Ceasefire, Resignation, and Political “Cults"

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is our Friday News Roundup and there's lots of news this week, of course. We'll probably talk a little bit about the fires, but more importantly Jack Smith issued his report one day after he resigned from his position.
And also we have Hamas deal in the making with Israel. So stay with us and we'll be back for those news stories.
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Protect what you've earned before the fraud economy collapses completely. welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshall Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com.
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Well, Victor, there seems to have been

a fine, I mean, they seem to be

getting closer to a deal hamas and israel that there will be some release of 34 hostages in the initial phase of the deal they don't know whether the hostages are dead or alive i have to say uh there will be a pause in the fighting and a release of Palestinian prisoners, and it sounds

like hundreds for a few prisoners from Israel. And then the final thing is they're demanding aid to the Gaza Strip.
And that was according to a CNN article, and I know that there's other things out there, but what are your thoughts on this deal? there's all these different catalysts at work, and they're mutually exclusive. So before we can figure out whether it's a good or bad deal, and we should say the captives, hostages, there's a lot of Americans among them, which is why Trump is interested.
Not that he's not interested in Israeli prisoners, but especially Americans. So what are these factors? Number one, Trump is not in office.
I'm speaking on a Tuesday, the 14th. So if this was 2017, they would be invoking, they being his political opponents, would evoke the Logan Act.
How dare you? This is what they got in Michael Flynn. So the degree to which the special envoy, is his name Weisskopf or something? And he's a businessman.
He's got kind of a, he was in financial trouble and the Qatari government at one point in the distant past helped him get out of it. But he's a blunt speaking non-diplomatic person.
And he supposedly has gone over there and said to Netanyahu, when Trump comes in, I don't want any Americans help. Okay, that's number one.
So it's in a transitional period. Two, we don't know the degree to which all the 13 cabinet level appointees are jumping the proverbial gun.
So, while this is going on,

what's Michael Waltz doing, the National Security Advisor? What's Pete Hexeth? He's not even confirmed. Waltz doesn't have to be, but he's not in office yet.
And then there's Marco Rubio. So, the people who will make these decisions in the Middle East are, of course, Trump, but a troika of Rubio, Waltz, and Hexeth.
And I think he will be appointed. DOD, State Department, National Security Advisor, and National Security Council.
They're not in power, but this, they're all pretty much not the neo-isolationist base, the Steve Bannon. They're more Jacksonian.
No better friend, no worse enemy. Kill Soleimani, bomb Baghdadi, bomb Mike, that kind of stuff, of the first administration.
So there's that. Second, does anybody believe that if Israel pulls back and withdraws from Gaza, which is one of the demands of Hamas, that Hamas will what?

Dissipate?

Well, we didn't mean it on October 7th.

No, there are, the only reason they're talking is three reasons.

Number one, they're afraid of Donald Trump.

When I say they are afraid, that means they are afraid that their Iranian patron is saying,

look, I want you to get rid of those American hostages. Give them back or they're going to bomb us or somebody will.
Or two, they're Turkish. They're new Turkish sponsors because Turkey is kind of filling the void now.
And Turkey is a NATO ally and they're calling up Trump. Oh, you know, we're a NATO ally, da, da, da, da, da.
That's number two. And then number three, they feel that the Israelis are going to wipe them out or not wipe them out, but I don't mean that the whole that can defeat them.
So then you look at the deal, they want humanitarian aid. They're in no position as losers to demand anything.
They want Israel not just to have a ceasefire, but basically to declare the war over and get out of Gaza. Mr.
Hamas, whoever you are now, because most of your leaders are dead, I want to tell you that they did not go into your country. They don't have any desire to go in.
You went in their country and you murdered 1200 plus people in a medieval fashion. And that's why you're in the position that you are.
And all the people you boasted about for a year, the Iranians, the Houthis, Assad, they've all been attrited. They're all diminished.
So now you're in the 11th hour and you want to basically the subtext of this is help us. Help us.
They're going to destroy Hamas. We're almost gone.
Can anybody help us? Oh, Donald Trump. Now, how can we flip Donald Trump? Well, Donald Trump wants to be Ronald Reagan in 1980.
So Reagan said there will be no hostages. Mr.
Reagan, Mr. Reagan, Jimmy Carter has not been able to bring the hostage on.
You're going to take office any day. What's your plans? Well, there's not going to be any hostages.
And that was a very dramatic thing to say. And it did force Iran.
Now we're 45 years later. We've got the same problem with Iran and Trump wants to be be a Reagan.
Well, who wouldn't? So, Trump is saying you better, but unlike Reagan, he's more explicit. I'm going to bomb, do whatever you have to give up these hostages.
But here's the problem. Does Donald Trump, he wants to be the person to get the hostages.
He wants the person to end the war. But when he sends an envoy who has not legal authority yet in the transition, and reportedly, I don't know if it's true or not, pressured on the Sabbath, Netanyahu, to do what? Get out.
Don't go into the last 25% of Gaza. End the war.
Allow humanitarian and release hundreds, if not thousands of terrorists, some of which were probably

involved in October 7th. Is that going to reflect well on the Trump administration?

And when you look at the advisors who will have Middle East portfolios, unlike this special envoy, you're talking about Mike Huckleby, ambassador to Israel, Pete Hexeth, Marco Rubio, Michael Wall. They all have one thing in common.
They're very strong Israel supporters. This deal is not going over.
The rumors of this deal is not going over well among the Israelis. Their attitude is we want the hostages there.
But if you're Donald Trump and you're our savior and we think you are our savior, only you can get the hostages back without us having to release all these terrorists and not to finish the job. Because Mr.
Trump, 85, 75% of Gaza we went in, there are no terrorists. We got, they're all in this last little enclave and that's who's negotiating.
And they're terrified. If we can go into that enclave and eliminate them, there will be no need.
And you can just tell them, you're going to surrender and get out of Gaza, and you're going to release the hostages, American and Israeli. And if you don't, this is what's going to happen to you.
This is what's going to happen to the Houthis. This is what's going to happen to Hezbollah.
And this is what's going to happen to Iran, starting with Iran.

And I guarantee you, he might be successful. But to put a special envoy with no legal authority during the transition to fly over to Israel, who's a businessman and has had some prior business relationships with Gutter, which is not really pro-Israeli, it's anti-Israeli, and then to have him strong-arm Netanyahu to stop the war in Medias Rebus, it's not good.
Not good.

No, not at all. Well, Victor, the other story that came out this week that was probably one of the more interesting is that Jack Smith did resign, but the day after he resigned, he also released his report where he claimed, and if you ask me in a very cowardly fashion, that Trump would have been convicted of conspiracy to defraud the United States if he had not won the election.
What does that mean in a report at this point? That means I wasted millions of dollars and I was appointed special prosecutor after Joe Biden demanded that I be appointed after denying that he had any influence on Merrick Garland. And I had no legal authority because the special counsel statute had expired.
So this was just, I wasn't a special counsel. I was just an appendage of Merrick Garland and Joe Biden's Department of Justice.
And I was appointed on the same day that Michael Coangelo, Mr. Coangelo, third ranking person in the department in which I worked for, resigned.
And he had come from Latita James's hit team, and he would now go back to Alvin Bragg's hit team. And the day that I was appointed, Mr.
Nathan Wade from Fannie Willis's operation was also meeting with the White House counsel. So this was a political hit from the very beginning.
He's angry that he was incompetent. Number one, there was nothing.
There was no proof that Donald Trump had done anything different than Joe Biden. He had taken documents that were labeled classified.
Maybe some there were more classified than Joe Biden. But the special counsel, his counterpart, Mr.
Herb, found out that Joe Biden had put them in more places than Donald Trump for a longer period of time or in less secure areas and had disclosed classified documents to somebody who had no clearance, such as his own ghostwriter, who then broke the law and destroyed subpoenaed evidence in the fashion of Hillary Clinton. And all of that, he said the same thing.
He could have been indicted, but he would be too sympathetic because he was an older man with a feeble memory. And of course, the left got angry.
They said, if you're going to indict him, indict him. But if you're not going to indict him, don't tell us why.
That's disparaging him. That's as if he was guilty.
But that's not for you to make. You indict him.
Or if you don't indict him, he's innocent. Okay.
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Thank you, Factor, for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Well, Victor, there's been a lot going on in L.A., of course, with the fires, and some new things that have shown up this week in the news are the excessive amount of looting.
In fact, we saw a sign on one owner's house that said, owner home and have gun beware. Elon Musk has provided the internet for areas that were hit by the fire particularly hard.
And a real estate investor, Keith Wasserman, asked for private firefighters. So the news came out to defend his home, and he got a lot of pushback on social media with that.
So I was wondering your thoughts on any or all of the things. Well, let's go in the order that you enumerated them.
Number one, there's looters. Somebody wrote me.
I had been on Fox, and I mentioned that, and they said, well, why would there be looters? Because it's all burned down. Well, no, it's not.
You're talking about, I don't want to give anybody any ideas, so bear with me, but you're talking about one of the wealthiest zip codes of the United States. So one would imagine that every single one of those majestic houses, there were safes.

And in the safe, there was everything from bonds to weapons to jewelry to gold bars, everything. And maybe not even in the safe, just in well-kept places like this bookcase or something.
And they will not be burned up. You know, they're not flammable.
And so many of them won't be, especially in a safe. So there's a huge amount of money that's tempting these looters that are even dressed up as fire protection people.
And worse yet is they're in Los Angeles. So they understand this was the era of George Gascon and they haven't got the message yet that he was recalled.
So they think that it's open season. They can just go steal and take things and wander around.
There's not going to be any consequences. So it's very important.
I don't know why Gavin Newsom doesn't have the National Guard there right now, just patrolling every street. He needs to do that immediately.
And then there's people who live there. Every, I don't know, 50th house, there seems to be, for some reason, they're standing.
But they have no electricity and they have no water and they have no sewage. So, there's people living in there and that has to be addressed.
The second thing is about Elon Musk. I don't understand why the left, I understand why the left hates him.
But just as he did in the Carolinas during the flood, he has this brilliant idea that cyber trucks with this huge 7,000 pounds of batteries, if you don't use the batteries for transportation and you position them strategically on a grid, then they can offer Starlink and power the Starlink. So he's taking all of these cyber trucks, apparently hundreds of them, and he's putting them in key places.
And then he's opening up Starlink free. So all the first responders, all of the people who are trying to find out who's alive can communicate on the Internet.
That's amazing. And he is doing more than almost any, a lot more than the mayor is doing, a lot more than the deputy mayor for safety, who's basically under house arrest for phoning in a bomb threat or the allegations of such.
But it's a larger question about Elon Musk is they've been going after him. They say he's a billionaire.
He's too close. Well, you never said that about George Sorrells, who basically destroyed the prosecutorial system in our major cities.
You never said that about billionaire Reid Hoffman that funded the whole bogus E. Gene Carroll suit.
You never said that about Mark Zuckerberg, put on $419 million to absorb the work of the registrar's 2020 election. You only do it about Elon because he flipped.
Part of it is, I love my Tesla, but I hate the man who made it now. So, every time I drive around my beloved Tesla, and Tesla, I know, is better than all the other EVs, but every

time I get in it, it's an advertisement for, oh, no, for a pro-Trump person.

So they have that frustration.

And then there's fear.

They're thinking, wow, nobody can break into the top three GM, Chrysler.

He did.

He's the first person.

The DeLorean never did. No, but Studebaker, Americansler he did he's the first person the delorean never did no but studebaker american motors he did and then they're thinking well he bought x he paid 30 billion dollars too much it wasn't worth over 10 billion he paid 40 billion something 50 yes and he revolutionized the whole idea of social media and he created aede.
And now you have Mark Zuckerberg, who's following in the footsteps of Elon and the Google people. But you also have Mark Zuckerberg, who said that he couldn't possibly have gone against the government.
And apparently Elon did. That's the other frustration.
There's some difference. I don't know who would have won their cage fight.
Elon's much older, and Mark Zuckerberg's kind of buff, but Elon's a much more courageous person. And then you have the rocket.
If you had said Elon is going to save NASA from itself and he's going to launch a dozen, two dozen satellites every month, nobody would have believed you. My point is this.
So now they're thinking,

Elon is going to cut with Ramaswamy and this Doge thing? That's silly. He can't cut a trillion.

He can. He did it with NASA.
He did it with Tesla. And he did it with X.
So he can do it. So they hate him and they're afraid of him.
And so anytime he comes in the news, they trash him. And now he's interfering, they think interfering over in Europe.
He's telling the Europeans that they, what is he telling Europeans? The latest is he's retweeting list of labor party members who have been not alleged, but convicted of pedophilia. And that is in response to the, you shouldn't meddle.
I want to remind the British Labor Party, you sent over and put it on the internet, 100 foreign nationals. And if they didn't register as foreign agents, and none of them did, they were breakings election law federal law that's a felony and they did it in 2004 when they went to ohio and they always get away with it and then as leftist europeans they say oh the united states and fear you interfere in our elections and you and we interfere in the ukrainian elections and we interfered especially in the Israeli election elections.
So he's doing a wonderful job, and he's hated because they're envious and fearful of him. So that was eluding.
And then the Musk question. And your third one was? Oh, about the guy who got his house who tried to get private firefighters for his house.
But there's actually two more. There's also Rick Caruso's village was saved.
Yeah. So there's a question there.
This goes back to Marcus Licinius Crassus, the first triumvir, and he made his fortune. He was considered – there's a book, I think, by F.E.
Adcock, Marcus Crassus Millionaire, and it's about a biography of Crassus. He ended up, remember, decapitated.
And I think they poured that scene in Game of Thrones where they poured gold into Dany's brother. Yeah, that comes from Marcus Licinius Crassus' life of Plutarch, where they poured molten gold.
It's kind of, well, you're a billionaire and you're greedy. Here's some gold to go out with.
Then they decapitated his head and used it in Euripides' Bac when the head of Pentheus is carried in. So, they performed it.
So, my point is, he was notorious in Rome and he would pull up with a private fire brigade. He said, fire? So, how much is your four-story Roman villa worth? Well, here's what I can do to save it.
And there was always the allegation

that he was lighting fire. I don't know if that was true or not.
So there's this long history of anger at private fire services because they favor the wealthy. But this is a little different for a lot of reasons.
Number one, if you're against it, you have to assume that the private firefighter would have been otherwise employed by the Los Angeles Fire Department or in some kind of volunteer brigade. There's been some heroic brigades, but there's a lot of manpower in Los Angeles.
So I don't believe, and these people don't really have proven skills They're not necessarily trained to the same degree as firemen, as the union reminds us every second. So my point is, in greater LA of 20 million people, do you really believe that four or 5,000 who are being employed by private people would have the means? Therefore, they're taking resources from the fire department? I don't think so.
Number two, when they go into a row of houses in Malibu or up in Brentwood now or Bel Air now or parts of – and they go in, what do they do? They clear the brush, they turn off the gas and they usually spray the whole house

with So they clear the brush, they turn off the gas, and they usually spray the whole house with fire retardant or they spray it with water, soak it. And they're not all hired, by the way, by the private owner.
A lot of them are hired by the insurance companies. So up, and I mentioned this before, my house was almost burned to a crisp in Huntington, during Huntington Lake in Central California, Sierras, during the Aspen fire.
And it just survived by heroic action of the firefighters. But here's the point.
There were 400 cabins that were over 100 years old built on Forest Service land. And when this huge fire, and by the way, it was due to the same type of lack of forest management.
They didn't glean. Everybody up there said, please glean the forest.
Let the loggers come in after the drought and take these trees. They wouldn't do it.
So when they started to go up, the insurance companies came to their clients and said, let us send somebody. So sometimes they sent these trees.
They wouldn't do it. So when they started to go up, the insurance companies came

to their clients and said, let us send somebody. So sometimes they sent these aluminum blankets because their homes were not big.
And they put reflective heat resistant blankets. And when you drove after the fire, there were some there that survived.
So it's not just wealthy owners. It's It's people who have insurance policies with particular companies.

And then number three, if you've got nine houses in a row and two are saved, you're putting fires out. You're not turning the fires to another one, you're reducing the fire.
So it has some utility. Any house you can save is dampening the fire.
So they are, maybe it's hit and miss and they're not on a united front like the fire department with a strategy. But even the freelancing helps.
And then number four, what's going to happen when the fires are out? They have to recover economically. So I know our listeners will say, well, Victor, this Caruso guy, he's going to make a fortune because he saved this billion dollars.
Yes, he is. But on the other hand, the people who in the next year or two or three who have crews to clean up and they're going to be pouring cement, they're going to be raising the walls of houses.
They're going to want to eat. They're

going to want to buy stuff. And they don't have any facilities.
So, the more people that are

saved and the quicker you can get the community back. If you can get wealthy people to come back

there, maybe they'll clean up. The only thing that bothers me is this.
It's not the private.

It's this tragedy that if you go through that area, it is so wealthy and so

majestic, the homes. But there are homes of rich 80-year pedigrees that look beautiful.

The Spanish style, Southern California, you go by them. They're white stucco.
They have the red

tile roof, kind of adobe look with white. And then they have tropical plants.
They're beautiful. But they're not mansions, if you know what I mean.
So, then they're second generation or third. So, typically a person's parents died.
They're working in L.A. They inherited a 2,200 square home.
And let's say they inherited it in 1980 when they were in their 30s. And it was worth $300,000, $400,000.
Well, now it's worth $5,000 or $6,000,000. But they don't have the income.
And they're Prop 13, so they can only maintain it because they inherited it directly from their parents. And they didn't change the title with a sibling or something.

So my point is they're out.

So they have this lot that's worth a lot of money, but they do not have the wherewithal

to rebuild.

The insurance will cover the price maybe of a 2,200 square foot in theory, but not during

a rush when everybody's trying to get help and labor and supplies. It's going to be six, seven hundred dollars a square foot easy.
And so my point is there's going to be a lot of people come into that area. Speculators and investors are going to say, you know what? There's your house.
You inherit from your parents. I know it was worth four million, but their insurance is not going to pay because the lot's probably worth $2 million.
It's not going to pay for the repair. And it's a mess.
And do you really want to live in a tent for three years? I will give you a million dollars for the lot or something. And that's going to change the nature of that community.
It's going to make it even more exclusive. Unless the state comes in, this is even scarier.
I was on Laura Ingraham last night and comes in with its utopian idea that we're going to make a 15-minute city that this is a chance to experiment on these lab rats. We're going to make high rises all over Pacific Palaces.
No country, no Western home, no quarter acre lot, no pool.

You're all going to live like little rats in a apartment condo.

And then we're going to have a little green space.

And then you're going to get there with your new L.A. light rail.

Why we sit in, I don't know, five acre estates in Beverly Hills or Brentwood and dictate to how you live. I don't think that's going to happen, but that's what they want to happen.
Well, they being that line, it's in a wild bunch when they're tricked and they get these worthless washers and they scream, I think it's Warren,

and Edwin O'Brien said, they? Who is they?

They. So when you say they, they, who are they?

It's the wealthy. The wealthy will not let that happen.

They will call, hey, Gavin, I gave you a million bucks in your campaign.

Hey, city council, I funded you. And they will not let that happen.
The only mystery is, are they finally going to make the connection that they cannot always avoid the consequences of their ideology? they're subject to it on rare occasions this was a rare occasion I know that their kids are in prep school

and they hate teachers unions. Excuse me, they love teachers unions and they hate charter schools and their kids are in private school.
I know that they like green power, 40 cent kilowatt, because they don't care about people in Fresno. They're 105 with no money and can't afford air conditioning.
I know that they love the idea of $6 gas to save the planet because they don't care. They love the idea of 13% taxes because they would rather have – they make so much money, they don't care about 13% tax.
It's the people from, you know, 100 to 500 that get killed, not the people who make 10, 20 million a year. But this time, they lost their home.
And they will probably be angry. And we'll see how long it lasts.
Yeah, we'll see how long it lasts. They had interviewed a young girl on one of the Fox evening shows, and she said, Karen Bass is making a mockery of the Democratic Party.
And so I don't think she understood that it was the Democratic Party that gave birth to Karen Bass. But she thought maybe somehow this party was different from what Karen Bass was doing.
So you vote for Karen Bass, and that came up in whatever you think of Caruso. He is a proven guy that knows how to make money.
He would work for the government for a while. He's done everything, right? I don't think he's conservative, but he's competent.
That says a lot in Los Angeles. Or you've got a woman who was in Congress that was head of the Black Caucus who, what, 12 times went down to see El Jefe.
And when he died, she said she tweeted that El Comande, El Jefe, Castro, Marta, you know, in mourning for this mass murdering Castro. And she promises she's not going to go because she had a reputation as an itinerant junketeer when she was in Congress.
Well, I'll stay in Los Angeles. And of course, she gets reelected.
What's the first thing she's got reelected, just got reelected. And what's the first thing she does? She junkets to where? To find her roots in Ghana? It's not necessarily a strategic city or state or country, anything in Ghana, the nation of Ghana compared to the fire protection of Los Angeles.
And then she gets back and she's cornered and she can't say anything. Then she cuts the fire budget.
She appoints all these DEI people. Yeah, enough said.
Well, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about women in the news this week. We've got lots of them and Amy Chew is on deck.
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And we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Welcome back.
So Victor, lots of women this week and i i wanted to talk a little bit about amy chu she was famous as um praising the role of a tiger mom yep she wrote um but go ahead she's gonna be jd vance's guest she's a yale law professor and uh she came to prominence because she wrote, I think she wrote in two months, about what the Asian mode of parenting can do. And when she had a disobedient teenager, like every teenager, and so she, instead of accommodating or appeasing the teenager's demand, she doubled down.
You're going to play a piano or a violin. You're going to get straight.
And they were all very successful. And that became a bestseller.
She got a lot of criticism, but she was still okay as far as the left was. After all, she's probably a Democrat.
But she also had a reputation of reaching out to people that were very bright that she came in contact at Yale Law School, both left and right. She made no discrimination.
I don't know. I think she's center left.
But nevertheless, she met J.D. Vance.
And anybody who was bright, she thought, that didn't have network connection, she helped. So she was Miss Networker.
She could get somebody. She knew all the Supreme Court judges.
She had a reputation for being competent, reliable. If Amy Chu represented a Yale law graduate, they were good or she wouldn't really.
So she had a pipeline to federal appellate court and Supreme Court. And so that made her very powerful.
And then she wrote this book. People were kind of easy.
But then they turned on her because during the Kavanaugh hearings, she quite courageously refused to sign a letter, as most of the obsequious law professors at Yale did, condemning Brett Kavanaugh and supporting these absurd Susan Blasey Ford charges. She didn't.
And so they started to re-examine her, as the left always do. And she had a party, believe it or not, Sammy, she had a party where these 20-year-old, excuse me, law students, 21, 22, they were all above the drinking, but they had alcohol at her house.
This is from the puritanical left now. And then her husband, who had no record of ever doing anything wrong, he wanted to or he seemed or he sort of like wanted to touch, kiss an undergrad, but no evidence.
So they went after him. And of course, Yale thought, oh, boy, I can't get her to punish her for supporting this horrible Trump appointment.
I'll go after her husband. And they put him on suspension for two years.
He did nothing wrong. She wrote a book on tribalism during this period that I read.
It was actually very good. And it was a warning to minorities, Asians included, and Hispanics and blacks that they had been encouraged by white coastal elites to emphasize their tribal identifications.
But white coastal elites were not the majority of white people. And they were the white people that had the privilege.
But if everybody made their race or gender or sexual orientation essential rather than incidental to who they were, the great mass that's about 65% of the population is white. And if you say white privilege, white privilege, white privilege, white rage, white rage, white supremacy, white supremacy, you keep doing that as they did.
Well, these white puppeteers in the West, they love it because they think, oh, you're talking about all those people in East Palestine or Fresno, but you're going to create a backlash. And then this white group is going to

say, yeah, okay, you got your tribe, I got mine. And so, she predicted that would be very dangerous and called for people not to do that.
And they continued to do it. And she was proven right.
And I mentioned that when I go early, I won't mention the places I go to, but If I get up at 530 and run into a supermarket in rural Central Valley, that's for some reason in which there are heavily minority populations. And I see a rare white person.
It's like, hi, how are you? Everything okay, mister? And they don't know me. How is it? The subject says, you're white.
I'm white. I never thought about that before.
But since they got a tribe and they got a tribe and they got a tribe, we need a tribe. And it's like nuclear proliferation.
They got a bomb. We got a bomb.
We got to get one too. So, the only sad thing about this whole thing, when they went after her and they tried to take her courses away, they tried to get her for crazy things like delinquency to minors and that didn't work.

They tried to do everything, get after her husband.

She got ill and she developed sepsis under the intense pressure.

She's very – and she almost died.

So, you didn't hear from her for a while.

She's very bright. I wish her – I admire her courage.
I wish her the best. And now she's back in the news because she's going to the inauguration as a guest of J.D.
Vance. J.D.
Vance, a man who owes her a great deal. He met his wife, I think, in her class at Yale Law School.
And I met him once and talked to him once on the phone. I can tell you he is a man that has a good memory.
And he has a lot of – everything they said about J.D. Vance was not just untrue.
It was a lie. I talked to him a long time once and on the phone as well, and he was very knowledgeable.
He was very nice, kind. As soon as they nominate him, I thought, doesn't make traditional sense.
They're going to win Ohio anyway, check. Trump is a white male.
He is too, check. The MAa people are under assault he's a person and then cancel that out because i'd heard him before and i'd seen him i thought a unmatched intelligence b knows the underbelly of america like few people do three sword in law school and was successful.
And D, when they go after him on TV and they will, this is what I think I said that in the podcast, he is going to tie them in knots. He's a brilliant debater.
And he said the other day, they were trying to bait him about the transition and Joe Biden had done all these wonderful things and the economy is great. And he said basically he left us with a dumpster fire.
And this is in regard to Joe Biden had just given this atrocious speech. We need to talk about that speech.
He gave it to his State Department.

Did you hear this speech? No, I didn't. Well, I'll go ahead and talk about it.
He says, and I'm the first president that the next guy who follows me can say, there's no war in Afghanistan. Yeah, dummy, you lost the war and you got 13 brave people killed and you left $50 billion.
It would be like Roosevelt saying, well, we lost D-Day, so I pulled out. And now my anybody who follows me, there's no World War II.
Joe, the only worst thing than a bad occupation is to lose a war. You lost it.
And then he said this, and Iran is weakened. yeah because Israel didn't listen to you and retaliated and they wouldn't even have

a And he said this, and Iran is weakened. Yeah, because Israel didn't listen to you and retaliated.
They wouldn't even have a nuclear deterrent if you let them do what they wanted to do. And they said, and Hamas and Hezbollah are on the run.
Yes, because they ignored you after you demonized Netanyahu. He went in and did things that you said, don't retaliate.
Be measured. Don't do that.
And he didn't listen to you. And he saved Israel because he didn't listen to you.
And Assad, Assyria is gone. Well, it's not gone because of you.
It's gone because they're afraid of Donald Trump coming in. And they gave the green light to these rebels and said, you know what? Iran is weak.
Hezbollah is destroyed. The Israelis are there.
Trump's coming in. Now we can take him out.
And that's what the rebels did. Every single, and he said, we've got a China.
No, they're not. They're buying more farmland around military bases.
They sent the balloon trajectory. The worst was Ukraine.
My God. He said, thanks to me, Ukraine was not.

No, thanks to you, they invaded Ukraine because you pulled out of Afghanistan in such a humiliating

fashion that five months later, Vladimir Putin thought, you know, we went under Bush when

he was weakened in 2008 because of the war.

We went under this guy when he was vice president, when he was with loudmouth Obama, and Biden didn't do anything. And now after Afghanistan, he won't do anything.
And he didn't. He said, remember, are you going to react if Vladimir Putin comes in? Depends on whether it's a minor incursion or not.
And then when the incursion was major, and he panicked Biden and said, get Zelensky out, Alphirma ride out. You remember that? So, what I'm getting at is every single thing that he did made the world more unsafe.
And then he looked around and he said, the coming of Trump, what Israel's done in the Middle East, and all of that has made some things better. But I had nothing to do with him.
It was despite me, not because of me. And yet he took that reality and he lied.
And he always lies with his, I don't know what you call it, schizophrenic. It's like this.
And first, it's the slur anger mode, slur anger, S-A mode. And he goes like this.
And then he goes into the whisper mode. And guess what, everybody? I did that.
I weakened your... It's just impossible to listen to him.
He's so off-putting. He's so obnoxious.
And to sit up there in front of the American people and lie about... He said about the hostages, he's close to a deal.
He hasn't had a deal since they went in on October 7th and took them. He wasn't even worried about them.
He didn't even know who they were. He never really called the parents of the 13 people who were killed because of a skedaddle in Afghanistan.
You know, open border, wrecked economy. And here he's telling everybody he's made the world safer.
It's much more dangerous. As much as I do not approve of what Obama did when Trump came into office in 2017, the world was a safer place than it is now.
He's going to have to restore deterrence. And I don't know what mega people are going to say.
I am aGA person. I know what I'm going to say, but I'm going to say to Donald Trump, be a Jacksonian.
You're Andrew Jackson. And do not get in an optional war, a forever war, an endless war on the ground in the Middle East.
Yes, do not get into Ukraine, but you have to protect our interests. And that might be sometimes a Soleimani or Baghdadi type of operation.

I don't think he should start keep...

He's made his point about Greenland and Panama and Canada.

He made great tactical decisions, Trollin.

We talked about that.

It's funny.

It's ironic.

He puts the onus on Canada, onus on Denmark, onus on Panama.

But I wouldn't keep pushing about not ruling out force. Because Donald Trump is not going to send troops into Panama.
And you can't really make them guess or be afraid that you might, because they know you're not. But otherwise, suggesting that Denmark is a colonial power and reminding them that they're farther from Greenland than we are, and it's North American territory that Donald Trump, the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist is trying to protect the territorial integrity of Greenland, or telling Panama that they're subject to a colonial imperialist China and have betrayed their friends that were magnanimous,

or telling Panama that they're subject to a colonial imperialist China and have betrayed their friends that were magnanimous,

are telling Mexico, you had 400 years of Gulf of Mexico,

now it's our 400 years since we have the same amount of coastline, is effective.

Well, Victor, thank you for that.

Let's go ahead and take a break,

and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about women in the news this week. So stay with us and we'll be right back.
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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. You can find Victor at his Twitter or X handle at VD Hanson, or you can find him at Facebook on Hanson's Morning Cup.
So come join him there if those are your social media outlets.

So Victor, in the news as well are Lindy Lee and Pamela Hemphill. I hope I said her last name right.
Lindy Lee is a ex-Democrat who said the Democratic Party was like a cult, and Pamela Hempfell is an ex-MAGA, if I can put it that way, who claimed that the MAGA people were like a cult as well. And so I thought it was striking that we're seeing all this accusations of cult on both left and right.
Himfel is one of the accused January Sixers who says she's going to refuse a pardon after she pleaded guilty, but she would not take a pardon from Trump because the MAGA agenda was very cult-like, and they turned her mind. And I was wondering your thoughts on either of these people.
Well, they're adults, and all the information, each of them, one was there. Lindy Lee, I mean, she's upset because she bundled millions of dollars, and then she found out that Kamala Harris was paying people.
Of course, if anybody else had done that, there would have probably been some type of investigation, like Al Sharpton and Oprah Winfrey to basically endorse her she bought them and some wrappers and then in addition to that she was junketing with a lot of private flights for kind of low-level staff she ended up blowing through in a hundred days her own campaign in or PACs, $1.5 billion in three months. And then she ended up in debt, owning $20,000.
So she lost. So my question to her is, had she won, would you have done this? In other words, you're now telling us that the Democratic Party is so extreme and you feel so betrayed because you in heartfelt sincerity went to these donors and you found out that Kamala Harris was an operator and blew through their money and had nothing but contempt for them and lost.
But let me just reverse it. Had she won? let's say she beat Trump by three points, people would say, hey, Lindy, they kind of spent a lot of money, but it must have been worth something because he won.
And then when we go to the second MAGA person, you're trying to tell me that between November 2nd of 2000, I don't know what, excuse me, it wasn't the second, but it was the fifth or sixth of 2020. And January 6th of 2021, you did not know that there were both legitimate and illegitimate questions about balloting.
All you had to do was turn on the news. If you were a conspiracy theorist and a cult member, then you would listen to crazy Lin Wood.
And you would have believed that the Dominion computers were communicating with China or Venezuela. Nobody believed that.
Or you could have said there were legitimate questions about the election because they changed the voting laws in most of the swing states so that 70 percent of the traditional election day electorate did not vote on election day they voted under the guise of covid through mail-in early balloting and the rejection rate fell enormously by a magnitude double the ballots one-tenth of the authenticity So there were legitimate questions. So you, I don't know how that filtered down to you, but you thought that Donald, you were tired on election day and you looked at the returns and you went to bed and Donald Trump was ahead.
And then all of a sudden the mail-in ballots came in, in Arizona, in Georgia, in Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and he lost lost and you got angry. So you chose on your own volition to go to the Capitol and you were arrested for going in to the Capitol, as I remember.
I wouldn't have arrested you. I would have cited you as a misdemeanor of unlawfully entering a federal building.
But nobody put a gun to your head that you know that it was against the law to go into a federal building now you can say legitimately well was she to to leave and the squad and all those people had protest about hamas and they took over the whole rotunda and that was unlawful and they never arrested one and you have a point but don't tell me after all this time that you felt that you didn't have enough information or what are you trying to tell me?

You were brainwashed by Donald Trump.

And let me ask you in a different way.

Had you gone to the Capitol and had you had a legitimate discussion and had that discussion put emphases on what was going on as it did after January 6th. And maybe it had an effect.
I don't know. And they would have said to people that there were irregularities.
Would you have been mad now? Is it mad that you were arrested? Was it mad that you showed up? Nobody forced you to do that. And I thought this this section was on powerful independent-minded women well i yeah no actually it was just on women but they you know i might well put in that's exactly what got karen bass all these women they've come what they're complaining is it was cult-like but i think they were the ones that were cult-like.
They were seeking out a cult experience. I'm living in little old Selma when I heard what Kamala Harris was doing with these big high rollers, and they were spending all of this money, and you could tell they were buying endorsements.
You could tell that the people that were running her campaign were totally inept. And it was just a free fall with free money.
And I don't have any empathy for the guys that wrote the checks. Anyway, they were writing the checks, I don't think, because they believed in the genius of Kamala Harris and what she was going to do another four years of what Biden did.
They were doing it because they wanted influence. And that's fine, too.

That's what Donald Trump said when I think in the 2016 debates when Rand Paul said,

you're what's wrong with America.

You're the nexus of money and influence.

He said, basically, I'm paraphrasing him.

He said, you're absolutely right.

And you came up to my office, wrote me a check for $10,000, and I got a lot of influence with you. So that was pretty.
Well, let's turn then to student loans. And Joe Biden has announced cancellation of another $4.2 billion in student loans.
Now, I wouldn't bring this up, except there is, I've been investigating a case in California community colleges where they're talking about these fake students. And in some of the publications, they say their estimate is that as many as 25% of fake students.
And that means, and for all of you guys who are wondering, what does it mean, a fake student? It means that somebody is putting in names of people going that as though they were going to community college, and then going in and asking for financial aid, and then giving, getting financial aid from a whole bunch of different names that they do this with. And They have a case where they caught three women in 2023.
But so he's forgiving these loans. And there's a huge rate of fraud of people getting these loans.
And then last thing, I have a reader that wrote and said that the loans, he was reading about the loans. He said, the next time you hear about how the taxpayer should excuse student loans, keep the following in mind.
Student loan usage percentage based on the provided search results of a 2019 Lending Tree Survey found that 20% of students used student loans for travel, 26% used them for clothes, and it's worth noting that only 10% said that they used their student loans to pay their tuition. This suggests that significant portion of students, around 46 percent,

combine traveling and clothes, those two percentages, are using their school loans for non-essential or discretionary purposes. Now put all those things together and it's not just insulting to people who didn't go to school that these student loans are being forgiven, But for all taxpayers, that's so much broad is going on.

And then the students that do get the loans that aren't completely fraudulent are using them for other purposes. And I was wondering.
The general rule, whenever you take a collective group and you romanticize them or you idealize them or you suggest that they are noble and should be exempt from market forces or from reality.

You're going to have problems.

So if you say the homeless, to take one example, are kind of victims of society.

And they're there not of their own volition or their own laxities or crime whatever it is addictions mental illness but you're just not going to talk about them so they're all over the la hills everywhere when i've gone down to la i see them everywhere i see them on sidewalks i drive down malibu canyon road on the way to pepper i see them on the side of the road and it's cold and they're not going to light fires and you're not going to go out and arrest them or but if they are protected species in which you are paying almost double for their care than you are for their own the fire department then you're going to have a problem if you romanticize students and you say that they're all hard working and then we just we want to give them a hand to get their education when many of them are middle class and they are taking loans out with the expectation that they don't need it for actual school but that it's a income enhancer and they don't have any intention of paying it back i think 25 of them are in ar, then you have a problem. It's like Karen Bass.
If you say that powerful black women should not be subject to criticism, and that's what people are making the argument, that white racists like Victor suggested that she shouldn't have gone to Ghana, and she should have answered reporters' questions, And she shouldn't have cut the fire budget by 17.5 million dollars and she shouldn't have pointed this fellow deputy mayor who's now under charges of phoning in a bomb threat etc etc but if I am told that I can't say that because she's a powerful black woman.

Then she's going to take advantage of that powerful black woman exemption as our homeless people think.

You know what we can do?

Like a guy rides a bike with a blowtorch, a propane torch.

And he's riding openly in the middle of fire conditions.

And he's lighting Christmas trees in L.A. And his attitude is they don't do anything to the homeless people.
I'm a homeless person. You can do whatever you want.
You can defecate. You can inject.
You can fornicate. You can urinate.
And there's no consequence. Well, we've created this noble myth of the student.
And the fact is that it's one of the contributors to prolonged adolescence. So we have these students that are taking three, six units.
They're taking a federal loan and guaranteed loan. They're not graduating in four years.
50% graduate in six years. So they're eating up their 20s with kind of want to take a class in gender studies, kind of want to take a class in sociology of the self, kind of want to take a class in Marvel comic books, and I'll get my three, six units and my student loan.
And probably if I do it long enough, I'm not going to have to pay it back. I'll just pay the interest on it.
And they're going to forgive it when you get a demagogue like Joe Biden in. So it's not a good program.
And it delays marriage. It delays child rearing.
And it delays home ownership. So these guys should get on the pathway of life at 20 or 21 and decide what they want to do.
And most people, I'd say 55% don't belong in college of a population. They need to get a trade and help the country move and build and electrify and plum and do all these things and truck.
But not to kind of sort of kind of maybe might be a student. Yeah.
And that's costing us a lot of money. It's $1 trillion dollars and then joe biden being lawless says in a campaign stop he said well i forgave so many billion dollars and the supreme court said i couldn't do it was illegal because i did it without legislation but i got around it i got around it so he was openly flaunting the court's authority.
They need to get out of it. If you just think where I work, I think the Stanford endowment is over $30 billion.
So let's say tomorrow Donald Trump has a first executive. There shall be no federal guaranteed loans.
So Stanford tells its students, we can give you a tuition waiver, but to pay the $200,000 a year in tuition, room and board, inflation, eating at the cost. I mean, Stanford's raised its prices higher than the rate of inflation because they had a guaranteed loan package in some cases.
Some people are very wealthy and even a place like

where I used to teach Cal State Fresno probably had more student loans than Stanford because Stanford kids are pretty wealthy. But my point is to take this example.
So what if there was no student loans and the Stanford package said that out of the $200,000, we'll give you a grant for $50,000 guaranteed

loan by our endowment.

So suddenly

these kids say, well, Stanford, they're not going to make me pay it back. I'll just, no, they will make you pay it back.
So you go to Stanford and you want to take your DEI course, your environmental, they're going to sit you down and say, look, you came here. We want you out of here in four years.
And what are you going to major in? Because we need a major that's competitive and renumerative. We don't want you don't come to Stanford and borrow our money and then go out and take six years and then don't pay it back for 20.
We're not going to do that. I'm sorry.
And we're going to give you courses that are competitive because we're lean and mean. We don't have 16,000 staffers, which they do have.
And we don't have a DEI guy making 300,000 and 200,000 for his assistant. We are lean and mean.
And that would be great, wouldn't it? Yes. Moral hazard, moral hazard.
Where's the moral hazard? Well, the last thing on our agenda today, Victor, is the American Airlines failed to prioritize their employees by allowing the retirement managers of their pensions to invest in ESG, environmental, social, and governance. And the court ruling was that they failed their employees.

So the court upheld that. That they had to invest.
They took their money and made them invest in it. Yeah, they took the money and their pensions.
ESG is going the alphabetic suicide trajectory of DEI. DEI, ESG, same thing.
It is an unworkable mandated program mindset that's implemented by elites that doesn't work. So in the case of DEI, it's anti-merocratic and it uses criteria that are superficial race, sex, gender, but rather than merit.
And this ESg basically says that we're in the marketplace and the stock market's been going good and you don't have to be very smart to make money now with this huge increase in what's i'm talking about 20 year and we're going to invest in companies that are environmentally sound and socially responsible and then those companies think we have kind of a shaky operation here we're not very profitable but we're going to broadcast and virtue signal and performance art that we care and we're we hire people of color and we are very hot we use solar and wind power only. And that masks the actual productivity of the company.
And then the investor, the ESG people say to the investor, we want a virtue signal and feel good because everybody thinks we're greedy and we remember Occupy Wall Street and all that. We don't want that image.
We want to be part of the community.

We want to be supporters of the community of color, the LGBTQ community, the environmental community.

And so we're going to take maybe one or two percent off our productivity investing companies. They're not quite competitive, even though we have a commitment to our stockholders and investors and that we will get you the highest return.
And they got away with it. And now all of a sudden in times of semi-recession, people are saying, you didn't give me what I wanted.
You're not as competitive because you're investing in non-productive enterprises. So you can feel good at my expense.
So the governance part of that is essentially you had to be PC. The companies had to be PC on top of it, which was just politically biased.
It's okay if they're making money. Who cares if your ESG investment, let's say in Red Rock or something, returns 7% on your money and you feel, wow, I get 7% and they don't use any gasoline and their delivery trucks are all electrified.
Oh, wow. But when they're getting 2% and that's your hard-end money and the inflation rate is 9% like it was in 2021, then you say, oh my God, I lost 7% of my money just so these guys that are billionaires can go around and brag that they're for the environment.
It's not a sustainable proposition. No, it sure isn't.
Well, Victor, that's it for today. I'd like to thank you for all of your wisdom.
It's been wonderful today. And we'd like to thank our listeners.
Thank you for joining us. Thank you, everybody, for listening.
Much appreciated. This is Sammy Wink.
I'm Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off. If you've been with us at all over the last six months or so, you are probably familiar with one of our favorite new brews, Wired2Fish Coffee.

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