full of F you.

Speaker 2 And I have kind of an angry reader scale. How many, and they're threatening.

Speaker 2 I had a guy write and say, I know where you live, I know your phone number, I know what you look like, and I know you go to Washington. Next time you go to Washington, it's going to be your last trip.

Speaker 2 And actually, somebody, I printed that letter, and somebody

Speaker 2 online said, I'm a prosecutor, a federal prosecutor, and I know from from your email who that was, because I put his email on there.

Speaker 2 And then I had a guy drive into my farm, and he I went out and I said, Could I help you? And he said, I got a bone to pick with you. I said, You know, this is a private residence.

Speaker 2 And he said, I'm not leaving. I said, Fine, but you're on my property.
And I looked over there, and he had parked his car hidden in the orchard.

Speaker 2 Why would he do that? So I said, Just go by, wouldn't want to see you, wouldn't want to be you. And then he just sat there in his car for four or five hours.

Speaker 2 So, my point is, I think anybody that has a modicum of public exposure encounters that, encounters that.

Speaker 2 I was at the Reagan airport not too long ago. I think I told you, Jack.

Speaker 2 And I got off the plane and I noticed out of the corner of my eye there was this young man who fit perfectly the Antifa profile: skinny,

Speaker 2 white,

Speaker 2 all black,

Speaker 2 stocking hoodie, and behind him was a large African-American guy.

Speaker 2 So this guy, when I was walking, I saw that he kept walking, and then he walked very fast and hit me in the back of the head, really kind of hard.

Speaker 2 And then he jumped down the escalator, almost like the movies where he's going. And the African-American guy had actually seen him and was following him to help me, a stranger.

Speaker 2 So then he went, he was very big, though. He wasn't as

Speaker 2 light.

Speaker 2 And he went down the regular way and he came back and he said, you know, I listened to your podcast once in a while. I really like what you, and that guy was going to go after you.

Speaker 2 I saw you when you got off the plane. I was boarding and I got to get back.
And I was not that far from the loading, you know. And I was still in security.
So

Speaker 2 we all encounter those things. John Bolton, and then Trump made a very good point.
He said, these people made a lot of money.

Speaker 2 So Anthony Fauci, and correct me if I'm wrong, Jack, but he and his wife, I think, were the highest paid couple in the federal government.

Speaker 2 I think they were each making somewhere between $400,000 and $450,000 a year.

Speaker 2 Maybe 900. Drug royalties.
Yes, and the drug.

Speaker 2 So he's a very wealthy person, and he can afford $150,000 if he thinks that as a private citizen, after getting two years of government support that he has offended people. And when I write stuff,

Speaker 2 I always think when I say, when I get off this podcast, I say, did you, I always ask myself, were you unfair to anybody? Did you say a swear word that's going to offend children?

Speaker 2 Did you unfairly castigate? Did you...

Speaker 2 Do you have to retract anything? I've written probably 4,000 columns in my life. I've only had one retraction.

Speaker 2 So I, and I'm not a celebrity like Anthony Fauci, but he has the resources to protect himself. Now we go to John Bolton.
John Bolton

Speaker 2 is very wealthy. I know for a fact that he had a pack that earned $7 million a year.

Speaker 2 And I know a lot of people, I'm not going to mention their names, who have called me and said, I give this amount of money to John Bolton. What do you think I should do?

Speaker 2 And I've always said it's none of my business. If you want to donate to him, and they've said, would you donate if you had money? I said, no, and I wouldn't.

Speaker 2 I have nothing against John Bolton, but during the impeachment, John Bolton was writing a tell-all narrative.

Speaker 2 And he understood that if he was to oppose and say Donald Trump needed to be impeached, he would get a big backlash. On the other hand, if

Speaker 2 he kind of winked and nod,

Speaker 2 and he did, and they had problems with classifying, remember that back and forth about his memoirs. And then he made, it was a bestseller.
I know what that type of book will make. I do.

Speaker 2 So he has a lot of funds. If he thinks he's in danger, then just hire somebody for $150,000 a year.
And his speaking fees, I pretty much, because I've spoken at avenues that have hired him,

Speaker 2 he can pay that in four or five speaking engagements for the entire year.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I would imagine that he will be safer than Donald Trump will be

Speaker 2 at the level of the Secret Service. The one I have a problem with is Mike Pompeo.
Mike Pompeo, unlike Anthony Fauci and John Bolton, does not have those resources. He really doesn't.
I know him.

Speaker 2 I've known him. He was one of Trump's most loyal people.

Speaker 2 He had a falling out, as I understand, for three reasons, Jack.

Speaker 2 And I don't think these reasons constitute any defection on Mike Pompeo's part toward Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 But there was a time, you remember, right after January 6th, when they were floating names of possible...

Speaker 2 Remember, there was a flirtation, no announced candidacy, no campaigning, but there was a suggestion that Mike Pompeo was going to run against Donald Trump. You remember that?

Speaker 2 Jack?

Speaker 3 Yes, yeah.

Speaker 3 And he throws his hat in the ring.

Speaker 2 Yes, and the people in the Trump family said that's why he lost weight. You remember all that?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I thought he lost weight.

Speaker 2 So anyway, and then that was one. And the two, after the Mar-Lago raid, he said, and I'm not, I'm doing this by memory, everybody, so please correct me.
But I will try to be fair to both sides.

Speaker 2 He tried, he characterized the SWAT raid into Mar-Lago in terms of, well, it's unusual, but there was some culpability.

Speaker 2 If Donald Trump hadn't better, what, communicated, it wouldn't have been necessary. Something like that.

Speaker 2 And then a third time, he said something about the January 6th thing. Okay.

Speaker 2 So I think what happened was the Trump people felt: A, if we come back into power, we're not going to have anybody. It's not going to be directed at anybody.

Speaker 2 We're not going to have anybody from the first administration. Maybe Rick Rinnell or maybe

Speaker 2 Radcliffe. But pretty much we we got to have real strong MAGA people.

Speaker 2 And then there was some resentment about that. But the point is

Speaker 2 Iran has threatened to kill Bolton.

Speaker 2 I shouldn't say has, at one point threatened to kill Trump

Speaker 2 and more

Speaker 2 threats against Trump, but also Pompeo and Bolton for the death of Soleimani. I will say that the way that Trump,

Speaker 2 will protect Trump and protect Bolton and protect Pompeo if Trump continues what he's doing vis-a-vis Iran and he has told them if anybody

Speaker 2 if anybody is hurt by Iran we're holding you directly responsible. Did that have an effect? Yes.

Speaker 2 The Iranian president that was elected not too long ago gave an interview recently and they asked him point blank, are you going to develop a bomb? Probably not. We don't want to.

Speaker 2 Are you going to keep sending terrorists?

Speaker 2 This was a lie, but he said, probably we want peace. Have you in the past or in the future or in the present planned to kill the American president or have it? No, no, no.

Speaker 3 Bruno, we're not going to do that.

Speaker 2 So the point is that Donald Trump is creating deterrence and making it clear that if the Iranians send out, as they purportedly did, a team to kill Donald Trump, but if they try to touch one American, and that will be as valuable as security detail.

Speaker 2 That's my point.

Speaker 2 So bottom line, I would have said to myself,

Speaker 2 Bolton and Fauci,

Speaker 2 who don't like me and have written a lot of terrible things about me, and they have, both of them.

Speaker 2 have independent funds to at least get a security person and the government can't afford to give

Speaker 2 lifelong and for in the case of Pompeo I would have probably said I'm going to extend

Speaker 2 because he doesn't have those resources and he had a higher profile as Secretary of State than did Bolton at National Security and he had a longer tenure than John Bolton and he was more intimately involved with the decision to kill Solomani

Speaker 2 and the maximum press than was Bolton's brief tenure. Therefore, he may have greater exposure and he has less personal resources.
And I would have extended it for a year just to see what happens.

Speaker 2 But they made a.

Speaker 2 The news is so biased and john that if you look that if you google that issue almost the first 20 Google searches will show up. Donald Trump Yanks security.

Speaker 2 When asked, he said, I don't feel I'm responsible. That was all it was.
No background, nothing.

Speaker 2 And I wish when he saw the Google people

Speaker 2 at the inauguration festivities, he should have walked over to them and said, you know what, you can really help this country.

Speaker 2 Just don't use your algorithms to wire and warp the results of Google searches because every single Google search is wired to show the first 20 sites are left-wing propaganda bias.

Speaker 2 And you

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 2 Google Cash Battelle, who's coming up, I think, on Wednesday or Thursday for confirmation. Just Google it and see what comes up.

Speaker 2 Anybody with a right mind who takes the Schiff counter memo or the Nunes original memo that Cash was very instrumental in writing and looks at the events since the issuance of those competing narratives knows that Adam Schiff was lying through his teeth, and the Nunes memo has stood the test of time.

Speaker 2 And yet, if you go in and look at Google searches, it will say Cash Battell had a hand in the erroneous or biased biased or misleading Nunesman.

Speaker 2 So, bottom line.

Speaker 2 Let me put it this way to end.

Speaker 2 John Bolton was in more danger with a security deal

Speaker 2 with Joe Biden as president than he is with Donald Trump without it.

Speaker 2 Because Joe Biden gave no indication there would be any consequences because he was begging Iran to get back on the Iran deal and appeasing them.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump has a different argument, and they know that if anybody tried to make an attempt on anybody's life,

Speaker 2 he would probably go to an existential level in replying to that.

Speaker 2 I know that because comparing, I'll just finish with this, Jack. Do you remember when

Speaker 2 we expelled during the early

Speaker 2 Trump administration some,

Speaker 2 we had, excuse me, during the Obama administration, we had expelled some Russian oligarchs, but

Speaker 2 they were in

Speaker 2 the Russian embassy. And Putin replied by

Speaker 2 And we put them under sanctions and said they couldn't go.

Speaker 2 And then Putin replied by saying the following American former diplomats couldn't go back into the Soviet Union and we were going to consider them persona de non grata. Okay.

Speaker 2 So a person, I won't mention the person, he was from the opposite political persuasion of mine.

Speaker 2 And this speaks well of Mike Pompeo. And I'm relating a personal story, but I'll try to be is non-descriptive, so there's no individual.
Anyway,

Speaker 2 someone approached me from the Hoover Institution and said,

Speaker 2 there is this person who had a high diplomatic post,

Speaker 2 and Vladimir Putin has targeted him that he can't go back into Russia, and we feel that he might be in danger because of that. And I said, I don't think he is.
It's just a tit for tat. No, no.

Speaker 2 And I said, why are you asking me? I'm just nobody. Well, you may or may not have contacts that we don't have.
I said, I don't. And they said, would you please try to contact the Secretary of State?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I made some phone calls and I talked to Mike Pompeo just for a second. You know, his first reply was, do not worry about it.
We are way ahead of you, people.

Speaker 2 The Russian government will not touch one hair. on any of these people.
We do not care what the political persuasion is. We do not care what administration they work for.

Speaker 2 Our diplomats will be sacrosanct, and we have communicated that to the Russians. So he is as safe to go whatever he wants.
It's a Russian decision whether to let him in or not, but

Speaker 2 if they allow him to go in the country and he wants to take the risk to go meet with Putin dissidents, we will still assume, still assume that he is safe, and if they touch him, they're going to be in big trouble.

Speaker 2 That was Pompeo's attitude. So that's why I think he deserves some special consideration.
I really do.

Speaker 2 Because he was there for so long as Secretary of State, and he made the primary decision that the Iranians really got angry about, so many.

Speaker 2 And he may be a target. And he was a very honest guy, and he went in there with no money.
And he didn't leave. He's not making a lot of money, to my knowledge.

Speaker 2 And I've always found him a very principled person. And I understand why they had a falling out with the Trump administration, but I don't see culpability on either side.

Speaker 2 I just think it was a disagreement. And I think he has a role to play in future conservative administration.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, that's a terrific note on which to

Speaker 3 end this episode, except that we have some of that end-of-episode business to attend to, which is one is to say that I write a

Speaker 3 free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society. It's called Civil Thoughts, and I want to encourage you to sign up and get it every Friday.
It comes in your inbox.

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Speaker 3 And we read them. And folks also take the time to rate the show on Apple 0 to 5 stars.
Victor's getting 4.9 plus average from over 7,000 people who have done that. Thank you if you have.

Speaker 3 Here's a comment that was filed the other day. It's titled Current Events Through the Lens of History.

Speaker 3 I listen to this podcast regularly and appreciate BDH's succinct, articulate, and down-to-earth analysis so much. He affords an opportunity to look at current events through the lens of history.

Speaker 3 Clear-sighted, intelligent, and very entertaining. And this is from Honest Grace.
And we thank you, Honest Grace, and we thank everybody else who leaves these comments.

Speaker 3 And Victor, you've been terrific. Thank you.

Speaker 3 And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hans Show.

Speaker 2 Thank you, everybody, for listening. We wouldn't be able to continue without your listening and adherence and loyalty.
I really appreciate it. So does Jack.

Speaker 3 I do. Yes.